-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo\r
-\r
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with\r
-almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or\r
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included\r
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-\r
-Title: Les Miserables\r
- Complete in Five Volumes\r
-\r
-Author: Victor Hugo\r
-\r
-Translator: Isabel F. Hapgood\r
-\r
-Release Date: June 22, 2008 [EBook #135]\r
-Last Updated: October 30, 2009\r
-\r
-Language: English\r
-\r
-\r
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISERABLES ***\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Produced by Judith Boss\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-LES MISERABLES\r
-\r
-By Victor Hugo\r
-\r
-\r
-Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood\r
-\r
-Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.\r
-No. 13, Astor Place\r
-New York\r
-\r
-Copyright 1887\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Bookshelf 1spines]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Bookcover 1cover]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Frontpapers 1frontpapers]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Frontispiece 1frontispiece]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Titlepage Volume One 1titlepage]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Titlepage Verso 1verso]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CONTENTS\r
-\r
-\r
- VOLUME I\r
-\r
- BOOK FIRST.--A JUST MAN\r
-\r
- CHAPTER\r
- I. M. Myriel\r
- II. M. Myriel becomes M. Welcome\r
- III. A Hard Bishopric for a Good Bishop\r
- IV. Works corresponding to Words\r
- V. Monseigneur Bienvenu made his Cassocks last too long\r
- VI. Who guarded his House for him\r
- VII. Cravatte\r
- VIII. Philosophy after Drinking\r
- IX. The Brother as depicted by the Sister\r
- X. The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light\r
- XI. A Restriction\r
- XII. The Solitude of Monseigneur Welcome\r
- XIII. What he believed\r
- XIV. What he thought\r
-\r
- BOOK SECOND.--THE FALL\r
-\r
- I. The Evening of a Day of Walking\r
- II. Prudence counselled to Wisdom\r
- III. The Heroism of Passive Obedience\r
- IV. Details concerning the Cheese-Dairies of Pontarlier\r
- V. Tranquillity\r
- VI. Jean Valjean\r
- VII. The Interior of Despair\r
- VIII. Billows and Shadows\r
- IX. New Troubles\r
- X. The Man aroused\r
- XI. What he does\r
- XII. The Bishop works\r
- XIII. Little Gervais\r
-\r
- BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817\r
-\r
- I. The Year 1817\r
- II. A Double Quartette\r
- III. Four and Four\r
- IV. Tholomyes is so Merry that he sings a Spanish Ditty\r
- V. At Bombardas\r
- VI. A Chapter in which they adore Each Other\r
- VII. The Wisdom of Tholomyes\r
- VIII. The Death of a Horse\r
- IX. A Merry End to Mirth\r
-\r
- BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER\r
-\r
- I. One Mother meets Another Mother\r
- II. First Sketch of Two Unprepossessing Figures\r
- III. The Lark\r
-\r
- BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT\r
-\r
- I. The History of a Progress in Black Glass Trinkets\r
- II. Madeleine\r
- III. Sums deposited with Laffitte\r
- IV. M. Madeleine in Mourning\r
- V. Vague Flashes on the Horizon\r
- VI. Father Fauchelevent\r
- VII. Fauchelevent becomes a Gardener in Paris\r
- VIII. Madame Victurnien expends Thirty Francs on Morality\r
- IX. Madame Victurnien's Success\r
- X. Result of the Success\r
- XI. Christus nos Liberavit\r
- XII. M. Bamatabois's Inactivity\r
- XIII. The Solution of Some Questions connected with the\r
- Municipal Police\r
-\r
- BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT\r
-\r
- I. The Beginning of Repose\r
- II. How Jean may become Champ\r
-\r
- BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR\r
-\r
- I. Sister Simplice\r
- II. The Perspicacity of Master Scaufflaire\r
- III. A Tempest in a Skull\r
- IV. Forms assumed by Suffering during Sleep\r
- V. Hindrances\r
- VI. Sister Simplice put to the Proof\r
- VII. The Traveller on his Arrival takes Precautions\r
- for Departure\r
- VIII. An Entrance by Favor\r
- IX. A Place where Convictions are in Process of Formation\r
- X. The System of Denials\r
- XI. Champmathieu more and more Astonished\r
-\r
- BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW\r
-\r
- I. In what Mirror M. Madeleine contemplates his Hair\r
- II. Fantine Happy\r
- III. Javert Satisfied\r
- IV. Authority reasserts its Rights\r
- V. A Suitable Tomb\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
- VOLUME II\r
-\r
- BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO\r
-\r
- CHAPTER\r
- I. What is met with on the Way from Nivelles\r
- II. Hougomont\r
- III. The Eighteenth of June, 1815\r
- IV. A\r
- V. The Quid Obscurum of Battles\r
- VI. Four o'clock in the Afternoon\r
- VII. Napoleon in a Good Humor\r
- VIII. The Emperor puts a Question to the Guide Lacoste\r
- IX. The Unexpected\r
- X. The Plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean\r
- XI. A Bad Guide to Napoleon; a Good Guide to Bulow\r
- XII. The Guard\r
- XIII. The Catastrophe\r
- XIV. The Last Square\r
- XV. Cambronne\r
- XVI. Quot Libras in Duce?\r
- XVII. Is Waterloo to be considered Good?\r
- XVIII. A Recrudescence of Divine Right\r
- XIX. The Battle-Field at Night\r
-\r
- BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION\r
-\r
- I. Number 24,601 becomes Number 9,430\r
- II. In which the reader will peruse Two Verses which are\r
- of the Devil's Composition possibly\r
- III. The Ankle-Chain must have undergone a Certain Preparatory\r
- Manipulation to be thus broken with a Blow from a Hammer\r
-\r
- BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN\r
-\r
- I. The Water Question at Montfermeil\r
- II. Two Complete Portraits\r
- III. Men must have Wine, and Horses must have Water\r
- IV. Entrance on the Scene of a Doll\r
- V. The Little One All Alone\r
- VI. Which possibly proves Boulatruelle's Intelligence\r
- VII. Cosette Side by Side with the Stranger in the Dark\r
- VIII. The Unpleasantness of receiving into One's House a Poor\r
- Man who may be a Rich Man\r
- IX. Thenardier at his Manoeuvres\r
- X. He who seeks to better himself may render his Situation Worse\r
- XI. Number 9,430 reappears, and Cosette wins it in the Lottery\r
-\r
- BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL\r
-\r
- I. Master Gorbeau\r
- II. A Nest for Owl and a Warbler\r
- III. Two Misfortunes make One Piece of Good Fortune\r
- IV. The Remarks of the Principal Tenant\r
- V. A Five-Franc Piece falls on the Ground and produces a Tumult\r
-\r
- BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK\r
-\r
- I. The Zigzags of Strategy\r
- II. It is Lucky that the Pont d'Austerlitz bears\r
- Carriages\r
- III. To Wit, the Plan of Paris in 1727\r
- IV. The Gropings of Flight\r
- V. Which would be Impossible with Gas Lanterns\r
- VI. The Beginning of an Enigma\r
- VII. Continuation of the Enigma\r
- VIII. The Enigma becomes Doubly Mysterious\r
- IX. The Man with the Bell\r
- X. Which explains how Javert got on the Scent\r
-\r
- BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS\r
-\r
- I. Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus\r
- II. The Obedience of Martin Verga\r
- III. Austerities\r
- IV. Gayeties\r
- V. Distractions\r
- VI. The Little Convent\r
- VII. Some Silhouettes of this Darkness\r
- VIII. Post Corda Lapides\r
- IX. A Century under a Guimpe\r
- X. Origin of the Perpetual Adoration\r
- XI. End of the Petit-Picpus\r
-\r
- BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS\r
-\r
- I. The Convent as an Abstract Idea\r
- II. The Convent as an Historical Fact\r
- III. On What Conditions One can respect the Past\r
- IV. The Convent from the Point of View of Principles\r
- V. Prayer\r
- VI. The Absolute Goodness of Prayer\r
- VII. Precautions to be observed in Blame\r
- VIII. Faith, Law\r
-\r
- BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM\r
-\r
- I. Which treats of the Manner of entering a Convent\r
- II. Fauchelevent in the Presence of a Difficulty\r
- III. Mother Innocente\r
- IV. In which Jean Valjean has quite the Air of having read\r
- Austin Castillejo\r
- V. It is not Necessary to be Drunk in order to be Immortal\r
- VI. Between Four Planks\r
- VII. In which will be found the Origin of the Saying: Don't\r
- lose the Card\r
- VIII. A Successful Interrogatory\r
- IX. Cloistered\r
-\r
-\r
- VOLUME III\r
-\r
- BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM\r
-\r
- I. Parvulus\r
- II. Some of his Particular Characteristics\r
- III. He is Agreeable\r
- IV. He may be of Use\r
- V. His Frontiers\r
- VI. A Bit of History\r
- VII. The Gamin should have his Place in the Classifications\r
- of India\r
- VIII. In which the Reader will find a Charming Saying of the\r
- Last King\r
- IX. The Old Soul of Gaul\r
- X. Ecce Paris, ecce Homo\r
- XI. To Scoff, to Reign\r
- XII. The Future Latent in the People\r
- XIII. Little Gavroche\r
-\r
- BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS\r
-\r
- I. Ninety Years and Thirty-two Teeth\r
- II. Like Master, Like House\r
- III. Luc-Esprit\r
- IV. A Centenarian Aspirant\r
- V. Basque and Nicolette\r
- VI. In which Magnon and her Two Children are seen\r
- VII. Rule: Receive No One except in the Evening\r
- VIII. Two do not make a Pair\r
-\r
- BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON\r
-\r
- I. An Ancient Salon\r
- II. One of the Red Spectres of that Epoch\r
- III. Requiescant\r
- IV. End of the Brigand\r
- V. The Utility of going to Mass, in order to become a\r
- Revolutionist\r
- VI. The Consequences of having met a Warden\r
- VII. Some Petticoat\r
- VIII. Marble against Granite\r
-\r
- BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE ABC\r
-\r
- I. A Group which barely missed becoming Historic\r
- II. Blondeau's Funeral Oration by Bossuet\r
- III. Marius' Astonishments\r
- IV. The Back Room of the Cafe Musain\r
- V. Enlargement of Horizon\r
- VI. Res Angusta\r
-\r
- BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE\r
-\r
- I. Marius Indigent\r
- II. Marius Poor\r
- III. Marius Grown Up\r
- IV. M. Mabeuf\r
- V. Poverty a Good Neighbor for Misery\r
- VI. The Substitute\r
-\r
- BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS\r
-\r
- I. The Sobriquet; Mode of Formation of Family Names\r
- II. Lux Facta Est\r
- III. Effect of the Spring\r
- IV. Beginning of a Great Malady\r
- V. Divers Claps of Thunder fall on Ma'am Bougon\r
- VI. Taken Prisoner\r
- VII. Adventures of the Letter U delivered over to Conjectures\r
- VIII. The Veterans themselves can be Happy\r
- IX. Eclipse\r
-\r
- BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE\r
-\r
- I. Mines and Miners\r
- II. The Lowest Depths\r
- III. Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse\r
- IV. Composition of the Troupe\r
-\r
- BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN\r
-\r
- I. Marius, while seeking a Girl in a Bonnet encounters a\r
- Man in a Cap\r
- II. Treasure Trove\r
- III. Quadrifrons\r
- IV. A Rose in Misery\r
- V. A Providential Peep-Hole\r
- VI. The Wild Man in his Lair\r
- VII. Strategy and Tactics\r
- VIII. The Ray of Light in the Hovel\r
- IX. Jondrette comes near Weeping\r
- X. Tariff of Licensed Cabs, Two Francs an Hour\r
- XI. Offers of Service from Misery to Wretchedness\r
- XII. The Use made of M. Leblanc's Five-Franc Piece\r
- XIII. Solus cum Solo, in Loco Remoto, non cogitabuntur\r
- orare Pater Noster\r
- XIV. In which a Police Agent bestows Two Fistfuls on a Lawyer\r
- XV. Jondrette makes his Purchases\r
- XVI. In which will be found the Words to an English Air\r
- which was in Fashion in 1832\r
- XVII. The Use made of Marius' Five-Franc Piece\r
- XVIII. Marius' Two Chairs form a Vis-a-Vis\r
- XIX. Occupying One's Self with Obscure Depths\r
- XX. The Trap\r
- XXI. One should always begin by arresting the Victims\r
- XXII. The Little One who was crying in Volume Two\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
- VOLUME IV\r
-\r
- BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY\r
-\r
- I. Well Cut\r
- II. Badly Sewed\r
- III. Louis Philippe\r
- IV. Cracks beneath the Foundation\r
- V. Facts whence History springs and which History ignores\r
- VI. Enjolras and his Lieutenants\r
-\r
- BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE\r
-\r
- I. The Lark's Meadow\r
- II. Embryonic Formation of Crimes in the Incubation of Prisons\r
- III. Apparition to Father Mabeuf\r
- IV. An Apparition to Marius\r
-\r
- BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET\r
-\r
- I. The House with a Secret\r
- II. Jean Valjean as a National Guard\r
- III. Foliis ac Frondibus\r
- IV. Change of Gate\r
- V. The Rose perceives that it is an Engine of War\r
- VI. The Battle Begun\r
- VII. To One Sadness oppose a Sadness and a Half\r
- VIII. The Chain-Gang\r
-\r
- BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH\r
-\r
- I. A Wound without, Healing within\r
- II. Mother Plutarque finds no Difficulty in explaining a Phenomenon\r
-\r
- BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING\r
-\r
- I. Solitude and Barracks Combined\r
- II. Cosette's Apprehensions\r
- III. Enriched with Commentaries by Toussaint\r
- IV. A Heart beneath a Stone\r
- V. Cosette after the Letter\r
- VI. Old People are made to go out opportunely\r
-\r
- BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE\r
-\r
- I. The Malicious Playfulness of the Wind\r
- II. In which Little Gavroche extracts Profit from Napoleon the Great\r
- III. The Vicissitudes of Flight\r
-\r
- BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG\r
-\r
- I. Origin\r
- II. Roots\r
- III. Slang which weeps and Slang which laughs\r
- IV. The Two Duties: To Watch and to Hope\r
-\r
- BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS\r
-\r
- I. Full Light\r
- II. The Bewilderment of Perfect Happiness\r
- III. The Beginning of Shadow\r
- IV. A Cab runs in English and barks in Slang\r
- V. Things of the Night\r
- VI. Marius becomes Practical once more to the Extent of\r
- Giving Cosette his Address\r
- VII. The Old Heart and the Young Heart in the Presence\r
- of Each Other\r
-\r
- BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?\r
-\r
- I. Jean Valjean\r
- II. Marius\r
- III. M. Mabeuf\r
-\r
- BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832\r
-\r
- I. The Surface of the Question\r
- II. The Root of the Matter\r
- III. A Burial; an Occasion to be born again\r
- IV. The Ebullitions of Former Days\r
- V. Originality of Paris\r
-\r
- BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE\r
-\r
- I. Some Explanations with Regard to the Origin of Gavroche's\r
- Poetry. The Influence of an Academician on this Poetry\r
- II. Gavroche on the March\r
- III. Just Indignation of a Hair-dresser\r
- IV. The Child is amazed at the Old Man\r
- V. The Old Man\r
- VI. Recruits\r
-\r
- BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE\r
-\r
- I. History of Corinthe from its Foundation\r
- II. Preliminary Gayeties\r
- III. Night begins to descend upon Grantaire\r
- IV. An Attempt to console the Widow Hucheloup\r
- V. Preparations\r
- VI. Waiting\r
- VII. The Man recruited in the Rue des Billettes\r
- VIII. Many Interrogation Points with Regard to a Certain\r
- Le Cabuc, whose Name may not have been Le Cabuc\r
-\r
- BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW\r
-\r
- I. From the Rue Plumet to the Quartier Saint-Denis\r
- II. An Owl's View of Paris\r
- III. The Extreme Edge\r
-\r
- BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR\r
-\r
- I. The Flag: Act First\r
- II. The Flag: Act Second\r
- III. Gavroche would have done better to accept Enjolras' Carbine\r
- IV. The Barrel of Powder\r
- V. End of the Verses of Jean Prouvaire\r
- VI. The Agony of Death after the Agony of Life\r
- VII. Gavroche as a Profound Calculator of Distances\r
-\r
- BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME\r
-\r
- I. A Drinker is a Babbler\r
- II. The Street Urchin an Enemy of Light\r
- III. While Cosette and Toussaint are Asleep\r
- IV. Gavroche's Excess of Zeal\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
- VOLUME V\r
-\r
- BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS\r
-\r
- I. The Charybdis of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the\r
- Scylla of the Faubourg du Temple\r
- II. What Is to Be Done in the Abyss if One Does Not Converse\r
- III. Light and Shadow\r
- IV. Minus Five, Plus One\r
- V. The Horizon Which One Beholds from the Summit of a Barricade\r
- VI. Marius Haggard, Javert Laconic\r
- VII. The Situation Becomes Aggravated\r
- VIII. The Artillery-men Compel People to Take Them Seriously\r
- IX. Employment of the Old Talents of a Poacher and That\r
- Infallible Marksmanship Which Influenced the\r
- Condemnation of 1796\r
- X. Dawn\r
- XI. The Shot Which Misses Nothing and Kills No One\r
- XII. Disorder a Partisan of Order\r
- XIII. Passing Gleams\r
- XIV. Wherein Will Appear the Name of Enjolras' Mistress\r
- XV. Gavroche Outside\r
- XVI. How from a Brother One Becomes a Father\r
- XVII. Mortuus Pater Filium Moriturum Expectat\r
- XVIII. The Vulture Becomes Prey\r
- XIX. Jean Valjean Takes His Revenge\r
- XX. The Dead Are in the Right and the Living Are Not in the Wrong\r
- XXI. The Heroes\r
- XXII. Foot to Foot\r
- XXIII. Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk\r
- XXIV. Prisoner\r
-\r
- BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN\r
-\r
- I. The Land Impoverished by the Sea\r
- II. Ancient History of the Sewer\r
- III. Bruneseau\r
- IV. Bruneseau\r
- V. Present Progress\r
- VI. Future Progress\r
-\r
- BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL\r
-\r
- I. The Sewer and Its Surprises\r
- II. Explanation\r
- III. The "Spun" Man\r
- IV. He Also Bears His Cross\r
- V. In the Case of Sand, as in That of Woman, There Is a\r
- Fineness Which Is Treacherous\r
- VI. The Fontis\r
- VII. One Sometimes Runs Aground When One Fancies That\r
- One Is Disembarking\r
- VIII. The Torn Coat-Tail\r
- IX. Marius Produces on Some One Who Is a Judge of the\r
- Matter, the Effect of Being Dead\r
- X. Return of the Son Who Was Prodigal of His Life\r
- XI. Concussion in the Absolute\r
- XII. The Grandfather\r
-\r
- BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED\r
-\r
- I. Javert\r
-\r
- BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER\r
-\r
- I. In Which the Tree with the Zinc Plaster Appears Again\r
- II. Marius, Emerging from Civil War, Makes Ready for\r
- Domestic War\r
- III. Marius Attacked\r
- IV. Mademoiselle Gillenormand Ends by No Longer Thinking\r
- It a Bad Thing That M. Fauchelevent Should Have\r
- Entered With Something Under His Arm\r
- V. Deposit Your Money in a Forest Rather than with a Notary\r
- VI. The Two Old Men Do Everything, Each One After His\r
- Own Fashion, to Render Cosette Happy\r
- VII. The Effects of Dreams Mingled with Happiness\r
- VIII. Two Men Impossible to Find\r
-\r
- BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT\r
-\r
- I. The 16th of February, 1833\r
- II. Jean Valjean Still Wears His Arm in a Sling\r
- III. The Inseparable\r
- IV. The Immortal Liver\r
-\r
- BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP\r
-\r
- I. The Seventh Circle and the Eighth Heaven\r
- II. The Obscurities Which a Revelation Can Contain\r
-\r
- BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT\r
-\r
- I. The Lower Chamber\r
- II. Another Step Backwards\r
- III. They Recall the Garden of the Rue Plumet\r
- IV. Attraction and Extinction\r
-\r
- BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN\r
-\r
- I. Pity for the Unhappy, but Indulgence for the Happy\r
- II. Last Flickerings of a Lamp Without Oil\r
- III. A Pen Is Heavy to the Man Who Lifted the\r
- Fauchelevent's Cart\r
- IV. A Bottle of Ink Which Only Succeeded in Whitening\r
- V. A Night Behind Which There Is Day\r
- VI. The Grass Covers and the Rain Effaces\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-LES MISERABLES\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-VOLUME I.--FANTINE.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-PREFACE\r
-\r
-\r
-So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of\r
-damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the\r
-civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine\r
-destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century--the\r
-degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through\r
-hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light--are unsolved;\r
-so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;--in\r
-other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance\r
-and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot\r
-fail to be of use.\r
-\r
-HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-FANTINE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--M. MYRIEL\r
-\r
-In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D---- He was\r
-an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see\r
-of D---- since 1806.\r
-\r
-Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance\r
-of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely\r
-for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various\r
-rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very\r
-moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said\r
-of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all\r
-in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a\r
-councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility\r
-of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of\r
-his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty,\r
-in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in\r
-parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said\r
-that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed,\r
-though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the\r
-whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and\r
-to gallantry.\r
-\r
-The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the\r
-parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed.\r
-M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the\r
-Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she\r
-had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate\r
-of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall\r
-of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps,\r
-even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance,\r
-with the magnifying powers of terror,--did these cause the ideas of\r
-renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of\r
-these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly\r
-smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes\r
-overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes\r
-would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one\r
-could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from\r
-Italy he was a priest.\r
-\r
-In 1804, M. Myriel was the Cure of B---- [Brignolles]. He was already\r
-advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.\r
-\r
-About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with\r
-his curacy--just what, is not precisely known--took him to Paris.\r
-Among other powerful persons to whom he went to solicit aid for his\r
-parishioners was M. le Cardinal Fesch. One day, when the Emperor\r
-had come to visit his uncle, the worthy Cure, who was waiting in the\r
-anteroom, found himself present when His Majesty passed. Napoleon,\r
-on finding himself observed with a certain curiosity by this old man,\r
-turned round and said abruptly:--\r
-\r
-"Who is this good man who is staring at me?"\r
-\r
-"Sire," said M. Myriel, "you are looking at a good man, and I at a great\r
-man. Each of us can profit by it."\r
-\r
-That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Cure,\r
-and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that\r
-he had been appointed Bishop of D----\r
-\r
-What truth was there, after all, in the stories which were invented as\r
-to the early portion of M. Myriel's life? No one knew. Very few families\r
-had been acquainted with the Myriel family before the Revolution.\r
-\r
-M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town,\r
-where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.\r
-He was obliged to undergo it although he was a bishop, and because\r
-he was a bishop. But after all, the rumors with which his name\r
-was connected were rumors only,--noise, sayings, words; less than\r
-words--palabres, as the energetic language of the South expresses it.\r
-\r
-However that may be, after nine years of episcopal power and of\r
-residence in D----, all the stories and subjects of conversation which\r
-engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen into\r
-profound oblivion. No one would have dared to mention them; no one would\r
-have dared to recall them.\r
-\r
-M. Myriel had arrived at D---- accompanied by an elderly spinster,\r
-Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister, and ten years his junior.\r
-\r
-Their only domestic was a female servant of the same age as Mademoiselle\r
-Baptistine, and named Madame Magloire, who, after having been the\r
-servant of M. le Cure, now assumed the double title of maid to\r
-Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.\r
-\r
-Mademoiselle Baptistine was a long, pale, thin, gentle creature; she\r
-realized the ideal expressed by the word "respectable"; for it seems\r
-that a woman must needs be a mother in order to be venerable. She\r
-had never been pretty; her whole life, which had been nothing but a\r
-succession of holy deeds, had finally conferred upon her a sort of\r
-pallor and transparency; and as she advanced in years she had acquired\r
-what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been leanness in\r
-her youth had become transparency in her maturity; and this diaphaneity\r
-allowed the angel to be seen. She was a soul rather than a virgin. Her\r
-person seemed made of a shadow; there was hardly sufficient body to\r
-provide for sex; a little matter enclosing a light; large eyes forever\r
-drooping;--a mere pretext for a soul's remaining on the earth.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire was a little, fat, white old woman, corpulent and\r
-bustling; always out of breath,--in the first place, because of her\r
-activity, and in the next, because of her asthma.\r
-\r
-On his arrival, M. Myriel was installed in the episcopal palace with\r
-the honors required by the Imperial decrees, which class a bishop\r
-immediately after a major-general. The mayor and the president paid the\r
-first call on him, and he, in turn, paid the first call on the general\r
-and the prefect.\r
-\r
-The installation over, the town waited to see its bishop at work.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--M. MYRIEL BECOMES M. WELCOME\r
-\r
-\r
-The episcopal palace of D---- adjoins the hospital.\r
-\r
-The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at\r
-the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology\r
-of the Faculty of Paris, Abbe of Simore, who had been Bishop of D---- in\r
-1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about\r
-it had a grand air,--the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms,\r
-the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks\r
-encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens\r
-planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb\r
-gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the\r
-gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My\r
-Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince d'Embrun; Antoine\r
-de Mesgrigny, the capuchin, Bishop of Grasse; Philippe de Vendome, Grand\r
-Prior of France, Abbe of Saint Honore de Lerins; Francois de Berton de\r
-Crillon, bishop, Baron de Vence; Cesar de Sabran de Forcalquier, bishop,\r
-Seignor of Glandeve; and Jean Soanen, Priest of the Oratory, preacher in\r
-ordinary to the king, bishop, Seignor of Senez. The portraits of these\r
-seven reverend personages decorated this apartment; and this memorable\r
-date, the 29th of July, 1714, was there engraved in letters of gold on a\r
-table of white marble.\r
-\r
-The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a\r
-small garden.\r
-\r
-Three days after his arrival, the Bishop visited the hospital. The visit\r
-ended, he had the director requested to be so good as to come to his\r
-house.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur the director of the hospital," said he to him, "how many sick\r
-people have you at the present moment?"\r
-\r
-"Twenty-six, Monseigneur."\r
-\r
-"That was the number which I counted," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-"The beds," pursued the director, "are very much crowded against each\r
-other."\r
-\r
-"That is what I observed."\r
-\r
-"The halls are nothing but rooms, and it is with difficulty that the air\r
-can be changed in them."\r
-\r
-"So it seems to me."\r
-\r
-"And then, when there is a ray of sun, the garden is very small for the\r
-convalescents."\r
-\r
-"That was what I said to myself."\r
-\r
-"In case of epidemics,--we have had the typhus fever this year; we\r
-had the sweating sickness two years ago, and a hundred patients at\r
-times,--we know not what to do."\r
-\r
-"That is the thought which occurred to me."\r
-\r
-"What would you have, Monseigneur?" said the director. "One must resign\r
-one's self."\r
-\r
-This conversation took place in the gallery dining-room on the\r
-ground-floor.\r
-\r
-The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he turned abruptly to the\r
-director of the hospital.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," said he, "how many beds do you think this hall alone would\r
-hold?"\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur's dining-room?" exclaimed the stupefied director.\r
-\r
-The Bishop cast a glance round the apartment, and seemed to be taking\r
-measures and calculations with his eyes.\r
-\r
-"It would hold full twenty beds," said he, as though speaking to\r
-himself. Then, raising his voice:--\r
-\r
-"Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something.\r
-There is evidently a mistake here. There are thirty-six of you, in five\r
-or six small rooms. There are three of us here, and we have room for\r
-sixty. There is some mistake, I tell you; you have my house, and I have\r
-yours. Give me back my house; you are at home here."\r
-\r
-On the following day the thirty-six patients were installed in the\r
-Bishop's palace, and the Bishop was settled in the hospital.\r
-\r
-M. Myriel had no property, his family having been ruined by the\r
-Revolution. His sister was in receipt of a yearly income of five hundred\r
-francs, which sufficed for her personal wants at the vicarage. M. Myriel\r
-received from the State, in his quality of bishop, a salary of fifteen\r
-thousand francs. On the very day when he took up his abode in the\r
-hospital, M. Myriel settled on the disposition of this sum once for\r
-all, in the following manner. We transcribe here a note made by his own\r
-hand:--\r
-\r
-\r
-NOTE ON THE REGULATION OF MY HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES.\r
-\r
- For the little seminary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 livres\r
- Society of the mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 "\r
- For the Lazarists of Montdidier . . . . . . . . . . 100 "\r
- Seminary for foreign missions in Paris . . . . . . 200 "\r
- Congregation of the Holy Spirit . . . . . . . . . . 150 "\r
- Religious establishments of the Holy Land . . . . . 100 "\r
- Charitable maternity societies . . . . . . . . . . 300 "\r
- Extra, for that of Arles . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 "\r
- Work for the amelioration of prisons . . . . . . . 400 "\r
- Work for the relief and delivery of prisoners . . . 500 "\r
- To liberate fathers of families incarcerated for debt 1,000 "\r
- Addition to the salary of the poor teachers of the\r
- diocese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,000 "\r
- Public granary of the Hautes-Alpes . . . . . . . . 100 "\r
- Congregation of the ladies of D----, of Manosque, and of\r
- Sisteron, for the gratuitous instruction of poor\r
- girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 "\r
- For the poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6,000 "\r
- My personal expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,000 "\r
- ------\r
- Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15,000 "\r
-\r
-\r
-M. Myriel made no change in this arrangement during the entire period\r
-that he occupied the see of D---- As has been seen, he called it\r
-regulating his household expenses.\r
-\r
-This arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mademoiselle\r
-Baptistine. This holy woman regarded Monseigneur of D---- as at one and\r
-the same time her brother and her bishop, her friend according to the\r
-flesh and her superior according to the Church. She simply loved and\r
-venerated him. When he spoke, she bowed; when he acted, she yielded her\r
-adherence. Their only servant, Madame Magloire, grumbled a little. It\r
-will be observed that Monsieur the Bishop had reserved for himself\r
-only one thousand livres, which, added to the pension of Mademoiselle\r
-Baptistine, made fifteen hundred francs a year. On these fifteen hundred\r
-francs these two old women and the old man subsisted.\r
-\r
-And when a village curate came to D----, the Bishop still found means to\r
-entertain him, thanks to the severe economy of Madame Magloire, and to\r
-the intelligent administration of Mademoiselle Baptistine.\r
-\r
-One day, after he had been in D---- about three months, the Bishop\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"And still I am quite cramped with it all!"\r
-\r
-"I should think so!" exclaimed Madame Magloire. "Monseigneur has not\r
-even claimed the allowance which the department owes him for the expense\r
-of his carriage in town, and for his journeys about the diocese. It was\r
-customary for bishops in former days."\r
-\r
-"Hold!" cried the Bishop, "you are quite right, Madame Magloire."\r
-\r
-And he made his demand.\r
-\r
-Some time afterwards the General Council took this demand under\r
-consideration, and voted him an annual sum of three thousand francs,\r
-under this heading: Allowance to M. the Bishop for expenses of carriage,\r
-expenses of posting, and expenses of pastoral visits.\r
-\r
-This provoked a great outcry among the local burgesses; and a senator\r
-of the Empire, a former member of the Council of the Five Hundred\r
-which favored the 18 Brumaire, and who was provided with a magnificent\r
-senatorial office in the vicinity of the town of D----, wrote to M.\r
-Bigot de Preameneu, the minister of public worship, a very angry and\r
-confidential note on the subject, from which we extract these authentic\r
-lines:--\r
-\r
-"Expenses of carriage? What can be done with it in a town of less than\r
-four thousand inhabitants? Expenses of journeys? What is the use\r
-of these trips, in the first place? Next, how can the posting be\r
-accomplished in these mountainous parts? There are no roads. No one\r
-travels otherwise than on horseback. Even the bridge between Durance and\r
-Chateau-Arnoux can barely support ox-teams. These priests are all thus,\r
-greedy and avaricious. This man played the good priest when he\r
-first came. Now he does like the rest; he must have a carriage and a\r
-posting-chaise, he must have luxuries, like the bishops of the olden\r
-days. Oh, all this priesthood! Things will not go well, M. le Comte,\r
-until the Emperor has freed us from these black-capped rascals. Down\r
-with the Pope! [Matters were getting embroiled with Rome.] For my part,\r
-I am for Caesar alone." Etc., etc.\r
-\r
-On the other hand, this affair afforded great delight to Madame\r
-Magloire. "Good," said she to Mademoiselle Baptistine; "Monseigneur\r
-began with other people, but he has had to wind up with himself, after\r
-all. He has regulated all his charities. Now here are three thousand\r
-francs for us! At last!"\r
-\r
-That same evening the Bishop wrote out and handed to his sister a\r
-memorandum conceived in the following terms:--\r
-\r
-EXPENSES OF CARRIAGE AND CIRCUIT.\r
-\r
- For furnishing meat soup to the patients in the hospital. 1,500 livres\r
- For the maternity charitable society of Aix . . . . . . . 250 "\r
- For the maternity charitable society of Draguignan . . . 250 "\r
- For foundlings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "\r
- For orphans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "\r
- -----\r
- Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000 "\r
-\r
-Such was M. Myriel's budget.\r
-\r
-As for the chance episcopal perquisites, the fees for marriage bans,\r
-dispensations, private baptisms, sermons, benedictions, of churches or\r
-chapels, marriages, etc., the Bishop levied them on the wealthy with all\r
-the more asperity, since he bestowed them on the needy.\r
-\r
-After a time, offerings of money flowed in. Those who had and those who\r
-lacked knocked at M. Myriel's door,--the latter in search of the alms\r
-which the former came to deposit. In less than a year the Bishop had\r
-become the treasurer of all benevolence and the cashier of all those\r
-in distress. Considerable sums of money passed through his hands, but\r
-nothing could induce him to make any change whatever in his mode of\r
-life, or add anything superfluous to his bare necessities.\r
-\r
-Far from it. As there is always more wretchedness below than there\r
-is brotherhood above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was\r
-received. It was like water on dry soil; no matter how much money he\r
-received, he never had any. Then he stripped himself.\r
-\r
-The usage being that bishops shall announce their baptismal names at the\r
-head of their charges and their pastoral letters, the poor people of the\r
-country-side had selected, with a sort of affectionate instinct, among\r
-the names and prenomens of their bishop, that which had a meaning for\r
-them; and they never called him anything except Monseigneur Bienvenu\r
-[Welcome]. We will follow their example, and will also call him thus\r
-when we have occasion to name him. Moreover, this appellation pleased\r
-him.\r
-\r
-"I like that name," said he. "Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur."\r
-\r
-We do not claim that the portrait herewith presented is probable; we\r
-confine ourselves to stating that it resembles the original.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--A HARD BISHOPRIC FOR A GOOD BISHOP\r
-\r
-\r
-The Bishop did not omit his pastoral visits because he had converted his\r
-carriage into alms. The diocese of D---- is a fatiguing one. There are\r
-very few plains and a great many mountains; hardly any roads, as we have\r
-just seen; thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarships, and two hundred\r
-and eighty-five auxiliary chapels. To visit all these is quite a task.\r
-\r
-The Bishop managed to do it. He went on foot when it was in the\r
-neighborhood, in a tilted spring-cart when it was on the plain, and on\r
-a donkey in the mountains. The two old women accompanied him. When the\r
-trip was too hard for them, he went alone.\r
-\r
-One day he arrived at Senez, which is an ancient episcopal city. He was\r
-mounted on an ass. His purse, which was very dry at that moment, did not\r
-permit him any other equipage. The mayor of the town came to receive\r
-him at the gate of the town, and watched him dismount from his ass,\r
-with scandalized eyes. Some of the citizens were laughing around him.\r
-"Monsieur the Mayor," said the Bishop, "and Messieurs Citizens, I\r
-perceive that I shock you. You think it very arrogant in a poor priest\r
-to ride an animal which was used by Jesus Christ. I have done so from\r
-necessity, I assure you, and not from vanity."\r
-\r
-In the course of these trips he was kind and indulgent, and talked\r
-rather than preached. He never went far in search of his arguments and\r
-his examples. He quoted to the inhabitants of one district the example\r
-of a neighboring district. In the cantons where they were harsh to the\r
-poor, he said: "Look at the people of Briancon! They have conferred on\r
-the poor, on widows and orphans, the right to have their meadows mown\r
-three days in advance of every one else. They rebuild their houses for\r
-them gratuitously when they are ruined. Therefore it is a country which\r
-is blessed by God. For a whole century, there has not been a single\r
-murderer among them."\r
-\r
-In villages which were greedy for profit and harvest, he said: "Look at\r
-the people of Embrun! If, at the harvest season, the father of a family\r
-has his son away on service in the army, and his daughters at service in\r
-the town, and if he is ill and incapacitated, the cure recommends him to\r
-the prayers of the congregation; and on Sunday, after the mass, all the\r
-inhabitants of the village--men, women, and children--go to the poor\r
-man's field and do his harvesting for him, and carry his straw and his\r
-grain to his granary." To families divided by questions of money and\r
-inheritance he said: "Look at the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so\r
-wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years.\r
-Well, when the father of a family dies, the boys go off to seek their\r
-fortunes, leaving the property to the girls, so that they may find\r
-husbands." To the cantons which had a taste for lawsuits, and where the\r
-farmers ruined themselves in stamped paper, he said: "Look at those good\r
-peasants in the valley of Queyras! There are three thousand souls of\r
-them. Mon Dieu! it is like a little republic. Neither judge nor bailiff\r
-is known there. The mayor does everything. He allots the imposts,\r
-taxes each person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides\r
-inheritances without charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he\r
-is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple men." To villages where\r
-he found no schoolmaster, he quoted once more the people of Queyras: "Do\r
-you know how they manage?" he said. "Since a little country of a\r
-dozen or fifteen hearths cannot always support a teacher, they have\r
-school-masters who are paid by the whole valley, who make the round\r
-of the villages, spending a week in this one, ten days in that, and\r
-instruct them. These teachers go to the fairs. I have seen them there.\r
-They are to be recognized by the quill pens which they wear in the cord\r
-of their hat. Those who teach reading only have one pen; those who teach\r
-reading and reckoning have two pens; those who teach reading, reckoning,\r
-and Latin have three pens. But what a disgrace to be ignorant! Do like\r
-the people of Queyras!"\r
-\r
-Thus he discoursed gravely and paternally; in default of examples, he\r
-invented parables, going directly to the point, with few phrases and\r
-many images, which characteristic formed the real eloquence of Jesus\r
-Christ. And being convinced himself, he was persuasive.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS\r
-\r
-His conversation was gay and affable. He put himself on a level with the\r
-two old women who had passed their lives beside him. When he laughed,\r
-it was the laugh of a schoolboy. Madame Magloire liked to call him Your\r
-Grace [Votre Grandeur]. One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went\r
-to his library in search of a book. This book was on one of the upper\r
-shelves. As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not\r
-reach it. "Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair. My greatness\r
-[grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf."\r
-\r
-One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lo, rarely allowed\r
-an opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence, what she\r
-designated as "the expectations" of her three sons. She had numerous\r
-relatives, who were very old and near to death, and of whom her sons\r
-were the natural heirs. The youngest of the three was to receive from a\r
-grand-aunt a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second was the\r
-heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to\r
-succeed to the peerage of his grandfather. The Bishop was accustomed to\r
-listen in silence to these innocent and pardonable maternal boasts. On\r
-one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful than usual,\r
-while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details of all these\r
-inheritances and all these "expectations." She interrupted herself\r
-impatiently: "Mon Dieu, cousin! What are you thinking about?" "I am\r
-thinking," replied the Bishop, "of a singular remark, which is to be\r
-found, I believe, in St. Augustine,--'Place your hopes in the man from\r
-whom you do not inherit.'"\r
-\r
-At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a\r
-gentleman of the country-side, wherein not only the dignities of the\r
-dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications of all his\r
-relatives, spread over an entire page: "What a stout back Death has!"\r
-he exclaimed. "What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed\r
-on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb\r
-into the service of vanity!"\r
-\r
-He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which almost always\r
-concealed a serious meaning. In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar\r
-came to D----, and preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent.\r
-The subject of his sermon was charity. He urged the rich to give to the\r
-poor, in order to avoid hell, which he depicted in the most frightful\r
-manner of which he was capable, and to win paradise, which he\r
-represented as charming and desirable. Among the audience there was\r
-a wealthy retired merchant, who was somewhat of a usurer, named M.\r
-Geborand, who had amassed two millions in the manufacture of coarse\r
-cloth, serges, and woollen galloons. Never in his whole life had M.\r
-Geborand bestowed alms on any poor wretch. After the delivery of that\r
-sermon, it was observed that he gave a sou every Sunday to the poor old\r
-beggar-women at the door of the cathedral. There were six of them to\r
-share it. One day the Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing\r
-this charity, and said to his sister, with a smile, "There is M.\r
-Geborand purchasing paradise for a sou."\r
-\r
-When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed even by\r
-a refusal, and on such occasions he gave utterance to remarks which\r
-induced reflection. Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room\r
-of the town; there was present the Marquis de Champtercier, a wealthy\r
-and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same time,\r
-an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety of man has\r
-actually existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, "You\r
-must give me something, M. le Marquis." The Marquis turned round and\r
-answered dryly, "I have poor people of my own, Monseigneur." "Give them\r
-to me," replied the Bishop.\r
-\r
-One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral:--\r
-\r
-\r
-"My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are thirteen hundred\r
-and twenty thousand peasants' dwellings in France which have but three\r
-openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand hovels which have but\r
-two openings, the door and one window; and three hundred and forty-six\r
-thousand cabins besides which have but one opening, the door. And this\r
-arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors and windows. Just\r
-put poor families, old women and little children, in those buildings,\r
-and behold the fevers and maladies which result! Alas! God gives air to\r
-men; the law sells it to them. I do not blame the law, but I bless God.\r
-In the department of the Isere, in the Var, in the two departments\r
-of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have not even\r
-wheelbarrows; they transport their manure on the backs of men; they have\r
-no candles, and they burn resinous sticks, and bits of rope dipped in\r
-pitch. That is the state of affairs throughout the whole of the hilly\r
-country of Dauphine. They make bread for six months at one time; they\r
-bake it with dried cow-dung. In the winter they break this bread up with\r
-an axe, and they soak it for twenty-four hours, in order to render it\r
-eatable. My brethren, have pity! behold the suffering on all sides of\r
-you!"\r
-\r
-Born a Provencal, he easily familiarized himself with the dialect of the\r
-south. He said, "En be! moussu, ses sage?" as in lower Languedoc; "Onte\r
-anaras passa?" as in the Basses-Alpes; "Puerte un bouen moutu embe un\r
-bouen fromage grase," as in upper Dauphine. This pleased the people\r
-extremely, and contributed not a little to win him access to all\r
-spirits. He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the\r
-mountains. He understood how to say the grandest things in the most\r
-vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.\r
-\r
-Moreover, he was the same towards people of the world and towards\r
-the lower classes. He condemned nothing in haste and without taking\r
-circumstances into account. He said, "Examine the road over which the\r
-fault has passed."\r
-\r
-Being, as he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none\r
-of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal\r
-of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a\r
-doctrine which may be summed up as follows:--\r
-\r
-"Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his\r
-temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it,\r
-check it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may\r
-be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is\r
-venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in\r
-prayer.\r
-\r
-"To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err,\r
-fall, sin if you will, but be upright.\r
-\r
-"The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream\r
-of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a\r
-gravitation."\r
-\r
-When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very\r
-quickly, "Oh! oh!" he said, with a smile; "to all appearance, this is\r
-a great crime which all the world commits. These are hypocrisies\r
-which have taken fright, and are in haste to make protest and to put\r
-themselves under shelter."\r
-\r
-He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of\r
-human society rest. He said, "The faults of women, of children, of the\r
-feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands,\r
-the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise."\r
-\r
-He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as\r
-possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction\r
-gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul\r
-is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the\r
-person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the\r
-shadow."\r
-\r
-It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging\r
-things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.\r
-\r
-One day he heard a criminal case, which was in preparation and on the\r
-point of trial, discussed in a drawing-room. A wretched man, being at\r
-the end of his resources, had coined counterfeit money, out of love for\r
-a woman, and for the child which he had had by her. Counterfeiting was\r
-still punishable with death at that epoch. The woman had been arrested\r
-in the act of passing the first false piece made by the man. She was\r
-held, but there were no proofs except against her. She alone could\r
-accuse her lover, and destroy him by her confession. She denied; they\r
-insisted. She persisted in her denial. Thereupon an idea occurred to\r
-the attorney for the crown. He invented an infidelity on the part of\r
-the lover, and succeeded, by means of fragments of letters cunningly\r
-presented, in persuading the unfortunate woman that she had a rival, and\r
-that the man was deceiving her. Thereupon, exasperated by jealousy, she\r
-denounced her lover, confessed all, proved all.\r
-\r
-The man was ruined. He was shortly to be tried at Aix with his\r
-accomplice. They were relating the matter, and each one was expressing\r
-enthusiasm over the cleverness of the magistrate. By bringing jealousy\r
-into play, he had caused the truth to burst forth in wrath, he had\r
-educed the justice of revenge. The Bishop listened to all this in\r
-silence. When they had finished, he inquired,--\r
-\r
-"Where are this man and woman to be tried?"\r
-\r
-"At the Court of Assizes."\r
-\r
-He went on, "And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?"\r
-\r
-A tragic event occurred at D---- A man was condemned to death for\r
-murder. He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly\r
-ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the\r
-public. The town took a great interest in the trial. On the eve of the\r
-day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain of the\r
-prison fell ill. A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his\r
-last moments. They sent for the cure. It seems that he refused to come,\r
-saying, "That is no affair of mine. I have nothing to do with that\r
-unpleasant task, and with that mountebank: I, too, am ill; and besides,\r
-it is not my place." This reply was reported to the Bishop, who said,\r
-"Monsieur le Cure is right: it is not his place; it is mine."\r
-\r
-He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of the\r
-"mountebank," called him by name, took him by the hand, and spoke to\r
-him. He passed the entire day with him, forgetful of food and sleep,\r
-praying to God for the soul of the condemned man, and praying the\r
-condemned man for his own. He told him the best truths, which are also\r
-the most simple. He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to\r
-bless. He taught him everything, encouraged and consoled him. The man\r
-was on the point of dying in despair. Death was an abyss to him. As he\r
-stood trembling on its mournful brink, he recoiled with horror. He\r
-was not sufficiently ignorant to be absolutely indifferent. His\r
-condemnation, which had been a profound shock, had, in a manner, broken\r
-through, here and there, that wall which separates us from the mystery\r
-of things, and which we call life. He gazed incessantly beyond this\r
-world through these fatal breaches, and beheld only darkness. The Bishop\r
-made him see light.\r
-\r
-On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy wretch, the\r
-Bishop was still there. He followed him, and exhibited himself to the\r
-eyes of the crowd in his purple camail and with his episcopal cross upon\r
-his neck, side by side with the criminal bound with cords.\r
-\r
-He mounted the tumbril with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. The\r
-sufferer, who had been so gloomy and cast down on the preceding day, was\r
-radiant. He felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God. The\r
-Bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife was about to fall,\r
-he said to him: "God raises from the dead him whom man slays; he whom\r
-his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more. Pray, believe,\r
-enter into life: the Father is there." When he descended from the\r
-scaffold, there was something in his look which made the people draw\r
-aside to let him pass. They did not know which was most worthy of\r
-admiration, his pallor or his serenity. On his return to the humble\r
-dwelling, which he designated, with a smile, as his palace, he said to\r
-his sister, "I have just officiated pontifically."\r
-\r
-Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least\r
-understood, there were people in the town who said, when commenting on\r
-this conduct of the Bishop, "It is affectation."\r
-\r
-This, however, was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms.\r
-The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched, and\r
-admired him.\r
-\r
-As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine,\r
-and it was a long time before he recovered from it.\r
-\r
-In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared, it has\r
-something about it which produces hallucination. One may feel a certain\r
-indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon\r
-it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with\r
-one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent;\r
-one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some admire\r
-it, like de Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine\r
-is the concretion of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral,\r
-and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers\r
-with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their\r
-interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a\r
-vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not\r
-a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of\r
-wood, iron and cords.\r
-\r
-It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre\r
-initiative; one would say that this piece of carpenter's work saw, that\r
-this machine heard, that this mechanism understood, that this wood,\r
-this iron, and these cords were possessed of will. In the frightful\r
-meditation into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold appears\r
-in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The\r
-scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats\r
-flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated\r
-by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a\r
-horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.\r
-\r
-Therefore, the impression was terrible and profound; on the day\r
-following the execution, and on many succeeding days, the Bishop\r
-appeared to be crushed. The almost violent serenity of the funereal\r
-moment had disappeared; the phantom of social justice tormented him. He,\r
-who generally returned from all his deeds with a radiant satisfaction,\r
-seemed to be reproaching himself. At times he talked to himself, and\r
-stammered lugubrious monologues in a low voice. This is one which his\r
-sister overheard one evening and preserved: "I did not think that it was\r
-so monstrous. It is wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a\r
-degree as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what\r
-right do men touch that unknown thing?"\r
-\r
-In course of time these impressions weakened and probably vanished.\r
-Nevertheless, it was observed that the Bishop thenceforth avoided\r
-passing the place of execution.\r
-\r
-M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of the sick and\r
-dying. He did not ignore the fact that therein lay his greatest duty and\r
-his greatest labor. Widowed and orphaned families had no need to summon\r
-him; he came of his own accord. He understood how to sit down and hold\r
-his peace for long hours beside the man who had lost the wife of his\r
-love, of the mother who had lost her child. As he knew the moment for\r
-silence he knew also the moment for speech. Oh, admirable consoler! He\r
-sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify\r
-it by hope. He said:--\r
-\r
-"Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards the dead. Think\r
-not of that which perishes. Gaze steadily. You will perceive the living\r
-light of your well-beloved dead in the depths of heaven." He knew that\r
-faith is wholesome. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing man, by\r
-pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief which\r
-gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze upon a\r
-star.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG\r
-\r
-\r
-The private life of M. Myriel was filled with the same thoughts as his\r
-public life. The voluntary poverty in which the Bishop of D---- lived,\r
-would have been a solemn and charming sight for any one who could have\r
-viewed it close at hand.\r
-\r
-Like all old men, and like the majority of thinkers, he slept little.\r
-This brief slumber was profound. In the morning he meditated for an\r
-hour, then he said his mass, either at the cathedral or in his own\r
-house. His mass said, he broke his fast on rye bread dipped in the milk\r
-of his own cows. Then he set to work.\r
-\r
-A Bishop is a very busy man: he must every day receive the secretary\r
-of the bishopric, who is generally a canon, and nearly every day his\r
-vicars-general. He has congregations to reprove, privileges to grant,\r
-a whole ecclesiastical library to examine,--prayer-books, diocesan\r
-catechisms, books of hours, etc.,--charges to write, sermons to\r
-authorize, cures and mayors to reconcile, a clerical correspondence, an\r
-administrative correspondence; on one side the State, on the other the\r
-Holy See; and a thousand matters of business.\r
-\r
-What time was left to him, after these thousand details of business, and\r
-his offices and his breviary, he bestowed first on the necessitous,\r
-the sick, and the afflicted; the time which was left to him from the\r
-afflicted, the sick, and the necessitous, he devoted to work. Sometimes\r
-he dug in his garden; again, he read or wrote. He had but one word\r
-for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. "The mind is a\r
-garden," said he.\r
-\r
-Towards mid-day, when the weather was fine, he went forth and took a\r
-stroll in the country or in town, often entering lowly dwellings. He\r
-was seen walking alone, buried in his own thoughts, his eyes cast down,\r
-supporting himself on his long cane, clad in his wadded purple garment\r
-of silk, which was very warm, wearing purple stockings inside his coarse\r
-shoes, and surmounted by a flat hat which allowed three golden tassels\r
-of large bullion to droop from its three points.\r
-\r
-It was a perfect festival wherever he appeared. One would have said that\r
-his presence had something warming and luminous about it. The children\r
-and the old people came out to the doorsteps for the Bishop as for the\r
-sun. He bestowed his blessing, and they blessed him. They pointed out\r
-his house to any one who was in need of anything.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Comfortor 1b1-5-comfortor]\r
-\r
-Here and there he halted, accosted the little boys and girls, and smiled\r
-upon the mothers. He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when\r
-he no longer had any, he visited the rich.\r
-\r
-As he made his cassocks last a long while, and did not wish to have it\r
-noticed, he never went out in the town without his wadded purple cloak.\r
-This inconvenienced him somewhat in summer.\r
-\r
-On his return, he dined. The dinner resembled his breakfast.\r
-\r
-At half-past eight in the evening he supped with his sister, Madame\r
-Magloire standing behind them and serving them at table. Nothing could\r
-be more frugal than this repast. If, however, the Bishop had one of his\r
-cures to supper, Madame Magloire took advantage of the opportunity to\r
-serve Monseigneur with some excellent fish from the lake, or with some\r
-fine game from the mountains. Every cure furnished the pretext for\r
-a good meal: the Bishop did not interfere. With that exception, his\r
-ordinary diet consisted only of vegetables boiled in water, and oil\r
-soup. Thus it was said in the town, when the Bishop does not indulge in\r
-the cheer of a cure, he indulges in the cheer of a trappist.\r
-\r
-After supper he conversed for half an hour with Mademoiselle Baptistine\r
-and Madame Magloire; then he retired to his own room and set to writing,\r
-sometimes on loose sheets, and again on the margin of some folio. He was\r
-a man of letters and rather learned. He left behind him five or six\r
-very curious manuscripts; among others, a dissertation on this verse in\r
-Genesis, In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon the waters.\r
-With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic verse which says,\r
-The winds of God blew; Flavius Josephus who says, A wind from above was\r
-precipitated upon the earth; and finally, the Chaldaic paraphrase of\r
-Onkelos, which renders it, A wind coming from God blew upon the face of\r
-the waters. In another dissertation, he examines the theological works\r
-of Hugo, Bishop of Ptolemais, great-grand-uncle to the writer of this\r
-book, and establishes the fact, that to this bishop must be attributed\r
-the divers little works published during the last century, under the\r
-pseudonym of Barleycourt.\r
-\r
-Sometimes, in the midst of his reading, no matter what the book might\r
-be which he had in his hand, he would suddenly fall into a profound\r
-meditation, whence he only emerged to write a few lines on the pages of\r
-the volume itself. These lines have often no connection whatever with\r
-the book which contains them. We now have under our eyes a note written\r
-by him on the margin of a quarto entitled Correspondence of Lord Germain\r
-with Generals Clinton, Cornwallis, and the Admirals on the American\r
-station. Versailles, Poincot, book-seller; and Paris, Pissot,\r
-bookseller, Quai des Augustins.\r
-\r
-Here is the note:--\r
-\r
-"Oh, you who are!\r
-\r
-"Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the\r
-Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls\r
-you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you\r
-Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence;\r
-Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man\r
-calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most\r
-beautiful of all your names."\r
-\r
-Toward nine o'clock in the evening the two women retired and betook\r
-themselves to their chambers on the first floor, leaving him alone until\r
-morning on the ground floor.\r
-\r
-It is necessary that we should, in this place, give an exact idea of the\r
-dwelling of the Bishop of D----\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--WHO GUARDED HIS HOUSE FOR HIM\r
-\r
-The house in which he lived consisted, as we have said, of a ground\r
-floor, and one story above; three rooms on the ground floor, three\r
-chambers on the first, and an attic above. Behind the house was a\r
-garden, a quarter of an acre in extent. The two women occupied the\r
-first floor; the Bishop was lodged below. The first room, opening on the\r
-street, served him as dining-room, the second was his bedroom, and the\r
-third his oratory. There was no exit possible from this oratory, except\r
-by passing through the bedroom, nor from the bedroom, without passing\r
-through the dining-room. At the end of the suite, in the oratory, there\r
-was a detached alcove with a bed, for use in cases of hospitality.\r
-The Bishop offered this bed to country curates whom business or the\r
-requirements of their parishes brought to D----\r
-\r
-The pharmacy of the hospital, a small building which had been added\r
-to the house, and abutted on the garden, had been transformed into\r
-a kitchen and cellar. In addition to this, there was in the garden a\r
-stable, which had formerly been the kitchen of the hospital, and in\r
-which the Bishop kept two cows. No matter what the quantity of milk they\r
-gave, he invariably sent half of it every morning to the sick people in\r
-the hospital. "I am paying my tithes," he said.\r
-\r
-His bedroom was tolerably large, and rather difficult to warm in bad\r
-weather. As wood is extremely dear at D----, he hit upon the idea of\r
-having a compartment of boards constructed in the cow-shed. Here he\r
-passed his evenings during seasons of severe cold: he called it his\r
-winter salon.\r
-\r
-In this winter salon, as in the dining-room, there was no other\r
-furniture than a square table in white wood, and four straw-seated\r
-chairs. In addition to this the dining-room was ornamented with an\r
-antique sideboard, painted pink, in water colors. Out of a similar\r
-sideboard, properly draped with white napery and imitation lace, the\r
-Bishop had constructed the altar which decorated his oratory.\r
-\r
-His wealthy penitents and the sainted women of D---- had more than once\r
-assessed themselves to raise the money for a new altar for Monseigneur's\r
-oratory; on each occasion he had taken the money and had given it to\r
-the poor. "The most beautiful of altars," he said, "is the soul of an\r
-unhappy creature consoled and thanking God."\r
-\r
-In his oratory there were two straw prie-Dieu, and there was an\r
-arm-chair, also in straw, in his bedroom. When, by chance, he received\r
-seven or eight persons at one time, the prefect, or the general, or the\r
-staff of the regiment in garrison, or several pupils from the little\r
-seminary, the chairs had to be fetched from the winter salon in the\r
-stable, the prie-Dieu from the oratory, and the arm-chair from the\r
-bedroom: in this way as many as eleven chairs could be collected for the\r
-visitors. A room was dismantled for each new guest.\r
-\r
-It sometimes happened that there were twelve in the party; the Bishop\r
-then relieved the embarrassment of the situation by standing in front\r
-of the chimney if it was winter, or by strolling in the garden if it was\r
-summer.\r
-\r
-There was still another chair in the detached alcove, but the straw was\r
-half gone from it, and it had but three legs, so that it was of service\r
-only when propped against the wall. Mademoiselle Baptistine had also in\r
-her own room a very large easy-chair of wood, which had formerly been\r
-gilded, and which was covered with flowered pekin; but they had been\r
-obliged to hoist this bergere up to the first story through the window,\r
-as the staircase was too narrow; it could not, therefore, be reckoned\r
-among the possibilities in the way of furniture.\r
-\r
-Mademoiselle Baptistine's ambition had been to be able to purchase a set\r
-of drawing-room furniture in yellow Utrecht velvet, stamped with a rose\r
-pattern, and with mahogany in swan's neck style, with a sofa. But this\r
-would have cost five hundred francs at least, and in view of the fact\r
-that she had only been able to lay by forty-two francs and ten sous for\r
-this purpose in the course of five years, she had ended by renouncing\r
-the idea. However, who is there who has attained his ideal?\r
-\r
-Nothing is more easy to present to the imagination than the Bishop's\r
-bedchamber. A glazed door opened on the garden; opposite this was the\r
-bed,--a hospital bed of iron, with a canopy of green serge; in the\r
-shadow of the bed, behind a curtain, were the utensils of the toilet,\r
-which still betrayed the elegant habits of the man of the world: there\r
-were two doors, one near the chimney, opening into the oratory; the\r
-other near the bookcase, opening into the dining-room. The bookcase was\r
-a large cupboard with glass doors filled with books; the chimney was of\r
-wood painted to represent marble, and habitually without fire. In the\r
-chimney stood a pair of firedogs of iron, ornamented above with two\r
-garlanded vases, and flutings which had formerly been silvered\r
-with silver leaf, which was a sort of episcopal luxury; above the\r
-chimney-piece hung a crucifix of copper, with the silver worn off, fixed\r
-on a background of threadbare velvet in a wooden frame from which the\r
-gilding had fallen; near the glass door a large table with an inkstand,\r
-loaded with a confusion of papers and with huge volumes; before the\r
-table an arm-chair of straw; in front of the bed a prie-Dieu, borrowed\r
-from the oratory.\r
-\r
-Two portraits in oval frames were fastened to the wall on each side of\r
-the bed. Small gilt inscriptions on the plain surface of the cloth at\r
-the side of these figures indicated that the portraits represented,\r
-one the Abbe of Chaliot, bishop of Saint Claude; the other, the Abbe\r
-Tourteau, vicar-general of Agde, abbe of Grand-Champ, order of Citeaux,\r
-diocese of Chartres. When the Bishop succeeded to this apartment, after\r
-the hospital patients, he had found these portraits there, and had left\r
-them. They were priests, and probably donors--two reasons for respecting\r
-them. All that he knew about these two persons was, that they had\r
-been appointed by the king, the one to his bishopric, the other to his\r
-benefice, on the same day, the 27th of April, 1785. Madame Magloire\r
-having taken the pictures down to dust, the Bishop had discovered these\r
-particulars written in whitish ink on a little square of paper, yellowed\r
-by time, and attached to the back of the portrait of the Abbe of\r
-Grand-Champ with four wafers.\r
-\r
-At his window he had an antique curtain of a coarse woollen stuff, which\r
-finally became so old, that, in order to avoid the expense of a new one,\r
-Madame Magloire was forced to take a large seam in the very middle\r
-of it. This seam took the form of a cross. The Bishop often called\r
-attention to it: "How delightful that is!" he said.\r
-\r
-All the rooms in the house, without exception, those on the ground\r
-floor as well as those on the first floor, were white-washed, which is a\r
-fashion in barracks and hospitals.\r
-\r
-However, in their latter years, Madame Magloire discovered beneath the\r
-paper which had been washed over, paintings, ornamenting the apartment\r
-of Mademoiselle Baptistine, as we shall see further on. Before becoming\r
-a hospital, this house had been the ancient parliament house of the\r
-Bourgeois. Hence this decoration. The chambers were paved in red bricks,\r
-which were washed every week, with straw mats in front of all the beds.\r
-Altogether, this dwelling, which was attended to by the two women, was\r
-exquisitely clean from top to bottom. This was the sole luxury which the\r
-Bishop permitted. He said, "That takes nothing from the poor."\r
-\r
-It must be confessed, however, that he still retained from his former\r
-possessions six silver knives and forks and a soup-ladle, which\r
-Madame Magloire contemplated every day with delight, as they glistened\r
-splendidly upon the coarse linen cloth. And since we are now painting\r
-the Bishop of D---- as he was in reality, we must add that he had said\r
-more than once, "I find it difficult to renounce eating from silver\r
-dishes."\r
-\r
-To this silverware must be added two large candlesticks of massive\r
-silver, which he had inherited from a great-aunt. These candlesticks\r
-held two wax candles, and usually figured on the Bishop's chimney-piece.\r
-When he had any one to dinner, Madame Magloire lighted the two candles\r
-and set the candlesticks on the table.\r
-\r
-In the Bishop's own chamber, at the head of his bed, there was a small\r
-cupboard, in which Madame Magloire locked up the six silver knives and\r
-forks and the big spoon every night. But it is necessary to add, that\r
-the key was never removed.\r
-\r
-The garden, which had been rather spoiled by the ugly buildings which\r
-we have mentioned, was composed of four alleys in cross-form, radiating\r
-from a tank. Another walk made the circuit of the garden, and skirted\r
-the white wall which enclosed it. These alleys left behind them four\r
-square plots rimmed with box. In three of these, Madame Magloire\r
-cultivated vegetables; in the fourth, the Bishop had planted some\r
-flowers; here and there stood a few fruit-trees. Madame Magloire had\r
-once remarked, with a sort of gentle malice: "Monseigneur, you who turn\r
-everything to account, have, nevertheless, one useless plot. It would be\r
-better to grow salads there than bouquets." "Madame Magloire," retorted\r
-the Bishop, "you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the\r
-useful." He added after a pause, "More so, perhaps."\r
-\r
-This plot, consisting of three or four beds, occupied the Bishop\r
-almost as much as did his books. He liked to pass an hour or two there,\r
-trimming, hoeing, and making holes here and there in the earth, into\r
-which he dropped seeds. He was not as hostile to insects as a gardener\r
-could have wished to see him. Moreover, he made no pretensions to\r
-botany; he ignored groups and consistency; he made not the slightest\r
-effort to decide between Tournefort and the natural method; he took part\r
-neither with the buds against the cotyledons, nor with Jussieu against\r
-Linnaeus. He did not study plants; he loved flowers. He respected\r
-learned men greatly; he respected the ignorant still more; and, without\r
-ever failing in these two respects, he watered his flower-beds every\r
-summer evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.\r
-\r
-The house had not a single door which could be locked. The door of the\r
-dining-room, which, as we have said, opened directly on the cathedral\r
-square, had formerly been ornamented with locks and bolts like the door\r
-of a prison. The Bishop had had all this ironwork removed, and this door\r
-was never fastened, either by night or by day, with anything except the\r
-latch. All that the first passerby had to do at any hour, was to give it\r
-a push. At first, the two women had been very much tried by this door,\r
-which was never fastened, but Monsieur de D---- had said to them, "Have\r
-bolts put on your rooms, if that will please you." They had ended by\r
-sharing his confidence, or by at least acting as though they shared it.\r
-Madame Magloire alone had frights from time to time. As for the Bishop,\r
-his thought can be found explained, or at least indicated, in the three\r
-lines which he wrote on the margin of a Bible, "This is the shade of\r
-difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of\r
-the priest should always be open."\r
-\r
-On another book, entitled Philosophy of the Medical Science, he had\r
-written this other note: "Am not I a physician like them? I also have my\r
-patients, and then, too, I have some whom I call my unfortunates."\r
-\r
-Again he wrote: "Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of\r
-you. The very man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs\r
-shelter."\r
-\r
-It chanced that a worthy cure, I know not whether it was the cure of\r
-Couloubroux or the cure of Pompierry, took it into his head to ask\r
-him one day, probably at the instigation of Madame Magloire, whether\r
-Monsieur was sure that he was not committing an indiscretion, to a\r
-certain extent, in leaving his door unfastened day and night, at the\r
-mercy of any one who should choose to enter, and whether, in short,\r
-he did not fear lest some misfortune might occur in a house so little\r
-guarded. The Bishop touched his shoulder, with gentle gravity, and\r
-said to him, "Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui\r
-custodiunt eam," Unless the Lord guard the house, in vain do they watch\r
-who guard it.\r
-\r
-Then he spoke of something else.\r
-\r
-He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as\r
-the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be\r
-tranquil."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--CRAVATTE\r
-\r
-It is here that a fact falls naturally into place, which we must not\r
-omit, because it is one of the sort which show us best what sort of a\r
-man the Bishop of D---- was.\r
-\r
-After the destruction of the band of Gaspard Bes, who had infested the\r
-gorges of Ollioules, one of his lieutenants, Cravatte, took refuge in\r
-the mountains. He concealed himself for some time with his bandits, the\r
-remnant of Gaspard Bes's troop, in the county of Nice; then he made his\r
-way to Piedmont, and suddenly reappeared in France, in the vicinity\r
-of Barcelonette. He was first seen at Jauziers, then at Tuiles. He hid\r
-himself in the caverns of the Joug-de-l'Aigle, and thence he descended\r
-towards the hamlets and villages through the ravines of Ubaye and\r
-Ubayette.\r
-\r
-He even pushed as far as Embrun, entered the cathedral one night,\r
-and despoiled the sacristy. His highway robberies laid waste the\r
-country-side. The gendarmes were set on his track, but in vain. He\r
-always escaped; sometimes he resisted by main force. He was a bold\r
-wretch. In the midst of all this terror the Bishop arrived. He was\r
-making his circuit to Chastelar. The mayor came to meet him, and urged\r
-him to retrace his steps. Cravatte was in possession of the mountains\r
-as far as Arche, and beyond; there was danger even with an escort; it\r
-merely exposed three or four unfortunate gendarmes to no purpose.\r
-\r
-"Therefore," said the Bishop, "I intend to go without escort."\r
-\r
-"You do not really mean that, Monseigneur!" exclaimed the mayor.\r
-\r
-"I do mean it so thoroughly that I absolutely refuse any gendarmes, and\r
-shall set out in an hour."\r
-\r
-"Set out?"\r
-\r
-"Set out."\r
-\r
-"Alone?"\r
-\r
-"Alone."\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur, you will not do that!"\r
-\r
-"There exists yonder in the mountains," said the Bishop, "a tiny\r
-community no bigger than that, which I have not seen for three years.\r
-They are my good friends, those gentle and honest shepherds. They own\r
-one goat out of every thirty that they tend. They make very pretty\r
-woollen cords of various colors, and they play the mountain airs on\r
-little flutes with six holes. They need to be told of the good God now\r
-and then. What would they say to a bishop who was afraid? What would\r
-they say if I did not go?"\r
-\r
-"But the brigands, Monseigneur?"\r
-\r
-"Hold," said the Bishop, "I must think of that. You are right. I may\r
-meet them. They, too, need to be told of the good God."\r
-\r
-"But, Monseigneur, there is a band of them! A flock of wolves!"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le maire, it may be that it is of this very flock of wolves\r
-that Jesus has constituted me the shepherd. Who knows the ways of\r
-Providence?"\r
-\r
-"They will rob you, Monseigneur."\r
-\r
-"I have nothing."\r
-\r
-"They will kill you."\r
-\r
-"An old goodman of a priest, who passes along mumbling his prayers? Bah!\r
-To what purpose?"\r
-\r
-"Oh, mon Dieu! what if you should meet them!"\r
-\r
-"I should beg alms of them for my poor."\r
-\r
-"Do not go, Monseigneur. In the name of Heaven! You are risking your\r
-life!"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le maire," said the Bishop, "is that really all? I am not in\r
-the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls."\r
-\r
-They had to allow him to do as he pleased. He set out, accompanied only\r
-by a child who offered to serve as a guide. His obstinacy was bruited\r
-about the country-side, and caused great consternation.\r
-\r
-He would take neither his sister nor Madame Magloire. He traversed the\r
-mountain on mule-back, encountered no one, and arrived safe and sound\r
-at the residence of his "good friends," the shepherds. He remained\r
-there for a fortnight, preaching, administering the sacrament, teaching,\r
-exhorting. When the time of his departure approached, he resolved to\r
-chant a Te Deum pontifically. He mentioned it to the cure. But what was\r
-to be done? There were no episcopal ornaments. They could only place at\r
-his disposal a wretched village sacristy, with a few ancient chasubles\r
-of threadbare damask adorned with imitation lace.\r
-\r
-"Bah!" said the Bishop. "Let us announce our Te Deum from the pulpit,\r
-nevertheless, Monsieur le Cure. Things will arrange themselves."\r
-\r
-They instituted a search in the churches of the neighborhood. All the\r
-magnificence of these humble parishes combined would not have sufficed\r
-to clothe the chorister of a cathedral properly.\r
-\r
-While they were thus embarrassed, a large chest was brought and\r
-deposited in the presbytery for the Bishop, by two unknown horsemen, who\r
-departed on the instant. The chest was opened; it contained a cope of\r
-cloth of gold, a mitre ornamented with diamonds, an archbishop's cross,\r
-a magnificent crosier,--all the pontifical vestments which had been\r
-stolen a month previously from the treasury of Notre Dame d'Embrun. In\r
-the chest was a paper, on which these words were written, "From Cravatte\r
-to Monseigneur Bienvenu."\r
-\r
-"Did not I say that things would come right of themselves?" said the\r
-Bishop. Then he added, with a smile, "To him who contents himself with\r
-the surplice of a curate, God sends the cope of an archbishop."\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur," murmured the cure, throwing back his head with a smile.\r
-"God--or the Devil."\r
-\r
-The Bishop looked steadily at the cure, and repeated with authority,\r
-"God!"\r
-\r
-When he returned to Chastelar, the people came out to stare at him as at\r
-a curiosity, all along the road. At the priest's house in Chastelar he\r
-rejoined Mademoiselle Baptistine and Madame Magloire, who were waiting\r
-for him, and he said to his sister: "Well! was I in the right? The poor\r
-priest went to his poor mountaineers with empty hands, and he returns\r
-from them with his hands full. I set out bearing only my faith in God; I\r
-have brought back the treasure of a cathedral."\r
-\r
-That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear\r
-robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers.\r
-Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the\r
-real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it\r
-what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which\r
-threatens our soul."\r
-\r
-Then, turning to his sister: "Sister, never a precaution on the part\r
-of the priest, against his fellow-man. That which his fellow does, God\r
-permits. Let us confine ourselves to prayer, when we think that a danger\r
-is approaching us. Let us pray, not for ourselves, but that our brother\r
-may not fall into sin on our account."\r
-\r
-However, such incidents were rare in his life. We relate those of which\r
-we know; but generally he passed his life in doing the same things at\r
-the same moment. One month of his year resembled one hour of his day.\r
-\r
-As to what became of "the treasure" of the cathedral of Embrun, we\r
-should be embarrassed by any inquiry in that direction. It consisted of\r
-very handsome things, very tempting things, and things which were very\r
-well adapted to be stolen for the benefit of the unfortunate. Stolen\r
-they had already been elsewhere. Half of the adventure was completed; it\r
-only remained to impart a new direction to the theft, and to cause it\r
-to take a short trip in the direction of the poor. However, we make no\r
-assertions on this point. Only, a rather obscure note was found among\r
-the Bishop's papers, which may bear some relation to this matter, and\r
-which is couched in these terms, "The question is, to decide whether\r
-this should be turned over to the cathedral or to the hospital."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--PHILOSOPHY AFTER DRINKING\r
-\r
-The senator above mentioned was a clever man, who had made his own way,\r
-heedless of those things which present obstacles, and which are called\r
-conscience, sworn faith, justice, duty: he had marched straight to his\r
-goal, without once flinching in the line of his advancement and his\r
-interest. He was an old attorney, softened by success; not a bad man by\r
-any means, who rendered all the small services in his power to his sons,\r
-his sons-in-law, his relations, and even to his friends, having wisely\r
-seized upon, in life, good sides, good opportunities, good windfalls.\r
-Everything else seemed to him very stupid. He was intelligent, and just\r
-sufficiently educated to think himself a disciple of Epicurus; while he\r
-was, in reality, only a product of Pigault-Lebrun. He laughed willingly\r
-and pleasantly over infinite and eternal things, and at the "Crotchets\r
-of that good old fellow the Bishop." He even sometimes laughed at him\r
-with an amiable authority in the presence of M. Myriel himself, who\r
-listened to him.\r
-\r
-On some semi-official occasion or other, I do not recollect what,\r
-Count*** [this senator] and M. Myriel were to dine with the prefect.\r
-At dessert, the senator, who was slightly exhilarated, though still\r
-perfectly dignified, exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Egad, Bishop, let's have a discussion. It is hard for a senator and a\r
-bishop to look at each other without winking. We are two augurs. I am\r
-going to make a confession to you. I have a philosophy of my own."\r
-\r
-"And you are right," replied the Bishop. "As one makes one's philosophy,\r
-so one lies on it. You are on the bed of purple, senator."\r
-\r
-The senator was encouraged, and went on:--\r
-\r
-"Let us be good fellows."\r
-\r
-"Good devils even," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-"I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens,\r
-Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the\r
-philosophers in my library gilded on the edges."\r
-\r
-"Like yourself, Count," interposed the Bishop.\r
-\r
-The senator resumed:--\r
-\r
-"I hate Diderot; he is an ideologist, a declaimer, and a revolutionist,\r
-a believer in God at bottom, and more bigoted than Voltaire. Voltaire\r
-made sport of Needham, and he was wrong, for Needham's eels prove that\r
-God is useless. A drop of vinegar in a spoonful of flour paste supplies\r
-the fiat lux. Suppose the drop to be larger and the spoonful bigger;\r
-you have the world. Man is the eel. Then what is the good of the Eternal\r
-Father? The Jehovah hypothesis tires me, Bishop. It is good for nothing\r
-but to produce shallow people, whose reasoning is hollow. Down with that\r
-great All, which torments me! Hurrah for Zero which leaves me in peace!\r
-Between you and me, and in order to empty my sack, and make confession\r
-to my pastor, as it behooves me to do, I will admit to you that I\r
-have good sense. I am not enthusiastic over your Jesus, who preaches\r
-renunciation and sacrifice to the last extremity. 'Tis the counsel of an\r
-avaricious man to beggars. Renunciation; why? Sacrifice; to what end?\r
-I do not see one wolf immolating himself for the happiness of another\r
-wolf. Let us stick to nature, then. We are at the top; let us have a\r
-superior philosophy. What is the advantage of being at the top, if\r
-one sees no further than the end of other people's noses? Let us live\r
-merrily. Life is all. That man has another future elsewhere, on high,\r
-below, anywhere, I don't believe; not one single word of it. Ah!\r
-sacrifice and renunciation are recommended to me; I must take heed to\r
-everything I do; I must cudgel my brains over good and evil, over the\r
-just and the unjust, over the fas and the nefas. Why? Because I shall\r
-have to render an account of my actions. When? After death. What a fine\r
-dream! After my death it will be a very clever person who can catch me.\r
-Have a handful of dust seized by a shadow-hand, if you can. Let us tell\r
-the truth, we who are initiated, and who have raised the veil of Isis:\r
-there is no such thing as either good or evil; there is vegetation.\r
-Let us seek the real. Let us get to the bottom of it. Let us go into it\r
-thoroughly. What the deuce! let us go to the bottom of it! We must scent\r
-out the truth; dig in the earth for it, and seize it. Then it gives you\r
-exquisite joys. Then you grow strong, and you laugh. I am square on the\r
-bottom, I am. Immortality, Bishop, is a chance, a waiting for dead men's\r
-shoes. Ah! what a charming promise! trust to it, if you like! What a\r
-fine lot Adam has! We are souls, and we shall be angels, with blue wings\r
-on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it not Tertullian\r
-who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star? Very well. We\r
-shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall\r
-see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a\r
-nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I\r
-may whisper it among friends. Inter pocula. To sacrifice the world to\r
-paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the dupe of the\r
-infinite! I'm not such a fool. I am a nought. I call myself Monsieur le\r
-Comte Nought, senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist\r
-after death? No. What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What\r
-am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy.\r
-Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have\r
-suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall\r
-have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I\r
-shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. Such is my\r
-wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee, the grave-digger is there;\r
-the Pantheon for some of us: all falls into the great hole. End. Finis.\r
-Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death, believe\r
-me. I laugh at the idea of there being any one who has anything to tell\r
-me on that subject. Fables of nurses; bugaboo for children; Jehovah for\r
-men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond the tomb there is nothing\r
-but equal nothingness. You have been Sardanapalus, you have been Vincent\r
-de Paul--it makes no difference. That is the truth. Then live your life,\r
-above all things. Make use of your _I_ while you have it. In truth,\r
-Bishop, I tell you that I have a philosophy of my own, and I have my\r
-philosophers. I don't let myself be taken in with that nonsense.\r
-Of course, there must be something for those who are down,--for the\r
-barefooted beggars, knife-grinders, and miserable wretches. Legends,\r
-chimeras, the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars, are provided for\r
-them to swallow. They gobble it down. They spread it on their dry bread.\r
-He who has nothing else has the good. God. That is the least he can\r
-have. I oppose no objection to that; but I reserve Monsieur Naigeon for\r
-myself. The good God is good for the populace."\r
-\r
-The Bishop clapped his hands.\r
-\r
-"That's talking!" he exclaimed. "What an excellent and really marvellous\r
-thing is this materialism! Not every one who wants it can have it. Ah!\r
-when one does have it, one is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly\r
-allow one's self to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor\r
-burned alive like Jeanne d'Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring\r
-this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves\r
-irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without\r
-uneasiness,--places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or\r
-ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory\r
-capitulations of conscience,--and that they shall enter the tomb with\r
-their digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say that\r
-with reference to you, senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible for me\r
-to refrain from congratulating you. You great lords have, so you say, a\r
-philosophy of your own, and for yourselves, which is exquisite, refined,\r
-accessible to the rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons\r
-the voluptuousness of life admirably. This philosophy has been\r
-extracted from the depths, and unearthed by special seekers. But you are\r
-good-natured princes, and you do not think it a bad thing that belief in\r
-the good God should constitute the philosophy of the people, very much\r
-as the goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--THE BROTHER AS DEPICTED BY THE SISTER\r
-\r
-In order to furnish an idea of the private establishment of the\r
-Bishop of D----, and of the manner in which those two sainted women\r
-subordinated their actions, their thoughts, their feminine instincts\r
-even, which are easily alarmed, to the habits and purposes of the\r
-Bishop, without his even taking the trouble of speaking in order to\r
-explain them, we cannot do better than transcribe in this place a letter\r
-from Mademoiselle Baptistine to Madame the Vicomtess de Boischevron, the\r
-friend of her childhood. This letter is in our possession.\r
-\r
-\r
- D----, Dec. 16, 18--.\r
-MY GOOD MADAM: Not a day passes without our speaking of you. It is our\r
-established custom; but there is another reason besides. Just imagine,\r
-while washing and dusting the ceilings and walls, Madam Magloire has\r
-made some discoveries; now our two chambers hung with antique paper\r
-whitewashed over, would not discredit a chateau in the style of yours.\r
-Madam Magloire has pulled off all the paper. There were things beneath.\r
-My drawing-room, which contains no furniture, and which we use for\r
-spreading out the linen after washing, is fifteen feet in height,\r
-eighteen square, with a ceiling which was formerly painted and gilded,\r
-and with beams, as in yours. This was covered with a cloth while this\r
-was the hospital. And the woodwork was of the era of our grandmothers.\r
-But my room is the one you ought to see. Madam Magloire has discovered,\r
-under at least ten thicknesses of paper pasted on top, some paintings,\r
-which without being good are very tolerable. The subject is Telemachus\r
-being knighted by Minerva in some gardens, the name of which escapes\r
-me. In short, where the Roman ladies repaired on one single night. What\r
-shall I say to you? I have Romans, and Roman ladies [here occurs an\r
-illegible word], and the whole train. Madam Magloire has cleaned it all\r
-off; this summer she is going to have some small injuries repaired, and\r
-the whole revarnished, and my chamber will be a regular museum. She has\r
-also found in a corner of the attic two wooden pier-tables of ancient\r
-fashion. They asked us two crowns of six francs each to regild them, but\r
-it is much better to give the money to the poor; and they are very ugly\r
-besides, and I should much prefer a round table of mahogany.\r
-\r
-I am always very happy. My brother is so good. He gives all he has to\r
-the poor and sick. We are very much cramped. The country is trying in\r
-the winter, and we really must do something for those who are in need.\r
-We are almost comfortably lighted and warmed. You see that these are\r
-great treats.\r
-\r
-My brother has ways of his own. When he talks, he says that a bishop\r
-ought to be so. Just imagine! the door of our house is never fastened.\r
-Whoever chooses to enter finds himself at once in my brother's room. He\r
-fears nothing, even at night. That is his sort of bravery, he says.\r
-\r
-He does not wish me or Madame Magloire feel any fear for him. He exposes\r
-himself to all sorts of dangers, and he does not like to have us even\r
-seem to notice it. One must know how to understand him.\r
-\r
-He goes out in the rain, he walks in the water, he travels in winter. He\r
-fears neither suspicious roads nor dangerous encounters, nor night.\r
-\r
-Last year he went quite alone into a country of robbers. He would\r
-not take us. He was absent for a fortnight. On his return nothing had\r
-happened to him; he was thought to be dead, but was perfectly well, and\r
-said, "This is the way I have been robbed!" And then he opened a trunk\r
-full of jewels, all the jewels of the cathedral of Embrun, which the\r
-thieves had given him.\r
-\r
-When he returned on that occasion, I could not refrain from scolding him\r
-a little, taking care, however, not to speak except when the carriage\r
-was making a noise, so that no one might hear me.\r
-\r
-At first I used to say to myself, "There are no dangers which will stop\r
-him; he is terrible." Now I have ended by getting used to it. I make a\r
-sign to Madam Magloire that she is not to oppose him. He risks himself\r
-as he sees fit. I carry off Madam Magloire, I enter my chamber, I pray\r
-for him and fall asleep. I am at ease, because I know that if anything\r
-were to happen to him, it would be the end of me. I should go to the\r
-good God with my brother and my bishop. It has cost Madam Magloire\r
-more trouble than it did me to accustom herself to what she terms his\r
-imprudences. But now the habit has been acquired. We pray together, we\r
-tremble together, and we fall asleep. If the devil were to enter this\r
-house, he would be allowed to do so. After all, what is there for us\r
-to fear in this house? There is always some one with us who is stronger\r
-than we. The devil may pass through it, but the good God dwells here.\r
-\r
-This suffices me. My brother has no longer any need of saying a word to\r
-me. I understand him without his speaking, and we abandon ourselves to\r
-the care of Providence. That is the way one has to do with a man who\r
-possesses grandeur of soul.\r
-\r
-I have interrogated my brother with regard to the information which you\r
-desire on the subject of the Faux family. You are aware that he knows\r
-everything, and that he has memories, because he is still a very\r
-good royalist. They really are a very ancient Norman family of the\r
-generalship of Caen. Five hundred years ago there was a Raoul de Faux, a\r
-Jean de Faux, and a Thomas de Faux, who were gentlemen, and one of whom\r
-was a seigneur de Rochefort. The last was Guy-Etienne-Alexandre, and was\r
-commander of a regiment, and something in the light horse of Bretagne.\r
-His daughter, Marie-Louise, married Adrien-Charles de Gramont, son of\r
-the Duke Louis de Gramont, peer of France, colonel of the French guards,\r
-and lieutenant-general of the army. It is written Faux, Fauq, and\r
-Faoucq.\r
-\r
-Good Madame, recommend us to the prayers of your sainted relative,\r
-Monsieur the Cardinal. As for your dear Sylvanie, she has done well in\r
-not wasting the few moments which she passes with you in writing to me.\r
-She is well, works as you would wish, and loves me.\r
-\r
-That is all that I desire. The souvenir which she sent through you\r
-reached me safely, and it makes me very happy. My health is not so very\r
-bad, and yet I grow thinner every day. Farewell; my paper is at an end,\r
-and this forces me to leave you. A thousand good wishes.\r
-\r
-BAPTISTINE.\r
-\r
-P.S. Your grand nephew is charming. Do you know that he will soon be\r
-five years old? Yesterday he saw some one riding by on horseback who\r
-had on knee-caps, and he said, "What has he got on his knees?" He is a\r
-charming child! His little brother is dragging an old broom about the\r
-room, like a carriage, and saying, "Hu!"\r
-\r
-\r
-As will be perceived from this letter, these two women understood how to\r
-mould themselves to the Bishop's ways with that special feminine genius\r
-which comprehends the man better than he comprehends himself. The Bishop\r
-of D----, in spite of the gentle and candid air which never deserted\r
-him, sometimes did things that were grand, bold, and magnificent,\r
-without seeming to have even a suspicion of the fact. They trembled, but\r
-they let him alone. Sometimes Madame Magloire essayed a remonstrance in\r
-advance, but never at the time, nor afterwards. They never interfered\r
-with him by so much as a word or sign, in any action once entered upon.\r
-At certain moments, without his having occasion to mention it, when he\r
-was not even conscious of it himself in all probability, so perfect was\r
-his simplicity, they vaguely felt that he was acting as a bishop; then\r
-they were nothing more than two shadows in the house. They served him\r
-passively; and if obedience consisted in disappearing, they disappeared.\r
-They understood, with an admirable delicacy of instinct, that certain\r
-cares may be put under constraint. Thus, even when believing him to be\r
-in peril, they understood, I will not say his thought, but his nature,\r
-to such a degree that they no longer watched over him. They confided him\r
-to God.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Baptistine said, as we have just read, that her brother's end\r
-would prove her own. Madame Magloire did not say this, but she knew it.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--THE BISHOP IN THE PRESENCE OF AN UNKNOWN LIGHT\r
-\r
-At an epoch a little later than the date of the letter cited in the\r
-preceding pages, he did a thing which, if the whole town was to be\r
-believed, was even more hazardous than his trip across the mountains\r
-infested with bandits.\r
-\r
-In the country near D---- a man lived quite alone. This man, we will\r
-state at once, was a former member of the Convention. His name was G----\r
-\r
-Member of the Convention, G---- was mentioned with a sort of horror in\r
-the little world of D---- A member of the Convention--can you imagine\r
-such a thing? That existed from the time when people called each other\r
-thou, and when they said "citizen." This man was almost a monster.\r
-He had not voted for the death of the king, but almost. He was a\r
-quasi-regicide. He had been a terrible man. How did it happen that such\r
-a man had not been brought before a provost's court, on the return of\r
-the legitimate princes? They need not have cut off his head, if you\r
-please; clemency must be exercised, agreed; but a good banishment for\r
-life. An example, in short, etc. Besides, he was an atheist, like all\r
-the rest of those people. Gossip of the geese about the vulture.\r
-\r
-Was G---- a vulture after all? Yes; if he were to be judged by the\r
-element of ferocity in this solitude of his. As he had not voted for the\r
-death of the king, he had not been included in the decrees of exile, and\r
-had been able to remain in France.\r
-\r
-He dwelt at a distance of three-quarters of an hour from the city, far\r
-from any hamlet, far from any road, in some hidden turn of a very wild\r
-valley, no one knew exactly where. He had there, it was said, a sort\r
-of field, a hole, a lair. There were no neighbors, not even passers-by.\r
-Since he had dwelt in that valley, the path which led thither had\r
-disappeared under a growth of grass. The locality was spoken of as\r
-though it had been the dwelling of a hangman.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, the Bishop meditated on the subject, and from time to time\r
-he gazed at the horizon at a point where a clump of trees marked the\r
-valley of the former member of the Convention, and he said, "There is a\r
-soul yonder which is lonely."\r
-\r
-And he added, deep in his own mind, "I owe him a visit."\r
-\r
-But, let us avow it, this idea, which seemed natural at the first blush,\r
-appeared to him after a moment's reflection, as strange, impossible, and\r
-almost repulsive. For, at bottom, he shared the general impression, and\r
-the old member of the Convention inspired him, without his being clearly\r
-conscious of the fact himself, with that sentiment which borders on\r
-hate, and which is so well expressed by the word estrangement.\r
-\r
-Still, should the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No.\r
-But what a sheep!\r
-\r
-The good Bishop was perplexed. Sometimes he set out in that direction;\r
-then he returned.\r
-\r
-Finally, the rumor one day spread through the town that a sort of young\r
-shepherd, who served the member of the Convention in his hovel, had come\r
-in quest of a doctor; that the old wretch was dying, that paralysis was\r
-gaining on him, and that he would not live over night.--"Thank God!"\r
-some added.\r
-\r
-The Bishop took his staff, put on his cloak, on account of his too\r
-threadbare cassock, as we have mentioned, and because of the evening\r
-breeze which was sure to rise soon, and set out.\r
-\r
-The sun was setting, and had almost touched the horizon when the Bishop\r
-arrived at the excommunicated spot. With a certain beating of the heart,\r
-he recognized the fact that he was near the lair. He strode over a\r
-ditch, leaped a hedge, made his way through a fence of dead boughs,\r
-entered a neglected paddock, took a few steps with a good deal of\r
-boldness, and suddenly, at the extremity of the waste land, and behind\r
-lofty brambles, he caught sight of the cavern.\r
-\r
-It was a very low hut, poor, small, and clean, with a vine nailed\r
-against the outside.\r
-\r
-Near the door, in an old wheel-chair, the arm-chair of the peasants,\r
-there was a white-haired man, smiling at the sun.\r
-\r
-Near the seated man stood a young boy, the shepherd lad. He was offering\r
-the old man a jar of milk.\r
-\r
-While the Bishop was watching him, the old man spoke: "Thank you," he\r
-said, "I need nothing." And his smile quitted the sun to rest upon the\r
-child.\r
-\r
-The Bishop stepped forward. At the sound which he made in walking, the\r
-old man turned his head, and his face expressed the sum total of the\r
-surprise which a man can still feel after a long life.\r
-\r
-"This is the first time since I have been here," said he, "that any one\r
-has entered here. Who are you, sir?"\r
-\r
-The Bishop answered:--\r
-\r
-"My name is Bienvenu Myriel."\r
-\r
-"Bienvenu Myriel? I have heard that name. Are you the man whom the\r
-people call Monseigneur Welcome?"\r
-\r
-"I am."\r
-\r
-The old man resumed with a half-smile\r
-\r
-"In that case, you are my bishop?"\r
-\r
-"Something of that sort."\r
-\r
-"Enter, sir."\r
-\r
-The member of the Convention extended his hand to the Bishop, but the\r
-Bishop did not take it. The Bishop confined himself to the remark:--\r
-\r
-"I am pleased to see that I have been misinformed. You certainly do not\r
-seem to me to be ill."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," replied the old man, "I am going to recover."\r
-\r
-He paused, and then said:--\r
-\r
-"I shall die three hours hence."\r
-\r
-Then he continued:--\r
-\r
-"I am something of a doctor; I know in what fashion the last hour draws\r
-on. Yesterday, only my feet were cold; to-day, the chill has ascended to\r
-my knees; now I feel it mounting to my waist; when it reaches the heart,\r
-I shall stop. The sun is beautiful, is it not? I had myself wheeled\r
-out here to take a last look at things. You can talk to me; it does not\r
-fatigue me. You have done well to come and look at a man who is on\r
-the point of death. It is well that there should be witnesses at that\r
-moment. One has one's caprices; I should have liked to last until the\r
-dawn, but I know that I shall hardly live three hours. It will be night\r
-then. What does it matter, after all? Dying is a simple affair. One has\r
-no need of the light for that. So be it. I shall die by starlight."\r
-\r
-The old man turned to the shepherd lad:--\r
-\r
-"Go to thy bed; thou wert awake all last night; thou art tired."\r
-\r
-The child entered the hut.\r
-\r
-The old man followed him with his eyes, and added, as though speaking to\r
-himself:--\r
-\r
-"I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors."\r
-\r
-The Bishop was not touched as it seems that he should have been. He\r
-did not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the\r
-whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated\r
-like the rest: he, who on occasion, was so fond of laughing at "His\r
-Grace," was rather shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur, and he\r
-was almost tempted to retort "citizen." He was assailed by a fancy for\r
-peevish familiarity, common enough to doctors and priests, but which\r
-was not habitual with him. This man, after all, this member of the\r
-Convention, this representative of the people, had been one of the\r
-powerful ones of the earth; for the first time in his life, probably,\r
-the Bishop felt in a mood to be severe.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, the member of the Convention had been surveying him with a\r
-modest cordiality, in which one could have distinguished, possibly, that\r
-humility which is so fitting when one is on the verge of returning to\r
-dust.\r
-\r
-The Bishop, on his side, although he generally restrained his curiosity,\r
-which, in his opinion, bordered on a fault, could not refrain from\r
-examining the member of the Convention with an attention which, as it\r
-did not have its course in sympathy, would have served his conscience as\r
-a matter of reproach, in connection with any other man. A member of the\r
-Convention produced on him somewhat the effect of being outside the pale\r
-of the law, even of the law of charity. G----, calm, his body almost\r
-upright, his voice vibrating, was one of those octogenarians who form\r
-the subject of astonishment to the physiologist. The Revolution had\r
-many of these men, proportioned to the epoch. In this old man one was\r
-conscious of a man put to the proof. Though so near to his end, he\r
-preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm\r
-tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something\r
-calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the\r
-sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken\r
-the door. G---- seemed to be dying because he willed it so. There was\r
-freedom in his agony. His legs alone were motionless. It was there that\r
-the shadows held him fast. His feet were cold and dead, but his head\r
-survived with all the power of life, and seemed full of light. G----,\r
-at this solemn moment, resembled the king in that tale of the Orient who\r
-was flesh above and marble below.\r
-\r
-There was a stone there. The Bishop sat down. The exordium was abrupt.\r
-\r
-"I congratulate you," said he, in the tone which one uses for a\r
-reprimand. "You did not vote for the death of the king, after all."\r
-\r
-The old member of the Convention did not appear to notice the bitter\r
-meaning underlying the words "after all." He replied. The smile had\r
-quite disappeared from his face.\r
-\r
-"Do not congratulate me too much, sir. I did vote for the death of the\r
-tyrant."\r
-\r
-It was the tone of austerity answering the tone of severity.\r
-\r
-"What do you mean to say?" resumed the Bishop.\r
-\r
-"I mean to say that man has a tyrant,--ignorance. I voted for the death\r
-of that tyrant. That tyrant engendered royalty, which is authority\r
-falsely understood, while science is authority rightly understood. Man\r
-should be governed only by science."\r
-\r
-"And conscience," added the Bishop.\r
-\r
-"It is the same thing. Conscience is the quantity of innate science\r
-which we have within us."\r
-\r
-Monseigneur Bienvenu listened in some astonishment to this language,\r
-which was very new to him.\r
-\r
-The member of the Convention resumed:--\r
-\r
-"So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said 'no.' I did not think that I\r
-had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil.\r
-I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution\r
-for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child.\r
-In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted for fraternity,\r
-concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and\r
-errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light. We\r
-have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of\r
-miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn\r
-of joy."\r
-\r
-"Mixed joy," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-"You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the\r
-past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work\r
-was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we\r
-were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not\r
-sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the\r
-wind is still there."\r
-\r
-"You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a\r
-demolition complicated with wrath."\r
-\r
-"Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of\r
-progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French\r
-Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent\r
-of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the\r
-unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased,\r
-enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the\r
-earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of\r
-humanity."\r
-\r
-The Bishop could not refrain from murmuring:--\r
-\r
-"Yes? '93!"\r
-\r
-The member of the Convention straightened himself up in his chair with\r
-an almost lugubrious solemnity, and exclaimed, so far as a dying man is\r
-capable of exclamation:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, there you go; '93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been\r
-forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen\r
-hundred years it burst. You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial."\r
-\r
-The Bishop felt, without, perhaps, confessing it, that something within\r
-him had suffered extinction. Nevertheless, he put a good face on the\r
-matter. He replied:--\r
-\r
-"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name\r
-of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice. A thunderbolt should\r
-commit no error." And he added, regarding the member of the Convention\r
-steadily the while, "Louis XVII.?"\r
-\r
-The conventionary stretched forth his hand and grasped the Bishop's arm.\r
-\r
-"Louis XVII.! let us see. For whom do you mourn? is it for the innocent\r
-child? very good; in that case I mourn with you. Is it for the royal\r
-child? I demand time for reflection. To me, the brother of Cartouche,\r
-an innocent child who was hung up by the armpits in the Place de Greve,\r
-until death ensued, for the sole crime of having been the brother\r
-of Cartouche, is no less painful than the grandson of Louis XV., an\r
-innocent child, martyred in the tower of the Temple, for the sole crime\r
-of having been grandson of Louis XV."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," said the Bishop, "I like not this conjunction of names."\r
-\r
-"Cartouche? Louis XV.? To which of the two do you object?"\r
-\r
-A momentary silence ensued. The Bishop almost regretted having come, and\r
-yet he felt vaguely and strangely shaken.\r
-\r
-The conventionary resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ\r
-loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge,\r
-full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried,\r
-'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children.\r
-It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of\r
-Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own\r
-crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags\r
-as in fleurs de lys."\r
-\r
-"That is true," said the Bishop in a low voice.\r
-\r
-"I persist," continued the conventionary G---- "You have mentioned Louis\r
-XVII. to me. Let us come to an understanding. Shall we weep for all the\r
-innocent, all martyrs, all children, the lowly as well as the exalted?\r
-I agree to that. But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back\r
-further than '93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will\r
-weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep\r
-with me over the children of the people."\r
-\r
-"I weep for all," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-"Equally!" exclaimed conventionary G----; "and if the balance must\r
-incline, let it be on the side of the people. They have been suffering\r
-longer."\r
-\r
-Another silence ensued. The conventionary was the first to break it. He\r
-raised himself on one elbow, took a bit of his cheek between his thumb\r
-and his forefinger, as one does mechanically when one interrogates and\r
-judges, and appealed to the Bishop with a gaze full of all the forces of\r
-the death agony. It was almost an explosion.\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir, the people have been suffering a long while. And hold! that\r
-is not all, either; why have you just questioned me and talked to me\r
-about Louis XVII.? I know you not. Ever since I have been in these parts\r
-I have dwelt in this enclosure alone, never setting foot outside, and\r
-seeing no one but that child who helps me. Your name has reached me in\r
-a confused manner, it is true, and very badly pronounced, I must admit;\r
-but that signifies nothing: clever men have so many ways of imposing on\r
-that honest goodman, the people. By the way, I did not hear the sound of\r
-your carriage; you have left it yonder, behind the coppice at the fork\r
-of the roads, no doubt. I do not know you, I tell you. You have told me\r
-that you are the Bishop; but that affords me no information as to your\r
-moral personality. In short, I repeat my question. Who are you? You are\r
-a bishop; that is to say, a prince of the church, one of those gilded\r
-men with heraldic bearings and revenues, who have vast prebends,--the\r
-bishopric of D---- fifteen thousand francs settled income, ten thousand\r
-in perquisites; total, twenty-five thousand francs,--who have kitchens,\r
-who have liveries, who make good cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who\r
-strut about, a lackey before, a lackey behind, in a gala coach, and\r
-who have palaces, and who roll in their carriages in the name of Jesus\r
-Christ who went barefoot! You are a prelate,--revenues, palace, horses,\r
-servants, good table, all the sensualities of life; you have this like\r
-the rest, and like the rest, you enjoy it; it is well; but this says\r
-either too much or too little; this does not enlighten me upon the\r
-intrinsic and essential value of the man who comes with the probable\r
-intention of bringing wisdom to me. To whom do I speak? Who are you?"\r
-\r
-The Bishop hung his head and replied, "Vermis sum--I am a worm."\r
-\r
-"A worm of the earth in a carriage?" growled the conventionary.\r
-\r
-It was the conventionary's turn to be arrogant, and the Bishop's to be\r
-humble.\r
-\r
-The Bishop resumed mildly:--\r
-\r
-"So be it, sir. But explain to me how my carriage, which is a few paces\r
-off behind the trees yonder, how my good table and the moor-hens which I\r
-eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand francs income, how my palace\r
-and my lackeys prove that clemency is not a duty, and that '93 was not\r
-inexorable."\r
-\r
-The conventionary passed his hand across his brow, as though to sweep\r
-away a cloud.\r
-\r
-"Before replying to you," he said, "I beseech you to pardon me. I have\r
-just committed a wrong, sir. You are at my house, you are my guest, I\r
-owe you courtesy. You discuss my ideas, and it becomes me to confine\r
-myself to combating your arguments. Your riches and your pleasures are\r
-advantages which I hold over you in the debate; but good taste dictates\r
-that I shall not make use of them. I promise you to make no use of them\r
-in the future."\r
-\r
-"I thank you," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-G---- resumed.\r
-\r
-"Let us return to the explanation which you have asked of me. Where were\r
-we? What were you saying to me? That '93 was inexorable?"\r
-\r
-"Inexorable; yes," said the Bishop. "What think you of Marat clapping\r
-his hands at the guillotine?"\r
-\r
-"What think you of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?"\r
-\r
-The retort was a harsh one, but it attained its mark with the directness\r
-of a point of steel. The Bishop quivered under it; no reply occurred to\r
-him; but he was offended by this mode of alluding to Bossuet. The best\r
-of minds will have their fetiches, and they sometimes feel vaguely\r
-wounded by the want of respect of logic.\r
-\r
-The conventionary began to pant; the asthma of the agony which is\r
-mingled with the last breaths interrupted his voice; still, there was a\r
-perfect lucidity of soul in his eyes. He went on:--\r
-\r
-"Let me say a few words more in this and that direction; I am willing.\r
-Apart from the Revolution, which, taken as a whole, is an immense human\r
-affirmation, '93 is, alas! a rejoinder. You think it inexorable, sir;\r
-but what of the whole monarchy, sir? Carrier is a bandit; but what name\r
-do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a rascal; but what\r
-is your opinion as to Lamoignon-Baville? Maillard is terrible; but\r
-Saulx-Tavannes, if you please? Duchene senior is ferocious; but what\r
-epithet will you allow me for the elder Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tete\r
-is a monster; but not so great a one as M. the Marquis de Louvois. Sir,\r
-sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am\r
-also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the\r
-Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist,\r
-to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with\r
-milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld\r
-that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a\r
-mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of\r
-her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture\r
-of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the\r
-French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be\r
-absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its\r
-most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. I\r
-abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage; moreover, I am dying."\r
-\r
-And ceasing to gaze at the Bishop, the conventionary concluded his\r
-thoughts in these tranquil words:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are\r
-over, this fact is recognized,--that the human race has been treated\r
-harshly, but that it has progressed."\r
-\r
-The conventionary doubted not that he had successively conquered all the\r
-inmost intrenchments of the Bishop. One remained, however, and from this\r
-intrenchment, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu's resistance,\r
-came forth this reply, wherein appeared nearly all the harshness of the\r
-beginning:--\r
-\r
-"Progress should believe in God. Good cannot have an impious servitor.\r
-He who is an atheist is but a bad leader for the human race."\r
-\r
-The former representative of the people made no reply. He was seized\r
-with a fit of trembling. He looked towards heaven, and in his glance a\r
-tear gathered slowly. When the eyelid was full, the tear trickled down\r
-his livid cheek, and he said, almost in a stammer, quite low, and to\r
-himself, while his eyes were plunged in the depths:--\r
-\r
-"O thou! O ideal! Thou alone existest!"\r
-\r
-The Bishop experienced an indescribable shock.\r
-\r
-After a pause, the old man raised a finger heavenward and said:--\r
-\r
-"The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person\r
-would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it\r
-would not exist. There is, then, an _I_. That _I_ of the infinite is\r
-God."\r
-\r
-The dying man had pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with\r
-the shiver of ecstasy, as though he beheld some one. When he had spoken,\r
-his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he\r
-had just lived through in a moment the few hours which had been left to\r
-him. That which he had said brought him nearer to him who is in death.\r
-The supreme moment was approaching.\r
-\r
-The Bishop understood this; time pressed; it was as a priest that he had\r
-come: from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion;\r
-he gazed at those closed eyes, he took that wrinkled, aged and ice-cold\r
-hand in his, and bent over the dying man.\r
-\r
-"This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think that it would be\r
-regrettable if we had met in vain?"\r
-\r
-The conventionary opened his eyes again. A gravity mingled with gloom\r
-was imprinted on his countenance.\r
-\r
-"Bishop," said he, with a slowness which probably arose more from his\r
-dignity of soul than from the failing of his strength, "I have passed my\r
-life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years of age\r
-when my country called me and commanded me to concern myself with its\r
-affairs. I obeyed. Abuses existed, I combated them; tyrannies existed,\r
-I destroyed them; rights and principles existed, I proclaimed and\r
-confessed them. Our territory was invaded, I defended it; France was\r
-menaced, I offered my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I have been one\r
-of the masters of the state; the vaults of the treasury were encumbered\r
-with specie to such a degree that we were forced to shore up the walls,\r
-which were on the point of bursting beneath the weight of gold and\r
-silver; I dined in Dead Tree Street, at twenty-two sous. I have succored\r
-the oppressed, I have comforted the suffering. I tore the cloth from\r
-the altar, it is true; but it was to bind up the wounds of my country. I\r
-have always upheld the march forward of the human race, forward towards\r
-the light, and I have sometimes resisted progress without pity. I have,\r
-when the occasion offered, protected my own adversaries, men of your\r
-profession. And there is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very spot\r
-where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a convent of\r
-Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in\r
-1793. I have done my duty according to my powers, and all the good\r
-that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued, persecuted,\r
-blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed. For many years past,\r
-I with my white hair have been conscious that many people think they\r
-have the right to despise me; to the poor ignorant masses I present the\r
-visage of one damned. And I accept this isolation of hatred, without\r
-hating any one myself. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am on the point\r
-of death. What is it that you have come to ask of me?"\r
-\r
-"Your blessing," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-And he knelt down.\r
-\r
-When the Bishop raised his head again, the face of the conventionary had\r
-become august. He had just expired.\r
-\r
-The Bishop returned home, deeply absorbed in thoughts which cannot\r
-be known to us. He passed the whole night in prayer. On the following\r
-morning some bold and curious persons attempted to speak to him about\r
-member of the Convention G----; he contented himself with pointing\r
-heavenward.\r
-\r
-From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly feeling\r
-towards all children and sufferers.\r
-\r
-Any allusion to "that old wretch of a G----" caused him to fall into a\r
-singular preoccupation. No one could say that the passage of that soul\r
-before his, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his, did\r
-not count for something in his approach to perfection.\r
-\r
-This "pastoral visit" naturally furnished an occasion for a murmur of\r
-comment in all the little local coteries.\r
-\r
-"Was the bedside of such a dying man as that the proper place for a\r
-bishop? There was evidently no conversion to be expected. All those\r
-revolutionists are backsliders. Then why go there? What was there to be\r
-seen there? He must have been very curious indeed to see a soul carried\r
-off by the devil."\r
-\r
-One day a dowager of the impertinent variety who thinks herself\r
-spiritual, addressed this sally to him, "Monseigneur, people are\r
-inquiring when Your Greatness will receive the red cap!"--"Oh! oh!\r
-that's a coarse color," replied the Bishop. "It is lucky that those who\r
-despise it in a cap revere it in a hat."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--A RESTRICTION\r
-\r
-We should incur a great risk of deceiving ourselves, were we to conclude\r
-from this that Monseigneur Welcome was "a philosophical bishop," or a\r
-"patriotic cure." His meeting, which may almost be designated as his\r
-union, with conventionary G----, left behind it in his mind a sort of\r
-astonishment, which rendered him still more gentle. That is all.\r
-\r
-Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was far from being a politician, this is,\r
-perhaps, the place to indicate very briefly what his attitude was in the\r
-events of that epoch, supposing that Monseigneur Bienvenu ever dreamed\r
-of having an attitude.\r
-\r
-Let us, then, go back a few years.\r
-\r
-Some time after the elevation of M. Myriel to the episcopate, the\r
-Emperor had made him a baron of the Empire, in company with many other\r
-bishops. The arrest of the Pope took place, as every one knows, on the\r
-night of the 5th to the 6th of July, 1809; on this occasion, M. Myriel\r
-was summoned by Napoleon to the synod of the bishops of France and Italy\r
-convened at Paris. This synod was held at Notre-Dame, and assembled\r
-for the first time on the 15th of June, 1811, under the presidency\r
-of Cardinal Fesch. M. Myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops who\r
-attended it. But he was present only at one sitting and at three or four\r
-private conferences. Bishop of a mountain diocese, living so very close\r
-to nature, in rusticity and deprivation, it appeared that he imported\r
-among these eminent personages, ideas which altered the temperature of\r
-the assembly. He very soon returned to D---- He was interrogated as to\r
-this speedy return, and he replied: "I embarrassed them. The outside air\r
-penetrated to them through me. I produced on them the effect of an open\r
-door."\r
-\r
-On another occasion he said, "What would you have? Those gentlemen are\r
-princes. I am only a poor peasant bishop."\r
-\r
-The fact is that he displeased them. Among other strange things, it is\r
-said that he chanced to remark one evening, when he found himself at\r
-the house of one of his most notable colleagues: "What beautiful clocks!\r
-What beautiful carpets! What beautiful liveries! They must be a great\r
-trouble. I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly\r
-in my ears: 'There are people who are hungry! There are people who are\r
-cold! There are poor people! There are poor people!'"\r
-\r
-Let us remark, by the way, that the hatred of luxury is not an\r
-intelligent hatred. This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.\r
-Nevertheless, in churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with\r
-representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have\r
-very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a\r
-contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come\r
-in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these\r
-misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a\r
-little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine\r
-a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is\r
-working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened\r
-nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first\r
-proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty.\r
-\r
-This is, no doubt, what the Bishop of D---- thought.\r
-\r
-It must not be supposed, however, that he shared what we call the "ideas\r
-of the century" on certain delicate points. He took very little part\r
-in the theological quarrels of the moment, and maintained silence on\r
-questions in which Church and State were implicated; but if he had\r
-been strongly pressed, it seems that he would have been found to be an\r
-ultramontane rather than a gallican. Since we are making a portrait, and\r
-since we do not wish to conceal anything, we are forced to add that he\r
-was glacial towards Napoleon in his decline. Beginning with 1813, he\r
-gave in his adherence to or applauded all hostile manifestations. He\r
-refused to see him, as he passed through on his return from the island\r
-of Elba, and he abstained from ordering public prayers for the Emperor\r
-in his diocese during the Hundred Days.\r
-\r
-Besides his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, he had two brothers, one a\r
-general, the other a prefect. He wrote to both with tolerable frequency.\r
-He was harsh for a time towards the former, because, holding a command\r
-in Provence at the epoch of the disembarkation at Cannes, the general\r
-had put himself at the head of twelve hundred men and had pursued the\r
-Emperor as though the latter had been a person whom one is desirous\r
-of allowing to escape. His correspondence with the other brother, the\r
-ex-prefect, a fine, worthy man who lived in retirement at Paris, Rue\r
-Cassette, remained more affectionate.\r
-\r
-Thus Monseigneur Bienvenu also had his hour of party spirit, his hour\r
-of bitterness, his cloud. The shadow of the passions of the moment\r
-traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.\r
-Certainly, such a man would have done well not to entertain any\r
-political opinions. Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are\r
-not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand\r
-aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic,\r
-humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous\r
-intellect. Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly\r
-connected with the subject of this book, we will simply say this: It\r
-would have been well if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been a Royalist,\r
-and if his glance had never been, for a single instant, turned away from\r
-that serene contemplation in which is distinctly discernible, above the\r
-fictions and the hatreds of this world, above the stormy vicissitudes of\r
-human things, the beaming of those three pure radiances, truth, justice,\r
-and charity.\r
-\r
-While admitting that it was not for a political office that God created\r
-Monseigneur Welcome, we should have understood and admired his protest\r
-in the name of right and liberty, his proud opposition, his just but\r
-perilous resistance to the all-powerful Napoleon. But that which pleases\r
-us in people who are rising pleases us less in the case of people who\r
-are falling. We only love the fray so long as there is danger, and in\r
-any case, the combatants of the first hour have alone the right to be\r
-the exterminators of the last. He who has not been a stubborn accuser in\r
-prosperity should hold his peace in the face of ruin. The denunciator of\r
-success is the only legitimate executioner of the fall. As for us, when\r
-Providence intervenes and strikes, we let it work. 1812 commenced to\r
-disarm us. In 1813 the cowardly breach of silence of that taciturn\r
-legislative body, emboldened by catastrophe, possessed only traits which\r
-aroused indignation. And it was a crime to applaud, in 1814, in the\r
-presence of those marshals who betrayed; in the presence of that senate\r
-which passed from one dunghill to another, insulting after having\r
-deified; in the presence of that idolatry which was loosing its footing\r
-and spitting on its idol,--it was a duty to turn aside the head. In\r
-1815, when the supreme disasters filled the air, when France was seized\r
-with a shiver at their sinister approach, when Waterloo could be dimly\r
-discerned opening before Napoleon, the mournful acclamation of the army\r
-and the people to the condemned of destiny had nothing laughable in it,\r
-and, after making all allowance for the despot, a heart like that of\r
-the Bishop of D----, ought not perhaps to have failed to recognize the\r
-august and touching features presented by the embrace of a great nation\r
-and a great man on the brink of the abyss.\r
-\r
-With this exception, he was in all things just, true, equitable,\r
-intelligent, humble and dignified, beneficent and kindly, which is only\r
-another sort of benevolence. He was a priest, a sage, and a man. It must\r
-be admitted, that even in the political views with which we have just\r
-reproached him, and which we are disposed to judge almost with severity,\r
-he was tolerant and easy, more so, perhaps, than we who are speaking\r
-here. The porter of the town-hall had been placed there by the Emperor.\r
-He was an old non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a member of the\r
-Legion of Honor at Austerlitz, as much of a Bonapartist as the eagle.\r
-This poor fellow occasionally let slip inconsiderate remarks, which the\r
-law then stigmatized as seditious speeches. After the imperial profile\r
-disappeared from the Legion of Honor, he never dressed himself in his\r
-regimentals, as he said, so that he should not be obliged to wear his\r
-cross. He had himself devoutly removed the imperial effigy from the\r
-cross which Napoleon had given him; this made a hole, and he would not\r
-put anything in its place. "I will die," he said, "rather than wear the\r
-three frogs upon my heart!" He liked to scoff aloud at Louis XVIII. "The\r
-gouty old creature in English gaiters!" he said; "let him take himself\r
-off to Prussia with that queue of his." He was happy to combine in the\r
-same imprecation the two things which he most detested, Prussia and\r
-England. He did it so often that he lost his place. There he was, turned\r
-out of the house, with his wife and children, and without bread. The\r
-Bishop sent for him, reproved him gently, and appointed him beadle in\r
-the cathedral.\r
-\r
-In the course of nine years Monseigneur Bienvenu had, by dint of holy\r
-deeds and gentle manners, filled the town of D----with a sort of\r
-tender and filial reverence. Even his conduct towards Napoleon had been\r
-accepted and tacitly pardoned, as it were, by the people, the good and\r
-weakly flock who adored their emperor, but loved their bishop.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--THE SOLITUDE OF MONSEIGNEUR WELCOME\r
-\r
-A bishop is almost always surrounded by a full squadron of little abbes,\r
-just as a general is by a covey of young officers. This is what\r
-that charming Saint Francois de Sales calls somewhere "les pretres\r
-blancs-becs," callow priests. Every career has its aspirants, who form\r
-a train for those who have attained eminence in it. There is no power\r
-which has not its dependents. There is no fortune which has not its\r
-court. The seekers of the future eddy around the splendid present. Every\r
-metropolis has its staff of officials. Every bishop who possesses the\r
-least influence has about him his patrol of cherubim from the seminary,\r
-which goes the round, and maintains good order in the episcopal palace,\r
-and mounts guard over monseigneur's smile. To please a bishop is\r
-equivalent to getting one's foot in the stirrup for a sub-diaconate.\r
-It is necessary to walk one's path discreetly; the apostleship does not\r
-disdain the canonship.\r
-\r
-Just as there are bigwigs elsewhere, there are big mitres in the Church.\r
-These are the bishops who stand well at Court, who are rich, well\r
-endowed, skilful, accepted by the world, who know how to pray, no doubt,\r
-but who know also how to beg, who feel little scruple at making a whole\r
-diocese dance attendance in their person, who are connecting links\r
-between the sacristy and diplomacy, who are abbes rather than priests,\r
-prelates rather than bishops. Happy those who approach them! Being\r
-persons of influence, they create a shower about them, upon the\r
-assiduous and the favored, and upon all the young men who understand\r
-the art of pleasing, of large parishes, prebends, archidiaconates,\r
-chaplaincies, and cathedral posts, while awaiting episcopal honors. As\r
-they advance themselves, they cause their satellites to progress also;\r
-it is a whole solar system on the march. Their radiance casts a gleam\r
-of purple over their suite. Their prosperity is crumbled up behind\r
-the scenes, into nice little promotions. The larger the diocese of the\r
-patron, the fatter the curacy for the favorite. And then, there is Rome.\r
-A bishop who understands how to become an archbishop, an archbishop who\r
-knows how to become a cardinal, carries you with him as conclavist;\r
-you enter a court of papal jurisdiction, you receive the pallium, and\r
-behold! you are an auditor, then a papal chamberlain, then monsignor,\r
-and from a Grace to an Eminence is only a step, and between the Eminence\r
-and the Holiness there is but the smoke of a ballot. Every skull-cap may\r
-dream of the tiara. The priest is nowadays the only man who can become a\r
-king in a regular manner; and what a king! the supreme king. Then what a\r
-nursery of aspirations is a seminary! How many blushing choristers,\r
-how many youthful abbes bear on their heads Perrette's pot of milk!\r
-Who knows how easy it is for ambition to call itself vocation? in good\r
-faith, perchance, and deceiving itself, devotee that it is.\r
-\r
-Monseigneur Bienvenu, poor, humble, retiring, was not accounted among\r
-the big mitres. This was plain from the complete absence of young\r
-priests about him. We have seen that he "did not take" in Paris. Not a\r
-single future dreamed of engrafting itself on this solitary old man.\r
-Not a single sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting forth its\r
-foliage in his shadow. His canons and grand-vicars were good old men,\r
-rather vulgar like himself, walled up like him in this diocese, without\r
-exit to a cardinalship, and who resembled their bishop, with this\r
-difference, that they were finished and he was completed. The\r
-impossibility of growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so well\r
-understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he ordained left the\r
-seminary than they got themselves recommended to the archbishops of Aix\r
-or of Auch, and went off in a great hurry. For, in short, we repeat it,\r
-men wish to be pushed. A saint who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation\r
-is a dangerous neighbor; he might communicate to you, by contagion,\r
-an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints, which are useful in\r
-advancement, and in short, more renunciation than you desire; and\r
-this infectious virtue is avoided. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur\r
-Bienvenu. We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the\r
-lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption.\r
-\r
-Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false\r
-resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost\r
-the same profile as supremacy. Success, that Menaechmus of talent, has\r
-one dupe,--history. Juvenal and Tacitus alone grumble at it. In our\r
-day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its\r
-service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its\r
-antechamber. Succeed: theory. Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the\r
-lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. He who triumphs is venerated.\r
-Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth! everything lies in that. Be\r
-lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people will think\r
-you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose\r
-the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but\r
-short-sightedness. Gilding is gold. It does no harm to be the first\r
-arrival by pure chance, so long as you do arrive. The common herd is an\r
-old Narcissus who adores himself, and who applauds the vulgar herd.\r
-That enormous ability by virtue of which one is Moses, Aeschylus, Dante,\r
-Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude awards on the spot, and by\r
-acclamation, to whomsoever attains his object, in whatsoever it may\r
-consist. Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false\r
-Corneille compose Tiridate; let a eunuch come to possess a harem; let a\r
-military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch;\r
-let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army of the\r
-Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold\r
-as leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer\r
-espouse usury, and cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of\r
-which he is the father and of which it is the mother; let a preacher\r
-become a bishop by force of his nasal drawl; let the steward of a fine\r
-family be so rich on retiring from service that he is made minister\r
-of finances,--and men call that Genius, just as they call the face\r
-of Mousqueton Beauty, and the mien of Claude Majesty. With the\r
-constellations of space they confound the stars of the abyss which are\r
-made in the soft mire of the puddle by the feet of ducks.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIII--WHAT HE BELIEVED\r
-\r
-We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of D---- on the score of\r
-orthodoxy. In the presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood\r
-but respect. The conscience of the just man should be accepted on his\r
-word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we admit the possible\r
-development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs\r
-from our own.\r
-\r
-What did he think of this dogma, or of that mystery? These secrets of\r
-the inner tribunal of the conscience are known only to the tomb, where\r
-souls enter naked. The point on which we are certain is, that the\r
-difficulties of faith never resolved themselves into hypocrisy in his\r
-case. No decay is possible to the diamond. He believed to the extent\r
-of his powers. "Credo in Patrem," he often exclaimed. Moreover, he\r
-drew from good works that amount of satisfaction which suffices to the\r
-conscience, and which whispers to a man, "Thou art with God!"\r
-\r
-The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and\r
-beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. It\r
-was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,--because he loved much--that\r
-he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and\r
-"reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism\r
-takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love?\r
-It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already\r
-pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived\r
-without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man,\r
-even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves\r
-for animals. The Bishop of D---- had none of that harshness, which is\r
-peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the\r
-Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who\r
-knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect,\r
-deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his\r
-indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as\r
-though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which\r
-is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He\r
-seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined\r
-without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a\r
-palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This\r
-revery sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in\r
-his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind\r
-him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the\r
-ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard\r
-him say:--\r
-\r
-"Poor beast! It is not its fault!"\r
-\r
-Why not mention these almost divinely childish sayings of kindness?\r
-Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to\r
-Saint Francis d'Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius. One day he sprained his\r
-ankle in his effort to avoid stepping on an ant. Thus lived this just\r
-man. Sometimes he fell asleep in his garden, and then there was nothing\r
-more venerable possible.\r
-\r
-Monseigneur Bienvenu had formerly been, if the stories anent his youth,\r
-and even in regard to his manhood, were to be believed, a passionate,\r
-and, possibly, a violent man. His universal suavity was less an instinct\r
-of nature than the result of a grand conviction which had filtered into\r
-his heart through the medium of life, and had trickled there slowly,\r
-thought by thought; for, in a character, as in a rock, there may exist\r
-apertures made by drops of water. These hollows are uneffaceable; these\r
-formations are indestructible.\r
-\r
-In 1815, as we think we have already said, he reached his seventy-fifth\r
-birthday, but he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall;\r
-he was rather plump; and, in order to combat this tendency, he was fond\r
-of taking long strolls on foot; his step was firm, and his form was\r
-but slightly bent, a detail from which we do not pretend to draw any\r
-conclusion. Gregory XVI., at the age of eighty, held himself erect and\r
-smiling, which did not prevent him from being a bad bishop. Monseigneur\r
-Welcome had what the people term a "fine head," but so amiable was he\r
-that they forgot that it was fine.\r
-\r
-When he conversed with that infantile gayety which was one of his\r
-charms, and of which we have already spoken, people felt at their ease\r
-with him, and joy seemed to radiate from his whole person. His fresh and\r
-ruddy complexion, his very white teeth, all of which he had preserved,\r
-and which were displayed by his smile, gave him that open and easy air\r
-which cause the remark to be made of a man, "He's a good fellow"; and\r
-of an old man, "He is a fine man." That, it will be recalled, was the\r
-effect which he produced upon Napoleon. On the first encounter, and to\r
-one who saw him for the first time, he was nothing, in fact, but a fine\r
-man. But if one remained near him for a few hours, and beheld him in the\r
-least degree pensive, the fine man became gradually transfigured, and\r
-took on some imposing quality, I know not what; his broad and serious\r
-brow, rendered august by his white locks, became august also by virtue\r
-of meditation; majesty radiated from his goodness, though his goodness\r
-ceased not to be radiant; one experienced something of the emotion which\r
-one would feel on beholding a smiling angel slowly unfold his wings,\r
-without ceasing to smile. Respect, an unutterable respect, penetrated\r
-you by degrees and mounted to your heart, and one felt that one had\r
-before him one of those strong, thoroughly tried, and indulgent souls\r
-where thought is so grand that it can no longer be anything but gentle.\r
-\r
-As we have seen, prayer, the celebration of the offices of religion,\r
-alms-giving, the consolation of the afflicted, the cultivation of a bit\r
-of land, fraternity, frugality, hospitality, renunciation, confidence,\r
-study, work, filled every day of his life. Filled is exactly the word;\r
-certainly the Bishop's day was quite full to the brim, of good words and\r
-good deeds. Nevertheless, it was not complete if cold or rainy weather\r
-prevented his passing an hour or two in his garden before going to bed,\r
-and after the two women had retired. It seemed to be a sort of rite with\r
-him, to prepare himself for slumber by meditation in the presence of\r
-the grand spectacles of the nocturnal heavens. Sometimes, if the two old\r
-women were not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at\r
-a very advanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with\r
-himself, peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the\r
-serenity of the ether, moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor\r
-of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his\r
-heart to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At such moments,\r
-while he offered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer\r
-their perfume, illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he\r
-poured himself out in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of\r
-creation, he could not have told himself, probably, what was passing in\r
-his spirit; he felt something take its flight from him, and something\r
-descend into him. Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with\r
-the abysses of the universe!\r
-\r
-He thought of the grandeur and presence of God; of the future eternity,\r
-that strange mystery; of the eternity past, a mystery still more\r
-strange; of all the infinities, which pierced their way into all\r
-his senses, beneath his eyes; and, without seeking to comprehend the\r
-incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled\r
-by him. He considered those magnificent conjunctions of atoms, which\r
-communicate aspects to matter, reveal forces by verifying them, create\r
-individualities in unity, proportions in extent, the innumerable in the\r
-infinite, and, through light, produce beauty. These conjunctions are\r
-formed and dissolved incessantly; hence life and death.\r
-\r
-He seated himself on a wooden bench, with his back against a decrepit\r
-vine; he gazed at the stars, past the puny and stunted silhouettes\r
-of his fruit-trees. This quarter of an acre, so poorly planted, so\r
-encumbered with mean buildings and sheds, was dear to him, and satisfied\r
-his wants.\r
-\r
-What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure of his\r
-life, where there was so little leisure, between gardening in the\r
-daytime and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with\r
-the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him to adore God in his\r
-most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and\r
-what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to\r
-walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be\r
-cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate\r
-upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIV--WHAT HE THOUGHT\r
-\r
-\r
-One last word.\r
-\r
-Since this sort of details might, particularly at the present moment,\r
-and to use an expression now in fashion, give to the Bishop of D---- a\r
-certain "pantheistical" physiognomy, and induce the belief, either\r
-to his credit or discredit, that he entertained one of those personal\r
-philosophies which are peculiar to our century, which sometimes spring\r
-up in solitary spirits, and there take on a form and grow until they\r
-usurp the place of religion, we insist upon it, that not one of\r
-those persons who knew Monseigneur Welcome would have thought himself\r
-authorized to think anything of the sort. That which enlightened this\r
-man was his heart. His wisdom was made of the light which comes from\r
-there.\r
-\r
-No systems; many works. Abstruse speculations contain vertigo; no,\r
-there is nothing to indicate that he risked his mind in apocalypses. The\r
-apostle may be daring, but the bishop must be timid. He would probably\r
-have felt a scruple at sounding too far in advance certain problems\r
-which are, in a manner, reserved for terrible great minds. There is a\r
-sacred horror beneath the porches of the enigma; those gloomy openings\r
-stand yawning there, but something tells you, you, a passer-by in life,\r
-that you must not enter. Woe to him who penetrates thither!\r
-\r
-Geniuses in the impenetrable depths of abstraction and pure speculation,\r
-situated, so to speak, above all dogmas, propose their ideas to\r
-God. Their prayer audaciously offers discussion. Their adoration\r
-interrogates. This is direct religion, which is full of anxiety and\r
-responsibility for him who attempts its steep cliffs.\r
-\r
-Human meditation has no limits. At his own risk and peril, it analyzes\r
-and digs deep into its own bedazzlement. One might almost say, that by\r
-a sort of splendid reaction, it with it dazzles nature; the mysterious\r
-world which surrounds us renders back what it has received; it is\r
-probable that the contemplators are contemplated. However that may be,\r
-there are on earth men who--are they men?--perceive distinctly at the\r
-verge of the horizons of revery the heights of the absolute, and who\r
-have the terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Welcome\r
-was one of these men; Monseigneur Welcome was not a genius. He would\r
-have feared those sublimities whence some very great men even, like\r
-Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity. Certainly, these\r
-powerful reveries have their moral utility, and by these arduous paths\r
-one approaches to ideal perfection. As for him, he took the path which\r
-shortens,--the Gospel's.\r
-\r
-He did not attempt to impart to his chasuble the folds of Elijah's\r
-mantle; he projected no ray of future upon the dark groundswell of\r
-events; he did not seek to condense in flame the light of things; he\r
-had nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician about him. This\r
-humble soul loved, and that was all.\r
-\r
-That he carried prayer to the pitch of a superhuman aspiration is\r
-probable: but one can no more pray too much than one can love too much;\r
-and if it is a heresy to pray beyond the texts, Saint Theresa and Saint\r
-Jerome would be heretics.\r
-\r
-He inclined towards all that groans and all that expiates. The universe\r
-appeared to him like an immense malady; everywhere he felt fever,\r
-everywhere he heard the sound of suffering, and, without seeking to\r
-solve the enigma, he strove to dress the wound. The terrible spectacle\r
-of created things developed tenderness in him; he was occupied only\r
-in finding for himself, and in inspiring others with the best way to\r
-compassionate and relieve. That which exists was for this good and rare\r
-priest a permanent subject of sadness which sought consolation.\r
-\r
-There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction\r
-of pity. Universal misery was his mine. The sadness which reigned\r
-everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. Love each other; he\r
-declared this to be complete, desired nothing further, and that was the\r
-whole of his doctrine. One day, that man who believed himself to be a\r
-"philosopher," the senator who has already been alluded to, said to the\r
-Bishop: "Just survey the spectacle of the world: all war against\r
-all; the strongest has the most wit. Your love each other is\r
-nonsense."--"Well," replied Monseigneur Welcome, without contesting the\r
-point, "if it is nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it, as the\r
-pearl in the oyster." Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he\r
-was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious\r
-questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of\r
-abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics--all those profundities\r
-which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness;\r
-destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience\r
-of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation\r
-in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the\r
-incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent _I_,\r
-the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature,\r
-liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where\r
-lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses,\r
-which Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes\r
-flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the infinite to\r
-cause stars to blaze forth there.\r
-\r
-Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note of the exterior of\r
-mysterious questions without scrutinizing them, and without troubling\r
-his own mind with them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave\r
-respect for darkness.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SECOND--THE FALL\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING\r
-\r
-Early in the month of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a\r
-man who was travelling on foot entered the little town of D----The few\r
-inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the\r
-moment stared at this traveller with a sort of uneasiness. It was\r
-difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was\r
-a man of medium stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life.\r
-He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a\r
-drooping leather visor partly concealed his face, burned and tanned by\r
-sun and wind, and dripping with perspiration. His shirt of coarse yellow\r
-linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view\r
-of his hairy breast: he had a cravat twisted into a string; trousers of\r
-blue drilling, worn and threadbare, white on one knee and torn on the\r
-other; an old gray, tattered blouse, patched on one of the elbows with\r
-a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly packed soldier\r
-knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an enormous,\r
-knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a\r
-shaved head and a long beard.\r
-\r
-The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not\r
-what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole. His hair was closely cut,\r
-yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little, and did not seem to\r
-have been cut for some time.\r
-\r
-No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came\r
-he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance\r
-into D---- by the same street which, seven months previously, had\r
-witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes\r
-to Paris. This man must have been walking all day. He seemed very much\r
-fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town which is situated below\r
-the city had seen him pause beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi,\r
-and drink at the fountain which stands at the end of the promenade. He\r
-must have been very thirsty: for the children who followed him saw him\r
-stop again for a drink, two hundred paces further on, at the fountain in\r
-the market-place.\r
-\r
-On arriving at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left,\r
-and directed his steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out\r
-a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was seated near the door, on the\r
-stone bench which General Drouot had mounted on the 4th of March to read\r
-to the frightened throng of the inhabitants of D---- the proclamation\r
-of the Gulf Juan. The man pulled off his cap and humbly saluted the\r
-gendarme.\r
-\r
-The gendarme, without replying to his salute, stared attentively at him,\r
-followed him for a while with his eyes, and then entered the town-hall.\r
-\r
-There then existed at D---- a fine inn at the sign of the Cross of\r
-Colbas. This inn had for a landlord a certain Jacquin Labarre, a man\r
-of consideration in the town on account of his relationship to another\r
-Labarre, who kept the inn of the Three Dauphins in Grenoble, and had\r
-served in the Guides. At the time of the Emperor's landing, many rumors\r
-had circulated throughout the country with regard to this inn of the\r
-Three Dauphins. It was said that General Bertrand, disguised as a\r
-carter, had made frequent trips thither in the month of January, and\r
-that he had distributed crosses of honor to the soldiers and handfuls\r
-of gold to the citizens. The truth is, that when the Emperor entered\r
-Grenoble he had refused to install himself at the hotel of the\r
-prefecture; he had thanked the mayor, saying, "I am going to the house\r
-of a brave man of my acquaintance"; and he had betaken himself to the\r
-Three Dauphins. This glory of the Labarre of the Three Dauphins was\r
-reflected upon the Labarre of the Cross of Colbas, at a distance of five\r
-and twenty leagues. It was said of him in the town, "That is the cousin\r
-of the man of Grenoble."\r
-\r
-The man bent his steps towards this inn, which was the best in the\r
-country-side. He entered the kitchen, which opened on a level with the\r
-street. All the stoves were lighted; a huge fire blazed gayly in the\r
-fireplace. The host, who was also the chief cook, was going from one\r
-stew-pan to another, very busily superintending an excellent dinner\r
-designed for the wagoners, whose loud talking, conversation, and\r
-laughter were audible from an adjoining apartment. Any one who has\r
-travelled knows that there is no one who indulges in better cheer than\r
-wagoners. A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and heather-cocks,\r
-was turning on a long spit before the fire; on the stove, two huge carps\r
-from Lake Lauzet and a trout from Lake Alloz were cooking.\r
-\r
-The host, hearing the door open and seeing a newcomer enter, said,\r
-without raising his eyes from his stoves:--\r
-\r
-"What do you wish, sir?"\r
-\r
-"Food and lodging," said the man.\r
-\r
-"Nothing easier," replied the host. At that moment he turned his head,\r
-took in the traveller's appearance with a single glance, and added, "By\r
-paying for it."\r
-\r
-The man drew a large leather purse from the pocket of his blouse, and\r
-answered, "I have money."\r
-\r
-"In that case, we are at your service," said the host.\r
-\r
-The man put his purse back in his pocket, removed his knapsack from\r
-his back, put it on the ground near the door, retained his stick in his\r
-hand, and seated himself on a low stool close to the fire. D---- is in\r
-the mountains. The evenings are cold there in October.\r
-\r
-But as the host went back and forth, he scrutinized the traveller.\r
-\r
-"Will dinner be ready soon?" said the man.\r
-\r
-"Immediately," replied the landlord.\r
-\r
-While the newcomer was warming himself before the fire, with his back\r
-turned, the worthy host, Jacquin Labarre, drew a pencil from his pocket,\r
-then tore off the corner of an old newspaper which was lying on a small\r
-table near the window. On the white margin he wrote a line or two,\r
-folded it without sealing, and then intrusted this scrap of paper to\r
-a child who seemed to serve him in the capacity both of scullion and\r
-lackey. The landlord whispered a word in the scullion's ear, and the\r
-child set off on a run in the direction of the town-hall.\r
-\r
-The traveller saw nothing of all this.\r
-\r
-Once more he inquired, "Will dinner be ready soon?"\r
-\r
-"Immediately," responded the host.\r
-\r
-The child returned. He brought back the paper. The host unfolded it\r
-eagerly, like a person who is expecting a reply. He seemed to read it\r
-attentively, then tossed his head, and remained thoughtful for a moment.\r
-Then he took a step in the direction of the traveller, who appeared to\r
-be immersed in reflections which were not very serene.\r
-\r
-"I cannot receive you, sir," said he.\r
-\r
-The man half rose.\r
-\r
-"What! Are you afraid that I will not pay you? Do you want me to pay you\r
-in advance? I have money, I tell you."\r
-\r
-"It is not that."\r
-\r
-"What then?"\r
-\r
-"You have money--"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said the man.\r
-\r
-"And I," said the host, "have no room."\r
-\r
-The man resumed tranquilly, "Put me in the stable."\r
-\r
-"I cannot."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"The horses take up all the space."\r
-\r
-"Very well!" retorted the man; "a corner of the loft then, a truss of\r
-straw. We will see about that after dinner."\r
-\r
-"I cannot give you any dinner."\r
-\r
-This declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, struck the stranger\r
-as grave. He rose.\r
-\r
-"Ah! bah! But I am dying of hunger. I have been walking since sunrise. I\r
-have travelled twelve leagues. I pay. I wish to eat."\r
-\r
-"I have nothing," said the landlord.\r
-\r
-The man burst out laughing, and turned towards the fireplace and the\r
-stoves: "Nothing! and all that?"\r
-\r
-"All that is engaged."\r
-\r
-"By whom?"\r
-\r
-"By messieurs the wagoners."\r
-\r
-"How many are there of them?"\r
-\r
-"Twelve."\r
-\r
-"There is enough food there for twenty."\r
-\r
-"They have engaged the whole of it and paid for it in advance."\r
-\r
-The man seated himself again, and said, without raising his voice, "I am\r
-at an inn; I am hungry, and I shall remain."\r
-\r
-Then the host bent down to his ear, and said in a tone which made him\r
-start, "Go away!"\r
-\r
-At that moment the traveller was bending forward and thrusting some\r
-brands into the fire with the iron-shod tip of his staff; he turned\r
-quickly round, and as he opened his mouth to reply, the host gazed\r
-steadily at him and added, still in a low voice: "Stop! there's enough\r
-of that sort of talk. Do you want me to tell you your name? Your name is\r
-Jean Valjean. Now do you want me to tell you who you are? When I saw you\r
-come in I suspected something; I sent to the town-hall, and this was the\r
-reply that was sent to me. Can you read?"\r
-\r
-So saying, he held out to the stranger, fully unfolded, the paper which\r
-had just travelled from the inn to the town-hall, and from the town-hall\r
-to the inn. The man cast a glance upon it. The landlord resumed after a\r
-pause.\r
-\r
-"I am in the habit of being polite to every one. Go away!"\r
-\r
-The man dropped his head, picked up the knapsack which he had deposited\r
-on the ground, and took his departure.\r
-\r
-He chose the principal street. He walked straight on at a venture,\r
-keeping close to the houses like a sad and humiliated man. He did not\r
-turn round a single time. Had he done so, he would have seen the host\r
-of the Cross of Colbas standing on his threshold, surrounded by all\r
-the guests of his inn, and all the passers-by in the street, talking\r
-vivaciously, and pointing him out with his finger; and, from the glances\r
-of terror and distrust cast by the group, he might have divined that his\r
-arrival would speedily become an event for the whole town.\r
-\r
-He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind\r
-them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.\r
-\r
-Thus he proceeded for some time, walking on without ceasing, traversing\r
-at random streets of which he knew nothing, forgetful of his fatigue,\r
-as is often the case when a man is sad. All at once he felt the pangs\r
-of hunger sharply. Night was drawing near. He glanced about him, to see\r
-whether he could not discover some shelter.\r
-\r
-The fine hostelry was closed to him; he was seeking some very humble\r
-public house, some hovel, however lowly.\r
-\r
-Just then a light flashed up at the end of the streets; a pine branch\r
-suspended from a cross-beam of iron was outlined against the white sky\r
-of the twilight. He proceeded thither.\r
-\r
-It proved to be, in fact, a public house. The public house which is in\r
-the Rue de Chaffaut.\r
-\r
-The wayfarer halted for a moment, and peeped through the window into the\r
-interior of the low-studded room of the public house, illuminated by a\r
-small lamp on a table and by a large fire on the hearth. Some men were\r
-engaged in drinking there. The landlord was warming himself. An iron\r
-pot, suspended from a crane, bubbled over the flame.\r
-\r
-The entrance to this public house, which is also a sort of an inn, is by\r
-two doors. One opens on the street, the other upon a small yard filled\r
-with manure. The traveller dare not enter by the street door. He slipped\r
-into the yard, halted again, then raised the latch timidly and opened\r
-the door.\r
-\r
-"Who goes there?" said the master.\r
-\r
-"Some one who wants supper and bed."\r
-\r
-"Good. We furnish supper and bed here."\r
-\r
-He entered. All the men who were drinking turned round. The lamp\r
-illuminated him on one side, the firelight on the other. They examined\r
-him for some time while he was taking off his knapsack.\r
-\r
-The host said to him, "There is the fire. The supper is cooking in the\r
-pot. Come and warm yourself, comrade."\r
-\r
-He approached and seated himself near the hearth. He stretched out his\r
-feet, which were exhausted with fatigue, to the fire; a fine odor was\r
-emitted by the pot. All that could be distinguished of his face, beneath\r
-his cap, which was well pulled down, assumed a vague appearance\r
-of comfort, mingled with that other poignant aspect which habitual\r
-suffering bestows.\r
-\r
-It was, moreover, a firm, energetic, and melancholy profile. This\r
-physiognomy was strangely composed; it began by seeming humble, and\r
-ended by seeming severe. The eye shone beneath its lashes like a fire\r
-beneath brushwood.\r
-\r
-One of the men seated at the table, however, was a fishmonger who,\r
-before entering the public house of the Rue de Chaffaut, had been to\r
-stable his horse at Labarre's. It chanced that he had that very morning\r
-encountered this unprepossessing stranger on the road between Bras\r
-d'Asse and--I have forgotten the name. I think it was Escoublon. Now,\r
-when he met him, the man, who then seemed already extremely weary, had\r
-requested him to take him on his crupper; to which the fishmonger had\r
-made no reply except by redoubling his gait. This fishmonger had been\r
-a member half an hour previously of the group which surrounded Jacquin\r
-Labarre, and had himself related his disagreeable encounter of the\r
-morning to the people at the Cross of Colbas. From where he sat he made\r
-an imperceptible sign to the tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper went to\r
-him. They exchanged a few words in a low tone. The man had again become\r
-absorbed in his reflections.\r
-\r
-The tavern-keeper returned to the fireplace, laid his hand abruptly on\r
-the shoulder of the man, and said to him:--\r
-\r
-"You are going to get out of here."\r
-\r
-The stranger turned round and replied gently, "Ah! You know?--"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"I was sent away from the other inn."\r
-\r
-"And you are to be turned out of this one."\r
-\r
-"Where would you have me go?"\r
-\r
-"Elsewhere."\r
-\r
-The man took his stick and his knapsack and departed.\r
-\r
-As he went out, some children who had followed him from the Cross of\r
-Colbas, and who seemed to be lying in wait for him, threw stones at him.\r
-He retraced his steps in anger, and threatened them with his stick: the\r
-children dispersed like a flock of birds.\r
-\r
-He passed before the prison. At the door hung an iron chain attached to\r
-a bell. He rang.\r
-\r
-The wicket opened.\r
-\r
-"Turnkey," said he, removing his cap politely, "will you have the\r
-kindness to admit me, and give me a lodging for the night?"\r
-\r
-A voice replied:--\r
-\r
-"The prison is not an inn. Get yourself arrested, and you will be\r
-admitted."\r
-\r
-The wicket closed again.\r
-\r
-He entered a little street in which there were many gardens. Some of\r
-them are enclosed only by hedges, which lends a cheerful aspect to the\r
-street. In the midst of these gardens and hedges he caught sight of a\r
-small house of a single story, the window of which was lighted up. He\r
-peered through the pane as he had done at the public house. Within was a\r
-large whitewashed room, with a bed draped in printed cotton stuff, and\r
-a cradle in one corner, a few wooden chairs, and a double-barrelled gun\r
-hanging on the wall. A table was spread in the centre of the room. A\r
-copper lamp illuminated the tablecloth of coarse white linen, the pewter\r
-jug shining like silver, and filled with wine, and the brown, smoking\r
-soup-tureen. At this table sat a man of about forty, with a merry and\r
-open countenance, who was dandling a little child on his knees. Close by\r
-a very young woman was nursing another child. The father was laughing,\r
-the child was laughing, the mother was smiling.\r
-\r
-The stranger paused a moment in revery before this tender and calming\r
-spectacle. What was taking place within him? He alone could have\r
-told. It is probable that he thought that this joyous house would be\r
-hospitable, and that, in a place where he beheld so much happiness, he\r
-would find perhaps a little pity.\r
-\r
-He tapped on the pane with a very small and feeble knock.\r
-\r
-They did not hear him.\r
-\r
-He tapped again.\r
-\r
-He heard the woman say, "It seems to me, husband, that some one is\r
-knocking."\r
-\r
-"No," replied the husband.\r
-\r
-He tapped a third time.\r
-\r
-The husband rose, took the lamp, and went to the door, which he opened.\r
-\r
-He was a man of lofty stature, half peasant, half artisan. He wore a\r
-huge leather apron, which reached to his left shoulder, and which a\r
-hammer, a red handkerchief, a powder-horn, and all sorts of objects\r
-which were upheld by the girdle, as in a pocket, caused to bulge out. He\r
-carried his head thrown backwards; his shirt, widely opened and turned\r
-back, displayed his bull neck, white and bare. He had thick eyelashes,\r
-enormous black whiskers, prominent eyes, the lower part of his face\r
-like a snout; and besides all this, that air of being on his own ground,\r
-which is indescribable.\r
-\r
-"Pardon me, sir," said the wayfarer, "Could you, in consideration of\r
-payment, give me a plate of soup and a corner of that shed yonder in the\r
-garden, in which to sleep? Tell me; can you? For money?"\r
-\r
-"Who are you?" demanded the master of the house.\r
-\r
-The man replied: "I have just come from Puy-Moisson. I have walked all\r
-day long. I have travelled twelve leagues. Can you?--if I pay?"\r
-\r
-"I would not refuse," said the peasant, "to lodge any respectable man\r
-who would pay me. But why do you not go to the inn?"\r
-\r
-"There is no room."\r
-\r
-"Bah! Impossible. This is neither a fair nor a market day. Have you been\r
-to Labarre?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-The traveller replied with embarrassment: "I do not know. He did not\r
-receive me."\r
-\r
-"Have you been to What's-his-name's, in the Rue Chaffaut?"\r
-\r
-The stranger's embarrassment increased; he stammered, "He did not\r
-receive me either."\r
-\r
-The peasant's countenance assumed an expression of distrust; he surveyed\r
-the newcomer from head to feet, and suddenly exclaimed, with a sort of\r
-shudder:--\r
-\r
-"Are you the man?--"\r
-\r
-He cast a fresh glance upon the stranger, took three steps backwards,\r
-placed the lamp on the table, and took his gun down from the wall.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, at the words, Are you the man? the woman had risen, had\r
-clasped her two children in her arms, and had taken refuge precipitately\r
-behind her husband, staring in terror at the stranger, with her bosom\r
-uncovered, and with frightened eyes, as she murmured in a low tone,\r
-"Tso-maraude."[1]\r
-\r
-All this took place in less time than it requires to picture it to\r
-one's self. After having scrutinized the man for several moments, as one\r
-scrutinizes a viper, the master of the house returned to the door and\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"Clear out!"\r
-\r
-"For pity's sake, a glass of water," said the man.\r
-\r
-"A shot from my gun!" said the peasant.\r
-\r
-Then he closed the door violently, and the man heard him shoot two large\r
-bolts. A moment later, the window-shutter was closed, and the sound of a\r
-bar of iron which was placed against it was audible outside.\r
-\r
-Night continued to fall. A cold wind from the Alps was blowing. By the\r
-light of the expiring day the stranger perceived, in one of the gardens\r
-which bordered the street, a sort of hut, which seemed to him to be\r
-built of sods. He climbed over the wooden fence resolutely, and found\r
-himself in the garden. He approached the hut; its door consisted of a\r
-very low and narrow aperture, and it resembled those buildings which\r
-road-laborers construct for themselves along the roads. He thought\r
-without doubt, that it was, in fact, the dwelling of a road-laborer; he\r
-was suffering from cold and hunger, but this was, at least, a shelter\r
-from the cold. This sort of dwelling is not usually occupied at night.\r
-He threw himself flat on his face, and crawled into the hut. It was warm\r
-there, and he found a tolerably good bed of straw. He lay, for a moment,\r
-stretched out on this bed, without the power to make a movement, so\r
-fatigued was he. Then, as the knapsack on his back was in his way, and\r
-as it furnished, moreover, a pillow ready to his hand, he set about\r
-unbuckling one of the straps. At that moment, a ferocious growl became\r
-audible. He raised his eyes. The head of an enormous dog was outlined in\r
-the darkness at the entrance of the hut.\r
-\r
-It was a dog's kennel.\r
-\r
-He was himself vigorous and formidable; he armed himself with his staff,\r
-made a shield of his knapsack, and made his way out of the kennel in the\r
-best way he could, not without enlarging the rents in his rags.\r
-\r
-He left the garden in the same manner, but backwards, being obliged,\r
-in order to keep the dog respectful, to have recourse to that manoeuvre\r
-with his stick which masters in that sort of fencing designate as la\r
-rose couverte.\r
-\r
-When he had, not without difficulty, repassed the fence, and found\r
-himself once more in the street, alone, without refuge, without shelter,\r
-without a roof over his head, chased even from that bed of straw and\r
-from that miserable kennel, he dropped rather than seated himself on a\r
-stone, and it appears that a passer-by heard him exclaim, "I am not even\r
-a dog!"\r
-\r
-He soon rose again and resumed his march. He went out of the town,\r
-hoping to find some tree or haystack in the fields which would afford\r
-him shelter.\r
-\r
-He walked thus for some time, with his head still drooping. When he felt\r
-himself far from every human habitation, he raised his eyes and gazed\r
-searchingly about him. He was in a field. Before him was one of those\r
-low hills covered with close-cut stubble, which, after the harvest,\r
-resemble shaved heads.\r
-\r
-The horizon was perfectly black. This was not alone the obscurity of\r
-night; it was caused by very low-hanging clouds which seemed to rest\r
-upon the hill itself, and which were mounting and filling the whole\r
-sky. Meanwhile, as the moon was about to rise, and as there was still\r
-floating in the zenith a remnant of the brightness of twilight, these\r
-clouds formed at the summit of the sky a sort of whitish arch, whence a\r
-gleam of light fell upon the earth.\r
-\r
-The earth was thus better lighted than the sky, which produces a\r
-particularly sinister effect, and the hill, whose contour was poor and\r
-mean, was outlined vague and wan against the gloomy horizon. The whole\r
-effect was hideous, petty, lugubrious, and narrow.\r
-\r
-There was nothing in the field or on the hill except a deformed tree,\r
-which writhed and shivered a few paces distant from the wayfarer.\r
-\r
-This man was evidently very far from having those delicate habits of\r
-intelligence and spirit which render one sensible to the mysterious\r
-aspects of things; nevertheless, there was something in that sky,\r
-in that hill, in that plain, in that tree, which was so profoundly\r
-desolate, that after a moment of immobility and revery he turned back\r
-abruptly. There are instants when nature seems hostile.\r
-\r
-He retraced his steps; the gates of D---- were closed. D----, which had\r
-sustained sieges during the wars of religion, was still surrounded\r
-in 1815 by ancient walls flanked by square towers which have been\r
-demolished since. He passed through a breach and entered the town again.\r
-\r
-It might have been eight o'clock in the evening. As he was not\r
-acquainted with the streets, he recommenced his walk at random.\r
-\r
-In this way he came to the prefecture, then to the seminary. As he\r
-passed through the Cathedral Square, he shook his fist at the church.\r
-\r
-At the corner of this square there is a printing establishment. It is\r
-there that the proclamations of the Emperor and of the Imperial Guard\r
-to the army, brought from the Island of Elba and dictated by Napoleon\r
-himself, were printed for the first time.\r
-\r
-Worn out with fatigue, and no longer entertaining any hope, he lay down\r
-on a stone bench which stands at the doorway of this printing office.\r
-\r
-At that moment an old woman came out of the church. She saw the man\r
-stretched out in the shadow. "What are you doing there, my friend?" said\r
-she.\r
-\r
-He answered harshly and angrily: "As you see, my good woman, I am\r
-sleeping." The good woman, who was well worthy the name, in fact, was\r
-the Marquise de R----\r
-\r
-"On this bench?" she went on.\r
-\r
-"I have had a mattress of wood for nineteen years," said the man;\r
-"to-day I have a mattress of stone."\r
-\r
-"You have been a soldier?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, my good woman, a soldier."\r
-\r
-"Why do you not go to the inn?"\r
-\r
-"Because I have no money."\r
-\r
-"Alas!" said Madame de R----, "I have only four sous in my purse."\r
-\r
-"Give it to me all the same."\r
-\r
-The man took the four sous. Madame de R---- continued: "You cannot\r
-obtain lodgings in an inn for so small a sum. But have you tried? It is\r
-impossible for you to pass the night thus. You are cold and hungry, no\r
-doubt. Some one might have given you a lodging out of charity."\r
-\r
-"I have knocked at all doors."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"I have been driven away everywhere."\r
-\r
-The "good woman" touched the man's arm, and pointed out to him on the\r
-other side of the street a small, low house, which stood beside the\r
-Bishop's palace.\r
-\r
-"You have knocked at all doors?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Have you knocked at that one?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Knock there."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--PRUDENCE COUNSELLED TO WISDOM.\r
-\r
-That evening, the Bishop of D----, after his promenade through the town,\r
-remained shut up rather late in his room. He was busy over a great work\r
-on Duties, which was never completed, unfortunately. He was carefully\r
-compiling everything that the Fathers and the doctors have said on this\r
-important subject. His book was divided into two parts: firstly, the\r
-duties of all; secondly, the duties of each individual, according to the\r
-class to which he belongs. The duties of all are the great duties. There\r
-are four of these. Saint Matthew points them out: duties towards God\r
-(Matt. vi.); duties towards one's self (Matt. v. 29, 30); duties towards\r
-one's neighbor (Matt. vii. 12); duties towards animals (Matt. vi. 20,\r
-25). As for the other duties the Bishop found them pointed out and\r
-prescribed elsewhere: to sovereigns and subjects, in the Epistle to the\r
-Romans; to magistrates, to wives, to mothers, to young men, by Saint\r
-Peter; to husbands, fathers, children and servants, in the Epistle\r
-to the Ephesians; to the faithful, in the Epistle to the Hebrews; to\r
-virgins, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Out of these precepts he was\r
-laboriously constructing a harmonious whole, which he desired to present\r
-to souls.\r
-\r
-At eight o'clock he was still at work, writing with a good deal of\r
-inconvenience upon little squares of paper, with a big book open on his\r
-knees, when Madame Magloire entered, according to her wont, to get the\r
-silver-ware from the cupboard near his bed. A moment later, the Bishop,\r
-knowing that the table was set, and that his sister was probably\r
-waiting for him, shut his book, rose from his table, and entered the\r
-dining-room.\r
-\r
-The dining-room was an oblong apartment, with a fireplace, which had a\r
-door opening on the street (as we have said), and a window opening on\r
-the garden.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire was, in fact, just putting the last touches to the\r
-table.\r
-\r
-As she performed this service, she was conversing with Mademoiselle\r
-Baptistine.\r
-\r
-A lamp stood on the table; the table was near the fireplace. A wood fire\r
-was burning there.\r
-\r
-One can easily picture to one's self these two women, both of whom\r
-were over sixty years of age. Madame Magloire small, plump, vivacious;\r
-Mademoiselle Baptistine gentle, slender, frail, somewhat taller than her\r
-brother, dressed in a gown of puce-colored silk, of the fashion of 1806,\r
-which she had purchased at that date in Paris, and which had lasted\r
-ever since. To borrow vulgar phrases, which possess the merit of giving\r
-utterance in a single word to an idea which a whole page would hardly\r
-suffice to express, Madame Magloire had the air of a peasant, and\r
-Mademoiselle Baptistine that of a lady. Madame Magloire wore a white\r
-quilted cap, a gold Jeannette cross on a velvet ribbon upon her neck,\r
-the only bit of feminine jewelry that there was in the house, a very\r
-white fichu puffing out from a gown of coarse black woollen stuff, with\r
-large, short sleeves, an apron of cotton cloth in red and green checks,\r
-knotted round the waist with a green ribbon, with a stomacher of the\r
-same attached by two pins at the upper corners, coarse shoes on her\r
-feet, and yellow stockings, like the women of Marseilles. Mademoiselle\r
-Baptistine's gown was cut on the patterns of 1806, with a short waist,\r
-a narrow, sheath-like skirt, puffed sleeves, with flaps and buttons.\r
-She concealed her gray hair under a frizzed wig known as the baby wig.\r
-Madame Magloire had an intelligent, vivacious, and kindly air; the two\r
-corners of her mouth unequally raised, and her upper lip, which was\r
-larger than the lower, imparted to her a rather crabbed and imperious\r
-look. So long as Monseigneur held his peace, she talked to him\r
-resolutely with a mixture of respect and freedom; but as soon as\r
-Monseigneur began to speak, as we have seen, she obeyed passively like\r
-her mistress. Mademoiselle Baptistine did not even speak. She confined\r
-herself to obeying and pleasing him. She had never been pretty, even\r
-when she was young; she had large, blue, prominent eyes, and a long\r
-arched nose; but her whole visage, her whole person, breathed forth an\r
-ineffable goodness, as we stated in the beginning. She had always been\r
-predestined to gentleness; but faith, charity, hope, those three virtues\r
-which mildly warm the soul, had gradually elevated that gentleness to\r
-sanctity. Nature had made her a lamb, religion had made her an angel.\r
-Poor sainted virgin! Sweet memory which has vanished!\r
-\r
-Mademoiselle Baptistine has so often narrated what passed at the\r
-episcopal residence that evening, that there are many people now living\r
-who still recall the most minute details.\r
-\r
-At the moment when the Bishop entered, Madame Magloire was talking with\r
-considerable vivacity. She was haranguing Mademoiselle Baptistine on\r
-a subject which was familiar to her and to which the Bishop was also\r
-accustomed. The question concerned the lock upon the entrance door.\r
-\r
-It appears that while procuring some provisions for supper, Madame\r
-Magloire had heard things in divers places. People had spoken of a\r
-prowler of evil appearance; a suspicious vagabond had arrived who must\r
-be somewhere about the town, and those who should take it into their\r
-heads to return home late that night might be subjected to unpleasant\r
-encounters. The police was very badly organized, moreover, because there\r
-was no love lost between the Prefect and the Mayor, who sought to injure\r
-each other by making things happen. It behooved wise people to play the\r
-part of their own police, and to guard themselves well, and care must be\r
-taken to duly close, bar and barricade their houses, and to fasten the\r
-doors well.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire emphasized these last words; but the Bishop had just\r
-come from his room, where it was rather cold. He seated himself in front\r
-of the fire, and warmed himself, and then fell to thinking of other\r
-things. He did not take up the remark dropped with design by Madame\r
-Magloire. She repeated it. Then Mademoiselle Baptistine, desirous of\r
-satisfying Madame Magloire without displeasing her brother, ventured to\r
-say timidly:--\r
-\r
-"Did you hear what Madame Magloire is saying, brother?"\r
-\r
-"I have heard something of it in a vague way," replied the Bishop. Then\r
-half-turning in his chair, placing his hands on his knees, and raising\r
-towards the old servant woman his cordial face, which so easily grew\r
-joyous, and which was illuminated from below by the firelight,--"Come,\r
-what is the matter? What is the matter? Are we in any great danger?"\r
-\r
-Then Madame Magloire began the whole story afresh, exaggerating it a\r
-little without being aware of the fact. It appeared that a Bohemian, a\r
-bare-footed vagabond, a sort of dangerous mendicant, was at that moment\r
-in the town. He had presented himself at Jacquin Labarre's to obtain\r
-lodgings, but the latter had not been willing to take him in. He had\r
-been seen to arrive by the way of the boulevard Gassendi and roam about\r
-the streets in the gloaming. A gallows-bird with a terrible face.\r
-\r
-"Really!" said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-This willingness to interrogate encouraged Madame Magloire; it seemed\r
-to her to indicate that the Bishop was on the point of becoming alarmed;\r
-she pursued triumphantly:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, Monseigneur. That is how it is. There will be some sort of\r
-catastrophe in this town to-night. Every one says so. And withal, the\r
-police is so badly regulated" (a useful repetition). "The idea of living\r
-in a mountainous country, and not even having lights in the streets at\r
-night! One goes out. Black as ovens, indeed! And I say, Monseigneur, and\r
-Mademoiselle there says with me--"\r
-\r
-"I," interrupted his sister, "say nothing. What my brother does is well\r
-done."\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire continued as though there had been no protest:--\r
-\r
-"We say that this house is not safe at all; that if Monseigneur will\r
-permit, I will go and tell Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, to come and\r
-replace the ancient locks on the doors; we have them, and it is only the\r
-work of a moment; for I say that nothing is more terrible than a\r
-door which can be opened from the outside with a latch by the first\r
-passer-by; and I say that we need bolts, Monseigneur, if only for this\r
-night; moreover, Monseigneur has the habit of always saying 'come in';\r
-and besides, even in the middle of the night, O mon Dieu! there is no\r
-need to ask permission."\r
-\r
-At that moment there came a tolerably violent knock on the door.\r
-\r
-"Come in," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE HEROISM OF PASSIVE OBEDIENCE.\r
-\r
-The door opened.\r
-\r
-It opened wide with a rapid movement, as though some one had given it an\r
-energetic and resolute push.\r
-\r
-A man entered.\r
-\r
-We already know the man. It was the wayfarer whom we have seen wandering\r
-about in search of shelter.\r
-\r
-He entered, advanced a step, and halted, leaving the door open behind\r
-him. He had his knapsack on his shoulders, his cudgel in his hand, a\r
-rough, audacious, weary, and violent expression in his eyes. The fire on\r
-the hearth lighted him up. He was hideous. It was a sinister apparition.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire had not even the strength to utter a cry. She trembled,\r
-and stood with her mouth wide open.\r
-\r
-Mademoiselle Baptistine turned round, beheld the man entering, and half\r
-started up in terror; then, turning her head by degrees towards the\r
-fireplace again, she began to observe her brother, and her face became\r
-once more profoundly calm and serene.\r
-\r
-The Bishop fixed a tranquil eye on the man.\r
-\r
-As he opened his mouth, doubtless to ask the new-comer what he desired,\r
-the man rested both hands on his staff, directed his gaze at the old man\r
-and the two women, and without waiting for the Bishop to speak, he said,\r
-in a loud voice:--\r
-\r
-"See here. My name is Jean Valjean. I am a convict from the galleys.\r
-I have passed nineteen years in the galleys. I was liberated four days\r
-ago, and am on my way to Pontarlier, which is my destination. I have\r
-been walking for four days since I left Toulon. I have travelled a dozen\r
-leagues to-day on foot. This evening, when I arrived in these parts, I\r
-went to an inn, and they turned me out, because of my yellow passport,\r
-which I had shown at the town-hall. I had to do it. I went to an inn.\r
-They said to me, 'Be off,' at both places. No one would take me. I\r
-went to the prison; the jailer would not admit me. I went into a dog's\r
-kennel; the dog bit me and chased me off, as though he had been a man.\r
-One would have said that he knew who I was. I went into the fields,\r
-intending to sleep in the open air, beneath the stars. There were no\r
-stars. I thought it was going to rain, and I re-entered the town, to\r
-seek the recess of a doorway. Yonder, in the square, I meant to sleep\r
-on a stone bench. A good woman pointed out your house to me, and said\r
-to me, 'Knock there!' I have knocked. What is this place? Do you keep\r
-an inn? I have money--savings. One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous,\r
-which I earned in the galleys by my labor, in the course of nineteen\r
-years. I will pay. What is that to me? I have money. I am very weary;\r
-twelve leagues on foot; I am very hungry. Are you willing that I should\r
-remain?"\r
-\r
-"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will set another place."\r
-\r
-The man advanced three paces, and approached the lamp which was on\r
-the table. "Stop," he resumed, as though he had not quite understood;\r
-"that's not it. Did you hear? I am a galley-slave; a convict. I come\r
-from the galleys." He drew from his pocket a large sheet of yellow\r
-paper, which he unfolded. "Here's my passport. Yellow, as you see. This\r
-serves to expel me from every place where I go. Will you read it? I know\r
-how to read. I learned in the galleys. There is a school there for those\r
-who choose to learn. Hold, this is what they put on this passport: 'Jean\r
-Valjean, discharged convict, native of'--that is nothing to you--'has\r
-been nineteen years in the galleys: five years for house-breaking\r
-and burglary; fourteen years for having attempted to escape on four\r
-occasions. He is a very dangerous man.' There! Every one has cast me\r
-out. Are you willing to receive me? Is this an inn? Will you give me\r
-something to eat and a bed? Have you a stable?"\r
-\r
-"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will put white sheets on the\r
-bed in the alcove." We have already explained the character of the two\r
-women's obedience.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire retired to execute these orders.\r
-\r
-The Bishop turned to the man.\r
-\r
-"Sit down, sir, and warm yourself. We are going to sup in a few moments,\r
-and your bed will be prepared while you are supping."\r
-\r
-At this point the man suddenly comprehended. The expression of his face,\r
-up to that time sombre and harsh, bore the imprint of stupefaction,\r
-of doubt, of joy, and became extraordinary. He began stammering like a\r
-crazy man:--\r
-\r
-"Really? What! You will keep me? You do not drive me forth? A convict!\r
-You call me sir! You do not address me as thou? 'Get out of here, you\r
-dog!' is what people always say to me. I felt sure that you would expel\r
-me, so I told you at once who I am. Oh, what a good woman that was who\r
-directed me hither! I am going to sup! A bed with a mattress and sheets,\r
-like the rest of the world! a bed! It is nineteen years since I have\r
-slept in a bed! You actually do not want me to go! You are good\r
-people. Besides, I have money. I will pay well. Pardon me, monsieur the\r
-inn-keeper, but what is your name? I will pay anything you ask. You are\r
-a fine man. You are an inn-keeper, are you not?"\r
-\r
-"I am," replied the Bishop, "a priest who lives here."\r
-\r
-"A priest!" said the man. "Oh, what a fine priest! Then you are not\r
-going to demand any money of me? You are the cure, are you not? the cure\r
-of this big church? Well! I am a fool, truly! I had not perceived your\r
-skull-cap."\r
-\r
-As he spoke, he deposited his knapsack and his cudgel in a corner,\r
-replaced his passport in his pocket, and seated himself. Mademoiselle\r
-Baptistine gazed mildly at him. He continued:\r
-\r
-"You are humane, Monsieur le Cure; you have not scorned me. A good\r
-priest is a very good thing. Then you do not require me to pay?"\r
-\r
-"No," said the Bishop; "keep your money. How much have you? Did you not\r
-tell me one hundred and nine francs?"\r
-\r
-"And fifteen sous," added the man.\r
-\r
-"One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous. And how long did it take you\r
-to earn that?"\r
-\r
-"Nineteen years."\r
-\r
-"Nineteen years!"\r
-\r
-The Bishop sighed deeply.\r
-\r
-The man continued: "I have still the whole of my money. In four days I\r
-have spent only twenty-five sous, which I earned by helping unload some\r
-wagons at Grasse. Since you are an abbe, I will tell you that we had a\r
-chaplain in the galleys. And one day I saw a bishop there. Monseigneur\r
-is what they call him. He was the Bishop of Majore at Marseilles. He is\r
-the cure who rules over the other cures, you understand. Pardon me,\r
-I say that very badly; but it is such a far-off thing to me! You\r
-understand what we are! He said mass in the middle of the galleys, on an\r
-altar. He had a pointed thing, made of gold, on his head; it glittered\r
-in the bright light of midday. We were all ranged in lines on the three\r
-sides, with cannons with lighted matches facing us. We could not see\r
-very well. He spoke; but he was too far off, and we did not hear. That\r
-is what a bishop is like."\r
-\r
-While he was speaking, the Bishop had gone and shut the door, which had\r
-remained wide open.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire returned. She brought a silver fork and spoon, which she\r
-placed on the table.\r
-\r
-"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "place those things as near the fire\r
-as possible." And turning to his guest: "The night wind is harsh on the\r
-Alps. You must be cold, sir."\r
-\r
-Each time that he uttered the word sir, in his voice which was so gently\r
-grave and polished, the man's face lighted up. Monsieur to a convict is\r
-like a glass of water to one of the shipwrecked of the Medusa. Ignominy\r
-thirsts for consideration.\r
-\r
-"This lamp gives a very bad light," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire understood him, and went to get the two silver\r
-candlesticks from the chimney-piece in Monseigneur's bed-chamber, and\r
-placed them, lighted, on the table.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Cure," said the man, "you are good; you do not despise me.\r
-You receive me into your house. You light your candles for me. Yet I\r
-have not concealed from you whence I come and that I am an unfortunate\r
-man."\r
-\r
-The Bishop, who was sitting close to him, gently touched his hand. "You\r
-could not help telling me who you were. This is not my house; it is\r
-the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters\r
-whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are\r
-hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say\r
-that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man\r
-who needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much\r
-more at home here than I am myself. Everything here is yours. What need\r
-have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me you had one which\r
-I knew."\r
-\r
-The man opened his eyes in astonishment.\r
-\r
-"Really? You knew what I was called?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied the Bishop, "you are called my brother."\r
-\r
-"Stop, Monsieur le Cure," exclaimed the man. "I was very hungry when\r
-I entered here; but you are so good, that I no longer know what has\r
-happened to me."\r
-\r
-The Bishop looked at him, and said,--\r
-\r
-"You have suffered much?"\r
-\r
-"Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat,\r
-cold, toil, the convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing,\r
-the cell for one word; even sick and in bed, still the chain! Dogs, dogs\r
-are happier! Nineteen years! I am forty-six. Now there is the yellow\r
-passport. That is what it is like."\r
-\r
-"Yes," resumed the Bishop, "you have come from a very sad place.\r
-Listen. There will be more joy in heaven over the tear-bathed face of a\r
-repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men. If you\r
-emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred and of wrath against\r
-mankind, you are deserving of pity; if you emerge with thoughts of\r
-good-will and of peace, you are more worthy than any one of us."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Madame Magloire had served supper: soup, made with\r
-water, oil, bread, and salt; a little bacon, a bit of mutton, figs, a\r
-fresh cheese, and a large loaf of rye bread. She had, of her own accord,\r
-added to the Bishop's ordinary fare a bottle of his old Mauves wine.\r
-\r
-The Bishop's face at once assumed that expression of gayety which is\r
-peculiar to hospitable natures. "To table!" he cried vivaciously. As was\r
-his custom when a stranger supped with him, he made the man sit on his\r
-right. Mademoiselle Baptistine, perfectly peaceable and natural, took\r
-her seat at his left.\r
-\r
-The Bishop asked a blessing; then helped the soup himself, according to\r
-his custom. The man began to eat with avidity.\r
-\r
-All at once the Bishop said: "It strikes me there is something missing\r
-on this table."\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire had, in fact, only placed the three sets of forks and\r
-spoons which were absolutely necessary. Now, it was the usage of the\r
-house, when the Bishop had any one to supper, to lay out the whole\r
-six sets of silver on the table-cloth--an innocent ostentation. This\r
-graceful semblance of luxury was a kind of child's play, which was full\r
-of charm in that gentle and severe household, which raised poverty into\r
-dignity.\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire understood the remark, went out without saying a word,\r
-and a moment later the three sets of silver forks and spoons demanded by\r
-the Bishop were glittering upon the cloth, symmetrically arranged before\r
-the three persons seated at the table.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--DETAILS CONCERNING THE CHEESE-DAIRIES OF PONTARLIER.\r
-\r
-Now, in order to convey an idea of what passed at that table, we cannot\r
-do better than to transcribe here a passage from one of Mademoiselle\r
-Baptistine's letters to Madame Boischevron, wherein the conversation\r
-between the convict and the Bishop is described with ingenious\r
-minuteness.\r
-\r
-\r
-". . . This man paid no attention to any one. He ate with the voracity\r
-of a starving man. However, after supper he said:\r
-\r
-"'Monsieur le Cure of the good God, all this is far too good for me; but\r
-I must say that the carters who would not allow me to eat with them keep\r
-a better table than you do.'\r
-\r
-"Between ourselves, the remark rather shocked me. My brother replied:--\r
-\r
-"'They are more fatigued than I.'\r
-\r
-"'No,' returned the man, 'they have more money. You are poor; I see that\r
-plainly. You cannot be even a curate. Are you really a cure? Ah, if the\r
-good God were but just, you certainly ought to be a cure!'\r
-\r
-"'The good God is more than just,' said my brother.\r
-\r
-"A moment later he added:--\r
-\r
-"'Monsieur Jean Valjean, is it to Pontarlier that you are going?'\r
-\r
-"'With my road marked out for me.'\r
-\r
-"I think that is what the man said. Then he went on:--\r
-\r
-"'I must be on my way by daybreak to-morrow. Travelling is hard. If the\r
-nights are cold, the days are hot.'\r
-\r
-"'You are going to a good country,' said my brother. 'During the\r
-Revolution my family was ruined. I took refuge in Franche-Comte at\r
-first, and there I lived for some time by the toil of my hands. My will\r
-was good. I found plenty to occupy me. One has only to choose. There are\r
-paper mills, tanneries, distilleries, oil factories, watch factories\r
-on a large scale, steel mills, copper works, twenty iron foundries at\r
-least, four of which, situated at Lods, at Chatillon, at Audincourt, and\r
-at Beure, are tolerably large.'\r
-\r
-"I think I am not mistaken in saying that those are the names which my\r
-brother mentioned. Then he interrupted himself and addressed me:--\r
-\r
-"'Have we not some relatives in those parts, my dear sister?'\r
-\r
-"I replied,--\r
-\r
-"'We did have some; among others, M. de Lucenet, who was captain of the\r
-gates at Pontarlier under the old regime.'\r
-\r
-"'Yes,' resumed my brother; 'but in '93, one had no longer any\r
-relatives, one had only one's arms. I worked. They have, in the\r
-country of Pontarlier, whither you are going, Monsieur Valjean, a\r
-truly patriarchal and truly charming industry, my sister. It is their\r
-cheese-dairies, which they call fruitieres.'\r
-\r
-"Then my brother, while urging the man to eat, explained to him, with\r
-great minuteness, what these fruitieres of Pontarlier were; that they\r
-were divided into two classes: the big barns which belong to the rich,\r
-and where there are forty or fifty cows which produce from seven to\r
-eight thousand cheeses each summer, and the associated fruitieres, which\r
-belong to the poor; these are the peasants of mid-mountain, who hold\r
-their cows in common, and share the proceeds. 'They engage the services\r
-of a cheese-maker, whom they call the grurin; the grurin receives the\r
-milk of the associates three times a day, and marks the quantity on\r
-a double tally. It is towards the end of April that the work of the\r
-cheese-dairies begins; it is towards the middle of June that the\r
-cheese-makers drive their cows to the mountains.'\r
-\r
-"The man recovered his animation as he ate. My brother made him drink\r
-that good Mauves wine, which he does not drink himself, because he says\r
-that wine is expensive. My brother imparted all these details with that\r
-easy gayety of his with which you are acquainted, interspersing his\r
-words with graceful attentions to me. He recurred frequently to that\r
-comfortable trade of grurin, as though he wished the man to understand,\r
-without advising him directly and harshly, that this would afford him\r
-a refuge. One thing struck me. This man was what I have told you. Well,\r
-neither during supper, nor during the entire evening, did my brother\r
-utter a single word, with the exception of a few words about Jesus when\r
-he entered, which could remind the man of what he was, nor of what my\r
-brother was. To all appearances, it was an occasion for preaching him\r
-a little sermon, and of impressing the Bishop on the convict, so that a\r
-mark of the passage might remain behind. This might have appeared to any\r
-one else who had this, unfortunate man in his hands to afford a chance\r
-to nourish his soul as well as his body, and to bestow upon him\r
-some reproach, seasoned with moralizing and advice, or a little\r
-commiseration, with an exhortation to conduct himself better in the\r
-future. My brother did not even ask him from what country he came,\r
-nor what was his history. For in his history there is a fault, and my\r
-brother seemed to avoid everything which could remind him of it. To such\r
-a point did he carry it, that at one time, when my brother was speaking\r
-of the mountaineers of Pontarlier, who exercise a gentle labor near\r
-heaven, and who, he added, are happy because they are innocent, he\r
-stopped short, fearing lest in this remark there might have escaped him\r
-something which might wound the man. By dint of reflection, I think\r
-I have comprehended what was passing in my brother's heart. He was\r
-thinking, no doubt, that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean, had his\r
-misfortune only too vividly present in his mind; that the best thing\r
-was to divert him from it, and to make him believe, if only momentarily,\r
-that he was a person like any other, by treating him just in his\r
-ordinary way. Is not this indeed, to understand charity well? Is there\r
-not, dear Madame, something truly evangelical in this delicacy which\r
-abstains from sermon, from moralizing, from allusions? and is not the\r
-truest pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all? It has\r
-seemed to me that this might have been my brother's private thought. In\r
-any case, what I can say is that, if he entertained all these ideas, he\r
-gave no sign of them; from beginning to end, even to me he was the same\r
-as he is every evening, and he supped with this Jean Valjean with the\r
-same air and in the same manner in which he would have supped with M.\r
-Gedeon le Provost, or with the curate of the parish.\r
-\r
-"Towards the end, when he had reached the figs, there came a knock at\r
-the door. It was Mother Gerbaud, with her little one in her arms. My\r
-brother kissed the child on the brow, and borrowed fifteen sous which I\r
-had about me to give to Mother Gerbaud. The man was not paying much\r
-heed to anything then. He was no longer talking, and he seemed very much\r
-fatigued. After poor old Gerbaud had taken her departure, my brother\r
-said grace; then he turned to the man and said to him, 'You must be\r
-in great need of your bed.' Madame Magloire cleared the table very\r
-promptly. I understood that we must retire, in order to allow this\r
-traveller to go to sleep, and we both went up stairs. Nevertheless, I\r
-sent Madame Magloire down a moment later, to carry to the man's bed a\r
-goat skin from the Black Forest, which was in my room. The nights are\r
-frigid, and that keeps one warm. It is a pity that this skin is old; all\r
-the hair is falling out. My brother bought it while he was in Germany,\r
-at Tottlingen, near the sources of the Danube, as well as the little\r
-ivory-handled knife which I use at table.\r
-\r
-"Madame Magloire returned immediately. We said our prayers in the\r
-drawing-room, where we hang up the linen, and then we each retired to\r
-our own chambers, without saying a word to each other."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--TRANQUILLITY\r
-\r
-After bidding his sister good night, Monseigneur Bienvenu took one of\r
-the two silver candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his\r
-guest, and said to him,--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur, I will conduct you to your room."\r
-\r
-The man followed him.\r
-\r
-As might have been observed from what has been said above, the house was\r
-so arranged that in order to pass into the oratory where the alcove was\r
-situated, or to get out of it, it was necessary to traverse the Bishop's\r
-bedroom.\r
-\r
-At the moment when he was crossing this apartment, Madame Magloire was\r
-putting away the silverware in the cupboard near the head of the bed.\r
-This was her last care every evening before she went to bed.\r
-\r
-The Bishop installed his guest in the alcove. A fresh white bed had been\r
-prepared there. The man set the candle down on a small table.\r
-\r
-"Well," said the Bishop, "may you pass a good night. To-morrow morning,\r
-before you set out, you shall drink a cup of warm milk from our cows."\r
-\r
-"Thanks, Monsieur l'Abbe," said the man.\r
-\r
-Hardly had he pronounced these words full of peace, when all of a\r
-sudden, and without transition, he made a strange movement, which would\r
-have frozen the two sainted women with horror, had they witnessed it.\r
-Even at this day it is difficult for us to explain what inspired him at\r
-that moment. Did he intend to convey a warning or to throw out a menace?\r
-Was he simply obeying a sort of instinctive impulse which was obscure\r
-even to himself? He turned abruptly to the old man, folded his arms, and\r
-bending upon his host a savage gaze, he exclaimed in a hoarse voice:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! really! You lodge me in your house, close to yourself like this?"\r
-\r
-He broke off, and added with a laugh in which there lurked something\r
-monstrous:--\r
-\r
-"Have you really reflected well? How do you know that I have not been an\r
-assassin?"\r
-\r
-The Bishop replied:--\r
-\r
-"That is the concern of the good God."\r
-\r
-Then gravely, and moving his lips like one who is praying or talking\r
-to himself, he raised two fingers of his right hand and bestowed his\r
-benediction on the man, who did not bow, and without turning his head or\r
-looking behind him, he returned to his bedroom.\r
-\r
-When the alcove was in use, a large serge curtain drawn from wall to\r
-wall concealed the altar. The Bishop knelt before this curtain as he\r
-passed and said a brief prayer. A moment later he was in his garden,\r
-walking, meditating, contemplating, his heart and soul wholly absorbed\r
-in those grand and mysterious things which God shows at night to the\r
-eyes which remain open.\r
-\r
-As for the man, he was actually so fatigued that he did not even profit\r
-by the nice white sheets. Snuffing out his candle with his nostrils\r
-after the manner of convicts, he dropped, all dressed as he was, upon\r
-the bed, where he immediately fell into a profound sleep.\r
-\r
-Midnight struck as the Bishop returned from his garden to his apartment.\r
-\r
-A few minutes later all were asleep in the little house.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--JEAN VALJEAN\r
-\r
-Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned\r
-to read in his childhood. When he reached man's estate, he became a\r
-tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his\r
-father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a\r
-contraction of viola Jean, "here's Jean."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which\r
-constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole,\r
-however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about\r
-Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother\r
-at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not\r
-been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had\r
-been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean\r
-was a sister older than himself,--a widow with seven children, boys and\r
-girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a\r
-husband she lodged and fed her young brother.\r
-\r
-The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old.\r
-The youngest, one.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the\r
-father's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had brought\r
-him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishly\r
-on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude and\r
-ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native\r
-parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.\r
-\r
-He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.\r
-His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from\r
-his bowl while he was eating,--a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the\r
-heart of the cabbage,--to give to one of her children. As he went on\r
-eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his\r
-long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air\r
-of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not\r
-far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane,\r
-a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habitually\r
-famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in\r
-their mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley\r
-corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little\r
-girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother\r
-had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents\r
-severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for\r
-the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not\r
-punished.\r
-\r
-In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as\r
-a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did\r
-whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with\r
-seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was\r
-being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work.\r
-The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!\r
-\r
-One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at\r
-Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on\r
-the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed\r
-through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the\r
-glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran\r
-out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran\r
-after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his\r
-arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals\r
-of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at\r
-night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world,\r
-he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a\r
-legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,\r
-smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark\r
-cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and the\r
-hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, the\r
-smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferocious\r
-men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest,\r
-make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without\r
-destroying the humane side.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit.\r
-There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when\r
-the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in\r
-which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment\r
-of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the\r
-galleys.\r
-\r
-On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the\r
-general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory\r
-to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floreal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte,\r
-was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of galley-slaves\r
-was put in chains at Bicetre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang.\r
-An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old, still\r
-recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end of\r
-the fourth line, in the north angle of the courtyard. He was seated on\r
-the ground like the others. He did not seem to comprehend his position,\r
-except that it was horrible. It is probable that he, also, was\r
-disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of\r
-everything, something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar was\r
-being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept,\r
-his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he only managed to\r
-say from time to time, "I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles." Then still\r
-sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times,\r
-as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights,\r
-and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done,\r
-whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing\r
-seven little children.\r
-\r
-He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven\r
-days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in\r
-the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name,\r
-was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.\r
-What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who\r
-troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from\r
-the young tree which is sawed off at the root?\r
-\r
-It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures\r
-of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge,\r
-wandered away at random,--who even knows?--each in his own direction\r
-perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which\r
-engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear in\r
-succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race.\r
-They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their village\r
-forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field forgot them;\r
-after a few years' residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot\r
-them. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar.\r
-That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon,\r
-did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think, towards\r
-the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through what\r
-channels the news reached him. Some one who had known them in their\r
-own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a poor\r
-street Rear Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre. She had with her only\r
-one child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the other six? Perhaps\r
-she did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing office,\r
-No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged\r
-to be there at six o'clock in the morning--long before daylight in\r
-winter. In the same building with the printing office there was a\r
-school, and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven years\r
-old. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school only\r
-opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school\r
-to open, for an hour--one hour of a winter night in the open air! They\r
-would not allow the child to come into the printing office, because he\r
-was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in the morning, they\r
-beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement, overcome with\r
-drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down and\r
-doubled up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the portress,\r
-took pity on him; she took him into her den, where there was a pallet, a\r
-spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs, and the little one slumbered in a\r
-corner, pressing himself close to the cat that he might suffer less from\r
-cold. At seven o'clock the school opened, and he entered. That is what\r
-was told to Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash,\r
-as though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of those\r
-things whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard nothing more\r
-forever. Nothing from them ever reached him again; he never beheld\r
-them; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this mournful\r
-history they will not be met with any more.\r
-\r
-Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape\r
-arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place.\r
-He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being\r
-at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at\r
-the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,--of a smoking roof,\r
-of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking\r
-clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot\r
-see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening\r
-of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for\r
-thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime,\r
-to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years.\r
-In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself\r
-of it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at\r
-roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found him\r
-hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he\r
-resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This\r
-case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition of\r
-five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In the\r
-tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he\r
-succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years.\r
-Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last\r
-attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four\r
-hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. In\r
-October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having\r
-broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.\r
-\r
-Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his\r
-studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of\r
-this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of\r
-departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gueux had stolen a loaf;\r
-Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that\r
-four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged\r
-impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.\r
-\r
-What had taken place in that soul?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR\r
-\r
-\r
-Let us try to say it.\r
-\r
-It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is\r
-itself which creates them.\r
-\r
-He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. The\r
-light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses a\r
-clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small amount of daylight\r
-which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, in\r
-the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon the\r
-plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and\r
-meditated.\r
-\r
-He constituted himself the tribunal.\r
-\r
-He began by putting himself on trial.\r
-\r
-He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly\r
-punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy\r
-act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to\r
-him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better to\r
-wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that\r
-it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one is\r
-hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die of\r
-hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man\r
-is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally and\r
-physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to have\r
-patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little\r
-children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,\r
-unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,\r
-and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that that\r
-is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through\r
-which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.\r
-\r
-Then he asked himself--\r
-\r
-Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether\r
-it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, an\r
-industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault once\r
-committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious and\r
-disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part of\r
-the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part\r
-of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an\r
-excess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which contains\r
-expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not equivalent\r
-to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing the\r
-situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault of the\r
-repression, of converting the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor\r
-into the creditor, and of ranging the law definitely on the side of the\r
-man who had violated it.\r
-\r
-Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for\r
-attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage\r
-perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society against\r
-the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh every day, a\r
-crime which had lasted nineteen years.\r
-\r
-He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force its\r
-members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lack\r
-of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight; and to\r
-seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess, a default of\r
-work and an excess of punishment.\r
-\r
-Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those\r
-of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods\r
-made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.\r
-\r
-These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.\r
-\r
-He condemned it to his hatred.\r
-\r
-He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said\r
-to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call\r
-it to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibrium\r
-between the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being done\r
-to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment was\r
-not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.\r
-\r
-Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;\r
-one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one's side\r
-at bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.\r
-\r
-And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never\r
-seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and\r
-which it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched him to\r
-bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, since\r
-his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever\r
-encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to\r
-suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a\r
-war; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weapon\r
-than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it away\r
-with him when he departed.\r
-\r
-There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin\r
-friars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of the\r
-unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who had\r
-a mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read,\r
-to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to\r
-fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can\r
-serve to eke out evil.\r
-\r
-This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had\r
-caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,\r
-and he condemned it also.\r
-\r
-Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted and\r
-at the same time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness on the\r
-other.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still good\r
-when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and felt\r
-that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and was\r
-conscious that he was becoming impious.\r
-\r
-It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.\r
-\r
-Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the\r
-man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be\r
-completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can\r
-the heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and\r
-infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness,\r
-as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every\r
-human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a\r
-first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in\r
-the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with\r
-splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?\r
-\r
-Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist\r
-would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation, had\r
-he beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were for Jean\r
-Valjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave, seated with folded\r
-arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust into\r
-his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and thoughtful,\r
-a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath, condemned by\r
-civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.\r
-\r
-Certainly,--and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,--the\r
-observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; he\r
-would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law's making; but\r
-he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have turned aside\r
-his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse within\r
-this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would have effaced\r
-from this existence the word which the finger of God has, nevertheless,\r
-inscribed upon the brow of every man,--hope.\r
-\r
-Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as\r
-perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it for\r
-those who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive, after their\r
-formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process of their\r
-formation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Had\r
-this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception of\r
-the succession of ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted and\r
-descended to the lugubrious aspects which had, for so many years, formed\r
-the inner horizon of his spirit? Was he conscious of all that passed\r
-within him, and of all that was working there? That is something\r
-which we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not even\r
-believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his\r
-misfortune, to prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. At\r
-times he did not rightly know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in\r
-the shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one\r
-might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt habitually\r
-in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, at\r
-intervals, there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, an\r
-access of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash which\r
-illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all around\r
-him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light, the hideous\r
-precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.\r
-\r
-The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He no\r
-longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in which\r
-that which is pitiless--that is to say, that which is\r
-brutalizing--predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, by\r
-a sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into a\r
-ferocious beast.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone\r
-suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul.\r
-Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless and\r
-foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself,\r
-without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experiences\r
-which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the wolf\r
-who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would have\r
-said, "Remain!" But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason\r
-vanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. When\r
-he was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on him only served to\r
-render him still more wild.\r
-\r
-One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical\r
-strength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of the\r
-galleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan, Jean\r
-Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained enormous\r
-weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it, he replaced that\r
-implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly called orgueil\r
-[pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived the name of the\r
-Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris. His comrades had\r
-nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they were repairing the\r
-balcony of the town-hall at Toulon, one of those admirable caryatids of\r
-Puget, which support the balcony, became loosened, and was on the point\r
-of falling. Jean Valjean, who was present, supported the caryatid with\r
-his shoulder, and gave the workmen time to arrive.\r
-\r
-His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who were\r
-forever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of force\r
-and skill combined. It is the science of muscles. An entire system of\r
-mysterious statics is daily practised by prisoners, men who are forever\r
-envious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical surface, and to find\r
-points of support where hardly a projection was visible, was play to\r
-Jean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given, with the tension of his\r
-back and legs, with his elbows and his heels fitted into the unevenness\r
-of the stone, he raised himself as if by magic to the third story. He\r
-sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of the galley prison.\r
-\r
-He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion was\r
-required to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laugh\r
-of the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon. To all\r
-appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant contemplation of\r
-something terrible.\r
-\r
-He was absorbed, in fact.\r
-\r
-Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed\r
-intelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing was\r
-resting on him. In that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,\r
-each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his glance,\r
-he perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of frightful\r
-accumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond the\r
-range of his vision,--laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,--whose outlines\r
-escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than\r
-that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,\r
-here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now\r
-afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,\r
-vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the\r
-gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top,\r
-like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him\r
-that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, rendered\r
-it more funereal and more black. All this--laws, prejudices, deeds, men,\r
-things--went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with the\r
-complicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,\r
-walking over him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulness\r
-in its cruelty and inexorability in its indifference. Souls which have\r
-fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in the\r
-lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the reproved of\r
-the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so formidable for\r
-him who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon\r
-their heads.\r
-\r
-In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature\r
-of his meditation?\r
-\r
-If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would,\r
-doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.\r
-\r
-All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of\r
-realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state which\r
-is almost indescribable.\r
-\r
-At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. His\r
-reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled than of yore,\r
-rose in revolt. Everything which had happened to him seemed to him\r
-absurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. He said\r
-to himself, "It is a dream." He gazed at the galley-sergeant standing a\r
-few paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All of\r
-a sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.\r
-\r
-Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to say\r
-that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days,\r
-nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns. I know not what vent-hole\r
-daylight habitually illumined his soul.\r
-\r
-To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated\r
-into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will\r
-confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen\r
-years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the\r
-formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner\r
-in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:\r
-firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,\r
-entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil which\r
-he had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,\r
-consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which\r
-such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through\r
-three successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alone\r
-traverse,--reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes his\r
-habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities\r
-suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the\r
-just, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the point\r
-of arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred\r
-which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential\r
-incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then\r
-the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which\r
-manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to\r
-some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was\r
-not without reason that Jean Valjean's passport described him as a very\r
-dangerous man.\r
-\r
-From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal\r
-sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from\r
-the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--BILLOWS AND SHADOWS\r
-\r
-\r
-A man overboard!\r
-\r
-What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre\r
-ship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.\r
-\r
-The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the\r
-surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The\r
-vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own\r
-workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;\r
-his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He\r
-gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is\r
-that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It retreats,\r
-it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just now, he was\r
-one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the rest, he had\r
-his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man. Now, what has\r
-taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an end.\r
-\r
-He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees\r
-and crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him\r
-hideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues of\r
-water dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused\r
-openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses\r
-of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seize\r
-him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he is\r
-becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss him\r
-from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly ocean\r
-attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his agony.\r
-It seems as though all that water were hate.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, he struggles.\r
-\r
-He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes\r
-an effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly,\r
-combats the inexhaustible.\r
-\r
-Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of\r
-the horizon.\r
-\r
-The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyes\r
-and beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid his\r
-death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this\r
-madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond\r
-the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region\r
-beyond.\r
-\r
-There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human\r
-distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float,\r
-and he, he rattles in the death agony.\r
-\r
-He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,\r
-at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.\r
-\r
-Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is\r
-exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has\r
-vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he\r
-stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous\r
-billows of the invisible; he shouts.\r
-\r
-There are no more men. Where is God?\r
-\r
-He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.\r
-\r
-Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.\r
-\r
-He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are\r
-deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the\r
-infinite.\r
-\r
-Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,\r
-the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.\r
-Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy\r
-adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold\r
-paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp\r
-nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is\r
-to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the\r
-alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons\r
-his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths\r
-of engulfment.\r
-\r
-Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of\r
-souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!\r
-Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!\r
-\r
-The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling\r
-their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.\r
-\r
-The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall\r
-resuscitate it?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--NEW TROUBLES\r
-\r
-When the hour came for him to take his departure from the galleys, when\r
-Jean Valjean heard in his ear the strange words, Thou art free! the\r
-moment seemed improbable and unprecedented; a ray of vivid light, a ray\r
-of the true light of the living, suddenly penetrated within him. But it\r
-was not long before this ray paled. Jean Valjean had been dazzled by\r
-the idea of liberty. He had believed in a new life. He very speedily\r
-perceived what sort of liberty it is to which a yellow passport is\r
-provided.\r
-\r
-And this was encompassed with much bitterness. He had calculated that\r
-his earnings, during his sojourn in the galleys, ought to amount to\r
-a hundred and seventy-one francs. It is but just to add that he had\r
-forgotten to include in his calculations the forced repose of Sundays\r
-and festival days during nineteen years, which entailed a diminution\r
-of about eighty francs. At all events, his hoard had been reduced by\r
-various local levies to the sum of one hundred and nine francs fifteen\r
-sous, which had been counted out to him on his departure. He had\r
-understood nothing of this, and had thought himself wronged. Let us say\r
-the word--robbed.\r
-\r
-On the day following his liberation, he saw, at Grasse, in front of\r
-an orange-flower distillery, some men engaged in unloading bales. He\r
-offered his services. Business was pressing; they were accepted. He set\r
-to work. He was intelligent, robust, adroit; he did his best; the master\r
-seemed pleased. While he was at work, a gendarme passed, observed\r
-him, and demanded his papers. It was necessary to show him the yellow\r
-passport. That done, Jean Valjean resumed his labor. A little while\r
-before he had questioned one of the workmen as to the amount which they\r
-earned each day at this occupation; he had been told thirty sous. When\r
-evening arrived, as he was forced to set out again on the following day,\r
-he presented himself to the owner of the distillery and requested to be\r
-paid. The owner did not utter a word, but handed him twenty-five sous. He\r
-objected. He was told, "That is enough for thee." He persisted. The\r
-master looked him straight between the eyes, and said to him "Beware of\r
-the prison."\r
-\r
-There, again, he considered that he had been robbed.\r
-\r
-Society, the State, by diminishing his hoard, had robbed him wholesale.\r
-Now it was the individual who was robbing him at retail.\r
-\r
-Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not\r
-from the sentence.\r
-\r
-That is what happened to him at Grasse. We have seen in what manner he\r
-was received at D----\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--THE MAN AROUSED\r
-\r
-As the Cathedral clock struck two in the morning, Jean Valjean awoke.\r
-\r
-What woke him was that his bed was too good. It was nearly twenty years\r
-since he had slept in a bed, and, although he had not undressed, the\r
-sensation was too novel not to disturb his slumbers.\r
-\r
-He had slept more than four hours. His fatigue had passed away. He was\r
-accustomed not to devote many hours to repose.\r
-\r
-He opened his eyes and stared into the gloom which surrounded him; then\r
-he closed them again, with the intention of going to sleep once more.\r
-\r
-When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters\r
-preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time.\r
-Sleep comes more easily than it returns. This is what happened to Jean\r
-Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he fell to thinking.\r
-\r
-He was at one of those moments when the thoughts which one has in one's\r
-mind are troubled. There was a sort of dark confusion in his brain. His\r
-memories of the olden time and of the immediate present floated there\r
-pell-mell and mingled confusedly, losing their proper forms, becoming\r
-disproportionately large, then suddenly disappearing, as in a muddy and\r
-perturbed pool. Many thoughts occurred to him; but there was one which\r
-kept constantly presenting itself afresh, and which drove away all\r
-others. We will mention this thought at once: he had observed the six\r
-sets of silver forks and spoons and the ladle which Madame Magloire had\r
-placed on the table.\r
-\r
-Those six sets of silver haunted him.--They were there.--A few paces\r
-distant.--Just as he was traversing the adjoining room to reach the\r
-one in which he then was, the old servant-woman had been in the act\r
-of placing them in a little cupboard near the head of the bed.--He had\r
-taken careful note of this cupboard.--On the right, as you entered from\r
-the dining-room.--They were solid.--And old silver.--From the ladle one\r
-could get at least two hundred francs.--Double what he had earned in\r
-nineteen years.--It is true that he would have earned more if "the\r
-administration had not robbed him."\r
-\r
-His mind wavered for a whole hour in fluctuations with which there was\r
-certainly mingled some struggle. Three o'clock struck. He opened his\r
-eyes again, drew himself up abruptly into a sitting posture, stretched\r
-out his arm and felt of his knapsack, which he had thrown down on a\r
-corner of the alcove; then he hung his legs over the edge of the bed,\r
-and placed his feet on the floor, and thus found himself, almost without\r
-knowing it, seated on his bed.\r
-\r
-He remained for a time thoughtfully in this attitude, which would have\r
-been suggestive of something sinister for any one who had seen him\r
-thus in the dark, the only person awake in that house where all were\r
-sleeping. All of a sudden he stooped down, removed his shoes and placed\r
-them softly on the mat beside the bed; then he resumed his thoughtful\r
-attitude, and became motionless once more.\r
-\r
-Throughout this hideous meditation, the thoughts which we have above\r
-indicated moved incessantly through his brain; entered, withdrew,\r
-re-entered, and in a manner oppressed him; and then he thought, also,\r
-without knowing why, and with the mechanical persistence of revery, of\r
-a convict named Brevet, whom he had known in the galleys, and whose\r
-trousers had been upheld by a single suspender of knitted cotton. The\r
-checkered pattern of that suspender recurred incessantly to his mind.\r
-\r
-He remained in this situation, and would have so remained indefinitely,\r
-even until daybreak, had not the clock struck one--the half or quarter\r
-hour. It seemed to him that that stroke said to him, "Come on!"\r
-\r
-He rose to his feet, hesitated still another moment, and listened; all\r
-was quiet in the house; then he walked straight ahead, with short steps,\r
-to the window, of which he caught a glimpse. The night was not very\r
-dark; there was a full moon, across which coursed large clouds driven by\r
-the wind. This created, outdoors, alternate shadow and gleams of light,\r
-eclipses, then bright openings of the clouds; and indoors a sort of\r
-twilight. This twilight, sufficient to enable a person to see his way,\r
-intermittent on account of the clouds, resembled the sort of livid light\r
-which falls through an air-hole in a cellar, before which the passersby\r
-come and go. On arriving at the window, Jean Valjean examined it. It had\r
-no grating; it opened in the garden and was fastened, according to the\r
-fashion of the country, only by a small pin. He opened it; but as a\r
-rush of cold and piercing air penetrated the room abruptly, he closed\r
-it again immediately. He scrutinized the garden with that attentive gaze\r
-which studies rather than looks. The garden was enclosed by a tolerably\r
-low white wall, easy to climb. Far away, at the extremity, he perceived\r
-tops of trees, spaced at regular intervals, which indicated that the\r
-wall separated the garden from an avenue or lane planted with trees.\r
-\r
-Having taken this survey, he executed a movement like that of a man who\r
-has made up his mind, strode to his alcove, grasped his knapsack, opened\r
-it, fumbled in it, pulled out of it something which he placed on the\r
-bed, put his shoes into one of his pockets, shut the whole thing up\r
-again, threw the knapsack on his shoulders, put on his cap, drew the\r
-visor down over his eyes, felt for his cudgel, went and placed it in the\r
-angle of the window; then returned to the bed, and resolutely seized the\r
-object which he had deposited there. It resembled a short bar of\r
-iron, pointed like a pike at one end. It would have been difficult to\r
-distinguish in that darkness for what employment that bit of iron could\r
-have been designed. Perhaps it was a lever; possibly it was a club.\r
-\r
-In the daytime it would have been possible to recognize it as nothing\r
-more than a miner's candlestick. Convicts were, at that period,\r
-sometimes employed in quarrying stone from the lofty hills which environ\r
-Toulon, and it was not rare for them to have miners' tools at their\r
-command. These miners' candlesticks are of massive iron, terminated at\r
-the lower extremity by a point, by means of which they are stuck into\r
-the rock.\r
-\r
-He took the candlestick in his right hand; holding his breath and trying\r
-to deaden the sound of his tread, he directed his steps to the door of\r
-the adjoining room, occupied by the Bishop, as we already know.\r
-\r
-On arriving at this door, he found it ajar. The Bishop had not closed\r
-it.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--WHAT HE DOES\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean listened. Not a sound.\r
-\r
-He gave the door a push.\r
-\r
-He pushed it gently with the tip of his finger, lightly, with the\r
-furtive and uneasy gentleness of a cat which is desirous of entering.\r
-\r
-The door yielded to this pressure, and made an imperceptible and silent\r
-movement, which enlarged the opening a little.\r
-\r
-He waited a moment; then gave the door a second and a bolder push.\r
-\r
-It continued to yield in silence. The opening was now large enough to\r
-allow him to pass. But near the door there stood a little table, which\r
-formed an embarrassing angle with it, and barred the entrance.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean recognized the difficulty. It was necessary, at any cost,\r
-to enlarge the aperture still further.\r
-\r
-He decided on his course of action, and gave the door a third push, more\r
-energetic than the two preceding. This time a badly oiled hinge suddenly\r
-emitted amid the silence a hoarse and prolonged cry.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean shuddered. The noise of the hinge rang in his ears with\r
-something of the piercing and formidable sound of the trump of the Day\r
-of Judgment.\r
-\r
-In the fantastic exaggerations of the first moment he almost imagined\r
-that that hinge had just become animated, and had suddenly assumed a\r
-terrible life, and that it was barking like a dog to arouse every one,\r
-and warn and to wake those who were asleep. He halted, shuddering,\r
-bewildered, and fell back from the tips of his toes upon his heels. He\r
-heard the arteries in his temples beating like two forge hammers, and\r
-it seemed to him that his breath issued from his breast with the roar\r
-of the wind issuing from a cavern. It seemed impossible to him that the\r
-horrible clamor of that irritated hinge should not have disturbed the\r
-entire household, like the shock of an earthquake; the door, pushed by\r
-him, had taken the alarm, and had shouted; the old man would rise at\r
-once; the two old women would shriek out; people would come to their\r
-assistance; in less than a quarter of an hour the town would be in an\r
-uproar, and the gendarmerie on hand. For a moment he thought himself\r
-lost.\r
-\r
-He remained where he was, petrified like the statue of salt, not daring\r
-to make a movement. Several minutes elapsed. The door had fallen wide\r
-open. He ventured to peep into the next room. Nothing had stirred there.\r
-He lent an ear. Nothing was moving in the house. The noise made by the\r
-rusty hinge had not awakened any one.\r
-\r
-This first danger was past; but there still reigned a frightful tumult\r
-within him. Nevertheless, he did not retreat. Even when he had thought\r
-himself lost, he had not drawn back. His only thought now was to finish\r
-as soon as possible. He took a step and entered the room.\r
-\r
-This room was in a state of perfect calm. Here and there vague and\r
-confused forms were distinguishable, which in the daylight were papers\r
-scattered on a table, open folios, volumes piled upon a stool, an\r
-arm-chair heaped with clothing, a prie-Dieu, and which at that hour\r
-were only shadowy corners and whitish spots. Jean Valjean advanced with\r
-precaution, taking care not to knock against the furniture. He could\r
-hear, at the extremity of the room, the even and tranquil breathing of\r
-the sleeping Bishop.\r
-\r
-He suddenly came to a halt. He was near the bed. He had arrived there\r
-sooner than he had thought for.\r
-\r
-Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions\r
-with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to\r
-make us reflect. For the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the\r
-heavens. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed,\r
-this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing\r
-the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop's pale face. He was\r
-sleeping peacefully. He lay in his bed almost completely dressed, on\r
-account of the cold of the Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool,\r
-which covered his arms to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the\r
-pillow, in the careless attitude of repose; his hand, adorned with the\r
-pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds and so many\r
-holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the bed. His whole face\r
-was illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of\r
-felicity. It was more than a smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon\r
-his brow the indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible.\r
-The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.\r
-\r
-A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.\r
-\r
-It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that heaven was\r
-within him. That heaven was his conscience.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Fall 1b2-10-the-fall]\r
-\r
-At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed itself, so to speak,\r
-upon that inward radiance, the sleeping Bishop seemed as in a glory. It\r
-remained, however, gentle and veiled in an ineffable half-light. That\r
-moon in the sky, that slumbering nature, that garden without a quiver,\r
-that house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence, added\r
-some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable repose of this man,\r
-and enveloped in a sort of serene and majestic aureole that white\r
-hair, those closed eyes, that face in which all was hope and all was\r
-confidence, that head of an old man, and that slumber of an infant.\r
-\r
-There was something almost divine in this man, who was thus august,\r
-without being himself aware of it.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron\r
-candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had\r
-he beheld anything like this. This confidence terrified him. The\r
-moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and\r
-uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action,\r
-contemplating the slumber of the just.\r
-\r
-That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had\r
-about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously\r
-conscious.\r
-\r
-No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself. In\r
-order to attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of the\r
-most violent of things in the presence of the most gentle. Even on\r
-his visage it would have been impossible to distinguish anything with\r
-certainty. It was a sort of haggard astonishment. He gazed at it, and\r
-that was all. But what was his thought? It would have been impossible to\r
-divine it. What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded. But\r
-what was the nature of this emotion?\r
-\r
-His eye never quitted the old man. The only thing which was clearly\r
-to be inferred from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange\r
-indecision. One would have said that he was hesitating between the two\r
-abysses,--the one in which one loses one's self and that in which one\r
-saves one's self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that\r
-hand.\r
-\r
-At the expiration of a few minutes his left arm rose slowly towards\r
-his brow, and he took off his cap; then his arm fell back with the same\r
-deliberation, and Jean Valjean fell to meditating once more, his cap in\r
-his left hand, his club in his right hand, his hair bristling all over\r
-his savage head.\r
-\r
-The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying\r
-gaze.\r
-\r
-The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the\r
-chimney-piece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them,\r
-with a benediction for one and pardon for the other.\r
-\r
-Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped rapidly\r
-past the bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the cupboard,\r
-which he saw near the head; he raised his iron candlestick as though to\r
-force the lock; the key was there; he opened it; the first thing which\r
-presented itself to him was the basket of silverware; he seized it,\r
-traversed the chamber with long strides, without taking any precautions\r
-and without troubling himself about the noise, gained the door,\r
-re-entered the oratory, opened the window, seized his cudgel, bestrode\r
-the window-sill of the ground-floor, put the silver into his knapsack,\r
-threw away the basket, crossed the garden, leaped over the wall like a\r
-tiger, and fled.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--THE BISHOP WORKS\r
-\r
-The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his\r
-garden. Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur, Monseigneur!" she exclaimed, "does your Grace know where\r
-the basket of silver is?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied the Bishop.\r
-\r
-"Jesus the Lord be blessed!" she resumed; "I did not know what had\r
-become of it."\r
-\r
-The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented\r
-it to Madame Magloire.\r
-\r
-"Here it is."\r
-\r
-"Well!" said she. "Nothing in it! And the silver?"\r
-\r
-"Ah," returned the Bishop, "so it is the silver which troubles you? I\r
-don't know where it is."\r
-\r
-"Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has\r
-stolen it."\r
-\r
-In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame\r
-Magloire had rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned\r
-to the Bishop. The Bishop had just bent down, and was sighing as he\r
-examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons, which the basket had broken\r
-as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire's cry.\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!"\r
-\r
-As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the\r
-garden, where traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The\r
-coping of the wall had been torn away.\r
-\r
-"Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane.\r
-Ah, the abomination! He has stolen our silver!"\r
-\r
-The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes,\r
-and said gently to Madame Magloire:--\r
-\r
-"And, in the first place, was that silver ours?"\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop\r
-went on:--\r
-\r
-"Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver\r
-wrongfully. It belonged to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man,\r
-evidently."\r
-\r
-"Alas! Jesus!" returned Madame Magloire. "It is not for my sake, nor for\r
-Mademoiselle's. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the sake of\r
-Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur to eat with now?"\r
-\r
-The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.\r
-\r
-"Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?"\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.\r
-\r
-"Pewter has an odor."\r
-\r
-"Iron forks and spoons, then."\r
-\r
-Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.\r
-\r
-"Iron has a taste."\r
-\r
-"Very well," said the Bishop; "wooden ones then."\r
-\r
-A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which\r
-Jean Valjean had sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast,\r
-Monseigneur Welcome remarked gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and\r
-to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling under her breath, that one really\r
-does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit\r
-of bread in a cup of milk.\r
-\r
-"A pretty idea, truly," said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went and\r
-came, "to take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one's self!\r
-And how fortunate that he did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it makes\r
-one shudder to think of it!"\r
-\r
-As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came\r
-a knock at the door.\r
-\r
-"Come in," said the Bishop.\r
-\r
-The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the\r
-threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three\r
-men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was\r
-standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a\r
-military salute.\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur--" said he.\r
-\r
-At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed,\r
-raised his head with an air of stupefaction.\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur!" he murmured. "So he is not the cure?"\r
-\r
-"Silence!" said the gendarme. "He is Monseigneur the Bishop."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his\r
-great age permitted.\r
-\r
-"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to\r
-see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which\r
-are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two\r
-hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and\r
-spoons?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop\r
-with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.\r
-\r
-"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said\r
-is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is\r
-running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this\r
-silver--"\r
-\r
-"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been\r
-given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed\r
-the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back\r
-here? It is a mistake."\r
-\r
-"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"\r
-\r
-"Certainly," replied the Bishop.\r
-\r
-The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.\r
-\r
-"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost\r
-inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.\r
-\r
-"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the\r
-gendarmes.\r
-\r
-"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your\r
-candlesticks. Take them."\r
-\r
-He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and\r
-brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering\r
-a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the\r
-Bishop.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks\r
-mechanically, and with a bewildered air.\r
-\r
-"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my\r
-friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always\r
-enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with\r
-anything but a latch, either by day or by night."\r
-\r
-Then, turning to the gendarmes:--\r
-\r
-"You may retire, gentlemen."\r
-\r
-The gendarmes retired.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.\r
-\r
-The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:--\r
-\r
-"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money\r
-in becoming an honest man."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,\r
-remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered\r
-them. He resumed with solemnity:--\r
-\r
-"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It\r
-is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and\r
-the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GERVAIS\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set out\r
-at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and paths\r
-presented themselves to him, without perceiving that he was incessantly\r
-retracing his steps. He wandered thus the whole morning, without having\r
-eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the prey of a throng\r
-of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of rage; he did not\r
-know against whom it was directed. He could not have told whether he was\r
-touched or humiliated. There came over him at moments a strange emotion\r
-which he resisted and to which he opposed the hardness acquired during\r
-the last twenty years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him.\r
-He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the\r
-injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within\r
-him. He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have\r
-actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things\r
-should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less.\r
-Although the season was tolerably far advanced, there were still a few\r
-late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose odor as he passed\r
-through them in his march recalled to him memories of his childhood.\r
-These memories were almost intolerable to him, it was so long since they\r
-had recurred to him.\r
-\r
-Unutterable thoughts assembled within him in this manner all day long.\r
-\r
-As the sun declined to its setting, casting long shadows athwart the\r
-soil from every pebble, Jean Valjean sat down behind a bush upon a large\r
-ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the\r
-horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village. Jean\r
-Valjean might have been three leagues distant from D---- A path which\r
-intersected the plain passed a few paces from the bush.\r
-\r
-In the middle of this meditation, which would have contributed not\r
-a little to render his rags terrifying to any one who might have\r
-encountered him, a joyous sound became audible.\r
-\r
-He turned his head and saw a little Savoyard, about ten years of age,\r
-coming up the path and singing, his hurdy-gurdy on his hip, and his\r
-marmot-box on his back.\r
-\r
-One of those gay and gentle children, who go from land to land affording\r
-a view of their knees through the holes in their trousers.\r
-\r
-Without stopping his song, the lad halted in his march from time to\r
-time, and played at knuckle-bones with some coins which he had in his\r
-hand--his whole fortune, probably.\r
-\r
-Among this money there was one forty-sou piece.\r
-\r
-The child halted beside the bush, without perceiving Jean Valjean, and\r
-tossed up his handful of sous, which, up to that time, he had caught\r
-with a good deal of adroitness on the back of his hand.\r
-\r
-This time the forty-sou piece escaped him, and went rolling towards the\r
-brushwood until it reached Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean set his foot upon it.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the child had looked after his coin and had caught\r
-sight of him.\r
-\r
-He showed no astonishment, but walked straight up to the man.\r
-\r
-The spot was absolutely solitary. As far as the eye could see there was\r
-not a person on the plain or on the path. The only sound was the tiny,\r
-feeble cries of a flock of birds of passage, which was traversing the\r
-heavens at an immense height. The child was standing with his back to\r
-the sun, which cast threads of gold in his hair and empurpled with its\r
-blood-red gleam the savage face of Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Sir," said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is\r
-composed of ignorance and innocence, "my money."\r
-\r
-"What is your name?" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Little Gervais, sir."\r
-\r
-"Go away," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Sir," resumed the child, "give me back my money."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean dropped his head, and made no reply.\r
-\r
-The child began again, "My money, sir."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's eyes remained fixed on the earth.\r
-\r
-"My piece of money!" cried the child, "my white piece! my silver!"\r
-\r
-It seemed as though Jean Valjean did not hear him. The child grasped him\r
-by the collar of his blouse and shook him. At the same time he made an\r
-effort to displace the big iron-shod shoe which rested on his treasure.\r
-\r
-"I want my piece of money! my piece of forty sous!"\r
-\r
-The child wept. Jean Valjean raised his head. He still remained seated.\r
-His eyes were troubled. He gazed at the child, in a sort of amazement,\r
-then he stretched out his hand towards his cudgel and cried in a\r
-terrible voice, "Who's there?"\r
-\r
-"I, sir," replied the child. "Little Gervais! I! Give me back my forty\r
-sous, if you please! Take your foot away, sir, if you please!"\r
-\r
-Then irritated, though he was so small, and becoming almost menacing:--\r
-\r
-"Come now, will you take your foot away? Take your foot away, or we'll\r
-see!"\r
-\r
-"Ah! It's still you!" said Jean Valjean, and rising abruptly to his\r
-feet, his foot still resting on the silver piece, he added:--\r
-\r
-"Will you take yourself off!"\r
-\r
-The frightened child looked at him, then began to tremble from head to\r
-foot, and after a few moments of stupor he set out, running at the top\r
-of his speed, without daring to turn his neck or to utter a cry.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, lack of breath forced him to halt after a certain\r
-distance, and Jean Valjean heard him sobbing, in the midst of his own\r
-revery.\r
-\r
-At the end of a few moments the child had disappeared.\r
-\r
-The sun had set.\r
-\r
-The shadows were descending around Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing\r
-all day; it is probable that he was feverish.\r
-\r
-He had remained standing and had not changed his attitude after the\r
-child's flight. The breath heaved his chest at long and irregular\r
-intervals. His gaze, fixed ten or twelve paces in front of him, seemed\r
-to be scrutinizing with profound attention the shape of an ancient\r
-fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass. All at once\r
-he shivered; he had just begun to feel the chill of evening.\r
-\r
-He settled his cap more firmly on his brow, sought mechanically to\r
-cross and button his blouse, advanced a step and stopped to pick up his\r
-cudgel.\r
-\r
-At that moment he caught sight of the forty-sou piece, which his foot\r
-had half ground into the earth, and which was shining among the pebbles.\r
-It was as though he had received a galvanic shock. "What is this?"\r
-he muttered between his teeth. He recoiled three paces, then halted,\r
-without being able to detach his gaze from the spot which his foot had\r
-trodden but an instant before, as though the thing which lay glittering\r
-there in the gloom had been an open eye riveted upon him.\r
-\r
-At the expiration of a few moments he darted convulsively towards the\r
-silver coin, seized it, and straightened himself up again and began to\r
-gaze afar off over the plain, at the same time casting his eyes towards\r
-all points of the horizon, as he stood there erect and shivering, like a\r
-terrified wild animal which is seeking refuge.\r
-\r
-He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and vague, great\r
-banks of violet haze were rising in the gleam of the twilight.\r
-\r
-He said, "Ah!" and set out rapidly in the direction in which the child\r
-had disappeared. After about thirty paces he paused, looked about him\r
-and saw nothing.\r
-\r
-Then he shouted with all his might:--\r
-\r
-"Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"\r
-\r
-He paused and waited.\r
-\r
-There was no reply.\r
-\r
-The landscape was gloomy and deserted. He was encompassed by space.\r
-There was nothing around him but an obscurity in which his gaze was\r
-lost, and a silence which engulfed his voice.\r
-\r
-An icy north wind was blowing, and imparted to things around him a\r
-sort of lugubrious life. The bushes shook their thin little arms with\r
-incredible fury. One would have said that they were threatening and\r
-pursuing some one.\r
-\r
-He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and from time to\r
-time he halted and shouted into that solitude, with a voice which was\r
-the most formidable and the most disconsolate that it was possible to\r
-hear, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"\r
-\r
-Assuredly, if the child had heard him, he would have been alarmed and\r
-would have taken good care not to show himself. But the child was no\r
-doubt already far away.\r
-\r
-He encountered a priest on horseback. He stepped up to him and said:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Cure, have you seen a child pass?"\r
-\r
-"No," said the priest.\r
-\r
-"One named Little Gervais?"\r
-\r
-"I have seen no one."\r
-\r
-He drew two five-franc pieces from his money-bag and handed them to the\r
-priest.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Cure, this is for your poor people. Monsieur le Cure, he\r
-was a little lad, about ten years old, with a marmot, I think, and a\r
-hurdy-gurdy. One of those Savoyards, you know?"\r
-\r
-"I have not seen him."\r
-\r
-"Little Gervais? There are no villages here? Can you tell me?"\r
-\r
-"If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such\r
-persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence,\r
-and gave them to the priest.\r
-\r
-"For your poor," he said.\r
-\r
-Then he added, wildly:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur l'Abbe, have me arrested. I am a thief."\r
-\r
-The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first\r
-taken.\r
-\r
-In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling,\r
-shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran across the plain\r
-towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being\r
-reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood\r
-or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a spot where\r
-three paths intersected each other, he stopped. The moon had risen. He\r
-sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little\r
-Gervais! Little Gervais! Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the\r
-mist, without even awakening an echo. He murmured yet once more, "Little\r
-Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice. It was his last\r
-effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible\r
-power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil\r
-conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in\r
-his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"\r
-\r
-Then his heart burst, and he began to cry. It was the first time that he\r
-had wept in nineteen years.\r
-\r
-When Jean Valjean left the Bishop's house, he was, as we have seen,\r
-quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto. He\r
-could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him. He\r
-hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words of the\r
-old man. "You have promised me to become an honest man. I buy your soul.\r
-I take it away from the spirit of perversity; I give it to the good\r
-God."\r
-\r
-This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness\r
-he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil within us. He was\r
-indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest\r
-assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his\r
-obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he\r
-yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the\r
-actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and\r
-which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be\r
-conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been\r
-begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.\r
-\r
-In the presence of these lights, he proceeded like a man who is\r
-intoxicated. As he walked thus with haggard eyes, did he have a distinct\r
-perception of what might result to him from his adventure at D----? Did\r
-he understand all those mysterious murmurs which warn or importune the\r
-spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that\r
-he had just passed the solemn hour of his destiny; that there no longer\r
-remained a middle course for him; that if he were not henceforth the\r
-best of men, he would be the worst; that it behooved him now, so to\r
-speak, to mount higher than the Bishop, or fall lower than the convict;\r
-that if he wished to become good be must become an angel; that if he\r
-wished to remain evil, he must become a monster?\r
-\r
-Here, again, some questions must be put, which we have already put\r
-to ourselves elsewhere: did he catch some shadow of all this in his\r
-thought, in a confused way? Misfortune certainly, as we have said, does\r
-form the education of the intelligence; nevertheless, it is doubtful\r
-whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to disentangle all that we have\r
-here indicated. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught glimpses\r
-of, rather than saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into\r
-an unutterable and almost painful state of emotion. On emerging from\r
-that black and deformed thing which is called the galleys, the Bishop\r
-had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt his eyes on\r
-emerging from the dark. The future life, the possible life which offered\r
-itself to him henceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremors\r
-and anxiety. He no longer knew where he really was. Like an owl, who\r
-should suddenly see the sun rise, the convict had been dazzled and\r
-blinded, as it were, by virtue.\r
-\r
-That which was certain, that which he did not doubt, was that he was no\r
-longer the same man, that everything about him was changed, that it was\r
-no longer in his power to make it as though the Bishop had not spoken to\r
-him and had not touched him.\r
-\r
-In this state of mind he had encountered little Gervais, and had robbed\r
-him of his forty sous. Why? He certainly could not have explained it;\r
-was this the last effect and the supreme effort, as it were, of the\r
-evil thoughts which he had brought away from the galleys,--a remnant of\r
-impulse, a result of what is called in statics, acquired force? It\r
-was that, and it was also, perhaps, even less than that. Let us say it\r
-simply, it was not he who stole; it was not the man; it was the beast,\r
-who, by habit and instinct, had simply placed his foot upon that money,\r
-while the intelligence was struggling amid so many novel and hitherto\r
-unheard-of thoughts besetting it.\r
-\r
-When intelligence re-awakened and beheld that action of the brute, Jean\r
-Valjean recoiled with anguish and uttered a cry of terror.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Awakened 1b2-11-awakened]\r
-\r
-It was because,--strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only\r
-in the situation in which he found himself,--in stealing the money from\r
-that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.\r
-\r
-However that may be, this last evil action had a decisive effect on\r
-him; it abruptly traversed that chaos which he bore in his mind, and\r
-dispersed it, placed on one side the thick obscurity, and on the other\r
-the light, and acted on his soul, in the state in which it then was, as\r
-certain chemical reagents act upon a troubled mixture by precipitating\r
-one element and clarifying the other.\r
-\r
-First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting, all\r
-bewildered, like one who seeks to save himself, he tried to find the\r
-child in order to return his money to him; then, when he recognized the\r
-fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair. At the moment when\r
-he exclaimed "I am a wretch!" he had just perceived what he was, and he\r
-was already separated from himself to such a degree, that he seemed to\r
-himself to be no longer anything more than a phantom, and as if he had,\r
-there before him, in flesh and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean\r
-Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled\r
-with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage,\r
-with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.\r
-\r
-Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort\r
-a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw\r
-that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached\r
-the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified by\r
-him.\r
-\r
-His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly calm\r
-moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality. One no\r
-longer beholds the object which one has before one, and one sees, as\r
-though apart from one's self, the figures which one has in one's own\r
-mind.\r
-\r
-Thus he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face, and at the same\r
-time, athwart this hallucination, he perceived in a mysterious depth a\r
-sort of light which he at first took for a torch. On scrutinizing\r
-this light which appeared to his conscience with more attention, he\r
-recognized the fact that it possessed a human form and that this torch\r
-was the Bishop.\r
-\r
-His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it,--the\r
-Bishop and Jean Valjean. Nothing less than the first was required to\r
-soften the second. By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar\r
-to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his revery continued, as the\r
-Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean grow\r
-less and vanish. After a certain time he was no longer anything more\r
-than a shade. All at once he disappeared. The Bishop alone remained; he\r
-filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed with\r
-more weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.\r
-\r
-As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an\r
-extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past\r
-life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutishness, his\r
-internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in manifold plans\r
-of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop's, the last thing\r
-that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime all the\r
-more cowardly, and all the more monstrous since it had come after the\r
-Bishop's pardon,--all this recurred to his mind and appeared clearly\r
-to him, but with a clearness which he had never hitherto witnessed.\r
-He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it\r
-seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this\r
-life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light\r
-of Paradise.\r
-\r
-How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept?\r
-Whither did he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be\r
-authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble at\r
-that epoch, and who arrived at D---- about three o'clock in the morning,\r
-saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's residence was\r
-situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in\r
-the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE YEAR 1817\r
-\r
-\r
-1817 is the year which Louis XVIII., with a certain royal assurance\r
-which was not wanting in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his reign.\r
-It is the year in which M. Bruguiere de Sorsum was celebrated. All the\r
-hairdressers' shops, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird,\r
-were besmeared with azure and decked with fleurs-de-lys. It was the\r
-candid time at which Count Lynch sat every Sunday as church-warden in\r
-the church-warden's pew of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in his costume of a\r
-peer of France, with his red ribbon and his long nose and the majesty\r
-of profile peculiar to a man who has performed a brilliant action.\r
-The brilliant action performed by M. Lynch was this: being mayor of\r
-Bordeaux, on the 12th of March, 1814, he had surrendered the city a\r
-little too promptly to M. the Duke d'Angouleme. Hence his peerage. In\r
-1817 fashion swallowed up little boys of from four to six years of\r
-age in vast caps of morocco leather with ear-tabs resembling Esquimaux\r
-mitres. The French army was dressed in white, after the mode of the\r
-Austrian; the regiments were called legions; instead of numbers they\r
-bore the names of departments; Napoleon was at St. Helena; and since\r
-England refused him green cloth, he was having his old coats turned.\r
-In 1817 Pelligrini sang; Mademoiselle Bigottini danced; Potier reigned;\r
-Odry did not yet exist. Madame Saqui had succeeded to Forioso. There\r
-were still Prussians in France. M. Delalot was a personage. Legitimacy\r
-had just asserted itself by cutting off the hand, then the head, of\r
-Pleignier, of Carbonneau, and of Tolleron. The Prince de Talleyrand,\r
-grand chamberlain, and the Abbe Louis, appointed minister of finance,\r
-laughed as they looked at each other, with the laugh of the two augurs;\r
-both of them had celebrated, on the 14th of July, 1790, the mass of\r
-federation in the Champ de Mars; Talleyrand had said it as bishop, Louis\r
-had served it in the capacity of deacon. In 1817, in the side-alleys\r
-of this same Champ de Mars, two great cylinders of wood might have\r
-been seen lying in the rain, rotting amid the grass, painted blue, with\r
-traces of eagles and bees, from which the gilding was falling. These\r
-were the columns which two years before had upheld the Emperor's\r
-platform in the Champ de Mai. They were blackened here and there with\r
-the scorches of the bivouac of Austrians encamped near Gros-Caillou. Two\r
-or three of these columns had disappeared in these bivouac fires, and\r
-had warmed the large hands of the Imperial troops. The Field of May had\r
-this remarkable point: that it had been held in the month of June and in\r
-the Field of March (Mars). In this year, 1817, two things were popular:\r
-the Voltaire-Touquet and the snuff-box a la Charter. The most recent\r
-Parisian sensation was the crime of Dautun, who had thrown his brother's\r
-head into the fountain of the Flower-Market.\r
-\r
-They had begun to feel anxious at the Naval Department, on account of\r
-the lack of news from that fatal frigate, The Medusa, which was destined\r
-to cover Chaumareix with infamy and Gericault with glory. Colonel Selves\r
-was going to Egypt to become Soliman-Pasha. The palace of Thermes, in\r
-the Rue de La Harpe, served as a shop for a cooper. On the platform of\r
-the octagonal tower of the Hotel de Cluny, the little shed of boards,\r
-which had served as an observatory to Messier, the naval astronomer\r
-under Louis XVI., was still to be seen. The Duchesse de Duras read to\r
-three or four friends her unpublished Ourika, in her boudoir furnished\r
-by X. in sky-blue satin. The N's were scratched off the Louvre. The\r
-bridge of Austerlitz had abdicated, and was entitled the bridge of the\r
-King's Garden [du Jardin du Roi], a double enigma, which disguised the\r
-bridge of Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes at one stroke. Louis\r
-XVIII., much preoccupied while annotating Horace with the corner of his\r
-finger-nail, heroes who have become emperors, and makers of wooden shoes\r
-who have become dauphins, had two anxieties,--Napoleon and Mathurin\r
-Bruneau. The French Academy had given for its prize subject, The\r
-Happiness procured through Study. M. Bellart was officially eloquent.\r
-In his shadow could be seen germinating that future advocate-general of\r
-Broe, dedicated to the sarcasms of Paul-Louis Courier. There was a false\r
-Chateaubriand, named Marchangy, in the interim, until there should be a\r
-false Marchangy, named d'Arlincourt. Claire d'Albe and Malek-Adel were\r
-masterpieces; Madame Cottin was proclaimed the chief writer of the\r
-epoch. The Institute had the academician, Napoleon Bonaparte, stricken\r
-from its list of members. A royal ordinance erected Angouleme into a\r
-naval school; for the Duc d'Angouleme, being lord high admiral, it was\r
-evident that the city of Angouleme had all the qualities of a seaport;\r
-otherwise the monarchical principle would have received a wound. In\r
-the Council of Ministers the question was agitated whether vignettes\r
-representing slack-rope performances, which adorned Franconi's\r
-advertising posters, and which attracted throngs of street urchins,\r
-should be tolerated. M. Paer, the author of Agnese, a good sort of\r
-fellow, with a square face and a wart on his cheek, directed the little\r
-private concerts of the Marquise de Sasenaye in the Rue Ville l'Eveque.\r
-All the young girls were singing the Hermit of Saint-Avelle, with words\r
-by Edmond Geraud. The Yellow Dwarf was transferred into Mirror. The Cafe\r
-Lemblin stood up for the Emperor, against the Cafe Valois, which upheld\r
-the Bourbons. The Duc de Berri, already surveyed from the shadow by\r
-Louvel, had just been married to a princess of Sicily. Madame de Stael\r
-had died a year previously. The body-guard hissed Mademoiselle Mars.\r
-The grand newspapers were all very small. Their form was restricted,\r
-but their liberty was great. The Constitutionnel was constitutional.\r
-La Minerve called Chateaubriand Chateaubriant. That made the good\r
-middle-class people laugh heartily at the expense of the great writer.\r
-In journals which sold themselves, prostituted journalists, insulted the\r
-exiles of 1815. David had no longer any talent, Arnault had no longer\r
-any wit, Carnot was no longer honest, Soult had won no battles; it is\r
-true that Napoleon had no longer any genius. No one is ignorant of the\r
-fact that letters sent to an exile by post very rarely reached him, as\r
-the police made it their religious duty to intercept them. This is no\r
-new fact; Descartes complained of it in his exile. Now David, having, in\r
-a Belgian publication, shown some displeasure at not receiving letters\r
-which had been written to him, it struck the royalist journals as\r
-amusing; and they derided the prescribed man well on this occasion. What\r
-separated two men more than an abyss was to say, the regicides, or\r
-to say the voters; to say the enemies, or to say the allies; to say\r
-Napoleon, or to say Buonaparte. All sensible people were agreed that the\r
-era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII., surnamed\r
-"The Immortal Author of the Charter." On the platform of the Pont-Neuf,\r
-the word Redivivus was carved on the pedestal that awaited the statue of\r
-Henry IV. M. Piet, in the Rue Therese, No. 4, was making the rough draft\r
-of his privy assembly to consolidate the monarchy. The leaders of the\r
-Right said at grave conjunctures, "We must write to Bacot." MM. Canuel,\r
-O'Mahoney, and De Chappedelaine were preparing the sketch, to some\r
-extent with Monsieur's approval, of what was to become later on "The\r
-Conspiracy of the Bord de l'Eau"--of the waterside. L'Epingle Noire was\r
-already plotting in his own quarter. Delaverderie was conferring with\r
-Trogoff. M. Decazes, who was liberal to a degree, reigned. Chateaubriand\r
-stood every morning at his window at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, clad in\r
-footed trousers, and slippers, with a madras kerchief knotted over his\r
-gray hair, with his eyes fixed on a mirror, a complete set of dentist's\r
-instruments spread out before him, cleaning his teeth, which were\r
-charming, while he dictated The Monarchy according to the Charter to\r
-M. Pilorge, his secretary. Criticism, assuming an authoritative tone,\r
-preferred Lafon to Talma. M. de Feletez signed himself A.; M. Hoffmann\r
-signed himself Z. Charles Nodier wrote Therese Aubert. Divorce was\r
-abolished. Lyceums called themselves colleges. The collegians, decorated\r
-on the collar with a golden fleur-de-lys, fought each other apropos of\r
-the King of Rome. The counter-police of the chateau had denounced to her\r
-Royal Highness Madame, the portrait, everywhere exhibited, of M. the\r
-Duc d'Orleans, who made a better appearance in his uniform of a\r
-colonel-general of hussars than M. the Duc de Berri, in his uniform of\r
-colonel-general of dragoons--a serious inconvenience. The city of\r
-Paris was having the dome of the Invalides regilded at its own expense.\r
-Serious men asked themselves what M. de Trinquelague would do on such or\r
-such an occasion; M. Clausel de Montals differed on divers points\r
-from M. Clausel de Coussergues; M. de Salaberry was not satisfied. The\r
-comedian Picard, who belonged to the Academy, which the comedian Moliere\r
-had not been able to do, had The Two Philiberts played at the Odeon,\r
-upon whose pediment the removal of the letters still allowed THEATRE OF\r
-THE EMPRESS to be plainly read. People took part for or against Cugnet\r
-de Montarlot. Fabvier was factious; Bavoux was revolutionary. The\r
-Liberal, Pelicier, published an edition of Voltaire, with the following\r
-title: Works of Voltaire, of the French Academy. "That will attract\r
-purchasers," said the ingenious editor. The general opinion was that M.\r
-Charles Loyson would be the genius of the century; envy was beginning to\r
-gnaw at him--a sign of glory; and this verse was composed on him:--\r
-\r
- "Even when Loyson steals, one feels that he has paws."\r
-\r
-As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Archbishop of Amasie,\r
-administered the diocese of Lyons. The quarrel over the valley of Dappes\r
-was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain,\r
-afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his\r
-sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science,\r
-whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier,\r
-whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark;\r
-a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms:\r
-a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The\r
-Abbe Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of\r
-seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest,\r
-named Felicite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing\r
-which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog\r
-went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal\r
-to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not\r
-good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden\r
-inventor; an utopia--a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at\r
-this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by\r
-a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians,\r
-ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could\r
-not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the\r
-pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on\r
-account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in\r
-the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other\r
-with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier,\r
-with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted\r
-reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons\r
-flatter Moses.\r
-\r
-M. Francois de Neufchateau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory\r
-of Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have pomme de terre [potato]\r
-pronounced parmentiere, and succeeded therein not at all. The Abbe\r
-Gregoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the\r
-royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Gregoire." The locution of\r
-which we have made use--passed to the state of--has been condemned as a\r
-neologism by M. Royer Collard. Under the third arch of the Pont de Jena,\r
-the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining aperture\r
-made by Blucher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was still\r
-recognizable on account of its whiteness. Justice summoned to its bar a\r
-man who, on seeing the Comte d'Artois enter Notre Dame, had said aloud:\r
-"Sapristi! I regret the time when I saw Bonaparte and Talma enter the\r
-Bel Sauvage, arm in arm." A seditious utterance. Six months in prison.\r
-Traitors showed themselves unbuttoned; men who had gone over to the\r
-enemy on the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense, and\r
-strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches and\r
-dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness of\r
-their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy in\r
-the most barefaced manner.\r
-\r
-This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is\r
-now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot\r
-do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these\r
-details, which are wrongly called trivial,--there are no trivial facts\r
-in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,--are useful. It is of\r
-the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is\r
-composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine\r
-farce."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--A DOUBLE QUARTETTE\r
-\r
-\r
-These Parisians came, one from Toulouse, another from Limoges, the third\r
-from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students; and\r
-when one says student, one says Parisian: to study in Paris is to be\r
-born in Paris.\r
-\r
-These young men were insignificant; every one has seen such faces; four\r
-specimens of humanity taken at random; neither good nor bad, neither\r
-wise nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor fools; handsome, with that\r
-charming April which is called twenty years. They were four Oscars; for,\r
-at that epoch, Arthurs did not yet exist. Burn for him the perfumes of\r
-Araby! exclaimed romance. Oscar advances. Oscar, I shall behold him!\r
-People had just emerged from Ossian; elegance was Scandinavian and\r
-Caledonian; the pure English style was only to prevail later, and\r
-the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had but just won the battle of\r
-Waterloo.\r
-\r
-These Oscars bore the names, one of Felix Tholomyes, of Toulouse; the\r
-second, Listolier, of Cahors; the next, Fameuil, of Limoges; the last,\r
-Blachevelle, of Montauban. Naturally, each of them had his mistress.\r
-Blachevelle loved Favourite, so named because she had been in England;\r
-Listolier adored Dahlia, who had taken for her nickname the name of a\r
-flower; Fameuil idolized Zephine, an abridgment of Josephine; Tholomyes\r
-had Fantine, called the Blonde, because of her beautiful, sunny hair.\r
-\r
-Favourite, Dahlia, Zephine, and Fantine were four ravishing young women,\r
-perfumed and radiant, still a little like working-women, and not yet\r
-entirely divorced from their needles; somewhat disturbed by intrigues,\r
-but still retaining on their faces something of the serenity of toil,\r
-and in their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall\r
-in woman. One of the four was called the young, because she was\r
-the youngest of them, and one was called the old; the old one was\r
-twenty-three. Not to conceal anything, the three first were more\r
-experienced, more heedless, and more emancipated into the tumult of life\r
-than Fantine the Blonde, who was still in her first illusions.\r
-\r
-Dahlia, Zephine, and especially Favourite, could not have said as much.\r
-There had already been more than one episode in their romance, though\r
-hardly begun; and the lover who had borne the name of Adolph in the\r
-first chapter had turned out to be Alphonse in the second, and Gustave\r
-in the third. Poverty and coquetry are two fatal counsellors; one scolds\r
-and the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have\r
-both of them whispering in their ear, each on its own side. These badly\r
-guarded souls listen. Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the\r
-stones which are thrown at them. They are overwhelmed with splendor of\r
-all that is immaculate and inaccessible. Alas! what if the Jungfrau were\r
-hungry?\r
-\r
-Favourite having been in England, was admired by Dahlia and Zephine. She\r
-had had an establishment of her own very early in life. Her father was\r
-an old unmarried professor of mathematics, a brutal man and a braggart,\r
-who went out to give lessons in spite of his age. This professor, when\r
-he was a young man, had one day seen a chambermaid's gown catch on\r
-a fender; he had fallen in love in consequence of this accident. The\r
-result had been Favourite. She met her father from time to time, and he\r
-bowed to her. One morning an old woman with the air of a devotee,\r
-had entered her apartments, and had said to her, "You do not know me,\r
-Mamemoiselle?" "No." "I am your mother." Then the old woman opened the\r
-sideboard, and ate and drank, had a mattress which she owned brought in,\r
-and installed herself. This cross and pious old mother never spoke to\r
-Favourite, remained hours without uttering a word, breakfasted, dined,\r
-and supped for four, and went down to the porter's quarters for company,\r
-where she spoke ill of her daughter.\r
-\r
-It was having rosy nails that were too pretty which had drawn Dahlia to\r
-Listolier, to others perhaps, to idleness. How could she make such nails\r
-work? She who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands.\r
-As for Zephine, she had conquered Fameuil by her roguish and caressing\r
-little way of saying "Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-The young men were comrades; the young girls were friends. Such loves\r
-are always accompanied by such friendships.\r
-\r
-Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things; the proof of this\r
-is that, after making all due allowances for these little irregular\r
-households, Favourite, Zephine, and Dahlia were philosophical young\r
-women, while Fantine was a good girl.\r
-\r
-Good! some one will exclaim; and Tholomyes? Solomon would reply that\r
-love forms a part of wisdom. We will confine ourselves to saying that\r
-the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.\r
-\r
-She alone, of all the four, was not called "thou" by a single one of\r
-them.\r
-\r
-Fantine was one of those beings who blossom, so to speak, from the dregs\r
-of the people. Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths\r
-of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the\r
-unknown. She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had\r
-never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She\r
-had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory\r
-still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal\r
-name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased\r
-the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small\r
-child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she\r
-received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was\r
-called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature\r
-had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted\r
-the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At\r
-fifteen she came to Paris "to seek her fortune." Fantine was beautiful,\r
-and remained pure as long as she could. She was a lovely blonde, with\r
-fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on\r
-her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.\r
-\r
-She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living,--for\r
-the heart, also, has its hunger,--she loved.\r
-\r
-She loved Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-An amour for him; passion for her. The streets of the Latin quarter,\r
-filled with throngs of students and grisettes, saw the beginning of\r
-their dream. Fantine had long evaded Tholomyes in the mazes of the hill\r
-of the Pantheon, where so many adventurers twine and untwine, but in\r
-such a way as constantly to encounter him again. There is a way of\r
-avoiding which resembles seeking. In short, the eclogue took place.\r
-\r
-Blachevelle, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group of which\r
-Tholomyes was the head. It was he who possessed the wit.\r
-\r
-Tholomyes was the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of\r
-four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on\r
-Mount Sainte-Genevieve. Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly\r
-preserved. He was wrinkled and toothless, and he had the beginning of a\r
-bald spot, of which he himself said with sadness, the skull at thirty,\r
-the knee at forty. His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked\r
-by a watering in one eye. But in proportion as his youth disappeared,\r
-gayety was kindled; he replaced his teeth with buffooneries, his hair\r
-with mirth, his health with irony, his weeping eye laughed incessantly.\r
-He was dilapidated but still in flower. His youth, which was packing\r
-up for departure long before its time, beat a retreat in good order,\r
-bursting with laughter, and no one saw anything but fire. He had had a\r
-piece rejected at the Vaudeville. He made a few verses now and then. In\r
-addition to this he doubted everything to the last degree, which is a\r
-vast force in the eyes of the weak. Being thus ironical and bald, he\r
-was the leader. Iron is an English word. Is it possible that irony is\r
-derived from it?\r
-\r
-One day Tholomyes took the three others aside, with the gesture of an\r
-oracle, and said to them:--\r
-\r
-"Fantine, Dahlia, Zephine, and Favourite have been teasing us for nearly\r
-a year to give them a surprise. We have promised them solemnly that we\r
-would. They are forever talking about it to us, to me in particular,\r
-just as the old women in Naples cry to Saint Januarius, 'Faccia\r
-gialluta, fa o miracolo, Yellow face, perform thy miracle,' so our\r
-beauties say to me incessantly, 'Tholomyes, when will you bring forth\r
-your surprise?' At the same time our parents keep writing to us.\r
-Pressure on both sides. The moment has arrived, it seems to me; let us\r
-discuss the question."\r
-\r
-Thereupon, Tholomyes lowered his voice and articulated something so\r
-mirthful, that a vast and enthusiastic grin broke out upon the four\r
-mouths simultaneously, and Blachevelle exclaimed, "That is an idea."\r
-\r
-A smoky tap-room presented itself; they entered, and the remainder of\r
-their confidential colloquy was lost in shadow.\r
-\r
-The result of these shades was a dazzling pleasure party which took\r
-place on the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four\r
-young girls.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--FOUR AND FOUR\r
-\r
-It is hard nowadays to picture to one's self what a pleasure-trip of\r
-students and grisettes to the country was like, forty-five years ago.\r
-The suburbs of Paris are no longer the same; the physiognomy of what\r
-may be called circumparisian life has changed completely in the last\r
-half-century; where there was the cuckoo, there is the railway car;\r
-where there was a tender-boat, there is now the steamboat; people speak\r
-of Fecamp nowadays as they spoke of Saint-Cloud in those days. The Paris\r
-of 1862 is a city which has France for its outskirts.\r
-\r
-The four couples conscientiously went through with all the country\r
-follies possible at that time. The vacation was beginning, and it was a\r
-warm, bright, summer day. On the preceding day, Favourite, the only one\r
-who knew how to write, had written the following to Tholomyes in the\r
-name of the four: "It is a good hour to emerge from happiness." That\r
-is why they rose at five o'clock in the morning. Then they went to\r
-Saint-Cloud by the coach, looked at the dry cascade and exclaimed, "This\r
-must be very beautiful when there is water!" They breakfasted at the\r
-Tete-Noir, where Castaing had not yet been; they treated themselves to a\r
-game of ring-throwing under the quincunx of trees of the grand fountain;\r
-they ascended Diogenes' lantern, they gambled for macaroons at the\r
-roulette establishment of the Pont de Sevres, picked bouquets at\r
-Pateaux, bought reed-pipes at Neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and\r
-were perfectly happy.\r
-\r
-The young girls rustled and chatted like warblers escaped from their\r
-cage. It was a perfect delirium. From time to time they bestowed little\r
-taps on the young men. Matutinal intoxication of life! adorable years!\r
-the wings of the dragonfly quiver. Oh, whoever you may be, do you not\r
-remember? Have you rambled through the brushwood, holding aside the\r
-branches, on account of the charming head which is coming on behind you?\r
-Have you slid, laughing, down a slope all wet with rain, with a beloved\r
-woman holding your hand, and crying, "Ah, my new boots! what a state\r
-they are in!"\r
-\r
-Let us say at once that that merry obstacle, a shower, was lacking in\r
-the case of this good-humored party, although Favourite had said as they\r
-set out, with a magisterial and maternal tone, "The slugs are crawling\r
-in the paths,--a sign of rain, children."\r
-\r
-All four were madly pretty. A good old classic poet, then famous, a good\r
-fellow who had an Eleonore, M. le Chevalier de Labouisse, as he strolled\r
-that day beneath the chestnut-trees of Saint-Cloud, saw them pass about\r
-ten o'clock in the morning, and exclaimed, "There is one too many of\r
-them," as he thought of the Graces. Favourite, Blachevelle's friend, the\r
-one aged three and twenty, the old one, ran on in front under the great\r
-green boughs, jumped the ditches, stalked distractedly over bushes, and\r
-presided over this merry-making with the spirit of a young female faun.\r
-Zephine and Dahlia, whom chance had made beautiful in such a way that\r
-they set each off when they were together, and completed each other,\r
-never left each other, more from an instinct of coquetry than from\r
-friendship, and clinging to each other, they assumed English poses; the\r
-first keepsakes had just made their appearance, melancholy was dawning\r
-for women, as later on, Byronism dawned for men; and the hair of the\r
-tender sex began to droop dolefully. Zephine and Dahlia had their hair\r
-dressed in rolls. Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing\r
-their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed\r
-between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.\r
-\r
-Blachevelle seemed to have been created expressly to carry Favourite's\r
-single-bordered, imitation India shawl of Ternaux's manufacture, on his\r
-arm on Sundays.\r
-\r
-Tholomyes followed, dominating the group. He was very gay, but one felt\r
-the force of government in him; there was dictation in his joviality;\r
-his principal ornament was a pair of trousers of elephant-leg pattern of\r
-nankeen, with straps of braided copper wire; he carried a stout rattan\r
-worth two hundred francs in his hand, and, as he treated himself to\r
-everything, a strange thing called a cigar in his mouth. Nothing was\r
-sacred to him; he smoked.\r
-\r
-"That Tholomyes is astounding!" said the others, with veneration. "What\r
-trousers! What energy!"\r
-\r
-As for Fantine, she was a joy to behold. Her splendid teeth had\r
-evidently received an office from God,--laughter. She preferred to carry\r
-her little hat of sewed straw, with its long white strings, in her hand\r
-rather than on her head. Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to\r
-wave, and which easily uncoiled, and which it was necessary to fasten\r
-up incessantly, seemed made for the flight of Galatea under the\r
-willows. Her rosy lips babbled enchantingly. The corners of her mouth\r
-voluptuously turned up, as in the antique masks of Erigone, had an\r
-air of encouraging the audacious; but her long, shadowy lashes drooped\r
-discreetly over the jollity of the lower part of the face as though to\r
-call a halt. There was something indescribably harmonious and striking\r
-about her entire dress. She wore a gown of mauve barege, little reddish\r
-brown buskins, whose ribbons traced an X on her fine, white, open-worked\r
-stockings, and that sort of muslin spencer, a Marseilles invention,\r
-whose name, canezou, a corruption of the words quinze aout, pronounced\r
-after the fashion of the Canebiere, signifies fine weather, heat, and\r
-midday. The three others, less timid, as we have already said,\r
-wore low-necked dresses without disguise, which in summer, beneath\r
-flower-adorned hats, are very graceful and enticing; but by the side\r
-of these audacious outfits, blond Fantine's canezou, with its\r
-transparencies, its indiscretion, and its reticence, concealing and\r
-displaying at one and the same time, seemed an alluring godsend of\r
-decency, and the famous Court of Love, presided over by the Vicomtesse\r
-de Cette, with the sea-green eyes, would, perhaps, have awarded the\r
-prize for coquetry to this canezou, in the contest for the prize of\r
-modesty. The most ingenious is, at times, the wisest. This does happen.\r
-\r
-Brilliant of face, delicate of profile, with eyes of a deep blue, heavy\r
-lids, feet arched and small, wrists and ankles admirably formed, a white\r
-skin which, here and there allowed the azure branching of the veins to\r
-be seen, joy, a cheek that was young and fresh, the robust throat of the\r
-Juno of AEgina, a strong and supple nape of the neck, shoulders modelled\r
-as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous dimple in the middle, visible\r
-through the muslin; a gayety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and\r
-exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and\r
-these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.\r
-\r
-Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. Those rare\r
-dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful who silently confront\r
-everything with perfection, would have caught a glimpse in this little\r
-working-woman, through the transparency of her Parisian grace, of the\r
-ancient sacred euphony. This daughter of the shadows was thoroughbred.\r
-She was beautiful in the two ways--style and rhythm. Style is the form\r
-of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.\r
-\r
-We have said that Fantine was joy; she was also modesty.\r
-\r
-To an observer who studied her attentively, that which breathed from\r
-her athwart all the intoxication of her age, the season, and her\r
-love affair, was an invincible expression of reserve and modesty. She\r
-remained a little astonished. This chaste astonishment is the shade\r
-of difference which separates Psyche from Venus. Fantine had the long,\r
-white, fine fingers of the vestal virgin who stirs the ashes of the\r
-sacred fire with a golden pin. Although she would have refused nothing\r
-to Tholomyes, as we shall have more than ample opportunity to see, her\r
-face in repose was supremely virginal; a sort of serious and almost\r
-austere dignity suddenly overwhelmed her at certain times, and there\r
-was nothing more singular and disturbing than to see gayety become so\r
-suddenly extinct there, and meditation succeed to cheerfulness without\r
-any transition state. This sudden and sometimes severely accentuated\r
-gravity resembled the disdain of a goddess. Her brow, her nose, her\r
-chin, presented that equilibrium of outline which is quite distinct\r
-from equilibrium of proportion, and from which harmony of countenance\r
-results; in the very characteristic interval which separates the base\r
-of the nose from the upper lip, she had that imperceptible and charming\r
-fold, a mysterious sign of chastity, which makes Barberousse fall in\r
-love with a Diana found in the treasures of Iconia.\r
-\r
-Love is a fault; so be it. Fantine was innocence floating high over\r
-fault.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THOLOMYES IS SO MERRY THAT HE SINGS A SPANISH DITTY\r
-\r
-\r
-That day was composed of dawn, from one end to the other. All nature\r
-seemed to be having a holiday, and to be laughing. The flower-beds of\r
-Saint-Cloud perfumed the air; the breath of the Seine rustled the\r
-leaves vaguely; the branches gesticulated in the wind, bees pillaged the\r
-jasmines; a whole bohemia of butterflies swooped down upon the yarrow,\r
-the clover, and the sterile oats; in the august park of the King of\r
-France there was a pack of vagabonds, the birds.\r
-\r
-The four merry couples, mingled with the sun, the fields, the flowers,\r
-the trees, were resplendent.\r
-\r
-And in this community of Paradise, talking, singing, running, dancing,\r
-chasing butterflies, plucking convolvulus, wetting their pink, open-work\r
-stockings in the tall grass, fresh, wild, without malice, all received,\r
-to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine,\r
-who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of\r
-dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. "You always have a queer\r
-look about you," said Favourite to her.\r
-\r
-Such things are joys. These passages of happy couples are a profound\r
-appeal to life and nature, and make a caress and light spring forth from\r
-everything. There was once a fairy who created the fields and forests\r
-expressly for those in love,--in that eternal hedge-school of lovers,\r
-which is forever beginning anew, and which will last as long as there\r
-are hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers.\r
-The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb\r
-of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden\r
-times, all are subjects of this fairy. They laugh and hunt, and there\r
-is in the air the brilliance of an apotheosis--what a transfiguration\r
-effected by love! Notaries' clerks are gods. And the little cries,\r
-the pursuits through the grass, the waists embraced on the fly, those\r
-jargons which are melodies, those adorations which burst forth in the\r
-manner of pronouncing a syllable, those cherries torn from one mouth by\r
-another,--all this blazes forth and takes its place among the celestial\r
-glories. Beautiful women waste themselves sweetly. They think that this\r
-will never come to an end. Philosophers, poets, painters, observe these\r
-ecstasies and know not what to make of it, so greatly are they dazzled\r
-by it. The departure for Cythera! exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter\r
-of plebeians, contemplates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the\r
-azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love idyls, and\r
-d'Urfe mingles druids with them.\r
-\r
-After breakfast the four couples went to what was then called the King's\r
-Square to see a newly arrived plant from India, whose name escapes our\r
-memory at this moment, and which, at that epoch, was attracting all\r
-Paris to Saint-Cloud. It was an odd and charming shrub with a long stem,\r
-whose numerous branches, bristling and leafless and as fine as threads,\r
-were covered with a million tiny white rosettes; this gave the shrub the\r
-air of a head of hair studded with flowers. There was always an admiring\r
-crowd about it.\r
-\r
-After viewing the shrub, Tholomyes exclaimed, "I offer you asses!" and\r
-having agreed upon a price with the owner of the asses, they returned\r
-by way of Vanvres and Issy. At Issy an incident occurred. The truly\r
-national park, at that time owned by Bourguin the contractor, happened\r
-to be wide open. They passed the gates, visited the manikin anchorite in\r
-his grotto, tried the mysterious little effects of the famous cabinet\r
-of mirrors, the wanton trap worthy of a satyr become a millionaire or of\r
-Turcaret metamorphosed into a Priapus. They had stoutly shaken the swing\r
-attached to the two chestnut-trees celebrated by the Abbe de Bernis.\r
-As he swung these beauties, one after the other, producing folds in the\r
-fluttering skirts which Greuze would have found to his taste, amid peals\r
-of laughter, the Toulousan Tholomyes, who was somewhat of a Spaniard,\r
-Toulouse being the cousin of Tolosa, sang, to a melancholy chant, the\r
-old ballad gallega, probably inspired by some lovely maid dashing in\r
-full flight upon a rope between two trees:--\r
-\r
- "Soy de Badajoz, "Badajoz is my home,\r
- Amor me llama, And Love is my name;\r
- Toda mi alma, To my eyes in flame,\r
- Es en mi ojos, All my soul doth come;\r
- Porque ensenas, For instruction meet\r
- A tuas piernas. I receive at thy feet"\r
-\r
-\r
-Fantine alone refused to swing.\r
-\r
-"I don't like to have people put on airs like that," muttered Favourite,\r
-with a good deal of acrimony.\r
-\r
-After leaving the asses there was a fresh delight; they crossed the\r
-Seine in a boat, and proceeding from Passy on foot they reached the\r
-barrier of l'Etoile. They had been up since five o'clock that morning,\r
-as the reader will remember; but bah! there is no such thing as fatigue\r
-on Sunday, said Favourite; on Sunday fatigue does not work.\r
-\r
-About three o'clock the four couples, frightened at their happiness,\r
-were sliding down the Russian mountains, a singular edifice which then\r
-occupied the heights of Beaujon, and whose undulating line was visible\r
-above the trees of the Champs Elysees.\r
-\r
-From time to time Favourite exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"And the surprise? I claim the surprise."\r
-\r
-"Patience," replied Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--AT BOMBARDA'S\r
-\r
-The Russian mountains having been exhausted, they began to think about\r
-dinner; and the radiant party of eight, somewhat weary at last, became\r
-stranded in Bombarda's public house, a branch establishment which had\r
-been set up in the Champs-Elysees by that famous restaurant-keeper,\r
-Bombarda, whose sign could then be seen in the Rue de Rivoli, near\r
-Delorme Alley.\r
-\r
-A large but ugly room, with an alcove and a bed at the end (they had\r
-been obliged to put up with this accommodation in view of the Sunday\r
-crowd); two windows whence they could survey beyond the elms, the quay\r
-and the river; a magnificent August sunlight lightly touching the panes;\r
-two tables; upon one of them a triumphant mountain of bouquets, mingled\r
-with the hats of men and women; at the other the four couples seated\r
-round a merry confusion of platters, dishes, glasses, and bottles; jugs\r
-of beer mingled with flasks of wine; very little order on the table,\r
-some disorder beneath it;\r
-\r
- "They made beneath the table\r
- A noise, a clatter of the feet that was abominable,"\r
-\r
-says Moliere.\r
-\r
-This was the state which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in\r
-the morning, had reached at half-past four in the afternoon. The sun was\r
-setting; their appetites were satisfied.\r
-\r
-The Champs-Elysees, filled with sunshine and with people, were nothing\r
-but light and dust, the two things of which glory is composed. The\r
-horses of Marly, those neighing marbles, were prancing in a cloud\r
-of gold. Carriages were going and coming. A squadron of magnificent\r
-body-guards, with their clarions at their head, were descending the\r
-Avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, showing faintly rosy in the setting\r
-sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde,\r
-which had become the Place Louis XV. once more, was choked with happy\r
-promenaders. Many wore the silver fleur-de-lys suspended from the\r
-white-watered ribbon, which had not yet wholly disappeared from\r
-button-holes in the year 1817. Here and there choruses of little girls\r
-threw to the winds, amid the passersby, who formed into circles and\r
-applauded, the then celebrated Bourbon air, which was destined to strike\r
-the Hundred Days with lightning, and which had for its refrain:--\r
-\r
- "Rendez-nous notre pere de Gand,\r
- Rendez-nous notre pere."\r
-\r
- "Give us back our father from Ghent,\r
- Give us back our father."\r
-\r
-\r
-Groups of dwellers in the suburbs, in Sunday array, sometimes even\r
-decorated with the fleur-de-lys, like the bourgeois, scattered over the\r
-large square and the Marigny square, were playing at rings and revolving\r
-on the wooden horses; others were engaged in drinking; some journeyman\r
-printers had on paper caps; their laughter was audible. Every thing\r
-was radiant. It was a time of undisputed peace and profound royalist\r
-security; it was the epoch when a special and private report of Chief\r
-of Police Angeles to the King, on the subject of the suburbs of Paris,\r
-terminated with these lines:--\r
-\r
-"Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be\r
-feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats.\r
-The populace is restless in the provinces; it is not in Paris. These are\r
-very pretty men, Sire. It would take all of two of them to make one\r
-of your grenadiers. There is nothing to be feared on the part of the\r
-populace of Paris the capital. It is remarkable that the stature of\r
-this population should have diminished in the last fifty years; and\r
-the populace of the suburbs is still more puny than at the time of the\r
-Revolution. It is not dangerous. In short, it is an amiable rabble."\r
-\r
-Prefects of the police do not deem it possible that a cat can transform\r
-itself into a lion; that does happen, however, and in that lies the\r
-miracle wrought by the populace of Paris. Moreover, the cat so despised\r
-by Count Angles possessed the esteem of the republics of old. In their\r
-eyes it was liberty incarnate; and as though to serve as pendant to\r
-the Minerva Aptera of the Piraeus, there stood on the public square in\r
-Corinth the colossal bronze figure of a cat. The ingenuous police of the\r
-Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too "rose-colored" a light;\r
-it is not so much of "an amiable rabble" as it is thought. The Parisian\r
-is to the Frenchman what the Athenian was to the Greek: no one sleeps\r
-more soundly than he, no one is more frankly frivolous and lazy than\r
-he, no one can better assume the air of forgetfulness; let him not be\r
-trusted nevertheless; he is ready for any sort of cool deed; but when\r
-there is glory at the end of it, he is worthy of admiration in every\r
-sort of fury. Give him a pike, he will produce the 10th of August; give\r
-him a gun, you will have Austerlitz. He is Napoleon's stay and Danton's\r
-resource. Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of\r
-liberty, he tears up the pavements. Beware! his hair filled with wrath,\r
-is epic; his blouse drapes itself like the folds of a chlamys. Take\r
-care! he will make of the first Rue Grenetat which comes to hand Caudine\r
-Forks. When the hour strikes, this man of the faubourgs will grow in\r
-stature; this little man will arise, and his gaze will be terrible, and\r
-his breath will become a tempest, and there will issue forth from that\r
-slender chest enough wind to disarrange the folds of the Alps. It is,\r
-thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with\r
-arms, conquers Europe. He sings; it is his delight. Proportion his song\r
-to his nature, and you will see! As long as he has for refrain nothing\r
-but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the\r
-Marseillaise, and he will free the world.\r
-\r
-This note jotted down on the margin of Angles' report, we will return to\r
-our four couples. The dinner, as we have said, was drawing to its close.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--A CHAPTER IN WHICH THEY ADORE EACH OTHER\r
-\r
-Chat at table, the chat of love; it is as impossible to reproduce one as\r
-the other; the chat of love is a cloud; the chat at table is smoke.\r
-\r
-Fameuil and Dahlia were humming. Tholomyes was drinking. Zephine was\r
-laughing, Fantine smiling, Listolier blowing a wooden trumpet which he\r
-had purchased at Saint-Cloud.\r
-\r
-Favourite gazed tenderly at Blachevelle and said:--\r
-\r
-"Blachevelle, I adore you."\r
-\r
-This called forth a question from Blachevelle:--\r
-\r
-"What would you do, Favourite, if I were to cease to love you?"\r
-\r
-"I!" cried Favourite. "Ah! Do not say that even in jest! If you were\r
-to cease to love me, I would spring after you, I would scratch you,\r
-I should rend you, I would throw you into the water, I would have you\r
-arrested."\r
-\r
-Blachevelle smiled with the voluptuous self-conceit of a man who is\r
-tickled in his self-love. Favourite resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, I would scream to the police! Ah! I should not restrain myself,\r
-not at all! Rabble!"\r
-\r
-Blachevelle threw himself back in his chair, in an ecstasy, and closed\r
-both eyes proudly.\r
-\r
-Dahlia, as she ate, said in a low voice to Favourite, amid the uproar:--\r
-\r
-"So you really idolize him deeply, that Blachevelle of yours?"\r
-\r
-"I? I detest him," replied Favourite in the same tone, seizing her fork\r
-again. "He is avaricious. I love the little fellow opposite me in my\r
-house. He is very nice, that young man; do you know him? One can see\r
-that he is an actor by profession. I love actors. As soon as he comes\r
-in, his mother says to him: 'Ah! mon Dieu! my peace of mind is gone.\r
-There he goes with his shouting. But, my dear, you are splitting my\r
-head!' So he goes up to rat-ridden garrets, to black holes, as high as\r
-he can mount, and there he sets to singing, declaiming, how do I know\r
-what? so that he can be heard down stairs! He earns twenty sous a day at\r
-an attorney's by penning quibbles. He is the son of a former precentor\r
-of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Ah! he is very nice. He idolizes me so,\r
-that one day when he saw me making batter for some pancakes, he said to\r
-me: 'Mamselle, make your gloves into fritters, and I will eat them.' It\r
-is only artists who can say such things as that. Ah! he is very nice.\r
-I am in a fair way to go out of my head over that little fellow. Never\r
-mind; I tell Blachevelle that I adore him--how I lie! Hey! How I do\r
-lie!"\r
-\r
-Favourite paused, and then went on:--\r
-\r
-"I am sad, you see, Dahlia. It has done nothing but rain all summer; the\r
-wind irritates me; the wind does not abate. Blachevelle is very stingy;\r
-there are hardly any green peas in the market; one does not know what to\r
-eat. I have the spleen, as the English say, butter is so dear! and then\r
-you see it is horrible, here we are dining in a room with a bed in it,\r
-and that disgusts me with life."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE WISDOM OF THOLOMYES\r
-\r
-In the meantime, while some sang, the rest talked together tumultuously\r
-all at once; it was no longer anything but noise. Tholomyes intervened.\r
-\r
-"Let us not talk at random nor too fast," he exclaimed. "Let us reflect,\r
-if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in\r
-a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen. Let us\r
-mingle majesty with the feast. Let us eat with meditation; let us make\r
-haste slowly. Let us not hurry. Consider the springtime; if it makes\r
-haste, it is done for; that is to say, it gets frozen. Excess of zeal\r
-ruins peach-trees and apricot-trees. Excess of zeal kills the grace and\r
-the mirth of good dinners. No zeal, gentlemen! Grimod de la Reyniere\r
-agrees with Talleyrand."\r
-\r
-A hollow sound of rebellion rumbled through the group.\r
-\r
-"Leave us in peace, Tholomyes," said Blachevelle.\r
-\r
-"Down with the tyrant!" said Fameuil.\r
-\r
-"Bombarda, Bombance, and Bambochel!" cried Listolier.\r
-\r
-"Sunday exists," resumed Fameuil.\r
-\r
-"We are sober," added Listolier.\r
-\r
-"Tholomyes," remarked Blachevelle, "contemplate my calmness [mon\r
-calme]."\r
-\r
-"You are the Marquis of that," retorted Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-This mediocre play upon words produced the effect of a stone in a pool.\r
-The Marquis de Montcalm was at that time a celebrated royalist. All the\r
-frogs held their peace.\r
-\r
-"Friends," cried Tholomyes, with the accent of a man who had recovered\r
-his empire, "Come to yourselves. This pun which has fallen from the\r
-skies must not be received with too much stupor. Everything which falls\r
-in that way is not necessarily worthy of enthusiasm and respect. The pun\r
-is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where;\r
-and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure\r
-depths. A whitish speck flattened against the rock does not prevent the\r
-condor from soaring aloft. Far be it from me to insult the pun! I honor\r
-it in proportion to its merits; nothing more. All the most august, the\r
-most sublime, the most charming of humanity, and perhaps outside of\r
-humanity, have made puns. Jesus Christ made a pun on St. Peter, Moses on\r
-Isaac, AEschylus on Polynices, Cleopatra on Octavius. And observe that\r
-Cleopatra's pun preceded the battle of Actium, and that had it not been\r
-for it, no one would have remembered the city of Toryne, a Greek name\r
-which signifies a ladle. That once conceded, I return to my exhortation.\r
-I repeat, brothers, I repeat, no zeal, no hubbub, no excess; even in\r
-witticisms, gayety, jollities, or plays on words. Listen to me. I have\r
-the prudence of Amphiaraus and the baldness of Caesar. There must be a\r
-limit, even to rebuses. Est modus in rebus.\r
-\r
-"There must be a limit, even to dinners. You are fond of apple\r
-turnovers, ladies; do not indulge in them to excess. Even in the matter\r
-of turnovers, good sense and art are requisite. Gluttony chastises the\r
-glutton, Gula punit Gulax. Indigestion is charged by the good God with\r
-preaching morality to stomachs. And remember this: each one of our\r
-passions, even love, has a stomach which must not be filled too full. In\r
-all things the word finis must be written in good season; self-control\r
-must be exercised when the matter becomes urgent; the bolt must be drawn\r
-on appetite; one must set one's own fantasy to the violin, and carry\r
-one's self to the post. The sage is the man who knows how, at a given\r
-moment, to effect his own arrest. Have some confidence in me, for I\r
-have succeeded to some extent in my study of the law, according to\r
-the verdict of my examinations, for I know the difference between the\r
-question put and the question pending, for I have sustained a thesis in\r
-Latin upon the manner in which torture was administered at Rome at the\r
-epoch when Munatius Demens was quaestor of the Parricide; because I\r
-am going to be a doctor, apparently it does not follow that it is\r
-absolutely necessary that I should be an imbecile. I recommend you to\r
-moderation in your desires. It is true that my name is Felix Tholomyes;\r
-I speak well. Happy is he who, when the hour strikes, takes a heroic\r
-resolve, and abdicates like Sylla or Origenes."\r
-\r
-Favourite listened with profound attention.\r
-\r
-"Felix," said she, "what a pretty word! I love that name. It is Latin;\r
-it means prosper."\r
-\r
-Tholomyes went on:--\r
-\r
-"Quirites, gentlemen, caballeros, my friends. Do you wish never to feel\r
-the prick, to do without the nuptial bed, and to brave love? Nothing\r
-more simple. Here is the receipt: lemonade, excessive exercise, hard\r
-labor; work yourself to death, drag blocks, sleep not, hold vigil,\r
-gorge yourself with nitrous beverages, and potions of nymphaeas; drink\r
-emulsions of poppies and agnus castus; season this with a strict diet,\r
-starve yourself, and add thereto cold baths, girdles of herbs, the\r
-application of a plate of lead, lotions made with the subacetate of\r
-lead, and fomentations of oxycrat."\r
-\r
-"I prefer a woman," said Listolier.\r
-\r
-"Woman," resumed Tholomyes; "distrust her. Woe to him who yields himself\r
-to the unstable heart of woman! Woman is perfidious and disingenuous.\r
-She detests the serpent from professional jealousy. The serpent is the\r
-shop over the way."\r
-\r
-"Tholomyes!" cried Blachevelle, "you are drunk!"\r
-\r
-"Pardieu," said Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-"Then be gay," resumed Blachevelle.\r
-\r
-"I agree to that," responded Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-And, refilling his glass, he rose.\r
-\r
-"Glory to wine! Nunc te, Bacche, canam! Pardon me ladies; that is\r
-Spanish. And the proof of it, senoras, is this: like people, like cask.\r
-The arrobe of Castile contains sixteen litres; the cantaro of Alicante,\r
-twelve; the almude of the Canaries, twenty-five; the cuartin of the\r
-Balearic Isles, twenty-six; the boot of Tzar Peter, thirty. Long\r
-live that Tzar who was great, and long live his boot, which was still\r
-greater! Ladies, take the advice of a friend; make a mistake in your\r
-neighbor if you see fit. The property of love is to err. A love\r
-affair is not made to crouch down and brutalize itself like an English\r
-serving-maid who has callouses on her knees from scrubbing. It is not\r
-made for that; it errs gayly, our gentle love. It has been said, error\r
-is human; I say, error is love. Ladies, I idolize you all. O Zephine, O\r
-Josephine, face more than irregular, you would be charming were you not\r
-all askew. You have the air of a pretty face upon which some one has\r
-sat down by mistake. As for Favourite, O nymphs and muses! one day\r
-when Blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the Rue Guerin-Boisseau,\r
-he espied a beautiful girl with white stockings well drawn up, which\r
-displayed her legs. This prologue pleased him, and Blachevelle fell\r
-in love. The one he loved was Favourite. O Favourite, thou hast Ionian\r
-lips. There was a Greek painter named Euphorion, who was surnamed the\r
-painter of the lips. That Greek alone would have been worthy to paint\r
-thy mouth. Listen! before thee, there was never a creature worthy of the\r
-name. Thou wert made to receive the apple like Venus, or to eat it like\r
-Eve; beauty begins with thee. I have just referred to Eve; it is thou\r
-who hast created her. Thou deservest the letters-patent of the beautiful\r
-woman. O Favourite, I cease to address you as 'thou,' because I pass\r
-from poetry to prose. You were speaking of my name a little while ago.\r
-That touched me; but let us, whoever we may be, distrust names. They may\r
-delude us. I am called Felix, and I am not happy. Words are liars. Let\r
-us not blindly accept the indications which they afford us. It would be\r
-a mistake to write to Liege [2] for corks, and to Pau for gloves. Miss\r
-Dahlia, were I in your place, I would call myself Rosa. A flower should\r
-smell sweet, and woman should have wit. I say nothing of Fantine; she\r
-is a dreamer, a musing, thoughtful, pensive person; she is a phantom\r
-possessed of the form of a nymph and the modesty of a nun, who has\r
-strayed into the life of a grisette, but who takes refuge in illusions,\r
-and who sings and prays and gazes into the azure without very well\r
-knowing what she sees or what she is doing, and who, with her eyes fixed\r
-on heaven, wanders in a garden where there are more birds than are in\r
-existence. O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyes, I am all illusion; but\r
-she does not even hear me, that blond maid of Chimeras! as for the rest,\r
-everything about her is freshness, suavity, youth, sweet morning light.\r
-O Fantine, maid worthy of being called Marguerite or Pearl, you are a\r
-woman from the beauteous Orient. Ladies, a second piece of advice: do\r
-not marry; marriage is a graft; it takes well or ill; avoid that risk.\r
-But bah! what am I saying? I am wasting my words. Girls are incurable\r
-on the subject of marriage, and all that we wise men can say will not\r
-prevent the waistcoat-makers and the shoe-stitchers from dreaming\r
-of husbands studded with diamonds. Well, so be it; but, my beauties,\r
-remember this, you eat too much sugar. You have but one fault, O woman,\r
-and that is nibbling sugar. O nibbling sex, your pretty little white\r
-teeth adore sugar. Now, heed me well, sugar is a salt. All salts are\r
-withering. Sugar is the most desiccating of all salts; it sucks the\r
-liquids of the blood through the veins; hence the coagulation, and then\r
-the solidification of the blood; hence tubercles in the lungs, hence\r
-death. That is why diabetes borders on consumption. Then, do not crunch\r
-sugar, and you will live. I turn to the men: gentlemen, make conquest,\r
-rob each other of your well-beloved without remorse. Chassez across.\r
-In love there are no friends. Everywhere where there is a pretty woman\r
-hostility is open. No quarter, war to the death! a pretty woman is a\r
-casus belli; a pretty woman is flagrant misdemeanor. All the invasions\r
-of history have been determined by petticoats. Woman is man's right.\r
-Romulus carried off the Sabines; William carried off the Saxon women;\r
-Caesar carried off the Roman women. The man who is not loved soars like\r
-a vulture over the mistresses of other men; and for my own part, to all\r
-those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation\r
-of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: "Soldiers, you are in need of\r
-everything; the enemy has it."\r
-\r
-Tholomyes paused.\r
-\r
-"Take breath, Tholomyes," said Blachevelle.\r
-\r
-At the same moment Blachevelle, supported by Listolier and Fameuil,\r
-struck up to a plaintive air, one of those studio songs composed of\r
-the first words which come to hand, rhymed richly and not at all, as\r
-destitute of sense as the gesture of the tree and the sound of the wind,\r
-which have their birth in the vapor of pipes, and are dissipated and\r
-take their flight with them. This is the couplet by which the group\r
-replied to Tholomyes' harangue:--\r
-\r
-\r
- "The father turkey-cocks so grave\r
- Some money to an agent gave,\r
- That master good Clermont-Tonnerre\r
- Might be made pope on Saint Johns' day fair.\r
- But this good Clermont could not be\r
- Made pope, because no priest was he;\r
- And then their agent, whose wrath burned,\r
- With all their money back returned."\r
-\r
-\r
-This was not calculated to calm Tholomyes' improvisation; he emptied his\r
-glass, filled, refilled it, and began again:--\r
-\r
-"Down with wisdom! Forget all that I have said. Let us be neither prudes\r
-nor prudent men nor prudhommes. I propose a toast to mirth; be merry.\r
-Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and\r
-the digest. Let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy in\r
-the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy.\r
-The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale\r
-is a gratuitous Elleviou. Summer, I salute thee! O Luxembourg! O\r
-Georgics of the Rue Madame, and of the Allee de l'Observatoire! O\r
-pensive infantry soldiers! O all those charming nurses who, while they\r
-guard the children, amuse themselves! The pampas of America would please\r
-me if I had not the arcades of the Odeon. My soul flits away into the\r
-virgin forests and to the savannas. All is beautiful. The flies buzz in\r
-the sun. The sun has sneezed out the humming bird. Embrace me, Fantine!"\r
-\r
-He made a mistake and embraced Favourite.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE DEATH OF A HORSE\r
-\r
-\r
-"The dinners are better at Edon's than at Bombarda's," exclaimed\r
-Zephine.\r
-\r
-"I prefer Bombarda to Edon," declared Blachevelle. "There is more\r
-luxury. It is more Asiatic. Look at the room downstairs; there are\r
-mirrors [glaces] on the walls."\r
-\r
-"I prefer them [glaces, ices] on my plate," said Favourite.\r
-\r
-Blachevelle persisted:--\r
-\r
-"Look at the knives. The handles are of silver at Bombarda's and of bone\r
-at Edon's. Now, silver is more valuable than bone."\r
-\r
-"Except for those who have a silver chin," observed Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-He was looking at the dome of the Invalides, which was visible from\r
-Bombarda's windows.\r
-\r
-A pause ensued.\r
-\r
-"Tholomyes," exclaimed Fameuil, "Listolier and I were having a\r
-discussion just now."\r
-\r
-"A discussion is a good thing," replied Tholomyes; "a quarrel is\r
-better."\r
-\r
-"We were disputing about philosophy."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"Which do you prefer, Descartes or Spinoza?"\r
-\r
-"Desaugiers," said Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-This decree pronounced, he took a drink, and went on:--\r
-\r
-"I consent to live. All is not at an end on earth since we can still\r
-talk nonsense. For that I return thanks to the immortal gods. We lie.\r
-One lies, but one laughs. One affirms, but one doubts. The unexpected\r
-bursts forth from the syllogism. That is fine. There are still human\r
-beings here below who know how to open and close the surprise box of the\r
-paradox merrily. This, ladies, which you are drinking with so tranquil\r
-an air is Madeira wine, you must know, from the vineyard of Coural das\r
-Freiras, which is three hundred and seventeen fathoms above the level of\r
-the sea. Attention while you drink! three hundred and seventeen fathoms!\r
-and Monsieur Bombarda, the magnificent eating-house keeper, gives you\r
-those three hundred and seventeen fathoms for four francs and fifty\r
-centimes."\r
-\r
-Again Fameuil interrupted him:--\r
-\r
-"Tholomyes, your opinions fix the law. Who is your favorite author?"\r
-\r
-"Ber--"\r
-\r
-"Quin?"\r
-\r
-"No; Choux."\r
-\r
-And Tholomyes continued:--\r
-\r
-"Honor to Bombarda! He would equal Munophis of Elephanta if he could but\r
-get me an Indian dancing-girl, and Thygelion of Chaeronea if he could\r
-bring me a Greek courtesan; for, oh, ladies! there were Bombardas in\r
-Greece and in Egypt. Apuleius tells us of them. Alas! always the same,\r
-and nothing new; nothing more unpublished by the creator in creation!\r
-Nil sub sole novum, says Solomon; amor omnibus idem, says Virgil; and\r
-Carabine mounts with Carabin into the bark at Saint-Cloud, as Aspasia\r
-embarked with Pericles upon the fleet at Samos. One last word. Do you\r
-know what Aspasia was, ladies? Although she lived at an epoch when women\r
-had, as yet, no soul, she was a soul; a soul of a rosy and purple\r
-hue, more ardent hued than fire, fresher than the dawn. Aspasia was\r
-a creature in whom two extremes of womanhood met; she was the goddess\r
-prostitute; Socrates plus Manon Lescaut. Aspasia was created in case a\r
-mistress should be needed for Prometheus."\r
-\r
-Tholomyes, once started, would have found some difficulty in stopping,\r
-had not a horse fallen down upon the quay just at that moment. The\r
-shock caused the cart and the orator to come to a dead halt. It was a\r
-Beauceron mare, old and thin, and one fit for the knacker, which was\r
-dragging a very heavy cart. On arriving in front of Bombarda's, the\r
-worn-out, exhausted beast had refused to proceed any further. This\r
-incident attracted a crowd. Hardly had the cursing and indignant carter\r
-had time to utter with proper energy the sacramental word, Matin (the\r
-jade), backed up with a pitiless cut of the whip, when the jade fell,\r
-never to rise again. On hearing the hubbub made by the passersby,\r
-Tholomyes' merry auditors turned their heads, and Tholomyes took\r
-advantage of the opportunity to bring his allocution to a close with\r
-this melancholy strophe:--\r
-\r
- "Elle etait de ce monde ou coucous et carrosses [3]\r
- Ont le meme destin;\r
- Et, rosse, elle a vecu ce que vivant les rosses,\r
- L'espace d'un matin!"\r
-\r
-\r
-"Poor horse!" sighed Fantine.\r
-\r
-And Dahlia exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"There is Fantine on the point of crying over horses. How can one be\r
-such a pitiful fool as that!"\r
-\r
-At that moment Favourite, folding her arms and throwing her head back,\r
-looked resolutely at Tholomyes and said:--\r
-\r
-"Come, now! the surprise?"\r
-\r
-"Exactly. The moment has arrived," replied Tholomyes. "Gentlemen,\r
-the hour for giving these ladies a surprise has struck. Wait for us a\r
-moment, ladies."\r
-\r
-"It begins with a kiss," said Blachevelle.\r
-\r
-"On the brow," added Tholomyes.\r
-\r
-Each gravely bestowed a kiss on his mistress's brow; then all four filed\r
-out through the door, with their fingers on their lips.\r
-\r
-Favourite clapped her hands on their departure.\r
-\r
-"It is beginning to be amusing already," said she.\r
-\r
-"Don't be too long," murmured Fantine; "we are waiting for you."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--A MERRY END TO MIRTH\r
-\r
-When the young girls were left alone, they leaned two by two on the\r
-window-sills, chatting, craning out their heads, and talking from one\r
-window to the other.\r
-\r
-They saw the young men emerge from the Cafe Bombarda arm in arm. The\r
-latter turned round, made signs to them, smiled, and disappeared in\r
-that dusty Sunday throng which makes a weekly invasion into the\r
-Champs-Elysees.\r
-\r
-"Don't be long!" cried Fantine.\r
-\r
-"What are they going to bring us?" said Zephine.\r
-\r
-"It will certainly be something pretty," said Dahlia.\r
-\r
-"For my part," said Favourite, "I want it to be of gold."\r
-\r
-Their attention was soon distracted by the movements on the shore of the\r
-lake, which they could see through the branches of the large trees, and\r
-which diverted them greatly.\r
-\r
-It was the hour for the departure of the mail-coaches and diligences.\r
-Nearly all the stage-coaches for the south and west passed through the\r
-Champs-Elysees. The majority followed the quay and went through the\r
-Passy Barrier. From moment to moment, some huge vehicle, painted yellow\r
-and black, heavily loaded, noisily harnessed, rendered shapeless\r
-by trunks, tarpaulins, and valises, full of heads which immediately\r
-disappeared, rushed through the crowd with all the sparks of a forge,\r
-with dust for smoke, and an air of fury, grinding the pavements,\r
-changing all the paving-stones into steels. This uproar delighted the\r
-young girls. Favourite exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"What a row! One would say that it was a pile of chains flying away."\r
-\r
-It chanced that one of these vehicles, which they could only see with\r
-difficulty through the thick elms, halted for a moment, then set out\r
-again at a gallop. This surprised Fantine.\r
-\r
-"That's odd!" said she. "I thought the diligence never stopped."\r
-\r
-Favourite shrugged her shoulders.\r
-\r
-"This Fantine is surprising. I am coming to take a look at her out of\r
-curiosity. She is dazzled by the simplest things. Suppose a case: I am\r
-a traveller; I say to the diligence, 'I will go on in advance; you shall\r
-pick me up on the quay as you pass.' The diligence passes, sees me,\r
-halts, and takes me. That is done every day. You do not know life, my\r
-dear."\r
-\r
-In this manner a certain time elapsed. All at once Favourite made a\r
-movement, like a person who is just waking up.\r
-\r
-"Well," said she, "and the surprise?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, by the way," joined in Dahlia, "the famous surprise?"\r
-\r
-"They are a very long time about it!" said Fantine.\r
-\r
-As Fantine concluded this sigh, the waiter who had served them at dinner\r
-entered. He held in his hand something which resembled a letter.\r
-\r
-"What is that?" demanded Favourite.\r
-\r
-The waiter replied:--\r
-\r
-"It is a paper that those gentlemen left for these ladies."\r
-\r
-"Why did you not bring it at once?"\r
-\r
-"Because," said the waiter, "the gentlemen ordered me not to deliver it\r
-to the ladies for an hour."\r
-\r
-Favourite snatched the paper from the waiter's hand. It was, in fact, a\r
-letter.\r
-\r
-"Stop!" said she; "there is no address; but this is what is written on\r
-it--"\r
-\r
- "THIS IS THE SURPRISE."\r
-\r
-She tore the letter open hastily, opened it, and read [she knew how to\r
-read]:--\r
-\r
-"OUR BELOVED:--\r
-\r
-"You must know that we have parents. Parents--you do not know much about\r
-such things. They are called fathers and mothers by the civil code,\r
-which is puerile and honest. Now, these parents groan, these old folks\r
-implore us, these good men and these good women call us prodigal sons;\r
-they desire our return, and offer to kill calves for us. Being virtuous,\r
-we obey them. At the hour when you read this, five fiery horses will\r
-be bearing us to our papas and mammas. We are pulling up our stakes, as\r
-Bossuet says. We are going; we are gone. We flee in the arms of Lafitte\r
-and on the wings of Caillard. The Toulouse diligence tears us from\r
-the abyss, and the abyss is you, O our little beauties! We return to\r
-society, to duty, to respectability, at full trot, at the rate of three\r
-leagues an hour. It is necessary for the good of the country that we\r
-should be, like the rest of the world, prefects, fathers of families,\r
-rural police, and councillors of state. Venerate us. We are sacrificing\r
-ourselves. Mourn for us in haste, and replace us with speed. If this\r
-letter lacerates you, do the same by it. Adieu.\r
-\r
-"For the space of nearly two years we have made you happy. We bear you\r
-no grudge for that. "Signed:\r
- BLACHEVELLE.\r
- FAMUEIL.\r
- LISTOLIER.\r
- FELIX THOLOMYES.\r
-\r
-"Postscriptum. The dinner is paid for."\r
-\r
-\r
-The four young women looked at each other.\r
-\r
-Favourite was the first to break the silence.\r
-\r
-"Well!" she exclaimed, "it's a very pretty farce, all the same."\r
-\r
-"It is very droll," said Zephine.\r
-\r
-"That must have been Blachevelle's idea," resumed Favourite. "It makes\r
-me in love with him. No sooner is he gone than he is loved. This is an\r
-adventure, indeed."\r
-\r
-"No," said Dahlia; "it was one of Tholomyes' ideas. That is evident.\r
-\r
-"In that case," retorted Favourite, "death to Blachevelle, and long live\r
-Tholomyes!"\r
-\r
-"Long live Tholomyes!" exclaimed Dahlia and Zephine.\r
-\r
-And they burst out laughing.\r
-\r
-Fantine laughed with the rest.\r
-\r
-An hour later, when she had returned to her room, she wept. It was\r
-her first love affair, as we have said; she had given herself to this\r
-Tholomyes as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER MOTHER\r
-\r
-There was, at Montfermeil, near Paris, during the first quarter of this\r
-century, a sort of cook-shop which no longer exists. This cook-shop was\r
-kept by some people named Thenardier, husband and wife. It was situated\r
-in Boulanger Lane. Over the door there was a board nailed flat against\r
-the wall. Upon this board was painted something which resembled a\r
-man carrying another man on his back, the latter wearing the big gilt\r
-epaulettes of a general, with large silver stars; red spots represented\r
-blood; the rest of the picture consisted of smoke, and probably\r
-represented a battle. Below ran this inscription: AT THE SIGN OF\r
-SERGEANT OF WATERLOO (Au Sargent de Waterloo).\r
-\r
-Nothing is more common than a cart or a truck at the door of a hostelry.\r
-Nevertheless, the vehicle, or, to speak more accurately, the fragment of\r
-a vehicle, which encumbered the street in front of the cook-shop of the\r
-Sergeant of Waterloo, one evening in the spring of 1818, would certainly\r
-have attracted, by its mass, the attention of any painter who had passed\r
-that way.\r
-\r
-It was the fore-carriage of one of those trucks which are used in wooded\r
-tracts of country, and which serve to transport thick planks and the\r
-trunks of trees. This fore-carriage was composed of a massive iron\r
-axle-tree with a pivot, into which was fitted a heavy shaft, and\r
-which was supported by two huge wheels. The whole thing was compact,\r
-overwhelming, and misshapen. It seemed like the gun-carriage of an\r
-enormous cannon. The ruts of the road had bestowed on the wheels, the\r
-fellies, the hub, the axle, and the shaft, a layer of mud, a hideous\r
-yellowish daubing hue, tolerably like that with which people are fond\r
-of ornamenting cathedrals. The wood was disappearing under mud, and the\r
-iron beneath rust. Under the axle-tree hung, like drapery, a huge chain,\r
-worthy of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the\r
-beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and\r
-mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the\r
-galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have\r
-been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with\r
-it, and Shakespeare, Caliban.\r
-\r
-Why was that fore-carriage of a truck in that place in the street? In\r
-the first place, to encumber the street; next, in order that it might\r
-finish the process of rusting. There is a throng of institutions in the\r
-old social order, which one comes across in this fashion as one walks\r
-about outdoors, and which have no other reasons for existence than the\r
-above.\r
-\r
-The centre of the chain swung very near the ground in the middle, and in\r
-the loop, as in the rope of a swing, there were seated and grouped, on\r
-that particular evening, in exquisite interlacement, two little girls;\r
-one about two years and a half old, the other, eighteen months; the\r
-younger in the arms of the other. A handkerchief, cleverly knotted about\r
-them, prevented their falling out. A mother had caught sight of that\r
-frightful chain, and had said, "Come! there's a plaything for my\r
-children."\r
-\r
-The two children, who were dressed prettily and with some elegance, were\r
-radiant with pleasure; one would have said that they were two roses amid\r
-old iron; their eyes were a triumph; their fresh cheeks were full of\r
-laughter. One had chestnut hair; the other, brown. Their innocent faces\r
-were two delighted surprises; a blossoming shrub which grew near wafted\r
-to the passers-by perfumes which seemed to emanate from them; the child\r
-of eighteen months displayed her pretty little bare stomach with the\r
-chaste indecency of childhood. Above and around these two delicate\r
-heads, all made of happiness and steeped in light, the gigantic\r
-fore-carriage, black with rust, almost terrible, all entangled in curves\r
-and wild angles, rose in a vault, like the entrance of a cavern. A few\r
-paces apart, crouching down upon the threshold of the hostelry, the\r
-mother, not a very prepossessing woman, by the way, though touching\r
-at that moment, was swinging the two children by means of a long cord,\r
-watching them carefully, for fear of accidents, with that animal and\r
-celestial expression which is peculiar to maternity. At every backward\r
-and forward swing the hideous links emitted a strident sound, which\r
-resembled a cry of rage; the little girls were in ecstasies; the setting\r
-sun mingled in this joy, and nothing could be more charming than this\r
-caprice of chance which had made of a chain of Titans the swing of\r
-cherubim.\r
-\r
-As she rocked her little ones, the mother hummed in a discordant voice a\r
-romance then celebrated:--\r
-\r
-\r
- "It must be, said a warrior."\r
-\r
-\r
-Her song, and the contemplation of her daughters, prevented her hearing\r
-and seeing what was going on in the street.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, some one had approached her, as she was beginning the\r
-first couplet of the romance, and suddenly she heard a voice saying very\r
-near her ear:--\r
-\r
-"You have two beautiful children there, Madame."\r
-\r
-\r
- "To the fair and tender Imogene--"\r
-\r
-\r
-replied the mother, continuing her romance; then she turned her head.\r
-\r
-A woman stood before her, a few paces distant. This woman also had a\r
-child, which she carried in her arms.\r
-\r
-She was carrying, in addition, a large carpet-bag, which seemed very\r
-heavy.\r
-\r
-This woman's child was one of the most divine creatures that it is\r
-possible to behold. It was a girl, two or three years of age. She could\r
-have entered into competition with the two other little ones, so far as\r
-the coquetry of her dress was concerned; she wore a cap of fine linen,\r
-ribbons on her bodice, and Valenciennes lace on her cap. The folds of\r
-her skirt were raised so as to permit a view of her white, firm, and\r
-dimpled leg. She was admirably rosy and healthy. The little beauty\r
-inspired a desire to take a bite from the apples of her cheeks. Of her\r
-eyes nothing could be known, except that they must be very large, and\r
-that they had magnificent lashes. She was asleep.\r
-\r
-She slept with that slumber of absolute confidence peculiar to her\r
-age. The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep\r
-profoundly.\r
-\r
-As for the mother, her appearance was sad and poverty-stricken. She\r
-was dressed like a working-woman who is inclined to turn into a peasant\r
-again. She was young. Was she handsome? Perhaps; but in that attire it\r
-was not apparent. Her hair, a golden lock of which had escaped, seemed\r
-very thick, but was severely concealed beneath an ugly, tight, close,\r
-nun-like cap, tied under the chin. A smile displays beautiful teeth when\r
-one has them; but she did not smile. Her eyes did not seem to have been\r
-dry for a very long time. She was pale; she had a very weary and rather\r
-sickly appearance. She gazed upon her daughter asleep in her arms with\r
-the air peculiar to a mother who has nursed her own child. A large blue\r
-handkerchief, such as the Invalides use, was folded into a fichu, and\r
-concealed her figure clumsily. Her hands were sunburnt and all dotted\r
-with freckles, her forefinger was hardened and lacerated with the\r
-needle; she wore a cloak of coarse brown woollen stuff, a linen gown,\r
-and coarse shoes. It was Fantine.\r
-\r
-It was Fantine, but difficult to recognize. Nevertheless, on\r
-scrutinizing her attentively, it was evident that she still retained\r
-her beauty. A melancholy fold, which resembled the beginning of irony,\r
-wrinkled her right cheek. As for her toilette, that aerial toilette of\r
-muslin and ribbons, which seemed made of mirth, of folly, and of music,\r
-full of bells, and perfumed with lilacs had vanished like that beautiful\r
-and dazzling hoar-frost which is mistaken for diamonds in the sunlight;\r
-it melts and leaves the branch quite black.\r
-\r
-Ten months had elapsed since the "pretty farce."\r
-\r
-What had taken place during those ten months? It can be divined.\r
-\r
-After abandonment, straightened circumstances. Fantine had immediately\r
-lost sight of Favourite, Zephine and Dahlia; the bond once broken on the\r
-side of the men, it was loosed between the women; they would have been\r
-greatly astonished had any one told them a fortnight later, that they\r
-had been friends; there no longer existed any reason for such a thing.\r
-Fantine had remained alone. The father of her child gone,--alas! such\r
-ruptures are irrevocable,--she found herself absolutely isolated, minus\r
-the habit of work and plus the taste for pleasure. Drawn away by her\r
-liaison with Tholomyes to disdain the pretty trade which she knew, she\r
-had neglected to keep her market open; it was now closed to her. She had\r
-no resource. Fantine barely knew how to read, and did not know how to\r
-write; in her childhood she had only been taught to sign her name;\r
-she had a public letter-writer indite an epistle to Tholomyes, then a\r
-second, then a third. Tholomyes replied to none of them. Fantine heard\r
-the gossips say, as they looked at her child: "Who takes those children\r
-seriously! One only shrugs one's shoulders over such children!" Then she\r
-thought of Tholomyes, who had shrugged his shoulders over his child,\r
-and who did not take that innocent being seriously; and her heart grew\r
-gloomy toward that man. But what was she to do? She no longer knew to\r
-whom to apply. She had committed a fault, but the foundation of her\r
-nature, as will be remembered, was modesty and virtue. She was vaguely\r
-conscious that she was on the verge of falling into distress, and of\r
-gliding into a worse state. Courage was necessary; she possessed it, and\r
-held herself firm. The idea of returning to her native town of M. sur\r
-M. occurred to her. There, some one might possibly know her and give her\r
-work; yes, but it would be necessary to conceal her fault. In a confused\r
-way she perceived the necessity of a separation which would be more\r
-painful than the first one. Her heart contracted, but she took her\r
-resolution. Fantine, as we shall see, had the fierce bravery of life.\r
-She had already valiantly renounced finery, had dressed herself in\r
-linen, and had put all her silks, all her ornaments, all her ribbons,\r
-and all her laces on her daughter, the only vanity which was left to\r
-her, and a holy one it was. She sold all that she had, which produced\r
-for her two hundred francs; her little debts paid, she had only about\r
-eighty francs left. At the age of twenty-two, on a beautiful spring\r
-morning, she quitted Paris, bearing her child on her back. Any one who\r
-had seen these two pass would have had pity on them. This woman had,\r
-in all the world, nothing but her child, and the child had, in all the\r
-world, no one but this woman. Fantine had nursed her child, and this had\r
-tired her chest, and she coughed a little.\r
-\r
-We shall have no further occasion to speak of M. Felix Tholomyes. Let us\r
-confine ourselves to saying, that, twenty years later, under King Louis\r
-Philippe, he was a great provincial lawyer, wealthy and influential, a\r
-wise elector, and a very severe juryman; he was still a man of pleasure.\r
-\r
-Towards the middle of the day, after having, from time to time, for the\r
-sake of resting herself, travelled, for three or four sous a league, in\r
-what was then known as the Petites Voitures des Environs de Paris, the\r
-"little suburban coach service," Fantine found herself at Montfermeil,\r
-in the alley Boulanger.\r
-\r
-As she passed the Thenardier hostelry, the two little girls, blissful\r
-in the monster swing, had dazzled her in a manner, and she had halted in\r
-front of that vision of joy.\r
-\r
-Charms exist. These two little girls were a charm to this mother.\r
-\r
-She gazed at them in much emotion. The presence of angels is an\r
-announcement of Paradise. She thought that, above this inn, she beheld\r
-the mysterious HERE of Providence. These two little creatures were\r
-evidently happy. She gazed at them, she admired them, in such emotion\r
-that at the moment when their mother was recovering her breath between\r
-two couplets of her song, she could not refrain from addressing to her\r
-the remark which we have just read:--\r
-\r
-"You have two pretty children, Madame."\r
-\r
-The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their\r
-young.\r
-\r
-The mother raised her head and thanked her, and bade the wayfarer\r
-sit down on the bench at the door, she herself being seated on the\r
-threshold. The two women began to chat.\r
-\r
-"My name is Madame Thenardier," said the mother of the two little girls.\r
-"We keep this inn."\r
-\r
-Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between\r
-her teeth:--\r
-\r
- "It must be so; I am a knight,\r
- And I am off to Palestine."\r
-\r
-\r
-This Madame Thenardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and\r
-angular--the type of the soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and\r
-what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal\r
-of romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances\r
-produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop\r
-woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching\r
-woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a\r
-perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the\r
-traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what\r
-caused what we have to relate to vanish. A person who is seated instead\r
-of standing erect--destinies hang upon such a thing as that.\r
-\r
-The traveller told her story, with slight modifications.\r
-\r
-That she was a working-woman; that her husband was dead; that her\r
-work in Paris had failed her, and that she was on her way to seek it\r
-elsewhere, in her own native parts; that she had left Paris that morning\r
-on foot; that, as she was carrying her child, and felt fatigued, she had\r
-got into the Villemomble coach when she met it; that from Villemomble\r
-she had come to Montfermeil on foot; that the little one had walked a\r
-little, but not much, because she was so young, and that she had been\r
-obliged to take her up, and the jewel had fallen asleep.\r
-\r
-At this word she bestowed on her daughter a passionate kiss, which woke\r
-her. The child opened her eyes, great blue eyes like her mother's, and\r
-looked at--what? Nothing; with that serious and sometimes severe air of\r
-little children, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in\r
-the presence of our twilight of virtue. One would say that they feel\r
-themselves to be angels, and that they know us to be men. Then the child\r
-began to laugh; and although the mother held fast to her, she slipped to\r
-the ground with the unconquerable energy of a little being which wished\r
-to run. All at once she caught sight of the two others in the swing,\r
-stopped short, and put out her tongue, in sign of admiration.\r
-\r
-Mother Thenardier released her daughters, made them descend from the\r
-swing, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Now amuse yourselves, all three of you."\r
-\r
-Children become acquainted quickly at that age, and at the expiration\r
-of a minute the little Thenardiers were playing with the new-comer at\r
-making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure.\r
-\r
-The new-comer was very gay; the goodness of the mother is written in the\r
-gayety of the child; she had seized a scrap of wood which served her\r
-for a shovel, and energetically dug a cavity big enough for a fly. The\r
-grave-digger's business becomes a subject for laughter when performed by\r
-a child.\r
-\r
-The two women pursued their chat.\r
-\r
-"What is your little one's name?"\r
-\r
-"Cosette."\r
-\r
-For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The child's name was Euphrasie. But out\r
-of Euphrasie the mother had made Cosette by that sweet and graceful\r
-instinct of mothers and of the populace which changes Josepha into\r
-Pepita, and Francoise into Sillette. It is a sort of derivative which\r
-disarranges and disconcerts the whole science of etymologists. We have\r
-known a grandmother who succeeded in turning Theodore into Gnon.\r
-\r
-"How old is she?"\r
-\r
-"She is going on three."\r
-\r
-"That is the age of my eldest."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the three little girls were grouped in an attitude of\r
-profound anxiety and blissfulness; an event had happened; a big worm\r
-had emerged from the ground, and they were afraid; and they were in\r
-ecstasies over it.\r
-\r
-Their radiant brows touched each other; one would have said that there\r
-were three heads in one aureole.\r
-\r
-"How easily children get acquainted at once!" exclaimed Mother\r
-Thenardier; "one would swear that they were three sisters!"\r
-\r
-This remark was probably the spark which the other mother had been\r
-waiting for. She seized the Thenardier's hand, looked at her fixedly,\r
-and said:--\r
-\r
-"Will you keep my child for me?"\r
-\r
-The Thenardier made one of those movements of surprise which signify\r
-neither assent nor refusal.\r
-\r
-Cosette's mother continued:--\r
-\r
-"You see, I cannot take my daughter to the country. My work will not\r
-permit it. With a child one can find no situation. People are ridiculous\r
-in the country. It was the good God who caused me to pass your inn. When\r
-I caught sight of your little ones, so pretty, so clean, and so happy,\r
-it overwhelmed me. I said: 'Here is a good mother. That is just the\r
-thing; that will make three sisters.' And then, it will not be long\r
-before I return. Will you keep my child for me?"\r
-\r
-"I must see about it," replied the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"I will give you six francs a month."\r
-\r
-Here a man's voice called from the depths of the cook-shop:--\r
-\r
-"Not for less than seven francs. And six months paid in advance."\r
-\r
-"Six times seven makes forty-two," said the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"I will give it," said the mother.\r
-\r
-"And fifteen francs in addition for preliminary expenses," added the\r
-man's voice.\r
-\r
-"Total, fifty-seven francs," said Madame Thenardier. And she hummed\r
-vaguely, with these figures:--\r
-\r
- "It must be, said a warrior."\r
-\r
-\r
-"I will pay it," said the mother. "I have eighty francs. I shall have\r
-enough left to reach the country, by travelling on foot. I shall\r
-earn money there, and as soon as I have a little I will return for my\r
-darling."\r
-\r
-The man's voice resumed:--\r
-\r
-"The little one has an outfit?"\r
-\r
-"That is my husband," said the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Of course she has an outfit, the poor treasure.--I understood perfectly\r
-that it was your husband.--And a beautiful outfit, too! a senseless\r
-outfit, everything by the dozen, and silk gowns like a lady. It is here,\r
-in my carpet-bag."\r
-\r
-"You must hand it over," struck in the man's voice again.\r
-\r
-"Of course I shall give it to you," said the mother. "It would be very\r
-queer if I were to leave my daughter quite naked!"\r
-\r
-The master's face appeared.\r
-\r
-"That's good," said he.\r
-\r
-The bargain was concluded. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave\r
-up her money and left her child, fastened her carpet-bag once more, now\r
-reduced in volume by the removal of the outfit, and light henceforth\r
-and set out on the following morning, intending to return soon. People\r
-arrange such departures tranquilly; but they are despairs!\r
-\r
-A neighbor of the Thenardiers met this mother as she was setting out,\r
-and came back with the remark:--\r
-\r
-"I have just seen a woman crying in the street so that it was enough to\r
-rend your heart."\r
-\r
-When Cosette's mother had taken her departure, the man said to the\r
-woman:--\r
-\r
-"That will serve to pay my note for one hundred and ten francs which\r
-falls due to-morrow; I lacked fifty francs. Do you know that I should\r
-have had a bailiff and a protest after me? You played the mouse-trap\r
-nicely with your young ones."\r
-\r
-"Without suspecting it," said the woman.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES\r
-\r
-The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat\r
-rejoices even over a lean mouse.\r
-\r
-Who were these Thenardiers?\r
-\r
-Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later\r
-on.\r
-\r
-These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people\r
-who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended\r
-in the scale, which is between the class called "middle" and the class\r
-denominated as "inferior," and which combines some of the defects of the\r
-second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing\r
-the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the\r
-bourgeois.\r
-\r
-They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm\r
-them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum\r
-of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were\r
-susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress\r
-which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like\r
-souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,\r
-retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to\r
-augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more\r
-and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and\r
-woman possessed such souls.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can\r
-only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are\r
-dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening\r
-in front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more\r
-answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow\r
-which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing them\r
-utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse of\r
-sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their future.\r
-\r
-This Thenardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier--a\r
-sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,\r
-and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We\r
-shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his\r
-hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it\r
-himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.\r
-\r
-It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after\r
-having been Clelie, was no longer anything but Lodoiska, still noble,\r
-but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle de\r
-Scuderi to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to\r
-Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses\r
-of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. Madame\r
-Thenardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. She\r
-lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This had\r
-given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive\r
-attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian\r
-lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the\r
-same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the\r
-perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said\r
-in his jargon--a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or\r
-fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged in\r
-a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magaera\r
-began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thenardier was nothing\r
-but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now,\r
-one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldest\r
-daughter was named Eponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing\r
-came near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effected\r
-by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely bore\r
-the name of Azelma.\r
-\r
-However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and\r
-superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which\r
-may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of\r
-this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social\r
-symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd's boy nowadays to bear the name\r
-of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte--if there are\r
-still any vicomtes--to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This\r
-displacement, which places the "elegant" name on the plebeian and the\r
-rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality.\r
-The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there as\r
-everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and a\r
-profound thing,--the French Revolution.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE LARK\r
-\r
-It is not all in all sufficient to be wicked in order to prosper. The\r
-cook-shop was in a bad way.\r
-\r
-Thanks to the traveller's fifty-seven francs, Thenardier had been able\r
-to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. On the following month\r
-they were again in need of money. The woman took Cosette's outfit to\r
-Paris, and pawned it at the pawnbroker's for sixty francs. As soon\r
-as that sum was spent, the Thenardiers grew accustomed to look on the\r
-little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity;\r
-and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they\r
-dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thenardier\r
-brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest\r
-had left--a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat.\r
-Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions;\r
-Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to\r
-theirs.\r
-\r
-The mother, who had established herself, as we shall see later on, at M.\r
-sur M., wrote, or, more correctly, caused to be written, a letter every\r
-month, that she might have news of her child. The Thenardiers replied\r
-invariably, "Cosette is doing wonderfully well."\r
-\r
-At the expiration of the first six months the mother sent seven francs\r
-for the seventh month, and continued her remittances with tolerable\r
-regularity from month to month. The year was not completed when\r
-Thenardier said: "A fine favor she is doing us, in sooth! What does she\r
-expect us to do with her seven francs?" and he wrote to demand twelve\r
-francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her\r
-child was happy, "and was coming on well," submitted, and forwarded the\r
-twelve francs.\r
-\r
-Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the other.\r
-Mother Thenardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her\r
-to hate the stranger.\r
-\r
-It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous\r
-aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to\r
-her as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child\r
-diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many\r
-women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and\r
-injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is certain\r
-that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received the whole\r
-of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the blows to\r
-herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Cosette could not\r
-make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy shower of\r
-violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble being, who\r
-should not have understood anything of this world or of God, incessantly\r
-punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her two little\r
-creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier was vicious with Cosette. Eponine and Azelma were\r
-vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size\r
-is smaller; that is all.\r
-\r
-A year passed; then another.\r
-\r
-People in the village said:--\r
-\r
-"Those Thenardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are\r
-bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!"\r
-\r
-They thought that Cosette's mother had forgotten her.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, Thenardier, having learned, it is impossible to say by\r
-what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that the\r
-mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month, saying\r
-that "the creature" was growing and "eating," and threatening to send\r
-her away. "Let her not bother me," he exclaimed, "or I'll fire her brat\r
-right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase." The\r
-mother paid the fifteen francs.\r
-\r
-From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.\r
-\r
-As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other\r
-children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say,\r
-before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the\r
-household.\r
-\r
-Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is\r
-true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen the\r
-trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the\r
-age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world,\r
-"worked for his living and stole"?\r
-\r
-Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard,\r
-the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thenardiers\r
-considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner,\r
-since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in\r
-her payments. Some months she was in arrears.\r
-\r
-If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three\r
-years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and\r
-rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an\r
-indescribably uneasy look. "The sly creature," said the Thenardiers.\r
-\r
-Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing\r
-remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because,\r
-large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still\r
-larger amount of sadness.\r
-\r
-It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years\r
-old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes,\r
-sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny\r
-red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Cossette Sweeping 1b4-1-cossette-sweeping]\r
-\r
-She was called the Lark in the neighborhood. The populace, who are fond\r
-of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name on\r
-this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger\r
-than a bird, who was awake every morning before any one else in the\r
-house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before\r
-daybreak.\r
-\r
-Only the little lark never sang.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS\r
-\r
-And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according to\r
-the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was\r
-she? What was she doing?\r
-\r
-After leaving her little Cosette with the Thenardiers, she had continued\r
-her journey, and had reached M. sur M.\r
-\r
-This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.\r
-\r
-Fantine had quitted her province ten years before. M. sur M. had changed\r
-its aspect. While Fantine had been slowly descending from wretchedness\r
-to wretchedness, her native town had prospered.\r
-\r
-About two years previously one of those industrial facts which are the\r
-grand events of small districts had taken place.\r
-\r
-This detail is important, and we regard it as useful to develop it at\r
-length; we should almost say, to underline it.\r
-\r
-From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry the\r
-imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany. This\r
-industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price of the raw\r
-material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the moment when Fantine\r
-returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation had taken place\r
-in the production of "black goods." Towards the close of 1815 a man,\r
-a stranger, had established himself in the town, and had been inspired\r
-with the idea of substituting, in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin,\r
-and, for bracelets in particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid\r
-together, for slides of soldered sheet-iron.\r
-\r
-This very small change had effected a revolution.\r
-\r
-This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced the cost of\r
-the raw material, which had rendered it possible in the first place, to\r
-raise the price of manufacture, a benefit to the country; in the second\r
-place, to improve the workmanship, an advantage to the consumer; in the\r
-third place, to sell at a lower price, while trebling the profit, which\r
-was a benefit to the manufacturer.\r
-\r
-Thus three results ensued from one idea.\r
-\r
-In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich,\r
-which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better.\r
-He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known;\r
-of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had\r
-come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.\r
-\r
-It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an\r
-ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his\r
-own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside.\r
-\r
-On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the appearance,\r
-and the language of a workingman.\r
-\r
-It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry into\r
-the little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December evening,\r
-knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire had broken out\r
-in the town-hall. This man had rushed into the flames and saved, at the\r
-risk of his own life, two children who belonged to the captain of the\r
-gendarmerie; this is why they had forgotten to ask him for his passport.\r
-Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father Madeleine.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--MADELEINE\r
-\r
-He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and\r
-who was good. That was all that could be said about him.\r
-\r
-Thanks to the rapid progress of the industry which he had so admirably\r
-re-constructed, M. sur M. had become a rather important centre of trade.\r
-Spain, which consumes a good deal of black jet, made enormous purchases\r
-there each year. M. sur M. almost rivalled London and Berlin in this\r
-branch of commerce. Father Madeleine's profits were such, that at the\r
-end of the second year he was able to erect a large factory, in which\r
-there were two vast workrooms, one for the men, and the other for women.\r
-Any one who was hungry could present himself there, and was sure of\r
-finding employment and bread. Father Madeleine required of the men good\r
-will, of the women pure morals, and of all, probity. He had separated\r
-the work-rooms in order to separate the sexes, and so that the women and\r
-girls might remain discreet. On this point he was inflexible. It was the\r
-only thing in which he was in a manner intolerant. He was all the more\r
-firmly set on this severity, since M. sur M., being a garrison town,\r
-opportunities for corruption abounded. However, his coming had been a\r
-boon, and his presence was a godsend. Before Father Madeleine's arrival,\r
-everything had languished in the country; now everything lived with\r
-a healthy life of toil. A strong circulation warmed everything and\r
-penetrated everywhere. Slack seasons and wretchedness were unknown.\r
-There was no pocket so obscure that it had not a little money in it; no\r
-dwelling so lowly that there was not some little joy within it.\r
-\r
-Father Madeleine gave employment to every one. He exacted but one thing:\r
-Be an honest man. Be an honest woman.\r
-\r
-As we have said, in the midst of this activity of which he was the cause\r
-and the pivot, Father Madeleine made his fortune; but a singular thing\r
-in a simple man of business, it did not seem as though that were his\r
-chief care. He appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of\r
-himself. In 1820 he was known to have a sum of six hundred and thirty\r
-thousand francs lodged in his name with Laffitte; but before reserving\r
-these six hundred and thirty thousand francs, he had spent more than a\r
-million for the town and its poor.\r
-\r
-The hospital was badly endowed; he founded six beds there. M. sur M. is\r
-divided into the upper and the lower town. The lower town, in which he\r
-lived, had but one school, a miserable hovel, which was falling to ruin:\r
-he constructed two, one for girls, the other for boys. He allotted a\r
-salary from his own funds to the two instructors, a salary twice as\r
-large as their meagre official salary, and one day he said to some one\r
-who expressed surprise, "The two prime functionaries of the state are\r
-the nurse and the schoolmaster." He created at his own expense an infant\r
-school, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for aiding old\r
-and infirm workmen. As his factory was a centre, a new quarter, in which\r
-there were a good many indigent families, rose rapidly around him; he\r
-established there a free dispensary.\r
-\r
-At first, when they watched his beginnings, the good souls said, "He's\r
-a jolly fellow who means to get rich." When they saw him enriching\r
-the country before he enriched himself, the good souls said, "He is\r
-an ambitious man." This seemed all the more probable since the man was\r
-religious, and even practised his religion to a certain degree, a thing\r
-which was very favorably viewed at that epoch. He went regularly to\r
-low mass every Sunday. The local deputy, who nosed out all rivalry\r
-everywhere, soon began to grow uneasy over this religion. This deputy\r
-had been a member of the legislative body of the Empire, and shared the\r
-religious ideas of a father of the Oratoire, known under the name\r
-of Fouche, Duc d'Otrante, whose creature and friend he had been. He\r
-indulged in gentle raillery at God with closed doors. But when he beheld\r
-the wealthy manufacturer Madeleine going to low mass at seven o'clock,\r
-he perceived in him a possible candidate, and resolved to outdo him; he\r
-took a Jesuit confessor, and went to high mass and to vespers. Ambition\r
-was at that time, in the direct acceptation of the word, a race to the\r
-steeple. The poor profited by this terror as well as the good God, for\r
-the honorable deputy also founded two beds in the hospital, which made\r
-twelve.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, in 1819 a rumor one morning circulated through the town\r
-to the effect that, on the representations of the prefect and in\r
-consideration of the services rendered by him to the country, Father\r
-Madeleine was to be appointed by the King, mayor of M. sur M. Those who\r
-had pronounced this new-comer to be "an ambitious fellow," seized with\r
-delight on this opportunity which all men desire, to exclaim, "There!\r
-what did we say!" All M. sur M. was in an uproar. The rumor was well\r
-founded. Several days later the appointment appeared in the Moniteur. On\r
-the following day Father Madeleine refused.\r
-\r
-In this same year of 1819 the products of the new process invented by\r
-Madeleine figured in the industrial exhibition; when the jury made their\r
-report, the King appointed the inventor a chevalier of the Legion of\r
-Honor. A fresh excitement in the little town. Well, so it was the cross\r
-that he wanted! Father Madeleine refused the cross.\r
-\r
-Decidedly this man was an enigma. The good souls got out of their\r
-predicament by saying, "After all, he is some sort of an adventurer."\r
-\r
-We have seen that the country owed much to him; the poor owed him\r
-everything; he was so useful and he was so gentle that people had been\r
-obliged to honor and respect him. His workmen, in particular, adored\r
-him, and he endured this adoration with a sort of melancholy gravity.\r
-When he was known to be rich, "people in society" bowed to him, and\r
-he received invitations in the town; he was called, in town, Monsieur\r
-Madeleine; his workmen and the children continued to call him Father\r
-Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In\r
-proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him.\r
-"Society" claimed him for its own. The prim little drawing-rooms on\r
-M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan,\r
-opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionnaire. They made\r
-a thousand advances to him. He refused.\r
-\r
-This time the good gossips had no trouble. "He is an ignorant man, of\r
-no education. No one knows where he came from. He would not know how to\r
-behave in society. It has not been absolutely proved that he knows how\r
-to read."\r
-\r
-When they saw him making money, they said, "He is a man of business."\r
-When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, "He is an\r
-ambitious man." When he was seen to decline honors, they said, "He is\r
-an adventurer." When they saw him repulse society, they said, "He is a\r
-brute."\r
-\r
-In 1820, five years after his arrival in M. sur M., the services which\r
-he had rendered to the district were so dazzling, the opinion of\r
-the whole country round about was so unanimous, that the King again\r
-appointed him mayor of the town. He again declined; but the prefect\r
-resisted his refusal, all the notabilities of the place came to implore\r
-him, the people in the street besought him; the urging was so vigorous\r
-that he ended by accepting. It was noticed that the thing which seemed\r
-chiefly to bring him to a decision was the almost irritated apostrophe\r
-addressed to him by an old woman of the people, who called to him from\r
-her threshold, in an angry way: "A good mayor is a useful thing. Is he\r
-drawing back before the good which he can do?"\r
-\r
-This was the third phase of his ascent. Father Madeleine had become\r
-Monsieur Madeleine. Monsieur Madeleine became Monsieur le Maire.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--SUMS DEPOSITED WITH LAFFITTE\r
-\r
-On the other hand, he remained as simple as on the first day. He had\r
-gray hair, a serious eye, the sunburned complexion of a laborer, the\r
-thoughtful visage of a philosopher. He habitually wore a hat with a\r
-wide brim, and a long coat of coarse cloth, buttoned to the chin. He\r
-fulfilled his duties as mayor; but, with that exception, he lived in\r
-solitude. He spoke to but few people. He avoided polite attentions;\r
-he escaped quickly; he smiled to relieve himself of the necessity of\r
-talking; he gave, in order to get rid of the necessity for smiling, The\r
-women said of him, "What a good-natured bear!" His pleasure consisted in\r
-strolling in the fields.\r
-\r
-He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he\r
-read. He had a well-selected little library. He loved books; books\r
-are cold but safe friends. In proportion as leisure came to him with\r
-fortune, he seemed to take advantage of it to cultivate his mind. It had\r
-been observed that, ever since his arrival at M. sur M.. his language\r
-had grown more polished, more choice, and more gentle with every passing\r
-year. He liked to carry a gun with him on his strolls, but he rarely\r
-made use of it. When he did happen to do so, his shooting was something\r
-so infallible as to inspire terror. He never killed an inoffensive\r
-animal. He never shot at a little bird.\r
-\r
-Although he was no longer young, it was thought that he was still\r
-prodigiously strong. He offered his assistance to any one who was in\r
-need of it, lifted a horse, released a wheel clogged in the mud, or\r
-stopped a runaway bull by the horns. He always had his pockets full\r
-of money when he went out; but they were empty on his return. When he\r
-passed through a village, the ragged brats ran joyously after him, and\r
-surrounded him like a swarm of gnats.\r
-\r
-It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a country life,\r
-since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which he taught to the\r
-peasants. He taught them how to destroy scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it\r
-and the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution\r
-of common salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in\r
-bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the grass and in\r
-the houses.\r
-\r
-He had "recipes" for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail,\r
-and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit\r
-warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed\r
-in it.\r
-\r
-One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles;\r
-he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said:\r
-"They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to\r
-make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent\r
-vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibres like hemp and\r
-flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are\r
-good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle. The seed of\r
-the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the\r
-root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter.\r
-Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is\r
-required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the\r
-seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That\r
-is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made\r
-useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How\r
-many men resemble the nettle!" He added, after a pause: "Remember this,\r
-my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are\r
-only bad cultivators."\r
-\r
-The children loved him because he knew how to make charming little\r
-trifles of straw and cocoanuts.\r
-\r
-When he saw the door of a church hung in black, he entered: he sought\r
-out funerals as other men seek christenings. Widowhood and the grief of\r
-others attracted him, because of his great gentleness; he mingled with\r
-the friends clad in mourning, with families dressed in black, with\r
-the priests groaning around a coffin. He seemed to like to give to his\r
-thoughts for text these funereal psalmodies filled with the vision of\r
-the other world. With his eyes fixed on heaven, he listened with a\r
-sort of aspiration towards all the mysteries of the infinite, those sad\r
-voices which sing on the verge of the obscure abyss of death.\r
-\r
-He performed a multitude of good actions, concealing his agency in them\r
-as a man conceals himself because of evil actions. He penetrated houses\r
-privately, at night; he ascended staircases furtively. A poor wretch\r
-on returning to his attic would find that his door had been opened,\r
-sometimes even forced, during his absence. The poor man made a clamor\r
-over it: some malefactor had been there! He entered, and the first\r
-thing he beheld was a piece of gold lying forgotten on some piece of\r
-furniture. The "malefactor" who had been there was Father Madeleine.\r
-\r
-He was affable and sad. The people said: "There is a rich man who has\r
-not a haughty air. There is a happy man who has not a contented air."\r
-\r
-Some people maintained that he was a mysterious person, and that no\r
-one ever entered his chamber, which was a regular anchorite's cell,\r
-furnished with winged hour-glasses and enlivened by cross-bones and\r
-skulls of dead men! This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant\r
-and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked:\r
-"Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber. It is said to be a\r
-grotto." He smiled, and introduced them instantly into this "grotto."\r
-They were well punished for their curiosity. The room was very simply\r
-furnished in mahogany, which was rather ugly, like all furniture of\r
-that sort, and hung with paper worth twelve sous. They could see nothing\r
-remarkable about it, except two candlesticks of antique pattern which\r
-stood on the chimney-piece and appeared to be silver, "for they were\r
-hall-marked," an observation full of the type of wit of petty towns.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, people continued to say that no one ever got into the\r
-room, and that it was a hermit's cave, a mysterious retreat, a hole, a\r
-tomb.\r
-\r
-It was also whispered about that he had "immense" sums deposited with\r
-Laffitte, with this peculiar feature, that they were always at his\r
-immediate disposal, so that, it was added, M. Madeleine could make his\r
-appearance at Laffitte's any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his\r
-two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, "these two or three\r
-millions" were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or\r
-forty thousand francs.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--M. MADELEINE IN MOURNING\r
-\r
-At the beginning of 1820 the newspapers announced the death of M.\r
-Myriel, Bishop of D----, surnamed "Monseigneur Bienvenu," who had died\r
-in the odor of sanctity at the age of eighty-two.\r
-\r
-The Bishop of D---- to supply here a detail which the papers\r
-omitted--had been blind for many years before his death, and content to\r
-be blind, as his sister was beside him.\r
-\r
-Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact,\r
-one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth,\r
-where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a\r
-daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her\r
-and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable\r
-to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure\r
-one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us,\r
-and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time\r
-to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her\r
-thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one\r
-being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown\r
-as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return,\r
-sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this\r
-speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel\r
-one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become\r
-in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which\r
-this angel gravitates,--few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness\r
-of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for\r
-one's own sake--let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this\r
-conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be\r
-caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when\r
-one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There\r
-is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly,\r
-and finds it. And this soul, found and tested, is a woman. A hand\r
-sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly touches your brow; it is her\r
-mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it is hers. To have everything\r
-of her, from her worship to her pity, never to be left, to have that\r
-sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that immovable reed, to\r
-touch Providence with one's hands, and to be able to take it in\r
-one's arms,--God made tangible,--what bliss! The heart, that obscure,\r
-celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming. One would not\r
-exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there,\r
-uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she\r
-vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality. One feels warmth\r
-approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity, with\r
-gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there are\r
-a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The\r
-most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and\r
-supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul.\r
-One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a paradise of\r
-shadows.\r
-\r
-It was from this paradise that Monseigneur Welcome had passed to the\r
-other.\r
-\r
-The announcement of his death was reprinted by the local journal of M.\r
-sur M. On the following day, M. Madeleine appeared clad wholly in black,\r
-and with crape on his hat.\r
-\r
-This mourning was noticed in the town, and commented on. It seemed\r
-to throw a light on M. Madeleine's origin. It was concluded that some\r
-relationship existed between him and the venerable Bishop. "He has gone\r
-into mourning for the Bishop of D----" said the drawing-rooms; this\r
-raised M. Madeleine's credit greatly, and procured for him, instantly\r
-and at one blow, a certain consideration in the noble world of M. sur\r
-M. The microscopic Faubourg Saint-Germain of the place meditated raising\r
-the quarantine against M. Madeleine, the probable relative of a bishop.\r
-M. Madeleine perceived the advancement which he had obtained, by the\r
-more numerous courtesies of the old women and the more plentiful smiles\r
-of the young ones. One evening, a ruler in that petty great world, who\r
-was curious by right of seniority, ventured to ask him, "M. le Maire is\r
-doubtless a cousin of the late Bishop of D----?"\r
-\r
-He said, "No, Madame."\r
-\r
-"But," resumed the dowager, "you are wearing mourning for him."\r
-\r
-He replied, "It is because I was a servant in his family in my youth."\r
-\r
-Another thing which was remarked, was, that every time that he\r
-encountered in the town a young Savoyard who was roaming about the\r
-country and seeking chimneys to sweep, the mayor had him summoned,\r
-inquired his name, and gave him money. The little Savoyards told each\r
-other about it: a great many of them passed that way.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--VAGUE FLASHES ON THE HORIZON\r
-\r
-Little by little, and in the course of time, all this opposition\r
-subsided. There had at first been exercised against M. Madeleine,\r
-in virtue of a sort of law which all those who rise must submit to,\r
-blackening and calumnies; then they grew to be nothing more than\r
-ill-nature, then merely malicious remarks, then even this entirely\r
-disappeared; respect became complete, unanimous, cordial, and towards\r
-1821 the moment arrived when the word "Monsieur le Maire" was pronounced\r
-at M. sur M. with almost the same accent as "Monseigneur the Bishop"\r
-had been pronounced in D---- in 1815. People came from a distance of ten\r
-leagues around to consult M. Madeleine. He put an end to differences,\r
-he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies. Every one took him for the\r
-judge, and with good reason. It seemed as though he had for a soul the\r
-book of the natural law. It was like an epidemic of veneration, which in\r
-the course of six or seven years gradually took possession of the whole\r
-district.\r
-\r
-One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped\r
-this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his\r
-opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct\r
-kept him on the alert and uneasy. It seems, in fact, as though there\r
-existed in certain men a veritable bestial instinct, though pure and\r
-upright, like all instincts, which creates antipathies and sympathies,\r
-which fatally separates one nature from another nature, which does not\r
-hesitate, which feels no disquiet, which does not hold its peace,\r
-and which never belies itself, clear in its obscurity, infallible,\r
-imperious, intractable, stubborn to all counsels of the intelligence\r
-and to all the dissolvents of reason, and which, in whatever manner\r
-destinies are arranged, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of\r
-the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.\r
-\r
-It frequently happened that when M. Madeleine was passing along a\r
-street, calm, affectionate, surrounded by the blessings of all, a man of\r
-lofty stature, clad in an iron-gray frock-coat, armed with a heavy\r
-cane, and wearing a battered hat, turned round abruptly behind him, and\r
-followed him with his eyes until he disappeared, with folded arms and\r
-a slow shake of the head, and his upper lip raised in company with\r
-his lower to his nose, a sort of significant grimace which might be\r
-translated by: "What is that man, after all? I certainly have seen him\r
-somewhere. In any case, I am not his dupe."\r
-\r
-This person, grave with a gravity which was almost menacing, was one\r
-of those men who, even when only seen by a rapid glimpse, arrest the\r
-spectator's attention.\r
-\r
-His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.\r
-\r
-At M. sur M. he exercised the unpleasant but useful functions of an\r
-inspector. He had not seen Madeleine's beginnings. Javert owed the post\r
-which he occupied to the protection of M. Chabouillet, the secretary of\r
-the Minister of State, Comte Angeles, then prefect of police at Paris.\r
-When Javert arrived at M. sur M. the fortune of the great manufacturer\r
-was already made, and Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.\r
-\r
-Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is\r
-complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority.\r
-Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.\r
-\r
-It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes, we should\r
-be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual\r
-of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal\r
-creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived\r
-by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the\r
-tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man.\r
-Sometimes even several of them at a time.\r
-\r
-Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices,\r
-straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows\r
-them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere\r
-shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense\r
-of the word; what is the use? On the contrary, our souls being realities\r
-and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on\r
-them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social\r
-education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of whatever sort\r
-it may be, the utility which it contains.\r
-\r
-This, be it said, is of course from the restricted point of view of the\r
-terrestrial life which is apparent, and without prejudging the profound\r
-question of the anterior or ulterior personality of the beings which are\r
-not man. The visible _I_ in nowise authorizes the thinker to deny the\r
-latent _I_. Having made this reservation, let us pass on.\r
-\r
-Now, if the reader will admit, for a moment, with us, that in every man\r
-there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us\r
-to say what there was in Police Officer Javert.\r
-\r
-The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves\r
-there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as\r
-he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.\r
-\r
-Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be\r
-Javert.\r
-\r
-Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was\r
-in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale\r
-of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that\r
-society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,--those who attack\r
-it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these\r
-two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable\r
-foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an\r
-inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung. He\r
-entered the police; he succeeded there. At forty years of age he was an\r
-inspector.\r
-\r
-During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of\r
-the South.\r
-\r
-Before proceeding further, let us come to an understanding as to the\r
-words, "human face," which we have just applied to Javert.\r
-\r
-The human face of Javert consisted of a flat nose, with two deep\r
-nostrils, towards which enormous whiskers ascended on his cheeks. One\r
-felt ill at ease when he saw these two forests and these two caverns\r
-for the first time. When Javert laughed,--and his laugh was rare and\r
-terrible,--his thin lips parted and revealed to view not only his teeth,\r
-but his gums, and around his nose there formed a flattened and savage\r
-fold, as on the muzzle of a wild beast. Javert, serious, was a watchdog;\r
-when he laughed, he was a tiger. As for the rest, he had very little\r
-skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and\r
-fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central\r
-frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed\r
-up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.\r
-\r
-This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments,\r
-comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating\r
-them,--respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes,\r
-murder, robbery, all crimes, are only forms of rebellion. He enveloped\r
-in a blind and profound faith every one who had a function in the state,\r
-from the prime minister to the rural policeman. He covered with scorn,\r
-aversion, and disgust every one who had once crossed the legal threshold\r
-of evil. He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand,\r
-he said, "The functionary can make no mistake; the magistrate is never\r
-the wrong." On the other hand, he said, "These men are irremediably\r
-lost. Nothing good can come from them." He fully shared the opinion of\r
-those extreme minds which attribute to human law I know not what power\r
-of making, or, if the reader will have it so, of authenticating, demons,\r
-and who place a Styx at the base of society. He was stoical, serious,\r
-austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, like fanatics. His\r
-glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing. His whole life hung on\r
-these two words: watchfulness and supervision. He had introduced a\r
-straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world;\r
-he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his\r
-functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests. Woe to the man\r
-who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father, if\r
-the latter had escaped from the galleys, and would have denounced his\r
-mother, if she had broken her ban. And he would have done it with that\r
-sort of inward satisfaction which is conferred by virtue. And, withal,\r
-a life of privation, isolation, abnegation, chastity, with never\r
-a diversion. It was implacable duty; the police understood, as the\r
-Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a ferocious\r
-honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.\r
-\r
-Javert's whole person was expressive of the man who spies and who\r
-withdraws himself from observation. The mystical school of Joseph de\r
-Maistre, which at that epoch seasoned with lofty cosmogony those things\r
-which were called the ultra newspapers, would not have failed to declare\r
-that Javert was a symbol. His brow was not visible; it disappeared\r
-beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under\r
-his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his\r
-cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves:\r
-and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat. But when the\r
-occasion presented itself, there was suddenly seen to emerge from all\r
-this shadow, as from an ambuscade, a narrow and angular forehead, a\r
-baleful glance, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous\r
-cudgel.\r
-\r
-In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although\r
-he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate. This could\r
-be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.\r
-\r
-As we have said, he had no vices. When he was pleased with himself,\r
-he permitted himself a pinch of snuff. Therein lay his connection with\r
-humanity.\r
-\r
-The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that Javert was the\r
-terror of that whole class which the annual statistics of the Ministry\r
-of Justice designates under the rubric, Vagrants. The name of Javert\r
-routed them by its mere utterance; the face of Javert petrified them at\r
-sight.\r
-\r
-Such was this formidable man.\r
-\r
-Javert was like an eye constantly fixed on M. Madeleine. An eye full of\r
-suspicion and conjecture. M. Madeleine had finally perceived the fact;\r
-but it seemed to be of no importance to him. He did not even put a\r
-question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that\r
-embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it.\r
-He treated Javert with ease and courtesy, as he did all the rest of the\r
-world.\r
-\r
-It was divined, from some words which escaped Javert, that he had\r
-secretly investigated, with that curiosity which belongs to the race,\r
-and into which there enters as much instinct as will, all the anterior\r
-traces which Father Madeleine might have left elsewhere. He seemed to\r
-know, and he sometimes said in covert words, that some one had gleaned\r
-certain information in a certain district about a family which had\r
-disappeared. Once he chanced to say, as he was talking to himself, "I\r
-think I have him!" Then he remained pensive for three days, and uttered\r
-not a word. It seemed that the thread which he thought he held had\r
-broken.\r
-\r
-Moreover, and this furnishes the necessary corrective for the too\r
-absolute sense which certain words might present, there can be nothing\r
-really infallible in a human creature, and the peculiarity of instinct\r
-is that it can become confused, thrown off the track, and defeated.\r
-Otherwise, it would be superior to intelligence, and the beast would be\r
-found to be provided with a better light than man.\r
-\r
-Javert was evidently somewhat disconcerted by the perfect naturalness\r
-and tranquillity of M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-One day, nevertheless, his strange manner appeared to produce an\r
-impression on M. Madeleine. It was on the following occasion.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--FATHER FAUCHELEVENT\r
-\r
-One morning M. Madeleine was passing through an unpaved alley of M. sur\r
-M.; he heard a noise, and saw a group some distance away. He approached.\r
-An old man named Father Fauchelevent had just fallen beneath his cart,\r
-his horse having tumbled down.\r
-\r
-This Fauchelevent was one of the few enemies whom M. Madeleine had at\r
-that time. When Madeleine arrived in the neighborhood, Fauchelevent, an\r
-ex-notary and a peasant who was almost educated, had a business which\r
-was beginning to be in a bad way. Fauchelevent had seen this simple\r
-workman grow rich, while he, a lawyer, was being ruined. This had filled\r
-him with jealousy, and he had done all he could, on every occasion,\r
-to injure Madeleine. Then bankruptcy had come; and as the old man had\r
-nothing left but a cart and a horse, and neither family nor children, he\r
-had turned carter.\r
-\r
-The horse had two broken legs and could not rise. The old man was caught\r
-in the wheels. The fall had been so unlucky that the whole weight of the\r
-vehicle rested on his breast. The cart was quite heavily laden. Father\r
-Fauchelevent was rattling in the throat in the most lamentable manner.\r
-They had tried, but in vain, to drag him out. An unmethodical effort,\r
-aid awkwardly given, a wrong shake, might kill him. It was impossible to\r
-disengage him otherwise than by lifting the vehicle off of him.\r
-Javert, who had come up at the moment of the accident, had sent for a\r
-jack-screw.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine arrived. People stood aside respectfully.\r
-\r
-"Help!" cried old Fauchelevent. "Who will be good and save the old man?"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine turned towards those present:--\r
-\r
-"Is there a jack-screw to be had?"\r
-\r
-"One has been sent for," answered the peasant.\r
-\r
-"How long will it take to get it?"\r
-\r
-"They have gone for the nearest, to Flachot's place, where there is a\r
-farrier; but it makes no difference; it will take a good quarter of an\r
-hour."\r
-\r
-"A quarter of an hour!" exclaimed Madeleine.\r
-\r
-It had rained on the preceding night; the soil was soaked.\r
-\r
-The cart was sinking deeper into the earth every moment, and crushing\r
-the old carter's breast more and more. It was evident that his ribs\r
-would be broken in five minutes more.\r
-\r
-"It is impossible to wait another quarter of an hour," said Madeleine to\r
-the peasants, who were staring at him.\r
-\r
-"We must!"\r
-\r
-"But it will be too late then! Don't you see that the cart is sinking?"\r
-\r
-"Well!"\r
-\r
-"Listen," resumed Madeleine; "there is still room enough under the cart\r
-to allow a man to crawl beneath it and raise it with his back. Only half\r
-a minute, and the poor man can be taken out. Is there any one here who\r
-has stout loins and heart? There are five louis d'or to be earned!"\r
-\r
-Not a man in the group stirred.\r
-\r
-"Ten louis," said Madeleine.\r
-\r
-The persons present dropped their eyes. One of them muttered: "A man\r
-would need to be devilish strong. And then he runs the risk of getting\r
-crushed!"\r
-\r
-"Come," began Madeleine again, "twenty louis."\r
-\r
-The same silence.\r
-\r
-"It is not the will which is lacking," said a voice.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine turned round, and recognized Javert. He had not noticed him\r
-on his arrival.\r
-\r
-Javert went on:--\r
-\r
-"It is strength. One would have to be a terrible man to do such a thing\r
-as lift a cart like that on his back."\r
-\r
-Then, gazing fixedly at M. Madeleine, he went on, emphasizing every word\r
-that he uttered:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Madeleine, I have never known but one man capable of doing\r
-what you ask."\r
-\r
-Madeleine shuddered.\r
-\r
-Javert added, with an air of indifference, but without removing his eyes\r
-from Madeleine:--\r
-\r
-"He was a convict."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said Madeleine.\r
-\r
-"In the galleys at Toulon."\r
-\r
-Madeleine turned pale.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, the cart continued to sink slowly. Father Fauchelevent\r
-rattled in the throat, and shrieked:--\r
-\r
-"I am strangling! My ribs are breaking! a screw! something! Ah!"\r
-\r
-Madeleine glanced about him.\r
-\r
-"Is there, then, no one who wishes to earn twenty louis and save the\r
-life of this poor old man?"\r
-\r
-No one stirred. Javert resumed:--\r
-\r
-"I have never known but one man who could take the place of a screw, and\r
-he was that convict."\r
-\r
-"Ah! It is crushing me!" cried the old man.\r
-\r
-Madeleine raised his head, met Javert's falcon eye still fixed upon\r
-him, looked at the motionless peasants, and smiled sadly. Then, without\r
-saying a word, he fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had\r
-time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle.\r
-\r
-A terrible moment of expectation and silence ensued.\r
-\r
-They beheld Madeleine, almost flat on his stomach beneath that terrible\r
-weight, make two vain efforts to bring his knees and his elbows\r
-together. They shouted to him, "Father Madeleine, come out!" Old\r
-Fauchelevent himself said to him, "Monsieur Madeleine, go away! You see\r
-that I am fated to die! Leave me! You will get yourself crushed also!"\r
-Madeleine made no reply.\r
-\r
-All the spectators were panting. The wheels had continued to sink, and\r
-it had become almost impossible for Madeleine to make his way from under\r
-the vehicle.\r
-\r
-Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver, the cart rose slowly, the\r
-wheels half emerged from the ruts. They heard a stifled voice crying,\r
-"Make haste! Help!" It was Madeleine, who had just made a final effort.\r
-\r
-They rushed forwards. The devotion of a single man had given force and\r
-courage to all. The cart was raised by twenty arms. Old Fauchelevent was\r
-saved.\r
-\r
-Madeleine rose. He was pale, though dripping with perspiration. His\r
-clothes were torn and covered with mud. All wept. The old man kissed\r
-his knees and called him the good God. As for him, he bore upon\r
-his countenance an indescribable expression of happy and celestial\r
-suffering, and he fixed his tranquil eye on Javert, who was still\r
-staring at him.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--FAUCHELEVENT BECOMES A GARDENER IN PARIS\r
-\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent had dislocated his kneepan in his fall. Father Madeleine\r
-had him conveyed to an infirmary which he had established for his\r
-workmen in the factory building itself, and which was served by two\r
-sisters of charity. On the following morning the old man found a\r
-thousand-franc bank-note on his night-stand, with these words in Father\r
-Madeleine's writing: "I purchase your horse and cart." The cart was\r
-broken, and the horse was dead. Fauchelevent recovered, but his knee\r
-remained stiff. M. Madeleine, on the recommendation of the sisters of\r
-charity and of his priest, got the good man a place as gardener in a\r
-female convent in the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris.\r
-\r
-Some time afterwards, M. Madeleine was appointed mayor. The first time\r
-that Javert beheld M. Madeleine clothed in the scarf which gave him\r
-authority over the town, he felt the sort of shudder which a watch-dog\r
-might experience on smelling a wolf in his master's clothes. From\r
-that time forth he avoided him as much as he possibly could. When the\r
-requirements of the service imperatively demanded it, and he could\r
-not do otherwise than meet the mayor, he addressed him with profound\r
-respect.\r
-\r
-This prosperity created at M. sur M. by Father Madeleine had, besides\r
-the visible signs which we have mentioned, another symptom which was\r
-none the less significant for not being visible. This never deceives.\r
-When the population suffers, when work is lacking, when there is no\r
-commerce, the tax-payer resists imposts through penury, he exhausts and\r
-oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in\r
-the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when\r
-the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the\r
-state nothing. It may be said, that there is one infallible thermometer\r
-of the public misery and riches,--the cost of collecting the taxes.\r
-In the course of seven years the expense of collecting the taxes had\r
-diminished three-fourths in the arrondissement of M. sur M., and this\r
-led to this arrondissement being frequently cited from all the rest by\r
-M. de Villele, then Minister of Finance.\r
-\r
-Such was the condition of the country when Fantine returned thither. No\r
-one remembered her. Fortunately, the door of M. Madeleine's factory was\r
-like the face of a friend. She presented herself there, and was admitted\r
-to the women's workroom. The trade was entirely new to Fantine; she\r
-could not be very skilful at it, and she therefore earned but little by\r
-her day's work; but it was sufficient; the problem was solved; she was\r
-earning her living.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--MADAME VICTURNIEN EXPENDS THIRTY FRANCS ON MORALITY\r
-\r
-When Fantine saw that she was making her living, she felt joyful for a\r
-moment. To live honestly by her own labor, what mercy from heaven! The\r
-taste for work had really returned to her. She bought a looking-glass,\r
-took pleasure in surveying in it her youth, her beautiful hair, her fine\r
-teeth; she forgot many things; she thought only of Cosette and of the\r
-possible future, and was almost happy. She hired a little room and\r
-furnished on credit on the strength of her future work--a lingering\r
-trace of her improvident ways. As she was not able to say that she was\r
-married she took good care, as we have seen, not to mention her little\r
-girl.\r
-\r
-At first, as the reader has seen, she paid the Thenardiers promptly. As\r
-she only knew how to sign her name, she was obliged to write through a\r
-public letter-writer.\r
-\r
-She wrote often, and this was noticed. It began to be said in an\r
-undertone, in the women's workroom, that Fantine "wrote letters" and\r
-that "she had ways about her."\r
-\r
-There is no one for spying on people's actions like those who are\r
-not concerned in them. Why does that gentleman never come except at\r
-nightfall? Why does Mr. So-and-So never hang his key on its nail on\r
-Tuesday? Why does he always take the narrow streets? Why does Madame\r
-always descend from her hackney-coach before reaching her house? Why\r
-does she send out to purchase six sheets of note paper, when she has a\r
-"whole stationer's shop full of it?" etc. There exist beings who, for\r
-the sake of obtaining the key to these enigmas, which are, moreover, of\r
-no consequence whatever to them, spend more money, waste more time,\r
-take more trouble, than would be required for ten good actions, and\r
-that gratuitously, for their own pleasure, without receiving any other\r
-payment for their curiosity than curiosity. They will follow up such and\r
-such a man or woman for whole days; they will do sentry duty for hours\r
-at a time on the corners of the streets, under alley-way doors at night,\r
-in cold and rain; they will bribe errand-porters, they will make the\r
-drivers of hackney-coaches and lackeys tipsy, buy a waiting-maid, suborn\r
-a porter. Why? For no reason. A pure passion for seeing, knowing,\r
-and penetrating into things. A pure itch for talking. And often\r
-these secrets once known, these mysteries made public, these enigmas\r
-illuminated by the light of day, bring on catastrophies, duels,\r
-failures, the ruin of families, and broken lives, to the great joy\r
-of those who have "found out everything," without any interest in the\r
-matter, and by pure instinct. A sad thing.\r
-\r
-Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking.\r
-Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the\r
-anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need\r
-a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by\r
-their neighbors.\r
-\r
-So Fantine was watched.\r
-\r
-In addition, many a one was jealous of her golden hair and of her white\r
-teeth.\r
-\r
-It was remarked that in the workroom she often turned aside, in the\r
-midst of the rest, to wipe away a tear. These were the moments when she\r
-was thinking of her child; perhaps, also, of the man whom she had loved.\r
-\r
-Breaking the gloomy bonds of the past is a mournful task.\r
-\r
-It was observed that she wrote twice a month at least, and that she\r
-paid the carriage on the letter. They managed to obtain the address:\r
-Monsieur, Monsieur Thenardier, inn-keeper at Montfermeil. The public\r
-writer, a good old man who could not fill his stomach with red wine\r
-without emptying his pocket of secrets, was made to talk in the\r
-wine-shop. In short, it was discovered that Fantine had a child. "She\r
-must be a pretty sort of a woman." An old gossip was found, who made the\r
-trip to Montfermeil, talked to the Thenardiers, and said on her return:\r
-"For my five and thirty francs I have freed my mind. I have seen the\r
-child."\r
-\r
-The gossip who did this thing was a gorgon named Madame Victurnien, the\r
-guardian and door-keeper of every one's virtue. Madame Victurnien was\r
-fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age.\r
-A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been\r
-young--astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a\r
-monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from\r
-the Bernardines to the Jacobins. She was dry, rough, peevish, sharp,\r
-captious, almost venomous; all this in memory of her monk, whose widow\r
-she was, and who had ruled over her masterfully and bent her to his\r
-will. She was a nettle in which the rustle of the cassock was visible.\r
-At the Restoration she had turned bigot, and that with so much energy\r
-that the priests had forgiven her her monk. She had a small property,\r
-which she bequeathed with much ostentation to a religious community.\r
-She was in high favor at the episcopal palace of Arras. So this Madame\r
-Victurnien went to Montfermeil, and returned with the remark, "I have\r
-seen the child."\r
-\r
-All this took time. Fantine had been at the factory for more than a\r
-year, when, one morning, the superintendent of the workroom handed her\r
-fifty francs from the mayor, told her that she was no longer employed\r
-in the shop, and requested her, in the mayor's name, to leave the\r
-neighborhood.\r
-\r
-This was the very month when the Thenardiers, after having demanded\r
-twelve francs instead of six, had just exacted fifteen francs instead of\r
-twelve.\r
-\r
-Fantine was overwhelmed. She could not leave the neighborhood; she was\r
-in debt for her rent and furniture. Fifty francs was not sufficient\r
-to cancel this debt. She stammered a few supplicating words. The\r
-superintendent ordered her to leave the shop on the instant. Besides,\r
-Fantine was only a moderately good workwoman. Overcome with shame, even\r
-more than with despair, she quitted the shop, and returned to her room.\r
-So her fault was now known to every one.\r
-\r
-She no longer felt strong enough to say a word. She was advised to\r
-see the mayor; she did not dare. The mayor had given her fifty francs\r
-because he was good, and had dismissed her because he was just. She\r
-bowed before the decision.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--MADAME VICTURNIEN'S SUCCESS\r
-\r
-So the monk's widow was good for something.\r
-\r
-But M. Madeleine had heard nothing of all this. Life is full of just\r
-such combinations of events. M. Madeleine was in the habit of almost\r
-never entering the women's workroom.\r
-\r
-At the head of this room he had placed an elderly spinster, whom\r
-the priest had provided for him, and he had full confidence in this\r
-superintendent,--a truly respectable person, firm, equitable, upright,\r
-full of the charity which consists in giving, but not having in the same\r
-degree that charity which consists in understanding and in forgiving.\r
-M. Madeleine relied wholly on her. The best men are often obliged\r
-to delegate their authority. It was with this full power, and the\r
-conviction that she was doing right, that the superintendent had\r
-instituted the suit, judged, condemned, and executed Fantine.\r
-\r
-As regards the fifty francs, she had given them from a fund which M.\r
-Madeleine had intrusted to her for charitable purposes, and for giving\r
-assistance to the workwomen, and of which she rendered no account.\r
-\r
-Fantine tried to obtain a situation as a servant in the neighborhood;\r
-she went from house to house. No one would have her. She could not\r
-leave town. The second-hand dealer, to whom she was in debt for her\r
-furniture--and what furniture!--said to her, "If you leave, I will have\r
-you arrested as a thief." The householder, whom she owed for her rent,\r
-said to her, "You are young and pretty; you can pay." She divided the\r
-fifty francs between the landlord and the furniture-dealer, returned to\r
-the latter three-quarters of his goods, kept only necessaries, and found\r
-herself without work, without a trade, with nothing but her bed, and\r
-still about fifty francs in debt.\r
-\r
-She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned\r
-twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that\r
-she began to pay the Thenardiers irregularly.\r
-\r
-However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned\r
-at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on\r
-little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the\r
-first is dark, the second is black.\r
-\r
-Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to\r
-give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every\r
-two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of\r
-one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by\r
-the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble\r
-creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of\r
-a sou. It ends by being a talent. Fantine acquired this sublime talent,\r
-and regained a little courage.\r
-\r
-At this epoch she said to a neighbor, "Bah! I say to myself, by only\r
-sleeping five hours, and working all the rest of the time at my sewing,\r
-I shall always manage to nearly earn my bread. And, then, when one is\r
-sad, one eats less. Well, sufferings, uneasiness, a little bread on one\r
-hand, trouble on the other,--all this will support me."\r
-\r
-It would have been a great happiness to have her little girl with her in\r
-this distress. She thought of having her come. But what then! Make her\r
-share her own destitution! And then, she was in debt to the Thenardiers!\r
-How could she pay them? And the journey! How pay for that?\r
-\r
-The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life\r
-of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious\r
-with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even\r
-towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself\r
-Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.\r
-\r
-There are many such virtuous people in this lower world; some day they\r
-will be in the world above. This life has a morrow.\r
-\r
-At first, Fantine had been so ashamed that she had not dared to go out.\r
-\r
-When she was in the street, she divined that people turned round behind\r
-her, and pointed at her; every one stared at her and no one greeted her;\r
-the cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very flesh\r
-and soul like a north wind.\r
-\r
-It seems as though an unfortunate woman were utterly bare beneath the\r
-sarcasm and the curiosity of all in small towns. In Paris, at least, no\r
-one knows you, and this obscurity is a garment. Oh! how she would have\r
-liked to betake herself to Paris! Impossible!\r
-\r
-She was obliged to accustom herself to disrepute, as she had accustomed\r
-herself to indigence. Gradually she decided on her course. At the\r
-expiration of two or three months she shook off her shame, and began to\r
-go about as though there were nothing the matter. "It is all the same to\r
-me," she said.\r
-\r
-She went and came, bearing her head well up, with a bitter smile, and\r
-was conscious that she was becoming brazen-faced.\r
-\r
-Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed\r
-the distress of "that creature" who, "thanks to her," had been "put back\r
-in her proper place," and congratulated herself. The happiness of the\r
-evil-minded is black.\r
-\r
-Excess of toil wore out Fantine, and the little dry cough which troubled\r
-her increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite, "Just\r
-feel how hot my hands are!"\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, when she combed her beautiful hair in the morning with\r
-an old broken comb, and it flowed about her like floss silk, she\r
-experienced a moment of happy coquetry.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--RESULT OF THE SUCCESS\r
-\r
-She had been dismissed towards the end of the winter; the summer passed,\r
-but winter came again. Short days, less work. Winter: no warmth,\r
-no light, no noonday, the evening joining on to the morning, fogs,\r
-twilight; the window is gray; it is impossible to see clearly at it. The\r
-sky is but a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern. The sun has the air\r
-of a beggar. A frightful season! Winter changes the water of heaven and\r
-the heart of man into a stone. Her creditors harrassed her.\r
-\r
-Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thenardiers, who\r
-were not promptly paid, wrote to her constantly letters whose contents\r
-drove her to despair, and whose carriage ruined her. One day they wrote\r
-to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather,\r
-that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least\r
-ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her\r
-hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber's shop at the\r
-corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair\r
-fell to her knees.\r
-\r
-"What splendid hair!" exclaimed the barber.\r
-\r
-"How much will you give me for it?" said she.\r
-\r
-"Ten francs."\r
-\r
-"Cut it off."\r
-\r
-She purchased a knitted petticoat and sent it to the Thenardiers. This\r
-petticoat made the Thenardiers furious. It was the money that they\r
-wanted. They gave the petticoat to Eponine. The poor Lark continued to\r
-shiver.\r
-\r
-Fantine thought: "My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my\r
-hair." She put on little round caps which concealed her shorn head, and\r
-in which she was still pretty.\r
-\r
-Dark thoughts held possession of Fantine's heart.\r
-\r
-When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate\r
-every one about her. She had long shared the universal veneration for\r
-Father Madeleine; yet, by dint of repeating to herself that it was he\r
-who had discharged her, that he was the cause of her unhappiness, she\r
-came to hate him also, and most of all. When she passed the factory in\r
-working hours, when the workpeople were at the door, she affected to\r
-laugh and sing.\r
-\r
-An old workwoman who once saw her laughing and singing in this fashion\r
-said, "There's a girl who will come to a bad end."\r
-\r
-She took a lover, the first who offered, a man whom she did not love,\r
-out of bravado and with rage in her heart. He was a miserable scamp,\r
-a sort of mendicant musician, a lazy beggar, who beat her, and who\r
-abandoned her as she had taken him, in disgust.\r
-\r
-She adored her child.\r
-\r
-The lower she descended, the darker everything grew about her, the more\r
-radiant shone that little angel at the bottom of her heart. She said,\r
-"When I get rich, I will have my Cosette with me;" and she laughed. Her\r
-cough did not leave her, and she had sweats on her back.\r
-\r
-One day she received from the Thenardiers a letter couched in the\r
-following terms: "Cosette is ill with a malady which is going the rounds\r
-of the neighborhood. A miliary fever, they call it. Expensive drugs are\r
-required. This is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them. If you\r
-do not send us forty francs before the week is out, the little one will\r
-be dead."\r
-\r
-She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor: "Ah! they are\r
-good! Forty francs! the idea! That makes two napoleons! Where do they\r
-think I am to get them? These peasants are stupid, truly."\r
-\r
-Nevertheless she went to a dormer window in the staircase and read the\r
-letter once more. Then she descended the stairs and emerged, running and\r
-leaping and still laughing.\r
-\r
-Some one met her and said to her, "What makes you so gay?"\r
-\r
-She replied: "A fine piece of stupidity that some country people have\r
-written to me. They demand forty francs of me. So much for you, you\r
-peasants!"\r
-\r
-As she crossed the square, she saw a great many people collected around\r
-a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed\r
-in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his rounds,\r
-who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and\r
-elixirs.\r
-\r
-Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at\r
-the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for\r
-respectable people. The tooth-puller espied the lovely, laughing girl,\r
-and suddenly exclaimed: "You have beautiful teeth, you girl there, who\r
-are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a\r
-gold napoleon apiece for them."\r
-\r
-"What are my palettes?" asked Fantine.\r
-\r
-"The palettes," replied the dental professor, "are the front teeth, the\r
-two upper ones."\r
-\r
-"How horrible!" exclaimed Fantine.\r
-\r
-"Two napoleons!" grumbled a toothless old woman who was present. "Here's\r
-a lucky girl!"\r
-\r
-Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse\r
-voice of the man shouting to her: "Reflect, my beauty! two napoleons;\r
-they may prove of service. If your heart bids you, come this evening to\r
-the inn of the Tillac d'Argent; you will find me there."\r
-\r
-Fantine returned home. She was furious, and related the occurrence to\r
-her good neighbor Marguerite: "Can you understand such a thing? Is he\r
-not an abominable man? How can they allow such people to go about the\r
-country! Pull out my two front teeth! Why, I should be horrible! My hair\r
-will grow again, but my teeth! Ah! what a monster of a man! I should\r
-prefer to throw myself head first on the pavement from the fifth story!\r
-He told me that he should be at the Tillac d'Argent this evening."\r
-\r
-"And what did he offer?" asked Marguerite.\r
-\r
-"Two napoleons."\r
-\r
-"That makes forty francs."\r
-\r
-"Yes," said Fantine; "that makes forty francs."\r
-\r
-She remained thoughtful, and began her work. At the expiration of a\r
-quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to read the Thenardiers'\r
-letter once more on the staircase.\r
-\r
-On her return, she said to Marguerite, who was at work beside her:--\r
-\r
-"What is a miliary fever? Do you know?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," answered the old spinster; "it is a disease."\r
-\r
-"Does it require many drugs?"\r
-\r
-"Oh! terrible drugs."\r
-\r
-"How does one get it?"\r
-\r
-"It is a malady that one gets without knowing how."\r
-\r
-"Then it attacks children?"\r
-\r
-"Children in particular."\r
-\r
-"Do people die of it?"\r
-\r
-"They may," said Marguerite.\r
-\r
-Fantine left the room and went to read her letter once more on the\r
-staircase.\r
-\r
-That evening she went out, and was seen to turn her steps in the\r
-direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are situated.\r
-\r
-The next morning, when Marguerite entered Fantine's room before\r
-daylight,--for they always worked together, and in this manner used only\r
-one candle for the two,--she found Fantine seated on her bed, pale and\r
-frozen. She had not lain down. Her cap had fallen on her knees.\r
-Her candle had burned all night, and was almost entirely consumed.\r
-Marguerite halted on the threshold, petrified at this tremendous\r
-wastefulness, and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Lord! the candle is all burned out! Something has happened."\r
-\r
-Then she looked at Fantine, who turned toward her her head bereft of its\r
-hair.\r
-\r
-Fantine had grown ten years older since the preceding night.\r
-\r
-"Jesus!" said Marguerite, "what is the matter with you, Fantine?"\r
-\r
-"Nothing," replied Fantine. "Quite the contrary. My child will not die\r
-of that frightful malady, for lack of succor. I am content."\r
-\r
-So saying, she pointed out to the spinster two napoleons which were\r
-glittering on the table.\r
-\r
-"Ah! Jesus God!" cried Marguerite. "Why, it is a fortune! Where did you\r
-get those louis d'or?"\r
-\r
-"I got them," replied Fantine.\r
-\r
-At the same time she smiled. The candle illuminated her countenance. It\r
-was a bloody smile. A reddish saliva soiled the corners of her lips, and\r
-she had a black hole in her mouth.\r
-\r
-The two teeth had been extracted.\r
-\r
-She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.\r
-\r
-After all it was a ruse of the Thenardiers to obtain money. Cosette was\r
-not ill.\r
-\r
-Fantine threw her mirror out of the window. She had long since quitted\r
-her cell on the second floor for an attic with only a latch to fasten\r
-it, next the roof; one of those attics whose extremity forms an angle\r
-with the floor, and knocks you on the head every instant. The poor\r
-occupant can reach the end of his chamber as he can the end of his\r
-destiny, only by bending over more and more.\r
-\r
-She had no longer a bed; a rag which she called her coverlet, a mattress\r
-on the floor, and a seatless chair still remained. A little rosebush\r
-which she had, had dried up, forgotten, in one corner. In the other\r
-corner was a butter-pot to hold water, which froze in winter, and in\r
-which the various levels of the water remained long marked by these\r
-circles of ice. She had lost her shame; she lost her coquetry. A final\r
-sign. She went out, with dirty caps. Whether from lack of time or from\r
-indifference, she no longer mended her linen. As the heels wore out,\r
-she dragged her stockings down into her shoes. This was evident from the\r
-perpendicular wrinkles. She patched her bodice, which was old and worn\r
-out, with scraps of calico which tore at the slightest movement. The\r
-people to whom she was indebted made "scenes" and gave her no peace.\r
-She found them in the street, she found them again on her staircase. She\r
-passed many a night weeping and thinking. Her eyes were very bright,\r
-and she felt a steady pain in her shoulder towards the top of the\r
-left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. She deeply hated Father\r
-Madeleine, but made no complaint. She sewed seventeen hours a day; but\r
-a contractor for the work of prisons, who made the prisoners work at a\r
-discount, suddenly made prices fall, which reduced the daily earnings\r
-of working-women to nine sous. Seventeen hours of toil, and nine sous a\r
-day! Her creditors were more pitiless than ever. The second-hand dealer,\r
-who had taken back nearly all his furniture, said to her incessantly,\r
-"When will you pay me, you hussy?" What did they want of her, good God!\r
-She felt that she was being hunted, and something of the wild beast\r
-developed in her. About the same time, Thenardier wrote to her that he\r
-had waited with decidedly too much amiability and that he must have a\r
-hundred francs at once; otherwise he would turn little Cosette out of\r
-doors, convalescent as she was from her heavy illness, into the cold and\r
-the streets, and that she might do what she liked with herself, and die\r
-if she chose. "A hundred francs," thought Fantine. "But in what trade\r
-can one earn a hundred sous a day?"\r
-\r
-"Come!" said she, "let us sell what is left."\r
-\r
-The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--CHRISTUS NOS LIBERAVIT\r
-\r
-What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave.\r
-\r
-From whom? From misery.\r
-\r
-From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul\r
-for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.\r
-\r
-The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does\r
-not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from\r
-European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs\r
-only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution.\r
-\r
-It weighs upon the woman, that is to say, upon grace, weakness, beauty,\r
-maternity. This is not one of the least of man's disgraces.\r
-\r
-At the point in this melancholy drama which we have now reached, nothing\r
-is left to Fantine of that which she had formerly been.\r
-\r
-She has become marble in becoming mire. Whoever touches her feels cold.\r
-She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and\r
-dishonored figure. Life and the social order have said their last word\r
-for her. All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has\r
-felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered\r
-everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with\r
-that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep.\r
-She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all\r
-the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that\r
-is soaked.\r
-\r
-At least, she believes it to be so; but it is an error to imagine that\r
-fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything\r
-whatever.\r
-\r
-Alas! What are all these fates, driven on pell-mell? Whither are they\r
-going? Why are they thus?\r
-\r
-He who knows that sees the whole of the shadow.\r
-\r
-He is alone. His name is God.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--M. BAMATABOIS'S INACTIVITY\r
-\r
-There is in all small towns, and there was at M. sur M. in particular,\r
-a class of young men who nibble away an income of fifteen hundred\r
-francs with the same air with which their prototypes devour two hundred\r
-thousand francs a year in Paris. These are beings of the great neuter\r
-species: impotent men, parasites, cyphers, who have a little land, a\r
-little folly, a little wit; who would be rustics in a drawing-room, and\r
-who think themselves gentlemen in the dram-shop; who say, "My fields,\r
-my peasants, my woods"; who hiss actresses at the theatre to prove that\r
-they are persons of taste; quarrel with the officers of the garrison\r
-to prove that they are men of war; hunt, smoke, yawn, drink, smell of\r
-tobacco, play billiards, stare at travellers as they descend from the\r
-diligence, live at the cafe, dine at the inn, have a dog which eats the\r
-bones under the table, and a mistress who eats the dishes on the table;\r
-who stick at a sou, exaggerate the fashions, admire tragedy, despise\r
-women, wear out their old boots, copy London through Paris, and Paris\r
-through the medium of Pont-A-Mousson, grow old as dullards, never work,\r
-serve no use, and do no great harm.\r
-\r
-M. Felix Tholomyes, had he remained in his own province and never beheld\r
-Paris, would have been one of these men.\r
-\r
-If they were richer, one would say, "They are dandies;" if they were\r
-poorer, one would say, "They are idlers." They are simply men without\r
-employment. Among these unemployed there are bores, the bored, dreamers,\r
-and some knaves.\r
-\r
-At that period a dandy was composed of a tall collar, a big cravat, a\r
-watch with trinkets, three vests of different colors, worn one on top of\r
-the other--the red and blue inside; of a short-waisted olive coat, with\r
-a codfish tail, a double row of silver buttons set close to each other\r
-and running up to the shoulder; and a pair of trousers of a lighter\r
-shade of olive, ornamented on the two seams with an indefinite, but\r
-always uneven, number of lines, varying from one to eleven--a limit\r
-which was never exceeded. Add to this, high shoes with little irons\r
-on the heels, a tall hat with a narrow brim, hair worn in a tuft, an\r
-enormous cane, and conversation set off by puns of Potier. Over all,\r
-spurs and a mustache. At that epoch mustaches indicated the bourgeois,\r
-and spurs the pedestrian.\r
-\r
-The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of\r
-mustaches.\r
-\r
-It was the period of the conflict of the republics of South America with\r
-the King of Spain, of Bolivar against Morillo. Narrow-brimmed hats were\r
-royalist, and were called morillos; liberals wore hats with wide brims,\r
-which were called bolivars.\r
-\r
-Eight or ten months, then, after that which is related in the preceding\r
-pages, towards the first of January, 1823, on a snowy evening, one of\r
-these dandies, one of these unemployed, a "right thinker," for he wore\r
-a morillo, and was, moreover, warmly enveloped in one of those large\r
-cloaks which completed the fashionable costume in cold weather, was\r
-amusing himself by tormenting a creature who was prowling about in a\r
-ball-dress, with neck uncovered and flowers in her hair, in front of\r
-the officers' cafe. This dandy was smoking, for he was decidedly\r
-fashionable.\r
-\r
-Each time that the woman passed in front of him, he bestowed on her,\r
-together with a puff from his cigar, some apostrophe which he considered\r
-witty and mirthful, such as, "How ugly you are!--Will you get out of my\r
-sight?--You have no teeth!" etc., etc. This gentleman was known as M.\r
-Bamatabois. The woman, a melancholy, decorated spectre which went and\r
-came through the snow, made him no reply, did not even glance at him,\r
-and nevertheless continued her promenade in silence, and with a sombre\r
-regularity, which brought her every five minutes within reach of this\r
-sarcasm, like the condemned soldier who returns under the rods. The\r
-small effect which he produced no doubt piqued the lounger; and taking\r
-advantage of a moment when her back was turned, he crept up behind her\r
-with the gait of a wolf, and stifling his laugh, bent down, picked up a\r
-handful of snow from the pavement, and thrust it abruptly into her back,\r
-between her bare shoulders. The woman uttered a roar, whirled round,\r
-gave a leap like a panther, and hurled herself upon the man, burying her\r
-nails in his face, with the most frightful words which could fall from\r
-the guard-room into the gutter. These insults, poured forth in a voice\r
-roughened by brandy, did, indeed, proceed in hideous wise from a mouth\r
-which lacked its two front teeth. It was Fantine.\r
-\r
-At the noise thus produced, the officers ran out in throngs from the\r
-cafe, passers-by collected, and a large and merry circle, hooting and\r
-applauding, was formed around this whirlwind composed of two beings,\r
-whom there was some difficulty in recognizing as a man and a woman: the\r
-man struggling, his hat on the ground; the woman striking out with feet\r
-and fists, bareheaded, howling, minus hair and teeth, livid with wrath,\r
-horrible.\r
-\r
-Suddenly a man of lofty stature emerged vivaciously from the crowd,\r
-seized the woman by her satin bodice, which was covered with mud, and\r
-said to her, "Follow me!"\r
-\r
-The woman raised her head; her furious voice suddenly died away. Her\r
-eyes were glassy; she turned pale instead of livid, and she trembled\r
-with a quiver of terror. She had recognized Javert.\r
-\r
-The dandy took advantage of the incident to make his escape.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIII--THE SOLUTION OF SOME QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE\r
-MUNICIPAL POLICE\r
-\r
-Javert thrust aside the spectators, broke the circle, and set out\r
-with long strides towards the police station, which is situated at the\r
-extremity of the square, dragging the wretched woman after him. She\r
-yielded mechanically. Neither he nor she uttered a word. The cloud of\r
-spectators followed, jesting, in a paroxysm of delight. Supreme misery\r
-an occasion for obscenity.\r
-\r
-On arriving at the police station, which was a low room, warmed by a\r
-stove, with a glazed and grated door opening on the street, and guarded\r
-by a detachment, Javert opened the door, entered with Fantine, and shut\r
-the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the curious, who\r
-raised themselves on tiptoe, and craned their necks in front of the\r
-thick glass of the station-house, in their effort to see. Curiosity is a\r
-sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.\r
-\r
-On entering, Fantine fell down in a corner, motionless and mute,\r
-crouching down like a terrified dog.\r
-\r
-The sergeant of the guard brought a lighted candle to the table. Javert\r
-seated himself, drew a sheet of stamped paper from his pocket, and began\r
-to write.\r
-\r
-This class of women is consigned by our laws entirely to the discretion\r
-of the police. The latter do what they please, punish them, as seems\r
-good to them, and confiscate at their will those two sorry things which\r
-they entitle their industry and their liberty. Javert was impassive; his\r
-grave face betrayed no emotion whatever. Nevertheless, he was seriously\r
-and deeply preoccupied. It was one of those moments when he was\r
-exercising without control, but subject to all the scruples of a severe\r
-conscience, his redoubtable discretionary power. At that moment he was\r
-conscious that his police agent's stool was a tribunal. He was entering\r
-judgment. He judged and condemned. He summoned all the ideas which could\r
-possibly exist in his mind, around the great thing which he was doing.\r
-The more he examined the deed of this woman, the more shocked he felt.\r
-It was evident that he had just witnessed the commission of a crime.\r
-He had just beheld, yonder, in the street, society, in the person of a\r
-freeholder and an elector, insulted and attacked by a creature who was\r
-outside all pales. A prostitute had made an attempt on the life of a\r
-citizen. He had seen that, he, Javert. He wrote in silence.\r
-\r
-When he had finished he signed the paper, folded it, and said to the\r
-sergeant of the guard, as he handed it to him, "Take three men and\r
-conduct this creature to jail."\r
-\r
-Then, turning to Fantine, "You are to have six months of it." The\r
-unhappy woman shuddered.\r
-\r
-"Six months! six months of prison!" she exclaimed. "Six months in which\r
-to earn seven sous a day! But what will become of Cosette? My daughter!\r
-my daughter! But I still owe the Thenardiers over a hundred francs; do\r
-you know that, Monsieur Inspector?"\r
-\r
-She dragged herself across the damp floor, among the muddy boots of all\r
-those men, without rising, with clasped hands, and taking great strides\r
-on her knees.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Javert," said she, "I beseech your mercy. I assure you that\r
-I was not in the wrong. If you had seen the beginning, you would have\r
-seen. I swear to you by the good God that I was not to blame! That\r
-gentleman, the bourgeois, whom I do not know, put snow in my back. Has\r
-any one the right to put snow down our backs when we are walking along\r
-peaceably, and doing no harm to any one? I am rather ill, as you see.\r
-And then, he had been saying impertinent things to me for a long time:\r
-'You are ugly! you have no teeth!' I know well that I have no longer\r
-those teeth. I did nothing; I said to myself, 'The gentleman is amusing\r
-himself.' I was honest with him; I did not speak to him. It was at that\r
-moment that he put the snow down my back. Monsieur Javert, good Monsieur\r
-Inspector! is there not some person here who saw it and can tell you\r
-that this is quite true? Perhaps I did wrong to get angry. You know that\r
-one is not master of one's self at the first moment. One gives way to\r
-vivacity; and then, when some one puts something cold down your\r
-back just when you are not expecting it! I did wrong to spoil that\r
-gentleman's hat. Why did he go away? I would ask his pardon. Oh, my God!\r
-It makes no difference to me whether I ask his pardon. Do me the favor\r
-to-day, for this once, Monsieur Javert. Hold! you do not know that in\r
-prison one can earn only seven sous a day; it is not the government's\r
-fault, but seven sous is one's earnings; and just fancy, I must pay\r
-one hundred francs, or my little girl will be sent to me. Oh, my God!\r
-I cannot have her with me. What I do is so vile! Oh, my Cosette! Oh, my\r
-little angel of the Holy Virgin! what will become of her, poor creature?\r
-I will tell you: it is the Thenardiers, inn-keepers, peasants; and such\r
-people are unreasonable. They want money. Don't put me in prison! You\r
-see, there is a little girl who will be turned out into the street to\r
-get along as best she may, in the very heart of the winter; and you must\r
-have pity on such a being, my good Monsieur Javert. If she were older,\r
-she might earn her living; but it cannot be done at that age. I am not a\r
-bad woman at bottom. It is not cowardliness and gluttony that have made\r
-me what I am. If I have drunk brandy, it was out of misery. I do not\r
-love it; but it benumbs the senses. When I was happy, it was only\r
-necessary to glance into my closets, and it would have been evident that\r
-I was not a coquettish and untidy woman. I had linen, a great deal of\r
-linen. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!"\r
-\r
-She spoke thus, rent in twain, shaken with sobs, blinded with tears,\r
-her neck bare, wringing her hands, and coughing with a dry, short cough,\r
-stammering softly with a voice of agony. Great sorrow is a divine and\r
-terrible ray, which transfigures the unhappy. At that moment Fantine had\r
-become beautiful once more. From time to time she paused, and tenderly\r
-kissed the police agent's coat. She would have softened a heart of\r
-granite; but a heart of wood cannot be softened.\r
-\r
-"Come!" said Javert, "I have heard you out. Have you entirely finished?\r
-You will get six months. Now march! The Eternal Father in person could\r
-do nothing more."\r
-\r
-At these solemn words, "the Eternal Father in person could do nothing\r
-more," she understood that her fate was sealed. She sank down,\r
-murmuring, "Mercy!"\r
-\r
-Javert turned his back.\r
-\r
-The soldiers seized her by the arms.\r
-\r
-A few moments earlier a man had entered, but no one had paid any heed\r
-to him. He shut the door, leaned his back against it, and listened to\r
-Fantine's despairing supplications.\r
-\r
-At the instant when the soldiers laid their hands upon the unfortunate\r
-woman, who would not rise, he emerged from the shadow, and said:--\r
-\r
-"One moment, if you please."\r
-\r
-Javert raised his eyes and recognized M. Madeleine. He removed his hat,\r
-and, saluting him with a sort of aggrieved awkwardness:--\r
-\r
-"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor--"\r
-\r
-The words "Mr. Mayor" produced a curious effect upon Fantine. She rose\r
-to her feet with one bound, like a spectre springing from the earth,\r
-thrust aside the soldiers with both arms, walked straight up to M.\r
-Madeleine before any one could prevent her, and gazing intently at him,\r
-with a bewildered air, she cried:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! so it is you who are M. le Maire!"\r
-\r
-Then she burst into a laugh, and spit in his face.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine wiped his face, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty."\r
-\r
-Javert felt that he was on the verge of going mad. He experienced at\r
-that moment, blow upon blow and almost simultaneously, the most violent\r
-emotions which he had ever undergone in all his life. To see a woman of\r
-the town spit in the mayor's face was a thing so monstrous that, in his\r
-most daring flights of fancy, he would have regarded it as a sacrilege\r
-to believe it possible. On the other hand, at the very bottom of his\r
-thought, he made a hideous comparison as to what this woman was, and as\r
-to what this mayor might be; and then he, with horror, caught a glimpse\r
-of I know not what simple explanation of this prodigious attack. But\r
-when he beheld that mayor, that magistrate, calmly wipe his face and\r
-say, "Set this woman at liberty," he underwent a sort of intoxication\r
-of amazement; thought and word failed him equally; the sum total of\r
-possible astonishment had been exceeded in his case. He remained mute.\r
-\r
-The words had produced no less strange an effect on Fantine. She raised\r
-her bare arm, and clung to the damper of the stove, like a person who\r
-is reeling. Nevertheless, she glanced about her, and began to speak in a\r
-low voice, as though talking to herself:--\r
-\r
-"At liberty! I am to be allowed to go! I am not to go to prison for six\r
-months! Who said that? It is not possible that any one could have said\r
-that. I did not hear aright. It cannot have been that monster of a\r
-mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said that I was to be\r
-set free? Oh, see here! I will tell you about it, and you will let me\r
-go. That monster of a mayor, that old blackguard of a mayor, is the\r
-cause of all. Just imagine, Monsieur Javert, he turned me out! all\r
-because of a pack of rascally women, who gossip in the workroom. If that\r
-is not a horror, what is? To dismiss a poor girl who is doing her\r
-work honestly! Then I could no longer earn enough, and all this misery\r
-followed. In the first place, there is one improvement which these\r
-gentlemen of the police ought to make, and that is, to prevent prison\r
-contractors from wronging poor people. I will explain it to you, you\r
-see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to\r
-nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become\r
-whatever one can. As for me, I had my little Cosette, and I was actually\r
-forced to become a bad woman. Now you understand how it is that that\r
-blackguard of a mayor caused all the mischief. After that I stamped on\r
-that gentleman's hat in front of the officers' cafe; but he had spoiled\r
-my whole dress with snow. We women have but one silk dress for evening\r
-wear. You see that I did not do wrong deliberately--truly, Monsieur\r
-Javert; and everywhere I behold women who are far more wicked than I,\r
-and who are much happier. O Monsieur Javert! it was you who gave orders\r
-that I am to be set free, was it not? Make inquiries, speak to my\r
-landlord; I am paying my rent now; they will tell you that I am\r
-perfectly honest. Ah! my God! I beg your pardon; I have unintentionally\r
-touched the damper of the stove, and it has made it smoke."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine listened to her with profound attention. While she was\r
-speaking, he fumbled in his waistcoat, drew out his purse and opened\r
-it. It was empty. He put it back in his pocket. He said to Fantine, "How\r
-much did you say that you owed?"\r
-\r
-Fantine, who was looking at Javert only, turned towards him:--\r
-\r
-"Was I speaking to you?"\r
-\r
-Then, addressing the soldiers:--\r
-\r
-"Say, you fellows, did you see how I spit in his face? Ah! you old\r
-wretch of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I'm not afraid of\r
-you. I am afraid of Monsieur Javert. I am afraid of my good Monsieur\r
-Javert!"\r
-\r
-So saying, she turned to the inspector again:--\r
-\r
-"And yet, you see, Mr. Inspector, it is necessary to be just. I\r
-understand that you are just, Mr. Inspector; in fact, it is perfectly\r
-simple: a man amuses himself by putting snow down a woman's back, and\r
-that makes the officers laugh; one must divert themselves in some way;\r
-and we--well, we are here for them to amuse themselves with, of course!\r
-And then, you, you come; you are certainly obliged to preserve order,\r
-you lead off the woman who is in the wrong; but on reflection, since you\r
-are a good man, you say that I am to be set at liberty; it is for\r
-the sake of the little one, for six months in prison would prevent my\r
-supporting my child. 'Only, don't do it again, you hussy!' Oh! I won't\r
-do it again, Monsieur Javert! They may do whatever they please to me\r
-now; I will not stir. But to-day, you see, I cried because it hurt me.\r
-I was not expecting that snow from the gentleman at all; and then as I\r
-told you, I am not well; I have a cough; I seem to have a burning ball\r
-in my stomach, and the doctor tells me, 'Take care of yourself.' Here,\r
-feel, give me your hand; don't be afraid--it is here."\r
-\r
-She no longer wept, her voice was caressing; she placed Javert's coarse\r
-hand on her delicate, white throat and looked smilingly at him.\r
-\r
-All at once she rapidly adjusted her disordered garments, dropped the\r
-folds of her skirt, which had been pushed up as she dragged herself\r
-along, almost to the height of her knee, and stepped towards the door,\r
-saying to the soldiers in a low voice, and with a friendly nod:--\r
-\r
-"Children, Monsieur l'Inspecteur has said that I am to be released, and\r
-I am going."\r
-\r
-She laid her hand on the latch of the door. One step more and she would\r
-be in the street.\r
-\r
-Javert up to that moment had remained erect, motionless, with his eyes\r
-fixed on the ground, cast athwart this scene like some displaced statue,\r
-which is waiting to be put away somewhere.\r
-\r
-The sound of the latch roused him. He raised his head with an expression\r
-of sovereign authority, an expression all the more alarming in\r
-proportion as the authority rests on a low level, ferocious in the wild\r
-beast, atrocious in the man of no estate.\r
-\r
-"Sergeant!" he cried, "don't you see that that jade is walking off! Who\r
-bade you let her go?"\r
-\r
-"I," said Madeleine.\r
-\r
-Fantine trembled at the sound of Javert's voice, and let go of the latch\r
-as a thief relinquishes the article which he has stolen. At the sound\r
-of Madeleine's voice she turned around, and from that moment forth she\r
-uttered no word, nor dared so much as to breathe freely, but her glance\r
-strayed from Madeleine to Javert, and from Javert to Madeleine in turn,\r
-according to which was speaking.\r
-\r
-It was evident that Javert must have been exasperated beyond measure\r
-before he would permit himself to apostrophize the sergeant as he\r
-had done, after the mayor's suggestion that Fantine should be set at\r
-liberty. Had he reached the point of forgetting the mayor's presence?\r
-Had he finally declared to himself that it was impossible that any\r
-"authority" should have given such an order, and that the mayor must\r
-certainly have said one thing by mistake for another, without intending\r
-it? Or, in view of the enormities of which he had been a witness for the\r
-past two hours, did he say to himself, that it was necessary to recur to\r
-supreme resolutions, that it was indispensable that the small should\r
-be made great, that the police spy should transform himself into a\r
-magistrate, that the policeman should become a dispenser of justice, and\r
-that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government,\r
-society in its entirety, was personified in him, Javert?\r
-\r
-However that may be, when M. Madeleine uttered that word, _I_, as we\r
-have just heard, Police Inspector Javert was seen to turn toward the\r
-mayor, pale, cold, with blue lips, and a look of despair, his whole body\r
-agitated by an imperceptible quiver and an unprecedented occurrence, and\r
-say to him, with downcast eyes but a firm voice:--\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor, that cannot be."\r
-\r
-"Why not?" said M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-"This miserable woman has insulted a citizen."\r
-\r
-"Inspector Javert," replied the mayor, in a calm and conciliating tone,\r
-"listen. You are an honest man, and I feel no hesitation in explaining\r
-matters to you. Here is the true state of the case: I was passing\r
-through the square just as you were leading this woman away; there were\r
-still groups of people standing about, and I made inquiries and learned\r
-everything; it was the townsman who was in the wrong and who should have\r
-been arrested by properly conducted police."\r
-\r
-Javert retorted:--\r
-\r
-"This wretch has just insulted Monsieur le Maire."\r
-\r
-"That concerns me," said M. Madeleine. "My own insult belongs to me, I\r
-think. I can do what I please about it."\r
-\r
-"I beg Monsieur le Maire's pardon. The insult is not to him but to the\r
-law."\r
-\r
-"Inspector Javert," replied M. Madeleine, "the highest law is\r
-conscience. I have heard this woman; I know what I am doing."\r
-\r
-"And I, Mr. Mayor, do not know what I see."\r
-\r
-"Then content yourself with obeying."\r
-\r
-"I am obeying my duty. My duty demands that this woman shall serve six\r
-months in prison."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine replied gently:--\r
-\r
-"Heed this well; she will not serve a single day."\r
-\r
-At this decisive word, Javert ventured to fix a searching look on the\r
-mayor and to say, but in a tone of voice that was still profoundly\r
-respectful:--\r
-\r
-"I am sorry to oppose Monsieur le Maire; it is for the first time in my\r
-life, but he will permit me to remark that I am within the bounds of my\r
-authority. I confine myself, since Monsieur le Maire desires it, to the\r
-question of the gentleman. I was present. This woman flung herself\r
-on Monsieur Bamatabnois, who is an elector and the proprietor of that\r
-handsome house with a balcony, which forms the corner of the esplanade,\r
-three stories high and entirely of cut stone. Such things as there are\r
-in the world! In any case, Monsieur le Maire, this is a question of\r
-police regulations in the streets, and concerns me, and I shall detain\r
-this woman Fantine."\r
-\r
-Then M. Madeleine folded his arms, and said in a severe voice which no\r
-one in the town had heard hitherto:--\r
-\r
-"The matter to which you refer is one connected with the municipal\r
-police. According to the terms of articles nine, eleven, fifteen, and\r
-sixty-six of the code of criminal examination, I am the judge. I order\r
-that this woman shall be set at liberty."\r
-\r
-Javert ventured to make a final effort.\r
-\r
-"But, Mr. Mayor--"\r
-\r
-"I refer you to article eighty-one of the law of the 13th of December,\r
-1799, in regard to arbitrary detention."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Maire, permit me--"\r
-\r
-"Not another word."\r
-\r
-"But--"\r
-\r
-"Leave the room," said M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-Javert received the blow erect, full in the face, in his breast, like\r
-a Russian soldier. He bowed to the very earth before the mayor and left\r
-the room.\r
-\r
-Fantine stood aside from the door and stared at him in amazement as he\r
-passed.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, she also was the prey to a strange confusion. She had just\r
-seen herself a subject of dispute between two opposing powers. She had\r
-seen two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul,\r
-her child, in combat before her very eyes; one of these men was drawing\r
-her towards darkness, the other was leading her back towards the light.\r
-In this conflict, viewed through the exaggerations of terror, these two\r
-men had appeared to her like two giants; the one spoke like her demon,\r
-the other like her good angel. The angel had conquered the demon, and,\r
-strange to say, that which made her shudder from head to foot was\r
-the fact that this angel, this liberator, was the very man whom she\r
-abhorred, that mayor whom she had so long regarded as the author of all\r
-her woes, that Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had insulted\r
-him in so hideous a fashion, he had saved her! Had she, then, been\r
-mistaken? Must she change her whole soul? She did not know; she\r
-trembled. She listened in bewilderment, she looked on in affright, and\r
-at every word uttered by M. Madeleine she felt the frightful shades of\r
-hatred crumble and melt within her, and something warm and ineffable,\r
-indescribable, which was both joy, confidence and love, dawn in her\r
-heart.\r
-\r
-When Javert had taken his departure, M. Madeleine turned to her and said\r
-to her in a deliberate voice, like a serious man who does not wish to\r
-weep and who finds some difficulty in speaking:--\r
-\r
-"I have heard you. I knew nothing about what you have mentioned. I\r
-believe that it is true, and I feel that it is true. I was even ignorant\r
-of the fact that you had left my shop. Why did you not apply to me? But\r
-here; I will pay your debts, I will send for your child, or you shall go\r
-to her. You shall live here, in Paris, or where you please. I undertake\r
-the care of your child and yourself. You shall not work any longer if\r
-you do not like. I will give all the money you require. You shall be\r
-honest and happy once more. And listen! I declare to you that if all\r
-is as you say,--and I do not doubt it,--you have never ceased to be\r
-virtuous and holy in the sight of God. Oh! poor woman."\r
-\r
-This was more than Fantine could bear. To have Cosette! To leave this\r
-life of infamy. To live free, rich, happy, respectable with Cosette; to\r
-see all these realities of paradise blossom of a sudden in the midst of\r
-her misery. She stared stupidly at this man who was talking to her, and\r
-could only give vent to two or three sobs, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"\r
-\r
-Her limbs gave way beneath her, she knelt in front of M. Madeleine, and\r
-before he could prevent her he felt her grasp his hand and press her\r
-lips to it.\r
-\r
-Then she fainted.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE BEGINNING OF REPOSE\r
-\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine had Fantine removed to that infirmary which he had\r
-established in his own house. He confided her to the sisters, who put\r
-her to bed. A burning fever had come on. She passed a part of the night\r
-in delirium and raving. At length, however, she fell asleep.\r
-\r
-On the morrow, towards midday, Fantine awoke. She heard some one\r
-breathing close to her bed; she drew aside the curtain and saw M.\r
-Madeleine standing there and looking at something over her head. His\r
-gaze was full of pity, anguish, and supplication. She followed its\r
-direction, and saw that it was fixed on a crucifix which was nailed to\r
-the wall.\r
-\r
-Thenceforth, M. Madeleine was transfigured in Fantine's eyes. He seemed\r
-to her to be clothed in light. He was absorbed in a sort of prayer. She\r
-gazed at him for a long time without daring to interrupt him. At last\r
-she said timidly:--\r
-\r
-"What are you doing?"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine had been there for an hour. He had been waiting for Fantine\r
-to awake. He took her hand, felt of her pulse, and replied:--\r
-\r
-"How do you feel?"\r
-\r
-"Well, I have slept," she replied; "I think that I am better, It is\r
-nothing."\r
-\r
-He answered, responding to the first question which she had put to him\r
-as though he had just heard it:--\r
-\r
-"I was praying to the martyr there on high."\r
-\r
-And he added in his own mind, "For the martyr here below."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine had passed the night and the morning in making inquiries.\r
-He knew all now. He knew Fantine's history in all its heart-rending\r
-details. He went on:--\r
-\r
-"You have suffered much, poor mother. Oh! do not complain; you now have\r
-the dowry of the elect. It is thus that men are transformed into angels.\r
-It is not their fault they do not know how to go to work otherwise.\r
-You see this hell from which you have just emerged is the first form of\r
-heaven. It was necessary to begin there."\r
-\r
-He sighed deeply. But she smiled on him with that sublime smile in which\r
-two teeth were lacking.\r
-\r
-That same night, Javert wrote a letter. The next morning be posted it\r
-himself at the office of M. sur M. It was addressed to Paris, and the\r
-superscription ran: To Monsieur Chabouillet, Secretary of Monsieur le\r
-Prefet of Police. As the affair in the station-house had been bruited\r
-about, the post-mistress and some other persons who saw the letter\r
-before it was sent off, and who recognized Javert's handwriting on the\r
-cover, thought that he was sending in his resignation.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine made haste to write to the Thenardiers. Fantine owed\r
-them one hundred and twenty francs. He sent them three hundred francs,\r
-telling them to pay themselves from that sum, and to fetch the child\r
-instantly to M. sur M., where her sick mother required her presence.\r
-\r
-This dazzled Thenardier. "The devil!" said the man to his wife; "don't\r
-let's allow the child to go. This lark is going to turn into a milch\r
-cow. I see through it. Some ninny has taken a fancy to the mother."\r
-\r
-He replied with a very well drawn-up bill for five hundred and some odd\r
-francs. In this memorandum two indisputable items figured up over three\r
-hundred francs,--one for the doctor, the other for the apothecary\r
-who had attended and physicked Eponine and Azelma through two long\r
-illnesses. Cosette, as we have already said, had not been ill. It was\r
-only a question of a trifling substitution of names. At the foot of the\r
-memorandum Thenardier wrote, Received on account, three hundred francs.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine immediately sent three hundred francs more, and wrote,\r
-"Make haste to bring Cosette."\r
-\r
-"Christi!" said Thenardier, "let's not give up the child."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Fantine did not recover. She still remained in the\r
-infirmary.\r
-\r
-The sisters had at first only received and nursed "that woman" with\r
-repugnance. Those who have seen the bas-reliefs of Rheims will recall\r
-the inflation of the lower lip of the wise virgins as they survey the\r
-foolish virgins. The ancient scorn of the vestals for the ambubajae is\r
-one of the most profound instincts of feminine dignity; the sisters\r
-felt it with the double force contributed by religion. But in a few days\r
-Fantine disarmed them. She said all kinds of humble and gentle things,\r
-and the mother in her provoked tenderness. One day the sisters heard\r
-her say amid her fever: "I have been a sinner; but when I have my child\r
-beside me, it will be a sign that God has pardoned me. While I was\r
-leading a bad life, I should not have liked to have my Cosette with me;\r
-I could not have borne her sad, astonished eyes. It was for her sake\r
-that I did evil, and that is why God pardons me. I shall feel the\r
-benediction of the good God when Cosette is here. I shall gaze at her;\r
-it will do me good to see that innocent creature. She knows nothing at\r
-all. She is an angel, you see, my sisters. At that age the wings have\r
-not fallen off."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine went to see her twice a day, and each time she asked him:--\r
-\r
-"Shall I see my Cosette soon?"\r
-\r
-He answered:--\r
-\r
-"To-morrow, perhaps. She may arrive at any moment. I am expecting her."\r
-\r
-And the mother's pale face grew radiant.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" she said, "how happy I am going to be!"\r
-\r
-We have just said that she did not recover her health. On the contrary,\r
-her condition seemed to become more grave from week to week. That\r
-handful of snow applied to her bare skin between her shoulder-blades had\r
-brought about a sudden suppression of perspiration, as a consequence of\r
-which the malady which had been smouldering within her for many years\r
-was violently developed at last. At that time people were beginning to\r
-follow the fine Laennec's fine suggestions in the study and treatment of\r
-chest maladies. The doctor sounded Fantine's chest and shook his head.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine said to the doctor:--\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"Has she not a child which she desires to see?" said the doctor.\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Well! Make haste and get it here!"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine shuddered.\r
-\r
-Fantine inquired:--\r
-\r
-"What did the doctor say?"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine forced himself to smile.\r
-\r
-"He said that your child was to be brought speedily. That that would\r
-restore your health."\r
-\r
-"Oh!" she rejoined, "he is right! But what do those Thenardiers mean\r
-by keeping my Cosette from me! Oh! she is coming. At last I behold\r
-happiness close beside me!"\r
-\r
-In the meantime Thenardier did not "let go of the child," and gave a\r
-hundred insufficient reasons for it. Cosette was not quite well enough\r
-to take a journey in the winter. And then, there still remained some\r
-petty but pressing debts in the neighborhood, and they were collecting\r
-the bills for them, etc., etc.\r
-\r
-"I shall send some one to fetch Cosette!" said Father Madeleine. "If\r
-necessary, I will go myself."\r
-\r
-He wrote the following letter to Fantine's dictation, and made her sign\r
-it:--\r
-\r
- "MONSIEUR THENARDIER:--\r
- You will deliver Cosette to this person.\r
- You will be paid for all the little things.\r
- I have the honor to salute you with respect.\r
- "FANTINE."\r
-\r
-\r
-In the meantime a serious incident occurred. Carve as we will the\r
-mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny\r
-constantly reappears in it.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--HOW JEAN MAY BECOME CHAMP\r
-\r
-\r
-One morning M. Madeleine was in his study, occupied in arranging in\r
-advance some pressing matters connected with the mayor's office, in case\r
-he should decide to take the trip to Montfermeil, when he was informed\r
-that Police Inspector Javert was desirous of speaking with him.\r
-Madeleine could not refrain from a disagreeable impression on hearing\r
-this name. Javert had avoided him more than ever since the affair of the\r
-police-station, and M. Madeleine had not seen him.\r
-\r
-"Admit him," he said.\r
-\r
-Javert entered.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine had retained his seat near the fire, pen in hand, his eyes\r
-fixed on the docket which he was turning over and annotating, and which\r
-contained the trials of the commission on highways for the infraction of\r
-police regulations. He did not disturb himself on Javert's account. He\r
-could not help thinking of poor Fantine, and it suited him to be glacial\r
-in his manner.\r
-\r
-Javert bestowed a respectful salute on the mayor, whose back was turned\r
-to him. The mayor did not look at him, but went on annotating this\r
-docket.\r
-\r
-Javert advanced two or three paces into the study, and halted, without\r
-breaking the silence.\r
-\r
-If any physiognomist who had been familiar with Javert, and who had\r
-made a lengthy study of this savage in the service of civilization,\r
-this singular composite of the Roman, the Spartan, the monk, and the\r
-corporal, this spy who was incapable of a lie, this unspotted police\r
-agent--if any physiognomist had known his secret and long-cherished\r
-aversion for M. Madeleine, his conflict with the mayor on the subject of\r
-Fantine, and had examined Javert at that moment, he would have said to\r
-himself, "What has taken place?" It was evident to any one acquainted\r
-with that clear, upright, sincere, honest, austere, and ferocious\r
-conscience, that Javert had but just gone through some great interior\r
-struggle. Javert had nothing in his soul which he had not also in his\r
-countenance. Like violent people in general, he was subject to abrupt\r
-changes of opinion. His physiognomy had never been more peculiar and\r
-startling. On entering he bowed to M. Madeleine with a look in which\r
-there was neither rancor, anger, nor distrust; he halted a few paces in\r
-the rear of the mayor's arm-chair, and there he stood, perfectly erect,\r
-in an attitude almost of discipline, with the cold, ingenuous roughness\r
-of a man who has never been gentle and who has always been patient; he\r
-waited without uttering a word, without making a movement, in genuine\r
-humility and tranquil resignation, calm, serious, hat in hand, with\r
-eyes cast down, and an expression which was half-way between that of a\r
-soldier in the presence of his officer and a criminal in the presence\r
-of his judge, until it should please the mayor to turn round. All the\r
-sentiments as well as all the memories which one might have attributed\r
-to him had disappeared. That face, as impenetrable and simple as\r
-granite, no longer bore any trace of anything but a melancholy\r
-depression. His whole person breathed lowliness and firmness and an\r
-indescribable courageous despondency.\r
-\r
-At last the mayor laid down his pen and turned half round.\r
-\r
-"Well! What is it? What is the matter, Javert?"\r
-\r
-Javert remained silent for an instant as though collecting his ideas,\r
-then raised his voice with a sort of sad solemnity, which did not,\r
-however, preclude simplicity.\r
-\r
-"This is the matter, Mr. Mayor; a culpable act has been committed."\r
-\r
-"What act?"\r
-\r
-"An inferior agent of the authorities has failed in respect, and in the\r
-gravest manner, towards a magistrate. I have come to bring the fact to\r
-your knowledge, as it is my duty to do."\r
-\r
-"Who is the agent?" asked M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-"I," said Javert.\r
-\r
-"You?"\r
-\r
-"I."\r
-\r
-"And who is the magistrate who has reason to complain of the agent?"\r
-\r
-"You, Mr. Mayor."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine sat erect in his arm-chair. Javert went on, with a severe\r
-air and his eyes still cast down.\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor, I have come to request you to instigate the authorities to\r
-dismiss me."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine opened his mouth in amazement. Javert interrupted him:--\r
-\r
-"You will say that I might have handed in my resignation, but that does\r
-not suffice. Handing in one's resignation is honorable. I have failed in\r
-my duty; I ought to be punished; I must be turned out."\r
-\r
-And after a pause he added:--\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor, you were severe with me the other day, and unjustly. Be so\r
-to-day, with justice."\r
-\r
-"Come, now! Why?" exclaimed M. Madeleine. "What nonsense is this?\r
-What is the meaning of this? What culpable act have you been guilty of\r
-towards me? What have you done to me? What are your wrongs with regard\r
-to me? You accuse yourself; you wish to be superseded--"\r
-\r
-"Turned out," said Javert.\r
-\r
-"Turned out; so it be, then. That is well. I do not understand."\r
-\r
-"You shall understand, Mr. Mayor."\r
-\r
-Javert sighed from the very bottom of his chest, and resumed, still\r
-coldly and sadly:--\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor, six weeks ago, in consequence of the scene over that woman,\r
-I was furious, and I informed against you."\r
-\r
-"Informed against me!"\r
-\r
-"At the Prefecture of Police in Paris."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine, who was not in the habit of laughing much oftener than\r
-Javert himself, burst out laughing now:--\r
-\r
-"As a mayor who had encroached on the province of the police?"\r
-\r
-"As an ex-convict."\r
-\r
-The mayor turned livid.\r
-\r
-Javert, who had not raised his eyes, went on:--\r
-\r
-"I thought it was so. I had had an idea for a long time; a resemblance;\r
-inquiries which you had caused to be made at Faverolles; the strength\r
-of your loins; the adventure with old Fauchelevant; your skill in\r
-marksmanship; your leg, which you drag a little;--I hardly know what\r
-all,--absurdities! But, at all events, I took you for a certain Jean\r
-Valjean."\r
-\r
-"A certain--What did you say the name was?"\r
-\r
-"Jean Valjean. He was a convict whom I was in the habit of seeing twenty\r
-years ago, when I was adjutant-guard of convicts at Toulon. On leaving\r
-the galleys, this Jean Valjean, as it appears, robbed a bishop; then he\r
-committed another theft, accompanied with violence, on a public highway\r
-on the person of a little Savoyard. He disappeared eight years ago, no\r
-one knows how, and he has been sought, I fancied. In short, I did this\r
-thing! Wrath impelled me; I denounced you at the Prefecture!"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine, who had taken up the docket again several moments before\r
-this, resumed with an air of perfect indifference:--\r
-\r
-"And what reply did you receive?"\r
-\r
-"That I was mad."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"Well, they were right."\r
-\r
-"It is lucky that you recognize the fact."\r
-\r
-"I am forced to do so, since the real Jean Valjean has been found."\r
-\r
-The sheet of paper which M. Madeleine was holding dropped from his\r
-hand; he raised his head, gazed fixedly at Javert, and said with his\r
-indescribable accent:--\r
-\r
-"Ah!"\r
-\r
-Javert continued:--\r
-\r
-"This is the way it is, Mr. Mayor. It seems that there was in the\r
-neighborhood near Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher an old fellow who was called\r
-Father Champmathieu. He was a very wretched creature. No one paid any\r
-attention to him. No one knows what such people subsist on. Lately, last\r
-autumn, Father Champmathieu was arrested for the theft of some cider\r
-apples from--Well, no matter, a theft had been committed, a wall scaled,\r
-branches of trees broken. My Champmathieu was arrested. He still had\r
-the branch of apple-tree in his hand. The scamp is locked up. Up to\r
-this point it was merely an affair of a misdemeanor. But here is where\r
-Providence intervened.\r
-\r
-"The jail being in a bad condition, the examining magistrate finds it\r
-convenient to transfer Champmathieu to Arras, where the departmental\r
-prison is situated. In this prison at Arras there is an ex-convict named\r
-Brevet, who is detained for I know not what, and who has been appointed\r
-turnkey of the house, because of good behavior. Mr. Mayor, no sooner had\r
-Champmathieu arrived than Brevet exclaims: 'Eh! Why, I know that man!\r
-He is a fagot![4] Take a good look at me, my good man! You are Jean\r
-Valjean!' 'Jean Valjean! who's Jean Valjean?' Champmathieu feigns\r
-astonishment. 'Don't play the innocent dodge,' says Brevet. 'You are\r
-Jean Valjean! You have been in the galleys of Toulon; it was twenty\r
-years ago; we were there together.' Champmathieu denies it. Parbleu! You\r
-understand. The case is investigated. The thing was well ventilated for\r
-me. This is what they discovered: This Champmathieu had been, thirty\r
-years ago, a pruner of trees in various localities, notably at\r
-Faverolles. There all trace of him was lost. A long time afterwards he\r
-was seen again in Auvergne; then in Paris, where he is said to have been\r
-a wheelwright, and to have had a daughter, who was a laundress; but that\r
-has not been proved. Now, before going to the galleys for theft, what\r
-was Jean Valjean? A pruner of trees. Where? At Faverolles. Another fact.\r
-This Valjean's Christian name was Jean, and his mother's surname was\r
-Mathieu. What more natural to suppose than that, on emerging from the\r
-galleys, he should have taken his mother's name for the purpose of\r
-concealing himself, and have called himself Jean Mathieu? He goes to\r
-Auvergne. The local pronunciation turns Jean into Chan--he is called\r
-Chan Mathieu. Our man offers no opposition, and behold him transformed\r
-into Champmathieu. You follow me, do you not? Inquiries were made at\r
-Faverolles. The family of Jean Valjean is no longer there. It is not\r
-known where they have gone. You know that among those classes a family\r
-often disappears. Search was made, and nothing was found. When such\r
-people are not mud, they are dust. And then, as the beginning of the\r
-story dates thirty years back, there is no longer any one at Faverolles\r
-who knew Jean Valjean. Inquiries were made at Toulon. Besides Brevet,\r
-there are only two convicts in existence who have seen Jean Valjean;\r
-they are Cochepaille and Chenildieu, and are sentenced for life.\r
-They are taken from the galleys and confronted with the pretended\r
-Champmathieu. They do not hesitate; he is Jean Valjean for them as well\r
-as for Brevet. The same age,--he is fifty-four,--the same height, the\r
-same air, the same man; in short, it is he. It was precisely at this\r
-moment that I forwarded my denunciation to the Prefecture in Paris. I\r
-was told that I had lost my reason, and that Jean Valjean is at Arras,\r
-in the power of the authorities. You can imagine whether this surprised\r
-me, when I thought that I had that same Jean Valjean here. I write to\r
-the examining judge; he sends for me; Champmathieu is conducted to me--"\r
-\r
-"Well?" interposed M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-Javert replied, his face incorruptible, and as melancholy as ever:--\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor, the truth is the truth. I am sorry; but that man is Jean\r
-Valjean. I recognized him also."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine resumed in, a very low voice:--\r
-\r
-"You are sure?"\r
-\r
-Javert began to laugh, with that mournful laugh which comes from\r
-profound conviction.\r
-\r
-"O! Sure!"\r
-\r
-He stood there thoughtfully for a moment, mechanically taking pinches of\r
-powdered wood for blotting ink from the wooden bowl which stood on the\r
-table, and he added:--\r
-\r
-"And even now that I have seen the real Jean Valjean, I do not see how I\r
-could have thought otherwise. I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor."\r
-\r
-Javert, as he addressed these grave and supplicating words to the man,\r
-who six weeks before had humiliated him in the presence of the whole\r
-station-house, and bade him "leave the room,"--Javert, that haughty man,\r
-was unconsciously full of simplicity and dignity,--M. Madeleine made no\r
-other reply to his prayer than the abrupt question:--\r
-\r
-"And what does this man say?"\r
-\r
-"Ah! Indeed, Mr. Mayor, it's a bad business. If he is Jean Valjean, he\r
-has his previous conviction against him. To climb a wall, to break a\r
-branch, to purloin apples, is a mischievous trick in a child; for a\r
-man it is a misdemeanor; for a convict it is a crime. Robbing\r
-and housebreaking--it is all there. It is no longer a question of\r
-correctional police; it is a matter for the Court of Assizes. It is no\r
-longer a matter of a few days in prison; it is the galleys for life. And\r
-then, there is the affair with the little Savoyard, who will return, I\r
-hope. The deuce! there is plenty to dispute in the matter, is there not?\r
-Yes, for any one but Jean Valjean. But Jean Valjean is a sly dog. That\r
-is the way I recognized him. Any other man would have felt that things\r
-were getting hot for him; he would struggle, he would cry out--the\r
-kettle sings before the fire; he would not be Jean Valjean, et\r
-cetera. But he has not the appearance of understanding; he says, 'I am\r
-Champmathieu, and I won't depart from that!' He has an astonished air,\r
-he pretends to be stupid; it is far better. Oh! the rogue is clever! But\r
-it makes no difference. The proofs are there. He has been recognized by\r
-four persons; the old scamp will be condemned. The case has been taken\r
-to the Assizes at Arras. I shall go there to give my testimony. I have\r
-been summoned."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine had turned to his desk again, and taken up his docket, and\r
-was turning over the leaves tranquilly, reading and writing by turns,\r
-like a busy man. He turned to Javert:--\r
-\r
-"That will do, Javert. In truth, all these details interest me but\r
-little. We are wasting our time, and we have pressing business on hand.\r
-Javert, you will betake yourself at once to the house of the woman\r
-Buseaupied, who sells herbs at the corner of the Rue Saint-Saulve. You\r
-will tell her that she must enter her complaint against carter Pierre\r
-Chesnelong. The man is a brute, who came near crushing this woman and\r
-her child. He must be punished. You will then go to M. Charcellay,\r
-Rue Montre-de-Champigny. He complained that there is a gutter on the\r
-adjoining house which discharges rain-water on his premises, and is\r
-undermining the foundations of his house. After that, you will verify\r
-the infractions of police regulations which have been reported to me in\r
-the Rue Guibourg, at Widow Doris's, and Rue du Garraud-Blanc, at Madame\r
-Renee le Bosse's, and you will prepare documents. But I am giving you a\r
-great deal of work. Are you not to be absent? Did you not tell me that\r
-you were going to Arras on that matter in a week or ten days?"\r
-\r
-"Sooner than that, Mr. Mayor."\r
-\r
-"On what day, then?"\r
-\r
-"Why, I thought that I had said to Monsieur le Maire that the case was\r
-to be tried to-morrow, and that I am to set out by diligence to-night."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine made an imperceptible movement.\r
-\r
-"And how long will the case last?"\r
-\r
-"One day, at the most. The judgment will be pronounced to-morrow evening\r
-at latest. But I shall not wait for the sentence, which is certain; I\r
-shall return here as soon as my deposition has been taken."\r
-\r
-"That is well," said M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-And he dismissed Javert with a wave of the hand.\r
-\r
-Javert did not withdraw.\r
-\r
-"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor," said he.\r
-\r
-"What is it now?" demanded M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor, there is still something of which I must remind you."\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-"That I must be dismissed."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine rose.\r
-\r
-"Javert, you are a man of honor, and I esteem you. You exaggerate your\r
-fault. Moreover, this is an offence which concerns me. Javert, you\r
-deserve promotion instead of degradation. I wish you to retain your\r
-post."\r
-\r
-Javert gazed at M. Madeleine with his candid eyes, in whose depths his\r
-not very enlightened but pure and rigid conscience seemed visible, and\r
-said in a tranquil voice:--\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor, I cannot grant you that."\r
-\r
-"I repeat," replied M. Madeleine, "that the matter concerns me."\r
-\r
-But Javert, heeding his own thought only, continued:--\r
-\r
-"So far as exaggeration is concerned, I am not exaggerating. This is the\r
-way I reason: I have suspected you unjustly. That is nothing. It is our\r
-right to cherish suspicion, although suspicion directed above ourselves\r
-is an abuse. But without proofs, in a fit of rage, with the object\r
-of wreaking my vengeance, I have denounced you as a convict, you, a\r
-respectable man, a mayor, a magistrate! That is serious, very serious. I\r
-have insulted authority in your person, I, an agent of the authorities!\r
-If one of my subordinates had done what I have done, I should have\r
-declared him unworthy of the service, and have expelled him. Well? Stop,\r
-Mr. Mayor; one word more. I have often been severe in the course of my\r
-life towards others. That is just. I have done well. Now, if I were not\r
-severe towards myself, all the justice that I have done would become\r
-injustice. Ought I to spare myself more than others? No! What! I should\r
-be good for nothing but to chastise others, and not myself! Why, I\r
-should be a blackguard! Those who say, 'That blackguard of a Javert!'\r
-would be in the right. Mr. Mayor, I do not desire that you should treat\r
-me kindly; your kindness roused sufficient bad blood in me when it was\r
-directed to others. I want none of it for myself. The kindness which\r
-consists in upholding a woman of the town against a citizen, the police\r
-agent against the mayor, the man who is down against the man who is\r
-up in the world, is what I call false kindness. That is the sort of\r
-kindness which disorganizes society. Good God! it is very easy to be\r
-kind; the difficulty lies in being just. Come! if you had been what I\r
-thought you, I should not have been kind to you, not I! You would have\r
-seen! Mr. Mayor, I must treat myself as I would treat any other man.\r
-When I have subdued malefactors, when I have proceeded with vigor\r
-against rascals, I have often said to myself, 'If you flinch, if I ever\r
-catch you in fault, you may rest at your ease!' I have flinched, I\r
-have caught myself in a fault. So much the worse! Come, discharged,\r
-cashiered, expelled! That is well. I have arms. I will till the soil; it\r
-makes no difference to me. Mr. Mayor, the good of the service demands an\r
-example. I simply require the discharge of Inspector Javert."\r
-\r
-All this was uttered in a proud, humble, despairing, yet convinced tone,\r
-which lent indescribable grandeur to this singular, honest man.\r
-\r
-"We shall see," said M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-And he offered him his hand.\r
-\r
-Javert recoiled, and said in a wild voice:--\r
-\r
-"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor, but this must not be. A mayor does not offer his\r
-hand to a police spy."\r
-\r
-He added between his teeth:--\r
-\r
-"A police spy, yes; from the moment when I have misused the police. I am\r
-no more than a police spy."\r
-\r
-Then he bowed profoundly, and directed his steps towards the door.\r
-\r
-There he wheeled round, and with eyes still downcast:--\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor," he said, "I shall continue to serve until I am superseded."\r
-\r
-He withdrew. M. Madeleine remained thoughtfully listening to the firm,\r
-sure step, which died away on the pavement of the corridor.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--SISTER SIMPLICE\r
-\r
-The incidents the reader is about to peruse were not all known at M. sur\r
-M. But the small portion of them which became known left such a memory\r
-in that town that a serious gap would exist in this book if we did\r
-not narrate them in their most minute details. Among these details the\r
-reader will encounter two or three improbable circumstances, which we\r
-preserve out of respect for the truth.\r
-\r
-On the afternoon following the visit of Javert, M. Madeleine went to see\r
-Fantine according to his wont.\r
-\r
-Before entering Fantine's room, he had Sister Simplice summoned.\r
-\r
-The two nuns who performed the services of nurse in the infirmary,\r
-Lazariste ladies, like all sisters of charity, bore the names of Sister\r
-Perpetue and Sister Simplice.\r
-\r
-Sister Perpetue was an ordinary villager, a sister of charity in a\r
-coarse style, who had entered the service of God as one enters any other\r
-service. She was a nun as other women are cooks. This type is not\r
-so very rare. The monastic orders gladly accept this heavy peasant\r
-earthenware, which is easily fashioned into a Capuchin or an Ursuline.\r
-These rustics are utilized for the rough work of devotion. The\r
-transition from a drover to a Carmelite is not in the least violent;\r
-the one turns into the other without much effort; the fund of ignorance\r
-common to the village and the cloister is a preparation ready at hand,\r
-and places the boor at once on the same footing as the monk: a little\r
-more amplitude in the smock, and it becomes a frock. Sister Perpetue\r
-was a robust nun from Marines near Pontoise, who chattered her patois,\r
-droned, grumbled, sugared the potion according to the bigotry or the\r
-hypocrisy of the invalid, treated her patients abruptly, roughly, was\r
-crabbed with the dying, almost flung God in their faces, stoned their\r
-death agony with prayers mumbled in a rage; was bold, honest, and ruddy.\r
-\r
-Sister Simplice was white, with a waxen pallor. Beside Sister Perpetue,\r
-she was the taper beside the candle. Vincent de Paul has divinely traced\r
-the features of the Sister of Charity in these admirable words, in which\r
-he mingles as much freedom as servitude: "They shall have for their\r
-convent only the house of the sick; for cell only a hired room; for\r
-chapel only their parish church; for cloister only the streets of the\r
-town and the wards of the hospitals; for enclosure only obedience; for\r
-gratings only the fear of God; for veil only modesty." This ideal was\r
-realized in the living person of Sister Simplice: she had never been\r
-young, and it seemed as though she would never grow old. No one could\r
-have told Sister Simplice's age. She was a person--we dare not say a\r
-woman--who was gentle, austere, well-bred, cold, and who had never lied.\r
-She was so gentle that she appeared fragile; but she was more solid than\r
-granite. She touched the unhappy with fingers that were charmingly pure\r
-and fine. There was, so to speak, silence in her speech; she said just\r
-what was necessary, and she possessed a tone of voice which would\r
-have equally edified a confessional or enchanted a drawing-room. This\r
-delicacy accommodated itself to the serge gown, finding in this harsh\r
-contact a continual reminder of heaven and of God. Let us emphasize\r
-one detail. Never to have lied, never to have said, for any interest\r
-whatever, even in indifference, any single thing which was not the\r
-truth, the sacred truth, was Sister Simplice's distinctive trait; it was\r
-the accent of her virtue. She was almost renowned in the congregation\r
-for this imperturbable veracity. The Abbe Sicard speaks of Sister\r
-Simplice in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu. However pure and sincere\r
-we may be, we all bear upon our candor the crack of the little, innocent\r
-lie. She did not. Little lie, innocent lie--does such a thing exist? To\r
-lie is the absolute form of evil. To lie a little is not possible: he\r
-who lies, lies the whole lie. To lie is the very face of the demon.\r
-Satan has two names; he is called Satan and Lying. That is what she\r
-thought; and as she thought, so she did. The result was the whiteness\r
-which we have mentioned--a whiteness which covered even her lips and her\r
-eyes with radiance. Her smile was white, her glance was white. There was\r
-not a single spider's web, not a grain of dust, on the glass window of\r
-that conscience. On entering the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, she had\r
-taken the name of Simplice by special choice. Simplice of Sicily, as we\r
-know, is the saint who preferred to allow both her breasts to be torn\r
-off rather than to say that she had been born at Segesta when she had\r
-been born at Syracuse--a lie which would have saved her. This patron\r
-saint suited this soul.\r
-\r
-Sister Simplice, on her entrance into the order, had had two faults\r
-which she had gradually corrected: she had a taste for dainties, and she\r
-liked to receive letters. She never read anything but a book of prayers\r
-printed in Latin, in coarse type. She did not understand Latin, but she\r
-understood the book.\r
-\r
-This pious woman had conceived an affection for Fantine, probably\r
-feeling a latent virtue there, and she had devoted herself almost\r
-exclusively to her care.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine took Sister Simplice apart and recommended Fantine to her\r
-in a singular tone, which the sister recalled later on.\r
-\r
-On leaving the sister, he approached Fantine.\r
-\r
-Fantine awaited M. Madeleine's appearance every day as one awaits a ray\r
-of warmth and joy. She said to the sisters, "I only live when Monsieur\r
-le Maire is here."\r
-\r
-She had a great deal of fever that day. As soon as she saw M. Madeleine\r
-she asked him:--\r
-\r
-"And Cosette?"\r
-\r
-He replied with a smile:--\r
-\r
-"Soon."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine was the same as usual with Fantine. Only he remained an\r
-hour instead of half an hour, to Fantine's great delight. He urged every\r
-one repeatedly not to allow the invalid to want for anything. It was\r
-noticed that there was a moment when his countenance became very sombre.\r
-But this was explained when it became known that the doctor had bent\r
-down to his ear and said to him, "She is losing ground fast."\r
-\r
-Then he returned to the town-hall, and the clerk observed him\r
-attentively examining a road map of France which hung in his study. He\r
-wrote a few figures on a bit of paper with a pencil.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE PERSPICACITY OF MASTER SCAUFFLAIRE\r
-\r
-From the town-hall he betook himself to the extremity of the town, to a\r
-Fleming named Master Scaufflaer, French Scaufflaire, who let out "horses\r
-and cabriolets as desired."\r
-\r
-In order to reach this Scaufflaire, the shortest way was to take the\r
-little-frequented street in which was situated the parsonage of the\r
-parish in which M. Madeleine resided. The cure was, it was said, a\r
-worthy, respectable, and sensible man. At the moment when M. Madeleine\r
-arrived in front of the parsonage there was but one passer-by in the\r
-street, and this person noticed this: After the mayor had passed the\r
-priest's house he halted, stood motionless, then turned about, and\r
-retraced his steps to the door of the parsonage, which had an iron\r
-knocker. He laid his hand quickly on the knocker and lifted it; then\r
-he paused again and stopped short, as though in thought, and after\r
-the lapse of a few seconds, instead of allowing the knocker to fall\r
-abruptly, he placed it gently, and resumed his way with a sort of haste\r
-which had not been apparent previously.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine found Master Scaufflaire at home, engaged in stitching a\r
-harness over.\r
-\r
-"Master Scaufflaire," he inquired, "have you a good horse?"\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor," said the Fleming, "all my horses are good. What do you mean\r
-by a good horse?"\r
-\r
-"I mean a horse which can travel twenty leagues in a day."\r
-\r
-"The deuce!" said the Fleming. "Twenty leagues!"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Hitched to a cabriolet?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"And how long can he rest at the end of his journey?"\r
-\r
-"He must be able to set out again on the next day if necessary."\r
-\r
-"To traverse the same road?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"The deuce! the deuce! And it is twenty leagues?"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine drew from his pocket the paper on which he had pencilled\r
-some figures. He showed it to the Fleming. The figures were 5, 6, 8 1/2.\r
-\r
-"You see," he said, "total, nineteen and a half; as well say twenty\r
-leagues."\r
-\r
-"Mr. Mayor," returned the Fleming, "I have just what you want. My little\r
-white horse--you may have seen him pass occasionally; he is a small\r
-beast from Lower Boulonnais. He is full of fire. They wanted to make\r
-a saddle-horse of him at first. Bah! He reared, he kicked, he laid\r
-everybody flat on the ground. He was thought to be vicious, and no one\r
-knew what to do with him. I bought him. I harnessed him to a carriage.\r
-That is what he wanted, sir; he is as gentle as a girl; he goes like the\r
-wind. Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to\r
-be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. 'Draw? Yes. Carry? No.'\r
-We must suppose that is what he said to himself."\r
-\r
-"And he will accomplish the trip?"\r
-\r
-"Your twenty leagues all at a full trot, and in less than eight hours.\r
-But here are the conditions."\r
-\r
-"State them."\r
-\r
-"In the first place, you will give him half an hour's breathing spell\r
-midway of the road; he will eat; and some one must be by while he is\r
-eating to prevent the stable boy of the inn from stealing his oats; for\r
-I have noticed that in inns the oats are more often drunk by the stable\r
-men than eaten by the horses."\r
-\r
-"Some one will be by."\r
-\r
-"In the second place--is the cabriolet for Monsieur le Maire?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Does Monsieur le Maire know how to drive?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Well, Monsieur le Maire will travel alone and without baggage, in order\r
-not to overload the horse?"\r
-\r
-"Agreed."\r
-\r
-"But as Monsieur le Maire will have no one with him, he will be obliged\r
-to take the trouble himself of seeing that the oats are not stolen."\r
-\r
-"That is understood."\r
-\r
-"I am to have thirty francs a day. The days of rest to be paid for\r
-also--not a farthing less; and the beast's food to be at Monsieur le\r
-Maire's expense."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine drew three napoleons from his purse and laid them on the\r
-table.\r
-\r
-"Here is the pay for two days in advance."\r
-\r
-"Fourthly, for such a journey a cabriolet would be too heavy, and would\r
-fatigue the horse. Monsieur le Maire must consent to travel in a little\r
-tilbury that I own."\r
-\r
-"I consent to that."\r
-\r
-"It is light, but it has no cover."\r
-\r
-"That makes no difference to me."\r
-\r
-"Has Monsieur le Maire reflected that we are in the middle of winter?"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine did not reply. The Fleming resumed:--\r
-\r
-"That it is very cold?"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine preserved silence.\r
-\r
-Master Scaufflaire continued:--\r
-\r
-"That it may rain?"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine raised his head and said:--\r
-\r
-"The tilbury and the horse will be in front of my door to-morrow morning\r
-at half-past four o'clock."\r
-\r
-"Of course, Monsieur le Maire," replied Scaufflaire; then, scratching a\r
-speck in the wood of the table with his thumb-nail, he resumed with that\r
-careless air which the Flemings understand so well how to mingle with\r
-their shrewdness:--\r
-\r
-"But this is what I am thinking of now: Monsieur le Maire has not told\r
-me where he is going. Where is Monsieur le Maire going?"\r
-\r
-He had been thinking of nothing else since the beginning of the\r
-conversation, but he did not know why he had not dared to put the\r
-question.\r
-\r
-"Are your horse's forelegs good?" said M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-"Yes, Monsieur le Maire. You must hold him in a little when going down\r
-hill. Are there many descends between here and the place whither you are\r
-going?"\r
-\r
-"Do not forget to be at my door at precisely half-past four o'clock\r
-to-morrow morning," replied M. Madeleine; and he took his departure.\r
-\r
-The Fleming remained "utterly stupid," as he himself said some time\r
-afterwards.\r
-\r
-The mayor had been gone two or three minutes when the door opened again;\r
-it was the mayor once more.\r
-\r
-He still wore the same impassive and preoccupied air.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Scaufflaire," said he, "at what sum do you estimate the value\r
-of the horse and tilbury which you are to let to me,--the one bearing\r
-the other?"\r
-\r
-"The one dragging the other, Monsieur le Maire," said the Fleming, with\r
-a broad smile.\r
-\r
-"So be it. Well?"\r
-\r
-"Does Monsieur le Maire wish to purchase them or me?"\r
-\r
-"No; but I wish to guarantee you in any case. You shall give me back\r
-the sum at my return. At what value do you estimate your horse and\r
-cabriolet?"\r
-\r
-"Five hundred francs, Monsieur le Maire."\r
-\r
-"Here it is."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine laid a bank-bill on the table, then left the room; and this\r
-time he did not return.\r
-\r
-Master Scaufflaire experienced a frightful regret that he had not said a\r
-thousand francs. Besides the horse and tilbury together were worth but a\r
-hundred crowns.\r
-\r
-The Fleming called his wife, and related the affair to her. "Where the\r
-devil could Monsieur le Maire be going?" They held counsel together.\r
-"He is going to Paris," said the wife. "I don't believe it," said the\r
-husband.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine had forgotten the paper with the figures on it, and it lay\r
-on the chimney-piece. The Fleming picked it up and studied it. "Five,\r
-six, eight and a half? That must designate the posting relays." He\r
-turned to his wife:--\r
-\r
-"I have found out."\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"It is five leagues from here to Hesdin, six from Hesdin to Saint-Pol,\r
-eight and a half from Saint-Pol to Arras. He is going to Arras."\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, M. Madeleine had returned home. He had taken the longest way\r
-to return from Master Scaufflaire's, as though the parsonage door had\r
-been a temptation for him, and he had wished to avoid it. He ascended\r
-to his room, and there he shut himself up, which was a very simple act,\r
-since he liked to go to bed early. Nevertheless, the portress of the\r
-factory, who was, at the same time, M. Madeleine's only servant, noticed\r
-that the latter's light was extinguished at half-past eight, and she\r
-mentioned it to the cashier when he came home, adding:--\r
-\r
-"Is Monsieur le Maire ill? I thought he had a rather singular air."\r
-\r
-This cashier occupied a room situated directly under M. Madeleine's\r
-chamber. He paid no heed to the portress's words, but went to bed and\r
-to sleep. Towards midnight he woke up with a start; in his sleep he had\r
-heard a noise above his head. He listened; it was a footstep pacing back\r
-and forth, as though some one were walking in the room above him. He\r
-listened more attentively, and recognized M. Madeleine's step. This\r
-struck him as strange; usually, there was no noise in M. Madeleine's\r
-chamber until he rose in the morning. A moment later the cashier heard\r
-a noise which resembled that of a cupboard being opened, and then shut\r
-again; then a piece of furniture was disarranged; then a pause ensued;\r
-then the step began again. The cashier sat up in bed, quite awake now,\r
-and staring; and through his window-panes he saw the reddish gleam of a\r
-lighted window reflected on the opposite wall; from the direction of the\r
-rays, it could only come from the window of M. Madeleine's chamber. The\r
-reflection wavered, as though it came rather from a fire which had\r
-been lighted than from a candle. The shadow of the window-frame was not\r
-shown, which indicated that the window was wide open. The fact that this\r
-window was open in such cold weather was surprising. The cashier fell\r
-asleep again. An hour or two later he waked again. The same step was\r
-still passing slowly and regularly back and forth overhead.\r
-\r
-The reflection was still visible on the wall, but now it was pale and\r
-peaceful, like the reflection of a lamp or of a candle. The window was\r
-still open.\r
-\r
-This is what had taken place in M. Madeleine's room.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--A TEMPEST IN A SKULL\r
-\r
-The reader has, no doubt, already divined that M. Madeleine is no other\r
-than Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-We have already gazed into the depths of this conscience; the moment has\r
-now come when we must take another look into it. We do so not without\r
-emotion and trepidation. There is nothing more terrible in existence\r
-than this sort of contemplation. The eye of the spirit can nowhere find\r
-more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself\r
-on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more\r
-mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the\r
-sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is\r
-the inmost recesses of the soul.\r
-\r
-To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to\r
-a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would\r
-be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience\r
-is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of\r
-dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium\r
-of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions. Penetrate, at\r
-certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged\r
-in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that\r
-obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants,\r
-like those recorded in Homer, are in progress; skirmishes of dragons and\r
-hydras and swarms of phantoms, as in Milton; visionary circles, as in\r
-Dante. What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within\r
-him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his\r
-brain and the actions of his life!\r
-\r
-Alighieri one day met with a sinister-looking door, before which he\r
-hesitated. Here is one before us, upon whose threshold we hesitate. Let\r
-us enter, nevertheless.\r
-\r
-We have but little to add to what the reader already knows of what had\r
-happened to Jean Valjean after the adventure with Little Gervais. From\r
-that moment forth he was, as we have seen, a totally different man. What\r
-the Bishop had wished to make of him, that he carried out. It was more\r
-than a transformation; it was a transfiguration.\r
-\r
-He succeeded in disappearing, sold the Bishop's silver, reserving only\r
-the candlesticks as a souvenir, crept from town to town, traversed\r
-France, came to M. sur M., conceived the idea which we have mentioned,\r
-accomplished what we have related, succeeded in rendering himself safe\r
-from seizure and inaccessible, and, thenceforth, established at M. sur\r
-M., happy in feeling his conscience saddened by the past and the first\r
-half of his existence belied by the last, he lived in peace, reassured\r
-and hopeful, having henceforth only two thoughts,--to conceal his name\r
-and to sanctify his life; to escape men and to return to God.\r
-\r
-These two thoughts were so closely intertwined in his mind that\r
-they formed but a single one there; both were equally absorbing and\r
-imperative and ruled his slightest actions. In general, they conspired\r
-to regulate the conduct of his life; they turned him towards the gloom;\r
-they rendered him kindly and simple; they counselled him to the same\r
-things. Sometimes, however, they conflicted. In that case, as the reader\r
-will remember, the man whom all the country of M. sur M. called M.\r
-Madeleine did not hesitate to sacrifice the first to the second--his\r
-security to his virtue. Thus, in spite of all his reserve and all his\r
-prudence, he had preserved the Bishop's candlesticks, worn mourning for\r
-him, summoned and interrogated all the little Savoyards who passed that\r
-way, collected information regarding the families at Faverolles, and\r
-saved old Fauchelevent's life, despite the disquieting insinuations of\r
-Javert. It seemed, as we have already remarked, as though he thought,\r
-following the example of all those who have been wise, holy, and just,\r
-that his first duty was not towards himself.\r
-\r
-At the same time, it must be confessed, nothing just like this had yet\r
-presented itself.\r
-\r
-Never had the two ideas which governed the unhappy man whose sufferings\r
-we are narrating, engaged in so serious a struggle. He understood this\r
-confusedly but profoundly at the very first words pronounced by Javert,\r
-when the latter entered his study. At the moment when that name, which\r
-he had buried beneath so many layers, was so strangely articulated,\r
-he was struck with stupor, and as though intoxicated with the sinister\r
-eccentricity of his destiny; and through this stupor he felt that\r
-shudder which precedes great shocks. He bent like an oak at the approach\r
-of a storm, like a soldier at the approach of an assault. He felt\r
-shadows filled with thunders and lightnings descending upon his head.\r
-As he listened to Javert, the first thought which occurred to him was to\r
-go, to run and denounce himself, to take that Champmathieu out of prison\r
-and place himself there; this was as painful and as poignant as an\r
-incision in the living flesh. Then it passed away, and he said to\r
-himself, "We will see! We will see!" He repressed this first, generous\r
-instinct, and recoiled before heroism.\r
-\r
-It would be beautiful, no doubt, after the Bishop's holy words, after\r
-so many years of repentance and abnegation, in the midst of a penitence\r
-admirably begun, if this man had not flinched for an instant, even in\r
-the presence of so terrible a conjecture, but had continued to walk with\r
-the same step towards this yawning precipice, at the bottom of which\r
-lay heaven; that would have been beautiful; but it was not thus. We must\r
-render an account of the things which went on in this soul, and we can\r
-only tell what there was there. He was carried away, at first, by\r
-the instinct of self-preservation; he rallied all his ideas in haste,\r
-stifled his emotions, took into consideration Javert's presence, that\r
-great danger, postponed all decision with the firmness of terror, shook\r
-off thought as to what he had to do, and resumed his calmness as a\r
-warrior picks up his buckler.\r
-\r
-He remained in this state during the rest of the day, a whirlwind\r
-within, a profound tranquillity without. He took no "preservative\r
-measures," as they may be called. Everything was still confused, and\r
-jostling together in his brain. His trouble was so great that he could\r
-not perceive the form of a single idea distinctly, and he could have\r
-told nothing about himself, except that he had received a great blow.\r
-\r
-He repaired to Fantine's bed of suffering, as usual, and prolonged his\r
-visit, through a kindly instinct, telling himself that he must behave\r
-thus, and recommend her well to the sisters, in case he should be\r
-obliged to be absent himself. He had a vague feeling that he might be\r
-obliged to go to Arras; and without having the least in the world made\r
-up his mind to this trip, he said to himself that being, as he was,\r
-beyond the shadow of any suspicion, there could be nothing out of the\r
-way in being a witness to what was to take place, and he engaged the\r
-tilbury from Scaufflaire in order to be prepared in any event.\r
-\r
-He dined with a good deal of appetite.\r
-\r
-On returning to his room, he communed with himself.\r
-\r
-He examined the situation, and found it unprecedented; so unprecedented\r
-that in the midst of his revery he rose from his chair, moved by some\r
-inexplicable impulse of anxiety, and bolted his door. He feared\r
-lest something more should enter. He was barricading himself against\r
-possibilities.\r
-\r
-A moment later he extinguished his light; it embarrassed him.\r
-\r
-It seemed to him as though he might be seen.\r
-\r
-By whom?\r
-\r
-Alas! That on which he desired to close the door had already entered;\r
-that which he desired to blind was staring him in the face,--his\r
-conscience.\r
-\r
-His conscience; that is to say, God.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, he deluded himself at first; he had a feeling of security\r
-and of solitude; the bolt once drawn, he thought himself impregnable;\r
-the candle extinguished, he felt himself invisible. Then he took\r
-possession of himself: he set his elbows on the table, leaned his head\r
-on his hand, and began to meditate in the dark.\r
-\r
-"Where do I stand? Am not I dreaming? What have I heard? Is it really\r
-true that I have seen that Javert, and that he spoke to me in that\r
-manner? Who can that Champmathieu be? So he resembles me! Is it\r
-possible? When I reflect that yesterday I was so tranquil, and so far\r
-from suspecting anything! What was I doing yesterday at this hour? What\r
-is there in this incident? What will the end be? What is to be done?"\r
-\r
-This was the torment in which he found himself. His brain had lost its\r
-power of retaining ideas; they passed like waves, and he clutched his\r
-brow in both hands to arrest them.\r
-\r
-Nothing but anguish extricated itself from this tumult which overwhelmed\r
-his will and his reason, and from which he sought to draw proof and\r
-resolution.\r
-\r
-His head was burning. He went to the window and threw it wide open.\r
-There were no stars in the sky. He returned and seated himself at the\r
-table.\r
-\r
-The first hour passed in this manner.\r
-\r
-Gradually, however, vague outlines began to take form and to fix\r
-themselves in his meditation, and he was able to catch a glimpse with\r
-precision of the reality,--not the whole situation, but some of\r
-the details. He began by recognizing the fact that, critical and\r
-extraordinary as was this situation, he was completely master of it.\r
-\r
-This only caused an increase of his stupor.\r
-\r
-Independently of the severe and religious aim which he had assigned to\r
-his actions, all that he had made up to that day had been nothing but a\r
-hole in which to bury his name. That which he had always feared most of\r
-all in his hours of self-communion, during his sleepless nights, was to\r
-ever hear that name pronounced; he had said to himself, that that would\r
-be the end of all things for him; that on the day when that name made\r
-its reappearance it would cause his new life to vanish from about\r
-him, and--who knows?--perhaps even his new soul within him, also. He\r
-shuddered at the very thought that this was possible. Assuredly, if any\r
-one had said to him at such moments that the hour would come when that\r
-name would ring in his ears, when the hideous words, Jean Valjean, would\r
-suddenly emerge from the darkness and rise in front of him, when that\r
-formidable light, capable of dissipating the mystery in which he had\r
-enveloped himself, would suddenly blaze forth above his head, and that\r
-that name would not menace him, that that light would but produce\r
-an obscurity more dense, that this rent veil would but increase the\r
-mystery, that this earthquake would solidify his edifice, that this\r
-prodigious incident would have no other result, so far as he was\r
-concerned, if so it seemed good to him, than that of rendering his\r
-existence at once clearer and more impenetrable, and that, out of his\r
-confrontation with the phantom of Jean Valjean, the good and worthy\r
-citizen Monsieur Madeleine would emerge more honored, more peaceful, and\r
-more respected than ever--if any one had told him that, he would have\r
-tossed his head and regarded the words as those of a madman. Well, all\r
-this was precisely what had just come to pass; all that accumulation of\r
-impossibilities was a fact, and God had permitted these wild fancies to\r
-become real things!\r
-\r
-His revery continued to grow clearer. He came more and more to an\r
-understanding of his position.\r
-\r
-It seemed to him that he had but just waked up from some inexplicable\r
-dream, and that he found himself slipping down a declivity in the middle\r
-of the night, erect, shivering, holding back all in vain, on the very\r
-brink of the abyss. He distinctly perceived in the darkness a stranger,\r
-a man unknown to him, whom destiny had mistaken for him, and whom she\r
-was thrusting into the gulf in his stead; in order that the gulf might\r
-close once more, it was necessary that some one, himself or that other\r
-man, should fall into it: he had only let things take their course.\r
-\r
-The light became complete, and he acknowledged this to himself: That\r
-his place was empty in the galleys; that do what he would, it was still\r
-awaiting him; that the theft from little Gervais had led him back to it;\r
-that this vacant place would await him, and draw him on until he filled\r
-it; that this was inevitable and fatal; and then he said to himself,\r
-"that, at this moment, he had a substitute; that it appeared that a\r
-certain Champmathieu had that ill luck, and that, as regards himself,\r
-being present in the galleys in the person of that Champmathieu, present\r
-in society under the name of M. Madeleine, he had nothing more to fear,\r
-provided that he did not prevent men from sealing over the head of\r
-that Champmathieu this stone of infamy which, like the stone of the\r
-sepulchre, falls once, never to rise again."\r
-\r
-All this was so strange and so violent, that there suddenly took place\r
-in him that indescribable movement, which no man feels more than two\r
-or three times in the course of his life, a sort of convulsion of the\r
-conscience which stirs up all that there is doubtful in the heart, which\r
-is composed of irony, of joy, and of despair, and which may be called an\r
-outburst of inward laughter.\r
-\r
-He hastily relighted his candle.\r
-\r
-"Well, what then?" he said to himself; "what am I afraid of? What is\r
-there in all that for me to think about? I am safe; all is over. I had\r
-but one partly open door through which my past might invade my life,\r
-and behold that door is walled up forever! That Javert, who has been\r
-annoying me so long; that terrible instinct which seemed to have divined\r
-me, which had divined me--good God! and which followed me everywhere;\r
-that frightful hunting-dog, always making a point at me, is thrown\r
-off the scent, engaged elsewhere, absolutely turned from the trail:\r
-henceforth he is satisfied; he will leave me in peace; he has his Jean\r
-Valjean. Who knows? it is even probable that he will wish to leave town!\r
-And all this has been brought about without any aid from me, and I count\r
-for nothing in it! Ah! but where is the misfortune in this? Upon my\r
-honor, people would think, to see me, that some catastrophe had happened\r
-to me! After all, if it does bring harm to some one, that is not my\r
-fault in the least: it is Providence which has done it all; it is\r
-because it wishes it so to be, evidently. Have I the right to disarrange\r
-what it has arranged? What do I ask now? Why should I meddle? It does\r
-not concern me; what! I am not satisfied: but what more do I want? The\r
-goal to which I have aspired for so many years, the dream of my nights,\r
-the object of my prayers to Heaven,--security,--I have now attained; it\r
-is God who wills it; I can do nothing against the will of God, and why\r
-does God will it? In order that I may continue what I have begun, that I\r
-may do good, that I may one day be a grand and encouraging example, that\r
-it may be said at last, that a little happiness has been attached to\r
-the penance which I have undergone, and to that virtue to which I have\r
-returned. Really, I do not understand why I was afraid, a little while\r
-ago, to enter the house of that good cure, and to ask his advice; this\r
-is evidently what he would have said to me: It is settled; let things\r
-take their course; let the good God do as he likes!"\r
-\r
-Thus did he address himself in the depths of his own conscience, bending\r
-over what may be called his own abyss; he rose from his chair, and began\r
-to pace the room: "Come," said he, "let us think no more about it; my\r
-resolve is taken!" but he felt no joy.\r
-\r
-Quite the reverse.\r
-\r
-One can no more prevent thought from recurring to an idea than one can\r
-the sea from returning to the shore: the sailor calls it the tide; the\r
-guilty man calls it remorse; God upheaves the soul as he does the ocean.\r
-\r
-After the expiration of a few moments, do what he would, he resumed the\r
-gloomy dialogue in which it was he who spoke and he who listened, saying\r
-that which he would have preferred to ignore, and listened to that which\r
-he would have preferred not to hear, yielding to that mysterious power\r
-which said to him: "Think!" as it said to another condemned man, two\r
-thousand years ago, "March on!"\r
-\r
-Before proceeding further, and in order to make ourselves fully\r
-understood, let us insist upon one necessary observation.\r
-\r
-It is certain that people do talk to themselves; there is no living\r
-being who has not done it. It may even be said that the word is never\r
-a more magnificent mystery than when it goes from thought to conscience\r
-within a man, and when it returns from conscience to thought; it is in\r
-this sense only that the words so often employed in this chapter, he\r
-said, he exclaimed, must be understood; one speaks to one's self, talks\r
-to one's self, exclaims to one's self without breaking the external\r
-silence; there is a great tumult; everything about us talks except the\r
-mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less realities because\r
-they are not visible and palpable.\r
-\r
-So he asked himself where he stood. He interrogated himself upon that\r
-"settled resolve." He confessed to himself that all that he had just\r
-arranged in his mind was monstrous, that "to let things take their\r
-course, to let the good God do as he liked," was simply horrible; to\r
-allow this error of fate and of men to be carried out, not to hinder it,\r
-to lend himself to it through his silence, to do nothing, in short,\r
-was to do everything! that this was hypocritical baseness in the last\r
-degree! that it was a base, cowardly, sneaking, abject, hideous crime!\r
-\r
-For the first time in eight years, the wretched man had just tasted the\r
-bitter savor of an evil thought and of an evil action.\r
-\r
-He spit it out with disgust.\r
-\r
-He continued to question himself. He asked himself severely what he had\r
-meant by this, "My object is attained!" He declared to himself that\r
-his life really had an object; but what object? To conceal his name?\r
-To deceive the police? Was it for so petty a thing that he had done all\r
-that he had done? Had he not another and a grand object, which was the\r
-true one--to save, not his person, but his soul; to become honest and\r
-good once more; to be a just man? Was it not that above all, that alone,\r
-which he had always desired, which the Bishop had enjoined upon him--to\r
-shut the door on his past? But he was not shutting it! great God! he was\r
-re-opening it by committing an infamous action! He was becoming a thief\r
-once more, and the most odious of thieves! He was robbing another of\r
-his existence, his life, his peace, his place in the sunshine. He was\r
-becoming an assassin. He was murdering, morally murdering, a wretched\r
-man. He was inflicting on him that frightful living death, that death\r
-beneath the open sky, which is called the galleys. On the other hand,\r
-to surrender himself to save that man, struck down with so melancholy\r
-an error, to resume his own name, to become once more, out of duty, the\r
-convict Jean Valjean, that was, in truth, to achieve his resurrection,\r
-and to close forever that hell whence he had just emerged; to fall back\r
-there in appearance was to escape from it in reality. This must be\r
-done! He had done nothing if he did not do all this; his whole life was\r
-useless; all his penitence was wasted. There was no longer any need of\r
-saying, "What is the use?" He felt that the Bishop was there, that the\r
-Bishop was present all the more because he was dead, that the Bishop\r
-was gazing fixedly at him, that henceforth Mayor Madeleine, with all his\r
-virtues, would be abominable to him, and that the convict Jean Valjean\r
-would be pure and admirable in his sight; that men beheld his mask, but\r
-that the Bishop saw his face; that men saw his life, but that the Bishop\r
-beheld his conscience. So he must go to Arras, deliver the false Jean\r
-Valjean, and denounce the real one. Alas! that was the greatest of\r
-sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the last step to take; but\r
-it must be done. Sad fate! he would enter into sanctity only in the eyes\r
-of God when he returned to infamy in the eyes of men.\r
-\r
-"Well," said he, "let us decide upon this; let us do our duty; let us\r
-save this man." He uttered these words aloud, without perceiving that he\r
-was speaking aloud.\r
-\r
-He took his books, verified them, and put them in order. He flung in\r
-the fire a bundle of bills which he had against petty and embarrassed\r
-tradesmen. He wrote and sealed a letter, and on the envelope it might\r
-have been read, had there been any one in his chamber at the moment,\r
-To Monsieur Laffitte, Banker, Rue d'Artois, Paris. He drew from his\r
-secretary a pocket-book which contained several bank-notes and the\r
-passport of which he had made use that same year when he went to the\r
-elections.\r
-\r
-Any one who had seen him during the execution of these various acts,\r
-into which there entered such grave thought, would have had no suspicion\r
-of what was going on within him. Only occasionally did his lips move; at\r
-other times he raised his head and fixed his gaze upon some point of the\r
-wall, as though there existed at that point something which he wished to\r
-elucidate or interrogate.\r
-\r
-When he had finished the letter to M. Laffitte, he put it into his\r
-pocket, together with the pocket-book, and began his walk once more.\r
-\r
-His revery had not swerved from its course. He continued to see his duty\r
-clearly, written in luminous letters, which flamed before his eyes and\r
-changed its place as he altered the direction of his glance:--\r
-\r
-"Go! Tell your name! Denounce yourself!"\r
-\r
-In the same way he beheld, as though they had passed before him in\r
-visible forms, the two ideas which had, up to that time, formed\r
-the double rule of his soul,--the concealment of his name, the\r
-sanctification of his life. For the first time they appeared to him as\r
-absolutely distinct, and he perceived the distance which separated them.\r
-He recognized the fact that one of these ideas was, necessarily, good,\r
-while the other might become bad; that the first was self-devotion, and\r
-that the other was personality; that the one said, my neighbor, and that\r
-the other said, myself; that one emanated from the light, and the other\r
-from darkness.\r
-\r
-They were antagonistic. He saw them in conflict. In proportion as\r
-he meditated, they grew before the eyes of his spirit. They had now\r
-attained colossal statures, and it seemed to him that he beheld within\r
-himself, in that infinity of which we were recently speaking, in the\r
-midst of the darkness and the lights, a goddess and a giant contending.\r
-\r
-He was filled with terror; but it seemed to him that the good thought\r
-was getting the upper hand.\r
-\r
-He felt that he was on the brink of the second decisive crisis of his\r
-conscience and of his destiny; that the Bishop had marked the first\r
-phase of his new life, and that Champmathieu marked the second. After\r
-the grand crisis, the grand test.\r
-\r
-But the fever, allayed for an instant, gradually resumed possession\r
-of him. A thousand thoughts traversed his mind, but they continued to\r
-fortify him in his resolution.\r
-\r
-One moment he said to himself that he was, perhaps, taking the matter\r
-too keenly; that, after all, this Champmathieu was not interesting, and\r
-that he had actually been guilty of theft.\r
-\r
-He answered himself: "If this man has, indeed, stolen a few apples, that\r
-means a month in prison. It is a long way from that to the galleys. And\r
-who knows? Did he steal? Has it been proved? The name of Jean Valjean\r
-overwhelms him, and seems to dispense with proofs. Do not the attorneys\r
-for the Crown always proceed in this manner? He is supposed to be a\r
-thief because he is known to be a convict."\r
-\r
-In another instant the thought had occurred to him that, when he\r
-denounced himself, the heroism of his deed might, perhaps, be taken into\r
-consideration, and his honest life for the last seven years, and what he\r
-had done for the district, and that they would have mercy on him.\r
-\r
-But this supposition vanished very quickly, and he smiled bitterly as he\r
-remembered that the theft of the forty sous from little Gervais put him\r
-in the position of a man guilty of a second offence after conviction,\r
-that this affair would certainly come up, and, according to the precise\r
-terms of the law, would render him liable to penal servitude for life.\r
-\r
-He turned aside from all illusions, detached himself more and more from\r
-earth, and sought strength and consolation elsewhere. He told himself\r
-that he must do his duty; that perhaps he should not be more unhappy\r
-after doing his duty than after having avoided it; that if he allowed\r
-things to take their own course, if he remained at M. sur M., his\r
-consideration, his good name, his good works, the deference and\r
-veneration paid to him, his charity, his wealth, his popularity, his\r
-virtue, would be seasoned with a crime. And what would be the taste of\r
-all these holy things when bound up with this hideous thing? while, if\r
-he accomplished his sacrifice, a celestial idea would be mingled with\r
-the galleys, the post, the iron necklet, the green cap, unceasing toil,\r
-and pitiless shame.\r
-\r
-At length he told himself that it must be so, that his destiny was thus\r
-allotted, that he had not authority to alter the arrangements made on\r
-high, that, in any case, he must make his choice: virtue without and\r
-abomination within, or holiness within and infamy without.\r
-\r
-The stirring up of these lugubrious ideas did not cause his courage to\r
-fail, but his brain grow weary. He began to think of other things, of\r
-indifferent matters, in spite of himself.\r
-\r
-The veins in his temples throbbed violently; he still paced to and fro;\r
-midnight sounded first from the parish church, then from the town-hall;\r
-he counted the twelve strokes of the two clocks, and compared the sounds\r
-of the two bells; he recalled in this connection the fact that, a few\r
-days previously, he had seen in an ironmonger's shop an ancient clock\r
-for sale, upon which was written the name, Antoine-Albin de Romainville.\r
-\r
-He was cold; he lighted a small fire; it did not occur to him to close\r
-the window.\r
-\r
-In the meantime he had relapsed into his stupor; he was obliged to make\r
-a tolerably vigorous effort to recall what had been the subject of his\r
-thoughts before midnight had struck; he finally succeeded in doing this.\r
-\r
-"Ah! yes," he said to himself, "I had resolved to inform against\r
-myself."\r
-\r
-And then, all of a sudden, he thought of Fantine.\r
-\r
-"Hold!" said he, "and what about that poor woman?"\r
-\r
-Here a fresh crisis declared itself.\r
-\r
-Fantine, by appearing thus abruptly in his revery, produced the effect\r
-of an unexpected ray of light; it seemed to him as though everything\r
-about him were undergoing a change of aspect: he exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! but I have hitherto considered no one but myself; it is proper for\r
-me to hold my tongue or to denounce myself, to conceal my person or\r
-to save my soul, to be a despicable and respected magistrate, or an\r
-infamous and venerable convict; it is I, it is always I and nothing\r
-but I: but, good God! all this is egotism; these are diverse forms\r
-of egotism, but it is egotism all the same. What if I were to think a\r
-little about others? The highest holiness is to think of others; come,\r
-let us examine the matter. The _I_ excepted, the _I_ effaced, the _I_\r
-forgotten, what would be the result of all this? What if I denounce\r
-myself? I am arrested; this Champmathieu is released; I am put back in\r
-the galleys; that is well--and what then? What is going on here? Ah!\r
-here is a country, a town, here are factories, an industry, workers,\r
-both men and women, aged grandsires, children, poor people! All this I\r
-have created; all these I provide with their living; everywhere where\r
-there is a smoking chimney, it is I who have placed the brand on the\r
-hearth and meat in the pot; I have created ease, circulation, credit;\r
-before me there was nothing; I have elevated, vivified, informed with\r
-life, fecundated, stimulated, enriched the whole country-side; lacking\r
-me, the soul is lacking; I take myself off, everything dies: and this\r
-woman, who has suffered so much, who possesses so many merits in spite\r
-of her fall; the cause of all whose misery I have unwittingly been! And\r
-that child whom I meant to go in search of, whom I have promised to her\r
-mother; do I not also owe something to this woman, in reparation for\r
-the evil which I have done her? If I disappear, what happens? The mother\r
-dies; the child becomes what it can; that is what will take place, if\r
-I denounce myself. If I do not denounce myself? come, let us see how it\r
-will be if I do not denounce myself."\r
-\r
-After putting this question to himself, he paused; he seemed to undergo\r
-a momentary hesitation and trepidation; but it did not last long, and he\r
-answered himself calmly:--\r
-\r
-"Well, this man is going to the galleys; it is true, but what the deuce!\r
-he has stolen! There is no use in my saying that he has not been guilty\r
-of theft, for he has! I remain here; I go on: in ten years I shall have\r
-made ten millions; I scatter them over the country; I have nothing of\r
-my own; what is that to me? It is not for myself that I am doing it;\r
-the prosperity of all goes on augmenting; industries are aroused and\r
-animated; factories and shops are multiplied; families, a hundred\r
-families, a thousand families, are happy; the district becomes\r
-populated; villages spring up where there were only farms before;\r
-farms rise where there was nothing; wretchedness disappears, and\r
-with wretchedness debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder; all vices\r
-disappear, all crimes: and this poor mother rears her child; and behold\r
-a whole country rich and honest! Ah! I was a fool! I was absurd!\r
-what was that I was saying about denouncing myself? I really must pay\r
-attention and not be precipitate about anything. What! because it would\r
-have pleased me to play the grand and generous; this is melodrama, after\r
-all; because I should have thought of no one but myself, the idea! for\r
-the sake of saving from a punishment, a trifle exaggerated, perhaps,\r
-but just at bottom, no one knows whom, a thief, a good-for-nothing,\r
-evidently, a whole country-side must perish! a poor woman must die in\r
-the hospital! a poor little girl must die in the street! like dogs; ah,\r
-this is abominable! And without the mother even having seen her child\r
-once more, almost without the child's having known her mother; and\r
-all that for the sake of an old wretch of an apple-thief who, most\r
-assuredly, has deserved the galleys for something else, if not for\r
-that; fine scruples, indeed, which save a guilty man and sacrifice the\r
-innocent, which save an old vagabond who has only a few years to live at\r
-most, and who will not be more unhappy in the galleys than in his hovel,\r
-and which sacrifice a whole population, mothers, wives, children. This\r
-poor little Cosette who has no one in the world but me, and who is, no\r
-doubt, blue with cold at this moment in the den of those Thenardiers;\r
-those peoples are rascals; and I was going to neglect my duty towards\r
-all these poor creatures; and I was going off to denounce myself; and I\r
-was about to commit that unspeakable folly! Let us put it at the worst:\r
-suppose that there is a wrong action on my part in this, and that my\r
-conscience will reproach me for it some day, to accept, for the good of\r
-others, these reproaches which weigh only on myself; this evil action\r
-which compromises my soul alone; in that lies self-sacrifice; in that\r
-alone there is virtue."\r
-\r
-He rose and resumed his march; this time, he seemed to be content.\r
-\r
-Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are\r
-found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him, that, after\r
-having descended into these depths, after having long groped among the\r
-darkest of these shadows, he had at last found one of these diamonds,\r
-one of these truths, and that he now held it in his hand, and he was\r
-dazzled as he gazed upon it.\r
-\r
-"Yes," he thought, "this is right; I am on the right road; I have the\r
-solution; I must end by holding fast to something; my resolve is taken;\r
-let things take their course; let us no longer vacillate; let us no\r
-longer hang back; this is for the interest of all, not for my own; I am\r
-Madeleine, and Madeleine I remain. Woe to the man who is Jean Valjean!\r
-I am no longer he; I do not know that man; I no longer know anything; it\r
-turns out that some one is Jean Valjean at the present moment; let him\r
-look out for himself; that does not concern me; it is a fatal name which\r
-was floating abroad in the night; if it halts and descends on a head, so\r
-much the worse for that head."\r
-\r
-He looked into the little mirror which hung above his chimney-piece, and\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"Hold! it has relieved me to come to a decision; I am quite another man\r
-now."\r
-\r
-He proceeded a few paces further, then he stopped short.\r
-\r
-"Come!" he said, "I must not flinch before any of the consequences of\r
-the resolution which I have once adopted; there are still threads which\r
-attach me to that Jean Valjean; they must be broken; in this very room\r
-there are objects which would betray me, dumb things which would bear\r
-witness against me; it is settled; all these things must disappear."\r
-\r
-He fumbled in his pocket, drew out his purse, opened it, and took out a\r
-small key; he inserted the key in a lock whose aperture could hardly\r
-be seen, so hidden was it in the most sombre tones of the design which\r
-covered the wall-paper; a secret receptacle opened, a sort of\r
-false cupboard constructed in the angle between the wall and the\r
-chimney-piece; in this hiding-place there were some rags--a blue linen\r
-blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old knapsack, and a huge thorn\r
-cudgel shod with iron at both ends. Those who had seen Jean Valjean at\r
-the epoch when he passed through D----in October, 1815, could easily\r
-have recognized all the pieces of this miserable outfit.\r
-\r
-He had preserved them as he had preserved the silver candlesticks, in\r
-order to remind himself continually of his starting-point, but he\r
-had concealed all that came from the galleys, and he had allowed the\r
-candlesticks which came from the Bishop to be seen.\r
-\r
-He cast a furtive glance towards the door, as though he feared that it\r
-would open in spite of the bolt which fastened it; then, with a quick\r
-and abrupt movement, he took the whole in his arms at once, without\r
-bestowing so much as a glance on the things which he had so religiously\r
-and so perilously preserved for so many years, and flung them all, rags,\r
-cudgel, knapsack, into the fire.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Candlesticks Into the Fire 1b7-3-into-the-fire]\r
-\r
-He closed the false cupboard again, and with redoubled precautions,\r
-henceforth unnecessary, since it was now empty, he concealed the door\r
-behind a heavy piece of furniture, which he pushed in front of it.\r
-\r
-After the lapse of a few seconds, the room and the opposite wall were\r
-lighted up with a fierce, red, tremulous glow. Everything was on fire;\r
-the thorn cudgel snapped and threw out sparks to the middle of the\r
-chamber.\r
-\r
-As the knapsack was consumed, together with the hideous rags which it\r
-contained, it revealed something which sparkled in the ashes. By bending\r
-over, one could have readily recognized a coin,--no doubt the forty-sou\r
-piece stolen from the little Savoyard.\r
-\r
-He did not look at the fire, but paced back and forth with the same\r
-step.\r
-\r
-All at once his eye fell on the two silver candlesticks, which shone\r
-vaguely on the chimney-piece, through the glow.\r
-\r
-"Hold!" he thought; "the whole of Jean Valjean is still in them. They\r
-must be destroyed also."\r
-\r
-He seized the two candlesticks.\r
-\r
-There was still fire enough to allow of their being put out of shape,\r
-and converted into a sort of unrecognizable bar of metal.\r
-\r
-He bent over the hearth and warmed himself for a moment. He felt a sense\r
-of real comfort. "How good warmth is!" said he.\r
-\r
-He stirred the live coals with one of the candlesticks.\r
-\r
-A minute more, and they were both in the fire.\r
-\r
-At that moment it seemed to him that he heard a voice within him\r
-shouting: "Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!"\r
-\r
-His hair rose upright: he became like a man who is listening to some\r
-terrible thing.\r
-\r
-"Yes, that's it! finish!" said the voice. "Complete what you are about!\r
-Destroy these candlesticks! Annihilate this souvenir! Forget the Bishop!\r
-Forget everything! Destroy this Champmathieu, do! That is right! Applaud\r
-yourself! So it is settled, resolved, fixed, agreed: here is an old man\r
-who does not know what is wanted of him, who has, perhaps, done nothing,\r
-an innocent man, whose whole misfortune lies in your name, upon whom\r
-your name weighs like a crime, who is about to be taken for you, who\r
-will be condemned, who will finish his days in abjectness and horror.\r
-That is good! Be an honest man yourself; remain Monsieur le Maire;\r
-remain honorable and honored; enrich the town; nourish the indigent;\r
-rear the orphan; live happy, virtuous, and admired; and, during this\r
-time, while you are here in the midst of joy and light, there will be a\r
-man who will wear your red blouse, who will bear your name in ignominy,\r
-and who will drag your chain in the galleys. Yes, it is well arranged\r
-thus. Ah, wretch!"\r
-\r
-The perspiration streamed from his brow. He fixed a haggard eye on the\r
-candlesticks. But that within him which had spoken had not finished. The\r
-voice continued:--\r
-\r
-"Jean Valjean, there will be around you many voices, which will make a\r
-great noise, which will talk very loud, and which will bless you, and\r
-only one which no one will hear, and which will curse you in the dark.\r
-Well! listen, infamous man! All those benedictions will fall back before\r
-they reach heaven, and only the malediction will ascend to God."\r
-\r
-This voice, feeble at first, and which had proceeded from the most\r
-obscure depths of his conscience, had gradually become startling and\r
-formidable, and he now heard it in his very ear. It seemed to him that\r
-it had detached itself from him, and that it was now speaking outside\r
-of him. He thought that he heard the last words so distinctly, that he\r
-glanced around the room in a sort of terror.\r
-\r
-"Is there any one here?" he demanded aloud, in utter bewilderment.\r
-\r
-Then he resumed, with a laugh which resembled that of an idiot:--\r
-\r
-"How stupid I am! There can be no one!"\r
-\r
-There was some one; but the person who was there was of those whom the\r
-human eye cannot see.\r
-\r
-He placed the candlesticks on the chimney-piece.\r
-\r
-Then he resumed his monotonous and lugubrious tramp, which troubled the\r
-dreams of the sleeping man beneath him, and awoke him with a start.\r
-\r
-This tramping to and fro soothed and at the same time intoxicated him.\r
-It sometimes seems, on supreme occasions, as though people moved about\r
-for the purpose of asking advice of everything that they may encounter\r
-by change of place. After the lapse of a few minutes he no longer knew\r
-his position.\r
-\r
-He now recoiled in equal terror before both the resolutions at which he\r
-had arrived in turn. The two ideas which counselled him appeared to him\r
-equally fatal. What a fatality! What conjunction that that Champmathieu\r
-should have been taken for him; to be overwhelmed by precisely the means\r
-which Providence seemed to have employed, at first, to strengthen his\r
-position!\r
-\r
-There was a moment when he reflected on the future. Denounce himself,\r
-great God! Deliver himself up! With immense despair he faced all that\r
-he should be obliged to leave, all that he should be obliged to take up\r
-once more. He should have to bid farewell to that existence which was so\r
-good, so pure, so radiant, to the respect of all, to honor, to liberty.\r
-He should never more stroll in the fields; he should never more hear the\r
-birds sing in the month of May; he should never more bestow alms on the\r
-little children; he should never more experience the sweetness of having\r
-glances of gratitude and love fixed upon him; he should quit that house\r
-which he had built, that little chamber! Everything seemed charming to\r
-him at that moment. Never again should he read those books; never more\r
-should he write on that little table of white wood; his old portress,\r
-the only servant whom he kept, would never more bring him his coffee\r
-in the morning. Great God! instead of that, the convict gang, the iron\r
-necklet, the red waistcoat, the chain on his ankle, fatigue, the cell,\r
-the camp bed all those horrors which he knew so well! At his age,\r
-after having been what he was! If he were only young again! but to\r
-be addressed in his old age as "thou" by any one who pleased; to\r
-be searched by the convict-guard; to receive the galley-sergeant's\r
-cudgellings; to wear iron-bound shoes on his bare feet; to have to\r
-stretch out his leg night and morning to the hammer of the roundsman who\r
-visits the gang; to submit to the curiosity of strangers, who would be\r
-told: "That man yonder is the famous Jean Valjean, who was mayor of\r
-M. sur M."; and at night, dripping with perspiration, overwhelmed with\r
-lassitude, their green caps drawn over their eyes, to remount, two by\r
-two, the ladder staircase of the galleys beneath the sergeant's whip.\r
-Oh, what misery! Can destiny, then, be as malicious as an intelligent\r
-being, and become as monstrous as the human heart?\r
-\r
-And do what he would, he always fell back upon the heartrending dilemma\r
-which lay at the foundation of his revery: "Should he remain in paradise\r
-and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel?"\r
-\r
-What was to be done? Great God! what was to be done?\r
-\r
-The torment from which he had escaped with so much difficulty was\r
-unchained afresh within him. His ideas began to grow confused once\r
-more; they assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is\r
-peculiar to despair. The name of Romainville recurred incessantly to his\r
-mind, with the two verses of a song which he had heard in the past.\r
-He thought that Romainville was a little grove near Paris, where young\r
-lovers go to pluck lilacs in the month of April.\r
-\r
-He wavered outwardly as well as inwardly. He walked like a little child\r
-who is permitted to toddle alone.\r
-\r
-At intervals, as he combated his lassitude, he made an effort to recover\r
-the mastery of his mind. He tried to put to himself, for the last time,\r
-and definitely, the problem over which he had, in a manner, fallen\r
-prostrate with fatigue: Ought he to denounce himself? Ought he to hold\r
-his peace? He could not manage to see anything distinctly. The vague\r
-aspects of all the courses of reasoning which had been sketched out by\r
-his meditations quivered and vanished, one after the other, into smoke.\r
-He only felt that, to whatever course of action he made up his mind,\r
-something in him must die, and that of necessity, and without his being\r
-able to escape the fact; that he was entering a sepulchre on the\r
-right hand as much as on the left; that he was passing through a death\r
-agony,--the agony of his happiness, or the agony of his virtue.\r
-\r
-Alas! all his resolution had again taken possession of him. He was no\r
-further advanced than at the beginning.\r
-\r
-Thus did this unhappy soul struggle in its anguish. Eighteen hundred\r
-years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being in whom are\r
-summed up all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity had also\r
-long thrust aside with his hand, while the olive-trees quivered in\r
-the wild wind of the infinite, the terrible cup which appeared to Him\r
-dripping with darkness and overflowing with shadows in the depths all\r
-studded with stars.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--FORMS ASSUMED BY SUFFERING DURING SLEEP\r
-\r
-Three o'clock in the morning had just struck, and he had been walking\r
-thus for five hours, almost uninterruptedly, when he at length allowed\r
-himself to drop into his chair.\r
-\r
-There he fell asleep and had a dream.\r
-\r
-This dream, like the majority of dreams, bore no relation to the\r
-situation, except by its painful and heart-rending character, but it\r
-made an impression on him. This nightmare struck him so forcibly that he\r
-wrote it down later on. It is one of the papers in his own handwriting\r
-which he has bequeathed to us. We think that we have here reproduced the\r
-thing in strict accordance with the text.\r
-\r
-Of whatever nature this dream may be, the history of this night would\r
-be incomplete if we were to omit it: it is the gloomy adventure of an\r
-ailing soul.\r
-\r
-Here it is. On the envelope we find this line inscribed, "The Dream I\r
-had that Night."\r
-\r
-"I was in a plain; a vast, gloomy plain, where there was no grass. It\r
-did not seem to me to be daylight nor yet night.\r
-\r
-"I was walking with my brother, the brother of my childish years,\r
-the brother of whom, I must say, I never think, and whom I now hardly\r
-remember.\r
-\r
-"We were conversing and we met some passers-by. We were talking of a\r
-neighbor of ours in former days, who had always worked with her window\r
-open from the time when she came to live on the street. As we talked we\r
-felt cold because of that open window.\r
-\r
-"There were no trees in the plain. We saw a man passing close to us. He\r
-was entirely nude, of the hue of ashes, and mounted on a horse which was\r
-earth color. The man had no hair; we could see his skull and the veins\r
-on it. In his hand he held a switch which was as supple as a vine-shoot\r
-and as heavy as iron. This horseman passed and said nothing to us.\r
-\r
-"My brother said to me, 'Let us take to the hollow road.'\r
-\r
-"There existed a hollow way wherein one saw neither a single shrub nor\r
-a spear of moss. Everything was dirt-colored, even the sky. After\r
-proceeding a few paces, I received no reply when I spoke: I perceived\r
-that my brother was no longer with me.\r
-\r
-"I entered a village which I espied. I reflected that it must be\r
-Romainville. (Why Romainville?)[5]\r
-\r
-"The first street that I entered was deserted. I entered a second\r
-street. Behind the angle formed by the two streets, a man was standing\r
-erect against the wall. I said to this Man:--\r
-\r
-"'What country is this? Where am I?' The man made no reply. I saw the\r
-door of a house open, and I entered.\r
-\r
-"The first chamber was deserted. I entered the second. Behind the door\r
-of this chamber a man was standing erect against the wall. I inquired of\r
-this man, 'Whose house is this? Where am I?' The man replied not.\r
-\r
-"The house had a garden. I quitted the house and entered the garden.\r
-The garden was deserted. Behind the first tree I found a man standing\r
-upright. I said to this man, 'What garden is this? Where am I?' The man\r
-did not answer.\r
-\r
-"I strolled into the village, and perceived that it was a town. All\r
-the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. Not a single living\r
-being was passing in the streets, walking through the chambers or\r
-strolling in the gardens. But behind each angle of the walls, behind\r
-each door, behind each tree, stood a silent man. Only one was to be seen\r
-at a time. These men watched me pass.\r
-\r
-"I left the town and began to ramble about the fields.\r
-\r
-"After the lapse of some time I turned back and saw a great crowd coming\r
-up behind me. I recognized all the men whom I had seen in that town.\r
-They had strange heads. They did not seem to be in a hurry, yet they\r
-walked faster than I did. They made no noise as they walked. In an\r
-instant this crowd had overtaken and surrounded me. The faces of these\r
-men were earthen in hue.\r
-\r
-"Then the first one whom I had seen and questioned on entering the town\r
-said to me:--\r
-\r
-"'Whither are you going! Do you not know that you have been dead this\r
-long time?'\r
-\r
-"I opened my mouth to reply, and I perceived that there was no one near\r
-me."\r
-\r
-\r
-He woke. He was icy cold. A wind which was chill like the breeze of dawn\r
-was rattling the leaves of the window, which had been left open on their\r
-hinges. The fire was out. The candle was nearing its end. It was still\r
-black night.\r
-\r
-He rose, he went to the window. There were no stars in the sky even yet.\r
-\r
-From his window the yard of the house and the street were visible. A\r
-sharp, harsh noise, which made him drop his eyes, resounded from the\r
-earth.\r
-\r
-Below him he perceived two red stars, whose rays lengthened and\r
-shortened in a singular manner through the darkness.\r
-\r
-As his thoughts were still half immersed in the mists of sleep, "Hold!"\r
-said he, "there are no stars in the sky. They are on earth now."\r
-\r
-But this confusion vanished; a second sound similar to the first roused\r
-him thoroughly; he looked and recognized the fact that these two stars\r
-were the lanterns of a carriage. By the light which they cast he was\r
-able to distinguish the form of this vehicle. It was a tilbury harnessed\r
-to a small white horse. The noise which he had heard was the trampling\r
-of the horse's hoofs on the pavement.\r
-\r
-"What vehicle is this?" he said to himself. "Who is coming here so early\r
-in the morning?"\r
-\r
-At that moment there came a light tap on the door of his chamber.\r
-\r
-He shuddered from head to foot, and cried in a terrible voice:--\r
-\r
-"Who is there?"\r
-\r
-Some one said:--\r
-\r
-"I, Monsieur le Maire."\r
-\r
-He recognized the voice of the old woman who was his portress.\r
-\r
-"Well!" he replied, "what is it?"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Maire, it is just five o'clock in the morning."\r
-\r
-"What is that to me?"\r
-\r
-"The cabriolet is here, Monsieur le Maire."\r
-\r
-"What cabriolet?"\r
-\r
-"The tilbury."\r
-\r
-"What tilbury?"\r
-\r
-"Did not Monsieur le Maire order a tilbury?"\r
-\r
-"No," said he.\r
-\r
-"The coachman says that he has come for Monsieur le Maire."\r
-\r
-"What coachman?"\r
-\r
-"M. Scaufflaire's coachman."\r
-\r
-"M. Scaufflaire?"\r
-\r
-That name sent a shudder over him, as though a flash of lightning had\r
-passed in front of his face.\r
-\r
-"Ah! yes," he resumed; "M. Scaufflaire!"\r
-\r
-If the old woman could have seen him at that moment, she would have been\r
-frightened.\r
-\r
-A tolerably long silence ensued. He examined the flame of the candle\r
-with a stupid air, and from around the wick he took some of the burning\r
-wax, which he rolled between his fingers. The old woman waited for him.\r
-She even ventured to uplift her voice once more:--\r
-\r
-"What am I to say, Monsieur le Maire?"\r
-\r
-"Say that it is well, and that I am coming down."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--HINDRANCES\r
-\r
-The posting service from Arras to M. sur M. was still operated at this\r
-period by small mail-wagons of the time of the Empire. These mail-wagons\r
-were two-wheeled cabriolets, upholstered inside with fawn-colored\r
-leather, hung on springs, and having but two seats, one for the postboy,\r
-the other for the traveller. The wheels were armed with those long,\r
-offensive axles which keep other vehicles at a distance, and which\r
-may still be seen on the road in Germany. The despatch box, an immense\r
-oblong coffer, was placed behind the vehicle and formed a part of it.\r
-This coffer was painted black, and the cabriolet yellow.\r
-\r
-These vehicles, which have no counterparts nowadays, had something\r
-distorted and hunchbacked about them; and when one saw them passing in\r
-the distance, and climbing up some road to the horizon, they resembled\r
-the insects which are called, I think, termites, and which, though with\r
-but little corselet, drag a great train behind them. But they travelled\r
-at a very rapid rate. The post-wagon which set out from Arras at one\r
-o'clock every night, after the mail from Paris had passed, arrived at M.\r
-sur M. a little before five o'clock in the morning.\r
-\r
-That night the wagon which was descending to M. sur M. by the Hesdin\r
-road, collided at the corner of a street, just as it was entering the\r
-town, with a little tilbury harnessed to a white horse, which was going\r
-in the opposite direction, and in which there was but one person, a man\r
-enveloped in a mantle. The wheel of the tilbury received quite a violent\r
-shock. The postman shouted to the man to stop, but the traveller paid no\r
-heed and pursued his road at full gallop.\r
-\r
-"That man is in a devilish hurry!" said the postman.\r
-\r
-The man thus hastening on was the one whom we have just seen struggling\r
-in convulsions which are certainly deserving of pity.\r
-\r
-Whither was he going? He could not have told. Why was he hastening?\r
-He did not know. He was driving at random, straight ahead. Whither?\r
-To Arras, no doubt; but he might have been going elsewhere as well.\r
-At times he was conscious of it, and he shuddered. He plunged into the\r
-night as into a gulf. Something urged him forward; something drew him\r
-on. No one could have told what was taking place within him; every one\r
-will understand it. What man is there who has not entered, at least once\r
-in his life, into that obscure cavern of the unknown?\r
-\r
-However, he had resolved on nothing, decided nothing, formed no plan,\r
-done nothing. None of the actions of his conscience had been decisive.\r
-He was, more than ever, as he had been at the first moment.\r
-\r
-Why was he going to Arras?\r
-\r
-He repeated what he had already said to himself when he had hired\r
-Scaufflaire's cabriolet: that, whatever the result was to be, there was\r
-no reason why he should not see with his own eyes, and judge of matters\r
-for himself; that this was even prudent; that he must know what took\r
-place; that no decision could be arrived at without having observed and\r
-scrutinized; that one made mountains out of everything from a distance;\r
-that, at any rate, when he should have seen that Champmathieu, some\r
-wretch, his conscience would probably be greatly relieved to allow him\r
-to go to the galleys in his stead; that Javert would indeed be there;\r
-and that Brevet, that Chenildieu, that Cochepaille, old convicts who\r
-had known him; but they certainly would not recognize him;--bah! what an\r
-idea! that Javert was a hundred leagues from suspecting the truth; that\r
-all conjectures and all suppositions were fixed on Champmathieu, and\r
-that there is nothing so headstrong as suppositions and conjectures;\r
-that accordingly there was no danger.\r
-\r
-That it was, no doubt, a dark moment, but that he should emerge from it;\r
-that, after all, he held his destiny, however bad it might be, in his\r
-own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to this thought.\r
-\r
-At bottom, to tell the whole truth, he would have preferred not to go to\r
-Arras.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, he was going thither.\r
-\r
-As he meditated, he whipped up his horse, which was proceeding at that\r
-fine, regular, and even trot which accomplishes two leagues and a half\r
-an hour.\r
-\r
-In proportion as the cabriolet advanced, he felt something within him\r
-draw back.\r
-\r
-At daybreak he was in the open country; the town of M. sur M. lay far\r
-behind him. He watched the horizon grow white; he stared at all the\r
-chilly figures of a winter's dawn as they passed before his eyes,\r
-but without seeing them. The morning has its spectres as well as the\r
-evening. He did not see them; but without his being aware of it, and by\r
-means of a sort of penetration which was almost physical, these black\r
-silhouettes of trees and of hills added some gloomy and sinister quality\r
-to the violent state of his soul.\r
-\r
-Each time that he passed one of those isolated dwellings which sometimes\r
-border on the highway, he said to himself, "And yet there are people\r
-there within who are sleeping!"\r
-\r
-The trot of the horse, the bells on the harness, the wheels on the road,\r
-produced a gentle, monotonous noise. These things are charming when one\r
-is joyous, and lugubrious when one is sad.\r
-\r
-It was broad daylight when he arrived at Hesdin. He halted in front of\r
-the inn, to allow the horse a breathing spell, and to have him given\r
-some oats.\r
-\r
-The horse belonged, as Scaufflaire had said, to that small race of the\r
-Boulonnais, which has too much head, too much belly, and not enough neck\r
-and shoulders, but which has a broad chest, a large crupper, thin, fine\r
-legs, and solid hoofs--a homely, but a robust and healthy race. The\r
-excellent beast had travelled five leagues in two hours, and had not a\r
-drop of sweat on his loins.\r
-\r
-He did not get out of the tilbury. The stableman who brought the oats\r
-suddenly bent down and examined the left wheel.\r
-\r
-"Are you going far in this condition?" said the man.\r
-\r
-He replied, with an air of not having roused himself from his revery:--\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"Have you come from a great distance?" went on the man.\r
-\r
-"Five leagues."\r
-\r
-"Ah!"\r
-\r
-"Why do you say, 'Ah?'"\r
-\r
-The man bent down once more, was silent for a moment, with his eyes\r
-fixed on the wheel; then he rose erect and said:--\r
-\r
-"Because, though this wheel has travelled five leagues, it certainly\r
-will not travel another quarter of a league."\r
-\r
-He sprang out of the tilbury.\r
-\r
-"What is that you say, my friend?"\r
-\r
-"I say that it is a miracle that you should have travelled five leagues\r
-without you and your horse rolling into some ditch on the highway. Just\r
-see here!"\r
-\r
-The wheel really had suffered serious damage. The shock administered by\r
-the mail-wagon had split two spokes and strained the hub, so that the\r
-nut no longer held firm.\r
-\r
-"My friend," he said to the stableman, "is there a wheelwright here?"\r
-\r
-"Certainly, sir."\r
-\r
-"Do me the service to go and fetch him."\r
-\r
-"He is only a step from here. Hey! Master Bourgaillard!"\r
-\r
-Master Bourgaillard, the wheelwright, was standing on his own threshold.\r
-He came, examined the wheel and made a grimace like a surgeon when the\r
-latter thinks a limb is broken.\r
-\r
-"Can you repair this wheel immediately?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-"When can I set out again?"\r
-\r
-"To-morrow."\r
-\r
-"To-morrow!"\r
-\r
-"There is a long day's work on it. Are you in a hurry, sir?"\r
-\r
-"In a very great hurry. I must set out again in an hour at the latest."\r
-\r
-"Impossible, sir."\r
-\r
-"I will pay whatever you ask."\r
-\r
-"Impossible."\r
-\r
-"Well, in two hours, then."\r
-\r
-"Impossible to-day. Two new spokes and a hub must be made. Monsieur will\r
-not be able to start before to-morrow morning."\r
-\r
-"The matter cannot wait until to-morrow. What if you were to replace\r
-this wheel instead of repairing it?"\r
-\r
-"How so?"\r
-\r
-"You are a wheelwright?"\r
-\r
-"Certainly, sir."\r
-\r
-"Have you not a wheel that you can sell me? Then I could start again at\r
-once."\r
-\r
-"A spare wheel?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"I have no wheel on hand that would fit your cabriolet. Two wheels make\r
-a pair. Two wheels cannot be put together hap-hazard."\r
-\r
-"In that case, sell me a pair of wheels."\r
-\r
-"Not all wheels fit all axles, sir."\r
-\r
-"Try, nevertheless."\r
-\r
-"It is useless, sir. I have nothing to sell but cart-wheels. We are but\r
-a poor country here."\r
-\r
-"Have you a cabriolet that you can let me have?"\r
-\r
-The wheelwright had seen at the first glance that the tilbury was a\r
-hired vehicle. He shrugged his shoulders.\r
-\r
-"You treat the cabriolets that people let you so well! If I had one, I\r
-would not let it to you!"\r
-\r
-"Well, sell it to me, then."\r
-\r
-"I have none."\r
-\r
-"What! not even a spring-cart? I am not hard to please, as you see."\r
-\r
-"We live in a poor country. There is, in truth," added the wheelwright,\r
-"an old calash under the shed yonder, which belongs to a bourgeois of\r
-the town, who gave it to me to take care of, and who only uses it on the\r
-thirty-sixth of the month--never, that is to say. I might let that\r
-to you, for what matters it to me? But the bourgeois must not see it\r
-pass--and then, it is a calash; it would require two horses."\r
-\r
-"I will take two post-horses."\r
-\r
-"Where is Monsieur going?"\r
-\r
-"To Arras."\r
-\r
-"And Monsieur wishes to reach there to-day?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, of course."\r
-\r
-"By taking two post-horses?"\r
-\r
-"Why not?"\r
-\r
-"Does it make any difference whether Monsieur arrives at four o'clock\r
-to-morrow morning?"\r
-\r
-"Certainly not."\r
-\r
-"There is one thing to be said about that, you see, by taking\r
-post-horses--Monsieur has his passport?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Well, by taking post-horses, Monsieur cannot reach Arras before\r
-to-morrow. We are on a cross-road. The relays are badly served, the\r
-horses are in the fields. The season for ploughing is just beginning;\r
-heavy teams are required, and horses are seized upon everywhere, from\r
-the post as well as elsewhere. Monsieur will have to wait three or four\r
-hours at the least at every relay. And, then, they drive at a walk.\r
-There are many hills to ascend."\r
-\r
-"Come then, I will go on horseback. Unharness the cabriolet. Some one\r
-can surely sell me a saddle in the neighborhood."\r
-\r
-"Without doubt. But will this horse bear the saddle?"\r
-\r
-"That is true; you remind me of that; he will not bear it."\r
-\r
-"Then--"\r
-\r
-"But I can surely hire a horse in the village?"\r
-\r
-"A horse to travel to Arras at one stretch?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"That would require such a horse as does not exist in these parts. You\r
-would have to buy it to begin with, because no one knows you. But you\r
-will not find one for sale nor to let, for five hundred francs, or for a\r
-thousand."\r
-\r
-"What am I to do?"\r
-\r
-"The best thing is to let me repair the wheel like an honest man, and\r
-set out on your journey to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"To-morrow will be too late."\r
-\r
-"The deuce!"\r
-\r
-"Is there not a mail-wagon which runs to Arras? When will it pass?"\r
-\r
-"To-night. Both the posts pass at night; the one going as well as the\r
-one coming."\r
-\r
-"What! It will take you a day to mend this wheel?"\r
-\r
-"A day, and a good long one."\r
-\r
-"If you set two men to work?"\r
-\r
-"If I set ten men to work."\r
-\r
-"What if the spokes were to be tied together with ropes?"\r
-\r
-"That could be done with the spokes, not with the hub; and the felly is\r
-in a bad state, too."\r
-\r
-"Is there any one in this village who lets out teams?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Is there another wheelwright?"\r
-\r
-The stableman and the wheelwright replied in concert, with a toss of the\r
-head.\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-He felt an immense joy.\r
-\r
-It was evident that Providence was intervening. That it was it who had\r
-broken the wheel of the tilbury and who was stopping him on the road.\r
-He had not yielded to this sort of first summons; he had just made every\r
-possible effort to continue the journey; he had loyally and scrupulously\r
-exhausted all means; he had been deterred neither by the season, nor\r
-fatigue, nor by the expense; he had nothing with which to reproach\r
-himself. If he went no further, that was no fault of his. It did not\r
-concern him further. It was no longer his fault. It was not the act of\r
-his own conscience, but the act of Providence.\r
-\r
-He breathed again. He breathed freely and to the full extent of his\r
-lungs for the first time since Javert's visit. It seemed to him that the\r
-hand of iron which had held his heart in its grasp for the last twenty\r
-hours had just released him.\r
-\r
-It seemed to him that God was for him now, and was manifesting Himself.\r
-\r
-He said himself that he had done all he could, and that now he had\r
-nothing to do but retrace his steps quietly.\r
-\r
-If his conversation with the wheelwright had taken place in a chamber\r
-of the inn, it would have had no witnesses, no one would have heard him,\r
-things would have rested there, and it is probable that we should not\r
-have had to relate any of the occurrences which the reader is about\r
-to peruse; but this conversation had taken place in the street. Any\r
-colloquy in the street inevitably attracts a crowd. There are always\r
-people who ask nothing better than to become spectators. While he was\r
-questioning the wheelwright, some people who were passing back and forth\r
-halted around them. After listening for a few minutes, a young lad, to\r
-whom no one had paid any heed, detached himself from the group and ran\r
-off.\r
-\r
-At the moment when the traveller, after the inward deliberation which we\r
-have just described, resolved to retrace his steps, this child returned.\r
-He was accompanied by an old woman.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," said the woman, "my boy tells me that you wish to hire a\r
-cabriolet."\r
-\r
-These simple words uttered by an old woman led by a child made the\r
-perspiration trickle down his limbs. He thought that he beheld the hand\r
-which had relaxed its grasp reappear in the darkness behind him, ready\r
-to seize him once more.\r
-\r
-He answered:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, my good woman; I am in search of a cabriolet which I can hire."\r
-\r
-And he hastened to add:--\r
-\r
-"But there is none in the place."\r
-\r
-"Certainly there is," said the old woman.\r
-\r
-"Where?" interpolated the wheelwright.\r
-\r
-"At my house," replied the old woman.\r
-\r
-He shuddered. The fatal hand had grasped him again.\r
-\r
-The old woman really had in her shed a sort of basket spring-cart.\r
-The wheelwright and the stable-man, in despair at the prospect of the\r
-traveller escaping their clutches, interfered.\r
-\r
-"It was a frightful old trap; it rests flat on the axle; it is an actual\r
-fact that the seats were suspended inside it by leather thongs; the rain\r
-came into it; the wheels were rusted and eaten with moisture; it\r
-would not go much further than the tilbury; a regular ramshackle old\r
-stage-wagon; the gentleman would make a great mistake if he trusted\r
-himself to it," etc., etc.\r
-\r
-All this was true; but this trap, this ramshackle old vehicle, this\r
-thing, whatever it was, ran on its two wheels and could go to Arras.\r
-\r
-He paid what was asked, left the tilbury with the wheelwright to be\r
-repaired, intending to reclaim it on his return, had the white horse\r
-put to the cart, climbed into it, and resumed the road which he had been\r
-travelling since morning.\r
-\r
-At the moment when the cart moved off, he admitted that he had felt, a\r
-moment previously, a certain joy in the thought that he should not\r
-go whither he was now proceeding. He examined this joy with a sort of\r
-wrath, and found it absurd. Why should he feel joy at turning back?\r
-After all, he was taking this trip of his own free will. No one was\r
-forcing him to it.\r
-\r
-And assuredly nothing would happen except what he should choose.\r
-\r
-As he left Hesdin, he heard a voice shouting to him: "Stop! Stop!" He\r
-halted the cart with a vigorous movement which contained a feverish and\r
-convulsive element resembling hope.\r
-\r
-It was the old woman's little boy.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," said the latter, "it was I who got the cart for you."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"You have not given me anything."\r
-\r
-He who gave to all so readily thought this demand exorbitant and almost\r
-odious.\r
-\r
-"Ah! it's you, you scamp?" said he; "you shall have nothing."\r
-\r
-He whipped up his horse and set off at full speed.\r
-\r
-He had lost a great deal of time at Hesdin. He wanted to make it good.\r
-The little horse was courageous, and pulled for two; but it was the\r
-month of February, there had been rain; the roads were bad. And then,\r
-it was no longer the tilbury. The cart was very heavy, and in addition,\r
-there were many ascents.\r
-\r
-He took nearly four hours to go from Hesdin to Saint-Pol; four hours for\r
-five leagues.\r
-\r
-At Saint-Pol he had the horse unharnessed at the first inn he came to\r
-and led to the stable; as he had promised Scaufflaire, he stood beside\r
-the manger while the horse was eating; he thought of sad and confusing\r
-things.\r
-\r
-The inn-keeper's wife came to the stable.\r
-\r
-"Does not Monsieur wish to breakfast?"\r
-\r
-"Come, that is true; I even have a good appetite."\r
-\r
-He followed the woman, who had a rosy, cheerful face; she led him to the\r
-public room where there were tables covered with waxed cloth.\r
-\r
-"Make haste!" said he; "I must start again; I am in a hurry."\r
-\r
-A big Flemish servant-maid placed his knife and fork in all haste; he\r
-looked at the girl with a sensation of comfort.\r
-\r
-"That is what ailed me," he thought; "I had not breakfasted."\r
-\r
-His breakfast was served; he seized the bread, took a mouthful, and then\r
-slowly replaced it on the table, and did not touch it again.\r
-\r
-A carter was eating at another table; he said to this man:--\r
-\r
-"Why is their bread so bitter here?"\r
-\r
-The carter was a German and did not understand him.\r
-\r
-He returned to the stable and remained near the horse.\r
-\r
-An hour later he had quitted Saint-Pol and was directing his course\r
-towards Tinques, which is only five leagues from Arras.\r
-\r
-What did he do during this journey? Of what was he thinking? As in the\r
-morning, he watched the trees, the thatched roofs, the tilled fields\r
-pass by, and the way in which the landscape, broken at every turn of the\r
-road, vanished; this is a sort of contemplation which sometimes\r
-suffices to the soul, and almost relieves it from thought. What is more\r
-melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the\r
-first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every\r
-instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make\r
-comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all\r
-the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and\r
-bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse;\r
-we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing;\r
-each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel\r
-a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy\r
-horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and\r
-unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows.\r
-\r
-Twilight was falling when the children who were coming out of school\r
-beheld this traveller enter Tinques; it is true that the days were still\r
-short; he did not halt at Tinques; as he emerged from the village, a\r
-laborer, who was mending the road with stones, raised his head and said\r
-to him:--\r
-\r
-"That horse is very much fatigued."\r
-\r
-The poor beast was, in fact, going at a walk.\r
-\r
-"Are you going to Arras?" added the road-mender.\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"If you go on at that rate you will not arrive very early."\r
-\r
-He stopped his horse, and asked the laborer:--\r
-\r
-"How far is it from here to Arras?"\r
-\r
-"Nearly seven good leagues."\r
-\r
-"How is that? the posting guide only says five leagues and a quarter."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" returned the road-mender, "so you don't know that the road is\r
-under repair? You will find it barred a quarter of an hour further on;\r
-there is no way to proceed further."\r
-\r
-"Really?"\r
-\r
-"You will take the road on the left, leading to Carency; you will cross\r
-the river; when you reach Camblin, you will turn to the right; that is\r
-the road to Mont-Saint-Eloy which leads to Arras."\r
-\r
-"But it is night, and I shall lose my way."\r
-\r
-"You do not belong in these parts?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"And, besides, it is all cross-roads; stop! sir," resumed the\r
-road-mender; "shall I give you a piece of advice? your horse is tired;\r
-return to Tinques; there is a good inn there; sleep there; you can reach\r
-Arras to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"I must be there this evening."\r
-\r
-"That is different; but go to the inn all the same, and get an extra\r
-horse; the stable-boy will guide you through the cross-roads."\r
-\r
-He followed the road-mender's advice, retraced his steps, and, half an\r
-hour later, he passed the same spot again, but this time at full speed,\r
-with a good horse to aid; a stable-boy, who called himself a postilion,\r
-was seated on the shaft of the cariole.\r
-\r
-Still, he felt that he had lost time.\r
-\r
-Night had fully come.\r
-\r
-They turned into the cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the\r
-cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to the postilion:--\r
-\r
-"Keep at a trot, and you shall have a double fee."\r
-\r
-In one of the jolts, the whiffle-tree broke.\r
-\r
-"There's the whiffle-tree broken, sir," said the postilion; "I don't\r
-know how to harness my horse now; this road is very bad at night; if\r
-you wish to return and sleep at Tinques, we could be in Arras early\r
-to-morrow morning."\r
-\r
-He replied, "Have you a bit of rope and a knife?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-He cut a branch from a tree and made a whiffle-tree of it.\r
-\r
-This caused another loss of twenty minutes; but they set out again at a\r
-gallop.\r
-\r
-The plain was gloomy; low-hanging, black, crisp fogs crept over the\r
-hills and wrenched themselves away like smoke: there were whitish gleams\r
-in the clouds; a strong breeze which blew in from the sea produced a\r
-sound in all quarters of the horizon, as of some one moving furniture;\r
-everything that could be seen assumed attitudes of terror. How many\r
-things shiver beneath these vast breaths of the night!\r
-\r
-He was stiff with cold; he had eaten nothing since the night before;\r
-he vaguely recalled his other nocturnal trip in the vast plain in\r
-the neighborhood of D----, eight years previously, and it seemed but\r
-yesterday.\r
-\r
-The hour struck from a distant tower; he asked the boy:--\r
-\r
-"What time is it?"\r
-\r
-"Seven o'clock, sir; we shall reach Arras at eight; we have but three\r
-leagues still to go."\r
-\r
-At that moment, he for the first time indulged in this reflection,\r
-thinking it odd the while that it had not occurred to him sooner: that\r
-all this trouble which he was taking was, perhaps, useless; that he did\r
-not know so much as the hour of the trial; that he should, at least,\r
-have informed himself of that; that he was foolish to go thus straight\r
-ahead without knowing whether he would be of any service or not; then\r
-he sketched out some calculations in his mind: that, ordinarily, the\r
-sittings of the Court of Assizes began at nine o'clock in the morning;\r
-that it could not be a long affair; that the theft of the apples would\r
-be very brief; that there would then remain only a question of identity,\r
-four or five depositions, and very little for the lawyers to say; that\r
-he should arrive after all was over.\r
-\r
-The postilion whipped up the horses; they had crossed the river and left\r
-Mont-Saint-Eloy behind them.\r
-\r
-The night grew more profound.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--SISTER SIMPLICE PUT TO THE PROOF\r
-\r
-But at that moment Fantine was joyous.\r
-\r
-She had passed a very bad night; her cough was frightful; her fever\r
-had doubled in intensity; she had had dreams: in the morning, when the\r
-doctor paid his visit, she was delirious; he assumed an alarmed look,\r
-and ordered that he should be informed as soon as M. Madeleine arrived.\r
-\r
-All the morning she was melancholy, said but little, and laid plaits\r
-in her sheets, murmuring the while, in a low voice, calculations\r
-which seemed to be calculations of distances. Her eyes were hollow and\r
-staring. They seemed almost extinguished at intervals, then lighted up\r
-again and shone like stars. It seems as though, at the approach of a\r
-certain dark hour, the light of heaven fills those who are quitting the\r
-light of earth.\r
-\r
-Each time that Sister Simplice asked her how she felt, she replied\r
-invariably, "Well. I should like to see M. Madeleine."\r
-\r
-Some months before this, at the moment when Fantine had just lost her\r
-last modesty, her last shame, and her last joy, she was the shadow of\r
-herself; now she was the spectre of herself. Physical suffering had\r
-completed the work of moral suffering. This creature of five and twenty\r
-had a wrinkled brow, flabby cheeks, pinched nostrils, teeth from which\r
-the gums had receded, a leaden complexion, a bony neck, prominent\r
-shoulder-blades, frail limbs, a clayey skin, and her golden hair was\r
-growing out sprinkled with gray. Alas! how illness improvises old-age!\r
-\r
-At mid-day the physician returned, gave some directions, inquired\r
-whether the mayor had made his appearance at the infirmary, and shook\r
-his head.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine usually came to see the invalid at three o'clock. As\r
-exactness is kindness, he was exact.\r
-\r
-About half-past two, Fantine began to be restless. In the course of\r
-twenty minutes, she asked the nun more than ten times, "What time is it,\r
-sister?"\r
-\r
-Three o'clock struck. At the third stroke, Fantine sat up in bed; she\r
-who could, in general, hardly turn over, joined her yellow, fleshless\r
-hands in a sort of convulsive clasp, and the nun heard her utter one\r
-of those profound sighs which seem to throw off dejection. Then Fantine\r
-turned and looked at the door.\r
-\r
-No one entered; the door did not open.\r
-\r
-She remained thus for a quarter of an hour, her eyes riveted on the\r
-door, motionless and apparently holding her breath. The sister dared not\r
-speak to her. The clock struck a quarter past three. Fantine fell back\r
-on her pillow.\r
-\r
-She said nothing, but began to plait the sheets once more.\r
-\r
-Half an hour passed, then an hour, no one came; every time the clock\r
-struck, Fantine started up and looked towards the door, then fell back\r
-again.\r
-\r
-Her thought was clearly perceptible, but she uttered no name, she made\r
-no complaint, she blamed no one. But she coughed in a melancholy way.\r
-One would have said that something dark was descending upon her. She was\r
-livid and her lips were blue. She smiled now and then.\r
-\r
-Five o'clock struck. Then the sister heard her say, very low and gently,\r
-"He is wrong not to come to-day, since I am going away to-morrow."\r
-\r
-Sister Simplice herself was surprised at M. Madeleine's delay.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Fantine was staring at the tester of her bed. She\r
-seemed to be endeavoring to recall something. All at once she began to\r
-sing in a voice as feeble as a breath. The nun listened. This is what\r
-Fantine was singing:--\r
-\r
-\r
- "Lovely things we will buy\r
- As we stroll the faubourgs through.\r
- Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,\r
- I love my love, corn-flowers are blue.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Yestere'en the Virgin Mary came near my stove, in a broidered mantle\r
-clad, and said to me, 'Here, hide 'neath my veil the child whom you\r
-one day begged from me. Haste to the city, buy linen, buy a needle, buy\r
-thread.'\r
-\r
-\r
- "Lovely things we will buy\r
- As we stroll the faubourgs through.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Dear Holy Virgin, beside my stove I have set a cradle with ribbons\r
-decked. God may give me his loveliest star; I prefer the child thou hast\r
-granted me. 'Madame, what shall I do with this linen fine?'--'Make of it\r
-clothes for thy new-born babe.'\r
-\r
-\r
- "Roses are pink and corn-flowers are blue,\r
- I love my love, and corn-flowers are blue.\r
-\r
-\r
-"'Wash this linen.'--'Where?'--'In the stream. Make of it, soiling\r
-not, spoiling not, a petticoat fair with its bodice fine, which I will\r
-embroider and fill with flowers.'--'Madame, the child is no longer here;\r
-what is to be done?'--'Then make of it a winding-sheet in which to bury\r
-me.'\r
-\r
-\r
- "Lovely things we will buy\r
- As we stroll the faubourgs through,\r
- Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,\r
- I love my love, corn-flowers are blue."\r
-\r
-\r
-This song was an old cradle romance with which she had, in former days,\r
-lulled her little Cosette to sleep, and which had never recurred to her\r
-mind in all the five years during which she had been parted from her\r
-child. She sang it in so sad a voice, and to so sweet an air, that it\r
-was enough to make any one, even a nun, weep. The sister, accustomed as\r
-she was to austerities, felt a tear spring to her eyes.\r
-\r
-The clock struck six. Fantine did not seem to hear it. She no longer\r
-seemed to pay attention to anything about her.\r
-\r
-Sister Simplice sent a serving-maid to inquire of the portress of the\r
-factory, whether the mayor had returned, and if he would not come to the\r
-infirmary soon. The girl returned in a few minutes.\r
-\r
-Fantine was still motionless and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.\r
-\r
-The servant informed Sister Simplice in a very low tone, that the\r
-mayor had set out that morning before six o'clock, in a little tilbury\r
-harnessed to a white horse, cold as the weather was; that he had gone\r
-alone, without even a driver; that no one knew what road he had taken;\r
-that people said he had been seen to turn into the road to Arras; that\r
-others asserted that they had met him on the road to Paris. That when he\r
-went away he had been very gentle, as usual, and that he had merely told\r
-the portress not to expect him that night.\r
-\r
-While the two women were whispering together, with their backs turned\r
-to Fantine's bed, the sister interrogating, the servant conjecturing,\r
-Fantine, with the feverish vivacity of certain organic maladies, which\r
-unite the free movements of health with the frightful emaciation of\r
-death, had raised herself to her knees in bed, with her shrivelled hands\r
-resting on the bolster, and her head thrust through the opening of the\r
-curtains, and was listening. All at once she cried:--\r
-\r
-"You are speaking of M. Madeleine! Why are you talking so low? What is\r
-he doing? Why does he not come?"\r
-\r
-Her voice was so abrupt and hoarse that the two women thought they heard\r
-the voice of a man; they wheeled round in affright.\r
-\r
-"Answer me!" cried Fantine.\r
-\r
-The servant stammered:--\r
-\r
-"The portress told me that he could not come to-day."\r
-\r
-"Be calm, my child," said the sister; "lie down again."\r
-\r
-Fantine, without changing her attitude, continued in a loud voice, and\r
-with an accent that was both imperious and heart-rending:--\r
-\r
-"He cannot come? Why not? You know the reason. You are whispering it to\r
-each other there. I want to know it."\r
-\r
-The servant-maid hastened to say in the nun's ear, "Say that he is busy\r
-with the city council."\r
-\r
-Sister Simplice blushed faintly, for it was a lie that the maid had\r
-proposed to her.\r
-\r
-On the other hand, it seemed to her that the mere communication of the\r
-truth to the invalid would, without doubt, deal her a terrible blow, and\r
-that this was a serious matter in Fantine's present state. Her flush\r
-did not last long; the sister raised her calm, sad eyes to Fantine, and\r
-said, "Monsieur le Maire has gone away."\r
-\r
-Fantine raised herself and crouched on her heels in the bed: her eyes\r
-sparkled; indescribable joy beamed from that melancholy face.\r
-\r
-"Gone!" she cried; "he has gone to get Cosette."\r
-\r
-Then she raised her arms to heaven, and her white face became ineffable;\r
-her lips moved; she was praying in a low voice.\r
-\r
-When her prayer was finished, "Sister," she said, "I am willing to lie\r
-down again; I will do anything you wish; I was naughty just now; I beg\r
-your pardon for having spoken so loud; it is very wrong to talk loudly;\r
-I know that well, my good sister, but, you see, I am very happy: the\r
-good God is good; M. Madeleine is good; just think! he has gone to\r
-Montfermeil to get my little Cosette."\r
-\r
-She lay down again, with the nun's assistance, helped the nun to arrange\r
-her pillow, and kissed the little silver cross which she wore on her\r
-neck, and which Sister Simplice had given her.\r
-\r
-"My child," said the sister, "try to rest now, and do not talk any\r
-more."\r
-\r
-Fantine took the sister's hand in her moist hands, and the latter was\r
-pained to feel that perspiration.\r
-\r
-"He set out this morning for Paris; in fact, he need not even go through\r
-Paris; Montfermeil is a little to the left as you come thence. Do you\r
-remember how he said to me yesterday, when I spoke to him of Cosette,\r
-Soon, soon? He wants to give me a surprise, you know! he made me sign a\r
-letter so that she could be taken from the Thenardiers; they cannot\r
-say anything, can they? they will give back Cosette, for they have been\r
-paid; the authorities will not allow them to keep the child since they\r
-have received their pay. Do not make signs to me that I must not talk,\r
-sister! I am extremely happy; I am doing well; I am not ill at all any\r
-more; I am going to see Cosette again; I am even quite hungry; it is\r
-nearly five years since I saw her last; you cannot imagine how much\r
-attached one gets to children, and then, she will be so pretty; you will\r
-see! If you only knew what pretty little rosy fingers she had! In the\r
-first place, she will have very beautiful hands; she had ridiculous\r
-hands when she was only a year old; like this! she must be a big girl\r
-now; she is seven years old; she is quite a young lady; I call her\r
-Cosette, but her name is really Euphrasie. Stop! this morning I was\r
-looking at the dust on the chimney-piece, and I had a sort of idea come\r
-across me, like that, that I should see Cosette again soon. Mon Dieu!\r
-how wrong it is not to see one's children for years! One ought to\r
-reflect that life is not eternal. Oh, how good M. le Maire is to go! it\r
-is very cold! it is true; he had on his cloak, at least? he will be\r
-here to-morrow, will he not? to-morrow will be a festival day; to-morrow\r
-morning, sister, you must remind me to put on my little cap that has\r
-lace on it. What a place that Montfermeil is! I took that journey on\r
-foot once; it was very long for me, but the diligences go very quickly!\r
-he will be here to-morrow with Cosette: how far is it from here to\r
-Montfermeil?"\r
-\r
-The sister, who had no idea of distances, replied, "Oh, I think that he\r
-will be here to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"To-morrow! to-morrow!" said Fantine, "I shall see Cosette to-morrow!\r
-you see, good sister of the good God, that I am no longer ill; I am mad;\r
-I could dance if any one wished it."\r
-\r
-A person who had seen her a quarter of an hour previously would not have\r
-understood the change; she was all rosy now; she spoke in a lively and\r
-natural voice; her whole face was one smile; now and then she talked,\r
-she laughed softly; the joy of a mother is almost infantile.\r
-\r
-"Well," resumed the nun, "now that you are happy, mind me, and do not\r
-talk any more."\r
-\r
-Fantine laid her head on her pillow and said in a low voice: "Yes,\r
-lie down again; be good, for you are going to have your child; Sister\r
-Simplice is right; every one here is right."\r
-\r
-And then, without stirring, without even moving her head, she began to\r
-stare all about her with wide-open eyes and a joyous air, and she said\r
-nothing more.\r
-\r
-The sister drew the curtains together again, hoping that she would\r
-fall into a doze. Between seven and eight o'clock the doctor came; not\r
-hearing any sound, he thought Fantine was asleep, entered softly, and\r
-approached the bed on tiptoe; he opened the curtains a little, and, by\r
-the light of the taper, he saw Fantine's big eyes gazing at him.\r
-\r
-She said to him, "She will be allowed to sleep beside me in a little\r
-bed, will she not, sir?"\r
-\r
-The doctor thought that she was delirious. She added:--\r
-\r
-"See! there is just room."\r
-\r
-The doctor took Sister Simplice aside, and she explained matters to him;\r
-that M. Madeleine was absent for a day or two, and that in their doubt\r
-they had not thought it well to undeceive the invalid, who believed that\r
-the mayor had gone to Montfermeil; that it was possible, after all, that\r
-her guess was correct: the doctor approved.\r
-\r
-He returned to Fantine's bed, and she went on:--\r
-\r
-"You see, when she wakes up in the morning, I shall be able to say good\r
-morning to her, poor kitten, and when I cannot sleep at night, I can\r
-hear her asleep; her little gentle breathing will do me good."\r
-\r
-"Give me your hand," said the doctor.\r
-\r
-She stretched out her arm, and exclaimed with a laugh:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, hold! in truth, you did not know it; I am cured; Cosette will\r
-arrive to-morrow."\r
-\r
-The doctor was surprised; she was better; the pressure on her chest\r
-had decreased; her pulse had regained its strength; a sort of life had\r
-suddenly supervened and reanimated this poor, worn-out creature.\r
-\r
-"Doctor," she went on, "did the sister tell you that M. le Maire has\r
-gone to get that mite of a child?"\r
-\r
-The doctor recommended silence, and that all painful emotions should be\r
-avoided; he prescribed an infusion of pure chinchona, and, in case the\r
-fever should increase again during the night, a calming potion. As he\r
-took his departure, he said to the sister:--\r
-\r
-"She is doing better; if good luck willed that the mayor should\r
-actually arrive to-morrow with the child, who knows? there are crises\r
-so astounding; great joy has been known to arrest maladies; I know well\r
-that this is an organic disease, and in an advanced state, but all those\r
-things are such mysteries: we may be able to save her."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE TRAVELLER ON HIS ARRIVAL TAKES PRECAUTIONS FOR\r
-DEPARTURE\r
-\r
-It was nearly eight o'clock in the evening when the cart, which we\r
-left on the road, entered the porte-cochere of the Hotel de la Poste in\r
-Arras; the man whom we have been following up to this moment alighted\r
-from it, responded with an abstracted air to the attentions of the\r
-people of the inn, sent back the extra horse, and with his own hands\r
-led the little white horse to the stable; then he opened the door of a\r
-billiard-room which was situated on the ground floor, sat down there,\r
-and leaned his elbows on a table; he had taken fourteen hours for\r
-the journey which he had counted on making in six; he did himself the\r
-justice to acknowledge that it was not his fault, but at bottom, he was\r
-not sorry.\r
-\r
-The landlady of the hotel entered.\r
-\r
-"Does Monsieur wish a bed? Does Monsieur require supper?"\r
-\r
-He made a sign of the head in the negative.\r
-\r
-"The stableman says that Monsieur's horse is extremely fatigued."\r
-\r
-Here he broke his silence.\r
-\r
-"Will not the horse be in a condition to set out again to-morrow\r
-morning?"\r
-\r
-"Oh, Monsieur! he must rest for two days at least."\r
-\r
-He inquired:--\r
-\r
-"Is not the posting-station located here?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-The hostess conducted him to the office; he showed his passport, and\r
-inquired whether there was any way of returning that same night to M.\r
-sur M. by the mail-wagon; the seat beside the post-boy chanced to be\r
-vacant; he engaged it and paid for it. "Monsieur," said the clerk,\r
-"do not fail to be here ready to start at precisely one o'clock in the\r
-morning."\r
-\r
-This done, he left the hotel and began to wander about the town.\r
-\r
-He was not acquainted with Arras; the streets were dark, and he\r
-walked on at random; but he seemed bent upon not asking the way of the\r
-passers-by. He crossed the little river Crinchon, and found himself in a\r
-labyrinth of narrow alleys where he lost his way. A citizen was passing\r
-along with a lantern. After some hesitation, he decided to apply to this\r
-man, not without having first glanced behind and in front of him, as\r
-though he feared lest some one should hear the question which he was\r
-about to put.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," said he, "where is the court-house, if you please."\r
-\r
-"You do not belong in town, sir?" replied the bourgeois, who was an\r
-oldish man; "well, follow me. I happen to be going in the direction of\r
-the court-house, that is to say, in the direction of the hotel of the\r
-prefecture; for the court-house is undergoing repairs just at this\r
-moment, and the courts are holding their sittings provisionally in the\r
-prefecture."\r
-\r
-"Is it there that the Assizes are held?" he asked.\r
-\r
-"Certainly, sir; you see, the prefecture of to-day was the bishop's\r
-palace before the Revolution. M. de Conzie, who was bishop in '82, built\r
-a grand hall there. It is in this grand hall that the court is held."\r
-\r
-On the way, the bourgeois said to him:--\r
-\r
-"If Monsieur desires to witness a case, it is rather late. The sittings\r
-generally close at six o'clock."\r
-\r
-When they arrived on the grand square, however, the man pointed out to\r
-him four long windows all lighted up, in the front of a vast and gloomy\r
-building.\r
-\r
-"Upon my word, sir, you are in luck; you have arrived in season. Do you\r
-see those four windows? That is the Court of Assizes. There is light\r
-there, so they are not through. The matter must have been greatly\r
-protracted, and they are holding an evening session. Do you take an\r
-interest in this affair? Is it a criminal case? Are you a witness?"\r
-\r
-He replied:--\r
-\r
-"I have not come on any business; I only wish to speak to one of the\r
-lawyers."\r
-\r
-"That is different," said the bourgeois. "Stop, sir; here is the door\r
-where the sentry stands. You have only to ascend the grand staircase."\r
-\r
-He conformed to the bourgeois's directions, and a few minutes later he\r
-was in a hall containing many people, and where groups, intermingled\r
-with lawyers in their gowns, were whispering together here and there.\r
-\r
-It is always a heart-breaking thing to see these congregations of men\r
-robed in black, murmuring together in low voices, on the threshold of\r
-the halls of justice. It is rare that charity and pity are the outcome\r
-of these words. Condemnations pronounced in advance are more likely\r
-to be the result. All these groups seem to the passing and thoughtful\r
-observer so many sombre hives where buzzing spirits construct in concert\r
-all sorts of dark edifices.\r
-\r
-This spacious hall, illuminated by a single lamp, was the old hall of\r
-the episcopal palace, and served as the large hall of the palace\r
-of justice. A double-leaved door, which was closed at that moment,\r
-separated it from the large apartment where the court was sitting.\r
-\r
-The obscurity was such that he did not fear to accost the first lawyer\r
-whom he met.\r
-\r
-"What stage have they reached, sir?" he asked.\r
-\r
-"It is finished," said the lawyer.\r
-\r
-"Finished!"\r
-\r
-This word was repeated in such accents that the lawyer turned round.\r
-\r
-"Excuse me sir; perhaps you are a relative?"\r
-\r
-"No; I know no one here. Has judgment been pronounced?"\r
-\r
-"Of course. Nothing else was possible."\r
-\r
-"To penal servitude?"\r
-\r
-"For life."\r
-\r
-He continued, in a voice so weak that it was barely audible:--\r
-\r
-"Then his identity was established?"\r
-\r
-"What identity?" replied the lawyer. "There was no identity to be\r
-established. The matter was very simple. The woman had murdered her\r
-child; the infanticide was proved; the jury threw out the question of\r
-premeditation, and she was condemned for life."\r
-\r
-"So it was a woman?" said he.\r
-\r
-"Why, certainly. The Limosin woman. Of what are you speaking?"\r
-\r
-"Nothing. But since it is all over, how comes it that the hall is still\r
-lighted?"\r
-\r
-"For another case, which was begun about two hours ago."\r
-\r
-"What other case?"\r
-\r
-"Oh! this one is a clear case also. It is about a sort of blackguard;\r
-a man arrested for a second offence; a convict who has been guilty of\r
-theft. I don't know his name exactly. There's a bandit's phiz for you!\r
-I'd send him to the galleys on the strength of his face alone."\r
-\r
-"Is there any way of getting into the court-room, sir?" said he.\r
-\r
-"I really think that there is not. There is a great crowd. However,\r
-the hearing has been suspended. Some people have gone out, and when the\r
-hearing is resumed, you might make an effort."\r
-\r
-"Where is the entrance?"\r
-\r
-"Through yonder large door."\r
-\r
-The lawyer left him. In the course of a few moments he had experienced,\r
-almost simultaneously, almost intermingled with each other, all possible\r
-emotions. The words of this indifferent spectator had, in turn, pierced\r
-his heart like needles of ice and like blades of fire. When he saw that\r
-nothing was settled, he breathed freely once more; but he could not have\r
-told whether what he felt was pain or pleasure.\r
-\r
-He drew near to many groups and listened to what they were saying. The\r
-docket of the session was very heavy; the president had appointed\r
-for the same day two short and simple cases. They had begun with the\r
-infanticide, and now they had reached the convict, the old offender, the\r
-"return horse." This man had stolen apples, but that did not appear to\r
-be entirely proved; what had been proved was, that he had already been\r
-in the galleys at Toulon. It was that which lent a bad aspect to\r
-his case. However, the man's examination and the depositions of the\r
-witnesses had been completed, but the lawyer's plea, and the speech\r
-of the public prosecutor were still to come; it could not be\r
-finished before midnight. The man would probably be condemned; the\r
-attorney-general was very clever, and never missed his culprits; he was\r
-a brilliant fellow who wrote verses.\r
-\r
-An usher stood at the door communicating with the hall of the Assizes.\r
-He inquired of this usher:--\r
-\r
-"Will the door be opened soon, sir?"\r
-\r
-"It will not be opened at all," replied the usher.\r
-\r
-"What! It will not be opened when the hearing is resumed? Is not the\r
-hearing suspended?"\r
-\r
-"The hearing has just been begun again," replied the usher, "but the\r
-door will not be opened again."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"Because the hall is full."\r
-\r
-"What! There is not room for one more?"\r
-\r
-"Not another one. The door is closed. No one can enter now."\r
-\r
-The usher added after a pause: "There are, to tell the truth, two\r
-or three extra places behind Monsieur le President, but Monsieur le\r
-President only admits public functionaries to them."\r
-\r
-So saying, the usher turned his back.\r
-\r
-He retired with bowed head, traversed the antechamber, and slowly\r
-descended the stairs, as though hesitating at every step. It is probable\r
-that he was holding counsel with himself. The violent conflict which had\r
-been going on within him since the preceding evening was not yet ended;\r
-and every moment he encountered some new phase of it. On reaching the\r
-landing-place, he leaned his back against the balusters and folded his\r
-arms. All at once he opened his coat, drew out his pocket-book, took\r
-from it a pencil, tore out a leaf, and upon that leaf he wrote rapidly,\r
-by the light of the street lantern, this line: M. Madeleine, Mayor of M.\r
-sur M.; then he ascended the stairs once more with great strides, made\r
-his way through the crowd, walked straight up to the usher, handed him\r
-the paper, and said in an authoritative manner:--\r
-\r
-"Take this to Monsieur le President."\r
-\r
-The usher took the paper, cast a glance upon it, and obeyed.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--AN ENTRANCE BY FAVOR\r
-\r
-\r
-Although he did not suspect the fact, the mayor of M. sur M. enjoyed\r
-a sort of celebrity. For the space of seven years his reputation for\r
-virtue had filled the whole of Bas Boulonnais; it had eventually passed\r
-the confines of a small district and had been spread abroad through\r
-two or three neighboring departments. Besides the service which he had\r
-rendered to the chief town by resuscitating the black jet industry,\r
-there was not one out of the hundred and forty communes of the\r
-arrondissement of M. sur M. which was not indebted to him for some\r
-benefit. He had even at need contrived to aid and multiply the\r
-industries of other arrondissements. It was thus that he had, when\r
-occasion offered, supported with his credit and his funds the linen\r
-factory at Boulogne, the flax-spinning industry at Frevent, and the\r
-hydraulic manufacture of cloth at Boubers-sur-Canche. Everywhere the\r
-name of M. Madeleine was pronounced with veneration. Arras and Douai\r
-envied the happy little town of M. sur M. its mayor.\r
-\r
-The Councillor of the Royal Court of Douai, who was presiding over this\r
-session of the Assizes at Arras, was acquainted, in common with the rest\r
-of the world, with this name which was so profoundly and universally\r
-honored. When the usher, discreetly opening the door which connected\r
-the council-chamber with the court-room, bent over the back of the\r
-President's arm-chair and handed him the paper on which was inscribed\r
-the line which we have just perused, adding: "The gentleman desires to\r
-be present at the trial," the President, with a quick and deferential\r
-movement, seized a pen and wrote a few words at the bottom of the paper\r
-and returned it to the usher, saying, "Admit him."\r
-\r
-The unhappy man whose history we are relating had remained near the door\r
-of the hall, in the same place and the same attitude in which the usher\r
-had left him. In the midst of his revery he heard some one saying to\r
-him, "Will Monsieur do me the honor to follow me?" It was the same usher\r
-who had turned his back upon him but a moment previously, and who was\r
-now bowing to the earth before him. At the same time, the usher handed\r
-him the paper. He unfolded it, and as he chanced to be near the light,\r
-he could read it.\r
-\r
-"The President of the Court of Assizes presents his respects to M.\r
-Madeleine."\r
-\r
-He crushed the paper in his hand as though those words contained for him\r
-a strange and bitter aftertaste.\r
-\r
-He followed the usher.\r
-\r
-A few minutes later he found himself alone in a sort of wainscoted\r
-cabinet of severe aspect, lighted by two wax candles, placed upon a\r
-table with a green cloth. The last words of the usher who had just\r
-quitted him still rang in his ears: "Monsieur, you are now in the\r
-council-chamber; you have only to turn the copper handle of yonder door,\r
-and you will find yourself in the court-room, behind the President's\r
-chair." These words were mingled in his thoughts with a vague memory of\r
-narrow corridors and dark staircases which he had recently traversed.\r
-\r
-The usher had left him alone. The supreme moment had arrived. He sought\r
-to collect his faculties, but could not. It is chiefly at the moment\r
-when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful\r
-realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain. He\r
-was in the very place where the judges deliberated and condemned. With\r
-stupid tranquillity he surveyed this peaceful and terrible apartment,\r
-where so many lives had been broken, which was soon to ring with his\r
-name, and which his fate was at that moment traversing. He stared at\r
-the wall, then he looked at himself, wondering that it should be that\r
-chamber and that it should be he.\r
-\r
-He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours; he was worn out by the\r
-jolts of the cart, but he was not conscious of it. It seemed to him that\r
-he felt nothing.\r
-\r
-He approached a black frame which was suspended on the wall, and which\r
-contained, under glass, an ancient autograph letter of Jean Nicolas\r
-Pache, mayor of Paris and minister, and dated, through an error, no\r
-doubt, the 9th of June, of the year II., and in which Pache forwarded to\r
-the commune the list of ministers and deputies held in arrest by them.\r
-Any spectator who had chanced to see him at that moment, and who had\r
-watched him, would have imagined, doubtless, that this letter struck him\r
-as very curious, for he did not take his eyes from it, and he read it\r
-two or three times. He read it without paying any attention to it, and\r
-unconsciously. He was thinking of Fantine and Cosette.\r
-\r
-As he dreamed, he turned round, and his eyes fell upon the brass knob\r
-of the door which separated him from the Court of Assizes. He had almost\r
-forgotten that door. His glance, calm at first, paused there, remained\r
-fixed on that brass handle, then grew terrified, and little by little\r
-became impregnated with fear. Beads of perspiration burst forth among\r
-his hair and trickled down upon his temples.\r
-\r
-At a certain moment he made that indescribable gesture of a sort of\r
-authority mingled with rebellion, which is intended to convey, and which\r
-does so well convey, "Pardieu! who compels me to this?" Then he wheeled\r
-briskly round, caught sight of the door through which he had entered in\r
-front of him, went to it, opened it, and passed out. He was no longer\r
-in that chamber; he was outside in a corridor, a long, narrow corridor,\r
-broken by steps and gratings, making all sorts of angles, lighted\r
-here and there by lanterns similar to the night taper of invalids, the\r
-corridor through which he had approached. He breathed, he listened; not\r
-a sound in front, not a sound behind him, and he fled as though pursued.\r
-\r
-When he had turned many angles in this corridor, he still listened. The\r
-same silence reigned, and there was the same darkness around him. He was\r
-out of breath; he staggered; he leaned against the wall. The stone was\r
-cold; the perspiration lay ice-cold on his brow; he straightened himself\r
-up with a shiver.\r
-\r
-Then, there alone in the darkness, trembling with cold and with\r
-something else, too, perchance, he meditated.\r
-\r
-He had meditated all night long; he had meditated all the day: he heard\r
-within him but one voice, which said, "Alas!"\r
-\r
-A quarter of an hour passed thus. At length he bowed his head, sighed\r
-with agony, dropped his arms, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly,\r
-and as though crushed. It seemed as though some one had overtaken him in\r
-his flight and was leading him back.\r
-\r
-He re-entered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of\r
-was the knob of the door. This knob, which was round and of polished\r
-brass, shone like a terrible star for him. He gazed at it as a lamb\r
-might gaze into the eye of a tiger.\r
-\r
-He could not take his eyes from it. From time to time he advanced a step\r
-and approached the door.\r
-\r
-Had he listened, he would have heard the sound of the adjoining hall\r
-like a sort of confused murmur; but he did not listen, and he did not\r
-hear.\r
-\r
-Suddenly, without himself knowing how it happened, he found himself near\r
-the door; he grasped the knob convulsively; the door opened.\r
-\r
-He was in the court-room.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION\r
-\r
-He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, and\r
-remained standing, contemplating what he saw.\r
-\r
-It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now full\r
-of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its petty\r
-and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process of\r
-development.\r
-\r
-At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, with\r
-abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails or\r
-closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers in\r
-all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient,\r
-spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that was\r
-yellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room\r
-lamps which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in\r
-the wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,\r
-ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere and\r
-august impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which is\r
-called the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.\r
-\r
-No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were\r
-directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small\r
-door, in the stretch of wall on the President's left; on this bench,\r
-illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.\r
-\r
-This man was the man.\r
-\r
-He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally, as\r
-though they had known beforehand where that figure was.\r
-\r
-He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the same\r
-in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect, with his\r
-bristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that blouse, just as\r
-it was on the day when he entered D----, full of hatred, concealing\r
-his soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which he had spent\r
-nineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.\r
-\r
-He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I become like that\r
-again?"\r
-\r
-This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something\r
-indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.\r
-\r
-At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to make\r
-way for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding that\r
-the personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had\r
-bowed to him; the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M.\r
-sur M., whither the duties of his office had called him more than once,\r
-recognized him and saluted him also: he had hardly perceived it; he was\r
-the victim of a sort of hallucination; he was watching.\r
-\r
-Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads, all these\r
-he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before;\r
-he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; they\r
-moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage\r
-of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real\r
-crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld the\r
-monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once more around him,\r
-with all that there is formidable in reality.\r
-\r
-All this was yawning before him.\r
-\r
-He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in the deepest\r
-recesses of his soul, "Never!"\r
-\r
-And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas tremble, and\r
-rendered him nearly mad, it was another self of his that was there! all\r
-called that man who was being tried Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of representation\r
-of the most horrible moment of his life, enacted by his spectre.\r
-\r
-Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the hour of the night,\r
-the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and of spectators; all were the\r
-same, only above the President's head there hung a crucifix, something\r
-which the courts had lacked at the time of his condemnation: God had\r
-been absent when he had been judged.\r
-\r
-There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified at the\r
-thought that he might be seen; when he was seated, he took advantage of\r
-a pile of cardboard boxes, which stood on the judge's desk, to conceal\r
-his face from the whole room; he could now see without being seen; he\r
-had fully regained consciousness of the reality of things; gradually he\r
-recovered; he attained that phase of composure where it is possible to\r
-listen.\r
-\r
-M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.\r
-\r
-He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the witnesses was\r
-hidden from him by the clerk's table, and then, as we have just said,\r
-the hall was sparely lighted.\r
-\r
-At the moment of this entrance, the defendant's lawyer had just finished\r
-his plea.\r
-\r
-The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the affair had\r
-lasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd had been watching a\r
-strange man, a miserable specimen of humanity, either profoundly stupid\r
-or profoundly subtle, gradually bending beneath the weight of a terrible\r
-likeness. This man, as the reader already knows, was a vagabond who had\r
-been found in a field carrying a branch laden with ripe apples, broken\r
-in the orchard of a neighbor, called the Pierron orchard. Who was this\r
-man? an examination had been made; witnesses had been heard, and they\r
-were unanimous; light had abounded throughout the entire debate; the\r
-accusation said: "We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealer\r
-of fruit; we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender who\r
-has broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerous\r
-description, a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom justice has long been\r
-in search of, and who, eight years ago, on emerging from the galleys\r
-at Toulon, committed a highway robbery, accompanied by violence, on the\r
-person of a child, a Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime provided\r
-for by article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try him for which\r
-we reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have been judicially\r
-established. He has just committed a fresh theft; it is a case of a\r
-second offence; condemn him for the fresh deed; later on he will be\r
-judged for the old crime." In the face of this accusation, in the face\r
-of the unanimity of the witnesses, the accused appeared to be astonished\r
-more than anything else; he made signs and gestures which were meant to\r
-convey No, or else he stared at the ceiling: he spoke with difficulty,\r
-replied with embarrassment, but his whole person, from head to foot, was\r
-a denial; he was an idiot in the presence of all these minds ranged in\r
-order of battle around him, and like a stranger in the midst of this\r
-society which was seizing fast upon him; nevertheless, it was a question\r
-of the most menacing future for him; the likeness increased every\r
-moment, and the entire crowd surveyed, with more anxiety than he did\r
-himself, that sentence freighted with calamity, which descended\r
-ever closer over his head; there was even a glimpse of a possibility\r
-afforded; besides the galleys, a possible death penalty, in case his\r
-identity were established, and the affair of Little Gervais were to end\r
-thereafter in condemnation. Who was this man? what was the nature of his\r
-apathy? was it imbecility or craft? Did he understand too well, or did\r
-he not understand at all? these were questions which divided the crowd,\r
-and seemed to divide the jury; there was something both terrible and\r
-puzzling in this case: the drama was not only melancholy; it was also\r
-obscure.\r
-\r
-The counsel for the defence had spoken tolerably well, in that\r
-provincial tongue which has long constituted the eloquence of the bar,\r
-and which was formerly employed by all advocates, at Paris as well as at\r
-Romorantin or at Montbrison, and which to-day, having become classic, is\r
-no longer spoken except by the official orators of magistracy, to whom\r
-it is suited on account of its grave sonorousness and its majestic\r
-stride; a tongue in which a husband is called a consort, and a woman\r
-a spouse; Paris, the centre of art and civilization; the king,\r
-the monarch; Monseigneur the Bishop, a sainted pontiff; the\r
-district-attorney, the eloquent interpreter of public prosecution; the\r
-arguments, the accents which we have just listened to; the age of Louis\r
-XIV., the grand age; a theatre, the temple of Melpomene; the reigning\r
-family, the august blood of our kings; a concert, a musical solemnity;\r
-the General Commandant of the province, the illustrious warrior, who,\r
-etc.; the pupils in the seminary, these tender levities; errors imputed\r
-to newspapers, the imposture which distills its venom through the\r
-columns of those organs; etc. The lawyer had, accordingly, begun with an\r
-explanation as to the theft of the apples,--an awkward matter couched\r
-in fine style; but Benigne Bossuet himself was obliged to allude to a\r
-chicken in the midst of a funeral oration, and he extricated himself\r
-from the situation in stately fashion. The lawyer established the fact\r
-that the theft of the apples had not been circumstantially proved.\r
-His client, whom he, in his character of counsel, persisted in calling\r
-Champmathieu, had not been seen scaling that wall nor breaking that\r
-branch by any one. He had been taken with that branch (which the lawyer\r
-preferred to call a bough) in his possession; but he said that he had\r
-found it broken off and lying on the ground, and had picked it up.\r
-Where was there any proof to the contrary? No doubt that branch had been\r
-broken off and concealed after the scaling of the wall, then thrown away\r
-by the alarmed marauder; there was no doubt that there had been a\r
-thief in the case. But what proof was there that that thief had been\r
-Champmathieu? One thing only. His character as an ex-convict. The\r
-lawyer did not deny that that character appeared to be, unhappily,\r
-well attested; the accused had resided at Faverolles; the accused had\r
-exercised the calling of a tree-pruner there; the name of Champmathieu\r
-might well have had its origin in Jean Mathieu; all that was true,--in\r
-short, four witnesses recognize Champmathieu, positively and without\r
-hesitation, as that convict, Jean Valjean; to these signs, to this\r
-testimony, the counsel could oppose nothing but the denial of his\r
-client, the denial of an interested party; but supposing that he was\r
-the convict Jean Valjean, did that prove that he was the thief of the\r
-apples? that was a presumption at the most, not a proof. The prisoner,\r
-it was true, and his counsel, "in good faith," was obliged to admit it,\r
-had adopted "a bad system of defence." He obstinately denied everything,\r
-the theft and his character of convict. An admission upon this last\r
-point would certainly have been better, and would have won for him the\r
-indulgence of his judges; the counsel had advised him to do this; but\r
-the accused had obstinately refused, thinking, no doubt, that he would\r
-save everything by admitting nothing. It was an error; but ought not the\r
-paucity of this intelligence to be taken into consideration? This man\r
-was visibly stupid. Long-continued wretchedness in the galleys, long\r
-misery outside the galleys, had brutalized him, etc. He defended himself\r
-badly; was that a reason for condemning him? As for the affair with\r
-Little Gervais, the counsel need not discuss it; it did not enter into\r
-the case. The lawyer wound up by beseeching the jury and the court, if\r
-the identity of Jean Valjean appeared to them to be evident, to apply\r
-to him the police penalties which are provided for a criminal who has\r
-broken his ban, and not the frightful chastisement which descends upon\r
-the convict guilty of a second offence.\r
-\r
-The district-attorney answered the counsel for the defence. He was\r
-violent and florid, as district-attorneys usually are.\r
-\r
-He congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "loyalty," and\r
-skilfully took advantage of this loyalty. He reached the accused through\r
-all the concessions made by his lawyer. The advocate had seemed to admit\r
-that the prisoner was Jean Valjean. He took note of this. So this man\r
-was Jean Valjean. This point had been conceded to the accusation and\r
-could no longer be disputed. Here, by means of a clever\r
-autonomasia which went back to the sources and causes of crime, the\r
-district-attorney thundered against the immorality of the romantic\r
-school, then dawning under the name of the Satanic school, which\r
-had been bestowed upon it by the critics of the Quotidienne and the\r
-Oriflamme; he attributed, not without some probability, to the influence\r
-of this perverse literature the crime of Champmathieu, or rather,\r
-to speak more correctly, of Jean Valjean. Having exhausted these\r
-considerations, he passed on to Jean Valjean himself. Who was this Jean\r
-Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean: a monster spewed forth, etc.\r
-The model for this sort of description is contained in the tale of\r
-Theramene, which is not useful to tragedy, but which every day renders\r
-great services to judicial eloquence. The audience and the jury\r
-"shuddered." The description finished, the district-attorney resumed\r
-with an oratorical turn calculated to raise the enthusiasm of the\r
-journal of the prefecture to the highest pitch on the following day: And\r
-it is such a man, etc., etc., etc., vagabond, beggar, without means of\r
-existence, etc., etc., inured by his past life to culpable deeds, and\r
-but little reformed by his sojourn in the galleys, as was proved by the\r
-crime committed against Little Gervais, etc., etc.; it is such a man,\r
-caught upon the highway in the very act of theft, a few paces from a\r
-wall that had been scaled, still holding in his hand the object\r
-stolen, who denies the crime, the theft, the climbing the wall; denies\r
-everything; denies even his own identity! In addition to a hundred\r
-other proofs, to which we will not recur, four witnesses recognize\r
-him--Javert, the upright inspector of police; Javert, and three of\r
-his former companions in infamy, the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, and\r
-Cochepaille. What does he offer in opposition to this overwhelming\r
-unanimity? His denial. What obduracy! You will do justice, gentlemen\r
-of the jury, etc., etc. While the district-attorney was speaking, the\r
-accused listened to him open-mouthed, with a sort of amazement in which\r
-some admiration was assuredly blended. He was evidently surprised that\r
-a man could talk like that. From time to time, at those "energetic"\r
-moments of the prosecutor's speech, when eloquence which cannot contain\r
-itself overflows in a flood of withering epithets and envelops the\r
-accused like a storm, he moved his head slowly from right to left and\r
-from left to right in the sort of mute and melancholy protest with which\r
-he had contented himself since the beginning of the argument. Two or\r
-three times the spectators who were nearest to him heard him say in\r
-a low voice, "That is what comes of not having asked M. Baloup." The\r
-district-attorney directed the attention of the jury to this stupid\r
-attitude, evidently deliberate, which denoted not imbecility, but craft,\r
-skill, a habit of deceiving justice, and which set forth in all its\r
-nakedness the "profound perversity" of this man. He ended by making\r
-his reserves on the affair of Little Gervais and demanding a severe\r
-sentence.\r
-\r
-At that time, as the reader will remember, it was penal servitude for\r
-life.\r
-\r
-The counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting Monsieur\r
-l'Avocat-General on his "admirable speech," then replied as best he\r
-could; but he weakened; the ground was evidently slipping away from\r
-under his feet.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--THE SYSTEM OF DENIALS\r
-\r
-The moment for closing the debate had arrived. The President had the\r
-accused stand up, and addressed to him the customary question, "Have you\r
-anything to add to your defence?"\r
-\r
-The man did not appear to understand, as he stood there, twisting in his\r
-hands a terrible cap which he had.\r
-\r
-The President repeated the question.\r
-\r
-This time the man heard it. He seemed to understand. He made a motion\r
-like a man who is just waking up, cast his eyes about him, stared at\r
-the audience, the gendarmes, his counsel, the jury, the court, laid\r
-his monstrous fist on the rim of woodwork in front of his bench,\r
-took another look, and all at once, fixing his glance upon the\r
-district-attorney, he began to speak. It was like an eruption.\r
-It seemed, from the manner in which the words escaped from his\r
-mouth,--incoherent, impetuous, pell-mell, tumbling over each other,--as\r
-though they were all pressing forward to issue forth at once. He said:--\r
-\r
-"This is what I have to say. That I have been a wheelwright in Paris,\r
-and that it was with Monsieur Baloup. It is a hard trade. In the\r
-wheelwright's trade one works always in the open air, in courtyards,\r
-under sheds when the masters are good, never in closed workshops,\r
-because space is required, you see. In winter one gets so cold that one\r
-beats one's arms together to warm one's self; but the masters don't like\r
-it; they say it wastes time. Handling iron when there is ice between\r
-the paving-stones is hard work. That wears a man out quickly. One is old\r
-while he is still quite young in that trade. At forty a man is done for.\r
-I was fifty-three. I was in a bad state. And then, workmen are so mean!\r
-When a man is no longer young, they call him nothing but an old bird,\r
-old beast! I was not earning more than thirty sous a day. They paid me\r
-as little as possible. The masters took advantage of my age--and then I\r
-had my daughter, who was a laundress at the river. She earned a little\r
-also. It sufficed for us two. She had trouble, also; all day long up to\r
-her waist in a tub, in rain, in snow. When the wind cuts your face, when\r
-it freezes, it is all the same; you must still wash. There are people\r
-who have not much linen, and wait until late; if you do not wash, you\r
-lose your custom. The planks are badly joined, and water drops on you\r
-from everywhere; you have your petticoats all damp above and below. That\r
-penetrates. She has also worked at the laundry of the Enfants-Rouges,\r
-where the water comes through faucets. You are not in the tub there; you\r
-wash at the faucet in front of you, and rinse in a basin behind you. As\r
-it is enclosed, you are not so cold; but there is that hot steam, which\r
-is terrible, and which ruins your eyes. She came home at seven o'clock\r
-in the evening, and went to bed at once, she was so tired. Her husband\r
-beat her. She is dead. We have not been very happy. She was a good girl,\r
-who did not go to the ball, and who was very peaceable. I remember\r
-one Shrove-Tuesday when she went to bed at eight o'clock. There, I am\r
-telling the truth; you have only to ask. Ah, yes! how stupid I am! Paris\r
-is a gulf. Who knows Father Champmathieu there? But M. Baloup does, I\r
-tell you. Go see at M. Baloup's; and after all, I don't know what is\r
-wanted of me."\r
-\r
-The man ceased speaking, and remained standing. He had said these things\r
-in a loud, rapid, hoarse voice, with a sort of irritated and savage\r
-ingenuousness. Once he paused to salute some one in the crowd. The sort\r
-of affirmations which he seemed to fling out before him at random came\r
-like hiccoughs, and to each he added the gesture of a wood-cutter who is\r
-splitting wood. When he had finished, the audience burst into a laugh.\r
-He stared at the public, and, perceiving that they were laughing, and\r
-not understanding why, he began to laugh himself.\r
-\r
-It was inauspicious.\r
-\r
-The President, an attentive and benevolent man, raised his voice.\r
-\r
-He reminded "the gentlemen of the jury" that "the sieur Baloup, formerly\r
-a master-wheelwright, with whom the accused stated that he had served,\r
-had been summoned in vain. He had become bankrupt, and was not to be\r
-found." Then turning to the accused, he enjoined him to listen to what\r
-he was about to say, and added: "You are in a position where reflection\r
-is necessary. The gravest presumptions rest upon you, and may induce\r
-vital results. Prisoner, in your own interests, I summon you for the\r
-last time to explain yourself clearly on two points. In the first place,\r
-did you or did you not climb the wall of the Pierron orchard, break\r
-the branch, and steal the apples; that is to say, commit the crime\r
-of breaking in and theft? In the second place, are you the discharged\r
-convict, Jean Valjean--yes or no?"\r
-\r
-The prisoner shook his head with a capable air, like a man who has\r
-thoroughly understood, and who knows what answer he is going to make. He\r
-opened his mouth, turned towards the President, and said:--\r
-\r
-"In the first place--"\r
-\r
-Then he stared at his cap, stared at the ceiling, and held his peace.\r
-\r
-"Prisoner," said the district-attorney, in a severe voice; "pay\r
-attention. You are not answering anything that has been asked of you.\r
-Your embarrassment condemns you. It is evident that your name is not\r
-Champmathieu; that you are the convict, Jean Valjean, concealed first\r
-under the name of Jean Mathieu, which was the name of his mother; that\r
-you went to Auvergne; that you were born at Faverolles, where you were\r
-a pruner of trees. It is evident that you have been guilty of entering,\r
-and of the theft of ripe apples from the Pierron orchard. The gentlemen\r
-of the jury will form their own opinion."\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Father Champmathieu on Trial]\r
-\r
-The prisoner had finally resumed his seat; he arose abruptly when the\r
-district-attorney had finished, and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"You are very wicked; that you are! This what I wanted to say; I could\r
-not find words for it at first. I have stolen nothing. I am a man who\r
-does not have something to eat every day. I was coming from Ailly; I\r
-was walking through the country after a shower, which had made the whole\r
-country yellow: even the ponds were overflowed, and nothing sprang from\r
-the sand any more but the little blades of grass at the wayside. I\r
-found a broken branch with apples on the ground; I picked up the branch\r
-without knowing that it would get me into trouble. I have been in\r
-prison, and they have been dragging me about for the last three months;\r
-more than that I cannot say; people talk against me, they tell me,\r
-'Answer!' The gendarme, who is a good fellow, nudges my elbow, and says\r
-to me in a low voice, 'Come, answer!' I don't know how to explain; I\r
-have no education; I am a poor man; that is where they wrong me, because\r
-they do not see this. I have not stolen; I picked up from the ground\r
-things that were lying there. You say, Jean Valjean, Jean Mathieu! I\r
-don't know those persons; they are villagers. I worked for M. Baloup,\r
-Boulevard de l'Hopital; my name is Champmathieu. You are very clever to\r
-tell me where I was born; I don't know myself: it's not everybody\r
-who has a house in which to come into the world; that would be too\r
-convenient. I think that my father and mother were people who strolled\r
-along the highways; I know nothing different. When I was a child,\r
-they called me young fellow; now they call me old fellow; those are my\r
-baptismal names; take that as you like. I have been in Auvergne; I have\r
-been at Faverolles. Pardi. Well! can't a man have been in Auvergne, or\r
-at Faverolles, without having been in the galleys? I tell you that I\r
-have not stolen, and that I am Father Champmathieu; I have been with M.\r
-Baloup; I have had a settled residence. You worry me with your nonsense,\r
-there! Why is everybody pursuing me so furiously?"\r
-\r
-The district-attorney had remained standing; he addressed the\r
-President:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le President, in view of the confused but exceedingly clever\r
-denials of the prisoner, who would like to pass himself off as an idiot,\r
-but who will not succeed in so doing,--we shall attend to that,--we\r
-demand that it shall please you and that it shall please the court to\r
-summon once more into this place the convicts Brevet, Cochepaille, and\r
-Chenildieu, and Police-Inspector Javert, and question them for the last\r
-time as to the identity of the prisoner with the convict Jean Valjean."\r
-\r
-"I would remind the district-attorney," said the President, "that\r
-Police-Inspector Javert, recalled by his duties to the capital of a\r
-neighboring arrondissement, left the court-room and the town as soon as\r
-he had made his deposition; we have accorded him permission, with the\r
-consent of the district-attorney and of the counsel for the prisoner."\r
-\r
-"That is true, Mr. President," responded the district-attorney. "In the\r
-absence of sieur Javert, I think it my duty to remind the gentlemen of\r
-the jury of what he said here a few hours ago. Javert is an estimable\r
-man, who does honor by his rigorous and strict probity to inferior but\r
-important functions. These are the terms of his deposition: 'I do not\r
-even stand in need of circumstantial proofs and moral presumptions to\r
-give the lie to the prisoner's denial. I recognize him perfectly. The\r
-name of this man is not Champmathieu; he is an ex-convict named Jean\r
-Valjean, and is very vicious and much to be feared. It is only with\r
-extreme regret that he was released at the expiration of his term. He\r
-underwent nineteen years of penal servitude for theft. He made five or\r
-six attempts to escape. Besides the theft from Little Gervais, and from\r
-the Pierron orchard, I suspect him of a theft committed in the house of\r
-His Grace the late Bishop of D---- I often saw him at the time when I\r
-was adjutant of the galley-guard at the prison in Toulon. I repeat that\r
-I recognize him perfectly.'"\r
-\r
-This extremely precise statement appeared to produce a vivid impression\r
-on the public and on the jury. The district-attorney concluded by\r
-insisting, that in default of Javert, the three witnesses Brevet,\r
-Chenildieu, and Cochepaille should be heard once more and solemnly\r
-interrogated.\r
-\r
-The President transmitted the order to an usher, and, a moment later,\r
-the door of the witnesses' room opened. The usher, accompanied by a\r
-gendarme ready to lend him armed assistance, introduced the convict\r
-Brevet. The audience was in suspense; and all breasts heaved as though\r
-they had contained but one soul.\r
-\r
-The ex-convict Brevet wore the black and gray waistcoat of the central\r
-prisons. Brevet was a person sixty years of age, who had a sort of\r
-business man's face, and the air of a rascal. The two sometimes go\r
-together. In prison, whither fresh misdeeds had led him, he had become\r
-something in the nature of a turnkey. He was a man of whom his superiors\r
-said, "He tries to make himself of use." The chaplains bore good\r
-testimony as to his religious habits. It must not be forgotten that this\r
-passed under the Restoration.\r
-\r
-"Brevet," said the President, "you have undergone an ignominious\r
-sentence, and you cannot take an oath."\r
-\r
-Brevet dropped his eyes.\r
-\r
-"Nevertheless," continued the President, "even in the man whom the law\r
-has degraded, there may remain, when the divine mercy permits it, a\r
-sentiment of honor and of equity. It is to this sentiment that I\r
-appeal at this decisive hour. If it still exists in you,--and I hope\r
-it does,--reflect before replying to me: consider on the one hand, this\r
-man, whom a word from you may ruin; on the other hand, justice, which a\r
-word from you may enlighten. The instant is solemn; there is still time\r
-to retract if you think you have been mistaken. Rise, prisoner. Brevet,\r
-take a good look at the accused, recall your souvenirs, and tell us on\r
-your soul and conscience, if you persist in recognizing this man as your\r
-former companion in the galleys, Jean Valjean?"\r
-\r
-Brevet looked at the prisoner, then turned towards the court.\r
-\r
-"Yes, Mr. President, I was the first to recognize him, and I stick to\r
-it; that man is Jean Valjean, who entered at Toulon in 1796, and left in\r
-1815. I left a year later. He has the air of a brute now; but it must be\r
-because age has brutalized him; he was sly at the galleys: I recognize\r
-him positively."\r
-\r
-"Take your seat," said the President. "Prisoner, remain standing."\r
-\r
-Chenildieu was brought in, a prisoner for life, as was indicated by his\r
-red cassock and his green cap. He was serving out his sentence at the\r
-galleys of Toulon, whence he had been brought for this case. He was a\r
-small man of about fifty, brisk, wrinkled, frail, yellow, brazen-faced,\r
-feverish, who had a sort of sickly feebleness about all his limbs and\r
-his whole person, and an immense force in his glance. His companions in\r
-the galleys had nicknamed him I-deny-God (Je-nie Dieu, Chenildieu).\r
-\r
-The President addressed him in nearly the same words which he had\r
-used to Brevet. At the moment when he reminded him of his infamy which\r
-deprived him of the right to take an oath, Chenildieu raised his\r
-head and looked the crowd in the face. The President invited him to\r
-reflection, and asked him as he had asked Brevet, if he persisted in\r
-recognition of the prisoner.\r
-\r
-Chenildieu burst out laughing.\r
-\r
-"Pardieu, as if I didn't recognize him! We were attached to the same\r
-chain for five years. So you are sulking, old fellow?"\r
-\r
-"Go take your seat," said the President.\r
-\r
-The usher brought in Cochepaille. He was another convict for life, who\r
-had come from the galleys, and was dressed in red, like Chenildieu, was\r
-a peasant from Lourdes, and a half-bear of the Pyrenees. He had guarded\r
-the flocks among the mountains, and from a shepherd he had slipped into\r
-a brigand. Cochepaille was no less savage and seemed even more stupid\r
-than the prisoner. He was one of those wretched men whom nature has\r
-sketched out for wild beasts, and on whom society puts the finishing\r
-touches as convicts in the galleys.\r
-\r
-The President tried to touch him with some grave and pathetic words,\r
-and asked him, as he had asked the other two, if he persisted, without\r
-hesitation or trouble, in recognizing the man who was standing before\r
-him.\r
-\r
-"He is Jean Valjean," said Cochepaille. "He was even called\r
-Jean-the-Screw, because he was so strong."\r
-\r
-Each of these affirmations from these three men, evidently sincere and\r
-in good faith, had raised in the audience a murmur of bad augury for the\r
-prisoner,--a murmur which increased and lasted longer each time that a\r
-fresh declaration was added to the proceeding.\r
-\r
-The prisoner had listened to them, with that astounded face which was,\r
-according to the accusation, his principal means of defence; at the\r
-first, the gendarmes, his neighbors, had heard him mutter between his\r
-teeth: "Ah, well, he's a nice one!" after the second, he said, a little\r
-louder, with an air that was almost that of satisfaction, "Good!" at the\r
-third, he cried, "Famous!"\r
-\r
-The President addressed him:--\r
-\r
-"Have you heard, prisoner? What have you to say?"\r
-\r
-He replied:--\r
-\r
-"I say, 'Famous!'"\r
-\r
-An uproar broke out among the audience, and was communicated to the\r
-jury; it was evident that the man was lost.\r
-\r
-"Ushers," said the President, "enforce silence! I am going to sum up the\r
-arguments."\r
-\r
-At that moment there was a movement just beside the President; a voice\r
-was heard crying:--\r
-\r
-"Brevet! Chenildieu! Cochepaille! look here!"\r
-\r
-All who heard that voice were chilled, so lamentable and terrible was\r
-it; all eyes were turned to the point whence it had proceeded. A man,\r
-placed among the privileged spectators who were seated behind the\r
-court, had just risen, had pushed open the half-door which separated the\r
-tribunal from the audience, and was standing in the middle of the hall;\r
-the President, the district-attorney, M. Bamatabois, twenty persons,\r
-recognized him, and exclaimed in concert:--\r
-\r
-"M. Madeleine!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--CHAMPMATHIEU MORE AND MORE ASTONISHED\r
-\r
-It was he, in fact. The clerk's lamp illumined his countenance. He held\r
-his hat in his hand; there was no disorder in his clothing; his coat\r
-was carefully buttoned; he was very pale, and he trembled slightly;\r
-his hair, which had still been gray on his arrival in Arras, was now\r
-entirely white: it had turned white during the hour he had sat there.\r
-\r
-All heads were raised: the sensation was indescribable; there was\r
-a momentary hesitation in the audience, the voice had been so\r
-heart-rending; the man who stood there appeared so calm that they did\r
-not understand at first. They asked themselves whether he had indeed\r
-uttered that cry; they could not believe that that tranquil man had been\r
-the one to give that terrible outcry.\r
-\r
-This indecision only lasted a few seconds. Even before the President\r
-and the district-attorney could utter a word, before the ushers and the\r
-gendarmes could make a gesture, the man whom all still called, at that\r
-moment, M. Madeleine, had advanced towards the witnesses Cochepaille,\r
-Brevet, and Chenildieu.\r
-\r
-"Do you not recognize me?" said he.\r
-\r
-All three remained speechless, and indicated by a sign of the head that\r
-they did not know him. Cochepaille, who was intimidated, made a military\r
-salute. M. Madeleine turned towards the jury and the court, and said in\r
-a gentle voice:--\r
-\r
-"Gentlemen of the jury, order the prisoner to be released! Mr.\r
-President, have me arrested. He is not the man whom you are in search\r
-of; it is I: I am Jean Valjean."\r
-\r
-Not a mouth breathed; the first commotion of astonishment had been\r
-followed by a silence like that of the grave; those within the hall\r
-experienced that sort of religious terror which seizes the masses when\r
-something grand has been done.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the face of the President was stamped with sympathy and\r
-sadness; he had exchanged a rapid sign with the district-attorney and a\r
-few low-toned words with the assistant judges; he addressed the public,\r
-and asked in accents which all understood:--\r
-\r
-"Is there a physician present?"\r
-\r
-The district-attorney took the word:--\r
-\r
-"Gentlemen of the jury, the very strange and unexpected incident\r
-which disturbs the audience inspires us, like yourselves, only with a\r
-sentiment which it is unnecessary for us to express. You all know, by\r
-reputation at least, the honorable M. Madeleine, mayor of M. sur M.;\r
-if there is a physician in the audience, we join the President in\r
-requesting him to attend to M. Madeleine, and to conduct him to his\r
-home."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine did not allow the district-attorney to finish; he\r
-interrupted him in accents full of suavity and authority. These are the\r
-words which he uttered; here they are literally, as they were written\r
-down, immediately after the trial by one of the witnesses to this scene,\r
-and as they now ring in the ears of those who heard them nearly forty\r
-years ago:--\r
-\r
-"I thank you, Mr. District-Attorney, but I am not mad; you shall see;\r
-you were on the point of committing a great error; release this man! I\r
-am fulfilling a duty; I am that miserable criminal. I am the only one\r
-here who sees the matter clearly, and I am telling you the truth. God,\r
-who is on high, looks down on what I am doing at this moment, and that\r
-suffices. You can take me, for here I am: but I have done my best; I\r
-concealed myself under another name; I have become rich; I have become\r
-a mayor; I have tried to re-enter the ranks of the honest. It seems that\r
-that is not to be done. In short, there are many things which I cannot\r
-tell. I will not narrate the story of my life to you; you will hear it\r
-one of these days. I robbed Monseigneur the Bishop, it is true; it is\r
-true that I robbed Little Gervais; they were right in telling you that\r
-Jean Valjean was a very vicious wretch. Perhaps it was not altogether\r
-his fault. Listen, honorable judges! a man who has been so greatly\r
-humbled as I have has neither any remonstrances to make to Providence,\r
-nor any advice to give to society; but, you see, the infamy from which I\r
-have tried to escape is an injurious thing; the galleys make the convict\r
-what he is; reflect upon that, if you please. Before going to the\r
-galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort\r
-of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became\r
-vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand. Later on,\r
-indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me. But, pardon\r
-me, you cannot understand what I am saying. You will find at my house,\r
-among the ashes in the fireplace, the forty-sou piece which I stole,\r
-seven years ago, from little Gervais. I have nothing farther to add;\r
-take me. Good God! the district-attorney shakes his head; you say, 'M.\r
-Madeleine has gone mad!' you do not believe me! that is distressing. Do\r
-not, at least, condemn this man! What! these men do not recognize me! I\r
-wish Javert were here; he would recognize me."\r
-\r
-Nothing can reproduce the sombre and kindly melancholy of tone which\r
-accompanied these words.\r
-\r
-He turned to the three convicts, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Well, I recognize you; do you remember, Brevet?"\r
-\r
-He paused, hesitated for an instant, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Do you remember the knitted suspenders with a checked pattern which you\r
-wore in the galleys?"\r
-\r
-Brevet gave a start of surprise, and surveyed him from head to foot with\r
-a frightened air. He continued:--\r
-\r
-"Chenildieu, you who conferred on yourself the name of 'Jenie-Dieu,'\r
-your whole right shoulder bears a deep burn, because you one day laid\r
-your shoulder against the chafing-dish full of coals, in order to efface\r
-the three letters T. F. P., which are still visible, nevertheless;\r
-answer, is this true?"\r
-\r
-"It is true," said Chenildieu.\r
-\r
-He addressed himself to Cochepaille:--\r
-\r
-"Cochepaille, you have, near the bend in your left arm, a date stamped\r
-in blue letters with burnt powder; the date is that of the landing of\r
-the Emperor at Cannes, March 1, 1815; pull up your sleeve!"\r
-\r
-Cochepaille pushed up his sleeve; all eyes were focused on him and on\r
-his bare arm.\r
-\r
-A gendarme held a light close to it; there was the date.\r
-\r
-The unhappy man turned to the spectators and the judges with a smile\r
-which still rends the hearts of all who saw it whenever they think of\r
-it. It was a smile of triumph; it was also a smile of despair.\r
-\r
-"You see plainly," he said, "that I am Jean Valjean."\r
-\r
-In that chamber there were no longer either judges, accusers, nor\r
-gendarmes; there was nothing but staring eyes and sympathizing hearts.\r
-No one recalled any longer the part that each might be called upon\r
-to play; the district-attorney forgot he was there for the purpose of\r
-prosecuting, the President that he was there to preside, the counsel for\r
-the defence that he was there to defend. It was a striking circumstance\r
-that no question was put, that no authority intervened. The peculiarity\r
-of sublime spectacles is, that they capture all souls and turn witnesses\r
-into spectators. No one, probably, could have explained what he felt;\r
-no one, probably, said to himself that he was witnessing the splendid\r
-outburst of a grand light: all felt themselves inwardly dazzled.\r
-\r
-It was evident that they had Jean Valjean before their eyes. That was\r
-clear. The appearance of this man had sufficed to suffuse with light\r
-that matter which had been so obscure but a moment previously, without\r
-any further explanation: the whole crowd, as by a sort of electric\r
-revelation, understood instantly and at a single glance the simple\r
-and magnificent history of a man who was delivering himself up so\r
-that another man might not be condemned in his stead. The details, the\r
-hesitations, little possible oppositions, were swallowed up in that vast\r
-and luminous fact.\r
-\r
-It was an impression which vanished speedily, but which was irresistible\r
-at the moment.\r
-\r
-"I do not wish to disturb the court further," resumed Jean Valjean. "I\r
-shall withdraw, since you do not arrest me. I have many things to do.\r
-The district-attorney knows who I am; he knows whither I am going; he\r
-can have me arrested when he likes."\r
-\r
-He directed his steps towards the door. Not a voice was raised, not an\r
-arm extended to hinder him. All stood aside. At that moment there was\r
-about him that divine something which causes multitudes to stand aside\r
-and make way for a man. He traversed the crowd slowly. It was never\r
-known who opened the door, but it is certain that he found the door open\r
-when he reached it. On arriving there he turned round and said:--\r
-\r
-"I am at your command, Mr. District-Attorney."\r
-\r
-Then he addressed the audience:--\r
-\r
-"All of you, all who are present--consider me worthy of pity, do you\r
-not? Good God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, I\r
-consider that I am to be envied. Nevertheless, I should have preferred\r
-not to have had this occur."\r
-\r
-He withdrew, and the door closed behind him as it had opened, for those\r
-who do certain sovereign things are always sure of being served by some\r
-one in the crowd.\r
-\r
-Less than an hour after this, the verdict of the jury freed the said\r
-Champmathieu from all accusations; and Champmathieu, being at once\r
-released, went off in a state of stupefaction, thinking that all men\r
-were fools, and comprehending nothing of this vision.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--IN WHAT MIRROR M. MADELEINE CONTEMPLATES HIS HAIR\r
-\r
-The day had begun to dawn. Fantine had passed a sleepless and feverish\r
-night, filled with happy visions; at daybreak she fell asleep. Sister\r
-Simplice, who had been watching with her, availed herself of this\r
-slumber to go and prepare a new potion of chinchona. The worthy sister\r
-had been in the laboratory of the infirmary but a few moments, bending\r
-over her drugs and phials, and scrutinizing things very closely, on\r
-account of the dimness which the half-light of dawn spreads over all\r
-objects. Suddenly she raised her head and uttered a faint shriek. M.\r
-Madeleine stood before her; he had just entered silently.\r
-\r
-"Is it you, Mr. Mayor?" she exclaimed.\r
-\r
-He replied in a low voice:--\r
-\r
-"How is that poor woman?"\r
-\r
-"Not so bad just now; but we have been very uneasy."\r
-\r
-She explained to him what had passed: that Fantine had been very ill the\r
-day before, and that she was better now, because she thought that the\r
-mayor had gone to Montfermeil to get her child. The sister dared not\r
-question the mayor; but she perceived plainly from his air that he had\r
-not come from there.\r
-\r
-"All that is good," said he; "you were right not to undeceive her."\r
-\r
-"Yes," responded the sister; "but now, Mr. Mayor, she will see you and\r
-will not see her child. What shall we say to her?"\r
-\r
-He reflected for a moment.\r
-\r
-"God will inspire us," said he.\r
-\r
-"But we cannot tell a lie," murmured the sister, half aloud.\r
-\r
-It was broad daylight in the room. The light fell full on M. Madeleine's\r
-face. The sister chanced to raise her eyes to it.\r
-\r
-"Good God, sir!" she exclaimed; "what has happened to you? Your hair is\r
-perfectly white!"\r
-\r
-"White!" said he.\r
-\r
-Sister Simplice had no mirror. She rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out\r
-the little glass which the doctor of the infirmary used to see whether\r
-a patient was dead and whether he no longer breathed. M. Madeleine took\r
-the mirror, looked at his hair, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Well!"\r
-\r
-He uttered the word indifferently, and as though his mind were on\r
-something else.\r
-\r
-The sister felt chilled by something strange of which she caught a\r
-glimpse in all this.\r
-\r
-He inquired:--\r
-\r
-"Can I see her?"\r
-\r
-"Is not Monsieur le Maire going to have her child brought back to her?"\r
-said the sister, hardly venturing to put the question.\r
-\r
-"Of course; but it will take two or three days at least."\r
-\r
-"If she were not to see Monsieur le Maire until that time," went on\r
-the sister, timidly, "she would not know that Monsieur le Maire had\r
-returned, and it would be easy to inspire her with patience; and when\r
-the child arrived, she would naturally think Monsieur le Maire had just\r
-come with the child. We should not have to enact a lie."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine seemed to reflect for a few moments; then he said with his\r
-calm gravity:--\r
-\r
-"No, sister, I must see her. I may, perhaps, be in haste."\r
-\r
-The nun did not appear to notice this word "perhaps," which communicated\r
-an obscure and singular sense to the words of the mayor's speech. She\r
-replied, lowering her eyes and her voice respectfully:--\r
-\r
-"In that case, she is asleep; but Monsieur le Maire may enter."\r
-\r
-He made some remarks about a door which shut badly, and the noise of\r
-which might awaken the sick woman; then he entered Fantine's chamber,\r
-approached the bed and drew aside the curtains. She was asleep. Her\r
-breath issued from her breast with that tragic sound which is peculiar\r
-to those maladies, and which breaks the hearts of mothers when they are\r
-watching through the night beside their sleeping child who is condemned\r
-to death. But this painful respiration hardly troubled a sort of\r
-ineffable serenity which overspread her countenance, and which\r
-transfigured her in her sleep. Her pallor had become whiteness; her\r
-cheeks were crimson; her long golden lashes, the only beauty of her\r
-youth and her virginity which remained to her, palpitated, though they\r
-remained closed and drooping. Her whole person was trembling with an\r
-indescribable unfolding of wings, all ready to open wide and bear her\r
-away, which could be felt as they rustled, though they could not be\r
-seen. To see her thus, one would never have dreamed that she was\r
-an invalid whose life was almost despaired of. She resembled rather\r
-something on the point of soaring away than something on the point of\r
-dying.\r
-\r
-The branch trembles when a hand approaches it to pluck a flower, and\r
-seems to both withdraw and to offer itself at one and the same time.\r
-The human body has something of this tremor when the instant arrives in\r
-which the mysterious fingers of Death are about to pluck the soul.\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine remained for some time motionless beside that bed, gazing\r
-in turn upon the sick woman and the crucifix, as he had done two months\r
-before, on the day when he had come for the first time to see her\r
-in that asylum. They were both still there in the same attitude--she\r
-sleeping, he praying; only now, after the lapse of two months, her hair\r
-was gray and his was white.\r
-\r
-The sister had not entered with him. He stood beside the bed, with his\r
-finger on his lips, as though there were some one in the chamber whom he\r
-must enjoin to silence.\r
-\r
-She opened her eyes, saw him, and said quietly, with a smile:--\r
-\r
-"And Cosette?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--FANTINE HAPPY\r
-\r
-She made no movement of either surprise or of joy; she was joy itself.\r
-That simple question, "And Cosette?" was put with so profound a faith,\r
-with so much certainty, with such a complete absence of disquiet and of\r
-doubt, that he found not a word of reply. She continued:--\r
-\r
-"I knew that you were there. I was asleep, but I saw you. I have seen\r
-you for a long, long time. I have been following you with my eyes all\r
-night long. You were in a glory, and you had around you all sorts of\r
-celestial forms."\r
-\r
-He raised his glance to the crucifix.\r
-\r
-"But," she resumed, "tell me where Cosette is. Why did not you place her\r
-on my bed against the moment of my waking?"\r
-\r
-He made some mechanical reply which he was never afterwards able to\r
-recall.\r
-\r
-Fortunately, the doctor had been warned, and he now made his appearance.\r
-He came to the aid of M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-"Calm yourself, my child," said the doctor; "your child is here."\r
-\r
-Fantine's eyes beamed and filled her whole face with light. She clasped\r
-her hands with an expression which contained all that is possible to\r
-prayer in the way of violence and tenderness.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" she exclaimed, "bring her to me!"\r
-\r
-Touching illusion of a mother! Cosette was, for her, still the little\r
-child who is carried.\r
-\r
-"Not yet," said the doctor, "not just now. You still have some fever.\r
-The sight of your child would agitate you and do you harm. You must be\r
-cured first."\r
-\r
-She interrupted him impetuously:--\r
-\r
-"But I am cured! Oh, I tell you that I am cured! What an ass that doctor\r
-is! The idea! I want to see my child!"\r
-\r
-"You see," said the doctor, "how excited you become. So long as you are\r
-in this state I shall oppose your having your child. It is not enough\r
-to see her; it is necessary that you should live for her. When you are\r
-reasonable, I will bring her to you myself."\r
-\r
-The poor mother bowed her head.\r
-\r
-"I beg your pardon, doctor, I really beg your pardon. Formerly I should\r
-never have spoken as I have just done; so many misfortunes have happened\r
-to me, that I sometimes do not know what I am saying. I understand you;\r
-you fear the emotion. I will wait as long as you like, but I swear to\r
-you that it would not have harmed me to see my daughter. I have been\r
-seeing her; I have not taken my eyes from her since yesterday evening.\r
-Do you know? If she were brought to me now, I should talk to her very\r
-gently. That is all. Is it not quite natural that I should desire to see\r
-my daughter, who has been brought to me expressly from Montfermeil? I\r
-am not angry. I know well that I am about to be happy. All night long I\r
-have seen white things, and persons who smiled at me. When Monsieur le\r
-Docteur pleases, he shall bring me Cosette. I have no longer any fever;\r
-I am well. I am perfectly conscious that there is nothing the matter\r
-with me any more; but I am going to behave as though I were ill, and not\r
-stir, to please these ladies here. When it is seen that I am very calm,\r
-they will say, 'She must have her child.'"\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine was sitting on a chair beside the bed. She turned towards\r
-him; she was making a visible effort to be calm and "very good," as she\r
-expressed it in the feebleness of illness which resembles infancy, in\r
-order that, seeing her so peaceable, they might make no difficulty about\r
-bringing Cosette to her. But while she controlled herself she could not\r
-refrain from questioning M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-"Did you have a pleasant trip, Monsieur le Maire? Oh! how good you were\r
-to go and get her for me! Only tell me how she is. Did she stand the\r
-journey well? Alas! she will not recognize me. She must have forgotten\r
-me by this time, poor darling! Children have no memories. They are like\r
-birds. A child sees one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow, and\r
-thinks of nothing any longer. And did she have white linen? Did those\r
-Thenardiers keep her clean? How have they fed her? Oh! if you only knew\r
-how I have suffered, putting such questions as that to myself during all\r
-the time of my wretchedness. Now, it is all past. I am happy. Oh, how I\r
-should like to see her! Do you think her pretty, Monsieur le Maire?\r
-Is not my daughter beautiful? You must have been very cold in that\r
-diligence! Could she not be brought for just one little instant? She\r
-might be taken away directly afterwards. Tell me; you are the master; it\r
-could be so if you chose!"\r
-\r
-He took her hand. "Cosette is beautiful," he said, "Cosette is well.\r
-You shall see her soon; but calm yourself; you are talking with too much\r
-vivacity, and you are throwing your arms out from under the clothes, and\r
-that makes you cough."\r
-\r
-In fact, fits of coughing interrupted Fantine at nearly every word.\r
-\r
-Fantine did not murmur; she feared that she had injured by her too\r
-passionate lamentations the confidence which she was desirous of\r
-inspiring, and she began to talk of indifferent things.\r
-\r
-"Montfermeil is quite pretty, is it not? People go there on pleasure\r
-parties in summer. Are the Thenardiers prosperous? There are not many\r
-travellers in their parts. That inn of theirs is a sort of a cook-shop."\r
-\r
-M. Madeleine was still holding her hand, and gazing at her with anxiety;\r
-it was evident that he had come to tell her things before which his mind\r
-now hesitated. The doctor, having finished his visit, retired. Sister\r
-Simplice remained alone with them.\r
-\r
-But in the midst of this pause Fantine exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"I hear her! mon Dieu, I hear her!"\r
-\r
-She stretched out her arm to enjoin silence about her, held her breath,\r
-and began to listen with rapture.\r
-\r
-There was a child playing in the yard--the child of the portress or\r
-of some work-woman. It was one of those accidents which are always\r
-occurring, and which seem to form a part of the mysterious stage-setting\r
-of mournful scenes. The child--a little girl--was going and coming,\r
-running to warm herself, laughing, singing at the top of her voice.\r
-Alas! in what are the plays of children not intermingled. It was this\r
-little girl whom Fantine heard singing.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" she resumed, "it is my Cosette! I recognize her voice."\r
-\r
-The child retreated as it had come; the voice died away. Fantine\r
-listened for a while longer, then her face clouded over, and M.\r
-Madeleine heard her say, in a low voice: "How wicked that doctor is not\r
-to allow me to see my daughter! That man has an evil countenance, that\r
-he has."\r
-\r
-But the smiling background of her thoughts came to the front again. She\r
-continued to talk to herself, with her head resting on the pillow: "How\r
-happy we are going to be! We shall have a little garden the very first\r
-thing; M. Madeleine has promised it to me. My daughter will play in the\r
-garden. She must know her letters by this time. I will make her spell.\r
-She will run over the grass after butterflies. I will watch her. Then\r
-she will take her first communion. Ah! when will she take her first\r
-communion?"\r
-\r
-She began to reckon on her fingers.\r
-\r
-"One, two, three, four--she is seven years old. In five years she will\r
-have a white veil, and openwork stockings; she will look like a little\r
-woman. O my good sister, you do not know how foolish I become when I\r
-think of my daughter's first communion!"\r
-\r
-She began to laugh.\r
-\r
-He had released Fantine's hand. He listened to her words as one listens\r
-to the sighing of the breeze, with his eyes on the ground, his mind\r
-absorbed in reflection which had no bottom. All at once she ceased\r
-speaking, and this caused him to raise his head mechanically. Fantine\r
-had become terrible.\r
-\r
-She no longer spoke, she no longer breathed; she had raised herself to\r
-a sitting posture, her thin shoulder emerged from her chemise; her face,\r
-which had been radiant but a moment before, was ghastly, and she\r
-seemed to have fixed her eyes, rendered large with terror, on something\r
-alarming at the other extremity of the room.\r
-\r
-"Good God!" he exclaimed; "what ails you, Fantine?"\r
-\r
-She made no reply; she did not remove her eyes from the object which\r
-she seemed to see. She removed one hand from his arm, and with the other\r
-made him a sign to look behind him.\r
-\r
-He turned, and beheld Javert.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--JAVERT SATISFIED\r
-\r
-This is what had taken place.\r
-\r
-The half-hour after midnight had just struck when M. Madeleine quitted\r
-the Hall of Assizes in Arras. He regained his inn just in time to set\r
-out again by the mail-wagon, in which he had engaged his place. A little\r
-before six o'clock in the morning he had arrived at M. sur M., and his\r
-first care had been to post a letter to M. Laffitte, then to enter the\r
-infirmary and see Fantine.\r
-\r
-However, he had hardly quitted the audience hall of the Court of\r
-Assizes, when the district-attorney, recovering from his first shock,\r
-had taken the word to deplore the mad deed of the honorable mayor of\r
-M. sur M., to declare that his convictions had not been in the least\r
-modified by that curious incident, which would be explained thereafter,\r
-and to demand, in the meantime, the condemnation of that Champmathieu,\r
-who was evidently the real Jean Valjean. The district-attorney's\r
-persistence was visibly at variance with the sentiments of every one, of\r
-the public, of the court, and of the jury. The counsel for the defence\r
-had some difficulty in refuting this harangue and in establishing that,\r
-in consequence of the revelations of M. Madeleine, that is to say, of\r
-the real Jean Valjean, the aspect of the matter had been thoroughly\r
-altered, and that the jury had before their eyes now only an innocent\r
-man. Thence the lawyer had drawn some epiphonemas, not very fresh,\r
-unfortunately, upon judicial errors, etc., etc.; the President, in his\r
-summing up, had joined the counsel for the defence, and in a few minutes\r
-the jury had thrown Champmathieu out of the case.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, the district-attorney was bent on having a Jean Valjean;\r
-and as he had no longer Champmathieu, he took Madeleine.\r
-\r
-Immediately after Champmathieu had been set at liberty, the\r
-district-attorney shut himself up with the President. They conferred "as\r
-to the necessity of seizing the person of M. le Maire of M. sur M."\r
-This phrase, in which there was a great deal of of, is the\r
-district-attorney's, written with his own hand, on the minutes of his\r
-report to the attorney-general. His first emotion having passed off, the\r
-President did not offer many objections. Justice must, after all, take\r
-its course. And then, when all was said, although the President was\r
-a kindly and a tolerably intelligent man, he was, at the same time, a\r
-devoted and almost an ardent royalist, and he had been shocked to hear\r
-the Mayor of M. sur M. say the Emperor, and not Bonaparte, when alluding\r
-to the landing at Cannes.\r
-\r
-The order for his arrest was accordingly despatched. The\r
-district-attorney forwarded it to M. sur M. by a special messenger, at\r
-full speed, and entrusted its execution to Police Inspector Javert.\r
-\r
-The reader knows that Javert had returned to M. sur M. immediately after\r
-having given his deposition.\r
-\r
-Javert was just getting out of bed when the messenger handed him the\r
-order of arrest and the command to produce the prisoner.\r
-\r
-The messenger himself was a very clever member of the police, who, in\r
-two words, informed Javert of what had taken place at Arras. The order\r
-of arrest, signed by the district-attorney, was couched in these words:\r
-"Inspector Javert will apprehend the body of the Sieur Madeleine, mayor\r
-of M. sur M., who, in this day's session of the court, was recognized as\r
-the liberated convict, Jean Valjean."\r
-\r
-Any one who did not know Javert, and who had chanced to see him at the\r
-moment when he penetrated the antechamber of the infirmary, could have\r
-divined nothing of what had taken place, and would have thought his air\r
-the most ordinary in the world. He was cool, calm, grave, his gray\r
-hair was perfectly smooth upon his temples, and he had just mounted\r
-the stairs with his habitual deliberation. Any one who was thoroughly\r
-acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the moment,\r
-would have shuddered. The buckle of his leather stock was under his\r
-left ear instead of at the nape of his neck. This betrayed unwonted\r
-agitation.\r
-\r
-Javert was a complete character, who never had a wrinkle in his duty or\r
-in his uniform; methodical with malefactors, rigid with the buttons of\r
-his coat.\r
-\r
-That he should have set the buckle of his stock awry, it was\r
-indispensable that there should have taken place in him one of those\r
-emotions which may be designated as internal earthquakes.\r
-\r
-He had come in a simple way, had made a requisition on the neighboring\r
-post for a corporal and four soldiers, had left the soldiers in the\r
-courtyard, had had Fantine's room pointed out to him by the portress,\r
-who was utterly unsuspicious, accustomed as she was to seeing armed men\r
-inquiring for the mayor.\r
-\r
-On arriving at Fantine's chamber, Javert turned the handle, pushed\r
-the door open with the gentleness of a sick-nurse or a police spy, and\r
-entered.\r
-\r
-Properly speaking, he did not enter. He stood erect in the half-open\r
-door, his hat on his head and his left hand thrust into his coat, which\r
-was buttoned up to the chin. In the bend of his elbow the leaden head of\r
-his enormous cane, which was hidden behind him, could be seen.\r
-\r
-Thus he remained for nearly a minute, without his presence being\r
-perceived. All at once Fantine raised her eyes, saw him, and made M.\r
-Madeleine turn round.\r
-\r
-The instant that Madeleine's glance encountered Javert's glance, Javert,\r
-without stirring, without moving from his post, without approaching him,\r
-became terrible. No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy.\r
-\r
-It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.\r
-\r
-The satisfaction of at last getting hold of Jean Valjean caused all that\r
-was in his soul to appear in his countenance. The depths having been\r
-stirred up, mounted to the surface. The humiliation of having, in\r
-some slight degree, lost the scent, and of having indulged, for a few\r
-moments, in an error with regard to Champmathieu, was effaced by pride\r
-at having so well and accurately divined in the first place, and of\r
-having for so long cherished a just instinct. Javert's content shone\r
-forth in his sovereign attitude. The deformity of triumph overspread\r
-that narrow brow. All the demonstrations of horror which a satisfied\r
-face can afford were there.\r
-\r
-Javert was in heaven at that moment. Without putting the thing clearly\r
-to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his\r
-presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and\r
-truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil. Behind him and\r
-around him, at an infinite distance, he had authority, reason, the case\r
-judged, the legal conscience, the public prosecution, all the stars; he\r
-was protecting order, he was causing the law to yield up its thunders,\r
-he was avenging society, he was lending a helping hand to the absolute,\r
-he was standing erect in the midst of a glory. There existed in his\r
-victory a remnant of defiance and of combat. Erect, haughty, brilliant,\r
-he flaunted abroad in open day the superhuman bestiality of a ferocious\r
-archangel. The terrible shadow of the action which he was accomplishing\r
-caused the vague flash of the social sword to be visible in his clenched\r
-fist; happy and indignant, he held his heel upon crime, vice, rebellion,\r
-perdition, hell; he was radiant, he exterminated, he smiled, and there\r
-was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous Saint Michael.\r
-\r
-Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him.\r
-\r
-Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things\r
-which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when\r
-hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human\r
-conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues\r
-which have one vice,--error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic\r
-in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously\r
-venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his\r
-formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who\r
-triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face,\r
-wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the\r
-good.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--AUTHORITY REASSERTS ITS RIGHTS\r
-\r
-Fantine had not seen Javert since the day on which the mayor had torn\r
-her from the man. Her ailing brain comprehended nothing, but the only\r
-thing which she did not doubt was that he had come to get her. She could\r
-not endure that terrible face; she felt her life quitting her; she hid\r
-her face in both hands, and shrieked in her anguish:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Madeleine, save me!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean--we shall henceforth not speak of him otherwise--had risen.\r
-He said to Fantine in the gentlest and calmest of voices:--\r
-\r
-"Be at ease; it is not for you that he is come."\r
-\r
-Then he addressed Javert, and said:--\r
-\r
-"I know what you want."\r
-\r
-Javert replied:--\r
-\r
-"Be quick about it!"\r
-\r
-There lay in the inflection of voice which accompanied these words\r
-something indescribably fierce and frenzied. Javert did not say, "Be\r
-quick about it!" he said "Bequiabouit."\r
-\r
-No orthography can do justice to the accent with which it was uttered:\r
-it was no longer a human word: it was a roar.\r
-\r
-He did not proceed according to his custom, he did not enter into the\r
-matter, he exhibited no warrant of arrest. In his eyes, Jean Valjean\r
-was a sort of mysterious combatant, who was not to be laid hands upon,\r
-a wrestler in the dark whom he had had in his grasp for the last five\r
-years, without being able to throw him. This arrest was not a beginning,\r
-but an end. He confined himself to saying, "Be quick about it!"\r
-\r
-As he spoke thus, he did not advance a single step; he hurled at Jean\r
-Valjean a glance which he threw out like a grappling-hook, and with\r
-which he was accustomed to draw wretches violently to him.\r
-\r
-It was this glance which Fantine had felt penetrating to the very marrow\r
-of her bones two months previously.\r
-\r
-At Javert's exclamation, Fantine opened her eyes once more. But the\r
-mayor was there; what had she to fear?\r
-\r
-Javert advanced to the middle of the room, and cried:--\r
-\r
-"See here now! Art thou coming?"\r
-\r
-The unhappy woman glanced about her. No one was present excepting the\r
-nun and the mayor. To whom could that abject use of "thou" be addressed?\r
-To her only. She shuddered.\r
-\r
-Then she beheld a most unprecedented thing, a thing so unprecedented\r
-that nothing equal to it had appeared to her even in the blackest\r
-deliriums of fever.\r
-\r
-She beheld Javert, the police spy, seize the mayor by the collar; she\r
-saw the mayor bow his head. It seemed to her that the world was coming\r
-to an end.\r
-\r
-Javert had, in fact, grasped Jean Valjean by the collar.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Maire!" shrieked Fantine.\r
-\r
-Javert burst out laughing with that frightful laugh which displayed all\r
-his gums.\r
-\r
-"There is no longer any Monsieur le Maire here!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean made no attempt to disengage the hand which grasped the\r
-collar of his coat. He said:--\r
-\r
-"Javert--"\r
-\r
-Javert interrupted him: "Call me Mr. Inspector."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," said Jean Valjean, "I should like to say a word to you in\r
-private."\r
-\r
-"Aloud! Say it aloud!" replied Javert; "people are in the habit of\r
-talking aloud to me."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean went on in a lower tone:--\r
-\r
-"I have a request to make of you--"\r
-\r
-"I tell you to speak loud."\r
-\r
-"But you alone should hear it--"\r
-\r
-"What difference does that make to me? I shall not listen."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean turned towards him and said very rapidly and in a very low\r
-voice:--\r
-\r
-"Grant me three days' grace! three days in which to go and fetch the\r
-child of this unhappy woman. I will pay whatever is necessary. You shall\r
-accompany me if you choose."\r
-\r
-"You are making sport of me!" cried Javert. "Come now, I did not think\r
-you such a fool! You ask me to give you three days in which to run away!\r
-You say that it is for the purpose of fetching that creature's child!\r
-Ah! Ah! That's good! That's really capital!"\r
-\r
-Fantine was seized with a fit of trembling.\r
-\r
-"My child!" she cried, "to go and fetch my child! She is not here,\r
-then! Answer me, sister; where is Cosette? I want my child! Monsieur\r
-Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire!"\r
-\r
-Javert stamped his foot.\r
-\r
-"And now there's the other one! Will you hold your tongue, you hussy?\r
-It's a pretty sort of a place where convicts are magistrates, and where\r
-women of the town are cared for like countesses! Ah! But we are going to\r
-change all that; it is high time!"\r
-\r
-He stared intently at Fantine, and added, once more taking into his\r
-grasp Jean Valjean's cravat, shirt and collar:--\r
-\r
-"I tell you that there is no Monsieur Madeleine and that there is no\r
-Monsieur le Maire. There is a thief, a brigand, a convict named Jean\r
-Valjean! And I have him in my grasp! That's what there is!"\r
-\r
-Fantine raised herself in bed with a bound, supporting herself on her\r
-stiffened arms and on both hands: she gazed at Jean Valjean, she gazed\r
-at Javert, she gazed at the nun, she opened her mouth as though to\r
-speak; a rattle proceeded from the depths of her throat, her teeth\r
-chattered; she stretched out her arms in her agony, opening her hands\r
-convulsively, and fumbling about her like a drowning person; then\r
-suddenly fell back on her pillow.\r
-\r
-Her head struck the head-board of the bed and fell forwards on her\r
-breast, with gaping mouth and staring, sightless eyes.\r
-\r
-She was dead.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean laid his hand upon the detaining hand of Javert, and opened\r
-it as he would have opened the hand of a baby; then he said to Javert:--\r
-\r
-"You have murdered that woman."\r
-\r
-"Let's have an end of this!" shouted Javert, in a fury; "I am not here\r
-to listen to argument. Let us economize all that; the guard is below;\r
-march on instantly, or you'll get the thumb-screws!"\r
-\r
-In the corner of the room stood an old iron bedstead, which was in a\r
-decidedly decrepit state, and which served the sisters as a camp-bed\r
-when they were watching with the sick. Jean Valjean stepped up to this\r
-bed, in a twinkling wrenched off the head-piece, which was already in a\r
-dilapidated condition, an easy matter to muscles like his, grasped the\r
-principal rod like a bludgeon, and glanced at Javert. Javert retreated\r
-towards the door. Jean Valjean, armed with his bar of iron, walked\r
-slowly up to Fantine's couch. When he arrived there he turned and said\r
-to Javert, in a voice that was barely audible:--\r
-\r
-"I advise you not to disturb me at this moment."\r
-\r
-One thing is certain, and that is, that Javert trembled.\r
-\r
-It did occur to him to summon the guard, but Jean Valjean might avail\r
-himself of that moment to effect his escape; so he remained, grasped\r
-his cane by the small end, and leaned against the door-post, without\r
-removing his eyes from Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean rested his elbow on the knob at the head of the bed, and\r
-his brow on his hand, and began to contemplate the motionless body of\r
-Fantine, which lay extended there. He remained thus, mute, absorbed,\r
-evidently with no further thought of anything connected with this life.\r
-Upon his face and in his attitude there was nothing but inexpressible\r
-pity. After a few moments of this meditation he bent towards Fantine,\r
-and spoke to her in a low voice.\r
-\r
-What did he say to her? What could this man, who was reproved, say to\r
-that woman, who was dead? What words were those? No one on earth heard\r
-them. Did the dead woman hear them? There are some touching illusions\r
-which are, perhaps, sublime realities. The point as to which there\r
-exists no doubt is, that Sister Simplice, the sole witness of the\r
-incident, often said that at the moment that Jean Valjean whispered in\r
-Fantine's ear, she distinctly beheld an ineffable smile dawn on those\r
-pale lips, and in those dim eyes, filled with the amazement of the tomb.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean took Fantine's head in both his hands, and arranged it on\r
-the pillow as a mother might have done for her child; then he tied the\r
-string of her chemise, and smoothed her hair back under her cap. That\r
-done, he closed her eyes.\r
-\r
-Fantine's face seemed strangely illuminated at that moment.\r
-\r
-Death, that signifies entrance into the great light.\r
-\r
-Fantine's hand was hanging over the side of the bed. Jean Valjean knelt\r
-down before that hand, lifted it gently, and kissed it.\r
-\r
-Then he rose, and turned to Javert.\r
-\r
-"Now," said he, "I am at your disposal."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--A SUITABLE TOMB\r
-\r
-Javert deposited Jean Valjean in the city prison.\r
-\r
-The arrest of M. Madeleine occasioned a sensation, or rather, an\r
-extraordinary commotion in M. sur M. We are sorry that we cannot conceal\r
-the fact, that at the single word, "He was a convict," nearly every one\r
-deserted him. In less than two hours all the good that he had done had\r
-been forgotten, and he was nothing but a "convict from the galleys." It\r
-is just to add that the details of what had taken place at Arras were\r
-not yet known. All day long conversations like the following were to be\r
-heard in all quarters of the town:--\r
-\r
-"You don't know? He was a liberated convict!" "Who?" "The mayor." "Bah!\r
-M. Madeleine?" "Yes." "Really?" "His name was not Madeleine at all; he\r
-had a frightful name, Bejean, Bojean, Boujean." "Ah! Good God!" "He\r
-has been arrested." "Arrested!" "In prison, in the city prison, while\r
-waiting to be transferred." "Until he is transferred!" "He is to be\r
-transferred!" "Where is he to be taken?" "He will be tried at the\r
-Assizes for a highway robbery which he committed long ago." "Well! I\r
-suspected as much. That man was too good, too perfect, too affected.\r
-He refused the cross; he bestowed sous on all the little scamps he came\r
-across. I always thought there was some evil history back of all that."\r
-\r
-The "drawing-rooms" particularly abounded in remarks of this nature.\r
-\r
-One old lady, a subscriber to the Drapeau Blanc, made the following\r
-remark, the depth of which it is impossible to fathom:--\r
-\r
-"I am not sorry. It will be a lesson to the Bonapartists!"\r
-\r
-It was thus that the phantom which had been called M. Madeleine vanished\r
-from M. sur M. Only three or four persons in all the town remained\r
-faithful to his memory. The old portress who had served him was among\r
-the number.\r
-\r
-On the evening of that day the worthy old woman was sitting in her\r
-lodge, still in a thorough fright, and absorbed in sad reflections.\r
-The factory had been closed all day, the carriage gate was bolted, the\r
-street was deserted. There was no one in the house but the two nuns,\r
-Sister Perpetue and Sister Simplice, who were watching beside the body\r
-of Fantine.\r
-\r
-Towards the hour when M. Madeleine was accustomed to return home,\r
-the good portress rose mechanically, took from a drawer the key of\r
-M. Madeleine's chamber, and the flat candlestick which he used every\r
-evening to go up to his quarters; then she hung the key on the nail\r
-whence he was accustomed to take it, and set the candlestick on one\r
-side, as though she was expecting him. Then she sat down again on her\r
-chair, and became absorbed in thought once more. The poor, good old\r
-woman had done all this without being conscious of it.\r
-\r
-It was only at the expiration of two hours that she roused herself from\r
-her revery, and exclaimed, "Hold! My good God Jesus! And I hung his key\r
-on the nail!"\r
-\r
-At that moment the small window in the lodge opened, a hand passed\r
-through, seized the key and the candlestick, and lighted the taper at\r
-the candle which was burning there.\r
-\r
-The portress raised her eyes, and stood there with gaping mouth, and a\r
-shriek which she confined to her throat.\r
-\r
-She knew that hand, that arm, the sleeve of that coat.\r
-\r
-It was M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-It was several seconds before she could speak; she had a seizure, as she\r
-said herself, when she related the adventure afterwards.\r
-\r
-"Good God, Monsieur le Maire," she cried at last, "I thought you were--"\r
-\r
-She stopped; the conclusion of her sentence would have been lacking in\r
-respect towards the beginning. Jean Valjean was still Monsieur le Maire\r
-to her.\r
-\r
-He finished her thought.\r
-\r
-"In prison," said he. "I was there; I broke a bar of one of the windows;\r
-I let myself drop from the top of a roof, and here I am. I am going up\r
-to my room; go and find Sister Simplice for me. She is with that poor\r
-woman, no doubt."\r
-\r
-The old woman obeyed in all haste.\r
-\r
-He gave her no orders; he was quite sure that she would guard him better\r
-than he should guard himself.\r
-\r
-No one ever found out how he had managed to get into the courtyard\r
-without opening the big gates. He had, and always carried about him,\r
-a pass-key which opened a little side-door; but he must have been\r
-searched, and his latch-key must have been taken from him. This point\r
-was never explained.\r
-\r
-He ascended the staircase leading to his chamber. On arriving at the\r
-top, he left his candle on the top step of his stairs, opened his door\r
-with very little noise, went and closed his window and his shutters by\r
-feeling, then returned for his candle and re-entered his room.\r
-\r
-It was a useful precaution; it will be recollected that his window could\r
-be seen from the street.\r
-\r
-He cast a glance about him, at his table, at his chair, at his bed which\r
-had not been disturbed for three days. No trace of the disorder of the\r
-night before last remained. The portress had "done up" his room; only\r
-she had picked out of the ashes and placed neatly on the table the two\r
-iron ends of the cudgel and the forty-sou piece which had been blackened\r
-by the fire.\r
-\r
-He took a sheet of paper, on which he wrote: "These are the two tips of\r
-my iron-shod cudgel and the forty-sou piece stolen from Little Gervais,\r
-which I mentioned at the Court of Assizes," and he arranged this piece\r
-of paper, the bits of iron, and the coin in such a way that they were\r
-the first things to be seen on entering the room. From a cupboard he\r
-pulled out one of his old shirts, which he tore in pieces. In the\r
-strips of linen thus prepared he wrapped the two silver candlesticks. He\r
-betrayed neither haste nor agitation; and while he was wrapping up the\r
-Bishop's candlesticks, he nibbled at a piece of black bread. It was\r
-probably the prison-bread which he had carried with him in his flight.\r
-\r
-This was proved by the crumbs which were found on the floor of the room\r
-when the authorities made an examination later on.\r
-\r
-There came two taps at the door.\r
-\r
-"Come in," said he.\r
-\r
-It was Sister Simplice.\r
-\r
-She was pale; her eyes were red; the candle which she carried trembled\r
-in her hand. The peculiar feature of the violences of destiny is, that\r
-however polished or cool we may be, they wring human nature from our\r
-very bowels, and force it to reappear on the surface. The emotions of\r
-that day had turned the nun into a woman once more. She had wept, and\r
-she was trembling.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had just finished writing a few lines on a paper, which he\r
-handed to the nun, saying, "Sister, you will give this to Monsieur le\r
-Cure."\r
-\r
-The paper was not folded. She cast a glance upon it.\r
-\r
-"You can read it," said he.\r
-\r
-She read:--\r
-\r
-"I beg Monsieur le Cure to keep an eye on all that I leave behind me. He\r
-will be so good as to pay out of it the expenses of my trial, and of the\r
-funeral of the woman who died yesterday. The rest is for the poor."\r
-\r
-The sister tried to speak, but she only managed to stammer a few\r
-inarticulate sounds. She succeeded in saying, however:--\r
-\r
-"Does not Monsieur le Maire desire to take a last look at that poor,\r
-unhappy woman?"\r
-\r
-"No," said he; "I am pursued; it would only end in their arresting me in\r
-that room, and that would disturb her."\r
-\r
-He had hardly finished when a loud noise became audible on the\r
-staircase. They heard a tumult of ascending footsteps, and the old\r
-portress saying in her loudest and most piercing tones:--\r
-\r
-"My good sir, I swear to you by the good God, that not a soul has\r
-entered this house all day, nor all the evening, and that I have not\r
-even left the door."\r
-\r
-A man responded:--\r
-\r
-"But there is a light in that room, nevertheless."\r
-\r
-They recognized Javert's voice.\r
-\r
-The chamber was so arranged that the door in opening masked the corner\r
-of the wall on the right. Jean Valjean blew out the light and placed\r
-himself in this angle. Sister Simplice fell on her knees near the table.\r
-\r
-The door opened.\r
-\r
-Javert entered.\r
-\r
-The whispers of many men and the protestations of the portress were\r
-audible in the corridor.\r
-\r
-The nun did not raise her eyes. She was praying.\r
-\r
-The candle was on the chimney-piece, and gave but very little light.\r
-\r
-Javert caught sight of the nun and halted in amazement.\r
-\r
-It will be remembered that the fundamental point in Javert, his element,\r
-the very air he breathed, was veneration for all authority. This was\r
-impregnable, and admitted of neither objection nor restriction. In his\r
-eyes, of course, the ecclesiastical authority was the chief of all; he\r
-was religious, superficial and correct on this point as on all others.\r
-In his eyes, a priest was a mind, who never makes a mistake; a nun was a\r
-creature who never sins; they were souls walled in from this world,\r
-with a single door which never opened except to allow the truth to pass\r
-through.\r
-\r
-On perceiving the sister, his first movement was to retire.\r
-\r
-But there was also another duty which bound him and impelled him\r
-imperiously in the opposite direction. His second movement was to remain\r
-and to venture on at least one question.\r
-\r
-This was Sister Simplice, who had never told a lie in her life. Javert\r
-knew it, and held her in special veneration in consequence.\r
-\r
-"Sister," said he, "are you alone in this room?"\r
-\r
-A terrible moment ensued, during which the poor portress felt as though\r
-she should faint.\r
-\r
-The sister raised her eyes and answered:--\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Then," resumed Javert, "you will excuse me if I persist; it is my duty;\r
-you have not seen a certain person--a man--this evening? He has escaped;\r
-we are in search of him--that Jean Valjean; you have not seen him?"\r
-\r
-The sister replied:--\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-She lied. She had lied twice in succession, one after the other, without\r
-hesitation, promptly, as a person does when sacrificing herself.\r
-\r
-"Pardon me," said Javert, and he retired with a deep bow.\r
-\r
-O sainted maid! you left this world many years ago; you have rejoined\r
-your sisters, the virgins, and your brothers, the angels, in the light;\r
-may this lie be counted to your credit in paradise!\r
-\r
-The sister's affirmation was for Javert so decisive a thing that he did\r
-not even observe the singularity of that candle which had but just been\r
-extinguished, and which was still smoking on the table.\r
-\r
-An hour later, a man, marching amid trees and mists, was rapidly\r
-departing from M. sur M. in the direction of Paris. That man was Jean\r
-Valjean. It has been established by the testimony of two or three\r
-carters who met him, that he was carrying a bundle; that he was dressed\r
-in a blouse. Where had he obtained that blouse? No one ever found out.\r
-But an aged workman had died in the infirmary of the factory a few days\r
-before, leaving behind him nothing but his blouse. Perhaps that was the\r
-one.\r
-\r
-One last word about Fantine.\r
-\r
-We all have a mother,--the earth. Fantine was given back to that mother.\r
-\r
-The cure thought that he was doing right, and perhaps he really was, in\r
-reserving as much money as possible from what Jean Valjean had left for\r
-the poor. Who was concerned, after all? A convict and a woman of the\r
-town. That is why he had a very simple funeral for Fantine, and reduced\r
-it to that strictly necessary form known as the pauper's grave.\r
-\r
-So Fantine was buried in the free corner of the cemetery which belongs\r
-to anybody and everybody, and where the poor are lost. Fortunately, God\r
-knows where to find the soul again. Fantine was laid in the shade,\r
-among the first bones that came to hand; she was subjected to the\r
-promiscuousness of ashes. She was thrown into the public grave. Her\r
-grave resembled her bed.\r
-\r
-\r
-[THE END OF VOLUME I. "FANTINE"]\r
-\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Two 2frontispiece]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Two 2titlepage]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-VOLUME II.--COSETTE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--WHAT IS MET WITH ON THE WAY FROM NIVELLES\r
-\r
-Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person\r
-who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles, and directing his\r
-course towards La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved\r
-road, which undulated between two rows of trees, over the hills which\r
-succeed each other, raise the road and let it fall again, and produce\r
-something in the nature of enormous waves.\r
-\r
-He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he perceived\r
-the slate-roofed tower of Braine-l'Alleud, which has the form of a\r
-reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence; and\r
-at the angle of the cross-road, by the side of a sort of mouldy gibbet\r
-bearing the inscription Ancient Barrier No. 4, a public house, bearing\r
-on its front this sign: At the Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents). Echabeau,\r
-Private Cafe.\r
-\r
-A quarter of a league further on, he arrived at the bottom of a little\r
-valley, where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through\r
-the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very green\r
-trees, which fills the valley on one side of the road, is dispersed over\r
-the meadows on the other, and disappears gracefully and as in order in\r
-the direction of Braine-l'Alleud.\r
-\r
-On the right, close to the road, was an inn, with a four-wheeled cart\r
-at the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of dried\r
-brushwood near a flourishing hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, and\r
-a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A young\r
-girl was weeding in a field, where a huge yellow poster, probably of\r
-some outside spectacle, such as a parish festival, was fluttering in\r
-the wind. At one corner of the inn, beside a pool in which a flotilla\r
-of ducks was navigating, a badly paved path plunged into the bushes. The\r
-wayfarer struck into this.\r
-\r
-After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth\r
-century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he\r
-found himself before a large door of arched stone, with a rectilinear\r
-impost, in the sombre style of Louis XIV., flanked by two flat\r
-medallions. A severe facade rose above this door; a wall, perpendicular\r
-to the facade, almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt\r
-right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through\r
-which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed.\r
-The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old\r
-rusty knocker.\r
-\r
-The sun was charming; the branches had that soft shivering of May,\r
-which seems to proceed rather from the nests than from the wind. A brave\r
-little bird, probably a lover, was carolling in a distracted manner in a\r
-large tree.\r
-\r
-The wayfarer bent over and examined a rather large circular excavation,\r
-resembling the hollow of a sphere, in the stone on the left, at the foot\r
-of the pier of the door.\r
-\r
-At this moment the leaves of the door parted, and a peasant woman\r
-emerged.\r
-\r
-She saw the wayfarer, and perceived what he was looking at.\r
-\r
-"It was a French cannon-ball which made that," she said to him. And she\r
-added:--\r
-\r
-"That which you see there, higher up in the door, near a nail, is the\r
-hole of a big iron bullet as large as an egg. The bullet did not pierce\r
-the wood."\r
-\r
-"What is the name of this place?" inquired the wayfarer.\r
-\r
-"Hougomont," said the peasant woman.\r
-\r
-The traveller straightened himself up. He walked on a few paces, and\r
-went off to look over the tops of the hedges. On the horizon through the\r
-trees, he perceived a sort of little elevation, and on this elevation\r
-something which at that distance resembled a lion.\r
-\r
-He was on the battle-field of Waterloo.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--HOUGOMONT\r
-\r
-Hougomont,--this was a funereal spot, the beginning of the obstacle,\r
-the first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe, called\r
-Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo, the first knot under the blows of his\r
-axe.\r
-\r
-It was a chateau; it is no longer anything but a farm. For the\r
-antiquary, Hougomont is Hugomons. This manor was built by Hugo, Sire\r
-of Somerel, the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of\r
-Villiers.\r
-\r
-The traveller pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient calash under the\r
-porch, and entered the courtyard.\r
-\r
-The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the\r
-sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else\r
-having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its\r
-birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door, of\r
-the time of Henry IV., permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard;\r
-beside this door, a manure-hole, some pickaxes, some shovels, some\r
-carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its iron reel, a chicken\r
-jumping, and a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel surmounted by a small\r
-bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree trained in espalier against the\r
-wall of the chapel--behold the court, the conquest of which was one of\r
-Napoleon's dreams. This corner of earth, could he but have seized\r
-it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise. Chickens are\r
-scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is a\r
-huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.\r
-\r
-The English behaved admirably there. Cooke's four companies of guards\r
-there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.\r
-\r
-Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings\r
-and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of\r
-which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern\r
-door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun's length away.\r
-Hougomont has two doors,--the southern door, that of the chateau; and\r
-the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent his brother\r
-Jerome against Hougomont; the divisions of Foy, Guilleminot, and Bachelu\r
-hurled themselves against it; nearly the entire corps of Reille was\r
-employed against it, and miscarried; Kellermann's balls were exhausted\r
-on this heroic section of wall. Bauduin's brigade was not strong enough\r
-to force Hougomont on the north, and the brigade of Soye could not do\r
-more than effect the beginning of a breach on the south, but without\r
-taking it.\r
-\r
-The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south. A bit of the north\r
-door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall. It consists of\r
-four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the scars of the attack\r
-are visible.\r
-\r
-The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had\r
-a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, stands\r
-half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in the wall,\r
-built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the courtyard on\r
-the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms,\r
-with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie the meadows.\r
-The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts\r
-of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there\r
-that Bauduin was killed.\r
-\r
-The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is\r
-visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives\r
-and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death\r
-agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds;\r
-the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.\r
-\r
-This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings\r
-which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.\r
-\r
-The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in,\r
-but could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of the\r
-chateau, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises in\r
-a crumbling state,--disembowelled, one might say. The chateau served\r
-for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. There men exterminated each\r
-other. The French, fired on from every point,--from behind the walls,\r
-from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars, through\r
-all the casements, through all the air-holes, through every crack in the\r
-stones,--fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the reply to the\r
-grape-shot was a conflagration.\r
-\r
-In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron, the\r
-dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible; the\r
-English guards were in ambush in these rooms; the spiral of the\r
-staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof, appears\r
-like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories; the\r
-English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps, had\r
-cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs of blue stone,\r
-which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score of steps still\r
-cling to the wall; on the first is cut the figure of a trident. These\r
-inaccessible steps are solid in their niches. All the rest resembles a\r
-jaw which has been denuded of its teeth. There are two old trees there:\r
-one is dead; the other is wounded at its base, and is clothed with\r
-verdure in April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the\r
-staircase.\r
-\r
-A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered\r
-its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the\r
-carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there--an altar of\r
-unpolished wood, placed against a background of roughhewn stone. Four\r
-whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows;\r
-over the door a large wooden crucifix, below the crucifix a square\r
-air-hole stopped up with a bundle of hay; on the ground, in one corner,\r
-an old window-frame with the glass all broken to pieces--such is the\r
-chapel. Near the altar there is nailed up a wooden statue of Saint Anne,\r
-of the fifteenth century; the head of the infant Jesus has been carried\r
-off by a large ball. The French, who were masters of the chapel for a\r
-moment, and were then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled this\r
-building; it was a perfect furnace; the door was burned, the floor was\r
-burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his\r
-feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen; then it\r
-stopped,--a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the\r
-neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate than the\r
-Christ.\r
-\r
-The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this\r
-name is to be read: Henquinez. Then these others: Conde de Rio Maior\r
-Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with\r
-exclamation points,--a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed\r
-in 1849. The nations insulted each other there.\r
-\r
-It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up which\r
-held an axe in its hand; this corpse was Sub-Lieutenant Legros.\r
-\r
-On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left. There are\r
-two in this courtyard. One inquires, Why is there no bucket and pulley\r
-to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there. Why is water not\r
-drawn there? Because it is full of skeletons.\r
-\r
-The last person who drew water from the well was named Guillaume van\r
-Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener there.\r
-On the 18th of June, 1815, his family fled and concealed themselves in\r
-the woods.\r
-\r
-The forest surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these unfortunate\r
-people who had been scattered abroad, for many days and nights. There\r
-are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old boles of burned\r
-trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs trembling in the\r
-depths of the thickets.\r
-\r
-Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, "to guard the chateau," and\r
-concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there.\r
-They tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants forced this\r
-frightened man to serve them, by administering blows with the flats of\r
-their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It\r
-was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught.\r
-This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself.\r
-\r
-After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death\r
-has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow\r
-glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and\r
-it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into\r
-it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they\r
-were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble\r
-voices were heard calling from the well.\r
-\r
-This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part\r
-stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded like\r
-the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side is\r
-open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom has\r
-a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell. This\r
-little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The iron\r
-supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over, the\r
-eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped-up\r
-mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is concealed\r
-in a growth of nettles.\r
-\r
-This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the\r
-table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a\r
-cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of knotty\r
-and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer either\r
-pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which served\r
-the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to time a\r
-bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then flies\r
-away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The\r
-door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a\r
-pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed\r
-slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped\r
-this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed\r
-off his hand with an axe.\r
-\r
-The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van\r
-Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said\r
-to us: "I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older,\r
-was terrified and wept. They carried us off to the woods. I went there\r
-in my mother's arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated\r
-the cannon, and went boum! boum!"\r
-\r
-A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so\r
-we were told. The orchard is terrible.\r
-\r
-It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts. The first\r
-part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third is a wood. These\r
-three parts have a common enclosure: on the side of the entrance, the\r
-buildings of the chateau and the farm; on the left, a hedge; on the\r
-right, a wall; and at the end, a wall. The wall on the right is of\r
-brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone. One enters the garden first.\r
-It slopes downwards, is planted with gooseberry bushes, choked with a\r
-wild growth of vegetation, and terminated by a monumental terrace of cut\r
-stone, with balustrade with a double curve.\r
-\r
-It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded Le\r
-Notre; to-day it is ruins and briars. The pilasters are surmounted by\r
-globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone. Forty-three balusters can\r
-still be counted on their sockets; the rest lie prostrate in the grass.\r
-Almost all bear scratches of bullets. One broken baluster is placed on\r
-the pediment like a fractured leg.\r
-\r
-It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six\r
-light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being\r
-unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens,\r
-accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was\r
-armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired\r
-from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two\r
-hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a\r
-quarter of an hour to die.\r
-\r
-One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard,\r
-properly speaking. There, within the limits of those few square fathoms,\r
-fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems ready\r
-to renew the combat. Thirty-eight loopholes, pierced by the English at\r
-irregular heights, are there still. In front of the sixth are placed two\r
-English tombs of granite. There are loopholes only in the south wall, as\r
-the principal attack came from that quarter. The wall is hidden on the\r
-outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to\r
-deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle\r
-and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight\r
-loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's\r
-brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French\r
-scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees.\r
-All this grass has been soaked in blood. A battalion of Nassau, seven\r
-hundred strong, was overwhelmed there. The outside of the wall, against\r
-which Kellermann's two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.\r
-\r
-This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its\r
-buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the cart-horses\r
-browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the\r
-spaces between the trees and force the passer-by to bend his head; one\r
-walks over this uncultivated land, and one's foot dives into mole-holes.\r
-In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies\r
-there all verdant. Major Blackmann leaned against it to die. Beneath\r
-a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat,\r
-descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict\r
-of Nantes. An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side,\r
-its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam. Nearly all\r
-the apple-trees are falling with age. There is not one which has not\r
-had its bullet or its biscayan.[6] The skeletons of dead trees abound in\r
-this orchard. Crows fly through their branches, and at the end of it is\r
-a wood full of violets.\r
-\r
-Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a\r
-rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled\r
-in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the\r
-regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the\r
-English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, besides the forty\r
-from Reille's corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of\r
-Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their\r
-throats cut,--and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the\r
-traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will\r
-explain to you the affair of Waterloo!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE EIGHTEENTH OF JUNE, 1815\r
-\r
-Let us turn back,--that is one of the story-teller's rights,--and put\r
-ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than\r
-the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took\r
-place.\r
-\r
-If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of\r
-June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops\r
-of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that\r
-Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz\r
-was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season\r
-sufficed to make a world crumble.\r
-\r
-The battle of Waterloo could not be begun until half-past eleven\r
-o'clock, and that gave Blucher time to come up. Why? Because the ground\r
-was wet. The artillery had to wait until it became a little firmer\r
-before they could manoeuvre.\r
-\r
-Napoleon was an artillery officer, and felt the effects of this. The\r
-foundation of this wonderful captain was the man who, in the report to\r
-the Directory on Aboukir, said: Such a one of our balls killed six men.\r
-All his plans of battle were arranged for projectiles. The key to his\r
-victory was to make the artillery converge on one point. He treated the\r
-strategy of the hostile general like a citadel, and made a breach in it.\r
-He overwhelmed the weak point with grape-shot; he joined and dissolved\r
-battles with cannon. There was something of the sharpshooter in his\r
-genius. To beat in squares, to pulverize regiments, to break lines, to\r
-crush and disperse masses,--for him everything lay in this, to\r
-strike, strike, strike incessantly,--and he intrusted this task to the\r
-cannon-ball. A redoubtable method, and one which, united with genius,\r
-rendered this gloomy athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for the\r
-space of fifteen years.\r
-\r
-On the 18th of June, 1815, he relied all the more on his artillery,\r
-because he had numbers on his side. Wellington had only one hundred and\r
-fifty-nine mouths of fire; Napoleon had two hundred and forty.\r
-\r
-Suppose the soil dry, and the artillery capable of moving, the action\r
-would have begun at six o'clock in the morning. The battle would have\r
-been won and ended at two o'clock, three hours before the change of\r
-fortune in favor of the Prussians. What amount of blame attaches to\r
-Napoleon for the loss of this battle? Is the shipwreck due to the pilot?\r
-\r
-Was it the evident physical decline of Napoleon that complicated this\r
-epoch by an inward diminution of force? Had the twenty years of war worn\r
-out the blade as it had worn the scabbard, the soul as well as the body?\r
-Did the veteran make himself disastrously felt in the leader? In a word,\r
-was this genius, as many historians of note have thought, suffering from\r
-an eclipse? Did he go into a frenzy in order to disguise his weakened\r
-powers from himself? Did he begin to waver under the delusion of\r
-a breath of adventure? Had he become--a grave matter in a\r
-general--unconscious of peril? Is there an age, in this class of\r
-material great men, who may be called the giants of action, when genius\r
-grows short-sighted? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal;\r
-for the Dantes and Michael Angelos to grow old is to grow in greatness;\r
-is it to grow less for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes? Had Napoleon\r
-lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where he\r
-could no longer recognize the reef, could no longer divine the snare, no\r
-longer discern the crumbling brink of abysses? Had he lost his power of\r
-scenting out catastrophes? He who had in former days known all the\r
-roads to triumph, and who, from the summit of his chariot of lightning,\r
-pointed them out with a sovereign finger, had he now reached that\r
-state of sinister amazement when he could lead his tumultuous legions\r
-harnessed to it, to the precipice? Was he seized at the age of forty-six\r
-with a supreme madness? Was that titanic charioteer of destiny no longer\r
-anything more than an immense dare-devil?\r
-\r
-We do not think so.\r
-\r
-His plan of battle was, by the confession of all, a masterpiece. To\r
-go straight to the centre of the Allies' line, to make a breach in the\r
-enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hal,\r
-and the Prussian half on Tongres, to make two shattered fragments of\r
-Wellington and Blucher, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels,\r
-to hurl the German into the Rhine, and the Englishman into the sea. All\r
-this was contained in that battle, according to Napoleon. Afterwards\r
-people would see.\r
-\r
-Of course, we do not here pretend to furnish a history of the battle of\r
-Waterloo; one of the scenes of the foundation of the story which we\r
-are relating is connected with this battle, but this history is not our\r
-subject; this history, moreover, has been finished, and finished in a\r
-masterly manner, from one point of view by Napoleon, and from another\r
-point of view by a whole pleiad of historians.[7]\r
-\r
-As for us, we leave the historians at loggerheads; we are but a distant\r
-witness, a passer-by on the plain, a seeker bending over that soil all\r
-made of human flesh, taking appearances for realities, perchance; we\r
-have no right to oppose, in the name of science, a collection of facts\r
-which contain illusions, no doubt; we possess neither military practice\r
-nor strategic ability which authorize a system; in our opinion, a chain\r
-of accidents dominated the two leaders at Waterloo; and when it becomes\r
-a question of destiny, that mysterious culprit, we judge like that\r
-ingenious judge, the populace.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--A\r
-\r
-Those persons who wish to gain a clear idea of the battle of Waterloo\r
-have only to place, mentally, on the ground, a capital A. The left limb\r
-of the A is the road to Nivelles, the right limb is the road to Genappe,\r
-the tie of the A is the hollow road to Ohain from Braine-l'Alleud. The\r
-top of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean, where Wellington is; the lower left tip\r
-is Hougomont, where Reille is stationed with Jerome Bonaparte; the right\r
-tip is the Belle-Alliance, where Napoleon was. At the centre of this\r
-chord is the precise point where the final word of the battle was\r
-pronounced. It was there that the lion has been placed, the involuntary\r
-symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial Guard.\r
-\r
-The triangle included in the top of the A, between the two limbs and the\r
-tie, is the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. The dispute over this plateau\r
-constituted the whole battle. The wings of the two armies extended to\r
-the right and left of the two roads to Genappe and Nivelles; d'Erlon\r
-facing Picton, Reille facing Hill.\r
-\r
-Behind the tip of the A, behind the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, is the\r
-forest of Soignes.\r
-\r
-As for the plain itself, let the reader picture to himself a vast\r
-undulating sweep of ground; each rise commands the next rise, and all\r
-the undulations mount towards Mont-Saint-Jean, and there end in the\r
-forest.\r
-\r
-Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers. It is a\r
-question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The one seeks to trip\r
-up the other. They clutch at everything: a bush is a point of support;\r
-an angle of the wall offers them a rest to the shoulder; for the lack\r
-of a hovel under whose cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its\r
-ground; an unevenness in the ground, a chance turn in the landscape, a\r
-cross-path encountered at the right moment, a grove, a ravine, can\r
-stay the heel of that colossus which is called an army, and prevent its\r
-retreat. He who quits the field is beaten; hence the necessity devolving\r
-on the responsible leader, of examining the most insignificant clump of\r
-trees, and of studying deeply the slightest relief in the ground.\r
-\r
-The two generals had attentively studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean,\r
-now called the plain of Waterloo. In the preceding year, Wellington,\r
-with the sagacity of foresight, had examined it as the possible seat of\r
-a great battle. Upon this spot, and for this duel, on the 18th of June,\r
-Wellington had the good post, Napoleon the bad post. The English army\r
-was stationed above, the French army below.\r
-\r
-It is almost superfluous here to sketch the appearance of Napoleon on\r
-horseback, glass in hand, upon the heights of Rossomme, at daybreak, on\r
-June 18, 1815. All the world has seen him before we can show him.\r
-That calm profile under the little three-cornered hat of the school of\r
-Brienne, that green uniform, the white revers concealing the star of the\r
-Legion of Honor, his great coat hiding his epaulets, the corner of red\r
-ribbon peeping from beneath his vest, his leather trousers, the white\r
-horse with the saddle-cloth of purple velvet bearing on the corners\r
-crowned N's and eagles, Hessian boots over silk stockings, silver spurs,\r
-the sword of Marengo,--that whole figure of the last of the Caesars is\r
-present to all imaginations, saluted with acclamations by some, severely\r
-regarded by others.\r
-\r
-That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from\r
-a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which\r
-always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day history\r
-and daylight have arrived.\r
-\r
-That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and\r
-divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it\r
-is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had\r
-hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different\r
-phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and\r
-the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader.\r
-Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations.\r
-Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Caesar,\r
-Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a\r
-misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES\r
-\r
-Every one is acquainted with the first phase of this battle; a beginning\r
-which was troubled, uncertain, hesitating, menacing to both armies, but\r
-still more so for the English than for the French.\r
-\r
-It had rained all night, the earth had been cut up by the downpour, the\r
-water had accumulated here and there in the hollows of the plain as if\r
-in casks; at some points the gear of the artillery carriages was buried\r
-up to the axles, the circingles of the horses were dripping with liquid\r
-mud. If the wheat and rye trampled down by this cohort of transports\r
-on the march had not filled in the ruts and strewn a litter beneath the\r
-wheels, all movement, particularly in the valleys, in the direction of\r
-Papelotte would have been impossible.\r
-\r
-The affair began late. Napoleon, as we have already explained, was in\r
-the habit of keeping all his artillery well in hand, like a pistol,\r
-aiming it now at one point, now at another, of the battle; and it had\r
-been his wish to wait until the horse batteries could move and gallop\r
-freely. In order to do that it was necessary that the sun should come\r
-out and dry the soil. But the sun did not make its appearance. It was\r
-no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. When the first cannon was fired,\r
-the English general, Colville, looked at his watch, and noted that it\r
-was thirty-five minutes past eleven.\r
-\r
-The action was begun furiously, with more fury, perhaps, than the\r
-Emperor would have wished, by the left wing of the French resting on\r
-Hougomont. At the same time Napoleon attacked the centre by hurling\r
-Quiot's brigade on La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed forward the right\r
-wing of the French against the left wing of the English, which rested on\r
-Papelotte.\r
-\r
-The attack on Hougomont was something of a feint; the plan was to draw\r
-Wellington thither, and to make him swerve to the left. This plan would\r
-have succeeded if the four companies of the English guards and the brave\r
-Belgians of Perponcher's division had not held the position solidly, and\r
-Wellington, instead of massing his troops there, could confine himself\r
-to despatching thither, as reinforcements, only four more companies of\r
-guards and one battalion from Brunswick.\r
-\r
-The attack of the right wing of the French on Papelotte was calculated,\r
-in fact, to overthrow the English left, to cut off the road to Brussels,\r
-to bar the passage against possible Prussians, to force Mont-Saint-Jean,\r
-to turn Wellington back on Hougomont, thence on Braine-l'Alleud, thence\r
-on Hal; nothing easier. With the exception of a few incidents this\r
-attack succeeded Papelotte was taken; La Haie-Sainte was carried.\r
-\r
-A detail to be noted. There was in the English infantry, particularly\r
-in Kempt's brigade, a great many raw recruits. These young soldiers were\r
-valiant in the presence of our redoubtable infantry; their inexperience\r
-extricated them intrepidly from the dilemma; they performed particularly\r
-excellent service as skirmishers: the soldier skirmisher, left somewhat\r
-to himself, becomes, so to speak, his own general. These recruits\r
-displayed some of the French ingenuity and fury. This novice of an\r
-infantry had dash. This displeased Wellington.\r
-\r
-After the taking of La Haie-Sainte the battle wavered.\r
-\r
-There is in this day an obscure interval, from mid-day to four o'clock;\r
-the middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates\r
-in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it.\r
-We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog, a dizzy mirage, paraphernalia\r
-of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks, floating sabre-taches,\r
-cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades, hussar dolmans, red boots\r
-with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos garlanded with torsades, the\r
-almost black infantry of Brunswick mingled with the scarlet infantry\r
-of England, the English soldiers with great, white circular pads on the\r
-slopes of their shoulders for epaulets, the Hanoverian light-horse with\r
-their oblong casques of leather, with brass hands and red horse-tails,\r
-the Scotch with their bare knees and plaids, the great white gaiters\r
-of our grenadiers; pictures, not strategic lines--what Salvator Rosa\r
-requires, not what is suited to the needs of Gribeauval.\r
-\r
-A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid\r
-obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the\r
-particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell. Whatever may\r
-be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses has an\r
-incalculable ebb. During the action the plans of the two leaders enter\r
-into each other and become mutually thrown out of shape. Such a point of\r
-the field of battle devours more combatants than such another, just as\r
-more or less spongy soils soak up more or less quickly the water which\r
-is poured on them. It becomes necessary to pour out more soldiers than\r
-one would like; a series of expenditures which are the unforeseen. The\r
-line of battle waves and undulates like a thread, the trails of blood\r
-gush illogically, the fronts of the armies waver, the regiments\r
-form capes and gulfs as they enter and withdraw; all these reefs are\r
-continually moving in front of each other. Where the infantry stood the\r
-artillery arrives, the cavalry rushes in where the artillery was, the\r
-battalions are like smoke. There was something there; seek it. It has\r
-disappeared; the open spots change place, the sombre folds advance and\r
-retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back,\r
-distends, and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? an\r
-oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute,\r
-not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those\r
-powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better\r
-than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o'clock.\r
-Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane alone is trustworthy. That is what\r
-confers on Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add, that\r
-there is a certain instant when the battle degenerates into a combat,\r
-becomes specialized, and disperses into innumerable detailed feats,\r
-which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, "belong rather to\r
-the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army." The\r
-historian has, in this case, the evident right to sum up the whole. He\r
-cannot do more than seize the principal outlines of the struggle, and\r
-it is not given to any one narrator, however conscientious he may be,\r
-to fix, absolutely, the form of that horrible cloud which is called a\r
-battle.\r
-\r
-This, which is true of all great armed encounters, is particularly\r
-applicable to Waterloo.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, at a certain moment in the afternoon the battle came to a\r
-point.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON\r
-\r
-Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. The\r
-Prince of Orange was in command of the centre, Hill of the right wing,\r
-Picton of the left wing. The Prince of Orange, desperate and intrepid,\r
-shouted to the Hollando-Belgians: "Nassau! Brunswick! Never retreat!"\r
-Hill, having been weakened, had come up to the support of Wellington;\r
-Picton was dead. At the very moment when the English had captured from\r
-the French the flag of the 105th of the line, the French had killed the\r
-English general, Picton, with a bullet through the head. The battle\r
-had, for Wellington, two bases of action, Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte;\r
-Hougomont still held out, but was on fire; La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of\r
-the German battalion which defended it, only forty-two men survived; all\r
-the officers, except five, were either dead or captured. Three thousand\r
-combatants had been massacred in that barn. A sergeant of the English\r
-Guards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by his\r
-companions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy. Baring\r
-had been dislodged, Alten put to the sword. Many flags had been lost,\r
-one from Alten's division, and one from the battalion of Lunenburg,\r
-carried by a prince of the house of Deux-Ponts. The Scotch Grays no\r
-longer existed; Ponsonby's great dragoons had been hacked to pieces.\r
-That valiant cavalry had bent beneath the lancers of Bro and beneath\r
-the cuirassiers of Travers; out of twelve hundred horses, six\r
-hundred remained; out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on the\r
-earth,--Hamilton wounded, Mater slain. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by\r
-seven lance-thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the\r
-fifth and the sixth, had been annihilated.\r
-\r
-Hougomont injured, La Haie-Sainte taken, there now existed but one\r
-rallying-point, the centre. That point still held firm. Wellington\r
-reinforced it. He summoned thither Hill, who was at Merle-Braine; he\r
-summoned Chasse, who was at Braine-l'Alleud.\r
-\r
-The centre of the English army, rather concave, very dense, and\r
-very compact, was strongly posted. It occupied the plateau of\r
-Mont-Saint-Jean, having behind it the village, and in front of it the\r
-slope, which was tolerably steep then. It rested on that stout stone\r
-dwelling which at that time belonged to the domain of Nivelles, and\r
-which marks the intersection of the roads--a pile of the sixteenth\r
-century, and so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded from it without\r
-injuring it. All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges here\r
-and there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat of\r
-a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There artillery was\r
-ambushed in the brushwood. This punic labor, incontestably authorized\r
-by war, which permits traps, was so well done, that Haxo, who had been\r
-despatched by the Emperor at nine o'clock in the morning to reconnoitre\r
-the enemy's batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and had returned\r
-and reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles except the two\r
-barricades which barred the road to Nivelles and to Genappe. It was\r
-at the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of the plateau a\r
-battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, armed with carabines, was\r
-concealed in the tall wheat.\r
-\r
-Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was well\r
-posted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes,\r
-then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of\r
-Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat thither without\r
-dissolving; the regiments would have broken up immediately there.\r
-The artillery would have been lost among the morasses. The retreat,\r
-according to many a man versed in the art,--though it is disputed by\r
-others,--would have been a disorganized flight.\r
-\r
-To this centre, Wellington added one of Chasse's brigades taken from the\r
-right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the left wing, plus\r
-Clinton's division. To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, to\r
-the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as\r
-reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent,\r
-Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. This placed twenty-six\r
-battalions under his hand. The right wing, as Charras says, was thrown\r
-back on the centre. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth at\r
-the spot where there now stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo."\r
-Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground, Somerset's\r
-Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the remaining half\r
-of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset\r
-remained.\r
-\r
-The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was\r
-ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bags\r
-of sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished; there\r
-had been no time to make a palisade for it.\r
-\r
-Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained\r
-the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill\r
-of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, which\r
-an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for two\r
-hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic.\r
-The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at his\r
-side. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him: "My\r
-lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?" "To do like me,"\r
-replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, "To hold this spot\r
-to the last man." The day was evidently turning out ill. Wellington\r
-shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of Salamanca:\r
-"Boys, can retreat be thought of? Think of old England!"\r
-\r
-Towards four o'clock, the English line drew back. Suddenly nothing\r
-was visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the\r
-sharpshooters; the rest had disappeared: the regiments, dislodged by\r
-the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, now\r
-intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a\r
-retrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself, Wellington\r
-drew back. "The beginning of retreat!" cried Napoleon.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR\r
-\r
-The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble,\r
-had never been in a better humor than on that day. His impenetrability\r
-had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that\r
-profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who had been\r
-gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites of\r
-destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme\r
-smile is God's alone.\r
-\r
-Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix\r
-Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is\r
-certain that Caesar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o'clock\r
-on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the\r
-communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of the\r
-long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon from\r
-Frischemont to Braine-l'Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to\r
-whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to\r
-the appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time\r
-motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder;\r
-and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious\r
-saying, "We are in accord." Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer\r
-in accord.\r
-\r
-He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked\r
-by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts,\r
-halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, near\r
-the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he\r
-thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.\r
-He said: "It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the\r
-purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English who\r
-have just arrived at Ostend." He conversed expansively; he regained the\r
-animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, when\r
-he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Gulf\r
-Juan, and cried, "Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already!" On\r
-the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied Wellington. "That\r
-little Englishman needs a lesson," said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in\r
-violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was speaking.\r
-\r
-At half-past three o'clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;\r
-officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that\r
-the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not a\r
-bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. The\r
-silence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens.\r
-At four o'clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; this\r
-peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably\r
-Vivian's brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the\r
-village of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o'clock, two Belgian\r
-deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment,\r
-and that the English army was ready for battle. "So much the better!"\r
-exclaimed Napoleon. "I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive\r
-them back."\r
-\r
-In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an\r
-angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant's\r
-chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with a\r
-truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chart\r
-of the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, "A pretty\r
-checker-board."\r
-\r
-In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of\r
-provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive by\r
-morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. This\r
-did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, "We have\r
-ninety chances out of a hundred." At eight o'clock the Emperor's\r
-breakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. During\r
-breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights\r
-before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond's; and Soult, a rough\r
-man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, "The ball takes place\r
-to-day." The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, "Wellington will not be\r
-so simple as to wait for Your Majesty." That was his way, however. "He\r
-was fond of jesting," says Fleury de Chaboulon. "A merry humor was\r
-at the foundation of his character," says Gourgaud. "He abounded in\r
-pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty," says Benjamin\r
-Constant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It was\r
-he who called his grenadiers "his grumblers"; he pinched their ears; he\r
-pulled their mustaches. "The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us,"\r
-is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the island\r
-of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the French\r
-brig of war, Le Zephyr, having encountered the brig L'Inconstant, on\r
-which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the news of Napoleon\r
-from L'Inconstant, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white and\r
-amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had adopted at the isle of\r
-Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself,\r
-"The Emperor is well." A man who laughs like that is on familiar terms\r
-with events. Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during the\r
-breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of an\r
-hour; then two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen in\r
-hand and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to them\r
-the order of battle.\r
-\r
-At nine o'clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in echelons\r
-and set in motion in five columns, had deployed--the divisions in two\r
-lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their head; as\r
-they beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of trumpets,\r
-mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of bayonets on\r
-the horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed, "Magnificent!\r
-Magnificent!"\r
-\r
-Between nine o'clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as it\r
-may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines,\r
-forming, to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's."\r
-A few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst of\r
-that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm,\r
-which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the shoulder, as\r
-he beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached by his orders\r
-from the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined to begin the\r
-action by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersection\r
-of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to him, "There are four\r
-and twenty handsome maids, General."\r
-\r
-Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before\r
-him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed\r
-to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.\r
-All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty\r
-pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large\r
-tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing\r
-themselves, he said, "It is a pity."\r
-\r
-Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for\r
-his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of\r
-the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during\r
-the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the\r
-evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;\r
-it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the\r
-guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls\r
-rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at\r
-Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the\r
-heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless\r
-projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his\r
-horse' feet stood. Scabra rubigine. A few years ago, a shell of sixty\r
-pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with the bomb,\r
-was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his\r
-guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to the\r
-saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canister\r
-and tried to hide behind Napoleon: "Fool, it is shameful! You'll get\r
-yourself killed with a ball in the back." He who writes these lines has\r
-himself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over\r
-the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the\r
-oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which\r
-parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.\r
-\r
-Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the\r
-plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place,\r
-are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from this\r
-mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief\r
-has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her\r
-bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying\r
-it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,\r
-exclaimed, "They have altered my field of battle!" Where the great\r
-pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a\r
-hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but\r
-which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.\r
-The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of\r
-the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from\r
-Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other,\r
-the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole\r
-of that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands upon\r
-thousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred and\r
-fifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau\r
-of Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of\r
-battle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and\r
-difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English\r
-cannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley,\r
-which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rains\r
-had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated the\r
-problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck fast\r
-in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench whose\r
-presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.\r
-\r
-What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l'Alleud is a Belgian\r
-village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in\r
-curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a\r
-half in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level,\r
-and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which\r
-makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present\r
-day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between\r
-the two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level\r
-with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been\r
-appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is,\r
-a trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench,\r
-sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep,\r
-crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving\r
-rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the\r
-Braine-l'Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is\r
-proved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives\r
-the name of the dead, Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels,\r
-and the date of the accident, February, 1637.[8] It was so deep on\r
-the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise,\r
-was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on\r
-another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of\r
-clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on\r
-the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and\r
-the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.\r
-\r
-On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no way\r
-indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at the\r
-summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible;\r
-that is to say, terrible.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE\r
-\r
-So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.\r
-\r
-He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen,\r
-really admirable.\r
-\r
-The battle once begun, its very various changes,--the resistance of\r
-Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the\r
-disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was\r
-shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard\r
-nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted\r
-pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the\r
-bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in\r
-the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud,\r
-so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of Pire's\r
-demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons,\r
-almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the\r
-left wing badly cut into; Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead of\r
-echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to\r
-grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage\r
-of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by the\r
-cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly\r
-unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised;\r
-Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the\r
-Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an\r
-axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the English\r
-barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels;\r
-Marcognet's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot\r
-down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put\r
-to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Prince\r
-of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, both\r
-Frischemont and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the\r
-45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the\r
-flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre\r
-and Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by prisoners;\r
-Grouchy's delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont\r
-in less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter\r
-time about La Haie-Sainte,--all these stormy incidents passing like the\r
-clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and\r
-had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was\r
-accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending\r
-details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that\r
-they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings\r
-did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor\r
-at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the\r
-question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate,\r
-Thou wilt not dare.\r
-\r
-Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself\r
-protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had,\r
-a connivance, one might almost say a complicity, of events in his favor,\r
-which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind\r
-one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown\r
-becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.\r
-\r
-At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenly\r
-beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van of the\r
-English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor\r
-half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from his\r
-eyes.\r
-\r
-Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and\r
-destroyed--that was the definitive conquest of England by France; it was\r
-Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo\r
-was wiping out Agincourt.\r
-\r
-So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his\r
-glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His\r
-guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below\r
-with a sort of religion. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the\r
-declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the\r
-path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness\r
-at the English barricades of the two highways,--two large abatis of\r
-trees, that on the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two\r
-cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded\r
-the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles\r
-where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade. Near this\r
-barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,\r
-which stands at the angle of the cross-road near Braine-l'Alleud; he\r
-bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made\r
-a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious.\r
-\r
-The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking.\r
-\r
-Wellington had drawn back.\r
-\r
-All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him.\r
-\r
-Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full speed to\r
-Paris to announce that the battle was won.\r
-\r
-Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.\r
-\r
-He had just found his clap of thunder.\r
-\r
-He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the table-land of\r
-Mont-Saint-Jean.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--THE UNEXPECTED\r
-\r
-There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a\r
-quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men, on colossal horses.\r
-There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them to\r
-support them Lefebvre-Desnouettes's division,--the one hundred and six\r
-picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred and\r
-ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and\r
-eighty lances. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses\r
-of beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long\r
-sabre-swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at\r
-nine o'clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing "Let us\r
-watch o'er the Safety of the Empire," they had come in a solid column,\r
-with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and\r
-deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont,\r
-and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line,\r
-so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left\r
-Kellermann's cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers,\r
-had, so to speak, two wings of iron.\r
-\r
-Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor's orders. Ney drew his\r
-sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set\r
-in motion.\r
-\r
-Then a formidable spectacle was seen.\r
-\r
-All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to\r
-the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous\r
-movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram\r
-which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into\r
-the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared\r
-there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the\r
-other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at\r
-a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them,\r
-the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They\r
-ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between\r
-the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible.\r
-Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier's division\r
-held the right, Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though\r
-two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest\r
-of the table-land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy.\r
-\r
-Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of\r
-the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was\r
-again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and\r
-had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a\r
-polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent\r
-here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy\r
-heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of\r
-trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses\r
-like the scales on the hydra.\r
-\r
-These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to\r
-this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told\r
-of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human\r
-heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible,\r
-invulnerable, sublime--gods and beasts.\r
-\r
-Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode to meet\r
-twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of\r
-the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares,\r
-two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first\r
-line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders,\r
-taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm,\r
-mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers\r
-did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They\r
-heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and\r
-symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the\r
-cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage\r
-breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once,\r
-a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the\r
-crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads\r
-with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry\r
-debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an\r
-earthquake.\r
-\r
-All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the\r
-head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On\r
-arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly\r
-given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and\r
-cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,--a trench\r
-between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.\r
-\r
-It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning,\r
-directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep between its double\r
-slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed\r
-on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their\r
-haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming\r
-the riders; and there being no means of retreat,--the whole column being\r
-no longer anything more than a projectile,--the force which had been\r
-acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine\r
-could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell,\r
-grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when\r
-this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and\r
-passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.\r
-\r
-This began the loss of the battle.\r
-\r
-A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two\r
-thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road\r
-of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which\r
-were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.\r
-\r
-Let us note in passing that it was Dubois's sorely tried brigade which,\r
-an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag\r
-of the Lunenburg battalion.\r
-\r
-Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud's\r
-cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see\r
-that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of\r
-the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little\r
-white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles\r
-highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an\r
-obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might\r
-almost affirm that Napoleon's catastrophe originated in that sign of a\r
-peasant's head.\r
-\r
-Other fatalities were destined to arise.\r
-\r
-Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No.\r
-Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.\r
-\r
-Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the\r
-nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which\r
-there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had\r
-declared itself long before.\r
-\r
-It was time that this vast man should fall.\r
-\r
-The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance.\r
-This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These\r
-plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world\r
-mounting to the brain of one man,--this would be mortal to civilization\r
-were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and\r
-supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the\r
-elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the\r
-material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled\r
-cemeteries, mothers in tears,--these are formidable pleaders. When\r
-the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious\r
-groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.\r
-\r
-Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been\r
-decided on.\r
-\r
-He embarrassed God.\r
-\r
-Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the\r
-Universe.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN\r
-\r
-The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.\r
-\r
-Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank on\r
-the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute to\r
-the English battery.\r
-\r
-The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the\r
-squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for a\r
-halt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not discouraged\r
-them. They belonged to that class of men who, when diminished in number,\r
-increase in courage.\r
-\r
-Wathier's column alone had suffered in the disaster; Delort's column,\r
-which Ney had deflected to the left, as though he had a presentiment of\r
-an ambush, had arrived whole.\r
-\r
-The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.\r
-\r
-At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth pistols in\r
-fist,--such was the attack.\r
-\r
-There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until\r
-the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns into\r
-granite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not stir.\r
-\r
-Then it was terrible.\r
-\r
-All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied\r
-whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first\r
-rank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second\r
-ranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged\r
-their guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage of\r
-an eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers replied\r
-by crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,\r
-leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four\r
-living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers;\r
-the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,\r
-ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies\r
-of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably\r
-never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,\r
-closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of\r
-grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants' midst. The form\r
-of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions,\r
-they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were\r
-a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended\r
-with lightning.\r
-\r
-The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the\r
-air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed\r
-of the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centre\r
-dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the\r
-forests and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being\r
-exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under\r
-his arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben\r
-Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier,\r
-which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to\r
-the song by killing the singer.\r
-\r
-The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished\r
-by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army\r
-against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them\r
-was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.\r
-Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at\r
-that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.\r
-This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.\r
-\r
-All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found\r
-themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Before\r
-them two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred\r
-dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the\r
-German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;\r
-the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the\r
-rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it\r
-to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something indescribable.\r
-\r
-In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still\r
-thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never\r
-have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on the\r
-shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,[9] is in the collection of the\r
-Waterloo Museum.\r
-\r
-For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It\r
-was no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy\r
-transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an\r
-instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred.\r
-Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up with\r
-the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes's light-horse. The plateau\r
-of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The\r
-cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put\r
-it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other\r
-without releasing the other. The squares still held firm.\r
-\r
-There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half\r
-the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two hours.\r
-\r
-The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had they\r
-not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the hollow\r
-road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and decided the\r
-victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen\r
-Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, admired\r
-heroically. He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"\r
-\r
-The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or\r
-spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments\r
-six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore\r
-to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.\r
-\r
-Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a\r
-duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and\r
-still resisting, is expending all his blood.\r
-\r
-Which of the two will be the first to fall?\r
-\r
-The conflict on the plateau continued.\r
-\r
-What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have told. One thing\r
-is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his\r
-horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at\r
-Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,\r
-Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This\r
-horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the\r
-body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was eighteen\r
-years old at that time.\r
-\r
-Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand.\r
-\r
-The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken\r
-through. As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it,\r
-and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English. Wellington\r
-held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest and\r
-the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.\r
-\r
-But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding\r
-of that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded\r
-reinforcements. "There are none," replied Wellington; "he must let\r
-himself be killed!" Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence\r
-which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry\r
-from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, "Infantry! Where does he expect\r
-me to get it? Does he think I can make it?"\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The\r
-furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and\r
-breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men clustered\r
-round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a battalion\r
-was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten's division,\r
-already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed;\r
-the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade strewed the rye-fields\r
-all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of those Dutch\r
-grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811,\r
-fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the\r
-English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was\r
-considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following\r
-day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussle\r
-of the cuirassiers, Delort, l'Heritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and\r
-Blancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alten\r
-wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda\r
-killed, the whole of Wellington's staff decimated, and England had the\r
-worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guards\r
-had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;\r
-the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200\r
-soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officers\r
-killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of Cumberland, a\r
-whole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was destined to be\r
-tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the presence of the\r
-fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing defeat all the way\r
-to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the baggage-wagons, the\r
-wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the French were gaining\r
-ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong thither. The Dutch,\r
-mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, "Alarm!" From Vert-Coucou to\r
-Groentendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues in the direction\r
-of Brussels, according to the testimony of eye-witnesses who are still\r
-alive, the roads were encumbered with fugitives. This panic was such\r
-that it attacked the Prince de Conde at Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at\r
-Ghent. With the exception of the feeble reserve echelonned behind the\r
-ambulance established at the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian's\r
-and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked the left wing, Wellington had\r
-no cavalry left. A number of batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are\r
-attested by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far\r
-as to say that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand\r
-men. The Iron Duke remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the\r
-Austrian commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present\r
-at the battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At five\r
-o'clock Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these\r
-sinister words, "Blucher, or night!"\r
-\r
-It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on\r
-the heights in the direction of Frischemont.\r
-\r
-Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--A BAD GUIDE TO NAPOLEON; A GOOD GUIDE TO BULOW\r
-\r
-The painful surprise of Napoleon is well known. Grouchy hoped for,\r
-Blucher arriving. Death instead of life.\r
-\r
-Fate has these turns; the throne of the world was expected; it was Saint\r
-Helena that was seen.\r
-\r
-If the little shepherd who served as guide to Bulow, Blucher's\r
-lieutenant, had advised him to debouch from the forest above\r
-Frischemont, instead of below Plancenoit, the form of the nineteenth\r
-century might, perhaps, have been different. Napoleon would have won the\r
-battle of Waterloo. By any other route than that below Plancenoit,\r
-the Prussian army would have come out upon a ravine impassable for\r
-artillery, and Bulow would not have arrived.\r
-\r
-Now the Prussian general, Muffling, declares that one hour's delay, and\r
-Blucher would not have found Wellington on his feet. "The battle was\r
-lost."\r
-\r
-It was time that Bulow should arrive, as will be seen. He had, moreover,\r
-been very much delayed. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont, and had set\r
-out at daybreak; but the roads were impassable, and his divisions stuck\r
-fast in the mire. The ruts were up to the hubs of the cannons. Moreover,\r
-he had been obliged to pass the Dyle on the narrow bridge of Wavre;\r
-the street leading to the bridge had been fired by the French, so\r
-the caissons and ammunition-wagons could not pass between two rows of\r
-burning houses, and had been obliged to wait until the conflagration was\r
-extinguished. It was mid-day before Bulow's vanguard had been able to\r
-reach Chapelle-Saint-Lambert.\r
-\r
-Had the action been begun two hours earlier, it would have been over\r
-at four o'clock, and Blucher would have fallen on the battle won by\r
-Napoleon. Such are these immense risks proportioned to an infinite which\r
-we cannot comprehend.\r
-\r
-The Emperor had been the first, as early as mid-day, to descry with his\r
-field-glass, on the extreme horizon, something which had attracted his\r
-attention. He had said, "I see yonder a cloud, which seems to me to be\r
-troops." Then he asked the Duc de Dalmatie, "Soult, what do you see in\r
-the direction of Chapelle-Saint-Lambert?" The marshal, levelling his\r
-glass, answered, "Four or five thousand men, Sire; evidently Grouchy."\r
-But it remained motionless in the mist. All the glasses of the staff\r
-had studied "the cloud" pointed out by the Emperor. Some said: "It is\r
-trees." The truth is, that the cloud did not move. The Emperor detached\r
-Domon's division of light cavalry to reconnoitre in that quarter.\r
-\r
-Bulow had not moved, in fact. His vanguard was very feeble, and could\r
-accomplish nothing. He was obliged to wait for the body of the army\r
-corps, and he had received orders to concentrate his forces before\r
-entering into line; but at five o'clock, perceiving Wellington's peril,\r
-Blucher ordered Bulow to attack, and uttered these remarkable words: "We\r
-must give air to the English army."\r
-\r
-A little later, the divisions of Losthin, Hiller, Hacke, and Ryssel\r
-deployed before Lobau's corps, the cavalry of Prince William of Prussia\r
-debouched from the forest of Paris, Plancenoit was in flames, and the\r
-Prussian cannon-balls began to rain even upon the ranks of the guard in\r
-reserve behind Napoleon.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--THE GUARD\r
-\r
-Every one knows the rest,--the irruption of a third army; the battle\r
-broken to pieces; eighty-six mouths of fire thundering simultaneously;\r
-Pirch the first coming up with Bulow; Zieten's cavalry led by Blucher\r
-in person, the French driven back; Marcognet swept from the plateau of\r
-Ohain; Durutte dislodged from Papelotte; Donzelot and Quiot retreating;\r
-Lobau caught on the flank; a fresh battle precipitating itself on our\r
-dismantled regiments at nightfall; the whole English line resuming the\r
-offensive and thrust forward; the gigantic breach made in the French\r
-army; the English grape-shot and the Prussian grape-shot aiding each\r
-other; the extermination; disaster in front; disaster on the flank; the\r
-Guard entering the line in the midst of this terrible crumbling of all\r
-things.\r
-\r
-Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, "Vive l'Empereur!"\r
-History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in\r
-acclamations.\r
-\r
-The sky had been overcast all day long. All of a sudden, at that very\r
-moment,--it was eight o'clock in the evening--the clouds on the horizon\r
-parted, and allowed the grand and sinister glow of the setting sun to\r
-pass through, athwart the elms on the Nivelles road. They had seen it\r
-rise at Austerlitz.\r
-\r
-Each battalion of the Guard was commanded by a general for this final\r
-catastrophe. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlet, Mallet, Poret de Morvan,\r
-were there. When the tall caps of the grenadiers of the Guard, with\r
-their large plaques bearing the eagle appeared, symmetrical, in line,\r
-tranquil, in the midst of that combat, the enemy felt a respect for\r
-France; they thought they beheld twenty victories entering the field\r
-of battle, with wings outspread, and those who were the conquerors,\r
-believing themselves to be vanquished, retreated; but Wellington\r
-shouted, "Up, Guards, and aim straight!" The red regiment of English\r
-guards, lying flat behind the hedges, sprang up, a cloud of grape-shot\r
-riddled the tricolored flag and whistled round our eagles; all hurled\r
-themselves forwards, and the final carnage began. In the darkness, the\r
-Imperial Guard felt the army losing ground around it, and in the vast\r
-shock of the rout it heard the desperate flight which had taken the\r
-place of the "Vive l'Empereur!" and, with flight behind it, it continued\r
-to advance, more crushed, losing more men at every step that it took.\r
-There were none who hesitated, no timid men in its ranks. The soldier in\r
-that troop was as much of a hero as the general. Not a man was missing\r
-in that suicide.\r
-\r
-Ney, bewildered, great with all the grandeur of accepted death, offered\r
-himself to all blows in that tempest. He had his fifth horse killed\r
-under him there. Perspiring, his eyes aflame, foaming at the mouth, with\r
-uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulets half cut off by a sword-stroke\r
-from a horseguard, his plaque with the great eagle dented by a bullet;\r
-bleeding, bemired, magnificent, a broken sword in his hand, he said,\r
-"Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field of battle!" But\r
-in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and angry. At Drouet d'Erlon he\r
-hurled this question, "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" In\r
-the midst of all that artillery engaged in crushing a handful of men,\r
-he shouted: "So there is nothing for me! Oh! I should like to have all\r
-these English bullets enter my bowels!" Unhappy man, thou wert reserved\r
-for French bullets!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIII--THE CATASTROPHE\r
-\r
-The rout behind the Guard was melancholy.\r
-\r
-The army yielded suddenly on all sides at once,--Hougomont, La\r
-Haie-Sainte, Papelotte, Plancenoit. The cry "Treachery!" was followed by\r
-a cry of "Save yourselves who can!" An army which is disbanding is\r
-like a thaw. All yields, splits, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, jostles,\r
-hastens, is precipitated. The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney\r
-borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and without hat, cravat, or sword,\r
-places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both English and\r
-French. He strives to detain the army, he recalls it to its duty, he\r
-insults it, he clings to the rout. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers fly\r
-from him, shouting, "Long live Marshal Ney!" Two of Durutte's regiments\r
-go and come in affright as though tossed back and forth between the\r
-swords of the Uhlans and the fusillade of the brigades of Kempt, Best,\r
-Pack, and Rylandt; the worst of hand-to-hand conflicts is the defeat;\r
-friends kill each other in order to escape; squadrons and battalions\r
-break and disperse against each other, like the tremendous foam of\r
-battle. Lobau at one extremity, and Reille at the other, are drawn into\r
-the tide. In vain does Napoleon erect walls from what is left to him of\r
-his Guard; in vain does he expend in a last effort his last serviceable\r
-squadrons. Quiot retreats before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur,\r
-Lobau before Bulow, Morand before Pirch, Domon and Subervic before\r
-Prince William of Prussia; Guyot, who led the Emperor's squadrons to the\r
-charge, falls beneath the feet of the English dragoons. Napoleon gallops\r
-past the line of fugitives, harangues, urges, threatens, entreats\r
-them. All the mouths which in the morning had shouted, "Long live\r
-the Emperor!" remain gaping; they hardly recognize him. The Prussian\r
-cavalry, newly arrived, dashes forwards, flies, hews, slashes, kills,\r
-exterminates. Horses lash out, the cannons flee; the soldiers of the\r
-artillery-train unharness the caissons and use the horses to make their\r
-escape; transports overturned, with all four wheels in the air, clog the\r
-road and occasion massacres. Men are crushed, trampled down, others walk\r
-over the dead and the living. Arms are lost. A dizzy multitude fills the\r
-roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys,\r
-the woods, encumbered by this invasion of forty thousand men. Shouts\r
-despair, knapsacks and guns flung among the rye, passages forced at\r
-the point of the sword, no more comrades, no more officers, no more\r
-generals, an inexpressible terror. Zieten putting France to the sword at\r
-its leisure. Lions converted into goats. Such was the flight.\r
-\r
-At Genappe, an effort was made to wheel about, to present a battle\r
-front, to draw up in line. Lobau rallied three hundred men. The entrance\r
-to the village was barricaded, but at the first volley of Prussian\r
-canister, all took to flight again, and Lobau was taken. That volley of\r
-grape-shot can be seen to-day imprinted on the ancient gable of a brick\r
-building on the right of the road at a few minutes' distance before you\r
-enter Genappe. The Prussians threw themselves into Genappe, furious, no\r
-doubt, that they were not more entirely the conquerors. The pursuit was\r
-stupendous. Blucher ordered extermination. Roguet had set the lugubrious\r
-example of threatening with death any French grenadier who should bring\r
-him a Prussian prisoner. Blucher outdid Roguet. Duhesme, the general\r
-of the Young Guard, hemmed in at the doorway of an inn at Genappe,\r
-surrendered his sword to a huzzar of death, who took the sword and slew\r
-the prisoner. The victory was completed by the assassination of the\r
-vanquished. Let us inflict punishment, since we are history: old\r
-Blucher disgraced himself. This ferocity put the finishing touch to the\r
-disaster. The desperate route traversed Genappe, traversed Quatre-Bras,\r
-traversed Gosselies, traversed Frasnes, traversed Charleroi, traversed\r
-Thuin, and only halted at the frontier. Alas! and who, then, was fleeing\r
-in that manner? The Grand Army.\r
-\r
-This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest\r
-bravery which ever astounded history,--is that causeless? No. The shadow\r
-of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of\r
-destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence\r
-the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls\r
-surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen\r
-prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the\r
-present shadow of a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day the\r
-perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the\r
-hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was\r
-necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom\r
-one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes\r
-can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than\r
-a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.\r
-\r
-At nightfall, in a meadow near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by\r
-the skirt of his coat and detained a man, haggard, pensive, sinister,\r
-gloomy, who, dragged to that point by the current of the rout, had just\r
-dismounted, had passed the bridle of his horse over his arm, and with\r
-wild eye was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense\r
-somnambulist of this dream which had crumbled, essaying once more to\r
-advance.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIV--THE LAST SQUARE\r
-\r
-Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the defeat,\r
-as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night came,\r
-death also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible, allowed\r
-themselves to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated from the\r
-rest, and having no bond with the army, now shattered in every part,\r
-died alone. They had taken up position for this final action, some on\r
-the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There,\r
-abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy squares endured their\r
-death-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, died\r
-with them.\r
-\r
-At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of them was left\r
-at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley,\r
-at the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, now\r
-inundated by the masses of the English, under the converging fires\r
-of the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density of\r
-projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscure\r
-officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished and\r
-replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continually\r
-contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing breathless for a\r
-moment in the distance, listened in the darkness to that gloomy and\r
-ever-decreasing thunder.\r
-\r
-When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left\r
-of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no\r
-longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the\r
-group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those men\r
-dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery,\r
-taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of respite. These\r
-combatants had around them something in the nature of a swarm of\r
-spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles of cannon,\r
-the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the colossal\r
-death's-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in the\r
-depths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through the\r
-shades of twilight they could hear the pieces being loaded; the matches\r
-all lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night, formed a circle round\r
-their heads; all the lintstocks of the English batteries approached the\r
-cannons, and then, with emotion, holding the supreme moment suspended\r
-above these men, an English general, Colville according to some,\r
-Maitland according to others, shouted to them, "Surrender, brave\r
-Frenchmen!" Cambronne replied, "-----."\r
-\r
-{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word "Merde!"\r
-in lieu of the ----- above.}\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XV--CAMBRONNE\r
-\r
-If any French reader object to having his susceptibilities offended, one\r
-would have to refrain from repeating in his presence what is perhaps\r
-the finest reply that a Frenchman ever made. This would enjoin us from\r
-consigning something sublime to History.\r
-\r
-At our own risk and peril, let us violate this injunction.\r
-\r
-Now, then, among those giants there was one Titan,--Cambronne.\r
-\r
-To make that reply and then perish, what could be grander? For being\r
-willing to die is the same as to die; and it was not this man's fault if\r
-he survived after he was shot.\r
-\r
-The winner of the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon, who was put to\r
-flight; nor Wellington, giving way at four o'clock, in despair at five;\r
-nor Blucher, who took no part in the engagement. The winner of Waterloo\r
-was Cambronne.\r
-\r
-To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning-flash that kills you is\r
-to conquer!\r
-\r
-Thus to answer the Catastrophe, thus to speak to Fate, to give this\r
-pedestal to the future lion, to hurl such a challenge to the midnight\r
-rainstorm, to the treacherous wall of Hougomont, to the sunken road of\r
-Ohain, to Grouchy's delay, to Blucher's arrival, to be Irony itself in\r
-the tomb, to act so as to stand upright though fallen, to drown in\r
-two syllables the European coalition, to offer kings privies which\r
-the Caesars once knew, to make the lowest of words the most lofty by\r
-entwining with it the glory of France, insolently to end Waterloo with\r
-Mardigras, to finish Leonidas with Rabellais, to set the crown on this\r
-victory by a word impossible to speak, to lose the field and preserve\r
-history, to have the laugh on your side after such a carnage,--this is\r
-immense!\r
-\r
-It was an insult such as a thunder-cloud might hurl! It reaches the\r
-grandeur of AEschylus!\r
-\r
-Cambronne's reply produces the effect of a violent break. 'Tis like the\r
-breaking of a heart under a weight of scorn. 'Tis the overflow of agony\r
-bursting forth. Who conquered? Wellington? No! Had it not been for\r
-Blucher, he was lost. Was it Blucher? No! If Wellington had not begun,\r
-Blucher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this man spending his\r
-last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war, realizes\r
-that here is a falsehood, a falsehood in a catastrophe, and so doubly\r
-agonizing; and at the moment when his rage is bursting forth because of\r
-it, he is offered this mockery,--life! How could he restrain himself?\r
-Yonder are all the kings of Europe, the general's flushed with victory,\r
-the Jupiter's darting thunderbolts; they have a hundred thousand\r
-victorious soldiers, and back of the hundred thousand a million; their\r
-cannon stand with yawning mouths, the match is lighted; they grind down\r
-under their heels the Imperial guards, and the grand army; they have\r
-just crushed Napoleon, and only Cambronne remains,--only this earthworm\r
-is left to protest. He will protest. Then he seeks for the appropriate\r
-word as one seeks for a sword. His mouth froths, and the froth is the\r
-word. In face of this mean and mighty victory, in face of this victory\r
-which counts none victorious, this desperate soldier stands erect. He\r
-grants its overwhelming immensity, but he establishes its triviality;\r
-and he does more than spit upon it. Borne down by numbers, by superior\r
-force, by brute matter, he finds in his soul an expression: "Excrement!"\r
-We repeat it,--to use that word, to do thus, to invent such an\r
-expression, is to be the conqueror!\r
-\r
-The spirit of mighty days at that portentous moment made its descent\r
-on that unknown man. Cambronne invents the word for Waterloo as Rouget\r
-invents the "Marseillaise," under the visitation of a breath from on\r
-high. An emanation from the divine whirlwind leaps forth and comes\r
-sweeping over these men, and they shake, and one of them sings the song\r
-supreme, and the other utters the frightful cry.\r
-\r
-This challenge of titanic scorn Cambronne hurls not only at Europe in\r
-the name of the Empire,--that would be a trifle: he hurls it at the past\r
-in the name of the Revolution. It is heard, and Cambronne is recognized\r
-as possessed by the ancient spirit of the Titans. Danton seems to be\r
-speaking! Kleber seems to be bellowing!\r
-\r
-At that word from Cambronne, the English voice responded, "Fire!"\r
-The batteries flamed, the hill trembled, from all those brazen mouths\r
-belched a last terrible gush of grape-shot; a vast volume of smoke,\r
-vaguely white in the light of the rising moon, rolled out, and when the\r
-smoke dispersed, there was no longer anything there. That formidable\r
-remnant had been annihilated; the Guard was dead. The four walls of the\r
-living redoubt lay prone, and hardly was there discernible, here and\r
-there, even a quiver in the bodies; it was thus that the French legions,\r
-greater than the Roman legions, expired on Mont-Saint-Jean, on the soil\r
-watered with rain and blood, amid the gloomy grain, on the spot where\r
-nowadays Joseph, who drives the post-wagon from Nivelles, passes\r
-whistling, and cheerfully whipping up his horse at four o'clock in the\r
-morning.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVI--QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?\r
-\r
-The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who won\r
-it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;[10] Blucher\r
-sees nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands nothing in regard\r
-to it. Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries\r
-involved. Some stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of\r
-Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;\r
-Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on some points,\r
-seized with his haughty glance the characteristic outlines of that\r
-catastrophe of human genius in conflict with divine chance. All the\r
-other historians suffer from being somewhat dazzled, and in this dazzled\r
-state they fumble about. It was a day of lightning brilliancy; in fact,\r
-a crumbling of the military monarchy which, to the vast stupefaction of\r
-kings, drew all the kingdoms after it--the fall of force, the defeat of\r
-war.\r
-\r
-In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played by men\r
-amounts to nothing.\r
-\r
-If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blucher, do we thereby deprive\r
-England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious England\r
-nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank\r
-Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of\r
-the sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in\r
-a scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords,\r
-above Blucher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has\r
-Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the peculiarity of our century, and in\r
-that aurora England and Germany have a magnificent radiance. They\r
-are majestic because they think. The elevation of level which they\r
-contribute to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from\r
-themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement which they have\r
-brought to the nineteenth century has not Waterloo as its source. It is\r
-only barbarous peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That is\r
-the temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized people,\r
-especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the good or\r
-bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human species\r
-results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank God! their\r
-dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers which those\r
-gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of battles.\r
-Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory\r
-and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the word. It is\r
-a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo\r
-coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which is due\r
-to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is Waterloo? A\r
-victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.\r
-\r
-The quine [11] won by Europe, paid by France.\r
-\r
-It was not worth while to place a lion there.\r
-\r
-Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and\r
-Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,\r
-who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more\r
-extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,\r
-prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate\r
-coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage\r
-of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,\r
-carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,\r
-nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,\r
-absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military\r
-oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable\r
-something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the\r
-lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries\r
-of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the plain, the\r
-forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot\r
-going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in\r
-a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it.\r
-Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and\r
-on this occasion, genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides\r
-some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded.\r
-Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected\r
-Blucher; he came.\r
-\r
-Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his dawning,\r
-had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old owl had\r
-fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only struck\r
-as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of six and twenty?\r
-What signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with everything against\r
-him, nothing in his favor, without provisions, without ammunition,\r
-without cannon, without shoes, almost without an army, with a mere\r
-handful of men against masses, hurled himself on Europe combined,\r
-and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence had issued that\r
-fulminating convict, who almost without taking breath, and with the same\r
-set of combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the other, the five\r
-armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on Alvinzi, Wurmser\r
-on Beaulieu, Melas on Wurmser, Mack on Melas? Who was this novice in\r
-war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical military school\r
-excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence, the implacable\r
-rancor of the old Caesarism against the new; of the regular sword\r
-against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against genius. On the\r
-18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word. and beneath Lodi,\r
-Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote: Waterloo. A triumph of\r
-the mediocres which is sweet to the majority. Destiny consented to this\r
-irony. In his decline, Napoleon found Wurmser, the younger, again in\r
-front of him.\r
-\r
-In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.\r
-\r
-Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second.\r
-\r
-That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the\r
-English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb\r
-thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not\r
-her captain; it was her army.\r
-\r
-Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,\r
-that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a\r
-"detestable army." What does that sombre intermingling of bones buried\r
-beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?\r
-\r
-England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make\r
-Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but\r
-a hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those\r
-regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,\r
-that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the\r
-pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt,\r
-those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket\r
-holding their own against Essling's and Rivoli's old troops,--that is\r
-what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we\r
-are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of\r
-his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth\r
-as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the\r
-English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy\r
-there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of\r
-Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it bore\r
-on high the statue of a people.\r
-\r
-But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She\r
-still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion.\r
-She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none\r
-in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people. And\r
-as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for its\r
-head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier, it\r
-allows itself to be flogged.\r
-\r
-It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who\r
-had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Paglan,\r
-as the English military hierarchy does not permit any hero below the\r
-grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.\r
-\r
-That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of\r
-Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the\r
-wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,\r
-Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bulow's guide enlightening him,--the\r
-whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.\r
-\r
-On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre than of a\r
-battle at Waterloo.\r
-\r
-Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest front\r
-for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters of a league;\r
-Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on each side.\r
-From this denseness the carnage arose.\r
-\r
-The following calculation has been made, and the following proportion\r
-established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;\r
-Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four per cent. At Wagram,\r
-French, thirteen per cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French,\r
-thirty-seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,\r
-thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo,\r
-French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,\r
-forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;\r
-sixty thousand dead.\r
-\r
-To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,\r
-the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.\r
-\r
-At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it; and if a\r
-traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he dreams\r
-like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the\r
-catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th of June lives\r
-again; the false monumental hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in\r
-air, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate\r
-over the plain, furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened\r
-dreamer beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare of\r
-bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as it were,\r
-the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the battle\r
-phantom; those shadows are grenadiers, those lights are cuirassiers;\r
-that skeleton Napoleon, that other skeleton is Wellington; all this no\r
-longer exists, and yet it clashes together and combats still; and the\r
-ravines are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there is fury even in\r
-the clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible heights, Hougomont,\r
-Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, appear confusedly\r
-crowned with whirlwinds of spectres engaged in exterminating each other.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVII--IS WATERLOO TO BE CONSIDERED GOOD?\r
-\r
-There exists a very respectable liberal school which does not hate\r
-Waterloo. We do not belong to it. To us, Waterloo is but the stupefied\r
-date of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an egg is\r
-certainly unexpected.\r
-\r
-If one places one's self at the culminating point of view of the\r
-question, Waterloo is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory. It\r
-is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against\r
-Paris; it is the statu quo against the initiative; it is the 14th\r
-of July, 1789, attacked through the 20th of March, 1815; it is the\r
-monarchies clearing the decks in opposition to the indomitable French\r
-rioting. The final extinction of that vast people which had been in\r
-eruption for twenty-six years--such was the dream. The solidarity of the\r
-Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs\r
-with the Bourbons. Waterloo bears divine right on its crupper. It is\r
-true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom by the natural\r
-reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and that a constitutional\r
-order was the unwilling result of Waterloo, to the great regret of the\r
-conquerors. It is because revolution cannot be really conquered, and\r
-that being providential and absolutely fatal, it is always cropping\r
-up afresh: before Waterloo, in Bonaparte overthrowing the old thrones;\r
-after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII. granting and conforming to the charter.\r
-Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne of Naples, and a sergeant\r
-on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate equality;\r
-Louis XVIII. at Saint-Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights\r
-of man. If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it\r
-Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress,\r
-call it To-morrow. To-morrow fulfils its work irresistibly, and it is\r
-already fulfilling it to-day. It always reaches its goal strangely. It\r
-employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only a soldier, an orator.\r
-Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the tribune. Thus does\r
-progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad tool for that workman.\r
-It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to its divine work the\r
-man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old tottering invalid\r
-of Father Elysee. It makes use of the gouty man as well as of the\r
-conqueror; of the conqueror without, of the gouty man within. Waterloo,\r
-by cutting short the demolition of European thrones by the sword, had\r
-no other effect than to cause the revolutionary work to be continued in\r
-another direction. The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the\r
-thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to arrest has pursued\r
-its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by liberty.\r
-\r
-In short, and incontestably, that which triumphed at Waterloo; that\r
-which smiled in Wellington's rear; that which brought him all the\r
-marshals' staffs of Europe, including, it is said, the staff of a\r
-marshal of France; that which joyously trundled the barrows full of\r
-bones to erect the knoll of the lion; that which triumphantly inscribed\r
-on that pedestal the date "June 18, 1815"; that which encouraged\r
-Blucher, as he put the flying army to the sword; that which, from the\r
-heights of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, hovered over France as over\r
-its prey, was the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution\r
-which murmured that infamous word "dismemberment." On arriving in Paris,\r
-it beheld the crater close at hand; it felt those ashes which scorched\r
-its feet, and it changed its mind; it returned to the stammer of a\r
-charter.\r
-\r
-Let us behold in Waterloo only that which is in Waterloo. Of intentional\r
-liberty there is none. The counter-revolution was involuntarily liberal,\r
-in the same manner as, by a corresponding phenomenon, Napoleon was\r
-involuntarily revolutionary. On the 18th of June, 1815, the mounted\r
-Robespierre was hurled from his saddle.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVIII--A RECRUDESCENCE OF DIVINE RIGHT\r
-\r
-End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.\r
-\r
-The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as\r
-it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the barbarians;\r
-only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet name of the\r
-counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to panting, and\r
-halted short. The Empire was bewept,--let us acknowledge the fact,--and\r
-bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword converted into a\r
-sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had diffused over the\r
-earth all the light which tyranny can give a sombre light. We will say\r
-more; an obscure light. Compared to the true daylight, it is night. This\r
-disappearance of night produces the effect of an eclipse.\r
-\r
-Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July\r
-effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the\r
-antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was\r
-white. The exile reigned. Hartwell's pine table took its place in front\r
-of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy\r
-were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding\r
-day, Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne\r
-fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the health\r
-of society in the nineteenth century was established over France, and\r
-over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade. Trestaillon was\r
-celebrated. The device non pluribus impar re-appeared on the stone rays\r
-representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on the Quai d'Orsay.\r
-Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now a red house. The\r
-Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne victories, thrown out\r
-of its element among these novelties, a little ashamed, it may be, of\r
-Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its predicament with the\r
-statue of the Duc d'Angouleme. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a terrible\r
-pauper's grave in 1793, was covered with jasper and marble, since the\r
-bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.\r
-\r
-In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,\r
-recalling the fact that the Duc d'Enghien had perished in the very\r
-month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the\r
-coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on the\r
-fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there was\r
-a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King of\r
-Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their thrones,\r
-and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became\r
-the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the earth\r
-changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a\r
-shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!"\r
-\r
-This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and\r
-poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded\r
-1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became\r
-constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with\r
-Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was the\r
-serpent's change of skin.\r
-\r
-Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this\r
-reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of\r
-ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future\r
-into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so\r
-fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is\r
-he doing? "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo\r
-and Waterloo. "He dead!" cried the soldier; "you don't know him."\r
-Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of\r
-Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous remained\r
-long empty through Napoleon's disappearance.\r
-\r
-The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by\r
-it to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; Belle-Alliance,\r
-Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.\r
-\r
-In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the\r
-features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the\r
-Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,\r
-Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.\r
-Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with\r
-the future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the\r
-vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon\r
-erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by\r
-Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms\r
-became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him "my\r
-sleeplessness." This terror was the result of the quantity of\r
-revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and excuses\r
-Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble.\r
-The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of Saint Helena\r
-on the horizon.\r
-\r
-While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the\r
-sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly\r
-rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.\r
-The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called this\r
-the Restoration.\r
-\r
-This is what Waterloo was.\r
-\r
-But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,\r
-that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a\r
-moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from\r
-one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to\r
-belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIX--THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT\r
-\r
-Let us return--it is a necessity in this book--to that fatal\r
-battle-field.\r
-\r
-On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored Blucher's\r
-ferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives, delivered\r
-up that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry, and aided the\r
-massacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur sometimes during\r
-catastrophes.\r
-\r
-After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean\r
-remained deserted.\r
-\r
-The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the usual sign\r
-of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They established their\r
-bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the retreating\r
-rout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of Waterloo to draw\r
-up his report to Lord Bathurst.\r
-\r
-If ever the sic vos non vobis was applicable, it certainly is to that\r
-village of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half a league from\r
-the scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont was\r
-burned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault, Papelotte was burned,\r
-Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld the embrace of the two\r
-conquerors; these names are hardly known, and Waterloo, which worked not\r
-in the battle, bears off all the honor.\r
-\r
-We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasion\r
-presents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful beauties\r
-which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous\r
-features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the\r
-bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle\r
-always rises on naked corpses.\r
-\r
-Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand is\r
-that which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpockets\r
-are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory? Some\r
-philosophers--Voltaire among the number--affirm that it is precisely\r
-those persons have made the glory. It is the same men, they say; there\r
-is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are prone\r
-on the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night. One has\r
-assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when one is the\r
-author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so; it seems\r
-to us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and purloin the\r
-shoes from a dead man.\r
-\r
-One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors follow\r
-thieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the contemporary\r
-soldier, out of the question.\r
-\r
-Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.\r
-Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of\r
-vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of\r
-uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids;\r
-formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts,\r
-sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which they\r
-sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; soldiers'\r
-servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,--we are not\r
-speaking of the present,--dragged all this behind them, so that in the\r
-special language they are called "stragglers." No army, no nation,\r
-was responsible for those beings; they spoke Italian and followed the\r
-Germans, then spoke French and followed the English. It was by one of\r
-these wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French, that the Marquis\r
-of Fervacques, deceived by his Picard jargon, and taking him for one\r
-of our own men, was traitorously slain and robbed on the battle-field\r
-itself, in the course of the night which followed the victory of\r
-Cerisoles. The rascal sprang from this marauding. The detestable maxim,\r
-Live on the enemy! produced this leprosy, which a strict discipline\r
-alone could heal. There are reputations which are deceptive; one does\r
-not always know why certain generals, great in other directions, have\r
-been so popular. Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he tolerated\r
-pillage; evil permitted constitutes part of goodness. Turenne was so\r
-good that he allowed the Palatinate to be delivered over to fire and\r
-blood. The marauders in the train of an army were more or less in\r
-number, according as the chief was more or less severe. Hoche and\r
-Marceau had no stragglers; Wellington had few, and we do him the justice\r
-to mention it.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, on the night from the 18th to the 19th of June, the dead\r
-were robbed. Wellington was rigid; he gave orders that any one caught in\r
-the act should be shot; but rapine is tenacious. The marauders stole in\r
-one corner of the battlefield while others were being shot in another.\r
-\r
-The moon was sinister over this plain.\r
-\r
-Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the\r
-direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of\r
-those whom we have just described,--neither English nor French, neither\r
-peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent\r
-of the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle\r
-Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat;\r
-he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him.\r
-Who was this man? The night probably knew more of him than the day. He\r
-had no sack, but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. From\r
-time to time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though to\r
-see whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed something\r
-silent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled. His sliding\r
-motion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures, caused him\r
-to resemble those twilight larvae which haunt ruins, and which ancient\r
-Norman legends call the Alleurs.\r
-\r
-Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among the\r
-marshes.\r
-\r
-A glance capable of piercing all that mist deeply would have perceived\r
-at some distance a sort of little sutler's wagon with a fluted wicker\r
-hood, harnessed to a famished nag which was cropping the grass across\r
-its bit as it halted, hidden, as it were, behind the hovel which adjoins\r
-the highway to Nivelles, at the angle of the road from Mont-Saint-Jean\r
-to Braine l'Alleud; and in the wagon, a sort of woman seated on coffers\r
-and packages. Perhaps there was some connection between that wagon and\r
-that prowler.\r
-\r
-The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith. What matters it if\r
-the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of\r
-the sky. In the fields, branches of trees broken by grape-shot, but not\r
-fallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze of night.\r
-A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery. Quivers which\r
-resembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.\r
-\r
-In the distance the coming and going of patrols and the general rounds\r
-of the English camp were audible.\r
-\r
-Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one in the\r
-west, the other in the east, two great flames which were joined by the\r
-cordon of bivouac fires of the English, like a necklace of rubies\r
-with two carbuncles at the extremities, as they extended in an immense\r
-semicircle over the hills along the horizon.\r
-\r
-We have described the catastrophe of the road of Ohain. The heart is\r
-terrified at the thought of what that death must have been to so many\r
-brave men.\r
-\r
-If there is anything terrible, if there exists a reality which surpasses\r
-dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun; to be in full possession\r
-of virile force; to possess health and joy; to laugh valiantly; to rush\r
-towards a glory which one sees dazzling in front of one; to feel in\r
-one's breast lungs which breathe, a heart which beats, a will which\r
-reasons; to speak, think, hope, love; to have a mother, to have a wife,\r
-to have children; to have the light--and all at once, in the space of a\r
-shout, in less than a minute, to sink into an abyss; to fall, to\r
-roll, to crush, to be crushed; to see ears of wheat, flowers, leaves,\r
-branches; not to be able to catch hold of anything; to feel one's sword\r
-useless, men beneath one, horses on top of one; to struggle in vain,\r
-since one's bones have been broken by some kick in the darkness; to feel\r
-a heel which makes one's eyes start from their sockets; to bite horses'\r
-shoes in one's rage; to stifle, to yell, to writhe; to be beneath, and\r
-to say to one's self, "But just a little while ago I was a living man!"\r
-\r
-There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle,\r
-all was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered with\r
-horses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement! There\r
-was no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road with the\r
-plain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel of barley. A\r
-heap of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of blood in the lower\r
-part--such was that road on the evening of the 18th of June, 1815. The\r
-blood ran even to the Nivelles highway, and there overflowed in a large\r
-pool in front of the abatis of trees which barred the way, at a spot\r
-which is still pointed out.\r
-\r
-It will be remembered that it was at the opposite point, in the\r
-direction of the Genappe road, that the destruction of the cuirassiers\r
-had taken place. The thickness of the layer of bodies was proportioned\r
-to the depth of the hollow road. Towards the middle, at the point\r
-where it became level, where Delort's division had passed, the layer of\r
-corpses was thinner.\r
-\r
-The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader was going\r
-in that direction. He was searching that vast tomb. He gazed about. He\r
-passed the dead in some sort of hideous review. He walked with his feet\r
-in the blood.\r
-\r
-All at once he paused.\r
-\r
-A few paces in front of him, in the hollow road, at the point where\r
-the pile of dead came to an end, an open hand, illumined by the moon,\r
-projected from beneath that heap of men. That hand had on its finger\r
-something sparkling, which was a ring of gold.\r
-\r
-The man bent over, remained in a crouching attitude for a moment, and\r
-when he rose there was no longer a ring on the hand.\r
-\r
-He did not precisely rise; he remained in a stooping and frightened\r
-attitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead, scanning the horizon\r
-on his knees, with the whole upper portion of his body supported on his\r
-two forefingers, which rested on the earth, and his head peering above\r
-the edge of the hollow road. The jackal's four paws suit some actions.\r
-\r
-Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.\r
-\r
-At that moment, he gave a terrible start. He felt some one clutch him\r
-from behind.\r
-\r
-He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had seized\r
-the skirt of his coat.\r
-\r
-An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.\r
-\r
-"Come," said he, "it's only a dead body. I prefer a spook to a\r
-gendarme."\r
-\r
-But the hand weakened and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted in\r
-the grave.\r
-\r
-"Well now," said the prowler, "is that dead fellow alive? Let's see."\r
-\r
-He bent down again, fumbled among the heap, pushed aside everything that\r
-was in his way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head, pulled\r
-out the body, and a few moments later he was dragging the lifeless, or\r
-at least the unconscious, man, through the shadows of hollow road. He\r
-was a cuirassier, an officer, and even an officer of considerable rank;\r
-a large gold epaulette peeped from beneath the cuirass; this officer\r
-no longer possessed a helmet. A furious sword-cut had scarred his face,\r
-where nothing was discernible but blood.\r
-\r
-However, he did not appear to have any broken limbs, and, by some happy\r
-chance, if that word is permissible here, the dead had been vaulted\r
-above him in such a manner as to preserve him from being crushed. His\r
-eyes were still closed.\r
-\r
-On his cuirass he wore the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.\r
-\r
-The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared into one of the gulfs\r
-which he had beneath his great coat.\r
-\r
-Then he felt of the officer's fob, discovered a watch there, and took\r
-possession of it. Next he searched his waistcoat, found a purse and\r
-pocketed it.\r
-\r
-When he had arrived at this stage of succor which he was administering\r
-to this dying man, the officer opened his eyes.\r
-\r
-"Thanks," he said feebly.\r
-\r
-The abruptness of the movements of the man who was manipulating him, the\r
-freshness of the night, the air which he could inhale freely, had roused\r
-him from his lethargy.\r
-\r
-The prowler made no reply. He raised his head. A sound of footsteps was\r
-audible in the plain; some patrol was probably approaching.\r
-\r
-The officer murmured, for the death agony was still in his voice:--\r
-\r
-"Who won the battle?"\r
-\r
-"The English," answered the prowler.\r
-\r
-The officer went on:--\r
-\r
-"Look in my pockets; you will find a watch and a purse. Take them."\r
-\r
-It was already done.\r
-\r
-The prowler executed the required feint, and said:--\r
-\r
-"There is nothing there."\r
-\r
-"I have been robbed," said the officer; "I am sorry for that. You should\r
-have had them."\r
-\r
-The steps of the patrol became more and more distinct.\r
-\r
-"Some one is coming," said the prowler, with the movement of a man who\r
-is taking his departure.\r
-\r
-The officer raised his arm feebly, and detained him.\r
-\r
-"You have saved my life. Who are you?"\r
-\r
-The prowler answered rapidly, and in a low voice:--\r
-\r
-"Like yourself, I belonged to the French army. I must leave you. If they\r
-were to catch me, they would shoot me. I have saved your life. Now get\r
-out of the scrape yourself."\r
-\r
-"What is your rank?"\r
-\r
-"Sergeant."\r
-\r
-"What is your name?"\r
-\r
-"Thenardier."\r
-\r
-"I shall not forget that name," said the officer; "and do you remember\r
-mine. My name is Pontmercy."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--NUMBER 24,601 BECOMES NUMBER 9,430\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had been recaptured.\r
-\r
-The reader will be grateful to us if we pass rapidly over the sad\r
-details. We will confine ourselves to transcribing two paragraphs\r
-published by the journals of that day, a few months after the surprising\r
-events which had taken place at M. sur M.\r
-\r
-These articles are rather summary. It must be remembered, that at that\r
-epoch the Gazette des Tribunaux was not yet in existence.\r
-\r
-We borrow the first from the Drapeau Blanc. It bears the date of July\r
-25, 1823.\r
-\r
-\r
-An arrondissement of the Pas de Calais has just been the theatre of an\r
-event quite out of the ordinary course. A man, who was a stranger in the\r
-Department, and who bore the name of M. Madeleine, had, thanks to the\r
-new methods, resuscitated some years ago an ancient local industry, the\r
-manufacture of jet and of black glass trinkets. He had made his fortune\r
-in the business, and that of the arrondissement as well, we will admit.\r
-He had been appointed mayor, in recognition of his services. The police\r
-discovered that M. Madeleine was no other than an ex-convict who had\r
-broken his ban, condemned in 1796 for theft, and named Jean Valjean.\r
-Jean Valjean has been recommitted to prison. It appears that previous\r
-to his arrest he had succeeded in withdrawing from the hands of M.\r
-Laffitte, a sum of over half a million which he had lodged there, and\r
-which he had, moreover, and by perfectly legitimate means, acquired in\r
-his business. No one has been able to discover where Jean Valjean has\r
-concealed this money since his return to prison at Toulon.\r
-\r
-\r
-The second article, which enters a little more into detail, is an\r
-extract from the Journal de Paris, of the same date.\r
-\r
-A former convict, who had been liberated, named Jean Valjean, has just\r
-appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Var, under circumstances\r
-calculated to attract attention. This wretch had succeeded in escaping\r
-the vigilance of the police, he had changed his name, and had succeeded\r
-in getting himself appointed mayor of one of our small northern towns;\r
-in this town he had established a considerable commerce. He has at last\r
-been unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the\r
-public prosecutor. He had for his concubine a woman of the town, who\r
-died of a shock at the moment of his arrest. This scoundrel, who is\r
-endowed with Herculean strength, found means to escape; but three or\r
-four days after his flight the police laid their hands on him once more,\r
-in Paris itself, at the very moment when he was entering one of those\r
-little vehicles which run between the capital and the village of\r
-Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). He is said to have profited by this\r
-interval of three or four days of liberty, to withdraw a considerable\r
-sum deposited by him with one of our leading bankers. This sum has been\r
-estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. If the indictment is\r
-to be trusted, he has hidden it in some place known to himself alone,\r
-and it has not been possible to lay hands on it. However that may be,\r
-the said Jean Valjean has just been brought before the Assizes of the\r
-Department of the Var as accused of highway robbery accompanied with\r
-violence, about eight years ago, on the person of one of those honest\r
-children who, as the patriarch of Ferney has said, in immortal verse,\r
-\r
-\r
- ". . . Arrive from Savoy every year,\r
- And who, with gentle hands, do clear\r
- Those long canals choked up with soot."\r
-\r
-\r
-This bandit refused to defend himself. It was proved by the skilful and\r
-eloquent representative of the public prosecutor, that the theft was\r
-committed in complicity with others, and that Jean Valjean was a member\r
-of a band of robbers in the south. Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty\r
-and was condemned to the death penalty in consequence. This criminal\r
-refused to lodge an appeal. The king, in his inexhaustible clemency, has\r
-deigned to commute his penalty to that of penal servitude for life. Jean\r
-Valjean was immediately taken to the prison at Toulon.\r
-\r
-\r
-The reader has not forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious habits at\r
-M. sur M. Some papers, among others the Constitutional, presented this\r
-commutation as a triumph of the priestly party.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean changed his number in the galleys. He was called 9,430.\r
-\r
-However, and we will mention it at once in order that we may not be\r
-obliged to recur to the subject, the prosperity of M. sur M. vanished\r
-with M. Madeleine; all that he had foreseen during his night of fever\r
-and hesitation was realized; lacking him, there actually was a soul\r
-lacking. After this fall, there took place at M. sur M. that egotistical\r
-division of great existences which have fallen, that fatal dismemberment\r
-of flourishing things which is accomplished every day, obscurely, in\r
-the human community, and which history has noted only once, because it\r
-occurred after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants are crowned kings;\r
-superintendents improvise manufacturers out of themselves. Envious\r
-rivalries arose. M. Madeleine's vast workshops were shut; his buildings\r
-fell to ruin, his workmen were scattered. Some of them quitted the\r
-country, others abandoned the trade. Thenceforth, everything was done\r
-on a small scale, instead of on a grand scale; for lucre instead of\r
-the general good. There was no longer a centre; everywhere there\r
-was competition and animosity. M. Madeleine had reigned over all and\r
-directed all. No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things to\r
-himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of organization,\r
-bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another to the benevolence of\r
-the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeleine had set were\r
-tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the products were\r
-debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished, for lack of\r
-orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still, bankruptcy\r
-arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor. All had vanished.\r
-\r
-The state itself perceived that some one had been crushed somewhere.\r
-Less than four years after the judgment of the Court of Assizes\r
-establishing the identity of Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine, for the\r
-benefit of the galleys, the cost of collecting taxes had doubled in the\r
-arrondissement of M. sur M.; and M. de Villele called attention to the\r
-fact in the rostrum, in the month of February, 1827.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--IN WHICH THE READER WILL PERUSE TWO VERSES, WHICH ARE OF THE\r
-DEVIL'S COMPOSITION, POSSIBLY\r
-\r
-Before proceeding further, it will be to the purpose to narrate in some\r
-detail, a singular occurrence which took place at about the same epoch,\r
-in Montfermeil, and which is not lacking in coincidence with certain\r
-conjectures of the indictment.\r
-\r
-There exists in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition,\r
-which is all the more curious and all the more precious, because\r
-a popular superstition in the vicinity of Paris is like an aloe in\r
-Siberia. We are among those who respect everything which is in the\r
-nature of a rare plant. Here, then, is the superstition of Montfermeil:\r
-it is thought that the devil, from time immemorial, has selected the\r
-forest as a hiding-place for his treasures. Goodwives affirm that it is\r
-no rarity to encounter at nightfall, in secluded nooks of the forest,\r
-a black man with the air of a carter or a wood-chopper, wearing wooden\r
-shoes, clad in trousers and a blouse of linen, and recognizable by the\r
-fact, that, instead of a cap or hat, he has two immense horns on his\r
-head. This ought, in fact, to render him recognizable. This man is\r
-habitually engaged in digging a hole. There are three ways of profiting\r
-by such an encounter. The first is to approach the man and speak to him.\r
-Then it is seen that the man is simply a peasant, that he appears black\r
-because it is nightfall; that he is not digging any hole whatever, but\r
-is cutting grass for his cows, and that what had been taken for horns\r
-is nothing but a dung-fork which he is carrying on his back, and whose\r
-teeth, thanks to the perspective of evening, seemed to spring from his\r
-head. The man returns home and dies within the week. The second way is\r
-to watch him, to wait until he has dug his hole, until he has filled it\r
-and has gone away; then to run with great speed to the trench, to\r
-open it once more and to seize the "treasure" which the black man\r
-has necessarily placed there. In this case one dies within the month.\r
-Finally, the last method is not to speak to the black man, not to look\r
-at him, and to flee at the best speed of one's legs. One then dies\r
-within the year.\r
-\r
-As all three methods are attended with their special inconveniences, the\r
-second, which at all events, presents some advantages, among others that\r
-of possessing a treasure, if only for a month, is the one most generally\r
-adopted. So bold men, who are tempted by every chance, have quite\r
-frequently, as we are assured, opened the holes excavated by the black\r
-man, and tried to rob the devil. The success of the operation appears\r
-to be but moderate. At least, if the tradition is to be believed, and in\r
-particular the two enigmatical lines in barbarous Latin, which an\r
-evil Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer, named Tryphon has left on\r
-this subject. This Tryphon is buried at the Abbey of Saint-Georges de\r
-Bocherville, near Rouen, and toads spawn on his grave.\r
-\r
-Accordingly, enormous efforts are made. Such trenches are ordinarily\r
-extremely deep; a man sweats, digs, toils all night--for it must be done\r
-at night; he wets his shirt, burns out his candle, breaks his mattock,\r
-and when he arrives at the bottom of the hole, when he lays his hand on\r
-the "treasure," what does he find? What is the devil's treasure? A sou,\r
-sometimes a crown-piece, a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding body, sometimes\r
-a spectre folded in four like a sheet of paper in a portfolio,\r
-sometimes nothing. This is what Tryphon's verses seem to announce to the\r
-indiscreet and curious:--\r
-\r
- "Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca,\r
- As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque."\r
-\r
-\r
-It seems that in our day there is sometimes found a powder-horn with\r
-bullets, sometimes an old pack of cards greasy and worn, which has\r
-evidently served the devil. Tryphon does not record these two finds,\r
-since Tryphon lived in the twelfth century, and since the devil does not\r
-appear to have had the wit to invent powder before Roger Bacon's time,\r
-and cards before the time of Charles VI.\r
-\r
-Moreover, if one plays at cards, one is sure to lose all that one\r
-possesses! and as for the powder in the horn, it possesses the property\r
-of making your gun burst in your face.\r
-\r
-Now, a very short time after the epoch when it seemed to the prosecuting\r
-attorney that the liberated convict Jean Valjean during his flight of\r
-several days had been prowling around Montfermeil, it was remarked in\r
-that village that a certain old road-laborer, named Boulatruelle, had\r
-"peculiar ways" in the forest. People thereabouts thought they knew that\r
-this Boulatruelle had been in the galleys. He was subjected to\r
-certain police supervision, and, as he could find work nowhere, the\r
-administration employed him at reduced rates as a road-mender on the\r
-cross-road from Gagny to Lagny.\r
-\r
-This Boulatruelle was a man who was viewed with disfavor by the\r
-inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in\r
-removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence\r
-of the gendarmes,--probably affiliated to robber bands, they said;\r
-suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only\r
-thing in his favor was that he was a drunkard.\r
-\r
-This is what people thought they had noticed:--\r
-\r
-Of late, Boulatruelle had taken to quitting his task of stone-breaking\r
-and care of the road at a very early hour, and to betaking himself to\r
-the forest with his pickaxe. He was encountered towards evening in\r
-the most deserted clearings, in the wildest thickets; and he had the\r
-appearance of being in search of something, and sometimes he was digging\r
-holes. The goodwives who passed took him at first for Beelzebub; then\r
-they recognized Boulatruelle, and were not in the least reassured\r
-thereby. These encounters seemed to cause Boulatruelle a lively\r
-displeasure. It was evident that he sought to hide, and that there was\r
-some mystery in what he was doing.\r
-\r
-It was said in the village: "It is clear that the devil has appeared.\r
-Boulatruelle has seen him, and is on the search. In sooth, he is cunning\r
-enough to pocket Lucifer's hoard."\r
-\r
-The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil, or will the\r
-devil catch Boulatruelle?" The old women made a great many signs of the\r
-cross.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Boulatruelle's manoeuvres in the forest ceased; and he\r
-resumed his regular occupation of roadmending; and people gossiped of\r
-something else.\r
-\r
-Some persons, however, were still curious, surmising that in all this\r
-there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends, but some\r
-fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort than the devil's\r
-bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half discovered the secret. The\r
-most "puzzled" were the school-master and Thenardier, the proprietor of\r
-the tavern, who was everybody's friend, and had not disdained to ally\r
-himself with Boulatruelle.\r
-\r
-"He has been in the galleys," said Thenardier. "Eh! Good God! no one\r
-knows who has been there or will be there."\r
-\r
-One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that in former times the law would\r
-have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle did in the forest,\r
-and that the latter would have been forced to speak, and that he would\r
-have been put to the torture in case of need, and that Boulatruelle\r
-would not have resisted the water test, for example. "Let us put him to\r
-the wine test," said Thenardier.\r
-\r
-They made an effort, and got the old road-mender to drinking.\r
-Boulatruelle drank an enormous amount, but said very little. He combined\r
-with admirable art, and in masterly proportions, the thirst of a\r
-gormandizer with the discretion of a judge. Nevertheless, by dint of\r
-returning to the charge and of comparing and putting together the few\r
-obscure words which he did allow to escape him, this is what Thenardier\r
-and the schoolmaster imagined that they had made out:--\r
-\r
-One morning, when Boulatruelle was on his way to his work, at daybreak,\r
-he had been surprised to see, at a nook of the forest in the underbrush,\r
-a shovel and a pickaxe, concealed, as one might say.\r
-\r
-However, he might have supposed that they were probably the shovel and\r
-pick of Father Six-Fours, the water-carrier, and would have thought no\r
-more about it. But, on the evening of that day, he saw, without being\r
-seen himself, as he was hidden by a large tree, "a person who did not\r
-belong in those parts, and whom he, Boulatruelle, knew well," directing\r
-his steps towards the densest part of the wood. Translation by\r
-Thenardier: A comrade of the galleys. Boulatruelle obstinately refused\r
-to reveal his name. This person carried a package--something square,\r
-like a large box or a small trunk. Surprise on the part of Boulatruelle.\r
-However, it was only after the expiration of seven or eight minutes that\r
-the idea of following that "person" had occurred to him. But it was too\r
-late; the person was already in the thicket, night had descended, and\r
-Boulatruelle had not been able to catch up with him. Then he had\r
-adopted the course of watching for him at the edge of the woods. "It was\r
-moonlight." Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle had seen this person\r
-emerge from the brushwood, carrying no longer the coffer, but a shovel\r
-and pick. Boulatruelle had allowed the person to pass, and had not\r
-dreamed of accosting him, because he said to himself that the other man\r
-was three times as strong as he was, and armed with a pickaxe, and that\r
-he would probably knock him over the head on recognizing him, and on\r
-perceiving that he was recognized. Touching effusion of two old comrades\r
-on meeting again. But the shovel and pick had served as a ray of light\r
-to Boulatruelle; he had hastened to the thicket in the morning, and had\r
-found neither shovel nor pick. From this he had drawn the inference that\r
-this person, once in the forest, had dug a hole with his pick, buried\r
-the coffer, and reclosed the hole with his shovel. Now, the coffer was\r
-too small to contain a body; therefore it contained money. Hence his\r
-researches. Boulatruelle had explored, sounded, searched the entire\r
-forest and the thicket, and had dug wherever the earth appeared to him\r
-to have been recently turned up. In vain.\r
-\r
-He had "ferreted out" nothing. No one in Montfermeil thought any more\r
-about it. There were only a few brave gossips, who said, "You may be\r
-certain that the mender on the Gagny road did not take all that trouble\r
-for nothing; he was sure that the devil had come."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE ANKLE-CHAIN MUST HAVE UNDERGONE A CERTAIN PREPARATORY\r
-MANIPULATION TO BE THUS BROKEN WITH A BLOW FROM A HAMMER\r
-\r
-Towards the end of October, in that same year, 1823, the inhabitants of\r
-Toulon beheld the entry into their port, after heavy weather, and for\r
-the purpose of repairing some damages, of the ship Orion, which was\r
-employed later at Brest as a school-ship, and which then formed a part\r
-of the Mediterranean squadron.\r
-\r
-This vessel, battered as it was,--for the sea had handled it\r
-roughly,--produced a fine effect as it entered the roads. It flew some\r
-colors which procured for it the regulation salute of eleven guns, which\r
-it returned, shot for shot; total, twenty-two. It has been calculated\r
-that what with salvos, royal and military politenesses, courteous\r
-exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and\r
-citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and\r
-all ships of war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized\r
-world, discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty\r
-hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six francs the\r
-shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred\r
-millions a year, which vanish in smoke. This is a mere detail. All this\r
-time the poor were dying of hunger.\r
-\r
-The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the Spanish\r
-war."\r
-\r
-This war contained many events in one, and a quantity of peculiarities.\r
-A grand family affair for the house of Bourbon; the branch of France\r
-succoring and protecting the branch of Madrid, that is to say,\r
-performing an act devolving on the elder; an apparent return to our\r
-national traditions, complicated by servitude and by subjection to the\r
-cabinets of the North; M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal\r
-sheets the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude that\r
-was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient and very\r
-powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the chimerical\r
-terrorism of the liberals; the sansculottes resuscitated, to the great\r
-terror of dowagers, under the name of descamisados; monarchy opposing an\r
-obstacle to progress described as anarchy; the theories of '89 roughly\r
-interrupted in the sap; a European halt, called to the French idea,\r
-which was making the tour of the world; beside the son of France as\r
-generalissimo, the Prince de Carignan, afterwards Charles Albert,\r
-enrolling himself in that crusade of kings against people as a\r
-volunteer, with grenadier epaulets of red worsted; the soldiers of the\r
-Empire setting out on a fresh campaign, but aged, saddened, after eight\r
-years of repose, and under the white cockade; the tricolored standard\r
-waved abroad by a heroic handful of Frenchmen, as the white standard had\r
-been thirty years earlier at Coblentz; monks mingled with our troops;\r
-the spirit of liberty and of novelty brought to its senses by bayonets;\r
-principles slaughtered by cannonades; France undoing by her arms that\r
-which she had done by her mind; in addition to this, hostile leaders\r
-sold, soldiers hesitating, cities besieged by millions; no military\r
-perils, and yet possible explosions, as in every mine which is surprised\r
-and invaded; but little bloodshed, little honor won, shame for some,\r
-glory for no one. Such was this war, made by the princes descended from\r
-Louis XIV., and conducted by generals who had been under Napoleon. Its\r
-sad fate was to recall neither the grand war nor grand politics.\r
-\r
-Some feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadero, among\r
-others, was a fine military action; but after all, we repeat, the\r
-trumpets of this war give back a cracked sound, the whole effect was\r
-suspicious; history approves of France for making a difficulty about\r
-accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident that certain Spanish\r
-officers charged with resistance yielded too easily; the idea of\r
-corruption was connected with the victory; it appears as though generals\r
-and not battles had been won, and the conquering soldier returned\r
-humiliated. A debasing war, in short, in which the Bank of France could\r
-be read in the folds of the flag.\r
-\r
-Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen in formidable\r
-ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of citadels, and began to\r
-regret Palafox. It is the nature of France to prefer to have Rostopchine\r
-rather than Ballesteros in front of her.\r
-\r
-From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is also proper\r
-to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the military spirit\r
-of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise of\r
-inthralment. In that campaign, the object of the French soldier, the\r
-son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others. A hideous\r
-contradiction. France is made to arouse the soul of nations, not to\r
-stifle it. All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are the French\r
-Revolution: liberty darts rays from France. That is a solar fact. Blind\r
-is he who will not see! It was Bonaparte who said it.\r
-\r
-The war of 1823, an outrage on the generous Spanish nation, was then,\r
-at the same time, an outrage on the French Revolution. It was France\r
-who committed this monstrous violence; by foul means, for, with the\r
-exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul\r
-means. The words passive obedience indicate this. An army is a strange\r
-masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous sum\r
-of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity against humanity, despite\r
-humanity, explained.\r
-\r
-As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them. They took it for\r
-a success. They did not perceive the danger that lies in having an idea\r
-slain to order. They went astray, in their innocence, to such a degree\r
-that they introduced the immense enfeeblement of a crime into their\r
-establishment as an element of strength. The spirit of the ambush\r
-entered into their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823. The Spanish\r
-campaign became in their counsels an argument for force and for\r
-adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established elrey netto\r
-in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute king at home. They\r
-fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience of the soldier for\r
-the consent of the nation. Such confidence is the ruin of thrones. It is\r
-not permitted to fall asleep, either in the shadow of a machineel tree,\r
-nor in the shadow of an army.\r
-\r
-Let us return to the ship Orion.\r
-\r
-During the operations of the army commanded by the prince generalissimo,\r
-a squadron had been cruising in the Mediterranean. We have just stated\r
-that the Orion belonged to this fleet, and that accidents of the sea had\r
-brought it into port at Toulon.\r
-\r
-The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something about it which\r
-attracts and engages a crowd. It is because it is great, and the crowd\r
-loves what is great.\r
-\r
-A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations of the\r
-genius of man with the powers of nature.\r
-\r
-A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the heaviest and\r
-the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one and the same time\r
-with three forms of substance,--solid, liquid, and fluid,--and it must\r
-do battle with all three. It has eleven claws of iron with which to\r
-seize the granite on the bottom of the sea, and more wings and more\r
-antennae than winged insects, to catch the wind in the clouds. Its\r
-breath pours out through its hundred and twenty cannons as through\r
-enormous trumpets, and replies proudly to the thunder. The ocean seeks\r
-to lead it astray in the alarming sameness of its billows, but the\r
-vessel has its soul, its compass, which counsels it and always shows it\r
-the north. In the blackest nights, its lanterns supply the place of\r
-the stars. Thus, against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas;\r
-against the water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead;\r
-against the shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.\r
-\r
-If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which,\r
-taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to enter\r
-one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports of Brest\r
-or Toulon. The vessels in process of construction are under a bell-glass\r
-there, as it were. This colossal beam is a yard; that great column of\r
-wood which stretches out on the earth as far as the eye can reach is\r
-the main-mast. Taking it from its root in the stocks to its tip in the\r
-clouds, it is sixty fathoms long, and its diameter at its base is\r
-three feet. The English main-mast rises to a height of two hundred and\r
-seventeen feet above the water-line. The navy of our fathers employed\r
-cables, ours employs chains. The simple pile of chains on a ship of a\r
-hundred guns is four feet high, twenty feet in breadth, and eight\r
-feet in depth. And how much wood is required to make this ship? Three\r
-thousand cubic metres. It is a floating forest.\r
-\r
-And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question here of\r
-the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple sailing-vessel;\r
-steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to that prodigy\r
-which is called a war vessel. At the present time, for example, the\r
-mixed vessel with a screw is a surprising machine, propelled by three\r
-thousand square metres of canvas and by an engine of two thousand five\r
-hundred horse-power.\r
-\r
-Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of Christopher\r
-Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces of man. It is as\r
-inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite in gales; it stores up\r
-the wind in its sails, it is precise in the immense vagueness of the\r
-billows, it floats, and it reigns.\r
-\r
-There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot\r
-yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet tall,\r
-when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in the jaws\r
-of the waves like a fisherman's hook in the jaws of a pike, when those\r
-monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars, which the hurricane\r
-bears forth into the void and into night, when all that power and all\r
-that majesty are engulfed in a power and majesty which are superior.\r
-\r
-Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate in an immense\r
-feebleness it affords men food for thought, Hence in the ports curious\r
-people abound around these marvellous machines of war and of navigation,\r
-without being able to explain perfectly to themselves why. Every day,\r
-accordingly, from morning until night, the quays, sluices, and the\r
-jetties of the port of Toulon were covered with a multitude of idlers\r
-and loungers, as they say in Paris, whose business consisted in staring\r
-at the Orion.\r
-\r
-The Orion was a ship that had been ailing for a long time; in the course\r
-of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles had collected on its\r
-keel to such a degree as to deprive it of half its speed; it had gone\r
-into the dry dock the year before this, in order to have the barnacles\r
-scraped off, then it had put to sea again; but this cleaning had\r
-affected the bolts of the keel: in the neighborhood of the Balearic\r
-Isles the sides had been strained and had opened; and, as the plating\r
-in those days was not of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak.\r
-A violent equinoctial gale had come up, which had first staved in\r
-a grating and a porthole on the larboard side, and damaged the\r
-foretop-gallant-shrouds; in consequence of these injuries, the Orion had\r
-run back to Toulon.\r
-\r
-It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs were\r
-begun. The hull had received no damage on the starboard, but some of the\r
-planks had been unnailed here and there, according to custom, to permit\r
-of air entering the hold.\r
-\r
-One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an accident.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Ship Orion, An Accident 2b2-1-the-ship-orion]\r
-\r
-The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had to take the\r
-upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard, lost his balance;\r
-he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging the Arsenal quay uttered a\r
-cry; the man's head overbalanced his body; the man fell around the yard,\r
-with his hands outstretched towards the abyss; on his way he seized the\r
-footrope, first with one hand, then with the other, and remained hanging\r
-from it: the sea lay below him at a dizzy depth; the shock of his fall\r
-had imparted to the foot-rope a violent swinging motion; the man swayed\r
-back and forth at the end of that rope, like a stone in a sling.\r
-\r
-It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not one\r
-of the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for the\r
-service, dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate topman\r
-was losing his strength; his anguish could not be discerned on his face,\r
-but his exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were contracted\r
-in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to re-ascend served\r
-but to augment the oscillations of the foot-rope; he did not shout, for\r
-fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting the minute when he\r
-should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant to instant, heads\r
-were turned aside that his fall might not be seen. There are moments\r
-when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree, is life itself, and\r
-it is a terrible thing to see a living being detach himself from it and\r
-fall like a ripe fruit.\r
-\r
-All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility\r
-of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he wore a\r
-green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level with the top, a\r
-gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed a perfectly white head to\r
-be seen: he was not a young man.\r
-\r
-A convict employed on board with a detachment from the galleys had, in\r
-fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the officer of the watch,\r
-and, in the midst of the consternation and the hesitation of the crew,\r
-while all the sailors were trembling and drawing back, he had asked\r
-the officer's permission to risk his life to save the topman; at an\r
-affirmative sign from the officer he had broken the chain riveted to his\r
-ankle with one blow of a hammer, then he had caught up a rope, and had\r
-dashed into the rigging: no one noticed, at the instant, with what ease\r
-that chain had been broken; it was only later on that the incident was\r
-recalled.\r
-\r
-In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few seconds and\r
-appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these seconds, during which\r
-the breeze swayed the topman at the extremity of a thread, seemed\r
-centuries to those who were looking on. At last, the convict raised his\r
-eyes to heaven and advanced a step: the crowd drew a long breath. He was\r
-seen to run out along the yard: on arriving at the point, he fastened\r
-the rope which he had brought to it, and allowed the other end to hang\r
-down, then he began to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then,--and\r
-the anguish was indescribable,--instead of one man suspended over the\r
-gulf, there were two.\r
-\r
-One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly, only here the\r
-spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand glances were fastened on\r
-this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor contracted every\r
-brow; all mouths held their breath as though they feared to add the\r
-slightest puff to the wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself to a\r
-position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute more, and the\r
-exhausted and despairing man would have allowed himself to fall into\r
-the abyss. The convict had moored him securely with the cord to which\r
-he clung with one hand, while he was working with the other. At last, he\r
-was seen to climb back on the yard, and to drag the sailor up after him;\r
-he held him there a moment to allow him to recover his strength, then he\r
-grasped him in his arms and carried him, walking on the yard himself to\r
-the cap, and from there to the main-top, where he left him in the hands\r
-of his comrades.\r
-\r
-At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old convict-sergeants\r
-among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay, and all\r
-voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage, "Pardon for that\r
-man!"\r
-\r
-He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his descent to rejoin\r
-his detachment. In order to reach them the more speedily, he dropped\r
-into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards; all eyes were\r
-following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them; whether it was\r
-that he was fatigued, or that his head turned, they thought they saw him\r
-hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd uttered a loud shout: the\r
-convict had fallen into the sea.\r
-\r
-The fall was perilous. The frigate Algesiras was anchored alongside the\r
-Orion, and the poor convict had fallen between the two vessels: it was\r
-to be feared that he would slip under one or the other of them. Four men\r
-flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered them on;\r
-anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not risen to\r
-the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving a ripple, as\r
-though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded, they dived. In\r
-vain. The search was continued until the evening: they did not even find\r
-the body.\r
-\r
-On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these lines:--\r
-\r
-"Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on\r
-board of the Orion, on his return from rendering assistance to a sailor,\r
-fell into the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been found; it\r
-is supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the Arsenal point:\r
-this man was committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean\r
-Valjean."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL\r
-\r
-Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge\r
-of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At\r
-the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year\r
-through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In\r
-1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so\r
-many well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some\r
-pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be\r
-sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in\r
-twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts\r
-of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but\r
-Montfermeil was none the less a village. Retired cloth-merchants and\r
-rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful\r
-and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people\r
-lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and\r
-so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the\r
-plateau.\r
-\r
-It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of\r
-the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds\r
-which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the\r
-church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water\r
-only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to\r
-Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.\r
-\r
-Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The\r
-large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thenardier tavern formed a\r
-part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of\r
-it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of supplying\r
-Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until seven\r
-o'clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night once\r
-come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had no\r
-water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.\r
-\r
-This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has\r
-probably not forgotten,--little Cosette. It will be remembered that\r
-Cosette was useful to the Thenardiers in two ways: they made the mother\r
-pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased\r
-to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding\r
-chapters, the Thenardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant\r
-in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when\r
-it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of\r
-going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never be\r
-lacking in the house.\r
-\r
-Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.\r
-The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow\r
-nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained\r
-permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street of\r
-the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of the\r
-same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,\r
-and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will\r
-perhaps remember, the Thenardiers' hostelry was situated. These people\r
-filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil\r
-little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of\r
-a faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities\r
-displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful\r
-clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to\r
-the peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian\r
-vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and which\r
-have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists call\r
-this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the Apicides,\r
-and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers,\r
-who had retired to the village, went to see this creature with great\r
-devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored cockade was a\r
-unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their menagerie.\r
-\r
-On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were\r
-seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in\r
-the public room of Thenardier's hostelry. This room resembled all\r
-drinking-shop rooms,--tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers;\r
-but little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year 1823\r
-was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable\r
-in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin.\r
-The female Thenardier was attending to the supper, which was roasting in\r
-front of a clear fire; her husband was drinking with his customers and\r
-talking politics.\r
-\r
-Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects\r
-the Spanish war and M. le Duc d'Angouleme, strictly local parentheses,\r
-like the following, were audible amid the uproar:--\r
-\r
-"About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly. When\r
-ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve. They have yielded a\r
-great deal of juice under the press." "But the grapes cannot be ripe?"\r
-"In those parts the grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as\r
-soon as spring comes." "Then it is very thin wine?" "There are wines\r
-poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while green." Etc.\r
-\r
-Or a miller would call out:--\r
-\r
-"Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a quantity\r
-of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are obliged to send\r
-through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel, vetches, hempseed,\r
-fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention pebbles, which\r
-abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I am not fond of\r
-grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like to saw beams with\r
-nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that makes in grinding. And\r
-then people complain of the flour. They are in the wrong. The flour is\r
-no fault of ours."\r
-\r
-In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a\r
-landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be\r
-performed in the spring, was saying:--\r
-\r
-"It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good\r
-thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young\r
-and very hard to cut still. It's terribly tender. It yields before the\r
-iron." Etc.\r
-\r
-Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen\r
-table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into\r
-wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen\r
-stockings destined for the young Thenardiers. A very young kitten was\r
-playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in\r
-the adjoining room, from two fresh children's voices: it was Eponine and\r
-Azelma.\r
-\r
-In the chimney-corner a cat-o'-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.\r
-\r
-At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the\r
-house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy\r
-who had been born to the Thenardiers during one of the preceding\r
-winters,--"she did not know why," she said, "the result of the\r
-cold,"--and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had\r
-nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the\r
-brat became too annoying, "Your son is squalling," Thenardier would\r
-say; "do go and see what he wants." "Bah!" the mother would reply, "he\r
-bothers me." And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS\r
-\r
-So far in this book the Thenardiers have been viewed only in profile;\r
-the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple, and\r
-considering it under all its aspects.\r
-\r
-Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thenardier was\r
-approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so\r
-that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.\r
-\r
-Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this Thenardier\r
-woman, ever since her first appearance,--tall, blond, red, fat, angular,\r
-square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we have said, to the\r
-race of those colossal wild women, who contort themselves at fairs with\r
-paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything about the\r
-house,--made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and everything\r
-else. Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an\r
-elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice,--window panes,\r
-furniture, and people. Her big face, dotted with red blotches,\r
-presented the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an ideal\r
-market-porter dressed in woman's clothes. She swore splendidly; she\r
-boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist. Except\r
-for the romances which she had read, and which made the affected lady\r
-peep through the ogress at times, in a very queer way, the idea would\r
-never have occurred to any one to say of her, "That is a woman."\r
-This Thenardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a\r
-fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, "That is a gendarme"; when\r
-one saw her drink, one said, "That is a carter"; when one saw her handle\r
-Cosette, one said, "That is the hangman." One of her teeth projected\r
-when her face was in repose.\r
-\r
-Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had\r
-a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here;\r
-he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to\r
-everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He had\r
-the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He greatly\r
-resembled the portraits of the Abbe Delille. His coquetry consisted in\r
-drinking with the carters. No one had ever succeeded in rendering him\r
-drunk. He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an\r
-old black coat. He made pretensions to literature and to materialism.\r
-There were certain names which he often pronounced to support whatever\r
-things he might be saying,--Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, singularly\r
-enough, Saint Augustine. He declared that he had "a system." In\r
-addition, he was a great swindler. A filousophe [philosophe], a\r
-scientific thief. The species does exist. It will be remembered that he\r
-pretended to have served in the army; he was in the habit of relating\r
-with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or the 9th light\r
-something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the presence of a\r
-squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body and saved\r
-from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, "a general, who had been\r
-dangerously wounded." Thence arose for his wall the flaring sign, and\r
-for his inn the name which it bore in the neighborhood, of "the cabaret\r
-of the Sergeant of Waterloo." He was a liberal, a classic, and a\r
-Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d'Asile. It was said in the\r
-village that he had studied for the priesthood.\r
-\r
-We believe that he had simply studied in Holland for an inn-keeper. This\r
-rascal of composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming from\r
-Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian at Brussels, being\r
-comfortably astride of both frontiers. As for his prowess at Waterloo,\r
-the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be perceived that\r
-he exaggerated it a trifle. Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was\r
-the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience entails a fragmentary\r
-life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier\r
-belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken,\r
-beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and\r
-travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety\r
-cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always\r
-attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended, and\r
-having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil and set up\r
-an inn there.\r
-\r
-This quibus, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver\r
-crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did\r
-not amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler turned\r
-eating-house-keeper very far.\r
-\r
-Thenardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his gestures\r
-which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks, and by a sign\r
-of the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker. He allowed it to be\r
-thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had\r
-noticed that he pronounced improperly.[12]\r
-\r
-He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner, but\r
-practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.\r
-Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not disdain\r
-his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This giantess\r
-was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow little man must\r
-be an object coveted by all.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-balanced man, was a\r
-scamp of a temperate sort. This is the worst species; hypocrisy enters\r
-into it.\r
-\r
-It is not that Thenardier was not, on occasion, capable of wrath to\r
-quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very rare, and at such\r
-times, since he was enraged with the human race in general, as he bore\r
-within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he was one of those\r
-people who are continually avenging their wrongs, who accuse everything\r
-that passes before them of everything which has befallen them, and who\r
-are always ready to cast upon the first person who comes to hand, as a\r
-legitimate grievance, the sum total of the deceptions, the bankruptcies,\r
-and the calamities of their lives,--when all this leaven was stirred up\r
-in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was terrible. Woe to\r
-the person who came under his wrath at such a time!\r
-\r
-In addition to his other qualities, Thenardier was attentive and\r
-penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances, and always\r
-highly intelligent. He had something of the look of sailors, who are\r
-accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses.\r
-Thenardier was a statesman.\r
-\r
-Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame\r
-Thenardier, "There is the master of the house." A mistake. She was not\r
-even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She worked;\r
-he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant\r
-magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the\r
-mastodon obeyed. Thenardier was a sort of special and sovereign being in\r
-Madame Thenardier's eyes, though she did not thoroughly realize it.\r
-She was possessed of virtues after her own kind; if she had ever had a\r
-disagreement as to any detail with "Monsieur Thenardier,"--which was\r
-an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,--she would not have blamed\r
-her husband in public on any subject whatever. She would never have\r
-committed "before strangers" that mistake so often committed by women,\r
-and which is called in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown."\r
-Although their concord had only evil as its result, there was\r
-contemplation in Madame Thenardier's submission to her husband. That\r
-mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little finger of that\r
-frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side, this was that\r
-grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by matter; for certain\r
-ugly features have a cause in the very depths of eternal beauty. There\r
-was an unknown quantity about Thenardier; hence the absolute empire\r
-of the man over that woman. At certain moments she beheld him like a\r
-lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.\r
-\r
-This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her\r
-children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a\r
-mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short with\r
-her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had\r
-but one thought,--how to enrich himself.\r
-\r
-He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was\r
-lacking. Thenardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is\r
-possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless scamp\r
-would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse where\r
-fate has hitched him.\r
-\r
-It will be understood that the word inn-keeper is here employed in a\r
-restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.\r
-\r
-In this same year, 1823, Thenardier was burdened with about fifteen\r
-hundred francs' worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.\r
-\r
-Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case,\r
-Thenardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most\r
-profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue\r
-among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized\r
-peoples,--hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted\r
-for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh,\r
-which was particularly dangerous.\r
-\r
-His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth in lightning flashes.\r
-He had professional aphorisms, which he inserted into his wife's mind.\r
-"The duty of the inn-keeper," he said to her one day, violently, and in\r
-a low voice, "is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light, fire,\r
-dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by, to empty\r
-small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter travelling\r
-families respectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman, to pick\r
-the child clean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the\r
-chimney-corner, the arm-chair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the\r
-feather-bed, the mattress and the truss of straw; to know how much\r
-the shadow uses up the mirror, and to put a price on it; and, by five\r
-hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even\r
-for the flies which his dog eats!"\r
-\r
-This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded--a hideous and\r
-terrible team.\r
-\r
-While the husband pondered and combined, Madame Thenardier thought not\r
-of absent creditors, took no heed of yesterday nor of to-morrow, and\r
-lived in a fit of anger, all in a minute.\r
-\r
-Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to their\r
-double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being ground up\r
-in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The man and the woman each\r
-had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed with blows--this was the\r
-woman's; she went barefooted in winter--that was the man's doing.\r
-\r
-Cosette ran up stairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran,\r
-fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was,\r
-did the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and\r
-venomous master. The Thenardier hostelry was like a spider's web, in\r
-which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The ideal\r
-of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something\r
-like the fly serving the spiders.\r
-\r
-The poor child passively held her peace.\r
-\r
-What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God,\r
-find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the\r
-midst of men all naked!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER\r
-\r
-Four new travellers had arrived.\r
-\r
-Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years\r
-old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the\r
-lugubrious air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a\r
-blow from Madame Thenardier's fist, which caused the latter to remark\r
-from time to time, "How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!"\r
-\r
-Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and\r
-caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have\r
-been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.\r
-\r
-She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thenardier\r
-establishment drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking there;\r
-but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather than to\r
-the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water among all those\r
-glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men. But there\r
-came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thenardier raised the\r
-cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then seized a glass\r
-and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the faucet; the child\r
-had raised her head and was following all the woman's movements. A thin\r
-stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half filled the glass.\r
-"Well," said she, "there is no more water!" A momentary silence ensued.\r
-The child did not breathe.\r
-\r
-"Bah!" resumed Madame Thenardier, examining the half-filled glass, "this\r
-will be enough."\r
-\r
-Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an\r
-hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.\r
-\r
-She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it were\r
-the next morning.\r
-\r
-From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street, and\r
-exclaimed, "It's as black as an oven!" or, "One must needs be a cat\r
-to go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!" And Cosette\r
-trembled.\r
-\r
-All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered, and\r
-said in a harsh voice:--\r
-\r
-"My horse has not been watered."\r
-\r
-"Yes, it has," said Madame Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"I tell you that it has not," retorted the pedler.\r
-\r
-Cosette had emerged from under the table.\r
-\r
-"Oh, yes, sir!" said she, "the horse has had a drink; he drank out of a\r
-bucket, a whole bucketful, and it was I who took the water to him, and I\r
-spoke to him."\r
-\r
-It was not true; Cosette lied.\r
-\r
-"There's a brat as big as my fist who tells lies as big as the house,"\r
-exclaimed the pedler. "I tell you that he has not been watered, you\r
-little jade! He has a way of blowing when he has had no water, which I\r
-know well."\r
-\r
-Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse with anguish,\r
-and which was hardly audible:--\r
-\r
-"And he drank heartily."\r
-\r
-"Come," said the pedler, in a rage, "this won't do at all, let my horse\r
-be watered, and let that be the end of it!"\r
-\r
-Cosette crept under the table again.\r
-\r
-"In truth, that is fair!" said Madame Thenardier, "if the beast has not\r
-been watered, it must be."\r
-\r
-Then glancing about her:--\r
-\r
-"Well, now! Where's that other beast?"\r
-\r
-She bent down and discovered Cosette cowering at the other end of the\r
-table, almost under the drinkers' feet.\r
-\r
-"Are you coming?" shrieked Madame Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had hidden herself.\r
-The Thenardier resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse."\r
-\r
-"But, Madame," said Cosette, feebly, "there is no water."\r
-\r
-The Thenardier threw the street door wide open:--\r
-\r
-"Well, go and get some, then!"\r
-\r
-Cosette dropped her head, and went for an empty bucket which stood near\r
-the chimney-corner.\r
-\r
-This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have set down\r
-in it at her ease.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier returned to her stove, and tasted what was in the\r
-stewpan, with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while:--\r
-\r
-"There's plenty in the spring. There never was such a malicious creature\r
-as that. I think I should have done better to strain my onions."\r
-\r
-Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained sous, pepper, and\r
-shallots.\r
-\r
-"See here, Mam'selle Toad," she added, "on your way back, you will get a\r
-big loaf from the baker. Here's a fifteen-sou piece."\r
-\r
-Cosette had a little pocket on one side of her apron; she took the coin\r
-without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.\r
-\r
-Then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her. She\r
-seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her rescue.\r
-\r
-"Get along with you!" screamed the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE OF A DOLL\r
-\r
-The line of open-air booths starting at the church, extended, as the\r
-reader will remember, as far as the hostelry of the Thenardiers. These\r
-booths were all illuminated, because the citizens would soon pass on\r
-their way to the midnight mass, with candles burning in paper funnels,\r
-which, as the schoolmaster, then seated at the table at the Thenardiers'\r
-observed, produced "a magical effect." In compensation, not a star was\r
-visible in the sky.\r
-\r
-The last of these stalls, established precisely opposite the\r
-Thenardiers' door, was a toy-shop all glittering with tinsel, glass,\r
-and magnificent objects of tin. In the first row, and far forwards, the\r
-merchant had placed on a background of white napkins, an immense doll,\r
-nearly two feet high, who was dressed in a robe of pink crepe, with gold\r
-wheat-ears on her head, which had real hair and enamel eyes. All that\r
-day, this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of all passers-by\r
-under ten years of age, without a mother being found in Montfermeil\r
-sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to give it to her child.\r
-Eponine and Azelma had passed hours in contemplating it, and Cosette\r
-herself had ventured to cast a glance at it, on the sly, it is true.\r
-\r
-At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and\r
-overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes to\r
-that wonderful doll, towards the lady, as she called it. The poor child\r
-paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld that doll close to. The\r
-whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was a\r
-vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in\r
-a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly\r
-engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With the sad and innocent sagacity\r
-of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from\r
-that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a\r
-princess, to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink\r
-dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, "How happy that doll\r
-must be!" She could not take her eyes from that fantastic stall. The\r
-more she looked, the more dazzled she grew. She thought she was gazing\r
-at paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one, which seemed\r
-to her to be fairies and genii. The merchant, who was pacing back and\r
-forth in front of his shop, produced on her somewhat the effect of being\r
-the Eternal Father.\r
-\r
-In this adoration she forgot everything, even the errand with which she\r
-was charged.\r
-\r
-All at once the Thenardier's coarse voice recalled her to reality:\r
-"What, you silly jade! you have not gone? Wait! I'll give it to you! I\r
-want to know what you are doing there! Get along, you little monster!"\r
-\r
-The Thenardier had cast a glance into the street, and had caught sight\r
-of Cosette in her ecstasy.\r
-\r
-Cosette fled, dragging her pail, and taking the longest strides of which\r
-she was capable.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--THE LITTLE ONE ALL ALONE\r
-\r
-As the Thenardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is\r
-near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction of\r
-Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.\r
-\r
-She did not glance at the display of a single other merchant. So long\r
-as she was in Boulanger Lane and in the neighborhood of the church, the\r
-lighted stalls illuminated the road; but soon the last light from the\r
-last stall vanished. The poor child found herself in the dark. She\r
-plunged into it. Only, as a certain emotion overcame her, she made as\r
-much motion as possible with the handle of the bucket as she walked\r
-along. This made a noise which afforded her company.\r
-\r
-The further she went, the denser the darkness became. There was no one\r
-in the streets. However, she did encounter a woman, who turned around\r
-on seeing her, and stood still, muttering between her teeth: "Where can\r
-that child be going? Is it a werewolf child?" Then the woman recognized\r
-Cosette. "Well," said she, "it's the Lark!"\r
-\r
-In this manner Cosette traversed the labyrinth of tortuous and deserted\r
-streets which terminate in the village of Montfermeil on the side of\r
-Chelles. So long as she had the houses or even the walls only on both\r
-sides of her path, she proceeded with tolerable boldness. From time\r
-to time she caught the flicker of a candle through the crack of a\r
-shutter--this was light and life; there were people there, and it\r
-reassured her. But in proportion as she advanced, her pace slackened\r
-mechanically, as it were. When she had passed the corner of the last\r
-house, Cosette paused. It had been hard to advance further than the last\r
-stall; it became impossible to proceed further than the last house. She\r
-set her bucket on the ground, thrust her hand into her hair, and\r
-began slowly to scratch her head,--a gesture peculiar to children when\r
-terrified and undecided what to do. It was no longer Montfermeil; it\r
-was the open fields. Black and desert space was before her. She gazed in\r
-despair at that darkness, where there was no longer any one, where there\r
-were beasts, where there were spectres, possibly. She took a good\r
-look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass, and she distinctly saw\r
-spectres moving in the trees. Then she seized her bucket again; fear had\r
-lent her audacity. "Bah!" said she; "I will tell him that there was no\r
-more water!" And she resolutely re-entered Montfermeil.\r
-\r
-Hardly had she gone a hundred paces when she paused and began to scratch\r
-her head again. Now it was the Thenardier who appeared to her, with her\r
-hideous, hyena mouth, and wrath flashing in her eyes. The child cast a\r
-melancholy glance before her and behind her. What was she to do? What\r
-was to become of her? Where was she to go? In front of her was the\r
-spectre of the Thenardier; behind her all the phantoms of the night\r
-and of the forest. It was before the Thenardier that she recoiled. She\r
-resumed her path to the spring, and began to run. She emerged from\r
-the village, she entered the forest at a run, no longer looking at or\r
-listening to anything. She only paused in her course when her breath\r
-failed her; but she did not halt in her advance. She went straight\r
-before her in desperation.\r
-\r
-As she ran she felt like crying.\r
-\r
-The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.\r
-\r
-She no longer thought, she no longer saw. The immensity of night was\r
-facing this tiny creature. On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an\r
-atom.\r
-\r
-It was only seven or eight minutes' walk from the edge of the woods to\r
-the spring. Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it many times\r
-in daylight. Strange to say, she did not get lost. A remnant of instinct\r
-guided her vaguely. But she did not turn her eyes either to right or to\r
-left, for fear of seeing things in the branches and in the brushwood. In\r
-this manner she reached the spring.\r
-\r
-It was a narrow, natural basin, hollowed out by the water in a clayey\r
-soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss and with those tall,\r
-crimped grasses which are called Henry IV.'s frills, and paved with\r
-several large stones. A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little\r
-noise.\r
-\r
-Cosette did not take time to breathe. It was very dark, but she was in\r
-the habit of coming to this spring. She felt with her left hand in the\r
-dark for a young oak which leaned over the spring, and which usually\r
-served to support her, found one of its branches, clung to it, bent\r
-down, and plunged the bucket in the water. She was in a state of such\r
-violent excitement that her strength was trebled. While thus bent over,\r
-she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into\r
-the spring. The fifteen-sou piece fell into the water. Cosette neither\r
-saw nor heard it fall. She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it\r
-on the grass.\r
-\r
-That done, she perceived that she was worn out with fatigue. She would\r
-have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required to fill the\r
-bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take a step. She\r
-was forced to sit down. She dropped on the grass, and remained crouching\r
-there.\r
-\r
-She shut her eyes; then she opened them again, without knowing why, but\r
-because she could not do otherwise. The agitated water in the bucket\r
-beside her was describing circles which resembled tin serpents.\r
-\r
-Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were like\r
-masses of smoke. The tragic mask of shadow seemed to bend vaguely over\r
-the child.\r
-\r
-Jupiter was setting in the depths.\r
-\r
-The child stared with bewildered eyes at this great star, with which she\r
-was unfamiliar, and which terrified her. The planet was, in fact, very\r
-near the horizon and was traversing a dense layer of mist which imparted\r
-to it a horrible ruddy hue. The mist, gloomily empurpled, magnified the\r
-star. One would have called it a luminous wound.\r
-\r
-A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The forest was dark, not a leaf\r
-was moving; there were none of the vague, fresh gleams of summertide.\r
-Great boughs uplifted themselves in frightful wise. Slender and\r
-misshapen bushes whistled in the clearings. The tall grasses undulated\r
-like eels under the north wind. The nettles seemed to twist long arms\r
-furnished with claws in search of prey. Some bits of dry heather, tossed\r
-by the breeze, flew rapidly by, and had the air of fleeing in terror\r
-before something which was coming after. On all sides there were\r
-lugubrious stretches.\r
-\r
-The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries himself\r
-in the opposite of day feels his heart contract. When the eye sees\r
-black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night, in the sooty\r
-opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. No one walks\r
-alone in the forest at night without trembling. Shadows and trees--two\r
-formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct\r
-depths. The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant from you with\r
-a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in space or in one's\r
-own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the\r
-dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes on the horizon.\r
-One inhales the effluvia of the great black void. One is afraid to\r
-glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so. The cavities of night,\r
-things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one advances,\r
-obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious\r
-reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, unknown\r
-but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches, alarming torsos of\r
-trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,--against all this one has no\r
-protection. There is no hardihood which does not shudder and which does\r
-not feel the vicinity of anguish. One is conscious of something hideous,\r
-as though one's soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness. This\r
-penetration of the shadows is indescribably sinister in the case of a\r
-child.\r
-\r
-Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul\r
-produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.\r
-\r
-Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was\r
-seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror\r
-alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more\r
-terrible even than terror; she shivered. There are no words to express\r
-the strangeness of that shiver which chilled her to the very bottom of\r
-her heart; her eye grew wild; she thought she felt that she should not\r
-be able to refrain from returning there at the same hour on the morrow.\r
-\r
-Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud, one, two, three,\r
-four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape from that singular state\r
-which she did not understand, but which terrified her, and, when she had\r
-finished, she began again; this restored her to a true perception of\r
-the things about her. Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the water,\r
-felt cold; she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable terror, had\r
-returned: she had but one thought now,--to flee at full speed through\r
-the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the windows, to the\r
-lighted candles. Her glance fell upon the water which stood before her;\r
-such was the fright which the Thenardier inspired in her, that she dared\r
-not flee without that bucket of water: she seized the handle with both\r
-hands; she could hardly lift the pail.\r
-\r
-In this manner she advanced a dozen paces, but the bucket was full; it\r
-was heavy; she was forced to set it on the ground once more. She took\r
-breath for an instant, then lifted the handle of the bucket again, and\r
-resumed her march, proceeding a little further this time, but again she\r
-was obliged to pause. After some seconds of repose she set out again.\r
-She walked bent forward, with drooping head, like an old woman; the\r
-weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms. The iron\r
-handle completed the benumbing and freezing of her wet and tiny hands;\r
-she was forced to halt from time to time, and each time that she did so,\r
-the cold water which splashed from the pail fell on her bare legs. This\r
-took place in the depths of a forest, at night, in winter, far from all\r
-human sight; she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that sad thing\r
-at the moment.\r
-\r
-And her mother, no doubt, alas!\r
-\r
-For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves.\r
-\r
-She panted with a sort of painful rattle; sobs contracted her throat,\r
-but she dared not weep, so afraid was she of the Thenardier, even at a\r
-distance: it was her custom to imagine the Thenardier always present.\r
-\r
-However, she could not make much headway in that manner, and she went\r
-on very slowly. In spite of diminishing the length of her stops, and\r
-of walking as long as possible between them, she reflected with anguish\r
-that it would take her more than an hour to return to Montfermeil in\r
-this manner, and that the Thenardier would beat her. This anguish was\r
-mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods at night; she was\r
-worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from the forest. On\r
-arriving near an old chestnut-tree with which she was acquainted, made\r
-a last halt, longer than the rest, in order that she might get well\r
-rested; then she summoned up all her strength, picked up her bucket\r
-again, and courageously resumed her march, but the poor little desperate\r
-creature could not refrain from crying, "O my God! my God!"\r
-\r
-At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer\r
-weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just\r
-seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously. She raised her head. A\r
-large black form, straight and erect, was walking beside her through the\r
-darkness; it was a man who had come up behind her, and whose approach\r
-she had not heard. This man, without uttering a word, had seized the\r
-handle of the bucket which she was carrying.\r
-\r
-There are instincts for all the encounters of life.\r
-\r
-The child was not afraid.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--WHICH POSSIBLY PROVES BOULATRUELLE'S INTELLIGENCE\r
-\r
-On the afternoon of that same Christmas Day, 1823, a man had walked\r
-for rather a long time in the most deserted part of the Boulevard de\r
-l'Hopital in Paris. This man had the air of a person who is seeking\r
-lodgings, and he seemed to halt, by preference, at the most modest\r
-houses on that dilapidated border of the faubourg Saint-Marceau.\r
-\r
-We shall see further on that this man had, in fact, hired a chamber in\r
-that isolated quarter.\r
-\r
-This man, in his attire, as in all his person, realized the type of what\r
-may be called the well-bred mendicant,--extreme wretchedness combined\r
-with extreme cleanliness. This is a very rare mixture which inspires\r
-intelligent hearts with that double respect which one feels for the man\r
-who is very poor, and for the man who is very worthy. He wore a very\r
-old and very well brushed round hat; a coarse coat, worn perfectly\r
-threadbare, of an ochre yellow, a color that was not in the least\r
-eccentric at that epoch; a large waistcoat with pockets of a venerable\r
-cut; black breeches, worn gray at the knee, stockings of black worsted;\r
-and thick shoes with copper buckles. He would have been pronounced a\r
-preceptor in some good family, returned from the emigration. He would\r
-have been taken for more than sixty years of age, from his perfectly\r
-white hair, his wrinkled brow, his livid lips, and his countenance,\r
-where everything breathed depression and weariness of life. Judging from\r
-his firm tread, from the singular vigor which stamped all his movements,\r
-he would have hardly been thought fifty. The wrinkles on his brow were\r
-well placed, and would have disposed in his favor any one who observed\r
-him attentively. His lip contracted with a strange fold which seemed\r
-severe, and which was humble. There was in the depth of his glance an\r
-indescribable melancholy serenity. In his left hand he carried a little\r
-bundle tied up in a handkerchief; in his right he leaned on a sort of a\r
-cudgel, cut from some hedge. This stick had been carefully trimmed, and\r
-had an air that was not too threatening; the most had been made of its\r
-knots, and it had received a coral-like head, made from red wax: it was\r
-a cudgel, and it seemed to be a cane.\r
-\r
-There are but few passers-by on that boulevard, particularly in the\r
-winter. The man seemed to avoid them rather than to seek them, but this\r
-without any affectation.\r
-\r
-At that epoch, King Louis XVIII. went nearly every day to Choisy-le-Roi:\r
-it was one of his favorite excursions. Towards two o'clock, almost\r
-invariably, the royal carriage and cavalcade was seen to pass at full\r
-speed along the Boulevard de l'Hopital.\r
-\r
-This served in lieu of a watch or clock to the poor women of the quarter\r
-who said, "It is two o'clock; there he is returning to the Tuileries."\r
-\r
-And some rushed forward, and others drew up in line, for a passing king\r
-always creates a tumult; besides, the appearance and disappearance of\r
-Louis XVIII. produced a certain effect in the streets of Paris. It was\r
-rapid but majestic. This impotent king had a taste for a fast gallop;\r
-as he was not able to walk, he wished to run: that cripple would gladly\r
-have had himself drawn by the lightning. He passed, pacific and severe,\r
-in the midst of naked swords. His massive coach, all covered with\r
-gilding, with great branches of lilies painted on the panels, thundered\r
-noisily along. There was hardly time to cast a glance upon it. In the\r
-rear angle on the right there was visible on tufted cushions of white\r
-satin a large, firm, and ruddy face, a brow freshly powdered a l'oiseau\r
-royal, a proud, hard, crafty eye, the smile of an educated man, two\r
-great epaulets with bullion fringe floating over a bourgeois coat, the\r
-Golden Fleece, the cross of Saint Louis, the cross of the Legion of\r
-Honor, the silver plaque of the Saint-Esprit, a huge belly, and a wide\r
-blue ribbon: it was the king. Outside of Paris, he held his hat decked\r
-with white ostrich plumes on his knees enwrapped in high English\r
-gaiters; when he re-entered the city, he put on his hat and saluted\r
-rarely; he stared coldly at the people, and they returned it in kind.\r
-When he appeared for the first time in the Saint-Marceau quarter,\r
-the whole success which he produced is contained in this remark of an\r
-inhabitant of the faubourg to his comrade, "That big fellow yonder is\r
-the government."\r
-\r
-This infallible passage of the king at the same hour was, therefore, the\r
-daily event of the Boulevard de l'Hopital.\r
-\r
-The promenader in the yellow coat evidently did not belong in the\r
-quarter, and probably did not belong in Paris, for he was ignorant as to\r
-this detail. When, at two o'clock, the royal carriage, surrounded by a\r
-squadron of the body-guard all covered with silver lace, debouched\r
-on the boulevard, after having made the turn of the Salpetriere, he\r
-appeared surprised and almost alarmed. There was no one but himself in\r
-this cross-lane. He drew up hastily behind the corner of the wall of an\r
-enclosure, though this did not prevent M. le Duc de Havre from spying\r
-him out.\r
-\r
-M. le Duc de Havre, as captain of the guard on duty that day, was seated\r
-in the carriage, opposite the king. He said to his Majesty, "Yonder\r
-is an evil-looking man." Members of the police, who were clearing the\r
-king's route, took equal note of him: one of them received an order to\r
-follow him. But the man plunged into the deserted little streets of the\r
-faubourg, and as twilight was beginning to fall, the agent lost trace of\r
-him, as is stated in a report addressed that same evening to M. le Comte\r
-d'Angles, Minister of State, Prefect of Police.\r
-\r
-When the man in the yellow coat had thrown the agent off his track,\r
-he redoubled his pace, not without turning round many a time to assure\r
-himself that he was not being followed. At a quarter-past four, that is\r
-to say, when night was fully come, he passed in front of the theatre\r
-of the Porte Saint-Martin, where The Two Convicts was being played that\r
-day. This poster, illuminated by the theatre lanterns, struck him; for,\r
-although he was walking rapidly, he halted to read it. An instant later\r
-he was in the blind alley of La Planchette, and he entered the Plat\r
-d'Etain [the Pewter Platter], where the office of the coach for Lagny\r
-was then situated. This coach set out at half-past four. The horses were\r
-harnessed, and the travellers, summoned by the coachman, were hastily\r
-climbing the lofty iron ladder of the vehicle.\r
-\r
-The man inquired:--\r
-\r
-"Have you a place?"\r
-\r
-"Only one--beside me on the box," said the coachman.\r
-\r
-"I will take it."\r
-\r
-"Climb up."\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, before setting out, the coachman cast a glance at the\r
-traveller's shabby dress, at the diminutive size of his bundle, and made\r
-him pay his fare.\r
-\r
-"Are you going as far as Lagny?" demanded the coachman.\r
-\r
-"Yes," said the man.\r
-\r
-The traveller paid to Lagny.\r
-\r
-They started. When they had passed the barrier, the coachman tried\r
-to enter into conversation, but the traveller only replied in\r
-monosyllables. The coachman took to whistling and swearing at his\r
-horses.\r
-\r
-The coachman wrapped himself up in his cloak. It was cold. The man\r
-did not appear to be thinking of that. Thus they passed Gournay and\r
-Neuilly-sur-Marne.\r
-\r
-Towards six o'clock in the evening they reached Chelles. The coachman\r
-drew up in front of the carters' inn installed in the ancient buildings\r
-of the Royal Abbey, to give his horses a breathing spell.\r
-\r
-"I get down here," said the man.\r
-\r
-He took his bundle and his cudgel and jumped down from the vehicle.\r
-\r
-An instant later he had disappeared.\r
-\r
-He did not enter the inn.\r
-\r
-When the coach set out for Lagny a few minutes later, it did not\r
-encounter him in the principal street of Chelles.\r
-\r
-The coachman turned to the inside travellers.\r
-\r
-"There," said he, "is a man who does not belong here, for I do not know\r
-him. He had not the air of owning a sou, but he does not consider money;\r
-he pays to Lagny, and he goes only as far as Chelles. It is night; all\r
-the houses are shut; he does not enter the inn, and he is not to be\r
-found. So he has dived through the earth."\r
-\r
-The man had not plunged into the earth, but he had gone with great\r
-strides through the dark, down the principal street of Chelles, then he\r
-had turned to the right before reaching the church, into the cross-road\r
-leading to Montfermeil, like a person who was acquainted with the\r
-country and had been there before.\r
-\r
-He followed this road rapidly. At the spot where it is intersected by\r
-the ancient tree-bordered road which runs from Gagny to Lagny, he heard\r
-people coming. He concealed himself precipitately in a ditch, and there\r
-waited until the passers-by were at a distance. The precaution was\r
-nearly superfluous, however; for, as we have already said, it was a very\r
-dark December night. Not more than two or three stars were visible in\r
-the sky.\r
-\r
-It is at this point that the ascent of the hill begins. The man did not\r
-return to the road to Montfermeil; he struck across the fields to the\r
-right, and entered the forest with long strides.\r
-\r
-Once in the forest he slackened his pace, and began a careful\r
-examination of all the trees, advancing, step by step, as though seeking\r
-and following a mysterious road known to himself alone. There came a\r
-moment when he appeared to lose himself, and he paused in indecision. At\r
-last he arrived, by dint of feeling his way inch by inch, at a clearing\r
-where there was a great heap of whitish stones. He stepped up briskly to\r
-these stones, and examined them attentively through the mists of night,\r
-as though he were passing them in review. A large tree, covered with\r
-those excrescences which are the warts of vegetation, stood a few paces\r
-distant from the pile of stones. He went up to this tree and passed\r
-his hand over the bark of the trunk, as though seeking to recognize and\r
-count all the warts.\r
-\r
-Opposite this tree, which was an ash, there was a chestnut-tree,\r
-suffering from a peeling of the bark, to which a band of zinc had been\r
-nailed by way of dressing. He raised himself on tiptoe and touched this\r
-band of zinc.\r
-\r
-Then he trod about for awhile on the ground comprised in the space\r
-between the tree and the heap of stones, like a person who is trying to\r
-assure himself that the soil has not recently been disturbed.\r
-\r
-That done, he took his bearings, and resumed his march through the\r
-forest.\r
-\r
-It was the man who had just met Cosette.\r
-\r
-As he walked through the thicket in the direction of Montfermeil, he had\r
-espied that tiny shadow moving with a groan, depositing a burden on\r
-the ground, then taking it up and setting out again. He drew near, and\r
-perceived that it was a very young child, laden with an enormous bucket\r
-of water. Then he approached the child, and silently grasped the handle\r
-of the bucket.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--COSETTE SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE STRANGER IN THE DARK\r
-\r
-Cosette, as we have said, was not frightened.\r
-\r
-The man accosted her. He spoke in a voice that was grave and almost\r
-bass.\r
-\r
-"My child, what you are carrying is very heavy for you."\r
-\r
-Cosette raised her head and replied:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-"Give it to me," said the man; "I will carry it for you."\r
-\r
-Cosette let go of the bucket-handle. The man walked along beside her.\r
-\r
-"It really is very heavy," he muttered between his teeth. Then he\r
-added:--\r
-\r
-"How old are you, little one?"\r
-\r
-"Eight, sir."\r
-\r
-"And have you come from far like this?"\r
-\r
-"From the spring in the forest."\r
-\r
-"Are you going far?"\r
-\r
-"A good quarter of an hour's walk from here."\r
-\r
-The man said nothing for a moment; then he remarked abruptly:--\r
-\r
-"So you have no mother."\r
-\r
-"I don't know," answered the child.\r
-\r
-Before the man had time to speak again, she added:--\r
-\r
-"I don't think so. Other people have mothers. I have none."\r
-\r
-And after a silence she went on:--\r
-\r
-"I think that I never had any."\r
-\r
-The man halted; he set the bucket on the ground, bent down and placed\r
-both hands on the child's shoulders, making an effort to look at her and\r
-to see her face in the dark.\r
-\r
-Cosette's thin and sickly face was vaguely outlined by the livid light\r
-in the sky.\r
-\r
-"What is your name?" said the man.\r
-\r
-"Cosette."\r
-\r
-The man seemed to have received an electric shock. He looked at her once\r
-more; then he removed his hands from Cosette's shoulders, seized the\r
-bucket, and set out again.\r
-\r
-After a moment he inquired:--\r
-\r
-"Where do you live, little one?"\r
-\r
-"At Montfermeil, if you know where that is."\r
-\r
-"That is where we are going?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-He paused; then began again:--\r
-\r
-"Who sent you at such an hour to get water in the forest?"\r
-\r
-"It was Madame Thenardier."\r
-\r
-The man resumed, in a voice which he strove to render indifferent, but\r
-in which there was, nevertheless, a singular tremor:--\r
-\r
-"What does your Madame Thenardier do?"\r
-\r
-"She is my mistress," said the child. "She keeps the inn."\r
-\r
-"The inn?" said the man. "Well, I am going to lodge there to-night. Show\r
-me the way."\r
-\r
-"We are on the way there," said the child.\r
-\r
-The man walked tolerably fast. Cosette followed him without difficulty.\r
-She no longer felt any fatigue. From time to time she raised her eyes\r
-towards the man, with a sort of tranquillity and an indescribable\r
-confidence. She had never been taught to turn to Providence and to pray;\r
-nevertheless, she felt within her something which resembled hope and\r
-joy, and which mounted towards heaven.\r
-\r
-Several minutes elapsed. The man resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Is there no servant in Madame Thenardier's house?"\r
-\r
-"No, sir."\r
-\r
-"Are you alone there?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-Another pause ensued. Cosette lifted up her voice:--\r
-\r
-"That is to say, there are two little girls."\r
-\r
-"What little girls?"\r
-\r
-"Ponine and Zelma."\r
-\r
-This was the way the child simplified the romantic names so dear to the\r
-female Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Who are Ponine and Zelma?"\r
-\r
-"They are Madame Thenardier's young ladies; her daughters, as you would\r
-say."\r
-\r
-"And what do those girls do?"\r
-\r
-"Oh!" said the child, "they have beautiful dolls; things with gold in\r
-them, all full of affairs. They play; they amuse themselves."\r
-\r
-"All day long?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-"And you?"\r
-\r
-"I? I work."\r
-\r
-"All day long?"\r
-\r
-The child raised her great eyes, in which hung a tear, which was not\r
-visible because of the darkness, and replied gently:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir."\r
-\r
-After an interval of silence she went on:--\r
-\r
-"Sometimes, when I have finished my work and they let me, I amuse\r
-myself, too."\r
-\r
-"How do you amuse yourself?"\r
-\r
-"In the best way I can. They let me alone; but I have not many\r
-playthings. Ponine and Zelma will not let me play with their dolls. I\r
-have only a little lead sword, no longer than that."\r
-\r
-The child held up her tiny finger.\r
-\r
-"And it will not cut?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir," said the child; "it cuts salad and the heads of flies."\r
-\r
-They reached the village. Cosette guided the stranger through the\r
-streets. They passed the bakeshop, but Cosette did not think of the\r
-bread which she had been ordered to fetch. The man had ceased to ply her\r
-with questions, and now preserved a gloomy silence.\r
-\r
-When they had left the church behind them, the man, on perceiving all\r
-the open-air booths, asked Cosette:--\r
-\r
-"So there is a fair going on here?"\r
-\r
-"No, sir; it is Christmas."\r
-\r
-As they approached the tavern, Cosette timidly touched his arm:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur?"\r
-\r
-"What, my child?"\r
-\r
-"We are quite near the house."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"Will you let me take my bucket now?"\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"If Madame sees that some one has carried it for me, she will beat me."\r
-\r
-The man handed her the bucket. An instant later they were at the tavern\r
-door.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE UNPLEASANTNESS OF RECEIVING INTO ONE'S HOUSE A POOR\r
-MAN WHO MAY BE A RICH MAN\r
-\r
-\r
-Cosette could not refrain from casting a sidelong glance at the big\r
-doll, which was still displayed at the toy-merchant's; then she knocked.\r
-The door opened. The Thenardier appeared with a candle in her hand.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Ah! so it's you, you little wretch! good mercy, but you've taken your\r
-time! The hussy has been amusing herself!"\r
-\r
-"Madame," said Cosette, trembling all over, "here's a gentleman who\r
-wants a lodging."\r
-\r
-The Thenardier speedily replaced her gruff air by her amiable grimace,\r
-a change of aspect common to tavern-keepers, and eagerly sought the\r
-new-comer with her eyes.\r
-\r
-"This is the gentleman?" said she.\r
-\r
-"Yes, Madame," replied the man, raising his hand to his hat.\r
-\r
-Wealthy travellers are not so polite. This gesture, and an inspection\r
-of the stranger's costume and baggage, which the Thenardier passed in\r
-review with one glance, caused the amiable grimace to vanish, and the\r
-gruff mien to reappear. She resumed dryly:--\r
-\r
-"Enter, my good man."\r
-\r
-The "good man" entered. The Thenardier cast a second glance at him, paid\r
-particular attention to his frock-coat, which was absolutely threadbare,\r
-and to his hat, which was a little battered, and, tossing her head,\r
-wrinkling her nose, and screwing up her eyes, she consulted her husband,\r
-who was still drinking with the carters. The husband replied by that\r
-imperceptible movement of the forefinger, which, backed up by an\r
-inflation of the lips, signifies in such cases: A regular beggar.\r
-Thereupon, the Thenardier exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! see here, my good man; I am very sorry, but I have no room left."\r
-\r
-"Put me where you like," said the man; "in the attic, in the stable. I\r
-will pay as though I occupied a room."\r
-\r
-"Forty sous."\r
-\r
-"Forty sous; agreed."\r
-\r
-"Very well, then!"\r
-\r
-"Forty sous!" said a carter, in a low tone, to the Thenardier woman;\r
-"why, the charge is only twenty sous!"\r
-\r
-"It is forty in his case," retorted the Thenardier, in the same tone. "I\r
-don't lodge poor folks for less."\r
-\r
-"That's true," added her husband, gently; "it ruins a house to have such\r
-people in it."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the man, laying his bundle and his cudgel on a bench,\r
-had seated himself at a table, on which Cosette made haste to place a\r
-bottle of wine and a glass. The merchant who had demanded the bucket of\r
-water took it to his horse himself. Cosette resumed her place under the\r
-kitchen table, and her knitting.\r
-\r
-The man, who had barely moistened his lips in the wine which he had\r
-poured out for himself, observed the child with peculiar attention.\r
-\r
-Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty. We\r
-have already given a sketch of that sombre little figure. Cosette was\r
-thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but she seemed to be\r
-hardly six. Her large eyes, sunken in a sort of shadow, were almost put\r
-out with weeping. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual\r
-anguish which is seen in condemned persons and desperately sick people.\r
-Her hands were, as her mother had divined, "ruined with chilblains." The\r
-fire which illuminated her at that moment brought into relief all the\r
-angles of her bones, and rendered her thinness frightfully apparent.\r
-As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of pressing her\r
-knees one against the other. Her entire clothing was but a rag which\r
-would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror in winter.\r
-All she had on was hole-ridden linen, not a scrap of woollen. Her skin\r
-was visible here and there and everywhere black and blue spots could be\r
-descried, which marked the places where the Thenardier woman had touched\r
-her. Her naked legs were thin and red. The hollows in her neck were\r
-enough to make one weep. This child's whole person, her mien, her\r
-attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals which she allowed to\r
-elapse between one word and the next, her glance, her silence, her\r
-slightest gesture, expressed and betrayed one sole idea,--fear.\r
-\r
-Fear was diffused all over her; she was covered with it, so to speak;\r
-fear drew her elbows close to her hips, withdrew her heels under her\r
-petticoat, made her occupy as little space as possible, allowed her only\r
-the breath that was absolutely necessary, and had become what might be\r
-called the habit of her body, admitting of no possible variation except\r
-an increase. In the depths of her eyes there was an astonished nook\r
-where terror lurked.\r
-\r
-Her fear was such, that on her arrival, wet as she was, Cosette did not\r
-dare to approach the fire and dry herself, but sat silently down to her\r
-work again.\r
-\r
-The expression in the glance of that child of eight years was habitually\r
-so gloomy, and at times so tragic, that it seemed at certain moments as\r
-though she were on the verge of becoming an idiot or a demon.\r
-\r
-As we have stated, she had never known what it is to pray; she had never\r
-set foot in a church. "Have I the time?" said the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-The man in the yellow coat never took his eyes from Cosette.\r
-\r
-All at once, the Thenardier exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"By the way, where's that bread?"\r
-\r
-Cosette, according to her custom whenever the Thenardier uplifted her\r
-voice, emerged with great haste from beneath the table.\r
-\r
-She had completely forgotten the bread. She had recourse to the\r
-expedient of children who live in a constant state of fear. She lied.\r
-\r
-"Madame, the baker's shop was shut."\r
-\r
-"You should have knocked."\r
-\r
-"I did knock, Madame."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"He did not open the door."\r
-\r
-"I'll find out to-morrow whether that is true," said the Thenardier;\r
-"and if you are telling me a lie, I'll lead you a pretty dance. In the\r
-meantime, give me back my fifteen-sou piece."\r
-\r
-Cosette plunged her hand into the pocket of her apron, and turned green.\r
-The fifteen-sou piece was not there.\r
-\r
-"Ah, come now," said Madame Thenardier, "did you hear me?"\r
-\r
-Cosette turned her pocket inside out; there was nothing in it. What\r
-could have become of that money? The unhappy little creature could not\r
-find a word to say. She was petrified.\r
-\r
-"Have you lost that fifteen-sou piece?" screamed the Thenardier,\r
-hoarsely, "or do you want to rob me of it?"\r
-\r
-At the same time, she stretched out her arm towards the\r
-cat-o'-nine-tails which hung on a nail in the chimney-corner.\r
-\r
-This formidable gesture restored to Cosette sufficient strength to\r
-shriek:--\r
-\r
-"Mercy, Madame, Madame! I will not do so any more!"\r
-\r
-The Thenardier took down the whip.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the fob\r
-of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements. Besides,\r
-the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were not paying\r
-attention to anything.\r
-\r
-Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle\r
-of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude\r
-limbs. The Thenardier raised her arm.\r
-\r
-"Pardon me, Madame," said the man, "but just now I caught sight of\r
-something which had fallen from this little one's apron pocket, and\r
-rolled aside. Perhaps this is it."\r
-\r
-At the same time he bent down and seemed to be searching on the floor\r
-for a moment.\r
-\r
-"Exactly; here it is," he went on, straightening himself up.\r
-\r
-And he held out a silver coin to the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Yes, that's it," said she.\r
-\r
-It was not it, for it was a twenty-sou piece; but the Thenardier found\r
-it to her advantage. She put the coin in her pocket, and confined\r
-herself to casting a fierce glance at the child, accompanied with the\r
-remark, "Don't let this ever happen again!"\r
-\r
-Cosette returned to what the Thenardier called "her kennel," and her\r
-large eyes, which were riveted on the traveller, began to take on an\r
-expression such as they had never worn before. Thus far it was only an\r
-innocent amazement, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with\r
-it.\r
-\r
-"By the way, would you like some supper?" the Thenardier inquired of the\r
-traveller.\r
-\r
-He made no reply. He appeared to be absorbed in thought.\r
-\r
-"What sort of a man is that?" she muttered between her teeth. "He's some\r
-frightfully poor wretch. He hasn't a sou to pay for a supper. Will he\r
-even pay me for his lodging? It's very lucky, all the same, that it did\r
-not occur to him to steal the money that was on the floor."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, a door had opened, and Eponine and Azelma entered.\r
-\r
-They were two really pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant\r
-in looks, and very charming; the one with shining chestnut tresses,\r
-the other with long black braids hanging down her back, both vivacious,\r
-neat, plump, rosy, and healthy, and a delight to the eye. They were\r
-warmly clad, but with so much maternal art that the thickness of the\r
-stuffs did not detract from the coquetry of arrangement. There was a\r
-hint of winter, though the springtime was not wholly effaced. Light\r
-emanated from these two little beings. Besides this, they were on the\r
-throne. In their toilettes, in their gayety, in the noise which they\r
-made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, the Thenardier said to\r
-them in a grumbling tone which was full of adoration, "Ah! there you\r
-are, you children!"\r
-\r
-Then drawing them, one after the other to her knees, smoothing their\r
-hair, tying their ribbons afresh, and then releasing them with\r
-that gentle manner of shaking off which is peculiar to mothers, she\r
-exclaimed, "What frights they are!"\r
-\r
-They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner. They had a doll,\r
-which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyous\r
-chatter. From time to time Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting,\r
-and watched their play with a melancholy air.\r
-\r
-Eponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was the same as a dog\r
-to them. These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty\r
-years between them, but they already represented the whole society of\r
-man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.\r
-\r
-The doll of the Thenardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and\r
-much broken; but it seemed none the less admirable to Cosette, who had\r
-never had a doll in her life, a real doll, to make use of the expression\r
-which all children will understand.\r
-\r
-All at once, the Thenardier, who had been going back and forth in the\r
-room, perceived that Cosette's mind was distracted, and that, instead of\r
-working, she was paying attention to the little ones at their play.\r
-\r
-"Ah! I've caught you at it!" she cried. "So that's the way you work!\r
-I'll make you work to the tune of the whip; that I will."\r
-\r
-The stranger turned to the Thenardier, without quitting his chair.\r
-\r
-"Bah, Madame," he said, with an almost timid air, "let her play!"\r
-\r
-Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice of mutton and\r
-had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with his supper, and who had not\r
-the air of being frightfully poor, would have been equivalent to an\r
-order. But that a man with such a hat should permit himself such a\r
-desire, and that a man with such a coat should permit himself to have a\r
-will, was something which Madame Thenardier did not intend to tolerate.\r
-She retorted with acrimony:--\r
-\r
-"She must work, since she eats. I don't feed her to do nothing."\r
-\r
-"What is she making?" went on the stranger, in a gentle voice which\r
-contrasted strangely with his beggarly garments and his porter's\r
-shoulders.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier deigned to reply:--\r
-\r
-"Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls, who have none,\r
-so to speak, and who are absolutely barefoot just now."\r
-\r
-The man looked at Cosette's poor little red feet, and continued:--\r
-\r
-"When will she have finished this pair of stockings?"\r
-\r
-"She has at least three or four good days' work on them still, the lazy\r
-creature!"\r
-\r
-"And how much will that pair of stockings be worth when she has finished\r
-them?"\r
-\r
-The Thenardier cast a glance of disdain on him.\r
-\r
-"Thirty sous at least."\r
-\r
-"Will you sell them for five francs?" went on the man.\r
-\r
-"Good heavens!" exclaimed a carter who was listening, with a loud laugh;\r
-"five francs! the deuce, I should think so! five balls!"\r
-\r
-Thenardier thought it time to strike in.\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir; if such is your fancy, you will be allowed to have that pair\r
-of stockings for five francs. We can refuse nothing to travellers."\r
-\r
-"You must pay on the spot," said the Thenardier, in her curt and\r
-peremptory fashion.\r
-\r
-"I will buy that pair of stockings," replied the man, "and," he added,\r
-drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it on the table,\r
-"I will pay for them."\r
-\r
-Then he turned to Cosette.\r
-\r
-"Now I own your work; play, my child."\r
-\r
-The carter was so much touched by the five-franc piece, that he\r
-abandoned his glass and hastened up.\r
-\r
-"But it's true!" he cried, examining it. "A real hind wheel! and not\r
-counterfeit!"\r
-\r
-Thenardier approached and silently put the coin in his pocket.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier had no reply to make. She bit her lips, and her face\r
-assumed an expression of hatred.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Cosette was trembling. She ventured to ask:--\r
-\r
-"Is it true, Madame? May I play?"\r
-\r
-"Play!" said the Thenardier, in a terrible voice.\r
-\r
-"Thanks, Madame," said Cosette.\r
-\r
-And while her mouth thanked the Thenardier, her whole little soul\r
-thanked the traveller.\r
-\r
-Thenardier had resumed his drinking; his wife whispered in his ear:--\r
-\r
-"Who can this yellow man be?"\r
-\r
-"I have seen millionaires with coats like that," replied Thenardier, in\r
-a sovereign manner.\r
-\r
-Cosette had dropped her knitting, but had not left her seat. Cosette\r
-always moved as little as possible. She picked up some old rags and her\r
-little lead sword from a box behind her.\r
-\r
-Eponine and Azelma paid no attention to what was going on. They had just\r
-executed a very important operation; they had just got hold of the\r
-cat. They had thrown their doll on the ground, and Eponine, who was\r
-the elder, was swathing the little cat, in spite of its mewing and its\r
-contortions, in a quantity of clothes and red and blue scraps. While\r
-performing this serious and difficult work she was saying to her sister\r
-in that sweet and adorable language of children, whose grace, like the\r
-splendor of the butterfly's wing, vanishes when one essays to fix it\r
-fast.\r
-\r
-"You see, sister, this doll is more amusing than the other. She twists,\r
-she cries, she is warm. See, sister, let us play with her. She shall be\r
-my little girl. I will be a lady. I will come to see you, and you shall\r
-look at her. Gradually, you will perceive her whiskers, and that will\r
-surprise you. And then you will see her ears, and then you will see her\r
-tail and it will amaze you. And you will say to me, 'Ah! Mon Dieu!' and\r
-I will say to you: 'Yes, Madame, it is my little girl. Little girls are\r
-made like that just at present.'"\r
-\r
-Azelma listened admiringly to Eponine.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the drinkers had begun to sing an obscene song, and\r
-to laugh at it until the ceiling shook. Thenardier accompanied and\r
-encouraged them.\r
-\r
-As birds make nests out of everything, so children make a doll out of\r
-anything which comes to hand. While Eponine and Azelma were bundling up\r
-the cat, Cosette, on her side, had dressed up her sword. That done, she\r
-laid it in her arms, and sang to it softly, to lull it to sleep.\r
-\r
-The doll is one of the most imperious needs and, at the same time, one\r
-of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, to\r
-clothe, to deck, to dress, to undress, to redress, to teach, scold a\r
-little, to rock, to dandle, to lull to sleep, to imagine that something\r
-is some one,--therein lies the whole woman's future. While dreaming and\r
-chattering, making tiny outfits, and baby clothes, while sewing little\r
-gowns, and corsages and bodices, the child grows into a young girl, the\r
-young girl into a big girl, the big girl into a woman. The first child\r
-is the continuation of the last doll.\r
-\r
-A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as\r
-impossible, as a woman without children.\r
-\r
-So Cosette had made herself a doll out of the sword.\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier approached the yellow man; "My husband is right," she\r
-thought; "perhaps it is M. Laffitte; there are such queer rich men!"\r
-\r
-She came and set her elbows on the table.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," said she. At this word, Monsieur, the man turned; up to that\r
-time, the Thenardier had addressed him only as brave homme or bonhomme.\r
-\r
-"You see, sir," she pursued, assuming a sweetish air that was even more\r
-repulsive to behold than her fierce mien, "I am willing that the child\r
-should play; I do not oppose it, but it is good for once, because you\r
-are generous. You see, she has nothing; she must needs work."\r
-\r
-"Then this child is not yours?" demanded the man.\r
-\r
-"Oh! mon Dieu! no, sir! she is a little beggar whom we have taken in\r
-through charity; a sort of imbecile child. She must have water on the\r
-brain; she has a large head, as you see. We do what we can for her, for\r
-we are not rich; we have written in vain to her native place, and have\r
-received no reply these six months. It must be that her mother is dead."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said the man, and fell into his revery once more.\r
-\r
-"Her mother didn't amount to much," added the Thenardier; "she abandoned\r
-her child."\r
-\r
-During the whole of this conversation Cosette, as though warned by some\r
-instinct that she was under discussion, had not taken her eyes from the\r
-Thenardier's face; she listened vaguely; she caught a few words here and\r
-there.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, the drinkers, all three-quarters intoxicated, were repeating\r
-their unclean refrain with redoubled gayety; it was a highly spiced and\r
-wanton song, in which the Virgin and the infant Jesus were introduced.\r
-The Thenardier went off to take part in the shouts of laughter. Cosette,\r
-from her post under the table, gazed at the fire, which was reflected\r
-from her fixed eyes. She had begun to rock the sort of baby which she\r
-had made, and, as she rocked it, she sang in a low voice, "My mother is\r
-dead! my mother is dead! my mother is dead!"\r
-\r
-On being urged afresh by the hostess, the yellow man, "the millionaire,"\r
-consented at last to take supper.\r
-\r
-"What does Monsieur wish?"\r
-\r
-"Bread and cheese," said the man.\r
-\r
-"Decidedly, he is a beggar" thought Madame Thenardier.\r
-\r
-The drunken men were still singing their song, and the child under the\r
-table was singing hers.\r
-\r
-All at once, Cosette paused; she had just turned round and caught sight\r
-of the little Thenardiers' doll, which they had abandoned for the cat\r
-and had left on the floor a few paces from the kitchen table.\r
-\r
-Then she dropped the swaddled sword, which only half met her needs, and\r
-cast her eyes slowly round the room. Madame Thenardier was whispering to\r
-her husband and counting over some money; Ponine and Zelma were playing\r
-with the cat; the travellers were eating or drinking or singing; not\r
-a glance was fixed on her. She had not a moment to lose; she crept out\r
-from under the table on her hands and knees, made sure once more that no\r
-one was watching her; then she slipped quickly up to the doll and seized\r
-it. An instant later she was in her place again, seated motionless, and\r
-only turned so as to cast a shadow on the doll which she held in her\r
-arms. The happiness of playing with a doll was so rare for her that it\r
-contained all the violence of voluptuousness.\r
-\r
-No one had seen her, except the traveller, who was slowly devouring his\r
-meagre supper.\r
-\r
-This joy lasted about a quarter of an hour.\r
-\r
-But with all the precautions that Cosette had taken she did not perceive\r
-that one of the doll's legs stuck out and that the fire on the hearth\r
-lighted it up very vividly. That pink and shining foot, projecting from\r
-the shadow, suddenly struck the eye of Azelma, who said to Eponine,\r
-"Look! sister."\r
-\r
-The two little girls paused in stupefaction; Cosette had dared to take\r
-their doll!\r
-\r
-Eponine rose, and, without releasing the cat, she ran to her mother, and\r
-began to tug at her skirt.\r
-\r
-"Let me alone!" said her mother; "what do you want?"\r
-\r
-"Mother," said the child, "look there!"\r
-\r
-And she pointed to Cosette.\r
-\r
-Cosette, absorbed in the ecstasies of possession, no longer saw or heard\r
-anything.\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier's countenance assumed that peculiar expression which\r
-is composed of the terrible mingled with the trifles of life, and which\r
-has caused this style of woman to be named megaeras.\r
-\r
-On this occasion, wounded pride exasperated her wrath still further.\r
-Cosette had overstepped all bounds; Cosette had laid violent hands on\r
-the doll belonging to "these young ladies." A czarina who should see\r
-a muzhik trying on her imperial son's blue ribbon would wear no other\r
-face.\r
-\r
-She shrieked in a voice rendered hoarse with indignation:--\r
-\r
-"Cosette!"\r
-\r
-Cosette started as though the earth had trembled beneath her; she turned\r
-round.\r
-\r
-"Cosette!" repeated the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Cosette took the doll and laid it gently on the floor with a sort of\r
-veneration, mingled with despair; then, without taking her eyes from\r
-it, she clasped her hands, and, what is terrible to relate of a child\r
-of that age, she wrung them; then--not one of the emotions of the day,\r
-neither the trip to the forest, nor the weight of the bucket of water,\r
-nor the loss of the money, nor the sight of the whip, nor even the sad\r
-words which she had heard Madame Thenardier utter had been able to wring\r
-this from her--she wept; she burst out sobbing.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, the traveller had risen to his feet.\r
-\r
-"What is the matter?" he said to the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Don't you see?" said the Thenardier, pointing to the corpus delicti\r
-which lay at Cosette's feet.\r
-\r
-"Well, what of it?" resumed the man.\r
-\r
-"That beggar," replied the Thenardier, "has permitted herself to touch\r
-the children's doll!"\r
-\r
-"All this noise for that!" said the man; "well, what if she did play\r
-with that doll?"\r
-\r
-"She touched it with her dirty hands!" pursued the Thenardier, "with her\r
-frightful hands!"\r
-\r
-Here Cosette redoubled her sobs.\r
-\r
-"Will you stop your noise?" screamed the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-The man went straight to the street door, opened it, and stepped out.\r
-\r
-As soon as he had gone, the Thenardier profited by his absence to give\r
-Cosette a hearty kick under the table, which made the child utter loud\r
-cries.\r
-\r
-The door opened again, the man re-appeared; he carried in both hands the\r
-fabulous doll which we have mentioned, and which all the village brats\r
-had been staring at ever since the morning, and he set it upright in\r
-front of Cosette, saying:--\r
-\r
-"Here; this is for you."\r
-\r
-It must be supposed that in the course of the hour and more which he had\r
-spent there he had taken confused notice through his revery of that\r
-toy shop, lighted up by fire-pots and candles so splendidly that it was\r
-visible like an illumination through the window of the drinking-shop.\r
-\r
-Cosette raised her eyes; she gazed at the man approaching her with that\r
-doll as she might have gazed at the sun; she heard the unprecedented\r
-words, "It is for you"; she stared at him; she stared at the doll; then\r
-she slowly retreated, and hid herself at the extreme end, under the\r
-table in a corner of the wall.\r
-\r
-She no longer cried; she no longer wept; she had the appearance of no\r
-longer daring to breathe.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier, Eponine, and Azelma were like statues also; the very\r
-drinkers had paused; a solemn silence reigned through the whole room.\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier, petrified and mute, recommenced her conjectures: "Who\r
-is that old fellow? Is he a poor man? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps he is\r
-both; that is to say, a thief."\r
-\r
-The face of the male Thenardier presented that expressive fold which\r
-accentuates the human countenance whenever the dominant instinct appears\r
-there in all its bestial force. The tavern-keeper stared alternately at\r
-the doll and at the traveller; he seemed to be scenting out the man, as\r
-he would have scented out a bag of money. This did not last longer than\r
-the space of a flash of lightning. He stepped up to his wife and said to\r
-her in a low voice:--\r
-\r
-"That machine costs at least thirty francs. No nonsense. Down on your\r
-belly before that man!"\r
-\r
-Gross natures have this in common with naive natures, that they possess\r
-no transition state.\r
-\r
-"Well, Cosette," said the Thenardier, in a voice that strove to be\r
-sweet, and which was composed of the bitter honey of malicious women,\r
-"aren't you going to take your doll?"\r
-\r
-Cosette ventured to emerge from her hole.\r
-\r
-"The gentleman has given you a doll, my little Cosette," said\r
-Thenardier, with a caressing air. "Take it; it is yours."\r
-\r
-Cosette gazed at the marvellous doll in a sort of terror. Her face was\r
-still flooded with tears, but her eyes began to fill, like the sky at\r
-daybreak, with strange beams of joy. What she felt at that moment was\r
-a little like what she would have felt if she had been abruptly told,\r
-"Little one, you are the Queen of France."\r
-\r
-It seemed to her that if she touched that doll, lightning would dart\r
-from it.\r
-\r
-This was true, up to a certain point, for she said to herself that the\r
-Thenardier would scold and beat her.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, the attraction carried the day. She ended by drawing near\r
-and murmuring timidly as she turned towards Madame Thenardier:--\r
-\r
-"May I, Madame?"\r
-\r
-No words can render that air, at once despairing, terrified, and\r
-ecstatic.\r
-\r
-"Pardi!" cried the Thenardier, "it is yours. The gentleman has given it\r
-to you."\r
-\r
-"Truly, sir?" said Cosette. "Is it true? Is the 'lady' mine?"\r
-\r
-The stranger's eyes seemed to be full of tears. He appeared to have\r
-reached that point of emotion where a man does not speak for fear lest\r
-he should weep. He nodded to Cosette, and placed the "lady's" hand in\r
-her tiny hand.\r
-\r
-Cosette hastily withdrew her hand, as though that of the "lady" scorched\r
-her, and began to stare at the floor. We are forced to add that at that\r
-moment she stuck out her tongue immoderately. All at once she wheeled\r
-round and seized the doll in a transport.\r
-\r
-"I shall call her Catherine," she said.\r
-\r
-It was an odd moment when Cosette's rags met and clasped the ribbons and\r
-fresh pink muslins of the doll.\r
-\r
-"Madame," she resumed, "may I put her on a chair?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, my child," replied the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-It was now the turn of Eponine and Azelma to gaze at Cosette with envy.\r
-\r
-Cosette placed Catherine on a chair, then seated herself on the floor\r
-in front of her, and remained motionless, without uttering a word, in an\r
-attitude of contemplation.\r
-\r
-"Play, Cosette," said the stranger.\r
-\r
-"Oh! I am playing," returned the child.\r
-\r
-This stranger, this unknown individual, who had the air of a visit which\r
-Providence was making on Cosette, was the person whom the Thenardier\r
-hated worse than any one in the world at that moment. However, it was\r
-necessary to control herself. Habituated as she was to dissimulation\r
-through endeavoring to copy her husband in all his actions, these\r
-emotions were more than she could endure. She made haste to send her\r
-daughters to bed, then she asked the man's permission to send Cosette\r
-off also; "for she has worked hard all day," she added with a maternal\r
-air. Cosette went off to bed, carrying Catherine in her arms.\r
-\r
-From time to time the Thenardier went to the other end of the room where\r
-her husband was, to relieve her soul, as she said. She exchanged with\r
-her husband words which were all the more furious because she dared not\r
-utter them aloud.\r
-\r
-"Old beast! What has he got in his belly, to come and upset us in this\r
-manner! To want that little monster to play! to give away forty-franc\r
-dolls to a jade that I would sell for forty sous, so I would! A little\r
-more and he will be saying Your Majesty to her, as though to the Duchess\r
-de Berry! Is there any sense in it? Is he mad, then, that mysterious old\r
-fellow?"\r
-\r
-"Why! it is perfectly simple," replied Thenardier, "if that amuses him!\r
-It amuses you to have the little one work; it amuses him to have her\r
-play. He's all right. A traveller can do what he pleases when he pays\r
-for it. If the old fellow is a philanthropist, what is that to you? If\r
-he is an imbecile, it does not concern you. What are you worrying for,\r
-so long as he has money?"\r
-\r
-The language of a master, and the reasoning of an innkeeper, neither of\r
-which admitted of any reply.\r
-\r
-The man had placed his elbows on the table, and resumed his thoughtful\r
-attitude. All the other travellers, both pedlers and carters, had\r
-withdrawn a little, and had ceased singing. They were staring at him\r
-from a distance, with a sort of respectful awe. This poorly dressed\r
-man, who drew "hind-wheels" from his pocket with so much ease, and\r
-who lavished gigantic dolls on dirty little brats in wooden shoes, was\r
-certainly a magnificent fellow, and one to be feared.\r
-\r
-Many hours passed. The midnight mass was over, the chimes had ceased,\r
-the drinkers had taken their departure, the drinking-shop was closed,\r
-the public room was deserted, the fire extinct, the stranger still\r
-remained in the same place and the same attitude. From time to time he\r
-changed the elbow on which he leaned. That was all; but he had not said\r
-a word since Cosette had left the room.\r
-\r
-The Thenardiers alone, out of politeness and curiosity, had remained in\r
-the room.\r
-\r
-"Is he going to pass the night in that fashion?" grumbled the\r
-Thenardier. When two o'clock in the morning struck, she declared herself\r
-vanquished, and said to her husband, "I'm going to bed. Do as you like."\r
-Her husband seated himself at a table in the corner, lighted a candle,\r
-and began to read the Courrier Francais.\r
-\r
-A good hour passed thus. The worthy inn-keeper had perused the Courrier\r
-Francais at least three times, from the date of the number to the\r
-printer's name. The stranger did not stir.\r
-\r
-Thenardier fidgeted, coughed, spit, blew his nose, and creaked his\r
-chair. Not a movement on the man's part. "Is he asleep?" thought\r
-Thenardier. The man was not asleep, but nothing could arouse him.\r
-\r
-At last Thenardier took off his cap, stepped gently up to him, and\r
-ventured to say:--\r
-\r
-"Is not Monsieur going to his repose?"\r
-\r
-Not going to bed would have seemed to him excessive and familiar. To\r
-repose smacked of luxury and respect. These words possess the mysterious\r
-and admirable property of swelling the bill on the following day. A\r
-chamber where one sleeps costs twenty sous; a chamber in which one\r
-reposes costs twenty francs.\r
-\r
-"Well!" said the stranger, "you are right. Where is your stable?"\r
-\r
-"Sir!" exclaimed Thenardier, with a smile, "I will conduct you, sir."\r
-\r
-He took the candle; the man picked up his bundle and cudgel, and\r
-Thenardier conducted him to a chamber on the first floor, which was of\r
-rare splendor, all furnished in mahogany, with a low bedstead, curtained\r
-with red calico.\r
-\r
-"What is this?" said the traveller.\r
-\r
-"It is really our bridal chamber," said the tavern-keeper. "My wife and\r
-I occupy another. This is only entered three or four times a year."\r
-\r
-"I should have liked the stable quite as well," said the man, abruptly.\r
-\r
-Thenardier pretended not to hear this unamiable remark.\r
-\r
-He lighted two perfectly fresh wax candles which figured on the\r
-chimney-piece. A very good fire was flickering on the hearth.\r
-\r
-On the chimney-piece, under a glass globe, stood a woman's head-dress in\r
-silver wire and orange flowers.\r
-\r
-"And what is this?" resumed the stranger.\r
-\r
-"That, sir," said Thenardier, "is my wife's wedding bonnet."\r
-\r
-The traveller surveyed the object with a glance which seemed to say,\r
-"There really was a time, then, when that monster was a maiden?"\r
-\r
-Thenardier lied, however. When he had leased this paltry building for\r
-the purpose of converting it into a tavern, he had found this chamber\r
-decorated in just this manner, and had purchased the furniture and\r
-obtained the orange flowers at second hand, with the idea that this\r
-would cast a graceful shadow on "his spouse," and would result in what\r
-the English call respectability for his house.\r
-\r
-When the traveller turned round, the host had disappeared. Thenardier\r
-had withdrawn discreetly, without venturing to wish him a good night,\r
-as he did not wish to treat with disrespectful cordiality a man whom he\r
-proposed to fleece royally the following morning.\r
-\r
-The inn-keeper retired to his room. His wife was in bed, but she was not\r
-asleep. When she heard her husband's step she turned over and said to\r
-him:--\r
-\r
-"Do you know, I'm going to turn Cosette out of doors to-morrow."\r
-\r
-Thenardier replied coldly:--\r
-\r
-"How you do go on!"\r
-\r
-They exchanged no further words, and a few moments later their candle\r
-was extinguished.\r
-\r
-As for the traveller, he had deposited his cudgel and his bundle in a\r
-corner. The landlord once gone, he threw himself into an arm-chair and\r
-remained for some time buried in thought. Then he removed his shoes,\r
-took one of the two candles, blew out the other, opened the door, and\r
-quitted the room, gazing about him like a person who is in search of\r
-something. He traversed a corridor and came upon a staircase. There he\r
-heard a very faint and gentle sound like the breathing of a child. He\r
-followed this sound, and came to a sort of triangular recess built under\r
-the staircase, or rather formed by the staircase itself. This recess was\r
-nothing else than the space under the steps. There, in the midst of all\r
-sorts of old papers and potsherds, among dust and spiders' webs, was a\r
-bed--if one can call by the name of bed a straw pallet so full of holes\r
-as to display the straw, and a coverlet so tattered as to show the\r
-pallet. No sheets. This was placed on the floor.\r
-\r
-In this bed Cosette was sleeping.\r
-\r
-The man approached and gazed down upon her.\r
-\r
-Cosette was in a profound sleep; she was fully dressed. In the winter\r
-she did not undress, in order that she might not be so cold.\r
-\r
-Against her breast was pressed the doll, whose large eyes, wide open,\r
-glittered in the dark. From time to time she gave vent to a deep sigh as\r
-though she were on the point of waking, and she strained the doll almost\r
-convulsively in her arms. Beside her bed there was only one of her\r
-wooden shoes.\r
-\r
-A door which stood open near Cosette's pallet permitted a view of a\r
-rather large, dark room. The stranger stepped into it. At the further\r
-extremity, through a glass door, he saw two small, very white beds.\r
-They belonged to Eponine and Azelma. Behind these beds, and half hidden,\r
-stood an uncurtained wicker cradle, in which the little boy who had\r
-cried all the evening lay asleep.\r
-\r
-The stranger conjectured that this chamber connected with that of the\r
-Thenardier pair. He was on the point of retreating when his eye fell\r
-upon the fireplace--one of those vast tavern chimneys where there is\r
-always so little fire when there is any fire at all, and which are\r
-so cold to look at. There was no fire in this one, there was not even\r
-ashes; but there was something which attracted the stranger's gaze,\r
-nevertheless. It was two tiny children's shoes, coquettish in shape\r
-and unequal in size. The traveller recalled the graceful and immemorial\r
-custom in accordance with which children place their shoes in the\r
-chimney on Christmas eve, there to await in the darkness some sparkling\r
-gift from their good fairy. Eponine and Azelma had taken care not to\r
-omit this, and each of them had set one of her shoes on the hearth.\r
-\r
-The traveller bent over them.\r
-\r
-The fairy, that is to say, their mother, had already paid her visit, and\r
-in each he saw a brand-new and shining ten-sou piece.\r
-\r
-The man straightened himself up, and was on the point of withdrawing,\r
-when far in, in the darkest corner of the hearth, he caught sight\r
-of another object. He looked at it, and recognized a wooden shoe, a\r
-frightful shoe of the coarsest description, half dilapidated and all\r
-covered with ashes and dried mud. It was Cosette's sabot. Cosette, with\r
-that touching trust of childhood, which can always be deceived yet never\r
-discouraged, had placed her shoe on the hearth-stone also.\r
-\r
-Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and\r
-touching thing.\r
-\r
-There was nothing in this wooden shoe.\r
-\r
-The stranger fumbled in his waistcoat, bent over and placed a louis d'or\r
-in Cosette's shoe.\r
-\r
-Then he regained his own chamber with the stealthy tread of a wolf.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--THENARDIER AND HIS MANOEUVRES\r
-\r
-On the following morning, two hours at least before day-break,\r
-Thenardier, seated beside a candle in the public room of the tavern, pen\r
-in hand, was making out the bill for the traveller with the yellow coat.\r
-\r
-His wife, standing beside him, and half bent over him, was following\r
-him with her eyes. They exchanged not a word. On the one hand, there was\r
-profound meditation, on the other, the religious admiration with which\r
-one watches the birth and development of a marvel of the human mind. A\r
-noise was audible in the house; it was the Lark sweeping the stairs.\r
-\r
-After the lapse of a good quarter of an hour, and some erasures,\r
-Thenardier produced the following masterpiece:--\r
-\r
- BILL OF THE GENTLEMAN IN No. 1.\r
-\r
- Supper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 francs.\r
- Chamber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 "\r
- Candle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 "\r
- Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 "\r
- Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 "\r
- ----------\r
- Total . . . . . . 23 francs.\r
-\r
-\r
-Service was written servisse.\r
-\r
-"Twenty-three francs!" cried the woman, with an enthusiasm which was\r
-mingled with some hesitation.\r
-\r
-Like all great artists, Thenardier was dissatisfied.\r
-\r
-"Peuh!" he exclaimed.\r
-\r
-It was the accent of Castlereagh auditing France's bill at the Congress\r
-of Vienna.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Thenardier, you are right; he certainly owes that," murmured\r
-the wife, who was thinking of the doll bestowed on Cosette in the\r
-presence of her daughters. "It is just, but it is too much. He will not\r
-pay it."\r
-\r
-Thenardier laughed coldly, as usual, and said:--\r
-\r
-"He will pay."\r
-\r
-This laugh was the supreme assertion of certainty and authority. That\r
-which was asserted in this manner must needs be so. His wife did not\r
-insist.\r
-\r
-She set about arranging the table; her husband paced the room. A moment\r
-later he added:--\r
-\r
-"I owe full fifteen hundred francs!"\r
-\r
-He went and seated himself in the chimney-corner, meditating, with his\r
-feet among the warm ashes.\r
-\r
-"Ah! by the way," resumed his wife, "you don't forget that I'm going to\r
-turn Cosette out of doors to-day? The monster! She breaks my heart with\r
-that doll of hers! I'd rather marry Louis XVIII. than keep her another\r
-day in the house!"\r
-\r
-Thenardier lighted his pipe, and replied between two puffs:--\r
-\r
-"You will hand that bill to the man."\r
-\r
-Then he went out.\r
-\r
-Hardly had he left the room when the traveller entered.\r
-\r
-Thenardier instantly reappeared behind him and remained motionless in\r
-the half-open door, visible only to his wife.\r
-\r
-The yellow man carried his bundle and his cudgel in his hand.\r
-\r
-"Up so early?" said Madame Thenardier; "is Monsieur leaving us already?"\r
-\r
-As she spoke thus, she was twisting the bill about in her hands with an\r
-embarrassed air, and making creases in it with her nails. Her hard\r
-face presented a shade which was not habitual with it,--timidity and\r
-scruples.\r
-\r
-To present such a bill to a man who had so completely the air "of a poor\r
-wretch" seemed difficult to her.\r
-\r
-The traveller appeared to be preoccupied and absent-minded. He\r
-replied:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, Madame, I am going."\r
-\r
-"So Monsieur has no business in Montfermeil?"\r
-\r
-"No, I was passing through. That is all. What do I owe you, Madame," he\r
-added.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier silently handed him the folded bill.\r
-\r
-The man unfolded the paper and glanced at it; but his thoughts were\r
-evidently elsewhere.\r
-\r
-"Madame," he resumed, "is business good here in Montfermeil?"\r
-\r
-"So so, Monsieur," replied the Thenardier, stupefied at not witnessing\r
-another sort of explosion.\r
-\r
-She continued, in a dreary and lamentable tone:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! Monsieur, times are so hard! and then, we have so few bourgeois in\r
-the neighborhood! All the people are poor, you see. If we had not, now\r
-and then, some rich and generous travellers like Monsieur, we should\r
-not get along at all. We have so many expenses. Just see, that child is\r
-costing us our very eyes."\r
-\r
-"What child?"\r
-\r
-"Why, the little one, you know! Cosette--the Lark, as she is called\r
-hereabouts!"\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said the man.\r
-\r
-She went on:--\r
-\r
-"How stupid these peasants are with their nicknames! She has more the\r
-air of a bat than of a lark. You see, sir, we do not ask charity, and we\r
-cannot bestow it. We earn nothing and we have to pay out a great deal.\r
-The license, the imposts, the door and window tax, the hundredths!\r
-Monsieur is aware that the government demands a terrible deal of money.\r
-And then, I have my daughters. I have no need to bring up other people's\r
-children."\r
-\r
-The man resumed, in that voice which he strove to render indifferent,\r
-and in which there lingered a tremor:--\r
-\r
-"What if one were to rid you of her?"\r
-\r
-"Who? Cosette?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-The landlady's red and violent face brightened up hideously.\r
-\r
-"Ah! sir, my dear sir, take her, keep her, lead her off, carry her\r
-away, sugar her, stuff her with truffles, drink her, eat her, and the\r
-blessings of the good holy Virgin and of all the saints of paradise be\r
-upon you!"\r
-\r
-"Agreed."\r
-\r
-"Really! You will take her away?"\r
-\r
-"I will take her away."\r
-\r
-"Immediately?"\r
-\r
-"Immediately. Call the child."\r
-\r
-"Cosette!" screamed the Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"In the meantime," pursued the man, "I will pay you what I owe you. How\r
-much is it?"\r
-\r
-He cast a glance on the bill, and could not restrain a start of\r
-surprise:--\r
-\r
-"Twenty-three francs!"\r
-\r
-He looked at the landlady, and repeated:--\r
-\r
-"Twenty-three francs?"\r
-\r
-There was in the enunciation of these words, thus repeated, an accent\r
-between an exclamation and an interrogation point.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier had had time to prepare herself for the shock. She\r
-replied, with assurance:--\r
-\r
-"Good gracious, yes, sir, it is twenty-three francs."\r
-\r
-The stranger laid five five-franc pieces on the table.\r
-\r
-"Go and get the child," said he.\r
-\r
-At that moment Thenardier advanced to the middle of the room, and\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur owes twenty-six sous."\r
-\r
-"Twenty-six sous!" exclaimed his wife.\r
-\r
-"Twenty sous for the chamber," resumed Thenardier, coldly, "and six sous\r
-for his supper. As for the child, I must discuss that matter a little\r
-with the gentleman. Leave us, wife."\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier was dazzled as with the shock caused by unexpected\r
-lightning flashes of talent. She was conscious that a great actor was\r
-making his entrance on the stage, uttered not a word in reply, and left\r
-the room.\r
-\r
-As soon as they were alone, Thenardier offered the traveller a chair.\r
-The traveller seated himself; Thenardier remained standing, and his face\r
-assumed a singular expression of good-fellowship and simplicity.\r
-\r
-"Sir," said he, "what I have to say to you is this, that I adore that\r
-child."\r
-\r
-The stranger gazed intently at him.\r
-\r
-"What child?"\r
-\r
-Thenardier continued:--\r
-\r
-"How strange it is, one grows attached. What money is that? Take back\r
-your hundred-sou piece. I adore the child."\r
-\r
-"Whom do you mean?" demanded the stranger.\r
-\r
-"Eh! our little Cosette! Are you not intending to take her away from\r
-us? Well, I speak frankly; as true as you are an honest man, I will not\r
-consent to it. I shall miss that child. I saw her first when she was a\r
-tiny thing. It is true that she costs us money; it is true that she has\r
-her faults; it is true that we are not rich; it is true that I have paid\r
-out over four hundred francs for drugs for just one of her illnesses!\r
-But one must do something for the good God's sake. She has neither\r
-father nor mother. I have brought her up. I have bread enough for\r
-her and for myself. In truth, I think a great deal of that child. You\r
-understand, one conceives an affection for a person; I am a good sort\r
-of a beast, I am; I do not reason; I love that little girl; my wife is\r
-quick-tempered, but she loves her also. You see, she is just the same as\r
-our own child. I want to keep her to babble about the house."\r
-\r
-The stranger kept his eye intently fixed on Thenardier. The latter\r
-continued:--\r
-\r
-"Excuse me, sir, but one does not give away one's child to a passer-by,\r
-like that. I am right, am I not? Still, I don't say--you are rich; you\r
-have the air of a very good man,--if it were for her happiness. But one\r
-must find out that. You understand: suppose that I were to let her go\r
-and to sacrifice myself, I should like to know what becomes of her; I\r
-should not wish to lose sight of her; I should like to know with whom\r
-she is living, so that I could go to see her from time to time; so that\r
-she may know that her good foster-father is alive, that he is watching\r
-over her. In short, there are things which are not possible. I do not\r
-even know your name. If you were to take her away, I should say: 'Well,\r
-and the Lark, what has become of her?' One must, at least, see some\r
-petty scrap of paper, some trifle in the way of a passport, you know!"\r
-\r
-The stranger, still surveying him with that gaze which penetrates, as\r
-the saying goes, to the very depths of the conscience, replied in a\r
-grave, firm voice:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Thenardier, one does not require a passport to travel five\r
-leagues from Paris. If I take Cosette away, I shall take her away, and\r
-that is the end of the matter. You will not know my name, you will not\r
-know my residence, you will not know where she is; and my intention is\r
-that she shall never set eyes on you again so long as she lives. I break\r
-the thread which binds her foot, and she departs. Does that suit you?\r
-Yes or no?"\r
-\r
-Since geniuses, like demons, recognize the presence of a superior God by\r
-certain signs, Thenardier comprehended that he had to deal with a very\r
-strong person. It was like an intuition; he comprehended it with his\r
-clear and sagacious promptitude. While drinking with the carters,\r
-smoking, and singing coarse songs on the preceding evening, he had\r
-devoted the whole of the time to observing the stranger, watching him\r
-like a cat, and studying him like a mathematician. He had watched him,\r
-both on his own account, for the pleasure of the thing, and through\r
-instinct, and had spied upon him as though he had been paid for so\r
-doing. Not a movement, not a gesture, on the part of the man in the\r
-yellow great-coat had escaped him. Even before the stranger had so\r
-clearly manifested his interest in Cosette, Thenardier had divined his\r
-purpose. He had caught the old man's deep glances returning constantly\r
-to the child. Who was this man? Why this interest? Why this hideous\r
-costume, when he had so much money in his purse? Questions which he put\r
-to himself without being able to solve them, and which irritated him. He\r
-had pondered it all night long. He could not be Cosette's father. Was he\r
-her grandfather? Then why not make himself known at once? When one has\r
-a right, one asserts it. This man evidently had no right over Cosette.\r
-What was it, then? Thenardier lost himself in conjectures. He caught\r
-glimpses of everything, but he saw nothing. Be that as it may, on\r
-entering into conversation with the man, sure that there was some secret\r
-in the case, that the latter had some interest in remaining in the\r
-shadow, he felt himself strong; when he perceived from the stranger's\r
-clear and firm retort, that this mysterious personage was mysterious in\r
-so simple a way, he became conscious that he was weak. He had expected\r
-nothing of the sort. His conjectures were put to the rout. He rallied\r
-his ideas. He weighed everything in the space of a second. Thenardier\r
-was one of those men who take in a situation at a glance. He decided\r
-that the moment had arrived for proceeding straightforward, and quickly\r
-at that. He did as great leaders do at the decisive moment, which they\r
-know that they alone recognize; he abruptly unmasked his batteries.\r
-\r
-"Sir," said he, "I am in need of fifteen hundred francs."\r
-\r
-The stranger took from his side pocket an old pocketbook of black\r
-leather, opened it, drew out three bank-bills, which he laid on the\r
-table. Then he placed his large thumb on the notes and said to the\r
-inn-keeper:--\r
-\r
-"Go and fetch Cosette."\r
-\r
-While this was taking place, what had Cosette been doing?\r
-\r
-On waking up, Cosette had run to get her shoe. In it she had found the\r
-gold piece. It was not a Napoleon; it was one of those perfectly new\r
-twenty-franc pieces of the Restoration, on whose effigy the little\r
-Prussian queue had replaced the laurel wreath. Cosette was dazzled. Her\r
-destiny began to intoxicate her. She did not know what a gold piece was;\r
-she had never seen one; she hid it quickly in her pocket, as though\r
-she had stolen it. Still, she felt that it really was hers; she guessed\r
-whence her gift had come, but the joy which she experienced was full of\r
-fear. She was happy; above all she was stupefied. Such magnificent and\r
-beautiful things did not appear real. The doll frightened her, the\r
-gold piece frightened her. She trembled vaguely in the presence of this\r
-magnificence. The stranger alone did not frighten her. On the contrary,\r
-he reassured her. Ever since the preceding evening, amid all her\r
-amazement, even in her sleep, she had been thinking in her little\r
-childish mind of that man who seemed to be so poor and so sad, and who\r
-was so rich and so kind. Everything had changed for her since she had\r
-met that good man in the forest. Cosette, less happy than the most\r
-insignificant swallow of heaven, had never known what it was to take\r
-refuge under a mother's shadow and under a wing. For the last five\r
-years, that is to say, as far back as her memory ran, the poor child had\r
-shivered and trembled. She had always been exposed completely naked\r
-to the sharp wind of adversity; now it seemed to her she was clothed.\r
-Formerly her soul had seemed cold, now it was warm. Cosette was no\r
-longer afraid of the Thenardier. She was no longer alone; there was some\r
-one there.\r
-\r
-She hastily set about her regular morning duties. That louis, which she\r
-had about her, in the very apron pocket whence the fifteen-sou piece had\r
-fallen on the night before, distracted her thoughts. She dared not touch\r
-it, but she spent five minutes in gazing at it, with her tongue hanging\r
-out, if the truth must be told. As she swept the staircase, she paused,\r
-remained standing there motionless, forgetful of her broom and of the\r
-entire universe, occupied in gazing at that star which was blazing at\r
-the bottom of her pocket.\r
-\r
-It was during one of these periods of contemplation that the Thenardier\r
-joined her. She had gone in search of Cosette at her husband's orders.\r
-What was quite unprecedented, she neither struck her nor said an\r
-insulting word to her.\r
-\r
-"Cosette," she said, almost gently, "come immediately."\r
-\r
-An instant later Cosette entered the public room.\r
-\r
-The stranger took up the bundle which he had brought and untied it. This\r
-bundle contained a little woollen gown, an apron, a fustian bodice, a\r
-kerchief, a petticoat, woollen stockings, shoes--a complete outfit for a\r
-girl of seven years. All was black.\r
-\r
-"My child," said the man, "take these, and go and dress yourself\r
-quickly."\r
-\r
-Daylight was appearing when those of the inhabitants of Montfermeil who\r
-had begun to open their doors beheld a poorly clad old man leading a\r
-little girl dressed in mourning, and carrying a pink doll in her arms,\r
-pass along the road to Paris. They were going in the direction of Livry.\r
-\r
-It was our man and Cosette.\r
-\r
-No one knew the man; as Cosette was no longer in rags, many did not\r
-recognize her. Cosette was going away. With whom? She did not know.\r
-Whither? She knew not. All that she understood was that she was leaving\r
-the Thenardier tavern behind her. No one had thought of bidding her\r
-farewell, nor had she thought of taking leave of any one. She was\r
-leaving that hated and hating house.\r
-\r
-Poor, gentle creature, whose heart had been repressed up to that hour!\r
-\r
-Cosette walked along gravely, with her large eyes wide open, and gazing\r
-at the sky. She had put her louis in the pocket of her new apron. From\r
-time to time, she bent down and glanced at it; then she looked at the\r
-good man. She felt something as though she were beside the good God.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--HE WHO SEEKS TO BETTER HIMSELF MAY RENDER HIS SITUATION WORSE\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier had allowed her husband to have his own way, as was\r
-her wont. She had expected great results. When the man and Cosette had\r
-taken their departure, Thenardier allowed a full quarter of an hour\r
-to elapse; then he took her aside and showed her the fifteen hundred\r
-francs.\r
-\r
-"Is that all?" said she.\r
-\r
-It was the first time since they had set up housekeeping that she had\r
-dared to criticise one of the master's acts.\r
-\r
-The blow told.\r
-\r
-"You are right, in sooth," said he; "I am a fool. Give me my hat."\r
-\r
-He folded up the three bank-bills, thrust them into his pocket, and ran\r
-out in all haste; but he made a mistake and turned to the right first.\r
-Some neighbors, of whom he made inquiries, put him on the track again;\r
-the Lark and the man had been seen going in the direction of Livry. He\r
-followed these hints, walking with great strides, and talking to himself\r
-the while:--\r
-\r
-"That man is evidently a million dressed in yellow, and I am an animal.\r
-First he gave twenty sous, then five francs, then fifty francs, then\r
-fifteen hundred francs, all with equal readiness. He would have given\r
-fifteen thousand francs. But I shall overtake him."\r
-\r
-And then, that bundle of clothes prepared beforehand for the child; all\r
-that was singular; many mysteries lay concealed under it. One does not\r
-let mysteries out of one's hand when one has once grasped them. The\r
-secrets of the wealthy are sponges of gold; one must know how to subject\r
-them to pressure. All these thoughts whirled through his brain. "I am an\r
-animal," said he.\r
-\r
-When one leaves Montfermeil and reaches the turn which the road takes\r
-that runs to Livry, it can be seen stretching out before one to a great\r
-distance across the plateau. On arriving there, he calculated that he\r
-ought to be able to see the old man and the child. He looked as far as\r
-his vision reached, and saw nothing. He made fresh inquiries, but he had\r
-wasted time. Some passers-by informed him that the man and child of whom\r
-he was in search had gone towards the forest in the direction of Gagny.\r
-He hastened in that direction.\r
-\r
-They were far in advance of him; but a child walks slowly, and he walked\r
-fast; and then, he was well acquainted with the country.\r
-\r
-All at once he paused and dealt himself a blow on his forehead like a\r
-man who has forgotten some essential point and who is ready to retrace\r
-his steps.\r
-\r
-"I ought to have taken my gun," said he to himself.\r
-\r
-Thenardier was one of those double natures which sometimes pass through\r
-our midst without our being aware of the fact, and who disappear without\r
-our finding them out, because destiny has only exhibited one side of\r
-them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a\r
-calm and even situation, Thenardier possessed all that is required to\r
-make--we will not say to be--what people have agreed to call an honest\r
-trader, a good bourgeois. At the same time certain circumstances being\r
-given, certain shocks arriving to bring his under-nature to the surface,\r
-he had all the requisites for a blackguard. He was a shopkeeper in\r
-whom there was some taint of the monster. Satan must have occasionally\r
-crouched down in some corner of the hovel in which Thenardier dwelt, and\r
-have fallen a-dreaming in the presence of this hideous masterpiece.\r
-\r
-After a momentary hesitation:--\r
-\r
-"Bah!" he thought; "they will have time to make their escape."\r
-\r
-And he pursued his road, walking rapidly straight ahead, and with almost\r
-an air of certainty, with the sagacity of a fox scenting a covey of\r
-partridges.\r
-\r
-In truth, when he had passed the ponds and had traversed in an oblique\r
-direction the large clearing which lies on the right of the Avenue de\r
-Bellevue, and reached that turf alley which nearly makes the circuit of\r
-the hill, and covers the arch of the ancient aqueduct of the Abbey of\r
-Chelles, he caught sight, over the top of the brushwood, of the hat on\r
-which he had already erected so many conjectures; it was that man's hat.\r
-The brushwood was not high. Thenardier recognized the fact that the man\r
-and Cosette were sitting there. The child could not be seen on account\r
-of her small size, but the head of her doll was visible.\r
-\r
-Thenardier was not mistaken. The man was sitting there, and letting\r
-Cosette get somewhat rested. The inn-keeper walked round the brushwood\r
-and presented himself abruptly to the eyes of those whom he was in\r
-search of.\r
-\r
-"Pardon, excuse me, sir," he said, quite breathless, "but here are your\r
-fifteen hundred francs."\r
-\r
-So saying, he handed the stranger the three bank-bills.\r
-\r
-The man raised his eyes.\r
-\r
-"What is the meaning of this?"\r
-\r
-Thenardier replied respectfully:--\r
-\r
-"It means, sir, that I shall take back Cosette."\r
-\r
-Cosette shuddered, and pressed close to the old man.\r
-\r
-He replied, gazing to the very bottom of Thenardier's eyes the while,\r
-and enunciating every syllable distinctly:--\r
-\r
-"You are go-ing to take back Co-sette?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir, I am. I will tell you; I have considered the matter. In fact,\r
-I have not the right to give her to you. I am an honest man, you see;\r
-this child does not belong to me; she belongs to her mother. It was her\r
-mother who confided her to me; I can only resign her to her mother. You\r
-will say to me, 'But her mother is dead.' Good; in that case I can only\r
-give the child up to the person who shall bring me a writing, signed by\r
-her mother, to the effect that I am to hand the child over to the person\r
-therein mentioned; that is clear."\r
-\r
-The man, without making any reply, fumbled in his pocket, and Thenardier\r
-beheld the pocket-book of bank-bills make its appearance once more.\r
-\r
-The tavern-keeper shivered with joy.\r
-\r
-"Good!" thought he; "let us hold firm; he is going to bribe me!"\r
-\r
-Before opening the pocket-book, the traveller cast a glance about him:\r
-the spot was absolutely deserted; there was not a soul either in the\r
-woods or in the valley. The man opened his pocket-book once more and\r
-drew from it, not the handful of bills which Thenardier expected, but a\r
-simple little paper, which he unfolded and presented fully open to the\r
-inn-keeper, saying:--\r
-\r
-"You are right; read!"\r
-\r
-Thenardier took the paper and read:--\r
-\r
- "M. SUR M., March 25, 1823.\r
-\r
- "MONSIEUR THENARDIER:--\r
-\r
- You will deliver Cosette to this person.\r
- You will be paid for all the little things.\r
- I have the honor to salute you with respect,\r
- FANTINE."\r
-\r
-"You know that signature?" resumed the man.\r
-\r
-It certainly was Fantine's signature; Thenardier recognized it.\r
-\r
-There was no reply to make; he experienced two violent vexations, the\r
-vexation of renouncing the bribery which he had hoped for, and the\r
-vexation of being beaten; the man added:--\r
-\r
-"You may keep this paper as your receipt."\r
-\r
-Thenardier retreated in tolerably good order.\r
-\r
-"This signature is fairly well imitated," he growled between his teeth;\r
-"however, let it go!"\r
-\r
-Then he essayed a desperate effort.\r
-\r
-"It is well, sir," he said, "since you are the person, but I must be\r
-paid for all those little things. A great deal is owing to me."\r
-\r
-The man rose to his feet, filliping the dust from his thread-bare\r
-sleeve:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Thenardier, in January last, the mother reckoned that she owed\r
-you one hundred and twenty francs. In February, you sent her a bill of\r
-five hundred francs; you received three hundred francs at the end of\r
-February, and three hundred francs at the beginning of March. Since then\r
-nine months have elapsed, at fifteen francs a month, the price agreed\r
-upon, which makes one hundred and thirty-five francs. You had received\r
-one hundred francs too much; that makes thirty-five still owing you. I\r
-have just given you fifteen hundred francs."\r
-\r
-Thenardier's sensations were those of the wolf at the moment when he\r
-feels himself nipped and seized by the steel jaw of the trap.\r
-\r
-"Who is this devil of a man?" he thought.\r
-\r
-He did what the wolf does: he shook himself. Audacity had succeeded with\r
-him once.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur-I-don't-know-your-name," he said resolutely, and this time\r
-casting aside all respectful ceremony, "I shall take back Cosette if you\r
-do not give me a thousand crowns."\r
-\r
-The stranger said tranquilly:--\r
-\r
-"Come, Cosette."\r
-\r
-He took Cosette by his left hand, and with his right he picked up his\r
-cudgel, which was lying on the ground.\r
-\r
-Thenardier noted the enormous size of the cudgel and the solitude of the\r
-spot.\r
-\r
-The man plunged into the forest with the child, leaving the inn-keeper\r
-motionless and speechless.\r
-\r
-While they were walking away, Thenardier scrutinized his huge shoulders,\r
-which were a little rounded, and his great fists.\r
-\r
-Then, bringing his eyes back to his own person, they fell upon his\r
-feeble arms and his thin hands. "I really must have been exceedingly\r
-stupid not to have thought to bring my gun," he said to himself, "since\r
-I was going hunting!"\r
-\r
-However, the inn-keeper did not give up.\r
-\r
-"I want to know where he is going," said he, and he set out to follow\r
-them at a distance. Two things were left on his hands, an irony in\r
-the shape of the paper signed Fantine, and a consolation, the fifteen\r
-hundred francs.\r
-\r
-The man led Cosette off in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He walked\r
-slowly, with drooping head, in an attitude of reflection and sadness.\r
-The winter had thinned out the forest, so that Thenardier did not lose\r
-them from sight, although he kept at a good distance. The man turned\r
-round from time to time, and looked to see if he was being followed.\r
-All at once he caught sight of Thenardier. He plunged suddenly into\r
-the brushwood with Cosette, where they could both hide themselves. "The\r
-deuce!" said Thenardier, and he redoubled his pace.\r
-\r
-The thickness of the undergrowth forced him to draw nearer to them. When\r
-the man had reached the densest part of the thicket, he wheeled\r
-round. It was in vain that Thenardier sought to conceal himself in the\r
-branches; he could not prevent the man seeing him. The man cast upon him\r
-an uneasy glance, then elevated his head and continued his course. The\r
-inn-keeper set out again in pursuit. Thus they continued for two or\r
-three hundred paces. All at once the man turned round once more; he saw\r
-the inn-keeper. This time he gazed at him with so sombre an air that\r
-Thenardier decided that it was "useless" to proceed further. Thenardier\r
-retraced his steps.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--NUMBER 9,430 REAPPEARS, AND COSETTE WINS IT IN THE LOTTERY\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was not dead.\r
-\r
-When he fell into the sea, or rather, when he threw himself into it, he\r
-was not ironed, as we have seen. He swam under water until he reached a\r
-vessel at anchor, to which a boat was moored. He found means of hiding\r
-himself in this boat until night. At night he swam off again, and\r
-reached the shore a little way from Cape Brun. There, as he did not lack\r
-money, he procured clothing. A small country-house in the neighborhood\r
-of Balaguier was at that time the dressing-room of escaped convicts,--a\r
-lucrative specialty. Then Jean Valjean, like all the sorry fugitives\r
-who are seeking to evade the vigilance of the law and social fatality,\r
-pursued an obscure and undulating itinerary. He found his first\r
-refuge at Pradeaux, near Beausset. Then he directed his course towards\r
-Grand-Villard, near Briancon, in the Hautes-Alpes. It was a fumbling and\r
-uneasy flight,--a mole's track, whose branchings are untraceable. Later\r
-on, some trace of his passage into Ain, in the territory of Civrieux,\r
-was discovered; in the Pyrenees, at Accons; at the spot called\r
-Grange-de-Doumec, near the market of Chavailles, and in the environs of\r
-Perigueux at Brunies, canton of La Chapelle-Gonaguet. He reached Paris.\r
-We have just seen him at Montfermeil.\r
-\r
-His first care on arriving in Paris had been to buy mourning clothes\r
-for a little girl of from seven to eight years of age; then to procure\r
-a lodging. That done, he had betaken himself to Montfermeil. It will\r
-be remembered that already, during his preceding escape, he had made a\r
-mysterious trip thither, or somewhere in that neighborhood, of which the\r
-law had gathered an inkling.\r
-\r
-However, he was thought to be dead, and this still further increased the\r
-obscurity which had gathered about him. At Paris, one of the journals\r
-which chronicled the fact fell into his hands. He felt reassured and\r
-almost at peace, as though he had really been dead.\r
-\r
-On the evening of the day when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from the\r
-claws of the Thenardiers, he returned to Paris. He re-entered it at\r
-nightfall, with the child, by way of the Barrier Monceaux. There\r
-he entered a cabriolet, which took him to the esplanade of the\r
-Observatoire. There he got out, paid the coachman, took Cosette by\r
-the hand, and together they directed their steps through the\r
-darkness,--through the deserted streets which adjoin the Ourcine and the\r
-Glaciere, towards the Boulevard de l'Hopital.\r
-\r
-The day had been strange and filled with emotions for Cosette. They\r
-had eaten some bread and cheese purchased in isolated taverns, behind\r
-hedges; they had changed carriages frequently; they had travelled short\r
-distances on foot. She made no complaint, but she was weary, and Jean\r
-Valjean perceived it by the way she dragged more and more on his hand\r
-as she walked. He took her on his back. Cosette, without letting go\r
-of Catherine, laid her head on Jean Valjean's shoulder, and there fell\r
-asleep.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Gorbeau Hovel 2b3-10-gorbeau-house]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--MASTER GORBEAU\r
-\r
-Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country of\r
-the Salpetriere, and who had mounted to the Barriere d'Italie by way\r
-of the boulevard, reached a point where it might be said that Paris\r
-disappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it\r
-was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the\r
-city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in\r
-them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it,\r
-then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert\r
-place where there was some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, a\r
-street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day\r
-than a cemetery.\r
-\r
-It was the old quarter of the Marche-aux-Chevaux.\r
-\r
-The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of\r
-this Marche-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond the Rue du\r
-Petit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high\r
-walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver\r
-huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps,\r
-sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a long,\r
-low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in mourning,\r
-laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the spring; then,\r
-in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building, on which\r
-ran the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS,--this daring\r
-rambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of the\r
-Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. There, near a factory, and between two\r
-garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a mean building,\r
-which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a thatched hovel, and\r
-which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral. It presented its side\r
-and gable to the public road; hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearly\r
-the whole of the house was hidden. Only the door and one window could be\r
-seen.\r
-\r
-This hovel was only one story high.\r
-\r
-The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could never\r
-have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if it\r
-had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in rough masonry,\r
-might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.\r
-\r
-The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound\r
-together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. It\r
-opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky,\r
-plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, which\r
-could be seen from the street, running straight up like a ladder and\r
-disappearing in the darkness between two walls. The top of the shapeless\r
-bay into which this door shut was masked by a narrow scantling in the\r
-centre of which a triangular hole had been sawed, which served both as\r
-wicket and air-hole when the door was closed. On the inside of the\r
-door the figures 52 had been traced with a couple of strokes of a brush\r
-dipped in ink, and above the scantling the same hand had daubed the\r
-number 50, so that one hesitated. Where was one? Above the door it said,\r
-"Number 50"; the inside replied, "no, Number 52." No one knows what\r
-dust-colored figures were suspended like draperies from the triangular\r
-opening.\r
-\r
-The window was large, sufficiently elevated, garnished with Venetian\r
-blinds, and with a frame in large square panes; only these large panes\r
-were suffering from various wounds, which were both concealed and\r
-betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage. And the blinds, dislocated and\r
-unpasted, threatened passers-by rather than screened the occupants.\r
-The horizontal slats were missing here and there and had been naively\r
-replaced with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so that what began as\r
-a blind ended as a shutter. This door with an unclean, and this window\r
-with an honest though dilapidated air, thus beheld on the same house,\r
-produced the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side,\r
-with different miens beneath the same rags, the one having always been a\r
-mendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman.\r
-\r
-The staircase led to a very vast edifice which resembled a shed which\r
-had been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its intestinal\r
-tube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left sorts of\r
-compartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable under stress\r
-of circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells. These chambers\r
-received their light from the vague waste grounds in the neighborhood.\r
-\r
-All this was dark, disagreeable, wan, melancholy, sepulchral; traversed\r
-according as the crevices lay in the roof or in the door, by cold rays\r
-or by icy winds. An interesting and picturesque peculiarity of this sort\r
-of dwelling is the enormous size of the spiders.\r
-\r
-To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard side, at about the\r
-height of a man from the ground, a small window which had been walled up\r
-formed a square niche full of stones which the children had thrown there\r
-as they passed by.\r
-\r
-A portion of this building has recently been demolished. From what still\r
-remains of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former days.\r
-As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years is\r
-youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging\r
-partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.\r
-\r
-The postmen called the house Number 50-52; but it was known in the\r
-neighborhood as the Gorbeau house.\r
-\r
-Let us explain whence this appellation was derived.\r
-\r
-Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes, and\r
-prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin, know that there\r
-was in Paris, during the last century, about 1770, two attorneys at the\r
-Chatelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other Renard (Fox). The two\r
-names had been forestalled by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too fine\r
-for the lawyers; they made the most of it. A parody was immediately\r
-put in circulation in the galleries of the court-house, in verses that\r
-limped a little:--\r
-\r
-\r
- Maitre Corbeau, sur un dossier perche,[13]\r
- Tenait dans son bee une saisie executoire;\r
- Maitre Renard, par l'odeur alleche,\r
- Lui fit a peu pres cette histoire:\r
- He! bonjour. Etc.\r
-\r
-\r
-The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jests, and finding the\r
-bearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter which\r
-followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit upon the\r
-expedient of applying to the king.\r
-\r
-Their petition was presented to Louis XV. on the same day when the\r
-Papal Nuncio, on the one hand, and the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon on the\r
-other, both devoutly kneeling, were each engaged in putting on, in his\r
-Majesty's presence, a slipper on the bare feet of Madame du Barry, who\r
-had just got out of bed. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh,\r
-passed gayly from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and bestowed on\r
-these limbs of the law their former names, or nearly so. By the kings\r
-command, Maitre Corbeau was permitted to add a tail to his initial\r
-letter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maitre Renard was less lucky; all he\r
-obtained was leave to place a P in front of his R, and to call himself\r
-Prenard; so that the second name bore almost as much resemblance as the\r
-first.\r
-\r
-Now, according to local tradition, this Maitre Gorbeau had been the\r
-proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the Boulevard de l'Hopital.\r
-He was even the author of the monumental window.\r
-\r
-Hence the edifice bore the name of the Gorbeau house.\r
-\r
-Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm\r
-which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue\r
-de la Barriere des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved,\r
-planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the\r
-season, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odor\r
-of copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory.\r
-\r
-The barrier was close at hand. In 1823 the city wall was still in\r
-existence.\r
-\r
-This barrier itself evoked gloomy fancies in the mind. It was the\r
-road to Bicetre. It was through it that, under the Empire and the\r
-Restoration, prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris on the day\r
-of their execution. It was there, that, about 1829, was committed that\r
-mysterious assassination, called "The assassination of the Fontainebleau\r
-barrier," whose authors justice was never able to discover; a melancholy\r
-problem which has never been elucidated, a frightful enigma which has\r
-never been unriddled. Take a few steps, and you come upon that fatal Rue\r
-Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl of Ivry to the sound of\r
-thunder, as in the melodramas. A few paces more, and you arrive at the\r
-abominable pollarded elms of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient\r
-of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and\r
-shameful Place de Grove of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which\r
-recoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with\r
-grandeur, nor to uphold it with authority.\r
-\r
-Leaving aside this Place Saint-Jacques, which was, as it were,\r
-predestined, and which has always been horrible, probably the most\r
-mournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty years ago,\r
-was the spot which even to-day is so unattractive, where stood the\r
-building Number 50-52.\r
-\r
-Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later.\r
-The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts which\r
-assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpetriere,\r
-a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicetre, whose outskirts one\r
-was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women and\r
-the madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could perceive\r
-nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a few\r
-factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stood\r
-hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white\r
-walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings\r
-erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the\r
-melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground,\r
-not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial,\r
-regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is\r
-because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.\r
-Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers\r
-may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell\r
-existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hopital might have formed the\r
-entrance to it.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight is\r
-vanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breeze\r
-tears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the darkness is deep\r
-and starless, or when the moon and the wind are making openings in the\r
-clouds and losing themselves in the shadows, this boulevard suddenly\r
-becomes frightful. The black lines sink inwards and are lost in the\r
-shades, like morsels of the infinite. The passer-by cannot refrain from\r
-recalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connected\r
-with the gibbet. The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes have\r
-been committed, had something terrible about it. One almost had a\r
-presentiment of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confused\r
-forms of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square, of\r
-which one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves: by day it\r
-was ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it was sinister.\r
-\r
-In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women seated\r
-at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good old\r
-women were fond of begging.\r
-\r
-However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an antique\r
-air, was tending even then to transformation. Even at that time any one\r
-who was desirous of seeing it had to make haste. Each day some detail of\r
-the whole effect was disappearing. For the last twenty years the station\r
-of the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and distracted\r
-it, as it does to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders of a\r
-capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a\r
-city. It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements of\r
-a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf the\r
-ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth, at the\r
-rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstrous\r
-horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The old houses\r
-crumble and new ones rise.\r
-\r
-Since the Orleans railway has invaded the region of the Salpetriere,\r
-the ancient, narrow streets which adjoin the moats Saint-Victor and the\r
-Jardin des Plantes tremble, as they are violently traversed three or\r
-four times each day by those currents of coach fiacres and omnibuses\r
-which, in a given time, crowd back the houses to the right and the left;\r
-for there are things which are odd when said that are rigorously exact;\r
-and just as it is true to say that in large cities the sun makes the\r
-southern fronts of houses to vegetate and grow, it is certain that the\r
-frequent passage of vehicles enlarges streets. The symptoms of a new\r
-life are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest nooks,\r
-the pavement shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to grow\r
-longer, even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,--a\r
-memorable morning in July, 1845,--black pots of bitumen were seen\r
-smoking there; on that day it might be said that civilization had\r
-arrived in the Rue de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburb\r
-of Saint-Marceau.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--A NEST FOR OWL AND A WARBLER\r
-\r
-It was in front of this Gorbeau house that Jean Valjean halted. Like\r
-wild birds, he had chosen this desert place to construct his nest.\r
-\r
-He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a sort of a pass-key,\r
-opened the door, entered, closed it again carefully, and ascended the\r
-staircase, still carrying Cosette.\r
-\r
-At the top of the stairs he drew from his pocket another key, with\r
-which he opened another door. The chamber which he entered, and which\r
-he closed again instantly, was a kind of moderately spacious attic,\r
-furnished with a mattress laid on the floor, a table, and several\r
-chairs; a stove in which a fire was burning, and whose embers were\r
-visible, stood in one corner. A lantern on the boulevard cast a vague\r
-light into this poor room. At the extreme end there was a dressing-room\r
-with a folding bed; Jean Valjean carried the child to this bed and laid\r
-her down there without waking her.\r
-\r
-He struck a match and lighted a candle. All this was prepared beforehand\r
-on the table, and, as he had done on the previous evening, he began\r
-to scrutinize Cosette's face with a gaze full of ecstasy, in which the\r
-expression of kindness and tenderness almost amounted to aberration. The\r
-little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme\r
-strength and extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with\r
-whom she was, and continued to sleep without knowing where she was.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean bent down and kissed that child's hand.\r
-\r
-Nine months before he had kissed the hand of the mother, who had also\r
-just fallen asleep.\r
-\r
-The same sad, piercing, religious sentiment filled his heart.\r
-\r
-He knelt beside Cosette's bed.\r
-\r
-lt was broad daylight, and the child still slept. A wan ray of the\r
-December sun penetrated the window of the attic and lay upon the\r
-ceiling in long threads of light and shade. All at once a heavily laden\r
-carrier's cart, which was passing along the boulevard, shook the frail\r
-bed, like a clap of thunder, and made it quiver from top to bottom.\r
-\r
-"Yes, madame!" cried Cosette, waking with a start, "here I am! here I\r
-am!"\r
-\r
-And she sprang out of bed, her eyes still half shut with the heaviness\r
-of sleep, extending her arms towards the corner of the wall.\r
-\r
-"Ah! mon Dieu, my broom!" said she.\r
-\r
-She opened her eyes wide now, and beheld the smiling countenance of Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Ah! so it is true!" said the child. "Good morning, Monsieur."\r
-\r
-Children accept joy and happiness instantly and familiarly, being\r
-themselves by nature joy and happiness.\r
-\r
-Cosette caught sight of Catherine at the foot of her bed, and took\r
-possession of her, and, as she played, she put a hundred questions to\r
-Jean Valjean. Where was she? Was Paris very large? Was Madame Thenardier\r
-very far away? Was she to go back? etc., etc. All at once she exclaimed,\r
-"How pretty it is here!"\r
-\r
-It was a frightful hole, but she felt free.\r
-\r
-"Must I sweep?" she resumed at last.\r
-\r
-"Play!" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-The day passed thus. Cosette, without troubling herself to understand\r
-anything, was inexpressibly happy with that doll and that kind man.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--TWO MISFORTUNES MAKE ONE PIECE OF GOOD FORTUNE\r
-\r
-On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still by\r
-Cosette's bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for her to wake.\r
-\r
-Some new thing had come into his soul.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been\r
-alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In\r
-the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy.\r
-The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister and his\r
-sister's children had left him only a vague and far-off memory which\r
-had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort to\r
-find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten them.\r
-Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his youth, if he\r
-had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss.\r
-\r
-When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her\r
-off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within him.\r
-\r
-All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed towards that\r
-child. He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled with\r
-joy. He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it\r
-meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to\r
-love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.\r
-\r
-Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!\r
-\r
-Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that\r
-might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together\r
-into a sort of ineffable light.\r
-\r
-It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop\r
-had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the\r
-dawn of love to rise.\r
-\r
-The early days passed in this dazzled state.\r
-\r
-Cosette, on her side, had also, unknown to herself, become another\r
-being, poor little thing! She was so little when her mother left her,\r
-that she no longer remembered her. Like all children, who resemble young\r
-shoots of the vine, which cling to everything, she had tried to love;\r
-she had not succeeded. All had repulsed her,--the Thenardiers, their\r
-children, other children. She had loved the dog, and he had died, after\r
-which nothing and nobody would have anything to do with her. It is a sad\r
-thing to say, and we have already intimated it, that, at eight years of\r
-age, her heart was cold. It was not her fault; it was not the faculty\r
-of loving that she lacked; alas! it was the possibility. Thus, from the\r
-very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved this kind\r
-man. She felt that which she had never felt before--a sensation of\r
-expansion.\r
-\r
-The man no longer produced on her the effect of being old or poor; she\r
-thought Jean Valjean handsome, just as she thought the hovel pretty.\r
-\r
-These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy. The novelty of\r
-the earth and of life counts for something here. Nothing is so charming\r
-as the coloring reflection of happiness on a garret. We all have in our\r
-past a delightful garret.\r
-\r
-Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between\r
-Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly\r
-united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted\r
-existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. One, in fact, completed\r
-the other. Cosette's instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean's\r
-instinct sought a child. To meet was to find each other. At the\r
-mysterious moment when their hands touched, they were welded together.\r
-When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other as\r
-necessary to each other, and embraced each other closely.\r
-\r
-Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute sense, we\r
-may say that, separated from every one by the walls of the tomb, Jean\r
-Valjean was the widower, and Cosette was the orphan: this situation\r
-caused Jean Valjean to become Cosette's father after a celestial\r
-fashion.\r
-\r
-And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette in the\r
-depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping\r
-hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality. The entrance of\r
-that man into the destiny of that child had been the advent of God.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well. There he seemed\r
-perfectly secure.\r
-\r
-The chamber with a dressing-room, which he occupied with Cosette, was\r
-the one whose window opened on the boulevard. This being the only window\r
-in the house, no neighbors' glances were to be feared from across the\r
-way or at the side.\r
-\r
-The ground-floor of Number 50-52, a sort of dilapidated penthouse,\r
-served as a wagon-house for market-gardeners, and no communication\r
-existed between it and the first story. It was separated by the\r
-flooring, which had neither traps nor stairs, and which formed the\r
-diaphragm of the building, as it were. The first story contained, as we\r
-have said, numerous chambers and several attics, only one of which\r
-was occupied by the old woman who took charge of Jean Valjean's\r
-housekeeping; all the rest was uninhabited.\r
-\r
-It was this old woman, ornamented with the name of the principal lodger,\r
-and in reality intrusted with the functions of portress, who had let\r
-him the lodging on Christmas eve. He had represented himself to her as a\r
-gentleman of means who had been ruined by Spanish bonds, who was coming\r
-there to live with his little daughter. He had paid her six months in\r
-advance, and had commissioned the old woman to furnish the chamber and\r
-dressing-room, as we have seen. It was this good woman who had lighted\r
-the fire in the stove, and prepared everything on the evening of their\r
-arrival.\r
-\r
-Week followed week; these two beings led a happy life in that hovel.\r
-\r
-Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang from daybreak. Children have their\r
-morning song as well as birds.\r
-\r
-It sometimes happened that Jean Valjean clasped her tiny red hand, all\r
-cracked with chilblains, and kissed it. The poor child, who was used\r
-to being beaten, did not know the meaning of this, and ran away in\r
-confusion.\r
-\r
-At times she became serious and stared at her little black gown. Cosette\r
-was no longer in rags; she was in mourning. She had emerged from misery,\r
-and she was entering into life.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made\r
-the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil\r
-that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a\r
-child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the\r
-angels.\r
-\r
-He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who\r
-was not man, and he became absorbed in revery. Good thoughts have their\r
-abysses as well as evil ones.\r
-\r
-To teach Cosette to read, and to let her play, this constituted nearly\r
-the whole of Jean Valjean's existence. And then he talked of her mother,\r
-and he made her pray.\r
-\r
-She called him father, and knew no other name for him.\r
-\r
-He passed hours in watching her dressing and undressing her doll, and in\r
-listening to her prattle. Life, henceforth, appeared to him to be full\r
-of interest; men seemed to him good and just; he no longer reproached\r
-any one in thought; he saw no reason why he should not live to be a very\r
-old man, now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future stretching\r
-out before him, illuminated by Cosette as by a charming light. The best\r
-of us are not exempt from egotistical thoughts. At times, he reflected\r
-with a sort of joy that she would be ugly.\r
-\r
-This is only a personal opinion; but, to utter our whole thought, at the\r
-point where Jean Valjean had arrived when he began to love Cosette, it\r
-is by no means clear to us that he did not need this encouragement in\r
-order that he might persevere in well-doing. He had just viewed the\r
-malice of men and the misery of society under a new aspect--incomplete\r
-aspects, which unfortunately only exhibited one side of the truth,\r
-the fate of woman as summed up in Fantine, and public authority as\r
-personified in Javert. He had returned to prison, this time for having\r
-done right; he had quaffed fresh bitterness; disgust and lassitude were\r
-overpowering him; even the memory of the Bishop probably suffered\r
-a temporary eclipse, though sure to reappear later on luminous and\r
-triumphant; but, after all, that sacred memory was growing dim.\r
-Who knows whether Jean Valjean had not been on the eve of growing\r
-discouraged and of falling once more? He loved and grew strong again.\r
-Alas! he walked with no less indecision than Cosette. He protected her,\r
-and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she could walk through life;\r
-thanks to her, he could continue in virtue. He was that child's stay,\r
-and she was his prop. Oh, unfathomable and divine mystery of the\r
-balances of destiny!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE REMARKS OF THE PRINCIPAL TENANT\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was prudent enough never to go out by day. Every evening,\r
-at twilight, he walked for an hour or two, sometimes alone, often with\r
-Cosette, seeking the most deserted side alleys of the boulevard, and\r
-entering churches at nightfall. He liked to go to Saint-Medard, which is\r
-the nearest church. When he did not take Cosette with him, she remained\r
-with the old woman; but the child's delight was to go out with the good\r
-man. She preferred an hour with him to all her rapturous tete-a-tetes\r
-with Catherine. He held her hand as they walked, and said sweet things\r
-to her.\r
-\r
-It turned out that Cosette was a very gay little person.\r
-\r
-The old woman attended to the housekeeping and cooking and went to\r
-market.\r
-\r
-They lived soberly, always having a little fire, but like people in\r
-very moderate circumstances. Jean Valjean had made no alterations in\r
-the furniture as it was the first day; he had merely had the glass door\r
-leading to Cosette's dressing-room replaced by a solid door.\r
-\r
-He still wore his yellow coat, his black breeches, and his old hat.\r
-In the street, he was taken for a poor man. It sometimes happened that\r
-kind-hearted women turned back to bestow a sou on him. Jean Valjean\r
-accepted the sou with a deep bow. It also happened occasionally that he\r
-encountered some poor wretch asking alms; then he looked behind him\r
-to make sure that no one was observing him, stealthily approached the\r
-unfortunate man, put a piece of money into his hand, often a silver\r
-coin, and walked rapidly away. This had its disadvantages. He began\r
-to be known in the neighborhood under the name of the beggar who gives\r
-alms.\r
-\r
-The old principal lodger, a cross-looking creature, who was\r
-thoroughly permeated, so far as her neighbors were concerned, with the\r
-inquisitiveness peculiar to envious persons, scrutinized Jean Valjean\r
-a great deal, without his suspecting the fact. She was a little deaf,\r
-which rendered her talkative. There remained to her from her past, two\r
-teeth,--one above, the other below,--which she was continually knocking\r
-against each other. She had questioned Cosette, who had not been able\r
-to tell her anything, since she knew nothing herself except that she had\r
-come from Montfermeil. One morning, this spy saw Jean Valjean, with\r
-an air which struck the old gossip as peculiar, entering one of the\r
-uninhabited compartments of the hovel. She followed him with the step\r
-of an old cat, and was able to observe him without being seen, through a\r
-crack in the door, which was directly opposite him. Jean Valjean had his\r
-back turned towards this door, by way of greater security, no doubt. The\r
-old woman saw him fumble in his pocket and draw thence a case, scissors,\r
-and thread; then he began to rip the lining of one of the skirts of his\r
-coat, and from the opening he took a bit of yellowish paper, which he\r
-unfolded. The old woman recognized, with terror, the fact that it was\r
-a bank-bill for a thousand francs. It was the second or third only that\r
-she had seen in the course of her existence. She fled in alarm.\r
-\r
-A moment later, Jean Valjean accosted her, and asked her to go and\r
-get this thousand-franc bill changed for him, adding that it was his\r
-quarterly income, which he had received the day before. "Where?" thought\r
-the old woman. "He did not go out until six o'clock in the evening, and\r
-the government bank certainly is not open at that hour." The old\r
-woman went to get the bill changed, and mentioned her surmises. That\r
-thousand-franc note, commented on and multiplied, produced a vast\r
-amount of terrified discussion among the gossips of the Rue des Vignes\r
-Saint-Marcel.\r
-\r
-A few days later, it chanced that Jean Valjean was sawing some wood, in\r
-his shirt-sleeves, in the corridor. The old woman was in the chamber,\r
-putting things in order. She was alone. Cosette was occupied in admiring\r
-the wood as it was sawed. The old woman caught sight of the coat hanging\r
-on a nail, and examined it. The lining had been sewed up again. The good\r
-woman felt of it carefully, and thought she observed in the skirts and\r
-revers thicknesses of paper. More thousand-franc bank-bills, no doubt!\r
-\r
-She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets.\r
-Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a big\r
-pocket-book, a very large knife, and--a suspicious circumstance--several\r
-wigs of various colors. Each pocket of this coat had the air of being in\r
-a manner provided against unexpected accidents.\r
-\r
-Thus the inhabitants of the house reached the last days of winter.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--A FIVE-FRANC PIECE FALLS ON THE GROUND AND PRODUCES A TUMULT\r
-\r
-Near Saint-Medard's church there was a poor man who was in the habit of\r
-crouching on the brink of a public well which had been condemned, and\r
-on whom Jean Valjean was fond of bestowing charity. He never passed this\r
-man without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he spoke to him. Those who\r
-envied this mendicant said that he belonged to the police. He was an\r
-ex-beadle of seventy-five, who was constantly mumbling his prayers.\r
-\r
-One evening, as Jean Valjean was passing by, when he had not Cosette\r
-with him, he saw the beggar in his usual place, beneath the lantern\r
-which had just been lighted. The man seemed engaged in prayer, according\r
-to his custom, and was much bent over. Jean Valjean stepped up to him\r
-and placed his customary alms in his hand. The mendicant raised his\r
-eyes suddenly, stared intently at Jean Valjean, then dropped his head\r
-quickly. This movement was like a flash of lightning. Jean Valjean was\r
-seized with a shudder. It seemed to him that he had just caught sight,\r
-by the light of the street lantern, not of the placid and beaming\r
-visage of the old beadle, but of a well-known and startling face. He\r
-experienced the same impression that one would have on finding one's\r
-self, all of a sudden, face to face, in the dark, with a tiger. He\r
-recoiled, terrified, petrified, daring neither to breathe, to speak,\r
-to remain, nor to flee, staring at the beggar who had dropped his head,\r
-which was enveloped in a rag, and no longer appeared to know that he\r
-was there. At this strange moment, an instinct--possibly the mysterious\r
-instinct of self-preservation,--restrained Jean Valjean from uttering a\r
-word. The beggar had the same figure, the same rags, the same appearance\r
-as he had every day. "Bah!" said Jean Valjean, "I am mad! I am dreaming!\r
-Impossible!" And he returned profoundly troubled.\r
-\r
-He hardly dared to confess, even to himself, that the face which he\r
-thought he had seen was the face of Javert.\r
-\r
-That night, on thinking the matter over, he regretted not having\r
-questioned the man, in order to force him to raise his head a second\r
-time.\r
-\r
-On the following day, at nightfall, he went back. The beggar was at his\r
-post. "Good day, my good man," said Jean Valjean, resolutely, handing\r
-him a sou. The beggar raised his head, and replied in a whining voice,\r
-"Thanks, my good sir." It was unmistakably the ex-beadle.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean felt completely reassured. He began to laugh. "How the\r
-deuce could I have thought that I saw Javert there?" he thought. "Am I\r
-going to lose my eyesight now?" And he thought no more about it.\r
-\r
-A few days afterwards,--it might have been at eight o'clock in the\r
-evening,--he was in his room, and engaged in making Cosette spell aloud,\r
-when he heard the house door open and then shut again. This struck him\r
-as singular. The old woman, who was the only inhabitant of the house\r
-except himself, always went to bed at nightfall, so that she might not\r
-burn out her candles. Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be quiet.\r
-He heard some one ascending the stairs. It might possibly be the old\r
-woman, who might have fallen ill and have been out to the apothecary's.\r
-Jean Valjean listened.\r
-\r
-The step was heavy, and sounded like that of a man; but the old woman\r
-wore stout shoes, and there is nothing which so strongly resembles the\r
-step of a man as that of an old woman. Nevertheless, Jean Valjean blew\r
-out his candle.\r
-\r
-He had sent Cosette to bed, saying to her in a low voice, "Get into bed\r
-very softly"; and as he kissed her brow, the steps paused.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean remained silent, motionless, with his back towards the\r
-door, seated on the chair from which he had not stirred, and holding his\r
-breath in the dark.\r
-\r
-After the expiration of a rather long interval, he turned round, as he\r
-heard nothing more, and, as he raised his eyes towards the door of his\r
-chamber, he saw a light through the keyhole. This light formed a sort\r
-of sinister star in the blackness of the door and the wall. There was\r
-evidently some one there, who was holding a candle in his hand and\r
-listening.\r
-\r
-Several minutes elapsed thus, and the light retreated. But he heard no\r
-sound of footsteps, which seemed to indicate that the person who had\r
-been listening at the door had removed his shoes.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean threw himself, all dressed as he was, on his bed, and could\r
-not close his eyes all night.\r
-\r
-At daybreak, just as he was falling into a doze through fatigue, he was\r
-awakened by the creaking of a door which opened on some attic at the\r
-end of the corridor, then he heard the same masculine footstep which had\r
-ascended the stairs on the preceding evening. The step was approaching.\r
-He sprang off the bed and applied his eye to the keyhole, which was\r
-tolerably large, hoping to see the person who had made his way by night\r
-into the house and had listened at his door, as he passed. It was a\r
-man, in fact, who passed, this time without pausing, in front of Jean\r
-Valjean's chamber. The corridor was too dark to allow of the person's\r
-face being distinguished; but when the man reached the staircase, a\r
-ray of light from without made it stand out like a silhouette, and Jean\r
-Valjean had a complete view of his back. The man was of lofty stature,\r
-clad in a long frock-coat, with a cudgel under his arm. The formidable\r
-neck and shoulders belonged to Javert.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean might have attempted to catch another glimpse of him\r
-through his window opening on the boulevard, but he would have been\r
-obliged to open the window: he dared not.\r
-\r
-It was evident that this man had entered with a key, and like himself.\r
-Who had given him that key? What was the meaning of this?\r
-\r
-When the old woman came to do the work, at seven o'clock in the morning,\r
-Jean Valjean cast a penetrating glance on her, but he did not question\r
-her. The good woman appeared as usual.\r
-\r
-As she swept up she remarked to him:--\r
-\r
-"Possibly Monsieur may have heard some one come in last night?"\r
-\r
-At that age, and on that boulevard, eight o'clock in the evening was the\r
-dead of the night.\r
-\r
-"That is true, by the way," he replied, in the most natural tone\r
-possible. "Who was it?"\r
-\r
-"It was a new lodger who has come into the house," said the old woman.\r
-\r
-"And what is his name?"\r
-\r
-"I don't know exactly; Dumont, or Daumont, or some name of that sort."\r
-\r
-"And who is this Monsieur Dumont?"\r
-\r
-The old woman gazed at him with her little polecat eyes, and answered:--\r
-\r
-"A gentleman of property, like yourself."\r
-\r
-Perhaps she had no ulterior meaning. Jean Valjean thought he perceived\r
-one.\r
-\r
-When the old woman had taken her departure, he did up a hundred francs\r
-which he had in a cupboard, into a roll, and put it in his pocket. In\r
-spite of all the precautions which he took in this operation so that he\r
-might not be heard rattling silver, a hundred-sou piece escaped from his\r
-hands and rolled noisily on the floor.\r
-\r
-When darkness came on, he descended and carefully scrutinized both sides\r
-of the boulevard. He saw no one. The boulevard appeared to be absolutely\r
-deserted. It is true that a person can conceal himself behind trees.\r
-\r
-He went up stairs again.\r
-\r
-"Come." he said to Cosette.\r
-\r
-He took her by the hand, and they both went out.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY\r
-\r
-An observation here becomes necessary, in view of the pages which the\r
-reader is about to peruse, and of others which will be met with further\r
-on.\r
-\r
-The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning\r
-himself, has been absent from Paris for many years. Paris has been\r
-transformed since he quitted it. A new city has arisen, which is, after\r
-a fashion, unknown to him. There is no need for him to say that he loves\r
-Paris: Paris is his mind's natal city. In consequence of demolitions and\r
-reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris which he bore away\r
-religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of days gone by. He must\r
-be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed. It is\r
-possible that when the author conducts his readers to a spot and says,\r
-"In such a street there stands such and such a house," neither street\r
-nor house will any longer exist in that locality. Readers may verify\r
-the facts if they care to take the trouble. For his own part, he is\r
-unacquainted with the new Paris, and he writes with the old Paris before\r
-his eyes in an illusion which is precious to him. It is a delight to him\r
-to dream that there still lingers behind him something of that which he\r
-beheld when he was in his own country, and that all has not vanished.\r
-So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those\r
-streets are a matter of indifference to you; that those windows,\r
-those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are\r
-strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered\r
-haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to\r
-you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on,\r
-when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to\r
-you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are\r
-necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered\r
-those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left\r
-a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements.\r
-All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never\r
-behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on\r
-a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an\r
-apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak,\r
-the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they\r
-are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no\r
-change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the\r
-face of your mother.\r
-\r
-May we, then, be permitted to speak of the past in the present? That\r
-said, we beg the reader to take note of it, and we continue.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean instantly quitted the boulevard and plunged into the\r
-streets, taking the most intricate lines which he could devise,\r
-returning on his track at times, to make sure that he was not being\r
-followed.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Black Hunt 2b5-1-black-hunt]\r
-\r
-This manoeuvre is peculiar to the hunted stag. On soil where an\r
-imprint of the track may be left, this manoeuvre possesses, among other\r
-advantages, that of deceiving the huntsmen and the dogs, by throwing\r
-them on the wrong scent. In venery this is called false re-imbushment.\r
-\r
-The moon was full that night. Jean Valjean was not sorry for this. The\r
-moon, still very close to the horizon, cast great masses of light and\r
-shadow in the streets. Jean Valjean could glide along close to the\r
-houses on the dark side, and yet keep watch on the light side. He did\r
-not, perhaps, take sufficiently into consideration the fact that the\r
-dark side escaped him. Still, in the deserted lanes which lie near the\r
-Rue Poliveau, he thought he felt certain that no one was following him.\r
-\r
-Cosette walked on without asking any questions. The sufferings of the\r
-first six years of her life had instilled something passive into her\r
-nature. Moreover,--and this is a remark to which we shall frequently\r
-have occasion to recur,--she had grown used, without being herself\r
-aware of it, to the peculiarities of this good man and to the freaks of\r
-destiny. And then she was with him, and she felt safe.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean knew no more where he was going than did Cosette. He\r
-trusted in God, as she trusted in him. It seemed as though he also were\r
-clinging to the hand of some one greater than himself; he thought he\r
-felt a being leading him, though invisible. However, he had no settled\r
-idea, no plan, no project. He was not even absolutely sure that it was\r
-Javert, and then it might have been Javert, without Javert knowing that\r
-he was Jean Valjean. Was not he disguised? Was not he believed to be\r
-dead? Still, queer things had been going on for several days. He wanted\r
-no more of them. He was determined not to return to the Gorbeau house.\r
-Like the wild animal chased from its lair, he was seeking a hole in\r
-which he might hide until he could find one where he might dwell.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean described many and varied labyrinths in the Mouffetard\r
-quarter, which was already asleep, as though the discipline of the\r
-Middle Ages and the yoke of the curfew still existed; he combined in\r
-various manners, with cunning strategy, the Rue Censier and the Rue\r
-Copeau, the Rue du Battoir-Saint-Victor and the Rue du Puits l'Ermite.\r
-There are lodging houses in this locality, but he did not even enter\r
-one, finding nothing which suited him. He had no doubt that if any one\r
-had chanced to be upon his track, they would have lost it.\r
-\r
-As eleven o'clock struck from Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, he was traversing\r
-the Rue de Pontoise, in front of the office of the commissary of police,\r
-situated at No. 14. A few moments later, the instinct of which we have\r
-spoken above made him turn round. At that moment he saw distinctly,\r
-thanks to the commissary's lantern, which betrayed them, three men\r
-who were following him closely, pass, one after the other, under that\r
-lantern, on the dark side of the street. One of the three entered the\r
-alley leading to the commissary's house. The one who marched at their\r
-head struck him as decidedly suspicious.\r
-\r
-"Come, child," he said to Cosette; and he made haste to quit the Rue\r
-Pontoise.\r
-\r
-He took a circuit, turned into the Passage des Patriarches, which was\r
-closed on account of the hour, strode along the Rue de l'Epee-de-Bois\r
-and the Rue de l'Arbalete, and plunged into the Rue des Postes.\r
-\r
-At that time there was a square formed by the intersection of\r
-streets, where the College Rollin stands to-day, and where the Rue\r
-Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve turns off.\r
-\r
-It is understood, of course, that the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve is an\r
-old street, and that a posting-chaise does not pass through the Rue des\r
-Postes once in ten years. In the thirteenth century this Rue des Postes\r
-was inhabited by potters, and its real name is Rue des Pots.\r
-\r
-The moon cast a livid light into this open space. Jean Valjean went into\r
-ambush in a doorway, calculating that if the men were still following\r
-him, he could not fail to get a good look at them, as they traversed\r
-this illuminated space.\r
-\r
-In point of fact, three minutes had not elapsed when the men made their\r
-appearance. There were four of them now. All were tall, dressed in long,\r
-brown coats, with round hats, and huge cudgels in their hands. Their\r
-great stature and their vast fists rendered them no less alarming\r
-than did their sinister stride through the darkness. One would have\r
-pronounced them four spectres disguised as bourgeois.\r
-\r
-They halted in the middle of the space and formed a group, like men in\r
-consultation. They had an air of indecision. The one who appeared to be\r
-their leader turned round and pointed hastily with his right hand in the\r
-direction which Jean Valjean had taken; another seemed to indicate the\r
-contrary direction with considerable obstinacy. At the moment when the\r
-first man wheeled round, the moon fell full in his face. Jean Valjean\r
-recognized Javert perfectly.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--IT IS LUCKY THAT THE PONT D'AUSTERLITZ BEARS CARRIAGES\r
-\r
-Uncertainty was at an end for Jean Valjean: fortunately it still lasted\r
-for the men. He took advantage of their hesitation. It was time lost for\r
-them, but gained for him. He slipped from under the gate where he had\r
-concealed himself, and went down the Rue des Postes, towards the region\r
-of the Jardin des Plantes. Cosette was beginning to be tired. He took\r
-her in his arms and carried her. There were no passers-by, and the\r
-street lanterns had not been lighted on account of there being a moon.\r
-\r
-He redoubled his pace.\r
-\r
-In a few strides he had reached the Goblet potteries, on the front\r
-of which the moonlight rendered distinctly legible the ancient\r
-inscription:--\r
-\r
- De Goblet fils c'est ici la fabrique;[14]\r
- Venez choisir des cruches et des broos,\r
- Des pots a fleurs, des tuyaux, de la brique.\r
- A tout venant le Coeur vend des Carreaux.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-He left behind him the Rue de la Clef, then the Fountain Saint-Victor,\r
-skirted the Jardin des Plantes by the lower streets, and reached the\r
-quay. There he turned round. The quay was deserted. The streets were\r
-deserted. There was no one behind him. He drew a long breath.\r
-\r
-He gained the Pont d'Austerlitz.\r
-\r
-Tolls were still collected there at that epoch.\r
-\r
-He presented himself at the toll office and handed over a sou.\r
-\r
-"It is two sous," said the old soldier in charge of the bridge. "You are\r
-carrying a child who can walk. Pay for two."\r
-\r
-He paid, vexed that his passage should have aroused remark. Every flight\r
-should be an imperceptible slipping away.\r
-\r
-A heavy cart was crossing the Seine at the same time as himself, and on\r
-its way, like him, to the right bank. This was of use to him. He could\r
-traverse the bridge in the shadow of the cart.\r
-\r
-Towards the middle of the Bridge, Cosette, whose feet were benumbed,\r
-wanted to walk. He set her on the ground and took her hand again.\r
-\r
-The bridge once crossed, he perceived some timber-yards on his right. He\r
-directed his course thither. In order to reach them, it was necessary to\r
-risk himself in a tolerably large unsheltered and illuminated space.\r
-He did not hesitate. Those who were on his track had evidently lost the\r
-scent, and Jean Valjean believed himself to be out of danger. Hunted,\r
-yes; followed, no.\r
-\r
-A little street, the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, opened out\r
-between two timber-yards enclosed in walls. This street was dark and\r
-narrow and seemed made expressly for him. Before entering it he cast a\r
-glance behind him.\r
-\r
-From the point where he stood he could see the whole extent of the Pont\r
-d'Austerlitz.\r
-\r
-Four shadows were just entering on the bridge.\r
-\r
-These shadows had their backs turned to the Jardin des Plantes and were\r
-on their way to the right bank.\r
-\r
-These four shadows were the four men.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean shuddered like the wild beast which is recaptured.\r
-\r
-One hope remained to him; it was, that the men had not, perhaps, stepped\r
-on the bridge, and had not caught sight of him while he was crossing the\r
-large illuminated space, holding Cosette by the hand.\r
-\r
-In that case, by plunging into the little street before him, he\r
-might escape, if he could reach the timber-yards, the marshes, the\r
-market-gardens, the uninhabited ground which was not built upon.\r
-\r
-It seemed to him that he might commit himself to that silent little\r
-street. He entered it.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--TO WIT, THE PLAN OF PARIS IN 1727\r
-\r
-Three hundred paces further on, he arrived at a point where the street\r
-forked. It separated into two streets, which ran in a slanting line, one\r
-to the right, and the other to the left.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had before him what resembled the two branches of a Y.\r
-Which should he choose? He did not hesitate, but took the one on the\r
-right.\r
-\r
-Why?\r
-\r
-Because that to the left ran towards a suburb, that is to say, towards\r
-inhabited regions, and the right branch towards the open country, that\r
-is to say, towards deserted regions.\r
-\r
-However, they no longer walked very fast. Cosette's pace retarded Jean\r
-Valjean's.\r
-\r
-He took her up and carried her again. Cosette laid her head on the\r
-shoulder of the good man and said not a word.\r
-\r
-He turned round from time to time and looked behind him. He took care to\r
-keep always on the dark side of the street. The street was straight\r
-in his rear. The first two or three times that he turned round he saw\r
-nothing; the silence was profound, and he continued his march somewhat\r
-reassured. All at once, on turning round, he thought he perceived in the\r
-portion of the street which he had just passed through, far off in the\r
-obscurity, something which was moving.\r
-\r
-He rushed forward precipitately rather than walked, hoping to find some\r
-side-street, to make his escape through it, and thus to break his scent\r
-once more.\r
-\r
-He arrived at a wall.\r
-\r
-This wall, however, did not absolutely prevent further progress; it was\r
-a wall which bordered a transverse street, in which the one he had taken\r
-ended.\r
-\r
-Here again, he was obliged to come to a decision; should he go to the\r
-right or to the left.\r
-\r
-He glanced to the right. The fragmentary lane was prolonged between\r
-buildings which were either sheds or barns, then ended at a blind alley.\r
-The extremity of the cul-de-sac was distinctly visible,--a lofty white\r
-wall.\r
-\r
-He glanced to the left. On that side the lane was open, and about\r
-two hundred paces further on, ran into a street of which it was the\r
-affluent. On that side lay safety.\r
-\r
-At the moment when Jean Valjean was meditating a turn to the left, in\r
-an effort to reach the street which he saw at the end of the lane, he\r
-perceived a sort of motionless, black statue at the corner of the lane\r
-and the street towards which he was on the point of directing his steps.\r
-\r
-It was some one, a man, who had evidently just been posted there, and\r
-who was barring the passage and waiting.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean recoiled.\r
-\r
-The point of Paris where Jean Valjean found himself, situated between\r
-the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and la Rapee, is one of those which recent\r
-improvements have transformed from top to bottom,--resulting in\r
-disfigurement according to some, and in a transfiguration according to\r
-others. The market-gardens, the timber-yards, and the old buildings\r
-have been effaced. To-day, there are brand-new, wide streets, arenas,\r
-circuses, hippodromes, railway stations, and a prison, Mazas, there;\r
-progress, as the reader sees, with its antidote.\r
-\r
-Half a century ago, in that ordinary, popular tongue, which is all\r
-compounded of traditions, which persists in calling the Institut les\r
-Quatre-Nations, and the Opera-Comique Feydeau, the precise spot\r
-whither Jean Valjean had arrived was called le Petit Picpus. The\r
-Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Paris, the Barriere des Sergents, the\r
-Porcherons, la Galiote, les Celestins, les Capucins, le Mail, la Bourbe,\r
-l'Arbre de Cracovie, la Petite-Pologne--these are the names of old Paris\r
-which survive amid the new. The memory of the populace hovers over these\r
-relics of the past.\r
-\r
-Le Petit-Picpus, which, moreover, hardly ever had any existence, and\r
-never was more than the outline of a quarter, had nearly the monkish\r
-aspect of a Spanish town. The roads were not much paved; the streets\r
-were not much built up. With the exception of the two or three streets,\r
-of which we shall presently speak, all was wall and solitude there. Not\r
-a shop, not a vehicle, hardly a candle lighted here and there in the\r
-windows; all lights extinguished after ten o'clock. Gardens, convents,\r
-timber-yards, marshes; occasional lowly dwellings and great walls as\r
-high as the houses.\r
-\r
-Such was this quarter in the last century. The Revolution snubbed\r
-it soundly. The republican government demolished and cut through it.\r
-Rubbish shoots were established there. Thirty years ago, this quarter\r
-was disappearing under the erasing process of new buildings. To-day,\r
-it has been utterly blotted out. The Petit-Picpus, of which no existing\r
-plan has preserved a trace, is indicated with sufficient clearness\r
-in the plan of 1727, published at Paris by Denis Thierry, Rue\r
-Saint-Jacques, opposite the Rue du Platre; and at Lyons, by Jean Girin,\r
-Rue Merciere, at the sign of Prudence. Petit-Picpus had, as\r
-we have just mentioned, a Y of streets, formed by the Rue du\r
-Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which spread out in two branches, taking on\r
-the left the name of Little Picpus Street, and on the right the name of\r
-the Rue Polonceau. The two limbs of the Y were connected at the apex\r
-as by a bar; this bar was called Rue Droit-Mur. The Rue Polonceau ended\r
-there; Rue Petit-Picpus passed on, and ascended towards the Lenoir\r
-market. A person coming from the Seine reached the extremity of the Rue\r
-Polonceau, and had on his right the Rue Droit-Mur, turning abruptly at a\r
-right angle, in front of him the wall of that street, and on his right a\r
-truncated prolongation of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had no issue and was\r
-called the Cul-de-Sac Genrot.\r
-\r
-It was here that Jean Valjean stood.\r
-\r
-As we have just said, on catching sight of that black silhouette\r
-standing on guard at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur and the Rue\r
-Petit-Picpus, he recoiled. There could be no doubt of it. That phantom\r
-was lying in wait for him.\r
-\r
-What was he to do?\r
-\r
-The time for retreating was passed. That which he had perceived in\r
-movement an instant before, in the distant darkness, was Javert and his\r
-squad without a doubt. Javert was probably already at the commencement\r
-of the street at whose end Jean Valjean stood. Javert, to all\r
-appearances, was acquainted with this little labyrinth, and had taken\r
-his precautions by sending one of his men to guard the exit. These\r
-surmises, which so closely resembled proofs, whirled suddenly, like a\r
-handful of dust caught up by an unexpected gust of wind, through Jean\r
-Valjean's mournful brain. He examined the Cul-de-Sac Genrot; there he\r
-was cut off. He examined the Rue Petit-Picpus; there stood a sentinel.\r
-He saw that black form standing out in relief against the white\r
-pavement, illuminated by the moon; to advance was to fall into this\r
-man's hands; to retreat was to fling himself into Javert's arms. Jean\r
-Valjean felt himself caught, as in a net, which was slowly contracting;\r
-he gazed heavenward in despair.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE GROPINGS OF FLIGHT\r
-\r
-In order to understand what follows, it is requisite to form an exact\r
-idea of the Droit-Mur lane, and, in particular, of the angle which one\r
-leaves on the left when one emerges from the Rue Polonceau into this\r
-lane. Droit-Mur lane was almost entirely bordered on the right, as far\r
-as the Rue Petit-Picpus, by houses of mean aspect; on the left by a\r
-solitary building of severe outlines, composed of numerous parts which\r
-grew gradually higher by a story or two as they approached the Rue\r
-Petit-Picpus side; so that this building, which was very lofty on the\r
-Rue Petit-Picpus side, was tolerably low on the side adjoining the Rue\r
-Polonceau. There, at the angle of which we have spoken, it descended to\r
-such a degree that it consisted of merely a wall. This wall did not abut\r
-directly on the Street; it formed a deeply retreating niche, concealed\r
-by its two corners from two observers who might have been, one in the\r
-Rue Polonceau, the other in the Rue Droit-Mur.\r
-\r
-Beginning with these angles of the niche, the wall extended along the\r
-Rue Polonceau as far as a house which bore the number 49, and along the\r
-Rue Droit-Mur, where the fragment was much shorter, as far as the gloomy\r
-building which we have mentioned and whose gable it intersected, thus\r
-forming another retreating angle in the street. This gable was sombre\r
-of aspect; only one window was visible, or, to speak more correctly, two\r
-shutters covered with a sheet of zinc and kept constantly closed.\r
-\r
-The state of the places of which we are here giving a description is\r
-rigorously exact, and will certainly awaken a very precise memory in the\r
-mind of old inhabitants of the quarter.\r
-\r
-The niche was entirely filled by a thing which resembled a colossal\r
-and wretched door; it was a vast, formless assemblage of perpendicular\r
-planks, the upper ones being broader than the lower, bound together by\r
-long transverse strips of iron. At one side there was a carriage gate of\r
-the ordinary dimensions, and which had evidently not been cut more than\r
-fifty years previously.\r
-\r
-A linden-tree showed its crest above the niche, and the wall was covered\r
-with ivy on the side of the Rue Polonceau.\r
-\r
-In the imminent peril in which Jean Valjean found himself, this sombre\r
-building had about it a solitary and uninhabited look which tempted him.\r
-He ran his eyes rapidly over it; he said to himself, that if he could\r
-contrive to get inside it, he might save himself. First he conceived an\r
-idea, then a hope.\r
-\r
-In the central portion of the front of this building, on the Rue\r
-Droit-Mur side, there were at all the windows of the different stories\r
-ancient cistern pipes of lead. The various branches of the pipes which\r
-led from one central pipe to all these little basins sketched out a sort\r
-of tree on the front. These ramifications of pipes with their hundred\r
-elbows imitated those old leafless vine-stocks which writhe over the\r
-fronts of old farm-houses.\r
-\r
-This odd espalier, with its branches of lead and iron, was the first\r
-thing that struck Jean Valjean. He seated Cosette with her back against\r
-a stone post, with an injunction to be silent, and ran to the spot where\r
-the conduit touched the pavement. Perhaps there was some way of climbing\r
-up by it and entering the house. But the pipe was dilapidated and past\r
-service, and hardly hung to its fastenings. Moreover, all the windows\r
-of this silent dwelling were grated with heavy iron bars, even the attic\r
-windows in the roof. And then, the moon fell full upon that facade, and\r
-the man who was watching at the corner of the street would have seen\r
-Jean Valjean in the act of climbing. And finally, what was to be done\r
-with Cosette? How was she to be drawn up to the top of a three-story\r
-house?\r
-\r
-He gave up all idea of climbing by means of the drain-pipe, and crawled\r
-along the wall to get back into the Rue Polonceau.\r
-\r
-When he reached the slant of the wall where he had left Cosette, he\r
-noticed that no one could see him there. As we have just explained, he\r
-was concealed from all eyes, no matter from which direction they were\r
-approaching; besides this, he was in the shadow. Finally, there were\r
-two doors; perhaps they might be forced. The wall above which he saw the\r
-linden-tree and the ivy evidently abutted on a garden where he could, at\r
-least, hide himself, although there were as yet no leaves on the trees,\r
-and spend the remainder of the night.\r
-\r
-Time was passing; he must act quickly.\r
-\r
-He felt over the carriage door, and immediately recognized the fact that\r
-it was impracticable outside and in.\r
-\r
-He approached the other door with more hope; it was frightfully\r
-decrepit; its very immensity rendered it less solid; the planks were\r
-rotten; the iron bands--there were only three of them--were rusted. It\r
-seemed as though it might be possible to pierce this worm-eaten barrier.\r
-\r
-On examining it he found that the door was not a door; it had neither\r
-hinges, cross-bars, lock, nor fissure in the middle; the iron bands\r
-traversed it from side to side without any break. Through the crevices\r
-in the planks he caught a view of unhewn slabs and blocks of stone\r
-roughly cemented together, which passers-by might still have seen there\r
-ten years ago. He was forced to acknowledge with consternation that this\r
-apparent door was simply the wooden decoration of a building against\r
-which it was placed. It was easy to tear off a plank; but then, one\r
-found one's self face to face with a wall.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH GAS LANTERNS\r
-\r
-At that moment a heavy and measured sound began to be audible at some\r
-distance. Jean Valjean risked a glance round the corner of the street.\r
-Seven or eight soldiers, drawn up in a platoon, had just debouched\r
-into the Rue Polonceau. He saw the gleam of their bayonets. They were\r
-advancing towards him; these soldiers, at whose head he distinguished\r
-Javert's tall figure, advanced slowly and cautiously. They halted\r
-frequently; it was plain that they were searching all the nooks of the\r
-walls and all the embrasures of the doors and alleys.\r
-\r
-This was some patrol that Javert had encountered--there could be no\r
-mistake as to this surmise--and whose aid he had demanded.\r
-\r
-Javert's two acolytes were marching in their ranks.\r
-\r
-At the rate at which they were marching, and in consideration of the\r
-halts which they were making, it would take them about a quarter of\r
-an hour to reach the spot where Jean Valjean stood. It was a frightful\r
-moment. A few minutes only separated Jean Valjean from that terrible\r
-precipice which yawned before him for the third time. And the galleys\r
-now meant not only the galleys, but Cosette lost to him forever; that is\r
-to say, a life resembling the interior of a tomb.\r
-\r
-There was but one thing which was possible.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one might say,\r
-two beggar's pouches: in one he kept his saintly thoughts; in the other\r
-the redoubtable talents of a convict. He rummaged in the one or the\r
-other, according to circumstances.\r
-\r
-Among his other resources, thanks to his numerous escapes from the\r
-prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be remembered, a past master in the\r
-incredible art of crawling up without ladder or climbing-irons, by sheer\r
-muscular force, by leaning on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his\r
-hips, and his knees, by helping himself on the rare projections of the\r
-stone, in the right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth story, if need\r
-be; an art which has rendered so celebrated and so alarming that corner\r
-of the wall of the Conciergerie of Paris by which Battemolle, condemned\r
-to death, made his escape twenty years ago.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which he espied the\r
-linden; it was about eighteen feet in height. The angle which it formed\r
-with the gable of the large building was filled, at its lower extremity,\r
-by a mass of masonry of a triangular shape, probably intended to\r
-preserve that too convenient corner from the rubbish of those dirty\r
-creatures called the passers-by. This practice of filling up corners of\r
-the wall is much in use in Paris.\r
-\r
-This mass was about five feet in height; the space above the summit of\r
-this mass which it was necessary to climb was not more than fourteen\r
-feet.\r
-\r
-The wall was surmounted by a flat stone without a coping.\r
-\r
-Cosette was the difficulty, for she did not know how to climb a wall.\r
-Should he abandon her? Jean Valjean did not once think of that. It\r
-was impossible to carry her. A man's whole strength is required to\r
-successfully carry out these singular ascents. The least burden would\r
-disturb his centre of gravity and pull him downwards.\r
-\r
-A rope would have been required; Jean Valjean had none. Where was he to\r
-get a rope at midnight, in the Rue Polonceau? Certainly, if Jean Valjean\r
-had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope at that moment.\r
-\r
-All extreme situations have their lightning flashes which sometimes\r
-dazzle, sometimes illuminate us.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's despairing glance fell on the street lantern-post of the\r
-blind alley Genrot.\r
-\r
-At that epoch there were no gas-jets in the streets of Paris. At\r
-nightfall lanterns placed at regular distances were lighted; they were\r
-ascended and descended by means of a rope, which traversed the street\r
-from side to side, and was adjusted in a groove of the post. The pulley\r
-over which this rope ran was fastened underneath the lantern in a little\r
-iron box, the key to which was kept by the lamp-lighter, and the rope\r
-itself was protected by a metal case.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, with the energy of a supreme struggle, crossed the street\r
-at one bound, entered the blind alley, broke the latch of the little box\r
-with the point of his knife, and an instant later he was beside Cosette\r
-once more. He had a rope. These gloomy inventors of expedients work\r
-rapidly when they are fighting against fatality.\r
-\r
-We have already explained that the lanterns had not been lighted that\r
-night. The lantern in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot was thus naturally extinct,\r
-like the rest; and one could pass directly under it without even\r
-noticing that it was no longer in its place.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, the hour, the place, the darkness, Jean Valjean's\r
-absorption, his singular gestures, his goings and comings, all had begun\r
-to render Cosette uneasy. Any other child than she would have given vent\r
-to loud shrieks long before. She contented herself with plucking Jean\r
-Valjean by the skirt of his coat. They could hear the sound of the\r
-patrol's approach ever more and more distinctly.\r
-\r
-"Father," said she, in a very low voice, "I am afraid. Who is coming\r
-yonder?"\r
-\r
-"Hush!" replied the unhappy man; "it is Madame Thenardier."\r
-\r
-Cosette shuddered. He added:--\r
-\r
-"Say nothing. Don't interfere with me. If you cry out, if you weep, the\r
-Thenardier is lying in wait for you. She is coming to take you back."\r
-\r
-Then, without haste, but without making a useless movement, with firm\r
-and curt precision, the more remarkable at a moment when the patrol and\r
-Javert might come upon him at any moment, he undid his cravat, passed it\r
-round Cosette's body under the armpits, taking care that it should not\r
-hurt the child, fastened this cravat to one end of the rope, by means of\r
-that knot which seafaring men call a "swallow knot," took the other end\r
-of the rope in his teeth, pulled off his shoes and stockings, which\r
-he threw over the wall, stepped upon the mass of masonry, and began\r
-to raise himself in the angle of the wall and the gable with as much\r
-solidity and certainty as though he had the rounds of a ladder under his\r
-feet and elbows. Half a minute had not elapsed when he was resting on\r
-his knees on the wall.\r
-\r
-Cosette gazed at him in stupid amazement, without uttering a word. Jean\r
-Valjean's injunction, and the name of Madame Thenardier, had chilled her\r
-blood.\r
-\r
-All at once she heard Jean Valjean's voice crying to her, though in a\r
-very low tone:--\r
-\r
-"Put your back against the wall."\r
-\r
-She obeyed.\r
-\r
-"Don't say a word, and don't be alarmed," went on Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-And she felt herself lifted from the ground.\r
-\r
-Before she had time to recover herself, she was on the top of the wall.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean grasped her, put her on his back, took her two tiny hands\r
-in his large left hand, lay down flat on his stomach and crawled along\r
-on top of the wall as far as the cant. As he had guessed, there stood\r
-a building whose roof started from the top of the wooden barricade and\r
-descended to within a very short distance of the ground, with a gentle\r
-slope which grazed the linden-tree. A lucky circumstance, for the wall\r
-was much higher on this side than on the street side. Jean Valjean could\r
-only see the ground at a great depth below him.\r
-\r
-He had just reached the slope of the roof, and had not yet left the\r
-crest of the wall, when a violent uproar announced the arrival of the\r
-patrol. The thundering voice of Javert was audible:--\r
-\r
-"Search the blind alley! The Rue Droit-Mur is guarded! so is the Rue\r
-Petit-Picpus. I'll answer for it that he is in the blind alley."\r
-\r
-The soldiers rushed into the Genrot alley.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean allowed himself to slide down the roof, still holding fast\r
-to Cosette, reached the linden-tree, and leaped to the ground. Whether\r
-from terror or courage, Cosette had not breathed a sound, though her\r
-hands were a little abraded.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean found himself in a sort of garden which was very vast and\r
-of singular aspect; one of those melancholy gardens which seem made to\r
-be looked at in winter and at night. This garden was oblong in shape,\r
-with an alley of large poplars at the further end, tolerably tall forest\r
-trees in the corners, and an unshaded space in the centre, where could\r
-be seen a very large, solitary tree, then several fruit-trees, gnarled\r
-and bristling like bushes, beds of vegetables, a melon patch, whose\r
-glass frames sparkled in the moonlight, and an old well. Here and\r
-there stood stone benches which seemed black with moss. The alleys were\r
-bordered with gloomy and very erect little shrubs. The grass had half\r
-taken possession of them, and a green mould covered the rest.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had beside him the building whose roof had served him as\r
-a means of descent, a pile of fagots, and, behind the fagots, directly\r
-against the wall, a stone statue, whose mutilated face was no longer\r
-anything more than a shapeless mask which loomed vaguely through the\r
-gloom.\r
-\r
-The building was a sort of ruin, where dismantled chambers were\r
-distinguishable, one of which, much encumbered, seemed to serve as a\r
-shed.\r
-\r
-The large building of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had a wing on the Rue\r
-Petit-Picpus, turned two facades, at right angles, towards this garden.\r
-These interior facades were even more tragic than the exterior. All\r
-the windows were grated. Not a gleam of light was visible at any one of\r
-them. The upper story had scuttles like prisons. One of those facades\r
-cast its shadow on the other, which fell over the garden like an immense\r
-black pall.\r
-\r
-No other house was visible. The bottom of the garden was lost in mist\r
-and darkness. Nevertheless, walls could be confusedly made out, which\r
-intersected as though there were more cultivated land beyond, and the\r
-low roofs of the Rue Polonceau.\r
-\r
-Nothing more wild and solitary than this garden could be imagined. There\r
-was no one in it, which was quite natural in view of the hour; but it\r
-did not seem as though this spot were made for any one to walk in, even\r
-in broad daylight.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's first care had been to get hold of his shoes and put them\r
-on again, then to step under the shed with Cosette. A man who is fleeing\r
-never thinks himself sufficiently hidden. The child, whose thoughts were\r
-still on the Thenardier, shared his instinct for withdrawing from sight\r
-as much as possible.\r
-\r
-Cosette trembled and pressed close to him. They heard the tumultuous\r
-noise of the patrol searching the blind alley and the streets; the blows\r
-of their gun-stocks against the stones; Javert's appeals to the police\r
-spies whom he had posted, and his imprecations mingled with words which\r
-could not be distinguished.\r
-\r
-At the expiration of a quarter of an hour it seemed as though that\r
-species of stormy roar were becoming more distant. Jean Valjean held his\r
-breath.\r
-\r
-He had laid his hand lightly on Cosette's mouth.\r
-\r
-However, the solitude in which he stood was so strangely calm, that this\r
-frightful uproar, close and furious as it was, did not disturb him by so\r
-much as the shadow of a misgiving. It seemed as though those walls had\r
-been built of the deaf stones of which the Scriptures speak.\r
-\r
-All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a\r
-sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been\r
-horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst\r
-of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night;\r
-women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure\r
-accents of virgins and the innocent accents of children,--voices which\r
-are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant\r
-still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded\r
-from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment\r
-when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of\r
-angels was approaching through the gloom.\r
-\r
-Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.\r
-\r
-They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of\r
-them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that\r
-they must kneel.\r
-\r
-These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent\r
-the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in\r
-an uninhabited house.\r
-\r
-While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no\r
-longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he\r
-felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.\r
-\r
-The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could\r
-not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.\r
-\r
-All fell silent again. There was no longer anything in the street;\r
-there was nothing in the garden. That which had menaced, that which had\r
-reassured him,--all had vanished. The breeze swayed a few dry weeds\r
-on the crest of the wall, and they gave out a faint, sweet, melancholy\r
-sound.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--CONTINUATION OF THE ENIGMA\r
-\r
-The night wind had risen, which indicated that it must be between one\r
-and two o'clock in the morning. Poor Cosette said nothing. As she had\r
-seated herself beside him and leaned her head against him, Jean Valjean\r
-had fancied that she was asleep. He bent down and looked at her.\r
-Cosette's eyes were wide open, and her thoughtful air pained Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-She was still trembling.\r
-\r
-"Are you sleepy?" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"I am very cold," she replied.\r
-\r
-A moment later she resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Is she still there?"\r
-\r
-"Who?" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Madame Thenardier."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had already forgotten the means which he had employed to\r
-make Cosette keep silent.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said he, "she is gone. You need fear nothing further."\r
-\r
-The child sighed as though a load had been lifted from her breast.\r
-\r
-The ground was damp, the shed open on all sides, the breeze grew more\r
-keen every instant. The goodman took off his coat and wrapped it round\r
-Cosette.\r
-\r
-"Are you less cold now?" said he.\r
-\r
-"Oh, yes, father."\r
-\r
-"Well, wait for me a moment. I will soon be back."\r
-\r
-He quitted the ruin and crept along the large building, seeking a better\r
-shelter. He came across doors, but they were closed. There were bars at\r
-all the windows of the ground floor.\r
-\r
-Just after he had turned the inner angle of the edifice, he observed\r
-that he was coming to some arched windows, where he perceived a light.\r
-He stood on tiptoe and peeped through one of these windows. They all\r
-opened on a tolerably vast hall, paved with large flagstones, cut up\r
-by arcades and pillars, where only a tiny light and great shadows were\r
-visible. The light came from a taper which was burning in one\r
-corner. The apartment was deserted, and nothing was stirring in it.\r
-Nevertheless, by dint of gazing intently he thought he perceived on the\r
-ground something which appeared to be covered with a winding-sheet, and\r
-which resembled a human form. This form was lying face downward, flat\r
-on the pavement, with the arms extended in the form of a cross, in the\r
-immobility of death. One would have said, judging from a sort of serpent\r
-which undulated over the floor, that this sinister form had a rope round\r
-its neck.\r
-\r
-The whole chamber was bathed in that mist of places which are sparely\r
-illuminated, which adds to horror.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean often said afterwards, that, although many funereal\r
-spectres had crossed his path in life, he had never beheld anything more\r
-blood-curdling and terrible than that enigmatical form accomplishing\r
-some inexplicable mystery in that gloomy place, and beheld thus at\r
-night. It was alarming to suppose that that thing was perhaps dead; and\r
-still more alarming to think that it was perhaps alive.\r
-\r
-He had the courage to plaster his face to the glass, and to watch\r
-whether the thing would move. In spite of his remaining thus what seemed\r
-to him a very long time, the outstretched form made no movement. All\r
-at once he felt himself overpowered by an inexpressible terror, and he\r
-fled. He began to run towards the shed, not daring to look behind him.\r
-It seemed to him, that if he turned his head, he should see that form\r
-following him with great strides and waving its arms.\r
-\r
-He reached the ruin all out of breath. His knees were giving way beneath\r
-him; the perspiration was pouring from him.\r
-\r
-Where was he? Who could ever have imagined anything like that sort of\r
-sepulchre in the midst of Paris! What was this strange house? An edifice\r
-full of nocturnal mystery, calling to souls through the darkness with\r
-the voice of angels, and when they came, offering them abruptly that\r
-terrible vision; promising to open the radiant portals of heaven, and\r
-then opening the horrible gates of the tomb! And it actually was an\r
-edifice, a house, which bore a number on the street! It was not a dream!\r
-He had to touch the stones to convince himself that such was the fact.\r
-\r
-Cold, anxiety, uneasiness, the emotions of the night, had given him a\r
-genuine fever, and all these ideas were clashing together in his brain.\r
-\r
-He stepped up to Cosette. She was asleep.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE ENIGMA BECOMES DOUBLY MYSTERIOUS\r
-\r
-The child had laid her head on a stone and fallen asleep.\r
-\r
-He sat down beside her and began to think. Little by little, as he gazed\r
-at her, he grew calm and regained possession of his freedom of mind.\r
-\r
-He clearly perceived this truth, the foundation of his life henceforth,\r
-that so long as she was there, so long as he had her near him, he should\r
-need nothing except for her, he should fear nothing except for her. He\r
-was not even conscious that he was very cold, since he had taken off his\r
-coat to cover her.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, athwart this revery into which he had fallen he had heard\r
-for some time a peculiar noise. It was like the tinkling of a bell. This\r
-sound proceeded from the garden. It could be heard distinctly though\r
-faintly. It resembled the faint, vague music produced by the bells of\r
-cattle at night in the pastures.\r
-\r
-This noise made Valjean turn round.\r
-\r
-He looked and saw that there was some one in the garden.\r
-\r
-A being resembling a man was walking amid the bell-glasses of the melon\r
-beds, rising, stooping, halting, with regular movements, as though he\r
-were dragging or spreading out something on the ground. This person\r
-appeared to limp.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean shuddered with the continual tremor of the unhappy. For\r
-them everything is hostile and suspicious. They distrust the day\r
-because it enables people to see them, and the night because it aids\r
-in surprising them. A little while before he had shivered because the\r
-garden was deserted, and now he shivered because there was some one\r
-there.\r
-\r
-He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He said to himself\r
-that Javert and the spies had, perhaps, not taken their departure; that\r
-they had, no doubt, left people on the watch in the street; that if this\r
-man should discover him in the garden, he would cry out for help against\r
-thieves and deliver him up. He took the sleeping Cosette gently in his\r
-arms and carried her behind a heap of old furniture, which was out of\r
-use, in the most remote corner of the shed. Cosette did not stir.\r
-\r
-From that point he scrutinized the appearance of the being in the\r
-melon patch. The strange thing about it was, that the sound of the bell\r
-followed each of this man's movements. When the man approached, the\r
-sound approached; when the man retreated, the sound retreated; if he\r
-made any hasty gesture, a tremolo accompanied the gesture; when he\r
-halted, the sound ceased. It appeared evident that the bell was attached\r
-to that man; but what could that signify? Who was this man who had a\r
-bell suspended about him like a ram or an ox?\r
-\r
-As he put these questions to himself, he touched Cosette's hands. They\r
-were icy cold.\r
-\r
-"Ah! good God!" he cried.\r
-\r
-He spoke to her in a low voice:--\r
-\r
-"Cosette!"\r
-\r
-She did not open her eyes.\r
-\r
-He shook her vigorously.\r
-\r
-She did not wake.\r
-\r
-"Is she dead?" he said to himself, and sprang to his feet, quivering\r
-from head to foot.\r
-\r
-The most frightful thoughts rushed pell-mell through his mind. There\r
-are moments when hideous surmises assail us like a cohort of furies, and\r
-violently force the partitions of our brains. When those we love are in\r
-question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. He remembered that\r
-sleep in the open air on a cold night may be fatal.\r
-\r
-Cosette was pale, and had fallen at full length on the ground at his\r
-feet, without a movement.\r
-\r
-He listened to her breathing: she still breathed, but with a respiration\r
-which seemed to him weak and on the point of extinction.\r
-\r
-\r
-How was he to warm her back to life? How was he to rouse her? All that\r
-was not connected with this vanished from his thoughts. He rushed wildly\r
-from the ruin.\r
-\r
-It was absolutely necessary that Cosette should be in bed and beside a\r
-fire in less than a quarter of an hour.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--THE MAN WITH THE BELL\r
-\r
-He walked straight up to the man whom he saw in the garden. He had taken\r
-in his hand the roll of silver which was in the pocket of his waistcoat.\r
-\r
-The man's head was bent down, and he did not see him approaching. In a\r
-few strides Jean Valjean stood beside him.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean accosted him with the cry:--\r
-\r
-"One hundred francs!"\r
-\r
-The man gave a start and raised his eyes.\r
-\r
-"You can earn a hundred francs," went on Jean Valjean, "if you will\r
-grant me shelter for this night."\r
-\r
-The moon shone full upon Jean Valjean's terrified countenance.\r
-\r
-"What! so it is you, Father Madeleine!" said the man.\r
-\r
-That name, thus pronounced, at that obscure hour, in that unknown spot,\r
-by that strange man, made Jean Valjean start back.\r
-\r
-He had expected anything but that. The person who thus addressed him was\r
-a bent and lame old man, dressed almost like a peasant, who wore on his\r
-left knee a leather knee-cap, whence hung a moderately large bell. His\r
-face, which was in the shadow, was not distinguishable.\r
-\r
-However, the goodman had removed his cap, and exclaimed, trembling all\r
-over:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, good God! How come you here, Father Madeleine? Where did you enter?\r
-Dieu-Jesus! Did you fall from heaven? There is no trouble about that:\r
-if ever you do fall, it will be from there. And what a state you are in!\r
-You have no cravat; you have no hat; you have no coat! Do you know, you\r
-would have frightened any one who did not know you? No coat! Lord God!\r
-Are the saints going mad nowadays? But how did you get in here?"\r
-\r
-His words tumbled over each other. The goodman talked with a rustic\r
-volubility, in which there was nothing alarming. All this was uttered\r
-with a mixture of stupefaction and naive kindliness.\r
-\r
-"Who are you? and what house is this?" demanded Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Ah! pardieu, this is too much!" exclaimed the old man. "I am the person\r
-for whom you got the place here, and this house is the one where you had\r
-me placed. What! You don't recognize me?"\r
-\r
-"No," said Jean Valjean; "and how happens it that you know me?"\r
-\r
-"You saved my life," said the man.\r
-\r
-He turned. A ray of moonlight outlined his profile, and Jean Valjean\r
-recognized old Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said Jean Valjean, "so it is you? Yes, I recollect you."\r
-\r
-"That is very lucky," said the old man, in a reproachful tone.\r
-\r
-"And what are you doing here?" resumed Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Why, I am covering my melons, of course!"\r
-\r
-In fact, at the moment when Jean Valjean accosted him, old Fauchelevent\r
-held in his hand the end of a straw mat which he was occupied in\r
-spreading over the melon bed. During the hour or thereabouts that he had\r
-been in the garden he had already spread out a number of them. It was\r
-this operation which had caused him to execute the peculiar movements\r
-observed from the shed by Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-He continued:--\r
-\r
-"I said to myself, 'The moon is bright: it is going to freeze. What if I\r
-were to put my melons into their greatcoats?' And," he added, looking at\r
-Jean Valjean with a broad smile,--"pardieu! you ought to have done the\r
-same! But how do you come here?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, finding himself known to this man, at least only under the\r
-name of Madeleine, thenceforth advanced only with caution. He multiplied\r
-his questions. Strange to say, their roles seemed to be reversed. It was\r
-he, the intruder, who interrogated.\r
-\r
-"And what is this bell which you wear on your knee?"\r
-\r
-"This," replied Fauchelevent, "is so that I may be avoided."\r
-\r
-"What! so that you may be avoided?"\r
-\r
-Old Fauchelevent winked with an indescribable air.\r
-\r
-"Ah, goodness! there are only women in this house--many young girls. It\r
-appears that I should be a dangerous person to meet. The bell gives them\r
-warning. When I come, they go."\r
-\r
-"What house is this?"\r
-\r
-"Come, you know well enough."\r
-\r
-"But I do not."\r
-\r
-"Not when you got me the place here as gardener?"\r
-\r
-"Answer me as though I knew nothing."\r
-\r
-"Well, then, this is the Petit-Picpus convent."\r
-\r
-Memories recurred to Jean Valjean. Chance, that is to say, Providence,\r
-had cast him into precisely that convent in the Quartier Saint-Antoine\r
-where old Fauchelevent, crippled by the fall from his cart, had been\r
-admitted on his recommendation two years previously. He repeated, as\r
-though talking to himself:--\r
-\r
-"The Petit-Picpus convent."\r
-\r
-"Exactly," returned old Fauchelevent. "But to come to the point, how the\r
-deuce did you manage to get in here, you, Father Madeleine? No matter if\r
-you are a saint; you are a man as well, and no man enters here."\r
-\r
-"You certainly are here."\r
-\r
-"There is no one but me."\r
-\r
-"Still," said Jean Valjean, "I must stay here."\r
-\r
-"Ah, good God!" cried Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean drew near to the old man, and said to him in a grave\r
-voice:--\r
-\r
-"Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life."\r
-\r
-"I was the first to recall it," returned Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-"Well, you can do to-day for me that which I did for you in the olden\r
-days."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent took in his aged, trembling, and wrinkled hands Jean\r
-Valjean's two robust hands, and stood for several minutes as though\r
-incapable of speaking. At length he exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! that would be a blessing from the good God, if I could make you\r
-some little return for that! Save your life! Monsieur le Maire, dispose\r
-of the old man!"\r
-\r
-A wonderful joy had transfigured this old man. His countenance seemed to\r
-emit a ray of light.\r
-\r
-"What do you wish me to do?" he resumed.\r
-\r
-"That I will explain to you. You have a chamber?"\r
-\r
-"I have an isolated hovel yonder, behind the ruins of the old convent,\r
-in a corner which no one ever looks into. There are three rooms in it."\r
-\r
-The hut was, in fact, so well hidden behind the ruins, and so cleverly\r
-arranged to prevent it being seen, that Jean Valjean had not perceived\r
-it.\r
-\r
-"Good," said Jean Valjean. "Now I am going to ask two things of you."\r
-\r
-"What are they, Mr. Mayor?"\r
-\r
-"In the first place, you are not to tell any one what you know about me.\r
-In the second, you are not to try to find out anything more."\r
-\r
-"As you please. I know that you can do nothing that is not honest,\r
-that you have always been a man after the good God's heart. And then,\r
-moreover, you it was who placed me here. That concerns you. I am at your\r
-service."\r
-\r
-"That is settled then. Now, come with me. We will go and get the child."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "so there is a child?"\r
-\r
-He added not a word further, and followed Jean Valjean as a dog follows\r
-his master.\r
-\r
-Less than half an hour afterwards Cosette, who had grown rosy again\r
-before the flame of a good fire, was lying asleep in the old gardener's\r
-bed. Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat once more; his hat,\r
-which he had flung over the wall, had been found and picked up. While\r
-Jean Valjean was putting on his coat, Fauchelevent had removed the\r
-bell and kneecap, which now hung on a nail beside a vintage basket that\r
-adorned the wall. The two men were warming themselves with their elbows\r
-resting on a table upon which Fauchelevent had placed a bit of cheese,\r
-black bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man was\r
-saying to Jean Valjean, as he laid his hand on the latter's knee:\r
-"Ah! Father Madeleine! You did not recognize me immediately; you save\r
-people's lives, and then you forget them! That is bad! But they remember\r
-you! You are an ingrate!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--WHICH EXPLAINS HOW JAVERT GOT ON THE SCENT\r
-\r
-The events of which we have just beheld the reverse side, so to speak,\r
-had come about in the simplest possible manner.\r
-\r
-When Jean Valjean, on the evening of the very day when Javert had\r
-arrested him beside Fantine's death-bed, had escaped from the town jail\r
-of M. sur M., the police had supposed that he had betaken himself to\r
-Paris. Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything\r
-disappears in this belly of the world, as in the belly of the sea. No\r
-forest hides a man as does that crowd. Fugitives of every sort know\r
-this. They go to Paris as to an abyss; there are gulfs which save. The\r
-police know it also, and it is in Paris that they seek what they\r
-have lost elsewhere. They sought the ex-mayor of M. sur M. Javert was\r
-summoned to Paris to throw light on their researches. Javert had, in\r
-fact, rendered powerful assistance in the recapture of Jean Valjean.\r
-Javert's zeal and intelligence on that occasion had been remarked by\r
-M. Chabouillet, secretary of the Prefecture under Comte Angles. M.\r
-Chabouillet, who had, moreover, already been Javert's patron, had the\r
-inspector of M. sur M. attached to the police force of Paris. There\r
-Javert rendered himself useful in divers and, though the word may seem\r
-strange for such services, honorable manners.\r
-\r
-He no longer thought of Jean Valjean,--the wolf of to-day causes these\r
-dogs who are always on the chase to forget the wolf of yesterday,--when,\r
-in December, 1823, he read a newspaper, he who never read newspapers;\r
-but Javert, a monarchical man, had a desire to know the particulars of\r
-the triumphal entry of the "Prince Generalissimo" into Bayonne. Just as\r
-he was finishing the article, which interested him; a name, the name of\r
-Jean Valjean, attracted his attention at the bottom of a page. The paper\r
-announced that the convict Jean Valjean was dead, and published the fact\r
-in such formal terms that Javert did not doubt it. He confined himself\r
-to the remark, "That's a good entry." Then he threw aside the paper, and\r
-thought no more about it.\r
-\r
-Some time afterwards, it chanced that a police report was transmitted\r
-from the prefecture of the Seine-et-Oise to the prefecture of police in\r
-Paris, concerning the abduction of a child, which had taken place, under\r
-peculiar circumstances, as it was said, in the commune of Montfermeil.\r
-A little girl of seven or eight years of age, the report said, who had\r
-been intrusted by her mother to an inn-keeper of that neighborhood, had\r
-been stolen by a stranger; this child answered to the name of Cosette,\r
-and was the daughter of a girl named Fantine, who had died in the\r
-hospital, it was not known where or when.\r
-\r
-This report came under Javert's eye and set him to thinking.\r
-\r
-The name of Fantine was well known to him. He remembered that Jean\r
-Valjean had made him, Javert, burst into laughter, by asking him for a\r
-respite of three days, for the purpose of going to fetch that creature's\r
-child. He recalled the fact that Jean Valjean had been arrested in Paris\r
-at the very moment when he was stepping into the coach for Montfermeil.\r
-Some signs had made him suspect at the time that this was the second\r
-occasion of his entering that coach, and that he had already, on the\r
-previous day, made an excursion to the neighborhood of that village, for\r
-he had not been seen in the village itself. What had he been intending\r
-to do in that region of Montfermeil? It could not even be surmised.\r
-Javert understood it now. Fantine's daughter was there. Jean Valjean was\r
-going there in search of her. And now this child had been stolen by a\r
-stranger! Who could that stranger be? Could it be Jean Valjean? But Jean\r
-Valjean was dead. Javert, without saying anything to anybody, took the\r
-coach from the Pewter Platter, Cul-de-Sac de la Planchette, and made a\r
-trip to Montfermeil.\r
-\r
-He expected to find a great deal of light on the subject there; he found\r
-a great deal of obscurity.\r
-\r
-For the first few days the Thenardiers had chattered in their rage. The\r
-disappearance of the Lark had created a sensation in the village. He\r
-immediately obtained numerous versions of the story, which ended in the\r
-abduction of a child. Hence the police report. But their first vexation\r
-having passed off, Thenardier, with his wonderful instinct, had\r
-very quickly comprehended that it is never advisable to stir up the\r
-prosecutor of the Crown, and that his complaints with regard to the\r
-abduction of Cosette would have as their first result to fix upon\r
-himself, and upon many dark affairs which he had on hand, the glittering\r
-eye of justice. The last thing that owls desire is to have a candle\r
-brought to them. And in the first place, how explain the fifteen hundred\r
-francs which he had received? He turned squarely round, put a gag on\r
-his wife's mouth, and feigned astonishment when the stolen child was\r
-mentioned to him. He understood nothing about it; no doubt he had\r
-grumbled for awhile at having that dear little creature "taken from him"\r
-so hastily; he should have liked to keep her two or three days longer,\r
-out of tenderness; but her "grandfather" had come for her in the most\r
-natural way in the world. He added the "grandfather," which produced a\r
-good effect. This was the story that Javert hit upon when he arrived at\r
-Montfermeil. The grandfather caused Jean Valjean to vanish.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, Javert dropped a few questions, like plummets, into\r
-Thenardier's history. "Who was that grandfather? and what was his name?"\r
-Thenardier replied with simplicity: "He is a wealthy farmer. I saw his\r
-passport. I think his name was M. Guillaume Lambert."\r
-\r
-Lambert is a respectable and extremely reassuring name. Thereupon Javert\r
-returned to Paris.\r
-\r
-"Jean Valjean is certainly dead," said he, "and I am a ninny."\r
-\r
-He had again begun to forget this history, when, in the course of\r
-March, 1824, he heard of a singular personage who dwelt in the parish of\r
-Saint-Medard and who had been surnamed "the mendicant who gives alms."\r
-This person, the story ran, was a man of means, whose name no one knew\r
-exactly, and who lived alone with a little girl of eight years, who\r
-knew nothing about herself, save that she had come from Montfermeil.\r
-Montfermeil! that name was always coming up, and it made Javert prick\r
-up his ears. An old beggar police spy, an ex-beadle, to whom this person\r
-had given alms, added a few more details. This gentleman of property was\r
-very shy,--never coming out except in the evening, speaking to no one,\r
-except, occasionally to the poor, and never allowing any one to approach\r
-him. He wore a horrible old yellow frock-coat, which was worth many\r
-millions, being all wadded with bank-bills. This piqued Javert's\r
-curiosity in a decided manner. In order to get a close look at this\r
-fantastic gentleman without alarming him, he borrowed the beadle's\r
-outfit for a day, and the place where the old spy was in the habit of\r
-crouching every evening, whining orisons through his nose, and playing\r
-the spy under cover of prayer.\r
-\r
-"The suspected individual" did indeed approach Javert thus disguised,\r
-and bestow alms on him. At that moment Javert raised his head, and the\r
-shock which Jean Valjean received on recognizing Javert was equal to the\r
-one received by Javert when he thought he recognized Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-However, the darkness might have misled him; Jean Valjean's death was\r
-official; Javert cherished very grave doubts; and when in doubt, Javert,\r
-the man of scruples, never laid a finger on any one's collar.\r
-\r
-He followed his man to the Gorbeau house, and got "the old woman" to\r
-talking, which was no difficult matter. The old woman confirmed the fact\r
-regarding the coat lined with millions, and narrated to him the episode\r
-of the thousand-franc bill. She had seen it! She had handled it! Javert\r
-hired a room; that evening he installed himself in it. He came and\r
-listened at the mysterious lodger's door, hoping to catch the sound of\r
-his voice, but Jean Valjean saw his candle through the key-hole, and\r
-foiled the spy by keeping silent.\r
-\r
-On the following day Jean Valjean decamped; but the noise made by the\r
-fall of the five-franc piece was noticed by the old woman, who, hearing\r
-the rattling of coin, suspected that he might be intending to leave, and\r
-made haste to warn Javert. At night, when Jean Valjean came out, Javert\r
-was waiting for him behind the trees of the boulevard with two men.\r
-\r
-Javert had demanded assistance at the Prefecture, but he had not\r
-mentioned the name of the individual whom he hoped to seize; that was\r
-his secret, and he had kept it for three reasons: in the first place,\r
-because the slightest indiscretion might put Jean Valjean on the alert;\r
-next, because, to lay hands on an ex-convict who had made his escape\r
-and was reputed dead, on a criminal whom justice had formerly classed\r
-forever as among malefactors of the most dangerous sort, was a\r
-magnificent success which the old members of the Parisian police would\r
-assuredly not leave to a new-comer like Javert, and he was afraid of\r
-being deprived of his convict; and lastly, because Javert, being an\r
-artist, had a taste for the unforeseen. He hated those well-heralded\r
-successes which are talked of long in advance and have had the bloom\r
-brushed off. He preferred to elaborate his masterpieces in the dark and\r
-to unveil them suddenly at the last.\r
-\r
-Javert had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree, then from corner\r
-to corner of the street, and had not lost sight of him for a single\r
-instant; even at the moments when Jean Valjean believed himself to\r
-be the most secure Javert's eye had been on him. Why had not Javert\r
-arrested Jean Valjean? Because he was still in doubt.\r
-\r
-It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely\r
-at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests\r
-denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and\r
-had rendered the Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty\r
-was a grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mistake;\r
-the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal. The\r
-reader can imagine the effect which this brief paragraph, reproduced\r
-by twenty newspapers, would have caused in Paris: "Yesterday, an aged\r
-grandfather, with white hair, a respectable and well-to-do gentleman,\r
-who was walking with his grandchild, aged eight, was arrested and\r
-conducted to the agency of the Prefecture as an escaped convict!"\r
-\r
-Let us repeat in addition that Javert had scruples of his own;\r
-injunctions of his conscience were added to the injunctions of the\r
-prefect. He was really in doubt.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean turned his back on him and walked in the dark.\r
-\r
-Sadness, uneasiness, anxiety, depression, this fresh misfortune of being\r
-forced to flee by night, to seek a chance refuge in Paris for Cosette\r
-and himself, the necessity of regulating his pace to the pace of\r
-the child--all this, without his being aware of it, had altered Jean\r
-Valjean's walk, and impressed on his bearing such senility, that the\r
-police themselves, incarnate in the person of Javert, might, and did in\r
-fact, make a mistake. The impossibility of approaching too close, his\r
-costume of an emigre preceptor, the declaration of Thenardier which made\r
-a grandfather of him, and, finally, the belief in his death in prison,\r
-added still further to the uncertainty which gathered thick in Javert's\r
-mind.\r
-\r
-For an instant it occurred to him to make an abrupt demand for his\r
-papers; but if the man was not Jean Valjean, and if this man was not a\r
-good, honest old fellow living on his income, he was probably some merry\r
-blade deeply and cunningly implicated in the obscure web of Parisian\r
-misdeeds, some chief of a dangerous band, who gave alms to conceal\r
-his other talents, which was an old dodge. He had trusty fellows,\r
-accomplices' retreats in case of emergencies, in which he would, no\r
-doubt, take refuge. All these turns which he was making through the\r
-streets seemed to indicate that he was not a simple and honest man. To\r
-arrest him too hastily would be "to kill the hen that laid the golden\r
-eggs." Where was the inconvenience in waiting? Javert was very sure that\r
-he would not escape.\r
-\r
-Thus he proceeded in a tolerably perplexed state of mind, putting to\r
-himself a hundred questions about this enigmatical personage.\r
-\r
-It was only quite late in the Rue de Pontoise, that, thanks to the\r
-brilliant light thrown from a dram-shop, he decidedly recognized Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-There are in this world two beings who give a profound start,--the\r
-mother who recovers her child and the tiger who recovers his prey.\r
-Javert gave that profound start.\r
-\r
-As soon as he had positively recognized Jean Valjean, the formidable\r
-convict, he perceived that there were only three of them, and he asked\r
-for reinforcements at the police station of the Rue de Pontoise. One\r
-puts on gloves before grasping a thorn cudgel.\r
-\r
-This delay and the halt at the Carrefour Rollin to consult with his\r
-agents came near causing him to lose the trail. He speedily divined,\r
-however, that Jean Valjean would want to put the river between his\r
-pursuers and himself. He bent his head and reflected like a blood-hound\r
-who puts his nose to the ground to make sure that he is on the right\r
-scent. Javert, with his powerful rectitude of instinct, went straight to\r
-the bridge of Austerlitz. A word with the toll-keeper furnished him with\r
-the information which he required: "Have you seen a man with a little\r
-girl?" "I made him pay two sous," replied the toll-keeper. Javert\r
-reached the bridge in season to see Jean Valjean traverse the small\r
-illuminated spot on the other side of the water, leading Cosette by\r
-the hand. He saw him enter the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine; he\r
-remembered the Cul-de-Sac Genrot arranged there like a trap, and of the\r
-sole exit of the Rue Droit-Mur into the Rue Petit-Picpus. He made sure\r
-of his back burrows, as huntsmen say; he hastily despatched one of his\r
-agents, by a roundabout way, to guard that issue. A patrol which was\r
-returning to the Arsenal post having passed him, he made a requisition\r
-on it, and caused it to accompany him. In such games soldiers are aces.\r
-Moreover, the principle is, that in order to get the best of a wild\r
-boar, one must employ the science of venery and plenty of dogs. These\r
-combinations having been effected, feeling that Jean Valjean was caught\r
-between the blind alley Genrot on the right, his agent on the left, and\r
-himself, Javert, in the rear, he took a pinch of snuff.\r
-\r
-Then he began the game. He experienced one ecstatic and infernal moment;\r
-he allowed his man to go on ahead, knowing that he had him safe, but\r
-desirous of postponing the moment of arrest as long as possible, happy\r
-at the thought that he was taken and yet at seeing him free, gloating\r
-over him with his gaze, with that voluptuousness of the spider which\r
-allows the fly to flutter, and of the cat which lets the mouse run.\r
-Claws and talons possess a monstrous sensuality,--the obscure movements\r
-of the creature imprisoned in their pincers. What a delight this\r
-strangling is!\r
-\r
-Javert was enjoying himself. The meshes of his net were stoutly knotted.\r
-He was sure of success; all he had to do now was to close his hand.\r
-\r
-Accompanied as he was, the very idea of resistance was impossible,\r
-however vigorous, energetic, and desperate Jean Valjean might be.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Javert on the Hunt 2b5-10-javert-on-the-hunt]\r
-\r
-Javert advanced slowly, sounding, searching on his way all the nooks of\r
-the street like so many pockets of thieves.\r
-\r
-When he reached the centre of the web he found the fly no longer there.\r
-\r
-His exasperation can be imagined.\r
-\r
-He interrogated his sentinel of the Rues Droit-Mur and Petit-Picpus;\r
-that agent, who had remained imperturbably at his post, had not seen the\r
-man pass.\r
-\r
-It sometimes happens that a stag is lost head and horns; that is to\r
-say, he escapes although he has the pack on his very heels, and then the\r
-oldest huntsmen know not what to say. Duvivier, Ligniville, and Desprez\r
-halt short. In a discomfiture of this sort, Artonge exclaims, "It was\r
-not a stag, but a sorcerer." Javert would have liked to utter the same\r
-cry.\r
-\r
-His disappointment bordered for a moment on despair and rage.\r
-\r
-It is certain that Napoleon made mistakes during the war with Russia,\r
-that Alexander committed blunders in the war in India, that Caesar made\r
-mistakes in the war in Africa, that Cyrus was at fault in the war\r
-in Scythia, and that Javert blundered in this campaign against Jean\r
-Valjean. He was wrong, perhaps, in hesitating in his recognition of the\r
-exconvict. The first glance should have sufficed him. He was wrong in\r
-not arresting him purely and simply in the old building; he was wrong\r
-in not arresting him when he positively recognized him in the Rue de\r
-Pontoise. He was wrong in taking counsel with his auxiliaries in the\r
-full light of the moon in the Carrefour Rollin. Advice is certainly\r
-useful; it is a good thing to know and to interrogate those of the dogs\r
-who deserve confidence; but the hunter cannot be too cautious when he is\r
-chasing uneasy animals like the wolf and the convict. Javert, by taking\r
-too much thought as to how he should set the bloodhounds of the pack on\r
-the trail, alarmed the beast by giving him wind of the dart, and so\r
-made him run. Above all, he was wrong in that after he had picked up the\r
-scent again on the bridge of Austerlitz, he played that formidable and\r
-puerile game of keeping such a man at the end of a thread. He thought\r
-himself stronger than he was, and believed that he could play at the\r
-game of the mouse and the lion. At the same time, he reckoned himself\r
-as too weak, when he judged it necessary to obtain reinforcement. Fatal\r
-precaution, waste of precious time! Javert committed all these blunders,\r
-and none the less was one of the cleverest and most correct spies that\r
-ever existed. He was, in the full force of the term, what is called in\r
-venery a knowing dog. But what is there that is perfect?\r
-\r
-Great strategists have their eclipses.\r
-\r
-The greatest follies are often composed, like the largest ropes, of\r
-a multitude of strands. Take the cable thread by thread, take all the\r
-petty determining motives separately, and you can break them one after\r
-the other, and you say, "That is all there is of it!" Braid them, twist\r
-them together; the result is enormous: it is Attila hesitating between\r
-Marcian on the east and Valentinian on the west; it is Hannibal tarrying\r
-at Capua; it is Danton falling asleep at Arcis-sur-Aube.\r
-\r
-However that may be, even at the moment when he saw that Jean Valjean\r
-had escaped him, Javert did not lose his head. Sure that the convict who\r
-had broken his ban could not be far off, he established sentinels, he\r
-organized traps and ambuscades, and beat the quarter all that night. The\r
-first thing he saw was the disorder in the street lantern whose rope\r
-had been cut. A precious sign which, however, led him astray, since it\r
-caused him to turn all his researches in the direction of the Cul-de-Sac\r
-Genrot. In this blind alley there were tolerably low walls which abutted\r
-on gardens whose bounds adjoined the immense stretches of waste land.\r
-Jean Valjean evidently must have fled in that direction. The fact is,\r
-that had he penetrated a little further in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot, he\r
-would probably have done so and have been lost. Javert explored these\r
-gardens and these waste stretches as though he had been hunting for a\r
-needle.\r
-\r
-At daybreak he left two intelligent men on the outlook, and returned to\r
-the Prefecture of Police, as much ashamed as a police spy who had been\r
-captured by a robber might have been.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--NUMBER 62 RUE PETIT-PICPUS\r
-\r
-Nothing, half a century ago, more resembled every other carriage gate\r
-than the carriage gate of Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. This entrance,\r
-which usually stood ajar in the most inviting fashion, permitted a\r
-view of two things, neither of which have anything very funereal about\r
-them,--a courtyard surrounded by walls hung with vines, and the face\r
-of a lounging porter. Above the wall, at the bottom of the court, tall\r
-trees were visible. When a ray of sunlight enlivened the courtyard, when\r
-a glass of wine cheered up the porter, it was difficult to pass Number\r
-62 Little Picpus Street without carrying away a smiling impression of\r
-it. Nevertheless, it was a sombre place of which one had had a glimpse.\r
-\r
-The threshold smiled; the house prayed and wept.\r
-\r
-If one succeeded in passing the porter, which was not easy,--which was\r
-even nearly impossible for every one, for there was an open sesame!\r
-which it was necessary to know,--if, the porter once passed, one entered\r
-a little vestibule on the right, on which opened a staircase shut in\r
-between two walls and so narrow that only one person could ascend it at\r
-a time, if one did not allow one's self to be alarmed by a daubing of\r
-canary yellow, with a dado of chocolate which clothed this staircase, if\r
-one ventured to ascend it, one crossed a first landing, then a second,\r
-and arrived on the first story at a corridor where the yellow wash and\r
-the chocolate-hued plinth pursued one with a peaceable persistency.\r
-Staircase and corridor were lighted by two beautiful windows. The\r
-corridor took a turn and became dark. If one doubled this cape, one\r
-arrived a few paces further on, in front of a door which was all the\r
-more mysterious because it was not fastened. If one opened it, one\r
-found one's self in a little chamber about six feet square, tiled,\r
-well-scrubbed, clean, cold, and hung with nankin paper with green\r
-flowers, at fifteen sous the roll. A white, dull light fell from a large\r
-window, with tiny panes, on the left, which usurped the whole width\r
-of the room. One gazed about, but saw no one; one listened, one heard\r
-neither a footstep nor a human murmur. The walls were bare, the chamber\r
-was not furnished; there was not even a chair.\r
-\r
-One looked again, and beheld on the wall facing the door a quadrangular\r
-hole, about a foot square, with a grating of interlacing iron bars,\r
-black, knotted, solid, which formed squares--I had almost said\r
-meshes--of less than an inch and a half in diagonal length. The little\r
-green flowers of the nankin paper ran in a calm and orderly manner to\r
-those iron bars, without being startled or thrown into confusion by\r
-their funereal contact. Supposing that a living being had been so\r
-wonderfully thin as to essay an entrance or an exit through the square\r
-hole, this grating would have prevented it. It did not allow the passage\r
-of the body, but it did allow the passage of the eyes; that is to\r
-say, of the mind. This seems to have occurred to them, for it had been\r
-re-enforced by a sheet of tin inserted in the wall a little in the rear,\r
-and pierced with a thousand holes more microscopic than the holes of\r
-a strainer. At the bottom of this plate, an aperture had been pierced\r
-exactly similar to the orifice of a letter box. A bit of tape attached\r
-to a bell-wire hung at the right of the grated opening.\r
-\r
-If the tape was pulled, a bell rang, and one heard a voice very near at\r
-hand, which made one start.\r
-\r
-"Who is there?" the voice demanded.\r
-\r
-It was a woman's voice, a gentle voice, so gentle that it was mournful.\r
-\r
-Here, again, there was a magical word which it was necessary to know. If\r
-one did not know it, the voice ceased, the wall became silent once more,\r
-as though the terrified obscurity of the sepulchre had been on the other\r
-side of it.\r
-\r
-If one knew the password, the voice resumed, "Enter on the right."\r
-\r
-One then perceived on the right, facing the window, a glass door\r
-surmounted by a frame glazed and painted gray. On raising the latch and\r
-crossing the threshold, one experienced precisely the same impression\r
-as when one enters at the theatre into a grated baignoire, before the\r
-grating is lowered and the chandelier is lighted. One was, in fact, in\r
-a sort of theatre-box, narrow, furnished with two old chairs, and a\r
-much-frayed straw matting, sparely illuminated by the vague light from\r
-the glass door; a regular box, with its front just of a height to lean\r
-upon, bearing a tablet of black wood. This box was grated, only\r
-the grating of it was not of gilded wood, as at the opera; it was a\r
-monstrous lattice of iron bars, hideously interlaced and riveted to the\r
-wall by enormous fastenings which resembled clenched fists.\r
-\r
-The first minutes passed; when one's eyes began to grow used to this\r
-cellar-like half-twilight, one tried to pass the grating, but got no\r
-further than six inches beyond it. There he encountered a barrier of\r
-black shutters, re-enforced and fortified with transverse beams of wood\r
-painted a gingerbread yellow. These shutters were divided into long,\r
-narrow slats, and they masked the entire length of the grating. They\r
-were always closed. At the expiration of a few moments one heard a voice\r
-proceeding from behind these shutters, and saying:--\r
-\r
-"I am here. What do you wish with me?"\r
-\r
-It was a beloved, sometimes an adored, voice. No one was visible. Hardly\r
-the sound of a breath was audible. It seemed as though it were a spirit\r
-which had been evoked, that was speaking to you across the walls of the\r
-tomb.\r
-\r
-If one chanced to be within certain prescribed and very rare conditions,\r
-the slat of one of the shutters opened opposite you; the evoked spirit\r
-became an apparition. Behind the grating, behind the shutter, one\r
-perceived so far as the grating permitted sight, a head, of which only\r
-the mouth and the chin were visible; the rest was covered with a black\r
-veil. One caught a glimpse of a black guimpe, and a form that was barely\r
-defined, covered with a black shroud. That head spoke with you, but did\r
-not look at you and never smiled at you.\r
-\r
-The light which came from behind you was adjusted in such a manner that\r
-you saw her in the white, and she saw you in the black. This light was\r
-symbolical.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, your eyes plunged eagerly through that opening which\r
-was made in that place shut off from all glances. A profound vagueness\r
-enveloped that form clad in mourning. Your eyes searched that vagueness,\r
-and sought to make out the surroundings of the apparition. At the\r
-expiration of a very short time you discovered that you could see\r
-nothing. What you beheld was night, emptiness, shadows, a wintry mist\r
-mingled with a vapor from the tomb, a sort of terrible peace, a silence\r
-from which you could gather nothing, not even sighs, a gloom in which\r
-you could distinguish nothing, not even phantoms.\r
-\r
-What you beheld was the interior of a cloister.\r
-\r
-It was the interior of that severe and gloomy edifice which was called\r
-the Convent of the Bernardines of the Perpetual Adoration. The box in\r
-which you stood was the parlor. The first voice which had addressed you\r
-was that of the portress who always sat motionless and silent, on the\r
-other side of the wall, near the square opening, screened by the iron\r
-grating and the plate with its thousand holes, as by a double visor.\r
-The obscurity which bathed the grated box arose from the fact that the\r
-parlor, which had a window on the side of the world, had none on the\r
-side of the convent. Profane eyes must see nothing of that sacred place.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, there was something beyond that shadow; there was a light;\r
-there was life in the midst of that death. Although this was the most\r
-strictly walled of all convents, we shall endeavor to make our way into\r
-it, and to take the reader in, and to say, without transgressing the\r
-proper bounds, things which story-tellers have never seen, and have,\r
-therefore, never described.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE OBEDIENCE OF MARTIN VERGA\r
-\r
-This convent, which in 1824 had already existed for many a long year in\r
-the Rue Petit-Picpus, was a community of Bernardines of the obedience of\r
-Martin Verga.\r
-\r
-These Bernardines were attached, in consequence, not to Clairvaux, like\r
-the Bernardine monks, but to Citeaux, like the Benedictine monks. In\r
-other words, they were the subjects, not of Saint Bernard, but of Saint\r
-Benoit.\r
-\r
-Any one who has turned over old folios to any extent knows that Martin\r
-Verga founded in 1425 a congregation of Bernardines-Benedictines,\r
-with Salamanca for the head of the order, and Alcala as the branch\r
-establishment.\r
-\r
-This congregation had sent out branches throughout all the Catholic\r
-countries of Europe.\r
-\r
-There is nothing unusual in the Latin Church in these grafts of one\r
-order on another. To mention only a single order of Saint-Benoit, which\r
-is here in question: there are attached to this order, without counting\r
-the obedience of Martin Verga, four congregations,--two in Italy,\r
-Mont-Cassin and Sainte-Justine of Padua; two in France, Cluny and\r
-Saint-Maur; and nine orders,--Vallombrosa, Granmont, the Celestins,\r
-the Camaldules, the Carthusians, the Humilies, the Olivateurs, the\r
-Silvestrins, and lastly, Citeaux; for Citeaux itself, a trunk for other\r
-orders, is only an offshoot of Saint-Benoit. Citeaux dates from Saint\r
-Robert, Abbe de Molesme, in the diocese of Langres, in 1098. Now it was\r
-in 529 that the devil, having retired to the desert of Subiaco--he\r
-was old--had he turned hermit?--was chased from the ancient temple of\r
-Apollo, where he dwelt, by Saint-Benoit, then aged seventeen.\r
-\r
-After the rule of the Carmelites, who go barefoot, wear a bit of willow\r
-on their throats, and never sit down, the harshest rule is that of the\r
-Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga. They are clothed in black,\r
-with a guimpe, which, in accordance with the express command of\r
-Saint-Benoit, mounts to the chin. A robe of serge with large sleeves,\r
-a large woollen veil, the guimpe which mounts to the chin cut square on\r
-the breast, the band which descends over their brow to their eyes,--this\r
-is their dress. All is black except the band, which is white. The\r
-novices wear the same habit, but all in white. The professed nuns also\r
-wear a rosary at their side.\r
-\r
-The Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga practise the Perpetual\r
-Adoration, like the Benedictines called Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,\r
-who, at the beginning of this century, had two houses in Paris,--one at\r
-the Temple, the other in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve. However, the\r
-Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus, of whom we are speaking,\r
-were a totally different order from the Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,\r
-cloistered in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve and at the Temple. There\r
-were numerous differences in their rule; there were some in their\r
-costume. The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus wore the\r
-black guimpe, and the Benedictines of the Holy Sacrament and of the\r
-Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve wore a white one, and had, besides, on their\r
-breasts, a Holy Sacrament about three inches long, in silver gilt or\r
-gilded copper. The nuns of the Petit-Picpus did not wear this Holy\r
-Sacrament. The Perpetual Adoration, which was common to the house of\r
-the Petit-Picpus and to the house of the Temple, leaves those two orders\r
-perfectly distinct. Their only resemblance lies in this practice of the\r
-Ladies of the Holy Sacrament and the Bernardines of Martin Verga, just\r
-as there existed a similarity in the study and the glorification of\r
-all the mysteries relating to the infancy, the life, and death of Jesus\r
-Christ and the Virgin, between the two orders, which were, nevertheless,\r
-widely separated, and on occasion even hostile. The Oratory of Italy,\r
-established at Florence by Philip de Neri, and the Oratory of France,\r
-established by Pierre de Berulle. The Oratory of France claimed the\r
-precedence, since Philip de Neri was only a saint, while Berulle was a\r
-cardinal.\r
-\r
-Let us return to the harsh Spanish rule of Martin Verga.\r
-\r
-The Bernardines-Benedictines of this obedience fast all the year\r
-round, abstain from meat, fast in Lent and on many other days which are\r
-peculiar to them, rise from their first sleep, from one to three o'clock\r
-in the morning, to read their breviary and chant matins, sleep in all\r
-seasons between serge sheets and on straw, make no use of the bath,\r
-never light a fire, scourge themselves every Friday, observe the rule of\r
-silence, speak to each other only during the recreation hours, which are\r
-very brief, and wear drugget chemises for six months in the year, from\r
-September 14th, which is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, until Easter.\r
-These six months are a modification: the rule says all the year, but\r
-this drugget chemise, intolerable in the heat of summer, produced fevers\r
-and nervous spasms. The use of it had to be restricted. Even with this\r
-palliation, when the nuns put on this chemise on the 14th of September,\r
-they suffer from fever for three or four days. Obedience, poverty,\r
-chastity, perseverance in their seclusion,--these are their vows, which\r
-the rule greatly aggravates.\r
-\r
-The prioress is elected for three years by the mothers, who are called\r
-meres vocales because they have a voice in the chapter. A prioress can\r
-only be re-elected twice, which fixes the longest possible reign of a\r
-prioress at nine years.\r
-\r
-They never see the officiating priest, who is always hidden from them\r
-by a serge curtain nine feet in height. During the sermon, when the\r
-preacher is in the chapel, they drop their veils over their faces. They\r
-must always speak low, walk with their eyes on the ground and their\r
-heads bowed. One man only is allowed to enter the convent,--the\r
-archbishop of the diocese.\r
-\r
-There is really one other,--the gardener. But he is always an old man,\r
-and, in order that he may always be alone in the garden, and that the\r
-nuns may be warned to avoid him, a bell is attached to his knee.\r
-\r
-Their submission to the prioress is absolute and passive. It is the\r
-canonical subjection in the full force of its abnegation. As at the\r
-voice of Christ, ut voci Christi, at a gesture, at the first sign,\r
-ad nutum, ad primum signum, immediately, with cheerfulness, with\r
-perseverance, with a certain blind obedience, prompte, hilariter,\r
-perseveranter et caeca quadam obedientia, as the file in the hand of the\r
-workman, quasi limam in manibus fabri, without power to read or to write\r
-without express permission, legere vel scribere non addiscerit sine\r
-expressa superioris licentia.\r
-\r
-Each one of them in turn makes what they call reparation. The reparation\r
-is the prayer for all the sins, for all the faults, for all the\r
-dissensions, for all the violations, for all the iniquities, for all the\r
-crimes committed on earth. For the space of twelve consecutive hours,\r
-from four o'clock in the afternoon till four o'clock in the morning, or\r
-from four o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon,\r
-the sister who is making reparation remains on her knees on the stone\r
-before the Holy Sacrament, with hands clasped, a rope around her neck.\r
-When her fatigue becomes unendurable, she prostrates herself flat on\r
-her face against the earth, with her arms outstretched in the form of a\r
-cross; this is her only relief. In this attitude she prays for all the\r
-guilty in the universe. This is great to sublimity.\r
-\r
-As this act is performed in front of a post on which burns a candle, it\r
-is called without distinction, to make reparation or to be at the post.\r
-The nuns even prefer, out of humility, this last expression, which\r
-contains an idea of torture and abasement.\r
-\r
-To make reparation is a function in which the whole soul is absorbed.\r
-The sister at the post would not turn round were a thunderbolt to fall\r
-directly behind her.\r
-\r
-Besides this, there is always a sister kneeling before the Holy\r
-Sacrament. This station lasts an hour. They relieve each other like\r
-soldiers on guard. This is the Perpetual Adoration.\r
-\r
-The prioresses and the mothers almost always bear names stamped with\r
-peculiar solemnity, recalling, not the saints and martyrs, but moments\r
-in the life of Jesus Christ: as Mother Nativity, Mother Conception,\r
-Mother Presentation, Mother Passion. But the names of saints are not\r
-interdicted.\r
-\r
-When one sees them, one never sees anything but their mouths.\r
-\r
-All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent.\r
-Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the\r
-loss of one's soul.\r
-\r
-They never say my. They possess nothing of their own, and they must not\r
-attach themselves to anything. They call everything our; thus: our veil,\r
-our chaplet; if they were speaking of their chemise, they would say our\r
-chemise. Sometimes they grow attached to some petty object,--to a book\r
-of hours, a relic, a medal that has been blessed. As soon as they become\r
-aware that they are growing attached to this object, they must give it\r
-up. They recall the words of Saint Therese, to whom a great lady said,\r
-as she was on the point of entering her order, "Permit me, mother, to\r
-send for a Bible to which I am greatly attached." "Ah, you are attached\r
-to something! In that case, do not enter our order!"\r
-\r
-Every person whatever is forbidden to shut herself up, to have a place\r
-of her own, a chamber. They live with their cells open. When they meet,\r
-one says, "Blessed and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"\r
-The other responds, "Forever." The same ceremony when one taps at the\r
-other's door. Hardly has she touched the door when a soft voice on the\r
-other side is heard to say hastily, "Forever!" Like all practices, this\r
-becomes mechanical by force of habit; and one sometimes says forever\r
-before the other has had time to say the rather long sentence, "Praised\r
-and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar."\r
-\r
-Among the Visitandines the one who enters says: "Ave Maria," and the one\r
-whose cell is entered says, "Gratia plena." It is their way of saying\r
-good day, which is in fact full of grace.\r
-\r
-At each hour of the day three supplementary strokes sound from the\r
-church bell of the convent. At this signal prioress, vocal mothers,\r
-professed nuns, lay-sisters, novices, postulants, interrupt what they\r
-are saying, what they are doing, or what they are thinking, and all say\r
-in unison if it is five o'clock, for instance, "At five o'clock and at\r
-all hours praised and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"\r
-If it is eight o'clock, "At eight o'clock and at all hours!" and so on,\r
-according to the hour.\r
-\r
-This custom, the object of which is to break the thread of thought\r
-and to lead it back constantly to God, exists in many communities; the\r
-formula alone varies. Thus at The Infant Jesus they say, "At this\r
-hour and at every hour may the love of Jesus kindle my heart!" The\r
-Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga, cloistered fifty years ago at\r
-Petit-Picpus, chant the offices to a solemn psalmody, a pure Gregorian\r
-chant, and always with full voice during the whole course of the office.\r
-Everywhere in the missal where an asterisk occurs they pause, and say in\r
-a low voice, "Jesus-Marie-Joseph." For the office of the dead they adopt\r
-a tone so low that the voices of women can hardly descend to such a\r
-depth. The effect produced is striking and tragic.\r
-\r
-The nuns of the Petit-Picpus had made a vault under their grand altar\r
-for the burial of their community. The Government, as they say, does not\r
-permit this vault to receive coffins so they leave the convent when they\r
-die. This is an affliction to them, and causes them consternation as an\r
-infraction of the rules.\r
-\r
-They had obtained a mediocre consolation at best,--permission to be\r
-interred at a special hour and in a special corner in the ancient\r
-Vaugirard cemetery, which was made of land which had formerly belonged\r
-to their community.\r
-\r
-On Fridays the nuns hear high mass, vespers, and all the offices, as on\r
-Sunday. They scrupulously observe in addition all the little festivals\r
-unknown to people of the world, of which the Church of France was so\r
-prodigal in the olden days, and of which it is still prodigal in Spain\r
-and Italy. Their stations in the chapel are interminable. As for the\r
-number and duration of their prayers we can convey no better idea of\r
-them than by quoting the ingenuous remark of one of them: "The prayers\r
-of the postulants are frightful, the prayers of the novices are still\r
-worse, and the prayers of the professed nuns are still worse."\r
-\r
-Once a week the chapter assembles: the prioress presides; the vocal\r
-mothers assist. Each sister kneels in turn on the stones, and confesses\r
-aloud, in the presence of all, the faults and sins which she has\r
-committed during the week. The vocal mothers consult after each\r
-confession and inflict the penance aloud.\r
-\r
-Besides this confession in a loud tone, for which all faults in the\r
-least serious are reserved, they have for their venial offences what\r
-they call the coulpe. To make one's coulpe means to prostrate one's self\r
-flat on one's face during the office in front of the prioress until\r
-the latter, who is never called anything but our mother, notifies the\r
-culprit by a slight tap of her foot against the wood of her stall that\r
-she can rise. The coulpe or peccavi, is made for a very small matter--a\r
-broken glass, a torn veil, an involuntary delay of a few seconds at an\r
-office, a false note in church, etc.; this suffices, and the coulpe\r
-is made. The coulpe is entirely spontaneous; it is the culpable person\r
-herself (the word is etymologically in its place here) who judges\r
-herself and inflicts it on herself. On festival days and Sundays four\r
-mother precentors intone the offices before a large reading-desk with\r
-four places. One day one of the mother precentors intoned a psalm\r
-beginning with Ecce, and instead of Ecce she uttered aloud the three\r
-notes do si sol; for this piece of absent-mindedness she underwent a\r
-coulpe which lasted during the whole service: what rendered the fault\r
-enormous was the fact that the chapter had laughed.\r
-\r
-When a nun is summoned to the parlor, even were it the prioress herself,\r
-she drops her veil, as will be remembered, so that only her mouth is\r
-visible.\r
-\r
-The prioress alone can hold communication with strangers. The others can\r
-see only their immediate family, and that very rarely. If, by chance,\r
-an outsider presents herself to see a nun, or one whom she has known and\r
-loved in the outer world, a regular series of negotiations is required.\r
-If it is a woman, the authorization may sometimes be granted; the nun\r
-comes, and they talk to her through the shutters, which are opened only\r
-for a mother or sister. It is unnecessary to say that permission is\r
-always refused to men.\r
-\r
-Such is the rule of Saint-Benoit, aggravated by Martin Verga.\r
-\r
-These nuns are not gay, rosy, and fresh, as the daughters of other\r
-orders often are. They are pale and grave. Between 1825 and 1830 three\r
-of them went mad.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--AUSTERITIES\r
-\r
-One is a postulant for two years at least, often for four; a novice for\r
-four. It is rare that the definitive vows can be pronounced\r
-earlier than the age of twenty-three or twenty-four years. The\r
-Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga do not admit widows to their\r
-order.\r
-\r
-In their cells, they deliver themselves up to many unknown macerations,\r
-of which they must never speak.\r
-\r
-On the day when a novice makes her profession, she is dressed in her\r
-handsomest attire, she is crowned with white roses, her hair is brushed\r
-until it shines, and curled. Then she prostrates herself; a great black\r
-veil is thrown over her, and the office for the dead is sung. Then the\r
-nuns separate into two files; one file passes close to her, saying in\r
-plaintive accents, "Our sister is dead"; and the other file responds in\r
-a voice of ecstasy, "Our sister is alive in Jesus Christ!"\r
-\r
-At the epoch when this story takes place, a boarding-school was attached\r
-to the convent--a boarding-school for young girls of noble and\r
-mostly wealthy families, among whom could be remarked Mademoiselle\r
-de Saint-Aulaire and de Belissen, and an English girl bearing the\r
-illustrious Catholic name of Talbot. These young girls, reared by these\r
-nuns between four walls, grew up with a horror of the world and of the\r
-age. One of them said to us one day, "The sight of the street pavement\r
-made me shudder from head to foot." They were dressed in blue, with a\r
-white cap and a Holy Spirit of silver gilt or of copper on their breast.\r
-On certain grand festival days, particularly Saint Martha's day, they\r
-were permitted, as a high favor and a supreme happiness, to dress\r
-themselves as nuns and to carry out the offices and practice of\r
-Saint-Benoit for a whole day. In the early days the nuns were in the\r
-habit of lending them their black garments. This seemed profane, and\r
-the prioress forbade it. Only the novices were permitted to lend. It is\r
-remarkable that these performances, tolerated and encouraged, no doubt,\r
-in the convent out of a secret spirit of proselytism and in order\r
-to give these children a foretaste of the holy habit, were a genuine\r
-happiness and a real recreation for the scholars. They simply amused\r
-themselves with it. It was new; it gave them a change. Candid reasons\r
-of childhood, which do not, however, succeed in making us worldlings\r
-comprehend the felicity of holding a holy water sprinkler in one's hand\r
-and standing for hours together singing hard enough for four in front of\r
-a reading-desk.\r
-\r
-The pupils conformed, with the exception of the austerities, to all the\r
-practices of the convent. There was a certain young woman who entered\r
-the world, and who after many years of married life had not succeeded in\r
-breaking herself of the habit of saying in great haste whenever any\r
-one knocked at her door, "forever!" Like the nuns, the pupils saw\r
-their relatives only in the parlor. Their very mothers did not obtain\r
-permission to embrace them. The following illustrates to what a degree\r
-severity on that point was carried. One day a young girl received a\r
-visit from her mother, who was accompanied by a little sister three\r
-years of age. The young girl wept, for she wished greatly to embrace\r
-her sister. Impossible. She begged that, at least, the child might be\r
-permitted to pass her little hand through the bars so that she could\r
-kiss it. This was almost indignantly refused.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--GAYETIES\r
-\r
-None the less, these young girls filled this grave house with charming\r
-souvenirs.\r
-\r
-At certain hours childhood sparkled in that cloister. The recreation\r
-hour struck. A door swung on its hinges. The birds said, "Good;\r
-here come the children!" An irruption of youth inundated that garden\r
-intersected with a cross like a shroud. Radiant faces, white foreheads,\r
-innocent eyes, full of merry light, all sorts of auroras, were scattered\r
-about amid these shadows. After the psalmodies, the bells, the peals,\r
-and knells and offices, the sound of these little girls burst forth on a\r
-sudden more sweetly than the noise of bees. The hive of joy was opened,\r
-and each one brought her honey. They played, they called to each other,\r
-they formed into groups, they ran about; pretty little white teeth\r
-chattered in the corners; the veils superintended the laughs from a\r
-distance, shades kept watch of the sunbeams, but what mattered it? Still\r
-they beamed and laughed. Those four lugubrious walls had their moment\r
-of dazzling brilliancy. They looked on, vaguely blanched with the\r
-reflection of so much joy at this sweet swarming of the hives. It was\r
-like a shower of roses falling athwart this house of mourning. The young\r
-girls frolicked beneath the eyes of the nuns; the gaze of impeccability\r
-does not embarrass innocence. Thanks to these children, there was,\r
-among so many austere hours, one hour of ingenuousness. The little ones\r
-skipped about; the elder ones danced. In this cloister play was mingled\r
-with heaven. Nothing is so delightful and so august as all these fresh,\r
-expanding young souls. Homer would have come thither to laugh with\r
-Perrault; and there was in that black garden, youth, health, noise,\r
-cries, giddiness, pleasure, happiness enough to smooth out the wrinkles\r
-of all their ancestresses, those of the epic as well as those of the\r
-fairy-tale, those of the throne as well as those of the thatched cottage\r
-from Hecuba to la Mere-Grand.\r
-\r
-In that house more than anywhere else, perhaps, arise those children's\r
-sayings which are so graceful and which evoke a smile that is full of\r
-thoughtfulness. It was between those four gloomy walls that a child of\r
-five years exclaimed one day: "Mother! one of the big girls has just\r
-told me that I have only nine years and ten months longer to remain\r
-here. What happiness!"\r
-\r
-It was here, too, that this memorable dialogue took place:--\r
-\r
-A Vocal Mother. Why are you weeping, my child?\r
-\r
-The child (aged six). I told Alix that I knew my French history. She\r
-says that I do not know it, but I do.\r
-\r
-Alix, the big girl (aged nine). No; she does not know it.\r
-\r
-The Mother. How is that, my child?\r
-\r
-Alix. She told me to open the book at random and to ask her any question\r
-in the book, and she would answer it.\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"She did not answer it."\r
-\r
-"Let us see about it. What did you ask her?"\r
-\r
-"I opened the book at random, as she proposed, and I put the first\r
-question that I came across."\r
-\r
-"And what was the question?"\r
-\r
-"It was, 'What happened after that?'"\r
-\r
-It was there that that profound remark was made anent a rather greedy\r
-paroquet which belonged to a lady boarder:--\r
-\r
-"How well bred! it eats the top of the slice of bread and butter just\r
-like a person!"\r
-\r
-It was on one of the flagstones of this cloister that there was once\r
-picked up a confession which had been written out in advance, in order\r
-that she might not forget it, by a sinner of seven years:--\r
-\r
-"Father, I accuse myself of having been avaricious.\r
-\r
-"Father, I accuse myself of having been an adulteress.\r
-\r
-"Father, I accuse myself of having raised my eyes to the gentlemen."\r
-\r
-It was on one of the turf benches of this garden that a rosy mouth six\r
-years of age improvised the following tale, which was listened to by\r
-blue eyes aged four and five years:--\r
-\r
-"There were three little cocks who owned a country where there were\r
-a great many flowers. They plucked the flowers and put them in their\r
-pockets. After that they plucked the leaves and put them in their\r
-playthings. There was a wolf in that country; there was a great deal of\r
-forest; and the wolf was in the forest; and he ate the little cocks."\r
-\r
-And this other poem:--\r
-\r
-"There came a blow with a stick.\r
-\r
-"It was Punchinello who bestowed it on the cat.\r
-\r
-"It was not good for her; it hurt her.\r
-\r
-"Then a lady put Punchinello in prison."\r
-\r
-It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent\r
-was bringing up out of charity, uttered this sweet and heart-breaking\r
-saying. She heard the others talking of their mothers, and she murmured\r
-in her corner:--\r
-\r
-"As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!"\r
-\r
-There was a stout portress who could always be seen hurrying through the\r
-corridors with her bunch of keys, and whose name was Sister Agatha. The\r
-big big girls--those over ten years of age--called her Agathocles.\r
-\r
-The refectory, a large apartment of an oblong square form, which\r
-received no light except through a vaulted cloister on a level with the\r
-garden, was dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of beasts. All\r
-the places round about furnished their contingent of insects.\r
-\r
-Each of its four corners had received, in the language of the pupils,\r
-a special and expressive name. There was Spider corner, Caterpillar\r
-corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket corner.\r
-\r
-Cricket corner was near the kitchen and was highly esteemed. It was not\r
-so cold there as elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to\r
-the boarding-school, and there served as in the old College Mazarin\r
-to distinguish four nations. Every pupil belonged to one of these four\r
-nations according to the corner of the refectory in which she sat at\r
-meals. One day Monseigneur the Archbishop while making his pastoral\r
-visit saw a pretty little rosy girl with beautiful golden hair enter the\r
-class-room through which he was passing.\r
-\r
-He inquired of another pupil, a charming brunette with rosy cheeks, who\r
-stood near him:--\r
-\r
-"Who is that?"\r
-\r
-"She is a spider, Monseigneur."\r
-\r
-"Bah! And that one yonder?"\r
-\r
-"She is a cricket."\r
-\r
-"And that one?"\r
-\r
-"She is a caterpillar."\r
-\r
-"Really! and yourself?"\r
-\r
-"I am a wood-louse, Monseigneur."\r
-\r
-Every house of this sort has its own peculiarities. At the beginning of\r
-this century Ecouen was one of those strict and graceful places where\r
-young girls pass their childhood in a shadow that is almost august. At\r
-Ecouen, in order to take rank in the procession of the Holy Sacrament,\r
-a distinction was made between virgins and florists. There were also the\r
-"dais" and the "censors,"--the first who held the cords of the dais, and\r
-the others who carried incense before the Holy Sacrament. The flowers\r
-belonged by right to the florists. Four "virgins" walked in advance. On\r
-the morning of that great day it was no rare thing to hear the question\r
-put in the dormitory, "Who is a virgin?"\r
-\r
-Madame Campan used to quote this saying of a "little one" of seven\r
-years, to a "big girl" of sixteen, who took the head of the procession,\r
-while she, the little one, remained at the rear, "You are a virgin, but\r
-I am not."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--DISTRACTIONS\r
-\r
-Above the door of the refectory this prayer, which was called the white\r
-Paternoster, and which possessed the property of bearing people straight\r
-to paradise, was inscribed in large black letters:--\r
-\r
-"Little white Paternoster, which God made, which God said, which God\r
-placed in paradise. In the evening, when I went to bed, I found three\r
-angels sitting on my bed, one at the foot, two at the head, the good\r
-Virgin Mary in the middle, who told me to lie down without hesitation.\r
-The good God is my father, the good Virgin is my mother, the three\r
-apostles are my brothers, the three virgins are my sisters. The shirt in\r
-which God was born envelopes my body; Saint Margaret's cross is written\r
-on my breast. Madame the Virgin was walking through the meadows, weeping\r
-for God, when she met M. Saint John. 'Monsieur Saint John, whence come\r
-you?' 'I come from Ave Salus.' 'You have not seen the good God; where\r
-is he?' 'He is on the tree of the Cross, his feet hanging, his hands\r
-nailed, a little cap of white thorns on his head.' Whoever shall say\r
-this thrice at eventide, thrice in the morning, shall win paradise at\r
-the last."\r
-\r
-In 1827 this characteristic orison had disappeared from the wall under\r
-a triple coating of daubing paint. At the present time it is finally\r
-disappearing from the memories of several who were young girls then, and\r
-who are old women now.\r
-\r
-A large crucifix fastened to the wall completed the decoration of this\r
-refectory, whose only door, as we think we have mentioned, opened on the\r
-garden. Two narrow tables, each flanked by two wooden benches, formed\r
-two long parallel lines from one end to the other of the refectory.\r
-The walls were white, the tables were black; these two mourning colors\r
-constitute the only variety in convents. The meals were plain, and\r
-the food of the children themselves severe. A single dish of meat and\r
-vegetables combined, or salt fish--such was their luxury. This meagre\r
-fare, which was reserved for the pupils alone, was, nevertheless, an\r
-exception. The children ate in silence, under the eye of the mother\r
-whose turn it was, who, if a fly took a notion to fly or to hum against\r
-the rule, opened and shut a wooden book from time to time. This silence\r
-was seasoned with the lives of the saints, read aloud from a little\r
-pulpit with a desk, which was situated at the foot of the crucifix. The\r
-reader was one of the big girls, in weekly turn. At regular distances,\r
-on the bare tables, there were large, varnished bowls in which the\r
-pupils washed their own silver cups and knives and forks, and into which\r
-they sometimes threw some scrap of tough meat or spoiled fish; this was\r
-punished. These bowls were called ronds d'eau. The child who broke the\r
-silence "made a cross with her tongue." Where? On the ground. She licked\r
-the pavement. The dust, that end of all joys, was charged with the\r
-chastisement of those poor little rose-leaves which had been guilty of\r
-chirping.\r
-\r
-There was in the convent a book which has never been printed except as\r
-a unique copy, and which it is forbidden to read. It is the rule of\r
-Saint-Benoit. An arcanum which no profane eye must penetrate. Nemo\r
-regulas, seu constitutiones nostras, externis communicabit.\r
-\r
-The pupils one day succeeded in getting possession of this book, and set\r
-to reading it with avidity, a reading which was often interrupted by\r
-the fear of being caught, which caused them to close the volume\r
-precipitately.\r
-\r
-From the great danger thus incurred they derived but a very moderate\r
-amount of pleasure. The most "interesting thing" they found were some\r
-unintelligible pages about the sins of young boys.\r
-\r
-They played in an alley of the garden bordered with a few shabby\r
-fruit-trees. In spite of the extreme surveillance and the severity of\r
-the punishments administered, when the wind had shaken the trees, they\r
-sometimes succeeded in picking up a green apple or a spoiled apricot or\r
-an inhabited pear on the sly. I will now cede the privilege of speech\r
-to a letter which lies before me, a letter written five and twenty\r
-years ago by an old pupil, now Madame la Duchesse de----one of the most\r
-elegant women in Paris. I quote literally: "One hides one's pear or\r
-one's apple as best one may. When one goes up stairs to put the veil on\r
-the bed before supper, one stuffs them under one's pillow and at night\r
-one eats them in bed, and when one cannot do that, one eats them in the\r
-closet." That was one of their greatest luxuries.\r
-\r
-Once--it was at the epoch of the visit from the archbishop to the\r
-convent--one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was\r
-connected with the Montmorency family, laid a wager that she would ask\r
-for a day's leave of absence--an enormity in so austere a community. The\r
-wager was accepted, but not one of those who bet believed that she would\r
-do it. When the moment came, as the archbishop was passing in front of\r
-the pupils, Mademoiselle Bouchard, to the indescribable terror of her\r
-companions, stepped out of the ranks, and said, "Monseigneur, a day's\r
-leave of absence." Mademoiselle Bouchard was tall, blooming, with the\r
-prettiest little rosy face in the world. M. de Quelen smiled and said,\r
-"What, my dear child, a day's leave of absence! Three days if you like.\r
-I grant you three days." The prioress could do nothing; the archbishop\r
-had spoken. Horror of the convent, but joy of the pupil. The effect may\r
-be imagined.\r
-\r
-This stern cloister was not so well walled off, however, but that the\r
-life of the passions of the outside world, drama, and even romance,\r
-did not make their way in. To prove this, we will confine ourselves to\r
-recording here and to briefly mentioning a real and incontestable fact,\r
-which, however, bears no reference in itself to, and is not connected by\r
-any thread whatever with the story which we are relating. We mention the\r
-fact for the sake of completing the physiognomy of the convent in the\r
-reader's mind.\r
-\r
-About this time there was in the convent a mysterious person who was\r
-not a nun, who was treated with great respect, and who was addressed as\r
-Madame Albertine. Nothing was known about her, save that she was mad,\r
-and that in the world she passed for dead. Beneath this history it\r
-was said there lay the arrangements of fortune necessary for a great\r
-marriage.\r
-\r
-This woman, hardly thirty years of age, of dark complexion and tolerably\r
-pretty, had a vague look in her large black eyes. Could she see? There\r
-was some doubt about this. She glided rather than walked, she never\r
-spoke; it was not quite known whether she breathed. Her nostrils were\r
-livid and pinched as after yielding up their last sigh. To touch her\r
-hand was like touching snow. She possessed a strange spectral grace.\r
-Wherever she entered, people felt cold. One day a sister, on seeing her\r
-pass, said to another sister, "She passes for a dead woman." "Perhaps\r
-she is one," replied the other.\r
-\r
-A hundred tales were told of Madame Albertine. This arose from the\r
-eternal curiosity of the pupils. In the chapel there was a gallery\r
-called L'OEil de Boeuf. It was in this gallery, which had only a\r
-circular bay, an oeil de boeuf, that Madame Albertine listened to the\r
-offices. She always occupied it alone because from this gallery, being\r
-on the level of the first story, the preacher or the officiating priest\r
-could be seen, which was interdicted to the nuns. One day the pulpit was\r
-occupied by a young priest of high rank, M. Le Duc de Rohan, peer of\r
-France, officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815 when he was Prince de\r
-Leon, and who died afterward, in 1830, as cardinal and Archbishop of\r
-Besancon. It was the first time that M. de Rohan had preached at the\r
-Petit-Picpus convent. Madame Albertine usually preserved perfect\r
-calmness and complete immobility during the sermons and services. That\r
-day, as soon as she caught sight of M. de Rohan, she half rose, and\r
-said, in a loud voice, amid the silence of the chapel, "Ah! Auguste!"\r
-The whole community turned their heads in amazement, the preacher raised\r
-his eyes, but Madame Albertine had relapsed into her immobility. A\r
-breath from the outer world, a flash of life, had passed for an instant\r
-across that cold and lifeless face and had then vanished, and the mad\r
-woman had become a corpse again.\r
-\r
-Those two words, however, had set every one in the convent who had the\r
-privilege of speech to chattering. How many things were contained in\r
-that "Ah! Auguste!" what revelations! M. de Rohan's name really was\r
-Auguste. It was evident that Madame Albertine belonged to the very\r
-highest society, since she knew M. de Rohan, and that her own rank there\r
-was of the highest, since she spoke thus familiarly of so great a lord,\r
-and that there existed between them some connection, of relationship,\r
-perhaps, but a very close one in any case, since she knew his "pet\r
-name."\r
-\r
-Two very severe duchesses, Mesdames de Choiseul and de Serent, often\r
-visited the community, whither they penetrated, no doubt, in virtue of\r
-the privilege Magnates mulieres, and caused great consternation in the\r
-boarding-school. When these two old ladies passed by, all the poor young\r
-girls trembled and dropped their eyes.\r
-\r
-Moreover, M. de Rohan, quite unknown to himself, was an object of\r
-attention to the school-girls. At that epoch he had just been made,\r
-while waiting for the episcopate, vicar-general of the Archbishop of\r
-Paris. It was one of his habits to come tolerably often to celebrate the\r
-offices in the chapel of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus. Not one of the\r
-young recluses could see him, because of the serge curtain, but he had\r
-a sweet and rather shrill voice, which they had come to know and to\r
-distinguish. He had been a mousquetaire, and then, he was said to be\r
-very coquettish, that his handsome brown hair was very well dressed in\r
-a roll around his head, and that he had a broad girdle of magnificent\r
-moire, and that his black cassock was of the most elegant cut in the\r
-world. He held a great place in all these imaginations of sixteen years.\r
-\r
-Not a sound from without made its way into the convent. But there was\r
-one year when the sound of a flute penetrated thither. This was an\r
-event, and the girls who were at school there at the time still recall\r
-it.\r
-\r
-It was a flute which was played in the neighborhood. This flute always\r
-played the same air, an air which is very far away nowadays,--"My\r
-Zetulbe, come reign o'er my soul,"--and it was heard two or three\r
-times a day. The young girls passed hours in listening to it, the vocal\r
-mothers were upset by it, brains were busy, punishments descended in\r
-showers. This lasted for several months. The girls were all more or\r
-less in love with the unknown musician. Each one dreamed that she was\r
-Zetulbe. The sound of the flute proceeded from the direction of the Rue\r
-Droit-Mur; and they would have given anything, compromised everything,\r
-attempted anything for the sake of seeing, of catching a glance, if only\r
-for a second, of the "young man" who played that flute so deliciously,\r
-and who, no doubt, played on all these souls at the same time. There\r
-were some who made their escape by a back door, and ascended to the\r
-third story on the Rue Droit-Mur side, in order to attempt to catch a\r
-glimpse through the gaps. Impossible! One even went so far as to thrust\r
-her arm through the grating, and to wave her white handkerchief. Two\r
-were still bolder. They found means to climb on a roof, and risked their\r
-lives there, and succeeded at last in seeing "the young man." He was an\r
-old emigre gentleman, blind and penniless, who was playing his flute in\r
-his attic, in order to pass the time.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE LITTLE CONVENT\r
-\r
-In this enclosure of the Petit-Picpus there were three perfectly\r
-distinct buildings,--the Great Convent, inhabited by the nuns, the\r
-Boarding-school, where the scholars were lodged; and lastly, what was\r
-called the Little Convent. It was a building with a garden, in which\r
-lived all sorts of aged nuns of various orders, the relics of cloisters\r
-destroyed in the Revolution; a reunion of all the black, gray, and white\r
-medleys of all communities and all possible varieties; what might be\r
-called, if such a coupling of words is permissible, a sort of harlequin\r
-convent.\r
-\r
-When the Empire was established, all these poor old dispersed and exiled\r
-women had been accorded permission to come and take shelter under the\r
-wings of the Bernardines-Benedictines. The government paid them a small\r
-pension, the ladies of the Petit-Picpus received them cordially. It was\r
-a singular pell-mell. Each followed her own rule, Sometimes the pupils\r
-of the boarding-school were allowed, as a great recreation, to pay them\r
-a visit; the result is, that all those young memories have\r
-retained among other souvenirs that of Mother Sainte-Bazile, Mother\r
-Sainte-Scolastique, and Mother Jacob.\r
-\r
-One of these refugees found herself almost at home. She was a nun of\r
-Sainte-Aure, the only one of her order who had survived. The ancient\r
-convent of the ladies of Sainte-Aure occupied, at the beginning of the\r
-eighteenth century, this very house of the Petit-Picpus, which belonged\r
-later to the Benedictines of Martin Verga. This holy woman, too poor to\r
-wear the magnificent habit of her order, which was a white robe with\r
-a scarlet scapulary, had piously put it on a little manikin, which she\r
-exhibited with complacency and which she bequeathed to the house at\r
-her death. In 1824, only one nun of this order remained; to-day, there\r
-remains only a doll.\r
-\r
-In addition to these worthy mothers, some old society women had obtained\r
-permission of the prioress, like Madame Albertine, to retire into the\r
-Little Convent. Among the number were Madame Beaufort d'Hautpoul and\r
-Marquise Dufresne. Another was never known in the convent except by\r
-the formidable noise which she made when she blew her nose. The pupils\r
-called her Madame Vacarmini (hubbub).\r
-\r
-About 1820 or 1821, Madame de Genlis, who was at that time editing a\r
-little periodical publication called l'Intrepide, asked to be allowed\r
-to enter the convent of the Petit-Picpus as lady resident. The Duc\r
-d'Orleans recommended her. Uproar in the hive; the vocal-mothers were\r
-all in a flutter; Madame de Genlis had made romances. But she declared\r
-that she was the first to detest them, and then, she had reached her\r
-fierce stage of devotion. With the aid of God, and of the Prince, she\r
-entered. She departed at the end of six or eight months, alleging as a\r
-reason, that there was no shade in the garden. The nuns were delighted.\r
-Although very old, she still played the harp, and did it very well.\r
-\r
-When she went away she left her mark in her cell. Madame de Genlis was\r
-superstitious and a Latinist. These two words furnish a tolerably good\r
-profile of her. A few years ago, there were still to be seen, pasted in\r
-the inside of a little cupboard in her cell in which she locked up her\r
-silverware and her jewels, these five lines in Latin, written with\r
-her own hand in red ink on yellow paper, and which, in her opinion,\r
-possessed the property of frightening away robbers:--\r
-\r
-\r
- Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis:[15]\r
- Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas;\r
- Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas;\r
- Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas.\r
- Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas.\r
-\r
-\r
-These verses in sixth century Latin raise the question whether the\r
-two thieves of Calvary were named, as is commonly believed, Dismas and\r
-Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas. This orthography might have confounded the\r
-pretensions put forward in the last century by the Vicomte de Gestas, of\r
-a descent from the wicked thief. However, the useful virtue attached to\r
-these verses forms an article of faith in the order of the Hospitallers.\r
-\r
-The church of the house, constructed in such a manner as to separate the\r
-Great Convent from the Boarding-school like a veritable intrenchment,\r
-was, of course, common to the Boarding-school, the Great Convent, and\r
-the Little Convent. The public was even admitted by a sort of lazaretto\r
-entrance on the street. But all was so arranged, that none of the\r
-inhabitants of the cloister could see a face from the outside world.\r
-Suppose a church whose choir is grasped in a gigantic hand, and\r
-folded in such a manner as to form, not, as in ordinary churches, a\r
-prolongation behind the altar, but a sort of hall, or obscure cellar, to\r
-the right of the officiating priest; suppose this hall to be shut off by\r
-a curtain seven feet in height, of which we have already spoken; in the\r
-shadow of that curtain, pile up on wooden stalls the nuns in the choir\r
-on the left, the school-girls on the right, the lay-sisters and the\r
-novices at the bottom, and you will have some idea of the nuns of the\r
-Petit-Picpus assisting at divine service. That cavern, which was called\r
-the choir, communicated with the cloister by a lobby. The church was\r
-lighted from the garden. When the nuns were present at services where\r
-their rule enjoined silence, the public was warned of their presence\r
-only by the folding seats of the stalls noisily rising and falling.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--SOME SILHOUETTES OF THIS DARKNESS\r
-\r
-During the six years which separate 1819 from 1825, the prioress of the\r
-Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, whose name, in religion,\r
-was Mother Innocente. She came of the family of Marguerite de Blemeur,\r
-author of Lives of the Saints of the Order of Saint-Benoit. She had\r
-been re-elected. She was a woman about sixty years of age, short, thick,\r
-"singing like a cracked pot," says the letter which we have already\r
-quoted; an excellent woman, moreover, and the only merry one in the\r
-whole convent, and for that reason adored. She was learned, erudite,\r
-wise, competent, curiously proficient in history, crammed with Latin,\r
-stuffed with Greek, full of Hebrew, and more of a Benedictine monk than\r
-a Benedictine nun.\r
-\r
-The sub-prioress was an old Spanish nun, Mother Cineres, who was almost\r
-blind.\r
-\r
-The most esteemed among the vocal mothers were Mother Sainte-Honorine;\r
-the treasurer, Mother Sainte-Gertrude, the chief mistress of the\r
-novices; Mother-Saint-Ange, the assistant mistress; Mother Annonciation,\r
-the sacristan; Mother Saint-Augustin, the nurse, the only one in the\r
-convent who was malicious; then Mother Sainte-Mechtilde (Mademoiselle\r
-Gauvain), very young and with a beautiful voice; Mother des Anges\r
-(Mademoiselle Drouet), who had been in the convent of the Filles-Dieu,\r
-and in the convent du Tresor, between Gisors and Magny; Mother\r
-Saint-Joseph (Mademoiselle de Cogolludo), Mother Sainte-Adelaide\r
-(Mademoiselle d'Auverney), Mother Misericorde (Mademoiselle de\r
-Cifuentes, who could not resist austerities), Mother Compassion\r
-(Mademoiselle de la Miltiere, received at the age of sixty in defiance\r
-of the rule, and very wealthy); Mother Providence (Mademoiselle de\r
-Laudiniere), Mother Presentation (Mademoiselle de Siguenza), who was\r
-prioress in 1847; and finally, Mother Sainte-Celigne (sister of the\r
-sculptor Ceracchi), who went mad; Mother Sainte-Chantal (Mademoiselle de\r
-Suzon), who went mad.\r
-\r
-There was also, among the prettiest of them, a charming girl of three\r
-and twenty, who was from the Isle de Bourbon, a descendant of the\r
-Chevalier Roze, whose name had been Mademoiselle Roze, and who was\r
-called Mother Assumption.\r
-\r
-Mother Sainte-Mechtilde, intrusted with the singing and the choir, was\r
-fond of making use of the pupils in this quarter. She usually took a\r
-complete scale of them, that is to say, seven, from ten to sixteen years\r
-of age, inclusive, of assorted voices and sizes, whom she made sing\r
-standing, drawn up in a line, side by side, according to age, from the\r
-smallest to the largest. This presented to the eye, something in the\r
-nature of a reed-pipe of young girls, a sort of living Pan-pipe made of\r
-angels.\r
-\r
-Those of the lay-sisters whom the scholars loved most were Sister\r
-Euphrasie, Sister Sainte-Marguerite, Sister Sainte-Marthe, who was in\r
-her dotage, and Sister Sainte-Michel, whose long nose made them laugh.\r
-\r
-All these women were gentle with the children. The nuns were severe only\r
-towards themselves. No fire was lighted except in the school, and the\r
-food was choice compared to that in the convent. Moreover, they lavished\r
-a thousand cares on their scholars. Only, when a child passed near a nun\r
-and addressed her, the nun never replied.\r
-\r
-This rule of silence had had this effect, that throughout the whole\r
-convent, speech had been withdrawn from human creatures, and bestowed\r
-on inanimate objects. Now it was the church-bell which spoke, now it was\r
-the gardener's bell. A very sonorous bell, placed beside the portress,\r
-and which was audible throughout the house, indicated by its varied\r
-peals, which formed a sort of acoustic telegraph, all the actions of\r
-material life which were to be performed, and summoned to the parlor, in\r
-case of need, such or such an inhabitant of the house. Each person\r
-and each thing had its own peal. The prioress had one and one, the\r
-sub-prioress one and two. Six-five announced lessons, so that the pupils\r
-never said "to go to lessons," but "to go to six-five." Four-four was\r
-Madame de Genlis's signal. It was very often heard. "C'est le diable\r
-a quatre,"--it's the very deuce--said the uncharitable. Tennine strokes\r
-announced a great event. It was the opening of the door of seclusion,\r
-a frightful sheet of iron bristling with bolts which only turned on its\r
-hinges in the presence of the archbishop.\r
-\r
-With the exception of the archbishop and the gardener, no man entered\r
-the convent, as we have already said. The schoolgirls saw two others:\r
-one, the chaplain, the Abbe Banes, old and ugly, whom they were\r
-permitted to contemplate in the choir, through a grating; the other the\r
-drawing-master, M. Ansiaux, whom the letter, of which we have perused a\r
-few lines, calls M. Anciot, and describes as a frightful old hunchback.\r
-\r
-It will be seen that all these men were carefully chosen.\r
-\r
-Such was this curious house.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--POST CORDA LAPIDES\r
-\r
-After having sketched its moral face, it will not prove unprofitable\r
-to point out, in a few words, its material configuration. The reader\r
-already has some idea of it.\r
-\r
-The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost the whole\r
-of the vast trapezium which resulted from the intersection of the Rue\r
-Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue Petit-Picpus, and the unused lane,\r
-called Rue Aumarais on old plans. These four streets surrounded this\r
-trapezium like a moat. The convent was composed of several buildings\r
-and a garden. The principal building, taken in its entirety, was a\r
-juxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, viewed from a bird's-eye\r
-view, outlined, with considerable exactness, a gibbet laid flat on the\r
-ground. The main arm of the gibbet occupied the whole of the fragment\r
-of the Rue Droit-Mur comprised between the Rue Petit-Picpus and the Rue\r
-Polonceau; the lesser arm was a lofty, gray, severe grated facade which\r
-faced the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage entrance No. 62 marked its\r
-extremity. Towards the centre of this facade was a low, arched door,\r
-whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders wove their webs,\r
-and which was open only for an hour or two on Sundays, and on rare\r
-occasions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This was the\r
-public entrance of the church. The elbow of the gibbet was a square\r
-hall which was used as the servants' hall, and which the nuns called the\r
-buttery. In the main arm were the cells of the mothers, the sisters, and\r
-the novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory, backed\r
-up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door No. 62 and the\r
-corner of the closed lane Aumarais, was the school, which was not\r
-visible from without. The remainder of the trapezium formed the garden,\r
-which was much lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, which caused\r
-the walls to be very much higher on the inside than on the outside. The\r
-garden, which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the summit of\r
-a hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence ran, as from\r
-the peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and, ranged by twos\r
-in between the branchings of these, eight small ones, so that, if the\r
-enclosure had been circular, the geometrical plan of the alleys would\r
-have resembled a cross superposed on a wheel. As the alleys all ended\r
-in the very irregular walls of the garden, they were of unequal length.\r
-They were bordered with currant bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tall\r
-poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent, which was at the angle of\r
-the Rue Droit-Mur to the house of the Little Convent, which was at the\r
-angle of the Aumarais lane. In front of the Little Convent was what was\r
-called the little garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard,\r
-all sorts of varied angles formed by the interior buildings, prison\r
-walls, the long black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the\r
-Rue Polonceau for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he will\r
-be able to form for himself a complete image of what the house of the\r
-Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy house\r
-had been built on the precise site of a famous tennis-ground of the\r
-fourteenth to the sixteenth century, which was called the "tennis-ground\r
-of the eleven thousand devils."\r
-\r
-All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris. These names,\r
-Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the streets which bear them\r
-are very much more ancient still. Aumarais Lane was called Maugout Lane;\r
-the Rue Droit-Mur was called the Rue des Eglantiers, for God opened\r
-flowers before man cut stones.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--A CENTURY UNDER A GUIMPE\r
-\r
-Since we are engaged in giving details as to what the convent of the\r
-Petit-Picpus was in former times, and since we have ventured to open\r
-a window on that discreet retreat, the reader will permit us one other\r
-little digression, utterly foreign to this book, but characteristic and\r
-useful, since it shows that the cloister even has its original figures.\r
-\r
-In the Little Convent there was a centenarian who came from the Abbey\r
-of Fontevrault. She had even been in society before the Revolution. She\r
-talked a great deal of M. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under Louis\r
-XVI. and of a Presidentess Duplat, with whom she had been very intimate.\r
-It was her pleasure and her vanity to drag in these names on every\r
-pretext. She told wonders of the Abbey of Fontevrault,--that it was like\r
-a city, and that there were streets in the monastery.\r
-\r
-She talked with a Picard accent which amused the pupils. Every year,\r
-she solemnly renewed her vows, and at the moment of taking the oath, she\r
-said to the priest, "Monseigneur Saint-Francois gave it to Monseigneur\r
-Saint-Julien, Monseigneur Saint-Julien gave it to Monseigneur\r
-Saint-Eusebius, Monseigneur Saint-Eusebius gave it to Monseigneur\r
-Saint-Procopius, etc., etc.; and thus I give it to you, father." And the\r
-school-girls would begin to laugh, not in their sleeves, but under\r
-their veils; charming little stifled laughs which made the vocal mothers\r
-frown.\r
-\r
-On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories. She said\r
-that in her youth the Bernardine monks were every whit as good as the\r
-mousquetaires. It was a century which spoke through her, but it was the\r
-eighteenth century. She told about the custom of the four wines, which\r
-existed before the Revolution in Champagne and Bourgogne. When a great\r
-personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke, and a peer, traversed\r
-a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the city fathers came out to harangue\r
-him and presented him with four silver gondolas into which they\r
-had poured four different sorts of wine. On the first goblet this\r
-inscription could be read, monkey wine; on the second, lion wine; on the\r
-third, sheep wine; on the fourth, hog wine. These four legends express\r
-the four stages descended by the drunkard; the first, intoxication,\r
-which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which\r
-dulls; and the fourth, that which brutalizes.\r
-\r
-In a cupboard, under lock and key, she kept a mysterious object of which\r
-she thought a great deal. The rule of Fontevrault did not forbid this.\r
-She would not show this object to anyone. She shut herself up, which her\r
-rule allowed her to do, and hid herself, every time that she desired to\r
-contemplate it. If she heard a footstep in the corridor, she closed the\r
-cupboard again as hastily as it was possible with her aged hands. As\r
-soon as it was mentioned to her, she became silent, she who was so fond\r
-of talking. The most curious were baffled by her silence and the most\r
-tenacious by her obstinacy. Thus it furnished a subject of comment for\r
-all those who were unoccupied or bored in the convent. What could that\r
-treasure of the centenarian be, which was so precious and so secret?\r
-Some holy book, no doubt? Some unique chaplet? Some authentic relic?\r
-They lost themselves in conjectures. When the poor old woman died,\r
-they rushed to her cupboard more hastily than was fitting, perhaps, and\r
-opened it. They found the object beneath a triple linen cloth, like some\r
-consecrated paten. It was a Faenza platter representing little Loves\r
-flitting away pursued by apothecary lads armed with enormous syringes.\r
-The chase abounds in grimaces and in comical postures. One of the\r
-charming little Loves is already fairly spitted. He is resisting,\r
-fluttering his tiny wings, and still making an effort to fly, but the\r
-dancer is laughing with a satanical air. Moral: Love conquered by the\r
-colic. This platter, which is very curious, and which had, possibly,\r
-the honor of furnishing Moliere with an idea, was still in existence\r
-in September, 1845; it was for sale by a bric-a-brac merchant in the\r
-Boulevard Beaumarchais.\r
-\r
-This good old woman would not receive any visits from outside because,\r
-said she, the parlor is too gloomy.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION\r
-\r
-However, this almost sepulchral parlor, of which we have sought to\r
-convey an idea, is a purely local trait which is not reproduced with the\r
-same severity in other convents. At the convent of the Rue du Temple,\r
-in particular, which belonged, in truth, to another order, the black\r
-shutters were replaced by brown curtains, and the parlor itself was a\r
-salon with a polished wood floor, whose windows were draped in white\r
-muslin curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts of frames, a portrait\r
-of a Benedictine nun with unveiled face, painted bouquets, and even the\r
-head of a Turk.\r
-\r
-It is in that garden of the Temple convent, that stood that famous\r
-chestnut-tree which was renowned as the finest and the largest in\r
-France, and which bore the reputation among the good people of the\r
-eighteenth century of being the father of all the chestnut trees of the\r
-realm.\r
-\r
-As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied by Benedictines\r
-of the Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different from those who\r
-depended on Citeaux. This order of the Perpetual Adoration is not very\r
-ancient and does not go back more than two hundred years. In 1649 the\r
-holy sacrament was profaned on two occasions a few days apart, in two\r
-churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Jean en Greve, a rare\r
-and frightful sacrilege which set the whole town in an uproar. M. the\r
-Prior and Vicar-General of Saint-Germain des Pres ordered a solemn\r
-procession of all his clergy, in which the Pope's Nuncio officiated.\r
-But this expiation did not satisfy two sainted women, Madame Courtin,\r
-Marquise de Boucs, and the Comtesse de Chateauvieux. This outrage\r
-committed on "the most holy sacrament of the altar," though but\r
-temporary, would not depart from these holy souls, and it seemed to\r
-them that it could only be extenuated by a "Perpetual Adoration" in some\r
-female monastery. Both of them, one in 1652, the other in 1653, made\r
-donations of notable sums to Mother Catherine de Bar, called of the Holy\r
-Sacrament, a Benedictine nun, for the purpose of founding, to this pious\r
-end, a monastery of the order of Saint-Benoit; the first permission for\r
-this foundation was given to Mother Catherine de Bar by M. de Metz, Abbe\r
-of Saint-Germain, "on condition that no woman could be received unless\r
-she contributed three hundred livres income, which amounts to six\r
-thousand livres, to the principal." After the Abbe of Saint-Germain, the\r
-king accorded letters-patent; and all the rest, abbatial charter, and\r
-royal letters, was confirmed in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts and the\r
-Parliament.\r
-\r
-Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the establishment of the\r
-Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament at Paris.\r
-Their first convent was "a new building" in the Rue Cassette, out of the\r
-contributions of Mesdames de Boucs and de Chateauvieux.\r
-\r
-This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with\r
-the Benedictine nuns of Citeaux. It mounted back to the Abbe of\r
-Saint-Germain des Pres, in the same manner that the ladies of the Sacred\r
-Heart go back to the general of the Jesuits, and the sisters of charity\r
-to the general of the Lazarists.\r
-\r
-It was also totally different from the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus,\r
-whose interior we have just shown. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII. had\r
-authorized, by a special brief, the Bernardines of the Rue Petit-Picpus,\r
-to practise the Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictine nuns of the\r
-Holy Sacrament. But the two orders remained distinct none the less.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS\r
-\r
-At the beginning of the Restoration, the convent of the Petit-Picpus\r
-was in its decay; this forms a part of the general death of the order,\r
-which, after the eighteenth century, has been disappearing like all\r
-the religious orders. Contemplation is, like prayer, one of humanity's\r
-needs; but, like everything which the Revolution touched, it will be\r
-transformed, and from being hostile to social progress, it will become\r
-favorable to it.\r
-\r
-The house of the Petit-Picpus was becoming rapidly depopulated. In 1840,\r
-the Little Convent had disappeared, the school had disappeared. There\r
-were no longer any old women, nor young girls; the first were dead, the\r
-latter had taken their departure. Volaverunt.\r
-\r
-The rule of the Perpetual Adoration is so rigid in its nature that it\r
-alarms, vocations recoil before it, the order receives no recruits. In\r
-1845, it still obtained lay-sisters here and there. But of professed\r
-nuns, none at all. Forty years ago, the nuns numbered nearly a hundred;\r
-fifteen years ago there were not more than twenty-eight of them. How\r
-many are there to-day? In 1847, the prioress was young, a sign that\r
-the circle of choice was restricted. She was not forty years old. In\r
-proportion as the number diminishes, the fatigue increases, the service\r
-of each becomes more painful; the moment could then be seen drawing near\r
-when there would be but a dozen bent and aching shoulders to bear the\r
-heavy rule of Saint-Benoit. The burden is implacable, and remains the\r
-same for the few as for the many. It weighs down, it crushes. Thus they\r
-die. At the period when the author of this book still lived in Paris,\r
-two died. One was twenty-five years old, the other twenty-three. This\r
-latter can say, like Julia Alpinula: "Hic jaceo. Vixi annos viginti et\r
-tres." It is in consequence of this decay that the convent gave up the\r
-education of girls.\r
-\r
-We have not felt able to pass before this extraordinary house without\r
-entering it, and without introducing the minds which accompany us, and\r
-which are listening to our tale, to the profit of some, perchance, of\r
-the melancholy history of Jean Valjean. We have penetrated into this\r
-community, full of those old practices which seem so novel to-day. It\r
-is the closed garden, hortus conclusus. We have spoken of this singular\r
-place in detail, but with respect, in so far, at least, as detail and\r
-respect are compatible. We do not understand all, but we insult nothing.\r
-We are equally far removed from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre, who\r
-wound up by anointing the executioner, and from the sneer of Voltaire,\r
-who even goes so far as to ridicule the cross.\r
-\r
-An illogical act on Voltaire's part, we may remark, by the way; for\r
-Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and even\r
-for those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix\r
-represent? The assassinated sage.\r
-\r
-In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis.\r
-People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that,\r
-while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human\r
-heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but\r
-on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, let us study things which are no more. It is necessary\r
-to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them. The counterfeits\r
-of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves the future.\r
-This spectre, this past, is given to falsifying its own passport. Let\r
-us inform ourselves of the trap. Let us be on our guard. The past has a\r
-visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the visage\r
-and let us tear off the mask.\r
-\r
-As for convents, they present a complex problem,--a question of\r
-civilization, which condemns them; a question of liberty, which protects\r
-them.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA\r
-\r
-This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.\r
-\r
-Man is the second.\r
-\r
-Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road, it\r
-has been our duty to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which is common\r
-to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well as to\r
-modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well as to\r
-Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to the\r
-Infinite.\r
-\r
-This is not the place for enlarging disproportionately on certain\r
-ideas; nevertheless, while absolutely maintaining our reserves, our\r
-restrictions, and even our indignations, we must say that every time we\r
-encounter man in the Infinite, either well or ill understood, we feel\r
-ourselves overpowered with respect. There is, in the synagogue, in the\r
-mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate,\r
-and a sublime side, which we adore. What a contemplation for the mind,\r
-and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the\r
-human wall!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT\r
-\r
-From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism\r
-is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in\r
-its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where\r
-centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great\r
-social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is\r
-to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the\r
-impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the\r
-beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the\r
-spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. Moreover,\r
-when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of disorder,\r
-it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it salutary in its\r
-period of purity, because it still continues to set the example.\r
-\r
-Claustration has had its day. Cloisters, useful in the early education\r
-of modern civilization, have embarrassed its growth, and are injurious\r
-to its development. So far as institution and formation with relation\r
-to man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth century,\r
-questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the nineteenth. The\r
-leprosy of monasticism has gnawed nearly to a skeleton two wonderful\r
-nations, Italy and Spain; the one the light, the other the splendor of\r
-Europe for centuries; and, at the present day, these two illustrious\r
-peoples are but just beginning to convalesce, thanks to the healthy and\r
-vigorous hygiene of 1789 alone.\r
-\r
-The convent--the ancient female convent in particular, such as it still\r
-presents itself on the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria,\r
-in Spain--is one of the most sombre concretions of the Middle Ages. The\r
-cloister, that cloister, is the point of intersection of horrors. The\r
-Catholic cloister, properly speaking, is wholly filled with the black\r
-radiance of death.\r
-\r
-The Spanish convent is the most funereal of all. There rise, in\r
-obscurity, beneath vaults filled with gloom, beneath domes vague with\r
-shadow, massive altars of Babel, as high as cathedrals; there immense\r
-white crucifixes hang from chains in the dark; there are extended, all\r
-nude on the ebony, great Christs of ivory; more than bleeding,--bloody;\r
-hideous and magnificent, with their elbows displaying the bones, their\r
-knee-pans showing their integuments, their wounds showing their flesh,\r
-crowned with silver thorns, nailed with nails of gold, with blood drops\r
-of rubies on their brows, and diamond tears in their eyes. The diamonds\r
-and rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings in the shadow below weep,\r
-their sides bruised with the hair shirt and their iron-tipped scourges,\r
-their breasts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated with\r
-prayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselves\r
-seraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they\r
-love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; their\r
-bones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breath\r
-under their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration of\r
-death. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them.\r
-The immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancient\r
-monasteries of Spain. Lairs of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,\r
-ferocious places.\r
-\r
-Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent was,\r
-above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the Orient\r
-about it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up and kept\r
-watch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the\r
-odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen in dreams\r
-and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man descended\r
-from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one. Lofty walls\r
-guarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her sultan, from\r
-all living distraction. A glance on the outer world was infidelity. The\r
-in pace replaced the leather sack. That which was cast into the sea in\r
-the East was thrown into the ground in the West. In both quarters, women\r
-wrung their hands; the waves for the first, the grave for the last; here\r
-the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous parallel.\r
-\r
-To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have\r
-adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion\r
-a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of\r
-invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing\r
-facts and all gloomy questions. A matter for declamations, say the\r
-clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer;\r
-Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers.\r
-I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer,\r
-that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that poor\r
-Holofernes."\r
-\r
-Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they are\r
-obstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eight\r
-leagues distant from Brussels,--there are relics of the Middle Ages\r
-there which are attainable for everybody,--at the Abbey of Villers, the\r
-hole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerly\r
-the courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stone\r
-dungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were in pace.\r
-Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and a\r
-grated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of the\r
-river, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground. Four\r
-feet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is always\r
-soaked. The occupant of the in pace had this wet soil for his bed. In\r
-one of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet riveted to\r
-the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of four slabs\r
-of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low for him to\r
-stand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a coverlid of stone\r
-on top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace,\r
-these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole\r
-on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid\r
-of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here\r
-was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those\r
-oozing walls,--what declaimers!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST\r
-\r
-Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in\r
-Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short. It\r
-simply depopulates. Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge\r
-of Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience, the\r
-forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister, the right of\r
-the first-born pouring the excess of the family into monasticism, the\r
-ferocities of which we have just spoken, the in pace, the closed mouths,\r
-the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate minds placed in the dungeon\r
-of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the interment of living souls.\r
-Add individual tortures to national degradations, and, whoever you\r
-may be, you will shudder before the frock and the veil,--those two\r
-winding-sheets of human devising. Nevertheless, at certain points and in\r
-certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit\r
-of the cloister persists in the midst of the nineteenth century, and\r
-a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing\r
-the civilized world. The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in\r
-perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume\r
-which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which\r
-should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment\r
-which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which\r
-should return to embrace the living.\r
-\r
-"Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Why\r
-will you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deep\r
-sea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I have\r
-loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent.\r
-\r
-To this there is but one reply: "In former days."\r
-\r
-To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the\r
-government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition,\r
-to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to\r
-refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles\r
-on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and\r
-militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication\r
-of parasites, to force the past on the present,--this seems strange.\r
-Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists,\r
-who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple\r
-process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social\r
-order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique\r
-authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about\r
-shouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to the\r
-ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over\r
-with chalk, and said, "She is white, Bos cretatus."\r
-\r
-As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above\r
-all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive,\r
-we attack it, and we try to kill it.\r
-\r
-Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms all\r
-forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in\r
-their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must\r
-be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities\r
-of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is\r
-difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.\r
-\r
-A convent in France, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, is\r
-a college of owls facing the light. A cloister, caught in the very act\r
-of asceticism, in the very heart of the city of '89 and of 1830 and\r
-of 1848, Rome blossoming out in Paris, is an anachronism. In ordinary\r
-times, in order to dissolve an anachronism and to cause it to vanish,\r
-one has only to make it spell out the date. But we are not in ordinary\r
-times.\r
-\r
-Let us fight.\r
-\r
-Let us fight, but let us make a distinction. The peculiar property of\r
-truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration?\r
-There is that which it is necessary to destroy, and there is that which\r
-it is simply necessary to elucidate and examine. What a force is kindly\r
-and serious examination! Let us not apply a flame where only a light is\r
-required.\r
-\r
-So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a general\r
-proposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe,\r
-in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration. Whoever says\r
-cloister, says marsh. Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation is\r
-unhealthy, their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolates\r
-them; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt. We cannot think\r
-without affright of those lands where fakirs, bonzes, santons, Greek\r
-monks, marabouts, talapoins, and dervishes multiply even like swarms of\r
-vermin.\r
-\r
-This said, the religious question remains. This question has certain\r
-mysterious, almost formidable sides; may we be permitted to look at it\r
-fixedly.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE CONVENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PRINCIPLES\r
-\r
-Men unite themselves and dwell in communities. By virtue of what right?\r
-By virtue of the right of association.\r
-\r
-They shut themselves up at home. By virtue of what right? By virtue of\r
-the right which every man has to open or shut his door.\r
-\r
-They do not come forth. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right\r
-to go and come, which implies the right to remain at home.\r
-\r
-There, at home, what do they do?\r
-\r
-They speak in low tones; they drop their eyes; they toil. They renounce\r
-the world, towns, sensualities, pleasures, vanities, pride, interests.\r
-They are clothed in coarse woollen or coarse linen. Not one of them\r
-possesses in his own right anything whatever. On entering there, each\r
-one who was rich makes himself poor. What he has, he gives to all. He\r
-who was what is called noble, a gentleman and a lord, is the equal of\r
-him who was a peasant. The cell is identical for all. All undergo the\r
-same tonsure, wear the same frock, eat the same black bread, sleep on\r
-the same straw, die on the same ashes. The same sack on their backs, the\r
-same rope around their loins. If the decision has been to go barefoot,\r
-all go barefoot. There may be a prince among them; that prince is the\r
-same shadow as the rest. No titles. Even family names have disappeared.\r
-They bear only first names. All are bowed beneath the equality of\r
-baptismal names. They have dissolved the carnal family, and constituted\r
-in their community a spiritual family. They have no other relatives than\r
-all men. They succor the poor, they care for the sick. They elect those\r
-whom they obey. They call each other "my brother."\r
-\r
-You stop me and exclaim, "But that is the ideal convent!"\r
-\r
-It is sufficient that it may be the possible convent, that I should take\r
-notice of it.\r
-\r
-Thence it results that, in the preceding book, I have spoken of a\r
-convent with respectful accents. The Middle Ages cast aside, Asia cast\r
-aside, the historical and political question held in reserve, from the\r
-purely philosophical point of view, outside the requirements of militant\r
-policy, on condition that the monastery shall be absolutely a voluntary\r
-matter and shall contain only consenting parties, I shall always\r
-consider a cloistered community with a certain attentive, and, in some\r
-respects, a deferential gravity.\r
-\r
-Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; where there is a\r
-commune, there is right. The monastery is the product of the formula:\r
-Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how grand is liberty! And what a splendid\r
-transfiguration! Liberty suffices to transform the monastery into a\r
-republic.\r
-\r
-Let us continue.\r
-\r
-But these men, or these women who are behind these four walls. They\r
-dress themselves in coarse woollen, they are equals, they call each\r
-other brothers, that is well; but they do something else?\r
-\r
-Yes.\r
-\r
-What?\r
-\r
-They gaze on the darkness, they kneel, and they clasp their hands.\r
-\r
-What does this signify?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--PRAYER\r
-\r
-They pray.\r
-\r
-To whom?\r
-\r
-To God.\r
-\r
-To pray to God,--what is the meaning of these words?\r
-\r
-Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent,\r
-permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because,\r
-if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since\r
-it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end\r
-there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we can\r
-attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms, is it\r
-not the absolute, of which we are only the relative?\r
-\r
-At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not\r
-an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming\r
-plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second\r
-infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's\r
-mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another\r
-abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does\r
-it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of\r
-them has a will principle, and there is an _I_ in the upper infinity as\r
-there is an _I_ in the lower infinity. The _I_ below is the soul; the\r
-_I_ on high is God.\r
-\r
-To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought,\r
-with the infinity on high, is called praying.\r
-\r
-Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must\r
-reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards\r
-the Unknown; thought, revery, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What\r
-is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, revery,\r
-prayer,--these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them.\r
-Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow;\r
-that is to say, to the light.\r
-\r
-The grandeur of democracy is to disown nothing and to deny nothing of\r
-humanity. Close to the right of the man, beside it, at the least, there\r
-exists the right of the soul.\r
-\r
-To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let\r
-us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of\r
-creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We\r
-have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against\r
-the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd,\r
-to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify\r
-belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of\r
-caterpillars.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER\r
-\r
-With regard to the modes of prayer, all are good, provided that they are\r
-sincere. Turn your book upside down and be in the infinite.\r
-\r
-There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is\r
-also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun; this\r
-philosophy is called blindness.\r
-\r
-To erect a sense which we lack into a source of truth, is a fine blind\r
-man's self-sufficiency.\r
-\r
-The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs which\r
-this groping philosophy assumes towards the philosophy which beholds\r
-God. One fancies he hears a mole crying, "I pity them with their sun!"\r
-\r
-There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led\r
-back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that\r
-they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in\r
-any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove\r
-God.\r
-\r
-We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their\r
-philosophy.\r
-\r
-Let us go on.\r
-\r
-The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying\r
-themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,\r
-impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a\r
-revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the\r
-word Will.\r
-\r
-To say: "the plant wills," instead of: "the plant grows": this would be\r
-fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: "the universe wills." Why?\r
-Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has an _I_;\r
-the universe wills, therefore it has a God.\r
-\r
-As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject\r
-nothing a priori, a will in the plant, accepted by this school, appears\r
-to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe denied by it.\r
-\r
-To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on\r
-any other conditions than a denial of the infinite. We have demonstrated\r
-this.\r
-\r
-The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything\r
-becomes "a mental conception."\r
-\r
-With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts\r
-the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists\r
-itself.\r
-\r
-From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only\r
-"a mental conception."\r
-\r
-Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in the\r
-lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind.\r
-\r
-In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all\r
-end in the monosyllable, No.\r
-\r
-To No there is only one reply, Yes.\r
-\r
-Nihilism has no point.\r
-\r
-There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything\r
-is something. Nothing is nothing.\r
-\r
-Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.\r
-\r
-Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an\r
-energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the condition\r
-of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in\r
-other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge from the man\r
-of felicity. Eden should be changed into a Lyceum. Science should be\r
-a cordial. To enjoy,--what a sad aim, and what a paltry ambition! The\r
-brute enjoys. To offer thought to the thirst of men, to give them all as\r
-an elixir the notion of God, to make conscience and science fraternize\r
-in them, to render them just by this mysterious confrontation; such is\r
-the function of real philosophy. Morality is a blossoming out of truths.\r
-Contemplation leads to action. The absolute should be practicable. It is\r
-necessary that the ideal should be breathable, drinkable, and eatable to\r
-the human mind. It is the ideal which has the right to say: Take, this!\r
-It is on this condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of science\r
-and becomes the one and sovereign mode of human rallying, and that\r
-philosophy herself is promoted to religion.\r
-\r
-Philosophy should not be a corbel erected on mystery to gaze upon it\r
-at its ease, without any other result than that of being convenient to\r
-curiosity.\r
-\r
-For our part, adjourning the development of our thought to another\r
-occasion, we will confine ourselves to saying that we neither understand\r
-man as a point of departure nor progress as an end, without those two\r
-forces which are their two motors: faith and love.\r
-\r
-Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type.\r
-\r
-What is this ideal? It is God.\r
-\r
-Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--PRECAUTIONS TO BE OBSERVED IN BLAME\r
-\r
-History and philosophy have eternal duties, which are, at the same time,\r
-simple duties; to combat Caiphas the High-priest, Draco the Lawgiver,\r
-Trimalcion the Legislator, Tiberius the Emperor; this is clear, direct,\r
-and limpid, and offers no obscurity.\r
-\r
-But the right to live apart, even with its inconveniences and its\r
-abuses, insists on being stated and taken into account. Cenobitism is a\r
-human problem.\r
-\r
-When one speaks of convents, those abodes of error, but of innocence,\r
-of aberration but of good-will, of ignorance but of devotion, of torture\r
-but of martyrdom, it always becomes necessary to say either yes or no.\r
-\r
-A convent is a contradiction. Its object, salvation; its means thereto,\r
-sacrifice. The convent is supreme egoism having for its result supreme\r
-abnegation.\r
-\r
-To abdicate with the object of reigning seems to be the device of\r
-monasticism.\r
-\r
-In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of\r
-exchange on death. One discounts in terrestrial gloom celestial light.\r
-In the cloister, hell is accepted in advance as a post obit on paradise.\r
-\r
-The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity.\r
-\r
-It does not seem to us, that on such a subject mockery is permissible.\r
-All about it is serious, the good as well as the bad.\r
-\r
-The just man frowns, but never smiles with a malicious sneer. We\r
-understand wrath, but not malice.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--FAITH, LAW\r
-\r
-A few words more.\r
-\r
-We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise the\r
-spiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere honor\r
-the thoughtful man.\r
-\r
-We salute the man who kneels.\r
-\r
-A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.\r
-\r
-One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor\r
-and invisible labor.\r
-\r
-To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.\r
-\r
-Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.\r
-\r
-Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.\r
-\r
-In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not idlers.\r
-\r
-To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.\r
-\r
-Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe that\r
-a perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,\r
-the priest and the philosopher agree. We must die. The Abbe de la Trappe\r
-replies to Horace.\r
-\r
-To mingle with one's life a certain presence of the sepulchre,--this is\r
-the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,\r
-the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; we\r
-admit it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless and\r
-vivacious spirits say:--\r
-\r
-"What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?\r
-What purpose do they serve? What do they do?"\r
-\r
-Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and which\r
-awaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make of\r
-us, we reply: "There is probably no work more divine than that performed\r
-by these souls." And we add: "There is probably no work which is more\r
-useful."\r
-\r
-There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who never\r
-pray at all.\r
-\r
-In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that is\r
-mingled with prayer.\r
-\r
-Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. Deo erexit\r
-Voltaire.\r
-\r
-We are for religion as against religions.\r
-\r
-We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and the\r
-sublimity of prayer.\r
-\r
-Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,--a minute which\r
-will not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,--at\r
-this hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but little\r
-elevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,\r
-and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,\r
-whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.\r
-\r
-The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is still\r
-sacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its\r
-own.\r
-\r
-Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on all\r
-sides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,\r
-the female convent in particular,--for in our century it is woman who\r
-suffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is something\r
-of protestation,--the female convent has incontestably a certain\r
-majesty.\r
-\r
-This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of\r
-whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;\r
-it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place\r
-whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side\r
-the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it\r
-is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated\r
-and obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has\r
-become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half\r
-obscurity of the tomb.\r
-\r
-We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,\r
-live by faith,--we have never been able to think without a sort of\r
-tender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full of\r
-envy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of these\r
-humble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of the\r
-mystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which is\r
-not yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessing\r
-the sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring\r
-towards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on the\r
-darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, at\r
-times, by the deep breaths of eternity.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--WHICH TREATS OF THE MANNER OF ENTERING A CONVENT\r
-\r
-It was into this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent expressed\r
-it, "fallen from the sky."\r
-\r
-He had scaled the wall of the garden which formed the angle of the Rue\r
-Polonceau. That hymn of the angels which he had heard in the middle\r
-of the night, was the nuns chanting matins; that hall, of which he had\r
-caught a glimpse in the gloom, was the chapel. That phantom which he had\r
-seen stretched on the ground was the sister who was making reparation;\r
-that bell, the sound of which had so strangely surprised him, was the\r
-gardener's bell attached to the knee of Father Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-Cosette once put to bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we have\r
-already seen, supped on a glass of wine and a bit of cheese before a\r
-good, crackling fire; then, the only bed in the hut being occupied by\r
-Cosette, each threw himself on a truss of straw.\r
-\r
-Before he shut his eyes, Jean Valjean said: "I must remain here\r
-henceforth." This remark trotted through Fauchelevent's head all night\r
-long.\r
-\r
-To tell the truth, neither of them slept.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, feeling that he was discovered and that Javert was on\r
-his scent, understood that he and Cosette were lost if they returned to\r
-Paris. Then the new storm which had just burst upon him had stranded\r
-him in this cloister. Jean Valjean had, henceforth, but one thought,--to\r
-remain there. Now, for an unfortunate man in his position, this\r
-convent was both the safest and the most dangerous of places; the most\r
-dangerous, because, as no men might enter there, if he were discovered,\r
-it was a flagrant offence, and Jean Valjean would find but one step\r
-intervening between the convent and prison; the safest, because, if he\r
-could manage to get himself accepted there and remain there, who would\r
-ever seek him in such a place? To dwell in an impossible place was\r
-safety.\r
-\r
-On his side, Fauchelevent was cudgelling his brains. He began by\r
-declaring to himself that he understood nothing of the matter. How had\r
-M. Madeleine got there, when the walls were what they were? Cloister\r
-walls are not to be stepped over. How did he get there with a child? One\r
-cannot scale a perpendicular wall with a child in one's arms. Who was\r
-that child? Where did they both come from? Since Fauchelevent had lived\r
-in the convent, he had heard nothing of M. sur M., and he knew nothing\r
-of what had taken place there. Father Madeleine had an air which\r
-discouraged questions; and besides, Fauchelevent said to himself: "One\r
-does not question a saint." M. Madeleine had preserved all his prestige\r
-in Fauchelevent's eyes. Only, from some words which Jean Valjean had let\r
-fall, the gardener thought he could draw the inference that M. Madeleine\r
-had probably become bankrupt through the hard times, and that he was\r
-pursued by his creditors; or that he had compromised himself in some\r
-political affair, and was in hiding; which last did not displease\r
-Fauchelevent, who, like many of our peasants of the North, had an\r
-old fund of Bonapartism about him. While in hiding, M. Madeleine had\r
-selected the convent as a refuge, and it was quite simple that he should\r
-wish to remain there. But the inexplicable point, to which Fauchelevent\r
-returned constantly and over which he wearied his brain, was that M.\r
-Madeleine should be there, and that he should have that little girl with\r
-him. Fauchelevent saw them, touched them, spoke to them, and still did\r
-not believe it possible. The incomprehensible had just made its entrance\r
-into Fauchelevent's hut. Fauchelevent groped about amid conjectures, and\r
-could see nothing clearly but this: "M. Madeleine saved my life."\r
-This certainty alone was sufficient and decided his course. He said to\r
-himself: "It is my turn now." He added in his conscience: "M. Madeleine\r
-did not stop to deliberate when it was a question of thrusting himself\r
-under the cart for the purpose of dragging me out." He made up his mind\r
-to save M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, he put many questions to himself and made himself divers\r
-replies: "After what he did for me, would I save him if he were a thief?\r
-Just the same. If he were an assassin, would I save him? Just the same.\r
-Since he is a saint, shall I save him? Just the same."\r
-\r
-But what a problem it was to manage to have him remain in the convent!\r
-Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical\r
-undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder\r
-than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old\r
-rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous\r
-enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the\r
-steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit. Father Fauchelevent was\r
-an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and who, towards the end\r
-of his days, halt, infirm, with no interest left to him in the world,\r
-found it sweet to be grateful, and perceiving a generous action to be\r
-performed, flung himself upon it like a man, who at the moment when he\r
-is dying, should find close to his hand a glass of good wine which he\r
-had never tasted, and should swallow it with avidity. We may add,\r
-that the air which he had breathed for many years in this convent had\r
-destroyed all personality in him, and had ended by rendering a good\r
-action of some kind absolutely necessary to him.\r
-\r
-So he took his resolve: to devote himself to M. Madeleine.\r
-\r
-We have just called him a poor peasant of Picardy. That description\r
-is just, but incomplete. At the point of this story which we have now\r
-reached, a little of Father Fauchelevent's physiology becomes useful.\r
-He was a peasant, but he had been a notary, which added trickery to his\r
-cunning, and penetration to his ingenuousness. Having, through various\r
-causes, failed in his business, he had descended to the calling of a\r
-carter and a laborer. But, in spite of oaths and lashings, which horses\r
-seem to require, something of the notary had lingered in him. He had\r
-some natural wit; he talked good grammar; he conversed, which is a rare\r
-thing in a village; and the other peasants said of him: "He talks almost\r
-like a gentleman with a hat." Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that\r
-species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last\r
-century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors\r
-showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the\r
-pigeon-hole of the plebeian: rather rustic, rather citified; pepper and\r
-salt. Fauchelevent, though sorely tried and harshly used by fate,\r
-worn out, a sort of poor, threadbare old soul, was, nevertheless, an\r
-impulsive man, and extremely spontaneous in his actions; a precious\r
-quality which prevents one from ever being wicked. His defects and his\r
-vices, for he had some, were all superficial; in short, his physiognomy\r
-was of the kind which succeeds with an observer. His aged face had none\r
-of those disagreeable wrinkles at the top of the forehead, which signify\r
-malice or stupidity.\r
-\r
-At daybreak, Father Fauchelevent opened his eyes, after having done an\r
-enormous deal of thinking, and beheld M. Madeleine seated on his truss\r
-of straw, and watching Cosette's slumbers. Fauchelevent sat up and\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"Now that you are here, how are you going to contrive to enter?"\r
-\r
-This remark summed up the situation and aroused Jean Valjean from his\r
-revery.\r
-\r
-The two men took counsel together.\r
-\r
-"In the first place," said Fauchelevent, "you will begin by not setting\r
-foot outside of this chamber, either you or the child. One step in the\r
-garden and we are done for."\r
-\r
-"That is true."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Madeleine," resumed Fauchelevent, "you have arrived at a very\r
-auspicious moment, I mean to say a very inauspicious moment; one of\r
-the ladies is very ill. This will prevent them from looking much in our\r
-direction. It seems that she is dying. The prayers of the forty hours\r
-are being said. The whole community is in confusion. That occupies them.\r
-The one who is on the point of departure is a saint. In fact, we are\r
-all saints here; all the difference between them and me is that they say\r
-'our cell,' and that I say 'my cabin.' The prayers for the dying are to\r
-be said, and then the prayers for the dead. We shall be at peace here\r
-for to-day; but I will not answer for to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"Still," observed Jean Valjean, "this cottage is in the niche of the\r
-wall, it is hidden by a sort of ruin, there are trees, it is not visible\r
-from the convent."\r
-\r
-"And I add that the nuns never come near it."\r
-\r
-"Well?" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-The interrogation mark which accentuated this "well" signified:\r
-"it seems to me that one may remain concealed here?" It was to this\r
-interrogation point that Fauchelevent responded:--\r
-\r
-"There are the little girls."\r
-\r
-"What little girls?" asked Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Just as Fauchelevent opened his mouth to explain the words which he had\r
-uttered, a bell emitted one stroke.\r
-\r
-"The nun is dead," said he. "There is the knell."\r
-\r
-And he made a sign to Jean Valjean to listen.\r
-\r
-The bell struck a second time.\r
-\r
-"It is the knell, Monsieur Madeleine. The bell will continue to strike\r
-once a minute for twenty-four hours, until the body is taken from the\r
-church.--You see, they play. At recreation hours it suffices to have a\r
-ball roll aside, to send them all hither, in spite of prohibitions, to\r
-hunt and rummage for it all about here. Those cherubs are devils."\r
-\r
-"Who?" asked Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"The little girls. You would be very quickly discovered. They would\r
-shriek: 'Oh! a man!' There is no danger to-day. There will be no\r
-recreation hour. The day will be entirely devoted to prayers. You hear\r
-the bell. As I told you, a stroke each minute. It is the death knell."\r
-\r
-"I understand, Father Fauchelevent. There are pupils."\r
-\r
-And Jean Valjean thought to himself:--\r
-\r
-"Here is Cosette's education already provided."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Pardine! There are little girls indeed! And they would bawl around you!\r
-And they would rush off! To be a man here is to have the plague. You see\r
-how they fasten a bell to my paw as though I were a wild beast."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean fell into more and more profound thought.--"This convent\r
-would be our salvation," he murmured.\r
-\r
-Then he raised his voice:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, the difficulty is to remain here."\r
-\r
-"No," said Fauchelevent, "the difficulty is to get out."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean felt the blood rush back to his heart.\r
-\r
-"To get out!"\r
-\r
-"Yes, Monsieur Madeleine. In order to return here it is first necessary\r
-to get out."\r
-\r
-And after waiting until another stroke of the knell had sounded,\r
-Fauchelevent went on:--\r
-\r
-"You must not be found here in this fashion. Whence come you? For me,\r
-you fall from heaven, because I know you; but the nuns require one to\r
-enter by the door."\r
-\r
-All at once they heard a rather complicated pealing from another bell.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "they are ringing up the vocal mothers. They\r
-are going to the chapter. They always hold a chapter when any one dies.\r
-She died at daybreak. People generally do die at daybreak. But cannot\r
-you get out by the way in which you entered? Come, I do not ask for the\r
-sake of questioning you, but how did you get in?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean turned pale; the very thought of descending again into\r
-that terrible street made him shudder. You make your way out of a forest\r
-filled with tigers, and once out of it, imagine a friendly counsel that\r
-shall advise you to return thither! Jean Valjean pictured to himself the\r
-whole police force still engaged in swarming in that quarter, agents on\r
-the watch, sentinels everywhere, frightful fists extended towards his\r
-collar, Javert at the corner of the intersection of the streets perhaps.\r
-\r
-"Impossible!" said he. "Father Fauchelevent, say that I fell from the\r
-sky."\r
-\r
-"But I believe it, I believe it," retorted Fauchelevent. "You have no\r
-need to tell me that. The good God must have taken you in his hand for\r
-the purpose of getting a good look at you close to, and then dropped\r
-you. Only, he meant to place you in a man's convent; he made a mistake.\r
-Come, there goes another peal, that is to order the porter to go and\r
-inform the municipality that the dead-doctor is to come here and view a\r
-corpse. All that is the ceremony of dying. These good ladies are not\r
-at all fond of that visit. A doctor is a man who does not believe in\r
-anything. He lifts the veil. Sometimes he lifts something else too. How\r
-quickly they have had the doctor summoned this time! What is the matter?\r
-Your little one is still asleep. What is her name?"\r
-\r
-"Cosette."\r
-\r
-"She is your daughter? You are her grandfather, that is?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"It will be easy enough for her to get out of here. I have my service\r
-door which opens on the courtyard. I knock. The porter opens; I have\r
-my vintage basket on my back, the child is in it, I go out. Father\r
-Fauchelevent goes out with his basket--that is perfectly natural. You\r
-will tell the child to keep very quiet. She will be under the cover. I\r
-will leave her for whatever time is required with a good old friend, a\r
-fruit-seller whom I know in the Rue Chemin-Vert, who is deaf, and who\r
-has a little bed. I will shout in the fruit-seller's ear, that she is a\r
-niece of mine, and that she is to keep her for me until to-morrow. Then\r
-the little one will re-enter with you; for I will contrive to have you\r
-re-enter. It must be done. But how will you manage to get out?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean shook his head.\r
-\r
-"No one must see me, the whole point lies there, Father Fauchelevent.\r
-Find some means of getting me out in a basket, under cover, like\r
-Cosette."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent scratched the lobe of his ear with the middle finger of his\r
-left hand, a sign of serious embarrassment.\r
-\r
-A third peal created a diversion.\r
-\r
-"That is the dead-doctor taking his departure," said Fauchelevent. "He\r
-has taken a look and said: 'She is dead, that is well.' When the doctor\r
-has signed the passport for paradise, the undertaker's company sends a\r
-coffin. If it is a mother, the mothers lay her out; if she is a sister,\r
-the sisters lay her out. After which, I nail her up. That forms a part\r
-of my gardener's duty. A gardener is a bit of a grave-digger. She is\r
-placed in a lower hall of the church which communicates with the street,\r
-and into which no man may enter save the doctor of the dead. I don't\r
-count the undertaker's men and myself as men. It is in that hall that I\r
-nail up the coffin. The undertaker's men come and get it, and whip\r
-up, coachman! that's the way one goes to heaven. They fetch a box with\r
-nothing in it, they take it away again with something in it. That's what\r
-a burial is like. De profundis."\r
-\r
-A horizontal ray of sunshine lightly touched the face of the sleeping\r
-Cosette, who lay with her mouth vaguely open, and had the air of an\r
-angel drinking in the light. Jean Valjean had fallen to gazing at her.\r
-He was no longer listening to Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-That one is not listened to is no reason for preserving silence. The\r
-good old gardener went on tranquilly with his babble:--\r
-\r
-"The grave is dug in the Vaugirard cemetery. They declare that they are\r
-going to suppress that Vaugirard cemetery. It is an ancient cemetery\r
-which is outside the regulations, which has no uniform, and which is\r
-going to retire. It is a shame, for it is convenient. I have a friend\r
-there, Father Mestienne, the grave-digger. The nuns here possess one\r
-privilege, it is to be taken to that cemetery at nightfall. There is\r
-a special permission from the Prefecture on their behalf. But how many\r
-events have happened since yesterday! Mother Crucifixion is dead, and\r
-Father Madeleine--"\r
-\r
-"Is buried," said Jean Valjean, smiling sadly.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent caught the word.\r
-\r
-"Goodness! if you were here for good, it would be a real burial."\r
-\r
-A fourth peal burst out. Fauchelevent hastily detached the belled\r
-knee-cap from its nail and buckled it on his knee again.\r
-\r
-"This time it is for me. The Mother Prioress wants me. Good, now I am\r
-pricking myself on the tongue of my buckle. Monsieur Madeleine, don't\r
-stir from here, and wait for me. Something new has come up. If you are\r
-hungry, there is wine, bread and cheese."\r
-\r
-And he hastened out of the hut, crying: "Coming! coming!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean watched him hurrying across the garden as fast as his\r
-crooked leg would permit, casting a sidelong glance by the way on his\r
-melon patch.\r
-\r
-Less than ten minutes later, Father Fauchelevent, whose bell put the\r
-nuns in his road to flight, tapped gently at a door, and a gentle voice\r
-replied: "Forever! Forever!" that is to say: "Enter."\r
-\r
-The door was the one leading to the parlor reserved for seeing the\r
-gardener on business. This parlor adjoined the chapter hall. The\r
-prioress, seated on the only chair in the parlor, was waiting for\r
-Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--FAUCHELEVENT IN THE PRESENCE OF A DIFFICULTY\r
-\r
-It is the peculiarity of certain persons and certain professions,\r
-notably priests and nuns, to wear a grave and agitated air on critical\r
-occasions. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, this double form of\r
-preoccupation was imprinted on the countenance of the prioress, who was\r
-that wise and charming Mademoiselle de Blemeur, Mother Innocente, who\r
-was ordinarily cheerful.\r
-\r
-The gardener made a timid bow, and remained at the door of the cell. The\r
-prioress, who was telling her beads, raised her eyes and said:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! it is you, Father Fauvent."\r
-\r
-This abbreviation had been adopted in the convent.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent bowed again.\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent, I have sent for you."\r
-\r
-"Here I am, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"I have something to say to you."\r
-\r
-"And so have I," said Fauchelevent with a boldness which caused him\r
-inward terror, "I have something to say to the very reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-The prioress stared at him.\r
-\r
-"Ah! you have a communication to make to me."\r
-\r
-"A request."\r
-\r
-"Very well, speak."\r
-\r
-Goodman Fauchelevent, the ex-notary, belonged to the category of\r
-peasants who have assurance. A certain clever ignorance constitutes a\r
-force; you do not distrust it, and you are caught by it. Fauchelevent\r
-had been a success during the something more than two years which he had\r
-passed in the convent. Always solitary and busied about his gardening,\r
-he had nothing else to do than to indulge his curiosity. As he was at a\r
-distance from all those veiled women passing to and fro, he saw before\r
-him only an agitation of shadows. By dint of attention and sharpness\r
-he had succeeded in clothing all those phantoms with flesh, and those\r
-corpses were alive for him. He was like a deaf man whose sight grows\r
-keener, and like a blind man whose hearing becomes more acute. He had\r
-applied himself to riddling out the significance of the different peals,\r
-and he had succeeded, so that this taciturn and enigmatical cloister\r
-possessed no secrets for him; the sphinx babbled all her secrets in his\r
-ear. Fauchelevent knew all and concealed all; that constituted his art.\r
-The whole convent thought him stupid. A great merit in religion. The\r
-vocal mothers made much of Fauchelevent. He was a curious mute. He\r
-inspired confidence. Moreover, he was regular, and never went out except\r
-for well-demonstrated requirements of the orchard and vegetable garden.\r
-This discretion of conduct had inured to his credit. None the less, he\r
-had set two men to chattering: the porter, in the convent, and he\r
-knew the singularities of their parlor, and the grave-digger, at\r
-the cemetery, and he was acquainted with the peculiarities of their\r
-sepulture; in this way, he possessed a double light on the subject of\r
-these nuns, one as to their life, the other as to their death. But he\r
-did not abuse his knowledge. The congregation thought a great deal of\r
-him. Old, lame, blind to everything, probably a little deaf into the\r
-bargain,--what qualities! They would have found it difficult to replace\r
-him.\r
-\r
-The goodman, with the assurance of a person who feels that he is\r
-appreciated, entered into a rather diffuse and very deep rustic harangue\r
-to the reverend prioress. He talked a long time about his age, his\r
-infirmities, the surcharge of years counting double for him henceforth,\r
-of the increasing demands of his work, of the great size of the garden,\r
-of nights which must be passed, like the last, for instance, when he had\r
-been obliged to put straw mats over the melon beds, because of the moon,\r
-and he wound up as follows: "That he had a brother"--(the prioress made\r
-a movement),--"a brother no longer young"--(a second movement on the\r
-part of the prioress, but one expressive of reassurance),--"that, if he\r
-might be permitted, this brother would come and live with him and help\r
-him, that he was an excellent gardener, that the community would receive\r
-from him good service, better than his own; that, otherwise, if his\r
-brother were not admitted, as he, the elder, felt that his health was\r
-broken and that he was insufficient for the work, he should be obliged,\r
-greatly to his regret, to go away; and that his brother had a little\r
-daughter whom he would bring with him, who might be reared for God in\r
-the house, and who might, who knows, become a nun some day."\r
-\r
-When he had finished speaking, the prioress stayed the slipping of her\r
-rosary between her fingers, and said to him:--\r
-\r
-"Could you procure a stout iron bar between now and this evening?"\r
-\r
-"For what purpose?"\r
-\r
-"To serve as a lever."\r
-\r
-"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The prioress, without adding a word, rose and entered the adjoining\r
-room, which was the hall of the chapter, and where the vocal mothers\r
-were probably assembled. Fauchelevent was left alone.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--MOTHER INNOCENTE\r
-\r
-About a quarter of an hour elapsed. The prioress returned and seated\r
-herself once more on her chair.\r
-\r
-The two interlocutors seemed preoccupied. We will present a stenographic\r
-report of the dialogue which then ensued, to the best of our ability.\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent!"\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother!"\r
-\r
-"Do you know the chapel?"\r
-\r
-"I have a little cage there, where I hear the mass and the offices."\r
-\r
-"And you have been in the choir in pursuance of your duties?"\r
-\r
-"Two or three times."\r
-\r
-"There is a stone to be raised."\r
-\r
-"Heavy?"\r
-\r
-"The slab of the pavement which is at the side of the altar."\r
-\r
-"The slab which closes the vault?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"It would be a good thing to have two men for it."\r
-\r
-"Mother Ascension, who is as strong as a man, will help you."\r
-\r
-"A woman is never a man."\r
-\r
-"We have only a woman here to help you. Each one does what he can.\r
-Because Dom Mabillon gives four hundred and seventeen epistles of\r
-Saint Bernard, while Merlonus Horstius only gives three hundred and\r
-sixty-seven, I do not despise Merlonus Horstius."\r
-\r
-"Neither do I."\r
-\r
-"Merit consists in working according to one's strength. A cloister is\r
-not a dock-yard."\r
-\r
-"And a woman is not a man. But my brother is the strong one, though!"\r
-\r
-"And can you get a lever?"\r
-\r
-"That is the only sort of key that fits that sort of door."\r
-\r
-"There is a ring in the stone."\r
-\r
-"I will put the lever through it."\r
-\r
-"And the stone is so arranged that it swings on a pivot."\r
-\r
-"That is good, reverend Mother. I will open the vault."\r
-\r
-"And the four Mother Precentors will help you."\r
-\r
-"And when the vault is open?"\r
-\r
-"It must be closed again."\r
-\r
-"Will that be all?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Give me your orders, very reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"Fauvent, we have confidence in you."\r
-\r
-"I am here to do anything you wish."\r
-\r
-"And to hold your peace about everything!"\r
-\r
-"Yes, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"When the vault is open--"\r
-\r
-"I will close it again."\r
-\r
-"But before that--"\r
-\r
-"What, reverend Mother?"\r
-\r
-"Something must be lowered into it."\r
-\r
-A silence ensued. The prioress, after a pout of the under lip which\r
-resembled hesitation, broke it.\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent!"\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother!"\r
-\r
-"You know that a mother died this morning?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Did you not hear the bell?"\r
-\r
-"Nothing can be heard at the bottom of the garden."\r
-\r
-"Really?"\r
-\r
-"I can hardly distinguish my own signal."\r
-\r
-"She died at daybreak."\r
-\r
-"And then, the wind is not blowing in my direction this morning."\r
-\r
-"It was Mother Crucifixion. A blessed woman."\r
-\r
-The prioress paused, moved her lips, as though in mental prayer, and\r
-resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Three years ago, Madame de Bethune, a Jansenist, turned orthodox,\r
-merely from having seen Mother Crucifixion at prayer."\r
-\r
-"Ah! yes, now I hear the knell, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"The mothers have taken her to the dead-room, which opens on the\r
-church."\r
-\r
-"I know."\r
-\r
-"No other man than you can or must enter that chamber. See to that. A\r
-fine sight it would be, to see a man enter the dead-room!"\r
-\r
-"More often!"\r
-\r
-"Hey?"\r
-\r
-"More often!"\r
-\r
-"What do you say?"\r
-\r
-"I say more often."\r
-\r
-"More often than what?"\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother, I did not say more often than what, I said more\r
-often."\r
-\r
-"I don't understand you. Why do you say more often?"\r
-\r
-"In order to speak like you, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"But I did not say 'more often.'"\r
-\r
-At that moment, nine o'clock struck.\r
-\r
-"At nine o'clock in the morning and at all hours, praised and adored be\r
-the most Holy Sacrament of the altar," said the prioress.\r
-\r
-"Amen," said Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The clock struck opportunely. It cut "more often" short. It is probable,\r
-that had it not been for this, the prioress and Fauchelevent would never\r
-have unravelled that skein.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent mopped his forehead.\r
-\r
-The prioress indulged in another little inward murmur, probably sacred,\r
-then raised her voice:--\r
-\r
-"In her lifetime, Mother Crucifixion made converts; after her death, she\r
-will perform miracles."\r
-\r
-"She will!" replied Father Fauchelevent, falling into step, and striving\r
-not to flinch again.\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent, the community has been blessed in Mother Crucifixion.\r
-No doubt, it is not granted to every one to die, like Cardinal de\r
-Berulle, while saying the holy mass, and to breathe forth their souls to\r
-God, while pronouncing these words: Hanc igitur oblationem. But without\r
-attaining to such happiness, Mother Crucifixion's death was very\r
-precious. She retained her consciousness to the very last moment.\r
-She spoke to us, then she spoke to the angels. She gave us her last\r
-commands. If you had a little more faith, and if you could have been\r
-in her cell, she would have cured your leg merely by touching it.\r
-She smiled. We felt that she was regaining her life in God. There was\r
-something of paradise in that death."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent thought that it was an orison which she was finishing.\r
-\r
-"Amen," said he.\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent, what the dead wish must be done."\r
-\r
-The prioress took off several beads of her chaplet. Fauchelevent held\r
-his peace.\r
-\r
-She went on:--\r
-\r
-"I have consulted upon this point many ecclesiastics laboring in Our\r
-Lord, who occupy themselves in the exercises of the clerical life, and\r
-who bear wonderful fruit."\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother, you can hear the knell much better here than in the\r
-garden."\r
-\r
-"Besides, she is more than a dead woman, she is a saint."\r
-\r
-"Like yourself, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"She slept in her coffin for twenty years, by express permission of our\r
-Holy Father, Pius VII.--"\r
-\r
-"The one who crowned the Emp--Buonaparte."\r
-\r
-For a clever man like Fauchelevent, this allusion was an awkward one.\r
-Fortunately, the prioress, completely absorbed in her own thoughts, did\r
-not hear it. She continued:--\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent?"\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother?"\r
-\r
-"Saint Didorus, Archbishop of Cappadocia, desired that this single word\r
-might be inscribed on his tomb: Acarus, which signifies, a worm of the\r
-earth; this was done. Is this true?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"The blessed Mezzocane, Abbot of Aquila, wished to be buried beneath the\r
-gallows; this was done."\r
-\r
-"That is true."\r
-\r
-"Saint Terentius, Bishop of Port, where the mouth of the Tiber empties\r
-into the sea, requested that on his tomb might be engraved the\r
-sign which was placed on the graves of parricides, in the hope that\r
-passers-by would spit on his tomb. This was done. The dead must be\r
-obeyed."\r
-\r
-"So be it."\r
-\r
-"The body of Bernard Guidonis, born in France near Roche-Abeille, was,\r
-as he had ordered, and in spite of the king of Castile, borne to the\r
-church of the Dominicans in Limoges, although Bernard Guidonis was\r
-Bishop of Tuy in Spain. Can the contrary be affirmed?"\r
-\r
-"For that matter, no, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"The fact is attested by Plantavit de la Fosse."\r
-\r
-Several beads of the chaplet were told off, still in silence. The\r
-prioress resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent, Mother Crucifixion will be interred in the coffin in\r
-which she has slept for the last twenty years."\r
-\r
-"That is just."\r
-\r
-"It is a continuation of her slumber."\r
-\r
-"So I shall have to nail up that coffin?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"And we are to reject the undertaker's coffin?"\r
-\r
-"Precisely."\r
-\r
-"I am at the orders of the very reverend community."\r
-\r
-"The four Mother Precentors will assist you."\r
-\r
-"In nailing up the coffin? I do not need them."\r
-\r
-"No. In lowering the coffin."\r
-\r
-"Where?"\r
-\r
-"Into the vault."\r
-\r
-"What vault?"\r
-\r
-"Under the altar."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent started.\r
-\r
-"The vault under the altar?"\r
-\r
-"Under the altar."\r
-\r
-"But--"\r
-\r
-"You will have an iron bar."\r
-\r
-"Yes, but--"\r
-\r
-"You will raise the stone with the bar by means of the ring."\r
-\r
-"But--"\r
-\r
-"The dead must be obeyed. To be buried in the vault under the altar of\r
-the chapel, not to go to profane earth; to remain there in death where\r
-she prayed while living; such was the last wish of Mother Crucifixion.\r
-She asked it of us; that is to say, commanded us."\r
-\r
-"But it is forbidden."\r
-\r
-"Forbidden by men, enjoined by God."\r
-\r
-"What if it became known?"\r
-\r
-"We have confidence in you."\r
-\r
-"Oh! I am a stone in your walls."\r
-\r
-"The chapter assembled. The vocal mothers, whom I have just consulted\r
-again, and who are now deliberating, have decided that Mother\r
-Crucifixion shall be buried, according to her wish, in her own coffin,\r
-under our altar. Think, Father Fauvent, if she were to work miracles\r
-here! What a glory of God for the community! And miracles issue from\r
-tombs."\r
-\r
-"But, reverend Mother, if the agent of the sanitary commission--"\r
-\r
-"Saint Benoit II., in the matter of sepulture, resisted Constantine\r
-Pogonatus."\r
-\r
-"But the commissary of police--"\r
-\r
-"Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who entered among the Gauls\r
-under the Empire of Constantius, expressly recognized the right of nuns\r
-to be buried in religion, that is to say, beneath the altar."\r
-\r
-"But the inspector from the Prefecture--"\r
-\r
-"The world is nothing in the presence of the cross. Martin, the eleventh\r
-general of the Carthusians, gave to his order this device: Stat crux dum\r
-volvitur orbis."\r
-\r
-"Amen," said Fauchelevent, who imperturbably extricated himself in this\r
-manner from the dilemma, whenever he heard Latin.\r
-\r
-Any audience suffices for a person who has held his peace too long. On\r
-the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison, bearing in\r
-his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had struck in, he\r
-halted in front of the first tree which he came to, harangued it and\r
-made very great efforts to convince it. The prioress, who was usually\r
-subjected to the barrier of silence, and whose reservoir was overfull,\r
-rose and exclaimed with the loquacity of a dam which has broken away:--\r
-\r
-"I have on my right Benoit and on my left Bernard. Who was Bernard? The\r
-first abbot of Clairvaux. Fontaines in Burgundy is a country that is\r
-blest because it gave him birth. His father was named Tecelin, and his\r
-mother Alethe. He began at Citeaux, to end in Clairvaux; he was ordained\r
-abbot by the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saone, Guillaume de Champeaux; he had\r
-seven hundred novices, and founded a hundred and sixty monasteries; he\r
-overthrew Abeilard at the council of Sens in 1140, and Pierre de Bruys\r
-and Henry his disciple, and another sort of erring spirits who were\r
-called the Apostolics; he confounded Arnauld de Brescia, darted\r
-lightning at the monk Raoul, the murderer of the Jews, dominated the\r
-council of Reims in 1148, caused the condemnation of Gilbert de Porea,\r
-Bishop of Poitiers, caused the condemnation of Eon de l'Etoile, arranged\r
-the disputes of princes, enlightened King Louis the Young, advised Pope\r
-Eugene III., regulated the Temple, preached the crusade, performed\r
-two hundred and fifty miracles during his lifetime, and as many\r
-as thirty-nine in one day. Who was Benoit? He was the patriarch of\r
-Mont-Cassin; he was the second founder of the Saintete Claustrale,\r
-he was the Basil of the West. His order has produced forty popes, two\r
-hundred cardinals, fifty patriarchs, sixteen hundred archbishops, four\r
-thousand six hundred bishops, four emperors, twelve empresses, forty-six\r
-kings, forty-one queens, three thousand six hundred canonized saints,\r
-and has been in existence for fourteen hundred years. On one side Saint\r
-Bernard, on the other the agent of the sanitary department! On one side\r
-Saint Benoit, on the other the inspector of public ways! The state,\r
-the road commissioners, the public undertaker, regulations, the\r
-administration, what do we know of all that? There is not a chance\r
-passer-by who would not be indignant to see how we are treated. We\r
-have not even the right to give our dust to Jesus Christ! Your sanitary\r
-department is a revolutionary invention. God subordinated to the\r
-commissary of police; such is the age. Silence, Fauvent!"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent was but ill at ease under this shower bath. The prioress\r
-continued:--\r
-\r
-"No one doubts the right of the monastery to sepulture. Only fanatics\r
-and those in error deny it. We live in times of terrible confusion. We\r
-do not know that which it is necessary to know, and we know that which\r
-we should ignore. We are ignorant and impious. In this age there exist\r
-people who do not distinguish between the very great Saint Bernard and\r
-the Saint Bernard denominated of the poor Catholics, a certain good\r
-ecclesiastic who lived in the thirteenth century. Others are so\r
-blasphemous as to compare the scaffold of Louis XVI. to the cross of\r
-Jesus Christ. Louis XVI. was merely a king. Let us beware of God! There\r
-is no longer just nor unjust. The name of Voltaire is known, but not\r
-the name of Cesar de Bus. Nevertheless, Cesar de Bus is a man of blessed\r
-memory, and Voltaire one of unblessed memory. The last arch-bishop,\r
-the Cardinal de Perigord, did not even know that Charles de\r
-Gondren succeeded to Berulle, and Francois Bourgoin to Gondren,\r
-and Jean-Francois Senault to Bourgoin, and Father Sainte-Marthe to\r
-Jean-Francois Senault. The name of Father Coton is known, not because\r
-he was one of the three who urged the foundation of the Oratorie, but\r
-because he furnished Henri IV., the Huguenot king, with the material\r
-for an oath. That which pleases people of the world in Saint Francois de\r
-Sales, is that he cheated at play. And then, religion is attacked. Why?\r
-Because there have been bad priests, because Sagittaire, Bishop of Gap,\r
-was the brother of Salone, Bishop of Embrun, and because both of them\r
-followed Mommol. What has that to do with the question? Does that\r
-prevent Martin de Tours from being a saint, and giving half of his cloak\r
-to a beggar? They persecute the saints. They shut their eyes to the\r
-truth. Darkness is the rule. The most ferocious beasts are beasts which\r
-are blind. No one thinks of hell as a reality. Oh! how wicked people\r
-are! By order of the king signifies to-day, by order of the revolution.\r
-One no longer knows what is due to the living or to the dead. A holy\r
-death is prohibited. Burial is a civil matter. This is horrible. Saint\r
-Leo II. wrote two special letters, one to Pierre Notaire, the other to\r
-the king of the Visigoths, for the purpose of combating and rejecting,\r
-in questions touching the dead, the authority of the exarch and the\r
-supremacy of the Emperor. Gauthier, Bishop of Chalons, held his own\r
-in this matter against Otho, Duke of Burgundy. The ancient magistracy\r
-agreed with him. In former times we had voices in the chapter, even on\r
-matters of the day. The Abbot of Citeaux, the general of the order, was\r
-councillor by right of birth to the parliament of Burgundy. We do what\r
-we please with our dead. Is not the body of Saint Benoit himself in\r
-France, in the abbey of Fleury, called Saint Benoit-sur-Loire, although\r
-he died in Italy at Mont-Cassin, on Saturday, the 21st of the month\r
-of March, of the year 543? All this is incontestable. I abhor\r
-psalm-singers, I hate priors, I execrate heretics, but I should detest\r
-yet more any one who should maintain the contrary. One has only to\r
-read Arnoul Wion, Gabriel Bucelin, Trithemus, Maurolics, and Dom Luc\r
-d'Achery."\r
-\r
-The prioress took breath, then turned to Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-"Is it settled, Father Fauvent?"\r
-\r
-"It is settled, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"We may depend on you?"\r
-\r
-"I will obey."\r
-\r
-"That is well."\r
-\r
-"I am entirely devoted to the convent."\r
-\r
-"That is understood. You will close the coffin. The sisters will carry\r
-it to the chapel. The office for the dead will then be said. Then we\r
-shall return to the cloister. Between eleven o'clock and midnight, you\r
-will come with your iron bar. All will be done in the most profound\r
-secrecy. There will be in the chapel only the four Mother Precentors,\r
-Mother Ascension and yourself."\r
-\r
-"And the sister at the post?"\r
-\r
-"She will not turn round."\r
-\r
-"But she will hear."\r
-\r
-"She will not listen. Besides, what the cloister knows the world learns\r
-not."\r
-\r
-A pause ensued. The prioress went on:--\r
-\r
-"You will remove your bell. It is not necessary that the sister at the\r
-post should perceive your presence."\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother?"\r
-\r
-"What, Father Fauvent?"\r
-\r
-"Has the doctor for the dead paid his visit?"\r
-\r
-"He will pay it at four o'clock to-day. The peal which orders the\r
-doctor for the dead to be summoned has already been rung. But you do not\r
-understand any of the peals?"\r
-\r
-"I pay no attention to any but my own."\r
-\r
-"That is well, Father Fauvent."\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother, a lever at least six feet long will be required."\r
-\r
-"Where will you obtain it?"\r
-\r
-"Where gratings are not lacking, iron bars are not lacking. I have my\r
-heap of old iron at the bottom of the garden."\r
-\r
-"About three-quarters of an hour before midnight; do not forget."\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother?"\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"If you were ever to have any other jobs of this sort, my brother is the\r
-strong man for you. A perfect Turk!"\r
-\r
-"You will do it as speedily as possible."\r
-\r
-"I cannot work very fast. I am infirm; that is why I require an\r
-assistant. I limp."\r
-\r
-"To limp is no sin, and perhaps it is a blessing. The Emperor Henry II.,\r
-who combated Antipope Gregory and re-established Benoit VIII., has two\r
-surnames, the Saint and the Lame."\r
-\r
-"Two surtouts are a good thing," murmured Fauchelevent, who really was a\r
-little hard of hearing.\r
-\r
-"Now that I think of it, Father Fauvent, let us give a whole hour to it.\r
-That is not too much. Be near the principal altar, with your iron bar,\r
-at eleven o'clock. The office begins at midnight. Everything must have\r
-been completed a good quarter of an hour before that."\r
-\r
-"I will do anything to prove my zeal towards the community. These are my\r
-orders. I am to nail up the coffin. At eleven o'clock exactly, I am to\r
-be in the chapel. The Mother Precentors will be there. Mother Ascension\r
-will be there. Two men would be better. However, never mind! I shall\r
-have my lever. We will open the vault, we will lower the coffin, and\r
-we will close the vault again. After which, there will be no trace\r
-of anything. The government will have no suspicion. Thus all has been\r
-arranged, reverend Mother?"\r
-\r
-"No!"\r
-\r
-"What else remains?"\r
-\r
-"The empty coffin remains."\r
-\r
-This produced a pause. Fauchelevent meditated. The prioress meditated.\r
-\r
-"What is to be done with that coffin, Father Fauvent?"\r
-\r
-"It will be given to the earth."\r
-\r
-"Empty?"\r
-\r
-Another silence. Fauchelevent made, with his left hand, that sort of a\r
-gesture which dismisses a troublesome subject.\r
-\r
-"Reverend Mother, I am the one who is to nail up the coffin in the\r
-basement of the church, and no one can enter there but myself, and I\r
-will cover the coffin with the pall."\r
-\r
-"Yes, but the bearers, when they place it in the hearse and lower it\r
-into the grave, will be sure to feel that there is nothing in it."\r
-\r
-"Ah! the de--!" exclaimed Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The prioress began to make the sign of the cross, and looked fixedly at\r
-the gardener. The vil stuck fast in his throat.\r
-\r
-He made haste to improvise an expedient to make her forget the oath.\r
-\r
-"I will put earth in the coffin, reverend Mother. That will produce the\r
-effect of a corpse."\r
-\r
-"You are right. Earth, that is the same thing as man. So you will manage\r
-the empty coffin?"\r
-\r
-"I will make that my special business."\r
-\r
-The prioress's face, up to that moment troubled and clouded, grew serene\r
-once more. She made the sign of a superior dismissing an inferior to\r
-him. Fauchelevent went towards the door. As he was on the point of\r
-passing out, the prioress raised her voice gently:--\r
-\r
-"I am pleased with you, Father Fauvent; bring your brother to me\r
-to-morrow, after the burial, and tell him to fetch his daughter."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--IN WHICH JEAN VALJEAN HAS QUITE THE AIR OF HAVING READ\r
-AUSTIN CASTILLEJO\r
-\r
-The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a one-eyed man;\r
-they do not reach their goal very promptly. Moreover, Fauchelevent\r
-was in a dilemma. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to return to his\r
-cottage in the garden. Cosette had waked up. Jean Valjean had placed her\r
-near the fire. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, Jean Valjean was\r
-pointing out to her the vintner's basket on the wall, and saying to her,\r
-"Listen attentively to me, my little Cosette. We must go away from this\r
-house, but we shall return to it, and we shall be very happy here. The\r
-good man who lives here is going to carry you off on his back in that.\r
-You will wait for me at a lady's house. I shall come to fetch you. Obey,\r
-and say nothing, above all things, unless you want Madame Thenardier to\r
-get you again!"\r
-\r
-Cosette nodded gravely.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean turned round at the noise made by Fauchelevent opening the\r
-door.\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"Everything is arranged, and nothing is," said Fauchelevent. "I have\r
-permission to bring you in; but before bringing you in you must be\r
-got out. That's where the difficulty lies. It is easy enough with the\r
-child."\r
-\r
-"You will carry her out?"\r
-\r
-"And she will hold her tongue?"\r
-\r
-"I answer for that."\r
-\r
-"But you, Father Madeleine?"\r
-\r
-And, after a silence, fraught with anxiety, Fauchelevent exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Why, get out as you came in!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, as in the first instance, contented himself with saying,\r
-"Impossible."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent grumbled, more to himself than to Jean Valjean:--\r
-\r
-"There is another thing which bothers me. I have said that I would put\r
-earth in it. When I come to think it over, the earth instead of the\r
-corpse will not seem like the real thing, it won't do, it will get\r
-displaced, it will move about. The men will bear it. You understand,\r
-Father Madeleine, the government will notice it."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean stared him straight in the eye and thought that he was\r
-raving.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent went on:--\r
-\r
-"How the de--uce are you going to get out? It must all be done by\r
-to-morrow morning. It is to-morrow that I am to bring you in. The\r
-prioress expects you."\r
-\r
-Then he explained to Jean Valjean that this was his recompense for a\r
-service which he, Fauchelevent, was to render to the community. That it\r
-fell among his duties to take part in their burials, that he nailed up\r
-the coffins and helped the grave-digger at the cemetery. That the nun\r
-who had died that morning had requested to be buried in the coffin which\r
-had served her for a bed, and interred in the vault under the altar of\r
-the chapel. That the police regulations forbade this, but that she was\r
-one of those dead to whom nothing is refused. That the prioress and the\r
-vocal mothers intended to fulfil the wish of the deceased. That it was\r
-so much the worse for the government. That he, Fauchelevent, was to nail\r
-up the coffin in the cell, raise the stone in the chapel, and lower the\r
-corpse into the vault. And that, by way of thanks, the prioress was to\r
-admit his brother to the house as a gardener, and his niece as a pupil.\r
-That his brother was M. Madeleine, and that his niece was Cosette. That\r
-the prioress had told him to bring his brother on the following evening,\r
-after the counterfeit interment in the cemetery. But that he could not\r
-bring M. Madeleine in from the outside if M. Madeleine was not outside.\r
-That that was the first problem. And then, that there was another: the\r
-empty coffin.\r
-\r
-"What is that empty coffin?" asked Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"The coffin of the administration."\r
-\r
-"What coffin? What administration?"\r
-\r
-"A nun dies. The municipal doctor comes and says, 'A nun has died.'\r
-The government sends a coffin. The next day it sends a hearse and\r
-undertaker's men to get the coffin and carry it to the cemetery. The\r
-undertaker's men will come and lift the coffin; there will be nothing in\r
-it."\r
-\r
-"Put something in it."\r
-\r
-"A corpse? I have none."\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"What then?"\r
-\r
-"A living person."\r
-\r
-"What person?"\r
-\r
-"Me!" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent, who was seated, sprang up as though a bomb had burst under\r
-his chair.\r
-\r
-"You!"\r
-\r
-"Why not?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean gave way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up his\r
-face like a flash from heaven in the winter.\r
-\r
-"You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said: 'Mother Crucifixion is\r
-dead.' and I add: 'and Father Madeleine is buried.'"\r
-\r
-"Ah! good, you can laugh, you are not speaking seriously."\r
-\r
-"Very seriously, I must get out of this place."\r
-\r
-"Certainly."\r
-\r
-"l have told you to find a basket, and a cover for me also."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"The basket will be of pine, and the cover a black cloth."\r
-\r
-"In the first place, it will be a white cloth. Nuns are buried in\r
-white."\r
-\r
-"Let it be a white cloth, then."\r
-\r
-"You are not like other men, Father Madeleine."\r
-\r
-To behold such devices, which are nothing else than the savage and\r
-daring inventions of the galleys, spring forth from the peaceable things\r
-which surrounded him, and mingle with what he called the "petty course\r
-of life in the convent," caused Fauchelevent as much amazement as a\r
-gull fishing in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Denis would inspire in a\r
-passer-by.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean went on:--\r
-\r
-"The problem is to get out of here without being seen. This offers\r
-the means. But give me some information, in the first place. How is it\r
-managed? Where is this coffin?"\r
-\r
-"The empty one?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Down stairs, in what is called the dead-room. It stands on two\r
-trestles, under the pall."\r
-\r
-"How long is the coffin?"\r
-\r
-"Six feet."\r
-\r
-"What is this dead-room?"\r
-\r
-"It is a chamber on the ground floor which has a grated window opening\r
-on the garden, which is closed on the outside by a shutter, and two\r
-doors; one leads into the convent, the other into the church."\r
-\r
-"What church?"\r
-\r
-"The church in the street, the church which any one can enter."\r
-\r
-"Have you the keys to those two doors?"\r
-\r
-"No; I have the key to the door which communicates with the convent; the\r
-porter has the key to the door which communicates with the church."\r
-\r
-"When does the porter open that door?"\r
-\r
-"Only to allow the undertaker's men to enter, when they come to get the\r
-coffin. When the coffin has been taken out, the door is closed again."\r
-\r
-"Who nails up the coffin?"\r
-\r
-"I do."\r
-\r
-"Who spreads the pall over it?"\r
-\r
-"I do."\r
-\r
-"Are you alone?"\r
-\r
-"Not another man, except the police doctor, can enter the dead-room.\r
-That is even written on the wall."\r
-\r
-"Could you hide me in that room to-night when every one is asleep?"\r
-\r
-"No. But I could hide you in a small, dark nook which opens on the\r
-dead-room, where I keep my tools to use for burials, and of which I have\r
-the key."\r
-\r
-"At what time will the hearse come for the coffin to-morrow?"\r
-\r
-"About three o'clock in the afternoon. The burial will take place at the\r
-Vaugirard cemetery a little before nightfall. It is not very near."\r
-\r
-"I will remain concealed in your tool-closet all night and all the\r
-morning. And how about food? I shall be hungry."\r
-\r
-"I will bring you something."\r
-\r
-"You can come and nail me up in the coffin at two o'clock."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent recoiled and cracked his finger-joints.\r
-\r
-"But that is impossible!"\r
-\r
-"Bah! Impossible to take a hammer and drive some nails in a plank?"\r
-\r
-What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, a simple\r
-matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits than\r
-this. Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract\r
-himself to fit the diameter of the escape. The prisoner is subject to\r
-flight as the sick man is subject to a crisis which saves or kills him.\r
-An escape is a cure. What does not a man undergo for the sake of a\r
-cure? To have himself nailed up in a case and carried off like a bale\r
-of goods, to live for a long time in a box, to find air where there is\r
-none, to economize his breath for hours, to know how to stifle without\r
-dying--this was one of Jean Valjean's gloomy talents.\r
-\r
-Moreover, a coffin containing a living being,--that convict's\r
-expedient,--is also an imperial expedient. If we are to credit the monk\r
-Austin Castillejo, this was the means employed by Charles the Fifth,\r
-desirous of seeing the Plombes for the last time after his abdication.\r
-\r
-He had her brought into and carried out of the monastery of Saint-Yuste\r
-in this manner.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent, who had recovered himself a little, exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"But how will you manage to breathe?"\r
-\r
-"I will breathe."\r
-\r
-"In that box! The mere thought of it suffocates me."\r
-\r
-"You surely must have a gimlet, you will make a few holes here and\r
-there, around my mouth, and you will nail the top plank on loosely."\r
-\r
-"Good! And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze?"\r
-\r
-"A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze."\r
-\r
-And Jean Valjean added:--\r
-\r
-"Father Fauchelevent, we must come to a decision: I must either be\r
-caught here, or accept this escape through the hearse."\r
-\r
-Every one has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging\r
-between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not\r
-said to a cat, "Do come in!" There are men who, when an incident stands\r
-half-open before them, have the same tendency to halt in indecision\r
-between two resolutions, at the risk of getting crushed through the\r
-abrupt closing of the adventure by fate. The over-prudent, cats as they\r
-are, and because they are cats, sometimes incur more danger than\r
-the audacious. Fauchelevent was of this hesitating nature. But\r
-Jean Valjean's coolness prevailed over him in spite of himself. He\r
-grumbled:--\r
-\r
-"Well, since there is no other means."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean resumed:--\r
-\r
-"The only thing which troubles me is what will take place at the\r
-cemetery."\r
-\r
-"That is the very point that is not troublesome," exclaimed\r
-Fauchelevent. "If you are sure of coming out of the coffin all right, I\r
-am sure of getting you out of the grave. The grave-digger is a drunkard,\r
-and a friend of mine. He is Father Mestienne. An old fellow of the old\r
-school. The grave-digger puts the corpses in the grave, and I put the\r
-grave-digger in my pocket. I will tell you what will take place. They\r
-will arrive a little before dusk, three-quarters of an hour before the\r
-gates of the cemetery are closed. The hearse will drive directly up to\r
-the grave. I shall follow; that is my business. I shall have a hammer,\r
-a chisel, and some pincers in my pocket. The hearse halts, the\r
-undertaker's men knot a rope around your coffin and lower you down. The\r
-priest says the prayers, makes the sign of the cross, sprinkles the holy\r
-water, and takes his departure. I am left alone with Father Mestienne.\r
-He is my friend, I tell you. One of two things will happen, he will\r
-either be sober, or he will not be sober. If he is not drunk, I shall\r
-say to him: 'Come and drink a bout while the Bon Coing [the Good Quince]\r
-is open.' I carry him off, I get him drunk,--it does not take long to\r
-make Father Mestienne drunk, he always has the beginning of it about\r
-him,--I lay him under the table, I take his card, so that I can get into\r
-the cemetery again, and I return without him. Then you have no longer\r
-any one but me to deal with. If he is drunk, I shall say to him: 'Be\r
-off; I will do your work for you.' Off he goes, and I drag you out of\r
-the hole."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean held out his hand, and Fauchelevent precipitated himself\r
-upon it with the touching effusion of a peasant.\r
-\r
-"That is settled, Father Fauchelevent. All will go well."\r
-\r
-"Provided nothing goes wrong," thought Fauchelevent. "In that case, it\r
-would be terrible."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BE DRUNK IN ORDER TO BE IMMORTAL\r
-\r
-On the following day, as the sun was declining, the very rare passers-by\r
-on the Boulevard du Maine pulled off their hats to an old-fashioned\r
-hearse, ornamented with skulls, cross-bones, and tears. This hearse\r
-contained a coffin covered with a white cloth over which spread a large\r
-black cross, like a huge corpse with drooping arms. A mourning-coach, in\r
-which could be seen a priest in his surplice, and a choir boy in his red\r
-cap, followed. Two undertaker's men in gray uniforms trimmed with black\r
-walked on the right and the left of the hearse. Behind it came an old\r
-man in the garments of a laborer, who limped along. The procession was\r
-going in the direction of the Vaugirard cemetery.\r
-\r
-The handle of a hammer, the blade of a cold chisel, and the antennae of\r
-a pair of pincers were visible, protruding from the man's pocket.\r
-\r
-The Vaugirard cemetery formed an exception among the cemeteries of\r
-Paris. It had its peculiar usages, just as it had its carriage\r
-entrance and its house door, which old people in the quarter, who clung\r
-tenaciously to ancient words, still called the porte cavaliere and the\r
-porte pietonne.[16] The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Rue Petit-Picpus\r
-had obtained permission, as we have already stated, to be buried there\r
-in a corner apart, and at night, the plot of land having formerly\r
-belonged to their community. The grave-diggers being thus bound to\r
-service in the evening in summer and at night in winter, in this\r
-cemetery, they were subjected to a special discipline. The gates of the\r
-Paris cemeteries closed, at that epoch, at sundown, and this being a\r
-municipal regulation, the Vaugirard cemetery was bound by it like the\r
-rest. The carriage gate and the house door were two contiguous grated\r
-gates, adjoining a pavilion built by the architect Perronet, and\r
-inhabited by the door-keeper of the cemetery. These gates, therefore,\r
-swung inexorably on their hinges at the instant when the sun disappeared\r
-behind the dome of the Invalides. If any grave-digger were delayed\r
-after that moment in the cemetery, there was but one way for him to\r
-get out--his grave-digger's card furnished by the department of public\r
-funerals. A sort of letter-box was constructed in the porter's window.\r
-The grave-digger dropped his card into this box, the porter heard it\r
-fall, pulled the rope, and the small door opened. If the man had not his\r
-card, he mentioned his name, the porter, who was sometimes in bed and\r
-asleep, rose, came out and identified the man, and opened the gate with\r
-his key; the grave-digger stepped out, but had to pay a fine of fifteen\r
-francs.\r
-\r
-This cemetery, with its peculiarities outside the regulations,\r
-embarrassed the symmetry of the administration. It was suppressed\r
-a little later than 1830. The cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, called the\r
-Eastern cemetery, succeeded to it, and inherited that famous dram-shop\r
-next to the Vaugirard cemetery, which was surmounted by a quince painted\r
-on a board, and which formed an angle, one side on the drinkers' tables,\r
-and the other on the tombs, with this sign: Au Bon Coing.\r
-\r
-The Vaugirard cemetery was what may be called a faded cemetery. It\r
-was falling into disuse. Dampness was invading it, the flowers were\r
-deserting it. The bourgeois did not care much about being buried in\r
-the Vaugirard; it hinted at poverty. Pere-Lachaise if you please! to be\r
-buried in Pere-Lachaise is equivalent to having furniture of mahogany.\r
-It is recognized as elegant. The Vaugirard cemetery was a venerable\r
-enclosure, planted like an old-fashioned French garden. Straight alleys,\r
-box, thuya-trees, holly, ancient tombs beneath aged cypress-trees, and\r
-very tall grass. In the evening it was tragic there. There were very\r
-lugubrious lines about it.\r
-\r
-The sun had not yet set when the hearse with the white pall and the\r
-black cross entered the avenue of the Vaugirard cemetery. The lame man\r
-who followed it was no other than Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The interment of Mother Crucifixion in the vault under the altar, the\r
-exit of Cosette, the introduction of Jean Valjean to the dead-room,--all\r
-had been executed without difficulty, and there had been no hitch.\r
-\r
-Let us remark in passing, that the burial of Mother Crucifixion under\r
-the altar of the convent is a perfectly venial offence in our sight. It\r
-is one of the faults which resemble a duty. The nuns had committed it,\r
-not only without difficulty, but even with the applause of their own\r
-consciences. In the cloister, what is called the "government" is only\r
-an intermeddling with authority, an interference which is always\r
-questionable. In the first place, the rule; as for the code, we shall\r
-see. Make as many laws as you please, men; but keep them for yourselves.\r
-The tribute to Caesar is never anything but the remnants of the tribute\r
-to God. A prince is nothing in the presence of a principle.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent limped along behind the hearse in a very contented frame\r
-of mind. His twin plots, the one with the nuns, the one for the convent,\r
-the other against it, the other with M. Madeleine, had succeeded, to\r
-all appearance. Jean Valjean's composure was one of those powerful\r
-tranquillities which are contagious. Fauchelevent no longer felt\r
-doubtful as to his success.\r
-\r
-What remained to be done was a mere nothing. Within the last two years,\r
-he had made good Father Mestienne, a chubby-cheeked person, drunk at\r
-least ten times. He played with Father Mestienne. He did what he liked\r
-with him. He made him dance according to his whim. Mestienne's head\r
-adjusted itself to the cap of Fauchelevent's will. Fauchelevent's\r
-confidence was perfect.\r
-\r
-At the moment when the convoy entered the avenue leading to the\r
-cemetery, Fauchelevent glanced cheerfully at the hearse, and said half\r
-aloud, as he rubbed his big hands:--\r
-\r
-"Here's a fine farce!"\r
-\r
-All at once the hearse halted; it had reached the gate. The permission\r
-for interment must be exhibited. The undertaker's man addressed himself\r
-to the porter of the cemetery. During this colloquy, which always is\r
-productive of a delay of from one to two minutes, some one, a stranger,\r
-came and placed himself behind the hearse, beside Fauchelevent. He was\r
-a sort of laboring man, who wore a waistcoat with large pockets and\r
-carried a mattock under his arm.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent surveyed this stranger.\r
-\r
-"Who are you?" he demanded.\r
-\r
-"The man replied:--\r
-\r
-"The grave-digger."\r
-\r
-If a man could survive the blow of a cannon-ball full in the breast, he\r
-would make the same face that Fauchelevent made.\r
-\r
-"The grave-digger?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"You?"\r
-\r
-"I."\r
-\r
-"Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."\r
-\r
-"He was."\r
-\r
-"What! He was?"\r
-\r
-"He is dead."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent had expected anything but this, that a grave-digger could\r
-die. It is true, nevertheless, that grave-diggers do die themselves. By\r
-dint of excavating graves for other people, one hollows out one's own.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent stood there with his mouth wide open. He had hardly the\r
-strength to stammer:--\r
-\r
-"But it is not possible!"\r
-\r
-"It is so."\r
-\r
-"But," he persisted feebly, "Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."\r
-\r
-"After Napoleon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier. Peasant, my name\r
-is Gribier."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent, who was deadly pale, stared at this Gribier.\r
-\r
-He was a tall, thin, livid, utterly funereal man. He had the air of an\r
-unsuccessful doctor who had turned grave-digger.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent burst out laughing.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said he, "what queer things do happen! Father Mestienne is dead,\r
-but long live little Father Lenoir! Do you know who little Father Lenoir\r
-is? He is a jug of red wine. It is a jug of Surene, morbigou! of real\r
-Paris Surene? Ah! So old Mestienne is dead! I am sorry for it; he was\r
-a jolly fellow. But you are a jolly fellow, too. Are you not, comrade?\r
-We'll go and have a drink together presently."\r
-\r
-The man replied:--\r
-\r
-"I have been a student. I passed my fourth examination. I never drink."\r
-\r
-The hearse had set out again, and was rolling up the grand alley of the\r
-cemetery.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent had slackened his pace. He limped more out of anxiety than\r
-from infirmity.\r
-\r
-The grave-digger walked on in front of him.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent passed the unexpected Gribier once more in review.\r
-\r
-He was one of those men who, though very young, have the air of age, and\r
-who, though slender, are extremely strong.\r
-\r
-"Comrade!" cried Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The man turned round.\r
-\r
-"I am the convent grave-digger."\r
-\r
-"My colleague," said the man.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent, who was illiterate but very sharp, understood that he\r
-had to deal with a formidable species of man, with a fine talker. He\r
-muttered:\r
-\r
-"So Father Mestienne is dead."\r
-\r
-The man replied:--\r
-\r
-"Completely. The good God consulted his note-book which shows when the\r
-time is up. It was Father Mestienne's turn. Father Mestienne died."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent repeated mechanically: "The good God--"\r
-\r
-"The good God," said the man authoritatively. "According to the\r
-philosophers, the Eternal Father; according to the Jacobins, the Supreme\r
-Being."\r
-\r
-"Shall we not make each other's acquaintance?" stammered Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-"It is made. You are a peasant, I am a Parisian."\r
-\r
-"People do not know each other until they have drunk together. He who\r
-empties his glass empties his heart. You must come and have a drink with\r
-me. Such a thing cannot be refused."\r
-\r
-"Business first."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent thought: "I am lost."\r
-\r
-They were only a few turns of the wheel distant from the small alley\r
-leading to the nuns' corner.\r
-\r
-The grave-digger resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Peasant, I have seven small children who must be fed. As they must eat,\r
-I cannot drink."\r
-\r
-And he added, with the satisfaction of a serious man who is turning a\r
-phrase well:--\r
-\r
-"Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst."\r
-\r
-The hearse skirted a clump of cypress-trees, quitted the grand alley,\r
-turned into a narrow one, entered the waste land, and plunged into\r
-a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the place of\r
-sepulture. Fauchelevent slackened his pace, but he could not detain the\r
-hearse. Fortunately, the soil, which was light and wet with the winter\r
-rains, clogged the wheels and retarded its speed.\r
-\r
-He approached the grave-digger.\r
-\r
-"They have such a nice little Argenteuil wine," murmured Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-"Villager," retorted the man, "I ought not be a grave-digger. My\r
-father was a porter at the Prytaneum [Town-Hall]. He destined me for\r
-literature. But he had reverses. He had losses on 'change. I was obliged\r
-to renounce the profession of author. But I am still a public writer."\r
-\r
-"So you are not a grave-digger, then?" returned Fauchelevent, clutching\r
-at this branch, feeble as it was.\r
-\r
-"The one does not hinder the other. I cumulate."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent did not understand this last word.\r
-\r
-"Come have a drink," said he.\r
-\r
-Here a remark becomes necessary. Fauchelevent, whatever his anguish,\r
-offered a drink, but he did not explain himself on one point; who was to\r
-pay? Generally, Fauchelevent offered and Father Mestienne paid. An offer\r
-of a drink was the evident result of the novel situation created by the\r
-new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make this offer, but the old\r
-gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour named after Rabelais in\r
-the dark, and that not unintentionally. As for himself, Fauchelevent did\r
-not wish to pay, troubled as he was.\r
-\r
-The grave-digger went on with a superior smile:--\r
-\r
-"One must eat. I have accepted Father Mestienne's reversion. One gets to\r
-be a philosopher when one has nearly completed his classes. To the labor\r
-of the hand I join the labor of the arm. I have my scrivener's stall in\r
-the market of the Rue de Sevres. You know? the Umbrella Market. All the\r
-cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their declarations of\r
-love to the raw soldiers. In the morning I write love letters; in the\r
-evening I dig graves. Such is life, rustic."\r
-\r
-The hearse was still advancing. Fauchelevent, uneasy to the last degree,\r
-was gazing about him on all sides. Great drops of perspiration trickled\r
-down from his brow.\r
-\r
-"But," continued the grave-digger, "a man cannot serve two mistresses.\r
-I must choose between the pen and the mattock. The mattock is ruining my\r
-hand."\r
-\r
-The hearse halted.\r
-\r
-The choir boy alighted from the mourning-coach, then the priest.\r
-\r
-One of the small front wheels of the hearse had run up a little on a\r
-pile of earth, beyond which an open grave was visible.\r
-\r
-"What a farce this is!" repeated Fauchelevent in consternation.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS\r
-\r
-Who was in the coffin? The reader knows. Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had arranged things so that he could exist there, and he\r
-could almost breathe.\r
-\r
-It is a strange thing to what a degree security of conscience confers\r
-security of the rest. Every combination thought out by Jean Valjean had\r
-been progressing, and progressing favorably, since the preceding day.\r
-He, like Fauchelevent, counted on Father Mestienne. He had no doubt\r
-as to the end. Never was there a more critical situation, never more\r
-complete composure.\r
-\r
-The four planks of the coffin breathe out a kind of terrible peace. It\r
-seemed as though something of the repose of the dead entered into Jean\r
-Valjean's tranquillity.\r
-\r
-From the depths of that coffin he had been able to follow, and he had\r
-followed, all the phases of the terrible drama which he was playing with\r
-death.\r
-\r
-Shortly after Fauchelevent had finished nailing on the upper plank, Jean\r
-Valjean had felt himself carried out, then driven off. He knew, from the\r
-diminution in the jolting, when they left the pavements and reached the\r
-earth road. He had divined, from a dull noise, that they were crossing\r
-the bridge of Austerlitz. At the first halt, he had understood that they\r
-were entering the cemetery; at the second halt, he said to himself:--\r
-\r
-"Here is the grave."\r
-\r
-Suddenly, he felt hands seize the coffin, then a harsh grating against\r
-the planks; he explained it to himself as the rope which was being\r
-fastened round the casket in order to lower it into the cavity.\r
-\r
-Then he experienced a giddiness.\r
-\r
-The undertaker's man and the grave-digger had probably allowed the\r
-coffin to lose its balance, and had lowered the head before the foot. He\r
-recovered himself fully when he felt himself horizontal and motionless.\r
-He had just touched the bottom.\r
-\r
-He had a certain sensation of cold.\r
-\r
-A voice rose above him, glacial and solemn. He heard Latin words, which\r
-he did not understand, pass over him, so slowly that he was able to\r
-catch them one by one:--\r
-\r
-"Qui dormiunt in terrae pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam aeternam, et\r
-alii in approbrium, ut videant semper."\r
-\r
-A child's voice said:--\r
-\r
-"De profundis."\r
-\r
-The grave voice began again:--\r
-\r
-"Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine."\r
-\r
-The child's voice responded:--\r
-\r
-"Et lux perpetua luceat ei."\r
-\r
-He heard something like the gentle patter of several drops of rain on\r
-the plank which covered him. It was probably the holy water.\r
-\r
-He thought: "This will be over soon now. Patience for a little while\r
-longer. The priest will take his departure. Fauchelevent will take\r
-Mestienne off to drink. I shall be left. Then Fauchelevent will return\r
-alone, and I shall get out. That will be the work of a good hour."\r
-\r
-The grave voice resumed\r
-\r
-"Requiescat in pace."\r
-\r
-And the child's voice said:--\r
-\r
-"Amen."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean strained his ears, and heard something like retreating\r
-footsteps.\r
-\r
-"There, they are going now," thought he. "I am alone."\r
-\r
-All at once, he heard over his head a sound which seemed to him to be a\r
-clap of thunder.\r
-\r
-It was a shovelful of earth falling on the coffin.\r
-\r
-A second shovelful fell.\r
-\r
-One of the holes through which he breathed had just been stopped up.\r
-\r
-A third shovelful of earth fell.\r
-\r
-Then a fourth.\r
-\r
-There are things which are too strong for the strongest man. Jean\r
-Valjean lost consciousness.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE ORIGIN OF THE SAYING: DON'T LOSE\r
-THE CARD\r
-\r
-This is what had taken place above the coffin in which lay Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-When the hearse had driven off, when the priest and the choir boy had\r
-entered the carriage again and taken their departure, Fauchelevent, who\r
-had not taken his eyes from the grave-digger, saw the latter bend over\r
-and grasp his shovel, which was sticking upright in the heap of dirt.\r
-\r
-Then Fauchelevent took a supreme resolve.\r
-\r
-He placed himself between the grave and the grave-digger, crossed his\r
-arms and said:--\r
-\r
-"I am the one to pay!"\r
-\r
-The grave-digger stared at him in amazement, and replied:--\r
-\r
-"What's that, peasant?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent repeated:--\r
-\r
-"I am the one who pays!"\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"For the wine."\r
-\r
-"What wine?"\r
-\r
-"That Argenteuil wine."\r
-\r
-"Where is the Argenteuil?"\r
-\r
-"At the Bon Coing."\r
-\r
-"Go to the devil!" said the grave-digger.\r
-\r
-And he flung a shovelful of earth on the coffin.\r
-\r
-The coffin gave back a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself stagger\r
-and on the point of falling headlong into the grave himself. He shouted\r
-in a voice in which the strangling sound of the death rattle began to\r
-mingle:--\r
-\r
-"Comrade! Before the Bon Coing is shut!"\r
-\r
-The grave-digger took some more earth on his shovel. Fauchelevent\r
-continued.\r
-\r
-"I will pay."\r
-\r
-And he seized the man's arm.\r
-\r
-"Listen to me, comrade. I am the convent grave-digger, I have come\r
-to help you. It is a business which can be performed at night. Let us\r
-begin, then, by going for a drink."\r
-\r
-And as he spoke, and clung to this desperate insistence, this melancholy\r
-reflection occurred to him: "And if he drinks, will he get drunk?"\r
-\r
-"Provincial," said the man, "if you positively insist upon it, I\r
-consent. We will drink. After work, never before."\r
-\r
-And he flourished his shovel briskly. Fauchelevent held him back.\r
-\r
-"It is Argenteuil wine, at six."\r
-\r
-"Oh, come," said the grave-digger, "you are a bell-ringer. Ding dong,\r
-ding dong, that's all you know how to say. Go hang yourself."\r
-\r
-And he threw in a second shovelful.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent had reached a point where he no longer knew what he was\r
-saying.\r
-\r
-"Come along and drink," he cried, "since it is I who pays the bill."\r
-\r
-"When we have put the child to bed," said the grave-digger.\r
-\r
-He flung in a third shovelful.\r
-\r
-Then he thrust his shovel into the earth and added:--\r
-\r
-"It's cold to-night, you see, and the corpse would shriek out after us\r
-if we were to plant her there without a coverlet."\r
-\r
-At that moment, as he loaded his shovel, the grave-digger bent over,\r
-and the pocket of his waistcoat gaped. Fauchelevent's wild gaze fell\r
-mechanically into that pocket, and there it stopped.\r
-\r
-The sun was not yet hidden behind the horizon; there was still light\r
-enough to enable him to distinguish something white at the bottom of\r
-that yawning pocket.\r
-\r
-The sum total of lightning that the eye of a Picard peasant can contain,\r
-traversed Fauchelevent's pupils. An idea had just occurred to him.\r
-\r
-He thrust his hand into the pocket from behind, without the\r
-grave-digger, who was wholly absorbed in his shovelful of earth,\r
-observing it, and pulled out the white object which lay at the bottom of\r
-it.\r
-\r
-The man sent a fourth shovelful tumbling into the grave.\r
-\r
-Just as he turned round to get the fifth, Fauchelevent looked calmly at\r
-him and said:--\r
-\r
-"By the way, you new man, have you your card?"\r
-\r
-The grave-digger paused.\r
-\r
-"What card?"\r
-\r
-"The sun is on the point of setting."\r
-\r
-"That's good, it is going to put on its nightcap."\r
-\r
-"The gate of the cemetery will close immediately."\r
-\r
-"Well, what then?"\r
-\r
-"Have you your card?"\r
-\r
-"Ah! my card?" said the grave-digger.\r
-\r
-And he fumbled in his pocket.\r
-\r
-Having searched one pocket, he proceeded to search the other. He passed\r
-on to his fobs, explored the first, returned to the second.\r
-\r
-"Why, no," said he, "I have not my card. I must have forgotten it."\r
-\r
-"Fifteen francs fine," said Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The grave-digger turned green. Green is the pallor of livid people.\r
-\r
-"Ah! Jesus-mon-Dieu-bancroche-a-bas-la-lune!"[17] he exclaimed. "Fifteen\r
-francs fine!"\r
-\r
-"Three pieces of a hundred sous," said Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The grave-digger dropped his shovel.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent's turn had come.\r
-\r
-"Ah, come now, conscript," said Fauchelevent, "none of this despair.\r
-There is no question of committing suicide and benefiting the grave.\r
-Fifteen francs is fifteen francs, and besides, you may not be able to\r
-pay it. I am an old hand, you are a new one. I know all the ropes and\r
-the devices. I will give you some friendly advice. One thing is clear,\r
-the sun is on the point of setting, it is touching the dome now, the\r
-cemetery will be closed in five minutes more."\r
-\r
-"That is true," replied the man.\r
-\r
-"Five minutes more and you will not have time to fill the grave, it is\r
-as hollow as the devil, this grave, and to reach the gate in season to\r
-pass it before it is shut."\r
-\r
-"That is true."\r
-\r
-"In that case, a fine of fifteen francs."\r
-\r
-"Fifteen francs."\r
-\r
-"But you have time. Where do you live?"\r
-\r
-"A couple of steps from the barrier, a quarter of an hour from here. No.\r
-87 Rue de Vaugirard."\r
-\r
-"You have just time to get out by taking to your heels at your best\r
-speed."\r
-\r
-"That is exactly so."\r
-\r
-"Once outside the gate, you gallop home, you get your card, you return,\r
-the cemetery porter admits you. As you have your card, there will be\r
-nothing to pay. And you will bury your corpse. I'll watch it for you in\r
-the meantime, so that it shall not run away."\r
-\r
-"I am indebted to you for my life, peasant."\r
-\r
-"Decamp!" said Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The grave-digger, overwhelmed with gratitude, shook his hand and set off\r
-on a run.\r
-\r
-When the man had disappeared in the thicket, Fauchelevent listened until\r
-he heard his footsteps die away in the distance, then he leaned over the\r
-grave, and said in a low tone:--\r
-\r
-"Father Madeleine!"\r
-\r
-There was no reply.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent was seized with a shudder. He tumbled rather than climbed\r
-into the grave, flung himself on the head of the coffin and cried:--\r
-\r
-"Are you there?"\r
-\r
-Silence in the coffin.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent, hardly able to draw his breath for trembling, seized his\r
-cold chisel and his hammer, and pried up the coffin lid.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's face appeared in the twilight; it was pale and his eyes\r
-were closed.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent's hair rose upright on his head, he sprang to his feet,\r
-then fell back against the side of the grave, ready to swoon on the\r
-coffin. He stared at Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean lay there pallid and motionless.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent murmured in a voice as faint as a sigh:--\r
-\r
-"He is dead!"\r
-\r
-And, drawing himself up, and folding his arms with such violence that\r
-his clenched fists came in contact with his shoulders, he cried:--\r
-\r
-"And this is the way I save his life!"\r
-\r
-Then the poor man fell to sobbing. He soliloquized the while, for it is\r
-an error to suppose that the soliloquy is unnatural. Powerful emotion\r
-often talks aloud.\r
-\r
-"It is Father Mestienne's fault. Why did that fool die? What need was\r
-there for him to give up the ghost at the very moment when no one was\r
-expecting it? It is he who has killed M. Madeleine. Father Madeleine!\r
-He is in the coffin. It is quite handy. All is over. Now, is there any\r
-sense in these things? Ah! my God! he is dead! Well! and his little\r
-girl, what am I to do with her? What will the fruit-seller say? The idea\r
-of its being possible for a man like that to die like this! When I think\r
-how he put himself under that cart! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!\r
-Pardine! He was suffocated, I said so. He wouldn't believe me. Well!\r
-Here's a pretty trick to play! He is dead, that good man, the very best\r
-man out of all the good God's good folks! And his little girl! Ah! In\r
-the first place, I won't go back there myself. I shall stay here. After\r
-having done such a thing as that! What's the use of being two old men,\r
-if we are two old fools! But, in the first place, how did he manage to\r
-enter the convent? That was the beginning of it all. One should not\r
-do such things. Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!\r
-Madeleine! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire! He does not hear me.\r
-Now get out of this scrape if you can!"\r
-\r
-And he tore his hair.\r
-\r
-A grating sound became audible through the trees in the distance. It was\r
-the cemetery gate closing.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent bent over Jean Valjean, and all at once he bounded back and\r
-recoiled so far as the limits of a grave permit.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's eyes were open and gazing at him.\r
-\r
-To see a corpse is alarming, to behold a resurrection is almost as much\r
-so. Fauchelevent became like stone, pale, haggard, overwhelmed by all\r
-these excesses of emotion, not knowing whether he had to do with a\r
-living man or a dead one, and staring at Jean Valjean, who was gazing at\r
-him.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Resurrection 2b8-7-resurrection]\r
-\r
-"I fell asleep," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-And he raised himself to a sitting posture.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent fell on his knees.\r
-\r
-"Just, good Virgin! How you frightened me!"\r
-\r
-Then he sprang to his feet and cried:--\r
-\r
-"Thanks, Father Madeleine!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had merely fainted. The fresh air had revived him.\r
-\r
-Joy is the ebb of terror. Fauchelevent found almost as much difficulty\r
-in recovering himself as Jean Valjean had.\r
-\r
-"So you are not dead! Oh! How wise you are! I called you so much that\r
-you came back. When I saw your eyes shut, I said: 'Good! there he is,\r
-stifled,' I should have gone raving mad, mad enough for a strait jacket.\r
-They would have put me in Bicetre. What do you suppose I should\r
-have done if you had been dead? And your little girl? There's that\r
-fruit-seller,--she would never have understood it! The child is thrust\r
-into your arms, and then--the grandfather is dead! What a story! good\r
-saints of paradise, what a tale! Ah! you are alive, that's the best of\r
-it!"\r
-\r
-"I am cold," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-This remark recalled Fauchelevent thoroughly to reality, and there was\r
-pressing need of it. The souls of these two men were troubled even when\r
-they had recovered themselves, although they did not realize it,\r
-and there was about them something uncanny, which was the sinister\r
-bewilderment inspired by the place.\r
-\r
-"Let us get out of here quickly," exclaimed Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-He fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a gourd with which he had\r
-provided himself.\r
-\r
-"But first, take a drop," said he.\r
-\r
-The flask finished what the fresh air had begun, Jean Valjean swallowed\r
-a mouthful of brandy, and regained full possession of his faculties.\r
-\r
-He got out of the coffin, and helped Fauchelevent to nail on the lid\r
-again.\r
-\r
-Three minutes later they were out of the grave.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Fauchelevent was perfectly composed. He took his time. The\r
-cemetery was closed. The arrival of the grave-digger Gribier was not to\r
-be apprehended. That "conscript" was at home busily engaged in looking\r
-for his card, and at some difficulty in finding it in his lodgings,\r
-since it was in Fauchelevent's pocket. Without a card, he could not get\r
-back into the cemetery.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent took the shovel, and Jean Valjean the pick-axe, and\r
-together they buried the empty coffin.\r
-\r
-When the grave was full, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean:--\r
-\r
-"Let us go. I will keep the shovel; do you carry off the mattock."\r
-\r
-Night was falling.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean experienced rome difficulty in moving and in walking. He\r
-had stiffened himself in that coffin, and had become a little like a\r
-corpse. The rigidity of death had seized upon him between those four\r
-planks. He had, in a manner, to thaw out, from the tomb.\r
-\r
-"You are benumbed," said Fauchelevent. "It is a pity that I have a game\r
-leg, for otherwise we might step out briskly."\r
-\r
-"Bah!" replied Jean Valjean, "four paces will put life into my legs once\r
-more."\r
-\r
-They set off by the alleys through which the hearse had passed. On\r
-arriving before the closed gate and the porter's pavilion Fauchelevent,\r
-who held the grave-digger's card in his hand, dropped it into the box,\r
-the porter pulled the rope, the gate opened, and they went out.\r
-\r
-"How well everything is going!" said Fauchelevent; "what a capital idea\r
-that was of yours, Father Madeleine!"\r
-\r
-They passed the Vaugirard barrier in the simplest manner in the world.\r
-In the neighborhood of the cemetery, a shovel and pick are equal to two\r
-passports.\r
-\r
-The Rue Vaugirard was deserted.\r
-\r
-"Father Madeleine," said Fauchelevent as they went along, and raising\r
-his eyes to the houses, "Your eyes are better than mine. Show me No.\r
-87."\r
-\r
-"Here it is," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"There is no one in the street," said Fauchelevent. "Give me your\r
-mattock and wait a couple of minutes for me."\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent entered No. 87, ascended to the very top, guided by the\r
-instinct which always leads the poor man to the garret, and knocked in\r
-the dark, at the door of an attic.\r
-\r
-A voice replied: "Come in."\r
-\r
-It was Gribier's voice.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent opened the door. The grave-digger's dwelling was, like\r
-all such wretched habitations, an unfurnished and encumbered garret.\r
-A packing-case--a coffin, perhaps--took the place of a commode, a\r
-butter-pot served for a drinking-fountain, a straw mattress served for\r
-a bed, the floor served instead of tables and chairs. In a corner, on a\r
-tattered fragment which had been a piece of an old carpet, a thin\r
-woman and a number of children were piled in a heap. The whole of this\r
-poverty-stricken interior bore traces of having been overturned. One\r
-would have said that there had been an earthquake "for one." The covers\r
-were displaced, the rags scattered about, the jug broken, the mother had\r
-been crying, the children had probably been beaten; traces of a vigorous\r
-and ill-tempered search. It was plain that the grave-digger had made\r
-a desperate search for his card, and had made everybody in the garret,\r
-from the jug to his wife, responsible for its loss. He wore an air of\r
-desperation.\r
-\r
-But Fauchelevent was in too great a hurry to terminate this adventure to\r
-take any notice of this sad side of his success.\r
-\r
-He entered and said:--\r
-\r
-"I have brought you back your shovel and pick."\r
-\r
-Gribier gazed at him in stupefaction.\r
-\r
-"Is it you, peasant?"\r
-\r
-"And to-morrow morning you will find your card with the porter of the\r
-cemetery."\r
-\r
-And he laid the shovel and mattock on the floor.\r
-\r
-"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Gribier.\r
-\r
-"The meaning of it is, that you dropped your card out of your pocket,\r
-that I found it on the ground after you were gone, that I have buried\r
-the corpse, that I have filled the grave, that I have done your work,\r
-that the porter will return your card to you, and that you will not have\r
-to pay fifteen francs. There you have it, conscript."\r
-\r
-"Thanks, villager!" exclaimed Gribier, radiant. "The next time I will\r
-pay for the drinks."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATORY\r
-\r
-An hour later, in the darkness of night, two men and a child presented\r
-themselves at No. 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. The elder of the men lifted the\r
-knocker and rapped.\r
-\r
-They were Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette.\r
-\r
-The two old men had gone to fetch Cosette from the fruiterer's in\r
-the Rue du Chemin-Vert, where Fauchelevent had deposited her on the\r
-preceding day. Cosette had passed these twenty-four hours trembling\r
-silently and understanding nothing. She trembled to such a degree that\r
-she wept. She had neither eaten nor slept. The worthy fruit-seller had\r
-plied her with a hundred questions, without obtaining any other reply\r
-than a melancholy and unvarying gaze. Cosette had betrayed nothing of\r
-what she had seen and heard during the last two days. She divined that\r
-they were passing through a crisis. She was deeply conscious that it was\r
-necessary to "be good." Who has not experienced the sovereign power\r
-of those two words, pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a\r
-terrified little being: Say nothing! Fear is mute. Moreover, no one\r
-guards a secret like a child.\r
-\r
-But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours, she\r
-beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy, that any\r
-thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry, would have guessed\r
-that it issued from an abyss.\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent belonged to the convent and knew the pass-words. All the\r
-doors opened.\r
-\r
-Thus was solved the double and alarming problem of how to get out and\r
-how to get in.\r
-\r
-The porter, who had received his instructions, opened the little\r
-servant's door which connected the courtyard with the garden, and which\r
-could still be seen from the street twenty years ago, in the wall at the\r
-bottom of the court, which faced the carriage entrance.\r
-\r
-The porter admitted all three of them through this door, and from that\r
-point they reached the inner, reserved parlor where Fauchelevent, on the\r
-preceding day, had received his orders from the prioress.\r
-\r
-The prioress, rosary in hand, was waiting for them. A vocal mother, with\r
-her veil lowered, stood beside her.\r
-\r
-A discreet candle lighted, one might almost say, made a show of lighting\r
-the parlor.\r
-\r
-The prioress passed Jean Valjean in review. There is nothing which\r
-examines like a downcast eye.\r
-\r
-Then she questioned him:--\r
-\r
-"You are the brother?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-"What is your name?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"Ultime Fauchelevent."\r
-\r
-He really had had a brother named Ultime, who was dead.\r
-\r
-"Where do you come from?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"From Picquigny, near Amiens."\r
-\r
-"What is your age?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"Fifty."\r
-\r
-"What is your profession?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"Gardener."\r
-\r
-"Are you a good Christian?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"Every one is in the family."\r
-\r
-"Is this your little girl?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, reverend Mother."\r
-\r
-"You are her father?"\r
-\r
-Fauchelevent replied:--\r
-\r
-"Her grandfather."\r
-\r
-The vocal mother said to the prioress in a low voice\r
-\r
-"He answers well."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word.\r
-\r
-The prioress looked attentively at Cosette, and said half aloud to the\r
-vocal mother:--\r
-\r
-"She will grow up ugly."\r
-\r
-The two mothers consulted for a few moments in very low tones in the\r
-corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned round and said:--\r
-\r
-"Father Fauvent, you will get another knee-cap with a bell. Two will be\r
-required now."\r
-\r
-On the following day, therefore, two bells were audible in the garden,\r
-and the nuns could not resist the temptation to raise the corner of\r
-their veils. At the extreme end of the garden, under the trees, two\r
-men, Fauvent and another man, were visible as they dug side by side. An\r
-enormous event. Their silence was broken to the extent of saying to each\r
-other: "He is an assistant gardener."\r
-\r
-The vocal mothers added: "He is a brother of Father Fauvent."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was, in fact, regularly installed; he had his belled\r
-knee-cap; henceforth he was official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-The most powerful determining cause of his admission had been the\r
-prioress's observation upon Cosette: "She will grow up ugly."\r
-\r
-The prioress, that pronounced prognosticator, immediately took a fancy\r
-to Cosette and gave her a place in the school as a charity pupil.\r
-\r
-There is nothing that is not strictly logical about this.\r
-\r
-It is in vain that mirrors are banished from the convent, women are\r
-conscious of their faces; now, girls who are conscious of their beauty\r
-do not easily become nuns; the vocation being voluntary in inverse\r
-proportion to their good looks, more is to be hoped from the ugly than\r
-from the pretty. Hence a lively taste for plain girls.\r
-\r
-The whole of this adventure increased the importance of good, old\r
-Fauchelevent; he won a triple success; in the eyes of Jean Valjean, whom\r
-he had saved and sheltered; in those of grave-digger Gribier, who said\r
-to himself: "He spared me that fine"; with the convent, which, being\r
-enabled, thanks to him, to retain the coffin of Mother Crucifixion\r
-under the altar, eluded Caesar and satisfied God. There was a coffin\r
-containing a body in the Petit-Picpus, and a coffin without a body in\r
-the Vaugirard cemetery, public order had no doubt been deeply disturbed\r
-thereby, but no one was aware of it.\r
-\r
-As for the convent, its gratitude to Fauchelevent was very great.\r
-Fauchelevent became the best of servitors and the most precious of\r
-gardeners. Upon the occasion of the archbishop's next visit, the\r
-prioress recounted the affair to his Grace, making something of a\r
-confession at the same time, and yet boasting of her deed. On leaving\r
-the convent, the archbishop mentioned it with approval, and in a whisper\r
-to M. de Latil, Monsieur's confessor, afterwards Archbishop of Reims\r
-and Cardinal. This admiration for Fauchelevent became widespread, for it\r
-made its way to Rome. We have seen a note addressed by the then reigning\r
-Pope, Leo XII., to one of his relatives, a Monsignor in the Nuncio's\r
-establishment in Paris, and bearing, like himself, the name of Della\r
-Genga; it contained these lines: "It appears that there is in a convent\r
-in Paris an excellent gardener, who is also a holy man, named Fauvent."\r
-Nothing of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut; he went on\r
-grafting, weeding, and covering up his melon beds, without in the least\r
-suspecting his excellences and his sanctity. Neither did he suspect his\r
-glory, any more than a Durham or Surrey bull whose portrait is published\r
-in the London Illustrated News, with this inscription: "Bull which\r
-carried off the prize at the Cattle Show."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--CLOISTERED\r
-\r
-Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.\r
-\r
-It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean's\r
-daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and\r
-then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have just\r
-observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. Cosette\r
-had suffered so much, that she feared everything, even to speak or to\r
-breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her.\r
-She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had been with\r
-Jean Valjean. She speedily became accustomed to the convent. Only she\r
-regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did\r
-say to Jean Valjean: "Father, if I had known, I would have brought her\r
-away with me."\r
-\r
-Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent, to don\r
-the garb of the pupils of the house. Jean Valjean succeeded in getting\r
-them to restore to him the garments which she laid aside. This was the\r
-same mourning suit which he had made her put on when she had quitted\r
-the Thenardiers' inn. It was not very threadbare even now. Jean Valjean\r
-locked up these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes, with a\r
-quantity of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents abound, in a\r
-little valise which he found means of procuring. He set this valise on\r
-a chair near his bed, and he always carried the key about his person.\r
-"Father," Cosette asked him one day, "what is there in that box which\r
-smells so good?"\r
-\r
-Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good action, in\r
-addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and of which he knew\r
-nothing; in the first place it made him happy; next, he had much less\r
-work, since it was shared. Lastly, as he was very fond of snuff, he\r
-found the presence of M. Madeleine an advantage, in that he used three\r
-times as much as he had done previously, and that in an infinitely more\r
-luxurious manner, seeing that M. Madeleine paid for it.\r
-\r
-The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean the\r
-other Fauvent.\r
-\r
-If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert's glance, they\r
-would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand to be\r
-done outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always the elder\r
-Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who went, and never the\r
-other; but whether it is that eyes constantly fixed on God know not how\r
-to spy, or whether they were, by preference, occupied in keeping watch\r
-on each other, they paid no heed to this.\r
-\r
-Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close and did not\r
-stir out. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.\r
-\r
-This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by gulfs.\r
-Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world. He saw enough of the\r
-sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity, and Cosette enough to\r
-remain happy.\r
-\r
-A very sweet life began for him.\r
-\r
-He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company with\r
-Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in\r
-existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three\r
-chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the\r
-walls. The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean\r
-had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent. The\r
-walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to the two nails\r
-whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist bank-note\r
-of '93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece, and of which the\r
-following is an exact facsimile:--\r
-\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Royalist Bank-note 2b8-9-banknote]\r
-\r
-\r
-This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall by\r
-the preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent, and\r
-whose place Fauchelevent had taken.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself very\r
-useful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found\r
-himself a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew all\r
-sorts of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these to\r
-advantage. Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and wild.\r
-He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.\r
-\r
-Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. As the\r
-sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made comparisons and\r
-adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered\r
-the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed\r
-out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he afforded\r
-Cosette. The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far\r
-from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant\r
-than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and\r
-playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the\r
-rest.\r
-\r
-For Cosette laughed now.\r
-\r
-Cosette's face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. The\r
-gloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine; it\r
-banishes winter from the human countenance.\r
-\r
-Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean\r
-gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at\r
-the windows of her dormitory.\r
-\r
-God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,\r
-to uphold and complete the Bishop's work in Jean Valjean. It is certain\r
-that virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devil\r
-exists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably\r
-near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the\r
-convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only to\r
-the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained humble;\r
-but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in general,\r
-and pride was beginning to spring up. Who knows? He might have ended by\r
-returning very gradually to hatred.\r
-\r
-The convent stopped him on that downward path.\r
-\r
-This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. In his youth,\r
-in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quite\r
-recently again, he had beheld another,--a frightful place, a terrible\r
-place, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity of\r
-justice, and the crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the\r
-cloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the galleys,\r
-and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister, he\r
-confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.\r
-\r
-Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly\r
-descended the endless spirals of revery.\r
-\r
-He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose at\r
-dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they\r
-lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches\r
-thick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of\r
-the year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were allowed,\r
-as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a woollen\r
-carter's blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they drank no\r
-wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on "fatigue duty." They\r
-lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after a\r
-manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered\r
-voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.\r
-\r
-Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.\r
-\r
-These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with\r
-lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world,\r
-not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders\r
-lacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished from\r
-among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.\r
-They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained until\r
-evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but in a\r
-black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in winter,\r
-without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without having\r
-even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment or the\r
-woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge chemises\r
-which gave them fever. They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only during\r
-rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they slept,\r
-not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. And finally, they were\r
-not even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of toil, they\r
-were obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at the moment\r
-when they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get warm, to rouse\r
-themselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel,\r
-with their knees on the stones.\r
-\r
-On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve\r
-successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon the\r
-pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.\r
-\r
-The others were men; these were women.\r
-\r
-What had those men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged,\r
-murdered, assassinated. They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners,\r
-incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had\r
-done nothing whatever.\r
-\r
-On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality,\r
-homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other,\r
-one thing only, innocence.\r
-\r
-Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious\r
-assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing\r
-something of heaven through holiness.\r
-\r
-On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged in\r
-whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And what\r
-crimes! And what faults!\r
-\r
-On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On the one\r
-hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range of\r
-cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; on\r
-the other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth. There,\r
-darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light,\r
-and of gleams full of radiance.\r
-\r
-Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible,\r
-a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,\r
-perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, that\r
-faint light of liberty which men call death.\r
-\r
-In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained by\r
-faith.\r
-\r
-What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,\r
-hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a\r
-sarcasm against heaven.\r
-\r
-What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.\r
-\r
-And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species\r
-of beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work,\r
-expiation.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former; that\r
-personal expiation, the expiation for one's self. But he did not\r
-understand that of these last, that of creatures without reproach and\r
-without stain, and he trembled as he asked himself: The expiation of\r
-what? What expiation?\r
-\r
-A voice within his conscience replied: "The most divine of human\r
-generosities, the expiation for others."\r
-\r
-Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator; we\r
-place ourselves at Jean Valjean's point of view, and we translate his\r
-impressions.\r
-\r
-Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest\r
-possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults,\r
-and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, torture\r
-accepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for the\r
-sake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity\r
-swallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct\r
-and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery\r
-of those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.\r
-\r
-And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!\r
-\r
-Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful\r
-song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and the\r
-blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly\r
-chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that he,\r
-wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.\r
-\r
-There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, like\r
-a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, the\r
-passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk of\r
-death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which\r
-he had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made in\r
-order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his destiny?\r
-This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy resemblance to\r
-that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never conceived an\r
-idea of anything similar.\r
-\r
-Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom? Angels.\r
-\r
-These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once\r
-more around lambs.\r
-\r
-This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it was\r
-still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.\r
-\r
-These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A cold,\r
-harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the barred\r
-and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more biting\r
-breeze blew in the cage of these doves.\r
-\r
-Why?\r
-\r
-When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in\r
-amazement before this mystery of sublimity.\r
-\r
-In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heart\r
-in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.\r
-All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him\r
-back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette through love, the\r
-convent through humility.\r
-\r
-Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden was\r
-deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk which\r
-skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed on\r
-the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he knew,\r
-the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer. Thus he prayed\r
-as he knelt before the sister.\r
-\r
-It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.\r
-\r
-Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrant\r
-flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave and simple\r
-women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him, and little by little,\r
-his soul became compounded of silence like the cloister, of perfume like\r
-the flowers, of simplicity like the women, of joy like the children.\r
-And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God which had\r
-received him in succession at two critical moments in his life: the\r
-first, when all doors were closed and when human society rejected him;\r
-the second, at a moment when human society had again set out in pursuit\r
-of him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and that, had it not\r
-been for the first, he should have relapsed into crime, and had it not\r
-been for the second, into torment.\r
-\r
-His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.\r
-\r
-Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.\r
-\r
-\r
-[THE END OF VOLUME II. "COSETTE"]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-VOLUME III--MARIUS.\r
-\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Three 3frontispiece]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Three 3titlepage]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--PARVULUS\r
-\r
-Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the\r
-sparrow; the child is called the gamin.\r
-\r
-Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the other\r
-all the dawn; strike these two sparks together, Paris, childhood; there\r
-leaps out from them a little being. Homuncio, Plautus would say.\r
-\r
-This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he goes to\r
-the play every evening, if he sees good. He has no shirt on his body,\r
-no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies of\r
-heaven, who have none of these things. He is from seven to thirteen\r
-years of age, he lives in bands, roams the streets, lodges in the open\r
-air, wears an old pair of trousers of his father's, which descend below\r
-his heels, an old hat of some other father, which descends below his\r
-ears, a single suspender of yellow listing; he runs, lies in wait,\r
-rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict,\r
-haunts the wine-shop, knows thieves, calls gay women thou, talks slang,\r
-sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart. This is because he\r
-has in his heart a pearl, innocence; and pearls are not to be dissolved\r
-in mud. So long as man is in his childhood, God wills that he shall be\r
-innocent.\r
-\r
-If one were to ask that enormous city: "What is this?" she would reply:\r
-"It is my little one."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS\r
-\r
-The gamin--the street Arab--of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.\r
-\r
-Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,\r
-but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then\r
-they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for\r
-he finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he\r
-finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose\r
-foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors:\r
-to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own occupations,\r
-calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing means\r
-of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains, which he\r
-calls making the bridge of arts, crying discourses pronounced by the\r
-authorities in favor of the French people, cleaning out the cracks\r
-in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed of all the\r
-little morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets.\r
-This curious money, which receives the name of loques--rags--has\r
-an invariable and well-regulated currency in this little Bohemia of\r
-children.\r
-\r
-Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in\r
-the corners; the lady-bird, the death's-head plant-louse, the\r
-daddy-long-legs, "the devil," a black insect, which menaces by twisting\r
-about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which\r
-has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on\r
-its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns\r
-and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls\r
-sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a\r
-look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls this\r
-monster "the deaf thing." The search for these "deaf things" among\r
-the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in\r
-suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.\r
-Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which\r
-are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the\r
-Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in\r
-the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.\r
-\r
-As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as\r
-Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed\r
-with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the\r
-composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly\r
-from high comedy to farce.\r
-\r
-A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a\r
-doctor. "Hey there!" shouts some street Arab, "how long has it been\r
-customary for doctors to carry home their own work?"\r
-\r
-Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and\r
-trinkets, turns round indignantly: "You good-for-nothing, you have\r
-seized my wife's waist!"--"I, sir? Search me!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--HE IS AGREEABLE\r
-\r
-In the evening, thanks to a few sous, which he always finds means\r
-to procure, the homuncio enters a theatre. On crossing that magic\r
-threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes\r
-the titi.[18] Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the\r
-keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together.\r
-The titi is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being\r
-endowed with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with\r
-his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with\r
-his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on\r
-that narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel,\r
-the name of Paradise.\r
-\r
-Bestow on an individual the useless and deprive him of the necessary,\r
-and you have the gamin.\r
-\r
-The gamin is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency, and we say\r
-it with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute classic\r
-taste. He is not very academic by nature. Thus, to give an example, the\r
-popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among that little audience of stormy\r
-children was seasoned with a touch of irony. The gamin called her\r
-Mademoiselle Muche--"hide yourself."\r
-\r
-This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a\r
-baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the\r
-cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his\r
-wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts, and shrieks, tempers\r
-Alleluia with Matantur-lurette, chants every rhythm from the De\r
-Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is\r
-ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is\r
-lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dunghill\r
-and emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is Rabelais\r
-in this youth.\r
-\r
-He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.\r
-\r
-He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified, he makes\r
-songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations, he twits\r
-mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the poetry out\r
-of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas.\r
-It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he replaces the solemn\r
-vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor were to appear to\r
-him, the street Arab would say: "Hi there! The bugaboo!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--HE MAY BE OF USE\r
-\r
-Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street Arab, two\r
-beings of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance, which\r
-contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme\r
-and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history. The whole of\r
-the monarchy is contained in the lounger; the whole of anarchy in the\r
-gamin.\r
-\r
-This pale child of the Parisian faubourgs lives and develops, makes\r
-connections, "grows supple" in suffering, in the presence of social\r
-realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness. He thinks himself\r
-heedless; and he is not. He looks and is on the verge of laughter; he is\r
-on the verge of something else also. Whoever you may be, if your name is\r
-Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice,\r
-Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin.\r
-\r
-The little fellow will grow up.\r
-\r
-Of what clay is he made? Of the first mud that comes to hand. A handful\r
-of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A\r
-God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny\r
-being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy\r
-kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low.\r
-Will that become an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit\r
-of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men\r
-of destiny, reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes of a jug an\r
-amphora.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--HIS FRONTIERS\r
-\r
-The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has something\r
-of the sage in him. Urbis amator, like Fuscus; ruris amator, like\r
-Flaccus.\r
-\r
-To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine\r
-employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that\r
-rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but\r
-odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities,\r
-notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal.\r
-End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning\r
-of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of\r
-the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur,\r
-beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.\r
-\r
-Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by the\r
-passing stroller with the epithet: melancholy, the apparently objectless\r
-promenades of the dreamer.\r
-\r
-He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers\r
-of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs. That\r
-close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools,\r
-those harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early\r
-market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture of\r
-the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the garrison\r
-drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of battle, those\r
-hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill which turns\r
-in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the tea-gardens at the\r
-corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of great, sombre walls\r
-squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of land inundated with\r
-sunshine and full of butterflies,--all this attracted him.\r
-\r
-There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those\r
-singular spots, the Glaciere, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle\r
-all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on\r
-the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate\r
-de Chatillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer\r
-serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed, on a\r
-level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagna of\r
-Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing\r
-but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is\r
-to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The\r
-spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always stamped\r
-with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both appeal\r
-to you at the same time there. Local originalities there make their\r
-appearance.\r
-\r
-Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes\r
-contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos of\r
-Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the\r
-most unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner of a\r
-lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy,\r
-dusty, ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with\r
-corn-flowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape\r
-from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the\r
-suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant. There\r
-they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs. There they are, or\r
-rather, there they exist, far from every eye, in the sweet light of\r
-May or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground, snapping marbles with\r
-their thumbs, quarrelling over half-farthings, irresponsible, volatile,\r
-free and happy; and, no sooner do they catch sight of you than they\r
-recollect that they have an industry, and that they must earn their\r
-living, and they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled\r
-with cockchafers, or a bunch of lilacs. These encounters with strange\r
-children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces of\r
-the environs of Paris.\r
-\r
-Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,--are they\r
-their sisters?--who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with\r
-sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of\r
-rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring cherries among\r
-the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing. These groups,\r
-warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday, or indistinctly seen in\r
-the twilight, occupy the thoughtful man for a very long time, and these\r
-visions mingle with his dreams.\r
-\r
-Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth\r
-to those children. They never venture beyond this. They can no more\r
-escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the\r
-water. For them, nothing exists two leagues beyond the barriers:\r
-Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Menilmontant,\r
-Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Mendon, Issy, Vanvre, Sevres, Puteaux,\r
-Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnieres,\r
-Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy,\r
-Gonesse; the universe ends there.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--A BIT OF HISTORY\r
-\r
-At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this\r
-book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at\r
-the corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss\r
-here); stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average\r
-of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that\r
-period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process\r
-of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of these\r
-nests, which has become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of\r
-Arcola." This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms. All\r
-crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.\r
-\r
-Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative\r
-measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the\r
-exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is\r
-a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in\r
-some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the\r
-public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy\r
-of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the\r
-surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to\r
-put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our\r
-popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the\r
-idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of\r
-the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.\r
-\r
-What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which\r
-one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around\r
-whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken\r
-family. In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still\r
-is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families\r
-pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has\r
-become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on the\r
-public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for this\r
-sad thing has given rise to an expression, "to be cast on the pavements\r
-of Paris."\r
-\r
-Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not\r
-discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in\r
-the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of\r
-the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people\r
-was a dogma. What is the use of "half-lights"? Such was the countersign.\r
-Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant child.\r
-\r
-Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in\r
-that case it skimmed the streets.\r
-\r
-Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired\r
-to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider\r
-the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that\r
-plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of\r
-necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either\r
-by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what\r
-steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley\r
-is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required.\r
-Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make\r
-as many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of\r
-complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a\r
-procession--it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A\r
-child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen\r
-years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the\r
-galleys. Grand reign; grand century.\r
-\r
-Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them\r
-off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew. People whispered with\r
-terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's baths of purple. Barbier\r
-speaks ingenuously of these things. It sometimes happened that the\r
-exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who\r
-had fathers. The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts. In that\r
-case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung. Who? The exempts?\r
-No, the fathers.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE GAMIN SHOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF\r
-INDIA\r
-\r
-The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste. One might\r
-almost say: Not every one who wishes to belong to it can do so.\r
-\r
-This word gamin was printed for the first time, and reached popular\r
-speech through the literary tongue, in 1834. It is in a little work\r
-entitled Claude Gueux that this word made its appearance. The horror was\r
-lively. The word passed into circulation.\r
-\r
-The elements which constitute the consideration of the gamins for each\r
-other are very various. We have known and associated with one who was\r
-greatly respected and vastly admired because he had seen a man fall from\r
-the top of the tower of Notre-Dame; another, because he had succeeded in\r
-making his way into the rear courtyard where the statues of the dome\r
-of the Invalides had been temporarily deposited, and had "prigged" some\r
-lead from them; a third, because he had seen a diligence tip over; still\r
-another, because he "knew" a soldier who came near putting out the eye\r
-of a citizen.\r
-\r
-This explains that famous exclamation of a Parisian gamin, a profound\r
-epiphonema, which the vulgar herd laughs at without comprehending,--Dieu\r
-de Dieu! What ill-luck I do have! to think that I have never yet seen\r
-anybody tumble from a fifth-story window! (I have pronounced I'ave and\r
-fifth pronounced fift'.)\r
-\r
-Surely, this saying of a peasant is a fine one: "Father So-and-So, your\r
-wife has died of her malady; why did you not send for the doctor?"\r
-"What would you have, sir, we poor folks die of ourselves." But if\r
-the peasant's whole passivity lies in this saying, the whole of the\r
-free-thinking anarchy of the brat of the faubourgs is, assuredly,\r
-contained in this other saying. A man condemned to death is listening\r
-to his confessor in the tumbrel. The child of Paris exclaims: "He is\r
-talking to his black cap! Oh, the sneak!"\r
-\r
-A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamin. To be\r
-strong-minded is an important item.\r
-\r
-To be present at executions constitutes a duty. He shows himself at the\r
-guillotine, and he laughs. He calls it by all sorts of pet names: The\r
-End of the Soup, The Growler, The Mother in the Blue (the sky), The Last\r
-Mouthful, etc., etc. In order not to lose anything of the affair, he\r
-scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies, he ascends trees, he\r
-suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast to chimneys. The gamin is\r
-born a tiler as he is born a mariner. A roof inspires him with no more\r
-fear than a mast. There is no festival which comes up to an execution\r
-on the Place de Greve. Samson and the Abbe Montes are the truly popular\r
-names. They hoot at the victim in order to encourage him. They sometimes\r
-admire him. Lacenaire, when a gamin, on seeing the hideous Dautin die\r
-bravely, uttered these words which contain a future: "I was jealous of\r
-him." In the brotherhood of gamins Voltaire is not known, but Papavoine\r
-is. "Politicians" are confused with assassins in the same legend.\r
-They have a tradition as to everybody's last garment. It is known that\r
-Tolleron had a fireman's cap, Avril an otter cap, Losvel a round hat,\r
-that old Delaporte was bald and bare-headed, that Castaing was all ruddy\r
-and very handsome, that Bories had a romantic small beard, that Jean\r
-Martin kept on his suspenders, that Lecouffe and his mother quarrelled.\r
-"Don't reproach each other for your basket," shouted a gamin to them.\r
-Another, in order to get a look at Debacker as he passed, and being too\r
-small in the crowd, caught sight of the lantern on the quay and climbed\r
-it. A gendarme stationed opposite frowned. "Let me climb up, m'sieu le\r
-gendarme," said the gamin. And, to soften the heart of the authorities\r
-he added: "I will not fall." "I don't care if you do," retorted the\r
-gendarme.\r
-\r
-In the brotherhood of gamins, a memorable accident counts for a great\r
-deal. One reaches the height of consideration if one chances to cut\r
-one's self very deeply, "to the very bone."\r
-\r
-The fist is no mediocre element of respect. One of the things that the\r
-gamin is fondest of saying is: "I am fine and strong, come now!" To be\r
-left-handed renders you very enviable. A squint is highly esteemed.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--IN WHICH THE READER WILL FIND A CHARMING SAYING OF THE\r
-LAST KING\r
-\r
-In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog; and in the evening,\r
-when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena,\r
-from the tops of coal wagons, and the washerwomen's boats, he hurls\r
-himself headlong into the Seine, and into all possible infractions of\r
-the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless the police keep an\r
-eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which\r
-once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; that cry which was\r
-celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from gamin to gamin; it\r
-scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the\r
-eleusiac chant of the Panathenaea, and in it one encounters again the\r
-ancient Evohe. Here it is: "Ohe, Titi, oheee! Here comes the bobby, here\r
-comes the p'lice, pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer with\r
-you!"\r
-\r
-Sometimes this gnat--that is what he calls himself--knows how to read;\r
-sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub. He\r
-does not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual\r
-instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public; from\r
-1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he\r
-scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when Louis Philippe was\r
-returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow, no higher than his knee,\r
-perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic pear in charcoal on one\r
-of the pillars of the gate of Neuilly; the King, with that good-nature\r
-which came to him from Henry IV., helped the gamin, finished the pear,\r
-and gave the child a louis, saying: "The pear is on that also."[19]\r
-The gamin loves uproar. A certain state of violence pleases him. He\r
-execrates "the cures." One day, in the Rue de l'Universite, one of these\r
-scamps was putting his thumb to his nose at the carriage gate of No.\r
-69. "Why are you doing that at the gate?" a passer-by asked. The boy\r
-replied: "There is a cure there." It was there, in fact, that the Papal\r
-Nuncio lived.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin, if\r
-the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite possible\r
-that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass civilly. There\r
-are two things to which he plays Tantalus, and which he always desires\r
-without ever attaining them: to overthrow the government, and to get his\r
-trousers sewed up again.\r
-\r
-The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris, and\r
-can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances to\r
-meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers. He studies their\r
-habits, and he has special notes on each one of them. He reads the souls\r
-of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and without\r
-flinching: "Such an one is a traitor; such another is very malicious;\r
-such another is great; such another is ridiculous." (All these words:\r
-traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a particular meaning in his\r
-mouth.) That one imagines that he owns the Pont-Neuf, and he prevents\r
-people from walking on the cornice outside the parapet; that other has a\r
-mania for pulling person's ears; etc., etc.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL\r
-\r
-There was something of that boy in Poquelin, the son of the fish-market;\r
-Beaumarchais had something of it. Gaminerie is a shade of the Gallic\r
-spirit. Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force to the latter,\r
-as alcohol does to wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer repeats himself\r
-eternally, granted; one may say that Voltaire plays the gamin. Camille\r
-Desmoulins was a native of the faubourgs. Championnet, who treated\r
-miracles brutally, rose from the pavements of Paris; he had, when a\r
-small lad, inundated the porticos of Saint-Jean de Beauvais, and of\r
-Saint-Etienne du Mont; he had addressed the shrine of Sainte-Genevieve\r
-familiarly to give orders to the phial of Saint Januarius.\r
-\r
-The gamin of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has\r
-villainous teeth, because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and\r
-handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present, he\r
-would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot. He is strong on\r
-boxing. All beliefs are possible to him. He plays in the gutter, and\r
-straightens himself up with a revolt; his effrontery persists even in\r
-the presence of grape-shot; he was a scapegrace, he is a hero; like the\r
-little Theban, he shakes the skin from the lion; Barra the drummer-boy\r
-was a gamin of Paris; he Shouts: "Forward!" as the horse of Scripture\r
-says "Vah!" and in a moment he has passed from the small brat to the\r
-giant.\r
-\r
-This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that\r
-spread of wings which reaches from Moliere to Barra.\r
-\r
-To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses\r
-himself, because he is unhappy.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO\r
-\r
-To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like the\r
-graeculus of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace with the\r
-wrinkle of the old world on his brow.\r
-\r
-The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a\r
-disease which must be cured, how? By light.\r
-\r
-Light renders healthy.\r
-\r
-Light kindles.\r
-\r
-All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts,\r
-education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm\r
-you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will\r
-present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth;\r
-and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea\r
-will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of\r
-Paris; flames in the light or will-o'-the-wisps in the gloom.\r
-\r
-The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.\r
-\r
-For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole\r
-of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living\r
-manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history with\r
-heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital, the\r
-Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg\r
-Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a\r
-Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion;\r
-and it replaces the Gemoniae by ridicule. Its majo is called "faraud,"\r
-its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its hammal is the\r
-market-porter, its lazzarone is the pegre, its cockney is the native of\r
-Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris. The fishwoman\r
-of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller of Euripides, the\r
-discobols Vejanus lives again in the Forioso, the tight-rope dancer.\r
-Therapontigonus Miles could walk arm in arm with Vadeboncoeur the\r
-grenadier, Damasippus the second-hand dealer would be happy among\r
-bric-a-brac merchants, Vincennes could grasp Socrates in its fist as\r
-just as Agora could imprison Diderot, Grimod de la Reyniere discovered\r
-larded roast beef, as Curtillus invented roast hedgehog, we see the\r
-trapeze which figures in Plautus reappear under the vault of the Arc\r
-of l'Etoile, the sword-eater of Poecilus encountered by Apuleius is a\r
-sword-swallower on the Pont Neuf, the nephew of Rameau and Curculio\r
-the parasite make a pair, Ergasilus could get himself presented to\r
-Cambaceres by d'Aigrefeuille; the four dandies of Rome: Alcesimarchus,\r
-Phoedromus, Diabolus, and Argyrippus, descend from Courtille in\r
-Labatut's posting-chaise; Aulus Gellius would halt no longer in front of\r
-Congrio than would Charles Nodier in front of Punchinello; Marto is not\r
-a tigress, but Pardalisca was not a dragon; Pantolabus the wag jeers in\r
-the Cafe Anglais at Nomentanus the fast liver, Hermogenus is a tenor\r
-in the Champs-Elysees, and round him, Thracius the beggar, clad like\r
-Bobeche, takes up a collection; the bore who stops you by the button\r
-of your coat in the Tuileries makes you repeat after a lapse of two\r
-thousand years Thesprion's apostrophe: Quis properantem me prehendit\r
-pallio? The wine on Surene is a parody of the wine of Alba, the red\r
-border of Desaugiers forms a balance to the great cutting of Balatro,\r
-Pere Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains same gleams as the\r
-Esquiliae, and the grave of the poor bought for five years, is certainly\r
-the equivalent of the slave's hived coffin.\r
-\r
-Seek something that Paris has not. The vat of Trophonius contains\r
-nothing that is not in Mesmer's tub; Ergaphilas lives again in\r
-Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vasaphanta become incarnate in the Comte de\r
-Saint-Germain; the cemetery of Saint-Medard works quite as good miracles\r
-as the Mosque of Oumoumie at Damascus.\r
-\r
-Paris has an AEsop-Mayeux, and a Canidia, Mademoiselle Lenormand. It is\r
-terrified, like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of the vision; it\r
-makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places the grisette on the\r
-throne, as Rome placed the courtesan there; and, taking it altogether,\r
-if Louis XV. is worse than Claudian, Madame Dubarry is better than\r
-Messalina. Paris combines in an unprecedented type, which has existed\r
-and which we have elbowed, Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the\r
-Gascon pun. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack-pudding, dresses up a\r
-spectre in old numbers of the Constitutional, and makes Chodruc Duclos.\r
-\r
-Although Plutarch says: the tyrant never grows old, Rome, under Sylla as\r
-under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine. The\r
-Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium made of it by Varus\r
-Vibiscus is to be credited: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus, Bibere\r
-Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci. Paris drinks a million litres of\r
-water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally beating the\r
-general alarm and ringing the tocsin.\r
-\r
-With that exception, Paris is amiable. It accepts everything royally;\r
-it is not too particular about its Venus; its Callipyge is Hottentot;\r
-provided that it is made to laugh, it condones; ugliness cheers it,\r
-deformity provokes it to laughter, vice diverts it; be eccentric and\r
-you may be an eccentric; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does\r
-not disgust it; it is so literary that it does not hold its nose before\r
-Basile, and is no more scandalized by the prayer of Tartuffe than Horace\r
-was repelled by the "hiccup" of Priapus. No trait of the universal face\r
-is lacking in the profile of Paris. The bal Mabile is not the polymnia\r
-dance of the Janiculum, but the dealer in ladies' wearing apparel there\r
-devours the lorette with her eyes, exactly as the procuress Staphyla\r
-lay in wait for the virgin Planesium. The Barriere du Combat is not\r
-the Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as though Caesar were\r
-looking on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet,\r
-but, if Virgil haunted the Roman wine-shop, David d'Angers, Balzac\r
-and Charlet have sat at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns.\r
-Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails prosper there. Adonai passes\r
-on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder and lightning; Silenus\r
-makes his entry there on his ass. For Silenus read Ramponneau.\r
-\r
-Paris is the synonym of Cosmos, Paris is Athens, Sybaris, Jerusalem,\r
-Pantin. All civilizations are there in an abridged form, all barbarisms\r
-also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine.\r
-\r
-A little of the Place de Greve is a good thing. What would all that\r
-eternal festival be without this seasoning? Our laws are wisely\r
-provided, and thanks to them, this blade drips on this Shrove Tuesday.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--TO SCOFF, TO REIGN\r
-\r
-There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which\r
-sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians!\r
-exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the\r
-fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris\r
-may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury;\r
-then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs\r
-its eyes, says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face\r
-of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing\r
-that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors,\r
-that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this\r
-parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the\r
-Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign\r
-joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a sceptre.\r
-\r
-Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions, its days,\r
-its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the bounds of\r
-the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its laugh is the\r
-mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its jests are sparks.\r
-It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on people; the highest\r
-monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their\r
-eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has a prodigious\r
-14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take\r
-the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three\r
-hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle\r
-of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of\r
-the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar,\r
-Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is\r
-everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779,\r
-at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it\r
-whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American\r
-abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear\r
-of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi before\r
-the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it creates Quiroga;\r
-it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great on earth; it was while\r
-proceeding whither its breath urge them, that Byron perished at\r
-Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona; it is the tribune under\r
-the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre;\r
-its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its\r
-philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier,\r
-Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Moliere\r
-for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked by the universal\r
-mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in all minds\r
-the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it forges are for the\r
-generations trusty friends, and it is with the soul of its thinkers and\r
-its poets that all heroes of all nations have been made since 1789; this\r
-does not prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called\r
-Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal\r
-Bouginier's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes\r
-Credeville the thief on the Pyramids.\r
-\r
-Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it is\r
-laughing.\r
-\r
-Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A\r
-heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It is\r
-more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.\r
-\r
-To dare; that is the price of progress.\r
-\r
-All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring. In\r
-order that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice that\r
-Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that\r
-Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it,\r
-that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; it\r
-is necessary that Danton should dare it.\r
-\r
-The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat lux. It is necessary, for the sake of the\r
-forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons of\r
-courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and are\r
-one of man's great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises. To\r
-attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one's\r
-self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount\r
-of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to\r
-insult drunken victory, to hold one's position, to stand one's ground;\r
-that is the example which nations need, that is the light which\r
-electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch\r
-of Prometheus to Cambronne's short pipe.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE\r
-\r
-As for the Parisian populace, even when a man grown, it is always the\r
-street Arab; to paint the child is to paint the city; and it is for that\r
-reason that we have studied this eagle in this arrant sparrow. It is in\r
-the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian race appears;\r
-there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there this\r
-people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two faces of\r
-man. There exist there immense numbers of unknown beings, among whom\r
-swarm types of the strangest, from the porter of la Rapee to the knacker\r
-of Montfaucon. Fex urbis, exclaims Cicero; mob, adds Burke, indignantly;\r
-rabble, multitude, populace. These are words and quickly uttered. But\r
-so be it. What does it matter? What is it to me if they do go barefoot!\r
-They do not know how to read; so much the worse. Would you abandon them\r
-for that? Would you turn their distress into a malediction? Cannot the\r
-light penetrate these masses? Let us return to that cry: Light! and let\r
-us obstinately persist therein! Light! Light! Who knows whether\r
-these opacities will not become transparent? Are not revolutions\r
-transfigurations? Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten, light up, think\r
-aloud, speak aloud, hasten joyously to the great sun, fraternize with\r
-the public place, announce the good news, spend your alphabets lavishly,\r
-proclaim rights, sing the Marseillaises, sow enthusiasms, tear green\r
-boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. This crowd may\r
-be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use of that vast\r
-conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles, bursts forth\r
-and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare arms, these\r
-rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses, these darknesses, may be\r
-employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the people, and you\r
-will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be\r
-cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a\r
-splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will\r
-discover stars.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GAVROCHE\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Little Gavroche 3b1-13-gavroche]\r
-\r
-Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of this\r
-story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the regions of\r
-the Chateau-d'Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years of age, who would\r
-have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal of the gamin sketched\r
-out above, if, with the laugh of his age on his lips, he had not had a\r
-heart absolutely sombre and empty. This child was well muffled up in a\r
-pair of man's trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and a\r
-woman's chemise, but he did not get it from his mother. Some people or\r
-other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and\r
-a mother. But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not\r
-love him.\r
-\r
-He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of\r
-those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.\r
-\r
-This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The\r
-pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.\r
-\r
-His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.\r
-\r
-He simply took flight.\r
-\r
-He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a\r
-vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,\r
-scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly\r
-laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.\r
-He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because\r
-he was free.\r
-\r
-When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social\r
-order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they\r
-escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every\r
-two or three months, that he said, "Come, I'll go and see mamma!" Then\r
-he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended\r
-to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the\r
-Salpetriere, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number\r
-50-52 with which the reader is acquainted--at the Gorbeau hovel.\r
-\r
-At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally\r
-decorated with the placard: "Chambers to let," chanced to be, a rare\r
-thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the\r
-case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to\r
-that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty\r
-bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery\r
-to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings\r
-in whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who\r
-sweeps up the mud, and the ragpicker who collects scraps.\r
-\r
-The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead and had been\r
-replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has\r
-said: "Old women are never lacking."\r
-\r
-This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable\r
-about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets, who had reigned in\r
-succession over her soul.\r
-\r
-The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of\r
-four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already\r
-well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the\r
-cells which we have already mentioned.\r
-\r
-At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except its\r
-extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber, had stated\r
-that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in, which had\r
-borne a singular resemblance to the entrance of nothing at all, to\r
-borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this Jondrette\r
-had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the same time\r
-portress and stair-sweeper: "Mother So-and-So, if any one should chance\r
-to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a Spaniard,\r
-perchance, it is I."\r
-\r
-This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and\r
-found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile; a cold hearth\r
-and cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked: "Whence come you?" He\r
-replied: "From the street." When he went away, they asked him: "Whither\r
-are you going?" He replied: "Into the streets." His mother said to him:\r
-"What did you come here for?"\r
-\r
-This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants\r
-which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he\r
-blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should\r
-be.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.\r
-\r
-We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this child\r
-was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?\r
-\r
-Probably because his father's name was Jondrette.\r
-\r
-It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the\r
-thread.\r
-\r
-The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the\r
-last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a\r
-very poor young man who was called M. Marius.\r
-\r
-Let us explain who this M. Marius was.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH\r
-\r
-In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge there\r
-still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of a\r
-worthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention him with complaisance.\r
-This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yet\r
-entirely disappeared--for those who regard with melancholy that vague\r
-swarm of shadows which is called the past--from the labyrinth of streets\r
-in the vicinity of the Temple to which, under Louis XIV., the names of\r
-all the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day, the\r
-streets of the new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all the\r
-capitals of Europe; a progression, by the way, in which progress is\r
-visible.\r
-\r
-M.Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one of\r
-those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because\r
-they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly\r
-resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man,\r
-and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and rather\r
-haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good, old\r
-bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisates. He\r
-was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw\r
-clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of\r
-his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous\r
-disposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly\r
-and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; he\r
-did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said: "If I were\r
-not ruined--Heee!" All he had left, in fact, was an income of about\r
-fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and\r
-to have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses. He did\r
-not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of\r
-octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their life;\r
-his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old man had always\r
-had good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew into\r
-a passion at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason. When\r
-contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as he had done in the\r
-great century. He had a daughter over fifty years of age, and unmarried,\r
-whom he chastised severely with his tongue, when in a rage, and whom he\r
-would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He\r
-boxed his servants' ears soundly, and said: "Ah! carogne!" One of his\r
-oaths was: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!" He had singular\r
-freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved every day by a barber who\r
-had been mad and who detested him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on\r
-account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand\r
-admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was\r
-extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, some\r
-penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it\r
-came."\r
-\r
-The words which he uttered the most frequently were: the sensible man,\r
-and nature. He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation\r
-which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own\r
-fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "in\r
-order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even\r
-specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia\r
-and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard\r
-is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages.\r
-They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they\r
-transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only\r
-the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not\r
-devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE\r
-\r
-He lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6. He owned the\r
-house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number\r
-has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the\r
-streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment\r
-on the first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very\r
-ceilings with great Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing\r
-pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceilings and the panels were\r
-repeated in miniature on the arm-chairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast,\r
-nine-leaved screen of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from\r
-the windows, and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.\r
-The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that\r
-one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase twelve or\r
-fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with\r
-great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber, he had a\r
-boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant retreat,\r
-with magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers and\r
-fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys of Louis XIV. and ordered of his\r
-convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M. Gillenormand had\r
-inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt, who had died a\r
-centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between\r
-those of the courtier, which he had never been, and the lawyer, which\r
-he might have been. He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In\r
-his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their\r
-wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same\r
-time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in\r
-existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a\r
-marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens, executed\r
-with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details, in a confused\r
-and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand's attire was not the habit of\r
-Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.; it was that of the Incroyables\r
-of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to that period and\r
-had followed the fashions. His coat was of light-weight cloth with\r
-voluminous revers, a long swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With\r
-this he wore knee-breeches and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands\r
-into his fobs. He said authoritatively: "The French Revolution is a heap\r
-of blackguards."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--LUC-ESPRIT\r
-\r
-At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the honor\r
-to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties at the same\r
-time--ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung by Voltaire, the\r
-Camargo and the Salle. Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic\r
-retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nahenry, who was\r
-sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love.\r
-He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim: "How pretty she\r
-was--that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her\r
-at Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained sentiments, with her\r
-come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of the color of persons newly\r
-arrived, and her little agitation muff!" He had worn in his young\r
-manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Londrin, which he was fond of talking about\r
-effusively. "I was dressed like a Turk of the Levant Levantin," said he.\r
-Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had\r
-described him as "a charming fool." He was horrified by all the names\r
-which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and\r
-bourgeois. He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes as he\r
-said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while. "Oh!" he said, "what\r
-people these are! Corbiere! Humann! Casimir Perier! There's a minister\r
-for you! I can imagine this in a journal: 'M. Gillenorman, minister!'\r
-that would be a farce. Well! They are so stupid that it would pass"; he\r
-merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and\r
-did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse\r
-speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack\r
-of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the\r
-unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of\r
-periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose. His god-father\r
-had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed\r
-on him these two significant names: Luc-Esprit.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT\r
-\r
-He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulins, where he\r
-was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duc de Nivernais,\r
-whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Neither the Convention, nor the death\r
-of Louis XVI., nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor\r
-anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. The\r
-Duc de Nevers was, in his eyes, the great figure of the century. "What a\r
-charming grand seigneur," he said, "and what a fine air he had with his\r
-blue ribbon!"\r
-\r
-In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had made reparation\r
-for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing, for three\r
-thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir of gold, from Bestucheff. He\r
-grew animated on this subject: "The elixir of gold," he exclaimed, "the\r
-yellow dye of Bestucheff, General Lamotte's drops, in the eighteenth\r
-century,--this was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the\r
-panacea against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial. Louis XV.\r
-sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope." He would have been greatly\r
-irritated and thrown off his balance, had any one told him that the\r
-elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand\r
-adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789; he was forever narrating\r
-in what manner he had saved himself during the Terror, and how he had\r
-been obliged to display a vast deal of gayety and cleverness in order to\r
-escape having his head cut off. If any young man ventured to pronounce\r
-an eulogium on the Republic in his presence, he turned purple and grew\r
-so angry that he was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to\r
-his ninety years, and said, "I hope that I shall not see ninety-three\r
-twice." On these occasions, he hinted to people that he meant to live to\r
-be a hundred.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--BASQUE AND NICOLETTE\r
-\r
-He had theories. Here is one of them: "When a man is passionately fond\r
-of women, and when he has himself a wife for whom he cares but little,\r
-who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights, perched on the\r
-code, and jealous at need, there is but one way of extricating himself\r
-from the quandry and of procuring peace, and that is to let his wife\r
-control the purse-strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his\r
-wife busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her\r
-fingers covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes the education\r
-of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers,\r
-presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits limbs of the law,\r
-follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself the\r
-sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, promises and compromises, binds fast\r
-and annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges,\r
-hoards, lavishes; she commits follies, a supreme and personal delight,\r
-and that consoles her. While her husband disdains her, she has the\r
-satisfaction of ruining her husband." This theory M. Gillenormand had\r
-himself applied, and it had become his history. His wife--the second\r
-one--had administered his fortune in such a manner that, one fine day,\r
-when M. Gillenormand found himself a widower, there remained to him just\r
-sufficient to live on, by sinking nearly the whole of it in an annuity\r
-of fifteen thousand francs, three-quarters of which would expire with\r
-him. He had not hesitated on this point, not being anxious to leave\r
-a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are\r
-subject to adventures, and, for instance, become national property; he\r
-had been present at the avatars of consolidated three per cents, and he\r
-had no great faith in the Great Book of the Public Debt. "All that's\r
-the Rue Quincampois!" he said. His house in the Rue Filles-du-Clavaire\r
-belonged to him, as we have already stated. He had two servants, "a male\r
-and a female." When a servant entered his establishment, M. Gillenormand\r
-re-baptized him. He bestowed on the men the name of their province:\r
-Nimois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard. His last valet was a big, foundered,\r
-short-winded fellow of fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty\r
-paces; but, as he had been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him\r
-Basque. All the female servants in his house were called Nicolette (even\r
-the Magnon, of whom we shall hear more farther on). One day, a haughty\r
-cook, a cordon bleu, of the lofty race of porters, presented herself.\r
-"How much wages do you want a month?" asked M. Gillenormand. "Thirty\r
-francs." "What is your name?" "Olympie." "You shall have fifty francs,\r
-and you shall be called Nicolette."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN\r
-\r
-With M. Gillenormand, sorrow was converted into wrath; he was furious at\r
-being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices and took all sorts\r
-of liberties. One of the facts of which his exterior relief and his\r
-internal satisfaction was composed, was, as we have just hinted, that he\r
-had remained a brisk spark, and that he passed energetically for such.\r
-This he called having "royal renown." This royal renown sometimes drew\r
-down upon him singular windfalls. One day, there was brought to him in\r
-a basket, as though it had been a basket of oysters, a stout, newly\r
-born boy, who was yelling like the deuce, and duly wrapped in\r
-swaddling-clothes, which a servant-maid, dismissed six months\r
-previously, attributed to him. M. Gillenormand had, at that time,\r
-fully completed his eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the\r
-establishment. And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to\r
-believe that? What audacity! What an abominable calumny! M. Gillenormand\r
-himself was not at all enraged. He gazed at the brat with the amiable\r
-smile of a good man who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an\r
-aside: "Well, what now? What's the matter? You are finely taken aback,\r
-and really, you are excessively ignorant. M. le Duc d'Angouleme, the\r
-bastard of his Majesty Charles IX., married a silly jade of fifteen\r
-when he was eighty-five; M. Virginal, Marquis d'Alluye, brother to\r
-the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had, at the age of\r
-eighty-three, by the maid of Madame la Presidente Jacquin, a son, a\r
-real child of love, who became a Chevalier of Malta and a counsellor of\r
-state; one of the great men of this century, the Abbe Tabaraud, is the\r
-son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the ordinary in\r
-these things. And then, the Bible! Upon that I declare that this little\r
-gentleman is none of mine. Let him be taken care of. It is not his\r
-fault." This manner of procedure was good-tempered. The woman, whose\r
-name was Magnon, sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a\r
-boy again. Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated. He sent the two brats\r
-back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month for their\r
-maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would not do so any\r
-more. He added: "I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well.\r
-I shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did. He had had\r
-a brother who was a priest, and who had been rector of the Academy of\r
-Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had died at seventy-nine.\r
-"I lost him young," said he. This brother, of whom but little memory\r
-remains, was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself\r
-bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them\r
-anything except bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering a means of\r
-going to hell by way of paradise. As for M. Gillenormand the elder, he\r
-never haggled over his alms-giving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was\r
-kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind\r
-would have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned him\r
-should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries. One day, having\r
-been cheated by a business man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross\r
-and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: "That was\r
-indecently done! I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has\r
-degenerated in this century, even the rascals. Morbleu! this is not the\r
-way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest, but\r
-badly robbed. Silva, sint consule dignae!" He had had two wives, as\r
-we have already mentioned; by the first he had had a daughter, who had\r
-remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter, who had died\r
-at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love, or chance,\r
-or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the\r
-Republic and of the Empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz and had\r
-been made colonel at Waterloo. "He is the disgrace of my family,"\r
-said the old bourgeois. He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a\r
-particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the\r
-back of one hand. He believed very little in God.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING\r
-\r
-Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair,--which\r
-was gray rather than white,--and which was always dressed in "dog's\r
-ears." To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this.\r
-\r
-He had something of the eighteenth century about him; frivolous and\r
-great.\r
-\r
-In 1814 and during the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand,\r
-who was still young,--he was only seventy-four,--lived in the Faubourg\r
-Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired\r
-to the Marais when he quitted society, long after attaining the age of\r
-eighty.\r
-\r
-And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his habits. The\r
-principal one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his door\r
-absolutely closed during the day, and never to receive any one whatever\r
-except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock, and after that his door\r
-was open. That had been the fashion of his century, and he would not\r
-swerve from it. "The day is vulgar," said he, "and deserves only a\r
-closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when the\r
-zenith lights up its stars." And he barricaded himself against every\r
-one, even had it been the king himself. This was the antiquated elegance\r
-of his day.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR\r
-\r
-We have just spoken of M. Gillenormand's two daughters. They had come\r
-into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very\r
-little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance,\r
-and had also been as little like sisters to each other as possible. The\r
-youngest had a charming soul, which turned towards all that belongs to\r
-the light, was occupied with flowers, with verses, with music, which\r
-fluttered away into glorious space, enthusiastic, ethereal, and was\r
-wedded from her very youth, in ideal, to a vague and heroic figure. The\r
-elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure some very wealthy\r
-purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million made man,\r
-or even a prefect; the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in the\r
-antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues\r
-of the town-hall, to be "Madame la Prefete,"--all this had created a\r
-whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her\r
-own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls. Both had wings, the\r
-one like an angel, the other like a goose.\r
-\r
-No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise\r
-becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her\r
-dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all.\r
-\r
-At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we are\r
-relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with one of\r
-the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible\r
-to see. A characteristic detail; outside of her immediate family, no one\r
-had ever known her first name. She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand,\r
-the elder.\r
-\r
-In the matter of cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given points\r
-to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness.\r
-She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man had beheld\r
-her garter.\r
-\r
-Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was\r
-never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She\r
-multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.\r
-The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in\r
-proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of\r
-innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew,\r
-named Theodule, to embrace her without displeasure.\r
-\r
-In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under which we\r
-have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle\r
-Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a\r
-demi-vice.\r
-\r
-To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged\r
-to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals,\r
-mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the sacred\r
-heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar\r
-in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful,\r
-and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and\r
-through great rays of gilded wood.\r
-\r
-She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named\r
-Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom\r
-Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond\r
-the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of\r
-anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle\r
-Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a\r
-single spot of intelligence.\r
-\r
-Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather than\r
-lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had\r
-never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then, years wear\r
-away the angles, and the softening which comes with time had come to\r
-her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not\r
-herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor\r
-of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.\r
-\r
-She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter near\r
-him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister with him.\r
-These households comprised of an old man and an old spinster are not\r
-rare, and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on\r
-each other for support.\r
-\r
-There was also in this house, between this elderly spinster and this\r
-old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling and mute in the\r
-presence of M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand never addressed this child\r
-except in a severe voice, and sometimes, with uplifted cane: "Here, sir!\r
-rascal, scoundrel, come here!--Answer me, you scamp! Just let me see\r
-you, you good-for-nothing!" etc., etc. He idolized him.\r
-\r
-This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--AN ANCIENT SALON\r
-\r
-When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented\r
-many very good and very aristocratic salons. Although a bourgeois, M.\r
-Gillenormand was received in society. As he had a double measure of wit,\r
-in the first place, that which was born with him, and secondly, that\r
-which was attributed to him, he was even sought out and made much of. He\r
-never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief person there.\r
-There are people who will have influence at any price, and who will have\r
-other people busy themselves over them; when they cannot be oracles,\r
-they turn wags. M. Gillenormand was not of this nature; his domination\r
-in the Royalist salons which he frequented cost his self-respect\r
-nothing. He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened to him to hold his\r
-own against M. de Bonald, and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallee.\r
-\r
-About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in\r
-his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame la Baronne de T.,\r
-a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of\r
-France to Berlin under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his lifetime,\r
-had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died\r
-bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune,\r
-some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript\r
-volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had\r
-not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a\r
-meagre income which had survived no one knew how.\r
-\r
-Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed society," as she\r
-said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled\r
-twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely\r
-Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of\r
-horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution\r
-of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the\r
-wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of\r
-the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.\r
-\r
-The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called Nicolas, were\r
-received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most delicate and\r
-charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the\r
-following, addressed to "the federates":--\r
-\r
- Refoncez dans vos culottes[20]\r
- Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.\r
- Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes\r
- Ont arbore l' drapeau blanc?\r
-\r
-There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible,\r
-with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous, with\r
-quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a\r
-moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:--\r
-\r
- Pour raffermir le trone ebranle sur sa base,[21]\r
- Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.\r
-\r
-Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an abominably Jacobin\r
-chamber," and from this list they combined alliances of names, in such\r
-a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following: Damas.\r
-Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.--All this was done merrily. In that society,\r
-they parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires to give\r
-point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little Ca\r
-ira:--\r
-\r
- Ah! ca ira ca ira ca ira!\r
- Les Bonapartistes a la lanterne!\r
-\r
-Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, to-day this\r
-head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.\r
-\r
-In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took\r
-part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a Buonapartist." They\r
-designated the liberals as friends and brothers; this constituted the\r
-most deadly insult.\r
-\r
-Like certain church towers, Madame de T.'s salon had two cocks. One of\r
-them was M. Gillenormand, the other was Comte de Lamothe-Valois, of whom\r
-it was whispered about, with a sort of respect: "Do you know? That is\r
-the Lamothe of the affair of the necklace." These singular amnesties do\r
-occur in parties.\r
-\r
-Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored situations decay\r
-through too easy relations; one must beware whom one admits; in the same\r
-way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who are\r
-cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of despised\r
-persons. The ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above\r
-this law, as above every other. Marigny, the brother of the Pompadour,\r
-had his entry with M. le Prince de Soubise. In spite of? No, because. Du\r
-Barry, the god-father of the Vaubernier, was very welcome at the house\r
-of M. le Marechal de Richelieu. This society is Olympus. Mercury and\r
-the Prince de Guemenee are at home there. A thief is admitted there,\r
-provided he be a god.\r
-\r
-The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five years of\r
-age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and sententious\r
-air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat\r
-buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always crossed in long,\r
-flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the same color\r
-as his trousers.\r
-\r
-This M. de Lamothe was "held in consideration" in this salon on account\r
-of his "celebrity" and, strange to say, though true, because of his name\r
-of Valois.\r
-\r
-As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of absolutely first-rate\r
-quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering in\r
-any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which was imposing,\r
-dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion; and his great\r
-age added to it. One is not a century with impunity. The years finally\r
-produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.\r
-\r
-In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of the\r
-old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis\r
-XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the Count de\r
-Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat\r
-as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most\r
-delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved: "All kings who are\r
-not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings." One day, the\r
-following question was put and the following answer returned in his\r
-presence: "To what was the editor of the Courrier Francais condemned?"\r
-"To be suspended." "Sus is superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.[22]\r
-Remarks of this nature found a situation.\r
-\r
-At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons, he\r
-said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: "There goes his Excellency the\r
-Evil One."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter, that tall\r
-mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty, and by a handsome\r
-little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with happy and trusting\r
-eyes, who never appeared in that salon without hearing voices murmur\r
-around him: "How handsome he is! What a pity! Poor child!" This child\r
-was the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago. He was called "poor\r
-child," because he had for a father "a brigand of the Loire."\r
-\r
-This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law, who has\r
-already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called "the disgrace of\r
-his family."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH\r
-\r
-Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at\r
-this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental\r
-bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron\r
-cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the\r
-parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and\r
-trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something yellow\r
-which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned\r
-by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large\r
-scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,\r
-prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,\r
-in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the\r
-bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,\r
-charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they\r
-much larger: "these are gardens," and were they a little smaller: "these\r
-are bouquets." All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and\r
-on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes\r
-of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these enclosures\r
-and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He lived there alone and\r
-solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young nor\r
-old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who\r
-served him. The plot of earth which he called his garden was celebrated\r
-in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there.\r
-These flowers were his occupation.\r
-\r
-By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets of\r
-water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he had\r
-invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been\r
-forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange\r
-Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the\r
-cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He\r
-was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting, cutting,\r
-hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness,\r
-sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful\r
-for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a\r
-child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of\r
-a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was very\r
-plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him give\r
-way, and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed shy, he\r
-rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his\r
-pane and his cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the\r
-inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any chance comers, curious to\r
-see his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he opened his door with a\r
-smile. He was the "brigand of the Loire."\r
-\r
-Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,\r
-the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been\r
-struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name\r
-of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been\r
-a soldier in Saintonge's regiment. The revolution broke out. Saintonge's\r
-regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine; for the old regiments\r
-of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even after the fall\r
-of the monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in 1794. Pontmercy\r
-fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at Alzey, at\r
-Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed Houchard's\r
-rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the corps\r
-of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and only\r
-rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy's cannon had opened\r
-a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis. He was\r
-under Kleber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel, where\r
-a ball from a biscaien broke his arm. Then he passed to the frontier\r
-of Italy, and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col\r
-de Tende with Joubert. Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and\r
-Pontmercy sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the midst\r
-of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused Bonaparte to say:\r
-"Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier." He beheld his\r
-old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at the moment when, with uplifted\r
-sabre, he was shouting: "Forward!" Having been embarked with his\r
-company in the exigencies of the campaign, on board a pinnace which was\r
-proceeding from Genoa to some obscure port on the coast, he fell into\r
-a wasps'-nest of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese commander\r
-wanted to throw his cannon into the sea, to hide the soldiers between\r
-decks, and to slip along in the dark as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had\r
-the colors hoisted to the peak, and sailed proudly past under the guns\r
-of the British frigates. Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having\r
-increased, he attacked with his pinnace, and captured a large English\r
-transport which was carrying troops to Sicily, and which was so loaded\r
-down with men and horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the\r
-sea. In 1805 he was in that Malher division which took Gunzberg from the\r
-Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a\r
-storm of bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the\r
-9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable\r
-march in echelons effected under the enemy's fire. When the cavalry of\r
-the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the line,\r
-Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the\r
-Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,\r
-Melas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession.\r
-He formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which Mortier\r
-commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the\r
-55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders. At Eylau\r
-he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two hours, the heroic\r
-Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author of this book, sustained\r
-alone with his company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile\r
-army. Pontmercy was one of the three who emerged alive from that\r
-cemetery. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Beresina,\r
-then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of\r
-Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the\r
-Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon. At\r
-Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword,\r
-and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed up on\r
-this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left\r
-arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just\r
-exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was called\r
-under the old regime, the double hand, that is to say, an equal aptitude\r
-for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or a squadron or\r
-a battalion as an officer. It is from this aptitude, perfected by a\r
-military education, which certain special branches of the service arise,\r
-the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalry-men and infantry at one\r
-and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the Island of Elba. At\r
-Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers, in Dubois' brigade.\r
-It was he who captured the standard of the Lunenburg battalion. He came\r
-and cast the flag at the Emperor's feet. He was covered with blood.\r
-While tearing down the banner he had received a sword-cut across his\r
-face. The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him: "You are a colonel,\r
-you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion of Honor!" Pontmercy\r
-replied: "Sire, I thank you for my widow." An hour later, he fell in the\r
-ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same\r
-"brigand of the Loire."\r
-\r
-We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo,\r
-Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow road of Ohain, as it\r
-will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army, and had dragged\r
-himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the\r
-Loire.\r
-\r
-The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent him into\r
-residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon. King Louis\r
-XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during the Hundred\r
-Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize his quality as an\r
-officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade of colonel, nor his title\r
-of baron. He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself\r
-"Colonel Baron Pontmercy." He had only an old blue coat, and he never\r
-went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the Legion\r
-of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had him warned that the authorities\r
-would prosecute him for "illegal" wearing of this decoration. When this\r
-notice was conveyed to him through an officious intermediary, Pontmercy\r
-retorted with a bitter smile: "I do not know whether I no longer\r
-understand French, or whether you no longer speak it; but the fact is\r
-that I do not understand." Then he went out for eight successive days\r
-with his rosette. They dared not interfere with him. Two or three times\r
-the Minister of War and the general in command of the department wrote\r
-to him with the following address: "A Monsieur le Commandant Pontmercy."\r
-He sent back the letters with the seals unbroken. At the same moment,\r
-Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating in the same fashion the missives\r
-of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed to General Bonaparte. Pontmercy had ended,\r
-may we be pardoned the expression, by having in his mouth the same\r
-saliva as his Emperor.\r
-\r
-In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused\r
-to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's spirit.\r
-\r
-One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets of\r
-Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: "Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted\r
-to wear my scar?"\r
-\r
-He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron. He had\r
-hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon. He lived there\r
-alone, we have just seen how. Under the Empire, between two wars, he\r
-had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois,\r
-thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh,\r
-saying: "The greatest families are forced into it." In 1815, Madame\r
-Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way, lofty in\r
-sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a\r
-child. This child had been the colonel's joy in his solitude; but the\r
-grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring that if\r
-the child were not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had\r
-yielded in the little one's interest, and had transferred his love to\r
-flowers.\r
-\r
-Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief\r
-nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which\r
-he was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed his\r
-time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The colonel\r
-was "a bandit" to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel,\r
-except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to "his Baronship."\r
-It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt to see\r
-his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the latter handed\r
-over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy\r
-was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to bring up the\r
-child in their own way. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these\r
-conditions, but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right\r
-and sacrificing no one but himself.\r
-\r
-The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much; but the\r
-inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was considerable.\r
-This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very rich on the maternal\r
-side, and her sister's son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name was\r
-Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one opened\r
-his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society into which his\r
-grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually\r
-enlightened the little boy's mind; he had finally understood something\r
-of the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which\r
-were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration and\r
-slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father only with\r
-shame and with a pain at his heart.\r
-\r
-While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped away every\r
-two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like a criminal breaking\r
-his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when\r
-Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There, trembling lest the aunt\r
-should turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not daring to\r
-breathe, he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was afraid of that\r
-old spinster.\r
-\r
-From this had arisen his connection with the cure of Vernon, M. l'Abbe\r
-Mabeuf.\r
-\r
-That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice, who had\r
-often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar on his cheek,\r
-and the large tears in his eyes. That man, who had so manly an air, yet\r
-who was weeping like a woman, had struck the warden. That face had clung\r
-to his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he had\r
-encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had recognized the man\r
-of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the circumstance to the cure,\r
-and both had paid the colonel a visit, on some pretext or other. This\r
-visit led to others. The colonel, who had been extremely reserved at\r
-first, ended by opening his heart, and the cure and the warden finally\r
-came to know the whole history, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his\r
-happiness to his child's future. This caused the cure to regard him with\r
-veneration and tenderness, and the colonel, on his side, became fond\r
-of the cure. And moreover, when both are sincere and good, no men so\r
-penetrate each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an old\r
-priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same. The one has\r
-devoted his life to his country here below, the other to his country on\r
-high; that is the only difference.\r
-\r
-Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's day, Marius\r
-wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated by his aunt, and\r
-which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula; this was\r
-all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father answered them with\r
-very tender letters which the grandfather thrust into his pocket unread.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--REQUIESCANT\r
-\r
-Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It\r
-was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse of life. This\r
-opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth, more night than day, came\r
-to him through this skylight. This child, who had been all joy and light\r
-on entering this strange world, soon became melancholy, and, what is\r
-still more contrary to his age, grave. Surrounded by all those singular\r
-and imposing personages, he gazed about him with serious amazement.\r
-Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him. There were\r
-in Madame de T.'s salon some very noble ladies named Mathan, Noe,\r
-Levis,--which was pronounced Levi,--Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. These\r
-antique visages and these Biblical names mingled in the child's mind\r
-with the Old Testament which he was learning by heart, and when they\r
-were all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted\r
-by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their gray or\r
-white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious colors\r
-could not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals, words which\r
-were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared at them with\r
-frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not women, but\r
-patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.\r
-\r
-With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of\r
-this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****, private\r
-secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who published,\r
-under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince de\r
-Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and a pretty and\r
-witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with gold\r
-torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****d'E******, the man\r
-in all France who best understood "proportioned politeness," the Comte\r
-d'Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de\r
-Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's\r
-cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than old, was wont\r
-to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in the\r
-galleys as refractory and chained with an octogenarian, the Bishop\r
-of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest, while he was so in the\r
-capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at\r
-night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons\r
-who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their backs\r
-these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of\r
-blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at\r
-night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.'s salon, and by\r
-dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies of the\r
-undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard,\r
-M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the right, M.\r
-Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his short breeches\r
-and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon on his way to M. de\r
-Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and\r
-unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl\r
-on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages a philosopher\r
-avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there was the Abbe Halma, the\r
-same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator on la Foudre, said: "Bah! Who\r
-is there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?" The Abbe\r
-Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbe Frayssinous, who was not, as\r
-yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer, and who wore an old\r
-cassock whose buttons were missing, and the Abbe Keravenant, Cure of\r
-Saint-Germain-des-Pres; also the Pope's Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi,\r
-Archbishop of Nisibi, later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long,\r
-pensive nose, and another Monsignor, entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri,\r
-domestic prelate, one of the seven participant prothonotaries of the\r
-Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian basilica, Advocate of the\r
-saints, Postulatore dei Santi, which refers to matters of canonization,\r
-and signifies very nearly: Master of Requests of the section of\r
-Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl******\r
-T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was destined to have,\r
-a few years later, the honor of signing in the Conservateur articles\r
-side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl****** T******* was Archbishop\r
-of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to his nephew, the Marquis\r
-de T*******, who was Minister of Marine and War. The Cardinal of\r
-Cl****** T******* was a merry little man, who displayed his red\r
-stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred of\r
-the Encyclopaedia, and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who,\r
-at that epoch, passed through the Rue M***** on summer evenings, where\r
-the hotel de Cl****** T******* then stood, halted to listen to the shock\r
-of the balls and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to his\r
-conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste: "Mark,\r
-Abbe, I make a cannon." The Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had been\r
-brought to Madame de T.'s by his most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure,\r
-former Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty. M. de Roquelaure was\r
-notable for his lofty figure and his assiduity at the Academy; through\r
-the glass door of the neighboring hall of the library where the French\r
-Academy then held its meetings, the curious could, on every Tuesday,\r
-contemplate the Ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing erect, freshly\r
-powdered, in violet hose, with his back turned to the door, apparently\r
-for the purpose of allowing a better view of his little collar. All\r
-these ecclesiastics, though for the most part as much courtiers as\r
-churchmen, added to the gravity of the T. salon, whose seigniorial\r
-aspect was accentuated by five peers of France, the Marquis de Vib****,\r
-the Marquis de Tal***, the Marquis de Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***,\r
-and the Duc de Val********. This Duc de Val********, although Prince de\r
-Mon***, that is to say a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of\r
-France and its peerage, that he viewed everything through their medium.\r
-It was he who said: "The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome;\r
-the lords are the peers of France of England." Moreover, as it is\r
-indispensable that the Revolution should be everywhere in this century,\r
-this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. M.\r
-Gillenormand reigned there.\r
-\r
-There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.\r
-There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.\r
-There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he\r
-entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere Duchene. Some of\r
-the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance. Comte\r
-Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.\r
-\r
-The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.\r
-The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists of\r
-to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.\r
-\r
-At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite and\r
-haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners there\r
-admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old\r
-regime itself, buried but still alive. Some of these habits, especially\r
-in the matter of language, seem eccentric. Persons but superficially\r
-acquainted with them would have taken for provincial that which was only\r
-antique. A woman was called Madame la Generale. Madame la Colonelle was\r
-not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no\r
-doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this\r
-appellation to her title of Princesse. The Marquise de Crequy was also\r
-called Madame la Colonelle.\r
-\r
-It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the\r
-refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King, in the third\r
-person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation of Your Majesty\r
-having been "soiled by the usurper."\r
-\r
-Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,\r
-which released them from the necessity of understanding it. They abetted\r
-each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that modicum\r
-of light which they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on\r
-Epimenides. The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course\r
-of things. They declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz\r
-had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace\r
-of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were,\r
-by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.\r
-\r
-All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted\r
-to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a papyrus.\r
-There were some young people, but they were rather dead. The liveries in\r
-the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were\r
-served by domestics of the same stamp.\r
-\r
-They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately\r
-resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of\r
-Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,--that was the\r
-point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable\r
-groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society. The\r
-masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.\r
-\r
-A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but a solitary\r
-maid, continued to say: "My people."\r
-\r
-What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were ultra.\r
-\r
-To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have\r
-disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us\r
-explain it.\r
-\r
-To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of\r
-the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat\r
-the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is\r
-to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by\r
-heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry;\r
-it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the\r
-Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently\r
-royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented\r
-with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of\r
-whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming\r
-their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.\r
-\r
-The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the\r
-Restoration.\r
-\r
-Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in\r
-1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele,\r
-the practical man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary\r
-moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and\r
-sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at\r
-the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still\r
-filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed\r
-in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,\r
-comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing\r
-resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France\r
-with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good old owls\r
-of marquises by the streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the\r
-"former" subjects of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen\r
-who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold\r
-their country once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the\r
-nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to\r
-say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who had\r
-lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne\r
-disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just\r
-remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and\r
-nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and\r
-was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. People no\r
-longer had the feeling for what was grand. There was some one who called\r
-Bonaparte Scapin. This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we\r
-repeat, exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,\r
-and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange to us\r
-as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a matter of\r
-fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared beneath two\r
-Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover all that it\r
-is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create\r
-frightful gulfs!\r
-\r
-Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times\r
-when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.\r
-\r
-These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed\r
-in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M.\r
-Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais. Napoleon\r
-was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on the introduction into\r
-history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the King's\r
-armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.\r
-\r
-These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,\r
-doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade. Their way\r
-was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the\r
-ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had\r
-wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated\r
-with arrogance; they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully\r
-too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned\r
-coats. The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to\r
-create aged youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed of\r
-engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.\r
-They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative\r
-liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:\r
-"Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has\r
-brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,\r
-brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,\r
-the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the\r
-nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,\r
-glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this\r
-mistake which it makes with regard to us,--have we not sometimes been\r
-guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to\r
-be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of\r
-liberalism. What an error! And what blindness! Revolutionary France is\r
-wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards its\r
-mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September, the\r
-nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire was\r
-treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle, we are\r
-unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always have something\r
-to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis\r
-XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M. de\r
-Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that\r
-he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo.\r
-The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our patrimony. To\r
-what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the\r
-past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history?\r
-Why not love the whole of France?"\r
-\r
-It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism, which\r
-was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.\r
-\r
-The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation\r
-characterized the second. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves\r
-here to this sketch.\r
-\r
-In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has encountered\r
-in his path this curious moment of contemporary history; he has been\r
-forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace once more some of\r
-the singular features of this society which is unknown to-day. But he\r
-does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive idea. Souvenirs both\r
-respectful and affectionate, for they touch his mother, attach him to\r
-this past. Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur\r
-of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor hate\r
-it. It was the France of former days.\r
-\r
-Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he\r
-emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided\r
-him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This\r
-young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.\r
-\r
-Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the law\r
-school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did not love his\r
-grandfather much, as the latter's gayety and cynicism repelled him, and\r
-his feelings towards his father were gloomy.\r
-\r
-He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,\r
-religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--END OF THE BRIGAND\r
-\r
-The conclusion of Marius' classical studies coincided with M.\r
-Gillenormand's departure from society. The old man bade farewell to\r
-the Faubourg Saint-Germain and to Madame de T.'s salon, and established\r
-himself in the Mardis, in his house of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.\r
-There he had for servants, in addition to the porter, that chambermaid,\r
-Nicolette, who had succeeded to Magnon, and that short-breathed and\r
-pursy Basque, who have been mentioned above.\r
-\r
-In 1827, Marius had just attained his seventeenth year. One evening, on\r
-his return home, he saw his grandfather holding a letter in his hand.\r
-\r
-"Marius," said M. Gillenormand, "you will set out for Vernon to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"Why?" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"To see your father."\r
-\r
-Marius was seized with a trembling fit. He had thought of everything\r
-except this--that he should one day be called upon to see his father.\r
-Nothing could be more unexpected, more surprising, and, let us admit\r
-it, more disagreeable to him. It was forcing estrangement into\r
-reconciliation. It was not an affliction, but it was an unpleasant duty.\r
-\r
-Marius, in addition to his motives of political antipathy, was convinced\r
-that his father, the slasher, as M. Gillenormand called him on his\r
-amiable days, did not love him; this was evident, since he had abandoned\r
-him to others. Feeling that he was not beloved, he did not love.\r
-"Nothing is more simple," he said to himself.\r
-\r
-He was so astounded that he did not question M. Gillenormand. The\r
-grandfather resumed:--\r
-\r
-"It appears that he is ill. He demands your presence."\r
-\r
-And after a pause, he added:--\r
-\r
-"Set out to-morrow morning. I think there is a coach which leaves the\r
-Cour des Fontaines at six o'clock, and which arrives in the evening.\r
-Take it. He says that here is haste."\r
-\r
-Then he crushed the letter in his hand and thrust it into his pocket.\r
-Marius might have set out that very evening and have been with his\r
-father on the following morning. A diligence from the Rue du Bouloi\r
-took the trip to Rouen by night at that date, and passed through Vernon.\r
-Neither Marius nor M. Gillenormand thought of making inquiries about it.\r
-\r
-The next day, at twilight, Marius reached Vernon. People were just\r
-beginning to light their candles. He asked the first person whom he\r
-met for "M. Pontmercy's house." For in his own mind, he agreed with the\r
-Restoration, and like it, did not recognize his father's claim to the\r
-title of either colonel or baron.\r
-\r
-The house was pointed out to him. He rang; a woman with a little lamp in\r
-her hand opened the door.\r
-\r
-"M. Pontmercy?" said Marius.\r
-\r
-The woman remained motionless.\r
-\r
-"Is this his house?" demanded Marius.\r
-\r
-The woman nodded affirmatively.\r
-\r
-"Can I speak with him?"\r
-\r
-The woman shook her head.\r
-\r
-"But I am his son!" persisted Marius. "He is expecting me."\r
-\r
-"He no longer expects you," said the woman.\r
-\r
-Then he perceived that she was weeping.\r
-\r
-She pointed to the door of a room on the ground-floor; he entered.\r
-\r
-In that room, which was lighted by a tallow candle standing on the\r
-chimney-piece, there were three men, one standing erect, another\r
-kneeling, and one lying at full length, on the floor in his shirt. The\r
-one on the floor was the colonel.\r
-\r
-The other two were the doctor, and the priest, who was engaged in\r
-prayer.\r
-\r
-The colonel had been attacked by brain fever three days previously. As\r
-he had a foreboding of evil at the very beginning of his illness, he\r
-had written to M. Gillenormand to demand his son. The malady had grown\r
-worse. On the very evening of Marius' arrival at Vernon, the colonel had\r
-had an attack of delirium; he had risen from his bed, in spite of the\r
-servant's efforts to prevent him, crying: "My son is not coming! I shall\r
-go to meet him!" Then he ran out of his room and fell prostrate on the\r
-floor of the antechamber. He had just expired.\r
-\r
-The doctor had been summoned, and the cure. The doctor had arrived too\r
-late. The son had also arrived too late.\r
-\r
-By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished on\r
-the pale and prostrate colonel's cheek, where it had trickled from his\r
-dead eye. The eye was extinguished, but the tear was not yet dry. That\r
-tear was his son's delay.\r
-\r
-Marius gazed upon that man whom he beheld for the first time, on that\r
-venerable and manly face, on those open eyes which saw not, on those\r
-white locks, those robust limbs, on which, here and there, brown\r
-lines, marking sword-thrusts, and a sort of red stars, which indicated\r
-bullet-holes, were visible. He contemplated that gigantic sear which\r
-stamped heroism on that countenance upon which God had imprinted\r
-goodness. He reflected that this man was his father, and that this man\r
-was dead, and a chill ran over him.\r
-\r
-The sorrow which he felt was the sorrow which he would have felt in the\r
-presence of any other man whom he had chanced to behold stretched out in\r
-death.\r
-\r
-Anguish, poignant anguish, was in that chamber. The servant-woman was\r
-lamenting in a corner, the cure was praying, and his sobs were audible,\r
-the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself was weeping.\r
-\r
-The doctor, the priest, and the woman gazed at Marius in the midst of\r
-their affliction without uttering a word; he was the stranger there.\r
-Marius, who was far too little affected, felt ashamed and embarrassed at\r
-his own attitude; he held his hat in his hand; and he dropped it on the\r
-floor, in order to produce the impression that grief had deprived him of\r
-the strength to hold it.\r
-\r
-At the same time, he experienced remorse, and he despised himself for\r
-behaving in this manner. But was it his fault? He did not love his\r
-father? Why should he!\r
-\r
-The colonel had left nothing. The sale of big furniture barely paid the\r
-expenses of his burial.\r
-\r
-The servant found a scrap of paper, which she handed to Marius. It\r
-contained the following, in the colonel's handwriting:--\r
-\r
-"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battle-field of\r
-Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I\r
-purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will\r
-be worthy of it is a matter of course." Below, the colonel had added:\r
-"At that same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. The man's\r
-name was Thenardier. I think that he has recently been keeping a\r
-little inn, in a village in the neighborhood of Paris, at Chelles or\r
-Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do all the good he can to\r
-Thenardier."\r
-\r
-Marius took this paper and preserved it, not out of duty to his father,\r
-but because of that vague respect for death which is always imperious in\r
-the heart of man.\r
-\r
-Nothing remained of the colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword and\r
-uniform sold to an old-clothes dealer. The neighbors devastated the\r
-garden and pillaged the rare flowers. The other plants turned to nettles\r
-and weeds, and died.\r
-\r
-Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the interment he\r
-returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies, with\r
-no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived. In two\r
-days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.\r
-\r
-Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--THE UTILITY OF GOING TO MASS, IN ORDER TO BECOME A\r
-REVOLUTIONIST\r
-\r
-Marius had preserved the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday,\r
-when he went to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, at that same chapel of the\r
-Virgin whither his aunt had led him when a small lad, he placed himself\r
-behind a pillar, being more absent-minded and thoughtful than usual on\r
-that occasion, and knelt down, without paying any special heed, upon a\r
-chair of Utrecht velvet, on the back of which was inscribed this name:\r
-Monsieur Mabeuf, warden. Mass had hardly begun when an old man presented\r
-himself and said to Marius:--\r
-\r
-"This is my place, sir."\r
-\r
-Marius stepped aside promptly, and the old man took possession of his\r
-chair.\r
-\r
-The mass concluded, Marius still stood thoughtfully a few paces distant;\r
-the old man approached him again and said:--\r
-\r
-"I beg your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you a while ago, and for\r
-again disturbing you at this moment; you must have thought me intrusive,\r
-and I will explain myself."\r
-\r
-"There is no need of that, Sir," said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Yes!" went on the old man, "I do not wish you to have a bad opinion of\r
-me. You see, I am attached to this place. It seems to me that the mass\r
-is better from here. Why? I will tell you. It is from this place, that\r
-I have watched a poor, brave father come regularly, every two or three\r
-months, for the last ten years, since he had no other opportunity and\r
-no other way of seeing his child, because he was prevented by family\r
-arrangements. He came at the hour when he knew that his son would be\r
-brought to mass. The little one never suspected that his father was\r
-there. Perhaps he did not even know that he had a father, poor innocent!\r
-The father kept behind a pillar, so that he might not be seen. He gazed\r
-at his child and he wept. He adored that little fellow, poor man! I\r
-could see that. This spot has become sanctified in my sight, and I have\r
-contracted a habit of coming hither to listen to the mass. I prefer it\r
-to the stall to which I have a right, in my capacity of warden. I knew\r
-that unhappy gentleman a little, too. He had a father-in-law, a wealthy\r
-aunt, relatives, I don't know exactly what all, who threatened to\r
-disinherit the child if he, the father, saw him. He sacrificed himself\r
-in order that his son might be rich and happy some day. He was separated\r
-from him because of political opinions. Certainly, I approve of\r
-political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.\r
-Mon Dieu! a man is not a monster because he was at Waterloo; a father\r
-is not separated from his child for such a reason as that. He was one of\r
-Bonaparte's colonels. He is dead, I believe. He lived at Vernon, where I\r
-have a brother who is a cure, and his name was something like Pontmarie\r
-or Montpercy. He had a fine sword-cut, on my honor."\r
-\r
-"Pontmercy," suggested Marius, turning pale.\r
-\r
-"Precisely, Pontmercy. Did you know him?"\r
-\r
-"Sir," said Marius, "he was my father."\r
-\r
-The old warden clasped his hands and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! you are the child! Yes, that's true, he must be a man by this\r
-time. Well! poor child, you may say that you had a father who loved you\r
-dearly!"\r
-\r
-Marius offered his arm to the old man and conducted him to his lodgings.\r
-\r
-On the following day, he said to M. Gillenormand:--\r
-\r
-"I have arranged a hunting-party with some friends. Will you permit me\r
-to be absent for three days?"\r
-\r
-"Four!" replied his grandfather. "Go and amuse yourself."\r
-\r
-And he said to his daughter in a low tone, and with a wink, "Some love\r
-affair!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN\r
-\r
-Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.\r
-\r
-Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris, went\r
-straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the files of the\r
-Moniteur.\r
-\r
-He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the Republic and\r
-the Empire, the Memorial de Sainte-Helene, all the memoirs, all the\r
-newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured everything.\r
-The first time that he came across his father's name in the bulletins of\r
-the grand army, he had a fever for a week. He went to see the generals\r
-under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others, Comte H.\r
-Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again, told him about the life\r
-at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his flowers, his solitude. Marius came\r
-to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime man, that species\r
-of lion-lamb who had been his father.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed all\r
-his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands at\r
-all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him, and he\r
-was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. "Bah! bah! He is just\r
-of the age for the girls!" Sometimes the old man added: "The deuce!\r
-I thought it was only an affair of gallantry, It seems that it is an\r
-affair of passion!"\r
-\r
-It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring his\r
-father.\r
-\r
-At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The\r
-phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the\r
-history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful to\r
-follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.\r
-\r
-That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.\r
-\r
-The first effect was to dazzle him.\r
-\r
-Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only\r
-monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire,\r
-a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it, and where he had\r
-expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a sort\r
-of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling,\r
-Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins,\r
-Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not know where he stood. He\r
-recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights. Little by little, when his\r
-astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this radiance, he\r
-contemplated these deeds without dizziness, he examined these personages\r
-without terror; the Revolution and the Empire presented themselves\r
-luminously, in perspective, before his mind's eye; he beheld each of\r
-these groups of events and of men summed up in two tremendous facts: the\r
-Republic in the sovereignty of civil right restored to the masses,\r
-the Empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe; he\r
-beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the Revolution, and\r
-the grand figure of France spring forth from the Empire. He asserted\r
-in his conscience, that all this had been good. What his dazzled state\r
-neglected in this, his first far too synthetic estimation, we do not\r
-think it necessary to point out here. It is the state of a mind on the\r
-march that we are recording. Progress is not accomplished in one stage.\r
-That stated, once for all, in connection with what precedes as well as\r
-with what is to follow, we continue.\r
-\r
-He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his\r
-country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not known\r
-either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night had obscured\r
-his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the other\r
-he adored.\r
-\r
-He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair that\r
-all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb. Oh! if his\r
-father had still been in existence, if he had still had him, if God, in\r
-his compassion and his goodness, had permitted his father to be still\r
-among the living, how he would have run, how he would have precipitated\r
-himself, how he would have cried to his father: "Father! Here I am! It\r
-is I! I have the same heart as thou! I am thy son!" How he would have\r
-embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his scar,\r
-pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why had his\r
-father died so early, before his time, before the justice, the love of\r
-his son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his heart, which\r
-said to him every moment: "Alas!" At the same time, he became more truly\r
-serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought and his faith. At\r
-each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his reason. An inward\r
-growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was conscious of a sort\r
-of natural enlargement, which gave him two things that were new to\r
-him--his father and his country.\r
-\r
-As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself that\r
-which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred; henceforth\r
-he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human sense of the\r
-great things which he had been taught to detest, and of the great men\r
-whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected on his former\r
-opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which, nevertheless,\r
-seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant, yet he smiled.\r
-\r
-From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed to the\r
-rehabilitation of Napoleon.\r
-\r
-But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.\r
-\r
-From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of\r
-1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its\r
-interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated\r
-him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very cleverly turned to\r
-sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of\r
-mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order\r
-to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately\r
-pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814\r
-made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from\r
-that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is\r
-terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in\r
-speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with\r
-laughter, provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never\r
-entertained--about that man, as he was called--any other ideas in his\r
-mind. They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.\r
-There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.\r
-\r
-On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and\r
-materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes\r
-of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse of something immense,\r
-and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment, on\r
-the score of Bonaparte as about all the rest; each day he saw more\r
-distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost\r
-regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication and as though\r
-attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then\r
-the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps\r
-of enthusiasm.\r
-\r
-One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle\r
-was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on his table close\r
-to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and\r
-mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night! One hears dull\r
-sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter, which\r
-is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a firebrand,\r
-the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.\r
-\r
-He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes\r
-penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his\r
-father's name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great\r
-Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising\r
-within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close\r
-to him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into\r
-a singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets,\r
-the measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the\r
-cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed\r
-upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless\r
-depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they\r
-beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted\r
-within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,\r
-without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was\r
-obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,\r
-gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the\r
-eternal immensity, and exclaimed: "Long live the Emperor!"\r
-\r
-From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--the\r
-usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his own\r
-sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner of\r
-Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave place\r
-in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an\r
-inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar. The Emperor had\r
-been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for\r
-whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more to Marius. He was\r
-the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman\r
-group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,\r
-of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry\r
-IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety,\r
-having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man,\r
-that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots,\r
-powerful in his crime.\r
-\r
-He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: "The\r
-great nation!" He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of\r
-France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world\r
-by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre\r
-which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the\r
-future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and\r
-summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus\r
-Christ is the man-God.\r
-\r
-It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his\r
-conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion\r
-and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the downward\r
-slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag. Fanaticism\r
-for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his mind his\r
-enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with genius,\r
-and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he was\r
-installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand that\r
-which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many respects, he\r
-had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted everything. There\r
-is a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth. He had a\r
-violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump. In the new\r
-path which he had entered on, in judging the mistakes of the old regime,\r
-as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating\r
-circumstances.\r
-\r
-At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly\r
-beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His\r
-orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had\r
-turned squarely round.\r
-\r
-All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family\r
-obtaining an inkling of the case.\r
-\r
-When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old Bourbon\r
-and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and\r
-the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist, profoundly\r
-democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des\r
-Orfevres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Le Baron Marius\r
-Pontmercy.\r
-\r
-This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had\r
-taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his\r
-father.\r
-\r
-Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any\r
-porter, he put them in his pocket.\r
-\r
-By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his\r
-father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which the\r
-colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his\r
-grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's temper did\r
-not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances\r
-of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Geronte\r
-shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. So long as the same\r
-political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both,\r
-Marius had met M. Gillenormand there as on a bridge. When the bridge\r
-fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over and above all, Marius\r
-experienced unutterable impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it\r
-was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly\r
-from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child\r
-of the father.\r
-\r
-By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion\r
-for his grandfather.\r
-\r
-Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as we have\r
-already said. Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and rare\r
-in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle and\r
-alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a pretext.\r
-His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis: "In love!\r
-I know all about it."\r
-\r
-From time to time Marius absented himself.\r
-\r
-"Where is it that he goes off like this?" said his aunt.\r
-\r
-On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to\r
-Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father had\r
-left him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the inn-keeper\r
-Thenardier. Thenardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew\r
-what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four days on\r
-this quest.\r
-\r
-"He is getting decidedly wild," said his grandfather.\r
-\r
-They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,\r
-under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--SOME PETTICOAT\r
-\r
-We have mentioned a lancer.\r
-\r
-He was a great-grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand, on the paternal side,\r
-who led a garrison life, outside the family and far from the domestic\r
-hearth. Lieutenant Theodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the conditions\r
-required to make what is called a fine officer. He had "a lady's waist,"\r
-a victorious manner of trailing his sword and of twirling his mustache\r
-in a hook. He visited Paris very rarely, and so rarely that Marius had\r
-never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name. We think\r
-we have said that Theodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand, who\r
-preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits one\r
-to attribute to them all possible perfections.\r
-\r
-One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her\r
-apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing.\r
-Marius had just asked his grandfather's permission to take a little\r
-trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening. "Go!" had been\r
-his grandfather's reply, and M. Gillenormand had added in an aside, as\r
-he raised his eyebrows to the top of his forehead: "Here he is passing\r
-the night out again." Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to\r
-her chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this\r
-exclamation: "This is too much!"--and this interrogation: "But where is\r
-it that he goes?" She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less\r
-illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would\r
-not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair. Tasting a\r
-mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls\r
-do not detest this. There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret\r
-compartments of bigotry.\r
-\r
-So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.\r
-\r
-In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her a little beyond\r
-her wont, she took refuge in her talents, and set about scalloping,\r
-with one layer of cotton after another, one of those embroideries of the\r
-Empire and the Restoration, in which there are numerous cart-wheels.\r
-The work was clumsy, the worker cross. She had been seated at this for\r
-several hours when the door opened. Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised\r
-her nose. Lieutenant Theodule stood before her, making the regulation\r
-salute. She uttered a cry of delight. One may be old, one may be a\r
-prude, one may be pious, one may be an aunt, but it is always agreeable\r
-to see a lancer enter one's chamber.\r
-\r
-"You here, Theodule!" she exclaimed.\r
-\r
-"On my way through town, aunt."\r
-\r
-"Embrace me."\r
-\r
-"Here goes!" said Theodule.\r
-\r
-And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her writing-desk and opened\r
-it.\r
-\r
-"You will remain with us a week at least?"\r
-\r
-"I leave this very evening, aunt."\r
-\r
-"It is not possible!"\r
-\r
-"Mathematically!"\r
-\r
-"Remain, my little Theodule, I beseech you."\r
-\r
-"My heart says 'yes,' but my orders say 'no.' The matter is simple.\r
-They are changing our garrison; we have been at Melun, we are being\r
-transferred to Gaillon. It is necessary to pass through Paris in order\r
-to get from the old post to the new one. I said: 'I am going to see my\r
-aunt.'"\r
-\r
-"Here is something for your trouble."\r
-\r
-And she put ten louis into his hand.\r
-\r
-"For my pleasure, you mean to say, my dear aunt."\r
-\r
-Theodule kissed her again, and she experienced the joy of having some of\r
-the skin scratched from her neck by the braidings on his uniform.\r
-\r
-"Are you making the journey on horseback, with your regiment?" she asked\r
-him.\r
-\r
-"No, aunt. I wanted to see you. I have special permission. My servant is\r
-taking my horse; I am travelling by diligence. And, by the way, I want\r
-to ask you something."\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-"Is my cousin Marius Pontmercy travelling so, too?"\r
-\r
-"How do you know that?" said his aunt, suddenly pricked to the quick\r
-with a lively curiosity.\r
-\r
-"On my arrival, I went to the diligence to engage my seat in the coupe."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"A traveller had already come to engage a seat in the imperial. I saw\r
-his name on the card."\r
-\r
-"What name?"\r
-\r
-"Marius Pontmercy."\r
-\r
-"The wicked fellow!" exclaimed his aunt. "Ah! your cousin is not a\r
-steady lad like yourself. To think that he is to pass the night in a\r
-diligence!"\r
-\r
-"Just as I am going to do."\r
-\r
-"But you--it is your duty; in his case, it is wildness."\r
-\r
-"Bosh!" said Theodule.\r
-\r
-Here an event occurred to Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,--an idea\r
-struck her. If she had been a man, she would have slapped her brow. She\r
-apostrophized Theodule:--\r
-\r
-"Are you aware whether your cousin knows you?"\r
-\r
-"No. I have seen him; but he has never deigned to notice me."\r
-\r
-"So you are going to travel together?"\r
-\r
-"He in the imperial, I in the coupe."\r
-\r
-"Where does this diligence run?"\r
-\r
-"To Andelys."\r
-\r
-"Then that is where Marius is going?"\r
-\r
-"Unless, like myself, he should stop on the way. I get down at Vernon,\r
-in order to take the branch coach for Gaillon. I know nothing of Marius'\r
-plan of travel."\r
-\r
-"Marius! what an ugly name! what possessed them to name him Marius?\r
-While you, at least, are called Theodule."\r
-\r
-"I would rather be called Alfred," said the officer.\r
-\r
-"Listen, Theodule."\r
-\r
-"I am listening, aunt."\r
-\r
-"Pay attention."\r
-\r
-"I am paying attention."\r
-\r
-"You understand?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Well, Marius absents himself!"\r
-\r
-"Eh! eh!"\r
-\r
-"He travels."\r
-\r
-"Ah! ah!"\r
-\r
-"He spends the night out."\r
-\r
-"Oh! oh!"\r
-\r
-"We should like to know what there is behind all this."\r
-\r
-Theodule replied with the composure of a man of bronze:--\r
-\r
-"Some petticoat or other."\r
-\r
-And with that inward laugh which denotes certainty, he added:--\r
-\r
-"A lass."\r
-\r
-"That is evident," exclaimed his aunt, who thought she heard M.\r
-Gillenormand speaking, and who felt her conviction become irresistible\r
-at that word fillette, accentuated in almost the very same fashion by\r
-the granduncle and the grandnephew. She resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Do us a favor. Follow Marius a little. He does not know you, it will be\r
-easy. Since a lass there is, try to get a sight of her. You must write\r
-us the tale. It will amuse his grandfather."\r
-\r
-Theodule had no excessive taste for this sort of spying; but he was much\r
-touched by the ten louis, and he thought he saw a chance for a possible\r
-sequel. He accepted the commission and said: "As you please, aunt."\r
-\r
-And he added in an aside, to himself: "Here I am a duenna."\r
-\r
-Mademoiselle Gillenormand embraced him.\r
-\r
-"You are not the man to play such pranks, Theodule. You obey discipline,\r
-you are the slave of orders, you are a man of scruples and duty, and you\r
-would not quit your family to go and see a creature."\r
-\r
-The lancer made the pleased grimace of Cartouche when praised for his\r
-probity.\r
-\r
-Marius, on the evening following this dialogue, mounted the diligence\r
-without suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher, the\r
-first thing he did was to fall asleep. His slumber was complete and\r
-conscientious. Argus snored all night long.\r
-\r
-At daybreak, the conductor of the diligence shouted: "Vernon! relay of\r
-Vernon! Travellers for Vernon!" And Lieutenant Theodule woke.\r
-\r
-"Good," he growled, still half asleep, "this is where I get out."\r
-\r
-Then, as his memory cleared by degrees, the effect of waking, he\r
-recalled his aunt, the ten louis, and the account which he had\r
-undertaken to render of the deeds and proceedings of Marius. This set\r
-him to laughing.\r
-\r
-"Perhaps he is no longer in the coach," he thought, as he rebuttoned the\r
-waistcoat of his undress uniform. "He may have stopped at Poissy; he may\r
-have stopped at Triel; if he did not get out at Meulan, he may have got\r
-out at Mantes, unless he got out at Rolleboise, or if he did not go on\r
-as far as Pacy, with the choice of turning to the left at Evreus, or to\r
-the right at Laroche-Guyon. Run after him, aunty. What the devil am I to\r
-write to that good old soul?"\r
-\r
-At that moment a pair of black trousers descending from the imperial,\r
-made its appearance at the window of the coupe.\r
-\r
-"Can that be Marius?" said the lieutenant.\r
-\r
-It was Marius.\r
-\r
-A little peasant girl, all entangled with the horses and the postilions\r
-at the end of the vehicle, was offering flowers to the travellers. "Give\r
-your ladies flowers!" she cried.\r
-\r
-Marius approached her and purchased the finest flowers in her flat\r
-basket.\r
-\r
-"Come now," said Theodule, leaping down from the coupe, "this piques my\r
-curiosity. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers to? She\r
-must be a splendidly handsome woman for so fine a bouquet. I want to see\r
-her."\r
-\r
-And no longer in pursuance of orders, but from personal curiosity, like\r
-dogs who hunt on their own account, he set out to follow Marius.\r
-\r
-Marius paid no attention to Theodule. Elegant women descended from the\r
-diligence; he did not glance at them. He seemed to see nothing around\r
-him.\r
-\r
-"He is pretty deeply in love!" thought Theodule.\r
-\r
-Marius directed his steps towards the church.\r
-\r
-"Capital," said Theodule to himself. "Rendezvous seasoned with a bit of\r
-mass are the best sort. Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle which passes\r
-over the good God's head."\r
-\r
-On arriving at the church, Marius did not enter it, but skirted the\r
-apse. He disappeared behind one of the angles of the apse.\r
-\r
-"The rendezvous is appointed outside," said Theodule. "Let's have a look\r
-at the lass."\r
-\r
-And he advanced on the tips of his boots towards the corner which Marius\r
-had turned.\r
-\r
-On arriving there, he halted in amazement.\r
-\r
-Marius, with his forehead clasped in his hands, was kneeling upon the\r
-grass on a grave. He had strewn his bouquet there. At the extremity of\r
-the grave, on a little swelling which marked the head, there stood\r
-a cross of black wood with this name in white letters: COLONEL BARON\r
-PONTMERCY. Marius' sobs were audible.\r
-\r
-The "lass" was a grave.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE\r
-\r
-It was hither that Marius had come on the first occasion of his\r
-absenting himself from Paris. It was hither that he had come every time\r
-that M. Gillenormand had said: "He is sleeping out."\r
-\r
-Lieutenant Theodule was absolutely put out of countenance by this\r
-unexpected encounter with a sepulchre; he experienced a singular and\r
-disagreeable sensation which he was incapable of analyzing, and which\r
-was composed of respect for the tomb, mingled with respect for the\r
-colonel. He retreated, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and\r
-there was discipline in this retreat. Death appeared to him with large\r
-epaulets, and he almost made the military salute to him. Not knowing\r
-what to write to his aunt, he decided not to write at all; and it is\r
-probable that nothing would have resulted from the discovery made\r
-by Theodule as to the love affairs of Marius, if, by one of those\r
-mysterious arrangements which are so frequent in chance, the scene at\r
-Vernon had not had an almost immediate counter-shock at Paris.\r
-\r
-Marius returned from Vernon on the third day, in the middle of the\r
-morning, descended at his grandfather's door, and, wearied by the two\r
-nights spent in the diligence, and feeling the need of repairing his\r
-loss of sleep by an hour at the swimming-school, he mounted rapidly to\r
-his chamber, took merely time enough to throw off his travelling-coat,\r
-and the black ribbon which he wore round his neck, and went off to the\r
-bath.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand, who had risen betimes like all old men in good health,\r
-had heard his entrance, and had made haste to climb, as quickly as his\r
-old legs permitted, the stairs to the upper story where Marius lived,\r
-in order to embrace him, and to question him while so doing, and to find\r
-out where he had been.\r
-\r
-But the youth had taken less time to descend than the old man had to\r
-ascend, and when Father Gillenormand entered the attic, Marius was no\r
-longer there.\r
-\r
-The bed had not been disturbed, and on the bed lay, outspread, but not\r
-defiantly the great-coat and the black ribbon.\r
-\r
-"I like this better," said M. Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-And a moment later, he made his entrance into the salon, where\r
-Mademoiselle Gillenormand was already seated, busily embroidering her\r
-cart-wheels.\r
-\r
-The entrance was a triumphant one.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand held in one hand the great-coat, and in the other the\r
-neck-ribbon, and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Victory! We are about to penetrate the mystery! We are going to\r
-learn the most minute details; we are going to lay our finger on the\r
-debaucheries of our sly friend! Here we have the romance itself. I have\r
-the portrait!"\r
-\r
-In fact, a case of black shagreen, resembling a medallion portrait, was\r
-suspended from the ribbon.\r
-\r
-The old man took this case and gazed at it for some time without opening\r
-it, with that air of enjoyment, rapture, and wrath, with which a poor\r
-hungry fellow beholds an admirable dinner which is not for him, pass\r
-under his very nose.\r
-\r
-"For this evidently is a portrait. I know all about such things. That is\r
-worn tenderly on the heart. How stupid they are! Some abominable fright\r
-that will make us shudder, probably! Young men have such bad taste\r
-nowadays!"\r
-\r
-"Let us see, father," said the old spinster.\r
-\r
-The case opened by the pressure of a spring. They found in it nothing\r
-but a carefully folded paper.\r
-\r
-"From the same to the same," said M. Gillenormand, bursting with\r
-laughter. "I know what it is. A billet-doux."\r
-\r
-"Ah! let us read it!" said the aunt.\r
-\r
-And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read as\r
-follows:--\r
-\r
-"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battlefield of\r
-Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I\r
-purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will\r
-be worthy of it is a matter of course."\r
-\r
-The feelings of father and daughter cannot be described. They felt\r
-chilled as by the breath of a death's-head. They did not exchange a\r
-word.\r
-\r
-Only, M. Gillenormand said in a low voice and as though speaking to\r
-himself:--\r
-\r
-"It is the slasher's handwriting."\r
-\r
-The aunt examined the paper, turned it about in all directions, then put\r
-it back in its case.\r
-\r
-At the same moment a little oblong packet, enveloped in blue paper, fell\r
-from one of the pockets of the great-coat. Mademoiselle Gillenormand\r
-picked it up and unfolded the blue paper.\r
-\r
-It contained Marius' hundred cards. She handed one of them to M.\r
-Gillenormand, who read: Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.\r
-\r
-The old man rang the bell. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the\r
-ribbon, the case, and the coat, flung them all on the floor in the\r
-middle of the room, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Carry those duds away."\r
-\r
-A full hour passed in the most profound silence. The old man and the old\r
-spinster had seated themselves with their backs to each other, and were\r
-thinking, each on his own account, the same things, in all probability.\r
-\r
-At the expiration of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said:--"A pretty state\r
-of things!"\r
-\r
-A few moments later, Marius made his appearance. He entered. Even before\r
-he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather holding one of\r
-his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight of him, the latter\r
-exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning superiority which was\r
-something crushing:--\r
-\r
-"Well! well! well! well! well! so you are a baron now. I present you my\r
-compliments. What is the meaning of this?"\r
-\r
-Marius reddened slightly and replied:--\r
-\r
-"It means that I am the son of my father."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand ceased to laugh, and said harshly:--\r
-\r
-"I am your father."\r
-\r
-"My father," retorted Marius, with downcast eyes and a severe air, "was\r
-a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France gloriously,\r
-who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who\r
-lived in the bivouac for a quarter of a century, beneath grape-shot and\r
-bullets, in snow and mud by day, beneath rain at night, who captured two\r
-flags, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and\r
-who never committed but one mistake, which was to love too fondly two\r
-ingrates, his country and myself."\r
-\r
-This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear to hear. At the word\r
-republic, he rose, or, to speak more correctly, he sprang to his feet.\r
-Every word that Marius had just uttered produced on the visage of the\r
-old Royalist the effect of the puffs of air from a forge upon a blazing\r
-brand. From a dull hue he had turned red, from red, purple, and from\r
-purple, flame-colored.\r
-\r
-"Marius!" he cried. "Abominable child! I do not know what your father\r
-was! I do not wish to know! I know nothing about that, and I do not know\r
-him! But what I do know is, that there never was anything but scoundrels\r
-among those men! They were all rascals, assassins, red-caps, thieves! I\r
-say all! I say all! I know not one! I say all! Do you hear me, Marius!\r
-See here, you are no more a baron than my slipper is! They were all\r
-bandits in the service of Robespierre! All who served B-u-o-naparte were\r
-brigands! They were all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their\r
-legitimate king! All cowards who fled before the Prussians and the\r
-English at Waterloo! That is what I do know! Whether Monsieur your\r
-father comes in that category, I do not know! I am sorry for it, so much\r
-the worse, your humble servant!"\r
-\r
-In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand\r
-who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know what\r
-would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was the priest who beholds\r
-all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds a\r
-passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things had been\r
-uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His father had just been\r
-trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? By\r
-his grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging the\r
-other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it was\r
-equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged. On the one\r
-hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.\r
-\r
-He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated,\r
-with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised\r
-his eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice of\r
-thunder:--\r
-\r
-"Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!"\r
-\r
-Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to\r
-him.\r
-\r
-The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He\r
-wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the\r
-chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar majesty.\r
-Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the\r
-window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length\r
-of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though he had been a\r
-stone statue walking.\r
-\r
-On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this\r
-encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her\r
-with a smile that was almost calm: "A baron like this gentleman, and a\r
-bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof."\r
-\r
-And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with\r
-his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he\r
-extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:--\r
-\r
-"Be off!"\r
-\r
-Marius left the house.\r
-\r
-On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:\r
-\r
-"You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,\r
-and you will never mention his name to me."\r
-\r
-Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing\r
-what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as you instead\r
-of thou for the next three months.\r
-\r
-Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one\r
-circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.\r
-There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic\r
-dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in reality,\r
-the wrongs are not increased by them. While carrying Marius' "duds"\r
-precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather's command, Nicolette\r
-had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic staircase, which\r
-was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which contained the paper\r
-penned by the colonel. Neither paper nor case could afterwards be found.\r
-Marius was convinced that "Monsieur Gillenormand"--from that day forth\r
-he never alluded to him otherwise--had flung "his father's testament" in\r
-the fire. He knew by heart the few lines which the colonel had written,\r
-and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the paper, the writing, that\r
-sacred relic,--all that was his very heart. What had been done with it?\r
-\r
-Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and\r
-without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes\r
-in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the\r
-hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin\r
-quarter.\r
-\r
-What was to become of Marius?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC\r
-\r
-At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain\r
-revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started\r
-forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was on\r
-the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were\r
-undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,\r
-through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the\r
-compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance\r
-which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals,\r
-liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with\r
-a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create\r
-intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people\r
-adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. These\r
-were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian\r
-royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist\r
-liberalism.\r
-\r
-Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they\r
-sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They\r
-grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite\r
-realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards\r
-the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing\r
-like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams\r
-for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.\r
-\r
-These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery\r
-menaced "the established order of things," which was suspicious and\r
-underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The\r
-second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in\r
-the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the\r
-premeditation of coups d'etat.\r
-\r
-There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying\r
-organizations, like the German tugendbund and Italian Carbonarism; but\r
-here and there there were dark underminings, which were in process of\r
-throwing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; there\r
-existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the society\r
-of the Friends of the A B C.\r
-\r
-What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which had for its object\r
-apparently the education of children, in reality the elevation of man.\r
-\r
-They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,--the Abaisse,--the\r
-debased,--that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate the people.\r
-It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes\r
-serious factors in politics; witness the Castratus ad castra, which made\r
-a general of the army of Narses; witness: Barbari et Barberini; witness:\r
-Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram, etc., etc.\r
-\r
-The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society in\r
-the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie, if coteries ended in\r
-heroes. They assembled in Paris in two localities, near the fish-market,\r
-in a wine-shop called Corinthe, of which more will be heard later on,\r
-and near the Pantheon in a little cafe in the Rue Saint-Michel called\r
-the Cafe Musain, now torn down; the first of these meeting-places was\r
-close to the workingman, the second to the students.\r
-\r
-The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually held in a back\r
-room of the Cafe Musain.\r
-\r
-This hall, which was tolerably remote from the cafe, with which it was\r
-connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exit\r
-with a private stairway on the little Rue des Gres. There they smoked\r
-and drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loud\r
-tones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old map\r
-of France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,--a sign quite\r
-sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.\r
-\r
-The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were students, who were\r
-on cordial terms with the working classes. Here are the names of the\r
-principal ones. They belong, in a certain measure, to history: Enjolras,\r
-Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or\r
-Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.\r
-\r
-These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond of friendship.\r
-All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the South.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Friends of the A B C 3b4-1-abc-friends]\r
-\r
-This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths which\r
-lie behind us. At the point of this drama which we have now reached,\r
-it will not perhaps be superfluous to throw a ray of light upon these\r
-youthful heads, before the reader beholds them plunging into the shadow\r
-of a tragic adventure.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,--the reader shall\r
-see why later on,--was an only son and wealthy.\r
-\r
-Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He\r
-was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said,\r
-to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already,\r
-in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary\r
-apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a\r
-witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great\r
-affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. He\r
-was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point of\r
-view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the\r
-priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his\r
-lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A\r
-great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view.\r
-Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of\r
-the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with\r
-excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to\r
-hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and\r
-twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not\r
-seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman.\r
-He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrow\r
-the obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the\r
-Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he\r
-ignored spring, he did not hear the carolling of the birds; the bare\r
-throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved\r
-Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing\r
-except to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He\r
-chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the Republic.\r
-He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired,\r
-and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of\r
-soul. Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him!\r
-If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais,\r
-seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien,\r
-those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the\r
-wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had\r
-conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty\r
-on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown\r
-her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty\r
-cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.\r
-\r
-By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,\r
-Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the\r
-Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference--that its\r
-logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.\r
-Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but\r
-broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of\r
-general ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization"; and around the\r
-mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolution\r
-was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras.\r
-Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right.\r
-The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself\r
-to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the world\r
-more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men to\r
-attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the wise\r
-man. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane. Homo and\r
-vir, that was the exact effect of their different shades. Combeferre was\r
-as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural whiteness. He loved\r
-the word citizen, but he preferred the word man. He would gladly\r
-have said: Hombre, like the Spanish. He read everything, went to\r
-the theatres, attended the courses of public lecturers, learned the\r
-polarization of light from Arago, grew enthusiastic over a lesson in\r
-which Geoffrey Sainte-Hilaire explained the double function of the\r
-external carotid artery, and the internal, the one which makes the face,\r
-and the one which makes the brain; he kept up with what was going\r
-on, followed science step by step, compared Saint-Simon with Fourier,\r
-deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble which he found and reasoned\r
-on geology, drew from memory a silkworm moth, pointed out the faulty\r
-French in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puysegur and Deleuze,\r
-affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts;\r
-turned over the files of the Moniteur, reflected. He declared that the\r
-future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with\r
-educational questions. He desired that society should labor without\r
-relaxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level, at\r
-coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at increasing the\r
-mind in youthful persons, and he feared lest the present poverty of\r
-method, the paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two\r
-or three centuries called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official\r
-pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our\r
-colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact,\r
-a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time,\r
-thoughtful "even to chimaeras," so his friends said. He believed in\r
-all dreams, railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical\r
-operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric\r
-telegraph, the steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed\r
-by the citadels erected against the human mind in every direction, by\r
-superstition, despotism, and prejudice. He was one of those who think\r
-that science will eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief,\r
-Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and\r
-to march behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of\r
-fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and\r
-to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to\r
-bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of\r
-education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws;\r
-and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than\r
-for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but\r
-why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a\r
-still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness\r
-of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke,\r
-progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this\r
-tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into\r
-the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still\r
-more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the\r
-whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the\r
-cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In\r
-short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends,\r
-captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary\r
-adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take\r
-its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but\r
-irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have\r
-knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all\r
-its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous\r
-evolution of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated\r
-incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists\r
-in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither\r
-athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty\r
-of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington,\r
-who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that\r
-difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an\r
-eagle.\r
-\r
-Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name\r
-was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the\r
-powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study\r
-of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot\r
-of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied\r
-woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same\r
-confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of a\r
-royal head, that of Andre Chenier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,\r
-but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost an\r
-Orientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to those\r
-who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter of\r
-poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and\r
-Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,\r
-Juvenal, AEschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to\r
-Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigne to Corneille. He loved to saunter through\r
-fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds\r
-nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on\r
-the side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied or\r
-he contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,\r
-salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,\r
-education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production\r
-and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human\r
-ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those\r
-enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke\r
-softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment,\r
-dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing, and was\r
-very timid. Yet he was intrepid.\r
-\r
-Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father and\r
-mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had but\r
-one thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, to\r
-educate himself; he called this also, delivering himself. He had taught\r
-himself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by\r
-himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was\r
-immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother had\r
-failed him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profound\r
-divination of the man of the people, over what we now call the idea of\r
-the nationality, had learned history with the express object of raging\r
-with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,\r
-occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had\r
-for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He uttered\r
-these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the\r
-tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of\r
-Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,\r
-the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereign\r
-eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with that\r
-eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on the\r
-subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and that\r
-three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and pattern\r
-of all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time,\r
-have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of\r
-birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin in\r
-the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which\r
-all present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been\r
-a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed,\r
-approved, counter-signed, and copied, ne variatur, the partition of\r
-Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the\r
-first thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consulted\r
-that crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset; 1815\r
-was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly's habitual text. This\r
-poor workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she\r
-recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there is\r
-eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be\r
-Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make\r
-them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and\r
-reappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The\r
-protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a\r
-nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of rascality\r
-have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket\r
-handkerchief.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of\r
-the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards\r
-aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The\r
-particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the\r
-bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated so highly that poor de,\r
-that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin\r
-had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de\r
-Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette.\r
-Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the rest, and called himself\r
-plain Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here,\r
-and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains: "For\r
-Courfeyrac, see Tholomyes."\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called\r
-the beaute du diable of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the\r
-playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois,\r
-on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.\r
-\r
-This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to generation of the\r
-successive levies of youth who traverse the schools, who pass it from\r
-hand to hand, quasi cursores, and is almost always exactly the same;\r
-so that, as we have just pointed out, any one who had listened to\r
-Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only,\r
-Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities\r
-of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was very\r
-great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different\r
-in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a\r
-district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.\r
-\r
-Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was the\r
-centre. The others gave more light, he shed more warmth; the truth is,\r
-that he possessed all the qualities of a centre, roundness and radiance.\r
-\r
-Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the occasion\r
-of the burial of young Lallemand.\r
-\r
-Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a\r
-spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and\r
-at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow\r
-possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale\r
-blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless\r
-it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were\r
-a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the\r
-pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it;\r
-a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the law, but did not\r
-practise it. He had taken for his device: "Never a lawyer," and for his\r
-armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Every\r
-time that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned\r
-up his frock-coat,--the paletot had not yet been invented,--and took\r
-hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: "What a fine\r
-old man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: "What a monument!" In his\r
-lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occasions\r
-for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something like\r
-three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.\r
-\r
-He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for\r
-their son.\r
-\r
-He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the\r
-reason they are intelligent."\r
-\r
-Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafes; the others\r
-had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human. To saunter\r
-is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more of a\r
-thinker than appeared to view.\r
-\r
-He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C and\r
-other still unorganized groups, which were destined to take form later\r
-on.\r
-\r
-In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald member.\r
-\r
-The Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having assisted\r
-him to enter a hackney-coach on the day when he emigrated, was wont\r
-to relate, that in 1814, on his return to France, as the King was\r
-disembarking at Calais, a man handed him a petition.\r
-\r
-"What is your request?" said the King.\r
-\r
-"Sire, a post-office."\r
-\r
-"What is your name?"\r
-\r
-"L'Aigle."\r
-\r
-The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition and beheld\r
-the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonoparte orthography touched\r
-the King and he began to smile. "Sire," resumed the man with the\r
-petition, "I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds surnamed\r
-Lesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, by\r
-contraction Lesgle, and by corruption l'Aigle." This caused the King\r
-to smile broadly. Later on he gave the man the posting office of Meaux,\r
-either intentionally or accidentally.\r
-\r
-The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, or Legle, and\r
-he signed himself, Legle [de Meaux]. As an abbreviation, his companions\r
-called him Bossuet.\r
-\r
-Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed\r
-in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything. At five and twenty\r
-he was bald. His father had ended by owning a house and a field; but\r
-he, the son, had made haste to lose that house and field in a bad\r
-speculation. He had nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but\r
-all he did miscarried. Everything failed him and everybody deceived him;\r
-what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting\r
-wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered\r
-that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him every moment,\r
-hence his joviality. He said: "I live under falling tiles." He was\r
-not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was what he had\r
-foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the teasing of\r
-fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries. He was poor, but\r
-his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon reached his last sou,\r
-never his last burst of laughter. When adversity entered his doors, he\r
-saluted this old acquaintance cordially, he tapped all catastrophes on\r
-the stomach; he was familiar with fatality to the point of calling it by\r
-its nickname: "Good day, Guignon," he said to it.\r
-\r
-These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full of\r
-resources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good to\r
-him, to indulge in "unbridled extravagance." One night, he went so far\r
-as to eat a "hundred francs" in a supper with a wench, which inspired\r
-him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: "Pull off my\r
-boots, you five-louis jade."\r
-\r
-Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the profession of a\r
-lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner of Bahorel.\r
-Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged now with\r
-one, now with another, most often with Joly. Joly was studying medicine.\r
-He was two years younger than Bossuet.\r
-\r
-Joly was the "malade imaginaire" junior. What he had won in medicine was\r
-to be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he thought\r
-himself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting his tongue\r
-in the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a needle, and\r
-in his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the south, and the\r
-foot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his blood\r
-might not be interfered with by the great electric current of the globe.\r
-During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was the gayest\r
-of them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived\r
-in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable\r
-being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, called\r
-Jolllly. "You may fly away on the four L's," Jean Prouvaire said to\r
-him.[23]\r
-\r
-Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane, which is\r
-an indication of a sagacious mind.\r
-\r
-All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on the whole, can\r
-only be discussed seriously, held the same religion: Progress.\r
-\r
-All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of\r
-them became solemn when they pronounced that date: '89. Their fathers in\r
-the flesh had been, either royalists, doctrinaires, it matters not what;\r
-this confusion anterior to themselves, who were young, did not concern\r
-them at all; the pure blood of principle ran in their veins. They\r
-attached themselves, without intermediate shades, to incorruptible right\r
-and absolute duty.\r
-\r
-Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.\r
-\r
-Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was\r
-one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic's name\r
-was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this\r
-rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in\r
-anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most\r
-during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be had\r
-at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Cafe Voltaire, that\r
-good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard\r
-du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes\r
-at the Barriere de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the\r
-Barriere du Com pat. He knew the best place for everything; in\r
-addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough\r
-single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He was\r
-inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma\r
-Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as\r
-follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was not to\r
-be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the\r
-air of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make his\r
-comrades believe that he was in general demand.\r
-\r
-All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social\r
-contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity,\r
-civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing\r
-whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the\r
-intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony.\r
-This was his axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass." He\r
-sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the\r
-brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. "They are greatly in\r
-advance to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: "There is a\r
-gibbet which has been a success." A rover, a gambler, a libertine,\r
-often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly:\r
-"J'aimons les filles, et j'aimons le bon vin." Air: Vive Henri IV.\r
-\r
-However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a\r
-dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras.\r
-Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this\r
-anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To\r
-the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his\r
-ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable.\r
-A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of\r
-complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the\r
-light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad\r
-always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in\r
-its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith\r
-soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm,\r
-upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly\r
-aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having\r
-occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct. His soft,\r
-yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves\r
-to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that\r
-firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once\r
-more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were,\r
-to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His\r
-indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his\r
-heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction;\r
-for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted. There\r
-are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong\r
-side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja.\r
-They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man;\r
-their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction\r
-and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an\r
-existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was\r
-the obverse of Enjolras.\r
-\r
-One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the\r
-alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will,\r
-pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.\r
-\r
-Grantaire, Enjolras' true satellite, inhabited this circle of young men;\r
-he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he followed them\r
-everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes\r
-of wine. They tolerated him on account of his good humor.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man\r
-himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little lofty pity.\r
-Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by Enjolras,\r
-roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of\r
-Enjolras: "What fine marble!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--BLONDEAU'S FUNERAL ORATION BY BOSSUET\r
-\r
-On a certain afternoon, which had, as will be seen hereafter, some\r
-coincidence with the events heretofore related, Laigle de Meaux was to\r
-be seen leaning in a sensual manner against the doorpost of the Cafe\r
-Musain. He had the air of a caryatid on a vacation; he carried nothing\r
-but his revery, however. He was staring at the Place Saint-Michel.\r
-To lean one's back against a thing is equivalent to lying down while\r
-standing erect, which attitude is not hated by thinkers. Laigle de Meaux\r
-was pondering without melancholy, over a little misadventure which\r
-had befallen him two days previously at the law-school, and which had\r
-modified his personal plans for the future, plans which were rather\r
-indistinct in any case.\r
-\r
-Revery does not prevent a cab from passing by, nor the dreamer from\r
-taking note of that cab. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were straying about\r
-in a sort of diffuse lounging, perceived, athwart his somnambulism, a\r
-two-wheeled vehicle proceeding through the place, at a foot pace and\r
-apparently in indecision. For whom was this cabriolet? Why was it\r
-driving at a walk? Laigle took a survey. In it, beside the coachman, sat\r
-a young man, and in front of the young man lay a rather bulky hand-bag.\r
-The bag displayed to passers-by the following name inscribed in large\r
-black letters on a card which was sewn to the stuff: MARIUS PONTMERCY.\r
-\r
-This name caused Laigle to change his attitude. He drew himself up and\r
-hurled this apostrophe at the young man in the cabriolet:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!"\r
-\r
-The cabriolet thus addressed came to a halt.\r
-\r
-The young man, who also seemed deeply buried in thought, raised his\r
-eyes:--\r
-\r
-"Hey?" said he.\r
-\r
-"You are M. Marius Pontmercy?"\r
-\r
-"Certainly."\r
-\r
-"I was looking for you," resumed Laigle de Meaux.\r
-\r
-"How so?" demanded Marius; for it was he: in fact, he had just quitted\r
-his grandfather's, and had before him a face which he now beheld for the\r
-first time. "I do not know you."\r
-\r
-"Neither do I know you," responded Laigle.\r
-\r
-Marius thought he had encountered a wag, the beginning of a\r
-mystification in the open street. He was not in a very good humor at the\r
-moment. He frowned. Laigle de Meaux went on imperturbably:--\r
-\r
-"You were not at the school day before yesterday."\r
-\r
-"That is possible."\r
-\r
-"That is certain."\r
-\r
-"You are a student?" demanded Marius.\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir. Like yourself. Day before yesterday, I entered the school, by\r
-chance. You know, one does have such freaks sometimes. The professor was\r
-just calling the roll. You are not unaware that they are very ridiculous\r
-on such occasions. At the third call, unanswered, your name is erased\r
-from the list. Sixty francs in the gulf."\r
-\r
-Marius began to listen.\r
-\r
-"It was Blondeau who was making the call. You know Blondeau, he has a\r
-very pointed and very malicious nose, and he delights to scent out the\r
-absent. He slyly began with the letter P. I was not listening, not being\r
-compromised by that letter. The call was not going badly. No erasures;\r
-the universe was present. Blondeau was grieved. I said to myself:\r
-'Blondeau, my love, you will not get the very smallest sort of an\r
-execution to-day.' All at once Blondeau calls, 'Marius Pontmercy!' No\r
-one answers. Blondeau, filled with hope, repeats more loudly: 'Marius\r
-Pontmercy!' And he takes his pen. Monsieur, I have bowels of compassion.\r
-I said to myself hastily: 'Here's a brave fellow who is going to get\r
-scratched out. Attention. Here is a veritable mortal who is not exact.\r
-He's not a good student. Here is none of your heavy-sides, a student who\r
-studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and\r
-sapience, one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession.\r
-He is an honorable idler who lounges, who practises country jaunts, who\r
-cultivates the grisette, who pays court to the fair sex, who is at\r
-this very moment, perhaps, with my mistress. Let us save him. Death to\r
-Blondeau!' At that moment, Blondeau dipped his pen in, all black with\r
-erasures in the ink, cast his yellow eyes round the audience room, and\r
-repeated for the third time: 'Marius Pontmercy!' I replied: 'Present!'\r
-This is why you were not crossed off."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur!--" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"And why I was," added Laigle de Meaux.\r
-\r
-"I do not understand you," said Marius.\r
-\r
-Laigle resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Nothing is more simple. I was close to the desk to reply, and close\r
-to the door for the purpose of flight. The professor gazed at me with a\r
-certain intensity. All of a sudden, Blondeau, who must be the malicious\r
-nose alluded to by Boileau, skipped to the letter L. L is my letter. I\r
-am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle."\r
-\r
-"L'Aigle!" interrupted Marius, "what fine name!"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur, Blondeau came to this fine name, and called: 'Laigle!' I\r
-reply: 'Present!' Then Blondeau gazes at me, with the gentleness of a\r
-tiger, and says to me: 'If you are Pontmercy, you are not Laigle.' A\r
-phrase which has a disobliging air for you, but which was lugubrious\r
-only for me. That said, he crossed me off."\r
-\r
-Marius exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"I am mortified, sir--"\r
-\r
-"First of all," interposed Laigle, "I demand permission to embalm\r
-Blondeau in a few phrases of deeply felt eulogium. I will assume that he\r
-is dead. There will be no great change required in his gauntness, in\r
-his pallor, in his coldness, and in his smell. And I say: 'Erudimini\r
-qui judicatis terram. Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau\r
-Nasica, the ox of discipline, bos disciplinae, the bloodhound of the\r
-password, the angel of the roll-call, who was upright, square exact,\r
-rigid, honest, and hideous. God crossed him off as he crossed me off.'"\r
-\r
-Marius resumed:--\r
-\r
-"I am very sorry--"\r
-\r
-"Young man," said Laigle de Meaux, "let this serve you as a lesson. In\r
-future, be exact."\r
-\r
-"I really beg you a thousand pardons."\r
-\r
-"Do not expose your neighbor to the danger of having his name erased\r
-again."\r
-\r
-"I am extremely sorry--"\r
-\r
-Laigle burst out laughing.\r
-\r
-"And I am delighted. I was on the brink of becoming a lawyer. This\r
-erasure saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar. I shall not defend\r
-the widow, and I shall not attack the orphan. No more toga, no more\r
-stage. Here is my erasure all ready for me. It is to you that I am\r
-indebted for it, Monsieur Pontmercy. I intend to pay a solemn call of\r
-thanks upon you. Where do you live?"\r
-\r
-"In this cab," said Marius.\r
-\r
-"A sign of opulence," retorted Laigle calmly. "I congratulate you. You\r
-have there a rent of nine thousand francs per annum."\r
-\r
-At that moment, Courfeyrac emerged from the cafe.\r
-\r
-Marius smiled sadly.\r
-\r
-"I have paid this rent for the last two hours, and I aspire to get rid\r
-of it; but there is a sort of history attached to it, and I don't know\r
-where to go."\r
-\r
-"Come to my place, sir," said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"I have the priority," observed Laigle, "but I have no home."\r
-\r
-"Hold your tongue, Bossuet," said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"Bossuet," said Marius, "but I thought that your name was Laigle."\r
-\r
-"De Meaux," replied Laigle; "by metaphor, Bossuet."\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac entered the cab.\r
-\r
-"Coachman," said he, "hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques."\r
-\r
-And that very evening, Marius found himself installed in a chamber of\r
-the hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques side by side with Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--MARIUS' ASTONISHMENTS\r
-\r
-In a few days, Marius had become Courfeyrac's friend. Youth is the\r
-season for prompt welding and the rapid healing of scars. Marius\r
-breathed freely in Courfeyrac's society, a decidedly new thing for him.\r
-Courfeyrac put no questions to him. He did not even think of such a\r
-thing. At that age, faces disclose everything on the spot. Words are\r
-superfluous. There are young men of whom it can be said that their\r
-countenances chatter. One looks at them and one knows them.\r
-\r
-One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly addressed this interrogation\r
-to him:--\r
-\r
-"By the way, have you any political opinions?"\r
-\r
-"The idea!" said Marius, almost affronted by the question.\r
-\r
-"What are you?"\r
-\r
-"A democrat-Bonapartist."\r
-\r
-"The gray hue of a reassured rat," said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Cafe Musain.\r
-Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: "I must give you your entry\r
-to the revolution." And he led him to the hall of the Friends of the A B\r
-C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this simple word which\r
-Marius did not understand: "A pupil."\r
-\r
-Marius had fallen into a wasps'-nest of wits. However, although he was\r
-silent and grave, he was, none the less, both winged and armed.\r
-\r
-Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy, and to\r
-asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered by this covey\r
-of young men around him. All these various initiatives solicited his\r
-attention at once, and pulled him about. The tumultuous movements of\r
-these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes,\r
-in his trouble, they fled so far from him, that he had difficulty in\r
-recovering them. He heard them talk of philosophy, of literature, of\r
-art, of history, of religion, in unexpected fashion. He caught glimpses\r
-of strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in proper perspective,\r
-he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos that he grasped. On\r
-abandoning his grandfather's opinions for the opinions of his father,\r
-he had supposed himself fixed; he now suspected, with uneasiness, and\r
-without daring to avow it to himself, that he was not. The angle\r
-at which he saw everything began to be displaced anew. A certain\r
-oscillation set all the horizons of his brains in motion. An odd\r
-internal upsetting. He almost suffered from it.\r
-\r
-It seemed as though there were no "consecrated things" for those young\r
-men. Marius heard singular propositions on every sort of subject, which\r
-embarrassed his still timid mind.\r
-\r
-A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy\r
-from the ancient repertory called classic: "Down with tragedy dear to\r
-the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:--\r
-\r
-"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the\r
-bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has\r
-a reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of\r
-AEschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in\r
-nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is not\r
-a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which\r
-are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh, there is\r
-the duck. Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I do\r
-not see why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique\r
-tragedy."\r
-\r
-Or chance decreed that Marius should traverse Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau\r
-between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac took his arm:--\r
-\r
-"Pay attention. This is the Rue Platriere, now called Rue Jean-Jacques\r
-Rousseau, on account of a singular household which lived in it sixty\r
-years ago. This consisted of Jean-Jacques and Therese. From time\r
-to time, little beings were born there. Therese gave birth to them,\r
-Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings."\r
-\r
-And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly:--\r
-\r
-"Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied\r
-his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people."\r
-\r
-Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor.\r
-Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said\r
-"Bonaparte." Enjolras pronounced it "Buonaparte."\r
-\r
-Marius was vaguely surprised. Initium sapientiae.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFE MUSAIN\r
-\r
-One of the conversations among the young men, at which Marius was\r
-present and in which he sometimes joined, was a veritable shock to his\r
-mind.\r
-\r
-This took place in the back room of the Cafe Musain. Nearly all the\r
-Friends of the A B C had convened that evening. The argand lamp was\r
-solemnly lighted. They talked of one thing and another, without passion\r
-and with noise. With the exception of Enjolras and Marius, who held\r
-their peace, all were haranguing rather at hap-hazard. Conversations\r
-between comrades sometimes are subject to these peaceable tumults. It\r
-was a game and an uproar as much as a conversation. They tossed words\r
-to each other and caught them up in turn. They were chattering in all\r
-quarters.\r
-\r
-No woman was admitted to this back room, except Louison, the dish-washer\r
-of the cafe, who passed through it from time to time, to go to her\r
-washing in the "lavatory."\r
-\r
-Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he had\r
-taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top of his lungs,\r
-and shouting:--\r
-\r
-"I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg has an\r
-attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which will\r
-be applied to it. I want a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a\r
-hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is\r
-worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in\r
-which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique\r
-reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: 'All is vanity.'\r
-I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing\r
-to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up\r
-of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a\r
-professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary\r
-is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect, a\r
-jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche. Vanity has a\r
-right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with\r
-his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with\r
-his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are\r
-called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally\r
-of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a\r
-horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself\r
-up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef. As for\r
-the intrinsic value of people, it is no longer respectable in the least.\r
-Listen to the panegyric which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white\r
-is ferocious; if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give\r
-the dove! A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous\r
-than the asp and the cobra. It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise\r
-I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing. For instance,\r
-I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of\r
-daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples;\r
-rapin[24] is the masculine of rapine. So much for myself; as for\r
-the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your\r
-perfections, excellencies, and qualities. Every good quality tends\r
-towards a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous man is next\r
-door to the prodigal, the brave man rubs elbows with the braggart; he\r
-who says very pious says a trifle bigoted; there are just as many vices\r
-in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes' cloak. Whom do you admire, the\r
-slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the\r
-slayer. Long live Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue,\r
-granted, but madness also. There are queer spots on those great men. The\r
-Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy.\r
-This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion,\r
-who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg,\r
-Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion\r
-left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was\r
-in love with the one, Nero with the other. All history is nothing but\r
-wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The\r
-battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; the Tolbiac of Clovis and\r
-the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each other as two drops of water.\r
-I don't attach much importance to victory. Nothing is so stupid as to\r
-conquer; true glory lies in convincing. But try to prove something! If\r
-you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering, what\r
-wretchedness! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys\r
-success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace. Therefore I disdain\r
-the human race. Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you wish me\r
-to begin admiring the peoples? What people, if you please? Shall it be\r
-Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by, slew Phocion,\r
-as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such an extent that\r
-Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: "His urine attracts the bees." The most\r
-prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas,\r
-who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to load his shoes with\r
-lead in order not to be blown away by the wind. There stood on the great\r
-square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny;\r
-this statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented\r
-a trip. That sums up Greece and glory. Let us pass on to others. Shall I\r
-admire England? Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris?\r
-I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of\r
-London? I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is\r
-the headquarters of wretchedness. There are a hundred deaths a year of\r
-hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion. I add,\r
-as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of\r
-roses and blue spectacles. A fig then for England! If I do not admire\r
-John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I have but little taste for\r
-that slave-holding brother. Take away Time is money, what remains of\r
-England? Take away Cotton is king, what remains of America? Germany is\r
-the lymph, Italy is the bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia?\r
-Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I admit that Russia has its\r
-beauties, among others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots.\r
-Their health is delicate. A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter,\r
-a strangled Paul, another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans\r
-strangled, with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils\r
-poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia\r
-is in a condition of flagrant insalubrity. All civilized peoples offer\r
-this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized\r
-war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the\r
-brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding\r
-of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass. 'Bah!' you will say to\r
-me, 'but Europe is certainly better than Asia?' I admit that Asia is a\r
-farce; but I do not precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand\r
-Lama, you peoples of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and\r
-your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty\r
-chemise of Queen Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen\r
-of the human race, I tell you, not a bit of it! It is at Brussels that\r
-the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the\r
-most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at\r
-Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are\r
-all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short. In Paris,\r
-even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a\r
-rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the\r
-Piraeus. Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the ragpickers\r
-are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The\r
-Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis,\r
-mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers,\r
-caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat\r
-at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll\r
-naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison. Good\r
-day."\r
-\r
-Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching\r
-at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of\r
-the Cafe Musain.\r
-\r
-Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him,\r
-and Grantaire began again worse than ever:--\r
-\r
-"Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with\r
-your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-a-brac. I excuse\r
-you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish\r
-me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a\r
-success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal. A\r
-crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch,\r
-Femme--woman--rhymes with infame,--infamous. Yes, I have the spleen,\r
-complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and\r
-I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to\r
-death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!"\r
-\r
-"Silence then, capital R!" resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point\r
-of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a\r
-phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:--\r
-\r
-"--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an\r
-amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms\r
-of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an\r
-equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving\r
-the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well\r
-as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses, leases,\r
-freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--"\r
-\r
-"Echo, plaintive nymph," hummed Grantaire.\r
-\r
-Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand\r
-and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville was\r
-being sketched out.\r
-\r
-This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads\r
-at work touched each other: "Let us begin by finding names. When one has\r
-the names, one finds the subject."\r
-\r
-"That is true. Dictate. I will write."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Dorimon."\r
-\r
-"An independent gentleman?"\r
-\r
-"Of course."\r
-\r
-"His daughter, Celestine."\r
-\r
-"--tine. What next?"\r
-\r
-"Colonel Sainval."\r
-\r
-"Sainval is stale. I should say Valsin."\r
-\r
-Beside the vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking\r
-advantage of the uproar to talk low, was discussing a duel. An old\r
-fellow of thirty was counselling a young one of eighteen, and explaining\r
-to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.\r
-\r
-"The deuce! Look out for yourself. He is a fine swordsman. His play is\r
-neat. He has the attack, no wasted feints, wrist, dash, lightning, a\r
-just parade, mathematical parries, bigre! and he is left-handed."\r
-\r
-In the angle opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes,\r
-and talking of love.\r
-\r
-"You are in luck, that you are," Joly was saying. "You have a mistress\r
-who is always laughing."\r
-\r
-"That is a fault of hers," returned Bahorel. "One's mistress does wrong\r
-to laugh. That encourages one to deceive her. To see her gay removes\r
-your remorse; if you see her sad, your conscience pricks you."\r
-\r
-"Ingrate! a woman who laughs is such a good thing! And you never\r
-quarrel!"\r
-\r
-"That is because of the treaty which we have made. On forming our little\r
-Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier, which we never\r
-cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs to Vaud, on the\r
-side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace."\r
-\r
-"Peace is happiness digesting."\r
-\r
-"And you, Jolllly, where do you stand in your entanglement with\r
-Mamselle--you know whom I mean?"\r
-\r
-"She sulks at me with cruel patience."\r
-\r
-"Yet you are a lover to soften the heart with gauntness."\r
-\r
-"Alas!"\r
-\r
-"In your place, I would let her alone."\r
-\r
-"That is easy enough to say."\r
-\r
-"And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?"\r
-\r
-"Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with\r
-tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled,\r
-with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her."\r
-\r
-"My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant,\r
-and produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of\r
-double-milled cloth at Staub's. That will assist."\r
-\r
-"At what price?" shouted Grantaire.\r
-\r
-The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion. Pagan\r
-mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology. The question was\r
-about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, out of pure\r
-romanticism.\r
-\r
-Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth,\r
-a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both\r
-laughing and lyric.\r
-\r
-"Let us not insult the gods," said he. "The gods may not have taken\r
-their departure. Jupiter does not impress me as dead. The gods are\r
-dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, such as it is to-day, after the\r
-flight of these dreams, we still find all the grand old pagan myths.\r
-Such and such a mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the\r
-Vignemale, for example, is still to me the headdress of Cybele; it has\r
-not been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to breathe into\r
-the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping up the holes in turn with his\r
-fingers, and I have always believed that Io had something to do with the\r
-cascade of Pissevache."\r
-\r
-In the last corner, they were talking politics. The Charter which had\r
-been granted was getting roughly handled. Combeferre was upholding it\r
-weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it. On the table\r
-lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter. Courfeyrac had\r
-seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his arguments the\r
-rattling of this sheet of paper.\r
-\r
-"In the first place, I won't have any kings; if it were only from an\r
-economical point of view, I don't want any; a king is a parasite. One\r
-does not have kings gratis. Listen to this: the dearness of kings. At\r
-the death of Francois I., the national debt of France amounted to an\r
-income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two\r
-milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which\r
-was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five\r
-hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards.\r
-In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is\r
-but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition, to soften\r
-the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly\r
-from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional\r
-fictions,--what detestable reasons all those are! No! no! let us never\r
-enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles dwindle and pale\r
-in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant\r
-from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14.\r
-By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches\r
-back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A charter is a mask; the lie\r
-lurks beneath it. A people which accepts a charter abdicates. The law is\r
-only the law when entire. No! no charter!"\r
-\r
-It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace. This\r
-was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor\r
-Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire. The paper\r
-flashed up. Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burn\r
-philosophically, and contented himself with saying:--\r
-\r
-"The charter metamorphosed into flame."\r
-\r
-And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called entrain,\r
-and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad taste,\r
-good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue, mounting\r
-together and crossing from all points of the room, produced a sort of\r
-merry bombardment over their heads.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON\r
-\r
-The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable\r
-property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the lightning\r
-flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows. The burst of laughter\r
-starts from a tender feeling.\r
-\r
-At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry. Impulses depend on\r
-the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices\r
-to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with\r
-abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly. Chance is the\r
-stage-manager of such conversations.\r
-\r
-A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly\r
-traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire,\r
-Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.\r
-\r
-How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it\r
-suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We\r
-have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the midst of the\r
-uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe to Combeferre,\r
-with this date:--\r
-\r
-"June 18th, 1815, Waterloo."\r
-\r
-At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a table,\r
-beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his chin, and\r
-began to gaze fixedly at the audience.\r
-\r
-"Pardieu!" exclaimed Courfeyrac ("Parbleu" was falling into disuse\r
-at this period), "that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is\r
-Bonaparte's fatal number. Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind, you\r
-have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity,\r
-that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement."\r
-\r
-Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence and\r
-addressed this remark to Combeferre:--\r
-\r
-"You mean to say, the crime and the expiation."\r
-\r
-This word crime overpassed the measure of what Marius, who was already\r
-greatly agitated by the abrupt evocation of Waterloo, could accept.\r
-\r
-He rose, walked slowly to the map of France spread out on the wall, and\r
-at whose base an island was visible in a separate compartment, laid his\r
-finger on this compartment and said:--\r
-\r
-"Corsica, a little island which has rendered France very great."\r
-\r
-This was like a breath of icy air. All ceased talking. They felt that\r
-something was on the point of occurring.\r
-\r
-Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming an attitude of the torso\r
-to which he was addicted. He gave it up to listen.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, whose blue eye was not fixed on any one, and who seemed to be\r
-gazing at space, replied, without glancing at Marius:--\r
-\r
-"France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great because she is\r
-France. Quia nomina leo."\r
-\r
-Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras, and his\r
-voice burst forth with a vibration which came from a quiver of his very\r
-being:--\r
-\r
-"God forbid that I should diminish France! But amalgamating Napoleon\r
-with her is not diminishing her. Come! let us argue the question. I am\r
-a new comer among you, but I will confess that you amaze me. Where do we\r
-stand? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us come to an explanation\r
-about the Emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte, accenting the u like the\r
-Royalists. I warn you that my grandfather does better still; he\r
-says Buonaparte'. I thought you were young men. Where, then, is your\r
-enthusiasm? And what are you doing with it? Whom do you admire, if you\r
-do not admire the Emperor? And what more do you want? If you will\r
-have none of that great man, what great men would you like? He had\r
-everything. He was complete. He had in his brain the sum of human\r
-faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Caesar, his\r
-conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the\r
-thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins\r
-are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of\r
-Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids,\r
-at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he\r
-replied to Laplace, in the Council of State be held his own against\r
-Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the\r
-chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal\r
-with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he\r
-went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything;\r
-he knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing\r
-good-naturedly beside the cradle of his little child; and all at once,\r
-frightened Europe lent an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks of\r
-artillery rumbled, pontoons stretched over the rivers, clouds of cavalry\r
-galloped in the storm, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones in every\r
-direction, the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map, the sound\r
-of a superhuman sword was heard, as it was drawn from its sheath; they\r
-beheld him, him, rise erect on the horizon with a blazing brand in his\r
-hand, and a glow in his eyes, unfolding amid the thunder, his two wings,\r
-the grand army and the old guard, and he was the archangel of war!"\r
-\r
-All held their peace, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always\r
-produces somewhat the effect of acquiescence, of the enemy being driven\r
-to the wall. Marius continued with increased enthusiasm, and almost\r
-without pausing for breath:--\r
-\r
-"Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation to be\r
-the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France and when it\r
-adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear and to reign,\r
-to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places all capitals, to\r
-take his grenadiers and to make kings of them, to decree the falls of\r
-dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at the pace of a charge; to make\r
-you feel that when you threaten you lay your hand on the hilt of the\r
-sword of God; to follow in a single man, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne;\r
-to be the people of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling\r
-announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to\r
-rouse you in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious words\r
-which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! To cause\r
-constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant from the\r
-zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant to the\r
-Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the grand\r
-army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a mountain\r
-sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to strike\r
-with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through glory,\r
-to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer\r
-the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what\r
-greater thing is there?"\r
-\r
-"To be free," said Combeferre.\r
-\r
-Marius lowered his head in his turn; that cold and simple word had\r
-traversed his epic effusion like a blade of steel, and he felt it\r
-vanishing within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer\r
-there. Probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis, he had\r
-just taken his departure, and all, with the exception of Enjolras,\r
-had followed him. The room had been emptied. Enjolras, left alone with\r
-Marius, was gazing gravely at him. Marius, however, having rallied his\r
-ideas to some extent, did not consider himself beaten; there lingered in\r
-him a trace of inward fermentation which was on the point, no doubt, of\r
-translating itself into syllogisms arrayed against Enjolras, when all of\r
-a sudden, they heard some one singing on the stairs as he went. It was\r
-Combeferre, and this is what he was singing:--\r
-\r
- "Si Cesar m'avait donne[25]\r
- La gloire et la guerre,\r
- Et qu'il me fallait quitter\r
- L'amour de ma mere,\r
- Je dirais au grand Cesar:\r
- Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,\r
- J'aime mieux ma mere, o gue!\r
- J'aime mieux ma mere!"\r
-\r
-The wild and tender accents with which Combeferre sang communicated to\r
-this couplet a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtfully, and\r
-with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: "My\r
-mother?--"\r
-\r
-At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder.\r
-\r
-"Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--RES ANGUSTA\r
-\r
-That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy shadow\r
-in his soul. He felt what the earth may possibly feel, at the moment\r
-when it is torn open with the iron, in order that grain may be deposited\r
-within it; it feels only the wound; the quiver of the germ and the joy\r
-of the fruit only arrive later.\r
-\r
-Marius was gloomy. He had but just acquired a faith; must he then reject\r
-it already? He affirmed to himself that he would not. He declared to\r
-himself that he would not doubt, and he began to doubt in spite of\r
-himself. To stand between two religions, from one of which you have\r
-not as yet emerged, and another into which you have not yet entered, is\r
-intolerable; and twilight is pleasing only to bat-like souls. Marius\r
-was clear-eyed, and he required the true light. The half-lights of doubt\r
-pained him. Whatever may have been his desire to remain where he was,\r
-he could not halt there, he was irresistibly constrained to continue, to\r
-advance, to examine, to think, to march further. Whither would this lead\r
-him? He feared, after having taken so many steps which had brought him\r
-nearer to his father, to now take a step which should estrange him from\r
-that father. His discomfort was augmented by all the reflections which\r
-occurred to him. An escarpment rose around him. He was in accord neither\r
-with his grandfather nor with his friends; daring in the eyes of\r
-the one, he was behind the times in the eyes of the others, and he\r
-recognized the fact that he was doubly isolated, on the side of age and\r
-on the side of youth. He ceased to go to the Cafe Musain.\r
-\r
-In the troubled state of his conscience, he no longer thought of\r
-certain serious sides of existence. The realities of life do not allow\r
-themselves to be forgotten. They soon elbowed him abruptly.\r
-\r
-One morning, the proprietor of the hotel entered Marius' room and said\r
-to him:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Courfeyrac answered for you."\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"But I must have my money."\r
-\r
-"Request Courfeyrac to come and talk with me," said Marius.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac having made his appearance, the host left them. Marius then\r
-told him what it had not before occurred to him to relate, that he was\r
-the same as alone in the world, and had no relatives.\r
-\r
-"What is to become of you?" said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"I do not know in the least," replied Marius.\r
-\r
-"What are you going to do?"\r
-\r
-"I do not know."\r
-\r
-"Have you any money?"\r
-\r
-"Fifteen francs."\r
-\r
-"Do you want me to lend you some?"\r
-\r
-"Never."\r
-\r
-"Have you clothes?"\r
-\r
-"Here is what I have."\r
-\r
-"Have you trinkets?"\r
-\r
-"A watch."\r
-\r
-"Silver?"\r
-\r
-"Gold; here it is."\r
-\r
-"I know a clothes-dealer who will take your frock-coat and a pair of\r
-trousers."\r
-\r
-"That is good."\r
-\r
-"You will then have only a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat and a\r
-coat."\r
-\r
-"And my boots."\r
-\r
-"What! you will not go barefoot? What opulence!"\r
-\r
-"That will be enough."\r
-\r
-"I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch."\r
-\r
-"That is good."\r
-\r
-"No; it is not good. What will you do after that?"\r
-\r
-"Whatever is necessary. Anything honest, that is to say."\r
-\r
-"Do you know English?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Do you know German?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"So much the worse."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"Because one of my friends, a publisher, is getting up a sort of an\r
-encyclopaedia, for which you might have translated English or German\r
-articles. It is badly paid work, but one can live by it."\r
-\r
-"I will learn English and German."\r
-\r
-"And in the meanwhile?"\r
-\r
-"In the meanwhile I will live on my clothes and my watch."\r
-\r
-The clothes-dealer was sent for. He paid twenty francs for the cast-off\r
-garments. They went to the watchmaker's. He bought the watch for\r
-forty-five francs.\r
-\r
-"That is not bad," said Marius to Courfeyrac, on their return to the\r
-hotel, "with my fifteen francs, that makes eighty."\r
-\r
-"And the hotel bill?" observed Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"Hello, I had forgotten that," said Marius.\r
-\r
-The landlord presented his bill, which had to be paid on the spot. It\r
-amounted to seventy francs.\r
-\r
-"I have ten francs left," said Marius.\r
-\r
-"The deuce," exclaimed Courfeyrac, "you will eat up five francs while\r
-you are learning English, and five while learning German. That will be\r
-swallowing a tongue very fast, or a hundred sous very slowly."\r
-\r
-In the meantime Aunt Gillenormand, a rather good-hearted person at\r
-bottom in difficulties, had finally hunted up Marius' abode.\r
-\r
-One morning, on his return from the law-school, Marius found a letter\r
-from his aunt, and the sixty pistoles, that is to say, six hundred\r
-francs in gold, in a sealed box.\r
-\r
-Marius sent back the thirty louis to his aunt, with a respectful letter,\r
-in which he stated that he had sufficient means of subsistence and that\r
-he should be able thenceforth to supply all his needs. At that moment,\r
-he had three francs left.\r
-\r
-His aunt did not inform his grandfather of this refusal for fear of\r
-exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: "Let me never hear the name\r
-of that blood-drinker again!"\r
-\r
-Marius left the hotel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, as he did not wish to\r
-run in debt there.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--MARIUS INDIGENT\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Excellence of Misfortune 3b5-1-misfortune]\r
-\r
-\r
-Life became hard for Marius. It was nothing to eat his clothes and his\r
-watch. He ate of that terrible, inexpressible thing that is called de la\r
-vache enrage; that is to say, he endured great hardships and privations.\r
-A terrible thing it is, containing days without bread, nights without\r
-sleep, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a fire, weeks without\r
-work, a future without hope, a coat out at the elbows, an old hat which\r
-evokes the laughter of young girls, a door which one finds locked on one\r
-at night because one's rent is not paid, the insolence of the porter\r
-and the cook-shop man, the sneers of neighbors, humiliations, dignity\r
-trampled on, work of whatever nature accepted, disgusts, bitterness,\r
-despondency. Marius learned how all this is eaten, and how such are\r
-often the only things which one has to devour. At that moment of his\r
-existence when a man needs his pride, because he needs love, he felt\r
-that he was jeered at because he was badly dressed, and ridiculous\r
-because he was poor. At the age when youth swells the heart with\r
-imperial pride, he dropped his eyes more than once on his dilapidated\r
-boots, and he knew the unjust shame and the poignant blushes of\r
-wretchedness. Admirable and terrible trial from which the feeble emerge\r
-base, from which the strong emerge sublime. A crucible into which\r
-destiny casts a man, whenever it desires a scoundrel or a demi-god.\r
-\r
-For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances\r
-of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by\r
-step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and\r
-mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no\r
-renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune,\r
-isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have\r
-their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the\r
-heroes who win renown.\r
-\r
-Firm and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a\r
-step-mother, is sometimes a mother; destitution gives birth to might of\r
-soul and spirit; distress is the nurse of pride; unhappiness is a good\r
-milk for the magnanimous.\r
-\r
-There came a moment in Marius' life, when he swept his own landing, when\r
-he bought his sou's worth of Brie cheese at the fruiterer's, when he\r
-waited until twilight had fallen to slip into the baker's and purchase\r
-a loaf, which he carried off furtively to his attic as though he had\r
-stolen it. Sometimes there could be seen gliding into the butcher's shop\r
-on the corner, in the midst of the bantering cooks who elbowed him, an\r
-awkward young man, carrying big books under his arm, who had a timid yet\r
-angry air, who, on entering, removed his hat from a brow whereon stood\r
-drops of perspiration, made a profound bow to the butcher's astonished\r
-wife, asked for a mutton cutlet, paid six or seven sous for it, wrapped\r
-it up in a paper, put it under his arm, between two books, and went\r
-away. It was Marius. On this cutlet, which he cooked for himself, he\r
-lived for three days.\r
-\r
-On the first day he ate the meat, on the second he ate the fat, on the\r
-third he gnawed the bone. Aunt Gillenormand made repeated attempts, and\r
-sent him the sixty pistoles several times. Marius returned them on every\r
-occasion, saying that he needed nothing.\r
-\r
-He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution which we\r
-have just described was effected within him. From that time forth, he\r
-had not put off his black garments. But his garments were quitting him.\r
-The day came when he had no longer a coat. The trousers would go next.\r
-What was to be done? Courfeyrac, to whom he had, on his side, done some\r
-good turns, gave him an old coat. For thirty sous, Marius got it turned\r
-by some porter or other, and it was a new coat. But this coat was green.\r
-Then Marius ceased to go out until after nightfall. This made his coat\r
-black. As he wished always to appear in mourning, he clothed himself\r
-with the night.\r
-\r
-In spite of all this, he got admitted to practice as a lawyer. He was\r
-supposed to live in Courfeyrac's room, which was decent, and where\r
-a certain number of law-books backed up and completed by several\r
-dilapidated volumes of romance, passed as the library required by the\r
-regulations. He had his letters addressed to Courfeyrac's quarters.\r
-\r
-When Marius became a lawyer, he informed his grandfather of the fact\r
-in a letter which was cold but full of submission and respect. M.\r
-Gillenormand trembled as he took the letter, read it, tore it in four\r
-pieces, and threw it into the waste-basket. Two or three days later,\r
-Mademoiselle Gillenormand heard her father, who was alone in his room,\r
-talking aloud to himself. He always did this whenever he was greatly\r
-agitated. She listened, and the old man was saying: "If you were not a\r
-fool, you would know that one cannot be a baron and a lawyer at the same\r
-time."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--MARIUS POOR\r
-\r
-It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else. It ends by\r
-becoming bearable. It finally assumes a form, and adjusts itself. One\r
-vegetates, that is to say, one develops in a certain meagre fashion,\r
-which is, however, sufficient for life. This is the mode in which the\r
-existence of Marius Pontmercy was arranged:\r
-\r
-He had passed the worst straits; the narrow pass was opening out a\r
-little in front of him. By dint of toil, perseverance, courage, and\r
-will, he had managed to draw from his work about seven hundred francs a\r
-year. He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had\r
-put him in communication with his friend the publisher, Marius filled\r
-the modest post of utility man in the literature of the publishing\r
-house. He drew up prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated\r
-editions, compiled biographies, etc.; net product, year in and year\r
-out, seven hundred francs. He lived on it. How? Not so badly. We will\r
-explain.\r
-\r
-Marius occupied in the Gorbeau house, for an annual sum of thirty\r
-francs, a den minus a fireplace, called a cabinet, which contained only\r
-the most indispensable articles of furniture. This furniture belonged\r
-to him. He gave three francs a month to the old principal tenant to come\r
-and sweep his hole, and to bring him a little hot water every morning,\r
-a fresh egg, and a penny roll. He breakfasted on this egg and roll. His\r
-breakfast varied in cost from two to four sous, according as eggs\r
-were dear or cheap. At six o'clock in the evening he descended the\r
-Rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau's, opposite Basset's, the\r
-stamp-dealer's, on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He ate no soup.\r
-He took a six-sou plate of meat, a half-portion of vegetables for three\r
-sous, and a three-sou dessert. For three sous he got as much bread as\r
-he wished. As for wine, he drank water. When he paid at the desk\r
-where Madam Rousseau, at that period still plump and rosy majestically\r
-presided, he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a\r
-smile. Then he went away. For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.\r
-\r
-This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many water carafes\r
-were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a restaurant. It no\r
-longer exists. The proprietor had a fine nickname: he was called\r
-Rousseau the Aquatic.\r
-\r
-Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost him twenty\r
-sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add\r
-the thirty francs for rent, and the thirty-six francs to the old woman,\r
-plus a few trifling expenses; for four hundred and fifty francs, Marius\r
-was fed, lodged, and waited on. His clothing cost him a hundred francs,\r
-his linen fifty francs, his washing fifty francs; the whole did not\r
-exceed six hundred and fifty francs. He was rich. He sometimes lent ten\r
-francs to a friend. Courfeyrac had once been able to borrow sixty francs\r
-of him. As far as fire was concerned, as Marius had no fireplace, he had\r
-"simplified matters."\r
-\r
-Marius always had two complete suits of clothes, the one old, "for every\r
-day"; the other, brand new for special occasions. Both were black. He\r
-had but three shirts, one on his person, the second in the commode, and\r
-the third in the washerwoman's hands. He renewed them as they wore out.\r
-They were always ragged, which caused him to button his coat to the\r
-chin.\r
-\r
-It had required years for Marius to attain to this flourishing\r
-condition. Hard years; difficult, some of them, to traverse, others to\r
-climb. Marius had not failed for a single day. He had endured everything\r
-in the way of destitution; he had done everything except contract debts.\r
-He did himself the justice to say that he had never owed any one a sou.\r
-A debt was, to him, the beginning of slavery. He even said to himself,\r
-that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only\r
-your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to\r
-it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had\r
-passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that,\r
-if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of\r
-soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality\r
-or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a\r
-deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against\r
-it. His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was timid even to rudeness.\r
-\r
-During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even\r
-uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.\r
-The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it. It is the\r
-only bird which bears up its own cage.\r
-\r
-Besides his father's name, another name was graven in Marius' heart,\r
-the name of Thenardier. Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature,\r
-surrounded with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts,\r
-he owed his father's life,--that intrepid sergeant who had saved the\r
-colonel amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo. He never\r
-separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father, and\r
-he associated them in his veneration. It was a sort of worship in two\r
-steps, with the grand altar for the colonel and the lesser one for\r
-Thenardier. What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude towards\r
-Thenardier, was the idea of the distress into which he knew that\r
-Thenardier had fallen, and which had engulfed the latter. Marius had\r
-learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate\r
-inn-keeper. Since that time, he had made unheard-of efforts to find\r
-traces of him and to reach him in that dark abyss of misery in which\r
-Thenardier had disappeared. Marius had beaten the whole country; he\r
-had gone to Chelles, to Bondy, to Gourney, to Nogent, to Lagny. He had\r
-persisted for three years, expending in these explorations the little\r
-money which he had laid by. No one had been able to give him any news of\r
-Thenardier: he was supposed to have gone abroad. His creditors had also\r
-sought him, with less love than Marius, but with as much assiduity, and\r
-had not been able to lay their hands on him. Marius blamed himself, and\r
-was almost angry with himself for his lack of success in his researches.\r
-It was the only debt left him by the colonel, and Marius made it a\r
-matter of honor to pay it. "What," he thought, "when my father lay dying\r
-on the field of battle, did Thenardier contrive to find him amid the\r
-smoke and the grape-shot, and bear him off on his shoulders, and yet he\r
-owed him nothing, and I, who owe so much to Thenardier, cannot join him\r
-in this shadow where he is lying in the pangs of death, and in my\r
-turn bring him back from death to life! Oh! I will find him!" To find\r
-Thenardier, in fact, Marius would have given one of his arms, to rescue\r
-him from his misery, he would have sacrificed all his blood. To see\r
-Thenardier, to render Thenardier some service, to say to him: "You do\r
-not know me; well, I do know you! Here I am. Dispose of me!" This was\r
-Marius' sweetest and most magnificent dream.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--MARIUS GROWN UP\r
-\r
-At this epoch, Marius was twenty years of age. It was three years since\r
-he had left his grandfather. Both parties had remained on the same\r
-terms, without attempting to approach each other, and without seeking to\r
-see each other. Besides, what was the use of seeing each other? Marius\r
-was the brass vase, while Father Gillenormand was the iron pot.\r
-\r
-We admit that Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather's heart. He had\r
-imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him, and that that crusty,\r
-harsh, and smiling old fellow who cursed, shouted, and stormed\r
-and brandished his cane, cherished for him, at the most, only that\r
-affection, which is at once slight and severe, of the dotards of comedy.\r
-Marius was in error. There are fathers who do not love their children;\r
-there exists no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. At bottom,\r
-as we have said, M. Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him after\r
-his own fashion, with an accompaniment of snappishness and boxes on the\r
-ear; but, this child once gone, he felt a black void in his heart;\r
-he would allow no one to mention the child to him, and all the while\r
-secretly regretted that he was so well obeyed. At first, he hoped that\r
-this Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist, this Septembrist, would\r
-return. But the weeks passed by, years passed; to M. Gillenormand's\r
-great despair, the "blood-drinker" did not make his appearance. "I could\r
-not do otherwise than turn him out," said the grandfather to himself,\r
-and he asked himself: "If the thing were to do over again, would I do\r
-it?" His pride instantly answered "yes," but his aged head, which he\r
-shook in silence, replied sadly "no." He had his hours of depression.\r
-He missed Marius. Old men need affection as they need the sun. It is\r
-warmth. Strong as his nature was, the absence of Marius had wrought some\r
-change in him. Nothing in the world could have induced him to take a\r
-step towards "that rogue"; but he suffered. He never inquired about him,\r
-but he thought of him incessantly. He lived in the Marais in a more and\r
-more retired manner; he was still merry and violent as of old, but\r
-his merriment had a convulsive harshness, and his violences always\r
-terminated in a sort of gentle and gloomy dejection. He sometimes said:\r
-"Oh! if he only would return, what a good box on the ear I would give\r
-him!"\r
-\r
-As for his aunt, she thought too little to love much; Marius was no\r
-longer for her much more than a vague black form; and she eventually\r
-came to occupy herself with him much less than with the cat or the\r
-paroquet which she probably had. What augmented Father Gillenormand's\r
-secret suffering was, that he locked it all up within his breast, and\r
-did not allow its existence to be divined. His sorrow was like those\r
-recently invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. It sometimes\r
-happened that officious busybodies spoke to him of Marius, and asked\r
-him: "What is your grandson doing?" "What has become of him?" The old\r
-bourgeois replied with a sigh, that he was a sad case, and giving a\r
-fillip to his cuff, if he wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de\r
-Pontmercy is practising pettifogging in some corner or other."\r
-\r
-While the old man regretted, Marius applauded himself. As is the case\r
-with all good-hearted people, misfortune had eradicated his bitterness.\r
-He only thought of M. Gillenormand in an amiable light, but he had set\r
-his mind on not receiving anything more from the man who had been\r
-unkind to his father. This was the mitigated translation of his first\r
-indignation. Moreover, he was happy at having suffered, and at suffering\r
-still. It was for his father's sake. The hardness of his life satisfied\r
-and pleased him. He said to himself with a sort of joy that--it was\r
-certainly the least he could do; that it was an expiation;--that, had\r
-it not been for that, he would have been punished in some other way and\r
-later on for his impious indifference towards his father, and such a\r
-father! that it would not have been just that his father should have all\r
-the suffering, and he none of it; and that, in any case, what were his\r
-toils and his destitution compared with the colonel's heroic life? that,\r
-in short, the only way for him to approach his father and resemble him,\r
-was to be brave in the face of indigence, as the other had been valiant\r
-before the enemy; and that that was, no doubt, what the colonel had\r
-meant to imply by the words: "He will be worthy of it." Words which\r
-Marius continued to wear, not on his breast, since the colonel's writing\r
-had disappeared, but in his heart.\r
-\r
-And then, on the day when his grandfather had turned him out of doors,\r
-he had been only a child, now he was a man. He felt it. Misery, we\r
-repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has\r
-this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole will towards\r
-effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration. Poverty instantly lays\r
-material life bare and renders it hideous; hence inexpressible bounds\r
-towards the ideal life. The wealthy young man has a hundred coarse and\r
-brilliant distractions, horse races, hunting, dogs, tobacco, gaming,\r
-good repasts, and all the rest of it; occupations for the baser side\r
-of the soul, at the expense of the loftier and more delicate sides.\r
-The poor young man wins his bread with difficulty; he eats; when he has\r
-eaten, he has nothing more but meditation. He goes to the spectacles\r
-which God furnishes gratis; he gazes at the sky, space, the stars,\r
-flowers, children, the humanity among which he is suffering, the\r
-creation amid which he beams. He gazes so much on humanity that he\r
-perceives its soul, he gazes upon creation to such an extent that he\r
-beholds God. He dreams, he feels himself great; he dreams on, and feels\r
-himself tender. From the egotism of the man who suffers he passes to the\r
-compassion of the man who meditates. An admirable sentiment breaks forth\r
-in him, forgetfulness of self and pity for all. As he thinks of the\r
-innumerable enjoyments which nature offers, gives, and lavishes to souls\r
-which stand open, and refuses to souls that are closed, he comes to\r
-pity, he the millionnaire of the mind, the millionnaire of money. All\r
-hatred departs from his heart, in proportion as light penetrates his\r
-spirit. And is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never\r
-miserable. The first young lad who comes to hand, however poor he may\r
-be, with his strength, his health, his rapid walk, his brilliant eyes,\r
-his warmly circulating blood, his black hair, his red lips, his white\r
-teeth, his pure breath, will always arouse the envy of an aged emperor.\r
-And then, every morning, he sets himself afresh to the task of earning\r
-his bread; and while his hands earn his bread, his dorsal column\r
-gains pride, his brain gathers ideas. His task finished, he returns to\r
-ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joys; he beholds his feet set\r
-in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement, in the nettles, sometimes\r
-in the mire; his head in the light. He is firm, serene, gentle, peaceful,\r
-attentive, serious, content with little, kindly; and he thanks God for\r
-having bestowed on him those two forms of riches which many a rich\r
-man lacks: work, which makes him free; and thought, which makes him\r
-dignified.\r
-\r
-This is what had happened with Marius. To tell the truth, he inclined a\r
-little too much to the side of contemplation. From the day when he had\r
-succeeded in earning his living with some approach to certainty, he had\r
-stopped, thinking it good to be poor, and retrenching time from his work\r
-to give to thought; that is to say, he sometimes passed entire days\r
-in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary, in the mute\r
-voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance. He had thus propounded\r
-the problem of his life: to toil as little as possible at material\r
-labor, in order to toil as much as possible at the labor which is\r
-impalpable; in other words, to bestow a few hours on real life, and to\r
-cast the rest to the infinite. As he believed that he lacked nothing, he\r
-did not perceive that contemplation, thus understood, ends by becoming\r
-one of the forms of idleness; that he was contenting himself with\r
-conquering the first necessities of life, and that he was resting from\r
-his labors too soon.\r
-\r
-It was evident that, for this energetic and enthusiastic nature, this\r
-could only be a transitory state, and that, at the first shock against\r
-the inevitable complications of destiny, Marius would awaken.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, although he was a lawyer, and whatever Father\r
-Gillenormand thought about the matter, he was not practising, he was\r
-not even pettifogging. Meditation had turned him aside from pleading. To\r
-haunt attorneys, to follow the court, to hunt up cases--what a bore! Why\r
-should he do it? He saw no reason for changing the manner of gaining his\r
-livelihood! The obscure and ill-paid publishing establishment had come\r
-to mean for him a sure source of work which did not involve too much\r
-labor, as we have explained, and which sufficed for his wants.\r
-\r
-One of the publishers for whom he worked, M. Magimel, I think, offered\r
-to take him into his own house, to lodge him well, to furnish him with\r
-regular occupation, and to give him fifteen hundred francs a year. To be\r
-well lodged! Fifteen hundred francs! No doubt. But renounce his liberty!\r
-Be on fixed wages! A sort of hired man of letters! According to Marius'\r
-opinion, if he accepted, his position would become both better and worse\r
-at the same time, he acquired comfort, and lost his dignity; it was a\r
-fine and complete unhappiness converted into a repulsive and ridiculous\r
-state of torture: something like the case of a blind man who should\r
-recover the sight of one eye. He refused.\r
-\r
-Marius dwelt in solitude. Owing to his taste for remaining outside of\r
-everything, and through having been too much alarmed, he had not entered\r
-decidedly into the group presided over by Enjolras. They had remained\r
-good friends; they were ready to assist each other on occasion in every\r
-possible way; but nothing more. Marius had two friends: one young,\r
-Courfeyrac; and one old, M. Mabeuf. He inclined more to the old man.\r
-In the first place, he owed to him the revolution which had taken\r
-place within him; to him he was indebted for having known and loved his\r
-father. "He operated on me for a cataract," he said.\r
-\r
-The churchwarden had certainly played a decisive part.\r
-\r
-It was not, however, that M. Mabeuf had been anything but the calm and\r
-impassive agent of Providence in this connection. He had enlightened\r
-Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle\r
-which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one.\r
-\r
-As for Marius' inward political revolution, M. Mabeuf was totally\r
-incapable of comprehending it, of willing or of directing it.\r
-\r
-As we shall see M. Mabeuf again, later on, a few words will not be\r
-superfluous.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--M. MABEUF\r
-\r
-On the day when M. Mabeuf said to Marius: "Certainly I approve of\r
-political opinions," he expressed the real state of his mind. All\r
-political opinions were matters of indifference to him, and he approved\r
-them all, without distinction, provided they left him in peace, as the\r
-Greeks called the Furies "the beautiful, the good, the charming," the\r
-Eumenides. M. Mabeuf's political opinion consisted in a passionate love\r
-for plants, and, above all, for books. Like all the rest of the world,\r
-he possessed the termination in ist, without which no one could exist at\r
-that time, but he was neither a Royalist, a Bonapartist, a Chartist,\r
-an Orleanist, nor an Anarchist; he was a bouquinist, a collector of old\r
-books. He did not understand how men could busy themselves with\r
-hating each other because of silly stuff like the charter, democracy,\r
-legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc., when there were in the world\r
-all sorts of mosses, grasses, and shrubs which they might be looking at,\r
-and heaps of folios, and even of 32mos, which they might turn over. He\r
-took good care not to become useless; having books did not prevent his\r
-reading, being a botanist did not prevent his being a gardener. When\r
-he made Pontmercy's acquaintance, this sympathy had existed between the\r
-colonel and himself--that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for\r
-fruits. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seedling pears as savory\r
-as the pears of St. Germain; it is from one of his combinations,\r
-apparently, that the October Mirabelle, now celebrated and no less\r
-perfumed than the summer Mirabelle, owes its origin. He went to mass\r
-rather from gentleness than from piety, and because, as he loved the\r
-faces of men, but hated their noise, he found them assembled and silent\r
-only in church. Feeling that he must be something in the State, he had\r
-chosen the career of warden. However, he had never succeeded in loving\r
-any woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as much as an Elzevir.\r
-He had long passed sixty, when, one day, some one asked him: "Have you\r
-never been married?" "I have forgotten," said he. When it sometimes\r
-happened to him--and to whom does it not happen?--to say: "Oh! if I were\r
-only rich!" it was not when ogling a pretty girl, as was the case with\r
-Father Gillenormand, but when contemplating an old book. He lived alone\r
-with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty, and when he was asleep,\r
-his aged fingers, stiffened with rheumatism, lay crooked up in the folds\r
-of his sheets. He had composed and published a Flora of the Environs of\r
-Cauteretz, with colored plates, a work which enjoyed a tolerable\r
-measure of esteem and which sold well. People rang his bell, in the Rue\r
-Mesieres, two or three times a day, to ask for it. He drew as much as\r
-two thousand francs a year from it; this constituted nearly the whole of\r
-his fortune. Although poor, he had had the talent to form for himself,\r
-by dint of patience, privations, and time, a precious collection of rare\r
-copies of every sort. He never went out without a book under his arm,\r
-and he often returned with two. The sole decoration of the four rooms\r
-on the ground floor, which composed his lodgings, consisted of framed\r
-herbariums, and engravings of the old masters. The sight of a sword or\r
-a gun chilled his blood. He had never approached a cannon in his life,\r
-even at the Invalides. He had a passable stomach, a brother who was a\r
-cure, perfectly white hair, no teeth, either in his mouth or his mind, a\r
-trembling in every limb, a Picard accent, an infantile laugh, the air of\r
-an old sheep, and he was easily frightened. Add to this, that he had no\r
-other friendship, no other acquaintance among the living, than an old\r
-bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques, named Royal. His dream was to\r
-naturalize indigo in France.\r
-\r
-His servant was also a sort of innocent. The poor good old woman was a\r
-spinster. Sultan, her cat, which might have mewed Allegri's miserere in\r
-the Sixtine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed for the quantity\r
-of passion which existed in her. None of her dreams had ever proceeded\r
-as far as man. She had never been able to get further than her cat. Like\r
-him, she had a mustache. Her glory consisted in her caps, which were\r
-always white. She passed her time, on Sundays, after mass, in counting\r
-over the linen in her chest, and in spreading out on her bed the dresses\r
-in the piece which she bought and never had made up. She knew how to\r
-read. M. Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarque.\r
-\r
-M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and\r
-gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity. Youth combined\r
-with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without\r
-wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, with gunpowder,\r
-with marches and countermarches, and with all those prodigious battles\r
-in which his father had given and received such tremendous blows of the\r
-sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf, and M. Mabeuf talked to him of his hero\r
-from the point of view of flowers.\r
-\r
-His brother the cure died about 1830, and almost immediately, as when\r
-the night is drawing on, the whole horizon grew dark for M. Mabeuf. A\r
-notary's failure deprived him of the sum of ten thousand francs, which\r
-was all that he possessed in his brother's right and his own. The\r
-Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period of\r
-embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a Flora. The Flora\r
-of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped short. Weeks passed by without a\r
-single purchaser. Sometimes M. Mabeuf started at the sound of the bell.\r
-"Monsieur," said Mother Plutarque sadly, "it is the water-carrier."\r
-In short, one day, M. Mabeuf quitted the Rue Mesieres, abdicated the\r
-functions of warden, gave up Saint-Sulpice, sold not a part of his\r
-books, but of his prints,--that to which he was the least attached,--and\r
-installed himself in a little house on the Rue Montparnasse, where,\r
-however, he remained but one quarter for two reasons: in the first\r
-place, the ground floor and the garden cost three hundred francs, and he\r
-dared not spend more than two hundred francs on his rent; in the second,\r
-being near Faton's shooting-gallery, he could hear the pistol-shots;\r
-which was intolerable to him.\r
-\r
-He carried off his Flora, his copper-plates, his herbariums, his\r
-portfolios, and his books, and established himself near the Salpetriere,\r
-in a sort of thatched cottage of the village of Austerlitz, where,\r
-for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms and a garden enclosed by a\r
-hedge, and containing a well. He took advantage of this removal to sell\r
-off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his entrance into his new\r
-quarters, he was very gay, and drove the nails on which his engravings\r
-and herbariums were to hang, with his own hands, dug in his garden the\r
-rest of the day, and at night, perceiving that Mother Plutarque had a\r
-melancholy air, and was very thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder\r
-and said to her with a smile: "We have the indigo!"\r
-\r
-Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and Marius,\r
-were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a brawling\r
-name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to him.\r
-\r
-However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed in some\r
-bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both at once, are\r
-but slowly accessible to the things of actual life. Their own destiny\r
-is a far-off thing to them. There results from such concentration a\r
-passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning, would resemble\r
-philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away,\r
-and yet is hardly conscious of it one's self. It always ends, it is\r
-true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it\r
-seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on\r
-between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we look\r
-on at the game with indifference.\r
-\r
-It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his\r
-hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather\r
-puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular\r
-swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very\r
-long time, even after the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not\r
-stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost.\r
-\r
-M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive\r
-and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day, Mother\r
-Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room. She was\r
-reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus. To read aloud is\r
-to assure one's self of what one is reading. There are people who read\r
-very loud, and who have the appearance of giving themselves their word\r
-of honor as to what they are perusing.\r
-\r
-It was with this sort of energy that Mother Plutarque was reading the\r
-romance which she had in hand. M. Mabeuf heard her without listening to\r
-her.\r
-\r
-In the course of her reading, Mother Plutarque came to this phrase. It\r
-was a question of an officer of dragoons and a beauty:--\r
-\r
-"--The beauty pouted, and the dragoon--"\r
-\r
-Here she interrupted herself to wipe her glasses.\r
-\r
-"Bouddha and the Dragon," struck in M. Mabeuf in a low voice. "Yes, it\r
-is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of its cave,\r
-spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire. Many stars\r
-had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides, had the claws\r
-of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting the\r
-dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother Plutarque.\r
-There is no more beautiful legend in existence."\r
-\r
-And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious revery.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR FOR MISERY\r
-\r
-Marius liked this candid old man who saw himself gradually falling into\r
-the clutches of indigence, and who came to feel astonishment, little\r
-by little, without, however, being made melancholy by it. Marius met\r
-Courfeyrac and sought out M. Mabeuf. Very rarely, however; twice a month\r
-at most.\r
-\r
-Marius' pleasure consisted in taking long walks alone on the outer\r
-boulevards, or in the Champs-de-Mars, or in the least frequented alleys\r
-of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in gazing at a market\r
-garden, the beds of lettuce, the chickens on the dung-heap, the horse\r
-turning the water-wheel. The passers-by stared at him in surprise, and\r
-some of them thought his attire suspicious and his mien sinister. He was\r
-only a poor young man dreaming in an objectless way.\r
-\r
-It was during one of his strolls that he had hit upon the Gorbeau house,\r
-and, tempted by its isolation and its cheapness, had taken up his abode\r
-there. He was known there only under the name of M. Marius.\r
-\r
-Some of his father's old generals or old comrades had invited him to go\r
-and see them, when they learned about him. Marius had not refused their\r
-invitations. They afforded opportunities of talking about his father.\r
-Thus he went from time to time, to Comte Pajol, to General Bellavesne,\r
-to General Fririon, to the Invalides. There was music and dancing there.\r
-On such evenings, Marius put on his new coat. But he never went to\r
-these evening parties or balls except on days when it was freezing cold,\r
-because he could not afford a carriage, and he did not wish to arrive\r
-with boots otherwise than like mirrors.\r
-\r
-He said sometimes, but without bitterness: "Men are so made that in a\r
-drawing-room you may be soiled everywhere except on your shoes. In order\r
-to insure a good reception there, only one irreproachable thing is asked\r
-of you; your conscience? No, your boots."\r
-\r
-All passions except those of the heart are dissipated by revery. Marius'\r
-political fevers vanished thus. The Revolution of 1830 assisted in the\r
-process, by satisfying and calming him. He remained the same, setting\r
-aside his fits of wrath. He still held the same opinions. Only, they had\r
-been tempered. To speak accurately, he had no longer any opinions, he\r
-had sympathies. To what party did he belong? To the party of humanity.\r
-Out of humanity he chose France; out of the Nation he chose the people;\r
-out of the people he chose the woman. It was to that point above all,\r
-that his pity was directed. Now he preferred an idea to a deed, a\r
-poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job more than an event like\r
-Marengo. And then, when, after a day spent in meditation, he returned\r
-in the evening through the boulevards, and caught a glimpse through\r
-the branches of the trees of the fathomless space beyond, the nameless\r
-gleams, the abyss, the shadow, the mystery, all that which is only human\r
-seemed very petty indeed to him.\r
-\r
-He thought that he had, and he really had, in fact, arrived at the truth\r
-of life and of human philosophy, and he had ended by gazing at nothing\r
-but heaven, the only thing which Truth can perceive from the bottom of\r
-her well.\r
-\r
-This did not prevent him from multiplying his plans, his combinations,\r
-his scaffoldings, his projects for the future. In this state of revery,\r
-an eye which could have cast a glance into Marius' interior would have\r
-been dazzled with the purity of that soul. In fact, had it been given to\r
-our eyes of the flesh to gaze into the consciences of others, we should\r
-be able to judge a man much more surely according to what he dreams,\r
-than according to what he thinks. There is will in thought, there is\r
-none in dreams. Revery, which is utterly spontaneous, takes and keeps,\r
-even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our spirit. Nothing\r
-proceeds more directly and more sincerely from the very depth of our\r
-soul, than our unpremeditated and boundless aspirations towards\r
-the splendors of destiny. In these aspirations, much more than in\r
-deliberate, rational coordinated ideas, is the real character of a man\r
-to be found. Our chimeras are the things which the most resemble us.\r
-Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance\r
-with his nature.\r
-\r
-Towards the middle of this year 1831, the old woman who waited on Marius\r
-told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family, had been\r
-turned out of doors. Marius, who passed nearly the whole of his days out\r
-of the house, hardly knew that he had any neighbors.\r
-\r
-"Why are they turned out?" he asked.\r
-\r
-"Because they do not pay their rent; they owe for two quarters."\r
-\r
-"How much is it?"\r
-\r
-"Twenty francs," said the old woman.\r
-\r
-Marius had thirty francs saved up in a drawer.\r
-\r
-"Here," he said to the old woman, "take these twenty-five francs. Pay\r
-for the poor people and give them five francs, and do not tell them that\r
-it was I."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE SUBSTITUTE\r
-\r
-It chanced that the regiment to which Lieutenant Theodule belonged came\r
-to perform garrison duty in Paris. This inspired Aunt Gillenormand with\r
-a second idea. She had, on the first occasion, hit upon the plan of\r
-having Marius spied upon by Theodule; now she plotted to have Theodule\r
-take Marius' place.\r
-\r
-At all events and in case the grandfather should feel the vague need of\r
-a young face in the house,--these rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to\r
-ruin,--it was expedient to find another Marius. "Take it as a simple\r
-erratum," she thought, "such as one sees in books. For Marius, read\r
-Theodule."\r
-\r
-A grandnephew is almost the same as a grandson; in default of a lawyer\r
-one takes a lancer.\r
-\r
-One morning, when M. Gillenormand was about to read something in the\r
-Quotidienne, his daughter entered and said to him in her sweetest voice;\r
-for the question concerned her favorite:--\r
-\r
-"Father, Theodule is coming to present his respects to you this\r
-morning."\r
-\r
-"Who's Theodule?"\r
-\r
-"Your grandnephew."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said the grandfather.\r
-\r
-Then he went back to his reading, thought no more of his grandnephew,\r
-who was merely some Theodule or other, and soon flew into a rage, which\r
-almost always happened when he read. The "sheet" which he held, although\r
-Royalist, of course, announced for the following day, without any\r
-softening phrases, one of these little events which were of daily\r
-occurrence at that date in Paris: "That the students of the schools\r
-of law and medicine were to assemble on the Place du Pantheon, at\r
-midday,--to deliberate." The discussion concerned one of the questions\r
-of the moment, the artillery of the National Guard, and a conflict\r
-between the Minister of War and "the citizen's militia," on the subject\r
-of the cannon parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were\r
-to "deliberate" over this. It did not take much more than this to swell\r
-M. Gillenormand's rage.\r
-\r
-He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who would probably go with\r
-the rest, to "deliberate, at midday, on the Place du Pantheon."\r
-\r
-As he was indulging in this painful dream, Lieutenant Theodule entered\r
-clad in plain clothes as a bourgeois, which was clever of him, and\r
-was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The lancer had\r
-reasoned as follows: "The old druid has not sunk all his money in a life\r
-pension. It is well to disguise one's self as a civilian from time to\r
-time."\r
-\r
-Mademoiselle Gillenormand said aloud to her father:--\r
-\r
-"Theodule, your grandnephew."\r
-\r
-And in a low voice to the lieutenant:--\r
-\r
-"Approve of everything."\r
-\r
-And she withdrew.\r
-\r
-The lieutenant, who was but little accustomed to such venerable\r
-encounters, stammered with some timidity: "Good day, uncle,"--and made\r
-a salute composed of the involuntary and mechanical outline of the\r
-military salute finished off as a bourgeois salute.\r
-\r
-"Ah! so it's you; that is well, sit down," said the old gentleman.\r
-\r
-That said, he totally forgot the lancer.\r
-\r
-Theodule seated himself, and M. Gillenormand rose.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand began to pace back and forth, his hands in his pockets,\r
-talking aloud, and twitching, with his irritated old fingers, at the two\r
-watches which he wore in his two fobs.\r
-\r
-"That pack of brats! they convene on the Place du Pantheon! by my life!\r
-urchins who were with their nurses but yesterday! If one were to squeeze\r
-their noses, milk would burst out. And they deliberate to-morrow, at\r
-midday. What are we coming to? What are we coming to? It is clear that\r
-we are making for the abyss. That is what the descamisados have brought\r
-us to! To deliberate on the citizen artillery! To go and jabber in the\r
-open air over the jibes of the National Guard! And with whom are they to\r
-meet there? Just see whither Jacobinism leads. I will bet anything you\r
-like, a million against a counter, that there will be no one there but\r
-returned convicts and released galley-slaves. The Republicans and the\r
-galley-slaves,--they form but one nose and one handkerchief. Carnot used\r
-to say: 'Where would you have me go, traitor?' Fouche replied: 'Wherever\r
-you please, imbecile!' That's what the Republicans are like."\r
-\r
-"That is true," said Theodule.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Theodule, and went on:--\r
-\r
-"When one reflects that that scoundrel was so vile as to turn carbonaro!\r
-Why did you leave my house? To go and become a Republican! Pssst! In\r
-the first place, the people want none of your republic, they have common\r
-sense, they know well that there always have been kings, and that there\r
-always will be; they know well that the people are only the people,\r
-after all, they make sport of it, of your republic--do you understand,\r
-idiot? Is it not a horrible caprice? To fall in love with Pere Duchesne,\r
-to make sheep's-eyes at the guillotine, to sing romances, and play on\r
-the guitar under the balcony of '93--it's enough to make one spit on all\r
-these young fellows, such fools are they! They are all alike. Not one\r
-escapes. It suffices for them to breathe the air which blows through the\r
-street to lose their senses. The nineteenth century is poison. The\r
-first scamp that happens along lets his beard grow like a goat's,\r
-thinks himself a real scoundrel, and abandons his old relatives. He's\r
-a Republican, he's a romantic. What does that mean, romantic? Do me the\r
-favor to tell me what it is. All possible follies. A year ago, they ran\r
-to Hernani. Now, I just ask you, Hernani! antitheses! abominations\r
-which are not even written in French! And then, they have cannons in the\r
-courtyard of the Louvre. Such are the rascalities of this age!"\r
-\r
-"You are right, uncle," said Theodule.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Cannons in the courtyard of the Museum! For what purpose? Do you want\r
-to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvedere? What have those cartridges\r
-to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh! the young men of the present day are\r
-all blackguards! What a pretty creature is their Benjamin Constant! And\r
-those who are not rascals are simpletons! They do all they can to make\r
-themselves ugly, they are badly dressed, they are afraid of women, in\r
-the presence of petticoats they have a mendicant air which sets the\r
-girls into fits of laughter; on my word of honor, one would say the poor\r
-creatures were ashamed of love. They are deformed, and they complete\r
-themselves by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and\r
-Potier, they have sack coats, stablemen's waistcoats, shirts of coarse\r
-linen, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their\r
-rigmarole resembles their plumage. One might make use of their jargon\r
-to put new soles on their old shoes. And all this awkward batch of brats\r
-has political opinions, if you please. Political opinions should be\r
-strictly forbidden. They fabricate systems, they recast society, they\r
-demolish the monarchy, they fling all laws to the earth, they put the\r
-attic in the cellar's place and my porter in the place of the King, they\r
-turn Europe topsy-turvy, they reconstruct the world, and all their love\r
-affairs consist in staring slily at the ankles of the laundresses as\r
-these women climb into their carts. Ah! Marius! Ah! you blackguard! to\r
-go and vociferate on the public place! to discuss, to debate, to take\r
-measures! They call that measures, just God! Disorder humbles itself\r
-and becomes silly. I have seen chaos, I now see a mess. Students\r
-deliberating on the National Guard,--such a thing could not be seen\r
-among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches! Savages who go naked, with their\r
-noddles dressed like a shuttlecock, with a club in their paws, are less\r
-of brutes than those bachelors of arts! The four-penny monkeys! And they\r
-set up for judges! Those creatures deliberate and ratiocinate! The\r
-end of the world is come! This is plainly the end of this miserable\r
-terraqueous globe! A final hiccough was required, and France has emitted\r
-it. Deliberate, my rascals! Such things will happen so long as they go\r
-and read the newspapers under the arcades of the Odeon. That costs them\r
-a sou, and their good sense, and their intelligence, and their heart and\r
-their soul, and their wits. They emerge thence, and decamp from their\r
-families. All newspapers are pests; all, even the Drapeau Blanc! At\r
-bottom, Martainville was a Jacobin. Ah! just Heaven! you may boast of\r
-having driven your grandfather to despair, that you may!"\r
-\r
-"That is evident," said Theodule.\r
-\r
-And profiting by the fact that M. Gillenormand was taking breath, the\r
-lancer added in a magisterial manner:--\r
-\r
-"There should be no other newspaper than the Moniteur, and no other book\r
-than the Annuaire Militaire."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand continued:--\r
-\r
-"It is like their Sieyes! A regicide ending in a senator; for that is\r
-the way they always end. They give themselves a scar with the address\r
-of thou as citizens, in order to get themselves called, eventually,\r
-Monsieur le Comte. Monsieur le Comte as big as my arm, assassins of\r
-September. The philosopher Sieyes! I will do myself the justice to say,\r
-that I have never had any better opinion of the philosophies of all\r
-those philosophers, than of the spectacles of the grimacer of Tivoli!\r
-One day I saw the Senators cross the Quai Malplaquet in mantles of\r
-violet velvet sown with bees, with hats a la Henri IV. They were\r
-hideous. One would have pronounced them monkeys from the tiger's court.\r
-Citizens, I declare to you, that your progress is madness, that your\r
-humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your republic\r
-is a monster, that your young and virgin France comes from the brothel,\r
-and I maintain it against all, whoever you may be, whether journalists,\r
-economists, legists, or even were you better judges of liberty, of\r
-equality, and fraternity than the knife of the guillotine! And that I\r
-announce to you, my fine fellows!"\r
-\r
-"Parbleu!" cried the lieutenant, "that is wonderfully true."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand paused in a gesture which he had begun, wheeled round,\r
-stared Lancer Theodule intently in the eyes, and said to him:--\r
-\r
-"You are a fool."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE SOBRIQUET: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES\r
-\r
-Marius was, at this epoch, a handsome young man, of medium stature,\r
-with thick and intensely black hair, a lofty and intelligent brow,\r
-well-opened and passionate nostrils, an air of calmness and sincerity,\r
-and with something indescribably proud, thoughtful, and innocent over\r
-his whole countenance. His profile, all of whose lines were rounded,\r
-without thereby losing their firmness, had a certain Germanic sweetness,\r
-which has made its way into the French physiognomy by way of Alsace\r
-and Lorraine, and that complete absence of angles which rendered\r
-the Sicambres so easily recognizable among the Romans, and which\r
-distinguishes the leonine from the aquiline race. He was at that period\r
-of life when the mind of men who think is composed, in nearly equal\r
-parts, of depth and ingenuousness. A grave situation being given, he\r
-had all that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he\r
-might be sublime. His manners were reserved, cold, polished, not very\r
-genial. As his mouth was charming, his lips the reddest, and his teeth\r
-the whitest in the world, his smile corrected the severity of his face,\r
-as a whole. At certain moments, that pure brow and that voluptuous smile\r
-presented a singular contrast. His eyes were small, but his glance was\r
-large.\r
-\r
-At the period of his most abject misery, he had observed that young\r
-girls turned round when he passed by, and he fled or hid, with death in\r
-his soul. He thought that they were staring at him because of his old\r
-clothes, and that they were laughing at them; the fact is, that they\r
-stared at him because of his grace, and that they dreamed of him.\r
-\r
-This mute misunderstanding between him and the pretty passers-by had\r
-made him shy. He chose none of them for the excellent reason that\r
-he fled from all of them. He lived thus indefinitely,--stupidly, as\r
-Courfeyrac said.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac also said to him: "Do not aspire to be venerable" [they\r
-called each other thou; it is the tendency of youthful friendships to\r
-slip into this mode of address]. "Let me give you a piece of advice,\r
-my dear fellow. Don't read so many books, and look a little more at the\r
-lasses. The jades have some good points about them, O Marius! By dint of\r
-fleeing and blushing, you will become brutalized."\r
-\r
-On other occasions, Courfeyrac encountered him and said:--"Good morning,\r
-Monsieur l'Abbe!"\r
-\r
-When Courfeyrac had addressed to him some remark of this nature, Marius\r
-avoided women, both young and old, more than ever for a week to come,\r
-and he avoided Courfeyrac to boot.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, there existed in all the immensity of creation, two women\r
-whom Marius did not flee, and to whom he paid no attention whatever. In\r
-truth, he would have been very much amazed if he had been informed\r
-that they were women. One was the bearded old woman who swept out his\r
-chamber, and caused Courfeyrac to say: "Seeing that his servant woman\r
-wears his beard, Marius does not wear his own beard." The other was a\r
-sort of little girl whom he saw very often, and whom he never looked at.\r
-\r
-For more than a year, Marius had noticed in one of the walks of the\r
-Luxembourg, the one which skirts the parapet of the Pepiniere, a man\r
-and a very young girl, who were almost always seated side by side on the\r
-same bench, at the most solitary end of the alley, on the Rue de l'Ouest\r
-side. Every time that that chance which meddles with the strolls of\r
-persons whose gaze is turned inwards, led Marius to that walk,--and it\r
-was nearly every day,--he found this couple there. The man appeared to\r
-be about sixty years of age; he seemed sad and serious; his whole person\r
-presented the robust and weary aspect peculiar to military men who have\r
-retired from the service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have\r
-said: "He is an ex-officer." He had a kindly but unapproachable air,\r
-and he never let his glance linger on the eyes of any one. He wore\r
-blue trousers, a blue frock coat and a broad-brimmed hat, which always\r
-appeared to be new, a black cravat, a quaker shirt, that is to say, it\r
-was dazzlingly white, but of coarse linen. A grisette who passed near\r
-him one day, said: "Here's a very tidy widower." His hair was very\r
-white.\r
-\r
-The first time that the young girl who accompanied him came and seated\r
-herself on the bench which they seemed to have adopted, she was a sort\r
-of child thirteen or fourteen years of age, so thin as to be almost\r
-homely, awkward, insignificant, and with a possible promise of\r
-handsome eyes. Only, they were always raised with a sort of displeasing\r
-assurance. Her dress was both aged and childish, like the dress of the\r
-scholars in a convent; it consisted of a badly cut gown of black merino.\r
-They had the air of being father and daughter.\r
-\r
-Marius scanned this old man, who was not yet aged, and this little\r
-girl, who was not yet a person, for a few days, and thereafter paid no\r
-attention to them. They, on their side, did not appear even to see him.\r
-They conversed together with a peaceful and indifferent air. The girl\r
-chattered incessantly and merrily. The old man talked but little, and,\r
-at times, he fixed on her eyes overflowing with an ineffable paternity.\r
-\r
-Marius had acquired the mechanical habit of strolling in that walk. He\r
-invariably found them there.\r
-\r
-This is the way things went:--\r
-\r
-Marius liked to arrive by the end of the alley which was furthest from\r
-their bench; he walked the whole length of the alley, passed in front\r
-of them, then returned to the extremity whence he had come, and began\r
-again. This he did five or six times in the course of his promenade,\r
-and the promenade was taken five or six times a week, without its\r
-having occurred to him or to these people to exchange a greeting. That\r
-personage, and that young girl, although they appeared,--and perhaps\r
-because they appeared,--to shun all glances, had, naturally, caused some\r
-attention on the part of the five or six students who strolled along\r
-the Pepiniere from time to time; the studious after their lectures,\r
-the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was among the\r
-last, had observed them several times, but, finding the girl homely, he\r
-had speedily and carefully kept out of the way. He had fled, discharging\r
-at them a sobriquet, like a Parthian dart. Impressed solely with\r
-the child's gown and the old man's hair, he had dubbed the daughter\r
-Mademoiselle Lanoire, and the father, Monsieur Leblanc, so that as no\r
-one knew them under any other title, this nickname became a law in the\r
-default of any other name. The students said: "Ah! Monsieur Leblanc is\r
-on his bench." And Marius, like the rest, had found it convenient to\r
-call this unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc.\r
-\r
-We shall follow their example, and we shall say M. Leblanc, in order to\r
-facilitate this tale.\r
-\r
-So Marius saw them nearly every day, at the same hour, during the first\r
-year. He found the man to his taste, but the girl insipid.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--LUX FACTA EST\r
-\r
-During the second year, precisely at the point in this history which the\r
-reader has now reached, it chanced that this habit of the Luxembourg was\r
-interrupted, without Marius himself being quite aware why, and nearly\r
-six months elapsed, during which he did not set foot in the alley. One\r
-day, at last, he returned thither once more; it was a serene summer\r
-morning, and Marius was in joyous mood, as one is when the weather is\r
-fine. It seemed to him that he had in his heart all the songs of the\r
-birds that he was listening to, and all the bits of blue sky of which he\r
-caught glimpses through the leaves of the trees.\r
-\r
-He went straight to "his alley," and when he reached the end of it he\r
-perceived, still on the same bench, that well-known couple. Only, when\r
-he approached, it certainly was the same man; but it seemed to him that\r
-it was no longer the same girl. The person whom he now beheld was a tall\r
-and beautiful creature, possessed of all the most charming lines of a\r
-woman at the precise moment when they are still combined with all the\r
-most ingenuous graces of the child; a pure and fugitive moment, which\r
-can be expressed only by these two words,--"fifteen years." She had\r
-wonderful brown hair, shaded with threads of gold, a brow that seemed\r
-made of marble, cheeks that seemed made of rose-leaf, a pale flush,\r
-an agitated whiteness, an exquisite mouth, whence smiles darted like\r
-sunbeams, and words like music, a head such as Raphael would have given\r
-to Mary, set upon a neck that Jean Goujon would have attributed to a\r
-Venus. And, in order that nothing might be lacking to this bewitching\r
-face, her nose was not handsome--it was pretty; neither straight nor\r
-curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose, that is\r
-to say, spiritual, delicate, irregular, pure,--which drives painters to\r
-despair, and charms poets.\r
-\r
-When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes, which were\r
-constantly lowered. He saw only her long chestnut lashes, permeated with\r
-shadow and modesty.\r
-\r
-This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling as she listened\r
-to what the white-haired old man was saying to her, and nothing could\r
-be more fascinating than that fresh smile, combined with those drooping\r
-eyes.\r
-\r
-For a moment, Marius thought that she was another daughter of the same\r
-man, a sister of the former, no doubt. But when the invariable habit of\r
-his stroll brought him, for the second time, near the bench, and he had\r
-examined her attentively, he recognized her as the same. In six months\r
-the little girl had become a young maiden; that was all. Nothing is more\r
-frequent than this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls blossom out\r
-in the twinkling of an eye, and become roses all at once. One left\r
-them children but yesterday; today, one finds them disquieting to the\r
-feelings.\r
-\r
-This child had not only grown, she had become idealized. As three days\r
-in April suffice to cover certain trees with flowers, six months had\r
-sufficed to clothe her with beauty. Her April had arrived.\r
-\r
-One sometimes sees people, who, poor and mean, seem to wake up, pass\r
-suddenly from indigence to luxury, indulge in expenditures of all sorts,\r
-and become dazzling, prodigal, magnificent, all of a sudden. That is\r
-the result of having pocketed an income; a note fell due yesterday. The\r
-young girl had received her quarterly income.\r
-\r
-And then, she was no longer the school-girl with her felt hat, her\r
-merino gown, her scholar's shoes, and red hands; taste had come to her\r
-with beauty; she was a well-dressed person, clad with a sort of rich\r
-and simple elegance, and without affectation. She wore a dress of black\r
-damask, a cape of the same material, and a bonnet of white crape. Her\r
-white gloves displayed the delicacy of the hand which toyed with the\r
-carved, Chinese ivory handle of a parasol, and her silken shoe outlined\r
-the smallness of her foot. When one passed near her, her whole toilette\r
-exhaled a youthful and penetrating perfume.\r
-\r
-As for the man, he was the same as usual.\r
-\r
-The second time that Marius approached her, the young girl raised her\r
-eyelids; her eyes were of a deep, celestial blue, but in that veiled\r
-azure, there was, as yet, nothing but the glance of a child. She looked\r
-at Marius indifferently, as she would have stared at the brat running\r
-beneath the sycamores, or the marble vase which cast a shadow on the\r
-bench, and Marius, on his side, continued his promenade, and thought\r
-about something else.\r
-\r
-He passed near the bench where the young girl sat, five or six times,\r
-but without even turning his eyes in her direction.\r
-\r
-On the following days, he returned, as was his wont, to the Luxembourg;\r
-as usual, he found there "the father and daughter;" but he paid no\r
-further attention to them. He thought no more about the girl now that\r
-she was beautiful than he had when she was homely. He passed very near\r
-the bench where she sat, because such was his habit.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--EFFECT OF THE SPRING\r
-\r
-One day, the air was warm, the Luxembourg was inundated with light\r
-and shade, the sky was as pure as though the angels had washed it that\r
-morning, the sparrows were giving vent to little twitters in the depths\r
-of the chestnut-trees. Marius had thrown open his whole soul to nature,\r
-he was not thinking of anything, he simply lived and breathed, he passed\r
-near the bench, the young girl raised her eyes to him, the two glances\r
-met.\r
-\r
-What was there in the young girl's glance on this occasion? Marius could\r
-not have told. There was nothing and there was everything. It was a\r
-strange flash.\r
-\r
-She dropped her eyes, and he pursued his way.\r
-\r
-What he had just seen was no longer the ingenuous and simple eye of a\r
-child; it was a mysterious gulf which had half opened, then abruptly\r
-closed again.\r
-\r
-There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him\r
-who chances to be there!\r
-\r
-That first gaze of a soul which does not, as yet, know itself, is\r
-like the dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant\r
-and strange. Nothing can give any idea of the dangerous charm of that\r
-unexpected gleam, which flashes suddenly and vaguely forth from adorable\r
-shadows, and which is composed of all the innocence of the present, and\r
-of all the passion of the future. It is a sort of undecided tenderness\r
-which reveals itself by chance, and which waits. It is a snare which\r
-the innocent maiden sets unknown to herself, and in which she captures\r
-hearts without either wishing or knowing it. It is a virgin looking like\r
-a woman.\r
-\r
-It is rare that a profound revery does not spring from that glance,\r
-where it falls. All purities and all candors meet in that celestial\r
-and fatal gleam which, more than all the best-planned tender glances of\r
-coquettes, possesses the magic power of causing the sudden blossoming,\r
-in the depths of the soul, of that sombre flower, impregnated with\r
-perfume and with poison, which is called love.\r
-\r
-That evening, on his return to his garret, Marius cast his eyes over\r
-his garments, and perceived, for the first time, that he had been so\r
-slovenly, indecorous, and inconceivably stupid as to go for his walk in\r
-the Luxembourg with his "every-day clothes," that is to say, with a\r
-hat battered near the band, coarse carter's boots, black trousers\r
-which showed white at the knees, and a black coat which was pale at the\r
-elbows.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY\r
-\r
-On the following day, at the accustomed hour, Marius drew from his\r
-wardrobe his new coat, his new trousers, his new hat, and his new\r
-boots; he clothed himself in this complete panoply, put on his gloves, a\r
-tremendous luxury, and set off for the Luxembourg.\r
-\r
-On the way thither, he encountered Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see\r
-him. Courfeyrac, on his return home, said to his friends:--\r
-\r
-"I have just met Marius' new hat and new coat, with Marius inside\r
-them. He was going to pass an examination, no doubt. He looked utterly\r
-stupid."\r
-\r
-On arriving at the Luxembourg, Marius made the tour of the fountain\r
-basin, and stared at the swans; then he remained for a long time in\r
-contemplation before a statue whose head was perfectly black with mould,\r
-and one of whose hips was missing. Near the basin there was a bourgeois\r
-forty years of age, with a prominent stomach, who was holding by the\r
-hand a little urchin of five, and saying to him: "Shun excess, my son,\r
-keep at an equal distance from despotism and from anarchy." Marius\r
-listened to this bourgeois. Then he made the circuit of the basin once\r
-more. At last he directed his course towards "his alley," slowly, and as\r
-if with regret. One would have said that he was both forced to go there\r
-and withheld from doing so. He did not perceive it himself, and thought\r
-that he was doing as he always did.\r
-\r
-On turning into the walk, he saw M. Leblanc and the young girl at the\r
-other end, "on their bench." He buttoned his coat up to the very top,\r
-pulled it down on his body so that there might be no wrinkles, examined,\r
-with a certain complaisance, the lustrous gleams of his trousers, and\r
-marched on the bench. This march savored of an attack, and certainly\r
-of a desire for conquest. So I say that he marched on the bench, as I\r
-should say: "Hannibal marched on Rome."\r
-\r
-However, all his movements were purely mechanical, and he had\r
-interrupted none of the habitual preoccupations of his mind and labors.\r
-At that moment, he was thinking that the Manuel du Baccalaureat was\r
-a stupid book, and that it must have been drawn up by rare idiots, to\r
-allow of three tragedies of Racine and only one comedy of Moliere being\r
-analyzed therein as masterpieces of the human mind. There was a piercing\r
-whistling going on in his ears. As he approached the bench, he held\r
-fast to the folds in his coat, and fixed his eyes on the young girl. It\r
-seemed to him that she filled the entire extremity of the alley with a\r
-vague blue light.\r
-\r
-In proportion as he drew near, his pace slackened more and more. On\r
-arriving at some little distance from the bench, and long before he had\r
-reached the end of the walk, he halted, and could not explain to himself\r
-why he retraced his steps. He did not even say to himself that he would\r
-not go as far as the end. It was only with difficulty that the young\r
-girl could have perceived him in the distance and noted his fine\r
-appearance in his new clothes. Nevertheless, he held himself very erect,\r
-in case any one should be looking at him from behind.\r
-\r
-He attained the opposite end, then came back, and this time he\r
-approached a little nearer to the bench. He even got to within three\r
-intervals of trees, but there he felt an indescribable impossibility of\r
-proceeding further, and he hesitated. He thought he saw the young girl's\r
-face bending towards him. But he exerted a manly and violent effort,\r
-subdued his hesitation, and walked straight ahead. A few seconds later,\r
-he rushed in front of the bench, erect and firm, reddening to the very\r
-ears, without daring to cast a glance either to the right or to the\r
-left, with his hand thrust into his coat like a statesman. At the moment\r
-when he passed,--under the cannon of the place,--he felt his heart beat\r
-wildly. As on the preceding day, she wore her damask gown and her crape\r
-bonnet. He heard an ineffable voice, which must have been "her voice."\r
-She was talking tranquilly. She was very pretty. He felt it, although he\r
-made no attempt to see her. "She could not, however," he thought, "help\r
-feeling esteem and consideration for me, if she only knew that I am\r
-the veritable author of the dissertation on Marcos Obregon de la Ronde,\r
-which M. Francois de Neufchateau put, as though it were his own, at the\r
-head of his edition of Gil Blas." He went beyond the bench as far as the\r
-extremity of the walk, which was very near, then turned on his heel and\r
-passed once more in front of the lovely girl. This time, he was very\r
-pale. Moreover, all his emotions were disagreeable. As he went further\r
-from the bench and the young girl, and while his back was turned to her,\r
-he fancied that she was gazing after him, and that made him stumble.\r
-\r
-He did not attempt to approach the bench again; he halted near the\r
-middle of the walk, and there, a thing which he never did, he sat down,\r
-and reflecting in the most profoundly indistinct depths of his spirit,\r
-that after all, it was hard that persons whose white bonnet and black\r
-gown he admired should be absolutely insensible to his splendid trousers\r
-and his new coat.\r
-\r
-At the expiration of a quarter of an hour, he rose, as though he were\r
-on the point of again beginning his march towards that bench which was\r
-surrounded by an aureole. But he remained standing there, motionless.\r
-For the first time in fifteen months, he said to himself that that\r
-gentleman who sat there every day with his daughter, had, on his side,\r
-noticed him, and probably considered his assiduity singular.\r
-\r
-For the first time, also, he was conscious of some irreverence in\r
-designating that stranger, even in his secret thoughts, by the sobriquet\r
-of M. le Blanc.\r
-\r
-He stood thus for several minutes, with drooping head, tracing figures\r
-in the sand, with the cane which he held in his hand.\r
-\r
-Then he turned abruptly in the direction opposite to the bench, to M.\r
-Leblanc and his daughter, and went home.\r
-\r
-That day he forgot to dine. At eight o'clock in the evening he perceived\r
-this fact, and as it was too late to go down to the Rue Saint-Jacques,\r
-he said: "Never mind!" and ate a bit of bread.\r
-\r
-He did not go to bed until he had brushed his coat and folded it up with\r
-great care.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--DIVRS CLAPS OF THUNDER FALL ON MA'AM BOUGON\r
-\r
-On the following day, Ma'am Bougon, as Courfeyrac styled the old\r
-portress-principal-tenant, housekeeper of the Gorbeau hovel, Ma'am\r
-Bougon, whose name was, in reality, Madame Burgon, as we have found\r
-out, but this iconoclast, Courfeyrac, respected nothing,--Ma'am Bougon\r
-observed, with stupefaction, that M. Marius was going out again in his\r
-new coat.\r
-\r
-He went to the Luxembourg again, but he did not proceed further than his\r
-bench midway of the alley. He seated himself there, as on the preceding\r
-day, surveying from a distance, and clearly making out, the white\r
-bonnet, the black dress, and above all, that blue light. He did not stir\r
-from it, and only went home when the gates of the Luxembourg closed. He\r
-did not see M. Leblanc and his daughter retire. He concluded that they\r
-had quitted the garden by the gate on the Rue de l'Ouest. Later on,\r
-several weeks afterwards, when he came to think it over, he could never\r
-recall where he had dined that evening.\r
-\r
-On the following day, which was the third, Ma'am Bougon was\r
-thunderstruck. Marius went out in his new coat. "Three days in\r
-succession!" she exclaimed.\r
-\r
-She tried to follow him, but Marius walked briskly, and with immense\r
-strides; it was a hippopotamus undertaking the pursuit of a chamois.\r
-She lost sight of him in two minutes, and returned breathless,\r
-three-quarters choked with asthma, and furious. "If there is any sense,"\r
-she growled, "in putting on one's best clothes every day, and making\r
-people run like this!"\r
-\r
-Marius betook himself to the Luxembourg.\r
-\r
-The young girl was there with M. Leblanc. Marius approached as near as\r
-he could, pretending to be busy reading a book, but he halted afar off,\r
-then returned and seated himself on his bench, where he spent four hours\r
-in watching the house-sparrows who were skipping about the walk, and who\r
-produced on him the impression that they were making sport of him.\r
-\r
-A fortnight passed thus. Marius went to the Luxembourg no longer for the\r
-sake of strolling there, but to seat himself always in the same spot,\r
-and that without knowing why. Once arrived there, he did not stir.\r
-He put on his new coat every morning, for the purpose of not showing\r
-himself, and he began all over again on the morrow.\r
-\r
-She was decidedly a marvellous beauty. The only remark approaching a\r
-criticism, that could be made, was, that the contradiction between\r
-her gaze, which was melancholy, and her smile, which was merry, gave\r
-a rather wild effect to her face, which sometimes caused this sweet\r
-countenance to become strange without ceasing to be charming.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--TAKEN PRISONER\r
-\r
-On one of the last days of the second week, Marius was seated on his\r
-bench, as usual, holding in his hand an open book, of which he had not\r
-turned a page for the last two hours. All at once he started. An event\r
-was taking place at the other extremity of the walk. Leblanc and his\r
-daughter had just left their seat, and the daughter had taken her\r
-father's arm, and both were advancing slowly, towards the middle of the\r
-alley where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then opened it again,\r
-then forced himself to read; he trembled; the aureole was coming\r
-straight towards him. "Ah! good Heavens!" thought he, "I shall not have\r
-time to strike an attitude." Still the white-haired man and the girl\r
-advanced. It seemed to him that this lasted for a century, and that it\r
-was but a second. "What are they coming in this direction for?" he asked\r
-himself. "What! She will pass here? Her feet will tread this sand, this\r
-walk, two paces from me?" He was utterly upset, he would have liked to\r
-be very handsome, he would have liked to own the cross. He heard the\r
-soft and measured sound of their approaching footsteps. He imagined that\r
-M. Leblanc was darting angry glances at him. "Is that gentleman going to\r
-address me?" he thought to himself. He dropped his head; when he raised\r
-it again, they were very near him. The young girl passed, and as she\r
-passed, she glanced at him. She gazed steadily at him, with a pensive\r
-sweetness which thrilled Marius from head to foot. It seemed to him\r
-that she was reproaching him for having allowed so long a time to elapse\r
-without coming as far as her, and that she was saying to him: "I am\r
-coming myself." Marius was dazzled by those eyes fraught with rays and\r
-abysses.\r
-\r
-He felt his brain on fire. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how\r
-she had looked at him! She appeared to him more beautiful than he had\r
-ever seen her yet. Beautiful with a beauty which was wholly feminine and\r
-angelic, with a complete beauty which would have made Petrarch sing and\r
-Dante kneel. It seemed to him that he was floating free in the azure\r
-heavens. At the same time, he was horribly vexed because there was dust\r
-on his boots.\r
-\r
-He thought he felt sure that she had looked at his boots too.\r
-\r
-He followed her with his eyes until she disappeared. Then he started\r
-up and walked about the Luxembourg garden like a madman. It is possible\r
-that, at times, he laughed to himself and talked aloud. He was so dreamy\r
-when he came near the children's nurses, that each one of them thought\r
-him in love with her.\r
-\r
-He quitted the Luxembourg, hoping to find her again in the street.\r
-\r
-He encountered Courfeyrac under the arcades of the Odeon, and said to\r
-him: "Come and dine with me." They went off to Rousseau's and spent\r
-six francs. Marius ate like an ogre. He gave the waiter six sous. At\r
-dessert, he said to Courfeyrac. "Have you read the paper? What a fine\r
-discourse Audry de Puyraveau delivered!"\r
-\r
-He was desperately in love.\r
-\r
-After dinner, he said to Courfeyrac: "I will treat you to the play."\r
-They went to the Porte-Sainte-Martin to see Frederick in l'Auberge des\r
-Adrets. Marius was enormously amused.\r
-\r
-At the same time, he had a redoubled attack of shyness. On emerging\r
-from the theatre, he refused to look at the garter of a modiste who was\r
-stepping across a gutter, and Courfeyrac, who said: "I should like to\r
-put that woman in my collection," almost horrified him.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac invited him to breakfast at the Cafe Voltaire on the\r
-following morning. Marius went thither, and ate even more than on the\r
-preceding evening. He was very thoughtful and very merry. One would\r
-have said that he was taking advantage of every occasion to laugh\r
-uproariously. He tenderly embraced some man or other from the provinces,\r
-who was presented to him. A circle of students formed round the table,\r
-and they spoke of the nonsense paid for by the State which was uttered\r
-from the rostrum in the Sorbonne, then the conversation fell upon the\r
-faults and omissions in Guicherat's dictionaries and grammars. Marius\r
-interrupted the discussion to exclaim: "But it is very agreeable, all\r
-the same to have the cross!"\r
-\r
-"That's queer!" whispered Courfeyrac to Jean Prouvaire.\r
-\r
-"No," responded Prouvaire, "that's serious."\r
-\r
-It was serious; in fact, Marius had reached that first violent and\r
-charming hour with which grand passions begin.\r
-\r
-A glance had wrought all this.\r
-\r
-When the mine is charged, when the conflagration is ready, nothing is\r
-more simple. A glance is a spark.\r
-\r
-It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His fate was entering\r
-the unknown.\r
-\r
-The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are\r
-tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every\r
-day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A\r
-moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come,\r
-dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is\r
-over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has\r
-caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought\r
-which was fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you.\r
-You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious\r
-forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human\r
-succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from\r
-agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune,\r
-your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power\r
-of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this\r
-terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured\r
-by passion.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER U DELIVERED OVER TO CONJECTURES\r
-\r
-Isolation, detachment from everything, pride, independence, the taste\r
-of nature, the absence of daily and material activity, the life within\r
-himself, the secret conflicts of chastity, a benevolent ecstasy towards\r
-all creation, had prepared Marius for this possession which is called\r
-passion. His worship of his father had gradually become a religion,\r
-and, like all religions, it had retreated to the depths of his soul.\r
-Something was required in the foreground. Love came.\r
-\r
-A full month elapsed, during which Marius went every day to the\r
-Luxembourg. When the hour arrived, nothing could hold him back.--"He\r
-is on duty," said Courfeyrac. Marius lived in a state of delight. It is\r
-certain that the young girl did look at him.\r
-\r
-He had finally grown bold, and approached the bench. Still, he did not\r
-pass in front of it any more, in obedience to the instinct of timidity\r
-and to the instinct of prudence common to lovers. He considered it\r
-better not to attract "the attention of the father." He combined his\r
-stations behind the trees and the pedestals of the statues with a\r
-profound diplomacy, so that he might be seen as much as possible by the\r
-young girl and as little as possible by the old gentleman. Sometimes, he\r
-remained motionless by the half-hour together in the shade of a Leonidas\r
-or a Spartacus, holding in his hand a book, above which his eyes, gently\r
-raised, sought the beautiful girl, and she, on her side, turned her\r
-charming profile towards him with a vague smile. While conversing in the\r
-most natural and tranquil manner in the world with the white-haired man,\r
-she bent upon Marius all the reveries of a virginal and passionate eye.\r
-Ancient and time-honored manoeuvre which Eve understood from the very\r
-first day of the world, and which every woman understands from the very\r
-first day of her life! her mouth replied to one, and her glance replied\r
-to another.\r
-\r
-It must be supposed, that M. Leblanc finally noticed something, for\r
-often, when Marius arrived, he rose and began to walk about. He had\r
-abandoned their accustomed place and had adopted the bench by the\r
-Gladiator, near the other end of the walk, as though with the object\r
-of seeing whether Marius would pursue them thither. Marius did not\r
-understand, and committed this error. "The father" began to grow\r
-inexact, and no longer brought "his daughter" every day. Sometimes, he\r
-came alone. Then Marius did not stay. Another blunder.\r
-\r
-Marius paid no heed to these symptoms. From the phase of timidity, he\r
-had passed, by a natural and fatal progress, to the phase of blindness.\r
-His love increased. He dreamed of it every night. And then, an\r
-unexpected bliss had happened to him, oil on the fire, a redoubling of\r
-the shadows over his eyes. One evening, at dusk, he had found, on\r
-the bench which "M. Leblanc and his daughter" had just quitted, a\r
-handkerchief, a very simple handkerchief, without embroidery, but white,\r
-and fine, and which seemed to him to exhale ineffable perfume. He seized\r
-it with rapture. This handkerchief was marked with the letters U. F.\r
-Marius knew nothing about this beautiful child,--neither her family\r
-name, her Christian name nor her abode; these two letters were the first\r
-thing of her that he had gained possession of, adorable initials, upon\r
-which he immediately began to construct his scaffolding. U was evidently\r
-the Christian name. "Ursule!" he thought, "what a delicious name!" He\r
-kissed the handkerchief, drank it in, placed it on his heart, on his\r
-flesh, during the day, and at night, laid it beneath his lips that he\r
-might fall asleep on it.\r
-\r
-"I feel that her whole soul lies within it!" he exclaimed.\r
-\r
-This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply let it\r
-fall from his pocket.\r
-\r
-In the days which followed the finding of this treasure, he only\r
-displayed himself at the Luxembourg in the act of kissing the\r
-handkerchief and laying it on his heart. The beautiful child understood\r
-nothing of all this, and signified it to him by imperceptible signs.\r
-\r
-"O modesty!" said Marius.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE VETERANS THEMSELVES CAN BE HAPPY\r
-\r
-Since we have pronounced the word modesty, and since we conceal nothing,\r
-we ought to say that once, nevertheless, in spite of his ecstasies, "his\r
-Ursule" caused him very serious grief. It was on one of the days when\r
-she persuaded M. Leblanc to leave the bench and stroll along the walk.\r
-A brisk May breeze was blowing, which swayed the crests of the\r
-plaintain-trees. The father and daughter, arm in arm, had just passed\r
-Marius' bench. Marius had risen to his feet behind them, and was\r
-following them with his eyes, as was fitting in the desperate situation\r
-of his soul.\r
-\r
-All at once, a gust of wind, more merry than the rest, and probably\r
-charged with performing the affairs of Springtime, swept down from\r
-the nursery, flung itself on the alley, enveloped the young girl in\r
-a delicious shiver, worthy of Virgil's nymphs, and the fawns of\r
-Theocritus, and lifted her dress, the robe more sacred than that of\r
-Isis, almost to the height of her garter. A leg of exquisite shape\r
-appeared. Marius saw it. He was exasperated and furious.\r
-\r
-The young girl had hastily thrust down her dress, with a divinely\r
-troubled motion, but he was none the less angry for all that. He was\r
-alone in the alley, it is true. But there might have been some one\r
-there. And what if there had been some one there! Can any one comprehend\r
-such a thing? What she had just done is horrible!--Alas, the poor child\r
-had done nothing; there had been but one culprit, the wind; but Marius,\r
-in whom quivered the Bartholo who exists in Cherubin, was determined to\r
-be vexed, and was jealous of his own shadow. It is thus, in fact, that\r
-the harsh and capricious jealousy of the flesh awakens in the human\r
-heart, and takes possession of it, even without any right. Moreover,\r
-setting aside even that jealousy, the sight of that charming leg had\r
-contained nothing agreeable for him; the white stocking of the first\r
-woman he chanced to meet would have afforded him more pleasure.\r
-\r
-When "his Ursule," after having reached the end of the walk, retraced\r
-her steps with M. Leblanc, and passed in front of the bench on which\r
-Marius had seated himself once more, Marius darted a sullen and\r
-ferocious glance at her. The young girl gave way to that slight\r
-straightening up with a backward movement, accompanied by a raising of\r
-the eyelids, which signifies: "Well, what is the matter?"\r
-\r
-This was "their first quarrel."\r
-\r
-Marius had hardly made this scene at her with his eyes, when some one\r
-crossed the walk. It was a veteran, very much bent, extremely wrinkled,\r
-and pale, in a uniform of the Louis XV. pattern, bearing on his breast\r
-the little oval plaque of red cloth, with the crossed swords, the\r
-soldier's cross of Saint-Louis, and adorned, in addition, with a\r
-coat-sleeve, which had no arm within it, with a silver chin and a wooden\r
-leg. Marius thought he perceived that this man had an extremely well\r
-satisfied air. It even struck him that the aged cynic, as he hobbled\r
-along past him, addressed to him a very fraternal and very merry wink,\r
-as though some chance had created an understanding between them, and as\r
-though they had shared some piece of good luck together. What did that\r
-relic of Mars mean by being so contented? What had passed between\r
-that wooden leg and the other? Marius reached a paroxysm of\r
-jealousy.--"Perhaps he was there!" he said to himself; "perhaps he\r
-saw!"--And he felt a desire to exterminate the veteran.\r
-\r
-With the aid of time, all points grow dull. Marius' wrath against\r
-"Ursule," just and legitimate as it was, passed off. He finally pardoned\r
-her; but this cost him a great effort; he sulked for three days.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, in spite of all this, and because of all this, his passion\r
-augmented and grew to madness.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--ECLIPSE\r
-\r
-The reader has just seen how Marius discovered, or thought that he\r
-discovered, that She was named Ursule.\r
-\r
-Appetite grows with loving. To know that her name was Ursule was a great\r
-deal; it was very little. In three or four weeks, Marius had devoured\r
-this bliss. He wanted another. He wanted to know where she lived.\r
-\r
-He had committed his first blunder, by falling into the ambush of the\r
-bench by the Gladiator. He had committed a second, by not remaining at\r
-the Luxembourg when M. Leblanc came thither alone. He now committed a\r
-third, and an immense one. He followed "Ursule."\r
-\r
-She lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, in the most unfrequented spot, in a\r
-new, three-story house, of modest appearance.\r
-\r
-From that moment forth, Marius added to his happiness of seeing her at\r
-the Luxembourg the happiness of following her home.\r
-\r
-His hunger was increasing. He knew her first name, at least, a charming\r
-name, a genuine woman's name; he knew where she lived; he wanted to know\r
-who she was.\r
-\r
-One evening, after he had followed them to their dwelling, and had seen\r
-them disappear through the carriage gate, he entered in their train and\r
-said boldly to the porter:--\r
-\r
-"Is that the gentleman who lives on the first floor, who has just come\r
-in?"\r
-\r
-"No," replied the porter. "He is the gentleman on the third floor."\r
-\r
-Another step gained. This success emboldened Marius.\r
-\r
-"On the front?" he asked.\r
-\r
-"Parbleu!" said the porter, "the house is only built on the street."\r
-\r
-"And what is that gentleman's business?" began Marius again.\r
-\r
-"He is a gentleman of property, sir. A very kind man who does good to\r
-the unfortunate, though not rich himself."\r
-\r
-"What is his name?" resumed Marius.\r
-\r
-The porter raised his head and said:--\r
-\r
-"Are you a police spy, sir?"\r
-\r
-Marius went off quite abashed, but delighted. He was getting on.\r
-\r
-"Good," thought he, "I know that her name is Ursule, that she is the\r
-daughter of a gentleman who lives on his income, and that she lives\r
-there, on the third floor, in the Rue de l'Ouest."\r
-\r
-On the following day, M. Leblanc and his daughter made only a very\r
-brief stay in the Luxembourg; they went away while it was still broad\r
-daylight. Marius followed them to the Rue de l'Ouest, as he had taken up\r
-the habit of doing. On arriving at the carriage entrance M. Leblanc made\r
-his daughter pass in first, then paused, before crossing the threshold,\r
-and stared intently at Marius.\r
-\r
-On the next day they did not come to the Luxembourg. Marius waited for\r
-them all day in vain.\r
-\r
-At nightfall, he went to the Rue de l'Ouest, and saw a light in the\r
-windows of the third story.\r
-\r
-He walked about beneath the windows until the light was extinguished.\r
-\r
-The next day, no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day, then went\r
-and did sentinel duty under their windows. This carried him on to ten\r
-o'clock in the evening.\r
-\r
-His dinner took care of itself. Fever nourishes the sick man, and love\r
-the lover.\r
-\r
-He spent a week in this manner. M. Leblanc no longer appeared at the\r
-Luxembourg.\r
-\r
-Marius indulged in melancholy conjectures; he dared not watch the porte\r
-cochere during the day; he contented himself with going at night to gaze\r
-upon the red light of the windows. At times he saw shadows flit across\r
-them, and his heart began to beat.\r
-\r
-On the eighth day, when he arrived under the windows, there was no light\r
-in them.\r
-\r
-"Hello!" he said, "the lamp is not lighted yet. But it is dark. Can they\r
-have gone out?" He waited until ten o'clock. Until midnight. Until one\r
-in the morning. Not a light appeared in the windows of the third story,\r
-and no one entered the house.\r
-\r
-He went away in a very gloomy frame of mind.\r
-\r
-On the morrow,--for he only existed from morrow to morrow, there was,\r
-so to speak, no to-day for him,--on the morrow, he found no one at the\r
-Luxembourg; he had expected this. At dusk, he went to the house.\r
-\r
-No light in the windows; the shades were drawn; the third floor was\r
-totally dark.\r
-\r
-Marius rapped at the porte cochere, entered, and said to the porter:--\r
-\r
-"The gentleman on the third floor?"\r
-\r
-"Has moved away," replied the porter.\r
-\r
-Marius reeled and said feebly:--\r
-\r
-"How long ago?"\r
-\r
-"Yesterday."\r
-\r
-"Where is he living now?"\r
-\r
-"I don't know anything about it."\r
-\r
-"So he has not left his new address?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-And the porter, raising his eyes, recognized Marius.\r
-\r
-"Come! So it's you!" said he; "but you are decidedly a spy then?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--MINES AND MINERS\r
-\r
-Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, a third\r
-lower floor. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes for\r
-good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the other.\r
-There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and a\r
-bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath\r
-civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under\r
-foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was\r
-almost open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive\r
-Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion\r
-under the Caesars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the\r
-sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow\r
-that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night. The\r
-catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the cellar\r
-of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.\r
-\r
-Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure,\r
-there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the\r
-philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. Such and\r
-such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another\r
-with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one catacomb to\r
-another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they\r
-branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize\r
-there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his\r
-lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius\r
-by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these\r
-energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which\r
-goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities,\r
-and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the\r
-bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this\r
-digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There\r
-are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works,\r
-as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The\r
-future.\r
-\r
-The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work\r
-is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to\r
-recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down,\r
-it becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer\r
-penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man\r
-has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.\r
-\r
-The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of this\r
-ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold, and\r
-where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine, sometimes\r
-misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is\r
-Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there\r
-is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre,\r
-there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes on. Lower\r
-down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the\r
-invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who perhaps do not exist as\r
-yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms.\r
-The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic\r
-work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.\r
-\r
-A world in limbo, in the state of foetus, what an unheard-of spectre!\r
-\r
-Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.\r
-\r
-Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,\r
-binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always, think\r
-themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary greatly, and\r
-the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The first are\r
-paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may be the\r
-contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal,\r
-from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this\r
-is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus. They\r
-throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not of\r
-themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute. The\r
-first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last, enigmatical though he\r
-may be, has still, beneath his eyelids, the pale beam of the infinite.\r
-Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign--the starry eye.\r
-\r
-The shadowy eye is the other sign.\r
-\r
-With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the presence of any one\r
-who has no glance at all. The social order has its black miners.\r
-\r
-There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where light\r
-becomes extinct.\r
-\r
-Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these\r
-galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of\r
-progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than\r
-Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection\r
-with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot. This\r
-is what we have designated as the le troisieme dessous. It is the grave\r
-of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. Inferi.\r
-\r
-This communicates with the abyss.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE LOWEST DEPTHS\r
-\r
-There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each\r
-one is for himself. The _I_ in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and\r
-gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf.\r
-\r
-The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost\r
-phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant\r
-both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything\r
-but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost\r
-unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible\r
-obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and\r
-misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction,\r
-appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not\r
-after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger.\r
-From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy\r
-creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower\r
-level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest\r
-of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty--that\r
-is the point of departure; to be Satan--that is the point reached. From\r
-that vault Lacenaire emerges.\r
-\r
-We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the\r
-upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical\r
-excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified,\r
-honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of\r
-veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there\r
-effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress.\r
-\r
-The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths,\r
-hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point,\r
-and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated,\r
-the great cavern of evil.\r
-\r
-This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without\r
-exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut\r
-a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the\r
-inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this\r
-stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.\r
-Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to\r
-Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of\r
-everything.\r
-\r
-Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates.\r
-It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social\r
-order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it\r
-undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines\r
-progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination.\r
-It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is formed of ignorance.\r
-\r
-All the others, those above it, have but one object--to suppress it.\r
-It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their\r
-organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by\r
-their contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cavern Ignorance and\r
-you destroy the lair Crime.\r
-\r
-Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written.\r
-The only social peril is darkness.\r
-\r
-Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no\r
-difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow\r
-in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But\r
-ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it. This incurable\r
-blackness takes possession of the interior of a man and is there\r
-converted into evil.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE\r
-\r
-A quartette of ruffians, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, and Montparnasse\r
-governed the third lower floor of Paris, from 1830 to 1835.\r
-\r
-Gueulemer was a Hercules of no defined position. For his lair he had the\r
-sewer of the Arche-Marion. He was six feet high, his pectoral muscles\r
-were of marble, his biceps of brass, his breath was that of a cavern,\r
-his torso that of a colossus, his head that of a bird. One thought one\r
-beheld the Farnese Hercules clad in duck trousers and a cotton velvet\r
-waistcoat. Gueulemer, built after this sculptural fashion, might have\r
-subdued monsters; he had found it more expeditious to be one. A low\r
-brow, large temples, less than forty years of age, but with crow's-feet,\r
-harsh, short hair, cheeks like a brush, a beard like that of a wild\r
-boar; the reader can see the man before him. His muscles called for\r
-work, his stupidity would have none of it. He was a great, idle force.\r
-He was an assassin through coolness. He was thought to be a creole. He\r
-had, probably, somewhat to do with Marshal Brune, having been a porter\r
-at Avignon in 1815. After this stage, he had turned ruffian.\r
-\r
-The diaphaneity of Babet contrasted with the grossness of Gueulemer.\r
-Babet was thin and learned. He was transparent but impenetrable.\r
-Daylight was visible through his bones, but nothing through his eyes. He\r
-declared that he was a chemist. He had been a jack of all trades. He had\r
-played in vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man of purpose, a fine\r
-talker, who underlined his smiles and accentuated his gestures. His\r
-occupation consisted in selling, in the open air, plaster busts and\r
-portraits of "the head of the State." In addition to this, he extracted\r
-teeth. He had exhibited phenomena at fairs, and he had owned a booth\r
-with a trumpet and this poster: "Babet, Dental Artist, Member of the\r
-Academies, makes physical experiments on metals and metalloids, extracts\r
-teeth, undertakes stumps abandoned by his brother practitioners. Price:\r
-one tooth, one franc, fifty centimes; two teeth, two francs; three\r
-teeth, two francs, fifty. Take advantage of this opportunity." This Take\r
-advantage of this opportunity meant: Have as many teeth extracted as\r
-possible. He had been married and had had children. He did not know what\r
-had become of his wife and children. He had lost them as one loses his\r
-handkerchief. Babet read the papers, a striking exception in the world\r
-to which he belonged. One day, at the period when he had his family with\r
-him in his booth on wheels, he had read in the Messager, that a woman\r
-had just given birth to a child, who was doing well, and had a calf's\r
-muzzle, and he exclaimed: "There's a fortune! my wife has not the wit to\r
-present me with a child like that!"\r
-\r
-Later on he had abandoned everything, in order to "undertake Paris."\r
-This was his expression.\r
-\r
-Who was Claquesous? He was night. He waited until the sky was daubed\r
-with black, before he showed himself. At nightfall he emerged from the\r
-hole whither he returned before daylight. Where was this hole? No one\r
-knew. He only addressed his accomplices in the most absolute darkness,\r
-and with his back turned to them. Was his name Claquesous? Certainly\r
-not. If a candle was brought, he put on a mask. He was a ventriloquist.\r
-Babet said: "Claquesous is a nocturne for two voices." Claquesous was\r
-vague, terrible, and a roamer. No one was sure whether he had a name,\r
-Claquesous being a sobriquet; none was sure that he had a voice, as his\r
-stomach spoke more frequently than his voice; no one was sure that he\r
-had a face, as he was never seen without his mask. He disappeared as\r
-though he had vanished into thin air; when he appeared, it was as though\r
-he sprang from the earth.\r
-\r
-A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than\r
-twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming\r
-black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all\r
-vices and aspired to all crimes.\r
-\r
-The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the\r
-street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was\r
-genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of\r
-his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft\r
-of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence.\r
-His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a\r
-fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The\r
-cause of all this youth's crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The\r
-first grisette who had said to him: "You are handsome!" had cast the\r
-stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel.\r
-Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the\r
-height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few\r
-prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already\r
-numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with\r
-outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a\r
-pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman,\r
-the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the\r
-boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon\r
-in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the\r
-sepulchre.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--COMPOSITION OF THE TROUPE\r
-\r
-These four ruffians formed a sort of Proteus, winding like a serpent\r
-among the police, and striving to escape Vidocq's indiscreet glances\r
-"under divers forms, tree, flame, fountain," lending each other their\r
-names and their traps, hiding in their own shadows, boxes with\r
-secret compartments and refuges for each other, stripping off their\r
-personalities, as one removes his false nose at a masked ball, sometimes\r
-simplifying matters to the point of consisting of but one individual,\r
-sometimes multiplying themselves to such a point that Coco-Latour\r
-himself took them for a whole throng.\r
-\r
-These four men were not four men; they were a sort of mysterious robber\r
-with four heads, operating on a grand scale on Paris; they were that\r
-monstrous polyp of evil, which inhabits the crypt of society.\r
-\r
-Thanks to their ramifications, and to the network underlying their\r
-relations, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse were charged\r
-with the general enterprise of the ambushes of the department of\r
-the Seine. The inventors of ideas of that nature, men with nocturnal\r
-imaginations, applied to them to have their ideas executed. They\r
-furnished the canvas to the four rascals, and the latter undertook the\r
-preparation of the scenery. They labored at the stage setting. They were\r
-always in a condition to lend a force proportioned and suitable to\r
-all crimes which demanded a lift of the shoulder, and which were\r
-sufficiently lucrative. When a crime was in quest of arms, they\r
-under-let their accomplices. They kept a troupe of actors of the shadows\r
-at the disposition of all underground tragedies.\r
-\r
-They were in the habit of assembling at nightfall, the hour when they\r
-woke up, on the plains which adjoin the Salpetriere. There they held\r
-their conferences. They had twelve black hours before them; they\r
-regulated their employment accordingly.\r
-\r
-Patron-Minette,--such was the name which was bestowed in the\r
-subterranean circulation on the association of these four men. In the\r
-fantastic, ancient, popular parlance, which is vanishing day by day,\r
-Patron-Minette signifies the morning, the same as entre chien et\r
-loup--between dog and wolf--signifies the evening. This appellation,\r
-Patron-Minette, was probably derived from the hour at which their work\r
-ended, the dawn being the vanishing moment for phantoms and for the\r
-separation of ruffians. These four men were known under this title.\r
-When the President of the Assizes visited Lacenaire in his prison, and\r
-questioned him concerning a misdeed which Lacenaire denied, "Who did\r
-it?" demanded the President. Lacenaire made this response, enigmatical\r
-so far as the magistrate was concerned, but clear to the police:\r
-"Perhaps it was Patron-Minette."\r
-\r
-A piece can sometimes be divined on the enunciation of the personages;\r
-in the same manner a band can almost be judged from the list of ruffians\r
-composing it. Here are the appellations to which the principal members\r
-of Patron-Minette answered,--for the names have survived in special\r
-memoirs.\r
-\r
-Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille.\r
-\r
-Brujon. [There was a Brujon dynasty; we cannot refrain from\r
-interpolating this word.]\r
-\r
-Boulatruelle, the road-mender already introduced.\r
-\r
-Laveuve.\r
-\r
-Finistere.\r
-\r
-Homere-Hogu, a negro.\r
-\r
-Mardisoir. (Tuesday evening.)\r
-\r
-Depeche. (Make haste.)\r
-\r
-Fauntleroy, alias Bouquetiere (the Flower Girl).\r
-\r
-Glorieux, a discharged convict.\r
-\r
-Barrecarrosse (Stop-carriage), called Monsieur Dupont.\r
-\r
-L'Esplanade-du-Sud.\r
-\r
-Poussagrive.\r
-\r
-Carmagnolet.\r
-\r
-Kruideniers, called Bizarro.\r
-\r
-Mangedentelle. (Lace-eater.)\r
-\r
-Les-pieds-en-l'Air. (Feet in the air.)\r
-\r
-Demi-Liard, called Deux-Milliards.\r
-\r
-Etc., etc.\r
-\r
-We pass over some, and not the worst of them. These names have faces\r
-attached. They do not express merely beings, but species. Each one of\r
-these names corresponds to a variety of those misshapen fungi from the\r
-under side of civilization.\r
-\r
-Those beings, who were not very lavish with their countenances, were not\r
-among the men whom one sees passing along the streets. Fatigued by the\r
-wild nights which they passed, they went off by day to sleep, sometimes\r
-in the lime-kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmatre or\r
-Montrouge, sometimes in the sewers. They ran to earth.\r
-\r
-What became of these men? They still exist. They have always existed.\r
-Horace speaks of them: Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici,\r
-mimae; and so long as society remains what it is, they will remain what\r
-they are. Beneath the obscure roof of their cavern, they are continually\r
-born again from the social ooze. They return, spectres, but always\r
-identical; only, they no longer bear the same names and they are\r
-no longer in the same skins. The individuals extirpated, the tribe\r
-subsists.\r
-\r
-They always have the same faculties. From the vagrant to the tramp, the\r
-race is maintained in its purity. They divine purses in pockets, they\r
-scent out watches in fobs. Gold and silver possess an odor for them.\r
-There exist ingenuous bourgeois, of whom it might be said, that they\r
-have a "stealable" air. These men patiently pursue these bourgeois. They\r
-experience the quivers of a spider at the passage of a stranger or of a\r
-man from the country.\r
-\r
-These men are terrible, when one encounters them, or catches a glimpse\r
-of them, towards midnight, on a deserted boulevard. They do not seem\r
-to be men but forms composed of living mists; one would say that they\r
-habitually constitute one mass with the shadows, that they are in\r
-no wise distinct from them, that they possess no other soul than the\r
-darkness, and that it is only momentarily and for the purpose of living\r
-for a few minutes a monstrous life, that they have separated from the\r
-night.\r
-\r
-What is necessary to cause these spectres to vanish? Light. Light in\r
-floods. Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up society from\r
-below.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--MARIUS, WHILE SEEKING A GIRL IN A BONNET, ENCOUNTERS A MAN IN\r
-A CAP\r
-\r
-Summer passed, then the autumn; winter came. Neither M. Leblanc nor the\r
-young girl had again set foot in the Luxembourg garden. Thenceforth,\r
-Marius had but one thought,--to gaze once more on that sweet and\r
-adorable face. He sought constantly, he sought everywhere; he found\r
-nothing. He was no longer Marius, the enthusiastic dreamer, the firm,\r
-resolute, ardent man, the bold defier of fate, the brain which erected\r
-future on future, the young spirit encumbered with plans, with projects,\r
-with pride, with ideas and wishes; he was a lost dog. He fell into a\r
-black melancholy. All was over. Work disgusted him, walking tired him.\r
-Vast nature, formerly so filled with forms, lights, voices, counsels,\r
-perspectives, horizons, teachings, now lay empty before him. It seemed\r
-to him that everything had disappeared.\r
-\r
-He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but he no longer\r
-took pleasure in his thoughts. To everything that they proposed to him\r
-in a whisper, he replied in his darkness: "What is the use?"\r
-\r
-He heaped a hundred reproaches on himself. "Why did I follow her? I\r
-was so happy at the mere sight of her! She looked at me; was not that\r
-immense? She had the air of loving me. Was not that everything? I wished\r
-to have, what? There was nothing after that. I have been absurd. It is\r
-my own fault," etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing,--it\r
-was his nature,--but who made some little guess at everything,--that was\r
-his nature,--had begun by congratulating him on being in love, though he\r
-was amazed at it; then, seeing Marius fall into this melancholy state,\r
-he ended by saying to him: "I see that you have been simply an animal.\r
-Here, come to the Chaumiere."\r
-\r
-Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had allowed\r
-himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and\r
-Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps, find her there.\r
-Of course he did not see the one he sought.--"But this is the place,\r
-all the same, where all lost women are found," grumbled Grantaire in an\r
-aside. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned home on foot,\r
-alone, through the night, weary, feverish, with sad and troubled eyes,\r
-stunned by the noise and dust of the merry wagons filled with singing\r
-creatures on their way home from the feast, which passed close to\r
-him, as he, in his discouragement, breathed in the acrid scent of the\r
-walnut-trees, along the road, in order to refresh his head.\r
-\r
-He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed, wholly given\r
-up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his pain like the wolf in\r
-the trap, seeking the absent one everywhere, stupefied by love.\r
-\r
-On another occasion, he had an encounter which produced on him a\r
-singular effect. He met, in the narrow streets in the vicinity of the\r
-Boulevard des Invalides, a man dressed like a workingman and wearing a\r
-cap with a long visor, which allowed a glimpse of locks of very\r
-white hair. Marius was struck with the beauty of this white hair, and\r
-scrutinized the man, who was walking slowly and as though absorbed in\r
-painful meditation. Strange to say, he thought that he recognized M.\r
-Leblanc. The hair was the same, also the profile, so far as the cap\r
-permitted a view of it, the mien identical, only more depressed. But why\r
-these workingman's clothes? What was the meaning of this? What signified\r
-that disguise? Marius was greatly astonished. When he recovered himself,\r
-his first impulse was to follow the man; who knows whether he did not\r
-hold at last the clue which he was seeking? In any case, he must see the\r
-man near at hand, and clear up the mystery. But the idea occurred to him\r
-too late, the man was no longer there. He had turned into some little\r
-side street, and Marius could not find him. This encounter occupied\r
-his mind for three days and then was effaced. "After all," he said to\r
-himself, "it was probably only a resemblance."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--TREASURE TROVE\r
-\r
-Marius had not left the Gorbeau house. He paid no attention to any one\r
-there.\r
-\r
-At that epoch, to tell the truth, there were no other inhabitants in the\r
-house, except himself and those Jondrettes whose rent he had once paid,\r
-without, moreover, ever having spoken to either father, mother, or\r
-daughters. The other lodgers had moved away or had died, or had been\r
-turned out in default of payment.\r
-\r
-One day during that winter, the sun had shown itself a little in the\r
-afternoon, but it was the 2d of February, that ancient Candlemas\r
-day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of a six weeks' cold spell,\r
-inspired Mathieu Laensberg with these two lines, which have with justice\r
-remained classic:--\r
-\r
-\r
- Qu'il luise ou qu'il luiserne,\r
- L'ours rentre dans en sa caverne.[26]\r
-\r
-\r
-Marius had just emerged from his: night was falling. It was the hour for\r
-his dinner; for he had been obliged to take to dining again, alas! oh,\r
-infirmities of ideal passions!\r
-\r
-He had just crossed his threshold, where Ma'am Bougon was sweeping at\r
-the moment, as she uttered this memorable monologue:--\r
-\r
-"What is there that is cheap now? Everything is dear. There is nothing\r
-in the world that is cheap except trouble; you can get that for nothing,\r
-the trouble of the world!"\r
-\r
-Marius slowly ascended the boulevard towards the barrier, in order to\r
-reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He was walking along with drooping head.\r
-\r
-All at once, he felt some one elbow him in the dusk; he wheeled round,\r
-and saw two young girls clad in rags, the one tall and slim, the other a\r
-little shorter, who were passing rapidly, all out of breath, in terror,\r
-and with the appearance of fleeing; they had been coming to meet him,\r
-had not seen him, and had jostled him as they passed. Through the\r
-twilight, Marius could distinguish their livid faces, their wild heads,\r
-their dishevelled hair, their hideous bonnets, their ragged petticoats,\r
-and their bare feet. They were talking as they ran. The taller said in a\r
-very low voice:--\r
-\r
-"The bobbies have come. They came near nabbing me at the half-circle."\r
-The other answered: "I saw them. I bolted, bolted, bolted!"\r
-\r
-Through this repulsive slang, Marius understood that gendarmes or the\r
-police had come near apprehending these two children, and that the\r
-latter had escaped.\r
-\r
-They plunged among the trees of the boulevard behind him, and there\r
-created, for a few minutes, in the gloom, a sort of vague white spot,\r
-then disappeared.\r
-\r
-Marius had halted for a moment.\r
-\r
-He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on a little grayish\r
-package lying on the ground at his feet. He stooped and picked it up. It\r
-was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.\r
-\r
-"Good," he said to himself, "those unhappy girls dropped it."\r
-\r
-He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he reflected\r
-that they must already be far away, put the package in his pocket, and\r
-went off to dine.\r
-\r
-On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a child's coffin,\r
-covered with a black cloth resting on three chairs, and illuminated by a\r
-candle. The two girls of the twilight recurred to his mind.\r
-\r
-"Poor mothers!" he thought. "There is one thing sadder than to see one's\r
-children die; it is to see them leading an evil life."\r
-\r
-Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy vanished from his\r
-thoughts, and he fell back once more into his habitual preoccupations.\r
-He fell to thinking once more of his six months of love and happiness\r
-in the open air and the broad daylight, beneath the beautiful trees of\r
-Luxembourg.\r
-\r
-"How gloomy my life has become!" he said to himself. "Young girls are\r
-always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now they are\r
-ghouls."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--QUADRIFRONS\r
-\r
-That evening, as he was undressing preparatory to going to bed, his hand\r
-came in contact, in the pocket of his coat, with the packet which he\r
-had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought that it\r
-would be well to open it, and that this package might possibly contain\r
-the address of the young girls, if it really belonged to them, and, in\r
-any case, the information necessary to a restitution to the person who\r
-had lost it.\r
-\r
-He opened the envelope.\r
-\r
-It was not sealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.\r
-\r
-They bore addresses.\r
-\r
-All four exhaled a horrible odor of tobacco.\r
-\r
-The first was addressed: "To Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray,\r
-the place opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.--"\r
-\r
-Marius said to himself, that he should probably find in it the\r
-information which he sought, and that, moreover, the letter being open,\r
-it was probable that it could be read without impropriety.\r
-\r
-It was conceived as follows:--\r
-\r
-\r
-Madame la Marquise: The virtue of clemency and piety is that which most\r
-closely unites sosiety. Turn your Christian spirit and cast a look of\r
-compassion on this unfortunate Spanish victim of loyalty and attachment\r
-to the sacred cause of legitimacy, who has given with his blood,\r
-consecrated his fortune, evverything, to defend that cause, and to-day\r
-finds himself in the greatest missery. He doubts not that your honorable\r
-person will grant succor to preserve an existence exteremely painful for\r
-a military man of education and honor full of wounds, counts in advance\r
-on the humanity which animates you and on the interest which Madame la\r
-Marquise bears to a nation so unfortunate. Their prayer will not be in\r
-vain, and their gratitude will preserve theirs charming souvenir.\r
-\r
- My respectful sentiments, with which I have the honor to be\r
- Madame,\r
- Don Alvares, Spanish Captain\r
- of Cavalry, a royalist who\r
- has take refuge in France,\r
- who finds himself on travells\r
- for his country, and the\r
- resources are lacking him to\r
- continue his travells.\r
-\r
-\r
-No address was joined to the signature. Marius hoped to find the address\r
-in the second letter, whose superscription read: A Madame, Madame la\r
-Comtesse de Montvernet, Rue Cassette, No. 9. This is what Marius read in\r
-it:--\r
-\r
-\r
- Madame la Comtesse: It is an unhappy mother of a family of six\r
- children the last of which is only eight months old. I sick\r
- since my last confinement, abandoned by my husband five months ago,\r
- haveing no resources in the world the most frightful indigance.\r
-\r
- In the hope of Madame la Comtesse, she has the honor to be,\r
- Madame, with profound respect,\r
- Mistress Balizard.\r
-\r
-\r
-Marius turned to the third letter, which was a petition like the\r
-preceding; he read:--\r
-\r
- Monsieur Pabourgeot, Elector, wholesale stocking merchant,\r
- Rue Saint-Denis on the corner of the Rue aux Fers.\r
-\r
- I permit myself to address you this letter to beg you to grant me\r
- the pretious favor of your simpaties and to interest yourself in a man\r
- of letters who has just sent a drama to the Theatre-Francais. The subject\r
- is historical, and the action takes place in Auvergne in the time\r
- of the Empire; the style, I think, is natural, laconic, and may have\r
- some merit. There are couplets to be sung in four places. The comic,\r
- the serious, the unexpected, are mingled in a variety of characters,\r
- and a tinge of romanticism lightly spread through all the intrigue\r
- which proceeds misteriously, and ends, after striking altarations,\r
- in the midst of many beautiful strokes of brilliant scenes.\r
-\r
- My principal object is to satisfi the desire which progressively\r
- animates the man of our century, that is to say, the fashion,\r
- that capritious and bizarre weathervane which changes at almost\r
- every new wind.\r
-\r
- In spite of these qualities I have reason to fear that jealousy,\r
- the egotism of priviliged authors, may obtaine my exclusion from\r
- the theatre, for I am not ignorant of the mortifications with which\r
- new-comers are treated.\r
-\r
- Monsiuer Pabourgeot, your just reputation as an enlightened protector\r
- of men of litters emboldens me to send you my daughter who will\r
- explain our indigant situation to you, lacking bread and fire\r
- in this wynter season. When I say to you that I beg you to accept\r
- the dedication of my drama which I desire to make to you and of all\r
- those that I shall make, is to prove to you how great is my ambition\r
- to have the honor of sheltering myself under your protection,\r
- and of adorning my writings with your name. If you deign to honor\r
- me with the most modest offering, I shall immediately occupy myself\r
- in making a piesse of verse to pay you my tribute of gratitude.\r
- Which I shall endeavor to render this piesse as perfect as possible,\r
- will be sent to you before it is inserted at the beginning of the\r
- drama and delivered on the stage.\r
- To Monsieur\r
- and Madame Pabourgeot,\r
- My most respectful complements,\r
- Genflot, man of letters.\r
- P. S. Even if it is only forty sous.\r
-\r
- Excuse me for sending my daughter and not presenting myself,\r
- but sad motives connected with the toilet do not permit me,\r
- alas! to go out.\r
-\r
-\r
-Finally, Marius opened the fourth letter. The address ran: To the\r
-benevolent Gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-haut-Pas. It\r
-contained the following lines:--\r
-\r
-\r
- Benevolent Man: If you deign to accompany my daughter, you will\r
- behold a misserable calamity, and I will show you my certificates.\r
-\r
- At the aspect of these writings your generous soul will be moved\r
- with a sentiment of obvious benevolence, for true philosophers\r
- always feel lively emotions.\r
-\r
- Admit, compassionate man, that it is necessary to suffer the most\r
- cruel need, and that it is very painful, for the sake of obtaining\r
- a little relief, to get oneself attested by the authorities as though\r
- one were not free to suffer and to die of inanition while waiting\r
- to have our misery relieved. Destinies are very fatal for several\r
- and too prodigal or too protecting for others.\r
-\r
- I await your presence or your offering, if you deign to make one,\r
- and I beseech you to accept the respectful sentiments with which I\r
- have the honor to be,\r
- truly magnanimous man,\r
- your very humble\r
- and very obedient servant,\r
- P. Fabantou, dramatic artist.\r
-\r
-\r
-After perusing these four letters, Marius did not find himself much\r
-further advanced than before.\r
-\r
-In the first place, not one of the signers gave his address.\r
-\r
-Then, they seemed to come from four different individuals, Don Alveras,\r
-Mistress Balizard, the poet Genflot, and dramatic artist Fabantou; but\r
-the singular thing about these letters was, that all four were written\r
-by the same hand.\r
-\r
-What conclusion was to be drawn from this, except that they all come\r
-from the same person?\r
-\r
-Moreover, and this rendered the conjecture all the more probable, the\r
-coarse and yellow paper was the same in all four, the odor of tobacco\r
-was the same, and, although an attempt had been made to vary the\r
-style, the same orthographical faults were reproduced with the greatest\r
-tranquillity, and the man of letters Genflot was no more exempt from\r
-them than the Spanish captain.\r
-\r
-It was waste of trouble to try to solve this petty mystery. Had it not\r
-been a chance find, it would have borne the air of a mystification.\r
-Marius was too melancholy to take even a chance pleasantry well, and to\r
-lend himself to a game which the pavement of the street seemed desirous\r
-of playing with him. It seemed to him that he was playing the part of\r
-the blind man in blind man's buff between the four letters, and that\r
-they were making sport of him.\r
-\r
-Nothing, however, indicated that these letters belonged to the two\r
-young girls whom Marius had met on the boulevard. After all, they were\r
-evidently papers of no value. Marius replaced them in their envelope,\r
-flung the whole into a corner and went to bed. About seven o'clock in\r
-the morning, he had just risen and breakfasted, and was trying to settle\r
-down to work, when there came a soft knock at his door.\r
-\r
-As he owned nothing, he never locked his door, unless occasionally,\r
-though very rarely, when he was engaged in some pressing work. Even when\r
-absent he left his key in the lock. "You will be robbed," said Ma'am\r
-Bougon. "Of what?" said Marius. The truth is, however, that he had, one\r
-day, been robbed of an old pair of boots, to the great triumph of Ma'am\r
-Bougon.\r
-\r
-There came a second knock, as gentle as the first.\r
-\r
-"Come in," said Marius.\r
-\r
-The door opened.\r
-\r
-"What do you want, Ma'am Bougon?" asked Marius, without raising his eyes\r
-from the books and manuscripts on his table.\r
-\r
-A voice which did not belong to Ma'am Bougon replied:--\r
-\r
-"Excuse me, sir--"\r
-\r
-It was a dull, broken, hoarse, strangled voice, the voice of an old man,\r
-roughened with brandy and liquor.\r
-\r
-Marius turned round hastily, and beheld a young girl.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--A ROSE IN MISERY\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Rose in Misery 3b8-4-rose-in-misery]\r
-\r
-A very young girl was standing in the half-open door. The dormer window\r
-of the garret, through which the light fell, was precisely opposite\r
-the door, and illuminated the figure with a wan light. She was a frail,\r
-emaciated, slender creature; there was nothing but a chemise and a\r
-petticoat upon that chilled and shivering nakedness. Her girdle was a\r
-string, her head ribbon a string, her pointed shoulders emerged from her\r
-chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor, earth-colored collar-bones, red\r
-hands, a half-open and degraded mouth, missing teeth, dull, bold, base\r
-eyes; she had the form of a young girl who has missed her youth, and the\r
-look of a corrupt old woman; fifty years mingled with fifteen; one of\r
-those beings which are both feeble and horrible, and which cause those\r
-to shudder whom they do not cause to weep.\r
-\r
-Marius had risen, and was staring in a sort of stupor at this being, who\r
-was almost like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams.\r
-\r
-The most heart-breaking thing of all was, that this young girl had not\r
-come into the world to be homely. In her early childhood she must even\r
-have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the\r
-hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. The remains of\r
-beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like the pale sunlight\r
-which is extinguished under hideous clouds at dawn on a winter's day.\r
-\r
-That face was not wholly unknown to Marius. He thought he remembered\r
-having seen it somewhere.\r
-\r
-"What do you wish, Mademoiselle?" he asked.\r
-\r
-The young girl replied in her voice of a drunken convict:--\r
-\r
-"Here is a letter for you, Monsieur Marius."\r
-\r
-She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that he was the person\r
-whom she wanted; but who was this girl? How did she know his name?\r
-\r
-Without waiting for him to tell her to advance, she entered. She entered\r
-resolutely, staring, with a sort of assurance that made the heart bleed,\r
-at the whole room and the unmade bed. Her feet were bare. Large holes\r
-in her petticoat permitted glimpses of her long legs and her thin knees.\r
-She was shivering.\r
-\r
-She held a letter in her hand, which she presented to Marius.\r
-\r
-Marius, as he opened the letter, noticed that the enormous wafer which\r
-sealed it was still moist. The message could not have come from a\r
-distance. He read:--\r
-\r
-\r
- My amiable neighbor, young man: I have learned of your goodness to me,\r
- that you paid my rent six months ago. I bless you, young man.\r
- My eldest daughter will tell you that we have been without a morsel\r
- of bread for two days, four persons and my spouse ill. If I am\r
- not deseaved in my opinion, I think I may hope that your generous\r
- heart will melt at this statement and the desire will subjugate you\r
- to be propitious to me by daigning to lavish on me a slight favor.\r
-\r
- I am with the distinguished consideration which is due to the\r
- benefactors of humanity,--\r
-\r
- Jondrette.\r
-\r
- P.S. My eldest daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius.\r
-\r
-\r
-This letter, coming in the very midst of the mysterious adventure which\r
-had occupied Marius' thoughts ever since the preceding evening, was like\r
-a candle in a cellar. All was suddenly illuminated.\r
-\r
-This letter came from the same place as the other four. There was the\r
-same writing, the same style, the same orthography, the same paper, the\r
-same odor of tobacco.\r
-\r
-There were five missives, five histories, five signatures, and a single\r
-signer. The Spanish Captain Don Alvares, the unhappy Mistress Balizard,\r
-the dramatic poet Genflot, the old comedian Fabantou, were all four\r
-named Jondrette, if, indeed, Jondrette himself were named Jondrette.\r
-\r
-Marius had lived in the house for a tolerably long time, and he had had,\r
-as we have said, but very rare occasion to see, to even catch a glimpse\r
-of, his extremely mean neighbors. His mind was elsewhere, and where the\r
-mind is, there the eyes are also. He had been obliged more than once to\r
-pass the Jondrettes in the corridor or on the stairs; but they were mere\r
-forms to him; he had paid so little heed to them, that, on the preceding\r
-evening, he had jostled the Jondrette girls on the boulevard, without\r
-recognizing them, for it had evidently been they, and it was with great\r
-difficulty that the one who had just entered his room had awakened in\r
-him, in spite of disgust and pity, a vague recollection of having met\r
-her elsewhere.\r
-\r
-Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that his neighbor\r
-Jondrette, in his distress, exercised the industry of speculating on the\r
-charity of benevolent persons, that he procured addresses, and that he\r
-wrote under feigned names to people whom he judged to be wealthy and\r
-compassionate, letters which his daughters delivered at their risk\r
-and peril, for this father had come to such a pass, that he risked his\r
-daughters; he was playing a game with fate, and he used them as the\r
-stake. Marius understood that probably, judging from their flight on the\r
-evening before, from their breathless condition, from their terror\r
-and from the words of slang which he had overheard, these unfortunate\r
-creatures were plying some inexplicably sad profession, and that the\r
-result of the whole was, in the midst of human society, as it is now\r
-constituted, two miserable beings who were neither girls nor women, a\r
-species of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.\r
-\r
-Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom neither good nor\r
-evil were any longer possible, and who, on emerging from childhood,\r
-have already nothing in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor\r
-responsibility. Souls which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded\r
-to-day, like those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled\r
-with every sort of mire, while waiting for some wheel to crush them.\r
-Nevertheless, while Marius bent a pained and astonished gaze on her, the\r
-young girl was wandering back and forth in the garret with the audacity\r
-of a spectre. She kicked about, without troubling herself as to her\r
-nakedness. Occasionally her chemise, which was untied and torn, fell\r
-almost to her waist. She moved the chairs about, she disarranged the\r
-toilet articles which stood on the commode, she handled Marius' clothes,\r
-she rummaged about to see what there was in the corners.\r
-\r
-"Hullo!" said she, "you have a mirror!"\r
-\r
-And she hummed scraps of vaudevilles, as though she had been alone,\r
-frolicsome refrains which her hoarse and guttural voice rendered\r
-lugubrious.\r
-\r
-An indescribable constraint, weariness, and humiliation were perceptible\r
-beneath this hardihood. Effrontery is a disgrace.\r
-\r
-Nothing could be more melancholy than to see her sport about the room,\r
-and, so to speak, flit with the movements of a bird which is frightened\r
-by the daylight, or which has broken its wing. One felt that under other\r
-conditions of education and destiny, the gay and over-free mien of this\r
-young girl might have turned out sweet and charming. Never, even among\r
-animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That\r
-is only to be seen among men.\r
-\r
-Marius reflected, and allowed her to have her way.\r
-\r
-She approached the table.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" said she, "books!"\r
-\r
-A flash pierced her glassy eye. She resumed, and her accent expressed\r
-the happiness which she felt in boasting of something, to which no human\r
-creature is insensible:--\r
-\r
-"I know how to read, I do!"\r
-\r
-She eagerly seized a book which lay open on the table, and read with\r
-tolerable fluency:--\r
-\r
-"--General Bauduin received orders to take the chateau of Hougomont\r
-which stands in the middle of the plain of Waterloo, with five\r
-battalions of his brigade."\r
-\r
-She paused.\r
-\r
-"Ah! Waterloo! I know about that. It was a battle long ago. My father\r
-was there. My father has served in the armies. We are fine Bonapartists\r
-in our house, that we are! Waterloo was against the English."\r
-\r
-She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"And I know how to write, too!"\r
-\r
-She dipped her pen in the ink, and turning to Marius:--\r
-\r
-"Do you want to see? Look here, I'm going to write a word to show you."\r
-\r
-And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a sheet of white paper,\r
-which lay in the middle of the table: "The bobbies are here."\r
-\r
-Then throwing down the pen:--\r
-\r
-"There are no faults of orthography. You can look. We have received an\r
-education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. We\r
-were not made--"\r
-\r
-Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing,\r
-saying, with an intonation which contained every form of anguish,\r
-stifled by every form of cynicism:--\r
-\r
-"Bah!"\r
-\r
-And she began to hum these words to a gay air:--\r
-\r
- "J'ai faim, mon pere." I am hungry, father.\r
- Pas de fricot. I have no food.\r
- J'ai froid, ma mere. I am cold, mother.\r
- Pas de tricot. I have no clothes.\r
- Grelotte, Lolotte!\r
- Lolotte! Shiver,\r
- Sanglote, Sob,\r
- Jacquot!" Jacquot!"\r
-\r
-\r
-She had hardly finished this couplet, when she exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little\r
-brother who is a friend of the artists, and who gives me tickets\r
-sometimes. But I don't like the benches in the galleries. One is cramped\r
-and uncomfortable there. There are rough people there sometimes; and\r
-people who smell bad."\r
-\r
-Then she scrutinized Marius, assumed a singular air and said:--\r
-\r
-"Do you know, Mr. Marius, that you are a very handsome fellow?"\r
-\r
-And at the same moment the same idea occurred to them both, and made\r
-her smile and him blush. She stepped up to him, and laid her hand on his\r
-shoulder: "You pay no heed to me, but I know you, Mr. Marius. I meet you\r
-here on the staircase, and then I often see you going to a person named\r
-Father Mabeuf who lives in the direction of Austerlitz, sometimes when I\r
-have been strolling in that quarter. It is very becoming to you to have\r
-your hair tumbled thus."\r
-\r
-She tried to render her voice soft, but only succeeded in making it very\r
-deep. A portion of her words was lost in the transit from her larynx to\r
-her lips, as though on a piano where some notes are missing.\r
-\r
-Marius had retreated gently.\r
-\r
-"Mademoiselle," said he, with his cool gravity, "I have here a package\r
-which belongs to you, I think. Permit me to return it to you."\r
-\r
-And he held out the envelope containing the four letters.\r
-\r
-She clapped her hands and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"We have been looking everywhere for that!"\r
-\r
-Then she eagerly seized the package and opened the envelope, saying as\r
-she did so:--\r
-\r
-"Dieu de Dieu! how my sister and I have hunted! And it was you who found\r
-it! On the boulevard, was it not? It must have been on the boulevard?\r
-You see, we let it fall when we were running. It was that brat of a\r
-sister of mine who was so stupid. When we got home, we could not find it\r
-anywhere. As we did not wish to be beaten, as that is useless, as that\r
-is entirely useless, as that is absolutely useless, we said that we had\r
-carried the letters to the proper persons, and that they had said to us:\r
-'Nix.' So here they are, those poor letters! And how did you find out\r
-that they belonged to me? Ah! yes, the writing. So it was you that we\r
-jostled as we passed last night. We couldn't see. I said to my sister:\r
-'Is it a gentleman?' My sister said to me: 'I think it is a gentleman.'"\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed to "the\r
-benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."\r
-\r
-"Here!" said she, "this is for that old fellow who goes to mass. By the\r
-way, this is his hour. I'll go and carry it to him. Perhaps he will give\r
-us something to breakfast on."\r
-\r
-Then she began to laugh again, and added:--\r
-\r
-"Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will mean\r
-that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday, our\r
-breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of to-day, and all that at once, and\r
-this morning. Come! Parbleu! if you are not satisfied, dogs, burst!"\r
-\r
-This reminded Marius of the wretched girl's errand to himself. He\r
-fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and found nothing there.\r
-\r
-The young girl went on, and seemed to have no consciousness of Marius'\r
-presence.\r
-\r
-"I often go off in the evening. Sometimes I don't come home again. Last\r
-winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches of the bridges.\r
-We huddled together to keep from freezing. My little sister cried. How\r
-melancholy the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said\r
-to myself: 'No, it's too cold.' I go out alone, whenever I choose, I\r
-sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk along\r
-the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses, all black and\r
-as big as Notre Dame, I fancy that the white walls are the river, I say\r
-to myself: 'Why, there's water there!' The stars are like the lamps in\r
-illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew\r
-them out, I am bewildered, as though horses were breathing in my ears;\r
-although it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning-machines, and I\r
-don't know what all. I think people are flinging stones at me, I flee\r
-without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. You feel very\r
-queer when you have had no food."\r
-\r
-And then she stared at him with a bewildered air.\r
-\r
-By dint of searching and ransacking his pockets, Marius had finally\r
-collected five francs sixteen sous. This was all he owned in the world\r
-for the moment. "At all events," he thought, "there is my dinner for\r
-to-day, and to-morrow we will see." He kept the sixteen sous, and handed\r
-the five francs to the young girl.\r
-\r
-She seized the coin.\r
-\r
-"Good!" said she, "the sun is shining!"\r
-\r
-And, as though the sun had possessed the property of melting the\r
-avalanches of slang in her brain, she went on:--\r
-\r
-"Five francs! the shiner! a monarch! in this hole! Ain't this fine!\r
-You're a jolly thief! I'm your humble servant! Bravo for the good\r
-fellows! Two days' wine! and meat! and stew! we'll have a royal feast!\r
-and a good fill!"\r
-\r
-She pulled her chemise up on her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius,\r
-then a familiar sign with her hand, and went towards the door, saying:--\r
-\r
-"Good morning, sir. It's all right. I'll go and find my old man."\r
-\r
-As she passed, she caught sight of a dry crust of bread on the commode,\r
-which was moulding there amid the dust; she flung herself upon it and\r
-bit into it, muttering:--\r
-\r
-"That's good! it's hard! it breaks my teeth!"\r
-\r
-Then she departed.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE\r
-\r
-Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in\r
-distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True\r
-misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just\r
-passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of\r
-man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who\r
-has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the\r
-misery of the child.\r
-\r
-When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last\r
-resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround\r
-him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him\r
-simultaneously. The light of day seems extinguished without, the moral\r
-light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness of the\r
-woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.\r
-\r
-Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile\r
-partitions which all open on either vice or crime.\r
-\r
-Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body, the\r
-heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are manipulated\r
-in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources, which\r
-encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers,\r
-mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere\r
-and become incorporated, almost like a mineral formation, in that dusky\r
-promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infamies, and innocences.\r
-They crouch, back to back, in a sort of hut of fate. They exchange\r
-woe-begone glances. Oh, the unfortunate wretches! How pale they are! How\r
-cold they are! It seems as though they dwelt in a planet much further\r
-from the sun than ours.\r
-\r
-This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm of sad\r
-shadows. She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.\r
-\r
-Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of revery and\r
-passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his neighbors up\r
-to that day. The payment of their rent had been a mechanical movement,\r
-which any one would have yielded to; but he, Marius, should have done\r
-better than that. What! only a wall separated him from those abandoned\r
-beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of\r
-the world, he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the\r
-last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or\r
-rather, rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to\r
-them! Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side\r
-of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did not even\r
-lend an ear! And groans lay in those words, and he did not even listen\r
-to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to impossible\r
-radiances, to loves in the air, to follies; and all the while, human\r
-creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people,\r
-were agonizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their\r
-misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor\r
-who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable\r
-man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of\r
-distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold\r
-of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no\r
-doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming\r
-degraded are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and\r
-the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word,\r
-the miserable; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be\r
-all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?\r
-\r
-While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions on\r
-which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own pedagogue and\r
-scolded himself more than he deserved, he stared at the wall which\r
-separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he were able to make his\r
-gaze, full of pity, penetrate that partition and warm these wretched\r
-people. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and beams,\r
-and, as the reader had just learned, it allowed the sound of voices and\r
-words to be clearly distinguished. Only a man as dreamy as Marius could\r
-have failed to perceive this long before. There was no paper pasted on\r
-the wall, either on the side of the Jondrettes or on that of Marius; the\r
-coarse construction was visible in its nakedness. Marius examined the\r
-partition, almost unconsciously; sometimes revery examines, observes,\r
-and scrutinizes as thought would. All at once he sprang up; he had just\r
-perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling, a triangular hole, which\r
-resulted from the space between three lathes. The plaster which should\r
-have filled this cavity was missing, and by mounting on the commode,\r
-a view could be had through this aperture into the Jondrettes' attic.\r
-Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity. This aperture formed\r
-a sort of peep-hole. It is permissible to gaze at misfortune like a\r
-traitor in order to succor it.[27]\r
-\r
-"Let us get some little idea of what these people are like," thought\r
-Marius, "and in what condition they are."\r
-\r
-He climbed upon the commode, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE WILD MAN IN HIS LAIR\r
-\r
-Cities, like forests, have their caverns in which all the most wicked\r
-and formidable creatures which they contain conceal themselves. Only,\r
-in cities, that which thus conceals itself is ferocious, unclean, and\r
-petty, that is to say, ugly; in forests, that which conceals itself is\r
-ferocious, savage, and grand, that is to say, beautiful. Taking one lair\r
-with another, the beast's is preferable to the man's. Caverns are better\r
-than hovels.\r
-\r
-What Marius now beheld was a hovel.\r
-\r
-Marius was poor, and his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his\r
-poverty was noble, his garret was neat. The den upon which his eye now\r
-rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid. The only\r
-furniture consisted of a straw chair, an infirm table, some old bits of\r
-crockery, and in two of the corners, two indescribable pallets; all\r
-the light was furnished by a dormer window of four panes, draped with\r
-spiders' webs. Through this aperture there penetrated just enough light\r
-to make the face of a man appear like the face of a phantom. The walls\r
-had a leprous aspect, and were covered with seams and scars, like a\r
-visage disfigured by some horrible malady; a repulsive moisture exuded\r
-from them. Obscene sketches roughly sketched with charcoal could be\r
-distinguished upon them.\r
-\r
-The chamber which Marius occupied had a dilapidated brick pavement; this\r
-one was neither tiled nor planked; its inhabitants stepped directly\r
-on the antique plaster of the hovel, which had grown black under the\r
-long-continued pressure of feet. Upon this uneven floor, where the dirt\r
-seemed to be fairly incrusted, and which possessed but one virginity,\r
-that of the broom, were capriciously grouped constellations of old\r
-shoes, socks, and repulsive rags; however, this room had a fireplace,\r
-so it was let for forty francs a year. There was every sort of thing\r
-in that fireplace, a brazier, a pot, broken boards, rags suspended\r
-from nails, a bird-cage, ashes, and even a little fire. Two brands were\r
-smouldering there in a melancholy way.\r
-\r
-One thing which added still more to the horrors of this garret was, that\r
-it was large. It had projections and angles and black holes, the lower\r
-sides of roofs, bays, and promontories. Hence horrible, unfathomable\r
-nooks where it seemed as though spiders as big as one's fist, wood-lice\r
-as large as one's foot, and perhaps even--who knows?--some monstrous\r
-human beings, must be hiding.\r
-\r
-One of the pallets was near the door, the other near the window. One\r
-end of each touched the fireplace and faced Marius. In a corner near the\r
-aperture through which Marius was gazing, a colored engraving in a black\r
-frame was suspended to a nail on the wall, and at its bottom, in large\r
-letters, was the inscription: THE DREAM. This represented a sleeping\r
-woman, and a child, also asleep, the child on the woman's lap, an eagle\r
-in a cloud, with a crown in his beak, and the woman thrusting the\r
-crown away from the child's head, without awaking the latter; in the\r
-background, Napoleon in a glory, leaning on a very blue column with a\r
-yellow capital ornamented with this inscription:\r
-\r
- MARINGO\r
- AUSTERLITS\r
- IENA\r
- WAGRAMME\r
- ELOT\r
-\r
-Beneath this frame, a sort of wooden panel, which was no longer than it\r
-was broad, stood on the ground and rested in a sloping attitude against\r
-the wall. It had the appearance of a picture with its face turned to\r
-the wall, of a frame probably showing a daub on the other side, of some\r
-pier-glass detached from a wall and lying forgotten there while waiting\r
-to be rehung.\r
-\r
-Near the table, upon which Marius descried a pen, ink, and paper, sat\r
-a man about sixty years of age, small, thin, livid, haggard, with a\r
-cunning, cruel, and uneasy air; a hideous scoundrel.\r
-\r
-If Lavater had studied this visage, he would have found the vulture\r
-mingled with the attorney there, the bird of prey and the pettifogger\r
-rendering each other mutually hideous and complementing each other; the\r
-pettifogger making the bird of prey ignoble, the bird of prey making the\r
-pettifogger horrible.\r
-\r
-This man had a long gray beard. He was clad in a woman's chemise, which\r
-allowed his hairy breast and his bare arms, bristling with gray hair,\r
-to be seen. Beneath this chemise, muddy trousers and boots through which\r
-his toes projected were visible.\r
-\r
-He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking. There was no bread in the\r
-hovel, but there was still tobacco.\r
-\r
-He was writing probably some more letters like those which Marius had\r
-read.\r
-\r
-On the corner of the table lay an ancient, dilapidated, reddish volume,\r
-and the size, which was the antique 12mo of reading-rooms, betrayed a\r
-romance. On the cover sprawled the following title, printed in large\r
-capitals: GOD; THE KING; HONOR AND THE LADIES; BY DUCRAY DUMINIL, 1814.\r
-\r
-As the man wrote, he talked aloud, and Marius heard his words:--\r
-\r
-"The idea that there is no equality, even when you are dead! Just look\r
-at Pere Lachaise! The great, those who are rich, are up above, in the\r
-acacia alley, which is paved. They can reach it in a carriage. The\r
-little people, the poor, the unhappy, well, what of them? they are put\r
-down below, where the mud is up to your knees, in the damp places. They\r
-are put there so that they will decay the sooner! You cannot go to see\r
-them without sinking into the earth."\r
-\r
-He paused, smote the table with his fist, and added, as he ground his\r
-teeth:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! I could eat the whole world!"\r
-\r
-A big woman, who might be forty years of age, or a hundred, was\r
-crouching near the fireplace on her bare heels.\r
-\r
-She, too, was clad only in a chemise and a knitted petticoat patched\r
-with bits of old cloth. A coarse linen apron concealed the half of her\r
-petticoat. Although this woman was doubled up and bent together, it\r
-could be seen that she was of very lofty stature. She was a sort of\r
-giant, beside her husband. She had hideous hair, of a reddish blond\r
-which was turning gray, and which she thrust back from time to time,\r
-with her enormous shining hands, with their flat nails.\r
-\r
-Beside her, on the floor, wide open, lay a book of the same form as the\r
-other, and probably a volume of the same romance.\r
-\r
-On one of the pallets, Marius caught a glimpse of a sort of tall pale\r
-young girl, who sat there half naked and with pendant feet, and who did\r
-not seem to be listening or seeing or living.\r
-\r
-No doubt the younger sister of the one who had come to his room.\r
-\r
-She seemed to be eleven or twelve years of age. On closer scrutiny it\r
-was evident that she really was fourteen. She was the child who had\r
-said, on the boulevard the evening before: "I bolted, bolted, bolted!"\r
-\r
-She was of that puny sort which remains backward for a long time,\r
-then suddenly starts up rapidly. It is indigence which produces these\r
-melancholy human plants. These creatures have neither childhood nor\r
-youth. At fifteen years of age they appear to be twelve, at sixteen they\r
-seem twenty. To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman. One might say\r
-that they stride through life, in order to get through with it the more\r
-speedily.\r
-\r
-At this moment, this being had the air of a child.\r
-\r
-Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling; no handicraft,\r
-no spinning-wheel, not a tool. In one corner lay some ironmongery of\r
-dubious aspect. It was the dull listlessness which follows despair and\r
-precedes the death agony.\r
-\r
-Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying than\r
-the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt fluttering\r
-there, and life was palpitating there. The garret, the cellar, the lowly\r
-ditch where certain indigent wretches crawl at the very bottom of the\r
-social edifice, is not exactly the sepulchre, but only its antechamber;\r
-but, as the wealthy display their greatest magnificence at the entrance\r
-of their palaces, it seems that death, which stands directly side by\r
-side with them, places its greatest miseries in that vestibule.\r
-\r
-The man held his peace, the woman spoke no word, the young girl did\r
-not even seem to breathe. The scratching of the pen on the paper was\r
-audible.\r
-\r
-The man grumbled, without pausing in his writing. "Canaille! canaille!\r
-everybody is canaille!"\r
-\r
-This variation to Solomon's exclamation elicited a sigh from the woman.\r
-\r
-"Calm yourself, my little friend," she said. "Don't hurt yourself, my\r
-dear. You are too good to write to all those people, husband."\r
-\r
-Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts draw\r
-apart. This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance, judging\r
-from the amount of love within her; but probably, in the daily and\r
-reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress which weighed on the\r
-whole group, this had become extinct. There no longer existed in her\r
-anything more than the ashes of affection for her husband. Nevertheless,\r
-caressing appellations had survived, as is often the case. She called\r
-him: My dear, my little friend, my good man, etc., with her mouth while\r
-her heart was silent.\r
-\r
-The man resumed his writing.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--STRATEGY AND TACTICS\r
-\r
-Marius, with a load upon his breast, was on the point of descending\r
-from the species of observatory which he had improvised, when a sound\r
-attracted his attention and caused him to remain at his post.\r
-\r
-The door of the attic had just burst open abruptly. The eldest girl made\r
-her appearance on the threshold. On her feet, she had large, coarse,\r
-men's shoes, bespattered with mud, which had splashed even to her red\r
-ankles, and she was wrapped in an old mantle which hung in tatters.\r
-Marius had not seen it on her an hour previously, but she had probably\r
-deposited it at his door, in order that she might inspire the more pity,\r
-and had picked it up again on emerging. She entered, pushed the door to\r
-behind her, paused to take breath, for she was completely breathless,\r
-then exclaimed with an expression of triumph and joy:--\r
-\r
-"He is coming!"\r
-\r
-The father turned his eyes towards her, the woman turned her head, the\r
-little sister did not stir.\r
-\r
-"Who?" demanded her father.\r
-\r
-"The gentleman!"\r
-\r
-"The philanthropist?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"From the church of Saint-Jacques?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"That old fellow?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"And he is coming?"\r
-\r
-"He is following me."\r
-\r
-"You are sure?"\r
-\r
-"I am sure."\r
-\r
-"There, truly, he is coming?"\r
-\r
-"He is coming in a fiacre."\r
-\r
-"In a fiacre. He is Rothschild."\r
-\r
-The father rose.\r
-\r
-"How are you sure? If he is coming in a fiacre, how is it that you\r
-arrive before him? You gave him our address at least? Did you tell him\r
-that it was the last door at the end of the corridor, on the right? If\r
-he only does not make a mistake! So you found him at the church? Did he\r
-read my letter? What did he say to you?"\r
-\r
-"Ta, ta, ta," said the girl, "how you do gallop on, my good man! See\r
-here: I entered the church, he was in his usual place, I made him a\r
-reverence, and I handed him the letter; he read it and said to me:\r
-'Where do you live, my child?' I said: 'Monsieur, I will show you.' He\r
-said to me: 'No, give me your address, my daughter has some purchases to\r
-make, I will take a carriage and reach your house at the same time that\r
-you do.' I gave him the address. When I mentioned the house, he seemed\r
-surprised and hesitated for an instant, then he said: 'Never mind, I\r
-will come.' When the mass was finished, I watched him leave the church\r
-with his daughter, and I saw them enter a carriage. I certainly did tell\r
-him the last door in the corridor, on the right."\r
-\r
-"And what makes you think that he will come?"\r
-\r
-"I have just seen the fiacre turn into the Rue Petit-Banquier. That is\r
-what made me run so."\r
-\r
-"How do you know that it was the same fiacre?"\r
-\r
-"Because I took notice of the number, so there!"\r
-\r
-"What was the number?"\r
-\r
-"440."\r
-\r
-"Good, you are a clever girl."\r
-\r
-The girl stared boldly at her father, and showing the shoes which she\r
-had on her feet:--\r
-\r
-"A clever girl, possibly; but I tell you I won't put these shoes on\r
-again, and that I won't, for the sake of my health, in the first place,\r
-and for the sake of cleanliness, in the next. I don't know anything\r
-more irritating than shoes that squelch, and go ghi, ghi, ghi, the whole\r
-time. I prefer to go barefoot."\r
-\r
-"You are right," said her father, in a sweet tone which contrasted with\r
-the young girl's rudeness, "but then, you will not be allowed to enter\r
-churches, for poor people must have shoes to do that. One cannot go\r
-barefoot to the good God," he added bitterly.\r
-\r
-Then, returning to the subject which absorbed him:--\r
-\r
-"So you are sure that he will come?"\r
-\r
-"He is following on my heels," said she.\r
-\r
-The man started up. A sort of illumination appeared on his countenance.\r
-\r
-"Wife!" he exclaimed, "you hear. Here is the philanthropist. Extinguish\r
-the fire."\r
-\r
-The stupefied mother did not stir.\r
-\r
-The father, with the agility of an acrobat, seized a broken-nosed jug\r
-which stood on the chimney, and flung the water on the brands.\r
-\r
-Then, addressing his eldest daughter:--\r
-\r
-"Here you! Pull the straw off that chair!"\r
-\r
-His daughter did not understand.\r
-\r
-He seized the chair, and with one kick he rendered it seatless. His leg\r
-passed through it.\r
-\r
-As he withdrew his leg, he asked his daughter:--\r
-\r
-"Is it cold?"\r
-\r
-"Very cold. It is snowing."\r
-\r
-The father turned towards the younger girl who sat on the bed near the\r
-window, and shouted to her in a thundering voice:--\r
-\r
-"Quick! get off that bed, you lazy thing! will you never do anything?\r
-Break a pane of glass!"\r
-\r
-The little girl jumped off the bed with a shiver.\r
-\r
-"Break a pane!" he repeated.\r
-\r
-The child stood still in bewilderment.\r
-\r
-"Do you hear me?" repeated her father, "I tell you to break a pane!"\r
-\r
-The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, rose on tiptoe, and\r
-struck a pane with her fist. The glass broke and fell with a loud\r
-clatter.\r
-\r
-"Good," said the father.\r
-\r
-He was grave and abrupt. His glance swept rapidly over all the crannies\r
-of the garret. One would have said that he was a general making the\r
-final preparation at the moment when the battle is on the point of\r
-beginning.\r
-\r
-The mother, who had not said a word so far, now rose and demanded in\r
-a dull, slow, languid voice, whence her words seemed to emerge in a\r
-congealed state:--\r
-\r
-"What do you mean to do, my dear?"\r
-\r
-"Get into bed," replied the man.\r
-\r
-His intonation admitted of no deliberation. The mother obeyed, and threw\r
-herself heavily on one of the pallets.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, a sob became audible in one corner.\r
-\r
-"What's that?" cried the father.\r
-\r
-The younger daughter exhibited her bleeding fist, without quitting the\r
-corner in which she was cowering. She had wounded herself while breaking\r
-the window; she went off, near her mother's pallet and wept silently.\r
-\r
-It was now the mother's turn to start up and exclaim:--\r
-\r
-"Just see there! What follies you commit! She has cut herself breaking\r
-that pane for you!"\r
-\r
-"So much the better!" said the man. "I foresaw that."\r
-\r
-"What? So much the better?" retorted his wife.\r
-\r
-"Peace!" replied the father, "I suppress the liberty of the press."\r
-\r
-Then tearing the woman's chemise which he was wearing, he made a strip\r
-of cloth with which he hastily swathed the little girl's bleeding wrist.\r
-\r
-That done, his eye fell with a satisfied expression on his torn chemise.\r
-\r
-"And the chemise too," said he, "this has a good appearance."\r
-\r
-An icy breeze whistled through the window and entered the room. The\r
-outer mist penetrated thither and diffused itself like a whitish sheet\r
-of wadding vaguely spread by invisible fingers. Through the broken pane\r
-the snow could be seen falling. The snow promised by the Candlemas sun\r
-of the preceding day had actually come.\r
-\r
-The father cast a glance about him as though to make sure that he had\r
-forgotten nothing. He seized an old shovel and spread ashes over the wet\r
-brands in such a manner as to entirely conceal them.\r
-\r
-Then drawing himself up and leaning against the chimney-piece:--\r
-\r
-"Now," said he, "we can receive the philanthropist."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE RAY OF LIGHT IN THE HOVEL\r
-\r
-The big girl approached and laid her hand in her father's.\r
-\r
-"Feel how cold I am," said she.\r
-\r
-"Bah!" replied the father, "I am much colder than that."\r
-\r
-The mother exclaimed impetuously:--\r
-\r
-"You always have something better than any one else, so you do! even bad\r
-things."\r
-\r
-"Down with you!" said the man.\r
-\r
-The mother, being eyed after a certain fashion, held her tongue.\r
-\r
-Silence reigned for a moment in the hovel. The elder girl was removing\r
-the mud from the bottom of her mantle, with a careless air; her younger\r
-sister continued to sob; the mother had taken the latter's head between\r
-her hands, and was covering it with kisses, whispering to her the\r
-while:--\r
-\r
-"My treasure, I entreat you, it is nothing of consequence, don't cry,\r
-you will anger your father."\r
-\r
-"No!" exclaimed the father, "quite the contrary! sob! sob! that's\r
-right."\r
-\r
-Then turning to the elder:--\r
-\r
-"There now! He is not coming! What if he were not to come! I shall have\r
-extinguished my fire, wrecked my chair, torn my shirt, and broken my\r
-pane all for nothing."\r
-\r
-"And wounded the child!" murmured the mother.\r
-\r
-"Do you know," went on the father, "that it's beastly cold in this\r
-devil's garret! What if that man should not come! Oh! See there, you! He\r
-makes us wait! He says to himself: 'Well! they will wait for me!\r
-That's what they're there for.' Oh! how I hate them, and with what joy,\r
-jubilation, enthusiasm, and satisfaction I could strangle all those rich\r
-folks! all those rich folks! These men who pretend to be charitable,\r
-who put on airs, who go to mass, who make presents to the priesthood,\r
-preachy, preachy, in their skullcaps, and who think themselves above\r
-us, and who come for the purpose of humiliating us, and to bring us\r
-'clothes,' as they say! old duds that are not worth four sous! And\r
-bread! That's not what I want, pack of rascals that they are, it's\r
-money! Ah! money! Never! Because they say that we would go off and drink\r
-it up, and that we are drunkards and idlers! And they! What are they,\r
-then, and what have they been in their time! Thieves! They never could\r
-have become rich otherwise! Oh! Society ought to be grasped by the four\r
-corners of the cloth and tossed into the air, all of it! It would all\r
-be smashed, very likely, but at least, no one would have anything,\r
-and there would be that much gained! But what is that blockhead of\r
-a benevolent gentleman doing? Will he come? Perhaps the animal has\r
-forgotten the address! I'll bet that that old beast--"\r
-\r
-At that moment there came a light tap at the door, the man rushed to it\r
-and opened it, exclaiming, amid profound bows and smiles of adoration:--\r
-\r
-"Enter, sir! Deign to enter, most respected benefactor, and your\r
-charming young lady, also."\r
-\r
-A man of ripe age and a young girl made their appearance on the\r
-threshold of the attic.\r
-\r
-Marius had not quitted his post. His feelings for the moment surpassed\r
-the powers of the human tongue.\r
-\r
-It was She!\r
-\r
-Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meanings contained in those\r
-three letters of that word: She.\r
-\r
-It was certainly she. Marius could hardly distinguish her through the\r
-luminous vapor which had suddenly spread before his eyes. It was that\r
-sweet, absent being, that star which had beamed upon him for six months;\r
-it was those eyes, that brow, that mouth, that lovely vanished face\r
-which had created night by its departure. The vision had been eclipsed,\r
-now it reappeared.\r
-\r
-It reappeared in that gloom, in that garret, in that misshapen attic, in\r
-all that horror.\r
-\r
-Marius shuddered in dismay. What! It was she! The palpitations of his\r
-heart troubled his sight. He felt that he was on the brink of bursting\r
-into tears! What! He beheld her again at last, after having sought her\r
-so long! It seemed to him that he had lost his soul, and that he had\r
-just found it again.\r
-\r
-She was the same as ever, only a little pale; her delicate face was\r
-framed in a bonnet of violet velvet, her figure was concealed beneath\r
-a pelisse of black satin. Beneath her long dress, a glimpse could be\r
-caught of her tiny foot shod in a silken boot.\r
-\r
-She was still accompanied by M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-She had taken a few steps into the room, and had deposited a tolerably\r
-bulky parcel on the table.\r
-\r
-The eldest Jondrette girl had retired behind the door, and was staring\r
-with sombre eyes at that velvet bonnet, that silk mantle, and that\r
-charming, happy face.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--JONDRETTE COMES NEAR WEEPING\r
-\r
-The hovel was so dark, that people coming from without felt on entering\r
-it the effect produced on entering a cellar. The two new-comers\r
-advanced, therefore, with a certain hesitation, being hardly able\r
-to distinguish the vague forms surrounding them, while they could be\r
-clearly seen and scrutinized by the eyes of the inhabitants of the\r
-garret, who were accustomed to this twilight.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc approached, with his sad but kindly look, and said to\r
-Jondrette the father:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur, in this package you will find some new clothes and some\r
-woollen stockings and blankets."\r
-\r
-"Our angelic benefactor overwhelms us," said Jondrette, bowing to the\r
-very earth.\r
-\r
-Then, bending down to the ear of his eldest daughter, while the two\r
-visitors were engaged in examining this lamentable interior, he added in\r
-a low and rapid voice:--\r
-\r
-"Hey? What did I say? Duds! No money! They are all alike! By the way,\r
-how was the letter to that old blockhead signed?"\r
-\r
-"Fabantou," replied the girl.\r
-\r
-"The dramatic artist, good!"\r
-\r
-It was lucky for Jondrette, that this had occurred to him, for at the\r
-very moment, M. Leblanc turned to him, and said to him with the air of a\r
-person who is seeking to recall a name:--\r
-\r
-"I see that you are greatly to be pitied, Monsieur--"\r
-\r
-"Fabantou," replied Jondrette quickly.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Fabantou, yes, that is it. I remember."\r
-\r
-"Dramatic artist, sir, and one who has had some success."\r
-\r
-Here Jondrette evidently judged the moment propitious for capturing the\r
-"philanthropist." He exclaimed with an accent which smacked at the same\r
-time of the vainglory of the mountebank at fairs, and the humility of\r
-the mendicant on the highway:--\r
-\r
-"A pupil of Talma! Sir! I am a pupil of Talma! Fortune formerly smiled\r
-on me--Alas! Now it is misfortune's turn. You see, my benefactor, no\r
-bread, no fire. My poor babes have no fire! My only chair has no seat! A\r
-broken pane! And in such weather! My spouse in bed! Ill!"\r
-\r
-"Poor woman!" said M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-"My child wounded!" added Jondrette.\r
-\r
-The child, diverted by the arrival of the strangers, had fallen to\r
-contemplating "the young lady," and had ceased to sob.\r
-\r
-"Cry! bawl!" said Jondrette to her in a low voice.\r
-\r
-At the same time he pinched her sore hand. All this was done with the\r
-talent of a juggler.\r
-\r
-The little girl gave vent to loud shrieks.\r
-\r
-The adorable young girl, whom Marius, in his heart, called "his Ursule,"\r
-approached her hastily.\r
-\r
-"Poor, dear child!" said she.\r
-\r
-"You see, my beautiful young lady," pursued Jondrette "her bleeding\r
-wrist! It came through an accident while working at a machine to earn\r
-six sous a day. It may be necessary to cut off her arm."\r
-\r
-"Really?" said the old gentleman, in alarm.\r
-\r
-The little girl, taking this seriously, fell to sobbing more violently\r
-than ever.\r
-\r
-"Alas! yes, my benefactor!" replied the father.\r
-\r
-For several minutes, Jondrette had been scrutinizing "the benefactor"\r
-in a singular fashion. As he spoke, he seemed to be examining the other\r
-attentively, as though seeking to summon up his recollections. All at\r
-once, profiting by a moment when the new-comers were questioning the\r
-child with interest as to her injured hand, he passed near his wife,\r
-who lay in her bed with a stupid and dejected air, and said to her in a\r
-rapid but very low tone:--\r
-\r
-"Take a look at that man!"\r
-\r
-Then, turning to M. Leblanc, and continuing his lamentations:--\r
-\r
-"You see, sir! All the clothing that I have is my wife's chemise! And\r
-all torn at that! In the depths of winter! I can't go out for lack of a\r
-coat. If I had a coat of any sort, I would go and see Mademoiselle Mars,\r
-who knows me and is very fond of me. Does she not still reside in the\r
-Rue de la Tour-des-Dames? Do you know, sir? We played together in the\r
-provinces. I shared her laurels. Celimene would come to my succor, sir!\r
-Elmire would bestow alms on Belisaire! But no, nothing! And not a sou in\r
-the house! My wife ill, and not a sou! My daughter dangerously injured,\r
-not a sou! My wife suffers from fits of suffocation. It comes from her\r
-age, and besides, her nervous system is affected. She ought to have\r
-assistance, and my daughter also! But the doctor! But the apothecary!\r
-How am I to pay them? I would kneel to a penny, sir! Such is the\r
-condition to which the arts are reduced. And do you know, my charming\r
-young lady, and you, my generous protector, do you know, you who breathe\r
-forth virtue and goodness, and who perfume that church where my daughter\r
-sees you every day when she says her prayers?--For I have brought up my\r
-children religiously, sir. I did not want them to take to the theatre.\r
-Ah! the hussies! If I catch them tripping! I do not jest, that I don't!\r
-I read them lessons on honor, on morality, on virtue! Ask them! They\r
-have got to walk straight. They are none of your unhappy wretches who\r
-begin by having no family, and end by espousing the public. One is\r
-Mamselle Nobody, and one becomes Madame Everybody. Deuce take it! None\r
-of that in the Fabantou family! I mean to bring them up virtuously, and\r
-they shall be honest, and nice, and believe in God, by the sacred name!\r
-Well, sir, my worthy sir, do you know what is going to happen to-morrow?\r
-To-morrow is the fourth day of February, the fatal day, the last day of\r
-grace allowed me by my landlord; if by this evening I have not paid my\r
-rent, to-morrow my oldest daughter, my spouse with her fever, my child\r
-with her wound,--we shall all four be turned out of here and thrown into\r
-the street, on the boulevard, without shelter, in the rain, in the snow.\r
-There, sir. I owe for four quarters--a whole year! that is to say, sixty\r
-francs."\r
-\r
-Jondrette lied. Four quarters would have amounted to only forty francs,\r
-and he could not owe four, because six months had not elapsed since\r
-Marius had paid for two.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc drew five francs from his pocket and threw them on the table.\r
-\r
-Jondrette found time to mutter in the ear of his eldest daughter:--\r
-\r
-"The scoundrel! What does he think I can do with his five francs?\r
-That won't pay me for my chair and pane of glass! That's what comes of\r
-incurring expenses!"\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, M. Leblanc had removed the large brown great-coat\r
-which he wore over his blue coat, and had thrown it over the back of the\r
-chair.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Fabantou," he said, "these five francs are all that I have\r
-about me, but I shall now take my daughter home, and I will return this\r
-evening,--it is this evening that you must pay, is it not?"\r
-\r
-Jondrette's face lighted up with a strange expression. He replied\r
-vivaciously:--\r
-\r
-"Yes, respected sir. At eight o'clock, I must be at my landlord's."\r
-\r
-"I will be here at six, and I will fetch you the sixty francs."\r
-\r
-"My benefactor!" exclaimed Jondrette, overwhelmed. And he added, in a\r
-low tone: "Take a good look at him, wife!"\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc had taken the arm of the young girl, once more, and had\r
-turned towards the door.\r
-\r
-"Farewell until this evening, my friends!" said he.\r
-\r
-"Six o'clock?" said Jondrette.\r
-\r
-"Six o'clock precisely."\r
-\r
-At that moment, the overcoat lying on the chair caught the eye of the\r
-elder Jondrette girl.\r
-\r
-"You are forgetting your coat, sir," said she.\r
-\r
-Jondrette darted an annihilating look at his daughter, accompanied by a\r
-formidable shrug of the shoulders.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc turned back and said, with a smile:--\r
-\r
-"I have not forgotten it, I am leaving it."\r
-\r
-"O my protector!" said Jondrette, "my august benefactor, I melt into\r
-tears! Permit me to accompany you to your carriage."\r
-\r
-"If you come out," answered M. Leblanc, "put on this coat. It really is\r
-very cold."\r
-\r
-Jondrette did not need to be told twice. He hastily donned the brown\r
-great-coat. And all three went out, Jondrette preceding the two\r
-strangers.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--TARIFF OF LICENSED CABS: TWO FRANCS AN HOUR\r
-\r
-Marius had lost nothing of this entire scene, and yet, in reality, had\r
-seen nothing. His eyes had remained fixed on the young girl, his heart\r
-had, so to speak, seized her and wholly enveloped her from the moment of\r
-her very first step in that garret. During her entire stay there, he\r
-had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material perceptions and\r
-precipitates the whole soul on a single point. He contemplated, not that\r
-girl, but that light which wore a satin pelisse and a velvet bonnet. The\r
-star Sirius might have entered the room, and he would not have been any\r
-more dazzled.\r
-\r
-While the young girl was engaged in opening the package, unfolding the\r
-clothing and the blankets, questioning the sick mother kindly, and the\r
-little injured girl tenderly, he watched her every movement, he sought\r
-to catch her words. He knew her eyes, her brow, her beauty, her form,\r
-her walk, he did not know the sound of her voice. He had once fancied\r
-that he had caught a few words at the Luxembourg, but he was not\r
-absolutely sure of the fact. He would have given ten years of his life\r
-to hear it, in order that he might bear away in his soul a little of\r
-that music. But everything was drowned in the lamentable exclamations\r
-and trumpet bursts of Jondrette. This added a touch of genuine wrath\r
-to Marius' ecstasy. He devoured her with his eyes. He could not believe\r
-that it really was that divine creature whom he saw in the midst of\r
-those vile creatures in that monstrous lair. It seemed to him that he\r
-beheld a humming-bird in the midst of toads.\r
-\r
-When she took her departure, he had but one thought, to follow her, to\r
-cling to her trace, not to quit her until he learned where she\r
-lived, not to lose her again, at least, after having so miraculously\r
-re-discovered her. He leaped down from the commode and seized his hat.\r
-As he laid his hand on the lock of the door, and was on the point of\r
-opening it, a sudden reflection caused him to pause. The corridor was\r
-long, the staircase steep, Jondrette was talkative, M. Leblanc had,\r
-no doubt, not yet regained his carriage; if, on turning round in the\r
-corridor, or on the staircase, he were to catch sight of him, Marius,\r
-in that house, he would, evidently, take the alarm, and find means to\r
-escape from him again, and this time it would be final. What was he\r
-to do? Should he wait a little? But while he was waiting, the carriage\r
-might drive off. Marius was perplexed. At last he accepted the risk and\r
-quitted his room.\r
-\r
-There was no one in the corridor. He hastened to the stairs. There was\r
-no one on the staircase. He descended in all haste, and reached the\r
-boulevard in time to see a fiacre turning the corner of the Rue du\r
-Petit-Banquier, on its way back to Paris.\r
-\r
-Marius rushed headlong in that direction. On arriving at the angle of\r
-the boulevard, he caught sight of the fiacre again, rapidly descending\r
-the Rue Mouffetard; the carriage was already a long way off, and there\r
-was no means of overtaking it; what! run after it? Impossible; and\r
-besides, the people in the carriage would assuredly notice an individual\r
-running at full speed in pursuit of a fiacre, and the father would\r
-recognize him. At that moment, wonderful and unprecedented good luck,\r
-Marius perceived an empty cab passing along the boulevard. There was but\r
-one thing to be done, to jump into this cab and follow the fiacre. That\r
-was sure, efficacious, and free from danger.\r
-\r
-Marius made the driver a sign to halt, and called to him:--\r
-\r
-"By the hour?"\r
-\r
-Marius wore no cravat, he had on his working-coat, which was destitute\r
-of buttons, his shirt was torn along one of the plaits on the bosom.\r
-\r
-The driver halted, winked, and held out his left hand to Marius, rubbing\r
-his forefinger gently with his thumb.\r
-\r
-"What is it?" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Pay in advance," said the coachman.\r
-\r
-Marius recollected that he had but sixteen sous about him.\r
-\r
-"How much?" he demanded.\r
-\r
-"Forty sous."\r
-\r
-"I will pay on my return."\r
-\r
-The driver's only reply was to whistle the air of La Palisse and to whip\r
-up his horse.\r
-\r
-Marius stared at the retreating cabriolet with a bewildered air. For the\r
-lack of four and twenty sous, he was losing his joy, his happiness,\r
-his love! He had seen, and he was becoming blind again. He reflected\r
-bitterly, and it must be confessed, with profound regret, on the five\r
-francs which he had bestowed, that very morning, on that miserable girl.\r
-If he had had those five francs, he would have been saved, he would have\r
-been born again, he would have emerged from the limbo and darkness, he\r
-would have made his escape from isolation and spleen, from his widowed\r
-state; he might have re-knotted the black thread of his destiny to that\r
-beautiful golden thread, which had just floated before his eyes and\r
-had broken at the same instant, once more! He returned to his hovel in\r
-despair.\r
-\r
-He might have told himself that M. Leblanc had promised to return in\r
-the evening, and that all he had to do was to set about the matter more\r
-skilfully, so that he might follow him on that occasion; but, in his\r
-contemplation, it is doubtful whether he had heard this.\r
-\r
-As he was on the point of mounting the staircase, he perceived, on the\r
-other side of the boulevard, near the deserted wall skirting the Rue De\r
-la Barriere-des-Gobelins, Jondrette, wrapped in the "philanthropist's"\r
-great-coat, engaged in conversation with one of those men of disquieting\r
-aspect who have been dubbed by common consent, prowlers of the barriers;\r
-people of equivocal face, of suspicious monologues, who present the\r
-air of having evil minds, and who generally sleep in the daytime, which\r
-suggests the supposition that they work by night.\r
-\r
-These two men, standing there motionless and in conversation, in the\r
-snow which was falling in whirlwinds, formed a group that a policeman\r
-would surely have observed, but which Marius hardly noticed.\r
-\r
-Still, in spite of his mournful preoccupation, he could not refrain from\r
-saying to himself that this prowler of the barriers with whom Jondrette\r
-was talking resembled a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias\r
-Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once pointed out to him as a very\r
-dangerous nocturnal roamer. This man's name the reader has learned in\r
-the preceding book. This Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille,\r
-figured later on in many criminal trials, and became a notorious rascal.\r
-He was at that time only a famous rascal. To-day he exists in the state\r
-of tradition among ruffians and assassins. He was at the head of\r
-a school towards the end of the last reign. And in the evening, at\r
-nightfall, at the hour when groups form and talk in whispers, he was\r
-discussed at La Force in the Fosse-aux-Lions. One might even, in\r
-that prison, precisely at the spot where the sewer which served the\r
-unprecedented escape, in broad daylight, of thirty prisoners, in 1843,\r
-passes under the culvert, read his name, PANCHAUD, audaciously carved\r
-by his own hand on the wall of the sewer, during one of his attempts at\r
-flight. In 1832, the police already had their eye on him, but he had not\r
-as yet made a serious beginning.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--OFFERS OF SERVICE FROM MISERY TO WRETCHEDNESS\r
-\r
-Marius ascended the stairs of the hovel with slow steps; at the moment\r
-when he was about to re-enter his cell, he caught sight of the elder\r
-Jondrette girl following him through the corridor. The very sight of\r
-this girl was odious to him; it was she who had his five francs, it was\r
-too late to demand them back, the cab was no longer there, the fiacre\r
-was far away. Moreover, she would not have given them back. As for\r
-questioning her about the residence of the persons who had just been\r
-there, that was useless; it was evident that she did not know, since the\r
-letter signed Fabantou had been addressed "to the benevolent gentleman\r
-of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."\r
-\r
-Marius entered his room and pushed the door to after him.\r
-\r
-It did not close; he turned round and beheld a hand which held the door\r
-half open.\r
-\r
-"What is it?" he asked, "who is there?"\r
-\r
-It was the Jondrette girl.\r
-\r
-"Is it you?" resumed Marius almost harshly, "still you! What do you want\r
-with me?"\r
-\r
-She appeared to be thoughtful and did not look at him. She no longer had\r
-the air of assurance which had characterized her that morning. She did\r
-not enter, but held back in the darkness of the corridor, where Marius\r
-could see her through the half-open door.\r
-\r
-"Come now, will you answer?" cried Marius. "What do you want with me?"\r
-\r
-She raised her dull eyes, in which a sort of gleam seemed to flicker\r
-vaguely, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Marius, you look sad. What is the matter with you?"\r
-\r
-"With me!" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Yes, you."\r
-\r
-"There is nothing the matter with me."\r
-\r
-"Yes, there is!"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"I tell you there is!"\r
-\r
-"Let me alone!"\r
-\r
-Marius gave the door another push, but she retained her hold on it.\r
-\r
-"Stop," said she, "you are in the wrong. Although you are not rich, you\r
-were kind this morning. Be so again now. You gave me something to eat,\r
-now tell me what ails you. You are grieved, that is plain. I do not want\r
-you to be grieved. What can be done for it? Can I be of any service?\r
-Employ me. I do not ask for your secrets, you need not tell them to me,\r
-but I may be of use, nevertheless. I may be able to help you, since I\r
-help my father. When it is necessary to carry letters, to go to houses,\r
-to inquire from door to door, to find out an address, to follow any one,\r
-I am of service. Well, you may assuredly tell me what is the matter with\r
-you, and I will go and speak to the persons; sometimes it is enough if\r
-some one speaks to the persons, that suffices to let them understand\r
-matters, and everything comes right. Make use of me."\r
-\r
-An idea flashed across Marius' mind. What branch does one disdain when\r
-one feels that one is falling?\r
-\r
-He drew near to the Jondrette girl.\r
-\r
-"Listen--" he said to her.\r
-\r
-She interrupted him with a gleam of joy in her eyes.\r
-\r
-"Oh yes, do call me thou! I like that better."\r
-\r
-"Well," he resumed, "thou hast brought hither that old gentleman and his\r
-daughter!"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Dost thou know their address?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Find it for me."\r
-\r
-The Jondrette's dull eyes had grown joyous, and they now became gloomy.\r
-\r
-"Is that what you want?" she demanded.\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Do you know them?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"That is to say," she resumed quickly, "you do not know her, but you\r
-wish to know her."\r
-\r
-This them which had turned into her had something indescribably\r
-significant and bitter about it.\r
-\r
-"Well, can you do it?" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"You shall have the beautiful lady's address."\r
-\r
-There was still a shade in the words "the beautiful lady" which troubled\r
-Marius. He resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Never mind, after all, the address of the father and daughter. Their\r
-address, indeed!"\r
-\r
-She gazed fixedly at him.\r
-\r
-"What will you give me?"\r
-\r
-"Anything you like."\r
-\r
-"Anything I like?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"You shall have the address."\r
-\r
-She dropped her head; then, with a brusque movement, she pulled to the\r
-door, which closed behind her.\r
-\r
-Marius found himself alone.\r
-\r
-He dropped into a chair, with his head and both elbows on his bed,\r
-absorbed in thoughts which he could not grasp, and as though a prey to\r
-vertigo. All that had taken place since the morning, the appearance of\r
-the angel, her disappearance, what that creature had just said to him, a\r
-gleam of hope floating in an immense despair,--this was what filled his\r
-brain confusedly.\r
-\r
-All at once he was violently aroused from his revery.\r
-\r
-He heard the shrill, hard voice of Jondrette utter these words, which\r
-were fraught with a strange interest for him:--\r
-\r
-"I tell you that I am sure of it, and that I recognized him."\r
-\r
-Of whom was Jondrette speaking? Whom had he recognized? M. Leblanc? The\r
-father of "his Ursule"? What! Did Jondrette know him? Was Marius about\r
-to obtain in this abrupt and unexpected fashion all the information\r
-without which his life was so dark to him? Was he about to learn at last\r
-who it was that he loved, who that young girl was? Who her father\r
-was? Was the dense shadow which enwrapped them on the point of being\r
-dispelled? Was the veil about to be rent? Ah! Heavens!\r
-\r
-He bounded rather than climbed upon his commode, and resumed his post\r
-near the little peep-hole in the partition wall.\r
-\r
-Again he beheld the interior of Jondrette's hovel.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--THE USE MADE OF M. LEBLANC'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE\r
-\r
-Nothing in the aspect of the family was altered, except that the wife\r
-and daughters had levied on the package and put on woollen stockings and\r
-jackets. Two new blankets were thrown across the two beds.\r
-\r
-Jondrette had evidently just returned. He still had the breathlessness\r
-of out of doors. His daughters were seated on the floor near the\r
-fireplace, the elder engaged in dressing the younger's wounded hand. His\r
-wife had sunk back on the bed near the fireplace, with a face indicative\r
-of astonishment. Jondrette was pacing up and down the garret with long\r
-strides. His eyes were extraordinary.\r
-\r
-The woman, who seemed timid and overwhelmed with stupor in the presence\r
-of her husband, turned to say:--\r
-\r
-"What, really? You are sure?"\r
-\r
-"Sure! Eight years have passed! But I recognize him! Ah! I recognize\r
-him. I knew him at once! What! Didn't it force itself on you?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"But I told you: 'Pay attention!' Why, it is his figure, it is his face,\r
-only older,--there are people who do not grow old, I don't know how they\r
-manage it,--it is the very sound of his voice. He is better dressed,\r
-that is all! Ah! you mysterious old devil, I've got you, that I have!"\r
-\r
-He paused, and said to his daughters:--\r
-\r
-"Get out of here, you!--It's queer that it didn't strike you!"\r
-\r
-They arose to obey.\r
-\r
-The mother stammered:--\r
-\r
-"With her injured hand."\r
-\r
-"The air will do it good," said Jondrette. "Be off."\r
-\r
-It was plain that this man was of the sort to whom no one offers to\r
-reply. The two girls departed.\r
-\r
-At the moment when they were about to pass through the door, the father\r
-detained the elder by the arm, and said to her with a peculiar accent:--\r
-\r
-"You will be here at five o'clock precisely. Both of you. I shall need\r
-you."\r
-\r
-Marius redoubled his attention.\r
-\r
-On being left alone with his wife, Jondrette began to pace the room\r
-again, and made the tour of it two or three times in silence. Then he\r
-spent several minutes in tucking the lower part of the woman's chemise\r
-which he wore into his trousers.\r
-\r
-All at once, he turned to the female Jondrette, folded his arms and\r
-exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"And would you like to have me tell you something? The young lady--"\r
-\r
-"Well, what?" retorted his wife, "the young lady?"\r
-\r
-Marius could not doubt that it was really she of whom they were\r
-speaking. He listened with ardent anxiety. His whole life was in his\r
-ears.\r
-\r
-But Jondrette had bent over and spoke to his wife in a whisper. Then he\r
-straightened himself up and concluded aloud:--\r
-\r
-"It is she!"\r
-\r
-"That one?" said his wife.\r
-\r
-"That very one," said the husband.\r
-\r
-No expression can reproduce the significance of the mother's words.\r
-Surprise, rage, hate, wrath, were mingled and combined in one monstrous\r
-intonation. The pronunciation of a few words, the name, no doubt, which\r
-her husband had whispered in her ear, had sufficed to rouse this huge,\r
-somnolent woman, and from being repulsive she became terrible.\r
-\r
-"It is not possible!" she cried. "When I think that my daughters are\r
-going barefoot, and have not a gown to their backs! What! A satin\r
-pelisse, a velvet bonnet, boots, and everything; more than two hundred\r
-francs' worth of clothes! so that one would think she was a lady! No,\r
-you are mistaken! Why, in the first place, the other was hideous, and\r
-this one is not so bad-looking! She really is not bad-looking! It can't\r
-be she!"\r
-\r
-"I tell you that it is she. You will see."\r
-\r
-At this absolute assertion, the Jondrette woman raised her large, red,\r
-blonde face and stared at the ceiling with a horrible expression.\r
-At that moment, she seemed to Marius even more to be feared than her\r
-husband. She was a sow with the look of a tigress.\r
-\r
-"What!" she resumed, "that horrible, beautiful young lady, who gazed at\r
-my daughters with an air of pity,--she is that beggar brat! Oh! I should\r
-like to kick her stomach in for her!"\r
-\r
-She sprang off of the bed, and remained standing for a moment, her\r
-hair in disorder, her nostrils dilating, her mouth half open, her fists\r
-clenched and drawn back. Then she fell back on the bed once more. The\r
-man paced to and fro and paid no attention to his female.\r
-\r
-After a silence lasting several minutes, he approached the female\r
-Jondrette, and halted in front of her, with folded arms, as he had done\r
-a moment before:--\r
-\r
-"And shall I tell you another thing?"\r
-\r
-"What is it?" she asked.\r
-\r
-He answered in a low, curt voice:--\r
-\r
-"My fortune is made."\r
-\r
-The woman stared at him with the look that signifies: "Is the person who\r
-is addressing me on the point of going mad?"\r
-\r
-He went on:--\r
-\r
-"Thunder! It was not so very long ago that I was a parishioner of\r
-the parish of\r
-die-of-hunger-if-you-have-a-fire,-die-of-cold-if-you-have-bread! I have\r
-had enough of misery! my share and other people's share! I am not joking\r
-any longer, I don't find it comic any more, I've had enough of puns,\r
-good God! no more farces, Eternal Father! I want to eat till I am full,\r
-I want to drink my fill! to gormandize! to sleep! to do nothing! I want\r
-to have my turn, so I do, come now! before I die! I want to be a bit of\r
-a millionnaire!"\r
-\r
-He took a turn round the hovel, and added:--\r
-\r
-"Like other people."\r
-\r
-"What do you mean by that?" asked the woman.\r
-\r
-He shook his head, winked, screwed up one eye, and raised his voice like\r
-a medical professor who is about to make a demonstration:--\r
-\r
-"What do I mean by that? Listen!"\r
-\r
-"Hush!" muttered the woman, "not so loud! These are matters which must\r
-not be overheard."\r
-\r
-"Bah! Who's here? Our neighbor? I saw him go out a little while ago.\r
-Besides, he doesn't listen, the big booby. And I tell you that I saw him\r
-go out."\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, by a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice,\r
-although not sufficiently to prevent Marius hearing his words. One\r
-favorable circumstance, which enabled Marius not to lose a word of this\r
-conversation was the falling snow which deadened the sound of vehicles\r
-on the boulevard.\r
-\r
-This is what Marius heard:--\r
-\r
-"Listen carefully. The Croesus is caught, or as good as caught! That's\r
-all settled already. Everything is arranged. I have seen some people. He\r
-will come here this evening at six o'clock. To bring sixty francs, the\r
-rascal! Did you notice how I played that game on him, my sixty francs,\r
-my landlord, my fourth of February? I don't even owe for one quarter!\r
-Isn't he a fool! So he will come at six o'clock! That's the hour when\r
-our neighbor goes to his dinner. Mother Bougon is off washing dishes in\r
-the city. There's not a soul in the house. The neighbor never comes home\r
-until eleven o'clock. The children shall stand on watch. You shall help\r
-us. He will give in."\r
-\r
-"And what if he does not give in?" demanded his wife.\r
-\r
-Jondrette made a sinister gesture, and said:--\r
-\r
-"We'll fix him."\r
-\r
-And he burst out laughing.\r
-\r
-This was the first time Marius had seen him laugh. The laugh was cold\r
-and sweet, and provoked a shudder.\r
-\r
-Jondrette opened a cupboard near the fireplace, and drew from it an old\r
-cap, which he placed on his head, after brushing it with his sleeve.\r
-\r
-"Now," said he, "I'm going out. I have some more people that I must see.\r
-Good ones. You'll see how well the whole thing will work. I shall be\r
-away as short a time as possible, it's a fine stroke of business, do you\r
-look after the house."\r
-\r
-And with both fists thrust into the pockets of his trousers, he stood\r
-for a moment in thought, then exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Do you know, it's mighty lucky, by the way, that he didn't recognize\r
-me! If he had recognized me on his side, he would not have come back\r
-again. He would have slipped through our fingers! It was my beard that\r
-saved us! my romantic beard! my pretty little romantic beard!"\r
-\r
-And again he broke into a laugh.\r
-\r
-He stepped to the window. The snow was still falling, and streaking the\r
-gray of the sky.\r
-\r
-"What beastly weather!" said he.\r
-\r
-Then lapping his overcoat across his breast:--\r
-\r
-"This rind is too large for me. Never mind," he added, "he did a\r
-devilish good thing in leaving it for me, the old scoundrel! If it\r
-hadn't been for that, I couldn't have gone out, and everything would\r
-have gone wrong! What small points things hang on, anyway!"\r
-\r
-And pulling his cap down over his eyes, he quitted the room.\r
-\r
-He had barely had time to take half a dozen steps from the door, when\r
-the door opened again, and his savage but intelligent face made its\r
-appearance once more in the opening.\r
-\r
-"I came near forgetting," said he. "You are to have a brazier of\r
-charcoal ready."\r
-\r
-And he flung into his wife's apron the five-franc piece which the\r
-"philanthropist" had left with him.\r
-\r
-"A brazier of charcoal?" asked his wife.\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"How many bushels?"\r
-\r
-"Two good ones."\r
-\r
-"That will come to thirty sous. With the rest I will buy something for\r
-dinner."\r
-\r
-"The devil, no."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"Don't go and spend the hundred-sou piece."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"Because I shall have to buy something, too."\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"Something."\r
-\r
-"How much shall you need?"\r
-\r
-"Whereabouts in the neighborhood is there an ironmonger's shop?"\r
-\r
-"Rue Mouffetard."\r
-\r
-"Ah! yes, at the corner of a street; I can see the shop."\r
-\r
-"But tell me how much you will need for what you have to purchase?"\r
-\r
-"Fifty sous--three francs."\r
-\r
-"There won't be much left for dinner."\r
-\r
-"Eating is not the point to-day. There's something better to be done."\r
-\r
-"That's enough, my jewel."\r
-\r
-At this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door again, and this\r
-time, Marius heard his step die away in the corridor of the hovel, and\r
-descend the staircase rapidly.\r
-\r
-At that moment, one o'clock struck from the church of Saint-Medard.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIII--SOLUS CUM SOLO, IN LOCO REMOTO, NON COGITABUNTUR ORARE\r
-PATER NOSTER\r
-\r
-Marius, dreamer as he was, was, as we have said, firm and energetic by\r
-nature. His habits of solitary meditation, while they had developed in\r
-him sympathy and compassion, had, perhaps, diminished the faculty for\r
-irritation, but had left intact the power of waxing indignant; he had\r
-the kindliness of a brahmin, and the severity of a judge; he took pity\r
-upon a toad, but he crushed a viper. Now, it was into a hole of vipers\r
-that his glance had just been directed, it was a nest of monsters that\r
-he had beneath his eyes.\r
-\r
-"These wretches must be stamped upon," said he.\r
-\r
-Not one of the enigmas which he had hoped to see solved had been\r
-elucidated; on the contrary, all of them had been rendered more dense,\r
-if anything; he knew nothing more about the beautiful maiden of the\r
-Luxembourg and the man whom he called M. Leblanc, except that Jondrette\r
-was acquainted with them. Athwart the mysterious words which had been\r
-uttered, the only thing of which he caught a distinct glimpse was the\r
-fact that an ambush was in course of preparation, a dark but terrible\r
-trap; that both of them were incurring great danger, she probably, her\r
-father certainly; that they must be saved; that the hideous plots of the\r
-Jondrettes must be thwarted, and the web of these spiders broken.\r
-\r
-He scanned the female Jondrette for a moment. She had pulled an old\r
-sheet-iron stove from a corner, and she was rummaging among the old heap\r
-of iron.\r
-\r
-He descended from the commode as softly as possible, taking care not to\r
-make the least noise. Amid his terror as to what was in preparation, and\r
-in the horror with which the Jondrettes had inspired him, he experienced\r
-a sort of joy at the idea that it might be granted to him perhaps to\r
-render a service to the one whom he loved.\r
-\r
-But how was it to be done? How warn the persons threatened? He did not\r
-know their address. They had reappeared for an instant before his eyes,\r
-and had then plunged back again into the immense depths of Paris. Should\r
-he wait for M. Leblanc at the door that evening at six o'clock, at the\r
-moment of his arrival, and warn him of the trap? But Jondrette and his\r
-men would see him on the watch, the spot was lonely, they were stronger\r
-than he, they would devise means to seize him or to get him away, and\r
-the man whom Marius was anxious to save would be lost. One o'clock had\r
-just struck, the trap was to be sprung at six. Marius had five hours\r
-before him.\r
-\r
-There was but one thing to be done.\r
-\r
-He put on his decent coat, knotted a silk handkerchief round his neck,\r
-took his hat, and went out, without making any more noise than if he had\r
-been treading on moss with bare feet.\r
-\r
-Moreover, the Jondrette woman continued to rummage among her old iron.\r
-\r
-Once outside of the house, he made for the Rue du Petit-Banquier.\r
-\r
-He had almost reached the middle of this street, near a very low wall\r
-which a man can easily step over at certain points, and which abuts on\r
-a waste space, and was walking slowly, in consequence of his preoccupied\r
-condition, and the snow deadened the sound of his steps; all at once he\r
-heard voices talking very close by. He turned his head, the street was\r
-deserted, there was not a soul in it, it was broad daylight, and yet he\r
-distinctly heard voices.\r
-\r
-It occurred to him to glance over the wall which he was skirting.\r
-\r
-There, in fact, sat two men, flat on the snow, with their backs against\r
-the wall, talking together in subdued tones.\r
-\r
-These two persons were strangers to him; one was a bearded man in a\r
-blouse, and the other a long-haired individual in rags. The bearded man\r
-had on a fez, the other's head was bare, and the snow had lodged in his\r
-hair.\r
-\r
-By thrusting his head over the wall, Marius could hear their remarks.\r
-\r
-The hairy one jogged the other man's elbow and said:--\r
-\r
-"--With the assistance of Patron-Minette, it can't fail."\r
-\r
-"Do you think so?" said the bearded man.\r
-\r
-And the long-haired one began again:--\r
-\r
-"It's as good as a warrant for each one, of five hundred balls, and the\r
-worst that can happen is five years, six years, ten years at the most!"\r
-\r
-The other replied with some hesitation, and shivering beneath his fez:--\r
-\r
-"That's a real thing. You can't go against such things."\r
-\r
-"I tell you that the affair can't go wrong," resumed the long-haired\r
-man. "Father What's-his-name's team will be already harnessed."\r
-\r
-Then they began to discuss a melodrama that they had seen on the\r
-preceding evening at the Gaite Theatre.\r
-\r
-Marius went his way.\r
-\r
-It seemed to him that the mysterious words of these men, so strangely\r
-hidden behind that wall, and crouching in the snow, could not but bear\r
-some relation to Jondrette's abominable projects. That must be the\r
-affair.\r
-\r
-He directed his course towards the faubourg Saint-Marceau and asked at\r
-the first shop he came to where he could find a commissary of police.\r
-\r
-He was directed to Rue de Pontoise, No. 14.\r
-\r
-Thither Marius betook himself.\r
-\r
-As he passed a baker's shop, he bought a two-penny roll, and ate it,\r
-foreseeing that he should not dine.\r
-\r
-On the way, he rendered justice to Providence. He reflected that had he\r
-not given his five francs to the Jondrette girl in the morning, he\r
-would have followed M. Leblanc's fiacre, and consequently have remained\r
-ignorant of everything, and that there would have been no obstacle to\r
-the trap of the Jondrettes and that M. Leblanc would have been lost, and\r
-his daughter with him, no doubt.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIV--IN WHICH A POLICE AGENT BESTOWS TWO FISTFULS ON A LAWYER\r
-\r
-On arriving at No. 14, Rue de Pontoise, he ascended to the first floor\r
-and inquired for the commissary of police.\r
-\r
-"The commissary of police is not here," said a clerk; "but there is an\r
-inspector who takes his place. Would you like to speak to him? Are you\r
-in haste?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said Marius.\r
-\r
-The clerk introduced him into the commissary's office. There stood a\r
-tall man behind a grating, leaning against a stove, and holding up with\r
-both hands the tails of a vast topcoat, with three collars. His face\r
-was square, with a thin, firm mouth, thick, gray, and very ferocious\r
-whiskers, and a look that was enough to turn your pockets inside out.\r
-Of that glance it might have been well said, not that it penetrated, but\r
-that it searched.\r
-\r
-This man's air was not much less ferocious nor less terrible than\r
-Jondrette's; the dog is, at times, no less terrible to meet than the\r
-wolf.\r
-\r
-"What do you want?" he said to Marius, without adding "monsieur."\r
-\r
-"Is this Monsieur le Commissaire de Police?"\r
-\r
-"He is absent. I am here in his stead."\r
-\r
-"The matter is very private."\r
-\r
-"Then speak."\r
-\r
-"And great haste is required."\r
-\r
-"Then speak quick."\r
-\r
-This calm, abrupt man was both terrifying and reassuring at one and the\r
-same time. He inspired fear and confidence. Marius related the adventure\r
-to him: That a person with whom he was not acquainted otherwise than by\r
-sight, was to be inveigled into a trap that very evening; that, as he\r
-occupied the room adjoining the den, he, Marius Pontmercy, a lawyer,\r
-had heard the whole plot through the partition; that the wretch who\r
-had planned the trap was a certain Jondrette; that there would be\r
-accomplices, probably some prowlers of the barriers, among others a\r
-certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille; that Jondrette's\r
-daughters were to lie in wait; that there was no way of warning the\r
-threatened man, since he did not even know his name; and that, finally,\r
-all this was to be carried out at six o'clock that evening, at the most\r
-deserted point of the Boulevard de l'Hopital, in house No. 50-52.\r
-\r
-At the sound of this number, the inspector raised his head, and said\r
-coldly:--\r
-\r
-"So it is in the room at the end of the corridor?"\r
-\r
-"Precisely," answered Marius, and he added: "Are you acquainted with\r
-that house?"\r
-\r
-The inspector remained silent for a moment, then replied, as he warmed\r
-the heel of his boot at the door of the stove:--\r
-\r
-"Apparently."\r
-\r
-He went on, muttering between his teeth, and not addressing Marius so\r
-much as his cravat:--\r
-\r
-"Patron-Minette must have had a hand in this."\r
-\r
-This word struck Marius.\r
-\r
-"Patron-Minette," said he, "I did hear that word pronounced, in fact."\r
-\r
-And he repeated to the inspector the dialogue between the long-haired\r
-man and the bearded man in the snow behind the wall of the Rue du\r
-Petit-Banquier.\r
-\r
-The inspector muttered:--\r
-\r
-"The long-haired man must be Brujon, and the bearded one Demi-Liard,\r
-alias Deux-Milliards."\r
-\r
-He had dropped his eyelids again, and became absorbed in thought.\r
-\r
-"As for Father What's-his-name, I think I recognize him. Here, I've\r
-burned my coat. They always have too much fire in these cursed stoves.\r
-Number 50-52. Former property of Gorbeau."\r
-\r
-Then he glanced at Marius.\r
-\r
-"You saw only that bearded and that long-haired man?"\r
-\r
-"And Panchaud."\r
-\r
-"You didn't see a little imp of a dandy prowling about the premises?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Nor a big lump of matter, resembling an elephant in the Jardin des\r
-Plantes?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Nor a scamp with the air of an old red tail?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"As for the fourth, no one sees him, not even his adjutants, clerks, and\r
-employees. It is not surprising that you did not see him."\r
-\r
-"No. Who are all those persons?" asked Marius.\r
-\r
-The inspector answered:--\r
-\r
-"Besides, this is not the time for them."\r
-\r
-He relapsed into silence, then resumed:--\r
-\r
-"50-52. I know that barrack. Impossible to conceal ourselves inside\r
-it without the artists seeing us, and then they will get off simply\r
-by countermanding the vaudeville. They are so modest! An audience\r
-embarrasses them. None of that, none of that. I want to hear them sing\r
-and make them dance."\r
-\r
-This monologue concluded, he turned to Marius, and demanded, gazing at\r
-him intently the while:--\r
-\r
-"Are you afraid?"\r
-\r
-"Of what?" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Of these men?"\r
-\r
-"No more than yourself!" retorted Marius rudely, who had begun to notice\r
-that this police agent had not yet said "monsieur" to him.\r
-\r
-The inspector stared still more intently at Marius, and continued with\r
-sententious solemnity:--\r
-\r
-"There, you speak like a brave man, and like an honest man. Courage does\r
-not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority."\r
-\r
-Marius interrupted him:--\r
-\r
-"That is well, but what do you intend to do?"\r
-\r
-The inspector contented himself with the remark:--\r
-\r
-"The lodgers have pass-keys with which to get in at night. You must have\r
-one."\r
-\r
-"Yes," said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Have you it about you?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Give it to me," said the inspector.\r
-\r
-Marius took his key from his waistcoat pocket, handed it to the\r
-inspector and added:--\r
-\r
-"If you will take my advice, you will come in force."\r
-\r
-The inspector cast on Marius such a glance as Voltaire might have\r
-bestowed on a provincial academician who had suggested a rhyme to him;\r
-with one movement he plunged his hands, which were enormous, into the\r
-two immense pockets of his top-coat, and pulled out two small steel\r
-pistols, of the sort called "knock-me-downs." Then he presented them to\r
-Marius, saying rapidly, in a curt tone:--\r
-\r
-"Take these. Go home. Hide in your chamber, so that you may be supposed\r
-to have gone out. They are loaded. Each one carries two balls. You will\r
-keep watch; there is a hole in the wall, as you have informed me. These\r
-men will come. Leave them to their own devices for a time. When you\r
-think matters have reached a crisis, and that it is time to put a stop\r
-to them, fire a shot. Not too soon. The rest concerns me. A shot into\r
-the ceiling, the air, no matter where. Above all things, not too soon.\r
-Wait until they begin to put their project into execution; you are a\r
-lawyer; you know the proper point." Marius took the pistols and put them\r
-in the side pocket of his coat.\r
-\r
-"That makes a lump that can be seen," said the inspector. "Put them in\r
-your trousers pocket."\r
-\r
-Marius hid the pistols in his trousers pockets.\r
-\r
-"Now," pursued the inspector, "there is not a minute more to be lost by\r
-any one. What time is it? Half-past two. Seven o'clock is the hour?"\r
-\r
-"Six o'clock," answered Marius.\r
-\r
-"I have plenty of time," said the inspector, "but no more than enough.\r
-Don't forget anything that I have said to you. Bang. A pistol shot."\r
-\r
-"Rest easy," said Marius.\r
-\r
-And as Marius laid his hand on the handle of the door on his way out,\r
-the inspector called to him:--\r
-\r
-"By the way, if you have occasion for my services between now and then,\r
-come or send here. You will ask for Inspector Javert."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XV--JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASES\r
-\r
-A few moments later, about three o'clock, Courfeyrac chanced to be\r
-passing along the Rue Mouffetard in company with Bossuet. The snow had\r
-redoubled in violence, and filled the air. Bossuet was just saying to\r
-Courfeyrac:--\r
-\r
-"One would say, to see all these snow-flakes fall, that there was a\r
-plague of white butterflies in heaven." All at once, Bossuet caught\r
-sight of Marius coming up the street towards the barrier with a peculiar\r
-air.\r
-\r
-"Hold!" said Bossuet. "There's Marius."\r
-\r
-"I saw him," said Courfeyrac. "Don't let's speak to him."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"He is busy."\r
-\r
-"With what?"\r
-\r
-"Don't you see his air?"\r
-\r
-"What air?"\r
-\r
-"He has the air of a man who is following some one."\r
-\r
-"That's true," said Bossuet.\r
-\r
-"Just see the eyes he is making!" said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"But who the deuce is he following?"\r
-\r
-"Some fine, flowery bonneted wench! He's in love."\r
-\r
-"But," observed Bossuet, "I don't see any wench nor any flowery bonnet\r
-in the street. There's not a woman round."\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac took a survey, and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"He's following a man!"\r
-\r
-A man, in fact, wearing a gray cap, and whose gray beard could be\r
-distinguished, although they only saw his back, was walking along about\r
-twenty paces in advance of Marius.\r
-\r
-This man was dressed in a great-coat which was perfectly new and too\r
-large for him, and in a frightful pair of trousers all hanging in rags\r
-and black with mud.\r
-\r
-Bossuet burst out laughing.\r
-\r
-"Who is that man?"\r
-\r
-"He?" retorted Courfeyrac, "he's a poet. Poets are very fond of wearing\r
-the trousers of dealers in rabbit skins and the overcoats of peers of\r
-France."\r
-\r
-"Let's see where Marius will go," said Bossuet; "let's see where the man\r
-is going, let's follow them, hey?"\r
-\r
-"Bossuet!" exclaimed Courfeyrac, "eagle of Meaux! You are a prodigious\r
-brute. Follow a man who is following another man, indeed!"\r
-\r
-They retraced their steps.\r
-\r
-Marius had, in fact, seen Jondrette passing along the Rue Mouffetard,\r
-and was spying on his proceedings.\r
-\r
-Jondrette walked straight ahead, without a suspicion that he was already\r
-held by a glance.\r
-\r
-He quitted the Rue Mouffetard, and Marius saw him enter one of the most\r
-terrible hovels in the Rue Gracieuse; he remained there about a quarter\r
-of an hour, then returned to the Rue Mouffetard. He halted at\r
-an ironmonger's shop, which then stood at the corner of the Rue\r
-Pierre-Lombard, and a few minutes later Marius saw him emerge from the\r
-shop, holding in his hand a huge cold chisel with a white wood handle,\r
-which he concealed beneath his great-coat. At the top of the Rue\r
-Petit-Gentilly he turned to the left and proceeded rapidly to the Rue du\r
-Petit-Banquier. The day was declining; the snow, which had ceased for a\r
-moment, had just begun again. Marius posted himself on the watch at the\r
-very corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, which was deserted, as usual,\r
-and did not follow Jondrette into it. It was lucky that he did so,\r
-for, on arriving in the vicinity of the wall where Marius had heard the\r
-long-haired man and the bearded man conversing, Jondrette turned round,\r
-made sure that no one was following him, did not see him, then sprang\r
-across the wall and disappeared.\r
-\r
-The waste land bordered by this wall communicated with the back yard of\r
-an ex-livery stable-keeper of bad repute, who had failed and who still\r
-kept a few old single-seated berlins under his sheds.\r
-\r
-Marius thought that it would be wise to profit by Jondrette's absence to\r
-return home; moreover, it was growing late; every evening, Ma'am Bougon\r
-when she set out for her dish-washing in town, had a habit of locking\r
-the door, which was always closed at dusk. Marius had given his key to\r
-the inspector of police; it was important, therefore, that he should\r
-make haste.\r
-\r
-Evening had arrived, night had almost closed in; on the horizon and in\r
-the immensity of space, there remained but one spot illuminated by the\r
-sun, and that was the moon.\r
-\r
-It was rising in a ruddy glow behind the low dome of Salpetriere.\r
-\r
-Marius returned to No. 50-52 with great strides. The door was still open\r
-when he arrived. He mounted the stairs on tip-toe and glided along the\r
-wall of the corridor to his chamber. This corridor, as the reader will\r
-remember, was bordered on both sides by attics, all of which were, for\r
-the moment, empty and to let. Ma'am Bougon was in the habit of leaving\r
-all the doors open. As he passed one of these attics, Marius thought\r
-he perceived in the uninhabited cell the motionless heads of four men,\r
-vaguely lighted up by a remnant of daylight, falling through a dormer\r
-window.\r
-\r
-Marius made no attempt to see, not wishing to be seen himself. He\r
-succeeded in reaching his chamber without being seen and without making\r
-any noise. It was high time. A moment later he heard Ma'am Bougon take\r
-her departure, locking the door of the house behind her.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVI--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE WORDS TO AN ENGLISH AIR WHICH\r
-WAS IN FASHION IN 1832\r
-\r
-Marius seated himself on his bed. It might have been half-past five\r
-o'clock. Only half an hour separated him from what was about to happen.\r
-He heard the beating of his arteries as one hears the ticking of a watch\r
-in the dark. He thought of the double march which was going on at that\r
-moment in the dark,--crime advancing on one side, justice coming up on\r
-the other. He was not afraid, but he could not think without a shudder\r
-of what was about to take place. As is the case with all those who are\r
-suddenly assailed by an unforeseen adventure, the entire day produced\r
-upon him the effect of a dream, and in order to persuade himself that he\r
-was not the prey of a nightmare, he had to feel the cold barrels of the\r
-steel pistols in his trousers pockets.\r
-\r
-It was no longer snowing; the moon disengaged itself more and more\r
-clearly from the mist, and its light, mingled with the white reflection\r
-of the snow which had fallen, communicated to the chamber a sort of\r
-twilight aspect.\r
-\r
-There was a light in the Jondrette den. Marius saw the hole in the wall\r
-shining with a reddish glow which seemed bloody to him.\r
-\r
-It was true that the light could not be produced by a candle. However,\r
-there was not a sound in the Jondrette quarters, not a soul was moving\r
-there, not a soul speaking, not a breath; the silence was glacial and\r
-profound, and had it not been for that light, he might have thought\r
-himself next door to a sepulchre.\r
-\r
-Marius softly removed his boots and pushed them under his bed.\r
-\r
-Several minutes elapsed. Marius heard the lower door turn on its hinges;\r
-a heavy step mounted the staircase, and hastened along the corridor; the\r
-latch of the hovel was noisily lifted; it was Jondrette returning.\r
-\r
-Instantly, several voices arose. The whole family was in the garret.\r
-Only, it had been silent in the master's absence, like wolf whelps in\r
-the absence of the wolf.\r
-\r
-"It's I," said he.\r
-\r
-"Good evening, daddy," yelped the girls.\r
-\r
-"Well?" said the mother.\r
-\r
-"All's going first-rate," responded Jondrette, "but my feet are beastly\r
-cold. Good! You have dressed up. You have done well! You must inspire\r
-confidence."\r
-\r
-"All ready to go out."\r
-\r
-"Don't forget what I told you. You will do everything sure?"\r
-\r
-"Rest easy."\r
-\r
-"Because--" said Jondrette. And he left the phrase unfinished.\r
-\r
-Marius heard him lay something heavy on the table, probably the chisel\r
-which he had purchased.\r
-\r
-"By the way," said Jondrette, "have you been eating here?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said the mother. "I got three large potatoes and some salt. I\r
-took advantage of the fire to cook them."\r
-\r
-"Good," returned Jondrette. "To-morrow I will take you out to dine with\r
-me. We will have a duck and fixings. You shall dine like Charles the\r
-Tenth; all is going well!"\r
-\r
-Then he added:--\r
-\r
-"The mouse-trap is open. The cats are there."\r
-\r
-He lowered his voice still further, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Put this in the fire."\r
-\r
-Marius heard a sound of charcoal being knocked with the tongs or some\r
-iron utensil, and Jondrette continued:--\r
-\r
-"Have you greased the hinges of the door so that they will not squeak?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied the mother.\r
-\r
-"What time is it?"\r
-\r
-"Nearly six. The half-hour struck from Saint-Medard a while ago."\r
-\r
-"The devil!" ejaculated Jondrette; "the children must go and watch. Come\r
-you, do you listen here."\r
-\r
-A whispering ensued.\r
-\r
-Jondrette's voice became audible again:--\r
-\r
-"Has old Bougon left?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said the mother.\r
-\r
-"Are you sure that there is no one in our neighbor's room?"\r
-\r
-"He has not been in all day, and you know very well that this is his\r
-dinner hour."\r
-\r
-"You are sure?"\r
-\r
-"Sure."\r
-\r
-"All the same," said Jondrette, "there's no harm in going to see whether\r
-he is there. Here, my girl, take the candle and go there."\r
-\r
-Marius fell on his hands and knees and crawled silently under his bed.\r
-\r
-Hardly had he concealed himself, when he perceived a light through the\r
-crack of his door.\r
-\r
-"P'pa," cried a voice, "he is not in here."\r
-\r
-He recognized the voice of the eldest daughter.\r
-\r
-"Did you go in?" demanded her father.\r
-\r
-"No," replied the girl, "but as his key is in the door, he must be out."\r
-\r
-The father exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Go in, nevertheless."\r
-\r
-The door opened, and Marius saw the tall Jondrette come in with a candle\r
-in her hand. She was as she had been in the morning, only still more\r
-repulsive in this light.\r
-\r
-She walked straight up to the bed. Marius endured an indescribable\r
-moment of anxiety; but near the bed there was a mirror nailed to the\r
-wall, and it was thither that she was directing her steps. She raised\r
-herself on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. In the neighboring room,\r
-the sound of iron articles being moved was audible.\r
-\r
-She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand, and smiled into the\r
-mirror, humming with her cracked and sepulchral voice:--\r
-\r
- Nos amours ont dure toute une semaine,[28]\r
- Mais que du bonheur les instants sont courts!\r
- S'adorer huit jours, c' etait bien la peine!\r
- Le temps des amours devait durer toujours!\r
- Devrait durer toujours! devrait durer toujours!\r
-\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Marius trembled. It seemed impossible to him that she\r
-should not hear his breathing.\r
-\r
-She stepped to the window and looked out with the half-foolish way she\r
-had.\r
-\r
-"How ugly Paris is when it has put on a white chemise!" said she.\r
-\r
-She returned to the mirror and began again to put on airs before it,\r
-scrutinizing herself full-face and three-quarters face in turn.\r
-\r
-"Well!" cried her father, "what are you about there?"\r
-\r
-"I am looking under the bed and the furniture," she replied, continuing\r
-to arrange her hair; "there's no one here."\r
-\r
-"Booby!" yelled her father. "Come here this minute! And don't waste any\r
-time about it!"\r
-\r
-"Coming! Coming!" said she. "One has no time for anything in this\r
-hovel!"\r
-\r
-She hummed:--\r
-\r
- Vous me quittez pour aller a la gloire;[29]\r
- Mon triste coeur suivra partout.\r
-\r
-\r
-She cast a parting glance in the mirror and went out, shutting the door\r
-behind her.\r
-\r
-A moment more, and Marius heard the sound of the two young girls' bare\r
-feet in the corridor, and Jondrette's voice shouting to them:--\r
-\r
-"Pay strict heed! One on the side of the barrier, the other at the\r
-corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don't lose sight for a moment of\r
-the door of this house, and the moment you see anything, rush here on\r
-the instant! as hard as you can go! You have a key to get in."\r
-\r
-The eldest girl grumbled:--\r
-\r
-"The idea of standing watch in the snow barefoot!"\r
-\r
-"To-morrow you shall have some dainty little green silk boots!" said the\r
-father.\r
-\r
-They ran down stairs, and a few seconds later the shock of the outer\r
-door as it banged to announced that they were outside.\r
-\r
-There now remained in the house only Marius, the Jondrettes and\r
-probably, also, the mysterious persons of whom Marius had caught a\r
-glimpse in the twilight, behind the door of the unused attic.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVII--THE USE MADE OF MARIUS' FIVE-FRANC PIECE\r
-\r
-Marius decided that the moment had now arrived when he must resume his\r
-post at his observatory. In a twinkling, and with the agility of his\r
-age, he had reached the hole in the partition.\r
-\r
-He looked.\r
-\r
-The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a curious aspect, and\r
-Marius found an explanation of the singular light which he had noticed.\r
-A candle was burning in a candlestick covered with verdigris, but\r
-that was not what really lighted the chamber. The hovel was completely\r
-illuminated, as it were, by the reflection from a rather large\r
-sheet-iron brazier standing in the fireplace, and filled with burning\r
-charcoal, the brazier prepared by the Jondrette woman that morning. The\r
-charcoal was glowing hot and the brazier was red; a blue flame flickered\r
-over it, and helped him to make out the form of the chisel purchased by\r
-Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard, where it had been thrust into the\r
-brazier to heat. In one corner, near the door, and as though prepared\r
-for some definite use, two heaps were visible, which appeared to be, the\r
-one a heap of old iron, the other a heap of ropes. All this would have\r
-caused the mind of a person who knew nothing of what was in preparation,\r
-to waver between a very sinister and a very simple idea. The lair thus\r
-lighted up more resembled a forge than a mouth of hell, but Jondrette,\r
-in this light, had rather the air of a demon than of a smith.\r
-\r
-The heat of the brazier was so great, that the candle on the table was\r
-melting on the side next the chafing-dish, and was drooping over. An old\r
-dark-lantern of copper, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche, stood on\r
-the chimney-piece.\r
-\r
-The brazier, placed in the fireplace itself, beside the nearly extinct\r
-brands, sent its vapors up the chimney, and gave out no odor.\r
-\r
-The moon, entering through the four panes of the window, cast its\r
-whiteness into the crimson and flaming garret; and to the poetic spirit\r
-of Marius, who was dreamy even in the moment of action, it was like a\r
-thought of heaven mingled with the misshapen reveries of earth.\r
-\r
-A breath of air which made its way in through the open pane, helped to\r
-dissipate the smell of the charcoal and to conceal the presence of the\r
-brazier.\r
-\r
-The Jondrette lair was, if the reader recalls what we have said of the\r
-Gorbeau building, admirably chosen to serve as the theatre of a violent\r
-and sombre deed, and as the envelope for a crime. It was the most\r
-retired chamber in the most isolated house on the most deserted\r
-boulevard in Paris. If the system of ambush and traps had not already\r
-existed, they would have been invented there.\r
-\r
-The whole thickness of a house and a multitude of uninhabited rooms\r
-separated this den from the boulevard, and the only window that existed\r
-opened on waste lands enclosed with walls and palisades.\r
-\r
-Jondrette had lighted his pipe, seated himself on the seatless chair,\r
-and was engaged in smoking. His wife was talking to him in a low tone.\r
-\r
-If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those men who\r
-laugh on every occasion in life, he would have burst with laughter when\r
-his gaze fell on the Jondrette woman. She had on a black bonnet with\r
-plumes not unlike the hats of the heralds-at-arms at the coronation of\r
-Charles X., an immense tartan shawl over her knitted petticoat, and the\r
-man's shoes which her daughter had scorned in the morning. It was this\r
-toilette which had extracted from Jondrette the exclamation: "Good! You\r
-have dressed up. You have done well. You must inspire confidence!"\r
-\r
-As for Jondrette, he had not taken off the new surtout, which was too\r
-large for him, and which M. Leblanc had given him, and his costume\r
-continued to present that contrast of coat and trousers which\r
-constituted the ideal of a poet in Courfeyrac's eyes.\r
-\r
-All at once, Jondrette lifted up his voice:--\r
-\r
-"By the way! Now that I think of it. In this weather, he will come in a\r
-carriage. Light the lantern, take it and go down stairs. You will stand\r
-behind the lower door. The very moment that you hear the carriage stop,\r
-you will open the door, instantly, he will come up, you will light the\r
-staircase and the corridor, and when he enters here, you will go down\r
-stairs again as speedily as possible, you will pay the coachman, and\r
-dismiss the fiacre."\r
-\r
-"And the money?" inquired the woman.\r
-\r
-Jondrette fumbled in his trousers pocket and handed her five francs.\r
-\r
-"What's this?" she exclaimed.\r
-\r
-Jondrette replied with dignity:--\r
-\r
-"That is the monarch which our neighbor gave us this morning."\r
-\r
-And he added:--\r
-\r
-"Do you know what? Two chairs will be needed here."\r
-\r
-"What for?"\r
-\r
-"To sit on."\r
-\r
-Marius felt a cold chill pass through his limbs at hearing this mild\r
-answer from Jondrette.\r
-\r
-"Pardieu! I'll go and get one of our neighbor's."\r
-\r
-And with a rapid movement, she opened the door of the den, and went out\r
-into the corridor.\r
-\r
-Marius absolutely had not the time to descend from the commode, reach\r
-his bed, and conceal himself beneath it.\r
-\r
-"Take the candle," cried Jondrette.\r
-\r
-"No," said she, "it would embarrass me, I have the two chairs to carry.\r
-There is moonlight."\r
-\r
-Marius heard Mother Jondrette's heavy hand fumbling at his lock in the\r
-dark. The door opened. He remained nailed to the spot with the shock and\r
-with horror.\r
-\r
-The Jondrette entered.\r
-\r
-The dormer window permitted the entrance of a ray of moonlight between\r
-two blocks of shadow. One of these blocks of shadow entirely covered the\r
-wall against which Marius was leaning, so that he disappeared within it.\r
-\r
-Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two\r
-chairs, the only ones which Marius possessed, and went away, letting the\r
-door fall heavily to behind her.\r
-\r
-She re-entered the lair.\r
-\r
-"Here are the two chairs."\r
-\r
-"And here is the lantern. Go down as quick as you can."\r
-\r
-She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.\r
-\r
-He placed the two chairs on opposite sides of the table, turned the\r
-chisel in the brazier, set in front of the fireplace an old screen which\r
-masked the chafing-dish, then went to the corner where lay the pile\r
-of rope, and bent down as though to examine something. Marius then\r
-recognized the fact, that what he had taken for a shapeless mass was a\r
-very well-made rope-ladder, with wooden rungs and two hooks with which\r
-to attach it.\r
-\r
-This ladder, and some large tools, veritable masses of iron, which were\r
-mingled with the old iron piled up behind the door, had not been in the\r
-Jondrette hovel in the morning, and had evidently been brought thither\r
-in the afternoon, during Marius' absence.\r
-\r
-"Those are the utensils of an edge-tool maker," thought Marius.\r
-\r
-Had Marius been a little more learned in this line, he would have\r
-recognized in what he took for the engines of an edge-tool maker,\r
-certain instruments which will force a lock or pick a lock, and others\r
-which will cut or slice, the two families of tools which burglars call\r
-cadets and fauchants.\r
-\r
-The fireplace and the two chairs were exactly opposite Marius. The\r
-brazier being concealed, the only light in the room was now furnished\r
-by the candle; the smallest bit of crockery on the table or on the\r
-chimney-piece cast a large shadow. There was something indescribably\r
-calm, threatening, and hideous about this chamber. One felt that there\r
-existed in it the anticipation of something terrible.\r
-\r
-Jondrette had allowed his pipe to go out, a serious sign of\r
-preoccupation, and had again seated himself. The candle brought out the\r
-fierce and the fine angles of his countenance. He indulged in scowls and\r
-in abrupt unfoldings of the right hand, as though he were responding to\r
-the last counsels of a sombre inward monologue. In the course of one of\r
-these dark replies which he was making to himself, he pulled the table\r
-drawer rapidly towards him, took out a long kitchen knife which was\r
-concealed there, and tried the edge of its blade on his nail. That done,\r
-he put the knife back in the drawer and shut it.\r
-\r
-Marius, on his side, grasped the pistol in his right pocket, drew it out\r
-and cocked it.\r
-\r
-The pistol emitted a sharp, clear click, as he cocked it.\r
-\r
-Jondrette started, half rose, listened a moment, then began to laugh and\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"What a fool I am! It's the partition cracking!"\r
-\r
-Marius kept the pistol in his hand.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVIII--MARIUS' TWO CHAIRS FORM A VIS-A-VIS\r
-\r
-Suddenly, the distant and melancholy vibration of a clock shook the\r
-panes. Six o'clock was striking from Saint-Medard.\r
-\r
-Jondrette marked off each stroke with a toss of his head. When the sixth\r
-had struck, he snuffed the candle with his fingers.\r
-\r
-Then he began to pace up and down the room, listened at the corridor,\r
-walked on again, then listened once more.\r
-\r
-"Provided only that he comes!" he muttered, then he returned to his\r
-chair.\r
-\r
-He had hardly reseated himself when the door opened.\r
-\r
-Mother Jondrette had opened it, and now remained in the corridor making\r
-a horrible, amiable grimace, which one of the holes of the dark-lantern\r
-illuminated from below.\r
-\r
-"Enter, sir," she said.\r
-\r
-"Enter, my benefactor," repeated Jondrette, rising hastily.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc made his appearance.\r
-\r
-He wore an air of serenity which rendered him singularly venerable.\r
-\r
-He laid four louis on the table.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Fabantou," said he, "this is for your rent and your most\r
-pressing necessities. We will attend to the rest hereafter."\r
-\r
-"May God requite it to you, my generous benefactor!" said Jondrette.\r
-\r
-And rapidly approaching his wife:--\r
-\r
-"Dismiss the carriage!"\r
-\r
-She slipped out while her husband was lavishing salutes and offering\r
-M. Leblanc a chair. An instant later she returned and whispered in his\r
-ear:--\r
-\r
-"'Tis done."\r
-\r
-The snow, which had not ceased falling since the morning, was so deep\r
-that the arrival of the fiacre had not been audible, and they did not\r
-now hear its departure.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, M. Leblanc had seated himself.\r
-\r
-Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair, facing M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-Now, in order to form an idea of the scene which is to follow, let the\r
-reader picture to himself in his own mind, a cold night, the solitudes\r
-of the Salpetriere covered with snow and white as winding-sheets in\r
-the moonlight, the taper-like lights of the street lanterns which shone\r
-redly here and there along those tragic boulevards, and the long rows\r
-of black elms, not a passer-by for perhaps a quarter of a league around,\r
-the Gorbeau hovel, at its highest pitch of silence, of horror, and of\r
-darkness; in that building, in the midst of those solitudes, in the\r
-midst of that darkness, the vast Jondrette garret lighted by a single\r
-candle, and in that den two men seated at a table, M. Leblanc tranquil,\r
-Jondrette smiling and alarming, the Jondrette woman, the female wolf,\r
-in one corner, and, behind the partition, Marius, invisible, erect, not\r
-losing a word, not missing a single movement, his eye on the watch, and\r
-pistol in hand.\r
-\r
-However, Marius experienced only an emotion of horror, but no fear. He\r
-clasped the stock of the pistol firmly and felt reassured. "I shall be\r
-able to stop that wretch whenever I please," he thought.\r
-\r
-He felt that the police were there somewhere in ambuscade, waiting for\r
-the signal agreed upon and ready to stretch out their arm.\r
-\r
-Moreover, he was in hopes, that this violent encounter between Jondrette\r
-and M. Leblanc would cast some light on all the things which he was\r
-interested in learning.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIX--OCCUPYING ONE'S SELF WITH OBSCURE DEPTHS\r
-\r
-Hardly was M. Leblanc seated, when he turned his eyes towards the\r
-pallets, which were empty.\r
-\r
-"How is the poor little wounded girl?" he inquired.\r
-\r
-"Bad," replied Jondrette with a heart-broken and grateful smile, "very\r
-bad, my worthy sir. Her elder sister has taken her to the Bourbe to\r
-have her hurt dressed. You will see them presently; they will be back\r
-immediately."\r
-\r
-"Madame Fabantou seems to me to be better," went on M. Leblanc, casting\r
-his eyes on the eccentric costume of the Jondrette woman, as she stood\r
-between him and the door, as though already guarding the exit, and gazed\r
-at him in an attitude of menace and almost of combat.\r
-\r
-"She is dying," said Jondrette. "But what do you expect, sir! She has so\r
-much courage, that woman has! She's not a woman, she's an ox."\r
-\r
-The Jondrette, touched by his compliment, deprecated it with the\r
-affected airs of a flattered monster.\r
-\r
-"You are always too good to me, Monsieur Jondrette!"\r
-\r
-"Jondrette!" said M. Leblanc, "I thought your name was Fabantou?"\r
-\r
-"Fabantou, alias Jondrette!" replied the husband hurriedly. "An artistic\r
-sobriquet!"\r
-\r
-And launching at his wife a shrug of the shoulders which M. Leblanc did\r
-not catch, he continued with an emphatic and caressing inflection of\r
-voice:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! we have had a happy life together, this poor darling and I! What\r
-would there be left for us if we had not that? We are so wretched, my\r
-respectable sir! We have arms, but there is no work! We have the will,\r
-no work! I don't know how the government arranges that, but, on my word\r
-of honor, sir, I am not Jacobin, sir, I am not a bousingot.[30] I don't\r
-wish them any evil, but if I were the ministers, on my most sacred word,\r
-things would be different. Here, for instance, I wanted to have my\r
-girls taught the trade of paper-box makers. You will say to me: 'What!\r
-a trade?' Yes! A trade! A simple trade! A bread-winner! What a fall,\r
-my benefactor! What a degradation, when one has been what we have been!\r
-Alas! There is nothing left to us of our days of prosperity! One thing\r
-only, a picture, of which I think a great deal, but which I am willing\r
-to part with, for I must live! Item, one must live!"\r
-\r
-While Jondrette thus talked, with an apparent incoherence which\r
-detracted nothing from the thoughtful and sagacious expression of his\r
-physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at the other end of\r
-the room a person whom he had not seen before. A man had just entered,\r
-so softly that the door had not been heard to turn on its hinges. This\r
-man wore a violet knitted vest, which was old, worn, spotted, cut and\r
-gaping at every fold, wide trousers of cotton velvet, wooden shoes on\r
-his feet, no shirt, had his neck bare, his bare arms tattooed, and his\r
-face smeared with black. He had seated himself in silence on the nearest\r
-bed, and, as he was behind Jondrette, he could only be indistinctly\r
-seen.\r
-\r
-That sort of magnetic instinct which turns aside the gaze, caused M.\r
-Leblanc to turn round almost at the same moment as Marius. He could not\r
-refrain from a gesture of surprise which did not escape Jondrette.\r
-\r
-"Ah! I see!" exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with an air of\r
-complaisance, "you are looking at your overcoat? It fits me! My faith,\r
-but it fits me!"\r
-\r
-"Who is that man?" said M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-"Him?" ejaculated Jondrette, "he's a neighbor of mine. Don't pay any\r
-attention to him."\r
-\r
-The neighbor was a singular-looking individual. However, manufactories\r
-of chemical products abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Many of the\r
-workmen might have black faces. Besides this, M. Leblanc's whole person\r
-was expressive of candid and intrepid confidence.\r
-\r
-He went on:--\r
-\r
-"Excuse me; what were you saying, M. Fabantou?"\r
-\r
-"I was telling you, sir, and dear protector," replied Jondrette placing\r
-his elbows on the table and contemplating M. Leblanc with steady and\r
-tender eyes, not unlike the eyes of the boa-constrictor, "I was telling\r
-you, that I have a picture to sell."\r
-\r
-A slight sound came from the door. A second man had just entered and\r
-seated himself on the bed, behind Jondrette.\r
-\r
-Like the first, his arms were bare, and he had a mask of ink or\r
-lampblack.\r
-\r
-Although this man had, literally, glided into the room, he had not been\r
-able to prevent M. Leblanc catching sight of him.\r
-\r
-"Don't mind them," said Jondrette, "they are people who belong in the\r
-house. So I was saying, that there remains in my possession a valuable\r
-picture. But stop, sir, take a look at it."\r
-\r
-He rose, went to the wall at the foot of which stood the panel which we\r
-have already mentioned, and turned it round, still leaving it supported\r
-against the wall. It really was something which resembled a picture, and\r
-which the candle illuminated, somewhat. Marius could make nothing out of\r
-it, as Jondrette stood between the picture and him; he only saw a coarse\r
-daub, and a sort of principal personage colored with the harsh crudity\r
-of foreign canvasses and screen paintings.\r
-\r
-"What is that?" asked M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-Jondrette exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"A painting by a master, a picture of great value, my benefactor! I am\r
-as much attached to it as I am to my two daughters; it recalls souvenirs\r
-to me! But I have told you, and I will not take it back, that I am so\r
-wretched that I will part with it."\r
-\r
-Either by chance, or because he had begun to feel a dawning uneasiness,\r
-M. Leblanc's glance returned to the bottom of the room as he examined\r
-the picture.\r
-\r
-There were now four men, three seated on the bed, one standing near the\r
-door-post, all four with bare arms and motionless, with faces smeared\r
-with black. One of those on the bed was leaning against the wall, with\r
-closed eyes, and it might have been supposed that he was asleep. He\r
-was old; his white hair contrasting with his blackened face produced a\r
-horrible effect. The other two seemed to be young; one wore a beard, the\r
-other wore his hair long. None of them had on shoes; those who did not\r
-wear socks were barefooted.\r
-\r
-Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on these men.\r
-\r
-"They are friends. They are neighbors," said he. "Their faces are black\r
-because they work in charcoal. They are chimney-builders. Don't trouble\r
-yourself about them, my benefactor, but buy my picture. Have pity on\r
-my misery. I will not ask you much for it. How much do you think it is\r
-worth?"\r
-\r
-"Well," said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette full in the eye, and with the\r
-manner of a man who is on his guard, "it is some signboard for a tavern,\r
-and is worth about three francs."\r
-\r
-Jondrette replied sweetly:--\r
-\r
-"Have you your pocket-book with you? I should be satisfied with a\r
-thousand crowns."\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc sprang up, placed his back against the wall, and cast a rapid\r
-glance around the room. He had Jondrette on his left, on the side next\r
-the window, and the Jondrette woman and the four men on his right, on\r
-the side next the door. The four men did not stir, and did not even seem\r
-to be looking on.\r
-\r
-Jondrette had again begun to speak in a plaintive tone, with so vague\r
-an eye, and so lamentable an intonation, that M. Leblanc might have\r
-supposed that what he had before him was a man who had simply gone mad\r
-with misery.\r
-\r
-"If you do not buy my picture, my dear benefactor," said Jondrette, "I\r
-shall be left without resources; there will be nothing left for me but\r
-to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wanted to have my\r
-two girls taught the middle-class paper-box trade, the making of boxes\r
-for New Year's gifts! Well! A table with a board at the end to keep the\r
-glasses from falling off is required, then a special stove is needed, a\r
-pot with three compartments for the different degrees of strength of\r
-the paste, according as it is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a\r
-paring-knife to cut the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to\r
-nail the steels, pincers, how the devil do I know what all? And all that\r
-in order to earn four sous a day! And you have to work fourteen hours a\r
-day! And each box passes through the workwoman's hands thirteen times!\r
-And you can't wet the paper! And you mustn't spot anything! And you must\r
-keep the paste hot. The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day! How do you\r
-suppose a man is to live?"\r
-\r
-As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing\r
-him. M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's eye was\r
-fixed on the door. Marius' eager attention was transferred from one\r
-to the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: "Is this man an\r
-idiot?" Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner\r
-of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order: "There\r
-is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river! I went down\r
-three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz the other day for\r
-that purpose."\r
-\r
-All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash; the little\r
-man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step toward M. Leblanc\r
-and cried in a voice of thunder: "That has nothing to do with the\r
-question! Do you know me?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XX--THE TRAP\r
-\r
-The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view of\r
-three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks of black\r
-paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the\r
-second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the\r
-handle, with the blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for slaughtering\r
-cattle. The third, a man with thick-set shoulders, not so slender as\r
-the first, held in his hand an enormous key stolen from the door of some\r
-prison.\r
-\r
-It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had been\r
-waiting for. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man with the\r
-cudgel, the thin one.\r
-\r
-"Is everything ready?" said Jondrette.\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied the thin man.\r
-\r
-"Where is Montparnasse?"\r
-\r
-"The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl."\r
-\r
-"Which?"\r
-\r
-"The eldest."\r
-\r
-"Is there a carriage at the door?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Is the team harnessed?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"With two good horses?"\r
-\r
-"Excellent."\r
-\r
-"Is it waiting where I ordered?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Good," said Jondrette.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc was very pale. He was scrutinizing everything around him in\r
-the den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into, and his\r
-head, directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him, moved\r
-on his neck with an astonished and attentive slowness, but there\r
-was nothing in his air which resembled fear. He had improvised\r
-an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but an instant\r
-previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly old man, had\r
-suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust fist on the\r
-back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.\r
-\r
-This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a\r
-danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous\r
-as they are kind, both easily and simply. The father of a woman whom we\r
-love is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of that unknown man.\r
-\r
-Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said: "They are\r
-chimney-builders," had armed themselves from the pile of old iron, one\r
-with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third\r
-with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without\r
-uttering a syllable. The old man had remained on the bed, and had merely\r
-opened his eyes. The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside him.\r
-\r
-Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention\r
-would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling, in the\r
-direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.\r
-\r
-Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,\r
-turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question, accompanying\r
-it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh which was peculiar to\r
-him:--\r
-\r
-"So you do not recognize me?"\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:--\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,\r
-crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M.\r
-Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing M.\r
-Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is about to\r
-bite, he exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is\r
-Thenardier. I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! Do you understand?\r
-Thenardier! Now do you know me?"\r
-\r
-An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he replied\r
-with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level,\r
-with his accustomed placidity:--\r
-\r
-"No more than before."\r
-\r
-Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at that moment\r
-through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard,\r
-stupid, thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: "My name is\r
-Thenardier," Marius had trembled in every limb, and had leaned against\r
-the wall, as though he felt the cold of a steel blade through his heart.\r
-Then his right arm, all ready to discharge the signal shot, dropped\r
-slowly, and at the moment when Jondrette repeated, "Thenardier, do you\r
-understand?" Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol\r
-fall. Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc,\r
-but he had quite upset Marius. That name of Thenardier, with which M.\r
-Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well. Let the reader\r
-recall what that name meant to him! That name he had worn on his heart,\r
-inscribed in his father's testament! He bore it at the bottom of his\r
-mind, in the depths of his memory, in that sacred injunction: "A certain\r
-Thenardier saved my life. If my son encounters him, he will do him all\r
-the good that lies in his power." That name, it will be remembered,\r
-was one of the pieties of his soul; he mingled it with the name of\r
-his father in his worship. What! This man was that Thenardier, that\r
-inn-keeper of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so vainly sought! He\r
-had found him at last, and how? His father's saviour was a ruffian!\r
-That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote himself, was\r
-a monster! That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the point\r
-of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet, clearly\r
-comprehend, but which resembled an assassination! And against whom,\r
-great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mockery of fate! His father\r
-had commanded him from the depths of his coffin to do all the good in\r
-his power to this Thenardier, and for four years Marius had cherished\r
-no other thought than to acquit this debt of his father's, and at the\r
-moment when he was on the eve of having a brigand seized in the very\r
-act of crime by justice, destiny cried to him: "This is Thenardier!"\r
-He could at last repay this man for his father's life, saved amid a\r
-hail-storm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it\r
-with the scaffold! He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that\r
-Thenardier, he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet;\r
-and now he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over\r
-to the executioner! His father said to him: "Succor Thenardier!" And he\r
-replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thenardier! He was\r
-about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of that man who\r
-had torn him from death at the peril of his own life, executed on the\r
-Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son, of that Marius to whom\r
-he had entrusted that man by his will! And what a mockery to have so\r
-long worn on his breast his father's last commands, written in his own\r
-hand, only to act in so horribly contrary a sense! But, on the other\r
-hand, now look on that trap and not prevent it! Condemn the victim and\r
-to spare the assassin! Could one be held to any gratitude towards so\r
-miserable a wretch? All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the\r
-last four years were pierced through and through, as it were, by this\r
-unforeseen blow.\r
-\r
-He shuddered. Everything depended on him. Unknown to themselves, he\r
-held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there before his\r
-eyes. If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved, and Thenardier lost;\r
-if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed, and, who knows?\r
-Thenardier would escape. Should he dash down the one or allow the other\r
-to fall? Remorse awaited him in either case.\r
-\r
-What was he to do? What should he choose? Be false to the most imperious\r
-souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most sacred duty,\r
-to the most venerated text! Should he ignore his father's testament,\r
-or allow the perpetration of a crime! On the one hand, it seemed to him\r
-that he heard "his Ursule" supplicating for her father and on the other,\r
-the colonel commending Thenardier to his care. He felt that he was going\r
-mad. His knees gave way beneath him. And he had not even the time for\r
-deliberation, so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes\r
-was hastening to its catastrophe. It was like a whirlwind of which he\r
-had thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away. He\r
-was on the verge of swooning.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Thenardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no other\r
-name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of frenzy\r
-and wild triumph.\r
-\r
-He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece with\r
-so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished, and the\r
-tallow bespattered the wall.\r
-\r
-Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out these\r
-words:--\r
-\r
-"Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked! Spitchcocked!"\r
-\r
-And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" he cried, "so I've found you again at last, Mister philanthropist!\r
-Mister threadbare millionnaire! Mister giver of dolls! you old\r
-ninny! Ah! so you don't recognize me! No, it wasn't you who came to\r
-Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823! It\r
-wasn't you who carried off that Fantine's child from me! The Lark! It\r
-wasn't you who had a yellow great-coat! No! Nor a package of duds in\r
-your hand, as you had this morning here! Say, wife, it seems to be his\r
-mania to carry packets of woollen stockings into houses! Old charity\r
-monger, get out with you! Are you a hosier, Mister millionnaire? You\r
-give away your stock in trade to the poor, holy man! What bosh! merry\r
-Andrew! Ah! and you don't recognize me? Well, I recognize you, that I\r
-do! I recognized you the very moment you poked your snout in here. Ah!\r
-you'll find out presently, that it isn't all roses to thrust yourself\r
-in that fashion into people's houses, under the pretext that they are\r
-taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a poor man, to whom one\r
-would give a sou, to deceive persons, to play the generous, to take away\r
-their means of livelihood, and to make threats in the woods, and you\r
-can't call things quits because afterwards, when people are ruined, you\r
-bring a coat that is too large, and two miserable hospital blankets, you\r
-old blackguard, you child-stealer!"\r
-\r
-He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment. One would\r
-have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole, like the Rhone;\r
-then, as though he were concluding aloud the things which he had been\r
-saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table with his fist, and\r
-shouted:--\r
-\r
-"And with his goody-goody air!"\r
-\r
-And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:--\r
-\r
-"Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my\r
-misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and\r
-who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a\r
-great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live\r
-on all my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything that\r
-I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual\r
-row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all\r
-the wine folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it!\r
-Well, never mind! Say, now! You must have thought me ridiculous when you\r
-went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel in the forest. You were the\r
-stronger. Revenge. I'm the one to hold the trumps to-day! You're in a\r
-sorry case, my good fellow! Oh, but I can laugh! Really, I laugh! Didn't\r
-he fall into the trap! I told him that I was an actor, that my name was\r
-Fabantou, that I had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle\r
-Muche, that my landlord insisted on being paid tomorrow, the 4th of\r
-February, and he didn't even notice that the 8th of January, and not the\r
-4th of February is the time when the quarter runs out! Absurd idiot!\r
-And the four miserable Philippes which he has brought me! Scoundrel!\r
-He hadn't the heart even to go as high as a hundred francs! And how\r
-he swallowed my platitudes! That did amuse me. I said to myself:\r
-'Blockhead! Come, I've got you! I lick your paws this morning, but I'll\r
-gnaw your heart this evening!'"\r
-\r
-Thenardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest panted\r
-like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble happiness of a\r
-feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that it can, at last,\r
-harass what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of\r
-a dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the head of Goliath, the\r
-joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick bull, so nearly dead\r
-that he can no longer defend himself, but sufficiently alive to suffer\r
-still.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:--\r
-\r
-"I do not know what you mean to say. You are mistaken in me. I am a very\r
-poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you. You are\r
-mistaking me for some other person."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" roared Thenardier hoarsely, "a pretty lie! You stick to that\r
-pleasantry, do you! You're floundering, my old buck! Ah! You don't\r
-remember! You don't see who I am?"\r
-\r
-"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at\r
-that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see that you are\r
-a villain!"\r
-\r
-Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a\r
-susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word\r
-"villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier grasped\r
-his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you\r
-stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:--\r
-\r
-"Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop!\r
-it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no\r
-bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It's three\r
-days since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain! Ah! you folks\r
-warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats,\r
-like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have\r
-porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch\r
-in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when\r
-you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what\r
-the engineer Chevalier's thermometer says about it. We, it is we who are\r
-thermometers. We don't need to go out and look on the quay at the corner\r
-of the Tour de l'Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold;\r
-we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our\r
-hearts, and we say: 'There is no God!' And you come to our caverns, yes\r
-our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! But we'll devour\r
-you! But we'll devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister\r
-millionnaire: I have been a solid man, I have held a license, I have\r
-been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it's quite possible\r
-that you are not!"\r
-\r
-Here Thenardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door, and\r
-added with a shudder:--\r
-\r
-"When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me like a\r
-cobbler!"\r
-\r
-Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:--\r
-\r
-"And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I'm not a suspicious\r
-character, not a bit of it! I'm not a man whose name nobody knows, and\r
-who comes and abducts children from houses! I'm an old French soldier,\r
-I ought to have been decorated! I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the\r
-battle I saved a general called the Comte of I don't know what. He told\r
-me his name, but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn't hear. All I\r
-caught was Merci [thanks]. I'd rather have had his name than his thanks.\r
-That would have helped me to find him again. The picture that you see\r
-here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,--do you know what\r
-it represents? It represents me. David wished to immortalize that\r
-feat of prowess. I have that general on my back, and I am carrying him\r
-through the grape-shot. There's the history of it! That general never\r
-did a single thing for me; he was no better than the rest! But none the\r
-less, I saved his life at the risk of my own, and I have the certificate\r
-of the fact in my pocket! I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies!\r
-And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let's have an\r
-end of it. I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous\r
-lot of money, or I'll exterminate you, by the thunder of the good God!"\r
-\r
-Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish, and was\r
-listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. It certainly\r
-was the Thenardier of the will. Marius shuddered at that reproach of\r
-ingratitude directed against his father, and which he was on the point\r
-of so fatally justifying. His perplexity was redoubled.\r
-\r
-Moreover, there was in all these words of Thenardier, in his accent, in\r
-his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word, there\r
-was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything, in that\r
-mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage\r
-and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in\r
-that immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous delights\r
-of violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul, in that\r
-conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds, something\r
-which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending as the truth.\r
-\r
-The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had proposed\r
-that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else, as the reader has\r
-divined, than the sign of his tavern painted, as it will be remembered,\r
-by himself, the only relic which he had preserved from his shipwreck at\r
-Montfermeil.\r
-\r
-As he had ceased to intercept Marius' visual ray, Marius could examine\r
-this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize a battle, a\r
-background of smoke, and a man carrying another man. It was the group\r
-composed of Pontmercy and Thenardier; the sergeant the rescuer, the\r
-colonel rescued. Marius was like a drunken man; this picture restored\r
-his father to life in some sort; it was no longer the signboard of the\r
-wine-shop at Montfermeil, it was a resurrection; a tomb had yawned, a\r
-phantom had risen there. Marius heard his heart beating in his temples,\r
-he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears, his bleeding father, vaguely\r
-depicted on that sinister panel terrified him, and it seemed to him that\r
-the misshapen spectre was gazing intently at him.\r
-\r
-When Thenardier had recovered his breath, he turned his bloodshot eyes\r
-on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice:--\r
-\r
-"What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?"\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc held his peace.\r
-\r
-In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this lugubrious\r
-sarcasm from the corridor:--\r
-\r
-"If there's any wood to be split, I'm there!"\r
-\r
-It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.\r
-\r
-At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made its\r
-appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited not teeth,\r
-but fangs.\r
-\r
-It was the face of the man with the butcher's axe.\r
-\r
-"Why have you taken off your mask?" cried Thenardier in a rage.\r
-\r
-"For fun," retorted the man.\r
-\r
-For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be watching and\r
-following all the movements of Thenardier, who, blinded and dazzled by\r
-his own rage, was stalking to and fro in the den with full confidence\r
-that the door was guarded, and of holding an unarmed man fast, he being\r
-armed himself, of being nine against one, supposing that the female\r
-Thenardier counted for but one man.\r
-\r
-During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had turned his back\r
-to M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair with his foot and\r
-the table with his fist, and with one bound, with prodigious agility,\r
-before Thenardier had time to turn round, he had reached the window. To\r
-open it, to scale the frame, to bestride it, was the work of a second\r
-only. He was half out when six robust fists seized him and dragged\r
-him back energetically into the hovel. These were the three\r
-"chimney-builders," who had flung themselves upon him. At the same time\r
-the Thenardier woman had wound her hands in his hair.\r
-\r
-At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up from the\r
-corridor. The old man on the bed, who seemed under the influence\r
-of wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up, with a\r
-stone-breaker's hammer in his hand.\r
-\r
-One of the "chimney-builders," whose smirched face was lighted up by\r
-the candle, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of his daubing,\r
-Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, lifted above M. Leblanc's\r
-head a sort of bludgeon made of two balls of lead, at the two ends of a\r
-bar of iron.\r
-\r
-Marius could not resist this sight. "My father," he thought, "forgive\r
-me!"\r
-\r
-And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.\r
-\r
-The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thenardier's voice\r
-shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Don't harm him!"\r
-\r
-This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thenardier,\r
-had calmed him. There existed in him two men, the ferocious man and\r
-the adroit man. Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph in the\r
-presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did not\r
-stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled and\r
-tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.\r
-\r
-"Don't hurt him!" he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first\r
-success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged, and to\r
-paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the case disappeared,\r
-and who, in the face of this new phase, saw no inconvenience in waiting\r
-a while longer.\r
-\r
-Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him\r
-from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule's father to perish, or\r
-of destroying the colonel's saviour?\r
-\r
-A herculean struggle had begun. With one blow full in the chest, M.\r
-Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of the\r
-room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown two\r
-more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees; the wretches\r
-were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure as under a granite\r
-millstone; but the other four had seized the formidable old man by both\r
-arms and the back of his neck, and were holding him doubled up over the\r
-two "chimney-builders" on the floor.\r
-\r
-Thus, the master of some and mastered by the rest, crushing those\r
-beneath him and stifling under those on top of him, endeavoring in vain\r
-to shake off all the efforts which were heaped upon him, M. Leblanc\r
-disappeared under the horrible group of ruffians like the wild boar\r
-beneath a howling pile of dogs and hounds.\r
-\r
-They succeeded in overthrowing him upon the bed nearest the window, and\r
-there they held him in awe. The Thenardier woman had not released her\r
-clutch on his hair.\r
-\r
-"Don't you mix yourself up in this affair," said Thenardier. "You'll\r
-tear your shawl."\r
-\r
-The Thenardier obeyed, as the female wolf obeys the male wolf, with a\r
-growl.\r
-\r
-"Now," said Thenardier, "search him, you other fellows!"\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc seemed to have renounced the idea of resistance.\r
-\r
-They searched him.\r
-\r
-He had nothing on his person except a leather purse containing six\r
-francs, and his handkerchief.\r
-\r
-Thenardier put the handkerchief into his own pocket.\r
-\r
-"What! No pocket-book?" he demanded.\r
-\r
-"No, nor watch," replied one of the "chimney-builders."\r
-\r
-"Never mind," murmured the masked man who carried the big key, in the\r
-voice of a ventriloquist, "he's a tough old fellow."\r
-\r
-Thenardier went to the corner near the door, picked up a bundle of ropes\r
-and threw them at the men.\r
-\r
-"Tie him to the leg of the bed," said he.\r
-\r
-And, catching sight of the old man who had been stretched across the\r
-room by the blow from M. Leblanc's fist, and who made no movement, he\r
-added:--\r
-\r
-"Is Boulatruelle dead?"\r
-\r
-"No," replied Bigrenaille, "he's drunk."\r
-\r
-"Sweep him into a corner," said Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Two of the "chimney-builders" pushed the drunken man into the corner\r
-near the heap of old iron with their feet.\r
-\r
-"Babet," said Thenardier in a low tone to the man with the cudgel, "why\r
-did you bring so many; they were not needed."\r
-\r
-"What can you do?" replied the man with the cudgel, "they all wanted to\r
-be in it. This is a bad season. There's no business going on."\r
-\r
-The pallet on which M. Leblanc had been thrown was a sort of hospital\r
-bed, elevated on four coarse wooden legs, roughly hewn.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc let them take their own course.\r
-\r
-The ruffians bound him securely, in an upright attitude, with his feet\r
-on the ground at the head of the bed, the end which was most remote from\r
-the window, and nearest to the fireplace.\r
-\r
-When the last knot had been tied, Thenardier took a chair and seated\r
-himself almost facing M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-Thenardier no longer looked like himself; in the course of a few moments\r
-his face had passed from unbridled violence to tranquil and cunning\r
-sweetness.\r
-\r
-Marius found it difficult to recognize in that polished smile of a man\r
-in official life the almost bestial mouth which had been foaming but a\r
-moment before; he gazed with amazement on that fantastic and alarming\r
-metamorphosis, and he felt as a man might feel who should behold a tiger\r
-converted into a lawyer.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur--" said Thenardier.\r
-\r
-And dismissing with a gesture the ruffians who still kept their hands on\r
-M. Leblanc:--\r
-\r
-"Stand off a little, and let me have a talk with the gentleman."\r
-\r
-All retired towards the door.\r
-\r
-He went on:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur, you did wrong to try to jump out of the window. You might\r
-have broken your leg. Now, if you will permit me, we will converse\r
-quietly. In the first place, I must communicate to you an observation\r
-which I have made which is, that you have not uttered the faintest cry."\r
-\r
-Thenardier was right, this detail was correct, although it had escaped\r
-Marius in his agitation. M. Leblanc had barely pronounced a few words,\r
-without raising his voice, and even during his struggle with the six\r
-ruffians near the window he had preserved the most profound and singular\r
-silence.\r
-\r
-Thenardier continued:--\r
-\r
-"Mon Dieu! You might have shouted 'stop thief' a bit, and I should not\r
-have thought it improper. 'Murder!' That, too, is said occasionally,\r
-and, so far as I am concerned, I should not have taken it in bad part.\r
-It is very natural that you should make a little row when you find\r
-yourself with persons who don't inspire you with sufficient confidence.\r
-You might have done that, and no one would have troubled you on that\r
-account. You would not even have been gagged. And I will tell you why.\r
-This room is very private. That's its only recommendation, but it has\r
-that in its favor. You might fire off a mortar and it would produce\r
-about as much noise at the nearest police station as the snores of a\r
-drunken man. Here a cannon would make a boum, and the thunder would make\r
-a pouf. It's a handy lodging. But, in short, you did not shout, and\r
-it is better so. I present you my compliments, and I will tell you the\r
-conclusion that I draw from that fact: My dear sir, when a man shouts,\r
-who comes? The police. And after the police? Justice. Well! You have not\r
-made an outcry; that is because you don't care to have the police and\r
-the courts come in any more than we do. It is because,--I have long\r
-suspected it,--you have some interest in hiding something. On our side\r
-we have the same interest. So we can come to an understanding."\r
-\r
-As he spoke thus, it seemed as though Thenardier, who kept his eyes\r
-fixed on M. Leblanc, were trying to plunge the sharp points which darted\r
-from the pupils into the very conscience of his prisoner. Moreover, his\r
-language, which was stamped with a sort of moderated, subdued insolence\r
-and crafty insolence, was reserved and almost choice, and in that\r
-rascal, who had been nothing but a robber a short time previously, one\r
-now felt "the man who had studied for the priesthood."\r
-\r
-The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had been\r
-carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his own life, that\r
-resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature, which is to utter\r
-a cry, all this, it must be confessed, now that his attention had\r
-been called to it, troubled Marius, and affected him with painful\r
-astonishment.\r
-\r
-Thenardier's well-grounded observation still further obscured for Marius\r
-the dense mystery which enveloped that grave and singular person on whom\r
-Courfeyrac had bestowed the sobriquet of Monsieur Leblanc.\r
-\r
-But whoever he was, bound with ropes, surrounded with executioners, half\r
-plunged, so to speak, in a grave which was closing in upon him to the\r
-extent of a degree with every moment that passed, in the presence\r
-of Thenardier's wrath, as in the presence of his sweetness, this man\r
-remained impassive; and Marius could not refrain from admiring at such a\r
-moment the superbly melancholy visage.\r
-\r
-Here, evidently, was a soul which was inaccessible to terror, and which\r
-did not know the meaning of despair. Here was one of those men who\r
-command amazement in desperate circumstances. Extreme as was the crisis,\r
-inevitable as was the catastrophe, there was nothing here of the agony\r
-of the drowning man, who opens his horror-filled eyes under the water.\r
-\r
-Thenardier rose in an unpretending manner, went to the fireplace, shoved\r
-aside the screen, which he leaned against the neighboring pallet, and\r
-thus unmasked the brazier full of glowing coals, in which the prisoner\r
-could plainly see the chisel white-hot and spotted here and there with\r
-tiny scarlet stars.\r
-\r
-Then Thenardier returned to his seat beside M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-"I continue," said he. "We can come to an understanding. Let us arrange\r
-this matter in an amicable way. I was wrong to lose my temper just now,\r
-I don't know what I was thinking of, I went a great deal too far, I said\r
-extravagant things. For example, because you are a millionnaire, I told\r
-you that I exacted money, a lot of money, a deal of money. That would\r
-not be reasonable. Mon Dieu, in spite of your riches, you have expenses\r
-of your own--who has not? I don't want to ruin you, I am not a greedy\r
-fellow, after all. I am not one of those people who, because they have\r
-the advantage of the position, profit by the fact to make themselves\r
-ridiculous. Why, I'm taking things into consideration and making a\r
-sacrifice on my side. I only want two hundred thousand francs."\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc uttered not a word.\r
-\r
-Thenardier went on:--\r
-\r
-"You see that I put not a little water in my wine; I'm very moderate. I\r
-don't know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you don't stick\r
-at money, and a benevolent man like yourself can certainly give two\r
-hundred thousand francs to the father of a family who is out of luck.\r
-Certainly, you are reasonable, too; you haven't imagined that I should\r
-take all the trouble I have to-day and organized this affair this\r
-evening, which has been labor well bestowed, in the opinion of these\r
-gentlemen, merely to wind up by asking you for enough to go and drink\r
-red wine at fifteen sous and eat veal at Desnoyer's. Two hundred\r
-thousand francs--it's surely worth all that. This trifle once out of\r
-your pocket, I guarantee you that that's the end of the matter, and that\r
-you have no further demands to fear. You will say to me: 'But I haven't\r
-two hundred thousand francs about me.' Oh! I'm not extortionate. I don't\r
-demand that. I only ask one thing of you. Have the goodness to write\r
-what I am about to dictate to you."\r
-\r
-Here Thenardier paused; then he added, emphasizing his words, and\r
-casting a smile in the direction of the brazier:--\r
-\r
-"I warn you that I shall not admit that you don't know how to write."\r
-\r
-A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.\r
-\r
-Thenardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took an inkstand,\r
-a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half open, and\r
-in which gleamed the long blade of the knife.\r
-\r
-He placed the sheet of paper before M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-"Write," said he.\r
-\r
-The prisoner spoke at last.\r
-\r
-"How do you expect me to write? I am bound."\r
-\r
-"That's true, excuse me!" ejaculated Thenardier, "you are quite right."\r
-\r
-And turning to Bigrenaille:--\r
-\r
-"Untie the gentleman's right arm."\r
-\r
-Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, executed Thenardier's\r
-order.\r
-\r
-When the prisoner's right arm was free, Thenardier dipped the pen in the\r
-ink and presented it to him.\r
-\r
-"Understand thoroughly, sir, that you are in our power, at our\r
-discretion, that no human power can get you out of this, and that we\r
-shall be really grieved if we are forced to proceed to disagreeable\r
-extremities. I know neither your name, nor your address, but I warn you,\r
-that you will remain bound until the person charged with carrying the\r
-letter which you are about to write shall have returned. Now, be so good\r
-as to write."\r
-\r
-"What?" demanded the prisoner.\r
-\r
-"I will dictate."\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc took the pen.\r
-\r
-Thenardier began to dictate:--\r
-\r
-"My daughter--"\r
-\r
-The prisoner shuddered, and raised his eyes to Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Put down 'My dear daughter'--" said Thenardier.\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc obeyed.\r
-\r
-Thenardier continued:--\r
-\r
-"Come instantly--"\r
-\r
-He paused:--\r
-\r
-"You address her as thou, do you not?"\r
-\r
-"Who?" asked M. Leblanc.\r
-\r
-"Parbleu!" cried Thenardier, "the little one, the Lark."\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc replied without the slightest apparent emotion:--\r
-\r
-"I do not know what you mean."\r
-\r
-"Go on, nevertheless," ejaculated Thenardier, and he continued to\r
-dictate:--\r
-\r
-"Come immediately, I am in absolute need of thee. The person who will\r
-deliver this note to thee is instructed to conduct thee to me. I am\r
-waiting for thee. Come with confidence."\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc had written the whole of this.\r
-\r
-Thenardier resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! erase 'come with confidence'; that might lead her to suppose that\r
-everything was not as it should be, and that distrust is possible."\r
-\r
-M. Leblanc erased the three words.\r
-\r
-"Now," pursued Thenardier, "sign it. What's your name?"\r
-\r
-The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded:--\r
-\r
-"For whom is this letter?"\r
-\r
-"You know well," retorted Thenardier, "for the little one I just told\r
-you so."\r
-\r
-It was evident that Thenardier avoided naming the young girl in\r
-question. He said "the Lark," he said "the little one," but he did not\r
-pronounce her name--the precaution of a clever man guarding his secret\r
-from his accomplices. To mention the name was to deliver the whole\r
-"affair" into their hands, and to tell them more about it than there was\r
-any need of their knowing.\r
-\r
-He went on:--\r
-\r
-"Sign. What is your name?"\r
-\r
-"Urbain Fabre," said the prisoner.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, with the movement of a cat, dashed his hand into his pocket\r
-and drew out the handkerchief which had been seized on M. Leblanc. He\r
-looked for the mark on it, and held it close to the candle.\r
-\r
-"U. F. That's it. Urbain Fabre. Well, sign it U. F."\r
-\r
-The prisoner signed.\r
-\r
-"As two hands are required to fold the letter, give it to me, I will\r
-fold it."\r
-\r
-That done, Thenardier resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Address it, 'Mademoiselle Fabre,' at your house. I know that you live\r
-a long distance from here, near Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas, because you go\r
-to mass there every day, but I don't know in what street. I see that\r
-you understand your situation. As you have not lied about your name, you\r
-will not lie about your address. Write it yourself."\r
-\r
-The prisoner paused thoughtfully for a moment, then he took the pen and\r
-wrote:--\r
-\r
-"Mademoiselle Fabre, at M. Urbain Fabre's, Rue Saint-Dominique-D'Enfer,\r
-No. 17."\r
-\r
-Thenardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion.\r
-\r
-"Wife!" he cried.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier woman hastened to him.\r
-\r
-"Here's the letter. You know what you have to do. There is a carriage at\r
-the door. Set out at once, and return ditto."\r
-\r
-And addressing the man with the meat-axe:--\r
-\r
-"Since you have taken off your nose-screen, accompany the mistress. You\r
-will get up behind the fiacre. You know where you left the team?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said the man.\r
-\r
-And depositing his axe in a corner, he followed Madame Thenardier.\r
-\r
-As they set off, Thenardier thrust his head through the half-open door,\r
-and shouted into the corridor:--\r
-\r
-"Above all things, don't lose the letter! remember that you carry two\r
-hundred thousand francs with you!"\r
-\r
-The Thenardier's hoarse voice replied:--\r
-\r
-"Be easy. I have it in my bosom."\r
-\r
-A minute had not elapsed, when the sound of the cracking of a whip was\r
-heard, which rapidly retreated and died away.\r
-\r
-"Good!" growled Thenardier. "They're going at a fine pace. At such a\r
-gallop, the bourgeoise will be back inside three-quarters of an hour."\r
-\r
-He drew a chair close to the fireplace, folding his arms, and presenting\r
-his muddy boots to the brazier.\r
-\r
-"My feet are cold!" said he.\r
-\r
-Only five ruffians now remained in the den with Thenardier and the\r
-prisoner.\r
-\r
-These men, through the black masks or paste which covered their faces,\r
-and made of them, at fear's pleasure, charcoal-burners, negroes, or\r
-demons, had a stupid and gloomy air, and it could be felt that they\r
-perpetrated a crime like a bit of work, tranquilly, without either wrath\r
-or mercy, with a sort of ennui. They were crowded together in one corner\r
-like brutes, and remained silent.\r
-\r
-Thenardier warmed his feet.\r
-\r
-The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturnity. A sombre calm had\r
-succeeded to the wild uproar which had filled the garret but a few\r
-moments before.\r
-\r
-The candle, on which a large "stranger" had formed, cast but a dim\r
-light in the immense hovel, the brazier had grown dull, and all those\r
-monstrous heads cast misshapen shadows on the walls and ceiling.\r
-\r
-No sound was audible except the quiet breathing of the old drunken man,\r
-who was fast asleep.\r
-\r
-Marius waited in a state of anxiety that was augmented by every trifle.\r
-The enigma was more impenetrable than ever.\r
-\r
-Who was this "little one" whom Thenardier had called the Lark? Was she\r
-his "Ursule"? The prisoner had not seemed to be affected by that word,\r
-"the Lark," and had replied in the most natural manner in the world:\r
-"I do not know what you mean." On the other hand, the two letters U. F.\r
-were explained; they meant Urbain Fabre; and Ursule was no longer named\r
-Ursule. This was what Marius perceived most clearly of all.\r
-\r
-A sort of horrible fascination held him nailed to his post, from which\r
-he was observing and commanding this whole scene. There he stood,\r
-almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though annihilated by the\r
-abominable things viewed at such close quarters. He waited, in the hope\r
-of some incident, no matter of what nature, since he could not collect\r
-his thoughts and did not know upon what course to decide.\r
-\r
-"In any case," he said, "if she is the Lark, I shall see her, for the\r
-Thenardier woman is to bring her hither. That will be the end, and then\r
-I will give my life and my blood if necessary, but I will deliver her!\r
-Nothing shall stop me."\r
-\r
-Nearly half an hour passed in this manner. Thenardier seemed to be\r
-absorbed in gloomy reflections, the prisoner did not stir. Still, Marius\r
-fancied that at intervals, and for the last few moments, he had heard a\r
-faint, dull noise in the direction of the prisoner.\r
-\r
-All at once, Thenardier addressed the prisoner:\r
-\r
-"By the way, Monsieur Fabre, I might as well say it to you at once."\r
-\r
-These few words appeared to be the beginning of an explanation. Marius\r
-strained his ears.\r
-\r
-"My wife will be back shortly, don't get impatient. I think that the\r
-Lark really is your daughter, and it seems to me quite natural that you\r
-should keep her. Only, listen to me a bit. My wife will go and hunt her\r
-up with your letter. I told my wife to dress herself in the way she did,\r
-so that your young lady might make no difficulty about following her.\r
-They will both enter the carriage with my comrade behind. Somewhere,\r
-outside the barrier, there is a trap harnessed to two very good horses.\r
-Your young lady will be taken to it. She will alight from the fiacre.\r
-My comrade will enter the other vehicle with her, and my wife will come\r
-back here to tell us: 'It's done.' As for the young lady, no harm will\r
-be done to her; the trap will conduct her to a place where she will be\r
-quiet, and just as soon as you have handed over to me those little two\r
-hundred thousand francs, she will be returned to you. If you have me\r
-arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark, that's\r
-all."\r
-\r
-The prisoner uttered not a syllable. After a pause, Thenardier\r
-continued:--\r
-\r
-"It's very simple, as you see. There'll be no harm done unless you wish\r
-that there should be harm done. I'm telling you how things stand. I warn\r
-you so that you may be prepared."\r
-\r
-He paused: the prisoner did not break the silence, and Thenardier\r
-resumed:--\r
-\r
-"As soon as my wife returns and says to me: 'The Lark is on the way,' we\r
-will release you, and you will be free to go and sleep at home. You see\r
-that our intentions are not evil."\r
-\r
-Terrible images passed through Marius' mind. What! That young girl whom\r
-they were abducting was not to be brought back? One of those monsters\r
-was to bear her off into the darkness? Whither? And what if it were she!\r
-\r
-It was clear that it was she. Marius felt his heart stop beating.\r
-\r
-What was he to do? Discharge the pistol? Place all those scoundrels in\r
-the hands of justice? But the horrible man with the meat-axe would, none\r
-the less, be out of reach with the young girl, and Marius reflected on\r
-Thenardier's words, of which he perceived the bloody significance: "If\r
-you have me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the\r
-Lark."\r
-\r
-Now, it was not alone by the colonel's testament, it was by his own\r
-love, it was by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt himself\r
-restrained.\r
-\r
-This frightful situation, which had already lasted above half an hour,\r
-was changing its aspect every moment.\r
-\r
-Marius had sufficient strength of mind to review in succession all the\r
-most heart-breaking conjectures, seeking hope and finding none.\r
-\r
-The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence of the\r
-den.\r
-\r
-In the midst of this silence, the door at the bottom of the staircase\r
-was heard to open and shut again.\r
-\r
-The prisoner made a movement in his bonds.\r
-\r
-"Here's the bourgeoise," said Thenardier.\r
-\r
-He had hardly uttered the words, when the Thenardier woman did in fact\r
-rush hastily into the room, red, panting, breathless, with flaming eyes,\r
-and cried, as she smote her huge hands on her thighs simultaneously:--\r
-\r
-"False address!"\r
-\r
-The ruffian who had gone with her made his appearance behind her and\r
-picked up his axe again.\r
-\r
-She resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Nobody there! Rue Saint-Dominique, No. 17, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre!\r
-They know not what it means!"\r
-\r
-She paused, choking, then went on:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Thenardier! That old fellow has duped you! You are too good,\r
-you see! If it had been me, I'd have chopped the beast in four quarters\r
-to begin with! And if he had acted ugly, I'd have boiled him alive! He\r
-would have been obliged to speak, and say where the girl is, and where\r
-he keeps his shiners! That's the way I should have managed matters!\r
-People are perfectly right when they say that men are a deal stupider\r
-than women! Nobody at No. 17. It's nothing but a big carriage gate! No\r
-Monsieur Fabre in the Rue Saint-Dominique! And after all that racing\r
-and fee to the coachman and all! I spoke to both the porter and the\r
-portress, a fine, stout woman, and they know nothing about him!"\r
-\r
-Marius breathed freely once more.\r
-\r
-She, Ursule or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her, was safe.\r
-\r
-While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thenardier had seated himself on\r
-the table.\r
-\r
-For several minutes he uttered not a word, but swung his right foot,\r
-which hung down, and stared at the brazier with an air of savage revery.\r
-\r
-Finally, he said to the prisoner, with a slow and singularly ferocious\r
-tone:\r
-\r
-"A false address? What did you expect to gain by that?"\r
-\r
-"To gain time!" cried the prisoner in a thundering voice, and at the\r
-same instant he shook off his bonds; they were cut. The prisoner was\r
-only attached to the bed now by one leg.\r
-\r
-Before the seven men had time to collect their senses and dash forward,\r
-he had bent down into the fireplace, had stretched out his hand to the\r
-brazier, and had then straightened himself up again, and now Thenardier,\r
-the female Thenardier, and the ruffians, huddled in amazement at the\r
-extremity of the hovel, stared at him in stupefaction, as almost free\r
-and in a formidable attitude, he brandished above his head the red-hot\r
-chisel, which emitted a threatening glow.\r
-\r
-The judicial examination to which the ambush in the Gorbeau house\r
-eventually gave rise, established the fact that a large sou piece, cut\r
-and worked in a peculiar fashion, was found in the garret, when the\r
-police made their descent on it. This sou piece was one of those marvels\r
-of industry, which are engendered by the patience of the galleys in\r
-the shadows and for the shadows, marvels which are nothing else than\r
-instruments of escape. These hideous and delicate products of wonderful\r
-art are to jewellers' work what the metaphors of slang are to poetry.\r
-There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the galleys, just as there are Villons\r
-in language. The unhappy wretch who aspires to deliverance finds means\r
-sometimes without tools, sometimes with a common wooden-handled knife,\r
-to saw a sou into two thin plates, to hollow out these plates without\r
-affecting the coinage stamp, and to make a furrow on the edge of the sou\r
-in such a manner that the plates will adhere again. This can be screwed\r
-together and unscrewed at will; it is a box. In this box he hides a\r
-watch-spring, and this watch-spring, properly handled, cuts good-sized\r
-chains and bars of iron. The unfortunate convict is supposed to possess\r
-merely a sou; not at all, he possesses liberty. It was a large sou of\r
-this sort which, during the subsequent search of the police, was found\r
-under the bed near the window. They also found a tiny saw of blue steel\r
-which would fit the sou.\r
-\r
-It is probable that the prisoner had this sou piece on his person at the\r
-moment when the ruffians searched him, that he contrived to conceal\r
-it in his hand, and that afterward, having his right hand free, he\r
-unscrewed it, and used it as a saw to cut the cords which fastened him,\r
-which would explain the faint noise and almost imperceptible movements\r
-which Marius had observed.\r
-\r
-As he had not been able to bend down, for fear of betraying himself, he\r
-had not cut the bonds of his left leg.\r
-\r
-The ruffians had recovered from their first surprise.\r
-\r
-"Be easy," said Bigrenaille to Thenardier. "He still holds by one leg,\r
-and he can't get away. I'll answer for that. I tied that paw for him."\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, the prisoner had begun to speak:--\r
-\r
-"You are wretches, but my life is not worth the trouble of defending it.\r
-When you think that you can make me speak, that you can make me write\r
-what I do not choose to write, that you can make me say what I do not\r
-choose to say--"\r
-\r
-He stripped up his left sleeve, and added:--\r
-\r
-"See here."\r
-\r
-At the same moment he extended his arm, and laid the glowing chisel\r
-which he held in his left hand by its wooden handle on his bare flesh.\r
-\r
-The crackling of the burning flesh became audible, and the odor peculiar\r
-to chambers of torture filled the hovel.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Red Hot Chisel 3b8-20-red-hot-chisel]\r
-\r
-Marius reeled in utter horror, the very ruffians shuddered, hardly a\r
-muscle of the old man's face contracted, and while the red-hot iron\r
-sank into the smoking wound, impassive and almost august, he fixed on\r
-Thenardier his beautiful glance, in which there was no hatred, and where\r
-suffering vanished in serene majesty.\r
-\r
-With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses\r
-when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth, and\r
-make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery force\r
-the captain to show himself.\r
-\r
-"Wretches!" said he, "have no more fear of me than I have for you!"\r
-\r
-And, tearing the chisel from the wound, he hurled it through the window,\r
-which had been left open; the horrible, glowing tool disappeared into\r
-the night, whirling as it flew, and fell far away on the snow.\r
-\r
-The prisoner resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Do what you please with me." He was disarmed.\r
-\r
-"Seize him!" said Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Two of the ruffians laid their hands on his shoulder, and the masked\r
-man with the ventriloquist's voice took up his station in front of him,\r
-ready to smash his skull at the slightest movement.\r
-\r
-At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the base of the partition,\r
-but so near that he could not see who was speaking, this colloquy\r
-conducted in a low tone:--\r
-\r
-"There is only one thing left to do."\r
-\r
-"Cut his throat."\r
-\r
-"That's it."\r
-\r
-It was the husband and wife taking counsel together.\r
-\r
-Thenardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer, and\r
-took out the knife. Marius fretted with the handle of his pistol.\r
-Unprecedented perplexity! For the last hour he had had two voices in his\r
-conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his father's testament, the\r
-other crying to him to rescue the prisoner. These two voices continued\r
-uninterruptedly that struggle which tormented him to agony. Up to that\r
-moment he had cherished a vague hope that he should find some means\r
-of reconciling these two duties, but nothing within the limits of\r
-possibility had presented itself.\r
-\r
-However, the peril was urgent, the last bounds of delay had been\r
-reached; Thenardier was standing thoughtfully a few paces distant from\r
-the prisoner.\r
-\r
-Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource of\r
-despair. All at once a shudder ran through him.\r
-\r
-At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full moon\r
-illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper. On this\r
-paper he read the following line written that very morning, in large\r
-letters, by the eldest of the Thenardier girls:--\r
-\r
-"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."\r
-\r
-An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient of which\r
-he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem which was\r
-torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.\r
-\r
-He knelt down on his commode, stretched out his arm, seized the sheet of\r
-paper, softly detached a bit of plaster from the wall, wrapped the paper\r
-round it, and tossed the whole through the crevice into the middle of\r
-the den.\r
-\r
-It was high time. Thenardier had conquered his last fears or his last\r
-scruples, and was advancing on the prisoner.\r
-\r
-"Something is falling!" cried the Thenardier woman.\r
-\r
-"What is it?" asked her husband.\r
-\r
-The woman darted forward and picked up the bit of plaster. She handed it\r
-to her husband.\r
-\r
-"Where did this come from?" demanded Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Pardie!" ejaculated his wife, "where do you suppose it came from?\r
-Through the window, of course."\r
-\r
-"I saw it pass," said Bigrenaille.\r
-\r
-Thenardier rapidly unfolded the paper and held it close to the candle.\r
-\r
-"It's in Eponine's handwriting. The devil!"\r
-\r
-He made a sign to his wife, who hastily drew near, and showed her the\r
-line written on the sheet of paper, then he added in a subdued voice:--\r
-\r
-"Quick! The ladder! Let's leave the bacon in the mousetrap and decamp!"\r
-\r
-"Without cutting that man's throat?" asked, the Thenardier woman.\r
-\r
-"We haven't the time."\r
-\r
-"Through what?" resumed Bigrenaille.\r
-\r
-"Through the window," replied Thenardier. "Since Ponine has thrown the\r
-stone through the window, it indicates that the house is not watched on\r
-that side."\r
-\r
-The mask with the ventriloquist's voice deposited his huge key on the\r
-floor, raised both arms in the air, and opened and clenched his fists,\r
-three times rapidly without uttering a word.\r
-\r
-This was the signal like the signal for clearing the decks for action on\r
-board ship.\r
-\r
-The ruffians who were holding the prisoner released him; in the\r
-twinkling of an eye the rope ladder was unrolled outside the window, and\r
-solidly fastened to the sill by the two iron hooks.\r
-\r
-The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on around him. He\r
-seemed to be dreaming or praying.\r
-\r
-As soon as the ladder was arranged, Thenardier cried:\r
-\r
-"Come! the bourgeoise first!"\r
-\r
-And he rushed headlong to the window.\r
-\r
-But just as he was about to throw his leg over, Bigrenaille seized him\r
-roughly by the collar.\r
-\r
-"Not much, come now, you old dog, after us!"\r
-\r
-"After us!" yelled the ruffians.\r
-\r
-"You are children," said Thenardier, "we are losing time. The police are\r
-on our heels."\r
-\r
-"Well," said the ruffians, "let's draw lots to see who shall go down\r
-first."\r
-\r
-Thenardier exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Are you mad! Are you crazy! What a pack of boobies! You want to waste\r
-time, do you? Draw lots, do you? By a wet finger, by a short straw! With\r
-written names! Thrown into a hat!--"\r
-\r
-"Would you like my hat?" cried a voice on the threshold.\r
-\r
-All wheeled round. It was Javert.\r
-\r
-He had his hat in his hand, and was holding it out to them with a smile.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XXI--ONE SHOULD ALWAYS BEGIN BY ARRESTING THE VICTIMS\r
-\r
-At nightfall, Javert had posted his men and had gone into ambush himself\r
-between the trees of the Rue de la Barrieredes-Gobelins which faced\r
-the Gorbeau house, on the other side of the boulevard. He had begun\r
-operations by opening "his pockets," and dropping into it the two young\r
-girls who were charged with keeping a watch on the approaches to the\r
-den. But he had only "caged" Azelma. As for Eponine, she was not at her\r
-post, she had disappeared, and he had not been able to seize her. Then\r
-Javert had made a point and had bent his ear to waiting for the signal\r
-agreed upon. The comings and goings of the fiacres had greatly agitated\r
-him. At last, he had grown impatient, and, sure that there was a nest\r
-there, sure of being in "luck," having recognized many of the ruffians\r
-who had entered, he had finally decided to go upstairs without waiting\r
-for the pistol-shot.\r
-\r
-It will be remembered that he had Marius' pass-key.\r
-\r
-He had arrived just in the nick of time.\r
-\r
-The terrified ruffians flung themselves on the arms which they had\r
-abandoned in all the corners at the moment of flight. In less than a\r
-second, these seven men, horrible to behold, had grouped themselves in\r
-an attitude of defence, one with his meat-axe, another with his key,\r
-another with his bludgeon, the rest with shears, pincers, and hammers.\r
-Thenardier had his knife in his fist. The Thenardier woman snatched up\r
-an enormous paving-stone which lay in the angle of the window and served\r
-her daughters as an ottoman.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Snatched up a Paving Stone 3b8-21-paving-stone]\r
-\r
-Javert put on his hat again, and advanced a couple of paces into the\r
-room, with arms folded, his cane under one arm, his sword in its sheath.\r
-\r
-"Halt there," said he. "You shall not go out by the window, you shall go\r
-through the door. It's less unhealthy. There are seven of you, there\r
-are fifteen of us. Don't let's fall to collaring each other like men of\r
-Auvergne."\r
-\r
-Bigrenaille drew out a pistol which he had kept concealed under his\r
-blouse, and put it in Thenardier's hand, whispering in the latter's\r
-ear:--\r
-\r
-"It's Javert. I don't dare fire at that man. Do you dare?"\r
-\r
-"Parbleu!" replied Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Well, then, fire."\r
-\r
-Thenardier took the pistol and aimed at Javert.\r
-\r
-Javert, who was only three paces from him, stared intently at him and\r
-contented himself with saying:--\r
-\r
-"Come now, don't fire. You'll miss fire."\r
-\r
-Thenardier pulled the trigger. The pistol missed fire.\r
-\r
-"Didn't I tell you so!" ejaculated Javert.\r
-\r
-Bigrenaille flung his bludgeon at Javert's feet.\r
-\r
-"You're the emperor of the fiends! I surrender."\r
-\r
-"And you?" Javert asked the rest of the ruffians.\r
-\r
-They replied:--\r
-\r
-"So do we."\r
-\r
-Javert began again calmly:--\r
-\r
-"That's right, that's good, I said so, you are nice fellows."\r
-\r
-"I only ask one thing," said Bigrenaille, "and that is, that I may not\r
-be denied tobacco while I am in confinement."\r
-\r
-"Granted," said Javert.\r
-\r
-And turning round and calling behind him:--\r
-\r
-"Come in now!"\r
-\r
-A squad of policemen, sword in hand, and agents armed with bludgeons and\r
-cudgels, rushed in at Javert's summons. They pinioned the ruffians.\r
-\r
-This throng of men, sparely lighted by the single candle, filled the den\r
-with shadows.\r
-\r
-"Handcuff them all!" shouted Javert.\r
-\r
-"Come on!" cried a voice which was not the voice of a man, but of which\r
-no one would ever have said: "It is a woman's voice."\r
-\r
-The Thenardier woman had entrenched herself in one of the angles of the\r
-window, and it was she who had just given vent to this roar.\r
-\r
-The policemen and agents recoiled.\r
-\r
-She had thrown off her shawl, but retained her bonnet; her husband, who\r
-was crouching behind her, was almost hidden under the discarded\r
-shawl, and she was shielding him with her body, as she elevated the\r
-paving-stone above her head with the gesture of a giantess on the point\r
-of hurling a rock.\r
-\r
-"Beware!" she shouted.\r
-\r
-All crowded back towards the corridor. A broad open space was cleared in\r
-the middle of the garret.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier woman cast a glance at the ruffians who had allowed\r
-themselves to be pinioned, and muttered in hoarse and guttural\r
-accents:--\r
-\r
-"The cowards!"\r
-\r
-Javert smiled, and advanced across the open space which the Thenardier\r
-was devouring with her eyes.\r
-\r
-"Don't come near me," she cried, "or I'll crush you."\r
-\r
-"What a grenadier!" ejaculated Javert; "you've got a beard like a man,\r
-mother, but I have claws like a woman."\r
-\r
-And he continued to advance.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far apart, threw\r
-herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone at Javert's head. Javert\r
-ducked, the stone passed over him, struck the wall behind, knocked off a\r
-huge piece of plastering, and, rebounding from angle to angle across the\r
-hovel, now luckily almost empty, rested at Javert's feet.\r
-\r
-At the same moment, Javert reached the Thenardier couple. One of his\r
-big hands descended on the woman's shoulder; the other on the husband's\r
-head.\r
-\r
-"The handcuffs!" he shouted.\r
-\r
-The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert's order\r
-had been executed.\r
-\r
-The Thenardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands, and\r
-at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor, and exclaimed,\r
-weeping:--\r
-\r
-"My daughters!"\r
-\r
-"They are in the jug," said Javert.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man asleep\r
-behind the door, and were shaking him:--\r
-\r
-He awoke, stammering:--\r
-\r
-"Is it all over, Jondrette?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied Javert.\r
-\r
-The six pinioned ruffians were standing, and still preserved their\r
-spectral mien; all three besmeared with black, all three masked.\r
-\r
-"Keep on your masks," said Javert.\r
-\r
-And passing them in review with a glance of a Frederick II. at a Potsdam\r
-parade, he said to the three "chimney-builders":--\r
-\r
-"Good day, Bigrenaille! good day, Brujon! good day, Deuxmilliards!"\r
-\r
-Then turning to the three masked men, he said to the man with the\r
-meat-axe:--\r
-\r
-"Good day, Gueulemer!"\r
-\r
-And to the man with the cudgel:--\r
-\r
-"Good day, Babet!"\r
-\r
-And to the ventriloquist:--\r
-\r
-"Your health, Claquesous."\r
-\r
-At that moment, he caught sight of the ruffians' prisoner, who, ever\r
-since the entrance of the police, had not uttered a word, and had held\r
-his head down.\r
-\r
-"Untie the gentleman!" said Javert, "and let no one go out!"\r
-\r
-That said, he seated himself with sovereign dignity before the table,\r
-where the candle and the writing-materials still remained, drew a\r
-stamped paper from his pocket, and began to prepare his report.\r
-\r
-When he had written the first lines, which are formulas that never vary,\r
-he raised his eyes:--\r
-\r
-"Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward."\r
-\r
-The policemen glanced round them.\r
-\r
-"Well," said Javert, "where is he?"\r
-\r
-The prisoner of the ruffians, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre, the father of\r
-Ursule or the Lark, had disappeared.\r
-\r
-The door was guarded, but the window was not. As soon as he had found\r
-himself released from his bonds, and while Javert was drawing up his\r
-report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd, the darkness,\r
-and of a moment when the general attention was diverted from him, to\r
-dash out of the window.\r
-\r
-An agent sprang to the opening and looked out. He saw no one outside.\r
-\r
-The rope ladder was still shaking.\r
-\r
-"The devil!" ejaculated Javert between his teeth, "he must have been the\r
-most valuable of the lot."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XXII--THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO\r
-\r
-On the day following that on which these events took place in the house\r
-on the Boulevard de l'Hopital, a child, who seemed to be coming from the\r
-direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the side-alley on\r
-the right in the direction of the Barriere de Fontainebleau.\r
-\r
-Night had fully come.\r
-\r
-This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers in the month\r
-of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.\r
-\r
-At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was\r
-rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern; the\r
-child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:--\r
-\r
-"Hello! And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!"\r
-\r
-He pronounced the word enormous the second time with a jeering swell\r
-of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals: "an\r
-enormous, ENORMOUS dog."\r
-\r
-The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.\r
-\r
-"Nasty brat!" she grumbled. "If I hadn't been bending over, I know well\r
-where I would have planted my foot on you."\r
-\r
-The boy was already far away.\r
-\r
-"Kisss! kisss!" he cried. "After that, I don't think I was mistaken!"\r
-\r
-The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,\r
-and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face, all\r
-hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow's-feet meeting the corners\r
-of her mouth.\r
-\r
-Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. One\r
-would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a light\r
-from the night.\r
-\r
-The boy surveyed her.\r
-\r
-"Madame," said he, "does not possess that style of beauty which pleases\r
-me."\r
-\r
-He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:--\r
-\r
- "Le roi Coupdesabot\r
- S'en allait a la chasse,\r
- A la chasse aux corbeaux--"\r
-\r
-\r
-At the end of these three lines he paused. He had arrived in front of\r
-No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it with\r
-resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man's shoes that\r
-he was wearing than the child's feet which he owned.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, the very old woman whom he had encountered at the\r
-corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier hastened up behind him, uttering\r
-clamorous cries and indulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.\r
-\r
-"What's this? What's this? Lord God! He's battering the door down! He's\r
-knocking the house down."\r
-\r
-The kicks continued.\r
-\r
-The old woman strained her lungs.\r
-\r
-"Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?"\r
-\r
-All at once she paused.\r
-\r
-She had recognized the gamin.\r
-\r
-"What! so it's that imp!"\r
-\r
-"Why, it's the old lady," said the lad. "Good day, Bougonmuche. I have\r
-come to see my ancestors."\r
-\r
-The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and a wonderful\r
-improvisation of hatred taking advantage of feebleness and ugliness,\r
-which was, unfortunately, wasted in the dark:--\r
-\r
-"There's no one here."\r
-\r
-"Bah!" retorted the boy, "where's my father?"\r
-\r
-"At La Force."\r
-\r
-"Come, now! And my mother?"\r
-\r
-"At Saint-Lazare."\r
-\r
-"Well! And my sisters?"\r
-\r
-"At the Madelonettes."\r
-\r
-The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma'am Bougon, and\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"Ah!"\r
-\r
-Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old woman,\r
-who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his clear, young\r
-voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:--\r
-\r
- "Le roi Coupdesabot[31]\r
- S'en allait a la chasse,\r
- A la chasse aux corbeaux,\r
- Monte sur deux echasses.\r
- Quand on passait dessous,\r
- On lui payait deux sous."\r
-\r
-\r
-[THE END OF VOLUME III. "MARIUS"]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-VOLUME IV.--SAINT-DENIS.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Four]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Four]\r
-\r
-\r
-THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--WELL CUT\r
-\r
-1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the\r
-Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments\r
-of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those\r
-which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary\r
-grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses,\r
-the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and\r
-adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French\r
-formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm\r
-clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances\r
-and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance.\r
-At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried\r
-shining there.\r
-\r
-This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning to\r
-be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal\r
-lines even at the present day.\r
-\r
-We shall make the attempt.\r
-\r
-The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to\r
-define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult,\r
-and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a\r
-halting-place.\r
-\r
-These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to\r
-convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but\r
-repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,\r
-to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great\r
-events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we\r
-have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would\r
-exchange Caesar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. "What\r
-a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we have\r
-reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first\r
-change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with\r
-Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.\r
-\r
-Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which\r
-are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,\r
-what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of\r
-tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the same\r
-time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in\r
-their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars, they\r
-are, they exist, they have the right to install themselves in society,\r
-and they do install themselves therein; and most of the time, facts\r
-are the stewards of the household and fouriers[32] who do nothing but\r
-prepare lodgings for principles.\r
-\r
-This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--\r
-\r
-At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand\r
-guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men.\r
-\r
-This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this\r
-is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.\r
-\r
-These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded.\r
-Princes "grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things which\r
-gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts\r
-did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a\r
-glimpse of in 1814.\r
-\r
-The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell, had\r
-the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed, and\r
-that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House of\r
-Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing, and\r
-that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. was\r
-merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House of\r
-Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should\r
-please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should have\r
-felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come\r
-from it.\r
-\r
-This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an\r
-ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of a\r
-trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it looked\r
-glum. The people saw this.\r
-\r
-It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried\r
-away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive that\r
-it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not perceive\r
-that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.\r
-\r
-It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;\r
-it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots\r
-of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations.\r
-These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family,\r
-but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the\r
-throne.\r
-\r
-The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot in\r
-her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,\r
-and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without the\r
-Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; there\r
-had been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And how\r
-should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. reigned\r
-on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the\r
-battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes been\r
-so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine authority\r
-which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension here below\r
-which is called the right of kings denied to such a point the right from\r
-on high.\r
-\r
-A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more on the\r
-guarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it termed them.\r
-Sad. A sad thing! What it termed its concessions were our conquests;\r
-what it termed our encroachments were our rights.\r
-\r
-When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration, supposing\r
-itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in the country, that is\r
-to say, believing itself to be strong and deep, abruptly decided on its\r
-plan of action, and risked its stroke. One morning it drew itself up\r
-before the face of France, and, elevating its voice, it contested the\r
-collective title and the individual right of the nation to sovereignty,\r
-of the citizen to liberty. In other words, it denied to the nation\r
-that which made it a nation, and to the citizen that which made him a\r
-citizen.\r
-\r
-This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the\r
-ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.\r
-\r
-It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to\r
-all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with it\r
-alongside.\r
-\r
-Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm\r
-discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur\r
-in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and\r
-strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of\r
-Europe. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon\r
-had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles\r
-X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The wind\r
-ceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, the\r
-pure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and\r
-charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principles\r
-which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be\r
-seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the\r
-law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the\r
-accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until\r
-1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the\r
-hands of Providence.\r
-\r
-The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but\r
-on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, but\r
-without authority; their descent into the night was not one of those\r
-solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history; it\r
-was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream of\r
-Napoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, and\r
-retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. They\r
-lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. Charles\r
-X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table to be cut\r
-over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilled\r
-etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened\r
-devoted men who loved their persons, and serious men who honored their\r
-race. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning with\r
-weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection, felt itself in the possession\r
-of so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself,\r
-restrained itself, restored things to their places, the government to\r
-law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and then halted! It took the old king\r
-Charles X. from beneath that dais which had sheltered Louis XIV. and\r
-set him gently on the ground. It touched the royal personages only with\r
-sadness and precaution. It was not one man, it was not a few men, it\r
-was France, France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her\r
-victory, who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,\r
-before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume du\r
-Vair after the day of the Barricades:--\r
-\r
-"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors of the\r
-great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough, from an afflicted\r
-fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves harsh towards their\r
-Prince in his adversity; but as for me, the fortune of my Kings and\r
-especially of my afflicted Kings, will always be venerable to me."\r
-\r
-The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. As we have\r
-just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were. They faded out\r
-in the horizon.\r
-\r
-The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout the\r
-entire world. The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm, the\r
-others turned away, each according to his nature. At the first blush,\r
-the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes, wounded\r
-and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten. A fright which can be\r
-comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned. This strange revolution had\r
-hardly produced a shock; it had not even paid to vanquished royalty the\r
-honor of treating it as an enemy, and of shedding its blood. In the eyes\r
-of despotic governments, who are always interested in having liberty\r
-calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of being\r
-formidable and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was attempted or\r
-plotted against it. The most discontented, the most irritated, the most\r
-trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor may be, a\r
-mysterious respect springs from events in which we are sensible of the\r
-collaboration of some one who is working above man.\r
-\r
-The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. A\r
-thing which is full of splendor.\r
-\r
-Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution of\r
-1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need of being\r
-violent.\r
-\r
-Right is the just and the true.\r
-\r
-The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. The\r
-fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most\r
-thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact, and\r
-if it contain only too little of right, or none at all, is infallibly\r
-destined to become, in the course of time, deformed, impure, perhaps,\r
-even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of\r
-hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries,\r
-let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a\r
-demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact.\r
-And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the\r
-fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the\r
-presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.\r
-\r
-This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin\r
-of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with the\r
-humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the fact\r
-and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--BADLY SEWED\r
-\r
-But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.\r
-The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.\r
-\r
-As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste to\r
-prepare the shipwreck.\r
-\r
-The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title of\r
-Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming somewhat\r
-of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact, that wherever\r
-there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness. To say "the\r
-skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."\r
-\r
-In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent to saying\r
-"traitors." If, then, we are to believe the skilful, revolutions like\r
-the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt ligature is\r
-indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken. Also, right\r
-once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened. Liberty once assured,\r
-attention must be directed to power.\r
-\r
-Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful, but they\r
-begin to be distrustful. Power, very good. But, in the first place, what\r
-is power? In the second, whence comes it? The skilful do not seem to\r
-hear the murmured objection, and they continue their manoeuvres.\r
-\r
-According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the mask\r
-of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement of a people\r
-after a revolution, when this people forms part of a monarchical\r
-continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty. In this way, say they,\r
-peace, that is to say, time to dress our wounds, and to repair\r
-the house, can be had after a revolution. The dynasty conceals the\r
-scaffolding and covers the ambulance. Now, it is not always easy to\r
-procure a dynasty.\r
-\r
-If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first\r
-man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of a\r
-king. You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.\r
-\r
-But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make a\r
-dynasty. There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity in\r
-a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.\r
-\r
-If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after\r
-making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the\r
-qualities of the king which result from it? He may be and it is useful\r
-for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his own\r
-person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it, that\r
-he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein, that\r
-he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.\r
-\r
-What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is to\r
-say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed, but by\r
-reason of ideas accepted. It should be composed of past and be historic;\r
-be composed of future and be sympathetic.\r
-\r
-All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves with\r
-finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second absolutely\r
-insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick or the House of\r
-Orleans.\r
-\r
-Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,\r
-bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.\r
-Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall\r
-bend down to the people.\r
-\r
-Such is the theory of the skilful.\r
-\r
-Here, then, lies the great art: to make a little render to success the\r
-sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may tremble\r
-from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken, to augment\r
-the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress, to dull\r
-that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm, to\r
-cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right, to envelop\r
-the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed very speedily, to\r
-impose a diet on that excess of health, to put Hercules on the treatment\r
-of a convalescent, to dilute the event with the expedient, to offer to\r
-spirits thirsting for the ideal that nectar thinned out with a potion,\r
-to take one's precautions against too much success, to garnish the\r
-revolution with a shade.\r
-\r
-1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.\r
-\r
-1830 is a revolution arrested midway. Half of progress, quasi-right.\r
-Now, logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the\r
-candle.\r
-\r
-Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?\r
-\r
-Why?\r
-\r
-Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.\r
-Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will be\r
-satiety.\r
-\r
-The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after\r
-Charles X.\r
-\r
-The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the\r
-bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the\r
-people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair\r
-is not a caste.\r
-\r
-But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march\r
-of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.\r
-\r
-One is not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is not\r
-one of the divisions of the social order.\r
-\r
-Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to which that part\r
-of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired after the shock\r
-of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated with indifference and\r
-laziness, and which contains a little shame; it was not the slumber\r
-which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to dreams; it was\r
-the halt.\r
-\r
-The halt is a word formed of a singular double and almost contradictory\r
-sense: a troop on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is\r
-to say, repose.\r
-\r
-The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on the\r
-alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels and holds\r
-itself on its guard.\r
-\r
-The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of\r
-to-morrow.\r
-\r
-It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.\r
-\r
-What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.\r
-\r
-The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man who\r
-should express this word Halt. An Although-Because. A composite\r
-individuality, signifying revolution and signifying stability, in other\r
-terms, strengthening the present by the evident compatibility of the\r
-past with the future.\r
-\r
-This man was "already found." His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.\r
-\r
-The 221 made Louis Philippe King. Lafayette undertook the coronation.\r
-\r
-He called it the best of republics. The town-hall of Paris took the\r
-place of the Cathedral of Rheims.\r
-\r
-This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work of\r
-1830."\r
-\r
-When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their solution became\r
-apparent. All this had been accomplished outside the bounds of absolute\r
-right. Absolute right cried: "I protest!" then, terrible to say, it\r
-retired into the darkness.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--LOUIS PHILIPPE\r
-\r
-Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly and\r
-choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced to the\r
-state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they nearly\r
-always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them from\r
-falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may be\r
-deceived, and grave errors have been seen.\r
-\r
-Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck. In the\r
-establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had been\r
-cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was a\r
-rare man.\r
-\r
-The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating\r
-circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of\r
-blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful\r
-of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing\r
-the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene,\r
-peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his\r
-wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing\r
-the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular\r
-sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate\r
-displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and,\r
-what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking\r
-them; an admirable representative of the "middle class," but\r
-outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent\r
-sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting\r
-most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race,\r
-very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly\r
-the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene\r
-Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in\r
-public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at\r
-bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own\r
-fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman,\r
-but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and\r
-his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly\r
-cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest\r
-range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of\r
-superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to\r
-put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under\r
-thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but\r
-with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in\r
-countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!\r
-Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming\r
-more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a\r
-disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns\r
-everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely\r
-repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves\r
-politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society\r
-from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious,\r
-indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the\r
-lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain,\r
-bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise\r
-with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste\r
-for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to\r
-chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms\r
-of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes;\r
-attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling. Brave as a\r
-grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the\r
-chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political\r
-adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising\r
-his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an\r
-intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not\r
-with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is\r
-to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating\r
-good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing\r
-incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Caesar,\r
-Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper\r
-names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the\r
-crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of\r
-souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents\r
-of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with\r
-France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too\r
-much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out\r
-of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas;\r
-mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and\r
-organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the\r
-founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and\r
-something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a\r
-prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness\r
-of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe\r
-will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be\r
-ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved\r
-glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to\r
-the same degree as the feeling for what is useful.\r
-\r
-Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained\r
-graceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the\r
-masses; he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he\r
-wore no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;\r
-his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new; a\r
-mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830; Louis Philippe\r
-was transition reigning; he had preserved the ancient pronunciation\r
-and the ancient orthography which he placed at the service of opinions\r
-modern; he loved Poland and Hungary, but he wrote les Polonois, and he\r
-pronounced les Hongrais. He wore the uniform of the national guard, like\r
-Charles X., and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.\r
-\r
-He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera.\r
-Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers; this\r
-made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went out\r
-with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a part of\r
-his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, something\r
-of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his horse; Louis\r
-Philippe no more went about without his lancet, than did Henri IV.\r
-without his poniard. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous king, the\r
-first who had ever shed blood with the object of healing.\r
-\r
-For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction to be\r
-made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the reign,\r
-that which accuses the King; three columns which all give different\r
-totals. Democratic right confiscated, progress becomes a matter of\r
-secondary interest, the protests of the street violently repressed,\r
-military execution of insurrections, the rising passed over by arms, the\r
-Rue Transnonain, the counsels of war, the absorption of the real\r
-country by the legal country, on half shares with three hundred thousand\r
-privileged persons,--these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused,\r
-Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the\r
-English, with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith, to\r
-Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are the doings\r
-of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than national was the\r
-doing of the King.\r
-\r
-As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's\r
-charge is decreased.\r
-\r
-This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.\r
-\r
-Whence arises this fault?\r
-\r
-We will state it.\r
-\r
-Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation\r
-of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of\r
-everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity,\r
-which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in their\r
-civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.\r
-\r
-Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled\r
-first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his\r
-family was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy of\r
-admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. One of Louis\r
-Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name of her race among\r
-artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it among poets. She made of\r
-her soul a marble which she named Jeanne d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's\r
-daughters elicited from Metternich this eulogium: "They are young people\r
-such as are rarely seen, and princes such as are never seen."\r
-\r
-This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration, is\r
-the truth about Louis Philippe.\r
-\r
-To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction of\r
-the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of the\r
-revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power, therein lay\r
-the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830; never was there a more complete\r
-adaptation of a man to an event; the one entered into the other, and the\r
-incarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, he\r
-had in his favor that great recommendation to the throne, exile. He had\r
-been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In\r
-Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in France had\r
-sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gave\r
-lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and\r
-sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie\r
-enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage of\r
-Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV. He was the\r
-companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged\r
-to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Danton\r
-had said to him: "Young man!" At the age of four and twenty, in '93,\r
-being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the depth of a box,\r
-the trial of Louis XVI., so well named that poor tyrant. The blind\r
-clairvoyance of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the\r
-King with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce\r
-crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal, the\r
-public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply, the\r
-alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that sombre\r
-breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe, of those\r
-who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked on those\r
-things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen the centuries\r
-appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he had beheld, behind\r
-Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made responsible, the\r
-terrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the shadows; and there had\r
-lingered in his soul the respectful fear of these immense justices of\r
-the populace, which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.\r
-\r
-The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory was\r
-like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. One day,\r
-in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted to doubt, he\r
-rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical list\r
-of the Constituent Assembly.\r
-\r
-Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the\r
-press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.\r
-The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of the\r
-gnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to the\r
-light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty.\r
-\r
-Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,\r
-is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is, as yet,\r
-only in the lower court.\r
-\r
-The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent, has\r
-not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a definite\r
-judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian Louis Blanc\r
-has himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis Philippe was\r
-elected by those two almosts which are called the 221 and 1830, that is\r
-to say, by a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution; and in any case,\r
-from the superior point of view where philosophy must place itself, we\r
-cannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above, except with certain\r
-reservations in the name of the absolute democratic principle; in the\r
-eyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the right of man in the\r
-first place, the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation;\r
-but what we can say, even at the present day, that after making these\r
-reserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is\r
-considered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view\r
-of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language of ancient\r
-history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.\r
-\r
-What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the\r
-king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times\r
-even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his gravest\r
-souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the\r
-continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted\r
-with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took a death\r
-sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering\r
-it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still\r
-greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He obstinately\r
-maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed the\r
-ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys,\r
-those chatterers of the law, as he called them. Sometimes the pile of\r
-sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was anguish to\r
-him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he said to\r
-the same witness to whom we have recently referred: "I won seven last\r
-night." During the early years of his reign, the death penalty was\r
-as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a violence\r
-committed against the King. The Greve having disappeared with the elder\r
-branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under the name\r
-of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques; "practical men" felt the necessity of\r
-a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the victories of\r
-Casimir Perier, who represented the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie,\r
-over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippe\r
-annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he\r
-exclaimed: "What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have\r
-pardoned!" On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by\r
-his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is\r
-one of the most generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it\r
-only remains for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis\r
-IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.\r
-\r
-Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,\r
-the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.\r
-\r
-Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps, by\r
-others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present\r
-day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before\r
-history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently and\r
-above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a dead\r
-man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing of the\r
-same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly to\r
-be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: "This one\r
-flattered the other."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION\r
-\r
-At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point of\r
-penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which envelop\r
-the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary that there\r
-should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that this book should\r
-offer some explanation with regard to this king.\r
-\r
-Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority\r
-without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue of a\r
-revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real aim of the\r
-Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans, exercised no personal\r
-initiative. He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have\r
-been elected King. He had not served this mandate on himself; he had not\r
-taken it; it had been offered to him, and he had accepted it; convinced,\r
-wrongly, to be sure, but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in\r
-accordance with right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance\r
-with duty. Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we say it in\r
-good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect good\r
-faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack, the amount\r
-of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither on the\r
-King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles resembles a clash of\r
-elements. The ocean defends the water, the hurricane defends the\r
-air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends the people; the\r
-relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the\r
-republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that which constitutes\r
-its suffering to-day will constitute its safety later on; and, in any\r
-case, those who combat are not to be blamed; one of the two parties is\r
-evidently mistaken; the right is not, like the Colossus of Rhodes, on\r
-two shores at once, with one foot on the republic, and one in Royalty;\r
-it is indivisible, and all on one side; but those who are in error are\r
-so sincerely; a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a\r
-ruffian. Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these\r
-formidable collisions. Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,\r
-human irresponsibility is mingled with them.\r
-\r
-Let us complete this exposition.\r
-\r
-The government of 1830 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it\r
-was obliged to fight to-day.\r
-\r
-Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague movements\r
-of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid, and so lacking in\r
-solidity.\r
-\r
-Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the\r
-preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased, and from\r
-being concealed it became patent.\r
-\r
-The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of\r
-France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have\r
-said.\r
-\r
-God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text\r
-written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations of it;\r
-translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense.\r
-Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most sagacious, the\r
-calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when they arrive with\r
-their text, the task has long been completed; there are already twenty\r
-translations on the public place. From each remaining springs a party,\r
-and from each misinterpretation a faction; and each party thinks that it\r
-alone has the true text, and each faction thinks that it possesses the\r
-light.\r
-\r
-Power itself is often a faction.\r
-\r
-There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they are\r
-the old parties.\r
-\r
-For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think\r
-that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the\r
-right to revolt against them. Error. For in these revolutions, the one\r
-who revolts is not the people; it is the king. Revolution is precisely\r
-the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome,\r
-contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists\r
-sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives\r
-even when stained with blood.\r
-\r
-Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A\r
-revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it\r
-must be that it is.\r
-\r
-None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of\r
-1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. Errors\r
-make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable\r
-spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this\r
-revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: "Revolution, why this\r
-king?" Factions are blind men who aim correctly.\r
-\r
-This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from\r
-them, this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was\r
-clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.\r
-The enraged democracy reproached it with this.\r
-\r
-Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the\r
-establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute at\r
-loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries, on the other\r
-hand with eternal right.\r
-\r
-In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had\r
-become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe. To\r
-keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony established\r
-contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war. From this secret\r
-conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace,\r
-that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the\r
-European cabinets is suspicious in itself. The Royalty of July reared\r
-up, in spite of the fact that it caught it in the harness of European\r
-cabinets. Metternich would gladly have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed\r
-on in France by progress, it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers\r
-in Europe. After having been towed, it undertook to tow.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary, education,\r
-penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman, wealth, misery,\r
-production, consumption, division, exchange, coin, credit, the rights of\r
-capital, the rights of labor,--all these questions were multiplied above\r
-society, a terrible slope.\r
-\r
-Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement became\r
-manifest. Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic fermentation.\r
-The elect felt troubled as well as the masses; in another manner, but\r
-quite as much.\r
-\r
-Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,\r
-traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with\r
-indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated,\r
-others united in families and almost in communion, turned over social\r
-questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners, who\r
-tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly\r
-disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they caught\r
-glimpses.\r
-\r
-This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated\r
-epoch.\r
-\r
-These men left to political parties the question of rights, they\r
-occupied themselves with the question of happiness.\r
-\r
-The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract from\r
-society.\r
-\r
-They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,\r
-of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization, such\r
-as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great deal by\r
-the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a\r
-manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,\r
-patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics. These men\r
-who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be\r
-designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that\r
-rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.\r
-\r
-From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works\r
-embraced everything. To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French\r
-Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.\r
-\r
-The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do not\r
-here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point of view, the\r
-questions raised by socialism. We confine ourselves to indicating them.\r
-\r
-All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves, cosmogonic\r
-visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be reduced to two\r
-principal problems.\r
-\r
-First problem: To produce wealth.\r
-\r
-Second problem: To share it.\r
-\r
-The first problem contains the question of work.\r
-\r
-The second contains the question of salary.\r
-\r
-In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.\r
-\r
-In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.\r
-\r
-From the proper employment of forces results public power.\r
-\r
-From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.\r
-\r
-By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must\r
-be understood.\r
-\r
-From these two things combined, the public power without, individual\r
-happiness within, results social prosperity.\r
-\r
-Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation\r
-great.\r
-\r
-England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth\r
-admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on\r
-one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence,\r
-monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the\r
-rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly,\r
-feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which\r
-sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State\r
-in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in\r
-which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral\r
-element enters.\r
-\r
-Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.\r
-They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition\r
-abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made\r
-by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore\r
-impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is\r
-not the same thing as dividing it.\r
-\r
-The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The\r
-two problems must be combined and made but one.\r
-\r
-Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice, you will\r
-be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial power, or, like\r
-England, a material power; you will be the wicked rich man. You will die\r
-by an act of violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England\r
-will fall. And the world will allow to die and fall all that is merely\r
-selfishness, all that does not represent for the human race either a\r
-virtue or an idea.\r
-\r
-It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England, we\r
-designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies\r
-superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations\r
-always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people, will live\r
-again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is\r
-immortal. That said, we continue.\r
-\r
-Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,\r
-suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by\r
-the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who\r
-is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust,\r
-mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and\r
-compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science\r
-the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one\r
-and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render\r
-property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal,\r
-so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier\r
-matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce\r
-wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and\r
-material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.\r
-\r
-This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects which have\r
-gone astray; that is what it sought in facts, that is what it sketched\r
-out in minds.\r
-\r
-Efforts worthy of admiration! Sacred attempts!\r
-\r
-These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen\r
-necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account, confused\r
-evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system of politics to be\r
-created, which shall be in accord with the old world without too much\r
-disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal, a situation in which it\r
-became necessary to use Lafayette to defend Polignac, the intuition of\r
-progress transparent beneath the revolt, the chambers and streets, the\r
-competitions to be brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in\r
-the Revolution, perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the\r
-vague acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain of\r
-his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people, his\r
-own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully, and there were\r
-moments when strong and courageous as he was, he was overwhelmed by the\r
-difficulties of being a king.\r
-\r
-He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,\r
-nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.\r
-\r
-Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade, gradually drawing\r
-nearer, extended little by little over men, over things, over ideas;\r
-a shade which came from wraths and systems. Everything which had been\r
-hastily stifled was moving and fermenting. At times the conscience of\r
-the honest man resumed its breathing, so great was the discomfort\r
-of that air in which sophisms were intermingled with truths. Spirits\r
-trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm.\r
-The electric tension was such that at certain instants, the first comer,\r
-a stranger, brought light. Then the twilight obscurity closed in again.\r
-At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed\r
-as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.\r
-\r
-Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July, the year\r
-1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending and threatening.\r
-\r
-The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince\r
-de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus as\r
-Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French Prince\r
-and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred of Nicolas,\r
-behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in\r
-Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand over\r
-Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona, at the North no one\r
-knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up Poland in her coffin,\r
-irritated glances watching France narrowly all over Europe, England, a\r
-suspected ally, ready to give a push to that which was tottering and to\r
-hurl herself on that which should fall, the peerage sheltering itself\r
-behind Beccaria to refuse four heads to the law, the fleurs-de-lys\r
-erased from the King's carriage, the cross torn from Notre Dame,\r
-Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined, Benjamin Constant dead in\r
-indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the exhaustion of his power; political\r
-and social malady breaking out simultaneously in the two capitals of the\r
-kingdom, the one in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil;\r
-at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same\r
-glare of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;\r
-the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in\r
-la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera, added the sombre roar\r
-of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--FACTS WHENCE HISTORY SPRINGS AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES\r
-\r
-Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated. The\r
-fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830, petty partial\r
-revolts had been going on here and there, which were quickly suppressed,\r
-but ever bursting forth afresh, the sign of a vast underlying\r
-conflagration. Something terrible was in preparation. Glimpses could be\r
-caught of the features still indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a\r
-possible revolution. France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on\r
-the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.\r
-\r
-The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning its\r
-ebullition.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: A Street Orator 4b1-5-street-orator]\r
-\r
-The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union of\r
-the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops, grave and\r
-stormy.\r
-\r
-The government was there purely and simply called in question. There\r
-people publicly discussed the question of fighting or of keeping quiet.\r
-There were back shops where workingmen were made to swear that they\r
-would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm, and "that they\r
-would fight without counting the number of the enemy." This engagement\r
-once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the wine-shop "assumed\r
-a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand! You have sworn!"\r
-\r
-Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor,\r
-and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made the\r
-initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as to the\r
-fathers of families. That was the formula.\r
-\r
-In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read. They treated the\r
-government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.\r
-\r
-Words like the following could be heard there:--\r
-\r
-"I don't know the names of the leaders. We folks shall not know the day\r
-until two hours beforehand." One workman said: "There are three hundred\r
-of us, let each contribute ten sous, that will make one hundred and\r
-fifty francs with which to procure powder and shot."\r
-\r
-Another said: "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two.\r
-In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government. With\r
-twenty-five thousand men we can face them." Another said: "I don't sleep\r
-at night, because I make cartridges all night." From time to time,\r
-men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats" came and "caused\r
-embarrassment," and with the air of "command," shook hands with the most\r
-important, and then went away. They never stayed more than ten minutes.\r
-Significant remarks were exchanged in a low tone: "The plot is ripe, the\r
-matter is arranged." "It was murmured by all who were there," to borrow\r
-the very expression of one of those who were present. The exaltation was\r
-such that one day, a workingman exclaimed, before the whole wine-shop:\r
-"We have no arms!" One of his comrades replied: "The soldiers have!"\r
-thus parodying without being aware of the fact, Bonaparte's proclamation\r
-to the army in Italy: "When they had anything of a more secret nature on\r
-hand," adds one report, "they did not communicate it to each other." It\r
-is not easy to understand what they could conceal after what they said.\r
-\r
-These reunions were sometimes periodical. At certain ones of them, there\r
-were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they were always\r
-the same. In others, any one entered who wished, and the room was\r
-so full that they were forced to stand. Some went thither through\r
-enthusiasm and passion; others because it was on their way to their\r
-work. As during the Revolution, there were patriotic women in some of\r
-these wine-shops who embraced new-comers.\r
-\r
-Other expressive facts came to light.\r
-\r
-A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:\r
-"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."\r
-\r
-Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue de\r
-Charonne. The balloting was carried on in their caps.\r
-\r
-Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons in\r
-the Rue de Cotte. There there was a trophy of arms formed of wooden\r
-broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils. One day, the buttons were removed\r
-from the foils.\r
-\r
-A workman said: "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't count\r
-on me, because I am looked upon as a machine." Later on, that machine\r
-became Quenisset.\r
-\r
-The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange\r
-and indescribable notoriety. A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said\r
-to another woman: "For a long time, there has been a strong force busy\r
-making cartridges." In the open street, proclamation could be seen\r
-addressed to the National Guard in the departments. One of these\r
-proclamations was signed: Burtot, wine-merchant.\r
-\r
-One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian\r
-accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the Marche\r
-Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to emanate from\r
-an occult power. Groups formed around him, and applauded.\r
-\r
-The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and\r
-noted down. "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn, our\r
-bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The breakdown\r
-which has recently taken place in cottons has converted to us many\r
-mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in our obscure\r
-ranks."--"Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction, revolution or\r
-counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer believe either in\r
-inertia or in immobility. For the people against the people, that is the\r
-question. There is no other."--"On the day when we cease to suit you,\r
-break us, but up to that day, help us to march on." All this in broad\r
-daylight.\r
-\r
-Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the\r
-people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832, a\r
-passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle of the\r
-Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: "I am a Babouvist!" But beneath\r
-Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.\r
-\r
-Among other things, this man said:--\r
-\r
-"Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly and\r
-treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side, it preaches\r
-revolution, it is democratic in order to escape being beaten, and\r
-royalist so that it may not have to fight. The republicans are beasts\r
-with feathers. Distrust the republicans, citizens of the laboring\r
-classes."\r
-\r
-"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.\r
-\r
-This shout put an end to the discourse.\r
-\r
-Mysterious incidents occurred.\r
-\r
-At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very well\r
-dressed man," who said to him: "Whither are you bound, citizen?" "Sir,"\r
-replied the workingman, "I have not the honor of your acquaintance." "I\r
-know you very well, however." And the man added: "Don't be alarmed, I\r
-am an agent of the committee. You are suspected of not being quite\r
-faithful. You know that if you reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on\r
-you." Then he shook hands with the workingman and went away, saying: "We\r
-shall meet again soon."\r
-\r
-The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues, not\r
-only in the wine-shops, but in the street.\r
-\r
-"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"There is going to be a shot to fire."\r
-\r
-Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies, fraught with\r
-evident Jacquerie:--\r
-\r
-"Who governs us?"\r
-\r
-"M. Philippe."\r
-\r
-"No, it is the bourgeoisie."\r
-\r
-The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie in a\r
-bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.\r
-\r
-On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they\r
-passed by: "We have a good plan of attack."\r
-\r
-Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four men\r
-who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere du Trone:--\r
-\r
-"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris any\r
-more."\r
-\r
-Who was the he? Menacing obscurity.\r
-\r
-"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves\r
-apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop\r
-near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society\r
-aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving as\r
-intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these\r
-leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of\r
-this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:--\r
-\r
-"Who was your leader?"\r
-\r
-"I knew of none and I recognized none."\r
-\r
-There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle\r
-reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.\r
-\r
-A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground\r
-on which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly\r
-found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still\r
-legible the following lines:--\r
-\r
-\r
-The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections\r
-for the different societies.\r
-\r
-\r
-And, as a postscript:--\r
-\r
-\r
-We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere,\r
-No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house of a\r
-gunsmith in that court. The section owns no arms.\r
-\r
-\r
-What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his\r
-neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up another\r
-paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of which we\r
-reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest attaching to\r
-these strange documents:--\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Code Table 4b1-5 page 26]\r
-\r
- +------------------------------------------------------------+\r
- | Q | C | D | E | Learn this list by heart. After so doing\r
- | | | | | | you will tear it up. The men admitted\r
- | | | | | | will do the same when you have transmitted\r
- | | | | | | their orders to them.\r
- | | | | | | Health and Fraternity,\r
- | | | | | | u og a fe L. |\r
- +------------------------------------------------------------+\r
-\r
-It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret of this\r
-find at the time, learned the significance of those four capital\r
-letters: quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs [scouts], and\r
-the sense of the letters: u og a fe, which was a date, and meant April\r
-15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed names followed by\r
-very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. Bannerel. 8 guns, 83 cartridges. A\r
-safe man.--C. Boubiere. 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.--D. Rollet. 1 foil,\r
-1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--E. Tessier. 1 sword, 1 cartridge-box.\r
-Exact.--Terreur. 8 guns. Brave, etc.\r
-\r
-Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure, a third\r
-paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly, this sort of\r
-enigmatical list:--\r
-\r
- Unite: Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.\r
- Barra. Soize. Salle-au-Comte.\r
- Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?\r
- J. J. R.\r
- Caius Gracchus.\r
- Right of revision. Dufond. Four.\r
- Fall of the Girondists. Derbac. Maubuee.\r
- Washington. Pinson. 1 pistol, 86 cartridges.\r
- Marseillaise.\r
- Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.\r
- Hoche.\r
- Marceau. Plato. Arbre-Sec.\r
- Warsaw. Tilly, crier of the Populaire.\r
-\r
-\r
-The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew its\r
-significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature of\r
-the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights\r
-of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections. To-day,\r
-when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than history,\r
-we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation of the\r
-Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to the date\r
-when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.\r
-\r
-Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to written\r
-notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.\r
-\r
-In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-abrac, there\r
-were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise\r
-and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this same\r
-gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card, on which was\r
-written the following:--\r
-\r
- Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . . 12 ounces.\r
- Sulphur . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.\r
- Charcoal . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces and a half.\r
- Water . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.\r
-\r
-\r
-The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong smell\r
-of powder.\r
-\r
-A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little package\r
-on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package was taken to\r
-the police station. It was opened, and in it were found two printed\r
-dialogues, signed Lahautiere, a song entitled: "Workmen, band together,"\r
-and a tin box full of cartridges.\r
-\r
-One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see how\r
-warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.\r
-\r
-In a ditch on the boulevard, between Pere-Lachaise and the Barriere\r
-du Trone, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,\r
-discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood, a\r
-bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation of\r
-cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of hunting-powder,\r
-and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented evident traces of\r
-melted lead.\r
-\r
-Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five\r
-o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon, who\r
-was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got himself\r
-killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing near his\r
-bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he was in the act of\r
-preparing.\r
-\r
-Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet\r
-between the Barriere Picpus and the Barriere Charenton in a little lane\r
-between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there was a "Jeu\r
-de Siam."[33] One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse and handed it to\r
-the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed that the perspiration\r
-of his chest had made the powder damp. He primed the pistol and added\r
-more powder to what was already in the pan. Then the two men parted.\r
-\r
-A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the affair\r
-of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred cartridges and\r
-twenty-four flints.\r
-\r
-The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred\r
-thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg. On\r
-the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. The\r
-remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to seize a\r
-single one.\r
-\r
-An intercepted letter read: "The day is not far distant when, within\r
-four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be under arms."\r
-\r
-All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. The\r
-approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the face of\r
-the government. No singularity was lacking to this still subterranean\r
-crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois talked peaceably to\r
-the working-classes of what was in preparation. They said: "How is the\r
-rising coming along?" in the same tone in which they would have said:\r
-"How is your wife?"\r
-\r
-A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: "Well, when are you\r
-going to make the attack?"\r
-\r
-Another shop-keeper said:--\r
-\r
-"The attack will be made soon."\r
-\r
-"I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there\r
-are twenty-five thousand." He offered his gun, and a neighbor offered a\r
-small pistol which he was willing to sell for seven francs.\r
-\r
-Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris nor\r
-in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere. Like\r
-those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form in the\r
-human body, the network of secret societies began to spread all over the\r
-country. From the associations of the Friends of the People, which was\r
-at the same time public and secret, sprang the Society of the Rights of\r
-Man, which also dated from one of the orders of the day: Pluviose, Year\r
-40 of the republican era, which was destined to survive even the mandate\r
-of the Court of Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which\r
-did not hesitate to bestow on its sections significant names like the\r
-following:--\r
-\r
- Pikes.\r
- Tocsin.\r
- Signal cannon.\r
- Phrygian cap.\r
- January 21.\r
- The beggars.\r
- The vagabonds.\r
- Forward march.\r
- Robespierre.\r
- Level.\r
- Ca Ira.\r
-\r
-The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action. These\r
-were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead. Other\r
-associations sought to recruit themselves from the great mother\r
-societies. The members of sections complained that they were torn\r
-asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee of organization of\r
-the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the liberty of the press,\r
-for individual liberty, for the instruction of the people against\r
-indirect taxes. Then the Society of Equal Workingmen which was divided\r
-into three fractions, the levellers, the communists, the reformers.\r
-Then the Army of the Bastilles, a sort of cohort organized on a military\r
-footing, four men commanded by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by\r
-a sub-lieutenant, forty by a lieutenant; there were never more than\r
-five men who knew each other. Creation where precaution is combined with\r
-audacity and which seemed stamped with the genius of Venice.\r
-\r
-The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms, the Society\r
-of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.\r
-\r
-A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about\r
-among these the republican affiliations. It was denounced and repudiated\r
-there.\r
-\r
-The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities, Lyons,\r
-Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society of the Rights of\r
-Man, the Charbonniere, and The Free Men. All had a revolutionary society\r
-which was called the Cougourde. We have already mentioned this word.\r
-\r
-In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with the\r
-Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than the\r
-faubourgs. A cafe in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop of the\r
-Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served as rallying\r
-points for the students. The Society of the Friends of the A B C\r
-affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the Cougourde of Aix,\r
-met, as we have seen, in the Cafe Musain. These same young men assembled\r
-also, as we have stated already, in a restaurant wine-shop of the Rue\r
-Mondetour which was called Corinthe. These meetings were secret. Others\r
-were as public as possible, and the reader can judge of their boldness\r
-from these fragments of an interrogatory undergone in one of the\r
-ulterior prosecutions: "Where was this meeting held?" "In the Rue de la\r
-Paix." "At whose house?" "In the street." "What sections were there?"\r
-"Only one." "Which?" "The Manuel section." "Who was its leader?"\r
-"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course of\r
-attacking the government. Where did your instructions come from?" "From\r
-the central committee."\r
-\r
-The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved\r
-subsequently by the operations of Beford, Luneville, and Epinard. They\r
-counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth, on\r
-the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry. In Burgundy and\r
-in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree; that is to say, a\r
-pole surmounted by a red cap.\r
-\r
-Such was the situation.\r
-\r
-The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,\r
-as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made\r
-it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled like\r
-an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees, was\r
-quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult. Everything\r
-was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption, however, of\r
-the regular work. It is impossible to convey an idea of this lively yet\r
-sombre physiognomy. In this faubourg exists poignant distress hidden\r
-under attic roofs; there also exist rare and ardent minds. It is\r
-particularly in the matter of distress and intelligence that it is\r
-dangerous to have extremes meet.\r
-\r
-The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble; for it\r
-received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures, strikes,\r
-slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances. In times\r
-of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow which it deals\r
-rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue, capable to the\r
-highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly to arms, prompt to\r
-explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to be only awaiting the\r
-fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks float on the horizon chased\r
-by the wind of events, it is impossible not to think of the Faubourg\r
-Saint-Antoine and of the formidable chance which has placed at the very\r
-gates of Paris that powder-house of suffering and ideas.\r
-\r
-The wine-shops of the Faubourg Antoine, which have been more than\r
-once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused, possess\r
-historical notoriety. In troublous times people grow intoxicated there\r
-more on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic spirit and an afflatus\r
-of the future circulates there, swelling hearts and enlarging souls. The\r
-cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine resemble those taverns of Mont\r
-Aventine erected on the cave of the Sibyl and communicating with\r
-the profound and sacred breath; taverns where the tables were almost\r
-tripods, and where was drunk what Ennius calls the sibylline wine.\r
-\r
-The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary\r
-agitations create fissures there, through which trickles the popular\r
-sovereignty. This sovereignty may do evil; it can be mistaken like any\r
-other; but, even when led astray, it remains great. We may say of it as\r
-of the blind cyclops, Ingens.\r
-\r
-In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good or evil,\r
-according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm, there leaped\r
-forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions, now heroic\r
-bands.\r
-\r
-Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men, who in the\r
-early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling, wild, with\r
-uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves upon ancient Paris in\r
-an uproar, what did they want? They wanted an end to oppression, an\r
-end to tyranny, an end to the sword, work for men, instruction for the\r
-child, social sweetness for the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity,\r
-bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress;\r
-and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible\r
-wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist,\r
-a roar in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of\r
-civilization.\r
-\r
-They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with\r
-fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. They seemed\r
-barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask of\r
-night.\r
-\r
-Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but\r
-ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling,\r
-embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white\r
-plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on\r
-a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently on demeanor\r
-and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right,\r
-of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the death penalty, of war,\r
-glorifying in low tones and with politeness, the sword, the stake, and\r
-the scaffold. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between\r
-the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we\r
-should choose the barbarians.\r
-\r
-But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. No perpendicular\r
-fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.\r
-\r
-Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle slope.\r
-\r
-God takes care of that. God's whole policy consists in rendering slopes\r
-less steep.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS\r
-\r
-It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible\r
-catastrophe, instituted a kind of mysterious census.\r
-\r
-All were present at a secret meeting at the Cafe Musain.\r
-\r
-Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical but\r
-significant metaphors:--\r
-\r
-"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we may\r
-count. If combatants are required, they must be provided. It can do no\r
-harm to have something with which to strike. Passers-by always have more\r
-chance of being gored when there are bulls on the road than when there\r
-are none. Let us, therefore, reckon a little on the herd. How many of us\r
-are there? There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.\r
-Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose.\r
-Let us mistrust the unexpected. Let us not be caught unprepared. We must\r
-go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they hold fast.\r
-This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac, you will see the\r
-polytechnic students. It is their day to go out. To-day is Wednesday.\r
-Feuilly, you will see those of the Glaciere, will you not? Combeferre\r
-has promised me to go to Picpus. There is a perfect swarm and an\r
-excellent one there. Bahorel will visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the\r
-masons are growing lukewarm; you will bring us news from the lodge of\r
-the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honore. Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical\r
-lecture, and feel the pulse of the medical school. Bossuet will take a\r
-little turn in the court and talk with the young law licentiates. I will\r
-take charge of the Cougourde myself."\r
-\r
-"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"What else is there?"\r
-\r
-"A very important thing."\r
-\r
-"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"The Barriere du Maine," replied Enjolras.\r
-\r
-Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection, then he\r
-resumed:--\r
-\r
-"At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters, and\r
-journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic family,\r
-but liable to cool off. I don't know what has been the matter with\r
-them for some time past. They are thinking of something else. They are\r
-becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes. There is\r
-urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little, but\r
-with firmness. They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found there\r
-between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into a glow.\r
-For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius, who is a good\r
-fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us. I need some one for\r
-the Barriere du Maine. I have no one."\r
-\r
-"What about me?" said Grantaire. "Here am I."\r
-\r
-"You?"\r
-\r
-"I."\r
-\r
-"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown cold\r
-in the name of principle!"\r
-\r
-"Why not?"\r
-\r
-"Are you good for anything?"\r
-\r
-"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.\r
-\r
-"You do not believe in everything."\r
-\r
-"I believe in you."\r
-\r
-"Grantaire will you do me a service?"\r
-\r
-"Anything. I'll black your boots."\r
-\r
-"Well, don't meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from your\r
-absinthe."\r
-\r
-"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."\r
-\r
-"You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine! You capable of it!"\r
-\r
-"I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place\r
-Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking\r
-the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the Rue\r
-d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind me the\r
-Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries, of striding\r
-across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine, of passing\r
-the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that. My shoes are\r
-capable of that."\r
-\r
-"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"\r
-\r
-"Not much. We only address each other as thou."\r
-\r
-"What will you say to them?"\r
-\r
-"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton. Of principles."\r
-\r
-"You?"\r
-\r
-"I. But I don't receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible. I\r
-have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my constitution\r
-of the year Two by heart. 'The liberty of one citizen ends where the\r
-liberty of another citizen begins.' Do you take me for a brute? I have\r
-an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. The Rights of Man, the\r
-sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am even a bit of a Hebertist. I\r
-can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in\r
-hand."\r
-\r
-"Be serious," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"I am wild," replied Grantaire.\r
-\r
-Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man who\r
-has taken a resolution.\r
-\r
-"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you. You shall go to the\r
-Barriere du Maine."\r
-\r
-Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain. He went\r
-out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home to put on a\r
-Robespierre waistcoat.\r
-\r
-"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras. Then,\r
-with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of\r
-the waistcoat across his breast.\r
-\r
-And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--\r
-\r
-"Be easy."\r
-\r
-He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.\r
-\r
-A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain was\r
-deserted. All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his own\r
-direction, each to his own task. Enjolras, who had reserved the\r
-Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.\r
-\r
-Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met on the\r
-plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are so numerous in\r
-that side of Paris.\r
-\r
-As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation\r
-in review in his own mind. The gravity of events was self-evident. When\r
-facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady, move heavily,\r
-the slightest complication stops and entangles them. A phenomenon whence\r
-arises ruin and new births. Enjolras descried a luminous uplifting\r
-beneath the gloomy skirts of the future. Who knows? Perhaps the moment\r
-was at hand. The people were again taking possession of right, and\r
-what a fine spectacle! The revolution was again majestically taking\r
-possession of France and saying to the world: "The sequel to-morrow!"\r
-Enjolras was content. The furnace was being heated. He had at that\r
-moment a powder train of friends scattered all over Paris. He composed,\r
-in his own mind, with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating\r
-eloquence, Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash,\r
-Bahorel's smile, Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's\r
-sarcasms, a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at\r
-once. All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer to the effort.\r
-This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.\r
-\r
-"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barriere du Maine will not take me far\r
-out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's? Let us have\r
-a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he is getting on."\r
-\r
-One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras\r
-reached the Richefeu smoking-room.\r
-\r
-He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door fall\r
-to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with tables,\r
-men, and smoke.\r
-\r
-A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another\r
-voice. It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.\r
-\r
-Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne\r
-table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was\r
-hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--\r
-\r
-"Double-six."\r
-\r
-"Fours."\r
-\r
-"The pig! I have no more."\r
-\r
-"You are dead. A two."\r
-\r
-"Six."\r
-\r
-"Three."\r
-\r
-"One."\r
-\r
-"It's my move."\r
-\r
-"Four points."\r
-\r
-"Not much."\r
-\r
-"It's your turn."\r
-\r
-"I have made an enormous mistake."\r
-\r
-"You are doing well."\r
-\r
-"Fifteen."\r
-\r
-"Seven more."\r
-\r
-"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]\r
-\r
-"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it at the\r
-beginning, the whole play would have been changed."\r
-\r
-"A two again."\r
-\r
-"One."\r
-\r
-"One! Well, five."\r
-\r
-"I haven't any."\r
-\r
-"It was your play, I believe?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Blank."\r
-\r
-"What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long revery.] Two."\r
-\r
-"One."\r
-\r
-"Neither five nor one. That's bad for you."\r
-\r
-"Domino."\r
-\r
-"Plague take it!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE LARK'S MEADOW\r
-\r
-Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon whose\r
-track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted the building,\r
-bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches, than Marius also\r
-glided out of the house. It was only nine o'clock in the evening. Marius\r
-betook himself to Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable\r
-inhabitant of the Latin Quarter, he had gone to live in the Rue de la\r
-Verrerie "for political reasons"; this quarter was one where, at that\r
-epoch, insurrection liked to install itself. Marius said to Courfeyrac:\r
-"I have come to sleep with you." Courfeyrac dragged a mattress off his\r
-bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on the floor, and said:\r
-"There."\r
-\r
-At seven o'clock on the following morning, Marius returned to the hovel,\r
-paid the quarter's rent which he owed to Ma'am Bougon, had his books,\r
-his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs loaded on a\r
-hand-cart and went off without leaving his address, so that when Javert\r
-returned in the course of the morning, for the purpose of questioning\r
-Marius as to the events of the preceding evening, he found only Ma'am\r
-Bougon, who answered: "Moved away!"\r
-\r
-Ma'am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an accomplice\r
-of the robbers who had been seized the night before. "Who would ever\r
-have said it?" she exclaimed to the portresses of the quarter, "a young\r
-man like that, who had the air of a girl!"\r
-\r
-Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence. The first\r
-was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he had beheld, so\r
-close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most ferocious development,\r
-a social deformity which is, perhaps, even more terrible than the wicked\r
-rich man, the wicked poor man. The second was, that he did not wish\r
-to figure in the lawsuit which would insue in all probability, and be\r
-brought in to testify against Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten, was\r
-afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home at the time\r
-of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him, however, but without\r
-success.\r
-\r
-A month passed, then another. Marius was still with Courfeyrac. He had\r
-learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter of the\r
-courts, that Thenardier was in close confinement. Every Monday,\r
-Marius had five francs handed in to the clerk's office of La Force for\r
-Thenardier.\r
-\r
-As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs from\r
-Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life that he had ever borrowed\r
-money. These periodical five francs were a double riddle to Courfeyrac\r
-who lent and to Thenardier who received them. "To whom can they go?"\r
-thought Courfeyrac. "Whence can this come to me?" Thenardier asked\r
-himself.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through a\r
-trap-door once more. He no longer saw anything before him; his life\r
-was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly. He had for a\r
-moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity, the young girl whom\r
-he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father, those unknown beings,\r
-who were his only interest and his only hope in this world; and, at the\r
-very moment when he thought himself on the point of grasping them, a\r
-gust had swept all these shadows away. Not a spark of certainty and\r
-truth had been emitted even in the most terrible of collisions. No\r
-conjecture was possible. He no longer knew even the name that he thought\r
-he knew. It certainly was not Ursule. And the Lark was a nickname. And\r
-what was he to think of the old man? Was he actually in hiding from\r
-the police? The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the\r
-vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It now seemed probable\r
-that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person. So he\r
-disguised himself? That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides. Why\r
-had he not called for help? Why had he fled? Was he, or was he not,\r
-the father of the young girl? Was he, in short, the man whom Thenardier\r
-thought that he recognized? Thenardier might have been mistaken. These\r
-formed so many insoluble problems. All this, it is true, detracted\r
-nothing from the angelic charms of the young girl of the Luxembourg.\r
-Heart-rending distress; Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night\r
-over his eyes. He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not\r
-stir. All had vanished, save love. Of love itself he had lost the\r
-instincts and the sudden illuminations. Ordinarily, this flame which\r
-burns us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without.\r
-But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion. He never\r
-said to himself: "What if I were to go to such a place? What if I were\r
-to try such and such a thing?" The girl whom he could no longer call\r
-Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius in what direction\r
-he should seek her. His whole life was now summed up in two words;\r
-absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog. To see her once again;\r
-he still aspired to this, but he no longer expected it.\r
-\r
-To crown all, his poverty had returned. He felt that icy breath close to\r
-him, on his heels. In the midst of his torments, and long before\r
-this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than\r
-discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes. A habit which is easy\r
-to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.\r
-\r
-A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.\r
-It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes\r
-severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects\r
-the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there,\r
-binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But too much\r
-dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to\r
-fall entirely from thought into revery! He thinks that he can re-ascend\r
-with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same\r
-thing. Error!\r
-\r
-Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To\r
-replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.\r
-\r
-Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. Passion had\r
-supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimaeras\r
-without object or bottom. One no longer emerges from one's self except\r
-for the purpose of going off to dream. Idle production. Tumultuous and\r
-stagnant gulf. And, in proportion as labor diminishes, needs increase.\r
-This is a law. Man, in a state of revery, is generally prodigal and\r
-slack; the unstrung mind cannot hold life within close bounds.\r
-\r
-There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil, for if\r
-enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful. But the poor\r
-man who is generous and noble, and who does not work, is lost. Resources\r
-are exhausted, needs crop up.\r
-\r
-Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well as\r
-the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends in one of two\r
-holds, suicide or crime.\r
-\r
-By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes out to\r
-throw one's self in the water.\r
-\r
-Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.\r
-\r
-Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes\r
-fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw. What we have just written seems\r
-strange, and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being kindles in\r
-the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it\r
-beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon;\r
-the star of the inner night. She--that was Marius' whole thought. He\r
-meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly conscious that his old coat\r
-was becoming an impossible coat, and that his new coat was growing old,\r
-that his shirts were wearing out, that his hat was wearing out, that his\r
-boots were giving out, and he said to himself: "If I could but see her\r
-once again before I die!"\r
-\r
-One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him, that her\r
-glance had told him so, that she did not know his name, but that she did\r
-know his soul, and that, wherever she was, however mysterious the place,\r
-she still loved him perhaps. Who knows whether she were not thinking of\r
-him as he was thinking of her? Sometimes, in those inexplicable hours\r
-such as are experienced by every heart that loves, though he had no\r
-reasons for anything but sadness and yet felt an obscure quiver of joy,\r
-he said to himself: "It is her thoughts that are coming to me!" Then he\r
-added: "Perhaps my thoughts reach her also."\r
-\r
-This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later, was\r
-sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times resembled hope,\r
-into his soul. From time to time, especially at that evening hour which\r
-is the most depressing to even the dreamy, he allowed the purest, the\r
-most impersonal, the most ideal of the reveries which filled his brain,\r
-to fall upon a notebook which contained nothing else. He called this\r
-"writing to her."\r
-\r
-It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged. Quite the\r
-contrary. He had lost the faculty of working and of moving firmly\r
-towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with more clear-sightedness\r
-and rectitude than ever. Marius surveyed by a calm and real, although\r
-peculiar light, what passed before his eyes, even the most indifferent\r
-deeds and men; he pronounced a just criticism on everything with a sort\r
-of honest dejection and candid disinterestedness. His judgment, which\r
-was almost wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared\r
-on high.\r
-\r
-In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him, and\r
-every moment he was discovering the foundation of life, of humanity, and\r
-of destiny. Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has\r
-given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed\r
-the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light\r
-has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.\r
-\r
-The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.\r
-\r
-However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself. It\r
-merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained to be\r
-traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant. He thought that\r
-he already distinctly perceived the brink of the bottomless abyss.\r
-\r
-"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before then!"\r
-\r
-When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on one\r
-side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance, you reach\r
-the Rue de la Sante, then the Glaciere, and, a little while before\r
-arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come to a sort of\r
-field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous chain of the\r
-boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdeel would be tempted to sit down.\r
-\r
-There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green\r
-meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter rags\r
-drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener's house, built in the\r
-time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly pierced with dormer\r
-windows, dilapidated palisades, a little water amid poplar-trees,\r
-women, voices, laughter; on the horizon the Pantheon, the pole of\r
-the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grace, black, squat, fantastic, amusing,\r
-magnificent, and in the background, the severe square crests of the\r
-towers of Notre Dame.\r
-\r
-As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither. Hardly one cart\r
-or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.\r
-\r
-It chanced that Marius' solitary strolls led him to this plot of\r
-ground, near the water. That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,\r
-a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty of\r
-the place, asked this passer-by:--"What is the name of this spot?"\r
-\r
-The person replied: "It is the Lark's meadow."\r
-\r
-And he added: "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess of Ivry."\r
-\r
-But after the word "Lark" Marius heard nothing more. These sudden\r
-congealments in the state of revery, which a single word suffices to\r
-evoke, do occur. The entire thought is abruptly condensed around an\r
-idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.\r
-\r
-The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths of\r
-Marius' melancholy.--"Stop," said he with a sort of unreasoning stupor\r
-peculiar to these mysterious asides, "this is her meadow. I shall know\r
-where she lives now."\r
-\r
-It was absurd, but irresistible.\r
-\r
-And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--EMBRYONIC FORMATION OF CRIMES IN THE INCUBATION OF PRISONS\r
-\r
-Javert's triumph in the Gorbeau hovel seemed complete, but had not been\r
-so.\r
-\r
-In the first place, and this constituted the principal anxiety, Javert\r
-had not taken the prisoner prisoner. The assassinated man who flees\r
-is more suspicious than the assassin, and it is probable that this\r
-personage, who had been so precious a capture for the ruffians, would be\r
-no less fine a prize for the authorities.\r
-\r
-And then, Montparnasse had escaped Javert.\r
-\r
-Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy" must be\r
-waited for. Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Eponine as she stood\r
-on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had led her off,\r
-preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather than Schinderhannes\r
-with the father. It was well that he did so. He was free. As for\r
-Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized; a mediocre consolation.\r
-Eponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.\r
-\r
-And finally, on the way from the Gorbeau house to La Force, one of the\r
-principal prisoners, Claquesous, had been lost. It was not known how\r
-this had been effected, the police agents and the sergeants "could\r
-not understand it at all." He had converted himself into vapor, he had\r
-slipped through the handcuffs, he had trickled through the crevices of\r
-the carriage, the fiacre was cracked, and he had fled; all that they\r
-were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison, there was no\r
-Claquesous. Either the fairies or the police had had a hand in it. Had\r
-Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake in water? Had there\r
-been unavowed connivance of the police agents? Did this man belong\r
-to the double enigma of order and disorder? Was he concentric with\r
-infraction and repression? Had this sphinx his fore paws in crime and\r
-his hind paws in authority? Javert did not accept such comminations, and\r
-would have bristled up against such compromises; but his squad included\r
-other inspectors besides himself, who were more initiated than he,\r
-perhaps, although they were his subordinates in the secrets of the\r
-Prefecture, and Claquesous had been such a villain that he might make\r
-a very good agent. It is an excellent thing for ruffianism and an\r
-admirable thing for the police to be on such intimate juggling terms\r
-with the night. These double-edged rascals do exist. However that may\r
-be, Claquesous had gone astray and was not found again. Javert appeared\r
-to be more irritated than amazed at this.\r
-\r
-As for Marius, "that booby of a lawyer," who had probably become\r
-frightened, and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert attached very\r
-little importance to him. Moreover, a lawyer can be hunted up at any\r
-time. But was he a lawyer after all?\r
-\r
-The investigation had begun.\r
-\r
-The magistrate had thought it advisable not to put one of these men of\r
-the band of Patron Minette in close confinement, in the hope that he\r
-would chatter. This man was Brujon, the long-haired man of the Rue du\r
-Petit-Banquier. He had been let loose in the Charlemagne courtyard, and\r
-the eyes of the watchers were fixed on him.\r
-\r
-This name of Brujon is one of the souvenirs of La Force. In that hideous\r
-courtyard, called the court of the Batiment-Neuf (New Building), which\r
-the administration called the court Saint-Bernard, and which the robbers\r
-called the Fosseaux-Lions (The Lion's Ditch), on that wall covered with\r
-scales and leprosy, which rose on the left to a level with the roofs,\r
-near an old door of rusty iron which led to the ancient chapel of the\r
-ducal residence of La Force, then turned in a dormitory for ruffians,\r
-there could still be seen, twelve years ago, a sort of fortress roughly\r
-carved in the stone with a nail, and beneath it this signature:--\r
-\r
- BRUJON, 1811.\r
-\r
-\r
-The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.\r
-\r
-The latter, of whom the reader caught but a glimpse at the Gorbeau\r
-house, was a very cunning and very adroit young spark, with a bewildered\r
-and plaintive air. It was in consequence of this plaintive air that the\r
-magistrate had released him, thinking him more useful in the Charlemagne\r
-yard than in close confinement.\r
-\r
-Robbers do not interrupt their profession because they are in the hands\r
-of justice. They do not let themselves be put out by such a trifle as\r
-that. To be in prison for one crime is no reason for not beginning on\r
-another crime. They are artists, who have one picture in the salon, and\r
-who toil, none the less, on a new work in their studios.\r
-\r
-Brujon seemed to be stupefied by prison. He could sometimes be seen\r
-standing by the hour together in front of the sutler's window in the\r
-Charlemagne yard, staring like an idiot at the sordid list of prices\r
-which began with: garlic, 62 centimes, and ended with: cigar, 5\r
-centimes. Or he passed his time in trembling, chattering his teeth,\r
-saying that he had a fever, and inquiring whether one of the eight and\r
-twenty beds in the fever ward was vacant.\r
-\r
-All at once, towards the end of February, 1832, it was discovered that\r
-Brujon, that somnolent fellow, had had three different commissions\r
-executed by the errand-men of the establishment, not under his own name,\r
-but in the name of three of his comrades; and they had cost him in all\r
-fifty sous, an exorbitant outlay which attracted the attention of the\r
-prison corporal.\r
-\r
-Inquiries were instituted, and on consulting the tariff of commissions\r
-posted in the convict's parlor, it was learned that the fifty sous could\r
-be analyzed as follows: three commissions; one to the Pantheon, ten\r
-sous; one to Val-de-Grace, fifteen sous; and one to the Barriere de\r
-Grenelle, twenty-five sous. This last was the dearest of the whole\r
-tariff. Now, at the Pantheon, at the Val-de-Grace, and at the Barriere\r
-de Grenelle were situated the domiciles of the three very redoubtable\r
-prowlers of the barriers, Kruideniers, alias Bizarre, Glorieux, an\r
-ex-convict, and Barre-Carosse, upon whom the attention of the police was\r
-directed by this incident. It was thought that these men were members\r
-of Patron Minette; two of those leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, had been\r
-captured. It was supposed that the messages, which had been addressed,\r
-not to houses, but to people who were waiting for them in the street,\r
-must have contained information with regard to some crime that had been\r
-plotted. They were in possession of other indications; they laid hand on\r
-the three prowlers, and supposed that they had circumvented some one or\r
-other of Brujon's machinations.\r
-\r
-About a week after these measures had been taken, one night, as the\r
-superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower dormitory\r
-in the Batiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in the box--this\r
-was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen performed their\r
-duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be dropped into all the\r
-boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories--a watchman looked through\r
-the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld Brujon sitting on his bed and\r
-writing something by the light of the hall-lamp. The guardian entered,\r
-Brujon was put in a solitary cell for a month, but they were not able to\r
-seize what he had written. The police learned nothing further about it.\r
-\r
-What is certain is, that on the following morning, a "postilion"\r
-was flung from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions' Ditch, over the\r
-five-story building which separated the two court-yards.\r
-\r
-What prisoners call a "postilion" is a pellet of bread artistically\r
-moulded, which is sent into Ireland, that is to say, over the roofs of a\r
-prison, from one courtyard to another. Etymology: over England; from one\r
-land to another; into Ireland. This little pellet falls in the yard. The\r
-man who picks it up opens it and finds in it a note addressed to some\r
-prisoner in that yard. If it is a prisoner who finds the treasure, he\r
-forwards the note to its destination; if it is a keeper, or one of the\r
-prisoners secretly sold who are called sheep in prisons and foxes in the\r
-galleys, the note is taken to the office and handed over to the police.\r
-\r
-On this occasion, the postilion reached its address, although the person\r
-to whom it was addressed was, at that moment, in solitary confinement.\r
-This person was no other than Babet, one of the four heads of Patron\r
-Minette.\r
-\r
-The postilion contained a roll of paper on which only these two lines\r
-were written:--\r
-\r
-"Babet. There is an affair in the Rue Plumet. A gate on a garden."\r
-\r
-This is what Brujon had written the night before.\r
-\r
-In spite of male and female searchers, Babet managed to pass the note on\r
-from La Force to the Salpetriere, to a "good friend" whom he had and who\r
-was shut up there. This woman in turn transmitted the note to another\r
-woman of her acquaintance, a certain Magnon, who was strongly suspected\r
-by the police, though not yet arrested. This Magnon, whose name the\r
-reader has already seen, had relations with the Thenardier, which will\r
-be described in detail later on, and she could, by going to see Eponine,\r
-serve as a bridge between the Salpetriere and Les Madelonettes.\r
-\r
-It happened, that at precisely that moment, as proofs were wanting\r
-in the investigation directed against Thenardier in the matter of his\r
-daughters, Eponine and Azelma were released. When Eponine came out,\r
-Magnon, who was watching the gate of the Madelonettes, handed her\r
-Brujon's note to Babet, charging her to look into the matter.\r
-\r
-Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden,\r
-observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later, brought to\r
-Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit, which Magnon\r
-transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpetriere. A biscuit, in the\r
-shady symbolism of prisons, signifies: Nothing to be done.\r
-\r
-So that in less than a week from that time, as Brujon and Babet met in\r
-the circle of La Force, the one on his way to the examination, the other\r
-on his way from it:--\r
-\r
-"Well?" asked Brujon, "the Rue P.?"\r
-\r
-"Biscuit," replied Babet. Thus did the foetus of crime engendered by\r
-Brujon in La Force miscarry.\r
-\r
-This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly\r
-distinct from Brujon's programme. The reader will see what they were.\r
-\r
-Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite\r
-another.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF\r
-\r
-Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered\r
-Father Mabeuf by chance.\r
-\r
-While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps which may be\r
-called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places without light, where\r
-the happy can be heard walking overhead, M. Mabeuf was descending on his\r
-side.\r
-\r
-The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all. The experiments on indigo\r
-had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz, which had\r
-a bad exposure. M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only a few plants which\r
-love shade and dampness. Nevertheless, he did not become discouraged. He\r
-had obtained a corner in the Jardin des Plantes, with a good exposure,\r
-to make his trials with indigo "at his own expense." For this purpose he\r
-had pawned his copperplates of the Flora. He had reduced his breakfast\r
-to two eggs, and he left one of these for his old servant, to whom he\r
-had paid no wages for the last fifteen months. And often his breakfast\r
-was his only meal. He no longer smiled with his infantile smile, he had\r
-grown morose and no longer received visitors. Marius did well not to\r
-dream of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on his\r
-way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man passed\r
-each other on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. They did not speak, and only\r
-exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A heart-breaking thing it is\r
-that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds! Two men who have\r
-been friends become two chance passers-by.\r
-\r
-Royal the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,\r
-his garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness,\r
-pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. This sufficed him for his\r
-living. He said to himself: "When I shall have made my balls of blueing,\r
-I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from the pawn-shop,\r
-I will put my Flora in vogue again with trickery, plenty of money and\r
-advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy, I know well where, a\r
-copy of Pierre de Medine's Art de Naviguer, with wood-cuts, edition of\r
-1655." In the meantime, he toiled all day over his plot of indigo, and\r
-at night he returned home to water his garden, and to read his books. At\r
-that epoch, M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.\r
-\r
-One evening he had a singular apparition.\r
-\r
-He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. Mother\r
-Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. He had dined\r
-on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit of bread that he\r
-had found on the kitchen table, and had seated himself on an overturned\r
-stone post, which took the place of a bench in his garden.\r
-\r
-Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens, a sort\r
-of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated, a rabbit-hutch on\r
-the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. There was nothing in the\r
-hutch, but there were a few apples in the fruit-closet,--the remains of\r
-the winter's provision.\r
-\r
-M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the aid of\r
-his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond and in which,\r
-a serious thing at his age, he was interested. His natural timidity\r
-rendered him accessible to the acceptance of superstitions in a certain\r
-degree. The first of these books was the famous treatise of President\r
-Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons; the other was a quarto by Mutor\r
-de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la\r
-Bievre. This last-mentioned old volume interested him all the more,\r
-because his garden had been one of the spots haunted by goblins in\r
-former times. The twilight had begun to whiten what was on high and to\r
-blacken all below. As he read, over the top of the book which he held\r
-in his hand, Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others a\r
-magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations; four days of\r
-heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed; the stalks were\r
-bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling; all this needed water,\r
-the rhododendron was particularly sad. Father Mabeuf was one of those\r
-persons for whom plants have souls. The old man had toiled all day over\r
-his indigo plot, he was worn out with fatigue, but he rose, laid\r
-his books on the bench, and walked, all bent over and with tottering\r
-footsteps, to the well, but when he had grasped the chain, he could not\r
-even draw it sufficiently to unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a\r
-glance of anguish toward heaven which was becoming studded with stars.\r
-\r
-The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man\r
-beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night promised to\r
-be as arid as the day had been.\r
-\r
-"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud! Not a\r
-drop of water!"\r
-\r
-And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon his\r
-breast.\r
-\r
-He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--\r
-\r
-"A tear of dew! A little pity!"\r
-\r
-He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.\r
-\r
-At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--\r
-\r
-"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"\r
-\r
-At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became audible\r
-in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery a sort of tall,\r
-slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him and stared boldly at\r
-him. She had less the air of a human being than of a form which had just\r
-blossomed forth from the twilight.\r
-\r
-Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we have\r
-said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable, this\r
-being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness, had\r
-unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket, and filled the\r
-watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare\r
-feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds\r
-distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the\r
-leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that\r
-the rhododendron was happy now.\r
-\r
-The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third. She\r
-watered the whole garden.\r
-\r
-There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths, where\r
-her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms, and with\r
-her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.\r
-\r
-When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears in his\r
-eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.\r
-\r
-"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take care of\r
-the flowers."\r
-\r
-"No," she replied. "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."\r
-\r
-The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing her\r
-response:--\r
-\r
-"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can do nothing\r
-for you!"\r
-\r
-"You can do something," said she.\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"Tell me where M. Marius lives."\r
-\r
-The old man did not understand. "What Monsieur Marius?"\r
-\r
-He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something that had\r
-vanished.\r
-\r
-"A young man who used to come here."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.\r
-\r
-"Ah! yes--" he exclaimed. "I know what you mean. Wait! Monsieur\r
-Marius--the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu! He lives,--or rather, he no\r
-longer lives,--ah well, I don't know."\r
-\r
-As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron, and he\r
-continued:--\r
-\r
-"Hold, I know now. He very often passes along the boulevard, and goes in\r
-the direction of the Glaciere, Rue Croulebarbe. The meadow of the Lark.\r
-Go there. It is not hard to meet him."\r
-\r
-When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any one\r
-there; the girl had disappeared.\r
-\r
-He was decidedly terrified.\r
-\r
-"Really," he thought, "if my garden had not been watered, I should think\r
-that she was a spirit."\r
-\r
-An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him, and as he fell\r
-asleep, at that confused moment when thought, like that fabulous bird\r
-which changes itself into a fish in order to cross the sea, little by\r
-little assumes the form of a dream in order to traverse slumber, he said\r
-to himself in a bewildered way:--\r
-\r
-"In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudiere narrates of the\r
-goblins. Could it have been a goblin?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--AN APPARITION TO MARIUS\r
-\r
-Some days after this visit of a "spirit" to Farmer Mabeuf, one\r
-morning,--it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the\r
-hundred-sou piece from Courfeyrac for Thenardier--Marius had put this\r
-coin in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk's office, he\r
-had gone "to take a little stroll," in the hope that this would make him\r
-work on his return. It was always thus, however. As soon as he rose, he\r
-seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper in order to scribble\r
-some translation; his task at that epoch consisted in turning into\r
-French a celebrated quarrel between Germans, the Gans and Savigny\r
-controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans, read four lines, tried to\r
-write one, could not, saw a star between him and his paper, and rose\r
-from his chair, saying: "I shall go out. That will put me in spirits."\r
-\r
-And off he went to the Lark's meadow.\r
-\r
-There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny and\r
-Gans.\r
-\r
-He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed;\r
-there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which\r
-were broken in his brain; then he said to himself: "I will not go out\r
-to-morrow. It prevents my working." And he went out every day.\r
-\r
-He lived in the Lark's meadow more than in Courfeyrac's lodgings. That\r
-was his real address: Boulevard de la Sante, at the seventh tree from\r
-the Rue Croulebarbe.\r
-\r
-That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself on\r
-the parapet of the River des Gobelins. A cheerful sunlight penetrated\r
-the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.\r
-\r
-He was dreaming of "Her." And his meditation turning to a reproach, fell\r
-back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness, his paralysis\r
-of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night which was growing\r
-more dense every moment before him, to such a point that he no longer\r
-even saw the sun.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas which\r
-was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him, and he\r
-had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this melancholy\r
-absorption, sensations from without did reach him. He heard behind him,\r
-beneath him, on both banks of the river, the laundresses of the Gobelins\r
-beating their linen, and above his head, the birds chattering and\r
-singing in the elm-trees. On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the\r
-careless happiness of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the\r
-sound of toil. What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect,\r
-were two cheerful sounds.\r
-\r
-All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard a familiar\r
-voice saying:--\r
-\r
-"Come! Here he is!"\r
-\r
-He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to\r
-him one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Eponine; he knew\r
-her name now. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier,\r
-two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take. She had\r
-accomplished a double progress, towards the light and towards distress.\r
-She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely\r
-entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes\r
-were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice,\r
-the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and\r
-vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face\r
-that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a\r
-prison adds to wretchedness.\r
-\r
-She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through\r
-having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness, but because she\r
-had slept in the loft of some stable.\r
-\r
-And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou, O\r
-youth!\r
-\r
-In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace of joy\r
-in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.\r
-\r
-She stood for several moments as though incapable of speech.\r
-\r
-"So I have met you at last!" she said at length. "Father Mabeuf was\r
-right, it was on this boulevard! How I have hunted for you! If you only\r
-knew! Do you know? I have been in the jug. A fortnight! They let me out!\r
-seeing that there was nothing against me, and that, moreover, I had not\r
-reached years of discretion. I lack two months of it. Oh! how I have\r
-hunted for you! These six weeks! So you don't live down there any more?"\r
-\r
-"No," said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Ah! I understand. Because of that affair. Those take-downs are\r
-disagreeable. You cleared out. Come now! Why do you wear old hats like\r
-this! A young man like you ought to have fine clothes. Do you know,\r
-Monsieur Marius, Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius, I don't know\r
-what. It isn't true that you are a baron? Barons are old fellows, they\r
-go to the Luxembourg, in front of the chateau, where there is the most\r
-sun, and they read the Quotidienne for a sou. I once carried a letter to\r
-a baron of that sort. He was over a hundred years old. Say, where do you\r
-live now?"\r
-\r
-Marius made no reply.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" she went on, "you have a hole in your shirt. I must sew it up for\r
-you."\r
-\r
-She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:--\r
-\r
-"You don't seem glad to see me."\r
-\r
-Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then\r
-exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!"\r
-\r
-"What?" demanded Marius. "What do you mean?"\r
-\r
-"Ah! you used to call me thou," she retorted.\r
-\r
-"Well, then, what dost thou mean?"\r
-\r
-She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some sort\r
-of inward conflict. At last she appeared to come to a decision.\r
-\r
-"So much the worse, I don't care. You have a melancholy air, I want you\r
-to be pleased. Only promise me that you will smile. I want to see you\r
-smile and hear you say: 'Ah, well, that's good.' Poor Mr. Marius! you\r
-know? You promised me that you would give me anything I like--"\r
-\r
-"Yes! Only speak!"\r
-\r
-She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:--\r
-\r
-"I have the address."\r
-\r
-Marius turned pale. All the blood flowed back to his heart.\r
-\r
-"What address?"\r
-\r
-"The address that you asked me to get!"\r
-\r
-She added, as though with an effort:--\r
-\r
-"The address--you know very well!"\r
-\r
-"Yes!" stammered Marius.\r
-\r
-"Of that young lady."\r
-\r
-This word uttered, she sighed deeply.\r
-\r
-Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting and seized\r
-her hand distractedly.\r
-\r
-"Oh! Well! lead me thither! Tell me! Ask of me anything you wish! Where\r
-is it?"\r
-\r
-"Come with me," she responded. "I don't know the street or number very\r
-well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know the house\r
-well, I will take you to it."\r
-\r
-She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent\r
-the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius in his\r
-intoxicated and ecstatic state:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! how glad you are!"\r
-\r
-A cloud swept across Marius' brow. He seized Eponine by the arm:--\r
-\r
-"Swear one thing to me!"\r
-\r
-"Swear!" said she, "what does that mean? Come! You want me to swear?"\r
-\r
-And she laughed.\r
-\r
-"Your father! promise me, Eponine! Swear to me that you will not give\r
-this address to your father!"\r
-\r
-She turned to him with a stupefied air.\r
-\r
-"Eponine! How do you know that my name is Eponine?"\r
-\r
-"Promise what I tell you!"\r
-\r
-But she did not seem to hear him.\r
-\r
-"That's nice! You have called me Eponine!"\r
-\r
-Marius grasped both her arms at once.\r
-\r
-"But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am saying\r
-to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this address that\r
-you know!"\r
-\r
-"My father!" said she. "Ah yes, my father! Be at ease. He's in close\r
-confinement. Besides, what do I care for my father!"\r
-\r
-"But you do not promise me!" exclaimed Marius.\r
-\r
-"Let go of me!" she said, bursting into a laugh, "how you do shake me!\r
-Yes! Yes! I promise that! I swear that to you! What is that to me? I\r
-will not tell my father the address. There! Is that right? Is that it?"\r
-\r
-"Nor to any one?" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Nor to any one."\r
-\r
-"Now," resumed Marius, "take me there."\r
-\r
-"Immediately?"\r
-\r
-"Immediately."\r
-\r
-"Come along. Ah! how pleased he is!" said she.\r
-\r
-After a few steps she halted.\r
-\r
-"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius. Let me go on ahead,\r
-and follow me so, without seeming to do it. A nice young man like you\r
-must not be seen with a woman like me."\r
-\r
-No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced\r
-by that child.\r
-\r
-She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined\r
-her. She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:--\r
-\r
-"By the way, you know that you promised me something?"\r
-\r
-Marius fumbled in his pocket. All that he owned in the world was the\r
-five francs intended for Thenardier the father. He took them and laid\r
-them in Eponine's hand.\r
-\r
-She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground, and gazed at\r
-him with a gloomy air.\r
-\r
-"I don't want your money," said she.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET\r
-\r
-About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament\r
-of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period\r
-the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois\r
-concealed them, had "a little house" built in the Faubourg\r
-Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue\r
-Plumet, not far from the spot which was then designated as Combat des\r
-Animaux.\r
-\r
-This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms on the\r
-ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen down stairs,\r
-a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a\r
-garden with a large gate opening on the street. This garden was about\r
-an acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen by\r
-passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and\r
-at the end of the courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and\r
-a cellar, a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse\r
-in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked\r
-door which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding\r
-corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden\r
-with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden enclosures and\r
-cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in\r
-another door, also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league\r
-away, almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue du\r
-Babylone.\r
-\r
-Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were\r
-spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the\r
-justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere, and\r
-would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go\r
-to the Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate\r
-had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,\r
-and consequently, without interference. Later on, he had sold in little\r
-parcels, for gardens and market gardens, the lots of ground adjoining\r
-the corridor, and the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought\r
-they had a party wall before their eyes, and did not even suspect the\r
-long, paved ribbon winding between two walls amid their flower-beds and\r
-their orchards. Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable\r
-that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal\r
-about the chief justice.\r
-\r
-The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted and\r
-furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned\r
-on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had something\r
-discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love\r
-and magistracy.\r
-\r
-This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in existence\r
-fifteen years ago. In '93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with\r
-the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the\r
-nation made him bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the\r
-coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell slowly\r
-to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man does not\r
-communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old furniture, was\r
-always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed\r
-through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible\r
-bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.\r
-\r
-Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have\r
-noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters on the\r
-first floor were open. The house was occupied, in fact. The windows had\r
-short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.\r
-\r
-In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented\r
-himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,\r
-the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. He\r
-had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.\r
-The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly furnished\r
-with the justice's old fitting; the new tenant had ordered some\r
-repairs, had added what was lacking here and there, had replaced the\r
-paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors, steps in the stairs,\r
-missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass in the lattice windows,\r
-and had finally installed himself there with a young girl and an elderly\r
-maid-servant, without commotion, rather like a person who is slipping\r
-in than like a man who is entering his own house. The neighbors did not\r
-gossip about him, for the reason that there were no neighbors.\r
-\r
-This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.\r
-The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved\r
-from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a\r
-stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had decided\r
-Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the house under the name\r
-of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. In all that has been\r
-related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than\r
-Thenardier to recognize Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What had\r
-happened?\r
-\r
-Nothing had happened.\r
-\r
-It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so\r
-happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw Cosette every\r
-day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within him more and more,\r
-he brooded over the soul of that child, he said to himself that she\r
-was his, that nothing could take her from him, that this would last\r
-indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, being thereto\r
-gently incited every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the\r
-universe for her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and\r
-that she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that\r
-he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation\r
-was possible. On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity. He\r
-interrogated himself. He asked himself if all that happiness were\r
-really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of another, of\r
-the happiness of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and\r
-stealing; if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child\r
-had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in\r
-advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under\r
-the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her\r
-ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation\r
-germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie\r
-to God. And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some\r
-day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come to\r
-hate him? A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the rest,\r
-but which was intolerable to him. He resolved to quit the convent.\r
-\r
-He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact that it was\r
-necessary. As for objections, there were none. Five years' sojourn\r
-between these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed\r
-or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly among men.\r
-He had grown old, and all had undergone a change. Who would recognize\r
-him now? And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself,\r
-and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason\r
-that he had been condemned to the galleys. Besides, what is danger in\r
-comparison with the right? Finally, nothing prevented his being prudent\r
-and taking his precautions.\r
-\r
-As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.\r
-\r
-His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It was not long\r
-in presenting itself. Old Fauchelevent died.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told her\r
-that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his brother,\r
-which permitted him henceforth to live without working, he should leave\r
-the service of the convent and take his daughter with him; but that, as\r
-it was not just that Cosette, since she had not taken the vows, should\r
-have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend\r
-Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community, as indemnity,\r
-for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five\r
-thousand francs.\r
-\r
-It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual\r
-Adoration.\r
-\r
-On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise the\r
-key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit no porter to\r
-touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which\r
-proceeded from it.\r
-\r
-Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more. He always\r
-had it in his chamber. It was the first and only thing sometimes, that\r
-he carried off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at it,\r
-and called this valise his inseparable, saying: "I am jealous of it."\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without\r
-profound anxiety.\r
-\r
-He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from\r
-sight there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:--Ultime\r
-Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order that\r
-he might attract less attention than if he were to remain always in the\r
-same quarter, and so that he could, at need, take himself off at the\r
-slightest disquietude which should assail him, and in short, so that\r
-he might not again be caught unprovided as on the night when he had\r
-so miraculously escaped from Javert. These two apartments were very\r
-pitiable, poor in appearance, and in two quarters which were far remote\r
-from each other, the one in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de\r
-l'Homme Arme.\r
-\r
-He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, now to the\r
-Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without taking Toussaint.\r
-He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out as a\r
-gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having a little\r
-temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had three domiciles\r
-in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD\r
-\r
-However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he had\r
-arranged his existence there in the following fashion:--\r
-\r
-Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big\r
-sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the gilded\r
-fillets, the justice's drawing-room furnished with tapestries and vast\r
-arm-chairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a canopied bed of\r
-antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug purchased in\r
-the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher's, put into Cosette's\r
-chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these magnificent\r
-old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-a-brac all the gay and\r
-graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young girls, an etagere,\r
-a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an inkstand, a blotting-book,\r
-paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of pearl, a silver-gilt\r
-dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese porcelain. Long damask\r
-curtains with a red foundation and three colors, like those on the\r
-bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the ground floor, the\r
-curtains were of tapestry. All winter long, Cosette's little house was\r
-heated from top to bottom. Jean Valjean inhabited the sort of porter's\r
-lodge which was situated at the end of the back courtyard, with a\r
-mattress on a folding-bed, a white wood table, two straw chairs, an\r
-earthenware water-jug, a few old volumes on a shelf, his beloved valise\r
-in one corner, and never any fire. He dined with Cosette, and he had a\r
-loaf of black bread on the table for his own use.\r
-\r
-When Toussaint came, he had said to her: "It is the young lady who is\r
-the mistress of this house."--"And you, monsieur?" Toussaint replied in\r
-amazement.--"I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father."\r
-\r
-Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated\r
-their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put\r
-his arm through Cosette's and took her for a walk. He led her to the\r
-Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk, and every Sunday he took her\r
-to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that was a long way off.\r
-As it was a very poor quarter, he bestowed alms largely there, and the\r
-poor people surrounded him in church, which had drawn down upon him\r
-Thenardier's epistle: "To the benevolent gentleman of the church of\r
-Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas." He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the\r
-poor and the sick. No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue Plumet.\r
-Toussaint brought their provisions, and Jean Valjean went himself for\r
-water to a fountain near by on the boulevard. Their wood and wine were\r
-put into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work which lay near\r
-the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the chief-justice as\r
-a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and "Little Houses" no love was\r
-without a grotto.\r
-\r
-In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined for\r
-the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants of\r
-the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters, the\r
-entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a love\r
-affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited to\r
-the tax-collector's notices, and the summons of the guard. For M.\r
-Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national guard;\r
-he had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the census of\r
-1831. The municipal information collected at that time had even reached\r
-the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable and holy cloud,\r
-whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise, and, consequently,\r
-worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the townhall.\r
-\r
-Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and mounted\r
-guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct disguise which\r
-mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary. Jean Valjean had\r
-just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he\r
-did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape\r
-his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed\r
-no civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his\r
-identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we\r
-have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum\r
-of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes. This\r
-man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.\r
-\r
-Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with\r
-Cosette, he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of\r
-a retired officer. When he went out alone, which was generally at night,\r
-he was always dressed in a workingman's trousers and blouse, and wore\r
-a cap which concealed his face. Was this precaution or humility? Both.\r
-Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny, and\r
-hardly noticed her father's peculiarities. As for Toussaint, she\r
-venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.\r
-\r
-One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to\r
-her: "That's a queer fish." She replied: "He's a saint."\r
-\r
-Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged\r
-except by the door on the Rue de Babylone. Unless seen through the\r
-garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they lived in\r
-the Rue Plumet. That gate was always closed. Jean Valjean had left the\r
-garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.\r
-\r
-In this, possibly, he made a mistake.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS\r
-\r
-The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become\r
-extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to\r
-gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its fresh\r
-and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often allowed\r
-his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of\r
-that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two\r
-green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of\r
-undecipherable arabesque.\r
-\r
-There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,\r
-several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on\r
-the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass\r
-everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.\r
-Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of\r
-land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing\r
-in this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;\r
-venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over\r
-towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had\r
-inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that\r
-which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over\r
-towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,\r
-clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,\r
-married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep\r
-and close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the\r
-well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet\r
-square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.\r
-This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is\r
-to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,\r
-quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a bouquet,\r
-solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.\r
-\r
-In Floreal[34] this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within\r
-its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered\r
-in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of\r
-cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in\r
-its veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,\r
-sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling\r
-steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,\r
-flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,\r
-perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and\r
-it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about\r
-there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of verdure,\r
-a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the\r
-twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the evening, a dreamy\r
-vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud of mist, a\r
-calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating perfume of the\r
-honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every part of it, like an\r
-exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals of the woodpeckers and\r
-the wagtails were audible as they dozed among the branches; one felt the\r
-sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice the\r
-leaves, by night the leaves protect the wings.\r
-\r
-In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and\r
-allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches\r
-and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were\r
-visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,\r
-under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this\r
-tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,\r
-liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old gate\r
-had the air of saying: "This garden belongs to me."\r
-\r
-It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every side,\r
-the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple of paces\r
-away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of Deputies\r
-not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the Rue\r
-Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in vain\r
-did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other's\r
-course at the neighboring cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;\r
-and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had passed\r
-over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness,\r
-forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to\r
-this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great\r
-crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles,\r
-uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths\r
-of the earth and to reappear between those four walls a certain\r
-indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts\r
-the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly\r
-where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle,\r
-to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force\r
-and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.\r
-\r
-Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound\r
-and penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute\r
-satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause\r
-or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable\r
-ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.\r
-Everything toils at everything.\r
-\r
-Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits\r
-the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the\r
-hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the\r
-course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not\r
-determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal\r
-ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the\r
-reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches\r
-of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the\r
-little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision\r
-for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and things;\r
-in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despises\r
-the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away\r
-terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is\r
-doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.\r
-All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.\r
-Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with\r
-the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the\r
-birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope\r
-ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two possesses the larger field\r
-of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an\r
-ant-hill of stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented,\r
-exists between the things of the intelligence and the facts of\r
-substance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with\r
-each other, to such a point that the material and the moral world are\r
-brought eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually\r
-returning upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life\r
-goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible\r
-mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,\r
-not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a\r
-planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of\r
-thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all,\r
-except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to the\r
-soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from\r
-summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the\r
-flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who\r
-knows? Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the\r
-comet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop\r
-of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of\r
-which is the gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--CHANGE OF GATE\r
-\r
-It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal wanton\r
-mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter chaste\r
-mysteries. There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens, or\r
-tunnels, or grottos; there was a magnificent, dishevelled obscurity\r
-falling like a veil over all. Paphos had been made over into Eden. It is\r
-impossible to say what element of repentance had rendered this retreat\r
-wholesome. This flower-girl now offered her blossom to the soul. This\r
-coquettish garden, formerly decidedly compromised, had returned to\r
-virginity and modesty. A justice assisted by a gardener, a goodman who\r
-thought that he was a continuation of Lamoignon, and another goodman who\r
-thought that he was a continuation of Lenotre, had turned it about, cut,\r
-ruffled, decked, moulded it to gallantry; nature had taken possession of\r
-it once more, had filled it with shade, and had arranged it for love.\r
-\r
-There was, also, in this solitude, a heart which was quite ready. Love\r
-had only to show himself; he had here a temple composed of verdure,\r
-grass, moss, the sight of birds, tender shadows, agitated branches, and\r
-a soul made of sweetness, of faith, of candor, of hope, of aspiration,\r
-and of illusion.\r
-\r
-Cosette had left the convent when she was still almost a child; she was\r
-a little more than fourteen, and she was at the "ungrateful age"; we\r
-have already said, that with the exception of her eyes, she was homely\r
-rather than pretty; she had no ungraceful feature, but she was awkward,\r
-thin, timid and bold at once, a grown-up little girl, in short.\r
-\r
-Her education was finished, that is to say, she has been taught\r
-religion, and even and above all, devotion; then "history," that is to\r
-say the thing that bears that name in convents, geography, grammar,\r
-the participles, the kings of France, a little music, a little drawing,\r
-etc.; but in all other respects she was utterly ignorant, which is a\r
-great charm and a great peril. The soul of a young girl should not be\r
-left in the dark; later on, mirages that are too abrupt and too lively\r
-are formed there, as in a dark chamber. She should be gently and\r
-discreetly enlightened, rather with the reflection of realities than\r
-with their harsh and direct light. A useful and graciously austere\r
-half-light which dissipates puerile fears and obviates falls. There is\r
-nothing but the maternal instinct, that admirable intuition composed of\r
-the memories of the virgin and the experience of the woman, which knows\r
-how this half-light is to be created and of what it should consist.\r
-\r
-Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world\r
-are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's\r
-soul.\r
-\r
-Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural.\r
-\r
-As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude; but\r
-he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.\r
-\r
-Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing a\r
-woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast ignorance\r
-which is called innocence!\r
-\r
-Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent. The convent\r
-turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown. The heart, thus\r
-thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself, since it cannot\r
-overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand. Hence visions,\r
-suppositions, conjectures, outlines of romances, a desire for\r
-adventures, fantastic constructions, edifices built wholly in the inner\r
-obscurity of the mind, sombre and secret abodes where the passions\r
-immediately find a lodgement as soon as the open gate permits them to\r
-enter. The convent is a compression which, in order to triumph over the\r
-human heart, should last during the whole life.\r
-\r
-On quitting the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more sweet and\r
-more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet. It was the continuation\r
-of solitude with the beginning of liberty; a garden that was closed, but\r
-a nature that was acrid, rich, voluptuous, and fragrant; the same dreams\r
-as in the convent, but with glimpses of young men; a grating, but one\r
-that opened on the street.\r
-\r
-Still, when she arrived there, we repeat, she was only a child. Jean\r
-Valjean gave this neglected garden over to her. "Do what you like with\r
-it," he said to her. This amused Cosette; she turned over all the clumps\r
-and all the stones, she hunted for "beasts"; she played in it, while\r
-awaiting the time when she would dream in it; she loved this garden\r
-for the insects that she found beneath her feet amid the grass, while\r
-awaiting the day when she would love it for the stars that she would see\r
-through the boughs above her head.\r
-\r
-And then, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean, with\r
-all her soul, with an innocent filial passion which made the goodman\r
-a beloved and charming companion to her. It will be remembered that M.\r
-Madeleine had been in the habit of reading a great deal. Jean Valjean\r
-had continued this practice; he had come to converse well; he possessed\r
-the secret riches and the eloquence of a true and humble mind which has\r
-spontaneously cultivated itself. He retained just enough sharpness to\r
-season his kindness; his mind was rough and his heart was soft. During\r
-their conversations in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of\r
-everything, drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had\r
-suffered. As she listened to him, Cosette's eyes wandered vaguely about.\r
-\r
-This simple man sufficed for Cosette's thought, the same as the wild\r
-garden sufficed for her eyes. When she had had a good chase after the\r
-butterflies, she came panting up to him and said: "Ah! How I have run!"\r
-He kissed her brow.\r
-\r
-Cosette adored the goodman. She was always at his heels. Where Jean\r
-Valjean was, there happiness was. Jean Valjean lived neither in the\r
-pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure in the paved back\r
-courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers, and in his little\r
-lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than in the great drawing-room\r
-hung with tapestry, against which stood tufted easy-chairs. Jean Valjean\r
-sometimes said to her, smiling at his happiness in being importuned: "Do\r
-go to your own quarters! Leave me alone a little!"\r
-\r
-She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are so graceful\r
-when they come from a daughter to her father.\r
-\r
-"Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don't you have a carpet here\r
-and a stove?"\r
-\r
-"Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I and who have\r
-not even a roof over their heads."\r
-\r
-"Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?"\r
-\r
-"Because you are a woman and a child."\r
-\r
-"Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?"\r
-\r
-"Certain men."\r
-\r
-"That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged to\r
-have a fire."\r
-\r
-And again she said to him:--\r
-\r
-"Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?"\r
-\r
-"Because, my daughter."\r
-\r
-"Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too."\r
-\r
-Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean ate\r
-white bread.\r
-\r
-Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood. She prayed\r
-morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known. The\r
-Thenardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures in a dream. She\r
-remembered that she had gone "one day, at night," to fetch water in a\r
-forest. She thought that it had been very far from Paris. It seemed to\r
-her that she had begun to live in an abyss, and that it was Jean Valjean\r
-who had rescued her from it. Her childhood produced upon her the effect\r
-of a time when there had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders,\r
-and serpents. When she meditated in the evening, before falling asleep,\r
-as she had not a very clear idea that she was Jean Valjean's daughter,\r
-and that he was her father, she fancied that the soul of her mother had\r
-passed into that good man and had come to dwell near her.\r
-\r
-When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and\r
-dropped a silent tear, saying to herself: "Perhaps this man is my\r
-mother."\r
-\r
-Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make, in the profound\r
-ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent,--maternity being also\r
-absolutely unintelligible to virginity,--had ended by fancying that she\r
-had had as little mother as possible. She did not even know her mother's\r
-name. Whenever she asked Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean remained silent. If\r
-she repeated her question, he responded with a smile. Once she insisted;\r
-the smile ended in a tear.\r
-\r
-This silence on the part of Jean Valjean covered Fantine with darkness.\r
-\r
-Was it prudence? Was it respect? Was it a fear that he should deliver\r
-this name to the hazards of another memory than his own?\r
-\r
-So long as Cosette had been small, Jean Valjean had been willing to talk\r
-to her of her mother; when she became a young girl, it was impossible\r
-for him to do so. It seemed to him that he no longer dared. Was it\r
-because of Cosette? Was it because of Fantine? He felt a certain\r
-religious horror at letting that shadow enter Cosette's thought; and of\r
-placing a third in their destiny. The more sacred this shade was to him,\r
-the more did it seem that it was to be feared. He thought of Fantine,\r
-and felt himself overwhelmed with silence.\r
-\r
-Through the darkness, he vaguely perceived something which appeared\r
-to have its finger on its lips. Had all the modesty which had been\r
-in Fantine, and which had violently quitted her during her lifetime,\r
-returned to rest upon her after her death, to watch in indignation over\r
-the peace of that dead woman, and in its shyness, to keep her in her\r
-grave? Was Jean Valjean unconsciously submitting to the pressure? We\r
-who believe in death, are not among the number who will reject this\r
-mysterious explanation.\r
-\r
-Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, that name of\r
-Fantine.\r
-\r
-One day Cosette said to him:--\r
-\r
-"Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night. She had two big wings.\r
-My mother must have been almost a saint during her life."\r
-\r
-"Through martyrdom," replied Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-However, Jean Valjean was happy.\r
-\r
-When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud and happy,\r
-in the plenitude of her heart. Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within\r
-him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so\r
-wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated\r
-with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would\r
-last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered\r
-sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the\r
-depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a\r
-wretch, by that innocent being.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR\r
-\r
-One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mirror, and she said\r
-to herself: "Really!" It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This\r
-threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she\r
-had never thought of her face. She saw herself in her mirror, but she\r
-did not look at herself. And then, she had so often been told that she\r
-was homely; Jean Valjean alone said gently: "No indeed! no indeed!" At\r
-all events, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had grown up\r
-in that belief with the easy resignation of childhood. And here, all\r
-at once, was her mirror saying to her, as Jean Valjean had said: "No\r
-indeed!" That night, she did not sleep. "What if I were pretty!" she\r
-thought. "How odd it would be if I were pretty!" And she recalled those\r
-of her companions whose beauty had produced a sensation in the convent,\r
-and she said to herself: "What! Am I to be like Mademoiselle So-and-So?"\r
-\r
-The next morning she looked at herself again, not by accident this time,\r
-and she was assailed with doubts: "Where did I get such an idea?" said\r
-she; "no, I am ugly." She had not slept well, that was all, her eyes\r
-were sunken and she was pale. She had not felt very joyous on the\r
-preceding evening in the belief that she was beautiful, but it made her\r
-very sad not to be able to believe in it any longer. She did not look at\r
-herself again, and for more than a fortnight she tried to dress her hair\r
-with her back turned to the mirror.\r
-\r
-In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool or\r
-did some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean Valjean read\r
-beside her. Once she raised her eyes from her work, and was rendered\r
-quite uneasy by the manner in which her father was gazing at her.\r
-\r
-On another occasion, she was passing along the street, and it seemed\r
-to her that some one behind her, whom she did not see, said: "A pretty\r
-woman! but badly dressed." "Bah!" she thought, "he does not mean me.\r
-I am well dressed and ugly." She was then wearing a plush hat and her\r
-merino gown.\r
-\r
-At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old\r
-Toussaint saying: "Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?"\r
-Cosette did not hear her father's reply, but Toussaint's words caused\r
-a sort of commotion within her. She fled from the garden, ran up to\r
-her room, flew to the looking-glass,--it was three months since she\r
-had looked at herself,--and gave vent to a cry. She had just dazzled\r
-herself.\r
-\r
-She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with Toussaint\r
-and her mirror. Her figure was formed, her skin had grown white, her\r
-hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had been lighted in her blue\r
-eyes. The consciousness of her beauty burst upon her in an instant, like\r
-the sudden advent of daylight; other people noticed it also, Toussaint\r
-had said so, it was evidently she of whom the passer-by had spoken,\r
-there could no longer be any doubt of that; she descended to the garden\r
-again, thinking herself a queen, imagining that she heard the birds\r
-singing, though it was winter, seeing the sky gilded, the sun among\r
-the trees, flowers in the thickets, distracted, wild, in inexpressible\r
-delight.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable oppression\r
-at heart.\r
-\r
-In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror that\r
-beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette's sweet\r
-face. The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.\r
-\r
-Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she became\r
-aware of it herself. But, from the very first day, that unexpected light\r
-which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole of the young girl's\r
-person, wounded Jean Valjean's sombre eye. He felt that it was a change\r
-in a happy life, a life so happy that he did not dare to move for fear\r
-of disarranging something. This man, who had passed through all manner\r
-of distresses, who was still all bleeding from the bruises of fate, who\r
-had been almost wicked and who had become almost a saint, who, after\r
-having dragged the chain of the galleys, was now dragging the invisible\r
-but heavy chain of indefinite misery, this man whom the law had not\r
-released from its grasp and who could be seized at any moment and\r
-brought back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad daylight of\r
-public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all, pardoned all, and\r
-merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law, of society, of nature,\r
-of the world, one thing, that Cosette might love him!\r
-\r
-That Cosette might continue to love him! That God would not prevent\r
-the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him!\r
-Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased, loaded\r
-with benefits, recompensed, crowned. Beloved by Cosette, it was well\r
-with him! He asked nothing more! Had any one said to him: "Do you want\r
-anything better?" he would have answered: "No." God might have said to\r
-him: "Do you desire heaven?" and he would have replied: "I should lose\r
-by it."\r
-\r
-Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,\r
-made him shudder like the beginning of something new. He had never\r
-known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means; but he\r
-understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.\r
-\r
-He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever more\r
-triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes, on the innocent\r
-and formidable brow of that child, from the depths of her homeliness, of\r
-his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.\r
-\r
-He said to himself: "How beautiful she is! What is to become of me?"\r
-\r
-There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the\r
-tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with anguish, a mother would have\r
-gazed upon with joy.\r
-\r
-The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.\r
-\r
-On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself:\r
-"Decidedly I am beautiful!" Cosette began to pay attention to her\r
-toilet. She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty, but badly\r
-dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had\r
-vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are\r
-destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is\r
-the other.\r
-\r
-With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her.\r
-She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat. Her\r
-father had never refused her anything. She at once acquired the whole\r
-science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff, the\r
-stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming, that science\r
-which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming, so deep, and so\r
-dangerous. The words heady woman were invented for the Parisienne.\r
-\r
-In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the Rue de\r
-Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one of the "best\r
-dressed" women in Paris, which means a great deal more.\r
-\r
-She would have liked to encounter her "passer-by," to see what he would\r
-say, and to "teach him a lesson!" The truth is, that she was ravishing\r
-in every respect, and that she distinguished the difference between a\r
-bonnet from Gerard and one from Herbaut in the most marvellous way.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that\r
-he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings\r
-sprouting on Cosette.\r
-\r
-Moreover, from the mere inspection of Cosette's toilet, a woman\r
-would have recognized the fact that she had no mother. Certain little\r
-proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by\r
-Cosette. A mother, for instance, would have told her that a young girl\r
-does not dress in damask.\r
-\r
-The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown and mantle,\r
-and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm, gay, radiant,\r
-rosy, proud, dazzling. "Father," she said, "how do you like me in this\r
-guise?" Jean Valjean replied in a voice which resembled the bitter voice\r
-of an envious man: "Charming!" He was the same as usual during their\r
-walk. On their return home, he asked Cosette:--\r
-\r
-"Won't you put on that other gown and bonnet again,--you know the ones I\r
-mean?"\r
-\r
-This took place in Cosette's chamber. Cosette turned towards the\r
-wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl's clothes were hanging.\r
-\r
-"That disguise!" said she. "Father, what do you want me to do with it?\r
-Oh no, the idea! I shall never put on those horrors again. With that\r
-machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.\r
-\r
-From that moment forth, he noticed that Cosette, who had always\r
-heretofore asked to remain at home, saying: "Father, I enjoy myself more\r
-here with you," now was always asking to go out. In fact, what is the\r
-use of having a handsome face and a delicious costume if one does not\r
-display them?\r
-\r
-He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the back\r
-garden. Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike to promenade\r
-back and forth in front of the railed fence. Jean Valjean, who was shy,\r
-never set foot in the garden. He kept to his back yard, like a dog.\r
-\r
-Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the grace\r
-of ignoring it. An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness\r
-is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent\r
-creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise\r
-without being conscious of it. But what she had lost in ingenuous grace,\r
-she gained in pensive and serious charm. Her whole person, permeated\r
-with the joy of youth, of innocence, and of beauty, breathed forth a\r
-splendid melancholy.\r
-\r
-It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months, saw her\r
-once more at the Luxembourg.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE BATTLE BEGUN\r
-\r
-Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.\r
-Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together\r
-these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy\r
-electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love as\r
-two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow\r
-and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.\r
-\r
-The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally\r
-fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two\r
-beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way\r
-people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. The rest is\r
-nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these\r
-great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of\r
-that spark.\r
-\r
-At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance\r
-which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also launched\r
-a look which disturbed Cosette.\r
-\r
-He caused her the same good and the same evil.\r
-\r
-She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had\r
-scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.\r
-Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to\r
-think Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, the young man\r
-was nothing to her.\r
-\r
-Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had\r
-beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone of voice\r
-when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he held himself\r
-badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace that was all his\r
-own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole person\r
-was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he seemed\r
-to be poor, yet his air was fine.\r
-\r
-On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those\r
-first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps, Cosette did\r
-not immediately understand. She returned thoughtfully to the house in\r
-the Rue de l'Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had\r
-come to spend six weeks. The next morning, on waking, she thought of\r
-that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now seemed to\r
-pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her that this attention\r
-was the least in the world agreeable to her. She was, on the contrary,\r
-somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual. A\r
-substratum of war stirred within her. It struck her, and the idea caused\r
-her a wholly childish joy, that she was going to take her revenge at\r
-last.\r
-\r
-Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though\r
-in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with\r
-their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.\r
-\r
-The reader will recall Marius' hesitations, his palpitations, his\r
-terrors. He remained on his bench and did not approach. This vexed\r
-Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: "Father, let us stroll about\r
-a little in that direction." Seeing that Marius did not come to her,\r
-she went to him. In such cases, all women resemble Mahomet. And then,\r
-strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is\r
-timidity; in a young girl it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet\r
-nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each\r
-other and assuming, each the other's qualities.\r
-\r
-That day, Cosette's glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius'\r
-glance set Cosette to trembling. Marius went away confident, and Cosette\r
-uneasy. From that day forth, they adored each other.\r
-\r
-The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound\r
-melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the\r
-day before. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul in young\r
-girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It\r
-melts in love, which is its sun.\r
-\r
-Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered\r
-in its terrestrial sense. On the books of profane music which entered\r
-the convent, amour (love) was replaced by tambour (drum) or pandour.\r
-This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the big girls,\r
-such as: Ah, how delightful is the drum! or, Pity is not a pandour. But\r
-Cosette had left the convent too early to have occupied herself much\r
-with the "drum." Therefore, she did not know what name to give to what\r
-she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one does not know the name\r
-of one's malady?\r
-\r
-She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She\r
-did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or\r
-dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved. She\r
-would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: "You do not\r
-sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very bad! You\r
-have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not be! You\r
-blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at the\r
-end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!" She would not have\r
-understood, and she would have replied: "What fault is there of mine in\r
-a matter in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?"\r
-\r
-It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to\r
-the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute\r
-contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the apparition of\r
-youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining\r
-a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but\r
-having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor\r
-defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a\r
-chimaera with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have\r
-alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in\r
-the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the fears of children\r
-and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the convent, with\r
-which she had been permeated for the space of five years, was still in\r
-the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made everything\r
-tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he was not\r
-even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring Marius as\r
-something charming, luminous, and impossible.\r
-\r
-As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him with\r
-all frankness.\r
-\r
-Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with\r
-impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,\r
-and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought\r
-when she said to Jean Valjean:--\r
-\r
-"What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!"\r
-\r
-Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not\r
-address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know\r
-each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are\r
-separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other.\r
-\r
-It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,\r
-beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty, and in\r
-ignorance of her love. She was a coquette to boot through her ignorance.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF\r
-\r
-All situations have their instincts. Old and eternal Mother Nature\r
-warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. Jean Valjean\r
-shuddered to the very bottom of his soul. Jean Valjean saw nothing, knew\r
-nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention, the darkness\r
-in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him something in\r
-process of construction, and on the other, something which was crumbling\r
-away. Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with the deep law of God,\r
-by that same Mother Nature, did all he could to keep out of sight of\r
-"the father." Nevertheless, it came to pass that Jean Valjean sometimes\r
-espied him. Marius' manners were no longer in the least natural. He\r
-exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring. He no longer came quite\r
-close to them as formerly. He seated himself at a distance and pretended\r
-to be reading; why did he pretend that? Formerly he had come in his old\r
-coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure\r
-that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore\r
-gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.\r
-\r
-Cosette allowed nothing to be divined. Without knowing just what was the\r
-matter with her she was convinced that there was something in it, and\r
-that it must be concealed.\r
-\r
-There was a coincidence between the taste for the toilet which had\r
-recently come to Cosette, and the habit of new clothes developed by\r
-that stranger which was very repugnant to Jean Valjean. It might be\r
-accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.\r
-\r
-He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger. One day,\r
-however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague\r
-despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair, he\r
-said to her: "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"\r
-\r
-Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl, would have\r
-replied: "Why, no, he is charming." Ten years later, with the love\r
-of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: "A pedant, and\r
-insufferable to the sight! You are right!"--At the moment in life\r
-and the heart which she had then attained, she contented herself with\r
-replying, with supreme calmness: "That young man!"\r
-\r
-As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.\r
-\r
-"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean. "She had not noticed him. It is\r
-I who have pointed him out to her."\r
-\r
-Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!\r
-\r
-It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of\r
-those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles,\r
-that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap\r
-whatever, and that the young man falls into every one. Jean Valjean\r
-had instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with\r
-the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine. Jean\r
-Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him; he changed his hour, he changed\r
-his bench, he forgot his handkerchief, he came alone to the Luxembourg;\r
-Marius dashed headlong into all these snares; and to all the\r
-interrogation marks planted by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he\r
-ingenuously answered "yes." But Cosette remained immured in her apparent\r
-unconcern and in her imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean\r
-arrived at the following conclusion: "That ninny is madly in love with\r
-Cosette, but Cosette does not even know that he exists."\r
-\r
-None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor. The minute\r
-when Cosette would love might strike at any moment. Does not everything\r
-begin with indifference?\r
-\r
-Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him. He rose from his\r
-seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: "What,\r
-already?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he\r
-did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,\r
-he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so sweet\r
-to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the intoxicated\r
-Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw nothing in all\r
-the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean was fixing on\r
-Marius flashing and terrible eyes. He, who had finally come to believe\r
-himself incapable of a malevolent feeling, experienced moments when\r
-Marius was present, in which he thought he was becoming savage and\r
-ferocious once more, and he felt the old depths of his soul, which\r
-had formerly contained so much wrath, opening once more and rising up\r
-against that young man. It almost seemed to him that unknown craters\r
-were forming in his bosom.\r
-\r
-What! he was there, that creature! What was he there for? He came\r
-creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying! He came, saying: "Hey!\r
-Why not?" He came to prowl about his, Jean Valjean's, life! to prowl\r
-about his happiness, with the purpose of seizing it and bearing it away!\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean added: "Yes, that's it! What is he in search of? An\r
-adventure! What does he want? A love affair! A love affair! And I? What!\r
-I have been first, the most wretched of men, and then the most unhappy,\r
-and I have traversed sixty years of life on my knees, I have suffered\r
-everything that man can suffer, I have grown old without having been\r
-young, I have lived without a family, without relatives, without\r
-friends, without life, without children, I have left my blood on every\r
-stone, on every bramble, on every mile-post, along every wall, I have\r
-been gentle, though others have been hard to me, and kind, although\r
-others have been malicious, I have become an honest man once more, in\r
-spite of everything, I have repented of the evil that I have done and\r
-have forgiven the evil that has been done to me, and at the moment\r
-when I receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over, at the\r
-moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment when I have what\r
-I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid, I have earned it, all\r
-this is to take flight, all this will vanish, and I shall lose Cosette,\r
-and I shall lose my life, my joy, my soul, because it has pleased a\r
-great booby to come and lounge at the Luxembourg."\r
-\r
-Then his eyes were filled with a sad and extraordinary gleam.\r
-\r
-It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy\r
-surveying an enemy. It was a dog scanning a thief.\r
-\r
-The reader knows the rest. Marius pursued his senseless course. One day\r
-he followed Cosette to the Rue de l'Ouest. Another day he spoke to\r
-the porter. The porter, on his side, spoke, and said to Jean Valjean:\r
-"Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is asking for you?" On the\r
-morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius that glance which Marius at last\r
-perceived. A week later, Jean Valjean had taken his departure. He swore\r
-to himself that he would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg\r
-or in the Rue de l'Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.\r
-\r
-Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she\r
-did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point\r
-where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself. Jean\r
-Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries which\r
-are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted; the\r
-consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance of\r
-Cosette's silence.\r
-\r
-He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. On his\r
-side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.\r
-\r
-Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:--\r
-\r
-"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"\r
-\r
-A ray illuminated Cosette's pale face.\r
-\r
-"Yes," said she.\r
-\r
-They went thither. Three months had elapsed. Marius no longer went\r
-there. Marius was not there.\r
-\r
-On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:--\r
-\r
-"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"\r
-\r
-She replied, sadly and gently:--\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken at this\r
-gentleness.\r
-\r
-What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so\r
-impenetrable? What was on its way there within? What was taking place\r
-in Cosette's soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean\r
-remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he passed\r
-whole nights asking himself: "What has Cosette in her mind?" and in\r
-thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.\r
-\r
-Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards that\r
-cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible\r
-glacier of virtue! How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy, that\r
-convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins, where\r
-all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven! How he adored that\r
-Eden forever closed against him, whence he had voluntarily and madly\r
-emerged! How he regretted his abnegation and his folly in having brought\r
-Cosette back into the world, poor hero of sacrifice, seized and hurled\r
-to the earth by his very self-devotion! How he said to himself, "What\r
-have I done?"\r
-\r
-However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette. No ill-temper,\r
-no harshness. His face was always serene and kind. Jean Valjean's\r
-manners were more tender and more paternal than ever. If anything could\r
-have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.\r
-\r
-On her side, Cosette languished. She suffered from the absence of Marius\r
-as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly being\r
-conscious of it. When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their customary\r
-strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the bottom of her\r
-heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and\r
-that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father\r
-would take her thither once more. But days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean\r
-Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette's tacit consent. She regretted it.\r
-It was too late. So Marius had disappeared; all was over. The day on\r
-which she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What\r
-was to be done? Should she ever find him again? She felt an anguish at\r
-her heart, which nothing relieved, and which augmented every day; she no\r
-longer knew whether it was winter or summer, whether it was raining or\r
-shining, whether the birds were singing, whether it was the season for\r
-dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming than\r
-the Tuileries, whether the linen which the laundress brought home\r
-was starched too much or not enough, whether Toussaint had done "her\r
-marketing" well or ill; and she remained dejected, absorbed, attentive\r
-to but a single thought, her eyes vague and staring as when one gazes by\r
-night at a black and fathomless spot where an apparition has vanished.\r
-\r
-However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,\r
-except her pallor.\r
-\r
-She still wore her sweet face for him.\r
-\r
-This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.\r
-Sometimes he asked her:--\r
-\r
-"What is the matter with you?"\r
-\r
-She replied: "There is nothing the matter with me."\r
-\r
-And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would\r
-add:--\r
-\r
-"And you, father--is there anything wrong with you?"\r
-\r
-"With me? Nothing," said he.\r
-\r
-These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so\r
-touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other\r
-now suffered side by side, each on the other's account; without\r
-acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and\r
-with a smile.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE CHAIN-GANG\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its\r
-sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.\r
-\r
-At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It is\r
-the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear. He\r
-had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him. He\r
-would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm by\r
-some external and brilliant matter. These ideas, puerile, as we have\r
-just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very\r
-childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on\r
-the imaginations of young girls. He once chanced to see a general on\r
-horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the\r
-commandant of Paris. He envied that gilded man; what happiness it\r
-would be, he said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an\r
-incontestable thing; and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be\r
-dazzled, and when he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the\r
-Tuileries, the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice\r
-for Cosette, and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.\r
-\r
-An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.\r
-\r
-In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come to dwell\r
-in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit. They sometimes took\r
-a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild species of enjoyment which\r
-befits those who are entering life and those who are quitting it.\r
-\r
-For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent\r
-to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added. The streets\r
-are deserted and the birds are singing. Cosette, a bird herself, liked\r
-to rise early. These matutinal excursions were planned on the preceding\r
-evening. He proposed, and she agreed. It was arranged like a plot, they\r
-set out before daybreak, and these trips were so many small delights for\r
-Cosette. These innocent eccentricities please young people.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least\r
-frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places. There then\r
-existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor\r
-meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in\r
-summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been\r
-gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but\r
-peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt these fields. Cosette was not bored\r
-there. It meant solitude to him and liberty to her. There, she became a\r
-little girl once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her\r
-hat, laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.\r
-She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;\r
-gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl who\r
-cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has mercy on\r
-the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands of poppies, which she placed\r
-on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated with sunlight, glowing\r
-until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a crown of burning embers.\r
-\r
-Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom of early\r
-strolls.\r
-\r
-One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection of\r
-the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break of\r
-day near the Barriere du Maine. It was not dawn, it was daybreak; a\r
-delightful and stern moment. A few constellations here and there in the\r
-deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white, a quiver\r
-amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious chill of twilight. A\r
-lark, which seemed mingled with the stars, was carolling at a prodigious\r
-height, and one would have declared that that hymn of pettiness calmed\r
-immensity. In the East, the Valde-Grace projected its dark mass on the\r
-clear horizon with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant\r
-was rising behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape\r
-from a gloomy edifice.\r
-\r
-All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray\r
-laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to\r
-their work along the side-paths.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at the\r
-gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway, his back\r
-towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the point of\r
-rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions in which the\r
-mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye, and which are\r
-equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be called\r
-vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return\r
-to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was\r
-thinking of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came\r
-between him and her, of the light with which she filled his life, a\r
-light which was but the emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in\r
-his revery. Cosette, who was standing beside him, was gazing at the\r
-clouds as they turned rosy.\r
-\r
-All at once Cosette exclaimed: "Father, I should think some one was\r
-coming yonder." Jean Valjean raised his eyes.\r
-\r
-Cosette was right. The causeway which leads to the ancient Barriere du\r
-Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue de Sevres,\r
-and is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard. At the elbow of the\r
-causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where it branches, they heard a\r
-noise which it was difficult to account for at that hour, and a sort of\r
-confused pile made its appearance. Some shapeless thing which was coming\r
-from the boulevard was turning into the road.\r
-\r
-It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner, though it was\r
-bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle, but its load could\r
-not be distinctly made out. There were horses, wheels, shouts; whips\r
-were cracking. By degrees the outlines became fixed, although bathed\r
-in shadows. It was a vehicle, in fact, which had just turned from the\r
-boulevard into the highway, and which was directing its course towards\r
-the barrier near which sat Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect,\r
-followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven chariots made their\r
-appearance in succession, the heads of the horses touching the rear of\r
-the wagon in front. Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were\r
-visible through the dusk as though there were naked swords there, a\r
-clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains, and as\r
-this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder, and it turned\r
-into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave of dreams.\r
-\r
-As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees\r
-with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,\r
-which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap which\r
-was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures turned\r
-into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:--\r
-\r
-Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road. The first six were\r
-singularly constructed. They resembled coopers' drays; they consisted\r
-of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming barrows at their rear\r
-extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say, each ladder, was attached\r
-to four horses harnessed tandem. On these ladders strange clusters of\r
-men were being drawn. In the faint light, these men were to be divined\r
-rather than seen. Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back to\r
-back, facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was\r
-the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs\r
-they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on their\r
-necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar. Each man had\r
-his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these four and twenty\r
-men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk, they were seized with\r
-a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind over the ground\r
-with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after the fashion of millepeds.\r
-In the back and front of each vehicle, two men armed with muskets\r
-stood erect, each holding one end of the chain under his foot. The iron\r
-necklets were square. The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided baggage\r
-wagon, without a hood, had four wheels and six horses, and carried a\r
-sonorous pile of iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains,\r
-among which were mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at\r
-full length, and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all lattice-work,\r
-was garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for\r
-former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle of the road. On\r
-each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect, wearing\r
-three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory, shabby,\r
-covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of veterans and the\r
-trousers of undertakers' men, half gray, half blue, which were almost\r
-hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder belts, short sabres,\r
-muskets, and cudgels; they were a species of soldier-blackguards.\r
-These myrmidons seemed composed of the abjectness of the beggar and the\r
-authority of the executioner. The one who appeared to be their chief\r
-held a postilion's whip in his hand. All these details, blurred by the\r
-dimness of dawn, became more and more clearly outlined as the light\r
-increased. At the head and in the rear of the convoy rode mounted\r
-gendarmes, serious and with sword in fist.\r
-\r
-This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached the\r
-barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard. A throng,\r
-sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in a twinkling, as\r
-is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward from both sides of\r
-the road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes the shouts of people\r
-calling to each other and the wooden shoes of market-gardeners hastening\r
-up to gaze were audible.\r
-\r
-The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in\r
-silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen\r
-trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest\r
-of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements were\r
-horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin in\r
-rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps,\r
-and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the elbow;\r
-many wore women's headgear, others had baskets on their heads; hairy\r
-breasts were visible, and through the rent in their garments tattooed\r
-designs could be descried; temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids;\r
-eruptions and unhealthy red blotches could also be seen. Two or three\r
-had a straw rope attached to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended\r
-under them like a stirrup, which supported their feet. One of them held\r
-in his hand and raised to his mouth something which had the appearance\r
-of a black stone and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which\r
-he was eating. There were no eyes there which were not either dry,\r
-dulled, or flaming with an evil light. The escort troop cursed, the men\r
-in chains did not utter a syllable; from time to time the sound of\r
-a blow became audible as the cudgels descended on shoulder-blades or\r
-skulls; some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible;\r
-their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed\r
-together, their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their\r
-fists clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the\r
-rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.\r
-\r
-This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful. It\r
-was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain might\r
-descend, that it might be followed by another and another, and that\r
-their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked, these\r
-men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would not again\r
-get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to their bones by the\r
-downpour, that the water would fill their shoes, that no lashes from\r
-the whips would be able to prevent their jaws from chattering, that the\r
-chain would continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs would\r
-continue to dangle, and it was impossible not to shudder at the sight\r
-of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of\r
-autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the blast, to all the furies\r
-of the air, like trees and stones.\r
-\r
-Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick men,\r
-who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon,\r
-and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled with\r
-misery.\r
-\r
-Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient\r
-burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all those\r
-ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration of grins,\r
-oaths, and songs exploded. The broad horizontal sheet of light severed\r
-the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies, leaving feet and\r
-wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their appearance on these faces;\r
-it was a terrible moment; visible demons with their masks removed,\r
-fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in\r
-gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through which they\r
-blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women; the dawn accentuated\r
-these lamentable profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there\r
-was not one of these creatures who was not deformed by reason of\r
-wretchedness; and the whole was so monstrous that one would have\r
-said that the sun's brilliancy had been changed into the glare of the\r
-lightning. The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a song,\r
-and were shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard joviality,\r
-a potpourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called The Vestal; the trees\r
-shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois\r
-listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by\r
-spectres.\r
-\r
-All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were to\r
-be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,\r
-bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation, savage\r
-grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps, heads like those\r
-of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples, infantile visages,\r
-and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces, to which death\r
-alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro, who had been a slave,\r
-in all probability, and who could make a comparison of his chains. The\r
-frightful leveller from below, shame, had passed over these brows; at\r
-that degree of abasement, the last transformations were suffered by all\r
-in their extremest depths, and ignorance, converted into dulness, was\r
-the equal of intelligence converted into despair. There was no choice\r
-possible between these men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the\r
-mud. It was evident that the person who had had the ordering of that\r
-unclean procession had not classified them. These beings had been\r
-fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder, probably, and\r
-loaded hap-hazard on those carts. Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped\r
-together, always end by evolving a result; all additions of wretched men\r
-give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul, and each dray-load\r
-had its own physiognomy. By the side of the one where they were singing,\r
-there was one where they were howling; a third where they were begging;\r
-one could be seen in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load\r
-menaced the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent\r
-as the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles\r
-of hell on the march. The march of the damned to their tortures,\r
-performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot\r
-of the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet\r
-cart.\r
-\r
-One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a\r
-pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth.\r
-An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five years\r
-old, and said to him: "Rascal, let that be a warning to you!"\r
-\r
-As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be the\r
-captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal a fearful\r
-dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail, fell upon the\r
-seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth; which redoubled\r
-the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up, a swarm of flies\r
-on these wounds.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They were no\r
-longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects which replace the\r
-glance in the case of certain wretched men, which seem unconscious\r
-of reality, and in which flames the reflection of terrors and of\r
-catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a vision.\r
-He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not move his\r
-feet. Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and hold you\r
-fast. He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself,\r
-athwart confused and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral\r
-persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium which was\r
-pursuing him. All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a gesture\r
-habitual to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this\r
-was, in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to make this\r
-detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering royalty on the\r
-road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before, he had\r
-himself passed through that barrier.\r
-\r
-Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did not\r
-understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible; at\r
-length she cried:--\r
-\r
-"Father! What are those men in those carts?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean replied: "Convicts."\r
-\r
-"Whither are they going?"\r
-\r
-"To the galleys."\r
-\r
-At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, became\r
-zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled with it, it was a\r
-perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts bent before it, a hideous\r
-obedience was evoked by the torture, and all held their peace, darting\r
-glances like chained wolves.\r
-\r
-Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Father, are they still men?"\r
-\r
-"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.\r
-\r
-It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak from\r
-Bicetre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid Fontainebleau,\r
-where the King then was. This caused the horrible journey to last three\r
-or four days longer; but torture may surely be prolonged with the object\r
-of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such encounters are\r
-shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles a thorough\r
-shaking up.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back to\r
-the Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him with other\r
-questions on the subject of what they had just seen; perhaps he was\r
-too much absorbed in his own dejection to notice her words and reply to\r
-them. But when Cosette was leaving him in the evening, to betake herself\r
-to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as though talking to\r
-herself: "It seems to me, that if I were to find one of those men in my\r
-pathway, oh, my God, I should die merely from the sight of him close at\r
-hand."\r
-\r
-Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,\r
-there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,--fetes in\r
-Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine, theatrical\r
-performances in the Champs-Elysees, fireworks at the Arc de l'Etoile,\r
-illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean did violence to his habits, and\r
-took Cosette to see these rejoicings, for the purpose of diverting her\r
-from the memory of the day before, and of effacing, beneath the smiling\r
-tumult of all Paris, the abominable thing which had passed before her.\r
-The review with which the festival was spiced made the presence of\r
-uniforms perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a\r
-national guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking\r
-himself to shelter. However, this trip seemed to attain its object.\r
-Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,\r
-moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion\r
-with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too\r
-disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fete; so that\r
-Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded, and that no\r
-trace of that hideous vision remained.\r
-\r
-Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly, and\r
-they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction of\r
-the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself, and\r
-to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had caused\r
-Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect in that\r
-negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls in an\r
-adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over a star;\r
-and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep, submitting\r
-to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking a daisy\r
-to pieces. Cosette did not know the delightful legend, I love a little,\r
-passionately, etc.--who was there who could have taught her? She was\r
-handling the flower instinctively, innocently, without a suspicion that\r
-to pluck a daisy apart is to do the same by a heart. If there were a\r
-fourth, and smiling Grace called Melancholy, she would have worn the air\r
-of that Grace. Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of those\r
-tiny fingers on that flower, and forgetful of everything in the radiance\r
-emitted by that child. A red-breast was warbling in the thicket, on one\r
-side. White cloudlets floated across the sky, so gayly, that one would\r
-have said that they had just been set at liberty. Cosette went on\r
-attentively tearing the leaves from her flower; she seemed to be\r
-thinking about something; but whatever it was, it must be something\r
-charming; all at once she turned her head over her shoulder with the\r
-delicate languor of a swan, and said to Jean Valjean: "Father, what are\r
-the galleys like?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--A WOUND WITHOUT, HEALING WITHIN\r
-\r
-Thus their life clouded over by degrees.\r
-\r
-But one diversion, which had formerly been a happiness, remained to\r
-them, which was to carry bread to those who were hungry, and clothing\r
-to those who were cold. Cosette often accompanied Jean Valjean on these\r
-visits to the poor, on which they recovered some remnants of their\r
-former free intercourse; and sometimes, when the day had been a good\r
-one, and they had assisted many in distress, and cheered and warmed many\r
-little children, Cosette was rather merry in the evening. It was at this\r
-epoch that they paid their visit to the Jondrette den.\r
-\r
-On the day following that visit, Jean Valjean made his appearance in the\r
-pavilion in the morning, calm as was his wont, but with a large wound on\r
-his left arm which was much inflamed, and very angry, which resembled a\r
-burn, and which he explained in some way or other. This wound resulted\r
-in his being detained in the house for a month with fever. He would not\r
-call in a doctor. When Cosette urged him, "Call the dog-doctor," said\r
-he.\r
-\r
-Cosette dressed the wound morning and evening with so divine an air and\r
-such angelic happiness at being of use to him, that Jean Valjean felt\r
-all his former joy returning, his fears and anxieties dissipating, and\r
-he gazed at Cosette, saying: "Oh! what a kindly wound! Oh! what a good\r
-misfortune!"\r
-\r
-Cosette on perceiving that her father was ill, had deserted the pavilion\r
-and again taken a fancy to the little lodging and the back courtyard.\r
-She passed nearly all her days beside Jean Valjean and read to him\r
-the books which he desired. Generally they were books of travel. Jean\r
-Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving in these\r
-ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger, Cosette's\r
-coldness,--all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim. He had\r
-reached the point where he said to himself: "I imagined all that. I am\r
-an old fool."\r
-\r
-His happiness was so great that the horrible discovery of the\r
-Thenardiers made in the Jondrette hovel, unexpected as it was, had,\r
-after a fashion, glided over him unnoticed. He had succeeded in making\r
-his escape; all trace of him was lost--what more did he care for! he\r
-only thought of those wretched beings to pity them. "Here they are in\r
-prison, and henceforth they will be incapacitated for doing any harm,"\r
-he thought, "but what a lamentable family in distress!"\r
-\r
-As for the hideous vision of the Barriere du Maine, Cosette had not\r
-referred to it again.\r
-\r
-Sister Sainte-Mechtilde had taught Cosette music in the convent; Cosette\r
-had the voice of a linnet with a soul, and sometimes, in the evening,\r
-in the wounded man's humble abode, she warbled melancholy songs which\r
-delighted Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Spring came; the garden was so delightful at that season of the year,\r
-that Jean Valjean said to Cosette:--\r
-\r
-"You never go there; I want you to stroll in it."\r
-\r
-"As you like, father," said Cosette.\r
-\r
-And for the sake of obeying her father, she resumed her walks in the\r
-garden, generally alone, for, as we have mentioned, Jean Valjean, who\r
-was probably afraid of being seen through the fence, hardly ever went\r
-there.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's wound had created a diversion.\r
-\r
-When Cosette saw that her father was suffering less, that he was\r
-convalescing, and that he appeared to be happy, she experienced a\r
-contentment which she did not even perceive, so gently and naturally\r
-had it come. Then, it was in the month of March, the days were growing\r
-longer, the winter was departing, the winter always bears away with it a\r
-portion of our sadness; then came April, that daybreak of summer, fresh\r
-as dawn always is, gay like every childhood; a little inclined to weep\r
-at times like the new-born being that it is. In that month, nature\r
-has charming gleams which pass from the sky, from the trees, from the\r
-meadows and the flowers into the heart of man.\r
-\r
-Cosette was still too young to escape the penetrating influence of that\r
-April joy which bore so strong a resemblance to herself. Insensibly, and\r
-without her suspecting the fact, the blackness departed from her spirit.\r
-In spring, sad souls grow light, as light falls into cellars at midday.\r
-Cosette was no longer sad. However, though this was so, she did not\r
-account for it to herself. In the morning, about ten o'clock, after\r
-breakfast, when she had succeeded in enticing her father into the garden\r
-for a quarter of an hour, and when she was pacing up and down in the\r
-sunlight in front of the steps, supporting his left arm for him, she did\r
-not perceive that she laughed every moment and that she was happy.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, intoxicated, beheld her growing fresh and rosy once more.\r
-\r
-"Oh! What a good wound!" he repeated in a whisper.\r
-\r
-And he felt grateful to the Thenardiers.\r
-\r
-His wound once healed, he resumed his solitary twilight strolls.\r
-\r
-It is a mistake to suppose that a person can stroll alone in that\r
-fashion in the uninhabited regions of Paris without meeting with some\r
-adventure.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--MOTHER PLUTARQUE FINDS NO DIFFICULTY IN EXPLAINING A\r
-PHENOMENON\r
-\r
-One evening, little Gavroche had had nothing to eat; he remembered\r
-that he had not dined on the preceding day either; this was becoming\r
-tiresome. He resolved to make an effort to secure some supper. He\r
-strolled out beyond the Salpetriere into deserted regions; that is\r
-where windfalls are to be found; where there is no one, one always\r
-finds something. He reached a settlement which appeared to him to be the\r
-village of Austerlitz.\r
-\r
-In one of his preceding lounges he had noticed there an old garden\r
-haunted by an old man and an old woman, and in that garden, a passable\r
-apple-tree. Beside the apple-tree stood a sort of fruit-house, which was\r
-not securely fastened, and where one might contrive to get an apple. One\r
-apple is a supper; one apple is life. That which was Adam's ruin might\r
-prove Gavroche's salvation. The garden abutted on a solitary, unpaved\r
-lane, bordered with brushwood while awaiting the arrival of houses; the\r
-garden was separated from it by a hedge.\r
-\r
-Gavroche directed his steps towards this garden; he found the lane, he\r
-recognized the apple-tree, he verified the fruit-house, he examined the\r
-hedge; a hedge means merely one stride. The day was declining, there was\r
-not even a cat in the lane, the hour was propitious. Gavroche began\r
-the operation of scaling the hedge, then suddenly paused. Some one was\r
-talking in the garden. Gavroche peeped through one of the breaks in the\r
-hedge.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Succor from Below 4b4-1-succor-from-below]\r
-\r
-A couple of paces distant, at the foot of the hedge on the other side,\r
-exactly at the point where the gap which he was meditating would have\r
-been made, there was a sort of recumbent stone which formed a bench, and\r
-on this bench was seated the old man of the garden, while the old woman\r
-was standing in front of him. The old woman was grumbling. Gavroche, who\r
-was not very discreet, listened.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Mabeuf!" said the old woman.\r
-\r
-"Mabeuf!" thought Gavroche, "that name is a perfect farce."\r
-\r
-The old man who was thus addressed, did not stir. The old woman\r
-repeated:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Mabeuf!"\r
-\r
-The old man, without raising his eyes from the ground, made up his mind\r
-to answer:--\r
-\r
-"What is it, Mother Plutarque?"\r
-\r
-"Mother Plutarque!" thought Gavroche, "another farcical name."\r
-\r
-Mother Plutarque began again, and the old man was forced to accept the\r
-conversation:--\r
-\r
-"The landlord is not pleased."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"We owe three quarters rent."\r
-\r
-"In three months, we shall owe him for four quarters."\r
-\r
-"He says that he will turn you out to sleep."\r
-\r
-"I will go."\r
-\r
-"The green-grocer insists on being paid. She will no longer leave her\r
-fagots. What will you warm yourself with this winter? We shall have no\r
-wood."\r
-\r
-"There is the sun."\r
-\r
-"The butcher refuses to give credit; he will not let us have any more\r
-meat."\r
-\r
-"That is quite right. I do not digest meat well. It is too heavy."\r
-\r
-"What shall we have for dinner?"\r
-\r
-"Bread."\r
-\r
-"The baker demands a settlement, and says, 'no money, no bread.'"\r
-\r
-"That is well."\r
-\r
-"What will you eat?"\r
-\r
-"We have apples in the apple-room."\r
-\r
-"But, Monsieur, we can't live like that without money."\r
-\r
-"I have none."\r
-\r
-The old woman went away, the old man remained alone. He fell into\r
-thought. Gavroche became thoughtful also. It was almost dark.\r
-\r
-The first result of Gavroche's meditation was, that instead of scaling\r
-the hedge, he crouched down under it. The branches stood apart a little\r
-at the foot of the thicket.\r
-\r
-"Come," exclaimed Gavroche mentally, "here's a nook!" and he curled up\r
-in it. His back was almost in contact with Father Mabeuf's bench. He\r
-could hear the octogenarian breathe.\r
-\r
-Then, by way of dinner, he tried to sleep.\r
-\r
-It was a cat-nap, with one eye open. While he dozed, Gavroche kept on\r
-the watch.\r
-\r
-The twilight pallor of the sky blanched the earth, and the lane formed a\r
-livid line between two rows of dark bushes.\r
-\r
-All at once, in this whitish band, two figures made their appearance.\r
-One was in front, the other some distance in the rear.\r
-\r
-"There come two creatures," muttered Gavroche.\r
-\r
-The first form seemed to be some elderly bourgeois, who was bent and\r
-thoughtful, dressed more than plainly, and who was walking slowly\r
-because of his age, and strolling about in the open evening air.\r
-\r
-The second was straight, firm, slender. It regulated its pace by that\r
-of the first; but in the voluntary slowness of its gait, suppleness\r
-and agility were discernible. This figure had also something fierce and\r
-disquieting about it, the whole shape was that of what was then called\r
-an elegant; the hat was of good shape, the coat black, well cut,\r
-probably of fine cloth, and well fitted in at the waist. The head was\r
-held erect with a sort of robust grace, and beneath the hat the pale\r
-profile of a young man could be made out in the dim light. The profile\r
-had a rose in its mouth. This second form was well known to Gavroche; it\r
-was Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-He could have told nothing about the other, except that he was a\r
-respectable old man.\r
-\r
-Gavroche immediately began to take observations.\r
-\r
-One of these two pedestrians evidently had a project connected with\r
-the other. Gavroche was well placed to watch the course of events. The\r
-bedroom had turned into a hiding-place at a very opportune moment.\r
-\r
-Montparnasse on the hunt at such an hour, in such a place, betokened\r
-something threatening. Gavroche felt his gamin's heart moved with\r
-compassion for the old man.\r
-\r
-What was he to do? Interfere? One weakness coming to the aid of another!\r
-It would be merely a laughing matter for Montparnasse. Gavroche did not\r
-shut his eyes to the fact that the old man, in the first place, and the\r
-child in the second, would make but two mouthfuls for that redoubtable\r
-ruffian eighteen years of age.\r
-\r
-While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack took place, abruptly and\r
-hideously. The attack of the tiger on the wild ass, the attack of the\r
-spider on the fly. Montparnasse suddenly tossed away his rose, bounded\r
-upon the old man, seized him by the collar, grasped and clung to him,\r
-and Gavroche with difficulty restrained a scream. A moment later one of\r
-these men was underneath the other, groaning, struggling, with a knee\r
-of marble upon his breast. Only, it was not just what Gavroche had\r
-expected. The one who lay on the earth was Montparnasse; the one who\r
-was on top was the old man. All this took place a few paces distant from\r
-Gavroche.\r
-\r
-The old man had received the shock, had returned it, and that in such\r
-a terrible fashion, that in a twinkling, the assailant and the assailed\r
-had exchanged roles.\r
-\r
-"Here's a hearty veteran!" thought Gavroche.\r
-\r
-He could not refrain from clapping his hands. But it was applause\r
-wasted. It did not reach the combatants, absorbed and deafened as they\r
-were, each by the other, as their breath mingled in the struggle.\r
-\r
-Silence ensued. Montparnasse ceased his struggles. Gavroche indulged in\r
-this aside: "Can he be dead!"\r
-\r
-The goodman had not uttered a word, nor given vent to a cry. He rose to\r
-his feet, and Gavroche heard him say to Montparnasse:--\r
-\r
-"Get up."\r
-\r
-Montparnasse rose, but the goodman held him fast. Montparnasse's\r
-attitude was the humiliated and furious attitude of the wolf who has\r
-been caught by a sheep.\r
-\r
-Gavroche looked on and listened, making an effort to reinforce his eyes\r
-with his ears. He was enjoying himself immensely.\r
-\r
-He was repaid for his conscientious anxiety in the character of a\r
-spectator. He was able to catch on the wing a dialogue which borrowed\r
-from the darkness an indescribably tragic accent. The goodman\r
-questioned, Montparnasse replied.\r
-\r
-"How old are you?"\r
-\r
-"Nineteen."\r
-\r
-"You are strong and healthy. Why do you not work?"\r
-\r
-"It bores me."\r
-\r
-"What is your trade?"\r
-\r
-"An idler."\r
-\r
-"Speak seriously. Can anything be done for you? What would you like to\r
-be?"\r
-\r
-"A thief."\r
-\r
-A pause ensued. The old man seemed absorbed in profound thought. He\r
-stood motionless, and did not relax his hold on Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-Every moment the vigorous and agile young ruffian indulged in the\r
-twitchings of a wild beast caught in a snare. He gave a jerk, tried a\r
-crook of the knee, twisted his limbs desperately, and made efforts to\r
-escape.\r
-\r
-The old man did not appear to notice it, and held both his arms with one\r
-hand, with the sovereign indifference of absolute force.\r
-\r
-The old man's revery lasted for some time, then, looking steadily at\r
-Montparnasse, he addressed to him in a gentle voice, in the midst of the\r
-darkness where they stood, a solemn harangue, of which Gavroche did not\r
-lose a single syllable:--\r
-\r
-"My child, you are entering, through indolence, on one of the most\r
-laborious of lives. Ah! You declare yourself to be an idler! prepare to\r
-toil. There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it? It is\r
-the rolling-mill. You must be on your guard against it, it is crafty\r
-and ferocious; if it catches hold of the skirt of your coat, you will be\r
-drawn in bodily. That machine is laziness. Stop while there is yet time,\r
-and save yourself! Otherwise, it is all over with you; in a short time\r
-you will be among the gearing. Once entangled, hope for nothing more.\r
-Toil, lazybones! there is no more repose for you! The iron hand of\r
-implacable toil has seized you. You do not wish to earn your living, to\r
-have a task, to fulfil a duty! It bores you to be like other men? Well!\r
-You will be different. Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find\r
-ennui his torment. You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a\r
-slave. Toil lets go of you on one side only to grasp you again on the\r
-other. You do not desire to be its friend, you shall be its negro slave.\r
-Ah! You would have none of the honest weariness of men, you shall have\r
-the sweat of the damned. Where others sing, you will rattle in your\r
-throat. You will see afar off, from below, other men at work; it will\r
-seem to you that they are resting. The laborer, the harvester, the\r
-sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in glory like the blessed\r
-spirits in paradise. What radiance surrounds the forge! To guide the\r
-plough, to bind the sheaves, is joy. The bark at liberty in the wind,\r
-what delight! Do you, lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march! Drag your\r
-halter. You are a beast of burden in the team of hell! Ah! To do nothing\r
-is your object. Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour shall you have\r
-free from oppression. You will be able to lift nothing without anguish.\r
-Every minute that passes will make your muscles crack. What is a feather\r
-to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become steep\r
-acclivities. Life will become monstrous all about you. To go, to come,\r
-to breathe, will be just so many terrible labors. Your lungs will\r
-produce on you the effect of weighing a hundred pounds. Whether you\r
-shall walk here rather than there, will become a problem that must be\r
-solved. Any one who wants to go out simply gives his door a push, and\r
-there he is in the open air. If you wish to go out, you will be obliged\r
-to pierce your wall. What does every one who wants to step into the\r
-street do? He goes down stairs; you will tear up your sheets, little\r
-by little you will make of them a rope, then you will climb out of your\r
-window, and you will suspend yourself by that thread over an abyss, and\r
-it will be night, amid storm, rain, and the hurricane, and if the rope\r
-is too short, but one way of descending will remain to you, to fall. To\r
-drop hap-hazard into the gulf, from an unknown height, on what? On what\r
-is beneath, on the unknown. Or you will crawl up a chimney-flue, at the\r
-risk of burning; or you will creep through a sewer-pipe, at the risk of\r
-drowning; I do not speak of the holes that you will be obliged to mask,\r
-of the stones which you will have to take up and replace twenty times a\r
-day, of the plaster that you will have to hide in your straw pallet. A\r
-lock presents itself; the bourgeois has in his pocket a key made by a\r
-locksmith. If you wish to pass out, you will be condemned to execute a\r
-terrible work of art; you will take a large sou, you will cut it in\r
-two plates; with what tools? You will have to invent them. That is your\r
-business. Then you will hollow out the interior of these plates, taking\r
-great care of the outside, and you will make on the edges a thread, so\r
-that they can be adjusted one upon the other like a box and its cover.\r
-The top and bottom thus screwed together, nothing will be suspected. To\r
-the overseers it will be only a sou; to you it will be a box. What will\r
-you put in this box? A small bit of steel. A watch-spring, in which you\r
-will have cut teeth, and which will form a saw. With this saw, as long\r
-as a pin, and concealed in a sou, you will cut the bolt of the lock, you\r
-will sever bolts, the padlock of your chain, and the bar at your window,\r
-and the fetter on your leg. This masterpiece finished, this prodigy\r
-accomplished, all these miracles of art, address, skill, and patience\r
-executed, what will be your recompense if it becomes known that you\r
-are the author? The dungeon. There is your future. What precipices are\r
-idleness and pleasure! Do you know that to do nothing is a melancholy\r
-resolution? To live in idleness on the property of society! to be\r
-useless, that is to say, pernicious! This leads straight to the depth\r
-of wretchedness. Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite! He will\r
-become vermin! Ah! So it does not please you to work? Ah! You have but\r
-one thought, to drink well, to eat well, to sleep well. You will drink\r
-water, you will eat black bread, you will sleep on a plank with a fetter\r
-whose cold touch you will feel on your flesh all night long, riveted to\r
-your limbs. You will break those fetters, you will flee. That is well.\r
-You will crawl on your belly through the brushwood, and you will eat\r
-grass like the beasts of the forest. And you will be recaptured. And\r
-then you will pass years in a dungeon, riveted to a wall, groping for\r
-your jug that you may drink, gnawing at a horrible loaf of darkness\r
-which dogs would not touch, eating beans that the worms have eaten\r
-before you. You will be a wood-louse in a cellar. Ah! Have pity on\r
-yourself, you miserable young child, who were sucking at nurse less\r
-than twenty years ago, and who have, no doubt, a mother still alive! I\r
-conjure you, listen to me, I entreat you. You desire fine black cloth,\r
-varnished shoes, to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on\r
-your locks, to please low women, to be handsome. You will be shaven\r
-clean, and you will wear a red blouse and wooden shoes. You want rings\r
-on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck. If you\r
-glance at a woman, you will receive a blow. And you will enter there at\r
-the age of twenty. And you will come out at fifty! You will enter young,\r
-rosy, fresh, with brilliant eyes, and all your white teeth, and your\r
-handsome, youthful hair; you will come out broken, bent, wrinkled,\r
-toothless, horrible, with white locks! Ah! my poor child, you are on the\r
-wrong road; idleness is counselling you badly; the hardest of all work\r
-is thieving. Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of\r
-an idle man. It is not comfortable to become a rascal. It is less\r
-disagreeable to be an honest man. Now go, and ponder on what I have said\r
-to you. By the way, what did you want of me? My purse? Here it is."\r
-\r
-And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the latter's\r
-hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which he allowed it to\r
-slide gently into the back pocket of his coat, with the same mechanical\r
-precaution as though he had stolen it.\r
-\r
-All this having been said and done, the goodman turned his back and\r
-tranquilly resumed his stroll.\r
-\r
-"The blockhead!" muttered Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-Who was this goodman? The reader has, no doubt, already divined.\r
-\r
-Montparnasse watched him with amazement, as he disappeared in the dusk.\r
-This contemplation was fatal to him.\r
-\r
-While the old man was walking away, Gavroche drew near.\r
-\r
-Gavroche had assured himself, with a sidelong glance, that Father Mabeuf\r
-was still sitting on his bench, probably sound asleep. Then the gamin\r
-emerged from his thicket, and began to crawl after Montparnasse in the\r
-dark, as the latter stood there motionless. In this manner he came up\r
-to Montparnasse without being seen or heard, gently insinuated his hand\r
-into the back pocket of that frock-coat of fine black cloth, seized the\r
-purse, withdrew his hand, and having recourse once more to his crawling,\r
-he slipped away like an adder through the shadows. Montparnasse, who\r
-had no reason to be on his guard, and who was engaged in thought for the\r
-first time in his life, perceived nothing. When Gavroche had once more\r
-attained the point where Father Mabeuf was, he flung the purse over the\r
-hedge, and fled as fast as his legs would carry him.\r
-\r
-The purse fell on Father Mabeuf's foot. This commotion roused him.\r
-\r
-He bent over and picked up the purse.\r
-\r
-He did not understand in the least, and opened it.\r
-\r
-The purse had two compartments; in one of them there was some small\r
-change; in the other lay six napoleons.\r
-\r
-M. Mabeuf, in great alarm, referred the matter to his housekeeper.\r
-\r
-"That has fallen from heaven," said Mother Plutarque.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED\r
-\r
-Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five\r
-months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact, entered\r
-upon its convalescence. Nature, spring, youth, love for her father,\r
-the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something almost resembling\r
-forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop, into that soul, which\r
-was so virgin and so young. Was the fire wholly extinct there? Or was\r
-it merely that layers of ashes had formed? The truth is, that she hardly\r
-felt the painful and burning spot any longer.\r
-\r
-One day she suddenly thought of Marius: "Why!" said she, "I no longer\r
-think of him."\r
-\r
-That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers, with\r
-a wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl, a\r
-sword under his arm, waxed mustaches, and a glazed schapka, passing the\r
-gate. Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes, a round face,\r
-was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse of Marius. He\r
-had a cigar in his mouth. Cosette thought that this officer doubtless\r
-belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue de Babylone.\r
-\r
-On the following day, she saw him pass again. She took note of the hour.\r
-\r
-From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.\r
-\r
-The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in that "badly kept"\r
-garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature,\r
-who was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,--who is not\r
-unknown to the reader, and whose name was Theodule Gillenormand,--passed\r
-by.\r
-\r
-"See here!" they said to him, "there's a little creature there who is\r
-making eyes at you, look."\r
-\r
-"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls who\r
-look at me?"\r
-\r
-This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily\r
-towards agony, and was saying: "If I could but see her before I\r
-die!"--Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment\r
-gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word, and\r
-he would have expired with grief.\r
-\r
-Whose fault was it? No one's.\r
-\r
-Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in\r
-sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons who plunge into\r
-sorrow and emerge from it again.\r
-\r
-Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal\r
-phase of feminine revery abandoned to itself, in which the isolated\r
-heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling,\r
-as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of\r
-a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be\r
-she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances\r
-are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as\r
-many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune,\r
-is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand\r
-ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who\r
-has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but\r
-inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a\r
-block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the\r
-post of a drinking-shop.\r
-\r
-What did Cosette's soul contain? Passion calmed or lulled to sleep;\r
-something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth, and gloomy\r
-lower down. The image of the handsome officer was reflected in\r
-the surface. Did a souvenir linger in the depths?--Quite at the\r
-bottom?--Possibly. Cosette did not know.\r
-\r
-A singular incident supervened.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS\r
-\r
-During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. This,\r
-as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long intervals.\r
-He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. Where did he go? No\r
-one knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on the occasion of one of these\r
-departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as far as a\r
-little blind-alley at the corner of which she read: Impasse de la\r
-Planchette. There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back to the\r
-Rue de Babylone. It was usually when money was lacking in the house that\r
-Jean Valjean took these little trips.\r
-\r
-So Jean Valjean was absent. He had said: "I shall return in three days."\r
-\r
-That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get\r
-rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun to sing,\r
-accompanying herself the while, the chorus from Euryanthe: "Hunters\r
-astray in the wood!" which is probably the most beautiful thing in all\r
-the sphere of music. When she had finished, she remained wrapped in\r
-thought.\r
-\r
-All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps in\r
-the garden.\r
-\r
-It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,\r
-she was in bed, and it was ten o'clock at night.\r
-\r
-She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and\r
-laid her ear against it.\r
-\r
-It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was walking\r
-very softly.\r
-\r
-She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber, opened a\r
-small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was at\r
-the full. Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.\r
-\r
-There was no one there.\r
-\r
-She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was\r
-visible was that the street was deserted as usual.\r
-\r
-Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought that she had\r
-heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and\r
-magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified\r
-depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in which\r
-one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread of the\r
-huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.\r
-\r
-She thought no more about it.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her\r
-veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs\r
-barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove.\r
-There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.\r
-\r
-On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was\r
-strolling in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which\r
-occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound similar\r
-to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were walking\r
-beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but she told\r
-herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass as the\r
-friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and she\r
-paid no heed to it. Besides, she could see nothing.\r
-\r
-She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn to\r
-regain the steps.\r
-\r
-The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow in\r
-front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.\r
-\r
-Cosette halted in alarm.\r
-\r
-Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another\r
-shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which\r
-had a round hat.\r
-\r
-It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border of\r
-the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.\r
-\r
-She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or\r
-stir, or turn her head.\r
-\r
-Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.\r
-\r
-There was no one there.\r
-\r
-She glanced on the ground. The figure had disappeared.\r
-\r
-She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as\r
-the gate, and found nothing.\r
-\r
-She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another\r
-hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might\r
-pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that\r
-the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom. Phantoms do not wear round\r
-hats.\r
-\r
-On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she\r
-thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see\r
-her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: "You are a little goose."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean grew anxious.\r
-\r
-"It cannot be anything," said he.\r
-\r
-He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw\r
-him examining the gate with great attention.\r
-\r
-During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly\r
-heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window.\r
-She ran to her little wicket and opened it. In point of fact, there\r
-was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand. Just as she\r
-was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile. It was her\r
-father. She returned to her bed, saying to herself: "He is very uneasy!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the\r
-garden. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.\r
-\r
-On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise\r
-later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst\r
-of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--\r
-\r
-"Cosette!"\r
-\r
-She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her\r
-window.\r
-\r
-Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.\r
-\r
-"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he; "look,\r
-there is your shadow with the round hat."\r
-\r
-And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and\r
-which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man\r
-wearing a round hat. It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of\r
-sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.\r
-\r
-Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were\r
-allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father,\r
-she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron\r
-chimney-pots.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did\r
-not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was\r
-really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she\r
-had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the sky.\r
-\r
-She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot\r
-which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some\r
-one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when Cosette\r
-had turned round, and Cosette had thought herself very sure of this.\r
-Cosette's serenity was fully restored. The proof appeared to her to\r
-be complete, and it quite vanished from her mind, whether there could\r
-possibly be any one walking in the garden during the evening or at\r
-night.\r
-\r
-A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT\r
-\r
-In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench,\r
-screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms,\r
-but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from the\r
-outside, past the trees and the gate.\r
-\r
-One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out;\r
-Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. The breeze was\r
-blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating; an objectless\r
-sadness was taking possession of her little by little, that invincible\r
-sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises, perhaps, who knows,\r
-from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at that hour.\r
-\r
-Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.\r
-\r
-Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on the\r
-grass drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the species of\r
-melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: "Really, one needs\r
-wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. One takes cold."\r
-\r
-She returned to the bench.\r
-\r
-As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the spot\r
-which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had, evidently, not\r
-been there a moment before.\r
-\r
-Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant. All at once\r
-the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench all by\r
-itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been thrust\r
-through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her. This time, the\r
-fear was genuine; the stone was there. No doubt was possible; she did\r
-not touch it, fled without glancing behind her, took refuge in the\r
-house, and immediately closed with shutter, bolt, and bar the door-like\r
-window opening on the flight of steps. She inquired of Toussaint:--\r
-\r
-"Has my father returned yet?"\r
-\r
-"Not yet, Mademoiselle."\r
-\r
-[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered.\r
-May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future. The musical\r
-notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often\r
-returned quite late at night.\r
-\r
-"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly barricade\r
-the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars, in the evening,\r
-and to put the little iron things in the little rings that close them?"\r
-\r
-"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."\r
-\r
-Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware of the\r
-fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--\r
-\r
-"It is so solitary here."\r
-\r
-"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true. We might be\r
-assassinated before we had time to say ouf! And Monsieur does not sleep\r
-in the house, to boot. But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the shutters up\r
-like prisons. Lone women! That is enough to make one shudder, I believe\r
-you! Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter your chamber at\r
-night and say: 'Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut your throat. It's\r
-not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and that's all right;\r
-it's the abomination of feeling those people touch you. And then, their\r
-knives; they can't be able to cut well with them! Ah, good gracious!"\r
-\r
-"Be quiet," said Cosette. "Fasten everything thoroughly."\r
-\r
-Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and\r
-possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past week,\r
-which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: "Go and look at\r
-the stone which has been placed on the bench!" for fear of opening the\r
-garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter. She saw that all the doors\r
-and windows were carefully fastened, made Toussaint go all over the\r
-house from garret to cellar, locked herself up in her own chamber,\r
-bolted her door, looked under her couch, went to bed and slept badly.\r
-All night long she saw that big stone, as large as a mountain and full\r
-of caverns.\r
-\r
-At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh at all\r
-our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct proportion\r
-to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette, when she\r
-woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: "What have\r
-I been thinking of? It is like the footsteps that I thought I heard a\r
-week or two ago in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the\r
-chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?" The sun, which was glowing through\r
-the crevices in her shutters, and turning the damask curtains crimson,\r
-reassured her to such an extent that everything vanished from her\r
-thoughts, even the stone.\r
-\r
-"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round\r
-hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest."\r
-\r
-She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench, and\r
-broke out in a cold perspiration. The stone was there.\r
-\r
-But this lasted only for a moment. That which is terror by night is\r
-curiosity by day.\r
-\r
-"Bah!" said she, "come, let us see what it is."\r
-\r
-She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large. Beneath it was\r
-something which resembled a letter. It was a white envelope. Cosette\r
-seized it. There was no address on one side, no seal on the other.\r
-Yet the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. Papers could be seen\r
-inside.\r
-\r
-Cosette examined it. It was no longer alarm, it was no longer curiosity;\r
-it was a beginning of anxiety.\r
-\r
-Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook of paper,\r
-each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines in a very fine and\r
-rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.\r
-\r
-Cosette looked for a name; there was none. To whom was this addressed?\r
-To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench.\r
-From whom did it come? An irresistible fascination took possession\r
-of her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were\r
-trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias\r
-all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,\r
-and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to\r
-herself that she must know what it contained.\r
-\r
-This is what she read.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--A HEART BENEATH A STONE\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Cosette with Letter 4b4-5-cosette-after-letter]\r
-\r
-The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a\r
-single being even to God, that is love.\r
-\r
-\r
-Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.\r
-\r
-\r
-How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!\r
-\r
-\r
-What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the\r
-world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could\r
-comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of\r
-all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.\r
-\r
-\r
-The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain\r
-is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.\r
-\r
-\r
-God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are\r
-black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being\r
-transparent.\r
-\r
-\r
-Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the\r
-attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.\r
-\r
-\r
-Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which\r
-possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing\r
-each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude\r
-of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the\r
-birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of\r
-the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.\r
-And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is\r
-sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.\r
-\r
-Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.\r
-\r
-\r
-The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that\r
-is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite,\r
-the inexhaustible is requisite.\r
-\r
-\r
-Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like\r
-it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,\r
-imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is\r
-immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can\r
-extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and\r
-we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.\r
-\r
-\r
-Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each\r
-other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances\r
-which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!\r
-strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have\r
-sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from\r
-the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of\r
-men.\r
-\r
-\r
-God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give\r
-them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in\r
-fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable\r
-felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is\r
-impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the\r
-plenitude of man.\r
-\r
-\r
-You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because\r
-it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater\r
-mystery, woman.\r
-\r
-\r
-All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack\r
-air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.\r
-Suffocation of the soul.\r
-\r
-\r
-When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic\r
-unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are\r
-concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of\r
-the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the\r
-same spirit. Love, soar.\r
-\r
-\r
-On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she\r
-walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to\r
-think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.\r
-\r
-\r
-What love commences can be finished by God alone.\r
-\r
-\r
-True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a\r
-handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its\r
-hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely\r
-little.\r
-\r
-\r
-If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive\r
-plant; if you are a man, be love.\r
-\r
-\r
-Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we\r
-possess paradise, we desire heaven.\r
-\r
-Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand\r
-how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more\r
-than heaven, it has voluptuousness.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church\r
-where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Does\r
-she still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she gone\r
-to dwell?"\r
-\r
-"She did not say."\r
-\r
-What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!\r
-\r
-Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame\r
-on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child\r
-of him!\r
-\r
-\r
-There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There\r
-is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.\r
-\r
-\r
-Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand\r
-in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a\r
-finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!\r
-\r
-\r
-Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live\r
-in it.\r
-\r
-\r
-Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.\r
-There is ecstasy in agony.\r
-\r
-\r
-Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.\r
-\r
-\r
-Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.\r
-\r
-\r
-Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long\r
-trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This\r
-destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the\r
-tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the\r
-definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive\r
-the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead.\r
-In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to\r
-him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will\r
-deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.\r
-\r
-\r
-I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His\r
-hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled\r
-through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.\r
-\r
-\r
-What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is\r
-to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer\r
-composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything\r
-that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more\r
-germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,\r
-inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds\r
-and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its\r
-vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels\r
-anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests\r
-of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.\r
-\r
-\r
-If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER\r
-\r
-As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought. At the very moment\r
-when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the\r
-handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,--it was his\r
-hour; Cosette thought him hideous.\r
-\r
-She resumed her contemplation of the book. It was written in the most\r
-charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with\r
-divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been\r
-added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days. It was,\r
-then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh, irregularly,\r
-without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard. Cosette\r
-had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she already\r
-perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a\r
-half-open sanctuary. Each one of these mysterious lines shone before\r
-her eyes and inundated her heart with a strange radiance. The education\r
-which she had received had always talked to her of the soul, and never\r
-of love, very much as one might talk of the firebrand and not of the\r
-flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed\r
-to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning,\r
-the end. It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly flung upon her\r
-a handful of rays of light. In these few lines she felt a passionate,\r
-ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, an immense sorrow, and\r
-an immense despair, a suffering heart, an ecstasy fully expanded. What\r
-was this manuscript? A letter. A letter without name, without address,\r
-without date, without signature, pressing and disinterested, an enigma\r
-composed of truths, a message of love made to be brought by an angel and\r
-read by a virgin, an appointment made beyond the bounds of earth, the\r
-love-letter of a phantom to a shade. It was an absent one, tranquil and\r
-dejected, who seemed ready to take refuge in death and who sent to the\r
-absent love, his lady, the secret of fate, the key of life, love. This\r
-had been written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven.\r
-These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what might\r
-be called drops of soul.\r
-\r
-Now, from whom could these pages come? Who could have penned them?\r
-\r
-Cosette did not hesitate a moment. One man only.\r
-\r
-He!\r
-\r
-Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. She felt an\r
-unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish. It was he! he who had written!\r
-he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust through that railing!\r
-While she was forgetful of him, he had found her again! But had she\r
-forgotten him? No, never! She was foolish to have thought so for a\r
-single moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire had\r
-been smothered, and had smouldered for a time, but she saw all plainly\r
-now; it had but made headway, and now it had burst forth afresh, and\r
-had inflamed her whole being. This note-book was like a spark which\r
-had fallen from that other soul into hers. She felt the conflagration\r
-starting up once more.\r
-\r
-She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: "Oh\r
-yes!" said she, "how perfectly I recognize all that! That is what I had\r
-already read in his eyes." As she was finishing it for the third time,\r
-Lieutenant Theodule passed the gate once more, and rattled his spurs\r
-upon the pavement. Cosette was forced to raise her eyes. She thought him\r
-insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and\r
-extremely ugly. The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.\r
-\r
-She turned away as in shame and indignation. She would gladly have\r
-thrown something at his head.\r
-\r
-She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her chamber to\r
-peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart, and to dream.\r
-When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed it and put it in her\r
-bosom.\r
-\r
-All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. The\r
-abyss of Eden had yawned once more.\r
-\r
-All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. She scarcely\r
-thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled skein in her brain,\r
-she could not manage to conjecture anything, she hoped through a tremor,\r
-what? vague things. She dared make herself no promises, and she did\r
-not wish to refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over her\r
-countenance, and shivers ran through her frame. It seemed to her, at\r
-intervals, that she was entering the land of chimaeras; she said to\r
-herself: "Is this reality?" Then she felt of the dear paper within her\r
-bosom under her gown, she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles\r
-against her flesh; and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he\r
-would have shuddered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy,\r
-which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.--"Oh yes!" she thought, "it\r
-is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for me!"\r
-\r
-And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a celestial\r
-chance, had given him back to her.\r
-\r
-Oh transfiguration of love! Oh dreams! That celestial chance, that\r
-intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed by one thief to\r
-another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard to the Lion's Ditch, over\r
-the roofs of La Force.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY\r
-\r
-When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She\r
-arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on a dress\r
-whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much, and which,\r
-through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning of her throat, and\r
-was, as young girls say, "a trifle indecent." It was not in the least\r
-indecent, but it was prettier than usual. She made her toilet thus\r
-without knowing why she did so.\r
-\r
-Did she mean to go out? No.\r
-\r
-Was she expecting a visitor? No.\r
-\r
-At dusk, she went down to the garden. Toussaint was busy in her kitchen,\r
-which opened on the back yard.\r
-\r
-She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside the branches\r
-from time to time with her hand, because there were some which hung very\r
-low.\r
-\r
-In this manner she reached the bench.\r
-\r
-The stone was still there.\r
-\r
-She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though she\r
-wished to caress and thank it.\r
-\r
-All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one\r
-undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she does\r
-not see the person.\r
-\r
-She turned her head and rose to her feet.\r
-\r
-It was he.\r
-\r
-His head was bare. He appeared to have grown thin and pale. His black\r
-clothes were hardly discernible. The twilight threw a wan light on\r
-his fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. Beneath a veil of\r
-incomparable sweetness, he had something about him that suggested death\r
-and night. His face was illuminated by the light of the dying day, and\r
-by the thought of a soul that is taking flight.\r
-\r
-He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.\r
-\r
-He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.\r
-\r
-Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry. She retreated slowly,\r
-for she felt herself attracted. He did not stir. By virtue of something\r
-ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his\r
-eyes which she could not see.\r
-\r
-Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. Had\r
-it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.\r
-\r
-Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,\r
-barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:--\r
-\r
-"Pardon me, here I am. My heart is full. I could not live on as I was\r
-living, and I have come. Have you read what I placed there on the bench?\r
-Do you recognize me at all? Have no fear of me. It is a long time, you\r
-remember the day, since you looked at me at the Luxembourg, near the\r
-Gladiator. And the day when you passed before me? It was on the 16th of\r
-June and the 2d of July. It is nearly a year ago. I have not seen you\r
-for a long time. I inquired of the woman who let the chairs, and she\r
-told me that she no longer saw you. You lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, on\r
-the third floor, in the front apartments of a new house,--you see that\r
-I know! I followed you. What else was there for me to do? And then you\r
-disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once, while I was reading the\r
-newspapers under the arcade of the Odeon. I ran after you. But no. It\r
-was a person who had a bonnet like yours. At night I came hither. Do\r
-not be afraid, no one sees me. I come to gaze upon your windows near\r
-at hand. I walk very softly, so that you may not hear, for you might be\r
-alarmed. The other evening I was behind you, you turned round, I fled.\r
-Once, I heard you singing. I was happy. Did it affect you because I\r
-heard you singing through the shutters? That could not hurt you. No,\r
-it is not so? You see, you are my angel! Let me come sometimes; I think\r
-that I am going to die. If you only knew! I adore you. Forgive me, I\r
-speak to you, but I do not know what I am saying; I may have displeased\r
-you; have I displeased you?"\r
-\r
-"Oh! my mother!" said she.\r
-\r
-And she sank down as though on the point of death.\r
-\r
-He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her close,\r
-without knowing what he was doing. He supported her, though he was\r
-tottering himself. It was as though his brain were full of smoke;\r
-lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed to him\r
-that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he was committing\r
-a profanation. Moreover, he had not the least passion for this lovely\r
-woman whose force he felt against his breast. He was beside himself with\r
-love.\r
-\r
-She took his hand and laid it on her heart. He felt the paper there, he\r
-stammered:--\r
-\r
-"You love me, then?"\r
-\r
-She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than a\r
-barely audible breath:--\r
-\r
-"Hush! Thou knowest it!"\r
-\r
-And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb and\r
-intoxicated young man.\r
-\r
-He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The\r
-stars were beginning to gleam. How did it come to pass that their lips\r
-met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that\r
-the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind the\r
-black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?\r
-\r
-A kiss, and that was all.\r
-\r
-Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.\r
-\r
-They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp\r
-earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts\r
-were full of thoughts. They had clasped hands unconsciously.\r
-\r
-She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there,\r
-and how he had made his way into the garden. It seemed so simple to her\r
-that he should be there!\r
-\r
-From time to time, Marius' knee touched Cosette's knee, and both\r
-shivered.\r
-\r
-At intervals, Cosette stammered a word. Her soul fluttered on her lips\r
-like a drop of dew on a flower.\r
-\r
-Little by little they began to talk to each other. Effusion followed\r
-silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid overhead.\r
-These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their\r
-dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras, their\r
-weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had\r
-longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each\r
-other. They confided to each other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing\r
-could augment, their most secret and most mysterious thoughts. They\r
-related to each other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that\r
-love, youth, and the remains of childhood which still lingered about\r
-them, suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves out\r
-into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a quarter of an\r
-hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's soul, and the young\r
-girl who had the young man's soul. Each became permeated with the other,\r
-they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.\r
-\r
-When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she\r
-laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:--\r
-\r
-"What is your name?"\r
-\r
-"My name is Marius," said he. "And yours?"\r
-\r
-"My name is Cosette."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND\r
-\r
-Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way to shipwreck\r
-and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but\r
-in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thenardier pair had had two other\r
-children; both males. That made five; two girls and three boys.\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier had got rid of the last two, while they were still\r
-young and very small, with remarkable luck.\r
-\r
-Got rid of is the word. There was but a mere fragment of nature in that\r
-woman. A phenomenon, by the way, of which there is more than one example\r
-extant. Like the Marechale de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the Thenardier was\r
-a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity ended. Her hatred of\r
-the human race began with her own sons. In the direction of her sons her\r
-evil disposition was uncompromising, and her heart had a lugubrious wall\r
-in that quarter. As the reader has seen, she detested the eldest; she\r
-cursed the other two. Why? Because. The most terrible of motives, the\r
-most unanswerable of retorts--Because. "I have no need of a litter of\r
-squalling brats," said this mother.\r
-\r
-Let us explain how the Thenardiers had succeeded in getting rid of their\r
-last two children; and even in drawing profit from the operation.\r
-\r
-The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back, was the\r
-same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two\r
-children which she had had. She lived on the Quai des Celestins, at the\r
-corner of this ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded her the\r
-opportunity of changing her evil repute into good odor. The reader will\r
-remember the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts\r
-of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago, and of which science took\r
-advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the efficacy of\r
-inhalations of alum, so beneficially replaced at the present day by the\r
-external tincture of iodine. During this epidemic, the Magnon lost both\r
-her boys, who were still very young, one in the morning, the other\r
-in the evening of the same day. This was a blow. These children were\r
-precious to their mother; they represented eighty francs a month. These\r
-eighty francs were punctually paid in the name of M. Gillenormand, by\r
-collector of his rents, M. Barge, a retired tip-staff, in the Rue du\r
-Roi-de-Sicile. The children dead, the income was at an end. The Magnon\r
-sought an expedient. In that dark free-masonry of evil of which she\r
-formed a part, everything is known, all secrets are kept, and all lend\r
-mutual aid. Magnon needed two children; the Thenardiers had two.\r
-The same sex, the same age. A good arrangement for the one, a good\r
-investment for the other. The little Thenardiers became little Magnons.\r
-Magnon quitted the Quai des Celestins and went to live in the Rue\r
-Clocheperce. In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to himself\r
-is broken between one street and another.\r
-\r
-The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections, and\r
-the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in the world.\r
-Only, the Thenardier exacted for this loan of her children, ten francs a\r
-month, which Magnon promised to pay, and which she actually did pay.\r
-It is unnecessary to add that M. Gillenormand continued to perform\r
-his compact. He came to see the children every six months. He did not\r
-perceive the change. "Monsieur," Magnon said to him, "how much they\r
-resemble you!"\r
-\r
-Thenardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion to become\r
-Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to\r
-discover that they had two little brothers. When a certain degree\r
-of misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort of spectral\r
-indifference, and one regards human beings as though they were spectres.\r
-Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague shadowy\r
-forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of life and easily\r
-confounded again with the invisible.\r
-\r
-On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two little\r
-ones to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them forever, the\r
-Thenardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple. She said to her\r
-husband: "But this is abandoning our children!" Thenardier, masterful\r
-and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this saying: "Jean Jacques\r
-Rousseau did even better!" From scruples, the mother proceeded to\r
-uneasiness: "But what if the police were to annoy us? Tell me, Monsieur\r
-Thenardier, is what we have done permissible?" Thenardier replied:\r
-"Everything is permissible. No one will see anything but true blue in\r
-it. Besides, no one has any interest in looking closely after children\r
-who have not a sou."\r
-\r
-Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime. She was\r
-careful about her toilet. She shared her lodgings, which were furnished\r
-in an affected and wretched style, with a clever gallicized English\r
-thief. This English woman, who had become a naturalized Parisienne,\r
-recommended by very wealthy relations, intimately connected with the\r
-medals in the Library and Mademoiselle Mar's diamonds, became celebrated\r
-later on in judicial accounts. She was called Mamselle Miss.\r
-\r
-The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason to\r
-complain of their lot. Recommended by the eighty francs, they were well\r
-cared for, as is everything from which profit is derived; they were\r
-neither badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated almost like\r
-"little gentlemen,"--better by their false mother than by their real\r
-one. Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves' slang in their\r
-presence.\r
-\r
-Thus passed several years. Thenardier augured well from the fact. One\r
-day, he chanced to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly stipend\r
-of ten francs: "The father must give them some education."\r
-\r
-All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time been\r
-protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly hurled\r
-into life and forced to begin it for themselves.\r
-\r
-A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret,\r
-necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent incarcerations,\r
-is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society\r
-which pursues its existence beneath public society; an adventure of this\r
-description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that sombre world. The\r
-Thenardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of Magnon.\r
-\r
-\r
-One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Eponine the note\r
-relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by the police in the\r
-Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also Mamselle Miss; and all\r
-the inhabitants of the house, which was of a suspicious character, were\r
-gathered into the net. While this was going on, the two little boys were\r
-playing in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. When they tried\r
-to enter the house again, they found the door fastened and the house\r
-empty. A cobbler opposite called them to him, and delivered to them a\r
-paper which "their mother" had left for them. On this paper there was an\r
-address: M. Barge, collector of rents, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, No. 8. The\r
-proprietor of the stall said to them: "You cannot live here any longer.\r
-Go there. It is near by. The first street on the left. Ask your way from\r
-this paper."\r
-\r
-The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his\r
-hand the paper which was to guide them. It was cold, and his benumbed\r
-little fingers could not close very firmly, and they did not keep a very\r
-good hold on the paper. At the corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust of\r
-wind tore it from him, and as night was falling, the child was not able\r
-to find it again.\r
-\r
-They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE\r
-GREAT\r
-\r
-Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which\r
-do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden\r
-the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs of\r
-cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly fitting\r
-door or window. It seems as though the gloomy door of winter had\r
-remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. In the\r
-spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic of this century\r
-broke out in Europe, these north gales were more harsh and piercing\r
-than ever. It was a door even more glacial than that of winter which\r
-was ajar. It was the door of the sepulchre. In these winds one felt the\r
-breath of the cholera.\r
-\r
-From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed this\r
-peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension.\r
-Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth at\r
-this epoch.\r
-\r
-One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree that\r
-January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had resumed their\r
-cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering gayly under his rags,\r
-was standing as though in ecstasy before a wig-maker's shop in the\r
-vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was adorned with a woman's\r
-woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where, and which he had converted\r
-into a neck comforter. Little Gavroche appeared to be engaged in intent\r
-admiration of a wax bride, in a low-necked dress, and crowned with\r
-orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her\r
-smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was\r
-taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he\r
-could not "prig" from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then\r
-proceed to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs. He had\r
-often managed to breakfast off of such a roll. He called his species of\r
-work, for which he possessed special aptitude, "shaving barbers."\r
-\r
-While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered\r
-between his teeth: "Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps\r
-it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday."\r
-\r
-No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.\r
-\r
-Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last\r
-occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now\r
-Friday.\r
-\r
-The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving\r
-a customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy, that\r
-freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were in his\r
-pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.\r
-\r
-While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of windsor\r
-soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed, and still\r
-smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years of age, the other\r
-five, timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, with a request for\r
-something or other, alms possibly, in a plaintive murmur which resembled\r
-a groan rather than a prayer. They both spoke at once, and their words\r
-were unintelligible because sobs broke the voice of the younger, and the\r
-teeth of the elder were chattering with cold. The barber wheeled round\r
-with a furious look, and without abandoning his razor, thrust back the\r
-elder with his left hand and the younger with his knee, and slammed\r
-his door, saying: "The idea of coming in and freezing everybody for\r
-nothing!"\r
-\r
-The two children resumed their march in tears. In the meantime, a cloud\r
-had risen; it had begun to rain.\r
-\r
-Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:--\r
-\r
-"What's the matter with you, brats?"\r
-\r
-"We don't know where we are to sleep," replied the elder.\r
-\r
-"Is that all?" said Gavroche. "A great matter, truly. The idea of\r
-bawling about that. They must be greenies!"\r
-\r
-And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather\r
-bantering, an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:--\r
-\r
-"Come along with me, young 'uns!"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir," said the elder.\r
-\r
-And the two children followed him as they would have followed an\r
-archbishop. They had stopped crying.\r
-\r
-Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the\r
-Bastille.\r
-\r
-As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance at the\r
-barber's shop.\r
-\r
-"That fellow has no heart, the whiting,"[35] he muttered. "He's an\r
-Englishman."\r
-\r
-A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file, with\r
-Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter. This laugh was\r
-wanting in respect towards the group.\r
-\r
-"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.\r
-\r
-An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more, and he\r
-added:--\r
-\r
-"I am making a mistake in the beast; he's not a whiting, he's a serpent.\r
-Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and I'll have a bell hung to your\r
-tail."\r
-\r
-This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive. As he strode over a gutter,\r
-he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy to meet Faust on the\r
-Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.\r
-\r
-"Madam," said he, "so you are going out with your horse?"\r
-\r
-And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.\r
-\r
-"You scamp!" shouted the furious pedestrian.\r
-\r
-Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.\r
-\r
-"Is Monsieur complaining?"\r
-\r
-"Of you!" ejaculated the man.\r
-\r
-"The office is closed," said Gavroche, "I do not receive any more\r
-complaints."\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a\r
-beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short a\r
-gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled under a\r
-porte-cochere. The little girl was getting to be too old for such a\r
-thing. Growth does play these tricks. The petticoat becomes short at the\r
-moment when nudity becomes indecent.\r
-\r
-"Poor girl!" said Gavroche. "She hasn't even trousers. Hold on, take\r
-this."\r
-\r
-And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck,\r
-he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl, where\r
-the scarf became a shawl once more.\r
-\r
-The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl in\r
-silence. When a certain stage of distress has been reached in his\r
-misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer returns\r
-thanks for good.\r
-\r
-That done: "Brrr!" said Gavroche, who was shivering more than Saint\r
-Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.\r
-\r
-At this brrr! the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite, became\r
-furious. The wicked skies punish good deeds.\r
-\r
-"Ah, come now!" exclaimed Gavroche, "what's the meaning of this? It's\r
-re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop my\r
-subscription."\r
-\r
-And he set out on the march once more.\r
-\r
-"It's all right," he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl, as\r
-she coiled up under the shawl, "she's got a famous peel."\r
-\r
-And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Caught!"\r
-\r
-The two children followed close on his heels.\r
-\r
-As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices, which indicate\r
-a baker's shop, for bread is put behind bars like gold, Gavroche turned\r
-round:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," replied the elder, "we have had nothing to eat since this\r
-morning."\r
-\r
-"So you have neither father nor mother?" resumed Gavroche majestically.\r
-\r
-"Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don't know where\r
-they are."\r
-\r
-"Sometimes that's better than knowing where they are," said Gavroche,\r
-who was a thinker.\r
-\r
-"We have been wandering about these two hours," continued the elder, "we\r
-have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we have found\r
-nothing."\r
-\r
-"I know," ejaculated Gavroche, "it's the dogs who eat everything."\r
-\r
-He went on, after a pause:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! we have lost our authors. We don't know what we have done with\r
-them. This should not be, gamins. It's stupid to let old people stray\r
-off like that. Come now! we must have a snooze all the same."\r
-\r
-However, he asked them no questions. What was more simple than that they\r
-should have no dwelling place!\r
-\r
-The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered the\r
-prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:--\r
-\r
-"It's queer, all the same. Mamma told us that she would take us to get a\r
-blessed spray on Palm Sunday."\r
-\r
-"Bosh," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"Mamma," resumed the elder, "is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."\r
-\r
-"Tanflute!" retorted Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been\r
-feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.\r
-\r
-At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied,\r
-but which was triumphant, in reality.\r
-\r
-"Let us be calm, young 'uns. Here's supper for three."\r
-\r
-And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.\r
-\r
-Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed both of\r
-them before him into the baker's shop, and flung his sou on the counter,\r
-crying:--\r
-\r
-"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."\r
-\r
-The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a knife.\r
-\r
-"In three pieces, my boy!" went on Gavroche.\r
-\r
-And he added with dignity:--\r
-\r
-"There are three of us."\r
-\r
-And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers, had\r
-taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose with\r
-an inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the great\r
-Frederick's snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this indignant\r
-apostrophe full in the baker's face:--\r
-\r
-"Keksekca?"\r
-\r
-Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this interpellation\r
-of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or a Polish word, or one of those\r
-savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl at each other from\r
-bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes, are warned that it is a\r
-word which they [our readers] utter every day, and which takes the place\r
-of the phrase: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?" The baker understood\r
-perfectly, and replied:--\r
-\r
-"Well! It's bread, and very good bread of the second quality."\r
-\r
-"You mean larton brutal [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche, calmly and\r
-coldly disdainful. "White bread, boy! white bread [larton savonne]! I'm\r
-standing treat."\r
-\r
-The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread he\r
-surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"Come, now, baker's boy!" said he, "what are you taking our measure like\r
-that for?"\r
-\r
-All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.\r
-\r
-When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer, and\r
-Gavroche said to the two children:--\r
-\r
-"Grub away."\r
-\r
-The little boys stared at him in surprise.\r
-\r
-Gavroche began to laugh.\r
-\r
-"Ah! hullo, that's so! they don't understand yet, they're too small."\r
-\r
-And he repeated:--\r
-\r
-"Eat away."\r
-\r
-At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.\r
-\r
-And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy of\r
-his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be\r
-relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added, as be\r
-handed him the largest share:--\r
-\r
-"Ram that into your muzzle."\r
-\r
-One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.\r
-\r
-The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished. As they tore their\r
-bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up the shop of the baker,\r
-who, now that they had paid their money, looked angrily at them.\r
-\r
-"Let's go into the street again," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.\r
-\r
-From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows, the smallest\r
-halted to look at the time on a leaden watch which was suspended from\r
-his neck by a cord.\r
-\r
-"Well, he is a very green 'un," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:--\r
-\r
-"All the same, if I had charge of the babes I'd lock 'em up better than\r
-that."\r
-\r
-Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached the\r
-angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end of which the low\r
-and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:--\r
-\r
-"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said some one.\r
-\r
-"Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no other\r
-than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles, but recognizable to\r
-Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"The bow-wows!" went on Gavroche, "you've got a hide the color of a\r
-linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor. You're putting on style,\r
-'pon my word!"\r
-\r
-"Hush!" ejaculated Montparnasse, "not so loud."\r
-\r
-And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.\r
-\r
-The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other by the\r
-hand.\r
-\r
-When they were ensconced under the arch of a portecochere, sheltered\r
-from the rain and from all eyes:--\r
-\r
-"Do you know where I'm going?" demanded Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-"To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,"[36] replied Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"Joker!"\r
-\r
-And Montparnasse went on:--\r
-\r
-"I'm going to find Babet."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" exclaimed Gavroche, "so her name is Babet."\r
-\r
-Montparnasse lowered his voice:--\r
-\r
-"Not she, he."\r
-\r
-"Ah! Babet."\r
-\r
-"Yes, Babet."\r
-\r
-"I thought he was buckled."\r
-\r
-"He has undone the buckle," replied Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very\r
-day, Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his\r
-escape, by turning to the left instead of to the right in "the police\r
-office."\r
-\r
-Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.\r
-\r
-"What a dentist!" he cried.\r
-\r
-Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet's flight, and ended with:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! That's not all."\r
-\r
-Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse held in\r
-his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part, and the blade of a\r
-dagger made its appearance.\r
-\r
-"Ah!" he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, "you have brought\r
-along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois."\r
-\r
-Montparnasse winked.\r
-\r
-"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "so you're going to have a bout with the\r
-bobbies?"\r
-\r
-"You can't tell," replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. "It's\r
-always a good thing to have a pin about one."\r
-\r
-Gavroche persisted:--\r
-\r
-"What are you up to to-night?"\r
-\r
-Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every syllable:\r
-"Things."\r
-\r
-And abruptly changing the conversation:--\r
-\r
-"By the way!"\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"Something happened t'other day. Fancy. I meet a bourgeois. He makes\r
-me a present of a sermon and his purse. I put it in my pocket. A minute\r
-later, I feel in my pocket. There's nothing there."\r
-\r
-"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"But you," went on Montparnasse, "where are you bound for now?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche pointed to his two proteges, and said:--\r
-\r
-"I'm going to put these infants to bed."\r
-\r
-"Whereabouts is the bed?"\r
-\r
-"At my house."\r
-\r
-"Where's your house?"\r
-\r
-"At my house."\r
-\r
-"So you have a lodging?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, I have."\r
-\r
-"And where is your lodging?"\r
-\r
-"In the elephant," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment, could not\r
-restrain an exclamation.\r
-\r
-"In the elephant!"\r
-\r
-"Well, yes, in the elephant!" retorted Gavroche. "Kekcaa?"\r
-\r
-This is another word of the language which no one writes, and which\r
-every one speaks.\r
-\r
-Kekcaa signifies: Quest que c'est que cela a? [What's the matter with\r
-that?]\r
-\r
-The urchin's profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness and\r
-good sense. He appeared to return to better sentiments with regard to\r
-Gavroche's lodging.\r
-\r
-"Of course," said he, "yes, the elephant. Is it comfortable there?"\r
-\r
-"Very," said Gavroche. "It's really bully there. There ain't any\r
-draughts, as there are under the bridges."\r
-\r
-"How do you get in?"\r
-\r
-"Oh, I get in."\r
-\r
-"So there is a hole?" demanded Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-"Parbleu! I should say so. But you mustn't tell. It's between the fore\r
-legs. The bobbies haven't seen it."\r
-\r
-"And you climb up? Yes, I understand."\r
-\r
-"A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it's all over, no one there."\r
-\r
-After a pause, Gavroche added:--\r
-\r
-"I shall have a ladder for these children."\r
-\r
-Montparnasse burst out laughing:--\r
-\r
-"Where the devil did you pick up those young 'uns?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche replied with great simplicity:--\r
-\r
-"They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of."\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:--\r
-\r
-"You recognized me very readily," he muttered.\r
-\r
-He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than\r
-two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.\r
-This gave him a different nose.\r
-\r
-"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you are less homely so, you\r
-ought to keep them on all the time."\r
-\r
-Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.\r
-\r
-"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do you like me so?"\r
-\r
-The sound of his voice was different also. In a twinkling, Montparnasse\r
-had become unrecognizable.\r
-\r
-"Oh! Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.\r
-\r
-The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being\r
-occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew\r
-near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and\r
-admiration.\r
-\r
-Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.\r
-\r
-He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing\r
-his words: "Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square with\r
-my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten sous on\r
-me, I wouldn't refuse to work, but this isn't Shrove Tuesday."\r
-\r
-This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He wheeled\r
-round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound\r
-attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to\r
-them a few paces off. Gavroche allowed an: "Ah! good!" to escape him,\r
-but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse's hand:--\r
-\r
-"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off to my elephant with my\r
-brats. Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and\r
-hunt me up there. I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter. You will\r
-inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."\r
-\r
-"Very good," said Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of\r
-the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille. The little one of five,\r
-dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his\r
-head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went.\r
-\r
-The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche\r
-of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than\r
-the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms. This\r
-syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words of\r
-a phrase, means: "Take care, we can no longer talk freely." There was\r
-besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty which was\r
-lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue, a slang\r
-expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my wife,\r
-greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great century\r
-when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.\r
-\r
-Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of\r
-the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the\r
-ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has\r
-already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved\r
-to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a "member of the Institute,\r
-the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."\r
-\r
-We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model\r
-itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of\r
-Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown,\r
-on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had\r
-acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional\r
-aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and\r
-masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly\r
-painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind,\r
-and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the\r
-broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his\r
-enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under\r
-the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was a sort of\r
-symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and immense. It was\r
-some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside\r
-the invisible spectre of the Bastille.\r
-\r
-Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was\r
-falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself\r
-from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. "The aediles," as the\r
-expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.\r
-There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded\r
-by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks\r
-meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass\r
-flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been\r
-rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and\r
-continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns,\r
-it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way\r
-beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the\r
-eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There was\r
-something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out,\r
-and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated.\r
-As we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is the real element\r
-of everything that is dark. As soon as twilight descended, the old\r
-elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable\r
-appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows. Being of the past,\r
-he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.\r
-\r
-This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but assuredly\r
-majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and savage\r
-gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of gigantic\r
-stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre fortress\r
-with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal\r
-classes. It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol of an\r
-epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass away, people\r
-have already begun to understand that, if there can be force in a\r
-boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other words,\r
-that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but ideas.\r
-Harness locomotives to ideas,--that is well done; but do not mistake the\r
-horse for the rider.\r
-\r
-At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect\r
-of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the\r
-architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of\r
-bronze.\r
-\r
-This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called\r
-the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried,\r
-was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we\r
-regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed the\r
-task of isolating the elephant.\r
-\r
-It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection\r
-of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two "brats."\r
-\r
-The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him\r
-that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the\r
-tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage,\r
-and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep\r
-in this very elephant of the Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.\r
-\r
-On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the\r
-effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small,\r
-and said:--\r
-\r
-"Don't be scared, infants."\r
-\r
-Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's enclosure\r
-and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. The two\r
-children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a\r
-word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which\r
-had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.\r
-\r
-There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day served\r
-the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche raised it with\r
-remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant's forelegs.\r
-Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole in the belly\r
-of the colossus could be distinguished.\r
-\r
-Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to\r
-them:--\r
-\r
-"Climb up and go in."\r
-\r
-The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.\r
-\r
-"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.\r
-\r
-And he added:--\r
-\r
-"You shall see!"\r
-\r
-He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling, without\r
-deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the aperture. He\r
-entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared within,\r
-and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which looked pale,\r
-appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish\r
-spectre.\r
-\r
-"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns! You'll see how snug it is\r
-here! Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend you a hand."\r
-\r
-The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and inspired\r
-them with confidence at one and the same time, and then, it was raining\r
-very hard. The elder one undertook the risk. The younger, on seeing his\r
-brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of this\r
-huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not dare.\r
-\r
-The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder;\r
-Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations like a\r
-fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.\r
-\r
-"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet there!--Give us\r
-your hand here!--Boldly!"\r
-\r
-And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly and\r
-vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.\r
-\r
-"Nabbed!" said he.\r
-\r
-The brat had passed through the crack.\r
-\r
-"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me. Be so good as to take a seat,\r
-Monsieur."\r
-\r
-And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped down\r
-the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on his feet in\r
-the grass, grasped the child of five round the body, and planted him\r
-fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began to climb up behind\r
-him, shouting to the elder:--\r
-\r
-"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."\r
-\r
-And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled,\r
-thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself,\r
-and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick\r
-which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--\r
-\r
-"Here we are! Long live General Lafayette!"\r
-\r
-This explosion over, he added:--\r
-\r
-"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."\r
-\r
-Gavroche was at home, in fact.\r
-\r
-Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless! Charity of great things! Goodness\r
-of giants! This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the\r
-Emperor's, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been\r
-accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in\r
-their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond\r
-of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes:\r
-"What's the good of that?" It served to save from the cold, the frost,\r
-the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve\r
-from slumber in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the\r
-snow which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother,\r
-no bread, no clothes, no refuge. It served to receive the innocent whom\r
-society repulsed. It served to diminish public crime. It was a lair\r
-open to one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed as though the\r
-miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with\r
-warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned,\r
-condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a\r
-benevolent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity on that\r
-other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes to his feet,\r
-without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed\r
-on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good\r
-for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by\r
-God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In order\r
-to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass,\r
-iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and plaster\r
-sufficed for God. The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that\r
-Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its\r
-tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters, he\r
-wished to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he\r
-had lodged a child there.\r
-\r
-The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was\r
-hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated,\r
-beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was only cats and\r
-homeless children who could pass through it.\r
-\r
-"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not at\r
-home."\r
-\r
-And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is\r
-well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped up the\r
-aperture.\r
-\r
-Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity. The children heard the\r
-crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical\r
-match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade steel\r
-represented progress.\r
-\r
-A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to ignite one\r
-of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called cellar rats. The\r
-cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered the interior\r
-of the elephant confusedly visible.\r
-\r
-Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation which they\r
-experienced was something like that which one would feel if shut up in\r
-the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still, like what Jonah must have\r
-felt in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic skeleton\r
-appeared enveloping them. Above, a long brown beam, whence started at\r
-regular distances, massive, arching ribs, represented the vertebral\r
-column with its sides, stalactites of plaster depended from them like\r
-entrails, and vast spiders' webs stretching from side to side, formed\r
-dirty diaphragms. Here and there, in the corners, were visible large\r
-blackish spots which had the appearance of being alive, and which\r
-changed places rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.\r
-\r
-Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his belly had\r
-filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it as on a\r
-floor.\r
-\r
-The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered to\r
-him:--\r
-\r
-"It's black."\r
-\r
-This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche. The petrified air of the\r
-two brats rendered some shock necessary.\r
-\r
-"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed. "Are\r
-you scoffing at me? Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the\r
-tuileries? Are you brutes? Come, say! I warn you that I don't belong to\r
-the regiment of simpletons. Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope's\r
-establishment?"\r
-\r
-A little roughness is good in cases of fear. It is reassuring. The two\r
-children drew close to Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave to\r
-gentle, and addressing the smaller:--\r
-\r
-"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing\r
-intonation, "it's outside that it is black. Outside it's raining, here\r
-it does not rain; outside it's cold, here there's not an atom of wind;\r
-outside there are heaps of people, here there's no one; outside there\r
-ain't even the moon, here there's my candle, confound it!"\r
-\r
-The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror; but\r
-Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.\r
-\r
-"Quick," said he.\r
-\r
-And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call the\r
-end of the room.\r
-\r
-There stood his bed.\r
-\r
-Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress, a\r
-blanket, and an alcove with curtains.\r
-\r
-The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip of\r
-gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new. This is what the alcove\r
-consisted of:--\r
-\r
-Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish\r
-which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant, two\r
-in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits, so as to\r
-form a pyramidal bundle. This cluster supported a trellis-work of brass\r
-wire which was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied, and held\r
-by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three holes. A row\r
-of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor so that nothing\r
-could pass under it. This grating was nothing else than a piece of the\r
-brass screens with which aviaries are covered in menageries. Gavroche's\r
-bed stood as in a cage, behind this net. The whole resembled an\r
-Esquimaux tent.\r
-\r
-This trellis-work took the place of curtains.\r
-\r
-Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front,\r
-and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.\r
-\r
-"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he crawled\r
-in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed the opening\r
-hermetically again.\r
-\r
-All three had stretched out on the mat. Gavroche still had the cellar\r
-rat in his hand.\r
-\r
-"Now," said he, "go to sleep! I'm going to suppress the candelabra."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the\r
-netting, "what's that for?"\r
-\r
-"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for the rats. Go to sleep!"\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction for the\r
-benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--\r
-\r
-"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes. It's used for fierce animals.\r
-There's a whole shopful of them there. All you've got to do is to climb\r
-over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door. You can\r
-get as much as you want."\r
-\r
-As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold of the\r
-blanket, and the little one murmured:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! how good that is! It's warm!"\r
-\r
-Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.\r
-\r
-"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said he. "I took that from\r
-the monkeys."\r
-\r
-And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying, a very\r
-thick and admirably made mat, he added:--\r
-\r
-"That belonged to the giraffe."\r
-\r
-After a pause he went on:--\r
-\r
-"The beasts had all these things. I took them away from them. It didn't\r
-trouble them. I told them: 'It's for the elephant.'"\r
-\r
-He paused, and then resumed:--\r
-\r
-"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw for the government.\r
-So there now!"\r
-\r
-The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this\r
-intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves, isolated\r
-like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something admirable\r
-and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural to them, and whose\r
-physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank,\r
-mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you are not afraid of the\r
-police, then?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche contented himself with replying:--\r
-\r
-"Brat! Nobody says 'police,' they say 'bobbies.'"\r
-\r
-The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As he was on\r
-the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the\r
-blanket round him as a mother might have done, and heightened the mat\r
-under his head with old rags, in such a way as to form a pillow for the\r
-child. Then he turned to the elder:--\r
-\r
-"Hey! We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"\r
-\r
-"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of\r
-a saved angel.\r
-\r
-The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow\r
-warm once more.\r
-\r
-"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what were you bawling about?"\r
-\r
-And pointing out the little one to his brother:--\r
-\r
-"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the idea of a big\r
-fellow like you crying! It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."\r
-\r
-"Gracious," replied the child, "we have no lodging."\r
-\r
-"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say 'lodgings,' you say 'crib.'"\r
-\r
-"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night."\r
-\r
-"You don't say 'night,' you say 'darkmans.'"\r
-\r
-"Thank you, sir," said the child.\r
-\r
-"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never bawl again over anything.\r
-I'll take care of you. You shall see what fun we'll have. In summer,\r
-we'll go to the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals, we'll bathe in\r
-the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at\r
-Austerlitz,--that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get\r
-mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the\r
-man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play. I'll take you to see\r
-Frederick Lemaitre. I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even\r
-played in a piece once. There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran\r
-under a cloth, and that made the sea. I'll get you an engagement at my\r
-theatre. We'll go to see the savages. They ain't real, those savages\r
-ain't. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you can see\r
-where their elbows have been darned with white. Then, we'll go to the\r
-Opera. We'll get in with the hired applauders. The Opera claque is well\r
-managed. I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard. At the\r
-Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies.\r
-They're called dishclouts. And then we'll go to see the guillotine work.\r
-I'll show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marais. Monsieur\r
-Sanson. He has a letter-box at his door. Ah! we'll have famous fun!"\r
-\r
-At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and recalled him\r
-to the realities of life.\r
-\r
-"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving out. Attention! I can't\r
-spend more than a sou a month on my lighting. When a body goes to bed,\r
-he must sleep. We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's\r
-romances. And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the\r
-porte-cochere, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."\r
-\r
-"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone dared talk to\r
-Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might fall in the straw, and we\r
-must look out and not burn the house down."\r
-\r
-"People don't say 'burn the house down,'" remarked Gavroche, "they say\r
-'blaze the crib.'"\r
-\r
-The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat upon the\r
-back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. "You're taken in, rain!"\r
-said Gavroche. "It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs of\r
-the house. Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses\r
-its labor, it can't wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old\r
-water-carrier that it is."\r
-\r
-This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche, in\r
-his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted, was\r
-followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a hint of it\r
-entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. Almost at the same\r
-instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. The two little creatures\r
-uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly that the network came near\r
-being displaced, but Gavroche turned his bold face to them, and took\r
-advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.\r
-\r
-"Calm down, children. Don't topple over the edifice. That's fine,\r
-first-class thunder; all right. That's no slouch of a streak of\r
-lightning. Bravo for the good God! Deuce take it! It's almost as good as\r
-it is at the Ambigu."\r
-\r
-That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children\r
-gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch them\r
-out at full length, and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Now,\r
-babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. It's very bad\r
-not to sleep. It'll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in\r
-fashionable society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the\r
-hide! I'm going to put out the light. Are you ready?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right. I seem to have feathers under\r
-my head."\r
-\r
-"People don't say 'head,'" cried Gavroche, "they say 'nut'."\r
-\r
-The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished\r
-arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then\r
-repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:--\r
-\r
-"Shut your peepers!"\r
-\r
-And he snuffed out his tiny light.\r
-\r
-Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began\r
-to affect the netting under which the three children lay.\r
-\r
-It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic\r
-sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was\r
-accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.\r
-\r
-The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and\r
-chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother\r
-had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little\r
-one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in\r
-a very low tone, and with bated breath:--\r
-\r
-"Sir?"\r
-\r
-"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.\r
-\r
-"What is that?"\r
-\r
-"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.\r
-\r
-And he laid his head down on the mat again.\r
-\r
-The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the\r
-elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already\r
-mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as\r
-it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same\r
-as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good\r
-story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in\r
-throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun\r
-to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.\r
-\r
-Still the little one could not sleep.\r
-\r
-"Sir?" he began again.\r
-\r
-"Hey?" said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"What are rats?"\r
-\r
-"They are mice."\r
-\r
-This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice in\r
-the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he\r
-lifted up his voice once more.\r
-\r
-"Sir?"\r
-\r
-"Hey?" said Gavroche again.\r
-\r
-"Why don't you have a cat?"\r
-\r
-"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate\r
-her."\r
-\r
-This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little\r
-fellow began to tremble again.\r
-\r
-The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur?"\r
-\r
-"Hey?"\r
-\r
-"Who was it that was eaten?"\r
-\r
-"The cat."\r
-\r
-"And who ate the cat?"\r
-\r
-"The rats."\r
-\r
-"The mice?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, the rats."\r
-\r
-The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate\r
-cats, pursued:--\r
-\r
-"Sir, would those mice eat us?"\r
-\r
-"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.\r
-\r
-The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:--\r
-\r
-"Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catch\r
-hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"\r
-\r
-At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand across his\r
-brother. The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.\r
-Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating\r
-themselves. Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their\r
-voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes,\r
-they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast\r
-asleep and heard nothing more.\r
-\r
-The hours of the night fled away. Darkness covered the vast Place de la\r
-Bastille. A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the\r
-patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks,\r
-and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence\r
-before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed\r
-into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good\r
-deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping\r
-children.\r
-\r
-In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must\r
-remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated at\r
-the other end of the square, and that what took place in the vicinity of\r
-the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.\r
-\r
-Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn, a\r
-man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit of the\r
-enclosure of the column of July, and glided between the palings until he\r
-was underneath the belly of the elephant. If any light had illuminated\r
-that man, it might have been divined from the thorough manner in which\r
-he was soaked that he had passed the night in the rain. Arrived beneath\r
-the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which did not belong to any\r
-human tongue, and which a paroquet alone could have imitated. Twice he\r
-repeated this cry, of whose orthography the following barely conveys an\r
-idea:--\r
-\r
-"Kirikikiou!"\r
-\r
-At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from the belly\r
-of the elephant:--\r
-\r
-"Yes!"\r
-\r
-Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,\r
-and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's leg, and fell\r
-briskly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-As for his cry of Kirikikiou,--that was, doubtless, what the child had\r
-meant, when he said:--\r
-\r
-"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."\r
-\r
-On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his\r
-"alcove," pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing it\r
-together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.\r
-\r
-The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom:\r
-Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--\r
-\r
-"We need you. Come, lend us a hand."\r
-\r
-The lad asked for no further enlightenment.\r
-\r
-"I'm with you," said he.\r
-\r
-And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence\r
-Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file of\r
-market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.\r
-\r
-The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons, amid the\r
-salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in their mufflers\r
-on account of the beating rain, did not even glance at these strange\r
-pedestrians.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT\r
-\r
-This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:--\r
-\r
-An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer, and\r
-Thenardier, although Thenardier was in close confinement. Babet had\r
-arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day, as the reader\r
-has seen from Montparnasse's account to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to\r
-help them from outside.\r
-\r
-Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell, had had\r
-time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second, to mature a\r
-plan. In former times, those severe places where the discipline of the\r
-prison delivers the convict into his own hands, were composed of four\r
-stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement, a camp bed, a grated\r
-window, and a door lined with iron, and were called dungeons; but the\r
-dungeon was judged to be too terrible; nowadays they are composed of an\r
-iron door, a grated window, a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone\r
-walls, and a stone ceiling, and are called chambers of punishment. A\r
-little light penetrates towards mid-day. The inconvenient point about\r
-these chambers which, as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that they\r
-allow the persons who should be at work to think.\r
-\r
-So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment with\r
-a rope. As he had the name of being very dangerous in the Charlemagne\r
-courtyard, he was placed in the New Building. The first thing he found\r
-in the New Building was Guelemer, the second was a nail; Guelemer, that\r
-is to say, crime; a nail, that is to say, liberty. Brujon, of whom it\r
-is high time that the reader should have a complete idea, was, with an\r
-appearance of delicate health and a profoundly premeditated languor, a\r
-polished, intelligent sprig, and a thief, who had a caressing glance,\r
-and an atrocious smile. His glance resulted from his will, and his\r
-smile from his nature. His first studies in his art had been directed\r
-to roofs. He had made great progress in the industry of the men who tear\r
-off lead, who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the process\r
-called double pickings.\r
-\r
-The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment peculiarly\r
-favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers were re-laying\r
-and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of the slates on the\r
-prison. The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer absolutely isolated\r
-from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. Up above there were\r
-scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the\r
-direction of liberty.\r
-\r
-The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be\r
-seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison. The walls\r
-were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the authorities had been\r
-obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories with a sheathing of wood,\r
-because stones were in the habit of becoming detached and falling on\r
-the prisoners in their beds. In spite of this antiquity, the authorities\r
-committed the error of confining in the New Building the most\r
-troublesome prisoners, of placing there "the hard cases," as they say in\r
-prison parlance.\r
-\r
-The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other, and a\r
-top story which was called the Bel-Air (Fine Air). A large chimney-flue,\r
-probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de la Force, started\r
-from the groundfloor, traversed all four stories, cut the dormitories,\r
-where it figured as a flattened pillar, into two portions, and finally\r
-pierced the roof.\r
-\r
-Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been placed, by\r
-way of precaution, on the lower story. Chance ordained that the heads of\r
-their beds should rest against the chimney.\r
-\r
-Thenardier was directly over their heads in the top story known as\r
-Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine,\r
-after passing the barracks of the firemen, in front of the porte-cochere\r
-of the bathing establishment, beholds a yard full of flowers and shrubs\r
-in wooden boxes, at the extremity of which spreads out a little white\r
-rotunda with two wings, brightened up with green shutters, the bucolic\r
-dream of Jean Jacques.\r
-\r
-Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda an enormous\r
-black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.\r
-\r
-This was the outer wall of La Force.\r
-\r
-This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.\r
-\r
-Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof, which\r
-could be seen beyond. This was the roof of the New Building. There\r
-one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars; they were the\r
-windows of the Fine-Air.\r
-\r
-A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed the\r
-dormitories.\r
-\r
-The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of large\r
-hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and double doors\r
-of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts. When one entered\r
-from the north end, one had on one's left the four dormer-windows, on\r
-one's right, facing the windows, at regular intervals, four square,\r
-tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages, built of masonry\r
-to about the height of the elbow, and the rest, up to the roof, of iron\r
-bars.\r
-\r
-Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since\r
-the night of the 3d of February. No one was ever able to discover how,\r
-and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a\r
-bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which\r
-a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or\r
-Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.\r
-\r
-There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers,\r
-half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police an\r
-unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.\r
-\r
-On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two lost\r
-children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had escaped that\r
-morning, was waiting for them in the street as well as Montparnasse,\r
-rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found, began to pierce\r
-the chimney against which their beds stood. The rubbish fell on Brujon's\r
-bed, so that they were not heard. Showers mingled with thunder shook\r
-the doors on their hinges, and created in the prison a terrible and\r
-opportune uproar. Those of the prisoners who woke, pretended to fall\r
-asleep again, and left Guelemer and Brujon to their own devices. Brujon\r
-was adroit; Guelemer was vigorous. Before any sound had reached the\r
-watcher, who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the\r
-dormitory, the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron\r
-grating which barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two\r
-redoubtable ruffians were on the roof. The wind and rain redoubled, the\r
-roof was slippery.\r
-\r
-"What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.\r
-\r
-An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from the\r
-surrounding wall. At the bottom of this abyss, they could see the musket\r
-of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom. They fastened one end of the\r
-rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon to the stumps of the iron bars\r
-which they had just wrenched off, flung the other over the outer wall,\r
-crossed the abyss at one bound, clung to the coping of the wall, got\r
-astride of it, let themselves slip, one after the other, along the rope,\r
-upon a little roof which touches the bath-house, pulled their rope after\r
-them, jumped down into the courtyard of the bath-house, traversed it,\r
-pushed open the porter's wicket, beside which hung his rope, pulled\r
-this, opened the porte-cochere, and found themselves in the street.\r
-\r
-Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen in bed in\r
-the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.\r
-\r
-A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse, who were\r
-prowling about the neighborhood.\r
-\r
-They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit of it\r
-remained attached to the chimney on the roof. They had sustained no\r
-other damage, however, than that of scratching nearly all the skin off\r
-their hands.\r
-\r
-That night, Thenardier was warned, without any one being able to explain\r
-how, and was not asleep.\r
-\r
-Towards one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw\r
-two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls, in front of\r
-the dormer-window which was opposite his cage. One halted at the window,\r
-long enough to dart in a glance. This was Brujon.\r
-\r
-Thenardier recognized him, and understood. This was enough.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution\r
-under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force, was\r
-kept in sight. The sentry, who was relieved every two hours, marched\r
-up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket. The Fine-Air was\r
-lighted by a skylight. The prisoner had on his feet fetters weighing\r
-fifty pounds. Every day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a jailer,\r
-escorted by two dogs,--this was still in vogue at that time,--entered\r
-his cage, deposited beside his bed a loaf of black bread weighing two\r
-pounds, a jug of water, a bowl filled with rather thin bouillon, in\r
-which swam a few Mayagan beans, inspected his irons and tapped the bars.\r
-This man and his dogs made two visits during the night.\r
-\r
-Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he\r
-used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve\r
-it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight,\r
-no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered\r
-afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: "It would be better to let\r
-him have only a wooden spike."\r
-\r
-At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was\r
-relieved, and replaced by a conscript. A few moments later, the man with\r
-the dogs paid his visit, and went off without noticing anything, except,\r
-possibly, the excessive youth and "the rustic air" of the "raw recruit."\r
-Two hours afterwards, at four o'clock, when they came to relieve the\r
-conscript, he was found asleep on the floor, lying like a log near\r
-Thenardier's cage. As for Thenardier, he was no longer there. There was\r
-a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the\r
-roof. One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably\r
-carried away with him, as it was not found. They also seized in his cell\r
-a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of the stupefying wine\r
-with which the soldier had been drugged. The soldier's bayonet had\r
-disappeared.\r
-\r
-At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that\r
-Thenardier was out of reach. The truth is, that he was no longer in the\r
-New Building, but that he was still in great danger.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found the\r
-remains of Brujon's rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the\r
-chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short, he had not\r
-been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and Guelemer had done.\r
-\r
-When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile,\r
-one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin. There stood on\r
-that spot, in the last century, a house of which only the back wall now\r
-remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises to the height of the\r
-third story between the adjoining buildings. This ruin can be recognized\r
-by two large square windows which are still to be seen there; the middle\r
-one, that nearest the right gable, is barred with a worm-eaten beam\r
-adjusted like a prop. Through these windows there was formerly visible a\r
-lofty and lugubrious wall, which was a fragment of the outer wall of La\r
-Force.\r
-\r
-The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is\r
-half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts.\r
-In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against the\r
-portion of the ruin which has remained standing. The fence has a gate,\r
-which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.\r
-\r
-It was the crest of this ruin that Thenardier had succeeded in reaching,\r
-a little after one o'clock in the morning.\r
-\r
-How had he got there? That is what no one has ever been able to explain\r
-or understand. The lightning must, at the same time, have hindered\r
-and helped him. Had he made use of the ladders and scaffoldings of the\r
-slaters to get from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from\r
-compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court,\r
-then to the buildings of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and\r
-thence to the hut on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary\r
-there existed breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility. Had\r
-he placed the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the\r
-Fine-Air to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping\r
-of the outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut?\r
-But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line;\r
-it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen's barracks, it rose\r
-towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings, it was not\r
-even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on the Rue Pavee;\r
-everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then, the sentinels must\r
-have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence, the route taken by\r
-Thenardier still remains rather inexplicable. In two manners, flight was\r
-impossible. Had Thenardier, spurred on by that thirst for liberty which\r
-changes precipices into ditches, iron bars into wattles of osier, a\r
-legless man into an athlete, a gouty man into a bird, stupidity into\r
-instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius, had\r
-Thenardier invented a third mode? No one has ever found out.\r
-\r
-The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for. The man who makes\r
-his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something of the star and\r
-of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight; the effort towards\r
-deliverance is no less surprising than the flight towards the sublime,\r
-and one says of the escaped thief: "How did he contrive to scale that\r
-wall?" in the same way that one says of Corneille: "Where did he find\r
-the means of dying?"\r
-\r
-At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain, with his\r
-clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows bleeding, his\r
-knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children, in their figurative\r
-language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin, there he had stretched\r
-himself out at full length, and there his strength had failed him. A\r
-steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the pavement of\r
-the street.\r
-\r
-The rope which he had was too short.\r
-\r
-There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair which\r
-he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling himself that\r
-the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea of hearing the\r
-neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within a few minutes, an\r
-hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the latter would be found\r
-asleep under the pierced roof, staring in horror at a terrible depth, at\r
-the light of the street lanterns, the wet, black pavement, that pavement\r
-longed for yet frightful, which meant death, and which meant liberty.\r
-\r
-He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded,\r
-if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance. He\r
-listened. With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed through\r
-the street since he had been there. Nearly the whole of the descent of\r
-the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne, from Vincennes,\r
-and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished through the Rue\r
-Saint-Antoine.\r
-\r
-Four o'clock struck. Thenardier shuddered. A few moments later, that\r
-terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery of an escape\r
-broke forth in the prison. The sound of doors opening and shutting, the\r
-creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult in the guard-house, the\r
-hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock of musket-butts on the pavement\r
-of the courts, reached his ears. Lights ascended and descended past the\r
-grated windows of the dormitories, a torch ran along the ridge-pole of\r
-the top story of the New Building, the firemen belonging in the barracks\r
-on the right had been summoned. Their helmets, which the torch lighted\r
-up in the rain, went and came along the roofs. At the same time,\r
-Thenardier perceived in the direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness\r
-lighting up the edge of the sky in doleful wise.\r
-\r
-He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the heavy\r
-rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir, subject to the\r
-giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror of a certain arrest,\r
-and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these\r
-ideas to the other: "Dead if I fall, caught if I stay." In the midst of\r
-this anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still dark, a man who\r
-was gliding along the walls and coming from the Rue Pavee, halt in the\r
-recess above which Thenardier was, as it were, suspended. Here this\r
-man was joined by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by\r
-a third, then by a fourth. When these men were re-united, one of them\r
-lifted the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered\r
-the enclosure in which the shanty stood. They halted directly under\r
-Thenardier. These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order\r
-that they might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the\r
-sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant. It\r
-must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in his box.\r
-Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their visages, lent an ear to\r
-their words with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels himself\r
-lost.\r
-\r
-Thenardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before his\r
-eyes,--these men conversed in slang.\r
-\r
-The first said in a low but distinct voice:--\r
-\r
-"Let's cut. What are we up to here?"\r
-\r
-The second replied: "It's raining hard enough to put out the very\r
-devil's fire. And the bobbies will be along instanter. There's a soldier\r
-on guard yonder. We shall get nabbed here."\r
-\r
-These two words, icigo and icicaille, both of which mean ici, and which\r
-belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second to the slang\r
-of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thenardier. By the icigo he\r
-recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers, by the icicaille\r
-he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been an old-clothes\r
-broker at the Temple.\r
-\r
-The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except in\r
-the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in all\r
-its purity. Had it not been for the icicaille, Thenardier would not have\r
-recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.\r
-\r
-"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit. How do we know that he doesn't\r
-stand in need of us?"\r
-\r
-By this, which was nothing but French, Thenardier recognized\r
-Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand all\r
-slangs and to speak none of them.\r
-\r
-As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders betrayed\r
-him. Thenardier did not hesitate. It was Guelemer.\r
-\r
-Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--\r
-\r
-"What are you jabbering about? The tavern-keeper hasn't managed to cut\r
-his stick. He don't tumble to the racket, that he don't! You have to be\r
-a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up your sheet to make\r
-a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers, make false keys, file\r
-your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself, and disguise yourself!\r
-The old fellow hasn't managed to play it, he doesn't understand how to\r
-work the business."\r
-\r
-Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken by\r
-Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new, highly colored\r
-and risky argot used by Brujon what the language of Racine is to the\r
-language of Andre Chenier:--\r
-\r
-"Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act. You have to be\r
-knowing. He's only a greenhorn. He must have let himself be taken in\r
-by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as his pal.\r
-Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison? You have\r
-seen all those lights. He's recaptured, there! He'll get off with twenty\r
-years. I ain't afraid, I ain't a coward, but there ain't anything more\r
-to do, or otherwise they'd lead us a dance. Don't get mad, come with us,\r
-let's go drink a bottle of old wine together."\r
-\r
-"One doesn't desert one's friends in a scrape," grumbled Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-"I tell you he's nabbed!" retorted Brujon. "At the present moment, the\r
-inn-keeper ain't worth a ha'penny. We can't do nothing for him. Let's be\r
-off. Every minute I think a bobby has got me in his fist."\r
-\r
-Montparnasse no longer offered more than a feeble resistance; the fact\r
-is, that these four men, with the fidelity of ruffians who never abandon\r
-each other, had prowled all night long about La Force, great as was\r
-their peril, in the hope of seeing Thenardier make his appearance on the\r
-top of some wall. But the night, which was really growing too fine,--for\r
-the downpour was such as to render all the streets deserted,--the cold\r
-which was overpowering them, their soaked garments, their hole-ridden\r
-shoes, the alarming noise which had just burst forth in the prison, the\r
-hours which had elapsed, the patrol which they had encountered, the\r
-hope which was vanishing, all urged them to beat a retreat. Montparnasse\r
-himself, who was, perhaps, almost Thenardier's son-in-law, yielded. A\r
-moment more, and they would be gone. Thenardier was panting on his wall\r
-like the shipwrecked sufferers of the Meduse on their raft when they\r
-beheld the vessel which had appeared in sight vanish on the horizon.\r
-\r
-He dared not call to them; a cry might be heard and ruin everything. An\r
-idea occurred to him, a last idea, a flash of inspiration; he drew from\r
-his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached from the\r
-chimney of the New Building, and flung it into the space enclosed by the\r
-fence.\r
-\r
-This rope fell at their feet.\r
-\r
-"A widow,"[37] said Babet.\r
-\r
-"My tortouse!"[38] said Brujon.\r
-\r
-"The tavern-keeper is there," said Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-They raised their eyes. Thenardier thrust out his head a very little.\r
-\r
-"Quick!" said Montparnasse, "have you the other end of the rope,\r
-Brujon?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Knot the two pieces together, we'll fling him the rope, he can fasten\r
-it to the wall, and he'll have enough of it to get down with."\r
-\r
-Thenardier ran the risk, and spoke:--\r
-\r
-"I am paralyzed with cold."\r
-\r
-"We'll warm you up."\r
-\r
-"I can't budge."\r
-\r
-"Let yourself slide, we'll catch you."\r
-\r
-"My hands are benumbed."\r
-\r
-"Only fasten the rope to the wall."\r
-\r
-"I can't."\r
-\r
-"Then one of us must climb up," said Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-"Three stories!" ejaculated Brujon.\r
-\r
-An ancient plaster flue, which had served for a stove that had been used\r
-in the shanty in former times, ran along the wall and mounted almost\r
-to the very spot where they could see Thenardier. This flue, then much\r
-damaged and full of cracks, has since fallen, but the marks of it are\r
-still visible.\r
-\r
-It was very narrow.\r
-\r
-"One might get up by the help of that," said Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-"By that flue?" exclaimed Babet, "a grown-up cove, never! it would take\r
-a brat."\r
-\r
-"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.\r
-\r
-"Where are we to find a young 'un?" said Guelemer.\r
-\r
-"Wait," said Montparnasse. "I've got the very article."\r
-\r
-He opened the gate of the fence very softly, made sure that no one was\r
-passing along the street, stepped out cautiously, shut the gate behind\r
-him, and set off at a run in the direction of the Bastille.\r
-\r
-Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thenardier;\r
-Babet, Brujon, and Guelemer did not open their lips; at last the gate\r
-opened once more, and Montparnasse appeared, breathless, and followed by\r
-Gavroche. The rain still rendered the street completely deserted.\r
-\r
-Little Gavroche entered the enclosure and gazed at the forms of these\r
-ruffians with a tranquil air. The water was dripping from his hair.\r
-Guelemer addressed him:--\r
-\r
-"Are you a man, young 'un?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:--\r
-\r
-"A young 'un like me's a man, and men like you are babes."\r
-\r
-"The brat's tongue's well hung!" exclaimed Babet.\r
-\r
-"The Paris brat ain't made of straw," added Brujon.\r
-\r
-"What do you want?" asked Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Montparnasse answered:--\r
-\r
-"Climb up that flue."\r
-\r
-"With this rope," said Babet.\r
-\r
-"And fasten it," continued Brujon.\r
-\r
-"To the top of the wall," went on Babet.\r
-\r
-"To the cross-bar of the window," added Brujon.\r
-\r
-"And then?" said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"There!" said Guelemer.\r
-\r
-The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windows, and made\r
-that indescribable and disdainful noise with his lips which signifies:--\r
-\r
-"Is that all!"\r
-\r
-"There's a man up there whom you are to save," resumed Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-"Will you?" began Brujon again.\r
-\r
-"Greenhorn!" replied the lad, as though the question appeared a most\r
-unprecedented one to him.\r
-\r
-And he took off his shoes.\r
-\r
-Guelemer seized Gavroche by one arm, set him on the roof of the shanty,\r
-whose worm-eaten planks bent beneath the urchin's weight, and handed\r
-him the rope which Brujon had knotted together during Montparnasse's\r
-absence. The gamin directed his steps towards the flue, which it was\r
-easy to enter, thanks to a large crack which touched the roof. At the\r
-moment when he was on the point of ascending, Thenardier, who saw life\r
-and safety approaching, bent over the edge of the wall; the first light\r
-of dawn struck white upon his brow dripping with sweat, upon his livid\r
-cheek-bones, his sharp and savage nose, his bristling gray beard, and\r
-Gavroche recognized him.\r
-\r
-"Hullo! it's my father! Oh, that won't hinder."\r
-\r
-And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.\r
-\r
-He reached the summit of the hut, bestrode the old wall as though it had\r
-been a horse, and knotted the rope firmly to the upper cross-bar of the\r
-window.\r
-\r
-A moment later, Thenardier was in the street.\r
-\r
-As soon as he touched the pavement, as soon as he found himself out\r
-of danger, he was no longer either weary, or chilled or trembling; the\r
-terrible things from which he had escaped vanished like smoke, all that\r
-strange and ferocious mind awoke once more, and stood erect and free,\r
-ready to march onward.\r
-\r
-These were this man's first words:--\r
-\r
-"Now, whom are we to eat?"\r
-\r
-It is useless to explain the sense of this frightfully transparent\r
-remark, which signifies both to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder. To\r
-eat, true sense: to devour.\r
-\r
-"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon. "Let's settle it in three\r
-words, and part at once. There was an affair that promised well in the\r
-Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated house, an old rotten gate on\r
-a garden, and lone women."\r
-\r
-"Well! why not?" demanded Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Your girl, Eponine, went to see about the matter," replied Babet.\r
-\r
-"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Guelemer. "Nothing to be\r
-made there."\r
-\r
-"The girl's no fool," said Thenardier. "Still, it must be seen to."\r
-\r
-"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who, during\r
-this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence-posts; he waited\r
-a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would turn towards him,\r
-then he put on his shoes again, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Is that all? You don't want any more, my men? Now you're out of your\r
-scrape. I'm off. I must go and get my brats out of bed."\r
-\r
-And off he went.\r
-\r
-The five men emerged, one after another, from the enclosure.\r
-\r
-When Gavroche had disappeared at the corner of the Rue des Ballets,\r
-Babet took Thenardier aside.\r
-\r
-"Did you take a good look at that young 'un?" he asked.\r
-\r
-"What young 'un?"\r
-\r
-"The one who climbed the wall and carried you the rope."\r
-\r
-"Not particularly."\r
-\r
-"Well, I don't know, but it strikes me that it was your son."\r
-\r
-"Bah!" said Thenardier, "do you think so?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Slang b7-1-slang]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--ORIGIN\r
-\r
-Pigritia is a terrible word.\r
-\r
-It engenders a whole world, la pegre, for which read theft, and a hell,\r
-la pegrenne, for which read hunger.\r
-\r
-Thus, idleness is the mother.\r
-\r
-She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.\r
-\r
-Where are we at this moment? In the land of slang.\r
-\r
-What is slang? It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect;\r
-it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.\r
-\r
-When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave and sombre\r
-history introduced into a work written with the same aim as this[39] a\r
-thief who talked argot, there arose amazement and clamor.--"What! How!\r
-Argot! Why, argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys,\r
-convicts, of everything that is most abominable in society!" etc., etc.\r
-\r
-We have never understood this sort of objections.\r
-\r
-Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a profound\r
-observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend of the people,\r
-Balzac and Eugene Sue, having represented their ruffians as talking\r
-their natural language, as the author of The Last Day of a Condemned\r
-Man did in 1828, the same objections have been raised. People repeated:\r
-"What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? Slang is odious! Slang\r
-makes one shudder!"\r
-\r
-Who denies that? Of course it does.\r
-\r
-When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when\r
-has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go to the bottom? We have\r
-always thought that it was sometimes a courageous act, and, at least, a\r
-simple and useful deed, worthy of the sympathetic attention which duty\r
-accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should one not explore everything,\r
-and study everything? Why should one halt on the way? The halt is a\r
-matter depending on the sounding-line, and not on the leadsman.\r
-\r
-Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to\r
-undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social order,\r
-where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins, to rummage in\r
-those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize and to fling, still\r
-quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with\r
-filth when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary each\r
-word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire and the\r
-shadows. Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in\r
-its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of\r
-slang. It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the\r
-night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks one beholds\r
-a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers, rustles,\r
-wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One word resembles a\r
-claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye, such and such a phrase\r
-seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this is alive with\r
-the hideous vitality of things which have been organized out of\r
-disorganization.\r
-\r
-Now, when has horror ever excluded study? Since when has malady banished\r
-medicine? Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the viper, the\r
-bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who would\r
-cast them back into their darkness, saying: "Oh! how ugly that is!" The\r
-thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon\r
-who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like\r
-a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher\r
-hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. For, it must be stated\r
-to those who are ignorant of the case, that argot is both a literary\r
-phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly speaking? It is\r
-the language of wretchedness.\r
-\r
-We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms, which is\r
-one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades, professions,\r
-it may be added, all the accidents of the social hierarchy and all\r
-forms of intelligence, have their own slang. The merchant who says:\r
-"Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality," the broker on 'change\r
-who says: "Assets at end of current month," the gambler who says: "Tiers\r
-et tout, refait de pique," the sheriff of the Norman Isles who says:\r
-"The holder in fee reverting to his landed estate cannot claim the\r
-fruits of that estate during the hereditary seizure of the real estate\r
-by the mortgagor," the playwright who says: "The piece was hissed,"\r
-the comedian who says: "I've made a hit," the philosopher who says:\r
-"Phenomenal triplicity," the huntsman who says: "Voileci allais,\r
-Voileci fuyant," the phrenologist who says: "Amativeness, combativeness,\r
-secretiveness," the infantry soldier who says: "My shooting-iron," the\r
-cavalry-man who says: "My turkey-cock," the fencing-master who says:\r
-"Tierce, quarte, break," the printer who says: "My shooting-stick and\r
-galley,"--all, printer, fencing-master, cavalry dragoon, infantry-man,\r
-phrenologist, huntsman, philosopher, comedian, playwright, sheriff,\r
-gambler, stock-broker, and merchant, speak slang. The painter who says:\r
-"My grinder," the notary who says: "My Skip-the-Gutter," the hairdresser\r
-who says: "My mealyback," the cobbler who says: "My cub," talks slang.\r
-Strictly speaking, if one absolutely insists on the point, all the\r
-different fashions of saying the right and the left, the sailor's port\r
-and starboard, the scene-shifter's court-side, and garden-side, the\r
-beadle's Gospel-side and Epistle-side, are slang. There is the slang of\r
-the affected lady as well as of the precieuses. The Hotel Rambouillet\r
-nearly adjoins the Cour des Miracles. There is a slang of duchesses,\r
-witness this phrase contained in a love-letter from a very great lady\r
-and a very pretty woman of the Restoration: "You will find in this\r
-gossip a fultitude of reasons why I should libertize."[40] Diplomatic\r
-ciphers are slang; the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome,\r
-grkztntgzyal for despatch, and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI. for the Due de\r
-Modena, speaks slang. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for\r
-carrot, radish, and turnip, said Opoponach, perfroschinum,\r
-reptitalmus, dracatholicum, angelorum, postmegorum, talked slang. The\r
-sugar-manufacturer who says: "Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common,\r
-burnt,"--this honest manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of\r
-criticism twenty years ago, which used to say: "Half of the works of\r
-Shakespeare consists of plays upon words and puns,"--talked slang. The\r
-poet, and the artist who, with profound understanding, would designate\r
-M. de Montmorency as "a bourgeois," if he were not a judge of verses and\r
-statues, speak slang. The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora,"\r
-fruits, "Pomona," the sea, "Neptune," love, "fires," beauty, "charms,"\r
-a horse, "a courser," the white or tricolored cockade, "the rose of\r
-Bellona," the three-cornered hat, "Mars' triangle,"--that classical\r
-Academician talks slang. Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their\r
-slang. The tongue which is employed on board ship, that wonderful\r
-language of the sea, which is so complete and so picturesque, which was\r
-spoken by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperre, which mingles with\r
-the whistling of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the\r
-shock of the boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind, the gale,\r
-the cannon, is wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which is to the\r
-fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the jackal.\r
-\r
-No doubt. But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word\r
-slang is an extension which every one will not admit. For our part,\r
-we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and\r
-determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang. The veritable\r
-slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can be\r
-coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing\r
-else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous,\r
-cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of wretchedness. There\r
-exists, at the extremity of all abasement and all misfortunes, a last\r
-misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter into conflict\r
-with the whole mass of fortunate facts and reigning rights; a fearful\r
-conflict, where, now cunning, now violent, unhealthy and ferocious\r
-at one and the same time, it attacks the social order with pin-pricks\r
-through vice, and with club-blows through crime. To meet the needs of\r
-this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is\r
-slang.\r
-\r
-To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf, were\r
-it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and which would,\r
-otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of\r
-which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated, to extend\r
-the records of social observation; is to serve civilization itself. This\r
-service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by making two\r
-Carthaginian soldiers talk Phoenician; that service Moliere rendered,\r
-by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of\r
-dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phoenician, very good!\r
-Levantine, quite right! Even dialect, let that pass! They are tongues\r
-which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! What is the use\r
-of preserving slang? What is the good of assisting slang "to survive"?\r
-\r
-To this we reply in one word, only. Assuredly, if the tongue which a\r
-nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language\r
-which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and\r
-study.\r
-\r
-It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example, for\r
-more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every possible\r
-human misery.\r
-\r
-And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and\r
-infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view to remedy,\r
-is not a business in which choice is permitted. The historian of manners\r
-and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events.\r
-The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts of crowns, the\r
-births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles, assemblages, great\r
-public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything on the exterior;\r
-the other historian has the interior, the depths, the people who toil,\r
-suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing child, the secret war\r
-between man and man, obscure ferocities, prejudices, plotted\r
-iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct tremors of multitudes, the\r
-die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of the law, the secret evolution of\r
-souls, the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans,\r
-the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms which roam through the\r
-darkness. He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity\r
-at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable\r
-casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed and those who deal the\r
-blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast and those\r
-who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict it. Have these\r
-historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior to the historians\r
-of external facts? Does any one think that Alighieri has any fewer\r
-things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization any\r
-less important than the upper side merely because it is deeper and more\r
-sombre? Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted\r
-with the cavern?\r
-\r
-Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words of what\r
-precedes a marked separation might be inferred between the two classes\r
-of historians which does not exist in our mind. No one is a good\r
-historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples,\r
-if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian\r
-of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the\r
-interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the\r
-exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history\r
-of events, and this is true reciprocally. They constitute two different\r
-orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always\r
-interlaced, and which often bring forth results. All the lineaments\r
-which providence traces on the surface of a nation have their parallels,\r
-sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of the depths\r
-produce ebullitions on the surface. True history being a mixture of all\r
-things, the true historian mingles in everything.\r
-\r
-Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double\r
-focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.\r
-\r
-Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some\r
-bad action to perform, disguises itself. There it clothes itself in\r
-word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.\r
-\r
-One finds it difficult to recognize. Is it really the French tongue, the\r
-great human tongue? Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to retort\r
-upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the repertory of\r
-evil. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the\r
-Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club; it is called\r
-vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have painted its face, it\r
-crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile. Henceforth, it is apt\r
-at all roles, it is made suspicious by the counterfeiter, covered with\r
-verdigris by the forger, blacked by the soot of the incendiary; and the\r
-murderer applies its rouge.\r
-\r
-When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society,\r
-one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside.\r
-One distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without\r
-understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents,\r
-but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.\r
-The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic\r
-bestiality. One thinks one hears hydras talking.\r
-\r
-It is unintelligible in the dark. It gnashes and whispers, completing\r
-the gloom with mystery. It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still\r
-in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang. Obscurity\r
-in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity in voices. Terrible,\r
-toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and\r
-stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain\r
-and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity, of\r
-suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.\r
-\r
-Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who\r
-am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And are\r
-you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The earth\r
-is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is not a\r
-recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is\r
-so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.\r
-\r
-Are you what is called a happy man? Well! you are sad every day. Each\r
-day has its own great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were\r
-trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear for your\r
-own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day after to-morrow\r
-the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of some\r
-friend; then the prevailing weather, then something that has been broken\r
-or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your vertebral\r
-column reproach you; again, the course of public affairs. This without\r
-reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it goes on. One cloud is\r
-dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day out of a hundred which\r
-is wholly joyous and sunny. And you belong to that small class who are\r
-happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.\r
-\r
-Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and\r
-the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another,\r
-there are no fortunate.\r
-\r
-The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish\r
-the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,--that\r
-is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading,\r
-means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.\r
-\r
-However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer\r
-in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn\r
-without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the marvel of genius.\r
-\r
-When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer.\r
-The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in\r
-darkness.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--ROOTS\r
-\r
-Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.\r
-\r
-Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden\r
-to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic\r
-dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement\r
-made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of\r
-the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were,\r
-beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Some seem to be still smoking.\r
-Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of a\r
-thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid bare.\r
-Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are\r
-fugitives from justice. Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that one\r
-feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.\r
-\r
-Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange\r
-dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case\r
-of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as\r
-for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the\r
-public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a\r
-language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the\r
-fact that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain\r
-metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.\r
-\r
-That exquisite and celebrated verse--\r
-\r
- Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?\r
- But where are the snows of years gone by?\r
-\r
-is a verse of slang. Antam--ante annum--is a word of Thunes slang, which\r
-signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. Thirty-five years\r
-ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there could\r
-be read in one of the cells at Bicetre, this maxim engraved with a\r
-nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys: Les dabs\r
-d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coesre. This means Kings in\r
-days gone by always went and had themselves anointed. In the opinion of\r
-that king, anointment meant the galleys.\r
-\r
-The word decarade, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles at\r
-a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word,\r
-which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a masterly\r
-onomatopoeia the whole of La Fontaine's admirable verse:--\r
-\r
- Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.\r
- Six stout horses drew a coach.\r
-\r
-\r
-From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more\r
-curious and fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language\r
-within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft\r
-which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the\r
-old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side of\r
-the language. This is what may be called the first, the vulgar aspect of\r
-slang. But, for those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that\r
-is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a veritable\r
-alluvial deposit. According as one digs a longer or shorter distance\r
-into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular French, Provencal,\r
-Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports,\r
-English and German, the Romance language in its three varieties, French,\r
-Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque and Celtic. A\r
-profound and unique formation. A subterranean edifice erected in common\r
-by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each\r
-suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its\r
-pebble. A throng of evil, base, or irritated souls, who have traversed\r
-life and have vanished into eternity, linger there almost entirely\r
-visible still beneath the form of some monstrous word.\r
-\r
-Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is\r
-boffete, a box on the ear, which is derived from bofeton; vantane,\r
-window (later on vanterne), which comes from vantana; gat, cat, which\r
-comes from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceyte. Do you want\r
-Italian? Here is spade, sword, which comes from spada; carvel, boat,\r
-which comes from caravella. Do you want English? Here is bichot, which\r
-comes from bishop; raille, spy, which comes from rascal, rascalion;\r
-pilche, a case, which comes from pilcher, a sheath. Do you want German?\r
-Here is the caleur, the waiter, kellner; the hers, the master, herzog\r
-(duke). Do you want Latin? Here is frangir, to break, frangere; affurer,\r
-to steal, fur; cadene, chain, catena. There is one word which crops up\r
-in every language of the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and\r
-authority. It is the word magnus; the Scotchman makes of it his mac,\r
-which designates the chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane, Mac-Callumore, the\r
-great Farlane, the great Callumore[41]; slang turns it into meck and\r
-later le meg, that is to say, God. Would you like Basque? Here is\r
-gahisto, the devil, which comes from gaiztoa, evil; sorgabon, good\r
-night, which comes from gabon, good evening. Do you want Celtic? Here is\r
-blavin, a handkerchief, which comes from blavet, gushing water; menesse,\r
-a woman (in a bad sense), which comes from meinec, full of stones;\r
-barant, brook, from baranton, fountain; goffeur, locksmith, from goff,\r
-blacksmith; guedouze, death, which comes from guenn-du, black-white.\r
-Finally, would you like history? Slang calls crowns les malteses, a\r
-souvenir of the coin in circulation on the galleys of Malta.\r
-\r
-In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses\r
-other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the\r
-mind of man itself.\r
-\r
-In the first place, the direct creation of words. Therein lies the\r
-mystery of tongues. To paint with words, which contains figures\r
-one knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human\r
-languages, what may be called their granite.\r
-\r
-Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words, words\r
-created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom, without\r
-etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary, barbarous,\r
-sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular power of\r
-expression and which live. The executioner, le taule; the forest,\r
-le sabri; fear, flight, taf; the lackey, le larbin; the mineral,\r
-the prefect, the minister, pharos; the devil, le rabouin. Nothing is\r
-stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. Some, le rabouin,\r
-for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce on\r
-you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.\r
-\r
-In the second place, metaphor. The peculiarity of a language which is\r
-desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in figures.\r
-Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a stroke,\r
-the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom is more\r
-metaphorical than slang: devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist\r
-the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a\r
-rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure\r
-which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates long oblique\r
-lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the lancers, and\r
-which compresses into a single word the popular expression: it rains\r
-halberds. Sometimes, in proportion as slang progresses from the first\r
-epoch to the second, words pass from the primitive and savage sense to\r
-the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes\r
-le boulanger (the baker), who puts the bread into the oven. This is\r
-more witty, but less grand, something like Racine after Corneille, like\r
-Euripides after AEschylus. Certain slang phrases which participate\r
-in the two epochs and have at once the barbaric character and the\r
-metaphorical character resemble phantasmagories. Les sorgueuers vont\r
-solliciter des gails a la lune--the prowlers are going to steal horses\r
-by night,--this passes before the mind like a group of spectres. One\r
-knows not what one sees.\r
-\r
-In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language. It uses\r
-it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it\r
-often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and\r
-summary fashion. Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed and\r
-complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed, in\r
-which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding elements, the\r
-direct creation and the metaphor: le cab jaspine, je marronne que la\r
-roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, the dog is barking, I suspect\r
-that the diligence for Paris is passing through the woods. Le dab est\r
-sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere, la fee est bative, the bourgeois is\r
-stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty. Generally,\r
-to throw listeners off the track, slang confines itself to adding to\r
-all the words of the language without distinction, an ignoble tail, a\r
-termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue, or in uche. Thus: Vousiergue\r
-trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? Do you think that leg of mutton\r
-good? A phrase addressed by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out\r
-whether the sum offered for his escape suited him.\r
-\r
-The termination in mar has been added recently.\r
-\r
-Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted\r
-itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as\r
-it feels that it is understood, it changes its form. Contrary to what\r
-happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls\r
-upon it kills whatever it touches. Thus slang is in constant process of\r
-decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never\r
-pauses. It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten\r
-centuries. Thus le larton (bread) becomes le lartif; le gail (horse)\r
-becomes le gaye; la fertanche (straw) becomes la fertille; le momignard\r
-(brat), le momacque; les fiques (duds), frusques; la chique (the\r
-church), l'egrugeoir; le colabre (neck), le colas. The devil is at\r
-first, gahisto, then le rabouin, then the baker; the priest is a\r
-ratichon, then the boar (le sanglier); the dagger is le vingt-deux\r
-(twenty-two), then le surin, then le lingre; the police are railles,\r
-then roussins, then rousses, then marchands de lacets (dealers in\r
-stay-laces), then coquers, then cognes; the executioner is le taule,\r
-then Charlot, l'atigeur, then le becquillard. In the seventeenth\r
-century, to fight was "to give each other snuff"; in the nineteenth\r
-it is "to chew each other's throats." There have been twenty different\r
-phrases between these two extremes. Cartouche's talk would have been\r
-Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of this language are perpetually\r
-engaged in flight like the men who utter them.\r
-\r
-Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement,\r
-the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more. It has its\r
-headquarters where it maintains its sway. The Temple preserved the slang\r
-of the seventeenth century; Bicetre, when it was a prison, preserved the\r
-slang of Thunes. There one could hear the termination in anche of\r
-the old Thuneurs. Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), do you drink? But perpetual\r
-movement remains its law, nevertheless.\r
-\r
-If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of\r
-observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls\r
-into doleful and useful meditation. No study is more efficacious and\r
-more fecund in instruction. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in\r
-slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means\r
-to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.\r
-\r
-For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of\r
-darkness. The night is called la sorgue; man, l'orgue. Man is a\r
-derivative of the night.\r
-\r
-They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light\r
-of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of\r
-their liberty as one would speak of his health. A man under arrest is a\r
-sick man; one who is condemned is a dead man.\r
-\r
-The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which\r
-he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon\r
-the castus. In that funereal place, life outside always presents itself\r
-under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet; you\r
-think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet that one\r
-walks? No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one dances; so,\r
-when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first idea is that\r
-now he can dance, and he calls the saw the bastringue (public-house\r
-ball).--A name is a centre; profound assimilation.--The ruffian has two\r
-heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads him all his life\r
-long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on the day of his\r
-death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime la sorbonne,\r
-and the head which expiates it la tronche.--When a man has no longer\r
-anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has\r
-arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word\r
-blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for crime;\r
-he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his\r
-distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says\r
-un reguise.--What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell. The\r
-convict calls himself a fagot.--And finally, what name do malefactors\r
-give to their prison? The college. A whole penitentiary system can be\r
-evolved from that word.\r
-\r
-Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of the\r
-galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary lirlonfa, have\r
-had their birth?\r
-\r
-Let him listen to what follows:--\r
-\r
-There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cellar. This\r
-cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither\r
-windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door; men could enter\r
-there, air could not. This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and\r
-for floor ten inches of mud. It was flagged; but the pavement had rotted\r
-and cracked under the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the floor,\r
-a long and massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation from side\r
-to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart, chains three\r
-feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings for the\r
-neck. In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys were\r
-incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon. They were\r
-thrust under this beam, where each one found his fetters swinging in the\r
-darkness and waiting for him.\r
-\r
-The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands,\r
-caught the unhappy wretches by the throat. They were rivetted and\r
-left there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They\r
-remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that beam,\r
-almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their bread, jug,\r
-or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth flowing to their\r
-very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with thighs and knees giving\r
-way, clinging fast to the chain with their hands in order to obtain some\r
-rest, unable to sleep except when standing erect, and awakened every\r
-moment by the strangling of the collar; some woke no more. In order to\r
-eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to them in the mud, along\r
-their leg with their heel until it reached their hand.\r
-\r
-How long did they remain thus? One month, two months, six months\r
-sometimes; one stayed a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys.\r
-Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king. In this\r
-sepulchre-hell, what did they do? What man can do in a sepulchre, they\r
-went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they\r
-sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. In the waters\r
-of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before\r
-the sound of the oars. Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone\r
-through the prison-cellar of the Chatelet, said: "It was the rhymes that\r
-kept me up." Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?\r
-\r
-It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.\r
-It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Chatelet of Paris that comes\r
-the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: "Timaloumisaine,\r
-timaloumison." The majority of these:\r
-\r
- Icicaille est la theatre Here is the theatre\r
- Du petit dardant. Of the little archer (Cupid).\r
-\r
-\r
-Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart\r
-of man, love.\r
-\r
-In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. The secret is\r
-the thing above all others. The secret, in the eyes of these wretches,\r
-is unity which serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to\r
-tear from each member of this fierce community something of his own\r
-personality. To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is\r
-called: "to eat the bit." As though the informer drew to himself a\r
-little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each\r
-one's flesh.\r
-\r
-What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace metaphor\r
-replies: "It is to see thirty-six candles."\r
-\r
-Here slang intervenes and takes it up: Candle, camoufle. Thereupon, the\r
-ordinary tongue gives camouflet[42] as the synonym for soufflet. Thus,\r
-by a sort of infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor,\r
-that incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the\r
-Academy; and Poulailler saying: "I light my camoufle," causes Voltaire\r
-to write: "Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets."\r
-\r
-Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step. Study and\r
-investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of\r
-intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.\r
-\r
-The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I,\r
-whoever passes by; le pantre. (Pan, everybody.)\r
-\r
-Slang is language turned convict.\r
-\r
-That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it\r
-can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality,\r
-that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is\r
-sufficient to create consternation.\r
-\r
-Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!\r
-\r
-Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness?\r
-Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the liberator, the\r
-immense rider of Pegasi and hippo-griffs, the combatant of heroes of\r
-the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two wings, the radiant\r
-knight of the future? Will she forever summon in vain to her assistance\r
-the lance of light of the ideal? Is she condemned to hear the fearful\r
-approach of Evil through the density of the gulf, and to catch glimpses,\r
-nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the hideous water of that dragon's\r
-head, that maw streaked with foam, and that writhing undulation of\r
-claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain there, without a gleam\r
-of light, without hope, given over to that terrible approach, vaguely\r
-scented out by the monster, shuddering, dishevelled, wringing its arms,\r
-forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked\r
-amid the shadows!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS\r
-\r
-As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred\r
-years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre,\r
-symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful,\r
-now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those\r
-vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of\r
-their own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for\r
-instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves,\r
-a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of this\r
-tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsman\r
-on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whence\r
-emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy than these\r
-reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakes\r
-for the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the boiling of\r
-counterfeiters. The diverse forms assumed by thought in the realm\r
-of slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of this\r
-powerless and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of some\r
-of which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the point of\r
-evoking tears. The pegre is always the poor pegre, and he is always\r
-the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He hardly\r
-complains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has come\r
-down to us: "I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture\r
-his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry, without himself\r
-suffering torture."[43] The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes\r
-himself small before the low, and frail in the presence of society;\r
-he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to the side of\r
-compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.\r
-\r
-Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songs\r
-and thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial\r
-mien. The plaintive malure was replaced by the larifla. We find in the\r
-eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons,\r
-a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and lilting\r
-refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent\r
-gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest by a\r
-will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--\r
-\r
- Miralabi suslababo\r
- Mirliton ribonribette\r
- Surlababi mirlababo\r
- Mirliton ribonribo.\r
-\r
-\r
-This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a\r
-man's throat.\r
-\r
-A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of\r
-the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the grand\r
-meg and the grand dab. Given Louis XV. they call the King of France "le\r
-Marquis de Pantin." And behold, they are almost gay. A sort of gleam\r
-proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their consciences were\r
-not heavy within them any more. These lamentable tribes of darkness have\r
-no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the\r
-heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of\r
-their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers and dreamers,\r
-some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not of. A\r
-sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines and\r
-sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of their ugliness, while\r
-communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines. A sign, in short, of\r
-some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some diversion shall\r
-arise.\r
-\r
-Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth\r
-century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth\r
-century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot\r
-at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers,\r
-Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these are\r
-four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due\r
-to them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards\r
-the four cardinal points of progress. Diderot towards the beautiful,\r
-Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towards\r
-the just. But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were the\r
-sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock\r
-in the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the great\r
-books of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the\r
-court-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the King's\r
-sanction, no one knows what strangely disorganizing writings, which were\r
-eagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd to\r
-say, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret\r
-Library. These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the\r
-surface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger.\r
-It is obscure because it is underhand. Of all these writers, the one\r
-who probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery was\r
-Restif de La Bretonne.\r
-\r
-This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in\r
-Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed up\r
-by Schiller in his famous drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up\r
-in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious and\r
-false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd in\r
-reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them,\r
-after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of\r
-theory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and\r
-honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had prepared\r
-the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it. Whenever a fact\r
-of this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenders\r
-wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep,\r
-which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the\r
-unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made\r
-spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of\r
-society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.\r
-\r
-Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful\r
-commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely\r
-political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer\r
-the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of\r
-discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.\r
-\r
-Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.\r
-\r
-It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth\r
-century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut\r
-short.\r
-\r
-The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with\r
-the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the\r
-door of ill and opened the door of good.\r
-\r
-It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma,\r
-rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.\r
-\r
-It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a\r
-second soul, the right.\r
-\r
-The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and\r
-to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply\r
-impossible. Blind is he who announces it! Foolish is he who fears it!\r
-Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.\r
-\r
-Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and\r
-monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of\r
-the Middle Ages in our constitution. We no longer live in the days when\r
-terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet\r
-the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from\r
-mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the\r
-soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one\r
-suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.\r
-\r
-The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, once\r
-developed, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all is\r
-liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to\r
-Robespierre's admirable definition. Since '89, the whole people has\r
-been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who,\r
-possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels\r
-within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an\r
-internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns. Hence\r
-incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes\r
-heroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary wholesomeness\r
-is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a 10th of August,\r
-there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the enlightened and\r
-increasing throngs is: death to thieves! Progress is an honest man; the\r
-ideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were\r
-the wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By\r
-the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over\r
-the treasure. Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. In\r
-those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a\r
-hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded with\r
-diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond,\r
-which was worth thirty millions. Barefooted, they guarded that crown.\r
-\r
-Hence, no more Jacquerie. I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The\r
-old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth\r
-it can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of the\r
-red spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scares\r
-no longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures\r
-alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE\r
-\r
-This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not.\r
-There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood\r
-will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner\r
-in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis\r
-is there. Social phthisis is called misery.\r
-\r
-One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by\r
-lightning.\r
-\r
-Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget\r
-that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must\r
-understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking\r
-first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing,\r
-airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a\r
-magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in\r
-offering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness,\r
-in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of the\r
-universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limit\r
-to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in\r
-having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to\r
-the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that\r
-grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes,\r
-and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting\r
-salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is,\r
-that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need;\r
-in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more light and more\r
-comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.\r
-\r
-And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is\r
-this: labor cannot be a law without being a right.\r
-\r
-We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for\r
-that.\r
-\r
-If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.\r
-\r
-Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material\r
-improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity,\r
-truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science\r
-and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and\r
-minds which do not eat. If there is anything more heart-breaking than\r
-a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from\r
-hunger for the light.\r
-\r
-The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we\r
-shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge\r
-naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be\r
-accomplished by a simple elevation of level.\r
-\r
-We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.\r
-\r
-The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It censures.\r
-This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is walking and\r
-advancing. It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arrives\r
-with his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism, with his\r
-banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He advances, he\r
-threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not despair, on our\r
-side. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped.\r
-\r
-What have we to fear, we who believe?\r
-\r
-No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists\r
-a return of a river on its course.\r
-\r
-But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When\r
-they say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that\r
-they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are\r
-inoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejecting\r
-To-morrow, and that is to die.\r
-\r
-Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul\r
-never,--this is what we desire.\r
-\r
-Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem\r
-will be solved.\r
-\r
-Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be\r
-finished by the nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future\r
-blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a\r
-divinely fatal phenomenon.\r
-\r
-Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them\r
-within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of\r
-equilibrium; that is to say, to equity. A force composed of earth and\r
-heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker\r
-of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than\r
-extraordinary vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man,\r
-and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed\r
-by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem\r
-impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing a\r
-solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson\r
-from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that\r
-mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident\r
-face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre, and made the\r
-imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the\r
-grandiose onward march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially\r
-in science and peace. Its object is, and its result must be, to dissolve\r
-wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it scrutinizes, it\r
-analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of\r
-reduction, discarding all hatred.\r
-\r
-More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind\r
-which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of\r
-nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,--and some fine\r
-day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all\r
-away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of\r
-Egypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are\r
-the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societies\r
-have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vice\r
-which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terrible\r
-deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no reply.\r
-Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they\r
-sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror that\r
-we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behind\r
-those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels,\r
-Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which\r
-emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and\r
-light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient\r
-civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own. Everywhere\r
-upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we\r
-lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once\r
-diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy.\r
-Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its\r
-prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved. It is\r
-already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.\r
-All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards\r
-this point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty--to auscultate\r
-civilization.\r
-\r
-We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this\r
-persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an\r
-austere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, we\r
-feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it has\r
-these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor\r
-because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do\r
-not kill man.\r
-\r
-And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his\r
-head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their\r
-hours of weakness.\r
-\r
-Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put\r
-this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy\r
-face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of\r
-the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite\r
-increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,\r
-a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the\r
-suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the\r
-soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing\r
-others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging\r
-its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and\r
-simple ignorance.\r
-\r
-Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point\r
-which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal\r
-is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated,\r
-imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces,\r
-monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the\r
-maw of the clouds.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--FULL LIGHT\r
-\r
-The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized\r
-through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither Magnon had\r
-sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from the Rue Plumet,\r
-and had then conducted Marius thither, and that, after many days spent\r
-in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on by that force which draws\r
-the iron to the magnet and a lover towards the stones of which is built\r
-the house of her whom he loves, had finally entered Cosette's garden as\r
-Romeo entered the garden of Juliet. This had even proved easier for him\r
-than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only\r
-to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which\r
-vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth.\r
-Marius was slender and readily passed through.\r
-\r
-As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never entered\r
-the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.\r
-\r
-Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed these\r
-two souls, Marius was there every evening. If, at that period of\r
-her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least\r
-unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are\r
-generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.\r
-One of woman's magnanimities is to yield. Love, at the height where it\r
-is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness\r
-of modesty. But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the\r
-heart, and we take the body. Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon\r
-it in the gloom with a shudder. Love has no middle course; it either\r
-ruins or it saves. All human destiny lies in this dilemma. This dilemma,\r
-ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than\r
-by love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same\r
-sentiment says "yes" and "no" in the human heart. Of all the things that\r
-God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light,\r
-alas! and the most darkness.\r
-\r
-God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves which\r
-save.\r
-\r
-Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832, there were\r
-there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden, beneath that\r
-thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day, two beings\r
-composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with all the\r
-felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind, pure,\r
-honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid the shadows.\r
-It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette\r
-had a nimbus. They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they\r
-clasped each other's hands, they pressed close to each other; but there\r
-was a distance which they did not pass. Not that they respected it;\r
-they did not know of its existence. Marius was conscious of a barrier,\r
-Cosette's innocence; and Cosette of a support, Marius' loyalty. The\r
-first kiss had also been the last. Marius, since that time, had not gone\r
-further than to touch Cosette's hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her\r
-hair, with his lips. For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman.\r
-He inhaled her. She refused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was\r
-happy, and Marius was satisfied. They lived in this ecstatic state which\r
-can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul. It was\r
-the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal. Two swans\r
-meeting on the Jungfrau.\r
-\r
-At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute,\r
-beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic\r
-Marius, would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised\r
-Cosette's robe to the height of her ankle. Once, in the moonlight,\r
-Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell\r
-apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat. Marius\r
-turned away his eyes.\r
-\r
-What took place between these two beings? Nothing. They adored each\r
-other.\r
-\r
-At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a sacred\r
-spot. All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense; and they\r
-opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers. The wanton and\r
-vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength and intoxication, around\r
-these two innocents, and they uttered words of love which set the trees\r
-to trembling.\r
-\r
-What words were these? Breaths. Nothing more. These breaths sufficed to\r
-trouble and to touch all nature round about. Magic power which we\r
-should find it difficult to understand were we to read in a book these\r
-conversations which are made to be borne away and dispersed like smoke\r
-wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves. Take from those murmurs of two\r
-lovers that melody which proceeds from the soul and which accompanies\r
-them like a lyre, and what remains is nothing more than a shade; you\r
-say: "What! is that all!" eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions,\r
-laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most\r
-sublime in the world! The only things which are worth the trouble of\r
-saying and hearing!\r
-\r
-The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these\r
-absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile and a malicious\r
-fellow. Cosette said to Marius:--\r
-\r
-"Dost thou know?--"\r
-\r
-[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without either\r
-of them being able to say how it had come about, they had begun to call\r
-each other thou.]\r
-\r
-"Dost thou know? My name is Euphrasie."\r
-\r
-"Euphrasie? Why, no, thy name is Cosette."\r
-\r
-"Oh! Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I was\r
-a little thing. But my real name is Euphrasie. Dost thou like that\r
-name--Euphrasie?"\r
-\r
-"Yes. But Cosette is not ugly."\r
-\r
-"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"\r
-\r
-"Why, yes."\r
-\r
-"Then I like it better too. Truly, it is pretty, Cosette. Call me\r
-Cosette."\r
-\r
-And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a\r
-grove situated in heaven. On another occasion she gazed intently at him\r
-and exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty, you\r
-are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am, but I bid\r
-you defiance with this word: I love you!"\r
-\r
-And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung by a\r
-star.\r
-\r
-Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she said to\r
-him:--\r
-\r
-"Don't cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without my\r
-permission. It's very naughty to cough and to disturb me. I want you to\r
-be well, because, in the first place, if you were not well, I should be\r
-very unhappy. What should I do then?"\r
-\r
-And this was simply divine.\r
-\r
-Once Marius said to Cosette:--\r
-\r
-"Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was Ursule."\r
-\r
-This made both of them laugh the whole evening.\r
-\r
-In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to exclaim:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to finish breaking\r
-up a veteran!" But he stopped short, and went no further. He would have\r
-been obliged to speak to Cosette of her garter, and that was impossible.\r
-This bordered on a strange theme, the flesh, before which that immense\r
-and innocent love recoiled with a sort of sacred fright.\r
-\r
-Marius pictured life with Cosette to himself like this, without anything\r
-else; to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, to displace the old and\r
-accommodating bar of the chief-justice's gate, to sit elbow to elbow\r
-on that bench, to gaze through the trees at the scintillation of the\r
-on-coming night, to fit a fold of the knee of his trousers into the\r
-ample fall of Cosette's gown, to caress her thumb-nail, to call her\r
-thou, to smell of the same flower, one after the other, forever,\r
-indefinitely. During this time, clouds passed above their heads. Every\r
-time that the wind blows it bears with it more of the dreams of men than\r
-of the clouds of heaven.\r
-\r
-This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry, by any means.\r
-To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves is the first method of\r
-bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious who tries it. A compliment\r
-is something like a kiss through a veil. Voluptuousness mingles there\r
-with its sweet tiny point, while it hides itself. The heart draws back\r
-before voluptuousness only to love the more. Marius' blandishments, all\r
-saturated with fancy, were, so to speak, of azure hue. The birds when\r
-they fly up yonder, in the direction of the angels, must hear such\r
-words. There were mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all\r
-the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in\r
-the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical\r
-effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of\r
-cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and\r
-exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are! I dare not look at you.\r
-It is all over with me when I contemplate you. You are a grace. I know\r
-not what is the matter with me. The hem of your gown, when the tip of\r
-your shoe peeps from beneath, upsets me. And then, what an enchanted\r
-gleam when you open your thought even but a little! You talk\r
-astonishingly good sense. It seems to me at times that you are a\r
-dream. Speak, I listen, I admire. Oh Cosette! how strange it is and how\r
-charming! I am really beside myself. You are adorable, Mademoiselle. I\r
-study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope."\r
-\r
-And Cosette answered:--\r
-\r
-"I have been loving a little more all the time that has passed since\r
-this morning."\r
-\r
-Questions and replies took care of themselves in this dialogue, which\r
-always turned with mutual consent upon love, as the little pith figures\r
-always turn on their peg.\r
-\r
-Cosette's whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency,\r
-whiteness, candor, radiance. It might have been said of Cosette that she\r
-was clear. She produced on those who saw her the sensation of April\r
-and dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of the\r
-auroral light in the form of a woman.\r
-\r
-It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her.\r
-But the truth is, that this little school-girl, fresh from the convent,\r
-talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts of\r
-true and delicate sayings. Her prattle was conversation. She never made\r
-a mistake about anything, and she saw things justly. The woman feels and\r
-speaks with the tender instinct of the heart, which is infallible.\r
-\r
-No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are, at\r
-once, both sweet and deep. Sweetness and depth, they are the whole of\r
-woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.\r
-\r
-In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. A\r
-crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of hawthorn\r
-broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled with\r
-melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep. The most\r
-sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times, almost\r
-unbearable.\r
-\r
-And, in addition to this,--all these contradictions are the lightning\r
-play of love,--they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily and with\r
-a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes presented the\r
-air of two boys.\r
-\r
-Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity, nature is\r
-always present and will not be forgotten. She is there with her brutal\r
-and sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one\r
-feels in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious\r
-shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.\r
-\r
-They idolized each other.\r
-\r
-The permanent and the immutable are persistent. People live, they smile,\r
-they laugh, they make little grimaces with the tips of their lips, they\r
-interlace their fingers, they call each other thou, and that does not\r
-prevent eternity.\r
-\r
-Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twilight, in the\r
-invisible, with the birds, with the roses; they fascinate each other in\r
-the darkness with their hearts which they throw into their eyes, they\r
-murmur, they whisper, and in the meantime, immense librations of the\r
-planets fill the infinite universe.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE BEWILDERMENT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS\r
-\r
-They existed vaguely, frightened at their happiness. They did not notice\r
-the cholera which decimated Paris precisely during that very month. They\r
-had confided in each other as far as possible, but this had not extended\r
-much further than their names. Marius had told Cosette that he was an\r
-orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer, that\r
-he lived by writing things for publishers, that his father had been a\r
-colonel, that the latter had been a hero, and that he, Marius, was on\r
-bad terms with his grandfather who was rich. He had also hinted at being\r
-a baron, but this had produced no effect on Cosette. She did not\r
-know the meaning of the word. Marius was Marius. On her side, she\r
-had confided to him that she had been brought up at the Petit-Picpus\r
-convent, that her mother, like his own, was dead, that her father's name\r
-was M. Fauchelevent, that he was very good, that he gave a great deal\r
-to the poor, but that he was poor himself, and that he denied himself\r
-everything though he denied her nothing.\r
-\r
-Strange to say, in the sort of symphony which Marius had lived since he\r
-had been in the habit of seeing Cosette, the past, even the most recent\r
-past, had become so confused and distant to him, that what Cosette told\r
-him satisfied him completely. It did not even occur to him to tell her\r
-about the nocturnal adventure in the hovel, about Thenardier, about the\r
-burn, and about the strange attitude and singular flight of her father.\r
-Marius had momentarily forgotten all this; in the evening he did not\r
-even know that there had been a morning, what he had done, where he had\r
-breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ears which\r
-rendered him deaf to every other thought; he only existed at the hours\r
-when he saw Cosette. Then, as he was in heaven, it was quite natural\r
-that he should forget earth. Both bore languidly the indefinable burden\r
-of immaterial pleasures. Thus lived these somnambulists who are called\r
-lovers.\r
-\r
-Alas! Who is there who has not felt all these things? Why does there\r
-come an hour when one emerges from this azure, and why does life go on\r
-afterwards?\r
-\r
-Loving almost takes the place of thinking. Love is an ardent\r
-forgetfulness of all the rest. Then ask logic of passion if you will.\r
-There is no more absolute logical sequence in the human heart than there\r
-is a perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette\r
-and Marius nothing existed except Marius and Cosette. The universe\r
-around them had fallen into a hole. They lived in a golden minute. There\r
-was nothing before them, nothing behind. It hardly occurred to Marius\r
-that Cosette had a father. His brain was dazzled and obliterated. Of\r
-what did these lovers talk then? We have seen, of the flowers, and\r
-the swallows, the setting sun and the rising moon, and all sorts of\r
-important things. They had told each other everything except everything.\r
-The everything of lovers is nothing. But the father, the realities, that\r
-lair, the ruffians, that adventure, to what purpose? And was he very\r
-sure that this nightmare had actually existed? They were two, and they\r
-adored each other, and beyond that there was nothing. Nothing else\r
-existed. It is probable that this vanishing of hell in our rear is\r
-inherent to the arrival of paradise. Have we beheld demons? Are there\r
-any? Have we trembled? Have we suffered? We no longer know. A rosy cloud\r
-hangs over it.\r
-\r
-So these two beings lived in this manner, high aloft, with all that\r
-improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the\r
-zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in\r
-the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head to foot;\r
-already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily charged with\r
-humanity to disappear in the blue, suspended like atoms which are\r
-waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the bounds of destiny;\r
-ignorant of that rut; yesterday, to-day, to-morrow; amazed, rapturous,\r
-floating, soaring; at times so light that they could take their flight\r
-out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar away to all eternity.\r
-They slept wide-awake, thus sweetly lulled. Oh! splendid lethargy of the\r
-real overwhelmed by the ideal.\r
-\r
-Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her\r
-presence. The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.\r
-\r
-Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them.\r
-They considered that they had already arrived. It is a strange claim on\r
-man's part to wish that love should lead to something.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE BEGINNING OF SHADOW\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean suspected nothing.\r
-\r
-Cosette, who was rather less dreamy than Marius, was gay, and that\r
-sufficed for Jean Valjean's happiness. The thoughts which Cosette\r
-cherished, her tender preoccupations, Marius' image which filled her\r
-heart, took away nothing from the incomparable purity of her beautiful,\r
-chaste, and smiling brow. She was at the age when the virgin bears her\r
-love as the angel his lily. So Jean Valjean was at ease. And then, when\r
-two lovers have come to an understanding, things always go well; the\r
-third party who might disturb their love is kept in a state of perfect\r
-blindness by a restricted number of precautions which are always the\r
-same in the case of all lovers. Thus, Cosette never objected to any of\r
-Jean Valjean's proposals. Did she want to take a walk? "Yes, dear little\r
-father." Did she want to stay at home? Very good. Did he wish to pass\r
-the evening with Cosette? She was delighted. As he always went to bed at\r
-ten o'clock, Marius did not come to the garden on such occasions until\r
-after that hour, when, from the street, he heard Cosette open the long\r
-glass door on the veranda. Of course, no one ever met Marius in the\r
-daytime. Jean Valjean never even dreamed any longer that Marius was in\r
-existence. Only once, one morning, he chanced to say to Cosette: "Why,\r
-you have whitewash on your back!" On the previous evening, Marius, in a\r
-transport, had pushed Cosette against the wall.\r
-\r
-Old Toussaint, who retired early, thought of nothing but her sleep, and\r
-was as ignorant of the whole matter as Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Marius never set foot in the house. When he was with Cosette, they hid\r
-themselves in a recess near the steps, in order that they might neither\r
-be seen nor heard from the street, and there they sat, frequently\r
-contenting themselves, by way of conversation, with pressing each\r
-other's hands twenty times a minute as they gazed at the branches of the\r
-trees. At such times, a thunderbolt might have fallen thirty paces from\r
-them, and they would not have noticed it, so deeply was the revery of\r
-the one absorbed and sunk in the revery of the other.\r
-\r
-Limpid purity. Hours wholly white; almost all alike. This sort of love\r
-is a recollection of lily petals and the plumage of the dove.\r
-\r
-The whole extent of the garden lay between them and the street. Every\r
-time that Marius entered and left, he carefully adjusted the bar of the\r
-gate in such a manner that no displacement was visible.\r
-\r
-He usually went away about midnight, and returned to Courfeyrac's\r
-lodgings. Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:--\r
-\r
-"Would you believe it? Marius comes home nowadays at one o'clock in the\r
-morning."\r
-\r
-Bahorel replied:--\r
-\r
-"What do you expect? There's always a petard in a seminary fellow."\r
-\r
-At times, Courfeyrac folded his arms, assumed a serious air, and said to\r
-Marius:--\r
-\r
-"You are getting irregular in your habits, young man."\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac, being a practical man, did not take in good part this\r
-reflection of an invisible paradise upon Marius; he was not much in the\r
-habit of concealed passions; it made him impatient, and now and then he\r
-called upon Marius to come back to reality.\r
-\r
-One morning, he threw him this admonition:--\r
-\r
-"My dear fellow, you produce upon me the effect of being located in\r
-the moon, the realm of dreams, the province of illusions, capital,\r
-soap-bubble. Come, be a good boy, what's her name?"\r
-\r
-But nothing could induce Marius "to talk." They might have torn out his\r
-nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable\r
-name, Cosette, was composed. True love is as luminous as the dawn and as\r
-silent as the tomb. Only, Courfeyrac saw this change in Marius, that his\r
-taciturnity was of the beaming order.\r
-\r
-During this sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette learned to know these\r
-immense delights. To dispute and to say you for thou, simply that they\r
-might say thou the better afterwards. To talk at great length with very\r
-minute details, of persons in whom they took not the slightest interest\r
-in the world; another proof that in that ravishing opera called love,\r
-the libretto counts for almost nothing.\r
-\r
-For Marius, to listen to Cosette discussing finery.\r
-\r
-For Cosette, to listen to Marius talk in politics;\r
-\r
-To listen, knee pressed to knee, to the carriages rolling along the Rue\r
-de Babylone;\r
-\r
-To gaze upon the same planet in space, or at the same glowworm gleaming\r
-in the grass;\r
-\r
-To hold their peace together; a still greater delight than conversation;\r
-\r
-Etc., etc.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, divers complications were approaching.\r
-\r
-One evening, Marius was on his way to the rendezvous, by way of the\r
-Boulevard des Invalides. He habitually walked with drooping head. As he\r
-was on the point of turning the corner of the Rue Plumet, he heard some\r
-one quite close to him say:--\r
-\r
-"Good evening, Monsieur Marius."\r
-\r
-He raised his head and recognized Eponine.\r
-\r
-This produced a singular effect upon him. He had not thought of that\r
-girl a single time since the day when she had conducted him to the Rue\r
-Plumet, he had not seen her again, and she had gone completely out of\r
-his mind. He had no reasons for anything but gratitude towards her, he\r
-owed her his happiness, and yet, it was embarrassing to him to meet her.\r
-\r
-It is an error to think that passion, when it is pure and happy, leads\r
-man to a state of perfection; it simply leads him, as we have noted, to\r
-a state of oblivion. In this situation, man forgets to be bad, but\r
-he also forgets to be good. Gratitude, duty, matters essential and\r
-important to be remembered, vanish. At any other time, Marius would have\r
-behaved quite differently to Eponine. Absorbed in Cosette, he had not\r
-even clearly put it to himself that this Eponine was named Eponine\r
-Thenardier, and that she bore the name inscribed in his father's will,\r
-that name, for which, but a few months before, he would have so ardently\r
-sacrificed himself. We show Marius as he was. His father himself was\r
-fading out of his soul to some extent, under the splendor of his love.\r
-\r
-He replied with some embarrassment:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! so it's you, Eponine?"\r
-\r
-"Why do you call me you? Have I done anything to you?"\r
-\r
-"No," he answered.\r
-\r
-Certainly, he had nothing against her. Far from it. Only, he felt that\r
-he could not do otherwise, now that he used thou to Cosette, than say\r
-you to Eponine.\r
-\r
-As he remained silent, she exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Say--"\r
-\r
-Then she paused. It seemed as though words failed that creature formerly\r
-so heedless and so bold. She tried to smile and could not. Then she\r
-resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-Then she paused again, and remained with downcast eyes.\r
-\r
-"Good evening, Mr. Marius," said she suddenly and abruptly; and away she\r
-went.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG\r
-\r
-The following day was the 3d of June, 1832, a date which it is necessary\r
-to indicate on account of the grave events which at that epoch hung on\r
-the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds. Marius,\r
-at nightfall, was pursuing the same road as on the preceding evening,\r
-with the same thoughts of delight in his heart, when he caught sight\r
-of Eponine approaching, through the trees of the boulevard. Two days\r
-in succession--this was too much. He turned hastily aside, quitted the\r
-boulevard, changed his course and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue\r
-Monsieur.\r
-\r
-This caused Eponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which\r
-she had not yet done. Up to that time, she had contented herself with\r
-watching him on his passage along the boulevard without ever seeking to\r
-encounter him. It was only on the evening before that she had attempted\r
-to address him.\r
-\r
-So Eponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact. She saw him\r
-displace the bar and slip into the garden.\r
-\r
-She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and\r
-readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.\r
-\r
-She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--\r
-\r
-"None of that, Lisette!"\r
-\r
-She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the\r
-bar, as though she were guarding it. It was precisely at the point where\r
-the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in\r
-which Eponine was entirely concealed.\r
-\r
-She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without\r
-breathing, a prey to her thoughts.\r
-\r
-Towards ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who\r
-passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making\r
-haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute, as he skirted\r
-the garden railings and reached the angle which it made with the wall,\r
-heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--\r
-\r
-"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."\r
-\r
-The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into\r
-the black niche, and was greatly alarmed. He redoubled his pace.\r
-\r
-This passer-by had reason to make haste, for a very few instants later,\r
-six men, who were marching separately and at some distance from each\r
-other, along the wall, and who might have been taken for a gray patrol,\r
-entered the Rue Plumet.\r
-\r
-The first to arrive at the garden railing halted, and waited for the\r
-others; a second later, all six were reunited.\r
-\r
-These men began to talk in a low voice.\r
-\r
-"This is the place," said one of them.\r
-\r
-"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" asked another.\r
-\r
-"I don't know. In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make him\r
-eat."\r
-\r
-"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice of a\r
-ventriloquist.\r
-\r
-"So much the better," said the second who had spoken. "It won't screech\r
-under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."\r
-\r
-The sixth, who had not yet opened his lips, now began to inspect\r
-the gate, as Eponine had done an hour earlier, grasping each bar in\r
-succession, and shaking them cautiously.\r
-\r
-Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened. As he was on the\r
-point of grasping this bar, a hand emerged abruptly from the darkness,\r
-fell upon his arm; he felt himself vigorously thrust aside by a push\r
-in the middle of his breast, and a hoarse voice said to him, but not\r
-loudly:--\r
-\r
-"There's a dog."\r
-\r
-At the same moment, he perceived a pale girl standing before him.\r
-\r
-The man underwent that shock which the unexpected always brings. He\r
-bristled up in hideous wise; nothing is so formidable to behold as\r
-ferocious beasts who are uneasy; their terrified air evokes terror.\r
-\r
-He recoiled and stammered:--\r
-\r
-"What jade is this?"\r
-\r
-"Your daughter."\r
-\r
-It was, in fact, Eponine, who had addressed Thenardier.\r
-\r
-At the apparition of Eponine, the other five, that is to say,\r
-Claquesous, Guelemer, Babet, Brujon, and Montparnasse had noiselessly\r
-drawn near, without precipitation, without uttering a word, with the\r
-sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night.\r
-\r
-Some indescribable but hideous tools were visible in their hands.\r
-Guelemer held one of those pairs of curved pincers which prowlers call\r
-fanchons.\r
-\r
-"Ah, see here, what are you about there? What do you want with us? Are\r
-you crazy?" exclaimed Thenardier, as loudly as one can exclaim and still\r
-speak low; "what have you come here to hinder our work for?"\r
-\r
-Eponine burst out laughing, and threw herself on his neck.\r
-\r
-"I am here, little father, because I am here. Isn't a person allowed to\r
-sit on the stones nowadays? It's you who ought not to be here. What\r
-have you come here for, since it's a biscuit? I told Magnon so. There's\r
-nothing to be done here. But embrace me, my good little father! It's a\r
-long time since I've seen you! So you're out?"\r
-\r
-Thenardier tried to disentangle himself from Eponine's arms, and\r
-grumbled:--\r
-\r
-"That's good. You've embraced me. Yes, I'm out. I'm not in. Now, get\r
-away with you."\r
-\r
-But Eponine did not release her hold, and redoubled her caresses.\r
-\r
-"But how did you manage it, little pa? You must have been very clever to\r
-get out of that. Tell me about it! And my mother? Where is mother? Tell\r
-me about mamma."\r
-\r
-Thenardier replied:--\r
-\r
-"She's well. I don't know, let me alone, and be off, I tell you."\r
-\r
-"I won't go, so there now," pouted Eponine like a spoiled child; "you\r
-send me off, and it's four months since I saw you, and I've hardly had\r
-time to kiss you."\r
-\r
-And she caught her father round the neck again.\r
-\r
-"Come, now, this is stupid!" said Babet.\r
-\r
-"Make haste!" said Guelemer, "the cops may pass."\r
-\r
-The ventriloquist's voice repeated his distich:--\r
-\r
-\r
- "Nous n' sommes pas le jour de l'an,\r
- "This isn't New Year's day\r
- A becoter papa, maman."\r
- To peck at pa and ma."\r
-\r
-\r
-Eponine turned to the five ruffians.\r
-\r
-"Why, it's Monsieur Brujon. Good day, Monsieur Babet. Good day,\r
-Monsieur Claquesous. Don't you know me, Monsieur Guelemer? How goes it,\r
-Montparnasse?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, they know you!" ejaculated Thenardier. "But good day, good\r
-evening, sheer off! leave us alone!"\r
-\r
-"It's the hour for foxes, not for chickens," said Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-"You see the job we have on hand here," added Babet.\r
-\r
-Eponine caught Montparnasse's hand.\r
-\r
-"Take care," said he, "you'll cut yourself, I've a knife open."\r
-\r
-"My little Montparnasse," responded Eponine very gently, "you must have\r
-confidence in people. I am the daughter of my father, perhaps. Monsieur\r
-Babet, Monsieur Guelemer, I'm the person who was charged to investigate\r
-this matter."\r
-\r
-It is remarkable that Eponine did not talk slang. That frightful tongue\r
-had become impossible to her since she had known Marius.\r
-\r
-She pressed in her hand, small, bony, and feeble as that of a skeleton,\r
-Guelemer's huge, coarse fingers, and continued:--\r
-\r
-"You know well that I'm no fool. Ordinarily, I am believed. I have\r
-rendered you service on various occasions. Well, I have made inquiries;\r
-you will expose yourselves to no purpose, you see. I swear to you that\r
-there is nothing in this house."\r
-\r
-"There are lone women," said Guelemer.\r
-\r
-"No, the persons have moved away."\r
-\r
-"The candles haven't, anyway!" ejaculated Babet.\r
-\r
-And he pointed out to Eponine, across the tops of the trees, a light\r
-which was wandering about in the mansard roof of the pavilion. It was\r
-Toussaint, who had stayed up to spread out some linen to dry.\r
-\r
-Eponine made a final effort.\r
-\r
-"Well," said she, "they're very poor folks, and it's a hovel where there\r
-isn't a sou."\r
-\r
-"Go to the devil!" cried Thenardier. "When we've turned the house upside\r
-down and put the cellar at the top and the attic below, we'll tell\r
-you what there is inside, and whether it's francs or sous or\r
-half-farthings."\r
-\r
-And he pushed her aside with the intention of entering.\r
-\r
-"My good friend, Mr. Montparnasse," said Eponine, "I entreat you, you\r
-are a good fellow, don't enter."\r
-\r
-"Take care, you'll cut yourself," replied Montparnasse.\r
-\r
-Thenardier resumed in his decided tone:--\r
-\r
-"Decamp, my girl, and leave men to their own affairs!"\r
-\r
-Eponine released Montparnasse's hand, which she had grasped again, and\r
-said:--\r
-\r
-"So you mean to enter this house?"\r
-\r
-"Rather!" grinned the ventriloquist.\r
-\r
-Then she set her back against the gate, faced the six ruffians who were\r
-armed to the teeth, and to whom the night lent the visages of demons,\r
-and said in a firm, low voice:--\r
-\r
-"Well, I don't mean that you shall."\r
-\r
-They halted in amazement. The ventriloquist, however, finished his grin.\r
-She went on:--\r
-\r
-"Friends! Listen well. This is not what you want. Now I'm talking. In\r
-the first place, if you enter this garden, if you lay a hand on this\r
-gate, I'll scream, I'll beat on the door, I'll rouse everybody, I'll\r
-have the whole six of you seized, I'll call the police."\r
-\r
-"She'd do it, too," said Thenardier in a low tone to Brujon and the\r
-ventriloquist.\r
-\r
-She shook her head and added:--\r
-\r
-"Beginning with my father!"\r
-\r
-Thenardier stepped nearer.\r
-\r
-"Not so close, my good man!" said she.\r
-\r
-He retreated, growling between his teeth:--\r
-\r
-"Why, what's the matter with her?"\r
-\r
-And he added:--\r
-\r
-"Bitch!"\r
-\r
-She began to laugh in a terrible way:--\r
-\r
-"As you like, but you shall not enter here. I'm not the daughter of\r
-a dog, since I'm the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, what\r
-matters that to me? You are men. Well, I'm a woman. You don't frighten\r
-me. I tell you that you shan't enter this house, because it doesn't suit\r
-me. If you approach, I'll bark. I told you, I'm the dog, and I don't\r
-care a straw for you. Go your way, you bore me! Go where you please, but\r
-don't come here, I forbid it! You can use your knives. I'll use kicks;\r
-it's all the same to me, come on!"\r
-\r
-She advanced a pace nearer the ruffians, she was terrible, she burst out\r
-laughing:--\r
-\r
-"Pardine! I'm not afraid. I shall be hungry this summer, and I shall be\r
-cold this winter. Aren't they ridiculous, these ninnies of men, to think\r
-they can scare a girl! What! Scare? Oh, yes, much! Because you have\r
-finical poppets of mistresses who hide under the bed when you put on a\r
-big voice, forsooth! I ain't afraid of anything, that I ain't!"\r
-\r
-She fastened her intent gaze upon Thenardier and said:--\r
-\r
-"Not even of you, father!"\r
-\r
-Then she continued, as she cast her blood-shot, spectre-like eyes upon\r
-the ruffians in turn:--\r
-\r
-"What do I care if I'm picked up to-morrow morning on the pavement of\r
-the Rue Plumet, killed by the blows of my father's club, or whether I'm\r
-found a year from now in the nets at Saint-Cloud or the Isle of Swans in\r
-the midst of rotten old corks and drowned dogs?"\r
-\r
-She was forced to pause; she was seized by a dry cough, her breath came\r
-from her weak and narrow chest like the death-rattle.\r
-\r
-She resumed:--\r
-\r
-"I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang!\r
-There are six of you; I represent the whole world."\r
-\r
-Thenardier made a movement towards her.\r
-\r
-"Don't approach!" she cried.\r
-\r
-He halted, and said gently:--\r
-\r
-"Well, no; I won't approach, but don't speak so loud. So you intend to\r
-hinder us in our work, my daughter? But we must earn our living all the\r
-same. Have you no longer any kind feeling for your father?"\r
-\r
-"You bother me," said Eponine.\r
-\r
-"But we must live, we must eat--"\r
-\r
-"Burst!"\r
-\r
-So saying, she seated herself on the underpinning of the fence and\r
-hummed:--\r
-\r
- "Mon bras si dodu, "My arm so plump,\r
- Ma jambe bien faite My leg well formed,\r
- Et le temps perdu." And time wasted."\r
-\r
-\r
-She had set her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she\r
-swung her foot with an air of indifference. Her tattered gown permitted\r
-a view of her thin shoulder-blades. The neighboring street lantern\r
-illuminated her profile and her attitude. Nothing more resolute and more\r
-surprising could be seen.\r
-\r
-The six rascals, speechless and gloomy at being held in check by a girl,\r
-retreated beneath the shadow cast by the lantern, and held counsel with\r
-furious and humiliated shrugs.\r
-\r
-In the meantime she stared at them with a stern but peaceful air.\r
-\r
-"There's something the matter with her," said Babet. "A reason. Is she\r
-in love with the dog? It's a shame to miss this, anyway. Two women, an\r
-old fellow who lodges in the back-yard, and curtains that ain't so bad\r
-at the windows. The old cove must be a Jew. I think the job's a good\r
-one."\r
-\r
-"Well, go in, then, the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse. "Do the\r
-job. I'll stay here with the girl, and if she fails us--"\r
-\r
-He flashed the knife, which he held open in his hand, in the light of\r
-the lantern.\r
-\r
-Thenardier said not a word, and seemed ready for whatever the rest\r
-pleased.\r
-\r
-Brujon, who was somewhat of an oracle, and who had, as the reader knows,\r
-"put up the job," had not as yet spoken. He seemed thoughtful. He had\r
-the reputation of not sticking at anything, and it was known that he\r
-had plundered a police post simply out of bravado. Besides this he made\r
-verses and songs, which gave him great authority.\r
-\r
-Babet interrogated him:--\r
-\r
-"You say nothing, Brujon?"\r
-\r
-Brujon remained silent an instant longer, then he shook his head in\r
-various ways, and finally concluded to speak:--\r
-\r
-"See here; this morning I came across two sparrows fighting, this\r
-evening I jostled a woman who was quarrelling. All that's bad. Let's\r
-quit."\r
-\r
-They went away.\r
-\r
-As they went, Montparnasse muttered:--\r
-\r
-"Never mind! if they had wanted, I'd have cut her throat."\r
-\r
-Babet responded\r
-\r
-"I wouldn't. I don't hit a lady."\r
-\r
-At the corner of the street they halted and exchanged the following\r
-enigmatical dialogue in a low tone:--\r
-\r
-"Where shall we go to sleep to-night?"\r
-\r
-"Under Pantin [Paris]."\r
-\r
-"Have you the key to the gate, Thenardier?"\r
-\r
-"Pardi."\r
-\r
-Eponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat by the\r
-road by which they had come. She rose and began to creep after them\r
-along the walls and the houses. She followed them thus as far as the\r
-boulevard.\r
-\r
-There they parted, and she saw these six men plunge into the gloom,\r
-where they appeared to melt away.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--THINGS OF THE NIGHT\r
-\r
-After the departure of the ruffians, the Rue Plumet resumed its\r
-tranquil, nocturnal aspect. That which had just taken place in this\r
-street would not have astonished a forest. The lofty trees, the copses,\r
-the heaths, the branches rudely interlaced, the tall grass, exist in\r
-a sombre manner; the savage swarming there catches glimpses of sudden\r
-apparitions of the invisible; that which is below man distinguishes,\r
-through the mists, that which is beyond man; and the things of which we\r
-living beings are ignorant there meet face to face in the night. Nature,\r
-bristling and wild, takes alarm at certain approaches in which she\r
-fancies that she feels the supernatural. The forces of the gloom know\r
-each other, and are strangely balanced by each other. Teeth and claws\r
-fear what they cannot grasp. Blood-drinking bestiality, voracious\r
-appetites, hunger in search of prey, the armed instincts of nails\r
-and jaws which have for source and aim the belly, glare and smell out\r
-uneasily the impassive spectral forms straying beneath a shroud, erect\r
-in its vague and shuddering robe, and which seem to them to live with\r
-a dead and terrible life. These brutalities, which are only matter,\r
-entertain a confused fear of having to deal with the immense obscurity\r
-condensed into an unknown being. A black figure barring the way stops\r
-the wild beast short. That which emerges from the cemetery intimidates\r
-and disconcerts that which emerges from the cave; the ferocious fear the\r
-sinister; wolves recoil when they encounter a ghoul.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--MARIUS BECOMES PRACTICAL ONCE MORE TO THE EXTENT OF GIVING\r
-COSETTE HIS ADDRESS\r
-\r
-While this sort of a dog with a human face was mounting guard over the\r
-gate, and while the six ruffians were yielding to a girl, Marius was by\r
-Cosette's side.\r
-\r
-Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the\r
-trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had\r
-the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had\r
-all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the\r
-inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy,\r
-more ecstatic.\r
-\r
-But he had found Cosette sad; Cosette had been weeping. Her eyes were\r
-red.\r
-\r
-This was the first cloud in that wonderful dream.\r
-\r
-Marius' first word had been: "What is the matter?"\r
-\r
-And she had replied: "This."\r
-\r
-Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps, and while he\r
-tremblingly took his place beside her, she had continued:--\r
-\r
-"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness, because he\r
-has business, and we may go away from here."\r
-\r
-Marius shivered from head to foot.\r
-\r
-When one is at the end of one's life, to die means to go away; when one\r
-is at the beginning of it, to go away means to die.\r
-\r
-For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly, by degrees,\r
-taken possession of Cosette each day. As we have already explained, in\r
-the case of first love, the soul is taken long before the body; later\r
-on, one takes the body long before the soul; sometimes one does not take\r
-the soul at all; the Faublas and the Prudhommes add: "Because there is\r
-none"; but the sarcasm is, fortunately, a blasphemy. So Marius possessed\r
-Cosette, as spirits possess, but he enveloped her with all his soul, and\r
-seized her jealously with incredible conviction. He possessed her smile,\r
-her breath, her perfume, the profound radiance of her blue eyes, the\r
-sweetness of her skin when he touched her hand, the charming mark which\r
-she had on her neck, all her thoughts. Therefore, he possessed all\r
-Cosette's dreams.\r
-\r
-He incessantly gazed at, and he sometimes touched lightly with his\r
-breath, the short locks on the nape of her neck, and he declared to\r
-himself that there was not one of those short hairs which did not belong\r
-to him, Marius. He gazed upon and adored the things that she wore, her\r
-knot of ribbon, her gloves, her sleeves, her shoes, her cuffs, as sacred\r
-objects of which he was the master. He dreamed that he was the lord of\r
-those pretty shell combs which she wore in her hair, and he even said to\r
-himself, in confused and suppressed stammerings of voluptuousness which\r
-did not make their way to the light, that there was not a ribbon of her\r
-gown, not a mesh in her stockings, not a fold in her bodice, which was\r
-not his. Beside Cosette he felt himself beside his own property, his\r
-own thing, his own despot and his slave. It seemed as though they had\r
-so intermingled their souls, that it would have been impossible to tell\r
-them apart had they wished to take them back again.--"This is mine."\r
-"No, it is mine." "I assure you that you are mistaken. This is my\r
-property." "What you are taking as your own is myself."--Marius was\r
-something that made a part of Cosette, and Cosette was something which\r
-made a part of Marius. Marius felt Cosette within him. To have Cosette,\r
-to possess Cosette, this, to him, was not to be distinguished from\r
-breathing. It was in the midst of this faith, of this intoxication, of\r
-this virgin possession, unprecedented and absolute, of this sovereignty,\r
-that these words: "We are going away," fell suddenly, at a blow, and\r
-that the harsh voice of reality cried to him: "Cosette is not yours!"\r
-\r
-Marius awoke. For six weeks Marius had been living, as we have said,\r
-outside of life; those words, going away! caused him to re-enter it\r
-harshly.\r
-\r
-He found not a word to say. Cosette merely felt that his hand was very\r
-cold. She said to him in her turn: "What is the matter?"\r
-\r
-He replied in so low a tone that Cosette hardly heard him:--\r
-\r
-"I did not understand what you said."\r
-\r
-She began again:--\r
-\r
-"This morning my father told me to settle all my little affairs and to\r
-hold myself in readiness, that he would give me his linen to put in a\r
-trunk, that he was obliged to go on a journey, that we were to go away,\r
-that it is necessary to have a large trunk for me and a small one for\r
-him, and that all is to be ready in a week from now, and that we might\r
-go to England."\r
-\r
-"But this is outrageous!" exclaimed Marius.\r
-\r
-It is certain, that, at that moment, no abuse of power, no violence, not\r
-one of the abominations of the worst tyrants, no action of Busiris, of\r
-Tiberius, or of Henry VIII., could have equalled this in atrocity,\r
-in the opinion of Marius; M. Fauchelevent taking his daughter off to\r
-England because he had business there.\r
-\r
-He demanded in a weak voice:--\r
-\r
-"And when do you start?"\r
-\r
-"He did not say when."\r
-\r
-"And when shall you return?"\r
-\r
-"He did not say when."\r
-\r
-Marius rose and said coldly:--\r
-\r
-"Cosette, shall you go?"\r
-\r
-Cosette turned toward him her beautiful eyes, all filled with anguish,\r
-and replied in a sort of bewilderment:--\r
-\r
-"Where?"\r
-\r
-"To England. Shall you go?"\r
-\r
-"Why do you say you to me?"\r
-\r
-"I ask you whether you will go?"\r
-\r
-"What do you expect me to do?" she said, clasping her hands.\r
-\r
-"So, you will go?"\r
-\r
-"If my father goes."\r
-\r
-"So, you will go?"\r
-\r
-Cosette took Marius' hand, and pressed it without replying.\r
-\r
-"Very well," said Marius, "then I will go elsewhere."\r
-\r
-Cosette felt rather than understood the meaning of these words.\r
-She turned so pale that her face shone white through the gloom. She\r
-stammered:--\r
-\r
-"What do you mean?"\r
-\r
-Marius looked at her, then raised his eyes to heaven, and answered:\r
-"Nothing."\r
-\r
-When his eyes fell again, he saw Cosette smiling at him. The smile of a\r
-woman whom one loves possesses a visible radiance, even at night.\r
-\r
-"How silly we are! Marius, I have an idea."\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-"If we go away, do you go too! I will tell you where! Come and join me\r
-wherever I am."\r
-\r
-Marius was now a thoroughly roused man. He had fallen back into reality.\r
-He cried to Cosette:--\r
-\r
-"Go away with you! Are you mad? Why, I should have to have money, and I\r
-have none! Go to England? But I am in debt now, I owe, I don't know how\r
-much, more than ten louis to Courfeyrac, one of my friends with whom you\r
-are not acquainted! I have an old hat which is not worth three francs,\r
-I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my\r
-elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I\r
-have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only\r
-see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the\r
-daytime, you would give me a sou! Go to England! Eh! I haven't enough to\r
-pay for a passport!"\r
-\r
-He threw himself against a tree which was close at hand, erect, his brow\r
-pressed close to the bark, feeling neither the wood which flayed his\r
-skin, nor the fever which was throbbing in his temples, and there he\r
-stood motionless, on the point of falling, like the statue of despair.\r
-\r
-He remained a long time thus. One could remain for eternity in such\r
-abysses. At last he turned round. He heard behind him a faint stifled\r
-noise, which was sweet yet sad.\r
-\r
-It was Cosette sobbing.\r
-\r
-She had been weeping for more than two hours beside Marius as he\r
-meditated.\r
-\r
-He came to her, fell at her knees, and slowly prostrating himself, he\r
-took the tip of her foot which peeped out from beneath her robe, and\r
-kissed it.\r
-\r
-She let him have his way in silence. There are moments when a woman\r
-accepts, like a sombre and resigned goddess, the religion of love.\r
-\r
-"Do not weep," he said.\r
-\r
-She murmured:--\r
-\r
-"Not when I may be going away, and you cannot come!"\r
-\r
-He went on:--\r
-\r
-"Do you love me?"\r
-\r
-She replied, sobbing, by that word from paradise which is never more\r
-charming than amid tears:--\r
-\r
-"I adore you!"\r
-\r
-He continued in a tone which was an indescribable caress:--\r
-\r
-"Do not weep. Tell me, will you do this for me, and cease to weep?"\r
-\r
-"Do you love me?" said she.\r
-\r
-He took her hand.\r
-\r
-"Cosette, I have never given my word of honor to any one, because my\r
-word of honor terrifies me. I feel that my father is by my side. Well, I\r
-give you my most sacred word of honor, that if you go away I shall die."\r
-\r
-In the tone with which he uttered these words there lay a melancholy so\r
-solemn and so tranquil, that Cosette trembled. She felt that chill which\r
-is produced by a true and gloomy thing as it passes by. The shock made\r
-her cease weeping.\r
-\r
-"Now, listen," said he, "do not expect me to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"Do not expect me until the day after to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"Oh! Why?"\r
-\r
-"You will see."\r
-\r
-"A day without seeing you! But that is impossible!"\r
-\r
-"Let us sacrifice one day in order to gain our whole lives, perhaps."\r
-\r
-And Marius added in a low tone and in an aside:--\r
-\r
-"He is a man who never changes his habits, and he has never received any\r
-one except in the evening."\r
-\r
-"Of what man are you speaking?" asked Cosette.\r
-\r
-"I? I said nothing."\r
-\r
-"What do you hope, then?"\r
-\r
-"Wait until the day after to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"You wish it?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, Cosette."\r
-\r
-She took his head in both her hands, raising herself on tiptoe in order\r
-to be on a level with him, and tried to read his hope in his eyes.\r
-\r
-Marius resumed:--\r
-\r
-"Now that I think of it, you ought to know my address: something might\r
-happen, one never knows; I live with that friend named Courfeyrac, Rue\r
-de la Verrerie, No. 16."\r
-\r
-He searched in his pocket, pulled out his penknife, and with the blade\r
-he wrote on the plaster of the wall:--\r
-\r
-"16 Rue de la Verrerie."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Cosette had begun to gaze into his eyes once more.\r
-\r
-"Tell me your thought, Marius; you have some idea. Tell it to me. Oh!\r
-tell me, so that I may pass a pleasant night."\r
-\r
-"This is my idea: that it is impossible that God should mean to part us.\r
-Wait; expect me the day after to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"What shall I do until then?" said Cosette. "You are outside, you go,\r
-and come! How happy men are! I shall remain entirely alone! Oh! How sad\r
-I shall be! What is it that you are going to do to-morrow evening? tell\r
-me."\r
-\r
-"I am going to try something."\r
-\r
-"Then I will pray to God and I will think of you here, so that you may\r
-be successful. I will question you no further, since you do not wish it.\r
-You are my master. I shall pass the evening to-morrow in singing that\r
-music from Euryanthe that you love, and that you came one evening to\r
-listen to, outside my shutters. But day after to-morrow you will come\r
-early. I shall expect you at dusk, at nine o'clock precisely, I warn\r
-you. Mon Dieu! how sad it is that the days are so long! On the stroke of\r
-nine, do you understand, I shall be in the garden."\r
-\r
-"And I also."\r
-\r
-And without having uttered it, moved by the same thought, impelled by\r
-those electric currents which place lovers in continual communication,\r
-both being intoxicated with delight even in their sorrow, they fell into\r
-each other's arms, without perceiving that their lips met while their\r
-uplifted eyes, overflowing with rapture and full of tears, gazed upon\r
-the stars.\r
-\r
-When Marius went forth, the street was deserted. This was the moment\r
-when Eponine was following the ruffians to the boulevard.\r
-\r
-While Marius had been dreaming with his head pressed to the tree, an\r
-idea had crossed his mind; an idea, alas! that he himself judged to be\r
-senseless and impossible. He had come to a desperate decision.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE OLD HEART AND THE YOUNG HEART IN THE PRESENCE OF EACH\r
-OTHER\r
-\r
-At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first\r
-birthday. He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue des\r
-Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned. He was, as\r
-the reader will remember, one of those antique old men who await death\r
-perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending, and whom even\r
-sorrow cannot curve.\r
-\r
-Still, his daughter had been saying for some time: "My father is\r
-sinking." He no longer boxed the maids' ears; he no longer thumped\r
-the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow in\r
-opening the door. The Revolution of July had exasperated him for the\r
-space of barely six months. He had viewed, almost tranquilly, that\r
-coupling of words, in the Moniteur: M. Humblot-Conte, peer of France.\r
-The fact is, that the old man was deeply dejected. He did not bend, he\r
-did not yield; this was no more a characteristic of his physical than\r
-of his moral nature, but he felt himself giving way internally. For four\r
-years he had been waiting for Marius, with his foot firmly planted, that\r
-is the exact word, in the conviction that that good-for-nothing young\r
-scamp would ring at his door some day or other; now he had reached\r
-the point, where, at certain gloomy hours, he said to himself, that\r
-if Marius made him wait much longer--It was not death that was\r
-insupportable to him; it was the idea that perhaps he should never see\r
-Marius again. The idea of never seeing Marius again had never entered\r
-his brain until that day; now the thought began to recur to him, and\r
-it chilled him. Absence, as is always the case in genuine and natural\r
-sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather's love for the\r
-ungrateful child, who had gone off like a flash. It is during December\r
-nights, when the cold stands at ten degrees, that one thinks oftenest of\r
-the son.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand was, or thought himself, above all things, incapable\r
-of taking a single step, he--the grandfather, towards his grandson; "I\r
-would die rather," he said to himself. He did not consider himself\r
-as the least to blame; but he thought of Marius only with profound\r
-tenderness, and the mute despair of an elderly, kindly old man who is\r
-about to vanish in the dark.\r
-\r
-He began to lose his teeth, which added to his sadness.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand, without however acknowledging it to himself, for it\r
-would have rendered him furious and ashamed, had never loved a mistress\r
-as he loved Marius.\r
-\r
-He had had placed in his chamber, opposite the head of his bed, so that\r
-it should be the first thing on which his eyes fell on waking, an\r
-old portrait of his other daughter, who was dead, Madame Pontmercy,\r
-a portrait which had been taken when she was eighteen. He gazed\r
-incessantly at that portrait. One day, he happened to say, as he gazed\r
-upon it:--\r
-\r
-"I think the likeness is strong."\r
-\r
-"To my sister?" inquired Mademoiselle Gillenormand. "Yes, certainly."\r
-\r
-"The old man added:--\r
-\r
-"And to him also."\r
-\r
-Once as he sat with his knees pressed together, and his eyes almost\r
-closed, in a despondent attitude, his daughter ventured to say to him:--\r
-\r
-"Father, are you as angry with him as ever?"\r
-\r
-She paused, not daring to proceed further.\r
-\r
-"With whom?" he demanded.\r
-\r
-"With that poor Marius."\r
-\r
-He raised his aged head, laid his withered and emaciated fist on the\r
-table, and exclaimed in his most irritated and vibrating tone:--\r
-\r
-"Poor Marius, do you say! That gentleman is a knave, a wretched\r
-scoundrel, a vain little ingrate, a heartless, soulless, haughty, and\r
-wicked man!"\r
-\r
-And he turned away so that his daughter might not see the tear that\r
-stood in his eye.\r
-\r
-Three days later he broke a silence which had lasted four hours, to say\r
-to his daughter point-blank:--\r
-\r
-"I had the honor to ask Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention him\r
-to me."\r
-\r
-Aunt Gillenormand renounced every effort, and pronounced this acute\r
-diagnosis: "My father never cared very much for my sister after her\r
-folly. It is clear that he detests Marius."\r
-\r
-"After her folly" meant: "after she had married the colonel."\r
-\r
-However, as the reader has been able to conjecture, Mademoiselle\r
-Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite, the\r
-officer of lancers, for Marius. The substitute, Theodule, had not been a\r
-success. M. Gillenormand had not accepted the quid pro quo. A vacancy\r
-in the heart does not accommodate itself to a stop-gap. Theodule, on his\r
-side, though he scented the inheritance, was disgusted at the task\r
-of pleasing. The goodman bored the lancer; and the lancer shocked the\r
-goodman. Lieutenant Theodule was gay, no doubt, but a chatter-box,\r
-frivolous, but vulgar; a high liver, but a frequenter of bad company; he\r
-had mistresses, it is true, and he had a great deal to say about them,\r
-it is true also; but he talked badly. All his good qualities had a\r
-defect. M. Gillenormand was worn out with hearing him tell about the\r
-love affairs that he had in the vicinity of the barracks in the Rue\r
-de Babylone. And then, Lieutenant Gillenormand sometimes came in his\r
-uniform, with the tricolored cockade. This rendered him downright\r
-intolerable. Finally, Father Gillenormand had said to his daughter:\r
-"I've had enough of that Theodule. I haven't much taste for warriors\r
-in time of peace. Receive him if you choose. I don't know but I prefer\r
-slashers to fellows that drag their swords. The clash of blades in\r
-battle is less dismal, after all, than the clank of the scabbard on\r
-the pavement. And then, throwing out your chest like a bully and\r
-lacing yourself like a girl, with stays under your cuirass, is doubly\r
-ridiculous. When one is a veritable man, one holds equally aloof\r
-from swagger and from affected airs. He is neither a blusterer nor a\r
-finnicky-hearted man. Keep your Theodule for yourself."\r
-\r
-It was in vain that his daughter said to him: "But he is your\r
-grandnephew, nevertheless,"--it turned out that M. Gillenormand, who\r
-was a grandfather to the very finger-tips, was not in the least a\r
-grand-uncle.\r
-\r
-In fact, as he had good sense, and as he had compared the two, Theodule\r
-had only served to make him regret Marius all the more.\r
-\r
-One evening,--it was the 24th of June, which did not prevent Father\r
-Gillenormand having a rousing fire on the hearth,--he had dismissed his\r
-daughter, who was sewing in a neighboring apartment. He was alone in\r
-his chamber, amid its pastoral scenes, with his feet propped on the\r
-andirons, half enveloped in his huge screen of coromandel lacquer, with\r
-its nine leaves, with his elbow resting on a table where burned two\r
-candles under a green shade, engulfed in his tapestry armchair, and in\r
-his hand a book which he was not reading. He was dressed, according\r
-to his wont, like an incroyable, and resembled an antique portrait by\r
-Garat. This would have made people run after him in the street, had not\r
-his daughter covered him up, whenever he went out, in a vast bishop's\r
-wadded cloak, which concealed his attire. At home, he never wore a\r
-dressing gown, except when he rose and retired. "It gives one a look of\r
-age," said he.\r
-\r
-Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius lovingly and bitterly; and,\r
-as usual, bitterness predominated. His tenderness once soured always\r
-ended by boiling and turning to indignation. He had reached the point\r
-where a man tries to make up his mind and to accept that which rends his\r
-heart. He was explaining to himself that there was no longer any reason\r
-why Marius should return, that if he intended to return, he should\r
-have done it long ago, that he must renounce the idea. He was trying to\r
-accustom himself to the thought that all was over, and that he should\r
-die without having beheld "that gentleman" again. But his whole nature\r
-revolted; his aged paternity would not consent to this. "Well!" said\r
-he,--this was his doleful refrain,--"he will not return!" His bald head\r
-had fallen upon his breast, and he fixed a melancholy and irritated gaze\r
-upon the ashes on his hearth.\r
-\r
-In the very midst of his revery, his old servant Basque entered, and\r
-inquired:--\r
-\r
-"Can Monsieur receive M. Marius?"\r
-\r
-The old man sat up erect, pallid, and like a corpse which rises under\r
-the influence of a galvanic shock. All his blood had retreated to his\r
-heart. He stammered:--\r
-\r
-"M. Marius what?"\r
-\r
-"I don't know," replied Basque, intimidated and put out of countenance\r
-by his master's air; "I have not seen him. Nicolette came in and said to\r
-me: 'There's a young man here; say that it is M. Marius.'"\r
-\r
-Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice:--\r
-\r
-"Show him in."\r
-\r
-And he remained in the same attitude, with shaking head, and his eyes\r
-fixed on the door. It opened once more. A young man entered. It was\r
-Marius.\r
-\r
-Marius halted at the door, as though waiting to be bidden to enter.\r
-\r
-His almost squalid attire was not perceptible in the obscurity caused by\r
-the shade. Nothing could be seen but his calm, grave, but strangely sad\r
-face.\r
-\r
-It was several minutes before Father Gillenormand, dulled with amazement\r
-and joy, could see anything except a brightness as when one is in the\r
-presence of an apparition. He was on the point of swooning; he saw\r
-Marius through a dazzling light. It certainly was he, it certainly was\r
-Marius.\r
-\r
-At last! After the lapse of four years! He grasped him entire, so to\r
-speak, in a single glance. He found him noble, handsome, distinguished,\r
-well-grown, a complete man, with a suitable mien and a charming air. He\r
-felt a desire to open his arms, to call him, to fling himself forward;\r
-his heart melted with rapture, affectionate words swelled and overflowed\r
-his breast; at length all his tenderness came to the light and reached\r
-his lips, and, by a contrast which constituted the very foundation of\r
-his nature, what came forth was harshness. He said abruptly:--\r
-\r
-"What have you come here for?"\r
-\r
-Marius replied with embarrassment:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur--"\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand would have liked to have Marius throw himself into his\r
-arms. He was displeased with Marius and with himself. He was conscious\r
-that he was brusque, and that Marius was cold. It caused the goodman\r
-unendurable and irritating anxiety to feel so tender and forlorn\r
-within, and only to be able to be hard outside. Bitterness returned. He\r
-interrupted Marius in a peevish tone:--\r
-\r
-"Then why did you come?"\r
-\r
-That "then" signified: If you do not come to embrace me. Marius looked\r
-at his grandfather, whose pallor gave him a face of marble.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur--"\r
-\r
-"Have you come to beg my pardon? Do you acknowledge your faults?"\r
-\r
-He thought he was putting Marius on the right road, and that "the child"\r
-would yield. Marius shivered; it was the denial of his father that was\r
-required of him; he dropped his eyes and replied:--\r
-\r
-"No, sir."\r
-\r
-"Then," exclaimed the old man impetuously, with a grief that was\r
-poignant and full of wrath, "what do you want of me?"\r
-\r
-Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said in a feeble and\r
-trembling voice:--\r
-\r
-"Sir, have pity on me."\r
-\r
-These words touched M. Gillenormand; uttered a little sooner, they would\r
-have rendered him tender, but they came too late. The grandfather rose;\r
-he supported himself with both hands on his cane; his lips were white,\r
-his brow wavered, but his lofty form towered above Marius as he bowed.\r
-\r
-"Pity on you, sir! It is youth demanding pity of the old man of\r
-ninety-one! You are entering into life, I am leaving it; you go to the\r
-play, to balls, to the cafe, to the billiard-hall; you have wit, you\r
-please the women, you are a handsome fellow; as for me, I spit on my\r
-brands in the heart of summer; you are rich with the only riches that\r
-are really such, I possess all the poverty of age; infirmity, isolation!\r
-You have your thirty-two teeth, a good digestion, bright eyes, strength,\r
-appetite, health, gayety, a forest of black hair; I have no longer even\r
-white hair, I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my\r
-memory; there are three names of streets that I confound incessantly,\r
-the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue Saint-Claude, that\r
-is what I have come to; you have before you the whole future, full of\r
-sunshine, and I am beginning to lose my sight, so far am I advancing\r
-into the night; you are in love, that is a matter of course, I am\r
-beloved by no one in all the world; and you ask pity of me! Parbleu!\r
-Moliere forgot that. If that is the way you jest at the courthouse,\r
-Messieurs the lawyers, I sincerely compliment you. You are droll."\r
-\r
-And the octogenarian went on in a grave and angry voice:--\r
-\r
-"Come, now, what do you want of me?"\r
-\r
-"Sir," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but\r
-I have come merely to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away\r
-immediately."\r
-\r
-"You are a fool!" said the old man. "Who said that you were to go away?"\r
-\r
-This was the translation of the tender words which lay at the bottom of\r
-his heart:--\r
-\r
-"Ask my pardon! Throw yourself on my neck!"\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand felt that Marius would leave him in a few moments, that\r
-his harsh reception had repelled the lad, that his hardness was driving\r
-him away; he said all this to himself, and it augmented his grief; and\r
-as his grief was straightway converted into wrath, it increased his\r
-harshness. He would have liked to have Marius understand, and Marius did\r
-not understand, which made the goodman furious.\r
-\r
-He began again:--\r
-\r
-"What! you deserted me, your grandfather, you left my house to go no\r
-one knows whither, you drove your aunt to despair, you went off, it is\r
-easily guessed, to lead a bachelor life; it's more convenient, to play\r
-the dandy, to come in at all hours, to amuse yourself; you have given me\r
-no signs of life, you have contracted debts without even telling me to\r
-pay them, you have become a smasher of windows and a blusterer, and, at\r
-the end of four years, you come to me, and that is all you have to say\r
-to me!"\r
-\r
-This violent fashion of driving a grandson to tenderness was productive\r
-only of silence on the part of Marius. M. Gillenormand folded his arms;\r
-a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious, and apostrophized\r
-Marius bitterly:--\r
-\r
-"Let us make an end of this. You have come to ask something of me, you\r
-say? Well, what? What is it? Speak!"\r
-\r
-"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is falling\r
-over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand rang the bell. Basque opened the door half-way.\r
-\r
-"Call my daughter."\r
-\r
-A second later, the door was opened once more, Mademoiselle Gillenormand\r
-did not enter, but showed herself; Marius was standing, mute, with\r
-pendant arms and the face of a criminal; M. Gillenormand was pacing back\r
-and forth in the room. He turned to his daughter and said to her:--\r
-\r
-"Nothing. It is Monsieur Marius. Say good day to him. Monsieur wishes to\r
-marry. That's all. Go away."\r
-\r
-The curt, hoarse sound of the old man's voice announced a strange degree\r
-of excitement. The aunt gazed at Marius with a frightened air, hardly\r
-appeared to recognize him, did not allow a gesture or a syllable to\r
-escape her, and disappeared at her father's breath more swiftly than a\r
-straw before the hurricane.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Father Gillenormand had returned and placed his back\r
-against the chimney-piece once more.\r
-\r
-"You marry! At one and twenty! You have arranged that! You have only\r
-a permission to ask! a formality. Sit down, sir. Well, you have had a\r
-revolution since I had the honor to see you last. The Jacobins got the\r
-upper hand. You must have been delighted. Are you not a Republican since\r
-you are a Baron? You can make that agree. The Republic makes a good\r
-sauce for the barony. Are you one of those decorated by July? Have you\r
-taken the Louvre at all, sir? Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine,\r
-opposite the Rue des Nonamdieres, there is a cannon-ball incrusted in\r
-the wall of the third story of a house with this inscription: 'July\r
-28th, 1830.' Go take a look at that. It produces a good effect. Ah!\r
-those friends of yours do pretty things. By the way, aren't they\r
-erecting a fountain in the place of the monument of M. le Duc de Berry?\r
-So you want to marry? Whom? Can one inquire without indiscretion?"\r
-\r
-He paused, and, before Marius had time to answer, he added violently:--\r
-\r
-"Come now, you have a profession? A fortune made? How much do you earn\r
-at your trade of lawyer?"\r
-\r
-"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of firmness and resolution that was\r
-almost fierce.\r
-\r
-"Nothing? Then all that you have to live upon is the twelve hundred\r
-livres that I allow you?"\r
-\r
-Marius did not reply. M. Gillenormand continued:--\r
-\r
-"Then I understand the girl is rich?"\r
-\r
-"As rich as I am."\r
-\r
-"What! No dowry?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Expectations?"\r
-\r
-"I think not."\r
-\r
-"Utterly naked! What's the father?"\r
-\r
-"I don't know."\r
-\r
-"And what's her name?"\r
-\r
-"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."\r
-\r
-"Fauchewhat?"\r
-\r
-"Fauchelevent."\r
-\r
-"Pttt!" ejaculated the old gentleman.\r
-\r
-"Sir!" exclaimed Marius.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand interrupted him with the tone of a man who is speaking\r
-to himself:--\r
-\r
-"That's right, one and twenty years of age, no profession, twelve\r
-hundred livres a year, Madame la Baronne de Pontmercy will go and\r
-purchase a couple of sous' worth of parsley from the fruiterer."\r
-\r
-"Sir," repeated Marius, in the despair at the last hope, which was\r
-vanishing, "I entreat you! I conjure you in the name of Heaven, with\r
-clasped hands, sir, I throw myself at your feet, permit me to marry\r
-her!"\r
-\r
-The old man burst into a shout of strident and mournful laughter,\r
-coughing and laughing at the same time.\r
-\r
-"Ah! ah! ah! You said to yourself: 'Pardine! I'll go hunt up that old\r
-blockhead, that absurd numskull! What a shame that I'm not twenty-five!\r
-How I'd treat him to a nice respectful summons! How nicely I'd get along\r
-without him! It's nothing to me, I'd say to him: "You're only too happy\r
-to see me, you old idiot, I want to marry, I desire to wed Mamselle\r
-No-matter-whom, daughter of Monsieur No-matter-what, I have no shoes,\r
-she has no chemise, that just suits; I want to throw my career, my\r
-future, my youth, my life to the dogs; I wish to take a plunge into\r
-wretchedness with a woman around my neck, that's an idea, and you must\r
-consent to it!" and the old fossil will consent.' Go, my lad, do as\r
-you like, attach your paving-stone, marry your Pousselevent, your\r
-Coupelevent--Never, sir, never!"\r
-\r
-"Father--"\r
-\r
-"Never!"\r
-\r
-At the tone in which that "never" was uttered, Marius lost all hope. He\r
-traversed the chamber with slow steps, with bowed head, tottering and\r
-more like a dying man than like one merely taking his departure. M.\r
-Gillenormand followed him with his eyes, and at the moment when the\r
-door opened, and Marius was on the point of going out, he advanced four\r
-paces, with the senile vivacity of impetuous and spoiled old gentlemen,\r
-seized Marius by the collar, brought him back energetically into the\r
-room, flung him into an armchair and said to him:--\r
-\r
-"Tell me all about it!"\r
-\r
-"It was that single word "father" which had effected this revolution.\r
-\r
-Marius stared at him in bewilderment. M. Gillenormand's mobile face was\r
-no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable good-nature.\r
-The grandsire had given way before the grandfather.\r
-\r
-"Come, see here, speak, tell me about your love affairs, jabber, tell me\r
-everything! Sapristi! how stupid young folks are!"\r
-\r
-"Father--" repeated Marius.\r
-\r
-The old man's entire countenance lighted up with indescribable radiance.\r
-\r
-"Yes, that's right, call me father, and you'll see!"\r
-\r
-There was now something so kind, so gentle, so openhearted, and so\r
-paternal in this brusqueness, that Marius, in the sudden transition from\r
-discouragement to hope, was stunned and intoxicated by it, as it were.\r
-He was seated near the table, the light from the candles brought out\r
-the dilapidation of his costume, which Father Gillenormand regarded with\r
-amazement.\r
-\r
-"Well, father--" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"Ah, by the way," interrupted M. Gillenormand, "you really have not a\r
-penny then? You are dressed like a pickpocket."\r
-\r
-He rummaged in a drawer, drew forth a purse, which he laid on the table:\r
-"Here are a hundred louis, buy yourself a hat."\r
-\r
-"Father," pursued Marius, "my good father, if you only knew! I love her.\r
-You cannot imagine it; the first time I saw her was at the Luxembourg,\r
-she came there; in the beginning, I did not pay much heed to her, and\r
-then, I don't know how it came about, I fell in love with her. Oh! how\r
-unhappy that made me! Now, at last, I see her every day, at her own\r
-home, her father does not know it, just fancy, they are going away, it\r
-is in the garden that we meet, in the evening, her father means to take\r
-her to England, then I said to myself: 'I'll go and see my grandfather\r
-and tell him all about the affair. I should go mad first, I should die,\r
-I should fall ill, I should throw myself into the water. I absolutely\r
-must marry her, since I should go mad otherwise.' This is the whole\r
-truth, and I do not think that I have omitted anything. She lives in a\r
-garden with an iron fence, in the Rue Plumet. It is in the neighborhood\r
-of the Invalides."\r
-\r
-Father Gillenormand had seated himself, with a beaming countenance,\r
-beside Marius. As he listened to him and drank in the sound of his\r
-voice, he enjoyed at the same time a protracted pinch of snuff. At\r
-the words "Rue Plumet" he interrupted his inhalation and allowed the\r
-remainder of his snuff to fall upon his knees.\r
-\r
-"The Rue Plumet, the Rue Plumet, did you say?--Let us see!--Are there\r
-not barracks in that vicinity?--Why, yes, that's it. Your cousin\r
-Theodule has spoken to me about it. The lancer, the officer. A gay girl,\r
-my good friend, a gay girl!--Pardieu, yes, the Rue Plumet. It is what\r
-used to be called the Rue Blomet.--It all comes back to me now. I have\r
-heard of that little girl of the iron railing in the Rue Plumet. In a\r
-garden, a Pamela. Your taste is not bad. She is said to be a very tidy\r
-creature. Between ourselves, I think that simpleton of a lancer has been\r
-courting her a bit. I don't know where he did it. However, that's not\r
-to the purpose. Besides, he is not to be believed. He brags, Marius! I\r
-think it quite proper that a young man like you should be in love. It's\r
-the right thing at your age. I like you better as a lover than as a\r
-Jacobin. I like you better in love with a petticoat, sapristi! with\r
-twenty petticoats, than with M. de Robespierre. For my part, I will do\r
-myself the justice to say, that in the line of sans-culottes, I have\r
-never loved any one but women. Pretty girls are pretty girls, the deuce!\r
-There's no objection to that. As for the little one, she receives you\r
-without her father's knowledge. That's in the established order of\r
-things. I have had adventures of that same sort myself. More than one.\r
-Do you know what is done then? One does not take the matter ferociously;\r
-one does not precipitate himself into the tragic; one does not make\r
-one's mind to marriage and M. le Maire with his scarf. One simply\r
-behaves like a fellow of spirit. One shows good sense. Slip along,\r
-mortals; don't marry. You come and look up your grandfather, who is a\r
-good-natured fellow at bottom, and who always has a few rolls of louis\r
-in an old drawer; you say to him: 'See here, grandfather.' And the\r
-grandfather says: 'That's a simple matter. Youth must amuse itself, and\r
-old age must wear out. I have been young, you will be old. Come, my boy,\r
-you shall pass it on to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles.\r
-Amuse yourself, deuce take it!' Nothing better! That's the way the\r
-affair should be treated. You don't marry, but that does no harm. You\r
-understand me?"\r
-\r
-Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a syllable, made a sign with\r
-his head that he did not.\r
-\r
-The old man burst out laughing, winked his aged eye, gave him a slap on\r
-the knee, stared him full in the face with a mysterious and beaming air,\r
-and said to him, with the tenderest of shrugs of the shoulder:--\r
-\r
-"Booby! make her your mistress."\r
-\r
-Marius turned pale. He had understood nothing of what his grandfather\r
-had just said. This twaddle about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks,\r
-the lancer, had passed before Marius like a dissolving view. Nothing of\r
-all that could bear any reference to Cosette, who was a lily. The good\r
-man was wandering in his mind. But this wandering terminated in words\r
-which Marius did understand, and which were a mortal insult to Cosette.\r
-Those words, "make her your mistress," entered the heart of the strict\r
-young man like a sword.\r
-\r
-He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked to the\r
-door with a firm, assured step. There he turned round, bowed deeply to\r
-his grandfather, raised his head erect again, and said:--\r
-\r
-"Five years ago you insulted my father; to-day you have insulted my\r
-wife. I ask nothing more of you, sir. Farewell."\r
-\r
-Father Gillenormand, utterly confounded, opened his mouth, extended his\r
-arms, tried to rise, and before he could utter a word, the door closed\r
-once more, and Marius had disappeared.\r
-\r
-The old man remained for several minutes motionless and as though\r
-struck by lightning, without the power to speak or breathe, as though\r
-a clenched fist grasped his throat. At last he tore himself from his\r
-arm-chair, ran, so far as a man can run at ninety-one, to the door,\r
-opened it, and cried:--\r
-\r
-"Help! Help!"\r
-\r
-His daughter made her appearance, then the domestics. He began again,\r
-with a pitiful rattle: "Run after him! Bring him back! What have I done\r
-to him? He is mad! He is going away! Ah! my God! Ah! my God! This time\r
-he will not come back!"\r
-\r
-He went to the window which looked out on the street, threw it open with\r
-his aged and palsied hands, leaned out more than half-way, while Basque\r
-and Nicolette held him behind, and shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!"\r
-\r
-But Marius could no longer hear him, for at that moment he was turning\r
-the corner of the Rue Saint-Louis.\r
-\r
-The octogenarian raised his hands to his temples two or three times\r
-with an expression of anguish, recoiled tottering, and fell back into an\r
-arm-chair, pulseless, voiceless, tearless, with quivering head and lips\r
-which moved with a stupid air, with nothing in his eyes and nothing\r
-any longer in his heart except a gloomy and profound something which\r
-resembled night.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--JEAN VALJEAN\r
-\r
-That same day, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was\r
-sitting alone on the back side of one of the most solitary slopes in the\r
-Champ-de-Mars. Either from prudence, or from a desire to meditate, or\r
-simply in consequence of one of those insensible changes of habit which\r
-gradually introduce themselves into the existence of every one, he now\r
-rarely went out with Cosette. He had on his workman's waistcoat,\r
-and trousers of gray linen; and his long-visored cap concealed his\r
-countenance.\r
-\r
-He was calm and happy now beside Cosette; that which had, for a time,\r
-alarmed and troubled him had been dissipated; but for the last week or\r
-two, anxieties of another nature had come up. One day, while walking\r
-on the boulevard, he had caught sight of Thenardier; thanks to his\r
-disguise, Thenardier had not recognized him; but since that day, Jean\r
-Valjean had seen him repeatedly, and he was now certain that Thenardier\r
-was prowling about in their neighborhood.\r
-\r
-This had been sufficient to make him come to a decision.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Paris was not tranquil: political troubles presented this\r
-inconvenient feature, for any one who had anything to conceal in his\r
-life, that the police had grown very uneasy and very suspicious, and\r
-that while seeking to ferret out a man like Pepin or Morey, they might\r
-very readily discover a man like Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had made up his mind to quit Paris, and even France, and go\r
-over to England.\r
-\r
-He had warned Cosette. He wished to set out before the end of the week.\r
-\r
-He had seated himself on the slope in the Champ-de-Mars, turning over\r
-all sorts of thoughts in his mind,--Thenardier, the police, the journey,\r
-and the difficulty of procuring a passport.\r
-\r
-He was troubled from all these points of view.\r
-\r
-Last of all, an inexplicable circumstance which had just attracted his\r
-attention, and from which he had not yet recovered, had added to his\r
-state of alarm.\r
-\r
-On the morning of that very day, when he alone of the household was\r
-stirring, while strolling in the garden before Cosette's shutters\r
-were open, he had suddenly perceived on the wall, the following line,\r
-engraved, probably with a nail:--\r
-\r
-16 Rue de la Verrerie.\r
-\r
-This was perfectly fresh, the grooves in the ancient black mortar were\r
-white, a tuft of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with the\r
-fine, fresh plaster.\r
-\r
-This had probably been written on the preceding night.\r
-\r
-What was this? A signal for others? A warning for himself?\r
-\r
-In any case, it was evident that the garden had been violated, and that\r
-strangers had made their way into it.\r
-\r
-He recalled the odd incidents which had already alarmed the household.\r
-\r
-His mind was now filling in this canvas.\r
-\r
-He took good care not to speak to Cosette of the line written on the\r
-wall, for fear of alarming her.\r
-\r
-In the midst of his preoccupations, he perceived, from a shadow cast by\r
-the sun, that some one had halted on the crest of the slope immediately\r
-behind him.\r
-\r
-He was on the point of turning round, when a paper folded in four fell\r
-upon his knees as though a hand had dropped it over his head.\r
-\r
-He took the paper, unfolded it, and read these words written in large\r
-characters, with a pencil:--\r
-\r
-"MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR HOUSE."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean sprang hastily to his feet; there was no one on the slope;\r
-he gazed all around him and perceived a creature larger than a\r
-child, not so large as a man, clad in a gray blouse and trousers of\r
-dust-colored cotton velvet, who was jumping over the parapet and who\r
-slipped into the moat of the Champde-Mars.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean returned home at once, in a very thoughtful mood.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--MARIUS\r
-\r
-Marius had left M. Gillenormand in despair. He had entered the house\r
-with very little hope, and quitted it with immense despair.\r
-\r
-However, and those who have observed the depths of the human heart will\r
-understand this, the officer, the lancer, the ninny, Cousin Theodule,\r
-had left no trace in his mind. Not the slightest. The dramatic poet\r
-might, apparently, expect some complications from this revelation made\r
-point-blank by the grandfather to the grandson. But what the drama would\r
-gain thereby, truth would lose. Marius was at an age when one believes\r
-nothing in the line of evil; later on comes the age when one believes\r
-everything. Suspicions are nothing else than wrinkles. Early youth\r
-has none of them. That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over\r
-Candide. Suspect Cosette! There are hosts of crimes which Marius could\r
-sooner have committed.\r
-\r
-He began to wander about the streets, the resource of those who suffer.\r
-He thought of nothing, so far as he could afterwards remember. At two\r
-o'clock in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac's quarters and flung\r
-himself, without undressing, on his mattress. The sun was shining\r
-brightly when he sank into that frightful leaden slumber which permits\r
-ideas to go and come in the brain. When he awoke, he saw Courfeyrac,\r
-Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in the room with their hats\r
-on and all ready to go out.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac said to him:--\r
-\r
-"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"\r
-\r
-It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.\r
-\r
-He went out some time after them. He put in his pocket the pistols which\r
-Javert had given him at the time of the adventure on the 3d of February,\r
-and which had remained in his hands. These pistols were still loaded. It\r
-would be difficult to say what vague thought he had in his mind when he\r
-took them with him.\r
-\r
-All day long he prowled about, without knowing where he was going; it\r
-rained at times, he did not perceive it; for his dinner, he purchased a\r
-penny roll at a baker's, put it in his pocket and forgot it. It appears\r
-that he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of it. There are\r
-moments when a man has a furnace within his skull. Marius was passing\r
-through one of those moments. He no longer hoped for anything; this\r
-step he had taken since the preceding evening. He waited for night with\r
-feverish impatience, he had but one idea clearly before his mind;--this\r
-was, that at nine o'clock he should see Cosette. This last happiness\r
-now constituted his whole future; after that, gloom. At intervals, as\r
-he roamed through the most deserted boulevards, it seemed to him that he\r
-heard strange noises in Paris. He thrust his head out of his revery and\r
-said: "Is there fighting on hand?"\r
-\r
-At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, as he had promised Cosette,\r
-he was in the Rue Plumet. When he approached the grating he forgot\r
-everything. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette; he was\r
-about to behold her once more; every other thought was effaced, and\r
-he felt only a profound and unheard-of joy. Those minutes in which one\r
-lives centuries always have this sovereign and wonderful property, that\r
-at the moment when they are passing they fill the heart completely.\r
-\r
-Marius displaced the bar, and rushed headlong into the garden. Cosette\r
-was not at the spot where she ordinarily waited for him. He traversed\r
-the thicket, and approached the recess near the flight of steps: "She\r
-is waiting for me there," said he. Cosette was not there. He raised his\r
-eyes, and saw that the shutters of the house were closed. He made the\r
-tour of the garden, the garden was deserted. Then he returned to\r
-the house, and, rendered senseless by love, intoxicated, terrified,\r
-exasperated with grief and uneasiness, like a master who returns home at\r
-an evil hour, he tapped on the shutters. He knocked and knocked again,\r
-at the risk of seeing the window open, and her father's gloomy face\r
-make its appearance, and demand: "What do you want?" This was nothing in\r
-comparison with what he dimly caught a glimpse of. When he had rapped,\r
-he lifted up his voice and called Cosette.--"Cosette!" he cried;\r
-"Cosette!" he repeated imperiously. There was no reply. All was over. No\r
-one in the garden; no one in the house.\r
-\r
-Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as\r
-black and as silent as a tomb and far more empty. He gazed at the stone\r
-seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then he\r
-seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled with sweetness\r
-and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his thought, and\r
-he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that there was left\r
-for him was to die.\r
-\r
-All at once he heard a voice which seemed to proceed from the street,\r
-and which was calling to him through the trees:--\r
-\r
-"Mr. Marius!"\r
-\r
-He started to his feet.\r
-\r
-"Hey?" said he.\r
-\r
-"Mr. Marius, are you there?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Mr. Marius," went on the voice, "your friends are waiting for you at\r
-the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie."\r
-\r
-This voice was not wholly unfamiliar to him. It resembled the hoarse,\r
-rough voice of Eponine. Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside the\r
-movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw some one who\r
-appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at a run into the gloom.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--M. MABEUF\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's purse was of no use to M. Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf, in his\r
-venerable, infantile austerity, had not accepted the gift of the stars;\r
-he had not admitted that a star could coin itself into louis d'or. He\r
-had not divined that what had fallen from heaven had come from Gavroche.\r
-He had taken the purse to the police commissioner of the quarter, as\r
-a lost article placed by the finder at the disposal of claimants. The\r
-purse was actually lost. It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed\r
-it, and that it did not succor M. Mabeuf.\r
-\r
-Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.\r
-\r
-His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the Jardin des\r
-Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz. The year before he had owed\r
-his housekeeper's wages; now, as we have seen, he owed three quarters\r
-of his rent. The pawnshop had sold the plates of his Flora after the\r
-expiration of thirteen months. Some coppersmith had made stewpans of\r
-them. His copper plates gone, and being unable to complete even the\r
-incomplete copies of his Flora which were in his possession, he had\r
-disposed of the text, at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a\r
-second-hand bookseller. Nothing now remained to him of his life's work.\r
-He set to work to eat up the money for these copies. When he saw that\r
-this wretched resource was becoming exhausted, he gave up his garden\r
-and allowed it to run to waste. Before this, a long time before, he had\r
-given up his two eggs and the morsel of beef which he ate from time\r
-to time. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his\r
-furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding, his clothing and his\r
-blankets, then his herbariums and prints; but he still retained his most\r
-precious books, many of which were of the greatest rarity, among others,\r
-Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible, edition of 1560; La Concordance\r
-des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse; Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, of\r
-Jean de La Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book de\r
-la Charge et Dignite de l'Ambassadeur, by the Sieur de Villiers\r
-Hotman; a Florilegium Rabbinicum of 1644; a Tibullus of 1567, with this\r
-magnificent inscription: Venetiis, in aedibus Manutianis; and lastly, a\r
-Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, which contained the famous\r
-variant of the manuscript 411, thirteenth century, of the Vatican, and\r
-those of the two manuscripts of Venice, 393 and 394, consulted with\r
-such fruitful results by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in Doric\r
-dialect which are only found in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth\r
-century belonging to the Naples Library. M. Mabeuf never had any fire\r
-in his chamber, and went to bed at sundown, in order not to consume\r
-any candles. It seemed as though he had no longer any neighbors: people\r
-avoided him when he went out; he perceived the fact. The wretchedness of\r
-a child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a young man interests a\r
-young girl, the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. It is, of\r
-all distresses, the coldest. Still, Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost\r
-his childlike serenity. His eyes acquired some vivacity when they rested\r
-on his books, and he smiled when he gazed at the Diogenes Laertius,\r
-which was a unique copy. His bookcase with glass doors was the\r
-only piece of furniture which he had kept beyond what was strictly\r
-indispensable.\r
-\r
-One day, Mother Plutarque said to him:--\r
-\r
-"I have no money to buy any dinner."\r
-\r
-What she called dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.\r
-\r
-"On credit?" suggested M. Mabeuf.\r
-\r
-"You know well that people refuse me."\r
-\r
-M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase, took a long look at all his books, one\r
-after another, as a father obliged to decimate his children would gaze\r
-upon them before making a choice, then seized one hastily, put it\r
-in under his arm and went out. He returned two hours later, without\r
-anything under his arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said:--\r
-\r
-"You will get something for dinner."\r
-\r
-From that moment forth, Mother Plutarque saw a sombre veil, which was\r
-never more lifted, descend over the old man's candid face.\r
-\r
-On the following day, on the day after, and on the day after that, it\r
-had to be done again.\r
-\r
-M. Mabeuf went out with a book and returned with a coin. As the\r
-second-hand dealers perceived that he was forced to sell, they purchased\r
-of him for twenty sous that for which he had paid twenty francs,\r
-sometimes at those very shops. Volume by volume, the whole library\r
-went the same road. He said at times: "But I am eighty;" as though he\r
-cherished some secret hope that he should arrive at the end of his days\r
-before reaching the end of his books. His melancholy increased. Once,\r
-however, he had a pleasure. He had gone out with a Robert Estienne,\r
-which he had sold for thirty-five sous under the Quai Malaquais, and he\r
-returned with an Aldus which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des\r
-Gres.--"I owe five sous," he said, beaming on Mother Plutarque. That day\r
-he had no dinner.\r
-\r
-He belonged to the Horticultural Society. His destitution became known\r
-there. The president of the society came to see him, promised to\r
-speak to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce about him, and did\r
-so.--"Why, what!" exclaimed the Minister, "I should think so! An old\r
-savant! a botanist! an inoffensive man! Something must be done for him!"\r
-On the following day, M. Mabeuf received an invitation to dine with the\r
-Minister. Trembling with joy, he showed the letter to Mother Plutarque.\r
-"We are saved!" said he. On the day appointed, he went to the Minister's\r
-house. He perceived that his ragged cravat, his long, square coat, and\r
-his waxed shoes astonished the ushers. No one spoke to him, not even the\r
-Minister. About ten o'clock in the evening, while he was still waiting\r
-for a word, he heard the Minister's wife, a beautiful woman in a\r
-low-necked gown whom he had not ventured to approach, inquire: "Who is\r
-that old gentleman?" He returned home on foot at midnight, in a driving\r
-rain-storm. He had sold an Elzevir to pay for a carriage in which to go\r
-thither.\r
-\r
-He had acquired the habit of reading a few pages in his Diogenes\r
-Laertius every night, before he went to bed. He knew enough Greek to\r
-enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he owned. He had now no other\r
-enjoyment. Several weeks passed. All at once, Mother Plutarque fell ill.\r
-There is one thing sadder than having no money with which to buy bread\r
-at the baker's and that is having no money to purchase drugs at the\r
-apothecary's. One evening, the doctor had ordered a very expensive\r
-potion. And the malady was growing worse; a nurse was required. M.\r
-Mabeuf opened his bookcase; there was nothing there. The last volume had\r
-taken its departure. All that was left to him was Diogenes Laertius.\r
-He put this unique copy under his arm, and went out. It was the 4th of\r
-June, 1832; he went to the Porte Saint-Jacques, to Royal's successor,\r
-and returned with one hundred francs. He laid the pile of five-franc\r
-pieces on the old serving-woman's nightstand, and returned to his\r
-chamber without saying a word.\r
-\r
-On the following morning, at dawn, he seated himself on the overturned\r
-post in his garden, and he could be seen over the top of the hedge,\r
-sitting the whole morning motionless, with drooping head, his eyes\r
-vaguely fixed on the withered flower-beds. It rained at intervals; the\r
-old man did not seem to perceive the fact.\r
-\r
-In the afternoon, extraordinary noises broke out in Paris. They\r
-resembled shots and the clamors of a multitude.\r
-\r
-Father Mabeuf raised his head. He saw a gardener passing, and\r
-inquired:--\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-The gardener, spade on back, replied in the most unconcerned tone:--\r
-\r
-"It is the riots."\r
-\r
-"What riots?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, they are fighting."\r
-\r
-"Why are they fighting?"\r
-\r
-"Ah, good Heavens!" ejaculated the gardener.\r
-\r
-"In what direction?" went on M. Mabeuf.\r
-\r
-"In the neighborhood of the Arsenal."\r
-\r
-Father Mabeuf went to his room, took his hat, mechanically sought for a\r
-book to place under his arm, found none, said: "Ah! truly!" and went off\r
-with a bewildered air.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION\r
-\r
-Of what is revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything. Of an\r
-electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly darting\r
-forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath encounters\r
-heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer, passions\r
-which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.\r
-\r
-Whither?\r
-\r
-At random. Athwart the state, the laws, athwart prosperity and the\r
-insolence of others.\r
-\r
-Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations,\r
-instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has\r
-been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change,\r
-the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to\r
-take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love,\r
-the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds, rancors,\r
-disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny has bankrupted\r
-it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitious that are hedged about, whoever\r
-hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short, at the very bottom, the\r
-rabble, that mud which catches fire,--such are the elements of revolt.\r
-That which is grandest and that which is basest; the beings who prowl\r
-outside of all bounds, awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants,\r
-vagabonds of the cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of\r
-houses with no other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who,\r
-each day, demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown\r
-of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong to\r
-revolt. Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against any deed\r
-whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate, is ripe for riot,\r
-and, as soon as it makes its appearance, he begins to quiver, and to\r
-feel himself borne away with the whirlwind.\r
-\r
-Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms\r
-suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies\r
-about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes,\r
-uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the\r
-feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw. Woe to him whom it\r
-bears away as well as to him whom it strikes! It breaks the one against\r
-the other.\r
-\r
-It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and\r
-extraordinary power. It fills the first-comer with the force of events;\r
-it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a\r
-rough stone, and a general of a porter.\r
-\r
-If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views, a little\r
-revolt is desirable from the point of view of power. System: revolt\r
-strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It puts\r
-the army to the test; it consecrates the bourgeoisie, it draws out\r
-the muscles of the police; it demonstrates the force of the social\r
-framework. It is an exercise in gymnastics; it is almost hygiene. Power\r
-is in better health after a revolt, as a man is after a good rubbing\r
-down.\r
-\r
-Revolt, thirty years ago, was regarded from still other points of view.\r
-\r
-There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself "good sense";\r
-Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and the\r
-true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which, because\r
-it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and is often\r
-only pedantry. A whole political school called "the golden mean" has\r
-been the outcome of this. As between cold water and hot water, it is\r
-the lukewarm water party. This school with its false depth, all on the\r
-surface, which dissects effects without going back to first causes,\r
-chides from its height of a demi-science, the agitation of the public\r
-square.\r
-\r
-If we listen to this school, "The riots which complicated the affair\r
-of 1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity. The\r
-Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed\r
-by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that\r
-revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into\r
-a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by\r
-fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered\r
-them perceptible. It might have been said: 'Ah! this is broken.' After\r
-the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of deliverance; after the\r
-riots, one was conscious of a catastrophe.\r
-\r
-"All revolt closes the shops, depresses the funds, throws the Exchange\r
-into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business, precipitates\r
-failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy, public credit\r
-shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing, work at a discount,\r
-fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. Hence gulfs. It has been\r
-calculated that the first day of a riot costs France twenty millions,\r
-the second day forty, the third sixty, a three days' uprising costs\r
-one hundred and twenty millions, that is to say, if only the financial\r
-result be taken into consideration, it is equivalent to a disaster, a\r
-shipwreck or a lost battle, which should annihilate a fleet of sixty\r
-ships of the line.\r
-\r
-"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the\r
-pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of\r
-thickets: in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the\r
-heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne.\r
-Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points\r
-of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students\r
-proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National Guard\r
-invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street urchins,\r
-contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and legions clashed\r
-together. After all, between the combatants, there was only a difference\r
-of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical men who died at the\r
-age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The\r
-army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity.\r
-Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also educated the courage\r
-of the bourgeois.\r
-\r
-"This is well. But is all this worth the bloodshed? And to the bloodshed\r
-add the future darkness, progress compromised, uneasiness among the\r
-best men, honest liberals in despair, foreign absolutism happy in these\r
-wounds dealt to revolution by its own hand, the vanquished of 1830\r
-triumphing and saying: 'We told you so!' Add Paris enlarged, possibly,\r
-but France most assuredly diminished. Add, for all must needs be told,\r
-the massacres which have too often dishonored the victory of order grown\r
-ferocious over liberty gone mad. To sum up all, uprisings have been\r
-disastrous."\r
-\r
-Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie,\r
-that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.\r
-\r
-For our parts, we reject this word uprisings as too large, and\r
-consequently as too convenient. We make a distinction between one\r
-popular movement and another popular movement. We do not inquire whether\r
-an uprising costs as much as a battle. Why a battle, in the first place?\r
-Here the question of war comes up. Is war less of a scourge than an\r
-uprising is of a calamity? And then, are all uprisings calamities? And\r
-what if the revolt of July did cost a hundred and twenty millions? The\r
-establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two milliards. Even at\r
-the same price, we should prefer the 14th of July. However, we reject\r
-these figures, which appear to be reasons and which are only words. An\r
-uprising being given, we examine it by itself. In all that is said by\r
-the doctrinarian objection above presented, there is no question of\r
-anything but effect, we seek the cause.\r
-\r
-We will be explicit.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE ROOT OF THE MATTER\r
-\r
-There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as\r
-insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the\r
-wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states, the only ones\r
-which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction\r
-usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may\r
-proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions which result from\r
-collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is\r
-insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt;\r
-according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they\r
-are justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the\r
-populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of\r
-Vendemiaire. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality;\r
-the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true. That which\r
-universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty\r
-cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining\r
-purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted\r
-to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when\r
-directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot. The\r
-destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of\r
-rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the\r
-refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by\r
-students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is\r
-revolt. Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against\r
-Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that is\r
-insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against\r
-Christopher Columbus,--this is the same revolt; impious revolt;\r
-why? Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which\r
-Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander\r
-like Columbus, is finding a world. These gifts of a world to\r
-civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in\r
-that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to\r
-itself. The masses are traitors to the people. Is there, for example,\r
-anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in\r
-contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive\r
-moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,\r
-espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and, from having been an\r
-insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of\r
-ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and\r
-with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death to\r
-the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!" The assassins of\r
-Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of\r
-Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the\r
-assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of\r
-Jehu, the chevaliers of Brassard,--behold an uprising. La Vendee is\r
-a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is\r
-recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited\r
-masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not\r
-give out the sound of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances\r
-is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what\r
-direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may\r
-grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any\r
-other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a\r
-revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human\r
-race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements\r
-which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These\r
-pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis\r
-XIV. is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is revolt.\r
-\r
-Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as\r
-Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most\r
-fatal of crimes.\r
-\r
-There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is\r
-often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.\r
-\r
-Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.\r
-Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.\r
-\r
-Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.\r
-\r
-The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely\r
-modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space\r
-of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of\r
-peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it\r
-is capable. Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was\r
-Juvenal.\r
-\r
-The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.\r
-\r
-Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of\r
-the Annales. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his\r
-part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of the\r
-ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts on\r
-Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of\r
-the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may\r
-understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes\r
-the Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.\r
-\r
-As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The\r
-work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured\r
-into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.\r
-\r
-Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word that\r
-is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his style\r
-when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence\r
-there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought\r
-and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces\r
-conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a\r
-celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.\r
-\r
-Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are\r
-augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed\r
-for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in\r
-the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his\r
-might.\r
-\r
-The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms\r
-as with lightning.\r
-\r
-Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed\r
-upon Caesar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus\r
-are two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be\r
-mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the\r
-stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Caesar is great, Tacitus\r
-is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to clash\r
-with one another. The guardian of justice, in striking Caesar, might\r
-strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it. The great wars\r
-of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization\r
-introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory\r
-covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine\r
-justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the\r
-formidable historian, sparing Caesar Tacitus, and according extenuating\r
-circumstances to genius.\r
-\r
-Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius.\r
-There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the moral pest is\r
-still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such reigns, nothing veils\r
-the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal,\r
-slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face, more usefully in the\r
-presence of all humanity.\r
-\r
-Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius and\r
-under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the\r
-repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a direct product\r
-of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein\r
-the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small;\r
-consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla,\r
-thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from\r
-the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor of the\r
-dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.\r
-\r
-Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;\r
-it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his\r
-appearance.\r
-\r
-But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in\r
-the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which\r
-is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.\r
-\r
-In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;\r
-insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;\r
-insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the\r
-stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in\r
-the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a\r
-true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains\r
-a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form. Shy\r
-although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it\r
-walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old\r
-men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and\r
-innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment of the people is a\r
-good object; to massacre them is a bad means.\r
-\r
-All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of\r
-August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before\r
-the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the\r
-insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends\r
-in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty\r
-mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason,\r
-right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from\r
-rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and\r
-increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,\r
-insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a\r
-swamp.\r
-\r
-All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal suffrage\r
-has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception,\r
-and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms.\r
-The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the\r
-frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day may be,\r
-To-morrow will be peace.\r
-\r
-However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former\r
-and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such\r
-shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the\r
-revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be\r
-punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day\r
-as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the\r
-gloom face to face with the lion.\r
-\r
-Then the bourgeois shouts: "Long live the people!"\r
-\r
-This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,\r
-so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?\r
-\r
-It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to\r
-say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,\r
-and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and\r
-insurrection, the foundation.\r
-\r
-This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy\r
-extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an\r
-uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it\r
-is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be\r
-calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs\r
-undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a\r
-mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura,\r
-nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.\r
-\r
-This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of\r
-Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly a characteristic\r
-hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we enter\r
-on the recital.\r
-\r
-The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and\r
-living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time\r
-and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation,\r
-human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so\r
-to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of\r
-history. The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of\r
-this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not\r
-sounded the depths, for another reason than history. We shall therefore\r
-bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things\r
-which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed\r
-the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the\r
-actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the\r
-very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we\r
-shall be able to say: "We have seen this." We alter a few names, for\r
-history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall\r
-paint will be genuine. In accordance with the conditions of the book\r
-which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode,\r
-and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the\r
-6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may\r
-catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of\r
-the real form of this frightful public adventure.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN\r
-\r
-In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all\r
-minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an\r
-indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe\r
-for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of\r
-artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the\r
-shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General\r
-Lamarque.\r
-\r
-Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession,\r
-under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery\r
-requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the\r
-bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a\r
-sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after\r
-upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and\r
-the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances\r
-of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the\r
-Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one\r
-of Napoleon's marshals in petto. The treaties of 1815 removed him as\r
-a personal offence. He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which\r
-pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically\r
-preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to\r
-intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to\r
-his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of\r
-the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque\r
-uttering the word country.\r
-\r
-His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and\r
-by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like\r
-everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what\r
-took place.\r
-\r
-On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day\r
-appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the\r
-procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This tumultuous\r
-network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed themselves as best\r
-they might. Joiners carried off door-weights of their establishment\r
-"to break down doors." One of them had made himself a dagger of a\r
-stocking-weaver's hook by breaking off the hook and sharpening the\r
-stump. Another, who was in a fever "to attack," slept wholly dressed\r
-for three days. A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade, who asked him:\r
-"Whither are you going?" "Eh! well, I have no weapons." "What then?"\r
-"I'm going to my timber-yard to get my compasses." "What for?" "I don't\r
-know," said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted\r
-some passing artisans: "Come here, you!" He treated them to ten sous'\r
-worth of wine and said: "Have you work?" "No." "Go to Filspierre,\r
-between the Barriere Charonne and the Barriere Montreuil, and you will\r
-find work." At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms. Certain\r
-well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say, running from\r
-one house to another, to collect their men. At Barthelemy's, near the\r
-Barriere du Trone, at Capel's, near the Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers\r
-accosted each other with a grave air. They were heard to say: "Have you\r
-your pistol?" "Under my blouse." "And you?" "Under my shirt." In the\r
-Rue Traversiere, in front of the Bland workshop, and in the yard of\r
-the Maison-Brulee, in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups whispered\r
-together. Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained\r
-more than a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him\r
-"because they were obliged to dispute with him every day." Mavot was\r
-killed on the following day at the barricade of the Rue Menilmontant.\r
-Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the struggle, seconded Mavot,\r
-and to the question: "What is your object?" he replied: "Insurrection."\r
-Workmen assembled at the corner of the Rue de Bercy, waited for a\r
-certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.\r
-Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.\r
-\r
-On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General\r
-Lamarque's funeral procession traversed Paris with official military\r
-pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions, with draped\r
-drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with their swords\r
-at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men.\r
-The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it, bearing laurel\r
-branches. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the\r
-sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical\r
-School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German,\r
-and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of\r
-banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who\r
-were on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their\r
-paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries, nearly\r
-all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres, without order\r
-and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again a column.\r
-Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with a pair of pistols in\r
-full view, seemed to pass the host in review, and the files separated\r
-before him. On the side alleys of the boulevards, in the branches of the\r
-trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men,\r
-women, and children; all eyes were filled with anxiety. An armed throng\r
-was passing, and a terrified throng looked on.\r
-\r
-The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with\r
-its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in\r
-the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their trumpets at their head,\r
-cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to march;\r
-in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal Guard\r
-echelonned from street to street; at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of\r
-dragoons; at the Greve half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other\r
-half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; and the\r
-courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery. The remainder of the troops\r
-were confined to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the\r
-environs of Paris. Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing\r
-multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand\r
-in the banlieue.\r
-\r
-Divers reports were in circulation in the cortege. Legitimist tricks\r
-were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked\r
-out for death at that very moment when the populace were designating\r
-him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has remained unknown,\r
-announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over,\r
-would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people. That\r
-which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority of those\r
-present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. Here and there, also, in\r
-that multitude given over to such violent but noble emotions, there were\r
-visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which said: "Let\r
-us plunder!" There are certain agitations which stir up the bottoms of\r
-marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water. A phenomenon to\r
-which "well drilled" policemen are no strangers.\r
-\r
-The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the\r
-deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained\r
-from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. Many\r
-incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column, stones thrown at\r
-the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his\r
-head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire,\r
-a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin,\r
-an officer of the 12th Light Infantry saying aloud: "I am a Republican,"\r
-the Polytechnic School coming up unexpectedly against orders to remain\r
-at home, the shouts of: "Long live the Polytechnique! Long live the\r
-Republic!" marked the passage of the funeral train. At the Bastille,\r
-long files of curious and formidable people who descended from the\r
-Faubourg Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the procession, and a\r
-certain terrible seething began to agitate the throng.\r
-\r
-One man was heard to say to another: "Do you see that fellow with a\r
-red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire." It\r
-appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quenisset\r
-affair, entrusted with this same function.\r
-\r
-The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached\r
-the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd,\r
-surveyed at that moment with a bird'seye view, would have presented the\r
-aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail spread\r
-out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was prolonged on\r
-the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle was traced\r
-around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette spoke and\r
-bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching and august instant, all\r
-heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.\r
-\r
-All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance\r
-in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike\r
-surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head.\r
-Exelmans quitted the procession.\r
-\r
-This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From\r
-the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors\r
-which resemble billows stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts went\r
-up: "Lamarque to the Pantheon!--Lafayette to the Town-hall!" Some young\r
-men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed themselves and\r
-began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and\r
-Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.\r
-\r
-In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed\r
-that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a centenarian\r
-afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who had fought at\r
-Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine under Lafayette.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set\r
-in motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons\r
-emerged from the Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men\r
-who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them at the corner\r
-of the quay and shouted: "The dragoons!" The dragoons advanced at a\r
-walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in\r
-their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air\r
-of gloomy expectation.\r
-\r
-They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in\r
-which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it\r
-to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the\r
-crowd touched. The women fled in terror. What took place during that\r
-fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds come\r
-together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was\r
-heard in the direction of the Arsenal others that a blow from a dagger\r
-was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is, that three shots were\r
-suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet, chief of the squadron,\r
-the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her\r
-window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed:\r
-"They are beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron of dragoons\r
-which had remained in the barracks up to this time, was seen to debouch\r
-at a gallop with bared swords, through the Rue Bassompierre and the\r
-Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.\r
-\r
-Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade\r
-breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank, and\r
-pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of the\r
-Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand, bristle with combatants,\r
-stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun, the young men\r
-who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run,\r
-and the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their\r
-swords, the crowd disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to\r
-all four quarters of Paris, men shout: "To arms!" they run, tumble down,\r
-flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS\r
-\r
-Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot.\r
-Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it\r
-prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it? From\r
-the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there\r
-of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the throng\r
-and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is\r
-mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the shops are\r
-closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated\r
-shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cocheres,\r
-servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying:\r
-"There's going to be a row!"\r
-\r
-A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place\r
-at twenty different spots in Paris at once.\r
-\r
-In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded and\r
-with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later, carrying\r
-a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at their\r
-head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the third\r
-with a pike.\r
-\r
-In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a\r
-prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black\r
-beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not lie flat, offered\r
-cartridges publicly to passers-by.\r
-\r
-In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a\r
-black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:\r
-"Republic or Death!" In the Rue des Jeuneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue\r
-Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be\r
-distinguished in gold letters, the word section with a number. One of\r
-these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of\r
-white between.\r
-\r
-They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and\r
-three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second in the\r
-Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few minutes,\r
-the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two hundred\r
-and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, and\r
-eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one man took the\r
-gun, the other the bayonet.\r
-\r
-Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets installed\r
-themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One\r
-of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making\r
-cartridges. One of these women relates: "I did not know what cartridges\r
-were; it was my husband who told me."\r
-\r
-One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des Vielles\r
-Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.\r
-\r
-The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de\r
-la Perle.\r
-\r
-And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the\r
-boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting\r
-men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and\r
-shouted: "To arms!" broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,\r
-unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,\r
-rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough\r
-slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.\r
-\r
-They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They entered the\r
-dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns\r
-of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting: "The\r
-arms have been delivered"; some signed "their names" to receipts for\r
-the guns and swords and said: "Send for them to-morrow at the Mayor's\r
-office." They disarmed isolated sentinels and National Guardsmen in\r
-the streets on their way to the Townhall. They tore the epaulets from\r
-officers. In the Rue du Cimitiere-Saint-Nicholas, an officer of the\r
-National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with clubs and foils,\r
-took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was only able to\r
-emerge at nightfall and in disguise.\r
-\r
-In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their\r
-hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Cafe du Progress,\r
-or descended to the Cafe des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins.\r
-There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone\r
-corner-posts, distributed arms. They plundered the timber-yard in the\r
-Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single\r
-point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye\r
-and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with\r
-their own hands. At a single point the insurgents yielded; they\r
-abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on\r
-a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la\r
-Corderie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a\r
-package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National\r
-Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the\r
-points of their bayonets.\r
-\r
-All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place\r
-simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,\r
-like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less than\r
-an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the quarter\r
-of the Halles alone. In the centre was that famous house No. 50, which\r
-was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions, and which,\r
-flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and on the other\r
-by a barricade of the Rue Maubuee, commanded three streets, the Rue\r
-des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which\r
-it faced. The barricades at right angles fell back, the one of the\r
-Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the other of the Rue\r
-Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without reckoning innumerable\r
-barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in the Marais, at\r
-Mont-Sainte-Genevieve; one in the Rue Menilmontant, where was visible\r
-a porte cochere torn from its hinges; another near the little bridge of\r
-the Hotel-Dieu made with an "ecossais," which had been unharnessed and\r
-overthrown, three hundred paces from the Prefecture of Police.\r
-\r
-At the barricade of the Rue des Menetriers, a well-dressed man\r
-distributed money to the workmen. At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,\r
-a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be\r
-the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of\r
-silver. "Here," said he, "this is to pay expenses, wine, et caetera."\r
-A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to\r
-barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue\r
-police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the\r
-barricades, the wine-shops and porters' lodges were converted into\r
-guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most scientific\r
-military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full of angles\r
-and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the Halles, in\r
-particular, a network of streets more intricate than a forest. The\r
-Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said, undertaken to\r
-direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A man killed in\r
-the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a plan of Paris.\r
-\r
-That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a\r
-sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection\r
-had abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized\r
-nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a\r
-train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied,\r
-on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the\r
-whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the\r
-Chateau-d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,\r
-the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pelagie, the Place Maubert, the\r
-powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five\r
-o'clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the\r
-Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place\r
-des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Peres barracks, and the\r
-Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.\r
-\r
-The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as a\r
-result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers' shops hastily\r
-invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing of\r
-stones was continued with gun-shots.\r
-\r
-About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the field\r
-of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the other.\r
-They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer, the\r
-author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this volcano,\r
-found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that he had to\r
-protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two half-columns which\r
-separate the shops; he remained in this delicate situation for nearly\r
-half an hour.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in\r
-haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from\r
-their barracks. Opposite the passage de l'Ancre a drummer received a\r
-blow from a dagger. Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by thirty\r
-young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword. Another was\r
-killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue-Michelle-Comte, three\r
-officers fell dead one after the other. Many of the Municipal Guards, on\r
-being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards, retreated.\r
-\r
-In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red\r
-flag bearing the following inscription: Republican revolution, No. 127.\r
-Was this a revolution, in fact?\r
-\r
-The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable,\r
-tortuous, colossal citadel.\r
-\r
-There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest\r
-was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there\r
-lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.\r
-\r
-In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the\r
-fearful uncertainty of the crisis. They recalled the popular ovation\r
-which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.\r
-Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General\r
-Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,\r
-composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the\r
-National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his scarf\r
-of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion. The insurgents,\r
-on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open spaces, and\r
-audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades. Each side was\r
-watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated;\r
-the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make\r
-itself heard. The Minister of War at that time, Marshal Soult, who had\r
-seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.\r
-\r
-These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvres and having as\r
-resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly\r
-disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called public\r
-wrath.\r
-\r
-The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A\r
-battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of\r
-the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School\r
-had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending\r
-from Vincennes.\r
-\r
-Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly\r
-serene.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--ORIGINALITY OF PARIS\r
-\r
-During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more\r
-than one insurrection. Nothing is, generally, more singularly calm than\r
-the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the bounds of\r
-the rebellious quarters. Paris very speedily accustoms herself to\r
-anything,--it is only a riot,--and Paris has so many affairs on hand,\r
-that she does not put herself out for so small a matter. These colossal\r
-cities alone can offer such spectacles. These immense enclosures alone\r
-can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable\r
-tranquillity. Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the\r
-shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he\r
-contents himself with the remark:--\r
-\r
-"There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin."\r
-\r
-Or:--\r
-\r
-"In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."\r
-\r
-Often he adds carelessly:--\r
-\r
-"Or somewhere in that direction."\r
-\r
-Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry and\r
-firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:--\r
-\r
-"It's getting hot! Hullo, it's getting hot!"\r
-\r
-A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up his\r
-shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say, he places\r
-his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.\r
-\r
-Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take and\r
-re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles the fronts\r
-of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds, corpses encumber the\r
-streets. A few streets away, the shock of billiard-balls can be heard in\r
-the cafes.\r
-\r
-The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious laugh\r
-and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with\r
-war. Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going to a dinner\r
-somewhere in town. Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is\r
-going on.\r
-\r
-In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.\r
-\r
-At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a\r
-little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored\r
-rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and\r
-came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade, offering\r
-his glasses of cocoa impartially,--now to the Government, now to\r
-anarchy.\r
-\r
-Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of uprisings\r
-in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this end, two\r
-things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. The city of\r
-Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.\r
-\r
-On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 25th, 1832, the\r
-great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. It\r
-was afraid.\r
-\r
-Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere, in the\r
-most distant and most "disinterested" quarters. The courageous took to\r
-arms, the poltroons hid. The busy and heedless passer-by disappeared.\r
-Many streets were empty at four o'clock in the morning.\r
-\r
-Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,--that\r
-they were masters of the Bank;--that there were six hundred of them\r
-in the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled in the\r
-church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand Carrel\r
-had been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: "Get a\r
-regiment first"; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had said to them,\r
-nevertheless: "I am with you. I will follow you wherever there is room\r
-for a chair"; that one must be on one's guard; that at night there would\r
-be people pillaging isolated dwellings in the deserted corners of Paris\r
-(there the imagination of the police, that Anne Radcliffe mixed up with\r
-the Government was recognizable); that a battery had been established\r
-in the Rue Aubry le Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud were putting their\r
-heads together, and that, at midnight, or at daybreak at latest, four\r
-columns would march simultaneously on the centre of the uprising, the\r
-first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte Saint-Martin,\r
-the third from the Greve, the fourth from the Halles; that perhaps,\r
-also, the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the Champ-de-Mars;\r
-that no one knew what would happen, but that this time, it certainly was\r
-serious.\r
-\r
-People busied themselves over Marshal Soult's hesitations. Why did not\r
-he attack at once? It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. The\r
-old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.\r
-\r
-Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with\r
-an air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons were\r
-arrested. By nine o'clock, more than eight hundred persons had been\r
-arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them, so was the\r
-Conciergerie, so was La Force.\r
-\r
-At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is called the\r
-Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon which lay a heap\r
-of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly.\r
-All that straw rustled by all these men, produced the sound of a heavy\r
-shower. Elsewhere prisoners slept in the open air in the meadows, piled\r
-on top of each other.\r
-\r
-Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not habitual\r
-with Paris.\r
-\r
-People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were\r
-uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this: "Ah! my God! He has not come\r
-home!" There was hardly even the distant rumble of a vehicle to be\r
-heard.\r
-\r
-People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts, the\r
-tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that were\r
-said: "It is cavalry," or: "Those are the caissons galloping," to the\r
-trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable\r
-alarm peal from Saint-Merry.\r
-\r
-They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of\r
-the streets and disappeared, shouting: "Go home!" And people made haste\r
-to bolt their doors. They said: "How will all this end?" From moment to\r
-moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take on\r
-a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S\r
-POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY\r
-\r
-At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the\r
-populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement\r
-in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following the\r
-hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards, weighed,\r
-so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a frightful ebb.\r
-The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their\r
-escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight.\r
-The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling,\r
-overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred\r
-streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.\r
-\r
-At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue\r
-Menilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which\r
-he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old\r
-holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-a-brac merchant's shop.\r
-\r
-"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."\r
-\r
-And off he ran with the pistol.\r
-\r
-Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing\r
-through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad\r
-brandishing his pistol and singing:--\r
-\r
- La nuit on ne voit rien,\r
- Le jour on voit tres bien,\r
- D'un ecrit apocrypha\r
- Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,\r
- Pratiquez la vertu,\r
- Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]\r
-\r
-\r
-It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.\r
-\r
-On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.\r
-\r
-Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march,\r
-and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We\r
-know not. Who does know? Himself, perhaps. However, Gavroche was well\r
-up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his\r
-own chirpings. An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of\r
-the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the repertory\r
-of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with\r
-thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been\r
-for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a\r
-commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche was a gamin\r
-of letters.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered\r
-the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously\r
-rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of\r
-Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning;\r
-that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets\r
-at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically\r
-extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of\r
-breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding\r
-them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost\r
-entirely. On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same\r
-spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a\r
-farewell: "I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as\r
-they say at the court, I file off. If you don't find papa and mamma,\r
-young 'uns, come back here this evening. I'll scramble you up some\r
-supper, and I'll give you a shakedown." The two children, picked up by\r
-some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank,\r
-or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris,\r
-did not return. The lowest depths of the actual social world are full of\r
-these lost traces. Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve weeks\r
-had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the back\r
-of his head and said: "Where the devil are my two children?"\r
-\r
-In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du\r
-Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that\r
-street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook's\r
-shop. This presented a providential occasion to eat another\r
-apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in\r
-his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou,\r
-and began to shout: "Help!"\r
-\r
-It is hard to miss the last cake.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.\r
-\r
-Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing the\r
-Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss of the\r
-apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged himself in the\r
-immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters in broad daylight.\r
-\r
-A little further on, on catching sight of a group of comfortable-looking\r
-persons, who seemed to be landed proprietors, he shrugged his shoulders\r
-and spit out at random before him this mouthful of philosophical bile as\r
-they passed:\r
-\r
-"How fat those moneyed men are! They're drunk! They just wallow in good\r
-dinners. Ask 'em what they do with their money. They don't know. They\r
-eat it, that's what they do! As much as their bellies will hold."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH\r
-\r
-The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one's hand in the\r
-open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche felt his\r
-fervor increasing with every moment. Amid the scraps of the Marseillaise\r
-which he was singing, he shouted:--\r
-\r
-"All goes well. I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I'm all broken\r
-up with rheumatism, but I'm satisfied, citizens. All that the bourgeois\r
-have to do is to bear themselves well, I'll sneeze them out subversive\r
-couplets. What are the police spies? Dogs. And I'd just like to have\r
-one of them at the end of my pistol. I'm just from the boulevard, my\r
-friends. It's getting hot there, it's getting into a little boil, it's\r
-simmering. It's time to skim the pot. Forward march, men! Let an impure\r
-blood inundate the furrows! I give my days to my country, I shall never\r
-see my concubine more, Nini, finished, yes, Nini? But never mind! Long\r
-live joy! Let's fight, crebleu! I've had enough of despotism."\r
-\r
-At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard having\r
-fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked up the\r
-man, then he assisted in raising the horse. After which he picked up his\r
-pistol and resumed his way. In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace and\r
-silence. This apathy, peculiar to the Marais, presented a contrast with\r
-the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips were chatting in a doorway.\r
-\r
-Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping\r
-hags; and the "Thou shalt be King" could be quite as mournfully hurled\r
-at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath of\r
-Armuyr. The croak would be almost identical.\r
-\r
-The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own\r
-concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker\r
-with her basket on her back.\r
-\r
-All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age,\r
-which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.\r
-\r
-The rag-picker was humble. In this open-air society, it is the\r
-rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. This is caused\r
-by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean, according to the will of\r
-the portresses, and after the fancy of the one who makes the heap. There\r
-may be kindness in the broom.\r
-\r
-This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what a\r
-smile! on the three portresses. Things of this nature were said:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?"\r
-\r
-"Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It's\r
-the dogs who complain."\r
-\r
-"And people also."\r
-\r
-"But the fleas from a cat don't go after people."\r
-\r
-"That's not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year\r
-when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the\r
-newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great\r
-sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you remember\r
-the King of Rome?"\r
-\r
-"I liked the Duc de Bordeau better."\r
-\r
-"I knew Louis XVIII. I prefer Louis XVIII."\r
-\r
-"Meat is awfully dear, isn't it, Mother Patagon?"\r
-\r
-"Ah! don't mention it, the butcher's shop is a horror. A horrible\r
-horror--one can't afford anything but the poor cuts nowadays."\r
-\r
-Here the rag-picker interposed:--\r
-\r
-"Ladies, business is dull. The refuse heaps are miserable. No one throws\r
-anything away any more. They eat everything."\r
-\r
-"There are poorer people than you, la Vargouleme."\r
-\r
-"Ah, that's true," replied the rag-picker, with deference, "I have a\r
-profession."\r
-\r
-A pause succeeded, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity for\r
-boasting which lies at the bottom of man, added:--\r
-\r
-"In the morning, on my return home, I pick over my basket, I sort my\r
-things. This makes heaps in my room. I put the rags in a basket, the\r
-cores and stalks in a bucket, the linen in my cupboard, the woollen\r
-stuff in my commode, the old papers in the corner of the window,\r
-the things that are good to eat in my bowl, the bits of glass in my\r
-fireplace, the old shoes behind my door, and the bones under my bed."\r
-\r
-Gavroche had stopped behind her and was listening.\r
-\r
-"Old ladies," said he, "what do you mean by talking politics?"\r
-\r
-He was assailed by a broadside, composed of a quadruple howl.\r
-\r
-"Here's another rascal."\r
-\r
-"What's that he's got in his paddle? A pistol?"\r
-\r
-"Well, I'd like to know what sort of a beggar's brat this is?"\r
-\r
-"That sort of animal is never easy unless he's overturning the\r
-authorities."\r
-\r
-Gavroche disdainfully contented himself, by way of reprisal, with\r
-elevating the tip of his nose with his thumb and opening his hand wide.\r
-\r
-The rag-picker cried:--\r
-\r
-"You malicious, bare-pawed little wretch!"\r
-\r
-The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands together\r
-in horror.\r
-\r
-"There's going to be evil doings, that's certain. The errand-boy next\r
-door has a little pointed beard, I have seen him pass every day with a\r
-young person in a pink bonnet on his arm; to-day I saw him pass, and\r
-he had a gun on his arm. Mame Bacheux says, that last week there was a\r
-revolution at--at--at--where's the calf!--at Pontoise. And then, there\r
-you see him, that horrid scamp, with his pistol! It seems that the\r
-Celestins are full of pistols. What do you suppose the Government can\r
-do with good-for-nothings who don't know how to do anything but contrive\r
-ways of upsetting the world, when we had just begun to get a little\r
-quiet after all the misfortunes that have happened, good Lord! to that\r
-poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! And all this is going to\r
-make tobacco dearer. It's infamous! And I shall certainly go to see him\r
-beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!"\r
-\r
-"You've got the sniffles, old lady," said Gavroche. "Blow your\r
-promontory."\r
-\r
-And he passed on. When he was in the Rue Pavee, the rag-picker occurred\r
-to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:--\r
-\r
-"You're in the wrong to insult the revolutionists, Mother\r
-Dust-Heap-Corner. This pistol is in your interests. It's so that you may\r
-have more good things to eat in your basket."\r
-\r
-All at once, he heard a shout behind him; it was the portress Patagon\r
-who had followed him, and who was shaking her fist at him in the\r
-distance and crying:--\r
-\r
-"You're nothing but a bastard."\r
-\r
-"Oh! Come now," said Gavroche, "I don't care a brass farthing for that!"\r
-\r
-Shortly afterwards, he passed the Hotel Lamoignon. There he uttered this\r
-appeal:--\r
-\r
-"Forward march to the battle!"\r
-\r
-And he was seized with a fit of melancholy. He gazed at his pistol with\r
-an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:--\r
-\r
-"I'm going off," said he, "but you won't go off!"\r
-\r
-One dog may distract the attention from another dog.[45] A very gaunt\r
-poodle came along at the moment. Gavroche felt compassion for him.\r
-\r
-"My poor doggy," said he, "you must have gone and swallowed a cask, for\r
-all the hoops are visible."\r
-\r
-Then he directed his course towards l'Orme-Saint-Gervais.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER\r
-\r
-The worthy hair-dresser who had chased from his shop the two little\r
-fellows to whom Gavroche had opened the paternal interior of the\r
-elephant was at that moment in his shop engaged in shaving an old\r
-soldier of the legion who had served under the Empire. They were\r
-talking. The hair-dresser had, naturally, spoken to the veteran of the\r
-riot, then of General Lamarque, and from Lamarque they had passed to\r
-the Emperor. Thence sprang up a conversation between barber and\r
-soldier which Prudhomme, had he been present, would have enriched with\r
-arabesques, and which he would have entitled: "Dialogue between the\r
-razor and the sword."\r
-\r
-"How did the Emperor ride, sir?" said the barber.\r
-\r
-"Badly. He did not know how to fall--so he never fell."\r
-\r
-"Did he have fine horses? He must have had fine horses!"\r
-\r
-"On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. It was a\r
-racing mare, perfectly white. Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle\r
-deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly\r
-articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful\r
-crupper. A little more than fifteen hands in height."\r
-\r
-"A pretty horse," remarked the hair-dresser.\r
-\r
-"It was His Majesty's beast."\r
-\r
-The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence\r
-would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:--\r
-\r
-"The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?"\r
-\r
-The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who\r
-had been there:--\r
-\r
-"In the heel. At Ratisbon. I never saw him so well dressed as on that\r
-day. He was as neat as a new sou."\r
-\r
-"And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?"\r
-\r
-"I?" said the soldier, "ah! not to amount to anything. At Marengo, I\r
-received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right\r
-arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. At Friedland,\r
-a thrust from a bayonet, there,--at the Moskowa seven or eight\r
-lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed\r
-one of my fingers. Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaien in\r
-the thigh, that's all."\r
-\r
-"How fine that is!" exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents, "to\r
-die on the field of battle! On my word of honor, rather than die in bed,\r
-of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms,\r
-syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannon-ball in my\r
-belly!"\r
-\r
-"You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.\r
-\r
-He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop. The\r
-show-window had suddenly been fractured.\r
-\r
-The wig-maker turned pale.\r
-\r
-"Ah, good God!" he exclaimed, "it's one of them!"\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"A cannon-ball."\r
-\r
-"Here it is," said the soldier.\r
-\r
-And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor. It was a\r
-pebble.\r
-\r
-The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing\r
-at the full speed, towards the Marche Saint-Jean. As he passed the\r
-hair-dresser's shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind,\r
-had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him, and had\r
-flung a stone through his panes.\r
-\r
-"You see!" shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue,\r
-"that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it. What\r
-has any one done to that gamin?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN\r
-\r
-In the meantime, in the Marche Saint-Jean, where the post had already\r
-been disarmed, Gavroche had just "effected a junction" with a band led\r
-by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were armed after\r
-a fashion. Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found them and swelled the\r
-group. Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun, Combeferre the gun\r
-of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion, and in his belt,\r
-two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen, Jean Prouvaire\r
-an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac was brandishing an\r
-unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, with a naked sword in his hand, marched\r
-at their head shouting: "Long live Poland!"\r
-\r
-They reached the Quai Morland. Cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked\r
-by the rain, with lightning in their eyes. Gavroche accosted them\r
-calmly:--\r
-\r
-"Where are we going?"\r
-\r
-"Come along," said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, who was like a fish\r
-in water in a riot. He wore a scarlet waistcoat, and indulged in\r
-the sort of words which break everything. His waistcoat astounded a\r
-passer-by, who cried in bewilderment:--\r
-\r
-"Here are the reds!"\r
-\r
-"The reds, the reds!" retorted Bahorel. "A queer kind of fear,\r
-bourgeois. For my part I don't tremble before a poppy, the little red\r
-hat inspires me with no alarm. Take my advice, bourgeois, let's leave\r
-fear of the red to horned cattle."\r
-\r
-He caught sight of a corner of the wall on which was placarded the\r
-most peaceable sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a\r
-Lenten admonition addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "flock."\r
-\r
-Bahorel exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"'Flock'; a polite way of saying geese."\r
-\r
-And he tore the charge from the nail. This conquered Gavroche. From that\r
-instant Gavroche set himself to study Bahorel.\r
-\r
-"Bahorel," observed Enjolras, "you are wrong. You should have let that\r
-charge alone, he is not the person with whom we have to deal, you are\r
-wasting your wrath to no purpose. Take care of your supply. One does not\r
-fire out of the ranks with the soul any more than with a gun."\r
-\r
-"Each one in his own fashion, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. "This\r
-bishop's prose shocks me; I want to eat eggs without being permitted.\r
-Your style is the hot and cold; I am amusing myself. Besides, I'm not\r
-wasting myself, I'm getting a start; and if I tore down that charge,\r
-Hercle! 'twas only to whet my appetite."\r
-\r
-This word, Hercle, struck Gavroche. He sought all occasions for\r
-learning, and that tearer-down of posters possessed his esteem. He\r
-inquired of him:--\r
-\r
-"What does Hercle mean?"\r
-\r
-Bahorel answered:--\r
-\r
-"It means cursed name of a dog, in Latin."\r
-\r
-Here Bahorel recognized at a window a pale young man with a black beard\r
-who was watching them as they passed, probably a Friend of the A B C. He\r
-shouted to him:--\r
-\r
-"Quick, cartridges, para bellum."\r
-\r
-"A fine man! that's true," said Gavroche, who now understood Latin.\r
-\r
-A tumultuous retinue accompanied them,--students, artists, young men\r
-affiliated to the Cougourde of Aix, artisans, longshoremen, armed with\r
-clubs and bayonets; some, like Combeferre, with pistols thrust into\r
-their trousers.\r
-\r
-An old man, who appeared to be extremely aged, was walking in the band.\r
-\r
-He had no arms, and he made great haste, so that he might not be left\r
-behind, although he had a thoughtful air.\r
-\r
-Gavroche caught sight of him:--\r
-\r
-"Keksekca?" said he to Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"He's an old duffer."\r
-\r
-It was M. Mabeuf.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--THE OLD MAN\r
-\r
-Let us recount what had taken place.\r
-\r
-Enjolras and his friends had been on the Boulevard Bourdon, near the\r
-public storehouses, at the moment when the dragoons had made their\r
-charge. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre were among those who had\r
-taken to the Rue Bassompierre, shouting: "To the barricades!" In the Rue\r
-Lesdiguieres they had met an old man walking along. What had attracted\r
-their attention was that the goodman was walking in a zig-zag, as though\r
-he were intoxicated. Moreover, he had his hat in his hand, although it\r
-had been raining all the morning, and was raining pretty briskly at the\r
-very time. Courfeyrac had recognized Father Mabeuf. He knew him through\r
-having many times accompanied Marius as far as his door. As he was\r
-acquainted with the peaceful and more than timid habits of the old\r
-beadle-book-collector, and was amazed at the sight of him in the midst\r
-of that uproar, a couple of paces from the cavalry charges, almost in\r
-the midst of a fusillade, hatless in the rain, and strolling about among\r
-the bullets, he had accosted him, and the following dialogue had been\r
-exchanged between the rioter of fire and the octogenarian:--\r
-\r
-"M. Mabeuf, go to your home."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"There's going to be a row."\r
-\r
-"That's well."\r
-\r
-"Thrusts with the sword and firing, M. Mabeuf."\r
-\r
-"That is well."\r
-\r
-"Firing from cannon."\r
-\r
-"That is good. Where are the rest of you going?"\r
-\r
-"We are going to fling the government to the earth."\r
-\r
-"That is good."\r
-\r
-And he had set out to follow them. From that moment forth he had not\r
-uttered a word. His step had suddenly become firm; artisans had offered\r
-him their arms; he had refused with a sign of the head. He advanced\r
-nearly to the front rank of the column, with the movement of a man who\r
-is marching and the countenance of a man who is sleeping.\r
-\r
-"What a fierce old fellow!" muttered the students. The rumor spread\r
-through the troop that he was a former member of the Convention,--an old\r
-regicide. The mob had turned in through the Rue de la Verrerie.\r
-\r
-Little Gavroche marched in front with that deafening song which made of\r
-him a sort of trumpet.\r
-\r
-He sang: "Voici la lune qui paratt,\r
- Quand irons-nous dans la foret?\r
- Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.\r
-\r
- Tou tou tou\r
- Pour Chatou.\r
- Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.\r
-\r
- "Pour avoir bu de grand matin\r
- La rosee a meme le thym,\r
- Deux moineaux etaient en ribotte.\r
-\r
- Zi zi zi\r
- Pour Passy.\r
- Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.\r
-\r
- "Et ces deux pauvres petits loups,\r
- Comme deux grives estaient souls;\r
- Une tigre en riait dans sa grotte.\r
-\r
- Don don don\r
- Pour Meudon.\r
- Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.\r
-\r
- "L'un jurait et l'autre sacrait.\r
- Quand irons nous dans la foret?\r
- Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.\r
-\r
- Tin tin tin\r
- Pour Pantin.\r
- Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte."[46]\r
-\r
-They directed their course towards Saint-Merry.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--RECRUITS\r
-\r
-The band augmented every moment. Near the Rue des Billettes, a man of\r
-lofty stature, whose hair was turning gray, and whose bold and daring\r
-mien was remarked by Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre, but whom\r
-none of them knew, joined them. Gavroche, who was occupied in singing,\r
-whistling, humming, running on ahead and pounding on the shutters of the\r
-shops with the butt of his triggerless pistol; paid no attention to this\r
-man.\r
-\r
-It chanced that in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed in front of\r
-Courfeyrac's door.\r
-\r
-"This happens just right," said Courfeyrac, "I have forgotten my purse,\r
-and I have lost my hat."\r
-\r
-He quitted the mob and ran up to his quarters at full speed. He seized\r
-an old hat and his purse.\r
-\r
-He also seized a large square coffer, of the dimensions of a large\r
-valise, which was concealed under his soiled linen.\r
-\r
-As he descended again at a run, the portress hailed him:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur de Courfeyrac!"\r
-\r
-"What's your name, portress?"\r
-\r
-The portress stood bewildered.\r
-\r
-"Why, you know perfectly well, I'm the concierge; my name is Mother\r
-Veuvain."\r
-\r
-"Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you\r
-Mother de Veuvain. Now speak, what's the matter? What do you want?"\r
-\r
-"There is some one who wants to speak with you."\r
-\r
-"Who is it?"\r
-\r
-"I don't know."\r
-\r
-"Where is he?"\r
-\r
-"In my lodge."\r
-\r
-"The devil!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"But the person has been waiting your return for over an hour," said the\r
-portress.\r
-\r
-At the same time, a sort of pale, thin, small, freckled, and youthful\r
-artisan, clad in a tattered blouse and patched trousers of ribbed\r
-velvet, and who had rather the air of a girl accoutred as a man than of\r
-a man, emerged from the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which\r
-was not the least in the world like a woman's voice:--\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Marius, if you please."\r
-\r
-"He is not here."\r
-\r
-"Will he return this evening?"\r
-\r
-"I know nothing about it."\r
-\r
-And Courfeyrac added:--\r
-\r
-"For my part, I shall not return."\r
-\r
-The young man gazed steadily at him and said:--\r
-\r
-"Why not?"\r
-\r
-"Because."\r
-\r
-"Where are you going, then?"\r
-\r
-"What business is that of yours?"\r
-\r
-"Would you like to have me carry your coffer for you?"\r
-\r
-"I am going to the barricades."\r
-\r
-"Would you like to have me go with you?"\r
-\r
-"If you like!" replied Courfeyrac. "The street is free, the pavements\r
-belong to every one."\r
-\r
-And he made his escape at a run to join his friends. When he had\r
-rejoined them, he gave the coffer to one of them to carry. It was only\r
-a quarter of an hour after this that he saw the young man, who had\r
-actually followed them.\r
-\r
-A mob does not go precisely where it intends. We have explained that\r
-a gust of wind carries it away. They overshot Saint-Merry and found\r
-themselves, without precisely knowing how, in the Rue Saint-Denis.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION\r
-\r
-The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end\r
-near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour, a\r
-basket-maker's shop having for its sign a basket in the form of Napoleon\r
-the Great with this inscription:--\r
-\r
- NAPOLEON IS MADE\r
- WHOLLY OF WILLOW,\r
-\r
-have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed\r
-hardly thirty years ago.\r
-\r
-It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds\r
-spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called Corinthe.\r
-\r
-The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade\r
-effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way, by the barricade\r
-Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade of the Rue de la\r
-Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity, that we are about to\r
-shed a little light.\r
-\r
-May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,\r
-to the simple means which we have already employed in the case of\r
-Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a tolerably exact\r
-manner the constitution of the houses which stood at that epoch near the\r
-Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of Paris,\r
-where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to\r
-imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis with its summit and the Halles\r
-with its base, and whose two vertical bars should form the Rue de la\r
-Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse\r
-bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue\r
-Mondetour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles,\r
-so that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed to\r
-form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and the Rue\r
-Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue\r
-des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut up, of\r
-varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely separated,\r
-like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.\r
-\r
-We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark,\r
-contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings. These\r
-buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue\r
-de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running\r
-from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter broad,\r
-the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet, skirting\r
-little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with iron hoops,\r
-excessive heaps of refuse, and gates armed with enormous, century-old\r
-gratings. The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.\r
-\r
-The name of Mondetour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of that\r
-whole set of streets. A little further on, they are found still better\r
-expressed by the Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondetour.\r
-\r
-The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue de\r
-la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though he had\r
-entered an elongated funnel. At the end of this street, which was very\r
-short, he found further passage barred in the direction of the Halles\r
-by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in a blind\r
-alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two dark cuts through\r
-which he could make his escape. This was the Rue Mondetour, which on\r
-one side ran into the Rue de Precheurs, and on the other into the Rue\r
-du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of\r
-cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be\r
-seen a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed a sort\r
-of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two stories only, that\r
-an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years\r
-before. This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old\r
-Theophilus described in the following couplet:--\r
-\r
- La branle le squelette horrible\r
- D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.[47]\r
-\r
-\r
-The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,\r
-from father to son.\r
-\r
-In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the\r
-Pot-aux-Roses, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its\r
-sign-board, a post (poteau) painted rose-color. In the last century, the\r
-worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised by the\r
-stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop at the\r
-very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted, by way of\r
-gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. The keeper of the\r
-cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had caused to be placed\r
-in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: "At the Bunch of Corinth\r
-Grapes" ("Au Raisin de Corinthe"). Hence the name of Corinthe. Nothing\r
-is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The ellipsis is the\r
-zig-zag of the phrase. Corinthe gradually dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses.\r
-The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no longer\r
-acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue.\r
-\r
-A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the first\r
-floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase piercing\r
-the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad\r
-daylight,--this was the style of this cabaret. A staircase with a\r
-trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. On the second floor were\r
-the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. They were reached by a staircase\r
-which was a ladder rather than a staircase, and had for their entrance\r
-only a private door in the large room on the first floor. Under the\r
-roof, in two mansard attics, were the nests for the servants. The\r
-kitchen shared the ground-floor with the tap-room.\r
-\r
-Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact is\r
-that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking alone\r
-in his wine-shop, they also ate there. Hucheloup had invented a capital\r
-thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps,\r
-which he called carpes au gras. These were eaten by the light of a\r
-tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., on tables to which\r
-were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths. People came thither\r
-from a distance. Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to notify\r
-passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped a brush in a pot of black\r
-paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as well as\r
-a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall this\r
-remarkable inscription:--\r
-\r
- CARPES HO GRAS.\r
-\r
-\r
-One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to\r
-obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began\r
-the third; this is what remained:--\r
-\r
- CARPE HO RAS.\r
-\r
-\r
-Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become\r
-a profound piece of advice.\r
-\r
-In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father\r
-Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his\r
-kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled\r
-Horace. And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant:\r
-"Enter my wine-shop."\r
-\r
-Nothing of all this is in existence now. The Mondetour labyrinth was\r
-disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer exists\r
-at the present moment. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe have\r
-disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.\r
-\r
-As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the\r
-rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire who had\r
-discovered Corinthe. He had entered it on account of the Carpe horas,\r
-and had returned thither on account of the Carpes au gras. There they\r
-drank, there they ate, there they shouted; they did not pay much, they\r
-paid badly, they did not pay at all, but they were always welcome.\r
-Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.\r
-\r
-Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper\r
-with a mustache; an amusing variety. He always had an ill-tempered air,\r
-seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people who\r
-entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking a quarrel\r
-with them than of serving them with soup. And yet, we insist upon\r
-the word, people were always welcome there. This oddity had attracted\r
-customers to his shop, and brought him young men, who said to each\r
-other: "Come hear Father Hucheloup growl." He had been a fencing-master.\r
-All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing. A big voice, a good\r
-fellow. He had a comic foundation under a tragic exterior, he asked\r
-nothing better than to frighten you, very much like those snuff-boxes\r
-which are in the shape of a pistol. The detonation makes one sneeze.\r
-\r
-Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.\r
-\r
-About 1830, Father Hucheloup died. With him disappeared the secret of\r
-stuffed carps. His inconsolable widow continued to keep the wine-shop.\r
-But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable; the wine, which had\r
-always been bad, became fearfully bad. Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his\r
-friends continued to go to Corinthe,--out of pity, as Bossuet said.\r
-\r
-The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given to rustic\r
-recollections. She deprived them of their flatness by her pronunciation.\r
-She had a way of her own of saying things, which spiced her\r
-reminiscences of the village and of her springtime. It had formerly been\r
-her delight, so she affirmed, to hear the loups-de-gorge (rouges-gorges)\r
-chanter dans les ogrepines (aubepines)--to hear the redbreasts sing in\r
-the hawthorn-trees.\r
-\r
-The hall on the first floor, where "the restaurant" was situated, was\r
-a large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches, and\r
-tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It was reached\r
-by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner of the room at a\r
-square hole like the hatchway of a ship.\r
-\r
-This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was\r
-always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed furniture\r
-comported itself as though it had but three legs--the whitewashed walls\r
-had for their only ornament the following quatrain in honor of Mame\r
-Hucheloup:--\r
-\r
- Elle etonne a dix pas, elle epouvente a deux,\r
- Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;\r
- On tremble a chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche\r
- Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.[48]\r
-\r
-\r
-This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.\r
-\r
-Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till\r
-night before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity. Two\r
-serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,[49] and who had never been\r
-known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set on the tables\r
-the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths which were served to the\r
-hungry patrons in earthenware bowls. Matelote, large, plump, redhaired,\r
-and noisy, the favorite ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was\r
-homelier than any mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it\r
-becomes the servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was\r
-less homely than Mame Hucheloup. Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with a\r
-lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids, always\r
-languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called chronic lassitude,\r
-the first up in the house and the last in bed, waited on every one, even\r
-the other maid, silently and gently, smiling through her fatigue with a\r
-vague and sleepy smile.\r
-\r
-Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the\r
-following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:--\r
-\r
- Regale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.[50]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--PRELIMINARY GAYETIES\r
-\r
-Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly than\r
-elsewhere. He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. The\r
-two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They had\r
-everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. They were, what\r
-the subordinate monks who accompany monks are called, bini. On the\r
-morning of the 5th of June, they went to Corinthe to breakfast. Joly,\r
-who was all stuffed up, had a catarrh which Laigle was beginning to\r
-share. Laigle's coat was threadbare, but Joly was well dressed.\r
-\r
-It was about nine o'clock in the morning, when they opened the door of\r
-Corinthe.\r
-\r
-They ascended to the first floor.\r
-\r
-Matelote and Gibelotte received them.\r
-\r
-"Oysters, cheese, and ham," said Laigle.\r
-\r
-And they seated themselves at a table.\r
-\r
-The wine-shop was empty; there was no one there but themselves.\r
-\r
-Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table.\r
-\r
-While they were busy with their first oysters, a head appeared at the\r
-hatchway of the staircase, and a voice said:--\r
-\r
-"I am passing by. I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie\r
-cheese. I enter." It was Grantaire.\r
-\r
-Grantaire took a stool and drew up to the table.\r
-\r
-At the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine on the\r
-table.\r
-\r
-That made three.\r
-\r
-"Are you going to drink those two bottles?" Laigle inquired of\r
-Grantaire.\r
-\r
-Grantaire replied:--\r
-\r
-"All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous. Two bottles never yet\r
-astonished a man."\r
-\r
-The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a\r
-bottle was rapidly gulped down.\r
-\r
-"So you have a hole in your stomach?" began Laigle again.\r
-\r
-"You have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.\r
-\r
-And after having emptied his glass, he added:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, by the way, Laigle of the funeral oration, your coat is old."\r
-\r
-"I should hope so," retorted Laigle. "That's why we get on well\r
-together, my coat and I. It has acquired all my folds, it does not bind\r
-me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities, it falls in with all my\r
-movements, I am only conscious of it because it keeps me warm. Old coats\r
-are just like old friends."\r
-\r
-"That's true," ejaculated Joly, striking into the dialogue, "an old goat\r
-is an old abi" (ami, friend).\r
-\r
-"Especially in the mouth of a man whose head is stuffed up," said\r
-Grantaire.\r
-\r
-"Grantaire," demanded Laigle, "have you just come from the boulevard?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"We have just seen the head of the procession pass, Joly and I."\r
-\r
-"It's a marvellous sight," said Joly.\r
-\r
-"How quiet this street is!" exclaimed Laigle. "Who would suspect that\r
-Paris was turned upside down? How plainly it is to be seen that in\r
-former days there were nothing but convents here! In this neighborhood!\r
-Du Breul and Sauval give a list of them, and so does the Abbe Lebeuf.\r
-They were all round here, they fairly swarmed, booted and barefooted,\r
-shaven, bearded, gray, black, white, Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins,\r
-Carmelites, Little Augustines, Great Augustines, old Augustines--there\r
-was no end of them."\r
-\r
-"Don't let's talk of monks," interrupted Grantaire, "it makes one want\r
-to scratch one's self."\r
-\r
-Then he exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Bouh! I've just swallowed a bad oyster. Now hypochondria is taking\r
-possession of me again. The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly.\r
-I hate the human race. I just passed through the Rue Richelieu, in front\r
-of the big public library. That pile of oyster-shells which is called\r
-a library is disgusting even to think of. What paper! What ink! What\r
-scrawling! And all that has been written! What rascal was it who said\r
-that man was a featherless biped?[51] And then, I met a pretty girl of\r
-my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring, worthy to be called\r
-Floreal, and who is delighted, enraptured, as happy as the angels,\r
-because a wretch yesterday, a frightful banker all spotted with\r
-small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her! Alas! woman keeps on the\r
-watch for a protector as much as for a lover; cats chase mice as well\r
-as birds. Two months ago that young woman was virtuous in an attic, she\r
-adjusted little brass rings in the eyelet-holes of corsets, what do\r
-you call it? She sewed, she had a camp bed, she dwelt beside a pot\r
-of flowers, she was contented. Now here she is a bankeress. This\r
-transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning in\r
-high spirits. The hideous point about it is, that the jade is as pretty\r
-to-day as she was yesterday. Her financier did not show in her face.\r
-Roses have this advantage or disadvantage over women, that the traces\r
-left upon them by caterpillars are visible. Ah! there is no morality on\r
-earth. I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol of love, the laurel,\r
-the symbol of air, the olive, that ninny, the symbol of peace, the\r
-apple-tree which came nearest rangling Adam with its pips, and the\r
-fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats. As for right, do you know what\r
-right is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium, and demands\r
-what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus answers: 'The wrong that\r
-Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidenae did to you, the wrong that the\r
-Eques, the Volsci, and the Sabines have done to you. They were your\r
-neighbors. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighborliness just as\r
-you do. You have stolen Alba, we shall take Clusium.' Rome said: 'You\r
-shall not take Clusium.' Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: 'Vae victis!'\r
-That is what right is. Ah! what beasts of prey there are in this world!\r
-What eagles! It makes my flesh creep."\r
-\r
-He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then he drank and went on,\r
-having hardly been interrupted by this glass of wine, of which no one,\r
-not even himself, had taken any notice:--\r
-\r
-"Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker who takes the grisette\r
-is an eagle. There is no more modesty in the one case than in the other.\r
-So we believe in nothing. There is but one reality: drink. Whatever your\r
-opinion may be in favor of the lean cock, like the Canton of Uri, or\r
-in favor of the fat cock, like the Canton of Glaris, it matters little,\r
-drink. You talk to me of the boulevard, of that procession, et caetera,\r
-et caetera. Come now, is there going to be another revolution? This\r
-poverty of means on the part of the good God astounds me. He has to keep\r
-greasing the groove of events every moment. There is a hitch, it won't\r
-work. Quick, a revolution! The good God has his hands perpetually black\r
-with that cart-grease. If I were in his place, I'd be perfectly simple\r
-about it, I would not wind up my mechanism every minute, I'd lead the\r
-human race in a straightforward way, I'd weave matters mesh by mesh,\r
-without breaking the thread, I would have no provisional arrangements,\r
-I would have no extraordinary repertory. What the rest of you call\r
-progress advances by means of two motors, men and events. But, sad to\r
-say, from time to time, the exceptional becomes necessary. The ordinary\r
-troupe suffices neither for event nor for men: among men geniuses are\r
-required, among events revolutions. Great accidents are the law; the\r
-order of things cannot do without them; and, judging from the apparition\r
-of comets, one would be tempted to think that Heaven itself finds actors\r
-needed for its performance. At the moment when one expects it the least,\r
-God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some queer star\r
-turns up, underlined by an enormous tail. And that causes the death\r
-of Caesar. Brutus deals him a blow with a knife, and God a blow with a\r
-comet. Crac, and behold an aurora borealis, behold a revolution, behold\r
-a great man; '93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of 1811\r
-at the head of the poster. Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all studded\r
-with unexpected flashes! Boum! Boum! extraordinary show! Raise your\r
-eyes, boobies. Everything is in disorder, the star as well as the drama.\r
-Good God, it is too much and not enough. These resources, gathered from\r
-exception, seem magnificence and poverty. My friends, Providence has\r
-come down to expedients. What does a revolution prove? That God is in a\r
-quandry. He effects a coup d'etat because he, God, has not been able to\r
-make both ends meet. In fact, this confirms me in my conjectures as\r
-to Jehovah's fortune; and when I see so much distress in heaven and on\r
-earth, from the bird who has not a grain of millet to myself without a\r
-hundred thousand livres of income, when I see human destiny, which is\r
-very badly worn, and even royal destiny, which is threadbare, witness\r
-the Prince de Conde hung, when I see winter, which is nothing but a rent\r
-in the zenith through which the wind blows, when I see so many rags even\r
-in the perfectly new purple of the morning on the crests of hills, when\r
-I see the drops of dew, those mock pearls, when I see the frost, that\r
-paste, when I see humanity ripped apart and events patched up, and so\r
-many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon, when I see so\r
-much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. The appearance\r
-exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. He gives a revolution\r
-as a tradesman whose money-box is empty gives a ball. God must not be\r
-judged from appearances. Beneath the gilding of heaven I perceive\r
-a poverty-stricken universe. Creation is bankrupt. That is why I am\r
-discontented. Here it is the 4th of June, it is almost night; ever since\r
-this morning I have been waiting for daylight to come; it has not come,\r
-and I bet that it won't come all day. This is the inexactness of an\r
-ill-paid clerk. Yes, everything is badly arranged, nothing fits anything\r
-else, this old world is all warped, I take my stand on the opposition,\r
-everything goes awry; the universe is a tease. It's like children, those\r
-who want them have none, and those who don't want them have them. Total:\r
-I'm vexed. Besides, Laigle de Meaux, that bald-head, offends my sight.\r
-It humiliates me to think that I am of the same age as that baldy.\r
-However, I criticise, but I do not insult. The universe is what it is.\r
-I speak here without evil intent and to ease my conscience. Receive,\r
-Eternal Father, the assurance of my distinguished consideration. Ah!\r
-by all the saints of Olympus and by all the gods of paradise, I was not\r
-intended to be a Parisian, that is to say, to rebound forever, like a\r
-shuttlecock between two battledores, from the group of the loungers to\r
-the group of the roysterers. I was made to be a Turk, watching oriental\r
-houris all day long, executing those exquisite Egyptian dances, as\r
-sensuous as the dream of a chaste man, or a Beauceron peasant, or a\r
-Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentlewomen, or a petty German prince,\r
-furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and\r
-occupying his leisure with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to\r
-say, his frontier. Those are the positions for which I was born! Yes, I\r
-have said a Turk, and I will not retract. I do not understand how people\r
-can habitually take Turks in bad part; Mohammed had his good points;\r
-respect for the inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises with\r
-odalisques! Let us not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion which is\r
-ornamented with a hen-roost! Now, I insist on a drink. The earth is a\r
-great piece of stupidity. And it appears that they are going to fight,\r
-all those imbeciles, and to break each other's profiles and to massacre\r
-each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might\r
-go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of\r
-new-mown hay in the meadows! Really, people do commit altogether\r
-too many follies. An old broken lantern which I have just seen at a\r
-bric-a-brac merchant's suggests a reflection to my mind; it is time to\r
-enlighten the human race. Yes, behold me sad again. That's what comes\r
-of swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way! I am growing\r
-melancholy once more. Oh! frightful old world. People strive, turn each\r
-other out, prostitute themselves, kill each other, and get used to it!"\r
-\r
-And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing, which\r
-was well earned.\r
-\r
-"A propos of revolution," said Joly, "it is decidedly abberent that\r
-Barius is in lub."\r
-\r
-"Does any one know with whom?" demanded Laigle.\r
-\r
-"Do."\r
-\r
-"No?"\r
-\r
-"Do! I tell you."\r
-\r
-"Marius' love affairs!" exclaimed Grantaire. "I can imagine it. Marius\r
-is a fog, and he must have found a vapor. Marius is of the race of\r
-poets. He who says poet, says fool, madman, Tymbraeus Apollo. Marius and\r
-his Marie, or his Marion, or his Maria, or his Mariette. They must make\r
-a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in which\r
-they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They are souls\r
-possessed of senses. They lie among the stars."\r
-\r
-Grantaire was attacking his second bottle and, possibly, his second\r
-harangue, when a new personage emerged from the square aperture of the\r
-stairs. It was a boy less than ten years of age, ragged, very small,\r
-yellow, with an odd phiz, a vivacious eye, an enormous amount of hair\r
-drenched with rain, and wearing a contented air.\r
-\r
-The child unhesitatingly making his choice among the three, addressed\r
-himself to Laigle de Meaux.\r
-\r
-"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?"\r
-\r
-"That is my nickname," replied Laigle. "What do you want with me?"\r
-\r
-"This. A tall blonde fellow on the boulevard said to me: 'Do you know\r
-Mother Hucheloup?' I said: 'Yes, Rue Chanvrerie, the old man's widow;'\r
-he said to me: 'Go there. There you will find M. Bossuet. Tell him from\r
-me: "A B C".' It's a joke that they're playing on you, isn't it. He gave\r
-me ten sous."\r
-\r
-"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle; and, turning to Grantaire:\r
-"Grantaire, lend me ten sous."\r
-\r
-This made twenty sous, which Laigle handed to the lad.\r
-\r
-"Thank you, sir," said the urchin.\r
-\r
-"What is your name?" inquired Laigle.\r
-\r
-"Navet, Gavroche's friend."\r
-\r
-"Stay with us," said Laigle.\r
-\r
-"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire.\r
-\r
-The child replied:--\r
-\r
-"I can't, I belong in the procession, I'm the one to shout 'Down with\r
-Polignac!'"\r
-\r
-And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is the\r
-most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure.\r
-\r
-The child gone, Grantaire took the word:--\r
-\r
-"That is the pure-bred gamin. There are a great many varieties of the\r
-gamin species. The notary's gamin is called Skip-the-Gutter, the cook's\r
-gamin is called a scullion, the baker's gamin is called a mitron,\r
-the lackey's gamin is called a groom, the marine gamin is called the\r
-cabin-boy, the soldier's gamin is called the drummer-boy, the painter's\r
-gamin is called paint-grinder, the tradesman's gamin is called an\r
-errand-boy, the courtesan gamin is called the minion, the kingly gamin\r
-is called the dauphin, the god gamin is called the bambino."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Laigle was engaged in reflection; he said half aloud:--\r
-\r
-"A B C, that is to say: the burial of Lamarque."\r
-\r
-"The tall blonde," remarked Grantaire, "is Enjolras, who is sending you\r
-a warning."\r
-\r
-"Shall we go?" ejaculated Bossuet.\r
-\r
-"It's raiding," said Joly. "I have sworn to go through fire, but not\r
-through water. I don't wand to ged a gold."\r
-\r
-"I shall stay here," said Grantaire. "I prefer a breakfast to a hearse."\r
-\r
-"Conclusion: we remain," said Laigle. "Well, then, let us drink.\r
-Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot."\r
-\r
-"Ah! the riot, I am with you!" cried Joly.\r
-\r
-Laigle rubbed his hands.\r
-\r
-"Now we're going to touch up the revolution of 1830. As a matter of\r
-fact, it does hurt the people along the seams."\r
-\r
-"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire. "I don't\r
-execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton\r
-night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, I think\r
-that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize his\r
-royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre end\r
-against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven."\r
-\r
-The room was dark, large clouds had just finished the extinction of\r
-daylight. There was no one in the wine-shop, or in the street, every one\r
-having gone off "to watch events."\r
-\r
-"Is it mid-day or midnight?" cried Bossuet. "You can't see your hand\r
-before your face. Gibelotte, fetch a light."\r
-\r
-Grantaire was drinking in a melancholy way.\r
-\r
-"Enjolras disdains me," he muttered. "Enjolras said: 'Joly is ill,\r
-Grantaire is drunk.' It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. If he had\r
-come for me, I would have followed him. So much the worse for Enjolras!\r
-I won't go to his funeral."\r
-\r
-This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not\r
-stir from the wine-shop. By two o'clock in the afternoon, the table at\r
-which they sat was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning\r
-on it, one in a flat copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the\r
-other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had seduced Joly and\r
-Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire back towards\r
-cheerfulness.\r
-\r
-As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate\r
-inspirer of dreams, ever since mid-day. Wine enjoys only a conventional\r
-popularity with serious drinkers. There is, in fact, in the matter\r
-of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic.\r
-Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible\r
-fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted\r
-him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The\r
-beer-glass is the abyss. Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and\r
-being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse\r
-to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the\r
-most terrible of lethargies. It is of these three vapors, beer, brandy,\r
-and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed. They are three\r
-grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there are formed\r
-there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat,\r
-three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the\r
-slumbering Psyche.\r
-\r
-Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He was\r
-tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses.\r
-Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas,\r
-a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with\r
-dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated\r
-astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn\r
-words at the big maid-servant Matelote:--\r
-\r
-"Let the doors of the palace be thrown open! Let every one be a member\r
-of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup.\r
-Let us drink."\r
-\r
-And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:--\r
-\r
-"Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate\r
-thee!"\r
-\r
-And Joly exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Matelote and Gibelotte, dod't gib Grantaire anything more to drink.\r
-He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two\r
-francs and ninety-five centibes."\r
-\r
-And Grantaire began again:--\r
-\r
-"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting\r
-them on the table in the guise of candles?"\r
-\r
-Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.\r
-\r
-He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the\r
-falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.\r
-\r
-All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of\r
-"To arms!" He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end\r
-of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and Gavroche\r
-with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his sword, and\r
-Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel\r
-with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which was following\r
-them.\r
-\r
-The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. Bossuet\r
-improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his\r
-mouth, and shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hohee!"\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few\r
-paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting: "What do you want?" which\r
-crossed a "Where are you going?"\r
-\r
-"To make a barricade," replied Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-"Well, here! This is a good place! Make it here!"\r
-\r
-"That's true, Aigle," said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue\r
-de la Chanvrerie.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE\r
-\r
-The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street\r
-widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket\r
-without exit. Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondetour was easily\r
-barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible except\r
-from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full sight.\r
-Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.\r
-\r
-Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob. There\r
-was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight. In the space of a\r
-flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left, shops, stables,\r
-area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights, shutters of every\r
-description were closed, from the ground floor to the roof. A terrified\r
-old woman fixed a mattress in front of her window on two clothes-poles\r
-for drying linen, in order to deaden the effect of musketry. The\r
-wine-shop alone remained open; and that for a very good reason, that the\r
-mob had rushed into it.--"Ah my God! Ah my God!" sighed Mame Hucheloup.\r
-\r
-Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella. You will gatch\r
-gold."\r
-\r
-In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had\r
-been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of\r
-street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its passage,\r
-and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this dray\r
-contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the piles\r
-of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the widow\r
-Hucheloup's empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime; Feuilly,\r
-with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of fans, had\r
-backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of blocks of\r
-rough stone. Blocks which were improvised like the rest and procured\r
-no one knows where. The beams which served as props were torn from\r
-the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks. When Bossuet and\r
-Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred with\r
-a rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the hand of the\r
-populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.\r
-\r
-Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers. Gibelotte went and\r
-came loaded with rubbish. Her lassitude helped on the barricade. She\r
-served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.\r
-\r
-An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.\r
-\r
-Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver,\r
-made the passengers alight, offered his hand to "the ladies," dismissed\r
-the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the horses by the\r
-bridle.\r
-\r
-"Omnibuses," said he, "do not pass the Corinthe. Non licet omnibus adire\r
-Corinthum."\r
-\r
-An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at their\r
-will, through the Rue Mondetour, and the omnibus lying on its side\r
-completed the bar across the street.\r
-\r
-Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.\r
-\r
-Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she cried\r
-in a low tone. Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge from her\r
-throat.\r
-\r
-"The end of the world has come," she muttered.\r
-\r
-Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup's fat, red, wrinkled neck, and\r
-said to Grantaire: "My dear fellow, I have always regarded a woman's\r
-neck as an infinitely delicate thing."\r
-\r
-But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. Matelote\r
-had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized her round her\r
-waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at the window.\r
-\r
-"Matelote is homely!" he cried: "Matelote is of a dream of ugliness!\r
-Matelote is a chimaera. This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic\r
-Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals, fell in love with\r
-one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. He besought Love to\r
-give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens! She has\r
-chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian's mistress, and she is a good\r
-girl. I guarantee that she will fight well. Every good girl contains\r
-a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she's an old warrior. Look at her\r
-moustaches! She inherited them from her husband. A hussar indeed! She\r
-will fight too. These two alone will strike terror to the heart of the\r
-banlieue. Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true as there\r
-are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid and formic acid;\r
-however, that is a matter of perfect indifference to me. Gentlemen, my\r
-father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics.\r
-I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the good fellow.\r
-Having never had any money, I never acquired the habit of it, and the\r
-result is that I have never lacked it; but, if I had been rich, there\r
-would have been no more poor people! You would have seen! Oh, if the\r
-kind hearts only had fat purses, how much better things would go! I\r
-picture myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild's fortune! How much good he\r
-would do! Matelote, embrace me! You are voluptuous and timid! You have\r
-cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips which claim the kiss\r
-of a lover."\r
-\r
-"Hold your tongue, you cask!" said Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-Grantaire retorted:--\r
-\r
-"I am the capitoul[52] and the master of the floral games!"\r
-\r
-Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand,\r
-raised his beautiful, austere face. Enjolras, as the reader knows, had\r
-something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He would\r
-have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda with\r
-Cromwell.\r
-\r
-"Grantaire," he shouted, "go get rid of the fumes of your wine somewhere\r
-else than here. This is the place for enthusiasm, not for drunkenness.\r
-Don't disgrace the barricade!"\r
-\r
-This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire. One would\r
-have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. He\r
-seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.\r
-\r
-He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at\r
-Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:--\r
-\r
-"Let me sleep here."\r
-\r
-"Go and sleep somewhere else," cried Enjolras.\r
-\r
-But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him,\r
-replied:--\r
-\r
-"Let me sleep here,--until I die."\r
-\r
-Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:--\r
-\r
-"Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of\r
-living, and of dying."\r
-\r
-Grantaire replied in a grave tone:--\r
-\r
-"You will see."\r
-\r
-He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily\r
-on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second period of\r
-inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly thrust him, an\r
-instant later he had fallen asleep.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP\r
-\r
-Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Here's the street in its low-necked dress! How well it looks!"\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent, sought to\r
-console the widowed proprietress.\r
-\r
-"Mother Hucheloup, weren't you complaining the other day because you\r
-had had a notice served on you for infringing the law, because Gibelotte\r
-shook a counterpane out of your window?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Ah! good Heavens, are you going\r
-to put that table of mine in your horror, too? And it was for the\r
-counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from the attic\r
-window into the street, that the government collected a fine of a\r
-hundred francs. If that isn't an abomination, what is!"\r
-\r
-"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you."\r
-\r
-Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly the benefit\r
-which she was to derive from these reprisals made on her account. She\r
-was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received\r
-a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and\r
-cried for vengeance, saying: "Father, you owe my husband affront for\r
-affront." The father asked: "On which cheek did you receive the blow?"\r
-"On the left cheek." The father slapped her right cheek and said: "Now\r
-you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter's\r
-ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife's."\r
-\r
-The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Workmen had brought under\r
-their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of\r
-vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with\r
-fire-pots, "left over from the King's festival." This festival was very\r
-recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these\r
-munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pepin.\r
-They smashed the only street lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie,\r
-the lantern corresponding to one in the Rue Saint-Denis, and all\r
-the lanterns in the surrounding streets, de Mondetour, du Cygne, des\r
-Precheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite-Truanderie.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything. Two barricades\r
-were now in process of construction at once, both of them resting on the\r
-Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger shut off the Rue\r
-de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondetour, on the side of\r
-the Rue de Cygne. This last barricade, which was very narrow, was\r
-constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were about fifty\r
-workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for, on their way, they had\r
-effected a wholesale loan from an armorer's shop.\r
-\r
-Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley than this\r
-troop. One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two holster-pistols,\r
-another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn\r
-slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine sheets of gray paper\r
-and was armed with a saddler's awl. There was one who was shouting:\r
-"Let us exterminate them to the last man and die at the point of our\r
-bayonet." This man had no bayonet. Another spread out over his coat the\r
-cross-belt and cartridge-box of a National Guardsman, the cover of the\r
-cartridge-box being ornamented with this inscription in red worsted:\r
-Public Order. There were a great many guns bearing the numbers of the\r
-legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes. Add to\r
-this, all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young men, and bronzed\r
-longshoremen. All were in haste; and as they helped each other, they\r
-discussed the possible chances. That they would receive succor about\r
-three o'clock in the morning--that they were sure of one regiment, that\r
-Paris would rise. Terrible sayings with which was mingled a sort of\r
-cordial joviality. One would have pronounced them brothers, but they did\r
-not know each other's names. Great perils have this fine characteristic,\r
-that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers. A fire had been\r
-lighted in the kitchen, and there they were engaged in moulding into\r
-bullets, pewter mugs, spoons, forks, and all the brass table-ware of\r
-the establishment. In the midst of it all, they drank. Caps and\r
-buckshot were mixed pell-mell on the tables with glasses of wine. In\r
-the billiard-hall, Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously\r
-modified by terror, which had stupefied one, rendered another\r
-breathless, and roused the third, were tearing up old dish-cloths and\r
-making lint; three insurgents were assisting them, three bushy-haired,\r
-jolly blades with beards and moustaches, who plucked away at the linen\r
-with the fingers of seamstresses and who made them tremble.\r
-\r
-The man of lofty stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had\r
-observed at the moment when he joined the mob at the corner of the\r
-Rue des Billettes, was at work on the smaller barricade and was making\r
-himself useful there. Gavroche was working on the larger one. As for the\r
-young man who had been waiting for Courfeyrac at his lodgings, and who\r
-had inquired for M. Marius, he had disappeared at about the time when\r
-the omnibus had been overturned.\r
-\r
-Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had undertaken to get\r
-everything in readiness. He went, came, mounted, descended, re-mounted,\r
-whistled, and sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of\r
-all. Had he any incentive? Yes, certainly, his poverty; had he wings?\r
-yes, certainly, his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind. He was constantly\r
-visible, he was incessantly audible. He filled the air, as he was\r
-everywhere at once. He was a sort of almost irritating ubiquity; no halt\r
-was possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its haunches.\r
-He troubled the loungers, he excited the idle, he reanimated the weary,\r
-he grew impatient over the thoughtful, he inspired gayety in some,\r
-and breath in others, wrath in others, movement in all, now pricking\r
-a student, now biting an artisan; he alighted, paused, flew off again,\r
-hovered over the tumult, and the effort, sprang from one party to\r
-another, murmuring and humming, and harassed the whole company; a fly on\r
-the immense revolutionary coach.\r
-\r
-Perpetual motion was in his little arms and perpetual clamor in his\r
-little lungs.\r
-\r
-"Courage! more paving-stones! more casks! more machines! Where are you\r
-now? A hod of plaster for me to stop this hole with! Your barricade\r
-is very small. It must be carried up. Put everything on it, fling\r
-everything there, stick it all in. Break down the house. A barricade is\r
-Mother Gibou's tea. Hullo, here's a glass door."\r
-\r
-This elicited an exclamation from the workers.\r
-\r
-"A glass door? what do you expect us to do with a glass door, tubercle?"\r
-\r
-"Hercules yourselves!" retorted Gavroche. "A glass door is an excellent\r
-thing in a barricade. It does not prevent an attack, but it prevents the\r
-enemy taking it. So you've never prigged apples over a wall where there\r
-were broken bottles? A glass door cuts the corns of the National Guard\r
-when they try to mount on the barricade. Pardi! glass is a treacherous\r
-thing. Well, you haven't a very wildly lively imagination, comrades."\r
-\r
-However, he was furious over his triggerless pistol. He went from one to\r
-another, demanding: "A gun, I want a gun! Why don't you give me a gun?"\r
-\r
-"Give you a gun!" said Combeferre.\r
-\r
-"Come now!" said Gavroche, "why not? I had one in 1830 when we had a\r
-dispute with Charles X."\r
-\r
-Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.\r
-\r
-"When there are enough for the men, we will give some to the children."\r
-\r
-Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:--\r
-\r
-"If you are killed before me, I shall take yours."\r
-\r
-"Gamin!" said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"Greenhorn!" said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the street\r
-created a diversion! Gavroche shouted to him:--\r
-\r
-"Come with us, young fellow! well now, don't we do anything for this old\r
-country of ours?"\r
-\r
-The dandy fled.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--PREPARATIONS\r
-\r
-The journals of the day which said that that nearly impregnable\r
-structure, of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call\r
-it, reached to the level of the first floor, were mistaken. The fact is,\r
-that it did not exceed an average height of six or seven feet. It was\r
-built in such a manner that the combatants could, at their will, either\r
-disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale its crest by\r
-means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top of each other\r
-and arranged as steps in the interior. On the outside, the front of the\r
-barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones and casks bound together\r
-by beams and planks, which were entangled in the wheels of Anceau's dray\r
-and of the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and inextricable aspect.\r
-\r
-An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been made\r
-between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade which\r
-was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit was possible at this\r
-point. The pole of the omnibus was placed upright and held up with\r
-ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole, floated over the\r
-barricade.\r
-\r
-The little Mondetour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building,\r
-was not visible. The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt.\r
-Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other\r
-fragment of the Rue Mondetour which opens through the Rue des Precheurs\r
-an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve a possible\r
-communication with the outside, and not entertaining much fear of\r
-an attack through the dangerous and difficult street of the Rue des\r
-Precheurs.\r
-\r
-With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which\r
-constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed a\r
-branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged on the\r
-Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the wine-shop\r
-formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square, closed on all\r
-sides. There existed an interval of twenty paces between the grand\r
-barrier and the lofty houses which formed the background of the street,\r
-so that one might say that the barricade rested on these houses, all\r
-inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.\r
-\r
-All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than an hour,\r
-and without this handful of bold men seeing a single bear-skin cap or\r
-a single bayonet make their appearance. The very bourgeois who still\r
-ventured at this hour of riot to enter the Rue Saint-Denis cast a\r
-glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, caught sight of the barricade, and\r
-redoubled their pace.\r
-\r
-The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was\r
-dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table.\r
-Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. This\r
-coffer was filled with cartridges. When the mob saw the cartridges, a\r
-tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.\r
-\r
-Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder, and set about\r
-making others with the bullets which they had run. As for the barrel of\r
-powder, it stood on a table on one side, near the door, and was held in\r
-reserve.\r
-\r
-The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it had\r
-finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which they no\r
-longer paid any attention. This noise retreated at times, and again drew\r
-near, with melancholy undulations.\r
-\r
-They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste, with\r
-solemn gravity. Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels outside the\r
-barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des\r
-Precheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.\r
-\r
-Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns\r
-loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those redoubtable\r
-streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded by those\r
-dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitated,\r
-enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was drawing on,\r
-in the midst of that silence through which something could be felt\r
-advancing, and which had about it something tragic and terrifying,\r
-isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--WAITING\r
-\r
-During those hours of waiting, what did they do?\r
-\r
-We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history.\r
-\r
-While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan\r
-of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a\r
-glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the\r
-barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an\r
-eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly,\r
-Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other out and\r
-united as in the most peaceful days of their conversations in their\r
-student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been\r
-converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt\r
-which they had built, with their carbines loaded and primed resting\r
-against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close to\r
-a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.\r
-\r
-What verses? These:--\r
-\r
- Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,\r
- Lorsque nous etions si jeunes tous deux,\r
- Et que nous n'avions au coeur d'autre envie\r
- Que d'etre bien mis et d'etre amoureux,\r
-\r
- Lorsqu'en ajoutant votre age a mon age,\r
- Nous ne comptions pas a deux quarante ans,\r
- Et que, dans notre humble et petit menage,\r
- Tout, meme l'hiver, nous etait printemps?\r
-\r
- Beaux jours! Manuel etait fier et sage,\r
- Paris s'asseyait a de saints banquets,\r
- Foy lancait la foudre, et votre corsage\r
- Avait une epingle ou je me piquais.\r
-\r
- Tout vous contemplait. Avocat sans causes,\r
- Quand je vous menais au Prado diner,\r
- Vous etiez jolie au point que les roses\r
- Me faisaient l'effet de se retourner.\r
-\r
- Je les entendais dire: Est elle belle!\r
- Comme elle sent bon! Quels cheveux a flots!\r
- Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile,\r
- Son bonnet charmant est a peine eclos.\r
-\r
- J'errais avec toi, pressant ton bras souple.\r
- Les passants crovaient que l'amour charme\r
- Avait marie, dans notre heureux couple,\r
- Le doux mois d'avril au beau mois de mai.\r
-\r
- Nous vivions caches, contents, porte close,\r
- Devorant l'amour, bon fruit defendu,\r
- Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose\r
- Que deja ton coeur avait repondu.\r
-\r
- La Sorbonne etait l'endroit bucolique\r
- Ou je t'adorais du soir au matin.\r
- C'est ainsi qu'une ame amoureuse applique\r
- La carte du Tendre au pays Latin.\r
-\r
- O place Maubert! o place Dauphine!\r
- Quand, dans le taudis frais et printanier,\r
- Tu tirais ton bas sur ton jambe fine,\r
- Je voyais un astre au fond du grenier.\r
-\r
- J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste;\r
- Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais,\r
- Tu me demontrais la bonte celeste\r
- Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.\r
-\r
- Je t'obeissais, tu m' etais soumise;\r
- O grenier dore! te lacer! te voir\r
- Aller et venir des l'aube en chemise,\r
- Mirant ton jeune front a ton vieux miroir.\r
-\r
- Et qui done pourrait perde la memoire\r
- De ces temps d'aurore et de firmament,\r
- De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,\r
- Ou l'amour begaye un argot charmant?\r
-\r
- Nos jardins etaient un pot de tulipe;\r
- Tu masquais la vitre avec un jupon;\r
- Je prenais le bol de terre de pipe,\r
- Et je te donnais le tasse en japon.\r
-\r
- Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!\r
- Ton manchon brule, ton boa perdu!\r
- Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakespeare\r
- Qu'un soir pour souper nons avons vendu!\r
-\r
- J'etais mendiant et toi charitable.\r
- Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.\r
- Dante in folio nous servait de table\r
- Pour manger gaiment un cent de marrons.\r
-\r
- La premiere fois qu'en mon joyeux bouge\r
- Je pris un baiser a ton levre en feu,\r
- Quand tu t'en allais decoiffee et rouge,\r
- Je restai tout pale et je crus en Dieu!\r
-\r
- Te rappelles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,\r
- Et tous ces fichus changes en chiffons?\r
- Oh que de soupirs, de nos coeurs pleins d'ombre,\r
- Se sont envoles dans les cieux profonds![53]\r
-\r
-\r
-The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars\r
-which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those deserted\r
-streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure, which was in\r
-preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low\r
-tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we have said, was a gentle\r
-poet.\r
-\r
-In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in\r
-the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on\r
-Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks, on their way\r
-to la Courtille. These torches, as the reader has seen, came from the\r
-Faubourg Saint-Antoine.\r
-\r
-The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed on\r
-three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such a fashion\r
-that all the light fell on the flag. The street and the barricade\r
-remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except the red flag\r
-formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern.\r
-\r
-This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable and\r
-terrible purple.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES\r
-\r
-Night was fully come, nothing made its appearance. All that they heard\r
-was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare,\r
-badly sustained and distant. This respite, which was thus prolonged,\r
-was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting its\r
-forces. These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.\r
-\r
-Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls\r
-on the threshold of redoubtable events. He went in search of Gavroche,\r
-who had set to making cartridges in the tap-room, by the dubious light\r
-of two candles placed on the counter by way of precaution, on account of\r
-the powder which was scattered on the tables. These two candles cast no\r
-gleam outside. The insurgents had, moreover, taken pains not to have any\r
-light in the upper stories.\r
-\r
-Gavroche was deeply preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely with\r
-his cartridges. The man of the Rue des Billettes had just entered\r
-the tap-room and had seated himself at the table which was the least\r
-lighted. A musket of large model had fallen to his share, and he held it\r
-between his legs. Gavroche, who had been, up to that moment, distracted\r
-by a hundred "amusing" things, had not even seen this man.\r
-\r
-When he entered, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes,\r
-admiring his gun; then, all at once, when the man was seated, the street\r
-urchin sprang to his feet. Any one who had spied upon that man up to\r
-that moment, would have seen that he was observing everything in the\r
-barricade and in the band of insurgents, with singular attention; but,\r
-from the moment when he had entered this room, he had fallen into a sort\r
-of brown study, and no longer seemed to see anything that was going on.\r
-The gamin approached this pensive personage, and began to step around\r
-him on tiptoe, as one walks in the vicinity of a person whom one is\r
-afraid of waking. At the same time, over his childish countenance which\r
-was, at once so impudent and so serious, so giddy and so profound, so\r
-gay and so heart-breaking, passed all those grimaces of an old man which\r
-signify: Ah bah! impossible! My sight is bad! I am dreaming! can this\r
-be? no, it is not! but yes! why, no! etc. Gavroche balanced on his\r
-heels, clenched both fists in his pockets, moved his neck around like a\r
-bird, expended in a gigantic pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. He\r
-was astounded, uncertain, incredulous, convinced, dazzled. He had the\r
-mien of the chief of the eunuchs in the slave mart, discovering a\r
-Venus among the blowsy females, and the air of an amateur recognizing\r
-a Raphael in a heap of daubs. His whole being was at work, the instinct\r
-which scents out, and the intelligence which combines. It was evident\r
-that a great event had happened in Gavroche's life.\r
-\r
-It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras\r
-accosted him.\r
-\r
-"You are small," said Enjolras, "you will not be seen. Go out of the\r
-barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about a bit in the\r
-streets, and come back and tell me what is going on."\r
-\r
-Gavroche raised himself on his haunches.\r
-\r
-"So the little chaps are good for something! that's very lucky! I'll\r
-go! In the meanwhile, trust to the little fellows, and distrust the big\r
-ones." And Gavroche, raising his head and lowering his voice, added,\r
-as he indicated the man of the Rue des Billettes: "Do you see that big\r
-fellow there?"\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"He's a police spy."\r
-\r
-"Are you sure of it?"\r
-\r
-"It isn't two weeks since he pulled me off the cornice of the Port\r
-Royal, where I was taking the air, by my ear."\r
-\r
-Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words in a very\r
-low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who chanced to be at hand.\r
-The man left the room, and returned almost immediately, accompanied by\r
-three others. The four men, four porters with broad shoulders, went\r
-and placed themselves without doing anything to attract his attention,\r
-behind the table on which the man of the Rue des Billettes was leaning\r
-with his elbows. They were evidently ready to hurl themselves upon him.\r
-\r
-Then Enjolras approached the man and demanded of him:--\r
-\r
-"Who are you?"\r
-\r
-At this abrupt query, the man started. He plunged his gaze deep into\r
-Enjolras' clear eyes and appeared to grasp the latter's meaning. He\r
-smiled with a smile than which nothing more disdainful, more energetic,\r
-and more resolute could be seen in the world, and replied with haughty\r
-gravity:--\r
-\r
-"I see what it is. Well, yes!"\r
-\r
-"You are a police spy?"\r
-\r
-"I am an agent of the authorities."\r
-\r
-"And your name?"\r
-\r
-"Javert."\r
-\r
-Enjolras made a sign to the four men. In the twinkling of an eye, before\r
-Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, thrown down, pinioned\r
-and searched.\r
-\r
-They found on him a little round card pasted between two pieces of\r
-glass, and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved, and with\r
-this motto: Supervision and vigilance, and on the other this note:\r
-"JAVERT, inspector of police, aged fifty-two," and the signature of the\r
-Prefect of Police of that day, M. Gisquet.\r
-\r
-Besides this, he had his watch and his purse, which contained several\r
-gold pieces. They left him his purse and his watch. Under the watch,\r
-at the bottom of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope,\r
-which Enjolras unfolded, and on which he read these five lines, written\r
-in the very hand of the Prefect of Police:--\r
-\r
-"As soon as his political mission is accomplished, Inspector Javert\r
-will make sure, by special supervision, whether it is true that the\r
-malefactors have instituted intrigues on the right bank of the Seine,\r
-near the Jena bridge."\r
-\r
-The search ended, they lifted Javert to his feet, bound his arms behind\r
-his back, and fastened him to that celebrated post in the middle of the\r
-room which had formerly given the wine-shop its name.\r
-\r
-Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had approved\r
-of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up to Javert and\r
-said to him:--\r
-\r
-"It's the mouse who has caught the cat."\r
-\r
-All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those about\r
-the wine-shop noticed it.\r
-\r
-Javert had not uttered a single cry.\r
-\r
-At the sight of Javert bound to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly,\r
-Combeferre, and the men scattered over the two barricades came running\r
-up.\r
-\r
-Javert, with his back to the post, and so surrounded with ropes that he\r
-could not make a movement, raised his head with the intrepid serenity of\r
-the man who has never lied.\r
-\r
-"He is a police spy," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-And turning to Javert: "You will be shot ten minutes before the\r
-barricade is taken."\r
-\r
-Javert replied in his most imperious tone:--\r
-\r
-"Why not at once?"\r
-\r
-"We are saving our powder."\r
-\r
-"Then finish the business with a blow from a knife."\r
-\r
-"Spy," said the handsome Enjolras, "we are judges and not assassins."\r
-\r
-Then he called Gavroche:--\r
-\r
-"Here you! go about your business! Do what I told you!"\r
-\r
-"I'm going!" cried Gavroche.\r
-\r
-And halting as he was on the point of setting out:--\r
-\r
-"By the way, you will give me his gun!" and he added: "I leave you the\r
-musician, but I want the clarionet."\r
-\r
-The gamin made the military salute and passed gayly through the opening\r
-in the large barricade.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE\r
-CABUC WHOSE NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC\r
-\r
-The tragic picture which we have undertaken would not be complete, the\r
-reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs in a\r
-revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort,\r
-in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here\r
-outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred\r
-almost immediately after Gavroche's departure.\r
-\r
-Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect as they\r
-roll along, a throng of tumultuous men. These men do not ask each other\r
-whence they come. Among the passers-by who had joined the rabble led by\r
-Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there had been a person wearing\r
-the jacket of a street porter, which was very threadbare on the\r
-shoulders, who gesticulated and vociferated, and who had the look of a\r
-drunken savage. This man, whose name or nickname was Le Cabuc, and who\r
-was, moreover, an utter stranger to those who pretended to know him,\r
-was very drunk, or assumed the appearance of being so, and had seated\r
-himself with several others at a table which they had dragged outside\r
-of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while making those who vied with him drunk\r
-seemed to be examining with a thoughtful air the large house at the\r
-extremity of the barricade, whose five stories commanded the whole\r
-street and faced the Rue Saint-Denis. All at once he exclaimed:--\r
-\r
-"Do you know, comrades, it is from that house yonder that we must fire.\r
-When we are at the windows, the deuce is in it if any one can advance\r
-into the street!"\r
-\r
-"Yes, but the house is closed," said one of the drinkers.\r
-\r
-"Let us knock!"\r
-\r
-"They will not open."\r
-\r
-"Let us break in the door!"\r
-\r
-Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and knocks.\r
-The door opens not. He strikes a second blow. No one answers. A third\r
-stroke. The same silence.\r
-\r
-"Is there any one here?" shouts Cabuc.\r
-\r
-Nothing stirs.\r
-\r
-Then he seizes a gun and begins to batter the door with the butt end.\r
-\r
-It was an ancient alley door, low, vaulted, narrow, solid, entirely of\r
-oak, lined on the inside with a sheet of iron and iron stays, a genuine\r
-prison postern. The blows from the butt end of the gun made the house\r
-tremble, but did not shake the door.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, it is probable that the inhabitants were disturbed, for a\r
-tiny, square window was finally seen to open on the third story, and at\r
-this aperture appeared the reverend and terrified face of a gray-haired\r
-old man, who was the porter, and who held a candle.\r
-\r
-The man who was knocking paused.\r
-\r
-"Gentlemen," said the porter, "what do you want?"\r
-\r
-"Open!" said Cabuc.\r
-\r
-"That cannot be, gentlemen."\r
-\r
-"Open, nevertheless."\r
-\r
-"Impossible, gentlemen."\r
-\r
-Le Cabuc took his gun and aimed at the porter; but as he was below, and\r
-as it was very dark, the porter did not see him.\r
-\r
-"Will you open, yes or no?"\r
-\r
-"No, gentlemen."\r
-\r
-"Do you say no?"\r
-\r
-"I say no, my goo--"\r
-\r
-The porter did not finish. The shot was fired; the ball entered under\r
-his chin and came out at the nape of his neck, after traversing the\r
-jugular vein.\r
-\r
-The old man fell back without a sigh. The candle fell and was\r
-extinguished, and nothing more was to be seen except a motionless head\r
-lying on the sill of the small window, and a little whitish smoke which\r
-floated off towards the roof.\r
-\r
-"There!" said Le Cabuc, dropping the butt end of his gun to the\r
-pavement.\r
-\r
-He had hardly uttered this word, when he felt a hand laid on his\r
-shoulder with the weight of an eagle's talon, and he heard a voice\r
-saying to him:--\r
-\r
-"On your knees."\r
-\r
-The murderer turned round and saw before him Enjolras' cold, white face.\r
-\r
-Enjolras held a pistol in his hand.\r
-\r
-He had hastened up at the sound of the discharge.\r
-\r
-He had seized Cabuc's collar, blouse, shirt, and suspender with his left\r
-hand.\r
-\r
-"On your knees!" he repeated.\r
-\r
-And, with an imperious motion, the frail young man of twenty years bent\r
-the thickset and sturdy porter like a reed, and brought him to his knees\r
-in the mire.\r
-\r
-Le Cabuc attempted to resist, but he seemed to have been seized by a\r
-superhuman hand.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, pale, with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman's\r
-face, had about him at that moment something of the antique Themis.\r
-His dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek\r
-profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity which,\r
-as the ancient world viewed the matter, befit Justice.\r
-\r
-The whole barricade hastened up, then all ranged themselves in a circle\r
-at a distance, feeling that it was impossible to utter a word in the\r
-presence of the thing which they were about to behold.\r
-\r
-Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer tried to struggle, and trembled in every\r
-limb.\r
-\r
-Enjolras released him and drew out his watch.\r
-\r
-"Collect yourself," said he. "Think or pray. You have one minute."\r
-\r
-"Mercy!" murmured the murderer; then he dropped his head and stammered a\r
-few inarticulate oaths.\r
-\r
-Enjolras never took his eyes off of him: he allowed a minute to pass,\r
-then he replaced his watch in his fob. That done, he grasped Le Cabuc\r
-by the hair, as the latter coiled himself into a ball at his knees and\r
-shrieked, and placed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those\r
-intrepid men, who had so tranquilly entered upon the most terrible of\r
-adventures, turned aside their heads.\r
-\r
-An explosion was heard, the assassin fell to the pavement face\r
-downwards.\r
-\r
-Enjolras straightened himself up, and cast a convinced and severe glance\r
-around him. Then he spurned the corpse with his foot and said:--\r
-\r
-"Throw that outside."\r
-\r
-Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still\r
-agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled,\r
-and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondetour.\r
-\r
-Enjolras was thoughtful. It is impossible to say what grandiose shadows\r
-slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity. All at once he raised his\r
-voice.\r
-\r
-A silence fell upon them.\r
-\r
-"Citizens," said Enjolras, "what that man did is frightful, what I have\r
-done is horrible. He killed, therefore I killed him. I had to do it,\r
-because insurrection must have its discipline. Assassination is even\r
-more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eyes of the\r
-Revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are the victims of\r
-duty, and must not be possible to slander our combat. I have, therefore,\r
-tried that man, and condemned him to death. As for myself, constrained\r
-as I am to do what I have done, and yet abhorring it, I have judged\r
-myself also, and you shall soon see to what I have condemned myself."\r
-\r
-Those who listened to him shuddered.\r
-\r
-"We will share thy fate," cried Combeferre.\r
-\r
-"So be it," replied Enjolras. "One word more. In executing this man,\r
-I have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world,\r
-necessity's name is Fatality. Now, the law of progress is, that monsters\r
-shall disappear before the angels, and that Fatality shall vanish before\r
-Fraternity. It is a bad moment to pronounce the word love. No matter, I\r
-do pronounce it. And I glorify it. Love, the future is thine. Death, I\r
-make use of thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, in the future there will\r
-be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor\r
-bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no\r
-more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth\r
-will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come,\r
-citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it\r
-will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to\r
-die."\r
-\r
-Enjolras ceased. His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time\r
-standing on the spot where he had shed blood, in marble immobility. His\r
-staring eye caused those about him to speak in low tones.\r
-\r
-Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other's hands silently, and,\r
-leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade, they watched\r
-with an admiration in which there was some compassion, that grave young\r
-man, executioner and priest, composed of light, like crystal, and also\r
-of rock.\r
-\r
-Let us say at once that later on, after the action, when the bodies were\r
-taken to the morgue and searched, a police agent's card was found on Le\r
-Cabuc. The author of this book had in his hands, in 1848, the special\r
-report on this subject made to the Prefect of Police in 1832.\r
-\r
-We will add, that if we are to believe a tradition of the police, which\r
-is strange but probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact\r
-is, that dating from the death of Le Cabuc, there was no longer any\r
-question of Claquesous. Claquesous had nowhere left any trace of his\r
-disappearance; he would seem to have amalgamated himself with the\r
-invisible. His life had been all shadows, his end was night.\r
-\r
-The whole insurgent group was still under the influence of the emotion\r
-of that tragic case which had been so quickly tried and so quickly\r
-terminated, when Courfeyrac again beheld on the barricade, the small\r
-young man who had inquired of him that morning for Marius.\r
-\r
-This lad, who had a bold and reckless air, had come by night to join the\r
-insurgents.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS\r
-\r
-The voice which had summoned Marius through the twilight to the\r
-barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had produced on him the effect\r
-of the voice of destiny. He wished to die; the opportunity presented\r
-itself; he knocked at the door of the tomb, a hand in the darkness\r
-offered him the key. These melancholy openings which take place in the\r
-gloom before despair, are tempting. Marius thrust aside the bar which\r
-had so often allowed him to pass, emerged from the garden, and said: "I\r
-will go."\r
-\r
-Mad with grief, no longer conscious of anything fixed or solid in his\r
-brain, incapable of accepting anything thenceforth of fate after those\r
-two months passed in the intoxication of youth and love, overwhelmed at\r
-once by all the reveries of despair, he had but one desire remaining, to\r
-make a speedy end of all.\r
-\r
-He set out at rapid pace. He found himself most opportunely armed, as he\r
-had Javert's pistols with him.\r
-\r
-The young man of whom he thought that he had caught a glimpse, had\r
-vanished from his sight in the street.\r
-\r
-Marius, who had emerged from the Rue Plumet by the boulevard, traversed\r
-the Esplanade and the bridge of the Invalides, the Champs Elysees, the\r
-Place Louis XV., and reached the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open\r
-there, the gas was burning under the arcades, women were making their\r
-purchases in the stalls, people were eating ices in the Cafe Laiter,\r
-and nibbling small cakes at the English pastry-cook's shop. Only a few\r
-posting-chaises were setting out at a gallop from the Hotel des Princes\r
-and the Hotel Meurice.\r
-\r
-Marius entered the Rue Saint-Honore through the Passage Delorme. There\r
-the shops were closed, the merchants were chatting in front of their\r
-half-open doors, people were walking about, the street lanterns were\r
-lighted, beginning with the first floor, all the windows were lighted as\r
-usual. There was cavalry on the Place du Palais-Royal.\r
-\r
-Marius followed the Rue Saint-Honore. In proportion as he left the\r
-Palais-Royal behind him, there were fewer lighted windows, the shops\r
-were fast shut, no one was chatting on the thresholds, the street grew\r
-sombre, and, at the same time, the crowd increased in density. For the\r
-passers-by now amounted to a crowd. No one could be seen to speak in\r
-this throng, and yet there arose from it a dull, deep murmur.\r
-\r
-Near the fountain of the Arbre-Sec, there were "assemblages", motionless\r
-and gloomy groups which were to those who went and came as stones in the\r
-midst of running water.\r
-\r
-At the entrance to the Rue des Prouvaires, the crowd no longer walked.\r
-It formed a resisting, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable\r
-block of people who were huddled together, and conversing in low tones.\r
-There were hardly any black coats or round hats now, but smock frocks,\r
-blouses, caps, and bristling and cadaverous heads. This multitude\r
-undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom. Its whisperings had the\r
-hoarse accent of a vibration. Although not one of them was walking, a\r
-dull trampling was audible in the mire. Beyond this dense portion of\r
-the throng, in the Rue du Roule, in the Rue des Prouvaires, and in the\r
-extension of the Rue Saint-Honore, there was no longer a single window\r
-in which a candle was burning. Only the solitary and diminishing rows\r
-of lanterns could be seen vanishing into the street in the distance. The\r
-lanterns of that date resembled large red stars, hanging to ropes, and\r
-shed upon the pavement a shadow which had the form of a huge spider.\r
-These streets were not deserted. There could be descried piles of guns,\r
-moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking. No curious observer passed that\r
-limit. There circulation ceased. There the rabble ended and the army\r
-began.\r
-\r
-Marius willed with the will of a man who hopes no more. He had been\r
-summoned, he must go. He found a means to traverse the throng and to\r
-pass the bivouac of the troops, he shunned the patrols, he avoided the\r
-sentinels. He made a circuit, reached the Rue de Bethisy, and directed\r
-his course towards the Halles. At the corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais,\r
-there were no longer any lanterns.\r
-\r
-After having passed the zone of the crowd, he had passed the limits of\r
-the troops; he found himself in something startling. There was no longer\r
-a passer-by, no longer a soldier, no longer a light, there was no one;\r
-solitude, silence, night, I know not what chill which seized hold upon\r
-one. Entering a street was like entering a cellar.\r
-\r
-He continued to advance.\r
-\r
-He took a few steps. Some one passed close to him at a run. Was it a\r
-man? Or a woman? Were there many of them? he could not have told. It had\r
-passed and vanished.\r
-\r
-Proceeding from circuit to circuit, he reached a lane which he judged\r
-to be the Rue de la Poterie; near the middle of this street, he came in\r
-contact with an obstacle. He extended his hands. It was an overturned\r
-wagon; his foot recognized pools of water, gullies, and paving-stones\r
-scattered and piled up. A barricade had been begun there and abandoned.\r
-He climbed over the stones and found himself on the other side of the\r
-barrier. He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along\r
-the walls of the houses. A little beyond the barricade, it seemed to him\r
-that he could make out something white in front of him. He approached,\r
-it took on a form. It was two white horses; the horses of the omnibus\r
-harnessed by Bossuet in the morning, who had been straying at random all\r
-day from street to street, and had finally halted there, with the weary\r
-patience of brutes who no more understand the actions of men, than man\r
-understands the actions of Providence.\r
-\r
-Marius left the horses behind him. As he was approaching a street which\r
-seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social, a shot coming no one\r
-knows whence, and traversing the darkness at random, whistled close by\r
-him, and the bullet pierced a brass shaving-dish suspended above his\r
-head over a hairdresser's shop. This pierced shaving-dish was still\r
-to be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the\r
-pillars of the market.\r
-\r
-This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered\r
-nothing more.\r
-\r
-The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS\r
-\r
-A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of\r
-the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.\r
-\r
-All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a\r
-city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a\r
-thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their\r
-redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark and\r
-enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance\r
-fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the closed\r
-windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased.\r
-The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch everywhere,\r
-and maintained order, that is to say, night. The necessary tactics of\r
-insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply\r
-every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains. At\r
-dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. The light\r
-was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was\r
-stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses;\r
-and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not even the long rows of\r
-windows and stores, the indentations of the chimneys, and the roofs,\r
-and the vague reflections which are cast back by the wet and muddy\r
-pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows\r
-might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and there, at intervals,\r
-of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and eccentric lines, and\r
-profiles of singular buildings, something like the lights which go and\r
-come in ruins; it was at such points that the barricades were situated.\r
-The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal, above\r
-which, in motionless and melancholy outlines, rose the tower of\r
-Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more of those\r
-grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night makes phantoms.\r
-\r
-All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters\r
-where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a\r
-few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have\r
-distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble\r
-of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were\r
-swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was slowly\r
-drawing in and around the insurrection.\r
-\r
-The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous\r
-cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we\r
-have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing but\r
-darkness.\r
-\r
-A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,\r
-into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible to\r
-remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they awaited,\r
-where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. Invisible\r
-combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street; snares of the\r
-sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was over. No more\r
-light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the lightning of guns,\r
-no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid apparition of death.\r
-Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain and inevitable. In\r
-this place which had been marked out for the struggle, the Government\r
-and the insurrection, the National Guard, and popular societies, the\r
-bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into\r
-contact. The necessity was the same for both. The only possible issue\r
-thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors. A situation so\r
-extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt themselves\r
-seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.\r
-\r
-Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were\r
-equal. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of\r
-retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of\r
-flight.\r
-\r
-It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that\r
-triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection should\r
-prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The Government understood this\r
-as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it. Hence\r
-a thought of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable gloom of this\r
-quarter where all was at the point of being decided; hence a redoubled\r
-anxiety around that silence whence a catastrophe was on the point of\r
-emerging. Here only one sound was audible, a sound as heart-rending\r
-as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction, the tocsin of\r
-Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than the clamor of\r
-that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows.\r
-\r
-As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what\r
-men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect.\r
-The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their\r
-melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an\r
-immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.\r
-\r
-While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in the\r
-same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary events,\r
-while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name of\r
-principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were\r
-approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and\r
-throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and\r
-decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal\r
-quarter, in the most profound depths of the unfathomable cavities of\r
-that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendor of happy\r
-and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving\r
-utterance to a dull roar.\r
-\r
-A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute\r
-and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns the\r
-wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from\r
-on high like the voice of the thunder.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE EXTREME EDGE\r
-\r
-Marius had reached the Halles.\r
-\r
-There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless than\r
-in the neighboring streets. One would have said that the glacial peace\r
-of the sepulchre had sprung forth from the earth and had spread over the\r
-heavens.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, a red glow brought out against this black background the\r
-lofty roofs of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie on\r
-the Saint-Eustache side. It was the reflection of the torch which was\r
-burning in the Corinthe barricade. Marius directed his steps towards\r
-that red light. It had drawn him to the Marche-aux-Poirees, and he\r
-caught a glimpse of the dark mouth of the Rue des Precheurs. He entered\r
-it. The insurgents' sentinel, who was guarding the other end, did not\r
-see him. He felt that he was very close to that which he had come in\r
-search of, and he walked on tiptoe. In this manner he reached the elbow\r
-of that short section of the Rue Mondetour which was, as the reader will\r
-remember, the only communication which Enjolras had preserved with the\r
-outside world. At the corner of the last house, on his left, he thrust\r
-his head forward, and looked into the fragment of the Rue Mondetour.\r
-\r
-A little beyond the angle of the lane and the Rue de la Chanvrerie which\r
-cast a broad curtain of shadow, in which he was himself engulfed,\r
-he perceived some light on the pavement, a bit of the wine-shop, and\r
-beyond, a flickering lamp within a sort of shapeless wall, and men\r
-crouching down with guns on their knees. All this was ten fathoms\r
-distant from him. It was the interior of the barricade.\r
-\r
-The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest of\r
-the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.\r
-\r
-Marius had but a step more to take.\r
-\r
-Then the unhappy young man seated himself on a post, folded his arms,\r
-and fell to thinking about his father.\r
-\r
-He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy, who had been so proud a\r
-soldier, who had guarded the frontier of France under the Republic, and\r
-had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa,\r
-Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who\r
-had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops of that\r
-same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown gray\r
-before his time in discipline and command, who had lived with his\r
-sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade\r
-blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet, in barracks,\r
-in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who, at the expiration of\r
-twenty years, had returned from the great wars with a scarred cheek, a\r
-smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done\r
-everything for France and nothing against her.\r
-\r
-He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour had\r
-struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself\r
-brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast\r
-to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that\r
-he was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of battle,\r
-and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was the\r
-street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil war!\r
-\r
-He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he\r
-was about to fall. Then he shuddered.\r
-\r
-He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold to a\r
-second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. He said to\r
-himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done well to escape from\r
-him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom; that if it had thus fled, it\r
-was because it was intelligent and because it had foreseen the future;\r
-that it had had a presentiment of this rebellion, the war of the\r
-gutters, the war of the pavements, fusillades through cellar-windows,\r
-blows given and received in the rear; it was because, coming from\r
-Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish to go to the Rue de la\r
-Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it had done with the father, it\r
-did not wish to do this for the son! He told himself that if that sword\r
-were there, if after taking possession of it at his father's pillow,\r
-he had dared to take it and carry it off for this combat of darkness\r
-between Frenchmen in the streets, it would assuredly have scorched his\r
-hands and burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword of the angel!\r
-He told himself that it was fortunate that it was not there and that\r
-it had disappeared, that that was well, that that was just, that his\r
-grandfather had been the true guardian of his father's glory, and that\r
-it was far better that the colonel's sword should be sold at auction,\r
-sold to the old-clothes man, thrown among the old junk, than that it\r
-should, to-day, wound the side of his country.\r
-\r
-And then he fell to weeping bitterly.\r
-\r
-This was horrible. But what was he to do? Live without Cosette he could\r
-not. Since she was gone, he must needs die. Had he not given her his\r
-word of honor that he would die? She had gone knowing that; this meant\r
-that it pleased her that Marius should die. And then, it was clear that\r
-she no longer loved him, since she had departed thus without warning,\r
-without a word, without a letter, although she knew his address! What\r
-was the good of living, and why should he live now? And then, what!\r
-should he retreat after going so far? should he flee from danger after\r
-having approached it? should he slip away after having come and peeped\r
-into the barricade? slip away, all in a tremble, saying: "After all, I\r
-have had enough of it as it is. I have seen it, that suffices, this is\r
-civil war, and I shall take my leave!" Should he abandon his friends who\r
-were expecting him? Who were in need of him possibly! who were a mere\r
-handful against an army! Should he be untrue at once to his love, to\r
-country, to his word? Should he give to his cowardice the pretext of\r
-patriotism? But this was impossible, and if the phantom of his father\r
-was there in the gloom, and beheld him retreating, he would beat him on\r
-the loins with the flat of his sword, and shout to him: "March on, you\r
-poltroon!"\r
-\r
-Thus a prey to the conflicting movements of his thoughts, he dropped his\r
-head.\r
-\r
-All at once he raised it. A sort of splendid rectification had just been\r
-effected in his mind. There is a widening of the sphere of thought which\r
-is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave; it makes one see clearly to\r
-be near death. The vision of the action into which he felt that he\r
-was, perhaps, on the point of entering, appeared to him no more\r
-as lamentable, but as superb. The war of the street was suddenly\r
-transfigured by some unfathomable inward working of his soul, before the\r
-eye of his thought. All the tumultuous interrogation points of revery\r
-recurred to him in throngs, but without troubling him. He left none of\r
-them unanswered.\r
-\r
-Let us see, why should his father be indignant? Are there not cases\r
-where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? What was there that was\r
-degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the combat which was about\r
-to begin? It is no longer Montmirail nor Champaubert; it is something\r
-quite different. The question is no longer one of sacred territory,--but\r
-of a holy idea. The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds.\r
-But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty\r
-smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her\r
-wound. And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of\r
-view, why do we speak of civil war?\r
-\r
-Civil war--what does that mean? Is there a foreign war? Is not all war\r
-between men, war between brothers? War is qualified only by its object.\r
-There is no such thing as foreign or civil war; there is only just and\r
-unjust war. Until that day when the grand human agreement is concluded,\r
-war, that at least which is the effort of the future, which is hastening\r
-on against the past, which is lagging in the rear, may be necessary.\r
-What have we to reproach that war with? War does not become a disgrace,\r
-the sword does not become a disgrace, except when it is used for\r
-assassinating the right, progress, reason, civilization, truth. Then\r
-war, whether foreign or civil, is iniquitous; it is called crime.\r
-Outside the pale of that holy thing, justice, by what right does\r
-one form of man despise another? By what right should the sword of\r
-Washington disown the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Leonidas against the\r
-stranger, Timoleon against the tyrant, which is the greater? the one is\r
-the defender, the other the liberator. Shall we brand every appeal\r
-to arms within a city's limits without taking the object into a\r
-consideration? Then note the infamy of Brutus, Marcel, Arnould von\r
-Blankenheim, Coligny, Hedgerow war? War of the streets? Why not? That\r
-was the war of Ambiorix, of Artevelde, of Marnix, of Pelagius. But\r
-Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artevelde against France, Marnix against\r
-Spain, Pelagius against the Moors; all against the foreigner. Well, the\r
-monarchy is a foreigner; oppression is a stranger; the right divine is\r
-a stranger. Despotism violates the moral frontier, an invasion violates\r
-the geographical frontier. Driving out the tyrant or driving out the\r
-English, in both cases, regaining possession of one's own territory.\r
-There comes an hour when protestation no longer suffices; after\r
-philosophy, action is required; live force finishes what the idea\r
-has sketched out; Prometheus chained begins, Arostogeiton ends; the\r
-encyclopedia enlightens souls, the 10th of August electrifies them.\r
-After AEschylus, Thrasybulus; after Diderot, Danton. Multitudes have\r
-a tendency to accept the master. Their mass bears witness to apathy.\r
-A crowd is easily led as a whole to obedience. Men must be stirred up,\r
-pushed on, treated roughly by the very benefit of their deliverance,\r
-their eyes must be wounded by the true, light must be hurled at them\r
-in terrible handfuls. They must be a little thunderstruck themselves at\r
-their own well-being; this dazzling awakens them. Hence the necessity\r
-of tocsins and wars. Great combatants must rise, must enlighten nations\r
-with audacity, and shake up that sad humanity which is covered\r
-with gloom by the right divine, Caesarian glory, force, fanaticism,\r
-irresponsible power, and absolute majesty; a rabble stupidly occupied in\r
-the contemplation, in their twilight splendor, of these sombre triumphs\r
-of the night. Down with the tyrant! Of whom are you speaking? Do you\r
-call Louis Philippe the tyrant? No; no more than Louis XVI. Both of them\r
-are what history is in the habit of calling good kings; but principles\r
-are not to be parcelled out, the logic of the true is rectilinear, the\r
-peculiarity of truth is that it lacks complaisance; no concessions,\r
-then; all encroachments on man should be repressed. There is a divine\r
-right in Louis XVI., there is because a Bourbon in Louis Philippe; both\r
-represent in a certain measure the confiscation of right, and, in order\r
-to clear away universal insurrection, they must be combated; it must\r
-be done, France being always the one to begin. When the master falls\r
-in France, he falls everywhere. In short, what cause is more just, and\r
-consequently, what war is greater, than that which re-establishes\r
-social truth, restores her throne to liberty, restores the people to the\r
-people, restores sovereignty to man, replaces the purple on the head of\r
-France, restores equity and reason in their plenitude, suppresses every\r
-germ of antagonism by restoring each one to himself, annihilates the\r
-obstacle which royalty presents to the whole immense universal concord,\r
-and places the human race once more on a level with the right? These\r
-wars build up peace. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges,\r
-superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and\r
-darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred.\r
-It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To\r
-conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.\r
-\r
-There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case--the soul,--and\r
-therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity, has\r
-a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most violent\r
-extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and profound\r
-despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues, treat subjects\r
-and discuss theses. Logic is mingled with convulsion, and the thread\r
-of the syllogism floats, without breaking, in the mournful storm of\r
-thought. This was the situation of Marius' mind.\r
-\r
-As he meditated thus, dejected but resolute, hesitating in every\r
-direction, and, in short, shuddering at what he was about to do, his\r
-glance strayed to the interior of the barricade. The insurgents\r
-were here conversing in a low voice, without moving, and there\r
-was perceptible that quasi-silence which marks the last stage of\r
-expectation. Overhead, at the small window in the third story Marius\r
-descried a sort of spectator who appeared to him to be singularly\r
-attentive. This was the porter who had been killed by Le Cabuc. Below,\r
-by the lights of the torch, which was thrust between the paving-stones,\r
-this head could be vaguely distinguished. Nothing could be stranger, in\r
-that sombre and uncertain gleam, than that livid, motionless, astonished\r
-face, with its bristling hair, its eyes fixed and staring, and its\r
-yawning mouth, bent over the street in an attitude of curiosity. One\r
-would have said that the man who was dead was surveying those who were\r
-about to die. A long trail of blood which had flowed from that head,\r
-descended in reddish threads from the window to the height of the first\r
-floor, where it stopped.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Grandeurs of Despair 4b-14-1-despair]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE FLAG: ACT FIRST\r
-\r
-As yet, nothing had come. Ten o'clock had sounded from Saint-Merry.\r
-Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and seated themselves, carbines in\r
-hand, near the outlet of the grand barricade. They no longer addressed\r
-each other, they listened, seeking to catch even the faintest and most\r
-distant sound of marching.\r
-\r
-Suddenly, in the midst of the dismal calm, a clear, gay, young voice,\r
-which seemed to come from the Rue Saint-Denis, rose and began to sing\r
-distinctly, to the old popular air of "By the Light of the Moon," this\r
-bit of poetry, terminated by a cry like the crow of a cock:--\r
-\r
- Mon nez est en larmes,\r
- Mon ami Bugeaud,\r
- Prete moi tes gendarmes\r
- Pour leur dire un mot.\r
-\r
- En capote bleue,\r
- La poule au shako,\r
- Voici la banlieue!\r
- Co-cocorico![54]\r
-\r
-\r
-They pressed each other's hands.\r
-\r
-"That is Gavroche," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"He is warning us," said Combeferre.\r
-\r
-A hasty rush troubled the deserted street; they beheld a being more\r
-agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the\r
-barricade, all breathless, saying:--\r
-\r
-"My gun! Here they are!"\r
-\r
-An electric quiver shot through the whole barricade, and the sound of\r
-hands seeking their guns became audible.\r
-\r
-"Would you like my carbine?" said Enjolras to the lad.\r
-\r
-"I want a big gun," replied Gavroche.\r
-\r
-And he seized Javert's gun.\r
-\r
-Two sentinels had fallen back, and had come in almost at the same moment\r
-as Gavroche. They were the sentinels from the end of the street, and the\r
-vidette of the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The vidette of the Lane des\r
-Precheurs had remained at his post, which indicated that nothing was\r
-approaching from the direction of the bridges and Halles.\r
-\r
-The Rue de la Chanvrerie, of which a few paving-stones alone were dimly\r
-visible in the reflection of the light projected on the flag, offered\r
-to the insurgents the aspect of a vast black door vaguely opened into a\r
-smoke.\r
-\r
-Each man had taken up his position for the conflict.\r
-\r
-Forty-three insurgents, among whom were Enjolras, Combeferre,\r
-Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were kneeling inside\r
-the large barricade, with their heads on a level with the crest of the\r
-barrier, the barrels of their guns and carbines aimed on the stones as\r
-though at loop-holes, attentive, mute, ready to fire. Six, commanded\r
-by Feuilly, had installed themselves, with their guns levelled at their\r
-shoulders, at the windows of the two stories of Corinthe.\r
-\r
-Several minutes passed thus, then a sound of footsteps, measured, heavy,\r
-and numerous, became distinctly audible in the direction of Saint-Leu.\r
-This sound, faint at first, then precise, then heavy and sonorous,\r
-approached slowly, without halt, without intermission, with a tranquil\r
-and terrible continuity. Nothing was to be heard but this. It was that\r
-combined silence and sound, of the statue of the commander, but this\r
-stony step had something indescribably enormous and multiple about it\r
-which awakened the idea of a throng, and, at the same time, the idea\r
-of a spectre. One thought one heard the terrible statue Legion marching\r
-onward. This tread drew near; it drew still nearer, and stopped. It\r
-seemed as though the breathing of many men could be heard at the end of\r
-the street. Nothing was to be seen, however, but at the bottom of that\r
-dense obscurity there could be distinguished a multitude of metallic\r
-threads, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about\r
-like those indescribable phosphoric networks which one sees beneath\r
-one's closed eyelids, in the first mists of slumber at the moment\r
-when one is dropping off to sleep. These were bayonets and gun-barrels\r
-confusedly illuminated by the distant reflection of the torch.\r
-\r
-A pause ensued, as though both sides were waiting. All at once, from the\r
-depths of this darkness, a voice, which was all the more sinister, since\r
-no one was visible, and which appeared to be the gloom itself speaking,\r
-shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Who goes there?"\r
-\r
-At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position,\r
-was heard.\r
-\r
-Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone:--\r
-\r
-"The French Revolution!"\r
-\r
-"Fire!" shouted the voice.\r
-\r
-A flash empurpled all the facades in the street as though the door of a\r
-furnace had been flung open, and hastily closed again.\r
-\r
-A fearful detonation burst forth on the barricade. The red flag fell.\r
-The discharge had been so violent and so dense that it had cut the\r
-staff, that is to say, the very tip of the omnibus pole.\r
-\r
-Bullets which had rebounded from the cornices of the houses penetrated\r
-the barricade and wounded several men.\r
-\r
-The impression produced by this first discharge was freezing. The attack\r
-had been rough, and of a nature to inspire reflection in the boldest.\r
-It was evident that they had to deal with an entire regiment at the very\r
-least.\r
-\r
-"Comrades!" shouted Courfeyrac, "let us not waste our powder. Let us\r
-wait until they are in the street before replying."\r
-\r
-"And, above all," said Enjolras, "let us raise the flag again."\r
-\r
-He picked up the flag, which had fallen precisely at his feet.\r
-\r
-Outside, the clatter of the ramrods in the guns could be heard; the\r
-troops were re-loading their arms.\r
-\r
-Enjolras went on:--\r
-\r
-"Who is there here with a bold heart? Who will plant the flag on the\r
-barricade again?"\r
-\r
-Not a man responded. To mount on the barricade at the very moment when,\r
-without any doubt, it was again the object of their aim, was simply\r
-death. The bravest hesitated to pronounce his own condemnation. Enjolras\r
-himself felt a thrill. He repeated:--\r
-\r
-"Does no one volunteer?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE FLAG: ACT SECOND\r
-\r
-Since they had arrived at Corinthe, and had begun the construction of\r
-the barricade, no attention had been paid to Father Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf\r
-had not quitted the mob, however; he had entered the ground-floor of the\r
-wine-shop and had seated himself behind the counter. There he had, so to\r
-speak, retreated into himself. He no longer seemed to look or to think.\r
-Courfeyrac and others had accosted him two or three times, warning him\r
-of his peril, beseeching him to withdraw, but he did not hear them.\r
-When they were not speaking to him, his mouth moved as though he were\r
-replying to some one, and as soon as he was addressed, his lips became\r
-motionless and his eyes no longer had the appearance of being alive.\r
-\r
-Several hours before the barricade was attacked, he had assumed an\r
-attitude which he did not afterwards abandon, with both fists planted\r
-on his knees and his head thrust forward as though he were gazing over a\r
-precipice. Nothing had been able to move him from this attitude; it did\r
-not seem as though his mind were in the barricade. When each had gone\r
-to take up his position for the combat, there remained in the tap-room\r
-where Javert was bound to the post, only a single insurgent with a naked\r
-sword, watching over Javert, and himself, Mabeuf. At the moment of the\r
-attack, at the detonation, the physical shock had reached him and had,\r
-as it were, awakened him; he started up abruptly, crossed the room,\r
-and at the instant when Enjolras repeated his appeal: "Does no one\r
-volunteer?" the old man was seen to make his appearance on the threshold\r
-of the wine-shop. His presence produced a sort of commotion in the\r
-different groups. A shout went up:--\r
-\r
-"It is the voter! It is the member of the Convention! It is the\r
-representative of the people!"\r
-\r
-It is probable that he did not hear them.\r
-\r
-He strode straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents withdrawing before him\r
-with a religious fear; he tore the flag from Enjolras, who recoiled in\r
-amazement and then, since no one dared to stop or to assist him, this\r
-old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot, began slowly to\r
-ascend the staircase of paving-stones arranged in the barricade. This\r
-was so melancholy and so grand that all around him cried: "Off with your\r
-hats!" At every step that he mounted, it was a frightful spectacle; his\r
-white locks, his decrepit face, his lofty, bald, and wrinkled brow,\r
-his amazed and open mouth, his aged arm upholding the red banner, rose\r
-through the gloom and were enlarged in the bloody light of the torch,\r
-and the bystanders thought that they beheld the spectre of '93 emerging\r
-from the earth, with the flag of terror in his hand.\r
-\r
-When he had reached the last step, when this trembling and terrible\r
-phantom, erect on that pile of rubbish in the presence of twelve hundred\r
-invisible guns, drew himself up in the face of death and as though\r
-he were more powerful than it, the whole barricade assumed amid the\r
-darkness, a supernatural and colossal form.\r
-\r
-There ensued one of those silences which occur only in the presence of\r
-prodigies. In the midst of this silence, the old man waved the red flag\r
-and shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Long live the Revolution! Long live the Republic! Fraternity! Equality!\r
-and Death!"\r
-\r
-Those in the barricade heard a low and rapid whisper, like the murmur\r
-of a priest who is despatching a prayer in haste. It was probably the\r
-commissary of police who was making the legal summons at the other end\r
-of the street.\r
-\r
-Then the same piercing voice which had shouted: "Who goes there?"\r
-shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Retire!"\r
-\r
-M. Mabeuf, pale, haggard, his eyes lighted up with the mournful flame of\r
-aberration, raised the flag above his head and repeated:--\r
-\r
-"Long live the Republic!"\r
-\r
-"Fire!" said the voice.\r
-\r
-A second discharge, similar to the first, rained down upon the\r
-barricade.\r
-\r
-The old man fell on his knees, then rose again, dropped the flag\r
-and fell backwards on the pavement, like a log, at full length, with\r
-outstretched arms.\r
-\r
-Rivulets of blood flowed beneath him. His aged head, pale and sad,\r
-seemed to be gazing at the sky.\r
-\r
-One of those emotions which are superior to man, which make him forget\r
-even to defend himself, seized upon the insurgents, and they approached\r
-the body with respectful awe.\r
-\r
-"What men these regicides were!" said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras' ear:--\r
-\r
-"This is for yourself alone, I do not wish to dampen the enthusiasm. But\r
-this man was anything rather than a regicide. I knew him. His name was\r
-Father Mabeuf. I do not know what was the matter with him to-day. But he\r
-was a brave blockhead. Just look at his head."\r
-\r
-"The head of a blockhead and the heart of a Brutus," replied Enjolras.\r
-\r
-Then he raised his voice:--\r
-\r
-"Citizens! This is the example which the old give to the young. We\r
-hesitated, he came! We were drawing back, he advanced! This is what\r
-those who are trembling with age teach to those who tremble with fear!\r
-This aged man is august in the eyes of his country. He has had a long\r
-life and a magnificent death! Now, let us place the body under cover,\r
-that each one of us may defend this old man dead as he would his\r
-father living, and may his presence in our midst render the barricade\r
-impregnable!"\r
-\r
-A murmur of gloomy and energetic assent followed these words.\r
-\r
-Enjolras bent down, raised the old man's head, and fierce as he was, he\r
-kissed him on the brow, then, throwing wide his arms, and handling this\r
-dead man with tender precaution, as though he feared to hurt it, he\r
-removed his coat, showed the bloody holes in it to all, and said:--\r
-\r
-"This is our flag now."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE\r
-\r
-They threw a long black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's over Father Mabeuf.\r
-Six men made a litter of their guns; on this they laid the body, and\r
-bore it, with bared heads, with solemn slowness, to the large table in\r
-the tap-room.\r
-\r
-These men, wholly absorbed in the grave and sacred task in which they\r
-were engaged, thought no more of the perilous situation in which they\r
-stood.\r
-\r
-When the corpse passed near Javert, who was still impassive, Enjolras\r
-said to the spy:--\r
-\r
-"It will be your turn presently!"\r
-\r
-During all this time, Little Gavroche, who alone had not quitted his\r
-post, but had remained on guard, thought he espied some men stealthily\r
-approaching the barricade. All at once he shouted:--\r
-\r
-"Look out!"\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel,\r
-Bossuet, and all the rest ran tumultuously from the wine-shop. It was\r
-almost too late. They saw a glistening density of bayonets undulating\r
-above the barricade. Municipal guards of lofty stature were making\r
-their way in, some striding over the omnibus, others through the cut,\r
-thrusting before them the urchin, who retreated, but did not flee.\r
-\r
-The moment was critical. It was that first, redoubtable moment of\r
-inundation, when the stream rises to the level of the levee and when the\r
-water begins to filter through the fissures of dike. A second more and\r
-the barricade would have been taken.\r
-\r
-Bahorel dashed upon the first municipal guard who was entering, and\r
-killed him on the spot with a blow from his gun; the second killed\r
-Bahorel with a blow from his bayonet. Another had already overthrown\r
-Courfeyrac, who was shouting: "Follow me!" The largest of all, a sort of\r
-colossus, marched on Gavroche with his bayonet fixed. The urchin took in\r
-his arms Javert's immense gun, levelled it resolutely at the giant, and\r
-fired. No discharge followed. Javert's gun was not loaded. The municipal\r
-guard burst into a laugh and raised his bayonet at the child.\r
-\r
-Before the bayonet had touched Gavroche, the gun slipped from the\r
-soldier's grasp, a bullet had struck the municipal guardsman in the\r
-centre of the forehead, and he fell over on his back. A second bullet\r
-struck the other guard, who had assaulted Courfeyrac in the breast, and\r
-laid him low on the pavement.\r
-\r
-This was the work of Marius, who had just entered the barricade.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE BARREL OF POWDER\r
-\r
-Marius, still concealed in the turn of the Rue Mondetour, had witnessed,\r
-shuddering and irresolute, the first phase of the combat. But he had not\r
-long been able to resist that mysterious and sovereign vertigo which may\r
-be designated as the call of the abyss. In the presence of the imminence\r
-of the peril, in the presence of the death of M. Mabeuf, that melancholy\r
-enigma, in the presence of Bahorel killed, and Courfeyrac shouting:\r
-"Follow me!" of that child threatened, of his friends to succor or to\r
-avenge, all hesitation had vanished, and he had flung himself into the\r
-conflict, his two pistols in hand. With his first shot he had saved\r
-Gavroche, and with the second delivered Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-Amid the sound of the shots, amid the cries of the assaulted guards,\r
-the assailants had climbed the entrenchment, on whose summit Municipal\r
-Guards, soldiers of the line and National Guards from the suburbs could\r
-now be seen, gun in hand, rearing themselves to more than half the\r
-height of their bodies.\r
-\r
-They already covered more than two-thirds of the barrier, but they did\r
-not leap into the enclosure, as though wavering in the fear of some\r
-trap. They gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion's\r
-den. The light of the torch illuminated only their bayonets, their\r
-bear-skin caps, and the upper part of their uneasy and angry faces.\r
-\r
-Marius had no longer any weapons; he had flung away his discharged\r
-pistols after firing them; but he had caught sight of the barrel of\r
-powder in the tap-room, near the door.\r
-\r
-As he turned half round, gazing in that direction, a soldier took aim at\r
-him. At the moment when the soldier was sighting Marius, a hand was laid\r
-on the muzzle of the gun and obstructed it. This was done by some one\r
-who had darted forward,--the young workman in velvet trousers. The shot\r
-sped, traversed the hand and possibly, also, the workman, since he fell,\r
-but the ball did not strike Marius. All this, which was rather to be\r
-apprehended than seen through the smoke, Marius, who was entering the\r
-tap-room, hardly noticed. Still, he had, in a confused way, perceived\r
-that gun-barrel aimed at him, and the hand which had blocked it, and he\r
-had heard the discharge. But in moments like this, the things which one\r
-sees vacillate and are precipitated, and one pauses for nothing. One\r
-feels obscurely impelled towards more darkness still, and all is cloud.\r
-\r
-The insurgents, surprised but not terrified, had rallied. Enjolras had\r
-shouted: "Wait! Don't fire at random!" In the first confusion, they\r
-might, in fact, wound each other. The majority of them had ascended\r
-to the window on the first story and to the attic windows, whence they\r
-commanded the assailants.\r
-\r
-The most determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and\r
-Combeferre, had proudly placed themselves with their backs against the\r
-houses at the rear, unsheltered and facing the ranks of soldiers and\r
-guards who crowned the barricade.\r
-\r
-All this was accomplished without haste, with that strange and\r
-threatening gravity which precedes engagements. They took aim, point\r
-blank, on both sides: they were so close that they could talk together\r
-without raising their voices.\r
-\r
-When they had reached this point where the spark is on the brink of\r
-darting forth, an officer in a gorget extended his sword and said:--\r
-\r
-"Lay down your arms!"\r
-\r
-"Fire!" replied Enjolras.\r
-\r
-The two discharges took place at the same moment, and all disappeared in\r
-smoke.\r
-\r
-An acrid and stifling smoke in which dying and wounded lay with weak,\r
-dull groans. When the smoke cleared away, the combatants on both sides\r
-could be seen to be thinned out, but still in the same positions,\r
-reloading in silence. All at once, a thundering voice was heard,\r
-shouting:--\r
-\r
-"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"\r
-\r
-All turned in the direction whence the voice proceeded.\r
-\r
-Marius had entered the tap-room, and had seized the barrel of powder,\r
-then he had taken advantage of the smoke, and the sort of obscure mist\r
-which filled the entrenched enclosure, to glide along the barricade as\r
-far as that cage of paving-stones where the torch was fixed. To tear\r
-it from the torch, to replace it by the barrel of powder, to thrust the\r
-pile of stones under the barrel, which was instantly staved in, with\r
-a sort of horrible obedience,--all this had cost Marius but the time\r
-necessary to stoop and rise again; and now all, National Guards,\r
-Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, huddled at the other extremity of\r
-the barricade, gazed stupidly at him, as he stood with his foot on the\r
-stones, his torch in his hand, his haughty face illuminated by a fatal\r
-resolution, drooping the flame of the torch towards that redoubtable\r
-pile where they could make out the broken barrel of powder, and giving\r
-vent to that startling cry:--\r
-\r
-"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"\r
-\r
-Marius on that barricade after the octogenarian was the vision of the\r
-young revolution after the apparition of the old.\r
-\r
-"Blow up the barricade!" said a sergeant, "and yourself with it!"\r
-\r
-Marius retorted: "And myself also."\r
-\r
-And he dropped the torch towards the barrel of powder.\r
-\r
-But there was no longer any one on the barrier. The assailants,\r
-abandoning their dead and wounded, flowed back pell-mell and in disorder\r
-towards the extremity of the street, and there were again lost in the\r
-night. It was a headlong flight.\r
-\r
-The barricade was free.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--END OF THE VERSES OF JEAN PROUVAIRE\r
-\r
-All flocked around Marius. Courfeyrac flung himself on his neck.\r
-\r
-"Here you are!"\r
-\r
-"What luck!" said Combeferre.\r
-\r
-"You came in opportunely!" ejaculated Bossuet.\r
-\r
-"If it had not been for you, I should have been dead!" began Courfeyrac\r
-again.\r
-\r
-"If it had not been for you, I should have been gobbled up!" added\r
-Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Marius asked:--\r
-\r
-"Where is the chief?"\r
-\r
-"You are he!" said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-Marius had had a furnace in his brain all day long; now it was a\r
-whirlwind. This whirlwind which was within him, produced on him the\r
-effect of being outside of him and of bearing him away. It seemed to him\r
-that he was already at an immense distance from life. His two luminous\r
-months of joy and love, ending abruptly at that frightful precipice,\r
-Cosette lost to him, that barricade, M. Mabeuf getting himself killed\r
-for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents,--all these\r
-things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. He was obliged to\r
-make a mental effort to recall the fact that all that surrounded him was\r
-real. Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing\r
-is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always\r
-necessary to foresee is the unforeseen. He had looked on at his own\r
-drama as a piece which one does not understand.\r
-\r
-In the mists which enveloped his thoughts, he did not recognize Javert,\r
-who, bound to his post, had not so much as moved his head during the\r
-whole of the attack on the barricade, and who had gazed on the revolt\r
-seething around him with the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of\r
-a judge. Marius had not even seen him.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, the assailants did not stir, they could be heard\r
-marching and swarming through at the end of the street but they did not\r
-venture into it, either because they were awaiting orders or because\r
-they were awaiting reinforcements before hurling themselves afresh on\r
-this impregnable redoubt. The insurgents had posted sentinels, and some\r
-of them, who were medical students, set about caring for the wounded.\r
-\r
-They had thrown the tables out of the wine-shop, with the exception of\r
-the two tables reserved for lint and cartridges, and of the one on\r
-which lay Father Mabeuf; they had added them to the barricade, and had\r
-replaced them in the tap-room with mattresses from the bed of the\r
-widow Hucheloup and her servants. On these mattresses they had laid the\r
-wounded. As for the three poor creatures who inhabited Corinthe, no one\r
-knew what had become of them. They were finally found, however, hidden\r
-in the cellar.\r
-\r
-A poignant emotion clouded the joy of the disencumbered barricade.\r
-\r
-The roll was called. One of the insurgents was missing. And who was\r
-it? One of the dearest. One of the most valiant. Jean Prouvaire. He\r
-was sought among the wounded, he was not there. He was sought among the\r
-dead, he was not there. He was evidently a prisoner. Combeferre said to\r
-Enjolras:--\r
-\r
-"They have our friend; we have their agent. Are you set on the death of\r
-that spy?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied Enjolras; "but less so than on the life of Jean\r
-Prouvaire."\r
-\r
-This took place in the tap-room near Javert's post.\r
-\r
-"Well," resumed Combeferre, "I am going to fasten my handkerchief to\r
-my cane, and go as a flag of truce, to offer to exchange our man for\r
-theirs."\r
-\r
-"Listen," said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre's arm.\r
-\r
-At the end of the street there was a significant clash of arms.\r
-\r
-They heard a manly voice shout:--\r
-\r
-"Vive la France! Long live France! Long live the future!"\r
-\r
-They recognized the voice of Prouvaire.\r
-\r
-A flash passed, a report rang out.\r
-\r
-Silence fell again.\r
-\r
-"They have killed him," exclaimed Combeferre.\r
-\r
-Enjolras glanced at Javert, and said to him:--\r
-\r
-"Your friends have just shot you."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE\r
-\r
-A peculiarity of this species of war is, that the attack of the\r
-barricades is almost always made from the front, and that the assailants\r
-generally abstain from turning the position, either because they\r
-fear ambushes, or because they are afraid of getting entangled in the\r
-tortuous streets. The insurgents' whole attention had been directed,\r
-therefore, to the grand barricade, which was, evidently, the spot always\r
-menaced, and there the struggle would infallibly recommence. But Marius\r
-thought of the little barricade, and went thither. It was deserted and\r
-guarded only by the fire-pot which trembled between the paving-stones.\r
-Moreover, the Mondetour alley, and the branches of the Rue de la Petite\r
-Truanderie and the Rue du Cygne were profoundly calm.\r
-\r
-As Marius was withdrawing, after concluding his inspection, he heard his\r
-name pronounced feebly in the darkness.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Marius!"\r
-\r
-He started, for he recognized the voice which had called to him two\r
-hours before through the gate in the Rue Plumet.\r
-\r
-Only, the voice now seemed to be nothing more than a breath.\r
-\r
-He looked about him, but saw no one.\r
-\r
-Marius thought he had been mistaken, that it was an illusion added by\r
-his mind to the extraordinary realities which were clashing around\r
-him. He advanced a step, in order to quit the distant recess where the\r
-barricade lay.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Marius!" repeated the voice.\r
-\r
-This time he could not doubt that he had heard it distinctly; he looked\r
-and saw nothing.\r
-\r
-"At your feet," said the voice.\r
-\r
-He bent down, and saw in the darkness a form which was dragging itself\r
-towards him.\r
-\r
-It was crawling along the pavement. It was this that had spoken to him.\r
-\r
-The fire-pot allowed him to distinguish a blouse, torn trousers of\r
-coarse velvet, bare feet, and something which resembled a pool of blood.\r
-Marius indistinctly made out a pale head which was lifted towards him\r
-and which was saying to him:--\r
-\r
-"You do not recognize me?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Eponine."\r
-\r
-Marius bent hastily down. It was, in fact, that unhappy child. She was\r
-dressed in men's clothes.\r
-\r
-"How come you here? What are you doing here?"\r
-\r
-"I am dying," said she.\r
-\r
-There are words and incidents which arouse dejected beings. Marius cried\r
-out with a start:--\r
-\r
-"You are wounded! Wait, I will carry you into the room! They will attend\r
-to you there. Is it serious? How must I take hold of you in order not\r
-to hurt you? Where do you suffer? Help! My God! But why did you come\r
-hither?"\r
-\r
-And he tried to pass his arm under her, in order to raise her.\r
-\r
-She uttered a feeble cry.\r
-\r
-"Have I hurt you?" asked Marius.\r
-\r
-"A little."\r
-\r
-"But I only touched your hand."\r
-\r
-She raised her hand to Marius, and in the middle of that hand Marius saw\r
-a black hole.\r
-\r
-"What is the matter with your hand?" said he.\r
-\r
-"It is pierced."\r
-\r
-"Pierced?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"What with?"\r
-\r
-"A bullet."\r
-\r
-"How?"\r
-\r
-"Did you see a gun aimed at you?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, and a hand stopping it."\r
-\r
-"It was mine."\r
-\r
-Marius was seized with a shudder.\r
-\r
-"What madness! Poor child! But so much the better, if that is all, it is\r
-nothing, let me carry you to a bed. They will dress your wound; one does\r
-not die of a pierced hand."\r
-\r
-She murmured:--\r
-\r
-"The bullet traversed my hand, but it came out through my back. It is\r
-useless to remove me from this spot. I will tell you how you can care\r
-for me better than any surgeon. Sit down near me on this stone."\r
-\r
-He obeyed; she laid her head on Marius' knees, and, without looking at\r
-him, she said:--\r
-\r
-"Oh! How good this is! How comfortable this is! There; I no longer\r
-suffer."\r
-\r
-She remained silent for a moment, then she turned her face with an\r
-effort, and looked at Marius.\r
-\r
-"Do you know what, Monsieur Marius? It puzzled me because you entered\r
-that garden; it was stupid, because it was I who showed you that house;\r
-and then, I ought to have said to myself that a young man like you--"\r
-\r
-She paused, and overstepping the sombre transitions that undoubtedly\r
-existed in her mind, she resumed with a heartrending smile:--\r
-\r
-"You thought me ugly, didn't you?"\r
-\r
-She continued:--\r
-\r
-"You see, you are lost! Now, no one can get out of the barricade. It was\r
-I who led you here, by the way! You are going to die, I count upon that.\r
-And yet, when I saw them taking aim at you, I put my hand on the muzzle\r
-of the gun. How queer it is! But it was because I wanted to die before\r
-you. When I received that bullet, I dragged myself here, no one saw\r
-me, no one picked me up, I was waiting for you, I said: 'So he is not\r
-coming!' Oh, if you only knew. I bit my blouse, I suffered so! Now I am\r
-well. Do you remember the day I entered your chamber and when I\r
-looked at myself in your mirror, and the day when I came to you on the\r
-boulevard near the washerwomen? How the birds sang! That was a long time\r
-ago. You gave me a hundred sous, and I said to you: 'I don't want your\r
-money.' I hope you picked up your coin? You are not rich. I did not\r
-think to tell you to pick it up. The sun was shining bright, and it was\r
-not cold. Do you remember, Monsieur Marius? Oh! How happy I am! Every\r
-one is going to die."\r
-\r
-She had a mad, grave, and heart-breaking air. Her torn blouse disclosed\r
-her bare throat.\r
-\r
-As she talked, she pressed her pierced hand to her breast, where there\r
-was another hole, and whence there spurted from moment to moment a\r
-stream of blood, like a jet of wine from an open bung-hole.\r
-\r
-Marius gazed at this unfortunate creature with profound compassion.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" she resumed, "it is coming again, I am stifling!"\r
-\r
-She caught up her blouse and bit it, and her limbs stiffened on the\r
-pavement.\r
-\r
-At that moment the young cock's crow executed by little Gavroche\r
-resounded through the barricade.\r
-\r
-The child had mounted a table to load his gun, and was singing gayly the\r
-song then so popular:--\r
-\r
-\r
- "En voyant Lafayette, "On beholding Lafayette,\r
- Le gendarme repete:-- The gendarme repeats:--\r
- Sauvons nous! sauvons nous! Let us flee! let us flee!\r
- sauvons nous!" let us flee!\r
-\r
-\r
-Eponine raised herself and listened; then she murmured:--\r
-\r
-"It is he."\r
-\r
-And turning to Marius:--\r
-\r
-"My brother is here. He must not see me. He would scold me."\r
-\r
-"Your brother?" inquired Marius, who was meditating in the most bitter\r
-and sorrowful depths of his heart on the duties to the Thenardiers which\r
-his father had bequeathed to him; "who is your brother?"\r
-\r
-"That little fellow."\r
-\r
-"The one who is singing?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-Marius made a movement.\r
-\r
-"Oh! don't go away," said she, "it will not be long now."\r
-\r
-She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low and broken by\r
-hiccoughs.\r
-\r
-At intervals, the death rattle interrupted her. She put her face as near\r
-that of Marius as possible. She added with a strange expression:--\r
-\r
-"Listen, I do not wish to play you a trick. I have a letter in my pocket\r
-for you. I was told to put it in the post. I kept it. I did not want to\r
-have it reach you. But perhaps you will be angry with me for it when we\r
-meet again presently? Take your letter."\r
-\r
-She grasped Marius' hand convulsively with her pierced hand, but she no\r
-longer seemed to feel her sufferings. She put Marius' hand in the pocket\r
-of her blouse. There, in fact, Marius felt a paper.\r
-\r
-"Take it," said she.\r
-\r
-Marius took the letter.\r
-\r
-She made a sign of satisfaction and contentment.\r
-\r
-"Now, for my trouble, promise me--"\r
-\r
-And she stopped.\r
-\r
-"What?" asked Marius.\r
-\r
-"Promise me!"\r
-\r
-"I promise."\r
-\r
-"Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it."\r
-\r
-She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He\r
-thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All\r
-at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she\r
-slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death,\r
-and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from\r
-another world:--\r
-\r
-"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in\r
-love with you."\r
-\r
-She tried to smile once more and expired.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES\r
-\r
-Marius kept his promise. He dropped a kiss on that livid brow, where the\r
-icy perspiration stood in beads.\r
-\r
-This was no infidelity to Cosette; it was a gentle and pensive farewell\r
-to an unhappy soul.\r
-\r
-It was not without a tremor that he had taken the letter which Eponine\r
-had given him. He had immediately felt that it was an event of weight.\r
-He was impatient to read it. The heart of man is so constituted that the\r
-unhappy child had hardly closed her eyes when Marius began to think of\r
-unfolding this paper.\r
-\r
-He laid her gently on the ground, and went away. Something told him that\r
-he could not peruse that letter in the presence of that body.\r
-\r
-He drew near to a candle in the tap-room. It was a small note, folded\r
-and sealed with a woman's elegant care. The address was in a woman's\r
-hand and ran:--\r
-\r
-"To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac's, Rue de la\r
-Verrerie, No. 16."\r
-\r
-He broke the seal and read:--\r
-\r
- "My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately.\r
- We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7.\r
- In a week we shall be in England. COSETTE. June 4th."\r
-\r
-Such was the innocence of their love that Marius was not even acquainted\r
-with Cosette's handwriting.\r
-\r
-What had taken place may be related in a few words. Eponine had been\r
-the cause of everything. After the evening of the 3d of June she had\r
-cherished a double idea, to defeat the projects of her father and the\r
-ruffians on the house of the Rue Plumet, and to separate Marius and\r
-Cosette. She had exchanged rags with the first young scamp she came\r
-across who had thought it amusing to dress like a woman, while Eponine\r
-disguised herself like a man. It was she who had conveyed to Jean\r
-Valjean in the Champ de Mars the expressive warning: "Leave your house."\r
-Jean Valjean had, in fact, returned home, and had said to Cosette:\r
-"We set out this evening and we go to the Rue de l'Homme Arme with\r
-Toussaint. Next week, we shall be in London." Cosette, utterly\r
-overwhelmed by this unexpected blow, had hastily penned a couple of\r
-lines to Marius. But how was she to get the letter to the post? She\r
-never went out alone, and Toussaint, surprised at such a commission,\r
-would certainly show the letter to M. Fauchelevent. In this dilemma,\r
-Cosette had caught sight through the fence of Eponine in man's clothes,\r
-who now prowled incessantly around the garden. Cosette had called to\r
-"this young workman" and had handed him five francs and the letter,\r
-saying: "Carry this letter immediately to its address." Eponine had put\r
-the letter in her pocket. The next day, on the 5th of June, she went\r
-to Courfeyrac's quarters to inquire for Marius, not for the purpose of\r
-delivering the letter, but,--a thing which every jealous and loving soul\r
-will comprehend,--"to see." There she had waited for Marius, or at least\r
-for Courfeyrac, still for the purpose of seeing. When Courfeyrac had\r
-told her: "We are going to the barricades," an idea flashed through her\r
-mind, to fling herself into that death, as she would have done into any\r
-other, and to thrust Marius into it also. She had followed Courfeyrac,\r
-had made sure of the locality where the barricade was in process of\r
-construction; and, quite certain, since Marius had received no warning,\r
-and since she had intercepted the letter, that he would go at dusk to\r
-his trysting place for every evening, she had betaken herself to the Rue\r
-Plumet, had there awaited Marius, and had sent him, in the name of his\r
-friends, the appeal which would, she thought, lead him to the barricade.\r
-She reckoned on Marius' despair when he should fail to find Cosette; she\r
-was not mistaken. She had returned to the Rue de la Chanvrerie herself.\r
-What she did there the reader has just seen. She died with the tragic\r
-joy of jealous hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death,\r
-and who say: "No one shall have him!"\r
-\r
-Marius covered Cosette's letter with kisses. So she loved him! For one\r
-moment the idea occurred to him that he ought not to die now. Then\r
-he said to himself: "She is going away. Her father is taking her to\r
-England, and my grandfather refuses his consent to the marriage. Nothing\r
-is changed in our fates." Dreamers like Marius are subject to supreme\r
-attacks of dejection, and desperate resolves are the result. The fatigue\r
-of living is insupportable; death is sooner over with. Then he reflected\r
-that he had still two duties to fulfil: to inform Cosette of his\r
-death and send her a final farewell, and to save from the impending\r
-catastrophe which was in preparation, that poor child, Eponine's brother\r
-and Thenardier's son.\r
-\r
-He had a pocket-book about him; the same one which had contained\r
-the note-book in which he had inscribed so many thoughts of love for\r
-Cosette. He tore out a leaf and wrote on it a few lines in pencil:--\r
-\r
-"Our marriage was impossible. I asked my grandfather, he refused; I have\r
-no fortune, neither hast thou. I hastened to thee, thou wert no longer\r
-there. Thou knowest the promise that I gave thee, I shall keep it. I\r
-die. I love thee. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee, and\r
-thou wilt smile."\r
-\r
-Having nothing wherewith to seal this letter, he contented himself with\r
-folding the paper in four, and added the address:--\r
-\r
-"To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de\r
-l'Homme Arme, No. 7."\r
-\r
-Having folded the letter, he stood in thought for a moment, drew out\r
-his pocket-book again, opened it, and wrote, with the same pencil, these\r
-four lines on the first page:--\r
-\r
-"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.\r
-Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."\r
-\r
-He put his pocketbook back in his pocket, then he called Gavroche.\r
-\r
-The gamin, at the sound of Marius' voice, ran up to him with his merry\r
-and devoted air.\r
-\r
-"Will you do something for me?"\r
-\r
-"Anything," said Gavroche. "Good God! if it had not been for you, I\r
-should have been done for."\r
-\r
-"Do you see this letter?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Take it. Leave the barricade instantly" (Gavroche began to scratch his\r
-ear uneasily) "and to-morrow morning, you will deliver it at its address\r
-to Mademoiselle Cosette, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de l'Homme Arme, No.\r
-7."\r
-\r
-The heroic child replied\r
-\r
-"Well, but! in the meanwhile the barricade will be taken, and I shall\r
-not be there."\r
-\r
-"The barricade will not be attacked until daybreak, according to all\r
-appearances, and will not be taken before to-morrow noon."\r
-\r
-The fresh respite which the assailants were granting to the barricade\r
-had, in fact, been prolonged. It was one of those intermissions which\r
-frequently occur in nocturnal combats, which are always followed by an\r
-increase of rage.\r
-\r
-"Well," said Gavroche, "what if I were to go and carry your letter\r
-to-morrow?"\r
-\r
-"It will be too late. The barricade will probably be blockaded, all\r
-the streets will be guarded, and you will not be able to get out. Go at\r
-once."\r
-\r
-Gavroche could think of no reply to this, and stood there in indecision,\r
-scratching his ear sadly.\r
-\r
-All at once, he took the letter with one of those birdlike movements\r
-which were common with him.\r
-\r
-"All right," said he.\r
-\r
-And he started off at a run through Mondetour lane.\r
-\r
-An idea had occurred to Gavroche which had brought him to a decision,\r
-but he had not mentioned it for fear that Marius might offer some\r
-objection to it.\r
-\r
-This was the idea:--\r
-\r
-"It is barely midnight, the Rue de l'Homme Arme is not far off; I will\r
-go and deliver the letter at once, and I shall get back in time."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--A DRINKER IS A BABBLER\r
-\r
-What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections\r
-of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people. Jean Valjean\r
-at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of\r
-gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling, like Paris,\r
-on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. A few hours\r
-had sufficed to bring this about. His destiny and his conscience had\r
-suddenly been covered with gloom. Of him also, as well as of Paris, it\r
-might have been said: "Two principles are face to face. The white angel\r
-and the black angel are about to seize each other on the bridge of the\r
-abyss. Which of the two will hurl the other over? Who will carry the\r
-day?"\r
-\r
-On the evening preceding this same 5th of June, Jean Valjean,\r
-accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint had installed himself in the Rue de\r
-l'Homme Arme. A change awaited him there.\r
-\r
-Cosette had not quitted the Rue Plumet without making an effort at\r
-resistance. For the first time since they had lived side by side,\r
-Cosette's will and the will of Jean Valjean had proved to be distinct,\r
-and had been in opposition, at least, if they had not clashed. There had\r
-been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other. The abrupt\r
-advice: "Leave your house," hurled at Jean Valjean by a stranger, had\r
-alarmed him to the extent of rendering him peremptory. He thought that\r
-he had been traced and followed. Cosette had been obliged to give way.\r
-\r
-Both had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme without opening their lips,\r
-and without uttering a word, each being absorbed in his own personal\r
-preoccupation; Jean Valjean so uneasy that he did not notice Cosette's\r
-sadness, Cosette so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's\r
-uneasiness.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had taken Toussaint with him, a thing which he had never\r
-done in his previous absences. He perceived the possibility of not\r
-returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind\r
-nor confide his secret to her. Besides, he felt that she was devoted and\r
-trustworthy. Treachery between master and servant begins in curiosity.\r
-Now Toussaint, as though she had been destined to be Jean Valjean's\r
-servant, was not curious. She stammered in her peasant dialect of\r
-Barneville: "I am made so; I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine."\r
-\r
-In this departure from the Rue Plumet, which had been almost a flight,\r
-Jean Valjean had carried away nothing but the little embalmed valise,\r
-baptized by Cosette "the inseparable." Full trunks would have required\r
-porters, and porters are witnesses. A fiacre had been summoned to the\r
-door on the Rue de Babylone, and they had taken their departure.\r
-\r
-It was with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission to pack up\r
-a little linen and clothes and a few toilet articles. Cosette had taken\r
-only her portfolio and her blotting-book.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, with a view to augmenting the solitude and the mystery of\r
-this departure, had arranged to quit the pavilion of the Rue Plumet only\r
-at dusk, which had allowed Cosette time to write her note to Marius.\r
-They had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme after night had fully\r
-fallen.\r
-\r
-They had gone to bed in silence.\r
-\r
-The lodgings in the Rue de l'Homme Arme were situated on a back\r
-court, on the second floor, and were composed of two sleeping-rooms, a\r
-dining-room and a kitchen adjoining the dining-room, with a garret\r
-where there was a folding-bed, and which fell to Toussaint's share. The\r
-dining-room was an antechamber as well, and separated the two bedrooms.\r
-The apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.\r
-\r
-People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature\r
-is so constituted. Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l'Homme\r
-Arme when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated. There\r
-are soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on the mind.\r
-An obscure street, peaceable inhabitants. Jean Valjean experienced an\r
-indescribable contagion of tranquillity in that alley of ancient Paris,\r
-which is so narrow that it is barred against carriages by a transverse\r
-beam placed on two posts, which is deaf and dumb in the midst of the\r
-clamorous city, dimly lighted at mid-day, and is, so to speak, incapable\r
-of emotions between two rows of lofty houses centuries old, which hold\r
-their peace like ancients as they are. There was a touch of stagnant\r
-oblivion in that street. Jean Valjean drew his breath once more there.\r
-How could he be found there?\r
-\r
-His first care was to place the inseparable beside him.\r
-\r
-He slept well. Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes. On the\r
-following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay. He thought the\r
-dining-room charming, though it was hideous, furnished with an old round\r
-table, a long sideboard surmounted by a slanting mirror, a dilapidated\r
-arm-chair, and several plain chairs which were encumbered with\r
-Toussaint's packages. In one of these packages Jean Valjean's uniform of\r
-a National Guard was visible through a rent.\r
-\r
-As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint take some broth to her room, and\r
-did not make her appearance until evening.\r
-\r
-About five o'clock, Toussaint, who was going and coming and busying\r
-herself with the tiny establishment, set on the table a cold chicken,\r
-which Cosette, out of deference to her father, consented to glance at.\r
-\r
-That done, Cosette, under the pretext of an obstinate sick headache,\r
-had bade Jean Valjean good night and had shut herself up in her chamber.\r
-Jean Valjean had eaten a wing of the chicken with a good appetite, and\r
-with his elbows on the table, having gradually recovered his serenity,\r
-had regained possession of his sense of security.\r
-\r
-While he was discussing this modest dinner, he had, twice or thrice,\r
-noticed in a confused way, Toussaint's stammering words as she said\r
-to him: "Monsieur, there is something going on, they are fighting in\r
-Paris." But absorbed in a throng of inward calculations, he had paid no\r
-heed to it. To tell the truth, he had not heard her. He rose and began\r
-to pace from the door to the window and from the window to the door,\r
-growing ever more serene.\r
-\r
-With this calm, Cosette, his sole anxiety, recurred to his thoughts. Not\r
-that he was troubled by this headache, a little nervous crisis, a young\r
-girl's fit of sulks, the cloud of a moment, there would be nothing left\r
-of it in a day or two; but he meditated on the future, and, as was his\r
-habit, he thought of it with pleasure. After all, he saw no obstacle to\r
-their happy life resuming its course. At certain hours, everything seems\r
-impossible, at others everything appears easy; Jean Valjean was in the\r
-midst of one of these good hours. They generally succeed the bad\r
-ones, as day follows night, by virtue of that law of succession and\r
-of contrast which lies at the very foundation of nature, and which\r
-superficial minds call antithesis. In this peaceful street where he had\r
-taken refuge, Jean Valjean got rid of all that had been troubling him\r
-for some time past. This very fact, that he had seen many shadows, made\r
-him begin to perceive a little azure. To have quitted the Rue\r
-Plumet without complications or incidents was one good step already\r
-accomplished. Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few\r
-months, and to set out for London. Well, they would go. What difference\r
-did it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he\r
-had Cosette beside him? Cosette was his nation. Cosette sufficed for\r
-his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for Cosette's\r
-happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his fever\r
-and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. He was in a\r
-state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he was fully entered\r
-on optimism. Cosette was by his side, she seemed to be his; an optical\r
-illusion which every one has experienced. He arranged in his own mind,\r
-with all sorts of felicitous devices, his departure for England with\r
-Cosette, and he beheld his felicity reconstituted wherever he pleased,\r
-in the perspective of his revery.\r
-\r
-As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly\r
-encountered something strange.\r
-\r
-In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard, he saw\r
-the four lines which follow:--\r
-\r
-"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We\r
-shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. In a week we\r
-shall be in England. COSETTE. June 4th."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.\r
-\r
-Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard in\r
-front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief, had\r
-forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she had left\r
-it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she had laid to\r
-dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she had given in\r
-charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet. The writing had been\r
-printed off on the blotter.\r
-\r
-The mirror reflected the writing.\r
-\r
-The result was, what is called in geometry, the symmetrical image; so\r
-that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the mirror and\r
-presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean had beneath his eyes\r
-the letter written by Cosette to Marius on the preceding evening.\r
-\r
-It was simple and withering.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean stepped up to the mirror. He read the four lines again, but\r
-he did not believe them. They produced on him the effect of appearing in\r
-a flash of lightning. It was a hallucination, it was impossible. It was\r
-not so.\r
-\r
-Little by little, his perceptions became more precise; he looked at\r
-Cosette's blotting-book, and the consciousness of the reality returned\r
-to him. He caught up the blotter and said: "It comes from there."\r
-He feverishly examined the four lines imprinted on the blotter, the\r
-reversal of the letters converted into an odd scrawl, and he saw no\r
-sense in it. Then he said to himself: "But this signifies nothing; there\r
-is nothing written here." And he drew a long breath with inexpressible\r
-relief. Who has not experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants?\r
-The soul does not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all\r
-illusions.\r
-\r
-He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight,\r
-almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the\r
-dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again, and again he\r
-beheld the vision. There were the four lines outlined with inexorable\r
-clearness. This time it was no mirage. The recurrence of a vision is a\r
-reality; it was palpable, it was the writing restored in the mirror. He\r
-understood.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old\r
-arm-chair beside the buffet, with drooping head, and glassy eyes, in\r
-utter bewilderment. He told himself that it was plain, that the light of\r
-the world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette had written that\r
-to some one. Then he heard his soul, which had become terrible once\r
-more, give vent to a dull roar in the gloom. Try then the effect of\r
-taking from the lion the dog which he has in his cage!\r
-\r
-Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet received\r
-Cosette's letter; chance had treacherously carried it to Jean Valjean\r
-before delivering it to Marius. Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not\r
-been vanquished by trial. He had been subjected to fearful proofs; no\r
-violence of bad fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed\r
-with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him for her prey\r
-and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity when it had\r
-been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man,\r
-had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered\r
-everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a\r
-point that he might have been thought to be absent from himself like a\r
-martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have\r
-appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one who had beheld his\r
-spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at\r
-that moment. It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone\r
-in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him,\r
-this was the most terrible. Never had such pincers seized him hitherto.\r
-He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt\r
-the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say\r
-rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.\r
-\r
-Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as\r
-a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity\r
-the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he\r
-loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he\r
-loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to\r
-love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that\r
-sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the\r
-rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious,\r
-celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct,\r
-less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and invisible but real\r
-attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness\r
-for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and\r
-virgin.\r
-\r
-Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already\r
-indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of\r
-souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With the\r
-exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood,\r
-Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known anything of\r
-that which may be loved. The passions and loves which succeed each other\r
-had not produced in him those successive green growths, tender green or\r
-dark green, which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter\r
-and in men who pass fifty. In short, and we have insisted on it more\r
-than once, all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum\r
-total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to\r
-Cosette. A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the\r
-brother, and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom\r
-there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored\r
-her, and who held that child as his light, his home, his family, his\r
-country, his paradise.\r
-\r
-Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping\r
-from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding\r
-from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this\r
-crushing proof: "another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish\r
-of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her\r
-father, I no longer exist"; when he could no longer doubt, when he\r
-said to himself: "She is going away from me!" the grief which he felt\r
-surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done\r
-for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being nothing!\r
-Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him from\r
-head to foot. He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the immense\r
-reawakening of egotism, and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled.\r
-\r
-There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. A\r
-despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting\r
-aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are\r
-the very man himself. Grief, when it attains this shape, is a headlong\r
-flight of all the forces of the conscience. These are fatal crises. Few\r
-among us emerge from them still like ourselves and firm in duty. When\r
-the limit of endurance is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is\r
-disconcerted. Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself\r
-afresh; he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes,\r
-over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such\r
-a cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was\r
-crumbling away.\r
-\r
-He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of revery, with\r
-an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a\r
-man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.\r
-\r
-He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his\r
-having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding\r
-summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was\r
-still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at\r
-the bottom of it.\r
-\r
-The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had\r
-fallen without perceiving it. All the light of his life had departed,\r
-while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.\r
-\r
-His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances,\r
-certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part,\r
-and he said to himself: "It is he."\r
-\r
-The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses\r
-its aim. He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the\r
-name, but he found the man instantly. He distinctly perceived, in the\r
-background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the unknown\r
-prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love adventures, that\r
-idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come\r
-and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a father who loves\r
-them.\r
-\r
-After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at\r
-the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that\r
-quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so\r
-labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve\r
-all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his own\r
-breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.\r
-\r
-Great griefs contain something of dejection. They discourage one with\r
-existence. The man into whom they enter feels something within him\r
-withdraw from him. In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on\r
-they are sinister. Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood is\r
-hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like\r
-the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full\r
-thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats\r
-which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when all\r
-women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are before\r
-one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age, when\r
-the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when one\r
-begins to behold the stars of the tomb?\r
-\r
-While he was meditating, Toussaint entered. Jean Valjean rose and asked\r
-her:--\r
-\r
-"In what quarter is it? Do you know?"\r
-\r
-Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:--\r
-\r
-"What is it, sir?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean began again: "Did you not tell me that just now that there\r
-is fighting going on?"\r
-\r
-"Ah! yes, sir," replied Toussaint. "It is in the direction of\r
-Saint-Merry."\r
-\r
-There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously, from\r
-the most profound depths of our thought. It was, no doubt, under\r
-the impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he was hardly\r
-conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later, found himself in the\r
-street.\r
-\r
-Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house. He\r
-seemed to be listening.\r
-\r
-Night had come.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT\r
-\r
-How long did he remain thus? What was the ebb and flow of this tragic\r
-meditation? Did he straighten up? Did he remain bowed? Had he been\r
-bent to breaking? Could he still rise and regain his footing in his\r
-conscience upon something solid? He probably would not have been able to\r
-tell himself.\r
-\r
-The street was deserted. A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly\r
-returning home, hardly saw him. Each one for himself in times of peril.\r
-The lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern which was situated\r
-precisely opposite the door of No. 7, and then went away. Jean Valjean\r
-would not have appeared like a living man to any one who had examined\r
-him in that shadow. He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as\r
-a form of ice. There is congealment in despair. The alarm bells and\r
-a vague and stormy uproar were audible. In the midst of all these\r
-convulsions of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of Saint-Paul\r
-struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is man; the\r
-hour is God. The passage of the hour produced no effect on Jean Valjean;\r
-Jean Valjean did not stir. Still, at about that moment, a brusque report\r
-burst forth in the direction of the Halles, a second yet more violent\r
-followed; it was probably that attack on the barricade in the Rue de la\r
-Chanvrerie which we have just seen repulsed by Marius. At this double\r
-discharge, whose fury seemed augmented by the stupor of the night, Jean\r
-Valjean started; he rose, turning towards the quarter whence the noise\r
-proceeded; then he fell back upon the post again, folded his arms, and\r
-his head slowly sank on his bosom again.\r
-\r
-He resumed his gloomy dialogue with himself.\r
-\r
-All at once, he raised his eyes; some one was walking in the street, he\r
-heard steps near him. He looked, and by the light of the lanterns, in\r
-the direction of the street which ran into the Rue-aux-Archives, he\r
-perceived a young, livid, and beaming face.\r
-\r
-Gavroche had just arrived in the Rue l'Homme Arme.\r
-\r
-Gavroche was staring into the air, apparently in search of something. He\r
-saw Jean Valjean perfectly well but he took no notice of him.\r
-\r
-Gavroche after staring into the air, stared below; he raised himself on\r
-tiptoe, and felt of the doors and windows of the ground floor; they were\r
-all shut, bolted, and padlocked. After having authenticated the fronts\r
-of five or six barricaded houses in this manner, the urchin shrugged his\r
-shoulders, and took himself to task in these terms:--\r
-\r
-"Pardi!"\r
-\r
-Then he began to stare into the air again.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, who, an instant previously, in his then state of mind,\r
-would not have spoken to or even answered any one, felt irresistibly\r
-impelled to accost that child.\r
-\r
-"What is the matter with you, my little fellow?" he said.\r
-\r
-"The matter with me is that I am hungry," replied Gavroche frankly. And\r
-he added: "Little fellow yourself."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.\r
-\r
-But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species, and who skipped\r
-vivaciously from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. He\r
-had caught sight of the lantern.\r
-\r
-"See here," said he, "you still have your lanterns here. You are\r
-disobeying the regulations, my friend. This is disorderly. Smash that\r
-for me."\r
-\r
-And he flung the stone at the lantern, whose broken glass fell with\r
-such a clatter that the bourgeois in hiding behind their curtains in the\r
-opposite house cried: "There is 'Ninety-three' come again."\r
-\r
-The lantern oscillated violently, and went out. The street had suddenly\r
-become black.\r
-\r
-"That's right, old street," ejaculated Gavroche, "put on your\r
-night-cap."\r
-\r
-And turning to Jean Valjean:--\r
-\r
-"What do you call that gigantic monument that you have there at the end\r
-of the street? It's the Archives, isn't it? I must crumble up those big\r
-stupids of pillars a bit and make a nice barricade out of them."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean stepped up to Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"Poor creature," he said in a low tone, and speaking to himself, "he is\r
-hungry."\r
-\r
-And he laid the hundred-sou piece in his hand.\r
-\r
-Gavroche raised his face, astonished at the size of this sou; he stared\r
-at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the big sou dazzled him.\r
-He knew five-franc pieces by hearsay; their reputation was agreeable to\r
-him; he was delighted to see one close to. He said:--\r
-\r
-"Let us contemplate the tiger."\r
-\r
-He gazed at it for several minutes in ecstasy; then, turning to Jean\r
-Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically to him:--\r
-\r
-"Bourgeois, I prefer to smash lanterns. Take back your ferocious beast.\r
-You can't bribe me. That has got five claws; but it doesn't scratch me."\r
-\r
-"Have you a mother?" asked Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Gavroche replied:--\r
-\r
-"More than you have, perhaps."\r
-\r
-"Well," returned Jean Valjean, "keep the money for your mother!"\r
-\r
-Gavroche was touched. Moreover, he had just noticed that the man who was\r
-addressing him had no hat, and this inspired him with confidence.\r
-\r
-"Truly," said he, "so it wasn't to keep me from breaking the lanterns?"\r
-\r
-"Break whatever you please."\r
-\r
-"You're a fine man," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-And he put the five-franc piece into one of his pockets.\r
-\r
-His confidence having increased, he added:--\r
-\r
-"Do you belong in this street?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, why?"\r
-\r
-"Can you tell me where No. 7 is?"\r
-\r
-"What do you want with No. 7?"\r
-\r
-Here the child paused, he feared that he had said too much; he thrust\r
-his nails energetically into his hair and contented himself with\r
-replying:--\r
-\r
-"Ah! Here it is."\r
-\r
-An idea flashed through Jean Valjean's mind. Anguish does have these\r
-gleams. He said to the lad:--\r
-\r
-"Are you the person who is bringing a letter that I am expecting?"\r
-\r
-"You?" said Gavroche. "You are not a woman."\r
-\r
-"The letter is for Mademoiselle Cosette, is it not?"\r
-\r
-"Cosette," muttered Gavroche. "Yes, I believe that is the queer name."\r
-\r
-"Well," resumed Jean Valjean, "I am the person to whom you are to\r
-deliver the letter. Give it here."\r
-\r
-"In that case, you must know that I was sent from the barricade."\r
-\r
-"Of course," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Gavroche engulfed his hand in another of his pockets and drew out a\r
-paper folded in four.\r
-\r
-Then he made the military salute.\r
-\r
-"Respect for despatches," said he. "It comes from the Provisional\r
-Government."\r
-\r
-"Give it to me," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Gavroche held the paper elevated above his head.\r
-\r
-"Don't go and fancy it's a love letter. It is for a woman, but it's for\r
-the people. We men fight and we respect the fair sex. We are not as\r
-they are in fine society, where there are lions who send chickens[55] to\r
-camels."\r
-\r
-"Give it to me."\r
-\r
-"After all," continued Gavroche, "you have the air of an honest man."\r
-\r
-"Give it to me quick."\r
-\r
-"Catch hold of it."\r
-\r
-And he handed the paper to Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"And make haste, Monsieur What's-your-name, for Mamselle Cosette is\r
-waiting."\r
-\r
-Gavroche was satisfied with himself for having produced this remark.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean began again:--\r
-\r
-"Is it to Saint-Merry that the answer is to be sent?"\r
-\r
-"There you are making some of those bits of pastry vulgarly called\r
-brioches [blunders]. This letter comes from the barricade of the Rue de\r
-la Chanvrerie, and I'm going back there. Good evening, citizen."\r
-\r
-That said, Gavroche took himself off, or, to describe it more exactly,\r
-fluttered away in the direction whence he had come with a flight like\r
-that of an escaped bird. He plunged back into the gloom as though he\r
-made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile; the alley of\r
-l'Homme Arme became silent and solitary once more; in a twinkling, that\r
-strange child, who had about him something of the shadow and of the\r
-dream, had buried himself in the mists of the rows of black houses, and\r
-was lost there, like smoke in the dark; and one might have thought that\r
-he had dissipated and vanished, had there not taken place, a few minutes\r
-after his disappearance, a startling shiver of glass, and had not the\r
-magnificent crash of a lantern rattling down on the pavement once more\r
-abruptly awakened the indignant bourgeois. It was Gavroche upon his way\r
-through the Rue du Chaume.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE ASLEEP\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean went into the house with Marius' letter.\r
-\r
-He groped his way up the stairs, as pleased with the darkness as an owl\r
-who grips his prey, opened and shut his door softly, listened to see\r
-whether he could hear any noise,--made sure that, to all appearances,\r
-Cosette and Toussaint were asleep, and plunged three or four matches\r
-into the bottle of the Fumade lighter before he could evoke a spark, so\r
-greatly did his hand tremble. What he had just done smacked of theft. At\r
-last the candle was lighted; he leaned his elbows on the table, unfolded\r
-the paper, and read.\r
-\r
-In violent emotions, one does not read, one flings to the earth, so to\r
-speak, the paper which one holds, one clutches it like a victim, one\r
-crushes it, one digs into it the nails of one's wrath, or of one's joy;\r
-one hastens to the end, one leaps to the beginning; attention is at\r
-fever heat; it takes up in the gross, as it were, the essential points;\r
-it seizes on one point, and the rest disappears. In Marius' note to\r
-Cosette, Jean Valjean saw only these words:--\r
-\r
-"I die. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee."\r
-\r
-In the presence of these two lines, he was horribly dazzled; he remained\r
-for a moment, crushed, as it were, by the change of emotion which\r
-was taking place within him, he stared at Marius' note with a sort of\r
-intoxicated amazement, he had before his eyes that splendor, the death\r
-of a hated individual.\r
-\r
-He uttered a frightful cry of inward joy. So it was all over. The\r
-catastrophe had arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. The being who\r
-obstructed his destiny was disappearing. That man had taken himself off\r
-of his own accord, freely, willingly. This man was going to his death,\r
-and he, Jean Valjean, had had no hand in the matter, and it was through\r
-no fault of his. Perhaps, even, he is already dead. Here his fever\r
-entered into calculations. No, he is not dead yet. The letter had\r
-evidently been intended for Cosette to read on the following morning;\r
-after the two discharges that were heard between eleven o'clock and\r
-midnight, nothing more has taken place; the barricade will not be\r
-attacked seriously until daybreak; but that makes no difference, from\r
-the moment when "that man" is concerned in this war, he is lost; he is\r
-caught in the gearing. Jean Valjean felt himself delivered. So he was\r
-about to find himself alone with Cosette once more. The rivalry would\r
-cease; the future was beginning again. He had but to keep this note in\r
-his pocket. Cosette would never know what had become of that man. All\r
-that there requires to be done is to let things take their own course.\r
-This man cannot escape. If he is not already dead, it is certain that he\r
-is about to die. What good fortune!\r
-\r
-Having said all this to himself, he became gloomy.\r
-\r
-Then he went down stairs and woke up the porter.\r
-\r
-About an hour later, Jean Valjean went out in the complete costume of\r
-a National Guard, and with his arms. The porter had easily found in the\r
-neighborhood the wherewithal to complete his equipment. He had a loaded\r
-gun and a cartridge-box filled with cartridges.\r
-\r
-He strode off in the direction of the markets.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL\r
-\r
-In the meantime, Gavroche had had an adventure.\r
-\r
-Gavroche, after having conscientiously stoned the lantern in the Rue du\r
-Chaume, entered the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes, and not seeing "even a\r
-cat" there, he thought the opportunity a good one to strike up all the\r
-song of which he was capable. His march, far from being retarded by his\r
-singing, was accelerated by it. He began to sow along the sleeping or\r
-terrified houses these incendiary couplets:--\r
-\r
- "L'oiseau medit dans les charmilles,\r
- Et pretend qu'hier Atala\r
- Avec un Russe s'en alla.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Mon ami Pierrot, tu babilles,\r
- Parce que l'autre jour Mila\r
- Cogna sa vitre et m'appela,\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Les drolesses sont fort gentilles,\r
- Leur poison qui m'ensorcela\r
- Griserait Monsieur Orfila.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "J'aime l'amour et les bisbilles,\r
- J'aime Agnes, j'aime Pamela,\r
- Lisa en m'allumant se brula.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Jadis, quand je vis les mantilles\r
- De Suzette et de Zeila,\r
- Mon ame aleurs plis se mela,\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Amour, quand dans l'ombre ou tu brilles,\r
- Tu coiffes de roses Lola,\r
- Je me damnerais pour cela.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Jeanne a ton miroir tu t'habilles!\r
- Mon coeur un beau jour s'envola.\r
- Je crois que c'est Jeanne qui l'a.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Le soir, en sortant des quadrilles,\r
- Je montre aux etoiles Stella,\r
- Et je leur dis: 'Regardez-la.'\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la."[56]\r
-\r
-Gavroche, as he sang, was lavish of his pantomime. Gesture is the strong\r
-point of the refrain. His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks,\r
-produced grimaces more convulsing and more fantastic than the rents of a\r
-cloth torn in a high gale. Unfortunately, as he was alone, and as it was\r
-night, this was neither seen nor even visible. Such wastes of riches do\r
-occur.\r
-\r
-All at once, he stopped short.\r
-\r
-"Let us interrupt the romance," said he.\r
-\r
-His feline eye had just descried, in the recess of a carriage door,\r
-what is called in painting, an ensemble, that is to say, a person and\r
-a thing; the thing was a hand-cart, the person was a man from Auvergene\r
-who was sleeping therein.\r
-\r
-The shafts of the cart rested on the pavement, and the Auvergnat's head\r
-was supported against the front of the cart. His body was coiled up on\r
-this inclined plane and his feet touched the ground.\r
-\r
-Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world, recognized\r
-a drunken man. He was some corner errand-man who had drunk too much and\r
-was sleeping too much.\r
-\r
-"There now," thought Gavroche, "that's what the summer nights are good\r
-for. We'll take the cart for the Republic, and leave the Auvergnat for\r
-the Monarchy."\r
-\r
-His mind had just been illuminated by this flash of light:--\r
-\r
-"How bully that cart would look on our barricade!"\r
-\r
-The Auvergnat was snoring.\r
-\r
-Gavroche gently tugged at the cart from behind, and at the Auvergnat\r
-from the front, that is to say, by the feet, and at the expiration of\r
-another minute the imperturbable Auvergnat was reposing flat on the\r
-pavement.\r
-\r
-The cart was free.\r
-\r
-Gavroche, habituated to facing the unexpected in all quarters, had\r
-everything about him. He fumbled in one of his pockets, and pulled from\r
-it a scrap of paper and a bit of red pencil filched from some carpenter.\r
-\r
-He wrote:--\r
-\r
- "French Republic."\r
-\r
- "Received thy cart."\r
-\r
- And he signed it: "GAVROCHE."\r
-\r
-That done, he put the paper in the pocket of the still snoring\r
-Auvergnat's velvet vest, seized the cart shafts in both hands, and set\r
-off in the direction of the Halles, pushing the cart before him at a\r
-hard gallop with a glorious and triumphant uproar.\r
-\r
-This was perilous. There was a post at the Royal Printing Establishment.\r
-Gavroche did not think of this. This post was occupied by the National\r
-Guards of the suburbs. The squad began to wake up, and heads were raised\r
-from camp beds. Two street lanterns broken in succession, that ditty\r
-sung at the top of the lungs. This was a great deal for those cowardly\r
-streets, which desire to go to sleep at sunset, and which put the\r
-extinguisher on their candles at such an early hour. For the last hour,\r
-that boy had been creating an uproar in that peaceable arrondissement,\r
-the uproar of a fly in a bottle. The sergeant of the banlieue lent an\r
-ear. He waited. He was a prudent man.\r
-\r
-The mad rattle of the cart, filled to overflowing the possible measure\r
-of waiting, and decided the sergeant to make a reconnaisance.\r
-\r
-"There's a whole band of them there!" said he, "let us proceed gently."\r
-\r
-It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box and that\r
-it was stalking abroad through the quarter.\r
-\r
-And the sergeant ventured out of the post with cautious tread.\r
-\r
-All at once, Gavroche, pushing his cart in front of him, and at the very\r
-moment when he was about to turn into the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes,\r
-found himself face to face with a uniform, a shako, a plume, and a gun.\r
-\r
-For the second time, he stopped short.\r
-\r
-"Hullo," said he, "it's him. Good day, public order."\r
-\r
-Gavroche's amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.\r
-\r
-"Where are you going, you rascal?" shouted the sergeant.\r
-\r
-"Citizen," retorted Gavroche, "I haven't called you 'bourgeois' yet. Why\r
-do you insult me?"\r
-\r
-"Where are you going, you rogue?"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur," retorted Gavroche, "perhaps you were a man of wit yesterday,\r
-but you have degenerated this morning."\r
-\r
-"I ask you where are you going, you villain?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche replied:--\r
-\r
-"You speak prettily. Really, no one would suppose you as old as you are.\r
-You ought to sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That would\r
-yield you five hundred francs."\r
-\r
-"Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going, bandit?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche retorted again:--\r
-\r
-"What villainous words! You must wipe your mouth better the first time\r
-that they give you suck."\r
-\r
-The sergeant lowered his bayonet.\r
-\r
-"Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?"\r
-\r
-"General," said Gavroche "I'm on my way to look for a doctor for my wife\r
-who is in labor."\r
-\r
-"To arms!" shouted the sergeant.\r
-\r
-The master-stroke of strong men consists in saving themselves by the\r
-very means that have ruined them; Gavroche took in the whole situation\r
-at a glance. It was the cart which had told against him, it was the\r
-cart's place to protect him.\r
-\r
-At the moment when the sergeant was on the point of making his descent\r
-on Gavroche, the cart, converted into a projectile and launched with all\r
-the latter's might, rolled down upon him furiously, and the sergeant,\r
-struck full in the stomach, tumbled over backwards into the gutter while\r
-his gun went off in the air.\r
-\r
-The men of the post had rushed out pell-mell at the sergeant's shout;\r
-the shot brought on a general random discharge, after which they\r
-reloaded their weapons and began again.\r
-\r
-This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and\r
-killed several panes of glass.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, Gavroche, who had retraced his steps at full speed,\r
-halted five or six streets distant and seated himself, panting, on the\r
-stone post which forms the corner of the Enfants-Rouges.\r
-\r
-He listened.\r
-\r
-After panting for a few minutes, he turned in the direction where the\r
-fusillade was raging, lifted his left hand to a level with his nose and\r
-thrust it forward three times, as he slapped the back of his head with\r
-his right hand; an imperious gesture in which Parisian street-urchindom\r
-has condensed French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since it\r
-has already lasted half a century.\r
-\r
-This gayety was troubled by one bitter reflection.\r
-\r
-"Yes," said he, "I'm splitting with laughter, I'm twisting with\r
-delight, I abound in joy, but I'm losing my way, I shall have to take a\r
-roundabout way. If I only reach the barricade in season!"\r
-\r
-Thereupon he set out again on a run.\r
-\r
-And as he ran:--\r
-\r
-"Ah, by the way, where was I?" said he.\r
-\r
-And he resumed his ditty, as he plunged rapidly through the streets, and\r
-this is what died away in the gloom:--\r
-\r
- "Mais il reste encore des bastilles,\r
- Et je vais mettre le hola\r
- Dans l'orde public que voila.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Quelqu'un veut-il jouer aux quilles?\r
- Tout l'ancien monde s'ecroula\r
- Quand la grosse boule roula.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Vieux bon peuple, a coups de bequilles,\r
- Cassons ce Louvre ou s'etala\r
- La monarchie en falbala.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
- "Nous en avons force les grilles,\r
- Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour la,\r
- Tenait mal et se decolla.\r
- Ou vont les belles filles,\r
- Lon la."[57]\r
-\r
-The post's recourse to arms was not without result. The cart was\r
-conquered, the drunken man was taken prisoner. The first was put in the\r
-pound, the second was later on somewhat harassed before the councils\r
-of war as an accomplice. The public ministry of the day proved its\r
-indefatigable zeal in the defence of society, in this instance.\r
-\r
-Gavroche's adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters\r
-of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly\r
-bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: "The\r
-nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment."\r
-\r
-\r
-[THE END OF VOLUME IV. "SAINT DENIS"]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-VOLUME V--JEAN VALJEAN\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Five ]\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Five ]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF\r
-THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE\r
-\r
-The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies\r
-can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work\r
-is laid. These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two different\r
-aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at the time\r
-of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of the streets\r
-that history has ever beheld.\r
-\r
-It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to\r
-liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote,\r
-even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its\r
-anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of\r
-its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that\r
-great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the\r
-populace wages battle against, the people.\r
-\r
-Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.\r
-\r
-These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of night\r
-even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those words\r
-which are intended to be insults--beggars, canaille, ochlocracy,\r
-populace--exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the\r
-fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the\r
-fault of the disinherited.\r
-\r
-For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and\r
-without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they\r
-correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries. Athens\r
-was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the populace\r
-saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.\r
-\r
-There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences\r
-of the lower classes.\r
-\r
-It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of\r
-all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable\r
-people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this\r
-mysterious saying: "Fex urbis, lex orbis,"--the dregs of the city, the\r
-law of the earth.\r
-\r
-The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences\r
-contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its\r
-life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular coups\r
-d'etat and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself,\r
-and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But how\r
-excusable he feels it even while holding out against it! How he\r
-venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments\r
-when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something\r
-which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding\r
-further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though\r
-satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a\r
-pain at the heart.\r
-\r
-June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost\r
-impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the\r
-words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes\r
-a question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy\r
-anxiety of toil claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat it, and\r
-this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848,\r
-at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself.\r
-\r
-Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we,\r
-then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for a moment on the\r
-two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which\r
-characterized this insurrection.\r
-\r
-One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other\r
-defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these\r
-two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath the\r
-brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.\r
-\r
-The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,\r
-and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the faubourg,\r
-that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined, jagged,\r
-cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed with piles\r
-that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and there,\r
-powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the\r
-faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the\r
-formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades\r
-were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets\r
-behind this principal barricade. At the very sight of it, one felt the\r
-agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg, which had reached that\r
-point of extremity when a distress may become a catastrophe. Of what was\r
-that barricade made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses demolished\r
-expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others. It wore\r
-the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred, ruin. It might be\r
-asked: Who built this? It might also be said: Who destroyed this? It was\r
-the improvisation of the ebullition. Hold! take this door! this grating!\r
-this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this broken brazier! this cracked\r
-pot! Give all! cast away all! Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn,\r
-ruin everything! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of\r
-stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane,\r
-the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the\r
-malediction. It was grand and it was petty. It was the abyss parodied\r
-on the public place by hubbub. The mass beside the atom; the strip of\r
-ruined wall and the broken bowl,--threatening fraternization of\r
-every sort of rubbish. Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his\r
-potsherd. Terrible, in short. It was the acropolis of the barefooted.\r
-Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was\r
-spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a\r
-scar on that tumultuous facade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force,\r
-to the very summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of\r
-savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their\r
-terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what\r
-horses of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt,\r
-figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89,\r
-the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the\r
-11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation\r
-deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very\r
-spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it\r
-is thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this\r
-shapeless mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought one beheld hubbub\r
-petrified. One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though\r
-there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress.\r
-Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo\r
-seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was\r
-something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in\r
-that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the\r
-rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper,\r
-window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting\r
-the cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling\r
-topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very\r
-refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and\r
-nothingness. One would have said that it was the tatters of a people,\r
-rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint\r
-Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the\r
-broom making of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling headsman's\r
-blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having\r
-the form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish,\r
-amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the old\r
-tortures endured by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine converted\r
-everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could throw at the\r
-head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm;\r
-the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some\r
-blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the\r
-casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of\r
-the brass. This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an\r
-inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it\r
-was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming\r
-heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns, of\r
-sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag\r
-flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of\r
-drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving\r
-were to be heard there. It was huge and living, and, like the back of an\r
-electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The\r
-spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled\r
-that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange\r
-majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of\r
-filth and it was Sinai.\r
-\r
-As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the\r
-revolution--what? The revolution. It--that barricade, chance, hazard,\r
-disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown--had facing it the\r
-Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage,\r
-the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to\r
-the Marseillaise.\r
-\r
-Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.\r
-\r
-The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance. The faubourg\r
-shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the\r
-faubourg. The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which\r
-the strategy of the African generals dashed itself. Its caverns, its\r
-excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and\r
-grinned beneath the smoke. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the\r
-bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it;\r
-what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to\r
-the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of\r
-redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its\r
-enormous size.\r
-\r
-A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which\r
-debouches on the boulevard near the Chateaud'Eau, if one thrust one's\r
-head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne shop,\r
-one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which\r
-mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the rise, a\r
-strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts, a sort\r
-of hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as\r
-though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall in order\r
-to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of paving-stones. It was\r
-straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid\r
-out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case\r
-of certain Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture.\r
-The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base. From distance\r
-to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible\r
-loopholes which resembled black threads. These loopholes were separated\r
-from each other by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the\r
-eye could reach. All windows and doors were closed. In the background\r
-rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a\r
-motionless and tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible;\r
-not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.\r
-\r
-The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.\r
-\r
-It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.\r
-\r
-As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was\r
-impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before\r
-this mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated,\r
-rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal. Science and gloom met there. One\r
-felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.\r
-One looked at it and spoke low.\r
-\r
-From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the\r
-people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle\r
-was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he escaped the\r
-bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to ensconce itself in some closed\r
-shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or in the\r
-plaster of a wall. For the men in the barricade had made themselves two\r
-small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at\r
-one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of useless powder.\r
-Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there, and pools of\r
-blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came\r
-in the street. Summer does not abdicate.\r
-\r
-In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cocheres were\r
-encumbered with wounded.\r
-\r
-One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one\r
-understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.\r
-\r
-Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms\r
-at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the attacking\r
-column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal redoubt, this\r
-immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. Some crawled flat on\r
-their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the bridge, taking care\r
-that their shakos did not project beyond it.\r
-\r
-The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a\r
-shudder.--"How that is built!" he said to a Representative. "Not one\r
-paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor. It is made of porcelain."--At\r
-that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.\r
-\r
-"The cowards!" people said. "Let them show themselves. Let us see them!\r
-They dare not! They are hiding!"\r
-\r
-The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,\r
-attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth, they\r
-did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they came\r
-over the roofs, the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards\r
-thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the\r
-leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak presently.\r
-\r
-The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade\r
-of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts\r
-was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a\r
-maw; the other a mask.\r
-\r
-Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was composed\r
-of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first barricade the\r
-dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.\r
-\r
-These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the one,\r
-Cournet, the other, Barthelemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine\r
-barricade; Barthelemy the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image of\r
-the man who had built it.\r
-\r
-Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,\r
-a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.\r
-Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men, the\r
-most formidable of combatants. War, strife, conflict, were the very air\r
-he breathed and put him in a good humor. He had been an officer in the\r
-navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined that he sprang\r
-from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he carried the\r
-hurricane on into battle. With the exception of the genius, there was\r
-in Cournet something of Danton, as, with the exception of the divinity,\r
-there was in Danton something of Hercules.\r
-\r
-Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic street\r
-urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for\r
-him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came\r
-out and made this barricade.\r
-\r
-Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all, Barthelemy\r
-slew Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards, caught in\r
-the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion\r
-plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice sees extenuating\r
-circumstances, and in which English justice sees only death, Barthelemy\r
-was hanged. The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to\r
-material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy being\r
-who possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began\r
-in France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows.\r
-Barthelemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE\r
-\r
-Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of insurrection, and\r
-June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it than June, 1832. So the\r
-barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline, and an embryo\r
-compared to the two colossal barricades which we have just sketched; but\r
-it was formidable for that epoch.\r
-\r
-The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked\r
-after anything, had made good use of the night. The barricade had been\r
-not only repaired, but augmented. They had raised it two feet. Bars\r
-of iron planted in the pavement resembled lances in rest. All sorts of\r
-rubbish brought and added from all directions complicated the external\r
-confusion. The redoubt had been cleverly made over, into a wall on the\r
-inside and a thicket on the outside.\r
-\r
-The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it like the\r
-wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.\r
-\r
-The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered, the\r
-kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the wounded\r
-completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables had been\r
-gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured, lint scraped, the\r
-fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior of the redoubt cleaned, the\r
-rubbish swept up, corpses removed.\r
-\r
-They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondetour lane, of which they were\r
-still the masters. The pavement was red for a long time at that spot.\r
-Among the dead there were four National Guardsmen of the suburbs.\r
-Enjolras had their uniforms laid aside.\r
-\r
-Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep. Advice from Enjolras was a\r
-command. Still, only three or four took advantage of it.\r
-\r
-Feuilly employed these two hours in engraving this inscription on the\r
-wall which faced the tavern:--\r
-\r
- LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!\r
-\r
-These four words, hollowed out in the rough stone with a nail, could be\r
-still read on the wall in 1848.\r
-\r
-The three women had profited by the respite of the night to vanish\r
-definitely; which allowed the insurgents to breathe more freely.\r
-\r
-They had found means of taking refuge in some neighboring house.\r
-\r
-The greater part of the wounded were able, and wished, to fight still.\r
-On a litter of mattresses and trusses of straw in the kitchen, which had\r
-been converted into an ambulance, there were five men gravely wounded,\r
-two of whom were municipal guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen were\r
-attended to first.\r
-\r
-In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his black cloth and\r
-Javert bound to his post.\r
-\r
-"This is the hall of the dead," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end, the\r
-mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of\r
-vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and Mabeuf lying prone.\r
-\r
-The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the fusillade, was\r
-still sufficiently upright to admit of their fastening the flag to it.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of always doing what\r
-he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden and bloody coat of the\r
-old man's.\r
-\r
-No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty\r
-men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty provisions of\r
-the wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had passed there. At a\r
-given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of la Meduse.\r
-They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had then reached\r
-the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June when, in the\r
-barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the insurgents who demanded\r
-bread, replied to all combatants crying: "Something to eat!" with: "Why?\r
-It is three o'clock; at four we shall be dead."\r
-\r
-As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink. He\r
-interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.\r
-\r
-They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed.\r
-Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. Combeferre when he came up again\r
-said:--"It's the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as\r
-a grocer."--"It must be real wine," observed Bossuet. "It's lucky that\r
-Grantaire is asleep. If he were on foot, there would be a good deal of\r
-difficulty in saving those bottles."--Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs,\r
-placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might\r
-touch them, he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf\r
-was lying.\r
-\r
-About two o'clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength. There\r
-were still thirty-seven of them.\r
-\r
-The day began to dawn. The torch, which had been replaced in its\r
-cavity in the pavement, had just been extinguished. The interior of the\r
-barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from the street,\r
-was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight\r
-horror, the deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, as they went\r
-and came, moved about there like black forms. Above that terrible\r
-nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute houses were lividly\r
-outlined; at the very top, the chimneys stood palely out. The sky was of\r
-that charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue. Birds\r
-flew about in it with cries of joy. The lofty house which formed the\r
-back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof a\r
-rosy reflection. The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head of\r
-the dead man at the third-story window.\r
-\r
-"I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished," said Courfeyrac\r
-to Feuilly. "That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the\r
-appearance of being afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom of\r
-cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles."\r
-\r
-Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.\r
-\r
-Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from\r
-it.\r
-\r
-"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God,\r
-having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And\r
-so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus\r
-the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected."\r
-\r
-Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking of the\r
-dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and\r
-of Enjolras' sad severity. He said:--\r
-\r
-"Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,\r
-Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was\r
-too late. Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a mystery that,\r
-even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if\r
-there be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses the\r
-joy of having served the human race."\r
-\r
-And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment\r
-later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire's verses,\r
-Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with\r
-Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages translated\r
-by Malfilatre, particularly the prodigies of Caesar's death; and at that\r
-word, Caesar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.\r
-\r
-"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly. Cicero was severe towards\r
-Caesar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoilus\r
-insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere,\r
-when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an\r
-old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts\r
-insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoilus and\r
-Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just\r
-as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword. For my own part, I blame that last\r
-justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. Caesar, the violator\r
-of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the dignities\r
-which emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of the\r
-senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac\r
-pene tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the\r
-better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His twenty-three wounds\r
-touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. Caesar is\r
-stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God\r
-through the greater outrage."\r
-\r
-Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit of a heap\r
-of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:--\r
-\r
-"Oh Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the\r
-AEantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a\r
-Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--LIGHT AND SHADOW\r
-\r
-Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out\r
-through Mondetour lane, gliding along close to the houses.\r
-\r
-The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope. The manner in which\r
-they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to\r
-almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn. They waited for it with\r
-a smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their\r
-cause. Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. They\r
-reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one\r
-of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the\r
-day which was at hand into three distinct phases. At six o'clock in the\r
-morning a regiment "which had been labored with," would turn; at noon,\r
-the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.\r
-\r
-They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent for\r
-an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade, the\r
-great one, Jeanne's, still held out.\r
-\r
-All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort of\r
-gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of\r
-bees.\r
-\r
-Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his sombre eagle flight into outer\r
-darkness. He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded arms, and\r
-one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of\r
-the dawn, he said:\r
-\r
-"The whole army of Paris is to strike. A third of the army is bearing\r
-down upon the barricades in which you now are. There is the National\r
-Guard in addition. I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the\r
-line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one hour you will\r
-be attacked. As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day\r
-it is not stirring. There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for.\r
-Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment. You are abandoned."\r
-\r
-These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them\r
-the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. A\r
-moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have been\r
-heard flitting by.\r
-\r
-This moment was brief.\r
-\r
-A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:\r
-\r
-"So be it. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and\r
-let us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses.\r
-Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans\r
-do not abandon the people."\r
-\r
-These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of\r
-individual anxieties. It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.\r
-\r
-No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some\r
-unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero, that\r
-great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social geneses\r
-who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the decisive word,\r
-and who vanishes into the shadows after having represented for a minute,\r
-in a lightning flash, the people and God.\r
-\r
-This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air of the\r
-6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour, on the barricade\r
-Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become a\r
-matter of history and which has been consigned to the documents in the\r
-case:--"What matters it whether they come to our assistance or not? Let\r
-us get ourselves killed here, to the very last man."\r
-\r
-As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated, were\r
-in communication with each other.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE\r
-\r
-After the man who decreed the "protest of corpses" had spoken, and had\r
-given this formula of their common soul, there issued from all mouths a\r
-strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in sense and triumphant\r
-in tone:\r
-\r
-"Long live death! Let us all remain here!"\r
-\r
-"Why all?" said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"All! All!"\r
-\r
-Enjolras resumed:\r
-\r
-"The position is good; the barricade is fine. Thirty men are enough. Why\r
-sacrifice forty?"\r
-\r
-They replied:\r
-\r
-"Because not one will go away."\r
-\r
-"Citizens," cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated vibration\r
-in his voice, "this republic is not rich enough in men to indulge in\r
-useless expenditure of them. Vain-glory is waste. If the duty of some is\r
-to depart, that duty should be fulfilled like any other."\r
-\r
-Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that sort of\r
-omnipotent power which emanates from the absolute. Still, great as was\r
-this omnipotence, a murmur arose. A leader to the very finger-tips,\r
-Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted. He resumed haughtily:\r
-\r
-"Let those who are afraid of not numbering more than thirty say so."\r
-\r
-The murmurs redoubled.\r
-\r
-"Besides," observed a voice in one group, "it is easy enough to talk\r
-about leaving. The barricade is hemmed in."\r
-\r
-"Not on the side of the Halles," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondetour is\r
-free, and through the Rue des Precheurs one can reach the Marche des\r
-Innocents."\r
-\r
-"And there," went on another voice, "you would be captured. You would\r
-fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs; they will spy\r
-a man passing in blouse and cap. 'Whence come you?' 'Don't you belong to\r
-the barricade?' And they will look at your hands. You smell of powder.\r
-Shot."\r
-\r
-Enjolras, without making any reply, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and\r
-the two entered the tap-room.\r
-\r
-They emerged thence a moment later. Enjolras held in his outstretched\r
-hands the four uniforms which he had laid aside. Combeferre followed,\r
-carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.\r
-\r
-"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks and\r
-escape; here is enough for four." And he flung on the ground, deprived\r
-of its pavement, the four uniforms.\r
-\r
-No wavering took place in his stoical audience. Combeferre took the\r
-word.\r
-\r
-"Come," said he, "you must have a little pity. Do you know what the\r
-question is here? It is a question of women. See here. Are there\r
-women or are there not? Are there children or are there not? Are there\r
-mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot and who have a lot\r
-of little ones around them? Let that man of you who has never beheld a\r
-nurse's breast raise his hand. Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so\r
-do I--I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms\r
-of women wreathing their arms around me. Die, if you will, but\r
-don't make others die. Suicides like that which is on the brink of\r
-accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not\r
-admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide\r
-is murder. Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks.\r
-Listen, Enjolras has just told me that he saw at the corner of the Rue\r
-du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window, on the fifth\r
-floor, and on the pane the quivering shadow of the head of an old woman,\r
-who had the air of having spent the night in watching. Perhaps she is\r
-the mother of some one of you. Well, let that man go, and make haste, to\r
-say to his mother: 'Here I am, mother!' Let him feel at ease, the task\r
-here will be performed all the same. When one supports one's relatives\r
-by one's toil, one has not the right to sacrifice one's self. That\r
-is deserting one's family. And those who have daughters! what are you\r
-thinking of? You get yourselves killed, you are dead, that is well. And\r
-tomorrow? Young girls without bread--that is a terrible thing. Man begs,\r
-woman sells. Ah! those charming and gracious beings, so gracious and so\r
-sweet, who have bonnets of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who\r
-sing and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence\r
-of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, that Jeanne,\r
-that Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures who are your\r
-blessings and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger! What do\r
-you want me to say to you? There is a market for human flesh; and it\r
-is not with your shadowy hands, shuddering around them, that you\r
-will prevent them from entering it! Think of the street, think of the\r
-pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past which women\r
-go and come with necks all bare, and through the mire. These women,\r
-too, were pure once. Think of your sisters, those of you who have them.\r
-Misery, prostitution, the police, Saint-Lazare--that is what those\r
-beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels of modesty, gentleness\r
-and loveliness, fresher than lilacs in the month of May, will come to.\r
-Ah! you have got yourselves killed! You are no longer on hand! That\r
-is well; you have wished to release the people from Royalty, and you\r
-deliver over your daughters to the police. Friends, have a care, have\r
-mercy. Women, unhappy women, we are not in the habit of bestowing much\r
-thought on them. We trust to the women not having received a man's\r
-education, we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we\r
-prevent their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them\r
-from going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies?\r
-Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands\r
-with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend to\r
-this affair. I know well that courage is required to leave, that it is\r
-hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. You say: 'I have a\r
-gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse, I shall remain there.' So\r
-much the worse is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow; you will\r
-not be here to-morrow, but your families will; and what sufferings! See,\r
-here is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple, who babbles,\r
-prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and\r
-do you know what becomes of him when he is abandoned? I have seen one,\r
-a very small creature, no taller than that. His father was dead. Poor\r
-people had taken him in out of charity, but they had bread only for\r
-themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He did not cry.\r
-You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire,\r
-and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. His breathing\r
-was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent. He\r
-said nothing. If you spoke to him, he did not answer. He is dead. He was\r
-taken to the Necker Hospital, where I saw him. I was house-surgeon in\r
-that hospital. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose\r
-happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in\r
-their robust hand, let each one of those fathers imagine that this child\r
-is his own. That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when\r
-he lay nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin\r
-like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery. A sort of mud was found\r
-in his stomach. There were ashes in his teeth. Come, let us examine\r
-ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. Statistics\r
-show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent.\r
-I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns\r
-young girls, it concerns little children. Who is talking to you of\r
-yourselves? We know well what you are; we know well that you are all\r
-brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your souls the joy and\r
-the glory of giving your life for the great cause; we know well that you\r
-feel yourselves elected to die usefully and magnificently, and that each\r
-one of you clings to his share in the triumph. Very well. But you are\r
-not alone in this world. There are other beings of whom you must think.\r
-You must not be egoists."\r
-\r
-All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.\r
-\r
-Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments.\r
-Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He recalled the mothers\r
-of other men, and forgot his own. He was about to get himself killed. He\r
-was "an egoist."\r
-\r
-Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged in succession from all hope,\r
-and having been stranded in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks, and\r
-saturated with violent emotions and conscious that the end was near,\r
-had plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor which always\r
-precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted.\r
-\r
-A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that\r
-febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science, and which is\r
-to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. Despair, also, has its\r
-ecstasy. Marius had reached this point. He looked on at everything as\r
-from without; as we have said, things which passed before him seemed far\r
-away; he made out the whole, but did not perceive the details. He beheld\r
-men going and coming as through a flame. He heard voices speaking as at\r
-the bottom of an abyss.\r
-\r
-But this moved him. There was in this scene a point which pierced and\r
-roused even him. He had but one idea now, to die; and he did not wish to\r
-be turned aside from it, but he reflected, in his gloomy somnambulism,\r
-that while destroying himself, he was not prohibited from saving some\r
-one else.\r
-\r
-He raised his voice.\r
-\r
-"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no unnecessary sacrifice.\r
-I join them, and you must make haste. Combeferre has said convincing\r
-things to you. There are some among you who have families, mothers,\r
-sisters, wives, children. Let such leave the ranks."\r
-\r
-No one stirred.\r
-\r
-"Married men and the supporters of families, step out of the ranks!"\r
-repeated Marius.\r
-\r
-His authority was great. Enjolras was certainly the head of the\r
-barricade, but Marius was its savior.\r
-\r
-"I order it," cried Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"I entreat you," said Marius.\r
-\r
-Then, touched by Combeferre's words, shaken by Enjolras' order, touched\r
-by Marius' entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce each other.--"It\r
-is true," said one young man to a full grown man, "you are the father\r
-of a family. Go."--"It is your duty rather," retorted the man, "you have\r
-two sisters whom you maintain."--And an unprecedented controversy broke\r
-forth. Each struggled to determine which should not allow himself to be\r
-placed at the door of the tomb.\r
-\r
-"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it will be\r
-too late."\r
-\r
-"Citizens," pursued Enjolras, "this is the Republic, and universal\r
-suffrage reigns. Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."\r
-\r
-They obeyed. After the expiration of a few minutes, five were\r
-unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.\r
-\r
-"There are five of them!" exclaimed Marius.\r
-\r
-There were only four uniforms.\r
-\r
-"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."\r
-\r
-And then a struggle arose as to who should remain, and who should find\r
-reasons for the others not remaining. The generous quarrel began afresh.\r
-\r
-"You have a wife who loves you."--"You have your aged mother."--" You\r
-have neither father nor mother, and what is to become of your three\r
-little brothers?"--"You are the father of five children."--"You have a\r
-right to live, you are only seventeen, it is too early for you to die."\r
-\r
-These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism.\r
-The improbable was simple there. These men did not astonish each other.\r
-\r
-"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-Men shouted to Marius from the groups:\r
-\r
-"Do you designate who is to remain."\r
-\r
-"Yes," said the five, "choose. We will obey you."\r
-\r
-Marius did not believe that he was capable of another emotion. Still,\r
-at this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood rushed back\r
-to his heart. He would have turned pale, had it been possible for him to\r
-become any paler.\r
-\r
-He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his\r
-eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the depths of history\r
-hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:\r
-\r
-"Me! me! me!"\r
-\r
-And Marius stupidly counted them; there were still five of them! Then\r
-his glance dropped to the four uniforms.\r
-\r
-At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the other\r
-four.\r
-\r
-The fifth man was saved.\r
-\r
-Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.\r
-\r
-He had arrived by way of Mondetour lane, whither by dint of inquiries\r
-made, or by instinct, or chance. Thanks to his dress of a National\r
-Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.\r
-\r
-The sentinel stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondetour had no\r
-occasion to give the alarm for a single National Guardsman, and he had\r
-allowed the latter to entangle himself in the street, saying to himself:\r
-"Probably it is a reinforcement, in any case it is a prisoner." The\r
-moment was too grave to admit of the sentinel abandoning his duty and\r
-his post of observation.\r
-\r
-At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed\r
-him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms.\r
-Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he had silently removed his\r
-coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.\r
-\r
-The emotion aroused was indescribable.\r
-\r
-"Who is this man?" demanded Bossuet.\r
-\r
-"He is a man who saves others," replied Combeferre.\r
-\r
-Marius added in a grave voice:\r
-\r
-"I know him."\r
-\r
-This guarantee satisfied every one.\r
-\r
-Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Welcome, citizen."\r
-\r
-And he added:\r
-\r
-"You know that we are about to die."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent whom he was saving\r
-to don his uniform.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE\r
-\r
-The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place, had as\r
-result and culminating point Enjolras' supreme melancholy.\r
-\r
-Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution; he was\r
-incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so; he had too much\r
-of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots; still,\r
-his mind, in the society of the Friends of the A B C, had ended by\r
-undergoing a certain polarization from Combeferre's ideas; for some time\r
-past, he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and\r
-had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress,\r
-and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution,\r
-the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense\r
-human republic. As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent\r
-situation being given, he wished to be violent; on that point, he never\r
-varied; and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is\r
-summed up in the words: "Eighty-three." Enjolras was standing erect on\r
-the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of\r
-his gun. He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of\r
-prophetic breaths; places where death is have these effects of tripods.\r
-A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an\r
-inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell\r
-back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they\r
-were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo, and\r
-Enjolras cried:\r
-\r
-"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of\r
-cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations\r
-sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the\r
-present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full\r
-equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience\r
-become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the\r
-school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for\r
-all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers! To\r
-conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second.\r
-Reflect on what progress has already accomplished. Formerly, the\r
-first human races beheld with terror the hydra pass before their eyes,\r
-breathing on the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who\r
-was the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle\r
-and the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man. Man,\r
-nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence, and\r
-finally conquered these monsters. We have vanquished the hydra, and\r
-it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing the\r
-griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon. On the day\r
-when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have\r
-definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity, the\r
-hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire,\r
-and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which\r
-the ancient gods formerly were to him. Courage, and onward! Citizens,\r
-whither are we going? To science made government, to the force of things\r
-become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself its\r
-sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawn\r
-of truth corresponding to a dawn of day. We are advancing to the union\r
-of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. No more fictions;\r
-no more parasites. The real governed by the true, that is the goal.\r
-Civilization will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and,\r
-later on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament of the\r
-intelligence. Something similar has already been seen. The amphictyons\r
-had two sittings a year, one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other\r
-at Thermopylae, the place of heroes. Europe will have her amphictyons;\r
-the globe will have its amphictyons. France bears this sublime future in\r
-her breast. This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. That which\r
-Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. Listen to me,\r
-you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I revere you. Yes, you\r
-clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. You had neither father\r
-nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother and right\r
-for your father. You are about to die, that is to say to triumph, here.\r
-Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as\r
-through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create.\r
-As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the\r
-whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have\r
-just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of\r
-view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over\r
-himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where\r
-two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But\r
-in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a\r
-certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right.\r
-This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession\r
-which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing\r
-else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This\r
-protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of\r
-intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society.\r
-This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence what\r
-is called the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same\r
-thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a\r
-bond. Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty\r
-is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not wholly a\r
-surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a\r
-proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally\r
-speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity;\r
-politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously,\r
-it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an\r
-organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet,\r
-that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed\r
-on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an\r
-identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction!\r
-light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.\r
-Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century\r
-will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old,\r
-we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion,\r
-a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of\r
-civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary\r
-tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because\r
-of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face\r
-to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we\r
-shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising\r
-from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the\r
-sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events.\r
-One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy.\r
-The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe\r
-accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul\r
-and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet\r
-around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing\r
-you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future.\r
-A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up,\r
-consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry\r
-of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is\r
-the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this\r
-barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of\r
-iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here\r
-misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: 'I\r
-am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.' From the embrace\r
-of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their\r
-agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are\r
-about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies\r
-in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded\r
-with the dawn."\r
-\r
-Enjolras paused rather than became silent; his lips continued to move\r
-silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused them all\r
-to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. There was no\r
-applause; but they whispered together for a long time. Speech being a\r
-breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling of leaves.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC\r
-\r
-Let us narrate what was passing in Marius' thoughts.\r
-\r
-Let the reader recall the state of his soul. We have just recalled it,\r
-everything was a vision to him now. His judgment was disturbed. Marius,\r
-let us insist on this point, was under the shadow of the great, dark\r
-wings which are spread over those in the death agony. He felt that he\r
-had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he was already on the other\r
-side of the wall, and he no longer beheld the faces of the living except\r
-with the eyes of one dead.\r
-\r
-How did M. Fauchelevent come there? Why was he there? What had he come\r
-there to do? Marius did not address all these questions to himself.\r
-Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity, that it envelops others\r
-as well as ourselves, it seemed logical to him that all the world should\r
-come thither to die.\r
-\r
-Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.\r
-\r
-However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him, and\r
-had not even the air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice to\r
-say: "I know him."\r
-\r
-As far as Marius was concerned, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent was\r
-comforting, and, if such a word can be used for such impressions,\r
-we should say that it pleased him. He had always felt the absolute\r
-impossibility of addressing that enigmatical man, who was, in his eyes,\r
-both equivocal and imposing. Moreover, it had been a long time since\r
-he had seen him; and this still further augmented the impossibility for\r
-Marius' timid and reserved nature.\r
-\r
-The five chosen men left the barricade by way of Mondetour lane; they\r
-bore a perfect resemblance to members of the National Guard. One of them\r
-wept as he took his leave. Before setting out, they embraced those who\r
-remained.\r
-\r
-When the five men sent back to life had taken their departure, Enjolras\r
-thought of the man who had been condemned to death.\r
-\r
-He entered the tap-room. Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged in\r
-meditation.\r
-\r
-"Do you want anything?" Enjolras asked him.\r
-\r
-Javert replied: "When are you going to kill me?"\r
-\r
-"Wait. We need all our cartridges just at present."\r
-\r
-"Then give me a drink," said Javert.\r
-\r
-Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert was\r
-pinioned, he helped him to drink.\r
-\r
-"Is that all?" inquired Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"I am uncomfortable against this post," replied Javert. "You are not\r
-tender to have left me to pass the night here. Bind me as you please,\r
-but you surely might lay me out on a table like that other man."\r
-\r
-And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body of M. Mabeuf.\r
-\r
-There was, as the reader will remember, a long, broad table at the\r
-end of the room, on which they had been running bullets and making\r
-cartridges. All the cartridges having been made, and all the powder\r
-used, this table was free.\r
-\r
-At Enjolras' command, four insurgents unbound Javert from the post.\r
-While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet against his breast.\r
-\r
-Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a\r
-slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting\r
-the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches in\r
-length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room, where\r
-they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.\r
-\r
-By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck,\r
-they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt\r
-at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons a\r
-martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach, and meets\r
-the hands, after passing between the legs.\r
-\r
-While they were binding Javert, a man standing on the threshold was\r
-surveying him with singular attention. The shadow cast by this man made\r
-Javert turn his head. He raised his eyes, and recognized Jean Valjean.\r
-He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly and confined himself\r
-to the remark: "It is perfectly simple."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED\r
-\r
-The daylight was increasing rapidly. Not a window was opened, not a door\r
-stood ajar; it was the dawn but not the awaking. The end of the Rue de\r
-la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had been evacuated by the\r
-troops, as we have stated it seemed to be free, and presented itself to\r
-passers-by with a sinister tranquillity. The Rue Saint-Denis was as\r
-dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. Not a living being in the\r
-cross-roads, which gleamed white in the light of the sun. Nothing is so\r
-mournful as this light in deserted streets. Nothing was to be seen, but\r
-there was something to be heard. A mysterious movement was going on at\r
-a certain distance. It was evident that the critical moment was\r
-approaching. As on the previous evening, the sentinels had come in; but\r
-this time all had come.\r
-\r
-The barricade was stronger than on the occasion of the first attack.\r
-Since the departure of the five, they had increased its height still\r
-further.\r
-\r
-On the advice of the sentinel who had examined the region of the\r
-Halles, Enjolras, for fear of a surprise in the rear, came to a serious\r
-decision. He had the small gut of the Mondetour lane, which had been\r
-left open up to that time, barricaded. For this purpose, they tore up\r
-the pavement for the length of several houses more. In this manner,\r
-the barricade, walled on three streets, in front on the Rue de\r
-la Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues du Cygne and de la Petite\r
-Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondetour, was really almost\r
-impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. It\r
-had three fronts, but no exit.--"A fortress but a rat hole too," said\r
-Courfeyrac with a laugh.\r
-\r
-Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones "torn up in excess," said\r
-Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.\r
-\r
-The silence was now so profound in the quarter whence the attack must\r
-needs come, that Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.\r
-\r
-An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.\r
-\r
-Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. Each\r
-man selects his place as though at the theatre. They jostle, and elbow\r
-and crowd each other. There are some who make stalls of paving-stones.\r
-Here is a corner of the wall which is in the way, it is removed; here\r
-is a redan which may afford protection, they take shelter behind it.\r
-Left-handed men are precious; they take the places that are inconvenient\r
-to the rest. Many arrange to fight in a sitting posture. They wish to be\r
-at ease to kill, and to die comfortably. In the sad war of June, 1848,\r
-an insurgent who was a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the\r
-top of a terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair brought there for\r
-his use; a charge of grape-shot found him out there.\r
-\r
-As soon as the leader has given the order to clear the decks for action,\r
-all disorderly movements cease; there is no more pulling from one\r
-another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is no more\r
-holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in, and changes\r
-into, a waiting for the assailants. A barricade before the arrival of\r
-danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself. Peril produces\r
-order.\r
-\r
-As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle, and had\r
-placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved for himself,\r
-all the rest held their peace. A series of faint, sharp noises resounded\r
-confusedly along the wall of paving-stones. It was the men cocking their\r
-guns.\r
-\r
-Moreover, their attitudes were prouder, more confident than ever; the\r
-excess of sacrifice strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope,\r
-but they had despair, despair,--the last weapon, which sometimes gives\r
-victory; Virgil has said so. Supreme resources spring from extreme\r
-resolutions. To embark in death is sometimes the means of escaping a\r
-shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank of safety.\r
-\r
-As on the preceding evening, the attention of all was directed, we\r
-might almost say leaned upon, the end of the street, now lighted up and\r
-visible.\r
-\r
-They had not long to wait. A stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu\r
-quarter, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. A\r
-clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass, the click of brass\r
-skipping along the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar, announced that\r
-some sinister construction of iron was approaching. There arose a tremor\r
-in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets, pierced and built for the\r
-fertile circulation of interests and ideas, and which are not made for\r
-the horrible rumble of the wheels of war.\r
-\r
-The fixity of eye in all the combatants upon the extremity of the street\r
-became ferocious.\r
-\r
-A cannon made its appearance.\r
-\r
-Artillery-men were pushing the piece; it was in firing trim; the\r
-fore-carriage had been detached; two upheld the gun-carriage, four were\r
-at the wheels; others followed with the caisson. They could see the\r
-smoke of the burning lint-stock.\r
-\r
-"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.\r
-\r
-The whole barricade fired, the report was terrible; an avalanche of\r
-smoke covered and effaced both cannon and men; after a few seconds, the\r
-cloud dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the gun-crew had\r
-just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste, into position\r
-facing the barricade. Not one of them had been struck. Then the captain\r
-of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order to raise the muzzle,\r
-began to point the cannon with the gravity of an astronomer levelling a\r
-telescope.\r
-\r
-"Bravo for the cannoneers!" cried Bossuet.\r
-\r
-And the whole barricade clapped their hands.\r
-\r
-A moment later, squarely planted in the very middle of the street,\r
-astride of the gutter, the piece was ready for action. A formidable pair\r
-of jaws yawned on the barricade.\r
-\r
-"Come, merrily now!" ejaculated Courfeyrac. "That's the brutal part of\r
-it. After the fillip on the nose, the blow from the fist. The army is\r
-reaching out its big paw to us. The barricade is going to be severely\r
-shaken up. The fusillade tries, the cannon takes."\r
-\r
-"It is a piece of eight, new model, brass," added Combeferre. "Those\r
-pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of ten parts of tin\r
-to one hundred of brass is exceeded. The excess of tin renders them too\r
-tender. Then it comes to pass that they have caves and chambers when\r
-looked at from the vent hole. In order to obviate this danger, and\r
-to render it possible to force the charge, it may become necessary\r
-to return to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping, and to\r
-encircle the piece on the outside with a series of unwelded steel bands,\r
-from the breech to the trunnions. In the meantime, they remedy this\r
-defect as best they may; they manage to discover where the holes are\r
-located in the vent of a cannon, by means of a searcher. But there is a\r
-better method, with Gribeauval's movable star."\r
-\r
-"In the sixteenth century," remarked Bossuet, "they used to rifle\r
-cannon."\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied Combeferre, "that augments the projectile force, but\r
-diminishes the accuracy of the firing. In firing at short range,\r
-the trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired, the parabola is\r
-exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no longer sufficiently\r
-rectilinear to allow of its striking intervening objects, which is,\r
-nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance of which increases\r
-with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation of the discharge.\r
-This defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile in the rifled\r
-cannon of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness of the charge;\r
-small charges for that sort of engine are imposed by the ballistic\r
-necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation of the\r
-gun-carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do all that\r
-it desires; force is a great weakness. A cannon-ball only travels\r
-six hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand leagues a\r
-second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."\r
-\r
-"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-How was the casing of the barricade going to behave under the\r
-cannon-balls? Would they effect a breach? That was the question. While\r
-the insurgents were reloading their guns, the artillery-men were loading\r
-the cannon.\r
-\r
-The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.\r
-\r
-The shot sped the report burst forth.\r
-\r
-"Present!" shouted a joyous voice.\r
-\r
-And Gavroche flung himself into the barricade just as the ball dashed\r
-against it.\r
-\r
-He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly\r
-climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth of\r
-the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.\r
-\r
-Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than the\r
-cannon-ball.\r
-\r
-The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish. At the most there was an\r
-omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. On seeing\r
-this, the barricade burst into a laugh.\r
-\r
-"Go on!" shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY\r
-\r
-They flocked round Gavroche. But he had no time to tell anything. Marius\r
-drew him aside with a shudder.\r
-\r
-"What are you doing here?"\r
-\r
-"Hullo!" said the child, "what are you doing here yourself?"\r
-\r
-And he stared at Marius intently with his epic effrontery. His eyes grew\r
-larger with the proud light within them.\r
-\r
-It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:\r
-\r
-"Who told you to come back? Did you deliver my letter at the address?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche was not without some compunctions in the matter of that letter.\r
-In his haste to return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather\r
-than delivered it. He was forced to acknowledge to himself that he had\r
-confided it rather lightly to that stranger whose face he had not been\r
-able to make out. It is true that the man was bareheaded, but that was\r
-not sufficient. In short, he had been administering to himself little\r
-inward remonstrances and he feared Marius' reproaches. In order to\r
-extricate himself from the predicament, he took the simplest course; he\r
-lied abominably.\r
-\r
-"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter. The lady was asleep. She\r
-will have the letter when she wakes up."\r
-\r
-Marius had had two objects in sending that letter: to bid farewell to\r
-Cosette and to save Gavroche. He was obliged to content himself with the\r
-half of his desire.\r
-\r
-The despatch of his letter and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the\r
-barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. He pointed out M.\r
-Fauchelevent to Gavroche.\r
-\r
-"Do you know that man?"\r
-\r
-"No," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Gavroche had, in fact, as we have just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean only\r
-at night.\r
-\r
-The troubled and unhealthy conjectures which had outlined themselves in\r
-Marius' mind were dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions?\r
-Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican. Hence his very natural\r
-presence in this combat.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting, at the other end of the\r
-barricade: "My gun!"\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac had it returned to him.\r
-\r
-Gavroche warned "his comrades" as he called them, that the barricade was\r
-blocked. He had had great difficulty in reaching it. A battalion of the\r
-line whose arms were piled in the Rue de la Petite Truanderie was on\r
-the watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the opposite side, the\r
-municipal guard occupied the Rue des Precheurs. The bulk of the army was\r
-facing them in front.\r
-\r
-This information given, Gavroche added:\r
-\r
-"I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack."\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his\r
-embrasure.\r
-\r
-The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt, with their shot, had not\r
-repeated it.\r
-\r
-A company of infantry of the line had come up and occupied the end of\r
-the street behind the piece of ordnance. The soldiers were tearing up\r
-the pavement and constructing with the stones a small, low wall, a\r
-sort of side-work not more than eighteen inches high, and facing the\r
-barricade. In the angle at the left of this epaulement, there was\r
-visible the head of the column of a battalion from the suburbs massed in\r
-the Rue Saint-Denis.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar sound\r
-which is produced when the shells of grape-shot are drawn from the\r
-caissons, and he saw the commander of the piece change the elevation\r
-and incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. Then the\r
-cannoneers began to load the piece. The chief seized the lint-stock\r
-himself and lowered it to the vent.\r
-\r
-"Down with your heads, hug the wall!" shouted Enjolras, "and all on your\r
-knees along the barricade!"\r
-\r
-The insurgents who were straggling in front of the wine-shop, and\r
-who had quitted their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival, rushed\r
-pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras' order could be\r
-executed, the discharge took place with the terrifying rattle of a round\r
-of grape-shot. This is what it was, in fact.\r
-\r
-The charge had been aimed at the cut in the redoubt, and had there\r
-rebounded from the wall; and this terrible rebound had produced two dead\r
-and three wounded.\r
-\r
-If this were continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. The\r
-grape-shot made its way in.\r
-\r
-A murmur of consternation arose.\r
-\r
-"Let us prevent the second discharge," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun, who, at\r
-that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun and rectifying\r
-and definitely fixing its pointing.\r
-\r
-The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery, very\r
-young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent air peculiar\r
-to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which, by dint of perfecting\r
-itself in horror, must end in killing war.\r
-\r
-Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this young\r
-man.\r
-\r
-"What a pity!" said Combeferre. "What hideous things these butcheries\r
-are! Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war.\r
-Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant, you are not looking at\r
-him. Fancy, he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; it is evident\r
-that he is thoughtful; those young artillery-men are very well educated;\r
-he has a father, a mother, a family; he is probably in love; he is not\r
-more than five and twenty at the most; he might be your brother."\r
-\r
-"He is," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too. Well, let us not kill him."\r
-\r
-"Let me alone. It must be done."\r
-\r
-And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.\r
-\r
-At the same moment, he pressed the trigger of his rifle. The flame\r
-leaped forth. The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms extended in\r
-front of him, his head uplifted, as though for breath, then he fell with\r
-his side on the gun, and lay there motionless. They could see his back,\r
-from the centre of which there flowed directly a stream of blood. The\r
-ball had traversed his breast from side to side. He was dead.\r
-\r
-He had to be carried away and replaced by another. Several minutes were\r
-thus gained, in fact.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT\r
-INFALLIBLE MARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796\r
-\r
-Opinions were exchanged in the barricade. The firing from the gun was\r
-about to begin again. Against that grape-shot, they could not hold out\r
-a quarter of an hour longer. It was absolutely necessary to deaden the\r
-blows.\r
-\r
-Enjolras issued this command:\r
-\r
-"We must place a mattress there."\r
-\r
-"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are lying on them."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, who was seated apart on a stone post, at the corner of the\r
-tavern, with his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment, taken\r
-no part in anything that was going on. He did not appear to hear the\r
-combatants saying around him: "Here is a gun that is doing nothing."\r
-\r
-At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.\r
-\r
-It will be remembered that, on the arrival of the rabble in the Rue\r
-de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placed her\r
-mattress in front of her window. This window, an attic window, was on\r
-the roof of a six-story house situated a little beyond the barricade.\r
-The mattress, placed cross-wise, supported at the bottom on two poles\r
-for drying linen, was upheld at the top by two ropes, which, at that\r
-distance, looked like two threads, and which were attached to two nails\r
-planted in the window frames. These ropes were distinctly visible, like\r
-hairs, against the sky.\r
-\r
-"Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to him.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.\r
-\r
-One of the mattress ropes was cut.\r
-\r
-The mattress now hung by one thread only.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean fired the second charge. The second rope lashed the panes\r
-of the attic window. The mattress slipped between the two poles and fell\r
-into the street.\r
-\r
-The barricade applauded.\r
-\r
-All voices cried:\r
-\r
-"Here is a mattress!"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"\r
-\r
-The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside the barricade, between\r
-besiegers and besieged. Now, the death of the sergeant of artillery\r
-having exasperated the troop, the soldiers had, for several minutes,\r
-been lying flat on their stomachs behind the line of paving-stones which\r
-they had erected, and, in order to supply the forced silence of\r
-the piece, which was quiet while its service was in course of\r
-reorganization, they had opened fire on the barricade. The insurgents\r
-did not reply to this musketry, in order to spare their ammunition The\r
-fusillade broke against the barricade; but the street, which it filled,\r
-was terrible.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut, entered the street, traversed the\r
-storm of bullets, walked up to the mattress, hoisted it upon his back,\r
-and returned to the barricade.\r
-\r
-He placed the mattress in the cut with his own hands. He fixed it there\r
-against the wall in such a manner that the artillery-men should not see\r
-it.\r
-\r
-That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.\r
-\r
-It was not long in coming.\r
-\r
-The cannon vomited forth its package of buck-shot with a roar. But there\r
-was no rebound. The effect which they had foreseen had been attained.\r
-The barricade was saved.\r
-\r
-"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the Republic thanks you."\r
-\r
-Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed:\r
-\r
-"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of\r
-that which yields over that which strikes with lightning. But never\r
-mind, glory to the mattress which annuls a cannon!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--DAWN\r
-\r
-At that moment, Cosette awoke.\r
-\r
-Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window,\r
-facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.\r
-\r
-Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris. She had not been\r
-there on the preceding evening, and she had already retired to her\r
-chamber when Toussaint had said:\r
-\r
-"It appears that there is a row."\r
-\r
-Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly. She had had sweet\r
-dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very\r
-white. Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to her in the light. She\r
-awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first, produced on her the\r
-effect of being a continuation of her dream. Her first thought on\r
-emerging from this dream was a smiling one. Cosette felt herself\r
-thoroughly reassured. Like Jean Valjean, she had, a few hours\r
-previously, passed through that reaction of the soul which absolutely\r
-will not hear of unhappiness. She began to cherish hope, with all her\r
-might, without knowing why. Then she felt a pang at her heart. It was\r
-three days since she had seen Marius. But she said to herself that he\r
-must have received her letter, that he knew where she was, and that\r
-he was so clever that he would find means of reaching her.--And that\r
-certainly to-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight,\r
-but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that it was very\r
-early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to receive Marius.\r
-\r
-She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that, consequently,\r
-that was sufficient and that Marius would come. No objection was valid.\r
-All this was certain. It was monstrous enough already to have suffered\r
-for three days. Marius absent three days, this was horrible on the part\r
-of the good God. Now, this cruel teasing from on high had been gone\r
-through with. Marius was about to arrive, and he would bring good news.\r
-Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless\r
-and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future in the presence\r
-of an unknown quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it to be\r
-happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her on\r
-the subject of this absence which was to last only one day, and what\r
-explanation of it he had given her. Every one has noticed with what\r
-nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and\r
-hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are\r
-thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of\r
-our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to\r
-lay the memory on them. Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless little\r
-effort made by her memory. She told herself, that it was very naughty\r
-and very wicked of her, to have forgotten the words uttered by Marius.\r
-\r
-She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul and\r
-body, her prayers and her toilet.\r
-\r
-One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into a nuptial\r
-chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it,\r
-prose must not.\r
-\r
-It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness\r
-in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be\r
-gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the\r
-bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity\r
-which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a\r
-slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though\r
-a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and\r
-conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing\r
-vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn,\r
-those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite\r
-affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there\r
-is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as\r
-the clouds of dawn,--it is not fitting that all this should be narrated,\r
-and it is too much to have even called attention to it.\r
-\r
-The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising of a\r
-young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility\r
-of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. The down on the\r
-peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal of the snow, the wing\r
-of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarse compared to that\r
-chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. The young girl is\r
-only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. Her bed-chamber is\r
-hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a glance\r
-brutalizes this vague penumbra. Here, contemplation is profanation.\r
-\r
-We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter of\r
-Cosette's rising.\r
-\r
-An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God, but that\r
-Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and she was ashamed and\r
-turned crimson. We are of the number who fall speechless in the presence\r
-of young girls and flowers, since we think them worthy of veneration.\r
-\r
-Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair, which\r
-was a very simple matter in those days, when women did not swell out\r
-their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and did not put crinoline\r
-in their locks. Then she opened the window and cast her eyes around her\r
-in every direction, hoping to descry some bit of the street, an angle of\r
-the house, an edge of pavement, so that she might be able to watch for\r
-Marius there. But no view of the outside was to be had. The back court\r
-was surrounded by tolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on\r
-several gardens. Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous: for the first\r
-time in her life, she found flowers ugly. The smallest scrap of the\r
-gutter of the street would have met her wishes better. She decided to\r
-gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might come from that\r
-quarter.\r
-\r
-All at once, she burst into tears. Not that this was fickleness of\r
-soul; but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. She had a\r
-confused consciousness of something horrible. Thoughts were rife in the\r
-air, in fact. She told herself that she was not sure of anything, that\r
-to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost; and the idea that Marius\r
-could return to her from heaven appeared to her no longer charming but\r
-mournful.\r
-\r
-Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her, and hope\r
-and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trust in God.\r
-\r
-Every one in the house was still asleep. A country-like silence reigned.\r
-Not a shutter had been opened. The porter's lodge was closed. Toussaint\r
-had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that her father was\r
-asleep. She must have suffered much, and she must have still been\r
-suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that her father had been\r
-unkind; but she counted on Marius. The eclipse of such a light was\r
-decidedly impossible. Now and then, she heard sharp shocks in the\r
-distance, and she said: "It is odd that people should be opening and\r
-shutting their carriage gates so early." They were the reports of the\r
-cannon battering the barricade.\r
-\r
-A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectly black\r
-cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curve of this nest\r
-formed a little projection beyond the cornice, so that from above it\r
-was possible to look into this little paradise. The mother was there,\r
-spreading her wings like a fan over her brood; the father fluttered\r
-about, flew away, then came back, bearing in his beak food and kisses.\r
-The dawning day gilded this happy thing, the great law, "Multiply," lay\r
-there smiling and august, and that sweet mystery unfolded in the\r
-glory of the morning. Cosette, with her hair in the sunlight, her\r
-soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn\r
-without, bent over mechanically, and almost without daring to avow to\r
-herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to gaze\r
-at these birds, at this family, at that male and female, that mother and\r
-her little ones, with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a\r
-virgin.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE\r
-\r
-The assailants' fire continued. Musketry and grape-shot alternated, but\r
-without committing great ravages, to tell the truth. The top alone of\r
-the Corinthe facade suffered; the window on the first floor, and the\r
-attic window in the roof, riddled with buck-shot and biscaiens, were\r
-slowly losing their shape. The combatants who had been posted there had\r
-been obliged to withdraw. However, this is according to the tactics\r
-of barricades; to fire for a long while, in order to exhaust the\r
-insurgents' ammunition, if they commit the mistake of replying. When it\r
-is perceived, from the slackening of their fire, that they have no more\r
-powder and ball, the assault is made. Enjolras had not fallen into this\r
-trap; the barricade did not reply.\r
-\r
-At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche puffed out his cheek with his\r
-tongue, a sign of supreme disdain.\r
-\r
-"Good for you," said he, "rip up the cloth. We want some lint."\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to order for the little effect which it\r
-produced, and said to the cannon:\r
-\r
-"You are growing diffuse, my good fellow."\r
-\r
-One gets puzzled in battle, as at a ball. It is probable that this\r
-silence on the part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy,\r
-and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt the\r
-necessity of getting a clear view behind that heap of paving-stones, and\r
-of knowing what was going on behind that impassable wall which received\r
-blows without retorting. The insurgents suddenly perceived a helmet\r
-glittering in the sun on a neighboring roof. A fireman had placed his\r
-back against a tall chimney, and seemed to be acting as sentinel. His\r
-glance fell directly down into the barricade.\r
-\r
-"There's an embarrassing watcher," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras' rifle, but he had his own gun.\r
-\r
-Without saying a word, he took aim at the fireman, and, a second later,\r
-the helmet, smashed by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street. The\r
-terrified soldier made haste to disappear. A second observer took his\r
-place. This one was an officer. Jean Valjean, who had re-loaded his\r
-gun, took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer's casque to join the\r
-soldier's. The officer did not persist, and retired speedily. This time\r
-the warning was understood. No one made his appearance thereafter on\r
-that roof; and the idea of spying on the barricade was abandoned.\r
-\r
-"Why did you not kill the man?" Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean made no reply.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER\r
-\r
-Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear:\r
-\r
-"He did not answer my question."\r
-\r
-"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.\r
-\r
-Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch\r
-know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against\r
-insurrections. It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of\r
-June, 1832. A certain good dram-shop keeper of Pantin des Vertus or\r
-la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been closed by the riots, became\r
-leonine at the sight of his deserted dance-hall, and got himself killed\r
-to preserve the order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and\r
-heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests\r
-had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing\r
-from the bravery of the movement. The diminution of a pile of crowns\r
-made bankers sing the Marseillaise. They shed their blood lyrically for\r
-the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive\r
-of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.\r
-\r
-At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not\r
-extremely serious. It was social elements entering into strife, while\r
-awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.\r
-\r
-Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism\r
-[the barbarous name of the correct party]. People were for order in\r
-combination with lack of discipline.\r
-\r
-The drum suddenly beat capricious calls, at the command of such or\r
-such a Colonel of the National Guard; such and such a captain went into\r
-action through inspiration; such and such National Guardsmen fought,\r
-"for an idea," and on their own account. At critical moments, on "days"\r
-they took counsel less of their leaders than of their instincts. There\r
-existed in the army of order, veritable guerilleros, some of the sword,\r
-like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrede.\r
-\r
-Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather by an\r
-aggregation of interests than by a group of principles, was or thought\r
-itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm; each, constituting himself\r
-a centre, defended it, succored it, and protected it with his own head;\r
-and the first comer took it upon himself to save society.\r
-\r
-Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination. A platoon of the National\r
-Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council of\r
-war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes. It\r
-was an improvisation of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. Fierce\r
-Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach the rest,\r
-for it has been applied by the Republic in America, as well as by the\r
-monarchy in Europe. This Lynch law was complicated with mistakes. On one\r
-day of rioting, a young poet, named Paul Aime Garnier, was pursued\r
-in the Place Royale, with a bayonet at his loins, and only escaped by\r
-taking refuge under the porte-cochere of No. 6. They shouted:--"There's\r
-another of those Saint-Simonians!" and they wanted to kill him. Now, he\r
-had under his arm a volume of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon.\r
-A National Guard had read the words Saint-Simon on the book, and had\r
-shouted: "Death!"\r
-\r
-On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of the National Guards from the\r
-suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned, had itself\r
-decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice and its own good\r
-pleasure. This fact, singular though it may seem, was proved at the\r
-judicial investigation opened in consequence of the insurrection of\r
-1832. Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a sort of\r
-condottiere of the order of those whom we have just characterized,\r
-a fanatical and intractable governmentalist, could not resist the\r
-temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition of capturing the\r
-barricade alone and unaided, that is to say, with his company.\r
-Exasperated by the successive apparition of the red flag and the old\r
-coat which he took for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and\r
-chiefs of the corps, who were holding council and did not think that the\r
-moment for the decisive assault had arrived, and who were allowing "the\r
-insurrection to fry in its own fat," to use the celebrated expression\r
-of one of them. For his part, he thought the barricade ripe, and as that\r
-which is ripe ought to fall, he made the attempt.\r
-\r
-He commanded men as resolute as himself, "raging fellows," as a witness\r
-said. His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet, was\r
-the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street. At the\r
-moment when they were least expecting it, the captain launched his men\r
-against the barricade. This movement, executed with more good will than\r
-strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear. Before it had traversed two\r
-thirds of the street it was received by a general discharge from the\r
-barricade. Four, the most audacious, who were running on in front,\r
-were mown down point-blank at the very foot of the redoubt, and this\r
-courageous throng of National Guards, very brave men but lacking in\r
-military tenacity, were forced to fall back, after some hesitation,\r
-leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. This momentary hesitation gave\r
-the insurgents time to re-load their weapons, and a second and very\r
-destructive discharge struck the company before it could regain the\r
-corner of the street, its shelter. A moment more, and it was caught\r
-between two fires, and it received the volley from the battery piece\r
-which, not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.\r
-\r
-The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this\r
-grape-shot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.\r
-\r
-This attack, which was more furious than serious, irritated\r
-Enjolras.--"The fools!" said he. "They are getting their own men killed\r
-and they are using up our ammunition for nothing."\r
-\r
-Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he\r
-was. Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons.\r
-Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number\r
-of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. An empty\r
-cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced. As repression has the\r
-army, it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes, it does not\r
-count its shots. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has\r
-men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge-boxes. Thus\r
-they are struggles of one against a hundred, which always end in\r
-crushing the barricade; unless the revolution, uprising suddenly,\r
-flings into the balance its flaming archangel's sword. This does happen\r
-sometimes. Then everything rises, the pavements begin to seethe, popular\r
-redoubts abound. Paris quivers supremely, the quid divinum is given\r
-forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the air, a\r
-wonderful light appears, the yawning maw of force draws back, and the\r
-army, that lion, sees before it, erect and tranquil, that prophet,\r
-France.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIII--PASSING GLEAMS\r
-\r
-In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there\r
-is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor,\r
-enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above\r
-all, intermittences of hope.\r
-\r
-One of these intermittences, one of these vague quivers of hope suddenly\r
-traversed the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie at the moment when\r
-it was least expected.\r
-\r
-"Listen," suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch, "it seems\r
-to me that Paris is waking up."\r
-\r
-It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection\r
-broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent. The obstinacy\r
-of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated some fancies. Barricades\r
-were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the Rue des Gravilliers. In front\r
-of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a rifle, attacked\r
-alone a squadron of cavalry. In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he\r
-placed one knee on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the\r
-commander of the squadron, and turned away, saying: "There's another who\r
-will do us no more harm."\r
-\r
-He was put to the sword. In the Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the\r
-National Guard from behind a lowered blind. The slats of the blind could\r
-be seen to tremble at every shot. A child fourteen years of age\r
-was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of\r
-cartridges. Many posts were attacked. At the entrance to the Rue\r
-Bertin-Poiree, a very lively and utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed\r
-a regiment of cuirrassiers, at whose head marched Marshal General\r
-Cavaignac de Barague. In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces\r
-of pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a\r
-bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's\r
-old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at\r
-Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre\r
-on our heads."\r
-\r
-These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment when\r
-it was thought that the uprising had been rendered local, this fever\r
-of wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above those deep\r
-masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs of Paris,--all\r
-this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs. They made haste to\r
-stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.\r
-\r
-They delayed the attack on the barricades Maubuee, de la Chanvrerie and\r
-Saint-Merry until these sparks had been extinguished, in order that they\r
-might have to deal with the barricades only and be able to finish\r
-them at one blow. Columns were thrown into the streets where there was\r
-fermentation, sweeping the large, sounding the small, right and left,\r
-now slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. The troops broke in\r
-the doors of houses whence shots had been fired; at the same time,\r
-manoeuvres by the cavalry dispersed the groups on the boulevards. This\r
-repression was not effected without some commotion, and without that\r
-tumultuous uproar peculiar to collisions between the army and the\r
-people. This was what Enjolras had caught in the intervals of the\r
-cannonade and the musketry. Moreover, he had seen wounded men passing\r
-the end of the street in litters, and he said to Courfeyrac:--"Those\r
-wounded do not come from us."\r
-\r
-Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed. In less\r
-than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was a flash of\r
-lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents felt that sort of\r
-leaden cope, which the indifference of the people casts over obstinate\r
-and deserted men, fall over them once more.\r
-\r
-The general movement, which seemed to have assumed a vague outline, had\r
-miscarried; and the attention of the minister of war and the strategy of\r
-the generals could now be concentrated on the three or four barricades\r
-which still remained standing.\r
-\r
-The sun was mounting above the horizon.\r
-\r
-An insurgent hailed Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"We are hungry here. Are we really going to die like this, without\r
-anything to eat?"\r
-\r
-Enjolras, who was still leaning on his elbows at his embrasure, made an\r
-affirmative sign with his head, but without taking his eyes from the end\r
-of the street.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIV--WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued to\r
-insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles\r
-which is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible sound he\r
-assailed it with a burst of irony.\r
-\r
-"You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me,\r
-you are wasting your row. That's not thunder, it's a cough."\r
-\r
-And the bystanders laughed.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave good humor increased with the peril,\r
-like Madame Scarron, replaced nourishment with pleasantry, and, as wine\r
-was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.\r
-\r
-"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet. "His impassive temerity astounds\r
-me. He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps; Enjolras\r
-complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. The rest of us\r
-have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy, that is to say, brave.\r
-When a man is as much in love as a tiger, the least that he can do is to\r
-fight like a lion. That is one way of taking our revenge for the capers\r
-that mesdames our grisettes play on us. Roland gets himself killed for\r
-Angelique; all our heroism comes from our women. A man without a woman\r
-is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off.\r
-Well, Enjolras has no woman. He is not in love, and yet he manages to be\r
-intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice\r
-and as bold as fire."\r
-\r
-Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him,\r
-that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice: "Patria."\r
-\r
-Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:\r
-\r
-"News!"\r
-\r
-And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:\r
-\r
-"My name is Eight-Pounder."\r
-\r
-In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene. This was a second\r
-piece of ordnance.\r
-\r
-The artillery-men rapidly performed their manoeuvres in force and placed\r
-this second piece in line with the first.\r
-\r
-This outlined the catastrophe.\r
-\r
-A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing\r
-point-blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and of the\r
-soldiers from the suburbs sustained the artillery.\r
-\r
-Another cannonade was audible at some distance. At the same time that\r
-the two guns were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue de la\r
-Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from the Rue Saint-Denis,\r
-the other from the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling the Saint-Merry\r
-barricade. The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.\r
-\r
-The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.\r
-\r
-One of the two pieces which was now battering the barricade on the Rue\r
-de la Chanvrerie was firing grape-shot, the other balls.\r
-\r
-The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high, and the aim\r
-was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper\r
-crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down upon the insurgents,\r
-mingled with bursts of grape-shot.\r
-\r
-The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents from\r
-the summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the\r
-interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.\r
-\r
-The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls,\r
-and from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns\r
-could venture into the street without being picked off, perhaps, even,\r
-without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the redoubt, as on\r
-the preceding evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise.\r
-\r
-"It is absolutely necessary that the inconvenience of those guns\r
-should be diminished," said Enjolras, and he shouted: "Fire on the\r
-artillery-men!"\r
-\r
-All were ready. The barricade, which had long been silent, poured forth\r
-a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort of\r
-rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke, and, at the end\r
-of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked with flame, two thirds\r
-of the gunners could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels of the\r
-cannons. Those who were left standing continued to serve the pieces with\r
-severe tranquillity, but the fire had slackened.\r
-\r
-"Things are going well now," said Bossuet to Enjolras. "Success."\r
-\r
-Enjolras shook his head and replied:\r
-\r
-"Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not be any\r
-cartridges left in the barricade."\r
-\r
-It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XV--GAVROCHE OUTSIDE\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base of the\r
-barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.\r
-\r
-Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made his\r
-way out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full\r
-cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been killed on the\r
-slope of the redoubt, into his basket.\r
-\r
-"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.\r
-\r
-Gavroche raised his face:--\r
-\r
-"I'm filling my basket, citizen."\r
-\r
-"Don't you see the grape-shot?"\r
-\r
-Gavroche replied:\r
-\r
-"Well, it is raining. What then?"\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"\r
-\r
-"Instanter," said Gavroche.\r
-\r
-And with a single bound he plunged into the street.\r
-\r
-It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind it a trail\r
-of bodies. Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the pavement,\r
-through the whole length of the street. Twenty cartouches for Gavroche\r
-meant a provision of cartridges for the barricade.\r
-\r
-The smoke in the street was like a fog. Whoever has beheld a cloud which\r
-has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments can\r
-imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows of\r
-lofty houses. It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a\r
-twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants\r
-could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other,\r
-short as it was.\r
-\r
-This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on by the\r
-commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade, was useful\r
-to Gavroche.\r
-\r
-Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size,\r
-he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. He\r
-rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.\r
-\r
-He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket\r
-in his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to\r
-another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey opens a\r
-nut.\r
-\r
-They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade, which\r
-was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.\r
-\r
-On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.\r
-\r
-"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.\r
-\r
-By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the fusillade\r
-became transparent. So that the sharpshooters of the line ranged on\r
-the outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the sharpshooters of the\r
-banlieue massed at the corner of the street suddenly pointed out to each\r
-other something moving through the smoke.\r
-\r
-At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying near\r
-a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.\r
-\r
-"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche. "They are killing my dead men for me."\r
-\r
-A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.--A third\r
-overturned his basket.\r
-\r
-Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.\r
-\r
-He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind,\r
-his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who were\r
-firing, and sang:\r
-\r
- "On est laid a Nanterre, "Men are ugly at Nanterre,\r
- C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;\r
- Et bete a Palaiseau, And dull at Palaiseau,\r
- C'est la faute a Rousseau." 'Tis the fault of Rousseau."\r
-\r
-\r
-Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had fallen\r
-from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards the\r
-fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There a fourth\r
-bullet missed him, again. Gavroche sang:\r
-\r
- "Je ne suis pas notaire, "I am not a notary,\r
- C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;\r
- Je suis un petit oiseau, I'm a little bird,\r
- C'est la faute a Rousseau." 'Tis the fault of Rousseau."\r
-\r
-A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.\r
-\r
- "Joie est mon caractere, "Joy is my character,\r
- C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;\r
- Misere est mon trousseau, Misery is my trousseau,\r
- C'est la faute a Rousseau." 'Tis the fault of Rousseau."\r
-\r
-\r
-Thus it went on for some time.\r
-\r
-It was a charming and terrible sight. Gavroche, though shot at, was\r
-teasing the fusillade. He had the air of being greatly diverted. It was\r
-the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen. To each discharge he retorted\r
-with a couplet. They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him. The\r
-National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at him. He\r
-lay down, sprang to his feet, hid in the corner of a doorway, then made\r
-a bound, disappeared, re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to\r
-the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on\r
-pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his\r
-basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their\r
-eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a child, he was not\r
-a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the\r
-invulnerable dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after him, he was more\r
-nimble than they. He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death;\r
-every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the\r
-urchin administered to it a fillip.\r
-\r
-One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest,\r
-finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child. Gavroche was seen to\r
-stagger, then he sank to the earth. The whole barricade gave vent to a\r
-cry; but there was something of Antaeus in that pygmy; for the gamin\r
-to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant to touch the earth;\r
-Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he remained in a sitting\r
-posture, a long thread of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms\r
-in the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had come, and began\r
-to sing:\r
-\r
-\r
- "Je suis tombe par terre, "I have fallen to the earth,\r
- C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;\r
- Le nez dans le ruisseau, With my nose in the gutter,\r
- C'est la faute a . . . " 'Tis the fault of . . . "\r
-\r
-\r
-He did not finish. A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him\r
-short. This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no\r
-more. This grand little soul had taken its flight.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVI--HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER\r
-\r
-At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,--for the gaze of\r
-the drama must be everywhere present,--two children were holding each\r
-other by the hand. One might have been seven years old, the other five.\r
-The rain having soaked them, they were walking along the paths on\r
-the sunny side; the elder was leading the younger; they were pale and\r
-ragged; they had the air of wild birds. The smaller of them said: "I am\r
-very hungry."\r
-\r
-The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his\r
-brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.\r
-\r
-They were alone in the garden. The garden was deserted, the gates had\r
-been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. The\r
-troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the exigencies of\r
-combat.\r
-\r
-How did those children come there? Perhaps they had escaped from some\r
-guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at\r
-the Barriere d'Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l'Observatoire, or in the\r
-neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be read:\r
-Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum, some mountebank's booth from which\r
-they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening, escaped the\r
-eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had\r
-passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the\r
-papers? The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free. To be\r
-astray and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little creatures were,\r
-in fact, lost.\r
-\r
-These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to\r
-some trouble, as the reader will recollect. Children of the Thenardiers,\r
-leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves\r
-fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by\r
-the wind. Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day, and\r
-which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been\r
-converted into rags.\r
-\r
-Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as "Abandoned\r
-children," whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again\r
-on the pavements of Paris.\r
-\r
-It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these\r
-miserable little creatures being in that garden. If the superintendents\r
-had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor\r
-little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect\r
-that, as children, they have a right to flowers.\r
-\r
-These children were there, thanks to the locked gates. They were there\r
-contrary to the regulations. They had slipped into the garden and there\r
-they remained. Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight\r
-is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the\r
-inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the\r
-outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not\r
-seen the two delinquents.\r
-\r
-It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But\r
-in June, showers do not count for much. An hour after a storm, it can\r
-hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. The earth, in\r
-summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of\r
-the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It\r
-takes everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself\r
-with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thirsty. A shower\r
-is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up. In the\r
-morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered\r
-over.\r
-\r
-Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and\r
-wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness. The gardens and\r
-meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become\r
-perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at\r
-once. Everything smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently\r
-intoxicated. The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man\r
-to have patience.\r
-\r
-There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having\r
-the azure of heaven, say: "It is enough!" dreamers absorbed in the\r
-wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to good and\r
-evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful of man, who do not\r
-understand how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of these,\r
-and the thirst of those, with the nudity of the poor in winter, with the\r
-lymphatic curvature of the little spinal column, with the pallet, the\r
-attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when they\r
-can dream beneath the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits they, and\r
-pitilessly satisfied. Strange to say, the infinite suffices them. That\r
-great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore.\r
-The finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not\r
-think about. The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine\r
-combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided that\r
-they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Joy never, ecstasy\r
-forever. Their life lies in surrendering their personality in\r
-contemplation. The history of humanity is for them only a detailed\r
-plan. All is not there; the true All remains without; what is the use\r
-of busying oneself over that detail, man? Man suffers, that is quite\r
-possible; but look at Aldebaran rising! The mother has no more milk, the\r
-new-born babe is dying. I know nothing about that, but just look at this\r
-wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under\r
-the microscope! Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you\r
-can! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives with them to such\r
-a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child. God eclipses\r
-their souls. This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and\r
-petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe. La Fontaine perhaps;\r
-magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who\r
-do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the\r
-funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the\r
-search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor\r
-the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since\r
-there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple\r
-and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are\r
-determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the songs of\r
-the birds are exhausted.\r
-\r
-These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be\r
-pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They\r
-are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being\r
-at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star\r
-on his brow.\r
-\r
-The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some, a superior\r
-philosophy. That may be; but in this superiority there is some\r
-infirmity. One may be immortal and yet limp: witness Vulcan. One may\r
-be more than man and less than man. There is incomplete immensity in\r
-nature. Who knows whether the sun is not a blind man?\r
-\r
-But then, what? In whom can we trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?\r
-Who shall dare to say that the sun is false? Thus certain geniuses,\r
-themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken? That\r
-which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that which\r
-sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little, sees badly, sees\r
-not at all? Is not this a desperate state of things? No. But what is\r
-there, then, above the sun? The god.\r
-\r
-On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o'clock in the morning, the\r
-Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. The quincunxes and\r
-flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty into the sunlight. The\r
-branches, wild with the brilliant glow of midday, seemed endeavoring\r
-to embrace. In the sycamores there was an uproar of linnets, sparrows\r
-triumphed, woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees, administering\r
-little pecks on the bark. The flower-beds accepted the legitimate\r
-royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is that which\r
-emanates from whiteness. The peppery odor of the carnations was\r
-perceptible. The old crows of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall\r
-trees. The sun gilded, empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips,\r
-which are nothing but all the varieties of flame made into flowers. All\r
-around the banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers,\r
-hummed. All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse,\r
-by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined to\r
-profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged in the\r
-charming threat of flying low. He who was there aspired to happiness;\r
-life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor, help, assistance,\r
-paternity, caress, dawn. The thoughts which fell from heaven were as\r
-sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one kisses it.\r
-\r
-The statues under the trees, white and nude, had robes of shadow pierced\r
-with light; these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight; rays hung\r
-from them on all sides. Around the great fountain, the earth was already\r
-dried up to the point of being burnt. There was sufficient breeze to\r
-raise little insurrections of dust here and there. A few yellow leaves,\r
-left over from the autumn, chased each other merrily, and seemed to be\r
-playing tricks on each other.\r
-\r
-This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring about it.\r
-Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious, beneath creation,\r
-of the enormous size of the source; in all these breaths permeated with\r
-love, in this interchange of reverberations and reflections, in this\r
-marvellous expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of liquid\r
-gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible; and, behind this\r
-splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that\r
-millionaire of stars.\r
-\r
-Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain,\r
-there was not a grain of ashes. The clumps of blossoms had just been\r
-bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish, which springs\r
-from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. This\r
-magnificence was cleanly. The grand silence of happy nature filled the\r
-garden. A celestial silence that is compatible with a thousand sorts of\r
-music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the flutterings of\r
-the breeze. All the harmony of the season was complete in one gracious\r
-whole; the entrances and exits of spring took place in proper order; the\r
-lilacs ended; the jasmines began; some flowers were tardy, some insects\r
-in advance of their time; the van-guard of the red June butterflies\r
-fraternized with the rear-guard of the white butterflies of May. The\r
-plantain trees were getting their new skins. The breeze hollowed out\r
-undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. It\r
-was splendid. A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing\r
-through the fence, said: "Here is the Spring presenting arms and in full\r
-uniform."\r
-\r
-All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; this was its hour;\r
-the great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth\r
-on earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly. God was serving\r
-the universal repast. Each creature had his pasture or his mess. The\r
-ring-dove found his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet, the\r
-goldfinch found chickweed, the red-breast found worms, the green finch\r
-found flies, the fly found infusoriae, the bee found flowers. They ate\r
-each other somewhat, it is true, which is the misery of evil mixed with\r
-good; but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.\r
-\r
-The two little abandoned creatures had arrived in the vicinity of the\r
-grand fountain, and, rather bewildered by all this light, they tried to\r
-hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the weak in the presence\r
-of even impersonal magnificence; and they kept behind the swans' hutch.\r
-\r
-Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort\r
-of tumultuous death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows, which\r
-were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly. Smoke hung over\r
-the roofs in the direction of the Halles. A bell, which had the air of\r
-an appeal, was ringing in the distance.\r
-\r
-These children did not appear to notice these noises. The little one\r
-repeated from time to time: "I am hungry."\r
-\r
-Almost at the same instant with the children, another couple approached\r
-the great basin. They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years of age,\r
-who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six. No doubt, a father\r
-and his son. The little man of six had a big brioche.\r
-\r
-At that epoch, certain houses abutting on the river, in the Rues Madame\r
-and d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxembourg garden, of which the lodgers\r
-enjoyed the use when the gates were shut, a privilege which was\r
-suppressed later on. This father and son came from one of these houses,\r
-no doubt.\r
-\r
-The two poor little creatures watched "that gentleman" approaching, and\r
-hid themselves a little more thoroughly.\r
-\r
-He was a bourgeois. The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had one day\r
-heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin, counselling\r
-his son "to avoid excesses." He had an affable and haughty air, and a\r
-mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. This mechanical\r
-smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth\r
-rather than the soul. The child, with his brioche, which he had bitten\r
-into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. The child was dressed\r
-as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection, and the father had\r
-remained clad as a bourgeois out of prudence.\r
-\r
-Father and son halted near the fountain where two swans were sporting.\r
-This bourgeois appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans.\r
-He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like them.\r
-\r
-For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their principal\r
-talent, and they were superb.\r
-\r
-If the two poor little beings had listened and if they had been of an\r
-age to understand, they might have gathered the words of this grave man.\r
-The father was saying to his son:\r
-\r
-"The sage lives content with little. Look at me, my son. I do not love\r
-pomp. I am never seen in clothes decked with gold lace and stones; I\r
-leave that false splendor to badly organized souls."\r
-\r
-Here the deep shouts which proceeded from the direction of the Halles\r
-burst out with fresh force of bell and uproar.\r
-\r
-"What is that?" inquired the child.\r
-\r
-The father replied:\r
-\r
-"It is the Saturnalia."\r
-\r
-All at once, he caught sight of the two little ragged boys behind the\r
-green swan-hutch.\r
-\r
-"There is the beginning," said he.\r
-\r
-And, after a pause, he added:\r
-\r
-"Anarchy is entering this garden."\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, his son took a bite of his brioche, spit it out, and,\r
-suddenly burst out crying.\r
-\r
-"What are you crying about?" demanded his father.\r
-\r
-"I am not hungry any more," said the child.\r
-\r
-The father's smile became more accentuated.\r
-\r
-"One does not need to be hungry in order to eat a cake."\r
-\r
-"My cake tires me. It is stale."\r
-\r
-"Don't you want any more of it?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-The father pointed to the swans.\r
-\r
-"Throw it to those palmipeds."\r
-\r
-The child hesitated. A person may not want any more of his cake; but\r
-that is no reason for giving it away.\r
-\r
-The father went on:\r
-\r
-"Be humane. You must have compassion on animals."\r
-\r
-And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into the basin.\r
-\r
-The cake fell very near the edge.\r
-\r
-The swans were far away, in the centre of the basin, and busy with some\r
-prey. They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.\r
-\r
-The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being wasted, and\r
-moved by this useless shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic agitation,\r
-which finally attracted the attention of the swans.\r
-\r
-They perceived something floating, steered for the edge like ships, as\r
-they are, and slowly directed their course toward the brioche, with the\r
-stupid majesty which befits white creatures.\r
-\r
-"The swans [cygnes] understand signs [signes]," said the bourgeois,\r
-delighted to make a jest.\r
-\r
-At that moment, the distant tumult of the city underwent another sudden\r
-increase. This time it was sinister. There are some gusts of wind which\r
-speak more distinctly than others. The one which was blowing at that\r
-moment brought clearly defined drum-beats, clamors, platoon firing, and\r
-the dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. This coincided with a\r
-black cloud which suddenly veiled the sun.\r
-\r
-The swans had not yet reached the brioche.\r
-\r
-"Let us return home," said the father, "they are attacking the\r
-Tuileries."\r
-\r
-He grasped his son's hand again. Then he continued:\r
-\r
-"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is but the distance which\r
-separates Royalty from the peerage; that is not far. Shots will soon\r
-rain down."\r
-\r
-He glanced at the cloud.\r
-\r
-"Perhaps it is rain itself that is about to shower down; the sky\r
-is joining in; the younger branch is condemned. Let us return home\r
-quickly."\r
-\r
-"I should like to see the swans eat the brioche," said the child.\r
-\r
-The father replied:\r
-\r
-"That would be imprudent."\r
-\r
-And he led his little bourgeois away.\r
-\r
-The son, regretting the swans, turned his head back toward the basin\r
-until a corner of the quincunxes concealed it from him.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, the two little waifs had approached the brioche at\r
-the same time as the swans. It was floating on the water. The smaller of\r
-them stared at the cake, the elder gazed after the retreating bourgeois.\r
-\r
-Father and son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to the grand\r
-flight of steps near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.\r
-\r
-As soon as they had disappeared from view, the elder child hastily\r
-flung himself flat on his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin, and\r
-clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over the water, on the\r
-verge of falling in, he stretched out his right hand with his stick\r
-towards the cake. The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste, and in so\r
-doing, they produced an effect of their breasts which was of service to\r
-the little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans, and one of\r
-these gentle concentric undulations softly floated the brioche towards\r
-the child's wand. Just as the swans came up, the stick touched the cake.\r
-The child gave it a brisk rap, drew in the brioche, frightened away the\r
-swans, seized the cake, and sprang to his feet. The cake was wet;\r
-but they were hungry and thirsty. The elder broke the cake into two\r
-portions, a large one and a small one, took the small one for himself,\r
-gave the large one to his brother, and said to him:\r
-\r
-"Ram that into your muzzle."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVII--MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT\r
-\r
-Marius dashed out of the barricade, Combeferre followed him. But he\r
-was too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the basket of\r
-cartridges; Marius bore the child.\r
-\r
-"Alas!" he thought, "that which the father had done for his father, he\r
-was requiting to the son; only, Thenardier had brought back his father\r
-alive; he was bringing back the child dead."\r
-\r
-When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his face,\r
-like the child, was inundated with blood.\r
-\r
-At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had grazed\r
-his head; he had not noticed it.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with it bandaged Marius' brow.\r
-\r
-They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and spread over the\r
-two corpses the black shawl. There was enough of it for both the old man\r
-and the child.\r
-\r
-Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he had\r
-brought in.\r
-\r
-This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his stone post.\r
-When Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.\r
-\r
-"Here's a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras.\r
-"He finds a way of not fighting in this barricade."\r
-\r
-"Which does not prevent him from defending it," responded Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"Heroism has its originals," resumed Combeferre.\r
-\r
-And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:\r
-\r
-"He is another sort from Father Mabeuf."\r
-\r
-One thing which must be noted is, that the fire which was battering the\r
-barricade hardly disturbed the interior. Those who have never traversed\r
-the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea of the singular\r
-moments of tranquillity mingled with these convulsions. Men go and\r
-come, they talk, they jest, they lounge. Some one whom we know heard a\r
-combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot: "We are here as\r
-at a bachelor breakfast." The redoubt of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we\r
-repeat, seemed very calm within. All mutations and all phases had been,\r
-or were about to be, exhausted. The position, from critical, had become\r
-menacing, and, from menacing, was probably about to become desperate. In\r
-proportion as the situation grew gloomy, the glow of heroism empurpled\r
-the barricade more and more. Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it,\r
-in the attitude of a young Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the\r
-sombre genius, Epidotas.\r
-\r
-Combeferre, wearing an apron, was dressing the wounds: Bossuet and\r
-Feuilly were making cartridges with the powder-flask picked up by\r
-Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to Feuilly: "We are soon\r
-to take the diligence for another planet"; Courfeyrac was disposing and\r
-arranging on some paving-stones which he had reserved for himself near\r
-Enjolras, a complete arsenal, his sword-cane, his gun, two holster\r
-pistols, and a cudgel, with the care of a young girl setting a small\r
-dunkerque in order. Jean Valjean stared silently at the wall opposite\r
-him. An artisan was fastening Mother Hucheloup's big straw hat on his\r
-head with a string, "for fear of sun-stroke," as he said. The young\r
-men from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves,\r
-as though eager to speak patois for the last time. Joly, who had taken\r
-Widow Hucheloup's mirror from the wall, was examining his tongue in it.\r
-Some combatants, having discovered a few crusts of rather mouldy bread,\r
-in a drawer, were eagerly devouring them. Marius was disturbed with\r
-regard to what his father was about to say to him.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XVIII--THE VULTURE BECOME PREY\r
-\r
-We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to barricades.\r
-Nothing which is characteristic of that surprising war of the streets\r
-should be omitted.\r
-\r
-Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquillity which we have\r
-just mentioned, the barricade, for those who are inside it, remains,\r
-none the less, a vision.\r
-\r
-There is something of the apocalypse in civil war, all the mists of the\r
-unknown are commingled with fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes,\r
-and any one who has passed through a barricade thinks he has traversed a\r
-dream.\r
-\r
-The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed out\r
-in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences; they are both\r
-more and less than life. On emerging from a barricade, one no longer\r
-knows what one has seen there. One has been terrible, but one knows\r
-it not. One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas which had human\r
-faces; one's head has been in the light of the future. There were\r
-corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect. The hours were\r
-colossal and seemed hours of eternity. One has lived in death. Shadows\r
-have passed by. What were they?\r
-\r
-One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a deafening\r
-horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open mouths which\r
-shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace; one was in the\r
-midst of smoke, of night, perhaps. One fancied that one had touched the\r
-sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one's\r
-finger nails. One no longer remembers anything.\r
-\r
-Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.\r
-\r
-All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock\r
-striking the hour became audible.\r
-\r
-"It is midday," said Combeferre.\r
-\r
-The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang to his\r
-feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering shout:\r
-\r
-"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the\r
-roofs with them. Half the men to their guns, the other half to the\r
-paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost."\r
-\r
-A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made their\r
-appearance in battle array at the end of the street.\r
-\r
-This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? The\r
-attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition of\r
-the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.\r
-\r
-They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which M.\r
-Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."\r
-\r
-Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar\r
-to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape\r
-is impossible. In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones which\r
-Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been carried up to\r
-the first floor and the attic, and before a second minute had elapsed,\r
-these stones, artistically set one upon the other, walled up the\r
-sash-window on the first floor and the windows in the roof to half their\r
-height. A few loop-holes carefully planned by Feuilly, the principal\r
-architect, allowed of the passage of the gun-barrels. This armament of\r
-the windows could be effected all the more easily since the firing of\r
-grape-shot had ceased. The two cannons were now discharging ball\r
-against the centre of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if\r
-possible, a breach for the assault.\r
-\r
-When the stones destined to the final defence were in place, Enjolras\r
-had the bottles which he had set under the table where Mabeuf lay,\r
-carried to the first floor.\r
-\r
-"Who is to drink that?" Bossuet asked him.\r
-\r
-"They," replied Enjolras.\r
-\r
-Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron\r
-cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.\r
-\r
-The fortress was complete. The barricade was the rampart, the wine-shop\r
-was the dungeon. With the stones which remained they stopped up the\r
-outlet.\r
-\r
-As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing of\r
-their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants\r
-combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose\r
-themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more than in\r
-reality, and take their ease. The preparations for attack are always\r
-made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which, the lightning\r
-strikes.\r
-\r
-This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything and\r
-to perfect everything. He felt that, since such men were to die, their\r
-death ought to be a masterpiece.\r
-\r
-He said to Marius: "We are the two leaders. I will give the last orders\r
-inside. Do you remain outside and observe."\r
-\r
-Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.\r
-\r
-Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance, as the\r
-reader will remember, nailed up.\r
-\r
-"No splashing of the wounded," he said.\r
-\r
-He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly\r
-tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.\r
-\r
-"On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase.\r
-Have you them?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said Feuilly.\r
-\r
-"How many?"\r
-\r
-"Two axes and a pole-axe."\r
-\r
-"That is good. There are now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. How\r
-many guns are there?"\r
-\r
-"Thirty-four."\r
-\r
-"Eight too many. Keep those eight guns loaded like the rest and at\r
-hand. Swords and pistols in your belts. Twenty men to the barricade. Six\r
-ambushed in the attic windows, and at the window on the first floor to\r
-fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in the stones. Let not a\r
-single worker remain inactive here. Presently, when the drum beats the\r
-assault, let the twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. The first to\r
-arrive will have the best places."\r
-\r
-These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:\r
-\r
-"I am not forgetting you."\r
-\r
-And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:\r
-\r
-"The last man to leave this room will smash the skull of this spy."\r
-\r
-"Here?" inquired a voice.\r
-\r
-"No, let us not mix their corpses with our own. The little barricade of\r
-the Mondetour lane can be scaled. It is only four feet high. The man is\r
-well pinioned. He shall be taken thither and put to death."\r
-\r
-There was some one who was more impassive at that moment than Enjolras,\r
-it was Javert. Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.\r
-\r
-He had been lost among the group of insurgents. He stepped forth and\r
-said to Enjolras:\r
-\r
-"You are the commander?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"You thanked me a while ago."\r
-\r
-"In the name of the Republic. The barricade has two saviors, Marius\r
-Pontmercy and yourself."\r
-\r
-"Do you think that I deserve a recompense?"\r
-\r
-"Certainly."\r
-\r
-"Well, I request one."\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-"That I may blow that man's brains out."\r
-\r
-Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an almost imperceptible\r
-movement, and said:\r
-\r
-"That is just."\r
-\r
-As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load his rifle; he cut his eyes\r
-about him:\r
-\r
-"No objections."\r
-\r
-And he turned to Jean Valjean:\r
-\r
-"Take the spy."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert, by seating\r
-himself on the end of the table. He seized the pistol, and a faint click\r
-announced that he had cocked it.\r
-\r
-Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became audible.\r
-\r
-"Take care!" shouted Marius from the top of the barricade.\r
-\r
-Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar to\r
-him, and gazing intently at the insurgents, he said to them:\r
-\r
-"You are in no better case than I am."\r
-\r
-"All out!" shouted Enjolras.\r
-\r
-The insurgents poured out tumultuously, and, as they went, received in\r
-the back,--may we be permitted the expression,--this sally of Javert's:\r
-\r
-"We shall meet again shortly!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XIX--JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE\r
-\r
-When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope which\r
-fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body, and the knot of\r
-which was under the table. After this he made him a sign to rise.\r
-\r
-Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of\r
-enchained authority is condensed.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take a beast of\r
-burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter after him, emerged\r
-from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert, with his impeded limbs, could\r
-take only very short steps.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.\r
-\r
-In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. The\r
-insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent, had their\r
-backs turned to these two.\r
-\r
-Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of the\r
-barricade, saw them pass. This group of victim and executioner was\r
-illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold for\r
-a single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the little\r
-entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.\r
-\r
-When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone in the\r
-lane. No one saw them. Among the heap they could distinguish a livid\r
-face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and the half nude breast of a\r
-woman. It was Eponine. The corner of the houses hid them from the\r
-insurgents. The corpses carried away from the barricade formed a\r
-terrible pile a few paces distant.\r
-\r
-Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in a low\r
-tone:\r
-\r
-"It strikes me that I know that girl."\r
-\r
-Then he turned to Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert a look\r
-which it required no words to interpret: "Javert, it is I."\r
-\r
-Javert replied:\r
-\r
-"Take your revenge."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.\r
-\r
-"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right. That suits you\r
-better."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then he\r
-cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut the cord on his\r
-feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:\r
-\r
-"You are free."\r
-\r
-Javert was not easily astonished. Still, master of himself though\r
-he was, he could not repress a start. He remained open-mouthed and\r
-motionless.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean continued:\r
-\r
-"I do not think that I shall escape from this place. But if, by chance,\r
-I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme\r
-Arme, No. 7."\r
-\r
-Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner of his\r
-mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:\r
-\r
-"Have a care."\r
-\r
-"Go," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Javert began again:\r
-\r
-"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"\r
-\r
-"Number 7."\r
-\r
-Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."\r
-\r
-He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness\r
-between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and, supporting\r
-his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction of the Halles.\r
-Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:\r
-\r
-A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:\r
-\r
-"You annoy me. Kill me, rather."\r
-\r
-Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean\r
-as "thou."\r
-\r
-"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Javert retreated slowly. A moment later he turned the corner of the Rue\r
-des Precheurs.\r
-\r
-When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.\r
-\r
-Then he returned to the barricade and said:\r
-\r
-"It is done."\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.\r
-\r
-Marius, more intent on the outside than on the interior, had not, up to\r
-that time, taken a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark background\r
-of the tap-room.\r
-\r
-When he beheld him in broad daylight, striding over the barricade in\r
-order to proceed to his death, he recognized him. Something suddenly\r
-recurred to his mind. He recalled the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise,\r
-and the two pistols which the latter had handed to him and which he,\r
-Marius, had used in this very barricade, and not only did he recall his\r
-face, but his name as well.\r
-\r
-This recollection was misty and troubled, however, like all his ideas.\r
-\r
-It was not an affirmation that he made, but a question which he put to\r
-himself:\r
-\r
-"Is not that the inspector of police who told me that his name was\r
-Javert?"\r
-\r
-Perhaps there was still time to intervene in behalf of that man. But, in\r
-the first place, he must know whether this was Javert.\r
-\r
-Marius called to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself at the other\r
-extremity of the barricade:\r
-\r
-"Enjolras!"\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"What is the name of yonder man?"\r
-\r
-"What man?"\r
-\r
-"The police agent. Do you know his name?"\r
-\r
-"Of course. He told us."\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-"Javert."\r
-\r
-Marius sprang to his feet.\r
-\r
-At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried: "It is done."\r
-\r
-A gloomy chill traversed Marius' heart.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XX--THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE\r
-WRONG\r
-\r
-The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.\r
-\r
-Everything contributed to its tragic majesty at that supreme moment; a\r
-thousand mysterious crashes in the air, the breath of armed masses set\r
-in movement in the streets which were not visible, the intermittent\r
-gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock of artillery on the march, the firing\r
-by squads, and the cannonades crossing each other in the labyrinth\r
-of Paris, the smokes of battle mounting all gilded above the roofs,\r
-indescribable and vaguely terrible cries, lightnings of menace\r
-everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which now had the accents of a\r
-sob, the mildness of the weather, the splendor of the sky filled with\r
-sun and clouds, the beauty of the day, and the alarming silence of the\r
-houses.\r
-\r
-For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue\r
-de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed,\r
-windows closed, shutters closed.\r
-\r
-In those days, so different from those in which we live, when the hour\r
-was come, when the people wished to put an end to a situation, which had\r
-lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a legal country, when\r
-universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city consented\r
-to the tearing up of the pavements, when insurrection made the\r
-bourgeoisie smile by whispering its password in its ear, then the\r
-inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated with the revolt, so to speak, was\r
-the auxiliary of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the\r
-improvised fortress which rested on it. When the situation was not\r
-ripe, when the insurrection was not decidedly admitted, when the masses\r
-disowned the movement, all was over with the combatants, the city was\r
-changed into a desert around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges\r
-were nailed up, and the street turned into a defile to help the army to\r
-take the barricade.\r
-\r
-A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly than\r
-it chooses. Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand! A people does not\r
-let itself go at random. Then it abandons the insurrection to itself.\r
-The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague. A house is an\r
-escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears,\r
-sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge.\r
-It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.\r
-They seem dead, they are living. Life which is, as it were, suspended\r
-there, persists there. No one has gone out of them for four and twenty\r
-hours, but no one is missing from them. In the interior of that rock,\r
-people go and come, go to bed and rise again; they are a family party\r
-there; there they eat and drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! Fear\r
-excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is mixed with it, an\r
-extenuating circumstance. Sometimes, even, and this has been actually\r
-seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change into fury, as prudence\r
-does into rage; hence this wise saying: "The enraged moderates." There\r
-are outbursts of supreme terror, whence springs wrath like a mournful\r
-smoke.--"What do these people want? What have they come there to do?\r
-Let them get out of the scrape. So much the worse for them. It is their\r
-fault. They are only getting what they deserve. It does not concern\r
-us. Here is our poor street all riddled with balls. They are a pack of\r
-rascals. Above all things, don't open the door."--And the house assumes\r
-the air of a tomb. The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of\r
-that house; he sees the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if\r
-he cries, he knows that they are listening to him, and that no one will\r
-come; there stand walls which might protect him, there are men who might\r
-save him; and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels\r
-of stone.\r
-\r
-Whom shall he reproach?\r
-\r
-No one and every one.\r
-\r
-The incomplete times in which we live.\r
-\r
-It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into\r
-revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and\r
-from Minerva turns to Pallas.\r
-\r
-The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits\r
-it; it almost always comes too soon. Then it becomes resigned, and\r
-stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph. It serves those who\r
-deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates\r
-them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. It is\r
-indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.\r
-\r
-Is this ingratitude, however?\r
-\r
-Yes, from the point of view of the human race.\r
-\r
-No, from the point of view of the individual.\r
-\r
-Progress is man's mode of existence. The general life of the human race\r
-is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called\r
-Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial\r
-journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting\r
-places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it\r
-meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled\r
-on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the\r
-poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the\r
-human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken\r
-that slumbering Progress.\r
-\r
-"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of\r
-these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption\r
-of movement for the death of Being.\r
-\r
-He who despairs is in the wrong. Progress infallibly awakes, and, in\r
-short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep, for it has\r
-increased in size. When we behold it erect once more, we find it taller.\r
-To be always peaceful does not depend on progress any more than it does\r
-on the stream; erect no barriers, cast in no boulders; obstacles make\r
-water froth and humanity boil. Hence arise troubles; but after these\r
-troubles, we recognize the fact that ground has been gained. Until\r
-order, which is nothing else than universal peace, has been established,\r
-until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions as its\r
-halting-places.\r
-\r
-What, then, is progress? We have just enunciated it; the permanent life\r
-of the peoples.\r
-\r
-Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals offers\r
-resistance to the eternal life of the human race.\r
-\r
-Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct\r
-interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and\r
-defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary\r
-life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to\r
-the future. The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth,\r
-is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal,\r
-after all, who will have their turn later on.--"I exist," murmurs that\r
-some one whose name is All. "I am young and in love, I am old and I\r
-wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am\r
-successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the\r
-government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all\r
-this, I desire to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a\r
-profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.\r
-\r
-Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when it makes\r
-war. It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure, battle,\r
-from the lie of yesterday. It, the future, behaves like the past. It,\r
-pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. It complicates its heroism with\r
-a violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a\r
-violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which\r
-it is fatally punished. The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old\r
-military code in its fist; it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it\r
-suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness. It makes\r
-use of death, a serious matter. It seems as though Utopia had no longer\r
-any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force. It\r
-strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every blade has two\r
-edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.\r
-\r
-Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is\r
-impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the\r
-glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia. Even when\r
-they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in\r
-failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in\r
-accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic\r
-defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other\r
-sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is\r
-greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.\r
-\r
-It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the\r
-vanquished.\r
-\r
-We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they\r
-fail.\r
-\r
-Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems\r
-a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their\r
-ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are\r
-reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning\r
-social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs,\r
-of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow\r
-in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout\r
-to them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply:\r
-"That is because our barricade is made of good intentions."\r
-\r
-The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution. In short, let us\r
-agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is\r
-a good will which renders society uneasy. But it depends on society\r
-to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make our appeal.\r
-No violent remedy is necessary. To study evil amiably, to prove its\r
-existence, then to cure it. It is to this that we invite it.\r
-\r
-However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men,\r
-who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are\r
-striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal,\r
-are august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they\r
-accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the\r
-appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who answers\r
-to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager, they enter the\r
-tomb. And this hopeless combat, this stoical disappearance they accept\r
-in order to bring about the supreme and universal consequences, the\r
-magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the 14th of July,\r
-1789; these soldiers are priests. The French revolution is an act of\r
-God.\r
-\r
-Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to the\r
-distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,--there are accepted\r
-revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused\r
-revolutions, which are called riots.\r
-\r
-An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its\r
-examination before the people. If the people lets fall a black ball, the\r
-idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.\r
-\r
-Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it, is\r
-not the thing for the peoples. Nations have not always and at every hour\r
-the temperament of heroes and martyrs.\r
-\r
-They are positive. A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them, in the\r
-first place, because it often results in a catastrophe, in the second\r
-place, because it always has an abstraction as its point of departure.\r
-\r
-Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal, and for\r
-the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus sacrifice\r
-themselves. An insurrection is an enthusiasm. Enthusiasm may wax wroth;\r
-hence the appeal to arms. But every insurrection, which aims at a\r
-government or a regime, aims higher. Thus, for instance, and we\r
-insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and, in\r
-particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie were\r
-combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe. The majority of them,\r
-when talking freely, did justice to this king who stood midway between\r
-monarchy and revolution; no one hated him. But they attacked the younger\r
-branch of the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked its\r
-elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they wished to overturn in\r
-overturning royalty in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation\r
-of man over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe.\r
-Paris without a king has as result the world without despots. This is\r
-the manner in which they reasoned. Their aim was distant no doubt,\r
-vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts; but it was\r
-great.\r
-\r
-Thus it is. And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are\r
-almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which,\r
-after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves\r
-into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are\r
-about to do. Who knows? We may succeed. We are few in number, we have a\r
-whole army arrayed against us; but we are defending right, the natural\r
-law, the sovereignty of each one over himself from which no abdication\r
-is possible, justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the\r
-three hundred Spartans. We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas.\r
-And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw\r
-back, and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an\r
-unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again,\r
-the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance; and in the\r
-event of the worst, Thermopylae.\r
-\r
-These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck,\r
-and we have just explained why. The crowd is restive in the presence of\r
-the impulses of paladins. Heavy masses, the multitudes which are fragile\r
-because of their very weight, fear adventures; and there is a touch of\r
-adventure in the ideal.\r
-\r
-Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very\r
-friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Sometimes the\r
-stomach paralyzes the heart.\r
-\r
-The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from\r
-the stomach than other nations: she more easily knots the rope about her\r
-loins. She is the first awake, the last asleep. She marches forwards.\r
-She is a seeker.\r
-\r
-This arises from the fact that she is an artist.\r
-\r
-The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic, the same as the\r
-beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are\r
-also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to see the light. That is why\r
-the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne by\r
-Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who handed it on to France. Divine,\r
-illuminating nations of scouts! Vitaelampada tradunt.\r
-\r
-It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of\r
-its progress. The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity\r
-of imagination. Only, a civilizing people should remain a manly people.\r
-Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no. Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a\r
-bastard. He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be\r
-artistic. In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must\r
-sublime. On this condition, one gives to the human race the pattern of\r
-the ideal.\r
-\r
-The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science. It is\r
-through science that it will realize that august vision of the poets,\r
-the socially beautiful. Eden will be reconstructed by A+B. At the point\r
-which civilization has now reached, the exact is a necessary element\r
-of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but\r
-completed by the scientific organ; dreams must be calculated. Art, which\r
-is the conqueror, should have for support science, which is the walker;\r
-the solidity of the creature which is ridden is of importance. The\r
-modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its\r
-vehicle; Alexander on the elephant.\r
-\r
-Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit to\r
-guide civilization. Genuflection before the idol or before money wastes\r
-away the muscles which walk and the will which advances. Hieratic or\r
-mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance, lowers its\r
-horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence,\r
-at once both human and divine of the universal goal, which makes\r
-missionaries of nations. Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal.\r
-Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of\r
-the centuries, halos of civilization.\r
-\r
-France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy. She is\r
-Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. Moreover,\r
-she is good. She gives herself. Oftener than is the case with other\r
-races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice. Only, this\r
-humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. And therein lies the\r
-great peril for those who run when she desires only to walk, or who walk\r
-on when she desires to halt. France has her relapses into materialism,\r
-and, at certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain\r
-have no longer anything which recalls French greatness and are of the\r
-dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is to be done in\r
-such a case? The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her\r
-freaks of pettiness. That is all.\r
-\r
-To this there is nothing to say. Peoples, like planets, possess the\r
-right to an eclipse. And all is well, provided that the light\r
-returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and\r
-resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is identical\r
-with the persistence of the _I_.\r
-\r
-Let us state these facts calmly. Death on the barricade or the tomb in\r
-exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. The real name of\r
-devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned allow themselves to\r
-be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us\r
-confine ourselves to entreating great nations not to retreat too far,\r
-when they do retreat. One must not push too far in descent under pretext\r
-of a return to reason.\r
-\r
-Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists;\r
-but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom. The life of the moment has\r
-its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. Alas! the\r
-fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in\r
-history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes\r
-the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked\r
-how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:\r
-"Because I love statesmen."\r
-\r
-One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.\r
-\r
-A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing else\r
-than a convulsion towards the ideal. Progress trammelled is sickly, and\r
-is subject to these tragic epilepsies. With that malady of progress,\r
-civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact in our passage. This\r
-is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr'acte of that drama\r
-whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is\r
-Progress.\r
-\r
-Progress!\r
-\r
-The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought; and,\r
-at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which it\r
-contains having still more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps,\r
-permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its\r
-light to shine through.\r
-\r
-The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from\r
-one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its\r
-intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from\r
-the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,\r
-from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.\r
-Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the\r
-beginning, the angel at the end.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XXI--THE HEROES\r
-\r
-All at once, the drum beat the charge.\r
-\r
-The attack was a hurricane. On the evening before, in the darkness,\r
-the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa. Now, in broad\r
-daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible,\r
-rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the\r
-roar, the army hurled itself on the barricade. Fury now became skill.\r
-A powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular\r
-intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot,\r
-and supported by serried masses which could be heard though not seen,\r
-debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating, trumpets\r
-braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head, and,\r
-imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight for the barricade\r
-with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.\r
-\r
-The wall held firm.\r
-\r
-The insurgents fired impetuously. The barricade once scaled had a mane\r
-of lightning flashes. The assault was so furious, that for one moment,\r
-it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the\r
-lion shakes off the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as\r
-the cliff is covered with foam, to re-appear, a moment later, beetling,\r
-black and formidable.\r
-\r
-The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street,\r
-unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible\r
-discharge of musketry. Any one who has seen fireworks will recall the\r
-sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. Let\r
-the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but\r
-horizontal, bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaien at the tip of each\r
-one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men one after another\r
-from its clusters of lightning. The barricade was underneath it.\r
-\r
-On both sides, the resolution was equal. The bravery exhibited there\r
-was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity\r
-which began by the sacrifice of self.\r
-\r
-This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave.\r
-The troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of\r
-fighting. The acceptance of the death agony in the flower of youth and\r
-in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. In this fray, each\r
-one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. The street was\r
-strewn with corpses.\r
-\r
-The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at the\r
-other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved\r
-and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after the other, under\r
-his embrasure, without having even seen him; Marius fought unprotected.\r
-He made himself a target. He stood with more than half his body above\r
-the breastworks. There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious\r
-man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in\r
-action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. In battle he\r
-was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in\r
-firing a gun.\r
-\r
-The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. In\r
-this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac was bare-headed.\r
-\r
-"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him.\r
-\r
-Courfeyrac replied:\r
-\r
-"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."\r
-\r
-Or they uttered haughty comments.\r
-\r
-"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those men,--[and\r
-he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging\r
-to the old army]--who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid\r
-us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals, and\r
-who abandon us!"\r
-\r
-And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.\r
-\r
-"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the\r
-stars, from a great distance."\r
-\r
-The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that\r
-one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.\r
-\r
-The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position.\r
-They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon\r
-the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in\r
-the escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably\r
-buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men\r
-hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly\r
-recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably\r
-nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army\r
-closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the wine-press.\r
-\r
-One assault followed another. The horror of the situation kept\r
-increasing.\r
-\r
-Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that Rue de la\r
-Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard, ragged,\r
-exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat for four and twenty hours, who\r
-had not slept, who had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling\r
-in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, nearly all\r
-of whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged with black and\r
-blood-stained linen, with holes in their clothes from which the blood\r
-trickled, and who were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords,\r
-became Titans. The barricade was ten times attacked, approached,\r
-assailed, scaled, and never captured.\r
-\r
-In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to imagine\r
-fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze at the\r
-conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace;\r
-there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances were extraordinary.\r
-The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants flamed forth\r
-there, and it was formidable to behold the going and coming in that red\r
-glow of those salamanders of the fray.\r
-\r
-The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we\r
-renounce all attempts at depicting. The epic alone has the right to fill\r
-twelve thousand verses with a battle.\r
-\r
-One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism, the most\r
-redoubtable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of\r
-Swords.\r
-\r
-They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows of\r
-the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from above,\r
-from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses, from the\r
-windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows, whither some had\r
-crawled. They were one against sixty.\r
-\r
-The facade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous. The window,\r
-tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing now\r
-but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.\r
-\r
-Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed;\r
-Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the breast at\r
-the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier, had only time to\r
-cast a glance to heaven when he expired.\r
-\r
-Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in the\r
-head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood, and one would\r
-have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.\r
-\r
-Enjolras alone was not struck. When he had no longer any weapon, he\r
-reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust some arm\r
-or other into his fist. All he had left was the stumps of four swords;\r
-one more than Francois I. at Marignan. Homer says: "Diomedes cuts\r
-the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy Arisba;\r
-Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios,\r
-Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the blameless\r
-Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius; Antilochus, Ablerus;\r
-Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene; and Teucer, Aretaon.\r
-Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus' pike. Agamemnon, king\r
-of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos, born in the rocky city which\r
-is laved by the sounding river Satnois." In our old poems of exploits,\r
-Esplandian attacks the giant marquis Swantibore with a cobbler's\r
-shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter defends himself by stoning the\r
-hero with towers which he plucks up by the roots. Our ancient mural\r
-frescoes show us the two Dukes of Bretagne and Bourbon, armed,\r
-emblazoned and crested in war-like guise, on horseback and approaching\r
-each other, their battle-axes in hand, masked with iron, gloved with\r
-iron, booted with iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the other draped\r
-in azure: Bretagne with his lion between the two horns of his crown,\r
-Bourbon helmeted with a monster fleur de lys on his visor. But, in order\r
-to be superb, it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion,\r
-to have in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles,\r
-father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a good suit of\r
-mail, a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it suffices to give\r
-one's life for a conviction or a loyalty. This ingenuous little\r
-soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who prowls with his\r
-clasp-knife by his side, around the children's nurses in the Luxembourg\r
-garden, this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book,\r
-a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,--take both of them,\r
-breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face in the\r
-Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray, and let the\r
-one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let both of\r
-them imagine that they are fighting for their country; the struggle will\r
-be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit and this sawbones\r
-in conflict will produce in that grand epic field where humanity\r
-is striving, will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, King of Lycia,\r
-tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the immense body of Ajax, equal to\r
-the gods.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XXII--FOOT TO FOOT\r
-\r
-When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive, except Enjolras\r
-and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade, the centre, which\r
-had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly and Combeferre,\r
-gave way. The cannon, though it had not effected a practicable breach,\r
-had made a rather large hollow in the middle of the redoubt; there, the\r
-summit of the wall had disappeared before the balls, and had crumbled\r
-away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now inside, now outside, had,\r
-as it accumulated, formed two piles in the nature of slopes on the two\r
-sides of the barrier, one on the inside, the other on the outside. The\r
-exterior slope presented an inclined plane to the attack.\r
-\r
-A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded. The\r
-mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run, came up with\r
-irresistible force, and the serried front of battle of the attacking\r
-column made its appearance through the smoke on the crest of the\r
-battlements. This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents who\r
-were defending the centre retreated in confusion.\r
-\r
-Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them. Many,\r
-finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns, did not\r
-wish to die. This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation\r
-emits howls, when the beast re-appears in men. They were hemmed in by\r
-the lofty, six-story house which formed the background of their redoubt.\r
-This house might prove their salvation. The building was barricaded, and\r
-walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before the troops of the line\r
-had reached the interior of the redoubt, there was time for a door to\r
-open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning was sufficient for\r
-that, and the door of that house, suddenly opened a crack and closed\r
-again instantly, was life for these despairing men. Behind this house,\r
-there were streets, possible flight, space. They set to knocking at that\r
-door with the butts of their guns, and with kicks, shouting, calling,\r
-entreating, wringing their hands. No one opened. From the little window\r
-on the third floor, the head of the dead man gazed down upon them.\r
-\r
-But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about them,\r
-sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras had shouted to the soldiers:\r
-"Don't advance!" and as an officer had not obeyed, Enjolras had killed\r
-the officer. He was now in the little inner court of the redoubt, with\r
-his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword in one hand,\r
-a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the wine-shop which he\r
-barred against assailants. He shouted to the desperate men:--"There is\r
-but one door open; this one."--And shielding them with his body, and\r
-facing an entire battalion alone, he made them pass in behind him. All\r
-precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with his rifle,\r
-which he now used like a cane, what single-stick players call a "covered\r
-rose" round his head, levelled the bayonets around and in front of him,\r
-and was the last to enter; and then ensued a horrible moment, when the\r
-soldiers tried to make their way in, and the insurgents strove to bar\r
-them out. The door was slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back\r
-into its frame, it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been\r
-clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.\r
-\r
-Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his collar bone, he\r
-felt that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes already\r
-shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the swoon\r
-in which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought,\r
-mingled with a last memory of Cosette:--"I am taken prisoner. I shall be\r
-shot."\r
-\r
-Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the\r
-wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had reached a moment when each\r
-man has not the time to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the\r
-bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and\r
-chain, while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers\r
-with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The\r
-assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the wine-shop was\r
-now beginning.\r
-\r
-The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.\r
-\r
-The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then, a still\r
-more melancholy circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded\r
-the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents were\r
-mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body of\r
-a soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual\r
-accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind\r
-which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.\r
-\r
-When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:\r
-\r
-"Let us sell our lives dearly."\r
-\r
-Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath\r
-the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,\r
-the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the\r
-cold folds of the shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding\r
-sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.\r
-\r
-Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had kissed\r
-his brow on the preceding evening.\r
-\r
-These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of\r
-his life.\r
-\r
-Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes;\r
-the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances are\r
-dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible. Men are willing to die,\r
-provided their opponent will kill them.\r
-\r
-When Suchet says:--"Capitulate,"--Palafox replies: "After the war with\r
-cannon, the war with knives." Nothing was lacking in the capture by\r
-assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from\r
-the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers\r
-by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and\r
-the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door yielded,\r
-the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing into the\r
-wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door which had been\r
-beaten in and flung on the ground, found not a single combatant there.\r
-The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the middle of\r
-the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing their last, every\r
-one who was not killed was on the first floor, and from there, through\r
-the hole in the ceiling, which had formed the entrance of the stairs,\r
-a terrific fire burst forth. It was the last of their cartridges. When\r
-they were exhausted, when these formidable men on the point of death had\r
-no longer either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands two of the\r
-bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of which we have spoken, and\r
-held the scaling party in check with these frightfully fragile clubs.\r
-They were bottles of aquafortis.\r
-\r
-We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The\r
-besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did\r
-not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war\r
-is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the\r
-besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below\r
-upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily\r
-surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking\r
-streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost\r
-produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express horror\r
-when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this\r
-conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants matched\r
-with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons\r
-attacked, spectres resisted.\r
-\r
-It was heroism become monstrous.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XXIII--ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK\r
-\r
-At length, by dint of mounting on each other's backs, aiding themselves\r
-with the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging to\r
-the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink of the trap-door, the last\r
-one who offered resistance, a score of assailants, soldiers, National\r
-Guardsmen, municipal guardsmen, in utter confusion, the majority\r
-disfigured by wounds in the face during that redoubtable ascent, blinded\r
-by blood, furious, rendered savage, made an irruption into the apartment\r
-on the first floor. There they found only one man still on his feet,\r
-Enjolras. Without cartridges, without sword, he had nothing in his hand\r
-now but the barrel of his gun whose stock he had broken over the head\r
-of those who were entering. He had placed the billiard table between his\r
-assailants and himself; he had retreated into the corner of the room,\r
-and there, with haughty eye, and head borne high, with this stump of a\r
-weapon in his hand, he was still so alarming as to speedily create an\r
-empty space around him. A cry arose:\r
-\r
-"He is the leader! It was he who slew the artillery-man. It is well that\r
-he has placed himself there. Let him remain there. Let us shoot him down\r
-on the spot."\r
-\r
-"Shoot me," said Enjolras.\r
-\r
-And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel, and folding his arms, he\r
-offered his breast.\r
-\r
-The audacity of a fine death always affects men. As soon as Enjolras\r
-folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in\r
-the room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort of sepulchral\r
-solemnity. The menacing majesty of Enjolras disarmed and motionless,\r
-appeared to oppress this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody,\r
-and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as indifferent as an\r
-invulnerable being, seemed, by the authority of his tranquil glance, to\r
-constrain this sinister rabble to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at\r
-that moment augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh\r
-and rosy after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just elapsed,\r
-as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded. It was of him,\r
-possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of\r
-war: "There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." A National\r
-Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying: "It\r
-seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower."\r
-\r
-Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras, and\r
-silently made ready their guns.\r
-\r
-Then a sergeant shouted:\r
-\r
-"Take aim!"\r
-\r
-An officer intervened.\r
-\r
-"Wait."\r
-\r
-And addressing Enjolras:\r
-\r
-"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.\r
-\r
-Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep ever since the\r
-preceding evening in the upper room of the wine-shop, seated on a chair\r
-and leaning on the table.\r
-\r
-He realized in its fullest sense the old metaphor of "dead drunk." The\r
-hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown him into a\r
-lethargy. His table being small, and not suitable for the barricade,\r
-he had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture,\r
-with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms,\r
-surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles. His was the overwhelming\r
-slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had had any\r
-effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the\r
-grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room where\r
-he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault. He merely replied to\r
-the cannonade, now and then, by a snore. He seemed to be waiting there\r
-for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking. Many corpses\r
-were strewn around him; and, at the first glance, there was nothing to\r
-distinguish him from those profound sleepers of death.\r
-\r
-Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him. The fall\r
-of everything around him only augmented Grantaire's prostration; the\r
-crumbling of all things was his lullaby. The sort of halt which the\r
-tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy\r
-slumber. It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which\r
-suddenly comes to a dead stop. The persons dozing within it wake up.\r
-Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed\r
-his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.\r
-\r
-A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn\r
-away. One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has\r
-concealed. All suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard\r
-who has known nothing of what has been taking place during the last\r
-twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly\r
-informed. Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration\r
-of intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is\r
-dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity\r
-of realities.\r
-\r
-Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the\r
-billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not\r
-even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his\r
-order: "Take aim!" when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout\r
-beside them:\r
-\r
-"Long live the Republic! I'm one of them."\r
-\r
-Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he\r
-had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant\r
-glance of the transfigured drunken man.\r
-\r
-He repeated: "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm\r
-stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.\r
-\r
-"Finish both of us at one blow," said he.\r
-\r
-And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:\r
-\r
-"Do you permit it?"\r
-\r
-Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.\r
-\r
-This smile was not ended when the report resounded.\r
-\r
-Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall,\r
-as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed.\r
-\r
-Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.\r
-\r
-A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining\r
-insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired\r
-into the attic through a wooden lattice. They fought under the very\r
-roof. They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the\r
-windows. Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus,\r
-were slain by two shots fired from the attic. A man in a blouse was\r
-flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed\r
-his last on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slipped together\r
-on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release each\r
-other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace. A similar conflict\r
-went on in the cellar. Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. Then silence.\r
-The barricade was captured.\r
-\r
-The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the\r
-fugitives.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XXIV--PRISONER\r
-\r
-Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.\r
-\r
-The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt\r
-at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose\r
-himself in it. Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase\r
-of agony, would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere\r
-present in the carnage, like a providence, those who fell were picked\r
-up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for. In the intervals, he\r
-reappeared on the barricade. But nothing which could resemble a blow,\r
-an attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands. He held his\r
-peace and lent succor. Moreover he had received only a few scratches.\r
-The bullets would have none of him. If suicide formed part of what he\r
-had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he had\r
-not succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an\r
-irreligious act.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to see\r
-Marius; the truth is, that he never took his eyes from the latter. When\r
-a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the agility of\r
-a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.\r
-\r
-The whirlwind of the attack was, at that moment, so violently\r
-concentrated upon Enjolras and upon the door of the wine-shop, that\r
-no one saw Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his arms,\r
-traverse the unpaved field of the barricade and disappear behind the\r
-angle of the Corinthe building.\r
-\r
-The reader will recall this angle which formed a sort of cape on the\r
-street; it afforded shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot, and all\r
-eyes, and a few square feet of space. There is sometimes a chamber\r
-which does not burn in the midst of a conflagration, and in the midst of\r
-raging seas, beyond a promontory or at the extremity of a blind alley\r
-of shoals, a tranquil nook. It was in this sort of fold in the interior\r
-trapezium of the barricade, that Eponine had breathed her last.\r
-\r
-There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground, placed his\r
-back against the wall, and cast his eyes about him.\r
-\r
-The situation was alarming.\r
-\r
-For an instant, for two or three perhaps, this bit of wall was a\r
-shelter, but how was he to escape from this massacre? He recalled the\r
-anguish which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight years before,\r
-and in what manner he had contrived to make his escape; it was difficult\r
-then, to-day it was impossible. He had before him that deaf and\r
-implacable house, six stories in height, which appeared to be inhabited\r
-only by a dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the\r
-rather low barricade, which shut off the Rue de la Petite Truanderie;\r
-to pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest of the barrier a\r
-line of bayonets was visible. The troops of the line were posted on the\r
-watch behind that barricade. It was evident, that to pass the barricade\r
-was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon, and that any head which\r
-should run the risk of lifting itself above the top of that wall of\r
-stones would serve as a target for sixty shots. On his left he had the\r
-field of battle. Death lurked round the corner of that wall.\r
-\r
-What was to be done?\r
-\r
-Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament.\r
-\r
-And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some expedient,\r
-to come to some decision. Fighting was going on a few paces away;\r
-fortunately, all were raging around a single point, the door of the\r
-wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier, to one single soldier,\r
-to turn the corner of the house, or to attack him on the flank, all was\r
-over.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the barricade at\r
-one side of him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of the\r
-last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would have liked to pierce\r
-a hole there with his eyes.\r
-\r
-By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony began\r
-to assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had been a power\r
-of glance which made the thing desired unfold. A few paces distant he\r
-perceived, at the base of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and\r
-watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones\r
-which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a level\r
-with the soil. This grating, made of stout, transverse bars, was about\r
-two feet square. The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been\r
-torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.\r
-\r
-Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture, something like\r
-the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted\r
-forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination.\r
-To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who\r
-was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this\r
-burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that\r
-sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon\r
-which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind\r
-him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below the\r
-surface,--all this was executed like that which one does in dreams, with\r
-the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle; this took only a\r
-few minutes.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious, in a\r
-sort of long, subterranean corridor.\r
-\r
-There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.\r
-\r
-The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling from the\r
-wall into the convent recurred to him. Only, what he was carrying to-day\r
-was not Cosette; it was Marius. He could barely hear the formidable\r
-tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA\r
-\r
-Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this without\r
-metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With\r
-no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no\r
-reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its\r
-intestine? The sewer.\r
-\r
-Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the\r
-valuations of special science have set upon it.\r
-\r
-Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most\r
-fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure.\r
-The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not\r
-a Chinese peasant--it is Eckberg who says this,--goes to town without\r
-bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two\r
-full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the\r
-earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese\r
-wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable\r
-in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most\r
-mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment\r
-of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our\r
-manure, on the other hand, is gold.\r
-\r
-What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.\r
-\r
-Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung\r
-of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element\r
-of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human and\r
-animal manure which the world wastes, restored to the land instead of\r
-being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.\r
-\r
-Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which\r
-jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street\r
-department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the\r
-pavements hide from you,--do you know what they are? They are the meadow\r
-in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game,\r
-they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the\r
-evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the\r
-bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are\r
-health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that mysterious\r
-creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.\r
-\r
-Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from\r
-it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.\r
-\r
-You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me\r
-ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.\r
-\r
-Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit of\r
-half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths of her\r
-rivers. Note this: with five hundred millions we could pay one quarter\r
-of the expenses of our budget. The cleverness of man is such that he\r
-prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter. It is\r
-the very substance of the people that is carried off, here drop by\r
-drop, there wave after wave, the wretched outpour of our sewers into the\r
-rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into the ocean. Every\r
-hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs. From this spring two\r
-results, the land impoverished, and the water tainted. Hunger arising\r
-from the furrow, and disease from the stream.\r
-\r
-It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames is\r
-poisoning London.\r
-\r
-So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late, to\r
-transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the last bridge.\r
-\r
-A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices, sucking up\r
-and driving back, a system of elementary drainage, simple as the lungs\r
-of a man, and which is already in full working order in many communities\r
-in England, would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields into\r
-our cities, and to send back to the fields the rich water of the cities,\r
-and this easy exchange, the simplest in the world, would retain among us\r
-the five hundred millions now thrown away. People are thinking of other\r
-things.\r
-\r
-The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good.\r
-The intention is good, the result is melancholy. Thinking to purge the\r
-city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. A sewer\r
-is a mistake. When drainage, everywhere, with its double function,\r
-restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a\r
-simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined with the data\r
-of a now social economy, the product of the earth will be increased\r
-tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly lightened. Add the\r
-suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river, and leakage\r
-takes place. Leakage is the word. Europe is being ruined in this manner\r
-by exhaustion.\r
-\r
-As for France, we have just cited its figures. Now, Paris contains one\r
-twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian guano being\r
-the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value the loss on\r
-the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half milliard which\r
-France annually rejects. These twenty-five millions, employed in\r
-assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris. The\r
-city spends them in sewers. So that we may say that Paris's great\r
-prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its\r
-stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence,\r
-is its sewer system.\r
-\r
-It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political economy,\r
-we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost in the gulfs the\r
-well-being of all. There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public\r
-fortune.\r
-\r
-Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: Paris is\r
-a spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged\r
-capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that\r
-metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of\r
-impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that\r
-nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of\r
-Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his\r
-shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.\r
-\r
-Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.\r
-\r
-Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris\r
-is itself an imitator.\r
-\r
-These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel; this is no\r
-young folly. The ancients did like the moderns. "The sewers of Rome,"\r
-says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant."\r
-When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted\r
-Italy, and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she poured in Sicily,\r
-then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.\r
-This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city and the universe. Urbi\r
-et orbi. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.\r
-\r
-Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.\r
-\r
-Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar to\r
-intelligent towns.\r
-\r
-For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we have\r
-just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris\r
-of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares, its\r
-blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire and\r
-minus the human form.\r
-\r
-For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there\r
-is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity; and,\r
-if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of might,\r
-Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels, it also\r
-contains Lutetia, the city of mud.\r
-\r
-However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of\r
-Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity\r
-by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness.\r
-\r
-The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would\r
-present the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge has no more\r
-partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six\r
-leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. Not to\r
-mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar, not to mention\r
-the inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes, without reckoning the vast\r
-tubular system for the distribution of fresh water which ends in the\r
-pillar fountains, the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work\r
-under the two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding\r
-thread.\r
-\r
-There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product to\r
-which Paris has given birth.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER\r
-\r
-Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean\r
-net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks\r
-a species of large branch grafted on the river. On the right bank, the\r
-belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary ducts will\r
-form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.\r
-\r
-This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right angle, which\r
-is the customary angle of this species of subterranean ramifications,\r
-being very rare in vegetation.\r
-\r
-A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can be formed\r
-by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental alphabet,\r
-as intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows, and the\r
-misshapen letters should be welded one to another in apparent confusion,\r
-and as at haphazard, now by their angles, again by their extremities.\r
-\r
-Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages, in the Lower\r
-Empire and in the Orient of old. The masses regarded these beds of\r
-decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death, with a fear that was\r
-almost religious. The vermin ditch of Benares is no less conducive to\r
-giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according\r
-to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh. It was from the\r
-sewer of Munster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it\r
-was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the\r
-veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused his false sun to emerge.\r
-\r
-The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers. The\r
-Germoniae[58] narrated Rome. The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and\r
-formidable thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum.\r
-Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought,\r
-theft, all that human laws persecute or have persecuted, is hidden in\r
-that hole; the maillotins in the fourteenth century, the tire-laine of\r
-the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin's illuminated in\r
-the seventeenth, the chauffeurs [brigands] in the eighteenth. A\r
-hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the\r
-pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had\r
-its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as the\r
-adjunct of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither,\r
-fierce and sly, through the Maubuee outlet, as into a bed-chamber.\r
-\r
-It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset,\r
-[Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene of\r
-their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night the culvert\r
-of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of\r
-souvenirs. All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary\r
-corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are\r
-breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.\r
-\r
-The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and\r
-of all attempts. Political economy therein spies a detritus, social\r
-philosophy there beholds a residuum.\r
-\r
-The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges\r
-and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but\r
-there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at\r
-least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor,\r
-that it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask\r
-of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its\r
-strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated\r
-by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor. All the\r
-uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this\r
-trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends. They are\r
-there engulfed, but they display themselves there. This mixture is a\r
-confession. There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is\r
-possible, filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout\r
-all illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really\r
-exists, presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end.\r
-There, the bottom of a bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle\r
-tells a tale of domesticity; there the core of an apple which has\r
-entertained literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more; the\r
-effigy on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris, Caiphas'\r
-spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes from\r
-the gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end of the\r
-suicide. A livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles which\r
-danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has pronounced\r
-judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which was formerly\r
-Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization, it is equivalent\r
-to addressing each other as thou. All which was formerly rouged, is\r
-washed free. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It tells\r
-everything.\r
-\r
-The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul. When one has\r
-passed one's time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the great airs\r
-which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity, human justice,\r
-professional probity, the austerities of situation, incorruptible robes\r
-all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer and to behold the mire which\r
-befits it.\r
-\r
-This is instructive at the same time. We have just said that history\r
-passes through the sewer. The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there,\r
-drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations,\r
-political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage\r
-of civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the\r
-thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous\r
-penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for\r
-an apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI. is there with\r
-Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,\r
-Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is\r
-there, Hebert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying\r
-to make the traces of their actions disappear. Beneath these vaults one\r
-hears the brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness\r
-of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.\r
-There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.\r
-\r
-The social observer should enter these shadows. They form a part of\r
-his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything\r
-desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is\r
-useless. What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful\r
-side. Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does\r
-not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration of things\r
-which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish, it recognizes\r
-all. It reconstructs the purple from the rag, and the woman from the\r
-scrap of her dress. From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from\r
-mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora\r
-or the jug. By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it\r
-recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse\r
-from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It re-discovers in what remains that\r
-which has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace,\r
-the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel, trials\r
-undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth, the turn which\r
-characters have taken as they became abased, the trace of prostitution\r
-in souls of which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the\r
-vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's elbowing.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--BRUNESEAU\r
-\r
-The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth\r
-century, Henri II. attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years\r
-ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself,\r
-and fared as best it might.\r
-\r
-Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision,\r
-and to gropings. It was tolerably stupid for a long time. Later on, '89\r
-showed how understanding comes to cities. But in the good, old times,\r
-the capital had not much head. It did not know how to manage its own\r
-affairs either morally or materially, and could not sweep out filth\r
-any better than it could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle,\r
-everything raised a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory to\r
-every itinerary. One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer\r
-than one could understand one's position in the city; above the\r
-unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues\r
-there reigned the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.\r
-\r
-Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though this\r
-misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. There\r
-occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At times, that\r
-stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool flowed back into\r
-the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth.\r
-These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they\r
-were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed indignant\r
-at the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that the filth should\r
-return. Drive it out better.\r
-\r
-The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians of\r
-the age of eighty. The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des\r
-Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue\r
-Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees,\r
-the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue\r
-Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt,\r
-through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through\r
-the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue des\r
-Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the\r
-South, through the vent of the Seine, performing its functions in\r
-inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and\r
-the Rue des Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and\r
-nine metres, a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had\r
-lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the\r
-King. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where\r
-it rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the\r
-water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it\r
-spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.\r
-\r
-At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a\r
-mysterious place. Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this case its\r
-evil renown reached the verge of the terrible. Paris knew, in a confused\r
-way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. People talked of it as\r
-of that monstrous bed of Thebes in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long\r
-feet in length, and which might have served Behemoth for a bathtub.\r
-The great boots of the sewermen never ventured further than certain\r
-well-known points. We were then very near the epoch when the scavenger's\r
-carts, from the summit of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis\r
-de Crequi, discharged their loads directly into the sewer. As for\r
-cleaning out,--that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which\r
-encumbered rather than swept away. Rome left some poetry to her sewer,\r
-and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the\r
-Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. The\r
-Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The goblin\r
-was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the\r
-corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie;\r
-Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the great\r
-hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in\r
-the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the Gallant Messenger.\r
-The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for\r
-the pestilences which had their source there; with its grating of iron,\r
-with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a dragon's maw\r
-in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men. The popular\r
-imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with some indescribably\r
-hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom. The sewer\r
-was the lower world. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not\r
-even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet\r
-into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss--who\r
-would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, some one did present\r
-himself. The cess-pool had its Christopher Columbus.\r
-\r
-One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor\r
-made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decres or Cretet or\r
-other, came to the master's intimate levee. In the Carrousel there was\r
-audible the clanking of swords of all those extraordinary soldiers of\r
-the great Republic, and of the great Empire; then Napoleon's door was\r
-blocked with heroes; men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the\r
-Adige, and from the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau,\r
-of Hoche, of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of\r
-Mayence, the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had\r
-looked down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered\r
-with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at anchor\r
-in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi,\r
-others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua, others had\r
-preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. The whole army of that\r
-day was present there, in the court-yard of the Tuileries, represented\r
-by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon in repose; and that\r
-was the splendid epoch when the grand army had Marengo behind it and\r
-Austerlitz before it.--"Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to\r
-Napoleon, "yesterday I saw the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What\r
-man is that?" said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He\r
-wants to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of\r
-Paris."\r
-\r
-This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--BRUNESEAU.\r
-\r
-The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle\r
-against pestilence and suffocation. It was, at the same time, a voyage\r
-of discovery. One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent\r
-workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with\r
-regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged\r
-to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of official\r
-style. The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely\r
-rudimentary. Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of\r
-that subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused\r
-to go any further. The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the\r
-necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same\r
-time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings\r
-and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the\r
-currents at the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds\r
-of the divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal\r
-sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain, and the\r
-width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom, in order\r
-to determine the arrangements with regard to the level of each\r
-water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on the soil of the\r
-street. They advanced with toil. The lanterns pined away in the foul\r
-atmosphere. From time to time, a fainting sewerman was carried out.\r
-At certain points, there were precipices. The soil had given away, the\r
-pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a bottomless well;\r
-they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly; they had great\r
-difficulty in getting him out again. On the advice of Fourcroy, they\r
-lighted large cages filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time,\r
-in spots which had been sufficiently disinfected. In some places, the\r
-wall was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors; the\r
-very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.\r
-\r
-Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill. At the point of\r
-separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered\r
-upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone indicated the\r
-limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. with visiting the\r
-subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of\r
-the sixteenth century on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of\r
-the seventeenth century once more in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue\r
-Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of\r
-the eighteenth in the western section of the collecting canal, walled\r
-and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that\r
-of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt\r
-sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of\r
-Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris, an\r
-advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first valet\r
-de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.\r
-\r
-Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought they\r
-recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the very sewer\r
-itself. Hideous place! An iron neck-collar was hanging in one of these\r
-cells. They walled them all up. Some of their finds were singular; among\r
-others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from the\r
-Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with\r
-the famous and indisputable apparition of the devil in the Rue des\r
-Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil\r
-had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.\r
-\r
-Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion,\r
-a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration of all\r
-connoisseurs. Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came to handle\r
-with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and\r
-silver, precious stones, coins. If a giant had filtered this cesspool,\r
-he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. At the point\r
-where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye\r
-separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on\r
-one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a wolf\r
-with a tiara on his head.\r
-\r
-The most surprising encounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer.\r
-This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but\r
-the hinges remained. From one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless\r
-rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there\r
-in the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart. Bruneseau\r
-held his lantern close to this rag and examined it. It was of very fine\r
-batiste, and in one of the corners, less frayed than the rest, they\r
-made out a heraldic coronet and embroidered above these seven letters:\r
-LAVBESP. The crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters\r
-signified Laubespine. They recognized the fact, that what they had\r
-before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat. Marat in his\r
-youth had had amorous intrigues. This was when he was a member of the\r
-household of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the\r
-Stables. From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great\r
-lady, he had retained this sheet. As a waif or a souvenir. At his death,\r
-as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house,\r
-they buried him in it. Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb in\r
-that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people had enjoyed\r
-voluptuousness. Bruneseau passed on. They left that rag where it hung;\r
-they did not put the finishing touch to it. Did this arise from scorn\r
-or from respect? Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there\r
-sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it. Besides, the\r
-things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which they select. In\r
-short, the relic was a strange one. A Marquise had slept in it; Marat\r
-had rotted in it; it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats\r
-of the sewer. This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have\r
-joyfully sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed\r
-gaze of Dante.\r
-\r
-The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris lasted\r
-seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew,\r
-directed, and completed considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the arch\r
-of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating new lines, he pushed the\r
-sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of\r
-the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the\r
-Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue\r
-du Mail, under the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812,\r
-under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same\r
-time, he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful. In\r
-the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his\r
-son-in-law Nargaud.\r
-\r
-It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society\r
-cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. There\r
-was that much clean, at all events.\r
-\r
-Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies,\r
-jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid,\r
-wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements\r
-and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was, retrospectively viewed, the\r
-antique sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings,\r
-of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum,\r
-blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby\r
-sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness;\r
-nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive\r
-apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a\r
-titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind\r
-mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has\r
-been splendor.\r
-\r
-This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--PRESENT PROGRESS\r
-\r
-To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes\r
-the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable." It\r
-is proper and grayish; laid out by rule and line; one might almost say\r
-as though it came out of a bandbox. It resembles a tradesman who has\r
-become a councillor of state. One can almost see distinctly there. The\r
-mire there comports itself with decency. At first, one might readily\r
-mistake it for one of those subterranean corridors, which were so common\r
-in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes, in\r
-those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." The present\r
-sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical\r
-rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have\r
-taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of\r
-that long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de\r
-Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer. However, if the geometrical\r
-line is in place anywhere, it is certainly in the drainage trench of\r
-a great city. There, everything should be subordinated to the shortest\r
-road. The sewer has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. The\r
-very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject, no longer\r
-are wanting in respect towards it. The words which characterize it in\r
-administrative language are sonorous and dignified. What used to be\r
-called a gut is now called a gallery; what used to be called a hole is\r
-now called a surveying orifice. Villon would no longer meet with his\r
-ancient temporary provisional lodging. This net-work of cellars has its\r
-immemorial population of prowlers, rodents, swarming in greater numbers\r
-than ever; from time to time, an aged and veteran rat risks his head at\r
-the window of the sewer and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin\r
-grow tame, so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace. The\r
-cesspool no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity. The rain,\r
-which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it. Nevertheless, do\r
-not trust yourself too much to it. Miasmas still inhabit it. It is\r
-more hypocritical than irreproachable. The prefecture of police and\r
-the commission of health have done their best. But, in spite of all the\r
-processes of disinfection, it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like\r
-Tartuffe after confession.\r
-\r
-Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage\r
-which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view,\r
-Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the Augean stables, it is\r
-certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.\r
-\r
-It is more than progress; it is transmutation. Between the ancient\r
-and the present sewer there is a revolution. What has effected this\r
-revolution?\r
-\r
-The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned,\r
-Bruneseau.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--FUTURE PROGRESS\r
-\r
-The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last\r
-ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a\r
-termination, any more than they have been able to finish Paris. The\r
-sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the growth of Paris.\r
-Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a\r
-thousand antennae, which expands below as the city expands above. Every\r
-time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The\r
-old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand three hundred\r
-metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this respect on the\r
-first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall\r
-shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and\r
-prosecuted; Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight\r
-hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred\r
-and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six;\r
-Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of\r
-1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present\r
-government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time,\r
-two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres;\r
-sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris. An obscure\r
-ramification ever at work; a construction which is immense and ignored.\r
-\r
-As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day\r
-more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is\r
-difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts which\r
-have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of relative\r
-perfection in which it now is. It was with great difficulty that the\r
-ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten years of\r
-the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded in\r
-perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed previous to 1806.\r
-All sorts of obstacles hindered this operation, some peculiar to the\r
-soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the laborious population\r
-of Paris. Paris is built upon a soil which is singularly rebellious to\r
-the pick, the hoe, the bore, and to human manipulation. There is nothing\r
-more difficult to pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation\r
-upon which is superposed the marvellous historical formation called\r
-Paris; as soon as work in any form whatsoever is begun and adventures\r
-upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. There\r
-are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires\r
-which special science calls moutardes.[59] The pick advances laboriously\r
-through the calcareous layers alternating with very slender threads of\r
-clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the\r
-contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans. Sometimes a rivulet suddenly\r
-bursts through a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers;\r
-or a layer of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a\r
-cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass. Quite\r
-recently, at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting\r
-sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or\r
-emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal, water\r
-suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond\r
-the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send a diver to\r
-explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow entrance of the\r
-grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty that it was stopped\r
-up. Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a considerable distance\r
-from the river, as for instance, at Belleville, Grand-Rue and Lumiere\r
-Passage, quicksands are encountered in which one sticks fast, and in\r
-which a man sinks visibly. Add suffocation by miasmas, burial by slides,\r
-and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the typhus, with which the\r
-workmen become slowly impregnated. In our own day, after having\r
-excavated the gallery of Clichy, with a banquette to receive the\r
-principal water-conduit of Ourcq, a piece of work which was executed in\r
-a trench ten metres deep; after having, in the midst of land-slides, and\r
-with the aid of excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted\r
-the Bievre from the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as the Seine; after\r
-having, in order to deliver Paris from the floods of Montmartre and in\r
-order to provide an outlet for that river-like pool nine hectares in\r
-extent, which crouched near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having, let\r
-us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche to\r
-the road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night, at a\r
-depth of eleven metres; after having--a thing heretofore unseen--made a\r
-subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench, six\r
-metres below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. After having\r
-vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters of the city, from\r
-the Rue Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine, after having\r
-freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard from inundations of rain by means\r
-of the branch of the Arbalete, after having built the Saint-Georges\r
-sewer, on rock and concrete in the fluid sands, after having directed\r
-the formidable lowering of the flooring of the vault timber in the\r
-Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch, Duleau the engineer died. There are no\r
-bulletins for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful,\r
-nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.\r
-\r
-The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are to-day.\r
-Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera was required to\r
-bring about the vast reconstruction which took place later on. It is\r
-surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, a part of the belt sewer,\r
-called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered\r
-to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was only in 1821 that the city\r
-of Paris found in its pocket the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty\r
-francs and six centimes required for covering this mass of filth. The\r
-three absorbing wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mande, with\r
-their discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their\r
-depuratory branches, only date from 1836. The intestinal sewer of Paris\r
-has been made over anew, and, as we have said, it has been extended more\r
-than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.\r
-\r
-Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of\r
-June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer.\r
-A very great number of streets which are now convex were then sunken\r
-causeways. At the end of a slope, where the tributaries of a street or\r
-cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large, square gratings\r
-with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps of the throng,\r
-gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and caused horses to fall.\r
-The official language of the Roads and Bridges gave to these gratings\r
-the expressive name of Cassis.[60]\r
-\r
-In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue\r
-Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue\r
-Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,\r
-the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches,\r
-the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame\r
-des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the\r
-Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic\r
-sewer still cynically displayed its maw. It consisted of enormous\r
-voids of stone catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone posts, with\r
-monumental effrontery.\r
-\r
-Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated in\r
-1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms. After Bruneseau, on the 1st\r
-of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. Between\r
-1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average, seven hundred and\r
-fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of\r
-galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small stones, with\r
-hydraulic mortar which hardens under water, on a cement foundation. At\r
-two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the\r
-present day represent forty-eight millions.\r
-\r
-In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated at the\r
-beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected with that\r
-immense question: the sewers of Paris.\r
-\r
-Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air.\r
-The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground, but\r
-already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green clay\r
-situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer may\r
-be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference; a\r
-multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine, the\r
-Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the\r
-Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. The sheet of water\r
-is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first place and next from the\r
-earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the\r
-miasms of the cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence\r
-this bad breath. The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has been\r
-scientifically proved, is purer than the air taken from above Paris. In\r
-a given time, with the aid of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and\r
-as light increases, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the\r
-sheet of air; that is to say, to wash the sewer. The reader knows, that\r
-by "washing the sewer" we mean: the restitution of the filth to the\r
-earth; the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields.\r
-Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a\r
-diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour,\r
-the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the\r
-Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.\r
-\r
-We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease\r
-of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The\r
-popular instinct has never been deceived in it. The occupation of\r
-sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the\r
-people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror\r
-and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary to induce\r
-a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool\r
-cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form:\r
-"to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of\r
-hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with\r
-terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions\r
-of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found\r
-vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of\r
-Marat.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES\r
-\r
-It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.\r
-\r
-Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean,\r
-the diver may disappear there.\r
-\r
-The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city,\r
-Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye,\r
-in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed\r
-from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from\r
-tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of\r
-the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of\r
-the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute\r
-obscurity.\r
-\r
-An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door\r
-of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that\r
-sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He\r
-remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.\r
-The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial\r
-goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery. Adorable\r
-ambuscades of providence!\r
-\r
-Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know\r
-whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a\r
-dead corpse.\r
-\r
-His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sudden, he could see\r
-nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf.\r
-He no longer heard anything. The frantic storm of murder which had been\r
-let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the\r
-thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said,\r
-otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the\r
-depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;\r
-but that was enough. He extended one arm and then the other, touched\r
-the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he\r
-slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put\r
-forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that\r
-the paving continued. A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in\r
-which he stood.\r
-\r
-After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind. A little light\r
-fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes\r
-became accustomed to this cavern. He began to distinguish something. The\r
-passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the\r
-situation--was walled in behind him. It was one of those blind alleys,\r
-which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was\r
-another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten\r
-or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast\r
-a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer. Beyond,\r
-the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an\r
-entrance into it appeared like an engulfment. A man could, however,\r
-plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do. Haste was\r
-even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he\r
-had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of\r
-the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance. They also might\r
-descend into that well and search it. There was not a minute to be lost.\r
-He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,--that is\r
-the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set\r
-out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom.\r
-\r
-The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils\r
-of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance. After\r
-the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and\r
-traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle\r
-of hell into another.\r
-\r
-When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem\r
-presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he\r
-encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which\r
-should he take? Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he\r
-to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which\r
-we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its\r
-slope. To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.\r
-\r
-This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.\r
-\r
-He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that\r
-if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would\r
-arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine\r
-between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would\r
-make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot\r
-in Paris. Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection\r
-of streets. Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men\r
-emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to\r
-arms of the neighboring post of guards. Thus they would be seized before\r
-they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth,\r
-to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence\r
-for the outcome.\r
-\r
-He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.\r
-\r
-When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an\r
-air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more,\r
-and he became blind again. Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as\r
-possible. Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's\r
-feet dragged behind him. He held both these arms with one hand, and\r
-groped along the wall with the other. Marius' cheek touched his, and\r
-clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius\r
-trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes. But a\r
-humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched,\r
-indicated respiration, and consequently, life. The passage along which\r
-Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean\r
-Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the\r
-preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little\r
-torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall\r
-in order not to have his feet in the water.\r
-\r
-Thus he proceeded in the gloom. He resembled the beings of the night\r
-groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.\r
-\r
-Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes\r
-emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his\r
-eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned\r
-to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall\r
-which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing. The\r
-pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends\r
-by finding God there.\r
-\r
-It was not easy to direct his course.\r
-\r
-The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets\r
-which lie above it. There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred\r
-streets. Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy\r
-branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at\r
-that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven\r
-leagues. We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the\r
-special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty\r
-leagues in extent.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder. He thought that he was\r
-beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under\r
-the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis\r
-XIII. and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand\r
-Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the\r
-ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer,\r
-whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie\r
-the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has\r
-never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended\r
-at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was\r
-entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself abound. The Montmartre\r
-sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the ancient network.\r
-Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets\r
-whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of a multitude of\r
-parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but he had before him more\r
-than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--for\r
-they are streets--presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation\r
-point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of\r
-Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs\r
-under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far\r
-as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the\r
-curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which\r
-are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the\r
-Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and\r
-proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand crypt of\r
-the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every direction; and\r
-lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, without\r
-counting little ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer,\r
-which alone could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be\r
-safe.\r
-\r
-Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he\r
-would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was\r
-not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the\r
-ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal\r
-even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and\r
-mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under\r
-his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone\r
-filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred\r
-francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits\r
-materiaux--small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.\r
-\r
-He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing\r
-nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.\r
-\r
-By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom\r
-which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This\r
-aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.\r
-It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean\r
-Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing\r
-it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How\r
-was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time?\r
-would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow\r
-itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some\r
-unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable\r
-and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of\r
-hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two\r
-skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these\r
-questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris\r
-form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.\r
-\r
-All at once, he had a surprise. At the most unforeseen moment, and\r
-without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he\r
-was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against\r
-his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now\r
-descending. Why? Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine? This\r
-danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.\r
-He continued to advance.\r
-\r
-It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding. The ridge which\r
-the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its water-sheds\r
-into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this\r
-ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very\r
-capricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of\r
-separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue\r
-Michelle-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and\r
-in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point\r
-that Jean Valjean had reached. He was directing his course towards the\r
-belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know it.\r
-\r
-Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if\r
-he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the\r
-passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route,\r
-rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind\r
-alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say,\r
-the outlet. Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in\r
-the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.\r
-\r
-At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath\r
-the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had\r
-suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and\r
-normal Paris. Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant\r
-but continuous. It was the rumbling of vehicles.\r
-\r
-He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the\r
-calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought of\r
-rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding Marius.\r
-The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth reassured\r
-him.\r
-\r
-All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him. It was outlined on\r
-a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the\r
-flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his\r
-right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied,\r
-he turned round.\r
-\r
-Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed\r
-through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense\r
-obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying\r
-him.\r
-\r
-It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.\r
-\r
-In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a\r
-confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--EXPLANATION\r
-\r
-On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been\r
-ordered. It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for\r
-refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General\r
-Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which\r
-exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented\r
-above by the army and below by the police. Three squads of agents and\r
-sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris, the first on the\r
-right bank, the second on the left bank, the third in the city. The\r
-agents of police were armed with carabines, with bludgeons, swords and\r
-poignards.\r
-\r
-That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the lantern\r
-of the patrol of the right bank.\r
-\r
-This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three blind\r
-alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were passing\r
-their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean had\r
-encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery, had perceived\r
-that it was narrower than the principal passage and had not penetrated\r
-thither. He had passed on. The police, on emerging from the gallery\r
-du Cadran, had fancied that they heard the sound of footsteps in the\r
-direction of the belt sewer. They were, in fact, the steps of Jean\r
-Valjean. The sergeant in command of the patrol had raised his lantern,\r
-and the squad had begun to gaze into the mist in the direction whence\r
-the sound proceeded.\r
-\r
-This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. It\r
-was light and he was shadow. He was very far off, and mingled with the\r
-darkness of the place. He hugged the wall and halted. Moreover, he did\r
-not understand what it was that was moving behind him. The lack of sleep\r
-and food, and his emotions had caused him also to pass into the state of\r
-a visionary. He beheld a gleam, and around that gleam, forms. What was\r
-it? He did not comprehend.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.\r
-\r
-The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked and saw\r
-nothing. They held a consultation.\r
-\r
-There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre sewer a sort\r
-of cross-roads called de service, which was afterwards suppressed, on\r
-account of the little interior lake which formed there, swallowing up\r
-the torrent of rain in heavy storms. The patrol could form a cluster in\r
-this open space. Jean Valjean saw these spectres form a sort of circle.\r
-These bull-dogs' heads approached each other closely and whispered\r
-together.\r
-\r
-The result of this council held by the watch dogs was, that they had\r
-been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that it was useless to get\r
-entangled in the belt sewer, that it would only be a waste of time,\r
-but that they ought to hasten towards Saint-Merry; that if there\r
-was anything to do, and any "bousingot" to track out, it was in that\r
-quarter.\r
-\r
-From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults. In 1832, the word\r
-bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin, which had become\r
-obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since rendered such excellent\r
-service.\r
-\r
-The sergeant gave orders to turn to the left, towards the watershed of\r
-the Seine.\r
-\r
-If it had occurred to them to separate into two squads, and to go in\r
-both directions, Jean Valjean would have been captured. All hung on\r
-that thread. It is probable that the instructions of the prefecture,\r
-foreseeing a possibility of combat and insurgents in force, had\r
-forbidden the patrol to part company. The patrol resumed its march,\r
-leaving Jean Valjean behind it. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean\r
-perceived nothing, except the eclipse of the lantern which suddenly\r
-wheeled round.\r
-\r
-Before taking his departure, the Sergeant, in order to acquit his\r
-policeman's conscience, discharged his gun in the direction of Jean\r
-Valjean. The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt, like the\r
-rumbling of that titanic entrail. A bit of plaster which fell into the\r
-stream and splashed up the water a few paces away from Jean Valjean,\r
-warned him that the ball had struck the arch over his head.\r
-\r
-Slow and measured steps resounded for some time on the timber work,\r
-gradually dying away as they retreated to a greater distance; the group\r
-of black forms vanished, a glimmer of light oscillated and floated,\r
-communicating to the vault a reddish glow which grew fainter, then\r
-disappeared; the silence became profound once more, the obscurity became\r
-complete, blindness and deafness resumed possession of the shadows;\r
-and Jean Valjean, not daring to stir as yet, remained for a long time\r
-leaning with his back against the wall, with straining ears, and dilated\r
-pupils, watching the disappearance of that phantom patrol.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE "SPUN" MAN\r
-\r
-This justice must be rendered to the police of that period, that even in\r
-the most serious public junctures, it imperturbably fulfilled its duties\r
-connected with the sewers and surveillance. A revolt was, in its eyes,\r
-no pretext for allowing malefactors to take the bit in their own mouths,\r
-and for neglecting society for the reason that the government was in\r
-peril. The ordinary service was performed correctly in company with the\r
-extraordinary service, and was not troubled by the latter. In the midst\r
-of an incalculable political event already begun, under the pressure of\r
-a possible revolution, a police agent, "spun" a thief without allowing\r
-himself to be distracted by insurrection and barricades.\r
-\r
-It was something precisely parallel which took place on the afternoon\r
-of the 6th of June on the banks of the Seine, on the slope of the right\r
-shore, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides.\r
-\r
-There is no longer any bank there now. The aspect of the locality has\r
-changed.\r
-\r
-On that bank, two men, separated by a certain distance, seemed to be\r
-watching each other while mutually avoiding each other. The one who was\r
-in advance was trying to get away, the one in the rear was trying to\r
-overtake the other.\r
-\r
-It was like a game of checkers played at a distance and in silence.\r
-Neither seemed to be in any hurry, and both walked slowly, as though\r
-each of them feared by too much haste to make his partner redouble his\r
-pace.\r
-\r
-One would have said that it was an appetite following its prey, and\r
-purposely without wearing the air of doing so. The prey was crafty and\r
-on its guard.\r
-\r
-The proper relations between the hunted pole-cat and the hunting dog\r
-were observed. The one who was seeking to escape had an insignificant\r
-mien and not an impressive appearance; the one who was seeking to seize\r
-him was rude of aspect, and must have been rude to encounter.\r
-\r
-The first, conscious that he was the more feeble, avoided the second;\r
-but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one who\r
-could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the sombre\r
-hostility of flight, and all the menace that fear contains.\r
-\r
-The shore was deserted; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman nor\r
-a lighter-man was in the skiffs which were moored here and there.\r
-\r
-It was not easy to see these two men, except from the quay opposite, and\r
-to any person who had scrutinized them at that distance, the man who was\r
-in advance would have appeared like a bristling, tattered, and equivocal\r
-being, who was uneasy and trembling beneath a ragged blouse, and the\r
-other like a classic and official personage, wearing the frock-coat of\r
-authority buttoned to the chin.\r
-\r
-Perchance the reader might recognize these two men, if he were to see\r
-them closer at hand.\r
-\r
-What was the object of the second man?\r
-\r
-Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.\r
-\r
-When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order\r
-to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole\r
-question lies in the color. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be\r
-dressed in red is disagreeable.\r
-\r
-There is a purple from below.\r
-\r
-It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this sort which\r
-the first man is desirous of shirking.\r
-\r
-If the other allowed him to walk on, and had not seized him as yet, it\r
-was, judging from all appearances, in the hope of seeing him lead up to\r
-some significant meeting-place and to some group worth catching. This\r
-delicate operation is called "spinning."\r
-\r
-What renders this conjecture entirely probable is that the buttoned-up\r
-man, on catching sight from the shore of a hackney-coach on the quay\r
-as it was passing along empty, made a sign to the driver; the driver\r
-understood, evidently recognized the person with whom he had to deal,\r
-turned about and began to follow the two men at the top of the quay,\r
-at a foot-pace. This was not observed by the slouching and tattered\r
-personage who was in advance.\r
-\r
-The hackney-coach rolled along the trees of the Champs-Elysees. The\r
-bust of the driver, whip in hand, could be seen moving along above the\r
-parapet.\r
-\r
-One of the secret instructions of the police authorities to their agents\r
-contains this article: "Always have on hand a hackney-coach, in case of\r
-emergency."\r
-\r
-While these two men were manoeuvring, each on his own side, with\r
-irreproachable strategy, they approached an inclined plane on the quay\r
-which descended to the shore, and which permitted cab-drivers arriving\r
-from Passy to come to the river and water their horses. This inclined\r
-plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry; horses may die\r
-of thirst, but the eye is gratified.\r
-\r
-It is probable that the man in the blouse had intended to ascend\r
-this inclined plane, with a view to making his escape into the\r
-Champs-Elysees, a place ornamented with trees, but, in return, much\r
-infested with policemen, and where the other could easily exercise\r
-violence.\r
-\r
-This point on the quay is not very far distant from the house brought to\r
-Paris from Moret in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and designated as "the house\r
-of Francois I." A guard house is situated close at hand.\r
-\r
-To the great surprise of his watcher, the man who was being tracked did\r
-not mount by the inclined plane for watering. He continued to advance\r
-along the quay on the shore.\r
-\r
-His position was visibly becoming critical.\r
-\r
-What was he intending to do, if not to throw himself into the Seine?\r
-\r
-Henceforth, there existed no means of ascending to the quay; there was\r
-no other inclined plane, no staircase; and they were near the spot,\r
-marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont de Jena, where the\r
-bank, growing constantly narrower, ended in a slender tongue, and\r
-was lost in the water. There he would inevitably find himself blocked\r
-between the perpendicular wall on his right, the river on his left and\r
-in front of him, and the authorities on his heels.\r
-\r
-It is true that this termination of the shore was hidden from sight by a\r
-heap of rubbish six or seven feet in height, produced by some demolition\r
-or other. But did this man hope to conceal himself effectually behind\r
-that heap of rubbish, which one need but skirt? The expedient would\r
-have been puerile. He certainly was not dreaming of such a thing. The\r
-innocence of thieves does not extend to that point.\r
-\r
-The pile of rubbish formed a sort of projection at the water's edge,\r
-which was prolonged in a promontory as far as the wall of the quay.\r
-\r
-The man who was being followed arrived at this little mound and went\r
-round it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.\r
-\r
-The latter, as he did not see, could not be seen; he took advantage of\r
-this fact to abandon all dissimulation and to walk very rapidly. In a\r
-few moments, he had reached the rubbish heap and passed round it. There\r
-he halted in sheer amazement. The man whom he had been pursuing was no\r
-longer there.\r
-\r
-Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.\r
-\r
-The shore, beginning with the rubbish heap, was only about thirty paces\r
-long, then it plunged into the water which beat against the wall of the\r
-quay. The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine without\r
-being seen by the man who was following him. What had become of him?\r
-\r
-The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the extremity of the shore,\r
-and remained there in thought for a moment, his fists clenched, his eyes\r
-searching. All at once he smote his brow. He had just perceived, at the\r
-point where the land came to an end and the water began, a large iron\r
-grating, low, arched, garnished with a heavy lock and with three massive\r
-hinges. This grating, a sort of door pierced at the base of the quay,\r
-opened on the river as well as on the shore. A blackish stream passed\r
-under it. This stream discharged into the Seine.\r
-\r
-Beyond the heavy, rusty iron bars, a sort of dark and vaulted corridor\r
-could be descried. The man folded his arms and stared at the grating\r
-with an air of reproach.\r
-\r
-As this gaze did not suffice, he tried to thrust it aside; he shook\r
-it, it resisted solidly. It is probable that it had just been opened,\r
-although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance in so rusty a\r
-grating; but it is certain that it had been closed again. This indicated\r
-that the man before whom that door had just opened had not a hook but a\r
-key.\r
-\r
-This evidence suddenly burst upon the mind of the man who was trying to\r
-move the grating, and evoked from him this indignant ejaculation:\r
-\r
-"That is too much! A government key!"\r
-\r
-Then, immediately regaining his composure, he expressed a whole world\r
-of interior ideas by this outburst of monosyllables accented almost\r
-ironically: "Come! Come! Come! Come!"\r
-\r
-That said, and in the hope of something or other, either that he should\r
-see the man emerge or other men enter, he posted himself on the watch\r
-behind a heap of rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.\r
-\r
-The hackney-coach, which regulated all its movements on his, had, in its\r
-turn, halted on the quay above him, close to the parapet. The coachman,\r
-foreseeing a prolonged wait, encased his horses' muzzles in the bag of\r
-oats which is damp at the bottom, and which is so familiar to Parisians,\r
-to whom, be it said in parenthesis, the Government sometimes applies it.\r
-The rare passers-by on the Pont de Jena turned their heads, before they\r
-pursued their way, to take a momentary glance at these two motionless\r
-items in the landscape, the man on the shore, the carriage on the quay.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.\r
-\r
-This march became more and more laborious. The level of these vaults\r
-varies; the average height is about five feet, six inches, and has been\r
-calculated for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend\r
-over, in order not to strike Marius against the vault; at every step\r
-he had to bend, then to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall. The\r
-moisture of the stones, and the viscous nature of the timber framework\r
-furnished but poor supports to which to cling, either for hand or foot.\r
-He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city. The intermittent\r
-gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were\r
-so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all\r
-the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean Valjean was both\r
-hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea, was a\r
-place full of water where a man cannot drink. His strength, which was\r
-prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased\r
-by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way,\r
-nevertheless. Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his strength\r
-decreased, it made the weight of his burden increase. Marius, who was,\r
-perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert bodies weigh. Jean Valjean\r
-held him in such a manner that his chest was not oppressed, and so that\r
-respiration could proceed as well as possible. Between his legs he felt\r
-the rapid gliding of the rats. One of them was frightened to such a\r
-degree that he bit him. From time to time, a breath of fresh air reached\r
-him through the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated\r
-him.\r
-\r
-It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the\r
-belt-sewer.\r
-\r
-He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening. He found himself,\r
-all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach\r
-the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. The\r
-Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.\r
-\r
-At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other\r
-subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence, and that of the\r
-Abattoir, form a square. Between these four ways, a less sagacious man\r
-would have remained undecided. Jean Valjean selected the broadest, that\r
-is to say, the belt-sewer. But here the question again came up--should\r
-he descend or ascend? He thought that the situation required haste, and\r
-that he must now gain the Seine at any risk. In other terms, he must\r
-descend. He turned to the left.\r
-\r
-It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose that the\r
-belt-sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction of Bercy, the other\r
-towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the subterranean\r
-girdle of the Paris on the right bank. The Grand Sewer, which is, it\r
-must be remembered, nothing else than the old brook of Menilmontant,\r
-terminates, if one ascends it, in a blind sack, that is to say, at its\r
-ancient point of departure which was its source, at the foot of the\r
-knoll of Menilmontant. There is no direct communication with the\r
-branch which collects the waters of Paris beginning with the Quartier\r
-Popincourt, and which falls into the Seine through the Amelot sewer\r
-above the ancient Isle Louviers. This branch, which completes the\r
-collecting sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Menilmontant\r
-itself, by a pile which marks the dividing point of the waters, between\r
-upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery he\r
-would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, and broken down with\r
-fatigue, and in an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a wall. He would\r
-have been lost.\r
-\r
-In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way, and entering\r
-the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition that he did not\r
-hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour Boucherat, and by\r
-taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles gut on the left,\r
-then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian gallery, he\r
-might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided that he did\r
-not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the Bastille, he might\r
-have attained the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But in order\r
-to do this, he must have been thoroughly familiar with the enormous\r
-madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications and in all its openings.\r
-Now, we must again insist that he knew nothing of that frightful drain\r
-which he was traversing; and had any one asked him in what he was, he\r
-would have answered: "In the night."\r
-\r
-His instinct served him well. To descend was, in fact, possible safety.\r
-\r
-He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch out in the\r
-form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges and the\r
-long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussee d'Antin.\r
-\r
-A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine branch,\r
-he halted. He was extremely weary. A passably large air-hole, probably\r
-the man-hole in the Rue d'Anjou, furnished a light that was almost\r
-vivid. Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement which a brother\r
-would exercise towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the\r
-banquette of the sewer. Marius' blood-stained face appeared under the\r
-wan light of the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. His\r
-eyes were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples like a\r
-painter's brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp and dead. A\r
-clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; his limbs were\r
-cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of his mouth; his shirt had\r
-thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth of his coat was chafing the\r
-yawning gashes in the living flesh. Jean Valjean, pushing aside the\r
-garments with the tips of his fingers, laid his hand upon Marius'\r
-breast; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean tore up his shirt,\r
-bandaged the young man's wounds as well as he was able and stopped the\r
-flowing blood; then bending over Marius, who still lay unconscious\r
-and almost without breathing, in that half light, he gazed at him with\r
-inexpressible hatred.\r
-\r
-On disarranging Marius' garments, he had found two things in his\r
-pockets, the roll which had been forgotten there on the preceding\r
-evening, and Marius' pocketbook. He ate the roll and opened the\r
-pocketbook. On the first page he found the four lines written by Marius.\r
-The reader will recall them:\r
-\r
-"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.\r
-Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole, and\r
-remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought, repeating in a low\r
-tone: "Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6, Monsieur Gillenormand." He\r
-replaced the pocketbook in Marius' pocket. He had eaten, his strength\r
-had returned to him; he took Marius up once more upon his back, placed\r
-the latter's head carefully on his right shoulder, and resumed his\r
-descent of the sewer.\r
-\r
-The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley of\r
-Menilmontant, is about two leagues long. It is paved throughout a\r
-notable portion of its extent.\r
-\r
-This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which we are\r
-illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean march, Jean\r
-Valjean himself did not possess. Nothing told him what zone of the city\r
-he was traversing, nor what way he had made. Only the growing pallor of\r
-the pools of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to\r
-him that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement, and that the day\r
-would soon be over; and the rolling of vehicles overhead, having become\r
-intermittent instead of continuous, then having almost ceased, he\r
-concluded that he was no longer under central Paris, and that he\r
-was approaching some solitary region, in the vicinity of the outer\r
-boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. Where there are fewer houses and\r
-streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes. The gloom deepened around Jean\r
-Valjean. Nevertheless, he continued to advance, groping his way in the\r
-dark.\r
-\r
-Suddenly this darkness became terrible.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS\r
-WHICH IS TREACHEROUS\r
-\r
-He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a\r
-pavement under his feet, but only mud.\r
-\r
-It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a\r
-man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on the\r
-beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past,\r
-he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is\r
-like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is\r
-bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he takes,\r
-as soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water. The\r
-eye, however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is smooth and\r
-tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes the\r
-soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little\r
-cloud of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the\r
-passer-by.\r
-\r
-The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors\r
-to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is\r
-conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every\r
-step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three\r
-inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get his\r
-bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared.\r
-The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries\r
-to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than\r
-before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it\r
-and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings\r
-himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with\r
-indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a\r
-quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which\r
-neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he\r
-have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late,\r
-the sand is above his knees.\r
-\r
-He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually\r
-gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if\r
-the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero in the neighborhood,\r
-all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is condemned to that\r
-terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible\r
-to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come\r
-to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which\r
-drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at\r
-every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air\r
-of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces\r
-a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the\r
-horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on\r
-the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly\r
-and sing, the sun and the sky. This engulfment is the sepulchre which\r
-assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the earth towards\r
-a living man. Each minute is an inexorable layer-out of the dead. The\r
-wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down, to climb; every movement\r
-that he makes buries him deeper; he straightens himself up, he sinks; he\r
-feels that he is being swallowed up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the\r
-clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in the sand up\r
-to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now.\r
-He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the\r
-beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows\r
-in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically;\r
-the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand\r
-reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries\r
-aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand\r
-closes them, night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above\r
-the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and\r
-disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man.\r
-\r
-Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is\r
-swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck\r
-elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man. The earth,\r
-permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the\r
-guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to\r
-these treacheries.\r
-\r
-This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also\r
-possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.\r
-\r
-Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain\r
-of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.\r
-\r
-The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were\r
-particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in\r
-the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,\r
-having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of this\r
-sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a\r
-certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a\r
-fontis, in the special tongue. What is a fontis? It is the quicksands of\r
-the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of the earth; it is\r
-the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked soil is in a\r
-state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in suspension in soft\r
-medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The depth is sometimes very\r
-great. Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. If the\r
-water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swallowed up; if earth\r
-predominates, death is slow.\r
-\r
-Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the\r
-earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool? Instead of\r
-the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,\r
-those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried\r
-in the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable\r
-passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,--instead\r
-of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb\r
-already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation\r
-by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and\r
-clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;\r
-slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the\r
-hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's\r
-teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that\r
-enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head!\r
-\r
-Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems\r
-his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in\r
-shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb\r
-attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.\r
-But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme\r
-floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is\r
-petty, ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is\r
-permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.\r
-To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going\r
-through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows\r
-enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and\r
-the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre\r
-or a frog.\r
-\r
-Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.\r
-\r
-The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their\r
-density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.\r
-Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten;\r
-sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost solid,\r
-there almost liquid. In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a\r
-day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by\r
-the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less, according to its\r
-density. A child can escape where a man will perish. The first law of\r
-safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every sewerman who felt the\r
-ground giving way beneath him began by flinging away his sack of tools,\r
-or his back-basket, or his hod.\r
-\r
-The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;\r
-some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer\r
-rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.\r
-Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil\r
-forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to\r
-bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under\r
-this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthenon,\r
-obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Genevieve\r
-hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the\r
-mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,\r
-like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was\r
-developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the\r
-cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be\r
-promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior ravages\r
-were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the\r
-sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer, they were\r
-liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several scavengers\r
-who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many names; among\r
-others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a quagmire under\r
-the man-hole of the Rue Careme-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain; this\r
-Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last\r
-grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents, in 1785,\r
-the epoch when that cemetery expired.\r
-\r
-There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, of whom we\r
-have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where they\r
-delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.\r
-D'Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin's, the Duchess de\r
-Sourdis', was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which\r
-he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis,\r
-when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to\r
-weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is no love\r
-which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash the\r
-body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and\r
-says: "Phew!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE FONTIS\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.\r
-\r
-This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the\r
-Champs-Elysees, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad\r
-preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its\r
-excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the\r
-sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by\r
-a stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata,\r
-infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid\r
-that the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des\r
-Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, the old stone\r
-sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honore, in which we now see Jean\r
-Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the\r
-quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees as far as the\r
-Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly\r
-six months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside,\r
-particularly those who had hotels and carriages. The work was more than\r
-unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a\r
-half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.\r
-\r
-The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the downpour\r
-of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the subjacent\r
-sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water.\r
-Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated bottom\r
-had sunk into the ooze. To what extent? Impossible to say. The obscurity\r
-was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in a cavern of\r
-night.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered\r
-this slime. There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom. He must\r
-pass it. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was dying, and Jean\r
-Valjean exhausted. Besides, where was he to go? Jean Valjean advanced.\r
-Moreover, the pit seemed, for the first few steps, not to be very deep.\r
-But in proportion as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper. Soon he had\r
-the slime up to his calves and water above his knees. He walked on,\r
-raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he could. The mire\r
-now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer\r
-retreat. This mud, dense enough for one man, could not, obviously,\r
-uphold two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have stood a chance of\r
-extricating themselves singly. Jean Valjean continued to advance,\r
-supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps, a corpse.\r
-\r
-The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking; it was\r
-only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze which\r
-he had now reached. The density, which was his support, was also\r
-an obstacle. He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of\r
-expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had only\r
-his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius. In the\r
-old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.\r
-\r
-He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the\r
-water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had\r
-seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a\r
-mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of the\r
-drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort and\r
-launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point of\r
-support. It was high time.\r
-\r
-He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of\r
-support with a sort of fury. This produced upon him the effect of the\r
-first step in a staircase leading back to life.\r
-\r
-The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme\r
-moment, was the beginning of the other water-shed of the pavement, which\r
-had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water\r
-like a plank and in a single piece. Well built pavements form a vault\r
-and possess this sort of firmness. This fragment of the vaulting, partly\r
-submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once on this\r
-plane, he was safe. Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane and reached\r
-the other side of the quagmire.\r
-\r
-As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell\r
-upon his knees. He reflected that this was but just, and he remained\r
-there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.\r
-\r
-He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath\r
-the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime,\r
-and his soul filled with a strange light.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS\r
-DISEMBARKING\r
-\r
-He set out on his way once more.\r
-\r
-However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed\r
-to have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had\r
-exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause\r
-for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once\r
-he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius'\r
-position, and he thought that he should have to remain there. But if his\r
-vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.\r
-\r
-He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred\r
-paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with\r
-the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the\r
-turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes,\r
-and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him,\r
-he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was\r
-good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.\r
-\r
-A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly\r
-perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt.\r
-It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that\r
-radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no\r
-longer felt Marius' weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran\r
-rather than walked. As he approached, the outlet became more and more\r
-distinctly defined. It was a pointed arch, lower than the vault, which\r
-gradually narrowed, and narrower than the gallery, which closed in as\r
-the vault grew lower. The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel;\r
-a faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries,\r
-logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been\r
-corrected.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean reached the outlet.\r
-\r
-There he halted.\r
-\r
-It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.\r
-\r
-The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all\r
-appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone\r
-jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous\r
-brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in\r
-the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those\r
-prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.\r
-\r
-Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore,\r
-very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that\r
-gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty.\r
-On the right, down stream, the bridge of Jena was discernible, on the\r
-left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a\r
-propitious one in which to await the night and to escape. It was one\r
-of the most solitary points in Paris; the shore which faces the\r
-Grand-Caillou. Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of the\r
-grating.\r
-\r
-It might have been half-past eight o'clock in the evening. The day was\r
-declining.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion of the\r
-vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both fists round the\r
-bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied, but it did not move. The\r
-grating did not stir. Jean Valjean seized the bars one after the other,\r
-in the hope that he might be able to tear away the least solid, and to\r
-make of it a lever wherewith to raise the door or to break the lock. Not\r
-a bar stirred. The teeth of a tiger are not more firmly fixed in their\r
-sockets. No lever; no prying possible. The obstacle was invincible.\r
-There was no means of opening the gate.\r
-\r
-Must he then stop there? What was he to do? What was to become of him?\r
-He had not the strength to retrace his steps, to recommence the journey\r
-which he had already taken. Besides, how was he to again traverse that\r
-quagmire whence he had only extricated himself as by a miracle? And\r
-after the quagmire, was there not the police patrol, which assuredly\r
-could not be twice avoided? And then, whither was he to go? What\r
-direction should he pursue? To follow the incline would not conduct\r
-him to his goal. If he were to reach another outlet, he would find it\r
-obstructed by a plug or a grating. Every outlet was, undoubtedly, closed\r
-in that manner. Chance had unsealed the grating through which he had\r
-entered, but it was evident that all the other sewer mouths were barred.\r
-He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.\r
-\r
-All was over. Everything that Jean Valjean had done was useless.\r
-Exhaustion had ended in failure.\r
-\r
-They were both caught in the immense and gloomy web of death, and Jean\r
-Valjean felt the terrible spider running along those black strands and\r
-quivering in the shadows. He turned his back to the grating, and fell\r
-upon the pavement, hurled to earth rather than seated, close to Marius,\r
-who still made no movement, and with his head bent between his knees.\r
-This was the last drop of anguish.\r
-\r
-Of what was he thinking during this profound depression? Neither of\r
-himself nor of Marius. He was thinking of Cosette.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--THE TORN COAT-TAIL\r
-\r
-In the midst of this prostration, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a\r
-low voice said to him:\r
-\r
-"Half shares."\r
-\r
-Some person in that gloom? Nothing so closely resembles a dream as\r
-despair. Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming. He had heard no\r
-footsteps. Was it possible? He raised his eyes.\r
-\r
-A man stood before him.\r
-\r
-This man was clad in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes\r
-in his left hand; he had evidently removed them in order to reach Jean\r
-Valjean, without allowing his steps to be heard.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean did not hesitate for an instant. Unexpected as was this\r
-encounter, this man was known to him. The man was Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Although awakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed\r
-to alarms, and steeled to unforeseen shocks that must be promptly\r
-parried, instantly regained possession of his presence of mind.\r
-Moreover, the situation could not be made worse, a certain degree of\r
-distress is no longer capable of a crescendo, and Thenardier himself\r
-could add nothing to this blackness of this night.\r
-\r
-A momentary pause ensued.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, raising his right hand to a level with his forehead, formed\r
-with it a shade, then he brought his eyelashes together, by screwing up\r
-his eyes, a motion which, in connection with a slight contraction of the\r
-mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who is endeavoring\r
-to recognize another man. He did not succeed. Jean Valjean, as we have\r
-just stated, had his back turned to the light, and he was, moreover,\r
-so disfigured, so bemired, so bleeding that he would have been\r
-unrecognizable in full noonday. On the contrary, illuminated by the\r
-light from the grating, a cellar light, it is true, livid, yet precise\r
-in its lividness, Thenardier, as the energetic popular metaphor\r
-expresses it, immediately "leaped into" Jean Valjean's eyes. This\r
-inequality of conditions sufficed to assure some advantage to Jean\r
-Valjean in that mysterious duel which was on the point of beginning\r
-between the two situations and the two men. The encounter took place\r
-between Jean Valjean veiled and Thenardier unmasked.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thenardier did not recognize\r
-him.\r
-\r
-They surveyed each other for a moment in that half-gloom, as though\r
-taking each other's measure. Thenardier was the first to break the\r
-silence.\r
-\r
-"How are you going to manage to get out?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean made no reply. Thenardier continued:\r
-\r
-"It's impossible to pick the lock of that gate. But still you must get\r
-out of this."\r
-\r
-"That is true," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Well, half shares then."\r
-\r
-"What do you mean by that?"\r
-\r
-"You have killed that man; that's all right. I have the key."\r
-\r
-Thenardier pointed to Marius. He went on:\r
-\r
-"I don't know you, but I want to help you. You must be a friend."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean began to comprehend. Thenardier took him for an assassin.\r
-\r
-Thenardier resumed:\r
-\r
-"Listen, comrade. You didn't kill that man without looking to see what\r
-he had in his pockets. Give me my half. I'll open the door for you."\r
-\r
-And half drawing from beneath his tattered blouse a huge key, he added:\r
-\r
-"Do you want to see how a key to liberty is made? Look here."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean "remained stupid"--the expression belongs to the elder\r
-Corneille--to such a degree that he doubted whether what he beheld was\r
-real. It was providence appearing in horrible guise, and his good angel\r
-springing from the earth in the form of Thenardier.\r
-\r
-Thenardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under his\r
-blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Hold on," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."\r
-\r
-"What is the rope for?"\r
-\r
-"You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside. There's a\r
-heap of rubbish."\r
-\r
-"What am I to do with a stone?"\r
-\r
-"Idiot, you'll want to sling that stiff into the river, you'll need a\r
-stone and a rope, otherwise it would float on the water."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean took the rope. There is no one who does not occasionally\r
-accept in this mechanical way.\r
-\r
-Thenardier snapped his fingers as though an idea had suddenly occurred\r
-to him.\r
-\r
-"Ah, see here, comrade, how did you contrive to get out of that slough\r
-yonder? I haven't dared to risk myself in it. Phew! you don't smell\r
-good."\r
-\r
-After a pause he added:\r
-\r
-"I'm asking you questions, but you're perfectly right not to answer.\r
-It's an apprenticeship against that cursed quarter of an hour before the\r
-examining magistrate. And then, when you don't talk at all, you run no\r
-risk of talking too loud. That's no matter, as I can't see your face and\r
-as I don't know your name, you are wrong in supposing that I don't know\r
-who you are and what you want. I twig. You've broken up that gentleman\r
-a bit; now you want to tuck him away somewhere. The river, that great\r
-hider of folly, is what you want. I'll get you out of your scrape.\r
-Helping a good fellow in a pinch is what suits me to a hair."\r
-\r
-While expressing his approval of Jean Valjean's silence, he endeavored\r
-to force him to talk. He jostled his shoulder in an attempt to catch a\r
-sight of his profile, and he exclaimed, without, however, raising his\r
-tone:\r
-\r
-"Apropos of that quagmire, you're a hearty animal. Why didn't you toss\r
-the man in there?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean preserved silence.\r
-\r
-Thenardier resumed, pushing the rag which served him as a cravat to the\r
-level of his Adam's apple, a gesture which completes the capable air of\r
-a serious man:\r
-\r
-"After all, you acted wisely. The workmen, when they come to-morrow to\r
-stop up that hole, would certainly have found the stiff abandoned there,\r
-and it might have been possible, thread by thread, straw by straw, to\r
-pick up the scent and reach you. Some one has passed through the sewer.\r
-Who? Where did he get out? Was he seen to come out? The police are full\r
-of cleverness. The sewer is treacherous and tells tales of you. Such a\r
-find is a rarity, it attracts attention, very few people make use of\r
-the sewers for their affairs, while the river belongs to everybody. The\r
-river is the true grave. At the end of a month they fish up your man\r
-in the nets at Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for that? It's\r
-carrion! Who killed that man? Paris. And justice makes no inquiries. You\r
-have done well."\r
-\r
-The more loquacious Thenardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Again Thenardier shook him by the shoulder.\r
-\r
-"Now let's settle this business. Let's go shares. You have seen my key,\r
-show me your money."\r
-\r
-Thenardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing, yet\r
-amicable.\r
-\r
-There was one singular circumstance; Thenardier's manners were not\r
-simple; he had not the air of being wholly at his ease; while affecting\r
-an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time he laid his finger on\r
-his mouth, and muttered, "hush!" It was difficult to divine why. There\r
-was no one there except themselves. Jean Valjean thought that other\r
-ruffians might possibly be concealed in some nook, not very far off, and\r
-that Thenardier did not care to share with them.\r
-\r
-Thenardier resumed:\r
-\r
-"Let's settle up. How much did the stiff have in his bags?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean searched his pockets.\r
-\r
-It was his habit, as the reader will remember, to always have some\r
-money about him. The mournful life of expedients to which he had been\r
-condemned imposed this as a law upon him. On this occasion, however,\r
-he had been caught unprepared. When donning his uniform of a National\r
-Guardsman on the preceding evening, he had forgotten, dolefully absorbed\r
-as he was, to take his pocket-book. He had only some small change in his\r
-fob. He turned out his pocket, all soaked with ooze, and spread out on\r
-the banquette of the vault one louis d'or, two five-franc pieces, and\r
-five or six large sous.\r
-\r
-Thenardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant twist of the\r
-neck.\r
-\r
-"You knocked him over cheap," said he.\r
-\r
-He set to feeling the pockets of Jean Valjean and Marius, with the\r
-greatest familiarity. Jean Valjean, who was chiefly concerned in keeping\r
-his back to the light, let him have his way.\r
-\r
-While handling Marius' coat, Thenardier, with the skill of a pickpocket,\r
-and without being noticed by Jean Valjean, tore off a strip which he\r
-concealed under his blouse, probably thinking that this morsel of\r
-stuff might serve, later on, to identify the assassinated man and the\r
-assassin. However, he found no more than the thirty francs.\r
-\r
-"That's true," said he, "both of you together have no more than that."\r
-\r
-And, forgetting his motto: "half shares," he took all.\r
-\r
-He hesitated a little over the large sous. After due reflection, he took\r
-them also, muttering:\r
-\r
-"Never mind! You cut folks' throats too cheap altogether."\r
-\r
-That done, he once more drew the big key from under his blouse.\r
-\r
-"Now, my friend, you must leave. It's like the fair here, you pay when\r
-you go out. You have paid, now clear out."\r
-\r
-And he began to laugh.\r
-\r
-Had he, in lending to this stranger the aid of his key, and in making\r
-some other man than himself emerge from that portal, the pure and\r
-disinterested intention of rescuing an assassin? We may be permitted to\r
-doubt this.\r
-\r
-Thenardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders, then\r
-he betook himself to the grating on tiptoe, and barefooted, making Jean\r
-Valjean a sign to follow him, looked out, laid his finger on his mouth,\r
-and remained for several seconds, as though in suspense; his inspection\r
-finished, he placed the key in the lock. The bolt slipped back and the\r
-gate swung open. It neither grated nor squeaked. It moved very softly.\r
-\r
-It was obvious that this gate and those hinges, carefully oiled, were\r
-in the habit of opening more frequently than was supposed. This\r
-softness was suspicious; it hinted at furtive goings and comings, silent\r
-entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolf-like tread of crime.\r
-\r
-The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some mysterious band. This\r
-taciturn grating was a receiver of stolen goods.\r
-\r
-Thenardier opened the gate a little way, allowing just sufficient space\r
-for Jean Valjean to pass out, closed the grating again, gave the key\r
-a double turn in the lock and plunged back into the darkness, without\r
-making any more noise than a breath. He seemed to walk with the velvet\r
-paws of a tiger.\r
-\r
-A moment later, that hideous providence had retreated into the\r
-invisibility.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IX--MARIUS PRODUCES ON SOME ONE WHO IS A JUDGE OF THE MATTER,\r
-THE EFFECT OF BEING DEAD\r
-\r
-He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.\r
-\r
-They were in the open air!\r
-\r
-The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him. The pure, healthful,\r
-living, joyous air that was easy to breathe inundated him. Everywhere\r
-around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when the sun has\r
-set in an unclouded azure sky. Twilight had descended; night was drawing\r
-on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those who need a mantle of\r
-darkness that they may escape from an anguish. The sky presented itself\r
-in all directions like an enormous calm. The river flowed to his feet\r
-with the sound of a kiss. The aerial dialogue of the nests bidding each\r
-other good night in the elms of the Champs-Elysees was audible. A few\r
-stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the zenith, and visible to\r
-revery alone, formed imperceptible little splendors amid the immensity.\r
-Evening was unfolding over the head of Jean Valjean all the sweetness of\r
-the infinite.\r
-\r
-It was that exquisite and undecided hour which says neither yes nor no.\r
-Night was already sufficiently advanced to render it possible to lose\r
-oneself at a little distance and yet there was sufficient daylight to\r
-permit of recognition at close quarters.\r
-\r
-For several seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by that\r
-august and caressing serenity; such moments of oblivion do come to men;\r
-suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch; everything is\r
-eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer like night; and,\r
-beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation of the sky which is\r
-illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars. Jean Valjean could\r
-not refrain from contemplating that vast, clear shadow which rested\r
-over him; thoughtfully he bathed in the sea of ecstasy and prayer in the\r
-majestic silence of the eternal heavens. Then he bent down swiftly\r
-to Marius, as though the sentiment of duty had returned to him, and,\r
-dipping up water in the hollow of his hand, he gently sprinkled a\r
-few drops on the latter's face. Marius' eyelids did not open; but his\r
-half-open mouth still breathed.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was on the point of dipping his hand in the river once\r
-more, when, all at once, he experienced an indescribable embarrassment,\r
-such as a person feels when there is some one behind him whom he does\r
-not see.\r
-\r
-We have already alluded to this impression, with which everyone is\r
-familiar.\r
-\r
-He turned round.\r
-\r
-Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a short while\r
-before.\r
-\r
-A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with folded arms,\r
-and bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which the leaden head was\r
-visible, stood a few paces in the rear of the spot where Jean Valjean\r
-was crouching over Marius.\r
-\r
-With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition. An\r
-ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight, a\r
-thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon. Jean Valjean recognized\r
-Javert.\r
-\r
-The reader has divined, no doubt, that Thenardier's pursuer was no other\r
-than Javert. Javert, after his unlooked-for escape from the barricade,\r
-had betaken himself to the prefecture of police, had rendered a\r
-verbal account to the Prefect in person in a brief audience, had then\r
-immediately gone on duty again, which implied--the note, the reader will\r
-recollect, which had been captured on his person--a certain surveillance\r
-of the shore on the right bank of the Seine near the Champs-Elysees,\r
-which had, for some time past, aroused the attention of the police.\r
-There he had caught sight of Thenardier and had followed him. The reader\r
-knows the rest.\r
-\r
-Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so obligingly\r
-opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness on Thenardier's part.\r
-Thenardier intuitively felt that Javert was still there; the man spied\r
-upon has a scent which never deceives him; it was necessary to fling\r
-a bone to that sleuth-hound. An assassin, what a godsend! Such an\r
-opportunity must never be allowed to slip. Thenardier, by putting Jean\r
-Valjean outside in his stead, provided a prey for the police, forced\r
-them to relinquish his scent, made them forget him in a bigger\r
-adventure, repaid Javert for his waiting, which always flatters a spy,\r
-earned thirty francs, and counted with certainty, so far as he himself\r
-was concerned, on escaping with the aid of this diversion.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.\r
-\r
-These two encounters, this falling one after the other, from Thenardier\r
-upon Javert, was a rude shock.\r
-\r
-Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we have stated, no longer\r
-looked like himself. He did not unfold his arms, he made sure of his\r
-bludgeon in his fist, by an imperceptible movement, and said in a curt,\r
-calm voice:\r
-\r
-"Who are you?"\r
-\r
-"I."\r
-\r
-"Who is 'I'?"\r
-\r
-"Jean Valjean."\r
-\r
-Javert thrust his bludgeon between his teeth, bent his knees, inclined\r
-his body, laid his two powerful hands on the shoulders of Jean Valjean,\r
-which were clamped within them as in a couple of vices, scrutinized\r
-him, and recognized him. Their faces almost touched. Javert's look was\r
-terrible.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert's grasp, like a lion\r
-submitting to the claws of a lynx.\r
-\r
-"Inspector Javert," said he, "you have me in your power. Moreover, I\r
-have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning. I did not\r
-give you my address with any intention of escaping from you. Take me.\r
-Only grant me one favor."\r
-\r
-Javert did not appear to hear him. He kept his eyes riveted on Jean\r
-Valjean. His chin being contracted, thrust his lips upwards towards\r
-his nose, a sign of savage revery. At length he released Jean Valjean,\r
-straightened himself stiffly up without bending, grasped his bludgeon\r
-again firmly, and, as though in a dream, he murmured rather than uttered\r
-this question:\r
-\r
-"What are you doing here? And who is this man?"\r
-\r
-He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as thou.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse\r
-Javert:\r
-\r
-"It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you. Dispose of me\r
-as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home. That is all that I\r
-ask of you."\r
-\r
-Javert's face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed to\r
-think him capable of making a concession. Nevertheless, he did not say\r
-"no."\r
-\r
-Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which\r
-he moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius'\r
-blood-stained brow.\r
-\r
-"This man was at the barricade," said he in a low voice and as though\r
-speaking to himself. "He is the one they called Marius."\r
-\r
-A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to\r
-everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was to\r
-die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his elbows\r
-leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.\r
-\r
-He seized Marius' hand and felt his pulse.\r
-\r
-"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"He is a dead man," said Javert.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean replied:\r
-\r
-"No. Not yet."\r
-\r
-"So you have brought him thither from the barricade?" remarked Javert.\r
-\r
-His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not to\r
-insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him not to\r
-even notice Jean Valjean's silence after his question.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought. He resumed:\r
-\r
-"He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his\r
-grandfather. I do not recollect his name."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius' coat, pulled out his pocket-book, opened\r
-it at the page which Marius had pencilled, and held it out to Javert.\r
-\r
-There was still sufficient light to admit of reading. Besides this,\r
-Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night\r
-birds. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered:\r
-"Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du Calvaire, No. 6."\r
-\r
-Then he exclaimed: "Coachman!"\r
-\r
-The reader will remember that the hackney-coach was waiting in case of\r
-need.\r
-\r
-Javert kept Marius' pocket-book.\r
-\r
-A moment later, the carriage, which had descended by the inclined plane\r
-of the watering-place, was on the shore. Marius was laid upon the back\r
-seat, and Javert seated himself on the front seat beside Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-The door slammed, and the carriage drove rapidly away, ascending the\r
-quays in the direction of the Bastille.\r
-\r
-They quitted the quays and entered the streets. The coachman, a black\r
-form on his box, whipped up his thin horses. A glacial silence reigned\r
-in the carriage. Marius, motionless, with his body resting in the\r
-corner, and his head drooping on his breast, his arms hanging, his legs\r
-stiff, seemed to be awaiting only a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of\r
-shadow, and Javert of stone, and in that vehicle full of night, whose\r
-interior, every time that it passed in front of a street lantern,\r
-appeared to be turned lividly wan, as by an intermittent flash of\r
-lightning, chance had united and seemed to be bringing face to face\r
-the three forms of tragic immobility, the corpse, the spectre, and the\r
-statue.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER X--RETURN OF THE SON WHO WAS PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE\r
-\r
-At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled from Marius'\r
-hair.\r
-\r
-Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at No. 6, Rue des\r
-Filles-du-Calvaire.\r
-\r
-Javert was the first to alight; he made sure with one glance of the\r
-number on the carriage gate, and, raising the heavy knocker of beaten\r
-iron, embellished in the old style, with a male goat and a satyr\r
-confronting each other, he gave a violent peal. The gate opened a little\r
-way and Javert gave it a push. The porter half made his appearance\r
-yawning, vaguely awake, and with a candle in his hand.\r
-\r
-Everyone in the house was asleep. People go to bed betimes in the\r
-Marais, especially on days when there is a revolt. This good, old\r
-quarter, terrified at the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber, as\r
-children, when they hear the Bugaboo coming, hide their heads hastily\r
-under their coverlet.\r
-\r
-In the meantime Jean Valjean and the coachman had taken Marius out of\r
-the carriage, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits, and the\r
-coachman under the knees.\r
-\r
-As they thus bore Marius, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under the\r
-latter's clothes, which were broadly rent, felt his breast, and assured\r
-himself that his heart was still beating. It was even beating a little\r
-less feebly, as though the movement of the carriage had brought about a\r
-certain fresh access of life.\r
-\r
-Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the\r
-presence of the porter of a factious person.\r
-\r
-"Some person whose name is Gillenormand?"\r
-\r
-"Here. What do you want with him?"\r
-\r
-"His son is brought back."\r
-\r
-"His son?" said the porter stupidly.\r
-\r
-"He is dead."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom\r
-the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his\r
-head that this was not so.\r
-\r
-The porter did not appear to understand either Javert's words or Jean\r
-Valjean's sign.\r
-\r
-Javert continued:\r
-\r
-"He went to the barricade, and here he is."\r
-\r
-"To the barricade?" ejaculated the porter.\r
-\r
-"He has got himself killed. Go waken his father."\r
-\r
-The porter did not stir.\r
-\r
-"Go along with you!" repeated Javert.\r
-\r
-And he added:\r
-\r
-"There will be a funeral here to-morrow."\r
-\r
-For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically\r
-classed, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance, and each\r
-contingency had its own compartment; all possible facts were arranged\r
-in drawers, as it were, whence they emerged on occasion, in variable\r
-quantities; in the street, uproar, revolt, carnival, and funeral.\r
-\r
-The porter contented himself with waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette;\r
-Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, thinking that he would\r
-hear about the matter early enough in any case.\r
-\r
-Marius was carried up to the first floor, without any one in the other\r
-parts of the house being aware of the fact, and deposited on an old sofa\r
-in M. Gillenormand's antechamber; and while Basque went in search of a\r
-physician, and while Nicolette opened the linen-presses, Jean Valjean\r
-felt Javert touch him on the shoulder. He understood and descended the\r
-stairs, having behind him the step of Javert who was following him.\r
-\r
-The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their\r
-arrival, in terrified somnolence.\r
-\r
-They entered the carriage once more, and the coachman mounted his box.\r
-\r
-"Inspector Javert," said Jean, "grant me yet another favor."\r
-\r
-"What is it?" demanded Javert roughly.\r
-\r
-"Let me go home for one instant. Then you shall do whatever you like\r
-with me."\r
-\r
-Javert remained silent for a few moments, with his chin drawn back into\r
-the collar of his great-coat, then he lowered the glass and front:\r
-\r
-"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XI--CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE\r
-\r
-They did not open their lips again during the whole space of their ride.\r
-\r
-What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had begun; to warn\r
-Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, to give her, possibly, some other\r
-useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures. As\r
-for himself, so far as he was personally concerned, all was over; he had\r
-been seized by Javert and had not resisted; any other man than himself\r
-in like situation would, perhaps, have had some vague thoughts connected\r
-with the rope which Thenardier had given him, and of the bars of the\r
-first cell that he should enter; but, let us impress it upon the\r
-reader, after the Bishop, there had existed in Jean Valjean a profound\r
-hesitation in the presence of any violence, even when directed against\r
-himself.\r
-\r
-Suicide, that mysterious act of violence against the unknown which may\r
-contain, in a measure, the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-At the entrance to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, the carriage halted, the way\r
-being too narrow to admit of the entrance of vehicles. Javert and Jean\r
-Valjean alighted.\r
-\r
-The coachman humbly represented to "monsieur l'Inspecteur," that the\r
-Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all spotted with the blood of the\r
-assassinated man, and with mire from the assassin. That is the way he\r
-understood it. He added that an indemnity was due him. At the same time,\r
-drawing his certificate book from his pocket, he begged the inspector to\r
-have the goodness to write him "a bit of an attestation."\r
-\r
-Javert thrust aside the book which the coachman held out to him, and\r
-said:\r
-\r
-"How much do you want, including your time of waiting and the drive?"\r
-\r
-"It comes to seven hours and a quarter," replied the man, "and my velvet\r
-was perfectly new. Eighty francs, Mr. Inspector."\r
-\r
-Javert drew four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the carriage.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean fancied that it was Javert's intention to conduct him on\r
-foot to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post of the Archives,\r
-both of which are close at hand.\r
-\r
-They entered the street. It was deserted as usual. Javert followed Jean\r
-Valjean. They reached No. 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened.\r
-\r
-"It is well," said Javert. "Go up stairs."\r
-\r
-He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting an\r
-effort in speaking in this manner:\r
-\r
-"I will wait for you here."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This mode of procedure was but little in\r
-accord with Javert's habits. However, he could not be greatly surprised\r
-that Javert should now have a sort of haughty confidence in him, the\r
-confidence of the cat which grants the mouse liberty to the length of\r
-its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had made up his mind to surrender\r
-himself and to make an end of it. He pushed open the door, entered the\r
-house, called to the porter who was in bed and who had pulled the cord\r
-from his couch: "It is I!" and ascended the stairs.\r
-\r
-On arriving at the first floor, he paused. All sorrowful roads\r
-have their stations. The window on the landing-place, which was a\r
-sash-window, was open. As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its\r
-light from without and had a view on the street. The street-lantern,\r
-situated directly opposite, cast some light on the stairs, and thus\r
-effected some economy in illumination.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically,\r
-thrust his head out of this window. He leaned out over the street. It\r
-is short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end. Jean Valjean was\r
-overwhelmed with amazement; there was no longer any one there.\r
-\r
-Javert had taken his departure.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER XII--THE GRANDFATHER\r
-\r
-Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room, as he\r
-still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which he had been\r
-placed on his arrival. The doctor who had been sent for had hastened\r
-thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.\r
-\r
-Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and\r
-incapable of doing anything but saying: "Heavens! is it possible?" At\r
-times she added: "Everything will be covered with blood." When her first\r
-horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation penetrated\r
-her mind, and took form in the exclamation: "It was bound to end in this\r
-way!" She did not go so far as: "I told you so!" which is customary on\r
-this sort of occasion. At the physician's orders, a camp bed had been\r
-prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and after having\r
-found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded man had no very\r
-deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on the corners of his lips\r
-proceeded from his nostrils, he had him placed flat on the bed, without\r
-a pillow, with his head on the same level as his body, and even a\r
-trifle lower, and with his bust bare in order to facilitate respiration.\r
-Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing\r
-Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her beads in her own\r
-chamber.\r
-\r
-The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by\r
-the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a\r
-hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not\r
-dangerous. The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation\r
-of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The arms\r
-had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar disfigured his face;\r
-but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the result of\r
-these wounds on the head? Would they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or\r
-would they attack the brain? As yet, this could not be decided. A grave\r
-symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always\r
-recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted\r
-by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the barricade had protected the\r
-lower part of the body from injury.\r
-\r
-Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette\r
-sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor, for\r
-the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside\r
-the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical\r
-instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius' face and hair with\r
-cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter, candle\r
-in hand, lighted them.\r
-\r
-The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time, he made a\r
-negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which\r
-he had inwardly addressed to himself.\r
-\r
-A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the doctor\r
-with himself.\r
-\r
-At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and lightly\r
-touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the end\r
-of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.\r
-\r
-This was the grandfather.\r
-\r
-The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and\r
-engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep\r
-on the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the\r
-evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in\r
-the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through\r
-sheer fatigue.\r
-\r
-Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined the\r
-drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken,\r
-the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he\r
-saw under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way\r
-thither.\r
-\r
-He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the\r
-half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering,\r
-his body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as\r
-destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom\r
-who is gazing into a tomb.\r
-\r
-He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white with\r
-a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid lips,\r
-stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds, motionless\r
-and brilliantly lighted up.\r
-\r
-The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified\r
-limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae were yellow on account of\r
-his great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole\r
-face assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell\r
-pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed\r
-by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which quivered\r
-all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing, through\r
-the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs, all\r
-bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:\r
-\r
-"Marius!"\r
-\r
-"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to the\r
-barricade, and . . ."\r
-\r
-"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice. "Ah! The rascal!"\r
-\r
-Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this\r
-centenarian as erect as a young man.\r
-\r
-"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He\r
-is dead, is he not?"\r
-\r
-The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.\r
-\r
-"He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on\r
-the barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You\r
-blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he\r
-is dead!"\r
-\r
-He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,\r
-and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to the\r
-night:\r
-\r
-"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at\r
-that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I\r
-had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed\r
-his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had\r
-only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and that\r
-I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing what\r
-to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but to\r
-return and to say: 'It is I,' and you would have been the master of the\r
-house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have done\r
-whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew\r
-that well, and you said:\r
-\r
-"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,\r
-and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what\r
-I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed\r
-then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening."\r
-\r
-The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted\r
-Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm.\r
-The grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed\r
-exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:\r
-\r
-"I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of\r
-Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that is\r
-to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You will\r
-have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions,\r
-progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of the press,\r
-and this is the way that your children will be brought home to you. Ah!\r
-Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A barricade! Ah, the\r
-scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe? Oh! I know you well.\r
-I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to tell you. You are\r
-wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into a rage against a\r
-dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I have reared.\r
-I was already old while he was very young. He played in the Tuileries\r
-garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and in order that\r
-the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes that he made in\r
-the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he exclaimed: Down with\r
-Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of mine. He was all rosy\r
-and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever noticed that all little\r
-children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son of one of those brigands\r
-of the Loire, but children are innocent of their fathers' crimes.\r
-I remember when he was no higher than that. He could not manage\r
-to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was so sweet and\r
-indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird chirping. I\r
-remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese, people formed a\r
-circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so handsome, was that\r
-child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I talked in a deep\r
-voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it\r
-was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he entered my room, I\r
-grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot\r
-defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you\r
-fast, they never let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a\r
-cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for your Lafayettes, your\r
-Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles who have killed him?\r
-This cannot be allowed to pass in this fashion."\r
-\r
-He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom\r
-the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The\r
-old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the\r
-passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death\r
-agony:\r
-\r
-"Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!"\r
-\r
-Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.\r
-\r
-Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions\r
-should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the\r
-grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his\r
-voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other\r
-side of an abyss:\r
-\r
-"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And\r
-to think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been\r
-delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing\r
-himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down\r
-like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to\r
-dance at the Chaumiere, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What's\r
-the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!\r
-Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two\r
-funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself arranged\r
-like this for the sake of General Lamarque's handsome eyes! What had\r
-that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box! To get\r
-oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn't enough to drive any one\r
-mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning his\r
-head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That's the\r
-way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, now-adays. Perish\r
-in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that is what\r
-I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old, I am\r
-a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought, by\r
-rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So all\r
-is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale ammonia\r
-and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you fool of\r
-a doctor! Come, he's dead, completely dead. I know all about it, I\r
-am dead myself too. He hasn't done things by half. Yes, this age is\r
-infamous, infamous and that's what I think of you, of your ideas, of\r
-your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of your\r
-scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all the\r
-revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening\r
-the flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting\r
-yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do\r
-you understand, you assassin?"\r
-\r
-At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still\r
-dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-"Marius!" cried the old man. "Marius! My little Marius! my child! my\r
-well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,\r
-thanks!"\r
-\r
-And he fell fainting.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--JAVERT\r
-\r
-Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l'Homme Arme.\r
-\r
-He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and\r
-likewise, for the first time in his life, with his hands behind his\r
-back.\r
-\r
-Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon's attitudes, only that\r
-which is expressive of resolution, with arms folded across the chest;\r
-that which is expressive of uncertainty--with the hands behind the\r
-back--had been unknown to him. Now, a change had taken place; his whole\r
-person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.\r
-\r
-He plunged into the silent streets.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, he followed one given direction.\r
-\r
-He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes,\r
-skirted the quay, passed the Greve, and halted at some distance from\r
-the post of the Place du Chatelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame.\r
-There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand,\r
-and the Quai de la Megisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, the\r
-Seine forms a sort of square lake, traversed by a rapid.\r
-\r
-This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more\r
-dangerous than this rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated by\r
-the piles of the mill on the bridge, now demolished. The two bridges,\r
-situated thus close together, augment the peril; the water hurries in\r
-formidable wise through the arches. It rolls in vast and terrible waves;\r
-it accumulates and piles up there; the flood attacks the piles of the\r
-bridges as though in an effort to pluck them up with great liquid ropes.\r
-Men who fall in there never re-appear; the best of swimmers are drowned\r
-there.\r
-\r
-Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting in both\r
-hands, and, while his nails were mechanically twined in the abundance of\r
-his whiskers, he meditated.\r
-\r
-A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the\r
-depths of his being; and he had something upon which to examine himself.\r
-\r
-Javert was undergoing horrible suffering.\r
-\r
-For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled;\r
-that brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; that\r
-crystal was clouded. Javert felt duty divided within his conscience, and\r
-he could not conceal the fact from himself. When he had so unexpectedly\r
-encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there had been in\r
-him something of the wolf which regains his grip on his prey, and of the\r
-dog who finds his master again.\r
-\r
-He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld\r
-two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known\r
-more than one straight line. And, the poignant anguish lay in this, that\r
-the two paths were contrary to each other. One of these straight lines\r
-excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?\r
-\r
-His situation was indescribable.\r
-\r
-To owe his life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to repay it; to\r
-be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice, and to\r
-repay his service with another service; to allow it to be said to him,\r
-"Go," and to say to the latter in his turn: "Be free"; to sacrifice to\r
-personal motives duty, that general obligation, and to be conscious,\r
-in those personal motives, of something that was also general, and,\r
-perchance, superior, to betray society in order to remain true to his\r
-conscience; that all these absurdities should be realized and should\r
-accumulate upon him,--this was what overwhelmed him.\r
-\r
-One thing had amazed him,--this was that Jean Valjean should have done\r
-him a favor, and one thing petrified him,--that he, Javert, should have\r
-done Jean Valjean a favor.\r
-\r
-Where did he stand? He sought to comprehend his position, and could no\r
-longer find his bearings.\r
-\r
-What was he to do now? To deliver up Jean Valjean was bad; to leave Jean\r
-Valjean at liberty was bad. In the first case, the man of authority fell\r
-lower than the man of the galleys, in the second, a convict rose above\r
-the law, and set his foot upon it. In both cases, dishonor for him,\r
-Javert. There was disgrace in any resolution at which he might arrive.\r
-Destiny has some extremities which rise perpendicularly from the\r
-impossible, and beyond which life is no longer anything but a precipice.\r
-Javert had reached one of those extremities.\r
-\r
-One of his anxieties consisted in being constrained to think. The very\r
-violence of all these conflicting emotions forced him to it. Thought was\r
-something to which he was unused, and which was peculiarly painful.\r
-\r
-In thought there always exists a certain amount of internal rebellion;\r
-and it irritated him to have that within him.\r
-\r
-Thought on any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of his\r
-functions, would have been for him in any case useless and a fatigue;\r
-thought on the day which had just passed was a torture. Nevertheless, it\r
-was indispensable that he should take a look into his conscience, after\r
-such shocks, and render to himself an account of himself.\r
-\r
-What he had just done made him shudder. He, Javert, had seen fit to\r
-decide, contrary to all the regulations of the police, contrary to the\r
-whole social and judicial organization, contrary to the entire code,\r
-upon a release; this had suited him; he had substituted his own affairs\r
-for the affairs of the public; was not this unjustifiable? Every time\r
-that he brought himself face to face with this deed without a name which\r
-he had committed, he trembled from head to foot. Upon what should he\r
-decide? One sole resource remained to him; to return in all haste to\r
-the Rue de l'Homme Arme, and commit Jean Valjean to prison. It was clear\r
-that that was what he ought to do. He could not.\r
-\r
-Something barred his way in that direction.\r
-\r
-Something? What? Is there in the world, anything outside of the\r
-tribunals, executory sentences, the police and the authorities? Javert\r
-was overwhelmed.\r
-\r
-A galley-slave sacred! A convict who could not be touched by the law!\r
-And that the deed of Javert!\r
-\r
-Was it not a fearful thing that Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to\r
-proceed with vigor, the man made to submit,--that these two men who were\r
-both the things of the law, should have come to such a pass, that both\r
-of them had set themselves above the law? What then! such enormities\r
-were to happen and no one was to be punished! Jean Valjean, stronger\r
-than the whole social order, was to remain at liberty, and he, Javert,\r
-was to go on eating the government's bread!\r
-\r
-His revery gradually became terrible.\r
-\r
-He might, athwart this revery, have also reproached himself on\r
-the subject of that insurgent who had been taken to the Rue des\r
-Filles-du-Calvaire; but he never even thought of that. The lesser fault\r
-was lost in the greater. Besides, that insurgent was, obviously, a dead\r
-man, and, legally, death puts an end to pursuit.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was the load which weighed upon his spirit.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as\r
-points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence\r
-of this man. Jean Valjean's generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him.\r
-Other facts which he now recalled, and which he had formerly treated\r
-as lies and folly, now recurred to him as realities. M. Madeleine\r
-re-appeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were superposed in\r
-such fashion that they now formed but one, which was venerable. Javert\r
-felt that something terrible was penetrating his soul--admiration for\r
-a convict. Respect for a galley-slave--is that a possible thing? He\r
-shuddered at it, yet could not escape from it. In vain did he struggle,\r
-he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity of that\r
-wretch. This was odious.\r
-\r
-A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict,\r
-returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity\r
-to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy,\r
-saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more\r
-nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit\r
-to himself that this monster existed.\r
-\r
-Things could not go on in this manner.\r
-\r
-Certainly, and we insist upon this point, he had not yielded without\r
-resistance to that monster, to that infamous angel, to that hideous\r
-hero, who enraged almost as much as he amazed him. Twenty times, as he\r
-sat in that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the legal tiger had\r
-roared within him. A score of times he had been tempted to fling himself\r
-upon Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is to say, to\r
-arrest him. What more simple, in fact? To cry out at the first post that\r
-they passed:--"Here is a fugitive from justice, who has broken his ban!"\r
-to summon the gendarmes and say to them: "This man is yours!" then to\r
-go off, leaving that condemned man there, to ignore the rest and not to\r
-meddle further in the matter. This man is forever a prisoner of the law;\r
-the law may do with him what it will. What could be more just? Javert\r
-had said all this to himself; he had wished to pass beyond, to act, to\r
-apprehend the man, and then, as at present, he had not been able to do\r
-it; and every time that his arm had been raised convulsively towards\r
-Jean Valjean's collar, his hand had fallen back again, as beneath an\r
-enormous weight, and in the depths of his thought he had heard a voice,\r
-a strange voice crying to him:--"It is well. Deliver up your savior.\r
-Then have the basin of Pontius Pilate brought and wash your claws."\r
-\r
-Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean\r
-glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded.\r
-\r
-A convict was his benefactor!\r
-\r
-But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? He had\r
-the right to be killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that\r
-right. It would have been better to summon the other insurgents to his\r
-succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot by force.\r
-\r
-His supreme anguish was the loss of certainty. He felt that he had been\r
-uprooted. The code was no longer anything more than a stump in his hand.\r
-He had to deal with scruples of an unknown species. There had taken\r
-place within him a sentimental revelation entirely distinct from legal\r
-affirmation, his only standard of measurement hitherto. To remain in his\r
-former uprightness did not suffice. A whole order of unexpected facts\r
-had cropped up and subjugated him. A whole new world was dawning on\r
-his soul: kindness accepted and repaid, devotion, mercy, indulgence,\r
-violences committed by pity on austerity, respect for persons, no more\r
-definitive condemnation, no more conviction, the possibility of a tear\r
-in the eye of the law, no one knows what justice according to God,\r
-running in inverse sense to justice according to men. He perceived amid\r
-the shadows the terrible rising of an unknown moral sun; it horrified\r
-and dazzled him. An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle.\r
-\r
-He said to himself that it was true that there were exceptional cases,\r
-that authority might be put out of countenance, that the rule might\r
-be inadequate in the presence of a fact, that everything could not\r
-be framed within the text of the code, that the unforeseen compelled\r
-obedience, that the virtue of a convict might set a snare for the virtue\r
-of the functionary, that destiny did indulge in such ambushes, and\r
-he reflected with despair that he himself had not even been fortified\r
-against a surprise.\r
-\r
-He was forced to acknowledge that goodness did exist. This convict had\r
-been good. And he himself, unprecedented circumstance, had just been\r
-good also. So he was becoming depraved.\r
-\r
-He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself.\r
-\r
-Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was\r
-to be irreproachable.\r
-\r
-Now, he had just failed in this.\r
-\r
-How had he come to such a pass? How had all this happened? He could not\r
-have told himself. He clasped his head in both hands, but in spite of\r
-all that he could do, he could not contrive to explain it to himself.\r
-\r
-He had certainly always entertained the intention of restoring Jean\r
-Valjean to the law of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which\r
-he, Javert, was the slave. Not for a single instant while he held him\r
-in his grasp had he confessed to himself that he entertained the idea of\r
-releasing him. It was, in some sort, without his consciousness, that his\r
-hand had relaxed and had let him go free.\r
-\r
-All sorts of interrogation points flashed before his eyes. He put\r
-questions to himself, and made replies to himself, and his replies\r
-frightened him. He asked himself: "What has that convict done, that\r
-desperate fellow, whom I have pursued even to persecution, and who has\r
-had me under his foot, and who could have avenged himself, and who\r
-owed it both to his rancor and to his safety, in leaving me my life, in\r
-showing mercy upon me? His duty? No. Something more. And I in showing\r
-mercy upon him in my turn--what have I done? My duty? No. Something\r
-more. So there is something beyond duty?" Here he took fright; his\r
-balance became disjointed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the\r
-other rose heavenward, and Javert was no less terrified by the one which\r
-was on high than by the one which was below. Without being in the least\r
-in the world what is called Voltairian or a philosopher, or incredulous,\r
-being, on the contrary, respectful by instinct, towards the established\r
-church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social whole; order\r
-was his dogma, and sufficed for him; ever since he had attained to man's\r
-estate and the rank of a functionary, he had centred nearly all his\r
-religion in the police. Being,--and here we employ words without the\r
-least irony and in their most serious acceptation, being, as we have\r
-said, a spy as other men are priests. He had a superior, M. Gisquet; up\r
-to that day he had never dreamed of that other superior, God.\r
-\r
-This new chief, God, he became unexpectedly conscious of, and he felt\r
-embarrassed by him. This unforeseen presence threw him off his bearings;\r
-he did not know what to do with this superior, he, who was not ignorant\r
-of the fact that the subordinate is bound always to bow, that he must\r
-not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that, in the presence of a\r
-superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior has no other resource\r
-than that of handing in his resignation.\r
-\r
-But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God?\r
-\r
-However things might stand,--and it was to this point that he reverted\r
-constantly,--one fact dominated everything else for him, and that was,\r
-that he had just committed a terrible infraction of the law. He had just\r
-shut his eyes on an escaped convict who had broken his ban. He had just\r
-set a galley-slave at large. He had just robbed the laws of a man who\r
-belonged to them. That was what he had done. He no longer understood\r
-himself. The very reasons for his action escaped him; only their vertigo\r
-was left with him. Up to that moment he had lived with that blind faith\r
-which gloomy probity engenders. This faith had quitted him, this probity\r
-had deserted him. All that he had believed in melted away. Truths which\r
-he did not wish to recognize were besieging him, inexorably. Henceforth,\r
-he must be a different man. He was suffering from the strange pains of\r
-a conscience abruptly operated on for the cataract. He saw that which\r
-it was repugnant to him to behold. He felt himself emptied, useless, put\r
-out of joint with his past life, turned out, dissolved. Authority was\r
-dead within him. He had no longer any reason for existing.\r
-\r
-A terrible situation! to be touched.\r
-\r
-To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast in one\r
-piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the fact\r
-that one cherishes beneath one's breast of bronze something absurd\r
-and disobedient which almost resembles a heart! To come to the pass of\r
-returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that day\r
-that that good is evil! to be the watch-dog, and to lick the intruder's\r
-hand! to be ice and melt! to be the pincers and to turn into a hand!\r
-to suddenly feel one's fingers opening! to relax one's grip,--what a\r
-terrible thing!\r
-\r
-The man-projectile no longer acquainted with his route and retreating!\r
-\r
-To be obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not\r
-infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said\r
-when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated\r
-with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but\r
-men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! to behold a rift in\r
-the immense blue pane of the firmament!\r
-\r
-That which was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear\r
-conscience, the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity which\r
-had been irresistibly launched in a straight line and was breaking\r
-against God. It certainly was singular that the stoker of order, that\r
-the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its\r
-rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immovable,\r
-the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect,\r
-could bend! that there should exist for the locomotive a road to\r
-Damascus!\r
-\r
-God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the\r
-false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to\r
-remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the veritable\r
-absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute, humanity\r
-which cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible; that splendid\r
-phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did Javert\r
-understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for it\r
-to himself? Evidently he did not. But beneath the pressure of that\r
-incontestable incomprehensibility he felt his brain bursting.\r
-\r
-He was less the man transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. In all\r
-this he perceived only the tremendous difficulty of existence. It seemed\r
-to him that, henceforth, his respiration was repressed forever. He was\r
-not accustomed to having something unknown hanging over his head.\r
-\r
-Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze, merely a\r
-smooth, limpid and simple surface; there was nothing incomprehensible,\r
-nothing obscure; nothing that was not defined, regularly disposed,\r
-linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited, closed, fully provided\r
-for; authority was a plane surface; there was no fall in it, no\r
-dizziness in its presence. Javert had never beheld the unknown except\r
-from below. The irregular, the unforeseen, the disordered opening of\r
-chaos, the possible slip over a precipice--this was the work of the\r
-lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked, of wretches. Now Javert threw\r
-himself back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unprecedented\r
-apparition: a gulf on high.\r
-\r
-What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! one was disconcerted,\r
-absolutely! In what could one trust! That which had been agreed upon was\r
-giving way! What! the defect in society's armor could be discovered by\r
-a magnanimous wretch! What! an honest servitor of the law could suddenly\r
-find himself caught between two crimes--the crime of allowing a man to\r
-escape and the crime of arresting him! everything was not settled in\r
-the orders given by the State to the functionary! There might be\r
-blind alleys in duty! What,--all this was real! was it true that an\r
-ex-ruffian, weighed down with convictions, could rise erect and end by\r
-being in the right? Was this credible? were there cases in which the law\r
-should retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its excuses?--Yes,\r
-that was the state of the case! and Javert saw it! and Javert had\r
-touched it! and not only could he not deny it, but he had taken part\r
-in it. These were realities. It was abominable that actual facts could\r
-reach such deformity. If facts did their duty, they would confine\r
-themselves to being proofs of the law; facts--it is God who sends them.\r
-Was anarchy, then, on the point of now descending from on high?\r
-\r
-Thus,--and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion\r
-of consternation, all that might have corrected and restrained this\r
-impression was effaced, and society, and the human race, and the\r
-universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one simple and\r
-terrible feature,--thus the penal laws, the thing judged, the force due\r
-to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy,\r
-the government, prevention, repression, official cruelty, wisdom, legal\r
-infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which rest\r
-political and civil security, sovereignty, justice, public truth, all\r
-this was rubbish, a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert, the spy\r
-of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog\r
-providence of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at\r
-the summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a\r
-halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which he had\r
-come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.\r
-\r
-Was this to be endured? No.\r
-\r
-A violent state, if ever such existed. There were only two ways of\r
-escaping from it. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and restore\r
-to his cell the convict from the galleys. The other . . .\r
-\r
-Javert quitted the parapet, and, with head erect this time, betook\r
-himself, with a firm tread, towards the station-house indicated by a\r
-lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Chatelet.\r
-\r
-On arriving there, he saw through the window a sergeant of police, and\r
-he entered. Policemen recognize each other by the very way in which they\r
-open the door of a station-house. Javert mentioned his name, showed his\r
-card to the sergeant, and seated himself at the table of the post on\r
-which a candle was burning. On a table lay a pen, a leaden inkstand and\r
-paper, provided in the event of possible reports and the orders of the\r
-night patrols. This table, still completed by its straw-seated chair,\r
-is an institution; it exists in all police stations; it is invariably\r
-ornamented with a box-wood saucer filled with sawdust and a wafer box\r
-of cardboard filled with red wafers, and it forms the lowest stage of\r
-official style. It is there that the literature of the State has its\r
-beginning.\r
-\r
-Javert took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. This is what\r
-he wrote:\r
-\r
- A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE.\r
-\r
-\r
- "In the first place: I beg Monsieur le Prefet to cast his eyes\r
- on this.\r
-\r
- "Secondly: prisoners, on arriving after examination, take off\r
- their shoes and stand barefoot on the flagstones while they are\r
- being searched. Many of them cough on their return to prison.\r
- This entails hospital expenses.\r
-\r
- "Thirdly: the mode of keeping track of a man with relays of police\r
- agents from distance to distance, is good, but, on important occasions,\r
- it is requisite that at least two agents should never lose sight\r
- of each other, so that, in case one agent should, for any cause,\r
- grow weak in his service, the other may supervise him and take\r
- his place.\r
-\r
- "Fourthly: it is inexplicable why the special regulation of the prison\r
- of the Madelonettes interdicts the prisoner from having a chair,\r
- even by paying for it.\r
-\r
- "Fifthly: in the Madelonettes there are only two bars to the canteen,\r
- so that the canteen woman can touch the prisoners with her hand.\r
-\r
- "Sixthly: the prisoners called barkers, who summon the other\r
- prisoners to the parlor, force the prisoner to pay them two sous\r
- to call his name distinctly. This is a theft.\r
-\r
- "Seventhly: for a broken thread ten sous are withheld in the\r
- weaving shop; this is an abuse of the contractor, since the cloth\r
- is none the worse for it.\r
-\r
- "Eighthly: it is annoying for visitors to La Force to be\r
- obliged to traverse the boys' court in order to reach the parlor\r
- of Sainte-Marie-l'Egyptienne.\r
-\r
- "Ninthly: it is a fact that any day gendarmes can be overheard\r
- relating in the court-yard of the prefecture the interrogations put\r
- by the magistrates to prisoners. For a gendarme, who should be\r
- sworn to secrecy, to repeat what he has heard in the examination\r
- room is a grave disorder.\r
-\r
- "Tenthly: Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very neat;\r
- but it is bad to have a woman keep the wicket to the mouse-trap\r
- of the secret cells. This is unworthy of the Conciergerie of a\r
- great civilization."\r
-\r
- Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct chirography,\r
- not omitting a single comma, and making the paper screech under his pen.\r
- Below the last line he signed:\r
-\r
- "JAVERT,\r
- "Inspector of the 1st class.\r
- "The Post of the Place du Chatelet.\r
- "June 7th, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning."\r
-\r
-\r
-Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter, sealed\r
-it, wrote on the back: Note for the administration, left it on the\r
-table, and quitted the post. The glazed and grated door fell to behind\r
-him.\r
-\r
-Again he traversed the Place du Chatelet diagonally, regained the quay,\r
-and returned with automatic precision to the very point which he had\r
-abandoned a quarter of an hour previously, leaned on his elbows and\r
-found himself again in the same attitude on the same paving-stone of the\r
-parapet. He did not appear to have stirred.\r
-\r
-The darkness was complete. It was the sepulchral moment which follows\r
-midnight. A ceiling of clouds concealed the stars. Not a single light\r
-burned in the houses of the city; no one was passing; all of the streets\r
-and quays which could be seen were deserted; Notre-Dame and the towers\r
-of the Court-House seemed features of the night. A street lantern\r
-reddened the margin of the quay. The outlines of the bridges lay\r
-shapeless in the mist one behind the other. Recent rains had swollen the\r
-river.\r
-\r
-The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered, situated\r
-precisely over the rapids of the Seine, perpendicularly above that\r
-formidable spiral of whirlpools which loose and knot themselves again\r
-like an endless screw.\r
-\r
-Javert bent his head and gazed. All was black. Nothing was to be\r
-distinguished. A sound of foam was audible; but the river could not be\r
-seen. At moments, in that dizzy depth, a gleam of light appeared, and\r
-undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light, no one\r
-knows whence, and converting it into a snake. The light vanished, and\r
-all became indistinct once more. Immensity seemed thrown open there.\r
-What lay below was not water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay,\r
-abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from\r
-sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing was\r
-to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of\r
-the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The\r
-flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering\r
-of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the\r
-imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow was full of\r
-horror.\r
-\r
-Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening\r
-of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled\r
-attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed\r
-it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which\r
-a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom,\r
-appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the\r
-Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the\r
-shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret\r
-of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath\r
-the water.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN\r
-\r
-Some time after the events which we have just recorded, Sieur\r
-Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.\r
-\r
-Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader\r
-has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.\r
-\r
-Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who\r
-was occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and\r
-damaged travellers on the highway.\r
-\r
-Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed in\r
-the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to\r
-find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meanwhile, he\r
-lived to search the pockets of passers-by.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent. He had just escaped\r
-neatly. He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up in Jondrette's\r
-garret in company with the other ruffians. Utility of a vice: his\r
-drunkenness had been his salvation. The authorities had never been able\r
-to make out whether he had been there in the quality of a robber or a\r
-man who had been robbed. An order of nolle prosequi, founded on his well\r
-authenticated state of intoxication on the evening of the ambush, had\r
-set him at liberty. He had taken to his heels. He had returned to his\r
-road from Gagny to Lagny, to make, under administrative supervision,\r
-broken stone for the good of the state, with downcast mien, in a very\r
-pensive mood, his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but he was addicted\r
-none the less tenderly to the wine which had recently saved him.\r
-\r
-As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time after\r
-his return to his road-mender's turf-thatched cot, here it is:\r
-\r
-One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont, to his\r
-work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before daybreak caught\r
-sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man, whose back alone\r
-he saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it seemed to him at that\r
-distance and in the early dusk, was not entirely unfamiliar to him.\r
-Boulatruelle, although intoxicated, had a correct and lucid memory, a\r
-defensive arm that is indispensable to any one who is at all in conflict\r
-with legal order.\r
-\r
-"Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?" he said\r
-to himself. But he could make himself no answer, except that the man\r
-resembled some one of whom his memory preserved a confused trace.\r
-\r
-However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,\r
-Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did\r
-not belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. On foot,\r
-evidently. No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil at that hour.\r
-He had walked all night. Whence came he? Not from a very great distance;\r
-for he had neither haversack, nor bundle. From Paris, no doubt. Why was\r
-he in these woods? why was he there at such an hour? what had he come\r
-there for?\r
-\r
-Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of ransacking his memory,\r
-he recalled in a vague way that he had already, many years before, had\r
-a similar alarm in connection with a man who produced on him the effect\r
-that he might well be this very individual.\r
-\r
-"By the deuce," said Boulatruelle, "I'll find him again. I'll discover\r
-the parish of that parishioner. This prowler of Patron-Minette has a\r
-reason, and I'll know it. People can't have secrets in my forest if I\r
-don't have a finger in the pie."\r
-\r
-He took his pick-axe which was very sharply pointed.\r
-\r
-"There now," he grumbled, "is something that will search the earth and a\r
-man."\r
-\r
-And, as one knots one thread to another thread, he took up the line of\r
-march at his best pace in the direction which the man must follow, and\r
-set out across the thickets.\r
-\r
-When he had compassed a hundred strides, the day, which was already\r
-beginning to break, came to his assistance. Footprints stamped in the\r
-sand, weeds trodden down here and there, heather crushed, young branches\r
-in the brushwood bent and in the act of straightening themselves up\r
-again with the graceful deliberation of the arms of a pretty woman who\r
-stretches herself when she wakes, pointed out to him a sort of track. He\r
-followed it, then lost it. Time was flying. He plunged deeper into the\r
-woods and came to a sort of eminence. An early huntsman who was passing\r
-in the distance along a path, whistling the air of Guillery, suggested\r
-to him the idea of climbing a tree. Old as he was, he was agile. There\r
-stood close at hand a beech-tree of great size, worthy of Tityrus and of\r
-Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle ascended the beech as high as he was able.\r
-\r
-The idea was a good one. On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side\r
-where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly\r
-caught sight of his man.\r
-\r
-Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.\r
-\r
-The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a\r
-considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which\r
-Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near\r
-a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with\r
-a sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. This glade was the one\r
-which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones, destined\r
-for no one knows what employment, which was visible there thirty years\r
-ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of stones in\r
-longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary expedients.\r
-What a reason for lasting!\r
-\r
-Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended\r
-from the tree. The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize the\r
-beast. That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.\r
-\r
-It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which\r
-indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an\r
-hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense,\r
-very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was\r
-necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.\r
-He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which\r
-ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the\r
-best road.\r
-\r
-"Let's take to the wolves' Rue de Rivoli," said he.\r
-\r
-Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this occasion\r
-guilty of the fault of going straight.\r
-\r
-He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.\r
-\r
-He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,\r
-thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.\r
-\r
-At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to\r
-traverse.\r
-\r
-At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes,\r
-sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.\r
-\r
-There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of\r
-stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.\r
-\r
-As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.\r
-Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.\r
-\r
-And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of\r
-the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe,\r
-abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.\r
-\r
-The hole was empty.\r
-\r
-"Thief!" shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC\r
-WAR\r
-\r
-For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive. For many weeks he\r
-lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral\r
-symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by\r
-the wounds themselves.\r
-\r
-He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity\r
-of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The extent of some of\r
-the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds\r
-being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill\r
-the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of\r
-weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.\r
-\r
-"Above all things," he repeated, "let the wounded man be subjected to no\r
-emotion." The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult,\r
-the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been\r
-invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet "as big as the\r
-ceiling," as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty\r
-that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the\r
-gangrene. As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in\r
-despair at his grandson's pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor\r
-dead.\r
-\r
-Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with\r
-white hair,--such was the description given by the porter,--came to\r
-inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the\r
-dressings.\r
-\r
-Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the\r
-sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a\r
-dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.\r
-Convalescence began. But Marius was forced to remain for two months more\r
-stretched out on a long chair, on account of the results called up by\r
-the fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like that\r
-which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings indefinitely, to\r
-the great annoyance of the sick person.\r
-\r
-However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him\r
-from all pursuit. In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public\r
-character, which six months will not extinguish. Revolts, in the present\r
-state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they are\r
-followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.\r
-\r
-Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined doctors\r
-to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged public\r
-opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all, the wounded\r
-were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception\r
-of those who had been made prisoners in the very act of combat, the\r
-councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. So Marius was left in\r
-peace.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish, and then\r
-through every form of ecstasy. It was found difficult to prevent his\r
-passing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big arm-chair\r
-carried to Marius' bedside; he required his daughter to take the\r
-finest linen in the house for compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle\r
-Gillenormand, like a sage and elderly person, contrived to spare the\r
-fine linen, while allowing the grandfather to think that he was obeyed.\r
-M. Gillenormand would not permit any one to explain to him, that for the\r
-preparation of lint batiste is not nearly so good as coarse linen,\r
-nor new linen as old linen. He was present at all the dressings of the\r
-wounds from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself.\r
-When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said: "Aie! aie!"\r
-Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle, senile palsy,\r
-offer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught. He overwhelmed the\r
-doctor with questions. He did not observe that he asked the same ones\r
-over and over again.\r
-\r
-On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was out of\r
-danger, the good man was in a delirium. He made his porter a present of\r
-three louis. That evening, on his return to his own chamber, he danced\r
-a gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets, and he sang the\r
-following song:\r
-\r
- "Jeanne est nee a Fougere "Amour, tu vis en elle;\r
- Vrai nid d'une bergere; Car c'est dans sa prunelle\r
- J'adore son jupon, Que tu mets ton carquois.\r
- Fripon. Narquois!\r
-\r
- "Moi, je la chante, et j'aime,\r
- Plus que Diane meme,\r
- Jeanne et ses durs tetons\r
- Bretons."[61]\r
-\r
-\r
-"Love, thou dwellest in her; For 'tis in her eyes that thou placest thy\r
-quiver, sly scamp!\r
-\r
-"As for me, I sing her, and I love, more than Diana herself, Jeanne and\r
-her firm Breton breasts."\r
-\r
-\r
-Then he knelt upon a chair, and Basque, who was watching him through the\r
-half-open door, made sure that he was praying.\r
-\r
-Up to that time, he had not believed in God.\r
-\r
-At each succeeding phase of improvement, which became more and more\r
-pronounced, the grandfather raved. He executed a multitude of mechanical\r
-actions full of joy; he ascended and descended the stairs, without\r
-knowing why. A pretty female neighbor was amazed one morning at\r
-receiving a big bouquet; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it to\r
-her. The husband made a jealous scene. M. Gillenormand tried to draw\r
-Nicolette upon his knees. He called Marius, "M. le Baron." He shouted:\r
-"Long live the Republic!"\r
-\r
-Every moment, he kept asking the doctor: "Is he no longer in danger?"\r
-He gazed upon Marius with the eyes of a grandmother. He brooded over him\r
-while he ate. He no longer knew himself, he no longer rendered himself\r
-an account of himself. Marius was the master of the house, there was\r
-abdication in his joy, he was the grandson of his grandson.\r
-\r
-In the state of joy in which he then was, he was the most venerable of\r
-children. In his fear lest he might fatigue or annoy the convalescent,\r
-he stepped behind him to smile. He was content, joyous, delighted,\r
-charming, young. His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay\r
-radiance of his visage. When grace is mingled with wrinkles, it is\r
-adorable. There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.\r
-\r
-As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and care for him,\r
-he had but one fixed idea: Cosette.\r
-\r
-After the fever and delirium had left him, he did not again pronounce\r
-her name, and it might have been supposed that he no longer thought of\r
-her. He held his peace, precisely because his soul was there.\r
-\r
-He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair of the\r
-Rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows that were\r
-almost indistinct, floated through his mind, Eponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf,\r
-the Thenardiers, all his friends gloomily intermingled with the smoke\r
-of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent through that\r
-adventure produced on him the effect of a puzzle in a tempest; he\r
-understood nothing connected with his own life, he did not know how nor\r
-by whom he had been saved, and no one of those around him knew this; all\r
-that they had been able to tell him was, that he had been brought home\r
-at night in a hackney-coach, to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; past,\r
-present, future were nothing more to him than the mist of a vague idea;\r
-but in that fog there was one immovable point, one clear and precise\r
-outline, something made of granite, a resolution, a will; to find\r
-Cosette once more. For him, the idea of life was not distinct from the\r
-idea of Cosette. He had decreed in his heart that he would not accept\r
-the one without the other, and he was immovably resolved to exact of\r
-any person whatever, who should desire to force him to live,--from his\r
-grandfather, from fate, from hell,--the restitution of his vanished\r
-Eden.\r
-\r
-He did not conceal from himself the fact that obstacles existed.\r
-\r
-Let us here emphasize one detail, he was not won over and was but little\r
-softened by all the solicitude and tenderness of his grandfather. In\r
-the first place, he was not in the secret; then, in his reveries of\r
-an invalid, which were still feverish, possibly, he distrusted this\r
-tenderness as a strange and novel thing, which had for its object his\r
-conquest. He remained cold. The grandfather absolutely wasted his poor\r
-old smile. Marius said to himself that it was all right so long as he,\r
-Marius, did not speak, and let things take their course; but that when\r
-it became a question of Cosette, he would find another face, and that\r
-his grandfather's true attitude would be unmasked. Then there would\r
-be an unpleasant scene; a recrudescence of family questions, a\r
-confrontation of positions, every sort of sarcasm and all manner of\r
-objections at one and the same time, Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune,\r
-poverty, a stone about his neck, the future. Violent resistance;\r
-conclusion: a refusal. Marius stiffened himself in advance.\r
-\r
-And then, in proportion as he regained life, the old ulcers of his\r
-memory opened once more, he reflected again on the past, Colonel\r
-Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand and him,\r
-Marius, he told himself that he had no true kindness to expect from\r
-a person who had been so unjust and so hard to his father. And\r
-with health, there returned to him a sort of harshness towards his\r
-grandfather. The old man was gently pained by this. M. Gillenormand,\r
-without however allowing it to appear, observed that Marius, ever since\r
-the latter had been brought back to him and had regained consciousness,\r
-had not once called him father. It is true that he did not say\r
-"monsieur" to him; but he contrived not to say either the one or the\r
-other, by means of a certain way of turning his phrases. Obviously, a\r
-crisis was approaching.\r
-\r
-As almost always happens in such cases, Marius skirmished before giving\r
-battle, by way of proving himself. This is called "feeling the ground."\r
-One morning it came to pass that M. Gillenormand spoke slightingly of\r
-the Convention, apropos of a newspaper which had fallen into his\r
-hands, and gave vent to a Royalist harangue on Danton, Saint-Juste and\r
-Robespierre.--"The men of '93 were giants," said Marius with severity.\r
-The old man held his peace, and uttered not a sound during the remainder\r
-of that day.\r
-\r
-Marius, who had always present to his mind the inflexible grandfather of\r
-his early years, interpreted this silence as a profound concentration\r
-of wrath, augured from it a hot conflict, and augmented his preparations\r
-for the fray in the inmost recesses of his mind.\r
-\r
-He decided that, in case of a refusal, he would tear off his bandages,\r
-dislocate his collar-bone, that he would lay bare all the wounds which\r
-he had left, and would reject all food. His wounds were his munitions of\r
-war. He would have Cosette or die.\r
-\r
-He awaited the propitious moment with the crafty patience of the sick.\r
-\r
-That moment arrived.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--MARIUS ATTACKED\r
-\r
-One day, M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was putting in order the\r
-phials and cups on the marble of the commode, bent over Marius and said\r
-to him in his tenderest accents: "Look here, my little Marius, if I were\r
-in your place, I would eat meat now in preference to fish. A fried sole\r
-is excellent to begin a convalescence with, but a good cutlet is needed\r
-to put a sick man on his feet."\r
-\r
-Marius, who had almost entirely recovered his strength, collected\r
-the whole of it, drew himself up into a sitting posture, laid his two\r
-clenched fists on the sheets of his bed, looked his grandfather in the\r
-face, assumed a terrible air, and said:\r
-\r
-"This leads me to say something to you."\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-"That I wish to marry."\r
-\r
-"Agreed," said his grandfather.--And he burst out laughing.\r
-\r
-"How agreed?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, agreed. You shall have your little girl."\r
-\r
-Marius, stunned and overwhelmed with the dazzling shock, trembled in\r
-every limb.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand went on:\r
-\r
-"Yes, you shall have her, that pretty little girl of yours. She comes\r
-every day in the shape of an old gentleman to inquire after you. Ever\r
-since you were wounded, she has passed her time in weeping and making\r
-lint. I have made inquiries. She lives in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No.\r
-7. Ah! There we have it! Ah! so you want her! Well, you shall have\r
-her. You're caught. You had arranged your little plot, you had said to\r
-yourself:--'I'm going to signify this squarely to my grandfather, to\r
-that mummy of the Regency and of the Directory, to that ancient beau,\r
-to that Dorante turned Geronte; he has indulged in his frivolities also,\r
-that he has, and he has had his love affairs, and his grisettes and his\r
-Cosettes; he has made his rustle, he has had his wings, he has eaten of\r
-the bread of spring; he certainly must remember it.' Ah! you take the\r
-cockchafer by the horns. That's good. I offer you a cutlet and you\r
-answer me: 'By the way, I want to marry.' There's a transition for\r
-you! Ah! you reckoned on a bickering! You do not know that I am an old\r
-coward. What do you say to that? You are vexed? You did not expect to\r
-find your grandfather still more foolish than yourself, you are wasting\r
-the discourse which you meant to bestow upon me, Mr. Lawyer, and that's\r
-vexatious. Well, so much the worse, rage away. I'll do whatever\r
-you wish, and that cuts you short, imbecile! Listen. I have made my\r
-inquiries, I'm cunning too; she is charming, she is discreet, it is not\r
-true about the lancer, she has made heaps of lint, she's a jewel, she\r
-adores you, if you had died, there would have been three of us, her\r
-coffin would have accompanied mine. I have had an idea, ever since you\r
-have been better, of simply planting her at your bedside, but it is only\r
-in romances that young girls are brought to the bedsides of handsome\r
-young wounded men who interest them. It is not done. What would your\r
-aunt have said to it? You were nude three quarters of the time, my good\r
-fellow. Ask Nicolette, who has not left you for a moment, if there was\r
-any possibility of having a woman here. And then, what would the doctor\r
-have said? A pretty girl does not cure a man of fever. In short, it's\r
-all right, let us say no more about it, all's said, all's done, it's all\r
-settled, take her. Such is my ferocity. You see, I perceived that you\r
-did not love me. I said to myself: 'Here now, I have my little Cosette\r
-right under my hand, I'm going to give her to him, he will be obliged\r
-to love me a little then, or he must tell the reason why.' Ah! so you\r
-thought that the old man was going to storm, to put on a big voice,\r
-to shout no, and to lift his cane at all that aurora. Not a bit of it.\r
-Cosette, so be it; love, so be it; I ask nothing better. Pray take the\r
-trouble of getting married, sir. Be happy, my well-beloved child."\r
-\r
-That said, the old man burst forth into sobs.\r
-\r
-And he seized Marius' head, and pressed it with both arms against his\r
-breast, and both fell to weeping. This is one of the forms of supreme\r
-happiness.\r
-\r
-"Father!" cried Marius.\r
-\r
-"Ah, so you love me!" said the old man.\r
-\r
-An ineffable moment ensued. They were choking and could not speak.\r
-\r
-At length the old man stammered:\r
-\r
-"Come! his mouth is unstopped at last. He has said: 'Father' to me."\r
-\r
-Marius disengaged his head from his grandfather's arms, and said gently:\r
-\r
-"But, father, now that I am quite well, it seems to me that I might see\r
-her."\r
-\r
-"Agreed again, you shall see her to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"Father!"\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"Why not to-day?"\r
-\r
-"Well, to-day then. Let it be to-day. You have called me 'father' three\r
-times, and it is worth it. I will attend to it. She shall be brought\r
-hither. Agreed, I tell you. It has already been put into verse. This is\r
-the ending of the elegy of the 'Jeune Malade' by Andre Chenier, by Andre\r
-Chenier whose throat was cut by the ras . . . by the giants of '93."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand fancied that he detected a faint frown on the part of\r
-Marius, who, in truth, as we must admit, was no longer listening to him,\r
-and who was thinking far more of Cosette than of 1793.\r
-\r
-The grandfather, trembling at having so inopportunely introduced Andre\r
-Chenier, resumed precipitately:\r
-\r
-"Cut his throat is not the word. The fact is that the great\r
-revolutionary geniuses, who were not malicious, that is incontestable,\r
-who were heroes, pardi! found that Andre Chenier embarrassed them\r
-somewhat, and they had him guillot . . . that is to say, those great\r
-men on the 7th of Thermidor, besought Andre Chenier, in the interests of\r
-public safety, to be so good as to go . . ."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand, clutched by the throat by his own phrase, could not\r
-proceed. Being able neither to finish it nor to retract it, while his\r
-daughter arranged the pillow behind Marius, who was overwhelmed with so\r
-many emotions, the old man rushed headlong, with as much rapidity as\r
-his age permitted, from the bed-chamber, shut the door behind him, and,\r
-purple, choking and foaming at the mouth, his eyes starting from his\r
-head, he found himself nose to nose with honest Basque, who was blacking\r
-boots in the anteroom. He seized Basque by the collar, and shouted full\r
-in his face in fury:--"By the hundred thousand Javottes of the devil,\r
-those ruffians did assassinate him!"\r
-\r
-"Who, sir?"\r
-\r
-"Andre Chenier!"\r
-\r
-"Yes, sir," said Basque in alarm.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND ENDS BY NO LONGER THINKING IT A\r
-BAD THING THAT M. FAUCHELEVENT SHOULD HAVE ENTERED WITH SOMETHING UNDER\r
-HIS ARM\r
-\r
-Cosette and Marius beheld each other once more.\r
-\r
-What that interview was like we decline to say. There are things which\r
-one must not attempt to depict; the sun is one of them.\r
-\r
-The entire family, including Basque and Nicolette, were assembled in\r
-Marius' chamber at the moment when Cosette entered it.\r
-\r
-Precisely at that moment, the grandfather was on the point of blowing\r
-his nose; he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief, and\r
-gazing over it at Cosette.\r
-\r
-She appeared on the threshold; it seemed to him that she was surrounded\r
-by a glory.\r
-\r
-"Adorable!" he exclaimed.\r
-\r
-Then he blew his nose noisily.\r
-\r
-Cosette was intoxicated, delighted, frightened, in heaven. She was as\r
-thoroughly alarmed as any one can be by happiness. She stammered all\r
-pale, yet flushed, she wanted to fling herself into Marius' arms, and\r
-dared not. Ashamed of loving in the presence of all these people. People\r
-are pitiless towards happy lovers; they remain when the latter most\r
-desire to be left alone. Lovers have no need of any people whatever.\r
-\r
-With Cosette, and behind her, there had entered a man with white hair\r
-who was grave yet smiling, though with a vague and heartrending smile.\r
-It was "Monsieur Fauchelevent"; it was Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-He was very well dressed, as the porter had said, entirely in black, in\r
-perfectly new garments, and with a white cravat.\r
-\r
-The porter was a thousand leagues from recognizing in this correct\r
-bourgeois, in this probable notary, the fear-inspiring bearer of the\r
-corpse, who had sprung up at his door on the night of the 7th of June,\r
-tattered, muddy, hideous, haggard, his face masked in blood and mire,\r
-supporting in his arms the fainting Marius; still, his porter's scent\r
-was aroused. When M. Fauchelevent arrived with Cosette, the porter had\r
-not been able to refrain from communicating to his wife this aside: "I\r
-don't know why it is, but I can't help fancying that I've seen that face\r
-before."\r
-\r
-M. Fauchelevent in Marius' chamber, remained apart near the door. He\r
-had under his arm, a package which bore considerable resemblance to an\r
-octavo volume enveloped in paper. The enveloping paper was of a greenish\r
-hue, and appeared to be mouldy.\r
-\r
-"Does the gentleman always have books like that under his arm?"\r
-Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who did not like books, demanded in a low\r
-tone of Nicolette.\r
-\r
-"Well," retorted M. Gillenormand, who had overheard her, in the same\r
-tone, "he's a learned man. What then? Is that his fault? Monsieur\r
-Boulard, one of my acquaintances, never walked out without a book under\r
-his arm either, and he always had some old volume hugged to his heart\r
-like that."\r
-\r
-And, with a bow, he said aloud:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Tranchelevent . . ."\r
-\r
-Father Gillenormand did not do it intentionally, but inattention to\r
-proper names was an aristocratic habit of his.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of asking you, on behalf of my\r
-grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, for the hand of Mademoiselle."\r
-\r
-Monsieur Tranchelevent bowed.\r
-\r
-"That's settled," said the grandfather.\r
-\r
-And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended in blessing,\r
-he cried:\r
-\r
-"Permission to adore each other!"\r
-\r
-They did not require him to repeat it twice. So much the worse! the\r
-chirping began. They talked low. Marius, resting on his elbow on his\r
-reclining chair, Cosette standing beside him. "Oh, heavens!" murmured\r
-Cosette, "I see you once again! it is thou! it is you! The idea of going\r
-and fighting like that! But why? It is horrible. I have been dead for\r
-four months. Oh! how wicked it was of you to go to that battle! What had\r
-I done to you? I pardon you, but you will never do it again. A little\r
-while ago, when they came to tell us to come to you, I still thought\r
-that I was about to die, but it was from joy. I was so sad! I have not\r
-taken the time to dress myself, I must frighten people with my looks!\r
-What will your relatives say to see me in a crumpled collar? Do speak!\r
-You let me do all the talking. We are still in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.\r
-It seems that your shoulder was terrible. They told me that you could\r
-put your fist in it. And then, it seems that they cut your flesh with\r
-the scissors. That is frightful. I have cried till I have no eyes left.\r
-It is queer that a person can suffer like that. Your grandfather has a\r
-very kindly air. Don't disturb yourself, don't rise on your elbow, you\r
-will injure yourself. Oh! how happy I am! So our unhappiness is over!\r
-I am quite foolish. I had things to say to you, and I no longer know in\r
-the least what they were. Do you still love me? We live in the Rue de\r
-l'Homme Arme. There is no garden. I made lint all the time; stay, sir,\r
-look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my fingers."\r
-\r
-"Angel!" said Marius.\r
-\r
-Angel is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out. No\r
-other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make of it.\r
-\r
-Then as there were spectators, they paused and said not a word more,\r
-contenting themselves with softly touching each other's hands.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand turned towards those who were in the room and cried:\r
-\r
-"Talk loud, the rest of you. Make a noise, you people behind the scenes.\r
-Come, a little uproar, the deuce! so that the children can chatter at\r
-their ease."\r
-\r
-And, approaching Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a very low\r
-voice:\r
-\r
-"Call each other thou. Don't stand on ceremony."\r
-\r
-Aunt Gillenormand looked on in amazement at this irruption of light\r
-in her elderly household. There was nothing aggressive about this\r
-amazement; it was not the least in the world like the scandalized and\r
-envious glance of an owl at two turtle-doves, it was the stupid eye of a\r
-poor innocent seven and fifty years of age; it was a life which had been\r
-a failure gazing at that triumph, love.\r
-\r
-"Mademoiselle Gillenormand senior," said her father to her, "I told you\r
-that this is what would happen to you."\r
-\r
-He remained silent for a moment, and then added:\r
-\r
-"Look at the happiness of others."\r
-\r
-Then he turned to Cosette.\r
-\r
-"How pretty she is! how pretty she is! She's a Greuze. So you are going\r
-to have that all to yourself, you scamp! Ah! my rogue, you are getting\r
-off nicely with me, you are happy; if I were not fifteen years too old,\r
-we would fight with swords to see which of us should have her. Come now!\r
-I am in love with you, mademoiselle. It's perfectly simple. It is your\r
-right. You are in the right. Ah! what a sweet, charming little wedding\r
-this will make! Our parish is Saint-Denis du Saint Sacrament, but I will\r
-get a dispensation so that you can be married at Saint-Paul. The church\r
-is better. It was built by the Jesuits. It is more coquettish. It is\r
-opposite the fountain of Cardinal de Birague. The masterpiece of Jesuit\r
-architecture is at Namur. It is called Saint-Loup. You must go there\r
-after you are married. It is worth the journey. Mademoiselle, I am quite\r
-of your mind, I think girls ought to marry; that is what they are made\r
-for. There is a certain Sainte-Catherine whom I should always like to\r
-see uncoiffed.[62] It's a fine thing to remain a spinster, but it is\r
-chilly. The Bible says: Multiply. In order to save the people, Jeanne\r
-d'Arc is needed; but in order to make people, what is needed is Mother\r
-Goose. So, marry, my beauties. I really do not see the use in remaining\r
-a spinster! I know that they have their chapel apart in the church,\r
-and that they fall back on the Society of the Virgin; but, sapristi, a\r
-handsome husband, a fine fellow, and at the expiration of a year, a\r
-big, blond brat who nurses lustily, and who has fine rolls of fat on his\r
-thighs, and who musses up your breast in handfuls with his little rosy\r
-paws, laughing the while like the dawn,--that's better than holding a\r
-candle at vespers, and chanting Turris eburnea!"\r
-\r
-The grandfather executed a pirouette on his eighty-year-old heels, and\r
-began to talk again like a spring that has broken loose once more:\r
-\r
- "Ainsi, bornant les cours de tes revasseries,\r
- Alcippe, il est donc vrai, dans peu tu te maries."[63]\r
-\r
-\r
-"By the way!"\r
-\r
-"What is it, father?"\r
-\r
-"Have not you an intimate friend?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, Courfeyrac."\r
-\r
-"What has become of him?"\r
-\r
-"He is dead."\r
-\r
-"That is good."\r
-\r
-He seated himself near them, made Cosette sit down, and took their four\r
-hands in his aged and wrinkled hands:\r
-\r
-"She is exquisite, this darling. She's a masterpiece, this Cosette!\r
-She is a very little girl and a very great lady. She will only be a\r
-Baroness, which is a come down for her; she was born a Marquise. What\r
-eyelashes she has! Get it well fixed in your noddles, my children, that\r
-you are in the true road. Love each other. Be foolish about it. Love is\r
-the folly of men and the wit of God. Adore each other. Only," he added,\r
-suddenly becoming gloomy, "what a misfortune! It has just occurred to\r
-me! More than half of what I possess is swallowed up in an annuity; so\r
-long as I live, it will not matter, but after my death, a score of years\r
-hence, ah! my poor children, you will not have a sou! Your beautiful\r
-white hands, Madame la Baronne, will do the devil the honor of pulling\r
-him by the tail."[64]\r
-\r
-At this point they heard a grave and tranquil voice say:\r
-\r
-"Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent possesses six hundred thousand\r
-francs."\r
-\r
-It was the voice of Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-So far he had not uttered a single word, no one seemed to be aware that\r
-he was there, and he had remained standing erect and motionless, behind\r
-all these happy people.\r
-\r
-"What has Mademoiselle Euphrasie to do with the question?" inquired the\r
-startled grandfather.\r
-\r
-"I am she," replied Cosette.\r
-\r
-"Six hundred thousand francs?" resumed M. Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-"Minus fourteen or fifteen thousand francs, possibly," said Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-And he laid on the table the package which Mademoiselle Gillenormand had\r
-mistaken for a book.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank-notes.\r
-They were turned over and counted. There were five hundred notes for a\r
-thousand francs each, and one hundred and sixty-eight of five hundred.\r
-In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.\r
-\r
-"This is a fine book," said M. Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" murmured the aunt.\r
-\r
-"This arranges things well, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand\r
-senior?" said the grandfather. "That devil of a Marius has ferreted out\r
-the nest of a millionaire grisette in his tree of dreams! Just trust\r
-to the love affairs of young folks now, will you! Students find\r
-studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino works better\r
-than Rothschild."\r
-\r
-"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" repeated Mademoiselle\r
-Gillenormand, in a low tone. "Five hundred and eighty-four! one might as\r
-well say six hundred thousand!"\r
-\r
-As for Marius and Cosette, they were gazing at each other while this was\r
-going on; they hardly heeded this detail.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY\r
-\r
-The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a lengthy\r
-explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been\r
-able, thanks to his first escape of a few days' duration, to come to\r
-Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte, the\r
-sum earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at\r
-Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,--which\r
-eventually happened--he had buried and hidden that sum in the forest\r
-of Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom. The sum,\r
-six hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills, was not very\r
-bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order to preserve the\r
-box from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer filled with chestnut\r
-shavings. In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the\r
-Bishop's candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had carried off\r
-the candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The man\r
-seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean Valjean.\r
-Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went to get it\r
-in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have mentioned. He had\r
-a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place known to himself\r
-alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling that the hour was at\r
-hand, when that money might prove of service, he had gone to get it;\r
-it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but on\r
-this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening. Boulatreulle\r
-inherited his pickaxe.\r
-\r
-The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred\r
-francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.--"We\r
-shall see hereafter," he thought.\r
-\r
-The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand\r
-francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten years,\r
-from 1823 to 1833. The five years of his stay in the convent had cost\r
-only five thousand francs.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they\r
-glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The\r
-story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in\r
-the Moniteur, how a police inspector named Javert had been found drowned\r
-under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au Change\r
-and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man, otherwise\r
-irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed to a fit\r
-of mental aberration and a suicide.--"In fact," thought Jean Valjean,\r
-"since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power, he must\r
-have been already mad."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN\r
-FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY\r
-\r
-Everything was made ready for the wedding. The doctor, on being\r
-consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was then\r
-December. A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.\r
-\r
-The grandfather was not the least happy of them all. He remained for a\r
-quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.\r
-\r
-"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed. "And she has so sweet and\r
-good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that I\r
-have ever seen in my life. Later on, she'll have virtues with an odor of\r
-violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with such\r
-a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to\r
-pettifogging, I beg of you."\r
-\r
-Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise.\r
-The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,\r
-had they not been dazzled by it.\r
-\r
-"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius to Cosette.\r
-\r
-"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me that the good God is caring\r
-for us."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty, arranged\r
-everything, made everything easy. He hastened towards Cosette's\r
-happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with as much joy, as\r
-Cosette herself.\r
-\r
-As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate\r
-problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted, Cosette's\r
-civil status. If he were to announce her origin bluntly, it might\r
-prevent the marriage, who knows? He extricated Cosette from all\r
-difficulties. He concocted for her a family of dead people, a sure means\r
-of not encountering any objections. Cosette was the only scion of an\r
-extinct family; Cosette was not his own daughter, but the daughter of\r
-the other Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners to\r
-the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent; the\r
-very best information and the most respectable references abounded; the\r
-good nuns, not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions of\r
-paternity, and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never\r
-understood exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the\r
-daughter. They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal. An\r
-acte de notoriete was drawn up. Cosette became in the eyes of the law,\r
-Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan, both\r
-father and mother being dead. Jean Valjean so arranged it that he was\r
-appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette's guardian, with\r
-M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.\r
-\r
-As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted\r
-a legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired to\r
-remain unknown. The original legacy had consisted of five hundred and\r
-ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been expended\r
-on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand francs of that\r
-amount having been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited in\r
-the hands of a third party, was to be turned over to Cosette at her\r
-majority, or at the date of her marriage. This, taken as a whole, was\r
-very acceptable, as the reader will perceive, especially when the sum\r
-due was half a million. There were some peculiarities here and there,\r
-it is true, but they were not noticed; one of the interested parties\r
-had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand\r
-francs.\r
-\r
-Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man whom she\r
-had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman; another Fauchelevent\r
-was her real father. At any other time this would have broken her heart.\r
-But at the ineffable moment which she was then passing through, it cast\r
-but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she was so full of joy that the\r
-cloud did not last long. She had Marius. The young man arrived, the old\r
-man was effaced; such is life.\r
-\r
-And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing enigmas\r
-around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is always\r
-prepared for certain renunciations.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.\r
-\r
-Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father Gillenormand.\r
-It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant compliments and\r
-presents. While Jean Valjean was building up for Cosette a normal\r
-situation in society and an unassailable status, M. Gillenormand was\r
-superintending the basket of wedding gifts. Nothing so amused him as\r
-being magnificent. He had given to Cosette a robe of Binche guipure\r
-which had descended to him from his own grandmother.\r
-\r
-"These fashions come up again," said he, "ancient things are the\r
-rage, and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my\r
-childhood."\r
-\r
-He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer, with\r
-swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.--"Let us hear the\r
-confession of these dowagers," he said, "let us see what they have in\r
-their paunches." He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers of all\r
-his wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. Pekins,\r
-damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India\r
-kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a\r
-right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alencon point lace,\r
-parures in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented\r
-with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons--he lavished everything on\r
-Cosette. Cosette, amazed, desperately in love with Marius, and wild with\r
-gratitude towards M. Gillenormand, dreamed of a happiness without limit\r
-clothed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket seemed to her to be\r
-upheld by seraphim. Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with wings\r
-of Mechlin lace.\r
-\r
-The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have already\r
-said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather. A sort of flourish of trumpets\r
-went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.\r
-\r
-Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather to\r
-Cosette. All possible knickknacks glittered around her.\r
-\r
-One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst of his\r
-bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:\r
-\r
-"The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige of\r
-the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them seems to me\r
-an antique memory."\r
-\r
-"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman. "Thanks, Marius. That is\r
-precisely the idea of which I was in search."\r
-\r
-And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored moire\r
-antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.\r
-\r
-From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.\r
-\r
-"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with\r
-it. The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the\r
-necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A\r
-palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand\r
-waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a\r
-duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred\r
-thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you\r
-can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also\r
-to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry\r
-bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the\r
-useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. I\r
-remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall\r
-as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness to\r
-indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and\r
-which, after having struck midday, or midnight,--midday, the hour of the\r
-sun, or midnight, the hour of love,--or any other hour that you like,\r
-gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and\r
-fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a host of things which emerged from a\r
-niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and\r
-Eponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played\r
-on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it\r
-sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing\r
-why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to\r
-that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,\r
-and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all\r
-the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his\r
-dithyrambs.\r
-\r
-"You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know how to\r
-organize a day of enjoyment in this age," he exclaimed. "Your nineteenth\r
-century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores the rich, it ignores the\r
-noble. In everything it is clean-shaven. Your third estate is insipid,\r
-colorless, odorless, and shapeless. The dreams of your bourgeois who\r
-set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet,\r
-ebony and calico. Make way! Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying\r
-Mademoiselle Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d'or has\r
-been stuck to a candle. There's the epoch for you. My demand is that I\r
-may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians. Ah! in 1787, I predict that all\r
-was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Leon,\r
-Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Sonbise, Vicomte de Thouars,\r
-peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits.\r
-In this century, men attend to business, they gamble on 'Change, they\r
-win money, they are stingy. People take care of their surfaces and\r
-varnish them; every one is dressed as though just out of a band-box,\r
-washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed,\r
-brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble,\r
-discreet, neat, and at the same time, death of my life, in the depths of\r
-their consciences they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to\r
-make a cow-herd who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to\r
-this age the device: 'Dirty Cleanliness.' Don't be vexed, Marius, give\r
-me permission to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am\r
-always harping on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit\r
-of a slap to the bourgeoisie. I belong to it. He who loves well lashes\r
-well. Thereupon, I say plainly, that now-a-days people marry, but that\r
-they no longer know how to marry. Ah! it is true, I regret the grace\r
-of the ancient manners. I regret everything about them, their elegance,\r
-their chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury\r
-which every one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony\r
-above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous\r
-faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the songs, the\r
-fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil's own row, the huge knots of\r
-ribbon. I regret the bride's garter. The bride's garter is cousin to the\r
-girdle of Venus. On what does the war of Troy turn? On Helen's garter,\r
-parbleu! Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over\r
-the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did\r
-Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances?\r
-Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette's garter,\r
-Homer would construct the Iliad. He would put in his poem, a loquacious\r
-old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. My friends, in bygone\r
-days, in those amiable days of yore, people married wisely; they had a\r
-good contract, and then they had a good carouse. As soon as Cujas had\r
-taken his departure, Gamacho entered. But, in sooth! the stomach is\r
-an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which wants to have its\r
-wedding also. People supped well, and had at table a beautiful neighbor\r
-without a guimpe so that her throat was only moderately concealed. Oh!\r
-the large laughing mouths, and how gay we were in those days! youth was\r
-a bouquet; every young man terminated in a branch of lilacs or a tuft\r
-of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a warrior; and if, by chance,\r
-one was a captain of dragoons, one found means to call oneself Florian.\r
-People thought much of looking well. They embroidered and tinted\r
-themselves. A bourgeois had the air of a flower, a Marquis had the air\r
-of a precious stone. People had no straps to their boots, they had no\r
-boots. They were spruce, shining, waved, lustrous, fluttering, dainty,\r
-coquettish, which did not at all prevent their wearing swords by their\r
-sides. The humming-bird has beak and claws. That was the day of the\r
-Galland Indies. One of the sides of that century was delicate, the other\r
-was magnificent; and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves.\r
-To-day, people are serious. The bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise\r
-is a prude; your century is unfortunate. People would drive away the\r
-Graces as being too low in the neck. Alas! beauty is concealed as\r
-though it were ugliness. Since the revolution, everything, including the\r
-ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave;\r
-your rigadoons are doctrinarian. It is necessary to be majestic. People\r
-would be greatly annoyed if they did not carry their chins in their\r
-cravats. The ideal of an urchin of twenty when he marries, is to\r
-resemble M. Royer-Collard. And do you know what one arrives at with\r
-that majesty? at being petty. Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is\r
-great. But be in love gayly then, what the deuce! marry, when you marry,\r
-with fever and giddiness, and tumult, and the uproar of happiness! Be\r
-grave in church, well and good. But, as soon as the mass is finished,\r
-sarpejou! you must make a dream whirl around the bride. A marriage\r
-should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from\r
-the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I have a horror\r
-of a paltry wedding. Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day,\r
-at least. Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs. Games and\r
-Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends, every recently\r
-made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique\r
-minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the\r
-eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the\r
-bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don't economize on the nuptials, do not prune\r
-them of their splendors; don't scrimp on the day when you beam. The\r
-wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy,\r
-it would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees. Here is\r
-my programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with the festival\r
-the rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids. The\r
-nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks\r
-and entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a\r
-chariot drawn by marine monsters.\r
-\r
- "Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque\r
- Des sons si ravissants qu'il ravissait quiconque!"[65]\r
-\r
---there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else I know\r
-nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"\r
-\r
-While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to\r
-himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at\r
-each other.\r
-\r
-Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity.\r
-Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain amount\r
-of emotions. Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius\r
-brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius\r
-reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wedding\r
-a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs had been her last\r
-surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first communion\r
-returned to her. She went regularly to service, told her beads, read her\r
-euchology, mumbled Aves in one corner of the house, while I love you\r
-was being whispered in the other, and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a\r
-vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was herself.\r
-\r
-There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,\r
-neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the\r
-business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant\r
-or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes. This\r
-devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his daughter, corresponds to\r
-a cold in the head. You smell nothing of life. Neither any bad, nor any\r
-good odor.\r
-\r
-Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly\r
-spinster's indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking her\r
-so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the matter of\r
-consent to Marius' marriage. He had acted impetuously, according to his\r
-wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a single thought,--to satisfy\r
-Marius. As for the aunt,--it had not even occurred to him that the aunt\r
-existed, and that she could have an opinion of her own, and, sheep as\r
-she was, this had vexed her. Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but\r
-impassive externally, she had said to herself: "My father has settled\r
-the question of the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle the\r
-question of the inheritance without consulting him." She was rich, in\r
-fact, and her father was not. She had reserved her decision on this\r
-point. It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would\r
-have left him poor. "So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding a\r
-beggar, let him be a beggar himself!" But Cosette's half-million pleased\r
-the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this pair of lovers\r
-were concerned. One owes some consideration to six hundred thousand\r
-francs, and it was evident that she could not do otherwise than leave\r
-her fortune to these young people, since they did not need it.\r
-\r
-It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather--M.\r
-Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the finest in\r
-the house. "That will make me young again," he said. "It's an old plan\r
-of mine. I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in my\r
-chamber."\r
-\r
-He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. He had\r
-the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff, which he had by\r
-him in the piece, and which he believed to have emanated from Utrecht\r
-with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered with velvet auricula\r
-blossoms.--"It was with that stuff," said he, "that the bed of the\r
-Duchesse d'Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped."--On the chimney-piece,\r
-he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her\r
-nude stomach.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which Marius\r
-needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council of\r
-the order.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VII--THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS\r
-\r
-The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.\r
-Fauchelevent.--"This is reversing things," said Mademoiselle\r
-Gillenormand, "to have the bride come to the house to do the courting\r
-like this." But Marius' convalescence had caused the habit to become\r
-established, and the arm-chairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,\r
-better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de l'Homme\r
-Arme, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other, but did\r
-not address each other. It seemed as though this had been agreed upon.\r
-Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come without\r
-M. Fauchelevent. In Marius' eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the condition\r
-attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing political\r
-matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of view of the\r
-general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to say a little\r
-more than "yes" and "no." Once, on the subject of education, which\r
-Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied under all forms\r
-lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a word, respirable\r
-for the entire population, they were in unison, and they almost\r
-conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a certain\r
-loftiness of language--still he lacked something indescribable. M.\r
-Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than a\r
-man of the world.\r
-\r
-Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with\r
-all sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply\r
-benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own\r
-recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black\r
-spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.--Many things had been\r
-lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it were\r
-really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so calm a\r
-man, in the barricade.\r
-\r
-This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the\r
-disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be supposed\r
-that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory which\r
-force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly behind\r
-us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have\r
-vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius clasped his\r
-face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past traversed the\r
-twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld Mabeuf fall, he\r
-heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt beneath his lips the\r
-cold brow of Eponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre,\r
-Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect before him, then\r
-dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear, sorrowful, valiant,\r
-charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they actually existed? The\r
-revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke. These great fevers create\r
-great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt himself; all these vanished\r
-realities made him dizzy. Where were they all then? was it really true\r
-that all were dead? A fall into the shadows had carried off all except\r
-himself. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind the\r
-curtain of a theatre. There are curtains like this which drop in life.\r
-God passes on to the following act.\r
-\r
-And he himself--was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was\r
-rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry\r
-Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had\r
-entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb\r
-the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the\r
-past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and overshadowed\r
-him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his serenity; but nothing\r
-less than this felicity could have sufficed to efface that catastrophe.\r
-\r
-M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.\r
-Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was\r
-the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely\r
-beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares\r
-occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However,\r
-the natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.\r
-Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him. We\r
-have already indicated this characteristic detail.\r
-\r
-Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit\r
-agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is\r
-commonly supposed.\r
-\r
-Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the\r
-conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,\r
-he said to him:\r
-\r
-"Of course, you are acquainted with that street?"\r
-\r
-"What street?"\r
-\r
-"The Rue de la Chanvrerie."\r
-\r
-"I have no idea of the name of that street," replied M. Fauchelevent, in\r
-the most natural manner in the world.\r
-\r
-The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the\r
-street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really\r
-was.\r
-\r
-"Decidedly," thought he, "I have been dreaming. I have been subject to\r
-a hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was\r
-not there."'\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VIII--TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND\r
-\r
-Marius' enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his mind\r
-other pre-occupations.\r
-\r
-While the wedding was in preparation, and while awaiting the date fixed\r
-upon, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective researches to be\r
-made.\r
-\r
-He owed gratitude in various quarters; he owed it on his father's\r
-account, he owed it on his own.\r
-\r
-There was Thenardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him,\r
-Marius, back to M. Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-Marius endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry, to\r
-be happy, and to forget them, and fearing that, were these debts of\r
-gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on his life, which\r
-promised so brightly for the future.\r
-\r
-It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears of suffering behind\r
-him, and he wished, before entering joyously into the future, to obtain\r
-a quittance from the past.\r
-\r
-That Thenardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact that he\r
-had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thenardier was a ruffian in the eyes of all\r
-the world except Marius.\r
-\r
-And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field of Waterloo,\r
-was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father, so far as\r
-Thenardier was concerned was in the strange position of being indebted\r
-to the latter for his life, without being indebted to him for any\r
-gratitude.\r
-\r
-None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in discovering\r
-any trace of Thenardier. Obliteration appeared to be complete in\r
-that quarter. Madame Thenardier had died in prison pending the trial.\r
-Thenardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two remaining of that\r
-lamentable group, had plunged back into the gloom. The gulf of the\r
-social unknown had silently closed above those beings. On the surface\r
-there was not visible so much as that quiver, that trembling, those\r
-obscure concentric circles which announce that something has fallen in,\r
-and that the plummet may be dropped.\r
-\r
-Madame Thenardier being dead, Boulatruelle being eliminated from the\r
-case, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal persons accused\r
-having escaped from prison, the trial connected with the ambush in the\r
-Gorbeau house had come to nothing.\r
-\r
-That affair had remained rather obscure. The bench of Assizes had been\r
-obliged to content themselves with two subordinates. Panchaud, alias\r
-Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, alias Deux-Milliards, who\r
-had been inconsistently condemned, after a hearing of both sides of\r
-the case, to ten years in the galleys. Hard labor for life had been the\r
-sentence pronounced against the escaped and contumacious accomplices.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, the head and leader, had been, through contumacy, likewise\r
-condemned to death.\r
-\r
-This sentence was the only information remaining about Thenardier,\r
-casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside a\r
-bier.\r
-\r
-Moreover, by thrusting Thenardier back into the very remotest depths,\r
-through a fear of being re-captured, this sentence added to the density\r
-of the shadows which enveloped this man.\r
-\r
-As for the other person, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius,\r
-the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came to\r
-an abrupt conclusion. They succeeded in finding the carriage which had\r
-brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the evening of the\r
-6th of June.\r
-\r
-The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience to the\r
-commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o'clock in the\r
-afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Elysees, above the\r
-outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o'clock in the evening,\r
-the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank of the river, had\r
-opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on his shoulders\r
-another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent, who was on the watch\r
-at that point, had arrested the living man and had seized the dead man;\r
-that, at the order of the police-agent, he, the coachman, had taken "all\r
-those folks" into his carriage; that they had first driven to the Rue\r
-des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had there deposited the dead man; that\r
-the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the coachman, recognized\r
-him perfectly, although he was alive "this time"; that afterwards, they\r
-had entered the vehicle again, that he had whipped up his horses; a few\r
-paces from the gate of the Archives, they had called to him to halt;\r
-that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him, and that the\r
-police-agent had led the other man away; that he knew nothing more; that\r
-the night had been very dark.\r
-\r
-Marius, as we have said, recalled nothing. He only remembered that he\r
-had been seized from behind by an energetic hand at the moment when he\r
-was falling backwards into the barricade; then, everything vanished so\r
-far as he was concerned.\r
-\r
-He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand's.\r
-\r
-He was lost in conjectures.\r
-\r
-He could not doubt his own identity. Still, how had it come to pass\r
-that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked\r
-up by the police-agent on the banks of the Seine, near the Pont des\r
-Invalides?\r
-\r
-Some one had carried him from the Quartier des Halles to the\r
-Champs-Elysees. And how? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion!\r
-\r
-Some one? Who?\r
-\r
-This was the man for whom Marius was searching.\r
-\r
-Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; not a trace; not the faintest\r
-indication.\r
-\r
-Marius, although forced to preserve great reserve, in that direction,\r
-pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture of police. There, no more\r
-than elsewhere, did the information obtained lead to any enlightenment.\r
-\r
-The prefecture knew less about the matter than did the hackney-coachman.\r
-They had no knowledge of any arrest having been made on the 6th of June\r
-at the mouth of the Grand Sewer.\r
-\r
-No report of any agent had been received there upon this matter, which\r
-was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable\r
-was attributed to the coachman.\r
-\r
-A coachman who wants a gratuity is capable of anything, even of\r
-imagination. The fact was assured, nevertheless, and Marius could not\r
-doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said.\r
-\r
-Everything about this singular enigma was inexplicable.\r
-\r
-What had become of that man, that mysterious man, whom the coachman had\r
-seen emerge from the grating of the Grand Sewer bearing upon his back\r
-the unconscious Marius, and whom the police-agent on the watch had\r
-arrested in the very act of rescuing an insurgent? What had become of\r
-the agent himself?\r
-\r
-Why had this agent preserved silence? Had the man succeeded in making\r
-his escape? Had he bribed the agent? Why did this man give no sign of\r
-life to Marius, who owed everything to him? His disinterestedness was no\r
-less tremendous than his devotion. Why had not that man appeared again?\r
-Perhaps he was above compensation, but no one is above gratitude. Was he\r
-dead? Who was the man? What sort of a face had he? No one could tell him\r
-this.\r
-\r
-The coachman answered: "The night was very dark." Basque and Nicolette,\r
-all in a flutter, had looked only at their young master all covered with\r
-blood.\r
-\r
-The porter, whose candle had lighted the tragic arrival of Marius, had\r
-been the only one to take note of the man in question, and this is the\r
-description that he gave:\r
-\r
-"That man was terrible."\r
-\r
-Marius had the blood-stained clothing which he had worn when he had been\r
-brought back to his grandfather preserved, in the hope that it would\r
-prove of service in his researches.\r
-\r
-On examining the coat, it was found that one skirt had been torn in a\r
-singular way. A piece was missing.\r
-\r
-One evening, Marius was speaking in the presence of Cosette and Jean\r
-Valjean of the whole of that singular adventure, of the innumerable\r
-inquiries which he had made, and of the fruitlessness of his efforts.\r
-The cold countenance of "Monsieur Fauchelevent" angered him.\r
-\r
-He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it:\r
-\r
-"Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime. Do you know what\r
-he did, sir? He intervened like an archangel. He must have flung himself\r
-into the midst of the battle, have stolen me away, have opened the\r
-sewer, have dragged me into it and have carried me through it! He\r
-must have traversed more than a league and a half in those frightful\r
-subterranean galleries, bent over, weighed down, in the dark, in the\r
-cess-pool,--more than a league and a half, sir, with a corpse upon his\r
-back! And with what object? With the sole object of saving the corpse.\r
-And that corpse I was. He said to himself: 'There may still be a\r
-glimpse of life there, perchance; I will risk my own existence for that\r
-miserable spark!' And his existence he risked not once but twenty times!\r
-And every step was a danger. The proof of it is, that on emerging from\r
-the sewer, he was arrested. Do you know, sir, that that man did all\r
-this? And he had no recompense to expect. What was I? An insurgent.\r
-What was I? One of the conquered. Oh! if Cosette's six hundred thousand\r
-francs were mine . . ."\r
-\r
-"They are yours," interrupted Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Well," resumed Marius, "I would give them all to find that man once\r
-more."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean remained silent.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833\r
-\r
-The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a blessed\r
-night. Above its shadows heaven stood open. It was the wedding night of\r
-Marius and Cosette.\r
-\r
-The day had been adorable.\r
-\r
-It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather, a fairy\r
-spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over the heads of the\r
-bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject of a painting to be\r
-placed over a door; but it had been sweet and smiling.\r
-\r
-The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day. France\r
-had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy of carrying off\r
-one's wife, of fleeing, on coming out of church, of hiding oneself with\r
-shame from one's happiness, and of combining the ways of a bankrupt with\r
-the delights of the Song of Songs. People had not yet grasped to the\r
-full the chastity, exquisiteness, and decency of jolting their paradise\r
-in a posting-chaise, of breaking up their mystery with clic-clacs, of\r
-taking for a nuptial bed the bed of an inn, and of leaving behind them,\r
-in a commonplace chamber, at such a night, the most sacred of\r
-the souvenirs of life mingled pell-mell with the tete-a-tete of the\r
-conductor of the diligence and the maid-servant of the inn.\r
-\r
-In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we are now\r
-living, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law\r
-and God no longer suffice; they must be eked out by the Postilion de\r
-Lonjumeau; a blue waistcoat turned up with red, and with bell buttons,\r
-a plaque like a vantbrace, knee-breeches of green leather, oaths to the\r
-Norman horses with their tails knotted up, false galloons, varnished\r
-hat, long powdered locks, an enormous whip and tall boots. France does\r
-not yet carry elegance to the length of doing like the English nobility,\r
-and raining down on the post-chaise of the bridal pair a hail storm\r
-of slippers trodden down at heel and of worn-out shoes, in memory of\r
-Churchill, afterwards Marlborough, or Malbrouck, who was assailed on\r
-his wedding-day by the wrath of an aunt which brought him good luck.\r
-Old shoes and slippers do not, as yet, form a part of our nuptial\r
-celebrations; but patience, as good taste continues to spread, we shall\r
-come to that.\r
-\r
-In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at a full trot.\r
-\r
-Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was\r
-a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not\r
-spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be\r
-honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a\r
-good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies whence\r
-a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that the\r
-household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness.\r
-\r
-And people were so immodest as to marry in their own homes.\r
-\r
-The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this now\r
-superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand's house.\r
-\r
-Natural and commonplace as this matter of marrying is, the banns to\r
-publish, the papers to be drawn up, the mayoralty, and the church\r
-produce some complication. They could not get ready before the 16th of\r
-February.\r
-\r
-Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being exact, it\r
-chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday. Hesitations, scruples,\r
-particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-"Shrove Tuesday!" exclaimed the grandfather, "so much the better. There\r
-is a proverb:\r
-\r
- "'Mariage un Mardi gras\r
- N'aura point enfants ingrats.'[66]\r
-\r
-\r
-Let us proceed. Here goes for the 16th! Do you want to delay, Marius?"\r
-\r
-"No, certainly not!" replied the lover.\r
-\r
-"Let us marry, then," cried the grandfather.\r
-\r
-Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the\r
-public merrymaking. It rained that day, but there is always in the sky\r
-a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even\r
-when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.\r
-\r
-On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence\r
-of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.\r
-\r
-As the marriage was taking place under the regime of community of\r
-property, the papers had been simple.\r
-\r
-Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette inherited\r
-her and promoted her to the rank of lady's maid.\r
-\r
-As for Jean Valjean, a beautiful chamber in the Gillenormand house had\r
-been furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said to him in such\r
-an irresistible manner: "Father, I entreat you," that she had almost\r
-persuaded him to promise that he would come and occupy it.\r
-\r
-A few days before that fixed on for the marriage, an accident happened\r
-to Jean Valjean; he crushed the thumb of his right hand. This was not a\r
-serious matter; and he had not allowed any one to trouble himself\r
-about it, nor to dress it, nor even to see his hurt, not even Cosette.\r
-Nevertheless, this had forced him to swathe his hand in a linen bandage,\r
-and to carry his arm in a sling, and had prevented his signing. M.\r
-Gillenormand, in his capacity of Cosette's supervising-guardian, had\r
-supplied his place.\r
-\r
-We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor's office or to the\r
-church. One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent, and one is\r
-accustomed to turn one's back on the drama as soon as it puts a wedding\r
-nosegay in its buttonhole. We will confine ourselves to noting an\r
-incident which, though unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the\r
-transit from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of Saint-Paul.\r
-\r
-At that epoch, the northern extremity of the Rue Saint-Louis was in\r
-process of repaving. It was barred off, beginning with the Rue du\r
-Pare-Royal. It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly\r
-to Saint-Paul. They were obliged to alter their course, and the simplest\r
-way was to turn through the boulevard. One of the invited guests\r
-observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a jam\r
-of vehicles.--"Why?" asked M. Gillenormand--"Because of the\r
-maskers."--"Capital," said the grandfather, "let us go that way. These\r
-young folks are on the way to be married; they are about to enter the\r
-serious part of life. This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the\r
-masquerade."\r
-\r
-They went by way of the boulevard. The first wedding coach held Cosette\r
-and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. Marius, still\r
-separated from his betrothed according to usage, did not come until\r
-the second. The nuptial train, on emerging from the Rue des\r
-Filles-du-Calvaire, became entangled in a long procession of vehicles\r
-which formed an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille, and\r
-from the Bastille to the Madeleine. Maskers abounded on the boulevard.\r
-In spite of the fact that it was raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew,\r
-Pantaloon and Clown persisted. In the good humor of that winter of 1833,\r
-Paris had disguised itself as Venice. Such Shrove Tuesdays are no\r
-longer to be seen now-a-days. Everything which exists being a scattered\r
-Carnival, there is no longer any Carnival.\r
-\r
-The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows with\r
-curious spectators. The terraces which crown the peristyles of the\r
-theatres were bordered with spectators. Besides the maskers, they stared\r
-at that procession--peculiar to Shrove Tuesday as to Longchamps,--of\r
-vehicles of every description, citadines, tapissieres, carioles,\r
-cabriolets marching in order, rigorously riveted to each other by the\r
-police regulations, and locked into rails, as it were. Any one in\r
-these vehicles is at once a spectator and a spectacle. Police-sergeants\r
-maintained, on the sides of the boulevard, these two interminable\r
-parallel files, moving in contrary directions, and saw to it that\r
-nothing interfered with that double current, those two brooks of\r
-carriages, flowing, the one down stream, the other up stream, the\r
-one towards the Chaussee d'Antin, the other towards the Faubourg\r
-Saint-Antoine. The carriages of the peers of France and of the\r
-Ambassadors, emblazoned with coats of arms, held the middle of the way,\r
-going and coming freely. Certain joyous and magnificent trains, notably\r
-that of the Boeuf Gras, had the same privilege. In this gayety of Paris,\r
-England cracked her whip; Lord Seymour's post-chaise, harassed by a\r
-nickname from the populace, passed with great noise.\r
-\r
-In the double file, along which the municipal guards galloped like\r
-sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down with great-aunts and\r
-grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of children in\r
-disguise, Clowns of seven years of age, Columbines of six, ravishing\r
-little creatures, who felt that they formed an official part of the\r
-public mirth, who were imbued with the dignity of their harlequinade,\r
-and who possessed the gravity of functionaries.\r
-\r
-From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession of\r
-vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until the knot\r
-was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze the whole\r
-line. Then they set out again on the march.\r
-\r
-The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards the Bastille,\r
-and skirting the right side of the Boulevard. At the top of the\r
-Pont-aux-Choux, there was a stoppage. Nearly at the same moment, the\r
-other file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine, halted also. At\r
-that point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers.\r
-\r
-These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads of\r
-maskers are very familiar to Parisians. If they were missing on a Shrove\r
-Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent, it would be taken in bad part, and people\r
-would say: "There's something behind that. Probably the ministry\r
-is about to undergo a change." A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and\r
-Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible\r
-grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting\r
-Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just\r
-as the Maenads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights,\r
-dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot\r
-tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on\r
-hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of\r
-shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what\r
-that institution was like.\r
-\r
-Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands in need of\r
-the hackney-coach of Vade.\r
-\r
-Everything can be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of\r
-antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove\r
-Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves\r
-and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a\r
-divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her shape under\r
-the soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be called the\r
-Jack-pudding.\r
-\r
-The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the most ancient\r
-days of the monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the bailiff of\r
-the palace "twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of mascarades\r
-in the cross-roads." In our day, these noisy heaps of creatures are\r
-accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient cuckoo carriage,\r
-whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a hired landau, with\r
-its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups. Twenty of them ride\r
-in a carriage intended for six. They cling to the seats, to the rumble,\r
-on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts. They even bestride the\r
-carriage lamps. They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up in a\r
-knot, and their legs hanging. The women sit on the men's laps. Far\r
-away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is visible. These\r
-carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of the rout. Colle,\r
-Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang. This carriage which\r
-has become colossal through its freight, has an air of conquest. Uproar\r
-reigns in front, tumult behind. People vociferate, shout, howl, there\r
-they break forth and writhe with enjoyment; gayety roars; sarcasm flames\r
-forth, joviality is flaunted like a red flag; two jades there drag farce\r
-blossomed forth into an apotheosis; it is the triumphal car of laughter.\r
-\r
-A laughter that is too cynical to be frank. In truth, this laughter is\r
-suspicious. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the\r
-Carnival to the Parisians.\r
-\r
-These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows,\r
-set the philosopher to thinking. There is government therein. There one\r
-lays one's finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and public\r
-women.\r
-\r
-It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total\r
-of gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should\r
-be enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids to\r
-prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them, that the\r
-crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags, half\r
-dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing, that they\r
-should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames, that there\r
-would be no festival for the populace, did not the police promenade in\r
-their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy. But what can be\r
-done about it? These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are\r
-insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public. The laughter of all\r
-is the accomplice of universal degradation. Certain unhealthy festivals\r
-disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace. And\r
-populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The King has Roquelaure,\r
-the populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a great, mad city on every\r
-occasion that it is a great sublime city. There the Carnival forms\r
-part of politics. Paris,--let us confess it--willingly allows infamy to\r
-furnish it with comedy. She only demands of her masters--when she has\r
-masters--one thing: "Paint me the mud." Rome was of the same mind. She\r
-loved Nero. Nero was a titanic lighterman.\r
-\r
-Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless\r
-clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash, should\r
-halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train halted on the\r
-right. The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage\r
-containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side of the\r
-boulevard.\r
-\r
-"Hullo!" said a masker, "here's a wedding."\r
-\r
-"A sham wedding," retorted another. "We are the genuine article."\r
-\r
-And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also,\r
-the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.\r
-\r
-At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their\r
-hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd's caress\r
-to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the\r
-throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of\r
-projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous\r
-verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of metaphors took\r
-place between the maskers and the crowd.\r
-\r
-In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard\r
-with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache, and a\r
-gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a loup,[67] had\r
-also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by\r
-were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue in a low voice.\r
-\r
-Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. The gusts of\r
-rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the\r
-breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked\r
-gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.\r
-\r
-Here is their dialogue:\r
-\r
-"Say, now."\r
-\r
-"What, daddy?"\r
-\r
-"Do you see that old cove?"\r
-\r
-"What old cove?"\r
-\r
-"Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side."\r
-\r
-"The one with his arm hung up in a black cravat?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"I'm sure that I know him."\r
-\r
-"Ah!"\r
-\r
-"I'm willing that they should cut my throat, and I'm ready to swear that\r
-I never said either you, thou, or I, in my life, if I don't know that\r
-Parisian." [pantinois.]\r
-\r
-"Paris in Pantin to-day."\r
-\r
-"Can you see the bride if you stoop down?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"And the bridegroom?"\r
-\r
-"There's no bridegroom in that trap."\r
-\r
-"Bah!"\r
-\r
-"Unless it's the old fellow."\r
-\r
-"Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low."\r
-\r
-"I can't."\r
-\r
-"Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter with his paw I\r
-know, and that I'm positive."\r
-\r
-"And what good does it do to know him?"\r
-\r
-"No one can tell. Sometimes it does!"\r
-\r
-"I don't care a hang for old fellows, that I don't!"\r
-\r
-"I know him."\r
-\r
-"Know him, if you want to."\r
-\r
-"How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding party?"\r
-\r
-"We are in it, too."\r
-\r
-"Where does that wedding come from?"\r
-\r
-"How should I know?"\r
-\r
-"Listen."\r
-\r
-"Well, what?"\r
-\r
-"There's one thing you ought to do."\r
-\r
-"What's that?"\r
-\r
-"Get off of our trap and spin that wedding."\r
-\r
-"What for?"\r
-\r
-"To find out where it goes, and what it is. Hurry up and jump down,\r
-trot, my girl, your legs are young."\r
-\r
-"I can't quit the vehicle."\r
-\r
-"Why not?"\r
-\r
-"I'm hired."\r
-\r
-"Ah, the devil!"\r
-\r
-"I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture."\r
-\r
-"That's true."\r
-\r
-"If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his eye on me will\r
-arrest me. You know that well enough."\r
-\r
-"Yes, I do."\r
-\r
-"I'm bought by the government for to-day."\r
-\r
-"All the same, that old fellow bothers me."\r
-\r
-"Do the old fellows bother you? But you're not a young girl."\r
-\r
-"He's in the first carriage."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"In the bride's trap."\r
-\r
-"What then?"\r
-\r
-"So he is the father."\r
-\r
-"What concern is that of mine?"\r
-\r
-"I tell you that he's the father."\r
-\r
-"As if he were the only father."\r
-\r
-"Listen."\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"I can't go out otherwise than masked. Here I'm concealed, no one knows\r
-that I'm here. But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers. It's Ash\r
-Wednesday. I run the risk of being nabbed. I must sneak back into my\r
-hole. But you are free."\r
-\r
-"Not particularly."\r
-\r
-"More than I am, at any rate."\r
-\r
-"Well, what of that?"\r
-\r
-"You must try to find out where that wedding-party went to."\r
-\r
-"Where it went?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"I know."\r
-\r
-"Where is it going then?"\r
-\r
-"To the Cadran-Bleu."\r
-\r
-"In the first place, it's not in that direction."\r
-\r
-"Well! to la Rapee."\r
-\r
-"Or elsewhere."\r
-\r
-"It's free. Wedding-parties are at liberty."\r
-\r
-"That's not the point at all. I tell you that you must try to learn for\r
-me what that wedding is, who that old cove belongs to, and where that\r
-wedding pair lives."\r
-\r
-"I like that! that would be queer. It's so easy to find out a\r
-wedding-party that passed through the street on a Shrove Tuesday, a week\r
-afterwards. A pin in a hay-mow! It ain't possible!"\r
-\r
-"That don't matter. You must try. You understand me, Azelma."\r
-\r
-The two files resumed their movement on both sides of the boulevard, in\r
-opposite directions, and the carriage of the maskers lost sight of the\r
-"trap" of the bride.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING\r
-\r
-To realize one's dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be\r
-elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to\r
-ourselves; the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been elected.\r
-\r
-Cosette, both at the mayor's office and at church, was dazzling and\r
-touching. Toussaint, assisted by Nicolette, had dressed her.\r
-\r
-Cosette wore over a petticoat of white taffeta, her robe of Binche\r
-guipure, a veil of English point, a necklace of fine pearls, a wreath\r
-of orange flowers; all this was white, and, from the midst of that\r
-whiteness she beamed forth. It was an exquisite candor expanding and\r
-becoming transfigured in the light. One would have pronounced her a\r
-virgin on the point of turning into a goddess.\r
-\r
-Marius' handsome hair was lustrous and perfumed; here and there, beneath\r
-the thick curls, pale lines--the scars of the barricade--were visible.\r
-\r
-The grandfather, haughty, with head held high, amalgamating more than\r
-ever in his toilet and his manners all the elegances of the epoch of\r
-Barras, escorted Cosette. He took the place of Jean Valjean, who, on\r
-account of his arm being still in a sling, could not give his hand to\r
-the bride.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, dressed in black, followed them with a smile.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Fauchelevent," said the grandfather to him, "this is a fine\r
-day. I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows. Henceforth, there\r
-must be no sadness anywhere. Pardieu, I decree joy! Evil has no right to\r
-exist. That there should be any unhappy men is, in sooth, a disgrace\r
-to the azure of the sky. Evil does not come from man, who is good at\r
-bottom. All human miseries have for their capital and central government\r
-hell, otherwise, known as the Devil's Tuileries. Good, here I am\r
-uttering demagogical words! As far as I am concerned, I have no longer\r
-any political opinions; let all me be rich, that is to say, mirthful,\r
-and I confine myself to that."\r
-\r
-When, at the conclusion of all the ceremonies, after having pronounced\r
-before the mayor and before the priest all possible "yesses," after\r
-having signed the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy,\r
-after having exchanged their rings, after having knelt side by side\r
-under the pall of white moire in the smoke of the censer, they arrived,\r
-hand in hand, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white,\r
-preceded by the suisse, with the epaulets of a colonel, tapping the\r
-pavement with his halberd, between two rows of astonished spectators, at\r
-the portals of the church, both leaves of which were thrown wide open,\r
-ready to enter their carriage again, and all being finished, Cosette\r
-still could not believe that it was real. She looked at Marius, she\r
-looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky: it seemed as though she\r
-feared that she should wake up from her dream. Her amazed and uneasy air\r
-added something indescribably enchanting to her beauty. They entered the\r
-same carriage to return home, Marius beside Cosette; M. Gillenormand\r
-and Jean Valjean sat opposite them; Aunt Gillenormand had withdrawn one\r
-degree, and was in the second vehicle.\r
-\r
-"My children," said the grandfather, "here you are, Monsieur le Baron\r
-and Madame la Baronne, with an income of thirty thousand livres."\r
-\r
-And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an angelic\r
-whisper: "So it is true. My name is Marius. I am Madame Thou."\r
-\r
-These two creatures were resplendent. They had reached that irrevocable\r
-and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection of all youth and\r
-all joy. They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty\r
-years old taken together. It was marriage sublimated; these two children\r
-were two lilies. They did not see each other, they did not contemplate\r
-each other. Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glory; Marius\r
-perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar, and in that glory, the\r
-two apotheoses mingling, in the background, one knows not how, behind a\r
-cloud for Cosette, in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the\r
-real thing, the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow.\r
-All the torments through which they had passed came back to them in\r
-intoxication. It seemed to them that their sorrows, their sleepless\r
-nights, their tears, their anguish, their terrors, their despair,\r
-converted into caresses and rays of light, rendered still more charming\r
-the charming hour which was approaching; and that their griefs were but\r
-so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy. How good it is\r
-to have suffered! Their unhappiness formed a halo round their happiness.\r
-The long agony of their love was terminating in an ascension.\r
-\r
-It was the same enchantment in two souls, tinged with voluptuousness\r
-in Marius, and with modesty in Cosette. They said to each other in low\r
-tones: "We will go back to take a look at our little garden in the Rue\r
-Plumet." The folds of Cosette's gown lay across Marius.\r
-\r
-Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality. One\r
-possesses and one supposes. One still has time before one to divine. The\r
-emotion on that day, of being at mid-day and of dreaming of midnight\r
-is indescribable. The delights of these two hearts overflowed upon the\r
-crowd, and inspired the passers-by with cheerfulness.\r
-\r
-People halted in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in front of Saint-Paul, to gaze\r
-through the windows of the carriage at the orange-flowers quivering on\r
-Cosette's head.\r
-\r
-Then they returned home to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Marius,\r
-triumphant and radiant, mounted side by side with Cosette the staircase\r
-up which he had been borne in a dying condition. The poor, who had\r
-trooped to the door, and who shared their purses, blessed them. There\r
-were flowers everywhere. The house was no less fragrant than the church;\r
-after the incense, roses. They thought they heard voices carolling in\r
-the infinite; they had God in their hearts; destiny appeared to them\r
-like a ceiling of stars; above their heads they beheld the light of a\r
-rising sun. All at once, the clock struck. Marius glanced at Cosette's\r
-charming bare arm, and at the rosy things which were vaguely visible\r
-through the lace of her bodice, and Cosette, intercepting Marius'\r
-glance, blushed to her very hair.\r
-\r
-Quite a number of old family friends of the Gillenormand family had\r
-been invited; they pressed about Cosette. Each one vied with the rest in\r
-saluting her as Madame la Baronne.\r
-\r
-The officer, Theodule Gillenormand, now a captain, had come from\r
-Chartres, where he was stationed in garrison, to be present at the\r
-wedding of his cousin Pontmercy. Cosette did not recognize him.\r
-\r
-He, on his side, habituated as he was to have women consider him\r
-handsome, retained no more recollection of Cosette than of any other\r
-woman.\r
-\r
-"How right I was not to believe in that story about the lancer!" said\r
-Father Gillenormand, to himself.\r
-\r
-Cosette had never been more tender with Jean Valjean. She was in unison\r
-with Father Gillenormand; while he erected joy into aphorisms and\r
-maxims, she exhaled goodness like a perfume. Happiness desires that all\r
-the world should be happy.\r
-\r
-She regained, for the purpose of addressing Jean Valjean, inflections of\r
-voice belonging to the time when she was a little girl. She caressed him\r
-with her smile.\r
-\r
-A banquet had been spread in the dining-room.\r
-\r
-Illumination as brilliant as the daylight is the necessary seasoning of\r
-a great joy. Mist and obscurity are not accepted by the happy. They do\r
-not consent to be black. The night, yes; the shadows, no. If there is no\r
-sun, one must be made.\r
-\r
-The dining-room was full of gay things. In the centre, above the white\r
-and glittering table, was a Venetian lustre with flat plates, with all\r
-sorts of colored birds, blue, violet, red, and green, perched amid the\r
-candles; around the chandelier, girandoles, on the walls, sconces with\r
-triple and quintuple branches; mirrors, silverware, glassware, plate,\r
-porcelain, faience, pottery, gold and silversmith's work, all was\r
-sparkling and gay. The empty spaces between the candelabra were filled\r
-in with bouquets, so that where there was not a light, there was a\r
-flower.\r
-\r
-In the antechamber, three violins and a flute softly played quartettes\r
-by Haydn.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had seated himself on a chair in the drawing-room, behind\r
-the door, the leaf of which folded back upon him in such a manner as to\r
-nearly conceal him. A few moments before they sat down to table, Cosette\r
-came, as though inspired by a sudden whim, and made him a deep courtesy,\r
-spreading out her bridal toilet with both hands, and with a tenderly\r
-roguish glance, she asked him:\r
-\r
-"Father, are you satisfied?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," said Jean Valjean, "I am content!"\r
-\r
-"Well, then, laugh."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean began to laugh.\r
-\r
-A few moments later, Basque announced that dinner was served.\r
-\r
-The guests, preceded by M. Gillenormand with Cosette on his arm, entered\r
-the dining-room, and arranged themselves in the proper order around the\r
-table.\r
-\r
-Two large arm-chairs figured on the right and left of the bride, the\r
-first for M. Gillenormand, the other for Jean Valjean. M. Gillenormand\r
-took his seat. The other arm-chair remained empty.\r
-\r
-They looked about for M. Fauchelevent.\r
-\r
-He was no longer there.\r
-\r
-M. Gillenormand questioned Basque.\r
-\r
-"Do you know where M. Fauchelevent is?"\r
-\r
-"Sir," replied Basque, "I do, precisely. M. Fauchelevent told me to say\r
-to you, sir, that he was suffering, his injured hand was paining him\r
-somewhat, and that he could not dine with Monsieur le Baron and Madame\r
-la Baronne. That he begged to be excused, that he would come to-morrow.\r
-He has just taken his departure."\r
-\r
-That empty arm-chair chilled the effusion of the wedding feast for a\r
-moment. But, if M. Fauchelevent was absent, M. Gillenormand was present,\r
-and the grandfather beamed for two. He affirmed that M. Fauchelevent had\r
-done well to retire early, if he were suffering, but that it was only a\r
-slight ailment. This declaration sufficed. Moreover, what is an obscure\r
-corner in such a submersion of joy? Cosette and Marius were passing\r
-through one of those egotistical and blessed moments when no other\r
-faculty is left to a person than that of receiving happiness. And then,\r
-an idea occurred to M. Gillenormand.--"Pardieu, this armchair is empty.\r
-Come hither, Marius. Your aunt will permit it, although she has a\r
-right to you. This armchair is for you. That is legal and delightful.\r
-Fortunatus beside Fortunata."--Applause from the whole table. Marius\r
-took Jean Valjean's place beside Cosette, and things fell out so that\r
-Cosette, who had, at first, been saddened by Jean Valjean's absence,\r
-ended by being satisfied with it. From the moment when Marius took his\r
-place, and was the substitute, Cosette would not have regretted God\r
-himself. She set her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius'\r
-foot.\r
-\r
-The arm-chair being occupied, M. Fauchelevent was obliterated; and\r
-nothing was lacking.\r
-\r
-And, five minutes afterward, the whole table from one end to the other,\r
-was laughing with all the animation of forgetfulness.\r
-\r
-At dessert, M. Gillenormand, rising to his feet, with a glass of\r
-champagne in his hand--only half full so that the palsy of his eighty\r
-years might not cause an overflow,--proposed the health of the married\r
-pair.\r
-\r
-"You shall not escape two sermons," he exclaimed. "This morning you\r
-had one from the cure, this evening you shall have one from your\r
-grandfather. Listen to me; I will give you a bit of advice: Adore each\r
-other. I do not make a pack of gyrations, I go straight to the mark,\r
-be happy. In all creation, only the turtle-doves are wise. Philosophers\r
-say: 'Moderate your joys.' I say: 'Give rein to your joys.' Be as\r
-much smitten with each other as fiends. Be in a rage about it. The\r
-philosophers talk stuff and nonsense. I should like to stuff their\r
-philosophy down their gullets again. Can there be too many perfumes,\r
-too many open rose-buds, too many nightingales singing, too many green\r
-leaves, too much aurora in life? can people love each other too much?\r
-can people please each other too much? Take care, Estelle, thou art too\r
-pretty! Have a care, Nemorin, thou art too handsome! Fine stupidity,\r
-in sooth! Can people enchant each other too much, cajole each other too\r
-much, charm each other too much? Can one be too much alive, too happy?\r
-Moderate your joys. Ah, indeed! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom\r
-consists in jubilation. Make merry, let us make merry. Are we happy\r
-because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? Is the Sancy\r
-diamond called the Sancy because it belonged to Harley de Sancy, or\r
-because it weighs six hundred carats? I know nothing about it, life is\r
-full of such problems; the important point is to possess the Sancy and\r
-happiness. Let us be happy without quibbling and quirking. Let us obey\r
-the sun blindly. What is the sun? It is love. He who says love, says\r
-woman. Ah! ah! behold omnipotence--women. Ask that demagogue of a Marius\r
-if he is not the slave of that little tyrant of a Cosette. And of his\r
-own free will, too, the coward! Woman! There is no Robespierre who keeps\r
-his place but woman reigns. I am no longer Royalist except towards that\r
-royalty. What is Adam? The kingdom of Eve. No '89 for Eve. There has\r
-been the royal sceptre surmounted by a fleur-de-lys, there has been the\r
-imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe, there has been the sceptre of\r
-Charlemagne, which was of iron, there has been the sceptre of Louis the\r
-Great, which was of gold,--the revolution twisted them between its thumb\r
-and forefinger, ha'penny straws; it is done with, it is broken, it lies\r
-on the earth, there is no longer any sceptre, but make me a revolution\r
-against that little embroidered handkerchief, which smells of patchouli!\r
-I should like to see you do it. Try. Why is it so solid? Because it is a\r
-gewgaw. Ah! you are the nineteenth century? Well, what then? And we\r
-have been as foolish as you. Do not imagine that you have effected\r
-much change in the universe, because your trip-gallant is called the\r
-cholera-morbus, and because your pourree is called the cachuca. In fact,\r
-the women must always be loved. I defy you to escape from that. These\r
-friends are our angels. Yes, love, woman, the kiss forms a circle from\r
-which I defy you to escape; and, for my own part, I should be only\r
-too happy to re-enter it. Which of you has seen the planet Venus, the\r
-coquette of the abyss, the Celimene of the ocean, rise in the infinite,\r
-calming all here below? The ocean is a rough Alcestis. Well, grumble\r
-as he will, when Venus appears he is forced to smile. That brute beast\r
-submits. We are all made so. Wrath, tempest, claps of thunder, foam to\r
-the very ceiling. A woman enters on the scene, a planet rises; flat on\r
-your face! Marius was fighting six months ago; to-day he is married.\r
-That is well. Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are in the right. Exist\r
-boldly for each other, make us burst with rage that we cannot do the\r
-same, idealize each other, catch in your beaks all the tiny blades of\r
-felicity that exist on earth, and arrange yourselves a nest for life.\r
-Pardi, to love, to be loved, what a fine miracle when one is young!\r
-Don't imagine that you have invented that. I, too, have had my dream, I,\r
-too, have meditated, I, too, have sighed; I, too, have had a moonlight\r
-soul. Love is a child six thousand years old. Love has the right to a\r
-long white beard. Methusalem is a street arab beside Cupid. For sixty\r
-centuries men and women have got out of their scrape by loving. The\r
-devil, who is cunning, took to hating man; man, who is still more\r
-cunning, took to loving woman. In this way he does more good than\r
-the devil does him harm. This craft was discovered in the days of\r
-the terrestrial paradise. The invention is old, my friends, but it is\r
-perfectly new. Profit by it. Be Daphnis and Chloe, while waiting to\r
-become Philemon and Baucis. Manage so that, when you are with each\r
-other, nothing shall be lacking to you, and that Cosette may be the sun\r
-for Marius, and that Marius may be the universe to Cosette. Cosette, let\r
-your fine weather be the smile of your husband; Marius, let your rain\r
-be your wife's tears. And let it never rain in your household. You have\r
-filched the winning number in the lottery; you have gained the great\r
-prize, guard it well, keep it under lock and key, do not squander it,\r
-adore each other and snap your fingers at all the rest. Believe what I\r
-say to you. It is good sense. And good sense cannot lie. Be a religion\r
-to each other. Each man has his own fashion of adoring God. Saperlotte!\r
-the best way to adore God is to love one's wife. I love thee! that's\r
-my catechism. He who loves is orthodox. The oath of Henri IV. places\r
-sanctity somewhere between feasting and drunkenness. Ventre-saint-gris!\r
-I don't belong to the religion of that oath. Woman is forgotten in it.\r
-This astonishes me on the part of Henri IV. My friends, long live women!\r
-I am old, they say; it's astonishing how much I feel in the mood to\r
-be young. I should like to go and listen to the bagpipes in the woods.\r
-Children who contrive to be beautiful and contented,--that intoxicates\r
-me. I would like greatly to get married, if any one would have me. It is\r
-impossible to imagine that God could have made us for anything but this:\r
-to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves, to be dove-like, to be dainty,\r
-to bill and coo our loves from morn to night, to gaze at one's image in\r
-one's little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant, to plume oneself; that\r
-is the aim of life. There, let not that displease you which we used to\r
-think in our day, when we were young folks. Ah! vertu-bamboche! what\r
-charming women there were in those days, and what pretty little faces\r
-and what lovely lasses! I committed my ravages among them. Then love\r
-each other. If people did not love each other, I really do not see what\r
-use there would be in having any springtime; and for my own part, I\r
-should pray the good God to shut up all the beautiful things that he\r
-shows us, and to take away from us and put back in his box, the flowers,\r
-the birds, and the pretty maidens. My children, receive an old man's\r
-blessing."\r
-\r
-The evening was gay, lively and agreeable. The grandfather's sovereign\r
-good humor gave the key-note to the whole feast, and each person\r
-regulated his conduct on that almost centenarian cordiality. They danced\r
-a little, they laughed a great deal; it was an amiable wedding. Goodman\r
-Days of Yore might have been invited to it. However, he was present in\r
-the person of Father Gillenormand.\r
-\r
-There was a tumult, then silence.\r
-\r
-The married pair disappeared.\r
-\r
-A little after midnight, the Gillenormand house became a temple.\r
-\r
-Here we pause. On the threshold of wedding nights stands a smiling angel\r
-with his finger on his lips.\r
-\r
-The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where the\r
-celebration of love takes place.\r
-\r
-There should be flashes of light athwart such houses. The joy which\r
-they contain ought to make its escape through the stones of the walls in\r
-brilliancy, and vaguely illuminate the gloom. It is impossible that this\r
-sacred and fatal festival should not give off a celestial radiance to\r
-the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible wherein the fusion of the man\r
-and the woman takes place; the being one, the being triple, the being\r
-final, the human trinity proceeds from it. This birth of two souls into\r
-one, ought to be an emotion for the gloom. The lover is the priest;\r
-the ravished virgin is terrified. Something of that joy ascends to God.\r
-Where true marriage is, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal\r
-enters in. A nuptial bed makes a nook of dawn amid the shadows. If it\r
-were given to the eye of the flesh to scan the formidable and charming\r
-visions of the upper life, it is probable that we should behold the\r
-forms of night, the winged unknowns, the blue passers of the invisible,\r
-bend down, a throng of sombre heads, around the luminous house,\r
-satisfied, showering benedictions, pointing out to each other the virgin\r
-wife gently alarmed, sweetly terrified, and bearing the reflection of\r
-human bliss upon their divine countenances. If at that supreme hour, the\r
-wedded pair, dazzled with voluptuousness and believing themselves alone,\r
-were to listen, they would hear in their chamber a confused rustling of\r
-wings. Perfect happiness implies a mutual understanding with the angels.\r
-That dark little chamber has all heaven for its ceiling. When two\r
-mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible\r
-that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering\r
-throughout the immense mystery of stars.\r
-\r
-These felicities are the true ones. There is no joy outside of these\r
-joys. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps.\r
-\r
-To love, or to have loved,--this suffices. Demand nothing more. There\r
-is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a\r
-fulfilment.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THE INSEPARABLE\r
-\r
-What had become of Jean Valjean?\r
-\r
-Immediately after having laughed, at Cosette's graceful command, when\r
-no one was paying any heed to him, Jean Valjean had risen and had gained\r
-the antechamber unperceived. This was the very room which, eight months\r
-before, he had entered black with mud, with blood and powder, bringing\r
-back the grandson to the grandfather. The old wainscoting was garlanded\r
-with foliage and flowers; the musicians were seated on the sofa on which\r
-they had laid Marius down. Basque, in a black coat, knee-breeches, white\r
-stockings and white gloves, was arranging roses round all of the dishes\r
-that were to be served. Jean Valjean pointed to his arm in its sling,\r
-charged Basque to explain his absence, and went away.\r
-\r
-The long windows of the dining-room opened on the street. Jean Valjean\r
-stood for several minutes, erect and motionless in the darkness, beneath\r
-those radiant windows. He listened. The confused sounds of the banquet\r
-reached his ear. He heard the loud, commanding tones of the grandfather,\r
-the violins, the clatter of the plates, the bursts of laughter, and\r
-through all that merry uproar, he distinguished Cosette's sweet and\r
-joyous voice.\r
-\r
-He quitted the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and returned to the Rue de\r
-l'Homme Arme.\r
-\r
-In order to return thither, he took the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue\r
-Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and the Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little\r
-longer, but it was the road through which, for the last three months,\r
-he had become accustomed to pass every day on his way from the Rue de\r
-l'Homme Arme to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, in order to avoid the\r
-obstructions and the mud in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple.\r
-\r
-This road, through which Cosette had passed, excluded for him all\r
-possibility of any other itinerary.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean entered his lodgings. He lighted his candle and mounted\r
-the stairs. The apartment was empty. Even Toussaint was no longer there.\r
-Jean Valjean's step made more noise than usual in the chambers. All the\r
-cupboards stood open. He penetrated to Cosette's bedroom. There were no\r
-sheets on the bed. The pillow, covered with ticking, and without a case\r
-or lace, was laid on the blankets folded up on the foot of the mattress,\r
-whose covering was visible, and on which no one was ever to sleep again.\r
-All the little feminine objects which Cosette was attached to had been\r
-carried away; nothing remained except the heavy furniture and the four\r
-walls. Toussaint's bed was despoiled in like manner. One bed only was\r
-made up, and seemed to be waiting some one, and this was Jean Valjean's\r
-bed.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean looked at the walls, closed some of the cupboard doors, and\r
-went and came from one room to another.\r
-\r
-Then he sought his own chamber once more, and set his candle on a table.\r
-\r
-He had disengaged his arm from the sling, and he used his right hand as\r
-though it did not hurt him.\r
-\r
-He approached his bed, and his eyes rested, was it by chance? was it\r
-intentionally? on the inseparable of which Cosette had been jealous, on\r
-the little portmanteau which never left him. On his arrival in the Rue\r
-de l'Homme Arme, on the 4th of June, he had deposited it on a round\r
-table near the head of his bed. He went to this table with a sort of\r
-vivacity, took a key from his pocket, and opened the valise.\r
-\r
-From it he slowly drew forth the garments in which, ten years before,\r
-Cosette had quitted Montfermeil; first the little gown, then the black\r
-fichu, then the stout, coarse child's shoes which Cosette might almost\r
-have worn still, so tiny were her feet, then the fustian bodice, which\r
-was very thick, then the knitted petticoat, next the apron with pockets,\r
-then the woollen stockings. These stockings, which still preserved the\r
-graceful form of a tiny leg, were no longer than Jean Valjean's hand.\r
-All this was black of hue. It was he who had brought those garments to\r
-Montfermeil for her. As he removed them from the valise, he laid them on\r
-the bed. He fell to thinking. He called up memories. It was in winter,\r
-in a very cold month of December, she was shivering, half-naked, in\r
-rags, her poor little feet were all red in their wooden shoes. He, Jean\r
-Valjean, had made her abandon those rags to clothe herself in these\r
-mourning habiliments. The mother must have felt pleased in her grave, to\r
-see her daughter wearing mourning for her, and, above all, to see that\r
-she was properly clothed, and that she was warm. He thought of that\r
-forest of Montfermeil; they had traversed it together, Cosette and he;\r
-he thought of what the weather had been, of the leafless trees, of the\r
-wood destitute of birds, of the sunless sky; it mattered not, it was\r
-charming. He arranged the tiny garments on the bed, the fichu next to\r
-the petticoat, the stockings beside the shoes, and he looked at them,\r
-one after the other. She was no taller than that, she had her big doll\r
-in her arms, she had put her louis d'or in the pocket of that apron, she\r
-had laughed, they walked hand in hand, she had no one in the world but\r
-him.\r
-\r
-Then his venerable, white head fell forward on the bed, that stoical old\r
-heart broke, his face was engulfed, so to speak, in Cosette's garments,\r
-and if any one had passed up the stairs at that moment, he would have\r
-heard frightful sobs.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--THE IMMORTAL LIVER [68]\r
-\r
-The old and formidable struggle, of which we have already witnessed so\r
-many phases, began once more.\r
-\r
-Jacob struggled with the angel but one night. Alas! how many times have\r
-we beheld Jean Valjean seized bodily by his conscience, in the darkness,\r
-and struggling desperately against it!\r
-\r
-Unheard-of conflict! At certain moments the foot slips; at other moments\r
-the ground crumbles away underfoot. How many times had that conscience,\r
-mad for the good, clasped and overthrown him! How many times had the\r
-truth set her knee inexorably upon his breast! How many times, hurled\r
-to earth by the light, had he begged for mercy! How many times had\r
-that implacable spark, lighted within him, and upon him by the Bishop,\r
-dazzled him by force when he had wished to be blind! How many times\r
-had he risen to his feet in the combat, held fast to the rock, leaning\r
-against sophism, dragged in the dust, now getting the upper hand of his\r
-conscience, again overthrown by it! How many times, after an equivoque,\r
-after the specious and treacherous reasoning of egotism, had he heard\r
-his irritated conscience cry in his ear: "A trip! you wretch!" How many\r
-times had his refractory thoughts rattled convulsively in his throat,\r
-under the evidence of duty! Resistance to God. Funereal sweats. What\r
-secret wounds which he alone felt bleed! What excoriations in his\r
-lamentable existence! How many times he had risen bleeding, bruised,\r
-broken, enlightened, despair in his heart, serenity in his soul!\r
-and, vanquished, he had felt himself the conqueror. And, after having\r
-dislocated, broken, and rent his conscience with red-hot pincers, it had\r
-said to him, as it stood over him, formidable, luminous, and tranquil:\r
-"Now, go in peace!"\r
-\r
-But on emerging from so melancholy a conflict, what a lugubrious peace,\r
-alas!\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, that night Jean Valjean felt that he was passing through\r
-his final combat.\r
-\r
-A heart-rending question presented itself.\r
-\r
-Predestinations are not all direct; they do not open out in a straight\r
-avenue before the predestined man; they have blind courts, impassable\r
-alleys, obscure turns, disturbing crossroads offering the choice of many\r
-ways. Jean Valjean had halted at that moment at the most perilous of\r
-these crossroads.\r
-\r
-He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that\r
-gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had\r
-happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out\r
-before him, the one tempting, the other alarming.\r
-\r
-Which was he to take?\r
-\r
-He was counselled to the one which alarmed him by that mysterious index\r
-finger which we all perceive whenever we fix our eyes on the darkness.\r
-\r
-Once more, Jean Valjean had the choice between the terrible port and the\r
-smiling ambush.\r
-\r
-Is it then true? the soul may recover; but not fate. Frightful thing! an\r
-incurable destiny!\r
-\r
-This is the problem which presented itself to him:\r
-\r
-In what manner was Jean Valjean to behave in relation to the happiness\r
-of Cosette and Marius? It was he who had willed that happiness, it was\r
-he who had brought it about; he had, himself, buried it in his entrails,\r
-and at that moment, when he reflected on it, he was able to enjoy the\r
-sort of satisfaction which an armorer would experience on recognizing\r
-his factory mark on a knife, on withdrawing it, all smoking, from his\r
-own breast.\r
-\r
-Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette. They had everything, even\r
-riches. And this was his doing.\r
-\r
-But what was he, Jean Valjean, to do with this happiness, now that\r
-it existed, now that it was there? Should he force himself on this\r
-happiness? Should he treat it as belonging to him? No doubt, Cosette did\r
-belong to another; but should he, Jean Valjean, retain of Cosette all\r
-that he could retain? Should he remain the sort of father, half seen but\r
-respected, which he had hitherto been? Should he, without saying a\r
-word, bring his past to that future? Should he present himself there,\r
-as though he had a right, and should he seat himself, veiled, at that\r
-luminous fireside? Should he take those innocent hands into his tragic\r
-hands, with a smile? Should he place upon the peaceful fender of the\r
-Gillenormand drawing-room those feet of his, which dragged behind them\r
-the disgraceful shadow of the law? Should he enter into participation in\r
-the fair fortunes of Cosette and Marius? Should he render the obscurity\r
-on his brow and the cloud upon theirs still more dense? Should he\r
-place his catastrophe as a third associate in their felicity? Should he\r
-continue to hold his peace? In a word, should he be the sinister mute of\r
-destiny beside these two happy beings?\r
-\r
-We must have become habituated to fatality and to encounters with it, in\r
-order to have the daring to raise our eyes when certain questions appear\r
-to us in all their horrible nakedness. Good or evil stands behind\r
-this severe interrogation point. What are you going to do? demands the\r
-sphinx.\r
-\r
-This habit of trial Jean Valjean possessed. He gazed intently at the\r
-sphinx.\r
-\r
-He examined the pitiless problem under all its aspects.\r
-\r
-Cosette, that charming existence, was the raft of this shipwreck. What\r
-was he to do? To cling fast to it, or to let go his hold?\r
-\r
-If he clung to it, he should emerge from disaster, he should ascend\r
-again into the sunlight, he should let the bitter water drip from his\r
-garments and his hair, he was saved, he should live.\r
-\r
-And if he let go his hold?\r
-\r
-Then the abyss.\r
-\r
-Thus he took sad council with his thoughts. Or, to speak more correctly,\r
-he fought; he kicked furiously internally, now against his will, now\r
-against his conviction.\r
-\r
-Happily for Jean Valjean that he had been able to weep. That relieved\r
-him, possibly. But the beginning was savage. A tempest, more furious\r
-than the one which had formerly driven him to Arras, broke loose within\r
-him. The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared\r
-them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man\r
-writhed.\r
-\r
-He felt that he had been stopped short.\r
-\r
-Alas! in this fight to the death between our egotism and our duty, when\r
-we thus retreat step by step before our immutable ideal, bewildered,\r
-furious, exasperated at having to yield, disputing the ground, hoping\r
-for a possible flight, seeking an escape, what an abrupt and sinister\r
-resistance does the foot of the wall offer in our rear!\r
-\r
-To feel the sacred shadow which forms an obstacle!\r
-\r
-The invisible inexorable, what an obsession!\r
-\r
-Then, one is never done with conscience. Make your choice, Brutus; make\r
-your choice, Cato. It is fathomless, since it is God. One flings into\r
-that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in one's fortune,\r
-one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success, one flings in\r
-one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's well-being, one flings\r
-in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! More! more! more! Empty the\r
-vase! tip the urn! One must finish by flinging in one's heart.\r
-\r
-Somewhere in the fog of the ancient hells, there is a tun like that.\r
-\r
-Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses! Can the inexhaustible\r
-have any right? Are not chains which are endless above human strength?\r
-Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying: "It is enough!"\r
-\r
-The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit to the\r
-obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, can perpetual\r
-self-sacrifice be exacted?\r
-\r
-The first step is nothing, it is the last which is difficult. What was\r
-the Champmathieu affair in comparison with Cosette's marriage and of\r
-that which it entailed? What is a re-entrance into the galleys, compared\r
-to entrance into the void?\r
-\r
-Oh, first step that must be descended, how sombre art thou! Oh, second\r
-step, how black art thou!\r
-\r
-How could he refrain from turning aside his head this time?\r
-\r
-Martyrdom is sublimation, corrosive sublimation. It is a torture which\r
-consecrates. One can consent to it for the first hour; one seats oneself\r
-on the throne of glowing iron, one places on one's head the crown of hot\r
-iron, one accepts the globe of red hot iron, one takes the sceptre of\r
-red hot iron, but the mantle of flame still remains to be donned, and\r
-comes there not a moment when the miserable flesh revolts and when one\r
-abdicates from suffering?\r
-\r
-At length, Jean Valjean entered into the peace of exhaustion.\r
-\r
-He weighed, he reflected, he considered the alternatives, the mysterious\r
-balance of light and darkness.\r
-\r
-Should he impose his galleys on those two dazzling children, or should\r
-he consummate his irremediable engulfment by himself? On one side lay\r
-the sacrifice of Cosette, on the other that of himself.\r
-\r
-At what solution should he arrive? What decision did he come to?\r
-\r
-What resolution did he take? What was his own inward definitive response\r
-to the unbribable interrogatory of fatality? What door did he decide to\r
-open? Which side of his life did he resolve upon closing and condemning?\r
-Among all the unfathomable precipices which surrounded him, which was\r
-his choice? What extremity did he accept? To which of the gulfs did he\r
-nod his head?\r
-\r
-His dizzy revery lasted all night long.\r
-\r
-He remained there until daylight, in the same attitude, bent double over\r
-that bed, prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, crushed, perchance,\r
-alas! with clenched fists, with arms outspread at right angles, like a\r
-man crucified who has been un-nailed, and flung face down on the earth.\r
-There he remained for twelve hours, the twelve long hours of a long\r
-winter's night, ice-cold, without once raising his head, and without\r
-uttering a word. He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts\r
-wallowed on the earth and soared, now like the hydra, now like the\r
-eagle. Any one to behold him thus motionless would have pronounced him\r
-dead; all at once he shuddered convulsively, and his mouth, glued to\r
-Cosette's garments, kissed them; then it could be seen that he was\r
-alive.\r
-\r
-Who could see? Since Jean Valjean was alone, and there was no one there.\r
-\r
-The One who is in the shadows.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Last Drop from the Cup 5b7-1-last-drop]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN\r
-\r
-The days that follow weddings are solitary. People respect the\r
-meditations of the happy pair. And also, their tardy slumbers, to some\r
-degree. The tumult of visits and congratulations only begins later on.\r
-On the morning of the 17th of February, it was a little past midday when\r
-Basque, with napkin and feather-duster under his arm, busy in setting\r
-his antechamber to rights, heard a light tap at the door. There had been\r
-no ring, which was discreet on such a day. Basque opened the door, and\r
-beheld M. Fauchelevent. He introduced him into the drawing-room, still\r
-encumbered and topsy-turvy, and which bore the air of a field of battle\r
-after the joys of the preceding evening.\r
-\r
-"Dame, sir," remarked Basque, "we all woke up late."\r
-\r
-"Is your master up?" asked Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"How is Monsieur's arm?" replied Basque.\r
-\r
-"Better. Is your master up?"\r
-\r
-"Which one? the old one or the new one?"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Pontmercy."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron," said Basque, drawing himself up.\r
-\r
-A man is a Baron most of all to his servants. He counts for something\r
-with them; they are what a philosopher would call, bespattered with the\r
-title, and that flatters them. Marius, be it said in passing, a militant\r
-republican as he had proved, was now a Baron in spite of himself. A\r
-small revolution had taken place in the family in connection with\r
-this title. It was now M. Gillenormand who clung to it, and Marius who\r
-detached himself from it. But Colonel Pontmercy had written: "My son\r
-will bear my title." Marius obeyed. And then, Cosette, in whom the woman\r
-was beginning to dawn, was delighted to be a Baroness.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron?" repeated Basque. "I will go and see. I will tell\r
-him that M. Fauchelevent is here."\r
-\r
-"No. Do not tell him that it is I. Tell him that some one wishes to\r
-speak to him in private, and mention no name."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" ejaculated Basque.\r
-\r
-"I wish to surprise him."\r
-\r
-"Ah!" ejaculated Basque once more, emitting his second "ah!" as an\r
-explanation of the first.\r
-\r
-And he left the room.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean remained alone.\r
-\r
-The drawing-room, as we have just said, was in great disorder. It seemed\r
-as though, by lending an air, one might still hear the vague noise of\r
-the wedding. On the polished floor lay all sorts of flowers which\r
-had fallen from garlands and head-dresses. The wax candles, burned\r
-to stumps, added stalactites of wax to the crystal drops of the\r
-chandeliers. Not a single piece of furniture was in its place. In the\r
-corners, three or four arm-chairs, drawn close together in a circle,\r
-had the appearance of continuing a conversation. The whole effect was\r
-cheerful. A certain grace still lingers round a dead feast. It has been\r
-a happy thing. On the chairs in disarray, among those fading flowers,\r
-beneath those extinct lights, people have thought of joy. The sun\r
-had succeeded to the chandelier, and made its way gayly into the\r
-drawing-room.\r
-\r
-Several minutes elapsed. Jean Valjean stood motionless on the spot where\r
-Basque had left him. He was very pale. His eyes were hollow, and so\r
-sunken in his head by sleeplessness that they nearly disappeared in\r
-their orbits. His black coat bore the weary folds of a garment that\r
-has been up all night. The elbows were whitened with the down which the\r
-friction of cloth against linen leaves behind it.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean stared at the window outlined on the polished floor at his\r
-feet by the sun.\r
-\r
-There came a sound at the door, and he raised his eyes.\r
-\r
-Marius entered, his head well up, his mouth smiling, an indescribable\r
-light on his countenance, his brow expanded, his eyes triumphant. He had\r
-not slept either.\r
-\r
-"It is you, father!" he exclaimed, on catching sight of Jean Valjean;\r
-"that idiot of a Basque had such a mysterious air! But you have come too\r
-early. It is only half past twelve. Cosette is asleep."\r
-\r
-That word: "Father," said to M. Fauchelevent by Marius, signified:\r
-supreme felicity. There had always existed, as the reader knows, a lofty\r
-wall, a coldness and a constraint between them; ice which must be broken\r
-or melted. Marius had reached that point of intoxication when the wall\r
-was lowered, when the ice dissolved, and when M. Fauchelevent was to\r
-him, as to Cosette, a father.\r
-\r
-He continued: his words poured forth, as is the peculiarity of divine\r
-paroxysms of joy.\r
-\r
-"How glad I am to see you! If you only knew how we missed you yesterday!\r
-Good morning, father. How is your hand? Better, is it not?"\r
-\r
-And, satisfied with the favorable reply which he had made to himself, he\r
-pursued:\r
-\r
-"We have both been talking about you. Cosette loves you so dearly! You\r
-must not forget that you have a chamber here, We want nothing more to\r
-do with the Rue de l'Homme Arme. We will have no more of it at all. How\r
-could you go to live in a street like that, which is sickly, which is\r
-disagreeable, which is ugly, which has a barrier at one end, where one\r
-is cold, and into which one cannot enter? You are to come and install\r
-yourself here. And this very day. Or you will have to deal with Cosette.\r
-She means to lead us all by the nose, I warn you. You have your own\r
-chamber here, it is close to ours, it opens on the garden; the trouble\r
-with the clock has been attended to, the bed is made, it is all ready,\r
-you have only to take possession of it. Near your bed Cosette has placed\r
-a huge, old, easy-chair covered with Utrecht velvet and she has said to\r
-it: 'Stretch out your arms to him.' A nightingale comes to the clump of\r
-acacias opposite your windows, every spring. In two months more you will\r
-have it. You will have its nest on your left and ours on your right. By\r
-night it will sing, and by day Cosette will prattle. Your chamber faces\r
-due South. Cosette will arrange your books for you, your Voyages of\r
-Captain Cook and the other,--Vancouver's and all your affairs. I believe\r
-that there is a little valise to which you are attached, I have fixed\r
-upon a corner of honor for that. You have conquered my grandfather, you\r
-suit him. We will live together. Do you play whist? you will overwhelm\r
-my grandfather with delight if you play whist. It is you who shall take\r
-Cosette to walk on the days when I am at the courts, you shall give her\r
-your arm, you know, as you used to, in the Luxembourg. We are absolutely\r
-resolved to be happy. And you shall be included in it, in our happiness,\r
-do you hear, father? Come, will you breakfast with us to-day?"\r
-\r
-"Sir," said Jean Valjean, "I have something to say to you. I am an\r
-ex-convict."\r
-\r
-The limit of shrill sounds perceptible can be overleaped, as well in\r
-the case of the mind as in that of the ear. These words: "I am an\r
-ex-convict," proceeding from the mouth of M. Fauchelevent and entering\r
-the ear of Marius overshot the possible. It seemed to him that something\r
-had just been said to him; but he did not know what. He stood with his\r
-mouth wide open.\r
-\r
-Then he perceived that the man who was addressing him was frightful.\r
-Wholly absorbed in his own dazzled state, he had not, up to that moment,\r
-observed the other man's terrible pallor.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean untied the black cravat which supported his right arm,\r
-unrolled the linen from around his hand, bared his thumb and showed it\r
-to Marius.\r
-\r
-"There is nothing the matter with my hand," said he.\r
-\r
-Marius looked at the thumb.\r
-\r
-"There has not been anything the matter with it," went on Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-There was, in fact, no trace of any injury.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean continued:\r
-\r
-"It was fitting that I should be absent from your marriage. I absented\r
-myself as much as was in my power. So I invented this injury in order\r
-that I might not commit a forgery, that I might not introduce a flaw\r
-into the marriage documents, in order that I might escape from signing."\r
-\r
-Marius stammered.\r
-\r
-"What is the meaning of this?"\r
-\r
-"The meaning of it is," replied Jean Valjean, "that I have been in the\r
-galleys."\r
-\r
-"You are driving me mad!" exclaimed Marius in terror.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Pontmercy," said Jean Valjean, "I was nineteen years in the\r
-galleys. For theft. Then, I was condemned for life for theft, for a\r
-second offence. At the present moment, I have broken my ban."\r
-\r
-In vain did Marius recoil before the reality, refuse the fact, resist\r
-the evidence, he was forced to give way. He began to understand, and, as\r
-always happens in such cases, he understood too much. An inward shudder\r
-of hideous enlightenment flashed through him; an idea which made him\r
-quiver traversed his mind. He caught a glimpse of a wretched destiny for\r
-himself in the future.\r
-\r
-"Say all, say all!" he cried. "You are Cosette's father!"\r
-\r
-And he retreated a couple of paces with a movement of indescribable\r
-horror.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean elevated his head with so much majesty of attitude that he\r
-seemed to grow even to the ceiling.\r
-\r
-"It is necessary that you should believe me here, sir; although our oath\r
-to others may not be received in law . . ."\r
-\r
-Here he paused, then, with a sort of sovereign and sepulchral authority,\r
-he added, articulating slowly, and emphasizing the syllables:\r
-\r
-". . . You will believe me. I the father of Cosette! before God, no.\r
-Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy, I am a peasant of Faverolles. I earned my\r
-living by pruning trees. My name is not Fauchelevent, but Jean Valjean.\r
-I am not related to Cosette. Reassure yourself."\r
-\r
-Marius stammered:\r
-\r
-"Who will prove that to me?"\r
-\r
-"I. Since I tell you so."\r
-\r
-Marius looked at the man. He was melancholy yet tranquil. No lie could\r
-proceed from such a calm. That which is icy is sincere. The truth could\r
-be felt in that chill of the tomb.\r
-\r
-"I believe you," said Marius.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean bent his head, as though taking note of this, and\r
-continued:\r
-\r
-"What am I to Cosette? A passer-by. Ten years ago, I did not know that\r
-she was in existence. I love her, it is true. One loves a child whom one\r
-has seen when very young, being old oneself. When one is old, one feels\r
-oneself a grandfather towards all little children. You may, it seems to\r
-me, suppose that I have something which resembles a heart. She was an\r
-orphan. Without either father or mother. She needed me. That is why I\r
-began to love her. Children are so weak that the first comer, even a man\r
-like me, can become their protector. I have fulfilled this duty towards\r
-Cosette. I do not think that so slight a thing can be called a good\r
-action; but if it be a good action, well, say that I have done it.\r
-Register this attenuating circumstance. To-day, Cosette passes out of my\r
-life; our two roads part. Henceforth, I can do nothing for her. She is\r
-Madame Pontmercy. Her providence has changed. And Cosette gains by the\r
-change. All is well. As for the six hundred thousand francs, you do not\r
-mention them to me, but I forestall your thought, they are a deposit.\r
-How did that deposit come into my hands? What does that matter? I\r
-restore the deposit. Nothing more can be demanded of me. I complete\r
-the restitution by announcing my true name. That concerns me. I have a\r
-reason for desiring that you should know who I am."\r
-\r
-And Jean Valjean looked Marius full in the face.\r
-\r
-All that Marius experienced was tumultuous and incoherent. Certain gusts\r
-of destiny produce these billows in our souls.\r
-\r
-We have all undergone moments of trouble in which everything within us\r
-is dispersed; we say the first things that occur to us, which are\r
-not always precisely those which should be said. There are sudden\r
-revelations which one cannot bear, and which intoxicate like baleful\r
-wine. Marius was stupefied by the novel situation which presented itself\r
-to him, to the point of addressing that man almost like a person who was\r
-angry with him for this avowal.\r
-\r
-"But why," he exclaimed, "do you tell me all this? Who forces you to\r
-do so? You could have kept your secret to yourself. You are neither\r
-denounced, nor tracked nor pursued. You have a reason for wantonly\r
-making such a revelation. Conclude. There is something more. In what\r
-connection do you make this confession? What is your motive?"\r
-\r
-"My motive?" replied Jean Valjean in a voice so low and dull that one\r
-would have said that he was talking to himself rather than to Marius.\r
-"From what motive, in fact, has this convict just said 'I am a convict'?\r
-Well, yes! the motive is strange. It is out of honesty. Stay, the\r
-unfortunate point is that I have a thread in my heart, which keeps me\r
-fast. It is when one is old that that sort of thread is particularly\r
-solid. All life falls in ruin around one; one resists. Had I been able\r
-to tear out that thread, to break it, to undo the knot or to cut it, to\r
-go far away, I should have been safe. I had only to go away; there are\r
-diligences in the Rue Bouloy; you are happy; I am going. I have tried\r
-to break that thread, I have jerked at it, it would not break, I tore my\r
-heart with it. Then I said: 'I cannot live anywhere else than here.' I\r
-must stay. Well, yes, you are right, I am a fool, why not simply\r
-remain here? You offer me a chamber in this house, Madame Pontmercy is\r
-sincerely attached to me, she said to the arm-chair: 'Stretch out your\r
-arms to him,' your grandfather demands nothing better than to have me, I\r
-suit him, we shall live together, and take our meals in common, I shall\r
-give Cosette my arm . . . Madame Pontmercy, excuse me, it is a habit, we\r
-shall have but one roof, one table, one fire, the same chimney-corner\r
-in winter, the same promenade in summer, that is joy, that is happiness,\r
-that is everything. We shall live as one family. One family!"\r
-\r
-At that word, Jean Valjean became wild. He folded his arms, glared at\r
-the floor beneath his feet as though he would have excavated an abyss\r
-therein, and his voice suddenly rose in thundering tones:\r
-\r
-"As one family! No. I belong to no family. I do not belong to yours.\r
-I do not belong to any family of men. In houses where people are among\r
-themselves, I am superfluous. There are families, but there is nothing\r
-of the sort for me. I am an unlucky wretch; I am left outside. Did I\r
-have a father and mother? I almost doubt it. On the day when I gave that\r
-child in marriage, all came to an end. I have seen her happy, and that\r
-she is with a man whom she loves, and that there exists here a kind old\r
-man, a household of two angels, and all joys in that house, and that it\r
-was well, I said to myself: 'Enter thou not.' I could have lied, it is\r
-true, have deceived you all, and remained Monsieur Fauchelevent. So long\r
-as it was for her, I could lie; but now it would be for myself, and I\r
-must not. It was sufficient for me to hold my peace, it is true, and all\r
-would go on. You ask me what has forced me to speak? a very odd thing;\r
-my conscience. To hold my peace was very easy, however. I passed the\r
-night in trying to persuade myself to it; you questioned me, and what I\r
-have just said to you is so extraordinary that you have the right to do\r
-it; well, yes, I have passed the night in alleging reasons to myself,\r
-and I gave myself very good reasons, I have done what I could. But there\r
-are two things in which I have not succeeded; in breaking the thread\r
-that holds me fixed, riveted and sealed here by the heart, or in\r
-silencing some one who speaks softly to me when I am alone. That is why\r
-I have come hither to tell you everything this morning. Everything or\r
-nearly everything. It is useless to tell you that which concerns only\r
-myself; I keep that to myself. You know the essential points. So I have\r
-taken my mystery and have brought it to you. And I have disembowelled my\r
-secret before your eyes. It was not a resolution that was easy to take.\r
-I struggled all night long. Ah! you think that I did not tell myself\r
-that this was no Champmathieu affair, that by concealing my name I was\r
-doing no one any injury, that the name of Fauchelevent had been given to\r
-me by Fauchelevent himself, out of gratitude for a service rendered to\r
-him, and that I might assuredly keep it, and that I should be happy in\r
-that chamber which you offer me, that I should not be in any one's way,\r
-that I should be in my own little corner, and that, while you would have\r
-Cosette, I should have the idea that I was in the same house with her.\r
-Each one of us would have had his share of happiness. If I continued to\r
-be Monsieur Fauchelevent, that would arrange everything. Yes, with the\r
-exception of my soul. There was joy everywhere upon my surface, but the\r
-bottom of my soul remained black. It is not enough to be happy, one must\r
-be content. Thus I should have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, thus\r
-I should have concealed my true visage, thus, in the presence of your\r
-expansion, I should have had an enigma, thus, in the midst of your full\r
-noonday, I should have had shadows, thus, without crying ''ware,' I\r
-should have simply introduced the galleys to your fireside, I should\r
-have taken my seat at your table with the thought that if you knew who\r
-I was, you would drive me from it, I should have allowed myself to\r
-be served by domestics who, had they known, would have said: 'How\r
-horrible!' I should have touched you with my elbow, which you have a\r
-right to dislike, I should have filched your clasps of the hand! There\r
-would have existed in your house a division of respect between venerable\r
-white locks and tainted white locks; at your most intimate hours, when\r
-all hearts thought themselves open to the very bottom to all the rest,\r
-when we four were together, your grandfather, you two and myself, a\r
-stranger would have been present! I should have been side by side with\r
-you in your existence, having for my only care not to disarrange the\r
-cover of my dreadful pit. Thus, I, a dead man, should have thrust myself\r
-upon you who are living beings. I should have condemned her to myself\r
-forever. You and Cosette and I would have had all three of our heads in\r
-the green cap! Does it not make you shudder? I am only the most crushed\r
-of men; I should have been the most monstrous of men. And I should have\r
-committed that crime every day! And I should have had that face of night\r
-upon my visage every day! every day! And I should have communicated to\r
-you a share in my taint every day! every day! to you, my dearly beloved,\r
-my children, to you, my innocent creatures! Is it nothing to hold one's\r
-peace? is it a simple matter to keep silence? No, it is not simple.\r
-There is a silence which lies. And my lie, and my fraud and my\r
-indignity, and my cowardice and my treason and my crime, I should have\r
-drained drop by drop, I should have spit it out, then swallowed it\r
-again, I should have finished at midnight and have begun again at\r
-midday, and my 'good morning' would have lied, and my 'good night' would\r
-have lied, and I should have slept on it, I should have eaten it, with\r
-my bread, and I should have looked Cosette in the face, and I should\r
-have responded to the smile of the angel by the smile of the damned\r
-soul, and I should have been an abominable villain! Why should I do\r
-it? in order to be happy. In order to be happy. Have I the right to be\r
-happy? I stand outside of life, Sir."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean paused. Marius listened. Such chains of ideas and of\r
-anguishes cannot be interrupted. Jean Valjean lowered his voice once\r
-more, but it was no longer a dull voice--it was a sinister voice.\r
-\r
-"You ask why I speak? I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked,\r
-you say. Yes! I am denounced! yes! I am tracked! By whom? By myself.\r
-It is I who bar the passage to myself, and I drag myself, and I push\r
-myself, and I arrest myself, and I execute myself, and when one holds\r
-oneself, one is firmly held."\r
-\r
-And, seizing a handful of his own coat by the nape of the neck and\r
-extending it towards Marius:\r
-\r
-"Do you see that fist?" he continued. "Don't you think that it holds\r
-that collar in such a wise as not to release it? Well! conscience\r
-is another grasp! If one desires to be happy, sir, one must never\r
-understand duty; for, as soon as one has comprehended it, it is\r
-implacable. One would say that it punished you for comprehending it;\r
-but no, it rewards you; for it places you in a hell, where you feel God\r
-beside you. One has no sooner lacerated his own entrails than he is at\r
-peace with himself."\r
-\r
-And, with a poignant accent, he added:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Pontmercy, this is not common sense, I am an honest man. It is\r
-by degrading myself in your eyes that I elevate myself in my own. This\r
-has happened to me once before, but it was less painful then; it was\r
-a mere nothing. Yes, an honest man. I should not be so if, through my\r
-fault, you had continued to esteem me; now that you despise me, I am so.\r
-I have that fatality hanging over me that, not being able to ever have\r
-anything but stolen consideration, that consideration humiliates me,\r
-and crushes me inwardly, and, in order that I may respect myself, it is\r
-necessary that I should be despised. Then I straighten up again. I am\r
-a galley-slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that that is most\r
-improbable. But what would you have me do about it? it is the fact.\r
-I have entered into engagements with myself; I keep them. There are\r
-encounters which bind us, there are chances which involve us in duties.\r
-You see, Monsieur Pontmercy, various things have happened to me in the\r
-course of my life."\r
-\r
-Again Jean Valjean paused, swallowing his saliva with an effort, as\r
-though his words had a bitter after-taste, and then he went on:\r
-\r
-"When one has such a horror hanging over one, one has not the right to\r
-make others share it without their knowledge, one has not the right to\r
-make them slip over one's own precipice without their perceiving it,\r
-one has not the right to let one's red blouse drag upon them, one has no\r
-right to slyly encumber with one's misery the happiness of others. It is\r
-hideous to approach those who are healthy, and to touch them in the dark\r
-with one's ulcer. In spite of the fact that Fauchelevent lent me his\r
-name, I have no right to use it; he could give it to me, but I could not\r
-take it. A name is an _I_. You see, sir, that I have thought somewhat, I\r
-have read a little, although I am a peasant; and you see that I\r
-express myself properly. I understand things. I have procured myself an\r
-education. Well, yes, to abstract a name and to place oneself under it\r
-is dishonest. Letters of the alphabet can be filched, like a purse or a\r
-watch. To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a living false\r
-key, to enter the house of honest people by picking their lock, never\r
-more to look straightforward, to forever eye askance, to be infamous\r
-within the _I_, no! no! no! no! no! It is better to suffer, to bleed, to\r
-weep, to tear one's skin from the flesh with one's nails, to pass nights\r
-writhing in anguish, to devour oneself body and soul. That is why I have\r
-just told you all this. Wantonly, as you say."\r
-\r
-He drew a painful breath, and hurled this final word:\r
-\r
-"In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live; to-day, in\r
-order to live, I will not steal a name."\r
-\r
-"To live!" interrupted Marius. "You do not need that name in order to\r
-live?"\r
-\r
-"Ah! I understand the matter," said Jean Valjean, raising and lowering\r
-his head several times in succession.\r
-\r
-A silence ensued. Both held their peace, each plunged in a gulf of\r
-thoughts. Marius was sitting near a table and resting the corner of his\r
-mouth on one of his fingers, which was folded back. Jean Valjean was\r
-pacing to and fro. He paused before a mirror, and remained motionless.\r
-Then, as though replying to some inward course of reasoning, he said, as\r
-he gazed at the mirror, which he did not see:\r
-\r
-"While, at present, I am relieved."\r
-\r
-He took up his march again, and walked to the other end of the\r
-drawing-room. At the moment when he turned round, he perceived that\r
-Marius was watching his walk. Then he said, with an inexpressible\r
-intonation:\r
-\r
-"I drag my leg a little. Now you understand why!"\r
-\r
-Then he turned fully round towards Marius:\r
-\r
-"And now, sir, imagine this: I have said nothing, I have remained\r
-Monsieur Fauchelevent, I have taken my place in your house, I am one of\r
-you, I am in my chamber, I come to breakfast in the morning in slippers,\r
-in the evening all three of us go to the play, I accompany Madame\r
-Pontmercy to the Tuileries, and to the Place Royale, we are together,\r
-you think me your equal; one fine day you are there, and I am there, we\r
-are conversing, we are laughing; all at once, you hear a voice shouting\r
-this name: 'Jean Valjean!' and behold, that terrible hand, the police,\r
-darts from the darkness, and abruptly tears off my mask!"\r
-\r
-Again he paused; Marius had sprung to his feet with a shudder. Jean\r
-Valjean resumed:\r
-\r
-"What do you say to that?"\r
-\r
-Marius' silence answered for him.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean continued:\r
-\r
-"You see that I am right in not holding my peace. Be happy, be\r
-in heaven, be the angel of an angel, exist in the sun, be content\r
-therewith, and do not trouble yourself about the means which a poor\r
-damned wretch takes to open his breast and force his duty to come forth;\r
-you have before you, sir, a wretched man."\r
-\r
-Marius slowly crossed the room, and, when he was quite close to Jean\r
-Valjean, he offered the latter his hand.\r
-\r
-But Marius was obliged to step up and take that hand which was not\r
-offered, Jean Valjean let him have his own way, and it seemed to Marius\r
-that he pressed a hand of marble.\r
-\r
-"My grandfather has friends," said Marius; "I will procure your pardon."\r
-\r
-"It is useless," replied Jean Valjean. "I am believed to be dead, and\r
-that suffices. The dead are not subjected to surveillance. They are\r
-supposed to rot in peace. Death is the same thing as pardon."\r
-\r
-And, disengaging the hand which Marius held, he added, with a sort of\r
-inexorable dignity:\r
-\r
-"Moreover, the friend to whom I have recourse is the doing of my duty;\r
-and I need but one pardon, that of my conscience."\r
-\r
-At that moment, a door at the other end of the drawing-room opened\r
-gently half way, and in the opening Cosette's head appeared. They saw\r
-only her sweet face, her hair was in charming disorder, her eyelids were\r
-still swollen with sleep. She made the movement of a bird, which thrusts\r
-its head out of its nest, glanced first at her husband, then at Jean\r
-Valjean, and cried to them with a smile, so that they seemed to behold a\r
-smile at the heart of a rose:\r
-\r
-"I will wager that you are talking politics. How stupid that is, instead\r
-of being with me!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean shuddered.\r
-\r
-"Cosette! . . ." stammered Marius.\r
-\r
-And he paused. One would have said that they were two criminals.\r
-\r
-Cosette, who was radiant, continued to gaze at both of them. There was\r
-something in her eyes like gleams of paradise.\r
-\r
-"I have caught you in the very act," said Cosette. "Just now, I heard my\r
-father Fauchelevent through the door saying: 'Conscience . . . doing my\r
-duty . . .' That is politics, indeed it is. I will not have it. People\r
-should not talk politics the very next day. It is not right."\r
-\r
-"You are mistaken. Cosette," said Marius, "we are talking business. We\r
-are discussing the best investment of your six hundred thousand\r
-francs . . ."\r
-\r
-"That is not it at all," interrupted Cosette. "I am coming. Does any\r
-body want me here?"\r
-\r
-And, passing resolutely through the door, she entered the drawing-room.\r
-She was dressed in a voluminous white dressing-gown, with a thousand\r
-folds and large sleeves which, starting from the neck, fell to her feet.\r
-In the golden heavens of some ancient gothic pictures, there are these\r
-charming sacks fit to clothe the angels.\r
-\r
-She contemplated herself from head to foot in a long mirror, then\r
-exclaimed, in an outburst of ineffable ecstasy:\r
-\r
-"There was once a King and a Queen. Oh! how happy I am!"\r
-\r
-That said, she made a curtsey to Marius and to Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"There," said she, "I am going to install myself near you in an\r
-easy-chair, we breakfast in half an hour, you shall say anything you\r
-like, I know well that men must talk, and I will be very good."\r
-\r
-Marius took her by the arm and said lovingly to her:\r
-\r
-"We are talking business."\r
-\r
-"By the way," said Cosette, "I have opened my window, a flock of\r
-pierrots has arrived in the garden,--Birds, not maskers. To-day is\r
-Ash-Wednesday; but not for the birds."\r
-\r
-"I tell you that we are talking business, go, my little Cosette, leave\r
-us alone for a moment. We are talking figures. That will bore you."\r
-\r
-"You have a charming cravat on this morning, Marius. You are very\r
-dandified, monseigneur. No, it will not bore me."\r
-\r
-"I assure you that it will bore you."\r
-\r
-"No. Since it is you. I shall not understand you, but I shall listen\r
-to you. When one hears the voices of those whom one loves, one does not\r
-need to understand the words that they utter. That we should be here\r
-together--that is all that I desire. I shall remain with you, bah!"\r
-\r
-"You are my beloved Cosette! Impossible."\r
-\r
-"Impossible!"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"Very good," said Cosette. "I was going to tell you some news. I could\r
-have told you that your grandfather is still asleep, that your aunt is\r
-at mass, that the chimney in my father Fauchelevent's room smokes, that\r
-Nicolette has sent for the chimney-sweep, that Toussaint and Nicolette\r
-have already quarrelled, that Nicolette makes sport of Toussaint's\r
-stammer. Well, you shall know nothing. Ah! it is impossible? you shall\r
-see, gentlemen, that I, in my turn, can say: It is impossible. Then who\r
-will be caught? I beseech you, my little Marius, let me stay here with\r
-you two."\r
-\r
-"I swear to you, that it is indispensable that we should be alone."\r
-\r
-"Well, am I anybody?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word. Cosette turned to him:\r
-\r
-"In the first place, father, I want you to come and embrace me. What do\r
-you mean by not saying anything instead of taking my part? who gave me\r
-such a father as that? You must perceive that my family life is very\r
-unhappy. My husband beats me. Come, embrace me instantly."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean approached.\r
-\r
-Cosette turned toward Marius.\r
-\r
-"As for you, I shall make a face at you."\r
-\r
-Then she presented her brow to Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean advanced a step toward her.\r
-\r
-Cosette recoiled.\r
-\r
-"Father, you are pale. Does your arm hurt you?"\r
-\r
-"It is well," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Did you sleep badly?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Are you sad?"\r
-\r
-"No."\r
-\r
-"Embrace me if you are well, if you sleep well, if you are content, I\r
-will not scold you."\r
-\r
-And again she offered him her brow.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean dropped a kiss upon that brow whereon rested a celestial\r
-gleam.\r
-\r
-"Smile."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean obeyed. It was the smile of a spectre.\r
-\r
-"Now, defend me against my husband."\r
-\r
-"Cosette! . . ." ejaculated Marius.\r
-\r
-"Get angry, father. Say that I must stay. You can certainly talk before\r
-me. So you think me very silly. What you say is astonishing! business,\r
-placing money in a bank a great matter truly. Men make mysteries out of\r
-nothing. I am very pretty this morning. Look at me, Marius."\r
-\r
-And with an adorable shrug of the shoulders, and an indescribably\r
-exquisite pout, she glanced at Marius.\r
-\r
-"I love you!" said Marius.\r
-\r
-"I adore you!" said Cosette.\r
-\r
-And they fell irresistibly into each other's arms.\r
-\r
-"Now," said Cosette, adjusting a fold of her dressing-gown, with a\r
-triumphant little grimace, "I shall stay."\r
-\r
-"No, not that," said Marius, in a supplicating tone. "We have to finish\r
-something."\r
-\r
-"Still no?"\r
-\r
-Marius assumed a grave tone:\r
-\r
-"I assure you, Cosette, that it is impossible."\r
-\r
-"Ah! you put on your man's voice, sir. That is well, I go. You, father,\r
-have not upheld me. Monsieur my father, monsieur my husband, you are\r
-tyrants. I shall go and tell grandpapa. If you think that I am going to\r
-return and talk platitudes to you, you are mistaken. I am proud. I shall\r
-wait for you now. You shall see, that it is you who are going to be\r
-bored without me. I am going, it is well."\r
-\r
-And she left the room.\r
-\r
-Two seconds later, the door opened once more, her fresh and rosy head\r
-was again thrust between the two leaves, and she cried to them:\r
-\r
-"I am very angry indeed."\r
-\r
-The door closed again, and the shadows descended once more.\r
-\r
-It was as though a ray of sunlight should have suddenly traversed the\r
-night, without itself being conscious of it.\r
-\r
-Marius made sure that the door was securely closed.\r
-\r
-"Poor Cosette!" he murmured, "when she finds out . . ."\r
-\r
-At that word Jean Valjean trembled in every limb. He fixed on Marius a\r
-bewildered eye.\r
-\r
-"Cosette! oh yes, it is true, you are going to tell Cosette about this.\r
-That is right. Stay, I had not thought of that. One has the strength for\r
-one thing, but not for another. Sir, I conjure you, I entreat now, sir,\r
-give me your most sacred word of honor, that you will not tell her. Is\r
-it not enough that you should know it? I have been able to say it myself\r
-without being forced to it, I could have told it to the universe, to the\r
-whole world,--it was all one to me. But she, she does not know what\r
-it is, it would terrify her. What, a convict! we should be obliged to\r
-explain matters to her, to say to her: 'He is a man who has been in the\r
-galleys.' She saw the chain-gang pass by one day. Oh! My God!" . . . He\r
-dropped into an arm-chair and hid his face in his hands.\r
-\r
-His grief was not audible, but from the quivering of his shoulders it\r
-was evident that he was weeping. Silent tears, terrible tears.\r
-\r
-There is something of suffocation in the sob. He was seized with a sort\r
-of convulsion, he threw himself against the back of the chair as though\r
-to gain breath, letting his arms fall, and allowing Marius to see his\r
-face inundated with tears, and Marius heard him murmur, so low that his\r
-voice seemed to issue from fathomless depths:\r
-\r
-"Oh! would that I could die!"\r
-\r
-"Be at your ease," said Marius, "I will keep your secret for myself\r
-alone." And, less touched, perhaps, than he ought to have been, but\r
-forced, for the last hour, to familiarize himself with something\r
-as unexpected as it was dreadful, gradually beholding the convict\r
-superposed before his very eyes, upon M. Fauchelevent, overcome,\r
-little by little, by that lugubrious reality, and led, by the natural\r
-inclination of the situation, to recognize the space which had just been\r
-placed between that man and himself, Marius added:\r
-\r
-"It is impossible that I should not speak a word to you with regard to\r
-the deposit which you have so faithfully and honestly remitted. That is\r
-an act of probity. It is just that some recompense should be bestowed on\r
-you. Fix the sum yourself, it shall be counted out to you. Do not fear\r
-to set it very high."\r
-\r
-"I thank you, sir," replied Jean Valjean, gently.\r
-\r
-He remained in thought for a moment, mechanically passing the tip of his\r
-fore-finger across his thumb-nail, then he lifted up his voice:\r
-\r
-"All is nearly over. But one last thing remains for me . . ."\r
-\r
-"What is it?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean struggled with what seemed a last hesitation, and, without\r
-voice, without breath, he stammered rather than said:\r
-\r
-"Now that you know, do you think, sir, you, who are the master, that I\r
-ought not to see Cosette any more?"\r
-\r
-"I think that would be better," replied Marius coldly.\r
-\r
-"I shall never see her more," murmured Jean Valjean. And he directed his\r
-steps towards the door.\r
-\r
-He laid his hand on the knob, the latch yielded, the door opened. Jean\r
-Valjean pushed it open far enough to pass through, stood motionless for\r
-a second, then closed the door again and turned to Marius.\r
-\r
-He was no longer pale, he was livid. There were no longer any tears\r
-in his eyes, but only a sort of tragic flame. His voice had regained a\r
-strange composure.\r
-\r
-"Stay, sir," he said. "If you will allow it, I will come to see her. I\r
-assure you that I desire it greatly. If I had not cared to see Cosette,\r
-I should not have made to you the confession that I have made, I should\r
-have gone away; but, as I desired to remain in the place where Cosette\r
-is, and to continue to see her, I had to tell you about it honestly. You\r
-follow my reasoning, do you not? it is a matter easily understood. You\r
-see, I have had her with me for more than nine years. We lived first\r
-in that hut on the boulevard, then in the convent, then near the\r
-Luxembourg. That was where you saw her for the first time. You remember\r
-her blue plush hat. Then we went to the Quartier des Invalides, where\r
-there was a railing on a garden, the Rue Plumet. I lived in a little\r
-back court-yard, whence I could hear her piano. That was my life. We\r
-never left each other. That lasted for nine years and some months. I\r
-was like her own father, and she was my child. I do not know whether\r
-you understand, Monsieur Pontmercy, but to go away now, never to see her\r
-again, never to speak to her again, to no longer have anything, would\r
-be hard. If you do not disapprove of it, I will come to see Cosette from\r
-time to time. I will not come often. I will not remain long. You shall\r
-give orders that I am to be received in the little waiting-room. On the\r
-ground floor. I could enter perfectly well by the back door, but that\r
-might create surprise perhaps, and it would be better, I think, for me\r
-to enter by the usual door. Truly, sir, I should like to see a little\r
-more of Cosette. As rarely as you please. Put yourself in my place,\r
-I have nothing left but that. And then, we must be cautious. If I\r
-no longer come at all, it would produce a bad effect, it would be\r
-considered singular. What I can do, by the way, is to come in the\r
-afternoon, when night is beginning to fall."\r
-\r
-"You shall come every evening," said Marius, "and Cosette will be\r
-waiting for you."\r
-\r
-"You are kind, sir," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Marius saluted Jean Valjean, happiness escorted despair to the door, and\r
-these two men parted.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--THE OBSCURITIES WHICH A REVELATION CAN CONTAIN\r
-\r
-Marius was quite upset.\r
-\r
-The sort of estrangement which he had always felt towards the man beside\r
-whom he had seen Cosette, was now explained to him. There was something\r
-enigmatic about that person, of which his instinct had warned him.\r
-\r
-This enigma was the most hideous of disgraces, the galleys. This M.\r
-Fauchelevent was the convict Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-To abruptly find such a secret in the midst of one's happiness resembles\r
-the discovery of a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves.\r
-\r
-Was the happiness of Marius and Cosette thenceforth condemned to such a\r
-neighborhood? Was this an accomplished fact? Did the acceptance of that\r
-man form a part of the marriage now consummated? Was there nothing to be\r
-done?\r
-\r
-Had Marius wedded the convict as well?\r
-\r
-In vain may one be crowned with light and joy, in vain may one taste the\r
-grand purple hour of life, happy love, such shocks would force even the\r
-archangel in his ecstasy, even the demigod in his glory, to shudder.\r
-\r
-As is always the case in changes of view of this nature, Marius asked\r
-himself whether he had nothing with which to reproach himself. Had he\r
-been wanting in divination? Had he been wanting in prudence? Had he\r
-involuntarily dulled his wits? A little, perhaps. Had he entered upon\r
-this love affair, which had ended in his marriage to Cosette, without\r
-taking sufficient precautions to throw light upon the surroundings? He\r
-admitted,--it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves\r
-in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,--he\r
-admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of\r
-internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms\r
-of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes,\r
-and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing\r
-more than a conscience bathed in a mist. We have more than once\r
-indicated this characteristic element of Marius' individuality.\r
-\r
-He recalled that, in the intoxication of his love, in the Rue Plumet,\r
-during those six or seven ecstatic weeks, he had not even spoke to\r
-Cosette of that drama in the Gorbeau hovel, where the victim had taken\r
-up such a singular line of silence during the struggle and the ensuing\r
-flight. How had it happened that he had not mentioned this to Cosette?\r
-Yet it was so near and so terrible! How had it come to pass that he had\r
-not even named the Thenardiers, and, particularly, on the day when he\r
-had encountered Eponine? He now found it almost difficult to explain his\r
-silence of that time. Nevertheless, he could account for it. He recalled\r
-his benumbed state, his intoxication with Cosette, love absorbing\r
-everything, that catching away of each other into the ideal, and perhaps\r
-also, like the imperceptible quantity of reason mingled with this\r
-violent and charming state of the soul, a vague, dull instinct impelling\r
-him to conceal and abolish in his memory that redoubtable adventure,\r
-contact with which he dreaded, in which he did not wish to play any\r
-part, his agency in which he had kept secret, and in which he could be\r
-neither narrator nor witness without being an accuser.\r
-\r
-Moreover, these few weeks had been a flash of lightning; there had been\r
-no time for anything except love.\r
-\r
-In short, having weighed everything, turned everything over in his mind,\r
-examined everything, whatever might have been the consequences if he had\r
-told Cosette about the Gorbeau ambush, even if he had discovered that\r
-Jean Valjean was a convict, would that have changed him, Marius? Would\r
-that have changed her, Cosette? Would he have drawn back? Would he have\r
-adored her any the less? Would he have refrained from marrying her? No.\r
-Then there was nothing to regret, nothing with which he need reproach\r
-himself. All was well. There is a deity for those drunken men who are\r
-called lovers. Marius blind, had followed the path which he would have\r
-chosen had he been in full possession of his sight. Love had bandaged\r
-his eyes, in order to lead him whither? To paradise.\r
-\r
-But this paradise was henceforth complicated with an infernal\r
-accompaniment.\r
-\r
-Marius' ancient estrangement towards this man, towards this Fauchelevent\r
-who had turned into Jean Valjean, was at present mingled with horror.\r
-\r
-In this horror, let us state, there was some pity, and even a certain\r
-surprise.\r
-\r
-This thief, this thief guilty of a second offence, had restored that\r
-deposit. And what a deposit! Six hundred thousand francs.\r
-\r
-He alone was in the secret of that deposit. He might have kept it all,\r
-he had restored it all.\r
-\r
-Moreover, he had himself revealed his situation. Nothing forced him to\r
-this. If any one learned who he was, it was through himself. In this\r
-avowal there was something more than acceptance of humiliation, there\r
-was acceptance of peril. For a condemned man, a mask is not a mask, it\r
-is a shelter. A false name is security, and he had rejected that false\r
-name. He, the galley-slave, might have hidden himself forever in an\r
-honest family; he had withstood this temptation. And with what motive?\r
-Through a conscientious scruple. He himself explained this with the\r
-irresistible accents of truth. In short, whatever this Jean Valjean\r
-might be, he was, undoubtedly, a conscience which was awakening. There\r
-existed some mysterious re-habilitation which had begun; and, to all\r
-appearances, scruples had for a long time already controlled this man.\r
-Such fits of justice and goodness are not characteristic of vulgar\r
-natures. An awakening of conscience is grandeur of soul.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was sincere. This sincerity, visible, palpable,\r
-irrefragable, evident from the very grief that it caused him, rendered\r
-inquiries useless, and conferred authority on all that that man had\r
-said.\r
-\r
-Here, for Marius, there was a strange reversal of situations. What\r
-breathed from M. Fauchelevent? distrust. What did Jean Valjean inspire?\r
-confidence.\r
-\r
-In the mysterious balance of this Jean Valjean which the pensive Marius\r
-struck, he admitted the active principle, he admitted the passive\r
-principle, and he tried to reach a balance.\r
-\r
-But all this went on as in a storm. Marius, while endeavoring to form a\r
-clear idea of this man, and while pursuing Jean Valjean, so to speak, in\r
-the depths of his thought, lost him and found him again in a fatal mist.\r
-\r
-The deposit honestly restored, the probity of the confession--these were\r
-good. This produced a lightening of the cloud, then the cloud became\r
-black once more.\r
-\r
-Troubled as were Marius' memories, a shadow of them returned to him.\r
-\r
-After all, what was that adventure in the Jondrette attic? Why had that\r
-man taken to flight on the arrival of the police, instead of entering a\r
-complaint?\r
-\r
-Here Marius found the answer. Because that man was a fugitive from\r
-justice, who had broken his ban.\r
-\r
-Another question: Why had that man come to the barricade?\r
-\r
-For Marius now once more distinctly beheld that recollection which had\r
-re-appeared in his emotions like sympathetic ink at the application of\r
-heat. This man had been in the barricade. He had not fought there. What\r
-had he come there for? In the presence of this question a spectre sprang\r
-up and replied: "Javert."\r
-\r
-Marius recalled perfectly now that funereal sight of Jean Valjean\r
-dragging the pinioned Javert out of the barricade, and he still heard\r
-behind the corner of the little Rue Mondetour that frightful pistol\r
-shot. Obviously, there was hatred between that police spy and the\r
-galley-slave. The one was in the other's way. Jean Valjean had gone to\r
-the barricade for the purpose of revenging himself. He had arrived late.\r
-He probably knew that Javert was a prisoner there. The Corsican vendetta\r
-has penetrated to certain lower strata and has become the law there; it\r
-is so simple that it does not astonish souls which are but half turned\r
-towards good; and those hearts are so constituted that a criminal, who\r
-is in the path of repentance, may be scrupulous in the matter of theft\r
-and unscrupulous in the matter of vengeance. Jean Valjean had killed\r
-Javert. At least, that seemed to be evident.\r
-\r
-This was the final question, to be sure; but to this there was no reply.\r
-This question Marius felt like pincers. How had it come to pass that\r
-Jean Valjean's existence had elbowed that of Cosette for so long a\r
-period?\r
-\r
-What melancholy sport of Providence was that which had placed that child\r
-in contact with that man? Are there then chains for two which are forged\r
-on high? and does God take pleasure in coupling the angel with the\r
-demon? So a crime and an innocence can be room-mates in the mysterious\r
-galleys of wretchedness? In that defiling of condemned persons which\r
-is called human destiny, can two brows pass side by side, the one\r
-ingenuous, the other formidable, the one all bathed in the divine\r
-whiteness of dawn, the other forever blemished by the flash of an\r
-eternal lightning? Who could have arranged that inexplicable pairing\r
-off? In what manner, in consequence of what prodigy, had any community\r
-of life been established between this celestial little creature and that\r
-old criminal?\r
-\r
-Who could have bound the lamb to the wolf, and, what was still more\r
-incomprehensible, have attached the wolf to the lamb? For the wolf loved\r
-the lamb, for the fierce creature adored the feeble one, for, during\r
-the space of nine years, the angel had had the monster as her point of\r
-support. Cosette's childhood and girlhood, her advent in the daylight,\r
-her virginal growth towards life and light, had been sheltered by\r
-that hideous devotion. Here questions exfoliated, so to speak, into\r
-innumerable enigmas, abysses yawned at the bottoms of abysses, and\r
-Marius could no longer bend over Jean Valjean without becoming dizzy.\r
-What was this man-precipice?\r
-\r
-The old symbols of Genesis are eternal; in human society, such as it now\r
-exists, and until a broader day shall effect a change in it, there will\r
-always be two men, the one superior, the other subterranean; the one\r
-which is according to good is Abel; the other which is according to evil\r
-is Cain. What was this tender Cain? What was this ruffian religiously\r
-absorbed in the adoration of a virgin, watching over her, rearing her,\r
-guarding her, dignifying her, and enveloping her, impure as he was\r
-himself, with purity?\r
-\r
-What was that cess-pool which had venerated that innocence to such a\r
-point as not to leave upon it a single spot? What was this Jean Valjean\r
-educating Cosette? What was this figure of the shadows which had for its\r
-only object the preservation of the rising of a star from every shadow\r
-and from every cloud?\r
-\r
-That was Jean Valjean's secret; that was also God's secret.\r
-\r
-In the presence of this double secret, Marius recoiled. The one, in some\r
-sort, reassured him as to the other. God was as visible in this affair\r
-as was Jean Valjean. God has his instruments. He makes use of the tool\r
-which he wills. He is not responsible to men. Do we know how God sets\r
-about the work? Jean Valjean had labored over Cosette. He had, to some\r
-extent, made that soul. That was incontestable. Well, what then? The\r
-workman was horrible; but the work was admirable. God produces his\r
-miracles as seems good to him. He had constructed that charming Cosette,\r
-and he had employed Jean Valjean. It had pleased him to choose this\r
-strange collaborator for himself. What account have we to demand of him?\r
-Is this the first time that the dung-heap has aided the spring to create\r
-the rose?\r
-\r
-Marius made himself these replies, and declared to himself that they\r
-were good. He had not dared to press Jean Valjean on all the points\r
-which we have just indicated, but he did not confess to himself that he\r
-did not dare to do it. He adored Cosette, he possessed Cosette, Cosette\r
-was splendidly pure. That was sufficient for him. What enlightenment did\r
-he need? Cosette was a light. Does light require enlightenment? He had\r
-everything; what more could he desire? All,--is not that enough? Jean\r
-Valjean's personal affairs did not concern him.\r
-\r
-And bending over the fatal shadow of that man, he clung fast,\r
-convulsively, to the solemn declaration of that unhappy wretch: "I\r
-am nothing to Cosette. Ten years ago I did not know that she was in\r
-existence."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was a passer-by. He had said so himself. Well, he had\r
-passed. Whatever he was, his part was finished.\r
-\r
-Henceforth, there remained Marius to fulfil the part of Providence to\r
-Cosette. Cosette had sought the azure in a person like herself, in her\r
-lover, her husband, her celestial male. Cosette, as she took her flight,\r
-winged and transfigured, left behind her on the earth her hideous and\r
-empty chrysalis, Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-In whatever circle of ideas Marius revolved, he always returned to a\r
-certain horror for Jean Valjean. A sacred horror, perhaps, for, as we\r
-have just pointed out, he felt a quid divinum in that man. But do what\r
-he would, and seek what extenuation he would, he was certainly forced to\r
-fall back upon this: the man was a convict; that is to say, a being who\r
-has not even a place in the social ladder, since he is lower than the\r
-very lowest rung. After the very last of men comes the convict. The\r
-convict is no longer, so to speak, in the semblance of the living. The\r
-law has deprived him of the entire quantity of humanity of which it can\r
-deprive a man.\r
-\r
-Marius, on penal questions, still held to the inexorable system, though\r
-he was a democrat and he entertained all the ideas of the law on the\r
-subject of those whom the law strikes. He had not yet accomplished all\r
-progress, we admit. He had not yet come to distinguish between that\r
-which is written by man and that which is written by God, between law\r
-and right. He had not examined and weighed the right which man takes to\r
-dispose of the irrevocable and the irreparable. He was not shocked by\r
-the word vindicte. He found it quite simple that certain breaches of the\r
-written law should be followed by eternal suffering, and he accepted,\r
-as the process of civilization, social damnation. He still stood at this\r
-point, though safe to advance infallibly later on, since his nature was\r
-good, and, at bottom, wholly formed of latent progress.\r
-\r
-In this stage of his ideas, Jean Valjean appeared to him hideous and\r
-repulsive. He was a man reproved, he was the convict. That word was\r
-for him like the sound of the trump on the Day of Judgment; and, after\r
-having reflected upon Jean Valjean for a long time, his final gesture\r
-had been to turn away his head. Vade retro.\r
-\r
-Marius, if we must recognize and even insist upon the fact, while\r
-interrogating Jean Valjean to such a point that Jean Valjean had said:\r
-"You are confessing me," had not, nevertheless, put to him two or three\r
-decisive questions.\r
-\r
-It was not that they had not presented themselves to his mind, but that\r
-he had been afraid of them. The Jondrette attic? The barricade? Javert?\r
-Who knows where these revelations would have stopped? Jean Valjean did\r
-not seem like a man who would draw back, and who knows whether Marius,\r
-after having urged him on, would not have himself desired to hold him\r
-back?\r
-\r
-Has it not happened to all of us, in certain supreme conjunctures, to\r
-stop our ears in order that we may not hear the reply, after we have\r
-asked a question? It is especially when one loves that one gives way\r
-to these exhibitions of cowardice. It is not wise to question sinister\r
-situations to the last point, particularly when the indissoluble side of\r
-our life is fatally intermingled with them. What a terrible light might\r
-have proceeded from the despairing explanations of Jean Valjean, and who\r
-knows whether that hideous glare would not have darted forth as far\r
-as Cosette? Who knows whether a sort of infernal glow would not have\r
-lingered behind it on the brow of that angel? The spattering of a\r
-lightning-flash is of the thunder also. Fatality has points of juncture\r
-where innocence itself is stamped with crime by the gloomy law of the\r
-reflections which give color. The purest figures may forever preserve\r
-the reflection of a horrible association. Rightly or wrongly, Marius\r
-had been afraid. He already knew too much. He sought to dull his senses\r
-rather than to gain further light.\r
-\r
-In dismay he bore off Cosette in his arms and shut his eyes to Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-That man was the night, the living and horrible night. How should he\r
-dare to seek the bottom of it? It is a terrible thing to interrogate\r
-the shadow. Who knows what its reply will be? The dawn may be blackened\r
-forever by it.\r
-\r
-In this state of mind the thought that that man would, henceforth, come\r
-into any contact whatever with Cosette was a heartrending perplexity to\r
-Marius.\r
-\r
-He now almost reproached himself for not having put those formidable\r
-questions, before which he had recoiled, and from which an implacable\r
-and definitive decision might have sprung. He felt that he was too good,\r
-too gentle, too weak, if we must say the word. This weakness had led him\r
-to an imprudent concession. He had allowed himself to be touched. He\r
-had been in the wrong. He ought to have simply and purely rejected\r
-Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean played the part of fire, and that is what he\r
-should have done, and have freed his house from that man.\r
-\r
-He was vexed with himself, he was angry with that whirlwind of emotions\r
-which had deafened, blinded, and carried him away. He was displeased\r
-with himself.\r
-\r
-What was he to do now? Jean Valjean's visits were profoundly repugnant\r
-to him. What was the use in having that man in his house? What did the\r
-man want? Here, he became dismayed, he did not wish to dig down, he did\r
-not wish to penetrate deeply; he did not wish to sound himself. He\r
-had promised, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a promise; Jean\r
-Valjean held his promise; one must keep one's word even to a convict,\r
-above all to a convict. Still, his first duty was to Cosette. In short,\r
-he was carried away by the repugnance which dominated him.\r
-\r
-Marius turned over all this confusion of ideas in his mind, passing\r
-from one to the other, and moved by all of them. Hence arose a profound\r
-trouble.\r
-\r
-It was not easy for him to hide this trouble from Cosette, but love is a\r
-talent, and Marius succeeded in doing it.\r
-\r
-However, without any apparent object, he questioned Cosette, who was as\r
-candid as a dove is white and who suspected nothing; he talked of her\r
-childhood and her youth, and he became more and more convinced that that\r
-convict had been everything good, paternal and respectable that a man\r
-can be towards Cosette. All that Marius had caught a glimpse of and had\r
-surmised was real. That sinister nettle had loved and protected that\r
-lily.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT\r
-\r
-[Illustration: The Twilight Decline 5b8-1-decline]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--THE LOWER CHAMBER\r
-\r
-On the following day, at nightfall, Jean Valjean knocked at the carriage\r
-gate of the Gillenormand house. It was Basque who received him. Basque\r
-was in the courtyard at the appointed hour, as though he had received\r
-his orders. It sometimes happens that one says to a servant: "You will\r
-watch for Mr. So and So, when he arrives."\r
-\r
-Basque addressed Jean Valjean without waiting for the latter to approach\r
-him:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron has charged me to inquire whether monsieur desires to\r
-go upstairs or to remain below?"\r
-\r
-"I will remain below," replied Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-Basque, who was perfectly respectful, opened the door of the\r
-waiting-room and said:\r
-\r
-"I will go and inform Madame."\r
-\r
-The room which Jean Valjean entered was a damp, vaulted room on the\r
-ground floor, which served as a cellar on occasion, which opened on the\r
-street, was paved with red squares and was badly lighted by a grated\r
-window.\r
-\r
-This chamber was not one of those which are harassed by the\r
-feather-duster, the pope's head brush, and the broom. The dust rested\r
-tranquilly there. Persecution of the spiders was not organized there. A\r
-fine web, which spread far and wide, and was very black and ornamented\r
-with dead flies, formed a wheel on one of the window-panes. The room,\r
-which was small and low-ceiled, was furnished with a heap of empty\r
-bottles piled up in one corner.\r
-\r
-The wall, which was daubed with an ochre yellow wash, was scaling off in\r
-large flakes. At one end there was a chimney-piece painted in black\r
-with a narrow shelf. A fire was burning there; which indicated that Jean\r
-Valjean's reply: "I will remain below," had been foreseen.\r
-\r
-Two arm-chairs were placed at the two corners of the fireplace. Between\r
-the chairs an old bedside rug, which displayed more foundation thread\r
-than wool, had been spread by way of a carpet.\r
-\r
-The chamber was lighted by the fire on the hearth and the twilight\r
-falling through the window.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean was fatigued. For days he had neither eaten nor slept. He\r
-threw himself into one of the arm-chairs.\r
-\r
-Basque returned, set a lighted candle on the chimney-piece and retired.\r
-Jean Valjean, his head drooping and his chin resting on his breast,\r
-perceived neither Basque nor the candle.\r
-\r
-All at once, he drew himself up with a start. Cosette was standing\r
-beside him.\r
-\r
-He had not seen her enter, but he had felt that she was there.\r
-\r
-He turned round. He gazed at her. She was adorably lovely. But what he\r
-was contemplating with that profound gaze was not her beauty but her\r
-soul.\r
-\r
-"Well," exclaimed Cosette, "father, I knew that you were peculiar, but\r
-I never should have expected this. What an idea! Marius told me that you\r
-wish me to receive you here."\r
-\r
-"Yes, it is my wish."\r
-\r
-"I expected that reply. Good. I warn you that I am going to make a scene\r
-for you. Let us begin at the beginning. Embrace me, father."\r
-\r
-And she offered him her cheek.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean remained motionless.\r
-\r
-"You do not stir. I take note of it. Attitude of guilt. But never mind,\r
-I pardon you. Jesus Christ said: Offer the other cheek. Here it is."\r
-\r
-And she presented her other cheek.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean did not move. It seemed as though his feet were nailed to\r
-the pavement.\r
-\r
-"This is becoming serious," said Cosette. "What have I done to you? I\r
-declare that I am perplexed. You owe me reparation. You will dine with\r
-us."\r
-\r
-"I have dined."\r
-\r
-"That is not true. I will get M. Gillenormand to scold you. Grandfathers\r
-are made to reprimand fathers. Come. Go upstairs with me to the\r
-drawing-room. Immediately."\r
-\r
-"Impossible."\r
-\r
-Here Cosette lost ground a little. She ceased to command and passed to\r
-questioning.\r
-\r
-"But why? and you choose the ugliest chamber in the house in which to\r
-see me. It's horrible here."\r
-\r
-"Thou knowest . . ."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean caught himself up.\r
-\r
-"You know, madame, that I am peculiar, I have my freaks."\r
-\r
-Cosette struck her tiny hands together.\r
-\r
-"Madame! . . . You know! . . . more novelties! What is the meaning of\r
-this?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean directed upon her that heartrending smile to which he\r
-occasionally had recourse:\r
-\r
-"You wished to be Madame. You are so."\r
-\r
-"Not for you, father."\r
-\r
-"Do not call me father."\r
-\r
-"What?"\r
-\r
-"Call me 'Monsieur Jean.' 'Jean,' if you like."\r
-\r
-"You are no longer my father? I am no longer Cosette? 'Monsieur Jean'?\r
-What does this mean? why, these are revolutions, aren't they? what has\r
-taken place? come, look me in the face. And you won't live with us!\r
-And you won't have my chamber! What have I done to you? Has anything\r
-happened?"\r
-\r
-"Nothing."\r
-\r
-"Well then?"\r
-\r
-"Everything is as usual."\r
-\r
-"Why do you change your name?"\r
-\r
-"You have changed yours, surely."\r
-\r
-He smiled again with the same smile as before and added:\r
-\r
-"Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I certainly can be Monsieur Jean."\r
-\r
-"I don't understand anything about it. All this is idiotic. I shall ask\r
-permission of my husband for you to be 'Monsieur Jean.' I hope that he\r
-will not consent to it. You cause me a great deal of pain. One does\r
-have freaks, but one does not cause one's little Cosette grief. That is\r
-wrong. You have no right to be wicked, you who are so good."\r
-\r
-He made no reply.\r
-\r
-She seized his hands with vivacity, and raising them to her face with\r
-an irresistible movement, she pressed them against her neck beneath her\r
-chin, which is a gesture of profound tenderness.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" she said to him, "be good!"\r
-\r
-And she went on:\r
-\r
-"This is what I call being good: being nice and coming and living\r
-here,--there are birds here as there are in the Rue Plumet,--living with\r
-us, quitting that hole of a Rue de l'Homme Arme, not giving us riddles\r
-to guess, being like all the rest of the world, dining with us,\r
-breakfasting with us, being my father."\r
-\r
-He loosed her hands.\r
-\r
-"You no longer need a father, you have a husband."\r
-\r
-Cosette became angry.\r
-\r
-"I no longer need a father! One really does not know what to say to\r
-things like that, which are not common sense!"\r
-\r
-"If Toussaint were here," resumed Jean Valjean, like a person who is\r
-driven to seek authorities, and who clutches at every branch, "she would\r
-be the first to agree that it is true that I have always had ways of my\r
-own. There is nothing new in this. I always have loved my black corner."\r
-\r
-"But it is cold here. One cannot see distinctly. It is abominable, that\r
-it is, to wish to be Monsieur Jean! I will not have you say 'you' to me.\r
-\r
-"Just now, as I was coming hither," replied Jean Valjean, "I saw a piece\r
-of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis. It was at a cabinet-maker's. If I\r
-were a pretty woman, I would treat myself to that bit of furniture. A\r
-very neat toilet table in the reigning style. What you call rosewood, I\r
-think. It is inlaid. The mirror is quite large. There are drawers. It is\r
-pretty."\r
-\r
-"Hou! the villainous bear!" replied Cosette.\r
-\r
-And with supreme grace, setting her teeth and drawing back her lips, she\r
-blew at Jean Valjean. She was a Grace copying a cat.\r
-\r
-"I am furious," she resumed. "Ever since yesterday, you have made me\r
-rage, all of you. I am greatly vexed. I don't understand. You do not\r
-defend me against Marius. Marius will not uphold me against you. I am\r
-all alone. I arrange a chamber prettily. If I could have put the good\r
-God there I would have done it. My chamber is left on my hands. My\r
-lodger sends me into bankruptcy. I order a nice little dinner of\r
-Nicolette. We will have nothing to do with your dinner, Madame. And my\r
-father Fauchelevent wants me to call him 'Monsieur Jean,' and to receive\r
-him in a frightful, old, ugly cellar, where the walls have beards, and\r
-where the crystal consists of empty bottles, and the curtains are of\r
-spiders' webs! You are singular, I admit, that is your style, but people\r
-who get married are granted a truce. You ought not to have begun being\r
-singular again instantly. So you are going to be perfectly contented in\r
-your abominable Rue de l'Homme Arme. I was very desperate indeed there,\r
-that I was. What have you against me? You cause me a great deal of\r
-grief. Fi!"\r
-\r
-And, becoming suddenly serious, she gazed intently at Jean Valjean and\r
-added:\r
-\r
-"Are you angry with me because I am happy?"\r
-\r
-Ingenuousness sometimes unconsciously penetrates deep. This question,\r
-which was simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. Cosette had\r
-meant to scratch, and she lacerated.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean turned pale.\r
-\r
-He remained for a moment without replying, then, with an inexpressible\r
-intonation, and speaking to himself, he murmured:\r
-\r
-"Her happiness was the object of my life. Now God may sign my dismissal.\r
-Cosette, thou art happy; my day is over."\r
-\r
-"Ah, you have said thou to me!" exclaimed Cosette.\r
-\r
-And she sprang to his neck.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, in bewilderment, strained her wildly to his breast. It\r
-almost seemed to him as though he were taking her back.\r
-\r
-"Thanks, father!" said Cosette.\r
-\r
-This enthusiastic impulse was on the point of becoming poignant for Jean\r
-Valjean. He gently removed Cosette's arms, and took his hat.\r
-\r
-"Well?" said Cosette.\r
-\r
-"I leave you, Madame, they are waiting for you."\r
-\r
-And, from the threshold, he added:\r
-\r
-"I have said thou to you. Tell your husband that this shall not happen\r
-again. Pardon me."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean quitted the room, leaving Cosette stupefied at this\r
-enigmatical farewell.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--ANOTHER STEP BACKWARDS\r
-\r
-On the following day, at the same hour, Jean Valjean came.\r
-\r
-Cosette asked him no questions, was no longer astonished, no longer\r
-exclaimed that she was cold, no longer spoke of the drawing-room, she\r
-avoided saying either "father" or "Monsieur Jean." She allowed herself\r
-to be addressed as you. She allowed herself to be called Madame. Only,\r
-her joy had undergone a certain diminution. She would have been sad, if\r
-sadness had been possible to her.\r
-\r
-It is probable that she had had with Marius one of those conversations\r
-in which the beloved man says what he pleases, explains nothing, and\r
-satisfies the beloved woman. The curiosity of lovers does not extend\r
-very far beyond their own love.\r
-\r
-The lower room had made a little toilet. Basque had suppressed the\r
-bottles, and Nicolette the spiders.\r
-\r
-All the days which followed brought Jean Valjean at the same hour. He\r
-came every day, because he had not the strength to take Marius' words\r
-otherwise than literally. Marius arranged matters so as to be absent at\r
-the hours when Jean Valjean came. The house grew accustomed to the novel\r
-ways of M. Fauchelevent. Toussaint helped in this direction: "Monsieur\r
-has always been like that," she repeated. The grandfather issued this\r
-decree:--"He's an original." And all was said. Moreover, at the age of\r
-ninety-six, no bond is any longer possible, all is merely juxtaposition;\r
-a newcomer is in the way. There is no longer any room; all habits are\r
-acquired. M. Fauchelevent, M. Tranchelevent, Father Gillenormand\r
-asked nothing better than to be relieved from "that gentleman." He\r
-added:--"Nothing is more common than those originals. They do all sorts\r
-of queer things. They have no reason. The Marquis de Canaples was still\r
-worse. He bought a palace that he might lodge in the garret. These are\r
-fantastic appearances that people affect."\r
-\r
-No one caught a glimpse of the sinister foundation. And moreover, who\r
-could have guessed such a thing? There are marshes of this description\r
-in India. The water seems extraordinary, inexplicable, rippling though\r
-there is no wind, and agitated where it should be calm. One gazes at the\r
-surface of these causeless ebullitions; one does not perceive the hydra\r
-which crawls on the bottom.\r
-\r
-Many men have a secret monster in this same manner, a dragon which gnaws\r
-them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles\r
-other men, he goes and comes. No one knows that he bears within him a\r
-frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth, which lives within the\r
-unhappy man, and of which he is dying. No one knows that this man is a\r
-gulf. He is stagnant but deep. From time to time, a trouble of which\r
-the onlooker understands nothing appears on his surface. A mysterious\r
-wrinkle is formed, then vanishes, then re-appears; an air-bubble rises\r
-and bursts. It is the breathing of the unknown beast.\r
-\r
-Certain strange habits: arriving at the hour when other people are\r
-taking their leave, keeping in the background when other people\r
-are displaying themselves, preserving on all occasions what may be\r
-designated as the wall-colored mantle, seeking the solitary walk,\r
-preferring the deserted street, avoiding any share in conversation,\r
-avoiding crowds and festivals, seeming at one's ease and living poorly,\r
-having one's key in one's pocket, and one's candle at the porter's\r
-lodge, however rich one may be, entering by the side door, ascending\r
-the private staircase,--all these insignificant singularities, fugitive\r
-folds on the surface, often proceed from a formidable foundation.\r
-\r
-Many weeks passed in this manner. A new life gradually took possession\r
-of Cosette: the relations which marriage creates, visits, the care\r
-of the house, pleasures, great matters. Cosette's pleasures were not\r
-costly, they consisted in one thing: being with Marius. The great\r
-occupation of her life was to go out with him, to remain with him. It\r
-was for them a joy that was always fresh, to go out arm in arm, in the\r
-face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding themselves, before\r
-the whole world, both of them completely alone.\r
-\r
-Cosette had one vexation. Toussaint could not get on with Nicolette, the\r
-soldering of two elderly maids being impossible, and she went away.\r
-The grandfather was well; Marius argued a case here and there; Aunt\r
-Gillenormand peacefully led that life aside which sufficed for her,\r
-beside the new household. Jean Valjean came every day.\r
-\r
-The address as thou disappeared, the you, the "Madame," the "Monsieur\r
-Jean," rendered him another person to Cosette. The care which he had\r
-himself taken to detach her from him was succeeding. She became more and\r
-more gay and less and less tender. Yet she still loved him sincerely,\r
-and he felt it.\r
-\r
-One day she said to him suddenly: "You used to be my father, you are\r
-no longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle, you\r
-were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean. Who are you then? I don't\r
-like all this. If I did not know how good you are, I should be afraid of\r
-you."\r
-\r
-He still lived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, because he could not make up\r
-his mind to remove to a distance from the quarter where Cosette dwelt.\r
-\r
-At first, he only remained a few minutes with Cosette, and then went\r
-away.\r
-\r
-Little by little he acquired the habit of making his visits less brief.\r
-One would have said that he was taking advantage of the authorization of\r
-the days which were lengthening, he arrived earlier and departed later.\r
-\r
-One day Cosette chanced to say "father" to him. A flash of joy\r
-illuminated Jean Valjean's melancholy old countenance. He caught her\r
-up: "Say Jean."--"Ah! truly," she replied with a burst of laughter,\r
-"Monsieur Jean."--"That is right," said he. And he turned aside so that\r
-she might not see him wipe his eyes.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--THEY RECALL THE GARDEN OF THE RUE PLUMET\r
-\r
-This was the last time. After that last flash of light, complete\r
-extinction ensued. No more familiarity, no more good-morning with a\r
-kiss, never more that word so profoundly sweet: "My father!" He was at\r
-his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his\r
-happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after\r
-having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose\r
-her again in detail.\r
-\r
-The eye eventually becomes accustomed to the light of a cellar. In\r
-short, it sufficed for him to have an apparition of Cosette every day.\r
-His whole life was concentrated in that one hour.\r
-\r
-He seated himself close to her, he gazed at her in silence, or he talked\r
-to her of years gone by, of her childhood, of the convent, of her little\r
-friends of those bygone days.\r
-\r
-One afternoon,--it was on one of those early days in April, already\r
-warm and fresh, the moment of the sun's great gayety, the gardens which\r
-surrounded the windows of Marius and Cosette felt the emotion of waking,\r
-the hawthorn was on the point of budding, a jewelled garniture of\r
-gillyflowers spread over the ancient walls, snapdragons yawned through\r
-the crevices of the stones, amid the grass there was a charming\r
-beginning of daisies, and buttercups, the white butterflies of the\r
-year were making their first appearance, the wind, that minstrel of the\r
-eternal wedding, was trying in the trees the first notes of that grand,\r
-auroral symphony which the old poets called the springtide,--Marius said\r
-to Cosette:--"We said that we would go back to take a look at our garden\r
-in the Rue Plumet. Let us go thither. We must not be ungrateful."--And\r
-away they flitted, like two swallows towards the spring. This garden of\r
-the Rue Plumet produced on them the effect of the dawn. They already\r
-had behind them in life something which was like the springtime of their\r
-love. The house in the Rue Plumet being held on a lease, still belonged\r
-to Cosette. They went to that garden and that house. There they\r
-found themselves again, there they forgot themselves. That\r
-evening, at the usual hour, Jean Valjean came to the Rue des\r
-Filles-du-Calvaire.--"Madame went out with Monsieur and has not yet\r
-returned," Basque said to him. He seated himself in silence, and waited\r
-an hour. Cosette did not return. He departed with drooping head.\r
-\r
-Cosette was so intoxicated with her walk to "their garden," and so\r
-joyous at having "lived a whole day in her past," that she talked of\r
-nothing else on the morrow. She did not notice that she had not seen\r
-Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"In what way did you go thither?" Jean Valjean asked her."\r
-\r
-"On foot."\r
-\r
-"And how did you return?"\r
-\r
-"In a hackney carriage."\r
-\r
-For some time, Jean Valjean had noticed the economical life led by the\r
-young people. He was troubled by it. Marius' economy was severe, and\r
-that word had its absolute meaning for Jean Valjean. He hazarded a\r
-query:\r
-\r
-"Why do you not have a carriage of your own? A pretty coupe would only\r
-cost you five hundred francs a month. You are rich."\r
-\r
-"I don't know," replied Cosette.\r
-\r
-"It is like Toussaint," resumed Jean Valjean. "She is gone. You have not\r
-replaced her. Why?"\r
-\r
-"Nicolette suffices."\r
-\r
-"But you ought to have a maid."\r
-\r
-"Have I not Marius?"\r
-\r
-"You ought to have a house of your own, your own servants, a carriage, a\r
-box at the theatre. There is nothing too fine for you. Why not profit by\r
-your riches? Wealth adds to happiness."\r
-\r
-Cosette made no reply.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean's visits were not abridged. Far from it. When it is the\r
-heart which is slipping, one does not halt on the downward slope.\r
-\r
-When Jean Valjean wished to prolong his visit and to induce\r
-forgetfulness of the hour, he sang the praises of Marius; he pronounced\r
-him handsome, noble, courageous, witty, eloquent, good. Cosette outdid\r
-him. Jean Valjean began again. They were never weary. Marius--that word\r
-was inexhaustible; those six letters contained volumes. In this manner,\r
-Jean Valjean contrived to remain a long time.\r
-\r
-It was so sweet to see Cosette, to forget by her side! It alleviated his\r
-wounds. It frequently happened that Basque came twice to announce:\r
-"M. Gillenormand sends me to remind Madame la Baronne that dinner is\r
-served."\r
-\r
-On those days, Jean Valjean was very thoughtful on his return home.\r
-\r
-Was there, then, any truth in that comparison of the chrysalis which\r
-had presented itself to the mind of Marius? Was Jean Valjean really a\r
-chrysalis who would persist, and who would come to visit his butterfly?\r
-\r
-One day he remained still longer than usual. On the following day he\r
-observed that there was no fire on the hearth.--"Hello!" he thought. "No\r
-fire."--And he furnished the explanation for himself.--"It is perfectly\r
-simple. It is April. The cold weather has ceased."\r
-\r
-"Heavens! how cold it is here!" exclaimed Cosette when she entered.\r
-\r
-"Why, no," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"Was it you who told Basque not to make a fire then?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, since we are now in the month of May."\r
-\r
-"But we have a fire until June. One is needed all the year in this\r
-cellar."\r
-\r
-"I thought that a fire was unnecessary."\r
-\r
-"That is exactly like one of your ideas!" retorted Cosette.\r
-\r
-On the following day there was a fire. But the two arm-chairs were\r
-arranged at the other end of the room near the door. "--What is the\r
-meaning of this?" thought Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-He went for the arm-chairs and restored them to their ordinary place\r
-near the hearth.\r
-\r
-This fire lighted once more encouraged him, however. He prolonged the\r
-conversation even beyond its customary limits. As he rose to take his\r
-leave, Cosette said to him:\r
-\r
-"My husband said a queer thing to me yesterday."\r
-\r
-"What was it?"\r
-\r
-"He said to me: 'Cosette, we have an income of thirty thousand livres.\r
-Twenty-seven that you own, and three that my grandfather gives me.' I\r
-replied: 'That makes thirty.' He went on: 'Would you have the courage to\r
-live on the three thousand?' I answered: 'Yes, on nothing. Provided\r
-that it was with you.' And then I asked: 'Why do you say that to me?' He\r
-replied: 'I wanted to know.'"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean found not a word to answer. Cosette probably expected some\r
-explanation from him; he listened in gloomy silence. He went back to the\r
-Rue de l'Homme Arme; he was so deeply absorbed that he mistook the\r
-door and instead of entering his own house, he entered the adjoining\r
-dwelling. It was only after having ascended nearly two stories that he\r
-perceived his error and went down again.\r
-\r
-His mind was swarming with conjectures. It was evident that Marius had\r
-his doubts as to the origin of the six hundred thousand francs, that\r
-he feared some source that was not pure, who knows? that he had even,\r
-perhaps, discovered that the money came from him, Jean Valjean, that he\r
-hesitated before this suspicious fortune, and was disinclined to take\r
-it as his own,--preferring that both he and Cosette should remain poor,\r
-rather than that they should be rich with wealth that was not clean.\r
-\r
-Moreover, Jean Valjean began vaguely to surmise that he was being shown\r
-the door.\r
-\r
-On the following day, he underwent something like a shock on entering\r
-the ground-floor room. The arm-chairs had disappeared. There was not a\r
-single chair of any sort.\r
-\r
-"Ah, what's this!" exclaimed Cosette as she entered, "no chairs! Where\r
-are the arm-chairs?"\r
-\r
-"They are no longer here," replied Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"This is too much!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean stammered:\r
-\r
-"It was I who told Basque to remove them."\r
-\r
-"And your reason?"\r
-\r
-"I have only a few minutes to stay to-day."\r
-\r
-"A brief stay is no reason for remaining standing."\r
-\r
-"I think that Basque needed the chairs for the drawing-room."\r
-\r
-"Why?"\r
-\r
-"You have company this evening, no doubt."\r
-\r
-"We expect no one."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean had not another word to say.\r
-\r
-Cosette shrugged her shoulders.\r
-\r
-"To have the chairs carried off! The other day you had the fire put out.\r
-How odd you are!"\r
-\r
-"Adieu!" murmured Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-He did not say: "Adieu, Cosette." But he had not the strength to say:\r
-"Adieu, Madame."\r
-\r
-He went away utterly overwhelmed.\r
-\r
-This time he had understood.\r
-\r
-On the following day he did not come. Cosette only observed the fact in\r
-the evening.\r
-\r
-"Why," said she, "Monsieur Jean has not been here today."\r
-\r
-And she felt a slight twinge at her heart, but she hardly perceived it,\r
-being immediately diverted by a kiss from Marius.\r
-\r
-On the following day he did not come.\r
-\r
-Cosette paid no heed to this, passed her evening and slept well that\r
-night, as usual, and thought of it only when she woke. She was so happy!\r
-She speedily despatched Nicolette to M. Jean's house to inquire whether\r
-he were ill, and why he had not come on the previous evening. Nicolette\r
-brought back the reply of M. Jean that he was not ill. He was busy. He\r
-would come soon. As soon as he was able. Moreover, he was on the point\r
-of taking a little journey. Madame must remember that it was his custom\r
-to take trips from time to time. They were not to worry about him. They\r
-were not to think of him.\r
-\r
-Nicolette on entering M. Jean's had repeated to him her mistress' very\r
-words. That Madame had sent her to inquire why M. Jean bad not come on\r
-the preceding evening."--It is two days since I have been there," said\r
-Jean Valjean gently.\r
-\r
-But the remark passed unnoticed by Nicolette, who did not report it to\r
-Cosette.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION\r
-\r
-During the last months of spring and the first months of summer in 1833,\r
-the rare passersby in the Marais, the petty shopkeepers, the loungers on\r
-thresholds, noticed an old man neatly clad in black, who emerged every\r
-day at the same hour, towards nightfall, from the Rue de l'Homme Arme,\r
-on the side of the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, passed in front\r
-of the Blancs Manteaux, gained the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and,\r
-on arriving at the Rue de l'Echarpe, turned to the left, and entered the\r
-Rue Saint-Louis.\r
-\r
-There he walked at a slow pace, with his head strained forward, seeing\r
-nothing, hearing nothing, his eye immovably fixed on a point which\r
-seemed to be a star to him, which never varied, and which was no\r
-other than the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The nearer he\r
-approached the corner of the street the more his eye lighted up; a sort\r
-of joy illuminated his pupils like an inward aurora, he had a fascinated\r
-and much affected air, his lips indulged in obscure movements, as though\r
-he were talking to some one whom he did not see, he smiled vaguely and\r
-advanced as slowly as possible. One would have said that, while desirous\r
-of reaching his destination, he feared the moment when he should be\r
-close at hand. When only a few houses remained between him and that\r
-street which appeared to attract him his pace slackened, to such a\r
-degree that, at times, one might have thought that he was no longer\r
-advancing at all. The vacillation of his head and the fixity of his\r
-eyeballs suggested the thought of the magnetic needle seeking the pole.\r
-Whatever time he spent on arriving, he was obliged to arrive at last; he\r
-reached the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; then he halted, he trembled, he\r
-thrust his head with a sort of melancholy timidity round the corner of\r
-the last house, and gazed into that street, and there was in that tragic\r
-look something which resembled the dazzling light of the impossible,\r
-and the reflection from a paradise that was closed to him. Then a tear,\r
-which had slowly gathered in the corner of his lids, and had become\r
-large enough to fall, trickled down his cheek, and sometimes stopped at\r
-his mouth. The old man tasted its bitter flavor. Thus he remained for\r
-several minutes as though made of stone, then he returned by the same\r
-road and with the same step, and, in proportion as he retreated, his\r
-glance died out.\r
-\r
-Little by little, this old man ceased to go as far as the corner of the\r
-Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; he halted half way in the Rue Saint-Louis;\r
-sometimes a little further off, sometimes a little nearer.\r
-\r
-One day he stopped at the corner of the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine and\r
-looked at the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire from a distance. Then he\r
-shook his head slowly from right to left, as though refusing himself\r
-something, and retraced his steps.\r
-\r
-Soon he no longer came as far as the Rue Saint-Louis. He got as far as\r
-the Rue Pavee, shook his head and turned back; then he went no\r
-further than the Rue des Trois-Pavillons; then he did not overstep the\r
-Blancs-Manteaux. One would have said that he was a pendulum which was\r
-no longer wound up, and whose oscillations were growing shorter before\r
-ceasing altogether.\r
-\r
-Every day he emerged from his house at the same hour, he undertook the\r
-same trip, but he no longer completed it, and, perhaps without\r
-himself being aware of the fact, he constantly shortened it. His whole\r
-countenance expressed this single idea: What is the use?--His eye was\r
-dim; no more radiance. His tears were also exhausted; they no longer\r
-collected in the corner of his eye-lid; that thoughtful eye was dry. The\r
-old man's head was still craned forward; his chin moved at times; the\r
-folds in his gaunt neck were painful to behold. Sometimes, when the\r
-weather was bad, he had an umbrella under his arm, but he never opened\r
-it.\r
-\r
-The good women of the quarter said: "He is an innocent." The children\r
-followed him and laughed.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER I--PITY FOR THE UNHAPPY, BUT INDULGENCE FOR THE HAPPY\r
-\r
-It is a terrible thing to be happy! How content one is! How\r
-all-sufficient one finds it! How, being in possession of the false\r
-object of life, happiness, one forgets the true object, duty!\r
-\r
-Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he to blame\r
-Marius.\r
-\r
-Marius, as we have explained, before his marriage, had put no questions\r
-to M. Fauchelevent, and, since that time, he had feared to put any to\r
-Jean Valjean. He had regretted the promise into which he had allowed\r
-himself to be drawn. He had often said to himself that he had done\r
-wrong in making that concession to despair. He had confined himself to\r
-gradually estranging Jean Valjean from his house and to effacing him,\r
-as much as possible, from Cosette's mind. He had, in a manner, always\r
-placed himself between Cosette and Jean Valjean, sure that, in this\r
-way, she would not perceive nor think of the latter. It was more than\r
-effacement, it was an eclipse.\r
-\r
-Marius did what he considered necessary and just. He thought that he had\r
-serious reasons which the reader has already seen, and others which will\r
-be seen later on, for getting rid of Jean Valjean without harshness, but\r
-without weakness.\r
-\r
-Chance having ordained that he should encounter, in a case which he had\r
-argued, a former employee of the Laffitte establishment, he had acquired\r
-mysterious information, without seeking it, which he had not been\r
-able, it is true, to probe, out of respect for the secret which he had\r
-promised to guard, and out of consideration for Jean Valjean's perilous\r
-position. He believed at that moment that he had a grave duty to\r
-perform: the restitution of the six hundred thousand francs to some\r
-one whom he sought with all possible discretion. In the meanwhile, he\r
-abstained from touching that money.\r
-\r
-As for Cosette, she had not been initiated into any of these secrets;\r
-but it would be harsh to condemn her also.\r
-\r
-There existed between Marius and her an all-powerful magnetism, which\r
-caused her to do, instinctively and almost mechanically, what Marius\r
-wished. She was conscious of Marius' will in the direction of "Monsieur\r
-Jean," she conformed to it. Her husband had not been obliged to say\r
-anything to her; she yielded to the vague but clear pressure of his\r
-tacit intentions, and obeyed blindly. Her obedience in this instance\r
-consisted in not remembering what Marius forgot. She was not obliged to\r
-make any effort to accomplish this. Without her knowing why herself, and\r
-without his having any cause to accuse her of it, her soul had become\r
-so wholly her husband's that that which was shrouded in gloom in Marius'\r
-mind became overcast in hers.\r
-\r
-Let us not go too far, however; in what concerns Jean Valjean, this\r
-forgetfulness and obliteration were merely superficial. She was rather\r
-heedless than forgetful. At bottom, she was sincerely attached to the\r
-man whom she had so long called her father; but she loved her husband\r
-still more dearly. This was what had somewhat disturbed the balance of\r
-her heart, which leaned to one side only.\r
-\r
-It sometimes happened that Cosette spoke of Jean Valjean and expressed\r
-her surprise. Then Marius calmed her: "He is absent, I think. Did not\r
-he say that he was setting out on a journey?"--"That is true," thought\r
-Cosette. "He had a habit of disappearing in this fashion. But not for so\r
-long." Two or three times she despatched Nicolette to inquire in the\r
-Rue de l'Homme Arme whether M. Jean had returned from his journey. Jean\r
-Valjean caused the answer "no" to be given.\r
-\r
-Cosette asked nothing more, since she had but one need on earth, Marius.\r
-\r
-Let us also say that, on their side, Cosette and Marius had also\r
-been absent. They had been to Vernon. Marius had taken Cosette to his\r
-father's grave.\r
-\r
-Marius gradually won Cosette away from Jean Valjean. Cosette allowed it.\r
-\r
-Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain cases, the\r
-ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so deserving of reproach\r
-as it is supposed. It is the ingratitude of nature. Nature, as we have\r
-elsewhere said, "looks before her." Nature divides living beings into\r
-those who are arriving and those who are departing. Those who are\r
-departing are turned towards the shadows, those who are arriving towards\r
-the light. Hence a gulf which is fatal on the part of the old, and\r
-involuntary on the part of the young. This breach, at first insensible,\r
-increases slowly, like all separations of branches. The boughs, without\r
-becoming detached from the trunk, grow away from it. It is no fault of\r
-theirs. Youth goes where there is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love.\r
-Old age goes towards the end. They do not lose sight of each other, but\r
-there is no longer a close connection. Young people feel the cooling\r
-off of life; old people, that of the tomb. Let us not blame these poor\r
-children.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER II--LAST FLICKERINGS OF A LAMP WITHOUT OIL\r
-\r
-One day, Jean Valjean descended his staircase, took three steps in the\r
-street, seated himself on a post, on that same stone post where Gavroche\r
-had found him meditating on the night between the 5th and the 6th of\r
-June; he remained there a few moments, then went up stairs again. This\r
-was the last oscillation of the pendulum. On the following day he did\r
-not leave his apartment. On the day after that, he did not leave his\r
-bed.\r
-\r
-His portress, who prepared his scanty repasts, a few cabbages or\r
-potatoes with bacon, glanced at the brown earthenware plate and\r
-exclaimed:\r
-\r
-"But you ate nothing yesterday, poor, dear man!"\r
-\r
-"Certainly I did," replied Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"The plate is quite full."\r
-\r
-"Look at the water jug. It is empty."\r
-\r
-"That proves that you have drunk; it does not prove that you have\r
-eaten."\r
-\r
-"Well," said Jean Valjean, "what if I felt hungry only for water?"\r
-\r
-"That is called thirst, and, when one does not eat at the same time, it\r
-is called fever."\r
-\r
-"I will eat to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"Or at Trinity day. Why not to-day? Is it the thing to say: 'I will eat\r
-to-morrow'? The idea of leaving my platter without even touching it! My\r
-ladyfinger potatoes were so good!"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean took the old woman's hand:\r
-\r
-"I promise you that I will eat them," he said, in his benevolent voice.\r
-\r
-"I am not pleased with you," replied the portress.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean saw no other human creature than this good woman. There are\r
-streets in Paris through which no one ever passes, and houses to which\r
-no one ever comes. He was in one of those streets and one of those\r
-houses.\r
-\r
-While he still went out, he had purchased of a coppersmith, for a few\r
-sous, a little copper crucifix which he had hung up on a nail opposite\r
-his bed. That gibbet is always good to look at.\r
-\r
-A week passed, and Jean Valjean had not taken a step in his room. He\r
-still remained in bed. The portress said to her husband:--"The good man\r
-upstairs yonder does not get up, he no longer eats, he will not last\r
-long. That man has his sorrows, that he has. You won't get it out of my\r
-head that his daughter has made a bad marriage."\r
-\r
-The porter replied, with the tone of marital sovereignty:\r
-\r
-"If he's rich, let him have a doctor. If he is not rich, let him go\r
-without. If he has no doctor he will die."\r
-\r
-"And if he has one?"\r
-\r
-"He will die," said the porter.\r
-\r
-The portress set to scraping away the grass from what she called her\r
-pavement, with an old knife, and, as she tore out the blades, she\r
-grumbled:\r
-\r
-"It's a shame. Such a neat old man! He's as white as a chicken."\r
-\r
-She caught sight of the doctor of the quarter as he passed the end of\r
-the street; she took it upon herself to request him to come up stairs.\r
-\r
-"It's on the second floor," said she. "You have only to enter. As the\r
-good man no longer stirs from his bed, the door is always unlocked."\r
-\r
-The doctor saw Jean Valjean and spoke with him.\r
-\r
-When he came down again the portress interrogated him:\r
-\r
-"Well, doctor?"\r
-\r
-"Your sick man is very ill indeed."\r
-\r
-"What is the matter with him?"\r
-\r
-"Everything and nothing. He is a man who, to all appearances, has lost\r
-some person who is dear to him. People die of that."\r
-\r
-"What did he say to you?"\r
-\r
-"He told me that he was in good health."\r
-\r
-"Shall you come again, doctor?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," replied the doctor. "But some one else besides must come."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER III--A PEN IS HEAVY TO THE MAN WHO LIFTED THE FAUCHELEVENT'S\r
-CART\r
-\r
-One evening Jean Valjean found difficulty in raising himself on his\r
-elbow; he felt of his wrist and could not find his pulse; his breath\r
-was short and halted at times; he recognized the fact that he was weaker\r
-than he had ever been before. Then, no doubt under the pressure of some\r
-supreme preoccupation, he made an effort, drew himself up into a sitting\r
-posture and dressed himself. He put on his old workingman's clothes. As\r
-he no longer went out, he had returned to them and preferred them. He\r
-was obliged to pause many times while dressing himself; merely putting\r
-his arms through his waistcoat made the perspiration trickle from his\r
-forehead.\r
-\r
-Since he had been alone, he had placed his bed in the antechamber, in\r
-order to inhabit that deserted apartment as little as possible.\r
-\r
-He opened the valise and drew from it Cosette's outfit.\r
-\r
-He spread it out on his bed.\r
-\r
-The Bishop's candlesticks were in their place on the chimney-piece. He\r
-took from a drawer two wax candles and put them in the candlesticks.\r
-Then, although it was still broad daylight,--it was summer,--he lighted\r
-them. In the same way candles are to be seen lighted in broad daylight\r
-in chambers where there is a corpse.\r
-\r
-Every step that he took in going from one piece of furniture to another\r
-exhausted him, and he was obliged to sit down. It was not ordinary\r
-fatigue which expends the strength only to renew it; it was the remnant\r
-of all movement possible to him, it was life drained which flows away\r
-drop by drop in overwhelming efforts and which will never be renewed.\r
-\r
-The chair into which he allowed himself to fall was placed in front of\r
-that mirror, so fatal for him, so providential for Marius, in which\r
-he had read Cosette's reversed writing on the blotting book. He caught\r
-sight of himself in this mirror, and did not recognize himself. He was\r
-eighty years old; before Marius' marriage, he would have hardly been\r
-taken for fifty; that year had counted for thirty. What he bore on his\r
-brow was no longer the wrinkles of age, it was the mysterious mark of\r
-death. The hollowing of that pitiless nail could be felt there. His\r
-cheeks were pendulous; the skin of his face had the color which would\r
-lead one to think that it already had earth upon it; the corners of his\r
-mouth drooped as in the mask which the ancients sculptured on tombs. He\r
-gazed into space with an air of reproach; one would have said that he\r
-was one of those grand tragic beings who have cause to complain of some\r
-one.\r
-\r
-He was in that condition, the last phase of dejection, in which sorrow\r
-no longer flows; it is coagulated, so to speak; there is something on\r
-the soul like a clot of despair.\r
-\r
-Night had come. He laboriously dragged a table and the old arm-chair to\r
-the fireside, and placed upon the table a pen, some ink and some paper.\r
-\r
-That done, he had a fainting fit. When he recovered consciousness, he\r
-was thirsty. As he could not lift the jug, he tipped it over painfully\r
-towards his mouth, and swallowed a draught.\r
-\r
-As neither the pen nor the ink had been used for a long time, the point\r
-of the pen had curled up, the ink had dried away, he was forced to rise\r
-and put a few drops of water in the ink, which he did not accomplish\r
-without pausing and sitting down two or three times, and he was\r
-compelled to write with the back of the pen. He wiped his brow from time\r
-to time.\r
-\r
-Then he turned towards the bed, and, still seated, for he could not\r
-stand, he gazed at the little black gown and all those beloved objects.\r
-\r
-These contemplations lasted for hours which seemed minutes.\r
-\r
-All at once he shivered, he felt that a child was taking possession of\r
-him; he rested his elbows on the table, which was illuminated by the\r
-Bishop's candles and took up the pen. His hand trembled. He wrote slowly\r
-the few following lines:\r
-\r
-"Cosette, I bless thee. I am going to explain to thee. Thy husband was\r
-right in giving me to understand that I ought to go away; but there is\r
-a little error in what he believed, though he was in the right. He is\r
-excellent. Love him well even after I am dead. Monsieur Pontmercy, love\r
-my darling child well. Cosette, this paper will be found; this is what\r
-I wish to say to thee, thou wilt see the figures, if I have the strength\r
-to recall them, listen well, this money is really thine. Here is the\r
-whole matter: White jet comes from Norway, black jet comes from England,\r
-black glass jewellery comes from Germany. Jet is the lightest, the most\r
-precious, the most costly. Imitations can be made in France as well as\r
-in Germany. What is needed is a little anvil two inches square, and a\r
-lamp burning spirits of wine to soften the wax. The wax was formerly\r
-made with resin and lampblack, and cost four livres the pound. I\r
-invented a way of making it with gum shellac and turpentine. It does not\r
-cost more than thirty sous, and is much better. Buckles are made with\r
-a violet glass which is stuck fast, by means of this wax, to a little\r
-framework of black iron. The glass must be violet for iron jewellery,\r
-and black for gold jewellery. Spain buys a great deal of it. It is the\r
-country of jet . . ."\r
-\r
-Here he paused, the pen fell from his fingers, he was seized by one of\r
-those sobs which at times welled up from the very depths of his being;\r
-the poor man clasped his head in both hands, and meditated.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" he exclaimed within himself [lamentable cries, heard by God\r
-alone], "all is over. I shall never see her more. She is a smile which\r
-passed over me. I am about to plunge into the night without even seeing\r
-her again. Oh! one minute, one instant, to hear her voice, to touch her\r
-dress, to gaze upon her, upon her, the angel! and then to die! It is\r
-nothing to die, what is frightful is to die without seeing her. She\r
-would smile on me, she would say a word to me, would that do any harm to\r
-any one? No, all is over, and forever. Here I am all alone. My God! My\r
-God! I shall never see her again!" At that moment there came a knock at\r
-the door.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER IV--A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY SUCCEEDED IN WHITENING\r
-\r
-That same day, or to speak more accurately, that same evening, as Marius\r
-left the table, and was on the point of withdrawing to his study, having\r
-a case to look over, Basque handed him a letter saying: "The person who\r
-wrote the letter is in the antechamber."\r
-\r
-Cosette had taken the grandfather's arm and was strolling in the garden.\r
-\r
-A letter, like a man, may have an unprepossessing exterior. Coarse\r
-paper, coarsely folded--the very sight of certain missives is\r
-displeasing.\r
-\r
-The letter which Basque had brought was of this sort.\r
-\r
-Marius took it. It smelled of tobacco. Nothing evokes a memory like an\r
-odor. Marius recognized that tobacco. He looked at the superscription:\r
-"To Monsieur, Monsieur le Baron Pommerci. At his hotel." The recognition\r
-of the tobacco caused him to recognize the writing as well. It may be\r
-said that amazement has its lightning flashes.\r
-\r
-Marius was, as it were, illuminated by one of these flashes.\r
-\r
-The sense of smell, that mysterious aid to memory, had just revived a\r
-whole world within him. This was certainly the paper, the fashion\r
-of folding, the dull tint of ink; it was certainly the well-known\r
-handwriting, especially was it the same tobacco.\r
-\r
-The Jondrette garret rose before his mind.\r
-\r
-Thus, strange freak of chance! one of the two scents which he had so\r
-diligently sought, the one in connection with which he had lately again\r
-exerted so many efforts and which he supposed to be forever lost, had\r
-come and presented itself to him of its own accord.\r
-\r
-He eagerly broke the seal, and read:\r
-\r
-\r
- "Monsieur le Baron:--If the Supreme Being had given me the talents,\r
- I might have been baron Thenard, member of the Institute [academy\r
- of ciences], but I am not. I only bear the same as him, happy if\r
- this memory recommends me to the eccellence of your kindnesses.\r
- The benefit with which you will honor me will be reciprocle.\r
- I am in possession of a secret concerning an individual.\r
- This individual concerns you. I hold the secret at your disposal\r
- desiring to have the honor to be huseful to you. I will furnish\r
- you with the simple means of driving from your honorabel family\r
- that individual who has no right there, madame la baronne being\r
- of lofty birth. The sanctuary of virtue cannot cohabit longer\r
- with crime without abdicating.\r
-\r
- "I awate in the entichamber the orders of monsieur le baron.\r
-\r
- "With respect."\r
-\r
-\r
-The letter was signed "Thenard."\r
-\r
-This signature was not false. It was merely a trifle abridged.\r
-\r
-Moreover, the rigmarole and the orthography completed the revelation.\r
-The certificate of origin was complete.\r
-\r
-Marius' emotion was profound. After a start of surprise, he underwent a\r
-feeling of happiness. If he could now but find that other man of whom he\r
-was in search, the man who had saved him, Marius, there would be nothing\r
-left for him to desire.\r
-\r
-He opened the drawer of his secretary, took out several bank-notes,\r
-put them in his pocket, closed the secretary again, and rang the bell.\r
-Basque half opened the door.\r
-\r
-"Show the man in," said Marius.\r
-\r
-Basque announced:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur Thenard."\r
-\r
-A man entered.\r
-\r
-A fresh surprise for Marius. The man who entered was an utter stranger\r
-to him.\r
-\r
-This man, who was old, moreover, had a thick nose, his chin swathed in a\r
-cravat, green spectacles with a double screen of green taffeta over his\r
-eyes, and his hair was plastered and flattened down on his brow on\r
-a level with his eyebrows like the wigs of English coachmen in "high\r
-life." His hair was gray. He was dressed in black from head to foot, in\r
-garments that were very threadbare but clean; a bunch of seals depending\r
-from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. He held in his hand an old\r
-hat! He walked in a bent attitude, and the curve in his spine augmented\r
-the profundity of his bow.\r
-\r
-The first thing that struck the observer was, that this personage's\r
-coat, which was too ample although carefully buttoned, had not been made\r
-for him.\r
-\r
-Here a short digression becomes necessary.\r
-\r
-There was in Paris at that epoch, in a low-lived old lodging in the Rue\r
-Beautreillis, near the Arsenal, an ingenious Jew whose profession was\r
-to change villains into honest men. Not for too long, which might have\r
-proved embarrassing for the villain. The change was on sight, for a day\r
-or two, at the rate of thirty sous a day, by means of a costume which\r
-resembled the honesty of the world in general as nearly as possible.\r
-This costumer was called "the Changer"; the pickpockets of Paris\r
-had given him this name and knew him by no other. He had a tolerably\r
-complete wardrobe. The rags with which he tricked out people were almost\r
-probable. He had specialties and categories; on each nail of his\r
-shop hung a social status, threadbare and worn; here the suit of a\r
-magistrate, there the outfit of a Cure, beyond the outfit of a banker,\r
-in one corner the costume of a retired military man, elsewhere\r
-the habiliments of a man of letters, and further on the dress of a\r
-statesman.\r
-\r
-This creature was the costumer of the immense drama which knavery plays\r
-in Paris. His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged, and into\r
-which roguery retreated. A tattered knave arrived at this dressing-room,\r
-deposited his thirty sous and selected, according to the part which\r
-he wished to play, the costume which suited him, and on descending the\r
-stairs once more, the knave was a somebody. On the following day, the\r
-clothes were faithfully returned, and the Changer, who trusted the\r
-thieves with everything, was never robbed. There was one inconvenience\r
-about these clothes, they "did not fit"; not having been made for those\r
-who wore them, they were too tight for one, too loose for another and\r
-did not adjust themselves to any one. Every pickpocket who exceeded or\r
-fell short of the human average was ill at his ease in the Changer's\r
-costumes. It was necessary that one should not be either too fat or\r
-too lean. The changer had foreseen only ordinary men. He had taken the\r
-measure of the species from the first rascal who came to hand, who is\r
-neither stout nor thin, neither tall nor short. Hence adaptations which\r
-were sometimes difficult and from which the Changer's clients extricated\r
-themselves as best they might. So much the worse for the exceptions!\r
-The suit of the statesman, for instance, black from head to foot, and\r
-consequently proper, would have been too large for Pitt and too small\r
-for Castelcicala. The costume of a statesman was designated as follows\r
-in the Changer's catalogue; we copy:\r
-\r
-"A coat of black cloth, trowsers of black wool, a silk waistcoat, boots\r
-and linen." On the margin there stood: ex-ambassador, and a note\r
-which we also copy: "In a separate box, a neatly frizzed peruke, green\r
-glasses, seals, and two small quills an inch long, wrapped in cotton."\r
-All this belonged to the statesman, the ex-ambassador. This whole\r
-costume was, if we may so express ourselves, debilitated; the seams were\r
-white, a vague button-hole yawned at one of the elbows; moreover, one of\r
-the coat buttons was missing on the breast; but this was only detail; as\r
-the hand of the statesman should always be thrust into his coat and laid\r
-upon his heart, its function was to conceal the absent button.\r
-\r
-If Marius had been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris, he\r
-would instantly have recognized upon the back of the visitor whom\r
-Basque had just shown in, the statesman's suit borrowed from the\r
-pick-me-down-that shop of the Changer.\r
-\r
-Marius' disappointment on beholding another man than the one whom he\r
-expected to see turned to the newcomer's disadvantage.\r
-\r
-He surveyed him from head to foot, while that personage made exaggerated\r
-bows, and demanded in a curt tone:\r
-\r
-"What do you want?"\r
-\r
-The man replied with an amiable grin of which the caressing smile of a\r
-crocodile will furnish some idea:\r
-\r
-"It seems to me impossible that I should not have already had the honor\r
-of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society. I think I actually did meet\r
-monsieur personally, several years ago, at the house of Madame la\r
-Princesse Bagration and in the drawing-rooms of his Lordship the Vicomte\r
-Dambray, peer of France."\r
-\r
-It is always a good bit of tactics in knavery to pretend to recognize\r
-some one whom one does not know.\r
-\r
-Marius paid attention to the manner of this man's speech. He spied\r
-on his accent and gesture, but his disappointment increased; the\r
-pronunciation was nasal and absolutely unlike the dry, shrill tone which\r
-he had expected.\r
-\r
-He was utterly routed.\r
-\r
-"I know neither Madame Bagration nor M. Dambray," said he. "I have never\r
-set foot in the house of either of them in my life."\r
-\r
-The reply was ungracious. The personage, determined to be gracious at\r
-any cost, insisted.\r
-\r
-"Then it must have been at Chateaubriand's that I have seen Monsieur! I\r
-know Chateaubriand very well. He is very affable. He sometimes says to\r
-me: 'Thenard, my friend . . . won't you drink a glass of wine with me?'"\r
-\r
-Marius' brow grew more and more severe:\r
-\r
-"I have never had the honor of being received by M. de Chateaubriand.\r
-Let us cut it short. What do you want?"\r
-\r
-The man bowed lower at that harsh voice.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, deign to listen to me. There is in America, in a\r
-district near Panama, a village called la Joya. That village is composed\r
-of a single house, a large, square house of three stories, built of\r
-bricks dried in the sun, each side of the square five hundred feet in\r
-length, each story retreating twelve feet back of the story below, in\r
-such a manner as to leave in front a terrace which makes the circuit\r
-of the edifice, in the centre an inner court where the provisions and\r
-munitions are kept; no windows, loopholes, no doors, ladders, ladders\r
-to mount from the ground to the first terrace, and from the first to the\r
-second, and from the second to the third, ladders to descend into the\r
-inner court, no doors to the chambers, trap-doors, no staircases to the\r
-chambers, ladders; in the evening the traps are closed, the ladders\r
-are withdrawn carbines and blunderbusses trained from the loopholes;\r
-no means of entering, a house by day, a citadel by night, eight hundred\r
-inhabitants,--that is the village. Why so many precautions? because the\r
-country is dangerous; it is full of cannibals. Then why do people go\r
-there? because the country is marvellous; gold is found there."\r
-\r
-"What are you driving at?" interrupted Marius, who had passed from\r
-disappointment to impatience.\r
-\r
-"At this, Monsieur le Baron. I am an old and weary diplomat. Ancient\r
-civilization has thrown me on my own devices. I want to try savages."\r
-\r
-"Well?"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, egotism is the law of the world. The proletarian\r
-peasant woman, who toils by the day, turns round when the diligence\r
-passes by, the peasant proprietress, who toils in her field, does not\r
-turn round. The dog of the poor man barks at the rich man, the dog\r
-of the rich man barks at the poor man. Each one for himself.\r
-Self-interest--that's the object of men. Gold, that's the loadstone."\r
-\r
-"What then? Finish."\r
-\r
-"I should like to go and establish myself at la Joya. There are three\r
-of us. I have my spouse and my young lady; a very beautiful girl. The\r
-journey is long and costly. I need a little money."\r
-\r
-"What concern is that of mine?" demanded Marius.\r
-\r
-The stranger stretched his neck out of his cravat, a gesture\r
-characteristic of the vulture, and replied with an augmented smile.\r
-\r
-"Has not Monsieur le Baron perused my letter?"\r
-\r
-There was some truth in this. The fact is, that the contents of the\r
-epistle had slipped Marius' mind. He had seen the writing rather than\r
-read the letter. He could hardly recall it. But a moment ago a fresh\r
-start had been given him. He had noted that detail: "my spouse and my\r
-young lady."\r
-\r
-He fixed a penetrating glance on the stranger. An examining judge could\r
-not have done the look better. He almost lay in wait for him.\r
-\r
-He confined himself to replying:\r
-\r
-"State the case precisely."\r
-\r
-The stranger inserted his two hands in both his fobs, drew himself up\r
-without straightening his dorsal column, but scrutinizing Marius in his\r
-turn, with the green gaze of his spectacles.\r
-\r
-"So be it, Monsieur le Baron. I will be precise. I have a secret to sell\r
-to you."\r
-\r
-"A secret?"\r
-\r
-"A secret."\r
-\r
-"Which concerns me?"\r
-\r
-"Somewhat."\r
-\r
-"What is the secret?"\r
-\r
-Marius scrutinized the man more and more as he listened to him.\r
-\r
-"I commence gratis," said the stranger. "You will see that I am\r
-interesting."\r
-\r
-"Speak."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, you have in your house a thief and an assassin."\r
-\r
-Marius shuddered.\r
-\r
-"In my house? no," said he.\r
-\r
-The imperturbable stranger brushed his hat with his elbow and went on:\r
-\r
-"An assassin and a thief. Remark, Monsieur le Baron, that I do not here\r
-speak of ancient deeds, deeds of the past which have lapsed, which can\r
-be effaced by limitation before the law and by repentance before God.\r
-I speak of recent deeds, of actual facts as still unknown to justice\r
-at this hour. I continue. This man has insinuated himself into your\r
-confidence, and almost into your family under a false name. I am about\r
-to tell you his real name. And to tell it to you for nothing."\r
-\r
-"I am listening."\r
-\r
-"His name is Jean Valjean."\r
-\r
-"I know it."\r
-\r
-"I am going to tell you, equally for nothing, who he is."\r
-\r
-"Say on."\r
-\r
-"He is an ex-convict."\r
-\r
-"I know it."\r
-\r
-"You know it since I have had the honor of telling you."\r
-\r
-"No. I knew it before."\r
-\r
-Marius' cold tone, that double reply of "I know it," his laconicism,\r
-which was not favorable to dialogue, stirred up some smouldering wrath\r
-in the stranger. He launched a furious glance on the sly at Marius,\r
-which was instantly extinguished. Rapid as it was, this glance was of\r
-the kind which a man recognizes when he has once beheld it; it did not\r
-escape Marius. Certain flashes can only proceed from certain souls;\r
-the eye, that vent-hole of the thought, glows with it; spectacles hide\r
-nothing; try putting a pane of glass over hell!\r
-\r
-The stranger resumed with a smile:\r
-\r
-"I will not permit myself to contradict Monsieur le Baron. In any case,\r
-you ought to perceive that I am well informed. Now what I have to tell\r
-you is known to myself alone. This concerns the fortune of Madame la\r
-Baronne. It is an extraordinary secret. It is for sale--I make you the\r
-first offer of it. Cheap. Twenty thousand francs."\r
-\r
-"I know that secret as well as the others," said Marius.\r
-\r
-The personage felt the necessity of lowering his price a trifle.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, say ten thousand francs and I will speak."\r
-\r
-"I repeat to you that there is nothing which you can tell me. I know\r
-what you wish to say to me."\r
-\r
-A fresh flash gleamed in the man's eye. He exclaimed:\r
-\r
-"But I must dine to-day, nevertheless. It is an extraordinary secret,\r
-I tell you. Monsieur le Baron, I will speak. I speak. Give me twenty\r
-francs."\r
-\r
-Marius gazed intently at him:\r
-\r
-"I know your extraordinary secret, just as I knew Jean Valjean's name,\r
-just as I know your name."\r
-\r
-"My name?"\r
-\r
-"Yes."\r
-\r
-"That is not difficult, Monsieur le Baron. I had the honor to write to\r
-you and to tell it to you. Thenard."\r
-\r
-"--Dier."\r
-\r
-"Hey?"\r
-\r
-"Thenardier."\r
-\r
-"Who's that?"\r
-\r
-In danger the porcupine bristles up, the beetle feigns death, the old\r
-guard forms in a square; this man burst into laughter.\r
-\r
-Then he flicked a grain of dust from the sleeve of his coat with a\r
-fillip.\r
-\r
-Marius continued:\r
-\r
-"You are also Jondrette the workman, Fabantou the comedian, Genflot the\r
-poet, Don Alvares the Spaniard, and Mistress Balizard."\r
-\r
-"Mistress what?"\r
-\r
-"And you kept a pot-house at Montfermeil."\r
-\r
-"A pot-house! Never."\r
-\r
-"And I tell you that your name is Thenardier."\r
-\r
-"I deny it."\r
-\r
-"And that you are a rascal. Here."\r
-\r
-And Marius drew a bank-note from his pocket and flung it in his face.\r
-\r
-"Thanks! Pardon me! five hundred francs! Monsieur le Baron!"\r
-\r
-And the man, overcome, bowed, seized the note and examined it.\r
-\r
-"Five hundred francs!" he began again, taken aback. And he stammered in\r
-a low voice: "An honest rustler."[69]\r
-\r
-Then brusquely:\r
-\r
-"Well, so be it!" he exclaimed. "Let us put ourselves at our ease."\r
-\r
-And with the agility of a monkey, flinging back his hair, tearing off\r
-his spectacles, and withdrawing from his nose by sleight of hand the two\r
-quills of which mention was recently made, and which the reader has also\r
-met with on another page of this book, he took off his face as the man\r
-takes off his hat.\r
-\r
-His eye lighted up; his uneven brow, with hollows in some places and\r
-bumps in others, hideously wrinkled at the top, was laid bare, his nose\r
-had become as sharp as a beak; the fierce and sagacious profile of the\r
-man of prey reappeared.\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron is infallible," he said in a clear voice whence all\r
-nasal twang had disappeared, "I am Thenardier."\r
-\r
-And he straightened up his crooked back.\r
-\r
-Thenardier, for it was really he, was strangely surprised; he would have\r
-been troubled, had he been capable of such a thing. He had come to bring\r
-astonishment, and it was he who had received it. This humiliation had\r
-been worth five hundred francs to him, and, taking it all in all, he\r
-accepted it; but he was none the less bewildered.\r
-\r
-He beheld this Baron Pontmercy for the first time, and, in spite of\r
-his disguise, this Baron Pontmercy recognized him, and recognized\r
-him thoroughly. And not only was this Baron perfectly informed as to\r
-Thenardier, but he seemed well posted as to Jean Valjean. Who was this\r
-almost beardless young man, who was so glacial and so generous, who knew\r
-people's names, who knew all their names, and who opened his purse to\r
-them, who bullied rascals like a judge, and who paid them like a dupe?\r
-\r
-Thenardier, the reader will remember, although he had been Marius'\r
-neighbor, had never seen him, which is not unusual in Paris; he had\r
-formerly, in a vague way, heard his daughters talk of a very poor young\r
-man named Marius who lived in the house. He had written to him, without\r
-knowing him, the letter with which the reader is acquainted.\r
-\r
-No connection between that Marius and M. le Baron Pontmercy was possible\r
-in his mind.\r
-\r
-As for the name Pontmercy, it will be recalled that, on the battlefield\r
-of Waterloo, he had only heard the last two syllables, for which he\r
-always entertained the legitimate scorn which one owes to what is merely\r
-an expression of thanks.\r
-\r
-However, through his daughter Azelma, who had started on the scent of\r
-the married pair on the 16th of February, and through his own personal\r
-researches, he had succeeded in learning many things, and, from the\r
-depths of his own gloom, he had contrived to grasp more than one\r
-mysterious clew. He had discovered, by dint of industry, or, at least,\r
-by dint of induction, he had guessed who the man was whom he had\r
-encountered on a certain day in the Grand Sewer. From the man he had\r
-easily reached the name. He knew that Madame la Baronne Pontmercy was\r
-Cosette. But he meant to be discreet in that quarter.\r
-\r
-Who was Cosette? He did not know exactly himself. He did, indeed, catch\r
-an inkling of illegitimacy, the history of Fantine had always seemed to\r
-him equivocal; but what was the use of talking about that? in order to\r
-cause himself to be paid for his silence? He had, or thought he had,\r
-better wares than that for sale. And, according to all appearances, if\r
-he were to come and make to the Baron Pontmercy this revelation--and\r
-without proof: "Your wife is a bastard," the only result would be to\r
-attract the boot of the husband towards the loins of the revealer.\r
-\r
-From Thenardier's point of view, the conversation with Marius had not\r
-yet begun. He ought to have drawn back, to have modified his strategy,\r
-to have abandoned his position, to have changed his front; but nothing\r
-essential had been compromised as yet, and he had five hundred francs\r
-in his pocket. Moreover, he had something decisive to say, and, even\r
-against this very well-informed and well-armed Baron Pontmercy, he felt\r
-himself strong. For men of Thenardier's nature, every dialogue is\r
-a combat. In the one in which he was about to engage, what was his\r
-situation? He did not know to whom he was speaking, but he did know of\r
-what he was speaking, he made this rapid review of his inner forces, and\r
-after having said: "I am Thenardier," he waited.\r
-\r
-Marius had become thoughtful. So he had hold of Thenardier at last.\r
-That man whom he had so greatly desired to find was before him. He could\r
-honor Colonel Pontmercy's recommendation.\r
-\r
-He felt humiliated that that hero should have owned anything to this\r
-villain, and that the letter of change drawn from the depths of the tomb\r
-by his father upon him, Marius, had been protested up to that day. It\r
-also seemed to him, in the complex state of his mind towards Thenardier,\r
-that there was occasion to avenge the Colonel for the misfortune of\r
-having been saved by such a rascal. In any case, he was content. He\r
-was about to deliver the Colonel's shade from this unworthy creditor\r
-at last, and it seemed to him that he was on the point of rescuing his\r
-father's memory from the debtors' prison. By the side of this duty there\r
-was another--to elucidate, if possible, the source of Cosette's fortune.\r
-The opportunity appeared to present itself. Perhaps Thenardier knew\r
-something. It might prove useful to see the bottom of this man.\r
-\r
-He commenced with this.\r
-\r
-Thenardier had caused the "honest rustler" to disappear in his fob, and\r
-was gazing at Marius with a gentleness that was almost tender.\r
-\r
-Marius broke the silence.\r
-\r
-"Thenardier, I have told you your name. Now, would you like to have me\r
-tell you your secret--the one that you came here to reveal to me? I have\r
-information of my own, also. You shall see that I know more about it\r
-than you do. Jean Valjean, as you have said, is an assassin and a thief.\r
-A thief, because he robbed a wealthy manufacturer, whose ruin he brought\r
-about. An assassin, because he assassinated police-agent Javert."\r
-\r
-"I don't understand, sir," ejaculated Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"I will make myself intelligible. In a certain arrondissement of the Pas\r
-de Calais, there was, in 1822, a man who had fallen out with justice,\r
-and who, under the name of M. Madeleine, had regained his status and\r
-rehabilitated himself. This man had become a just man in the full force\r
-of the term. In a trade, the manufacture of black glass goods, he\r
-made the fortune of an entire city. As far as his personal fortune was\r
-concerned he made that also, but as a secondary matter, and in some\r
-sort, by accident. He was the foster-father of the poor. He founded\r
-hospitals, opened schools, visited the sick, dowered young girls,\r
-supported widows, and adopted orphans; he was like the guardian angel of\r
-the country. He refused the cross, he was appointed Mayor. A liberated\r
-convict knew the secret of a penalty incurred by this man in former\r
-days; he denounced him, and had him arrested, and profited by the arrest\r
-to come to Paris and cause the banker Laffitte,--I have the fact from\r
-the cashier himself,--by means of a false signature, to hand over to\r
-him the sum of over half a million which belonged to M. Madeleine. This\r
-convict who robbed M. Madeleine was Jean Valjean. As for the other fact,\r
-you have nothing to tell me about it either. Jean Valjean killed the\r
-agent Javert; he shot him with a pistol. I, the person who is speaking\r
-to you, was present."\r
-\r
-Thenardier cast upon Marius the sovereign glance of a conquered man who\r
-lays his hand once more upon the victory, and who has just regained, in\r
-one instant, all the ground which he has lost. But the smile returned\r
-instantly. The inferior's triumph in the presence of his superior must\r
-be wheedling.\r
-\r
-Thenardier contented himself with saying to Marius:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track."\r
-\r
-And he emphasized this phrase by making his bunch of seals execute an\r
-expressive whirl.\r
-\r
-"What!" broke forth Marius, "do you dispute that? These are facts."\r
-\r
-"They are chimeras. The confidence with which Monsieur le Baron honors\r
-me renders it my duty to tell him so. Truth and justice before all\r
-things. I do not like to see folks accused unjustly. Monsieur le Baron,\r
-Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean did not kill\r
-Javert."\r
-\r
-"This is too much! How is this?"\r
-\r
-"For two reasons."\r
-\r
-"What are they? Speak."\r
-\r
-"This is the first: he did not rob M. Madeleine, because it is Jean\r
-Valjean himself who was M. Madeleine."\r
-\r
-"What tale are you telling me?"\r
-\r
-"And this is the second: he did not assassinate Javert, because the\r
-person who killed Javert was Javert."\r
-\r
-"What do you mean to say?"\r
-\r
-"That Javert committed suicide."\r
-\r
-"Prove it! prove it!" cried Marius beside himself.\r
-\r
-Thenardier resumed, scanning his phrase after the manner of the ancient\r
-Alexandrine measure:\r
-\r
-\r
-"Police-agent-Ja-vert-was-found-drowned-un-der-a-boat-of-the-Pont-au-Change."\r
-\r
-"But prove it!"\r
-\r
-Thenardier drew from his pocket a large envelope of gray paper, which\r
-seemed to contain sheets folded in different sizes.\r
-\r
-"I have my papers," he said calmly.\r
-\r
-And he added:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, in your interests I desired to know Jean Valjean\r
-thoroughly. I say that Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine are one and the\r
-same man, and I say that Javert had no other assassin than Javert. If\r
-I speak, it is because I have proofs. Not manuscript proofs--writing is\r
-suspicious, handwriting is complaisant,--but printed proofs."\r
-\r
-As he spoke, Thenardier extracted from the envelope two copies of\r
-newspapers, yellow, faded, and strongly saturated with tobacco. One of\r
-these two newspapers, broken at every fold and falling into rags, seemed\r
-much older than the other.\r
-\r
-"Two facts, two proofs," remarked Thenardier. And he offered the two\r
-newspapers, unfolded, to Marius.\r
-\r
-The reader is acquainted with these two papers. One, the most ancient, a\r
-number of the Drapeau Blanc of the 25th of July, 1823, the text of\r
-which can be seen in the first volume, established the identity of M.\r
-Madeleine and Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-The other, a Moniteur of the 15th of June, 1832, announced the suicide\r
-of Javert, adding that it appeared from a verbal report of Javert to the\r
-prefect that, having been taken prisoner in the barricade of the Rue de\r
-la Chanvrerie, he had owed his life to the magnanimity of an insurgent\r
-who, holding him under his pistol, had fired into the air, instead of\r
-blowing out his brains.\r
-\r
-Marius read. He had evidence, a certain date, irrefragable proof, these\r
-two newspapers had not been printed expressly for the purpose of backing\r
-up Thenardier's statements; the note printed in the Moniteur had been an\r
-administrative communication from the Prefecture of Police. Marius could\r
-not doubt.\r
-\r
-The information of the cashier-clerk had been false, and he himself had\r
-been deceived.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, who had suddenly grown grand, emerged from his cloud.\r
-Marius could not repress a cry of joy.\r
-\r
-"Well, then this unhappy wretch is an admirable man! the whole of that\r
-fortune really belonged to him! he is Madeleine, the providence of a\r
-whole countryside! he is Jean Valjean, Javert's savior! he is a hero! he\r
-is a saint!"\r
-\r
-"He's not a saint, and he's not a hero!" said Thenardier. "He's an\r
-assassin and a robber."\r
-\r
-And he added, in the tone of a man who begins to feel that he possesses\r
-some authority:\r
-\r
-"Let us be calm."\r
-\r
-Robber, assassin--those words which Marius thought had disappeared and\r
-which returned, fell upon him like an ice-cold shower-bath.\r
-\r
-"Again!" said he.\r
-\r
-"Always," ejaculated Thenardier. "Jean Valjean did not rob Madeleine,\r
-but he is a thief. He did not kill Javert, but he is a murderer."\r
-\r
-"Will you speak," retorted Marius, "of that miserable theft, committed\r
-forty years ago, and expiated, as your own newspapers prove, by a whole\r
-life of repentance, of self-abnegation and of virtue?"\r
-\r
-"I say assassination and theft, Monsieur le Baron, and I repeat that I\r
-am speaking of actual facts. What I have to reveal to you is absolutely\r
-unknown. It belongs to unpublished matter. And perhaps you will find in\r
-it the source of the fortune so skilfully presented to Madame la Baronne\r
-by Jean Valjean. I say skilfully, because, by a gift of that nature it\r
-would not be so very unskilful to slip into an honorable house whose\r
-comforts one would then share, and, at the same stroke, to conceal one's\r
-crime, and to enjoy one's theft, to bury one's name and to create for\r
-oneself a family."\r
-\r
-"I might interrupt you at this point," said Marius, "but go on."\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, I will tell you all, leaving the recompense to your\r
-generosity. This secret is worth massive gold. You will say to me: 'Why\r
-do not you apply to Jean Valjean?' For a very simple reason; I know\r
-that he has stripped himself, and stripped himself in your favor, and I\r
-consider the combination ingenious; but he has no longer a son, he would\r
-show me his empty hands, and, since I am in need of some money for\r
-my trip to la Joya, I prefer you, you who have it all, to him who has\r
-nothing. I am a little fatigued, permit me to take a chair."\r
-\r
-Marius seated himself and motioned to him to do the same.\r
-\r
-Thenardier installed himself on a tufted chair, picked up his two\r
-newspapers, thrust them back into their envelope, and murmured as he\r
-pecked at the Drapeau Blanc with his nail: "It cost me a good deal of\r
-trouble to get this one."\r
-\r
-That done he crossed his legs and stretched himself out on the back of\r
-the chair, an attitude characteristic of people who are sure of what\r
-they are saying, then he entered upon his subject gravely, emphasizing\r
-his words:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, on the 6th of June, 1832, about a year ago, on the\r
-day of the insurrection, a man was in the Grand Sewer of Paris, at the\r
-point where the sewer enters the Seine, between the Pont des Invalides\r
-and the Pont de Jena."\r
-\r
-Marius abruptly drew his chair closer to that of Thenardier. Thenardier\r
-noticed this movement and continued with the deliberation of an orator\r
-who holds his interlocutor and who feels his adversary palpitating under\r
-his words:\r
-\r
-"This man, forced to conceal himself, and for reasons, moreover, which\r
-are foreign to politics, had adopted the sewer as his domicile and had\r
-a key to it. It was, I repeat, on the 6th of June; it might have been\r
-eight o'clock in the evening. The man hears a noise in the sewer.\r
-Greatly surprised, he hides himself and lies in wait. It was the sound\r
-of footsteps, some one was walking in the dark, and coming in his\r
-direction. Strange to say, there was another man in the sewer besides\r
-himself. The grating of the outlet from the sewer was not far off.\r
-A little light which fell through it permitted him to recognize the\r
-newcomer, and to see that the man was carrying something on his back.\r
-He was walking in a bent attitude. The man who was walking in a bent\r
-attitude was an ex-convict, and what he was dragging on his shoulders\r
-was a corpse. Assassination caught in the very act, if ever there was\r
-such a thing. As for the theft, that is understood; one does not kill\r
-a man gratis. This convict was on his way to fling the body into the\r
-river. One fact is to be noticed, that before reaching the exit\r
-grating, this convict, who had come a long distance in the sewer, must,\r
-necessarily, have encountered a frightful quagmire where it seems as\r
-though he might have left the body, but the sewermen would have found\r
-the assassinated man the very next day, while at work on the quagmire,\r
-and that did not suit the assassin's plans. He had preferred to\r
-traverse that quagmire with his burden, and his exertions must have been\r
-terrible, for it is impossible to risk one's life more completely; I\r
-don't understand how he could have come out of that alive."\r
-\r
-Marius' chair approached still nearer. Thenardier took advantage of this\r
-to draw a long breath. He went on:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, a sewer is not the Champ de Mars. One lacks\r
-everything there, even room. When two men are there, they must meet.\r
-That is what happened. The man domiciled there and the passer-by were\r
-forced to bid each other good-day, greatly to the regret of both. The\r
-passer-by said to the inhabitant:--"You see what I have on my back, I\r
-must get out, you have the key, give it to me." That convict was a man\r
-of terrible strength. There was no way of refusing. Nevertheless, the\r
-man who had the key parleyed, simply to gain time. He examined the dead\r
-man, but he could see nothing, except that the latter was young, well\r
-dressed, with the air of being rich, and all disfigured with blood.\r
-While talking, the man contrived to tear and pull off behind, without\r
-the assassin perceiving it, a bit of the assassinated man's coat. A\r
-document for conviction, you understand; a means of recovering the trace\r
-of things and of bringing home the crime to the criminal. He put\r
-this document for conviction in his pocket. After which he opened the\r
-grating, made the man go out with his embarrassment on his back, closed\r
-the grating again, and ran off, not caring to be mixed up with the\r
-remainder of the adventure and above all, not wishing to be present\r
-when the assassin threw the assassinated man into the river. Now you\r
-comprehend. The man who was carrying the corpse was Jean Valjean; the\r
-one who had the key is speaking to you at this moment; and the piece of\r
-the coat . . ."\r
-\r
-Thenardier completed his phrase by drawing from his pocket, and holding,\r
-on a level with his eyes, nipped between his two thumbs and his two\r
-forefingers, a strip of torn black cloth, all covered with dark spots.\r
-\r
-Marius had sprung to his feet, pale, hardly able to draw his breath,\r
-with his eyes riveted on the fragment of black cloth, and, without\r
-uttering a word, without taking his eyes from that fragment, he\r
-retreated to the wall and fumbled with his right hand along the wall for\r
-a key which was in the lock of a cupboard near the chimney.\r
-\r
-He found the key, opened the cupboard, plunged his arm into it without\r
-looking, and without his frightened gaze quitting the rag which\r
-Thenardier still held outspread.\r
-\r
-But Thenardier continued:\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron, I have the strongest of reasons for believing that\r
-the assassinated young man was an opulent stranger lured into a trap by\r
-Jean Valjean, and the bearer of an enormous sum of money."\r
-\r
-"The young man was myself, and here is the coat!" cried Marius, and he\r
-flung upon the floor an old black coat all covered with blood.\r
-\r
-Then, snatching the fragment from the hands of Thenardier, he crouched\r
-down over the coat, and laid the torn morsel against the tattered skirt.\r
-The rent fitted exactly, and the strip completed the coat.\r
-\r
-Thenardier was petrified.\r
-\r
-This is what he thought: "I'm struck all of a heap."\r
-\r
-Marius rose to his feet trembling, despairing, radiant.\r
-\r
-He fumbled in his pocket and stalked furiously to Thenardier, presenting\r
-to him and almost thrusting in his face his fist filled with bank-notes\r
-for five hundred and a thousand francs.\r
-\r
-"You are an infamous wretch! you are a liar, a calumniator, a villain.\r
-You came to accuse that man, you have only justified him; you wanted to\r
-ruin him, you have only succeeded in glorifying him. And it is you who\r
-are the thief! And it is you who are the assassin! I saw you, Thenardier\r
-Jondrette, in that lair on the Rue de l'Hopital. I know enough about\r
-you to send you to the galleys and even further if I choose. Here are a\r
-thousand francs, bully that you are!"\r
-\r
-And he flung a thousand franc note at Thenardier.\r
-\r
-"Ah! Jondrette Thenardier, vile rascal! Let this serve you as a lesson,\r
-you dealer in second-hand secrets, merchant of mysteries, rummager of\r
-the shadows, wretch! Take these five hundred francs and get out of here!\r
-Waterloo protects you."\r
-\r
-"Waterloo!" growled Thenardier, pocketing the five hundred francs along\r
-with the thousand.\r
-\r
-"Yes, assassin! You there saved the life of a Colonel. . ."\r
-\r
-"Of a General," said Thenardier, elevating his head.\r
-\r
-"Of a Colonel!" repeated Marius in a rage. "I wouldn't give a ha'penny\r
-for a general. And you come here to commit infamies! I tell you that\r
-you have committed all crimes. Go! disappear! Only be happy, that is all\r
-that I desire. Ah! monster! here are three thousand francs more. Take\r
-them. You will depart to-morrow, for America, with your daughter;\r
-for your wife is dead, you abominable liar. I shall watch over your\r
-departure, you ruffian, and at that moment I will count out to you\r
-twenty thousand francs. Go get yourself hung elsewhere!"\r
-\r
-"Monsieur le Baron!" replied Thenardier, bowing to the very earth,\r
-"eternal gratitude." And Thenardier left the room, understanding\r
-nothing, stupefied and delighted with this sweet crushing beneath sacks\r
-of gold, and with that thunder which had burst forth over his head in\r
-bank-bills.\r
-\r
-Struck by lightning he was, but he was also content; and he would\r
-have been greatly angered had he had a lightning rod to ward off such\r
-lightning as that.\r
-\r
-Let us finish with this man at once.\r
-\r
-Two days after the events which we are at this moment narrating, he set\r
-out, thanks to Marius' care, for America under a false name, with his\r
-daughter Azelma, furnished with a draft on New York for twenty thousand\r
-francs.\r
-\r
-The moral wretchedness of Thenardier, the bourgeois who had missed\r
-his vocation, was irremediable. He was in America what he had been in\r
-Europe. Contact with an evil man sometimes suffices to corrupt a good\r
-action and to cause evil things to spring from it. With Marius' money,\r
-Thenardier set up as a slave-dealer.\r
-\r
-As soon as Thenardier had left the house, Marius rushed to the garden,\r
-where Cosette was still walking.\r
-\r
-"Cosette! Cosette!" he cried. "Come! come quick! Let us go. Basque, a\r
-carriage! Cosette, come. Ah! My God! It was he who saved my life! Let us\r
-not lose a minute! Put on your shawl."\r
-\r
-Cosette thought him mad and obeyed.\r
-\r
-He could not breathe, he laid his hand on his heart to restrain its\r
-throbbing. He paced back and forth with huge strides, he embraced\r
-Cosette:\r
-\r
-"Ah! Cosette! I am an unhappy wretch!" said he.\r
-\r
-Marius was bewildered. He began to catch a glimpse in Jean Valjean of\r
-some indescribably lofty and melancholy figure. An unheard-of virtue,\r
-supreme and sweet, humble in its immensity, appeared to him. The convict\r
-was transfigured into Christ.\r
-\r
-Marius was dazzled by this prodigy. He did not know precisely what he\r
-beheld, but it was grand.\r
-\r
-In an instant, a hackney-carriage stood in front of the door.\r
-\r
-Marius helped Cosette in and darted in himself.\r
-\r
-"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, Number 7."\r
-\r
-The carriage drove off.\r
-\r
-"Ah! what happiness!" ejaculated Cosette. "Rue de l'Homme Arme, I did\r
-not dare to speak to you of that. We are going to see M. Jean."\r
-\r
-"Thy father! Cosette, thy father more than ever. Cosette, I guess it.\r
-You told me that you had never received the letter that I sent you by\r
-Gavroche. It must have fallen into his hands. Cosette, he went to the\r
-barricade to save me. As it is a necessity with him to be an angel, he\r
-saved others also; he saved Javert. He rescued me from that gulf to give\r
-me to you. He carried me on his back through that frightful sewer. Ah! I\r
-am a monster of ingratitude. Cosette, after having been your providence,\r
-he became mine. Just imagine, there was a terrible quagmire enough to\r
-drown one a hundred times over, to drown one in mire. Cosette! he made\r
-me traverse it. I was unconscious; I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I\r
-could know nothing of my own adventure. We are going to bring him back,\r
-to take him with us, whether he is willing or not, he shall never leave\r
-us again. If only he is at home! Provided only that we can find him,\r
-I will pass the rest of my life in venerating him. Yes, that is how it\r
-should be, do you see, Cosette? Gavroche must have delivered my letter\r
-to him. All is explained. You understand."\r
-\r
-Cosette did not understand a word.\r
-\r
-"You are right," she said to him.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile the carriage rolled on.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER V--A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH THERE IS DAY\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean turned round at the knock which he heard on his door.\r
-\r
-"Come in," he said feebly.\r
-\r
-The door opened.\r
-\r
-Cosette and Marius made their appearance.\r
-\r
-Cosette rushed into the room.\r
-\r
-Marius remained on the threshold, leaning against the jamb of the door.\r
-\r
-"Cosette!" said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-And he sat erect in his chair, his arms outstretched and trembling,\r
-haggard, livid, gloomy, an immense joy in his eyes.\r
-\r
-Cosette, stifling with emotion, fell upon Jean Valjean's breast.\r
-\r
-"Father!" said she.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, overcome, stammered:\r
-\r
-"Cosette! she! you! Madame! it is thou! Ah! my God!"\r
-\r
-And, pressed close in Cosette's arms, he exclaimed:\r
-\r
-"It is thou! thou art here! Thou dost pardon me then!"\r
-\r
-Marius, lowering his eyelids, in order to keep his tears from flowing,\r
-took a step forward and murmured between lips convulsively contracted to\r
-repress his sobs:\r
-\r
-"My father!"\r
-\r
-"And you also, you pardon me!" Jean Valjean said to him.\r
-\r
-Marius could find no words, and Jean Valjean added:\r
-\r
-"Thanks."\r
-\r
-Cosette tore off her shawl and tossed her hat on the bed.\r
-\r
-"It embarrasses me," said she.\r
-\r
-And, seating herself on the old man's knees, she put aside his white\r
-locks with an adorable movement, and kissed his brow.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean, bewildered, let her have her own way.\r
-\r
-Cosette, who only understood in a very confused manner, redoubled her\r
-caresses, as though she desired to pay Marius' debt.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean stammered:\r
-\r
-"How stupid people are! I thought that I should never see her again.\r
-Imagine, Monsieur Pontmercy, at the very moment when you entered, I\r
-was saying to myself: 'All is over. Here is her little gown, I am a\r
-miserable man, I shall never see Cosette again,' and I was saying that\r
-at the very moment when you were mounting the stairs. Was not I an\r
-idiot? Just see how idiotic one can be! One reckons without the good\r
-God. The good God says:\r
-\r
-"'You fancy that you are about to be abandoned, stupid! No. No, things\r
-will not go so. Come, there is a good man yonder who is in need of an\r
-angel.' And the angel comes, and one sees one's Cosette again! and one\r
-sees one's little Cosette once more! Ah! I was very unhappy."\r
-\r
-For a moment he could not speak, then he went on:\r
-\r
-"I really needed to see Cosette a little bit now and then. A heart needs\r
-a bone to gnaw. But I was perfectly conscious that I was in the way. I\r
-gave myself reasons: 'They do not want you, keep in your own course,\r
-one has not the right to cling eternally.' Ah! God be praised, I see her\r
-once more! Dost thou know, Cosette, thy husband is very handsome? Ah!\r
-what a pretty embroidered collar thou hast on, luckily. I am fond of\r
-that pattern. It was thy husband who chose it, was it not? And then,\r
-thou shouldst have some cashmere shawls. Let me call her thou, Monsieur\r
-Pontmercy. It will not be for long."\r
-\r
-And Cosette began again:\r
-\r
-"How wicked of you to have left us like that! Where did you go? Why have\r
-you stayed away so long? Formerly your journeys only lasted three or\r
-four days. I sent Nicolette, the answer always was: 'He is absent.' How\r
-long have you been back? Why did you not let us know? Do you know that\r
-you are very much changed? Ah! what a naughty father! he has been ill,\r
-and we have not known it! Stay, Marius, feel how cold his hand is!"\r
-\r
-"So you are here! Monsieur Pontmercy, you pardon me!" repeated Jean\r
-Valjean.\r
-\r
-At that word which Jean Valjean had just uttered once more, all that was\r
-swelling Marius' heart found vent.\r
-\r
-He burst forth:\r
-\r
-"Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And\r
-do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He\r
-has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and\r
-after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He\r
-has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate,\r
-to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks!\r
-Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too\r
-little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all\r
-that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through\r
-all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself.\r
-Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses!\r
-Cosette, that man is an angel!"\r
-\r
-"Hush! hush!" said Jean Valjean in a low voice. "Why tell all that?"\r
-\r
-"But you!" cried Marius with a wrath in which there was veneration, "why\r
-did you not tell it to me? It is your own fault, too. You save people's\r
-lives, and you conceal it from them! You do more, under the pretext of\r
-unmasking yourself, you calumniate yourself. It is frightful."\r
-\r
-"I told the truth," replied Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-"No," retorted Marius, "the truth is the whole truth; and that you did\r
-not tell. You were Monsieur Madeleine, why not have said so? You saved\r
-Javert, why not have said so? I owed my life to you, why not have said\r
-so?"\r
-\r
-"Because I thought as you do. I thought that you were in the right. It\r
-was necessary that I should go away. If you had known about that affair,\r
-of the sewer, you would have made me remain near you. I was therefore\r
-forced to hold my peace. If I had spoken, it would have caused\r
-embarrassment in every way."\r
-\r
-"It would have embarrassed what? embarrassed whom?" retorted Marius. "Do\r
-you think that you are going to stay here? We shall carry you off. Ah!\r
-good heavens! when I reflect that it was by an accident that I have\r
-learned all this. You form a part of ourselves. You are her father,\r
-and mine. You shall not pass another day in this dreadful house. Do not\r
-imagine that you will be here to-morrow."\r
-\r
-"To-morrow," said Jean Valjean, "I shall not be here, but I shall not be\r
-with you."\r
-\r
-"What do you mean?" replied Marius. "Ah! come now, we are not going to\r
-permit any more journeys. You shall never leave us again. You belong to\r
-us. We shall not loose our hold of you."\r
-\r
-"This time it is for good," added Cosette. "We have a carriage at the\r
-door. I shall run away with you. If necessary, I shall employ force."\r
-\r
-And she laughingly made a movement to lift the old man in her arms.\r
-\r
-"Your chamber still stands ready in our house," she went on. "If you\r
-only knew how pretty the garden is now! The azaleas are doing very\r
-well there. The walks are sanded with river sand; there are tiny violet\r
-shells. You shall eat my strawberries. I water them myself. And no\r
-more 'madame,' no more 'Monsieur Jean,' we are living under a Republic,\r
-everybody says thou, don't they, Marius? The programme is changed. If\r
-you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow, there was a robin redbreast\r
-which had made her nest in a hole in the wall, and a horrible cat ate\r
-her. My poor, pretty, little robin red-breast which used to put her head\r
-out of her window and look at me! I cried over it. I should have liked\r
-to kill the cat. But now nobody cries any more. Everybody laughs,\r
-everybody is happy. You are going to come with us. How delighted\r
-grandfather will be! You shall have your plot in the garden, you shall\r
-cultivate it, and we shall see whether your strawberries are as fine as\r
-mine. And, then, I shall do everything that you wish, and then, you will\r
-obey me prettily."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean listened to her without hearing her. He heard the music of\r
-her voice rather than the sense of her words; one of those large tears\r
-which are the sombre pearls of the soul welled up slowly in his eyes.\r
-\r
-He murmured:\r
-\r
-"The proof that God is good is that she is here."\r
-\r
-"Father!" said Cosette.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean continued:\r
-\r
-"It is quite true that it would be charming for us to live together.\r
-Their trees are full of birds. I would walk with Cosette. It is sweet to\r
-be among living people who bid each other 'good-day,' who call to each\r
-other in the garden. People see each other from early morning. We\r
-should each cultivate our own little corner. She would make me eat her\r
-strawberries. I would make her gather my roses. That would be charming.\r
-Only . . ."\r
-\r
-He paused and said gently:\r
-\r
-"It is a pity."\r
-\r
-The tear did not fall, it retreated, and Jean Valjean replaced it with a\r
-smile.\r
-\r
-Cosette took both the old man's hands in hers.\r
-\r
-"My God!" said she, "your hands are still colder than before. Are you\r
-ill? Do you suffer?"\r
-\r
-"I? No," replied Jean Valjean. "I am very well. Only . . ."\r
-\r
-He paused.\r
-\r
-"Only what?"\r
-\r
-"I am going to die presently."\r
-\r
-Cosette and Marius shuddered.\r
-\r
-"To die!" exclaimed Marius.\r
-\r
-"Yes, but that is nothing," said Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-He took breath, smiled and resumed:\r
-\r
-"Cosette, thou wert talking to me, go on, so thy little robin red-breast\r
-is dead? Speak, so that I may hear thy voice."\r
-\r
-Marius gazed at the old man in amazement.\r
-\r
-Cosette uttered a heartrending cry.\r
-\r
-"Father! my father! you will live. You are going to live. I insist upon\r
-your living, do you hear?"\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean raised his head towards her with adoration.\r
-\r
-"Oh! yes, forbid me to die. Who knows? Perhaps I shall obey. I was on\r
-the verge of dying when you came. That stopped me, it seemed to me that\r
-I was born again."\r
-\r
-"You are full of strength and life," cried Marius. "Do you imagine that\r
-a person can die like this? You have had sorrow, you shall have no more.\r
-It is I who ask your forgiveness, and on my knees! You are going to\r
-live, and to live with us, and to live a long time. We take possession\r
-of you once more. There are two of us here who will henceforth have no\r
-other thought than your happiness."\r
-\r
-"You see," resumed Cosette, all bathed in tears, "that Marius says that\r
-you shall not die."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean continued to smile.\r
-\r
-"Even if you were to take possession of me, Monsieur Pontmercy, would\r
-that make me other than I am? No, God has thought like you and myself,\r
-and he does not change his mind; it is useful for me to go. Death is\r
-a good arrangement. God knows better than we what we need. May you be\r
-happy, may Monsieur Pontmercy have Cosette, may youth wed the morning,\r
-may there be around you, my children, lilacs and nightingales; may your\r
-life be a beautiful, sunny lawn, may all the enchantments of heaven fill\r
-your souls, and now let me, who am good for nothing, die; it is certain\r
-that all this is right. Come, be reasonable, nothing is possible now, I\r
-am fully conscious that all is over. And then, last night, I drank that\r
-whole jug of water. How good thy husband is, Cosette! Thou art much\r
-better off with him than with me."\r
-\r
-A noise became audible at the door.\r
-\r
-It was the doctor entering.\r
-\r
-"Good-day, and farewell, doctor," said Jean Valjean. "Here are my poor\r
-children."\r
-\r
-Marius stepped up to the doctor. He addressed to him only this single\r
-word: "Monsieur? . . ." But his manner of pronouncing it contained a\r
-complete question.\r
-\r
-The doctor replied to the question by an expressive glance.\r
-\r
-"Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no\r
-reason for being unjust towards God."\r
-\r
-A silence ensued.\r
-\r
-All breasts were oppressed.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean turned to Cosette. He began to gaze at her as though he\r
-wished to retain her features for eternity.\r
-\r
-In the depths of the shadow into which he had already descended, ecstasy\r
-was still possible to him when gazing at Cosette. The reflection of that\r
-sweet face lighted up his pale visage.\r
-\r
-The doctor felt of his pulse.\r
-\r
-"Ah! it was you that he wanted!" he murmured, looking at Cosette and\r
-Marius.\r
-\r
-And bending down to Marius' ear, he added in a very low voice:\r
-\r
-"Too late."\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean surveyed the doctor and Marius serenely, almost without\r
-ceasing to gaze at Cosette.\r
-\r
-These barely articulate words were heard to issue from his mouth:\r
-\r
-"It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live."\r
-\r
-All at once he rose to his feet. These accesses of strength are\r
-sometimes the sign of the death agony. He walked with a firm step to\r
-the wall, thrusting aside Marius and the doctor who tried to help him,\r
-detached from the wall a little copper crucifix which was suspended\r
-there, and returned to his seat with all the freedom of movement of\r
-perfect health, and said in a loud voice, as he laid the crucifix on the\r
-table:\r
-\r
-"Behold the great martyr."\r
-\r
-Then his chest sank in, his head wavered, as though the intoxication of\r
-the tomb were seizing hold upon him.\r
-\r
-His hands, which rested on his knees, began to press their nails into\r
-the stuff of his trousers.\r
-\r
-Cosette supported his shoulders, and sobbed, and tried to speak to him,\r
-but could not.\r
-\r
-Among the words mingled with that mournful saliva which accompanies\r
-tears, they distinguished words like the following:\r
-\r
-"Father, do not leave us. Is it possible that we have found you only to\r
-lose you again?"\r
-\r
-It might be said that agony writhes. It goes, comes, advances towards\r
-the sepulchre, and returns towards life. There is groping in the action\r
-of dying.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean rallied after this semi-swoon, shook his brow as though\r
-to make the shadows fall away from it and became almost perfectly lucid\r
-once more.\r
-\r
-He took a fold of Cosette's sleeve and kissed it.\r
-\r
-"He is coming back! doctor, he is coming back," cried Marius.\r
-\r
-"You are good, both of you," said Jean Valjean. "I am going to tell you\r
-what has caused me pain. What has pained me, Monsieur Pontmercy, is that\r
-you have not been willing to touch that money. That money really belongs\r
-to your wife. I will explain to you, my children, and for that reason,\r
-also, I am glad to see you. Black jet comes from England, white jet\r
-comes from Norway. All this is in this paper, which you will read. For\r
-bracelets, I invented a way of substituting for slides of soldered sheet\r
-iron, slides of iron laid together. It is prettier, better and less\r
-costly. You will understand how much money can be made in that way. So\r
-Cosette's fortune is really hers. I give you these details, in order\r
-that your mind may be set at rest."\r
-\r
-The portress had come upstairs and was gazing in at the half-open door.\r
-The doctor dismissed her.\r
-\r
-But he could not prevent this zealous woman from exclaiming to the dying\r
-man before she disappeared: "Would you like a priest?"\r
-\r
-"I have had one," replied Jean Valjean.\r
-\r
-And with his finger he seemed to indicate a point above his head where\r
-one would have said that he saw some one.\r
-\r
-It is probable, in fact, that the Bishop was present at this death\r
-agony.\r
-\r
-Cosette gently slipped a pillow under his loins.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean resumed:\r
-\r
-"Have no fear, Monsieur Pontmercy, I adjure you. The six hundred\r
-thousand francs really belong to Cosette. My life will have been wasted\r
-if you do not enjoy them! We managed to do very well with those glass\r
-goods. We rivalled what is called Berlin jewellery. However, we could\r
-not equal the black glass of England. A gross, which contains twelve\r
-hundred very well cut grains, only costs three francs."\r
-\r
-When a being who is dear to us is on the point of death, we gaze upon\r
-him with a look which clings convulsively to him and which would fain\r
-hold him back.\r
-\r
-Cosette gave her hand to Marius, and both, mute with anguish, not\r
-knowing what to say to the dying man, stood trembling and despairing\r
-before him.\r
-\r
-Jean Valjean sank moment by moment. He was failing; he was drawing near\r
-to the gloomy horizon.\r
-\r
-His breath had become intermittent; a little rattling interrupted it.\r
-He found some difficulty in moving his forearm, his feet had lost all\r
-movement, and in proportion as the wretchedness of limb and feebleness\r
-of body increased, all the majesty of his soul was displayed and spread\r
-over his brow. The light of the unknown world was already visible in his\r
-eyes.\r
-\r
-His face paled and smiled. Life was no longer there, it was something\r
-else.\r
-\r
-His breath sank, his glance grew grander. He was a corpse on which the\r
-wings could be felt.\r
-\r
-He made a sign to Cosette to draw near, then to Marius; the last minute\r
-of the last hour had, evidently, arrived.\r
-\r
-He began to speak to them in a voice so feeble that it seemed to come\r
-from a distance, and one would have said that a wall now rose between\r
-them and him.\r
-\r
-"Draw near, draw near, both of you. I love you dearly. Oh! how good it\r
-is to die like this! And thou lovest me also, my Cosette. I knew well\r
-that thou still felt friendly towards thy poor old man. How kind it was\r
-of thee to place that pillow under my loins! Thou wilt weep for me a\r
-little, wilt thou not? Not too much. I do not wish thee to have any real\r
-griefs. You must enjoy yourselves a great deal, my children. I forgot\r
-to tell you that the profit was greater still on the buckles without\r
-tongues than on all the rest. A gross of a dozen dozens cost ten francs\r
-and sold for sixty. It really was a good business. So there is no\r
-occasion for surprise at the six hundred thousand francs, Monsieur\r
-Pontmercy. It is honest money. You may be rich with a tranquil mind.\r
-Thou must have a carriage, a box at the theatres now and then, and\r
-handsome ball dresses, my Cosette, and then, thou must give good dinners\r
-to thy friends, and be very happy. I was writing to Cosette a while ago.\r
-She will find my letter. I bequeath to her the two candlesticks which\r
-stand on the chimney-piece. They are of silver, but to me they are gold,\r
-they are diamonds; they change candles which are placed in them into\r
-wax-tapers. I do not know whether the person who gave them to me is\r
-pleased with me yonder on high. I have done what I could. My children,\r
-you will not forget that I am a poor man, you will have me buried in the\r
-first plot of earth that you find, under a stone to mark the spot. This\r
-is my wish. No name on the stone. If Cosette cares to come for a little\r
-while now and then, it will give me pleasure. And you too, Monsieur\r
-Pontmercy. I must admit that I have not always loved you. I ask your\r
-pardon for that. Now she and you form but one for me. I feel very\r
-grateful to you. I am sure that you make Cosette happy. If you only\r
-knew, Monsieur Pontmercy, her pretty rosy cheeks were my delight; when I\r
-saw her in the least pale, I was sad. In the chest of drawers, there is\r
-a bank-bill for five hundred francs. I have not touched it. It is for\r
-the poor. Cosette, dost thou see thy little gown yonder on the bed? dost\r
-thou recognize it? That was ten years ago, however. How time flies! We\r
-have been very happy. All is over. Do not weep, my children, I am not\r
-going very far, I shall see you from there, you will only have to\r
-look at night, and you will see me smile. Cosette, dost thou remember\r
-Montfermeil? Thou wert in the forest, thou wert greatly terrified; dost\r
-thou remember how I took hold of the handle of the water-bucket? That\r
-was the first time that I touched thy poor, little hand. It was so cold!\r
-Ah! your hands were red then, mademoiselle, they are very white now. And\r
-the big doll! dost thou remember? Thou didst call her Catherine. Thou\r
-regrettedest not having taken her to the convent! How thou didst make\r
-me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had been raining, thou didst\r
-float bits of straw on the gutters, and watch them pass away. One day\r
-I gave thee a willow battledore and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and\r
-green feathers. Thou hast forgotten it. Thou wert roguish so young! Thou\r
-didst play. Thou didst put cherries in thy ears. Those are things of\r
-the past. The forests through which one has passed with one's child, the\r
-trees under which one has strolled, the convents where one has concealed\r
-oneself, the games, the hearty laughs of childhood, are shadows. I\r
-imagined that all that belonged to me. In that lay my stupidity. Those\r
-Thenardiers were wicked. Thou must forgive them. Cosette, the moment\r
-has come to tell thee the name of thy mother. She was called Fantine.\r
-Remember that name--Fantine. Kneel whenever thou utterest it. She\r
-suffered much. She loved thee dearly. She had as much unhappiness as\r
-thou hast had happiness. That is the way God apportions things. He is\r
-there on high, he sees us all, and he knows what he does in the midst of\r
-his great stars. I am on the verge of departure, my children. Love each\r
-other well and always. There is nothing else but that in the world: love\r
-for each other. You will think sometimes of the poor old man who died\r
-here. Oh my Cosette, it is not my fault, indeed, that I have not seen\r
-thee all this time, it cut me to the heart; I went as far as the corner\r
-of the street, I must have produced a queer effect on the people who\r
-saw me pass, I was like a madman, I once went out without my hat. I no\r
-longer see clearly, my children, I had still other things to say, but\r
-never mind. Think a little of me. Come still nearer. I die happy. Give\r
-me your dear and well-beloved heads, so that I may lay my hands upon\r
-them."\r
-\r
-Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, in despair, suffocating with\r
-tears, each beneath one of Jean Valjean's hands. Those august hands no\r
-longer moved.\r
-\r
-He had fallen backwards, the light of the candles illuminated him.\r
-\r
-His white face looked up to heaven, he allowed Cosette and Marius to\r
-cover his hands with kisses.\r
-\r
-He was dead.\r
-\r
-The night was starless and extremely dark. No doubt, in the gloom, some\r
-immense angel stood erect with wings outspread, awaiting that soul.\r
-\r
-[Illustration: Darkness 5b9-1-Darkness]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER VI--THE GRASS COVERS AND THE RAIN EFFACES\r
-\r
-In the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, in the vicinity of the common grave,\r
-far from the elegant quarter of that city of sepulchres, far from all\r
-the tombs of fancy which display in the presence of eternity all the\r
-hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner, beside an old wall,\r
-beneath a great yew tree over which climbs the wild convolvulus, amid\r
-dandelions and mosses, there lies a stone. That stone is no more exempt\r
-than others from the leprosy of time, of dampness, of the lichens and\r
-from the defilement of the birds. The water turns it green, the air\r
-blackens it. It is not near any path, and people are not fond of\r
-walking in that direction, because the grass is high and their feet\r
-are immediately wet. When there is a little sunshine, the lizards\r
-come thither. All around there is a quivering of weeds. In the spring,\r
-linnets warble in the trees.\r
-\r
-This stone is perfectly plain. In cutting it the only thought was the\r
-requirements of the tomb, and no other care was taken than to make the\r
-stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.\r
-\r
-No name is to be read there.\r
-\r
-Only, many years ago, a hand wrote upon it in pencil these four lines,\r
-which have become gradually illegible beneath the rain and the dust, and\r
-which are, to-day, probably effaced:\r
-\r
- Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien etrange,\r
- Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut plus son ange.\r
- La chose simplement d'elle-meme arriva,\r
- Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va.[70]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-LETTER TO M. DAELLI\r
-\r
-Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables in Milan.\r
-\r
- HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.\r
-\r
-\r
-You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Miserables is written for\r
-all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote\r
-it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as\r
-well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which\r
-have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems\r
-overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which\r
-cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the\r
-map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place\r
-where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of\r
-the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm\r
-him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: "Open to\r
-me, I come for you."\r
-\r
-At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which\r
-is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all\r
-climes, and he is groaning in all languages.\r
-\r
-Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your\r
-admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism,\r
-that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are\r
-more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to\r
-fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin,\r
-Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a\r
-heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities,\r
-you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin.\r
-Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky\r
-does not prevent rags on man.\r
-\r
-Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms,\r
-blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of\r
-the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled\r
-with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone.\r
-The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less\r
-deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social\r
-hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in\r
-England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo\r
-is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty\r
-nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same\r
-thing as to understand the Gospel badly.\r
-\r
-Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism\r
-be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance\r
-below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance,\r
-whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their\r
-mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where\r
-is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization\r
-acknowledges?\r
-\r
-Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to\r
-read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public\r
-schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent\r
-war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that\r
-passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience?\r
-military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of\r
-firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy?\r
-Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it\r
-stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the\r
-woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these\r
-two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization\r
-is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in\r
-Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what\r
-amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so\r
-fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public\r
-prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the\r
-death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and\r
-Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons.\r
-Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and\r
-politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes!\r
-Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass\r
-miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich\r
-as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious\r
-condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed\r
-by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great\r
-nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves,\r
-Miserables.\r
-\r
-From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more\r
-distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the\r
-priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.\r
-\r
-I resume. This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours.\r
-Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,--I\r
-understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that\r
-does not prevent them from being of use.\r
-\r
-As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own\r
-country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other\r
-nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I\r
-become more and more patriotic for humanity.\r
-\r
-This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance\r
-of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French,\r
-Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more,\r
-human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.\r
-\r
-Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition\r
-which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste\r
-and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.\r
-\r
-In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight,\r
-with having transgressed the bounds of what they call "French taste"; I\r
-should be glad if this eulogium were merited.\r
-\r
-In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal\r
-suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a\r
-man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"\r
-\r
-This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and\r
-for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one\r
-phrase in your letter. You write:--\r
-\r
-"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: 'This book, Les\r
-Miserables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French\r
-read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"--Alas! I repeat,\r
-whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since\r
-history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery\r
-has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived\r
-for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the\r
-Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe\r
-of the dawn.\r
-\r
-If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and\r
-in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it,\r
-sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished\r
-sentiments.\r
-\r
- VICTOR HUGO.\r
-\r
-\r
-*****\r
-\r
-FOOTNOTES:\r
-\r
-\r
-[Footnote 1: Patois of the French Alps: chat de maraude, rascally\r
-marauder.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 2: Liege: a cork-tree. Pau: a jest on peau, skin.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 3: She belonged to that circle where cuckoos and carriages\r
-share the same fate; and a jade herself, she lived, as jades live, for\r
-the space of a morning (or jade).]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 4: An ex-convict.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 5: This parenthesis is due to Jean Valjean.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 6: A bullet as large as an egg.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 7: Walter Scott, Lamartine, Vaulabelle, Charras, Quinet,\r
-Thiers.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 8: This is the inscription:--\r
-\r
- D. O. M.\r
- CY A ETE ECRASE\r
- PAR MALHEUR\r
- SOUS UN CHARIOT,\r
- MONSIEUR BERNARD\r
- DE BRYE MARCHAND\r
- A BRUXELLE LE [Illegible]\r
- FEVRIER 1637.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 9: A heavy rifled gun.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 10: "A battle terminated, a day finished, false measures\r
-repaired, greater successes assured for the morrow,--all was lost by a\r
-moment of panic, terror."--Napoleon, Dictees de Sainte Helene.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 11: Five winning numbers in a lottery]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 12: Literally "made cuirs"; i. e., pronounced a t or an s at\r
-the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used either\r
-one of them where neither exists.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 13: Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a\r
-writ of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him\r
-nearly as follows, etc.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 14: This is the factory of Goblet Junior:\r
- Come choose your jugs and crocks,\r
- Flower-pots, pipes, bricks.\r
- The Heart sells Diamonds to every comer.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 15: On the boughs hang three bodies of unequal merits: Dismas\r
-and Gesmas, between is the divine power. Dismas seeks the heights,\r
-Gesmas, unhappy man, the lowest regions; the highest power will preserve\r
-us and our effects. If you repeat this verse, you will not lose your\r
-things by theft.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 16: Instead of porte cochere and porte batarde.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 17: Jesus-my-God-bandy-leg--down with the moon!]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 18: Chicken: slang allusion to the noise made in calling\r
-poultry.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 19: Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that day\r
-as having a pear-shaped head.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 20: Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging\r
-out. Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 21: In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on\r
-its base, soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must be\r
-changed.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 22: Suspendu, suspended; pendu, hung.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 23: L'Aile, wing.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 24: The slang term for a painter's assistant.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 25: If Cesar had given me glory and war, and I were obliged\r
-to quit my mother's love, I would say to great Caesar, "Take back thy\r
-sceptre and thy chariot; I prefer the love of my mother."]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 26: Whether the sun shines brightly or dim, the bear returns\r
-to his cave.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 27: The peep-hole is a Judas in French. Hence the half-punning\r
-allusion.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 28: Our love has lasted a whole week, but how short are the\r
-instants of happiness! To adore each other for eight days was hardly\r
-worth the while! The time of love should last forever.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 29: You leave me to go to glory; my sad heart will follow you\r
-everywhere.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 30: A democrat.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 31: King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two\r
-stilts. When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 32: In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded\r
-the Court and allotted the lodgings.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 33: A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is\r
-smaller than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes\r
-a curve on the ground.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 34: From April 19 to May 20.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 35: Merlan: a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they are\r
-white with powder.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 36: The scaffold.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 37: Argot of the Temple.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 38: Argot of the barriers.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 39: The Last Day of a Condemned Man.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 40: "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-la, une foultitude de\r
-raisons pour que je me libertise."]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 41: It must be observed, however, that mac in Celtic means\r
-son.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 42: Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 43: Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des\r
-orgues, peut atiger ses momes et ses momignards et les locher criblant\r
-sans etre agite lui-meme.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 44: At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well;\r
-the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue,\r
-tutu, pointed hat!]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 45: Chien, dog, trigger.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 46: Here is the morn appearing. When shall we go to the\r
-forest, Charlot asked Charlotte. Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but\r
-one God, one King, one half-farthing, and one boot. And these two poor\r
-little wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme\r
-very early in the morning. And these two poor little things were as\r
-drunk as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave.\r
-The one cursed, the other swore. When shall we go to the forest? Charlot\r
-asked Charlotte.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 47: There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who\r
-hung himself.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 48: She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart\r
-inhabits her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should\r
-blow it at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her\r
-mouth.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 49: Matelote: a culinary preparation of various fishes.\r
-Gibelotte: stewed rabbits.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 50: Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 51: Bipede sans plume: biped without feathers--pen.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 52: Municipal officer of Toulouse.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 53: Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so\r
-young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well\r
-dressed and in love? When, by adding your age to my age, we could\r
-not count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny\r
-household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days!\r
-Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched\r
-thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself.\r
-Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the\r
-Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn\r
-round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she smells!\r
-What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing. Her charming\r
-bonnet is hardly unfolded. I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple\r
-arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our happy\r
-couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May. We lived\r
-concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love, that sweet\r
-forbidden fruit. My mouth had not uttered a thing when thy heart had\r
-already responded. The Sorbonne was the bucolic spot where I adored thee\r
-from eve till morn. 'Tis thus that an amorous soul applies the chart of\r
-the Tender to the Latin country. O Place Maubert! O Place Dauphine!\r
-When in the fresh spring-like hut thou didst draw thy stocking on thy\r
-delicate leg, I saw a star in the depths of the garret. I have read\r
-a great deal of Plato, but nothing of it remains by me; better than\r
-Malebranche and then Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me celestial\r
-goodness with a flower which thou gavest to me, I obeyed thee, thou\r
-didst submit to me; oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to behold thee going\r
-and coming from dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy young brow in thine\r
-ancient mirror! And who, then, would forego the memory of those days of\r
-aurora and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze and of moire, when love\r
-stammers a charming slang? Our gardens consisted of a pot of tulips;\r
-thou didst mask the window with thy petticoat; I took the earthenware\r
-bowl and I gave thee the Japanese cup. And those great misfortunes which\r
-made us laugh! Thy cuff scorched, thy boa lost! And that dear portrait\r
-of the divine Shakespeare which we sold one evening that we might sup! I\r
-was a beggar and thou wert charitable. I kissed thy fresh round arms\r
-in haste. A folio Dante served us as a table on which to eat merrily a\r
-centime's worth of chestnuts. The first time that, in my joyous den, I\r
-snatched a kiss from thy fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled\r
-and blushing, I turned deathly pale and I believed in God. Dost thou\r
-recall our innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags? Oh!\r
-what sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly\r
-depths!]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 54: My nose is in tears, my friend Bugeaud, lend me thy\r
-gendarmes that I may say a word to them. With a blue capote and a\r
-chicken in his shako, here's the banlieue, co-cocorico.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 55: Love letters.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 56:\r
-\r
- "The bird slanders in the elms,\r
- And pretends that yesterday, Atala\r
- Went off with a Russian,\r
- Where fair maids go.\r
- Lon la.\r
-\r
-My friend Pierrot, thou pratest, because Mila knocked at her pane the\r
-other day and called me. The jades are very charming, their poison which\r
-bewitched me would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila. I'm fond of love and its\r
-bickerings, I love Agnes, I love Pamela, Lise burned herself in setting\r
-me aflame. In former days when I saw the mantillas of Suzette and of\r
-Zeila, my soul mingled with their folds. Love, when thou gleamest in\r
-the dark thou crownest Lola with roses, I would lose my soul for that.\r
-Jeanne, at thy mirror thou deckest thyself! One fine day, my heart flew\r
-forth. I think that it is Jeanne who has it. At night, when I come from\r
-the quadrilles, I show Stella to the stars, and I say to them: "Behold\r
-her." Where fair maids go, lon la.]\r
-\r
-\r
-[Footnote 57: But some prisons still remain, and I am going to put\r
-a stop to this sort of public order. Does any one wish to play at\r
-skittles? The whole ancient world fell in ruin, when the big ball\r
-rolled. Good old folks, let us smash with our crutches that Louvre where\r
-the monarchy displayed itself in furbelows. We have forced its gates. On\r
-that day, King Charles X. did not stick well and came unglued.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 58: Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which\r
-the bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to be thrown into\r
-the Tiber.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 59: Mustards.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 60: From casser, to break: break-necks.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 61: "Jeanne was born at Fougere, a true shepherd's nest; I\r
-adore her petticoat, the rogue."]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 62: In allusion to the expression, coiffer Sainte-Catherine,\r
-"to remain unmarried."]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 63: "Thus, hemming in the course of thy musings, Alcippus, it\r
-is true that thou wilt wed ere long."]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 64: Tirer le diable par la queue, "to live from hand to\r
-mouth."]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 65: "Triton trotted on before, and drew from his conch-shell\r
-sounds so ravishing that he delighted everyone!"]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 66: "A Shrove-Tuesday marriage will have no ungrateful\r
-children."]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 67: A short mask.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 68: In allusion to the story of Prometheus.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 69: Un fafiot serieux. Fafiot is the slang term for a\r
-bank-bill, derived from its rustling noise.]\r
-\r
-[Footnote 70: He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived.\r
-He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply,\r
-of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.]\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo\r
-\r
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISERABLES ***\r
-\r
-***** This file should be named 135.txt or 135.zip *****\r
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:\r
- http://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/135/\r
-\r
-Produced by Judith Boss\r
-\r
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions\r
-will be renamed.\r
-\r
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no\r
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation\r
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without\r
-permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,\r
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to\r
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to\r
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project\r
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you\r
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you\r
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the\r
-rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose\r
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and\r
-research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do\r
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is\r
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial\r
-redistribution.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***\r
-\r
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE\r
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK\r
-\r
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free\r
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work\r
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project\r
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at\r
-http://gutenberg.org/license).\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic works\r
-\r
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to\r
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property\r
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all\r
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy\r
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.\r
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the\r
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or\r
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.\r
-\r
-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be\r
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who\r
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few\r
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works\r
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See\r
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement\r
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works. See paragraph 1.E below.\r
-\r
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"\r
-or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the\r
-collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an\r
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are\r
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from\r
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative\r
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg\r
-are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by\r
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of\r
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with\r
-the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by\r
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.\r
-\r
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern\r
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in\r
-a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check\r
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement\r
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or\r
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning\r
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United\r
-States.\r
-\r
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:\r
-\r
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate\r
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently\r
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the\r
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project\r
-Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,\r
-copied or distributed:\r
-\r
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with\r
-almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or\r
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included\r
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived\r
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is\r
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied\r
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees\r
-or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work\r
-with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the\r
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1\r
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or\r
-1.E.9.\r
-\r
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted\r
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution\r
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional\r
-terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked\r
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the\r
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.\r
-\r
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this\r
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.\r
-\r
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this\r
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without\r
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with\r
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License.\r
-\r
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,\r
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any\r
-word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or\r
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than\r
-"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version\r
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),\r
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a\r
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon\r
-request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other\r
-form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.\r
-\r
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,\r
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works\r
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.\r
-\r
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing\r
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided\r
-that\r
-\r
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from\r
- the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method\r
- you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is\r
- owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he\r
- has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the\r
- Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments\r
- must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you\r
- prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax\r
- returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and\r
- sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the\r
- address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to\r
- the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."\r
-\r
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies\r
- you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he\r
- does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
- License. You must require such a user to return or\r
- destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium\r
- and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of\r
- Project Gutenberg-tm works.\r
-\r
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any\r
- money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the\r
- electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days\r
- of receipt of the work.\r
-\r
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free\r
- distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.\r
-\r
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set\r
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from\r
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael\r
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the\r
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.\r
-\r
-1.F.\r
-\r
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable\r
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread\r
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain\r
-"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or\r
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual\r
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a\r
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by\r
-your equipment.\r
-\r
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right\r
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project\r
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all\r
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal\r
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT\r
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE\r
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE\r
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE\r
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR\r
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH\r
-DAMAGE.\r
-\r
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a\r
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can\r
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a\r
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you\r
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with\r
-your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with\r
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a\r
-refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity\r
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to\r
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy\r
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further\r
-opportunities to fix the problem.\r
-\r
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth\r
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER\r
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO\r
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.\r
-\r
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied\r
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.\r
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the\r
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be\r
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by\r
-the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any\r
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.\r
-\r
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the\r
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone\r
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance\r
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,\r
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,\r
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,\r
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do\r
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of\r
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers\r
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists\r
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from\r
-people in all walks of life.\r
-\r
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the\r
-assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's\r
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will\r
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project\r
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure\r
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.\r
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation\r
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4\r
-and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive\r
-Foundation\r
-\r
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit\r
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the\r
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal\r
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification\r
-number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at\r
-http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg\r
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent\r
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.\r
-\r
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.\r
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered\r
-throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at\r
-809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email\r
-business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact\r
-information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official\r
-page at http://pglaf.org\r
-\r
-For additional contact information:\r
- Dr. Gregory B. Newby\r
- Chief Executive and Director\r
- gbnewby@pglaf.org\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg\r
-Literary Archive Foundation\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide\r
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of\r
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be\r
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest\r
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations\r
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt\r
-status with the IRS.\r
-\r
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating\r
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United\r
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a\r
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up\r
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations\r
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To\r
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any\r
-particular state visit http://pglaf.org\r
-\r
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we\r
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition\r
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who\r
-approach us with offers to donate.\r
-\r
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make\r
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from\r
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.\r
-\r
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation\r
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other\r
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.\r
-To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works.\r
-\r
-Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared\r
-with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.\r
-\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed\r
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.\r
-unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily\r
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.\r
-\r
-\r
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:\r
-\r
- http://www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,\r
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary\r
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to\r
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.\r
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Les Miserables
+ Complete in Five Volumes
+
+Author: Victor Hugo
+
+Translator: Isabel F. Hapgood
+
+Release Date: June 22, 2008 [EBook #135]
+Last Updated: October 30, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISERABLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+LES MISERABLES
+
+By Victor Hugo
+
+
+Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood
+
+Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
+No. 13, Astor Place
+New York
+
+Copyright 1887
+
+[Illustration: Bookshelf 1spines]
+
+[Illustration: Bookcover 1cover]
+
+[Illustration: Frontpapers 1frontpapers]
+
+[Illustration: Frontispiece 1frontispiece]
+
+[Illustration: Titlepage Volume One 1titlepage]
+
+[Illustration: Titlepage Verso 1verso]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ VOLUME I
+
+ BOOK FIRST.--A JUST MAN
+
+ CHAPTER
+ I. M. Myriel
+ II. M. Myriel becomes M. Welcome
+ III. A Hard Bishopric for a Good Bishop
+ IV. Works corresponding to Words
+ V. Monseigneur Bienvenu made his Cassocks last too long
+ VI. Who guarded his House for him
+ VII. Cravatte
+ VIII. Philosophy after Drinking
+ IX. The Brother as depicted by the Sister
+ X. The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light
+ XI. A Restriction
+ XII. The Solitude of Monseigneur Welcome
+ XIII. What he believed
+ XIV. What he thought
+
+ BOOK SECOND.--THE FALL
+
+ I. The Evening of a Day of Walking
+ II. Prudence counselled to Wisdom
+ III. The Heroism of Passive Obedience
+ IV. Details concerning the Cheese-Dairies of Pontarlier
+ V. Tranquillity
+ VI. Jean Valjean
+ VII. The Interior of Despair
+ VIII. Billows and Shadows
+ IX. New Troubles
+ X. The Man aroused
+ XI. What he does
+ XII. The Bishop works
+ XIII. Little Gervais
+
+ BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817
+
+ I. The Year 1817
+ II. A Double Quartette
+ III. Four and Four
+ IV. Tholomyes is so Merry that he sings a Spanish Ditty
+ V. At Bombardas
+ VI. A Chapter in which they adore Each Other
+ VII. The Wisdom of Tholomyes
+ VIII. The Death of a Horse
+ IX. A Merry End to Mirth
+
+ BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER
+
+ I. One Mother meets Another Mother
+ II. First Sketch of Two Unprepossessing Figures
+ III. The Lark
+
+ BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT
+
+ I. The History of a Progress in Black Glass Trinkets
+ II. Madeleine
+ III. Sums deposited with Laffitte
+ IV. M. Madeleine in Mourning
+ V. Vague Flashes on the Horizon
+ VI. Father Fauchelevent
+ VII. Fauchelevent becomes a Gardener in Paris
+ VIII. Madame Victurnien expends Thirty Francs on Morality
+ IX. Madame Victurnien's Success
+ X. Result of the Success
+ XI. Christus nos Liberavit
+ XII. M. Bamatabois's Inactivity
+ XIII. The Solution of Some Questions connected with the
+ Municipal Police
+
+ BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT
+
+ I. The Beginning of Repose
+ II. How Jean may become Champ
+
+ BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR
+
+ I. Sister Simplice
+ II. The Perspicacity of Master Scaufflaire
+ III. A Tempest in a Skull
+ IV. Forms assumed by Suffering during Sleep
+ V. Hindrances
+ VI. Sister Simplice put to the Proof
+ VII. The Traveller on his Arrival takes Precautions
+ for Departure
+ VIII. An Entrance by Favor
+ IX. A Place where Convictions are in Process of Formation
+ X. The System of Denials
+ XI. Champmathieu more and more Astonished
+
+ BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW
+
+ I. In what Mirror M. Madeleine contemplates his Hair
+ II. Fantine Happy
+ III. Javert Satisfied
+ IV. Authority reasserts its Rights
+ V. A Suitable Tomb
+
+
+
+ VOLUME II
+
+ BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO
+
+ CHAPTER
+ I. What is met with on the Way from Nivelles
+ II. Hougomont
+ III. The Eighteenth of June, 1815
+ IV. A
+ V. The Quid Obscurum of Battles
+ VI. Four o'clock in the Afternoon
+ VII. Napoleon in a Good Humor
+ VIII. The Emperor puts a Question to the Guide Lacoste
+ IX. The Unexpected
+ X. The Plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean
+ XI. A Bad Guide to Napoleon; a Good Guide to Bulow
+ XII. The Guard
+ XIII. The Catastrophe
+ XIV. The Last Square
+ XV. Cambronne
+ XVI. Quot Libras in Duce?
+ XVII. Is Waterloo to be considered Good?
+ XVIII. A Recrudescence of Divine Right
+ XIX. The Battle-Field at Night
+
+ BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION
+
+ I. Number 24,601 becomes Number 9,430
+ II. In which the reader will peruse Two Verses which are
+ of the Devil's Composition possibly
+ III. The Ankle-Chain must have undergone a Certain Preparatory
+ Manipulation to be thus broken with a Blow from a Hammer
+
+ BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN
+
+ I. The Water Question at Montfermeil
+ II. Two Complete Portraits
+ III. Men must have Wine, and Horses must have Water
+ IV. Entrance on the Scene of a Doll
+ V. The Little One All Alone
+ VI. Which possibly proves Boulatruelle's Intelligence
+ VII. Cosette Side by Side with the Stranger in the Dark
+ VIII. The Unpleasantness of receiving into One's House a Poor
+ Man who may be a Rich Man
+ IX. Thenardier at his Manoeuvres
+ X. He who seeks to better himself may render his Situation Worse
+ XI. Number 9,430 reappears, and Cosette wins it in the Lottery
+
+ BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL
+
+ I. Master Gorbeau
+ II. A Nest for Owl and a Warbler
+ III. Two Misfortunes make One Piece of Good Fortune
+ IV. The Remarks of the Principal Tenant
+ V. A Five-Franc Piece falls on the Ground and produces a Tumult
+
+ BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK
+
+ I. The Zigzags of Strategy
+ II. It is Lucky that the Pont d'Austerlitz bears
+ Carriages
+ III. To Wit, the Plan of Paris in 1727
+ IV. The Gropings of Flight
+ V. Which would be Impossible with Gas Lanterns
+ VI. The Beginning of an Enigma
+ VII. Continuation of the Enigma
+ VIII. The Enigma becomes Doubly Mysterious
+ IX. The Man with the Bell
+ X. Which explains how Javert got on the Scent
+
+ BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS
+
+ I. Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus
+ II. The Obedience of Martin Verga
+ III. Austerities
+ IV. Gayeties
+ V. Distractions
+ VI. The Little Convent
+ VII. Some Silhouettes of this Darkness
+ VIII. Post Corda Lapides
+ IX. A Century under a Guimpe
+ X. Origin of the Perpetual Adoration
+ XI. End of the Petit-Picpus
+
+ BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS
+
+ I. The Convent as an Abstract Idea
+ II. The Convent as an Historical Fact
+ III. On What Conditions One can respect the Past
+ IV. The Convent from the Point of View of Principles
+ V. Prayer
+ VI. The Absolute Goodness of Prayer
+ VII. Precautions to be observed in Blame
+ VIII. Faith, Law
+
+ BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM
+
+ I. Which treats of the Manner of entering a Convent
+ II. Fauchelevent in the Presence of a Difficulty
+ III. Mother Innocente
+ IV. In which Jean Valjean has quite the Air of having read
+ Austin Castillejo
+ V. It is not Necessary to be Drunk in order to be Immortal
+ VI. Between Four Planks
+ VII. In which will be found the Origin of the Saying: Don't
+ lose the Card
+ VIII. A Successful Interrogatory
+ IX. Cloistered
+
+
+ VOLUME III
+
+ BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM
+
+ I. Parvulus
+ II. Some of his Particular Characteristics
+ III. He is Agreeable
+ IV. He may be of Use
+ V. His Frontiers
+ VI. A Bit of History
+ VII. The Gamin should have his Place in the Classifications
+ of India
+ VIII. In which the Reader will find a Charming Saying of the
+ Last King
+ IX. The Old Soul of Gaul
+ X. Ecce Paris, ecce Homo
+ XI. To Scoff, to Reign
+ XII. The Future Latent in the People
+ XIII. Little Gavroche
+
+ BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS
+
+ I. Ninety Years and Thirty-two Teeth
+ II. Like Master, Like House
+ III. Luc-Esprit
+ IV. A Centenarian Aspirant
+ V. Basque and Nicolette
+ VI. In which Magnon and her Two Children are seen
+ VII. Rule: Receive No One except in the Evening
+ VIII. Two do not make a Pair
+
+ BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON
+
+ I. An Ancient Salon
+ II. One of the Red Spectres of that Epoch
+ III. Requiescant
+ IV. End of the Brigand
+ V. The Utility of going to Mass, in order to become a
+ Revolutionist
+ VI. The Consequences of having met a Warden
+ VII. Some Petticoat
+ VIII. Marble against Granite
+
+ BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE ABC
+
+ I. A Group which barely missed becoming Historic
+ II. Blondeau's Funeral Oration by Bossuet
+ III. Marius' Astonishments
+ IV. The Back Room of the Cafe Musain
+ V. Enlargement of Horizon
+ VI. Res Angusta
+
+ BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE
+
+ I. Marius Indigent
+ II. Marius Poor
+ III. Marius Grown Up
+ IV. M. Mabeuf
+ V. Poverty a Good Neighbor for Misery
+ VI. The Substitute
+
+ BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS
+
+ I. The Sobriquet; Mode of Formation of Family Names
+ II. Lux Facta Est
+ III. Effect of the Spring
+ IV. Beginning of a Great Malady
+ V. Divers Claps of Thunder fall on Ma'am Bougon
+ VI. Taken Prisoner
+ VII. Adventures of the Letter U delivered over to Conjectures
+ VIII. The Veterans themselves can be Happy
+ IX. Eclipse
+
+ BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE
+
+ I. Mines and Miners
+ II. The Lowest Depths
+ III. Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse
+ IV. Composition of the Troupe
+
+ BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN
+
+ I. Marius, while seeking a Girl in a Bonnet encounters a
+ Man in a Cap
+ II. Treasure Trove
+ III. Quadrifrons
+ IV. A Rose in Misery
+ V. A Providential Peep-Hole
+ VI. The Wild Man in his Lair
+ VII. Strategy and Tactics
+ VIII. The Ray of Light in the Hovel
+ IX. Jondrette comes near Weeping
+ X. Tariff of Licensed Cabs, Two Francs an Hour
+ XI. Offers of Service from Misery to Wretchedness
+ XII. The Use made of M. Leblanc's Five-Franc Piece
+ XIII. Solus cum Solo, in Loco Remoto, non cogitabuntur
+ orare Pater Noster
+ XIV. In which a Police Agent bestows Two Fistfuls on a Lawyer
+ XV. Jondrette makes his Purchases
+ XVI. In which will be found the Words to an English Air
+ which was in Fashion in 1832
+ XVII. The Use made of Marius' Five-Franc Piece
+ XVIII. Marius' Two Chairs form a Vis-a-Vis
+ XIX. Occupying One's Self with Obscure Depths
+ XX. The Trap
+ XXI. One should always begin by arresting the Victims
+ XXII. The Little One who was crying in Volume Two
+
+
+
+ VOLUME IV
+
+ BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY
+
+ I. Well Cut
+ II. Badly Sewed
+ III. Louis Philippe
+ IV. Cracks beneath the Foundation
+ V. Facts whence History springs and which History ignores
+ VI. Enjolras and his Lieutenants
+
+ BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE
+
+ I. The Lark's Meadow
+ II. Embryonic Formation of Crimes in the Incubation of Prisons
+ III. Apparition to Father Mabeuf
+ IV. An Apparition to Marius
+
+ BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET
+
+ I. The House with a Secret
+ II. Jean Valjean as a National Guard
+ III. Foliis ac Frondibus
+ IV. Change of Gate
+ V. The Rose perceives that it is an Engine of War
+ VI. The Battle Begun
+ VII. To One Sadness oppose a Sadness and a Half
+ VIII. The Chain-Gang
+
+ BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH
+
+ I. A Wound without, Healing within
+ II. Mother Plutarque finds no Difficulty in explaining a Phenomenon
+
+ BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING
+
+ I. Solitude and Barracks Combined
+ II. Cosette's Apprehensions
+ III. Enriched with Commentaries by Toussaint
+ IV. A Heart beneath a Stone
+ V. Cosette after the Letter
+ VI. Old People are made to go out opportunely
+
+ BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE
+
+ I. The Malicious Playfulness of the Wind
+ II. In which Little Gavroche extracts Profit from Napoleon the Great
+ III. The Vicissitudes of Flight
+
+ BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG
+
+ I. Origin
+ II. Roots
+ III. Slang which weeps and Slang which laughs
+ IV. The Two Duties: To Watch and to Hope
+
+ BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS
+
+ I. Full Light
+ II. The Bewilderment of Perfect Happiness
+ III. The Beginning of Shadow
+ IV. A Cab runs in English and barks in Slang
+ V. Things of the Night
+ VI. Marius becomes Practical once more to the Extent of
+ Giving Cosette his Address
+ VII. The Old Heart and the Young Heart in the Presence
+ of Each Other
+
+ BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?
+
+ I. Jean Valjean
+ II. Marius
+ III. M. Mabeuf
+
+ BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832
+
+ I. The Surface of the Question
+ II. The Root of the Matter
+ III. A Burial; an Occasion to be born again
+ IV. The Ebullitions of Former Days
+ V. Originality of Paris
+
+ BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE
+
+ I. Some Explanations with Regard to the Origin of Gavroche's
+ Poetry. The Influence of an Academician on this Poetry
+ II. Gavroche on the March
+ III. Just Indignation of a Hair-dresser
+ IV. The Child is amazed at the Old Man
+ V. The Old Man
+ VI. Recruits
+
+ BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE
+
+ I. History of Corinthe from its Foundation
+ II. Preliminary Gayeties
+ III. Night begins to descend upon Grantaire
+ IV. An Attempt to console the Widow Hucheloup
+ V. Preparations
+ VI. Waiting
+ VII. The Man recruited in the Rue des Billettes
+ VIII. Many Interrogation Points with Regard to a Certain
+ Le Cabuc, whose Name may not have been Le Cabuc
+
+ BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW
+
+ I. From the Rue Plumet to the Quartier Saint-Denis
+ II. An Owl's View of Paris
+ III. The Extreme Edge
+
+ BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR
+
+ I. The Flag: Act First
+ II. The Flag: Act Second
+ III. Gavroche would have done better to accept Enjolras' Carbine
+ IV. The Barrel of Powder
+ V. End of the Verses of Jean Prouvaire
+ VI. The Agony of Death after the Agony of Life
+ VII. Gavroche as a Profound Calculator of Distances
+
+ BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME
+
+ I. A Drinker is a Babbler
+ II. The Street Urchin an Enemy of Light
+ III. While Cosette and Toussaint are Asleep
+ IV. Gavroche's Excess of Zeal
+
+
+
+ VOLUME V
+
+ BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS
+
+ I. The Charybdis of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the
+ Scylla of the Faubourg du Temple
+ II. What Is to Be Done in the Abyss if One Does Not Converse
+ III. Light and Shadow
+ IV. Minus Five, Plus One
+ V. The Horizon Which One Beholds from the Summit of a Barricade
+ VI. Marius Haggard, Javert Laconic
+ VII. The Situation Becomes Aggravated
+ VIII. The Artillery-men Compel People to Take Them Seriously
+ IX. Employment of the Old Talents of a Poacher and That
+ Infallible Marksmanship Which Influenced the
+ Condemnation of 1796
+ X. Dawn
+ XI. The Shot Which Misses Nothing and Kills No One
+ XII. Disorder a Partisan of Order
+ XIII. Passing Gleams
+ XIV. Wherein Will Appear the Name of Enjolras' Mistress
+ XV. Gavroche Outside
+ XVI. How from a Brother One Becomes a Father
+ XVII. Mortuus Pater Filium Moriturum Expectat
+ XVIII. The Vulture Becomes Prey
+ XIX. Jean Valjean Takes His Revenge
+ XX. The Dead Are in the Right and the Living Are Not in the Wrong
+ XXI. The Heroes
+ XXII. Foot to Foot
+ XXIII. Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk
+ XXIV. Prisoner
+
+ BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN
+
+ I. The Land Impoverished by the Sea
+ II. Ancient History of the Sewer
+ III. Bruneseau
+ IV. Bruneseau
+ V. Present Progress
+ VI. Future Progress
+
+ BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL
+
+ I. The Sewer and Its Surprises
+ II. Explanation
+ III. The "Spun" Man
+ IV. He Also Bears His Cross
+ V. In the Case of Sand, as in That of Woman, There Is a
+ Fineness Which Is Treacherous
+ VI. The Fontis
+ VII. One Sometimes Runs Aground When One Fancies That
+ One Is Disembarking
+ VIII. The Torn Coat-Tail
+ IX. Marius Produces on Some One Who Is a Judge of the
+ Matter, the Effect of Being Dead
+ X. Return of the Son Who Was Prodigal of His Life
+ XI. Concussion in the Absolute
+ XII. The Grandfather
+
+ BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED
+
+ I. Javert
+
+ BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
+
+ I. In Which the Tree with the Zinc Plaster Appears Again
+ II. Marius, Emerging from Civil War, Makes Ready for
+ Domestic War
+ III. Marius Attacked
+ IV. Mademoiselle Gillenormand Ends by No Longer Thinking
+ It a Bad Thing That M. Fauchelevent Should Have
+ Entered With Something Under His Arm
+ V. Deposit Your Money in a Forest Rather than with a Notary
+ VI. The Two Old Men Do Everything, Each One After His
+ Own Fashion, to Render Cosette Happy
+ VII. The Effects of Dreams Mingled with Happiness
+ VIII. Two Men Impossible to Find
+
+ BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT
+
+ I. The 16th of February, 1833
+ II. Jean Valjean Still Wears His Arm in a Sling
+ III. The Inseparable
+ IV. The Immortal Liver
+
+ BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP
+
+ I. The Seventh Circle and the Eighth Heaven
+ II. The Obscurities Which a Revelation Can Contain
+
+ BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT
+
+ I. The Lower Chamber
+ II. Another Step Backwards
+ III. They Recall the Garden of the Rue Plumet
+ IV. Attraction and Extinction
+
+ BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN
+
+ I. Pity for the Unhappy, but Indulgence for the Happy
+ II. Last Flickerings of a Lamp Without Oil
+ III. A Pen Is Heavy to the Man Who Lifted the
+ Fauchelevent's Cart
+ IV. A Bottle of Ink Which Only Succeeded in Whitening
+ V. A Night Behind Which There Is Day
+ VI. The Grass Covers and the Rain Effaces
+
+
+
+
+
+LES MISERABLES
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME I.--FANTINE.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of
+damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the
+civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine
+destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century--the
+degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through
+hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light--are unsolved;
+so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;--in
+other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance
+and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot
+fail to be of use.
+
+HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.
+
+
+
+
+FANTINE
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--M. MYRIEL
+
+In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D---- He was
+an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see
+of D---- since 1806.
+
+Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance
+of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely
+for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various
+rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very
+moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said
+of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all
+in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a
+councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility
+of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of
+his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty,
+in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in
+parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said
+that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed,
+though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the
+whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and
+to gallantry.
+
+The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the
+parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed.
+M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the
+Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she
+had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate
+of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall
+of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps,
+even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance,
+with the magnifying powers of terror,--did these cause the ideas of
+renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of
+these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly
+smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes
+overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes
+would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one
+could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from
+Italy he was a priest.
+
+In 1804, M. Myriel was the Cure of B---- [Brignolles]. He was already
+advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.
+
+About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with
+his curacy--just what, is not precisely known--took him to Paris.
+Among other powerful persons to whom he went to solicit aid for his
+parishioners was M. le Cardinal Fesch. One day, when the Emperor
+had come to visit his uncle, the worthy Cure, who was waiting in the
+anteroom, found himself present when His Majesty passed. Napoleon,
+on finding himself observed with a certain curiosity by this old man,
+turned round and said abruptly:--
+
+"Who is this good man who is staring at me?"
+
+"Sire," said M. Myriel, "you are looking at a good man, and I at a great
+man. Each of us can profit by it."
+
+That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Cure,
+and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that
+he had been appointed Bishop of D----
+
+What truth was there, after all, in the stories which were invented as
+to the early portion of M. Myriel's life? No one knew. Very few families
+had been acquainted with the Myriel family before the Revolution.
+
+M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town,
+where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
+He was obliged to undergo it although he was a bishop, and because
+he was a bishop. But after all, the rumors with which his name
+was connected were rumors only,--noise, sayings, words; less than
+words--palabres, as the energetic language of the South expresses it.
+
+However that may be, after nine years of episcopal power and of
+residence in D----, all the stories and subjects of conversation which
+engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen into
+profound oblivion. No one would have dared to mention them; no one would
+have dared to recall them.
+
+M. Myriel had arrived at D---- accompanied by an elderly spinster,
+Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister, and ten years his junior.
+
+Their only domestic was a female servant of the same age as Mademoiselle
+Baptistine, and named Madame Magloire, who, after having been the
+servant of M. le Cure, now assumed the double title of maid to
+Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.
+
+Mademoiselle Baptistine was a long, pale, thin, gentle creature; she
+realized the ideal expressed by the word "respectable"; for it seems
+that a woman must needs be a mother in order to be venerable. She
+had never been pretty; her whole life, which had been nothing but a
+succession of holy deeds, had finally conferred upon her a sort of
+pallor and transparency; and as she advanced in years she had acquired
+what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been leanness in
+her youth had become transparency in her maturity; and this diaphaneity
+allowed the angel to be seen. She was a soul rather than a virgin. Her
+person seemed made of a shadow; there was hardly sufficient body to
+provide for sex; a little matter enclosing a light; large eyes forever
+drooping;--a mere pretext for a soul's remaining on the earth.
+
+Madame Magloire was a little, fat, white old woman, corpulent and
+bustling; always out of breath,--in the first place, because of her
+activity, and in the next, because of her asthma.
+
+On his arrival, M. Myriel was installed in the episcopal palace with
+the honors required by the Imperial decrees, which class a bishop
+immediately after a major-general. The mayor and the president paid the
+first call on him, and he, in turn, paid the first call on the general
+and the prefect.
+
+The installation over, the town waited to see its bishop at work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--M. MYRIEL BECOMES M. WELCOME
+
+
+The episcopal palace of D---- adjoins the hospital.
+
+The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at
+the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology
+of the Faculty of Paris, Abbe of Simore, who had been Bishop of D---- in
+1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about
+it had a grand air,--the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms,
+the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks
+encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens
+planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb
+gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the
+gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My
+Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince d'Embrun; Antoine
+de Mesgrigny, the capuchin, Bishop of Grasse; Philippe de Vendome, Grand
+Prior of France, Abbe of Saint Honore de Lerins; Francois de Berton de
+Crillon, bishop, Baron de Vence; Cesar de Sabran de Forcalquier, bishop,
+Seignor of Glandeve; and Jean Soanen, Priest of the Oratory, preacher in
+ordinary to the king, bishop, Seignor of Senez. The portraits of these
+seven reverend personages decorated this apartment; and this memorable
+date, the 29th of July, 1714, was there engraved in letters of gold on a
+table of white marble.
+
+The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a
+small garden.
+
+Three days after his arrival, the Bishop visited the hospital. The visit
+ended, he had the director requested to be so good as to come to his
+house.
+
+"Monsieur the director of the hospital," said he to him, "how many sick
+people have you at the present moment?"
+
+"Twenty-six, Monseigneur."
+
+"That was the number which I counted," said the Bishop.
+
+"The beds," pursued the director, "are very much crowded against each
+other."
+
+"That is what I observed."
+
+"The halls are nothing but rooms, and it is with difficulty that the air
+can be changed in them."
+
+"So it seems to me."
+
+"And then, when there is a ray of sun, the garden is very small for the
+convalescents."
+
+"That was what I said to myself."
+
+"In case of epidemics,--we have had the typhus fever this year; we
+had the sweating sickness two years ago, and a hundred patients at
+times,--we know not what to do."
+
+"That is the thought which occurred to me."
+
+"What would you have, Monseigneur?" said the director. "One must resign
+one's self."
+
+This conversation took place in the gallery dining-room on the
+ground-floor.
+
+The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he turned abruptly to the
+director of the hospital.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, "how many beds do you think this hall alone would
+hold?"
+
+"Monseigneur's dining-room?" exclaimed the stupefied director.
+
+The Bishop cast a glance round the apartment, and seemed to be taking
+measures and calculations with his eyes.
+
+"It would hold full twenty beds," said he, as though speaking to
+himself. Then, raising his voice:--
+
+"Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something.
+There is evidently a mistake here. There are thirty-six of you, in five
+or six small rooms. There are three of us here, and we have room for
+sixty. There is some mistake, I tell you; you have my house, and I have
+yours. Give me back my house; you are at home here."
+
+On the following day the thirty-six patients were installed in the
+Bishop's palace, and the Bishop was settled in the hospital.
+
+M. Myriel had no property, his family having been ruined by the
+Revolution. His sister was in receipt of a yearly income of five hundred
+francs, which sufficed for her personal wants at the vicarage. M. Myriel
+received from the State, in his quality of bishop, a salary of fifteen
+thousand francs. On the very day when he took up his abode in the
+hospital, M. Myriel settled on the disposition of this sum once for
+all, in the following manner. We transcribe here a note made by his own
+hand:--
+
+
+NOTE ON THE REGULATION OF MY HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES.
+
+ For the little seminary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 livres
+ Society of the mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 "
+ For the Lazarists of Montdidier . . . . . . . . . . 100 "
+ Seminary for foreign missions in Paris . . . . . . 200 "
+ Congregation of the Holy Spirit . . . . . . . . . . 150 "
+ Religious establishments of the Holy Land . . . . . 100 "
+ Charitable maternity societies . . . . . . . . . . 300 "
+ Extra, for that of Arles . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 "
+ Work for the amelioration of prisons . . . . . . . 400 "
+ Work for the relief and delivery of prisoners . . . 500 "
+ To liberate fathers of families incarcerated for debt 1,000 "
+ Addition to the salary of the poor teachers of the
+ diocese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,000 "
+ Public granary of the Hautes-Alpes . . . . . . . . 100 "
+ Congregation of the ladies of D----, of Manosque, and of
+ Sisteron, for the gratuitous instruction of poor
+ girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 "
+ For the poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6,000 "
+ My personal expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,000 "
+ ------
+ Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15,000 "
+
+
+M. Myriel made no change in this arrangement during the entire period
+that he occupied the see of D---- As has been seen, he called it
+regulating his household expenses.
+
+This arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mademoiselle
+Baptistine. This holy woman regarded Monseigneur of D---- as at one and
+the same time her brother and her bishop, her friend according to the
+flesh and her superior according to the Church. She simply loved and
+venerated him. When he spoke, she bowed; when he acted, she yielded her
+adherence. Their only servant, Madame Magloire, grumbled a little. It
+will be observed that Monsieur the Bishop had reserved for himself
+only one thousand livres, which, added to the pension of Mademoiselle
+Baptistine, made fifteen hundred francs a year. On these fifteen hundred
+francs these two old women and the old man subsisted.
+
+And when a village curate came to D----, the Bishop still found means to
+entertain him, thanks to the severe economy of Madame Magloire, and to
+the intelligent administration of Mademoiselle Baptistine.
+
+One day, after he had been in D---- about three months, the Bishop
+said:--
+
+"And still I am quite cramped with it all!"
+
+"I should think so!" exclaimed Madame Magloire. "Monseigneur has not
+even claimed the allowance which the department owes him for the expense
+of his carriage in town, and for his journeys about the diocese. It was
+customary for bishops in former days."
+
+"Hold!" cried the Bishop, "you are quite right, Madame Magloire."
+
+And he made his demand.
+
+Some time afterwards the General Council took this demand under
+consideration, and voted him an annual sum of three thousand francs,
+under this heading: Allowance to M. the Bishop for expenses of carriage,
+expenses of posting, and expenses of pastoral visits.
+
+This provoked a great outcry among the local burgesses; and a senator
+of the Empire, a former member of the Council of the Five Hundred
+which favored the 18 Brumaire, and who was provided with a magnificent
+senatorial office in the vicinity of the town of D----, wrote to M.
+Bigot de Preameneu, the minister of public worship, a very angry and
+confidential note on the subject, from which we extract these authentic
+lines:--
+
+"Expenses of carriage? What can be done with it in a town of less than
+four thousand inhabitants? Expenses of journeys? What is the use
+of these trips, in the first place? Next, how can the posting be
+accomplished in these mountainous parts? There are no roads. No one
+travels otherwise than on horseback. Even the bridge between Durance and
+Chateau-Arnoux can barely support ox-teams. These priests are all thus,
+greedy and avaricious. This man played the good priest when he
+first came. Now he does like the rest; he must have a carriage and a
+posting-chaise, he must have luxuries, like the bishops of the olden
+days. Oh, all this priesthood! Things will not go well, M. le Comte,
+until the Emperor has freed us from these black-capped rascals. Down
+with the Pope! [Matters were getting embroiled with Rome.] For my part,
+I am for Caesar alone." Etc., etc.
+
+On the other hand, this affair afforded great delight to Madame
+Magloire. "Good," said she to Mademoiselle Baptistine; "Monseigneur
+began with other people, but he has had to wind up with himself, after
+all. He has regulated all his charities. Now here are three thousand
+francs for us! At last!"
+
+That same evening the Bishop wrote out and handed to his sister a
+memorandum conceived in the following terms:--
+
+EXPENSES OF CARRIAGE AND CIRCUIT.
+
+ For furnishing meat soup to the patients in the hospital. 1,500 livres
+ For the maternity charitable society of Aix . . . . . . . 250 "
+ For the maternity charitable society of Draguignan . . . 250 "
+ For foundlings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "
+ For orphans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "
+ -----
+ Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000 "
+
+Such was M. Myriel's budget.
+
+As for the chance episcopal perquisites, the fees for marriage bans,
+dispensations, private baptisms, sermons, benedictions, of churches or
+chapels, marriages, etc., the Bishop levied them on the wealthy with all
+the more asperity, since he bestowed them on the needy.
+
+After a time, offerings of money flowed in. Those who had and those who
+lacked knocked at M. Myriel's door,--the latter in search of the alms
+which the former came to deposit. In less than a year the Bishop had
+become the treasurer of all benevolence and the cashier of all those
+in distress. Considerable sums of money passed through his hands, but
+nothing could induce him to make any change whatever in his mode of
+life, or add anything superfluous to his bare necessities.
+
+Far from it. As there is always more wretchedness below than there
+is brotherhood above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was
+received. It was like water on dry soil; no matter how much money he
+received, he never had any. Then he stripped himself.
+
+The usage being that bishops shall announce their baptismal names at the
+head of their charges and their pastoral letters, the poor people of the
+country-side had selected, with a sort of affectionate instinct, among
+the names and prenomens of their bishop, that which had a meaning for
+them; and they never called him anything except Monseigneur Bienvenu
+[Welcome]. We will follow their example, and will also call him thus
+when we have occasion to name him. Moreover, this appellation pleased
+him.
+
+"I like that name," said he. "Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur."
+
+We do not claim that the portrait herewith presented is probable; we
+confine ourselves to stating that it resembles the original.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--A HARD BISHOPRIC FOR A GOOD BISHOP
+
+
+The Bishop did not omit his pastoral visits because he had converted his
+carriage into alms. The diocese of D---- is a fatiguing one. There are
+very few plains and a great many mountains; hardly any roads, as we have
+just seen; thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarships, and two hundred
+and eighty-five auxiliary chapels. To visit all these is quite a task.
+
+The Bishop managed to do it. He went on foot when it was in the
+neighborhood, in a tilted spring-cart when it was on the plain, and on
+a donkey in the mountains. The two old women accompanied him. When the
+trip was too hard for them, he went alone.
+
+One day he arrived at Senez, which is an ancient episcopal city. He was
+mounted on an ass. His purse, which was very dry at that moment, did not
+permit him any other equipage. The mayor of the town came to receive
+him at the gate of the town, and watched him dismount from his ass,
+with scandalized eyes. Some of the citizens were laughing around him.
+"Monsieur the Mayor," said the Bishop, "and Messieurs Citizens, I
+perceive that I shock you. You think it very arrogant in a poor priest
+to ride an animal which was used by Jesus Christ. I have done so from
+necessity, I assure you, and not from vanity."
+
+In the course of these trips he was kind and indulgent, and talked
+rather than preached. He never went far in search of his arguments and
+his examples. He quoted to the inhabitants of one district the example
+of a neighboring district. In the cantons where they were harsh to the
+poor, he said: "Look at the people of Briancon! They have conferred on
+the poor, on widows and orphans, the right to have their meadows mown
+three days in advance of every one else. They rebuild their houses for
+them gratuitously when they are ruined. Therefore it is a country which
+is blessed by God. For a whole century, there has not been a single
+murderer among them."
+
+In villages which were greedy for profit and harvest, he said: "Look at
+the people of Embrun! If, at the harvest season, the father of a family
+has his son away on service in the army, and his daughters at service in
+the town, and if he is ill and incapacitated, the cure recommends him to
+the prayers of the congregation; and on Sunday, after the mass, all the
+inhabitants of the village--men, women, and children--go to the poor
+man's field and do his harvesting for him, and carry his straw and his
+grain to his granary." To families divided by questions of money and
+inheritance he said: "Look at the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so
+wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years.
+Well, when the father of a family dies, the boys go off to seek their
+fortunes, leaving the property to the girls, so that they may find
+husbands." To the cantons which had a taste for lawsuits, and where the
+farmers ruined themselves in stamped paper, he said: "Look at those good
+peasants in the valley of Queyras! There are three thousand souls of
+them. Mon Dieu! it is like a little republic. Neither judge nor bailiff
+is known there. The mayor does everything. He allots the imposts,
+taxes each person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides
+inheritances without charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he
+is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple men." To villages where
+he found no schoolmaster, he quoted once more the people of Queyras: "Do
+you know how they manage?" he said. "Since a little country of a
+dozen or fifteen hearths cannot always support a teacher, they have
+school-masters who are paid by the whole valley, who make the round
+of the villages, spending a week in this one, ten days in that, and
+instruct them. These teachers go to the fairs. I have seen them there.
+They are to be recognized by the quill pens which they wear in the cord
+of their hat. Those who teach reading only have one pen; those who teach
+reading and reckoning have two pens; those who teach reading, reckoning,
+and Latin have three pens. But what a disgrace to be ignorant! Do like
+the people of Queyras!"
+
+Thus he discoursed gravely and paternally; in default of examples, he
+invented parables, going directly to the point, with few phrases and
+many images, which characteristic formed the real eloquence of Jesus
+Christ. And being convinced himself, he was persuasive.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS
+
+His conversation was gay and affable. He put himself on a level with the
+two old women who had passed their lives beside him. When he laughed,
+it was the laugh of a schoolboy. Madame Magloire liked to call him Your
+Grace [Votre Grandeur]. One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went
+to his library in search of a book. This book was on one of the upper
+shelves. As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not
+reach it. "Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair. My greatness
+[grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf."
+
+One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lo, rarely allowed
+an opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence, what she
+designated as "the expectations" of her three sons. She had numerous
+relatives, who were very old and near to death, and of whom her sons
+were the natural heirs. The youngest of the three was to receive from a
+grand-aunt a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second was the
+heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to
+succeed to the peerage of his grandfather. The Bishop was accustomed to
+listen in silence to these innocent and pardonable maternal boasts. On
+one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful than usual,
+while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details of all these
+inheritances and all these "expectations." She interrupted herself
+impatiently: "Mon Dieu, cousin! What are you thinking about?" "I am
+thinking," replied the Bishop, "of a singular remark, which is to be
+found, I believe, in St. Augustine,--'Place your hopes in the man from
+whom you do not inherit.'"
+
+At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a
+gentleman of the country-side, wherein not only the dignities of the
+dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications of all his
+relatives, spread over an entire page: "What a stout back Death has!"
+he exclaimed. "What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed
+on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb
+into the service of vanity!"
+
+He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which almost always
+concealed a serious meaning. In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar
+came to D----, and preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent.
+The subject of his sermon was charity. He urged the rich to give to the
+poor, in order to avoid hell, which he depicted in the most frightful
+manner of which he was capable, and to win paradise, which he
+represented as charming and desirable. Among the audience there was
+a wealthy retired merchant, who was somewhat of a usurer, named M.
+Geborand, who had amassed two millions in the manufacture of coarse
+cloth, serges, and woollen galloons. Never in his whole life had M.
+Geborand bestowed alms on any poor wretch. After the delivery of that
+sermon, it was observed that he gave a sou every Sunday to the poor old
+beggar-women at the door of the cathedral. There were six of them to
+share it. One day the Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing
+this charity, and said to his sister, with a smile, "There is M.
+Geborand purchasing paradise for a sou."
+
+When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed even by
+a refusal, and on such occasions he gave utterance to remarks which
+induced reflection. Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room
+of the town; there was present the Marquis de Champtercier, a wealthy
+and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same time,
+an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety of man has
+actually existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, "You
+must give me something, M. le Marquis." The Marquis turned round and
+answered dryly, "I have poor people of my own, Monseigneur." "Give them
+to me," replied the Bishop.
+
+One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral:--
+
+
+"My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are thirteen hundred
+and twenty thousand peasants' dwellings in France which have but three
+openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand hovels which have but
+two openings, the door and one window; and three hundred and forty-six
+thousand cabins besides which have but one opening, the door. And this
+arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors and windows. Just
+put poor families, old women and little children, in those buildings,
+and behold the fevers and maladies which result! Alas! God gives air to
+men; the law sells it to them. I do not blame the law, but I bless God.
+In the department of the Isere, in the Var, in the two departments
+of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have not even
+wheelbarrows; they transport their manure on the backs of men; they have
+no candles, and they burn resinous sticks, and bits of rope dipped in
+pitch. That is the state of affairs throughout the whole of the hilly
+country of Dauphine. They make bread for six months at one time; they
+bake it with dried cow-dung. In the winter they break this bread up with
+an axe, and they soak it for twenty-four hours, in order to render it
+eatable. My brethren, have pity! behold the suffering on all sides of
+you!"
+
+Born a Provencal, he easily familiarized himself with the dialect of the
+south. He said, "En be! moussu, ses sage?" as in lower Languedoc; "Onte
+anaras passa?" as in the Basses-Alpes; "Puerte un bouen moutu embe un
+bouen fromage grase," as in upper Dauphine. This pleased the people
+extremely, and contributed not a little to win him access to all
+spirits. He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the
+mountains. He understood how to say the grandest things in the most
+vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.
+
+Moreover, he was the same towards people of the world and towards
+the lower classes. He condemned nothing in haste and without taking
+circumstances into account. He said, "Examine the road over which the
+fault has passed."
+
+Being, as he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none
+of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal
+of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a
+doctrine which may be summed up as follows:--
+
+"Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his
+temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it,
+check it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may
+be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is
+venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in
+prayer.
+
+"To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err,
+fall, sin if you will, but be upright.
+
+"The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream
+of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a
+gravitation."
+
+When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very
+quickly, "Oh! oh!" he said, with a smile; "to all appearance, this is
+a great crime which all the world commits. These are hypocrisies
+which have taken fright, and are in haste to make protest and to put
+themselves under shelter."
+
+He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of
+human society rest. He said, "The faults of women, of children, of the
+feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands,
+the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise."
+
+He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as
+possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction
+gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul
+is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the
+person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the
+shadow."
+
+It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging
+things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.
+
+One day he heard a criminal case, which was in preparation and on the
+point of trial, discussed in a drawing-room. A wretched man, being at
+the end of his resources, had coined counterfeit money, out of love for
+a woman, and for the child which he had had by her. Counterfeiting was
+still punishable with death at that epoch. The woman had been arrested
+in the act of passing the first false piece made by the man. She was
+held, but there were no proofs except against her. She alone could
+accuse her lover, and destroy him by her confession. She denied; they
+insisted. She persisted in her denial. Thereupon an idea occurred to
+the attorney for the crown. He invented an infidelity on the part of
+the lover, and succeeded, by means of fragments of letters cunningly
+presented, in persuading the unfortunate woman that she had a rival, and
+that the man was deceiving her. Thereupon, exasperated by jealousy, she
+denounced her lover, confessed all, proved all.
+
+The man was ruined. He was shortly to be tried at Aix with his
+accomplice. They were relating the matter, and each one was expressing
+enthusiasm over the cleverness of the magistrate. By bringing jealousy
+into play, he had caused the truth to burst forth in wrath, he had
+educed the justice of revenge. The Bishop listened to all this in
+silence. When they had finished, he inquired,--
+
+"Where are this man and woman to be tried?"
+
+"At the Court of Assizes."
+
+He went on, "And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?"
+
+A tragic event occurred at D---- A man was condemned to death for
+murder. He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly
+ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the
+public. The town took a great interest in the trial. On the eve of the
+day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain of the
+prison fell ill. A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his
+last moments. They sent for the cure. It seems that he refused to come,
+saying, "That is no affair of mine. I have nothing to do with that
+unpleasant task, and with that mountebank: I, too, am ill; and besides,
+it is not my place." This reply was reported to the Bishop, who said,
+"Monsieur le Cure is right: it is not his place; it is mine."
+
+He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of the
+"mountebank," called him by name, took him by the hand, and spoke to
+him. He passed the entire day with him, forgetful of food and sleep,
+praying to God for the soul of the condemned man, and praying the
+condemned man for his own. He told him the best truths, which are also
+the most simple. He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to
+bless. He taught him everything, encouraged and consoled him. The man
+was on the point of dying in despair. Death was an abyss to him. As he
+stood trembling on its mournful brink, he recoiled with horror. He
+was not sufficiently ignorant to be absolutely indifferent. His
+condemnation, which had been a profound shock, had, in a manner, broken
+through, here and there, that wall which separates us from the mystery
+of things, and which we call life. He gazed incessantly beyond this
+world through these fatal breaches, and beheld only darkness. The Bishop
+made him see light.
+
+On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy wretch, the
+Bishop was still there. He followed him, and exhibited himself to the
+eyes of the crowd in his purple camail and with his episcopal cross upon
+his neck, side by side with the criminal bound with cords.
+
+He mounted the tumbril with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. The
+sufferer, who had been so gloomy and cast down on the preceding day, was
+radiant. He felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God. The
+Bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife was about to fall,
+he said to him: "God raises from the dead him whom man slays; he whom
+his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more. Pray, believe,
+enter into life: the Father is there." When he descended from the
+scaffold, there was something in his look which made the people draw
+aside to let him pass. They did not know which was most worthy of
+admiration, his pallor or his serenity. On his return to the humble
+dwelling, which he designated, with a smile, as his palace, he said to
+his sister, "I have just officiated pontifically."
+
+Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least
+understood, there were people in the town who said, when commenting on
+this conduct of the Bishop, "It is affectation."
+
+This, however, was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms.
+The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched, and
+admired him.
+
+As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine,
+and it was a long time before he recovered from it.
+
+In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared, it has
+something about it which produces hallucination. One may feel a certain
+indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon
+it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with
+one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent;
+one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some admire
+it, like de Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine
+is the concretion of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral,
+and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers
+with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their
+interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a
+vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not
+a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of
+wood, iron and cords.
+
+It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre
+initiative; one would say that this piece of carpenter's work saw, that
+this machine heard, that this mechanism understood, that this wood,
+this iron, and these cords were possessed of will. In the frightful
+meditation into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold appears
+in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The
+scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats
+flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated
+by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a
+horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.
+
+Therefore, the impression was terrible and profound; on the day
+following the execution, and on many succeeding days, the Bishop
+appeared to be crushed. The almost violent serenity of the funereal
+moment had disappeared; the phantom of social justice tormented him. He,
+who generally returned from all his deeds with a radiant satisfaction,
+seemed to be reproaching himself. At times he talked to himself, and
+stammered lugubrious monologues in a low voice. This is one which his
+sister overheard one evening and preserved: "I did not think that it was
+so monstrous. It is wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a
+degree as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what
+right do men touch that unknown thing?"
+
+In course of time these impressions weakened and probably vanished.
+Nevertheless, it was observed that the Bishop thenceforth avoided
+passing the place of execution.
+
+M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of the sick and
+dying. He did not ignore the fact that therein lay his greatest duty and
+his greatest labor. Widowed and orphaned families had no need to summon
+him; he came of his own accord. He understood how to sit down and hold
+his peace for long hours beside the man who had lost the wife of his
+love, of the mother who had lost her child. As he knew the moment for
+silence he knew also the moment for speech. Oh, admirable consoler! He
+sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify
+it by hope. He said:--
+
+"Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards the dead. Think
+not of that which perishes. Gaze steadily. You will perceive the living
+light of your well-beloved dead in the depths of heaven." He knew that
+faith is wholesome. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing man, by
+pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief which
+gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze upon a
+star.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG
+
+
+The private life of M. Myriel was filled with the same thoughts as his
+public life. The voluntary poverty in which the Bishop of D---- lived,
+would have been a solemn and charming sight for any one who could have
+viewed it close at hand.
+
+Like all old men, and like the majority of thinkers, he slept little.
+This brief slumber was profound. In the morning he meditated for an
+hour, then he said his mass, either at the cathedral or in his own
+house. His mass said, he broke his fast on rye bread dipped in the milk
+of his own cows. Then he set to work.
+
+A Bishop is a very busy man: he must every day receive the secretary
+of the bishopric, who is generally a canon, and nearly every day his
+vicars-general. He has congregations to reprove, privileges to grant,
+a whole ecclesiastical library to examine,--prayer-books, diocesan
+catechisms, books of hours, etc.,--charges to write, sermons to
+authorize, cures and mayors to reconcile, a clerical correspondence, an
+administrative correspondence; on one side the State, on the other the
+Holy See; and a thousand matters of business.
+
+What time was left to him, after these thousand details of business, and
+his offices and his breviary, he bestowed first on the necessitous,
+the sick, and the afflicted; the time which was left to him from the
+afflicted, the sick, and the necessitous, he devoted to work. Sometimes
+he dug in his garden; again, he read or wrote. He had but one word
+for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. "The mind is a
+garden," said he.
+
+Towards mid-day, when the weather was fine, he went forth and took a
+stroll in the country or in town, often entering lowly dwellings. He
+was seen walking alone, buried in his own thoughts, his eyes cast down,
+supporting himself on his long cane, clad in his wadded purple garment
+of silk, which was very warm, wearing purple stockings inside his coarse
+shoes, and surmounted by a flat hat which allowed three golden tassels
+of large bullion to droop from its three points.
+
+It was a perfect festival wherever he appeared. One would have said that
+his presence had something warming and luminous about it. The children
+and the old people came out to the doorsteps for the Bishop as for the
+sun. He bestowed his blessing, and they blessed him. They pointed out
+his house to any one who was in need of anything.
+
+[Illustration: The Comfortor 1b1-5-comfortor]
+
+Here and there he halted, accosted the little boys and girls, and smiled
+upon the mothers. He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when
+he no longer had any, he visited the rich.
+
+As he made his cassocks last a long while, and did not wish to have it
+noticed, he never went out in the town without his wadded purple cloak.
+This inconvenienced him somewhat in summer.
+
+On his return, he dined. The dinner resembled his breakfast.
+
+At half-past eight in the evening he supped with his sister, Madame
+Magloire standing behind them and serving them at table. Nothing could
+be more frugal than this repast. If, however, the Bishop had one of his
+cures to supper, Madame Magloire took advantage of the opportunity to
+serve Monseigneur with some excellent fish from the lake, or with some
+fine game from the mountains. Every cure furnished the pretext for
+a good meal: the Bishop did not interfere. With that exception, his
+ordinary diet consisted only of vegetables boiled in water, and oil
+soup. Thus it was said in the town, when the Bishop does not indulge in
+the cheer of a cure, he indulges in the cheer of a trappist.
+
+After supper he conversed for half an hour with Mademoiselle Baptistine
+and Madame Magloire; then he retired to his own room and set to writing,
+sometimes on loose sheets, and again on the margin of some folio. He was
+a man of letters and rather learned. He left behind him five or six
+very curious manuscripts; among others, a dissertation on this verse in
+Genesis, In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon the waters.
+With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic verse which says,
+The winds of God blew; Flavius Josephus who says, A wind from above was
+precipitated upon the earth; and finally, the Chaldaic paraphrase of
+Onkelos, which renders it, A wind coming from God blew upon the face of
+the waters. In another dissertation, he examines the theological works
+of Hugo, Bishop of Ptolemais, great-grand-uncle to the writer of this
+book, and establishes the fact, that to this bishop must be attributed
+the divers little works published during the last century, under the
+pseudonym of Barleycourt.
+
+Sometimes, in the midst of his reading, no matter what the book might
+be which he had in his hand, he would suddenly fall into a profound
+meditation, whence he only emerged to write a few lines on the pages of
+the volume itself. These lines have often no connection whatever with
+the book which contains them. We now have under our eyes a note written
+by him on the margin of a quarto entitled Correspondence of Lord Germain
+with Generals Clinton, Cornwallis, and the Admirals on the American
+station. Versailles, Poincot, book-seller; and Paris, Pissot,
+bookseller, Quai des Augustins.
+
+Here is the note:--
+
+"Oh, you who are!
+
+"Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the
+Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls
+you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you
+Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence;
+Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man
+calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most
+beautiful of all your names."
+
+Toward nine o'clock in the evening the two women retired and betook
+themselves to their chambers on the first floor, leaving him alone until
+morning on the ground floor.
+
+It is necessary that we should, in this place, give an exact idea of the
+dwelling of the Bishop of D----
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--WHO GUARDED HIS HOUSE FOR HIM
+
+The house in which he lived consisted, as we have said, of a ground
+floor, and one story above; three rooms on the ground floor, three
+chambers on the first, and an attic above. Behind the house was a
+garden, a quarter of an acre in extent. The two women occupied the
+first floor; the Bishop was lodged below. The first room, opening on the
+street, served him as dining-room, the second was his bedroom, and the
+third his oratory. There was no exit possible from this oratory, except
+by passing through the bedroom, nor from the bedroom, without passing
+through the dining-room. At the end of the suite, in the oratory, there
+was a detached alcove with a bed, for use in cases of hospitality.
+The Bishop offered this bed to country curates whom business or the
+requirements of their parishes brought to D----
+
+The pharmacy of the hospital, a small building which had been added
+to the house, and abutted on the garden, had been transformed into
+a kitchen and cellar. In addition to this, there was in the garden a
+stable, which had formerly been the kitchen of the hospital, and in
+which the Bishop kept two cows. No matter what the quantity of milk they
+gave, he invariably sent half of it every morning to the sick people in
+the hospital. "I am paying my tithes," he said.
+
+His bedroom was tolerably large, and rather difficult to warm in bad
+weather. As wood is extremely dear at D----, he hit upon the idea of
+having a compartment of boards constructed in the cow-shed. Here he
+passed his evenings during seasons of severe cold: he called it his
+winter salon.
+
+In this winter salon, as in the dining-room, there was no other
+furniture than a square table in white wood, and four straw-seated
+chairs. In addition to this the dining-room was ornamented with an
+antique sideboard, painted pink, in water colors. Out of a similar
+sideboard, properly draped with white napery and imitation lace, the
+Bishop had constructed the altar which decorated his oratory.
+
+His wealthy penitents and the sainted women of D---- had more than once
+assessed themselves to raise the money for a new altar for Monseigneur's
+oratory; on each occasion he had taken the money and had given it to
+the poor. "The most beautiful of altars," he said, "is the soul of an
+unhappy creature consoled and thanking God."
+
+In his oratory there were two straw prie-Dieu, and there was an
+arm-chair, also in straw, in his bedroom. When, by chance, he received
+seven or eight persons at one time, the prefect, or the general, or the
+staff of the regiment in garrison, or several pupils from the little
+seminary, the chairs had to be fetched from the winter salon in the
+stable, the prie-Dieu from the oratory, and the arm-chair from the
+bedroom: in this way as many as eleven chairs could be collected for the
+visitors. A room was dismantled for each new guest.
+
+It sometimes happened that there were twelve in the party; the Bishop
+then relieved the embarrassment of the situation by standing in front
+of the chimney if it was winter, or by strolling in the garden if it was
+summer.
+
+There was still another chair in the detached alcove, but the straw was
+half gone from it, and it had but three legs, so that it was of service
+only when propped against the wall. Mademoiselle Baptistine had also in
+her own room a very large easy-chair of wood, which had formerly been
+gilded, and which was covered with flowered pekin; but they had been
+obliged to hoist this bergere up to the first story through the window,
+as the staircase was too narrow; it could not, therefore, be reckoned
+among the possibilities in the way of furniture.
+
+Mademoiselle Baptistine's ambition had been to be able to purchase a set
+of drawing-room furniture in yellow Utrecht velvet, stamped with a rose
+pattern, and with mahogany in swan's neck style, with a sofa. But this
+would have cost five hundred francs at least, and in view of the fact
+that she had only been able to lay by forty-two francs and ten sous for
+this purpose in the course of five years, she had ended by renouncing
+the idea. However, who is there who has attained his ideal?
+
+Nothing is more easy to present to the imagination than the Bishop's
+bedchamber. A glazed door opened on the garden; opposite this was the
+bed,--a hospital bed of iron, with a canopy of green serge; in the
+shadow of the bed, behind a curtain, were the utensils of the toilet,
+which still betrayed the elegant habits of the man of the world: there
+were two doors, one near the chimney, opening into the oratory; the
+other near the bookcase, opening into the dining-room. The bookcase was
+a large cupboard with glass doors filled with books; the chimney was of
+wood painted to represent marble, and habitually without fire. In the
+chimney stood a pair of firedogs of iron, ornamented above with two
+garlanded vases, and flutings which had formerly been silvered
+with silver leaf, which was a sort of episcopal luxury; above the
+chimney-piece hung a crucifix of copper, with the silver worn off, fixed
+on a background of threadbare velvet in a wooden frame from which the
+gilding had fallen; near the glass door a large table with an inkstand,
+loaded with a confusion of papers and with huge volumes; before the
+table an arm-chair of straw; in front of the bed a prie-Dieu, borrowed
+from the oratory.
+
+Two portraits in oval frames were fastened to the wall on each side of
+the bed. Small gilt inscriptions on the plain surface of the cloth at
+the side of these figures indicated that the portraits represented,
+one the Abbe of Chaliot, bishop of Saint Claude; the other, the Abbe
+Tourteau, vicar-general of Agde, abbe of Grand-Champ, order of Citeaux,
+diocese of Chartres. When the Bishop succeeded to this apartment, after
+the hospital patients, he had found these portraits there, and had left
+them. They were priests, and probably donors--two reasons for respecting
+them. All that he knew about these two persons was, that they had
+been appointed by the king, the one to his bishopric, the other to his
+benefice, on the same day, the 27th of April, 1785. Madame Magloire
+having taken the pictures down to dust, the Bishop had discovered these
+particulars written in whitish ink on a little square of paper, yellowed
+by time, and attached to the back of the portrait of the Abbe of
+Grand-Champ with four wafers.
+
+At his window he had an antique curtain of a coarse woollen stuff, which
+finally became so old, that, in order to avoid the expense of a new one,
+Madame Magloire was forced to take a large seam in the very middle
+of it. This seam took the form of a cross. The Bishop often called
+attention to it: "How delightful that is!" he said.
+
+All the rooms in the house, without exception, those on the ground
+floor as well as those on the first floor, were white-washed, which is a
+fashion in barracks and hospitals.
+
+However, in their latter years, Madame Magloire discovered beneath the
+paper which had been washed over, paintings, ornamenting the apartment
+of Mademoiselle Baptistine, as we shall see further on. Before becoming
+a hospital, this house had been the ancient parliament house of the
+Bourgeois. Hence this decoration. The chambers were paved in red bricks,
+which were washed every week, with straw mats in front of all the beds.
+Altogether, this dwelling, which was attended to by the two women, was
+exquisitely clean from top to bottom. This was the sole luxury which the
+Bishop permitted. He said, "That takes nothing from the poor."
+
+It must be confessed, however, that he still retained from his former
+possessions six silver knives and forks and a soup-ladle, which
+Madame Magloire contemplated every day with delight, as they glistened
+splendidly upon the coarse linen cloth. And since we are now painting
+the Bishop of D---- as he was in reality, we must add that he had said
+more than once, "I find it difficult to renounce eating from silver
+dishes."
+
+To this silverware must be added two large candlesticks of massive
+silver, which he had inherited from a great-aunt. These candlesticks
+held two wax candles, and usually figured on the Bishop's chimney-piece.
+When he had any one to dinner, Madame Magloire lighted the two candles
+and set the candlesticks on the table.
+
+In the Bishop's own chamber, at the head of his bed, there was a small
+cupboard, in which Madame Magloire locked up the six silver knives and
+forks and the big spoon every night. But it is necessary to add, that
+the key was never removed.
+
+The garden, which had been rather spoiled by the ugly buildings which
+we have mentioned, was composed of four alleys in cross-form, radiating
+from a tank. Another walk made the circuit of the garden, and skirted
+the white wall which enclosed it. These alleys left behind them four
+square plots rimmed with box. In three of these, Madame Magloire
+cultivated vegetables; in the fourth, the Bishop had planted some
+flowers; here and there stood a few fruit-trees. Madame Magloire had
+once remarked, with a sort of gentle malice: "Monseigneur, you who turn
+everything to account, have, nevertheless, one useless plot. It would be
+better to grow salads there than bouquets." "Madame Magloire," retorted
+the Bishop, "you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the
+useful." He added after a pause, "More so, perhaps."
+
+This plot, consisting of three or four beds, occupied the Bishop
+almost as much as did his books. He liked to pass an hour or two there,
+trimming, hoeing, and making holes here and there in the earth, into
+which he dropped seeds. He was not as hostile to insects as a gardener
+could have wished to see him. Moreover, he made no pretensions to
+botany; he ignored groups and consistency; he made not the slightest
+effort to decide between Tournefort and the natural method; he took part
+neither with the buds against the cotyledons, nor with Jussieu against
+Linnaeus. He did not study plants; he loved flowers. He respected
+learned men greatly; he respected the ignorant still more; and, without
+ever failing in these two respects, he watered his flower-beds every
+summer evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.
+
+The house had not a single door which could be locked. The door of the
+dining-room, which, as we have said, opened directly on the cathedral
+square, had formerly been ornamented with locks and bolts like the door
+of a prison. The Bishop had had all this ironwork removed, and this door
+was never fastened, either by night or by day, with anything except the
+latch. All that the first passerby had to do at any hour, was to give it
+a push. At first, the two women had been very much tried by this door,
+which was never fastened, but Monsieur de D---- had said to them, "Have
+bolts put on your rooms, if that will please you." They had ended by
+sharing his confidence, or by at least acting as though they shared it.
+Madame Magloire alone had frights from time to time. As for the Bishop,
+his thought can be found explained, or at least indicated, in the three
+lines which he wrote on the margin of a Bible, "This is the shade of
+difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of
+the priest should always be open."
+
+On another book, entitled Philosophy of the Medical Science, he had
+written this other note: "Am not I a physician like them? I also have my
+patients, and then, too, I have some whom I call my unfortunates."
+
+Again he wrote: "Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of
+you. The very man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs
+shelter."
+
+It chanced that a worthy cure, I know not whether it was the cure of
+Couloubroux or the cure of Pompierry, took it into his head to ask
+him one day, probably at the instigation of Madame Magloire, whether
+Monsieur was sure that he was not committing an indiscretion, to a
+certain extent, in leaving his door unfastened day and night, at the
+mercy of any one who should choose to enter, and whether, in short,
+he did not fear lest some misfortune might occur in a house so little
+guarded. The Bishop touched his shoulder, with gentle gravity, and
+said to him, "Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui
+custodiunt eam," Unless the Lord guard the house, in vain do they watch
+who guard it.
+
+Then he spoke of something else.
+
+He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as
+the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be
+tranquil."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--CRAVATTE
+
+It is here that a fact falls naturally into place, which we must not
+omit, because it is one of the sort which show us best what sort of a
+man the Bishop of D---- was.
+
+After the destruction of the band of Gaspard Bes, who had infested the
+gorges of Ollioules, one of his lieutenants, Cravatte, took refuge in
+the mountains. He concealed himself for some time with his bandits, the
+remnant of Gaspard Bes's troop, in the county of Nice; then he made his
+way to Piedmont, and suddenly reappeared in France, in the vicinity
+of Barcelonette. He was first seen at Jauziers, then at Tuiles. He hid
+himself in the caverns of the Joug-de-l'Aigle, and thence he descended
+towards the hamlets and villages through the ravines of Ubaye and
+Ubayette.
+
+He even pushed as far as Embrun, entered the cathedral one night,
+and despoiled the sacristy. His highway robberies laid waste the
+country-side. The gendarmes were set on his track, but in vain. He
+always escaped; sometimes he resisted by main force. He was a bold
+wretch. In the midst of all this terror the Bishop arrived. He was
+making his circuit to Chastelar. The mayor came to meet him, and urged
+him to retrace his steps. Cravatte was in possession of the mountains
+as far as Arche, and beyond; there was danger even with an escort; it
+merely exposed three or four unfortunate gendarmes to no purpose.
+
+"Therefore," said the Bishop, "I intend to go without escort."
+
+"You do not really mean that, Monseigneur!" exclaimed the mayor.
+
+"I do mean it so thoroughly that I absolutely refuse any gendarmes, and
+shall set out in an hour."
+
+"Set out?"
+
+"Set out."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Alone."
+
+"Monseigneur, you will not do that!"
+
+"There exists yonder in the mountains," said the Bishop, "a tiny
+community no bigger than that, which I have not seen for three years.
+They are my good friends, those gentle and honest shepherds. They own
+one goat out of every thirty that they tend. They make very pretty
+woollen cords of various colors, and they play the mountain airs on
+little flutes with six holes. They need to be told of the good God now
+and then. What would they say to a bishop who was afraid? What would
+they say if I did not go?"
+
+"But the brigands, Monseigneur?"
+
+"Hold," said the Bishop, "I must think of that. You are right. I may
+meet them. They, too, need to be told of the good God."
+
+"But, Monseigneur, there is a band of them! A flock of wolves!"
+
+"Monsieur le maire, it may be that it is of this very flock of wolves
+that Jesus has constituted me the shepherd. Who knows the ways of
+Providence?"
+
+"They will rob you, Monseigneur."
+
+"I have nothing."
+
+"They will kill you."
+
+"An old goodman of a priest, who passes along mumbling his prayers? Bah!
+To what purpose?"
+
+"Oh, mon Dieu! what if you should meet them!"
+
+"I should beg alms of them for my poor."
+
+"Do not go, Monseigneur. In the name of Heaven! You are risking your
+life!"
+
+"Monsieur le maire," said the Bishop, "is that really all? I am not in
+the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls."
+
+They had to allow him to do as he pleased. He set out, accompanied only
+by a child who offered to serve as a guide. His obstinacy was bruited
+about the country-side, and caused great consternation.
+
+He would take neither his sister nor Madame Magloire. He traversed the
+mountain on mule-back, encountered no one, and arrived safe and sound
+at the residence of his "good friends," the shepherds. He remained
+there for a fortnight, preaching, administering the sacrament, teaching,
+exhorting. When the time of his departure approached, he resolved to
+chant a Te Deum pontifically. He mentioned it to the cure. But what was
+to be done? There were no episcopal ornaments. They could only place at
+his disposal a wretched village sacristy, with a few ancient chasubles
+of threadbare damask adorned with imitation lace.
+
+"Bah!" said the Bishop. "Let us announce our Te Deum from the pulpit,
+nevertheless, Monsieur le Cure. Things will arrange themselves."
+
+They instituted a search in the churches of the neighborhood. All the
+magnificence of these humble parishes combined would not have sufficed
+to clothe the chorister of a cathedral properly.
+
+While they were thus embarrassed, a large chest was brought and
+deposited in the presbytery for the Bishop, by two unknown horsemen, who
+departed on the instant. The chest was opened; it contained a cope of
+cloth of gold, a mitre ornamented with diamonds, an archbishop's cross,
+a magnificent crosier,--all the pontifical vestments which had been
+stolen a month previously from the treasury of Notre Dame d'Embrun. In
+the chest was a paper, on which these words were written, "From Cravatte
+to Monseigneur Bienvenu."
+
+"Did not I say that things would come right of themselves?" said the
+Bishop. Then he added, with a smile, "To him who contents himself with
+the surplice of a curate, God sends the cope of an archbishop."
+
+"Monseigneur," murmured the cure, throwing back his head with a smile.
+"God--or the Devil."
+
+The Bishop looked steadily at the cure, and repeated with authority,
+"God!"
+
+When he returned to Chastelar, the people came out to stare at him as at
+a curiosity, all along the road. At the priest's house in Chastelar he
+rejoined Mademoiselle Baptistine and Madame Magloire, who were waiting
+for him, and he said to his sister: "Well! was I in the right? The poor
+priest went to his poor mountaineers with empty hands, and he returns
+from them with his hands full. I set out bearing only my faith in God; I
+have brought back the treasure of a cathedral."
+
+That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear
+robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers.
+Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the
+real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it
+what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which
+threatens our soul."
+
+Then, turning to his sister: "Sister, never a precaution on the part
+of the priest, against his fellow-man. That which his fellow does, God
+permits. Let us confine ourselves to prayer, when we think that a danger
+is approaching us. Let us pray, not for ourselves, but that our brother
+may not fall into sin on our account."
+
+However, such incidents were rare in his life. We relate those of which
+we know; but generally he passed his life in doing the same things at
+the same moment. One month of his year resembled one hour of his day.
+
+As to what became of "the treasure" of the cathedral of Embrun, we
+should be embarrassed by any inquiry in that direction. It consisted of
+very handsome things, very tempting things, and things which were very
+well adapted to be stolen for the benefit of the unfortunate. Stolen
+they had already been elsewhere. Half of the adventure was completed; it
+only remained to impart a new direction to the theft, and to cause it
+to take a short trip in the direction of the poor. However, we make no
+assertions on this point. Only, a rather obscure note was found among
+the Bishop's papers, which may bear some relation to this matter, and
+which is couched in these terms, "The question is, to decide whether
+this should be turned over to the cathedral or to the hospital."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--PHILOSOPHY AFTER DRINKING
+
+The senator above mentioned was a clever man, who had made his own way,
+heedless of those things which present obstacles, and which are called
+conscience, sworn faith, justice, duty: he had marched straight to his
+goal, without once flinching in the line of his advancement and his
+interest. He was an old attorney, softened by success; not a bad man by
+any means, who rendered all the small services in his power to his sons,
+his sons-in-law, his relations, and even to his friends, having wisely
+seized upon, in life, good sides, good opportunities, good windfalls.
+Everything else seemed to him very stupid. He was intelligent, and just
+sufficiently educated to think himself a disciple of Epicurus; while he
+was, in reality, only a product of Pigault-Lebrun. He laughed willingly
+and pleasantly over infinite and eternal things, and at the "Crotchets
+of that good old fellow the Bishop." He even sometimes laughed at him
+with an amiable authority in the presence of M. Myriel himself, who
+listened to him.
+
+On some semi-official occasion or other, I do not recollect what,
+Count*** [this senator] and M. Myriel were to dine with the prefect.
+At dessert, the senator, who was slightly exhilarated, though still
+perfectly dignified, exclaimed:--
+
+"Egad, Bishop, let's have a discussion. It is hard for a senator and a
+bishop to look at each other without winking. We are two augurs. I am
+going to make a confession to you. I have a philosophy of my own."
+
+"And you are right," replied the Bishop. "As one makes one's philosophy,
+so one lies on it. You are on the bed of purple, senator."
+
+The senator was encouraged, and went on:--
+
+"Let us be good fellows."
+
+"Good devils even," said the Bishop.
+
+"I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens,
+Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the
+philosophers in my library gilded on the edges."
+
+"Like yourself, Count," interposed the Bishop.
+
+The senator resumed:--
+
+"I hate Diderot; he is an ideologist, a declaimer, and a revolutionist,
+a believer in God at bottom, and more bigoted than Voltaire. Voltaire
+made sport of Needham, and he was wrong, for Needham's eels prove that
+God is useless. A drop of vinegar in a spoonful of flour paste supplies
+the fiat lux. Suppose the drop to be larger and the spoonful bigger;
+you have the world. Man is the eel. Then what is the good of the Eternal
+Father? The Jehovah hypothesis tires me, Bishop. It is good for nothing
+but to produce shallow people, whose reasoning is hollow. Down with that
+great All, which torments me! Hurrah for Zero which leaves me in peace!
+Between you and me, and in order to empty my sack, and make confession
+to my pastor, as it behooves me to do, I will admit to you that I
+have good sense. I am not enthusiastic over your Jesus, who preaches
+renunciation and sacrifice to the last extremity. 'Tis the counsel of an
+avaricious man to beggars. Renunciation; why? Sacrifice; to what end?
+I do not see one wolf immolating himself for the happiness of another
+wolf. Let us stick to nature, then. We are at the top; let us have a
+superior philosophy. What is the advantage of being at the top, if
+one sees no further than the end of other people's noses? Let us live
+merrily. Life is all. That man has another future elsewhere, on high,
+below, anywhere, I don't believe; not one single word of it. Ah!
+sacrifice and renunciation are recommended to me; I must take heed to
+everything I do; I must cudgel my brains over good and evil, over the
+just and the unjust, over the fas and the nefas. Why? Because I shall
+have to render an account of my actions. When? After death. What a fine
+dream! After my death it will be a very clever person who can catch me.
+Have a handful of dust seized by a shadow-hand, if you can. Let us tell
+the truth, we who are initiated, and who have raised the veil of Isis:
+there is no such thing as either good or evil; there is vegetation.
+Let us seek the real. Let us get to the bottom of it. Let us go into it
+thoroughly. What the deuce! let us go to the bottom of it! We must scent
+out the truth; dig in the earth for it, and seize it. Then it gives you
+exquisite joys. Then you grow strong, and you laugh. I am square on the
+bottom, I am. Immortality, Bishop, is a chance, a waiting for dead men's
+shoes. Ah! what a charming promise! trust to it, if you like! What a
+fine lot Adam has! We are souls, and we shall be angels, with blue wings
+on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it not Tertullian
+who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star? Very well. We
+shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall
+see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a
+nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I
+may whisper it among friends. Inter pocula. To sacrifice the world to
+paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the dupe of the
+infinite! I'm not such a fool. I am a nought. I call myself Monsieur le
+Comte Nought, senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist
+after death? No. What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What
+am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy.
+Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have
+suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall
+have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I
+shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. Such is my
+wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee, the grave-digger is there;
+the Pantheon for some of us: all falls into the great hole. End. Finis.
+Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death, believe
+me. I laugh at the idea of there being any one who has anything to tell
+me on that subject. Fables of nurses; bugaboo for children; Jehovah for
+men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond the tomb there is nothing
+but equal nothingness. You have been Sardanapalus, you have been Vincent
+de Paul--it makes no difference. That is the truth. Then live your life,
+above all things. Make use of your _I_ while you have it. In truth,
+Bishop, I tell you that I have a philosophy of my own, and I have my
+philosophers. I don't let myself be taken in with that nonsense.
+Of course, there must be something for those who are down,--for the
+barefooted beggars, knife-grinders, and miserable wretches. Legends,
+chimeras, the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars, are provided for
+them to swallow. They gobble it down. They spread it on their dry bread.
+He who has nothing else has the good. God. That is the least he can
+have. I oppose no objection to that; but I reserve Monsieur Naigeon for
+myself. The good God is good for the populace."
+
+The Bishop clapped his hands.
+
+"That's talking!" he exclaimed. "What an excellent and really marvellous
+thing is this materialism! Not every one who wants it can have it. Ah!
+when one does have it, one is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly
+allow one's self to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor
+burned alive like Jeanne d'Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring
+this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves
+irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without
+uneasiness,--places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or
+ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory
+capitulations of conscience,--and that they shall enter the tomb with
+their digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say that
+with reference to you, senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible for me
+to refrain from congratulating you. You great lords have, so you say, a
+philosophy of your own, and for yourselves, which is exquisite, refined,
+accessible to the rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons
+the voluptuousness of life admirably. This philosophy has been
+extracted from the depths, and unearthed by special seekers. But you are
+good-natured princes, and you do not think it a bad thing that belief in
+the good God should constitute the philosophy of the people, very much
+as the goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THE BROTHER AS DEPICTED BY THE SISTER
+
+In order to furnish an idea of the private establishment of the
+Bishop of D----, and of the manner in which those two sainted women
+subordinated their actions, their thoughts, their feminine instincts
+even, which are easily alarmed, to the habits and purposes of the
+Bishop, without his even taking the trouble of speaking in order to
+explain them, we cannot do better than transcribe in this place a letter
+from Mademoiselle Baptistine to Madame the Vicomtess de Boischevron, the
+friend of her childhood. This letter is in our possession.
+
+
+ D----, Dec. 16, 18--.
+MY GOOD MADAM: Not a day passes without our speaking of you. It is our
+established custom; but there is another reason besides. Just imagine,
+while washing and dusting the ceilings and walls, Madam Magloire has
+made some discoveries; now our two chambers hung with antique paper
+whitewashed over, would not discredit a chateau in the style of yours.
+Madam Magloire has pulled off all the paper. There were things beneath.
+My drawing-room, which contains no furniture, and which we use for
+spreading out the linen after washing, is fifteen feet in height,
+eighteen square, with a ceiling which was formerly painted and gilded,
+and with beams, as in yours. This was covered with a cloth while this
+was the hospital. And the woodwork was of the era of our grandmothers.
+But my room is the one you ought to see. Madam Magloire has discovered,
+under at least ten thicknesses of paper pasted on top, some paintings,
+which without being good are very tolerable. The subject is Telemachus
+being knighted by Minerva in some gardens, the name of which escapes
+me. In short, where the Roman ladies repaired on one single night. What
+shall I say to you? I have Romans, and Roman ladies [here occurs an
+illegible word], and the whole train. Madam Magloire has cleaned it all
+off; this summer she is going to have some small injuries repaired, and
+the whole revarnished, and my chamber will be a regular museum. She has
+also found in a corner of the attic two wooden pier-tables of ancient
+fashion. They asked us two crowns of six francs each to regild them, but
+it is much better to give the money to the poor; and they are very ugly
+besides, and I should much prefer a round table of mahogany.
+
+I am always very happy. My brother is so good. He gives all he has to
+the poor and sick. We are very much cramped. The country is trying in
+the winter, and we really must do something for those who are in need.
+We are almost comfortably lighted and warmed. You see that these are
+great treats.
+
+My brother has ways of his own. When he talks, he says that a bishop
+ought to be so. Just imagine! the door of our house is never fastened.
+Whoever chooses to enter finds himself at once in my brother's room. He
+fears nothing, even at night. That is his sort of bravery, he says.
+
+He does not wish me or Madame Magloire feel any fear for him. He exposes
+himself to all sorts of dangers, and he does not like to have us even
+seem to notice it. One must know how to understand him.
+
+He goes out in the rain, he walks in the water, he travels in winter. He
+fears neither suspicious roads nor dangerous encounters, nor night.
+
+Last year he went quite alone into a country of robbers. He would
+not take us. He was absent for a fortnight. On his return nothing had
+happened to him; he was thought to be dead, but was perfectly well, and
+said, "This is the way I have been robbed!" And then he opened a trunk
+full of jewels, all the jewels of the cathedral of Embrun, which the
+thieves had given him.
+
+When he returned on that occasion, I could not refrain from scolding him
+a little, taking care, however, not to speak except when the carriage
+was making a noise, so that no one might hear me.
+
+At first I used to say to myself, "There are no dangers which will stop
+him; he is terrible." Now I have ended by getting used to it. I make a
+sign to Madam Magloire that she is not to oppose him. He risks himself
+as he sees fit. I carry off Madam Magloire, I enter my chamber, I pray
+for him and fall asleep. I am at ease, because I know that if anything
+were to happen to him, it would be the end of me. I should go to the
+good God with my brother and my bishop. It has cost Madam Magloire
+more trouble than it did me to accustom herself to what she terms his
+imprudences. But now the habit has been acquired. We pray together, we
+tremble together, and we fall asleep. If the devil were to enter this
+house, he would be allowed to do so. After all, what is there for us
+to fear in this house? There is always some one with us who is stronger
+than we. The devil may pass through it, but the good God dwells here.
+
+This suffices me. My brother has no longer any need of saying a word to
+me. I understand him without his speaking, and we abandon ourselves to
+the care of Providence. That is the way one has to do with a man who
+possesses grandeur of soul.
+
+I have interrogated my brother with regard to the information which you
+desire on the subject of the Faux family. You are aware that he knows
+everything, and that he has memories, because he is still a very
+good royalist. They really are a very ancient Norman family of the
+generalship of Caen. Five hundred years ago there was a Raoul de Faux, a
+Jean de Faux, and a Thomas de Faux, who were gentlemen, and one of whom
+was a seigneur de Rochefort. The last was Guy-Etienne-Alexandre, and was
+commander of a regiment, and something in the light horse of Bretagne.
+His daughter, Marie-Louise, married Adrien-Charles de Gramont, son of
+the Duke Louis de Gramont, peer of France, colonel of the French guards,
+and lieutenant-general of the army. It is written Faux, Fauq, and
+Faoucq.
+
+Good Madame, recommend us to the prayers of your sainted relative,
+Monsieur the Cardinal. As for your dear Sylvanie, she has done well in
+not wasting the few moments which she passes with you in writing to me.
+She is well, works as you would wish, and loves me.
+
+That is all that I desire. The souvenir which she sent through you
+reached me safely, and it makes me very happy. My health is not so very
+bad, and yet I grow thinner every day. Farewell; my paper is at an end,
+and this forces me to leave you. A thousand good wishes.
+
+BAPTISTINE.
+
+P.S. Your grand nephew is charming. Do you know that he will soon be
+five years old? Yesterday he saw some one riding by on horseback who
+had on knee-caps, and he said, "What has he got on his knees?" He is a
+charming child! His little brother is dragging an old broom about the
+room, like a carriage, and saying, "Hu!"
+
+
+As will be perceived from this letter, these two women understood how to
+mould themselves to the Bishop's ways with that special feminine genius
+which comprehends the man better than he comprehends himself. The Bishop
+of D----, in spite of the gentle and candid air which never deserted
+him, sometimes did things that were grand, bold, and magnificent,
+without seeming to have even a suspicion of the fact. They trembled, but
+they let him alone. Sometimes Madame Magloire essayed a remonstrance in
+advance, but never at the time, nor afterwards. They never interfered
+with him by so much as a word or sign, in any action once entered upon.
+At certain moments, without his having occasion to mention it, when he
+was not even conscious of it himself in all probability, so perfect was
+his simplicity, they vaguely felt that he was acting as a bishop; then
+they were nothing more than two shadows in the house. They served him
+passively; and if obedience consisted in disappearing, they disappeared.
+They understood, with an admirable delicacy of instinct, that certain
+cares may be put under constraint. Thus, even when believing him to be
+in peril, they understood, I will not say his thought, but his nature,
+to such a degree that they no longer watched over him. They confided him
+to God.
+
+Moreover, Baptistine said, as we have just read, that her brother's end
+would prove her own. Madame Magloire did not say this, but she knew it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--THE BISHOP IN THE PRESENCE OF AN UNKNOWN LIGHT
+
+At an epoch a little later than the date of the letter cited in the
+preceding pages, he did a thing which, if the whole town was to be
+believed, was even more hazardous than his trip across the mountains
+infested with bandits.
+
+In the country near D---- a man lived quite alone. This man, we will
+state at once, was a former member of the Convention. His name was G----
+
+Member of the Convention, G---- was mentioned with a sort of horror in
+the little world of D---- A member of the Convention--can you imagine
+such a thing? That existed from the time when people called each other
+thou, and when they said "citizen." This man was almost a monster.
+He had not voted for the death of the king, but almost. He was a
+quasi-regicide. He had been a terrible man. How did it happen that such
+a man had not been brought before a provost's court, on the return of
+the legitimate princes? They need not have cut off his head, if you
+please; clemency must be exercised, agreed; but a good banishment for
+life. An example, in short, etc. Besides, he was an atheist, like all
+the rest of those people. Gossip of the geese about the vulture.
+
+Was G---- a vulture after all? Yes; if he were to be judged by the
+element of ferocity in this solitude of his. As he had not voted for the
+death of the king, he had not been included in the decrees of exile, and
+had been able to remain in France.
+
+He dwelt at a distance of three-quarters of an hour from the city, far
+from any hamlet, far from any road, in some hidden turn of a very wild
+valley, no one knew exactly where. He had there, it was said, a sort
+of field, a hole, a lair. There were no neighbors, not even passers-by.
+Since he had dwelt in that valley, the path which led thither had
+disappeared under a growth of grass. The locality was spoken of as
+though it had been the dwelling of a hangman.
+
+Nevertheless, the Bishop meditated on the subject, and from time to time
+he gazed at the horizon at a point where a clump of trees marked the
+valley of the former member of the Convention, and he said, "There is a
+soul yonder which is lonely."
+
+And he added, deep in his own mind, "I owe him a visit."
+
+But, let us avow it, this idea, which seemed natural at the first blush,
+appeared to him after a moment's reflection, as strange, impossible, and
+almost repulsive. For, at bottom, he shared the general impression, and
+the old member of the Convention inspired him, without his being clearly
+conscious of the fact himself, with that sentiment which borders on
+hate, and which is so well expressed by the word estrangement.
+
+Still, should the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No.
+But what a sheep!
+
+The good Bishop was perplexed. Sometimes he set out in that direction;
+then he returned.
+
+Finally, the rumor one day spread through the town that a sort of young
+shepherd, who served the member of the Convention in his hovel, had come
+in quest of a doctor; that the old wretch was dying, that paralysis was
+gaining on him, and that he would not live over night.--"Thank God!"
+some added.
+
+The Bishop took his staff, put on his cloak, on account of his too
+threadbare cassock, as we have mentioned, and because of the evening
+breeze which was sure to rise soon, and set out.
+
+The sun was setting, and had almost touched the horizon when the Bishop
+arrived at the excommunicated spot. With a certain beating of the heart,
+he recognized the fact that he was near the lair. He strode over a
+ditch, leaped a hedge, made his way through a fence of dead boughs,
+entered a neglected paddock, took a few steps with a good deal of
+boldness, and suddenly, at the extremity of the waste land, and behind
+lofty brambles, he caught sight of the cavern.
+
+It was a very low hut, poor, small, and clean, with a vine nailed
+against the outside.
+
+Near the door, in an old wheel-chair, the arm-chair of the peasants,
+there was a white-haired man, smiling at the sun.
+
+Near the seated man stood a young boy, the shepherd lad. He was offering
+the old man a jar of milk.
+
+While the Bishop was watching him, the old man spoke: "Thank you," he
+said, "I need nothing." And his smile quitted the sun to rest upon the
+child.
+
+The Bishop stepped forward. At the sound which he made in walking, the
+old man turned his head, and his face expressed the sum total of the
+surprise which a man can still feel after a long life.
+
+"This is the first time since I have been here," said he, "that any one
+has entered here. Who are you, sir?"
+
+The Bishop answered:--
+
+"My name is Bienvenu Myriel."
+
+"Bienvenu Myriel? I have heard that name. Are you the man whom the
+people call Monseigneur Welcome?"
+
+"I am."
+
+The old man resumed with a half-smile
+
+"In that case, you are my bishop?"
+
+"Something of that sort."
+
+"Enter, sir."
+
+The member of the Convention extended his hand to the Bishop, but the
+Bishop did not take it. The Bishop confined himself to the remark:--
+
+"I am pleased to see that I have been misinformed. You certainly do not
+seem to me to be ill."
+
+"Monsieur," replied the old man, "I am going to recover."
+
+He paused, and then said:--
+
+"I shall die three hours hence."
+
+Then he continued:--
+
+"I am something of a doctor; I know in what fashion the last hour draws
+on. Yesterday, only my feet were cold; to-day, the chill has ascended to
+my knees; now I feel it mounting to my waist; when it reaches the heart,
+I shall stop. The sun is beautiful, is it not? I had myself wheeled
+out here to take a last look at things. You can talk to me; it does not
+fatigue me. You have done well to come and look at a man who is on
+the point of death. It is well that there should be witnesses at that
+moment. One has one's caprices; I should have liked to last until the
+dawn, but I know that I shall hardly live three hours. It will be night
+then. What does it matter, after all? Dying is a simple affair. One has
+no need of the light for that. So be it. I shall die by starlight."
+
+The old man turned to the shepherd lad:--
+
+"Go to thy bed; thou wert awake all last night; thou art tired."
+
+The child entered the hut.
+
+The old man followed him with his eyes, and added, as though speaking to
+himself:--
+
+"I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors."
+
+The Bishop was not touched as it seems that he should have been. He
+did not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the
+whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated
+like the rest: he, who on occasion, was so fond of laughing at "His
+Grace," was rather shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur, and he
+was almost tempted to retort "citizen." He was assailed by a fancy for
+peevish familiarity, common enough to doctors and priests, but which
+was not habitual with him. This man, after all, this member of the
+Convention, this representative of the people, had been one of the
+powerful ones of the earth; for the first time in his life, probably,
+the Bishop felt in a mood to be severe.
+
+Meanwhile, the member of the Convention had been surveying him with a
+modest cordiality, in which one could have distinguished, possibly, that
+humility which is so fitting when one is on the verge of returning to
+dust.
+
+The Bishop, on his side, although he generally restrained his curiosity,
+which, in his opinion, bordered on a fault, could not refrain from
+examining the member of the Convention with an attention which, as it
+did not have its course in sympathy, would have served his conscience as
+a matter of reproach, in connection with any other man. A member of the
+Convention produced on him somewhat the effect of being outside the pale
+of the law, even of the law of charity. G----, calm, his body almost
+upright, his voice vibrating, was one of those octogenarians who form
+the subject of astonishment to the physiologist. The Revolution had
+many of these men, proportioned to the epoch. In this old man one was
+conscious of a man put to the proof. Though so near to his end, he
+preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm
+tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something
+calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the
+sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken
+the door. G---- seemed to be dying because he willed it so. There was
+freedom in his agony. His legs alone were motionless. It was there that
+the shadows held him fast. His feet were cold and dead, but his head
+survived with all the power of life, and seemed full of light. G----,
+at this solemn moment, resembled the king in that tale of the Orient who
+was flesh above and marble below.
+
+There was a stone there. The Bishop sat down. The exordium was abrupt.
+
+"I congratulate you," said he, in the tone which one uses for a
+reprimand. "You did not vote for the death of the king, after all."
+
+The old member of the Convention did not appear to notice the bitter
+meaning underlying the words "after all." He replied. The smile had
+quite disappeared from his face.
+
+"Do not congratulate me too much, sir. I did vote for the death of the
+tyrant."
+
+It was the tone of austerity answering the tone of severity.
+
+"What do you mean to say?" resumed the Bishop.
+
+"I mean to say that man has a tyrant,--ignorance. I voted for the death
+of that tyrant. That tyrant engendered royalty, which is authority
+falsely understood, while science is authority rightly understood. Man
+should be governed only by science."
+
+"And conscience," added the Bishop.
+
+"It is the same thing. Conscience is the quantity of innate science
+which we have within us."
+
+Monseigneur Bienvenu listened in some astonishment to this language,
+which was very new to him.
+
+The member of the Convention resumed:--
+
+"So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said 'no.' I did not think that I
+had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil.
+I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution
+for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child.
+In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted for fraternity,
+concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and
+errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light. We
+have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of
+miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn
+of joy."
+
+"Mixed joy," said the Bishop.
+
+"You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the
+past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work
+was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we
+were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not
+sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the
+wind is still there."
+
+"You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a
+demolition complicated with wrath."
+
+"Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of
+progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French
+Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent
+of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the
+unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased,
+enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the
+earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of
+humanity."
+
+The Bishop could not refrain from murmuring:--
+
+"Yes? '93!"
+
+The member of the Convention straightened himself up in his chair with
+an almost lugubrious solemnity, and exclaimed, so far as a dying man is
+capable of exclamation:--
+
+"Ah, there you go; '93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been
+forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen
+hundred years it burst. You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial."
+
+The Bishop felt, without, perhaps, confessing it, that something within
+him had suffered extinction. Nevertheless, he put a good face on the
+matter. He replied:--
+
+"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name
+of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice. A thunderbolt should
+commit no error." And he added, regarding the member of the Convention
+steadily the while, "Louis XVII.?"
+
+The conventionary stretched forth his hand and grasped the Bishop's arm.
+
+"Louis XVII.! let us see. For whom do you mourn? is it for the innocent
+child? very good; in that case I mourn with you. Is it for the royal
+child? I demand time for reflection. To me, the brother of Cartouche,
+an innocent child who was hung up by the armpits in the Place de Greve,
+until death ensued, for the sole crime of having been the brother
+of Cartouche, is no less painful than the grandson of Louis XV., an
+innocent child, martyred in the tower of the Temple, for the sole crime
+of having been grandson of Louis XV."
+
+"Monsieur," said the Bishop, "I like not this conjunction of names."
+
+"Cartouche? Louis XV.? To which of the two do you object?"
+
+A momentary silence ensued. The Bishop almost regretted having come, and
+yet he felt vaguely and strangely shaken.
+
+The conventionary resumed:--
+
+"Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ
+loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge,
+full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried,
+'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children.
+It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of
+Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own
+crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags
+as in fleurs de lys."
+
+"That is true," said the Bishop in a low voice.
+
+"I persist," continued the conventionary G---- "You have mentioned Louis
+XVII. to me. Let us come to an understanding. Shall we weep for all the
+innocent, all martyrs, all children, the lowly as well as the exalted?
+I agree to that. But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back
+further than '93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will
+weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep
+with me over the children of the people."
+
+"I weep for all," said the Bishop.
+
+"Equally!" exclaimed conventionary G----; "and if the balance must
+incline, let it be on the side of the people. They have been suffering
+longer."
+
+Another silence ensued. The conventionary was the first to break it. He
+raised himself on one elbow, took a bit of his cheek between his thumb
+and his forefinger, as one does mechanically when one interrogates and
+judges, and appealed to the Bishop with a gaze full of all the forces of
+the death agony. It was almost an explosion.
+
+"Yes, sir, the people have been suffering a long while. And hold! that
+is not all, either; why have you just questioned me and talked to me
+about Louis XVII.? I know you not. Ever since I have been in these parts
+I have dwelt in this enclosure alone, never setting foot outside, and
+seeing no one but that child who helps me. Your name has reached me in
+a confused manner, it is true, and very badly pronounced, I must admit;
+but that signifies nothing: clever men have so many ways of imposing on
+that honest goodman, the people. By the way, I did not hear the sound of
+your carriage; you have left it yonder, behind the coppice at the fork
+of the roads, no doubt. I do not know you, I tell you. You have told me
+that you are the Bishop; but that affords me no information as to your
+moral personality. In short, I repeat my question. Who are you? You are
+a bishop; that is to say, a prince of the church, one of those gilded
+men with heraldic bearings and revenues, who have vast prebends,--the
+bishopric of D---- fifteen thousand francs settled income, ten thousand
+in perquisites; total, twenty-five thousand francs,--who have kitchens,
+who have liveries, who make good cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who
+strut about, a lackey before, a lackey behind, in a gala coach, and
+who have palaces, and who roll in their carriages in the name of Jesus
+Christ who went barefoot! You are a prelate,--revenues, palace, horses,
+servants, good table, all the sensualities of life; you have this like
+the rest, and like the rest, you enjoy it; it is well; but this says
+either too much or too little; this does not enlighten me upon the
+intrinsic and essential value of the man who comes with the probable
+intention of bringing wisdom to me. To whom do I speak? Who are you?"
+
+The Bishop hung his head and replied, "Vermis sum--I am a worm."
+
+"A worm of the earth in a carriage?" growled the conventionary.
+
+It was the conventionary's turn to be arrogant, and the Bishop's to be
+humble.
+
+The Bishop resumed mildly:--
+
+"So be it, sir. But explain to me how my carriage, which is a few paces
+off behind the trees yonder, how my good table and the moor-hens which I
+eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand francs income, how my palace
+and my lackeys prove that clemency is not a duty, and that '93 was not
+inexorable."
+
+The conventionary passed his hand across his brow, as though to sweep
+away a cloud.
+
+"Before replying to you," he said, "I beseech you to pardon me. I have
+just committed a wrong, sir. You are at my house, you are my guest, I
+owe you courtesy. You discuss my ideas, and it becomes me to confine
+myself to combating your arguments. Your riches and your pleasures are
+advantages which I hold over you in the debate; but good taste dictates
+that I shall not make use of them. I promise you to make no use of them
+in the future."
+
+"I thank you," said the Bishop.
+
+G---- resumed.
+
+"Let us return to the explanation which you have asked of me. Where were
+we? What were you saying to me? That '93 was inexorable?"
+
+"Inexorable; yes," said the Bishop. "What think you of Marat clapping
+his hands at the guillotine?"
+
+"What think you of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?"
+
+The retort was a harsh one, but it attained its mark with the directness
+of a point of steel. The Bishop quivered under it; no reply occurred to
+him; but he was offended by this mode of alluding to Bossuet. The best
+of minds will have their fetiches, and they sometimes feel vaguely
+wounded by the want of respect of logic.
+
+The conventionary began to pant; the asthma of the agony which is
+mingled with the last breaths interrupted his voice; still, there was a
+perfect lucidity of soul in his eyes. He went on:--
+
+"Let me say a few words more in this and that direction; I am willing.
+Apart from the Revolution, which, taken as a whole, is an immense human
+affirmation, '93 is, alas! a rejoinder. You think it inexorable, sir;
+but what of the whole monarchy, sir? Carrier is a bandit; but what name
+do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a rascal; but what
+is your opinion as to Lamoignon-Baville? Maillard is terrible; but
+Saulx-Tavannes, if you please? Duchene senior is ferocious; but what
+epithet will you allow me for the elder Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tete
+is a monster; but not so great a one as M. the Marquis de Louvois. Sir,
+sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am
+also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the
+Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist,
+to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with
+milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld
+that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a
+mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of
+her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture
+of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the
+French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be
+absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its
+most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. I
+abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage; moreover, I am dying."
+
+And ceasing to gaze at the Bishop, the conventionary concluded his
+thoughts in these tranquil words:--
+
+"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are
+over, this fact is recognized,--that the human race has been treated
+harshly, but that it has progressed."
+
+The conventionary doubted not that he had successively conquered all the
+inmost intrenchments of the Bishop. One remained, however, and from this
+intrenchment, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu's resistance,
+came forth this reply, wherein appeared nearly all the harshness of the
+beginning:--
+
+"Progress should believe in God. Good cannot have an impious servitor.
+He who is an atheist is but a bad leader for the human race."
+
+The former representative of the people made no reply. He was seized
+with a fit of trembling. He looked towards heaven, and in his glance a
+tear gathered slowly. When the eyelid was full, the tear trickled down
+his livid cheek, and he said, almost in a stammer, quite low, and to
+himself, while his eyes were plunged in the depths:--
+
+"O thou! O ideal! Thou alone existest!"
+
+The Bishop experienced an indescribable shock.
+
+After a pause, the old man raised a finger heavenward and said:--
+
+"The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person
+would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it
+would not exist. There is, then, an _I_. That _I_ of the infinite is
+God."
+
+The dying man had pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with
+the shiver of ecstasy, as though he beheld some one. When he had spoken,
+his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he
+had just lived through in a moment the few hours which had been left to
+him. That which he had said brought him nearer to him who is in death.
+The supreme moment was approaching.
+
+The Bishop understood this; time pressed; it was as a priest that he had
+come: from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion;
+he gazed at those closed eyes, he took that wrinkled, aged and ice-cold
+hand in his, and bent over the dying man.
+
+"This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think that it would be
+regrettable if we had met in vain?"
+
+The conventionary opened his eyes again. A gravity mingled with gloom
+was imprinted on his countenance.
+
+"Bishop," said he, with a slowness which probably arose more from his
+dignity of soul than from the failing of his strength, "I have passed my
+life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years of age
+when my country called me and commanded me to concern myself with its
+affairs. I obeyed. Abuses existed, I combated them; tyrannies existed,
+I destroyed them; rights and principles existed, I proclaimed and
+confessed them. Our territory was invaded, I defended it; France was
+menaced, I offered my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I have been one
+of the masters of the state; the vaults of the treasury were encumbered
+with specie to such a degree that we were forced to shore up the walls,
+which were on the point of bursting beneath the weight of gold and
+silver; I dined in Dead Tree Street, at twenty-two sous. I have succored
+the oppressed, I have comforted the suffering. I tore the cloth from
+the altar, it is true; but it was to bind up the wounds of my country. I
+have always upheld the march forward of the human race, forward towards
+the light, and I have sometimes resisted progress without pity. I have,
+when the occasion offered, protected my own adversaries, men of your
+profession. And there is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very spot
+where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a convent of
+Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in
+1793. I have done my duty according to my powers, and all the good
+that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued, persecuted,
+blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed. For many years past,
+I with my white hair have been conscious that many people think they
+have the right to despise me; to the poor ignorant masses I present the
+visage of one damned. And I accept this isolation of hatred, without
+hating any one myself. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am on the point
+of death. What is it that you have come to ask of me?"
+
+"Your blessing," said the Bishop.
+
+And he knelt down.
+
+When the Bishop raised his head again, the face of the conventionary had
+become august. He had just expired.
+
+The Bishop returned home, deeply absorbed in thoughts which cannot
+be known to us. He passed the whole night in prayer. On the following
+morning some bold and curious persons attempted to speak to him about
+member of the Convention G----; he contented himself with pointing
+heavenward.
+
+From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly feeling
+towards all children and sufferers.
+
+Any allusion to "that old wretch of a G----" caused him to fall into a
+singular preoccupation. No one could say that the passage of that soul
+before his, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his, did
+not count for something in his approach to perfection.
+
+This "pastoral visit" naturally furnished an occasion for a murmur of
+comment in all the little local coteries.
+
+"Was the bedside of such a dying man as that the proper place for a
+bishop? There was evidently no conversion to be expected. All those
+revolutionists are backsliders. Then why go there? What was there to be
+seen there? He must have been very curious indeed to see a soul carried
+off by the devil."
+
+One day a dowager of the impertinent variety who thinks herself
+spiritual, addressed this sally to him, "Monseigneur, people are
+inquiring when Your Greatness will receive the red cap!"--"Oh! oh!
+that's a coarse color," replied the Bishop. "It is lucky that those who
+despise it in a cap revere it in a hat."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--A RESTRICTION
+
+We should incur a great risk of deceiving ourselves, were we to conclude
+from this that Monseigneur Welcome was "a philosophical bishop," or a
+"patriotic cure." His meeting, which may almost be designated as his
+union, with conventionary G----, left behind it in his mind a sort of
+astonishment, which rendered him still more gentle. That is all.
+
+Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was far from being a politician, this is,
+perhaps, the place to indicate very briefly what his attitude was in the
+events of that epoch, supposing that Monseigneur Bienvenu ever dreamed
+of having an attitude.
+
+Let us, then, go back a few years.
+
+Some time after the elevation of M. Myriel to the episcopate, the
+Emperor had made him a baron of the Empire, in company with many other
+bishops. The arrest of the Pope took place, as every one knows, on the
+night of the 5th to the 6th of July, 1809; on this occasion, M. Myriel
+was summoned by Napoleon to the synod of the bishops of France and Italy
+convened at Paris. This synod was held at Notre-Dame, and assembled
+for the first time on the 15th of June, 1811, under the presidency
+of Cardinal Fesch. M. Myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops who
+attended it. But he was present only at one sitting and at three or four
+private conferences. Bishop of a mountain diocese, living so very close
+to nature, in rusticity and deprivation, it appeared that he imported
+among these eminent personages, ideas which altered the temperature of
+the assembly. He very soon returned to D---- He was interrogated as to
+this speedy return, and he replied: "I embarrassed them. The outside air
+penetrated to them through me. I produced on them the effect of an open
+door."
+
+On another occasion he said, "What would you have? Those gentlemen are
+princes. I am only a poor peasant bishop."
+
+The fact is that he displeased them. Among other strange things, it is
+said that he chanced to remark one evening, when he found himself at
+the house of one of his most notable colleagues: "What beautiful clocks!
+What beautiful carpets! What beautiful liveries! They must be a great
+trouble. I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly
+in my ears: 'There are people who are hungry! There are people who are
+cold! There are poor people! There are poor people!'"
+
+Let us remark, by the way, that the hatred of luxury is not an
+intelligent hatred. This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.
+Nevertheless, in churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with
+representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have
+very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a
+contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come
+in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these
+misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a
+little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine
+a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is
+working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened
+nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first
+proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty.
+
+This is, no doubt, what the Bishop of D---- thought.
+
+It must not be supposed, however, that he shared what we call the "ideas
+of the century" on certain delicate points. He took very little part
+in the theological quarrels of the moment, and maintained silence on
+questions in which Church and State were implicated; but if he had
+been strongly pressed, it seems that he would have been found to be an
+ultramontane rather than a gallican. Since we are making a portrait, and
+since we do not wish to conceal anything, we are forced to add that he
+was glacial towards Napoleon in his decline. Beginning with 1813, he
+gave in his adherence to or applauded all hostile manifestations. He
+refused to see him, as he passed through on his return from the island
+of Elba, and he abstained from ordering public prayers for the Emperor
+in his diocese during the Hundred Days.
+
+Besides his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, he had two brothers, one a
+general, the other a prefect. He wrote to both with tolerable frequency.
+He was harsh for a time towards the former, because, holding a command
+in Provence at the epoch of the disembarkation at Cannes, the general
+had put himself at the head of twelve hundred men and had pursued the
+Emperor as though the latter had been a person whom one is desirous
+of allowing to escape. His correspondence with the other brother, the
+ex-prefect, a fine, worthy man who lived in retirement at Paris, Rue
+Cassette, remained more affectionate.
+
+Thus Monseigneur Bienvenu also had his hour of party spirit, his hour
+of bitterness, his cloud. The shadow of the passions of the moment
+traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.
+Certainly, such a man would have done well not to entertain any
+political opinions. Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are
+not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand
+aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic,
+humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous
+intellect. Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly
+connected with the subject of this book, we will simply say this: It
+would have been well if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been a Royalist,
+and if his glance had never been, for a single instant, turned away from
+that serene contemplation in which is distinctly discernible, above the
+fictions and the hatreds of this world, above the stormy vicissitudes of
+human things, the beaming of those three pure radiances, truth, justice,
+and charity.
+
+While admitting that it was not for a political office that God created
+Monseigneur Welcome, we should have understood and admired his protest
+in the name of right and liberty, his proud opposition, his just but
+perilous resistance to the all-powerful Napoleon. But that which pleases
+us in people who are rising pleases us less in the case of people who
+are falling. We only love the fray so long as there is danger, and in
+any case, the combatants of the first hour have alone the right to be
+the exterminators of the last. He who has not been a stubborn accuser in
+prosperity should hold his peace in the face of ruin. The denunciator of
+success is the only legitimate executioner of the fall. As for us, when
+Providence intervenes and strikes, we let it work. 1812 commenced to
+disarm us. In 1813 the cowardly breach of silence of that taciturn
+legislative body, emboldened by catastrophe, possessed only traits which
+aroused indignation. And it was a crime to applaud, in 1814, in the
+presence of those marshals who betrayed; in the presence of that senate
+which passed from one dunghill to another, insulting after having
+deified; in the presence of that idolatry which was loosing its footing
+and spitting on its idol,--it was a duty to turn aside the head. In
+1815, when the supreme disasters filled the air, when France was seized
+with a shiver at their sinister approach, when Waterloo could be dimly
+discerned opening before Napoleon, the mournful acclamation of the army
+and the people to the condemned of destiny had nothing laughable in it,
+and, after making all allowance for the despot, a heart like that of
+the Bishop of D----, ought not perhaps to have failed to recognize the
+august and touching features presented by the embrace of a great nation
+and a great man on the brink of the abyss.
+
+With this exception, he was in all things just, true, equitable,
+intelligent, humble and dignified, beneficent and kindly, which is only
+another sort of benevolence. He was a priest, a sage, and a man. It must
+be admitted, that even in the political views with which we have just
+reproached him, and which we are disposed to judge almost with severity,
+he was tolerant and easy, more so, perhaps, than we who are speaking
+here. The porter of the town-hall had been placed there by the Emperor.
+He was an old non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a member of the
+Legion of Honor at Austerlitz, as much of a Bonapartist as the eagle.
+This poor fellow occasionally let slip inconsiderate remarks, which the
+law then stigmatized as seditious speeches. After the imperial profile
+disappeared from the Legion of Honor, he never dressed himself in his
+regimentals, as he said, so that he should not be obliged to wear his
+cross. He had himself devoutly removed the imperial effigy from the
+cross which Napoleon had given him; this made a hole, and he would not
+put anything in its place. "I will die," he said, "rather than wear the
+three frogs upon my heart!" He liked to scoff aloud at Louis XVIII. "The
+gouty old creature in English gaiters!" he said; "let him take himself
+off to Prussia with that queue of his." He was happy to combine in the
+same imprecation the two things which he most detested, Prussia and
+England. He did it so often that he lost his place. There he was, turned
+out of the house, with his wife and children, and without bread. The
+Bishop sent for him, reproved him gently, and appointed him beadle in
+the cathedral.
+
+In the course of nine years Monseigneur Bienvenu had, by dint of holy
+deeds and gentle manners, filled the town of D----with a sort of
+tender and filial reverence. Even his conduct towards Napoleon had been
+accepted and tacitly pardoned, as it were, by the people, the good and
+weakly flock who adored their emperor, but loved their bishop.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--THE SOLITUDE OF MONSEIGNEUR WELCOME
+
+A bishop is almost always surrounded by a full squadron of little abbes,
+just as a general is by a covey of young officers. This is what
+that charming Saint Francois de Sales calls somewhere "les pretres
+blancs-becs," callow priests. Every career has its aspirants, who form
+a train for those who have attained eminence in it. There is no power
+which has not its dependents. There is no fortune which has not its
+court. The seekers of the future eddy around the splendid present. Every
+metropolis has its staff of officials. Every bishop who possesses the
+least influence has about him his patrol of cherubim from the seminary,
+which goes the round, and maintains good order in the episcopal palace,
+and mounts guard over monseigneur's smile. To please a bishop is
+equivalent to getting one's foot in the stirrup for a sub-diaconate.
+It is necessary to walk one's path discreetly; the apostleship does not
+disdain the canonship.
+
+Just as there are bigwigs elsewhere, there are big mitres in the Church.
+These are the bishops who stand well at Court, who are rich, well
+endowed, skilful, accepted by the world, who know how to pray, no doubt,
+but who know also how to beg, who feel little scruple at making a whole
+diocese dance attendance in their person, who are connecting links
+between the sacristy and diplomacy, who are abbes rather than priests,
+prelates rather than bishops. Happy those who approach them! Being
+persons of influence, they create a shower about them, upon the
+assiduous and the favored, and upon all the young men who understand
+the art of pleasing, of large parishes, prebends, archidiaconates,
+chaplaincies, and cathedral posts, while awaiting episcopal honors. As
+they advance themselves, they cause their satellites to progress also;
+it is a whole solar system on the march. Their radiance casts a gleam
+of purple over their suite. Their prosperity is crumbled up behind
+the scenes, into nice little promotions. The larger the diocese of the
+patron, the fatter the curacy for the favorite. And then, there is Rome.
+A bishop who understands how to become an archbishop, an archbishop who
+knows how to become a cardinal, carries you with him as conclavist;
+you enter a court of papal jurisdiction, you receive the pallium, and
+behold! you are an auditor, then a papal chamberlain, then monsignor,
+and from a Grace to an Eminence is only a step, and between the Eminence
+and the Holiness there is but the smoke of a ballot. Every skull-cap may
+dream of the tiara. The priest is nowadays the only man who can become a
+king in a regular manner; and what a king! the supreme king. Then what a
+nursery of aspirations is a seminary! How many blushing choristers,
+how many youthful abbes bear on their heads Perrette's pot of milk!
+Who knows how easy it is for ambition to call itself vocation? in good
+faith, perchance, and deceiving itself, devotee that it is.
+
+Monseigneur Bienvenu, poor, humble, retiring, was not accounted among
+the big mitres. This was plain from the complete absence of young
+priests about him. We have seen that he "did not take" in Paris. Not a
+single future dreamed of engrafting itself on this solitary old man.
+Not a single sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting forth its
+foliage in his shadow. His canons and grand-vicars were good old men,
+rather vulgar like himself, walled up like him in this diocese, without
+exit to a cardinalship, and who resembled their bishop, with this
+difference, that they were finished and he was completed. The
+impossibility of growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so well
+understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he ordained left the
+seminary than they got themselves recommended to the archbishops of Aix
+or of Auch, and went off in a great hurry. For, in short, we repeat it,
+men wish to be pushed. A saint who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation
+is a dangerous neighbor; he might communicate to you, by contagion,
+an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints, which are useful in
+advancement, and in short, more renunciation than you desire; and
+this infectious virtue is avoided. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur
+Bienvenu. We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the
+lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption.
+
+Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false
+resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost
+the same profile as supremacy. Success, that Menaechmus of talent, has
+one dupe,--history. Juvenal and Tacitus alone grumble at it. In our
+day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its
+service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its
+antechamber. Succeed: theory. Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the
+lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. He who triumphs is venerated.
+Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth! everything lies in that. Be
+lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people will think
+you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose
+the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but
+short-sightedness. Gilding is gold. It does no harm to be the first
+arrival by pure chance, so long as you do arrive. The common herd is an
+old Narcissus who adores himself, and who applauds the vulgar herd.
+That enormous ability by virtue of which one is Moses, Aeschylus, Dante,
+Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude awards on the spot, and by
+acclamation, to whomsoever attains his object, in whatsoever it may
+consist. Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false
+Corneille compose Tiridate; let a eunuch come to possess a harem; let a
+military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch;
+let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army of the
+Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold
+as leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer
+espouse usury, and cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of
+which he is the father and of which it is the mother; let a preacher
+become a bishop by force of his nasal drawl; let the steward of a fine
+family be so rich on retiring from service that he is made minister
+of finances,--and men call that Genius, just as they call the face
+of Mousqueton Beauty, and the mien of Claude Majesty. With the
+constellations of space they confound the stars of the abyss which are
+made in the soft mire of the puddle by the feet of ducks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--WHAT HE BELIEVED
+
+We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of D---- on the score of
+orthodoxy. In the presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood
+but respect. The conscience of the just man should be accepted on his
+word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we admit the possible
+development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs
+from our own.
+
+What did he think of this dogma, or of that mystery? These secrets of
+the inner tribunal of the conscience are known only to the tomb, where
+souls enter naked. The point on which we are certain is, that the
+difficulties of faith never resolved themselves into hypocrisy in his
+case. No decay is possible to the diamond. He believed to the extent
+of his powers. "Credo in Patrem," he often exclaimed. Moreover, he
+drew from good works that amount of satisfaction which suffices to the
+conscience, and which whispers to a man, "Thou art with God!"
+
+The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and
+beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. It
+was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,--because he loved much--that
+he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and
+"reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism
+takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love?
+It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already
+pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived
+without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man,
+even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves
+for animals. The Bishop of D---- had none of that harshness, which is
+peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the
+Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who
+knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect,
+deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his
+indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as
+though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which
+is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He
+seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined
+without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a
+palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This
+revery sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in
+his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind
+him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the
+ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard
+him say:--
+
+"Poor beast! It is not its fault!"
+
+Why not mention these almost divinely childish sayings of kindness?
+Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to
+Saint Francis d'Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius. One day he sprained his
+ankle in his effort to avoid stepping on an ant. Thus lived this just
+man. Sometimes he fell asleep in his garden, and then there was nothing
+more venerable possible.
+
+Monseigneur Bienvenu had formerly been, if the stories anent his youth,
+and even in regard to his manhood, were to be believed, a passionate,
+and, possibly, a violent man. His universal suavity was less an instinct
+of nature than the result of a grand conviction which had filtered into
+his heart through the medium of life, and had trickled there slowly,
+thought by thought; for, in a character, as in a rock, there may exist
+apertures made by drops of water. These hollows are uneffaceable; these
+formations are indestructible.
+
+In 1815, as we think we have already said, he reached his seventy-fifth
+birthday, but he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall;
+he was rather plump; and, in order to combat this tendency, he was fond
+of taking long strolls on foot; his step was firm, and his form was
+but slightly bent, a detail from which we do not pretend to draw any
+conclusion. Gregory XVI., at the age of eighty, held himself erect and
+smiling, which did not prevent him from being a bad bishop. Monseigneur
+Welcome had what the people term a "fine head," but so amiable was he
+that they forgot that it was fine.
+
+When he conversed with that infantile gayety which was one of his
+charms, and of which we have already spoken, people felt at their ease
+with him, and joy seemed to radiate from his whole person. His fresh and
+ruddy complexion, his very white teeth, all of which he had preserved,
+and which were displayed by his smile, gave him that open and easy air
+which cause the remark to be made of a man, "He's a good fellow"; and
+of an old man, "He is a fine man." That, it will be recalled, was the
+effect which he produced upon Napoleon. On the first encounter, and to
+one who saw him for the first time, he was nothing, in fact, but a fine
+man. But if one remained near him for a few hours, and beheld him in the
+least degree pensive, the fine man became gradually transfigured, and
+took on some imposing quality, I know not what; his broad and serious
+brow, rendered august by his white locks, became august also by virtue
+of meditation; majesty radiated from his goodness, though his goodness
+ceased not to be radiant; one experienced something of the emotion which
+one would feel on beholding a smiling angel slowly unfold his wings,
+without ceasing to smile. Respect, an unutterable respect, penetrated
+you by degrees and mounted to your heart, and one felt that one had
+before him one of those strong, thoroughly tried, and indulgent souls
+where thought is so grand that it can no longer be anything but gentle.
+
+As we have seen, prayer, the celebration of the offices of religion,
+alms-giving, the consolation of the afflicted, the cultivation of a bit
+of land, fraternity, frugality, hospitality, renunciation, confidence,
+study, work, filled every day of his life. Filled is exactly the word;
+certainly the Bishop's day was quite full to the brim, of good words and
+good deeds. Nevertheless, it was not complete if cold or rainy weather
+prevented his passing an hour or two in his garden before going to bed,
+and after the two women had retired. It seemed to be a sort of rite with
+him, to prepare himself for slumber by meditation in the presence of
+the grand spectacles of the nocturnal heavens. Sometimes, if the two old
+women were not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at
+a very advanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with
+himself, peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the
+serenity of the ether, moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor
+of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his
+heart to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At such moments,
+while he offered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer
+their perfume, illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he
+poured himself out in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of
+creation, he could not have told himself, probably, what was passing in
+his spirit; he felt something take its flight from him, and something
+descend into him. Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with
+the abysses of the universe!
+
+He thought of the grandeur and presence of God; of the future eternity,
+that strange mystery; of the eternity past, a mystery still more
+strange; of all the infinities, which pierced their way into all
+his senses, beneath his eyes; and, without seeking to comprehend the
+incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled
+by him. He considered those magnificent conjunctions of atoms, which
+communicate aspects to matter, reveal forces by verifying them, create
+individualities in unity, proportions in extent, the innumerable in the
+infinite, and, through light, produce beauty. These conjunctions are
+formed and dissolved incessantly; hence life and death.
+
+He seated himself on a wooden bench, with his back against a decrepit
+vine; he gazed at the stars, past the puny and stunted silhouettes
+of his fruit-trees. This quarter of an acre, so poorly planted, so
+encumbered with mean buildings and sheds, was dear to him, and satisfied
+his wants.
+
+What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure of his
+life, where there was so little leisure, between gardening in the
+daytime and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with
+the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him to adore God in his
+most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and
+what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to
+walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be
+cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate
+upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--WHAT HE THOUGHT
+
+
+One last word.
+
+Since this sort of details might, particularly at the present moment,
+and to use an expression now in fashion, give to the Bishop of D---- a
+certain "pantheistical" physiognomy, and induce the belief, either
+to his credit or discredit, that he entertained one of those personal
+philosophies which are peculiar to our century, which sometimes spring
+up in solitary spirits, and there take on a form and grow until they
+usurp the place of religion, we insist upon it, that not one of
+those persons who knew Monseigneur Welcome would have thought himself
+authorized to think anything of the sort. That which enlightened this
+man was his heart. His wisdom was made of the light which comes from
+there.
+
+No systems; many works. Abstruse speculations contain vertigo; no,
+there is nothing to indicate that he risked his mind in apocalypses. The
+apostle may be daring, but the bishop must be timid. He would probably
+have felt a scruple at sounding too far in advance certain problems
+which are, in a manner, reserved for terrible great minds. There is a
+sacred horror beneath the porches of the enigma; those gloomy openings
+stand yawning there, but something tells you, you, a passer-by in life,
+that you must not enter. Woe to him who penetrates thither!
+
+Geniuses in the impenetrable depths of abstraction and pure speculation,
+situated, so to speak, above all dogmas, propose their ideas to
+God. Their prayer audaciously offers discussion. Their adoration
+interrogates. This is direct religion, which is full of anxiety and
+responsibility for him who attempts its steep cliffs.
+
+Human meditation has no limits. At his own risk and peril, it analyzes
+and digs deep into its own bedazzlement. One might almost say, that by
+a sort of splendid reaction, it with it dazzles nature; the mysterious
+world which surrounds us renders back what it has received; it is
+probable that the contemplators are contemplated. However that may be,
+there are on earth men who--are they men?--perceive distinctly at the
+verge of the horizons of revery the heights of the absolute, and who
+have the terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Welcome
+was one of these men; Monseigneur Welcome was not a genius. He would
+have feared those sublimities whence some very great men even, like
+Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity. Certainly, these
+powerful reveries have their moral utility, and by these arduous paths
+one approaches to ideal perfection. As for him, he took the path which
+shortens,--the Gospel's.
+
+He did not attempt to impart to his chasuble the folds of Elijah's
+mantle; he projected no ray of future upon the dark groundswell of
+events; he did not seek to condense in flame the light of things; he
+had nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician about him. This
+humble soul loved, and that was all.
+
+That he carried prayer to the pitch of a superhuman aspiration is
+probable: but one can no more pray too much than one can love too much;
+and if it is a heresy to pray beyond the texts, Saint Theresa and Saint
+Jerome would be heretics.
+
+He inclined towards all that groans and all that expiates. The universe
+appeared to him like an immense malady; everywhere he felt fever,
+everywhere he heard the sound of suffering, and, without seeking to
+solve the enigma, he strove to dress the wound. The terrible spectacle
+of created things developed tenderness in him; he was occupied only
+in finding for himself, and in inspiring others with the best way to
+compassionate and relieve. That which exists was for this good and rare
+priest a permanent subject of sadness which sought consolation.
+
+There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction
+of pity. Universal misery was his mine. The sadness which reigned
+everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. Love each other; he
+declared this to be complete, desired nothing further, and that was the
+whole of his doctrine. One day, that man who believed himself to be a
+"philosopher," the senator who has already been alluded to, said to the
+Bishop: "Just survey the spectacle of the world: all war against
+all; the strongest has the most wit. Your love each other is
+nonsense."--"Well," replied Monseigneur Welcome, without contesting the
+point, "if it is nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it, as the
+pearl in the oyster." Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he
+was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious
+questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of
+abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics--all those profundities
+which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness;
+destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience
+of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation
+in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the
+incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent _I_,
+the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature,
+liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where
+lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses,
+which Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes
+flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the infinite to
+cause stars to blaze forth there.
+
+Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note of the exterior of
+mysterious questions without scrutinizing them, and without troubling
+his own mind with them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave
+respect for darkness.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND--THE FALL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING
+
+Early in the month of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a
+man who was travelling on foot entered the little town of D----The few
+inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the
+moment stared at this traveller with a sort of uneasiness. It was
+difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was
+a man of medium stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life.
+He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a
+drooping leather visor partly concealed his face, burned and tanned by
+sun and wind, and dripping with perspiration. His shirt of coarse yellow
+linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view
+of his hairy breast: he had a cravat twisted into a string; trousers of
+blue drilling, worn and threadbare, white on one knee and torn on the
+other; an old gray, tattered blouse, patched on one of the elbows with
+a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly packed soldier
+knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an enormous,
+knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a
+shaved head and a long beard.
+
+The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not
+what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole. His hair was closely cut,
+yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little, and did not seem to
+have been cut for some time.
+
+No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came
+he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance
+into D---- by the same street which, seven months previously, had
+witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes
+to Paris. This man must have been walking all day. He seemed very much
+fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town which is situated below
+the city had seen him pause beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi,
+and drink at the fountain which stands at the end of the promenade. He
+must have been very thirsty: for the children who followed him saw him
+stop again for a drink, two hundred paces further on, at the fountain in
+the market-place.
+
+On arriving at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left,
+and directed his steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out
+a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was seated near the door, on the
+stone bench which General Drouot had mounted on the 4th of March to read
+to the frightened throng of the inhabitants of D---- the proclamation
+of the Gulf Juan. The man pulled off his cap and humbly saluted the
+gendarme.
+
+The gendarme, without replying to his salute, stared attentively at him,
+followed him for a while with his eyes, and then entered the town-hall.
+
+There then existed at D---- a fine inn at the sign of the Cross of
+Colbas. This inn had for a landlord a certain Jacquin Labarre, a man
+of consideration in the town on account of his relationship to another
+Labarre, who kept the inn of the Three Dauphins in Grenoble, and had
+served in the Guides. At the time of the Emperor's landing, many rumors
+had circulated throughout the country with regard to this inn of the
+Three Dauphins. It was said that General Bertrand, disguised as a
+carter, had made frequent trips thither in the month of January, and
+that he had distributed crosses of honor to the soldiers and handfuls
+of gold to the citizens. The truth is, that when the Emperor entered
+Grenoble he had refused to install himself at the hotel of the
+prefecture; he had thanked the mayor, saying, "I am going to the house
+of a brave man of my acquaintance"; and he had betaken himself to the
+Three Dauphins. This glory of the Labarre of the Three Dauphins was
+reflected upon the Labarre of the Cross of Colbas, at a distance of five
+and twenty leagues. It was said of him in the town, "That is the cousin
+of the man of Grenoble."
+
+The man bent his steps towards this inn, which was the best in the
+country-side. He entered the kitchen, which opened on a level with the
+street. All the stoves were lighted; a huge fire blazed gayly in the
+fireplace. The host, who was also the chief cook, was going from one
+stew-pan to another, very busily superintending an excellent dinner
+designed for the wagoners, whose loud talking, conversation, and
+laughter were audible from an adjoining apartment. Any one who has
+travelled knows that there is no one who indulges in better cheer than
+wagoners. A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and heather-cocks,
+was turning on a long spit before the fire; on the stove, two huge carps
+from Lake Lauzet and a trout from Lake Alloz were cooking.
+
+The host, hearing the door open and seeing a newcomer enter, said,
+without raising his eyes from his stoves:--
+
+"What do you wish, sir?"
+
+"Food and lodging," said the man.
+
+"Nothing easier," replied the host. At that moment he turned his head,
+took in the traveller's appearance with a single glance, and added, "By
+paying for it."
+
+The man drew a large leather purse from the pocket of his blouse, and
+answered, "I have money."
+
+"In that case, we are at your service," said the host.
+
+The man put his purse back in his pocket, removed his knapsack from
+his back, put it on the ground near the door, retained his stick in his
+hand, and seated himself on a low stool close to the fire. D---- is in
+the mountains. The evenings are cold there in October.
+
+But as the host went back and forth, he scrutinized the traveller.
+
+"Will dinner be ready soon?" said the man.
+
+"Immediately," replied the landlord.
+
+While the newcomer was warming himself before the fire, with his back
+turned, the worthy host, Jacquin Labarre, drew a pencil from his pocket,
+then tore off the corner of an old newspaper which was lying on a small
+table near the window. On the white margin he wrote a line or two,
+folded it without sealing, and then intrusted this scrap of paper to
+a child who seemed to serve him in the capacity both of scullion and
+lackey. The landlord whispered a word in the scullion's ear, and the
+child set off on a run in the direction of the town-hall.
+
+The traveller saw nothing of all this.
+
+Once more he inquired, "Will dinner be ready soon?"
+
+"Immediately," responded the host.
+
+The child returned. He brought back the paper. The host unfolded it
+eagerly, like a person who is expecting a reply. He seemed to read it
+attentively, then tossed his head, and remained thoughtful for a moment.
+Then he took a step in the direction of the traveller, who appeared to
+be immersed in reflections which were not very serene.
+
+"I cannot receive you, sir," said he.
+
+The man half rose.
+
+"What! Are you afraid that I will not pay you? Do you want me to pay you
+in advance? I have money, I tell you."
+
+"It is not that."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"You have money--"
+
+"Yes," said the man.
+
+"And I," said the host, "have no room."
+
+The man resumed tranquilly, "Put me in the stable."
+
+"I cannot."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"The horses take up all the space."
+
+"Very well!" retorted the man; "a corner of the loft then, a truss of
+straw. We will see about that after dinner."
+
+"I cannot give you any dinner."
+
+This declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, struck the stranger
+as grave. He rose.
+
+"Ah! bah! But I am dying of hunger. I have been walking since sunrise. I
+have travelled twelve leagues. I pay. I wish to eat."
+
+"I have nothing," said the landlord.
+
+The man burst out laughing, and turned towards the fireplace and the
+stoves: "Nothing! and all that?"
+
+"All that is engaged."
+
+"By whom?"
+
+"By messieurs the wagoners."
+
+"How many are there of them?"
+
+"Twelve."
+
+"There is enough food there for twenty."
+
+"They have engaged the whole of it and paid for it in advance."
+
+The man seated himself again, and said, without raising his voice, "I am
+at an inn; I am hungry, and I shall remain."
+
+Then the host bent down to his ear, and said in a tone which made him
+start, "Go away!"
+
+At that moment the traveller was bending forward and thrusting some
+brands into the fire with the iron-shod tip of his staff; he turned
+quickly round, and as he opened his mouth to reply, the host gazed
+steadily at him and added, still in a low voice: "Stop! there's enough
+of that sort of talk. Do you want me to tell you your name? Your name is
+Jean Valjean. Now do you want me to tell you who you are? When I saw you
+come in I suspected something; I sent to the town-hall, and this was the
+reply that was sent to me. Can you read?"
+
+So saying, he held out to the stranger, fully unfolded, the paper which
+had just travelled from the inn to the town-hall, and from the town-hall
+to the inn. The man cast a glance upon it. The landlord resumed after a
+pause.
+
+"I am in the habit of being polite to every one. Go away!"
+
+The man dropped his head, picked up the knapsack which he had deposited
+on the ground, and took his departure.
+
+He chose the principal street. He walked straight on at a venture,
+keeping close to the houses like a sad and humiliated man. He did not
+turn round a single time. Had he done so, he would have seen the host
+of the Cross of Colbas standing on his threshold, surrounded by all
+the guests of his inn, and all the passers-by in the street, talking
+vivaciously, and pointing him out with his finger; and, from the glances
+of terror and distrust cast by the group, he might have divined that his
+arrival would speedily become an event for the whole town.
+
+He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind
+them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.
+
+Thus he proceeded for some time, walking on without ceasing, traversing
+at random streets of which he knew nothing, forgetful of his fatigue,
+as is often the case when a man is sad. All at once he felt the pangs
+of hunger sharply. Night was drawing near. He glanced about him, to see
+whether he could not discover some shelter.
+
+The fine hostelry was closed to him; he was seeking some very humble
+public house, some hovel, however lowly.
+
+Just then a light flashed up at the end of the streets; a pine branch
+suspended from a cross-beam of iron was outlined against the white sky
+of the twilight. He proceeded thither.
+
+It proved to be, in fact, a public house. The public house which is in
+the Rue de Chaffaut.
+
+The wayfarer halted for a moment, and peeped through the window into the
+interior of the low-studded room of the public house, illuminated by a
+small lamp on a table and by a large fire on the hearth. Some men were
+engaged in drinking there. The landlord was warming himself. An iron
+pot, suspended from a crane, bubbled over the flame.
+
+The entrance to this public house, which is also a sort of an inn, is by
+two doors. One opens on the street, the other upon a small yard filled
+with manure. The traveller dare not enter by the street door. He slipped
+into the yard, halted again, then raised the latch timidly and opened
+the door.
+
+"Who goes there?" said the master.
+
+"Some one who wants supper and bed."
+
+"Good. We furnish supper and bed here."
+
+He entered. All the men who were drinking turned round. The lamp
+illuminated him on one side, the firelight on the other. They examined
+him for some time while he was taking off his knapsack.
+
+The host said to him, "There is the fire. The supper is cooking in the
+pot. Come and warm yourself, comrade."
+
+He approached and seated himself near the hearth. He stretched out his
+feet, which were exhausted with fatigue, to the fire; a fine odor was
+emitted by the pot. All that could be distinguished of his face, beneath
+his cap, which was well pulled down, assumed a vague appearance
+of comfort, mingled with that other poignant aspect which habitual
+suffering bestows.
+
+It was, moreover, a firm, energetic, and melancholy profile. This
+physiognomy was strangely composed; it began by seeming humble, and
+ended by seeming severe. The eye shone beneath its lashes like a fire
+beneath brushwood.
+
+One of the men seated at the table, however, was a fishmonger who,
+before entering the public house of the Rue de Chaffaut, had been to
+stable his horse at Labarre's. It chanced that he had that very morning
+encountered this unprepossessing stranger on the road between Bras
+d'Asse and--I have forgotten the name. I think it was Escoublon. Now,
+when he met him, the man, who then seemed already extremely weary, had
+requested him to take him on his crupper; to which the fishmonger had
+made no reply except by redoubling his gait. This fishmonger had been
+a member half an hour previously of the group which surrounded Jacquin
+Labarre, and had himself related his disagreeable encounter of the
+morning to the people at the Cross of Colbas. From where he sat he made
+an imperceptible sign to the tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper went to
+him. They exchanged a few words in a low tone. The man had again become
+absorbed in his reflections.
+
+The tavern-keeper returned to the fireplace, laid his hand abruptly on
+the shoulder of the man, and said to him:--
+
+"You are going to get out of here."
+
+The stranger turned round and replied gently, "Ah! You know?--"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I was sent away from the other inn."
+
+"And you are to be turned out of this one."
+
+"Where would you have me go?"
+
+"Elsewhere."
+
+The man took his stick and his knapsack and departed.
+
+As he went out, some children who had followed him from the Cross of
+Colbas, and who seemed to be lying in wait for him, threw stones at him.
+He retraced his steps in anger, and threatened them with his stick: the
+children dispersed like a flock of birds.
+
+He passed before the prison. At the door hung an iron chain attached to
+a bell. He rang.
+
+The wicket opened.
+
+"Turnkey," said he, removing his cap politely, "will you have the
+kindness to admit me, and give me a lodging for the night?"
+
+A voice replied:--
+
+"The prison is not an inn. Get yourself arrested, and you will be
+admitted."
+
+The wicket closed again.
+
+He entered a little street in which there were many gardens. Some of
+them are enclosed only by hedges, which lends a cheerful aspect to the
+street. In the midst of these gardens and hedges he caught sight of a
+small house of a single story, the window of which was lighted up. He
+peered through the pane as he had done at the public house. Within was a
+large whitewashed room, with a bed draped in printed cotton stuff, and
+a cradle in one corner, a few wooden chairs, and a double-barrelled gun
+hanging on the wall. A table was spread in the centre of the room. A
+copper lamp illuminated the tablecloth of coarse white linen, the pewter
+jug shining like silver, and filled with wine, and the brown, smoking
+soup-tureen. At this table sat a man of about forty, with a merry and
+open countenance, who was dandling a little child on his knees. Close by
+a very young woman was nursing another child. The father was laughing,
+the child was laughing, the mother was smiling.
+
+The stranger paused a moment in revery before this tender and calming
+spectacle. What was taking place within him? He alone could have
+told. It is probable that he thought that this joyous house would be
+hospitable, and that, in a place where he beheld so much happiness, he
+would find perhaps a little pity.
+
+He tapped on the pane with a very small and feeble knock.
+
+They did not hear him.
+
+He tapped again.
+
+He heard the woman say, "It seems to me, husband, that some one is
+knocking."
+
+"No," replied the husband.
+
+He tapped a third time.
+
+The husband rose, took the lamp, and went to the door, which he opened.
+
+He was a man of lofty stature, half peasant, half artisan. He wore a
+huge leather apron, which reached to his left shoulder, and which a
+hammer, a red handkerchief, a powder-horn, and all sorts of objects
+which were upheld by the girdle, as in a pocket, caused to bulge out. He
+carried his head thrown backwards; his shirt, widely opened and turned
+back, displayed his bull neck, white and bare. He had thick eyelashes,
+enormous black whiskers, prominent eyes, the lower part of his face
+like a snout; and besides all this, that air of being on his own ground,
+which is indescribable.
+
+"Pardon me, sir," said the wayfarer, "Could you, in consideration of
+payment, give me a plate of soup and a corner of that shed yonder in the
+garden, in which to sleep? Tell me; can you? For money?"
+
+"Who are you?" demanded the master of the house.
+
+The man replied: "I have just come from Puy-Moisson. I have walked all
+day long. I have travelled twelve leagues. Can you?--if I pay?"
+
+"I would not refuse," said the peasant, "to lodge any respectable man
+who would pay me. But why do you not go to the inn?"
+
+"There is no room."
+
+"Bah! Impossible. This is neither a fair nor a market day. Have you been
+to Labarre?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well?"
+
+The traveller replied with embarrassment: "I do not know. He did not
+receive me."
+
+"Have you been to What's-his-name's, in the Rue Chaffaut?"
+
+The stranger's embarrassment increased; he stammered, "He did not
+receive me either."
+
+The peasant's countenance assumed an expression of distrust; he surveyed
+the newcomer from head to feet, and suddenly exclaimed, with a sort of
+shudder:--
+
+"Are you the man?--"
+
+He cast a fresh glance upon the stranger, took three steps backwards,
+placed the lamp on the table, and took his gun down from the wall.
+
+Meanwhile, at the words, Are you the man? the woman had risen, had
+clasped her two children in her arms, and had taken refuge precipitately
+behind her husband, staring in terror at the stranger, with her bosom
+uncovered, and with frightened eyes, as she murmured in a low tone,
+"Tso-maraude."[1]
+
+All this took place in less time than it requires to picture it to
+one's self. After having scrutinized the man for several moments, as one
+scrutinizes a viper, the master of the house returned to the door and
+said:--
+
+"Clear out!"
+
+"For pity's sake, a glass of water," said the man.
+
+"A shot from my gun!" said the peasant.
+
+Then he closed the door violently, and the man heard him shoot two large
+bolts. A moment later, the window-shutter was closed, and the sound of a
+bar of iron which was placed against it was audible outside.
+
+Night continued to fall. A cold wind from the Alps was blowing. By the
+light of the expiring day the stranger perceived, in one of the gardens
+which bordered the street, a sort of hut, which seemed to him to be
+built of sods. He climbed over the wooden fence resolutely, and found
+himself in the garden. He approached the hut; its door consisted of a
+very low and narrow aperture, and it resembled those buildings which
+road-laborers construct for themselves along the roads. He thought
+without doubt, that it was, in fact, the dwelling of a road-laborer; he
+was suffering from cold and hunger, but this was, at least, a shelter
+from the cold. This sort of dwelling is not usually occupied at night.
+He threw himself flat on his face, and crawled into the hut. It was warm
+there, and he found a tolerably good bed of straw. He lay, for a moment,
+stretched out on this bed, without the power to make a movement, so
+fatigued was he. Then, as the knapsack on his back was in his way, and
+as it furnished, moreover, a pillow ready to his hand, he set about
+unbuckling one of the straps. At that moment, a ferocious growl became
+audible. He raised his eyes. The head of an enormous dog was outlined in
+the darkness at the entrance of the hut.
+
+It was a dog's kennel.
+
+He was himself vigorous and formidable; he armed himself with his staff,
+made a shield of his knapsack, and made his way out of the kennel in the
+best way he could, not without enlarging the rents in his rags.
+
+He left the garden in the same manner, but backwards, being obliged,
+in order to keep the dog respectful, to have recourse to that manoeuvre
+with his stick which masters in that sort of fencing designate as la
+rose couverte.
+
+When he had, not without difficulty, repassed the fence, and found
+himself once more in the street, alone, without refuge, without shelter,
+without a roof over his head, chased even from that bed of straw and
+from that miserable kennel, he dropped rather than seated himself on a
+stone, and it appears that a passer-by heard him exclaim, "I am not even
+a dog!"
+
+He soon rose again and resumed his march. He went out of the town,
+hoping to find some tree or haystack in the fields which would afford
+him shelter.
+
+He walked thus for some time, with his head still drooping. When he felt
+himself far from every human habitation, he raised his eyes and gazed
+searchingly about him. He was in a field. Before him was one of those
+low hills covered with close-cut stubble, which, after the harvest,
+resemble shaved heads.
+
+The horizon was perfectly black. This was not alone the obscurity of
+night; it was caused by very low-hanging clouds which seemed to rest
+upon the hill itself, and which were mounting and filling the whole
+sky. Meanwhile, as the moon was about to rise, and as there was still
+floating in the zenith a remnant of the brightness of twilight, these
+clouds formed at the summit of the sky a sort of whitish arch, whence a
+gleam of light fell upon the earth.
+
+The earth was thus better lighted than the sky, which produces a
+particularly sinister effect, and the hill, whose contour was poor and
+mean, was outlined vague and wan against the gloomy horizon. The whole
+effect was hideous, petty, lugubrious, and narrow.
+
+There was nothing in the field or on the hill except a deformed tree,
+which writhed and shivered a few paces distant from the wayfarer.
+
+This man was evidently very far from having those delicate habits of
+intelligence and spirit which render one sensible to the mysterious
+aspects of things; nevertheless, there was something in that sky,
+in that hill, in that plain, in that tree, which was so profoundly
+desolate, that after a moment of immobility and revery he turned back
+abruptly. There are instants when nature seems hostile.
+
+He retraced his steps; the gates of D---- were closed. D----, which had
+sustained sieges during the wars of religion, was still surrounded
+in 1815 by ancient walls flanked by square towers which have been
+demolished since. He passed through a breach and entered the town again.
+
+It might have been eight o'clock in the evening. As he was not
+acquainted with the streets, he recommenced his walk at random.
+
+In this way he came to the prefecture, then to the seminary. As he
+passed through the Cathedral Square, he shook his fist at the church.
+
+At the corner of this square there is a printing establishment. It is
+there that the proclamations of the Emperor and of the Imperial Guard
+to the army, brought from the Island of Elba and dictated by Napoleon
+himself, were printed for the first time.
+
+Worn out with fatigue, and no longer entertaining any hope, he lay down
+on a stone bench which stands at the doorway of this printing office.
+
+At that moment an old woman came out of the church. She saw the man
+stretched out in the shadow. "What are you doing there, my friend?" said
+she.
+
+He answered harshly and angrily: "As you see, my good woman, I am
+sleeping." The good woman, who was well worthy the name, in fact, was
+the Marquise de R----
+
+"On this bench?" she went on.
+
+"I have had a mattress of wood for nineteen years," said the man;
+"to-day I have a mattress of stone."
+
+"You have been a soldier?"
+
+"Yes, my good woman, a soldier."
+
+"Why do you not go to the inn?"
+
+"Because I have no money."
+
+"Alas!" said Madame de R----, "I have only four sous in my purse."
+
+"Give it to me all the same."
+
+The man took the four sous. Madame de R---- continued: "You cannot
+obtain lodgings in an inn for so small a sum. But have you tried? It is
+impossible for you to pass the night thus. You are cold and hungry, no
+doubt. Some one might have given you a lodging out of charity."
+
+"I have knocked at all doors."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I have been driven away everywhere."
+
+The "good woman" touched the man's arm, and pointed out to him on the
+other side of the street a small, low house, which stood beside the
+Bishop's palace.
+
+"You have knocked at all doors?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you knocked at that one?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Knock there."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--PRUDENCE COUNSELLED TO WISDOM.
+
+That evening, the Bishop of D----, after his promenade through the town,
+remained shut up rather late in his room. He was busy over a great work
+on Duties, which was never completed, unfortunately. He was carefully
+compiling everything that the Fathers and the doctors have said on this
+important subject. His book was divided into two parts: firstly, the
+duties of all; secondly, the duties of each individual, according to the
+class to which he belongs. The duties of all are the great duties. There
+are four of these. Saint Matthew points them out: duties towards God
+(Matt. vi.); duties towards one's self (Matt. v. 29, 30); duties towards
+one's neighbor (Matt. vii. 12); duties towards animals (Matt. vi. 20,
+25). As for the other duties the Bishop found them pointed out and
+prescribed elsewhere: to sovereigns and subjects, in the Epistle to the
+Romans; to magistrates, to wives, to mothers, to young men, by Saint
+Peter; to husbands, fathers, children and servants, in the Epistle
+to the Ephesians; to the faithful, in the Epistle to the Hebrews; to
+virgins, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Out of these precepts he was
+laboriously constructing a harmonious whole, which he desired to present
+to souls.
+
+At eight o'clock he was still at work, writing with a good deal of
+inconvenience upon little squares of paper, with a big book open on his
+knees, when Madame Magloire entered, according to her wont, to get the
+silver-ware from the cupboard near his bed. A moment later, the Bishop,
+knowing that the table was set, and that his sister was probably
+waiting for him, shut his book, rose from his table, and entered the
+dining-room.
+
+The dining-room was an oblong apartment, with a fireplace, which had a
+door opening on the street (as we have said), and a window opening on
+the garden.
+
+Madame Magloire was, in fact, just putting the last touches to the
+table.
+
+As she performed this service, she was conversing with Mademoiselle
+Baptistine.
+
+A lamp stood on the table; the table was near the fireplace. A wood fire
+was burning there.
+
+One can easily picture to one's self these two women, both of whom
+were over sixty years of age. Madame Magloire small, plump, vivacious;
+Mademoiselle Baptistine gentle, slender, frail, somewhat taller than her
+brother, dressed in a gown of puce-colored silk, of the fashion of 1806,
+which she had purchased at that date in Paris, and which had lasted
+ever since. To borrow vulgar phrases, which possess the merit of giving
+utterance in a single word to an idea which a whole page would hardly
+suffice to express, Madame Magloire had the air of a peasant, and
+Mademoiselle Baptistine that of a lady. Madame Magloire wore a white
+quilted cap, a gold Jeannette cross on a velvet ribbon upon her neck,
+the only bit of feminine jewelry that there was in the house, a very
+white fichu puffing out from a gown of coarse black woollen stuff, with
+large, short sleeves, an apron of cotton cloth in red and green checks,
+knotted round the waist with a green ribbon, with a stomacher of the
+same attached by two pins at the upper corners, coarse shoes on her
+feet, and yellow stockings, like the women of Marseilles. Mademoiselle
+Baptistine's gown was cut on the patterns of 1806, with a short waist,
+a narrow, sheath-like skirt, puffed sleeves, with flaps and buttons.
+She concealed her gray hair under a frizzed wig known as the baby wig.
+Madame Magloire had an intelligent, vivacious, and kindly air; the two
+corners of her mouth unequally raised, and her upper lip, which was
+larger than the lower, imparted to her a rather crabbed and imperious
+look. So long as Monseigneur held his peace, she talked to him
+resolutely with a mixture of respect and freedom; but as soon as
+Monseigneur began to speak, as we have seen, she obeyed passively like
+her mistress. Mademoiselle Baptistine did not even speak. She confined
+herself to obeying and pleasing him. She had never been pretty, even
+when she was young; she had large, blue, prominent eyes, and a long
+arched nose; but her whole visage, her whole person, breathed forth an
+ineffable goodness, as we stated in the beginning. She had always been
+predestined to gentleness; but faith, charity, hope, those three virtues
+which mildly warm the soul, had gradually elevated that gentleness to
+sanctity. Nature had made her a lamb, religion had made her an angel.
+Poor sainted virgin! Sweet memory which has vanished!
+
+Mademoiselle Baptistine has so often narrated what passed at the
+episcopal residence that evening, that there are many people now living
+who still recall the most minute details.
+
+At the moment when the Bishop entered, Madame Magloire was talking with
+considerable vivacity. She was haranguing Mademoiselle Baptistine on
+a subject which was familiar to her and to which the Bishop was also
+accustomed. The question concerned the lock upon the entrance door.
+
+It appears that while procuring some provisions for supper, Madame
+Magloire had heard things in divers places. People had spoken of a
+prowler of evil appearance; a suspicious vagabond had arrived who must
+be somewhere about the town, and those who should take it into their
+heads to return home late that night might be subjected to unpleasant
+encounters. The police was very badly organized, moreover, because there
+was no love lost between the Prefect and the Mayor, who sought to injure
+each other by making things happen. It behooved wise people to play the
+part of their own police, and to guard themselves well, and care must be
+taken to duly close, bar and barricade their houses, and to fasten the
+doors well.
+
+Madame Magloire emphasized these last words; but the Bishop had just
+come from his room, where it was rather cold. He seated himself in front
+of the fire, and warmed himself, and then fell to thinking of other
+things. He did not take up the remark dropped with design by Madame
+Magloire. She repeated it. Then Mademoiselle Baptistine, desirous of
+satisfying Madame Magloire without displeasing her brother, ventured to
+say timidly:--
+
+"Did you hear what Madame Magloire is saying, brother?"
+
+"I have heard something of it in a vague way," replied the Bishop. Then
+half-turning in his chair, placing his hands on his knees, and raising
+towards the old servant woman his cordial face, which so easily grew
+joyous, and which was illuminated from below by the firelight,--"Come,
+what is the matter? What is the matter? Are we in any great danger?"
+
+Then Madame Magloire began the whole story afresh, exaggerating it a
+little without being aware of the fact. It appeared that a Bohemian, a
+bare-footed vagabond, a sort of dangerous mendicant, was at that moment
+in the town. He had presented himself at Jacquin Labarre's to obtain
+lodgings, but the latter had not been willing to take him in. He had
+been seen to arrive by the way of the boulevard Gassendi and roam about
+the streets in the gloaming. A gallows-bird with a terrible face.
+
+"Really!" said the Bishop.
+
+This willingness to interrogate encouraged Madame Magloire; it seemed
+to her to indicate that the Bishop was on the point of becoming alarmed;
+she pursued triumphantly:--
+
+"Yes, Monseigneur. That is how it is. There will be some sort of
+catastrophe in this town to-night. Every one says so. And withal, the
+police is so badly regulated" (a useful repetition). "The idea of living
+in a mountainous country, and not even having lights in the streets at
+night! One goes out. Black as ovens, indeed! And I say, Monseigneur, and
+Mademoiselle there says with me--"
+
+"I," interrupted his sister, "say nothing. What my brother does is well
+done."
+
+Madame Magloire continued as though there had been no protest:--
+
+"We say that this house is not safe at all; that if Monseigneur will
+permit, I will go and tell Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, to come and
+replace the ancient locks on the doors; we have them, and it is only the
+work of a moment; for I say that nothing is more terrible than a
+door which can be opened from the outside with a latch by the first
+passer-by; and I say that we need bolts, Monseigneur, if only for this
+night; moreover, Monseigneur has the habit of always saying 'come in';
+and besides, even in the middle of the night, O mon Dieu! there is no
+need to ask permission."
+
+At that moment there came a tolerably violent knock on the door.
+
+"Come in," said the Bishop.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE HEROISM OF PASSIVE OBEDIENCE.
+
+The door opened.
+
+It opened wide with a rapid movement, as though some one had given it an
+energetic and resolute push.
+
+A man entered.
+
+We already know the man. It was the wayfarer whom we have seen wandering
+about in search of shelter.
+
+He entered, advanced a step, and halted, leaving the door open behind
+him. He had his knapsack on his shoulders, his cudgel in his hand, a
+rough, audacious, weary, and violent expression in his eyes. The fire on
+the hearth lighted him up. He was hideous. It was a sinister apparition.
+
+Madame Magloire had not even the strength to utter a cry. She trembled,
+and stood with her mouth wide open.
+
+Mademoiselle Baptistine turned round, beheld the man entering, and half
+started up in terror; then, turning her head by degrees towards the
+fireplace again, she began to observe her brother, and her face became
+once more profoundly calm and serene.
+
+The Bishop fixed a tranquil eye on the man.
+
+As he opened his mouth, doubtless to ask the new-comer what he desired,
+the man rested both hands on his staff, directed his gaze at the old man
+and the two women, and without waiting for the Bishop to speak, he said,
+in a loud voice:--
+
+"See here. My name is Jean Valjean. I am a convict from the galleys.
+I have passed nineteen years in the galleys. I was liberated four days
+ago, and am on my way to Pontarlier, which is my destination. I have
+been walking for four days since I left Toulon. I have travelled a dozen
+leagues to-day on foot. This evening, when I arrived in these parts, I
+went to an inn, and they turned me out, because of my yellow passport,
+which I had shown at the town-hall. I had to do it. I went to an inn.
+They said to me, 'Be off,' at both places. No one would take me. I
+went to the prison; the jailer would not admit me. I went into a dog's
+kennel; the dog bit me and chased me off, as though he had been a man.
+One would have said that he knew who I was. I went into the fields,
+intending to sleep in the open air, beneath the stars. There were no
+stars. I thought it was going to rain, and I re-entered the town, to
+seek the recess of a doorway. Yonder, in the square, I meant to sleep
+on a stone bench. A good woman pointed out your house to me, and said
+to me, 'Knock there!' I have knocked. What is this place? Do you keep
+an inn? I have money--savings. One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous,
+which I earned in the galleys by my labor, in the course of nineteen
+years. I will pay. What is that to me? I have money. I am very weary;
+twelve leagues on foot; I am very hungry. Are you willing that I should
+remain?"
+
+"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will set another place."
+
+The man advanced three paces, and approached the lamp which was on
+the table. "Stop," he resumed, as though he had not quite understood;
+"that's not it. Did you hear? I am a galley-slave; a convict. I come
+from the galleys." He drew from his pocket a large sheet of yellow
+paper, which he unfolded. "Here's my passport. Yellow, as you see. This
+serves to expel me from every place where I go. Will you read it? I know
+how to read. I learned in the galleys. There is a school there for those
+who choose to learn. Hold, this is what they put on this passport: 'Jean
+Valjean, discharged convict, native of'--that is nothing to you--'has
+been nineteen years in the galleys: five years for house-breaking
+and burglary; fourteen years for having attempted to escape on four
+occasions. He is a very dangerous man.' There! Every one has cast me
+out. Are you willing to receive me? Is this an inn? Will you give me
+something to eat and a bed? Have you a stable?"
+
+"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will put white sheets on the
+bed in the alcove." We have already explained the character of the two
+women's obedience.
+
+Madame Magloire retired to execute these orders.
+
+The Bishop turned to the man.
+
+"Sit down, sir, and warm yourself. We are going to sup in a few moments,
+and your bed will be prepared while you are supping."
+
+At this point the man suddenly comprehended. The expression of his face,
+up to that time sombre and harsh, bore the imprint of stupefaction,
+of doubt, of joy, and became extraordinary. He began stammering like a
+crazy man:--
+
+"Really? What! You will keep me? You do not drive me forth? A convict!
+You call me sir! You do not address me as thou? 'Get out of here, you
+dog!' is what people always say to me. I felt sure that you would expel
+me, so I told you at once who I am. Oh, what a good woman that was who
+directed me hither! I am going to sup! A bed with a mattress and sheets,
+like the rest of the world! a bed! It is nineteen years since I have
+slept in a bed! You actually do not want me to go! You are good
+people. Besides, I have money. I will pay well. Pardon me, monsieur the
+inn-keeper, but what is your name? I will pay anything you ask. You are
+a fine man. You are an inn-keeper, are you not?"
+
+"I am," replied the Bishop, "a priest who lives here."
+
+"A priest!" said the man. "Oh, what a fine priest! Then you are not
+going to demand any money of me? You are the cure, are you not? the cure
+of this big church? Well! I am a fool, truly! I had not perceived your
+skull-cap."
+
+As he spoke, he deposited his knapsack and his cudgel in a corner,
+replaced his passport in his pocket, and seated himself. Mademoiselle
+Baptistine gazed mildly at him. He continued:
+
+"You are humane, Monsieur le Cure; you have not scorned me. A good
+priest is a very good thing. Then you do not require me to pay?"
+
+"No," said the Bishop; "keep your money. How much have you? Did you not
+tell me one hundred and nine francs?"
+
+"And fifteen sous," added the man.
+
+"One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous. And how long did it take you
+to earn that?"
+
+"Nineteen years."
+
+"Nineteen years!"
+
+The Bishop sighed deeply.
+
+The man continued: "I have still the whole of my money. In four days I
+have spent only twenty-five sous, which I earned by helping unload some
+wagons at Grasse. Since you are an abbe, I will tell you that we had a
+chaplain in the galleys. And one day I saw a bishop there. Monseigneur
+is what they call him. He was the Bishop of Majore at Marseilles. He is
+the cure who rules over the other cures, you understand. Pardon me,
+I say that very badly; but it is such a far-off thing to me! You
+understand what we are! He said mass in the middle of the galleys, on an
+altar. He had a pointed thing, made of gold, on his head; it glittered
+in the bright light of midday. We were all ranged in lines on the three
+sides, with cannons with lighted matches facing us. We could not see
+very well. He spoke; but he was too far off, and we did not hear. That
+is what a bishop is like."
+
+While he was speaking, the Bishop had gone and shut the door, which had
+remained wide open.
+
+Madame Magloire returned. She brought a silver fork and spoon, which she
+placed on the table.
+
+"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "place those things as near the fire
+as possible." And turning to his guest: "The night wind is harsh on the
+Alps. You must be cold, sir."
+
+Each time that he uttered the word sir, in his voice which was so gently
+grave and polished, the man's face lighted up. Monsieur to a convict is
+like a glass of water to one of the shipwrecked of the Medusa. Ignominy
+thirsts for consideration.
+
+"This lamp gives a very bad light," said the Bishop.
+
+Madame Magloire understood him, and went to get the two silver
+candlesticks from the chimney-piece in Monseigneur's bed-chamber, and
+placed them, lighted, on the table.
+
+"Monsieur le Cure," said the man, "you are good; you do not despise me.
+You receive me into your house. You light your candles for me. Yet I
+have not concealed from you whence I come and that I am an unfortunate
+man."
+
+The Bishop, who was sitting close to him, gently touched his hand. "You
+could not help telling me who you were. This is not my house; it is
+the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters
+whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are
+hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say
+that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man
+who needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much
+more at home here than I am myself. Everything here is yours. What need
+have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me you had one which
+I knew."
+
+The man opened his eyes in astonishment.
+
+"Really? You knew what I was called?"
+
+"Yes," replied the Bishop, "you are called my brother."
+
+"Stop, Monsieur le Cure," exclaimed the man. "I was very hungry when
+I entered here; but you are so good, that I no longer know what has
+happened to me."
+
+The Bishop looked at him, and said,--
+
+"You have suffered much?"
+
+"Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat,
+cold, toil, the convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing,
+the cell for one word; even sick and in bed, still the chain! Dogs, dogs
+are happier! Nineteen years! I am forty-six. Now there is the yellow
+passport. That is what it is like."
+
+"Yes," resumed the Bishop, "you have come from a very sad place.
+Listen. There will be more joy in heaven over the tear-bathed face of a
+repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men. If you
+emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred and of wrath against
+mankind, you are deserving of pity; if you emerge with thoughts of
+good-will and of peace, you are more worthy than any one of us."
+
+In the meantime, Madame Magloire had served supper: soup, made with
+water, oil, bread, and salt; a little bacon, a bit of mutton, figs, a
+fresh cheese, and a large loaf of rye bread. She had, of her own accord,
+added to the Bishop's ordinary fare a bottle of his old Mauves wine.
+
+The Bishop's face at once assumed that expression of gayety which is
+peculiar to hospitable natures. "To table!" he cried vivaciously. As was
+his custom when a stranger supped with him, he made the man sit on his
+right. Mademoiselle Baptistine, perfectly peaceable and natural, took
+her seat at his left.
+
+The Bishop asked a blessing; then helped the soup himself, according to
+his custom. The man began to eat with avidity.
+
+All at once the Bishop said: "It strikes me there is something missing
+on this table."
+
+Madame Magloire had, in fact, only placed the three sets of forks and
+spoons which were absolutely necessary. Now, it was the usage of the
+house, when the Bishop had any one to supper, to lay out the whole
+six sets of silver on the table-cloth--an innocent ostentation. This
+graceful semblance of luxury was a kind of child's play, which was full
+of charm in that gentle and severe household, which raised poverty into
+dignity.
+
+Madame Magloire understood the remark, went out without saying a word,
+and a moment later the three sets of silver forks and spoons demanded by
+the Bishop were glittering upon the cloth, symmetrically arranged before
+the three persons seated at the table.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--DETAILS CONCERNING THE CHEESE-DAIRIES OF PONTARLIER.
+
+Now, in order to convey an idea of what passed at that table, we cannot
+do better than to transcribe here a passage from one of Mademoiselle
+Baptistine's letters to Madame Boischevron, wherein the conversation
+between the convict and the Bishop is described with ingenious
+minuteness.
+
+
+". . . This man paid no attention to any one. He ate with the voracity
+of a starving man. However, after supper he said:
+
+"'Monsieur le Cure of the good God, all this is far too good for me; but
+I must say that the carters who would not allow me to eat with them keep
+a better table than you do.'
+
+"Between ourselves, the remark rather shocked me. My brother replied:--
+
+"'They are more fatigued than I.'
+
+"'No,' returned the man, 'they have more money. You are poor; I see that
+plainly. You cannot be even a curate. Are you really a cure? Ah, if the
+good God were but just, you certainly ought to be a cure!'
+
+"'The good God is more than just,' said my brother.
+
+"A moment later he added:--
+
+"'Monsieur Jean Valjean, is it to Pontarlier that you are going?'
+
+"'With my road marked out for me.'
+
+"I think that is what the man said. Then he went on:--
+
+"'I must be on my way by daybreak to-morrow. Travelling is hard. If the
+nights are cold, the days are hot.'
+
+"'You are going to a good country,' said my brother. 'During the
+Revolution my family was ruined. I took refuge in Franche-Comte at
+first, and there I lived for some time by the toil of my hands. My will
+was good. I found plenty to occupy me. One has only to choose. There are
+paper mills, tanneries, distilleries, oil factories, watch factories
+on a large scale, steel mills, copper works, twenty iron foundries at
+least, four of which, situated at Lods, at Chatillon, at Audincourt, and
+at Beure, are tolerably large.'
+
+"I think I am not mistaken in saying that those are the names which my
+brother mentioned. Then he interrupted himself and addressed me:--
+
+"'Have we not some relatives in those parts, my dear sister?'
+
+"I replied,--
+
+"'We did have some; among others, M. de Lucenet, who was captain of the
+gates at Pontarlier under the old regime.'
+
+"'Yes,' resumed my brother; 'but in '93, one had no longer any
+relatives, one had only one's arms. I worked. They have, in the
+country of Pontarlier, whither you are going, Monsieur Valjean, a
+truly patriarchal and truly charming industry, my sister. It is their
+cheese-dairies, which they call fruitieres.'
+
+"Then my brother, while urging the man to eat, explained to him, with
+great minuteness, what these fruitieres of Pontarlier were; that they
+were divided into two classes: the big barns which belong to the rich,
+and where there are forty or fifty cows which produce from seven to
+eight thousand cheeses each summer, and the associated fruitieres, which
+belong to the poor; these are the peasants of mid-mountain, who hold
+their cows in common, and share the proceeds. 'They engage the services
+of a cheese-maker, whom they call the grurin; the grurin receives the
+milk of the associates three times a day, and marks the quantity on
+a double tally. It is towards the end of April that the work of the
+cheese-dairies begins; it is towards the middle of June that the
+cheese-makers drive their cows to the mountains.'
+
+"The man recovered his animation as he ate. My brother made him drink
+that good Mauves wine, which he does not drink himself, because he says
+that wine is expensive. My brother imparted all these details with that
+easy gayety of his with which you are acquainted, interspersing his
+words with graceful attentions to me. He recurred frequently to that
+comfortable trade of grurin, as though he wished the man to understand,
+without advising him directly and harshly, that this would afford him
+a refuge. One thing struck me. This man was what I have told you. Well,
+neither during supper, nor during the entire evening, did my brother
+utter a single word, with the exception of a few words about Jesus when
+he entered, which could remind the man of what he was, nor of what my
+brother was. To all appearances, it was an occasion for preaching him
+a little sermon, and of impressing the Bishop on the convict, so that a
+mark of the passage might remain behind. This might have appeared to any
+one else who had this, unfortunate man in his hands to afford a chance
+to nourish his soul as well as his body, and to bestow upon him
+some reproach, seasoned with moralizing and advice, or a little
+commiseration, with an exhortation to conduct himself better in the
+future. My brother did not even ask him from what country he came,
+nor what was his history. For in his history there is a fault, and my
+brother seemed to avoid everything which could remind him of it. To such
+a point did he carry it, that at one time, when my brother was speaking
+of the mountaineers of Pontarlier, who exercise a gentle labor near
+heaven, and who, he added, are happy because they are innocent, he
+stopped short, fearing lest in this remark there might have escaped him
+something which might wound the man. By dint of reflection, I think
+I have comprehended what was passing in my brother's heart. He was
+thinking, no doubt, that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean, had his
+misfortune only too vividly present in his mind; that the best thing
+was to divert him from it, and to make him believe, if only momentarily,
+that he was a person like any other, by treating him just in his
+ordinary way. Is not this indeed, to understand charity well? Is there
+not, dear Madame, something truly evangelical in this delicacy which
+abstains from sermon, from moralizing, from allusions? and is not the
+truest pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all? It has
+seemed to me that this might have been my brother's private thought. In
+any case, what I can say is that, if he entertained all these ideas, he
+gave no sign of them; from beginning to end, even to me he was the same
+as he is every evening, and he supped with this Jean Valjean with the
+same air and in the same manner in which he would have supped with M.
+Gedeon le Provost, or with the curate of the parish.
+
+"Towards the end, when he had reached the figs, there came a knock at
+the door. It was Mother Gerbaud, with her little one in her arms. My
+brother kissed the child on the brow, and borrowed fifteen sous which I
+had about me to give to Mother Gerbaud. The man was not paying much
+heed to anything then. He was no longer talking, and he seemed very much
+fatigued. After poor old Gerbaud had taken her departure, my brother
+said grace; then he turned to the man and said to him, 'You must be
+in great need of your bed.' Madame Magloire cleared the table very
+promptly. I understood that we must retire, in order to allow this
+traveller to go to sleep, and we both went up stairs. Nevertheless, I
+sent Madame Magloire down a moment later, to carry to the man's bed a
+goat skin from the Black Forest, which was in my room. The nights are
+frigid, and that keeps one warm. It is a pity that this skin is old; all
+the hair is falling out. My brother bought it while he was in Germany,
+at Tottlingen, near the sources of the Danube, as well as the little
+ivory-handled knife which I use at table.
+
+"Madame Magloire returned immediately. We said our prayers in the
+drawing-room, where we hang up the linen, and then we each retired to
+our own chambers, without saying a word to each other."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--TRANQUILLITY
+
+After bidding his sister good night, Monseigneur Bienvenu took one of
+the two silver candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his
+guest, and said to him,--
+
+"Monsieur, I will conduct you to your room."
+
+The man followed him.
+
+As might have been observed from what has been said above, the house was
+so arranged that in order to pass into the oratory where the alcove was
+situated, or to get out of it, it was necessary to traverse the Bishop's
+bedroom.
+
+At the moment when he was crossing this apartment, Madame Magloire was
+putting away the silverware in the cupboard near the head of the bed.
+This was her last care every evening before she went to bed.
+
+The Bishop installed his guest in the alcove. A fresh white bed had been
+prepared there. The man set the candle down on a small table.
+
+"Well," said the Bishop, "may you pass a good night. To-morrow morning,
+before you set out, you shall drink a cup of warm milk from our cows."
+
+"Thanks, Monsieur l'Abbe," said the man.
+
+Hardly had he pronounced these words full of peace, when all of a
+sudden, and without transition, he made a strange movement, which would
+have frozen the two sainted women with horror, had they witnessed it.
+Even at this day it is difficult for us to explain what inspired him at
+that moment. Did he intend to convey a warning or to throw out a menace?
+Was he simply obeying a sort of instinctive impulse which was obscure
+even to himself? He turned abruptly to the old man, folded his arms, and
+bending upon his host a savage gaze, he exclaimed in a hoarse voice:--
+
+"Ah! really! You lodge me in your house, close to yourself like this?"
+
+He broke off, and added with a laugh in which there lurked something
+monstrous:--
+
+"Have you really reflected well? How do you know that I have not been an
+assassin?"
+
+The Bishop replied:--
+
+"That is the concern of the good God."
+
+Then gravely, and moving his lips like one who is praying or talking
+to himself, he raised two fingers of his right hand and bestowed his
+benediction on the man, who did not bow, and without turning his head or
+looking behind him, he returned to his bedroom.
+
+When the alcove was in use, a large serge curtain drawn from wall to
+wall concealed the altar. The Bishop knelt before this curtain as he
+passed and said a brief prayer. A moment later he was in his garden,
+walking, meditating, contemplating, his heart and soul wholly absorbed
+in those grand and mysterious things which God shows at night to the
+eyes which remain open.
+
+As for the man, he was actually so fatigued that he did not even profit
+by the nice white sheets. Snuffing out his candle with his nostrils
+after the manner of convicts, he dropped, all dressed as he was, upon
+the bed, where he immediately fell into a profound sleep.
+
+Midnight struck as the Bishop returned from his garden to his apartment.
+
+A few minutes later all were asleep in the little house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--JEAN VALJEAN
+
+Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.
+
+Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned
+to read in his childhood. When he reached man's estate, he became a
+tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his
+father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a
+contraction of viola Jean, "here's Jean."
+
+Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which
+constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole,
+however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about
+Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother
+at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not
+been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had
+been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean
+was a sister older than himself,--a widow with seven children, boys and
+girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a
+husband she lodged and fed her young brother.
+
+The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old.
+The youngest, one.
+
+Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the
+father's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had brought
+him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishly
+on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude and
+ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native
+parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.
+
+He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.
+His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from
+his bowl while he was eating,--a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the
+heart of the cabbage,--to give to one of her children. As he went on
+eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his
+long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air
+of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not
+far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane,
+a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habitually
+famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in
+their mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley
+corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little
+girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother
+had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents
+severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for
+the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not
+punished.
+
+In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as
+a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did
+whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with
+seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was
+being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work.
+The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!
+
+One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at
+Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on
+the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed
+through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the
+glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran
+out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran
+after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his
+arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.
+
+This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals
+of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at
+night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world,
+he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a
+legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,
+smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark
+cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and the
+hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, the
+smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferocious
+men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest,
+make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without
+destroying the humane side.
+
+Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit.
+There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when
+the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in
+which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment
+of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the
+galleys.
+
+On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the
+general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory
+to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floreal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte,
+was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of galley-slaves
+was put in chains at Bicetre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang.
+An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old, still
+recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end of
+the fourth line, in the north angle of the courtyard. He was seated on
+the ground like the others. He did not seem to comprehend his position,
+except that it was horrible. It is probable that he, also, was
+disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of
+everything, something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar was
+being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept,
+his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he only managed to
+say from time to time, "I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles." Then still
+sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times,
+as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights,
+and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done,
+whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing
+seven little children.
+
+He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven
+days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in
+the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name,
+was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.
+What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who
+troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from
+the young tree which is sawed off at the root?
+
+It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures
+of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge,
+wandered away at random,--who even knows?--each in his own direction
+perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which
+engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear in
+succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race.
+They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their village
+forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field forgot them;
+after a few years' residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot
+them. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar.
+That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon,
+did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think, towards
+the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through what
+channels the news reached him. Some one who had known them in their
+own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a poor
+street Rear Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre. She had with her only
+one child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the other six? Perhaps
+she did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing office,
+No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged
+to be there at six o'clock in the morning--long before daylight in
+winter. In the same building with the printing office there was a
+school, and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven years
+old. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school only
+opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school
+to open, for an hour--one hour of a winter night in the open air! They
+would not allow the child to come into the printing office, because he
+was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in the morning, they
+beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement, overcome with
+drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down and
+doubled up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the portress,
+took pity on him; she took him into her den, where there was a pallet, a
+spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs, and the little one slumbered in a
+corner, pressing himself close to the cat that he might suffer less from
+cold. At seven o'clock the school opened, and he entered. That is what
+was told to Jean Valjean.
+
+They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash,
+as though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of those
+things whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard nothing more
+forever. Nothing from them ever reached him again; he never beheld
+them; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this mournful
+history they will not be met with any more.
+
+Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape
+arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place.
+He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being
+at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at
+the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,--of a smoking roof,
+of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking
+clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot
+see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening
+of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for
+thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime,
+to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years.
+In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself
+of it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at
+roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found him
+hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he
+resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This
+case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition of
+five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In the
+tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he
+succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years.
+Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last
+attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four
+hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. In
+October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having
+broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.
+
+Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his
+studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of
+this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of
+departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gueux had stolen a loaf;
+Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that
+four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.
+
+Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged
+impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.
+
+What had taken place in that soul?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR
+
+
+Let us try to say it.
+
+It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is
+itself which creates them.
+
+He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. The
+light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses a
+clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small amount of daylight
+which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, in
+the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon the
+plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and
+meditated.
+
+He constituted himself the tribunal.
+
+He began by putting himself on trial.
+
+He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly
+punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy
+act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to
+him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better to
+wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that
+it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one is
+hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die of
+hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man
+is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally and
+physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to have
+patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little
+children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,
+unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
+and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that that
+is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through
+which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.
+
+Then he asked himself--
+
+Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether
+it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, an
+industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault once
+committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious and
+disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part of
+the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part
+of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an
+excess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which contains
+expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not equivalent
+to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing the
+situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault of the
+repression, of converting the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor
+into the creditor, and of ranging the law definitely on the side of the
+man who had violated it.
+
+Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for
+attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage
+perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society against
+the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh every day, a
+crime which had lasted nineteen years.
+
+He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force its
+members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lack
+of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight; and to
+seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess, a default of
+work and an excess of punishment.
+
+Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those
+of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods
+made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.
+
+These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.
+
+He condemned it to his hatred.
+
+He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said
+to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call
+it to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibrium
+between the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being done
+to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment was
+not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.
+
+Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;
+one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one's side
+at bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.
+
+And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never
+seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and
+which it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched him to
+bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, since
+his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever
+encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to
+suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a
+war; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weapon
+than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it away
+with him when he departed.
+
+There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin
+friars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of the
+unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who had
+a mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read,
+to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to
+fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can
+serve to eke out evil.
+
+This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had
+caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,
+and he condemned it also.
+
+Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted and
+at the same time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness on the
+other.
+
+Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still good
+when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and felt
+that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and was
+conscious that he was becoming impious.
+
+It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.
+
+Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the
+man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be
+completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can
+the heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and
+infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness,
+as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every
+human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a
+first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in
+the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with
+splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?
+
+Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist
+would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation, had
+he beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were for Jean
+Valjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave, seated with folded
+arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust into
+his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and thoughtful,
+a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath, condemned by
+civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.
+
+Certainly,--and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,--the
+observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; he
+would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law's making; but
+he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have turned aside
+his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse within
+this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would have effaced
+from this existence the word which the finger of God has, nevertheless,
+inscribed upon the brow of every man,--hope.
+
+Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as
+perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it for
+those who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive, after their
+formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process of their
+formation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Had
+this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception of
+the succession of ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted and
+descended to the lugubrious aspects which had, for so many years, formed
+the inner horizon of his spirit? Was he conscious of all that passed
+within him, and of all that was working there? That is something
+which we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not even
+believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his
+misfortune, to prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. At
+times he did not rightly know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in
+the shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one
+might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt habitually
+in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, at
+intervals, there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, an
+access of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash which
+illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all around
+him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light, the hideous
+precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.
+
+The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He no
+longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in which
+that which is pitiless--that is to say, that which is
+brutalizing--predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, by
+a sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into a
+ferocious beast.
+
+Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone
+suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul.
+Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless and
+foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself,
+without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experiences
+which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the wolf
+who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would have
+said, "Remain!" But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason
+vanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. When
+he was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on him only served to
+render him still more wild.
+
+One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical
+strength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of the
+galleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan, Jean
+Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained enormous
+weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it, he replaced that
+implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly called orgueil
+[pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived the name of the
+Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris. His comrades had
+nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they were repairing the
+balcony of the town-hall at Toulon, one of those admirable caryatids of
+Puget, which support the balcony, became loosened, and was on the point
+of falling. Jean Valjean, who was present, supported the caryatid with
+his shoulder, and gave the workmen time to arrive.
+
+His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who were
+forever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of force
+and skill combined. It is the science of muscles. An entire system of
+mysterious statics is daily practised by prisoners, men who are forever
+envious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical surface, and to find
+points of support where hardly a projection was visible, was play to
+Jean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given, with the tension of his
+back and legs, with his elbows and his heels fitted into the unevenness
+of the stone, he raised himself as if by magic to the third story. He
+sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of the galley prison.
+
+He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion was
+required to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laugh
+of the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon. To all
+appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant contemplation of
+something terrible.
+
+He was absorbed, in fact.
+
+Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed
+intelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing was
+resting on him. In that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,
+each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his glance,
+he perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of frightful
+accumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond the
+range of his vision,--laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,--whose outlines
+escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than
+that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,
+here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now
+afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,
+vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the
+gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top,
+like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him
+that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, rendered
+it more funereal and more black. All this--laws, prejudices, deeds, men,
+things--went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with the
+complicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,
+walking over him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulness
+in its cruelty and inexorability in its indifference. Souls which have
+fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in the
+lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the reproved of
+the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so formidable for
+him who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon
+their heads.
+
+In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature
+of his meditation?
+
+If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would,
+doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.
+
+All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of
+realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state which
+is almost indescribable.
+
+At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. His
+reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled than of yore,
+rose in revolt. Everything which had happened to him seemed to him
+absurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. He said
+to himself, "It is a dream." He gazed at the galley-sergeant standing a
+few paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All of
+a sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.
+
+Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to say
+that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days,
+nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns. I know not what vent-hole
+daylight habitually illumined his soul.
+
+To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated
+into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will
+confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen
+years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the
+formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner
+in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:
+firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,
+entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil which
+he had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,
+consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which
+such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through
+three successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alone
+traverse,--reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes his
+habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities
+suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the
+just, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the point
+of arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred
+which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential
+incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then
+the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which
+manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to
+some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was
+not without reason that Jean Valjean's passport described him as a very
+dangerous man.
+
+From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal
+sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from
+the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--BILLOWS AND SHADOWS
+
+
+A man overboard!
+
+What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre
+ship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.
+
+The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the
+surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The
+vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own
+workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;
+his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He
+gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is
+that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It retreats,
+it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just now, he was
+one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the rest, he had
+his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man. Now, what has
+taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an end.
+
+He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees
+and crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him
+hideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues of
+water dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused
+openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses
+of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seize
+him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he is
+becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss him
+from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly ocean
+attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his agony.
+It seems as though all that water were hate.
+
+Nevertheless, he struggles.
+
+He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes
+an effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly,
+combats the inexhaustible.
+
+Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of
+the horizon.
+
+The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyes
+and beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid his
+death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this
+madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond
+the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region
+beyond.
+
+There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human
+distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float,
+and he, he rattles in the death agony.
+
+He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,
+at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.
+
+Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is
+exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has
+vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he
+stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous
+billows of the invisible; he shouts.
+
+There are no more men. Where is God?
+
+He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.
+
+Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.
+
+He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are
+deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the
+infinite.
+
+Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,
+the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.
+Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy
+adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold
+paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp
+nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is
+to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the
+alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons
+his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths
+of engulfment.
+
+Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of
+souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!
+Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!
+
+The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling
+their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.
+
+The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall
+resuscitate it?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--NEW TROUBLES
+
+When the hour came for him to take his departure from the galleys, when
+Jean Valjean heard in his ear the strange words, Thou art free! the
+moment seemed improbable and unprecedented; a ray of vivid light, a ray
+of the true light of the living, suddenly penetrated within him. But it
+was not long before this ray paled. Jean Valjean had been dazzled by
+the idea of liberty. He had believed in a new life. He very speedily
+perceived what sort of liberty it is to which a yellow passport is
+provided.
+
+And this was encompassed with much bitterness. He had calculated that
+his earnings, during his sojourn in the galleys, ought to amount to
+a hundred and seventy-one francs. It is but just to add that he had
+forgotten to include in his calculations the forced repose of Sundays
+and festival days during nineteen years, which entailed a diminution
+of about eighty francs. At all events, his hoard had been reduced by
+various local levies to the sum of one hundred and nine francs fifteen
+sous, which had been counted out to him on his departure. He had
+understood nothing of this, and had thought himself wronged. Let us say
+the word--robbed.
+
+On the day following his liberation, he saw, at Grasse, in front of
+an orange-flower distillery, some men engaged in unloading bales. He
+offered his services. Business was pressing; they were accepted. He set
+to work. He was intelligent, robust, adroit; he did his best; the master
+seemed pleased. While he was at work, a gendarme passed, observed
+him, and demanded his papers. It was necessary to show him the yellow
+passport. That done, Jean Valjean resumed his labor. A little while
+before he had questioned one of the workmen as to the amount which they
+earned each day at this occupation; he had been told thirty sous. When
+evening arrived, as he was forced to set out again on the following day,
+he presented himself to the owner of the distillery and requested to be
+paid. The owner did not utter a word, but handed him twenty-five sous. He
+objected. He was told, "That is enough for thee." He persisted. The
+master looked him straight between the eyes, and said to him "Beware of
+the prison."
+
+There, again, he considered that he had been robbed.
+
+Society, the State, by diminishing his hoard, had robbed him wholesale.
+Now it was the individual who was robbing him at retail.
+
+Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not
+from the sentence.
+
+That is what happened to him at Grasse. We have seen in what manner he
+was received at D----
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--THE MAN AROUSED
+
+As the Cathedral clock struck two in the morning, Jean Valjean awoke.
+
+What woke him was that his bed was too good. It was nearly twenty years
+since he had slept in a bed, and, although he had not undressed, the
+sensation was too novel not to disturb his slumbers.
+
+He had slept more than four hours. His fatigue had passed away. He was
+accustomed not to devote many hours to repose.
+
+He opened his eyes and stared into the gloom which surrounded him; then
+he closed them again, with the intention of going to sleep once more.
+
+When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters
+preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time.
+Sleep comes more easily than it returns. This is what happened to Jean
+Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he fell to thinking.
+
+He was at one of those moments when the thoughts which one has in one's
+mind are troubled. There was a sort of dark confusion in his brain. His
+memories of the olden time and of the immediate present floated there
+pell-mell and mingled confusedly, losing their proper forms, becoming
+disproportionately large, then suddenly disappearing, as in a muddy and
+perturbed pool. Many thoughts occurred to him; but there was one which
+kept constantly presenting itself afresh, and which drove away all
+others. We will mention this thought at once: he had observed the six
+sets of silver forks and spoons and the ladle which Madame Magloire had
+placed on the table.
+
+Those six sets of silver haunted him.--They were there.--A few paces
+distant.--Just as he was traversing the adjoining room to reach the
+one in which he then was, the old servant-woman had been in the act
+of placing them in a little cupboard near the head of the bed.--He had
+taken careful note of this cupboard.--On the right, as you entered from
+the dining-room.--They were solid.--And old silver.--From the ladle one
+could get at least two hundred francs.--Double what he had earned in
+nineteen years.--It is true that he would have earned more if "the
+administration had not robbed him."
+
+His mind wavered for a whole hour in fluctuations with which there was
+certainly mingled some struggle. Three o'clock struck. He opened his
+eyes again, drew himself up abruptly into a sitting posture, stretched
+out his arm and felt of his knapsack, which he had thrown down on a
+corner of the alcove; then he hung his legs over the edge of the bed,
+and placed his feet on the floor, and thus found himself, almost without
+knowing it, seated on his bed.
+
+He remained for a time thoughtfully in this attitude, which would have
+been suggestive of something sinister for any one who had seen him
+thus in the dark, the only person awake in that house where all were
+sleeping. All of a sudden he stooped down, removed his shoes and placed
+them softly on the mat beside the bed; then he resumed his thoughtful
+attitude, and became motionless once more.
+
+Throughout this hideous meditation, the thoughts which we have above
+indicated moved incessantly through his brain; entered, withdrew,
+re-entered, and in a manner oppressed him; and then he thought, also,
+without knowing why, and with the mechanical persistence of revery, of
+a convict named Brevet, whom he had known in the galleys, and whose
+trousers had been upheld by a single suspender of knitted cotton. The
+checkered pattern of that suspender recurred incessantly to his mind.
+
+He remained in this situation, and would have so remained indefinitely,
+even until daybreak, had not the clock struck one--the half or quarter
+hour. It seemed to him that that stroke said to him, "Come on!"
+
+He rose to his feet, hesitated still another moment, and listened; all
+was quiet in the house; then he walked straight ahead, with short steps,
+to the window, of which he caught a glimpse. The night was not very
+dark; there was a full moon, across which coursed large clouds driven by
+the wind. This created, outdoors, alternate shadow and gleams of light,
+eclipses, then bright openings of the clouds; and indoors a sort of
+twilight. This twilight, sufficient to enable a person to see his way,
+intermittent on account of the clouds, resembled the sort of livid light
+which falls through an air-hole in a cellar, before which the passersby
+come and go. On arriving at the window, Jean Valjean examined it. It had
+no grating; it opened in the garden and was fastened, according to the
+fashion of the country, only by a small pin. He opened it; but as a
+rush of cold and piercing air penetrated the room abruptly, he closed
+it again immediately. He scrutinized the garden with that attentive gaze
+which studies rather than looks. The garden was enclosed by a tolerably
+low white wall, easy to climb. Far away, at the extremity, he perceived
+tops of trees, spaced at regular intervals, which indicated that the
+wall separated the garden from an avenue or lane planted with trees.
+
+Having taken this survey, he executed a movement like that of a man who
+has made up his mind, strode to his alcove, grasped his knapsack, opened
+it, fumbled in it, pulled out of it something which he placed on the
+bed, put his shoes into one of his pockets, shut the whole thing up
+again, threw the knapsack on his shoulders, put on his cap, drew the
+visor down over his eyes, felt for his cudgel, went and placed it in the
+angle of the window; then returned to the bed, and resolutely seized the
+object which he had deposited there. It resembled a short bar of
+iron, pointed like a pike at one end. It would have been difficult to
+distinguish in that darkness for what employment that bit of iron could
+have been designed. Perhaps it was a lever; possibly it was a club.
+
+In the daytime it would have been possible to recognize it as nothing
+more than a miner's candlestick. Convicts were, at that period,
+sometimes employed in quarrying stone from the lofty hills which environ
+Toulon, and it was not rare for them to have miners' tools at their
+command. These miners' candlesticks are of massive iron, terminated at
+the lower extremity by a point, by means of which they are stuck into
+the rock.
+
+He took the candlestick in his right hand; holding his breath and trying
+to deaden the sound of his tread, he directed his steps to the door of
+the adjoining room, occupied by the Bishop, as we already know.
+
+On arriving at this door, he found it ajar. The Bishop had not closed
+it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--WHAT HE DOES
+
+Jean Valjean listened. Not a sound.
+
+He gave the door a push.
+
+He pushed it gently with the tip of his finger, lightly, with the
+furtive and uneasy gentleness of a cat which is desirous of entering.
+
+The door yielded to this pressure, and made an imperceptible and silent
+movement, which enlarged the opening a little.
+
+He waited a moment; then gave the door a second and a bolder push.
+
+It continued to yield in silence. The opening was now large enough to
+allow him to pass. But near the door there stood a little table, which
+formed an embarrassing angle with it, and barred the entrance.
+
+Jean Valjean recognized the difficulty. It was necessary, at any cost,
+to enlarge the aperture still further.
+
+He decided on his course of action, and gave the door a third push, more
+energetic than the two preceding. This time a badly oiled hinge suddenly
+emitted amid the silence a hoarse and prolonged cry.
+
+Jean Valjean shuddered. The noise of the hinge rang in his ears with
+something of the piercing and formidable sound of the trump of the Day
+of Judgment.
+
+In the fantastic exaggerations of the first moment he almost imagined
+that that hinge had just become animated, and had suddenly assumed a
+terrible life, and that it was barking like a dog to arouse every one,
+and warn and to wake those who were asleep. He halted, shuddering,
+bewildered, and fell back from the tips of his toes upon his heels. He
+heard the arteries in his temples beating like two forge hammers, and
+it seemed to him that his breath issued from his breast with the roar
+of the wind issuing from a cavern. It seemed impossible to him that the
+horrible clamor of that irritated hinge should not have disturbed the
+entire household, like the shock of an earthquake; the door, pushed by
+him, had taken the alarm, and had shouted; the old man would rise at
+once; the two old women would shriek out; people would come to their
+assistance; in less than a quarter of an hour the town would be in an
+uproar, and the gendarmerie on hand. For a moment he thought himself
+lost.
+
+He remained where he was, petrified like the statue of salt, not daring
+to make a movement. Several minutes elapsed. The door had fallen wide
+open. He ventured to peep into the next room. Nothing had stirred there.
+He lent an ear. Nothing was moving in the house. The noise made by the
+rusty hinge had not awakened any one.
+
+This first danger was past; but there still reigned a frightful tumult
+within him. Nevertheless, he did not retreat. Even when he had thought
+himself lost, he had not drawn back. His only thought now was to finish
+as soon as possible. He took a step and entered the room.
+
+This room was in a state of perfect calm. Here and there vague and
+confused forms were distinguishable, which in the daylight were papers
+scattered on a table, open folios, volumes piled upon a stool, an
+arm-chair heaped with clothing, a prie-Dieu, and which at that hour
+were only shadowy corners and whitish spots. Jean Valjean advanced with
+precaution, taking care not to knock against the furniture. He could
+hear, at the extremity of the room, the even and tranquil breathing of
+the sleeping Bishop.
+
+He suddenly came to a halt. He was near the bed. He had arrived there
+sooner than he had thought for.
+
+Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions
+with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to
+make us reflect. For the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the
+heavens. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed,
+this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing
+the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop's pale face. He was
+sleeping peacefully. He lay in his bed almost completely dressed, on
+account of the cold of the Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool,
+which covered his arms to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the
+pillow, in the careless attitude of repose; his hand, adorned with the
+pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds and so many
+holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the bed. His whole face
+was illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of
+felicity. It was more than a smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon
+his brow the indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible.
+The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.
+
+A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.
+
+It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that heaven was
+within him. That heaven was his conscience.
+
+[Illustration: The Fall 1b2-10-the-fall]
+
+At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed itself, so to speak,
+upon that inward radiance, the sleeping Bishop seemed as in a glory. It
+remained, however, gentle and veiled in an ineffable half-light. That
+moon in the sky, that slumbering nature, that garden without a quiver,
+that house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence, added
+some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable repose of this man,
+and enveloped in a sort of serene and majestic aureole that white
+hair, those closed eyes, that face in which all was hope and all was
+confidence, that head of an old man, and that slumber of an infant.
+
+There was something almost divine in this man, who was thus august,
+without being himself aware of it.
+
+Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron
+candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had
+he beheld anything like this. This confidence terrified him. The
+moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and
+uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action,
+contemplating the slumber of the just.
+
+That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had
+about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously
+conscious.
+
+No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself. In
+order to attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of the
+most violent of things in the presence of the most gentle. Even on
+his visage it would have been impossible to distinguish anything with
+certainty. It was a sort of haggard astonishment. He gazed at it, and
+that was all. But what was his thought? It would have been impossible to
+divine it. What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded. But
+what was the nature of this emotion?
+
+His eye never quitted the old man. The only thing which was clearly
+to be inferred from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange
+indecision. One would have said that he was hesitating between the two
+abysses,--the one in which one loses one's self and that in which one
+saves one's self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that
+hand.
+
+At the expiration of a few minutes his left arm rose slowly towards
+his brow, and he took off his cap; then his arm fell back with the same
+deliberation, and Jean Valjean fell to meditating once more, his cap in
+his left hand, his club in his right hand, his hair bristling all over
+his savage head.
+
+The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying
+gaze.
+
+The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the
+chimney-piece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them,
+with a benediction for one and pardon for the other.
+
+Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped rapidly
+past the bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the cupboard,
+which he saw near the head; he raised his iron candlestick as though to
+force the lock; the key was there; he opened it; the first thing which
+presented itself to him was the basket of silverware; he seized it,
+traversed the chamber with long strides, without taking any precautions
+and without troubling himself about the noise, gained the door,
+re-entered the oratory, opened the window, seized his cudgel, bestrode
+the window-sill of the ground-floor, put the silver into his knapsack,
+threw away the basket, crossed the garden, leaped over the wall like a
+tiger, and fled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--THE BISHOP WORKS
+
+The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his
+garden. Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.
+
+"Monseigneur, Monseigneur!" she exclaimed, "does your Grace know where
+the basket of silver is?"
+
+"Yes," replied the Bishop.
+
+"Jesus the Lord be blessed!" she resumed; "I did not know what had
+become of it."
+
+The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented
+it to Madame Magloire.
+
+"Here it is."
+
+"Well!" said she. "Nothing in it! And the silver?"
+
+"Ah," returned the Bishop, "so it is the silver which troubles you? I
+don't know where it is."
+
+"Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has
+stolen it."
+
+In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame
+Magloire had rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned
+to the Bishop. The Bishop had just bent down, and was sighing as he
+examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons, which the basket had broken
+as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire's cry.
+
+"Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!"
+
+As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the
+garden, where traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The
+coping of the wall had been torn away.
+
+"Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane.
+Ah, the abomination! He has stolen our silver!"
+
+The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes,
+and said gently to Madame Magloire:--
+
+"And, in the first place, was that silver ours?"
+
+Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop
+went on:--
+
+"Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver
+wrongfully. It belonged to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man,
+evidently."
+
+"Alas! Jesus!" returned Madame Magloire. "It is not for my sake, nor for
+Mademoiselle's. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the sake of
+Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur to eat with now?"
+
+The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.
+
+"Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?"
+
+Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Pewter has an odor."
+
+"Iron forks and spoons, then."
+
+Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.
+
+"Iron has a taste."
+
+"Very well," said the Bishop; "wooden ones then."
+
+A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which
+Jean Valjean had sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast,
+Monseigneur Welcome remarked gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and
+to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling under her breath, that one really
+does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit
+of bread in a cup of milk.
+
+"A pretty idea, truly," said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went and
+came, "to take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one's self!
+And how fortunate that he did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it makes
+one shudder to think of it!"
+
+As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came
+a knock at the door.
+
+"Come in," said the Bishop.
+
+The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the
+threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three
+men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.
+
+A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was
+standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a
+military salute.
+
+"Monseigneur--" said he.
+
+At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed,
+raised his head with an air of stupefaction.
+
+"Monseigneur!" he murmured. "So he is not the cure?"
+
+"Silence!" said the gendarme. "He is Monseigneur the Bishop."
+
+In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his
+great age permitted.
+
+"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to
+see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which
+are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two
+hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and
+spoons?"
+
+Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop
+with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
+
+"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said
+is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is
+running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this
+silver--"
+
+"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been
+given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed
+the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back
+here? It is a mistake."
+
+"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"
+
+"Certainly," replied the Bishop.
+
+The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.
+
+"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost
+inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.
+
+"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the
+gendarmes.
+
+"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your
+candlesticks. Take them."
+
+He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and
+brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering
+a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the
+Bishop.
+
+Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
+mechanically, and with a bewildered air.
+
+"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my
+friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always
+enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with
+anything but a latch, either by day or by night."
+
+Then, turning to the gendarmes:--
+
+"You may retire, gentlemen."
+
+The gendarmes retired.
+
+Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.
+
+The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:--
+
+"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money
+in becoming an honest man."
+
+Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,
+remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered
+them. He resumed with solemnity:--
+
+"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It
+is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and
+the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GERVAIS
+
+Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set out
+at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and paths
+presented themselves to him, without perceiving that he was incessantly
+retracing his steps. He wandered thus the whole morning, without having
+eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the prey of a throng
+of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of rage; he did not
+know against whom it was directed. He could not have told whether he was
+touched or humiliated. There came over him at moments a strange emotion
+which he resisted and to which he opposed the hardness acquired during
+the last twenty years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him.
+He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the
+injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within
+him. He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have
+actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things
+should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less.
+Although the season was tolerably far advanced, there were still a few
+late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose odor as he passed
+through them in his march recalled to him memories of his childhood.
+These memories were almost intolerable to him, it was so long since they
+had recurred to him.
+
+Unutterable thoughts assembled within him in this manner all day long.
+
+As the sun declined to its setting, casting long shadows athwart the
+soil from every pebble, Jean Valjean sat down behind a bush upon a large
+ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the
+horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village. Jean
+Valjean might have been three leagues distant from D---- A path which
+intersected the plain passed a few paces from the bush.
+
+In the middle of this meditation, which would have contributed not
+a little to render his rags terrifying to any one who might have
+encountered him, a joyous sound became audible.
+
+He turned his head and saw a little Savoyard, about ten years of age,
+coming up the path and singing, his hurdy-gurdy on his hip, and his
+marmot-box on his back.
+
+One of those gay and gentle children, who go from land to land affording
+a view of their knees through the holes in their trousers.
+
+Without stopping his song, the lad halted in his march from time to
+time, and played at knuckle-bones with some coins which he had in his
+hand--his whole fortune, probably.
+
+Among this money there was one forty-sou piece.
+
+The child halted beside the bush, without perceiving Jean Valjean, and
+tossed up his handful of sous, which, up to that time, he had caught
+with a good deal of adroitness on the back of his hand.
+
+This time the forty-sou piece escaped him, and went rolling towards the
+brushwood until it reached Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean set his foot upon it.
+
+In the meantime, the child had looked after his coin and had caught
+sight of him.
+
+He showed no astonishment, but walked straight up to the man.
+
+The spot was absolutely solitary. As far as the eye could see there was
+not a person on the plain or on the path. The only sound was the tiny,
+feeble cries of a flock of birds of passage, which was traversing the
+heavens at an immense height. The child was standing with his back to
+the sun, which cast threads of gold in his hair and empurpled with its
+blood-red gleam the savage face of Jean Valjean.
+
+"Sir," said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is
+composed of ignorance and innocence, "my money."
+
+"What is your name?" said Jean Valjean.
+
+"Little Gervais, sir."
+
+"Go away," said Jean Valjean.
+
+"Sir," resumed the child, "give me back my money."
+
+Jean Valjean dropped his head, and made no reply.
+
+The child began again, "My money, sir."
+
+Jean Valjean's eyes remained fixed on the earth.
+
+"My piece of money!" cried the child, "my white piece! my silver!"
+
+It seemed as though Jean Valjean did not hear him. The child grasped him
+by the collar of his blouse and shook him. At the same time he made an
+effort to displace the big iron-shod shoe which rested on his treasure.
+
+"I want my piece of money! my piece of forty sous!"
+
+The child wept. Jean Valjean raised his head. He still remained seated.
+His eyes were troubled. He gazed at the child, in a sort of amazement,
+then he stretched out his hand towards his cudgel and cried in a
+terrible voice, "Who's there?"
+
+"I, sir," replied the child. "Little Gervais! I! Give me back my forty
+sous, if you please! Take your foot away, sir, if you please!"
+
+Then irritated, though he was so small, and becoming almost menacing:--
+
+"Come now, will you take your foot away? Take your foot away, or we'll
+see!"
+
+"Ah! It's still you!" said Jean Valjean, and rising abruptly to his
+feet, his foot still resting on the silver piece, he added:--
+
+"Will you take yourself off!"
+
+The frightened child looked at him, then began to tremble from head to
+foot, and after a few moments of stupor he set out, running at the top
+of his speed, without daring to turn his neck or to utter a cry.
+
+Nevertheless, lack of breath forced him to halt after a certain
+distance, and Jean Valjean heard him sobbing, in the midst of his own
+revery.
+
+At the end of a few moments the child had disappeared.
+
+The sun had set.
+
+The shadows were descending around Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing
+all day; it is probable that he was feverish.
+
+He had remained standing and had not changed his attitude after the
+child's flight. The breath heaved his chest at long and irregular
+intervals. His gaze, fixed ten or twelve paces in front of him, seemed
+to be scrutinizing with profound attention the shape of an ancient
+fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass. All at once
+he shivered; he had just begun to feel the chill of evening.
+
+He settled his cap more firmly on his brow, sought mechanically to
+cross and button his blouse, advanced a step and stopped to pick up his
+cudgel.
+
+At that moment he caught sight of the forty-sou piece, which his foot
+had half ground into the earth, and which was shining among the pebbles.
+It was as though he had received a galvanic shock. "What is this?"
+he muttered between his teeth. He recoiled three paces, then halted,
+without being able to detach his gaze from the spot which his foot had
+trodden but an instant before, as though the thing which lay glittering
+there in the gloom had been an open eye riveted upon him.
+
+At the expiration of a few moments he darted convulsively towards the
+silver coin, seized it, and straightened himself up again and began to
+gaze afar off over the plain, at the same time casting his eyes towards
+all points of the horizon, as he stood there erect and shivering, like a
+terrified wild animal which is seeking refuge.
+
+He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and vague, great
+banks of violet haze were rising in the gleam of the twilight.
+
+He said, "Ah!" and set out rapidly in the direction in which the child
+had disappeared. After about thirty paces he paused, looked about him
+and saw nothing.
+
+Then he shouted with all his might:--
+
+"Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"
+
+He paused and waited.
+
+There was no reply.
+
+The landscape was gloomy and deserted. He was encompassed by space.
+There was nothing around him but an obscurity in which his gaze was
+lost, and a silence which engulfed his voice.
+
+An icy north wind was blowing, and imparted to things around him a
+sort of lugubrious life. The bushes shook their thin little arms with
+incredible fury. One would have said that they were threatening and
+pursuing some one.
+
+He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and from time to
+time he halted and shouted into that solitude, with a voice which was
+the most formidable and the most disconsolate that it was possible to
+hear, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"
+
+Assuredly, if the child had heard him, he would have been alarmed and
+would have taken good care not to show himself. But the child was no
+doubt already far away.
+
+He encountered a priest on horseback. He stepped up to him and said:--
+
+"Monsieur le Cure, have you seen a child pass?"
+
+"No," said the priest.
+
+"One named Little Gervais?"
+
+"I have seen no one."
+
+He drew two five-franc pieces from his money-bag and handed them to the
+priest.
+
+"Monsieur le Cure, this is for your poor people. Monsieur le Cure, he
+was a little lad, about ten years old, with a marmot, I think, and a
+hurdy-gurdy. One of those Savoyards, you know?"
+
+"I have not seen him."
+
+"Little Gervais? There are no villages here? Can you tell me?"
+
+"If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such
+persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them."
+
+Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence,
+and gave them to the priest.
+
+"For your poor," he said.
+
+Then he added, wildly:--
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbe, have me arrested. I am a thief."
+
+The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.
+
+Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first
+taken.
+
+In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling,
+shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran across the plain
+towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being
+reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood
+or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a spot where
+three paths intersected each other, he stopped. The moon had risen. He
+sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little
+Gervais! Little Gervais! Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the
+mist, without even awakening an echo. He murmured yet once more, "Little
+Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice. It was his last
+effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible
+power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil
+conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in
+his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"
+
+Then his heart burst, and he began to cry. It was the first time that he
+had wept in nineteen years.
+
+When Jean Valjean left the Bishop's house, he was, as we have seen,
+quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto. He
+could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him. He
+hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words of the
+old man. "You have promised me to become an honest man. I buy your soul.
+I take it away from the spirit of perversity; I give it to the good
+God."
+
+This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness
+he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil within us. He was
+indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest
+assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his
+obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he
+yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the
+actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and
+which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be
+conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been
+begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.
+
+In the presence of these lights, he proceeded like a man who is
+intoxicated. As he walked thus with haggard eyes, did he have a distinct
+perception of what might result to him from his adventure at D----? Did
+he understand all those mysterious murmurs which warn or importune the
+spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that
+he had just passed the solemn hour of his destiny; that there no longer
+remained a middle course for him; that if he were not henceforth the
+best of men, he would be the worst; that it behooved him now, so to
+speak, to mount higher than the Bishop, or fall lower than the convict;
+that if he wished to become good be must become an angel; that if he
+wished to remain evil, he must become a monster?
+
+Here, again, some questions must be put, which we have already put
+to ourselves elsewhere: did he catch some shadow of all this in his
+thought, in a confused way? Misfortune certainly, as we have said, does
+form the education of the intelligence; nevertheless, it is doubtful
+whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to disentangle all that we have
+here indicated. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught glimpses
+of, rather than saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into
+an unutterable and almost painful state of emotion. On emerging from
+that black and deformed thing which is called the galleys, the Bishop
+had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt his eyes on
+emerging from the dark. The future life, the possible life which offered
+itself to him henceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremors
+and anxiety. He no longer knew where he really was. Like an owl, who
+should suddenly see the sun rise, the convict had been dazzled and
+blinded, as it were, by virtue.
+
+That which was certain, that which he did not doubt, was that he was no
+longer the same man, that everything about him was changed, that it was
+no longer in his power to make it as though the Bishop had not spoken to
+him and had not touched him.
+
+In this state of mind he had encountered little Gervais, and had robbed
+him of his forty sous. Why? He certainly could not have explained it;
+was this the last effect and the supreme effort, as it were, of the
+evil thoughts which he had brought away from the galleys,--a remnant of
+impulse, a result of what is called in statics, acquired force? It
+was that, and it was also, perhaps, even less than that. Let us say it
+simply, it was not he who stole; it was not the man; it was the beast,
+who, by habit and instinct, had simply placed his foot upon that money,
+while the intelligence was struggling amid so many novel and hitherto
+unheard-of thoughts besetting it.
+
+When intelligence re-awakened and beheld that action of the brute, Jean
+Valjean recoiled with anguish and uttered a cry of terror.
+
+[Illustration: Awakened 1b2-11-awakened]
+
+It was because,--strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only
+in the situation in which he found himself,--in stealing the money from
+that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.
+
+However that may be, this last evil action had a decisive effect on
+him; it abruptly traversed that chaos which he bore in his mind, and
+dispersed it, placed on one side the thick obscurity, and on the other
+the light, and acted on his soul, in the state in which it then was, as
+certain chemical reagents act upon a troubled mixture by precipitating
+one element and clarifying the other.
+
+First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting, all
+bewildered, like one who seeks to save himself, he tried to find the
+child in order to return his money to him; then, when he recognized the
+fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair. At the moment when
+he exclaimed "I am a wretch!" he had just perceived what he was, and he
+was already separated from himself to such a degree, that he seemed to
+himself to be no longer anything more than a phantom, and as if he had,
+there before him, in flesh and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean
+Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled
+with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage,
+with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.
+
+Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort
+a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw
+that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached
+the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified by
+him.
+
+His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly calm
+moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality. One no
+longer beholds the object which one has before one, and one sees, as
+though apart from one's self, the figures which one has in one's own
+mind.
+
+Thus he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face, and at the same
+time, athwart this hallucination, he perceived in a mysterious depth a
+sort of light which he at first took for a torch. On scrutinizing
+this light which appeared to his conscience with more attention, he
+recognized the fact that it possessed a human form and that this torch
+was the Bishop.
+
+His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it,--the
+Bishop and Jean Valjean. Nothing less than the first was required to
+soften the second. By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar
+to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his revery continued, as the
+Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean grow
+less and vanish. After a certain time he was no longer anything more
+than a shade. All at once he disappeared. The Bishop alone remained; he
+filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.
+
+Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed with
+more weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.
+
+As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an
+extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past
+life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutishness, his
+internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in manifold plans
+of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop's, the last thing
+that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime all the
+more cowardly, and all the more monstrous since it had come after the
+Bishop's pardon,--all this recurred to his mind and appeared clearly
+to him, but with a clearness which he had never hitherto witnessed.
+He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it
+seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this
+life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light
+of Paradise.
+
+How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept?
+Whither did he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be
+authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble at
+that epoch, and who arrived at D---- about three o'clock in the morning,
+saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's residence was
+situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in
+the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE YEAR 1817
+
+
+1817 is the year which Louis XVIII., with a certain royal assurance
+which was not wanting in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his reign.
+It is the year in which M. Bruguiere de Sorsum was celebrated. All the
+hairdressers' shops, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird,
+were besmeared with azure and decked with fleurs-de-lys. It was the
+candid time at which Count Lynch sat every Sunday as church-warden in
+the church-warden's pew of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in his costume of a
+peer of France, with his red ribbon and his long nose and the majesty
+of profile peculiar to a man who has performed a brilliant action.
+The brilliant action performed by M. Lynch was this: being mayor of
+Bordeaux, on the 12th of March, 1814, he had surrendered the city a
+little too promptly to M. the Duke d'Angouleme. Hence his peerage. In
+1817 fashion swallowed up little boys of from four to six years of
+age in vast caps of morocco leather with ear-tabs resembling Esquimaux
+mitres. The French army was dressed in white, after the mode of the
+Austrian; the regiments were called legions; instead of numbers they
+bore the names of departments; Napoleon was at St. Helena; and since
+England refused him green cloth, he was having his old coats turned.
+In 1817 Pelligrini sang; Mademoiselle Bigottini danced; Potier reigned;
+Odry did not yet exist. Madame Saqui had succeeded to Forioso. There
+were still Prussians in France. M. Delalot was a personage. Legitimacy
+had just asserted itself by cutting off the hand, then the head, of
+Pleignier, of Carbonneau, and of Tolleron. The Prince de Talleyrand,
+grand chamberlain, and the Abbe Louis, appointed minister of finance,
+laughed as they looked at each other, with the laugh of the two augurs;
+both of them had celebrated, on the 14th of July, 1790, the mass of
+federation in the Champ de Mars; Talleyrand had said it as bishop, Louis
+had served it in the capacity of deacon. In 1817, in the side-alleys
+of this same Champ de Mars, two great cylinders of wood might have
+been seen lying in the rain, rotting amid the grass, painted blue, with
+traces of eagles and bees, from which the gilding was falling. These
+were the columns which two years before had upheld the Emperor's
+platform in the Champ de Mai. They were blackened here and there with
+the scorches of the bivouac of Austrians encamped near Gros-Caillou. Two
+or three of these columns had disappeared in these bivouac fires, and
+had warmed the large hands of the Imperial troops. The Field of May had
+this remarkable point: that it had been held in the month of June and in
+the Field of March (Mars). In this year, 1817, two things were popular:
+the Voltaire-Touquet and the snuff-box a la Charter. The most recent
+Parisian sensation was the crime of Dautun, who had thrown his brother's
+head into the fountain of the Flower-Market.
+
+They had begun to feel anxious at the Naval Department, on account of
+the lack of news from that fatal frigate, The Medusa, which was destined
+to cover Chaumareix with infamy and Gericault with glory. Colonel Selves
+was going to Egypt to become Soliman-Pasha. The palace of Thermes, in
+the Rue de La Harpe, served as a shop for a cooper. On the platform of
+the octagonal tower of the Hotel de Cluny, the little shed of boards,
+which had served as an observatory to Messier, the naval astronomer
+under Louis XVI., was still to be seen. The Duchesse de Duras read to
+three or four friends her unpublished Ourika, in her boudoir furnished
+by X. in sky-blue satin. The N's were scratched off the Louvre. The
+bridge of Austerlitz had abdicated, and was entitled the bridge of the
+King's Garden [du Jardin du Roi], a double enigma, which disguised the
+bridge of Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes at one stroke. Louis
+XVIII., much preoccupied while annotating Horace with the corner of his
+finger-nail, heroes who have become emperors, and makers of wooden shoes
+who have become dauphins, had two anxieties,--Napoleon and Mathurin
+Bruneau. The French Academy had given for its prize subject, The
+Happiness procured through Study. M. Bellart was officially eloquent.
+In his shadow could be seen germinating that future advocate-general of
+Broe, dedicated to the sarcasms of Paul-Louis Courier. There was a false
+Chateaubriand, named Marchangy, in the interim, until there should be a
+false Marchangy, named d'Arlincourt. Claire d'Albe and Malek-Adel were
+masterpieces; Madame Cottin was proclaimed the chief writer of the
+epoch. The Institute had the academician, Napoleon Bonaparte, stricken
+from its list of members. A royal ordinance erected Angouleme into a
+naval school; for the Duc d'Angouleme, being lord high admiral, it was
+evident that the city of Angouleme had all the qualities of a seaport;
+otherwise the monarchical principle would have received a wound. In
+the Council of Ministers the question was agitated whether vignettes
+representing slack-rope performances, which adorned Franconi's
+advertising posters, and which attracted throngs of street urchins,
+should be tolerated. M. Paer, the author of Agnese, a good sort of
+fellow, with a square face and a wart on his cheek, directed the little
+private concerts of the Marquise de Sasenaye in the Rue Ville l'Eveque.
+All the young girls were singing the Hermit of Saint-Avelle, with words
+by Edmond Geraud. The Yellow Dwarf was transferred into Mirror. The Cafe
+Lemblin stood up for the Emperor, against the Cafe Valois, which upheld
+the Bourbons. The Duc de Berri, already surveyed from the shadow by
+Louvel, had just been married to a princess of Sicily. Madame de Stael
+had died a year previously. The body-guard hissed Mademoiselle Mars.
+The grand newspapers were all very small. Their form was restricted,
+but their liberty was great. The Constitutionnel was constitutional.
+La Minerve called Chateaubriand Chateaubriant. That made the good
+middle-class people laugh heartily at the expense of the great writer.
+In journals which sold themselves, prostituted journalists, insulted the
+exiles of 1815. David had no longer any talent, Arnault had no longer
+any wit, Carnot was no longer honest, Soult had won no battles; it is
+true that Napoleon had no longer any genius. No one is ignorant of the
+fact that letters sent to an exile by post very rarely reached him, as
+the police made it their religious duty to intercept them. This is no
+new fact; Descartes complained of it in his exile. Now David, having, in
+a Belgian publication, shown some displeasure at not receiving letters
+which had been written to him, it struck the royalist journals as
+amusing; and they derided the prescribed man well on this occasion. What
+separated two men more than an abyss was to say, the regicides, or
+to say the voters; to say the enemies, or to say the allies; to say
+Napoleon, or to say Buonaparte. All sensible people were agreed that the
+era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII., surnamed
+"The Immortal Author of the Charter." On the platform of the Pont-Neuf,
+the word Redivivus was carved on the pedestal that awaited the statue of
+Henry IV. M. Piet, in the Rue Therese, No. 4, was making the rough draft
+of his privy assembly to consolidate the monarchy. The leaders of the
+Right said at grave conjunctures, "We must write to Bacot." MM. Canuel,
+O'Mahoney, and De Chappedelaine were preparing the sketch, to some
+extent with Monsieur's approval, of what was to become later on "The
+Conspiracy of the Bord de l'Eau"--of the waterside. L'Epingle Noire was
+already plotting in his own quarter. Delaverderie was conferring with
+Trogoff. M. Decazes, who was liberal to a degree, reigned. Chateaubriand
+stood every morning at his window at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, clad in
+footed trousers, and slippers, with a madras kerchief knotted over his
+gray hair, with his eyes fixed on a mirror, a complete set of dentist's
+instruments spread out before him, cleaning his teeth, which were
+charming, while he dictated The Monarchy according to the Charter to
+M. Pilorge, his secretary. Criticism, assuming an authoritative tone,
+preferred Lafon to Talma. M. de Feletez signed himself A.; M. Hoffmann
+signed himself Z. Charles Nodier wrote Therese Aubert. Divorce was
+abolished. Lyceums called themselves colleges. The collegians, decorated
+on the collar with a golden fleur-de-lys, fought each other apropos of
+the King of Rome. The counter-police of the chateau had denounced to her
+Royal Highness Madame, the portrait, everywhere exhibited, of M. the
+Duc d'Orleans, who made a better appearance in his uniform of a
+colonel-general of hussars than M. the Duc de Berri, in his uniform of
+colonel-general of dragoons--a serious inconvenience. The city of
+Paris was having the dome of the Invalides regilded at its own expense.
+Serious men asked themselves what M. de Trinquelague would do on such or
+such an occasion; M. Clausel de Montals differed on divers points
+from M. Clausel de Coussergues; M. de Salaberry was not satisfied. The
+comedian Picard, who belonged to the Academy, which the comedian Moliere
+had not been able to do, had The Two Philiberts played at the Odeon,
+upon whose pediment the removal of the letters still allowed THEATRE OF
+THE EMPRESS to be plainly read. People took part for or against Cugnet
+de Montarlot. Fabvier was factious; Bavoux was revolutionary. The
+Liberal, Pelicier, published an edition of Voltaire, with the following
+title: Works of Voltaire, of the French Academy. "That will attract
+purchasers," said the ingenious editor. The general opinion was that M.
+Charles Loyson would be the genius of the century; envy was beginning to
+gnaw at him--a sign of glory; and this verse was composed on him:--
+
+ "Even when Loyson steals, one feels that he has paws."
+
+As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Archbishop of Amasie,
+administered the diocese of Lyons. The quarrel over the valley of Dappes
+was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain,
+afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his
+sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science,
+whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier,
+whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark;
+a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms:
+a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The
+Abbe Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of
+seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest,
+named Felicite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing
+which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog
+went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal
+to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not
+good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden
+inventor; an utopia--a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at
+this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by
+a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians,
+ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could
+not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the
+pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on
+account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in
+the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other
+with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier,
+with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted
+reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons
+flatter Moses.
+
+M. Francois de Neufchateau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory
+of Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have pomme de terre [potato]
+pronounced parmentiere, and succeeded therein not at all. The Abbe
+Gregoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the
+royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Gregoire." The locution of
+which we have made use--passed to the state of--has been condemned as a
+neologism by M. Royer Collard. Under the third arch of the Pont de Jena,
+the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining aperture
+made by Blucher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was still
+recognizable on account of its whiteness. Justice summoned to its bar a
+man who, on seeing the Comte d'Artois enter Notre Dame, had said aloud:
+"Sapristi! I regret the time when I saw Bonaparte and Talma enter the
+Bel Sauvage, arm in arm." A seditious utterance. Six months in prison.
+Traitors showed themselves unbuttoned; men who had gone over to the
+enemy on the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense, and
+strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches and
+dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness of
+their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy in
+the most barefaced manner.
+
+This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is
+now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot
+do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these
+details, which are wrongly called trivial,--there are no trivial facts
+in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,--are useful. It is of
+the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is
+composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine
+farce."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--A DOUBLE QUARTETTE
+
+
+These Parisians came, one from Toulouse, another from Limoges, the third
+from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students; and
+when one says student, one says Parisian: to study in Paris is to be
+born in Paris.
+
+These young men were insignificant; every one has seen such faces; four
+specimens of humanity taken at random; neither good nor bad, neither
+wise nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor fools; handsome, with that
+charming April which is called twenty years. They were four Oscars; for,
+at that epoch, Arthurs did not yet exist. Burn for him the perfumes of
+Araby! exclaimed romance. Oscar advances. Oscar, I shall behold him!
+People had just emerged from Ossian; elegance was Scandinavian and
+Caledonian; the pure English style was only to prevail later, and
+the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had but just won the battle of
+Waterloo.
+
+These Oscars bore the names, one of Felix Tholomyes, of Toulouse; the
+second, Listolier, of Cahors; the next, Fameuil, of Limoges; the last,
+Blachevelle, of Montauban. Naturally, each of them had his mistress.
+Blachevelle loved Favourite, so named because she had been in England;
+Listolier adored Dahlia, who had taken for her nickname the name of a
+flower; Fameuil idolized Zephine, an abridgment of Josephine; Tholomyes
+had Fantine, called the Blonde, because of her beautiful, sunny hair.
+
+Favourite, Dahlia, Zephine, and Fantine were four ravishing young women,
+perfumed and radiant, still a little like working-women, and not yet
+entirely divorced from their needles; somewhat disturbed by intrigues,
+but still retaining on their faces something of the serenity of toil,
+and in their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall
+in woman. One of the four was called the young, because she was
+the youngest of them, and one was called the old; the old one was
+twenty-three. Not to conceal anything, the three first were more
+experienced, more heedless, and more emancipated into the tumult of life
+than Fantine the Blonde, who was still in her first illusions.
+
+Dahlia, Zephine, and especially Favourite, could not have said as much.
+There had already been more than one episode in their romance, though
+hardly begun; and the lover who had borne the name of Adolph in the
+first chapter had turned out to be Alphonse in the second, and Gustave
+in the third. Poverty and coquetry are two fatal counsellors; one scolds
+and the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have
+both of them whispering in their ear, each on its own side. These badly
+guarded souls listen. Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the
+stones which are thrown at them. They are overwhelmed with splendor of
+all that is immaculate and inaccessible. Alas! what if the Jungfrau were
+hungry?
+
+Favourite having been in England, was admired by Dahlia and Zephine. She
+had had an establishment of her own very early in life. Her father was
+an old unmarried professor of mathematics, a brutal man and a braggart,
+who went out to give lessons in spite of his age. This professor, when
+he was a young man, had one day seen a chambermaid's gown catch on
+a fender; he had fallen in love in consequence of this accident. The
+result had been Favourite. She met her father from time to time, and he
+bowed to her. One morning an old woman with the air of a devotee,
+had entered her apartments, and had said to her, "You do not know me,
+Mamemoiselle?" "No." "I am your mother." Then the old woman opened the
+sideboard, and ate and drank, had a mattress which she owned brought in,
+and installed herself. This cross and pious old mother never spoke to
+Favourite, remained hours without uttering a word, breakfasted, dined,
+and supped for four, and went down to the porter's quarters for company,
+where she spoke ill of her daughter.
+
+It was having rosy nails that were too pretty which had drawn Dahlia to
+Listolier, to others perhaps, to idleness. How could she make such nails
+work? She who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands.
+As for Zephine, she had conquered Fameuil by her roguish and caressing
+little way of saying "Yes, sir."
+
+The young men were comrades; the young girls were friends. Such loves
+are always accompanied by such friendships.
+
+Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things; the proof of this
+is that, after making all due allowances for these little irregular
+households, Favourite, Zephine, and Dahlia were philosophical young
+women, while Fantine was a good girl.
+
+Good! some one will exclaim; and Tholomyes? Solomon would reply that
+love forms a part of wisdom. We will confine ourselves to saying that
+the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.
+
+She alone, of all the four, was not called "thou" by a single one of
+them.
+
+Fantine was one of those beings who blossom, so to speak, from the dregs
+of the people. Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths
+of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the
+unknown. She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had
+never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She
+had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory
+still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal
+name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased
+the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small
+child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she
+received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was
+called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature
+had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted
+the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At
+fifteen she came to Paris "to seek her fortune." Fantine was beautiful,
+and remained pure as long as she could. She was a lovely blonde, with
+fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on
+her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.
+
+She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living,--for
+the heart, also, has its hunger,--she loved.
+
+She loved Tholomyes.
+
+An amour for him; passion for her. The streets of the Latin quarter,
+filled with throngs of students and grisettes, saw the beginning of
+their dream. Fantine had long evaded Tholomyes in the mazes of the hill
+of the Pantheon, where so many adventurers twine and untwine, but in
+such a way as constantly to encounter him again. There is a way of
+avoiding which resembles seeking. In short, the eclogue took place.
+
+Blachevelle, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group of which
+Tholomyes was the head. It was he who possessed the wit.
+
+Tholomyes was the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of
+four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on
+Mount Sainte-Genevieve. Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly
+preserved. He was wrinkled and toothless, and he had the beginning of a
+bald spot, of which he himself said with sadness, the skull at thirty,
+the knee at forty. His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked
+by a watering in one eye. But in proportion as his youth disappeared,
+gayety was kindled; he replaced his teeth with buffooneries, his hair
+with mirth, his health with irony, his weeping eye laughed incessantly.
+He was dilapidated but still in flower. His youth, which was packing
+up for departure long before its time, beat a retreat in good order,
+bursting with laughter, and no one saw anything but fire. He had had a
+piece rejected at the Vaudeville. He made a few verses now and then. In
+addition to this he doubted everything to the last degree, which is a
+vast force in the eyes of the weak. Being thus ironical and bald, he
+was the leader. Iron is an English word. Is it possible that irony is
+derived from it?
+
+One day Tholomyes took the three others aside, with the gesture of an
+oracle, and said to them:--
+
+"Fantine, Dahlia, Zephine, and Favourite have been teasing us for nearly
+a year to give them a surprise. We have promised them solemnly that we
+would. They are forever talking about it to us, to me in particular,
+just as the old women in Naples cry to Saint Januarius, 'Faccia
+gialluta, fa o miracolo, Yellow face, perform thy miracle,' so our
+beauties say to me incessantly, 'Tholomyes, when will you bring forth
+your surprise?' At the same time our parents keep writing to us.
+Pressure on both sides. The moment has arrived, it seems to me; let us
+discuss the question."
+
+Thereupon, Tholomyes lowered his voice and articulated something so
+mirthful, that a vast and enthusiastic grin broke out upon the four
+mouths simultaneously, and Blachevelle exclaimed, "That is an idea."
+
+A smoky tap-room presented itself; they entered, and the remainder of
+their confidential colloquy was lost in shadow.
+
+The result of these shades was a dazzling pleasure party which took
+place on the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four
+young girls.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--FOUR AND FOUR
+
+It is hard nowadays to picture to one's self what a pleasure-trip of
+students and grisettes to the country was like, forty-five years ago.
+The suburbs of Paris are no longer the same; the physiognomy of what
+may be called circumparisian life has changed completely in the last
+half-century; where there was the cuckoo, there is the railway car;
+where there was a tender-boat, there is now the steamboat; people speak
+of Fecamp nowadays as they spoke of Saint-Cloud in those days. The Paris
+of 1862 is a city which has France for its outskirts.
+
+The four couples conscientiously went through with all the country
+follies possible at that time. The vacation was beginning, and it was a
+warm, bright, summer day. On the preceding day, Favourite, the only one
+who knew how to write, had written the following to Tholomyes in the
+name of the four: "It is a good hour to emerge from happiness." That
+is why they rose at five o'clock in the morning. Then they went to
+Saint-Cloud by the coach, looked at the dry cascade and exclaimed, "This
+must be very beautiful when there is water!" They breakfasted at the
+Tete-Noir, where Castaing had not yet been; they treated themselves to a
+game of ring-throwing under the quincunx of trees of the grand fountain;
+they ascended Diogenes' lantern, they gambled for macaroons at the
+roulette establishment of the Pont de Sevres, picked bouquets at
+Pateaux, bought reed-pipes at Neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and
+were perfectly happy.
+
+The young girls rustled and chatted like warblers escaped from their
+cage. It was a perfect delirium. From time to time they bestowed little
+taps on the young men. Matutinal intoxication of life! adorable years!
+the wings of the dragonfly quiver. Oh, whoever you may be, do you not
+remember? Have you rambled through the brushwood, holding aside the
+branches, on account of the charming head which is coming on behind you?
+Have you slid, laughing, down a slope all wet with rain, with a beloved
+woman holding your hand, and crying, "Ah, my new boots! what a state
+they are in!"
+
+Let us say at once that that merry obstacle, a shower, was lacking in
+the case of this good-humored party, although Favourite had said as they
+set out, with a magisterial and maternal tone, "The slugs are crawling
+in the paths,--a sign of rain, children."
+
+All four were madly pretty. A good old classic poet, then famous, a good
+fellow who had an Eleonore, M. le Chevalier de Labouisse, as he strolled
+that day beneath the chestnut-trees of Saint-Cloud, saw them pass about
+ten o'clock in the morning, and exclaimed, "There is one too many of
+them," as he thought of the Graces. Favourite, Blachevelle's friend, the
+one aged three and twenty, the old one, ran on in front under the great
+green boughs, jumped the ditches, stalked distractedly over bushes, and
+presided over this merry-making with the spirit of a young female faun.
+Zephine and Dahlia, whom chance had made beautiful in such a way that
+they set each off when they were together, and completed each other,
+never left each other, more from an instinct of coquetry than from
+friendship, and clinging to each other, they assumed English poses; the
+first keepsakes had just made their appearance, melancholy was dawning
+for women, as later on, Byronism dawned for men; and the hair of the
+tender sex began to droop dolefully. Zephine and Dahlia had their hair
+dressed in rolls. Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing
+their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed
+between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.
+
+Blachevelle seemed to have been created expressly to carry Favourite's
+single-bordered, imitation India shawl of Ternaux's manufacture, on his
+arm on Sundays.
+
+Tholomyes followed, dominating the group. He was very gay, but one felt
+the force of government in him; there was dictation in his joviality;
+his principal ornament was a pair of trousers of elephant-leg pattern of
+nankeen, with straps of braided copper wire; he carried a stout rattan
+worth two hundred francs in his hand, and, as he treated himself to
+everything, a strange thing called a cigar in his mouth. Nothing was
+sacred to him; he smoked.
+
+"That Tholomyes is astounding!" said the others, with veneration. "What
+trousers! What energy!"
+
+As for Fantine, she was a joy to behold. Her splendid teeth had
+evidently received an office from God,--laughter. She preferred to carry
+her little hat of sewed straw, with its long white strings, in her hand
+rather than on her head. Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to
+wave, and which easily uncoiled, and which it was necessary to fasten
+up incessantly, seemed made for the flight of Galatea under the
+willows. Her rosy lips babbled enchantingly. The corners of her mouth
+voluptuously turned up, as in the antique masks of Erigone, had an
+air of encouraging the audacious; but her long, shadowy lashes drooped
+discreetly over the jollity of the lower part of the face as though to
+call a halt. There was something indescribably harmonious and striking
+about her entire dress. She wore a gown of mauve barege, little reddish
+brown buskins, whose ribbons traced an X on her fine, white, open-worked
+stockings, and that sort of muslin spencer, a Marseilles invention,
+whose name, canezou, a corruption of the words quinze aout, pronounced
+after the fashion of the Canebiere, signifies fine weather, heat, and
+midday. The three others, less timid, as we have already said,
+wore low-necked dresses without disguise, which in summer, beneath
+flower-adorned hats, are very graceful and enticing; but by the side
+of these audacious outfits, blond Fantine's canezou, with its
+transparencies, its indiscretion, and its reticence, concealing and
+displaying at one and the same time, seemed an alluring godsend of
+decency, and the famous Court of Love, presided over by the Vicomtesse
+de Cette, with the sea-green eyes, would, perhaps, have awarded the
+prize for coquetry to this canezou, in the contest for the prize of
+modesty. The most ingenious is, at times, the wisest. This does happen.
+
+Brilliant of face, delicate of profile, with eyes of a deep blue, heavy
+lids, feet arched and small, wrists and ankles admirably formed, a white
+skin which, here and there allowed the azure branching of the veins to
+be seen, joy, a cheek that was young and fresh, the robust throat of the
+Juno of AEgina, a strong and supple nape of the neck, shoulders modelled
+as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous dimple in the middle, visible
+through the muslin; a gayety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and
+exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and
+these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.
+
+Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. Those rare
+dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful who silently confront
+everything with perfection, would have caught a glimpse in this little
+working-woman, through the transparency of her Parisian grace, of the
+ancient sacred euphony. This daughter of the shadows was thoroughbred.
+She was beautiful in the two ways--style and rhythm. Style is the form
+of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.
+
+We have said that Fantine was joy; she was also modesty.
+
+To an observer who studied her attentively, that which breathed from
+her athwart all the intoxication of her age, the season, and her
+love affair, was an invincible expression of reserve and modesty. She
+remained a little astonished. This chaste astonishment is the shade
+of difference which separates Psyche from Venus. Fantine had the long,
+white, fine fingers of the vestal virgin who stirs the ashes of the
+sacred fire with a golden pin. Although she would have refused nothing
+to Tholomyes, as we shall have more than ample opportunity to see, her
+face in repose was supremely virginal; a sort of serious and almost
+austere dignity suddenly overwhelmed her at certain times, and there
+was nothing more singular and disturbing than to see gayety become so
+suddenly extinct there, and meditation succeed to cheerfulness without
+any transition state. This sudden and sometimes severely accentuated
+gravity resembled the disdain of a goddess. Her brow, her nose, her
+chin, presented that equilibrium of outline which is quite distinct
+from equilibrium of proportion, and from which harmony of countenance
+results; in the very characteristic interval which separates the base
+of the nose from the upper lip, she had that imperceptible and charming
+fold, a mysterious sign of chastity, which makes Barberousse fall in
+love with a Diana found in the treasures of Iconia.
+
+Love is a fault; so be it. Fantine was innocence floating high over
+fault.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THOLOMYES IS SO MERRY THAT HE SINGS A SPANISH DITTY
+
+
+That day was composed of dawn, from one end to the other. All nature
+seemed to be having a holiday, and to be laughing. The flower-beds of
+Saint-Cloud perfumed the air; the breath of the Seine rustled the
+leaves vaguely; the branches gesticulated in the wind, bees pillaged the
+jasmines; a whole bohemia of butterflies swooped down upon the yarrow,
+the clover, and the sterile oats; in the august park of the King of
+France there was a pack of vagabonds, the birds.
+
+The four merry couples, mingled with the sun, the fields, the flowers,
+the trees, were resplendent.
+
+And in this community of Paradise, talking, singing, running, dancing,
+chasing butterflies, plucking convolvulus, wetting their pink, open-work
+stockings in the tall grass, fresh, wild, without malice, all received,
+to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine,
+who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of
+dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. "You always have a queer
+look about you," said Favourite to her.
+
+Such things are joys. These passages of happy couples are a profound
+appeal to life and nature, and make a caress and light spring forth from
+everything. There was once a fairy who created the fields and forests
+expressly for those in love,--in that eternal hedge-school of lovers,
+which is forever beginning anew, and which will last as long as there
+are hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers.
+The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb
+of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden
+times, all are subjects of this fairy. They laugh and hunt, and there
+is in the air the brilliance of an apotheosis--what a transfiguration
+effected by love! Notaries' clerks are gods. And the little cries,
+the pursuits through the grass, the waists embraced on the fly, those
+jargons which are melodies, those adorations which burst forth in the
+manner of pronouncing a syllable, those cherries torn from one mouth by
+another,--all this blazes forth and takes its place among the celestial
+glories. Beautiful women waste themselves sweetly. They think that this
+will never come to an end. Philosophers, poets, painters, observe these
+ecstasies and know not what to make of it, so greatly are they dazzled
+by it. The departure for Cythera! exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter
+of plebeians, contemplates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the
+azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love idyls, and
+d'Urfe mingles druids with them.
+
+After breakfast the four couples went to what was then called the King's
+Square to see a newly arrived plant from India, whose name escapes our
+memory at this moment, and which, at that epoch, was attracting all
+Paris to Saint-Cloud. It was an odd and charming shrub with a long stem,
+whose numerous branches, bristling and leafless and as fine as threads,
+were covered with a million tiny white rosettes; this gave the shrub the
+air of a head of hair studded with flowers. There was always an admiring
+crowd about it.
+
+After viewing the shrub, Tholomyes exclaimed, "I offer you asses!" and
+having agreed upon a price with the owner of the asses, they returned
+by way of Vanvres and Issy. At Issy an incident occurred. The truly
+national park, at that time owned by Bourguin the contractor, happened
+to be wide open. They passed the gates, visited the manikin anchorite in
+his grotto, tried the mysterious little effects of the famous cabinet
+of mirrors, the wanton trap worthy of a satyr become a millionaire or of
+Turcaret metamorphosed into a Priapus. They had stoutly shaken the swing
+attached to the two chestnut-trees celebrated by the Abbe de Bernis.
+As he swung these beauties, one after the other, producing folds in the
+fluttering skirts which Greuze would have found to his taste, amid peals
+of laughter, the Toulousan Tholomyes, who was somewhat of a Spaniard,
+Toulouse being the cousin of Tolosa, sang, to a melancholy chant, the
+old ballad gallega, probably inspired by some lovely maid dashing in
+full flight upon a rope between two trees:--
+
+ "Soy de Badajoz, "Badajoz is my home,
+ Amor me llama, And Love is my name;
+ Toda mi alma, To my eyes in flame,
+ Es en mi ojos, All my soul doth come;
+ Porque ensenas, For instruction meet
+ A tuas piernas. I receive at thy feet"
+
+
+Fantine alone refused to swing.
+
+"I don't like to have people put on airs like that," muttered Favourite,
+with a good deal of acrimony.
+
+After leaving the asses there was a fresh delight; they crossed the
+Seine in a boat, and proceeding from Passy on foot they reached the
+barrier of l'Etoile. They had been up since five o'clock that morning,
+as the reader will remember; but bah! there is no such thing as fatigue
+on Sunday, said Favourite; on Sunday fatigue does not work.
+
+About three o'clock the four couples, frightened at their happiness,
+were sliding down the Russian mountains, a singular edifice which then
+occupied the heights of Beaujon, and whose undulating line was visible
+above the trees of the Champs Elysees.
+
+From time to time Favourite exclaimed:--
+
+"And the surprise? I claim the surprise."
+
+"Patience," replied Tholomyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--AT BOMBARDA'S
+
+The Russian mountains having been exhausted, they began to think about
+dinner; and the radiant party of eight, somewhat weary at last, became
+stranded in Bombarda's public house, a branch establishment which had
+been set up in the Champs-Elysees by that famous restaurant-keeper,
+Bombarda, whose sign could then be seen in the Rue de Rivoli, near
+Delorme Alley.
+
+A large but ugly room, with an alcove and a bed at the end (they had
+been obliged to put up with this accommodation in view of the Sunday
+crowd); two windows whence they could survey beyond the elms, the quay
+and the river; a magnificent August sunlight lightly touching the panes;
+two tables; upon one of them a triumphant mountain of bouquets, mingled
+with the hats of men and women; at the other the four couples seated
+round a merry confusion of platters, dishes, glasses, and bottles; jugs
+of beer mingled with flasks of wine; very little order on the table,
+some disorder beneath it;
+
+ "They made beneath the table
+ A noise, a clatter of the feet that was abominable,"
+
+says Moliere.
+
+This was the state which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in
+the morning, had reached at half-past four in the afternoon. The sun was
+setting; their appetites were satisfied.
+
+The Champs-Elysees, filled with sunshine and with people, were nothing
+but light and dust, the two things of which glory is composed. The
+horses of Marly, those neighing marbles, were prancing in a cloud
+of gold. Carriages were going and coming. A squadron of magnificent
+body-guards, with their clarions at their head, were descending the
+Avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, showing faintly rosy in the setting
+sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde,
+which had become the Place Louis XV. once more, was choked with happy
+promenaders. Many wore the silver fleur-de-lys suspended from the
+white-watered ribbon, which had not yet wholly disappeared from
+button-holes in the year 1817. Here and there choruses of little girls
+threw to the winds, amid the passersby, who formed into circles and
+applauded, the then celebrated Bourbon air, which was destined to strike
+the Hundred Days with lightning, and which had for its refrain:--
+
+ "Rendez-nous notre pere de Gand,
+ Rendez-nous notre pere."
+
+ "Give us back our father from Ghent,
+ Give us back our father."
+
+
+Groups of dwellers in the suburbs, in Sunday array, sometimes even
+decorated with the fleur-de-lys, like the bourgeois, scattered over the
+large square and the Marigny square, were playing at rings and revolving
+on the wooden horses; others were engaged in drinking; some journeyman
+printers had on paper caps; their laughter was audible. Every thing
+was radiant. It was a time of undisputed peace and profound royalist
+security; it was the epoch when a special and private report of Chief
+of Police Angeles to the King, on the subject of the suburbs of Paris,
+terminated with these lines:--
+
+"Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be
+feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats.
+The populace is restless in the provinces; it is not in Paris. These are
+very pretty men, Sire. It would take all of two of them to make one
+of your grenadiers. There is nothing to be feared on the part of the
+populace of Paris the capital. It is remarkable that the stature of
+this population should have diminished in the last fifty years; and
+the populace of the suburbs is still more puny than at the time of the
+Revolution. It is not dangerous. In short, it is an amiable rabble."
+
+Prefects of the police do not deem it possible that a cat can transform
+itself into a lion; that does happen, however, and in that lies the
+miracle wrought by the populace of Paris. Moreover, the cat so despised
+by Count Angles possessed the esteem of the republics of old. In their
+eyes it was liberty incarnate; and as though to serve as pendant to
+the Minerva Aptera of the Piraeus, there stood on the public square in
+Corinth the colossal bronze figure of a cat. The ingenuous police of the
+Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too "rose-colored" a light;
+it is not so much of "an amiable rabble" as it is thought. The Parisian
+is to the Frenchman what the Athenian was to the Greek: no one sleeps
+more soundly than he, no one is more frankly frivolous and lazy than
+he, no one can better assume the air of forgetfulness; let him not be
+trusted nevertheless; he is ready for any sort of cool deed; but when
+there is glory at the end of it, he is worthy of admiration in every
+sort of fury. Give him a pike, he will produce the 10th of August; give
+him a gun, you will have Austerlitz. He is Napoleon's stay and Danton's
+resource. Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of
+liberty, he tears up the pavements. Beware! his hair filled with wrath,
+is epic; his blouse drapes itself like the folds of a chlamys. Take
+care! he will make of the first Rue Grenetat which comes to hand Caudine
+Forks. When the hour strikes, this man of the faubourgs will grow in
+stature; this little man will arise, and his gaze will be terrible, and
+his breath will become a tempest, and there will issue forth from that
+slender chest enough wind to disarrange the folds of the Alps. It is,
+thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with
+arms, conquers Europe. He sings; it is his delight. Proportion his song
+to his nature, and you will see! As long as he has for refrain nothing
+but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the
+Marseillaise, and he will free the world.
+
+This note jotted down on the margin of Angles' report, we will return to
+our four couples. The dinner, as we have said, was drawing to its close.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--A CHAPTER IN WHICH THEY ADORE EACH OTHER
+
+Chat at table, the chat of love; it is as impossible to reproduce one as
+the other; the chat of love is a cloud; the chat at table is smoke.
+
+Fameuil and Dahlia were humming. Tholomyes was drinking. Zephine was
+laughing, Fantine smiling, Listolier blowing a wooden trumpet which he
+had purchased at Saint-Cloud.
+
+Favourite gazed tenderly at Blachevelle and said:--
+
+"Blachevelle, I adore you."
+
+This called forth a question from Blachevelle:--
+
+"What would you do, Favourite, if I were to cease to love you?"
+
+"I!" cried Favourite. "Ah! Do not say that even in jest! If you were
+to cease to love me, I would spring after you, I would scratch you,
+I should rend you, I would throw you into the water, I would have you
+arrested."
+
+Blachevelle smiled with the voluptuous self-conceit of a man who is
+tickled in his self-love. Favourite resumed:--
+
+"Yes, I would scream to the police! Ah! I should not restrain myself,
+not at all! Rabble!"
+
+Blachevelle threw himself back in his chair, in an ecstasy, and closed
+both eyes proudly.
+
+Dahlia, as she ate, said in a low voice to Favourite, amid the uproar:--
+
+"So you really idolize him deeply, that Blachevelle of yours?"
+
+"I? I detest him," replied Favourite in the same tone, seizing her fork
+again. "He is avaricious. I love the little fellow opposite me in my
+house. He is very nice, that young man; do you know him? One can see
+that he is an actor by profession. I love actors. As soon as he comes
+in, his mother says to him: 'Ah! mon Dieu! my peace of mind is gone.
+There he goes with his shouting. But, my dear, you are splitting my
+head!' So he goes up to rat-ridden garrets, to black holes, as high as
+he can mount, and there he sets to singing, declaiming, how do I know
+what? so that he can be heard down stairs! He earns twenty sous a day at
+an attorney's by penning quibbles. He is the son of a former precentor
+of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Ah! he is very nice. He idolizes me so,
+that one day when he saw me making batter for some pancakes, he said to
+me: 'Mamselle, make your gloves into fritters, and I will eat them.' It
+is only artists who can say such things as that. Ah! he is very nice.
+I am in a fair way to go out of my head over that little fellow. Never
+mind; I tell Blachevelle that I adore him--how I lie! Hey! How I do
+lie!"
+
+Favourite paused, and then went on:--
+
+"I am sad, you see, Dahlia. It has done nothing but rain all summer; the
+wind irritates me; the wind does not abate. Blachevelle is very stingy;
+there are hardly any green peas in the market; one does not know what to
+eat. I have the spleen, as the English say, butter is so dear! and then
+you see it is horrible, here we are dining in a room with a bed in it,
+and that disgusts me with life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE WISDOM OF THOLOMYES
+
+In the meantime, while some sang, the rest talked together tumultuously
+all at once; it was no longer anything but noise. Tholomyes intervened.
+
+"Let us not talk at random nor too fast," he exclaimed. "Let us reflect,
+if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in
+a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen. Let us
+mingle majesty with the feast. Let us eat with meditation; let us make
+haste slowly. Let us not hurry. Consider the springtime; if it makes
+haste, it is done for; that is to say, it gets frozen. Excess of zeal
+ruins peach-trees and apricot-trees. Excess of zeal kills the grace and
+the mirth of good dinners. No zeal, gentlemen! Grimod de la Reyniere
+agrees with Talleyrand."
+
+A hollow sound of rebellion rumbled through the group.
+
+"Leave us in peace, Tholomyes," said Blachevelle.
+
+"Down with the tyrant!" said Fameuil.
+
+"Bombarda, Bombance, and Bambochel!" cried Listolier.
+
+"Sunday exists," resumed Fameuil.
+
+"We are sober," added Listolier.
+
+"Tholomyes," remarked Blachevelle, "contemplate my calmness [mon
+calme]."
+
+"You are the Marquis of that," retorted Tholomyes.
+
+This mediocre play upon words produced the effect of a stone in a pool.
+The Marquis de Montcalm was at that time a celebrated royalist. All the
+frogs held their peace.
+
+"Friends," cried Tholomyes, with the accent of a man who had recovered
+his empire, "Come to yourselves. This pun which has fallen from the
+skies must not be received with too much stupor. Everything which falls
+in that way is not necessarily worthy of enthusiasm and respect. The pun
+is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where;
+and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure
+depths. A whitish speck flattened against the rock does not prevent the
+condor from soaring aloft. Far be it from me to insult the pun! I honor
+it in proportion to its merits; nothing more. All the most august, the
+most sublime, the most charming of humanity, and perhaps outside of
+humanity, have made puns. Jesus Christ made a pun on St. Peter, Moses on
+Isaac, AEschylus on Polynices, Cleopatra on Octavius. And observe that
+Cleopatra's pun preceded the battle of Actium, and that had it not been
+for it, no one would have remembered the city of Toryne, a Greek name
+which signifies a ladle. That once conceded, I return to my exhortation.
+I repeat, brothers, I repeat, no zeal, no hubbub, no excess; even in
+witticisms, gayety, jollities, or plays on words. Listen to me. I have
+the prudence of Amphiaraus and the baldness of Caesar. There must be a
+limit, even to rebuses. Est modus in rebus.
+
+"There must be a limit, even to dinners. You are fond of apple
+turnovers, ladies; do not indulge in them to excess. Even in the matter
+of turnovers, good sense and art are requisite. Gluttony chastises the
+glutton, Gula punit Gulax. Indigestion is charged by the good God with
+preaching morality to stomachs. And remember this: each one of our
+passions, even love, has a stomach which must not be filled too full. In
+all things the word finis must be written in good season; self-control
+must be exercised when the matter becomes urgent; the bolt must be drawn
+on appetite; one must set one's own fantasy to the violin, and carry
+one's self to the post. The sage is the man who knows how, at a given
+moment, to effect his own arrest. Have some confidence in me, for I
+have succeeded to some extent in my study of the law, according to
+the verdict of my examinations, for I know the difference between the
+question put and the question pending, for I have sustained a thesis in
+Latin upon the manner in which torture was administered at Rome at the
+epoch when Munatius Demens was quaestor of the Parricide; because I
+am going to be a doctor, apparently it does not follow that it is
+absolutely necessary that I should be an imbecile. I recommend you to
+moderation in your desires. It is true that my name is Felix Tholomyes;
+I speak well. Happy is he who, when the hour strikes, takes a heroic
+resolve, and abdicates like Sylla or Origenes."
+
+Favourite listened with profound attention.
+
+"Felix," said she, "what a pretty word! I love that name. It is Latin;
+it means prosper."
+
+Tholomyes went on:--
+
+"Quirites, gentlemen, caballeros, my friends. Do you wish never to feel
+the prick, to do without the nuptial bed, and to brave love? Nothing
+more simple. Here is the receipt: lemonade, excessive exercise, hard
+labor; work yourself to death, drag blocks, sleep not, hold vigil,
+gorge yourself with nitrous beverages, and potions of nymphaeas; drink
+emulsions of poppies and agnus castus; season this with a strict diet,
+starve yourself, and add thereto cold baths, girdles of herbs, the
+application of a plate of lead, lotions made with the subacetate of
+lead, and fomentations of oxycrat."
+
+"I prefer a woman," said Listolier.
+
+"Woman," resumed Tholomyes; "distrust her. Woe to him who yields himself
+to the unstable heart of woman! Woman is perfidious and disingenuous.
+She detests the serpent from professional jealousy. The serpent is the
+shop over the way."
+
+"Tholomyes!" cried Blachevelle, "you are drunk!"
+
+"Pardieu," said Tholomyes.
+
+"Then be gay," resumed Blachevelle.
+
+"I agree to that," responded Tholomyes.
+
+And, refilling his glass, he rose.
+
+"Glory to wine! Nunc te, Bacche, canam! Pardon me ladies; that is
+Spanish. And the proof of it, senoras, is this: like people, like cask.
+The arrobe of Castile contains sixteen litres; the cantaro of Alicante,
+twelve; the almude of the Canaries, twenty-five; the cuartin of the
+Balearic Isles, twenty-six; the boot of Tzar Peter, thirty. Long
+live that Tzar who was great, and long live his boot, which was still
+greater! Ladies, take the advice of a friend; make a mistake in your
+neighbor if you see fit. The property of love is to err. A love
+affair is not made to crouch down and brutalize itself like an English
+serving-maid who has callouses on her knees from scrubbing. It is not
+made for that; it errs gayly, our gentle love. It has been said, error
+is human; I say, error is love. Ladies, I idolize you all. O Zephine, O
+Josephine, face more than irregular, you would be charming were you not
+all askew. You have the air of a pretty face upon which some one has
+sat down by mistake. As for Favourite, O nymphs and muses! one day
+when Blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the Rue Guerin-Boisseau,
+he espied a beautiful girl with white stockings well drawn up, which
+displayed her legs. This prologue pleased him, and Blachevelle fell
+in love. The one he loved was Favourite. O Favourite, thou hast Ionian
+lips. There was a Greek painter named Euphorion, who was surnamed the
+painter of the lips. That Greek alone would have been worthy to paint
+thy mouth. Listen! before thee, there was never a creature worthy of the
+name. Thou wert made to receive the apple like Venus, or to eat it like
+Eve; beauty begins with thee. I have just referred to Eve; it is thou
+who hast created her. Thou deservest the letters-patent of the beautiful
+woman. O Favourite, I cease to address you as 'thou,' because I pass
+from poetry to prose. You were speaking of my name a little while ago.
+That touched me; but let us, whoever we may be, distrust names. They may
+delude us. I am called Felix, and I am not happy. Words are liars. Let
+us not blindly accept the indications which they afford us. It would be
+a mistake to write to Liege [2] for corks, and to Pau for gloves. Miss
+Dahlia, were I in your place, I would call myself Rosa. A flower should
+smell sweet, and woman should have wit. I say nothing of Fantine; she
+is a dreamer, a musing, thoughtful, pensive person; she is a phantom
+possessed of the form of a nymph and the modesty of a nun, who has
+strayed into the life of a grisette, but who takes refuge in illusions,
+and who sings and prays and gazes into the azure without very well
+knowing what she sees or what she is doing, and who, with her eyes fixed
+on heaven, wanders in a garden where there are more birds than are in
+existence. O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyes, I am all illusion; but
+she does not even hear me, that blond maid of Chimeras! as for the rest,
+everything about her is freshness, suavity, youth, sweet morning light.
+O Fantine, maid worthy of being called Marguerite or Pearl, you are a
+woman from the beauteous Orient. Ladies, a second piece of advice: do
+not marry; marriage is a graft; it takes well or ill; avoid that risk.
+But bah! what am I saying? I am wasting my words. Girls are incurable
+on the subject of marriage, and all that we wise men can say will not
+prevent the waistcoat-makers and the shoe-stitchers from dreaming
+of husbands studded with diamonds. Well, so be it; but, my beauties,
+remember this, you eat too much sugar. You have but one fault, O woman,
+and that is nibbling sugar. O nibbling sex, your pretty little white
+teeth adore sugar. Now, heed me well, sugar is a salt. All salts are
+withering. Sugar is the most desiccating of all salts; it sucks the
+liquids of the blood through the veins; hence the coagulation, and then
+the solidification of the blood; hence tubercles in the lungs, hence
+death. That is why diabetes borders on consumption. Then, do not crunch
+sugar, and you will live. I turn to the men: gentlemen, make conquest,
+rob each other of your well-beloved without remorse. Chassez across.
+In love there are no friends. Everywhere where there is a pretty woman
+hostility is open. No quarter, war to the death! a pretty woman is a
+casus belli; a pretty woman is flagrant misdemeanor. All the invasions
+of history have been determined by petticoats. Woman is man's right.
+Romulus carried off the Sabines; William carried off the Saxon women;
+Caesar carried off the Roman women. The man who is not loved soars like
+a vulture over the mistresses of other men; and for my own part, to all
+those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation
+of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: "Soldiers, you are in need of
+everything; the enemy has it."
+
+Tholomyes paused.
+
+"Take breath, Tholomyes," said Blachevelle.
+
+At the same moment Blachevelle, supported by Listolier and Fameuil,
+struck up to a plaintive air, one of those studio songs composed of
+the first words which come to hand, rhymed richly and not at all, as
+destitute of sense as the gesture of the tree and the sound of the wind,
+which have their birth in the vapor of pipes, and are dissipated and
+take their flight with them. This is the couplet by which the group
+replied to Tholomyes' harangue:--
+
+
+ "The father turkey-cocks so grave
+ Some money to an agent gave,
+ That master good Clermont-Tonnerre
+ Might be made pope on Saint Johns' day fair.
+ But this good Clermont could not be
+ Made pope, because no priest was he;
+ And then their agent, whose wrath burned,
+ With all their money back returned."
+
+
+This was not calculated to calm Tholomyes' improvisation; he emptied his
+glass, filled, refilled it, and began again:--
+
+"Down with wisdom! Forget all that I have said. Let us be neither prudes
+nor prudent men nor prudhommes. I propose a toast to mirth; be merry.
+Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and
+the digest. Let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy in
+the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy.
+The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale
+is a gratuitous Elleviou. Summer, I salute thee! O Luxembourg! O
+Georgics of the Rue Madame, and of the Allee de l'Observatoire! O
+pensive infantry soldiers! O all those charming nurses who, while they
+guard the children, amuse themselves! The pampas of America would please
+me if I had not the arcades of the Odeon. My soul flits away into the
+virgin forests and to the savannas. All is beautiful. The flies buzz in
+the sun. The sun has sneezed out the humming bird. Embrace me, Fantine!"
+
+He made a mistake and embraced Favourite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE DEATH OF A HORSE
+
+
+"The dinners are better at Edon's than at Bombarda's," exclaimed
+Zephine.
+
+"I prefer Bombarda to Edon," declared Blachevelle. "There is more
+luxury. It is more Asiatic. Look at the room downstairs; there are
+mirrors [glaces] on the walls."
+
+"I prefer them [glaces, ices] on my plate," said Favourite.
+
+Blachevelle persisted:--
+
+"Look at the knives. The handles are of silver at Bombarda's and of bone
+at Edon's. Now, silver is more valuable than bone."
+
+"Except for those who have a silver chin," observed Tholomyes.
+
+He was looking at the dome of the Invalides, which was visible from
+Bombarda's windows.
+
+A pause ensued.
+
+"Tholomyes," exclaimed Fameuil, "Listolier and I were having a
+discussion just now."
+
+"A discussion is a good thing," replied Tholomyes; "a quarrel is
+better."
+
+"We were disputing about philosophy."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Which do you prefer, Descartes or Spinoza?"
+
+"Desaugiers," said Tholomyes.
+
+This decree pronounced, he took a drink, and went on:--
+
+"I consent to live. All is not at an end on earth since we can still
+talk nonsense. For that I return thanks to the immortal gods. We lie.
+One lies, but one laughs. One affirms, but one doubts. The unexpected
+bursts forth from the syllogism. That is fine. There are still human
+beings here below who know how to open and close the surprise box of the
+paradox merrily. This, ladies, which you are drinking with so tranquil
+an air is Madeira wine, you must know, from the vineyard of Coural das
+Freiras, which is three hundred and seventeen fathoms above the level of
+the sea. Attention while you drink! three hundred and seventeen fathoms!
+and Monsieur Bombarda, the magnificent eating-house keeper, gives you
+those three hundred and seventeen fathoms for four francs and fifty
+centimes."
+
+Again Fameuil interrupted him:--
+
+"Tholomyes, your opinions fix the law. Who is your favorite author?"
+
+"Ber--"
+
+"Quin?"
+
+"No; Choux."
+
+And Tholomyes continued:--
+
+"Honor to Bombarda! He would equal Munophis of Elephanta if he could but
+get me an Indian dancing-girl, and Thygelion of Chaeronea if he could
+bring me a Greek courtesan; for, oh, ladies! there were Bombardas in
+Greece and in Egypt. Apuleius tells us of them. Alas! always the same,
+and nothing new; nothing more unpublished by the creator in creation!
+Nil sub sole novum, says Solomon; amor omnibus idem, says Virgil; and
+Carabine mounts with Carabin into the bark at Saint-Cloud, as Aspasia
+embarked with Pericles upon the fleet at Samos. One last word. Do you
+know what Aspasia was, ladies? Although she lived at an epoch when women
+had, as yet, no soul, she was a soul; a soul of a rosy and purple
+hue, more ardent hued than fire, fresher than the dawn. Aspasia was
+a creature in whom two extremes of womanhood met; she was the goddess
+prostitute; Socrates plus Manon Lescaut. Aspasia was created in case a
+mistress should be needed for Prometheus."
+
+Tholomyes, once started, would have found some difficulty in stopping,
+had not a horse fallen down upon the quay just at that moment. The
+shock caused the cart and the orator to come to a dead halt. It was a
+Beauceron mare, old and thin, and one fit for the knacker, which was
+dragging a very heavy cart. On arriving in front of Bombarda's, the
+worn-out, exhausted beast had refused to proceed any further. This
+incident attracted a crowd. Hardly had the cursing and indignant carter
+had time to utter with proper energy the sacramental word, Matin (the
+jade), backed up with a pitiless cut of the whip, when the jade fell,
+never to rise again. On hearing the hubbub made by the passersby,
+Tholomyes' merry auditors turned their heads, and Tholomyes took
+advantage of the opportunity to bring his allocution to a close with
+this melancholy strophe:--
+
+ "Elle etait de ce monde ou coucous et carrosses [3]
+ Ont le meme destin;
+ Et, rosse, elle a vecu ce que vivant les rosses,
+ L'espace d'un matin!"
+
+
+"Poor horse!" sighed Fantine.
+
+And Dahlia exclaimed:--
+
+"There is Fantine on the point of crying over horses. How can one be
+such a pitiful fool as that!"
+
+At that moment Favourite, folding her arms and throwing her head back,
+looked resolutely at Tholomyes and said:--
+
+"Come, now! the surprise?"
+
+"Exactly. The moment has arrived," replied Tholomyes. "Gentlemen,
+the hour for giving these ladies a surprise has struck. Wait for us a
+moment, ladies."
+
+"It begins with a kiss," said Blachevelle.
+
+"On the brow," added Tholomyes.
+
+Each gravely bestowed a kiss on his mistress's brow; then all four filed
+out through the door, with their fingers on their lips.
+
+Favourite clapped her hands on their departure.
+
+"It is beginning to be amusing already," said she.
+
+"Don't be too long," murmured Fantine; "we are waiting for you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--A MERRY END TO MIRTH
+
+When the young girls were left alone, they leaned two by two on the
+window-sills, chatting, craning out their heads, and talking from one
+window to the other.
+
+They saw the young men emerge from the Cafe Bombarda arm in arm. The
+latter turned round, made signs to them, smiled, and disappeared in
+that dusty Sunday throng which makes a weekly invasion into the
+Champs-Elysees.
+
+"Don't be long!" cried Fantine.
+
+"What are they going to bring us?" said Zephine.
+
+"It will certainly be something pretty," said Dahlia.
+
+"For my part," said Favourite, "I want it to be of gold."
+
+Their attention was soon distracted by the movements on the shore of the
+lake, which they could see through the branches of the large trees, and
+which diverted them greatly.
+
+It was the hour for the departure of the mail-coaches and diligences.
+Nearly all the stage-coaches for the south and west passed through the
+Champs-Elysees. The majority followed the quay and went through the
+Passy Barrier. From moment to moment, some huge vehicle, painted yellow
+and black, heavily loaded, noisily harnessed, rendered shapeless
+by trunks, tarpaulins, and valises, full of heads which immediately
+disappeared, rushed through the crowd with all the sparks of a forge,
+with dust for smoke, and an air of fury, grinding the pavements,
+changing all the paving-stones into steels. This uproar delighted the
+young girls. Favourite exclaimed:--
+
+"What a row! One would say that it was a pile of chains flying away."
+
+It chanced that one of these vehicles, which they could only see with
+difficulty through the thick elms, halted for a moment, then set out
+again at a gallop. This surprised Fantine.
+
+"That's odd!" said she. "I thought the diligence never stopped."
+
+Favourite shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"This Fantine is surprising. I am coming to take a look at her out of
+curiosity. She is dazzled by the simplest things. Suppose a case: I am
+a traveller; I say to the diligence, 'I will go on in advance; you shall
+pick me up on the quay as you pass.' The diligence passes, sees me,
+halts, and takes me. That is done every day. You do not know life, my
+dear."
+
+In this manner a certain time elapsed. All at once Favourite made a
+movement, like a person who is just waking up.
+
+"Well," said she, "and the surprise?"
+
+"Yes, by the way," joined in Dahlia, "the famous surprise?"
+
+"They are a very long time about it!" said Fantine.
+
+As Fantine concluded this sigh, the waiter who had served them at dinner
+entered. He held in his hand something which resembled a letter.
+
+"What is that?" demanded Favourite.
+
+The waiter replied:--
+
+"It is a paper that those gentlemen left for these ladies."
+
+"Why did you not bring it at once?"
+
+"Because," said the waiter, "the gentlemen ordered me not to deliver it
+to the ladies for an hour."
+
+Favourite snatched the paper from the waiter's hand. It was, in fact, a
+letter.
+
+"Stop!" said she; "there is no address; but this is what is written on
+it--"
+
+ "THIS IS THE SURPRISE."
+
+She tore the letter open hastily, opened it, and read [she knew how to
+read]:--
+
+"OUR BELOVED:--
+
+"You must know that we have parents. Parents--you do not know much about
+such things. They are called fathers and mothers by the civil code,
+which is puerile and honest. Now, these parents groan, these old folks
+implore us, these good men and these good women call us prodigal sons;
+they desire our return, and offer to kill calves for us. Being virtuous,
+we obey them. At the hour when you read this, five fiery horses will
+be bearing us to our papas and mammas. We are pulling up our stakes, as
+Bossuet says. We are going; we are gone. We flee in the arms of Lafitte
+and on the wings of Caillard. The Toulouse diligence tears us from
+the abyss, and the abyss is you, O our little beauties! We return to
+society, to duty, to respectability, at full trot, at the rate of three
+leagues an hour. It is necessary for the good of the country that we
+should be, like the rest of the world, prefects, fathers of families,
+rural police, and councillors of state. Venerate us. We are sacrificing
+ourselves. Mourn for us in haste, and replace us with speed. If this
+letter lacerates you, do the same by it. Adieu.
+
+"For the space of nearly two years we have made you happy. We bear you
+no grudge for that. "Signed:
+ BLACHEVELLE.
+ FAMUEIL.
+ LISTOLIER.
+ FELIX THOLOMYES.
+
+"Postscriptum. The dinner is paid for."
+
+
+The four young women looked at each other.
+
+Favourite was the first to break the silence.
+
+"Well!" she exclaimed, "it's a very pretty farce, all the same."
+
+"It is very droll," said Zephine.
+
+"That must have been Blachevelle's idea," resumed Favourite. "It makes
+me in love with him. No sooner is he gone than he is loved. This is an
+adventure, indeed."
+
+"No," said Dahlia; "it was one of Tholomyes' ideas. That is evident.
+
+"In that case," retorted Favourite, "death to Blachevelle, and long live
+Tholomyes!"
+
+"Long live Tholomyes!" exclaimed Dahlia and Zephine.
+
+And they burst out laughing.
+
+Fantine laughed with the rest.
+
+An hour later, when she had returned to her room, she wept. It was
+her first love affair, as we have said; she had given herself to this
+Tholomyes as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER MOTHER
+
+There was, at Montfermeil, near Paris, during the first quarter of this
+century, a sort of cook-shop which no longer exists. This cook-shop was
+kept by some people named Thenardier, husband and wife. It was situated
+in Boulanger Lane. Over the door there was a board nailed flat against
+the wall. Upon this board was painted something which resembled a
+man carrying another man on his back, the latter wearing the big gilt
+epaulettes of a general, with large silver stars; red spots represented
+blood; the rest of the picture consisted of smoke, and probably
+represented a battle. Below ran this inscription: AT THE SIGN OF
+SERGEANT OF WATERLOO (Au Sargent de Waterloo).
+
+Nothing is more common than a cart or a truck at the door of a hostelry.
+Nevertheless, the vehicle, or, to speak more accurately, the fragment of
+a vehicle, which encumbered the street in front of the cook-shop of the
+Sergeant of Waterloo, one evening in the spring of 1818, would certainly
+have attracted, by its mass, the attention of any painter who had passed
+that way.
+
+It was the fore-carriage of one of those trucks which are used in wooded
+tracts of country, and which serve to transport thick planks and the
+trunks of trees. This fore-carriage was composed of a massive iron
+axle-tree with a pivot, into which was fitted a heavy shaft, and
+which was supported by two huge wheels. The whole thing was compact,
+overwhelming, and misshapen. It seemed like the gun-carriage of an
+enormous cannon. The ruts of the road had bestowed on the wheels, the
+fellies, the hub, the axle, and the shaft, a layer of mud, a hideous
+yellowish daubing hue, tolerably like that with which people are fond
+of ornamenting cathedrals. The wood was disappearing under mud, and the
+iron beneath rust. Under the axle-tree hung, like drapery, a huge chain,
+worthy of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the
+beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and
+mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the
+galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have
+been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with
+it, and Shakespeare, Caliban.
+
+Why was that fore-carriage of a truck in that place in the street? In
+the first place, to encumber the street; next, in order that it might
+finish the process of rusting. There is a throng of institutions in the
+old social order, which one comes across in this fashion as one walks
+about outdoors, and which have no other reasons for existence than the
+above.
+
+The centre of the chain swung very near the ground in the middle, and in
+the loop, as in the rope of a swing, there were seated and grouped, on
+that particular evening, in exquisite interlacement, two little girls;
+one about two years and a half old, the other, eighteen months; the
+younger in the arms of the other. A handkerchief, cleverly knotted about
+them, prevented their falling out. A mother had caught sight of that
+frightful chain, and had said, "Come! there's a plaything for my
+children."
+
+The two children, who were dressed prettily and with some elegance, were
+radiant with pleasure; one would have said that they were two roses amid
+old iron; their eyes were a triumph; their fresh cheeks were full of
+laughter. One had chestnut hair; the other, brown. Their innocent faces
+were two delighted surprises; a blossoming shrub which grew near wafted
+to the passers-by perfumes which seemed to emanate from them; the child
+of eighteen months displayed her pretty little bare stomach with the
+chaste indecency of childhood. Above and around these two delicate
+heads, all made of happiness and steeped in light, the gigantic
+fore-carriage, black with rust, almost terrible, all entangled in curves
+and wild angles, rose in a vault, like the entrance of a cavern. A few
+paces apart, crouching down upon the threshold of the hostelry, the
+mother, not a very prepossessing woman, by the way, though touching
+at that moment, was swinging the two children by means of a long cord,
+watching them carefully, for fear of accidents, with that animal and
+celestial expression which is peculiar to maternity. At every backward
+and forward swing the hideous links emitted a strident sound, which
+resembled a cry of rage; the little girls were in ecstasies; the setting
+sun mingled in this joy, and nothing could be more charming than this
+caprice of chance which had made of a chain of Titans the swing of
+cherubim.
+
+As she rocked her little ones, the mother hummed in a discordant voice a
+romance then celebrated:--
+
+
+ "It must be, said a warrior."
+
+
+Her song, and the contemplation of her daughters, prevented her hearing
+and seeing what was going on in the street.
+
+In the meantime, some one had approached her, as she was beginning the
+first couplet of the romance, and suddenly she heard a voice saying very
+near her ear:--
+
+"You have two beautiful children there, Madame."
+
+
+ "To the fair and tender Imogene--"
+
+
+replied the mother, continuing her romance; then she turned her head.
+
+A woman stood before her, a few paces distant. This woman also had a
+child, which she carried in her arms.
+
+She was carrying, in addition, a large carpet-bag, which seemed very
+heavy.
+
+This woman's child was one of the most divine creatures that it is
+possible to behold. It was a girl, two or three years of age. She could
+have entered into competition with the two other little ones, so far as
+the coquetry of her dress was concerned; she wore a cap of fine linen,
+ribbons on her bodice, and Valenciennes lace on her cap. The folds of
+her skirt were raised so as to permit a view of her white, firm, and
+dimpled leg. She was admirably rosy and healthy. The little beauty
+inspired a desire to take a bite from the apples of her cheeks. Of her
+eyes nothing could be known, except that they must be very large, and
+that they had magnificent lashes. She was asleep.
+
+She slept with that slumber of absolute confidence peculiar to her
+age. The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep
+profoundly.
+
+As for the mother, her appearance was sad and poverty-stricken. She
+was dressed like a working-woman who is inclined to turn into a peasant
+again. She was young. Was she handsome? Perhaps; but in that attire it
+was not apparent. Her hair, a golden lock of which had escaped, seemed
+very thick, but was severely concealed beneath an ugly, tight, close,
+nun-like cap, tied under the chin. A smile displays beautiful teeth when
+one has them; but she did not smile. Her eyes did not seem to have been
+dry for a very long time. She was pale; she had a very weary and rather
+sickly appearance. She gazed upon her daughter asleep in her arms with
+the air peculiar to a mother who has nursed her own child. A large blue
+handkerchief, such as the Invalides use, was folded into a fichu, and
+concealed her figure clumsily. Her hands were sunburnt and all dotted
+with freckles, her forefinger was hardened and lacerated with the
+needle; she wore a cloak of coarse brown woollen stuff, a linen gown,
+and coarse shoes. It was Fantine.
+
+It was Fantine, but difficult to recognize. Nevertheless, on
+scrutinizing her attentively, it was evident that she still retained
+her beauty. A melancholy fold, which resembled the beginning of irony,
+wrinkled her right cheek. As for her toilette, that aerial toilette of
+muslin and ribbons, which seemed made of mirth, of folly, and of music,
+full of bells, and perfumed with lilacs had vanished like that beautiful
+and dazzling hoar-frost which is mistaken for diamonds in the sunlight;
+it melts and leaves the branch quite black.
+
+Ten months had elapsed since the "pretty farce."
+
+What had taken place during those ten months? It can be divined.
+
+After abandonment, straightened circumstances. Fantine had immediately
+lost sight of Favourite, Zephine and Dahlia; the bond once broken on the
+side of the men, it was loosed between the women; they would have been
+greatly astonished had any one told them a fortnight later, that they
+had been friends; there no longer existed any reason for such a thing.
+Fantine had remained alone. The father of her child gone,--alas! such
+ruptures are irrevocable,--she found herself absolutely isolated, minus
+the habit of work and plus the taste for pleasure. Drawn away by her
+liaison with Tholomyes to disdain the pretty trade which she knew, she
+had neglected to keep her market open; it was now closed to her. She had
+no resource. Fantine barely knew how to read, and did not know how to
+write; in her childhood she had only been taught to sign her name;
+she had a public letter-writer indite an epistle to Tholomyes, then a
+second, then a third. Tholomyes replied to none of them. Fantine heard
+the gossips say, as they looked at her child: "Who takes those children
+seriously! One only shrugs one's shoulders over such children!" Then she
+thought of Tholomyes, who had shrugged his shoulders over his child,
+and who did not take that innocent being seriously; and her heart grew
+gloomy toward that man. But what was she to do? She no longer knew to
+whom to apply. She had committed a fault, but the foundation of her
+nature, as will be remembered, was modesty and virtue. She was vaguely
+conscious that she was on the verge of falling into distress, and of
+gliding into a worse state. Courage was necessary; she possessed it, and
+held herself firm. The idea of returning to her native town of M. sur
+M. occurred to her. There, some one might possibly know her and give her
+work; yes, but it would be necessary to conceal her fault. In a confused
+way she perceived the necessity of a separation which would be more
+painful than the first one. Her heart contracted, but she took her
+resolution. Fantine, as we shall see, had the fierce bravery of life.
+She had already valiantly renounced finery, had dressed herself in
+linen, and had put all her silks, all her ornaments, all her ribbons,
+and all her laces on her daughter, the only vanity which was left to
+her, and a holy one it was. She sold all that she had, which produced
+for her two hundred francs; her little debts paid, she had only about
+eighty francs left. At the age of twenty-two, on a beautiful spring
+morning, she quitted Paris, bearing her child on her back. Any one who
+had seen these two pass would have had pity on them. This woman had,
+in all the world, nothing but her child, and the child had, in all the
+world, no one but this woman. Fantine had nursed her child, and this had
+tired her chest, and she coughed a little.
+
+We shall have no further occasion to speak of M. Felix Tholomyes. Let us
+confine ourselves to saying, that, twenty years later, under King Louis
+Philippe, he was a great provincial lawyer, wealthy and influential, a
+wise elector, and a very severe juryman; he was still a man of pleasure.
+
+Towards the middle of the day, after having, from time to time, for the
+sake of resting herself, travelled, for three or four sous a league, in
+what was then known as the Petites Voitures des Environs de Paris, the
+"little suburban coach service," Fantine found herself at Montfermeil,
+in the alley Boulanger.
+
+As she passed the Thenardier hostelry, the two little girls, blissful
+in the monster swing, had dazzled her in a manner, and she had halted in
+front of that vision of joy.
+
+Charms exist. These two little girls were a charm to this mother.
+
+She gazed at them in much emotion. The presence of angels is an
+announcement of Paradise. She thought that, above this inn, she beheld
+the mysterious HERE of Providence. These two little creatures were
+evidently happy. She gazed at them, she admired them, in such emotion
+that at the moment when their mother was recovering her breath between
+two couplets of her song, she could not refrain from addressing to her
+the remark which we have just read:--
+
+"You have two pretty children, Madame."
+
+The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their
+young.
+
+The mother raised her head and thanked her, and bade the wayfarer
+sit down on the bench at the door, she herself being seated on the
+threshold. The two women began to chat.
+
+"My name is Madame Thenardier," said the mother of the two little girls.
+"We keep this inn."
+
+Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between
+her teeth:--
+
+ "It must be so; I am a knight,
+ And I am off to Palestine."
+
+
+This Madame Thenardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and
+angular--the type of the soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and
+what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal
+of romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances
+produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop
+woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching
+woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a
+perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the
+traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what
+caused what we have to relate to vanish. A person who is seated instead
+of standing erect--destinies hang upon such a thing as that.
+
+The traveller told her story, with slight modifications.
+
+That she was a working-woman; that her husband was dead; that her
+work in Paris had failed her, and that she was on her way to seek it
+elsewhere, in her own native parts; that she had left Paris that morning
+on foot; that, as she was carrying her child, and felt fatigued, she had
+got into the Villemomble coach when she met it; that from Villemomble
+she had come to Montfermeil on foot; that the little one had walked a
+little, but not much, because she was so young, and that she had been
+obliged to take her up, and the jewel had fallen asleep.
+
+At this word she bestowed on her daughter a passionate kiss, which woke
+her. The child opened her eyes, great blue eyes like her mother's, and
+looked at--what? Nothing; with that serious and sometimes severe air of
+little children, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in
+the presence of our twilight of virtue. One would say that they feel
+themselves to be angels, and that they know us to be men. Then the child
+began to laugh; and although the mother held fast to her, she slipped to
+the ground with the unconquerable energy of a little being which wished
+to run. All at once she caught sight of the two others in the swing,
+stopped short, and put out her tongue, in sign of admiration.
+
+Mother Thenardier released her daughters, made them descend from the
+swing, and said:--
+
+"Now amuse yourselves, all three of you."
+
+Children become acquainted quickly at that age, and at the expiration
+of a minute the little Thenardiers were playing with the new-comer at
+making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure.
+
+The new-comer was very gay; the goodness of the mother is written in the
+gayety of the child; she had seized a scrap of wood which served her
+for a shovel, and energetically dug a cavity big enough for a fly. The
+grave-digger's business becomes a subject for laughter when performed by
+a child.
+
+The two women pursued their chat.
+
+"What is your little one's name?"
+
+"Cosette."
+
+For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The child's name was Euphrasie. But out
+of Euphrasie the mother had made Cosette by that sweet and graceful
+instinct of mothers and of the populace which changes Josepha into
+Pepita, and Francoise into Sillette. It is a sort of derivative which
+disarranges and disconcerts the whole science of etymologists. We have
+known a grandmother who succeeded in turning Theodore into Gnon.
+
+"How old is she?"
+
+"She is going on three."
+
+"That is the age of my eldest."
+
+In the meantime, the three little girls were grouped in an attitude of
+profound anxiety and blissfulness; an event had happened; a big worm
+had emerged from the ground, and they were afraid; and they were in
+ecstasies over it.
+
+Their radiant brows touched each other; one would have said that there
+were three heads in one aureole.
+
+"How easily children get acquainted at once!" exclaimed Mother
+Thenardier; "one would swear that they were three sisters!"
+
+This remark was probably the spark which the other mother had been
+waiting for. She seized the Thenardier's hand, looked at her fixedly,
+and said:--
+
+"Will you keep my child for me?"
+
+The Thenardier made one of those movements of surprise which signify
+neither assent nor refusal.
+
+Cosette's mother continued:--
+
+"You see, I cannot take my daughter to the country. My work will not
+permit it. With a child one can find no situation. People are ridiculous
+in the country. It was the good God who caused me to pass your inn. When
+I caught sight of your little ones, so pretty, so clean, and so happy,
+it overwhelmed me. I said: 'Here is a good mother. That is just the
+thing; that will make three sisters.' And then, it will not be long
+before I return. Will you keep my child for me?"
+
+"I must see about it," replied the Thenardier.
+
+"I will give you six francs a month."
+
+Here a man's voice called from the depths of the cook-shop:--
+
+"Not for less than seven francs. And six months paid in advance."
+
+"Six times seven makes forty-two," said the Thenardier.
+
+"I will give it," said the mother.
+
+"And fifteen francs in addition for preliminary expenses," added the
+man's voice.
+
+"Total, fifty-seven francs," said Madame Thenardier. And she hummed
+vaguely, with these figures:--
+
+ "It must be, said a warrior."
+
+
+"I will pay it," said the mother. "I have eighty francs. I shall have
+enough left to reach the country, by travelling on foot. I shall
+earn money there, and as soon as I have a little I will return for my
+darling."
+
+The man's voice resumed:--
+
+"The little one has an outfit?"
+
+"That is my husband," said the Thenardier.
+
+"Of course she has an outfit, the poor treasure.--I understood perfectly
+that it was your husband.--And a beautiful outfit, too! a senseless
+outfit, everything by the dozen, and silk gowns like a lady. It is here,
+in my carpet-bag."
+
+"You must hand it over," struck in the man's voice again.
+
+"Of course I shall give it to you," said the mother. "It would be very
+queer if I were to leave my daughter quite naked!"
+
+The master's face appeared.
+
+"That's good," said he.
+
+The bargain was concluded. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave
+up her money and left her child, fastened her carpet-bag once more, now
+reduced in volume by the removal of the outfit, and light henceforth
+and set out on the following morning, intending to return soon. People
+arrange such departures tranquilly; but they are despairs!
+
+A neighbor of the Thenardiers met this mother as she was setting out,
+and came back with the remark:--
+
+"I have just seen a woman crying in the street so that it was enough to
+rend your heart."
+
+When Cosette's mother had taken her departure, the man said to the
+woman:--
+
+"That will serve to pay my note for one hundred and ten francs which
+falls due to-morrow; I lacked fifty francs. Do you know that I should
+have had a bailiff and a protest after me? You played the mouse-trap
+nicely with your young ones."
+
+"Without suspecting it," said the woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES
+
+The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat
+rejoices even over a lean mouse.
+
+Who were these Thenardiers?
+
+Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later
+on.
+
+These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people
+who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended
+in the scale, which is between the class called "middle" and the class
+denominated as "inferior," and which combines some of the defects of the
+second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing
+the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the
+bourgeois.
+
+They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm
+them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum
+of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were
+susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress
+which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like
+souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,
+retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to
+augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more
+and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and
+woman possessed such souls.
+
+Thenardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can
+only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are
+dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening
+in front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more
+answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow
+which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing them
+utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse of
+sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their future.
+
+This Thenardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier--a
+sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,
+and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We
+shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his
+hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it
+himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.
+
+It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after
+having been Clelie, was no longer anything but Lodoiska, still noble,
+but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle de
+Scuderi to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to
+Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses
+of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. Madame
+Thenardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. She
+lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This had
+given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive
+attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian
+lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the
+same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the
+perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said
+in his jargon--a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or
+fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged in
+a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magaera
+began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thenardier was nothing
+but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now,
+one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldest
+daughter was named Eponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing
+came near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effected
+by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely bore
+the name of Azelma.
+
+However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and
+superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which
+may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of
+this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social
+symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd's boy nowadays to bear the name
+of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte--if there are
+still any vicomtes--to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This
+displacement, which places the "elegant" name on the plebeian and the
+rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality.
+The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there as
+everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and a
+profound thing,--the French Revolution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE LARK
+
+It is not all in all sufficient to be wicked in order to prosper. The
+cook-shop was in a bad way.
+
+Thanks to the traveller's fifty-seven francs, Thenardier had been able
+to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. On the following month
+they were again in need of money. The woman took Cosette's outfit to
+Paris, and pawned it at the pawnbroker's for sixty francs. As soon
+as that sum was spent, the Thenardiers grew accustomed to look on the
+little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity;
+and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they
+dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thenardier
+brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest
+had left--a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat.
+Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions;
+Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to
+theirs.
+
+The mother, who had established herself, as we shall see later on, at M.
+sur M., wrote, or, more correctly, caused to be written, a letter every
+month, that she might have news of her child. The Thenardiers replied
+invariably, "Cosette is doing wonderfully well."
+
+At the expiration of the first six months the mother sent seven francs
+for the seventh month, and continued her remittances with tolerable
+regularity from month to month. The year was not completed when
+Thenardier said: "A fine favor she is doing us, in sooth! What does she
+expect us to do with her seven francs?" and he wrote to demand twelve
+francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her
+child was happy, "and was coming on well," submitted, and forwarded the
+twelve francs.
+
+Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the other.
+Mother Thenardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her
+to hate the stranger.
+
+It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous
+aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to
+her as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child
+diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many
+women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and
+injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is certain
+that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received the whole
+of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the blows to
+herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Cosette could not
+make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy shower of
+violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble being, who
+should not have understood anything of this world or of God, incessantly
+punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her two little
+creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!
+
+Madame Thenardier was vicious with Cosette. Eponine and Azelma were
+vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size
+is smaller; that is all.
+
+A year passed; then another.
+
+People in the village said:--
+
+"Those Thenardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are
+bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!"
+
+They thought that Cosette's mother had forgotten her.
+
+In the meanwhile, Thenardier, having learned, it is impossible to say by
+what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that the
+mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month, saying
+that "the creature" was growing and "eating," and threatening to send
+her away. "Let her not bother me," he exclaimed, "or I'll fire her brat
+right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase." The
+mother paid the fifteen francs.
+
+From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.
+
+As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other
+children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say,
+before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the
+household.
+
+Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is
+true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen the
+trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the
+age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world,
+"worked for his living and stole"?
+
+Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard,
+the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thenardiers
+considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner,
+since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in
+her payments. Some months she was in arrears.
+
+If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three
+years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and
+rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an
+indescribably uneasy look. "The sly creature," said the Thenardiers.
+
+Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing
+remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because,
+large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still
+larger amount of sadness.
+
+It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years
+old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes,
+sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny
+red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.
+
+[Illustration: Cossette Sweeping 1b4-1-cossette-sweeping]
+
+She was called the Lark in the neighborhood. The populace, who are fond
+of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name on
+this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger
+than a bird, who was awake every morning before any one else in the
+house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before
+daybreak.
+
+Only the little lark never sang.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS
+
+And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according to
+the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was
+she? What was she doing?
+
+After leaving her little Cosette with the Thenardiers, she had continued
+her journey, and had reached M. sur M.
+
+This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.
+
+Fantine had quitted her province ten years before. M. sur M. had changed
+its aspect. While Fantine had been slowly descending from wretchedness
+to wretchedness, her native town had prospered.
+
+About two years previously one of those industrial facts which are the
+grand events of small districts had taken place.
+
+This detail is important, and we regard it as useful to develop it at
+length; we should almost say, to underline it.
+
+From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry the
+imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany. This
+industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price of the raw
+material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the moment when Fantine
+returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation had taken place
+in the production of "black goods." Towards the close of 1815 a man,
+a stranger, had established himself in the town, and had been inspired
+with the idea of substituting, in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin,
+and, for bracelets in particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid
+together, for slides of soldered sheet-iron.
+
+This very small change had effected a revolution.
+
+This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced the cost of
+the raw material, which had rendered it possible in the first place, to
+raise the price of manufacture, a benefit to the country; in the second
+place, to improve the workmanship, an advantage to the consumer; in the
+third place, to sell at a lower price, while trebling the profit, which
+was a benefit to the manufacturer.
+
+Thus three results ensued from one idea.
+
+In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich,
+which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better.
+He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known;
+of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had
+come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.
+
+It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an
+ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his
+own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside.
+
+On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the appearance,
+and the language of a workingman.
+
+It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry into
+the little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December evening,
+knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire had broken out
+in the town-hall. This man had rushed into the flames and saved, at the
+risk of his own life, two children who belonged to the captain of the
+gendarmerie; this is why they had forgotten to ask him for his passport.
+Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father Madeleine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--MADELEINE
+
+He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and
+who was good. That was all that could be said about him.
+
+Thanks to the rapid progress of the industry which he had so admirably
+re-constructed, M. sur M. had become a rather important centre of trade.
+Spain, which consumes a good deal of black jet, made enormous purchases
+there each year. M. sur M. almost rivalled London and Berlin in this
+branch of commerce. Father Madeleine's profits were such, that at the
+end of the second year he was able to erect a large factory, in which
+there were two vast workrooms, one for the men, and the other for women.
+Any one who was hungry could present himself there, and was sure of
+finding employment and bread. Father Madeleine required of the men good
+will, of the women pure morals, and of all, probity. He had separated
+the work-rooms in order to separate the sexes, and so that the women and
+girls might remain discreet. On this point he was inflexible. It was the
+only thing in which he was in a manner intolerant. He was all the more
+firmly set on this severity, since M. sur M., being a garrison town,
+opportunities for corruption abounded. However, his coming had been a
+boon, and his presence was a godsend. Before Father Madeleine's arrival,
+everything had languished in the country; now everything lived with
+a healthy life of toil. A strong circulation warmed everything and
+penetrated everywhere. Slack seasons and wretchedness were unknown.
+There was no pocket so obscure that it had not a little money in it; no
+dwelling so lowly that there was not some little joy within it.
+
+Father Madeleine gave employment to every one. He exacted but one thing:
+Be an honest man. Be an honest woman.
+
+As we have said, in the midst of this activity of which he was the cause
+and the pivot, Father Madeleine made his fortune; but a singular thing
+in a simple man of business, it did not seem as though that were his
+chief care. He appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of
+himself. In 1820 he was known to have a sum of six hundred and thirty
+thousand francs lodged in his name with Laffitte; but before reserving
+these six hundred and thirty thousand francs, he had spent more than a
+million for the town and its poor.
+
+The hospital was badly endowed; he founded six beds there. M. sur M. is
+divided into the upper and the lower town. The lower town, in which he
+lived, had but one school, a miserable hovel, which was falling to ruin:
+he constructed two, one for girls, the other for boys. He allotted a
+salary from his own funds to the two instructors, a salary twice as
+large as their meagre official salary, and one day he said to some one
+who expressed surprise, "The two prime functionaries of the state are
+the nurse and the schoolmaster." He created at his own expense an infant
+school, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for aiding old
+and infirm workmen. As his factory was a centre, a new quarter, in which
+there were a good many indigent families, rose rapidly around him; he
+established there a free dispensary.
+
+At first, when they watched his beginnings, the good souls said, "He's
+a jolly fellow who means to get rich." When they saw him enriching
+the country before he enriched himself, the good souls said, "He is
+an ambitious man." This seemed all the more probable since the man was
+religious, and even practised his religion to a certain degree, a thing
+which was very favorably viewed at that epoch. He went regularly to
+low mass every Sunday. The local deputy, who nosed out all rivalry
+everywhere, soon began to grow uneasy over this religion. This deputy
+had been a member of the legislative body of the Empire, and shared the
+religious ideas of a father of the Oratoire, known under the name
+of Fouche, Duc d'Otrante, whose creature and friend he had been. He
+indulged in gentle raillery at God with closed doors. But when he beheld
+the wealthy manufacturer Madeleine going to low mass at seven o'clock,
+he perceived in him a possible candidate, and resolved to outdo him; he
+took a Jesuit confessor, and went to high mass and to vespers. Ambition
+was at that time, in the direct acceptation of the word, a race to the
+steeple. The poor profited by this terror as well as the good God, for
+the honorable deputy also founded two beds in the hospital, which made
+twelve.
+
+Nevertheless, in 1819 a rumor one morning circulated through the town
+to the effect that, on the representations of the prefect and in
+consideration of the services rendered by him to the country, Father
+Madeleine was to be appointed by the King, mayor of M. sur M. Those who
+had pronounced this new-comer to be "an ambitious fellow," seized with
+delight on this opportunity which all men desire, to exclaim, "There!
+what did we say!" All M. sur M. was in an uproar. The rumor was well
+founded. Several days later the appointment appeared in the Moniteur. On
+the following day Father Madeleine refused.
+
+In this same year of 1819 the products of the new process invented by
+Madeleine figured in the industrial exhibition; when the jury made their
+report, the King appointed the inventor a chevalier of the Legion of
+Honor. A fresh excitement in the little town. Well, so it was the cross
+that he wanted! Father Madeleine refused the cross.
+
+Decidedly this man was an enigma. The good souls got out of their
+predicament by saying, "After all, he is some sort of an adventurer."
+
+We have seen that the country owed much to him; the poor owed him
+everything; he was so useful and he was so gentle that people had been
+obliged to honor and respect him. His workmen, in particular, adored
+him, and he endured this adoration with a sort of melancholy gravity.
+When he was known to be rich, "people in society" bowed to him, and
+he received invitations in the town; he was called, in town, Monsieur
+Madeleine; his workmen and the children continued to call him Father
+Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In
+proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him.
+"Society" claimed him for its own. The prim little drawing-rooms on
+M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan,
+opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionnaire. They made
+a thousand advances to him. He refused.
+
+This time the good gossips had no trouble. "He is an ignorant man, of
+no education. No one knows where he came from. He would not know how to
+behave in society. It has not been absolutely proved that he knows how
+to read."
+
+When they saw him making money, they said, "He is a man of business."
+When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, "He is an
+ambitious man." When he was seen to decline honors, they said, "He is
+an adventurer." When they saw him repulse society, they said, "He is a
+brute."
+
+In 1820, five years after his arrival in M. sur M., the services which
+he had rendered to the district were so dazzling, the opinion of
+the whole country round about was so unanimous, that the King again
+appointed him mayor of the town. He again declined; but the prefect
+resisted his refusal, all the notabilities of the place came to implore
+him, the people in the street besought him; the urging was so vigorous
+that he ended by accepting. It was noticed that the thing which seemed
+chiefly to bring him to a decision was the almost irritated apostrophe
+addressed to him by an old woman of the people, who called to him from
+her threshold, in an angry way: "A good mayor is a useful thing. Is he
+drawing back before the good which he can do?"
+
+This was the third phase of his ascent. Father Madeleine had become
+Monsieur Madeleine. Monsieur Madeleine became Monsieur le Maire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--SUMS DEPOSITED WITH LAFFITTE
+
+On the other hand, he remained as simple as on the first day. He had
+gray hair, a serious eye, the sunburned complexion of a laborer, the
+thoughtful visage of a philosopher. He habitually wore a hat with a
+wide brim, and a long coat of coarse cloth, buttoned to the chin. He
+fulfilled his duties as mayor; but, with that exception, he lived in
+solitude. He spoke to but few people. He avoided polite attentions;
+he escaped quickly; he smiled to relieve himself of the necessity of
+talking; he gave, in order to get rid of the necessity for smiling, The
+women said of him, "What a good-natured bear!" His pleasure consisted in
+strolling in the fields.
+
+He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he
+read. He had a well-selected little library. He loved books; books
+are cold but safe friends. In proportion as leisure came to him with
+fortune, he seemed to take advantage of it to cultivate his mind. It had
+been observed that, ever since his arrival at M. sur M.. his language
+had grown more polished, more choice, and more gentle with every passing
+year. He liked to carry a gun with him on his strolls, but he rarely
+made use of it. When he did happen to do so, his shooting was something
+so infallible as to inspire terror. He never killed an inoffensive
+animal. He never shot at a little bird.
+
+Although he was no longer young, it was thought that he was still
+prodigiously strong. He offered his assistance to any one who was in
+need of it, lifted a horse, released a wheel clogged in the mud, or
+stopped a runaway bull by the horns. He always had his pockets full
+of money when he went out; but they were empty on his return. When he
+passed through a village, the ragged brats ran joyously after him, and
+surrounded him like a swarm of gnats.
+
+It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a country life,
+since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which he taught to the
+peasants. He taught them how to destroy scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it
+and the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution
+of common salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in
+bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the grass and in
+the houses.
+
+He had "recipes" for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail,
+and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit
+warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed
+in it.
+
+One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles;
+he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said:
+"They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to
+make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent
+vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibres like hemp and
+flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are
+good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle. The seed of
+the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the
+root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter.
+Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is
+required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the
+seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That
+is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made
+useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How
+many men resemble the nettle!" He added, after a pause: "Remember this,
+my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are
+only bad cultivators."
+
+The children loved him because he knew how to make charming little
+trifles of straw and cocoanuts.
+
+When he saw the door of a church hung in black, he entered: he sought
+out funerals as other men seek christenings. Widowhood and the grief of
+others attracted him, because of his great gentleness; he mingled with
+the friends clad in mourning, with families dressed in black, with
+the priests groaning around a coffin. He seemed to like to give to his
+thoughts for text these funereal psalmodies filled with the vision of
+the other world. With his eyes fixed on heaven, he listened with a
+sort of aspiration towards all the mysteries of the infinite, those sad
+voices which sing on the verge of the obscure abyss of death.
+
+He performed a multitude of good actions, concealing his agency in them
+as a man conceals himself because of evil actions. He penetrated houses
+privately, at night; he ascended staircases furtively. A poor wretch
+on returning to his attic would find that his door had been opened,
+sometimes even forced, during his absence. The poor man made a clamor
+over it: some malefactor had been there! He entered, and the first
+thing he beheld was a piece of gold lying forgotten on some piece of
+furniture. The "malefactor" who had been there was Father Madeleine.
+
+He was affable and sad. The people said: "There is a rich man who has
+not a haughty air. There is a happy man who has not a contented air."
+
+Some people maintained that he was a mysterious person, and that no
+one ever entered his chamber, which was a regular anchorite's cell,
+furnished with winged hour-glasses and enlivened by cross-bones and
+skulls of dead men! This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant
+and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked:
+"Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber. It is said to be a
+grotto." He smiled, and introduced them instantly into this "grotto."
+They were well punished for their curiosity. The room was very simply
+furnished in mahogany, which was rather ugly, like all furniture of
+that sort, and hung with paper worth twelve sous. They could see nothing
+remarkable about it, except two candlesticks of antique pattern which
+stood on the chimney-piece and appeared to be silver, "for they were
+hall-marked," an observation full of the type of wit of petty towns.
+
+Nevertheless, people continued to say that no one ever got into the
+room, and that it was a hermit's cave, a mysterious retreat, a hole, a
+tomb.
+
+It was also whispered about that he had "immense" sums deposited with
+Laffitte, with this peculiar feature, that they were always at his
+immediate disposal, so that, it was added, M. Madeleine could make his
+appearance at Laffitte's any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his
+two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, "these two or three
+millions" were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or
+forty thousand francs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--M. MADELEINE IN MOURNING
+
+At the beginning of 1820 the newspapers announced the death of M.
+Myriel, Bishop of D----, surnamed "Monseigneur Bienvenu," who had died
+in the odor of sanctity at the age of eighty-two.
+
+The Bishop of D---- to supply here a detail which the papers
+omitted--had been blind for many years before his death, and content to
+be blind, as his sister was beside him.
+
+Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact,
+one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth,
+where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a
+daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her
+and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable
+to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure
+one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us,
+and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time
+to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her
+thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one
+being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown
+as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return,
+sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this
+speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel
+one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become
+in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which
+this angel gravitates,--few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness
+of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for
+one's own sake--let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this
+conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be
+caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when
+one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There
+is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly,
+and finds it. And this soul, found and tested, is a woman. A hand
+sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly touches your brow; it is her
+mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it is hers. To have everything
+of her, from her worship to her pity, never to be left, to have that
+sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that immovable reed, to
+touch Providence with one's hands, and to be able to take it in
+one's arms,--God made tangible,--what bliss! The heart, that obscure,
+celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming. One would not
+exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there,
+uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she
+vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality. One feels warmth
+approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity, with
+gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there are
+a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The
+most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and
+supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul.
+One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a paradise of
+shadows.
+
+It was from this paradise that Monseigneur Welcome had passed to the
+other.
+
+The announcement of his death was reprinted by the local journal of M.
+sur M. On the following day, M. Madeleine appeared clad wholly in black,
+and with crape on his hat.
+
+This mourning was noticed in the town, and commented on. It seemed
+to throw a light on M. Madeleine's origin. It was concluded that some
+relationship existed between him and the venerable Bishop. "He has gone
+into mourning for the Bishop of D----" said the drawing-rooms; this
+raised M. Madeleine's credit greatly, and procured for him, instantly
+and at one blow, a certain consideration in the noble world of M. sur
+M. The microscopic Faubourg Saint-Germain of the place meditated raising
+the quarantine against M. Madeleine, the probable relative of a bishop.
+M. Madeleine perceived the advancement which he had obtained, by the
+more numerous courtesies of the old women and the more plentiful smiles
+of the young ones. One evening, a ruler in that petty great world, who
+was curious by right of seniority, ventured to ask him, "M. le Maire is
+doubtless a cousin of the late Bishop of D----?"
+
+He said, "No, Madame."
+
+"But," resumed the dowager, "you are wearing mourning for him."
+
+He replied, "It is because I was a servant in his family in my youth."
+
+Another thing which was remarked, was, that every time that he
+encountered in the town a young Savoyard who was roaming about the
+country and seeking chimneys to sweep, the mayor had him summoned,
+inquired his name, and gave him money. The little Savoyards told each
+other about it: a great many of them passed that way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--VAGUE FLASHES ON THE HORIZON
+
+Little by little, and in the course of time, all this opposition
+subsided. There had at first been exercised against M. Madeleine,
+in virtue of a sort of law which all those who rise must submit to,
+blackening and calumnies; then they grew to be nothing more than
+ill-nature, then merely malicious remarks, then even this entirely
+disappeared; respect became complete, unanimous, cordial, and towards
+1821 the moment arrived when the word "Monsieur le Maire" was pronounced
+at M. sur M. with almost the same accent as "Monseigneur the Bishop"
+had been pronounced in D---- in 1815. People came from a distance of ten
+leagues around to consult M. Madeleine. He put an end to differences,
+he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies. Every one took him for the
+judge, and with good reason. It seemed as though he had for a soul the
+book of the natural law. It was like an epidemic of veneration, which in
+the course of six or seven years gradually took possession of the whole
+district.
+
+One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped
+this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his
+opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct
+kept him on the alert and uneasy. It seems, in fact, as though there
+existed in certain men a veritable bestial instinct, though pure and
+upright, like all instincts, which creates antipathies and sympathies,
+which fatally separates one nature from another nature, which does not
+hesitate, which feels no disquiet, which does not hold its peace,
+and which never belies itself, clear in its obscurity, infallible,
+imperious, intractable, stubborn to all counsels of the intelligence
+and to all the dissolvents of reason, and which, in whatever manner
+destinies are arranged, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of
+the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.
+
+It frequently happened that when M. Madeleine was passing along a
+street, calm, affectionate, surrounded by the blessings of all, a man of
+lofty stature, clad in an iron-gray frock-coat, armed with a heavy
+cane, and wearing a battered hat, turned round abruptly behind him, and
+followed him with his eyes until he disappeared, with folded arms and
+a slow shake of the head, and his upper lip raised in company with
+his lower to his nose, a sort of significant grimace which might be
+translated by: "What is that man, after all? I certainly have seen him
+somewhere. In any case, I am not his dupe."
+
+This person, grave with a gravity which was almost menacing, was one
+of those men who, even when only seen by a rapid glimpse, arrest the
+spectator's attention.
+
+His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.
+
+At M. sur M. he exercised the unpleasant but useful functions of an
+inspector. He had not seen Madeleine's beginnings. Javert owed the post
+which he occupied to the protection of M. Chabouillet, the secretary of
+the Minister of State, Comte Angeles, then prefect of police at Paris.
+When Javert arrived at M. sur M. the fortune of the great manufacturer
+was already made, and Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.
+
+Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is
+complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority.
+Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.
+
+It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes, we should
+be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual
+of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal
+creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived
+by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the
+tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man.
+Sometimes even several of them at a time.
+
+Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices,
+straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows
+them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere
+shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense
+of the word; what is the use? On the contrary, our souls being realities
+and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on
+them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social
+education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of whatever sort
+it may be, the utility which it contains.
+
+This, be it said, is of course from the restricted point of view of the
+terrestrial life which is apparent, and without prejudging the profound
+question of the anterior or ulterior personality of the beings which are
+not man. The visible _I_ in nowise authorizes the thinker to deny the
+latent _I_. Having made this reservation, let us pass on.
+
+Now, if the reader will admit, for a moment, with us, that in every man
+there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us
+to say what there was in Police Officer Javert.
+
+The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves
+there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as
+he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.
+
+Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be
+Javert.
+
+Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was
+in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale
+of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that
+society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,--those who attack
+it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these
+two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable
+foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an
+inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung. He
+entered the police; he succeeded there. At forty years of age he was an
+inspector.
+
+During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of
+the South.
+
+Before proceeding further, let us come to an understanding as to the
+words, "human face," which we have just applied to Javert.
+
+The human face of Javert consisted of a flat nose, with two deep
+nostrils, towards which enormous whiskers ascended on his cheeks. One
+felt ill at ease when he saw these two forests and these two caverns
+for the first time. When Javert laughed,--and his laugh was rare and
+terrible,--his thin lips parted and revealed to view not only his teeth,
+but his gums, and around his nose there formed a flattened and savage
+fold, as on the muzzle of a wild beast. Javert, serious, was a watchdog;
+when he laughed, he was a tiger. As for the rest, he had very little
+skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and
+fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central
+frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed
+up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.
+
+This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments,
+comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating
+them,--respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes,
+murder, robbery, all crimes, are only forms of rebellion. He enveloped
+in a blind and profound faith every one who had a function in the state,
+from the prime minister to the rural policeman. He covered with scorn,
+aversion, and disgust every one who had once crossed the legal threshold
+of evil. He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand,
+he said, "The functionary can make no mistake; the magistrate is never
+the wrong." On the other hand, he said, "These men are irremediably
+lost. Nothing good can come from them." He fully shared the opinion of
+those extreme minds which attribute to human law I know not what power
+of making, or, if the reader will have it so, of authenticating, demons,
+and who place a Styx at the base of society. He was stoical, serious,
+austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, like fanatics. His
+glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing. His whole life hung on
+these two words: watchfulness and supervision. He had introduced a
+straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world;
+he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his
+functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests. Woe to the man
+who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father, if
+the latter had escaped from the galleys, and would have denounced his
+mother, if she had broken her ban. And he would have done it with that
+sort of inward satisfaction which is conferred by virtue. And, withal,
+a life of privation, isolation, abnegation, chastity, with never
+a diversion. It was implacable duty; the police understood, as the
+Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a ferocious
+honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.
+
+Javert's whole person was expressive of the man who spies and who
+withdraws himself from observation. The mystical school of Joseph de
+Maistre, which at that epoch seasoned with lofty cosmogony those things
+which were called the ultra newspapers, would not have failed to declare
+that Javert was a symbol. His brow was not visible; it disappeared
+beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under
+his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his
+cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves:
+and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat. But when the
+occasion presented itself, there was suddenly seen to emerge from all
+this shadow, as from an ambuscade, a narrow and angular forehead, a
+baleful glance, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous
+cudgel.
+
+In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although
+he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate. This could
+be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.
+
+As we have said, he had no vices. When he was pleased with himself,
+he permitted himself a pinch of snuff. Therein lay his connection with
+humanity.
+
+The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that Javert was the
+terror of that whole class which the annual statistics of the Ministry
+of Justice designates under the rubric, Vagrants. The name of Javert
+routed them by its mere utterance; the face of Javert petrified them at
+sight.
+
+Such was this formidable man.
+
+Javert was like an eye constantly fixed on M. Madeleine. An eye full of
+suspicion and conjecture. M. Madeleine had finally perceived the fact;
+but it seemed to be of no importance to him. He did not even put a
+question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that
+embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it.
+He treated Javert with ease and courtesy, as he did all the rest of the
+world.
+
+It was divined, from some words which escaped Javert, that he had
+secretly investigated, with that curiosity which belongs to the race,
+and into which there enters as much instinct as will, all the anterior
+traces which Father Madeleine might have left elsewhere. He seemed to
+know, and he sometimes said in covert words, that some one had gleaned
+certain information in a certain district about a family which had
+disappeared. Once he chanced to say, as he was talking to himself, "I
+think I have him!" Then he remained pensive for three days, and uttered
+not a word. It seemed that the thread which he thought he held had
+broken.
+
+Moreover, and this furnishes the necessary corrective for the too
+absolute sense which certain words might present, there can be nothing
+really infallible in a human creature, and the peculiarity of instinct
+is that it can become confused, thrown off the track, and defeated.
+Otherwise, it would be superior to intelligence, and the beast would be
+found to be provided with a better light than man.
+
+Javert was evidently somewhat disconcerted by the perfect naturalness
+and tranquillity of M. Madeleine.
+
+One day, nevertheless, his strange manner appeared to produce an
+impression on M. Madeleine. It was on the following occasion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--FATHER FAUCHELEVENT
+
+One morning M. Madeleine was passing through an unpaved alley of M. sur
+M.; he heard a noise, and saw a group some distance away. He approached.
+An old man named Father Fauchelevent had just fallen beneath his cart,
+his horse having tumbled down.
+
+This Fauchelevent was one of the few enemies whom M. Madeleine had at
+that time. When Madeleine arrived in the neighborhood, Fauchelevent, an
+ex-notary and a peasant who was almost educated, had a business which
+was beginning to be in a bad way. Fauchelevent had seen this simple
+workman grow rich, while he, a lawyer, was being ruined. This had filled
+him with jealousy, and he had done all he could, on every occasion,
+to injure Madeleine. Then bankruptcy had come; and as the old man had
+nothing left but a cart and a horse, and neither family nor children, he
+had turned carter.
+
+The horse had two broken legs and could not rise. The old man was caught
+in the wheels. The fall had been so unlucky that the whole weight of the
+vehicle rested on his breast. The cart was quite heavily laden. Father
+Fauchelevent was rattling in the throat in the most lamentable manner.
+They had tried, but in vain, to drag him out. An unmethodical effort,
+aid awkwardly given, a wrong shake, might kill him. It was impossible to
+disengage him otherwise than by lifting the vehicle off of him.
+Javert, who had come up at the moment of the accident, had sent for a
+jack-screw.
+
+M. Madeleine arrived. People stood aside respectfully.
+
+"Help!" cried old Fauchelevent. "Who will be good and save the old man?"
+
+M. Madeleine turned towards those present:--
+
+"Is there a jack-screw to be had?"
+
+"One has been sent for," answered the peasant.
+
+"How long will it take to get it?"
+
+"They have gone for the nearest, to Flachot's place, where there is a
+farrier; but it makes no difference; it will take a good quarter of an
+hour."
+
+"A quarter of an hour!" exclaimed Madeleine.
+
+It had rained on the preceding night; the soil was soaked.
+
+The cart was sinking deeper into the earth every moment, and crushing
+the old carter's breast more and more. It was evident that his ribs
+would be broken in five minutes more.
+
+"It is impossible to wait another quarter of an hour," said Madeleine to
+the peasants, who were staring at him.
+
+"We must!"
+
+"But it will be too late then! Don't you see that the cart is sinking?"
+
+"Well!"
+
+"Listen," resumed Madeleine; "there is still room enough under the cart
+to allow a man to crawl beneath it and raise it with his back. Only half
+a minute, and the poor man can be taken out. Is there any one here who
+has stout loins and heart? There are five louis d'or to be earned!"
+
+Not a man in the group stirred.
+
+"Ten louis," said Madeleine.
+
+The persons present dropped their eyes. One of them muttered: "A man
+would need to be devilish strong. And then he runs the risk of getting
+crushed!"
+
+"Come," began Madeleine again, "twenty louis."
+
+The same silence.
+
+"It is not the will which is lacking," said a voice.
+
+M. Madeleine turned round, and recognized Javert. He had not noticed him
+on his arrival.
+
+Javert went on:--
+
+"It is strength. One would have to be a terrible man to do such a thing
+as lift a cart like that on his back."
+
+Then, gazing fixedly at M. Madeleine, he went on, emphasizing every word
+that he uttered:--
+
+"Monsieur Madeleine, I have never known but one man capable of doing
+what you ask."
+
+Madeleine shuddered.
+
+Javert added, with an air of indifference, but without removing his eyes
+from Madeleine:--
+
+"He was a convict."
+
+"Ah!" said Madeleine.
+
+"In the galleys at Toulon."
+
+Madeleine turned pale.
+
+Meanwhile, the cart continued to sink slowly. Father Fauchelevent
+rattled in the throat, and shrieked:--
+
+"I am strangling! My ribs are breaking! a screw! something! Ah!"
+
+Madeleine glanced about him.
+
+"Is there, then, no one who wishes to earn twenty louis and save the
+life of this poor old man?"
+
+No one stirred. Javert resumed:--
+
+"I have never known but one man who could take the place of a screw, and
+he was that convict."
+
+"Ah! It is crushing me!" cried the old man.
+
+Madeleine raised his head, met Javert's falcon eye still fixed upon
+him, looked at the motionless peasants, and smiled sadly. Then, without
+saying a word, he fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had
+time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle.
+
+A terrible moment of expectation and silence ensued.
+
+They beheld Madeleine, almost flat on his stomach beneath that terrible
+weight, make two vain efforts to bring his knees and his elbows
+together. They shouted to him, "Father Madeleine, come out!" Old
+Fauchelevent himself said to him, "Monsieur Madeleine, go away! You see
+that I am fated to die! Leave me! You will get yourself crushed also!"
+Madeleine made no reply.
+
+All the spectators were panting. The wheels had continued to sink, and
+it had become almost impossible for Madeleine to make his way from under
+the vehicle.
+
+Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver, the cart rose slowly, the
+wheels half emerged from the ruts. They heard a stifled voice crying,
+"Make haste! Help!" It was Madeleine, who had just made a final effort.
+
+They rushed forwards. The devotion of a single man had given force and
+courage to all. The cart was raised by twenty arms. Old Fauchelevent was
+saved.
+
+Madeleine rose. He was pale, though dripping with perspiration. His
+clothes were torn and covered with mud. All wept. The old man kissed
+his knees and called him the good God. As for him, he bore upon
+his countenance an indescribable expression of happy and celestial
+suffering, and he fixed his tranquil eye on Javert, who was still
+staring at him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--FAUCHELEVENT BECOMES A GARDENER IN PARIS
+
+
+Fauchelevent had dislocated his kneepan in his fall. Father Madeleine
+had him conveyed to an infirmary which he had established for his
+workmen in the factory building itself, and which was served by two
+sisters of charity. On the following morning the old man found a
+thousand-franc bank-note on his night-stand, with these words in Father
+Madeleine's writing: "I purchase your horse and cart." The cart was
+broken, and the horse was dead. Fauchelevent recovered, but his knee
+remained stiff. M. Madeleine, on the recommendation of the sisters of
+charity and of his priest, got the good man a place as gardener in a
+female convent in the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris.
+
+Some time afterwards, M. Madeleine was appointed mayor. The first time
+that Javert beheld M. Madeleine clothed in the scarf which gave him
+authority over the town, he felt the sort of shudder which a watch-dog
+might experience on smelling a wolf in his master's clothes. From
+that time forth he avoided him as much as he possibly could. When the
+requirements of the service imperatively demanded it, and he could
+not do otherwise than meet the mayor, he addressed him with profound
+respect.
+
+This prosperity created at M. sur M. by Father Madeleine had, besides
+the visible signs which we have mentioned, another symptom which was
+none the less significant for not being visible. This never deceives.
+When the population suffers, when work is lacking, when there is no
+commerce, the tax-payer resists imposts through penury, he exhausts and
+oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in
+the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when
+the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the
+state nothing. It may be said, that there is one infallible thermometer
+of the public misery and riches,--the cost of collecting the taxes.
+In the course of seven years the expense of collecting the taxes had
+diminished three-fourths in the arrondissement of M. sur M., and this
+led to this arrondissement being frequently cited from all the rest by
+M. de Villele, then Minister of Finance.
+
+Such was the condition of the country when Fantine returned thither. No
+one remembered her. Fortunately, the door of M. Madeleine's factory was
+like the face of a friend. She presented herself there, and was admitted
+to the women's workroom. The trade was entirely new to Fantine; she
+could not be very skilful at it, and she therefore earned but little by
+her day's work; but it was sufficient; the problem was solved; she was
+earning her living.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--MADAME VICTURNIEN EXPENDS THIRTY FRANCS ON MORALITY
+
+When Fantine saw that she was making her living, she felt joyful for a
+moment. To live honestly by her own labor, what mercy from heaven! The
+taste for work had really returned to her. She bought a looking-glass,
+took pleasure in surveying in it her youth, her beautiful hair, her fine
+teeth; she forgot many things; she thought only of Cosette and of the
+possible future, and was almost happy. She hired a little room and
+furnished on credit on the strength of her future work--a lingering
+trace of her improvident ways. As she was not able to say that she was
+married she took good care, as we have seen, not to mention her little
+girl.
+
+At first, as the reader has seen, she paid the Thenardiers promptly. As
+she only knew how to sign her name, she was obliged to write through a
+public letter-writer.
+
+She wrote often, and this was noticed. It began to be said in an
+undertone, in the women's workroom, that Fantine "wrote letters" and
+that "she had ways about her."
+
+There is no one for spying on people's actions like those who are
+not concerned in them. Why does that gentleman never come except at
+nightfall? Why does Mr. So-and-So never hang his key on its nail on
+Tuesday? Why does he always take the narrow streets? Why does Madame
+always descend from her hackney-coach before reaching her house? Why
+does she send out to purchase six sheets of note paper, when she has a
+"whole stationer's shop full of it?" etc. There exist beings who, for
+the sake of obtaining the key to these enigmas, which are, moreover, of
+no consequence whatever to them, spend more money, waste more time,
+take more trouble, than would be required for ten good actions, and
+that gratuitously, for their own pleasure, without receiving any other
+payment for their curiosity than curiosity. They will follow up such and
+such a man or woman for whole days; they will do sentry duty for hours
+at a time on the corners of the streets, under alley-way doors at night,
+in cold and rain; they will bribe errand-porters, they will make the
+drivers of hackney-coaches and lackeys tipsy, buy a waiting-maid, suborn
+a porter. Why? For no reason. A pure passion for seeing, knowing,
+and penetrating into things. A pure itch for talking. And often
+these secrets once known, these mysteries made public, these enigmas
+illuminated by the light of day, bring on catastrophies, duels,
+failures, the ruin of families, and broken lives, to the great joy
+of those who have "found out everything," without any interest in the
+matter, and by pure instinct. A sad thing.
+
+Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking.
+Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the
+anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need
+a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by
+their neighbors.
+
+So Fantine was watched.
+
+In addition, many a one was jealous of her golden hair and of her white
+teeth.
+
+It was remarked that in the workroom she often turned aside, in the
+midst of the rest, to wipe away a tear. These were the moments when she
+was thinking of her child; perhaps, also, of the man whom she had loved.
+
+Breaking the gloomy bonds of the past is a mournful task.
+
+It was observed that she wrote twice a month at least, and that she
+paid the carriage on the letter. They managed to obtain the address:
+Monsieur, Monsieur Thenardier, inn-keeper at Montfermeil. The public
+writer, a good old man who could not fill his stomach with red wine
+without emptying his pocket of secrets, was made to talk in the
+wine-shop. In short, it was discovered that Fantine had a child. "She
+must be a pretty sort of a woman." An old gossip was found, who made the
+trip to Montfermeil, talked to the Thenardiers, and said on her return:
+"For my five and thirty francs I have freed my mind. I have seen the
+child."
+
+The gossip who did this thing was a gorgon named Madame Victurnien, the
+guardian and door-keeper of every one's virtue. Madame Victurnien was
+fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age.
+A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been
+young--astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a
+monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from
+the Bernardines to the Jacobins. She was dry, rough, peevish, sharp,
+captious, almost venomous; all this in memory of her monk, whose widow
+she was, and who had ruled over her masterfully and bent her to his
+will. She was a nettle in which the rustle of the cassock was visible.
+At the Restoration she had turned bigot, and that with so much energy
+that the priests had forgiven her her monk. She had a small property,
+which she bequeathed with much ostentation to a religious community.
+She was in high favor at the episcopal palace of Arras. So this Madame
+Victurnien went to Montfermeil, and returned with the remark, "I have
+seen the child."
+
+All this took time. Fantine had been at the factory for more than a
+year, when, one morning, the superintendent of the workroom handed her
+fifty francs from the mayor, told her that she was no longer employed
+in the shop, and requested her, in the mayor's name, to leave the
+neighborhood.
+
+This was the very month when the Thenardiers, after having demanded
+twelve francs instead of six, had just exacted fifteen francs instead of
+twelve.
+
+Fantine was overwhelmed. She could not leave the neighborhood; she was
+in debt for her rent and furniture. Fifty francs was not sufficient
+to cancel this debt. She stammered a few supplicating words. The
+superintendent ordered her to leave the shop on the instant. Besides,
+Fantine was only a moderately good workwoman. Overcome with shame, even
+more than with despair, she quitted the shop, and returned to her room.
+So her fault was now known to every one.
+
+She no longer felt strong enough to say a word. She was advised to
+see the mayor; she did not dare. The mayor had given her fifty francs
+because he was good, and had dismissed her because he was just. She
+bowed before the decision.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--MADAME VICTURNIEN'S SUCCESS
+
+So the monk's widow was good for something.
+
+But M. Madeleine had heard nothing of all this. Life is full of just
+such combinations of events. M. Madeleine was in the habit of almost
+never entering the women's workroom.
+
+At the head of this room he had placed an elderly spinster, whom
+the priest had provided for him, and he had full confidence in this
+superintendent,--a truly respectable person, firm, equitable, upright,
+full of the charity which consists in giving, but not having in the same
+degree that charity which consists in understanding and in forgiving.
+M. Madeleine relied wholly on her. The best men are often obliged
+to delegate their authority. It was with this full power, and the
+conviction that she was doing right, that the superintendent had
+instituted the suit, judged, condemned, and executed Fantine.
+
+As regards the fifty francs, she had given them from a fund which M.
+Madeleine had intrusted to her for charitable purposes, and for giving
+assistance to the workwomen, and of which she rendered no account.
+
+Fantine tried to obtain a situation as a servant in the neighborhood;
+she went from house to house. No one would have her. She could not
+leave town. The second-hand dealer, to whom she was in debt for her
+furniture--and what furniture!--said to her, "If you leave, I will have
+you arrested as a thief." The householder, whom she owed for her rent,
+said to her, "You are young and pretty; you can pay." She divided the
+fifty francs between the landlord and the furniture-dealer, returned to
+the latter three-quarters of his goods, kept only necessaries, and found
+herself without work, without a trade, with nothing but her bed, and
+still about fifty francs in debt.
+
+She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned
+twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that
+she began to pay the Thenardiers irregularly.
+
+However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned
+at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on
+little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the
+first is dark, the second is black.
+
+Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to
+give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every
+two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of
+one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by
+the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble
+creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of
+a sou. It ends by being a talent. Fantine acquired this sublime talent,
+and regained a little courage.
+
+At this epoch she said to a neighbor, "Bah! I say to myself, by only
+sleeping five hours, and working all the rest of the time at my sewing,
+I shall always manage to nearly earn my bread. And, then, when one is
+sad, one eats less. Well, sufferings, uneasiness, a little bread on one
+hand, trouble on the other,--all this will support me."
+
+It would have been a great happiness to have her little girl with her in
+this distress. She thought of having her come. But what then! Make her
+share her own destitution! And then, she was in debt to the Thenardiers!
+How could she pay them? And the journey! How pay for that?
+
+The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life
+of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious
+with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even
+towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself
+Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.
+
+There are many such virtuous people in this lower world; some day they
+will be in the world above. This life has a morrow.
+
+At first, Fantine had been so ashamed that she had not dared to go out.
+
+When she was in the street, she divined that people turned round behind
+her, and pointed at her; every one stared at her and no one greeted her;
+the cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very flesh
+and soul like a north wind.
+
+It seems as though an unfortunate woman were utterly bare beneath the
+sarcasm and the curiosity of all in small towns. In Paris, at least, no
+one knows you, and this obscurity is a garment. Oh! how she would have
+liked to betake herself to Paris! Impossible!
+
+She was obliged to accustom herself to disrepute, as she had accustomed
+herself to indigence. Gradually she decided on her course. At the
+expiration of two or three months she shook off her shame, and began to
+go about as though there were nothing the matter. "It is all the same to
+me," she said.
+
+She went and came, bearing her head well up, with a bitter smile, and
+was conscious that she was becoming brazen-faced.
+
+Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed
+the distress of "that creature" who, "thanks to her," had been "put back
+in her proper place," and congratulated herself. The happiness of the
+evil-minded is black.
+
+Excess of toil wore out Fantine, and the little dry cough which troubled
+her increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite, "Just
+feel how hot my hands are!"
+
+Nevertheless, when she combed her beautiful hair in the morning with
+an old broken comb, and it flowed about her like floss silk, she
+experienced a moment of happy coquetry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--RESULT OF THE SUCCESS
+
+She had been dismissed towards the end of the winter; the summer passed,
+but winter came again. Short days, less work. Winter: no warmth,
+no light, no noonday, the evening joining on to the morning, fogs,
+twilight; the window is gray; it is impossible to see clearly at it. The
+sky is but a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern. The sun has the air
+of a beggar. A frightful season! Winter changes the water of heaven and
+the heart of man into a stone. Her creditors harrassed her.
+
+Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thenardiers, who
+were not promptly paid, wrote to her constantly letters whose contents
+drove her to despair, and whose carriage ruined her. One day they wrote
+to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather,
+that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least
+ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her
+hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber's shop at the
+corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair
+fell to her knees.
+
+"What splendid hair!" exclaimed the barber.
+
+"How much will you give me for it?" said she.
+
+"Ten francs."
+
+"Cut it off."
+
+She purchased a knitted petticoat and sent it to the Thenardiers. This
+petticoat made the Thenardiers furious. It was the money that they
+wanted. They gave the petticoat to Eponine. The poor Lark continued to
+shiver.
+
+Fantine thought: "My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my
+hair." She put on little round caps which concealed her shorn head, and
+in which she was still pretty.
+
+Dark thoughts held possession of Fantine's heart.
+
+When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate
+every one about her. She had long shared the universal veneration for
+Father Madeleine; yet, by dint of repeating to herself that it was he
+who had discharged her, that he was the cause of her unhappiness, she
+came to hate him also, and most of all. When she passed the factory in
+working hours, when the workpeople were at the door, she affected to
+laugh and sing.
+
+An old workwoman who once saw her laughing and singing in this fashion
+said, "There's a girl who will come to a bad end."
+
+She took a lover, the first who offered, a man whom she did not love,
+out of bravado and with rage in her heart. He was a miserable scamp,
+a sort of mendicant musician, a lazy beggar, who beat her, and who
+abandoned her as she had taken him, in disgust.
+
+She adored her child.
+
+The lower she descended, the darker everything grew about her, the more
+radiant shone that little angel at the bottom of her heart. She said,
+"When I get rich, I will have my Cosette with me;" and she laughed. Her
+cough did not leave her, and she had sweats on her back.
+
+One day she received from the Thenardiers a letter couched in the
+following terms: "Cosette is ill with a malady which is going the rounds
+of the neighborhood. A miliary fever, they call it. Expensive drugs are
+required. This is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them. If you
+do not send us forty francs before the week is out, the little one will
+be dead."
+
+She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor: "Ah! they are
+good! Forty francs! the idea! That makes two napoleons! Where do they
+think I am to get them? These peasants are stupid, truly."
+
+Nevertheless she went to a dormer window in the staircase and read the
+letter once more. Then she descended the stairs and emerged, running and
+leaping and still laughing.
+
+Some one met her and said to her, "What makes you so gay?"
+
+She replied: "A fine piece of stupidity that some country people have
+written to me. They demand forty francs of me. So much for you, you
+peasants!"
+
+As she crossed the square, she saw a great many people collected around
+a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed
+in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his rounds,
+who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and
+elixirs.
+
+Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at
+the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for
+respectable people. The tooth-puller espied the lovely, laughing girl,
+and suddenly exclaimed: "You have beautiful teeth, you girl there, who
+are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a
+gold napoleon apiece for them."
+
+"What are my palettes?" asked Fantine.
+
+"The palettes," replied the dental professor, "are the front teeth, the
+two upper ones."
+
+"How horrible!" exclaimed Fantine.
+
+"Two napoleons!" grumbled a toothless old woman who was present. "Here's
+a lucky girl!"
+
+Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse
+voice of the man shouting to her: "Reflect, my beauty! two napoleons;
+they may prove of service. If your heart bids you, come this evening to
+the inn of the Tillac d'Argent; you will find me there."
+
+Fantine returned home. She was furious, and related the occurrence to
+her good neighbor Marguerite: "Can you understand such a thing? Is he
+not an abominable man? How can they allow such people to go about the
+country! Pull out my two front teeth! Why, I should be horrible! My hair
+will grow again, but my teeth! Ah! what a monster of a man! I should
+prefer to throw myself head first on the pavement from the fifth story!
+He told me that he should be at the Tillac d'Argent this evening."
+
+"And what did he offer?" asked Marguerite.
+
+"Two napoleons."
+
+"That makes forty francs."
+
+"Yes," said Fantine; "that makes forty francs."
+
+She remained thoughtful, and began her work. At the expiration of a
+quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to read the Thenardiers'
+letter once more on the staircase.
+
+On her return, she said to Marguerite, who was at work beside her:--
+
+"What is a miliary fever? Do you know?"
+
+"Yes," answered the old spinster; "it is a disease."
+
+"Does it require many drugs?"
+
+"Oh! terrible drugs."
+
+"How does one get it?"
+
+"It is a malady that one gets without knowing how."
+
+"Then it attacks children?"
+
+"Children in particular."
+
+"Do people die of it?"
+
+"They may," said Marguerite.
+
+Fantine left the room and went to read her letter once more on the
+staircase.
+
+That evening she went out, and was seen to turn her steps in the
+direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are situated.
+
+The next morning, when Marguerite entered Fantine's room before
+daylight,--for they always worked together, and in this manner used only
+one candle for the two,--she found Fantine seated on her bed, pale and
+frozen. She had not lain down. Her cap had fallen on her knees.
+Her candle had burned all night, and was almost entirely consumed.
+Marguerite halted on the threshold, petrified at this tremendous
+wastefulness, and exclaimed:--
+
+"Lord! the candle is all burned out! Something has happened."
+
+Then she looked at Fantine, who turned toward her her head bereft of its
+hair.
+
+Fantine had grown ten years older since the preceding night.
+
+"Jesus!" said Marguerite, "what is the matter with you, Fantine?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Fantine. "Quite the contrary. My child will not die
+of that frightful malady, for lack of succor. I am content."
+
+So saying, she pointed out to the spinster two napoleons which were
+glittering on the table.
+
+"Ah! Jesus God!" cried Marguerite. "Why, it is a fortune! Where did you
+get those louis d'or?"
+
+"I got them," replied Fantine.
+
+At the same time she smiled. The candle illuminated her countenance. It
+was a bloody smile. A reddish saliva soiled the corners of her lips, and
+she had a black hole in her mouth.
+
+The two teeth had been extracted.
+
+She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.
+
+After all it was a ruse of the Thenardiers to obtain money. Cosette was
+not ill.
+
+Fantine threw her mirror out of the window. She had long since quitted
+her cell on the second floor for an attic with only a latch to fasten
+it, next the roof; one of those attics whose extremity forms an angle
+with the floor, and knocks you on the head every instant. The poor
+occupant can reach the end of his chamber as he can the end of his
+destiny, only by bending over more and more.
+
+She had no longer a bed; a rag which she called her coverlet, a mattress
+on the floor, and a seatless chair still remained. A little rosebush
+which she had, had dried up, forgotten, in one corner. In the other
+corner was a butter-pot to hold water, which froze in winter, and in
+which the various levels of the water remained long marked by these
+circles of ice. She had lost her shame; she lost her coquetry. A final
+sign. She went out, with dirty caps. Whether from lack of time or from
+indifference, she no longer mended her linen. As the heels wore out,
+she dragged her stockings down into her shoes. This was evident from the
+perpendicular wrinkles. She patched her bodice, which was old and worn
+out, with scraps of calico which tore at the slightest movement. The
+people to whom she was indebted made "scenes" and gave her no peace.
+She found them in the street, she found them again on her staircase. She
+passed many a night weeping and thinking. Her eyes were very bright,
+and she felt a steady pain in her shoulder towards the top of the
+left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. She deeply hated Father
+Madeleine, but made no complaint. She sewed seventeen hours a day; but
+a contractor for the work of prisons, who made the prisoners work at a
+discount, suddenly made prices fall, which reduced the daily earnings
+of working-women to nine sous. Seventeen hours of toil, and nine sous a
+day! Her creditors were more pitiless than ever. The second-hand dealer,
+who had taken back nearly all his furniture, said to her incessantly,
+"When will you pay me, you hussy?" What did they want of her, good God!
+She felt that she was being hunted, and something of the wild beast
+developed in her. About the same time, Thenardier wrote to her that he
+had waited with decidedly too much amiability and that he must have a
+hundred francs at once; otherwise he would turn little Cosette out of
+doors, convalescent as she was from her heavy illness, into the cold and
+the streets, and that she might do what she liked with herself, and die
+if she chose. "A hundred francs," thought Fantine. "But in what trade
+can one earn a hundred sous a day?"
+
+"Come!" said she, "let us sell what is left."
+
+The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--CHRISTUS NOS LIBERAVIT
+
+What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave.
+
+From whom? From misery.
+
+From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul
+for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.
+
+The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does
+not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from
+European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs
+only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution.
+
+It weighs upon the woman, that is to say, upon grace, weakness, beauty,
+maternity. This is not one of the least of man's disgraces.
+
+At the point in this melancholy drama which we have now reached, nothing
+is left to Fantine of that which she had formerly been.
+
+She has become marble in becoming mire. Whoever touches her feels cold.
+She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and
+dishonored figure. Life and the social order have said their last word
+for her. All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has
+felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered
+everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with
+that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep.
+She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all
+the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that
+is soaked.
+
+At least, she believes it to be so; but it is an error to imagine that
+fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything
+whatever.
+
+Alas! What are all these fates, driven on pell-mell? Whither are they
+going? Why are they thus?
+
+He who knows that sees the whole of the shadow.
+
+He is alone. His name is God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--M. BAMATABOIS'S INACTIVITY
+
+There is in all small towns, and there was at M. sur M. in particular,
+a class of young men who nibble away an income of fifteen hundred
+francs with the same air with which their prototypes devour two hundred
+thousand francs a year in Paris. These are beings of the great neuter
+species: impotent men, parasites, cyphers, who have a little land, a
+little folly, a little wit; who would be rustics in a drawing-room, and
+who think themselves gentlemen in the dram-shop; who say, "My fields,
+my peasants, my woods"; who hiss actresses at the theatre to prove that
+they are persons of taste; quarrel with the officers of the garrison
+to prove that they are men of war; hunt, smoke, yawn, drink, smell of
+tobacco, play billiards, stare at travellers as they descend from the
+diligence, live at the cafe, dine at the inn, have a dog which eats the
+bones under the table, and a mistress who eats the dishes on the table;
+who stick at a sou, exaggerate the fashions, admire tragedy, despise
+women, wear out their old boots, copy London through Paris, and Paris
+through the medium of Pont-A-Mousson, grow old as dullards, never work,
+serve no use, and do no great harm.
+
+M. Felix Tholomyes, had he remained in his own province and never beheld
+Paris, would have been one of these men.
+
+If they were richer, one would say, "They are dandies;" if they were
+poorer, one would say, "They are idlers." They are simply men without
+employment. Among these unemployed there are bores, the bored, dreamers,
+and some knaves.
+
+At that period a dandy was composed of a tall collar, a big cravat, a
+watch with trinkets, three vests of different colors, worn one on top of
+the other--the red and blue inside; of a short-waisted olive coat, with
+a codfish tail, a double row of silver buttons set close to each other
+and running up to the shoulder; and a pair of trousers of a lighter
+shade of olive, ornamented on the two seams with an indefinite, but
+always uneven, number of lines, varying from one to eleven--a limit
+which was never exceeded. Add to this, high shoes with little irons
+on the heels, a tall hat with a narrow brim, hair worn in a tuft, an
+enormous cane, and conversation set off by puns of Potier. Over all,
+spurs and a mustache. At that epoch mustaches indicated the bourgeois,
+and spurs the pedestrian.
+
+The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of
+mustaches.
+
+It was the period of the conflict of the republics of South America with
+the King of Spain, of Bolivar against Morillo. Narrow-brimmed hats were
+royalist, and were called morillos; liberals wore hats with wide brims,
+which were called bolivars.
+
+Eight or ten months, then, after that which is related in the preceding
+pages, towards the first of January, 1823, on a snowy evening, one of
+these dandies, one of these unemployed, a "right thinker," for he wore
+a morillo, and was, moreover, warmly enveloped in one of those large
+cloaks which completed the fashionable costume in cold weather, was
+amusing himself by tormenting a creature who was prowling about in a
+ball-dress, with neck uncovered and flowers in her hair, in front of
+the officers' cafe. This dandy was smoking, for he was decidedly
+fashionable.
+
+Each time that the woman passed in front of him, he bestowed on her,
+together with a puff from his cigar, some apostrophe which he considered
+witty and mirthful, such as, "How ugly you are!--Will you get out of my
+sight?--You have no teeth!" etc., etc. This gentleman was known as M.
+Bamatabois. The woman, a melancholy, decorated spectre which went and
+came through the snow, made him no reply, did not even glance at him,
+and nevertheless continued her promenade in silence, and with a sombre
+regularity, which brought her every five minutes within reach of this
+sarcasm, like the condemned soldier who returns under the rods. The
+small effect which he produced no doubt piqued the lounger; and taking
+advantage of a moment when her back was turned, he crept up behind her
+with the gait of a wolf, and stifling his laugh, bent down, picked up a
+handful of snow from the pavement, and thrust it abruptly into her back,
+between her bare shoulders. The woman uttered a roar, whirled round,
+gave a leap like a panther, and hurled herself upon the man, burying her
+nails in his face, with the most frightful words which could fall from
+the guard-room into the gutter. These insults, poured forth in a voice
+roughened by brandy, did, indeed, proceed in hideous wise from a mouth
+which lacked its two front teeth. It was Fantine.
+
+At the noise thus produced, the officers ran out in throngs from the
+cafe, passers-by collected, and a large and merry circle, hooting and
+applauding, was formed around this whirlwind composed of two beings,
+whom there was some difficulty in recognizing as a man and a woman: the
+man struggling, his hat on the ground; the woman striking out with feet
+and fists, bareheaded, howling, minus hair and teeth, livid with wrath,
+horrible.
+
+Suddenly a man of lofty stature emerged vivaciously from the crowd,
+seized the woman by her satin bodice, which was covered with mud, and
+said to her, "Follow me!"
+
+The woman raised her head; her furious voice suddenly died away. Her
+eyes were glassy; she turned pale instead of livid, and she trembled
+with a quiver of terror. She had recognized Javert.
+
+The dandy took advantage of the incident to make his escape.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--THE SOLUTION OF SOME QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE
+MUNICIPAL POLICE
+
+Javert thrust aside the spectators, broke the circle, and set out
+with long strides towards the police station, which is situated at the
+extremity of the square, dragging the wretched woman after him. She
+yielded mechanically. Neither he nor she uttered a word. The cloud of
+spectators followed, jesting, in a paroxysm of delight. Supreme misery
+an occasion for obscenity.
+
+On arriving at the police station, which was a low room, warmed by a
+stove, with a glazed and grated door opening on the street, and guarded
+by a detachment, Javert opened the door, entered with Fantine, and shut
+the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the curious, who
+raised themselves on tiptoe, and craned their necks in front of the
+thick glass of the station-house, in their effort to see. Curiosity is a
+sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.
+
+On entering, Fantine fell down in a corner, motionless and mute,
+crouching down like a terrified dog.
+
+The sergeant of the guard brought a lighted candle to the table. Javert
+seated himself, drew a sheet of stamped paper from his pocket, and began
+to write.
+
+This class of women is consigned by our laws entirely to the discretion
+of the police. The latter do what they please, punish them, as seems
+good to them, and confiscate at their will those two sorry things which
+they entitle their industry and their liberty. Javert was impassive; his
+grave face betrayed no emotion whatever. Nevertheless, he was seriously
+and deeply preoccupied. It was one of those moments when he was
+exercising without control, but subject to all the scruples of a severe
+conscience, his redoubtable discretionary power. At that moment he was
+conscious that his police agent's stool was a tribunal. He was entering
+judgment. He judged and condemned. He summoned all the ideas which could
+possibly exist in his mind, around the great thing which he was doing.
+The more he examined the deed of this woman, the more shocked he felt.
+It was evident that he had just witnessed the commission of a crime.
+He had just beheld, yonder, in the street, society, in the person of a
+freeholder and an elector, insulted and attacked by a creature who was
+outside all pales. A prostitute had made an attempt on the life of a
+citizen. He had seen that, he, Javert. He wrote in silence.
+
+When he had finished he signed the paper, folded it, and said to the
+sergeant of the guard, as he handed it to him, "Take three men and
+conduct this creature to jail."
+
+Then, turning to Fantine, "You are to have six months of it." The
+unhappy woman shuddered.
+
+"Six months! six months of prison!" she exclaimed. "Six months in which
+to earn seven sous a day! But what will become of Cosette? My daughter!
+my daughter! But I still owe the Thenardiers over a hundred francs; do
+you know that, Monsieur Inspector?"
+
+She dragged herself across the damp floor, among the muddy boots of all
+those men, without rising, with clasped hands, and taking great strides
+on her knees.
+
+"Monsieur Javert," said she, "I beseech your mercy. I assure you that
+I was not in the wrong. If you had seen the beginning, you would have
+seen. I swear to you by the good God that I was not to blame! That
+gentleman, the bourgeois, whom I do not know, put snow in my back. Has
+any one the right to put snow down our backs when we are walking along
+peaceably, and doing no harm to any one? I am rather ill, as you see.
+And then, he had been saying impertinent things to me for a long time:
+'You are ugly! you have no teeth!' I know well that I have no longer
+those teeth. I did nothing; I said to myself, 'The gentleman is amusing
+himself.' I was honest with him; I did not speak to him. It was at that
+moment that he put the snow down my back. Monsieur Javert, good Monsieur
+Inspector! is there not some person here who saw it and can tell you
+that this is quite true? Perhaps I did wrong to get angry. You know that
+one is not master of one's self at the first moment. One gives way to
+vivacity; and then, when some one puts something cold down your
+back just when you are not expecting it! I did wrong to spoil that
+gentleman's hat. Why did he go away? I would ask his pardon. Oh, my God!
+It makes no difference to me whether I ask his pardon. Do me the favor
+to-day, for this once, Monsieur Javert. Hold! you do not know that in
+prison one can earn only seven sous a day; it is not the government's
+fault, but seven sous is one's earnings; and just fancy, I must pay
+one hundred francs, or my little girl will be sent to me. Oh, my God!
+I cannot have her with me. What I do is so vile! Oh, my Cosette! Oh, my
+little angel of the Holy Virgin! what will become of her, poor creature?
+I will tell you: it is the Thenardiers, inn-keepers, peasants; and such
+people are unreasonable. They want money. Don't put me in prison! You
+see, there is a little girl who will be turned out into the street to
+get along as best she may, in the very heart of the winter; and you must
+have pity on such a being, my good Monsieur Javert. If she were older,
+she might earn her living; but it cannot be done at that age. I am not a
+bad woman at bottom. It is not cowardliness and gluttony that have made
+me what I am. If I have drunk brandy, it was out of misery. I do not
+love it; but it benumbs the senses. When I was happy, it was only
+necessary to glance into my closets, and it would have been evident that
+I was not a coquettish and untidy woman. I had linen, a great deal of
+linen. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!"
+
+She spoke thus, rent in twain, shaken with sobs, blinded with tears,
+her neck bare, wringing her hands, and coughing with a dry, short cough,
+stammering softly with a voice of agony. Great sorrow is a divine and
+terrible ray, which transfigures the unhappy. At that moment Fantine had
+become beautiful once more. From time to time she paused, and tenderly
+kissed the police agent's coat. She would have softened a heart of
+granite; but a heart of wood cannot be softened.
+
+"Come!" said Javert, "I have heard you out. Have you entirely finished?
+You will get six months. Now march! The Eternal Father in person could
+do nothing more."
+
+At these solemn words, "the Eternal Father in person could do nothing
+more," she understood that her fate was sealed. She sank down,
+murmuring, "Mercy!"
+
+Javert turned his back.
+
+The soldiers seized her by the arms.
+
+A few moments earlier a man had entered, but no one had paid any heed
+to him. He shut the door, leaned his back against it, and listened to
+Fantine's despairing supplications.
+
+At the instant when the soldiers laid their hands upon the unfortunate
+woman, who would not rise, he emerged from the shadow, and said:--
+
+"One moment, if you please."
+
+Javert raised his eyes and recognized M. Madeleine. He removed his hat,
+and, saluting him with a sort of aggrieved awkwardness:--
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor--"
+
+The words "Mr. Mayor" produced a curious effect upon Fantine. She rose
+to her feet with one bound, like a spectre springing from the earth,
+thrust aside the soldiers with both arms, walked straight up to M.
+Madeleine before any one could prevent her, and gazing intently at him,
+with a bewildered air, she cried:--
+
+"Ah! so it is you who are M. le Maire!"
+
+Then she burst into a laugh, and spit in his face.
+
+M. Madeleine wiped his face, and said:--
+
+"Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty."
+
+Javert felt that he was on the verge of going mad. He experienced at
+that moment, blow upon blow and almost simultaneously, the most violent
+emotions which he had ever undergone in all his life. To see a woman of
+the town spit in the mayor's face was a thing so monstrous that, in his
+most daring flights of fancy, he would have regarded it as a sacrilege
+to believe it possible. On the other hand, at the very bottom of his
+thought, he made a hideous comparison as to what this woman was, and as
+to what this mayor might be; and then he, with horror, caught a glimpse
+of I know not what simple explanation of this prodigious attack. But
+when he beheld that mayor, that magistrate, calmly wipe his face and
+say, "Set this woman at liberty," he underwent a sort of intoxication
+of amazement; thought and word failed him equally; the sum total of
+possible astonishment had been exceeded in his case. He remained mute.
+
+The words had produced no less strange an effect on Fantine. She raised
+her bare arm, and clung to the damper of the stove, like a person who
+is reeling. Nevertheless, she glanced about her, and began to speak in a
+low voice, as though talking to herself:--
+
+"At liberty! I am to be allowed to go! I am not to go to prison for six
+months! Who said that? It is not possible that any one could have said
+that. I did not hear aright. It cannot have been that monster of a
+mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said that I was to be
+set free? Oh, see here! I will tell you about it, and you will let me
+go. That monster of a mayor, that old blackguard of a mayor, is the
+cause of all. Just imagine, Monsieur Javert, he turned me out! all
+because of a pack of rascally women, who gossip in the workroom. If that
+is not a horror, what is? To dismiss a poor girl who is doing her
+work honestly! Then I could no longer earn enough, and all this misery
+followed. In the first place, there is one improvement which these
+gentlemen of the police ought to make, and that is, to prevent prison
+contractors from wronging poor people. I will explain it to you, you
+see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to
+nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become
+whatever one can. As for me, I had my little Cosette, and I was actually
+forced to become a bad woman. Now you understand how it is that that
+blackguard of a mayor caused all the mischief. After that I stamped on
+that gentleman's hat in front of the officers' cafe; but he had spoiled
+my whole dress with snow. We women have but one silk dress for evening
+wear. You see that I did not do wrong deliberately--truly, Monsieur
+Javert; and everywhere I behold women who are far more wicked than I,
+and who are much happier. O Monsieur Javert! it was you who gave orders
+that I am to be set free, was it not? Make inquiries, speak to my
+landlord; I am paying my rent now; they will tell you that I am
+perfectly honest. Ah! my God! I beg your pardon; I have unintentionally
+touched the damper of the stove, and it has made it smoke."
+
+M. Madeleine listened to her with profound attention. While she was
+speaking, he fumbled in his waistcoat, drew out his purse and opened
+it. It was empty. He put it back in his pocket. He said to Fantine, "How
+much did you say that you owed?"
+
+Fantine, who was looking at Javert only, turned towards him:--
+
+"Was I speaking to you?"
+
+Then, addressing the soldiers:--
+
+"Say, you fellows, did you see how I spit in his face? Ah! you old
+wretch of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I'm not afraid of
+you. I am afraid of Monsieur Javert. I am afraid of my good Monsieur
+Javert!"
+
+So saying, she turned to the inspector again:--
+
+"And yet, you see, Mr. Inspector, it is necessary to be just. I
+understand that you are just, Mr. Inspector; in fact, it is perfectly
+simple: a man amuses himself by putting snow down a woman's back, and
+that makes the officers laugh; one must divert themselves in some way;
+and we--well, we are here for them to amuse themselves with, of course!
+And then, you, you come; you are certainly obliged to preserve order,
+you lead off the woman who is in the wrong; but on reflection, since you
+are a good man, you say that I am to be set at liberty; it is for
+the sake of the little one, for six months in prison would prevent my
+supporting my child. 'Only, don't do it again, you hussy!' Oh! I won't
+do it again, Monsieur Javert! They may do whatever they please to me
+now; I will not stir. But to-day, you see, I cried because it hurt me.
+I was not expecting that snow from the gentleman at all; and then as I
+told you, I am not well; I have a cough; I seem to have a burning ball
+in my stomach, and the doctor tells me, 'Take care of yourself.' Here,
+feel, give me your hand; don't be afraid--it is here."
+
+She no longer wept, her voice was caressing; she placed Javert's coarse
+hand on her delicate, white throat and looked smilingly at him.
+
+All at once she rapidly adjusted her disordered garments, dropped the
+folds of her skirt, which had been pushed up as she dragged herself
+along, almost to the height of her knee, and stepped towards the door,
+saying to the soldiers in a low voice, and with a friendly nod:--
+
+"Children, Monsieur l'Inspecteur has said that I am to be released, and
+I am going."
+
+She laid her hand on the latch of the door. One step more and she would
+be in the street.
+
+Javert up to that moment had remained erect, motionless, with his eyes
+fixed on the ground, cast athwart this scene like some displaced statue,
+which is waiting to be put away somewhere.
+
+The sound of the latch roused him. He raised his head with an expression
+of sovereign authority, an expression all the more alarming in
+proportion as the authority rests on a low level, ferocious in the wild
+beast, atrocious in the man of no estate.
+
+"Sergeant!" he cried, "don't you see that that jade is walking off! Who
+bade you let her go?"
+
+"I," said Madeleine.
+
+Fantine trembled at the sound of Javert's voice, and let go of the latch
+as a thief relinquishes the article which he has stolen. At the sound
+of Madeleine's voice she turned around, and from that moment forth she
+uttered no word, nor dared so much as to breathe freely, but her glance
+strayed from Madeleine to Javert, and from Javert to Madeleine in turn,
+according to which was speaking.
+
+It was evident that Javert must have been exasperated beyond measure
+before he would permit himself to apostrophize the sergeant as he
+had done, after the mayor's suggestion that Fantine should be set at
+liberty. Had he reached the point of forgetting the mayor's presence?
+Had he finally declared to himself that it was impossible that any
+"authority" should have given such an order, and that the mayor must
+certainly have said one thing by mistake for another, without intending
+it? Or, in view of the enormities of which he had been a witness for the
+past two hours, did he say to himself, that it was necessary to recur to
+supreme resolutions, that it was indispensable that the small should
+be made great, that the police spy should transform himself into a
+magistrate, that the policeman should become a dispenser of justice, and
+that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government,
+society in its entirety, was personified in him, Javert?
+
+However that may be, when M. Madeleine uttered that word, _I_, as we
+have just heard, Police Inspector Javert was seen to turn toward the
+mayor, pale, cold, with blue lips, and a look of despair, his whole body
+agitated by an imperceptible quiver and an unprecedented occurrence, and
+say to him, with downcast eyes but a firm voice:--
+
+"Mr. Mayor, that cannot be."
+
+"Why not?" said M. Madeleine.
+
+"This miserable woman has insulted a citizen."
+
+"Inspector Javert," replied the mayor, in a calm and conciliating tone,
+"listen. You are an honest man, and I feel no hesitation in explaining
+matters to you. Here is the true state of the case: I was passing
+through the square just as you were leading this woman away; there were
+still groups of people standing about, and I made inquiries and learned
+everything; it was the townsman who was in the wrong and who should have
+been arrested by properly conducted police."
+
+Javert retorted:--
+
+"This wretch has just insulted Monsieur le Maire."
+
+"That concerns me," said M. Madeleine. "My own insult belongs to me, I
+think. I can do what I please about it."
+
+"I beg Monsieur le Maire's pardon. The insult is not to him but to the
+law."
+
+"Inspector Javert," replied M. Madeleine, "the highest law is
+conscience. I have heard this woman; I know what I am doing."
+
+"And I, Mr. Mayor, do not know what I see."
+
+"Then content yourself with obeying."
+
+"I am obeying my duty. My duty demands that this woman shall serve six
+months in prison."
+
+M. Madeleine replied gently:--
+
+"Heed this well; she will not serve a single day."
+
+At this decisive word, Javert ventured to fix a searching look on the
+mayor and to say, but in a tone of voice that was still profoundly
+respectful:--
+
+"I am sorry to oppose Monsieur le Maire; it is for the first time in my
+life, but he will permit me to remark that I am within the bounds of my
+authority. I confine myself, since Monsieur le Maire desires it, to the
+question of the gentleman. I was present. This woman flung herself
+on Monsieur Bamatabnois, who is an elector and the proprietor of that
+handsome house with a balcony, which forms the corner of the esplanade,
+three stories high and entirely of cut stone. Such things as there are
+in the world! In any case, Monsieur le Maire, this is a question of
+police regulations in the streets, and concerns me, and I shall detain
+this woman Fantine."
+
+Then M. Madeleine folded his arms, and said in a severe voice which no
+one in the town had heard hitherto:--
+
+"The matter to which you refer is one connected with the municipal
+police. According to the terms of articles nine, eleven, fifteen, and
+sixty-six of the code of criminal examination, I am the judge. I order
+that this woman shall be set at liberty."
+
+Javert ventured to make a final effort.
+
+"But, Mr. Mayor--"
+
+"I refer you to article eighty-one of the law of the 13th of December,
+1799, in regard to arbitrary detention."
+
+"Monsieur le Maire, permit me--"
+
+"Not another word."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Leave the room," said M. Madeleine.
+
+Javert received the blow erect, full in the face, in his breast, like
+a Russian soldier. He bowed to the very earth before the mayor and left
+the room.
+
+Fantine stood aside from the door and stared at him in amazement as he
+passed.
+
+Nevertheless, she also was the prey to a strange confusion. She had just
+seen herself a subject of dispute between two opposing powers. She had
+seen two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul,
+her child, in combat before her very eyes; one of these men was drawing
+her towards darkness, the other was leading her back towards the light.
+In this conflict, viewed through the exaggerations of terror, these two
+men had appeared to her like two giants; the one spoke like her demon,
+the other like her good angel. The angel had conquered the demon, and,
+strange to say, that which made her shudder from head to foot was
+the fact that this angel, this liberator, was the very man whom she
+abhorred, that mayor whom she had so long regarded as the author of all
+her woes, that Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had insulted
+him in so hideous a fashion, he had saved her! Had she, then, been
+mistaken? Must she change her whole soul? She did not know; she
+trembled. She listened in bewilderment, she looked on in affright, and
+at every word uttered by M. Madeleine she felt the frightful shades of
+hatred crumble and melt within her, and something warm and ineffable,
+indescribable, which was both joy, confidence and love, dawn in her
+heart.
+
+When Javert had taken his departure, M. Madeleine turned to her and said
+to her in a deliberate voice, like a serious man who does not wish to
+weep and who finds some difficulty in speaking:--
+
+"I have heard you. I knew nothing about what you have mentioned. I
+believe that it is true, and I feel that it is true. I was even ignorant
+of the fact that you had left my shop. Why did you not apply to me? But
+here; I will pay your debts, I will send for your child, or you shall go
+to her. You shall live here, in Paris, or where you please. I undertake
+the care of your child and yourself. You shall not work any longer if
+you do not like. I will give all the money you require. You shall be
+honest and happy once more. And listen! I declare to you that if all
+is as you say,--and I do not doubt it,--you have never ceased to be
+virtuous and holy in the sight of God. Oh! poor woman."
+
+This was more than Fantine could bear. To have Cosette! To leave this
+life of infamy. To live free, rich, happy, respectable with Cosette; to
+see all these realities of paradise blossom of a sudden in the midst of
+her misery. She stared stupidly at this man who was talking to her, and
+could only give vent to two or three sobs, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"
+
+Her limbs gave way beneath her, she knelt in front of M. Madeleine, and
+before he could prevent her he felt her grasp his hand and press her
+lips to it.
+
+Then she fainted.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE BEGINNING OF REPOSE
+
+
+M. Madeleine had Fantine removed to that infirmary which he had
+established in his own house. He confided her to the sisters, who put
+her to bed. A burning fever had come on. She passed a part of the night
+in delirium and raving. At length, however, she fell asleep.
+
+On the morrow, towards midday, Fantine awoke. She heard some one
+breathing close to her bed; she drew aside the curtain and saw M.
+Madeleine standing there and looking at something over her head. His
+gaze was full of pity, anguish, and supplication. She followed its
+direction, and saw that it was fixed on a crucifix which was nailed to
+the wall.
+
+Thenceforth, M. Madeleine was transfigured in Fantine's eyes. He seemed
+to her to be clothed in light. He was absorbed in a sort of prayer. She
+gazed at him for a long time without daring to interrupt him. At last
+she said timidly:--
+
+"What are you doing?"
+
+M. Madeleine had been there for an hour. He had been waiting for Fantine
+to awake. He took her hand, felt of her pulse, and replied:--
+
+"How do you feel?"
+
+"Well, I have slept," she replied; "I think that I am better, It is
+nothing."
+
+He answered, responding to the first question which she had put to him
+as though he had just heard it:--
+
+"I was praying to the martyr there on high."
+
+And he added in his own mind, "For the martyr here below."
+
+M. Madeleine had passed the night and the morning in making inquiries.
+He knew all now. He knew Fantine's history in all its heart-rending
+details. He went on:--
+
+"You have suffered much, poor mother. Oh! do not complain; you now have
+the dowry of the elect. It is thus that men are transformed into angels.
+It is not their fault they do not know how to go to work otherwise.
+You see this hell from which you have just emerged is the first form of
+heaven. It was necessary to begin there."
+
+He sighed deeply. But she smiled on him with that sublime smile in which
+two teeth were lacking.
+
+That same night, Javert wrote a letter. The next morning be posted it
+himself at the office of M. sur M. It was addressed to Paris, and the
+superscription ran: To Monsieur Chabouillet, Secretary of Monsieur le
+Prefet of Police. As the affair in the station-house had been bruited
+about, the post-mistress and some other persons who saw the letter
+before it was sent off, and who recognized Javert's handwriting on the
+cover, thought that he was sending in his resignation.
+
+M. Madeleine made haste to write to the Thenardiers. Fantine owed
+them one hundred and twenty francs. He sent them three hundred francs,
+telling them to pay themselves from that sum, and to fetch the child
+instantly to M. sur M., where her sick mother required her presence.
+
+This dazzled Thenardier. "The devil!" said the man to his wife; "don't
+let's allow the child to go. This lark is going to turn into a milch
+cow. I see through it. Some ninny has taken a fancy to the mother."
+
+He replied with a very well drawn-up bill for five hundred and some odd
+francs. In this memorandum two indisputable items figured up over three
+hundred francs,--one for the doctor, the other for the apothecary
+who had attended and physicked Eponine and Azelma through two long
+illnesses. Cosette, as we have already said, had not been ill. It was
+only a question of a trifling substitution of names. At the foot of the
+memorandum Thenardier wrote, Received on account, three hundred francs.
+
+M. Madeleine immediately sent three hundred francs more, and wrote,
+"Make haste to bring Cosette."
+
+"Christi!" said Thenardier, "let's not give up the child."
+
+In the meantime, Fantine did not recover. She still remained in the
+infirmary.
+
+The sisters had at first only received and nursed "that woman" with
+repugnance. Those who have seen the bas-reliefs of Rheims will recall
+the inflation of the lower lip of the wise virgins as they survey the
+foolish virgins. The ancient scorn of the vestals for the ambubajae is
+one of the most profound instincts of feminine dignity; the sisters
+felt it with the double force contributed by religion. But in a few days
+Fantine disarmed them. She said all kinds of humble and gentle things,
+and the mother in her provoked tenderness. One day the sisters heard
+her say amid her fever: "I have been a sinner; but when I have my child
+beside me, it will be a sign that God has pardoned me. While I was
+leading a bad life, I should not have liked to have my Cosette with me;
+I could not have borne her sad, astonished eyes. It was for her sake
+that I did evil, and that is why God pardons me. I shall feel the
+benediction of the good God when Cosette is here. I shall gaze at her;
+it will do me good to see that innocent creature. She knows nothing at
+all. She is an angel, you see, my sisters. At that age the wings have
+not fallen off."
+
+M. Madeleine went to see her twice a day, and each time she asked him:--
+
+"Shall I see my Cosette soon?"
+
+He answered:--
+
+"To-morrow, perhaps. She may arrive at any moment. I am expecting her."
+
+And the mother's pale face grew radiant.
+
+"Oh!" she said, "how happy I am going to be!"
+
+We have just said that she did not recover her health. On the contrary,
+her condition seemed to become more grave from week to week. That
+handful of snow applied to her bare skin between her shoulder-blades had
+brought about a sudden suppression of perspiration, as a consequence of
+which the malady which had been smouldering within her for many years
+was violently developed at last. At that time people were beginning to
+follow the fine Laennec's fine suggestions in the study and treatment of
+chest maladies. The doctor sounded Fantine's chest and shook his head.
+
+M. Madeleine said to the doctor:--
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Has she not a child which she desires to see?" said the doctor.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well! Make haste and get it here!"
+
+M. Madeleine shuddered.
+
+Fantine inquired:--
+
+"What did the doctor say?"
+
+M. Madeleine forced himself to smile.
+
+"He said that your child was to be brought speedily. That that would
+restore your health."
+
+"Oh!" she rejoined, "he is right! But what do those Thenardiers mean
+by keeping my Cosette from me! Oh! she is coming. At last I behold
+happiness close beside me!"
+
+In the meantime Thenardier did not "let go of the child," and gave a
+hundred insufficient reasons for it. Cosette was not quite well enough
+to take a journey in the winter. And then, there still remained some
+petty but pressing debts in the neighborhood, and they were collecting
+the bills for them, etc., etc.
+
+"I shall send some one to fetch Cosette!" said Father Madeleine. "If
+necessary, I will go myself."
+
+He wrote the following letter to Fantine's dictation, and made her sign
+it:--
+
+ "MONSIEUR THENARDIER:--
+ You will deliver Cosette to this person.
+ You will be paid for all the little things.
+ I have the honor to salute you with respect.
+ "FANTINE."
+
+
+In the meantime a serious incident occurred. Carve as we will the
+mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny
+constantly reappears in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--HOW JEAN MAY BECOME CHAMP
+
+
+One morning M. Madeleine was in his study, occupied in arranging in
+advance some pressing matters connected with the mayor's office, in case
+he should decide to take the trip to Montfermeil, when he was informed
+that Police Inspector Javert was desirous of speaking with him.
+Madeleine could not refrain from a disagreeable impression on hearing
+this name. Javert had avoided him more than ever since the affair of the
+police-station, and M. Madeleine had not seen him.
+
+"Admit him," he said.
+
+Javert entered.
+
+M. Madeleine had retained his seat near the fire, pen in hand, his eyes
+fixed on the docket which he was turning over and annotating, and which
+contained the trials of the commission on highways for the infraction of
+police regulations. He did not disturb himself on Javert's account. He
+could not help thinking of poor Fantine, and it suited him to be glacial
+in his manner.
+
+Javert bestowed a respectful salute on the mayor, whose back was turned
+to him. The mayor did not look at him, but went on annotating this
+docket.
+
+Javert advanced two or three paces into the study, and halted, without
+breaking the silence.
+
+If any physiognomist who had been familiar with Javert, and who had
+made a lengthy study of this savage in the service of civilization,
+this singular composite of the Roman, the Spartan, the monk, and the
+corporal, this spy who was incapable of a lie, this unspotted police
+agent--if any physiognomist had known his secret and long-cherished
+aversion for M. Madeleine, his conflict with the mayor on the subject of
+Fantine, and had examined Javert at that moment, he would have said to
+himself, "What has taken place?" It was evident to any one acquainted
+with that clear, upright, sincere, honest, austere, and ferocious
+conscience, that Javert had but just gone through some great interior
+struggle. Javert had nothing in his soul which he had not also in his
+countenance. Like violent people in general, he was subject to abrupt
+changes of opinion. His physiognomy had never been more peculiar and
+startling. On entering he bowed to M. Madeleine with a look in which
+there was neither rancor, anger, nor distrust; he halted a few paces in
+the rear of the mayor's arm-chair, and there he stood, perfectly erect,
+in an attitude almost of discipline, with the cold, ingenuous roughness
+of a man who has never been gentle and who has always been patient; he
+waited without uttering a word, without making a movement, in genuine
+humility and tranquil resignation, calm, serious, hat in hand, with
+eyes cast down, and an expression which was half-way between that of a
+soldier in the presence of his officer and a criminal in the presence
+of his judge, until it should please the mayor to turn round. All the
+sentiments as well as all the memories which one might have attributed
+to him had disappeared. That face, as impenetrable and simple as
+granite, no longer bore any trace of anything but a melancholy
+depression. His whole person breathed lowliness and firmness and an
+indescribable courageous despondency.
+
+At last the mayor laid down his pen and turned half round.
+
+"Well! What is it? What is the matter, Javert?"
+
+Javert remained silent for an instant as though collecting his ideas,
+then raised his voice with a sort of sad solemnity, which did not,
+however, preclude simplicity.
+
+"This is the matter, Mr. Mayor; a culpable act has been committed."
+
+"What act?"
+
+"An inferior agent of the authorities has failed in respect, and in the
+gravest manner, towards a magistrate. I have come to bring the fact to
+your knowledge, as it is my duty to do."
+
+"Who is the agent?" asked M. Madeleine.
+
+"I," said Javert.
+
+"You?"
+
+"I."
+
+"And who is the magistrate who has reason to complain of the agent?"
+
+"You, Mr. Mayor."
+
+M. Madeleine sat erect in his arm-chair. Javert went on, with a severe
+air and his eyes still cast down.
+
+"Mr. Mayor, I have come to request you to instigate the authorities to
+dismiss me."
+
+M. Madeleine opened his mouth in amazement. Javert interrupted him:--
+
+"You will say that I might have handed in my resignation, but that does
+not suffice. Handing in one's resignation is honorable. I have failed in
+my duty; I ought to be punished; I must be turned out."
+
+And after a pause he added:--
+
+"Mr. Mayor, you were severe with me the other day, and unjustly. Be so
+to-day, with justice."
+
+"Come, now! Why?" exclaimed M. Madeleine. "What nonsense is this?
+What is the meaning of this? What culpable act have you been guilty of
+towards me? What have you done to me? What are your wrongs with regard
+to me? You accuse yourself; you wish to be superseded--"
+
+"Turned out," said Javert.
+
+"Turned out; so it be, then. That is well. I do not understand."
+
+"You shall understand, Mr. Mayor."
+
+Javert sighed from the very bottom of his chest, and resumed, still
+coldly and sadly:--
+
+"Mr. Mayor, six weeks ago, in consequence of the scene over that woman,
+I was furious, and I informed against you."
+
+"Informed against me!"
+
+"At the Prefecture of Police in Paris."
+
+M. Madeleine, who was not in the habit of laughing much oftener than
+Javert himself, burst out laughing now:--
+
+"As a mayor who had encroached on the province of the police?"
+
+"As an ex-convict."
+
+The mayor turned livid.
+
+Javert, who had not raised his eyes, went on:--
+
+"I thought it was so. I had had an idea for a long time; a resemblance;
+inquiries which you had caused to be made at Faverolles; the strength
+of your loins; the adventure with old Fauchelevant; your skill in
+marksmanship; your leg, which you drag a little;--I hardly know what
+all,--absurdities! But, at all events, I took you for a certain Jean
+Valjean."
+
+"A certain--What did you say the name was?"
+
+"Jean Valjean. He was a convict whom I was in the habit of seeing twenty
+years ago, when I was adjutant-guard of convicts at Toulon. On leaving
+the galleys, this Jean Valjean, as it appears, robbed a bishop; then he
+committed another theft, accompanied with violence, on a public highway
+on the person of a little Savoyard. He disappeared eight years ago, no
+one knows how, and he has been sought, I fancied. In short, I did this
+thing! Wrath impelled me; I denounced you at the Prefecture!"
+
+M. Madeleine, who had taken up the docket again several moments before
+this, resumed with an air of perfect indifference:--
+
+"And what reply did you receive?"
+
+"That I was mad."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, they were right."
+
+"It is lucky that you recognize the fact."
+
+"I am forced to do so, since the real Jean Valjean has been found."
+
+The sheet of paper which M. Madeleine was holding dropped from his
+hand; he raised his head, gazed fixedly at Javert, and said with his
+indescribable accent:--
+
+"Ah!"
+
+Javert continued:--
+
+"This is the way it is, Mr. Mayor. It seems that there was in the
+neighborhood near Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher an old fellow who was called
+Father Champmathieu. He was a very wretched creature. No one paid any
+attention to him. No one knows what such people subsist on. Lately, last
+autumn, Father Champmathieu was arrested for the theft of some cider
+apples from--Well, no matter, a theft had been committed, a wall scaled,
+branches of trees broken. My Champmathieu was arrested. He still had
+the branch of apple-tree in his hand. The scamp is locked up. Up to
+this point it was merely an affair of a misdemeanor. But here is where
+Providence intervened.
+
+"The jail being in a bad condition, the examining magistrate finds it
+convenient to transfer Champmathieu to Arras, where the departmental
+prison is situated. In this prison at Arras there is an ex-convict named
+Brevet, who is detained for I know not what, and who has been appointed
+turnkey of the house, because of good behavior. Mr. Mayor, no sooner had
+Champmathieu arrived than Brevet exclaims: 'Eh! Why, I know that man!
+He is a fagot![4] Take a good look at me, my good man! You are Jean
+Valjean!' 'Jean Valjean! who's Jean Valjean?' Champmathieu feigns
+astonishment. 'Don't play the innocent dodge,' says Brevet. 'You are
+Jean Valjean! You have been in the galleys of Toulon; it was twenty
+years ago; we were there together.' Champmathieu denies it. Parbleu! You
+understand. The case is investigated. The thing was well ventilated for
+me. This is what they discovered: This Champmathieu had been, thirty
+years ago, a pruner of trees in various localities, notably at
+Faverolles. There all trace of him was lost. A long time afterwards he
+was seen again in Auvergne; then in Paris, where he is said to have been
+a wheelwright, and to have had a daughter, who was a laundress; but that
+has not been proved. Now, before going to the galleys for theft, what
+was Jean Valjean? A pruner of trees. Where? At Faverolles. Another fact.
+This Valjean's Christian name was Jean, and his mother's surname was
+Mathieu. What more natural to suppose than that, on emerging from the
+galleys, he should have taken his mother's name for the purpose of
+concealing himself, and have called himself Jean Mathieu? He goes to
+Auvergne. The local pronunciation turns Jean into Chan--he is called
+Chan Mathieu. Our man offers no opposition, and behold him transformed
+into Champmathieu. You follow me, do you not? Inquiries were made at
+Faverolles. The family of Jean Valjean is no longer there. It is not
+known where they have gone. You know that among those classes a family
+often disappears. Search was made, and nothing was found. When such
+people are not mud, they are dust. And then, as the beginning of the
+story dates thirty years back, there is no longer any one at Faverolles
+who knew Jean Valjean. Inquiries were made at Toulon. Besides Brevet,
+there are only two convicts in existence who have seen Jean Valjean;
+they are Cochepaille and Chenildieu, and are sentenced for life.
+They are taken from the galleys and confronted with the pretended
+Champmathieu. They do not hesitate; he is Jean Valjean for them as well
+as for Brevet. The same age,--he is fifty-four,--the same height, the
+same air, the same man; in short, it is he. It was precisely at this
+moment that I forwarded my denunciation to the Prefecture in Paris. I
+was told that I had lost my reason, and that Jean Valjean is at Arras,
+in the power of the authorities. You can imagine whether this surprised
+me, when I thought that I had that same Jean Valjean here. I write to
+the examining judge; he sends for me; Champmathieu is conducted to me--"
+
+"Well?" interposed M. Madeleine.
+
+Javert replied, his face incorruptible, and as melancholy as ever:--
+
+"Mr. Mayor, the truth is the truth. I am sorry; but that man is Jean
+Valjean. I recognized him also."
+
+M. Madeleine resumed in, a very low voice:--
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+Javert began to laugh, with that mournful laugh which comes from
+profound conviction.
+
+"O! Sure!"
+
+He stood there thoughtfully for a moment, mechanically taking pinches of
+powdered wood for blotting ink from the wooden bowl which stood on the
+table, and he added:--
+
+"And even now that I have seen the real Jean Valjean, I do not see how I
+could have thought otherwise. I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor."
+
+Javert, as he addressed these grave and supplicating words to the man,
+who six weeks before had humiliated him in the presence of the whole
+station-house, and bade him "leave the room,"--Javert, that haughty man,
+was unconsciously full of simplicity and dignity,--M. Madeleine made no
+other reply to his prayer than the abrupt question:--
+
+"And what does this man say?"
+
+"Ah! Indeed, Mr. Mayor, it's a bad business. If he is Jean Valjean, he
+has his previous conviction against him. To climb a wall, to break a
+branch, to purloin apples, is a mischievous trick in a child; for a
+man it is a misdemeanor; for a convict it is a crime. Robbing
+and housebreaking--it is all there. It is no longer a question of
+correctional police; it is a matter for the Court of Assizes. It is no
+longer a matter of a few days in prison; it is the galleys for life. And
+then, there is the affair with the little Savoyard, who will return, I
+hope. The deuce! there is plenty to dispute in the matter, is there not?
+Yes, for any one but Jean Valjean. But Jean Valjean is a sly dog. That
+is the way I recognized him. Any other man would have felt that things
+were getting hot for him; he would struggle, he would cry out--the
+kettle sings before the fire; he would not be Jean Valjean, et
+cetera. But he has not the appearance of understanding; he says, 'I am
+Champmathieu, and I won't depart from that!' He has an astonished air,
+he pretends to be stupid; it is far better. Oh! the rogue is clever! But
+it makes no difference. The proofs are there. He has been recognized by
+four persons; the old scamp will be condemned. The case has been taken
+to the Assizes at Arras. I shall go there to give my testimony. I have
+been summoned."
+
+M. Madeleine had turned to his desk again, and taken up his docket, and
+was turning over the leaves tranquilly, reading and writing by turns,
+like a busy man. He turned to Javert:--
+
+"That will do, Javert. In truth, all these details interest me but
+little. We are wasting our time, and we have pressing business on hand.
+Javert, you will betake yourself at once to the house of the woman
+Buseaupied, who sells herbs at the corner of the Rue Saint-Saulve. You
+will tell her that she must enter her complaint against carter Pierre
+Chesnelong. The man is a brute, who came near crushing this woman and
+her child. He must be punished. You will then go to M. Charcellay,
+Rue Montre-de-Champigny. He complained that there is a gutter on the
+adjoining house which discharges rain-water on his premises, and is
+undermining the foundations of his house. After that, you will verify
+the infractions of police regulations which have been reported to me in
+the Rue Guibourg, at Widow Doris's, and Rue du Garraud-Blanc, at Madame
+Renee le Bosse's, and you will prepare documents. But I am giving you a
+great deal of work. Are you not to be absent? Did you not tell me that
+you were going to Arras on that matter in a week or ten days?"
+
+"Sooner than that, Mr. Mayor."
+
+"On what day, then?"
+
+"Why, I thought that I had said to Monsieur le Maire that the case was
+to be tried to-morrow, and that I am to set out by diligence to-night."
+
+M. Madeleine made an imperceptible movement.
+
+"And how long will the case last?"
+
+"One day, at the most. The judgment will be pronounced to-morrow evening
+at latest. But I shall not wait for the sentence, which is certain; I
+shall return here as soon as my deposition has been taken."
+
+"That is well," said M. Madeleine.
+
+And he dismissed Javert with a wave of the hand.
+
+Javert did not withdraw.
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor," said he.
+
+"What is it now?" demanded M. Madeleine.
+
+"Mr. Mayor, there is still something of which I must remind you."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"That I must be dismissed."
+
+M. Madeleine rose.
+
+"Javert, you are a man of honor, and I esteem you. You exaggerate your
+fault. Moreover, this is an offence which concerns me. Javert, you
+deserve promotion instead of degradation. I wish you to retain your
+post."
+
+Javert gazed at M. Madeleine with his candid eyes, in whose depths his
+not very enlightened but pure and rigid conscience seemed visible, and
+said in a tranquil voice:--
+
+"Mr. Mayor, I cannot grant you that."
+
+"I repeat," replied M. Madeleine, "that the matter concerns me."
+
+But Javert, heeding his own thought only, continued:--
+
+"So far as exaggeration is concerned, I am not exaggerating. This is the
+way I reason: I have suspected you unjustly. That is nothing. It is our
+right to cherish suspicion, although suspicion directed above ourselves
+is an abuse. But without proofs, in a fit of rage, with the object
+of wreaking my vengeance, I have denounced you as a convict, you, a
+respectable man, a mayor, a magistrate! That is serious, very serious. I
+have insulted authority in your person, I, an agent of the authorities!
+If one of my subordinates had done what I have done, I should have
+declared him unworthy of the service, and have expelled him. Well? Stop,
+Mr. Mayor; one word more. I have often been severe in the course of my
+life towards others. That is just. I have done well. Now, if I were not
+severe towards myself, all the justice that I have done would become
+injustice. Ought I to spare myself more than others? No! What! I should
+be good for nothing but to chastise others, and not myself! Why, I
+should be a blackguard! Those who say, 'That blackguard of a Javert!'
+would be in the right. Mr. Mayor, I do not desire that you should treat
+me kindly; your kindness roused sufficient bad blood in me when it was
+directed to others. I want none of it for myself. The kindness which
+consists in upholding a woman of the town against a citizen, the police
+agent against the mayor, the man who is down against the man who is
+up in the world, is what I call false kindness. That is the sort of
+kindness which disorganizes society. Good God! it is very easy to be
+kind; the difficulty lies in being just. Come! if you had been what I
+thought you, I should not have been kind to you, not I! You would have
+seen! Mr. Mayor, I must treat myself as I would treat any other man.
+When I have subdued malefactors, when I have proceeded with vigor
+against rascals, I have often said to myself, 'If you flinch, if I ever
+catch you in fault, you may rest at your ease!' I have flinched, I
+have caught myself in a fault. So much the worse! Come, discharged,
+cashiered, expelled! That is well. I have arms. I will till the soil; it
+makes no difference to me. Mr. Mayor, the good of the service demands an
+example. I simply require the discharge of Inspector Javert."
+
+All this was uttered in a proud, humble, despairing, yet convinced tone,
+which lent indescribable grandeur to this singular, honest man.
+
+"We shall see," said M. Madeleine.
+
+And he offered him his hand.
+
+Javert recoiled, and said in a wild voice:--
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor, but this must not be. A mayor does not offer his
+hand to a police spy."
+
+He added between his teeth:--
+
+"A police spy, yes; from the moment when I have misused the police. I am
+no more than a police spy."
+
+Then he bowed profoundly, and directed his steps towards the door.
+
+There he wheeled round, and with eyes still downcast:--
+
+"Mr. Mayor," he said, "I shall continue to serve until I am superseded."
+
+He withdrew. M. Madeleine remained thoughtfully listening to the firm,
+sure step, which died away on the pavement of the corridor.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--SISTER SIMPLICE
+
+The incidents the reader is about to peruse were not all known at M. sur
+M. But the small portion of them which became known left such a memory
+in that town that a serious gap would exist in this book if we did
+not narrate them in their most minute details. Among these details the
+reader will encounter two or three improbable circumstances, which we
+preserve out of respect for the truth.
+
+On the afternoon following the visit of Javert, M. Madeleine went to see
+Fantine according to his wont.
+
+Before entering Fantine's room, he had Sister Simplice summoned.
+
+The two nuns who performed the services of nurse in the infirmary,
+Lazariste ladies, like all sisters of charity, bore the names of Sister
+Perpetue and Sister Simplice.
+
+Sister Perpetue was an ordinary villager, a sister of charity in a
+coarse style, who had entered the service of God as one enters any other
+service. She was a nun as other women are cooks. This type is not
+so very rare. The monastic orders gladly accept this heavy peasant
+earthenware, which is easily fashioned into a Capuchin or an Ursuline.
+These rustics are utilized for the rough work of devotion. The
+transition from a drover to a Carmelite is not in the least violent;
+the one turns into the other without much effort; the fund of ignorance
+common to the village and the cloister is a preparation ready at hand,
+and places the boor at once on the same footing as the monk: a little
+more amplitude in the smock, and it becomes a frock. Sister Perpetue
+was a robust nun from Marines near Pontoise, who chattered her patois,
+droned, grumbled, sugared the potion according to the bigotry or the
+hypocrisy of the invalid, treated her patients abruptly, roughly, was
+crabbed with the dying, almost flung God in their faces, stoned their
+death agony with prayers mumbled in a rage; was bold, honest, and ruddy.
+
+Sister Simplice was white, with a waxen pallor. Beside Sister Perpetue,
+she was the taper beside the candle. Vincent de Paul has divinely traced
+the features of the Sister of Charity in these admirable words, in which
+he mingles as much freedom as servitude: "They shall have for their
+convent only the house of the sick; for cell only a hired room; for
+chapel only their parish church; for cloister only the streets of the
+town and the wards of the hospitals; for enclosure only obedience; for
+gratings only the fear of God; for veil only modesty." This ideal was
+realized in the living person of Sister Simplice: she had never been
+young, and it seemed as though she would never grow old. No one could
+have told Sister Simplice's age. She was a person--we dare not say a
+woman--who was gentle, austere, well-bred, cold, and who had never lied.
+She was so gentle that she appeared fragile; but she was more solid than
+granite. She touched the unhappy with fingers that were charmingly pure
+and fine. There was, so to speak, silence in her speech; she said just
+what was necessary, and she possessed a tone of voice which would
+have equally edified a confessional or enchanted a drawing-room. This
+delicacy accommodated itself to the serge gown, finding in this harsh
+contact a continual reminder of heaven and of God. Let us emphasize
+one detail. Never to have lied, never to have said, for any interest
+whatever, even in indifference, any single thing which was not the
+truth, the sacred truth, was Sister Simplice's distinctive trait; it was
+the accent of her virtue. She was almost renowned in the congregation
+for this imperturbable veracity. The Abbe Sicard speaks of Sister
+Simplice in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu. However pure and sincere
+we may be, we all bear upon our candor the crack of the little, innocent
+lie. She did not. Little lie, innocent lie--does such a thing exist? To
+lie is the absolute form of evil. To lie a little is not possible: he
+who lies, lies the whole lie. To lie is the very face of the demon.
+Satan has two names; he is called Satan and Lying. That is what she
+thought; and as she thought, so she did. The result was the whiteness
+which we have mentioned--a whiteness which covered even her lips and her
+eyes with radiance. Her smile was white, her glance was white. There was
+not a single spider's web, not a grain of dust, on the glass window of
+that conscience. On entering the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, she had
+taken the name of Simplice by special choice. Simplice of Sicily, as we
+know, is the saint who preferred to allow both her breasts to be torn
+off rather than to say that she had been born at Segesta when she had
+been born at Syracuse--a lie which would have saved her. This patron
+saint suited this soul.
+
+Sister Simplice, on her entrance into the order, had had two faults
+which she had gradually corrected: she had a taste for dainties, and she
+liked to receive letters. She never read anything but a book of prayers
+printed in Latin, in coarse type. She did not understand Latin, but she
+understood the book.
+
+This pious woman had conceived an affection for Fantine, probably
+feeling a latent virtue there, and she had devoted herself almost
+exclusively to her care.
+
+M. Madeleine took Sister Simplice apart and recommended Fantine to her
+in a singular tone, which the sister recalled later on.
+
+On leaving the sister, he approached Fantine.
+
+Fantine awaited M. Madeleine's appearance every day as one awaits a ray
+of warmth and joy. She said to the sisters, "I only live when Monsieur
+le Maire is here."
+
+She had a great deal of fever that day. As soon as she saw M. Madeleine
+she asked him:--
+
+"And Cosette?"
+
+He replied with a smile:--
+
+"Soon."
+
+M. Madeleine was the same as usual with Fantine. Only he remained an
+hour instead of half an hour, to Fantine's great delight. He urged every
+one repeatedly not to allow the invalid to want for anything. It was
+noticed that there was a moment when his countenance became very sombre.
+But this was explained when it became known that the doctor had bent
+down to his ear and said to him, "She is losing ground fast."
+
+Then he returned to the town-hall, and the clerk observed him
+attentively examining a road map of France which hung in his study. He
+wrote a few figures on a bit of paper with a pencil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE PERSPICACITY OF MASTER SCAUFFLAIRE
+
+From the town-hall he betook himself to the extremity of the town, to a
+Fleming named Master Scaufflaer, French Scaufflaire, who let out "horses
+and cabriolets as desired."
+
+In order to reach this Scaufflaire, the shortest way was to take the
+little-frequented street in which was situated the parsonage of the
+parish in which M. Madeleine resided. The cure was, it was said, a
+worthy, respectable, and sensible man. At the moment when M. Madeleine
+arrived in front of the parsonage there was but one passer-by in the
+street, and this person noticed this: After the mayor had passed the
+priest's house he halted, stood motionless, then turned about, and
+retraced his steps to the door of the parsonage, which had an iron
+knocker. He laid his hand quickly on the knocker and lifted it; then
+he paused again and stopped short, as though in thought, and after
+the lapse of a few seconds, instead of allowing the knocker to fall
+abruptly, he placed it gently, and resumed his way with a sort of haste
+which had not been apparent previously.
+
+M. Madeleine found Master Scaufflaire at home, engaged in stitching a
+harness over.
+
+"Master Scaufflaire," he inquired, "have you a good horse?"
+
+"Mr. Mayor," said the Fleming, "all my horses are good. What do you mean
+by a good horse?"
+
+"I mean a horse which can travel twenty leagues in a day."
+
+"The deuce!" said the Fleming. "Twenty leagues!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Hitched to a cabriolet?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And how long can he rest at the end of his journey?"
+
+"He must be able to set out again on the next day if necessary."
+
+"To traverse the same road?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The deuce! the deuce! And it is twenty leagues?"
+
+M. Madeleine drew from his pocket the paper on which he had pencilled
+some figures. He showed it to the Fleming. The figures were 5, 6, 8 1/2.
+
+"You see," he said, "total, nineteen and a half; as well say twenty
+leagues."
+
+"Mr. Mayor," returned the Fleming, "I have just what you want. My little
+white horse--you may have seen him pass occasionally; he is a small
+beast from Lower Boulonnais. He is full of fire. They wanted to make
+a saddle-horse of him at first. Bah! He reared, he kicked, he laid
+everybody flat on the ground. He was thought to be vicious, and no one
+knew what to do with him. I bought him. I harnessed him to a carriage.
+That is what he wanted, sir; he is as gentle as a girl; he goes like the
+wind. Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to
+be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. 'Draw? Yes. Carry? No.'
+We must suppose that is what he said to himself."
+
+"And he will accomplish the trip?"
+
+"Your twenty leagues all at a full trot, and in less than eight hours.
+But here are the conditions."
+
+"State them."
+
+"In the first place, you will give him half an hour's breathing spell
+midway of the road; he will eat; and some one must be by while he is
+eating to prevent the stable boy of the inn from stealing his oats; for
+I have noticed that in inns the oats are more often drunk by the stable
+men than eaten by the horses."
+
+"Some one will be by."
+
+"In the second place--is the cabriolet for Monsieur le Maire?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Does Monsieur le Maire know how to drive?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, Monsieur le Maire will travel alone and without baggage, in order
+not to overload the horse?"
+
+"Agreed."
+
+"But as Monsieur le Maire will have no one with him, he will be obliged
+to take the trouble himself of seeing that the oats are not stolen."
+
+"That is understood."
+
+"I am to have thirty francs a day. The days of rest to be paid for
+also--not a farthing less; and the beast's food to be at Monsieur le
+Maire's expense."
+
+M. Madeleine drew three napoleons from his purse and laid them on the
+table.
+
+"Here is the pay for two days in advance."
+
+"Fourthly, for such a journey a cabriolet would be too heavy, and would
+fatigue the horse. Monsieur le Maire must consent to travel in a little
+tilbury that I own."
+
+"I consent to that."
+
+"It is light, but it has no cover."
+
+"That makes no difference to me."
+
+"Has Monsieur le Maire reflected that we are in the middle of winter?"
+
+M. Madeleine did not reply. The Fleming resumed:--
+
+"That it is very cold?"
+
+M. Madeleine preserved silence.
+
+Master Scaufflaire continued:--
+
+"That it may rain?"
+
+M. Madeleine raised his head and said:--
+
+"The tilbury and the horse will be in front of my door to-morrow morning
+at half-past four o'clock."
+
+"Of course, Monsieur le Maire," replied Scaufflaire; then, scratching a
+speck in the wood of the table with his thumb-nail, he resumed with that
+careless air which the Flemings understand so well how to mingle with
+their shrewdness:--
+
+"But this is what I am thinking of now: Monsieur le Maire has not told
+me where he is going. Where is Monsieur le Maire going?"
+
+He had been thinking of nothing else since the beginning of the
+conversation, but he did not know why he had not dared to put the
+question.
+
+"Are your horse's forelegs good?" said M. Madeleine.
+
+"Yes, Monsieur le Maire. You must hold him in a little when going down
+hill. Are there many descends between here and the place whither you are
+going?"
+
+"Do not forget to be at my door at precisely half-past four o'clock
+to-morrow morning," replied M. Madeleine; and he took his departure.
+
+The Fleming remained "utterly stupid," as he himself said some time
+afterwards.
+
+The mayor had been gone two or three minutes when the door opened again;
+it was the mayor once more.
+
+He still wore the same impassive and preoccupied air.
+
+"Monsieur Scaufflaire," said he, "at what sum do you estimate the value
+of the horse and tilbury which you are to let to me,--the one bearing
+the other?"
+
+"The one dragging the other, Monsieur le Maire," said the Fleming, with
+a broad smile.
+
+"So be it. Well?"
+
+"Does Monsieur le Maire wish to purchase them or me?"
+
+"No; but I wish to guarantee you in any case. You shall give me back
+the sum at my return. At what value do you estimate your horse and
+cabriolet?"
+
+"Five hundred francs, Monsieur le Maire."
+
+"Here it is."
+
+M. Madeleine laid a bank-bill on the table, then left the room; and this
+time he did not return.
+
+Master Scaufflaire experienced a frightful regret that he had not said a
+thousand francs. Besides the horse and tilbury together were worth but a
+hundred crowns.
+
+The Fleming called his wife, and related the affair to her. "Where the
+devil could Monsieur le Maire be going?" They held counsel together.
+"He is going to Paris," said the wife. "I don't believe it," said the
+husband.
+
+M. Madeleine had forgotten the paper with the figures on it, and it lay
+on the chimney-piece. The Fleming picked it up and studied it. "Five,
+six, eight and a half? That must designate the posting relays." He
+turned to his wife:--
+
+"I have found out."
+
+"What?"
+
+"It is five leagues from here to Hesdin, six from Hesdin to Saint-Pol,
+eight and a half from Saint-Pol to Arras. He is going to Arras."
+
+Meanwhile, M. Madeleine had returned home. He had taken the longest way
+to return from Master Scaufflaire's, as though the parsonage door had
+been a temptation for him, and he had wished to avoid it. He ascended
+to his room, and there he shut himself up, which was a very simple act,
+since he liked to go to bed early. Nevertheless, the portress of the
+factory, who was, at the same time, M. Madeleine's only servant, noticed
+that the latter's light was extinguished at half-past eight, and she
+mentioned it to the cashier when he came home, adding:--
+
+"Is Monsieur le Maire ill? I thought he had a rather singular air."
+
+This cashier occupied a room situated directly under M. Madeleine's
+chamber. He paid no heed to the portress's words, but went to bed and
+to sleep. Towards midnight he woke up with a start; in his sleep he had
+heard a noise above his head. He listened; it was a footstep pacing back
+and forth, as though some one were walking in the room above him. He
+listened more attentively, and recognized M. Madeleine's step. This
+struck him as strange; usually, there was no noise in M. Madeleine's
+chamber until he rose in the morning. A moment later the cashier heard
+a noise which resembled that of a cupboard being opened, and then shut
+again; then a piece of furniture was disarranged; then a pause ensued;
+then the step began again. The cashier sat up in bed, quite awake now,
+and staring; and through his window-panes he saw the reddish gleam of a
+lighted window reflected on the opposite wall; from the direction of the
+rays, it could only come from the window of M. Madeleine's chamber. The
+reflection wavered, as though it came rather from a fire which had
+been lighted than from a candle. The shadow of the window-frame was not
+shown, which indicated that the window was wide open. The fact that this
+window was open in such cold weather was surprising. The cashier fell
+asleep again. An hour or two later he waked again. The same step was
+still passing slowly and regularly back and forth overhead.
+
+The reflection was still visible on the wall, but now it was pale and
+peaceful, like the reflection of a lamp or of a candle. The window was
+still open.
+
+This is what had taken place in M. Madeleine's room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--A TEMPEST IN A SKULL
+
+The reader has, no doubt, already divined that M. Madeleine is no other
+than Jean Valjean.
+
+We have already gazed into the depths of this conscience; the moment has
+now come when we must take another look into it. We do so not without
+emotion and trepidation. There is nothing more terrible in existence
+than this sort of contemplation. The eye of the spirit can nowhere find
+more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself
+on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more
+mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the
+sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is
+the inmost recesses of the soul.
+
+To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to
+a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would
+be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience
+is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of
+dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium
+of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions. Penetrate, at
+certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged
+in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that
+obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants,
+like those recorded in Homer, are in progress; skirmishes of dragons and
+hydras and swarms of phantoms, as in Milton; visionary circles, as in
+Dante. What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within
+him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his
+brain and the actions of his life!
+
+Alighieri one day met with a sinister-looking door, before which he
+hesitated. Here is one before us, upon whose threshold we hesitate. Let
+us enter, nevertheless.
+
+We have but little to add to what the reader already knows of what had
+happened to Jean Valjean after the adventure with Little Gervais. From
+that moment forth he was, as we have seen, a totally different man. What
+the Bishop had wished to make of him, that he carried out. It was more
+than a transformation; it was a transfiguration.
+
+He succeeded in disappearing, sold the Bishop's silver, reserving only
+the candlesticks as a souvenir, crept from town to town, traversed
+France, came to M. sur M., conceived the idea which we have mentioned,
+accomplished what we have related, succeeded in rendering himself safe
+from seizure and inaccessible, and, thenceforth, established at M. sur
+M., happy in feeling his conscience saddened by the past and the first
+half of his existence belied by the last, he lived in peace, reassured
+and hopeful, having henceforth only two thoughts,--to conceal his name
+and to sanctify his life; to escape men and to return to God.
+
+These two thoughts were so closely intertwined in his mind that
+they formed but a single one there; both were equally absorbing and
+imperative and ruled his slightest actions. In general, they conspired
+to regulate the conduct of his life; they turned him towards the gloom;
+they rendered him kindly and simple; they counselled him to the same
+things. Sometimes, however, they conflicted. In that case, as the reader
+will remember, the man whom all the country of M. sur M. called M.
+Madeleine did not hesitate to sacrifice the first to the second--his
+security to his virtue. Thus, in spite of all his reserve and all his
+prudence, he had preserved the Bishop's candlesticks, worn mourning for
+him, summoned and interrogated all the little Savoyards who passed that
+way, collected information regarding the families at Faverolles, and
+saved old Fauchelevent's life, despite the disquieting insinuations of
+Javert. It seemed, as we have already remarked, as though he thought,
+following the example of all those who have been wise, holy, and just,
+that his first duty was not towards himself.
+
+At the same time, it must be confessed, nothing just like this had yet
+presented itself.
+
+Never had the two ideas which governed the unhappy man whose sufferings
+we are narrating, engaged in so serious a struggle. He understood this
+confusedly but profoundly at the very first words pronounced by Javert,
+when the latter entered his study. At the moment when that name, which
+he had buried beneath so many layers, was so strangely articulated,
+he was struck with stupor, and as though intoxicated with the sinister
+eccentricity of his destiny; and through this stupor he felt that
+shudder which precedes great shocks. He bent like an oak at the approach
+of a storm, like a soldier at the approach of an assault. He felt
+shadows filled with thunders and lightnings descending upon his head.
+As he listened to Javert, the first thought which occurred to him was to
+go, to run and denounce himself, to take that Champmathieu out of prison
+and place himself there; this was as painful and as poignant as an
+incision in the living flesh. Then it passed away, and he said to
+himself, "We will see! We will see!" He repressed this first, generous
+instinct, and recoiled before heroism.
+
+It would be beautiful, no doubt, after the Bishop's holy words, after
+so many years of repentance and abnegation, in the midst of a penitence
+admirably begun, if this man had not flinched for an instant, even in
+the presence of so terrible a conjecture, but had continued to walk with
+the same step towards this yawning precipice, at the bottom of which
+lay heaven; that would have been beautiful; but it was not thus. We must
+render an account of the things which went on in this soul, and we can
+only tell what there was there. He was carried away, at first, by
+the instinct of self-preservation; he rallied all his ideas in haste,
+stifled his emotions, took into consideration Javert's presence, that
+great danger, postponed all decision with the firmness of terror, shook
+off thought as to what he had to do, and resumed his calmness as a
+warrior picks up his buckler.
+
+He remained in this state during the rest of the day, a whirlwind
+within, a profound tranquillity without. He took no "preservative
+measures," as they may be called. Everything was still confused, and
+jostling together in his brain. His trouble was so great that he could
+not perceive the form of a single idea distinctly, and he could have
+told nothing about himself, except that he had received a great blow.
+
+He repaired to Fantine's bed of suffering, as usual, and prolonged his
+visit, through a kindly instinct, telling himself that he must behave
+thus, and recommend her well to the sisters, in case he should be
+obliged to be absent himself. He had a vague feeling that he might be
+obliged to go to Arras; and without having the least in the world made
+up his mind to this trip, he said to himself that being, as he was,
+beyond the shadow of any suspicion, there could be nothing out of the
+way in being a witness to what was to take place, and he engaged the
+tilbury from Scaufflaire in order to be prepared in any event.
+
+He dined with a good deal of appetite.
+
+On returning to his room, he communed with himself.
+
+He examined the situation, and found it unprecedented; so unprecedented
+that in the midst of his revery he rose from his chair, moved by some
+inexplicable impulse of anxiety, and bolted his door. He feared
+lest something more should enter. He was barricading himself against
+possibilities.
+
+A moment later he extinguished his light; it embarrassed him.
+
+It seemed to him as though he might be seen.
+
+By whom?
+
+Alas! That on which he desired to close the door had already entered;
+that which he desired to blind was staring him in the face,--his
+conscience.
+
+His conscience; that is to say, God.
+
+Nevertheless, he deluded himself at first; he had a feeling of security
+and of solitude; the bolt once drawn, he thought himself impregnable;
+the candle extinguished, he felt himself invisible. Then he took
+possession of himself: he set his elbows on the table, leaned his head
+on his hand, and began to meditate in the dark.
+
+"Where do I stand? Am not I dreaming? What have I heard? Is it really
+true that I have seen that Javert, and that he spoke to me in that
+manner? Who can that Champmathieu be? So he resembles me! Is it
+possible? When I reflect that yesterday I was so tranquil, and so far
+from suspecting anything! What was I doing yesterday at this hour? What
+is there in this incident? What will the end be? What is to be done?"
+
+This was the torment in which he found himself. His brain had lost its
+power of retaining ideas; they passed like waves, and he clutched his
+brow in both hands to arrest them.
+
+Nothing but anguish extricated itself from this tumult which overwhelmed
+his will and his reason, and from which he sought to draw proof and
+resolution.
+
+His head was burning. He went to the window and threw it wide open.
+There were no stars in the sky. He returned and seated himself at the
+table.
+
+The first hour passed in this manner.
+
+Gradually, however, vague outlines began to take form and to fix
+themselves in his meditation, and he was able to catch a glimpse with
+precision of the reality,--not the whole situation, but some of
+the details. He began by recognizing the fact that, critical and
+extraordinary as was this situation, he was completely master of it.
+
+This only caused an increase of his stupor.
+
+Independently of the severe and religious aim which he had assigned to
+his actions, all that he had made up to that day had been nothing but a
+hole in which to bury his name. That which he had always feared most of
+all in his hours of self-communion, during his sleepless nights, was to
+ever hear that name pronounced; he had said to himself, that that would
+be the end of all things for him; that on the day when that name made
+its reappearance it would cause his new life to vanish from about
+him, and--who knows?--perhaps even his new soul within him, also. He
+shuddered at the very thought that this was possible. Assuredly, if any
+one had said to him at such moments that the hour would come when that
+name would ring in his ears, when the hideous words, Jean Valjean, would
+suddenly emerge from the darkness and rise in front of him, when that
+formidable light, capable of dissipating the mystery in which he had
+enveloped himself, would suddenly blaze forth above his head, and that
+that name would not menace him, that that light would but produce
+an obscurity more dense, that this rent veil would but increase the
+mystery, that this earthquake would solidify his edifice, that this
+prodigious incident would have no other result, so far as he was
+concerned, if so it seemed good to him, than that of rendering his
+existence at once clearer and more impenetrable, and that, out of his
+confrontation with the phantom of Jean Valjean, the good and worthy
+citizen Monsieur Madeleine would emerge more honored, more peaceful, and
+more respected than ever--if any one had told him that, he would have
+tossed his head and regarded the words as those of a madman. Well, all
+this was precisely what had just come to pass; all that accumulation of
+impossibilities was a fact, and God had permitted these wild fancies to
+become real things!
+
+His revery continued to grow clearer. He came more and more to an
+understanding of his position.
+
+It seemed to him that he had but just waked up from some inexplicable
+dream, and that he found himself slipping down a declivity in the middle
+of the night, erect, shivering, holding back all in vain, on the very
+brink of the abyss. He distinctly perceived in the darkness a stranger,
+a man unknown to him, whom destiny had mistaken for him, and whom she
+was thrusting into the gulf in his stead; in order that the gulf might
+close once more, it was necessary that some one, himself or that other
+man, should fall into it: he had only let things take their course.
+
+The light became complete, and he acknowledged this to himself: That
+his place was empty in the galleys; that do what he would, it was still
+awaiting him; that the theft from little Gervais had led him back to it;
+that this vacant place would await him, and draw him on until he filled
+it; that this was inevitable and fatal; and then he said to himself,
+"that, at this moment, he had a substitute; that it appeared that a
+certain Champmathieu had that ill luck, and that, as regards himself,
+being present in the galleys in the person of that Champmathieu, present
+in society under the name of M. Madeleine, he had nothing more to fear,
+provided that he did not prevent men from sealing over the head of
+that Champmathieu this stone of infamy which, like the stone of the
+sepulchre, falls once, never to rise again."
+
+All this was so strange and so violent, that there suddenly took place
+in him that indescribable movement, which no man feels more than two
+or three times in the course of his life, a sort of convulsion of the
+conscience which stirs up all that there is doubtful in the heart, which
+is composed of irony, of joy, and of despair, and which may be called an
+outburst of inward laughter.
+
+He hastily relighted his candle.
+
+"Well, what then?" he said to himself; "what am I afraid of? What is
+there in all that for me to think about? I am safe; all is over. I had
+but one partly open door through which my past might invade my life,
+and behold that door is walled up forever! That Javert, who has been
+annoying me so long; that terrible instinct which seemed to have divined
+me, which had divined me--good God! and which followed me everywhere;
+that frightful hunting-dog, always making a point at me, is thrown
+off the scent, engaged elsewhere, absolutely turned from the trail:
+henceforth he is satisfied; he will leave me in peace; he has his Jean
+Valjean. Who knows? it is even probable that he will wish to leave town!
+And all this has been brought about without any aid from me, and I count
+for nothing in it! Ah! but where is the misfortune in this? Upon my
+honor, people would think, to see me, that some catastrophe had happened
+to me! After all, if it does bring harm to some one, that is not my
+fault in the least: it is Providence which has done it all; it is
+because it wishes it so to be, evidently. Have I the right to disarrange
+what it has arranged? What do I ask now? Why should I meddle? It does
+not concern me; what! I am not satisfied: but what more do I want? The
+goal to which I have aspired for so many years, the dream of my nights,
+the object of my prayers to Heaven,--security,--I have now attained; it
+is God who wills it; I can do nothing against the will of God, and why
+does God will it? In order that I may continue what I have begun, that I
+may do good, that I may one day be a grand and encouraging example, that
+it may be said at last, that a little happiness has been attached to
+the penance which I have undergone, and to that virtue to which I have
+returned. Really, I do not understand why I was afraid, a little while
+ago, to enter the house of that good cure, and to ask his advice; this
+is evidently what he would have said to me: It is settled; let things
+take their course; let the good God do as he likes!"
+
+Thus did he address himself in the depths of his own conscience, bending
+over what may be called his own abyss; he rose from his chair, and began
+to pace the room: "Come," said he, "let us think no more about it; my
+resolve is taken!" but he felt no joy.
+
+Quite the reverse.
+
+One can no more prevent thought from recurring to an idea than one can
+the sea from returning to the shore: the sailor calls it the tide; the
+guilty man calls it remorse; God upheaves the soul as he does the ocean.
+
+After the expiration of a few moments, do what he would, he resumed the
+gloomy dialogue in which it was he who spoke and he who listened, saying
+that which he would have preferred to ignore, and listened to that which
+he would have preferred not to hear, yielding to that mysterious power
+which said to him: "Think!" as it said to another condemned man, two
+thousand years ago, "March on!"
+
+Before proceeding further, and in order to make ourselves fully
+understood, let us insist upon one necessary observation.
+
+It is certain that people do talk to themselves; there is no living
+being who has not done it. It may even be said that the word is never
+a more magnificent mystery than when it goes from thought to conscience
+within a man, and when it returns from conscience to thought; it is in
+this sense only that the words so often employed in this chapter, he
+said, he exclaimed, must be understood; one speaks to one's self, talks
+to one's self, exclaims to one's self without breaking the external
+silence; there is a great tumult; everything about us talks except the
+mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less realities because
+they are not visible and palpable.
+
+So he asked himself where he stood. He interrogated himself upon that
+"settled resolve." He confessed to himself that all that he had just
+arranged in his mind was monstrous, that "to let things take their
+course, to let the good God do as he liked," was simply horrible; to
+allow this error of fate and of men to be carried out, not to hinder it,
+to lend himself to it through his silence, to do nothing, in short,
+was to do everything! that this was hypocritical baseness in the last
+degree! that it was a base, cowardly, sneaking, abject, hideous crime!
+
+For the first time in eight years, the wretched man had just tasted the
+bitter savor of an evil thought and of an evil action.
+
+He spit it out with disgust.
+
+He continued to question himself. He asked himself severely what he had
+meant by this, "My object is attained!" He declared to himself that
+his life really had an object; but what object? To conceal his name?
+To deceive the police? Was it for so petty a thing that he had done all
+that he had done? Had he not another and a grand object, which was the
+true one--to save, not his person, but his soul; to become honest and
+good once more; to be a just man? Was it not that above all, that alone,
+which he had always desired, which the Bishop had enjoined upon him--to
+shut the door on his past? But he was not shutting it! great God! he was
+re-opening it by committing an infamous action! He was becoming a thief
+once more, and the most odious of thieves! He was robbing another of
+his existence, his life, his peace, his place in the sunshine. He was
+becoming an assassin. He was murdering, morally murdering, a wretched
+man. He was inflicting on him that frightful living death, that death
+beneath the open sky, which is called the galleys. On the other hand,
+to surrender himself to save that man, struck down with so melancholy
+an error, to resume his own name, to become once more, out of duty, the
+convict Jean Valjean, that was, in truth, to achieve his resurrection,
+and to close forever that hell whence he had just emerged; to fall back
+there in appearance was to escape from it in reality. This must be
+done! He had done nothing if he did not do all this; his whole life was
+useless; all his penitence was wasted. There was no longer any need of
+saying, "What is the use?" He felt that the Bishop was there, that the
+Bishop was present all the more because he was dead, that the Bishop
+was gazing fixedly at him, that henceforth Mayor Madeleine, with all his
+virtues, would be abominable to him, and that the convict Jean Valjean
+would be pure and admirable in his sight; that men beheld his mask, but
+that the Bishop saw his face; that men saw his life, but that the Bishop
+beheld his conscience. So he must go to Arras, deliver the false Jean
+Valjean, and denounce the real one. Alas! that was the greatest of
+sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the last step to take; but
+it must be done. Sad fate! he would enter into sanctity only in the eyes
+of God when he returned to infamy in the eyes of men.
+
+"Well," said he, "let us decide upon this; let us do our duty; let us
+save this man." He uttered these words aloud, without perceiving that he
+was speaking aloud.
+
+He took his books, verified them, and put them in order. He flung in
+the fire a bundle of bills which he had against petty and embarrassed
+tradesmen. He wrote and sealed a letter, and on the envelope it might
+have been read, had there been any one in his chamber at the moment,
+To Monsieur Laffitte, Banker, Rue d'Artois, Paris. He drew from his
+secretary a pocket-book which contained several bank-notes and the
+passport of which he had made use that same year when he went to the
+elections.
+
+Any one who had seen him during the execution of these various acts,
+into which there entered such grave thought, would have had no suspicion
+of what was going on within him. Only occasionally did his lips move; at
+other times he raised his head and fixed his gaze upon some point of the
+wall, as though there existed at that point something which he wished to
+elucidate or interrogate.
+
+When he had finished the letter to M. Laffitte, he put it into his
+pocket, together with the pocket-book, and began his walk once more.
+
+His revery had not swerved from its course. He continued to see his duty
+clearly, written in luminous letters, which flamed before his eyes and
+changed its place as he altered the direction of his glance:--
+
+"Go! Tell your name! Denounce yourself!"
+
+In the same way he beheld, as though they had passed before him in
+visible forms, the two ideas which had, up to that time, formed
+the double rule of his soul,--the concealment of his name, the
+sanctification of his life. For the first time they appeared to him as
+absolutely distinct, and he perceived the distance which separated them.
+He recognized the fact that one of these ideas was, necessarily, good,
+while the other might become bad; that the first was self-devotion, and
+that the other was personality; that the one said, my neighbor, and that
+the other said, myself; that one emanated from the light, and the other
+from darkness.
+
+They were antagonistic. He saw them in conflict. In proportion as
+he meditated, they grew before the eyes of his spirit. They had now
+attained colossal statures, and it seemed to him that he beheld within
+himself, in that infinity of which we were recently speaking, in the
+midst of the darkness and the lights, a goddess and a giant contending.
+
+He was filled with terror; but it seemed to him that the good thought
+was getting the upper hand.
+
+He felt that he was on the brink of the second decisive crisis of his
+conscience and of his destiny; that the Bishop had marked the first
+phase of his new life, and that Champmathieu marked the second. After
+the grand crisis, the grand test.
+
+But the fever, allayed for an instant, gradually resumed possession
+of him. A thousand thoughts traversed his mind, but they continued to
+fortify him in his resolution.
+
+One moment he said to himself that he was, perhaps, taking the matter
+too keenly; that, after all, this Champmathieu was not interesting, and
+that he had actually been guilty of theft.
+
+He answered himself: "If this man has, indeed, stolen a few apples, that
+means a month in prison. It is a long way from that to the galleys. And
+who knows? Did he steal? Has it been proved? The name of Jean Valjean
+overwhelms him, and seems to dispense with proofs. Do not the attorneys
+for the Crown always proceed in this manner? He is supposed to be a
+thief because he is known to be a convict."
+
+In another instant the thought had occurred to him that, when he
+denounced himself, the heroism of his deed might, perhaps, be taken into
+consideration, and his honest life for the last seven years, and what he
+had done for the district, and that they would have mercy on him.
+
+But this supposition vanished very quickly, and he smiled bitterly as he
+remembered that the theft of the forty sous from little Gervais put him
+in the position of a man guilty of a second offence after conviction,
+that this affair would certainly come up, and, according to the precise
+terms of the law, would render him liable to penal servitude for life.
+
+He turned aside from all illusions, detached himself more and more from
+earth, and sought strength and consolation elsewhere. He told himself
+that he must do his duty; that perhaps he should not be more unhappy
+after doing his duty than after having avoided it; that if he allowed
+things to take their own course, if he remained at M. sur M., his
+consideration, his good name, his good works, the deference and
+veneration paid to him, his charity, his wealth, his popularity, his
+virtue, would be seasoned with a crime. And what would be the taste of
+all these holy things when bound up with this hideous thing? while, if
+he accomplished his sacrifice, a celestial idea would be mingled with
+the galleys, the post, the iron necklet, the green cap, unceasing toil,
+and pitiless shame.
+
+At length he told himself that it must be so, that his destiny was thus
+allotted, that he had not authority to alter the arrangements made on
+high, that, in any case, he must make his choice: virtue without and
+abomination within, or holiness within and infamy without.
+
+The stirring up of these lugubrious ideas did not cause his courage to
+fail, but his brain grow weary. He began to think of other things, of
+indifferent matters, in spite of himself.
+
+The veins in his temples throbbed violently; he still paced to and fro;
+midnight sounded first from the parish church, then from the town-hall;
+he counted the twelve strokes of the two clocks, and compared the sounds
+of the two bells; he recalled in this connection the fact that, a few
+days previously, he had seen in an ironmonger's shop an ancient clock
+for sale, upon which was written the name, Antoine-Albin de Romainville.
+
+He was cold; he lighted a small fire; it did not occur to him to close
+the window.
+
+In the meantime he had relapsed into his stupor; he was obliged to make
+a tolerably vigorous effort to recall what had been the subject of his
+thoughts before midnight had struck; he finally succeeded in doing this.
+
+"Ah! yes," he said to himself, "I had resolved to inform against
+myself."
+
+And then, all of a sudden, he thought of Fantine.
+
+"Hold!" said he, "and what about that poor woman?"
+
+Here a fresh crisis declared itself.
+
+Fantine, by appearing thus abruptly in his revery, produced the effect
+of an unexpected ray of light; it seemed to him as though everything
+about him were undergoing a change of aspect: he exclaimed:--
+
+"Ah! but I have hitherto considered no one but myself; it is proper for
+me to hold my tongue or to denounce myself, to conceal my person or
+to save my soul, to be a despicable and respected magistrate, or an
+infamous and venerable convict; it is I, it is always I and nothing
+but I: but, good God! all this is egotism; these are diverse forms
+of egotism, but it is egotism all the same. What if I were to think a
+little about others? The highest holiness is to think of others; come,
+let us examine the matter. The _I_ excepted, the _I_ effaced, the _I_
+forgotten, what would be the result of all this? What if I denounce
+myself? I am arrested; this Champmathieu is released; I am put back in
+the galleys; that is well--and what then? What is going on here? Ah!
+here is a country, a town, here are factories, an industry, workers,
+both men and women, aged grandsires, children, poor people! All this I
+have created; all these I provide with their living; everywhere where
+there is a smoking chimney, it is I who have placed the brand on the
+hearth and meat in the pot; I have created ease, circulation, credit;
+before me there was nothing; I have elevated, vivified, informed with
+life, fecundated, stimulated, enriched the whole country-side; lacking
+me, the soul is lacking; I take myself off, everything dies: and this
+woman, who has suffered so much, who possesses so many merits in spite
+of her fall; the cause of all whose misery I have unwittingly been! And
+that child whom I meant to go in search of, whom I have promised to her
+mother; do I not also owe something to this woman, in reparation for
+the evil which I have done her? If I disappear, what happens? The mother
+dies; the child becomes what it can; that is what will take place, if
+I denounce myself. If I do not denounce myself? come, let us see how it
+will be if I do not denounce myself."
+
+After putting this question to himself, he paused; he seemed to undergo
+a momentary hesitation and trepidation; but it did not last long, and he
+answered himself calmly:--
+
+"Well, this man is going to the galleys; it is true, but what the deuce!
+he has stolen! There is no use in my saying that he has not been guilty
+of theft, for he has! I remain here; I go on: in ten years I shall have
+made ten millions; I scatter them over the country; I have nothing of
+my own; what is that to me? It is not for myself that I am doing it;
+the prosperity of all goes on augmenting; industries are aroused and
+animated; factories and shops are multiplied; families, a hundred
+families, a thousand families, are happy; the district becomes
+populated; villages spring up where there were only farms before;
+farms rise where there was nothing; wretchedness disappears, and
+with wretchedness debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder; all vices
+disappear, all crimes: and this poor mother rears her child; and behold
+a whole country rich and honest! Ah! I was a fool! I was absurd!
+what was that I was saying about denouncing myself? I really must pay
+attention and not be precipitate about anything. What! because it would
+have pleased me to play the grand and generous; this is melodrama, after
+all; because I should have thought of no one but myself, the idea! for
+the sake of saving from a punishment, a trifle exaggerated, perhaps,
+but just at bottom, no one knows whom, a thief, a good-for-nothing,
+evidently, a whole country-side must perish! a poor woman must die in
+the hospital! a poor little girl must die in the street! like dogs; ah,
+this is abominable! And without the mother even having seen her child
+once more, almost without the child's having known her mother; and
+all that for the sake of an old wretch of an apple-thief who, most
+assuredly, has deserved the galleys for something else, if not for
+that; fine scruples, indeed, which save a guilty man and sacrifice the
+innocent, which save an old vagabond who has only a few years to live at
+most, and who will not be more unhappy in the galleys than in his hovel,
+and which sacrifice a whole population, mothers, wives, children. This
+poor little Cosette who has no one in the world but me, and who is, no
+doubt, blue with cold at this moment in the den of those Thenardiers;
+those peoples are rascals; and I was going to neglect my duty towards
+all these poor creatures; and I was going off to denounce myself; and I
+was about to commit that unspeakable folly! Let us put it at the worst:
+suppose that there is a wrong action on my part in this, and that my
+conscience will reproach me for it some day, to accept, for the good of
+others, these reproaches which weigh only on myself; this evil action
+which compromises my soul alone; in that lies self-sacrifice; in that
+alone there is virtue."
+
+He rose and resumed his march; this time, he seemed to be content.
+
+Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are
+found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him, that, after
+having descended into these depths, after having long groped among the
+darkest of these shadows, he had at last found one of these diamonds,
+one of these truths, and that he now held it in his hand, and he was
+dazzled as he gazed upon it.
+
+"Yes," he thought, "this is right; I am on the right road; I have the
+solution; I must end by holding fast to something; my resolve is taken;
+let things take their course; let us no longer vacillate; let us no
+longer hang back; this is for the interest of all, not for my own; I am
+Madeleine, and Madeleine I remain. Woe to the man who is Jean Valjean!
+I am no longer he; I do not know that man; I no longer know anything; it
+turns out that some one is Jean Valjean at the present moment; let him
+look out for himself; that does not concern me; it is a fatal name which
+was floating abroad in the night; if it halts and descends on a head, so
+much the worse for that head."
+
+He looked into the little mirror which hung above his chimney-piece, and
+said:--
+
+"Hold! it has relieved me to come to a decision; I am quite another man
+now."
+
+He proceeded a few paces further, then he stopped short.
+
+"Come!" he said, "I must not flinch before any of the consequences of
+the resolution which I have once adopted; there are still threads which
+attach me to that Jean Valjean; they must be broken; in this very room
+there are objects which would betray me, dumb things which would bear
+witness against me; it is settled; all these things must disappear."
+
+He fumbled in his pocket, drew out his purse, opened it, and took out a
+small key; he inserted the key in a lock whose aperture could hardly
+be seen, so hidden was it in the most sombre tones of the design which
+covered the wall-paper; a secret receptacle opened, a sort of
+false cupboard constructed in the angle between the wall and the
+chimney-piece; in this hiding-place there were some rags--a blue linen
+blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old knapsack, and a huge thorn
+cudgel shod with iron at both ends. Those who had seen Jean Valjean at
+the epoch when he passed through D----in October, 1815, could easily
+have recognized all the pieces of this miserable outfit.
+
+He had preserved them as he had preserved the silver candlesticks, in
+order to remind himself continually of his starting-point, but he
+had concealed all that came from the galleys, and he had allowed the
+candlesticks which came from the Bishop to be seen.
+
+He cast a furtive glance towards the door, as though he feared that it
+would open in spite of the bolt which fastened it; then, with a quick
+and abrupt movement, he took the whole in his arms at once, without
+bestowing so much as a glance on the things which he had so religiously
+and so perilously preserved for so many years, and flung them all, rags,
+cudgel, knapsack, into the fire.
+
+[Illustration: Candlesticks Into the Fire 1b7-3-into-the-fire]
+
+He closed the false cupboard again, and with redoubled precautions,
+henceforth unnecessary, since it was now empty, he concealed the door
+behind a heavy piece of furniture, which he pushed in front of it.
+
+After the lapse of a few seconds, the room and the opposite wall were
+lighted up with a fierce, red, tremulous glow. Everything was on fire;
+the thorn cudgel snapped and threw out sparks to the middle of the
+chamber.
+
+As the knapsack was consumed, together with the hideous rags which it
+contained, it revealed something which sparkled in the ashes. By bending
+over, one could have readily recognized a coin,--no doubt the forty-sou
+piece stolen from the little Savoyard.
+
+He did not look at the fire, but paced back and forth with the same
+step.
+
+All at once his eye fell on the two silver candlesticks, which shone
+vaguely on the chimney-piece, through the glow.
+
+"Hold!" he thought; "the whole of Jean Valjean is still in them. They
+must be destroyed also."
+
+He seized the two candlesticks.
+
+There was still fire enough to allow of their being put out of shape,
+and converted into a sort of unrecognizable bar of metal.
+
+He bent over the hearth and warmed himself for a moment. He felt a sense
+of real comfort. "How good warmth is!" said he.
+
+He stirred the live coals with one of the candlesticks.
+
+A minute more, and they were both in the fire.
+
+At that moment it seemed to him that he heard a voice within him
+shouting: "Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!"
+
+His hair rose upright: he became like a man who is listening to some
+terrible thing.
+
+"Yes, that's it! finish!" said the voice. "Complete what you are about!
+Destroy these candlesticks! Annihilate this souvenir! Forget the Bishop!
+Forget everything! Destroy this Champmathieu, do! That is right! Applaud
+yourself! So it is settled, resolved, fixed, agreed: here is an old man
+who does not know what is wanted of him, who has, perhaps, done nothing,
+an innocent man, whose whole misfortune lies in your name, upon whom
+your name weighs like a crime, who is about to be taken for you, who
+will be condemned, who will finish his days in abjectness and horror.
+That is good! Be an honest man yourself; remain Monsieur le Maire;
+remain honorable and honored; enrich the town; nourish the indigent;
+rear the orphan; live happy, virtuous, and admired; and, during this
+time, while you are here in the midst of joy and light, there will be a
+man who will wear your red blouse, who will bear your name in ignominy,
+and who will drag your chain in the galleys. Yes, it is well arranged
+thus. Ah, wretch!"
+
+The perspiration streamed from his brow. He fixed a haggard eye on the
+candlesticks. But that within him which had spoken had not finished. The
+voice continued:--
+
+"Jean Valjean, there will be around you many voices, which will make a
+great noise, which will talk very loud, and which will bless you, and
+only one which no one will hear, and which will curse you in the dark.
+Well! listen, infamous man! All those benedictions will fall back before
+they reach heaven, and only the malediction will ascend to God."
+
+This voice, feeble at first, and which had proceeded from the most
+obscure depths of his conscience, had gradually become startling and
+formidable, and he now heard it in his very ear. It seemed to him that
+it had detached itself from him, and that it was now speaking outside
+of him. He thought that he heard the last words so distinctly, that he
+glanced around the room in a sort of terror.
+
+"Is there any one here?" he demanded aloud, in utter bewilderment.
+
+Then he resumed, with a laugh which resembled that of an idiot:--
+
+"How stupid I am! There can be no one!"
+
+There was some one; but the person who was there was of those whom the
+human eye cannot see.
+
+He placed the candlesticks on the chimney-piece.
+
+Then he resumed his monotonous and lugubrious tramp, which troubled the
+dreams of the sleeping man beneath him, and awoke him with a start.
+
+This tramping to and fro soothed and at the same time intoxicated him.
+It sometimes seems, on supreme occasions, as though people moved about
+for the purpose of asking advice of everything that they may encounter
+by change of place. After the lapse of a few minutes he no longer knew
+his position.
+
+He now recoiled in equal terror before both the resolutions at which he
+had arrived in turn. The two ideas which counselled him appeared to him
+equally fatal. What a fatality! What conjunction that that Champmathieu
+should have been taken for him; to be overwhelmed by precisely the means
+which Providence seemed to have employed, at first, to strengthen his
+position!
+
+There was a moment when he reflected on the future. Denounce himself,
+great God! Deliver himself up! With immense despair he faced all that
+he should be obliged to leave, all that he should be obliged to take up
+once more. He should have to bid farewell to that existence which was so
+good, so pure, so radiant, to the respect of all, to honor, to liberty.
+He should never more stroll in the fields; he should never more hear the
+birds sing in the month of May; he should never more bestow alms on the
+little children; he should never more experience the sweetness of having
+glances of gratitude and love fixed upon him; he should quit that house
+which he had built, that little chamber! Everything seemed charming to
+him at that moment. Never again should he read those books; never more
+should he write on that little table of white wood; his old portress,
+the only servant whom he kept, would never more bring him his coffee
+in the morning. Great God! instead of that, the convict gang, the iron
+necklet, the red waistcoat, the chain on his ankle, fatigue, the cell,
+the camp bed all those horrors which he knew so well! At his age,
+after having been what he was! If he were only young again! but to
+be addressed in his old age as "thou" by any one who pleased; to
+be searched by the convict-guard; to receive the galley-sergeant's
+cudgellings; to wear iron-bound shoes on his bare feet; to have to
+stretch out his leg night and morning to the hammer of the roundsman who
+visits the gang; to submit to the curiosity of strangers, who would be
+told: "That man yonder is the famous Jean Valjean, who was mayor of
+M. sur M."; and at night, dripping with perspiration, overwhelmed with
+lassitude, their green caps drawn over their eyes, to remount, two by
+two, the ladder staircase of the galleys beneath the sergeant's whip.
+Oh, what misery! Can destiny, then, be as malicious as an intelligent
+being, and become as monstrous as the human heart?
+
+And do what he would, he always fell back upon the heartrending dilemma
+which lay at the foundation of his revery: "Should he remain in paradise
+and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel?"
+
+What was to be done? Great God! what was to be done?
+
+The torment from which he had escaped with so much difficulty was
+unchained afresh within him. His ideas began to grow confused once
+more; they assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is
+peculiar to despair. The name of Romainville recurred incessantly to his
+mind, with the two verses of a song which he had heard in the past.
+He thought that Romainville was a little grove near Paris, where young
+lovers go to pluck lilacs in the month of April.
+
+He wavered outwardly as well as inwardly. He walked like a little child
+who is permitted to toddle alone.
+
+At intervals, as he combated his lassitude, he made an effort to recover
+the mastery of his mind. He tried to put to himself, for the last time,
+and definitely, the problem over which he had, in a manner, fallen
+prostrate with fatigue: Ought he to denounce himself? Ought he to hold
+his peace? He could not manage to see anything distinctly. The vague
+aspects of all the courses of reasoning which had been sketched out by
+his meditations quivered and vanished, one after the other, into smoke.
+He only felt that, to whatever course of action he made up his mind,
+something in him must die, and that of necessity, and without his being
+able to escape the fact; that he was entering a sepulchre on the
+right hand as much as on the left; that he was passing through a death
+agony,--the agony of his happiness, or the agony of his virtue.
+
+Alas! all his resolution had again taken possession of him. He was no
+further advanced than at the beginning.
+
+Thus did this unhappy soul struggle in its anguish. Eighteen hundred
+years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being in whom are
+summed up all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity had also
+long thrust aside with his hand, while the olive-trees quivered in
+the wild wind of the infinite, the terrible cup which appeared to Him
+dripping with darkness and overflowing with shadows in the depths all
+studded with stars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--FORMS ASSUMED BY SUFFERING DURING SLEEP
+
+Three o'clock in the morning had just struck, and he had been walking
+thus for five hours, almost uninterruptedly, when he at length allowed
+himself to drop into his chair.
+
+There he fell asleep and had a dream.
+
+This dream, like the majority of dreams, bore no relation to the
+situation, except by its painful and heart-rending character, but it
+made an impression on him. This nightmare struck him so forcibly that he
+wrote it down later on. It is one of the papers in his own handwriting
+which he has bequeathed to us. We think that we have here reproduced the
+thing in strict accordance with the text.
+
+Of whatever nature this dream may be, the history of this night would
+be incomplete if we were to omit it: it is the gloomy adventure of an
+ailing soul.
+
+Here it is. On the envelope we find this line inscribed, "The Dream I
+had that Night."
+
+"I was in a plain; a vast, gloomy plain, where there was no grass. It
+did not seem to me to be daylight nor yet night.
+
+"I was walking with my brother, the brother of my childish years,
+the brother of whom, I must say, I never think, and whom I now hardly
+remember.
+
+"We were conversing and we met some passers-by. We were talking of a
+neighbor of ours in former days, who had always worked with her window
+open from the time when she came to live on the street. As we talked we
+felt cold because of that open window.
+
+"There were no trees in the plain. We saw a man passing close to us. He
+was entirely nude, of the hue of ashes, and mounted on a horse which was
+earth color. The man had no hair; we could see his skull and the veins
+on it. In his hand he held a switch which was as supple as a vine-shoot
+and as heavy as iron. This horseman passed and said nothing to us.
+
+"My brother said to me, 'Let us take to the hollow road.'
+
+"There existed a hollow way wherein one saw neither a single shrub nor
+a spear of moss. Everything was dirt-colored, even the sky. After
+proceeding a few paces, I received no reply when I spoke: I perceived
+that my brother was no longer with me.
+
+"I entered a village which I espied. I reflected that it must be
+Romainville. (Why Romainville?)[5]
+
+"The first street that I entered was deserted. I entered a second
+street. Behind the angle formed by the two streets, a man was standing
+erect against the wall. I said to this Man:--
+
+"'What country is this? Where am I?' The man made no reply. I saw the
+door of a house open, and I entered.
+
+"The first chamber was deserted. I entered the second. Behind the door
+of this chamber a man was standing erect against the wall. I inquired of
+this man, 'Whose house is this? Where am I?' The man replied not.
+
+"The house had a garden. I quitted the house and entered the garden.
+The garden was deserted. Behind the first tree I found a man standing
+upright. I said to this man, 'What garden is this? Where am I?' The man
+did not answer.
+
+"I strolled into the village, and perceived that it was a town. All
+the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. Not a single living
+being was passing in the streets, walking through the chambers or
+strolling in the gardens. But behind each angle of the walls, behind
+each door, behind each tree, stood a silent man. Only one was to be seen
+at a time. These men watched me pass.
+
+"I left the town and began to ramble about the fields.
+
+"After the lapse of some time I turned back and saw a great crowd coming
+up behind me. I recognized all the men whom I had seen in that town.
+They had strange heads. They did not seem to be in a hurry, yet they
+walked faster than I did. They made no noise as they walked. In an
+instant this crowd had overtaken and surrounded me. The faces of these
+men were earthen in hue.
+
+"Then the first one whom I had seen and questioned on entering the town
+said to me:--
+
+"'Whither are you going! Do you not know that you have been dead this
+long time?'
+
+"I opened my mouth to reply, and I perceived that there was no one near
+me."
+
+
+He woke. He was icy cold. A wind which was chill like the breeze of dawn
+was rattling the leaves of the window, which had been left open on their
+hinges. The fire was out. The candle was nearing its end. It was still
+black night.
+
+He rose, he went to the window. There were no stars in the sky even yet.
+
+From his window the yard of the house and the street were visible. A
+sharp, harsh noise, which made him drop his eyes, resounded from the
+earth.
+
+Below him he perceived two red stars, whose rays lengthened and
+shortened in a singular manner through the darkness.
+
+As his thoughts were still half immersed in the mists of sleep, "Hold!"
+said he, "there are no stars in the sky. They are on earth now."
+
+But this confusion vanished; a second sound similar to the first roused
+him thoroughly; he looked and recognized the fact that these two stars
+were the lanterns of a carriage. By the light which they cast he was
+able to distinguish the form of this vehicle. It was a tilbury harnessed
+to a small white horse. The noise which he had heard was the trampling
+of the horse's hoofs on the pavement.
+
+"What vehicle is this?" he said to himself. "Who is coming here so early
+in the morning?"
+
+At that moment there came a light tap on the door of his chamber.
+
+He shuddered from head to foot, and cried in a terrible voice:--
+
+"Who is there?"
+
+Some one said:--
+
+"I, Monsieur le Maire."
+
+He recognized the voice of the old woman who was his portress.
+
+"Well!" he replied, "what is it?"
+
+"Monsieur le Maire, it is just five o'clock in the morning."
+
+"What is that to me?"
+
+"The cabriolet is here, Monsieur le Maire."
+
+"What cabriolet?"
+
+"The tilbury."
+
+"What tilbury?"
+
+"Did not Monsieur le Maire order a tilbury?"
+
+"No," said he.
+
+"The coachman says that he has come for Monsieur le Maire."
+
+"What coachman?"
+
+"M. Scaufflaire's coachman."
+
+"M. Scaufflaire?"
+
+That name sent a shudder over him, as though a flash of lightning had
+passed in front of his face.
+
+"Ah! yes," he resumed; "M. Scaufflaire!"
+
+If the old woman could have seen him at that moment, she would have been
+frightened.
+
+A tolerably long silence ensued. He examined the flame of the candle
+with a stupid air, and from around the wick he took some of the burning
+wax, which he rolled between his fingers. The old woman waited for him.
+She even ventured to uplift her voice once more:--
+
+"What am I to say, Monsieur le Maire?"
+
+"Say that it is well, and that I am coming down."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--HINDRANCES
+
+The posting service from Arras to M. sur M. was still operated at this
+period by small mail-wagons of the time of the Empire. These mail-wagons
+were two-wheeled cabriolets, upholstered inside with fawn-colored
+leather, hung on springs, and having but two seats, one for the postboy,
+the other for the traveller. The wheels were armed with those long,
+offensive axles which keep other vehicles at a distance, and which
+may still be seen on the road in Germany. The despatch box, an immense
+oblong coffer, was placed behind the vehicle and formed a part of it.
+This coffer was painted black, and the cabriolet yellow.
+
+These vehicles, which have no counterparts nowadays, had something
+distorted and hunchbacked about them; and when one saw them passing in
+the distance, and climbing up some road to the horizon, they resembled
+the insects which are called, I think, termites, and which, though with
+but little corselet, drag a great train behind them. But they travelled
+at a very rapid rate. The post-wagon which set out from Arras at one
+o'clock every night, after the mail from Paris had passed, arrived at M.
+sur M. a little before five o'clock in the morning.
+
+That night the wagon which was descending to M. sur M. by the Hesdin
+road, collided at the corner of a street, just as it was entering the
+town, with a little tilbury harnessed to a white horse, which was going
+in the opposite direction, and in which there was but one person, a man
+enveloped in a mantle. The wheel of the tilbury received quite a violent
+shock. The postman shouted to the man to stop, but the traveller paid no
+heed and pursued his road at full gallop.
+
+"That man is in a devilish hurry!" said the postman.
+
+The man thus hastening on was the one whom we have just seen struggling
+in convulsions which are certainly deserving of pity.
+
+Whither was he going? He could not have told. Why was he hastening?
+He did not know. He was driving at random, straight ahead. Whither?
+To Arras, no doubt; but he might have been going elsewhere as well.
+At times he was conscious of it, and he shuddered. He plunged into the
+night as into a gulf. Something urged him forward; something drew him
+on. No one could have told what was taking place within him; every one
+will understand it. What man is there who has not entered, at least once
+in his life, into that obscure cavern of the unknown?
+
+However, he had resolved on nothing, decided nothing, formed no plan,
+done nothing. None of the actions of his conscience had been decisive.
+He was, more than ever, as he had been at the first moment.
+
+Why was he going to Arras?
+
+He repeated what he had already said to himself when he had hired
+Scaufflaire's cabriolet: that, whatever the result was to be, there was
+no reason why he should not see with his own eyes, and judge of matters
+for himself; that this was even prudent; that he must know what took
+place; that no decision could be arrived at without having observed and
+scrutinized; that one made mountains out of everything from a distance;
+that, at any rate, when he should have seen that Champmathieu, some
+wretch, his conscience would probably be greatly relieved to allow him
+to go to the galleys in his stead; that Javert would indeed be there;
+and that Brevet, that Chenildieu, that Cochepaille, old convicts who
+had known him; but they certainly would not recognize him;--bah! what an
+idea! that Javert was a hundred leagues from suspecting the truth; that
+all conjectures and all suppositions were fixed on Champmathieu, and
+that there is nothing so headstrong as suppositions and conjectures;
+that accordingly there was no danger.
+
+That it was, no doubt, a dark moment, but that he should emerge from it;
+that, after all, he held his destiny, however bad it might be, in his
+own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to this thought.
+
+At bottom, to tell the whole truth, he would have preferred not to go to
+Arras.
+
+Nevertheless, he was going thither.
+
+As he meditated, he whipped up his horse, which was proceeding at that
+fine, regular, and even trot which accomplishes two leagues and a half
+an hour.
+
+In proportion as the cabriolet advanced, he felt something within him
+draw back.
+
+At daybreak he was in the open country; the town of M. sur M. lay far
+behind him. He watched the horizon grow white; he stared at all the
+chilly figures of a winter's dawn as they passed before his eyes,
+but without seeing them. The morning has its spectres as well as the
+evening. He did not see them; but without his being aware of it, and by
+means of a sort of penetration which was almost physical, these black
+silhouettes of trees and of hills added some gloomy and sinister quality
+to the violent state of his soul.
+
+Each time that he passed one of those isolated dwellings which sometimes
+border on the highway, he said to himself, "And yet there are people
+there within who are sleeping!"
+
+The trot of the horse, the bells on the harness, the wheels on the road,
+produced a gentle, monotonous noise. These things are charming when one
+is joyous, and lugubrious when one is sad.
+
+It was broad daylight when he arrived at Hesdin. He halted in front of
+the inn, to allow the horse a breathing spell, and to have him given
+some oats.
+
+The horse belonged, as Scaufflaire had said, to that small race of the
+Boulonnais, which has too much head, too much belly, and not enough neck
+and shoulders, but which has a broad chest, a large crupper, thin, fine
+legs, and solid hoofs--a homely, but a robust and healthy race. The
+excellent beast had travelled five leagues in two hours, and had not a
+drop of sweat on his loins.
+
+He did not get out of the tilbury. The stableman who brought the oats
+suddenly bent down and examined the left wheel.
+
+"Are you going far in this condition?" said the man.
+
+He replied, with an air of not having roused himself from his revery:--
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Have you come from a great distance?" went on the man.
+
+"Five leagues."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Why do you say, 'Ah?'"
+
+The man bent down once more, was silent for a moment, with his eyes
+fixed on the wheel; then he rose erect and said:--
+
+"Because, though this wheel has travelled five leagues, it certainly
+will not travel another quarter of a league."
+
+He sprang out of the tilbury.
+
+"What is that you say, my friend?"
+
+"I say that it is a miracle that you should have travelled five leagues
+without you and your horse rolling into some ditch on the highway. Just
+see here!"
+
+The wheel really had suffered serious damage. The shock administered by
+the mail-wagon had split two spokes and strained the hub, so that the
+nut no longer held firm.
+
+"My friend," he said to the stableman, "is there a wheelwright here?"
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+"Do me the service to go and fetch him."
+
+"He is only a step from here. Hey! Master Bourgaillard!"
+
+Master Bourgaillard, the wheelwright, was standing on his own threshold.
+He came, examined the wheel and made a grimace like a surgeon when the
+latter thinks a limb is broken.
+
+"Can you repair this wheel immediately?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"When can I set out again?"
+
+"To-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow!"
+
+"There is a long day's work on it. Are you in a hurry, sir?"
+
+"In a very great hurry. I must set out again in an hour at the latest."
+
+"Impossible, sir."
+
+"I will pay whatever you ask."
+
+"Impossible."
+
+"Well, in two hours, then."
+
+"Impossible to-day. Two new spokes and a hub must be made. Monsieur will
+not be able to start before to-morrow morning."
+
+"The matter cannot wait until to-morrow. What if you were to replace
+this wheel instead of repairing it?"
+
+"How so?"
+
+"You are a wheelwright?"
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+"Have you not a wheel that you can sell me? Then I could start again at
+once."
+
+"A spare wheel?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I have no wheel on hand that would fit your cabriolet. Two wheels make
+a pair. Two wheels cannot be put together hap-hazard."
+
+"In that case, sell me a pair of wheels."
+
+"Not all wheels fit all axles, sir."
+
+"Try, nevertheless."
+
+"It is useless, sir. I have nothing to sell but cart-wheels. We are but
+a poor country here."
+
+"Have you a cabriolet that you can let me have?"
+
+The wheelwright had seen at the first glance that the tilbury was a
+hired vehicle. He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"You treat the cabriolets that people let you so well! If I had one, I
+would not let it to you!"
+
+"Well, sell it to me, then."
+
+"I have none."
+
+"What! not even a spring-cart? I am not hard to please, as you see."
+
+"We live in a poor country. There is, in truth," added the wheelwright,
+"an old calash under the shed yonder, which belongs to a bourgeois of
+the town, who gave it to me to take care of, and who only uses it on the
+thirty-sixth of the month--never, that is to say. I might let that
+to you, for what matters it to me? But the bourgeois must not see it
+pass--and then, it is a calash; it would require two horses."
+
+"I will take two post-horses."
+
+"Where is Monsieur going?"
+
+"To Arras."
+
+"And Monsieur wishes to reach there to-day?"
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"By taking two post-horses?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Does it make any difference whether Monsieur arrives at four o'clock
+to-morrow morning?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"There is one thing to be said about that, you see, by taking
+post-horses--Monsieur has his passport?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, by taking post-horses, Monsieur cannot reach Arras before
+to-morrow. We are on a cross-road. The relays are badly served, the
+horses are in the fields. The season for ploughing is just beginning;
+heavy teams are required, and horses are seized upon everywhere, from
+the post as well as elsewhere. Monsieur will have to wait three or four
+hours at the least at every relay. And, then, they drive at a walk.
+There are many hills to ascend."
+
+"Come then, I will go on horseback. Unharness the cabriolet. Some one
+can surely sell me a saddle in the neighborhood."
+
+"Without doubt. But will this horse bear the saddle?"
+
+"That is true; you remind me of that; he will not bear it."
+
+"Then--"
+
+"But I can surely hire a horse in the village?"
+
+"A horse to travel to Arras at one stretch?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That would require such a horse as does not exist in these parts. You
+would have to buy it to begin with, because no one knows you. But you
+will not find one for sale nor to let, for five hundred francs, or for a
+thousand."
+
+"What am I to do?"
+
+"The best thing is to let me repair the wheel like an honest man, and
+set out on your journey to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow will be too late."
+
+"The deuce!"
+
+"Is there not a mail-wagon which runs to Arras? When will it pass?"
+
+"To-night. Both the posts pass at night; the one going as well as the
+one coming."
+
+"What! It will take you a day to mend this wheel?"
+
+"A day, and a good long one."
+
+"If you set two men to work?"
+
+"If I set ten men to work."
+
+"What if the spokes were to be tied together with ropes?"
+
+"That could be done with the spokes, not with the hub; and the felly is
+in a bad state, too."
+
+"Is there any one in this village who lets out teams?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Is there another wheelwright?"
+
+The stableman and the wheelwright replied in concert, with a toss of the
+head.
+
+"No."
+
+He felt an immense joy.
+
+It was evident that Providence was intervening. That it was it who had
+broken the wheel of the tilbury and who was stopping him on the road.
+He had not yielded to this sort of first summons; he had just made every
+possible effort to continue the journey; he had loyally and scrupulously
+exhausted all means; he had been deterred neither by the season, nor
+fatigue, nor by the expense; he had nothing with which to reproach
+himself. If he went no further, that was no fault of his. It did not
+concern him further. It was no longer his fault. It was not the act of
+his own conscience, but the act of Providence.
+
+He breathed again. He breathed freely and to the full extent of his
+lungs for the first time since Javert's visit. It seemed to him that the
+hand of iron which had held his heart in its grasp for the last twenty
+hours had just released him.
+
+It seemed to him that God was for him now, and was manifesting Himself.
+
+He said himself that he had done all he could, and that now he had
+nothing to do but retrace his steps quietly.
+
+If his conversation with the wheelwright had taken place in a chamber
+of the inn, it would have had no witnesses, no one would have heard him,
+things would have rested there, and it is probable that we should not
+have had to relate any of the occurrences which the reader is about
+to peruse; but this conversation had taken place in the street. Any
+colloquy in the street inevitably attracts a crowd. There are always
+people who ask nothing better than to become spectators. While he was
+questioning the wheelwright, some people who were passing back and forth
+halted around them. After listening for a few minutes, a young lad, to
+whom no one had paid any heed, detached himself from the group and ran
+off.
+
+At the moment when the traveller, after the inward deliberation which we
+have just described, resolved to retrace his steps, this child returned.
+He was accompanied by an old woman.
+
+"Monsieur," said the woman, "my boy tells me that you wish to hire a
+cabriolet."
+
+These simple words uttered by an old woman led by a child made the
+perspiration trickle down his limbs. He thought that he beheld the hand
+which had relaxed its grasp reappear in the darkness behind him, ready
+to seize him once more.
+
+He answered:--
+
+"Yes, my good woman; I am in search of a cabriolet which I can hire."
+
+And he hastened to add:--
+
+"But there is none in the place."
+
+"Certainly there is," said the old woman.
+
+"Where?" interpolated the wheelwright.
+
+"At my house," replied the old woman.
+
+He shuddered. The fatal hand had grasped him again.
+
+The old woman really had in her shed a sort of basket spring-cart.
+The wheelwright and the stable-man, in despair at the prospect of the
+traveller escaping their clutches, interfered.
+
+"It was a frightful old trap; it rests flat on the axle; it is an actual
+fact that the seats were suspended inside it by leather thongs; the rain
+came into it; the wheels were rusted and eaten with moisture; it
+would not go much further than the tilbury; a regular ramshackle old
+stage-wagon; the gentleman would make a great mistake if he trusted
+himself to it," etc., etc.
+
+All this was true; but this trap, this ramshackle old vehicle, this
+thing, whatever it was, ran on its two wheels and could go to Arras.
+
+He paid what was asked, left the tilbury with the wheelwright to be
+repaired, intending to reclaim it on his return, had the white horse
+put to the cart, climbed into it, and resumed the road which he had been
+travelling since morning.
+
+At the moment when the cart moved off, he admitted that he had felt, a
+moment previously, a certain joy in the thought that he should not
+go whither he was now proceeding. He examined this joy with a sort of
+wrath, and found it absurd. Why should he feel joy at turning back?
+After all, he was taking this trip of his own free will. No one was
+forcing him to it.
+
+And assuredly nothing would happen except what he should choose.
+
+As he left Hesdin, he heard a voice shouting to him: "Stop! Stop!" He
+halted the cart with a vigorous movement which contained a feverish and
+convulsive element resembling hope.
+
+It was the old woman's little boy.
+
+"Monsieur," said the latter, "it was I who got the cart for you."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You have not given me anything."
+
+He who gave to all so readily thought this demand exorbitant and almost
+odious.
+
+"Ah! it's you, you scamp?" said he; "you shall have nothing."
+
+He whipped up his horse and set off at full speed.
+
+He had lost a great deal of time at Hesdin. He wanted to make it good.
+The little horse was courageous, and pulled for two; but it was the
+month of February, there had been rain; the roads were bad. And then,
+it was no longer the tilbury. The cart was very heavy, and in addition,
+there were many ascents.
+
+He took nearly four hours to go from Hesdin to Saint-Pol; four hours for
+five leagues.
+
+At Saint-Pol he had the horse unharnessed at the first inn he came to
+and led to the stable; as he had promised Scaufflaire, he stood beside
+the manger while the horse was eating; he thought of sad and confusing
+things.
+
+The inn-keeper's wife came to the stable.
+
+"Does not Monsieur wish to breakfast?"
+
+"Come, that is true; I even have a good appetite."
+
+He followed the woman, who had a rosy, cheerful face; she led him to the
+public room where there were tables covered with waxed cloth.
+
+"Make haste!" said he; "I must start again; I am in a hurry."
+
+A big Flemish servant-maid placed his knife and fork in all haste; he
+looked at the girl with a sensation of comfort.
+
+"That is what ailed me," he thought; "I had not breakfasted."
+
+His breakfast was served; he seized the bread, took a mouthful, and then
+slowly replaced it on the table, and did not touch it again.
+
+A carter was eating at another table; he said to this man:--
+
+"Why is their bread so bitter here?"
+
+The carter was a German and did not understand him.
+
+He returned to the stable and remained near the horse.
+
+An hour later he had quitted Saint-Pol and was directing his course
+towards Tinques, which is only five leagues from Arras.
+
+What did he do during this journey? Of what was he thinking? As in the
+morning, he watched the trees, the thatched roofs, the tilled fields
+pass by, and the way in which the landscape, broken at every turn of the
+road, vanished; this is a sort of contemplation which sometimes
+suffices to the soul, and almost relieves it from thought. What is more
+melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the
+first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every
+instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make
+comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all
+the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and
+bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse;
+we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing;
+each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel
+a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy
+horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and
+unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows.
+
+Twilight was falling when the children who were coming out of school
+beheld this traveller enter Tinques; it is true that the days were still
+short; he did not halt at Tinques; as he emerged from the village, a
+laborer, who was mending the road with stones, raised his head and said
+to him:--
+
+"That horse is very much fatigued."
+
+The poor beast was, in fact, going at a walk.
+
+"Are you going to Arras?" added the road-mender.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"If you go on at that rate you will not arrive very early."
+
+He stopped his horse, and asked the laborer:--
+
+"How far is it from here to Arras?"
+
+"Nearly seven good leagues."
+
+"How is that? the posting guide only says five leagues and a quarter."
+
+"Ah!" returned the road-mender, "so you don't know that the road is
+under repair? You will find it barred a quarter of an hour further on;
+there is no way to proceed further."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"You will take the road on the left, leading to Carency; you will cross
+the river; when you reach Camblin, you will turn to the right; that is
+the road to Mont-Saint-Eloy which leads to Arras."
+
+"But it is night, and I shall lose my way."
+
+"You do not belong in these parts?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And, besides, it is all cross-roads; stop! sir," resumed the
+road-mender; "shall I give you a piece of advice? your horse is tired;
+return to Tinques; there is a good inn there; sleep there; you can reach
+Arras to-morrow."
+
+"I must be there this evening."
+
+"That is different; but go to the inn all the same, and get an extra
+horse; the stable-boy will guide you through the cross-roads."
+
+He followed the road-mender's advice, retraced his steps, and, half an
+hour later, he passed the same spot again, but this time at full speed,
+with a good horse to aid; a stable-boy, who called himself a postilion,
+was seated on the shaft of the cariole.
+
+Still, he felt that he had lost time.
+
+Night had fully come.
+
+They turned into the cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the
+cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to the postilion:--
+
+"Keep at a trot, and you shall have a double fee."
+
+In one of the jolts, the whiffle-tree broke.
+
+"There's the whiffle-tree broken, sir," said the postilion; "I don't
+know how to harness my horse now; this road is very bad at night; if
+you wish to return and sleep at Tinques, we could be in Arras early
+to-morrow morning."
+
+He replied, "Have you a bit of rope and a knife?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+He cut a branch from a tree and made a whiffle-tree of it.
+
+This caused another loss of twenty minutes; but they set out again at a
+gallop.
+
+The plain was gloomy; low-hanging, black, crisp fogs crept over the
+hills and wrenched themselves away like smoke: there were whitish gleams
+in the clouds; a strong breeze which blew in from the sea produced a
+sound in all quarters of the horizon, as of some one moving furniture;
+everything that could be seen assumed attitudes of terror. How many
+things shiver beneath these vast breaths of the night!
+
+He was stiff with cold; he had eaten nothing since the night before;
+he vaguely recalled his other nocturnal trip in the vast plain in
+the neighborhood of D----, eight years previously, and it seemed but
+yesterday.
+
+The hour struck from a distant tower; he asked the boy:--
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"Seven o'clock, sir; we shall reach Arras at eight; we have but three
+leagues still to go."
+
+At that moment, he for the first time indulged in this reflection,
+thinking it odd the while that it had not occurred to him sooner: that
+all this trouble which he was taking was, perhaps, useless; that he did
+not know so much as the hour of the trial; that he should, at least,
+have informed himself of that; that he was foolish to go thus straight
+ahead without knowing whether he would be of any service or not; then
+he sketched out some calculations in his mind: that, ordinarily, the
+sittings of the Court of Assizes began at nine o'clock in the morning;
+that it could not be a long affair; that the theft of the apples would
+be very brief; that there would then remain only a question of identity,
+four or five depositions, and very little for the lawyers to say; that
+he should arrive after all was over.
+
+The postilion whipped up the horses; they had crossed the river and left
+Mont-Saint-Eloy behind them.
+
+The night grew more profound.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--SISTER SIMPLICE PUT TO THE PROOF
+
+But at that moment Fantine was joyous.
+
+She had passed a very bad night; her cough was frightful; her fever
+had doubled in intensity; she had had dreams: in the morning, when the
+doctor paid his visit, she was delirious; he assumed an alarmed look,
+and ordered that he should be informed as soon as M. Madeleine arrived.
+
+All the morning she was melancholy, said but little, and laid plaits
+in her sheets, murmuring the while, in a low voice, calculations
+which seemed to be calculations of distances. Her eyes were hollow and
+staring. They seemed almost extinguished at intervals, then lighted up
+again and shone like stars. It seems as though, at the approach of a
+certain dark hour, the light of heaven fills those who are quitting the
+light of earth.
+
+Each time that Sister Simplice asked her how she felt, she replied
+invariably, "Well. I should like to see M. Madeleine."
+
+Some months before this, at the moment when Fantine had just lost her
+last modesty, her last shame, and her last joy, she was the shadow of
+herself; now she was the spectre of herself. Physical suffering had
+completed the work of moral suffering. This creature of five and twenty
+had a wrinkled brow, flabby cheeks, pinched nostrils, teeth from which
+the gums had receded, a leaden complexion, a bony neck, prominent
+shoulder-blades, frail limbs, a clayey skin, and her golden hair was
+growing out sprinkled with gray. Alas! how illness improvises old-age!
+
+At mid-day the physician returned, gave some directions, inquired
+whether the mayor had made his appearance at the infirmary, and shook
+his head.
+
+M. Madeleine usually came to see the invalid at three o'clock. As
+exactness is kindness, he was exact.
+
+About half-past two, Fantine began to be restless. In the course of
+twenty minutes, she asked the nun more than ten times, "What time is it,
+sister?"
+
+Three o'clock struck. At the third stroke, Fantine sat up in bed; she
+who could, in general, hardly turn over, joined her yellow, fleshless
+hands in a sort of convulsive clasp, and the nun heard her utter one
+of those profound sighs which seem to throw off dejection. Then Fantine
+turned and looked at the door.
+
+No one entered; the door did not open.
+
+She remained thus for a quarter of an hour, her eyes riveted on the
+door, motionless and apparently holding her breath. The sister dared not
+speak to her. The clock struck a quarter past three. Fantine fell back
+on her pillow.
+
+She said nothing, but began to plait the sheets once more.
+
+Half an hour passed, then an hour, no one came; every time the clock
+struck, Fantine started up and looked towards the door, then fell back
+again.
+
+Her thought was clearly perceptible, but she uttered no name, she made
+no complaint, she blamed no one. But she coughed in a melancholy way.
+One would have said that something dark was descending upon her. She was
+livid and her lips were blue. She smiled now and then.
+
+Five o'clock struck. Then the sister heard her say, very low and gently,
+"He is wrong not to come to-day, since I am going away to-morrow."
+
+Sister Simplice herself was surprised at M. Madeleine's delay.
+
+In the meantime, Fantine was staring at the tester of her bed. She
+seemed to be endeavoring to recall something. All at once she began to
+sing in a voice as feeble as a breath. The nun listened. This is what
+Fantine was singing:--
+
+
+ "Lovely things we will buy
+ As we stroll the faubourgs through.
+ Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,
+ I love my love, corn-flowers are blue.
+
+
+"Yestere'en the Virgin Mary came near my stove, in a broidered mantle
+clad, and said to me, 'Here, hide 'neath my veil the child whom you
+one day begged from me. Haste to the city, buy linen, buy a needle, buy
+thread.'
+
+
+ "Lovely things we will buy
+ As we stroll the faubourgs through.
+
+
+"Dear Holy Virgin, beside my stove I have set a cradle with ribbons
+decked. God may give me his loveliest star; I prefer the child thou hast
+granted me. 'Madame, what shall I do with this linen fine?'--'Make of it
+clothes for thy new-born babe.'
+
+
+ "Roses are pink and corn-flowers are blue,
+ I love my love, and corn-flowers are blue.
+
+
+"'Wash this linen.'--'Where?'--'In the stream. Make of it, soiling
+not, spoiling not, a petticoat fair with its bodice fine, which I will
+embroider and fill with flowers.'--'Madame, the child is no longer here;
+what is to be done?'--'Then make of it a winding-sheet in which to bury
+me.'
+
+
+ "Lovely things we will buy
+ As we stroll the faubourgs through,
+ Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,
+ I love my love, corn-flowers are blue."
+
+
+This song was an old cradle romance with which she had, in former days,
+lulled her little Cosette to sleep, and which had never recurred to her
+mind in all the five years during which she had been parted from her
+child. She sang it in so sad a voice, and to so sweet an air, that it
+was enough to make any one, even a nun, weep. The sister, accustomed as
+she was to austerities, felt a tear spring to her eyes.
+
+The clock struck six. Fantine did not seem to hear it. She no longer
+seemed to pay attention to anything about her.
+
+Sister Simplice sent a serving-maid to inquire of the portress of the
+factory, whether the mayor had returned, and if he would not come to the
+infirmary soon. The girl returned in a few minutes.
+
+Fantine was still motionless and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
+
+The servant informed Sister Simplice in a very low tone, that the
+mayor had set out that morning before six o'clock, in a little tilbury
+harnessed to a white horse, cold as the weather was; that he had gone
+alone, without even a driver; that no one knew what road he had taken;
+that people said he had been seen to turn into the road to Arras; that
+others asserted that they had met him on the road to Paris. That when he
+went away he had been very gentle, as usual, and that he had merely told
+the portress not to expect him that night.
+
+While the two women were whispering together, with their backs turned
+to Fantine's bed, the sister interrogating, the servant conjecturing,
+Fantine, with the feverish vivacity of certain organic maladies, which
+unite the free movements of health with the frightful emaciation of
+death, had raised herself to her knees in bed, with her shrivelled hands
+resting on the bolster, and her head thrust through the opening of the
+curtains, and was listening. All at once she cried:--
+
+"You are speaking of M. Madeleine! Why are you talking so low? What is
+he doing? Why does he not come?"
+
+Her voice was so abrupt and hoarse that the two women thought they heard
+the voice of a man; they wheeled round in affright.
+
+"Answer me!" cried Fantine.
+
+The servant stammered:--
+
+"The portress told me that he could not come to-day."
+
+"Be calm, my child," said the sister; "lie down again."
+
+Fantine, without changing her attitude, continued in a loud voice, and
+with an accent that was both imperious and heart-rending:--
+
+"He cannot come? Why not? You know the reason. You are whispering it to
+each other there. I want to know it."
+
+The servant-maid hastened to say in the nun's ear, "Say that he is busy
+with the city council."
+
+Sister Simplice blushed faintly, for it was a lie that the maid had
+proposed to her.
+
+On the other hand, it seemed to her that the mere communication of the
+truth to the invalid would, without doubt, deal her a terrible blow, and
+that this was a serious matter in Fantine's present state. Her flush
+did not last long; the sister raised her calm, sad eyes to Fantine, and
+said, "Monsieur le Maire has gone away."
+
+Fantine raised herself and crouched on her heels in the bed: her eyes
+sparkled; indescribable joy beamed from that melancholy face.
+
+"Gone!" she cried; "he has gone to get Cosette."
+
+Then she raised her arms to heaven, and her white face became ineffable;
+her lips moved; she was praying in a low voice.
+
+When her prayer was finished, "Sister," she said, "I am willing to lie
+down again; I will do anything you wish; I was naughty just now; I beg
+your pardon for having spoken so loud; it is very wrong to talk loudly;
+I know that well, my good sister, but, you see, I am very happy: the
+good God is good; M. Madeleine is good; just think! he has gone to
+Montfermeil to get my little Cosette."
+
+She lay down again, with the nun's assistance, helped the nun to arrange
+her pillow, and kissed the little silver cross which she wore on her
+neck, and which Sister Simplice had given her.
+
+"My child," said the sister, "try to rest now, and do not talk any
+more."
+
+Fantine took the sister's hand in her moist hands, and the latter was
+pained to feel that perspiration.
+
+"He set out this morning for Paris; in fact, he need not even go through
+Paris; Montfermeil is a little to the left as you come thence. Do you
+remember how he said to me yesterday, when I spoke to him of Cosette,
+Soon, soon? He wants to give me a surprise, you know! he made me sign a
+letter so that she could be taken from the Thenardiers; they cannot
+say anything, can they? they will give back Cosette, for they have been
+paid; the authorities will not allow them to keep the child since they
+have received their pay. Do not make signs to me that I must not talk,
+sister! I am extremely happy; I am doing well; I am not ill at all any
+more; I am going to see Cosette again; I am even quite hungry; it is
+nearly five years since I saw her last; you cannot imagine how much
+attached one gets to children, and then, she will be so pretty; you will
+see! If you only knew what pretty little rosy fingers she had! In the
+first place, she will have very beautiful hands; she had ridiculous
+hands when she was only a year old; like this! she must be a big girl
+now; she is seven years old; she is quite a young lady; I call her
+Cosette, but her name is really Euphrasie. Stop! this morning I was
+looking at the dust on the chimney-piece, and I had a sort of idea come
+across me, like that, that I should see Cosette again soon. Mon Dieu!
+how wrong it is not to see one's children for years! One ought to
+reflect that life is not eternal. Oh, how good M. le Maire is to go! it
+is very cold! it is true; he had on his cloak, at least? he will be
+here to-morrow, will he not? to-morrow will be a festival day; to-morrow
+morning, sister, you must remind me to put on my little cap that has
+lace on it. What a place that Montfermeil is! I took that journey on
+foot once; it was very long for me, but the diligences go very quickly!
+he will be here to-morrow with Cosette: how far is it from here to
+Montfermeil?"
+
+The sister, who had no idea of distances, replied, "Oh, I think that he
+will be here to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow! to-morrow!" said Fantine, "I shall see Cosette to-morrow!
+you see, good sister of the good God, that I am no longer ill; I am mad;
+I could dance if any one wished it."
+
+A person who had seen her a quarter of an hour previously would not have
+understood the change; she was all rosy now; she spoke in a lively and
+natural voice; her whole face was one smile; now and then she talked,
+she laughed softly; the joy of a mother is almost infantile.
+
+"Well," resumed the nun, "now that you are happy, mind me, and do not
+talk any more."
+
+Fantine laid her head on her pillow and said in a low voice: "Yes,
+lie down again; be good, for you are going to have your child; Sister
+Simplice is right; every one here is right."
+
+And then, without stirring, without even moving her head, she began to
+stare all about her with wide-open eyes and a joyous air, and she said
+nothing more.
+
+The sister drew the curtains together again, hoping that she would
+fall into a doze. Between seven and eight o'clock the doctor came; not
+hearing any sound, he thought Fantine was asleep, entered softly, and
+approached the bed on tiptoe; he opened the curtains a little, and, by
+the light of the taper, he saw Fantine's big eyes gazing at him.
+
+She said to him, "She will be allowed to sleep beside me in a little
+bed, will she not, sir?"
+
+The doctor thought that she was delirious. She added:--
+
+"See! there is just room."
+
+The doctor took Sister Simplice aside, and she explained matters to him;
+that M. Madeleine was absent for a day or two, and that in their doubt
+they had not thought it well to undeceive the invalid, who believed that
+the mayor had gone to Montfermeil; that it was possible, after all, that
+her guess was correct: the doctor approved.
+
+He returned to Fantine's bed, and she went on:--
+
+"You see, when she wakes up in the morning, I shall be able to say good
+morning to her, poor kitten, and when I cannot sleep at night, I can
+hear her asleep; her little gentle breathing will do me good."
+
+"Give me your hand," said the doctor.
+
+She stretched out her arm, and exclaimed with a laugh:--
+
+"Ah, hold! in truth, you did not know it; I am cured; Cosette will
+arrive to-morrow."
+
+The doctor was surprised; she was better; the pressure on her chest
+had decreased; her pulse had regained its strength; a sort of life had
+suddenly supervened and reanimated this poor, worn-out creature.
+
+"Doctor," she went on, "did the sister tell you that M. le Maire has
+gone to get that mite of a child?"
+
+The doctor recommended silence, and that all painful emotions should be
+avoided; he prescribed an infusion of pure chinchona, and, in case the
+fever should increase again during the night, a calming potion. As he
+took his departure, he said to the sister:--
+
+"She is doing better; if good luck willed that the mayor should
+actually arrive to-morrow with the child, who knows? there are crises
+so astounding; great joy has been known to arrest maladies; I know well
+that this is an organic disease, and in an advanced state, but all those
+things are such mysteries: we may be able to save her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE TRAVELLER ON HIS ARRIVAL TAKES PRECAUTIONS FOR
+DEPARTURE
+
+It was nearly eight o'clock in the evening when the cart, which we
+left on the road, entered the porte-cochere of the Hotel de la Poste in
+Arras; the man whom we have been following up to this moment alighted
+from it, responded with an abstracted air to the attentions of the
+people of the inn, sent back the extra horse, and with his own hands
+led the little white horse to the stable; then he opened the door of a
+billiard-room which was situated on the ground floor, sat down there,
+and leaned his elbows on a table; he had taken fourteen hours for
+the journey which he had counted on making in six; he did himself the
+justice to acknowledge that it was not his fault, but at bottom, he was
+not sorry.
+
+The landlady of the hotel entered.
+
+"Does Monsieur wish a bed? Does Monsieur require supper?"
+
+He made a sign of the head in the negative.
+
+"The stableman says that Monsieur's horse is extremely fatigued."
+
+Here he broke his silence.
+
+"Will not the horse be in a condition to set out again to-morrow
+morning?"
+
+"Oh, Monsieur! he must rest for two days at least."
+
+He inquired:--
+
+"Is not the posting-station located here?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+The hostess conducted him to the office; he showed his passport, and
+inquired whether there was any way of returning that same night to M.
+sur M. by the mail-wagon; the seat beside the post-boy chanced to be
+vacant; he engaged it and paid for it. "Monsieur," said the clerk,
+"do not fail to be here ready to start at precisely one o'clock in the
+morning."
+
+This done, he left the hotel and began to wander about the town.
+
+He was not acquainted with Arras; the streets were dark, and he
+walked on at random; but he seemed bent upon not asking the way of the
+passers-by. He crossed the little river Crinchon, and found himself in a
+labyrinth of narrow alleys where he lost his way. A citizen was passing
+along with a lantern. After some hesitation, he decided to apply to this
+man, not without having first glanced behind and in front of him, as
+though he feared lest some one should hear the question which he was
+about to put.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, "where is the court-house, if you please."
+
+"You do not belong in town, sir?" replied the bourgeois, who was an
+oldish man; "well, follow me. I happen to be going in the direction of
+the court-house, that is to say, in the direction of the hotel of the
+prefecture; for the court-house is undergoing repairs just at this
+moment, and the courts are holding their sittings provisionally in the
+prefecture."
+
+"Is it there that the Assizes are held?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly, sir; you see, the prefecture of to-day was the bishop's
+palace before the Revolution. M. de Conzie, who was bishop in '82, built
+a grand hall there. It is in this grand hall that the court is held."
+
+On the way, the bourgeois said to him:--
+
+"If Monsieur desires to witness a case, it is rather late. The sittings
+generally close at six o'clock."
+
+When they arrived on the grand square, however, the man pointed out to
+him four long windows all lighted up, in the front of a vast and gloomy
+building.
+
+"Upon my word, sir, you are in luck; you have arrived in season. Do you
+see those four windows? That is the Court of Assizes. There is light
+there, so they are not through. The matter must have been greatly
+protracted, and they are holding an evening session. Do you take an
+interest in this affair? Is it a criminal case? Are you a witness?"
+
+He replied:--
+
+"I have not come on any business; I only wish to speak to one of the
+lawyers."
+
+"That is different," said the bourgeois. "Stop, sir; here is the door
+where the sentry stands. You have only to ascend the grand staircase."
+
+He conformed to the bourgeois's directions, and a few minutes later he
+was in a hall containing many people, and where groups, intermingled
+with lawyers in their gowns, were whispering together here and there.
+
+It is always a heart-breaking thing to see these congregations of men
+robed in black, murmuring together in low voices, on the threshold of
+the halls of justice. It is rare that charity and pity are the outcome
+of these words. Condemnations pronounced in advance are more likely
+to be the result. All these groups seem to the passing and thoughtful
+observer so many sombre hives where buzzing spirits construct in concert
+all sorts of dark edifices.
+
+This spacious hall, illuminated by a single lamp, was the old hall of
+the episcopal palace, and served as the large hall of the palace
+of justice. A double-leaved door, which was closed at that moment,
+separated it from the large apartment where the court was sitting.
+
+The obscurity was such that he did not fear to accost the first lawyer
+whom he met.
+
+"What stage have they reached, sir?" he asked.
+
+"It is finished," said the lawyer.
+
+"Finished!"
+
+This word was repeated in such accents that the lawyer turned round.
+
+"Excuse me sir; perhaps you are a relative?"
+
+"No; I know no one here. Has judgment been pronounced?"
+
+"Of course. Nothing else was possible."
+
+"To penal servitude?"
+
+"For life."
+
+He continued, in a voice so weak that it was barely audible:--
+
+"Then his identity was established?"
+
+"What identity?" replied the lawyer. "There was no identity to be
+established. The matter was very simple. The woman had murdered her
+child; the infanticide was proved; the jury threw out the question of
+premeditation, and she was condemned for life."
+
+"So it was a woman?" said he.
+
+"Why, certainly. The Limosin woman. Of what are you speaking?"
+
+"Nothing. But since it is all over, how comes it that the hall is still
+lighted?"
+
+"For another case, which was begun about two hours ago."
+
+"What other case?"
+
+"Oh! this one is a clear case also. It is about a sort of blackguard;
+a man arrested for a second offence; a convict who has been guilty of
+theft. I don't know his name exactly. There's a bandit's phiz for you!
+I'd send him to the galleys on the strength of his face alone."
+
+"Is there any way of getting into the court-room, sir?" said he.
+
+"I really think that there is not. There is a great crowd. However,
+the hearing has been suspended. Some people have gone out, and when the
+hearing is resumed, you might make an effort."
+
+"Where is the entrance?"
+
+"Through yonder large door."
+
+The lawyer left him. In the course of a few moments he had experienced,
+almost simultaneously, almost intermingled with each other, all possible
+emotions. The words of this indifferent spectator had, in turn, pierced
+his heart like needles of ice and like blades of fire. When he saw that
+nothing was settled, he breathed freely once more; but he could not have
+told whether what he felt was pain or pleasure.
+
+He drew near to many groups and listened to what they were saying. The
+docket of the session was very heavy; the president had appointed
+for the same day two short and simple cases. They had begun with the
+infanticide, and now they had reached the convict, the old offender, the
+"return horse." This man had stolen apples, but that did not appear to
+be entirely proved; what had been proved was, that he had already been
+in the galleys at Toulon. It was that which lent a bad aspect to
+his case. However, the man's examination and the depositions of the
+witnesses had been completed, but the lawyer's plea, and the speech
+of the public prosecutor were still to come; it could not be
+finished before midnight. The man would probably be condemned; the
+attorney-general was very clever, and never missed his culprits; he was
+a brilliant fellow who wrote verses.
+
+An usher stood at the door communicating with the hall of the Assizes.
+He inquired of this usher:--
+
+"Will the door be opened soon, sir?"
+
+"It will not be opened at all," replied the usher.
+
+"What! It will not be opened when the hearing is resumed? Is not the
+hearing suspended?"
+
+"The hearing has just been begun again," replied the usher, "but the
+door will not be opened again."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because the hall is full."
+
+"What! There is not room for one more?"
+
+"Not another one. The door is closed. No one can enter now."
+
+The usher added after a pause: "There are, to tell the truth, two
+or three extra places behind Monsieur le President, but Monsieur le
+President only admits public functionaries to them."
+
+So saying, the usher turned his back.
+
+He retired with bowed head, traversed the antechamber, and slowly
+descended the stairs, as though hesitating at every step. It is probable
+that he was holding counsel with himself. The violent conflict which had
+been going on within him since the preceding evening was not yet ended;
+and every moment he encountered some new phase of it. On reaching the
+landing-place, he leaned his back against the balusters and folded his
+arms. All at once he opened his coat, drew out his pocket-book, took
+from it a pencil, tore out a leaf, and upon that leaf he wrote rapidly,
+by the light of the street lantern, this line: M. Madeleine, Mayor of M.
+sur M.; then he ascended the stairs once more with great strides, made
+his way through the crowd, walked straight up to the usher, handed him
+the paper, and said in an authoritative manner:--
+
+"Take this to Monsieur le President."
+
+The usher took the paper, cast a glance upon it, and obeyed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--AN ENTRANCE BY FAVOR
+
+
+Although he did not suspect the fact, the mayor of M. sur M. enjoyed
+a sort of celebrity. For the space of seven years his reputation for
+virtue had filled the whole of Bas Boulonnais; it had eventually passed
+the confines of a small district and had been spread abroad through
+two or three neighboring departments. Besides the service which he had
+rendered to the chief town by resuscitating the black jet industry,
+there was not one out of the hundred and forty communes of the
+arrondissement of M. sur M. which was not indebted to him for some
+benefit. He had even at need contrived to aid and multiply the
+industries of other arrondissements. It was thus that he had, when
+occasion offered, supported with his credit and his funds the linen
+factory at Boulogne, the flax-spinning industry at Frevent, and the
+hydraulic manufacture of cloth at Boubers-sur-Canche. Everywhere the
+name of M. Madeleine was pronounced with veneration. Arras and Douai
+envied the happy little town of M. sur M. its mayor.
+
+The Councillor of the Royal Court of Douai, who was presiding over this
+session of the Assizes at Arras, was acquainted, in common with the rest
+of the world, with this name which was so profoundly and universally
+honored. When the usher, discreetly opening the door which connected
+the council-chamber with the court-room, bent over the back of the
+President's arm-chair and handed him the paper on which was inscribed
+the line which we have just perused, adding: "The gentleman desires to
+be present at the trial," the President, with a quick and deferential
+movement, seized a pen and wrote a few words at the bottom of the paper
+and returned it to the usher, saying, "Admit him."
+
+The unhappy man whose history we are relating had remained near the door
+of the hall, in the same place and the same attitude in which the usher
+had left him. In the midst of his revery he heard some one saying to
+him, "Will Monsieur do me the honor to follow me?" It was the same usher
+who had turned his back upon him but a moment previously, and who was
+now bowing to the earth before him. At the same time, the usher handed
+him the paper. He unfolded it, and as he chanced to be near the light,
+he could read it.
+
+"The President of the Court of Assizes presents his respects to M.
+Madeleine."
+
+He crushed the paper in his hand as though those words contained for him
+a strange and bitter aftertaste.
+
+He followed the usher.
+
+A few minutes later he found himself alone in a sort of wainscoted
+cabinet of severe aspect, lighted by two wax candles, placed upon a
+table with a green cloth. The last words of the usher who had just
+quitted him still rang in his ears: "Monsieur, you are now in the
+council-chamber; you have only to turn the copper handle of yonder door,
+and you will find yourself in the court-room, behind the President's
+chair." These words were mingled in his thoughts with a vague memory of
+narrow corridors and dark staircases which he had recently traversed.
+
+The usher had left him alone. The supreme moment had arrived. He sought
+to collect his faculties, but could not. It is chiefly at the moment
+when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful
+realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain. He
+was in the very place where the judges deliberated and condemned. With
+stupid tranquillity he surveyed this peaceful and terrible apartment,
+where so many lives had been broken, which was soon to ring with his
+name, and which his fate was at that moment traversing. He stared at
+the wall, then he looked at himself, wondering that it should be that
+chamber and that it should be he.
+
+He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours; he was worn out by the
+jolts of the cart, but he was not conscious of it. It seemed to him that
+he felt nothing.
+
+He approached a black frame which was suspended on the wall, and which
+contained, under glass, an ancient autograph letter of Jean Nicolas
+Pache, mayor of Paris and minister, and dated, through an error, no
+doubt, the 9th of June, of the year II., and in which Pache forwarded to
+the commune the list of ministers and deputies held in arrest by them.
+Any spectator who had chanced to see him at that moment, and who had
+watched him, would have imagined, doubtless, that this letter struck him
+as very curious, for he did not take his eyes from it, and he read it
+two or three times. He read it without paying any attention to it, and
+unconsciously. He was thinking of Fantine and Cosette.
+
+As he dreamed, he turned round, and his eyes fell upon the brass knob
+of the door which separated him from the Court of Assizes. He had almost
+forgotten that door. His glance, calm at first, paused there, remained
+fixed on that brass handle, then grew terrified, and little by little
+became impregnated with fear. Beads of perspiration burst forth among
+his hair and trickled down upon his temples.
+
+At a certain moment he made that indescribable gesture of a sort of
+authority mingled with rebellion, which is intended to convey, and which
+does so well convey, "Pardieu! who compels me to this?" Then he wheeled
+briskly round, caught sight of the door through which he had entered in
+front of him, went to it, opened it, and passed out. He was no longer
+in that chamber; he was outside in a corridor, a long, narrow corridor,
+broken by steps and gratings, making all sorts of angles, lighted
+here and there by lanterns similar to the night taper of invalids, the
+corridor through which he had approached. He breathed, he listened; not
+a sound in front, not a sound behind him, and he fled as though pursued.
+
+When he had turned many angles in this corridor, he still listened. The
+same silence reigned, and there was the same darkness around him. He was
+out of breath; he staggered; he leaned against the wall. The stone was
+cold; the perspiration lay ice-cold on his brow; he straightened himself
+up with a shiver.
+
+Then, there alone in the darkness, trembling with cold and with
+something else, too, perchance, he meditated.
+
+He had meditated all night long; he had meditated all the day: he heard
+within him but one voice, which said, "Alas!"
+
+A quarter of an hour passed thus. At length he bowed his head, sighed
+with agony, dropped his arms, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly,
+and as though crushed. It seemed as though some one had overtaken him in
+his flight and was leading him back.
+
+He re-entered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of
+was the knob of the door. This knob, which was round and of polished
+brass, shone like a terrible star for him. He gazed at it as a lamb
+might gaze into the eye of a tiger.
+
+He could not take his eyes from it. From time to time he advanced a step
+and approached the door.
+
+Had he listened, he would have heard the sound of the adjoining hall
+like a sort of confused murmur; but he did not listen, and he did not
+hear.
+
+Suddenly, without himself knowing how it happened, he found himself near
+the door; he grasped the knob convulsively; the door opened.
+
+He was in the court-room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION
+
+He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, and
+remained standing, contemplating what he saw.
+
+It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now full
+of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its petty
+and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process of
+development.
+
+At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, with
+abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails or
+closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers in
+all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient,
+spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that was
+yellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room
+lamps which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in
+the wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,
+ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere and
+august impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which is
+called the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.
+
+No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were
+directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small
+door, in the stretch of wall on the President's left; on this bench,
+illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.
+
+This man was the man.
+
+He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally, as
+though they had known beforehand where that figure was.
+
+He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the same
+in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect, with his
+bristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that blouse, just as
+it was on the day when he entered D----, full of hatred, concealing
+his soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which he had spent
+nineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.
+
+He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I become like that
+again?"
+
+This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something
+indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.
+
+At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to make
+way for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding that
+the personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had
+bowed to him; the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M.
+sur M., whither the duties of his office had called him more than once,
+recognized him and saluted him also: he had hardly perceived it; he was
+the victim of a sort of hallucination; he was watching.
+
+Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads, all these
+he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before;
+he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; they
+moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage
+of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real
+crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld the
+monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once more around him,
+with all that there is formidable in reality.
+
+All this was yawning before him.
+
+He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in the deepest
+recesses of his soul, "Never!"
+
+And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas tremble, and
+rendered him nearly mad, it was another self of his that was there! all
+called that man who was being tried Jean Valjean.
+
+Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of representation
+of the most horrible moment of his life, enacted by his spectre.
+
+Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the hour of the night,
+the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and of spectators; all were the
+same, only above the President's head there hung a crucifix, something
+which the courts had lacked at the time of his condemnation: God had
+been absent when he had been judged.
+
+There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified at the
+thought that he might be seen; when he was seated, he took advantage of
+a pile of cardboard boxes, which stood on the judge's desk, to conceal
+his face from the whole room; he could now see without being seen; he
+had fully regained consciousness of the reality of things; gradually he
+recovered; he attained that phase of composure where it is possible to
+listen.
+
+M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.
+
+He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the witnesses was
+hidden from him by the clerk's table, and then, as we have just said,
+the hall was sparely lighted.
+
+At the moment of this entrance, the defendant's lawyer had just finished
+his plea.
+
+The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the affair had
+lasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd had been watching a
+strange man, a miserable specimen of humanity, either profoundly stupid
+or profoundly subtle, gradually bending beneath the weight of a terrible
+likeness. This man, as the reader already knows, was a vagabond who had
+been found in a field carrying a branch laden with ripe apples, broken
+in the orchard of a neighbor, called the Pierron orchard. Who was this
+man? an examination had been made; witnesses had been heard, and they
+were unanimous; light had abounded throughout the entire debate; the
+accusation said: "We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealer
+of fruit; we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender who
+has broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerous
+description, a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom justice has long been
+in search of, and who, eight years ago, on emerging from the galleys
+at Toulon, committed a highway robbery, accompanied by violence, on the
+person of a child, a Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime provided
+for by article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try him for which
+we reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have been judicially
+established. He has just committed a fresh theft; it is a case of a
+second offence; condemn him for the fresh deed; later on he will be
+judged for the old crime." In the face of this accusation, in the face
+of the unanimity of the witnesses, the accused appeared to be astonished
+more than anything else; he made signs and gestures which were meant to
+convey No, or else he stared at the ceiling: he spoke with difficulty,
+replied with embarrassment, but his whole person, from head to foot, was
+a denial; he was an idiot in the presence of all these minds ranged in
+order of battle around him, and like a stranger in the midst of this
+society which was seizing fast upon him; nevertheless, it was a question
+of the most menacing future for him; the likeness increased every
+moment, and the entire crowd surveyed, with more anxiety than he did
+himself, that sentence freighted with calamity, which descended
+ever closer over his head; there was even a glimpse of a possibility
+afforded; besides the galleys, a possible death penalty, in case his
+identity were established, and the affair of Little Gervais were to end
+thereafter in condemnation. Who was this man? what was the nature of his
+apathy? was it imbecility or craft? Did he understand too well, or did
+he not understand at all? these were questions which divided the crowd,
+and seemed to divide the jury; there was something both terrible and
+puzzling in this case: the drama was not only melancholy; it was also
+obscure.
+
+The counsel for the defence had spoken tolerably well, in that
+provincial tongue which has long constituted the eloquence of the bar,
+and which was formerly employed by all advocates, at Paris as well as at
+Romorantin or at Montbrison, and which to-day, having become classic, is
+no longer spoken except by the official orators of magistracy, to whom
+it is suited on account of its grave sonorousness and its majestic
+stride; a tongue in which a husband is called a consort, and a woman
+a spouse; Paris, the centre of art and civilization; the king,
+the monarch; Monseigneur the Bishop, a sainted pontiff; the
+district-attorney, the eloquent interpreter of public prosecution; the
+arguments, the accents which we have just listened to; the age of Louis
+XIV., the grand age; a theatre, the temple of Melpomene; the reigning
+family, the august blood of our kings; a concert, a musical solemnity;
+the General Commandant of the province, the illustrious warrior, who,
+etc.; the pupils in the seminary, these tender levities; errors imputed
+to newspapers, the imposture which distills its venom through the
+columns of those organs; etc. The lawyer had, accordingly, begun with an
+explanation as to the theft of the apples,--an awkward matter couched
+in fine style; but Benigne Bossuet himself was obliged to allude to a
+chicken in the midst of a funeral oration, and he extricated himself
+from the situation in stately fashion. The lawyer established the fact
+that the theft of the apples had not been circumstantially proved.
+His client, whom he, in his character of counsel, persisted in calling
+Champmathieu, had not been seen scaling that wall nor breaking that
+branch by any one. He had been taken with that branch (which the lawyer
+preferred to call a bough) in his possession; but he said that he had
+found it broken off and lying on the ground, and had picked it up.
+Where was there any proof to the contrary? No doubt that branch had been
+broken off and concealed after the scaling of the wall, then thrown away
+by the alarmed marauder; there was no doubt that there had been a
+thief in the case. But what proof was there that that thief had been
+Champmathieu? One thing only. His character as an ex-convict. The
+lawyer did not deny that that character appeared to be, unhappily,
+well attested; the accused had resided at Faverolles; the accused had
+exercised the calling of a tree-pruner there; the name of Champmathieu
+might well have had its origin in Jean Mathieu; all that was true,--in
+short, four witnesses recognize Champmathieu, positively and without
+hesitation, as that convict, Jean Valjean; to these signs, to this
+testimony, the counsel could oppose nothing but the denial of his
+client, the denial of an interested party; but supposing that he was
+the convict Jean Valjean, did that prove that he was the thief of the
+apples? that was a presumption at the most, not a proof. The prisoner,
+it was true, and his counsel, "in good faith," was obliged to admit it,
+had adopted "a bad system of defence." He obstinately denied everything,
+the theft and his character of convict. An admission upon this last
+point would certainly have been better, and would have won for him the
+indulgence of his judges; the counsel had advised him to do this; but
+the accused had obstinately refused, thinking, no doubt, that he would
+save everything by admitting nothing. It was an error; but ought not the
+paucity of this intelligence to be taken into consideration? This man
+was visibly stupid. Long-continued wretchedness in the galleys, long
+misery outside the galleys, had brutalized him, etc. He defended himself
+badly; was that a reason for condemning him? As for the affair with
+Little Gervais, the counsel need not discuss it; it did not enter into
+the case. The lawyer wound up by beseeching the jury and the court, if
+the identity of Jean Valjean appeared to them to be evident, to apply
+to him the police penalties which are provided for a criminal who has
+broken his ban, and not the frightful chastisement which descends upon
+the convict guilty of a second offence.
+
+The district-attorney answered the counsel for the defence. He was
+violent and florid, as district-attorneys usually are.
+
+He congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "loyalty," and
+skilfully took advantage of this loyalty. He reached the accused through
+all the concessions made by his lawyer. The advocate had seemed to admit
+that the prisoner was Jean Valjean. He took note of this. So this man
+was Jean Valjean. This point had been conceded to the accusation and
+could no longer be disputed. Here, by means of a clever
+autonomasia which went back to the sources and causes of crime, the
+district-attorney thundered against the immorality of the romantic
+school, then dawning under the name of the Satanic school, which
+had been bestowed upon it by the critics of the Quotidienne and the
+Oriflamme; he attributed, not without some probability, to the influence
+of this perverse literature the crime of Champmathieu, or rather,
+to speak more correctly, of Jean Valjean. Having exhausted these
+considerations, he passed on to Jean Valjean himself. Who was this Jean
+Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean: a monster spewed forth, etc.
+The model for this sort of description is contained in the tale of
+Theramene, which is not useful to tragedy, but which every day renders
+great services to judicial eloquence. The audience and the jury
+"shuddered." The description finished, the district-attorney resumed
+with an oratorical turn calculated to raise the enthusiasm of the
+journal of the prefecture to the highest pitch on the following day: And
+it is such a man, etc., etc., etc., vagabond, beggar, without means of
+existence, etc., etc., inured by his past life to culpable deeds, and
+but little reformed by his sojourn in the galleys, as was proved by the
+crime committed against Little Gervais, etc., etc.; it is such a man,
+caught upon the highway in the very act of theft, a few paces from a
+wall that had been scaled, still holding in his hand the object
+stolen, who denies the crime, the theft, the climbing the wall; denies
+everything; denies even his own identity! In addition to a hundred
+other proofs, to which we will not recur, four witnesses recognize
+him--Javert, the upright inspector of police; Javert, and three of
+his former companions in infamy, the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, and
+Cochepaille. What does he offer in opposition to this overwhelming
+unanimity? His denial. What obduracy! You will do justice, gentlemen
+of the jury, etc., etc. While the district-attorney was speaking, the
+accused listened to him open-mouthed, with a sort of amazement in which
+some admiration was assuredly blended. He was evidently surprised that
+a man could talk like that. From time to time, at those "energetic"
+moments of the prosecutor's speech, when eloquence which cannot contain
+itself overflows in a flood of withering epithets and envelops the
+accused like a storm, he moved his head slowly from right to left and
+from left to right in the sort of mute and melancholy protest with which
+he had contented himself since the beginning of the argument. Two or
+three times the spectators who were nearest to him heard him say in
+a low voice, "That is what comes of not having asked M. Baloup." The
+district-attorney directed the attention of the jury to this stupid
+attitude, evidently deliberate, which denoted not imbecility, but craft,
+skill, a habit of deceiving justice, and which set forth in all its
+nakedness the "profound perversity" of this man. He ended by making
+his reserves on the affair of Little Gervais and demanding a severe
+sentence.
+
+At that time, as the reader will remember, it was penal servitude for
+life.
+
+The counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting Monsieur
+l'Avocat-General on his "admirable speech," then replied as best he
+could; but he weakened; the ground was evidently slipping away from
+under his feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--THE SYSTEM OF DENIALS
+
+The moment for closing the debate had arrived. The President had the
+accused stand up, and addressed to him the customary question, "Have you
+anything to add to your defence?"
+
+The man did not appear to understand, as he stood there, twisting in his
+hands a terrible cap which he had.
+
+The President repeated the question.
+
+This time the man heard it. He seemed to understand. He made a motion
+like a man who is just waking up, cast his eyes about him, stared at
+the audience, the gendarmes, his counsel, the jury, the court, laid
+his monstrous fist on the rim of woodwork in front of his bench,
+took another look, and all at once, fixing his glance upon the
+district-attorney, he began to speak. It was like an eruption.
+It seemed, from the manner in which the words escaped from his
+mouth,--incoherent, impetuous, pell-mell, tumbling over each other,--as
+though they were all pressing forward to issue forth at once. He said:--
+
+"This is what I have to say. That I have been a wheelwright in Paris,
+and that it was with Monsieur Baloup. It is a hard trade. In the
+wheelwright's trade one works always in the open air, in courtyards,
+under sheds when the masters are good, never in closed workshops,
+because space is required, you see. In winter one gets so cold that one
+beats one's arms together to warm one's self; but the masters don't like
+it; they say it wastes time. Handling iron when there is ice between
+the paving-stones is hard work. That wears a man out quickly. One is old
+while he is still quite young in that trade. At forty a man is done for.
+I was fifty-three. I was in a bad state. And then, workmen are so mean!
+When a man is no longer young, they call him nothing but an old bird,
+old beast! I was not earning more than thirty sous a day. They paid me
+as little as possible. The masters took advantage of my age--and then I
+had my daughter, who was a laundress at the river. She earned a little
+also. It sufficed for us two. She had trouble, also; all day long up to
+her waist in a tub, in rain, in snow. When the wind cuts your face, when
+it freezes, it is all the same; you must still wash. There are people
+who have not much linen, and wait until late; if you do not wash, you
+lose your custom. The planks are badly joined, and water drops on you
+from everywhere; you have your petticoats all damp above and below. That
+penetrates. She has also worked at the laundry of the Enfants-Rouges,
+where the water comes through faucets. You are not in the tub there; you
+wash at the faucet in front of you, and rinse in a basin behind you. As
+it is enclosed, you are not so cold; but there is that hot steam, which
+is terrible, and which ruins your eyes. She came home at seven o'clock
+in the evening, and went to bed at once, she was so tired. Her husband
+beat her. She is dead. We have not been very happy. She was a good girl,
+who did not go to the ball, and who was very peaceable. I remember
+one Shrove-Tuesday when she went to bed at eight o'clock. There, I am
+telling the truth; you have only to ask. Ah, yes! how stupid I am! Paris
+is a gulf. Who knows Father Champmathieu there? But M. Baloup does, I
+tell you. Go see at M. Baloup's; and after all, I don't know what is
+wanted of me."
+
+The man ceased speaking, and remained standing. He had said these things
+in a loud, rapid, hoarse voice, with a sort of irritated and savage
+ingenuousness. Once he paused to salute some one in the crowd. The sort
+of affirmations which he seemed to fling out before him at random came
+like hiccoughs, and to each he added the gesture of a wood-cutter who is
+splitting wood. When he had finished, the audience burst into a laugh.
+He stared at the public, and, perceiving that they were laughing, and
+not understanding why, he began to laugh himself.
+
+It was inauspicious.
+
+The President, an attentive and benevolent man, raised his voice.
+
+He reminded "the gentlemen of the jury" that "the sieur Baloup, formerly
+a master-wheelwright, with whom the accused stated that he had served,
+had been summoned in vain. He had become bankrupt, and was not to be
+found." Then turning to the accused, he enjoined him to listen to what
+he was about to say, and added: "You are in a position where reflection
+is necessary. The gravest presumptions rest upon you, and may induce
+vital results. Prisoner, in your own interests, I summon you for the
+last time to explain yourself clearly on two points. In the first place,
+did you or did you not climb the wall of the Pierron orchard, break
+the branch, and steal the apples; that is to say, commit the crime
+of breaking in and theft? In the second place, are you the discharged
+convict, Jean Valjean--yes or no?"
+
+The prisoner shook his head with a capable air, like a man who has
+thoroughly understood, and who knows what answer he is going to make. He
+opened his mouth, turned towards the President, and said:--
+
+"In the first place--"
+
+Then he stared at his cap, stared at the ceiling, and held his peace.
+
+"Prisoner," said the district-attorney, in a severe voice; "pay
+attention. You are not answering anything that has been asked of you.
+Your embarrassment condemns you. It is evident that your name is not
+Champmathieu; that you are the convict, Jean Valjean, concealed first
+under the name of Jean Mathieu, which was the name of his mother; that
+you went to Auvergne; that you were born at Faverolles, where you were
+a pruner of trees. It is evident that you have been guilty of entering,
+and of the theft of ripe apples from the Pierron orchard. The gentlemen
+of the jury will form their own opinion."
+
+[Illustration: Father Champmathieu on Trial]
+
+The prisoner had finally resumed his seat; he arose abruptly when the
+district-attorney had finished, and exclaimed:--
+
+"You are very wicked; that you are! This what I wanted to say; I could
+not find words for it at first. I have stolen nothing. I am a man who
+does not have something to eat every day. I was coming from Ailly; I
+was walking through the country after a shower, which had made the whole
+country yellow: even the ponds were overflowed, and nothing sprang from
+the sand any more but the little blades of grass at the wayside. I
+found a broken branch with apples on the ground; I picked up the branch
+without knowing that it would get me into trouble. I have been in
+prison, and they have been dragging me about for the last three months;
+more than that I cannot say; people talk against me, they tell me,
+'Answer!' The gendarme, who is a good fellow, nudges my elbow, and says
+to me in a low voice, 'Come, answer!' I don't know how to explain; I
+have no education; I am a poor man; that is where they wrong me, because
+they do not see this. I have not stolen; I picked up from the ground
+things that were lying there. You say, Jean Valjean, Jean Mathieu! I
+don't know those persons; they are villagers. I worked for M. Baloup,
+Boulevard de l'Hopital; my name is Champmathieu. You are very clever to
+tell me where I was born; I don't know myself: it's not everybody
+who has a house in which to come into the world; that would be too
+convenient. I think that my father and mother were people who strolled
+along the highways; I know nothing different. When I was a child,
+they called me young fellow; now they call me old fellow; those are my
+baptismal names; take that as you like. I have been in Auvergne; I have
+been at Faverolles. Pardi. Well! can't a man have been in Auvergne, or
+at Faverolles, without having been in the galleys? I tell you that I
+have not stolen, and that I am Father Champmathieu; I have been with M.
+Baloup; I have had a settled residence. You worry me with your nonsense,
+there! Why is everybody pursuing me so furiously?"
+
+The district-attorney had remained standing; he addressed the
+President:--
+
+"Monsieur le President, in view of the confused but exceedingly clever
+denials of the prisoner, who would like to pass himself off as an idiot,
+but who will not succeed in so doing,--we shall attend to that,--we
+demand that it shall please you and that it shall please the court to
+summon once more into this place the convicts Brevet, Cochepaille, and
+Chenildieu, and Police-Inspector Javert, and question them for the last
+time as to the identity of the prisoner with the convict Jean Valjean."
+
+"I would remind the district-attorney," said the President, "that
+Police-Inspector Javert, recalled by his duties to the capital of a
+neighboring arrondissement, left the court-room and the town as soon as
+he had made his deposition; we have accorded him permission, with the
+consent of the district-attorney and of the counsel for the prisoner."
+
+"That is true, Mr. President," responded the district-attorney. "In the
+absence of sieur Javert, I think it my duty to remind the gentlemen of
+the jury of what he said here a few hours ago. Javert is an estimable
+man, who does honor by his rigorous and strict probity to inferior but
+important functions. These are the terms of his deposition: 'I do not
+even stand in need of circumstantial proofs and moral presumptions to
+give the lie to the prisoner's denial. I recognize him perfectly. The
+name of this man is not Champmathieu; he is an ex-convict named Jean
+Valjean, and is very vicious and much to be feared. It is only with
+extreme regret that he was released at the expiration of his term. He
+underwent nineteen years of penal servitude for theft. He made five or
+six attempts to escape. Besides the theft from Little Gervais, and from
+the Pierron orchard, I suspect him of a theft committed in the house of
+His Grace the late Bishop of D---- I often saw him at the time when I
+was adjutant of the galley-guard at the prison in Toulon. I repeat that
+I recognize him perfectly.'"
+
+This extremely precise statement appeared to produce a vivid impression
+on the public and on the jury. The district-attorney concluded by
+insisting, that in default of Javert, the three witnesses Brevet,
+Chenildieu, and Cochepaille should be heard once more and solemnly
+interrogated.
+
+The President transmitted the order to an usher, and, a moment later,
+the door of the witnesses' room opened. The usher, accompanied by a
+gendarme ready to lend him armed assistance, introduced the convict
+Brevet. The audience was in suspense; and all breasts heaved as though
+they had contained but one soul.
+
+The ex-convict Brevet wore the black and gray waistcoat of the central
+prisons. Brevet was a person sixty years of age, who had a sort of
+business man's face, and the air of a rascal. The two sometimes go
+together. In prison, whither fresh misdeeds had led him, he had become
+something in the nature of a turnkey. He was a man of whom his superiors
+said, "He tries to make himself of use." The chaplains bore good
+testimony as to his religious habits. It must not be forgotten that this
+passed under the Restoration.
+
+"Brevet," said the President, "you have undergone an ignominious
+sentence, and you cannot take an oath."
+
+Brevet dropped his eyes.
+
+"Nevertheless," continued the President, "even in the man whom the law
+has degraded, there may remain, when the divine mercy permits it, a
+sentiment of honor and of equity. It is to this sentiment that I
+appeal at this decisive hour. If it still exists in you,--and I hope
+it does,--reflect before replying to me: consider on the one hand, this
+man, whom a word from you may ruin; on the other hand, justice, which a
+word from you may enlighten. The instant is solemn; there is still time
+to retract if you think you have been mistaken. Rise, prisoner. Brevet,
+take a good look at the accused, recall your souvenirs, and tell us on
+your soul and conscience, if you persist in recognizing this man as your
+former companion in the galleys, Jean Valjean?"
+
+Brevet looked at the prisoner, then turned towards the court.
+
+"Yes, Mr. President, I was the first to recognize him, and I stick to
+it; that man is Jean Valjean, who entered at Toulon in 1796, and left in
+1815. I left a year later. He has the air of a brute now; but it must be
+because age has brutalized him; he was sly at the galleys: I recognize
+him positively."
+
+"Take your seat," said the President. "Prisoner, remain standing."
+
+Chenildieu was brought in, a prisoner for life, as was indicated by his
+red cassock and his green cap. He was serving out his sentence at the
+galleys of Toulon, whence he had been brought for this case. He was a
+small man of about fifty, brisk, wrinkled, frail, yellow, brazen-faced,
+feverish, who had a sort of sickly feebleness about all his limbs and
+his whole person, and an immense force in his glance. His companions in
+the galleys had nicknamed him I-deny-God (Je-nie Dieu, Chenildieu).
+
+The President addressed him in nearly the same words which he had
+used to Brevet. At the moment when he reminded him of his infamy which
+deprived him of the right to take an oath, Chenildieu raised his
+head and looked the crowd in the face. The President invited him to
+reflection, and asked him as he had asked Brevet, if he persisted in
+recognition of the prisoner.
+
+Chenildieu burst out laughing.
+
+"Pardieu, as if I didn't recognize him! We were attached to the same
+chain for five years. So you are sulking, old fellow?"
+
+"Go take your seat," said the President.
+
+The usher brought in Cochepaille. He was another convict for life, who
+had come from the galleys, and was dressed in red, like Chenildieu, was
+a peasant from Lourdes, and a half-bear of the Pyrenees. He had guarded
+the flocks among the mountains, and from a shepherd he had slipped into
+a brigand. Cochepaille was no less savage and seemed even more stupid
+than the prisoner. He was one of those wretched men whom nature has
+sketched out for wild beasts, and on whom society puts the finishing
+touches as convicts in the galleys.
+
+The President tried to touch him with some grave and pathetic words,
+and asked him, as he had asked the other two, if he persisted, without
+hesitation or trouble, in recognizing the man who was standing before
+him.
+
+"He is Jean Valjean," said Cochepaille. "He was even called
+Jean-the-Screw, because he was so strong."
+
+Each of these affirmations from these three men, evidently sincere and
+in good faith, had raised in the audience a murmur of bad augury for the
+prisoner,--a murmur which increased and lasted longer each time that a
+fresh declaration was added to the proceeding.
+
+The prisoner had listened to them, with that astounded face which was,
+according to the accusation, his principal means of defence; at the
+first, the gendarmes, his neighbors, had heard him mutter between his
+teeth: "Ah, well, he's a nice one!" after the second, he said, a little
+louder, with an air that was almost that of satisfaction, "Good!" at the
+third, he cried, "Famous!"
+
+The President addressed him:--
+
+"Have you heard, prisoner? What have you to say?"
+
+He replied:--
+
+"I say, 'Famous!'"
+
+An uproar broke out among the audience, and was communicated to the
+jury; it was evident that the man was lost.
+
+"Ushers," said the President, "enforce silence! I am going to sum up the
+arguments."
+
+At that moment there was a movement just beside the President; a voice
+was heard crying:--
+
+"Brevet! Chenildieu! Cochepaille! look here!"
+
+All who heard that voice were chilled, so lamentable and terrible was
+it; all eyes were turned to the point whence it had proceeded. A man,
+placed among the privileged spectators who were seated behind the
+court, had just risen, had pushed open the half-door which separated the
+tribunal from the audience, and was standing in the middle of the hall;
+the President, the district-attorney, M. Bamatabois, twenty persons,
+recognized him, and exclaimed in concert:--
+
+"M. Madeleine!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--CHAMPMATHIEU MORE AND MORE ASTONISHED
+
+It was he, in fact. The clerk's lamp illumined his countenance. He held
+his hat in his hand; there was no disorder in his clothing; his coat
+was carefully buttoned; he was very pale, and he trembled slightly;
+his hair, which had still been gray on his arrival in Arras, was now
+entirely white: it had turned white during the hour he had sat there.
+
+All heads were raised: the sensation was indescribable; there was
+a momentary hesitation in the audience, the voice had been so
+heart-rending; the man who stood there appeared so calm that they did
+not understand at first. They asked themselves whether he had indeed
+uttered that cry; they could not believe that that tranquil man had been
+the one to give that terrible outcry.
+
+This indecision only lasted a few seconds. Even before the President
+and the district-attorney could utter a word, before the ushers and the
+gendarmes could make a gesture, the man whom all still called, at that
+moment, M. Madeleine, had advanced towards the witnesses Cochepaille,
+Brevet, and Chenildieu.
+
+"Do you not recognize me?" said he.
+
+All three remained speechless, and indicated by a sign of the head that
+they did not know him. Cochepaille, who was intimidated, made a military
+salute. M. Madeleine turned towards the jury and the court, and said in
+a gentle voice:--
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury, order the prisoner to be released! Mr.
+President, have me arrested. He is not the man whom you are in search
+of; it is I: I am Jean Valjean."
+
+Not a mouth breathed; the first commotion of astonishment had been
+followed by a silence like that of the grave; those within the hall
+experienced that sort of religious terror which seizes the masses when
+something grand has been done.
+
+In the meantime, the face of the President was stamped with sympathy and
+sadness; he had exchanged a rapid sign with the district-attorney and a
+few low-toned words with the assistant judges; he addressed the public,
+and asked in accents which all understood:--
+
+"Is there a physician present?"
+
+The district-attorney took the word:--
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury, the very strange and unexpected incident
+which disturbs the audience inspires us, like yourselves, only with a
+sentiment which it is unnecessary for us to express. You all know, by
+reputation at least, the honorable M. Madeleine, mayor of M. sur M.;
+if there is a physician in the audience, we join the President in
+requesting him to attend to M. Madeleine, and to conduct him to his
+home."
+
+M. Madeleine did not allow the district-attorney to finish; he
+interrupted him in accents full of suavity and authority. These are the
+words which he uttered; here they are literally, as they were written
+down, immediately after the trial by one of the witnesses to this scene,
+and as they now ring in the ears of those who heard them nearly forty
+years ago:--
+
+"I thank you, Mr. District-Attorney, but I am not mad; you shall see;
+you were on the point of committing a great error; release this man! I
+am fulfilling a duty; I am that miserable criminal. I am the only one
+here who sees the matter clearly, and I am telling you the truth. God,
+who is on high, looks down on what I am doing at this moment, and that
+suffices. You can take me, for here I am: but I have done my best; I
+concealed myself under another name; I have become rich; I have become
+a mayor; I have tried to re-enter the ranks of the honest. It seems that
+that is not to be done. In short, there are many things which I cannot
+tell. I will not narrate the story of my life to you; you will hear it
+one of these days. I robbed Monseigneur the Bishop, it is true; it is
+true that I robbed Little Gervais; they were right in telling you that
+Jean Valjean was a very vicious wretch. Perhaps it was not altogether
+his fault. Listen, honorable judges! a man who has been so greatly
+humbled as I have has neither any remonstrances to make to Providence,
+nor any advice to give to society; but, you see, the infamy from which I
+have tried to escape is an injurious thing; the galleys make the convict
+what he is; reflect upon that, if you please. Before going to the
+galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort
+of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became
+vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand. Later on,
+indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me. But, pardon
+me, you cannot understand what I am saying. You will find at my house,
+among the ashes in the fireplace, the forty-sou piece which I stole,
+seven years ago, from little Gervais. I have nothing farther to add;
+take me. Good God! the district-attorney shakes his head; you say, 'M.
+Madeleine has gone mad!' you do not believe me! that is distressing. Do
+not, at least, condemn this man! What! these men do not recognize me! I
+wish Javert were here; he would recognize me."
+
+Nothing can reproduce the sombre and kindly melancholy of tone which
+accompanied these words.
+
+He turned to the three convicts, and said:--
+
+"Well, I recognize you; do you remember, Brevet?"
+
+He paused, hesitated for an instant, and said:--
+
+"Do you remember the knitted suspenders with a checked pattern which you
+wore in the galleys?"
+
+Brevet gave a start of surprise, and surveyed him from head to foot with
+a frightened air. He continued:--
+
+"Chenildieu, you who conferred on yourself the name of 'Jenie-Dieu,'
+your whole right shoulder bears a deep burn, because you one day laid
+your shoulder against the chafing-dish full of coals, in order to efface
+the three letters T. F. P., which are still visible, nevertheless;
+answer, is this true?"
+
+"It is true," said Chenildieu.
+
+He addressed himself to Cochepaille:--
+
+"Cochepaille, you have, near the bend in your left arm, a date stamped
+in blue letters with burnt powder; the date is that of the landing of
+the Emperor at Cannes, March 1, 1815; pull up your sleeve!"
+
+Cochepaille pushed up his sleeve; all eyes were focused on him and on
+his bare arm.
+
+A gendarme held a light close to it; there was the date.
+
+The unhappy man turned to the spectators and the judges with a smile
+which still rends the hearts of all who saw it whenever they think of
+it. It was a smile of triumph; it was also a smile of despair.
+
+"You see plainly," he said, "that I am Jean Valjean."
+
+In that chamber there were no longer either judges, accusers, nor
+gendarmes; there was nothing but staring eyes and sympathizing hearts.
+No one recalled any longer the part that each might be called upon
+to play; the district-attorney forgot he was there for the purpose of
+prosecuting, the President that he was there to preside, the counsel for
+the defence that he was there to defend. It was a striking circumstance
+that no question was put, that no authority intervened. The peculiarity
+of sublime spectacles is, that they capture all souls and turn witnesses
+into spectators. No one, probably, could have explained what he felt;
+no one, probably, said to himself that he was witnessing the splendid
+outburst of a grand light: all felt themselves inwardly dazzled.
+
+It was evident that they had Jean Valjean before their eyes. That was
+clear. The appearance of this man had sufficed to suffuse with light
+that matter which had been so obscure but a moment previously, without
+any further explanation: the whole crowd, as by a sort of electric
+revelation, understood instantly and at a single glance the simple
+and magnificent history of a man who was delivering himself up so
+that another man might not be condemned in his stead. The details, the
+hesitations, little possible oppositions, were swallowed up in that vast
+and luminous fact.
+
+It was an impression which vanished speedily, but which was irresistible
+at the moment.
+
+"I do not wish to disturb the court further," resumed Jean Valjean. "I
+shall withdraw, since you do not arrest me. I have many things to do.
+The district-attorney knows who I am; he knows whither I am going; he
+can have me arrested when he likes."
+
+He directed his steps towards the door. Not a voice was raised, not an
+arm extended to hinder him. All stood aside. At that moment there was
+about him that divine something which causes multitudes to stand aside
+and make way for a man. He traversed the crowd slowly. It was never
+known who opened the door, but it is certain that he found the door open
+when he reached it. On arriving there he turned round and said:--
+
+"I am at your command, Mr. District-Attorney."
+
+Then he addressed the audience:--
+
+"All of you, all who are present--consider me worthy of pity, do you
+not? Good God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, I
+consider that I am to be envied. Nevertheless, I should have preferred
+not to have had this occur."
+
+He withdrew, and the door closed behind him as it had opened, for those
+who do certain sovereign things are always sure of being served by some
+one in the crowd.
+
+Less than an hour after this, the verdict of the jury freed the said
+Champmathieu from all accusations; and Champmathieu, being at once
+released, went off in a state of stupefaction, thinking that all men
+were fools, and comprehending nothing of this vision.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--IN WHAT MIRROR M. MADELEINE CONTEMPLATES HIS HAIR
+
+The day had begun to dawn. Fantine had passed a sleepless and feverish
+night, filled with happy visions; at daybreak she fell asleep. Sister
+Simplice, who had been watching with her, availed herself of this
+slumber to go and prepare a new potion of chinchona. The worthy sister
+had been in the laboratory of the infirmary but a few moments, bending
+over her drugs and phials, and scrutinizing things very closely, on
+account of the dimness which the half-light of dawn spreads over all
+objects. Suddenly she raised her head and uttered a faint shriek. M.
+Madeleine stood before her; he had just entered silently.
+
+"Is it you, Mr. Mayor?" she exclaimed.
+
+He replied in a low voice:--
+
+"How is that poor woman?"
+
+"Not so bad just now; but we have been very uneasy."
+
+She explained to him what had passed: that Fantine had been very ill the
+day before, and that she was better now, because she thought that the
+mayor had gone to Montfermeil to get her child. The sister dared not
+question the mayor; but she perceived plainly from his air that he had
+not come from there.
+
+"All that is good," said he; "you were right not to undeceive her."
+
+"Yes," responded the sister; "but now, Mr. Mayor, she will see you and
+will not see her child. What shall we say to her?"
+
+He reflected for a moment.
+
+"God will inspire us," said he.
+
+"But we cannot tell a lie," murmured the sister, half aloud.
+
+It was broad daylight in the room. The light fell full on M. Madeleine's
+face. The sister chanced to raise her eyes to it.
+
+"Good God, sir!" she exclaimed; "what has happened to you? Your hair is
+perfectly white!"
+
+"White!" said he.
+
+Sister Simplice had no mirror. She rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out
+the little glass which the doctor of the infirmary used to see whether
+a patient was dead and whether he no longer breathed. M. Madeleine took
+the mirror, looked at his hair, and said:--
+
+"Well!"
+
+He uttered the word indifferently, and as though his mind were on
+something else.
+
+The sister felt chilled by something strange of which she caught a
+glimpse in all this.
+
+He inquired:--
+
+"Can I see her?"
+
+"Is not Monsieur le Maire going to have her child brought back to her?"
+said the sister, hardly venturing to put the question.
+
+"Of course; but it will take two or three days at least."
+
+"If she were not to see Monsieur le Maire until that time," went on
+the sister, timidly, "she would not know that Monsieur le Maire had
+returned, and it would be easy to inspire her with patience; and when
+the child arrived, she would naturally think Monsieur le Maire had just
+come with the child. We should not have to enact a lie."
+
+M. Madeleine seemed to reflect for a few moments; then he said with his
+calm gravity:--
+
+"No, sister, I must see her. I may, perhaps, be in haste."
+
+The nun did not appear to notice this word "perhaps," which communicated
+an obscure and singular sense to the words of the mayor's speech. She
+replied, lowering her eyes and her voice respectfully:--
+
+"In that case, she is asleep; but Monsieur le Maire may enter."
+
+He made some remarks about a door which shut badly, and the noise of
+which might awaken the sick woman; then he entered Fantine's chamber,
+approached the bed and drew aside the curtains. She was asleep. Her
+breath issued from her breast with that tragic sound which is peculiar
+to those maladies, and which breaks the hearts of mothers when they are
+watching through the night beside their sleeping child who is condemned
+to death. But this painful respiration hardly troubled a sort of
+ineffable serenity which overspread her countenance, and which
+transfigured her in her sleep. Her pallor had become whiteness; her
+cheeks were crimson; her long golden lashes, the only beauty of her
+youth and her virginity which remained to her, palpitated, though they
+remained closed and drooping. Her whole person was trembling with an
+indescribable unfolding of wings, all ready to open wide and bear her
+away, which could be felt as they rustled, though they could not be
+seen. To see her thus, one would never have dreamed that she was
+an invalid whose life was almost despaired of. She resembled rather
+something on the point of soaring away than something on the point of
+dying.
+
+The branch trembles when a hand approaches it to pluck a flower, and
+seems to both withdraw and to offer itself at one and the same time.
+The human body has something of this tremor when the instant arrives in
+which the mysterious fingers of Death are about to pluck the soul.
+
+M. Madeleine remained for some time motionless beside that bed, gazing
+in turn upon the sick woman and the crucifix, as he had done two months
+before, on the day when he had come for the first time to see her
+in that asylum. They were both still there in the same attitude--she
+sleeping, he praying; only now, after the lapse of two months, her hair
+was gray and his was white.
+
+The sister had not entered with him. He stood beside the bed, with his
+finger on his lips, as though there were some one in the chamber whom he
+must enjoin to silence.
+
+She opened her eyes, saw him, and said quietly, with a smile:--
+
+"And Cosette?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--FANTINE HAPPY
+
+She made no movement of either surprise or of joy; she was joy itself.
+That simple question, "And Cosette?" was put with so profound a faith,
+with so much certainty, with such a complete absence of disquiet and of
+doubt, that he found not a word of reply. She continued:--
+
+"I knew that you were there. I was asleep, but I saw you. I have seen
+you for a long, long time. I have been following you with my eyes all
+night long. You were in a glory, and you had around you all sorts of
+celestial forms."
+
+He raised his glance to the crucifix.
+
+"But," she resumed, "tell me where Cosette is. Why did not you place her
+on my bed against the moment of my waking?"
+
+He made some mechanical reply which he was never afterwards able to
+recall.
+
+Fortunately, the doctor had been warned, and he now made his appearance.
+He came to the aid of M. Madeleine.
+
+"Calm yourself, my child," said the doctor; "your child is here."
+
+Fantine's eyes beamed and filled her whole face with light. She clasped
+her hands with an expression which contained all that is possible to
+prayer in the way of violence and tenderness.
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, "bring her to me!"
+
+Touching illusion of a mother! Cosette was, for her, still the little
+child who is carried.
+
+"Not yet," said the doctor, "not just now. You still have some fever.
+The sight of your child would agitate you and do you harm. You must be
+cured first."
+
+She interrupted him impetuously:--
+
+"But I am cured! Oh, I tell you that I am cured! What an ass that doctor
+is! The idea! I want to see my child!"
+
+"You see," said the doctor, "how excited you become. So long as you are
+in this state I shall oppose your having your child. It is not enough
+to see her; it is necessary that you should live for her. When you are
+reasonable, I will bring her to you myself."
+
+The poor mother bowed her head.
+
+"I beg your pardon, doctor, I really beg your pardon. Formerly I should
+never have spoken as I have just done; so many misfortunes have happened
+to me, that I sometimes do not know what I am saying. I understand you;
+you fear the emotion. I will wait as long as you like, but I swear to
+you that it would not have harmed me to see my daughter. I have been
+seeing her; I have not taken my eyes from her since yesterday evening.
+Do you know? If she were brought to me now, I should talk to her very
+gently. That is all. Is it not quite natural that I should desire to see
+my daughter, who has been brought to me expressly from Montfermeil? I
+am not angry. I know well that I am about to be happy. All night long I
+have seen white things, and persons who smiled at me. When Monsieur le
+Docteur pleases, he shall bring me Cosette. I have no longer any fever;
+I am well. I am perfectly conscious that there is nothing the matter
+with me any more; but I am going to behave as though I were ill, and not
+stir, to please these ladies here. When it is seen that I am very calm,
+they will say, 'She must have her child.'"
+
+M. Madeleine was sitting on a chair beside the bed. She turned towards
+him; she was making a visible effort to be calm and "very good," as she
+expressed it in the feebleness of illness which resembles infancy, in
+order that, seeing her so peaceable, they might make no difficulty about
+bringing Cosette to her. But while she controlled herself she could not
+refrain from questioning M. Madeleine.
+
+"Did you have a pleasant trip, Monsieur le Maire? Oh! how good you were
+to go and get her for me! Only tell me how she is. Did she stand the
+journey well? Alas! she will not recognize me. She must have forgotten
+me by this time, poor darling! Children have no memories. They are like
+birds. A child sees one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow, and
+thinks of nothing any longer. And did she have white linen? Did those
+Thenardiers keep her clean? How have they fed her? Oh! if you only knew
+how I have suffered, putting such questions as that to myself during all
+the time of my wretchedness. Now, it is all past. I am happy. Oh, how I
+should like to see her! Do you think her pretty, Monsieur le Maire?
+Is not my daughter beautiful? You must have been very cold in that
+diligence! Could she not be brought for just one little instant? She
+might be taken away directly afterwards. Tell me; you are the master; it
+could be so if you chose!"
+
+He took her hand. "Cosette is beautiful," he said, "Cosette is well.
+You shall see her soon; but calm yourself; you are talking with too much
+vivacity, and you are throwing your arms out from under the clothes, and
+that makes you cough."
+
+In fact, fits of coughing interrupted Fantine at nearly every word.
+
+Fantine did not murmur; she feared that she had injured by her too
+passionate lamentations the confidence which she was desirous of
+inspiring, and she began to talk of indifferent things.
+
+"Montfermeil is quite pretty, is it not? People go there on pleasure
+parties in summer. Are the Thenardiers prosperous? There are not many
+travellers in their parts. That inn of theirs is a sort of a cook-shop."
+
+M. Madeleine was still holding her hand, and gazing at her with anxiety;
+it was evident that he had come to tell her things before which his mind
+now hesitated. The doctor, having finished his visit, retired. Sister
+Simplice remained alone with them.
+
+But in the midst of this pause Fantine exclaimed:--
+
+"I hear her! mon Dieu, I hear her!"
+
+She stretched out her arm to enjoin silence about her, held her breath,
+and began to listen with rapture.
+
+There was a child playing in the yard--the child of the portress or
+of some work-woman. It was one of those accidents which are always
+occurring, and which seem to form a part of the mysterious stage-setting
+of mournful scenes. The child--a little girl--was going and coming,
+running to warm herself, laughing, singing at the top of her voice.
+Alas! in what are the plays of children not intermingled. It was this
+little girl whom Fantine heard singing.
+
+"Oh!" she resumed, "it is my Cosette! I recognize her voice."
+
+The child retreated as it had come; the voice died away. Fantine
+listened for a while longer, then her face clouded over, and M.
+Madeleine heard her say, in a low voice: "How wicked that doctor is not
+to allow me to see my daughter! That man has an evil countenance, that
+he has."
+
+But the smiling background of her thoughts came to the front again. She
+continued to talk to herself, with her head resting on the pillow: "How
+happy we are going to be! We shall have a little garden the very first
+thing; M. Madeleine has promised it to me. My daughter will play in the
+garden. She must know her letters by this time. I will make her spell.
+She will run over the grass after butterflies. I will watch her. Then
+she will take her first communion. Ah! when will she take her first
+communion?"
+
+She began to reckon on her fingers.
+
+"One, two, three, four--she is seven years old. In five years she will
+have a white veil, and openwork stockings; she will look like a little
+woman. O my good sister, you do not know how foolish I become when I
+think of my daughter's first communion!"
+
+She began to laugh.
+
+He had released Fantine's hand. He listened to her words as one listens
+to the sighing of the breeze, with his eyes on the ground, his mind
+absorbed in reflection which had no bottom. All at once she ceased
+speaking, and this caused him to raise his head mechanically. Fantine
+had become terrible.
+
+She no longer spoke, she no longer breathed; she had raised herself to
+a sitting posture, her thin shoulder emerged from her chemise; her face,
+which had been radiant but a moment before, was ghastly, and she
+seemed to have fixed her eyes, rendered large with terror, on something
+alarming at the other extremity of the room.
+
+"Good God!" he exclaimed; "what ails you, Fantine?"
+
+She made no reply; she did not remove her eyes from the object which
+she seemed to see. She removed one hand from his arm, and with the other
+made him a sign to look behind him.
+
+He turned, and beheld Javert.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--JAVERT SATISFIED
+
+This is what had taken place.
+
+The half-hour after midnight had just struck when M. Madeleine quitted
+the Hall of Assizes in Arras. He regained his inn just in time to set
+out again by the mail-wagon, in which he had engaged his place. A little
+before six o'clock in the morning he had arrived at M. sur M., and his
+first care had been to post a letter to M. Laffitte, then to enter the
+infirmary and see Fantine.
+
+However, he had hardly quitted the audience hall of the Court of
+Assizes, when the district-attorney, recovering from his first shock,
+had taken the word to deplore the mad deed of the honorable mayor of
+M. sur M., to declare that his convictions had not been in the least
+modified by that curious incident, which would be explained thereafter,
+and to demand, in the meantime, the condemnation of that Champmathieu,
+who was evidently the real Jean Valjean. The district-attorney's
+persistence was visibly at variance with the sentiments of every one, of
+the public, of the court, and of the jury. The counsel for the defence
+had some difficulty in refuting this harangue and in establishing that,
+in consequence of the revelations of M. Madeleine, that is to say, of
+the real Jean Valjean, the aspect of the matter had been thoroughly
+altered, and that the jury had before their eyes now only an innocent
+man. Thence the lawyer had drawn some epiphonemas, not very fresh,
+unfortunately, upon judicial errors, etc., etc.; the President, in his
+summing up, had joined the counsel for the defence, and in a few minutes
+the jury had thrown Champmathieu out of the case.
+
+Nevertheless, the district-attorney was bent on having a Jean Valjean;
+and as he had no longer Champmathieu, he took Madeleine.
+
+Immediately after Champmathieu had been set at liberty, the
+district-attorney shut himself up with the President. They conferred "as
+to the necessity of seizing the person of M. le Maire of M. sur M."
+This phrase, in which there was a great deal of of, is the
+district-attorney's, written with his own hand, on the minutes of his
+report to the attorney-general. His first emotion having passed off, the
+President did not offer many objections. Justice must, after all, take
+its course. And then, when all was said, although the President was
+a kindly and a tolerably intelligent man, he was, at the same time, a
+devoted and almost an ardent royalist, and he had been shocked to hear
+the Mayor of M. sur M. say the Emperor, and not Bonaparte, when alluding
+to the landing at Cannes.
+
+The order for his arrest was accordingly despatched. The
+district-attorney forwarded it to M. sur M. by a special messenger, at
+full speed, and entrusted its execution to Police Inspector Javert.
+
+The reader knows that Javert had returned to M. sur M. immediately after
+having given his deposition.
+
+Javert was just getting out of bed when the messenger handed him the
+order of arrest and the command to produce the prisoner.
+
+The messenger himself was a very clever member of the police, who, in
+two words, informed Javert of what had taken place at Arras. The order
+of arrest, signed by the district-attorney, was couched in these words:
+"Inspector Javert will apprehend the body of the Sieur Madeleine, mayor
+of M. sur M., who, in this day's session of the court, was recognized as
+the liberated convict, Jean Valjean."
+
+Any one who did not know Javert, and who had chanced to see him at the
+moment when he penetrated the antechamber of the infirmary, could have
+divined nothing of what had taken place, and would have thought his air
+the most ordinary in the world. He was cool, calm, grave, his gray
+hair was perfectly smooth upon his temples, and he had just mounted
+the stairs with his habitual deliberation. Any one who was thoroughly
+acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the moment,
+would have shuddered. The buckle of his leather stock was under his
+left ear instead of at the nape of his neck. This betrayed unwonted
+agitation.
+
+Javert was a complete character, who never had a wrinkle in his duty or
+in his uniform; methodical with malefactors, rigid with the buttons of
+his coat.
+
+That he should have set the buckle of his stock awry, it was
+indispensable that there should have taken place in him one of those
+emotions which may be designated as internal earthquakes.
+
+He had come in a simple way, had made a requisition on the neighboring
+post for a corporal and four soldiers, had left the soldiers in the
+courtyard, had had Fantine's room pointed out to him by the portress,
+who was utterly unsuspicious, accustomed as she was to seeing armed men
+inquiring for the mayor.
+
+On arriving at Fantine's chamber, Javert turned the handle, pushed
+the door open with the gentleness of a sick-nurse or a police spy, and
+entered.
+
+Properly speaking, he did not enter. He stood erect in the half-open
+door, his hat on his head and his left hand thrust into his coat, which
+was buttoned up to the chin. In the bend of his elbow the leaden head of
+his enormous cane, which was hidden behind him, could be seen.
+
+Thus he remained for nearly a minute, without his presence being
+perceived. All at once Fantine raised her eyes, saw him, and made M.
+Madeleine turn round.
+
+The instant that Madeleine's glance encountered Javert's glance, Javert,
+without stirring, without moving from his post, without approaching him,
+became terrible. No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy.
+
+It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.
+
+The satisfaction of at last getting hold of Jean Valjean caused all that
+was in his soul to appear in his countenance. The depths having been
+stirred up, mounted to the surface. The humiliation of having, in
+some slight degree, lost the scent, and of having indulged, for a few
+moments, in an error with regard to Champmathieu, was effaced by pride
+at having so well and accurately divined in the first place, and of
+having for so long cherished a just instinct. Javert's content shone
+forth in his sovereign attitude. The deformity of triumph overspread
+that narrow brow. All the demonstrations of horror which a satisfied
+face can afford were there.
+
+Javert was in heaven at that moment. Without putting the thing clearly
+to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his
+presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and
+truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil. Behind him and
+around him, at an infinite distance, he had authority, reason, the case
+judged, the legal conscience, the public prosecution, all the stars; he
+was protecting order, he was causing the law to yield up its thunders,
+he was avenging society, he was lending a helping hand to the absolute,
+he was standing erect in the midst of a glory. There existed in his
+victory a remnant of defiance and of combat. Erect, haughty, brilliant,
+he flaunted abroad in open day the superhuman bestiality of a ferocious
+archangel. The terrible shadow of the action which he was accomplishing
+caused the vague flash of the social sword to be visible in his clenched
+fist; happy and indignant, he held his heel upon crime, vice, rebellion,
+perdition, hell; he was radiant, he exterminated, he smiled, and there
+was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous Saint Michael.
+
+Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him.
+
+Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things
+which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when
+hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human
+conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues
+which have one vice,--error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic
+in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously
+venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his
+formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who
+triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face,
+wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the
+good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--AUTHORITY REASSERTS ITS RIGHTS
+
+Fantine had not seen Javert since the day on which the mayor had torn
+her from the man. Her ailing brain comprehended nothing, but the only
+thing which she did not doubt was that he had come to get her. She could
+not endure that terrible face; she felt her life quitting her; she hid
+her face in both hands, and shrieked in her anguish:--
+
+"Monsieur Madeleine, save me!"
+
+Jean Valjean--we shall henceforth not speak of him otherwise--had risen.
+He said to Fantine in the gentlest and calmest of voices:--
+
+"Be at ease; it is not for you that he is come."
+
+Then he addressed Javert, and said:--
+
+"I know what you want."
+
+Javert replied:--
+
+"Be quick about it!"
+
+There lay in the inflection of voice which accompanied these words
+something indescribably fierce and frenzied. Javert did not say, "Be
+quick about it!" he said "Bequiabouit."
+
+No orthography can do justice to the accent with which it was uttered:
+it was no longer a human word: it was a roar.
+
+He did not proceed according to his custom, he did not enter into the
+matter, he exhibited no warrant of arrest. In his eyes, Jean Valjean
+was a sort of mysterious combatant, who was not to be laid hands upon,
+a wrestler in the dark whom he had had in his grasp for the last five
+years, without being able to throw him. This arrest was not a beginning,
+but an end. He confined himself to saying, "Be quick about it!"
+
+As he spoke thus, he did not advance a single step; he hurled at Jean
+Valjean a glance which he threw out like a grappling-hook, and with
+which he was accustomed to draw wretches violently to him.
+
+It was this glance which Fantine had felt penetrating to the very marrow
+of her bones two months previously.
+
+At Javert's exclamation, Fantine opened her eyes once more. But the
+mayor was there; what had she to fear?
+
+Javert advanced to the middle of the room, and cried:--
+
+"See here now! Art thou coming?"
+
+The unhappy woman glanced about her. No one was present excepting the
+nun and the mayor. To whom could that abject use of "thou" be addressed?
+To her only. She shuddered.
+
+Then she beheld a most unprecedented thing, a thing so unprecedented
+that nothing equal to it had appeared to her even in the blackest
+deliriums of fever.
+
+She beheld Javert, the police spy, seize the mayor by the collar; she
+saw the mayor bow his head. It seemed to her that the world was coming
+to an end.
+
+Javert had, in fact, grasped Jean Valjean by the collar.
+
+"Monsieur le Maire!" shrieked Fantine.
+
+Javert burst out laughing with that frightful laugh which displayed all
+his gums.
+
+"There is no longer any Monsieur le Maire here!"
+
+Jean Valjean made no attempt to disengage the hand which grasped the
+collar of his coat. He said:--
+
+"Javert--"
+
+Javert interrupted him: "Call me Mr. Inspector."
+
+"Monsieur," said Jean Valjean, "I should like to say a word to you in
+private."
+
+"Aloud! Say it aloud!" replied Javert; "people are in the habit of
+talking aloud to me."
+
+Jean Valjean went on in a lower tone:--
+
+"I have a request to make of you--"
+
+"I tell you to speak loud."
+
+"But you alone should hear it--"
+
+"What difference does that make to me? I shall not listen."
+
+Jean Valjean turned towards him and said very rapidly and in a very low
+voice:--
+
+"Grant me three days' grace! three days in which to go and fetch the
+child of this unhappy woman. I will pay whatever is necessary. You shall
+accompany me if you choose."
+
+"You are making sport of me!" cried Javert. "Come now, I did not think
+you such a fool! You ask me to give you three days in which to run away!
+You say that it is for the purpose of fetching that creature's child!
+Ah! Ah! That's good! That's really capital!"
+
+Fantine was seized with a fit of trembling.
+
+"My child!" she cried, "to go and fetch my child! She is not here,
+then! Answer me, sister; where is Cosette? I want my child! Monsieur
+Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire!"
+
+Javert stamped his foot.
+
+"And now there's the other one! Will you hold your tongue, you hussy?
+It's a pretty sort of a place where convicts are magistrates, and where
+women of the town are cared for like countesses! Ah! But we are going to
+change all that; it is high time!"
+
+He stared intently at Fantine, and added, once more taking into his
+grasp Jean Valjean's cravat, shirt and collar:--
+
+"I tell you that there is no Monsieur Madeleine and that there is no
+Monsieur le Maire. There is a thief, a brigand, a convict named Jean
+Valjean! And I have him in my grasp! That's what there is!"
+
+Fantine raised herself in bed with a bound, supporting herself on her
+stiffened arms and on both hands: she gazed at Jean Valjean, she gazed
+at Javert, she gazed at the nun, she opened her mouth as though to
+speak; a rattle proceeded from the depths of her throat, her teeth
+chattered; she stretched out her arms in her agony, opening her hands
+convulsively, and fumbling about her like a drowning person; then
+suddenly fell back on her pillow.
+
+Her head struck the head-board of the bed and fell forwards on her
+breast, with gaping mouth and staring, sightless eyes.
+
+She was dead.
+
+Jean Valjean laid his hand upon the detaining hand of Javert, and opened
+it as he would have opened the hand of a baby; then he said to Javert:--
+
+"You have murdered that woman."
+
+"Let's have an end of this!" shouted Javert, in a fury; "I am not here
+to listen to argument. Let us economize all that; the guard is below;
+march on instantly, or you'll get the thumb-screws!"
+
+In the corner of the room stood an old iron bedstead, which was in a
+decidedly decrepit state, and which served the sisters as a camp-bed
+when they were watching with the sick. Jean Valjean stepped up to this
+bed, in a twinkling wrenched off the head-piece, which was already in a
+dilapidated condition, an easy matter to muscles like his, grasped the
+principal rod like a bludgeon, and glanced at Javert. Javert retreated
+towards the door. Jean Valjean, armed with his bar of iron, walked
+slowly up to Fantine's couch. When he arrived there he turned and said
+to Javert, in a voice that was barely audible:--
+
+"I advise you not to disturb me at this moment."
+
+One thing is certain, and that is, that Javert trembled.
+
+It did occur to him to summon the guard, but Jean Valjean might avail
+himself of that moment to effect his escape; so he remained, grasped
+his cane by the small end, and leaned against the door-post, without
+removing his eyes from Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean rested his elbow on the knob at the head of the bed, and
+his brow on his hand, and began to contemplate the motionless body of
+Fantine, which lay extended there. He remained thus, mute, absorbed,
+evidently with no further thought of anything connected with this life.
+Upon his face and in his attitude there was nothing but inexpressible
+pity. After a few moments of this meditation he bent towards Fantine,
+and spoke to her in a low voice.
+
+What did he say to her? What could this man, who was reproved, say to
+that woman, who was dead? What words were those? No one on earth heard
+them. Did the dead woman hear them? There are some touching illusions
+which are, perhaps, sublime realities. The point as to which there
+exists no doubt is, that Sister Simplice, the sole witness of the
+incident, often said that at the moment that Jean Valjean whispered in
+Fantine's ear, she distinctly beheld an ineffable smile dawn on those
+pale lips, and in those dim eyes, filled with the amazement of the tomb.
+
+Jean Valjean took Fantine's head in both his hands, and arranged it on
+the pillow as a mother might have done for her child; then he tied the
+string of her chemise, and smoothed her hair back under her cap. That
+done, he closed her eyes.
+
+Fantine's face seemed strangely illuminated at that moment.
+
+Death, that signifies entrance into the great light.
+
+Fantine's hand was hanging over the side of the bed. Jean Valjean knelt
+down before that hand, lifted it gently, and kissed it.
+
+Then he rose, and turned to Javert.
+
+"Now," said he, "I am at your disposal."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--A SUITABLE TOMB
+
+Javert deposited Jean Valjean in the city prison.
+
+The arrest of M. Madeleine occasioned a sensation, or rather, an
+extraordinary commotion in M. sur M. We are sorry that we cannot conceal
+the fact, that at the single word, "He was a convict," nearly every one
+deserted him. In less than two hours all the good that he had done had
+been forgotten, and he was nothing but a "convict from the galleys." It
+is just to add that the details of what had taken place at Arras were
+not yet known. All day long conversations like the following were to be
+heard in all quarters of the town:--
+
+"You don't know? He was a liberated convict!" "Who?" "The mayor." "Bah!
+M. Madeleine?" "Yes." "Really?" "His name was not Madeleine at all; he
+had a frightful name, Bejean, Bojean, Boujean." "Ah! Good God!" "He
+has been arrested." "Arrested!" "In prison, in the city prison, while
+waiting to be transferred." "Until he is transferred!" "He is to be
+transferred!" "Where is he to be taken?" "He will be tried at the
+Assizes for a highway robbery which he committed long ago." "Well! I
+suspected as much. That man was too good, too perfect, too affected.
+He refused the cross; he bestowed sous on all the little scamps he came
+across. I always thought there was some evil history back of all that."
+
+The "drawing-rooms" particularly abounded in remarks of this nature.
+
+One old lady, a subscriber to the Drapeau Blanc, made the following
+remark, the depth of which it is impossible to fathom:--
+
+"I am not sorry. It will be a lesson to the Bonapartists!"
+
+It was thus that the phantom which had been called M. Madeleine vanished
+from M. sur M. Only three or four persons in all the town remained
+faithful to his memory. The old portress who had served him was among
+the number.
+
+On the evening of that day the worthy old woman was sitting in her
+lodge, still in a thorough fright, and absorbed in sad reflections.
+The factory had been closed all day, the carriage gate was bolted, the
+street was deserted. There was no one in the house but the two nuns,
+Sister Perpetue and Sister Simplice, who were watching beside the body
+of Fantine.
+
+Towards the hour when M. Madeleine was accustomed to return home,
+the good portress rose mechanically, took from a drawer the key of
+M. Madeleine's chamber, and the flat candlestick which he used every
+evening to go up to his quarters; then she hung the key on the nail
+whence he was accustomed to take it, and set the candlestick on one
+side, as though she was expecting him. Then she sat down again on her
+chair, and became absorbed in thought once more. The poor, good old
+woman had done all this without being conscious of it.
+
+It was only at the expiration of two hours that she roused herself from
+her revery, and exclaimed, "Hold! My good God Jesus! And I hung his key
+on the nail!"
+
+At that moment the small window in the lodge opened, a hand passed
+through, seized the key and the candlestick, and lighted the taper at
+the candle which was burning there.
+
+The portress raised her eyes, and stood there with gaping mouth, and a
+shriek which she confined to her throat.
+
+She knew that hand, that arm, the sleeve of that coat.
+
+It was M. Madeleine.
+
+It was several seconds before she could speak; she had a seizure, as she
+said herself, when she related the adventure afterwards.
+
+"Good God, Monsieur le Maire," she cried at last, "I thought you were--"
+
+She stopped; the conclusion of her sentence would have been lacking in
+respect towards the beginning. Jean Valjean was still Monsieur le Maire
+to her.
+
+He finished her thought.
+
+"In prison," said he. "I was there; I broke a bar of one of the windows;
+I let myself drop from the top of a roof, and here I am. I am going up
+to my room; go and find Sister Simplice for me. She is with that poor
+woman, no doubt."
+
+The old woman obeyed in all haste.
+
+He gave her no orders; he was quite sure that she would guard him better
+than he should guard himself.
+
+No one ever found out how he had managed to get into the courtyard
+without opening the big gates. He had, and always carried about him,
+a pass-key which opened a little side-door; but he must have been
+searched, and his latch-key must have been taken from him. This point
+was never explained.
+
+He ascended the staircase leading to his chamber. On arriving at the
+top, he left his candle on the top step of his stairs, opened his door
+with very little noise, went and closed his window and his shutters by
+feeling, then returned for his candle and re-entered his room.
+
+It was a useful precaution; it will be recollected that his window could
+be seen from the street.
+
+He cast a glance about him, at his table, at his chair, at his bed which
+had not been disturbed for three days. No trace of the disorder of the
+night before last remained. The portress had "done up" his room; only
+she had picked out of the ashes and placed neatly on the table the two
+iron ends of the cudgel and the forty-sou piece which had been blackened
+by the fire.
+
+He took a sheet of paper, on which he wrote: "These are the two tips of
+my iron-shod cudgel and the forty-sou piece stolen from Little Gervais,
+which I mentioned at the Court of Assizes," and he arranged this piece
+of paper, the bits of iron, and the coin in such a way that they were
+the first things to be seen on entering the room. From a cupboard he
+pulled out one of his old shirts, which he tore in pieces. In the
+strips of linen thus prepared he wrapped the two silver candlesticks. He
+betrayed neither haste nor agitation; and while he was wrapping up the
+Bishop's candlesticks, he nibbled at a piece of black bread. It was
+probably the prison-bread which he had carried with him in his flight.
+
+This was proved by the crumbs which were found on the floor of the room
+when the authorities made an examination later on.
+
+There came two taps at the door.
+
+"Come in," said he.
+
+It was Sister Simplice.
+
+She was pale; her eyes were red; the candle which she carried trembled
+in her hand. The peculiar feature of the violences of destiny is, that
+however polished or cool we may be, they wring human nature from our
+very bowels, and force it to reappear on the surface. The emotions of
+that day had turned the nun into a woman once more. She had wept, and
+she was trembling.
+
+Jean Valjean had just finished writing a few lines on a paper, which he
+handed to the nun, saying, "Sister, you will give this to Monsieur le
+Cure."
+
+The paper was not folded. She cast a glance upon it.
+
+"You can read it," said he.
+
+She read:--
+
+"I beg Monsieur le Cure to keep an eye on all that I leave behind me. He
+will be so good as to pay out of it the expenses of my trial, and of the
+funeral of the woman who died yesterday. The rest is for the poor."
+
+The sister tried to speak, but she only managed to stammer a few
+inarticulate sounds. She succeeded in saying, however:--
+
+"Does not Monsieur le Maire desire to take a last look at that poor,
+unhappy woman?"
+
+"No," said he; "I am pursued; it would only end in their arresting me in
+that room, and that would disturb her."
+
+He had hardly finished when a loud noise became audible on the
+staircase. They heard a tumult of ascending footsteps, and the old
+portress saying in her loudest and most piercing tones:--
+
+"My good sir, I swear to you by the good God, that not a soul has
+entered this house all day, nor all the evening, and that I have not
+even left the door."
+
+A man responded:--
+
+"But there is a light in that room, nevertheless."
+
+They recognized Javert's voice.
+
+The chamber was so arranged that the door in opening masked the corner
+of the wall on the right. Jean Valjean blew out the light and placed
+himself in this angle. Sister Simplice fell on her knees near the table.
+
+The door opened.
+
+Javert entered.
+
+The whispers of many men and the protestations of the portress were
+audible in the corridor.
+
+The nun did not raise her eyes. She was praying.
+
+The candle was on the chimney-piece, and gave but very little light.
+
+Javert caught sight of the nun and halted in amazement.
+
+It will be remembered that the fundamental point in Javert, his element,
+the very air he breathed, was veneration for all authority. This was
+impregnable, and admitted of neither objection nor restriction. In his
+eyes, of course, the ecclesiastical authority was the chief of all; he
+was religious, superficial and correct on this point as on all others.
+In his eyes, a priest was a mind, who never makes a mistake; a nun was a
+creature who never sins; they were souls walled in from this world,
+with a single door which never opened except to allow the truth to pass
+through.
+
+On perceiving the sister, his first movement was to retire.
+
+But there was also another duty which bound him and impelled him
+imperiously in the opposite direction. His second movement was to remain
+and to venture on at least one question.
+
+This was Sister Simplice, who had never told a lie in her life. Javert
+knew it, and held her in special veneration in consequence.
+
+"Sister," said he, "are you alone in this room?"
+
+A terrible moment ensued, during which the poor portress felt as though
+she should faint.
+
+The sister raised her eyes and answered:--
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then," resumed Javert, "you will excuse me if I persist; it is my duty;
+you have not seen a certain person--a man--this evening? He has escaped;
+we are in search of him--that Jean Valjean; you have not seen him?"
+
+The sister replied:--
+
+"No."
+
+She lied. She had lied twice in succession, one after the other, without
+hesitation, promptly, as a person does when sacrificing herself.
+
+"Pardon me," said Javert, and he retired with a deep bow.
+
+O sainted maid! you left this world many years ago; you have rejoined
+your sisters, the virgins, and your brothers, the angels, in the light;
+may this lie be counted to your credit in paradise!
+
+The sister's affirmation was for Javert so decisive a thing that he did
+not even observe the singularity of that candle which had but just been
+extinguished, and which was still smoking on the table.
+
+An hour later, a man, marching amid trees and mists, was rapidly
+departing from M. sur M. in the direction of Paris. That man was Jean
+Valjean. It has been established by the testimony of two or three
+carters who met him, that he was carrying a bundle; that he was dressed
+in a blouse. Where had he obtained that blouse? No one ever found out.
+But an aged workman had died in the infirmary of the factory a few days
+before, leaving behind him nothing but his blouse. Perhaps that was the
+one.
+
+One last word about Fantine.
+
+We all have a mother,--the earth. Fantine was given back to that mother.
+
+The cure thought that he was doing right, and perhaps he really was, in
+reserving as much money as possible from what Jean Valjean had left for
+the poor. Who was concerned, after all? A convict and a woman of the
+town. That is why he had a very simple funeral for Fantine, and reduced
+it to that strictly necessary form known as the pauper's grave.
+
+So Fantine was buried in the free corner of the cemetery which belongs
+to anybody and everybody, and where the poor are lost. Fortunately, God
+knows where to find the soul again. Fantine was laid in the shade,
+among the first bones that came to hand; she was subjected to the
+promiscuousness of ashes. She was thrown into the public grave. Her
+grave resembled her bed.
+
+
+[THE END OF VOLUME I. "FANTINE"]
+
+
+[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Two 2frontispiece]
+
+[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Two 2titlepage]
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME II.--COSETTE
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--WHAT IS MET WITH ON THE WAY FROM NIVELLES
+
+Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person
+who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles, and directing his
+course towards La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved
+road, which undulated between two rows of trees, over the hills which
+succeed each other, raise the road and let it fall again, and produce
+something in the nature of enormous waves.
+
+He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he perceived
+the slate-roofed tower of Braine-l'Alleud, which has the form of a
+reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence; and
+at the angle of the cross-road, by the side of a sort of mouldy gibbet
+bearing the inscription Ancient Barrier No. 4, a public house, bearing
+on its front this sign: At the Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents). Echabeau,
+Private Cafe.
+
+A quarter of a league further on, he arrived at the bottom of a little
+valley, where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through
+the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very green
+trees, which fills the valley on one side of the road, is dispersed over
+the meadows on the other, and disappears gracefully and as in order in
+the direction of Braine-l'Alleud.
+
+On the right, close to the road, was an inn, with a four-wheeled cart
+at the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of dried
+brushwood near a flourishing hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, and
+a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A young
+girl was weeding in a field, where a huge yellow poster, probably of
+some outside spectacle, such as a parish festival, was fluttering in
+the wind. At one corner of the inn, beside a pool in which a flotilla
+of ducks was navigating, a badly paved path plunged into the bushes. The
+wayfarer struck into this.
+
+After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth
+century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he
+found himself before a large door of arched stone, with a rectilinear
+impost, in the sombre style of Louis XIV., flanked by two flat
+medallions. A severe facade rose above this door; a wall, perpendicular
+to the facade, almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt
+right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through
+which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed.
+The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old
+rusty knocker.
+
+The sun was charming; the branches had that soft shivering of May,
+which seems to proceed rather from the nests than from the wind. A brave
+little bird, probably a lover, was carolling in a distracted manner in a
+large tree.
+
+The wayfarer bent over and examined a rather large circular excavation,
+resembling the hollow of a sphere, in the stone on the left, at the foot
+of the pier of the door.
+
+At this moment the leaves of the door parted, and a peasant woman
+emerged.
+
+She saw the wayfarer, and perceived what he was looking at.
+
+"It was a French cannon-ball which made that," she said to him. And she
+added:--
+
+"That which you see there, higher up in the door, near a nail, is the
+hole of a big iron bullet as large as an egg. The bullet did not pierce
+the wood."
+
+"What is the name of this place?" inquired the wayfarer.
+
+"Hougomont," said the peasant woman.
+
+The traveller straightened himself up. He walked on a few paces, and
+went off to look over the tops of the hedges. On the horizon through the
+trees, he perceived a sort of little elevation, and on this elevation
+something which at that distance resembled a lion.
+
+He was on the battle-field of Waterloo.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--HOUGOMONT
+
+Hougomont,--this was a funereal spot, the beginning of the obstacle,
+the first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe, called
+Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo, the first knot under the blows of his
+axe.
+
+It was a chateau; it is no longer anything but a farm. For the
+antiquary, Hougomont is Hugomons. This manor was built by Hugo, Sire
+of Somerel, the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of
+Villiers.
+
+The traveller pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient calash under the
+porch, and entered the courtyard.
+
+The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the
+sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else
+having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its
+birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door, of
+the time of Henry IV., permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard;
+beside this door, a manure-hole, some pickaxes, some shovels, some
+carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its iron reel, a chicken
+jumping, and a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel surmounted by a small
+bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree trained in espalier against the
+wall of the chapel--behold the court, the conquest of which was one of
+Napoleon's dreams. This corner of earth, could he but have seized
+it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise. Chickens are
+scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is a
+huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.
+
+The English behaved admirably there. Cooke's four companies of guards
+there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.
+
+Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings
+and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of
+which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern
+door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun's length away.
+Hougomont has two doors,--the southern door, that of the chateau; and
+the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent his brother
+Jerome against Hougomont; the divisions of Foy, Guilleminot, and Bachelu
+hurled themselves against it; nearly the entire corps of Reille was
+employed against it, and miscarried; Kellermann's balls were exhausted
+on this heroic section of wall. Bauduin's brigade was not strong enough
+to force Hougomont on the north, and the brigade of Soye could not do
+more than effect the beginning of a breach on the south, but without
+taking it.
+
+The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south. A bit of the north
+door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall. It consists of
+four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the scars of the attack
+are visible.
+
+The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had
+a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, stands
+half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in the wall,
+built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the courtyard on
+the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms,
+with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie the meadows.
+The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts
+of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there
+that Bauduin was killed.
+
+The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is
+visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives
+and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death
+agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds;
+the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.
+
+This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings
+which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.
+
+The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in,
+but could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of the
+chateau, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises in
+a crumbling state,--disembowelled, one might say. The chateau served
+for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. There men exterminated each
+other. The French, fired on from every point,--from behind the walls,
+from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars, through
+all the casements, through all the air-holes, through every crack in the
+stones,--fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the reply to the
+grape-shot was a conflagration.
+
+In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron, the
+dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible; the
+English guards were in ambush in these rooms; the spiral of the
+staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof, appears
+like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories; the
+English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps, had
+cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs of blue stone,
+which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score of steps still
+cling to the wall; on the first is cut the figure of a trident. These
+inaccessible steps are solid in their niches. All the rest resembles a
+jaw which has been denuded of its teeth. There are two old trees there:
+one is dead; the other is wounded at its base, and is clothed with
+verdure in April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the
+staircase.
+
+A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered
+its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the
+carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there--an altar of
+unpolished wood, placed against a background of roughhewn stone. Four
+whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows;
+over the door a large wooden crucifix, below the crucifix a square
+air-hole stopped up with a bundle of hay; on the ground, in one corner,
+an old window-frame with the glass all broken to pieces--such is the
+chapel. Near the altar there is nailed up a wooden statue of Saint Anne,
+of the fifteenth century; the head of the infant Jesus has been carried
+off by a large ball. The French, who were masters of the chapel for a
+moment, and were then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled this
+building; it was a perfect furnace; the door was burned, the floor was
+burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his
+feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen; then it
+stopped,--a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the
+neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate than the
+Christ.
+
+The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this
+name is to be read: Henquinez. Then these others: Conde de Rio Maior
+Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with
+exclamation points,--a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed
+in 1849. The nations insulted each other there.
+
+It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up which
+held an axe in its hand; this corpse was Sub-Lieutenant Legros.
+
+On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left. There are
+two in this courtyard. One inquires, Why is there no bucket and pulley
+to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there. Why is water not
+drawn there? Because it is full of skeletons.
+
+The last person who drew water from the well was named Guillaume van
+Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener there.
+On the 18th of June, 1815, his family fled and concealed themselves in
+the woods.
+
+The forest surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these unfortunate
+people who had been scattered abroad, for many days and nights. There
+are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old boles of burned
+trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs trembling in the
+depths of the thickets.
+
+Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, "to guard the chateau," and
+concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there.
+They tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants forced this
+frightened man to serve them, by administering blows with the flats of
+their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It
+was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught.
+This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself.
+
+After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death
+has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow
+glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and
+it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into
+it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they
+were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble
+voices were heard calling from the well.
+
+This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part
+stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded like
+the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side is
+open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom has
+a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell. This
+little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The iron
+supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over, the
+eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped-up
+mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is concealed
+in a growth of nettles.
+
+This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the
+table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a
+cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of knotty
+and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer either
+pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which served
+the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to time a
+bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then flies
+away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The
+door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a
+pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed
+slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped
+this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed
+off his hand with an axe.
+
+The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van
+Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said
+to us: "I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older,
+was terrified and wept. They carried us off to the woods. I went there
+in my mother's arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated
+the cannon, and went boum! boum!"
+
+A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so
+we were told. The orchard is terrible.
+
+It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts. The first
+part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third is a wood. These
+three parts have a common enclosure: on the side of the entrance, the
+buildings of the chateau and the farm; on the left, a hedge; on the
+right, a wall; and at the end, a wall. The wall on the right is of
+brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone. One enters the garden first.
+It slopes downwards, is planted with gooseberry bushes, choked with a
+wild growth of vegetation, and terminated by a monumental terrace of cut
+stone, with balustrade with a double curve.
+
+It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded Le
+Notre; to-day it is ruins and briars. The pilasters are surmounted by
+globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone. Forty-three balusters can
+still be counted on their sockets; the rest lie prostrate in the grass.
+Almost all bear scratches of bullets. One broken baluster is placed on
+the pediment like a fractured leg.
+
+It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six
+light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being
+unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens,
+accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was
+armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired
+from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two
+hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a
+quarter of an hour to die.
+
+One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard,
+properly speaking. There, within the limits of those few square fathoms,
+fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems ready
+to renew the combat. Thirty-eight loopholes, pierced by the English at
+irregular heights, are there still. In front of the sixth are placed two
+English tombs of granite. There are loopholes only in the south wall, as
+the principal attack came from that quarter. The wall is hidden on the
+outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to
+deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle
+and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight
+loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's
+brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began.
+
+Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French
+scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees.
+All this grass has been soaked in blood. A battalion of Nassau, seven
+hundred strong, was overwhelmed there. The outside of the wall, against
+which Kellermann's two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.
+
+This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its
+buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the cart-horses
+browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the
+spaces between the trees and force the passer-by to bend his head; one
+walks over this uncultivated land, and one's foot dives into mole-holes.
+In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies
+there all verdant. Major Blackmann leaned against it to die. Beneath
+a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat,
+descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict
+of Nantes. An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side,
+its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam. Nearly all
+the apple-trees are falling with age. There is not one which has not
+had its bullet or its biscayan.[6] The skeletons of dead trees abound in
+this orchard. Crows fly through their branches, and at the end of it is
+a wood full of violets.
+
+Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a
+rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled
+in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the
+regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the
+English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, besides the forty
+from Reille's corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of
+Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their
+throats cut,--and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the
+traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will
+explain to you the affair of Waterloo!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE EIGHTEENTH OF JUNE, 1815
+
+Let us turn back,--that is one of the story-teller's rights,--and put
+ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than
+the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took
+place.
+
+If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of
+June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops
+of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that
+Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz
+was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season
+sufficed to make a world crumble.
+
+The battle of Waterloo could not be begun until half-past eleven
+o'clock, and that gave Blucher time to come up. Why? Because the ground
+was wet. The artillery had to wait until it became a little firmer
+before they could manoeuvre.
+
+Napoleon was an artillery officer, and felt the effects of this. The
+foundation of this wonderful captain was the man who, in the report to
+the Directory on Aboukir, said: Such a one of our balls killed six men.
+All his plans of battle were arranged for projectiles. The key to his
+victory was to make the artillery converge on one point. He treated the
+strategy of the hostile general like a citadel, and made a breach in it.
+He overwhelmed the weak point with grape-shot; he joined and dissolved
+battles with cannon. There was something of the sharpshooter in his
+genius. To beat in squares, to pulverize regiments, to break lines, to
+crush and disperse masses,--for him everything lay in this, to
+strike, strike, strike incessantly,--and he intrusted this task to the
+cannon-ball. A redoubtable method, and one which, united with genius,
+rendered this gloomy athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for the
+space of fifteen years.
+
+On the 18th of June, 1815, he relied all the more on his artillery,
+because he had numbers on his side. Wellington had only one hundred and
+fifty-nine mouths of fire; Napoleon had two hundred and forty.
+
+Suppose the soil dry, and the artillery capable of moving, the action
+would have begun at six o'clock in the morning. The battle would have
+been won and ended at two o'clock, three hours before the change of
+fortune in favor of the Prussians. What amount of blame attaches to
+Napoleon for the loss of this battle? Is the shipwreck due to the pilot?
+
+Was it the evident physical decline of Napoleon that complicated this
+epoch by an inward diminution of force? Had the twenty years of war worn
+out the blade as it had worn the scabbard, the soul as well as the body?
+Did the veteran make himself disastrously felt in the leader? In a word,
+was this genius, as many historians of note have thought, suffering from
+an eclipse? Did he go into a frenzy in order to disguise his weakened
+powers from himself? Did he begin to waver under the delusion of
+a breath of adventure? Had he become--a grave matter in a
+general--unconscious of peril? Is there an age, in this class of
+material great men, who may be called the giants of action, when genius
+grows short-sighted? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal;
+for the Dantes and Michael Angelos to grow old is to grow in greatness;
+is it to grow less for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes? Had Napoleon
+lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where he
+could no longer recognize the reef, could no longer divine the snare, no
+longer discern the crumbling brink of abysses? Had he lost his power of
+scenting out catastrophes? He who had in former days known all the
+roads to triumph, and who, from the summit of his chariot of lightning,
+pointed them out with a sovereign finger, had he now reached that
+state of sinister amazement when he could lead his tumultuous legions
+harnessed to it, to the precipice? Was he seized at the age of forty-six
+with a supreme madness? Was that titanic charioteer of destiny no longer
+anything more than an immense dare-devil?
+
+We do not think so.
+
+His plan of battle was, by the confession of all, a masterpiece. To
+go straight to the centre of the Allies' line, to make a breach in the
+enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hal,
+and the Prussian half on Tongres, to make two shattered fragments of
+Wellington and Blucher, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels,
+to hurl the German into the Rhine, and the Englishman into the sea. All
+this was contained in that battle, according to Napoleon. Afterwards
+people would see.
+
+Of course, we do not here pretend to furnish a history of the battle of
+Waterloo; one of the scenes of the foundation of the story which we
+are relating is connected with this battle, but this history is not our
+subject; this history, moreover, has been finished, and finished in a
+masterly manner, from one point of view by Napoleon, and from another
+point of view by a whole pleiad of historians.[7]
+
+As for us, we leave the historians at loggerheads; we are but a distant
+witness, a passer-by on the plain, a seeker bending over that soil all
+made of human flesh, taking appearances for realities, perchance; we
+have no right to oppose, in the name of science, a collection of facts
+which contain illusions, no doubt; we possess neither military practice
+nor strategic ability which authorize a system; in our opinion, a chain
+of accidents dominated the two leaders at Waterloo; and when it becomes
+a question of destiny, that mysterious culprit, we judge like that
+ingenious judge, the populace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A
+
+Those persons who wish to gain a clear idea of the battle of Waterloo
+have only to place, mentally, on the ground, a capital A. The left limb
+of the A is the road to Nivelles, the right limb is the road to Genappe,
+the tie of the A is the hollow road to Ohain from Braine-l'Alleud. The
+top of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean, where Wellington is; the lower left tip
+is Hougomont, where Reille is stationed with Jerome Bonaparte; the right
+tip is the Belle-Alliance, where Napoleon was. At the centre of this
+chord is the precise point where the final word of the battle was
+pronounced. It was there that the lion has been placed, the involuntary
+symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial Guard.
+
+The triangle included in the top of the A, between the two limbs and the
+tie, is the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. The dispute over this plateau
+constituted the whole battle. The wings of the two armies extended to
+the right and left of the two roads to Genappe and Nivelles; d'Erlon
+facing Picton, Reille facing Hill.
+
+Behind the tip of the A, behind the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, is the
+forest of Soignes.
+
+As for the plain itself, let the reader picture to himself a vast
+undulating sweep of ground; each rise commands the next rise, and all
+the undulations mount towards Mont-Saint-Jean, and there end in the
+forest.
+
+Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers. It is a
+question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The one seeks to trip
+up the other. They clutch at everything: a bush is a point of support;
+an angle of the wall offers them a rest to the shoulder; for the lack
+of a hovel under whose cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its
+ground; an unevenness in the ground, a chance turn in the landscape, a
+cross-path encountered at the right moment, a grove, a ravine, can
+stay the heel of that colossus which is called an army, and prevent its
+retreat. He who quits the field is beaten; hence the necessity devolving
+on the responsible leader, of examining the most insignificant clump of
+trees, and of studying deeply the slightest relief in the ground.
+
+The two generals had attentively studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean,
+now called the plain of Waterloo. In the preceding year, Wellington,
+with the sagacity of foresight, had examined it as the possible seat of
+a great battle. Upon this spot, and for this duel, on the 18th of June,
+Wellington had the good post, Napoleon the bad post. The English army
+was stationed above, the French army below.
+
+It is almost superfluous here to sketch the appearance of Napoleon on
+horseback, glass in hand, upon the heights of Rossomme, at daybreak, on
+June 18, 1815. All the world has seen him before we can show him.
+That calm profile under the little three-cornered hat of the school of
+Brienne, that green uniform, the white revers concealing the star of the
+Legion of Honor, his great coat hiding his epaulets, the corner of red
+ribbon peeping from beneath his vest, his leather trousers, the white
+horse with the saddle-cloth of purple velvet bearing on the corners
+crowned N's and eagles, Hessian boots over silk stockings, silver spurs,
+the sword of Marengo,--that whole figure of the last of the Caesars is
+present to all imaginations, saluted with acclamations by some, severely
+regarded by others.
+
+That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from
+a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which
+always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day history
+and daylight have arrived.
+
+That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and
+divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it
+is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had
+hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different
+phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and
+the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader.
+Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations.
+Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Caesar,
+Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a
+misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES
+
+Every one is acquainted with the first phase of this battle; a beginning
+which was troubled, uncertain, hesitating, menacing to both armies, but
+still more so for the English than for the French.
+
+It had rained all night, the earth had been cut up by the downpour, the
+water had accumulated here and there in the hollows of the plain as if
+in casks; at some points the gear of the artillery carriages was buried
+up to the axles, the circingles of the horses were dripping with liquid
+mud. If the wheat and rye trampled down by this cohort of transports
+on the march had not filled in the ruts and strewn a litter beneath the
+wheels, all movement, particularly in the valleys, in the direction of
+Papelotte would have been impossible.
+
+The affair began late. Napoleon, as we have already explained, was in
+the habit of keeping all his artillery well in hand, like a pistol,
+aiming it now at one point, now at another, of the battle; and it had
+been his wish to wait until the horse batteries could move and gallop
+freely. In order to do that it was necessary that the sun should come
+out and dry the soil. But the sun did not make its appearance. It was
+no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. When the first cannon was fired,
+the English general, Colville, looked at his watch, and noted that it
+was thirty-five minutes past eleven.
+
+The action was begun furiously, with more fury, perhaps, than the
+Emperor would have wished, by the left wing of the French resting on
+Hougomont. At the same time Napoleon attacked the centre by hurling
+Quiot's brigade on La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed forward the right
+wing of the French against the left wing of the English, which rested on
+Papelotte.
+
+The attack on Hougomont was something of a feint; the plan was to draw
+Wellington thither, and to make him swerve to the left. This plan would
+have succeeded if the four companies of the English guards and the brave
+Belgians of Perponcher's division had not held the position solidly, and
+Wellington, instead of massing his troops there, could confine himself
+to despatching thither, as reinforcements, only four more companies of
+guards and one battalion from Brunswick.
+
+The attack of the right wing of the French on Papelotte was calculated,
+in fact, to overthrow the English left, to cut off the road to Brussels,
+to bar the passage against possible Prussians, to force Mont-Saint-Jean,
+to turn Wellington back on Hougomont, thence on Braine-l'Alleud, thence
+on Hal; nothing easier. With the exception of a few incidents this
+attack succeeded Papelotte was taken; La Haie-Sainte was carried.
+
+A detail to be noted. There was in the English infantry, particularly
+in Kempt's brigade, a great many raw recruits. These young soldiers were
+valiant in the presence of our redoubtable infantry; their inexperience
+extricated them intrepidly from the dilemma; they performed particularly
+excellent service as skirmishers: the soldier skirmisher, left somewhat
+to himself, becomes, so to speak, his own general. These recruits
+displayed some of the French ingenuity and fury. This novice of an
+infantry had dash. This displeased Wellington.
+
+After the taking of La Haie-Sainte the battle wavered.
+
+There is in this day an obscure interval, from mid-day to four o'clock;
+the middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates
+in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it.
+We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog, a dizzy mirage, paraphernalia
+of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks, floating sabre-taches,
+cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades, hussar dolmans, red boots
+with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos garlanded with torsades, the
+almost black infantry of Brunswick mingled with the scarlet infantry
+of England, the English soldiers with great, white circular pads on the
+slopes of their shoulders for epaulets, the Hanoverian light-horse with
+their oblong casques of leather, with brass hands and red horse-tails,
+the Scotch with their bare knees and plaids, the great white gaiters
+of our grenadiers; pictures, not strategic lines--what Salvator Rosa
+requires, not what is suited to the needs of Gribeauval.
+
+A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid
+obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the
+particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell. Whatever may
+be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses has an
+incalculable ebb. During the action the plans of the two leaders enter
+into each other and become mutually thrown out of shape. Such a point of
+the field of battle devours more combatants than such another, just as
+more or less spongy soils soak up more or less quickly the water which
+is poured on them. It becomes necessary to pour out more soldiers than
+one would like; a series of expenditures which are the unforeseen. The
+line of battle waves and undulates like a thread, the trails of blood
+gush illogically, the fronts of the armies waver, the regiments
+form capes and gulfs as they enter and withdraw; all these reefs are
+continually moving in front of each other. Where the infantry stood the
+artillery arrives, the cavalry rushes in where the artillery was, the
+battalions are like smoke. There was something there; seek it. It has
+disappeared; the open spots change place, the sombre folds advance and
+retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back,
+distends, and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? an
+oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute,
+not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those
+powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better
+than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o'clock.
+Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane alone is trustworthy. That is what
+confers on Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add, that
+there is a certain instant when the battle degenerates into a combat,
+becomes specialized, and disperses into innumerable detailed feats,
+which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, "belong rather to
+the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army." The
+historian has, in this case, the evident right to sum up the whole. He
+cannot do more than seize the principal outlines of the struggle, and
+it is not given to any one narrator, however conscientious he may be,
+to fix, absolutely, the form of that horrible cloud which is called a
+battle.
+
+This, which is true of all great armed encounters, is particularly
+applicable to Waterloo.
+
+Nevertheless, at a certain moment in the afternoon the battle came to a
+point.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
+
+Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. The
+Prince of Orange was in command of the centre, Hill of the right wing,
+Picton of the left wing. The Prince of Orange, desperate and intrepid,
+shouted to the Hollando-Belgians: "Nassau! Brunswick! Never retreat!"
+Hill, having been weakened, had come up to the support of Wellington;
+Picton was dead. At the very moment when the English had captured from
+the French the flag of the 105th of the line, the French had killed the
+English general, Picton, with a bullet through the head. The battle
+had, for Wellington, two bases of action, Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte;
+Hougomont still held out, but was on fire; La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of
+the German battalion which defended it, only forty-two men survived; all
+the officers, except five, were either dead or captured. Three thousand
+combatants had been massacred in that barn. A sergeant of the English
+Guards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by his
+companions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy. Baring
+had been dislodged, Alten put to the sword. Many flags had been lost,
+one from Alten's division, and one from the battalion of Lunenburg,
+carried by a prince of the house of Deux-Ponts. The Scotch Grays no
+longer existed; Ponsonby's great dragoons had been hacked to pieces.
+That valiant cavalry had bent beneath the lancers of Bro and beneath
+the cuirassiers of Travers; out of twelve hundred horses, six
+hundred remained; out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on the
+earth,--Hamilton wounded, Mater slain. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by
+seven lance-thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the
+fifth and the sixth, had been annihilated.
+
+Hougomont injured, La Haie-Sainte taken, there now existed but one
+rallying-point, the centre. That point still held firm. Wellington
+reinforced it. He summoned thither Hill, who was at Merle-Braine; he
+summoned Chasse, who was at Braine-l'Alleud.
+
+The centre of the English army, rather concave, very dense, and
+very compact, was strongly posted. It occupied the plateau of
+Mont-Saint-Jean, having behind it the village, and in front of it the
+slope, which was tolerably steep then. It rested on that stout stone
+dwelling which at that time belonged to the domain of Nivelles, and
+which marks the intersection of the roads--a pile of the sixteenth
+century, and so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded from it without
+injuring it. All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges here
+and there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat of
+a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There artillery was
+ambushed in the brushwood. This punic labor, incontestably authorized
+by war, which permits traps, was so well done, that Haxo, who had been
+despatched by the Emperor at nine o'clock in the morning to reconnoitre
+the enemy's batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and had returned
+and reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles except the two
+barricades which barred the road to Nivelles and to Genappe. It was
+at the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of the plateau a
+battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, armed with carabines, was
+concealed in the tall wheat.
+
+Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was well
+posted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes,
+then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of
+Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat thither without
+dissolving; the regiments would have broken up immediately there.
+The artillery would have been lost among the morasses. The retreat,
+according to many a man versed in the art,--though it is disputed by
+others,--would have been a disorganized flight.
+
+To this centre, Wellington added one of Chasse's brigades taken from the
+right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the left wing, plus
+Clinton's division. To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, to
+the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as
+reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent,
+Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. This placed twenty-six
+battalions under his hand. The right wing, as Charras says, was thrown
+back on the centre. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth at
+the spot where there now stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo."
+Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground, Somerset's
+Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the remaining half
+of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset
+remained.
+
+The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was
+ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bags
+of sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished; there
+had been no time to make a palisade for it.
+
+Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained
+the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill
+of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, which
+an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for two
+hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic.
+The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at his
+side. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him: "My
+lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?" "To do like me,"
+replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, "To hold this spot
+to the last man." The day was evidently turning out ill. Wellington
+shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of Salamanca:
+"Boys, can retreat be thought of? Think of old England!"
+
+Towards four o'clock, the English line drew back. Suddenly nothing
+was visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the
+sharpshooters; the rest had disappeared: the regiments, dislodged by
+the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, now
+intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a
+retrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself, Wellington
+drew back. "The beginning of retreat!" cried Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR
+
+The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble,
+had never been in a better humor than on that day. His impenetrability
+had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that
+profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who had been
+gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites of
+destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme
+smile is God's alone.
+
+Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix
+Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is
+certain that Caesar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o'clock
+on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the
+communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of the
+long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon from
+Frischemont to Braine-l'Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to
+whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to
+the appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time
+motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder;
+and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious
+saying, "We are in accord." Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer
+in accord.
+
+He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked
+by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts,
+halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, near
+the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he
+thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.
+He said: "It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the
+purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English who
+have just arrived at Ostend." He conversed expansively; he regained the
+animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, when
+he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Gulf
+Juan, and cried, "Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already!" On
+the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied Wellington. "That
+little Englishman needs a lesson," said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in
+violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was speaking.
+
+At half-past three o'clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;
+officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that
+the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not a
+bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. The
+silence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens.
+At four o'clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; this
+peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably
+Vivian's brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the
+village of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o'clock, two Belgian
+deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment,
+and that the English army was ready for battle. "So much the better!"
+exclaimed Napoleon. "I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive
+them back."
+
+In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an
+angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant's
+chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with a
+truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chart
+of the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, "A pretty
+checker-board."
+
+In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of
+provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive by
+morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. This
+did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, "We have
+ninety chances out of a hundred." At eight o'clock the Emperor's
+breakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. During
+breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights
+before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond's; and Soult, a rough
+man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, "The ball takes place
+to-day." The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, "Wellington will not be
+so simple as to wait for Your Majesty." That was his way, however. "He
+was fond of jesting," says Fleury de Chaboulon. "A merry humor was
+at the foundation of his character," says Gourgaud. "He abounded in
+pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty," says Benjamin
+Constant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It was
+he who called his grenadiers "his grumblers"; he pinched their ears; he
+pulled their mustaches. "The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us,"
+is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the island
+of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the French
+brig of war, Le Zephyr, having encountered the brig L'Inconstant, on
+which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the news of Napoleon
+from L'Inconstant, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white and
+amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had adopted at the isle of
+Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself,
+"The Emperor is well." A man who laughs like that is on familiar terms
+with events. Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during the
+breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of an
+hour; then two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen in
+hand and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to them
+the order of battle.
+
+At nine o'clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in echelons
+and set in motion in five columns, had deployed--the divisions in two
+lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their head; as
+they beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of trumpets,
+mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of bayonets on
+the horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed, "Magnificent!
+Magnificent!"
+
+Between nine o'clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as it
+may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines,
+forming, to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's."
+A few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst of
+that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm,
+which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the shoulder, as
+he beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached by his orders
+from the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined to begin the
+action by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersection
+of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to him, "There are four
+and twenty handsome maids, General."
+
+Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before
+him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed
+to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.
+All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty
+pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large
+tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing
+themselves, he said, "It is a pity."
+
+Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for
+his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of
+the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during
+the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the
+evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;
+it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the
+guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls
+rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at
+Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the
+heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless
+projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his
+horse' feet stood. Scabra rubigine. A few years ago, a shell of sixty
+pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with the bomb,
+was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his
+guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to the
+saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canister
+and tried to hide behind Napoleon: "Fool, it is shameful! You'll get
+yourself killed with a ball in the back." He who writes these lines has
+himself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over
+the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the
+oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which
+parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.
+
+Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the
+plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place,
+are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from this
+mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief
+has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her
+bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying
+it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,
+exclaimed, "They have altered my field of battle!" Where the great
+pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a
+hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but
+which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.
+The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of
+the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from
+Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other,
+the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole
+of that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands upon
+thousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred and
+fifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau
+of Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of
+battle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and
+difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English
+cannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley,
+which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rains
+had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated the
+problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck fast
+in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench whose
+presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.
+
+What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l'Alleud is a Belgian
+village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in
+curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a
+half in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level,
+and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which
+makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present
+day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between
+the two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level
+with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been
+appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is,
+a trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench,
+sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep,
+crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving
+rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the
+Braine-l'Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is
+proved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives
+the name of the dead, Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels,
+and the date of the accident, February, 1637.[8] It was so deep on
+the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise,
+was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on
+another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of
+clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on
+the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and
+the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.
+
+On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no way
+indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at the
+summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible;
+that is to say, terrible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE
+
+So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.
+
+He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen,
+really admirable.
+
+The battle once begun, its very various changes,--the resistance of
+Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the
+disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was
+shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard
+nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted
+pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the
+bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in
+the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud,
+so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of Pire's
+demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons,
+almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the
+left wing badly cut into; Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead of
+echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to
+grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage
+of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by the
+cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly
+unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised;
+Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the
+Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an
+axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the English
+barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels;
+Marcognet's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot
+down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put
+to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Prince
+of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, both
+Frischemont and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the
+45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the
+flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre
+and Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by prisoners;
+Grouchy's delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont
+in less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter
+time about La Haie-Sainte,--all these stormy incidents passing like the
+clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and
+had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was
+accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending
+details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that
+they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings
+did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor
+at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the
+question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate,
+Thou wilt not dare.
+
+Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself
+protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had,
+a connivance, one might almost say a complicity, of events in his favor,
+which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity.
+
+Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind
+one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown
+becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.
+
+At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenly
+beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van of the
+English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor
+half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from his
+eyes.
+
+Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and
+destroyed--that was the definitive conquest of England by France; it was
+Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo
+was wiping out Agincourt.
+
+So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his
+glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His
+guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below
+with a sort of religion. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the
+declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the
+path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness
+at the English barricades of the two highways,--two large abatis of
+trees, that on the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two
+cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded
+the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles
+where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade. Near this
+barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,
+which stands at the angle of the cross-road near Braine-l'Alleud; he
+bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made
+a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious.
+
+The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking.
+
+Wellington had drawn back.
+
+All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him.
+
+Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full speed to
+Paris to announce that the battle was won.
+
+Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.
+
+He had just found his clap of thunder.
+
+He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the table-land of
+Mont-Saint-Jean.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THE UNEXPECTED
+
+There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a
+quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men, on colossal horses.
+There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them to
+support them Lefebvre-Desnouettes's division,--the one hundred and six
+picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred and
+ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and
+eighty lances. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses
+of beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long
+sabre-swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at
+nine o'clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing "Let us
+watch o'er the Safety of the Empire," they had come in a solid column,
+with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and
+deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont,
+and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line,
+so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left
+Kellermann's cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers,
+had, so to speak, two wings of iron.
+
+Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor's orders. Ney drew his
+sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set
+in motion.
+
+Then a formidable spectacle was seen.
+
+All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to
+the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous
+movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram
+which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into
+the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared
+there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the
+other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at
+a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them,
+the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They
+ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between
+the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible.
+Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier's division
+held the right, Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though
+two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest
+of the table-land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy.
+
+Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of
+the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was
+again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and
+had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a
+polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent
+here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy
+heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of
+trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses
+like the scales on the hydra.
+
+These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to
+this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told
+of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human
+heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible,
+invulnerable, sublime--gods and beasts.
+
+Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode to meet
+twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of
+the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares,
+two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first
+line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders,
+taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm,
+mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers
+did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They
+heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and
+symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the
+cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage
+breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once,
+a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the
+crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads
+with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry
+debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an
+earthquake.
+
+All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the
+head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On
+arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly
+given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and
+cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,--a trench
+between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.
+
+It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning,
+directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep between its double
+slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed
+on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their
+haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming
+the riders; and there being no means of retreat,--the whole column being
+no longer anything more than a projectile,--the force which had been
+acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine
+could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell,
+grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when
+this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and
+passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.
+
+This began the loss of the battle.
+
+A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two
+thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road
+of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which
+were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.
+
+Let us note in passing that it was Dubois's sorely tried brigade which,
+an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag
+of the Lunenburg battalion.
+
+Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud's
+cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see
+that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of
+the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little
+white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles
+highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an
+obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might
+almost affirm that Napoleon's catastrophe originated in that sign of a
+peasant's head.
+
+Other fatalities were destined to arise.
+
+Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No.
+Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.
+
+Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the
+nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which
+there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had
+declared itself long before.
+
+It was time that this vast man should fall.
+
+The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance.
+This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These
+plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world
+mounting to the brain of one man,--this would be mortal to civilization
+were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and
+supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the
+elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the
+material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled
+cemeteries, mothers in tears,--these are formidable pleaders. When
+the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious
+groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.
+
+Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been
+decided on.
+
+He embarrassed God.
+
+Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the
+Universe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN
+
+The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.
+
+Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank on
+the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute to
+the English battery.
+
+The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the
+squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for a
+halt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not discouraged
+them. They belonged to that class of men who, when diminished in number,
+increase in courage.
+
+Wathier's column alone had suffered in the disaster; Delort's column,
+which Ney had deflected to the left, as though he had a presentiment of
+an ambush, had arrived whole.
+
+The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.
+
+At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth pistols in
+fist,--such was the attack.
+
+There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until
+the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns into
+granite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not stir.
+
+Then it was terrible.
+
+All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied
+whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first
+rank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second
+ranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged
+their guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage of
+an eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers replied
+by crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,
+leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four
+living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers;
+the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,
+ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies
+of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably
+never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,
+closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of
+grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants' midst. The form
+of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions,
+they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were
+a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended
+with lightning.
+
+The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the
+air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed
+of the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centre
+dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the
+forests and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being
+exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under
+his arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben
+Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier,
+which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to
+the song by killing the singer.
+
+The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished
+by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army
+against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them
+was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.
+Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at
+that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.
+This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.
+
+All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found
+themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Before
+them two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred
+dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the
+German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;
+the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the
+rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it
+to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something indescribable.
+
+In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still
+thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never
+have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on the
+shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,[9] is in the collection of the
+Waterloo Museum.
+
+For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It
+was no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy
+transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an
+instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred.
+Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up with
+the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes's light-horse. The plateau
+of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The
+cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put
+it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other
+without releasing the other. The squares still held firm.
+
+There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half
+the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two hours.
+
+The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had they
+not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the hollow
+road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and decided the
+victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen
+Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, admired
+heroically. He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"
+
+The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or
+spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments
+six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore
+to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.
+
+Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a
+duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and
+still resisting, is expending all his blood.
+
+Which of the two will be the first to fall?
+
+The conflict on the plateau continued.
+
+What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have told. One thing
+is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his
+horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at
+Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,
+Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This
+horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the
+body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was eighteen
+years old at that time.
+
+Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand.
+
+The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken
+through. As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it,
+and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English. Wellington
+held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest and
+the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.
+
+But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding
+of that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded
+reinforcements. "There are none," replied Wellington; "he must let
+himself be killed!" Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence
+which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry
+from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, "Infantry! Where does he expect
+me to get it? Does he think I can make it?"
+
+Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The
+furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and
+breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men clustered
+round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a battalion
+was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten's division,
+already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed;
+the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade strewed the rye-fields
+all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of those Dutch
+grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811,
+fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the
+English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was
+considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following
+day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussle
+of the cuirassiers, Delort, l'Heritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and
+Blancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alten
+wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda
+killed, the whole of Wellington's staff decimated, and England had the
+worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guards
+had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;
+the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200
+soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officers
+killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of Cumberland, a
+whole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was destined to be
+tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the presence of the
+fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing defeat all the way
+to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the baggage-wagons, the
+wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the French were gaining
+ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong thither. The Dutch,
+mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, "Alarm!" From Vert-Coucou to
+Groentendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues in the direction
+of Brussels, according to the testimony of eye-witnesses who are still
+alive, the roads were encumbered with fugitives. This panic was such
+that it attacked the Prince de Conde at Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at
+Ghent. With the exception of the feeble reserve echelonned behind the
+ambulance established at the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian's
+and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked the left wing, Wellington had
+no cavalry left. A number of batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are
+attested by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far
+as to say that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand
+men. The Iron Duke remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the
+Austrian commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present
+at the battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At five
+o'clock Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these
+sinister words, "Blucher, or night!"
+
+It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on
+the heights in the direction of Frischemont.
+
+Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--A BAD GUIDE TO NAPOLEON; A GOOD GUIDE TO BULOW
+
+The painful surprise of Napoleon is well known. Grouchy hoped for,
+Blucher arriving. Death instead of life.
+
+Fate has these turns; the throne of the world was expected; it was Saint
+Helena that was seen.
+
+If the little shepherd who served as guide to Bulow, Blucher's
+lieutenant, had advised him to debouch from the forest above
+Frischemont, instead of below Plancenoit, the form of the nineteenth
+century might, perhaps, have been different. Napoleon would have won the
+battle of Waterloo. By any other route than that below Plancenoit,
+the Prussian army would have come out upon a ravine impassable for
+artillery, and Bulow would not have arrived.
+
+Now the Prussian general, Muffling, declares that one hour's delay, and
+Blucher would not have found Wellington on his feet. "The battle was
+lost."
+
+It was time that Bulow should arrive, as will be seen. He had, moreover,
+been very much delayed. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont, and had set
+out at daybreak; but the roads were impassable, and his divisions stuck
+fast in the mire. The ruts were up to the hubs of the cannons. Moreover,
+he had been obliged to pass the Dyle on the narrow bridge of Wavre;
+the street leading to the bridge had been fired by the French, so
+the caissons and ammunition-wagons could not pass between two rows of
+burning houses, and had been obliged to wait until the conflagration was
+extinguished. It was mid-day before Bulow's vanguard had been able to
+reach Chapelle-Saint-Lambert.
+
+Had the action been begun two hours earlier, it would have been over
+at four o'clock, and Blucher would have fallen on the battle won by
+Napoleon. Such are these immense risks proportioned to an infinite which
+we cannot comprehend.
+
+The Emperor had been the first, as early as mid-day, to descry with his
+field-glass, on the extreme horizon, something which had attracted his
+attention. He had said, "I see yonder a cloud, which seems to me to be
+troops." Then he asked the Duc de Dalmatie, "Soult, what do you see in
+the direction of Chapelle-Saint-Lambert?" The marshal, levelling his
+glass, answered, "Four or five thousand men, Sire; evidently Grouchy."
+But it remained motionless in the mist. All the glasses of the staff
+had studied "the cloud" pointed out by the Emperor. Some said: "It is
+trees." The truth is, that the cloud did not move. The Emperor detached
+Domon's division of light cavalry to reconnoitre in that quarter.
+
+Bulow had not moved, in fact. His vanguard was very feeble, and could
+accomplish nothing. He was obliged to wait for the body of the army
+corps, and he had received orders to concentrate his forces before
+entering into line; but at five o'clock, perceiving Wellington's peril,
+Blucher ordered Bulow to attack, and uttered these remarkable words: "We
+must give air to the English army."
+
+A little later, the divisions of Losthin, Hiller, Hacke, and Ryssel
+deployed before Lobau's corps, the cavalry of Prince William of Prussia
+debouched from the forest of Paris, Plancenoit was in flames, and the
+Prussian cannon-balls began to rain even upon the ranks of the guard in
+reserve behind Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--THE GUARD
+
+Every one knows the rest,--the irruption of a third army; the battle
+broken to pieces; eighty-six mouths of fire thundering simultaneously;
+Pirch the first coming up with Bulow; Zieten's cavalry led by Blucher
+in person, the French driven back; Marcognet swept from the plateau of
+Ohain; Durutte dislodged from Papelotte; Donzelot and Quiot retreating;
+Lobau caught on the flank; a fresh battle precipitating itself on our
+dismantled regiments at nightfall; the whole English line resuming the
+offensive and thrust forward; the gigantic breach made in the French
+army; the English grape-shot and the Prussian grape-shot aiding each
+other; the extermination; disaster in front; disaster on the flank; the
+Guard entering the line in the midst of this terrible crumbling of all
+things.
+
+Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, "Vive l'Empereur!"
+History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in
+acclamations.
+
+The sky had been overcast all day long. All of a sudden, at that very
+moment,--it was eight o'clock in the evening--the clouds on the horizon
+parted, and allowed the grand and sinister glow of the setting sun to
+pass through, athwart the elms on the Nivelles road. They had seen it
+rise at Austerlitz.
+
+Each battalion of the Guard was commanded by a general for this final
+catastrophe. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlet, Mallet, Poret de Morvan,
+were there. When the tall caps of the grenadiers of the Guard, with
+their large plaques bearing the eagle appeared, symmetrical, in line,
+tranquil, in the midst of that combat, the enemy felt a respect for
+France; they thought they beheld twenty victories entering the field
+of battle, with wings outspread, and those who were the conquerors,
+believing themselves to be vanquished, retreated; but Wellington
+shouted, "Up, Guards, and aim straight!" The red regiment of English
+guards, lying flat behind the hedges, sprang up, a cloud of grape-shot
+riddled the tricolored flag and whistled round our eagles; all hurled
+themselves forwards, and the final carnage began. In the darkness, the
+Imperial Guard felt the army losing ground around it, and in the vast
+shock of the rout it heard the desperate flight which had taken the
+place of the "Vive l'Empereur!" and, with flight behind it, it continued
+to advance, more crushed, losing more men at every step that it took.
+There were none who hesitated, no timid men in its ranks. The soldier in
+that troop was as much of a hero as the general. Not a man was missing
+in that suicide.
+
+Ney, bewildered, great with all the grandeur of accepted death, offered
+himself to all blows in that tempest. He had his fifth horse killed
+under him there. Perspiring, his eyes aflame, foaming at the mouth, with
+uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulets half cut off by a sword-stroke
+from a horseguard, his plaque with the great eagle dented by a bullet;
+bleeding, bemired, magnificent, a broken sword in his hand, he said,
+"Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field of battle!" But
+in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and angry. At Drouet d'Erlon he
+hurled this question, "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" In
+the midst of all that artillery engaged in crushing a handful of men,
+he shouted: "So there is nothing for me! Oh! I should like to have all
+these English bullets enter my bowels!" Unhappy man, thou wert reserved
+for French bullets!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--THE CATASTROPHE
+
+The rout behind the Guard was melancholy.
+
+The army yielded suddenly on all sides at once,--Hougomont, La
+Haie-Sainte, Papelotte, Plancenoit. The cry "Treachery!" was followed by
+a cry of "Save yourselves who can!" An army which is disbanding is
+like a thaw. All yields, splits, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, jostles,
+hastens, is precipitated. The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney
+borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and without hat, cravat, or sword,
+places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both English and
+French. He strives to detain the army, he recalls it to its duty, he
+insults it, he clings to the rout. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers fly
+from him, shouting, "Long live Marshal Ney!" Two of Durutte's regiments
+go and come in affright as though tossed back and forth between the
+swords of the Uhlans and the fusillade of the brigades of Kempt, Best,
+Pack, and Rylandt; the worst of hand-to-hand conflicts is the defeat;
+friends kill each other in order to escape; squadrons and battalions
+break and disperse against each other, like the tremendous foam of
+battle. Lobau at one extremity, and Reille at the other, are drawn into
+the tide. In vain does Napoleon erect walls from what is left to him of
+his Guard; in vain does he expend in a last effort his last serviceable
+squadrons. Quiot retreats before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur,
+Lobau before Bulow, Morand before Pirch, Domon and Subervic before
+Prince William of Prussia; Guyot, who led the Emperor's squadrons to the
+charge, falls beneath the feet of the English dragoons. Napoleon gallops
+past the line of fugitives, harangues, urges, threatens, entreats
+them. All the mouths which in the morning had shouted, "Long live
+the Emperor!" remain gaping; they hardly recognize him. The Prussian
+cavalry, newly arrived, dashes forwards, flies, hews, slashes, kills,
+exterminates. Horses lash out, the cannons flee; the soldiers of the
+artillery-train unharness the caissons and use the horses to make their
+escape; transports overturned, with all four wheels in the air, clog the
+road and occasion massacres. Men are crushed, trampled down, others walk
+over the dead and the living. Arms are lost. A dizzy multitude fills the
+roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys,
+the woods, encumbered by this invasion of forty thousand men. Shouts
+despair, knapsacks and guns flung among the rye, passages forced at
+the point of the sword, no more comrades, no more officers, no more
+generals, an inexpressible terror. Zieten putting France to the sword at
+its leisure. Lions converted into goats. Such was the flight.
+
+At Genappe, an effort was made to wheel about, to present a battle
+front, to draw up in line. Lobau rallied three hundred men. The entrance
+to the village was barricaded, but at the first volley of Prussian
+canister, all took to flight again, and Lobau was taken. That volley of
+grape-shot can be seen to-day imprinted on the ancient gable of a brick
+building on the right of the road at a few minutes' distance before you
+enter Genappe. The Prussians threw themselves into Genappe, furious, no
+doubt, that they were not more entirely the conquerors. The pursuit was
+stupendous. Blucher ordered extermination. Roguet had set the lugubrious
+example of threatening with death any French grenadier who should bring
+him a Prussian prisoner. Blucher outdid Roguet. Duhesme, the general
+of the Young Guard, hemmed in at the doorway of an inn at Genappe,
+surrendered his sword to a huzzar of death, who took the sword and slew
+the prisoner. The victory was completed by the assassination of the
+vanquished. Let us inflict punishment, since we are history: old
+Blucher disgraced himself. This ferocity put the finishing touch to the
+disaster. The desperate route traversed Genappe, traversed Quatre-Bras,
+traversed Gosselies, traversed Frasnes, traversed Charleroi, traversed
+Thuin, and only halted at the frontier. Alas! and who, then, was fleeing
+in that manner? The Grand Army.
+
+This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest
+bravery which ever astounded history,--is that causeless? No. The shadow
+of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of
+destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence
+the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls
+surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen
+prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the
+present shadow of a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day the
+perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the
+hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was
+necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom
+one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes
+can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than
+a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.
+
+At nightfall, in a meadow near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by
+the skirt of his coat and detained a man, haggard, pensive, sinister,
+gloomy, who, dragged to that point by the current of the rout, had just
+dismounted, had passed the bridle of his horse over his arm, and with
+wild eye was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense
+somnambulist of this dream which had crumbled, essaying once more to
+advance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--THE LAST SQUARE
+
+Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the defeat,
+as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night came,
+death also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible, allowed
+themselves to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated from the
+rest, and having no bond with the army, now shattered in every part,
+died alone. They had taken up position for this final action, some on
+the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There,
+abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy squares endured their
+death-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, died
+with them.
+
+At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of them was left
+at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley,
+at the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, now
+inundated by the masses of the English, under the converging fires
+of the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density of
+projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscure
+officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished and
+replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continually
+contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing breathless for a
+moment in the distance, listened in the darkness to that gloomy and
+ever-decreasing thunder.
+
+When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left
+of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no
+longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the
+group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those men
+dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery,
+taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of respite. These
+combatants had around them something in the nature of a swarm of
+spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles of cannon,
+the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the colossal
+death's-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in the
+depths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through the
+shades of twilight they could hear the pieces being loaded; the matches
+all lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night, formed a circle round
+their heads; all the lintstocks of the English batteries approached the
+cannons, and then, with emotion, holding the supreme moment suspended
+above these men, an English general, Colville according to some,
+Maitland according to others, shouted to them, "Surrender, brave
+Frenchmen!" Cambronne replied, "-----."
+
+{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word "Merde!"
+in lieu of the ----- above.}
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV--CAMBRONNE
+
+If any French reader object to having his susceptibilities offended, one
+would have to refrain from repeating in his presence what is perhaps
+the finest reply that a Frenchman ever made. This would enjoin us from
+consigning something sublime to History.
+
+At our own risk and peril, let us violate this injunction.
+
+Now, then, among those giants there was one Titan,--Cambronne.
+
+To make that reply and then perish, what could be grander? For being
+willing to die is the same as to die; and it was not this man's fault if
+he survived after he was shot.
+
+The winner of the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon, who was put to
+flight; nor Wellington, giving way at four o'clock, in despair at five;
+nor Blucher, who took no part in the engagement. The winner of Waterloo
+was Cambronne.
+
+To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning-flash that kills you is
+to conquer!
+
+Thus to answer the Catastrophe, thus to speak to Fate, to give this
+pedestal to the future lion, to hurl such a challenge to the midnight
+rainstorm, to the treacherous wall of Hougomont, to the sunken road of
+Ohain, to Grouchy's delay, to Blucher's arrival, to be Irony itself in
+the tomb, to act so as to stand upright though fallen, to drown in
+two syllables the European coalition, to offer kings privies which
+the Caesars once knew, to make the lowest of words the most lofty by
+entwining with it the glory of France, insolently to end Waterloo with
+Mardigras, to finish Leonidas with Rabellais, to set the crown on this
+victory by a word impossible to speak, to lose the field and preserve
+history, to have the laugh on your side after such a carnage,--this is
+immense!
+
+It was an insult such as a thunder-cloud might hurl! It reaches the
+grandeur of AEschylus!
+
+Cambronne's reply produces the effect of a violent break. 'Tis like the
+breaking of a heart under a weight of scorn. 'Tis the overflow of agony
+bursting forth. Who conquered? Wellington? No! Had it not been for
+Blucher, he was lost. Was it Blucher? No! If Wellington had not begun,
+Blucher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this man spending his
+last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war, realizes
+that here is a falsehood, a falsehood in a catastrophe, and so doubly
+agonizing; and at the moment when his rage is bursting forth because of
+it, he is offered this mockery,--life! How could he restrain himself?
+Yonder are all the kings of Europe, the general's flushed with victory,
+the Jupiter's darting thunderbolts; they have a hundred thousand
+victorious soldiers, and back of the hundred thousand a million; their
+cannon stand with yawning mouths, the match is lighted; they grind down
+under their heels the Imperial guards, and the grand army; they have
+just crushed Napoleon, and only Cambronne remains,--only this earthworm
+is left to protest. He will protest. Then he seeks for the appropriate
+word as one seeks for a sword. His mouth froths, and the froth is the
+word. In face of this mean and mighty victory, in face of this victory
+which counts none victorious, this desperate soldier stands erect. He
+grants its overwhelming immensity, but he establishes its triviality;
+and he does more than spit upon it. Borne down by numbers, by superior
+force, by brute matter, he finds in his soul an expression: "Excrement!"
+We repeat it,--to use that word, to do thus, to invent such an
+expression, is to be the conqueror!
+
+The spirit of mighty days at that portentous moment made its descent
+on that unknown man. Cambronne invents the word for Waterloo as Rouget
+invents the "Marseillaise," under the visitation of a breath from on
+high. An emanation from the divine whirlwind leaps forth and comes
+sweeping over these men, and they shake, and one of them sings the song
+supreme, and the other utters the frightful cry.
+
+This challenge of titanic scorn Cambronne hurls not only at Europe in
+the name of the Empire,--that would be a trifle: he hurls it at the past
+in the name of the Revolution. It is heard, and Cambronne is recognized
+as possessed by the ancient spirit of the Titans. Danton seems to be
+speaking! Kleber seems to be bellowing!
+
+At that word from Cambronne, the English voice responded, "Fire!"
+The batteries flamed, the hill trembled, from all those brazen mouths
+belched a last terrible gush of grape-shot; a vast volume of smoke,
+vaguely white in the light of the rising moon, rolled out, and when the
+smoke dispersed, there was no longer anything there. That formidable
+remnant had been annihilated; the Guard was dead. The four walls of the
+living redoubt lay prone, and hardly was there discernible, here and
+there, even a quiver in the bodies; it was thus that the French legions,
+greater than the Roman legions, expired on Mont-Saint-Jean, on the soil
+watered with rain and blood, amid the gloomy grain, on the spot where
+nowadays Joseph, who drives the post-wagon from Nivelles, passes
+whistling, and cheerfully whipping up his horse at four o'clock in the
+morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI--QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?
+
+The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who won
+it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;[10] Blucher
+sees nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands nothing in regard
+to it. Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries
+involved. Some stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of
+Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;
+Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on some points,
+seized with his haughty glance the characteristic outlines of that
+catastrophe of human genius in conflict with divine chance. All the
+other historians suffer from being somewhat dazzled, and in this dazzled
+state they fumble about. It was a day of lightning brilliancy; in fact,
+a crumbling of the military monarchy which, to the vast stupefaction of
+kings, drew all the kingdoms after it--the fall of force, the defeat of
+war.
+
+In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played by men
+amounts to nothing.
+
+If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blucher, do we thereby deprive
+England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious England
+nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank
+Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of
+the sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in
+a scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords,
+above Blucher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has
+Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the peculiarity of our century, and in
+that aurora England and Germany have a magnificent radiance. They
+are majestic because they think. The elevation of level which they
+contribute to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from
+themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement which they have
+brought to the nineteenth century has not Waterloo as its source. It is
+only barbarous peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That is
+the temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized people,
+especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the good or
+bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human species
+results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank God! their
+dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers which those
+gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of battles.
+Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory
+and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the word. It is
+a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo
+coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which is due
+to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is Waterloo? A
+victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.
+
+The quine [11] won by Europe, paid by France.
+
+It was not worth while to place a lion there.
+
+Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and
+Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,
+who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more
+extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,
+prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate
+coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage
+of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,
+carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,
+nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,
+absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military
+oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable
+something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the
+lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries
+of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the plain, the
+forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot
+going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in
+a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it.
+Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and
+on this occasion, genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides
+some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded.
+Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected
+Blucher; he came.
+
+Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his dawning,
+had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old owl had
+fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only struck
+as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of six and twenty?
+What signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with everything against
+him, nothing in his favor, without provisions, without ammunition,
+without cannon, without shoes, almost without an army, with a mere
+handful of men against masses, hurled himself on Europe combined,
+and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence had issued that
+fulminating convict, who almost without taking breath, and with the same
+set of combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the other, the five
+armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on Alvinzi, Wurmser
+on Beaulieu, Melas on Wurmser, Mack on Melas? Who was this novice in
+war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical military school
+excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence, the implacable
+rancor of the old Caesarism against the new; of the regular sword
+against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against genius. On the
+18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word. and beneath Lodi,
+Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote: Waterloo. A triumph of
+the mediocres which is sweet to the majority. Destiny consented to this
+irony. In his decline, Napoleon found Wurmser, the younger, again in
+front of him.
+
+In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.
+
+Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second.
+
+That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the
+English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb
+thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not
+her captain; it was her army.
+
+Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,
+that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a
+"detestable army." What does that sombre intermingling of bones buried
+beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?
+
+England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make
+Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but
+a hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those
+regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,
+that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the
+pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt,
+those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket
+holding their own against Essling's and Rivoli's old troops,--that is
+what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we
+are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of
+his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth
+as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the
+English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy
+there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of
+Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it bore
+on high the statue of a people.
+
+But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She
+still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion.
+She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none
+in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people. And
+as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for its
+head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier, it
+allows itself to be flogged.
+
+It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who
+had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Paglan,
+as the English military hierarchy does not permit any hero below the
+grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.
+
+That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of
+Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the
+wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,
+Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bulow's guide enlightening him,--the
+whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.
+
+On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre than of a
+battle at Waterloo.
+
+Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest front
+for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters of a league;
+Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on each side.
+From this denseness the carnage arose.
+
+The following calculation has been made, and the following proportion
+established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;
+Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four per cent. At Wagram,
+French, thirteen per cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French,
+thirty-seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,
+thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo,
+French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,
+forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;
+sixty thousand dead.
+
+To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,
+the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.
+
+At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it; and if a
+traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he dreams
+like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the
+catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th of June lives
+again; the false monumental hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in
+air, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate
+over the plain, furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened
+dreamer beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare of
+bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as it were,
+the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the battle
+phantom; those shadows are grenadiers, those lights are cuirassiers;
+that skeleton Napoleon, that other skeleton is Wellington; all this no
+longer exists, and yet it clashes together and combats still; and the
+ravines are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there is fury even in
+the clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible heights, Hougomont,
+Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, appear confusedly
+crowned with whirlwinds of spectres engaged in exterminating each other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII--IS WATERLOO TO BE CONSIDERED GOOD?
+
+There exists a very respectable liberal school which does not hate
+Waterloo. We do not belong to it. To us, Waterloo is but the stupefied
+date of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an egg is
+certainly unexpected.
+
+If one places one's self at the culminating point of view of the
+question, Waterloo is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory. It
+is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against
+Paris; it is the statu quo against the initiative; it is the 14th
+of July, 1789, attacked through the 20th of March, 1815; it is the
+monarchies clearing the decks in opposition to the indomitable French
+rioting. The final extinction of that vast people which had been in
+eruption for twenty-six years--such was the dream. The solidarity of the
+Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs
+with the Bourbons. Waterloo bears divine right on its crupper. It is
+true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom by the natural
+reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and that a constitutional
+order was the unwilling result of Waterloo, to the great regret of the
+conquerors. It is because revolution cannot be really conquered, and
+that being providential and absolutely fatal, it is always cropping
+up afresh: before Waterloo, in Bonaparte overthrowing the old thrones;
+after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII. granting and conforming to the charter.
+Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne of Naples, and a sergeant
+on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate equality;
+Louis XVIII. at Saint-Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights
+of man. If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it
+Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress,
+call it To-morrow. To-morrow fulfils its work irresistibly, and it is
+already fulfilling it to-day. It always reaches its goal strangely. It
+employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only a soldier, an orator.
+Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the tribune. Thus does
+progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad tool for that workman.
+It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to its divine work the
+man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old tottering invalid
+of Father Elysee. It makes use of the gouty man as well as of the
+conqueror; of the conqueror without, of the gouty man within. Waterloo,
+by cutting short the demolition of European thrones by the sword, had
+no other effect than to cause the revolutionary work to be continued in
+another direction. The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the
+thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to arrest has pursued
+its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by liberty.
+
+In short, and incontestably, that which triumphed at Waterloo; that
+which smiled in Wellington's rear; that which brought him all the
+marshals' staffs of Europe, including, it is said, the staff of a
+marshal of France; that which joyously trundled the barrows full of
+bones to erect the knoll of the lion; that which triumphantly inscribed
+on that pedestal the date "June 18, 1815"; that which encouraged
+Blucher, as he put the flying army to the sword; that which, from the
+heights of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, hovered over France as over
+its prey, was the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution
+which murmured that infamous word "dismemberment." On arriving in Paris,
+it beheld the crater close at hand; it felt those ashes which scorched
+its feet, and it changed its mind; it returned to the stammer of a
+charter.
+
+Let us behold in Waterloo only that which is in Waterloo. Of intentional
+liberty there is none. The counter-revolution was involuntarily liberal,
+in the same manner as, by a corresponding phenomenon, Napoleon was
+involuntarily revolutionary. On the 18th of June, 1815, the mounted
+Robespierre was hurled from his saddle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII--A RECRUDESCENCE OF DIVINE RIGHT
+
+End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.
+
+The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as
+it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the barbarians;
+only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet name of the
+counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to panting, and
+halted short. The Empire was bewept,--let us acknowledge the fact,--and
+bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword converted into a
+sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had diffused over the
+earth all the light which tyranny can give a sombre light. We will say
+more; an obscure light. Compared to the true daylight, it is night. This
+disappearance of night produces the effect of an eclipse.
+
+Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July
+effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the
+antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was
+white. The exile reigned. Hartwell's pine table took its place in front
+of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy
+were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding
+day, Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne
+fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the health
+of society in the nineteenth century was established over France, and
+over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade. Trestaillon was
+celebrated. The device non pluribus impar re-appeared on the stone rays
+representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on the Quai d'Orsay.
+Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now a red house. The
+Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne victories, thrown out
+of its element among these novelties, a little ashamed, it may be, of
+Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its predicament with the
+statue of the Duc d'Angouleme. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a terrible
+pauper's grave in 1793, was covered with jasper and marble, since the
+bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.
+
+In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
+recalling the fact that the Duc d'Enghien had perished in the very
+month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the
+coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on the
+fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there was
+a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King of
+Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their thrones,
+and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became
+the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the earth
+changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a
+shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!"
+
+This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and
+poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded
+1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became
+constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with
+Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was the
+serpent's change of skin.
+
+Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this
+reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of
+ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future
+into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so
+fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is
+he doing? "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo
+and Waterloo. "He dead!" cried the soldier; "you don't know him."
+Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of
+Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous remained
+long empty through Napoleon's disappearance.
+
+The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by
+it to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; Belle-Alliance,
+Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.
+
+In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the
+features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the
+Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,
+Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.
+Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with
+the future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the
+vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon
+erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by
+Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms
+became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him "my
+sleeplessness." This terror was the result of the quantity of
+revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and excuses
+Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble.
+The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of Saint Helena
+on the horizon.
+
+While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the
+sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly
+rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.
+The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called this
+the Restoration.
+
+This is what Waterloo was.
+
+But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,
+that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a
+moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from
+one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to
+belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX--THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT
+
+Let us return--it is a necessity in this book--to that fatal
+battle-field.
+
+On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored Blucher's
+ferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives, delivered
+up that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry, and aided the
+massacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur sometimes during
+catastrophes.
+
+After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean
+remained deserted.
+
+The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the usual sign
+of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They established their
+bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the retreating
+rout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of Waterloo to draw
+up his report to Lord Bathurst.
+
+If ever the sic vos non vobis was applicable, it certainly is to that
+village of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half a league from
+the scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont was
+burned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault, Papelotte was burned,
+Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld the embrace of the two
+conquerors; these names are hardly known, and Waterloo, which worked not
+in the battle, bears off all the honor.
+
+We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasion
+presents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful beauties
+which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous
+features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the
+bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle
+always rises on naked corpses.
+
+Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand is
+that which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpockets
+are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory? Some
+philosophers--Voltaire among the number--affirm that it is precisely
+those persons have made the glory. It is the same men, they say; there
+is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are prone
+on the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night. One has
+assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when one is the
+author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so; it seems
+to us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and purloin the
+shoes from a dead man.
+
+One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors follow
+thieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the contemporary
+soldier, out of the question.
+
+Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.
+Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of
+vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of
+uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids;
+formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts,
+sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which they
+sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; soldiers'
+servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,--we are not
+speaking of the present,--dragged all this behind them, so that in the
+special language they are called "stragglers." No army, no nation,
+was responsible for those beings; they spoke Italian and followed the
+Germans, then spoke French and followed the English. It was by one of
+these wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French, that the Marquis
+of Fervacques, deceived by his Picard jargon, and taking him for one
+of our own men, was traitorously slain and robbed on the battle-field
+itself, in the course of the night which followed the victory of
+Cerisoles. The rascal sprang from this marauding. The detestable maxim,
+Live on the enemy! produced this leprosy, which a strict discipline
+alone could heal. There are reputations which are deceptive; one does
+not always know why certain generals, great in other directions, have
+been so popular. Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he tolerated
+pillage; evil permitted constitutes part of goodness. Turenne was so
+good that he allowed the Palatinate to be delivered over to fire and
+blood. The marauders in the train of an army were more or less in
+number, according as the chief was more or less severe. Hoche and
+Marceau had no stragglers; Wellington had few, and we do him the justice
+to mention it.
+
+Nevertheless, on the night from the 18th to the 19th of June, the dead
+were robbed. Wellington was rigid; he gave orders that any one caught in
+the act should be shot; but rapine is tenacious. The marauders stole in
+one corner of the battlefield while others were being shot in another.
+
+The moon was sinister over this plain.
+
+Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the
+direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of
+those whom we have just described,--neither English nor French, neither
+peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent
+of the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle
+Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat;
+he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him.
+Who was this man? The night probably knew more of him than the day. He
+had no sack, but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. From
+time to time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though to
+see whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed something
+silent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled. His sliding
+motion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures, caused him
+to resemble those twilight larvae which haunt ruins, and which ancient
+Norman legends call the Alleurs.
+
+Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among the
+marshes.
+
+A glance capable of piercing all that mist deeply would have perceived
+at some distance a sort of little sutler's wagon with a fluted wicker
+hood, harnessed to a famished nag which was cropping the grass across
+its bit as it halted, hidden, as it were, behind the hovel which adjoins
+the highway to Nivelles, at the angle of the road from Mont-Saint-Jean
+to Braine l'Alleud; and in the wagon, a sort of woman seated on coffers
+and packages. Perhaps there was some connection between that wagon and
+that prowler.
+
+The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith. What matters it if
+the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of
+the sky. In the fields, branches of trees broken by grape-shot, but not
+fallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze of night.
+A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery. Quivers which
+resembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.
+
+In the distance the coming and going of patrols and the general rounds
+of the English camp were audible.
+
+Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one in the
+west, the other in the east, two great flames which were joined by the
+cordon of bivouac fires of the English, like a necklace of rubies
+with two carbuncles at the extremities, as they extended in an immense
+semicircle over the hills along the horizon.
+
+We have described the catastrophe of the road of Ohain. The heart is
+terrified at the thought of what that death must have been to so many
+brave men.
+
+If there is anything terrible, if there exists a reality which surpasses
+dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun; to be in full possession
+of virile force; to possess health and joy; to laugh valiantly; to rush
+towards a glory which one sees dazzling in front of one; to feel in
+one's breast lungs which breathe, a heart which beats, a will which
+reasons; to speak, think, hope, love; to have a mother, to have a wife,
+to have children; to have the light--and all at once, in the space of a
+shout, in less than a minute, to sink into an abyss; to fall, to
+roll, to crush, to be crushed; to see ears of wheat, flowers, leaves,
+branches; not to be able to catch hold of anything; to feel one's sword
+useless, men beneath one, horses on top of one; to struggle in vain,
+since one's bones have been broken by some kick in the darkness; to feel
+a heel which makes one's eyes start from their sockets; to bite horses'
+shoes in one's rage; to stifle, to yell, to writhe; to be beneath, and
+to say to one's self, "But just a little while ago I was a living man!"
+
+There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle,
+all was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered with
+horses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement! There
+was no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road with the
+plain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel of barley. A
+heap of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of blood in the lower
+part--such was that road on the evening of the 18th of June, 1815. The
+blood ran even to the Nivelles highway, and there overflowed in a large
+pool in front of the abatis of trees which barred the way, at a spot
+which is still pointed out.
+
+It will be remembered that it was at the opposite point, in the
+direction of the Genappe road, that the destruction of the cuirassiers
+had taken place. The thickness of the layer of bodies was proportioned
+to the depth of the hollow road. Towards the middle, at the point
+where it became level, where Delort's division had passed, the layer of
+corpses was thinner.
+
+The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader was going
+in that direction. He was searching that vast tomb. He gazed about. He
+passed the dead in some sort of hideous review. He walked with his feet
+in the blood.
+
+All at once he paused.
+
+A few paces in front of him, in the hollow road, at the point where
+the pile of dead came to an end, an open hand, illumined by the moon,
+projected from beneath that heap of men. That hand had on its finger
+something sparkling, which was a ring of gold.
+
+The man bent over, remained in a crouching attitude for a moment, and
+when he rose there was no longer a ring on the hand.
+
+He did not precisely rise; he remained in a stooping and frightened
+attitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead, scanning the horizon
+on his knees, with the whole upper portion of his body supported on his
+two forefingers, which rested on the earth, and his head peering above
+the edge of the hollow road. The jackal's four paws suit some actions.
+
+Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.
+
+At that moment, he gave a terrible start. He felt some one clutch him
+from behind.
+
+He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had seized
+the skirt of his coat.
+
+An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.
+
+"Come," said he, "it's only a dead body. I prefer a spook to a
+gendarme."
+
+But the hand weakened and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted in
+the grave.
+
+"Well now," said the prowler, "is that dead fellow alive? Let's see."
+
+He bent down again, fumbled among the heap, pushed aside everything that
+was in his way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head, pulled
+out the body, and a few moments later he was dragging the lifeless, or
+at least the unconscious, man, through the shadows of hollow road. He
+was a cuirassier, an officer, and even an officer of considerable rank;
+a large gold epaulette peeped from beneath the cuirass; this officer
+no longer possessed a helmet. A furious sword-cut had scarred his face,
+where nothing was discernible but blood.
+
+However, he did not appear to have any broken limbs, and, by some happy
+chance, if that word is permissible here, the dead had been vaulted
+above him in such a manner as to preserve him from being crushed. His
+eyes were still closed.
+
+On his cuirass he wore the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.
+
+The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared into one of the gulfs
+which he had beneath his great coat.
+
+Then he felt of the officer's fob, discovered a watch there, and took
+possession of it. Next he searched his waistcoat, found a purse and
+pocketed it.
+
+When he had arrived at this stage of succor which he was administering
+to this dying man, the officer opened his eyes.
+
+"Thanks," he said feebly.
+
+The abruptness of the movements of the man who was manipulating him, the
+freshness of the night, the air which he could inhale freely, had roused
+him from his lethargy.
+
+The prowler made no reply. He raised his head. A sound of footsteps was
+audible in the plain; some patrol was probably approaching.
+
+The officer murmured, for the death agony was still in his voice:--
+
+"Who won the battle?"
+
+"The English," answered the prowler.
+
+The officer went on:--
+
+"Look in my pockets; you will find a watch and a purse. Take them."
+
+It was already done.
+
+The prowler executed the required feint, and said:--
+
+"There is nothing there."
+
+"I have been robbed," said the officer; "I am sorry for that. You should
+have had them."
+
+The steps of the patrol became more and more distinct.
+
+"Some one is coming," said the prowler, with the movement of a man who
+is taking his departure.
+
+The officer raised his arm feebly, and detained him.
+
+"You have saved my life. Who are you?"
+
+The prowler answered rapidly, and in a low voice:--
+
+"Like yourself, I belonged to the French army. I must leave you. If they
+were to catch me, they would shoot me. I have saved your life. Now get
+out of the scrape yourself."
+
+"What is your rank?"
+
+"Sergeant."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Thenardier."
+
+"I shall not forget that name," said the officer; "and do you remember
+mine. My name is Pontmercy."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--NUMBER 24,601 BECOMES NUMBER 9,430
+
+Jean Valjean had been recaptured.
+
+The reader will be grateful to us if we pass rapidly over the sad
+details. We will confine ourselves to transcribing two paragraphs
+published by the journals of that day, a few months after the surprising
+events which had taken place at M. sur M.
+
+These articles are rather summary. It must be remembered, that at that
+epoch the Gazette des Tribunaux was not yet in existence.
+
+We borrow the first from the Drapeau Blanc. It bears the date of July
+25, 1823.
+
+
+An arrondissement of the Pas de Calais has just been the theatre of an
+event quite out of the ordinary course. A man, who was a stranger in the
+Department, and who bore the name of M. Madeleine, had, thanks to the
+new methods, resuscitated some years ago an ancient local industry, the
+manufacture of jet and of black glass trinkets. He had made his fortune
+in the business, and that of the arrondissement as well, we will admit.
+He had been appointed mayor, in recognition of his services. The police
+discovered that M. Madeleine was no other than an ex-convict who had
+broken his ban, condemned in 1796 for theft, and named Jean Valjean.
+Jean Valjean has been recommitted to prison. It appears that previous
+to his arrest he had succeeded in withdrawing from the hands of M.
+Laffitte, a sum of over half a million which he had lodged there, and
+which he had, moreover, and by perfectly legitimate means, acquired in
+his business. No one has been able to discover where Jean Valjean has
+concealed this money since his return to prison at Toulon.
+
+
+The second article, which enters a little more into detail, is an
+extract from the Journal de Paris, of the same date.
+
+A former convict, who had been liberated, named Jean Valjean, has just
+appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Var, under circumstances
+calculated to attract attention. This wretch had succeeded in escaping
+the vigilance of the police, he had changed his name, and had succeeded
+in getting himself appointed mayor of one of our small northern towns;
+in this town he had established a considerable commerce. He has at last
+been unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the
+public prosecutor. He had for his concubine a woman of the town, who
+died of a shock at the moment of his arrest. This scoundrel, who is
+endowed with Herculean strength, found means to escape; but three or
+four days after his flight the police laid their hands on him once more,
+in Paris itself, at the very moment when he was entering one of those
+little vehicles which run between the capital and the village of
+Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). He is said to have profited by this
+interval of three or four days of liberty, to withdraw a considerable
+sum deposited by him with one of our leading bankers. This sum has been
+estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. If the indictment is
+to be trusted, he has hidden it in some place known to himself alone,
+and it has not been possible to lay hands on it. However that may be,
+the said Jean Valjean has just been brought before the Assizes of the
+Department of the Var as accused of highway robbery accompanied with
+violence, about eight years ago, on the person of one of those honest
+children who, as the patriarch of Ferney has said, in immortal verse,
+
+
+ ". . . Arrive from Savoy every year,
+ And who, with gentle hands, do clear
+ Those long canals choked up with soot."
+
+
+This bandit refused to defend himself. It was proved by the skilful and
+eloquent representative of the public prosecutor, that the theft was
+committed in complicity with others, and that Jean Valjean was a member
+of a band of robbers in the south. Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty
+and was condemned to the death penalty in consequence. This criminal
+refused to lodge an appeal. The king, in his inexhaustible clemency, has
+deigned to commute his penalty to that of penal servitude for life. Jean
+Valjean was immediately taken to the prison at Toulon.
+
+
+The reader has not forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious habits at
+M. sur M. Some papers, among others the Constitutional, presented this
+commutation as a triumph of the priestly party.
+
+Jean Valjean changed his number in the galleys. He was called 9,430.
+
+However, and we will mention it at once in order that we may not be
+obliged to recur to the subject, the prosperity of M. sur M. vanished
+with M. Madeleine; all that he had foreseen during his night of fever
+and hesitation was realized; lacking him, there actually was a soul
+lacking. After this fall, there took place at M. sur M. that egotistical
+division of great existences which have fallen, that fatal dismemberment
+of flourishing things which is accomplished every day, obscurely, in
+the human community, and which history has noted only once, because it
+occurred after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants are crowned kings;
+superintendents improvise manufacturers out of themselves. Envious
+rivalries arose. M. Madeleine's vast workshops were shut; his buildings
+fell to ruin, his workmen were scattered. Some of them quitted the
+country, others abandoned the trade. Thenceforth, everything was done
+on a small scale, instead of on a grand scale; for lucre instead of
+the general good. There was no longer a centre; everywhere there
+was competition and animosity. M. Madeleine had reigned over all and
+directed all. No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things to
+himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of organization,
+bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another to the benevolence of
+the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeleine had set were
+tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the products were
+debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished, for lack of
+orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still, bankruptcy
+arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor. All had vanished.
+
+The state itself perceived that some one had been crushed somewhere.
+Less than four years after the judgment of the Court of Assizes
+establishing the identity of Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine, for the
+benefit of the galleys, the cost of collecting taxes had doubled in the
+arrondissement of M. sur M.; and M. de Villele called attention to the
+fact in the rostrum, in the month of February, 1827.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--IN WHICH THE READER WILL PERUSE TWO VERSES, WHICH ARE OF THE
+DEVIL'S COMPOSITION, POSSIBLY
+
+Before proceeding further, it will be to the purpose to narrate in some
+detail, a singular occurrence which took place at about the same epoch,
+in Montfermeil, and which is not lacking in coincidence with certain
+conjectures of the indictment.
+
+There exists in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition,
+which is all the more curious and all the more precious, because
+a popular superstition in the vicinity of Paris is like an aloe in
+Siberia. We are among those who respect everything which is in the
+nature of a rare plant. Here, then, is the superstition of Montfermeil:
+it is thought that the devil, from time immemorial, has selected the
+forest as a hiding-place for his treasures. Goodwives affirm that it is
+no rarity to encounter at nightfall, in secluded nooks of the forest,
+a black man with the air of a carter or a wood-chopper, wearing wooden
+shoes, clad in trousers and a blouse of linen, and recognizable by the
+fact, that, instead of a cap or hat, he has two immense horns on his
+head. This ought, in fact, to render him recognizable. This man is
+habitually engaged in digging a hole. There are three ways of profiting
+by such an encounter. The first is to approach the man and speak to him.
+Then it is seen that the man is simply a peasant, that he appears black
+because it is nightfall; that he is not digging any hole whatever, but
+is cutting grass for his cows, and that what had been taken for horns
+is nothing but a dung-fork which he is carrying on his back, and whose
+teeth, thanks to the perspective of evening, seemed to spring from his
+head. The man returns home and dies within the week. The second way is
+to watch him, to wait until he has dug his hole, until he has filled it
+and has gone away; then to run with great speed to the trench, to
+open it once more and to seize the "treasure" which the black man
+has necessarily placed there. In this case one dies within the month.
+Finally, the last method is not to speak to the black man, not to look
+at him, and to flee at the best speed of one's legs. One then dies
+within the year.
+
+As all three methods are attended with their special inconveniences, the
+second, which at all events, presents some advantages, among others that
+of possessing a treasure, if only for a month, is the one most generally
+adopted. So bold men, who are tempted by every chance, have quite
+frequently, as we are assured, opened the holes excavated by the black
+man, and tried to rob the devil. The success of the operation appears
+to be but moderate. At least, if the tradition is to be believed, and in
+particular the two enigmatical lines in barbarous Latin, which an
+evil Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer, named Tryphon has left on
+this subject. This Tryphon is buried at the Abbey of Saint-Georges de
+Bocherville, near Rouen, and toads spawn on his grave.
+
+Accordingly, enormous efforts are made. Such trenches are ordinarily
+extremely deep; a man sweats, digs, toils all night--for it must be done
+at night; he wets his shirt, burns out his candle, breaks his mattock,
+and when he arrives at the bottom of the hole, when he lays his hand on
+the "treasure," what does he find? What is the devil's treasure? A sou,
+sometimes a crown-piece, a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding body, sometimes
+a spectre folded in four like a sheet of paper in a portfolio,
+sometimes nothing. This is what Tryphon's verses seem to announce to the
+indiscreet and curious:--
+
+ "Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca,
+ As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque."
+
+
+It seems that in our day there is sometimes found a powder-horn with
+bullets, sometimes an old pack of cards greasy and worn, which has
+evidently served the devil. Tryphon does not record these two finds,
+since Tryphon lived in the twelfth century, and since the devil does not
+appear to have had the wit to invent powder before Roger Bacon's time,
+and cards before the time of Charles VI.
+
+Moreover, if one plays at cards, one is sure to lose all that one
+possesses! and as for the powder in the horn, it possesses the property
+of making your gun burst in your face.
+
+Now, a very short time after the epoch when it seemed to the prosecuting
+attorney that the liberated convict Jean Valjean during his flight of
+several days had been prowling around Montfermeil, it was remarked in
+that village that a certain old road-laborer, named Boulatruelle, had
+"peculiar ways" in the forest. People thereabouts thought they knew that
+this Boulatruelle had been in the galleys. He was subjected to
+certain police supervision, and, as he could find work nowhere, the
+administration employed him at reduced rates as a road-mender on the
+cross-road from Gagny to Lagny.
+
+This Boulatruelle was a man who was viewed with disfavor by the
+inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in
+removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence
+of the gendarmes,--probably affiliated to robber bands, they said;
+suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only
+thing in his favor was that he was a drunkard.
+
+This is what people thought they had noticed:--
+
+Of late, Boulatruelle had taken to quitting his task of stone-breaking
+and care of the road at a very early hour, and to betaking himself to
+the forest with his pickaxe. He was encountered towards evening in
+the most deserted clearings, in the wildest thickets; and he had the
+appearance of being in search of something, and sometimes he was digging
+holes. The goodwives who passed took him at first for Beelzebub; then
+they recognized Boulatruelle, and were not in the least reassured
+thereby. These encounters seemed to cause Boulatruelle a lively
+displeasure. It was evident that he sought to hide, and that there was
+some mystery in what he was doing.
+
+It was said in the village: "It is clear that the devil has appeared.
+Boulatruelle has seen him, and is on the search. In sooth, he is cunning
+enough to pocket Lucifer's hoard."
+
+The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil, or will the
+devil catch Boulatruelle?" The old women made a great many signs of the
+cross.
+
+In the meantime, Boulatruelle's manoeuvres in the forest ceased; and he
+resumed his regular occupation of roadmending; and people gossiped of
+something else.
+
+Some persons, however, were still curious, surmising that in all this
+there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends, but some
+fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort than the devil's
+bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half discovered the secret. The
+most "puzzled" were the school-master and Thenardier, the proprietor of
+the tavern, who was everybody's friend, and had not disdained to ally
+himself with Boulatruelle.
+
+"He has been in the galleys," said Thenardier. "Eh! Good God! no one
+knows who has been there or will be there."
+
+One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that in former times the law would
+have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle did in the forest,
+and that the latter would have been forced to speak, and that he would
+have been put to the torture in case of need, and that Boulatruelle
+would not have resisted the water test, for example. "Let us put him to
+the wine test," said Thenardier.
+
+They made an effort, and got the old road-mender to drinking.
+Boulatruelle drank an enormous amount, but said very little. He combined
+with admirable art, and in masterly proportions, the thirst of a
+gormandizer with the discretion of a judge. Nevertheless, by dint of
+returning to the charge and of comparing and putting together the few
+obscure words which he did allow to escape him, this is what Thenardier
+and the schoolmaster imagined that they had made out:--
+
+One morning, when Boulatruelle was on his way to his work, at daybreak,
+he had been surprised to see, at a nook of the forest in the underbrush,
+a shovel and a pickaxe, concealed, as one might say.
+
+However, he might have supposed that they were probably the shovel and
+pick of Father Six-Fours, the water-carrier, and would have thought no
+more about it. But, on the evening of that day, he saw, without being
+seen himself, as he was hidden by a large tree, "a person who did not
+belong in those parts, and whom he, Boulatruelle, knew well," directing
+his steps towards the densest part of the wood. Translation by
+Thenardier: A comrade of the galleys. Boulatruelle obstinately refused
+to reveal his name. This person carried a package--something square,
+like a large box or a small trunk. Surprise on the part of Boulatruelle.
+However, it was only after the expiration of seven or eight minutes that
+the idea of following that "person" had occurred to him. But it was too
+late; the person was already in the thicket, night had descended, and
+Boulatruelle had not been able to catch up with him. Then he had
+adopted the course of watching for him at the edge of the woods. "It was
+moonlight." Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle had seen this person
+emerge from the brushwood, carrying no longer the coffer, but a shovel
+and pick. Boulatruelle had allowed the person to pass, and had not
+dreamed of accosting him, because he said to himself that the other man
+was three times as strong as he was, and armed with a pickaxe, and that
+he would probably knock him over the head on recognizing him, and on
+perceiving that he was recognized. Touching effusion of two old comrades
+on meeting again. But the shovel and pick had served as a ray of light
+to Boulatruelle; he had hastened to the thicket in the morning, and had
+found neither shovel nor pick. From this he had drawn the inference that
+this person, once in the forest, had dug a hole with his pick, buried
+the coffer, and reclosed the hole with his shovel. Now, the coffer was
+too small to contain a body; therefore it contained money. Hence his
+researches. Boulatruelle had explored, sounded, searched the entire
+forest and the thicket, and had dug wherever the earth appeared to him
+to have been recently turned up. In vain.
+
+He had "ferreted out" nothing. No one in Montfermeil thought any more
+about it. There were only a few brave gossips, who said, "You may be
+certain that the mender on the Gagny road did not take all that trouble
+for nothing; he was sure that the devil had come."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE ANKLE-CHAIN MUST HAVE UNDERGONE A CERTAIN PREPARATORY
+MANIPULATION TO BE THUS BROKEN WITH A BLOW FROM A HAMMER
+
+Towards the end of October, in that same year, 1823, the inhabitants of
+Toulon beheld the entry into their port, after heavy weather, and for
+the purpose of repairing some damages, of the ship Orion, which was
+employed later at Brest as a school-ship, and which then formed a part
+of the Mediterranean squadron.
+
+This vessel, battered as it was,--for the sea had handled it
+roughly,--produced a fine effect as it entered the roads. It flew some
+colors which procured for it the regulation salute of eleven guns, which
+it returned, shot for shot; total, twenty-two. It has been calculated
+that what with salvos, royal and military politenesses, courteous
+exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and
+citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and
+all ships of war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized
+world, discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty
+hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six francs the
+shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred
+millions a year, which vanish in smoke. This is a mere detail. All this
+time the poor were dying of hunger.
+
+The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the Spanish
+war."
+
+This war contained many events in one, and a quantity of peculiarities.
+A grand family affair for the house of Bourbon; the branch of France
+succoring and protecting the branch of Madrid, that is to say,
+performing an act devolving on the elder; an apparent return to our
+national traditions, complicated by servitude and by subjection to the
+cabinets of the North; M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal
+sheets the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude that
+was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient and very
+powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the chimerical
+terrorism of the liberals; the sansculottes resuscitated, to the great
+terror of dowagers, under the name of descamisados; monarchy opposing an
+obstacle to progress described as anarchy; the theories of '89 roughly
+interrupted in the sap; a European halt, called to the French idea,
+which was making the tour of the world; beside the son of France as
+generalissimo, the Prince de Carignan, afterwards Charles Albert,
+enrolling himself in that crusade of kings against people as a
+volunteer, with grenadier epaulets of red worsted; the soldiers of the
+Empire setting out on a fresh campaign, but aged, saddened, after eight
+years of repose, and under the white cockade; the tricolored standard
+waved abroad by a heroic handful of Frenchmen, as the white standard had
+been thirty years earlier at Coblentz; monks mingled with our troops;
+the spirit of liberty and of novelty brought to its senses by bayonets;
+principles slaughtered by cannonades; France undoing by her arms that
+which she had done by her mind; in addition to this, hostile leaders
+sold, soldiers hesitating, cities besieged by millions; no military
+perils, and yet possible explosions, as in every mine which is surprised
+and invaded; but little bloodshed, little honor won, shame for some,
+glory for no one. Such was this war, made by the princes descended from
+Louis XIV., and conducted by generals who had been under Napoleon. Its
+sad fate was to recall neither the grand war nor grand politics.
+
+Some feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadero, among
+others, was a fine military action; but after all, we repeat, the
+trumpets of this war give back a cracked sound, the whole effect was
+suspicious; history approves of France for making a difficulty about
+accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident that certain Spanish
+officers charged with resistance yielded too easily; the idea of
+corruption was connected with the victory; it appears as though generals
+and not battles had been won, and the conquering soldier returned
+humiliated. A debasing war, in short, in which the Bank of France could
+be read in the folds of the flag.
+
+Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen in formidable
+ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of citadels, and began to
+regret Palafox. It is the nature of France to prefer to have Rostopchine
+rather than Ballesteros in front of her.
+
+From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is also proper
+to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the military spirit
+of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise of
+inthralment. In that campaign, the object of the French soldier, the
+son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others. A hideous
+contradiction. France is made to arouse the soul of nations, not to
+stifle it. All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are the French
+Revolution: liberty darts rays from France. That is a solar fact. Blind
+is he who will not see! It was Bonaparte who said it.
+
+The war of 1823, an outrage on the generous Spanish nation, was then,
+at the same time, an outrage on the French Revolution. It was France
+who committed this monstrous violence; by foul means, for, with the
+exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul
+means. The words passive obedience indicate this. An army is a strange
+masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous sum
+of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity against humanity, despite
+humanity, explained.
+
+As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them. They took it for
+a success. They did not perceive the danger that lies in having an idea
+slain to order. They went astray, in their innocence, to such a degree
+that they introduced the immense enfeeblement of a crime into their
+establishment as an element of strength. The spirit of the ambush
+entered into their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823. The Spanish
+campaign became in their counsels an argument for force and for
+adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established elrey netto
+in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute king at home. They
+fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience of the soldier for
+the consent of the nation. Such confidence is the ruin of thrones. It is
+not permitted to fall asleep, either in the shadow of a machineel tree,
+nor in the shadow of an army.
+
+Let us return to the ship Orion.
+
+During the operations of the army commanded by the prince generalissimo,
+a squadron had been cruising in the Mediterranean. We have just stated
+that the Orion belonged to this fleet, and that accidents of the sea had
+brought it into port at Toulon.
+
+The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something about it which
+attracts and engages a crowd. It is because it is great, and the crowd
+loves what is great.
+
+A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations of the
+genius of man with the powers of nature.
+
+A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the heaviest and
+the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one and the same time
+with three forms of substance,--solid, liquid, and fluid,--and it must
+do battle with all three. It has eleven claws of iron with which to
+seize the granite on the bottom of the sea, and more wings and more
+antennae than winged insects, to catch the wind in the clouds. Its
+breath pours out through its hundred and twenty cannons as through
+enormous trumpets, and replies proudly to the thunder. The ocean seeks
+to lead it astray in the alarming sameness of its billows, but the
+vessel has its soul, its compass, which counsels it and always shows it
+the north. In the blackest nights, its lanterns supply the place of
+the stars. Thus, against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas;
+against the water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead;
+against the shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.
+
+If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which,
+taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to enter
+one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports of Brest
+or Toulon. The vessels in process of construction are under a bell-glass
+there, as it were. This colossal beam is a yard; that great column of
+wood which stretches out on the earth as far as the eye can reach is
+the main-mast. Taking it from its root in the stocks to its tip in the
+clouds, it is sixty fathoms long, and its diameter at its base is
+three feet. The English main-mast rises to a height of two hundred and
+seventeen feet above the water-line. The navy of our fathers employed
+cables, ours employs chains. The simple pile of chains on a ship of a
+hundred guns is four feet high, twenty feet in breadth, and eight
+feet in depth. And how much wood is required to make this ship? Three
+thousand cubic metres. It is a floating forest.
+
+And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question here of
+the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple sailing-vessel;
+steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to that prodigy
+which is called a war vessel. At the present time, for example, the
+mixed vessel with a screw is a surprising machine, propelled by three
+thousand square metres of canvas and by an engine of two thousand five
+hundred horse-power.
+
+Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of Christopher
+Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces of man. It is as
+inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite in gales; it stores up
+the wind in its sails, it is precise in the immense vagueness of the
+billows, it floats, and it reigns.
+
+There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot
+yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet tall,
+when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in the jaws
+of the waves like a fisherman's hook in the jaws of a pike, when those
+monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars, which the hurricane
+bears forth into the void and into night, when all that power and all
+that majesty are engulfed in a power and majesty which are superior.
+
+Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate in an immense
+feebleness it affords men food for thought, Hence in the ports curious
+people abound around these marvellous machines of war and of navigation,
+without being able to explain perfectly to themselves why. Every day,
+accordingly, from morning until night, the quays, sluices, and the
+jetties of the port of Toulon were covered with a multitude of idlers
+and loungers, as they say in Paris, whose business consisted in staring
+at the Orion.
+
+The Orion was a ship that had been ailing for a long time; in the course
+of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles had collected on its
+keel to such a degree as to deprive it of half its speed; it had gone
+into the dry dock the year before this, in order to have the barnacles
+scraped off, then it had put to sea again; but this cleaning had
+affected the bolts of the keel: in the neighborhood of the Balearic
+Isles the sides had been strained and had opened; and, as the plating
+in those days was not of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak.
+A violent equinoctial gale had come up, which had first staved in
+a grating and a porthole on the larboard side, and damaged the
+foretop-gallant-shrouds; in consequence of these injuries, the Orion had
+run back to Toulon.
+
+It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs were
+begun. The hull had received no damage on the starboard, but some of the
+planks had been unnailed here and there, according to custom, to permit
+of air entering the hold.
+
+One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an accident.
+
+[Illustration: The Ship Orion, An Accident 2b2-1-the-ship-orion]
+
+The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had to take the
+upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard, lost his balance;
+he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging the Arsenal quay uttered a
+cry; the man's head overbalanced his body; the man fell around the yard,
+with his hands outstretched towards the abyss; on his way he seized the
+footrope, first with one hand, then with the other, and remained hanging
+from it: the sea lay below him at a dizzy depth; the shock of his fall
+had imparted to the foot-rope a violent swinging motion; the man swayed
+back and forth at the end of that rope, like a stone in a sling.
+
+It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not one
+of the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for the
+service, dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate topman
+was losing his strength; his anguish could not be discerned on his face,
+but his exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were contracted
+in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to re-ascend served
+but to augment the oscillations of the foot-rope; he did not shout, for
+fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting the minute when he
+should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant to instant, heads
+were turned aside that his fall might not be seen. There are moments
+when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree, is life itself, and
+it is a terrible thing to see a living being detach himself from it and
+fall like a ripe fruit.
+
+All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility
+of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he wore a
+green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level with the top, a
+gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed a perfectly white head to
+be seen: he was not a young man.
+
+A convict employed on board with a detachment from the galleys had, in
+fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the officer of the watch,
+and, in the midst of the consternation and the hesitation of the crew,
+while all the sailors were trembling and drawing back, he had asked
+the officer's permission to risk his life to save the topman; at an
+affirmative sign from the officer he had broken the chain riveted to his
+ankle with one blow of a hammer, then he had caught up a rope, and had
+dashed into the rigging: no one noticed, at the instant, with what ease
+that chain had been broken; it was only later on that the incident was
+recalled.
+
+In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few seconds and
+appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these seconds, during which
+the breeze swayed the topman at the extremity of a thread, seemed
+centuries to those who were looking on. At last, the convict raised his
+eyes to heaven and advanced a step: the crowd drew a long breath. He was
+seen to run out along the yard: on arriving at the point, he fastened
+the rope which he had brought to it, and allowed the other end to hang
+down, then he began to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then,--and
+the anguish was indescribable,--instead of one man suspended over the
+gulf, there were two.
+
+One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly, only here the
+spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand glances were fastened on
+this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor contracted every
+brow; all mouths held their breath as though they feared to add the
+slightest puff to the wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men.
+
+In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself to a
+position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute more, and the
+exhausted and despairing man would have allowed himself to fall into
+the abyss. The convict had moored him securely with the cord to which
+he clung with one hand, while he was working with the other. At last, he
+was seen to climb back on the yard, and to drag the sailor up after him;
+he held him there a moment to allow him to recover his strength, then he
+grasped him in his arms and carried him, walking on the yard himself to
+the cap, and from there to the main-top, where he left him in the hands
+of his comrades.
+
+At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old convict-sergeants
+among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay, and all
+voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage, "Pardon for that
+man!"
+
+He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his descent to rejoin
+his detachment. In order to reach them the more speedily, he dropped
+into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards; all eyes were
+following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them; whether it was
+that he was fatigued, or that his head turned, they thought they saw him
+hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd uttered a loud shout: the
+convict had fallen into the sea.
+
+The fall was perilous. The frigate Algesiras was anchored alongside the
+Orion, and the poor convict had fallen between the two vessels: it was
+to be feared that he would slip under one or the other of them. Four men
+flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered them on;
+anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not risen to
+the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving a ripple, as
+though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded, they dived. In
+vain. The search was continued until the evening: they did not even find
+the body.
+
+On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these lines:--
+
+"Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on
+board of the Orion, on his return from rendering assistance to a sailor,
+fell into the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been found; it
+is supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the Arsenal point:
+this man was committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean
+Valjean."
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL
+
+Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
+of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At
+the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
+through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In
+1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so
+many well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some
+pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be
+sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in
+twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts
+of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but
+Montfermeil was none the less a village. Retired cloth-merchants and
+rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful
+and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people
+lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and
+so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the
+plateau.
+
+It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of
+the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds
+which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the
+church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water
+only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to
+Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.
+
+Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The
+large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thenardier tavern formed a
+part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of
+it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of supplying
+Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until seven
+o'clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night once
+come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had no
+water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.
+
+This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has
+probably not forgotten,--little Cosette. It will be remembered that
+Cosette was useful to the Thenardiers in two ways: they made the mother
+pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased
+to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding
+chapters, the Thenardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant
+in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when
+it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of
+going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never be
+lacking in the house.
+
+Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
+The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
+nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
+permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street of
+the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of the
+same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
+and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will
+perhaps remember, the Thenardiers' hostelry was situated. These people
+filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil
+little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of
+a faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities
+displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful
+clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to
+the peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian
+vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and which
+have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists call
+this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the Apicides,
+and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers,
+who had retired to the village, went to see this creature with great
+devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored cockade was a
+unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their menagerie.
+
+On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were
+seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in
+the public room of Thenardier's hostelry. This room resembled all
+drinking-shop rooms,--tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers;
+but little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year 1823
+was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable
+in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin.
+The female Thenardier was attending to the supper, which was roasting in
+front of a clear fire; her husband was drinking with his customers and
+talking politics.
+
+Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects
+the Spanish war and M. le Duc d'Angouleme, strictly local parentheses,
+like the following, were audible amid the uproar:--
+
+"About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly. When
+ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve. They have yielded a
+great deal of juice under the press." "But the grapes cannot be ripe?"
+"In those parts the grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as
+soon as spring comes." "Then it is very thin wine?" "There are wines
+poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while green." Etc.
+
+Or a miller would call out:--
+
+"Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a quantity
+of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are obliged to send
+through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel, vetches, hempseed,
+fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention pebbles, which
+abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I am not fond of
+grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like to saw beams with
+nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that makes in grinding. And
+then people complain of the flour. They are in the wrong. The flour is
+no fault of ours."
+
+In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a
+landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be
+performed in the spring, was saying:--
+
+"It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good
+thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young
+and very hard to cut still. It's terribly tender. It yields before the
+iron." Etc.
+
+Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
+table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into
+wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen
+stockings destined for the young Thenardiers. A very young kitten was
+playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in
+the adjoining room, from two fresh children's voices: it was Eponine and
+Azelma.
+
+In the chimney-corner a cat-o'-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.
+
+At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the
+house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy
+who had been born to the Thenardiers during one of the preceding
+winters,--"she did not know why," she said, "the result of the
+cold,"--and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had
+nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the
+brat became too annoying, "Your son is squalling," Thenardier would
+say; "do go and see what he wants." "Bah!" the mother would reply, "he
+bothers me." And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS
+
+So far in this book the Thenardiers have been viewed only in profile;
+the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple, and
+considering it under all its aspects.
+
+Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thenardier was
+approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so
+that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.
+
+Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this Thenardier
+woman, ever since her first appearance,--tall, blond, red, fat, angular,
+square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we have said, to the
+race of those colossal wild women, who contort themselves at fairs with
+paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything about the
+house,--made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and everything
+else. Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an
+elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice,--window panes,
+furniture, and people. Her big face, dotted with red blotches,
+presented the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an ideal
+market-porter dressed in woman's clothes. She swore splendidly; she
+boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist. Except
+for the romances which she had read, and which made the affected lady
+peep through the ogress at times, in a very queer way, the idea would
+never have occurred to any one to say of her, "That is a woman."
+This Thenardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a
+fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, "That is a gendarme"; when
+one saw her drink, one said, "That is a carter"; when one saw her handle
+Cosette, one said, "That is the hangman." One of her teeth projected
+when her face was in repose.
+
+Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had
+a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here;
+he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to
+everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He had
+the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He greatly
+resembled the portraits of the Abbe Delille. His coquetry consisted in
+drinking with the carters. No one had ever succeeded in rendering him
+drunk. He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an
+old black coat. He made pretensions to literature and to materialism.
+There were certain names which he often pronounced to support whatever
+things he might be saying,--Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, singularly
+enough, Saint Augustine. He declared that he had "a system." In
+addition, he was a great swindler. A filousophe [philosophe], a
+scientific thief. The species does exist. It will be remembered that he
+pretended to have served in the army; he was in the habit of relating
+with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or the 9th light
+something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the presence of a
+squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body and saved
+from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, "a general, who had been
+dangerously wounded." Thence arose for his wall the flaring sign, and
+for his inn the name which it bore in the neighborhood, of "the cabaret
+of the Sergeant of Waterloo." He was a liberal, a classic, and a
+Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d'Asile. It was said in the
+village that he had studied for the priesthood.
+
+We believe that he had simply studied in Holland for an inn-keeper. This
+rascal of composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming from
+Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian at Brussels, being
+comfortably astride of both frontiers. As for his prowess at Waterloo,
+the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be perceived that
+he exaggerated it a trifle. Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was
+the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience entails a fragmentary
+life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier
+belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken,
+beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and
+travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety
+cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always
+attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended, and
+having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil and set up
+an inn there.
+
+This quibus, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver
+crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did
+not amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler turned
+eating-house-keeper very far.
+
+Thenardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his gestures
+which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks, and by a sign
+of the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker. He allowed it to be
+thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had
+noticed that he pronounced improperly.[12]
+
+He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner, but
+practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
+Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not disdain
+his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This giantess
+was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow little man must
+be an object coveted by all.
+
+Thenardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-balanced man, was a
+scamp of a temperate sort. This is the worst species; hypocrisy enters
+into it.
+
+It is not that Thenardier was not, on occasion, capable of wrath to
+quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very rare, and at such
+times, since he was enraged with the human race in general, as he bore
+within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he was one of those
+people who are continually avenging their wrongs, who accuse everything
+that passes before them of everything which has befallen them, and who
+are always ready to cast upon the first person who comes to hand, as a
+legitimate grievance, the sum total of the deceptions, the bankruptcies,
+and the calamities of their lives,--when all this leaven was stirred up
+in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was terrible. Woe to
+the person who came under his wrath at such a time!
+
+In addition to his other qualities, Thenardier was attentive and
+penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances, and always
+highly intelligent. He had something of the look of sailors, who are
+accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses.
+Thenardier was a statesman.
+
+Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame
+Thenardier, "There is the master of the house." A mistake. She was not
+even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She worked;
+he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant
+magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the
+mastodon obeyed. Thenardier was a sort of special and sovereign being in
+Madame Thenardier's eyes, though she did not thoroughly realize it.
+She was possessed of virtues after her own kind; if she had ever had a
+disagreement as to any detail with "Monsieur Thenardier,"--which was
+an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,--she would not have blamed
+her husband in public on any subject whatever. She would never have
+committed "before strangers" that mistake so often committed by women,
+and which is called in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown."
+Although their concord had only evil as its result, there was
+contemplation in Madame Thenardier's submission to her husband. That
+mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little finger of that
+frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side, this was that
+grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by matter; for certain
+ugly features have a cause in the very depths of eternal beauty. There
+was an unknown quantity about Thenardier; hence the absolute empire
+of the man over that woman. At certain moments she beheld him like a
+lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.
+
+This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her
+children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a
+mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short with
+her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had
+but one thought,--how to enrich himself.
+
+He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was
+lacking. Thenardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is
+possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless scamp
+would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse where
+fate has hitched him.
+
+It will be understood that the word inn-keeper is here employed in a
+restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.
+
+In this same year, 1823, Thenardier was burdened with about fifteen
+hundred francs' worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.
+
+Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case,
+Thenardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most
+profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue
+among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized
+peoples,--hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted
+for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh,
+which was particularly dangerous.
+
+His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth in lightning flashes.
+He had professional aphorisms, which he inserted into his wife's mind.
+"The duty of the inn-keeper," he said to her one day, violently, and in
+a low voice, "is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light, fire,
+dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by, to empty
+small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter travelling
+families respectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman, to pick
+the child clean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the
+chimney-corner, the arm-chair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the
+feather-bed, the mattress and the truss of straw; to know how much
+the shadow uses up the mirror, and to put a price on it; and, by five
+hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even
+for the flies which his dog eats!"
+
+This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded--a hideous and
+terrible team.
+
+While the husband pondered and combined, Madame Thenardier thought not
+of absent creditors, took no heed of yesterday nor of to-morrow, and
+lived in a fit of anger, all in a minute.
+
+Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to their
+double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being ground up
+in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The man and the woman each
+had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed with blows--this was the
+woman's; she went barefooted in winter--that was the man's doing.
+
+Cosette ran up stairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran,
+fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was,
+did the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and
+venomous master. The Thenardier hostelry was like a spider's web, in
+which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The ideal
+of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something
+like the fly serving the spiders.
+
+The poor child passively held her peace.
+
+What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God,
+find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the
+midst of men all naked!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER
+
+Four new travellers had arrived.
+
+Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years
+old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the
+lugubrious air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a
+blow from Madame Thenardier's fist, which caused the latter to remark
+from time to time, "How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!"
+
+Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and
+caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have
+been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.
+
+She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thenardier
+establishment drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking there;
+but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather than to
+the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water among all those
+glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men. But there
+came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thenardier raised the
+cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then seized a glass
+and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the faucet; the child
+had raised her head and was following all the woman's movements. A thin
+stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half filled the glass.
+"Well," said she, "there is no more water!" A momentary silence ensued.
+The child did not breathe.
+
+"Bah!" resumed Madame Thenardier, examining the half-filled glass, "this
+will be enough."
+
+Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an
+hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.
+
+She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it were
+the next morning.
+
+From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street, and
+exclaimed, "It's as black as an oven!" or, "One must needs be a cat
+to go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!" And Cosette
+trembled.
+
+All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered, and
+said in a harsh voice:--
+
+"My horse has not been watered."
+
+"Yes, it has," said Madame Thenardier.
+
+"I tell you that it has not," retorted the pedler.
+
+Cosette had emerged from under the table.
+
+"Oh, yes, sir!" said she, "the horse has had a drink; he drank out of a
+bucket, a whole bucketful, and it was I who took the water to him, and I
+spoke to him."
+
+It was not true; Cosette lied.
+
+"There's a brat as big as my fist who tells lies as big as the house,"
+exclaimed the pedler. "I tell you that he has not been watered, you
+little jade! He has a way of blowing when he has had no water, which I
+know well."
+
+Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse with anguish,
+and which was hardly audible:--
+
+"And he drank heartily."
+
+"Come," said the pedler, in a rage, "this won't do at all, let my horse
+be watered, and let that be the end of it!"
+
+Cosette crept under the table again.
+
+"In truth, that is fair!" said Madame Thenardier, "if the beast has not
+been watered, it must be."
+
+Then glancing about her:--
+
+"Well, now! Where's that other beast?"
+
+She bent down and discovered Cosette cowering at the other end of the
+table, almost under the drinkers' feet.
+
+"Are you coming?" shrieked Madame Thenardier.
+
+Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had hidden herself.
+The Thenardier resumed:--
+
+"Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse."
+
+"But, Madame," said Cosette, feebly, "there is no water."
+
+The Thenardier threw the street door wide open:--
+
+"Well, go and get some, then!"
+
+Cosette dropped her head, and went for an empty bucket which stood near
+the chimney-corner.
+
+This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have set down
+in it at her ease.
+
+The Thenardier returned to her stove, and tasted what was in the
+stewpan, with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while:--
+
+"There's plenty in the spring. There never was such a malicious creature
+as that. I think I should have done better to strain my onions."
+
+Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained sous, pepper, and
+shallots.
+
+"See here, Mam'selle Toad," she added, "on your way back, you will get a
+big loaf from the baker. Here's a fifteen-sou piece."
+
+Cosette had a little pocket on one side of her apron; she took the coin
+without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.
+
+Then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her. She
+seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her rescue.
+
+"Get along with you!" screamed the Thenardier.
+
+Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE OF A DOLL
+
+The line of open-air booths starting at the church, extended, as the
+reader will remember, as far as the hostelry of the Thenardiers. These
+booths were all illuminated, because the citizens would soon pass on
+their way to the midnight mass, with candles burning in paper funnels,
+which, as the schoolmaster, then seated at the table at the Thenardiers'
+observed, produced "a magical effect." In compensation, not a star was
+visible in the sky.
+
+The last of these stalls, established precisely opposite the
+Thenardiers' door, was a toy-shop all glittering with tinsel, glass,
+and magnificent objects of tin. In the first row, and far forwards, the
+merchant had placed on a background of white napkins, an immense doll,
+nearly two feet high, who was dressed in a robe of pink crepe, with gold
+wheat-ears on her head, which had real hair and enamel eyes. All that
+day, this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of all passers-by
+under ten years of age, without a mother being found in Montfermeil
+sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to give it to her child.
+Eponine and Azelma had passed hours in contemplating it, and Cosette
+herself had ventured to cast a glance at it, on the sly, it is true.
+
+At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and
+overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes to
+that wonderful doll, towards the lady, as she called it. The poor child
+paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld that doll close to. The
+whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was a
+vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in
+a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly
+engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With the sad and innocent sagacity
+of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from
+that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a
+princess, to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink
+dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, "How happy that doll
+must be!" She could not take her eyes from that fantastic stall. The
+more she looked, the more dazzled she grew. She thought she was gazing
+at paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one, which seemed
+to her to be fairies and genii. The merchant, who was pacing back and
+forth in front of his shop, produced on her somewhat the effect of being
+the Eternal Father.
+
+In this adoration she forgot everything, even the errand with which she
+was charged.
+
+All at once the Thenardier's coarse voice recalled her to reality:
+"What, you silly jade! you have not gone? Wait! I'll give it to you! I
+want to know what you are doing there! Get along, you little monster!"
+
+The Thenardier had cast a glance into the street, and had caught sight
+of Cosette in her ecstasy.
+
+Cosette fled, dragging her pail, and taking the longest strides of which
+she was capable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE LITTLE ONE ALL ALONE
+
+As the Thenardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is
+near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction of
+Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.
+
+She did not glance at the display of a single other merchant. So long
+as she was in Boulanger Lane and in the neighborhood of the church, the
+lighted stalls illuminated the road; but soon the last light from the
+last stall vanished. The poor child found herself in the dark. She
+plunged into it. Only, as a certain emotion overcame her, she made as
+much motion as possible with the handle of the bucket as she walked
+along. This made a noise which afforded her company.
+
+The further she went, the denser the darkness became. There was no one
+in the streets. However, she did encounter a woman, who turned around
+on seeing her, and stood still, muttering between her teeth: "Where can
+that child be going? Is it a werewolf child?" Then the woman recognized
+Cosette. "Well," said she, "it's the Lark!"
+
+In this manner Cosette traversed the labyrinth of tortuous and deserted
+streets which terminate in the village of Montfermeil on the side of
+Chelles. So long as she had the houses or even the walls only on both
+sides of her path, she proceeded with tolerable boldness. From time
+to time she caught the flicker of a candle through the crack of a
+shutter--this was light and life; there were people there, and it
+reassured her. But in proportion as she advanced, her pace slackened
+mechanically, as it were. When she had passed the corner of the last
+house, Cosette paused. It had been hard to advance further than the last
+stall; it became impossible to proceed further than the last house. She
+set her bucket on the ground, thrust her hand into her hair, and
+began slowly to scratch her head,--a gesture peculiar to children when
+terrified and undecided what to do. It was no longer Montfermeil; it
+was the open fields. Black and desert space was before her. She gazed in
+despair at that darkness, where there was no longer any one, where there
+were beasts, where there were spectres, possibly. She took a good
+look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass, and she distinctly saw
+spectres moving in the trees. Then she seized her bucket again; fear had
+lent her audacity. "Bah!" said she; "I will tell him that there was no
+more water!" And she resolutely re-entered Montfermeil.
+
+Hardly had she gone a hundred paces when she paused and began to scratch
+her head again. Now it was the Thenardier who appeared to her, with her
+hideous, hyena mouth, and wrath flashing in her eyes. The child cast a
+melancholy glance before her and behind her. What was she to do? What
+was to become of her? Where was she to go? In front of her was the
+spectre of the Thenardier; behind her all the phantoms of the night
+and of the forest. It was before the Thenardier that she recoiled. She
+resumed her path to the spring, and began to run. She emerged from
+the village, she entered the forest at a run, no longer looking at or
+listening to anything. She only paused in her course when her breath
+failed her; but she did not halt in her advance. She went straight
+before her in desperation.
+
+As she ran she felt like crying.
+
+The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.
+
+She no longer thought, she no longer saw. The immensity of night was
+facing this tiny creature. On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an
+atom.
+
+It was only seven or eight minutes' walk from the edge of the woods to
+the spring. Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it many times
+in daylight. Strange to say, she did not get lost. A remnant of instinct
+guided her vaguely. But she did not turn her eyes either to right or to
+left, for fear of seeing things in the branches and in the brushwood. In
+this manner she reached the spring.
+
+It was a narrow, natural basin, hollowed out by the water in a clayey
+soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss and with those tall,
+crimped grasses which are called Henry IV.'s frills, and paved with
+several large stones. A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little
+noise.
+
+Cosette did not take time to breathe. It was very dark, but she was in
+the habit of coming to this spring. She felt with her left hand in the
+dark for a young oak which leaned over the spring, and which usually
+served to support her, found one of its branches, clung to it, bent
+down, and plunged the bucket in the water. She was in a state of such
+violent excitement that her strength was trebled. While thus bent over,
+she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into
+the spring. The fifteen-sou piece fell into the water. Cosette neither
+saw nor heard it fall. She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it
+on the grass.
+
+That done, she perceived that she was worn out with fatigue. She would
+have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required to fill the
+bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take a step. She
+was forced to sit down. She dropped on the grass, and remained crouching
+there.
+
+She shut her eyes; then she opened them again, without knowing why, but
+because she could not do otherwise. The agitated water in the bucket
+beside her was describing circles which resembled tin serpents.
+
+Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were like
+masses of smoke. The tragic mask of shadow seemed to bend vaguely over
+the child.
+
+Jupiter was setting in the depths.
+
+The child stared with bewildered eyes at this great star, with which she
+was unfamiliar, and which terrified her. The planet was, in fact, very
+near the horizon and was traversing a dense layer of mist which imparted
+to it a horrible ruddy hue. The mist, gloomily empurpled, magnified the
+star. One would have called it a luminous wound.
+
+A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The forest was dark, not a leaf
+was moving; there were none of the vague, fresh gleams of summertide.
+Great boughs uplifted themselves in frightful wise. Slender and
+misshapen bushes whistled in the clearings. The tall grasses undulated
+like eels under the north wind. The nettles seemed to twist long arms
+furnished with claws in search of prey. Some bits of dry heather, tossed
+by the breeze, flew rapidly by, and had the air of fleeing in terror
+before something which was coming after. On all sides there were
+lugubrious stretches.
+
+The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries himself
+in the opposite of day feels his heart contract. When the eye sees
+black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night, in the sooty
+opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. No one walks
+alone in the forest at night without trembling. Shadows and trees--two
+formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct
+depths. The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant from you with
+a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in space or in one's
+own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the
+dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes on the horizon.
+One inhales the effluvia of the great black void. One is afraid to
+glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so. The cavities of night,
+things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one advances,
+obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious
+reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, unknown
+but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches, alarming torsos of
+trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,--against all this one has no
+protection. There is no hardihood which does not shudder and which does
+not feel the vicinity of anguish. One is conscious of something hideous,
+as though one's soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness. This
+penetration of the shadows is indescribably sinister in the case of a
+child.
+
+Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul
+produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.
+
+Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was
+seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror
+alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more
+terrible even than terror; she shivered. There are no words to express
+the strangeness of that shiver which chilled her to the very bottom of
+her heart; her eye grew wild; she thought she felt that she should not
+be able to refrain from returning there at the same hour on the morrow.
+
+Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud, one, two, three,
+four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape from that singular state
+which she did not understand, but which terrified her, and, when she had
+finished, she began again; this restored her to a true perception of
+the things about her. Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the water,
+felt cold; she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable terror, had
+returned: she had but one thought now,--to flee at full speed through
+the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the windows, to the
+lighted candles. Her glance fell upon the water which stood before her;
+such was the fright which the Thenardier inspired in her, that she dared
+not flee without that bucket of water: she seized the handle with both
+hands; she could hardly lift the pail.
+
+In this manner she advanced a dozen paces, but the bucket was full; it
+was heavy; she was forced to set it on the ground once more. She took
+breath for an instant, then lifted the handle of the bucket again, and
+resumed her march, proceeding a little further this time, but again she
+was obliged to pause. After some seconds of repose she set out again.
+She walked bent forward, with drooping head, like an old woman; the
+weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms. The iron
+handle completed the benumbing and freezing of her wet and tiny hands;
+she was forced to halt from time to time, and each time that she did so,
+the cold water which splashed from the pail fell on her bare legs. This
+took place in the depths of a forest, at night, in winter, far from all
+human sight; she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that sad thing
+at the moment.
+
+And her mother, no doubt, alas!
+
+For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves.
+
+She panted with a sort of painful rattle; sobs contracted her throat,
+but she dared not weep, so afraid was she of the Thenardier, even at a
+distance: it was her custom to imagine the Thenardier always present.
+
+However, she could not make much headway in that manner, and she went
+on very slowly. In spite of diminishing the length of her stops, and
+of walking as long as possible between them, she reflected with anguish
+that it would take her more than an hour to return to Montfermeil in
+this manner, and that the Thenardier would beat her. This anguish was
+mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods at night; she was
+worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from the forest. On
+arriving near an old chestnut-tree with which she was acquainted, made
+a last halt, longer than the rest, in order that she might get well
+rested; then she summoned up all her strength, picked up her bucket
+again, and courageously resumed her march, but the poor little desperate
+creature could not refrain from crying, "O my God! my God!"
+
+At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer
+weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just
+seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously. She raised her head. A
+large black form, straight and erect, was walking beside her through the
+darkness; it was a man who had come up behind her, and whose approach
+she had not heard. This man, without uttering a word, had seized the
+handle of the bucket which she was carrying.
+
+There are instincts for all the encounters of life.
+
+The child was not afraid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--WHICH POSSIBLY PROVES BOULATRUELLE'S INTELLIGENCE
+
+On the afternoon of that same Christmas Day, 1823, a man had walked
+for rather a long time in the most deserted part of the Boulevard de
+l'Hopital in Paris. This man had the air of a person who is seeking
+lodgings, and he seemed to halt, by preference, at the most modest
+houses on that dilapidated border of the faubourg Saint-Marceau.
+
+We shall see further on that this man had, in fact, hired a chamber in
+that isolated quarter.
+
+This man, in his attire, as in all his person, realized the type of what
+may be called the well-bred mendicant,--extreme wretchedness combined
+with extreme cleanliness. This is a very rare mixture which inspires
+intelligent hearts with that double respect which one feels for the man
+who is very poor, and for the man who is very worthy. He wore a very
+old and very well brushed round hat; a coarse coat, worn perfectly
+threadbare, of an ochre yellow, a color that was not in the least
+eccentric at that epoch; a large waistcoat with pockets of a venerable
+cut; black breeches, worn gray at the knee, stockings of black worsted;
+and thick shoes with copper buckles. He would have been pronounced a
+preceptor in some good family, returned from the emigration. He would
+have been taken for more than sixty years of age, from his perfectly
+white hair, his wrinkled brow, his livid lips, and his countenance,
+where everything breathed depression and weariness of life. Judging from
+his firm tread, from the singular vigor which stamped all his movements,
+he would have hardly been thought fifty. The wrinkles on his brow were
+well placed, and would have disposed in his favor any one who observed
+him attentively. His lip contracted with a strange fold which seemed
+severe, and which was humble. There was in the depth of his glance an
+indescribable melancholy serenity. In his left hand he carried a little
+bundle tied up in a handkerchief; in his right he leaned on a sort of a
+cudgel, cut from some hedge. This stick had been carefully trimmed, and
+had an air that was not too threatening; the most had been made of its
+knots, and it had received a coral-like head, made from red wax: it was
+a cudgel, and it seemed to be a cane.
+
+There are but few passers-by on that boulevard, particularly in the
+winter. The man seemed to avoid them rather than to seek them, but this
+without any affectation.
+
+At that epoch, King Louis XVIII. went nearly every day to Choisy-le-Roi:
+it was one of his favorite excursions. Towards two o'clock, almost
+invariably, the royal carriage and cavalcade was seen to pass at full
+speed along the Boulevard de l'Hopital.
+
+This served in lieu of a watch or clock to the poor women of the quarter
+who said, "It is two o'clock; there he is returning to the Tuileries."
+
+And some rushed forward, and others drew up in line, for a passing king
+always creates a tumult; besides, the appearance and disappearance of
+Louis XVIII. produced a certain effect in the streets of Paris. It was
+rapid but majestic. This impotent king had a taste for a fast gallop;
+as he was not able to walk, he wished to run: that cripple would gladly
+have had himself drawn by the lightning. He passed, pacific and severe,
+in the midst of naked swords. His massive coach, all covered with
+gilding, with great branches of lilies painted on the panels, thundered
+noisily along. There was hardly time to cast a glance upon it. In the
+rear angle on the right there was visible on tufted cushions of white
+satin a large, firm, and ruddy face, a brow freshly powdered a l'oiseau
+royal, a proud, hard, crafty eye, the smile of an educated man, two
+great epaulets with bullion fringe floating over a bourgeois coat, the
+Golden Fleece, the cross of Saint Louis, the cross of the Legion of
+Honor, the silver plaque of the Saint-Esprit, a huge belly, and a wide
+blue ribbon: it was the king. Outside of Paris, he held his hat decked
+with white ostrich plumes on his knees enwrapped in high English
+gaiters; when he re-entered the city, he put on his hat and saluted
+rarely; he stared coldly at the people, and they returned it in kind.
+When he appeared for the first time in the Saint-Marceau quarter,
+the whole success which he produced is contained in this remark of an
+inhabitant of the faubourg to his comrade, "That big fellow yonder is
+the government."
+
+This infallible passage of the king at the same hour was, therefore, the
+daily event of the Boulevard de l'Hopital.
+
+The promenader in the yellow coat evidently did not belong in the
+quarter, and probably did not belong in Paris, for he was ignorant as to
+this detail. When, at two o'clock, the royal carriage, surrounded by a
+squadron of the body-guard all covered with silver lace, debouched
+on the boulevard, after having made the turn of the Salpetriere, he
+appeared surprised and almost alarmed. There was no one but himself in
+this cross-lane. He drew up hastily behind the corner of the wall of an
+enclosure, though this did not prevent M. le Duc de Havre from spying
+him out.
+
+M. le Duc de Havre, as captain of the guard on duty that day, was seated
+in the carriage, opposite the king. He said to his Majesty, "Yonder
+is an evil-looking man." Members of the police, who were clearing the
+king's route, took equal note of him: one of them received an order to
+follow him. But the man plunged into the deserted little streets of the
+faubourg, and as twilight was beginning to fall, the agent lost trace of
+him, as is stated in a report addressed that same evening to M. le Comte
+d'Angles, Minister of State, Prefect of Police.
+
+When the man in the yellow coat had thrown the agent off his track,
+he redoubled his pace, not without turning round many a time to assure
+himself that he was not being followed. At a quarter-past four, that is
+to say, when night was fully come, he passed in front of the theatre
+of the Porte Saint-Martin, where The Two Convicts was being played that
+day. This poster, illuminated by the theatre lanterns, struck him; for,
+although he was walking rapidly, he halted to read it. An instant later
+he was in the blind alley of La Planchette, and he entered the Plat
+d'Etain [the Pewter Platter], where the office of the coach for Lagny
+was then situated. This coach set out at half-past four. The horses were
+harnessed, and the travellers, summoned by the coachman, were hastily
+climbing the lofty iron ladder of the vehicle.
+
+The man inquired:--
+
+"Have you a place?"
+
+"Only one--beside me on the box," said the coachman.
+
+"I will take it."
+
+"Climb up."
+
+Nevertheless, before setting out, the coachman cast a glance at the
+traveller's shabby dress, at the diminutive size of his bundle, and made
+him pay his fare.
+
+"Are you going as far as Lagny?" demanded the coachman.
+
+"Yes," said the man.
+
+The traveller paid to Lagny.
+
+They started. When they had passed the barrier, the coachman tried
+to enter into conversation, but the traveller only replied in
+monosyllables. The coachman took to whistling and swearing at his
+horses.
+
+The coachman wrapped himself up in his cloak. It was cold. The man
+did not appear to be thinking of that. Thus they passed Gournay and
+Neuilly-sur-Marne.
+
+Towards six o'clock in the evening they reached Chelles. The coachman
+drew up in front of the carters' inn installed in the ancient buildings
+of the Royal Abbey, to give his horses a breathing spell.
+
+"I get down here," said the man.
+
+He took his bundle and his cudgel and jumped down from the vehicle.
+
+An instant later he had disappeared.
+
+He did not enter the inn.
+
+When the coach set out for Lagny a few minutes later, it did not
+encounter him in the principal street of Chelles.
+
+The coachman turned to the inside travellers.
+
+"There," said he, "is a man who does not belong here, for I do not know
+him. He had not the air of owning a sou, but he does not consider money;
+he pays to Lagny, and he goes only as far as Chelles. It is night; all
+the houses are shut; he does not enter the inn, and he is not to be
+found. So he has dived through the earth."
+
+The man had not plunged into the earth, but he had gone with great
+strides through the dark, down the principal street of Chelles, then he
+had turned to the right before reaching the church, into the cross-road
+leading to Montfermeil, like a person who was acquainted with the
+country and had been there before.
+
+He followed this road rapidly. At the spot where it is intersected by
+the ancient tree-bordered road which runs from Gagny to Lagny, he heard
+people coming. He concealed himself precipitately in a ditch, and there
+waited until the passers-by were at a distance. The precaution was
+nearly superfluous, however; for, as we have already said, it was a very
+dark December night. Not more than two or three stars were visible in
+the sky.
+
+It is at this point that the ascent of the hill begins. The man did not
+return to the road to Montfermeil; he struck across the fields to the
+right, and entered the forest with long strides.
+
+Once in the forest he slackened his pace, and began a careful
+examination of all the trees, advancing, step by step, as though seeking
+and following a mysterious road known to himself alone. There came a
+moment when he appeared to lose himself, and he paused in indecision. At
+last he arrived, by dint of feeling his way inch by inch, at a clearing
+where there was a great heap of whitish stones. He stepped up briskly to
+these stones, and examined them attentively through the mists of night,
+as though he were passing them in review. A large tree, covered with
+those excrescences which are the warts of vegetation, stood a few paces
+distant from the pile of stones. He went up to this tree and passed
+his hand over the bark of the trunk, as though seeking to recognize and
+count all the warts.
+
+Opposite this tree, which was an ash, there was a chestnut-tree,
+suffering from a peeling of the bark, to which a band of zinc had been
+nailed by way of dressing. He raised himself on tiptoe and touched this
+band of zinc.
+
+Then he trod about for awhile on the ground comprised in the space
+between the tree and the heap of stones, like a person who is trying to
+assure himself that the soil has not recently been disturbed.
+
+That done, he took his bearings, and resumed his march through the
+forest.
+
+It was the man who had just met Cosette.
+
+As he walked through the thicket in the direction of Montfermeil, he had
+espied that tiny shadow moving with a groan, depositing a burden on
+the ground, then taking it up and setting out again. He drew near, and
+perceived that it was a very young child, laden with an enormous bucket
+of water. Then he approached the child, and silently grasped the handle
+of the bucket.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--COSETTE SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE STRANGER IN THE DARK
+
+Cosette, as we have said, was not frightened.
+
+The man accosted her. He spoke in a voice that was grave and almost
+bass.
+
+"My child, what you are carrying is very heavy for you."
+
+Cosette raised her head and replied:--
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Give it to me," said the man; "I will carry it for you."
+
+Cosette let go of the bucket-handle. The man walked along beside her.
+
+"It really is very heavy," he muttered between his teeth. Then he
+added:--
+
+"How old are you, little one?"
+
+"Eight, sir."
+
+"And have you come from far like this?"
+
+"From the spring in the forest."
+
+"Are you going far?"
+
+"A good quarter of an hour's walk from here."
+
+The man said nothing for a moment; then he remarked abruptly:--
+
+"So you have no mother."
+
+"I don't know," answered the child.
+
+Before the man had time to speak again, she added:--
+
+"I don't think so. Other people have mothers. I have none."
+
+And after a silence she went on:--
+
+"I think that I never had any."
+
+The man halted; he set the bucket on the ground, bent down and placed
+both hands on the child's shoulders, making an effort to look at her and
+to see her face in the dark.
+
+Cosette's thin and sickly face was vaguely outlined by the livid light
+in the sky.
+
+"What is your name?" said the man.
+
+"Cosette."
+
+The man seemed to have received an electric shock. He looked at her once
+more; then he removed his hands from Cosette's shoulders, seized the
+bucket, and set out again.
+
+After a moment he inquired:--
+
+"Where do you live, little one?"
+
+"At Montfermeil, if you know where that is."
+
+"That is where we are going?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+He paused; then began again:--
+
+"Who sent you at such an hour to get water in the forest?"
+
+"It was Madame Thenardier."
+
+The man resumed, in a voice which he strove to render indifferent, but
+in which there was, nevertheless, a singular tremor:--
+
+"What does your Madame Thenardier do?"
+
+"She is my mistress," said the child. "She keeps the inn."
+
+"The inn?" said the man. "Well, I am going to lodge there to-night. Show
+me the way."
+
+"We are on the way there," said the child.
+
+The man walked tolerably fast. Cosette followed him without difficulty.
+She no longer felt any fatigue. From time to time she raised her eyes
+towards the man, with a sort of tranquillity and an indescribable
+confidence. She had never been taught to turn to Providence and to pray;
+nevertheless, she felt within her something which resembled hope and
+joy, and which mounted towards heaven.
+
+Several minutes elapsed. The man resumed:--
+
+"Is there no servant in Madame Thenardier's house?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Are you alone there?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Another pause ensued. Cosette lifted up her voice:--
+
+"That is to say, there are two little girls."
+
+"What little girls?"
+
+"Ponine and Zelma."
+
+This was the way the child simplified the romantic names so dear to the
+female Thenardier.
+
+"Who are Ponine and Zelma?"
+
+"They are Madame Thenardier's young ladies; her daughters, as you would
+say."
+
+"And what do those girls do?"
+
+"Oh!" said the child, "they have beautiful dolls; things with gold in
+them, all full of affairs. They play; they amuse themselves."
+
+"All day long?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I? I work."
+
+"All day long?"
+
+The child raised her great eyes, in which hung a tear, which was not
+visible because of the darkness, and replied gently:--
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+After an interval of silence she went on:--
+
+"Sometimes, when I have finished my work and they let me, I amuse
+myself, too."
+
+"How do you amuse yourself?"
+
+"In the best way I can. They let me alone; but I have not many
+playthings. Ponine and Zelma will not let me play with their dolls. I
+have only a little lead sword, no longer than that."
+
+The child held up her tiny finger.
+
+"And it will not cut?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the child; "it cuts salad and the heads of flies."
+
+They reached the village. Cosette guided the stranger through the
+streets. They passed the bakeshop, but Cosette did not think of the
+bread which she had been ordered to fetch. The man had ceased to ply her
+with questions, and now preserved a gloomy silence.
+
+When they had left the church behind them, the man, on perceiving all
+the open-air booths, asked Cosette:--
+
+"So there is a fair going on here?"
+
+"No, sir; it is Christmas."
+
+As they approached the tavern, Cosette timidly touched his arm:--
+
+"Monsieur?"
+
+"What, my child?"
+
+"We are quite near the house."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Will you let me take my bucket now?"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"If Madame sees that some one has carried it for me, she will beat me."
+
+The man handed her the bucket. An instant later they were at the tavern
+door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE UNPLEASANTNESS OF RECEIVING INTO ONE'S HOUSE A POOR
+MAN WHO MAY BE A RICH MAN
+
+
+Cosette could not refrain from casting a sidelong glance at the big
+doll, which was still displayed at the toy-merchant's; then she knocked.
+The door opened. The Thenardier appeared with a candle in her hand.
+
+
+"Ah! so it's you, you little wretch! good mercy, but you've taken your
+time! The hussy has been amusing herself!"
+
+"Madame," said Cosette, trembling all over, "here's a gentleman who
+wants a lodging."
+
+The Thenardier speedily replaced her gruff air by her amiable grimace,
+a change of aspect common to tavern-keepers, and eagerly sought the
+new-comer with her eyes.
+
+"This is the gentleman?" said she.
+
+"Yes, Madame," replied the man, raising his hand to his hat.
+
+Wealthy travellers are not so polite. This gesture, and an inspection
+of the stranger's costume and baggage, which the Thenardier passed in
+review with one glance, caused the amiable grimace to vanish, and the
+gruff mien to reappear. She resumed dryly:--
+
+"Enter, my good man."
+
+The "good man" entered. The Thenardier cast a second glance at him, paid
+particular attention to his frock-coat, which was absolutely threadbare,
+and to his hat, which was a little battered, and, tossing her head,
+wrinkling her nose, and screwing up her eyes, she consulted her husband,
+who was still drinking with the carters. The husband replied by that
+imperceptible movement of the forefinger, which, backed up by an
+inflation of the lips, signifies in such cases: A regular beggar.
+Thereupon, the Thenardier exclaimed:--
+
+"Ah! see here, my good man; I am very sorry, but I have no room left."
+
+"Put me where you like," said the man; "in the attic, in the stable. I
+will pay as though I occupied a room."
+
+"Forty sous."
+
+"Forty sous; agreed."
+
+"Very well, then!"
+
+"Forty sous!" said a carter, in a low tone, to the Thenardier woman;
+"why, the charge is only twenty sous!"
+
+"It is forty in his case," retorted the Thenardier, in the same tone. "I
+don't lodge poor folks for less."
+
+"That's true," added her husband, gently; "it ruins a house to have such
+people in it."
+
+In the meantime, the man, laying his bundle and his cudgel on a bench,
+had seated himself at a table, on which Cosette made haste to place a
+bottle of wine and a glass. The merchant who had demanded the bucket of
+water took it to his horse himself. Cosette resumed her place under the
+kitchen table, and her knitting.
+
+The man, who had barely moistened his lips in the wine which he had
+poured out for himself, observed the child with peculiar attention.
+
+Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty. We
+have already given a sketch of that sombre little figure. Cosette was
+thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but she seemed to be
+hardly six. Her large eyes, sunken in a sort of shadow, were almost put
+out with weeping. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual
+anguish which is seen in condemned persons and desperately sick people.
+Her hands were, as her mother had divined, "ruined with chilblains." The
+fire which illuminated her at that moment brought into relief all the
+angles of her bones, and rendered her thinness frightfully apparent.
+As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of pressing her
+knees one against the other. Her entire clothing was but a rag which
+would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror in winter.
+All she had on was hole-ridden linen, not a scrap of woollen. Her skin
+was visible here and there and everywhere black and blue spots could be
+descried, which marked the places where the Thenardier woman had touched
+her. Her naked legs were thin and red. The hollows in her neck were
+enough to make one weep. This child's whole person, her mien, her
+attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals which she allowed to
+elapse between one word and the next, her glance, her silence, her
+slightest gesture, expressed and betrayed one sole idea,--fear.
+
+Fear was diffused all over her; she was covered with it, so to speak;
+fear drew her elbows close to her hips, withdrew her heels under her
+petticoat, made her occupy as little space as possible, allowed her only
+the breath that was absolutely necessary, and had become what might be
+called the habit of her body, admitting of no possible variation except
+an increase. In the depths of her eyes there was an astonished nook
+where terror lurked.
+
+Her fear was such, that on her arrival, wet as she was, Cosette did not
+dare to approach the fire and dry herself, but sat silently down to her
+work again.
+
+The expression in the glance of that child of eight years was habitually
+so gloomy, and at times so tragic, that it seemed at certain moments as
+though she were on the verge of becoming an idiot or a demon.
+
+As we have stated, she had never known what it is to pray; she had never
+set foot in a church. "Have I the time?" said the Thenardier.
+
+The man in the yellow coat never took his eyes from Cosette.
+
+All at once, the Thenardier exclaimed:--
+
+"By the way, where's that bread?"
+
+Cosette, according to her custom whenever the Thenardier uplifted her
+voice, emerged with great haste from beneath the table.
+
+She had completely forgotten the bread. She had recourse to the
+expedient of children who live in a constant state of fear. She lied.
+
+"Madame, the baker's shop was shut."
+
+"You should have knocked."
+
+"I did knock, Madame."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He did not open the door."
+
+"I'll find out to-morrow whether that is true," said the Thenardier;
+"and if you are telling me a lie, I'll lead you a pretty dance. In the
+meantime, give me back my fifteen-sou piece."
+
+Cosette plunged her hand into the pocket of her apron, and turned green.
+The fifteen-sou piece was not there.
+
+"Ah, come now," said Madame Thenardier, "did you hear me?"
+
+Cosette turned her pocket inside out; there was nothing in it. What
+could have become of that money? The unhappy little creature could not
+find a word to say. She was petrified.
+
+"Have you lost that fifteen-sou piece?" screamed the Thenardier,
+hoarsely, "or do you want to rob me of it?"
+
+At the same time, she stretched out her arm towards the
+cat-o'-nine-tails which hung on a nail in the chimney-corner.
+
+This formidable gesture restored to Cosette sufficient strength to
+shriek:--
+
+"Mercy, Madame, Madame! I will not do so any more!"
+
+The Thenardier took down the whip.
+
+In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the fob
+of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements. Besides,
+the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were not paying
+attention to anything.
+
+Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle
+of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude
+limbs. The Thenardier raised her arm.
+
+"Pardon me, Madame," said the man, "but just now I caught sight of
+something which had fallen from this little one's apron pocket, and
+rolled aside. Perhaps this is it."
+
+At the same time he bent down and seemed to be searching on the floor
+for a moment.
+
+"Exactly; here it is," he went on, straightening himself up.
+
+And he held out a silver coin to the Thenardier.
+
+"Yes, that's it," said she.
+
+It was not it, for it was a twenty-sou piece; but the Thenardier found
+it to her advantage. She put the coin in her pocket, and confined
+herself to casting a fierce glance at the child, accompanied with the
+remark, "Don't let this ever happen again!"
+
+Cosette returned to what the Thenardier called "her kennel," and her
+large eyes, which were riveted on the traveller, began to take on an
+expression such as they had never worn before. Thus far it was only an
+innocent amazement, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with
+it.
+
+"By the way, would you like some supper?" the Thenardier inquired of the
+traveller.
+
+He made no reply. He appeared to be absorbed in thought.
+
+"What sort of a man is that?" she muttered between her teeth. "He's some
+frightfully poor wretch. He hasn't a sou to pay for a supper. Will he
+even pay me for his lodging? It's very lucky, all the same, that it did
+not occur to him to steal the money that was on the floor."
+
+In the meantime, a door had opened, and Eponine and Azelma entered.
+
+They were two really pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant
+in looks, and very charming; the one with shining chestnut tresses,
+the other with long black braids hanging down her back, both vivacious,
+neat, plump, rosy, and healthy, and a delight to the eye. They were
+warmly clad, but with so much maternal art that the thickness of the
+stuffs did not detract from the coquetry of arrangement. There was a
+hint of winter, though the springtime was not wholly effaced. Light
+emanated from these two little beings. Besides this, they were on the
+throne. In their toilettes, in their gayety, in the noise which they
+made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, the Thenardier said to
+them in a grumbling tone which was full of adoration, "Ah! there you
+are, you children!"
+
+Then drawing them, one after the other to her knees, smoothing their
+hair, tying their ribbons afresh, and then releasing them with
+that gentle manner of shaking off which is peculiar to mothers, she
+exclaimed, "What frights they are!"
+
+They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner. They had a doll,
+which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyous
+chatter. From time to time Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting,
+and watched their play with a melancholy air.
+
+Eponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was the same as a dog
+to them. These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty
+years between them, but they already represented the whole society of
+man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.
+
+The doll of the Thenardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and
+much broken; but it seemed none the less admirable to Cosette, who had
+never had a doll in her life, a real doll, to make use of the expression
+which all children will understand.
+
+All at once, the Thenardier, who had been going back and forth in the
+room, perceived that Cosette's mind was distracted, and that, instead of
+working, she was paying attention to the little ones at their play.
+
+"Ah! I've caught you at it!" she cried. "So that's the way you work!
+I'll make you work to the tune of the whip; that I will."
+
+The stranger turned to the Thenardier, without quitting his chair.
+
+"Bah, Madame," he said, with an almost timid air, "let her play!"
+
+Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice of mutton and
+had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with his supper, and who had not
+the air of being frightfully poor, would have been equivalent to an
+order. But that a man with such a hat should permit himself such a
+desire, and that a man with such a coat should permit himself to have a
+will, was something which Madame Thenardier did not intend to tolerate.
+She retorted with acrimony:--
+
+"She must work, since she eats. I don't feed her to do nothing."
+
+"What is she making?" went on the stranger, in a gentle voice which
+contrasted strangely with his beggarly garments and his porter's
+shoulders.
+
+The Thenardier deigned to reply:--
+
+"Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls, who have none,
+so to speak, and who are absolutely barefoot just now."
+
+The man looked at Cosette's poor little red feet, and continued:--
+
+"When will she have finished this pair of stockings?"
+
+"She has at least three or four good days' work on them still, the lazy
+creature!"
+
+"And how much will that pair of stockings be worth when she has finished
+them?"
+
+The Thenardier cast a glance of disdain on him.
+
+"Thirty sous at least."
+
+"Will you sell them for five francs?" went on the man.
+
+"Good heavens!" exclaimed a carter who was listening, with a loud laugh;
+"five francs! the deuce, I should think so! five balls!"
+
+Thenardier thought it time to strike in.
+
+"Yes, sir; if such is your fancy, you will be allowed to have that pair
+of stockings for five francs. We can refuse nothing to travellers."
+
+"You must pay on the spot," said the Thenardier, in her curt and
+peremptory fashion.
+
+"I will buy that pair of stockings," replied the man, "and," he added,
+drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it on the table,
+"I will pay for them."
+
+Then he turned to Cosette.
+
+"Now I own your work; play, my child."
+
+The carter was so much touched by the five-franc piece, that he
+abandoned his glass and hastened up.
+
+"But it's true!" he cried, examining it. "A real hind wheel! and not
+counterfeit!"
+
+Thenardier approached and silently put the coin in his pocket.
+
+The Thenardier had no reply to make. She bit her lips, and her face
+assumed an expression of hatred.
+
+In the meantime, Cosette was trembling. She ventured to ask:--
+
+"Is it true, Madame? May I play?"
+
+"Play!" said the Thenardier, in a terrible voice.
+
+"Thanks, Madame," said Cosette.
+
+And while her mouth thanked the Thenardier, her whole little soul
+thanked the traveller.
+
+Thenardier had resumed his drinking; his wife whispered in his ear:--
+
+"Who can this yellow man be?"
+
+"I have seen millionaires with coats like that," replied Thenardier, in
+a sovereign manner.
+
+Cosette had dropped her knitting, but had not left her seat. Cosette
+always moved as little as possible. She picked up some old rags and her
+little lead sword from a box behind her.
+
+Eponine and Azelma paid no attention to what was going on. They had just
+executed a very important operation; they had just got hold of the
+cat. They had thrown their doll on the ground, and Eponine, who was
+the elder, was swathing the little cat, in spite of its mewing and its
+contortions, in a quantity of clothes and red and blue scraps. While
+performing this serious and difficult work she was saying to her sister
+in that sweet and adorable language of children, whose grace, like the
+splendor of the butterfly's wing, vanishes when one essays to fix it
+fast.
+
+"You see, sister, this doll is more amusing than the other. She twists,
+she cries, she is warm. See, sister, let us play with her. She shall be
+my little girl. I will be a lady. I will come to see you, and you shall
+look at her. Gradually, you will perceive her whiskers, and that will
+surprise you. And then you will see her ears, and then you will see her
+tail and it will amaze you. And you will say to me, 'Ah! Mon Dieu!' and
+I will say to you: 'Yes, Madame, it is my little girl. Little girls are
+made like that just at present.'"
+
+Azelma listened admiringly to Eponine.
+
+In the meantime, the drinkers had begun to sing an obscene song, and
+to laugh at it until the ceiling shook. Thenardier accompanied and
+encouraged them.
+
+As birds make nests out of everything, so children make a doll out of
+anything which comes to hand. While Eponine and Azelma were bundling up
+the cat, Cosette, on her side, had dressed up her sword. That done, she
+laid it in her arms, and sang to it softly, to lull it to sleep.
+
+The doll is one of the most imperious needs and, at the same time, one
+of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, to
+clothe, to deck, to dress, to undress, to redress, to teach, scold a
+little, to rock, to dandle, to lull to sleep, to imagine that something
+is some one,--therein lies the whole woman's future. While dreaming and
+chattering, making tiny outfits, and baby clothes, while sewing little
+gowns, and corsages and bodices, the child grows into a young girl, the
+young girl into a big girl, the big girl into a woman. The first child
+is the continuation of the last doll.
+
+A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as
+impossible, as a woman without children.
+
+So Cosette had made herself a doll out of the sword.
+
+Madame Thenardier approached the yellow man; "My husband is right," she
+thought; "perhaps it is M. Laffitte; there are such queer rich men!"
+
+She came and set her elbows on the table.
+
+"Monsieur," said she. At this word, Monsieur, the man turned; up to that
+time, the Thenardier had addressed him only as brave homme or bonhomme.
+
+"You see, sir," she pursued, assuming a sweetish air that was even more
+repulsive to behold than her fierce mien, "I am willing that the child
+should play; I do not oppose it, but it is good for once, because you
+are generous. You see, she has nothing; she must needs work."
+
+"Then this child is not yours?" demanded the man.
+
+"Oh! mon Dieu! no, sir! she is a little beggar whom we have taken in
+through charity; a sort of imbecile child. She must have water on the
+brain; she has a large head, as you see. We do what we can for her, for
+we are not rich; we have written in vain to her native place, and have
+received no reply these six months. It must be that her mother is dead."
+
+"Ah!" said the man, and fell into his revery once more.
+
+"Her mother didn't amount to much," added the Thenardier; "she abandoned
+her child."
+
+During the whole of this conversation Cosette, as though warned by some
+instinct that she was under discussion, had not taken her eyes from the
+Thenardier's face; she listened vaguely; she caught a few words here and
+there.
+
+Meanwhile, the drinkers, all three-quarters intoxicated, were repeating
+their unclean refrain with redoubled gayety; it was a highly spiced and
+wanton song, in which the Virgin and the infant Jesus were introduced.
+The Thenardier went off to take part in the shouts of laughter. Cosette,
+from her post under the table, gazed at the fire, which was reflected
+from her fixed eyes. She had begun to rock the sort of baby which she
+had made, and, as she rocked it, she sang in a low voice, "My mother is
+dead! my mother is dead! my mother is dead!"
+
+On being urged afresh by the hostess, the yellow man, "the millionaire,"
+consented at last to take supper.
+
+"What does Monsieur wish?"
+
+"Bread and cheese," said the man.
+
+"Decidedly, he is a beggar" thought Madame Thenardier.
+
+The drunken men were still singing their song, and the child under the
+table was singing hers.
+
+All at once, Cosette paused; she had just turned round and caught sight
+of the little Thenardiers' doll, which they had abandoned for the cat
+and had left on the floor a few paces from the kitchen table.
+
+Then she dropped the swaddled sword, which only half met her needs, and
+cast her eyes slowly round the room. Madame Thenardier was whispering to
+her husband and counting over some money; Ponine and Zelma were playing
+with the cat; the travellers were eating or drinking or singing; not
+a glance was fixed on her. She had not a moment to lose; she crept out
+from under the table on her hands and knees, made sure once more that no
+one was watching her; then she slipped quickly up to the doll and seized
+it. An instant later she was in her place again, seated motionless, and
+only turned so as to cast a shadow on the doll which she held in her
+arms. The happiness of playing with a doll was so rare for her that it
+contained all the violence of voluptuousness.
+
+No one had seen her, except the traveller, who was slowly devouring his
+meagre supper.
+
+This joy lasted about a quarter of an hour.
+
+But with all the precautions that Cosette had taken she did not perceive
+that one of the doll's legs stuck out and that the fire on the hearth
+lighted it up very vividly. That pink and shining foot, projecting from
+the shadow, suddenly struck the eye of Azelma, who said to Eponine,
+"Look! sister."
+
+The two little girls paused in stupefaction; Cosette had dared to take
+their doll!
+
+Eponine rose, and, without releasing the cat, she ran to her mother, and
+began to tug at her skirt.
+
+"Let me alone!" said her mother; "what do you want?"
+
+"Mother," said the child, "look there!"
+
+And she pointed to Cosette.
+
+Cosette, absorbed in the ecstasies of possession, no longer saw or heard
+anything.
+
+Madame Thenardier's countenance assumed that peculiar expression which
+is composed of the terrible mingled with the trifles of life, and which
+has caused this style of woman to be named megaeras.
+
+On this occasion, wounded pride exasperated her wrath still further.
+Cosette had overstepped all bounds; Cosette had laid violent hands on
+the doll belonging to "these young ladies." A czarina who should see
+a muzhik trying on her imperial son's blue ribbon would wear no other
+face.
+
+She shrieked in a voice rendered hoarse with indignation:--
+
+"Cosette!"
+
+Cosette started as though the earth had trembled beneath her; she turned
+round.
+
+"Cosette!" repeated the Thenardier.
+
+Cosette took the doll and laid it gently on the floor with a sort of
+veneration, mingled with despair; then, without taking her eyes from
+it, she clasped her hands, and, what is terrible to relate of a child
+of that age, she wrung them; then--not one of the emotions of the day,
+neither the trip to the forest, nor the weight of the bucket of water,
+nor the loss of the money, nor the sight of the whip, nor even the sad
+words which she had heard Madame Thenardier utter had been able to wring
+this from her--she wept; she burst out sobbing.
+
+Meanwhile, the traveller had risen to his feet.
+
+"What is the matter?" he said to the Thenardier.
+
+"Don't you see?" said the Thenardier, pointing to the corpus delicti
+which lay at Cosette's feet.
+
+"Well, what of it?" resumed the man.
+
+"That beggar," replied the Thenardier, "has permitted herself to touch
+the children's doll!"
+
+"All this noise for that!" said the man; "well, what if she did play
+with that doll?"
+
+"She touched it with her dirty hands!" pursued the Thenardier, "with her
+frightful hands!"
+
+Here Cosette redoubled her sobs.
+
+"Will you stop your noise?" screamed the Thenardier.
+
+The man went straight to the street door, opened it, and stepped out.
+
+As soon as he had gone, the Thenardier profited by his absence to give
+Cosette a hearty kick under the table, which made the child utter loud
+cries.
+
+The door opened again, the man re-appeared; he carried in both hands the
+fabulous doll which we have mentioned, and which all the village brats
+had been staring at ever since the morning, and he set it upright in
+front of Cosette, saying:--
+
+"Here; this is for you."
+
+It must be supposed that in the course of the hour and more which he had
+spent there he had taken confused notice through his revery of that
+toy shop, lighted up by fire-pots and candles so splendidly that it was
+visible like an illumination through the window of the drinking-shop.
+
+Cosette raised her eyes; she gazed at the man approaching her with that
+doll as she might have gazed at the sun; she heard the unprecedented
+words, "It is for you"; she stared at him; she stared at the doll; then
+she slowly retreated, and hid herself at the extreme end, under the
+table in a corner of the wall.
+
+She no longer cried; she no longer wept; she had the appearance of no
+longer daring to breathe.
+
+The Thenardier, Eponine, and Azelma were like statues also; the very
+drinkers had paused; a solemn silence reigned through the whole room.
+
+Madame Thenardier, petrified and mute, recommenced her conjectures: "Who
+is that old fellow? Is he a poor man? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps he is
+both; that is to say, a thief."
+
+The face of the male Thenardier presented that expressive fold which
+accentuates the human countenance whenever the dominant instinct appears
+there in all its bestial force. The tavern-keeper stared alternately at
+the doll and at the traveller; he seemed to be scenting out the man, as
+he would have scented out a bag of money. This did not last longer than
+the space of a flash of lightning. He stepped up to his wife and said to
+her in a low voice:--
+
+"That machine costs at least thirty francs. No nonsense. Down on your
+belly before that man!"
+
+Gross natures have this in common with naive natures, that they possess
+no transition state.
+
+"Well, Cosette," said the Thenardier, in a voice that strove to be
+sweet, and which was composed of the bitter honey of malicious women,
+"aren't you going to take your doll?"
+
+Cosette ventured to emerge from her hole.
+
+"The gentleman has given you a doll, my little Cosette," said
+Thenardier, with a caressing air. "Take it; it is yours."
+
+Cosette gazed at the marvellous doll in a sort of terror. Her face was
+still flooded with tears, but her eyes began to fill, like the sky at
+daybreak, with strange beams of joy. What she felt at that moment was
+a little like what she would have felt if she had been abruptly told,
+"Little one, you are the Queen of France."
+
+It seemed to her that if she touched that doll, lightning would dart
+from it.
+
+This was true, up to a certain point, for she said to herself that the
+Thenardier would scold and beat her.
+
+Nevertheless, the attraction carried the day. She ended by drawing near
+and murmuring timidly as she turned towards Madame Thenardier:--
+
+"May I, Madame?"
+
+No words can render that air, at once despairing, terrified, and
+ecstatic.
+
+"Pardi!" cried the Thenardier, "it is yours. The gentleman has given it
+to you."
+
+"Truly, sir?" said Cosette. "Is it true? Is the 'lady' mine?"
+
+The stranger's eyes seemed to be full of tears. He appeared to have
+reached that point of emotion where a man does not speak for fear lest
+he should weep. He nodded to Cosette, and placed the "lady's" hand in
+her tiny hand.
+
+Cosette hastily withdrew her hand, as though that of the "lady" scorched
+her, and began to stare at the floor. We are forced to add that at that
+moment she stuck out her tongue immoderately. All at once she wheeled
+round and seized the doll in a transport.
+
+"I shall call her Catherine," she said.
+
+It was an odd moment when Cosette's rags met and clasped the ribbons and
+fresh pink muslins of the doll.
+
+"Madame," she resumed, "may I put her on a chair?"
+
+"Yes, my child," replied the Thenardier.
+
+It was now the turn of Eponine and Azelma to gaze at Cosette with envy.
+
+Cosette placed Catherine on a chair, then seated herself on the floor
+in front of her, and remained motionless, without uttering a word, in an
+attitude of contemplation.
+
+"Play, Cosette," said the stranger.
+
+"Oh! I am playing," returned the child.
+
+This stranger, this unknown individual, who had the air of a visit which
+Providence was making on Cosette, was the person whom the Thenardier
+hated worse than any one in the world at that moment. However, it was
+necessary to control herself. Habituated as she was to dissimulation
+through endeavoring to copy her husband in all his actions, these
+emotions were more than she could endure. She made haste to send her
+daughters to bed, then she asked the man's permission to send Cosette
+off also; "for she has worked hard all day," she added with a maternal
+air. Cosette went off to bed, carrying Catherine in her arms.
+
+From time to time the Thenardier went to the other end of the room where
+her husband was, to relieve her soul, as she said. She exchanged with
+her husband words which were all the more furious because she dared not
+utter them aloud.
+
+"Old beast! What has he got in his belly, to come and upset us in this
+manner! To want that little monster to play! to give away forty-franc
+dolls to a jade that I would sell for forty sous, so I would! A little
+more and he will be saying Your Majesty to her, as though to the Duchess
+de Berry! Is there any sense in it? Is he mad, then, that mysterious old
+fellow?"
+
+"Why! it is perfectly simple," replied Thenardier, "if that amuses him!
+It amuses you to have the little one work; it amuses him to have her
+play. He's all right. A traveller can do what he pleases when he pays
+for it. If the old fellow is a philanthropist, what is that to you? If
+he is an imbecile, it does not concern you. What are you worrying for,
+so long as he has money?"
+
+The language of a master, and the reasoning of an innkeeper, neither of
+which admitted of any reply.
+
+The man had placed his elbows on the table, and resumed his thoughtful
+attitude. All the other travellers, both pedlers and carters, had
+withdrawn a little, and had ceased singing. They were staring at him
+from a distance, with a sort of respectful awe. This poorly dressed
+man, who drew "hind-wheels" from his pocket with so much ease, and
+who lavished gigantic dolls on dirty little brats in wooden shoes, was
+certainly a magnificent fellow, and one to be feared.
+
+Many hours passed. The midnight mass was over, the chimes had ceased,
+the drinkers had taken their departure, the drinking-shop was closed,
+the public room was deserted, the fire extinct, the stranger still
+remained in the same place and the same attitude. From time to time he
+changed the elbow on which he leaned. That was all; but he had not said
+a word since Cosette had left the room.
+
+The Thenardiers alone, out of politeness and curiosity, had remained in
+the room.
+
+"Is he going to pass the night in that fashion?" grumbled the
+Thenardier. When two o'clock in the morning struck, she declared herself
+vanquished, and said to her husband, "I'm going to bed. Do as you like."
+Her husband seated himself at a table in the corner, lighted a candle,
+and began to read the Courrier Francais.
+
+A good hour passed thus. The worthy inn-keeper had perused the Courrier
+Francais at least three times, from the date of the number to the
+printer's name. The stranger did not stir.
+
+Thenardier fidgeted, coughed, spit, blew his nose, and creaked his
+chair. Not a movement on the man's part. "Is he asleep?" thought
+Thenardier. The man was not asleep, but nothing could arouse him.
+
+At last Thenardier took off his cap, stepped gently up to him, and
+ventured to say:--
+
+"Is not Monsieur going to his repose?"
+
+Not going to bed would have seemed to him excessive and familiar. To
+repose smacked of luxury and respect. These words possess the mysterious
+and admirable property of swelling the bill on the following day. A
+chamber where one sleeps costs twenty sous; a chamber in which one
+reposes costs twenty francs.
+
+"Well!" said the stranger, "you are right. Where is your stable?"
+
+"Sir!" exclaimed Thenardier, with a smile, "I will conduct you, sir."
+
+He took the candle; the man picked up his bundle and cudgel, and
+Thenardier conducted him to a chamber on the first floor, which was of
+rare splendor, all furnished in mahogany, with a low bedstead, curtained
+with red calico.
+
+"What is this?" said the traveller.
+
+"It is really our bridal chamber," said the tavern-keeper. "My wife and
+I occupy another. This is only entered three or four times a year."
+
+"I should have liked the stable quite as well," said the man, abruptly.
+
+Thenardier pretended not to hear this unamiable remark.
+
+He lighted two perfectly fresh wax candles which figured on the
+chimney-piece. A very good fire was flickering on the hearth.
+
+On the chimney-piece, under a glass globe, stood a woman's head-dress in
+silver wire and orange flowers.
+
+"And what is this?" resumed the stranger.
+
+"That, sir," said Thenardier, "is my wife's wedding bonnet."
+
+The traveller surveyed the object with a glance which seemed to say,
+"There really was a time, then, when that monster was a maiden?"
+
+Thenardier lied, however. When he had leased this paltry building for
+the purpose of converting it into a tavern, he had found this chamber
+decorated in just this manner, and had purchased the furniture and
+obtained the orange flowers at second hand, with the idea that this
+would cast a graceful shadow on "his spouse," and would result in what
+the English call respectability for his house.
+
+When the traveller turned round, the host had disappeared. Thenardier
+had withdrawn discreetly, without venturing to wish him a good night,
+as he did not wish to treat with disrespectful cordiality a man whom he
+proposed to fleece royally the following morning.
+
+The inn-keeper retired to his room. His wife was in bed, but she was not
+asleep. When she heard her husband's step she turned over and said to
+him:--
+
+"Do you know, I'm going to turn Cosette out of doors to-morrow."
+
+Thenardier replied coldly:--
+
+"How you do go on!"
+
+They exchanged no further words, and a few moments later their candle
+was extinguished.
+
+As for the traveller, he had deposited his cudgel and his bundle in a
+corner. The landlord once gone, he threw himself into an arm-chair and
+remained for some time buried in thought. Then he removed his shoes,
+took one of the two candles, blew out the other, opened the door, and
+quitted the room, gazing about him like a person who is in search of
+something. He traversed a corridor and came upon a staircase. There he
+heard a very faint and gentle sound like the breathing of a child. He
+followed this sound, and came to a sort of triangular recess built under
+the staircase, or rather formed by the staircase itself. This recess was
+nothing else than the space under the steps. There, in the midst of all
+sorts of old papers and potsherds, among dust and spiders' webs, was a
+bed--if one can call by the name of bed a straw pallet so full of holes
+as to display the straw, and a coverlet so tattered as to show the
+pallet. No sheets. This was placed on the floor.
+
+In this bed Cosette was sleeping.
+
+The man approached and gazed down upon her.
+
+Cosette was in a profound sleep; she was fully dressed. In the winter
+she did not undress, in order that she might not be so cold.
+
+Against her breast was pressed the doll, whose large eyes, wide open,
+glittered in the dark. From time to time she gave vent to a deep sigh as
+though she were on the point of waking, and she strained the doll almost
+convulsively in her arms. Beside her bed there was only one of her
+wooden shoes.
+
+A door which stood open near Cosette's pallet permitted a view of a
+rather large, dark room. The stranger stepped into it. At the further
+extremity, through a glass door, he saw two small, very white beds.
+They belonged to Eponine and Azelma. Behind these beds, and half hidden,
+stood an uncurtained wicker cradle, in which the little boy who had
+cried all the evening lay asleep.
+
+The stranger conjectured that this chamber connected with that of the
+Thenardier pair. He was on the point of retreating when his eye fell
+upon the fireplace--one of those vast tavern chimneys where there is
+always so little fire when there is any fire at all, and which are
+so cold to look at. There was no fire in this one, there was not even
+ashes; but there was something which attracted the stranger's gaze,
+nevertheless. It was two tiny children's shoes, coquettish in shape
+and unequal in size. The traveller recalled the graceful and immemorial
+custom in accordance with which children place their shoes in the
+chimney on Christmas eve, there to await in the darkness some sparkling
+gift from their good fairy. Eponine and Azelma had taken care not to
+omit this, and each of them had set one of her shoes on the hearth.
+
+The traveller bent over them.
+
+The fairy, that is to say, their mother, had already paid her visit, and
+in each he saw a brand-new and shining ten-sou piece.
+
+The man straightened himself up, and was on the point of withdrawing,
+when far in, in the darkest corner of the hearth, he caught sight
+of another object. He looked at it, and recognized a wooden shoe, a
+frightful shoe of the coarsest description, half dilapidated and all
+covered with ashes and dried mud. It was Cosette's sabot. Cosette, with
+that touching trust of childhood, which can always be deceived yet never
+discouraged, had placed her shoe on the hearth-stone also.
+
+Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and
+touching thing.
+
+There was nothing in this wooden shoe.
+
+The stranger fumbled in his waistcoat, bent over and placed a louis d'or
+in Cosette's shoe.
+
+Then he regained his own chamber with the stealthy tread of a wolf.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THENARDIER AND HIS MANOEUVRES
+
+On the following morning, two hours at least before day-break,
+Thenardier, seated beside a candle in the public room of the tavern, pen
+in hand, was making out the bill for the traveller with the yellow coat.
+
+His wife, standing beside him, and half bent over him, was following
+him with her eyes. They exchanged not a word. On the one hand, there was
+profound meditation, on the other, the religious admiration with which
+one watches the birth and development of a marvel of the human mind. A
+noise was audible in the house; it was the Lark sweeping the stairs.
+
+After the lapse of a good quarter of an hour, and some erasures,
+Thenardier produced the following masterpiece:--
+
+ BILL OF THE GENTLEMAN IN No. 1.
+
+ Supper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 francs.
+ Chamber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 "
+ Candle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 "
+ Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 "
+ Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 "
+ ----------
+ Total . . . . . . 23 francs.
+
+
+Service was written servisse.
+
+"Twenty-three francs!" cried the woman, with an enthusiasm which was
+mingled with some hesitation.
+
+Like all great artists, Thenardier was dissatisfied.
+
+"Peuh!" he exclaimed.
+
+It was the accent of Castlereagh auditing France's bill at the Congress
+of Vienna.
+
+"Monsieur Thenardier, you are right; he certainly owes that," murmured
+the wife, who was thinking of the doll bestowed on Cosette in the
+presence of her daughters. "It is just, but it is too much. He will not
+pay it."
+
+Thenardier laughed coldly, as usual, and said:--
+
+"He will pay."
+
+This laugh was the supreme assertion of certainty and authority. That
+which was asserted in this manner must needs be so. His wife did not
+insist.
+
+She set about arranging the table; her husband paced the room. A moment
+later he added:--
+
+"I owe full fifteen hundred francs!"
+
+He went and seated himself in the chimney-corner, meditating, with his
+feet among the warm ashes.
+
+"Ah! by the way," resumed his wife, "you don't forget that I'm going to
+turn Cosette out of doors to-day? The monster! She breaks my heart with
+that doll of hers! I'd rather marry Louis XVIII. than keep her another
+day in the house!"
+
+Thenardier lighted his pipe, and replied between two puffs:--
+
+"You will hand that bill to the man."
+
+Then he went out.
+
+Hardly had he left the room when the traveller entered.
+
+Thenardier instantly reappeared behind him and remained motionless in
+the half-open door, visible only to his wife.
+
+The yellow man carried his bundle and his cudgel in his hand.
+
+"Up so early?" said Madame Thenardier; "is Monsieur leaving us already?"
+
+As she spoke thus, she was twisting the bill about in her hands with an
+embarrassed air, and making creases in it with her nails. Her hard
+face presented a shade which was not habitual with it,--timidity and
+scruples.
+
+To present such a bill to a man who had so completely the air "of a poor
+wretch" seemed difficult to her.
+
+The traveller appeared to be preoccupied and absent-minded. He
+replied:--
+
+"Yes, Madame, I am going."
+
+"So Monsieur has no business in Montfermeil?"
+
+"No, I was passing through. That is all. What do I owe you, Madame," he
+added.
+
+The Thenardier silently handed him the folded bill.
+
+The man unfolded the paper and glanced at it; but his thoughts were
+evidently elsewhere.
+
+"Madame," he resumed, "is business good here in Montfermeil?"
+
+"So so, Monsieur," replied the Thenardier, stupefied at not witnessing
+another sort of explosion.
+
+She continued, in a dreary and lamentable tone:--
+
+"Oh! Monsieur, times are so hard! and then, we have so few bourgeois in
+the neighborhood! All the people are poor, you see. If we had not, now
+and then, some rich and generous travellers like Monsieur, we should
+not get along at all. We have so many expenses. Just see, that child is
+costing us our very eyes."
+
+"What child?"
+
+"Why, the little one, you know! Cosette--the Lark, as she is called
+hereabouts!"
+
+"Ah!" said the man.
+
+She went on:--
+
+"How stupid these peasants are with their nicknames! She has more the
+air of a bat than of a lark. You see, sir, we do not ask charity, and we
+cannot bestow it. We earn nothing and we have to pay out a great deal.
+The license, the imposts, the door and window tax, the hundredths!
+Monsieur is aware that the government demands a terrible deal of money.
+And then, I have my daughters. I have no need to bring up other people's
+children."
+
+The man resumed, in that voice which he strove to render indifferent,
+and in which there lingered a tremor:--
+
+"What if one were to rid you of her?"
+
+"Who? Cosette?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The landlady's red and violent face brightened up hideously.
+
+"Ah! sir, my dear sir, take her, keep her, lead her off, carry her
+away, sugar her, stuff her with truffles, drink her, eat her, and the
+blessings of the good holy Virgin and of all the saints of paradise be
+upon you!"
+
+"Agreed."
+
+"Really! You will take her away?"
+
+"I will take her away."
+
+"Immediately?"
+
+"Immediately. Call the child."
+
+"Cosette!" screamed the Thenardier.
+
+"In the meantime," pursued the man, "I will pay you what I owe you. How
+much is it?"
+
+He cast a glance on the bill, and could not restrain a start of
+surprise:--
+
+"Twenty-three francs!"
+
+He looked at the landlady, and repeated:--
+
+"Twenty-three francs?"
+
+There was in the enunciation of these words, thus repeated, an accent
+between an exclamation and an interrogation point.
+
+The Thenardier had had time to prepare herself for the shock. She
+replied, with assurance:--
+
+"Good gracious, yes, sir, it is twenty-three francs."
+
+The stranger laid five five-franc pieces on the table.
+
+"Go and get the child," said he.
+
+At that moment Thenardier advanced to the middle of the room, and
+said:--
+
+"Monsieur owes twenty-six sous."
+
+"Twenty-six sous!" exclaimed his wife.
+
+"Twenty sous for the chamber," resumed Thenardier, coldly, "and six sous
+for his supper. As for the child, I must discuss that matter a little
+with the gentleman. Leave us, wife."
+
+Madame Thenardier was dazzled as with the shock caused by unexpected
+lightning flashes of talent. She was conscious that a great actor was
+making his entrance on the stage, uttered not a word in reply, and left
+the room.
+
+As soon as they were alone, Thenardier offered the traveller a chair.
+The traveller seated himself; Thenardier remained standing, and his face
+assumed a singular expression of good-fellowship and simplicity.
+
+"Sir," said he, "what I have to say to you is this, that I adore that
+child."
+
+The stranger gazed intently at him.
+
+"What child?"
+
+Thenardier continued:--
+
+"How strange it is, one grows attached. What money is that? Take back
+your hundred-sou piece. I adore the child."
+
+"Whom do you mean?" demanded the stranger.
+
+"Eh! our little Cosette! Are you not intending to take her away from
+us? Well, I speak frankly; as true as you are an honest man, I will not
+consent to it. I shall miss that child. I saw her first when she was a
+tiny thing. It is true that she costs us money; it is true that she has
+her faults; it is true that we are not rich; it is true that I have paid
+out over four hundred francs for drugs for just one of her illnesses!
+But one must do something for the good God's sake. She has neither
+father nor mother. I have brought her up. I have bread enough for
+her and for myself. In truth, I think a great deal of that child. You
+understand, one conceives an affection for a person; I am a good sort
+of a beast, I am; I do not reason; I love that little girl; my wife is
+quick-tempered, but she loves her also. You see, she is just the same as
+our own child. I want to keep her to babble about the house."
+
+The stranger kept his eye intently fixed on Thenardier. The latter
+continued:--
+
+"Excuse me, sir, but one does not give away one's child to a passer-by,
+like that. I am right, am I not? Still, I don't say--you are rich; you
+have the air of a very good man,--if it were for her happiness. But one
+must find out that. You understand: suppose that I were to let her go
+and to sacrifice myself, I should like to know what becomes of her; I
+should not wish to lose sight of her; I should like to know with whom
+she is living, so that I could go to see her from time to time; so that
+she may know that her good foster-father is alive, that he is watching
+over her. In short, there are things which are not possible. I do not
+even know your name. If you were to take her away, I should say: 'Well,
+and the Lark, what has become of her?' One must, at least, see some
+petty scrap of paper, some trifle in the way of a passport, you know!"
+
+The stranger, still surveying him with that gaze which penetrates, as
+the saying goes, to the very depths of the conscience, replied in a
+grave, firm voice:--
+
+"Monsieur Thenardier, one does not require a passport to travel five
+leagues from Paris. If I take Cosette away, I shall take her away, and
+that is the end of the matter. You will not know my name, you will not
+know my residence, you will not know where she is; and my intention is
+that she shall never set eyes on you again so long as she lives. I break
+the thread which binds her foot, and she departs. Does that suit you?
+Yes or no?"
+
+Since geniuses, like demons, recognize the presence of a superior God by
+certain signs, Thenardier comprehended that he had to deal with a very
+strong person. It was like an intuition; he comprehended it with his
+clear and sagacious promptitude. While drinking with the carters,
+smoking, and singing coarse songs on the preceding evening, he had
+devoted the whole of the time to observing the stranger, watching him
+like a cat, and studying him like a mathematician. He had watched him,
+both on his own account, for the pleasure of the thing, and through
+instinct, and had spied upon him as though he had been paid for so
+doing. Not a movement, not a gesture, on the part of the man in the
+yellow great-coat had escaped him. Even before the stranger had so
+clearly manifested his interest in Cosette, Thenardier had divined his
+purpose. He had caught the old man's deep glances returning constantly
+to the child. Who was this man? Why this interest? Why this hideous
+costume, when he had so much money in his purse? Questions which he put
+to himself without being able to solve them, and which irritated him. He
+had pondered it all night long. He could not be Cosette's father. Was he
+her grandfather? Then why not make himself known at once? When one has
+a right, one asserts it. This man evidently had no right over Cosette.
+What was it, then? Thenardier lost himself in conjectures. He caught
+glimpses of everything, but he saw nothing. Be that as it may, on
+entering into conversation with the man, sure that there was some secret
+in the case, that the latter had some interest in remaining in the
+shadow, he felt himself strong; when he perceived from the stranger's
+clear and firm retort, that this mysterious personage was mysterious in
+so simple a way, he became conscious that he was weak. He had expected
+nothing of the sort. His conjectures were put to the rout. He rallied
+his ideas. He weighed everything in the space of a second. Thenardier
+was one of those men who take in a situation at a glance. He decided
+that the moment had arrived for proceeding straightforward, and quickly
+at that. He did as great leaders do at the decisive moment, which they
+know that they alone recognize; he abruptly unmasked his batteries.
+
+"Sir," said he, "I am in need of fifteen hundred francs."
+
+The stranger took from his side pocket an old pocketbook of black
+leather, opened it, drew out three bank-bills, which he laid on the
+table. Then he placed his large thumb on the notes and said to the
+inn-keeper:--
+
+"Go and fetch Cosette."
+
+While this was taking place, what had Cosette been doing?
+
+On waking up, Cosette had run to get her shoe. In it she had found the
+gold piece. It was not a Napoleon; it was one of those perfectly new
+twenty-franc pieces of the Restoration, on whose effigy the little
+Prussian queue had replaced the laurel wreath. Cosette was dazzled. Her
+destiny began to intoxicate her. She did not know what a gold piece was;
+she had never seen one; she hid it quickly in her pocket, as though
+she had stolen it. Still, she felt that it really was hers; she guessed
+whence her gift had come, but the joy which she experienced was full of
+fear. She was happy; above all she was stupefied. Such magnificent and
+beautiful things did not appear real. The doll frightened her, the
+gold piece frightened her. She trembled vaguely in the presence of this
+magnificence. The stranger alone did not frighten her. On the contrary,
+he reassured her. Ever since the preceding evening, amid all her
+amazement, even in her sleep, she had been thinking in her little
+childish mind of that man who seemed to be so poor and so sad, and who
+was so rich and so kind. Everything had changed for her since she had
+met that good man in the forest. Cosette, less happy than the most
+insignificant swallow of heaven, had never known what it was to take
+refuge under a mother's shadow and under a wing. For the last five
+years, that is to say, as far back as her memory ran, the poor child had
+shivered and trembled. She had always been exposed completely naked
+to the sharp wind of adversity; now it seemed to her she was clothed.
+Formerly her soul had seemed cold, now it was warm. Cosette was no
+longer afraid of the Thenardier. She was no longer alone; there was some
+one there.
+
+She hastily set about her regular morning duties. That louis, which she
+had about her, in the very apron pocket whence the fifteen-sou piece had
+fallen on the night before, distracted her thoughts. She dared not touch
+it, but she spent five minutes in gazing at it, with her tongue hanging
+out, if the truth must be told. As she swept the staircase, she paused,
+remained standing there motionless, forgetful of her broom and of the
+entire universe, occupied in gazing at that star which was blazing at
+the bottom of her pocket.
+
+It was during one of these periods of contemplation that the Thenardier
+joined her. She had gone in search of Cosette at her husband's orders.
+What was quite unprecedented, she neither struck her nor said an
+insulting word to her.
+
+"Cosette," she said, almost gently, "come immediately."
+
+An instant later Cosette entered the public room.
+
+The stranger took up the bundle which he had brought and untied it. This
+bundle contained a little woollen gown, an apron, a fustian bodice, a
+kerchief, a petticoat, woollen stockings, shoes--a complete outfit for a
+girl of seven years. All was black.
+
+"My child," said the man, "take these, and go and dress yourself
+quickly."
+
+Daylight was appearing when those of the inhabitants of Montfermeil who
+had begun to open their doors beheld a poorly clad old man leading a
+little girl dressed in mourning, and carrying a pink doll in her arms,
+pass along the road to Paris. They were going in the direction of Livry.
+
+It was our man and Cosette.
+
+No one knew the man; as Cosette was no longer in rags, many did not
+recognize her. Cosette was going away. With whom? She did not know.
+Whither? She knew not. All that she understood was that she was leaving
+the Thenardier tavern behind her. No one had thought of bidding her
+farewell, nor had she thought of taking leave of any one. She was
+leaving that hated and hating house.
+
+Poor, gentle creature, whose heart had been repressed up to that hour!
+
+Cosette walked along gravely, with her large eyes wide open, and gazing
+at the sky. She had put her louis in the pocket of her new apron. From
+time to time, she bent down and glanced at it; then she looked at the
+good man. She felt something as though she were beside the good God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--HE WHO SEEKS TO BETTER HIMSELF MAY RENDER HIS SITUATION WORSE
+
+Madame Thenardier had allowed her husband to have his own way, as was
+her wont. She had expected great results. When the man and Cosette had
+taken their departure, Thenardier allowed a full quarter of an hour
+to elapse; then he took her aside and showed her the fifteen hundred
+francs.
+
+"Is that all?" said she.
+
+It was the first time since they had set up housekeeping that she had
+dared to criticise one of the master's acts.
+
+The blow told.
+
+"You are right, in sooth," said he; "I am a fool. Give me my hat."
+
+He folded up the three bank-bills, thrust them into his pocket, and ran
+out in all haste; but he made a mistake and turned to the right first.
+Some neighbors, of whom he made inquiries, put him on the track again;
+the Lark and the man had been seen going in the direction of Livry. He
+followed these hints, walking with great strides, and talking to himself
+the while:--
+
+"That man is evidently a million dressed in yellow, and I am an animal.
+First he gave twenty sous, then five francs, then fifty francs, then
+fifteen hundred francs, all with equal readiness. He would have given
+fifteen thousand francs. But I shall overtake him."
+
+And then, that bundle of clothes prepared beforehand for the child; all
+that was singular; many mysteries lay concealed under it. One does not
+let mysteries out of one's hand when one has once grasped them. The
+secrets of the wealthy are sponges of gold; one must know how to subject
+them to pressure. All these thoughts whirled through his brain. "I am an
+animal," said he.
+
+When one leaves Montfermeil and reaches the turn which the road takes
+that runs to Livry, it can be seen stretching out before one to a great
+distance across the plateau. On arriving there, he calculated that he
+ought to be able to see the old man and the child. He looked as far as
+his vision reached, and saw nothing. He made fresh inquiries, but he had
+wasted time. Some passers-by informed him that the man and child of whom
+he was in search had gone towards the forest in the direction of Gagny.
+He hastened in that direction.
+
+They were far in advance of him; but a child walks slowly, and he walked
+fast; and then, he was well acquainted with the country.
+
+All at once he paused and dealt himself a blow on his forehead like a
+man who has forgotten some essential point and who is ready to retrace
+his steps.
+
+"I ought to have taken my gun," said he to himself.
+
+Thenardier was one of those double natures which sometimes pass through
+our midst without our being aware of the fact, and who disappear without
+our finding them out, because destiny has only exhibited one side of
+them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a
+calm and even situation, Thenardier possessed all that is required to
+make--we will not say to be--what people have agreed to call an honest
+trader, a good bourgeois. At the same time certain circumstances being
+given, certain shocks arriving to bring his under-nature to the surface,
+he had all the requisites for a blackguard. He was a shopkeeper in
+whom there was some taint of the monster. Satan must have occasionally
+crouched down in some corner of the hovel in which Thenardier dwelt, and
+have fallen a-dreaming in the presence of this hideous masterpiece.
+
+After a momentary hesitation:--
+
+"Bah!" he thought; "they will have time to make their escape."
+
+And he pursued his road, walking rapidly straight ahead, and with almost
+an air of certainty, with the sagacity of a fox scenting a covey of
+partridges.
+
+In truth, when he had passed the ponds and had traversed in an oblique
+direction the large clearing which lies on the right of the Avenue de
+Bellevue, and reached that turf alley which nearly makes the circuit of
+the hill, and covers the arch of the ancient aqueduct of the Abbey of
+Chelles, he caught sight, over the top of the brushwood, of the hat on
+which he had already erected so many conjectures; it was that man's hat.
+The brushwood was not high. Thenardier recognized the fact that the man
+and Cosette were sitting there. The child could not be seen on account
+of her small size, but the head of her doll was visible.
+
+Thenardier was not mistaken. The man was sitting there, and letting
+Cosette get somewhat rested. The inn-keeper walked round the brushwood
+and presented himself abruptly to the eyes of those whom he was in
+search of.
+
+"Pardon, excuse me, sir," he said, quite breathless, "but here are your
+fifteen hundred francs."
+
+So saying, he handed the stranger the three bank-bills.
+
+The man raised his eyes.
+
+"What is the meaning of this?"
+
+Thenardier replied respectfully:--
+
+"It means, sir, that I shall take back Cosette."
+
+Cosette shuddered, and pressed close to the old man.
+
+He replied, gazing to the very bottom of Thenardier's eyes the while,
+and enunciating every syllable distinctly:--
+
+"You are go-ing to take back Co-sette?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I am. I will tell you; I have considered the matter. In fact,
+I have not the right to give her to you. I am an honest man, you see;
+this child does not belong to me; she belongs to her mother. It was her
+mother who confided her to me; I can only resign her to her mother. You
+will say to me, 'But her mother is dead.' Good; in that case I can only
+give the child up to the person who shall bring me a writing, signed by
+her mother, to the effect that I am to hand the child over to the person
+therein mentioned; that is clear."
+
+The man, without making any reply, fumbled in his pocket, and Thenardier
+beheld the pocket-book of bank-bills make its appearance once more.
+
+The tavern-keeper shivered with joy.
+
+"Good!" thought he; "let us hold firm; he is going to bribe me!"
+
+Before opening the pocket-book, the traveller cast a glance about him:
+the spot was absolutely deserted; there was not a soul either in the
+woods or in the valley. The man opened his pocket-book once more and
+drew from it, not the handful of bills which Thenardier expected, but a
+simple little paper, which he unfolded and presented fully open to the
+inn-keeper, saying:--
+
+"You are right; read!"
+
+Thenardier took the paper and read:--
+
+ "M. SUR M., March 25, 1823.
+
+ "MONSIEUR THENARDIER:--
+
+ You will deliver Cosette to this person.
+ You will be paid for all the little things.
+ I have the honor to salute you with respect,
+ FANTINE."
+
+"You know that signature?" resumed the man.
+
+It certainly was Fantine's signature; Thenardier recognized it.
+
+There was no reply to make; he experienced two violent vexations, the
+vexation of renouncing the bribery which he had hoped for, and the
+vexation of being beaten; the man added:--
+
+"You may keep this paper as your receipt."
+
+Thenardier retreated in tolerably good order.
+
+"This signature is fairly well imitated," he growled between his teeth;
+"however, let it go!"
+
+Then he essayed a desperate effort.
+
+"It is well, sir," he said, "since you are the person, but I must be
+paid for all those little things. A great deal is owing to me."
+
+The man rose to his feet, filliping the dust from his thread-bare
+sleeve:--
+
+"Monsieur Thenardier, in January last, the mother reckoned that she owed
+you one hundred and twenty francs. In February, you sent her a bill of
+five hundred francs; you received three hundred francs at the end of
+February, and three hundred francs at the beginning of March. Since then
+nine months have elapsed, at fifteen francs a month, the price agreed
+upon, which makes one hundred and thirty-five francs. You had received
+one hundred francs too much; that makes thirty-five still owing you. I
+have just given you fifteen hundred francs."
+
+Thenardier's sensations were those of the wolf at the moment when he
+feels himself nipped and seized by the steel jaw of the trap.
+
+"Who is this devil of a man?" he thought.
+
+He did what the wolf does: he shook himself. Audacity had succeeded with
+him once.
+
+"Monsieur-I-don't-know-your-name," he said resolutely, and this time
+casting aside all respectful ceremony, "I shall take back Cosette if you
+do not give me a thousand crowns."
+
+The stranger said tranquilly:--
+
+"Come, Cosette."
+
+He took Cosette by his left hand, and with his right he picked up his
+cudgel, which was lying on the ground.
+
+Thenardier noted the enormous size of the cudgel and the solitude of the
+spot.
+
+The man plunged into the forest with the child, leaving the inn-keeper
+motionless and speechless.
+
+While they were walking away, Thenardier scrutinized his huge shoulders,
+which were a little rounded, and his great fists.
+
+Then, bringing his eyes back to his own person, they fell upon his
+feeble arms and his thin hands. "I really must have been exceedingly
+stupid not to have thought to bring my gun," he said to himself, "since
+I was going hunting!"
+
+However, the inn-keeper did not give up.
+
+"I want to know where he is going," said he, and he set out to follow
+them at a distance. Two things were left on his hands, an irony in
+the shape of the paper signed Fantine, and a consolation, the fifteen
+hundred francs.
+
+The man led Cosette off in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He walked
+slowly, with drooping head, in an attitude of reflection and sadness.
+The winter had thinned out the forest, so that Thenardier did not lose
+them from sight, although he kept at a good distance. The man turned
+round from time to time, and looked to see if he was being followed.
+All at once he caught sight of Thenardier. He plunged suddenly into
+the brushwood with Cosette, where they could both hide themselves. "The
+deuce!" said Thenardier, and he redoubled his pace.
+
+The thickness of the undergrowth forced him to draw nearer to them. When
+the man had reached the densest part of the thicket, he wheeled
+round. It was in vain that Thenardier sought to conceal himself in the
+branches; he could not prevent the man seeing him. The man cast upon him
+an uneasy glance, then elevated his head and continued his course. The
+inn-keeper set out again in pursuit. Thus they continued for two or
+three hundred paces. All at once the man turned round once more; he saw
+the inn-keeper. This time he gazed at him with so sombre an air that
+Thenardier decided that it was "useless" to proceed further. Thenardier
+retraced his steps.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--NUMBER 9,430 REAPPEARS, AND COSETTE WINS IT IN THE LOTTERY
+
+Jean Valjean was not dead.
+
+When he fell into the sea, or rather, when he threw himself into it, he
+was not ironed, as we have seen. He swam under water until he reached a
+vessel at anchor, to which a boat was moored. He found means of hiding
+himself in this boat until night. At night he swam off again, and
+reached the shore a little way from Cape Brun. There, as he did not lack
+money, he procured clothing. A small country-house in the neighborhood
+of Balaguier was at that time the dressing-room of escaped convicts,--a
+lucrative specialty. Then Jean Valjean, like all the sorry fugitives
+who are seeking to evade the vigilance of the law and social fatality,
+pursued an obscure and undulating itinerary. He found his first
+refuge at Pradeaux, near Beausset. Then he directed his course towards
+Grand-Villard, near Briancon, in the Hautes-Alpes. It was a fumbling and
+uneasy flight,--a mole's track, whose branchings are untraceable. Later
+on, some trace of his passage into Ain, in the territory of Civrieux,
+was discovered; in the Pyrenees, at Accons; at the spot called
+Grange-de-Doumec, near the market of Chavailles, and in the environs of
+Perigueux at Brunies, canton of La Chapelle-Gonaguet. He reached Paris.
+We have just seen him at Montfermeil.
+
+His first care on arriving in Paris had been to buy mourning clothes
+for a little girl of from seven to eight years of age; then to procure
+a lodging. That done, he had betaken himself to Montfermeil. It will
+be remembered that already, during his preceding escape, he had made a
+mysterious trip thither, or somewhere in that neighborhood, of which the
+law had gathered an inkling.
+
+However, he was thought to be dead, and this still further increased the
+obscurity which had gathered about him. At Paris, one of the journals
+which chronicled the fact fell into his hands. He felt reassured and
+almost at peace, as though he had really been dead.
+
+On the evening of the day when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from the
+claws of the Thenardiers, he returned to Paris. He re-entered it at
+nightfall, with the child, by way of the Barrier Monceaux. There
+he entered a cabriolet, which took him to the esplanade of the
+Observatoire. There he got out, paid the coachman, took Cosette by
+the hand, and together they directed their steps through the
+darkness,--through the deserted streets which adjoin the Ourcine and the
+Glaciere, towards the Boulevard de l'Hopital.
+
+The day had been strange and filled with emotions for Cosette. They
+had eaten some bread and cheese purchased in isolated taverns, behind
+hedges; they had changed carriages frequently; they had travelled short
+distances on foot. She made no complaint, but she was weary, and Jean
+Valjean perceived it by the way she dragged more and more on his hand
+as she walked. He took her on his back. Cosette, without letting go
+of Catherine, laid her head on Jean Valjean's shoulder, and there fell
+asleep.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL
+
+[Illustration: The Gorbeau Hovel 2b3-10-gorbeau-house]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--MASTER GORBEAU
+
+Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country of
+the Salpetriere, and who had mounted to the Barriere d'Italie by way
+of the boulevard, reached a point where it might be said that Paris
+disappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it
+was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the
+city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in
+them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it,
+then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert
+place where there was some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, a
+street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day
+than a cemetery.
+
+It was the old quarter of the Marche-aux-Chevaux.
+
+The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of
+this Marche-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond the Rue du
+Petit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high
+walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver
+huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps,
+sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a long,
+low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in mourning,
+laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the spring; then,
+in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building, on which
+ran the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS,--this daring
+rambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of the
+Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. There, near a factory, and between two
+garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a mean building,
+which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a thatched hovel, and
+which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral. It presented its side
+and gable to the public road; hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearly
+the whole of the house was hidden. Only the door and one window could be
+seen.
+
+This hovel was only one story high.
+
+The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could never
+have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if it
+had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in rough masonry,
+might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.
+
+The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound
+together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. It
+opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky,
+plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, which
+could be seen from the street, running straight up like a ladder and
+disappearing in the darkness between two walls. The top of the shapeless
+bay into which this door shut was masked by a narrow scantling in the
+centre of which a triangular hole had been sawed, which served both as
+wicket and air-hole when the door was closed. On the inside of the
+door the figures 52 had been traced with a couple of strokes of a brush
+dipped in ink, and above the scantling the same hand had daubed the
+number 50, so that one hesitated. Where was one? Above the door it said,
+"Number 50"; the inside replied, "no, Number 52." No one knows what
+dust-colored figures were suspended like draperies from the triangular
+opening.
+
+The window was large, sufficiently elevated, garnished with Venetian
+blinds, and with a frame in large square panes; only these large panes
+were suffering from various wounds, which were both concealed and
+betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage. And the blinds, dislocated and
+unpasted, threatened passers-by rather than screened the occupants.
+The horizontal slats were missing here and there and had been naively
+replaced with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so that what began as
+a blind ended as a shutter. This door with an unclean, and this window
+with an honest though dilapidated air, thus beheld on the same house,
+produced the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side,
+with different miens beneath the same rags, the one having always been a
+mendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman.
+
+The staircase led to a very vast edifice which resembled a shed which
+had been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its intestinal
+tube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left sorts of
+compartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable under stress
+of circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells. These chambers
+received their light from the vague waste grounds in the neighborhood.
+
+All this was dark, disagreeable, wan, melancholy, sepulchral; traversed
+according as the crevices lay in the roof or in the door, by cold rays
+or by icy winds. An interesting and picturesque peculiarity of this sort
+of dwelling is the enormous size of the spiders.
+
+To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard side, at about the
+height of a man from the ground, a small window which had been walled up
+formed a square niche full of stones which the children had thrown there
+as they passed by.
+
+A portion of this building has recently been demolished. From what still
+remains of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former days.
+As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years is
+youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging
+partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.
+
+The postmen called the house Number 50-52; but it was known in the
+neighborhood as the Gorbeau house.
+
+Let us explain whence this appellation was derived.
+
+Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes, and
+prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin, know that there
+was in Paris, during the last century, about 1770, two attorneys at the
+Chatelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other Renard (Fox). The two
+names had been forestalled by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too fine
+for the lawyers; they made the most of it. A parody was immediately
+put in circulation in the galleries of the court-house, in verses that
+limped a little:--
+
+
+ Maitre Corbeau, sur un dossier perche,[13]
+ Tenait dans son bee une saisie executoire;
+ Maitre Renard, par l'odeur alleche,
+ Lui fit a peu pres cette histoire:
+ He! bonjour. Etc.
+
+
+The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jests, and finding the
+bearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter which
+followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit upon the
+expedient of applying to the king.
+
+Their petition was presented to Louis XV. on the same day when the
+Papal Nuncio, on the one hand, and the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon on the
+other, both devoutly kneeling, were each engaged in putting on, in his
+Majesty's presence, a slipper on the bare feet of Madame du Barry, who
+had just got out of bed. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh,
+passed gayly from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and bestowed on
+these limbs of the law their former names, or nearly so. By the kings
+command, Maitre Corbeau was permitted to add a tail to his initial
+letter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maitre Renard was less lucky; all he
+obtained was leave to place a P in front of his R, and to call himself
+Prenard; so that the second name bore almost as much resemblance as the
+first.
+
+Now, according to local tradition, this Maitre Gorbeau had been the
+proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the Boulevard de l'Hopital.
+He was even the author of the monumental window.
+
+Hence the edifice bore the name of the Gorbeau house.
+
+Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm
+which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue
+de la Barriere des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved,
+planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the
+season, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odor
+of copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory.
+
+The barrier was close at hand. In 1823 the city wall was still in
+existence.
+
+This barrier itself evoked gloomy fancies in the mind. It was the
+road to Bicetre. It was through it that, under the Empire and the
+Restoration, prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris on the day
+of their execution. It was there, that, about 1829, was committed that
+mysterious assassination, called "The assassination of the Fontainebleau
+barrier," whose authors justice was never able to discover; a melancholy
+problem which has never been elucidated, a frightful enigma which has
+never been unriddled. Take a few steps, and you come upon that fatal Rue
+Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl of Ivry to the sound of
+thunder, as in the melodramas. A few paces more, and you arrive at the
+abominable pollarded elms of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient
+of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and
+shameful Place de Grove of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which
+recoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with
+grandeur, nor to uphold it with authority.
+
+Leaving aside this Place Saint-Jacques, which was, as it were,
+predestined, and which has always been horrible, probably the most
+mournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty years ago,
+was the spot which even to-day is so unattractive, where stood the
+building Number 50-52.
+
+Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later.
+The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts which
+assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpetriere,
+a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicetre, whose outskirts one
+was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women and
+the madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could perceive
+nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a few
+factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stood
+hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white
+walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings
+erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the
+melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground,
+not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial,
+regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is
+because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.
+Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers
+may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell
+existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hopital might have formed the
+entrance to it.
+
+Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight is
+vanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breeze
+tears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the darkness is deep
+and starless, or when the moon and the wind are making openings in the
+clouds and losing themselves in the shadows, this boulevard suddenly
+becomes frightful. The black lines sink inwards and are lost in the
+shades, like morsels of the infinite. The passer-by cannot refrain from
+recalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connected
+with the gibbet. The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes have
+been committed, had something terrible about it. One almost had a
+presentiment of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confused
+forms of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square, of
+which one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves: by day it
+was ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it was sinister.
+
+In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women seated
+at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good old
+women were fond of begging.
+
+However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an antique
+air, was tending even then to transformation. Even at that time any one
+who was desirous of seeing it had to make haste. Each day some detail of
+the whole effect was disappearing. For the last twenty years the station
+of the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and distracted
+it, as it does to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders of a
+capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a
+city. It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements of
+a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf the
+ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth, at the
+rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstrous
+horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The old houses
+crumble and new ones rise.
+
+Since the Orleans railway has invaded the region of the Salpetriere,
+the ancient, narrow streets which adjoin the moats Saint-Victor and the
+Jardin des Plantes tremble, as they are violently traversed three or
+four times each day by those currents of coach fiacres and omnibuses
+which, in a given time, crowd back the houses to the right and the left;
+for there are things which are odd when said that are rigorously exact;
+and just as it is true to say that in large cities the sun makes the
+southern fronts of houses to vegetate and grow, it is certain that the
+frequent passage of vehicles enlarges streets. The symptoms of a new
+life are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest nooks,
+the pavement shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to grow
+longer, even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,--a
+memorable morning in July, 1845,--black pots of bitumen were seen
+smoking there; on that day it might be said that civilization had
+arrived in the Rue de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburb
+of Saint-Marceau.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--A NEST FOR OWL AND A WARBLER
+
+It was in front of this Gorbeau house that Jean Valjean halted. Like
+wild birds, he had chosen this desert place to construct his nest.
+
+He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a sort of a pass-key,
+opened the door, entered, closed it again carefully, and ascended the
+staircase, still carrying Cosette.
+
+At the top of the stairs he drew from his pocket another key, with
+which he opened another door. The chamber which he entered, and which
+he closed again instantly, was a kind of moderately spacious attic,
+furnished with a mattress laid on the floor, a table, and several
+chairs; a stove in which a fire was burning, and whose embers were
+visible, stood in one corner. A lantern on the boulevard cast a vague
+light into this poor room. At the extreme end there was a dressing-room
+with a folding bed; Jean Valjean carried the child to this bed and laid
+her down there without waking her.
+
+He struck a match and lighted a candle. All this was prepared beforehand
+on the table, and, as he had done on the previous evening, he began
+to scrutinize Cosette's face with a gaze full of ecstasy, in which the
+expression of kindness and tenderness almost amounted to aberration. The
+little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme
+strength and extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with
+whom she was, and continued to sleep without knowing where she was.
+
+Jean Valjean bent down and kissed that child's hand.
+
+Nine months before he had kissed the hand of the mother, who had also
+just fallen asleep.
+
+The same sad, piercing, religious sentiment filled his heart.
+
+He knelt beside Cosette's bed.
+
+lt was broad daylight, and the child still slept. A wan ray of the
+December sun penetrated the window of the attic and lay upon the
+ceiling in long threads of light and shade. All at once a heavily laden
+carrier's cart, which was passing along the boulevard, shook the frail
+bed, like a clap of thunder, and made it quiver from top to bottom.
+
+"Yes, madame!" cried Cosette, waking with a start, "here I am! here I
+am!"
+
+And she sprang out of bed, her eyes still half shut with the heaviness
+of sleep, extending her arms towards the corner of the wall.
+
+"Ah! mon Dieu, my broom!" said she.
+
+She opened her eyes wide now, and beheld the smiling countenance of Jean
+Valjean.
+
+"Ah! so it is true!" said the child. "Good morning, Monsieur."
+
+Children accept joy and happiness instantly and familiarly, being
+themselves by nature joy and happiness.
+
+Cosette caught sight of Catherine at the foot of her bed, and took
+possession of her, and, as she played, she put a hundred questions to
+Jean Valjean. Where was she? Was Paris very large? Was Madame Thenardier
+very far away? Was she to go back? etc., etc. All at once she exclaimed,
+"How pretty it is here!"
+
+It was a frightful hole, but she felt free.
+
+"Must I sweep?" she resumed at last.
+
+"Play!" said Jean Valjean.
+
+The day passed thus. Cosette, without troubling herself to understand
+anything, was inexpressibly happy with that doll and that kind man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--TWO MISFORTUNES MAKE ONE PIECE OF GOOD FORTUNE
+
+On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still by
+Cosette's bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for her to wake.
+
+Some new thing had come into his soul.
+
+Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been
+alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In
+the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy.
+The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister and his
+sister's children had left him only a vague and far-off memory which
+had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort to
+find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten them.
+Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his youth, if he
+had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss.
+
+When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her
+off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within him.
+
+All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed towards that
+child. He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled with
+joy. He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it
+meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to
+love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.
+
+Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!
+
+Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that
+might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together
+into a sort of ineffable light.
+
+It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop
+had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the
+dawn of love to rise.
+
+The early days passed in this dazzled state.
+
+Cosette, on her side, had also, unknown to herself, become another
+being, poor little thing! She was so little when her mother left her,
+that she no longer remembered her. Like all children, who resemble young
+shoots of the vine, which cling to everything, she had tried to love;
+she had not succeeded. All had repulsed her,--the Thenardiers, their
+children, other children. She had loved the dog, and he had died, after
+which nothing and nobody would have anything to do with her. It is a sad
+thing to say, and we have already intimated it, that, at eight years of
+age, her heart was cold. It was not her fault; it was not the faculty
+of loving that she lacked; alas! it was the possibility. Thus, from the
+very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved this kind
+man. She felt that which she had never felt before--a sensation of
+expansion.
+
+The man no longer produced on her the effect of being old or poor; she
+thought Jean Valjean handsome, just as she thought the hovel pretty.
+
+These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy. The novelty of
+the earth and of life counts for something here. Nothing is so charming
+as the coloring reflection of happiness on a garret. We all have in our
+past a delightful garret.
+
+Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between
+Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly
+united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted
+existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. One, in fact, completed
+the other. Cosette's instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean's
+instinct sought a child. To meet was to find each other. At the
+mysterious moment when their hands touched, they were welded together.
+When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other as
+necessary to each other, and embraced each other closely.
+
+Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute sense, we
+may say that, separated from every one by the walls of the tomb, Jean
+Valjean was the widower, and Cosette was the orphan: this situation
+caused Jean Valjean to become Cosette's father after a celestial
+fashion.
+
+And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette in the
+depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping
+hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality. The entrance of
+that man into the destiny of that child had been the advent of God.
+
+Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well. There he seemed
+perfectly secure.
+
+The chamber with a dressing-room, which he occupied with Cosette, was
+the one whose window opened on the boulevard. This being the only window
+in the house, no neighbors' glances were to be feared from across the
+way or at the side.
+
+The ground-floor of Number 50-52, a sort of dilapidated penthouse,
+served as a wagon-house for market-gardeners, and no communication
+existed between it and the first story. It was separated by the
+flooring, which had neither traps nor stairs, and which formed the
+diaphragm of the building, as it were. The first story contained, as we
+have said, numerous chambers and several attics, only one of which
+was occupied by the old woman who took charge of Jean Valjean's
+housekeeping; all the rest was uninhabited.
+
+It was this old woman, ornamented with the name of the principal lodger,
+and in reality intrusted with the functions of portress, who had let
+him the lodging on Christmas eve. He had represented himself to her as a
+gentleman of means who had been ruined by Spanish bonds, who was coming
+there to live with his little daughter. He had paid her six months in
+advance, and had commissioned the old woman to furnish the chamber and
+dressing-room, as we have seen. It was this good woman who had lighted
+the fire in the stove, and prepared everything on the evening of their
+arrival.
+
+Week followed week; these two beings led a happy life in that hovel.
+
+Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang from daybreak. Children have their
+morning song as well as birds.
+
+It sometimes happened that Jean Valjean clasped her tiny red hand, all
+cracked with chilblains, and kissed it. The poor child, who was used
+to being beaten, did not know the meaning of this, and ran away in
+confusion.
+
+At times she became serious and stared at her little black gown. Cosette
+was no longer in rags; she was in mourning. She had emerged from misery,
+and she was entering into life.
+
+Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made
+the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil
+that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a
+child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the
+angels.
+
+He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who
+was not man, and he became absorbed in revery. Good thoughts have their
+abysses as well as evil ones.
+
+To teach Cosette to read, and to let her play, this constituted nearly
+the whole of Jean Valjean's existence. And then he talked of her mother,
+and he made her pray.
+
+She called him father, and knew no other name for him.
+
+He passed hours in watching her dressing and undressing her doll, and in
+listening to her prattle. Life, henceforth, appeared to him to be full
+of interest; men seemed to him good and just; he no longer reproached
+any one in thought; he saw no reason why he should not live to be a very
+old man, now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future stretching
+out before him, illuminated by Cosette as by a charming light. The best
+of us are not exempt from egotistical thoughts. At times, he reflected
+with a sort of joy that she would be ugly.
+
+This is only a personal opinion; but, to utter our whole thought, at the
+point where Jean Valjean had arrived when he began to love Cosette, it
+is by no means clear to us that he did not need this encouragement in
+order that he might persevere in well-doing. He had just viewed the
+malice of men and the misery of society under a new aspect--incomplete
+aspects, which unfortunately only exhibited one side of the truth,
+the fate of woman as summed up in Fantine, and public authority as
+personified in Javert. He had returned to prison, this time for having
+done right; he had quaffed fresh bitterness; disgust and lassitude were
+overpowering him; even the memory of the Bishop probably suffered
+a temporary eclipse, though sure to reappear later on luminous and
+triumphant; but, after all, that sacred memory was growing dim.
+Who knows whether Jean Valjean had not been on the eve of growing
+discouraged and of falling once more? He loved and grew strong again.
+Alas! he walked with no less indecision than Cosette. He protected her,
+and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she could walk through life;
+thanks to her, he could continue in virtue. He was that child's stay,
+and she was his prop. Oh, unfathomable and divine mystery of the
+balances of destiny!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE REMARKS OF THE PRINCIPAL TENANT
+
+Jean Valjean was prudent enough never to go out by day. Every evening,
+at twilight, he walked for an hour or two, sometimes alone, often with
+Cosette, seeking the most deserted side alleys of the boulevard, and
+entering churches at nightfall. He liked to go to Saint-Medard, which is
+the nearest church. When he did not take Cosette with him, she remained
+with the old woman; but the child's delight was to go out with the good
+man. She preferred an hour with him to all her rapturous tete-a-tetes
+with Catherine. He held her hand as they walked, and said sweet things
+to her.
+
+It turned out that Cosette was a very gay little person.
+
+The old woman attended to the housekeeping and cooking and went to
+market.
+
+They lived soberly, always having a little fire, but like people in
+very moderate circumstances. Jean Valjean had made no alterations in
+the furniture as it was the first day; he had merely had the glass door
+leading to Cosette's dressing-room replaced by a solid door.
+
+He still wore his yellow coat, his black breeches, and his old hat.
+In the street, he was taken for a poor man. It sometimes happened that
+kind-hearted women turned back to bestow a sou on him. Jean Valjean
+accepted the sou with a deep bow. It also happened occasionally that he
+encountered some poor wretch asking alms; then he looked behind him
+to make sure that no one was observing him, stealthily approached the
+unfortunate man, put a piece of money into his hand, often a silver
+coin, and walked rapidly away. This had its disadvantages. He began
+to be known in the neighborhood under the name of the beggar who gives
+alms.
+
+The old principal lodger, a cross-looking creature, who was
+thoroughly permeated, so far as her neighbors were concerned, with the
+inquisitiveness peculiar to envious persons, scrutinized Jean Valjean
+a great deal, without his suspecting the fact. She was a little deaf,
+which rendered her talkative. There remained to her from her past, two
+teeth,--one above, the other below,--which she was continually knocking
+against each other. She had questioned Cosette, who had not been able
+to tell her anything, since she knew nothing herself except that she had
+come from Montfermeil. One morning, this spy saw Jean Valjean, with
+an air which struck the old gossip as peculiar, entering one of the
+uninhabited compartments of the hovel. She followed him with the step
+of an old cat, and was able to observe him without being seen, through a
+crack in the door, which was directly opposite him. Jean Valjean had his
+back turned towards this door, by way of greater security, no doubt. The
+old woman saw him fumble in his pocket and draw thence a case, scissors,
+and thread; then he began to rip the lining of one of the skirts of his
+coat, and from the opening he took a bit of yellowish paper, which he
+unfolded. The old woman recognized, with terror, the fact that it was
+a bank-bill for a thousand francs. It was the second or third only that
+she had seen in the course of her existence. She fled in alarm.
+
+A moment later, Jean Valjean accosted her, and asked her to go and
+get this thousand-franc bill changed for him, adding that it was his
+quarterly income, which he had received the day before. "Where?" thought
+the old woman. "He did not go out until six o'clock in the evening, and
+the government bank certainly is not open at that hour." The old
+woman went to get the bill changed, and mentioned her surmises. That
+thousand-franc note, commented on and multiplied, produced a vast
+amount of terrified discussion among the gossips of the Rue des Vignes
+Saint-Marcel.
+
+A few days later, it chanced that Jean Valjean was sawing some wood, in
+his shirt-sleeves, in the corridor. The old woman was in the chamber,
+putting things in order. She was alone. Cosette was occupied in admiring
+the wood as it was sawed. The old woman caught sight of the coat hanging
+on a nail, and examined it. The lining had been sewed up again. The good
+woman felt of it carefully, and thought she observed in the skirts and
+revers thicknesses of paper. More thousand-franc bank-bills, no doubt!
+
+She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets.
+Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a big
+pocket-book, a very large knife, and--a suspicious circumstance--several
+wigs of various colors. Each pocket of this coat had the air of being in
+a manner provided against unexpected accidents.
+
+Thus the inhabitants of the house reached the last days of winter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--A FIVE-FRANC PIECE FALLS ON THE GROUND AND PRODUCES A TUMULT
+
+Near Saint-Medard's church there was a poor man who was in the habit of
+crouching on the brink of a public well which had been condemned, and
+on whom Jean Valjean was fond of bestowing charity. He never passed this
+man without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he spoke to him. Those who
+envied this mendicant said that he belonged to the police. He was an
+ex-beadle of seventy-five, who was constantly mumbling his prayers.
+
+One evening, as Jean Valjean was passing by, when he had not Cosette
+with him, he saw the beggar in his usual place, beneath the lantern
+which had just been lighted. The man seemed engaged in prayer, according
+to his custom, and was much bent over. Jean Valjean stepped up to him
+and placed his customary alms in his hand. The mendicant raised his
+eyes suddenly, stared intently at Jean Valjean, then dropped his head
+quickly. This movement was like a flash of lightning. Jean Valjean was
+seized with a shudder. It seemed to him that he had just caught sight,
+by the light of the street lantern, not of the placid and beaming
+visage of the old beadle, but of a well-known and startling face. He
+experienced the same impression that one would have on finding one's
+self, all of a sudden, face to face, in the dark, with a tiger. He
+recoiled, terrified, petrified, daring neither to breathe, to speak,
+to remain, nor to flee, staring at the beggar who had dropped his head,
+which was enveloped in a rag, and no longer appeared to know that he
+was there. At this strange moment, an instinct--possibly the mysterious
+instinct of self-preservation,--restrained Jean Valjean from uttering a
+word. The beggar had the same figure, the same rags, the same appearance
+as he had every day. "Bah!" said Jean Valjean, "I am mad! I am dreaming!
+Impossible!" And he returned profoundly troubled.
+
+He hardly dared to confess, even to himself, that the face which he
+thought he had seen was the face of Javert.
+
+That night, on thinking the matter over, he regretted not having
+questioned the man, in order to force him to raise his head a second
+time.
+
+On the following day, at nightfall, he went back. The beggar was at his
+post. "Good day, my good man," said Jean Valjean, resolutely, handing
+him a sou. The beggar raised his head, and replied in a whining voice,
+"Thanks, my good sir." It was unmistakably the ex-beadle.
+
+Jean Valjean felt completely reassured. He began to laugh. "How the
+deuce could I have thought that I saw Javert there?" he thought. "Am I
+going to lose my eyesight now?" And he thought no more about it.
+
+A few days afterwards,--it might have been at eight o'clock in the
+evening,--he was in his room, and engaged in making Cosette spell aloud,
+when he heard the house door open and then shut again. This struck him
+as singular. The old woman, who was the only inhabitant of the house
+except himself, always went to bed at nightfall, so that she might not
+burn out her candles. Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be quiet.
+He heard some one ascending the stairs. It might possibly be the old
+woman, who might have fallen ill and have been out to the apothecary's.
+Jean Valjean listened.
+
+The step was heavy, and sounded like that of a man; but the old woman
+wore stout shoes, and there is nothing which so strongly resembles the
+step of a man as that of an old woman. Nevertheless, Jean Valjean blew
+out his candle.
+
+He had sent Cosette to bed, saying to her in a low voice, "Get into bed
+very softly"; and as he kissed her brow, the steps paused.
+
+Jean Valjean remained silent, motionless, with his back towards the
+door, seated on the chair from which he had not stirred, and holding his
+breath in the dark.
+
+After the expiration of a rather long interval, he turned round, as he
+heard nothing more, and, as he raised his eyes towards the door of his
+chamber, he saw a light through the keyhole. This light formed a sort
+of sinister star in the blackness of the door and the wall. There was
+evidently some one there, who was holding a candle in his hand and
+listening.
+
+Several minutes elapsed thus, and the light retreated. But he heard no
+sound of footsteps, which seemed to indicate that the person who had
+been listening at the door had removed his shoes.
+
+Jean Valjean threw himself, all dressed as he was, on his bed, and could
+not close his eyes all night.
+
+At daybreak, just as he was falling into a doze through fatigue, he was
+awakened by the creaking of a door which opened on some attic at the
+end of the corridor, then he heard the same masculine footstep which had
+ascended the stairs on the preceding evening. The step was approaching.
+He sprang off the bed and applied his eye to the keyhole, which was
+tolerably large, hoping to see the person who had made his way by night
+into the house and had listened at his door, as he passed. It was a
+man, in fact, who passed, this time without pausing, in front of Jean
+Valjean's chamber. The corridor was too dark to allow of the person's
+face being distinguished; but when the man reached the staircase, a
+ray of light from without made it stand out like a silhouette, and Jean
+Valjean had a complete view of his back. The man was of lofty stature,
+clad in a long frock-coat, with a cudgel under his arm. The formidable
+neck and shoulders belonged to Javert.
+
+Jean Valjean might have attempted to catch another glimpse of him
+through his window opening on the boulevard, but he would have been
+obliged to open the window: he dared not.
+
+It was evident that this man had entered with a key, and like himself.
+Who had given him that key? What was the meaning of this?
+
+When the old woman came to do the work, at seven o'clock in the morning,
+Jean Valjean cast a penetrating glance on her, but he did not question
+her. The good woman appeared as usual.
+
+As she swept up she remarked to him:--
+
+"Possibly Monsieur may have heard some one come in last night?"
+
+At that age, and on that boulevard, eight o'clock in the evening was the
+dead of the night.
+
+"That is true, by the way," he replied, in the most natural tone
+possible. "Who was it?"
+
+"It was a new lodger who has come into the house," said the old woman.
+
+"And what is his name?"
+
+"I don't know exactly; Dumont, or Daumont, or some name of that sort."
+
+"And who is this Monsieur Dumont?"
+
+The old woman gazed at him with her little polecat eyes, and answered:--
+
+"A gentleman of property, like yourself."
+
+Perhaps she had no ulterior meaning. Jean Valjean thought he perceived
+one.
+
+When the old woman had taken her departure, he did up a hundred francs
+which he had in a cupboard, into a roll, and put it in his pocket. In
+spite of all the precautions which he took in this operation so that he
+might not be heard rattling silver, a hundred-sou piece escaped from his
+hands and rolled noisily on the floor.
+
+When darkness came on, he descended and carefully scrutinized both sides
+of the boulevard. He saw no one. The boulevard appeared to be absolutely
+deserted. It is true that a person can conceal himself behind trees.
+
+He went up stairs again.
+
+"Come." he said to Cosette.
+
+He took her by the hand, and they both went out.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY
+
+An observation here becomes necessary, in view of the pages which the
+reader is about to peruse, and of others which will be met with further
+on.
+
+The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning
+himself, has been absent from Paris for many years. Paris has been
+transformed since he quitted it. A new city has arisen, which is, after
+a fashion, unknown to him. There is no need for him to say that he loves
+Paris: Paris is his mind's natal city. In consequence of demolitions and
+reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris which he bore away
+religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of days gone by. He must
+be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed. It is
+possible that when the author conducts his readers to a spot and says,
+"In such a street there stands such and such a house," neither street
+nor house will any longer exist in that locality. Readers may verify
+the facts if they care to take the trouble. For his own part, he is
+unacquainted with the new Paris, and he writes with the old Paris before
+his eyes in an illusion which is precious to him. It is a delight to him
+to dream that there still lingers behind him something of that which he
+beheld when he was in his own country, and that all has not vanished.
+So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those
+streets are a matter of indifference to you; that those windows,
+those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are
+strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered
+haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to
+you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on,
+when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to
+you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are
+necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered
+those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left
+a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements.
+All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never
+behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on
+a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an
+apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak,
+the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they
+are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no
+change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the
+face of your mother.
+
+May we, then, be permitted to speak of the past in the present? That
+said, we beg the reader to take note of it, and we continue.
+
+Jean Valjean instantly quitted the boulevard and plunged into the
+streets, taking the most intricate lines which he could devise,
+returning on his track at times, to make sure that he was not being
+followed.
+
+[Illustration: The Black Hunt 2b5-1-black-hunt]
+
+This manoeuvre is peculiar to the hunted stag. On soil where an
+imprint of the track may be left, this manoeuvre possesses, among other
+advantages, that of deceiving the huntsmen and the dogs, by throwing
+them on the wrong scent. In venery this is called false re-imbushment.
+
+The moon was full that night. Jean Valjean was not sorry for this. The
+moon, still very close to the horizon, cast great masses of light and
+shadow in the streets. Jean Valjean could glide along close to the
+houses on the dark side, and yet keep watch on the light side. He did
+not, perhaps, take sufficiently into consideration the fact that the
+dark side escaped him. Still, in the deserted lanes which lie near the
+Rue Poliveau, he thought he felt certain that no one was following him.
+
+Cosette walked on without asking any questions. The sufferings of the
+first six years of her life had instilled something passive into her
+nature. Moreover,--and this is a remark to which we shall frequently
+have occasion to recur,--she had grown used, without being herself
+aware of it, to the peculiarities of this good man and to the freaks of
+destiny. And then she was with him, and she felt safe.
+
+Jean Valjean knew no more where he was going than did Cosette. He
+trusted in God, as she trusted in him. It seemed as though he also were
+clinging to the hand of some one greater than himself; he thought he
+felt a being leading him, though invisible. However, he had no settled
+idea, no plan, no project. He was not even absolutely sure that it was
+Javert, and then it might have been Javert, without Javert knowing that
+he was Jean Valjean. Was not he disguised? Was not he believed to be
+dead? Still, queer things had been going on for several days. He wanted
+no more of them. He was determined not to return to the Gorbeau house.
+Like the wild animal chased from its lair, he was seeking a hole in
+which he might hide until he could find one where he might dwell.
+
+Jean Valjean described many and varied labyrinths in the Mouffetard
+quarter, which was already asleep, as though the discipline of the
+Middle Ages and the yoke of the curfew still existed; he combined in
+various manners, with cunning strategy, the Rue Censier and the Rue
+Copeau, the Rue du Battoir-Saint-Victor and the Rue du Puits l'Ermite.
+There are lodging houses in this locality, but he did not even enter
+one, finding nothing which suited him. He had no doubt that if any one
+had chanced to be upon his track, they would have lost it.
+
+As eleven o'clock struck from Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, he was traversing
+the Rue de Pontoise, in front of the office of the commissary of police,
+situated at No. 14. A few moments later, the instinct of which we have
+spoken above made him turn round. At that moment he saw distinctly,
+thanks to the commissary's lantern, which betrayed them, three men
+who were following him closely, pass, one after the other, under that
+lantern, on the dark side of the street. One of the three entered the
+alley leading to the commissary's house. The one who marched at their
+head struck him as decidedly suspicious.
+
+"Come, child," he said to Cosette; and he made haste to quit the Rue
+Pontoise.
+
+He took a circuit, turned into the Passage des Patriarches, which was
+closed on account of the hour, strode along the Rue de l'Epee-de-Bois
+and the Rue de l'Arbalete, and plunged into the Rue des Postes.
+
+At that time there was a square formed by the intersection of
+streets, where the College Rollin stands to-day, and where the Rue
+Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve turns off.
+
+It is understood, of course, that the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve is an
+old street, and that a posting-chaise does not pass through the Rue des
+Postes once in ten years. In the thirteenth century this Rue des Postes
+was inhabited by potters, and its real name is Rue des Pots.
+
+The moon cast a livid light into this open space. Jean Valjean went into
+ambush in a doorway, calculating that if the men were still following
+him, he could not fail to get a good look at them, as they traversed
+this illuminated space.
+
+In point of fact, three minutes had not elapsed when the men made their
+appearance. There were four of them now. All were tall, dressed in long,
+brown coats, with round hats, and huge cudgels in their hands. Their
+great stature and their vast fists rendered them no less alarming
+than did their sinister stride through the darkness. One would have
+pronounced them four spectres disguised as bourgeois.
+
+They halted in the middle of the space and formed a group, like men in
+consultation. They had an air of indecision. The one who appeared to be
+their leader turned round and pointed hastily with his right hand in the
+direction which Jean Valjean had taken; another seemed to indicate the
+contrary direction with considerable obstinacy. At the moment when the
+first man wheeled round, the moon fell full in his face. Jean Valjean
+recognized Javert perfectly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--IT IS LUCKY THAT THE PONT D'AUSTERLITZ BEARS CARRIAGES
+
+Uncertainty was at an end for Jean Valjean: fortunately it still lasted
+for the men. He took advantage of their hesitation. It was time lost for
+them, but gained for him. He slipped from under the gate where he had
+concealed himself, and went down the Rue des Postes, towards the region
+of the Jardin des Plantes. Cosette was beginning to be tired. He took
+her in his arms and carried her. There were no passers-by, and the
+street lanterns had not been lighted on account of there being a moon.
+
+He redoubled his pace.
+
+In a few strides he had reached the Goblet potteries, on the front
+of which the moonlight rendered distinctly legible the ancient
+inscription:--
+
+ De Goblet fils c'est ici la fabrique;[14]
+ Venez choisir des cruches et des broos,
+ Des pots a fleurs, des tuyaux, de la brique.
+ A tout venant le Coeur vend des Carreaux.
+
+
+
+He left behind him the Rue de la Clef, then the Fountain Saint-Victor,
+skirted the Jardin des Plantes by the lower streets, and reached the
+quay. There he turned round. The quay was deserted. The streets were
+deserted. There was no one behind him. He drew a long breath.
+
+He gained the Pont d'Austerlitz.
+
+Tolls were still collected there at that epoch.
+
+He presented himself at the toll office and handed over a sou.
+
+"It is two sous," said the old soldier in charge of the bridge. "You are
+carrying a child who can walk. Pay for two."
+
+He paid, vexed that his passage should have aroused remark. Every flight
+should be an imperceptible slipping away.
+
+A heavy cart was crossing the Seine at the same time as himself, and on
+its way, like him, to the right bank. This was of use to him. He could
+traverse the bridge in the shadow of the cart.
+
+Towards the middle of the Bridge, Cosette, whose feet were benumbed,
+wanted to walk. He set her on the ground and took her hand again.
+
+The bridge once crossed, he perceived some timber-yards on his right. He
+directed his course thither. In order to reach them, it was necessary to
+risk himself in a tolerably large unsheltered and illuminated space.
+He did not hesitate. Those who were on his track had evidently lost the
+scent, and Jean Valjean believed himself to be out of danger. Hunted,
+yes; followed, no.
+
+A little street, the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, opened out
+between two timber-yards enclosed in walls. This street was dark and
+narrow and seemed made expressly for him. Before entering it he cast a
+glance behind him.
+
+From the point where he stood he could see the whole extent of the Pont
+d'Austerlitz.
+
+Four shadows were just entering on the bridge.
+
+These shadows had their backs turned to the Jardin des Plantes and were
+on their way to the right bank.
+
+These four shadows were the four men.
+
+Jean Valjean shuddered like the wild beast which is recaptured.
+
+One hope remained to him; it was, that the men had not, perhaps, stepped
+on the bridge, and had not caught sight of him while he was crossing the
+large illuminated space, holding Cosette by the hand.
+
+In that case, by plunging into the little street before him, he
+might escape, if he could reach the timber-yards, the marshes, the
+market-gardens, the uninhabited ground which was not built upon.
+
+It seemed to him that he might commit himself to that silent little
+street. He entered it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--TO WIT, THE PLAN OF PARIS IN 1727
+
+Three hundred paces further on, he arrived at a point where the street
+forked. It separated into two streets, which ran in a slanting line, one
+to the right, and the other to the left.
+
+Jean Valjean had before him what resembled the two branches of a Y.
+Which should he choose? He did not hesitate, but took the one on the
+right.
+
+Why?
+
+Because that to the left ran towards a suburb, that is to say, towards
+inhabited regions, and the right branch towards the open country, that
+is to say, towards deserted regions.
+
+However, they no longer walked very fast. Cosette's pace retarded Jean
+Valjean's.
+
+He took her up and carried her again. Cosette laid her head on the
+shoulder of the good man and said not a word.
+
+He turned round from time to time and looked behind him. He took care to
+keep always on the dark side of the street. The street was straight
+in his rear. The first two or three times that he turned round he saw
+nothing; the silence was profound, and he continued his march somewhat
+reassured. All at once, on turning round, he thought he perceived in the
+portion of the street which he had just passed through, far off in the
+obscurity, something which was moving.
+
+He rushed forward precipitately rather than walked, hoping to find some
+side-street, to make his escape through it, and thus to break his scent
+once more.
+
+He arrived at a wall.
+
+This wall, however, did not absolutely prevent further progress; it was
+a wall which bordered a transverse street, in which the one he had taken
+ended.
+
+Here again, he was obliged to come to a decision; should he go to the
+right or to the left.
+
+He glanced to the right. The fragmentary lane was prolonged between
+buildings which were either sheds or barns, then ended at a blind alley.
+The extremity of the cul-de-sac was distinctly visible,--a lofty white
+wall.
+
+He glanced to the left. On that side the lane was open, and about
+two hundred paces further on, ran into a street of which it was the
+affluent. On that side lay safety.
+
+At the moment when Jean Valjean was meditating a turn to the left, in
+an effort to reach the street which he saw at the end of the lane, he
+perceived a sort of motionless, black statue at the corner of the lane
+and the street towards which he was on the point of directing his steps.
+
+It was some one, a man, who had evidently just been posted there, and
+who was barring the passage and waiting.
+
+Jean Valjean recoiled.
+
+The point of Paris where Jean Valjean found himself, situated between
+the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and la Rapee, is one of those which recent
+improvements have transformed from top to bottom,--resulting in
+disfigurement according to some, and in a transfiguration according to
+others. The market-gardens, the timber-yards, and the old buildings
+have been effaced. To-day, there are brand-new, wide streets, arenas,
+circuses, hippodromes, railway stations, and a prison, Mazas, there;
+progress, as the reader sees, with its antidote.
+
+Half a century ago, in that ordinary, popular tongue, which is all
+compounded of traditions, which persists in calling the Institut les
+Quatre-Nations, and the Opera-Comique Feydeau, the precise spot
+whither Jean Valjean had arrived was called le Petit Picpus. The
+Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Paris, the Barriere des Sergents, the
+Porcherons, la Galiote, les Celestins, les Capucins, le Mail, la Bourbe,
+l'Arbre de Cracovie, la Petite-Pologne--these are the names of old Paris
+which survive amid the new. The memory of the populace hovers over these
+relics of the past.
+
+Le Petit-Picpus, which, moreover, hardly ever had any existence, and
+never was more than the outline of a quarter, had nearly the monkish
+aspect of a Spanish town. The roads were not much paved; the streets
+were not much built up. With the exception of the two or three streets,
+of which we shall presently speak, all was wall and solitude there. Not
+a shop, not a vehicle, hardly a candle lighted here and there in the
+windows; all lights extinguished after ten o'clock. Gardens, convents,
+timber-yards, marshes; occasional lowly dwellings and great walls as
+high as the houses.
+
+Such was this quarter in the last century. The Revolution snubbed
+it soundly. The republican government demolished and cut through it.
+Rubbish shoots were established there. Thirty years ago, this quarter
+was disappearing under the erasing process of new buildings. To-day,
+it has been utterly blotted out. The Petit-Picpus, of which no existing
+plan has preserved a trace, is indicated with sufficient clearness
+in the plan of 1727, published at Paris by Denis Thierry, Rue
+Saint-Jacques, opposite the Rue du Platre; and at Lyons, by Jean Girin,
+Rue Merciere, at the sign of Prudence. Petit-Picpus had, as
+we have just mentioned, a Y of streets, formed by the Rue du
+Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which spread out in two branches, taking on
+the left the name of Little Picpus Street, and on the right the name of
+the Rue Polonceau. The two limbs of the Y were connected at the apex
+as by a bar; this bar was called Rue Droit-Mur. The Rue Polonceau ended
+there; Rue Petit-Picpus passed on, and ascended towards the Lenoir
+market. A person coming from the Seine reached the extremity of the Rue
+Polonceau, and had on his right the Rue Droit-Mur, turning abruptly at a
+right angle, in front of him the wall of that street, and on his right a
+truncated prolongation of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had no issue and was
+called the Cul-de-Sac Genrot.
+
+It was here that Jean Valjean stood.
+
+As we have just said, on catching sight of that black silhouette
+standing on guard at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur and the Rue
+Petit-Picpus, he recoiled. There could be no doubt of it. That phantom
+was lying in wait for him.
+
+What was he to do?
+
+The time for retreating was passed. That which he had perceived in
+movement an instant before, in the distant darkness, was Javert and his
+squad without a doubt. Javert was probably already at the commencement
+of the street at whose end Jean Valjean stood. Javert, to all
+appearances, was acquainted with this little labyrinth, and had taken
+his precautions by sending one of his men to guard the exit. These
+surmises, which so closely resembled proofs, whirled suddenly, like a
+handful of dust caught up by an unexpected gust of wind, through Jean
+Valjean's mournful brain. He examined the Cul-de-Sac Genrot; there he
+was cut off. He examined the Rue Petit-Picpus; there stood a sentinel.
+He saw that black form standing out in relief against the white
+pavement, illuminated by the moon; to advance was to fall into this
+man's hands; to retreat was to fling himself into Javert's arms. Jean
+Valjean felt himself caught, as in a net, which was slowly contracting;
+he gazed heavenward in despair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE GROPINGS OF FLIGHT
+
+In order to understand what follows, it is requisite to form an exact
+idea of the Droit-Mur lane, and, in particular, of the angle which one
+leaves on the left when one emerges from the Rue Polonceau into this
+lane. Droit-Mur lane was almost entirely bordered on the right, as far
+as the Rue Petit-Picpus, by houses of mean aspect; on the left by a
+solitary building of severe outlines, composed of numerous parts which
+grew gradually higher by a story or two as they approached the Rue
+Petit-Picpus side; so that this building, which was very lofty on the
+Rue Petit-Picpus side, was tolerably low on the side adjoining the Rue
+Polonceau. There, at the angle of which we have spoken, it descended to
+such a degree that it consisted of merely a wall. This wall did not abut
+directly on the Street; it formed a deeply retreating niche, concealed
+by its two corners from two observers who might have been, one in the
+Rue Polonceau, the other in the Rue Droit-Mur.
+
+Beginning with these angles of the niche, the wall extended along the
+Rue Polonceau as far as a house which bore the number 49, and along the
+Rue Droit-Mur, where the fragment was much shorter, as far as the gloomy
+building which we have mentioned and whose gable it intersected, thus
+forming another retreating angle in the street. This gable was sombre
+of aspect; only one window was visible, or, to speak more correctly, two
+shutters covered with a sheet of zinc and kept constantly closed.
+
+The state of the places of which we are here giving a description is
+rigorously exact, and will certainly awaken a very precise memory in the
+mind of old inhabitants of the quarter.
+
+The niche was entirely filled by a thing which resembled a colossal
+and wretched door; it was a vast, formless assemblage of perpendicular
+planks, the upper ones being broader than the lower, bound together by
+long transverse strips of iron. At one side there was a carriage gate of
+the ordinary dimensions, and which had evidently not been cut more than
+fifty years previously.
+
+A linden-tree showed its crest above the niche, and the wall was covered
+with ivy on the side of the Rue Polonceau.
+
+In the imminent peril in which Jean Valjean found himself, this sombre
+building had about it a solitary and uninhabited look which tempted him.
+He ran his eyes rapidly over it; he said to himself, that if he could
+contrive to get inside it, he might save himself. First he conceived an
+idea, then a hope.
+
+In the central portion of the front of this building, on the Rue
+Droit-Mur side, there were at all the windows of the different stories
+ancient cistern pipes of lead. The various branches of the pipes which
+led from one central pipe to all these little basins sketched out a sort
+of tree on the front. These ramifications of pipes with their hundred
+elbows imitated those old leafless vine-stocks which writhe over the
+fronts of old farm-houses.
+
+This odd espalier, with its branches of lead and iron, was the first
+thing that struck Jean Valjean. He seated Cosette with her back against
+a stone post, with an injunction to be silent, and ran to the spot where
+the conduit touched the pavement. Perhaps there was some way of climbing
+up by it and entering the house. But the pipe was dilapidated and past
+service, and hardly hung to its fastenings. Moreover, all the windows
+of this silent dwelling were grated with heavy iron bars, even the attic
+windows in the roof. And then, the moon fell full upon that facade, and
+the man who was watching at the corner of the street would have seen
+Jean Valjean in the act of climbing. And finally, what was to be done
+with Cosette? How was she to be drawn up to the top of a three-story
+house?
+
+He gave up all idea of climbing by means of the drain-pipe, and crawled
+along the wall to get back into the Rue Polonceau.
+
+When he reached the slant of the wall where he had left Cosette, he
+noticed that no one could see him there. As we have just explained, he
+was concealed from all eyes, no matter from which direction they were
+approaching; besides this, he was in the shadow. Finally, there were
+two doors; perhaps they might be forced. The wall above which he saw the
+linden-tree and the ivy evidently abutted on a garden where he could, at
+least, hide himself, although there were as yet no leaves on the trees,
+and spend the remainder of the night.
+
+Time was passing; he must act quickly.
+
+He felt over the carriage door, and immediately recognized the fact that
+it was impracticable outside and in.
+
+He approached the other door with more hope; it was frightfully
+decrepit; its very immensity rendered it less solid; the planks were
+rotten; the iron bands--there were only three of them--were rusted. It
+seemed as though it might be possible to pierce this worm-eaten barrier.
+
+On examining it he found that the door was not a door; it had neither
+hinges, cross-bars, lock, nor fissure in the middle; the iron bands
+traversed it from side to side without any break. Through the crevices
+in the planks he caught a view of unhewn slabs and blocks of stone
+roughly cemented together, which passers-by might still have seen there
+ten years ago. He was forced to acknowledge with consternation that this
+apparent door was simply the wooden decoration of a building against
+which it was placed. It was easy to tear off a plank; but then, one
+found one's self face to face with a wall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH GAS LANTERNS
+
+At that moment a heavy and measured sound began to be audible at some
+distance. Jean Valjean risked a glance round the corner of the street.
+Seven or eight soldiers, drawn up in a platoon, had just debouched
+into the Rue Polonceau. He saw the gleam of their bayonets. They were
+advancing towards him; these soldiers, at whose head he distinguished
+Javert's tall figure, advanced slowly and cautiously. They halted
+frequently; it was plain that they were searching all the nooks of the
+walls and all the embrasures of the doors and alleys.
+
+This was some patrol that Javert had encountered--there could be no
+mistake as to this surmise--and whose aid he had demanded.
+
+Javert's two acolytes were marching in their ranks.
+
+At the rate at which they were marching, and in consideration of the
+halts which they were making, it would take them about a quarter of
+an hour to reach the spot where Jean Valjean stood. It was a frightful
+moment. A few minutes only separated Jean Valjean from that terrible
+precipice which yawned before him for the third time. And the galleys
+now meant not only the galleys, but Cosette lost to him forever; that is
+to say, a life resembling the interior of a tomb.
+
+There was but one thing which was possible.
+
+Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one might say,
+two beggar's pouches: in one he kept his saintly thoughts; in the other
+the redoubtable talents of a convict. He rummaged in the one or the
+other, according to circumstances.
+
+Among his other resources, thanks to his numerous escapes from the
+prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be remembered, a past master in the
+incredible art of crawling up without ladder or climbing-irons, by sheer
+muscular force, by leaning on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his
+hips, and his knees, by helping himself on the rare projections of the
+stone, in the right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth story, if need
+be; an art which has rendered so celebrated and so alarming that corner
+of the wall of the Conciergerie of Paris by which Battemolle, condemned
+to death, made his escape twenty years ago.
+
+Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which he espied the
+linden; it was about eighteen feet in height. The angle which it formed
+with the gable of the large building was filled, at its lower extremity,
+by a mass of masonry of a triangular shape, probably intended to
+preserve that too convenient corner from the rubbish of those dirty
+creatures called the passers-by. This practice of filling up corners of
+the wall is much in use in Paris.
+
+This mass was about five feet in height; the space above the summit of
+this mass which it was necessary to climb was not more than fourteen
+feet.
+
+The wall was surmounted by a flat stone without a coping.
+
+Cosette was the difficulty, for she did not know how to climb a wall.
+Should he abandon her? Jean Valjean did not once think of that. It
+was impossible to carry her. A man's whole strength is required to
+successfully carry out these singular ascents. The least burden would
+disturb his centre of gravity and pull him downwards.
+
+A rope would have been required; Jean Valjean had none. Where was he to
+get a rope at midnight, in the Rue Polonceau? Certainly, if Jean Valjean
+had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope at that moment.
+
+All extreme situations have their lightning flashes which sometimes
+dazzle, sometimes illuminate us.
+
+Jean Valjean's despairing glance fell on the street lantern-post of the
+blind alley Genrot.
+
+At that epoch there were no gas-jets in the streets of Paris. At
+nightfall lanterns placed at regular distances were lighted; they were
+ascended and descended by means of a rope, which traversed the street
+from side to side, and was adjusted in a groove of the post. The pulley
+over which this rope ran was fastened underneath the lantern in a little
+iron box, the key to which was kept by the lamp-lighter, and the rope
+itself was protected by a metal case.
+
+Jean Valjean, with the energy of a supreme struggle, crossed the street
+at one bound, entered the blind alley, broke the latch of the little box
+with the point of his knife, and an instant later he was beside Cosette
+once more. He had a rope. These gloomy inventors of expedients work
+rapidly when they are fighting against fatality.
+
+We have already explained that the lanterns had not been lighted that
+night. The lantern in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot was thus naturally extinct,
+like the rest; and one could pass directly under it without even
+noticing that it was no longer in its place.
+
+Nevertheless, the hour, the place, the darkness, Jean Valjean's
+absorption, his singular gestures, his goings and comings, all had begun
+to render Cosette uneasy. Any other child than she would have given vent
+to loud shrieks long before. She contented herself with plucking Jean
+Valjean by the skirt of his coat. They could hear the sound of the
+patrol's approach ever more and more distinctly.
+
+"Father," said she, in a very low voice, "I am afraid. Who is coming
+yonder?"
+
+"Hush!" replied the unhappy man; "it is Madame Thenardier."
+
+Cosette shuddered. He added:--
+
+"Say nothing. Don't interfere with me. If you cry out, if you weep, the
+Thenardier is lying in wait for you. She is coming to take you back."
+
+Then, without haste, but without making a useless movement, with firm
+and curt precision, the more remarkable at a moment when the patrol and
+Javert might come upon him at any moment, he undid his cravat, passed it
+round Cosette's body under the armpits, taking care that it should not
+hurt the child, fastened this cravat to one end of the rope, by means of
+that knot which seafaring men call a "swallow knot," took the other end
+of the rope in his teeth, pulled off his shoes and stockings, which
+he threw over the wall, stepped upon the mass of masonry, and began
+to raise himself in the angle of the wall and the gable with as much
+solidity and certainty as though he had the rounds of a ladder under his
+feet and elbows. Half a minute had not elapsed when he was resting on
+his knees on the wall.
+
+Cosette gazed at him in stupid amazement, without uttering a word. Jean
+Valjean's injunction, and the name of Madame Thenardier, had chilled her
+blood.
+
+All at once she heard Jean Valjean's voice crying to her, though in a
+very low tone:--
+
+"Put your back against the wall."
+
+She obeyed.
+
+"Don't say a word, and don't be alarmed," went on Jean Valjean.
+
+And she felt herself lifted from the ground.
+
+Before she had time to recover herself, she was on the top of the wall.
+
+Jean Valjean grasped her, put her on his back, took her two tiny hands
+in his large left hand, lay down flat on his stomach and crawled along
+on top of the wall as far as the cant. As he had guessed, there stood
+a building whose roof started from the top of the wooden barricade and
+descended to within a very short distance of the ground, with a gentle
+slope which grazed the linden-tree. A lucky circumstance, for the wall
+was much higher on this side than on the street side. Jean Valjean could
+only see the ground at a great depth below him.
+
+He had just reached the slope of the roof, and had not yet left the
+crest of the wall, when a violent uproar announced the arrival of the
+patrol. The thundering voice of Javert was audible:--
+
+"Search the blind alley! The Rue Droit-Mur is guarded! so is the Rue
+Petit-Picpus. I'll answer for it that he is in the blind alley."
+
+The soldiers rushed into the Genrot alley.
+
+Jean Valjean allowed himself to slide down the roof, still holding fast
+to Cosette, reached the linden-tree, and leaped to the ground. Whether
+from terror or courage, Cosette had not breathed a sound, though her
+hands were a little abraded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA
+
+Jean Valjean found himself in a sort of garden which was very vast and
+of singular aspect; one of those melancholy gardens which seem made to
+be looked at in winter and at night. This garden was oblong in shape,
+with an alley of large poplars at the further end, tolerably tall forest
+trees in the corners, and an unshaded space in the centre, where could
+be seen a very large, solitary tree, then several fruit-trees, gnarled
+and bristling like bushes, beds of vegetables, a melon patch, whose
+glass frames sparkled in the moonlight, and an old well. Here and
+there stood stone benches which seemed black with moss. The alleys were
+bordered with gloomy and very erect little shrubs. The grass had half
+taken possession of them, and a green mould covered the rest.
+
+Jean Valjean had beside him the building whose roof had served him as
+a means of descent, a pile of fagots, and, behind the fagots, directly
+against the wall, a stone statue, whose mutilated face was no longer
+anything more than a shapeless mask which loomed vaguely through the
+gloom.
+
+The building was a sort of ruin, where dismantled chambers were
+distinguishable, one of which, much encumbered, seemed to serve as a
+shed.
+
+The large building of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had a wing on the Rue
+Petit-Picpus, turned two facades, at right angles, towards this garden.
+These interior facades were even more tragic than the exterior. All
+the windows were grated. Not a gleam of light was visible at any one of
+them. The upper story had scuttles like prisons. One of those facades
+cast its shadow on the other, which fell over the garden like an immense
+black pall.
+
+No other house was visible. The bottom of the garden was lost in mist
+and darkness. Nevertheless, walls could be confusedly made out, which
+intersected as though there were more cultivated land beyond, and the
+low roofs of the Rue Polonceau.
+
+Nothing more wild and solitary than this garden could be imagined. There
+was no one in it, which was quite natural in view of the hour; but it
+did not seem as though this spot were made for any one to walk in, even
+in broad daylight.
+
+Jean Valjean's first care had been to get hold of his shoes and put them
+on again, then to step under the shed with Cosette. A man who is fleeing
+never thinks himself sufficiently hidden. The child, whose thoughts were
+still on the Thenardier, shared his instinct for withdrawing from sight
+as much as possible.
+
+Cosette trembled and pressed close to him. They heard the tumultuous
+noise of the patrol searching the blind alley and the streets; the blows
+of their gun-stocks against the stones; Javert's appeals to the police
+spies whom he had posted, and his imprecations mingled with words which
+could not be distinguished.
+
+At the expiration of a quarter of an hour it seemed as though that
+species of stormy roar were becoming more distant. Jean Valjean held his
+breath.
+
+He had laid his hand lightly on Cosette's mouth.
+
+However, the solitude in which he stood was so strangely calm, that this
+frightful uproar, close and furious as it was, did not disturb him by so
+much as the shadow of a misgiving. It seemed as though those walls had
+been built of the deaf stones of which the Scriptures speak.
+
+All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a
+sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been
+horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst
+of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night;
+women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure
+accents of virgins and the innocent accents of children,--voices which
+are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant
+still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded
+from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment
+when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of
+angels was approaching through the gloom.
+
+Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.
+
+They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of
+them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that
+they must kneel.
+
+These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent
+the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in
+an uninhabited house.
+
+While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no
+longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he
+felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.
+
+The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could
+not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.
+
+All fell silent again. There was no longer anything in the street;
+there was nothing in the garden. That which had menaced, that which had
+reassured him,--all had vanished. The breeze swayed a few dry weeds
+on the crest of the wall, and they gave out a faint, sweet, melancholy
+sound.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--CONTINUATION OF THE ENIGMA
+
+The night wind had risen, which indicated that it must be between one
+and two o'clock in the morning. Poor Cosette said nothing. As she had
+seated herself beside him and leaned her head against him, Jean Valjean
+had fancied that she was asleep. He bent down and looked at her.
+Cosette's eyes were wide open, and her thoughtful air pained Jean
+Valjean.
+
+She was still trembling.
+
+"Are you sleepy?" said Jean Valjean.
+
+"I am very cold," she replied.
+
+A moment later she resumed:--
+
+"Is she still there?"
+
+"Who?" said Jean Valjean.
+
+"Madame Thenardier."
+
+Jean Valjean had already forgotten the means which he had employed to
+make Cosette keep silent.
+
+"Ah!" said he, "she is gone. You need fear nothing further."
+
+The child sighed as though a load had been lifted from her breast.
+
+The ground was damp, the shed open on all sides, the breeze grew more
+keen every instant. The goodman took off his coat and wrapped it round
+Cosette.
+
+"Are you less cold now?" said he.
+
+"Oh, yes, father."
+
+"Well, wait for me a moment. I will soon be back."
+
+He quitted the ruin and crept along the large building, seeking a better
+shelter. He came across doors, but they were closed. There were bars at
+all the windows of the ground floor.
+
+Just after he had turned the inner angle of the edifice, he observed
+that he was coming to some arched windows, where he perceived a light.
+He stood on tiptoe and peeped through one of these windows. They all
+opened on a tolerably vast hall, paved with large flagstones, cut up
+by arcades and pillars, where only a tiny light and great shadows were
+visible. The light came from a taper which was burning in one
+corner. The apartment was deserted, and nothing was stirring in it.
+Nevertheless, by dint of gazing intently he thought he perceived on the
+ground something which appeared to be covered with a winding-sheet, and
+which resembled a human form. This form was lying face downward, flat
+on the pavement, with the arms extended in the form of a cross, in the
+immobility of death. One would have said, judging from a sort of serpent
+which undulated over the floor, that this sinister form had a rope round
+its neck.
+
+The whole chamber was bathed in that mist of places which are sparely
+illuminated, which adds to horror.
+
+Jean Valjean often said afterwards, that, although many funereal
+spectres had crossed his path in life, he had never beheld anything more
+blood-curdling and terrible than that enigmatical form accomplishing
+some inexplicable mystery in that gloomy place, and beheld thus at
+night. It was alarming to suppose that that thing was perhaps dead; and
+still more alarming to think that it was perhaps alive.
+
+He had the courage to plaster his face to the glass, and to watch
+whether the thing would move. In spite of his remaining thus what seemed
+to him a very long time, the outstretched form made no movement. All
+at once he felt himself overpowered by an inexpressible terror, and he
+fled. He began to run towards the shed, not daring to look behind him.
+It seemed to him, that if he turned his head, he should see that form
+following him with great strides and waving its arms.
+
+He reached the ruin all out of breath. His knees were giving way beneath
+him; the perspiration was pouring from him.
+
+Where was he? Who could ever have imagined anything like that sort of
+sepulchre in the midst of Paris! What was this strange house? An edifice
+full of nocturnal mystery, calling to souls through the darkness with
+the voice of angels, and when they came, offering them abruptly that
+terrible vision; promising to open the radiant portals of heaven, and
+then opening the horrible gates of the tomb! And it actually was an
+edifice, a house, which bore a number on the street! It was not a dream!
+He had to touch the stones to convince himself that such was the fact.
+
+Cold, anxiety, uneasiness, the emotions of the night, had given him a
+genuine fever, and all these ideas were clashing together in his brain.
+
+He stepped up to Cosette. She was asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE ENIGMA BECOMES DOUBLY MYSTERIOUS
+
+The child had laid her head on a stone and fallen asleep.
+
+He sat down beside her and began to think. Little by little, as he gazed
+at her, he grew calm and regained possession of his freedom of mind.
+
+He clearly perceived this truth, the foundation of his life henceforth,
+that so long as she was there, so long as he had her near him, he should
+need nothing except for her, he should fear nothing except for her. He
+was not even conscious that he was very cold, since he had taken off his
+coat to cover her.
+
+Nevertheless, athwart this revery into which he had fallen he had heard
+for some time a peculiar noise. It was like the tinkling of a bell. This
+sound proceeded from the garden. It could be heard distinctly though
+faintly. It resembled the faint, vague music produced by the bells of
+cattle at night in the pastures.
+
+This noise made Valjean turn round.
+
+He looked and saw that there was some one in the garden.
+
+A being resembling a man was walking amid the bell-glasses of the melon
+beds, rising, stooping, halting, with regular movements, as though he
+were dragging or spreading out something on the ground. This person
+appeared to limp.
+
+Jean Valjean shuddered with the continual tremor of the unhappy. For
+them everything is hostile and suspicious. They distrust the day
+because it enables people to see them, and the night because it aids
+in surprising them. A little while before he had shivered because the
+garden was deserted, and now he shivered because there was some one
+there.
+
+He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He said to himself
+that Javert and the spies had, perhaps, not taken their departure; that
+they had, no doubt, left people on the watch in the street; that if this
+man should discover him in the garden, he would cry out for help against
+thieves and deliver him up. He took the sleeping Cosette gently in his
+arms and carried her behind a heap of old furniture, which was out of
+use, in the most remote corner of the shed. Cosette did not stir.
+
+From that point he scrutinized the appearance of the being in the
+melon patch. The strange thing about it was, that the sound of the bell
+followed each of this man's movements. When the man approached, the
+sound approached; when the man retreated, the sound retreated; if he
+made any hasty gesture, a tremolo accompanied the gesture; when he
+halted, the sound ceased. It appeared evident that the bell was attached
+to that man; but what could that signify? Who was this man who had a
+bell suspended about him like a ram or an ox?
+
+As he put these questions to himself, he touched Cosette's hands. They
+were icy cold.
+
+"Ah! good God!" he cried.
+
+He spoke to her in a low voice:--
+
+"Cosette!"
+
+She did not open her eyes.
+
+He shook her vigorously.
+
+She did not wake.
+
+"Is she dead?" he said to himself, and sprang to his feet, quivering
+from head to foot.
+
+The most frightful thoughts rushed pell-mell through his mind. There
+are moments when hideous surmises assail us like a cohort of furies, and
+violently force the partitions of our brains. When those we love are in
+question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. He remembered that
+sleep in the open air on a cold night may be fatal.
+
+Cosette was pale, and had fallen at full length on the ground at his
+feet, without a movement.
+
+He listened to her breathing: she still breathed, but with a respiration
+which seemed to him weak and on the point of extinction.
+
+
+How was he to warm her back to life? How was he to rouse her? All that
+was not connected with this vanished from his thoughts. He rushed wildly
+from the ruin.
+
+It was absolutely necessary that Cosette should be in bed and beside a
+fire in less than a quarter of an hour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THE MAN WITH THE BELL
+
+He walked straight up to the man whom he saw in the garden. He had taken
+in his hand the roll of silver which was in the pocket of his waistcoat.
+
+The man's head was bent down, and he did not see him approaching. In a
+few strides Jean Valjean stood beside him.
+
+Jean Valjean accosted him with the cry:--
+
+"One hundred francs!"
+
+The man gave a start and raised his eyes.
+
+"You can earn a hundred francs," went on Jean Valjean, "if you will
+grant me shelter for this night."
+
+The moon shone full upon Jean Valjean's terrified countenance.
+
+"What! so it is you, Father Madeleine!" said the man.
+
+That name, thus pronounced, at that obscure hour, in that unknown spot,
+by that strange man, made Jean Valjean start back.
+
+He had expected anything but that. The person who thus addressed him was
+a bent and lame old man, dressed almost like a peasant, who wore on his
+left knee a leather knee-cap, whence hung a moderately large bell. His
+face, which was in the shadow, was not distinguishable.
+
+However, the goodman had removed his cap, and exclaimed, trembling all
+over:--
+
+"Ah, good God! How come you here, Father Madeleine? Where did you enter?
+Dieu-Jesus! Did you fall from heaven? There is no trouble about that:
+if ever you do fall, it will be from there. And what a state you are in!
+You have no cravat; you have no hat; you have no coat! Do you know, you
+would have frightened any one who did not know you? No coat! Lord God!
+Are the saints going mad nowadays? But how did you get in here?"
+
+His words tumbled over each other. The goodman talked with a rustic
+volubility, in which there was nothing alarming. All this was uttered
+with a mixture of stupefaction and naive kindliness.
+
+"Who are you? and what house is this?" demanded Jean Valjean.
+
+"Ah! pardieu, this is too much!" exclaimed the old man. "I am the person
+for whom you got the place here, and this house is the one where you had
+me placed. What! You don't recognize me?"
+
+"No," said Jean Valjean; "and how happens it that you know me?"
+
+"You saved my life," said the man.
+
+He turned. A ray of moonlight outlined his profile, and Jean Valjean
+recognized old Fauchelevent.
+
+"Ah!" said Jean Valjean, "so it is you? Yes, I recollect you."
+
+"That is very lucky," said the old man, in a reproachful tone.
+
+"And what are you doing here?" resumed Jean Valjean.
+
+"Why, I am covering my melons, of course!"
+
+In fact, at the moment when Jean Valjean accosted him, old Fauchelevent
+held in his hand the end of a straw mat which he was occupied in
+spreading over the melon bed. During the hour or thereabouts that he had
+been in the garden he had already spread out a number of them. It was
+this operation which had caused him to execute the peculiar movements
+observed from the shed by Jean Valjean.
+
+He continued:--
+
+"I said to myself, 'The moon is bright: it is going to freeze. What if I
+were to put my melons into their greatcoats?' And," he added, looking at
+Jean Valjean with a broad smile,--"pardieu! you ought to have done the
+same! But how do you come here?"
+
+Jean Valjean, finding himself known to this man, at least only under the
+name of Madeleine, thenceforth advanced only with caution. He multiplied
+his questions. Strange to say, their roles seemed to be reversed. It was
+he, the intruder, who interrogated.
+
+"And what is this bell which you wear on your knee?"
+
+"This," replied Fauchelevent, "is so that I may be avoided."
+
+"What! so that you may be avoided?"
+
+Old Fauchelevent winked with an indescribable air.
+
+"Ah, goodness! there are only women in this house--many young girls. It
+appears that I should be a dangerous person to meet. The bell gives them
+warning. When I come, they go."
+
+"What house is this?"
+
+"Come, you know well enough."
+
+"But I do not."
+
+"Not when you got me the place here as gardener?"
+
+"Answer me as though I knew nothing."
+
+"Well, then, this is the Petit-Picpus convent."
+
+Memories recurred to Jean Valjean. Chance, that is to say, Providence,
+had cast him into precisely that convent in the Quartier Saint-Antoine
+where old Fauchelevent, crippled by the fall from his cart, had been
+admitted on his recommendation two years previously. He repeated, as
+though talking to himself:--
+
+"The Petit-Picpus convent."
+
+"Exactly," returned old Fauchelevent. "But to come to the point, how the
+deuce did you manage to get in here, you, Father Madeleine? No matter if
+you are a saint; you are a man as well, and no man enters here."
+
+"You certainly are here."
+
+"There is no one but me."
+
+"Still," said Jean Valjean, "I must stay here."
+
+"Ah, good God!" cried Fauchelevent.
+
+Jean Valjean drew near to the old man, and said to him in a grave
+voice:--
+
+"Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life."
+
+"I was the first to recall it," returned Fauchelevent.
+
+"Well, you can do to-day for me that which I did for you in the olden
+days."
+
+Fauchelevent took in his aged, trembling, and wrinkled hands Jean
+Valjean's two robust hands, and stood for several minutes as though
+incapable of speaking. At length he exclaimed:--
+
+"Oh! that would be a blessing from the good God, if I could make you
+some little return for that! Save your life! Monsieur le Maire, dispose
+of the old man!"
+
+A wonderful joy had transfigured this old man. His countenance seemed to
+emit a ray of light.
+
+"What do you wish me to do?" he resumed.
+
+"That I will explain to you. You have a chamber?"
+
+"I have an isolated hovel yonder, behind the ruins of the old convent,
+in a corner which no one ever looks into. There are three rooms in it."
+
+The hut was, in fact, so well hidden behind the ruins, and so cleverly
+arranged to prevent it being seen, that Jean Valjean had not perceived
+it.
+
+"Good," said Jean Valjean. "Now I am going to ask two things of you."
+
+"What are they, Mr. Mayor?"
+
+"In the first place, you are not to tell any one what you know about me.
+In the second, you are not to try to find out anything more."
+
+"As you please. I know that you can do nothing that is not honest,
+that you have always been a man after the good God's heart. And then,
+moreover, you it was who placed me here. That concerns you. I am at your
+service."
+
+"That is settled then. Now, come with me. We will go and get the child."
+
+"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "so there is a child?"
+
+He added not a word further, and followed Jean Valjean as a dog follows
+his master.
+
+Less than half an hour afterwards Cosette, who had grown rosy again
+before the flame of a good fire, was lying asleep in the old gardener's
+bed. Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat once more; his hat,
+which he had flung over the wall, had been found and picked up. While
+Jean Valjean was putting on his coat, Fauchelevent had removed the
+bell and kneecap, which now hung on a nail beside a vintage basket that
+adorned the wall. The two men were warming themselves with their elbows
+resting on a table upon which Fauchelevent had placed a bit of cheese,
+black bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man was
+saying to Jean Valjean, as he laid his hand on the latter's knee:
+"Ah! Father Madeleine! You did not recognize me immediately; you save
+people's lives, and then you forget them! That is bad! But they remember
+you! You are an ingrate!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--WHICH EXPLAINS HOW JAVERT GOT ON THE SCENT
+
+The events of which we have just beheld the reverse side, so to speak,
+had come about in the simplest possible manner.
+
+When Jean Valjean, on the evening of the very day when Javert had
+arrested him beside Fantine's death-bed, had escaped from the town jail
+of M. sur M., the police had supposed that he had betaken himself to
+Paris. Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything
+disappears in this belly of the world, as in the belly of the sea. No
+forest hides a man as does that crowd. Fugitives of every sort know
+this. They go to Paris as to an abyss; there are gulfs which save. The
+police know it also, and it is in Paris that they seek what they
+have lost elsewhere. They sought the ex-mayor of M. sur M. Javert was
+summoned to Paris to throw light on their researches. Javert had, in
+fact, rendered powerful assistance in the recapture of Jean Valjean.
+Javert's zeal and intelligence on that occasion had been remarked by
+M. Chabouillet, secretary of the Prefecture under Comte Angles. M.
+Chabouillet, who had, moreover, already been Javert's patron, had the
+inspector of M. sur M. attached to the police force of Paris. There
+Javert rendered himself useful in divers and, though the word may seem
+strange for such services, honorable manners.
+
+He no longer thought of Jean Valjean,--the wolf of to-day causes these
+dogs who are always on the chase to forget the wolf of yesterday,--when,
+in December, 1823, he read a newspaper, he who never read newspapers;
+but Javert, a monarchical man, had a desire to know the particulars of
+the triumphal entry of the "Prince Generalissimo" into Bayonne. Just as
+he was finishing the article, which interested him; a name, the name of
+Jean Valjean, attracted his attention at the bottom of a page. The paper
+announced that the convict Jean Valjean was dead, and published the fact
+in such formal terms that Javert did not doubt it. He confined himself
+to the remark, "That's a good entry." Then he threw aside the paper, and
+thought no more about it.
+
+Some time afterwards, it chanced that a police report was transmitted
+from the prefecture of the Seine-et-Oise to the prefecture of police in
+Paris, concerning the abduction of a child, which had taken place, under
+peculiar circumstances, as it was said, in the commune of Montfermeil.
+A little girl of seven or eight years of age, the report said, who had
+been intrusted by her mother to an inn-keeper of that neighborhood, had
+been stolen by a stranger; this child answered to the name of Cosette,
+and was the daughter of a girl named Fantine, who had died in the
+hospital, it was not known where or when.
+
+This report came under Javert's eye and set him to thinking.
+
+The name of Fantine was well known to him. He remembered that Jean
+Valjean had made him, Javert, burst into laughter, by asking him for a
+respite of three days, for the purpose of going to fetch that creature's
+child. He recalled the fact that Jean Valjean had been arrested in Paris
+at the very moment when he was stepping into the coach for Montfermeil.
+Some signs had made him suspect at the time that this was the second
+occasion of his entering that coach, and that he had already, on the
+previous day, made an excursion to the neighborhood of that village, for
+he had not been seen in the village itself. What had he been intending
+to do in that region of Montfermeil? It could not even be surmised.
+Javert understood it now. Fantine's daughter was there. Jean Valjean was
+going there in search of her. And now this child had been stolen by a
+stranger! Who could that stranger be? Could it be Jean Valjean? But Jean
+Valjean was dead. Javert, without saying anything to anybody, took the
+coach from the Pewter Platter, Cul-de-Sac de la Planchette, and made a
+trip to Montfermeil.
+
+He expected to find a great deal of light on the subject there; he found
+a great deal of obscurity.
+
+For the first few days the Thenardiers had chattered in their rage. The
+disappearance of the Lark had created a sensation in the village. He
+immediately obtained numerous versions of the story, which ended in the
+abduction of a child. Hence the police report. But their first vexation
+having passed off, Thenardier, with his wonderful instinct, had
+very quickly comprehended that it is never advisable to stir up the
+prosecutor of the Crown, and that his complaints with regard to the
+abduction of Cosette would have as their first result to fix upon
+himself, and upon many dark affairs which he had on hand, the glittering
+eye of justice. The last thing that owls desire is to have a candle
+brought to them. And in the first place, how explain the fifteen hundred
+francs which he had received? He turned squarely round, put a gag on
+his wife's mouth, and feigned astonishment when the stolen child was
+mentioned to him. He understood nothing about it; no doubt he had
+grumbled for awhile at having that dear little creature "taken from him"
+so hastily; he should have liked to keep her two or three days longer,
+out of tenderness; but her "grandfather" had come for her in the most
+natural way in the world. He added the "grandfather," which produced a
+good effect. This was the story that Javert hit upon when he arrived at
+Montfermeil. The grandfather caused Jean Valjean to vanish.
+
+Nevertheless, Javert dropped a few questions, like plummets, into
+Thenardier's history. "Who was that grandfather? and what was his name?"
+Thenardier replied with simplicity: "He is a wealthy farmer. I saw his
+passport. I think his name was M. Guillaume Lambert."
+
+Lambert is a respectable and extremely reassuring name. Thereupon Javert
+returned to Paris.
+
+"Jean Valjean is certainly dead," said he, "and I am a ninny."
+
+He had again begun to forget this history, when, in the course of
+March, 1824, he heard of a singular personage who dwelt in the parish of
+Saint-Medard and who had been surnamed "the mendicant who gives alms."
+This person, the story ran, was a man of means, whose name no one knew
+exactly, and who lived alone with a little girl of eight years, who
+knew nothing about herself, save that she had come from Montfermeil.
+Montfermeil! that name was always coming up, and it made Javert prick
+up his ears. An old beggar police spy, an ex-beadle, to whom this person
+had given alms, added a few more details. This gentleman of property was
+very shy,--never coming out except in the evening, speaking to no one,
+except, occasionally to the poor, and never allowing any one to approach
+him. He wore a horrible old yellow frock-coat, which was worth many
+millions, being all wadded with bank-bills. This piqued Javert's
+curiosity in a decided manner. In order to get a close look at this
+fantastic gentleman without alarming him, he borrowed the beadle's
+outfit for a day, and the place where the old spy was in the habit of
+crouching every evening, whining orisons through his nose, and playing
+the spy under cover of prayer.
+
+"The suspected individual" did indeed approach Javert thus disguised,
+and bestow alms on him. At that moment Javert raised his head, and the
+shock which Jean Valjean received on recognizing Javert was equal to the
+one received by Javert when he thought he recognized Jean Valjean.
+
+However, the darkness might have misled him; Jean Valjean's death was
+official; Javert cherished very grave doubts; and when in doubt, Javert,
+the man of scruples, never laid a finger on any one's collar.
+
+He followed his man to the Gorbeau house, and got "the old woman" to
+talking, which was no difficult matter. The old woman confirmed the fact
+regarding the coat lined with millions, and narrated to him the episode
+of the thousand-franc bill. She had seen it! She had handled it! Javert
+hired a room; that evening he installed himself in it. He came and
+listened at the mysterious lodger's door, hoping to catch the sound of
+his voice, but Jean Valjean saw his candle through the key-hole, and
+foiled the spy by keeping silent.
+
+On the following day Jean Valjean decamped; but the noise made by the
+fall of the five-franc piece was noticed by the old woman, who, hearing
+the rattling of coin, suspected that he might be intending to leave, and
+made haste to warn Javert. At night, when Jean Valjean came out, Javert
+was waiting for him behind the trees of the boulevard with two men.
+
+Javert had demanded assistance at the Prefecture, but he had not
+mentioned the name of the individual whom he hoped to seize; that was
+his secret, and he had kept it for three reasons: in the first place,
+because the slightest indiscretion might put Jean Valjean on the alert;
+next, because, to lay hands on an ex-convict who had made his escape
+and was reputed dead, on a criminal whom justice had formerly classed
+forever as among malefactors of the most dangerous sort, was a
+magnificent success which the old members of the Parisian police would
+assuredly not leave to a new-comer like Javert, and he was afraid of
+being deprived of his convict; and lastly, because Javert, being an
+artist, had a taste for the unforeseen. He hated those well-heralded
+successes which are talked of long in advance and have had the bloom
+brushed off. He preferred to elaborate his masterpieces in the dark and
+to unveil them suddenly at the last.
+
+Javert had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree, then from corner
+to corner of the street, and had not lost sight of him for a single
+instant; even at the moments when Jean Valjean believed himself to
+be the most secure Javert's eye had been on him. Why had not Javert
+arrested Jean Valjean? Because he was still in doubt.
+
+It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely
+at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests
+denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and
+had rendered the Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty
+was a grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mistake;
+the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal. The
+reader can imagine the effect which this brief paragraph, reproduced
+by twenty newspapers, would have caused in Paris: "Yesterday, an aged
+grandfather, with white hair, a respectable and well-to-do gentleman,
+who was walking with his grandchild, aged eight, was arrested and
+conducted to the agency of the Prefecture as an escaped convict!"
+
+Let us repeat in addition that Javert had scruples of his own;
+injunctions of his conscience were added to the injunctions of the
+prefect. He was really in doubt.
+
+Jean Valjean turned his back on him and walked in the dark.
+
+Sadness, uneasiness, anxiety, depression, this fresh misfortune of being
+forced to flee by night, to seek a chance refuge in Paris for Cosette
+and himself, the necessity of regulating his pace to the pace of
+the child--all this, without his being aware of it, had altered Jean
+Valjean's walk, and impressed on his bearing such senility, that the
+police themselves, incarnate in the person of Javert, might, and did in
+fact, make a mistake. The impossibility of approaching too close, his
+costume of an emigre preceptor, the declaration of Thenardier which made
+a grandfather of him, and, finally, the belief in his death in prison,
+added still further to the uncertainty which gathered thick in Javert's
+mind.
+
+For an instant it occurred to him to make an abrupt demand for his
+papers; but if the man was not Jean Valjean, and if this man was not a
+good, honest old fellow living on his income, he was probably some merry
+blade deeply and cunningly implicated in the obscure web of Parisian
+misdeeds, some chief of a dangerous band, who gave alms to conceal
+his other talents, which was an old dodge. He had trusty fellows,
+accomplices' retreats in case of emergencies, in which he would, no
+doubt, take refuge. All these turns which he was making through the
+streets seemed to indicate that he was not a simple and honest man. To
+arrest him too hastily would be "to kill the hen that laid the golden
+eggs." Where was the inconvenience in waiting? Javert was very sure that
+he would not escape.
+
+Thus he proceeded in a tolerably perplexed state of mind, putting to
+himself a hundred questions about this enigmatical personage.
+
+It was only quite late in the Rue de Pontoise, that, thanks to the
+brilliant light thrown from a dram-shop, he decidedly recognized Jean
+Valjean.
+
+There are in this world two beings who give a profound start,--the
+mother who recovers her child and the tiger who recovers his prey.
+Javert gave that profound start.
+
+As soon as he had positively recognized Jean Valjean, the formidable
+convict, he perceived that there were only three of them, and he asked
+for reinforcements at the police station of the Rue de Pontoise. One
+puts on gloves before grasping a thorn cudgel.
+
+This delay and the halt at the Carrefour Rollin to consult with his
+agents came near causing him to lose the trail. He speedily divined,
+however, that Jean Valjean would want to put the river between his
+pursuers and himself. He bent his head and reflected like a blood-hound
+who puts his nose to the ground to make sure that he is on the right
+scent. Javert, with his powerful rectitude of instinct, went straight to
+the bridge of Austerlitz. A word with the toll-keeper furnished him with
+the information which he required: "Have you seen a man with a little
+girl?" "I made him pay two sous," replied the toll-keeper. Javert
+reached the bridge in season to see Jean Valjean traverse the small
+illuminated spot on the other side of the water, leading Cosette by
+the hand. He saw him enter the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine; he
+remembered the Cul-de-Sac Genrot arranged there like a trap, and of the
+sole exit of the Rue Droit-Mur into the Rue Petit-Picpus. He made sure
+of his back burrows, as huntsmen say; he hastily despatched one of his
+agents, by a roundabout way, to guard that issue. A patrol which was
+returning to the Arsenal post having passed him, he made a requisition
+on it, and caused it to accompany him. In such games soldiers are aces.
+Moreover, the principle is, that in order to get the best of a wild
+boar, one must employ the science of venery and plenty of dogs. These
+combinations having been effected, feeling that Jean Valjean was caught
+between the blind alley Genrot on the right, his agent on the left, and
+himself, Javert, in the rear, he took a pinch of snuff.
+
+Then he began the game. He experienced one ecstatic and infernal moment;
+he allowed his man to go on ahead, knowing that he had him safe, but
+desirous of postponing the moment of arrest as long as possible, happy
+at the thought that he was taken and yet at seeing him free, gloating
+over him with his gaze, with that voluptuousness of the spider which
+allows the fly to flutter, and of the cat which lets the mouse run.
+Claws and talons possess a monstrous sensuality,--the obscure movements
+of the creature imprisoned in their pincers. What a delight this
+strangling is!
+
+Javert was enjoying himself. The meshes of his net were stoutly knotted.
+He was sure of success; all he had to do now was to close his hand.
+
+Accompanied as he was, the very idea of resistance was impossible,
+however vigorous, energetic, and desperate Jean Valjean might be.
+
+[Illustration: Javert on the Hunt 2b5-10-javert-on-the-hunt]
+
+Javert advanced slowly, sounding, searching on his way all the nooks of
+the street like so many pockets of thieves.
+
+When he reached the centre of the web he found the fly no longer there.
+
+His exasperation can be imagined.
+
+He interrogated his sentinel of the Rues Droit-Mur and Petit-Picpus;
+that agent, who had remained imperturbably at his post, had not seen the
+man pass.
+
+It sometimes happens that a stag is lost head and horns; that is to
+say, he escapes although he has the pack on his very heels, and then the
+oldest huntsmen know not what to say. Duvivier, Ligniville, and Desprez
+halt short. In a discomfiture of this sort, Artonge exclaims, "It was
+not a stag, but a sorcerer." Javert would have liked to utter the same
+cry.
+
+His disappointment bordered for a moment on despair and rage.
+
+It is certain that Napoleon made mistakes during the war with Russia,
+that Alexander committed blunders in the war in India, that Caesar made
+mistakes in the war in Africa, that Cyrus was at fault in the war
+in Scythia, and that Javert blundered in this campaign against Jean
+Valjean. He was wrong, perhaps, in hesitating in his recognition of the
+exconvict. The first glance should have sufficed him. He was wrong in
+not arresting him purely and simply in the old building; he was wrong
+in not arresting him when he positively recognized him in the Rue de
+Pontoise. He was wrong in taking counsel with his auxiliaries in the
+full light of the moon in the Carrefour Rollin. Advice is certainly
+useful; it is a good thing to know and to interrogate those of the dogs
+who deserve confidence; but the hunter cannot be too cautious when he is
+chasing uneasy animals like the wolf and the convict. Javert, by taking
+too much thought as to how he should set the bloodhounds of the pack on
+the trail, alarmed the beast by giving him wind of the dart, and so
+made him run. Above all, he was wrong in that after he had picked up the
+scent again on the bridge of Austerlitz, he played that formidable and
+puerile game of keeping such a man at the end of a thread. He thought
+himself stronger than he was, and believed that he could play at the
+game of the mouse and the lion. At the same time, he reckoned himself
+as too weak, when he judged it necessary to obtain reinforcement. Fatal
+precaution, waste of precious time! Javert committed all these blunders,
+and none the less was one of the cleverest and most correct spies that
+ever existed. He was, in the full force of the term, what is called in
+venery a knowing dog. But what is there that is perfect?
+
+Great strategists have their eclipses.
+
+The greatest follies are often composed, like the largest ropes, of
+a multitude of strands. Take the cable thread by thread, take all the
+petty determining motives separately, and you can break them one after
+the other, and you say, "That is all there is of it!" Braid them, twist
+them together; the result is enormous: it is Attila hesitating between
+Marcian on the east and Valentinian on the west; it is Hannibal tarrying
+at Capua; it is Danton falling asleep at Arcis-sur-Aube.
+
+However that may be, even at the moment when he saw that Jean Valjean
+had escaped him, Javert did not lose his head. Sure that the convict who
+had broken his ban could not be far off, he established sentinels, he
+organized traps and ambuscades, and beat the quarter all that night. The
+first thing he saw was the disorder in the street lantern whose rope
+had been cut. A precious sign which, however, led him astray, since it
+caused him to turn all his researches in the direction of the Cul-de-Sac
+Genrot. In this blind alley there were tolerably low walls which abutted
+on gardens whose bounds adjoined the immense stretches of waste land.
+Jean Valjean evidently must have fled in that direction. The fact is,
+that had he penetrated a little further in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot, he
+would probably have done so and have been lost. Javert explored these
+gardens and these waste stretches as though he had been hunting for a
+needle.
+
+At daybreak he left two intelligent men on the outlook, and returned to
+the Prefecture of Police, as much ashamed as a police spy who had been
+captured by a robber might have been.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--NUMBER 62 RUE PETIT-PICPUS
+
+Nothing, half a century ago, more resembled every other carriage gate
+than the carriage gate of Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. This entrance,
+which usually stood ajar in the most inviting fashion, permitted a
+view of two things, neither of which have anything very funereal about
+them,--a courtyard surrounded by walls hung with vines, and the face
+of a lounging porter. Above the wall, at the bottom of the court, tall
+trees were visible. When a ray of sunlight enlivened the courtyard, when
+a glass of wine cheered up the porter, it was difficult to pass Number
+62 Little Picpus Street without carrying away a smiling impression of
+it. Nevertheless, it was a sombre place of which one had had a glimpse.
+
+The threshold smiled; the house prayed and wept.
+
+If one succeeded in passing the porter, which was not easy,--which was
+even nearly impossible for every one, for there was an open sesame!
+which it was necessary to know,--if, the porter once passed, one entered
+a little vestibule on the right, on which opened a staircase shut in
+between two walls and so narrow that only one person could ascend it at
+a time, if one did not allow one's self to be alarmed by a daubing of
+canary yellow, with a dado of chocolate which clothed this staircase, if
+one ventured to ascend it, one crossed a first landing, then a second,
+and arrived on the first story at a corridor where the yellow wash and
+the chocolate-hued plinth pursued one with a peaceable persistency.
+Staircase and corridor were lighted by two beautiful windows. The
+corridor took a turn and became dark. If one doubled this cape, one
+arrived a few paces further on, in front of a door which was all the
+more mysterious because it was not fastened. If one opened it, one
+found one's self in a little chamber about six feet square, tiled,
+well-scrubbed, clean, cold, and hung with nankin paper with green
+flowers, at fifteen sous the roll. A white, dull light fell from a large
+window, with tiny panes, on the left, which usurped the whole width
+of the room. One gazed about, but saw no one; one listened, one heard
+neither a footstep nor a human murmur. The walls were bare, the chamber
+was not furnished; there was not even a chair.
+
+One looked again, and beheld on the wall facing the door a quadrangular
+hole, about a foot square, with a grating of interlacing iron bars,
+black, knotted, solid, which formed squares--I had almost said
+meshes--of less than an inch and a half in diagonal length. The little
+green flowers of the nankin paper ran in a calm and orderly manner to
+those iron bars, without being startled or thrown into confusion by
+their funereal contact. Supposing that a living being had been so
+wonderfully thin as to essay an entrance or an exit through the square
+hole, this grating would have prevented it. It did not allow the passage
+of the body, but it did allow the passage of the eyes; that is to
+say, of the mind. This seems to have occurred to them, for it had been
+re-enforced by a sheet of tin inserted in the wall a little in the rear,
+and pierced with a thousand holes more microscopic than the holes of
+a strainer. At the bottom of this plate, an aperture had been pierced
+exactly similar to the orifice of a letter box. A bit of tape attached
+to a bell-wire hung at the right of the grated opening.
+
+If the tape was pulled, a bell rang, and one heard a voice very near at
+hand, which made one start.
+
+"Who is there?" the voice demanded.
+
+It was a woman's voice, a gentle voice, so gentle that it was mournful.
+
+Here, again, there was a magical word which it was necessary to know. If
+one did not know it, the voice ceased, the wall became silent once more,
+as though the terrified obscurity of the sepulchre had been on the other
+side of it.
+
+If one knew the password, the voice resumed, "Enter on the right."
+
+One then perceived on the right, facing the window, a glass door
+surmounted by a frame glazed and painted gray. On raising the latch and
+crossing the threshold, one experienced precisely the same impression
+as when one enters at the theatre into a grated baignoire, before the
+grating is lowered and the chandelier is lighted. One was, in fact, in
+a sort of theatre-box, narrow, furnished with two old chairs, and a
+much-frayed straw matting, sparely illuminated by the vague light from
+the glass door; a regular box, with its front just of a height to lean
+upon, bearing a tablet of black wood. This box was grated, only
+the grating of it was not of gilded wood, as at the opera; it was a
+monstrous lattice of iron bars, hideously interlaced and riveted to the
+wall by enormous fastenings which resembled clenched fists.
+
+The first minutes passed; when one's eyes began to grow used to this
+cellar-like half-twilight, one tried to pass the grating, but got no
+further than six inches beyond it. There he encountered a barrier of
+black shutters, re-enforced and fortified with transverse beams of wood
+painted a gingerbread yellow. These shutters were divided into long,
+narrow slats, and they masked the entire length of the grating. They
+were always closed. At the expiration of a few moments one heard a voice
+proceeding from behind these shutters, and saying:--
+
+"I am here. What do you wish with me?"
+
+It was a beloved, sometimes an adored, voice. No one was visible. Hardly
+the sound of a breath was audible. It seemed as though it were a spirit
+which had been evoked, that was speaking to you across the walls of the
+tomb.
+
+If one chanced to be within certain prescribed and very rare conditions,
+the slat of one of the shutters opened opposite you; the evoked spirit
+became an apparition. Behind the grating, behind the shutter, one
+perceived so far as the grating permitted sight, a head, of which only
+the mouth and the chin were visible; the rest was covered with a black
+veil. One caught a glimpse of a black guimpe, and a form that was barely
+defined, covered with a black shroud. That head spoke with you, but did
+not look at you and never smiled at you.
+
+The light which came from behind you was adjusted in such a manner that
+you saw her in the white, and she saw you in the black. This light was
+symbolical.
+
+Nevertheless, your eyes plunged eagerly through that opening which
+was made in that place shut off from all glances. A profound vagueness
+enveloped that form clad in mourning. Your eyes searched that vagueness,
+and sought to make out the surroundings of the apparition. At the
+expiration of a very short time you discovered that you could see
+nothing. What you beheld was night, emptiness, shadows, a wintry mist
+mingled with a vapor from the tomb, a sort of terrible peace, a silence
+from which you could gather nothing, not even sighs, a gloom in which
+you could distinguish nothing, not even phantoms.
+
+What you beheld was the interior of a cloister.
+
+It was the interior of that severe and gloomy edifice which was called
+the Convent of the Bernardines of the Perpetual Adoration. The box in
+which you stood was the parlor. The first voice which had addressed you
+was that of the portress who always sat motionless and silent, on the
+other side of the wall, near the square opening, screened by the iron
+grating and the plate with its thousand holes, as by a double visor.
+The obscurity which bathed the grated box arose from the fact that the
+parlor, which had a window on the side of the world, had none on the
+side of the convent. Profane eyes must see nothing of that sacred place.
+
+Nevertheless, there was something beyond that shadow; there was a light;
+there was life in the midst of that death. Although this was the most
+strictly walled of all convents, we shall endeavor to make our way into
+it, and to take the reader in, and to say, without transgressing the
+proper bounds, things which story-tellers have never seen, and have,
+therefore, never described.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE OBEDIENCE OF MARTIN VERGA
+
+This convent, which in 1824 had already existed for many a long year in
+the Rue Petit-Picpus, was a community of Bernardines of the obedience of
+Martin Verga.
+
+These Bernardines were attached, in consequence, not to Clairvaux, like
+the Bernardine monks, but to Citeaux, like the Benedictine monks. In
+other words, they were the subjects, not of Saint Bernard, but of Saint
+Benoit.
+
+Any one who has turned over old folios to any extent knows that Martin
+Verga founded in 1425 a congregation of Bernardines-Benedictines,
+with Salamanca for the head of the order, and Alcala as the branch
+establishment.
+
+This congregation had sent out branches throughout all the Catholic
+countries of Europe.
+
+There is nothing unusual in the Latin Church in these grafts of one
+order on another. To mention only a single order of Saint-Benoit, which
+is here in question: there are attached to this order, without counting
+the obedience of Martin Verga, four congregations,--two in Italy,
+Mont-Cassin and Sainte-Justine of Padua; two in France, Cluny and
+Saint-Maur; and nine orders,--Vallombrosa, Granmont, the Celestins,
+the Camaldules, the Carthusians, the Humilies, the Olivateurs, the
+Silvestrins, and lastly, Citeaux; for Citeaux itself, a trunk for other
+orders, is only an offshoot of Saint-Benoit. Citeaux dates from Saint
+Robert, Abbe de Molesme, in the diocese of Langres, in 1098. Now it was
+in 529 that the devil, having retired to the desert of Subiaco--he
+was old--had he turned hermit?--was chased from the ancient temple of
+Apollo, where he dwelt, by Saint-Benoit, then aged seventeen.
+
+After the rule of the Carmelites, who go barefoot, wear a bit of willow
+on their throats, and never sit down, the harshest rule is that of the
+Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga. They are clothed in black,
+with a guimpe, which, in accordance with the express command of
+Saint-Benoit, mounts to the chin. A robe of serge with large sleeves,
+a large woollen veil, the guimpe which mounts to the chin cut square on
+the breast, the band which descends over their brow to their eyes,--this
+is their dress. All is black except the band, which is white. The
+novices wear the same habit, but all in white. The professed nuns also
+wear a rosary at their side.
+
+The Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga practise the Perpetual
+Adoration, like the Benedictines called Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,
+who, at the beginning of this century, had two houses in Paris,--one at
+the Temple, the other in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve. However, the
+Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus, of whom we are speaking,
+were a totally different order from the Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,
+cloistered in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve and at the Temple. There
+were numerous differences in their rule; there were some in their
+costume. The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus wore the
+black guimpe, and the Benedictines of the Holy Sacrament and of the
+Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve wore a white one, and had, besides, on their
+breasts, a Holy Sacrament about three inches long, in silver gilt or
+gilded copper. The nuns of the Petit-Picpus did not wear this Holy
+Sacrament. The Perpetual Adoration, which was common to the house of
+the Petit-Picpus and to the house of the Temple, leaves those two orders
+perfectly distinct. Their only resemblance lies in this practice of the
+Ladies of the Holy Sacrament and the Bernardines of Martin Verga, just
+as there existed a similarity in the study and the glorification of
+all the mysteries relating to the infancy, the life, and death of Jesus
+Christ and the Virgin, between the two orders, which were, nevertheless,
+widely separated, and on occasion even hostile. The Oratory of Italy,
+established at Florence by Philip de Neri, and the Oratory of France,
+established by Pierre de Berulle. The Oratory of France claimed the
+precedence, since Philip de Neri was only a saint, while Berulle was a
+cardinal.
+
+Let us return to the harsh Spanish rule of Martin Verga.
+
+The Bernardines-Benedictines of this obedience fast all the year
+round, abstain from meat, fast in Lent and on many other days which are
+peculiar to them, rise from their first sleep, from one to three o'clock
+in the morning, to read their breviary and chant matins, sleep in all
+seasons between serge sheets and on straw, make no use of the bath,
+never light a fire, scourge themselves every Friday, observe the rule of
+silence, speak to each other only during the recreation hours, which are
+very brief, and wear drugget chemises for six months in the year, from
+September 14th, which is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, until Easter.
+These six months are a modification: the rule says all the year, but
+this drugget chemise, intolerable in the heat of summer, produced fevers
+and nervous spasms. The use of it had to be restricted. Even with this
+palliation, when the nuns put on this chemise on the 14th of September,
+they suffer from fever for three or four days. Obedience, poverty,
+chastity, perseverance in their seclusion,--these are their vows, which
+the rule greatly aggravates.
+
+The prioress is elected for three years by the mothers, who are called
+meres vocales because they have a voice in the chapter. A prioress can
+only be re-elected twice, which fixes the longest possible reign of a
+prioress at nine years.
+
+They never see the officiating priest, who is always hidden from them
+by a serge curtain nine feet in height. During the sermon, when the
+preacher is in the chapel, they drop their veils over their faces. They
+must always speak low, walk with their eyes on the ground and their
+heads bowed. One man only is allowed to enter the convent,--the
+archbishop of the diocese.
+
+There is really one other,--the gardener. But he is always an old man,
+and, in order that he may always be alone in the garden, and that the
+nuns may be warned to avoid him, a bell is attached to his knee.
+
+Their submission to the prioress is absolute and passive. It is the
+canonical subjection in the full force of its abnegation. As at the
+voice of Christ, ut voci Christi, at a gesture, at the first sign,
+ad nutum, ad primum signum, immediately, with cheerfulness, with
+perseverance, with a certain blind obedience, prompte, hilariter,
+perseveranter et caeca quadam obedientia, as the file in the hand of the
+workman, quasi limam in manibus fabri, without power to read or to write
+without express permission, legere vel scribere non addiscerit sine
+expressa superioris licentia.
+
+Each one of them in turn makes what they call reparation. The reparation
+is the prayer for all the sins, for all the faults, for all the
+dissensions, for all the violations, for all the iniquities, for all the
+crimes committed on earth. For the space of twelve consecutive hours,
+from four o'clock in the afternoon till four o'clock in the morning, or
+from four o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon,
+the sister who is making reparation remains on her knees on the stone
+before the Holy Sacrament, with hands clasped, a rope around her neck.
+When her fatigue becomes unendurable, she prostrates herself flat on
+her face against the earth, with her arms outstretched in the form of a
+cross; this is her only relief. In this attitude she prays for all the
+guilty in the universe. This is great to sublimity.
+
+As this act is performed in front of a post on which burns a candle, it
+is called without distinction, to make reparation or to be at the post.
+The nuns even prefer, out of humility, this last expression, which
+contains an idea of torture and abasement.
+
+To make reparation is a function in which the whole soul is absorbed.
+The sister at the post would not turn round were a thunderbolt to fall
+directly behind her.
+
+Besides this, there is always a sister kneeling before the Holy
+Sacrament. This station lasts an hour. They relieve each other like
+soldiers on guard. This is the Perpetual Adoration.
+
+The prioresses and the mothers almost always bear names stamped with
+peculiar solemnity, recalling, not the saints and martyrs, but moments
+in the life of Jesus Christ: as Mother Nativity, Mother Conception,
+Mother Presentation, Mother Passion. But the names of saints are not
+interdicted.
+
+When one sees them, one never sees anything but their mouths.
+
+All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent.
+Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the
+loss of one's soul.
+
+They never say my. They possess nothing of their own, and they must not
+attach themselves to anything. They call everything our; thus: our veil,
+our chaplet; if they were speaking of their chemise, they would say our
+chemise. Sometimes they grow attached to some petty object,--to a book
+of hours, a relic, a medal that has been blessed. As soon as they become
+aware that they are growing attached to this object, they must give it
+up. They recall the words of Saint Therese, to whom a great lady said,
+as she was on the point of entering her order, "Permit me, mother, to
+send for a Bible to which I am greatly attached." "Ah, you are attached
+to something! In that case, do not enter our order!"
+
+Every person whatever is forbidden to shut herself up, to have a place
+of her own, a chamber. They live with their cells open. When they meet,
+one says, "Blessed and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"
+The other responds, "Forever." The same ceremony when one taps at the
+other's door. Hardly has she touched the door when a soft voice on the
+other side is heard to say hastily, "Forever!" Like all practices, this
+becomes mechanical by force of habit; and one sometimes says forever
+before the other has had time to say the rather long sentence, "Praised
+and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar."
+
+Among the Visitandines the one who enters says: "Ave Maria," and the one
+whose cell is entered says, "Gratia plena." It is their way of saying
+good day, which is in fact full of grace.
+
+At each hour of the day three supplementary strokes sound from the
+church bell of the convent. At this signal prioress, vocal mothers,
+professed nuns, lay-sisters, novices, postulants, interrupt what they
+are saying, what they are doing, or what they are thinking, and all say
+in unison if it is five o'clock, for instance, "At five o'clock and at
+all hours praised and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"
+If it is eight o'clock, "At eight o'clock and at all hours!" and so on,
+according to the hour.
+
+This custom, the object of which is to break the thread of thought
+and to lead it back constantly to God, exists in many communities; the
+formula alone varies. Thus at The Infant Jesus they say, "At this
+hour and at every hour may the love of Jesus kindle my heart!" The
+Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga, cloistered fifty years ago at
+Petit-Picpus, chant the offices to a solemn psalmody, a pure Gregorian
+chant, and always with full voice during the whole course of the office.
+Everywhere in the missal where an asterisk occurs they pause, and say in
+a low voice, "Jesus-Marie-Joseph." For the office of the dead they adopt
+a tone so low that the voices of women can hardly descend to such a
+depth. The effect produced is striking and tragic.
+
+The nuns of the Petit-Picpus had made a vault under their grand altar
+for the burial of their community. The Government, as they say, does not
+permit this vault to receive coffins so they leave the convent when they
+die. This is an affliction to them, and causes them consternation as an
+infraction of the rules.
+
+They had obtained a mediocre consolation at best,--permission to be
+interred at a special hour and in a special corner in the ancient
+Vaugirard cemetery, which was made of land which had formerly belonged
+to their community.
+
+On Fridays the nuns hear high mass, vespers, and all the offices, as on
+Sunday. They scrupulously observe in addition all the little festivals
+unknown to people of the world, of which the Church of France was so
+prodigal in the olden days, and of which it is still prodigal in Spain
+and Italy. Their stations in the chapel are interminable. As for the
+number and duration of their prayers we can convey no better idea of
+them than by quoting the ingenuous remark of one of them: "The prayers
+of the postulants are frightful, the prayers of the novices are still
+worse, and the prayers of the professed nuns are still worse."
+
+Once a week the chapter assembles: the prioress presides; the vocal
+mothers assist. Each sister kneels in turn on the stones, and confesses
+aloud, in the presence of all, the faults and sins which she has
+committed during the week. The vocal mothers consult after each
+confession and inflict the penance aloud.
+
+Besides this confession in a loud tone, for which all faults in the
+least serious are reserved, they have for their venial offences what
+they call the coulpe. To make one's coulpe means to prostrate one's self
+flat on one's face during the office in front of the prioress until
+the latter, who is never called anything but our mother, notifies the
+culprit by a slight tap of her foot against the wood of her stall that
+she can rise. The coulpe or peccavi, is made for a very small matter--a
+broken glass, a torn veil, an involuntary delay of a few seconds at an
+office, a false note in church, etc.; this suffices, and the coulpe
+is made. The coulpe is entirely spontaneous; it is the culpable person
+herself (the word is etymologically in its place here) who judges
+herself and inflicts it on herself. On festival days and Sundays four
+mother precentors intone the offices before a large reading-desk with
+four places. One day one of the mother precentors intoned a psalm
+beginning with Ecce, and instead of Ecce she uttered aloud the three
+notes do si sol; for this piece of absent-mindedness she underwent a
+coulpe which lasted during the whole service: what rendered the fault
+enormous was the fact that the chapter had laughed.
+
+When a nun is summoned to the parlor, even were it the prioress herself,
+she drops her veil, as will be remembered, so that only her mouth is
+visible.
+
+The prioress alone can hold communication with strangers. The others can
+see only their immediate family, and that very rarely. If, by chance,
+an outsider presents herself to see a nun, or one whom she has known and
+loved in the outer world, a regular series of negotiations is required.
+If it is a woman, the authorization may sometimes be granted; the nun
+comes, and they talk to her through the shutters, which are opened only
+for a mother or sister. It is unnecessary to say that permission is
+always refused to men.
+
+Such is the rule of Saint-Benoit, aggravated by Martin Verga.
+
+These nuns are not gay, rosy, and fresh, as the daughters of other
+orders often are. They are pale and grave. Between 1825 and 1830 three
+of them went mad.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--AUSTERITIES
+
+One is a postulant for two years at least, often for four; a novice for
+four. It is rare that the definitive vows can be pronounced
+earlier than the age of twenty-three or twenty-four years. The
+Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga do not admit widows to their
+order.
+
+In their cells, they deliver themselves up to many unknown macerations,
+of which they must never speak.
+
+On the day when a novice makes her profession, she is dressed in her
+handsomest attire, she is crowned with white roses, her hair is brushed
+until it shines, and curled. Then she prostrates herself; a great black
+veil is thrown over her, and the office for the dead is sung. Then the
+nuns separate into two files; one file passes close to her, saying in
+plaintive accents, "Our sister is dead"; and the other file responds in
+a voice of ecstasy, "Our sister is alive in Jesus Christ!"
+
+At the epoch when this story takes place, a boarding-school was attached
+to the convent--a boarding-school for young girls of noble and
+mostly wealthy families, among whom could be remarked Mademoiselle
+de Saint-Aulaire and de Belissen, and an English girl bearing the
+illustrious Catholic name of Talbot. These young girls, reared by these
+nuns between four walls, grew up with a horror of the world and of the
+age. One of them said to us one day, "The sight of the street pavement
+made me shudder from head to foot." They were dressed in blue, with a
+white cap and a Holy Spirit of silver gilt or of copper on their breast.
+On certain grand festival days, particularly Saint Martha's day, they
+were permitted, as a high favor and a supreme happiness, to dress
+themselves as nuns and to carry out the offices and practice of
+Saint-Benoit for a whole day. In the early days the nuns were in the
+habit of lending them their black garments. This seemed profane, and
+the prioress forbade it. Only the novices were permitted to lend. It is
+remarkable that these performances, tolerated and encouraged, no doubt,
+in the convent out of a secret spirit of proselytism and in order
+to give these children a foretaste of the holy habit, were a genuine
+happiness and a real recreation for the scholars. They simply amused
+themselves with it. It was new; it gave them a change. Candid reasons
+of childhood, which do not, however, succeed in making us worldlings
+comprehend the felicity of holding a holy water sprinkler in one's hand
+and standing for hours together singing hard enough for four in front of
+a reading-desk.
+
+The pupils conformed, with the exception of the austerities, to all the
+practices of the convent. There was a certain young woman who entered
+the world, and who after many years of married life had not succeeded in
+breaking herself of the habit of saying in great haste whenever any
+one knocked at her door, "forever!" Like the nuns, the pupils saw
+their relatives only in the parlor. Their very mothers did not obtain
+permission to embrace them. The following illustrates to what a degree
+severity on that point was carried. One day a young girl received a
+visit from her mother, who was accompanied by a little sister three
+years of age. The young girl wept, for she wished greatly to embrace
+her sister. Impossible. She begged that, at least, the child might be
+permitted to pass her little hand through the bars so that she could
+kiss it. This was almost indignantly refused.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--GAYETIES
+
+None the less, these young girls filled this grave house with charming
+souvenirs.
+
+At certain hours childhood sparkled in that cloister. The recreation
+hour struck. A door swung on its hinges. The birds said, "Good;
+here come the children!" An irruption of youth inundated that garden
+intersected with a cross like a shroud. Radiant faces, white foreheads,
+innocent eyes, full of merry light, all sorts of auroras, were scattered
+about amid these shadows. After the psalmodies, the bells, the peals,
+and knells and offices, the sound of these little girls burst forth on a
+sudden more sweetly than the noise of bees. The hive of joy was opened,
+and each one brought her honey. They played, they called to each other,
+they formed into groups, they ran about; pretty little white teeth
+chattered in the corners; the veils superintended the laughs from a
+distance, shades kept watch of the sunbeams, but what mattered it? Still
+they beamed and laughed. Those four lugubrious walls had their moment
+of dazzling brilliancy. They looked on, vaguely blanched with the
+reflection of so much joy at this sweet swarming of the hives. It was
+like a shower of roses falling athwart this house of mourning. The young
+girls frolicked beneath the eyes of the nuns; the gaze of impeccability
+does not embarrass innocence. Thanks to these children, there was,
+among so many austere hours, one hour of ingenuousness. The little ones
+skipped about; the elder ones danced. In this cloister play was mingled
+with heaven. Nothing is so delightful and so august as all these fresh,
+expanding young souls. Homer would have come thither to laugh with
+Perrault; and there was in that black garden, youth, health, noise,
+cries, giddiness, pleasure, happiness enough to smooth out the wrinkles
+of all their ancestresses, those of the epic as well as those of the
+fairy-tale, those of the throne as well as those of the thatched cottage
+from Hecuba to la Mere-Grand.
+
+In that house more than anywhere else, perhaps, arise those children's
+sayings which are so graceful and which evoke a smile that is full of
+thoughtfulness. It was between those four gloomy walls that a child of
+five years exclaimed one day: "Mother! one of the big girls has just
+told me that I have only nine years and ten months longer to remain
+here. What happiness!"
+
+It was here, too, that this memorable dialogue took place:--
+
+A Vocal Mother. Why are you weeping, my child?
+
+The child (aged six). I told Alix that I knew my French history. She
+says that I do not know it, but I do.
+
+Alix, the big girl (aged nine). No; she does not know it.
+
+The Mother. How is that, my child?
+
+Alix. She told me to open the book at random and to ask her any question
+in the book, and she would answer it.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"She did not answer it."
+
+"Let us see about it. What did you ask her?"
+
+"I opened the book at random, as she proposed, and I put the first
+question that I came across."
+
+"And what was the question?"
+
+"It was, 'What happened after that?'"
+
+It was there that that profound remark was made anent a rather greedy
+paroquet which belonged to a lady boarder:--
+
+"How well bred! it eats the top of the slice of bread and butter just
+like a person!"
+
+It was on one of the flagstones of this cloister that there was once
+picked up a confession which had been written out in advance, in order
+that she might not forget it, by a sinner of seven years:--
+
+"Father, I accuse myself of having been avaricious.
+
+"Father, I accuse myself of having been an adulteress.
+
+"Father, I accuse myself of having raised my eyes to the gentlemen."
+
+It was on one of the turf benches of this garden that a rosy mouth six
+years of age improvised the following tale, which was listened to by
+blue eyes aged four and five years:--
+
+"There were three little cocks who owned a country where there were
+a great many flowers. They plucked the flowers and put them in their
+pockets. After that they plucked the leaves and put them in their
+playthings. There was a wolf in that country; there was a great deal of
+forest; and the wolf was in the forest; and he ate the little cocks."
+
+And this other poem:--
+
+"There came a blow with a stick.
+
+"It was Punchinello who bestowed it on the cat.
+
+"It was not good for her; it hurt her.
+
+"Then a lady put Punchinello in prison."
+
+It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent
+was bringing up out of charity, uttered this sweet and heart-breaking
+saying. She heard the others talking of their mothers, and she murmured
+in her corner:--
+
+"As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!"
+
+There was a stout portress who could always be seen hurrying through the
+corridors with her bunch of keys, and whose name was Sister Agatha. The
+big big girls--those over ten years of age--called her Agathocles.
+
+The refectory, a large apartment of an oblong square form, which
+received no light except through a vaulted cloister on a level with the
+garden, was dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of beasts. All
+the places round about furnished their contingent of insects.
+
+Each of its four corners had received, in the language of the pupils,
+a special and expressive name. There was Spider corner, Caterpillar
+corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket corner.
+
+Cricket corner was near the kitchen and was highly esteemed. It was not
+so cold there as elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to
+the boarding-school, and there served as in the old College Mazarin
+to distinguish four nations. Every pupil belonged to one of these four
+nations according to the corner of the refectory in which she sat at
+meals. One day Monseigneur the Archbishop while making his pastoral
+visit saw a pretty little rosy girl with beautiful golden hair enter the
+class-room through which he was passing.
+
+He inquired of another pupil, a charming brunette with rosy cheeks, who
+stood near him:--
+
+"Who is that?"
+
+"She is a spider, Monseigneur."
+
+"Bah! And that one yonder?"
+
+"She is a cricket."
+
+"And that one?"
+
+"She is a caterpillar."
+
+"Really! and yourself?"
+
+"I am a wood-louse, Monseigneur."
+
+Every house of this sort has its own peculiarities. At the beginning of
+this century Ecouen was one of those strict and graceful places where
+young girls pass their childhood in a shadow that is almost august. At
+Ecouen, in order to take rank in the procession of the Holy Sacrament,
+a distinction was made between virgins and florists. There were also the
+"dais" and the "censors,"--the first who held the cords of the dais, and
+the others who carried incense before the Holy Sacrament. The flowers
+belonged by right to the florists. Four "virgins" walked in advance. On
+the morning of that great day it was no rare thing to hear the question
+put in the dormitory, "Who is a virgin?"
+
+Madame Campan used to quote this saying of a "little one" of seven
+years, to a "big girl" of sixteen, who took the head of the procession,
+while she, the little one, remained at the rear, "You are a virgin, but
+I am not."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--DISTRACTIONS
+
+Above the door of the refectory this prayer, which was called the white
+Paternoster, and which possessed the property of bearing people straight
+to paradise, was inscribed in large black letters:--
+
+"Little white Paternoster, which God made, which God said, which God
+placed in paradise. In the evening, when I went to bed, I found three
+angels sitting on my bed, one at the foot, two at the head, the good
+Virgin Mary in the middle, who told me to lie down without hesitation.
+The good God is my father, the good Virgin is my mother, the three
+apostles are my brothers, the three virgins are my sisters. The shirt in
+which God was born envelopes my body; Saint Margaret's cross is written
+on my breast. Madame the Virgin was walking through the meadows, weeping
+for God, when she met M. Saint John. 'Monsieur Saint John, whence come
+you?' 'I come from Ave Salus.' 'You have not seen the good God; where
+is he?' 'He is on the tree of the Cross, his feet hanging, his hands
+nailed, a little cap of white thorns on his head.' Whoever shall say
+this thrice at eventide, thrice in the morning, shall win paradise at
+the last."
+
+In 1827 this characteristic orison had disappeared from the wall under
+a triple coating of daubing paint. At the present time it is finally
+disappearing from the memories of several who were young girls then, and
+who are old women now.
+
+A large crucifix fastened to the wall completed the decoration of this
+refectory, whose only door, as we think we have mentioned, opened on the
+garden. Two narrow tables, each flanked by two wooden benches, formed
+two long parallel lines from one end to the other of the refectory.
+The walls were white, the tables were black; these two mourning colors
+constitute the only variety in convents. The meals were plain, and
+the food of the children themselves severe. A single dish of meat and
+vegetables combined, or salt fish--such was their luxury. This meagre
+fare, which was reserved for the pupils alone, was, nevertheless, an
+exception. The children ate in silence, under the eye of the mother
+whose turn it was, who, if a fly took a notion to fly or to hum against
+the rule, opened and shut a wooden book from time to time. This silence
+was seasoned with the lives of the saints, read aloud from a little
+pulpit with a desk, which was situated at the foot of the crucifix. The
+reader was one of the big girls, in weekly turn. At regular distances,
+on the bare tables, there were large, varnished bowls in which the
+pupils washed their own silver cups and knives and forks, and into which
+they sometimes threw some scrap of tough meat or spoiled fish; this was
+punished. These bowls were called ronds d'eau. The child who broke the
+silence "made a cross with her tongue." Where? On the ground. She licked
+the pavement. The dust, that end of all joys, was charged with the
+chastisement of those poor little rose-leaves which had been guilty of
+chirping.
+
+There was in the convent a book which has never been printed except as
+a unique copy, and which it is forbidden to read. It is the rule of
+Saint-Benoit. An arcanum which no profane eye must penetrate. Nemo
+regulas, seu constitutiones nostras, externis communicabit.
+
+The pupils one day succeeded in getting possession of this book, and set
+to reading it with avidity, a reading which was often interrupted by
+the fear of being caught, which caused them to close the volume
+precipitately.
+
+From the great danger thus incurred they derived but a very moderate
+amount of pleasure. The most "interesting thing" they found were some
+unintelligible pages about the sins of young boys.
+
+They played in an alley of the garden bordered with a few shabby
+fruit-trees. In spite of the extreme surveillance and the severity of
+the punishments administered, when the wind had shaken the trees, they
+sometimes succeeded in picking up a green apple or a spoiled apricot or
+an inhabited pear on the sly. I will now cede the privilege of speech
+to a letter which lies before me, a letter written five and twenty
+years ago by an old pupil, now Madame la Duchesse de----one of the most
+elegant women in Paris. I quote literally: "One hides one's pear or
+one's apple as best one may. When one goes up stairs to put the veil on
+the bed before supper, one stuffs them under one's pillow and at night
+one eats them in bed, and when one cannot do that, one eats them in the
+closet." That was one of their greatest luxuries.
+
+Once--it was at the epoch of the visit from the archbishop to the
+convent--one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was
+connected with the Montmorency family, laid a wager that she would ask
+for a day's leave of absence--an enormity in so austere a community. The
+wager was accepted, but not one of those who bet believed that she would
+do it. When the moment came, as the archbishop was passing in front of
+the pupils, Mademoiselle Bouchard, to the indescribable terror of her
+companions, stepped out of the ranks, and said, "Monseigneur, a day's
+leave of absence." Mademoiselle Bouchard was tall, blooming, with the
+prettiest little rosy face in the world. M. de Quelen smiled and said,
+"What, my dear child, a day's leave of absence! Three days if you like.
+I grant you three days." The prioress could do nothing; the archbishop
+had spoken. Horror of the convent, but joy of the pupil. The effect may
+be imagined.
+
+This stern cloister was not so well walled off, however, but that the
+life of the passions of the outside world, drama, and even romance,
+did not make their way in. To prove this, we will confine ourselves to
+recording here and to briefly mentioning a real and incontestable fact,
+which, however, bears no reference in itself to, and is not connected by
+any thread whatever with the story which we are relating. We mention the
+fact for the sake of completing the physiognomy of the convent in the
+reader's mind.
+
+About this time there was in the convent a mysterious person who was
+not a nun, who was treated with great respect, and who was addressed as
+Madame Albertine. Nothing was known about her, save that she was mad,
+and that in the world she passed for dead. Beneath this history it
+was said there lay the arrangements of fortune necessary for a great
+marriage.
+
+This woman, hardly thirty years of age, of dark complexion and tolerably
+pretty, had a vague look in her large black eyes. Could she see? There
+was some doubt about this. She glided rather than walked, she never
+spoke; it was not quite known whether she breathed. Her nostrils were
+livid and pinched as after yielding up their last sigh. To touch her
+hand was like touching snow. She possessed a strange spectral grace.
+Wherever she entered, people felt cold. One day a sister, on seeing her
+pass, said to another sister, "She passes for a dead woman." "Perhaps
+she is one," replied the other.
+
+A hundred tales were told of Madame Albertine. This arose from the
+eternal curiosity of the pupils. In the chapel there was a gallery
+called L'OEil de Boeuf. It was in this gallery, which had only a
+circular bay, an oeil de boeuf, that Madame Albertine listened to the
+offices. She always occupied it alone because from this gallery, being
+on the level of the first story, the preacher or the officiating priest
+could be seen, which was interdicted to the nuns. One day the pulpit was
+occupied by a young priest of high rank, M. Le Duc de Rohan, peer of
+France, officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815 when he was Prince de
+Leon, and who died afterward, in 1830, as cardinal and Archbishop of
+Besancon. It was the first time that M. de Rohan had preached at the
+Petit-Picpus convent. Madame Albertine usually preserved perfect
+calmness and complete immobility during the sermons and services. That
+day, as soon as she caught sight of M. de Rohan, she half rose, and
+said, in a loud voice, amid the silence of the chapel, "Ah! Auguste!"
+The whole community turned their heads in amazement, the preacher raised
+his eyes, but Madame Albertine had relapsed into her immobility. A
+breath from the outer world, a flash of life, had passed for an instant
+across that cold and lifeless face and had then vanished, and the mad
+woman had become a corpse again.
+
+Those two words, however, had set every one in the convent who had the
+privilege of speech to chattering. How many things were contained in
+that "Ah! Auguste!" what revelations! M. de Rohan's name really was
+Auguste. It was evident that Madame Albertine belonged to the very
+highest society, since she knew M. de Rohan, and that her own rank there
+was of the highest, since she spoke thus familiarly of so great a lord,
+and that there existed between them some connection, of relationship,
+perhaps, but a very close one in any case, since she knew his "pet
+name."
+
+Two very severe duchesses, Mesdames de Choiseul and de Serent, often
+visited the community, whither they penetrated, no doubt, in virtue of
+the privilege Magnates mulieres, and caused great consternation in the
+boarding-school. When these two old ladies passed by, all the poor young
+girls trembled and dropped their eyes.
+
+Moreover, M. de Rohan, quite unknown to himself, was an object of
+attention to the school-girls. At that epoch he had just been made,
+while waiting for the episcopate, vicar-general of the Archbishop of
+Paris. It was one of his habits to come tolerably often to celebrate the
+offices in the chapel of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus. Not one of the
+young recluses could see him, because of the serge curtain, but he had
+a sweet and rather shrill voice, which they had come to know and to
+distinguish. He had been a mousquetaire, and then, he was said to be
+very coquettish, that his handsome brown hair was very well dressed in
+a roll around his head, and that he had a broad girdle of magnificent
+moire, and that his black cassock was of the most elegant cut in the
+world. He held a great place in all these imaginations of sixteen years.
+
+Not a sound from without made its way into the convent. But there was
+one year when the sound of a flute penetrated thither. This was an
+event, and the girls who were at school there at the time still recall
+it.
+
+It was a flute which was played in the neighborhood. This flute always
+played the same air, an air which is very far away nowadays,--"My
+Zetulbe, come reign o'er my soul,"--and it was heard two or three
+times a day. The young girls passed hours in listening to it, the vocal
+mothers were upset by it, brains were busy, punishments descended in
+showers. This lasted for several months. The girls were all more or
+less in love with the unknown musician. Each one dreamed that she was
+Zetulbe. The sound of the flute proceeded from the direction of the Rue
+Droit-Mur; and they would have given anything, compromised everything,
+attempted anything for the sake of seeing, of catching a glance, if only
+for a second, of the "young man" who played that flute so deliciously,
+and who, no doubt, played on all these souls at the same time. There
+were some who made their escape by a back door, and ascended to the
+third story on the Rue Droit-Mur side, in order to attempt to catch a
+glimpse through the gaps. Impossible! One even went so far as to thrust
+her arm through the grating, and to wave her white handkerchief. Two
+were still bolder. They found means to climb on a roof, and risked their
+lives there, and succeeded at last in seeing "the young man." He was an
+old emigre gentleman, blind and penniless, who was playing his flute in
+his attic, in order to pass the time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE LITTLE CONVENT
+
+In this enclosure of the Petit-Picpus there were three perfectly
+distinct buildings,--the Great Convent, inhabited by the nuns, the
+Boarding-school, where the scholars were lodged; and lastly, what was
+called the Little Convent. It was a building with a garden, in which
+lived all sorts of aged nuns of various orders, the relics of cloisters
+destroyed in the Revolution; a reunion of all the black, gray, and white
+medleys of all communities and all possible varieties; what might be
+called, if such a coupling of words is permissible, a sort of harlequin
+convent.
+
+When the Empire was established, all these poor old dispersed and exiled
+women had been accorded permission to come and take shelter under the
+wings of the Bernardines-Benedictines. The government paid them a small
+pension, the ladies of the Petit-Picpus received them cordially. It was
+a singular pell-mell. Each followed her own rule, Sometimes the pupils
+of the boarding-school were allowed, as a great recreation, to pay them
+a visit; the result is, that all those young memories have
+retained among other souvenirs that of Mother Sainte-Bazile, Mother
+Sainte-Scolastique, and Mother Jacob.
+
+One of these refugees found herself almost at home. She was a nun of
+Sainte-Aure, the only one of her order who had survived. The ancient
+convent of the ladies of Sainte-Aure occupied, at the beginning of the
+eighteenth century, this very house of the Petit-Picpus, which belonged
+later to the Benedictines of Martin Verga. This holy woman, too poor to
+wear the magnificent habit of her order, which was a white robe with
+a scarlet scapulary, had piously put it on a little manikin, which she
+exhibited with complacency and which she bequeathed to the house at
+her death. In 1824, only one nun of this order remained; to-day, there
+remains only a doll.
+
+In addition to these worthy mothers, some old society women had obtained
+permission of the prioress, like Madame Albertine, to retire into the
+Little Convent. Among the number were Madame Beaufort d'Hautpoul and
+Marquise Dufresne. Another was never known in the convent except by
+the formidable noise which she made when she blew her nose. The pupils
+called her Madame Vacarmini (hubbub).
+
+About 1820 or 1821, Madame de Genlis, who was at that time editing a
+little periodical publication called l'Intrepide, asked to be allowed
+to enter the convent of the Petit-Picpus as lady resident. The Duc
+d'Orleans recommended her. Uproar in the hive; the vocal-mothers were
+all in a flutter; Madame de Genlis had made romances. But she declared
+that she was the first to detest them, and then, she had reached her
+fierce stage of devotion. With the aid of God, and of the Prince, she
+entered. She departed at the end of six or eight months, alleging as a
+reason, that there was no shade in the garden. The nuns were delighted.
+Although very old, she still played the harp, and did it very well.
+
+When she went away she left her mark in her cell. Madame de Genlis was
+superstitious and a Latinist. These two words furnish a tolerably good
+profile of her. A few years ago, there were still to be seen, pasted in
+the inside of a little cupboard in her cell in which she locked up her
+silverware and her jewels, these five lines in Latin, written with
+her own hand in red ink on yellow paper, and which, in her opinion,
+possessed the property of frightening away robbers:--
+
+
+ Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis:[15]
+ Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas;
+ Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas;
+ Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas.
+ Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas.
+
+
+These verses in sixth century Latin raise the question whether the
+two thieves of Calvary were named, as is commonly believed, Dismas and
+Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas. This orthography might have confounded the
+pretensions put forward in the last century by the Vicomte de Gestas, of
+a descent from the wicked thief. However, the useful virtue attached to
+these verses forms an article of faith in the order of the Hospitallers.
+
+The church of the house, constructed in such a manner as to separate the
+Great Convent from the Boarding-school like a veritable intrenchment,
+was, of course, common to the Boarding-school, the Great Convent, and
+the Little Convent. The public was even admitted by a sort of lazaretto
+entrance on the street. But all was so arranged, that none of the
+inhabitants of the cloister could see a face from the outside world.
+Suppose a church whose choir is grasped in a gigantic hand, and
+folded in such a manner as to form, not, as in ordinary churches, a
+prolongation behind the altar, but a sort of hall, or obscure cellar, to
+the right of the officiating priest; suppose this hall to be shut off by
+a curtain seven feet in height, of which we have already spoken; in the
+shadow of that curtain, pile up on wooden stalls the nuns in the choir
+on the left, the school-girls on the right, the lay-sisters and the
+novices at the bottom, and you will have some idea of the nuns of the
+Petit-Picpus assisting at divine service. That cavern, which was called
+the choir, communicated with the cloister by a lobby. The church was
+lighted from the garden. When the nuns were present at services where
+their rule enjoined silence, the public was warned of their presence
+only by the folding seats of the stalls noisily rising and falling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--SOME SILHOUETTES OF THIS DARKNESS
+
+During the six years which separate 1819 from 1825, the prioress of the
+Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, whose name, in religion,
+was Mother Innocente. She came of the family of Marguerite de Blemeur,
+author of Lives of the Saints of the Order of Saint-Benoit. She had
+been re-elected. She was a woman about sixty years of age, short, thick,
+"singing like a cracked pot," says the letter which we have already
+quoted; an excellent woman, moreover, and the only merry one in the
+whole convent, and for that reason adored. She was learned, erudite,
+wise, competent, curiously proficient in history, crammed with Latin,
+stuffed with Greek, full of Hebrew, and more of a Benedictine monk than
+a Benedictine nun.
+
+The sub-prioress was an old Spanish nun, Mother Cineres, who was almost
+blind.
+
+The most esteemed among the vocal mothers were Mother Sainte-Honorine;
+the treasurer, Mother Sainte-Gertrude, the chief mistress of the
+novices; Mother-Saint-Ange, the assistant mistress; Mother Annonciation,
+the sacristan; Mother Saint-Augustin, the nurse, the only one in the
+convent who was malicious; then Mother Sainte-Mechtilde (Mademoiselle
+Gauvain), very young and with a beautiful voice; Mother des Anges
+(Mademoiselle Drouet), who had been in the convent of the Filles-Dieu,
+and in the convent du Tresor, between Gisors and Magny; Mother
+Saint-Joseph (Mademoiselle de Cogolludo), Mother Sainte-Adelaide
+(Mademoiselle d'Auverney), Mother Misericorde (Mademoiselle de
+Cifuentes, who could not resist austerities), Mother Compassion
+(Mademoiselle de la Miltiere, received at the age of sixty in defiance
+of the rule, and very wealthy); Mother Providence (Mademoiselle de
+Laudiniere), Mother Presentation (Mademoiselle de Siguenza), who was
+prioress in 1847; and finally, Mother Sainte-Celigne (sister of the
+sculptor Ceracchi), who went mad; Mother Sainte-Chantal (Mademoiselle de
+Suzon), who went mad.
+
+There was also, among the prettiest of them, a charming girl of three
+and twenty, who was from the Isle de Bourbon, a descendant of the
+Chevalier Roze, whose name had been Mademoiselle Roze, and who was
+called Mother Assumption.
+
+Mother Sainte-Mechtilde, intrusted with the singing and the choir, was
+fond of making use of the pupils in this quarter. She usually took a
+complete scale of them, that is to say, seven, from ten to sixteen years
+of age, inclusive, of assorted voices and sizes, whom she made sing
+standing, drawn up in a line, side by side, according to age, from the
+smallest to the largest. This presented to the eye, something in the
+nature of a reed-pipe of young girls, a sort of living Pan-pipe made of
+angels.
+
+Those of the lay-sisters whom the scholars loved most were Sister
+Euphrasie, Sister Sainte-Marguerite, Sister Sainte-Marthe, who was in
+her dotage, and Sister Sainte-Michel, whose long nose made them laugh.
+
+All these women were gentle with the children. The nuns were severe only
+towards themselves. No fire was lighted except in the school, and the
+food was choice compared to that in the convent. Moreover, they lavished
+a thousand cares on their scholars. Only, when a child passed near a nun
+and addressed her, the nun never replied.
+
+This rule of silence had had this effect, that throughout the whole
+convent, speech had been withdrawn from human creatures, and bestowed
+on inanimate objects. Now it was the church-bell which spoke, now it was
+the gardener's bell. A very sonorous bell, placed beside the portress,
+and which was audible throughout the house, indicated by its varied
+peals, which formed a sort of acoustic telegraph, all the actions of
+material life which were to be performed, and summoned to the parlor, in
+case of need, such or such an inhabitant of the house. Each person
+and each thing had its own peal. The prioress had one and one, the
+sub-prioress one and two. Six-five announced lessons, so that the pupils
+never said "to go to lessons," but "to go to six-five." Four-four was
+Madame de Genlis's signal. It was very often heard. "C'est le diable
+a quatre,"--it's the very deuce--said the uncharitable. Tennine strokes
+announced a great event. It was the opening of the door of seclusion,
+a frightful sheet of iron bristling with bolts which only turned on its
+hinges in the presence of the archbishop.
+
+With the exception of the archbishop and the gardener, no man entered
+the convent, as we have already said. The schoolgirls saw two others:
+one, the chaplain, the Abbe Banes, old and ugly, whom they were
+permitted to contemplate in the choir, through a grating; the other the
+drawing-master, M. Ansiaux, whom the letter, of which we have perused a
+few lines, calls M. Anciot, and describes as a frightful old hunchback.
+
+It will be seen that all these men were carefully chosen.
+
+Such was this curious house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--POST CORDA LAPIDES
+
+After having sketched its moral face, it will not prove unprofitable
+to point out, in a few words, its material configuration. The reader
+already has some idea of it.
+
+The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost the whole
+of the vast trapezium which resulted from the intersection of the Rue
+Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue Petit-Picpus, and the unused lane,
+called Rue Aumarais on old plans. These four streets surrounded this
+trapezium like a moat. The convent was composed of several buildings
+and a garden. The principal building, taken in its entirety, was a
+juxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, viewed from a bird's-eye
+view, outlined, with considerable exactness, a gibbet laid flat on the
+ground. The main arm of the gibbet occupied the whole of the fragment
+of the Rue Droit-Mur comprised between the Rue Petit-Picpus and the Rue
+Polonceau; the lesser arm was a lofty, gray, severe grated facade which
+faced the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage entrance No. 62 marked its
+extremity. Towards the centre of this facade was a low, arched door,
+whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders wove their webs,
+and which was open only for an hour or two on Sundays, and on rare
+occasions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This was the
+public entrance of the church. The elbow of the gibbet was a square
+hall which was used as the servants' hall, and which the nuns called the
+buttery. In the main arm were the cells of the mothers, the sisters, and
+the novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory, backed
+up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door No. 62 and the
+corner of the closed lane Aumarais, was the school, which was not
+visible from without. The remainder of the trapezium formed the garden,
+which was much lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, which caused
+the walls to be very much higher on the inside than on the outside. The
+garden, which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the summit of
+a hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence ran, as from
+the peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and, ranged by twos
+in between the branchings of these, eight small ones, so that, if the
+enclosure had been circular, the geometrical plan of the alleys would
+have resembled a cross superposed on a wheel. As the alleys all ended
+in the very irregular walls of the garden, they were of unequal length.
+They were bordered with currant bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tall
+poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent, which was at the angle of
+the Rue Droit-Mur to the house of the Little Convent, which was at the
+angle of the Aumarais lane. In front of the Little Convent was what was
+called the little garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard,
+all sorts of varied angles formed by the interior buildings, prison
+walls, the long black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the
+Rue Polonceau for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he will
+be able to form for himself a complete image of what the house of the
+Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy house
+had been built on the precise site of a famous tennis-ground of the
+fourteenth to the sixteenth century, which was called the "tennis-ground
+of the eleven thousand devils."
+
+All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris. These names,
+Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the streets which bear them
+are very much more ancient still. Aumarais Lane was called Maugout Lane;
+the Rue Droit-Mur was called the Rue des Eglantiers, for God opened
+flowers before man cut stones.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--A CENTURY UNDER A GUIMPE
+
+Since we are engaged in giving details as to what the convent of the
+Petit-Picpus was in former times, and since we have ventured to open
+a window on that discreet retreat, the reader will permit us one other
+little digression, utterly foreign to this book, but characteristic and
+useful, since it shows that the cloister even has its original figures.
+
+In the Little Convent there was a centenarian who came from the Abbey
+of Fontevrault. She had even been in society before the Revolution. She
+talked a great deal of M. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under Louis
+XVI. and of a Presidentess Duplat, with whom she had been very intimate.
+It was her pleasure and her vanity to drag in these names on every
+pretext. She told wonders of the Abbey of Fontevrault,--that it was like
+a city, and that there were streets in the monastery.
+
+She talked with a Picard accent which amused the pupils. Every year,
+she solemnly renewed her vows, and at the moment of taking the oath, she
+said to the priest, "Monseigneur Saint-Francois gave it to Monseigneur
+Saint-Julien, Monseigneur Saint-Julien gave it to Monseigneur
+Saint-Eusebius, Monseigneur Saint-Eusebius gave it to Monseigneur
+Saint-Procopius, etc., etc.; and thus I give it to you, father." And the
+school-girls would begin to laugh, not in their sleeves, but under
+their veils; charming little stifled laughs which made the vocal mothers
+frown.
+
+On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories. She said
+that in her youth the Bernardine monks were every whit as good as the
+mousquetaires. It was a century which spoke through her, but it was the
+eighteenth century. She told about the custom of the four wines, which
+existed before the Revolution in Champagne and Bourgogne. When a great
+personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke, and a peer, traversed
+a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the city fathers came out to harangue
+him and presented him with four silver gondolas into which they
+had poured four different sorts of wine. On the first goblet this
+inscription could be read, monkey wine; on the second, lion wine; on the
+third, sheep wine; on the fourth, hog wine. These four legends express
+the four stages descended by the drunkard; the first, intoxication,
+which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which
+dulls; and the fourth, that which brutalizes.
+
+In a cupboard, under lock and key, she kept a mysterious object of which
+she thought a great deal. The rule of Fontevrault did not forbid this.
+She would not show this object to anyone. She shut herself up, which her
+rule allowed her to do, and hid herself, every time that she desired to
+contemplate it. If she heard a footstep in the corridor, she closed the
+cupboard again as hastily as it was possible with her aged hands. As
+soon as it was mentioned to her, she became silent, she who was so fond
+of talking. The most curious were baffled by her silence and the most
+tenacious by her obstinacy. Thus it furnished a subject of comment for
+all those who were unoccupied or bored in the convent. What could that
+treasure of the centenarian be, which was so precious and so secret?
+Some holy book, no doubt? Some unique chaplet? Some authentic relic?
+They lost themselves in conjectures. When the poor old woman died,
+they rushed to her cupboard more hastily than was fitting, perhaps, and
+opened it. They found the object beneath a triple linen cloth, like some
+consecrated paten. It was a Faenza platter representing little Loves
+flitting away pursued by apothecary lads armed with enormous syringes.
+The chase abounds in grimaces and in comical postures. One of the
+charming little Loves is already fairly spitted. He is resisting,
+fluttering his tiny wings, and still making an effort to fly, but the
+dancer is laughing with a satanical air. Moral: Love conquered by the
+colic. This platter, which is very curious, and which had, possibly,
+the honor of furnishing Moliere with an idea, was still in existence
+in September, 1845; it was for sale by a bric-a-brac merchant in the
+Boulevard Beaumarchais.
+
+This good old woman would not receive any visits from outside because,
+said she, the parlor is too gloomy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION
+
+However, this almost sepulchral parlor, of which we have sought to
+convey an idea, is a purely local trait which is not reproduced with the
+same severity in other convents. At the convent of the Rue du Temple,
+in particular, which belonged, in truth, to another order, the black
+shutters were replaced by brown curtains, and the parlor itself was a
+salon with a polished wood floor, whose windows were draped in white
+muslin curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts of frames, a portrait
+of a Benedictine nun with unveiled face, painted bouquets, and even the
+head of a Turk.
+
+It is in that garden of the Temple convent, that stood that famous
+chestnut-tree which was renowned as the finest and the largest in
+France, and which bore the reputation among the good people of the
+eighteenth century of being the father of all the chestnut trees of the
+realm.
+
+As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied by Benedictines
+of the Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different from those who
+depended on Citeaux. This order of the Perpetual Adoration is not very
+ancient and does not go back more than two hundred years. In 1649 the
+holy sacrament was profaned on two occasions a few days apart, in two
+churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Jean en Greve, a rare
+and frightful sacrilege which set the whole town in an uproar. M. the
+Prior and Vicar-General of Saint-Germain des Pres ordered a solemn
+procession of all his clergy, in which the Pope's Nuncio officiated.
+But this expiation did not satisfy two sainted women, Madame Courtin,
+Marquise de Boucs, and the Comtesse de Chateauvieux. This outrage
+committed on "the most holy sacrament of the altar," though but
+temporary, would not depart from these holy souls, and it seemed to
+them that it could only be extenuated by a "Perpetual Adoration" in some
+female monastery. Both of them, one in 1652, the other in 1653, made
+donations of notable sums to Mother Catherine de Bar, called of the Holy
+Sacrament, a Benedictine nun, for the purpose of founding, to this pious
+end, a monastery of the order of Saint-Benoit; the first permission for
+this foundation was given to Mother Catherine de Bar by M. de Metz, Abbe
+of Saint-Germain, "on condition that no woman could be received unless
+she contributed three hundred livres income, which amounts to six
+thousand livres, to the principal." After the Abbe of Saint-Germain, the
+king accorded letters-patent; and all the rest, abbatial charter, and
+royal letters, was confirmed in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts and the
+Parliament.
+
+Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the establishment of the
+Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament at Paris.
+Their first convent was "a new building" in the Rue Cassette, out of the
+contributions of Mesdames de Boucs and de Chateauvieux.
+
+This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with
+the Benedictine nuns of Citeaux. It mounted back to the Abbe of
+Saint-Germain des Pres, in the same manner that the ladies of the Sacred
+Heart go back to the general of the Jesuits, and the sisters of charity
+to the general of the Lazarists.
+
+It was also totally different from the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus,
+whose interior we have just shown. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII. had
+authorized, by a special brief, the Bernardines of the Rue Petit-Picpus,
+to practise the Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictine nuns of the
+Holy Sacrament. But the two orders remained distinct none the less.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS
+
+At the beginning of the Restoration, the convent of the Petit-Picpus
+was in its decay; this forms a part of the general death of the order,
+which, after the eighteenth century, has been disappearing like all
+the religious orders. Contemplation is, like prayer, one of humanity's
+needs; but, like everything which the Revolution touched, it will be
+transformed, and from being hostile to social progress, it will become
+favorable to it.
+
+The house of the Petit-Picpus was becoming rapidly depopulated. In 1840,
+the Little Convent had disappeared, the school had disappeared. There
+were no longer any old women, nor young girls; the first were dead, the
+latter had taken their departure. Volaverunt.
+
+The rule of the Perpetual Adoration is so rigid in its nature that it
+alarms, vocations recoil before it, the order receives no recruits. In
+1845, it still obtained lay-sisters here and there. But of professed
+nuns, none at all. Forty years ago, the nuns numbered nearly a hundred;
+fifteen years ago there were not more than twenty-eight of them. How
+many are there to-day? In 1847, the prioress was young, a sign that
+the circle of choice was restricted. She was not forty years old. In
+proportion as the number diminishes, the fatigue increases, the service
+of each becomes more painful; the moment could then be seen drawing near
+when there would be but a dozen bent and aching shoulders to bear the
+heavy rule of Saint-Benoit. The burden is implacable, and remains the
+same for the few as for the many. It weighs down, it crushes. Thus they
+die. At the period when the author of this book still lived in Paris,
+two died. One was twenty-five years old, the other twenty-three. This
+latter can say, like Julia Alpinula: "Hic jaceo. Vixi annos viginti et
+tres." It is in consequence of this decay that the convent gave up the
+education of girls.
+
+We have not felt able to pass before this extraordinary house without
+entering it, and without introducing the minds which accompany us, and
+which are listening to our tale, to the profit of some, perchance, of
+the melancholy history of Jean Valjean. We have penetrated into this
+community, full of those old practices which seem so novel to-day. It
+is the closed garden, hortus conclusus. We have spoken of this singular
+place in detail, but with respect, in so far, at least, as detail and
+respect are compatible. We do not understand all, but we insult nothing.
+We are equally far removed from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre, who
+wound up by anointing the executioner, and from the sneer of Voltaire,
+who even goes so far as to ridicule the cross.
+
+An illogical act on Voltaire's part, we may remark, by the way; for
+Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and even
+for those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix
+represent? The assassinated sage.
+
+In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis.
+People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that,
+while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human
+heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but
+on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.
+
+In the meantime, let us study things which are no more. It is necessary
+to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them. The counterfeits
+of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves the future.
+This spectre, this past, is given to falsifying its own passport. Let
+us inform ourselves of the trap. Let us be on our guard. The past has a
+visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the visage
+and let us tear off the mask.
+
+As for convents, they present a complex problem,--a question of
+civilization, which condemns them; a question of liberty, which protects
+them.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA
+
+This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.
+
+Man is the second.
+
+Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road, it
+has been our duty to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which is common
+to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well as to
+modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well as to
+Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to the
+Infinite.
+
+This is not the place for enlarging disproportionately on certain
+ideas; nevertheless, while absolutely maintaining our reserves, our
+restrictions, and even our indignations, we must say that every time we
+encounter man in the Infinite, either well or ill understood, we feel
+ourselves overpowered with respect. There is, in the synagogue, in the
+mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate,
+and a sublime side, which we adore. What a contemplation for the mind,
+and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the
+human wall!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT
+
+From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism
+is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in
+its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where
+centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great
+social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is
+to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the
+impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the
+beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the
+spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. Moreover,
+when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of disorder,
+it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it salutary in its
+period of purity, because it still continues to set the example.
+
+Claustration has had its day. Cloisters, useful in the early education
+of modern civilization, have embarrassed its growth, and are injurious
+to its development. So far as institution and formation with relation
+to man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth century,
+questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the nineteenth. The
+leprosy of monasticism has gnawed nearly to a skeleton two wonderful
+nations, Italy and Spain; the one the light, the other the splendor of
+Europe for centuries; and, at the present day, these two illustrious
+peoples are but just beginning to convalesce, thanks to the healthy and
+vigorous hygiene of 1789 alone.
+
+The convent--the ancient female convent in particular, such as it still
+presents itself on the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria,
+in Spain--is one of the most sombre concretions of the Middle Ages. The
+cloister, that cloister, is the point of intersection of horrors. The
+Catholic cloister, properly speaking, is wholly filled with the black
+radiance of death.
+
+The Spanish convent is the most funereal of all. There rise, in
+obscurity, beneath vaults filled with gloom, beneath domes vague with
+shadow, massive altars of Babel, as high as cathedrals; there immense
+white crucifixes hang from chains in the dark; there are extended, all
+nude on the ebony, great Christs of ivory; more than bleeding,--bloody;
+hideous and magnificent, with their elbows displaying the bones, their
+knee-pans showing their integuments, their wounds showing their flesh,
+crowned with silver thorns, nailed with nails of gold, with blood drops
+of rubies on their brows, and diamond tears in their eyes. The diamonds
+and rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings in the shadow below weep,
+their sides bruised with the hair shirt and their iron-tipped scourges,
+their breasts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated with
+prayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselves
+seraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they
+love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; their
+bones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breath
+under their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration of
+death. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them.
+The immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancient
+monasteries of Spain. Lairs of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,
+ferocious places.
+
+Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent was,
+above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the Orient
+about it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up and kept
+watch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the
+odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen in dreams
+and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man descended
+from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one. Lofty walls
+guarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her sultan, from
+all living distraction. A glance on the outer world was infidelity. The
+in pace replaced the leather sack. That which was cast into the sea in
+the East was thrown into the ground in the West. In both quarters, women
+wrung their hands; the waves for the first, the grave for the last; here
+the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous parallel.
+
+To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have
+adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion
+a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of
+invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing
+facts and all gloomy questions. A matter for declamations, say the
+clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer;
+Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers.
+I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer,
+that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that poor
+Holofernes."
+
+Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they are
+obstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eight
+leagues distant from Brussels,--there are relics of the Middle Ages
+there which are attainable for everybody,--at the Abbey of Villers, the
+hole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerly
+the courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stone
+dungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were in pace.
+Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and a
+grated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of the
+river, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground. Four
+feet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is always
+soaked. The occupant of the in pace had this wet soil for his bed. In
+one of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet riveted to
+the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of four slabs
+of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low for him to
+stand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a coverlid of stone
+on top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace,
+these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole
+on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid
+of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here
+was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those
+oozing walls,--what declaimers!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST
+
+Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in
+Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short. It
+simply depopulates. Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge
+of Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience, the
+forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister, the right of
+the first-born pouring the excess of the family into monasticism, the
+ferocities of which we have just spoken, the in pace, the closed mouths,
+the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate minds placed in the dungeon
+of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the interment of living souls.
+Add individual tortures to national degradations, and, whoever you
+may be, you will shudder before the frock and the veil,--those two
+winding-sheets of human devising. Nevertheless, at certain points and in
+certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit
+of the cloister persists in the midst of the nineteenth century, and
+a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing
+the civilized world. The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in
+perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume
+which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which
+should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment
+which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which
+should return to embrace the living.
+
+"Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Why
+will you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deep
+sea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I have
+loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent.
+
+To this there is but one reply: "In former days."
+
+To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the
+government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition,
+to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to
+refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles
+on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and
+militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication
+of parasites, to force the past on the present,--this seems strange.
+Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists,
+who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple
+process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social
+order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique
+authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about
+shouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to the
+ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over
+with chalk, and said, "She is white, Bos cretatus."
+
+As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above
+all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive,
+we attack it, and we try to kill it.
+
+Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms all
+forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in
+their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must
+be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities
+of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is
+difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.
+
+A convent in France, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, is
+a college of owls facing the light. A cloister, caught in the very act
+of asceticism, in the very heart of the city of '89 and of 1830 and
+of 1848, Rome blossoming out in Paris, is an anachronism. In ordinary
+times, in order to dissolve an anachronism and to cause it to vanish,
+one has only to make it spell out the date. But we are not in ordinary
+times.
+
+Let us fight.
+
+Let us fight, but let us make a distinction. The peculiar property of
+truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration?
+There is that which it is necessary to destroy, and there is that which
+it is simply necessary to elucidate and examine. What a force is kindly
+and serious examination! Let us not apply a flame where only a light is
+required.
+
+So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a general
+proposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe,
+in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration. Whoever says
+cloister, says marsh. Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation is
+unhealthy, their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolates
+them; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt. We cannot think
+without affright of those lands where fakirs, bonzes, santons, Greek
+monks, marabouts, talapoins, and dervishes multiply even like swarms of
+vermin.
+
+This said, the religious question remains. This question has certain
+mysterious, almost formidable sides; may we be permitted to look at it
+fixedly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE CONVENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PRINCIPLES
+
+Men unite themselves and dwell in communities. By virtue of what right?
+By virtue of the right of association.
+
+They shut themselves up at home. By virtue of what right? By virtue of
+the right which every man has to open or shut his door.
+
+They do not come forth. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right
+to go and come, which implies the right to remain at home.
+
+There, at home, what do they do?
+
+They speak in low tones; they drop their eyes; they toil. They renounce
+the world, towns, sensualities, pleasures, vanities, pride, interests.
+They are clothed in coarse woollen or coarse linen. Not one of them
+possesses in his own right anything whatever. On entering there, each
+one who was rich makes himself poor. What he has, he gives to all. He
+who was what is called noble, a gentleman and a lord, is the equal of
+him who was a peasant. The cell is identical for all. All undergo the
+same tonsure, wear the same frock, eat the same black bread, sleep on
+the same straw, die on the same ashes. The same sack on their backs, the
+same rope around their loins. If the decision has been to go barefoot,
+all go barefoot. There may be a prince among them; that prince is the
+same shadow as the rest. No titles. Even family names have disappeared.
+They bear only first names. All are bowed beneath the equality of
+baptismal names. They have dissolved the carnal family, and constituted
+in their community a spiritual family. They have no other relatives than
+all men. They succor the poor, they care for the sick. They elect those
+whom they obey. They call each other "my brother."
+
+You stop me and exclaim, "But that is the ideal convent!"
+
+It is sufficient that it may be the possible convent, that I should take
+notice of it.
+
+Thence it results that, in the preceding book, I have spoken of a
+convent with respectful accents. The Middle Ages cast aside, Asia cast
+aside, the historical and political question held in reserve, from the
+purely philosophical point of view, outside the requirements of militant
+policy, on condition that the monastery shall be absolutely a voluntary
+matter and shall contain only consenting parties, I shall always
+consider a cloistered community with a certain attentive, and, in some
+respects, a deferential gravity.
+
+Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; where there is a
+commune, there is right. The monastery is the product of the formula:
+Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how grand is liberty! And what a splendid
+transfiguration! Liberty suffices to transform the monastery into a
+republic.
+
+Let us continue.
+
+But these men, or these women who are behind these four walls. They
+dress themselves in coarse woollen, they are equals, they call each
+other brothers, that is well; but they do something else?
+
+Yes.
+
+What?
+
+They gaze on the darkness, they kneel, and they clasp their hands.
+
+What does this signify?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--PRAYER
+
+They pray.
+
+To whom?
+
+To God.
+
+To pray to God,--what is the meaning of these words?
+
+Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent,
+permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because,
+if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since
+it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end
+there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we can
+attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms, is it
+not the absolute, of which we are only the relative?
+
+At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not
+an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming
+plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second
+infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's
+mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another
+abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does
+it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of
+them has a will principle, and there is an _I_ in the upper infinity as
+there is an _I_ in the lower infinity. The _I_ below is the soul; the
+_I_ on high is God.
+
+To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought,
+with the infinity on high, is called praying.
+
+Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must
+reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards
+the Unknown; thought, revery, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What
+is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, revery,
+prayer,--these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them.
+Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow;
+that is to say, to the light.
+
+The grandeur of democracy is to disown nothing and to deny nothing of
+humanity. Close to the right of the man, beside it, at the least, there
+exists the right of the soul.
+
+To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let
+us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of
+creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We
+have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against
+the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd,
+to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify
+belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of
+caterpillars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER
+
+With regard to the modes of prayer, all are good, provided that they are
+sincere. Turn your book upside down and be in the infinite.
+
+There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is
+also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun; this
+philosophy is called blindness.
+
+To erect a sense which we lack into a source of truth, is a fine blind
+man's self-sufficiency.
+
+The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs which
+this groping philosophy assumes towards the philosophy which beholds
+God. One fancies he hears a mole crying, "I pity them with their sun!"
+
+There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led
+back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that
+they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in
+any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove
+God.
+
+We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their
+philosophy.
+
+Let us go on.
+
+The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying
+themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,
+impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a
+revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the
+word Will.
+
+To say: "the plant wills," instead of: "the plant grows": this would be
+fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: "the universe wills." Why?
+Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has an _I_;
+the universe wills, therefore it has a God.
+
+As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject
+nothing a priori, a will in the plant, accepted by this school, appears
+to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe denied by it.
+
+To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on
+any other conditions than a denial of the infinite. We have demonstrated
+this.
+
+The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything
+becomes "a mental conception."
+
+With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts
+the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists
+itself.
+
+From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only
+"a mental conception."
+
+Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in the
+lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind.
+
+In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all
+end in the monosyllable, No.
+
+To No there is only one reply, Yes.
+
+Nihilism has no point.
+
+There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything
+is something. Nothing is nothing.
+
+Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.
+
+Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an
+energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the condition
+of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in
+other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge from the man
+of felicity. Eden should be changed into a Lyceum. Science should be
+a cordial. To enjoy,--what a sad aim, and what a paltry ambition! The
+brute enjoys. To offer thought to the thirst of men, to give them all as
+an elixir the notion of God, to make conscience and science fraternize
+in them, to render them just by this mysterious confrontation; such is
+the function of real philosophy. Morality is a blossoming out of truths.
+Contemplation leads to action. The absolute should be practicable. It is
+necessary that the ideal should be breathable, drinkable, and eatable to
+the human mind. It is the ideal which has the right to say: Take, this!
+It is on this condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of science
+and becomes the one and sovereign mode of human rallying, and that
+philosophy herself is promoted to religion.
+
+Philosophy should not be a corbel erected on mystery to gaze upon it
+at its ease, without any other result than that of being convenient to
+curiosity.
+
+For our part, adjourning the development of our thought to another
+occasion, we will confine ourselves to saying that we neither understand
+man as a point of departure nor progress as an end, without those two
+forces which are their two motors: faith and love.
+
+Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type.
+
+What is this ideal? It is God.
+
+Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--PRECAUTIONS TO BE OBSERVED IN BLAME
+
+History and philosophy have eternal duties, which are, at the same time,
+simple duties; to combat Caiphas the High-priest, Draco the Lawgiver,
+Trimalcion the Legislator, Tiberius the Emperor; this is clear, direct,
+and limpid, and offers no obscurity.
+
+But the right to live apart, even with its inconveniences and its
+abuses, insists on being stated and taken into account. Cenobitism is a
+human problem.
+
+When one speaks of convents, those abodes of error, but of innocence,
+of aberration but of good-will, of ignorance but of devotion, of torture
+but of martyrdom, it always becomes necessary to say either yes or no.
+
+A convent is a contradiction. Its object, salvation; its means thereto,
+sacrifice. The convent is supreme egoism having for its result supreme
+abnegation.
+
+To abdicate with the object of reigning seems to be the device of
+monasticism.
+
+In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of
+exchange on death. One discounts in terrestrial gloom celestial light.
+In the cloister, hell is accepted in advance as a post obit on paradise.
+
+The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity.
+
+It does not seem to us, that on such a subject mockery is permissible.
+All about it is serious, the good as well as the bad.
+
+The just man frowns, but never smiles with a malicious sneer. We
+understand wrath, but not malice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--FAITH, LAW
+
+A few words more.
+
+We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise the
+spiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere honor
+the thoughtful man.
+
+We salute the man who kneels.
+
+A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.
+
+One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor
+and invisible labor.
+
+To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.
+
+Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.
+
+Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.
+
+In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not idlers.
+
+To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.
+
+Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe that
+a perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,
+the priest and the philosopher agree. We must die. The Abbe de la Trappe
+replies to Horace.
+
+To mingle with one's life a certain presence of the sepulchre,--this is
+the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,
+the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; we
+admit it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless and
+vivacious spirits say:--
+
+"What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?
+What purpose do they serve? What do they do?"
+
+Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and which
+awaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make of
+us, we reply: "There is probably no work more divine than that performed
+by these souls." And we add: "There is probably no work which is more
+useful."
+
+There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who never
+pray at all.
+
+In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that is
+mingled with prayer.
+
+Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. Deo erexit
+Voltaire.
+
+We are for religion as against religions.
+
+We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and the
+sublimity of prayer.
+
+Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,--a minute which
+will not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,--at
+this hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but little
+elevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,
+and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,
+whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.
+
+The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is still
+sacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its
+own.
+
+Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on all
+sides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,
+the female convent in particular,--for in our century it is woman who
+suffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is something
+of protestation,--the female convent has incontestably a certain
+majesty.
+
+This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of
+whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;
+it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place
+whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side
+the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it
+is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated
+and obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has
+become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half
+obscurity of the tomb.
+
+We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,
+live by faith,--we have never been able to think without a sort of
+tender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full of
+envy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of these
+humble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of the
+mystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which is
+not yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessing
+the sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring
+towards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on the
+darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, at
+times, by the deep breaths of eternity.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--WHICH TREATS OF THE MANNER OF ENTERING A CONVENT
+
+It was into this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent expressed
+it, "fallen from the sky."
+
+He had scaled the wall of the garden which formed the angle of the Rue
+Polonceau. That hymn of the angels which he had heard in the middle
+of the night, was the nuns chanting matins; that hall, of which he had
+caught a glimpse in the gloom, was the chapel. That phantom which he had
+seen stretched on the ground was the sister who was making reparation;
+that bell, the sound of which had so strangely surprised him, was the
+gardener's bell attached to the knee of Father Fauchelevent.
+
+Cosette once put to bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we have
+already seen, supped on a glass of wine and a bit of cheese before a
+good, crackling fire; then, the only bed in the hut being occupied by
+Cosette, each threw himself on a truss of straw.
+
+Before he shut his eyes, Jean Valjean said: "I must remain here
+henceforth." This remark trotted through Fauchelevent's head all night
+long.
+
+To tell the truth, neither of them slept.
+
+Jean Valjean, feeling that he was discovered and that Javert was on
+his scent, understood that he and Cosette were lost if they returned to
+Paris. Then the new storm which had just burst upon him had stranded
+him in this cloister. Jean Valjean had, henceforth, but one thought,--to
+remain there. Now, for an unfortunate man in his position, this
+convent was both the safest and the most dangerous of places; the most
+dangerous, because, as no men might enter there, if he were discovered,
+it was a flagrant offence, and Jean Valjean would find but one step
+intervening between the convent and prison; the safest, because, if he
+could manage to get himself accepted there and remain there, who would
+ever seek him in such a place? To dwell in an impossible place was
+safety.
+
+On his side, Fauchelevent was cudgelling his brains. He began by
+declaring to himself that he understood nothing of the matter. How had
+M. Madeleine got there, when the walls were what they were? Cloister
+walls are not to be stepped over. How did he get there with a child? One
+cannot scale a perpendicular wall with a child in one's arms. Who was
+that child? Where did they both come from? Since Fauchelevent had lived
+in the convent, he had heard nothing of M. sur M., and he knew nothing
+of what had taken place there. Father Madeleine had an air which
+discouraged questions; and besides, Fauchelevent said to himself: "One
+does not question a saint." M. Madeleine had preserved all his prestige
+in Fauchelevent's eyes. Only, from some words which Jean Valjean had let
+fall, the gardener thought he could draw the inference that M. Madeleine
+had probably become bankrupt through the hard times, and that he was
+pursued by his creditors; or that he had compromised himself in some
+political affair, and was in hiding; which last did not displease
+Fauchelevent, who, like many of our peasants of the North, had an
+old fund of Bonapartism about him. While in hiding, M. Madeleine had
+selected the convent as a refuge, and it was quite simple that he should
+wish to remain there. But the inexplicable point, to which Fauchelevent
+returned constantly and over which he wearied his brain, was that M.
+Madeleine should be there, and that he should have that little girl with
+him. Fauchelevent saw them, touched them, spoke to them, and still did
+not believe it possible. The incomprehensible had just made its entrance
+into Fauchelevent's hut. Fauchelevent groped about amid conjectures, and
+could see nothing clearly but this: "M. Madeleine saved my life."
+This certainty alone was sufficient and decided his course. He said to
+himself: "It is my turn now." He added in his conscience: "M. Madeleine
+did not stop to deliberate when it was a question of thrusting himself
+under the cart for the purpose of dragging me out." He made up his mind
+to save M. Madeleine.
+
+Nevertheless, he put many questions to himself and made himself divers
+replies: "After what he did for me, would I save him if he were a thief?
+Just the same. If he were an assassin, would I save him? Just the same.
+Since he is a saint, shall I save him? Just the same."
+
+But what a problem it was to manage to have him remain in the convent!
+Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical
+undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder
+than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old
+rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous
+enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the
+steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit. Father Fauchelevent was
+an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and who, towards the end
+of his days, halt, infirm, with no interest left to him in the world,
+found it sweet to be grateful, and perceiving a generous action to be
+performed, flung himself upon it like a man, who at the moment when he
+is dying, should find close to his hand a glass of good wine which he
+had never tasted, and should swallow it with avidity. We may add,
+that the air which he had breathed for many years in this convent had
+destroyed all personality in him, and had ended by rendering a good
+action of some kind absolutely necessary to him.
+
+So he took his resolve: to devote himself to M. Madeleine.
+
+We have just called him a poor peasant of Picardy. That description
+is just, but incomplete. At the point of this story which we have now
+reached, a little of Father Fauchelevent's physiology becomes useful.
+He was a peasant, but he had been a notary, which added trickery to his
+cunning, and penetration to his ingenuousness. Having, through various
+causes, failed in his business, he had descended to the calling of a
+carter and a laborer. But, in spite of oaths and lashings, which horses
+seem to require, something of the notary had lingered in him. He had
+some natural wit; he talked good grammar; he conversed, which is a rare
+thing in a village; and the other peasants said of him: "He talks almost
+like a gentleman with a hat." Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that
+species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last
+century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors
+showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the
+pigeon-hole of the plebeian: rather rustic, rather citified; pepper and
+salt. Fauchelevent, though sorely tried and harshly used by fate,
+worn out, a sort of poor, threadbare old soul, was, nevertheless, an
+impulsive man, and extremely spontaneous in his actions; a precious
+quality which prevents one from ever being wicked. His defects and his
+vices, for he had some, were all superficial; in short, his physiognomy
+was of the kind which succeeds with an observer. His aged face had none
+of those disagreeable wrinkles at the top of the forehead, which signify
+malice or stupidity.
+
+At daybreak, Father Fauchelevent opened his eyes, after having done an
+enormous deal of thinking, and beheld M. Madeleine seated on his truss
+of straw, and watching Cosette's slumbers. Fauchelevent sat up and
+said:--
+
+"Now that you are here, how are you going to contrive to enter?"
+
+This remark summed up the situation and aroused Jean Valjean from his
+revery.
+
+The two men took counsel together.
+
+"In the first place," said Fauchelevent, "you will begin by not setting
+foot outside of this chamber, either you or the child. One step in the
+garden and we are done for."
+
+"That is true."
+
+"Monsieur Madeleine," resumed Fauchelevent, "you have arrived at a very
+auspicious moment, I mean to say a very inauspicious moment; one of
+the ladies is very ill. This will prevent them from looking much in our
+direction. It seems that she is dying. The prayers of the forty hours
+are being said. The whole community is in confusion. That occupies them.
+The one who is on the point of departure is a saint. In fact, we are
+all saints here; all the difference between them and me is that they say
+'our cell,' and that I say 'my cabin.' The prayers for the dying are to
+be said, and then the prayers for the dead. We shall be at peace here
+for to-day; but I will not answer for to-morrow."
+
+"Still," observed Jean Valjean, "this cottage is in the niche of the
+wall, it is hidden by a sort of ruin, there are trees, it is not visible
+from the convent."
+
+"And I add that the nuns never come near it."
+
+"Well?" said Jean Valjean.
+
+The interrogation mark which accentuated this "well" signified:
+"it seems to me that one may remain concealed here?" It was to this
+interrogation point that Fauchelevent responded:--
+
+"There are the little girls."
+
+"What little girls?" asked Jean Valjean.
+
+Just as Fauchelevent opened his mouth to explain the words which he had
+uttered, a bell emitted one stroke.
+
+"The nun is dead," said he. "There is the knell."
+
+And he made a sign to Jean Valjean to listen.
+
+The bell struck a second time.
+
+"It is the knell, Monsieur Madeleine. The bell will continue to strike
+once a minute for twenty-four hours, until the body is taken from the
+church.--You see, they play. At recreation hours it suffices to have a
+ball roll aside, to send them all hither, in spite of prohibitions, to
+hunt and rummage for it all about here. Those cherubs are devils."
+
+"Who?" asked Jean Valjean.
+
+"The little girls. You would be very quickly discovered. They would
+shriek: 'Oh! a man!' There is no danger to-day. There will be no
+recreation hour. The day will be entirely devoted to prayers. You hear
+the bell. As I told you, a stroke each minute. It is the death knell."
+
+"I understand, Father Fauchelevent. There are pupils."
+
+And Jean Valjean thought to himself:--
+
+"Here is Cosette's education already provided."
+
+Fauchelevent exclaimed:--
+
+"Pardine! There are little girls indeed! And they would bawl around you!
+And they would rush off! To be a man here is to have the plague. You see
+how they fasten a bell to my paw as though I were a wild beast."
+
+Jean Valjean fell into more and more profound thought.--"This convent
+would be our salvation," he murmured.
+
+Then he raised his voice:--
+
+"Yes, the difficulty is to remain here."
+
+"No," said Fauchelevent, "the difficulty is to get out."
+
+Jean Valjean felt the blood rush back to his heart.
+
+"To get out!"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur Madeleine. In order to return here it is first necessary
+to get out."
+
+And after waiting until another stroke of the knell had sounded,
+Fauchelevent went on:--
+
+"You must not be found here in this fashion. Whence come you? For me,
+you fall from heaven, because I know you; but the nuns require one to
+enter by the door."
+
+All at once they heard a rather complicated pealing from another bell.
+
+"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "they are ringing up the vocal mothers. They
+are going to the chapter. They always hold a chapter when any one dies.
+She died at daybreak. People generally do die at daybreak. But cannot
+you get out by the way in which you entered? Come, I do not ask for the
+sake of questioning you, but how did you get in?"
+
+Jean Valjean turned pale; the very thought of descending again into
+that terrible street made him shudder. You make your way out of a forest
+filled with tigers, and once out of it, imagine a friendly counsel that
+shall advise you to return thither! Jean Valjean pictured to himself the
+whole police force still engaged in swarming in that quarter, agents on
+the watch, sentinels everywhere, frightful fists extended towards his
+collar, Javert at the corner of the intersection of the streets perhaps.
+
+"Impossible!" said he. "Father Fauchelevent, say that I fell from the
+sky."
+
+"But I believe it, I believe it," retorted Fauchelevent. "You have no
+need to tell me that. The good God must have taken you in his hand for
+the purpose of getting a good look at you close to, and then dropped
+you. Only, he meant to place you in a man's convent; he made a mistake.
+Come, there goes another peal, that is to order the porter to go and
+inform the municipality that the dead-doctor is to come here and view a
+corpse. All that is the ceremony of dying. These good ladies are not
+at all fond of that visit. A doctor is a man who does not believe in
+anything. He lifts the veil. Sometimes he lifts something else too. How
+quickly they have had the doctor summoned this time! What is the matter?
+Your little one is still asleep. What is her name?"
+
+"Cosette."
+
+"She is your daughter? You are her grandfather, that is?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It will be easy enough for her to get out of here. I have my service
+door which opens on the courtyard. I knock. The porter opens; I have
+my vintage basket on my back, the child is in it, I go out. Father
+Fauchelevent goes out with his basket--that is perfectly natural. You
+will tell the child to keep very quiet. She will be under the cover. I
+will leave her for whatever time is required with a good old friend, a
+fruit-seller whom I know in the Rue Chemin-Vert, who is deaf, and who
+has a little bed. I will shout in the fruit-seller's ear, that she is a
+niece of mine, and that she is to keep her for me until to-morrow. Then
+the little one will re-enter with you; for I will contrive to have you
+re-enter. It must be done. But how will you manage to get out?"
+
+Jean Valjean shook his head.
+
+"No one must see me, the whole point lies there, Father Fauchelevent.
+Find some means of getting me out in a basket, under cover, like
+Cosette."
+
+Fauchelevent scratched the lobe of his ear with the middle finger of his
+left hand, a sign of serious embarrassment.
+
+A third peal created a diversion.
+
+"That is the dead-doctor taking his departure," said Fauchelevent. "He
+has taken a look and said: 'She is dead, that is well.' When the doctor
+has signed the passport for paradise, the undertaker's company sends a
+coffin. If it is a mother, the mothers lay her out; if she is a sister,
+the sisters lay her out. After which, I nail her up. That forms a part
+of my gardener's duty. A gardener is a bit of a grave-digger. She is
+placed in a lower hall of the church which communicates with the street,
+and into which no man may enter save the doctor of the dead. I don't
+count the undertaker's men and myself as men. It is in that hall that I
+nail up the coffin. The undertaker's men come and get it, and whip
+up, coachman! that's the way one goes to heaven. They fetch a box with
+nothing in it, they take it away again with something in it. That's what
+a burial is like. De profundis."
+
+A horizontal ray of sunshine lightly touched the face of the sleeping
+Cosette, who lay with her mouth vaguely open, and had the air of an
+angel drinking in the light. Jean Valjean had fallen to gazing at her.
+He was no longer listening to Fauchelevent.
+
+That one is not listened to is no reason for preserving silence. The
+good old gardener went on tranquilly with his babble:--
+
+"The grave is dug in the Vaugirard cemetery. They declare that they are
+going to suppress that Vaugirard cemetery. It is an ancient cemetery
+which is outside the regulations, which has no uniform, and which is
+going to retire. It is a shame, for it is convenient. I have a friend
+there, Father Mestienne, the grave-digger. The nuns here possess one
+privilege, it is to be taken to that cemetery at nightfall. There is
+a special permission from the Prefecture on their behalf. But how many
+events have happened since yesterday! Mother Crucifixion is dead, and
+Father Madeleine--"
+
+"Is buried," said Jean Valjean, smiling sadly.
+
+Fauchelevent caught the word.
+
+"Goodness! if you were here for good, it would be a real burial."
+
+A fourth peal burst out. Fauchelevent hastily detached the belled
+knee-cap from its nail and buckled it on his knee again.
+
+"This time it is for me. The Mother Prioress wants me. Good, now I am
+pricking myself on the tongue of my buckle. Monsieur Madeleine, don't
+stir from here, and wait for me. Something new has come up. If you are
+hungry, there is wine, bread and cheese."
+
+And he hastened out of the hut, crying: "Coming! coming!"
+
+Jean Valjean watched him hurrying across the garden as fast as his
+crooked leg would permit, casting a sidelong glance by the way on his
+melon patch.
+
+Less than ten minutes later, Father Fauchelevent, whose bell put the
+nuns in his road to flight, tapped gently at a door, and a gentle voice
+replied: "Forever! Forever!" that is to say: "Enter."
+
+The door was the one leading to the parlor reserved for seeing the
+gardener on business. This parlor adjoined the chapter hall. The
+prioress, seated on the only chair in the parlor, was waiting for
+Fauchelevent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--FAUCHELEVENT IN THE PRESENCE OF A DIFFICULTY
+
+It is the peculiarity of certain persons and certain professions,
+notably priests and nuns, to wear a grave and agitated air on critical
+occasions. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, this double form of
+preoccupation was imprinted on the countenance of the prioress, who was
+that wise and charming Mademoiselle de Blemeur, Mother Innocente, who
+was ordinarily cheerful.
+
+The gardener made a timid bow, and remained at the door of the cell. The
+prioress, who was telling her beads, raised her eyes and said:--
+
+"Ah! it is you, Father Fauvent."
+
+This abbreviation had been adopted in the convent.
+
+Fauchelevent bowed again.
+
+"Father Fauvent, I have sent for you."
+
+"Here I am, reverend Mother."
+
+"I have something to say to you."
+
+"And so have I," said Fauchelevent with a boldness which caused him
+inward terror, "I have something to say to the very reverend Mother."
+
+The prioress stared at him.
+
+"Ah! you have a communication to make to me."
+
+"A request."
+
+"Very well, speak."
+
+Goodman Fauchelevent, the ex-notary, belonged to the category of
+peasants who have assurance. A certain clever ignorance constitutes a
+force; you do not distrust it, and you are caught by it. Fauchelevent
+had been a success during the something more than two years which he had
+passed in the convent. Always solitary and busied about his gardening,
+he had nothing else to do than to indulge his curiosity. As he was at a
+distance from all those veiled women passing to and fro, he saw before
+him only an agitation of shadows. By dint of attention and sharpness
+he had succeeded in clothing all those phantoms with flesh, and those
+corpses were alive for him. He was like a deaf man whose sight grows
+keener, and like a blind man whose hearing becomes more acute. He had
+applied himself to riddling out the significance of the different peals,
+and he had succeeded, so that this taciturn and enigmatical cloister
+possessed no secrets for him; the sphinx babbled all her secrets in his
+ear. Fauchelevent knew all and concealed all; that constituted his art.
+The whole convent thought him stupid. A great merit in religion. The
+vocal mothers made much of Fauchelevent. He was a curious mute. He
+inspired confidence. Moreover, he was regular, and never went out except
+for well-demonstrated requirements of the orchard and vegetable garden.
+This discretion of conduct had inured to his credit. None the less, he
+had set two men to chattering: the porter, in the convent, and he
+knew the singularities of their parlor, and the grave-digger, at
+the cemetery, and he was acquainted with the peculiarities of their
+sepulture; in this way, he possessed a double light on the subject of
+these nuns, one as to their life, the other as to their death. But he
+did not abuse his knowledge. The congregation thought a great deal of
+him. Old, lame, blind to everything, probably a little deaf into the
+bargain,--what qualities! They would have found it difficult to replace
+him.
+
+The goodman, with the assurance of a person who feels that he is
+appreciated, entered into a rather diffuse and very deep rustic harangue
+to the reverend prioress. He talked a long time about his age, his
+infirmities, the surcharge of years counting double for him henceforth,
+of the increasing demands of his work, of the great size of the garden,
+of nights which must be passed, like the last, for instance, when he had
+been obliged to put straw mats over the melon beds, because of the moon,
+and he wound up as follows: "That he had a brother"--(the prioress made
+a movement),--"a brother no longer young"--(a second movement on the
+part of the prioress, but one expressive of reassurance),--"that, if he
+might be permitted, this brother would come and live with him and help
+him, that he was an excellent gardener, that the community would receive
+from him good service, better than his own; that, otherwise, if his
+brother were not admitted, as he, the elder, felt that his health was
+broken and that he was insufficient for the work, he should be obliged,
+greatly to his regret, to go away; and that his brother had a little
+daughter whom he would bring with him, who might be reared for God in
+the house, and who might, who knows, become a nun some day."
+
+When he had finished speaking, the prioress stayed the slipping of her
+rosary between her fingers, and said to him:--
+
+"Could you procure a stout iron bar between now and this evening?"
+
+"For what purpose?"
+
+"To serve as a lever."
+
+"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.
+
+The prioress, without adding a word, rose and entered the adjoining
+room, which was the hall of the chapter, and where the vocal mothers
+were probably assembled. Fauchelevent was left alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--MOTHER INNOCENTE
+
+About a quarter of an hour elapsed. The prioress returned and seated
+herself once more on her chair.
+
+The two interlocutors seemed preoccupied. We will present a stenographic
+report of the dialogue which then ensued, to the best of our ability.
+
+"Father Fauvent!"
+
+"Reverend Mother!"
+
+"Do you know the chapel?"
+
+"I have a little cage there, where I hear the mass and the offices."
+
+"And you have been in the choir in pursuance of your duties?"
+
+"Two or three times."
+
+"There is a stone to be raised."
+
+"Heavy?"
+
+"The slab of the pavement which is at the side of the altar."
+
+"The slab which closes the vault?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It would be a good thing to have two men for it."
+
+"Mother Ascension, who is as strong as a man, will help you."
+
+"A woman is never a man."
+
+"We have only a woman here to help you. Each one does what he can.
+Because Dom Mabillon gives four hundred and seventeen epistles of
+Saint Bernard, while Merlonus Horstius only gives three hundred and
+sixty-seven, I do not despise Merlonus Horstius."
+
+"Neither do I."
+
+"Merit consists in working according to one's strength. A cloister is
+not a dock-yard."
+
+"And a woman is not a man. But my brother is the strong one, though!"
+
+"And can you get a lever?"
+
+"That is the only sort of key that fits that sort of door."
+
+"There is a ring in the stone."
+
+"I will put the lever through it."
+
+"And the stone is so arranged that it swings on a pivot."
+
+"That is good, reverend Mother. I will open the vault."
+
+"And the four Mother Precentors will help you."
+
+"And when the vault is open?"
+
+"It must be closed again."
+
+"Will that be all?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Give me your orders, very reverend Mother."
+
+"Fauvent, we have confidence in you."
+
+"I am here to do anything you wish."
+
+"And to hold your peace about everything!"
+
+"Yes, reverend Mother."
+
+"When the vault is open--"
+
+"I will close it again."
+
+"But before that--"
+
+"What, reverend Mother?"
+
+"Something must be lowered into it."
+
+A silence ensued. The prioress, after a pout of the under lip which
+resembled hesitation, broke it.
+
+"Father Fauvent!"
+
+"Reverend Mother!"
+
+"You know that a mother died this morning?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Did you not hear the bell?"
+
+"Nothing can be heard at the bottom of the garden."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"I can hardly distinguish my own signal."
+
+"She died at daybreak."
+
+"And then, the wind is not blowing in my direction this morning."
+
+"It was Mother Crucifixion. A blessed woman."
+
+The prioress paused, moved her lips, as though in mental prayer, and
+resumed:--
+
+"Three years ago, Madame de Bethune, a Jansenist, turned orthodox,
+merely from having seen Mother Crucifixion at prayer."
+
+"Ah! yes, now I hear the knell, reverend Mother."
+
+"The mothers have taken her to the dead-room, which opens on the
+church."
+
+"I know."
+
+"No other man than you can or must enter that chamber. See to that. A
+fine sight it would be, to see a man enter the dead-room!"
+
+"More often!"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"More often!"
+
+"What do you say?"
+
+"I say more often."
+
+"More often than what?"
+
+"Reverend Mother, I did not say more often than what, I said more
+often."
+
+"I don't understand you. Why do you say more often?"
+
+"In order to speak like you, reverend Mother."
+
+"But I did not say 'more often.'"
+
+At that moment, nine o'clock struck.
+
+"At nine o'clock in the morning and at all hours, praised and adored be
+the most Holy Sacrament of the altar," said the prioress.
+
+"Amen," said Fauchelevent.
+
+The clock struck opportunely. It cut "more often" short. It is probable,
+that had it not been for this, the prioress and Fauchelevent would never
+have unravelled that skein.
+
+Fauchelevent mopped his forehead.
+
+The prioress indulged in another little inward murmur, probably sacred,
+then raised her voice:--
+
+"In her lifetime, Mother Crucifixion made converts; after her death, she
+will perform miracles."
+
+"She will!" replied Father Fauchelevent, falling into step, and striving
+not to flinch again.
+
+"Father Fauvent, the community has been blessed in Mother Crucifixion.
+No doubt, it is not granted to every one to die, like Cardinal de
+Berulle, while saying the holy mass, and to breathe forth their souls to
+God, while pronouncing these words: Hanc igitur oblationem. But without
+attaining to such happiness, Mother Crucifixion's death was very
+precious. She retained her consciousness to the very last moment.
+She spoke to us, then she spoke to the angels. She gave us her last
+commands. If you had a little more faith, and if you could have been
+in her cell, she would have cured your leg merely by touching it.
+She smiled. We felt that she was regaining her life in God. There was
+something of paradise in that death."
+
+Fauchelevent thought that it was an orison which she was finishing.
+
+"Amen," said he.
+
+"Father Fauvent, what the dead wish must be done."
+
+The prioress took off several beads of her chaplet. Fauchelevent held
+his peace.
+
+She went on:--
+
+"I have consulted upon this point many ecclesiastics laboring in Our
+Lord, who occupy themselves in the exercises of the clerical life, and
+who bear wonderful fruit."
+
+"Reverend Mother, you can hear the knell much better here than in the
+garden."
+
+"Besides, she is more than a dead woman, she is a saint."
+
+"Like yourself, reverend Mother."
+
+"She slept in her coffin for twenty years, by express permission of our
+Holy Father, Pius VII.--"
+
+"The one who crowned the Emp--Buonaparte."
+
+For a clever man like Fauchelevent, this allusion was an awkward one.
+Fortunately, the prioress, completely absorbed in her own thoughts, did
+not hear it. She continued:--
+
+"Father Fauvent?"
+
+"Reverend Mother?"
+
+"Saint Didorus, Archbishop of Cappadocia, desired that this single word
+might be inscribed on his tomb: Acarus, which signifies, a worm of the
+earth; this was done. Is this true?"
+
+"Yes, reverend Mother."
+
+"The blessed Mezzocane, Abbot of Aquila, wished to be buried beneath the
+gallows; this was done."
+
+"That is true."
+
+"Saint Terentius, Bishop of Port, where the mouth of the Tiber empties
+into the sea, requested that on his tomb might be engraved the
+sign which was placed on the graves of parricides, in the hope that
+passers-by would spit on his tomb. This was done. The dead must be
+obeyed."
+
+"So be it."
+
+"The body of Bernard Guidonis, born in France near Roche-Abeille, was,
+as he had ordered, and in spite of the king of Castile, borne to the
+church of the Dominicans in Limoges, although Bernard Guidonis was
+Bishop of Tuy in Spain. Can the contrary be affirmed?"
+
+"For that matter, no, reverend Mother."
+
+"The fact is attested by Plantavit de la Fosse."
+
+Several beads of the chaplet were told off, still in silence. The
+prioress resumed:--
+
+"Father Fauvent, Mother Crucifixion will be interred in the coffin in
+which she has slept for the last twenty years."
+
+"That is just."
+
+"It is a continuation of her slumber."
+
+"So I shall have to nail up that coffin?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And we are to reject the undertaker's coffin?"
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"I am at the orders of the very reverend community."
+
+"The four Mother Precentors will assist you."
+
+"In nailing up the coffin? I do not need them."
+
+"No. In lowering the coffin."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Into the vault."
+
+"What vault?"
+
+"Under the altar."
+
+Fauchelevent started.
+
+"The vault under the altar?"
+
+"Under the altar."
+
+"But--"
+
+"You will have an iron bar."
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"You will raise the stone with the bar by means of the ring."
+
+"But--"
+
+"The dead must be obeyed. To be buried in the vault under the altar of
+the chapel, not to go to profane earth; to remain there in death where
+she prayed while living; such was the last wish of Mother Crucifixion.
+She asked it of us; that is to say, commanded us."
+
+"But it is forbidden."
+
+"Forbidden by men, enjoined by God."
+
+"What if it became known?"
+
+"We have confidence in you."
+
+"Oh! I am a stone in your walls."
+
+"The chapter assembled. The vocal mothers, whom I have just consulted
+again, and who are now deliberating, have decided that Mother
+Crucifixion shall be buried, according to her wish, in her own coffin,
+under our altar. Think, Father Fauvent, if she were to work miracles
+here! What a glory of God for the community! And miracles issue from
+tombs."
+
+"But, reverend Mother, if the agent of the sanitary commission--"
+
+"Saint Benoit II., in the matter of sepulture, resisted Constantine
+Pogonatus."
+
+"But the commissary of police--"
+
+"Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who entered among the Gauls
+under the Empire of Constantius, expressly recognized the right of nuns
+to be buried in religion, that is to say, beneath the altar."
+
+"But the inspector from the Prefecture--"
+
+"The world is nothing in the presence of the cross. Martin, the eleventh
+general of the Carthusians, gave to his order this device: Stat crux dum
+volvitur orbis."
+
+"Amen," said Fauchelevent, who imperturbably extricated himself in this
+manner from the dilemma, whenever he heard Latin.
+
+Any audience suffices for a person who has held his peace too long. On
+the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison, bearing in
+his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had struck in, he
+halted in front of the first tree which he came to, harangued it and
+made very great efforts to convince it. The prioress, who was usually
+subjected to the barrier of silence, and whose reservoir was overfull,
+rose and exclaimed with the loquacity of a dam which has broken away:--
+
+"I have on my right Benoit and on my left Bernard. Who was Bernard? The
+first abbot of Clairvaux. Fontaines in Burgundy is a country that is
+blest because it gave him birth. His father was named Tecelin, and his
+mother Alethe. He began at Citeaux, to end in Clairvaux; he was ordained
+abbot by the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saone, Guillaume de Champeaux; he had
+seven hundred novices, and founded a hundred and sixty monasteries; he
+overthrew Abeilard at the council of Sens in 1140, and Pierre de Bruys
+and Henry his disciple, and another sort of erring spirits who were
+called the Apostolics; he confounded Arnauld de Brescia, darted
+lightning at the monk Raoul, the murderer of the Jews, dominated the
+council of Reims in 1148, caused the condemnation of Gilbert de Porea,
+Bishop of Poitiers, caused the condemnation of Eon de l'Etoile, arranged
+the disputes of princes, enlightened King Louis the Young, advised Pope
+Eugene III., regulated the Temple, preached the crusade, performed
+two hundred and fifty miracles during his lifetime, and as many
+as thirty-nine in one day. Who was Benoit? He was the patriarch of
+Mont-Cassin; he was the second founder of the Saintete Claustrale,
+he was the Basil of the West. His order has produced forty popes, two
+hundred cardinals, fifty patriarchs, sixteen hundred archbishops, four
+thousand six hundred bishops, four emperors, twelve empresses, forty-six
+kings, forty-one queens, three thousand six hundred canonized saints,
+and has been in existence for fourteen hundred years. On one side Saint
+Bernard, on the other the agent of the sanitary department! On one side
+Saint Benoit, on the other the inspector of public ways! The state,
+the road commissioners, the public undertaker, regulations, the
+administration, what do we know of all that? There is not a chance
+passer-by who would not be indignant to see how we are treated. We
+have not even the right to give our dust to Jesus Christ! Your sanitary
+department is a revolutionary invention. God subordinated to the
+commissary of police; such is the age. Silence, Fauvent!"
+
+Fauchelevent was but ill at ease under this shower bath. The prioress
+continued:--
+
+"No one doubts the right of the monastery to sepulture. Only fanatics
+and those in error deny it. We live in times of terrible confusion. We
+do not know that which it is necessary to know, and we know that which
+we should ignore. We are ignorant and impious. In this age there exist
+people who do not distinguish between the very great Saint Bernard and
+the Saint Bernard denominated of the poor Catholics, a certain good
+ecclesiastic who lived in the thirteenth century. Others are so
+blasphemous as to compare the scaffold of Louis XVI. to the cross of
+Jesus Christ. Louis XVI. was merely a king. Let us beware of God! There
+is no longer just nor unjust. The name of Voltaire is known, but not
+the name of Cesar de Bus. Nevertheless, Cesar de Bus is a man of blessed
+memory, and Voltaire one of unblessed memory. The last arch-bishop,
+the Cardinal de Perigord, did not even know that Charles de
+Gondren succeeded to Berulle, and Francois Bourgoin to Gondren,
+and Jean-Francois Senault to Bourgoin, and Father Sainte-Marthe to
+Jean-Francois Senault. The name of Father Coton is known, not because
+he was one of the three who urged the foundation of the Oratorie, but
+because he furnished Henri IV., the Huguenot king, with the material
+for an oath. That which pleases people of the world in Saint Francois de
+Sales, is that he cheated at play. And then, religion is attacked. Why?
+Because there have been bad priests, because Sagittaire, Bishop of Gap,
+was the brother of Salone, Bishop of Embrun, and because both of them
+followed Mommol. What has that to do with the question? Does that
+prevent Martin de Tours from being a saint, and giving half of his cloak
+to a beggar? They persecute the saints. They shut their eyes to the
+truth. Darkness is the rule. The most ferocious beasts are beasts which
+are blind. No one thinks of hell as a reality. Oh! how wicked people
+are! By order of the king signifies to-day, by order of the revolution.
+One no longer knows what is due to the living or to the dead. A holy
+death is prohibited. Burial is a civil matter. This is horrible. Saint
+Leo II. wrote two special letters, one to Pierre Notaire, the other to
+the king of the Visigoths, for the purpose of combating and rejecting,
+in questions touching the dead, the authority of the exarch and the
+supremacy of the Emperor. Gauthier, Bishop of Chalons, held his own
+in this matter against Otho, Duke of Burgundy. The ancient magistracy
+agreed with him. In former times we had voices in the chapter, even on
+matters of the day. The Abbot of Citeaux, the general of the order, was
+councillor by right of birth to the parliament of Burgundy. We do what
+we please with our dead. Is not the body of Saint Benoit himself in
+France, in the abbey of Fleury, called Saint Benoit-sur-Loire, although
+he died in Italy at Mont-Cassin, on Saturday, the 21st of the month
+of March, of the year 543? All this is incontestable. I abhor
+psalm-singers, I hate priors, I execrate heretics, but I should detest
+yet more any one who should maintain the contrary. One has only to
+read Arnoul Wion, Gabriel Bucelin, Trithemus, Maurolics, and Dom Luc
+d'Achery."
+
+The prioress took breath, then turned to Fauchelevent.
+
+"Is it settled, Father Fauvent?"
+
+"It is settled, reverend Mother."
+
+"We may depend on you?"
+
+"I will obey."
+
+"That is well."
+
+"I am entirely devoted to the convent."
+
+"That is understood. You will close the coffin. The sisters will carry
+it to the chapel. The office for the dead will then be said. Then we
+shall return to the cloister. Between eleven o'clock and midnight, you
+will come with your iron bar. All will be done in the most profound
+secrecy. There will be in the chapel only the four Mother Precentors,
+Mother Ascension and yourself."
+
+"And the sister at the post?"
+
+"She will not turn round."
+
+"But she will hear."
+
+"She will not listen. Besides, what the cloister knows the world learns
+not."
+
+A pause ensued. The prioress went on:--
+
+"You will remove your bell. It is not necessary that the sister at the
+post should perceive your presence."
+
+"Reverend Mother?"
+
+"What, Father Fauvent?"
+
+"Has the doctor for the dead paid his visit?"
+
+"He will pay it at four o'clock to-day. The peal which orders the
+doctor for the dead to be summoned has already been rung. But you do not
+understand any of the peals?"
+
+"I pay no attention to any but my own."
+
+"That is well, Father Fauvent."
+
+"Reverend Mother, a lever at least six feet long will be required."
+
+"Where will you obtain it?"
+
+"Where gratings are not lacking, iron bars are not lacking. I have my
+heap of old iron at the bottom of the garden."
+
+"About three-quarters of an hour before midnight; do not forget."
+
+"Reverend Mother?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"If you were ever to have any other jobs of this sort, my brother is the
+strong man for you. A perfect Turk!"
+
+"You will do it as speedily as possible."
+
+"I cannot work very fast. I am infirm; that is why I require an
+assistant. I limp."
+
+"To limp is no sin, and perhaps it is a blessing. The Emperor Henry II.,
+who combated Antipope Gregory and re-established Benoit VIII., has two
+surnames, the Saint and the Lame."
+
+"Two surtouts are a good thing," murmured Fauchelevent, who really was a
+little hard of hearing.
+
+"Now that I think of it, Father Fauvent, let us give a whole hour to it.
+That is not too much. Be near the principal altar, with your iron bar,
+at eleven o'clock. The office begins at midnight. Everything must have
+been completed a good quarter of an hour before that."
+
+"I will do anything to prove my zeal towards the community. These are my
+orders. I am to nail up the coffin. At eleven o'clock exactly, I am to
+be in the chapel. The Mother Precentors will be there. Mother Ascension
+will be there. Two men would be better. However, never mind! I shall
+have my lever. We will open the vault, we will lower the coffin, and
+we will close the vault again. After which, there will be no trace
+of anything. The government will have no suspicion. Thus all has been
+arranged, reverend Mother?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"What else remains?"
+
+"The empty coffin remains."
+
+This produced a pause. Fauchelevent meditated. The prioress meditated.
+
+"What is to be done with that coffin, Father Fauvent?"
+
+"It will be given to the earth."
+
+"Empty?"
+
+Another silence. Fauchelevent made, with his left hand, that sort of a
+gesture which dismisses a troublesome subject.
+
+"Reverend Mother, I am the one who is to nail up the coffin in the
+basement of the church, and no one can enter there but myself, and I
+will cover the coffin with the pall."
+
+"Yes, but the bearers, when they place it in the hearse and lower it
+into the grave, will be sure to feel that there is nothing in it."
+
+"Ah! the de--!" exclaimed Fauchelevent.
+
+The prioress began to make the sign of the cross, and looked fixedly at
+the gardener. The vil stuck fast in his throat.
+
+He made haste to improvise an expedient to make her forget the oath.
+
+"I will put earth in the coffin, reverend Mother. That will produce the
+effect of a corpse."
+
+"You are right. Earth, that is the same thing as man. So you will manage
+the empty coffin?"
+
+"I will make that my special business."
+
+The prioress's face, up to that moment troubled and clouded, grew serene
+once more. She made the sign of a superior dismissing an inferior to
+him. Fauchelevent went towards the door. As he was on the point of
+passing out, the prioress raised her voice gently:--
+
+"I am pleased with you, Father Fauvent; bring your brother to me
+to-morrow, after the burial, and tell him to fetch his daughter."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--IN WHICH JEAN VALJEAN HAS QUITE THE AIR OF HAVING READ
+AUSTIN CASTILLEJO
+
+The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a one-eyed man;
+they do not reach their goal very promptly. Moreover, Fauchelevent
+was in a dilemma. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to return to his
+cottage in the garden. Cosette had waked up. Jean Valjean had placed her
+near the fire. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, Jean Valjean was
+pointing out to her the vintner's basket on the wall, and saying to her,
+"Listen attentively to me, my little Cosette. We must go away from this
+house, but we shall return to it, and we shall be very happy here. The
+good man who lives here is going to carry you off on his back in that.
+You will wait for me at a lady's house. I shall come to fetch you. Obey,
+and say nothing, above all things, unless you want Madame Thenardier to
+get you again!"
+
+Cosette nodded gravely.
+
+Jean Valjean turned round at the noise made by Fauchelevent opening the
+door.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Everything is arranged, and nothing is," said Fauchelevent. "I have
+permission to bring you in; but before bringing you in you must be
+got out. That's where the difficulty lies. It is easy enough with the
+child."
+
+"You will carry her out?"
+
+"And she will hold her tongue?"
+
+"I answer for that."
+
+"But you, Father Madeleine?"
+
+And, after a silence, fraught with anxiety, Fauchelevent exclaimed:--
+
+"Why, get out as you came in!"
+
+Jean Valjean, as in the first instance, contented himself with saying,
+"Impossible."
+
+Fauchelevent grumbled, more to himself than to Jean Valjean:--
+
+"There is another thing which bothers me. I have said that I would put
+earth in it. When I come to think it over, the earth instead of the
+corpse will not seem like the real thing, it won't do, it will get
+displaced, it will move about. The men will bear it. You understand,
+Father Madeleine, the government will notice it."
+
+Jean Valjean stared him straight in the eye and thought that he was
+raving.
+
+Fauchelevent went on:--
+
+"How the de--uce are you going to get out? It must all be done by
+to-morrow morning. It is to-morrow that I am to bring you in. The
+prioress expects you."
+
+Then he explained to Jean Valjean that this was his recompense for a
+service which he, Fauchelevent, was to render to the community. That it
+fell among his duties to take part in their burials, that he nailed up
+the coffins and helped the grave-digger at the cemetery. That the nun
+who had died that morning had requested to be buried in the coffin which
+had served her for a bed, and interred in the vault under the altar of
+the chapel. That the police regulations forbade this, but that she was
+one of those dead to whom nothing is refused. That the prioress and the
+vocal mothers intended to fulfil the wish of the deceased. That it was
+so much the worse for the government. That he, Fauchelevent, was to nail
+up the coffin in the cell, raise the stone in the chapel, and lower the
+corpse into the vault. And that, by way of thanks, the prioress was to
+admit his brother to the house as a gardener, and his niece as a pupil.
+That his brother was M. Madeleine, and that his niece was Cosette. That
+the prioress had told him to bring his brother on the following evening,
+after the counterfeit interment in the cemetery. But that he could not
+bring M. Madeleine in from the outside if M. Madeleine was not outside.
+That that was the first problem. And then, that there was another: the
+empty coffin.
+
+"What is that empty coffin?" asked Jean Valjean.
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"The coffin of the administration."
+
+"What coffin? What administration?"
+
+"A nun dies. The municipal doctor comes and says, 'A nun has died.'
+The government sends a coffin. The next day it sends a hearse and
+undertaker's men to get the coffin and carry it to the cemetery. The
+undertaker's men will come and lift the coffin; there will be nothing in
+it."
+
+"Put something in it."
+
+"A corpse? I have none."
+
+"No."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"A living person."
+
+"What person?"
+
+"Me!" said Jean Valjean.
+
+Fauchelevent, who was seated, sprang up as though a bomb had burst under
+his chair.
+
+"You!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Jean Valjean gave way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up his
+face like a flash from heaven in the winter.
+
+"You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said: 'Mother Crucifixion is
+dead.' and I add: 'and Father Madeleine is buried.'"
+
+"Ah! good, you can laugh, you are not speaking seriously."
+
+"Very seriously, I must get out of this place."
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"l have told you to find a basket, and a cover for me also."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"The basket will be of pine, and the cover a black cloth."
+
+"In the first place, it will be a white cloth. Nuns are buried in
+white."
+
+"Let it be a white cloth, then."
+
+"You are not like other men, Father Madeleine."
+
+To behold such devices, which are nothing else than the savage and
+daring inventions of the galleys, spring forth from the peaceable things
+which surrounded him, and mingle with what he called the "petty course
+of life in the convent," caused Fauchelevent as much amazement as a
+gull fishing in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Denis would inspire in a
+passer-by.
+
+Jean Valjean went on:--
+
+"The problem is to get out of here without being seen. This offers
+the means. But give me some information, in the first place. How is it
+managed? Where is this coffin?"
+
+"The empty one?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Down stairs, in what is called the dead-room. It stands on two
+trestles, under the pall."
+
+"How long is the coffin?"
+
+"Six feet."
+
+"What is this dead-room?"
+
+"It is a chamber on the ground floor which has a grated window opening
+on the garden, which is closed on the outside by a shutter, and two
+doors; one leads into the convent, the other into the church."
+
+"What church?"
+
+"The church in the street, the church which any one can enter."
+
+"Have you the keys to those two doors?"
+
+"No; I have the key to the door which communicates with the convent; the
+porter has the key to the door which communicates with the church."
+
+"When does the porter open that door?"
+
+"Only to allow the undertaker's men to enter, when they come to get the
+coffin. When the coffin has been taken out, the door is closed again."
+
+"Who nails up the coffin?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Who spreads the pall over it?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Are you alone?"
+
+"Not another man, except the police doctor, can enter the dead-room.
+That is even written on the wall."
+
+"Could you hide me in that room to-night when every one is asleep?"
+
+"No. But I could hide you in a small, dark nook which opens on the
+dead-room, where I keep my tools to use for burials, and of which I have
+the key."
+
+"At what time will the hearse come for the coffin to-morrow?"
+
+"About three o'clock in the afternoon. The burial will take place at the
+Vaugirard cemetery a little before nightfall. It is not very near."
+
+"I will remain concealed in your tool-closet all night and all the
+morning. And how about food? I shall be hungry."
+
+"I will bring you something."
+
+"You can come and nail me up in the coffin at two o'clock."
+
+Fauchelevent recoiled and cracked his finger-joints.
+
+"But that is impossible!"
+
+"Bah! Impossible to take a hammer and drive some nails in a plank?"
+
+What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, a simple
+matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits than
+this. Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract
+himself to fit the diameter of the escape. The prisoner is subject to
+flight as the sick man is subject to a crisis which saves or kills him.
+An escape is a cure. What does not a man undergo for the sake of a
+cure? To have himself nailed up in a case and carried off like a bale
+of goods, to live for a long time in a box, to find air where there is
+none, to economize his breath for hours, to know how to stifle without
+dying--this was one of Jean Valjean's gloomy talents.
+
+Moreover, a coffin containing a living being,--that convict's
+expedient,--is also an imperial expedient. If we are to credit the monk
+Austin Castillejo, this was the means employed by Charles the Fifth,
+desirous of seeing the Plombes for the last time after his abdication.
+
+He had her brought into and carried out of the monastery of Saint-Yuste
+in this manner.
+
+Fauchelevent, who had recovered himself a little, exclaimed:--
+
+"But how will you manage to breathe?"
+
+"I will breathe."
+
+"In that box! The mere thought of it suffocates me."
+
+"You surely must have a gimlet, you will make a few holes here and
+there, around my mouth, and you will nail the top plank on loosely."
+
+"Good! And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze?"
+
+"A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze."
+
+And Jean Valjean added:--
+
+"Father Fauchelevent, we must come to a decision: I must either be
+caught here, or accept this escape through the hearse."
+
+Every one has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging
+between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not
+said to a cat, "Do come in!" There are men who, when an incident stands
+half-open before them, have the same tendency to halt in indecision
+between two resolutions, at the risk of getting crushed through the
+abrupt closing of the adventure by fate. The over-prudent, cats as they
+are, and because they are cats, sometimes incur more danger than
+the audacious. Fauchelevent was of this hesitating nature. But
+Jean Valjean's coolness prevailed over him in spite of himself. He
+grumbled:--
+
+"Well, since there is no other means."
+
+Jean Valjean resumed:--
+
+"The only thing which troubles me is what will take place at the
+cemetery."
+
+"That is the very point that is not troublesome," exclaimed
+Fauchelevent. "If you are sure of coming out of the coffin all right, I
+am sure of getting you out of the grave. The grave-digger is a drunkard,
+and a friend of mine. He is Father Mestienne. An old fellow of the old
+school. The grave-digger puts the corpses in the grave, and I put the
+grave-digger in my pocket. I will tell you what will take place. They
+will arrive a little before dusk, three-quarters of an hour before the
+gates of the cemetery are closed. The hearse will drive directly up to
+the grave. I shall follow; that is my business. I shall have a hammer,
+a chisel, and some pincers in my pocket. The hearse halts, the
+undertaker's men knot a rope around your coffin and lower you down. The
+priest says the prayers, makes the sign of the cross, sprinkles the holy
+water, and takes his departure. I am left alone with Father Mestienne.
+He is my friend, I tell you. One of two things will happen, he will
+either be sober, or he will not be sober. If he is not drunk, I shall
+say to him: 'Come and drink a bout while the Bon Coing [the Good Quince]
+is open.' I carry him off, I get him drunk,--it does not take long to
+make Father Mestienne drunk, he always has the beginning of it about
+him,--I lay him under the table, I take his card, so that I can get into
+the cemetery again, and I return without him. Then you have no longer
+any one but me to deal with. If he is drunk, I shall say to him: 'Be
+off; I will do your work for you.' Off he goes, and I drag you out of
+the hole."
+
+Jean Valjean held out his hand, and Fauchelevent precipitated himself
+upon it with the touching effusion of a peasant.
+
+"That is settled, Father Fauchelevent. All will go well."
+
+"Provided nothing goes wrong," thought Fauchelevent. "In that case, it
+would be terrible."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BE DRUNK IN ORDER TO BE IMMORTAL
+
+On the following day, as the sun was declining, the very rare passers-by
+on the Boulevard du Maine pulled off their hats to an old-fashioned
+hearse, ornamented with skulls, cross-bones, and tears. This hearse
+contained a coffin covered with a white cloth over which spread a large
+black cross, like a huge corpse with drooping arms. A mourning-coach, in
+which could be seen a priest in his surplice, and a choir boy in his red
+cap, followed. Two undertaker's men in gray uniforms trimmed with black
+walked on the right and the left of the hearse. Behind it came an old
+man in the garments of a laborer, who limped along. The procession was
+going in the direction of the Vaugirard cemetery.
+
+The handle of a hammer, the blade of a cold chisel, and the antennae of
+a pair of pincers were visible, protruding from the man's pocket.
+
+The Vaugirard cemetery formed an exception among the cemeteries of
+Paris. It had its peculiar usages, just as it had its carriage
+entrance and its house door, which old people in the quarter, who clung
+tenaciously to ancient words, still called the porte cavaliere and the
+porte pietonne.[16] The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Rue Petit-Picpus
+had obtained permission, as we have already stated, to be buried there
+in a corner apart, and at night, the plot of land having formerly
+belonged to their community. The grave-diggers being thus bound to
+service in the evening in summer and at night in winter, in this
+cemetery, they were subjected to a special discipline. The gates of the
+Paris cemeteries closed, at that epoch, at sundown, and this being a
+municipal regulation, the Vaugirard cemetery was bound by it like the
+rest. The carriage gate and the house door were two contiguous grated
+gates, adjoining a pavilion built by the architect Perronet, and
+inhabited by the door-keeper of the cemetery. These gates, therefore,
+swung inexorably on their hinges at the instant when the sun disappeared
+behind the dome of the Invalides. If any grave-digger were delayed
+after that moment in the cemetery, there was but one way for him to
+get out--his grave-digger's card furnished by the department of public
+funerals. A sort of letter-box was constructed in the porter's window.
+The grave-digger dropped his card into this box, the porter heard it
+fall, pulled the rope, and the small door opened. If the man had not his
+card, he mentioned his name, the porter, who was sometimes in bed and
+asleep, rose, came out and identified the man, and opened the gate with
+his key; the grave-digger stepped out, but had to pay a fine of fifteen
+francs.
+
+This cemetery, with its peculiarities outside the regulations,
+embarrassed the symmetry of the administration. It was suppressed
+a little later than 1830. The cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, called the
+Eastern cemetery, succeeded to it, and inherited that famous dram-shop
+next to the Vaugirard cemetery, which was surmounted by a quince painted
+on a board, and which formed an angle, one side on the drinkers' tables,
+and the other on the tombs, with this sign: Au Bon Coing.
+
+The Vaugirard cemetery was what may be called a faded cemetery. It
+was falling into disuse. Dampness was invading it, the flowers were
+deserting it. The bourgeois did not care much about being buried in
+the Vaugirard; it hinted at poverty. Pere-Lachaise if you please! to be
+buried in Pere-Lachaise is equivalent to having furniture of mahogany.
+It is recognized as elegant. The Vaugirard cemetery was a venerable
+enclosure, planted like an old-fashioned French garden. Straight alleys,
+box, thuya-trees, holly, ancient tombs beneath aged cypress-trees, and
+very tall grass. In the evening it was tragic there. There were very
+lugubrious lines about it.
+
+The sun had not yet set when the hearse with the white pall and the
+black cross entered the avenue of the Vaugirard cemetery. The lame man
+who followed it was no other than Fauchelevent.
+
+The interment of Mother Crucifixion in the vault under the altar, the
+exit of Cosette, the introduction of Jean Valjean to the dead-room,--all
+had been executed without difficulty, and there had been no hitch.
+
+Let us remark in passing, that the burial of Mother Crucifixion under
+the altar of the convent is a perfectly venial offence in our sight. It
+is one of the faults which resemble a duty. The nuns had committed it,
+not only without difficulty, but even with the applause of their own
+consciences. In the cloister, what is called the "government" is only
+an intermeddling with authority, an interference which is always
+questionable. In the first place, the rule; as for the code, we shall
+see. Make as many laws as you please, men; but keep them for yourselves.
+The tribute to Caesar is never anything but the remnants of the tribute
+to God. A prince is nothing in the presence of a principle.
+
+Fauchelevent limped along behind the hearse in a very contented frame
+of mind. His twin plots, the one with the nuns, the one for the convent,
+the other against it, the other with M. Madeleine, had succeeded, to
+all appearance. Jean Valjean's composure was one of those powerful
+tranquillities which are contagious. Fauchelevent no longer felt
+doubtful as to his success.
+
+What remained to be done was a mere nothing. Within the last two years,
+he had made good Father Mestienne, a chubby-cheeked person, drunk at
+least ten times. He played with Father Mestienne. He did what he liked
+with him. He made him dance according to his whim. Mestienne's head
+adjusted itself to the cap of Fauchelevent's will. Fauchelevent's
+confidence was perfect.
+
+At the moment when the convoy entered the avenue leading to the
+cemetery, Fauchelevent glanced cheerfully at the hearse, and said half
+aloud, as he rubbed his big hands:--
+
+"Here's a fine farce!"
+
+All at once the hearse halted; it had reached the gate. The permission
+for interment must be exhibited. The undertaker's man addressed himself
+to the porter of the cemetery. During this colloquy, which always is
+productive of a delay of from one to two minutes, some one, a stranger,
+came and placed himself behind the hearse, beside Fauchelevent. He was
+a sort of laboring man, who wore a waistcoat with large pockets and
+carried a mattock under his arm.
+
+Fauchelevent surveyed this stranger.
+
+"Who are you?" he demanded.
+
+"The man replied:--
+
+"The grave-digger."
+
+If a man could survive the blow of a cannon-ball full in the breast, he
+would make the same face that Fauchelevent made.
+
+"The grave-digger?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You?"
+
+"I."
+
+"Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."
+
+"He was."
+
+"What! He was?"
+
+"He is dead."
+
+Fauchelevent had expected anything but this, that a grave-digger could
+die. It is true, nevertheless, that grave-diggers do die themselves. By
+dint of excavating graves for other people, one hollows out one's own.
+
+Fauchelevent stood there with his mouth wide open. He had hardly the
+strength to stammer:--
+
+"But it is not possible!"
+
+"It is so."
+
+"But," he persisted feebly, "Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."
+
+"After Napoleon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier. Peasant, my name
+is Gribier."
+
+Fauchelevent, who was deadly pale, stared at this Gribier.
+
+He was a tall, thin, livid, utterly funereal man. He had the air of an
+unsuccessful doctor who had turned grave-digger.
+
+Fauchelevent burst out laughing.
+
+"Ah!" said he, "what queer things do happen! Father Mestienne is dead,
+but long live little Father Lenoir! Do you know who little Father Lenoir
+is? He is a jug of red wine. It is a jug of Surene, morbigou! of real
+Paris Surene? Ah! So old Mestienne is dead! I am sorry for it; he was
+a jolly fellow. But you are a jolly fellow, too. Are you not, comrade?
+We'll go and have a drink together presently."
+
+The man replied:--
+
+"I have been a student. I passed my fourth examination. I never drink."
+
+The hearse had set out again, and was rolling up the grand alley of the
+cemetery.
+
+Fauchelevent had slackened his pace. He limped more out of anxiety than
+from infirmity.
+
+The grave-digger walked on in front of him.
+
+Fauchelevent passed the unexpected Gribier once more in review.
+
+He was one of those men who, though very young, have the air of age, and
+who, though slender, are extremely strong.
+
+"Comrade!" cried Fauchelevent.
+
+The man turned round.
+
+"I am the convent grave-digger."
+
+"My colleague," said the man.
+
+Fauchelevent, who was illiterate but very sharp, understood that he
+had to deal with a formidable species of man, with a fine talker. He
+muttered:
+
+"So Father Mestienne is dead."
+
+The man replied:--
+
+"Completely. The good God consulted his note-book which shows when the
+time is up. It was Father Mestienne's turn. Father Mestienne died."
+
+Fauchelevent repeated mechanically: "The good God--"
+
+"The good God," said the man authoritatively. "According to the
+philosophers, the Eternal Father; according to the Jacobins, the Supreme
+Being."
+
+"Shall we not make each other's acquaintance?" stammered Fauchelevent.
+
+"It is made. You are a peasant, I am a Parisian."
+
+"People do not know each other until they have drunk together. He who
+empties his glass empties his heart. You must come and have a drink with
+me. Such a thing cannot be refused."
+
+"Business first."
+
+Fauchelevent thought: "I am lost."
+
+They were only a few turns of the wheel distant from the small alley
+leading to the nuns' corner.
+
+The grave-digger resumed:--
+
+"Peasant, I have seven small children who must be fed. As they must eat,
+I cannot drink."
+
+And he added, with the satisfaction of a serious man who is turning a
+phrase well:--
+
+"Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst."
+
+The hearse skirted a clump of cypress-trees, quitted the grand alley,
+turned into a narrow one, entered the waste land, and plunged into
+a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the place of
+sepulture. Fauchelevent slackened his pace, but he could not detain the
+hearse. Fortunately, the soil, which was light and wet with the winter
+rains, clogged the wheels and retarded its speed.
+
+He approached the grave-digger.
+
+"They have such a nice little Argenteuil wine," murmured Fauchelevent.
+
+"Villager," retorted the man, "I ought not be a grave-digger. My
+father was a porter at the Prytaneum [Town-Hall]. He destined me for
+literature. But he had reverses. He had losses on 'change. I was obliged
+to renounce the profession of author. But I am still a public writer."
+
+"So you are not a grave-digger, then?" returned Fauchelevent, clutching
+at this branch, feeble as it was.
+
+"The one does not hinder the other. I cumulate."
+
+Fauchelevent did not understand this last word.
+
+"Come have a drink," said he.
+
+Here a remark becomes necessary. Fauchelevent, whatever his anguish,
+offered a drink, but he did not explain himself on one point; who was to
+pay? Generally, Fauchelevent offered and Father Mestienne paid. An offer
+of a drink was the evident result of the novel situation created by the
+new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make this offer, but the old
+gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour named after Rabelais in
+the dark, and that not unintentionally. As for himself, Fauchelevent did
+not wish to pay, troubled as he was.
+
+The grave-digger went on with a superior smile:--
+
+"One must eat. I have accepted Father Mestienne's reversion. One gets to
+be a philosopher when one has nearly completed his classes. To the labor
+of the hand I join the labor of the arm. I have my scrivener's stall in
+the market of the Rue de Sevres. You know? the Umbrella Market. All the
+cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their declarations of
+love to the raw soldiers. In the morning I write love letters; in the
+evening I dig graves. Such is life, rustic."
+
+The hearse was still advancing. Fauchelevent, uneasy to the last degree,
+was gazing about him on all sides. Great drops of perspiration trickled
+down from his brow.
+
+"But," continued the grave-digger, "a man cannot serve two mistresses.
+I must choose between the pen and the mattock. The mattock is ruining my
+hand."
+
+The hearse halted.
+
+The choir boy alighted from the mourning-coach, then the priest.
+
+One of the small front wheels of the hearse had run up a little on a
+pile of earth, beyond which an open grave was visible.
+
+"What a farce this is!" repeated Fauchelevent in consternation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS
+
+Who was in the coffin? The reader knows. Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean had arranged things so that he could exist there, and he
+could almost breathe.
+
+It is a strange thing to what a degree security of conscience confers
+security of the rest. Every combination thought out by Jean Valjean had
+been progressing, and progressing favorably, since the preceding day.
+He, like Fauchelevent, counted on Father Mestienne. He had no doubt
+as to the end. Never was there a more critical situation, never more
+complete composure.
+
+The four planks of the coffin breathe out a kind of terrible peace. It
+seemed as though something of the repose of the dead entered into Jean
+Valjean's tranquillity.
+
+From the depths of that coffin he had been able to follow, and he had
+followed, all the phases of the terrible drama which he was playing with
+death.
+
+Shortly after Fauchelevent had finished nailing on the upper plank, Jean
+Valjean had felt himself carried out, then driven off. He knew, from the
+diminution in the jolting, when they left the pavements and reached the
+earth road. He had divined, from a dull noise, that they were crossing
+the bridge of Austerlitz. At the first halt, he had understood that they
+were entering the cemetery; at the second halt, he said to himself:--
+
+"Here is the grave."
+
+Suddenly, he felt hands seize the coffin, then a harsh grating against
+the planks; he explained it to himself as the rope which was being
+fastened round the casket in order to lower it into the cavity.
+
+Then he experienced a giddiness.
+
+The undertaker's man and the grave-digger had probably allowed the
+coffin to lose its balance, and had lowered the head before the foot. He
+recovered himself fully when he felt himself horizontal and motionless.
+He had just touched the bottom.
+
+He had a certain sensation of cold.
+
+A voice rose above him, glacial and solemn. He heard Latin words, which
+he did not understand, pass over him, so slowly that he was able to
+catch them one by one:--
+
+"Qui dormiunt in terrae pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam aeternam, et
+alii in approbrium, ut videant semper."
+
+A child's voice said:--
+
+"De profundis."
+
+The grave voice began again:--
+
+"Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine."
+
+The child's voice responded:--
+
+"Et lux perpetua luceat ei."
+
+He heard something like the gentle patter of several drops of rain on
+the plank which covered him. It was probably the holy water.
+
+He thought: "This will be over soon now. Patience for a little while
+longer. The priest will take his departure. Fauchelevent will take
+Mestienne off to drink. I shall be left. Then Fauchelevent will return
+alone, and I shall get out. That will be the work of a good hour."
+
+The grave voice resumed
+
+"Requiescat in pace."
+
+And the child's voice said:--
+
+"Amen."
+
+Jean Valjean strained his ears, and heard something like retreating
+footsteps.
+
+"There, they are going now," thought he. "I am alone."
+
+All at once, he heard over his head a sound which seemed to him to be a
+clap of thunder.
+
+It was a shovelful of earth falling on the coffin.
+
+A second shovelful fell.
+
+One of the holes through which he breathed had just been stopped up.
+
+A third shovelful of earth fell.
+
+Then a fourth.
+
+There are things which are too strong for the strongest man. Jean
+Valjean lost consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE ORIGIN OF THE SAYING: DON'T LOSE
+THE CARD
+
+This is what had taken place above the coffin in which lay Jean Valjean.
+
+When the hearse had driven off, when the priest and the choir boy had
+entered the carriage again and taken their departure, Fauchelevent, who
+had not taken his eyes from the grave-digger, saw the latter bend over
+and grasp his shovel, which was sticking upright in the heap of dirt.
+
+Then Fauchelevent took a supreme resolve.
+
+He placed himself between the grave and the grave-digger, crossed his
+arms and said:--
+
+"I am the one to pay!"
+
+The grave-digger stared at him in amazement, and replied:--
+
+"What's that, peasant?"
+
+Fauchelevent repeated:--
+
+"I am the one who pays!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"For the wine."
+
+"What wine?"
+
+"That Argenteuil wine."
+
+"Where is the Argenteuil?"
+
+"At the Bon Coing."
+
+"Go to the devil!" said the grave-digger.
+
+And he flung a shovelful of earth on the coffin.
+
+The coffin gave back a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself stagger
+and on the point of falling headlong into the grave himself. He shouted
+in a voice in which the strangling sound of the death rattle began to
+mingle:--
+
+"Comrade! Before the Bon Coing is shut!"
+
+The grave-digger took some more earth on his shovel. Fauchelevent
+continued.
+
+"I will pay."
+
+And he seized the man's arm.
+
+"Listen to me, comrade. I am the convent grave-digger, I have come
+to help you. It is a business which can be performed at night. Let us
+begin, then, by going for a drink."
+
+And as he spoke, and clung to this desperate insistence, this melancholy
+reflection occurred to him: "And if he drinks, will he get drunk?"
+
+"Provincial," said the man, "if you positively insist upon it, I
+consent. We will drink. After work, never before."
+
+And he flourished his shovel briskly. Fauchelevent held him back.
+
+"It is Argenteuil wine, at six."
+
+"Oh, come," said the grave-digger, "you are a bell-ringer. Ding dong,
+ding dong, that's all you know how to say. Go hang yourself."
+
+And he threw in a second shovelful.
+
+Fauchelevent had reached a point where he no longer knew what he was
+saying.
+
+"Come along and drink," he cried, "since it is I who pays the bill."
+
+"When we have put the child to bed," said the grave-digger.
+
+He flung in a third shovelful.
+
+Then he thrust his shovel into the earth and added:--
+
+"It's cold to-night, you see, and the corpse would shriek out after us
+if we were to plant her there without a coverlet."
+
+At that moment, as he loaded his shovel, the grave-digger bent over,
+and the pocket of his waistcoat gaped. Fauchelevent's wild gaze fell
+mechanically into that pocket, and there it stopped.
+
+The sun was not yet hidden behind the horizon; there was still light
+enough to enable him to distinguish something white at the bottom of
+that yawning pocket.
+
+The sum total of lightning that the eye of a Picard peasant can contain,
+traversed Fauchelevent's pupils. An idea had just occurred to him.
+
+He thrust his hand into the pocket from behind, without the
+grave-digger, who was wholly absorbed in his shovelful of earth,
+observing it, and pulled out the white object which lay at the bottom of
+it.
+
+The man sent a fourth shovelful tumbling into the grave.
+
+Just as he turned round to get the fifth, Fauchelevent looked calmly at
+him and said:--
+
+"By the way, you new man, have you your card?"
+
+The grave-digger paused.
+
+"What card?"
+
+"The sun is on the point of setting."
+
+"That's good, it is going to put on its nightcap."
+
+"The gate of the cemetery will close immediately."
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"Have you your card?"
+
+"Ah! my card?" said the grave-digger.
+
+And he fumbled in his pocket.
+
+Having searched one pocket, he proceeded to search the other. He passed
+on to his fobs, explored the first, returned to the second.
+
+"Why, no," said he, "I have not my card. I must have forgotten it."
+
+"Fifteen francs fine," said Fauchelevent.
+
+The grave-digger turned green. Green is the pallor of livid people.
+
+"Ah! Jesus-mon-Dieu-bancroche-a-bas-la-lune!"[17] he exclaimed. "Fifteen
+francs fine!"
+
+"Three pieces of a hundred sous," said Fauchelevent.
+
+The grave-digger dropped his shovel.
+
+Fauchelevent's turn had come.
+
+"Ah, come now, conscript," said Fauchelevent, "none of this despair.
+There is no question of committing suicide and benefiting the grave.
+Fifteen francs is fifteen francs, and besides, you may not be able to
+pay it. I am an old hand, you are a new one. I know all the ropes and
+the devices. I will give you some friendly advice. One thing is clear,
+the sun is on the point of setting, it is touching the dome now, the
+cemetery will be closed in five minutes more."
+
+"That is true," replied the man.
+
+"Five minutes more and you will not have time to fill the grave, it is
+as hollow as the devil, this grave, and to reach the gate in season to
+pass it before it is shut."
+
+"That is true."
+
+"In that case, a fine of fifteen francs."
+
+"Fifteen francs."
+
+"But you have time. Where do you live?"
+
+"A couple of steps from the barrier, a quarter of an hour from here. No.
+87 Rue de Vaugirard."
+
+"You have just time to get out by taking to your heels at your best
+speed."
+
+"That is exactly so."
+
+"Once outside the gate, you gallop home, you get your card, you return,
+the cemetery porter admits you. As you have your card, there will be
+nothing to pay. And you will bury your corpse. I'll watch it for you in
+the meantime, so that it shall not run away."
+
+"I am indebted to you for my life, peasant."
+
+"Decamp!" said Fauchelevent.
+
+The grave-digger, overwhelmed with gratitude, shook his hand and set off
+on a run.
+
+When the man had disappeared in the thicket, Fauchelevent listened until
+he heard his footsteps die away in the distance, then he leaned over the
+grave, and said in a low tone:--
+
+"Father Madeleine!"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+Fauchelevent was seized with a shudder. He tumbled rather than climbed
+into the grave, flung himself on the head of the coffin and cried:--
+
+"Are you there?"
+
+Silence in the coffin.
+
+Fauchelevent, hardly able to draw his breath for trembling, seized his
+cold chisel and his hammer, and pried up the coffin lid.
+
+Jean Valjean's face appeared in the twilight; it was pale and his eyes
+were closed.
+
+Fauchelevent's hair rose upright on his head, he sprang to his feet,
+then fell back against the side of the grave, ready to swoon on the
+coffin. He stared at Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean lay there pallid and motionless.
+
+Fauchelevent murmured in a voice as faint as a sigh:--
+
+"He is dead!"
+
+And, drawing himself up, and folding his arms with such violence that
+his clenched fists came in contact with his shoulders, he cried:--
+
+"And this is the way I save his life!"
+
+Then the poor man fell to sobbing. He soliloquized the while, for it is
+an error to suppose that the soliloquy is unnatural. Powerful emotion
+often talks aloud.
+
+"It is Father Mestienne's fault. Why did that fool die? What need was
+there for him to give up the ghost at the very moment when no one was
+expecting it? It is he who has killed M. Madeleine. Father Madeleine!
+He is in the coffin. It is quite handy. All is over. Now, is there any
+sense in these things? Ah! my God! he is dead! Well! and his little
+girl, what am I to do with her? What will the fruit-seller say? The idea
+of its being possible for a man like that to die like this! When I think
+how he put himself under that cart! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!
+Pardine! He was suffocated, I said so. He wouldn't believe me. Well!
+Here's a pretty trick to play! He is dead, that good man, the very best
+man out of all the good God's good folks! And his little girl! Ah! In
+the first place, I won't go back there myself. I shall stay here. After
+having done such a thing as that! What's the use of being two old men,
+if we are two old fools! But, in the first place, how did he manage to
+enter the convent? That was the beginning of it all. One should not
+do such things. Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!
+Madeleine! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire! He does not hear me.
+Now get out of this scrape if you can!"
+
+And he tore his hair.
+
+A grating sound became audible through the trees in the distance. It was
+the cemetery gate closing.
+
+Fauchelevent bent over Jean Valjean, and all at once he bounded back and
+recoiled so far as the limits of a grave permit.
+
+Jean Valjean's eyes were open and gazing at him.
+
+To see a corpse is alarming, to behold a resurrection is almost as much
+so. Fauchelevent became like stone, pale, haggard, overwhelmed by all
+these excesses of emotion, not knowing whether he had to do with a
+living man or a dead one, and staring at Jean Valjean, who was gazing at
+him.
+
+[Illustration: The Resurrection 2b8-7-resurrection]
+
+"I fell asleep," said Jean Valjean.
+
+And he raised himself to a sitting posture.
+
+Fauchelevent fell on his knees.
+
+"Just, good Virgin! How you frightened me!"
+
+Then he sprang to his feet and cried:--
+
+"Thanks, Father Madeleine!"
+
+Jean Valjean had merely fainted. The fresh air had revived him.
+
+Joy is the ebb of terror. Fauchelevent found almost as much difficulty
+in recovering himself as Jean Valjean had.
+
+"So you are not dead! Oh! How wise you are! I called you so much that
+you came back. When I saw your eyes shut, I said: 'Good! there he is,
+stifled,' I should have gone raving mad, mad enough for a strait jacket.
+They would have put me in Bicetre. What do you suppose I should
+have done if you had been dead? And your little girl? There's that
+fruit-seller,--she would never have understood it! The child is thrust
+into your arms, and then--the grandfather is dead! What a story! good
+saints of paradise, what a tale! Ah! you are alive, that's the best of
+it!"
+
+"I am cold," said Jean Valjean.
+
+This remark recalled Fauchelevent thoroughly to reality, and there was
+pressing need of it. The souls of these two men were troubled even when
+they had recovered themselves, although they did not realize it,
+and there was about them something uncanny, which was the sinister
+bewilderment inspired by the place.
+
+"Let us get out of here quickly," exclaimed Fauchelevent.
+
+He fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a gourd with which he had
+provided himself.
+
+"But first, take a drop," said he.
+
+The flask finished what the fresh air had begun, Jean Valjean swallowed
+a mouthful of brandy, and regained full possession of his faculties.
+
+He got out of the coffin, and helped Fauchelevent to nail on the lid
+again.
+
+Three minutes later they were out of the grave.
+
+Moreover, Fauchelevent was perfectly composed. He took his time. The
+cemetery was closed. The arrival of the grave-digger Gribier was not to
+be apprehended. That "conscript" was at home busily engaged in looking
+for his card, and at some difficulty in finding it in his lodgings,
+since it was in Fauchelevent's pocket. Without a card, he could not get
+back into the cemetery.
+
+Fauchelevent took the shovel, and Jean Valjean the pick-axe, and
+together they buried the empty coffin.
+
+When the grave was full, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean:--
+
+"Let us go. I will keep the shovel; do you carry off the mattock."
+
+Night was falling.
+
+Jean Valjean experienced rome difficulty in moving and in walking. He
+had stiffened himself in that coffin, and had become a little like a
+corpse. The rigidity of death had seized upon him between those four
+planks. He had, in a manner, to thaw out, from the tomb.
+
+"You are benumbed," said Fauchelevent. "It is a pity that I have a game
+leg, for otherwise we might step out briskly."
+
+"Bah!" replied Jean Valjean, "four paces will put life into my legs once
+more."
+
+They set off by the alleys through which the hearse had passed. On
+arriving before the closed gate and the porter's pavilion Fauchelevent,
+who held the grave-digger's card in his hand, dropped it into the box,
+the porter pulled the rope, the gate opened, and they went out.
+
+"How well everything is going!" said Fauchelevent; "what a capital idea
+that was of yours, Father Madeleine!"
+
+They passed the Vaugirard barrier in the simplest manner in the world.
+In the neighborhood of the cemetery, a shovel and pick are equal to two
+passports.
+
+The Rue Vaugirard was deserted.
+
+"Father Madeleine," said Fauchelevent as they went along, and raising
+his eyes to the houses, "Your eyes are better than mine. Show me No.
+87."
+
+"Here it is," said Jean Valjean.
+
+"There is no one in the street," said Fauchelevent. "Give me your
+mattock and wait a couple of minutes for me."
+
+Fauchelevent entered No. 87, ascended to the very top, guided by the
+instinct which always leads the poor man to the garret, and knocked in
+the dark, at the door of an attic.
+
+A voice replied: "Come in."
+
+It was Gribier's voice.
+
+Fauchelevent opened the door. The grave-digger's dwelling was, like
+all such wretched habitations, an unfurnished and encumbered garret.
+A packing-case--a coffin, perhaps--took the place of a commode, a
+butter-pot served for a drinking-fountain, a straw mattress served for
+a bed, the floor served instead of tables and chairs. In a corner, on a
+tattered fragment which had been a piece of an old carpet, a thin
+woman and a number of children were piled in a heap. The whole of this
+poverty-stricken interior bore traces of having been overturned. One
+would have said that there had been an earthquake "for one." The covers
+were displaced, the rags scattered about, the jug broken, the mother had
+been crying, the children had probably been beaten; traces of a vigorous
+and ill-tempered search. It was plain that the grave-digger had made
+a desperate search for his card, and had made everybody in the garret,
+from the jug to his wife, responsible for its loss. He wore an air of
+desperation.
+
+But Fauchelevent was in too great a hurry to terminate this adventure to
+take any notice of this sad side of his success.
+
+He entered and said:--
+
+"I have brought you back your shovel and pick."
+
+Gribier gazed at him in stupefaction.
+
+"Is it you, peasant?"
+
+"And to-morrow morning you will find your card with the porter of the
+cemetery."
+
+And he laid the shovel and mattock on the floor.
+
+"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Gribier.
+
+"The meaning of it is, that you dropped your card out of your pocket,
+that I found it on the ground after you were gone, that I have buried
+the corpse, that I have filled the grave, that I have done your work,
+that the porter will return your card to you, and that you will not have
+to pay fifteen francs. There you have it, conscript."
+
+"Thanks, villager!" exclaimed Gribier, radiant. "The next time I will
+pay for the drinks."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATORY
+
+An hour later, in the darkness of night, two men and a child presented
+themselves at No. 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. The elder of the men lifted the
+knocker and rapped.
+
+They were Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette.
+
+The two old men had gone to fetch Cosette from the fruiterer's in
+the Rue du Chemin-Vert, where Fauchelevent had deposited her on the
+preceding day. Cosette had passed these twenty-four hours trembling
+silently and understanding nothing. She trembled to such a degree that
+she wept. She had neither eaten nor slept. The worthy fruit-seller had
+plied her with a hundred questions, without obtaining any other reply
+than a melancholy and unvarying gaze. Cosette had betrayed nothing of
+what she had seen and heard during the last two days. She divined that
+they were passing through a crisis. She was deeply conscious that it was
+necessary to "be good." Who has not experienced the sovereign power
+of those two words, pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a
+terrified little being: Say nothing! Fear is mute. Moreover, no one
+guards a secret like a child.
+
+But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours, she
+beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy, that any
+thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry, would have guessed
+that it issued from an abyss.
+
+Fauchelevent belonged to the convent and knew the pass-words. All the
+doors opened.
+
+Thus was solved the double and alarming problem of how to get out and
+how to get in.
+
+The porter, who had received his instructions, opened the little
+servant's door which connected the courtyard with the garden, and which
+could still be seen from the street twenty years ago, in the wall at the
+bottom of the court, which faced the carriage entrance.
+
+The porter admitted all three of them through this door, and from that
+point they reached the inner, reserved parlor where Fauchelevent, on the
+preceding day, had received his orders from the prioress.
+
+The prioress, rosary in hand, was waiting for them. A vocal mother, with
+her veil lowered, stood beside her.
+
+A discreet candle lighted, one might almost say, made a show of lighting
+the parlor.
+
+The prioress passed Jean Valjean in review. There is nothing which
+examines like a downcast eye.
+
+Then she questioned him:--
+
+"You are the brother?"
+
+"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"Ultime Fauchelevent."
+
+He really had had a brother named Ultime, who was dead.
+
+"Where do you come from?"
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"From Picquigny, near Amiens."
+
+"What is your age?"
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"Fifty."
+
+"What is your profession?"
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"Gardener."
+
+"Are you a good Christian?"
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"Every one is in the family."
+
+"Is this your little girl?"
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"Yes, reverend Mother."
+
+"You are her father?"
+
+Fauchelevent replied:--
+
+"Her grandfather."
+
+The vocal mother said to the prioress in a low voice
+
+"He answers well."
+
+Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word.
+
+The prioress looked attentively at Cosette, and said half aloud to the
+vocal mother:--
+
+"She will grow up ugly."
+
+The two mothers consulted for a few moments in very low tones in the
+corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned round and said:--
+
+"Father Fauvent, you will get another knee-cap with a bell. Two will be
+required now."
+
+On the following day, therefore, two bells were audible in the garden,
+and the nuns could not resist the temptation to raise the corner of
+their veils. At the extreme end of the garden, under the trees, two
+men, Fauvent and another man, were visible as they dug side by side. An
+enormous event. Their silence was broken to the extent of saying to each
+other: "He is an assistant gardener."
+
+The vocal mothers added: "He is a brother of Father Fauvent."
+
+Jean Valjean was, in fact, regularly installed; he had his belled
+knee-cap; henceforth he was official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.
+
+The most powerful determining cause of his admission had been the
+prioress's observation upon Cosette: "She will grow up ugly."
+
+The prioress, that pronounced prognosticator, immediately took a fancy
+to Cosette and gave her a place in the school as a charity pupil.
+
+There is nothing that is not strictly logical about this.
+
+It is in vain that mirrors are banished from the convent, women are
+conscious of their faces; now, girls who are conscious of their beauty
+do not easily become nuns; the vocation being voluntary in inverse
+proportion to their good looks, more is to be hoped from the ugly than
+from the pretty. Hence a lively taste for plain girls.
+
+The whole of this adventure increased the importance of good, old
+Fauchelevent; he won a triple success; in the eyes of Jean Valjean, whom
+he had saved and sheltered; in those of grave-digger Gribier, who said
+to himself: "He spared me that fine"; with the convent, which, being
+enabled, thanks to him, to retain the coffin of Mother Crucifixion
+under the altar, eluded Caesar and satisfied God. There was a coffin
+containing a body in the Petit-Picpus, and a coffin without a body in
+the Vaugirard cemetery, public order had no doubt been deeply disturbed
+thereby, but no one was aware of it.
+
+As for the convent, its gratitude to Fauchelevent was very great.
+Fauchelevent became the best of servitors and the most precious of
+gardeners. Upon the occasion of the archbishop's next visit, the
+prioress recounted the affair to his Grace, making something of a
+confession at the same time, and yet boasting of her deed. On leaving
+the convent, the archbishop mentioned it with approval, and in a whisper
+to M. de Latil, Monsieur's confessor, afterwards Archbishop of Reims
+and Cardinal. This admiration for Fauchelevent became widespread, for it
+made its way to Rome. We have seen a note addressed by the then reigning
+Pope, Leo XII., to one of his relatives, a Monsignor in the Nuncio's
+establishment in Paris, and bearing, like himself, the name of Della
+Genga; it contained these lines: "It appears that there is in a convent
+in Paris an excellent gardener, who is also a holy man, named Fauvent."
+Nothing of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut; he went on
+grafting, weeding, and covering up his melon beds, without in the least
+suspecting his excellences and his sanctity. Neither did he suspect his
+glory, any more than a Durham or Surrey bull whose portrait is published
+in the London Illustrated News, with this inscription: "Bull which
+carried off the prize at the Cattle Show."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--CLOISTERED
+
+Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.
+
+It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean's
+daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and
+then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have just
+observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. Cosette
+had suffered so much, that she feared everything, even to speak or to
+breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her.
+She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had been with
+Jean Valjean. She speedily became accustomed to the convent. Only she
+regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did
+say to Jean Valjean: "Father, if I had known, I would have brought her
+away with me."
+
+Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent, to don
+the garb of the pupils of the house. Jean Valjean succeeded in getting
+them to restore to him the garments which she laid aside. This was the
+same mourning suit which he had made her put on when she had quitted
+the Thenardiers' inn. It was not very threadbare even now. Jean Valjean
+locked up these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes, with a
+quantity of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents abound, in a
+little valise which he found means of procuring. He set this valise on
+a chair near his bed, and he always carried the key about his person.
+"Father," Cosette asked him one day, "what is there in that box which
+smells so good?"
+
+Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good action, in
+addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and of which he knew
+nothing; in the first place it made him happy; next, he had much less
+work, since it was shared. Lastly, as he was very fond of snuff, he
+found the presence of M. Madeleine an advantage, in that he used three
+times as much as he had done previously, and that in an infinitely more
+luxurious manner, seeing that M. Madeleine paid for it.
+
+The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean the
+other Fauvent.
+
+If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert's glance, they
+would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand to be
+done outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always the elder
+Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who went, and never the
+other; but whether it is that eyes constantly fixed on God know not how
+to spy, or whether they were, by preference, occupied in keeping watch
+on each other, they paid no heed to this.
+
+Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close and did not
+stir out. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.
+
+This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by gulfs.
+Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world. He saw enough of the
+sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity, and Cosette enough to
+remain happy.
+
+A very sweet life began for him.
+
+He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company with
+Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in
+existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three
+chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the
+walls. The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean
+had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent. The
+walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to the two nails
+whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist bank-note
+of '93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece, and of which the
+following is an exact facsimile:--
+
+
+[Illustration: Royalist Bank-note 2b8-9-banknote]
+
+
+This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall by
+the preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent, and
+whose place Fauchelevent had taken.
+
+Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself very
+useful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found
+himself a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew all
+sorts of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these to
+advantage. Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and wild.
+He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.
+
+Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. As the
+sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made comparisons and
+adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered
+the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed
+out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he afforded
+Cosette. The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far
+from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant
+than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and
+playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the
+rest.
+
+For Cosette laughed now.
+
+Cosette's face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. The
+gloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine; it
+banishes winter from the human countenance.
+
+Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean
+gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at
+the windows of her dormitory.
+
+God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,
+to uphold and complete the Bishop's work in Jean Valjean. It is certain
+that virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devil
+exists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably
+near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the
+convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only to
+the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained humble;
+but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in general,
+and pride was beginning to spring up. Who knows? He might have ended by
+returning very gradually to hatred.
+
+The convent stopped him on that downward path.
+
+This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. In his youth,
+in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quite
+recently again, he had beheld another,--a frightful place, a terrible
+place, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity of
+justice, and the crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the
+cloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the galleys,
+and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister, he
+confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.
+
+Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly
+descended the endless spirals of revery.
+
+He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose at
+dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they
+lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches
+thick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of
+the year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were allowed,
+as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a woollen
+carter's blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they drank no
+wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on "fatigue duty." They
+lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after a
+manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered
+voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.
+
+Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.
+
+These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with
+lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world,
+not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders
+lacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished from
+among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.
+They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained until
+evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but in a
+black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in winter,
+without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without having
+even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment or the
+woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge chemises
+which gave them fever. They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only during
+rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they slept,
+not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. And finally, they were
+not even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of toil, they
+were obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at the moment
+when they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get warm, to rouse
+themselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel,
+with their knees on the stones.
+
+On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve
+successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon the
+pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.
+
+The others were men; these were women.
+
+What had those men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged,
+murdered, assassinated. They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners,
+incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had
+done nothing whatever.
+
+On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality,
+homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other,
+one thing only, innocence.
+
+Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious
+assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing
+something of heaven through holiness.
+
+On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged in
+whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And what
+crimes! And what faults!
+
+On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On the one
+hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range of
+cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; on
+the other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth. There,
+darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light,
+and of gleams full of radiance.
+
+Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible,
+a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,
+perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, that
+faint light of liberty which men call death.
+
+In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained by
+faith.
+
+What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,
+hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a
+sarcasm against heaven.
+
+What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.
+
+And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species
+of beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work,
+expiation.
+
+Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former; that
+personal expiation, the expiation for one's self. But he did not
+understand that of these last, that of creatures without reproach and
+without stain, and he trembled as he asked himself: The expiation of
+what? What expiation?
+
+A voice within his conscience replied: "The most divine of human
+generosities, the expiation for others."
+
+Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator; we
+place ourselves at Jean Valjean's point of view, and we translate his
+impressions.
+
+Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest
+possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults,
+and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, torture
+accepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for the
+sake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity
+swallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct
+and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery
+of those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.
+
+And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!
+
+Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful
+song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and the
+blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly
+chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that he,
+wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.
+
+There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, like
+a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, the
+passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk of
+death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which
+he had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made in
+order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his destiny?
+This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy resemblance to
+that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never conceived an
+idea of anything similar.
+
+Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom? Angels.
+
+These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once
+more around lambs.
+
+This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it was
+still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.
+
+These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A cold,
+harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the barred
+and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more biting
+breeze blew in the cage of these doves.
+
+Why?
+
+When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in
+amazement before this mystery of sublimity.
+
+In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heart
+in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.
+All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him
+back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette through love, the
+convent through humility.
+
+Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden was
+deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk which
+skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed on
+the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he knew,
+the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer. Thus he prayed
+as he knelt before the sister.
+
+It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.
+
+Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrant
+flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave and simple
+women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him, and little by little,
+his soul became compounded of silence like the cloister, of perfume like
+the flowers, of simplicity like the women, of joy like the children.
+And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God which had
+received him in succession at two critical moments in his life: the
+first, when all doors were closed and when human society rejected him;
+the second, at a moment when human society had again set out in pursuit
+of him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and that, had it not
+been for the first, he should have relapsed into crime, and had it not
+been for the second, into torment.
+
+His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.
+
+Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.
+
+
+[THE END OF VOLUME II. "COSETTE"]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME III--MARIUS.
+
+
+[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Three 3frontispiece]
+
+[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Three 3titlepage]
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--PARVULUS
+
+Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the
+sparrow; the child is called the gamin.
+
+Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the other
+all the dawn; strike these two sparks together, Paris, childhood; there
+leaps out from them a little being. Homuncio, Plautus would say.
+
+This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he goes to
+the play every evening, if he sees good. He has no shirt on his body,
+no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies of
+heaven, who have none of these things. He is from seven to thirteen
+years of age, he lives in bands, roams the streets, lodges in the open
+air, wears an old pair of trousers of his father's, which descend below
+his heels, an old hat of some other father, which descends below his
+ears, a single suspender of yellow listing; he runs, lies in wait,
+rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict,
+haunts the wine-shop, knows thieves, calls gay women thou, talks slang,
+sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart. This is because he
+has in his heart a pearl, innocence; and pearls are not to be dissolved
+in mud. So long as man is in his childhood, God wills that he shall be
+innocent.
+
+If one were to ask that enormous city: "What is this?" she would reply:
+"It is my little one."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS
+
+The gamin--the street Arab--of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.
+
+Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,
+but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then
+they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for
+he finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he
+finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose
+foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors:
+to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own occupations,
+calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing means
+of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains, which he
+calls making the bridge of arts, crying discourses pronounced by the
+authorities in favor of the French people, cleaning out the cracks
+in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed of all the
+little morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets.
+This curious money, which receives the name of loques--rags--has
+an invariable and well-regulated currency in this little Bohemia of
+children.
+
+Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in
+the corners; the lady-bird, the death's-head plant-louse, the
+daddy-long-legs, "the devil," a black insect, which menaces by twisting
+about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which
+has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on
+its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns
+and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls
+sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a
+look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls this
+monster "the deaf thing." The search for these "deaf things" among
+the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in
+suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.
+Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which
+are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
+Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in
+the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.
+
+As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as
+Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed
+with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the
+composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly
+from high comedy to farce.
+
+A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a
+doctor. "Hey there!" shouts some street Arab, "how long has it been
+customary for doctors to carry home their own work?"
+
+Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and
+trinkets, turns round indignantly: "You good-for-nothing, you have
+seized my wife's waist!"--"I, sir? Search me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--HE IS AGREEABLE
+
+In the evening, thanks to a few sous, which he always finds means
+to procure, the homuncio enters a theatre. On crossing that magic
+threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes
+the titi.[18] Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the
+keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together.
+The titi is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being
+endowed with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with
+his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with
+his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on
+that narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel,
+the name of Paradise.
+
+Bestow on an individual the useless and deprive him of the necessary,
+and you have the gamin.
+
+The gamin is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency, and we say
+it with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute classic
+taste. He is not very academic by nature. Thus, to give an example, the
+popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among that little audience of stormy
+children was seasoned with a touch of irony. The gamin called her
+Mademoiselle Muche--"hide yourself."
+
+This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a
+baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the
+cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his
+wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts, and shrieks, tempers
+Alleluia with Matantur-lurette, chants every rhythm from the De
+Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is
+ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is
+lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dunghill
+and emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is Rabelais
+in this youth.
+
+He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.
+
+He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified, he makes
+songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations, he twits
+mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the poetry out
+of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas.
+It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he replaces the solemn
+vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor were to appear to
+him, the street Arab would say: "Hi there! The bugaboo!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--HE MAY BE OF USE
+
+Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street Arab, two
+beings of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance, which
+contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme
+and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history. The whole of
+the monarchy is contained in the lounger; the whole of anarchy in the
+gamin.
+
+This pale child of the Parisian faubourgs lives and develops, makes
+connections, "grows supple" in suffering, in the presence of social
+realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness. He thinks himself
+heedless; and he is not. He looks and is on the verge of laughter; he is
+on the verge of something else also. Whoever you may be, if your name is
+Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice,
+Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin.
+
+The little fellow will grow up.
+
+Of what clay is he made? Of the first mud that comes to hand. A handful
+of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A
+God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny
+being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy
+kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low.
+Will that become an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit
+of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men
+of destiny, reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes of a jug an
+amphora.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--HIS FRONTIERS
+
+The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has something
+of the sage in him. Urbis amator, like Fuscus; ruris amator, like
+Flaccus.
+
+To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine
+employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that
+rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but
+odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities,
+notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal.
+End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning
+of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of
+the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur,
+beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.
+
+Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by the
+passing stroller with the epithet: melancholy, the apparently objectless
+promenades of the dreamer.
+
+He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers
+of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs. That
+close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools,
+those harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early
+market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture of
+the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the garrison
+drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of battle, those
+hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill which turns
+in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the tea-gardens at the
+corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of great, sombre walls
+squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of land inundated with
+sunshine and full of butterflies,--all this attracted him.
+
+There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those
+singular spots, the Glaciere, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle
+all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on
+the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate
+de Chatillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer
+serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed, on a
+level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagna of
+Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing
+but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is
+to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The
+spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always stamped
+with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both appeal
+to you at the same time there. Local originalities there make their
+appearance.
+
+Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes
+contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos of
+Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the
+most unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner of a
+lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy,
+dusty, ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with
+corn-flowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape
+from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the
+suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant. There
+they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs. There they are, or
+rather, there they exist, far from every eye, in the sweet light of
+May or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground, snapping marbles with
+their thumbs, quarrelling over half-farthings, irresponsible, volatile,
+free and happy; and, no sooner do they catch sight of you than they
+recollect that they have an industry, and that they must earn their
+living, and they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled
+with cockchafers, or a bunch of lilacs. These encounters with strange
+children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces of
+the environs of Paris.
+
+Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,--are they
+their sisters?--who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with
+sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of
+rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring cherries among
+the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing. These groups,
+warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday, or indistinctly seen in
+the twilight, occupy the thoughtful man for a very long time, and these
+visions mingle with his dreams.
+
+Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth
+to those children. They never venture beyond this. They can no more
+escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the
+water. For them, nothing exists two leagues beyond the barriers:
+Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Menilmontant,
+Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Mendon, Issy, Vanvre, Sevres, Puteaux,
+Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnieres,
+Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy,
+Gonesse; the universe ends there.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--A BIT OF HISTORY
+
+At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this
+book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at
+the corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss
+here); stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average
+of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that
+period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process
+of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of these
+nests, which has become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of
+Arcola." This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms. All
+crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.
+
+Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative
+measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the
+exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is
+a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in
+some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the
+public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy
+of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the
+surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to
+put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our
+popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the
+idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of
+the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.
+
+What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which
+one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around
+whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken
+family. In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still
+is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families
+pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has
+become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on the
+public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for this
+sad thing has given rise to an expression, "to be cast on the pavements
+of Paris."
+
+Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not
+discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in
+the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of
+the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people
+was a dogma. What is the use of "half-lights"? Such was the countersign.
+Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant child.
+
+Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in
+that case it skimmed the streets.
+
+Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired
+to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider
+the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that
+plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of
+necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either
+by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what
+steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley
+is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required.
+Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make
+as many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of
+complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a
+procession--it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A
+child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen
+years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the
+galleys. Grand reign; grand century.
+
+Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them
+off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew. People whispered with
+terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's baths of purple. Barbier
+speaks ingenuously of these things. It sometimes happened that the
+exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who
+had fathers. The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts. In that
+case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung. Who? The exempts?
+No, the fathers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE GAMIN SHOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF
+INDIA
+
+The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste. One might
+almost say: Not every one who wishes to belong to it can do so.
+
+This word gamin was printed for the first time, and reached popular
+speech through the literary tongue, in 1834. It is in a little work
+entitled Claude Gueux that this word made its appearance. The horror was
+lively. The word passed into circulation.
+
+The elements which constitute the consideration of the gamins for each
+other are very various. We have known and associated with one who was
+greatly respected and vastly admired because he had seen a man fall from
+the top of the tower of Notre-Dame; another, because he had succeeded in
+making his way into the rear courtyard where the statues of the dome
+of the Invalides had been temporarily deposited, and had "prigged" some
+lead from them; a third, because he had seen a diligence tip over; still
+another, because he "knew" a soldier who came near putting out the eye
+of a citizen.
+
+This explains that famous exclamation of a Parisian gamin, a profound
+epiphonema, which the vulgar herd laughs at without comprehending,--Dieu
+de Dieu! What ill-luck I do have! to think that I have never yet seen
+anybody tumble from a fifth-story window! (I have pronounced I'ave and
+fifth pronounced fift'.)
+
+Surely, this saying of a peasant is a fine one: "Father So-and-So, your
+wife has died of her malady; why did you not send for the doctor?"
+"What would you have, sir, we poor folks die of ourselves." But if
+the peasant's whole passivity lies in this saying, the whole of the
+free-thinking anarchy of the brat of the faubourgs is, assuredly,
+contained in this other saying. A man condemned to death is listening
+to his confessor in the tumbrel. The child of Paris exclaims: "He is
+talking to his black cap! Oh, the sneak!"
+
+A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamin. To be
+strong-minded is an important item.
+
+To be present at executions constitutes a duty. He shows himself at the
+guillotine, and he laughs. He calls it by all sorts of pet names: The
+End of the Soup, The Growler, The Mother in the Blue (the sky), The Last
+Mouthful, etc., etc. In order not to lose anything of the affair, he
+scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies, he ascends trees, he
+suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast to chimneys. The gamin is
+born a tiler as he is born a mariner. A roof inspires him with no more
+fear than a mast. There is no festival which comes up to an execution
+on the Place de Greve. Samson and the Abbe Montes are the truly popular
+names. They hoot at the victim in order to encourage him. They sometimes
+admire him. Lacenaire, when a gamin, on seeing the hideous Dautin die
+bravely, uttered these words which contain a future: "I was jealous of
+him." In the brotherhood of gamins Voltaire is not known, but Papavoine
+is. "Politicians" are confused with assassins in the same legend.
+They have a tradition as to everybody's last garment. It is known that
+Tolleron had a fireman's cap, Avril an otter cap, Losvel a round hat,
+that old Delaporte was bald and bare-headed, that Castaing was all ruddy
+and very handsome, that Bories had a romantic small beard, that Jean
+Martin kept on his suspenders, that Lecouffe and his mother quarrelled.
+"Don't reproach each other for your basket," shouted a gamin to them.
+Another, in order to get a look at Debacker as he passed, and being too
+small in the crowd, caught sight of the lantern on the quay and climbed
+it. A gendarme stationed opposite frowned. "Let me climb up, m'sieu le
+gendarme," said the gamin. And, to soften the heart of the authorities
+he added: "I will not fall." "I don't care if you do," retorted the
+gendarme.
+
+In the brotherhood of gamins, a memorable accident counts for a great
+deal. One reaches the height of consideration if one chances to cut
+one's self very deeply, "to the very bone."
+
+The fist is no mediocre element of respect. One of the things that the
+gamin is fondest of saying is: "I am fine and strong, come now!" To be
+left-handed renders you very enviable. A squint is highly esteemed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--IN WHICH THE READER WILL FIND A CHARMING SAYING OF THE
+LAST KING
+
+In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog; and in the evening,
+when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena,
+from the tops of coal wagons, and the washerwomen's boats, he hurls
+himself headlong into the Seine, and into all possible infractions of
+the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless the police keep an
+eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which
+once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; that cry which was
+celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from gamin to gamin; it
+scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the
+eleusiac chant of the Panathenaea, and in it one encounters again the
+ancient Evohe. Here it is: "Ohe, Titi, oheee! Here comes the bobby, here
+comes the p'lice, pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer with
+you!"
+
+Sometimes this gnat--that is what he calls himself--knows how to read;
+sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub. He
+does not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual
+instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public; from
+1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he
+scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when Louis Philippe was
+returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow, no higher than his knee,
+perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic pear in charcoal on one
+of the pillars of the gate of Neuilly; the King, with that good-nature
+which came to him from Henry IV., helped the gamin, finished the pear,
+and gave the child a louis, saying: "The pear is on that also."[19]
+The gamin loves uproar. A certain state of violence pleases him. He
+execrates "the cures." One day, in the Rue de l'Universite, one of these
+scamps was putting his thumb to his nose at the carriage gate of No.
+69. "Why are you doing that at the gate?" a passer-by asked. The boy
+replied: "There is a cure there." It was there, in fact, that the Papal
+Nuncio lived.
+
+Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin, if
+the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite possible
+that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass civilly. There
+are two things to which he plays Tantalus, and which he always desires
+without ever attaining them: to overthrow the government, and to get his
+trousers sewed up again.
+
+The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris, and
+can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances to
+meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers. He studies their
+habits, and he has special notes on each one of them. He reads the souls
+of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and without
+flinching: "Such an one is a traitor; such another is very malicious;
+such another is great; such another is ridiculous." (All these words:
+traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a particular meaning in his
+mouth.) That one imagines that he owns the Pont-Neuf, and he prevents
+people from walking on the cornice outside the parapet; that other has a
+mania for pulling person's ears; etc., etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL
+
+There was something of that boy in Poquelin, the son of the fish-market;
+Beaumarchais had something of it. Gaminerie is a shade of the Gallic
+spirit. Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force to the latter,
+as alcohol does to wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer repeats himself
+eternally, granted; one may say that Voltaire plays the gamin. Camille
+Desmoulins was a native of the faubourgs. Championnet, who treated
+miracles brutally, rose from the pavements of Paris; he had, when a
+small lad, inundated the porticos of Saint-Jean de Beauvais, and of
+Saint-Etienne du Mont; he had addressed the shrine of Sainte-Genevieve
+familiarly to give orders to the phial of Saint Januarius.
+
+The gamin of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has
+villainous teeth, because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and
+handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present, he
+would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot. He is strong on
+boxing. All beliefs are possible to him. He plays in the gutter, and
+straightens himself up with a revolt; his effrontery persists even in
+the presence of grape-shot; he was a scapegrace, he is a hero; like the
+little Theban, he shakes the skin from the lion; Barra the drummer-boy
+was a gamin of Paris; he Shouts: "Forward!" as the horse of Scripture
+says "Vah!" and in a moment he has passed from the small brat to the
+giant.
+
+This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that
+spread of wings which reaches from Moliere to Barra.
+
+To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses
+himself, because he is unhappy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO
+
+To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like the
+graeculus of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace with the
+wrinkle of the old world on his brow.
+
+The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a
+disease which must be cured, how? By light.
+
+Light renders healthy.
+
+Light kindles.
+
+All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts,
+education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm
+you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will
+present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth;
+and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea
+will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of
+Paris; flames in the light or will-o'-the-wisps in the gloom.
+
+The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.
+
+For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole
+of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living
+manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history with
+heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital, the
+Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg
+Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a
+Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion;
+and it replaces the Gemoniae by ridicule. Its majo is called "faraud,"
+its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its hammal is the
+market-porter, its lazzarone is the pegre, its cockney is the native of
+Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris. The fishwoman
+of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller of Euripides, the
+discobols Vejanus lives again in the Forioso, the tight-rope dancer.
+Therapontigonus Miles could walk arm in arm with Vadeboncoeur the
+grenadier, Damasippus the second-hand dealer would be happy among
+bric-a-brac merchants, Vincennes could grasp Socrates in its fist as
+just as Agora could imprison Diderot, Grimod de la Reyniere discovered
+larded roast beef, as Curtillus invented roast hedgehog, we see the
+trapeze which figures in Plautus reappear under the vault of the Arc
+of l'Etoile, the sword-eater of Poecilus encountered by Apuleius is a
+sword-swallower on the Pont Neuf, the nephew of Rameau and Curculio
+the parasite make a pair, Ergasilus could get himself presented to
+Cambaceres by d'Aigrefeuille; the four dandies of Rome: Alcesimarchus,
+Phoedromus, Diabolus, and Argyrippus, descend from Courtille in
+Labatut's posting-chaise; Aulus Gellius would halt no longer in front of
+Congrio than would Charles Nodier in front of Punchinello; Marto is not
+a tigress, but Pardalisca was not a dragon; Pantolabus the wag jeers in
+the Cafe Anglais at Nomentanus the fast liver, Hermogenus is a tenor
+in the Champs-Elysees, and round him, Thracius the beggar, clad like
+Bobeche, takes up a collection; the bore who stops you by the button
+of your coat in the Tuileries makes you repeat after a lapse of two
+thousand years Thesprion's apostrophe: Quis properantem me prehendit
+pallio? The wine on Surene is a parody of the wine of Alba, the red
+border of Desaugiers forms a balance to the great cutting of Balatro,
+Pere Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains same gleams as the
+Esquiliae, and the grave of the poor bought for five years, is certainly
+the equivalent of the slave's hived coffin.
+
+Seek something that Paris has not. The vat of Trophonius contains
+nothing that is not in Mesmer's tub; Ergaphilas lives again in
+Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vasaphanta become incarnate in the Comte de
+Saint-Germain; the cemetery of Saint-Medard works quite as good miracles
+as the Mosque of Oumoumie at Damascus.
+
+Paris has an AEsop-Mayeux, and a Canidia, Mademoiselle Lenormand. It is
+terrified, like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of the vision; it
+makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places the grisette on the
+throne, as Rome placed the courtesan there; and, taking it altogether,
+if Louis XV. is worse than Claudian, Madame Dubarry is better than
+Messalina. Paris combines in an unprecedented type, which has existed
+and which we have elbowed, Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the
+Gascon pun. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack-pudding, dresses up a
+spectre in old numbers of the Constitutional, and makes Chodruc Duclos.
+
+Although Plutarch says: the tyrant never grows old, Rome, under Sylla as
+under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine. The
+Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium made of it by Varus
+Vibiscus is to be credited: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus, Bibere
+Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci. Paris drinks a million litres of
+water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally beating the
+general alarm and ringing the tocsin.
+
+With that exception, Paris is amiable. It accepts everything royally;
+it is not too particular about its Venus; its Callipyge is Hottentot;
+provided that it is made to laugh, it condones; ugliness cheers it,
+deformity provokes it to laughter, vice diverts it; be eccentric and
+you may be an eccentric; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does
+not disgust it; it is so literary that it does not hold its nose before
+Basile, and is no more scandalized by the prayer of Tartuffe than Horace
+was repelled by the "hiccup" of Priapus. No trait of the universal face
+is lacking in the profile of Paris. The bal Mabile is not the polymnia
+dance of the Janiculum, but the dealer in ladies' wearing apparel there
+devours the lorette with her eyes, exactly as the procuress Staphyla
+lay in wait for the virgin Planesium. The Barriere du Combat is not
+the Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as though Caesar were
+looking on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet,
+but, if Virgil haunted the Roman wine-shop, David d'Angers, Balzac
+and Charlet have sat at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns.
+Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails prosper there. Adonai passes
+on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder and lightning; Silenus
+makes his entry there on his ass. For Silenus read Ramponneau.
+
+Paris is the synonym of Cosmos, Paris is Athens, Sybaris, Jerusalem,
+Pantin. All civilizations are there in an abridged form, all barbarisms
+also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine.
+
+A little of the Place de Greve is a good thing. What would all that
+eternal festival be without this seasoning? Our laws are wisely
+provided, and thanks to them, this blade drips on this Shrove Tuesday.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--TO SCOFF, TO REIGN
+
+There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which
+sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians!
+exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the
+fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris
+may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury;
+then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs
+its eyes, says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face
+of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing
+that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors,
+that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this
+parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the
+Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign
+joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a sceptre.
+
+Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions, its days,
+its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the bounds of
+the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its laugh is the
+mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its jests are sparks.
+It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on people; the highest
+monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their
+eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has a prodigious
+14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take
+the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three
+hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle
+of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of
+the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar,
+Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is
+everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779,
+at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it
+whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American
+abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear
+of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi before
+the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it creates Quiroga;
+it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great on earth; it was while
+proceeding whither its breath urge them, that Byron perished at
+Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona; it is the tribune under
+the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre;
+its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its
+philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier,
+Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Moliere
+for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked by the universal
+mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in all minds
+the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it forges are for the
+generations trusty friends, and it is with the soul of its thinkers and
+its poets that all heroes of all nations have been made since 1789; this
+does not prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called
+Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal
+Bouginier's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes
+Credeville the thief on the Pyramids.
+
+Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it is
+laughing.
+
+Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A
+heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It is
+more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.
+
+To dare; that is the price of progress.
+
+All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring. In
+order that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice that
+Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that
+Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it,
+that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; it
+is necessary that Danton should dare it.
+
+The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat lux. It is necessary, for the sake of the
+forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons of
+courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and are
+one of man's great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises. To
+attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one's
+self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount
+of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to
+insult drunken victory, to hold one's position, to stand one's ground;
+that is the example which nations need, that is the light which
+electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch
+of Prometheus to Cambronne's short pipe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE
+
+As for the Parisian populace, even when a man grown, it is always the
+street Arab; to paint the child is to paint the city; and it is for that
+reason that we have studied this eagle in this arrant sparrow. It is in
+the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian race appears;
+there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there this
+people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two faces of
+man. There exist there immense numbers of unknown beings, among whom
+swarm types of the strangest, from the porter of la Rapee to the knacker
+of Montfaucon. Fex urbis, exclaims Cicero; mob, adds Burke, indignantly;
+rabble, multitude, populace. These are words and quickly uttered. But
+so be it. What does it matter? What is it to me if they do go barefoot!
+They do not know how to read; so much the worse. Would you abandon them
+for that? Would you turn their distress into a malediction? Cannot the
+light penetrate these masses? Let us return to that cry: Light! and let
+us obstinately persist therein! Light! Light! Who knows whether
+these opacities will not become transparent? Are not revolutions
+transfigurations? Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten, light up, think
+aloud, speak aloud, hasten joyously to the great sun, fraternize with
+the public place, announce the good news, spend your alphabets lavishly,
+proclaim rights, sing the Marseillaises, sow enthusiasms, tear green
+boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. This crowd may
+be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use of that vast
+conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles, bursts forth
+and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare arms, these
+rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses, these darknesses, may be
+employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the people, and you
+will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be
+cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a
+splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will
+discover stars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GAVROCHE
+
+[Illustration: Little Gavroche 3b1-13-gavroche]
+
+Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of this
+story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the regions of
+the Chateau-d'Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years of age, who would
+have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal of the gamin sketched
+out above, if, with the laugh of his age on his lips, he had not had a
+heart absolutely sombre and empty. This child was well muffled up in a
+pair of man's trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and a
+woman's chemise, but he did not get it from his mother. Some people or
+other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and
+a mother. But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not
+love him.
+
+He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of
+those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.
+
+This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The
+pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.
+
+His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.
+
+He simply took flight.
+
+He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
+vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
+scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly
+laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
+He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because
+he was free.
+
+When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
+order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they
+escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.
+
+Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every
+two or three months, that he said, "Come, I'll go and see mamma!" Then
+he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended
+to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the
+Salpetriere, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number
+50-52 with which the reader is acquainted--at the Gorbeau hovel.
+
+At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
+decorated with the placard: "Chambers to let," chanced to be, a rare
+thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
+case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to
+that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty
+bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery
+to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings
+in whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who
+sweeps up the mud, and the ragpicker who collects scraps.
+
+The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead and had been
+replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has
+said: "Old women are never lacking."
+
+This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable
+about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets, who had reigned in
+succession over her soul.
+
+The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of
+four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already
+well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the
+cells which we have already mentioned.
+
+At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except its
+extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber, had stated
+that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in, which had
+borne a singular resemblance to the entrance of nothing at all, to
+borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this Jondrette
+had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the same time
+portress and stair-sweeper: "Mother So-and-So, if any one should chance
+to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a Spaniard,
+perchance, it is I."
+
+This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and
+found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile; a cold hearth
+and cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked: "Whence come you?" He
+replied: "From the street." When he went away, they asked him: "Whither
+are you going?" He replied: "Into the streets." His mother said to him:
+"What did you come here for?"
+
+This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants
+which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he
+blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should
+be.
+
+Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.
+
+We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this child
+was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?
+
+Probably because his father's name was Jondrette.
+
+It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the
+thread.
+
+The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the
+last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a
+very poor young man who was called M. Marius.
+
+Let us explain who this M. Marius was.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH
+
+In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge there
+still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of a
+worthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention him with complaisance.
+This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yet
+entirely disappeared--for those who regard with melancholy that vague
+swarm of shadows which is called the past--from the labyrinth of streets
+in the vicinity of the Temple to which, under Louis XIV., the names of
+all the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day, the
+streets of the new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all the
+capitals of Europe; a progression, by the way, in which progress is
+visible.
+
+M.Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one of
+those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because
+they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly
+resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man,
+and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and rather
+haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good, old
+bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisates. He
+was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw
+clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of
+his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous
+disposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly
+and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; he
+did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said: "If I were
+not ruined--Heee!" All he had left, in fact, was an income of about
+fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and
+to have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses. He did
+not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of
+octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their life;
+his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old man had always
+had good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew into
+a passion at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason. When
+contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as he had done in the
+great century. He had a daughter over fifty years of age, and unmarried,
+whom he chastised severely with his tongue, when in a rage, and whom he
+would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He
+boxed his servants' ears soundly, and said: "Ah! carogne!" One of his
+oaths was: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!" He had singular
+freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved every day by a barber who
+had been mad and who detested him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on
+account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand
+admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was
+extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, some
+penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it
+came."
+
+The words which he uttered the most frequently were: the sensible man,
+and nature. He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation
+which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own
+fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "in
+order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even
+specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia
+and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard
+is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages.
+They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they
+transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only
+the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not
+devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE
+
+He lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6. He owned the
+house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number
+has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the
+streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment
+on the first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very
+ceilings with great Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing
+pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceilings and the panels were
+repeated in miniature on the arm-chairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast,
+nine-leaved screen of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from
+the windows, and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.
+The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that
+one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase twelve or
+fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with
+great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber, he had a
+boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant retreat,
+with magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers and
+fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys of Louis XIV. and ordered of his
+convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M. Gillenormand had
+inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt, who had died a
+centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between
+those of the courtier, which he had never been, and the lawyer, which
+he might have been. He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In
+his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their
+wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same
+time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in
+existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a
+marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens, executed
+with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details, in a confused
+and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand's attire was not the habit of
+Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.; it was that of the Incroyables
+of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to that period and
+had followed the fashions. His coat was of light-weight cloth with
+voluminous revers, a long swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With
+this he wore knee-breeches and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands
+into his fobs. He said authoritatively: "The French Revolution is a heap
+of blackguards."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--LUC-ESPRIT
+
+At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the honor
+to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties at the same
+time--ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung by Voltaire, the
+Camargo and the Salle. Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic
+retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nahenry, who was
+sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love.
+He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim: "How pretty she
+was--that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her
+at Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained sentiments, with her
+come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of the color of persons newly
+arrived, and her little agitation muff!" He had worn in his young
+manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Londrin, which he was fond of talking about
+effusively. "I was dressed like a Turk of the Levant Levantin," said he.
+Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had
+described him as "a charming fool." He was horrified by all the names
+which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and
+bourgeois. He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes as he
+said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while. "Oh!" he said, "what
+people these are! Corbiere! Humann! Casimir Perier! There's a minister
+for you! I can imagine this in a journal: 'M. Gillenorman, minister!'
+that would be a farce. Well! They are so stupid that it would pass"; he
+merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and
+did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse
+speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack
+of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the
+unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of
+periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose. His god-father
+had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed
+on him these two significant names: Luc-Esprit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT
+
+He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulins, where he
+was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duc de Nivernais,
+whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Neither the Convention, nor the death
+of Louis XVI., nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor
+anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. The
+Duc de Nevers was, in his eyes, the great figure of the century. "What a
+charming grand seigneur," he said, "and what a fine air he had with his
+blue ribbon!"
+
+In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had made reparation
+for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing, for three
+thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir of gold, from Bestucheff. He
+grew animated on this subject: "The elixir of gold," he exclaimed, "the
+yellow dye of Bestucheff, General Lamotte's drops, in the eighteenth
+century,--this was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the
+panacea against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial. Louis XV.
+sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope." He would have been greatly
+irritated and thrown off his balance, had any one told him that the
+elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand
+adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789; he was forever narrating
+in what manner he had saved himself during the Terror, and how he had
+been obliged to display a vast deal of gayety and cleverness in order to
+escape having his head cut off. If any young man ventured to pronounce
+an eulogium on the Republic in his presence, he turned purple and grew
+so angry that he was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to
+his ninety years, and said, "I hope that I shall not see ninety-three
+twice." On these occasions, he hinted to people that he meant to live to
+be a hundred.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--BASQUE AND NICOLETTE
+
+He had theories. Here is one of them: "When a man is passionately fond
+of women, and when he has himself a wife for whom he cares but little,
+who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights, perched on the
+code, and jealous at need, there is but one way of extricating himself
+from the quandry and of procuring peace, and that is to let his wife
+control the purse-strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his
+wife busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her
+fingers covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes the education
+of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers,
+presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits limbs of the law,
+follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself the
+sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, promises and compromises, binds fast
+and annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges,
+hoards, lavishes; she commits follies, a supreme and personal delight,
+and that consoles her. While her husband disdains her, she has the
+satisfaction of ruining her husband." This theory M. Gillenormand had
+himself applied, and it had become his history. His wife--the second
+one--had administered his fortune in such a manner that, one fine day,
+when M. Gillenormand found himself a widower, there remained to him just
+sufficient to live on, by sinking nearly the whole of it in an annuity
+of fifteen thousand francs, three-quarters of which would expire with
+him. He had not hesitated on this point, not being anxious to leave
+a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are
+subject to adventures, and, for instance, become national property; he
+had been present at the avatars of consolidated three per cents, and he
+had no great faith in the Great Book of the Public Debt. "All that's
+the Rue Quincampois!" he said. His house in the Rue Filles-du-Clavaire
+belonged to him, as we have already stated. He had two servants, "a male
+and a female." When a servant entered his establishment, M. Gillenormand
+re-baptized him. He bestowed on the men the name of their province:
+Nimois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard. His last valet was a big, foundered,
+short-winded fellow of fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty
+paces; but, as he had been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him
+Basque. All the female servants in his house were called Nicolette (even
+the Magnon, of whom we shall hear more farther on). One day, a haughty
+cook, a cordon bleu, of the lofty race of porters, presented herself.
+"How much wages do you want a month?" asked M. Gillenormand. "Thirty
+francs." "What is your name?" "Olympie." "You shall have fifty francs,
+and you shall be called Nicolette."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN
+
+With M. Gillenormand, sorrow was converted into wrath; he was furious at
+being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices and took all sorts
+of liberties. One of the facts of which his exterior relief and his
+internal satisfaction was composed, was, as we have just hinted, that he
+had remained a brisk spark, and that he passed energetically for such.
+This he called having "royal renown." This royal renown sometimes drew
+down upon him singular windfalls. One day, there was brought to him in
+a basket, as though it had been a basket of oysters, a stout, newly
+born boy, who was yelling like the deuce, and duly wrapped in
+swaddling-clothes, which a servant-maid, dismissed six months
+previously, attributed to him. M. Gillenormand had, at that time,
+fully completed his eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the
+establishment. And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to
+believe that? What audacity! What an abominable calumny! M. Gillenormand
+himself was not at all enraged. He gazed at the brat with the amiable
+smile of a good man who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an
+aside: "Well, what now? What's the matter? You are finely taken aback,
+and really, you are excessively ignorant. M. le Duc d'Angouleme, the
+bastard of his Majesty Charles IX., married a silly jade of fifteen
+when he was eighty-five; M. Virginal, Marquis d'Alluye, brother to
+the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had, at the age of
+eighty-three, by the maid of Madame la Presidente Jacquin, a son, a
+real child of love, who became a Chevalier of Malta and a counsellor of
+state; one of the great men of this century, the Abbe Tabaraud, is the
+son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the ordinary in
+these things. And then, the Bible! Upon that I declare that this little
+gentleman is none of mine. Let him be taken care of. It is not his
+fault." This manner of procedure was good-tempered. The woman, whose
+name was Magnon, sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a
+boy again. Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated. He sent the two brats
+back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month for their
+maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would not do so any
+more. He added: "I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well.
+I shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did. He had had
+a brother who was a priest, and who had been rector of the Academy of
+Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had died at seventy-nine.
+"I lost him young," said he. This brother, of whom but little memory
+remains, was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself
+bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them
+anything except bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering a means of
+going to hell by way of paradise. As for M. Gillenormand the elder, he
+never haggled over his alms-giving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was
+kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind
+would have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned him
+should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries. One day, having
+been cheated by a business man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross
+and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: "That was
+indecently done! I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has
+degenerated in this century, even the rascals. Morbleu! this is not the
+way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest, but
+badly robbed. Silva, sint consule dignae!" He had had two wives, as
+we have already mentioned; by the first he had had a daughter, who had
+remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter, who had died
+at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love, or chance,
+or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the
+Republic and of the Empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz and had
+been made colonel at Waterloo. "He is the disgrace of my family,"
+said the old bourgeois. He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a
+particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the
+back of one hand. He believed very little in God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING
+
+Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair,--which
+was gray rather than white,--and which was always dressed in "dog's
+ears." To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this.
+
+He had something of the eighteenth century about him; frivolous and
+great.
+
+In 1814 and during the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand,
+who was still young,--he was only seventy-four,--lived in the Faubourg
+Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired
+to the Marais when he quitted society, long after attaining the age of
+eighty.
+
+And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his habits. The
+principal one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his door
+absolutely closed during the day, and never to receive any one whatever
+except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock, and after that his door
+was open. That had been the fashion of his century, and he would not
+swerve from it. "The day is vulgar," said he, "and deserves only a
+closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when the
+zenith lights up its stars." And he barricaded himself against every
+one, even had it been the king himself. This was the antiquated elegance
+of his day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR
+
+We have just spoken of M. Gillenormand's two daughters. They had come
+into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very
+little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance,
+and had also been as little like sisters to each other as possible. The
+youngest had a charming soul, which turned towards all that belongs to
+the light, was occupied with flowers, with verses, with music, which
+fluttered away into glorious space, enthusiastic, ethereal, and was
+wedded from her very youth, in ideal, to a vague and heroic figure. The
+elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure some very wealthy
+purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million made man,
+or even a prefect; the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in the
+antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues
+of the town-hall, to be "Madame la Prefete,"--all this had created a
+whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her
+own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls. Both had wings, the
+one like an angel, the other like a goose.
+
+No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise
+becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her
+dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all.
+
+At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we are
+relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with one of
+the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible
+to see. A characteristic detail; outside of her immediate family, no one
+had ever known her first name. She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand,
+the elder.
+
+In the matter of cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given points
+to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness.
+She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man had beheld
+her garter.
+
+Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was
+never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She
+multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.
+The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in
+proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.
+
+Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of
+innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew,
+named Theodule, to embrace her without displeasure.
+
+In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under which we
+have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle
+Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a
+demi-vice.
+
+To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged
+to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals,
+mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the sacred
+heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar
+in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful,
+and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and
+through great rays of gilded wood.
+
+She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named
+Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom
+Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond
+the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of
+anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle
+Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a
+single spot of intelligence.
+
+Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather than
+lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had
+never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then, years wear
+away the angles, and the softening which comes with time had come to
+her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not
+herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor
+of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.
+
+She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter near
+him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister with him.
+These households comprised of an old man and an old spinster are not
+rare, and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on
+each other for support.
+
+There was also in this house, between this elderly spinster and this
+old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling and mute in the
+presence of M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand never addressed this child
+except in a severe voice, and sometimes, with uplifted cane: "Here, sir!
+rascal, scoundrel, come here!--Answer me, you scamp! Just let me see
+you, you good-for-nothing!" etc., etc. He idolized him.
+
+This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--AN ANCIENT SALON
+
+When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented
+many very good and very aristocratic salons. Although a bourgeois, M.
+Gillenormand was received in society. As he had a double measure of wit,
+in the first place, that which was born with him, and secondly, that
+which was attributed to him, he was even sought out and made much of. He
+never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief person there.
+There are people who will have influence at any price, and who will have
+other people busy themselves over them; when they cannot be oracles,
+they turn wags. M. Gillenormand was not of this nature; his domination
+in the Royalist salons which he frequented cost his self-respect
+nothing. He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened to him to hold his
+own against M. de Bonald, and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallee.
+
+About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in
+his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame la Baronne de T.,
+a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of
+France to Berlin under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his lifetime,
+had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died
+bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune,
+some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript
+volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had
+not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a
+meagre income which had survived no one knew how.
+
+Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed society," as she
+said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled
+twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely
+Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of
+horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution
+of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the
+wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of
+the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.
+
+The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called Nicolas, were
+received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most delicate and
+charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the
+following, addressed to "the federates":--
+
+ Refoncez dans vos culottes[20]
+ Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.
+ Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes
+ Ont arbore l' drapeau blanc?
+
+There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible,
+with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous, with
+quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a
+moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:--
+
+ Pour raffermir le trone ebranle sur sa base,[21]
+ Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.
+
+Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an abominably Jacobin
+chamber," and from this list they combined alliances of names, in such
+a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following: Damas.
+Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.--All this was done merrily. In that society,
+they parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires to give
+point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little Ca
+ira:--
+
+ Ah! ca ira ca ira ca ira!
+ Les Bonapartistes a la lanterne!
+
+Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, to-day this
+head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.
+
+In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took
+part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a Buonapartist." They
+designated the liberals as friends and brothers; this constituted the
+most deadly insult.
+
+Like certain church towers, Madame de T.'s salon had two cocks. One of
+them was M. Gillenormand, the other was Comte de Lamothe-Valois, of whom
+it was whispered about, with a sort of respect: "Do you know? That is
+the Lamothe of the affair of the necklace." These singular amnesties do
+occur in parties.
+
+Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored situations decay
+through too easy relations; one must beware whom one admits; in the same
+way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who are
+cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of despised
+persons. The ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above
+this law, as above every other. Marigny, the brother of the Pompadour,
+had his entry with M. le Prince de Soubise. In spite of? No, because. Du
+Barry, the god-father of the Vaubernier, was very welcome at the house
+of M. le Marechal de Richelieu. This society is Olympus. Mercury and
+the Prince de Guemenee are at home there. A thief is admitted there,
+provided he be a god.
+
+The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five years of
+age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and sententious
+air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat
+buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always crossed in long,
+flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the same color
+as his trousers.
+
+This M. de Lamothe was "held in consideration" in this salon on account
+of his "celebrity" and, strange to say, though true, because of his name
+of Valois.
+
+As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of absolutely first-rate
+quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering in
+any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which was imposing,
+dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion; and his great
+age added to it. One is not a century with impunity. The years finally
+produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.
+
+In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of the
+old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis
+XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the Count de
+Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat
+as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most
+delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved: "All kings who are
+not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings." One day, the
+following question was put and the following answer returned in his
+presence: "To what was the editor of the Courrier Francais condemned?"
+"To be suspended." "Sus is superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.[22]
+Remarks of this nature found a situation.
+
+At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons, he
+said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: "There goes his Excellency the
+Evil One."
+
+M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter, that tall
+mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty, and by a handsome
+little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with happy and trusting
+eyes, who never appeared in that salon without hearing voices murmur
+around him: "How handsome he is! What a pity! Poor child!" This child
+was the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago. He was called "poor
+child," because he had for a father "a brigand of the Loire."
+
+This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law, who has
+already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called "the disgrace of
+his family."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH
+
+Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at
+this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental
+bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron
+cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the
+parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and
+trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something yellow
+which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned
+by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large
+scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,
+prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,
+in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the
+bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
+charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they
+much larger: "these are gardens," and were they a little smaller: "these
+are bouquets." All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and
+on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes
+of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these enclosures
+and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He lived there alone and
+solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young nor
+old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who
+served him. The plot of earth which he called his garden was celebrated
+in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there.
+These flowers were his occupation.
+
+By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets of
+water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he had
+invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been
+forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange
+Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the
+cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He
+was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting, cutting,
+hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness,
+sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful
+for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a
+child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of
+a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was very
+plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him give
+way, and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed shy, he
+rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his
+pane and his cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the
+inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any chance comers, curious to
+see his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he opened his door with a
+smile. He was the "brigand of the Loire."
+
+Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,
+the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been
+struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name
+of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been
+a soldier in Saintonge's regiment. The revolution broke out. Saintonge's
+regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine; for the old regiments
+of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even after the fall
+of the monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in 1794. Pontmercy
+fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at Alzey, at
+Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed Houchard's
+rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the corps
+of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and only
+rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy's cannon had opened
+a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis. He was
+under Kleber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel, where
+a ball from a biscaien broke his arm. Then he passed to the frontier
+of Italy, and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col
+de Tende with Joubert. Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and
+Pontmercy sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the midst
+of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused Bonaparte to say:
+"Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier." He beheld his
+old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at the moment when, with uplifted
+sabre, he was shouting: "Forward!" Having been embarked with his
+company in the exigencies of the campaign, on board a pinnace which was
+proceeding from Genoa to some obscure port on the coast, he fell into
+a wasps'-nest of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese commander
+wanted to throw his cannon into the sea, to hide the soldiers between
+decks, and to slip along in the dark as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had
+the colors hoisted to the peak, and sailed proudly past under the guns
+of the British frigates. Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having
+increased, he attacked with his pinnace, and captured a large English
+transport which was carrying troops to Sicily, and which was so loaded
+down with men and horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the
+sea. In 1805 he was in that Malher division which took Gunzberg from the
+Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a
+storm of bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the
+9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable
+march in echelons effected under the enemy's fire. When the cavalry of
+the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the line,
+Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the
+Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,
+Melas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession.
+He formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which Mortier
+commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the
+55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders. At Eylau
+he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two hours, the heroic
+Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author of this book, sustained
+alone with his company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile
+army. Pontmercy was one of the three who emerged alive from that
+cemetery. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Beresina,
+then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of
+Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the
+Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon. At
+Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword,
+and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed up on
+this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left
+arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just
+exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was called
+under the old regime, the double hand, that is to say, an equal aptitude
+for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or a squadron or
+a battalion as an officer. It is from this aptitude, perfected by a
+military education, which certain special branches of the service arise,
+the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalry-men and infantry at one
+and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the Island of Elba. At
+Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers, in Dubois' brigade.
+It was he who captured the standard of the Lunenburg battalion. He came
+and cast the flag at the Emperor's feet. He was covered with blood.
+While tearing down the banner he had received a sword-cut across his
+face. The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him: "You are a colonel,
+you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion of Honor!" Pontmercy
+replied: "Sire, I thank you for my widow." An hour later, he fell in the
+ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same
+"brigand of the Loire."
+
+We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo,
+Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow road of Ohain, as it
+will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army, and had dragged
+himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the
+Loire.
+
+The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent him into
+residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon. King Louis
+XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during the Hundred
+Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize his quality as an
+officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade of colonel, nor his title
+of baron. He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself
+"Colonel Baron Pontmercy." He had only an old blue coat, and he never
+went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the Legion
+of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had him warned that the authorities
+would prosecute him for "illegal" wearing of this decoration. When this
+notice was conveyed to him through an officious intermediary, Pontmercy
+retorted with a bitter smile: "I do not know whether I no longer
+understand French, or whether you no longer speak it; but the fact is
+that I do not understand." Then he went out for eight successive days
+with his rosette. They dared not interfere with him. Two or three times
+the Minister of War and the general in command of the department wrote
+to him with the following address: "A Monsieur le Commandant Pontmercy."
+He sent back the letters with the seals unbroken. At the same moment,
+Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating in the same fashion the missives
+of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed to General Bonaparte. Pontmercy had ended,
+may we be pardoned the expression, by having in his mouth the same
+saliva as his Emperor.
+
+In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused
+to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's spirit.
+
+One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets of
+Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: "Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted
+to wear my scar?"
+
+He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron. He had
+hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon. He lived there
+alone, we have just seen how. Under the Empire, between two wars, he
+had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois,
+thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh,
+saying: "The greatest families are forced into it." In 1815, Madame
+Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way, lofty in
+sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a
+child. This child had been the colonel's joy in his solitude; but the
+grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring that if
+the child were not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had
+yielded in the little one's interest, and had transferred his love to
+flowers.
+
+Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief
+nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which
+he was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed his
+time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.
+
+M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The colonel
+was "a bandit" to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel,
+except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to "his Baronship."
+It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt to see
+his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the latter handed
+over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy
+was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to bring up the
+child in their own way. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these
+conditions, but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right
+and sacrificing no one but himself.
+
+The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much; but the
+inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was considerable.
+This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very rich on the maternal
+side, and her sister's son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name was
+Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one opened
+his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society into which his
+grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually
+enlightened the little boy's mind; he had finally understood something
+of the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which
+were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration and
+slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father only with
+shame and with a pain at his heart.
+
+While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped away every
+two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like a criminal breaking
+his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when
+Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There, trembling lest the aunt
+should turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not daring to
+breathe, he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was afraid of that
+old spinster.
+
+From this had arisen his connection with the cure of Vernon, M. l'Abbe
+Mabeuf.
+
+That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice, who had
+often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar on his cheek,
+and the large tears in his eyes. That man, who had so manly an air, yet
+who was weeping like a woman, had struck the warden. That face had clung
+to his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he had
+encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had recognized the man
+of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the circumstance to the cure,
+and both had paid the colonel a visit, on some pretext or other. This
+visit led to others. The colonel, who had been extremely reserved at
+first, ended by opening his heart, and the cure and the warden finally
+came to know the whole history, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his
+happiness to his child's future. This caused the cure to regard him with
+veneration and tenderness, and the colonel, on his side, became fond
+of the cure. And moreover, when both are sincere and good, no men so
+penetrate each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an old
+priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same. The one has
+devoted his life to his country here below, the other to his country on
+high; that is the only difference.
+
+Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's day, Marius
+wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated by his aunt, and
+which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula; this was
+all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father answered them with
+very tender letters which the grandfather thrust into his pocket unread.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--REQUIESCANT
+
+Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It
+was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse of life. This
+opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth, more night than day, came
+to him through this skylight. This child, who had been all joy and light
+on entering this strange world, soon became melancholy, and, what is
+still more contrary to his age, grave. Surrounded by all those singular
+and imposing personages, he gazed about him with serious amazement.
+Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him. There were
+in Madame de T.'s salon some very noble ladies named Mathan, Noe,
+Levis,--which was pronounced Levi,--Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. These
+antique visages and these Biblical names mingled in the child's mind
+with the Old Testament which he was learning by heart, and when they
+were all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted
+by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their gray or
+white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious colors
+could not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals, words which
+were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared at them with
+frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not women, but
+patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.
+
+With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of
+this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****, private
+secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who published,
+under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince de
+Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and a pretty and
+witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with gold
+torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****d'E******, the man
+in all France who best understood "proportioned politeness," the Comte
+d'Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de
+Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's
+cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than old, was wont
+to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in the
+galleys as refractory and chained with an octogenarian, the Bishop
+of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest, while he was so in the
+capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at
+night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons
+who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their backs
+these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of
+blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at
+night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.'s salon, and by
+dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies of the
+undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard,
+M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the right, M.
+Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his short breeches
+and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon on his way to M. de
+Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and
+unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl
+on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages a philosopher
+avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there was the Abbe Halma, the
+same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator on la Foudre, said: "Bah! Who
+is there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?" The Abbe
+Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbe Frayssinous, who was not, as
+yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer, and who wore an old
+cassock whose buttons were missing, and the Abbe Keravenant, Cure of
+Saint-Germain-des-Pres; also the Pope's Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi,
+Archbishop of Nisibi, later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long,
+pensive nose, and another Monsignor, entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri,
+domestic prelate, one of the seven participant prothonotaries of the
+Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian basilica, Advocate of the
+saints, Postulatore dei Santi, which refers to matters of canonization,
+and signifies very nearly: Master of Requests of the section of
+Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl******
+T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was destined to have,
+a few years later, the honor of signing in the Conservateur articles
+side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl****** T******* was Archbishop
+of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to his nephew, the Marquis
+de T*******, who was Minister of Marine and War. The Cardinal of
+Cl****** T******* was a merry little man, who displayed his red
+stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred of
+the Encyclopaedia, and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who,
+at that epoch, passed through the Rue M***** on summer evenings, where
+the hotel de Cl****** T******* then stood, halted to listen to the shock
+of the balls and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to his
+conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste: "Mark,
+Abbe, I make a cannon." The Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had been
+brought to Madame de T.'s by his most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure,
+former Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty. M. de Roquelaure was
+notable for his lofty figure and his assiduity at the Academy; through
+the glass door of the neighboring hall of the library where the French
+Academy then held its meetings, the curious could, on every Tuesday,
+contemplate the Ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing erect, freshly
+powdered, in violet hose, with his back turned to the door, apparently
+for the purpose of allowing a better view of his little collar. All
+these ecclesiastics, though for the most part as much courtiers as
+churchmen, added to the gravity of the T. salon, whose seigniorial
+aspect was accentuated by five peers of France, the Marquis de Vib****,
+the Marquis de Tal***, the Marquis de Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***,
+and the Duc de Val********. This Duc de Val********, although Prince de
+Mon***, that is to say a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of
+France and its peerage, that he viewed everything through their medium.
+It was he who said: "The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome;
+the lords are the peers of France of England." Moreover, as it is
+indispensable that the Revolution should be everywhere in this century,
+this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. M.
+Gillenormand reigned there.
+
+There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.
+There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.
+There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he
+entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere Duchene. Some of
+the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance. Comte
+Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.
+
+The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
+The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists of
+to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.
+
+At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite and
+haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners there
+admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old
+regime itself, buried but still alive. Some of these habits, especially
+in the matter of language, seem eccentric. Persons but superficially
+acquainted with them would have taken for provincial that which was only
+antique. A woman was called Madame la Generale. Madame la Colonelle was
+not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no
+doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this
+appellation to her title of Princesse. The Marquise de Crequy was also
+called Madame la Colonelle.
+
+It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the
+refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King, in the third
+person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation of Your Majesty
+having been "soiled by the usurper."
+
+Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,
+which released them from the necessity of understanding it. They abetted
+each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that modicum
+of light which they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on
+Epimenides. The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course
+of things. They declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz
+had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace
+of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were,
+by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.
+
+All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted
+to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a papyrus.
+There were some young people, but they were rather dead. The liveries in
+the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were
+served by domestics of the same stamp.
+
+They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately
+resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of
+Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,--that was the
+point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable
+groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society. The
+masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.
+
+A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but a solitary
+maid, continued to say: "My people."
+
+What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were ultra.
+
+To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have
+disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us
+explain it.
+
+To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of
+the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat
+the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is
+to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by
+heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry;
+it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the
+Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently
+royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented
+with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of
+whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming
+their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.
+
+The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the
+Restoration.
+
+Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in
+1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele,
+the practical man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary
+moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and
+sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at
+the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still
+filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed
+in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,
+comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing
+resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France
+with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good old owls
+of marquises by the streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the
+"former" subjects of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen
+who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold
+their country once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the
+nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to
+say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who had
+lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne
+disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just
+remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and
+nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and
+was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. People no
+longer had the feeling for what was grand. There was some one who called
+Bonaparte Scapin. This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we
+repeat, exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,
+and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange to us
+as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a matter of
+fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared beneath two
+Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover all that it
+is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create
+frightful gulfs!
+
+Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times
+when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.
+
+These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed
+in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M.
+Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais. Napoleon
+was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on the introduction into
+history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the King's
+armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.
+
+These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
+doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade. Their way
+was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the
+ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had
+wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated
+with arrogance; they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully
+too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned
+coats. The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to
+create aged youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed of
+engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.
+They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
+liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:
+"Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has
+brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,
+brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,
+the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the
+nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,
+glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this
+mistake which it makes with regard to us,--have we not sometimes been
+guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to
+be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of
+liberalism. What an error! And what blindness! Revolutionary France is
+wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards its
+mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September, the
+nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire was
+treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle, we are
+unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always have something
+to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis
+XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M. de
+Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that
+he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo.
+The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our patrimony. To
+what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the
+past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history?
+Why not love the whole of France?"
+
+It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism, which
+was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.
+
+The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation
+characterized the second. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves
+here to this sketch.
+
+In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has encountered
+in his path this curious moment of contemporary history; he has been
+forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace once more some of
+the singular features of this society which is unknown to-day. But he
+does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive idea. Souvenirs both
+respectful and affectionate, for they touch his mother, attach him to
+this past. Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur
+of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor hate
+it. It was the France of former days.
+
+Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he
+emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided
+him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This
+young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.
+
+Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the law
+school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did not love his
+grandfather much, as the latter's gayety and cynicism repelled him, and
+his feelings towards his father were gloomy.
+
+He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,
+religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--END OF THE BRIGAND
+
+The conclusion of Marius' classical studies coincided with M.
+Gillenormand's departure from society. The old man bade farewell to
+the Faubourg Saint-Germain and to Madame de T.'s salon, and established
+himself in the Mardis, in his house of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
+There he had for servants, in addition to the porter, that chambermaid,
+Nicolette, who had succeeded to Magnon, and that short-breathed and
+pursy Basque, who have been mentioned above.
+
+In 1827, Marius had just attained his seventeenth year. One evening, on
+his return home, he saw his grandfather holding a letter in his hand.
+
+"Marius," said M. Gillenormand, "you will set out for Vernon to-morrow."
+
+"Why?" said Marius.
+
+"To see your father."
+
+Marius was seized with a trembling fit. He had thought of everything
+except this--that he should one day be called upon to see his father.
+Nothing could be more unexpected, more surprising, and, let us admit
+it, more disagreeable to him. It was forcing estrangement into
+reconciliation. It was not an affliction, but it was an unpleasant duty.
+
+Marius, in addition to his motives of political antipathy, was convinced
+that his father, the slasher, as M. Gillenormand called him on his
+amiable days, did not love him; this was evident, since he had abandoned
+him to others. Feeling that he was not beloved, he did not love.
+"Nothing is more simple," he said to himself.
+
+He was so astounded that he did not question M. Gillenormand. The
+grandfather resumed:--
+
+"It appears that he is ill. He demands your presence."
+
+And after a pause, he added:--
+
+"Set out to-morrow morning. I think there is a coach which leaves the
+Cour des Fontaines at six o'clock, and which arrives in the evening.
+Take it. He says that here is haste."
+
+Then he crushed the letter in his hand and thrust it into his pocket.
+Marius might have set out that very evening and have been with his
+father on the following morning. A diligence from the Rue du Bouloi
+took the trip to Rouen by night at that date, and passed through Vernon.
+Neither Marius nor M. Gillenormand thought of making inquiries about it.
+
+The next day, at twilight, Marius reached Vernon. People were just
+beginning to light their candles. He asked the first person whom he
+met for "M. Pontmercy's house." For in his own mind, he agreed with the
+Restoration, and like it, did not recognize his father's claim to the
+title of either colonel or baron.
+
+The house was pointed out to him. He rang; a woman with a little lamp in
+her hand opened the door.
+
+"M. Pontmercy?" said Marius.
+
+The woman remained motionless.
+
+"Is this his house?" demanded Marius.
+
+The woman nodded affirmatively.
+
+"Can I speak with him?"
+
+The woman shook her head.
+
+"But I am his son!" persisted Marius. "He is expecting me."
+
+"He no longer expects you," said the woman.
+
+Then he perceived that she was weeping.
+
+She pointed to the door of a room on the ground-floor; he entered.
+
+In that room, which was lighted by a tallow candle standing on the
+chimney-piece, there were three men, one standing erect, another
+kneeling, and one lying at full length, on the floor in his shirt. The
+one on the floor was the colonel.
+
+The other two were the doctor, and the priest, who was engaged in
+prayer.
+
+The colonel had been attacked by brain fever three days previously. As
+he had a foreboding of evil at the very beginning of his illness, he
+had written to M. Gillenormand to demand his son. The malady had grown
+worse. On the very evening of Marius' arrival at Vernon, the colonel had
+had an attack of delirium; he had risen from his bed, in spite of the
+servant's efforts to prevent him, crying: "My son is not coming! I shall
+go to meet him!" Then he ran out of his room and fell prostrate on the
+floor of the antechamber. He had just expired.
+
+The doctor had been summoned, and the cure. The doctor had arrived too
+late. The son had also arrived too late.
+
+By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished on
+the pale and prostrate colonel's cheek, where it had trickled from his
+dead eye. The eye was extinguished, but the tear was not yet dry. That
+tear was his son's delay.
+
+Marius gazed upon that man whom he beheld for the first time, on that
+venerable and manly face, on those open eyes which saw not, on those
+white locks, those robust limbs, on which, here and there, brown
+lines, marking sword-thrusts, and a sort of red stars, which indicated
+bullet-holes, were visible. He contemplated that gigantic sear which
+stamped heroism on that countenance upon which God had imprinted
+goodness. He reflected that this man was his father, and that this man
+was dead, and a chill ran over him.
+
+The sorrow which he felt was the sorrow which he would have felt in the
+presence of any other man whom he had chanced to behold stretched out in
+death.
+
+Anguish, poignant anguish, was in that chamber. The servant-woman was
+lamenting in a corner, the cure was praying, and his sobs were audible,
+the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself was weeping.
+
+The doctor, the priest, and the woman gazed at Marius in the midst of
+their affliction without uttering a word; he was the stranger there.
+Marius, who was far too little affected, felt ashamed and embarrassed at
+his own attitude; he held his hat in his hand; and he dropped it on the
+floor, in order to produce the impression that grief had deprived him of
+the strength to hold it.
+
+At the same time, he experienced remorse, and he despised himself for
+behaving in this manner. But was it his fault? He did not love his
+father? Why should he!
+
+The colonel had left nothing. The sale of big furniture barely paid the
+expenses of his burial.
+
+The servant found a scrap of paper, which she handed to Marius. It
+contained the following, in the colonel's handwriting:--
+
+"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battle-field of
+Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
+purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
+be worthy of it is a matter of course." Below, the colonel had added:
+"At that same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. The man's
+name was Thenardier. I think that he has recently been keeping a
+little inn, in a village in the neighborhood of Paris, at Chelles or
+Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do all the good he can to
+Thenardier."
+
+Marius took this paper and preserved it, not out of duty to his father,
+but because of that vague respect for death which is always imperious in
+the heart of man.
+
+Nothing remained of the colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword and
+uniform sold to an old-clothes dealer. The neighbors devastated the
+garden and pillaged the rare flowers. The other plants turned to nettles
+and weeds, and died.
+
+Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the interment he
+returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies, with
+no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived. In two
+days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.
+
+Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE UTILITY OF GOING TO MASS, IN ORDER TO BECOME A
+REVOLUTIONIST
+
+Marius had preserved the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday,
+when he went to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, at that same chapel of the
+Virgin whither his aunt had led him when a small lad, he placed himself
+behind a pillar, being more absent-minded and thoughtful than usual on
+that occasion, and knelt down, without paying any special heed, upon a
+chair of Utrecht velvet, on the back of which was inscribed this name:
+Monsieur Mabeuf, warden. Mass had hardly begun when an old man presented
+himself and said to Marius:--
+
+"This is my place, sir."
+
+Marius stepped aside promptly, and the old man took possession of his
+chair.
+
+The mass concluded, Marius still stood thoughtfully a few paces distant;
+the old man approached him again and said:--
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you a while ago, and for
+again disturbing you at this moment; you must have thought me intrusive,
+and I will explain myself."
+
+"There is no need of that, Sir," said Marius.
+
+"Yes!" went on the old man, "I do not wish you to have a bad opinion of
+me. You see, I am attached to this place. It seems to me that the mass
+is better from here. Why? I will tell you. It is from this place, that
+I have watched a poor, brave father come regularly, every two or three
+months, for the last ten years, since he had no other opportunity and
+no other way of seeing his child, because he was prevented by family
+arrangements. He came at the hour when he knew that his son would be
+brought to mass. The little one never suspected that his father was
+there. Perhaps he did not even know that he had a father, poor innocent!
+The father kept behind a pillar, so that he might not be seen. He gazed
+at his child and he wept. He adored that little fellow, poor man! I
+could see that. This spot has become sanctified in my sight, and I have
+contracted a habit of coming hither to listen to the mass. I prefer it
+to the stall to which I have a right, in my capacity of warden. I knew
+that unhappy gentleman a little, too. He had a father-in-law, a wealthy
+aunt, relatives, I don't know exactly what all, who threatened to
+disinherit the child if he, the father, saw him. He sacrificed himself
+in order that his son might be rich and happy some day. He was separated
+from him because of political opinions. Certainly, I approve of
+political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.
+Mon Dieu! a man is not a monster because he was at Waterloo; a father
+is not separated from his child for such a reason as that. He was one of
+Bonaparte's colonels. He is dead, I believe. He lived at Vernon, where I
+have a brother who is a cure, and his name was something like Pontmarie
+or Montpercy. He had a fine sword-cut, on my honor."
+
+"Pontmercy," suggested Marius, turning pale.
+
+"Precisely, Pontmercy. Did you know him?"
+
+"Sir," said Marius, "he was my father."
+
+The old warden clasped his hands and exclaimed:--
+
+"Ah! you are the child! Yes, that's true, he must be a man by this
+time. Well! poor child, you may say that you had a father who loved you
+dearly!"
+
+Marius offered his arm to the old man and conducted him to his lodgings.
+
+On the following day, he said to M. Gillenormand:--
+
+"I have arranged a hunting-party with some friends. Will you permit me
+to be absent for three days?"
+
+"Four!" replied his grandfather. "Go and amuse yourself."
+
+And he said to his daughter in a low tone, and with a wink, "Some love
+affair!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN
+
+Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.
+
+Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris, went
+straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the files of the
+Moniteur.
+
+He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the Republic and
+the Empire, the Memorial de Sainte-Helene, all the memoirs, all the
+newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured everything.
+The first time that he came across his father's name in the bulletins of
+the grand army, he had a fever for a week. He went to see the generals
+under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others, Comte H.
+Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again, told him about the life
+at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his flowers, his solitude. Marius came
+to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime man, that species
+of lion-lamb who had been his father.
+
+In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed all
+his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands at
+all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him, and he
+was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. "Bah! bah! He is just
+of the age for the girls!" Sometimes the old man added: "The deuce!
+I thought it was only an affair of gallantry, It seems that it is an
+affair of passion!"
+
+It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring his
+father.
+
+At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The
+phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the
+history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful to
+follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.
+
+That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.
+
+The first effect was to dazzle him.
+
+Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only
+monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire,
+a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it, and where he had
+expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a sort
+of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling,
+Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins,
+Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not know where he stood. He
+recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights. Little by little, when his
+astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this radiance, he
+contemplated these deeds without dizziness, he examined these personages
+without terror; the Revolution and the Empire presented themselves
+luminously, in perspective, before his mind's eye; he beheld each of
+these groups of events and of men summed up in two tremendous facts: the
+Republic in the sovereignty of civil right restored to the masses,
+the Empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe; he
+beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the Revolution, and
+the grand figure of France spring forth from the Empire. He asserted
+in his conscience, that all this had been good. What his dazzled state
+neglected in this, his first far too synthetic estimation, we do not
+think it necessary to point out here. It is the state of a mind on the
+march that we are recording. Progress is not accomplished in one stage.
+That stated, once for all, in connection with what precedes as well as
+with what is to follow, we continue.
+
+He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his
+country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not known
+either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night had obscured
+his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the other
+he adored.
+
+He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair that
+all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb. Oh! if his
+father had still been in existence, if he had still had him, if God, in
+his compassion and his goodness, had permitted his father to be still
+among the living, how he would have run, how he would have precipitated
+himself, how he would have cried to his father: "Father! Here I am! It
+is I! I have the same heart as thou! I am thy son!" How he would have
+embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his scar,
+pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why had his
+father died so early, before his time, before the justice, the love of
+his son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his heart, which
+said to him every moment: "Alas!" At the same time, he became more truly
+serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought and his faith. At
+each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his reason. An inward
+growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was conscious of a sort
+of natural enlargement, which gave him two things that were new to
+him--his father and his country.
+
+As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself that
+which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred; henceforth
+he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human sense of the
+great things which he had been taught to detest, and of the great men
+whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected on his former
+opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which, nevertheless,
+seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant, yet he smiled.
+
+From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed to the
+rehabilitation of Napoleon.
+
+But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.
+
+From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of
+1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its
+interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated
+him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very cleverly turned to
+sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of
+mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order
+to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately
+pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814
+made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from
+that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is
+terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in
+speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with
+laughter, provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never
+entertained--about that man, as he was called--any other ideas in his
+mind. They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.
+There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.
+
+On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and
+materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes
+of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse of something immense,
+and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment, on
+the score of Bonaparte as about all the rest; each day he saw more
+distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost
+regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication and as though
+attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then
+the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps
+of enthusiasm.
+
+One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle
+was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on his table close
+to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and
+mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night! One hears dull
+sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter, which
+is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a firebrand,
+the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.
+
+He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes
+penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his
+father's name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great
+Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising
+within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close
+to him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into
+a singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets,
+the measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the
+cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed
+upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless
+depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they
+beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted
+within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,
+without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was
+obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
+gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the
+eternal immensity, and exclaimed: "Long live the Emperor!"
+
+From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--the
+usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his own
+sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner of
+Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave place
+in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an
+inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar. The Emperor had
+been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for
+whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more to Marius. He was
+the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman
+group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,
+of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry
+IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety,
+having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man,
+that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots,
+powerful in his crime.
+
+He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: "The
+great nation!" He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of
+France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world
+by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre
+which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the
+future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and
+summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus
+Christ is the man-God.
+
+It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his
+conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion
+and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the downward
+slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag. Fanaticism
+for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his mind his
+enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with genius,
+and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he was
+installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand that
+which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many respects, he
+had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted everything. There
+is a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth. He had a
+violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump. In the new
+path which he had entered on, in judging the mistakes of the old regime,
+as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating
+circumstances.
+
+At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
+beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His
+orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had
+turned squarely round.
+
+All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family
+obtaining an inkling of the case.
+
+When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old Bourbon
+and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and
+the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist, profoundly
+democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des
+Orfevres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Le Baron Marius
+Pontmercy.
+
+This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had
+taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his
+father.
+
+Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any
+porter, he put them in his pocket.
+
+By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his
+father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which the
+colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his
+grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's temper did
+not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances
+of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Geronte
+shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. So long as the same
+political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both,
+Marius had met M. Gillenormand there as on a bridge. When the bridge
+fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over and above all, Marius
+experienced unutterable impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it
+was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly
+from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child
+of the father.
+
+By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion
+for his grandfather.
+
+Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as we have
+already said. Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and rare
+in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle and
+alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a pretext.
+His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis: "In love!
+I know all about it."
+
+From time to time Marius absented himself.
+
+"Where is it that he goes off like this?" said his aunt.
+
+On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to
+Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father had
+left him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the inn-keeper
+Thenardier. Thenardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew
+what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four days on
+this quest.
+
+"He is getting decidedly wild," said his grandfather.
+
+They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,
+under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--SOME PETTICOAT
+
+We have mentioned a lancer.
+
+He was a great-grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand, on the paternal side,
+who led a garrison life, outside the family and far from the domestic
+hearth. Lieutenant Theodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the conditions
+required to make what is called a fine officer. He had "a lady's waist,"
+a victorious manner of trailing his sword and of twirling his mustache
+in a hook. He visited Paris very rarely, and so rarely that Marius had
+never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name. We think
+we have said that Theodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand, who
+preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits one
+to attribute to them all possible perfections.
+
+One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her
+apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing.
+Marius had just asked his grandfather's permission to take a little
+trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening. "Go!" had been
+his grandfather's reply, and M. Gillenormand had added in an aside, as
+he raised his eyebrows to the top of his forehead: "Here he is passing
+the night out again." Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to
+her chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this
+exclamation: "This is too much!"--and this interrogation: "But where is
+it that he goes?" She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less
+illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would
+not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair. Tasting a
+mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls
+do not detest this. There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret
+compartments of bigotry.
+
+So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.
+
+In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her a little beyond
+her wont, she took refuge in her talents, and set about scalloping,
+with one layer of cotton after another, one of those embroideries of the
+Empire and the Restoration, in which there are numerous cart-wheels.
+The work was clumsy, the worker cross. She had been seated at this for
+several hours when the door opened. Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised
+her nose. Lieutenant Theodule stood before her, making the regulation
+salute. She uttered a cry of delight. One may be old, one may be a
+prude, one may be pious, one may be an aunt, but it is always agreeable
+to see a lancer enter one's chamber.
+
+"You here, Theodule!" she exclaimed.
+
+"On my way through town, aunt."
+
+"Embrace me."
+
+"Here goes!" said Theodule.
+
+And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her writing-desk and opened
+it.
+
+"You will remain with us a week at least?"
+
+"I leave this very evening, aunt."
+
+"It is not possible!"
+
+"Mathematically!"
+
+"Remain, my little Theodule, I beseech you."
+
+"My heart says 'yes,' but my orders say 'no.' The matter is simple.
+They are changing our garrison; we have been at Melun, we are being
+transferred to Gaillon. It is necessary to pass through Paris in order
+to get from the old post to the new one. I said: 'I am going to see my
+aunt.'"
+
+"Here is something for your trouble."
+
+And she put ten louis into his hand.
+
+"For my pleasure, you mean to say, my dear aunt."
+
+Theodule kissed her again, and she experienced the joy of having some of
+the skin scratched from her neck by the braidings on his uniform.
+
+"Are you making the journey on horseback, with your regiment?" she asked
+him.
+
+"No, aunt. I wanted to see you. I have special permission. My servant is
+taking my horse; I am travelling by diligence. And, by the way, I want
+to ask you something."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Is my cousin Marius Pontmercy travelling so, too?"
+
+"How do you know that?" said his aunt, suddenly pricked to the quick
+with a lively curiosity.
+
+"On my arrival, I went to the diligence to engage my seat in the coupe."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"A traveller had already come to engage a seat in the imperial. I saw
+his name on the card."
+
+"What name?"
+
+"Marius Pontmercy."
+
+"The wicked fellow!" exclaimed his aunt. "Ah! your cousin is not a
+steady lad like yourself. To think that he is to pass the night in a
+diligence!"
+
+"Just as I am going to do."
+
+"But you--it is your duty; in his case, it is wildness."
+
+"Bosh!" said Theodule.
+
+Here an event occurred to Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,--an idea
+struck her. If she had been a man, she would have slapped her brow. She
+apostrophized Theodule:--
+
+"Are you aware whether your cousin knows you?"
+
+"No. I have seen him; but he has never deigned to notice me."
+
+"So you are going to travel together?"
+
+"He in the imperial, I in the coupe."
+
+"Where does this diligence run?"
+
+"To Andelys."
+
+"Then that is where Marius is going?"
+
+"Unless, like myself, he should stop on the way. I get down at Vernon,
+in order to take the branch coach for Gaillon. I know nothing of Marius'
+plan of travel."
+
+"Marius! what an ugly name! what possessed them to name him Marius?
+While you, at least, are called Theodule."
+
+"I would rather be called Alfred," said the officer.
+
+"Listen, Theodule."
+
+"I am listening, aunt."
+
+"Pay attention."
+
+"I am paying attention."
+
+"You understand?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, Marius absents himself!"
+
+"Eh! eh!"
+
+"He travels."
+
+"Ah! ah!"
+
+"He spends the night out."
+
+"Oh! oh!"
+
+"We should like to know what there is behind all this."
+
+Theodule replied with the composure of a man of bronze:--
+
+"Some petticoat or other."
+
+And with that inward laugh which denotes certainty, he added:--
+
+"A lass."
+
+"That is evident," exclaimed his aunt, who thought she heard M.
+Gillenormand speaking, and who felt her conviction become irresistible
+at that word fillette, accentuated in almost the very same fashion by
+the granduncle and the grandnephew. She resumed:--
+
+"Do us a favor. Follow Marius a little. He does not know you, it will be
+easy. Since a lass there is, try to get a sight of her. You must write
+us the tale. It will amuse his grandfather."
+
+Theodule had no excessive taste for this sort of spying; but he was much
+touched by the ten louis, and he thought he saw a chance for a possible
+sequel. He accepted the commission and said: "As you please, aunt."
+
+And he added in an aside, to himself: "Here I am a duenna."
+
+Mademoiselle Gillenormand embraced him.
+
+"You are not the man to play such pranks, Theodule. You obey discipline,
+you are the slave of orders, you are a man of scruples and duty, and you
+would not quit your family to go and see a creature."
+
+The lancer made the pleased grimace of Cartouche when praised for his
+probity.
+
+Marius, on the evening following this dialogue, mounted the diligence
+without suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher, the
+first thing he did was to fall asleep. His slumber was complete and
+conscientious. Argus snored all night long.
+
+At daybreak, the conductor of the diligence shouted: "Vernon! relay of
+Vernon! Travellers for Vernon!" And Lieutenant Theodule woke.
+
+"Good," he growled, still half asleep, "this is where I get out."
+
+Then, as his memory cleared by degrees, the effect of waking, he
+recalled his aunt, the ten louis, and the account which he had
+undertaken to render of the deeds and proceedings of Marius. This set
+him to laughing.
+
+"Perhaps he is no longer in the coach," he thought, as he rebuttoned the
+waistcoat of his undress uniform. "He may have stopped at Poissy; he may
+have stopped at Triel; if he did not get out at Meulan, he may have got
+out at Mantes, unless he got out at Rolleboise, or if he did not go on
+as far as Pacy, with the choice of turning to the left at Evreus, or to
+the right at Laroche-Guyon. Run after him, aunty. What the devil am I to
+write to that good old soul?"
+
+At that moment a pair of black trousers descending from the imperial,
+made its appearance at the window of the coupe.
+
+"Can that be Marius?" said the lieutenant.
+
+It was Marius.
+
+A little peasant girl, all entangled with the horses and the postilions
+at the end of the vehicle, was offering flowers to the travellers. "Give
+your ladies flowers!" she cried.
+
+Marius approached her and purchased the finest flowers in her flat
+basket.
+
+"Come now," said Theodule, leaping down from the coupe, "this piques my
+curiosity. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers to? She
+must be a splendidly handsome woman for so fine a bouquet. I want to see
+her."
+
+And no longer in pursuance of orders, but from personal curiosity, like
+dogs who hunt on their own account, he set out to follow Marius.
+
+Marius paid no attention to Theodule. Elegant women descended from the
+diligence; he did not glance at them. He seemed to see nothing around
+him.
+
+"He is pretty deeply in love!" thought Theodule.
+
+Marius directed his steps towards the church.
+
+"Capital," said Theodule to himself. "Rendezvous seasoned with a bit of
+mass are the best sort. Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle which passes
+over the good God's head."
+
+On arriving at the church, Marius did not enter it, but skirted the
+apse. He disappeared behind one of the angles of the apse.
+
+"The rendezvous is appointed outside," said Theodule. "Let's have a look
+at the lass."
+
+And he advanced on the tips of his boots towards the corner which Marius
+had turned.
+
+On arriving there, he halted in amazement.
+
+Marius, with his forehead clasped in his hands, was kneeling upon the
+grass on a grave. He had strewn his bouquet there. At the extremity of
+the grave, on a little swelling which marked the head, there stood
+a cross of black wood with this name in white letters: COLONEL BARON
+PONTMERCY. Marius' sobs were audible.
+
+The "lass" was a grave.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE
+
+It was hither that Marius had come on the first occasion of his
+absenting himself from Paris. It was hither that he had come every time
+that M. Gillenormand had said: "He is sleeping out."
+
+Lieutenant Theodule was absolutely put out of countenance by this
+unexpected encounter with a sepulchre; he experienced a singular and
+disagreeable sensation which he was incapable of analyzing, and which
+was composed of respect for the tomb, mingled with respect for the
+colonel. He retreated, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and
+there was discipline in this retreat. Death appeared to him with large
+epaulets, and he almost made the military salute to him. Not knowing
+what to write to his aunt, he decided not to write at all; and it is
+probable that nothing would have resulted from the discovery made
+by Theodule as to the love affairs of Marius, if, by one of those
+mysterious arrangements which are so frequent in chance, the scene at
+Vernon had not had an almost immediate counter-shock at Paris.
+
+Marius returned from Vernon on the third day, in the middle of the
+morning, descended at his grandfather's door, and, wearied by the two
+nights spent in the diligence, and feeling the need of repairing his
+loss of sleep by an hour at the swimming-school, he mounted rapidly to
+his chamber, took merely time enough to throw off his travelling-coat,
+and the black ribbon which he wore round his neck, and went off to the
+bath.
+
+M. Gillenormand, who had risen betimes like all old men in good health,
+had heard his entrance, and had made haste to climb, as quickly as his
+old legs permitted, the stairs to the upper story where Marius lived,
+in order to embrace him, and to question him while so doing, and to find
+out where he had been.
+
+But the youth had taken less time to descend than the old man had to
+ascend, and when Father Gillenormand entered the attic, Marius was no
+longer there.
+
+The bed had not been disturbed, and on the bed lay, outspread, but not
+defiantly the great-coat and the black ribbon.
+
+"I like this better," said M. Gillenormand.
+
+And a moment later, he made his entrance into the salon, where
+Mademoiselle Gillenormand was already seated, busily embroidering her
+cart-wheels.
+
+The entrance was a triumphant one.
+
+M. Gillenormand held in one hand the great-coat, and in the other the
+neck-ribbon, and exclaimed:--
+
+"Victory! We are about to penetrate the mystery! We are going to
+learn the most minute details; we are going to lay our finger on the
+debaucheries of our sly friend! Here we have the romance itself. I have
+the portrait!"
+
+In fact, a case of black shagreen, resembling a medallion portrait, was
+suspended from the ribbon.
+
+The old man took this case and gazed at it for some time without opening
+it, with that air of enjoyment, rapture, and wrath, with which a poor
+hungry fellow beholds an admirable dinner which is not for him, pass
+under his very nose.
+
+"For this evidently is a portrait. I know all about such things. That is
+worn tenderly on the heart. How stupid they are! Some abominable fright
+that will make us shudder, probably! Young men have such bad taste
+nowadays!"
+
+"Let us see, father," said the old spinster.
+
+The case opened by the pressure of a spring. They found in it nothing
+but a carefully folded paper.
+
+"From the same to the same," said M. Gillenormand, bursting with
+laughter. "I know what it is. A billet-doux."
+
+"Ah! let us read it!" said the aunt.
+
+And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read as
+follows:--
+
+"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battlefield of
+Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
+purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
+be worthy of it is a matter of course."
+
+The feelings of father and daughter cannot be described. They felt
+chilled as by the breath of a death's-head. They did not exchange a
+word.
+
+Only, M. Gillenormand said in a low voice and as though speaking to
+himself:--
+
+"It is the slasher's handwriting."
+
+The aunt examined the paper, turned it about in all directions, then put
+it back in its case.
+
+At the same moment a little oblong packet, enveloped in blue paper, fell
+from one of the pockets of the great-coat. Mademoiselle Gillenormand
+picked it up and unfolded the blue paper.
+
+It contained Marius' hundred cards. She handed one of them to M.
+Gillenormand, who read: Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.
+
+The old man rang the bell. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the
+ribbon, the case, and the coat, flung them all on the floor in the
+middle of the room, and said:--
+
+"Carry those duds away."
+
+A full hour passed in the most profound silence. The old man and the old
+spinster had seated themselves with their backs to each other, and were
+thinking, each on his own account, the same things, in all probability.
+
+At the expiration of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said:--"A pretty state
+of things!"
+
+A few moments later, Marius made his appearance. He entered. Even before
+he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather holding one of
+his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight of him, the latter
+exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning superiority which was
+something crushing:--
+
+"Well! well! well! well! well! so you are a baron now. I present you my
+compliments. What is the meaning of this?"
+
+Marius reddened slightly and replied:--
+
+"It means that I am the son of my father."
+
+M. Gillenormand ceased to laugh, and said harshly:--
+
+"I am your father."
+
+"My father," retorted Marius, with downcast eyes and a severe air, "was
+a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France gloriously,
+who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who
+lived in the bivouac for a quarter of a century, beneath grape-shot and
+bullets, in snow and mud by day, beneath rain at night, who captured two
+flags, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and
+who never committed but one mistake, which was to love too fondly two
+ingrates, his country and myself."
+
+This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear to hear. At the word
+republic, he rose, or, to speak more correctly, he sprang to his feet.
+Every word that Marius had just uttered produced on the visage of the
+old Royalist the effect of the puffs of air from a forge upon a blazing
+brand. From a dull hue he had turned red, from red, purple, and from
+purple, flame-colored.
+
+"Marius!" he cried. "Abominable child! I do not know what your father
+was! I do not wish to know! I know nothing about that, and I do not know
+him! But what I do know is, that there never was anything but scoundrels
+among those men! They were all rascals, assassins, red-caps, thieves! I
+say all! I say all! I know not one! I say all! Do you hear me, Marius!
+See here, you are no more a baron than my slipper is! They were all
+bandits in the service of Robespierre! All who served B-u-o-naparte were
+brigands! They were all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their
+legitimate king! All cowards who fled before the Prussians and the
+English at Waterloo! That is what I do know! Whether Monsieur your
+father comes in that category, I do not know! I am sorry for it, so much
+the worse, your humble servant!"
+
+In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand
+who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know what
+would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was the priest who beholds
+all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds a
+passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things had been
+uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His father had just been
+trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? By
+his grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging the
+other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it was
+equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged. On the one
+hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.
+
+He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated,
+with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised
+his eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice of
+thunder:--
+
+"Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!"
+
+Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to
+him.
+
+The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He
+wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the
+chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar majesty.
+Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the
+window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length
+of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though he had been a
+stone statue walking.
+
+On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this
+encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her
+with a smile that was almost calm: "A baron like this gentleman, and a
+bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof."
+
+And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with
+his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he
+extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:--
+
+"Be off!"
+
+Marius left the house.
+
+On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:
+
+"You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,
+and you will never mention his name to me."
+
+Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing
+what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as you instead
+of thou for the next three months.
+
+Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one
+circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
+There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic
+dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in reality,
+the wrongs are not increased by them. While carrying Marius' "duds"
+precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather's command, Nicolette
+had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic staircase, which
+was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which contained the paper
+penned by the colonel. Neither paper nor case could afterwards be found.
+Marius was convinced that "Monsieur Gillenormand"--from that day forth
+he never alluded to him otherwise--had flung "his father's testament" in
+the fire. He knew by heart the few lines which the colonel had written,
+and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the paper, the writing, that
+sacred relic,--all that was his very heart. What had been done with it?
+
+Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and
+without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes
+in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the
+hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin
+quarter.
+
+What was to become of Marius?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC
+
+At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain
+revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started
+forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was on
+the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were
+undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,
+through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the
+compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance
+which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals,
+liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with
+a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create
+intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people
+adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. These
+were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian
+royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist
+liberalism.
+
+Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they
+sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They
+grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite
+realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards
+the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing
+like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams
+for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.
+
+These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery
+menaced "the established order of things," which was suspicious and
+underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The
+second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in
+the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the
+premeditation of coups d'etat.
+
+There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying
+organizations, like the German tugendbund and Italian Carbonarism; but
+here and there there were dark underminings, which were in process of
+throwing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; there
+existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the society
+of the Friends of the A B C.
+
+What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which had for its object
+apparently the education of children, in reality the elevation of man.
+
+They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,--the Abaisse,--the
+debased,--that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate the people.
+It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes
+serious factors in politics; witness the Castratus ad castra, which made
+a general of the army of Narses; witness: Barbari et Barberini; witness:
+Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram, etc., etc.
+
+The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society in
+the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie, if coteries ended in
+heroes. They assembled in Paris in two localities, near the fish-market,
+in a wine-shop called Corinthe, of which more will be heard later on,
+and near the Pantheon in a little cafe in the Rue Saint-Michel called
+the Cafe Musain, now torn down; the first of these meeting-places was
+close to the workingman, the second to the students.
+
+The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually held in a back
+room of the Cafe Musain.
+
+This hall, which was tolerably remote from the cafe, with which it was
+connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exit
+with a private stairway on the little Rue des Gres. There they smoked
+and drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loud
+tones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old map
+of France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,--a sign quite
+sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.
+
+The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were students, who were
+on cordial terms with the working classes. Here are the names of the
+principal ones. They belong, in a certain measure, to history: Enjolras,
+Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or
+Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.
+
+These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond of friendship.
+All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the South.
+
+[Illustration: Friends of the A B C 3b4-1-abc-friends]
+
+This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths which
+lie behind us. At the point of this drama which we have now reached,
+it will not perhaps be superfluous to throw a ray of light upon these
+youthful heads, before the reader beholds them plunging into the shadow
+of a tragic adventure.
+
+Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,--the reader shall
+see why later on,--was an only son and wealthy.
+
+Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He
+was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said,
+to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already,
+in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary
+apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a
+witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great
+affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. He
+was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point of
+view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the
+priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his
+lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A
+great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view.
+Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of
+the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with
+excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to
+hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and
+twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not
+seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman.
+He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrow
+the obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the
+Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he
+ignored spring, he did not hear the carolling of the birds; the bare
+throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved
+Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing
+except to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He
+chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the Republic.
+He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired,
+and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of
+soul. Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him!
+If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais,
+seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien,
+those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the
+wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had
+conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty
+on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown
+her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty
+cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.
+
+By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,
+Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the
+Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference--that its
+logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.
+Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but
+broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of
+general ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization"; and around the
+mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolution
+was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras.
+Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right.
+The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself
+to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the world
+more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men to
+attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the wise
+man. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane. Homo and
+vir, that was the exact effect of their different shades. Combeferre was
+as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural whiteness. He loved
+the word citizen, but he preferred the word man. He would gladly
+have said: Hombre, like the Spanish. He read everything, went to
+the theatres, attended the courses of public lecturers, learned the
+polarization of light from Arago, grew enthusiastic over a lesson in
+which Geoffrey Sainte-Hilaire explained the double function of the
+external carotid artery, and the internal, the one which makes the face,
+and the one which makes the brain; he kept up with what was going
+on, followed science step by step, compared Saint-Simon with Fourier,
+deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble which he found and reasoned
+on geology, drew from memory a silkworm moth, pointed out the faulty
+French in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puysegur and Deleuze,
+affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts;
+turned over the files of the Moniteur, reflected. He declared that the
+future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with
+educational questions. He desired that society should labor without
+relaxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level, at
+coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at increasing the
+mind in youthful persons, and he feared lest the present poverty of
+method, the paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two
+or three centuries called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official
+pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our
+colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact,
+a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time,
+thoughtful "even to chimaeras," so his friends said. He believed in
+all dreams, railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical
+operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric
+telegraph, the steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed
+by the citadels erected against the human mind in every direction, by
+superstition, despotism, and prejudice. He was one of those who think
+that science will eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief,
+Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and
+to march behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of
+fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and
+to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to
+bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of
+education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws;
+and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than
+for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but
+why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a
+still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness
+of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke,
+progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this
+tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into
+the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still
+more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the
+whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the
+cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In
+short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends,
+captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary
+adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take
+its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but
+irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have
+knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all
+its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous
+evolution of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated
+incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists
+in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither
+athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty
+of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington,
+who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that
+difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an
+eagle.
+
+Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name
+was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the
+powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study
+of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot
+of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied
+woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same
+confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of a
+royal head, that of Andre Chenier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,
+but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost an
+Orientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to those
+who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter of
+poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and
+Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,
+Juvenal, AEschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to
+Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigne to Corneille. He loved to saunter through
+fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds
+nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on
+the side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied or
+he contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,
+salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,
+education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production
+and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human
+ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those
+enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke
+softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment,
+dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing, and was
+very timid. Yet he was intrepid.
+
+Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father and
+mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had but
+one thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, to
+educate himself; he called this also, delivering himself. He had taught
+himself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by
+himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was
+immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother had
+failed him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profound
+divination of the man of the people, over what we now call the idea of
+the nationality, had learned history with the express object of raging
+with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,
+occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had
+for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He uttered
+these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the
+tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of
+Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,
+the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereign
+eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with that
+eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on the
+subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and that
+three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and pattern
+of all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time,
+have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of
+birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin in
+the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which
+all present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been
+a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed,
+approved, counter-signed, and copied, ne variatur, the partition of
+Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the
+first thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consulted
+that crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset; 1815
+was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly's habitual text. This
+poor workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she
+recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there is
+eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be
+Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make
+them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and
+reappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The
+protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a
+nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of rascality
+have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket
+handkerchief.
+
+Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of
+the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards
+aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The
+particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the
+bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated so highly that poor de,
+that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin
+had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de
+Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette.
+Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the rest, and called himself
+plain Courfeyrac.
+
+We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here,
+and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains: "For
+Courfeyrac, see Tholomyes."
+
+Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called
+the beaute du diable of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the
+playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois,
+on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.
+
+This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to generation of the
+successive levies of youth who traverse the schools, who pass it from
+hand to hand, quasi cursores, and is almost always exactly the same;
+so that, as we have just pointed out, any one who had listened to
+Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only,
+Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities
+of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was very
+great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different
+in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a
+district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.
+
+Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was the
+centre. The others gave more light, he shed more warmth; the truth is,
+that he possessed all the qualities of a centre, roundness and radiance.
+
+Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the occasion
+of the burial of young Lallemand.
+
+Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a
+spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and
+at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow
+possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale
+blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless
+it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were
+a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the
+pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it;
+a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the law, but did not
+practise it. He had taken for his device: "Never a lawyer," and for his
+armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Every
+time that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned
+up his frock-coat,--the paletot had not yet been invented,--and took
+hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: "What a fine
+old man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: "What a monument!" In his
+lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occasions
+for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something like
+three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.
+
+He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for
+their son.
+
+He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the
+reason they are intelligent."
+
+Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafes; the others
+had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human. To saunter
+is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more of a
+thinker than appeared to view.
+
+He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C and
+other still unorganized groups, which were destined to take form later
+on.
+
+In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald member.
+
+The Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having assisted
+him to enter a hackney-coach on the day when he emigrated, was wont
+to relate, that in 1814, on his return to France, as the King was
+disembarking at Calais, a man handed him a petition.
+
+"What is your request?" said the King.
+
+"Sire, a post-office."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"L'Aigle."
+
+The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition and beheld
+the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonoparte orthography touched
+the King and he began to smile. "Sire," resumed the man with the
+petition, "I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds surnamed
+Lesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, by
+contraction Lesgle, and by corruption l'Aigle." This caused the King
+to smile broadly. Later on he gave the man the posting office of Meaux,
+either intentionally or accidentally.
+
+The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, or Legle, and
+he signed himself, Legle [de Meaux]. As an abbreviation, his companions
+called him Bossuet.
+
+Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed
+in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything. At five and twenty
+he was bald. His father had ended by owning a house and a field; but
+he, the son, had made haste to lose that house and field in a bad
+speculation. He had nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but
+all he did miscarried. Everything failed him and everybody deceived him;
+what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting
+wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered
+that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him every moment,
+hence his joviality. He said: "I live under falling tiles." He was
+not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was what he had
+foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the teasing of
+fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries. He was poor, but
+his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon reached his last sou,
+never his last burst of laughter. When adversity entered his doors, he
+saluted this old acquaintance cordially, he tapped all catastrophes on
+the stomach; he was familiar with fatality to the point of calling it by
+its nickname: "Good day, Guignon," he said to it.
+
+These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full of
+resources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good to
+him, to indulge in "unbridled extravagance." One night, he went so far
+as to eat a "hundred francs" in a supper with a wench, which inspired
+him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: "Pull off my
+boots, you five-louis jade."
+
+Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the profession of a
+lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner of Bahorel.
+Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged now with
+one, now with another, most often with Joly. Joly was studying medicine.
+He was two years younger than Bossuet.
+
+Joly was the "malade imaginaire" junior. What he had won in medicine was
+to be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he thought
+himself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting his tongue
+in the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a needle, and
+in his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the south, and the
+foot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his blood
+might not be interfered with by the great electric current of the globe.
+During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was the gayest
+of them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived
+in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable
+being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, called
+Jolllly. "You may fly away on the four L's," Jean Prouvaire said to
+him.[23]
+
+Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane, which is
+an indication of a sagacious mind.
+
+All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on the whole, can
+only be discussed seriously, held the same religion: Progress.
+
+All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of
+them became solemn when they pronounced that date: '89. Their fathers in
+the flesh had been, either royalists, doctrinaires, it matters not what;
+this confusion anterior to themselves, who were young, did not concern
+them at all; the pure blood of principle ran in their veins. They
+attached themselves, without intermediate shades, to incorruptible right
+and absolute duty.
+
+Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.
+
+Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was
+one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic's name
+was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this
+rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in
+anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most
+during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be had
+at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Cafe Voltaire, that
+good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard
+du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes
+at the Barriere de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the
+Barriere du Com pat. He knew the best place for everything; in
+addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough
+single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He was
+inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma
+Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as
+follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was not to
+be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the
+air of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make his
+comrades believe that he was in general demand.
+
+All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social
+contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity,
+civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing
+whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the
+intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony.
+This was his axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass." He
+sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the
+brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. "They are greatly in
+advance to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: "There is a
+gibbet which has been a success." A rover, a gambler, a libertine,
+often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly:
+"J'aimons les filles, et j'aimons le bon vin." Air: Vive Henri IV.
+
+However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a
+dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras.
+Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this
+anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To
+the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his
+ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable.
+A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of
+complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the
+light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad
+always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in
+its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith
+soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm,
+upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly
+aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having
+occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct. His soft,
+yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves
+to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that
+firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once
+more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were,
+to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His
+indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his
+heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction;
+for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted. There
+are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong
+side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja.
+They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man;
+their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction
+and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an
+existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was
+the obverse of Enjolras.
+
+One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the
+alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will,
+pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.
+
+Grantaire, Enjolras' true satellite, inhabited this circle of young men;
+he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he followed them
+everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes
+of wine. They tolerated him on account of his good humor.
+
+Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man
+himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little lofty pity.
+Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by Enjolras,
+roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of
+Enjolras: "What fine marble!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--BLONDEAU'S FUNERAL ORATION BY BOSSUET
+
+On a certain afternoon, which had, as will be seen hereafter, some
+coincidence with the events heretofore related, Laigle de Meaux was to
+be seen leaning in a sensual manner against the doorpost of the Cafe
+Musain. He had the air of a caryatid on a vacation; he carried nothing
+but his revery, however. He was staring at the Place Saint-Michel.
+To lean one's back against a thing is equivalent to lying down while
+standing erect, which attitude is not hated by thinkers. Laigle de Meaux
+was pondering without melancholy, over a little misadventure which
+had befallen him two days previously at the law-school, and which had
+modified his personal plans for the future, plans which were rather
+indistinct in any case.
+
+Revery does not prevent a cab from passing by, nor the dreamer from
+taking note of that cab. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were straying about
+in a sort of diffuse lounging, perceived, athwart his somnambulism, a
+two-wheeled vehicle proceeding through the place, at a foot pace and
+apparently in indecision. For whom was this cabriolet? Why was it
+driving at a walk? Laigle took a survey. In it, beside the coachman, sat
+a young man, and in front of the young man lay a rather bulky hand-bag.
+The bag displayed to passers-by the following name inscribed in large
+black letters on a card which was sewn to the stuff: MARIUS PONTMERCY.
+
+This name caused Laigle to change his attitude. He drew himself up and
+hurled this apostrophe at the young man in the cabriolet:--
+
+"Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!"
+
+The cabriolet thus addressed came to a halt.
+
+The young man, who also seemed deeply buried in thought, raised his
+eyes:--
+
+"Hey?" said he.
+
+"You are M. Marius Pontmercy?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"I was looking for you," resumed Laigle de Meaux.
+
+"How so?" demanded Marius; for it was he: in fact, he had just quitted
+his grandfather's, and had before him a face which he now beheld for the
+first time. "I do not know you."
+
+"Neither do I know you," responded Laigle.
+
+Marius thought he had encountered a wag, the beginning of a
+mystification in the open street. He was not in a very good humor at the
+moment. He frowned. Laigle de Meaux went on imperturbably:--
+
+"You were not at the school day before yesterday."
+
+"That is possible."
+
+"That is certain."
+
+"You are a student?" demanded Marius.
+
+"Yes, sir. Like yourself. Day before yesterday, I entered the school, by
+chance. You know, one does have such freaks sometimes. The professor was
+just calling the roll. You are not unaware that they are very ridiculous
+on such occasions. At the third call, unanswered, your name is erased
+from the list. Sixty francs in the gulf."
+
+Marius began to listen.
+
+"It was Blondeau who was making the call. You know Blondeau, he has a
+very pointed and very malicious nose, and he delights to scent out the
+absent. He slyly began with the letter P. I was not listening, not being
+compromised by that letter. The call was not going badly. No erasures;
+the universe was present. Blondeau was grieved. I said to myself:
+'Blondeau, my love, you will not get the very smallest sort of an
+execution to-day.' All at once Blondeau calls, 'Marius Pontmercy!' No
+one answers. Blondeau, filled with hope, repeats more loudly: 'Marius
+Pontmercy!' And he takes his pen. Monsieur, I have bowels of compassion.
+I said to myself hastily: 'Here's a brave fellow who is going to get
+scratched out. Attention. Here is a veritable mortal who is not exact.
+He's not a good student. Here is none of your heavy-sides, a student who
+studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and
+sapience, one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession.
+He is an honorable idler who lounges, who practises country jaunts, who
+cultivates the grisette, who pays court to the fair sex, who is at
+this very moment, perhaps, with my mistress. Let us save him. Death to
+Blondeau!' At that moment, Blondeau dipped his pen in, all black with
+erasures in the ink, cast his yellow eyes round the audience room, and
+repeated for the third time: 'Marius Pontmercy!' I replied: 'Present!'
+This is why you were not crossed off."
+
+"Monsieur!--" said Marius.
+
+"And why I was," added Laigle de Meaux.
+
+"I do not understand you," said Marius.
+
+Laigle resumed:--
+
+"Nothing is more simple. I was close to the desk to reply, and close
+to the door for the purpose of flight. The professor gazed at me with a
+certain intensity. All of a sudden, Blondeau, who must be the malicious
+nose alluded to by Boileau, skipped to the letter L. L is my letter. I
+am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle."
+
+"L'Aigle!" interrupted Marius, "what fine name!"
+
+"Monsieur, Blondeau came to this fine name, and called: 'Laigle!' I
+reply: 'Present!' Then Blondeau gazes at me, with the gentleness of a
+tiger, and says to me: 'If you are Pontmercy, you are not Laigle.' A
+phrase which has a disobliging air for you, but which was lugubrious
+only for me. That said, he crossed me off."
+
+Marius exclaimed:--
+
+"I am mortified, sir--"
+
+"First of all," interposed Laigle, "I demand permission to embalm
+Blondeau in a few phrases of deeply felt eulogium. I will assume that he
+is dead. There will be no great change required in his gauntness, in
+his pallor, in his coldness, and in his smell. And I say: 'Erudimini
+qui judicatis terram. Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau
+Nasica, the ox of discipline, bos disciplinae, the bloodhound of the
+password, the angel of the roll-call, who was upright, square exact,
+rigid, honest, and hideous. God crossed him off as he crossed me off.'"
+
+Marius resumed:--
+
+"I am very sorry--"
+
+"Young man," said Laigle de Meaux, "let this serve you as a lesson. In
+future, be exact."
+
+"I really beg you a thousand pardons."
+
+"Do not expose your neighbor to the danger of having his name erased
+again."
+
+"I am extremely sorry--"
+
+Laigle burst out laughing.
+
+"And I am delighted. I was on the brink of becoming a lawyer. This
+erasure saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar. I shall not defend
+the widow, and I shall not attack the orphan. No more toga, no more
+stage. Here is my erasure all ready for me. It is to you that I am
+indebted for it, Monsieur Pontmercy. I intend to pay a solemn call of
+thanks upon you. Where do you live?"
+
+"In this cab," said Marius.
+
+"A sign of opulence," retorted Laigle calmly. "I congratulate you. You
+have there a rent of nine thousand francs per annum."
+
+At that moment, Courfeyrac emerged from the cafe.
+
+Marius smiled sadly.
+
+"I have paid this rent for the last two hours, and I aspire to get rid
+of it; but there is a sort of history attached to it, and I don't know
+where to go."
+
+"Come to my place, sir," said Courfeyrac.
+
+"I have the priority," observed Laigle, "but I have no home."
+
+"Hold your tongue, Bossuet," said Courfeyrac.
+
+"Bossuet," said Marius, "but I thought that your name was Laigle."
+
+"De Meaux," replied Laigle; "by metaphor, Bossuet."
+
+Courfeyrac entered the cab.
+
+"Coachman," said he, "hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques."
+
+And that very evening, Marius found himself installed in a chamber of
+the hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques side by side with Courfeyrac.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--MARIUS' ASTONISHMENTS
+
+In a few days, Marius had become Courfeyrac's friend. Youth is the
+season for prompt welding and the rapid healing of scars. Marius
+breathed freely in Courfeyrac's society, a decidedly new thing for him.
+Courfeyrac put no questions to him. He did not even think of such a
+thing. At that age, faces disclose everything on the spot. Words are
+superfluous. There are young men of whom it can be said that their
+countenances chatter. One looks at them and one knows them.
+
+One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly addressed this interrogation
+to him:--
+
+"By the way, have you any political opinions?"
+
+"The idea!" said Marius, almost affronted by the question.
+
+"What are you?"
+
+"A democrat-Bonapartist."
+
+"The gray hue of a reassured rat," said Courfeyrac.
+
+On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Cafe Musain.
+Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: "I must give you your entry
+to the revolution." And he led him to the hall of the Friends of the A B
+C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this simple word which
+Marius did not understand: "A pupil."
+
+Marius had fallen into a wasps'-nest of wits. However, although he was
+silent and grave, he was, none the less, both winged and armed.
+
+Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy, and to
+asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered by this covey
+of young men around him. All these various initiatives solicited his
+attention at once, and pulled him about. The tumultuous movements of
+these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes,
+in his trouble, they fled so far from him, that he had difficulty in
+recovering them. He heard them talk of philosophy, of literature, of
+art, of history, of religion, in unexpected fashion. He caught glimpses
+of strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in proper perspective,
+he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos that he grasped. On
+abandoning his grandfather's opinions for the opinions of his father,
+he had supposed himself fixed; he now suspected, with uneasiness, and
+without daring to avow it to himself, that he was not. The angle
+at which he saw everything began to be displaced anew. A certain
+oscillation set all the horizons of his brains in motion. An odd
+internal upsetting. He almost suffered from it.
+
+It seemed as though there were no "consecrated things" for those young
+men. Marius heard singular propositions on every sort of subject, which
+embarrassed his still timid mind.
+
+A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy
+from the ancient repertory called classic: "Down with tragedy dear to
+the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:--
+
+"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the
+bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has
+a reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of
+AEschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in
+nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is not
+a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which
+are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh, there is
+the duck. Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I do
+not see why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique
+tragedy."
+
+Or chance decreed that Marius should traverse Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau
+between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.
+
+Courfeyrac took his arm:--
+
+"Pay attention. This is the Rue Platriere, now called Rue Jean-Jacques
+Rousseau, on account of a singular household which lived in it sixty
+years ago. This consisted of Jean-Jacques and Therese. From time
+to time, little beings were born there. Therese gave birth to them,
+Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings."
+
+And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly:--
+
+"Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied
+his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people."
+
+Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor.
+Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said
+"Bonaparte." Enjolras pronounced it "Buonaparte."
+
+Marius was vaguely surprised. Initium sapientiae.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFE MUSAIN
+
+One of the conversations among the young men, at which Marius was
+present and in which he sometimes joined, was a veritable shock to his
+mind.
+
+This took place in the back room of the Cafe Musain. Nearly all the
+Friends of the A B C had convened that evening. The argand lamp was
+solemnly lighted. They talked of one thing and another, without passion
+and with noise. With the exception of Enjolras and Marius, who held
+their peace, all were haranguing rather at hap-hazard. Conversations
+between comrades sometimes are subject to these peaceable tumults. It
+was a game and an uproar as much as a conversation. They tossed words
+to each other and caught them up in turn. They were chattering in all
+quarters.
+
+No woman was admitted to this back room, except Louison, the dish-washer
+of the cafe, who passed through it from time to time, to go to her
+washing in the "lavatory."
+
+Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he had
+taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top of his lungs,
+and shouting:--
+
+"I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg has an
+attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which will
+be applied to it. I want a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a
+hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is
+worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in
+which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique
+reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: 'All is vanity.'
+I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing
+to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up
+of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a
+professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary
+is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect, a
+jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche. Vanity has a
+right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with
+his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with
+his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are
+called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally
+of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a
+horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself
+up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef. As for
+the intrinsic value of people, it is no longer respectable in the least.
+Listen to the panegyric which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white
+is ferocious; if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give
+the dove! A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous
+than the asp and the cobra. It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise
+I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing. For instance,
+I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of
+daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples;
+rapin[24] is the masculine of rapine. So much for myself; as for
+the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your
+perfections, excellencies, and qualities. Every good quality tends
+towards a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous man is next
+door to the prodigal, the brave man rubs elbows with the braggart; he
+who says very pious says a trifle bigoted; there are just as many vices
+in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes' cloak. Whom do you admire, the
+slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the
+slayer. Long live Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue,
+granted, but madness also. There are queer spots on those great men. The
+Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy.
+This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion,
+who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg,
+Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion
+left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was
+in love with the one, Nero with the other. All history is nothing but
+wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The
+battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; the Tolbiac of Clovis and
+the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each other as two drops of water.
+I don't attach much importance to victory. Nothing is so stupid as to
+conquer; true glory lies in convincing. But try to prove something! If
+you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering, what
+wretchedness! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys
+success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace. Therefore I disdain
+the human race. Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you wish me
+to begin admiring the peoples? What people, if you please? Shall it be
+Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by, slew Phocion,
+as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such an extent that
+Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: "His urine attracts the bees." The most
+prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas,
+who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to load his shoes with
+lead in order not to be blown away by the wind. There stood on the great
+square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny;
+this statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented
+a trip. That sums up Greece and glory. Let us pass on to others. Shall I
+admire England? Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris?
+I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of
+London? I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is
+the headquarters of wretchedness. There are a hundred deaths a year of
+hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion. I add,
+as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of
+roses and blue spectacles. A fig then for England! If I do not admire
+John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I have but little taste for
+that slave-holding brother. Take away Time is money, what remains of
+England? Take away Cotton is king, what remains of America? Germany is
+the lymph, Italy is the bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia?
+Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I admit that Russia has its
+beauties, among others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots.
+Their health is delicate. A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter,
+a strangled Paul, another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans
+strangled, with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils
+poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia
+is in a condition of flagrant insalubrity. All civilized peoples offer
+this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized
+war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the
+brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding
+of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass. 'Bah!' you will say to
+me, 'but Europe is certainly better than Asia?' I admit that Asia is a
+farce; but I do not precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand
+Lama, you peoples of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and
+your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty
+chemise of Queen Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen
+of the human race, I tell you, not a bit of it! It is at Brussels that
+the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the
+most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at
+Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are
+all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short. In Paris,
+even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a
+rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the
+Piraeus. Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the ragpickers
+are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The
+Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis,
+mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers,
+caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat
+at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll
+naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison. Good
+day."
+
+Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching
+at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of
+the Cafe Musain.
+
+Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him,
+and Grantaire began again worse than ever:--
+
+"Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with
+your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-a-brac. I excuse
+you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish
+me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a
+success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal. A
+crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch,
+Femme--woman--rhymes with infame,--infamous. Yes, I have the spleen,
+complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and
+I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to
+death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!"
+
+"Silence then, capital R!" resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point
+of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a
+phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:--
+
+"--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an
+amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms
+of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an
+equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving
+the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well
+as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses, leases,
+freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--"
+
+"Echo, plaintive nymph," hummed Grantaire.
+
+Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand
+and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville was
+being sketched out.
+
+This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads
+at work touched each other: "Let us begin by finding names. When one has
+the names, one finds the subject."
+
+"That is true. Dictate. I will write."
+
+"Monsieur Dorimon."
+
+"An independent gentleman?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"His daughter, Celestine."
+
+"--tine. What next?"
+
+"Colonel Sainval."
+
+"Sainval is stale. I should say Valsin."
+
+Beside the vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking
+advantage of the uproar to talk low, was discussing a duel. An old
+fellow of thirty was counselling a young one of eighteen, and explaining
+to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.
+
+"The deuce! Look out for yourself. He is a fine swordsman. His play is
+neat. He has the attack, no wasted feints, wrist, dash, lightning, a
+just parade, mathematical parries, bigre! and he is left-handed."
+
+In the angle opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes,
+and talking of love.
+
+"You are in luck, that you are," Joly was saying. "You have a mistress
+who is always laughing."
+
+"That is a fault of hers," returned Bahorel. "One's mistress does wrong
+to laugh. That encourages one to deceive her. To see her gay removes
+your remorse; if you see her sad, your conscience pricks you."
+
+"Ingrate! a woman who laughs is such a good thing! And you never
+quarrel!"
+
+"That is because of the treaty which we have made. On forming our little
+Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier, which we never
+cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs to Vaud, on the
+side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace."
+
+"Peace is happiness digesting."
+
+"And you, Jolllly, where do you stand in your entanglement with
+Mamselle--you know whom I mean?"
+
+"She sulks at me with cruel patience."
+
+"Yet you are a lover to soften the heart with gauntness."
+
+"Alas!"
+
+"In your place, I would let her alone."
+
+"That is easy enough to say."
+
+"And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?"
+
+"Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with
+tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled,
+with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her."
+
+"My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant,
+and produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of
+double-milled cloth at Staub's. That will assist."
+
+"At what price?" shouted Grantaire.
+
+The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion. Pagan
+mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology. The question was
+about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, out of pure
+romanticism.
+
+Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth,
+a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both
+laughing and lyric.
+
+"Let us not insult the gods," said he. "The gods may not have taken
+their departure. Jupiter does not impress me as dead. The gods are
+dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, such as it is to-day, after the
+flight of these dreams, we still find all the grand old pagan myths.
+Such and such a mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the
+Vignemale, for example, is still to me the headdress of Cybele; it has
+not been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to breathe into
+the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping up the holes in turn with his
+fingers, and I have always believed that Io had something to do with the
+cascade of Pissevache."
+
+In the last corner, they were talking politics. The Charter which had
+been granted was getting roughly handled. Combeferre was upholding it
+weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it. On the table
+lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter. Courfeyrac had
+seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his arguments the
+rattling of this sheet of paper.
+
+"In the first place, I won't have any kings; if it were only from an
+economical point of view, I don't want any; a king is a parasite. One
+does not have kings gratis. Listen to this: the dearness of kings. At
+the death of Francois I., the national debt of France amounted to an
+income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two
+milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which
+was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five
+hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards.
+In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is
+but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition, to soften
+the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly
+from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional
+fictions,--what detestable reasons all those are! No! no! let us never
+enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles dwindle and pale
+in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant
+from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14.
+By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches
+back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A charter is a mask; the lie
+lurks beneath it. A people which accepts a charter abdicates. The law is
+only the law when entire. No! no charter!"
+
+It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace. This
+was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor
+Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire. The paper
+flashed up. Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burn
+philosophically, and contented himself with saying:--
+
+"The charter metamorphosed into flame."
+
+And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called entrain,
+and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad taste,
+good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue, mounting
+together and crossing from all points of the room, produced a sort of
+merry bombardment over their heads.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON
+
+The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable
+property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the lightning
+flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows. The burst of laughter
+starts from a tender feeling.
+
+At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry. Impulses depend on
+the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices
+to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with
+abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly. Chance is the
+stage-manager of such conversations.
+
+A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly
+traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire,
+Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.
+
+How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it
+suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We
+have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the midst of the
+uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe to Combeferre,
+with this date:--
+
+"June 18th, 1815, Waterloo."
+
+At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a table,
+beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his chin, and
+began to gaze fixedly at the audience.
+
+"Pardieu!" exclaimed Courfeyrac ("Parbleu" was falling into disuse
+at this period), "that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is
+Bonaparte's fatal number. Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind, you
+have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity,
+that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement."
+
+Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence and
+addressed this remark to Combeferre:--
+
+"You mean to say, the crime and the expiation."
+
+This word crime overpassed the measure of what Marius, who was already
+greatly agitated by the abrupt evocation of Waterloo, could accept.
+
+He rose, walked slowly to the map of France spread out on the wall, and
+at whose base an island was visible in a separate compartment, laid his
+finger on this compartment and said:--
+
+"Corsica, a little island which has rendered France very great."
+
+This was like a breath of icy air. All ceased talking. They felt that
+something was on the point of occurring.
+
+Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming an attitude of the torso
+to which he was addicted. He gave it up to listen.
+
+Enjolras, whose blue eye was not fixed on any one, and who seemed to be
+gazing at space, replied, without glancing at Marius:--
+
+"France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great because she is
+France. Quia nomina leo."
+
+Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras, and his
+voice burst forth with a vibration which came from a quiver of his very
+being:--
+
+"God forbid that I should diminish France! But amalgamating Napoleon
+with her is not diminishing her. Come! let us argue the question. I am
+a new comer among you, but I will confess that you amaze me. Where do we
+stand? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us come to an explanation
+about the Emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte, accenting the u like the
+Royalists. I warn you that my grandfather does better still; he
+says Buonaparte'. I thought you were young men. Where, then, is your
+enthusiasm? And what are you doing with it? Whom do you admire, if you
+do not admire the Emperor? And what more do you want? If you will
+have none of that great man, what great men would you like? He had
+everything. He was complete. He had in his brain the sum of human
+faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Caesar, his
+conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the
+thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins
+are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of
+Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids,
+at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he
+replied to Laplace, in the Council of State be held his own against
+Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the
+chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal
+with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he
+went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything;
+he knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing
+good-naturedly beside the cradle of his little child; and all at once,
+frightened Europe lent an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks of
+artillery rumbled, pontoons stretched over the rivers, clouds of cavalry
+galloped in the storm, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones in every
+direction, the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map, the sound
+of a superhuman sword was heard, as it was drawn from its sheath; they
+beheld him, him, rise erect on the horizon with a blazing brand in his
+hand, and a glow in his eyes, unfolding amid the thunder, his two wings,
+the grand army and the old guard, and he was the archangel of war!"
+
+All held their peace, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always
+produces somewhat the effect of acquiescence, of the enemy being driven
+to the wall. Marius continued with increased enthusiasm, and almost
+without pausing for breath:--
+
+"Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation to be
+the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France and when it
+adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear and to reign,
+to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places all capitals, to
+take his grenadiers and to make kings of them, to decree the falls of
+dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at the pace of a charge; to make
+you feel that when you threaten you lay your hand on the hilt of the
+sword of God; to follow in a single man, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne;
+to be the people of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling
+announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to
+rouse you in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious words
+which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! To cause
+constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant from the
+zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant to the
+Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the grand
+army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a mountain
+sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to strike
+with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through glory,
+to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer
+the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what
+greater thing is there?"
+
+"To be free," said Combeferre.
+
+Marius lowered his head in his turn; that cold and simple word had
+traversed his epic effusion like a blade of steel, and he felt it
+vanishing within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer
+there. Probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis, he had
+just taken his departure, and all, with the exception of Enjolras,
+had followed him. The room had been emptied. Enjolras, left alone with
+Marius, was gazing gravely at him. Marius, however, having rallied his
+ideas to some extent, did not consider himself beaten; there lingered in
+him a trace of inward fermentation which was on the point, no doubt, of
+translating itself into syllogisms arrayed against Enjolras, when all of
+a sudden, they heard some one singing on the stairs as he went. It was
+Combeferre, and this is what he was singing:--
+
+ "Si Cesar m'avait donne[25]
+ La gloire et la guerre,
+ Et qu'il me fallait quitter
+ L'amour de ma mere,
+ Je dirais au grand Cesar:
+ Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,
+ J'aime mieux ma mere, o gue!
+ J'aime mieux ma mere!"
+
+The wild and tender accents with which Combeferre sang communicated to
+this couplet a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtfully, and
+with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: "My
+mother?--"
+
+At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--RES ANGUSTA
+
+That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy shadow
+in his soul. He felt what the earth may possibly feel, at the moment
+when it is torn open with the iron, in order that grain may be deposited
+within it; it feels only the wound; the quiver of the germ and the joy
+of the fruit only arrive later.
+
+Marius was gloomy. He had but just acquired a faith; must he then reject
+it already? He affirmed to himself that he would not. He declared to
+himself that he would not doubt, and he began to doubt in spite of
+himself. To stand between two religions, from one of which you have
+not as yet emerged, and another into which you have not yet entered, is
+intolerable; and twilight is pleasing only to bat-like souls. Marius
+was clear-eyed, and he required the true light. The half-lights of doubt
+pained him. Whatever may have been his desire to remain where he was,
+he could not halt there, he was irresistibly constrained to continue, to
+advance, to examine, to think, to march further. Whither would this lead
+him? He feared, after having taken so many steps which had brought him
+nearer to his father, to now take a step which should estrange him from
+that father. His discomfort was augmented by all the reflections which
+occurred to him. An escarpment rose around him. He was in accord neither
+with his grandfather nor with his friends; daring in the eyes of
+the one, he was behind the times in the eyes of the others, and he
+recognized the fact that he was doubly isolated, on the side of age and
+on the side of youth. He ceased to go to the Cafe Musain.
+
+In the troubled state of his conscience, he no longer thought of
+certain serious sides of existence. The realities of life do not allow
+themselves to be forgotten. They soon elbowed him abruptly.
+
+One morning, the proprietor of the hotel entered Marius' room and said
+to him:--
+
+"Monsieur Courfeyrac answered for you."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But I must have my money."
+
+"Request Courfeyrac to come and talk with me," said Marius.
+
+Courfeyrac having made his appearance, the host left them. Marius then
+told him what it had not before occurred to him to relate, that he was
+the same as alone in the world, and had no relatives.
+
+"What is to become of you?" said Courfeyrac.
+
+"I do not know in the least," replied Marius.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"Have you any money?"
+
+"Fifteen francs."
+
+"Do you want me to lend you some?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Have you clothes?"
+
+"Here is what I have."
+
+"Have you trinkets?"
+
+"A watch."
+
+"Silver?"
+
+"Gold; here it is."
+
+"I know a clothes-dealer who will take your frock-coat and a pair of
+trousers."
+
+"That is good."
+
+"You will then have only a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat and a
+coat."
+
+"And my boots."
+
+"What! you will not go barefoot? What opulence!"
+
+"That will be enough."
+
+"I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch."
+
+"That is good."
+
+"No; it is not good. What will you do after that?"
+
+"Whatever is necessary. Anything honest, that is to say."
+
+"Do you know English?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you know German?"
+
+"No."
+
+"So much the worse."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because one of my friends, a publisher, is getting up a sort of an
+encyclopaedia, for which you might have translated English or German
+articles. It is badly paid work, but one can live by it."
+
+"I will learn English and German."
+
+"And in the meanwhile?"
+
+"In the meanwhile I will live on my clothes and my watch."
+
+The clothes-dealer was sent for. He paid twenty francs for the cast-off
+garments. They went to the watchmaker's. He bought the watch for
+forty-five francs.
+
+"That is not bad," said Marius to Courfeyrac, on their return to the
+hotel, "with my fifteen francs, that makes eighty."
+
+"And the hotel bill?" observed Courfeyrac.
+
+"Hello, I had forgotten that," said Marius.
+
+The landlord presented his bill, which had to be paid on the spot. It
+amounted to seventy francs.
+
+"I have ten francs left," said Marius.
+
+"The deuce," exclaimed Courfeyrac, "you will eat up five francs while
+you are learning English, and five while learning German. That will be
+swallowing a tongue very fast, or a hundred sous very slowly."
+
+In the meantime Aunt Gillenormand, a rather good-hearted person at
+bottom in difficulties, had finally hunted up Marius' abode.
+
+One morning, on his return from the law-school, Marius found a letter
+from his aunt, and the sixty pistoles, that is to say, six hundred
+francs in gold, in a sealed box.
+
+Marius sent back the thirty louis to his aunt, with a respectful letter,
+in which he stated that he had sufficient means of subsistence and that
+he should be able thenceforth to supply all his needs. At that moment,
+he had three francs left.
+
+His aunt did not inform his grandfather of this refusal for fear of
+exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: "Let me never hear the name
+of that blood-drinker again!"
+
+Marius left the hotel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, as he did not wish to
+run in debt there.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--MARIUS INDIGENT
+
+[Illustration: Excellence of Misfortune 3b5-1-misfortune]
+
+
+Life became hard for Marius. It was nothing to eat his clothes and his
+watch. He ate of that terrible, inexpressible thing that is called de la
+vache enrage; that is to say, he endured great hardships and privations.
+A terrible thing it is, containing days without bread, nights without
+sleep, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a fire, weeks without
+work, a future without hope, a coat out at the elbows, an old hat which
+evokes the laughter of young girls, a door which one finds locked on one
+at night because one's rent is not paid, the insolence of the porter
+and the cook-shop man, the sneers of neighbors, humiliations, dignity
+trampled on, work of whatever nature accepted, disgusts, bitterness,
+despondency. Marius learned how all this is eaten, and how such are
+often the only things which one has to devour. At that moment of his
+existence when a man needs his pride, because he needs love, he felt
+that he was jeered at because he was badly dressed, and ridiculous
+because he was poor. At the age when youth swells the heart with
+imperial pride, he dropped his eyes more than once on his dilapidated
+boots, and he knew the unjust shame and the poignant blushes of
+wretchedness. Admirable and terrible trial from which the feeble emerge
+base, from which the strong emerge sublime. A crucible into which
+destiny casts a man, whenever it desires a scoundrel or a demi-god.
+
+For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances
+of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by
+step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and
+mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no
+renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune,
+isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have
+their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the
+heroes who win renown.
+
+Firm and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a
+step-mother, is sometimes a mother; destitution gives birth to might of
+soul and spirit; distress is the nurse of pride; unhappiness is a good
+milk for the magnanimous.
+
+There came a moment in Marius' life, when he swept his own landing, when
+he bought his sou's worth of Brie cheese at the fruiterer's, when he
+waited until twilight had fallen to slip into the baker's and purchase
+a loaf, which he carried off furtively to his attic as though he had
+stolen it. Sometimes there could be seen gliding into the butcher's shop
+on the corner, in the midst of the bantering cooks who elbowed him, an
+awkward young man, carrying big books under his arm, who had a timid yet
+angry air, who, on entering, removed his hat from a brow whereon stood
+drops of perspiration, made a profound bow to the butcher's astonished
+wife, asked for a mutton cutlet, paid six or seven sous for it, wrapped
+it up in a paper, put it under his arm, between two books, and went
+away. It was Marius. On this cutlet, which he cooked for himself, he
+lived for three days.
+
+On the first day he ate the meat, on the second he ate the fat, on the
+third he gnawed the bone. Aunt Gillenormand made repeated attempts, and
+sent him the sixty pistoles several times. Marius returned them on every
+occasion, saying that he needed nothing.
+
+He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution which we
+have just described was effected within him. From that time forth, he
+had not put off his black garments. But his garments were quitting him.
+The day came when he had no longer a coat. The trousers would go next.
+What was to be done? Courfeyrac, to whom he had, on his side, done some
+good turns, gave him an old coat. For thirty sous, Marius got it turned
+by some porter or other, and it was a new coat. But this coat was green.
+Then Marius ceased to go out until after nightfall. This made his coat
+black. As he wished always to appear in mourning, he clothed himself
+with the night.
+
+In spite of all this, he got admitted to practice as a lawyer. He was
+supposed to live in Courfeyrac's room, which was decent, and where
+a certain number of law-books backed up and completed by several
+dilapidated volumes of romance, passed as the library required by the
+regulations. He had his letters addressed to Courfeyrac's quarters.
+
+When Marius became a lawyer, he informed his grandfather of the fact
+in a letter which was cold but full of submission and respect. M.
+Gillenormand trembled as he took the letter, read it, tore it in four
+pieces, and threw it into the waste-basket. Two or three days later,
+Mademoiselle Gillenormand heard her father, who was alone in his room,
+talking aloud to himself. He always did this whenever he was greatly
+agitated. She listened, and the old man was saying: "If you were not a
+fool, you would know that one cannot be a baron and a lawyer at the same
+time."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--MARIUS POOR
+
+It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else. It ends by
+becoming bearable. It finally assumes a form, and adjusts itself. One
+vegetates, that is to say, one develops in a certain meagre fashion,
+which is, however, sufficient for life. This is the mode in which the
+existence of Marius Pontmercy was arranged:
+
+He had passed the worst straits; the narrow pass was opening out a
+little in front of him. By dint of toil, perseverance, courage, and
+will, he had managed to draw from his work about seven hundred francs a
+year. He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had
+put him in communication with his friend the publisher, Marius filled
+the modest post of utility man in the literature of the publishing
+house. He drew up prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated
+editions, compiled biographies, etc.; net product, year in and year
+out, seven hundred francs. He lived on it. How? Not so badly. We will
+explain.
+
+Marius occupied in the Gorbeau house, for an annual sum of thirty
+francs, a den minus a fireplace, called a cabinet, which contained only
+the most indispensable articles of furniture. This furniture belonged
+to him. He gave three francs a month to the old principal tenant to come
+and sweep his hole, and to bring him a little hot water every morning,
+a fresh egg, and a penny roll. He breakfasted on this egg and roll. His
+breakfast varied in cost from two to four sous, according as eggs
+were dear or cheap. At six o'clock in the evening he descended the
+Rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau's, opposite Basset's, the
+stamp-dealer's, on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He ate no soup.
+He took a six-sou plate of meat, a half-portion of vegetables for three
+sous, and a three-sou dessert. For three sous he got as much bread as
+he wished. As for wine, he drank water. When he paid at the desk
+where Madam Rousseau, at that period still plump and rosy majestically
+presided, he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a
+smile. Then he went away. For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.
+
+This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many water carafes
+were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a restaurant. It no
+longer exists. The proprietor had a fine nickname: he was called
+Rousseau the Aquatic.
+
+Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost him twenty
+sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add
+the thirty francs for rent, and the thirty-six francs to the old woman,
+plus a few trifling expenses; for four hundred and fifty francs, Marius
+was fed, lodged, and waited on. His clothing cost him a hundred francs,
+his linen fifty francs, his washing fifty francs; the whole did not
+exceed six hundred and fifty francs. He was rich. He sometimes lent ten
+francs to a friend. Courfeyrac had once been able to borrow sixty francs
+of him. As far as fire was concerned, as Marius had no fireplace, he had
+"simplified matters."
+
+Marius always had two complete suits of clothes, the one old, "for every
+day"; the other, brand new for special occasions. Both were black. He
+had but three shirts, one on his person, the second in the commode, and
+the third in the washerwoman's hands. He renewed them as they wore out.
+They were always ragged, which caused him to button his coat to the
+chin.
+
+It had required years for Marius to attain to this flourishing
+condition. Hard years; difficult, some of them, to traverse, others to
+climb. Marius had not failed for a single day. He had endured everything
+in the way of destitution; he had done everything except contract debts.
+He did himself the justice to say that he had never owed any one a sou.
+A debt was, to him, the beginning of slavery. He even said to himself,
+that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only
+your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to
+it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had
+passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that,
+if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of
+soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality
+or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a
+deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against
+it. His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was timid even to rudeness.
+
+During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even
+uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.
+The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it. It is the
+only bird which bears up its own cage.
+
+Besides his father's name, another name was graven in Marius' heart,
+the name of Thenardier. Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature,
+surrounded with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts,
+he owed his father's life,--that intrepid sergeant who had saved the
+colonel amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo. He never
+separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father, and
+he associated them in his veneration. It was a sort of worship in two
+steps, with the grand altar for the colonel and the lesser one for
+Thenardier. What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude towards
+Thenardier, was the idea of the distress into which he knew that
+Thenardier had fallen, and which had engulfed the latter. Marius had
+learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate
+inn-keeper. Since that time, he had made unheard-of efforts to find
+traces of him and to reach him in that dark abyss of misery in which
+Thenardier had disappeared. Marius had beaten the whole country; he
+had gone to Chelles, to Bondy, to Gourney, to Nogent, to Lagny. He had
+persisted for three years, expending in these explorations the little
+money which he had laid by. No one had been able to give him any news of
+Thenardier: he was supposed to have gone abroad. His creditors had also
+sought him, with less love than Marius, but with as much assiduity, and
+had not been able to lay their hands on him. Marius blamed himself, and
+was almost angry with himself for his lack of success in his researches.
+It was the only debt left him by the colonel, and Marius made it a
+matter of honor to pay it. "What," he thought, "when my father lay dying
+on the field of battle, did Thenardier contrive to find him amid the
+smoke and the grape-shot, and bear him off on his shoulders, and yet he
+owed him nothing, and I, who owe so much to Thenardier, cannot join him
+in this shadow where he is lying in the pangs of death, and in my
+turn bring him back from death to life! Oh! I will find him!" To find
+Thenardier, in fact, Marius would have given one of his arms, to rescue
+him from his misery, he would have sacrificed all his blood. To see
+Thenardier, to render Thenardier some service, to say to him: "You do
+not know me; well, I do know you! Here I am. Dispose of me!" This was
+Marius' sweetest and most magnificent dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--MARIUS GROWN UP
+
+At this epoch, Marius was twenty years of age. It was three years since
+he had left his grandfather. Both parties had remained on the same
+terms, without attempting to approach each other, and without seeking to
+see each other. Besides, what was the use of seeing each other? Marius
+was the brass vase, while Father Gillenormand was the iron pot.
+
+We admit that Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather's heart. He had
+imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him, and that that crusty,
+harsh, and smiling old fellow who cursed, shouted, and stormed
+and brandished his cane, cherished for him, at the most, only that
+affection, which is at once slight and severe, of the dotards of comedy.
+Marius was in error. There are fathers who do not love their children;
+there exists no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. At bottom,
+as we have said, M. Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him after
+his own fashion, with an accompaniment of snappishness and boxes on the
+ear; but, this child once gone, he felt a black void in his heart;
+he would allow no one to mention the child to him, and all the while
+secretly regretted that he was so well obeyed. At first, he hoped that
+this Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist, this Septembrist, would
+return. But the weeks passed by, years passed; to M. Gillenormand's
+great despair, the "blood-drinker" did not make his appearance. "I could
+not do otherwise than turn him out," said the grandfather to himself,
+and he asked himself: "If the thing were to do over again, would I do
+it?" His pride instantly answered "yes," but his aged head, which he
+shook in silence, replied sadly "no." He had his hours of depression.
+He missed Marius. Old men need affection as they need the sun. It is
+warmth. Strong as his nature was, the absence of Marius had wrought some
+change in him. Nothing in the world could have induced him to take a
+step towards "that rogue"; but he suffered. He never inquired about him,
+but he thought of him incessantly. He lived in the Marais in a more and
+more retired manner; he was still merry and violent as of old, but
+his merriment had a convulsive harshness, and his violences always
+terminated in a sort of gentle and gloomy dejection. He sometimes said:
+"Oh! if he only would return, what a good box on the ear I would give
+him!"
+
+As for his aunt, she thought too little to love much; Marius was no
+longer for her much more than a vague black form; and she eventually
+came to occupy herself with him much less than with the cat or the
+paroquet which she probably had. What augmented Father Gillenormand's
+secret suffering was, that he locked it all up within his breast, and
+did not allow its existence to be divined. His sorrow was like those
+recently invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. It sometimes
+happened that officious busybodies spoke to him of Marius, and asked
+him: "What is your grandson doing?" "What has become of him?" The old
+bourgeois replied with a sigh, that he was a sad case, and giving a
+fillip to his cuff, if he wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de
+Pontmercy is practising pettifogging in some corner or other."
+
+While the old man regretted, Marius applauded himself. As is the case
+with all good-hearted people, misfortune had eradicated his bitterness.
+He only thought of M. Gillenormand in an amiable light, but he had set
+his mind on not receiving anything more from the man who had been
+unkind to his father. This was the mitigated translation of his first
+indignation. Moreover, he was happy at having suffered, and at suffering
+still. It was for his father's sake. The hardness of his life satisfied
+and pleased him. He said to himself with a sort of joy that--it was
+certainly the least he could do; that it was an expiation;--that, had
+it not been for that, he would have been punished in some other way and
+later on for his impious indifference towards his father, and such a
+father! that it would not have been just that his father should have all
+the suffering, and he none of it; and that, in any case, what were his
+toils and his destitution compared with the colonel's heroic life? that,
+in short, the only way for him to approach his father and resemble him,
+was to be brave in the face of indigence, as the other had been valiant
+before the enemy; and that that was, no doubt, what the colonel had
+meant to imply by the words: "He will be worthy of it." Words which
+Marius continued to wear, not on his breast, since the colonel's writing
+had disappeared, but in his heart.
+
+And then, on the day when his grandfather had turned him out of doors,
+he had been only a child, now he was a man. He felt it. Misery, we
+repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has
+this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole will towards
+effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration. Poverty instantly lays
+material life bare and renders it hideous; hence inexpressible bounds
+towards the ideal life. The wealthy young man has a hundred coarse and
+brilliant distractions, horse races, hunting, dogs, tobacco, gaming,
+good repasts, and all the rest of it; occupations for the baser side
+of the soul, at the expense of the loftier and more delicate sides.
+The poor young man wins his bread with difficulty; he eats; when he has
+eaten, he has nothing more but meditation. He goes to the spectacles
+which God furnishes gratis; he gazes at the sky, space, the stars,
+flowers, children, the humanity among which he is suffering, the
+creation amid which he beams. He gazes so much on humanity that he
+perceives its soul, he gazes upon creation to such an extent that he
+beholds God. He dreams, he feels himself great; he dreams on, and feels
+himself tender. From the egotism of the man who suffers he passes to the
+compassion of the man who meditates. An admirable sentiment breaks forth
+in him, forgetfulness of self and pity for all. As he thinks of the
+innumerable enjoyments which nature offers, gives, and lavishes to souls
+which stand open, and refuses to souls that are closed, he comes to
+pity, he the millionnaire of the mind, the millionnaire of money. All
+hatred departs from his heart, in proportion as light penetrates his
+spirit. And is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never
+miserable. The first young lad who comes to hand, however poor he may
+be, with his strength, his health, his rapid walk, his brilliant eyes,
+his warmly circulating blood, his black hair, his red lips, his white
+teeth, his pure breath, will always arouse the envy of an aged emperor.
+And then, every morning, he sets himself afresh to the task of earning
+his bread; and while his hands earn his bread, his dorsal column
+gains pride, his brain gathers ideas. His task finished, he returns to
+ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joys; he beholds his feet set
+in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement, in the nettles, sometimes
+in the mire; his head in the light. He is firm, serene, gentle, peaceful,
+attentive, serious, content with little, kindly; and he thanks God for
+having bestowed on him those two forms of riches which many a rich
+man lacks: work, which makes him free; and thought, which makes him
+dignified.
+
+This is what had happened with Marius. To tell the truth, he inclined a
+little too much to the side of contemplation. From the day when he had
+succeeded in earning his living with some approach to certainty, he had
+stopped, thinking it good to be poor, and retrenching time from his work
+to give to thought; that is to say, he sometimes passed entire days
+in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary, in the mute
+voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance. He had thus propounded
+the problem of his life: to toil as little as possible at material
+labor, in order to toil as much as possible at the labor which is
+impalpable; in other words, to bestow a few hours on real life, and to
+cast the rest to the infinite. As he believed that he lacked nothing, he
+did not perceive that contemplation, thus understood, ends by becoming
+one of the forms of idleness; that he was contenting himself with
+conquering the first necessities of life, and that he was resting from
+his labors too soon.
+
+It was evident that, for this energetic and enthusiastic nature, this
+could only be a transitory state, and that, at the first shock against
+the inevitable complications of destiny, Marius would awaken.
+
+In the meantime, although he was a lawyer, and whatever Father
+Gillenormand thought about the matter, he was not practising, he was
+not even pettifogging. Meditation had turned him aside from pleading. To
+haunt attorneys, to follow the court, to hunt up cases--what a bore! Why
+should he do it? He saw no reason for changing the manner of gaining his
+livelihood! The obscure and ill-paid publishing establishment had come
+to mean for him a sure source of work which did not involve too much
+labor, as we have explained, and which sufficed for his wants.
+
+One of the publishers for whom he worked, M. Magimel, I think, offered
+to take him into his own house, to lodge him well, to furnish him with
+regular occupation, and to give him fifteen hundred francs a year. To be
+well lodged! Fifteen hundred francs! No doubt. But renounce his liberty!
+Be on fixed wages! A sort of hired man of letters! According to Marius'
+opinion, if he accepted, his position would become both better and worse
+at the same time, he acquired comfort, and lost his dignity; it was a
+fine and complete unhappiness converted into a repulsive and ridiculous
+state of torture: something like the case of a blind man who should
+recover the sight of one eye. He refused.
+
+Marius dwelt in solitude. Owing to his taste for remaining outside of
+everything, and through having been too much alarmed, he had not entered
+decidedly into the group presided over by Enjolras. They had remained
+good friends; they were ready to assist each other on occasion in every
+possible way; but nothing more. Marius had two friends: one young,
+Courfeyrac; and one old, M. Mabeuf. He inclined more to the old man.
+In the first place, he owed to him the revolution which had taken
+place within him; to him he was indebted for having known and loved his
+father. "He operated on me for a cataract," he said.
+
+The churchwarden had certainly played a decisive part.
+
+It was not, however, that M. Mabeuf had been anything but the calm and
+impassive agent of Providence in this connection. He had enlightened
+Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle
+which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one.
+
+As for Marius' inward political revolution, M. Mabeuf was totally
+incapable of comprehending it, of willing or of directing it.
+
+As we shall see M. Mabeuf again, later on, a few words will not be
+superfluous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--M. MABEUF
+
+On the day when M. Mabeuf said to Marius: "Certainly I approve of
+political opinions," he expressed the real state of his mind. All
+political opinions were matters of indifference to him, and he approved
+them all, without distinction, provided they left him in peace, as the
+Greeks called the Furies "the beautiful, the good, the charming," the
+Eumenides. M. Mabeuf's political opinion consisted in a passionate love
+for plants, and, above all, for books. Like all the rest of the world,
+he possessed the termination in ist, without which no one could exist at
+that time, but he was neither a Royalist, a Bonapartist, a Chartist,
+an Orleanist, nor an Anarchist; he was a bouquinist, a collector of old
+books. He did not understand how men could busy themselves with
+hating each other because of silly stuff like the charter, democracy,
+legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc., when there were in the world
+all sorts of mosses, grasses, and shrubs which they might be looking at,
+and heaps of folios, and even of 32mos, which they might turn over. He
+took good care not to become useless; having books did not prevent his
+reading, being a botanist did not prevent his being a gardener. When
+he made Pontmercy's acquaintance, this sympathy had existed between the
+colonel and himself--that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for
+fruits. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seedling pears as savory
+as the pears of St. Germain; it is from one of his combinations,
+apparently, that the October Mirabelle, now celebrated and no less
+perfumed than the summer Mirabelle, owes its origin. He went to mass
+rather from gentleness than from piety, and because, as he loved the
+faces of men, but hated their noise, he found them assembled and silent
+only in church. Feeling that he must be something in the State, he had
+chosen the career of warden. However, he had never succeeded in loving
+any woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as much as an Elzevir.
+He had long passed sixty, when, one day, some one asked him: "Have you
+never been married?" "I have forgotten," said he. When it sometimes
+happened to him--and to whom does it not happen?--to say: "Oh! if I were
+only rich!" it was not when ogling a pretty girl, as was the case with
+Father Gillenormand, but when contemplating an old book. He lived alone
+with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty, and when he was asleep,
+his aged fingers, stiffened with rheumatism, lay crooked up in the folds
+of his sheets. He had composed and published a Flora of the Environs of
+Cauteretz, with colored plates, a work which enjoyed a tolerable
+measure of esteem and which sold well. People rang his bell, in the Rue
+Mesieres, two or three times a day, to ask for it. He drew as much as
+two thousand francs a year from it; this constituted nearly the whole of
+his fortune. Although poor, he had had the talent to form for himself,
+by dint of patience, privations, and time, a precious collection of rare
+copies of every sort. He never went out without a book under his arm,
+and he often returned with two. The sole decoration of the four rooms
+on the ground floor, which composed his lodgings, consisted of framed
+herbariums, and engravings of the old masters. The sight of a sword or
+a gun chilled his blood. He had never approached a cannon in his life,
+even at the Invalides. He had a passable stomach, a brother who was a
+cure, perfectly white hair, no teeth, either in his mouth or his mind, a
+trembling in every limb, a Picard accent, an infantile laugh, the air of
+an old sheep, and he was easily frightened. Add to this, that he had no
+other friendship, no other acquaintance among the living, than an old
+bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques, named Royal. His dream was to
+naturalize indigo in France.
+
+His servant was also a sort of innocent. The poor good old woman was a
+spinster. Sultan, her cat, which might have mewed Allegri's miserere in
+the Sixtine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed for the quantity
+of passion which existed in her. None of her dreams had ever proceeded
+as far as man. She had never been able to get further than her cat. Like
+him, she had a mustache. Her glory consisted in her caps, which were
+always white. She passed her time, on Sundays, after mass, in counting
+over the linen in her chest, and in spreading out on her bed the dresses
+in the piece which she bought and never had made up. She knew how to
+read. M. Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarque.
+
+M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and
+gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity. Youth combined
+with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without
+wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, with gunpowder,
+with marches and countermarches, and with all those prodigious battles
+in which his father had given and received such tremendous blows of the
+sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf, and M. Mabeuf talked to him of his hero
+from the point of view of flowers.
+
+His brother the cure died about 1830, and almost immediately, as when
+the night is drawing on, the whole horizon grew dark for M. Mabeuf. A
+notary's failure deprived him of the sum of ten thousand francs, which
+was all that he possessed in his brother's right and his own. The
+Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period of
+embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a Flora. The Flora
+of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped short. Weeks passed by without a
+single purchaser. Sometimes M. Mabeuf started at the sound of the bell.
+"Monsieur," said Mother Plutarque sadly, "it is the water-carrier."
+In short, one day, M. Mabeuf quitted the Rue Mesieres, abdicated the
+functions of warden, gave up Saint-Sulpice, sold not a part of his
+books, but of his prints,--that to which he was the least attached,--and
+installed himself in a little house on the Rue Montparnasse, where,
+however, he remained but one quarter for two reasons: in the first
+place, the ground floor and the garden cost three hundred francs, and he
+dared not spend more than two hundred francs on his rent; in the second,
+being near Faton's shooting-gallery, he could hear the pistol-shots;
+which was intolerable to him.
+
+He carried off his Flora, his copper-plates, his herbariums, his
+portfolios, and his books, and established himself near the Salpetriere,
+in a sort of thatched cottage of the village of Austerlitz, where,
+for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms and a garden enclosed by a
+hedge, and containing a well. He took advantage of this removal to sell
+off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his entrance into his new
+quarters, he was very gay, and drove the nails on which his engravings
+and herbariums were to hang, with his own hands, dug in his garden the
+rest of the day, and at night, perceiving that Mother Plutarque had a
+melancholy air, and was very thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder
+and said to her with a smile: "We have the indigo!"
+
+Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and Marius,
+were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a brawling
+name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to him.
+
+However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed in some
+bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both at once, are
+but slowly accessible to the things of actual life. Their own destiny
+is a far-off thing to them. There results from such concentration a
+passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning, would resemble
+philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away,
+and yet is hardly conscious of it one's self. It always ends, it is
+true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it
+seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on
+between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we look
+on at the game with indifference.
+
+It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his
+hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather
+puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular
+swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very
+long time, even after the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not
+stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost.
+
+M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive
+and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day, Mother
+Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room. She was
+reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus. To read aloud is
+to assure one's self of what one is reading. There are people who read
+very loud, and who have the appearance of giving themselves their word
+of honor as to what they are perusing.
+
+It was with this sort of energy that Mother Plutarque was reading the
+romance which she had in hand. M. Mabeuf heard her without listening to
+her.
+
+In the course of her reading, Mother Plutarque came to this phrase. It
+was a question of an officer of dragoons and a beauty:--
+
+"--The beauty pouted, and the dragoon--"
+
+Here she interrupted herself to wipe her glasses.
+
+"Bouddha and the Dragon," struck in M. Mabeuf in a low voice. "Yes, it
+is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of its cave,
+spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire. Many stars
+had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides, had the claws
+of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting the
+dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother Plutarque.
+There is no more beautiful legend in existence."
+
+And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious revery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR FOR MISERY
+
+Marius liked this candid old man who saw himself gradually falling into
+the clutches of indigence, and who came to feel astonishment, little
+by little, without, however, being made melancholy by it. Marius met
+Courfeyrac and sought out M. Mabeuf. Very rarely, however; twice a month
+at most.
+
+Marius' pleasure consisted in taking long walks alone on the outer
+boulevards, or in the Champs-de-Mars, or in the least frequented alleys
+of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in gazing at a market
+garden, the beds of lettuce, the chickens on the dung-heap, the horse
+turning the water-wheel. The passers-by stared at him in surprise, and
+some of them thought his attire suspicious and his mien sinister. He was
+only a poor young man dreaming in an objectless way.
+
+It was during one of his strolls that he had hit upon the Gorbeau house,
+and, tempted by its isolation and its cheapness, had taken up his abode
+there. He was known there only under the name of M. Marius.
+
+Some of his father's old generals or old comrades had invited him to go
+and see them, when they learned about him. Marius had not refused their
+invitations. They afforded opportunities of talking about his father.
+Thus he went from time to time, to Comte Pajol, to General Bellavesne,
+to General Fririon, to the Invalides. There was music and dancing there.
+On such evenings, Marius put on his new coat. But he never went to
+these evening parties or balls except on days when it was freezing cold,
+because he could not afford a carriage, and he did not wish to arrive
+with boots otherwise than like mirrors.
+
+He said sometimes, but without bitterness: "Men are so made that in a
+drawing-room you may be soiled everywhere except on your shoes. In order
+to insure a good reception there, only one irreproachable thing is asked
+of you; your conscience? No, your boots."
+
+All passions except those of the heart are dissipated by revery. Marius'
+political fevers vanished thus. The Revolution of 1830 assisted in the
+process, by satisfying and calming him. He remained the same, setting
+aside his fits of wrath. He still held the same opinions. Only, they had
+been tempered. To speak accurately, he had no longer any opinions, he
+had sympathies. To what party did he belong? To the party of humanity.
+Out of humanity he chose France; out of the Nation he chose the people;
+out of the people he chose the woman. It was to that point above all,
+that his pity was directed. Now he preferred an idea to a deed, a
+poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job more than an event like
+Marengo. And then, when, after a day spent in meditation, he returned
+in the evening through the boulevards, and caught a glimpse through
+the branches of the trees of the fathomless space beyond, the nameless
+gleams, the abyss, the shadow, the mystery, all that which is only human
+seemed very petty indeed to him.
+
+He thought that he had, and he really had, in fact, arrived at the truth
+of life and of human philosophy, and he had ended by gazing at nothing
+but heaven, the only thing which Truth can perceive from the bottom of
+her well.
+
+This did not prevent him from multiplying his plans, his combinations,
+his scaffoldings, his projects for the future. In this state of revery,
+an eye which could have cast a glance into Marius' interior would have
+been dazzled with the purity of that soul. In fact, had it been given to
+our eyes of the flesh to gaze into the consciences of others, we should
+be able to judge a man much more surely according to what he dreams,
+than according to what he thinks. There is will in thought, there is
+none in dreams. Revery, which is utterly spontaneous, takes and keeps,
+even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our spirit. Nothing
+proceeds more directly and more sincerely from the very depth of our
+soul, than our unpremeditated and boundless aspirations towards
+the splendors of destiny. In these aspirations, much more than in
+deliberate, rational coordinated ideas, is the real character of a man
+to be found. Our chimeras are the things which the most resemble us.
+Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance
+with his nature.
+
+Towards the middle of this year 1831, the old woman who waited on Marius
+told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family, had been
+turned out of doors. Marius, who passed nearly the whole of his days out
+of the house, hardly knew that he had any neighbors.
+
+"Why are they turned out?" he asked.
+
+"Because they do not pay their rent; they owe for two quarters."
+
+"How much is it?"
+
+"Twenty francs," said the old woman.
+
+Marius had thirty francs saved up in a drawer.
+
+"Here," he said to the old woman, "take these twenty-five francs. Pay
+for the poor people and give them five francs, and do not tell them that
+it was I."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE SUBSTITUTE
+
+It chanced that the regiment to which Lieutenant Theodule belonged came
+to perform garrison duty in Paris. This inspired Aunt Gillenormand with
+a second idea. She had, on the first occasion, hit upon the plan of
+having Marius spied upon by Theodule; now she plotted to have Theodule
+take Marius' place.
+
+At all events and in case the grandfather should feel the vague need of
+a young face in the house,--these rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to
+ruin,--it was expedient to find another Marius. "Take it as a simple
+erratum," she thought, "such as one sees in books. For Marius, read
+Theodule."
+
+A grandnephew is almost the same as a grandson; in default of a lawyer
+one takes a lancer.
+
+One morning, when M. Gillenormand was about to read something in the
+Quotidienne, his daughter entered and said to him in her sweetest voice;
+for the question concerned her favorite:--
+
+"Father, Theodule is coming to present his respects to you this
+morning."
+
+"Who's Theodule?"
+
+"Your grandnephew."
+
+"Ah!" said the grandfather.
+
+Then he went back to his reading, thought no more of his grandnephew,
+who was merely some Theodule or other, and soon flew into a rage, which
+almost always happened when he read. The "sheet" which he held, although
+Royalist, of course, announced for the following day, without any
+softening phrases, one of these little events which were of daily
+occurrence at that date in Paris: "That the students of the schools
+of law and medicine were to assemble on the Place du Pantheon, at
+midday,--to deliberate." The discussion concerned one of the questions
+of the moment, the artillery of the National Guard, and a conflict
+between the Minister of War and "the citizen's militia," on the subject
+of the cannon parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were
+to "deliberate" over this. It did not take much more than this to swell
+M. Gillenormand's rage.
+
+He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who would probably go with
+the rest, to "deliberate, at midday, on the Place du Pantheon."
+
+As he was indulging in this painful dream, Lieutenant Theodule entered
+clad in plain clothes as a bourgeois, which was clever of him, and
+was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The lancer had
+reasoned as follows: "The old druid has not sunk all his money in a life
+pension. It is well to disguise one's self as a civilian from time to
+time."
+
+Mademoiselle Gillenormand said aloud to her father:--
+
+"Theodule, your grandnephew."
+
+And in a low voice to the lieutenant:--
+
+"Approve of everything."
+
+And she withdrew.
+
+The lieutenant, who was but little accustomed to such venerable
+encounters, stammered with some timidity: "Good day, uncle,"--and made
+a salute composed of the involuntary and mechanical outline of the
+military salute finished off as a bourgeois salute.
+
+"Ah! so it's you; that is well, sit down," said the old gentleman.
+
+That said, he totally forgot the lancer.
+
+Theodule seated himself, and M. Gillenormand rose.
+
+M. Gillenormand began to pace back and forth, his hands in his pockets,
+talking aloud, and twitching, with his irritated old fingers, at the two
+watches which he wore in his two fobs.
+
+"That pack of brats! they convene on the Place du Pantheon! by my life!
+urchins who were with their nurses but yesterday! If one were to squeeze
+their noses, milk would burst out. And they deliberate to-morrow, at
+midday. What are we coming to? What are we coming to? It is clear that
+we are making for the abyss. That is what the descamisados have brought
+us to! To deliberate on the citizen artillery! To go and jabber in the
+open air over the jibes of the National Guard! And with whom are they to
+meet there? Just see whither Jacobinism leads. I will bet anything you
+like, a million against a counter, that there will be no one there but
+returned convicts and released galley-slaves. The Republicans and the
+galley-slaves,--they form but one nose and one handkerchief. Carnot used
+to say: 'Where would you have me go, traitor?' Fouche replied: 'Wherever
+you please, imbecile!' That's what the Republicans are like."
+
+"That is true," said Theodule.
+
+M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Theodule, and went on:--
+
+"When one reflects that that scoundrel was so vile as to turn carbonaro!
+Why did you leave my house? To go and become a Republican! Pssst! In
+the first place, the people want none of your republic, they have common
+sense, they know well that there always have been kings, and that there
+always will be; they know well that the people are only the people,
+after all, they make sport of it, of your republic--do you understand,
+idiot? Is it not a horrible caprice? To fall in love with Pere Duchesne,
+to make sheep's-eyes at the guillotine, to sing romances, and play on
+the guitar under the balcony of '93--it's enough to make one spit on all
+these young fellows, such fools are they! They are all alike. Not one
+escapes. It suffices for them to breathe the air which blows through the
+street to lose their senses. The nineteenth century is poison. The
+first scamp that happens along lets his beard grow like a goat's,
+thinks himself a real scoundrel, and abandons his old relatives. He's
+a Republican, he's a romantic. What does that mean, romantic? Do me the
+favor to tell me what it is. All possible follies. A year ago, they ran
+to Hernani. Now, I just ask you, Hernani! antitheses! abominations
+which are not even written in French! And then, they have cannons in the
+courtyard of the Louvre. Such are the rascalities of this age!"
+
+"You are right, uncle," said Theodule.
+
+M. Gillenormand resumed:--
+
+"Cannons in the courtyard of the Museum! For what purpose? Do you want
+to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvedere? What have those cartridges
+to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh! the young men of the present day are
+all blackguards! What a pretty creature is their Benjamin Constant! And
+those who are not rascals are simpletons! They do all they can to make
+themselves ugly, they are badly dressed, they are afraid of women, in
+the presence of petticoats they have a mendicant air which sets the
+girls into fits of laughter; on my word of honor, one would say the poor
+creatures were ashamed of love. They are deformed, and they complete
+themselves by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and
+Potier, they have sack coats, stablemen's waistcoats, shirts of coarse
+linen, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their
+rigmarole resembles their plumage. One might make use of their jargon
+to put new soles on their old shoes. And all this awkward batch of brats
+has political opinions, if you please. Political opinions should be
+strictly forbidden. They fabricate systems, they recast society, they
+demolish the monarchy, they fling all laws to the earth, they put the
+attic in the cellar's place and my porter in the place of the King, they
+turn Europe topsy-turvy, they reconstruct the world, and all their love
+affairs consist in staring slily at the ankles of the laundresses as
+these women climb into their carts. Ah! Marius! Ah! you blackguard! to
+go and vociferate on the public place! to discuss, to debate, to take
+measures! They call that measures, just God! Disorder humbles itself
+and becomes silly. I have seen chaos, I now see a mess. Students
+deliberating on the National Guard,--such a thing could not be seen
+among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches! Savages who go naked, with their
+noddles dressed like a shuttlecock, with a club in their paws, are less
+of brutes than those bachelors of arts! The four-penny monkeys! And they
+set up for judges! Those creatures deliberate and ratiocinate! The
+end of the world is come! This is plainly the end of this miserable
+terraqueous globe! A final hiccough was required, and France has emitted
+it. Deliberate, my rascals! Such things will happen so long as they go
+and read the newspapers under the arcades of the Odeon. That costs them
+a sou, and their good sense, and their intelligence, and their heart and
+their soul, and their wits. They emerge thence, and decamp from their
+families. All newspapers are pests; all, even the Drapeau Blanc! At
+bottom, Martainville was a Jacobin. Ah! just Heaven! you may boast of
+having driven your grandfather to despair, that you may!"
+
+"That is evident," said Theodule.
+
+And profiting by the fact that M. Gillenormand was taking breath, the
+lancer added in a magisterial manner:--
+
+"There should be no other newspaper than the Moniteur, and no other book
+than the Annuaire Militaire."
+
+M. Gillenormand continued:--
+
+"It is like their Sieyes! A regicide ending in a senator; for that is
+the way they always end. They give themselves a scar with the address
+of thou as citizens, in order to get themselves called, eventually,
+Monsieur le Comte. Monsieur le Comte as big as my arm, assassins of
+September. The philosopher Sieyes! I will do myself the justice to say,
+that I have never had any better opinion of the philosophies of all
+those philosophers, than of the spectacles of the grimacer of Tivoli!
+One day I saw the Senators cross the Quai Malplaquet in mantles of
+violet velvet sown with bees, with hats a la Henri IV. They were
+hideous. One would have pronounced them monkeys from the tiger's court.
+Citizens, I declare to you, that your progress is madness, that your
+humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your republic
+is a monster, that your young and virgin France comes from the brothel,
+and I maintain it against all, whoever you may be, whether journalists,
+economists, legists, or even were you better judges of liberty, of
+equality, and fraternity than the knife of the guillotine! And that I
+announce to you, my fine fellows!"
+
+"Parbleu!" cried the lieutenant, "that is wonderfully true."
+
+M. Gillenormand paused in a gesture which he had begun, wheeled round,
+stared Lancer Theodule intently in the eyes, and said to him:--
+
+"You are a fool."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE SOBRIQUET: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES
+
+Marius was, at this epoch, a handsome young man, of medium stature,
+with thick and intensely black hair, a lofty and intelligent brow,
+well-opened and passionate nostrils, an air of calmness and sincerity,
+and with something indescribably proud, thoughtful, and innocent over
+his whole countenance. His profile, all of whose lines were rounded,
+without thereby losing their firmness, had a certain Germanic sweetness,
+which has made its way into the French physiognomy by way of Alsace
+and Lorraine, and that complete absence of angles which rendered
+the Sicambres so easily recognizable among the Romans, and which
+distinguishes the leonine from the aquiline race. He was at that period
+of life when the mind of men who think is composed, in nearly equal
+parts, of depth and ingenuousness. A grave situation being given, he
+had all that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he
+might be sublime. His manners were reserved, cold, polished, not very
+genial. As his mouth was charming, his lips the reddest, and his teeth
+the whitest in the world, his smile corrected the severity of his face,
+as a whole. At certain moments, that pure brow and that voluptuous smile
+presented a singular contrast. His eyes were small, but his glance was
+large.
+
+At the period of his most abject misery, he had observed that young
+girls turned round when he passed by, and he fled or hid, with death in
+his soul. He thought that they were staring at him because of his old
+clothes, and that they were laughing at them; the fact is, that they
+stared at him because of his grace, and that they dreamed of him.
+
+This mute misunderstanding between him and the pretty passers-by had
+made him shy. He chose none of them for the excellent reason that
+he fled from all of them. He lived thus indefinitely,--stupidly, as
+Courfeyrac said.
+
+Courfeyrac also said to him: "Do not aspire to be venerable" [they
+called each other thou; it is the tendency of youthful friendships to
+slip into this mode of address]. "Let me give you a piece of advice,
+my dear fellow. Don't read so many books, and look a little more at the
+lasses. The jades have some good points about them, O Marius! By dint of
+fleeing and blushing, you will become brutalized."
+
+On other occasions, Courfeyrac encountered him and said:--"Good morning,
+Monsieur l'Abbe!"
+
+When Courfeyrac had addressed to him some remark of this nature, Marius
+avoided women, both young and old, more than ever for a week to come,
+and he avoided Courfeyrac to boot.
+
+Nevertheless, there existed in all the immensity of creation, two women
+whom Marius did not flee, and to whom he paid no attention whatever. In
+truth, he would have been very much amazed if he had been informed
+that they were women. One was the bearded old woman who swept out his
+chamber, and caused Courfeyrac to say: "Seeing that his servant woman
+wears his beard, Marius does not wear his own beard." The other was a
+sort of little girl whom he saw very often, and whom he never looked at.
+
+For more than a year, Marius had noticed in one of the walks of the
+Luxembourg, the one which skirts the parapet of the Pepiniere, a man
+and a very young girl, who were almost always seated side by side on the
+same bench, at the most solitary end of the alley, on the Rue de l'Ouest
+side. Every time that that chance which meddles with the strolls of
+persons whose gaze is turned inwards, led Marius to that walk,--and it
+was nearly every day,--he found this couple there. The man appeared to
+be about sixty years of age; he seemed sad and serious; his whole person
+presented the robust and weary aspect peculiar to military men who have
+retired from the service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have
+said: "He is an ex-officer." He had a kindly but unapproachable air,
+and he never let his glance linger on the eyes of any one. He wore
+blue trousers, a blue frock coat and a broad-brimmed hat, which always
+appeared to be new, a black cravat, a quaker shirt, that is to say, it
+was dazzlingly white, but of coarse linen. A grisette who passed near
+him one day, said: "Here's a very tidy widower." His hair was very
+white.
+
+The first time that the young girl who accompanied him came and seated
+herself on the bench which they seemed to have adopted, she was a sort
+of child thirteen or fourteen years of age, so thin as to be almost
+homely, awkward, insignificant, and with a possible promise of
+handsome eyes. Only, they were always raised with a sort of displeasing
+assurance. Her dress was both aged and childish, like the dress of the
+scholars in a convent; it consisted of a badly cut gown of black merino.
+They had the air of being father and daughter.
+
+Marius scanned this old man, who was not yet aged, and this little
+girl, who was not yet a person, for a few days, and thereafter paid no
+attention to them. They, on their side, did not appear even to see him.
+They conversed together with a peaceful and indifferent air. The girl
+chattered incessantly and merrily. The old man talked but little, and,
+at times, he fixed on her eyes overflowing with an ineffable paternity.
+
+Marius had acquired the mechanical habit of strolling in that walk. He
+invariably found them there.
+
+This is the way things went:--
+
+Marius liked to arrive by the end of the alley which was furthest from
+their bench; he walked the whole length of the alley, passed in front
+of them, then returned to the extremity whence he had come, and began
+again. This he did five or six times in the course of his promenade,
+and the promenade was taken five or six times a week, without its
+having occurred to him or to these people to exchange a greeting. That
+personage, and that young girl, although they appeared,--and perhaps
+because they appeared,--to shun all glances, had, naturally, caused some
+attention on the part of the five or six students who strolled along
+the Pepiniere from time to time; the studious after their lectures,
+the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was among the
+last, had observed them several times, but, finding the girl homely, he
+had speedily and carefully kept out of the way. He had fled, discharging
+at them a sobriquet, like a Parthian dart. Impressed solely with
+the child's gown and the old man's hair, he had dubbed the daughter
+Mademoiselle Lanoire, and the father, Monsieur Leblanc, so that as no
+one knew them under any other title, this nickname became a law in the
+default of any other name. The students said: "Ah! Monsieur Leblanc is
+on his bench." And Marius, like the rest, had found it convenient to
+call this unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc.
+
+We shall follow their example, and we shall say M. Leblanc, in order to
+facilitate this tale.
+
+So Marius saw them nearly every day, at the same hour, during the first
+year. He found the man to his taste, but the girl insipid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--LUX FACTA EST
+
+During the second year, precisely at the point in this history which the
+reader has now reached, it chanced that this habit of the Luxembourg was
+interrupted, without Marius himself being quite aware why, and nearly
+six months elapsed, during which he did not set foot in the alley. One
+day, at last, he returned thither once more; it was a serene summer
+morning, and Marius was in joyous mood, as one is when the weather is
+fine. It seemed to him that he had in his heart all the songs of the
+birds that he was listening to, and all the bits of blue sky of which he
+caught glimpses through the leaves of the trees.
+
+He went straight to "his alley," and when he reached the end of it he
+perceived, still on the same bench, that well-known couple. Only, when
+he approached, it certainly was the same man; but it seemed to him that
+it was no longer the same girl. The person whom he now beheld was a tall
+and beautiful creature, possessed of all the most charming lines of a
+woman at the precise moment when they are still combined with all the
+most ingenuous graces of the child; a pure and fugitive moment, which
+can be expressed only by these two words,--"fifteen years." She had
+wonderful brown hair, shaded with threads of gold, a brow that seemed
+made of marble, cheeks that seemed made of rose-leaf, a pale flush,
+an agitated whiteness, an exquisite mouth, whence smiles darted like
+sunbeams, and words like music, a head such as Raphael would have given
+to Mary, set upon a neck that Jean Goujon would have attributed to a
+Venus. And, in order that nothing might be lacking to this bewitching
+face, her nose was not handsome--it was pretty; neither straight nor
+curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose, that is
+to say, spiritual, delicate, irregular, pure,--which drives painters to
+despair, and charms poets.
+
+When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes, which were
+constantly lowered. He saw only her long chestnut lashes, permeated with
+shadow and modesty.
+
+This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling as she listened
+to what the white-haired old man was saying to her, and nothing could
+be more fascinating than that fresh smile, combined with those drooping
+eyes.
+
+For a moment, Marius thought that she was another daughter of the same
+man, a sister of the former, no doubt. But when the invariable habit of
+his stroll brought him, for the second time, near the bench, and he had
+examined her attentively, he recognized her as the same. In six months
+the little girl had become a young maiden; that was all. Nothing is more
+frequent than this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls blossom out
+in the twinkling of an eye, and become roses all at once. One left
+them children but yesterday; today, one finds them disquieting to the
+feelings.
+
+This child had not only grown, she had become idealized. As three days
+in April suffice to cover certain trees with flowers, six months had
+sufficed to clothe her with beauty. Her April had arrived.
+
+One sometimes sees people, who, poor and mean, seem to wake up, pass
+suddenly from indigence to luxury, indulge in expenditures of all sorts,
+and become dazzling, prodigal, magnificent, all of a sudden. That is
+the result of having pocketed an income; a note fell due yesterday. The
+young girl had received her quarterly income.
+
+And then, she was no longer the school-girl with her felt hat, her
+merino gown, her scholar's shoes, and red hands; taste had come to her
+with beauty; she was a well-dressed person, clad with a sort of rich
+and simple elegance, and without affectation. She wore a dress of black
+damask, a cape of the same material, and a bonnet of white crape. Her
+white gloves displayed the delicacy of the hand which toyed with the
+carved, Chinese ivory handle of a parasol, and her silken shoe outlined
+the smallness of her foot. When one passed near her, her whole toilette
+exhaled a youthful and penetrating perfume.
+
+As for the man, he was the same as usual.
+
+The second time that Marius approached her, the young girl raised her
+eyelids; her eyes were of a deep, celestial blue, but in that veiled
+azure, there was, as yet, nothing but the glance of a child. She looked
+at Marius indifferently, as she would have stared at the brat running
+beneath the sycamores, or the marble vase which cast a shadow on the
+bench, and Marius, on his side, continued his promenade, and thought
+about something else.
+
+He passed near the bench where the young girl sat, five or six times,
+but without even turning his eyes in her direction.
+
+On the following days, he returned, as was his wont, to the Luxembourg;
+as usual, he found there "the father and daughter;" but he paid no
+further attention to them. He thought no more about the girl now that
+she was beautiful than he had when she was homely. He passed very near
+the bench where she sat, because such was his habit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--EFFECT OF THE SPRING
+
+One day, the air was warm, the Luxembourg was inundated with light
+and shade, the sky was as pure as though the angels had washed it that
+morning, the sparrows were giving vent to little twitters in the depths
+of the chestnut-trees. Marius had thrown open his whole soul to nature,
+he was not thinking of anything, he simply lived and breathed, he passed
+near the bench, the young girl raised her eyes to him, the two glances
+met.
+
+What was there in the young girl's glance on this occasion? Marius could
+not have told. There was nothing and there was everything. It was a
+strange flash.
+
+She dropped her eyes, and he pursued his way.
+
+What he had just seen was no longer the ingenuous and simple eye of a
+child; it was a mysterious gulf which had half opened, then abruptly
+closed again.
+
+There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him
+who chances to be there!
+
+That first gaze of a soul which does not, as yet, know itself, is
+like the dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant
+and strange. Nothing can give any idea of the dangerous charm of that
+unexpected gleam, which flashes suddenly and vaguely forth from adorable
+shadows, and which is composed of all the innocence of the present, and
+of all the passion of the future. It is a sort of undecided tenderness
+which reveals itself by chance, and which waits. It is a snare which
+the innocent maiden sets unknown to herself, and in which she captures
+hearts without either wishing or knowing it. It is a virgin looking like
+a woman.
+
+It is rare that a profound revery does not spring from that glance,
+where it falls. All purities and all candors meet in that celestial
+and fatal gleam which, more than all the best-planned tender glances of
+coquettes, possesses the magic power of causing the sudden blossoming,
+in the depths of the soul, of that sombre flower, impregnated with
+perfume and with poison, which is called love.
+
+That evening, on his return to his garret, Marius cast his eyes over
+his garments, and perceived, for the first time, that he had been so
+slovenly, indecorous, and inconceivably stupid as to go for his walk in
+the Luxembourg with his "every-day clothes," that is to say, with a
+hat battered near the band, coarse carter's boots, black trousers
+which showed white at the knees, and a black coat which was pale at the
+elbows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY
+
+On the following day, at the accustomed hour, Marius drew from his
+wardrobe his new coat, his new trousers, his new hat, and his new
+boots; he clothed himself in this complete panoply, put on his gloves, a
+tremendous luxury, and set off for the Luxembourg.
+
+On the way thither, he encountered Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see
+him. Courfeyrac, on his return home, said to his friends:--
+
+"I have just met Marius' new hat and new coat, with Marius inside
+them. He was going to pass an examination, no doubt. He looked utterly
+stupid."
+
+On arriving at the Luxembourg, Marius made the tour of the fountain
+basin, and stared at the swans; then he remained for a long time in
+contemplation before a statue whose head was perfectly black with mould,
+and one of whose hips was missing. Near the basin there was a bourgeois
+forty years of age, with a prominent stomach, who was holding by the
+hand a little urchin of five, and saying to him: "Shun excess, my son,
+keep at an equal distance from despotism and from anarchy." Marius
+listened to this bourgeois. Then he made the circuit of the basin once
+more. At last he directed his course towards "his alley," slowly, and as
+if with regret. One would have said that he was both forced to go there
+and withheld from doing so. He did not perceive it himself, and thought
+that he was doing as he always did.
+
+On turning into the walk, he saw M. Leblanc and the young girl at the
+other end, "on their bench." He buttoned his coat up to the very top,
+pulled it down on his body so that there might be no wrinkles, examined,
+with a certain complaisance, the lustrous gleams of his trousers, and
+marched on the bench. This march savored of an attack, and certainly
+of a desire for conquest. So I say that he marched on the bench, as I
+should say: "Hannibal marched on Rome."
+
+However, all his movements were purely mechanical, and he had
+interrupted none of the habitual preoccupations of his mind and labors.
+At that moment, he was thinking that the Manuel du Baccalaureat was
+a stupid book, and that it must have been drawn up by rare idiots, to
+allow of three tragedies of Racine and only one comedy of Moliere being
+analyzed therein as masterpieces of the human mind. There was a piercing
+whistling going on in his ears. As he approached the bench, he held
+fast to the folds in his coat, and fixed his eyes on the young girl. It
+seemed to him that she filled the entire extremity of the alley with a
+vague blue light.
+
+In proportion as he drew near, his pace slackened more and more. On
+arriving at some little distance from the bench, and long before he had
+reached the end of the walk, he halted, and could not explain to himself
+why he retraced his steps. He did not even say to himself that he would
+not go as far as the end. It was only with difficulty that the young
+girl could have perceived him in the distance and noted his fine
+appearance in his new clothes. Nevertheless, he held himself very erect,
+in case any one should be looking at him from behind.
+
+He attained the opposite end, then came back, and this time he
+approached a little nearer to the bench. He even got to within three
+intervals of trees, but there he felt an indescribable impossibility of
+proceeding further, and he hesitated. He thought he saw the young girl's
+face bending towards him. But he exerted a manly and violent effort,
+subdued his hesitation, and walked straight ahead. A few seconds later,
+he rushed in front of the bench, erect and firm, reddening to the very
+ears, without daring to cast a glance either to the right or to the
+left, with his hand thrust into his coat like a statesman. At the moment
+when he passed,--under the cannon of the place,--he felt his heart beat
+wildly. As on the preceding day, she wore her damask gown and her crape
+bonnet. He heard an ineffable voice, which must have been "her voice."
+She was talking tranquilly. She was very pretty. He felt it, although he
+made no attempt to see her. "She could not, however," he thought, "help
+feeling esteem and consideration for me, if she only knew that I am
+the veritable author of the dissertation on Marcos Obregon de la Ronde,
+which M. Francois de Neufchateau put, as though it were his own, at the
+head of his edition of Gil Blas." He went beyond the bench as far as the
+extremity of the walk, which was very near, then turned on his heel and
+passed once more in front of the lovely girl. This time, he was very
+pale. Moreover, all his emotions were disagreeable. As he went further
+from the bench and the young girl, and while his back was turned to her,
+he fancied that she was gazing after him, and that made him stumble.
+
+He did not attempt to approach the bench again; he halted near the
+middle of the walk, and there, a thing which he never did, he sat down,
+and reflecting in the most profoundly indistinct depths of his spirit,
+that after all, it was hard that persons whose white bonnet and black
+gown he admired should be absolutely insensible to his splendid trousers
+and his new coat.
+
+At the expiration of a quarter of an hour, he rose, as though he were
+on the point of again beginning his march towards that bench which was
+surrounded by an aureole. But he remained standing there, motionless.
+For the first time in fifteen months, he said to himself that that
+gentleman who sat there every day with his daughter, had, on his side,
+noticed him, and probably considered his assiduity singular.
+
+For the first time, also, he was conscious of some irreverence in
+designating that stranger, even in his secret thoughts, by the sobriquet
+of M. le Blanc.
+
+He stood thus for several minutes, with drooping head, tracing figures
+in the sand, with the cane which he held in his hand.
+
+Then he turned abruptly in the direction opposite to the bench, to M.
+Leblanc and his daughter, and went home.
+
+That day he forgot to dine. At eight o'clock in the evening he perceived
+this fact, and as it was too late to go down to the Rue Saint-Jacques,
+he said: "Never mind!" and ate a bit of bread.
+
+He did not go to bed until he had brushed his coat and folded it up with
+great care.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--DIVRS CLAPS OF THUNDER FALL ON MA'AM BOUGON
+
+On the following day, Ma'am Bougon, as Courfeyrac styled the old
+portress-principal-tenant, housekeeper of the Gorbeau hovel, Ma'am
+Bougon, whose name was, in reality, Madame Burgon, as we have found
+out, but this iconoclast, Courfeyrac, respected nothing,--Ma'am Bougon
+observed, with stupefaction, that M. Marius was going out again in his
+new coat.
+
+He went to the Luxembourg again, but he did not proceed further than his
+bench midway of the alley. He seated himself there, as on the preceding
+day, surveying from a distance, and clearly making out, the white
+bonnet, the black dress, and above all, that blue light. He did not stir
+from it, and only went home when the gates of the Luxembourg closed. He
+did not see M. Leblanc and his daughter retire. He concluded that they
+had quitted the garden by the gate on the Rue de l'Ouest. Later on,
+several weeks afterwards, when he came to think it over, he could never
+recall where he had dined that evening.
+
+On the following day, which was the third, Ma'am Bougon was
+thunderstruck. Marius went out in his new coat. "Three days in
+succession!" she exclaimed.
+
+She tried to follow him, but Marius walked briskly, and with immense
+strides; it was a hippopotamus undertaking the pursuit of a chamois.
+She lost sight of him in two minutes, and returned breathless,
+three-quarters choked with asthma, and furious. "If there is any sense,"
+she growled, "in putting on one's best clothes every day, and making
+people run like this!"
+
+Marius betook himself to the Luxembourg.
+
+The young girl was there with M. Leblanc. Marius approached as near as
+he could, pretending to be busy reading a book, but he halted afar off,
+then returned and seated himself on his bench, where he spent four hours
+in watching the house-sparrows who were skipping about the walk, and who
+produced on him the impression that they were making sport of him.
+
+A fortnight passed thus. Marius went to the Luxembourg no longer for the
+sake of strolling there, but to seat himself always in the same spot,
+and that without knowing why. Once arrived there, he did not stir.
+He put on his new coat every morning, for the purpose of not showing
+himself, and he began all over again on the morrow.
+
+She was decidedly a marvellous beauty. The only remark approaching a
+criticism, that could be made, was, that the contradiction between
+her gaze, which was melancholy, and her smile, which was merry, gave
+a rather wild effect to her face, which sometimes caused this sweet
+countenance to become strange without ceasing to be charming.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--TAKEN PRISONER
+
+On one of the last days of the second week, Marius was seated on his
+bench, as usual, holding in his hand an open book, of which he had not
+turned a page for the last two hours. All at once he started. An event
+was taking place at the other extremity of the walk. Leblanc and his
+daughter had just left their seat, and the daughter had taken her
+father's arm, and both were advancing slowly, towards the middle of the
+alley where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then opened it again,
+then forced himself to read; he trembled; the aureole was coming
+straight towards him. "Ah! good Heavens!" thought he, "I shall not have
+time to strike an attitude." Still the white-haired man and the girl
+advanced. It seemed to him that this lasted for a century, and that it
+was but a second. "What are they coming in this direction for?" he asked
+himself. "What! She will pass here? Her feet will tread this sand, this
+walk, two paces from me?" He was utterly upset, he would have liked to
+be very handsome, he would have liked to own the cross. He heard the
+soft and measured sound of their approaching footsteps. He imagined that
+M. Leblanc was darting angry glances at him. "Is that gentleman going to
+address me?" he thought to himself. He dropped his head; when he raised
+it again, they were very near him. The young girl passed, and as she
+passed, she glanced at him. She gazed steadily at him, with a pensive
+sweetness which thrilled Marius from head to foot. It seemed to him
+that she was reproaching him for having allowed so long a time to elapse
+without coming as far as her, and that she was saying to him: "I am
+coming myself." Marius was dazzled by those eyes fraught with rays and
+abysses.
+
+He felt his brain on fire. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how
+she had looked at him! She appeared to him more beautiful than he had
+ever seen her yet. Beautiful with a beauty which was wholly feminine and
+angelic, with a complete beauty which would have made Petrarch sing and
+Dante kneel. It seemed to him that he was floating free in the azure
+heavens. At the same time, he was horribly vexed because there was dust
+on his boots.
+
+He thought he felt sure that she had looked at his boots too.
+
+He followed her with his eyes until she disappeared. Then he started
+up and walked about the Luxembourg garden like a madman. It is possible
+that, at times, he laughed to himself and talked aloud. He was so dreamy
+when he came near the children's nurses, that each one of them thought
+him in love with her.
+
+He quitted the Luxembourg, hoping to find her again in the street.
+
+He encountered Courfeyrac under the arcades of the Odeon, and said to
+him: "Come and dine with me." They went off to Rousseau's and spent
+six francs. Marius ate like an ogre. He gave the waiter six sous. At
+dessert, he said to Courfeyrac. "Have you read the paper? What a fine
+discourse Audry de Puyraveau delivered!"
+
+He was desperately in love.
+
+After dinner, he said to Courfeyrac: "I will treat you to the play."
+They went to the Porte-Sainte-Martin to see Frederick in l'Auberge des
+Adrets. Marius was enormously amused.
+
+At the same time, he had a redoubled attack of shyness. On emerging
+from the theatre, he refused to look at the garter of a modiste who was
+stepping across a gutter, and Courfeyrac, who said: "I should like to
+put that woman in my collection," almost horrified him.
+
+Courfeyrac invited him to breakfast at the Cafe Voltaire on the
+following morning. Marius went thither, and ate even more than on the
+preceding evening. He was very thoughtful and very merry. One would
+have said that he was taking advantage of every occasion to laugh
+uproariously. He tenderly embraced some man or other from the provinces,
+who was presented to him. A circle of students formed round the table,
+and they spoke of the nonsense paid for by the State which was uttered
+from the rostrum in the Sorbonne, then the conversation fell upon the
+faults and omissions in Guicherat's dictionaries and grammars. Marius
+interrupted the discussion to exclaim: "But it is very agreeable, all
+the same to have the cross!"
+
+"That's queer!" whispered Courfeyrac to Jean Prouvaire.
+
+"No," responded Prouvaire, "that's serious."
+
+It was serious; in fact, Marius had reached that first violent and
+charming hour with which grand passions begin.
+
+A glance had wrought all this.
+
+When the mine is charged, when the conflagration is ready, nothing is
+more simple. A glance is a spark.
+
+It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His fate was entering
+the unknown.
+
+The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are
+tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every
+day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A
+moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come,
+dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is
+over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has
+caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought
+which was fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you.
+You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious
+forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human
+succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from
+agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune,
+your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power
+of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this
+terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured
+by passion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER U DELIVERED OVER TO CONJECTURES
+
+Isolation, detachment from everything, pride, independence, the taste
+of nature, the absence of daily and material activity, the life within
+himself, the secret conflicts of chastity, a benevolent ecstasy towards
+all creation, had prepared Marius for this possession which is called
+passion. His worship of his father had gradually become a religion,
+and, like all religions, it had retreated to the depths of his soul.
+Something was required in the foreground. Love came.
+
+A full month elapsed, during which Marius went every day to the
+Luxembourg. When the hour arrived, nothing could hold him back.--"He
+is on duty," said Courfeyrac. Marius lived in a state of delight. It is
+certain that the young girl did look at him.
+
+He had finally grown bold, and approached the bench. Still, he did not
+pass in front of it any more, in obedience to the instinct of timidity
+and to the instinct of prudence common to lovers. He considered it
+better not to attract "the attention of the father." He combined his
+stations behind the trees and the pedestals of the statues with a
+profound diplomacy, so that he might be seen as much as possible by the
+young girl and as little as possible by the old gentleman. Sometimes, he
+remained motionless by the half-hour together in the shade of a Leonidas
+or a Spartacus, holding in his hand a book, above which his eyes, gently
+raised, sought the beautiful girl, and she, on her side, turned her
+charming profile towards him with a vague smile. While conversing in the
+most natural and tranquil manner in the world with the white-haired man,
+she bent upon Marius all the reveries of a virginal and passionate eye.
+Ancient and time-honored manoeuvre which Eve understood from the very
+first day of the world, and which every woman understands from the very
+first day of her life! her mouth replied to one, and her glance replied
+to another.
+
+It must be supposed, that M. Leblanc finally noticed something, for
+often, when Marius arrived, he rose and began to walk about. He had
+abandoned their accustomed place and had adopted the bench by the
+Gladiator, near the other end of the walk, as though with the object
+of seeing whether Marius would pursue them thither. Marius did not
+understand, and committed this error. "The father" began to grow
+inexact, and no longer brought "his daughter" every day. Sometimes, he
+came alone. Then Marius did not stay. Another blunder.
+
+Marius paid no heed to these symptoms. From the phase of timidity, he
+had passed, by a natural and fatal progress, to the phase of blindness.
+His love increased. He dreamed of it every night. And then, an
+unexpected bliss had happened to him, oil on the fire, a redoubling of
+the shadows over his eyes. One evening, at dusk, he had found, on
+the bench which "M. Leblanc and his daughter" had just quitted, a
+handkerchief, a very simple handkerchief, without embroidery, but white,
+and fine, and which seemed to him to exhale ineffable perfume. He seized
+it with rapture. This handkerchief was marked with the letters U. F.
+Marius knew nothing about this beautiful child,--neither her family
+name, her Christian name nor her abode; these two letters were the first
+thing of her that he had gained possession of, adorable initials, upon
+which he immediately began to construct his scaffolding. U was evidently
+the Christian name. "Ursule!" he thought, "what a delicious name!" He
+kissed the handkerchief, drank it in, placed it on his heart, on his
+flesh, during the day, and at night, laid it beneath his lips that he
+might fall asleep on it.
+
+"I feel that her whole soul lies within it!" he exclaimed.
+
+This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply let it
+fall from his pocket.
+
+In the days which followed the finding of this treasure, he only
+displayed himself at the Luxembourg in the act of kissing the
+handkerchief and laying it on his heart. The beautiful child understood
+nothing of all this, and signified it to him by imperceptible signs.
+
+"O modesty!" said Marius.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE VETERANS THEMSELVES CAN BE HAPPY
+
+Since we have pronounced the word modesty, and since we conceal nothing,
+we ought to say that once, nevertheless, in spite of his ecstasies, "his
+Ursule" caused him very serious grief. It was on one of the days when
+she persuaded M. Leblanc to leave the bench and stroll along the walk.
+A brisk May breeze was blowing, which swayed the crests of the
+plaintain-trees. The father and daughter, arm in arm, had just passed
+Marius' bench. Marius had risen to his feet behind them, and was
+following them with his eyes, as was fitting in the desperate situation
+of his soul.
+
+All at once, a gust of wind, more merry than the rest, and probably
+charged with performing the affairs of Springtime, swept down from
+the nursery, flung itself on the alley, enveloped the young girl in
+a delicious shiver, worthy of Virgil's nymphs, and the fawns of
+Theocritus, and lifted her dress, the robe more sacred than that of
+Isis, almost to the height of her garter. A leg of exquisite shape
+appeared. Marius saw it. He was exasperated and furious.
+
+The young girl had hastily thrust down her dress, with a divinely
+troubled motion, but he was none the less angry for all that. He was
+alone in the alley, it is true. But there might have been some one
+there. And what if there had been some one there! Can any one comprehend
+such a thing? What she had just done is horrible!--Alas, the poor child
+had done nothing; there had been but one culprit, the wind; but Marius,
+in whom quivered the Bartholo who exists in Cherubin, was determined to
+be vexed, and was jealous of his own shadow. It is thus, in fact, that
+the harsh and capricious jealousy of the flesh awakens in the human
+heart, and takes possession of it, even without any right. Moreover,
+setting aside even that jealousy, the sight of that charming leg had
+contained nothing agreeable for him; the white stocking of the first
+woman he chanced to meet would have afforded him more pleasure.
+
+When "his Ursule," after having reached the end of the walk, retraced
+her steps with M. Leblanc, and passed in front of the bench on which
+Marius had seated himself once more, Marius darted a sullen and
+ferocious glance at her. The young girl gave way to that slight
+straightening up with a backward movement, accompanied by a raising of
+the eyelids, which signifies: "Well, what is the matter?"
+
+This was "their first quarrel."
+
+Marius had hardly made this scene at her with his eyes, when some one
+crossed the walk. It was a veteran, very much bent, extremely wrinkled,
+and pale, in a uniform of the Louis XV. pattern, bearing on his breast
+the little oval plaque of red cloth, with the crossed swords, the
+soldier's cross of Saint-Louis, and adorned, in addition, with a
+coat-sleeve, which had no arm within it, with a silver chin and a wooden
+leg. Marius thought he perceived that this man had an extremely well
+satisfied air. It even struck him that the aged cynic, as he hobbled
+along past him, addressed to him a very fraternal and very merry wink,
+as though some chance had created an understanding between them, and as
+though they had shared some piece of good luck together. What did that
+relic of Mars mean by being so contented? What had passed between
+that wooden leg and the other? Marius reached a paroxysm of
+jealousy.--"Perhaps he was there!" he said to himself; "perhaps he
+saw!"--And he felt a desire to exterminate the veteran.
+
+With the aid of time, all points grow dull. Marius' wrath against
+"Ursule," just and legitimate as it was, passed off. He finally pardoned
+her; but this cost him a great effort; he sulked for three days.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of all this, and because of all this, his passion
+augmented and grew to madness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--ECLIPSE
+
+The reader has just seen how Marius discovered, or thought that he
+discovered, that She was named Ursule.
+
+Appetite grows with loving. To know that her name was Ursule was a great
+deal; it was very little. In three or four weeks, Marius had devoured
+this bliss. He wanted another. He wanted to know where she lived.
+
+He had committed his first blunder, by falling into the ambush of the
+bench by the Gladiator. He had committed a second, by not remaining at
+the Luxembourg when M. Leblanc came thither alone. He now committed a
+third, and an immense one. He followed "Ursule."
+
+She lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, in the most unfrequented spot, in a
+new, three-story house, of modest appearance.
+
+From that moment forth, Marius added to his happiness of seeing her at
+the Luxembourg the happiness of following her home.
+
+His hunger was increasing. He knew her first name, at least, a charming
+name, a genuine woman's name; he knew where she lived; he wanted to know
+who she was.
+
+One evening, after he had followed them to their dwelling, and had seen
+them disappear through the carriage gate, he entered in their train and
+said boldly to the porter:--
+
+"Is that the gentleman who lives on the first floor, who has just come
+in?"
+
+"No," replied the porter. "He is the gentleman on the third floor."
+
+Another step gained. This success emboldened Marius.
+
+"On the front?" he asked.
+
+"Parbleu!" said the porter, "the house is only built on the street."
+
+"And what is that gentleman's business?" began Marius again.
+
+"He is a gentleman of property, sir. A very kind man who does good to
+the unfortunate, though not rich himself."
+
+"What is his name?" resumed Marius.
+
+The porter raised his head and said:--
+
+"Are you a police spy, sir?"
+
+Marius went off quite abashed, but delighted. He was getting on.
+
+"Good," thought he, "I know that her name is Ursule, that she is the
+daughter of a gentleman who lives on his income, and that she lives
+there, on the third floor, in the Rue de l'Ouest."
+
+On the following day, M. Leblanc and his daughter made only a very
+brief stay in the Luxembourg; they went away while it was still broad
+daylight. Marius followed them to the Rue de l'Ouest, as he had taken up
+the habit of doing. On arriving at the carriage entrance M. Leblanc made
+his daughter pass in first, then paused, before crossing the threshold,
+and stared intently at Marius.
+
+On the next day they did not come to the Luxembourg. Marius waited for
+them all day in vain.
+
+At nightfall, he went to the Rue de l'Ouest, and saw a light in the
+windows of the third story.
+
+He walked about beneath the windows until the light was extinguished.
+
+The next day, no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day, then went
+and did sentinel duty under their windows. This carried him on to ten
+o'clock in the evening.
+
+His dinner took care of itself. Fever nourishes the sick man, and love
+the lover.
+
+He spent a week in this manner. M. Leblanc no longer appeared at the
+Luxembourg.
+
+Marius indulged in melancholy conjectures; he dared not watch the porte
+cochere during the day; he contented himself with going at night to gaze
+upon the red light of the windows. At times he saw shadows flit across
+them, and his heart began to beat.
+
+On the eighth day, when he arrived under the windows, there was no light
+in them.
+
+"Hello!" he said, "the lamp is not lighted yet. But it is dark. Can they
+have gone out?" He waited until ten o'clock. Until midnight. Until one
+in the morning. Not a light appeared in the windows of the third story,
+and no one entered the house.
+
+He went away in a very gloomy frame of mind.
+
+On the morrow,--for he only existed from morrow to morrow, there was,
+so to speak, no to-day for him,--on the morrow, he found no one at the
+Luxembourg; he had expected this. At dusk, he went to the house.
+
+No light in the windows; the shades were drawn; the third floor was
+totally dark.
+
+Marius rapped at the porte cochere, entered, and said to the porter:--
+
+"The gentleman on the third floor?"
+
+"Has moved away," replied the porter.
+
+Marius reeled and said feebly:--
+
+"How long ago?"
+
+"Yesterday."
+
+"Where is he living now?"
+
+"I don't know anything about it."
+
+"So he has not left his new address?"
+
+"No."
+
+And the porter, raising his eyes, recognized Marius.
+
+"Come! So it's you!" said he; "but you are decidedly a spy then?"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--MINES AND MINERS
+
+Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, a third
+lower floor. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes for
+good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the other.
+There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and a
+bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath
+civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under
+foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was
+almost open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive
+Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion
+under the Caesars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the
+sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow
+that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night. The
+catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the cellar
+of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.
+
+Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure,
+there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the
+philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. Such and
+such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another
+with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one catacomb to
+another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they
+branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize
+there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his
+lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius
+by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these
+energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which
+goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities,
+and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the
+bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this
+digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There
+are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works,
+as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The
+future.
+
+The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work
+is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to
+recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down,
+it becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer
+penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man
+has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.
+
+The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of this
+ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold, and
+where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine, sometimes
+misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is
+Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there
+is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre,
+there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes on. Lower
+down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the
+invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who perhaps do not exist as
+yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms.
+The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic
+work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.
+
+A world in limbo, in the state of foetus, what an unheard-of spectre!
+
+Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.
+
+Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,
+binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always, think
+themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary greatly, and
+the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The first are
+paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may be the
+contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal,
+from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this
+is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus. They
+throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not of
+themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute. The
+first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last, enigmatical though he
+may be, has still, beneath his eyelids, the pale beam of the infinite.
+Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign--the starry eye.
+
+The shadowy eye is the other sign.
+
+With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the presence of any one
+who has no glance at all. The social order has its black miners.
+
+There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where light
+becomes extinct.
+
+Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these
+galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of
+progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than
+Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection
+with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot. This
+is what we have designated as the le troisieme dessous. It is the grave
+of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. Inferi.
+
+This communicates with the abyss.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE LOWEST DEPTHS
+
+There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each
+one is for himself. The _I_ in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and
+gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf.
+
+The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost
+phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant
+both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything
+but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost
+unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible
+obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and
+misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction,
+appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not
+after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger.
+From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy
+creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower
+level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest
+of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty--that
+is the point of departure; to be Satan--that is the point reached. From
+that vault Lacenaire emerges.
+
+We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the
+upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical
+excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified,
+honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of
+veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there
+effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress.
+
+The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths,
+hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point,
+and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated,
+the great cavern of evil.
+
+This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without
+exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut
+a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the
+inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this
+stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.
+Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to
+Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of
+everything.
+
+Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates.
+It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social
+order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it
+undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines
+progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination.
+It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is formed of ignorance.
+
+All the others, those above it, have but one object--to suppress it.
+It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their
+organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by
+their contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cavern Ignorance and
+you destroy the lair Crime.
+
+Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written.
+The only social peril is darkness.
+
+Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no
+difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow
+in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But
+ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it. This incurable
+blackness takes possession of the interior of a man and is there
+converted into evil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE
+
+A quartette of ruffians, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, and Montparnasse
+governed the third lower floor of Paris, from 1830 to 1835.
+
+Gueulemer was a Hercules of no defined position. For his lair he had the
+sewer of the Arche-Marion. He was six feet high, his pectoral muscles
+were of marble, his biceps of brass, his breath was that of a cavern,
+his torso that of a colossus, his head that of a bird. One thought one
+beheld the Farnese Hercules clad in duck trousers and a cotton velvet
+waistcoat. Gueulemer, built after this sculptural fashion, might have
+subdued monsters; he had found it more expeditious to be one. A low
+brow, large temples, less than forty years of age, but with crow's-feet,
+harsh, short hair, cheeks like a brush, a beard like that of a wild
+boar; the reader can see the man before him. His muscles called for
+work, his stupidity would have none of it. He was a great, idle force.
+He was an assassin through coolness. He was thought to be a creole. He
+had, probably, somewhat to do with Marshal Brune, having been a porter
+at Avignon in 1815. After this stage, he had turned ruffian.
+
+The diaphaneity of Babet contrasted with the grossness of Gueulemer.
+Babet was thin and learned. He was transparent but impenetrable.
+Daylight was visible through his bones, but nothing through his eyes. He
+declared that he was a chemist. He had been a jack of all trades. He had
+played in vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man of purpose, a fine
+talker, who underlined his smiles and accentuated his gestures. His
+occupation consisted in selling, in the open air, plaster busts and
+portraits of "the head of the State." In addition to this, he extracted
+teeth. He had exhibited phenomena at fairs, and he had owned a booth
+with a trumpet and this poster: "Babet, Dental Artist, Member of the
+Academies, makes physical experiments on metals and metalloids, extracts
+teeth, undertakes stumps abandoned by his brother practitioners. Price:
+one tooth, one franc, fifty centimes; two teeth, two francs; three
+teeth, two francs, fifty. Take advantage of this opportunity." This Take
+advantage of this opportunity meant: Have as many teeth extracted as
+possible. He had been married and had had children. He did not know what
+had become of his wife and children. He had lost them as one loses his
+handkerchief. Babet read the papers, a striking exception in the world
+to which he belonged. One day, at the period when he had his family with
+him in his booth on wheels, he had read in the Messager, that a woman
+had just given birth to a child, who was doing well, and had a calf's
+muzzle, and he exclaimed: "There's a fortune! my wife has not the wit to
+present me with a child like that!"
+
+Later on he had abandoned everything, in order to "undertake Paris."
+This was his expression.
+
+Who was Claquesous? He was night. He waited until the sky was daubed
+with black, before he showed himself. At nightfall he emerged from the
+hole whither he returned before daylight. Where was this hole? No one
+knew. He only addressed his accomplices in the most absolute darkness,
+and with his back turned to them. Was his name Claquesous? Certainly
+not. If a candle was brought, he put on a mask. He was a ventriloquist.
+Babet said: "Claquesous is a nocturne for two voices." Claquesous was
+vague, terrible, and a roamer. No one was sure whether he had a name,
+Claquesous being a sobriquet; none was sure that he had a voice, as his
+stomach spoke more frequently than his voice; no one was sure that he
+had a face, as he was never seen without his mask. He disappeared as
+though he had vanished into thin air; when he appeared, it was as though
+he sprang from the earth.
+
+A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than
+twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming
+black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all
+vices and aspired to all crimes.
+
+The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the
+street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was
+genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of
+his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft
+of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence.
+His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a
+fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The
+cause of all this youth's crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The
+first grisette who had said to him: "You are handsome!" had cast the
+stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel.
+Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the
+height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few
+prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already
+numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with
+outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a
+pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman,
+the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the
+boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon
+in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the
+sepulchre.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--COMPOSITION OF THE TROUPE
+
+These four ruffians formed a sort of Proteus, winding like a serpent
+among the police, and striving to escape Vidocq's indiscreet glances
+"under divers forms, tree, flame, fountain," lending each other their
+names and their traps, hiding in their own shadows, boxes with
+secret compartments and refuges for each other, stripping off their
+personalities, as one removes his false nose at a masked ball, sometimes
+simplifying matters to the point of consisting of but one individual,
+sometimes multiplying themselves to such a point that Coco-Latour
+himself took them for a whole throng.
+
+These four men were not four men; they were a sort of mysterious robber
+with four heads, operating on a grand scale on Paris; they were that
+monstrous polyp of evil, which inhabits the crypt of society.
+
+Thanks to their ramifications, and to the network underlying their
+relations, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse were charged
+with the general enterprise of the ambushes of the department of
+the Seine. The inventors of ideas of that nature, men with nocturnal
+imaginations, applied to them to have their ideas executed. They
+furnished the canvas to the four rascals, and the latter undertook the
+preparation of the scenery. They labored at the stage setting. They were
+always in a condition to lend a force proportioned and suitable to
+all crimes which demanded a lift of the shoulder, and which were
+sufficiently lucrative. When a crime was in quest of arms, they
+under-let their accomplices. They kept a troupe of actors of the shadows
+at the disposition of all underground tragedies.
+
+They were in the habit of assembling at nightfall, the hour when they
+woke up, on the plains which adjoin the Salpetriere. There they held
+their conferences. They had twelve black hours before them; they
+regulated their employment accordingly.
+
+Patron-Minette,--such was the name which was bestowed in the
+subterranean circulation on the association of these four men. In the
+fantastic, ancient, popular parlance, which is vanishing day by day,
+Patron-Minette signifies the morning, the same as entre chien et
+loup--between dog and wolf--signifies the evening. This appellation,
+Patron-Minette, was probably derived from the hour at which their work
+ended, the dawn being the vanishing moment for phantoms and for the
+separation of ruffians. These four men were known under this title.
+When the President of the Assizes visited Lacenaire in his prison, and
+questioned him concerning a misdeed which Lacenaire denied, "Who did
+it?" demanded the President. Lacenaire made this response, enigmatical
+so far as the magistrate was concerned, but clear to the police:
+"Perhaps it was Patron-Minette."
+
+A piece can sometimes be divined on the enunciation of the personages;
+in the same manner a band can almost be judged from the list of ruffians
+composing it. Here are the appellations to which the principal members
+of Patron-Minette answered,--for the names have survived in special
+memoirs.
+
+Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille.
+
+Brujon. [There was a Brujon dynasty; we cannot refrain from
+interpolating this word.]
+
+Boulatruelle, the road-mender already introduced.
+
+Laveuve.
+
+Finistere.
+
+Homere-Hogu, a negro.
+
+Mardisoir. (Tuesday evening.)
+
+Depeche. (Make haste.)
+
+Fauntleroy, alias Bouquetiere (the Flower Girl).
+
+Glorieux, a discharged convict.
+
+Barrecarrosse (Stop-carriage), called Monsieur Dupont.
+
+L'Esplanade-du-Sud.
+
+Poussagrive.
+
+Carmagnolet.
+
+Kruideniers, called Bizarro.
+
+Mangedentelle. (Lace-eater.)
+
+Les-pieds-en-l'Air. (Feet in the air.)
+
+Demi-Liard, called Deux-Milliards.
+
+Etc., etc.
+
+We pass over some, and not the worst of them. These names have faces
+attached. They do not express merely beings, but species. Each one of
+these names corresponds to a variety of those misshapen fungi from the
+under side of civilization.
+
+Those beings, who were not very lavish with their countenances, were not
+among the men whom one sees passing along the streets. Fatigued by the
+wild nights which they passed, they went off by day to sleep, sometimes
+in the lime-kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmatre or
+Montrouge, sometimes in the sewers. They ran to earth.
+
+What became of these men? They still exist. They have always existed.
+Horace speaks of them: Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici,
+mimae; and so long as society remains what it is, they will remain what
+they are. Beneath the obscure roof of their cavern, they are continually
+born again from the social ooze. They return, spectres, but always
+identical; only, they no longer bear the same names and they are
+no longer in the same skins. The individuals extirpated, the tribe
+subsists.
+
+They always have the same faculties. From the vagrant to the tramp, the
+race is maintained in its purity. They divine purses in pockets, they
+scent out watches in fobs. Gold and silver possess an odor for them.
+There exist ingenuous bourgeois, of whom it might be said, that they
+have a "stealable" air. These men patiently pursue these bourgeois. They
+experience the quivers of a spider at the passage of a stranger or of a
+man from the country.
+
+These men are terrible, when one encounters them, or catches a glimpse
+of them, towards midnight, on a deserted boulevard. They do not seem
+to be men but forms composed of living mists; one would say that they
+habitually constitute one mass with the shadows, that they are in
+no wise distinct from them, that they possess no other soul than the
+darkness, and that it is only momentarily and for the purpose of living
+for a few minutes a monstrous life, that they have separated from the
+night.
+
+What is necessary to cause these spectres to vanish? Light. Light in
+floods. Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up society from
+below.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--MARIUS, WHILE SEEKING A GIRL IN A BONNET, ENCOUNTERS A MAN IN
+A CAP
+
+Summer passed, then the autumn; winter came. Neither M. Leblanc nor the
+young girl had again set foot in the Luxembourg garden. Thenceforth,
+Marius had but one thought,--to gaze once more on that sweet and
+adorable face. He sought constantly, he sought everywhere; he found
+nothing. He was no longer Marius, the enthusiastic dreamer, the firm,
+resolute, ardent man, the bold defier of fate, the brain which erected
+future on future, the young spirit encumbered with plans, with projects,
+with pride, with ideas and wishes; he was a lost dog. He fell into a
+black melancholy. All was over. Work disgusted him, walking tired him.
+Vast nature, formerly so filled with forms, lights, voices, counsels,
+perspectives, horizons, teachings, now lay empty before him. It seemed
+to him that everything had disappeared.
+
+He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but he no longer
+took pleasure in his thoughts. To everything that they proposed to him
+in a whisper, he replied in his darkness: "What is the use?"
+
+He heaped a hundred reproaches on himself. "Why did I follow her? I
+was so happy at the mere sight of her! She looked at me; was not that
+immense? She had the air of loving me. Was not that everything? I wished
+to have, what? There was nothing after that. I have been absurd. It is
+my own fault," etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing,--it
+was his nature,--but who made some little guess at everything,--that was
+his nature,--had begun by congratulating him on being in love, though he
+was amazed at it; then, seeing Marius fall into this melancholy state,
+he ended by saying to him: "I see that you have been simply an animal.
+Here, come to the Chaumiere."
+
+Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had allowed
+himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and
+Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps, find her there.
+Of course he did not see the one he sought.--"But this is the place,
+all the same, where all lost women are found," grumbled Grantaire in an
+aside. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned home on foot,
+alone, through the night, weary, feverish, with sad and troubled eyes,
+stunned by the noise and dust of the merry wagons filled with singing
+creatures on their way home from the feast, which passed close to
+him, as he, in his discouragement, breathed in the acrid scent of the
+walnut-trees, along the road, in order to refresh his head.
+
+He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed, wholly given
+up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his pain like the wolf in
+the trap, seeking the absent one everywhere, stupefied by love.
+
+On another occasion, he had an encounter which produced on him a
+singular effect. He met, in the narrow streets in the vicinity of the
+Boulevard des Invalides, a man dressed like a workingman and wearing a
+cap with a long visor, which allowed a glimpse of locks of very
+white hair. Marius was struck with the beauty of this white hair, and
+scrutinized the man, who was walking slowly and as though absorbed in
+painful meditation. Strange to say, he thought that he recognized M.
+Leblanc. The hair was the same, also the profile, so far as the cap
+permitted a view of it, the mien identical, only more depressed. But why
+these workingman's clothes? What was the meaning of this? What signified
+that disguise? Marius was greatly astonished. When he recovered himself,
+his first impulse was to follow the man; who knows whether he did not
+hold at last the clue which he was seeking? In any case, he must see the
+man near at hand, and clear up the mystery. But the idea occurred to him
+too late, the man was no longer there. He had turned into some little
+side street, and Marius could not find him. This encounter occupied
+his mind for three days and then was effaced. "After all," he said to
+himself, "it was probably only a resemblance."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--TREASURE TROVE
+
+Marius had not left the Gorbeau house. He paid no attention to any one
+there.
+
+At that epoch, to tell the truth, there were no other inhabitants in the
+house, except himself and those Jondrettes whose rent he had once paid,
+without, moreover, ever having spoken to either father, mother, or
+daughters. The other lodgers had moved away or had died, or had been
+turned out in default of payment.
+
+One day during that winter, the sun had shown itself a little in the
+afternoon, but it was the 2d of February, that ancient Candlemas
+day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of a six weeks' cold spell,
+inspired Mathieu Laensberg with these two lines, which have with justice
+remained classic:--
+
+
+ Qu'il luise ou qu'il luiserne,
+ L'ours rentre dans en sa caverne.[26]
+
+
+Marius had just emerged from his: night was falling. It was the hour for
+his dinner; for he had been obliged to take to dining again, alas! oh,
+infirmities of ideal passions!
+
+He had just crossed his threshold, where Ma'am Bougon was sweeping at
+the moment, as she uttered this memorable monologue:--
+
+"What is there that is cheap now? Everything is dear. There is nothing
+in the world that is cheap except trouble; you can get that for nothing,
+the trouble of the world!"
+
+Marius slowly ascended the boulevard towards the barrier, in order to
+reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He was walking along with drooping head.
+
+All at once, he felt some one elbow him in the dusk; he wheeled round,
+and saw two young girls clad in rags, the one tall and slim, the other a
+little shorter, who were passing rapidly, all out of breath, in terror,
+and with the appearance of fleeing; they had been coming to meet him,
+had not seen him, and had jostled him as they passed. Through the
+twilight, Marius could distinguish their livid faces, their wild heads,
+their dishevelled hair, their hideous bonnets, their ragged petticoats,
+and their bare feet. They were talking as they ran. The taller said in a
+very low voice:--
+
+"The bobbies have come. They came near nabbing me at the half-circle."
+The other answered: "I saw them. I bolted, bolted, bolted!"
+
+Through this repulsive slang, Marius understood that gendarmes or the
+police had come near apprehending these two children, and that the
+latter had escaped.
+
+They plunged among the trees of the boulevard behind him, and there
+created, for a few minutes, in the gloom, a sort of vague white spot,
+then disappeared.
+
+Marius had halted for a moment.
+
+He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on a little grayish
+package lying on the ground at his feet. He stooped and picked it up. It
+was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.
+
+"Good," he said to himself, "those unhappy girls dropped it."
+
+He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he reflected
+that they must already be far away, put the package in his pocket, and
+went off to dine.
+
+On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a child's coffin,
+covered with a black cloth resting on three chairs, and illuminated by a
+candle. The two girls of the twilight recurred to his mind.
+
+"Poor mothers!" he thought. "There is one thing sadder than to see one's
+children die; it is to see them leading an evil life."
+
+Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy vanished from his
+thoughts, and he fell back once more into his habitual preoccupations.
+He fell to thinking once more of his six months of love and happiness
+in the open air and the broad daylight, beneath the beautiful trees of
+Luxembourg.
+
+"How gloomy my life has become!" he said to himself. "Young girls are
+always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now they are
+ghouls."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--QUADRIFRONS
+
+That evening, as he was undressing preparatory to going to bed, his hand
+came in contact, in the pocket of his coat, with the packet which he
+had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought that it
+would be well to open it, and that this package might possibly contain
+the address of the young girls, if it really belonged to them, and, in
+any case, the information necessary to a restitution to the person who
+had lost it.
+
+He opened the envelope.
+
+It was not sealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.
+
+They bore addresses.
+
+All four exhaled a horrible odor of tobacco.
+
+The first was addressed: "To Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray,
+the place opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.--"
+
+Marius said to himself, that he should probably find in it the
+information which he sought, and that, moreover, the letter being open,
+it was probable that it could be read without impropriety.
+
+It was conceived as follows:--
+
+
+Madame la Marquise: The virtue of clemency and piety is that which most
+closely unites sosiety. Turn your Christian spirit and cast a look of
+compassion on this unfortunate Spanish victim of loyalty and attachment
+to the sacred cause of legitimacy, who has given with his blood,
+consecrated his fortune, evverything, to defend that cause, and to-day
+finds himself in the greatest missery. He doubts not that your honorable
+person will grant succor to preserve an existence exteremely painful for
+a military man of education and honor full of wounds, counts in advance
+on the humanity which animates you and on the interest which Madame la
+Marquise bears to a nation so unfortunate. Their prayer will not be in
+vain, and their gratitude will preserve theirs charming souvenir.
+
+ My respectful sentiments, with which I have the honor to be
+ Madame,
+ Don Alvares, Spanish Captain
+ of Cavalry, a royalist who
+ has take refuge in France,
+ who finds himself on travells
+ for his country, and the
+ resources are lacking him to
+ continue his travells.
+
+
+No address was joined to the signature. Marius hoped to find the address
+in the second letter, whose superscription read: A Madame, Madame la
+Comtesse de Montvernet, Rue Cassette, No. 9. This is what Marius read in
+it:--
+
+
+ Madame la Comtesse: It is an unhappy mother of a family of six
+ children the last of which is only eight months old. I sick
+ since my last confinement, abandoned by my husband five months ago,
+ haveing no resources in the world the most frightful indigance.
+
+ In the hope of Madame la Comtesse, she has the honor to be,
+ Madame, with profound respect,
+ Mistress Balizard.
+
+
+Marius turned to the third letter, which was a petition like the
+preceding; he read:--
+
+ Monsieur Pabourgeot, Elector, wholesale stocking merchant,
+ Rue Saint-Denis on the corner of the Rue aux Fers.
+
+ I permit myself to address you this letter to beg you to grant me
+ the pretious favor of your simpaties and to interest yourself in a man
+ of letters who has just sent a drama to the Theatre-Francais. The subject
+ is historical, and the action takes place in Auvergne in the time
+ of the Empire; the style, I think, is natural, laconic, and may have
+ some merit. There are couplets to be sung in four places. The comic,
+ the serious, the unexpected, are mingled in a variety of characters,
+ and a tinge of romanticism lightly spread through all the intrigue
+ which proceeds misteriously, and ends, after striking altarations,
+ in the midst of many beautiful strokes of brilliant scenes.
+
+ My principal object is to satisfi the desire which progressively
+ animates the man of our century, that is to say, the fashion,
+ that capritious and bizarre weathervane which changes at almost
+ every new wind.
+
+ In spite of these qualities I have reason to fear that jealousy,
+ the egotism of priviliged authors, may obtaine my exclusion from
+ the theatre, for I am not ignorant of the mortifications with which
+ new-comers are treated.
+
+ Monsiuer Pabourgeot, your just reputation as an enlightened protector
+ of men of litters emboldens me to send you my daughter who will
+ explain our indigant situation to you, lacking bread and fire
+ in this wynter season. When I say to you that I beg you to accept
+ the dedication of my drama which I desire to make to you and of all
+ those that I shall make, is to prove to you how great is my ambition
+ to have the honor of sheltering myself under your protection,
+ and of adorning my writings with your name. If you deign to honor
+ me with the most modest offering, I shall immediately occupy myself
+ in making a piesse of verse to pay you my tribute of gratitude.
+ Which I shall endeavor to render this piesse as perfect as possible,
+ will be sent to you before it is inserted at the beginning of the
+ drama and delivered on the stage.
+ To Monsieur
+ and Madame Pabourgeot,
+ My most respectful complements,
+ Genflot, man of letters.
+ P. S. Even if it is only forty sous.
+
+ Excuse me for sending my daughter and not presenting myself,
+ but sad motives connected with the toilet do not permit me,
+ alas! to go out.
+
+
+Finally, Marius opened the fourth letter. The address ran: To the
+benevolent Gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-haut-Pas. It
+contained the following lines:--
+
+
+ Benevolent Man: If you deign to accompany my daughter, you will
+ behold a misserable calamity, and I will show you my certificates.
+
+ At the aspect of these writings your generous soul will be moved
+ with a sentiment of obvious benevolence, for true philosophers
+ always feel lively emotions.
+
+ Admit, compassionate man, that it is necessary to suffer the most
+ cruel need, and that it is very painful, for the sake of obtaining
+ a little relief, to get oneself attested by the authorities as though
+ one were not free to suffer and to die of inanition while waiting
+ to have our misery relieved. Destinies are very fatal for several
+ and too prodigal or too protecting for others.
+
+ I await your presence or your offering, if you deign to make one,
+ and I beseech you to accept the respectful sentiments with which I
+ have the honor to be,
+ truly magnanimous man,
+ your very humble
+ and very obedient servant,
+ P. Fabantou, dramatic artist.
+
+
+After perusing these four letters, Marius did not find himself much
+further advanced than before.
+
+In the first place, not one of the signers gave his address.
+
+Then, they seemed to come from four different individuals, Don Alveras,
+Mistress Balizard, the poet Genflot, and dramatic artist Fabantou; but
+the singular thing about these letters was, that all four were written
+by the same hand.
+
+What conclusion was to be drawn from this, except that they all come
+from the same person?
+
+Moreover, and this rendered the conjecture all the more probable, the
+coarse and yellow paper was the same in all four, the odor of tobacco
+was the same, and, although an attempt had been made to vary the
+style, the same orthographical faults were reproduced with the greatest
+tranquillity, and the man of letters Genflot was no more exempt from
+them than the Spanish captain.
+
+It was waste of trouble to try to solve this petty mystery. Had it not
+been a chance find, it would have borne the air of a mystification.
+Marius was too melancholy to take even a chance pleasantry well, and to
+lend himself to a game which the pavement of the street seemed desirous
+of playing with him. It seemed to him that he was playing the part of
+the blind man in blind man's buff between the four letters, and that
+they were making sport of him.
+
+Nothing, however, indicated that these letters belonged to the two
+young girls whom Marius had met on the boulevard. After all, they were
+evidently papers of no value. Marius replaced them in their envelope,
+flung the whole into a corner and went to bed. About seven o'clock in
+the morning, he had just risen and breakfasted, and was trying to settle
+down to work, when there came a soft knock at his door.
+
+As he owned nothing, he never locked his door, unless occasionally,
+though very rarely, when he was engaged in some pressing work. Even when
+absent he left his key in the lock. "You will be robbed," said Ma'am
+Bougon. "Of what?" said Marius. The truth is, however, that he had, one
+day, been robbed of an old pair of boots, to the great triumph of Ma'am
+Bougon.
+
+There came a second knock, as gentle as the first.
+
+"Come in," said Marius.
+
+The door opened.
+
+"What do you want, Ma'am Bougon?" asked Marius, without raising his eyes
+from the books and manuscripts on his table.
+
+A voice which did not belong to Ma'am Bougon replied:--
+
+"Excuse me, sir--"
+
+It was a dull, broken, hoarse, strangled voice, the voice of an old man,
+roughened with brandy and liquor.
+
+Marius turned round hastily, and beheld a young girl.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A ROSE IN MISERY
+
+[Illustration: Rose in Misery 3b8-4-rose-in-misery]
+
+A very young girl was standing in the half-open door. The dormer window
+of the garret, through which the light fell, was precisely opposite
+the door, and illuminated the figure with a wan light. She was a frail,
+emaciated, slender creature; there was nothing but a chemise and a
+petticoat upon that chilled and shivering nakedness. Her girdle was a
+string, her head ribbon a string, her pointed shoulders emerged from her
+chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor, earth-colored collar-bones, red
+hands, a half-open and degraded mouth, missing teeth, dull, bold, base
+eyes; she had the form of a young girl who has missed her youth, and the
+look of a corrupt old woman; fifty years mingled with fifteen; one of
+those beings which are both feeble and horrible, and which cause those
+to shudder whom they do not cause to weep.
+
+Marius had risen, and was staring in a sort of stupor at this being, who
+was almost like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams.
+
+The most heart-breaking thing of all was, that this young girl had not
+come into the world to be homely. In her early childhood she must even
+have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the
+hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. The remains of
+beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like the pale sunlight
+which is extinguished under hideous clouds at dawn on a winter's day.
+
+That face was not wholly unknown to Marius. He thought he remembered
+having seen it somewhere.
+
+"What do you wish, Mademoiselle?" he asked.
+
+The young girl replied in her voice of a drunken convict:--
+
+"Here is a letter for you, Monsieur Marius."
+
+She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that he was the person
+whom she wanted; but who was this girl? How did she know his name?
+
+Without waiting for him to tell her to advance, she entered. She entered
+resolutely, staring, with a sort of assurance that made the heart bleed,
+at the whole room and the unmade bed. Her feet were bare. Large holes
+in her petticoat permitted glimpses of her long legs and her thin knees.
+She was shivering.
+
+She held a letter in her hand, which she presented to Marius.
+
+Marius, as he opened the letter, noticed that the enormous wafer which
+sealed it was still moist. The message could not have come from a
+distance. He read:--
+
+
+ My amiable neighbor, young man: I have learned of your goodness to me,
+ that you paid my rent six months ago. I bless you, young man.
+ My eldest daughter will tell you that we have been without a morsel
+ of bread for two days, four persons and my spouse ill. If I am
+ not deseaved in my opinion, I think I may hope that your generous
+ heart will melt at this statement and the desire will subjugate you
+ to be propitious to me by daigning to lavish on me a slight favor.
+
+ I am with the distinguished consideration which is due to the
+ benefactors of humanity,--
+
+ Jondrette.
+
+ P.S. My eldest daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius.
+
+
+This letter, coming in the very midst of the mysterious adventure which
+had occupied Marius' thoughts ever since the preceding evening, was like
+a candle in a cellar. All was suddenly illuminated.
+
+This letter came from the same place as the other four. There was the
+same writing, the same style, the same orthography, the same paper, the
+same odor of tobacco.
+
+There were five missives, five histories, five signatures, and a single
+signer. The Spanish Captain Don Alvares, the unhappy Mistress Balizard,
+the dramatic poet Genflot, the old comedian Fabantou, were all four
+named Jondrette, if, indeed, Jondrette himself were named Jondrette.
+
+Marius had lived in the house for a tolerably long time, and he had had,
+as we have said, but very rare occasion to see, to even catch a glimpse
+of, his extremely mean neighbors. His mind was elsewhere, and where the
+mind is, there the eyes are also. He had been obliged more than once to
+pass the Jondrettes in the corridor or on the stairs; but they were mere
+forms to him; he had paid so little heed to them, that, on the preceding
+evening, he had jostled the Jondrette girls on the boulevard, without
+recognizing them, for it had evidently been they, and it was with great
+difficulty that the one who had just entered his room had awakened in
+him, in spite of disgust and pity, a vague recollection of having met
+her elsewhere.
+
+Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that his neighbor
+Jondrette, in his distress, exercised the industry of speculating on the
+charity of benevolent persons, that he procured addresses, and that he
+wrote under feigned names to people whom he judged to be wealthy and
+compassionate, letters which his daughters delivered at their risk
+and peril, for this father had come to such a pass, that he risked his
+daughters; he was playing a game with fate, and he used them as the
+stake. Marius understood that probably, judging from their flight on the
+evening before, from their breathless condition, from their terror
+and from the words of slang which he had overheard, these unfortunate
+creatures were plying some inexplicably sad profession, and that the
+result of the whole was, in the midst of human society, as it is now
+constituted, two miserable beings who were neither girls nor women, a
+species of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.
+
+Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom neither good nor
+evil were any longer possible, and who, on emerging from childhood,
+have already nothing in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor
+responsibility. Souls which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded
+to-day, like those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled
+with every sort of mire, while waiting for some wheel to crush them.
+Nevertheless, while Marius bent a pained and astonished gaze on her, the
+young girl was wandering back and forth in the garret with the audacity
+of a spectre. She kicked about, without troubling herself as to her
+nakedness. Occasionally her chemise, which was untied and torn, fell
+almost to her waist. She moved the chairs about, she disarranged the
+toilet articles which stood on the commode, she handled Marius' clothes,
+she rummaged about to see what there was in the corners.
+
+"Hullo!" said she, "you have a mirror!"
+
+And she hummed scraps of vaudevilles, as though she had been alone,
+frolicsome refrains which her hoarse and guttural voice rendered
+lugubrious.
+
+An indescribable constraint, weariness, and humiliation were perceptible
+beneath this hardihood. Effrontery is a disgrace.
+
+Nothing could be more melancholy than to see her sport about the room,
+and, so to speak, flit with the movements of a bird which is frightened
+by the daylight, or which has broken its wing. One felt that under other
+conditions of education and destiny, the gay and over-free mien of this
+young girl might have turned out sweet and charming. Never, even among
+animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That
+is only to be seen among men.
+
+Marius reflected, and allowed her to have her way.
+
+She approached the table.
+
+"Ah!" said she, "books!"
+
+A flash pierced her glassy eye. She resumed, and her accent expressed
+the happiness which she felt in boasting of something, to which no human
+creature is insensible:--
+
+"I know how to read, I do!"
+
+She eagerly seized a book which lay open on the table, and read with
+tolerable fluency:--
+
+"--General Bauduin received orders to take the chateau of Hougomont
+which stands in the middle of the plain of Waterloo, with five
+battalions of his brigade."
+
+She paused.
+
+"Ah! Waterloo! I know about that. It was a battle long ago. My father
+was there. My father has served in the armies. We are fine Bonapartists
+in our house, that we are! Waterloo was against the English."
+
+She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:--
+
+"And I know how to write, too!"
+
+She dipped her pen in the ink, and turning to Marius:--
+
+"Do you want to see? Look here, I'm going to write a word to show you."
+
+And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a sheet of white paper,
+which lay in the middle of the table: "The bobbies are here."
+
+Then throwing down the pen:--
+
+"There are no faults of orthography. You can look. We have received an
+education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. We
+were not made--"
+
+Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing,
+saying, with an intonation which contained every form of anguish,
+stifled by every form of cynicism:--
+
+"Bah!"
+
+And she began to hum these words to a gay air:--
+
+ "J'ai faim, mon pere." I am hungry, father.
+ Pas de fricot. I have no food.
+ J'ai froid, ma mere. I am cold, mother.
+ Pas de tricot. I have no clothes.
+ Grelotte, Lolotte!
+ Lolotte! Shiver,
+ Sanglote, Sob,
+ Jacquot!" Jacquot!"
+
+
+She had hardly finished this couplet, when she exclaimed:--
+
+"Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little
+brother who is a friend of the artists, and who gives me tickets
+sometimes. But I don't like the benches in the galleries. One is cramped
+and uncomfortable there. There are rough people there sometimes; and
+people who smell bad."
+
+Then she scrutinized Marius, assumed a singular air and said:--
+
+"Do you know, Mr. Marius, that you are a very handsome fellow?"
+
+And at the same moment the same idea occurred to them both, and made
+her smile and him blush. She stepped up to him, and laid her hand on his
+shoulder: "You pay no heed to me, but I know you, Mr. Marius. I meet you
+here on the staircase, and then I often see you going to a person named
+Father Mabeuf who lives in the direction of Austerlitz, sometimes when I
+have been strolling in that quarter. It is very becoming to you to have
+your hair tumbled thus."
+
+She tried to render her voice soft, but only succeeded in making it very
+deep. A portion of her words was lost in the transit from her larynx to
+her lips, as though on a piano where some notes are missing.
+
+Marius had retreated gently.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said he, with his cool gravity, "I have here a package
+which belongs to you, I think. Permit me to return it to you."
+
+And he held out the envelope containing the four letters.
+
+She clapped her hands and exclaimed:--
+
+"We have been looking everywhere for that!"
+
+Then she eagerly seized the package and opened the envelope, saying as
+she did so:--
+
+"Dieu de Dieu! how my sister and I have hunted! And it was you who found
+it! On the boulevard, was it not? It must have been on the boulevard?
+You see, we let it fall when we were running. It was that brat of a
+sister of mine who was so stupid. When we got home, we could not find it
+anywhere. As we did not wish to be beaten, as that is useless, as that
+is entirely useless, as that is absolutely useless, we said that we had
+carried the letters to the proper persons, and that they had said to us:
+'Nix.' So here they are, those poor letters! And how did you find out
+that they belonged to me? Ah! yes, the writing. So it was you that we
+jostled as we passed last night. We couldn't see. I said to my sister:
+'Is it a gentleman?' My sister said to me: 'I think it is a gentleman.'"
+
+In the meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed to "the
+benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."
+
+"Here!" said she, "this is for that old fellow who goes to mass. By the
+way, this is his hour. I'll go and carry it to him. Perhaps he will give
+us something to breakfast on."
+
+Then she began to laugh again, and added:--
+
+"Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will mean
+that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday, our
+breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of to-day, and all that at once, and
+this morning. Come! Parbleu! if you are not satisfied, dogs, burst!"
+
+This reminded Marius of the wretched girl's errand to himself. He
+fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and found nothing there.
+
+The young girl went on, and seemed to have no consciousness of Marius'
+presence.
+
+"I often go off in the evening. Sometimes I don't come home again. Last
+winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches of the bridges.
+We huddled together to keep from freezing. My little sister cried. How
+melancholy the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said
+to myself: 'No, it's too cold.' I go out alone, whenever I choose, I
+sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk along
+the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses, all black and
+as big as Notre Dame, I fancy that the white walls are the river, I say
+to myself: 'Why, there's water there!' The stars are like the lamps in
+illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew
+them out, I am bewildered, as though horses were breathing in my ears;
+although it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning-machines, and I
+don't know what all. I think people are flinging stones at me, I flee
+without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. You feel very
+queer when you have had no food."
+
+And then she stared at him with a bewildered air.
+
+By dint of searching and ransacking his pockets, Marius had finally
+collected five francs sixteen sous. This was all he owned in the world
+for the moment. "At all events," he thought, "there is my dinner for
+to-day, and to-morrow we will see." He kept the sixteen sous, and handed
+the five francs to the young girl.
+
+She seized the coin.
+
+"Good!" said she, "the sun is shining!"
+
+And, as though the sun had possessed the property of melting the
+avalanches of slang in her brain, she went on:--
+
+"Five francs! the shiner! a monarch! in this hole! Ain't this fine!
+You're a jolly thief! I'm your humble servant! Bravo for the good
+fellows! Two days' wine! and meat! and stew! we'll have a royal feast!
+and a good fill!"
+
+She pulled her chemise up on her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius,
+then a familiar sign with her hand, and went towards the door, saying:--
+
+"Good morning, sir. It's all right. I'll go and find my old man."
+
+As she passed, she caught sight of a dry crust of bread on the commode,
+which was moulding there amid the dust; she flung herself upon it and
+bit into it, muttering:--
+
+"That's good! it's hard! it breaks my teeth!"
+
+Then she departed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE
+
+Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in
+distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True
+misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just
+passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of
+man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who
+has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the
+misery of the child.
+
+When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last
+resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround
+him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him
+simultaneously. The light of day seems extinguished without, the moral
+light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness of the
+woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.
+
+Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile
+partitions which all open on either vice or crime.
+
+Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body, the
+heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are manipulated
+in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources, which
+encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers,
+mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere
+and become incorporated, almost like a mineral formation, in that dusky
+promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infamies, and innocences.
+They crouch, back to back, in a sort of hut of fate. They exchange
+woe-begone glances. Oh, the unfortunate wretches! How pale they are! How
+cold they are! It seems as though they dwelt in a planet much further
+from the sun than ours.
+
+This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm of sad
+shadows. She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.
+
+Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of revery and
+passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his neighbors up
+to that day. The payment of their rent had been a mechanical movement,
+which any one would have yielded to; but he, Marius, should have done
+better than that. What! only a wall separated him from those abandoned
+beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of
+the world, he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the
+last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or
+rather, rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to
+them! Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side
+of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did not even
+lend an ear! And groans lay in those words, and he did not even listen
+to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to impossible
+radiances, to loves in the air, to follies; and all the while, human
+creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people,
+were agonizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their
+misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor
+who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable
+man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of
+distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold
+of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no
+doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming
+degraded are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and
+the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word,
+the miserable; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be
+all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?
+
+While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions on
+which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own pedagogue and
+scolded himself more than he deserved, he stared at the wall which
+separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he were able to make his
+gaze, full of pity, penetrate that partition and warm these wretched
+people. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and beams,
+and, as the reader had just learned, it allowed the sound of voices and
+words to be clearly distinguished. Only a man as dreamy as Marius could
+have failed to perceive this long before. There was no paper pasted on
+the wall, either on the side of the Jondrettes or on that of Marius; the
+coarse construction was visible in its nakedness. Marius examined the
+partition, almost unconsciously; sometimes revery examines, observes,
+and scrutinizes as thought would. All at once he sprang up; he had just
+perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling, a triangular hole, which
+resulted from the space between three lathes. The plaster which should
+have filled this cavity was missing, and by mounting on the commode,
+a view could be had through this aperture into the Jondrettes' attic.
+Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity. This aperture formed
+a sort of peep-hole. It is permissible to gaze at misfortune like a
+traitor in order to succor it.[27]
+
+"Let us get some little idea of what these people are like," thought
+Marius, "and in what condition they are."
+
+He climbed upon the commode, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE WILD MAN IN HIS LAIR
+
+Cities, like forests, have their caverns in which all the most wicked
+and formidable creatures which they contain conceal themselves. Only,
+in cities, that which thus conceals itself is ferocious, unclean, and
+petty, that is to say, ugly; in forests, that which conceals itself is
+ferocious, savage, and grand, that is to say, beautiful. Taking one lair
+with another, the beast's is preferable to the man's. Caverns are better
+than hovels.
+
+What Marius now beheld was a hovel.
+
+Marius was poor, and his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his
+poverty was noble, his garret was neat. The den upon which his eye now
+rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid. The only
+furniture consisted of a straw chair, an infirm table, some old bits of
+crockery, and in two of the corners, two indescribable pallets; all
+the light was furnished by a dormer window of four panes, draped with
+spiders' webs. Through this aperture there penetrated just enough light
+to make the face of a man appear like the face of a phantom. The walls
+had a leprous aspect, and were covered with seams and scars, like a
+visage disfigured by some horrible malady; a repulsive moisture exuded
+from them. Obscene sketches roughly sketched with charcoal could be
+distinguished upon them.
+
+The chamber which Marius occupied had a dilapidated brick pavement; this
+one was neither tiled nor planked; its inhabitants stepped directly
+on the antique plaster of the hovel, which had grown black under the
+long-continued pressure of feet. Upon this uneven floor, where the dirt
+seemed to be fairly incrusted, and which possessed but one virginity,
+that of the broom, were capriciously grouped constellations of old
+shoes, socks, and repulsive rags; however, this room had a fireplace,
+so it was let for forty francs a year. There was every sort of thing
+in that fireplace, a brazier, a pot, broken boards, rags suspended
+from nails, a bird-cage, ashes, and even a little fire. Two brands were
+smouldering there in a melancholy way.
+
+One thing which added still more to the horrors of this garret was, that
+it was large. It had projections and angles and black holes, the lower
+sides of roofs, bays, and promontories. Hence horrible, unfathomable
+nooks where it seemed as though spiders as big as one's fist, wood-lice
+as large as one's foot, and perhaps even--who knows?--some monstrous
+human beings, must be hiding.
+
+One of the pallets was near the door, the other near the window. One
+end of each touched the fireplace and faced Marius. In a corner near the
+aperture through which Marius was gazing, a colored engraving in a black
+frame was suspended to a nail on the wall, and at its bottom, in large
+letters, was the inscription: THE DREAM. This represented a sleeping
+woman, and a child, also asleep, the child on the woman's lap, an eagle
+in a cloud, with a crown in his beak, and the woman thrusting the
+crown away from the child's head, without awaking the latter; in the
+background, Napoleon in a glory, leaning on a very blue column with a
+yellow capital ornamented with this inscription:
+
+ MARINGO
+ AUSTERLITS
+ IENA
+ WAGRAMME
+ ELOT
+
+Beneath this frame, a sort of wooden panel, which was no longer than it
+was broad, stood on the ground and rested in a sloping attitude against
+the wall. It had the appearance of a picture with its face turned to
+the wall, of a frame probably showing a daub on the other side, of some
+pier-glass detached from a wall and lying forgotten there while waiting
+to be rehung.
+
+Near the table, upon which Marius descried a pen, ink, and paper, sat
+a man about sixty years of age, small, thin, livid, haggard, with a
+cunning, cruel, and uneasy air; a hideous scoundrel.
+
+If Lavater had studied this visage, he would have found the vulture
+mingled with the attorney there, the bird of prey and the pettifogger
+rendering each other mutually hideous and complementing each other; the
+pettifogger making the bird of prey ignoble, the bird of prey making the
+pettifogger horrible.
+
+This man had a long gray beard. He was clad in a woman's chemise, which
+allowed his hairy breast and his bare arms, bristling with gray hair,
+to be seen. Beneath this chemise, muddy trousers and boots through which
+his toes projected were visible.
+
+He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking. There was no bread in the
+hovel, but there was still tobacco.
+
+He was writing probably some more letters like those which Marius had
+read.
+
+On the corner of the table lay an ancient, dilapidated, reddish volume,
+and the size, which was the antique 12mo of reading-rooms, betrayed a
+romance. On the cover sprawled the following title, printed in large
+capitals: GOD; THE KING; HONOR AND THE LADIES; BY DUCRAY DUMINIL, 1814.
+
+As the man wrote, he talked aloud, and Marius heard his words:--
+
+"The idea that there is no equality, even when you are dead! Just look
+at Pere Lachaise! The great, those who are rich, are up above, in the
+acacia alley, which is paved. They can reach it in a carriage. The
+little people, the poor, the unhappy, well, what of them? they are put
+down below, where the mud is up to your knees, in the damp places. They
+are put there so that they will decay the sooner! You cannot go to see
+them without sinking into the earth."
+
+He paused, smote the table with his fist, and added, as he ground his
+teeth:--
+
+"Oh! I could eat the whole world!"
+
+A big woman, who might be forty years of age, or a hundred, was
+crouching near the fireplace on her bare heels.
+
+She, too, was clad only in a chemise and a knitted petticoat patched
+with bits of old cloth. A coarse linen apron concealed the half of her
+petticoat. Although this woman was doubled up and bent together, it
+could be seen that she was of very lofty stature. She was a sort of
+giant, beside her husband. She had hideous hair, of a reddish blond
+which was turning gray, and which she thrust back from time to time,
+with her enormous shining hands, with their flat nails.
+
+Beside her, on the floor, wide open, lay a book of the same form as the
+other, and probably a volume of the same romance.
+
+On one of the pallets, Marius caught a glimpse of a sort of tall pale
+young girl, who sat there half naked and with pendant feet, and who did
+not seem to be listening or seeing or living.
+
+No doubt the younger sister of the one who had come to his room.
+
+She seemed to be eleven or twelve years of age. On closer scrutiny it
+was evident that she really was fourteen. She was the child who had
+said, on the boulevard the evening before: "I bolted, bolted, bolted!"
+
+She was of that puny sort which remains backward for a long time,
+then suddenly starts up rapidly. It is indigence which produces these
+melancholy human plants. These creatures have neither childhood nor
+youth. At fifteen years of age they appear to be twelve, at sixteen they
+seem twenty. To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman. One might say
+that they stride through life, in order to get through with it the more
+speedily.
+
+At this moment, this being had the air of a child.
+
+Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling; no handicraft,
+no spinning-wheel, not a tool. In one corner lay some ironmongery of
+dubious aspect. It was the dull listlessness which follows despair and
+precedes the death agony.
+
+Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying than
+the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt fluttering
+there, and life was palpitating there. The garret, the cellar, the lowly
+ditch where certain indigent wretches crawl at the very bottom of the
+social edifice, is not exactly the sepulchre, but only its antechamber;
+but, as the wealthy display their greatest magnificence at the entrance
+of their palaces, it seems that death, which stands directly side by
+side with them, places its greatest miseries in that vestibule.
+
+The man held his peace, the woman spoke no word, the young girl did
+not even seem to breathe. The scratching of the pen on the paper was
+audible.
+
+The man grumbled, without pausing in his writing. "Canaille! canaille!
+everybody is canaille!"
+
+This variation to Solomon's exclamation elicited a sigh from the woman.
+
+"Calm yourself, my little friend," she said. "Don't hurt yourself, my
+dear. You are too good to write to all those people, husband."
+
+Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts draw
+apart. This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance, judging
+from the amount of love within her; but probably, in the daily and
+reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress which weighed on the
+whole group, this had become extinct. There no longer existed in her
+anything more than the ashes of affection for her husband. Nevertheless,
+caressing appellations had survived, as is often the case. She called
+him: My dear, my little friend, my good man, etc., with her mouth while
+her heart was silent.
+
+The man resumed his writing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--STRATEGY AND TACTICS
+
+Marius, with a load upon his breast, was on the point of descending
+from the species of observatory which he had improvised, when a sound
+attracted his attention and caused him to remain at his post.
+
+The door of the attic had just burst open abruptly. The eldest girl made
+her appearance on the threshold. On her feet, she had large, coarse,
+men's shoes, bespattered with mud, which had splashed even to her red
+ankles, and she was wrapped in an old mantle which hung in tatters.
+Marius had not seen it on her an hour previously, but she had probably
+deposited it at his door, in order that she might inspire the more pity,
+and had picked it up again on emerging. She entered, pushed the door to
+behind her, paused to take breath, for she was completely breathless,
+then exclaimed with an expression of triumph and joy:--
+
+"He is coming!"
+
+The father turned his eyes towards her, the woman turned her head, the
+little sister did not stir.
+
+"Who?" demanded her father.
+
+"The gentleman!"
+
+"The philanthropist?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"From the church of Saint-Jacques?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That old fellow?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And he is coming?"
+
+"He is following me."
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"I am sure."
+
+"There, truly, he is coming?"
+
+"He is coming in a fiacre."
+
+"In a fiacre. He is Rothschild."
+
+The father rose.
+
+"How are you sure? If he is coming in a fiacre, how is it that you
+arrive before him? You gave him our address at least? Did you tell him
+that it was the last door at the end of the corridor, on the right? If
+he only does not make a mistake! So you found him at the church? Did he
+read my letter? What did he say to you?"
+
+"Ta, ta, ta," said the girl, "how you do gallop on, my good man! See
+here: I entered the church, he was in his usual place, I made him a
+reverence, and I handed him the letter; he read it and said to me:
+'Where do you live, my child?' I said: 'Monsieur, I will show you.' He
+said to me: 'No, give me your address, my daughter has some purchases to
+make, I will take a carriage and reach your house at the same time that
+you do.' I gave him the address. When I mentioned the house, he seemed
+surprised and hesitated for an instant, then he said: 'Never mind, I
+will come.' When the mass was finished, I watched him leave the church
+with his daughter, and I saw them enter a carriage. I certainly did tell
+him the last door in the corridor, on the right."
+
+"And what makes you think that he will come?"
+
+"I have just seen the fiacre turn into the Rue Petit-Banquier. That is
+what made me run so."
+
+"How do you know that it was the same fiacre?"
+
+"Because I took notice of the number, so there!"
+
+"What was the number?"
+
+"440."
+
+"Good, you are a clever girl."
+
+The girl stared boldly at her father, and showing the shoes which she
+had on her feet:--
+
+"A clever girl, possibly; but I tell you I won't put these shoes on
+again, and that I won't, for the sake of my health, in the first place,
+and for the sake of cleanliness, in the next. I don't know anything
+more irritating than shoes that squelch, and go ghi, ghi, ghi, the whole
+time. I prefer to go barefoot."
+
+"You are right," said her father, in a sweet tone which contrasted with
+the young girl's rudeness, "but then, you will not be allowed to enter
+churches, for poor people must have shoes to do that. One cannot go
+barefoot to the good God," he added bitterly.
+
+Then, returning to the subject which absorbed him:--
+
+"So you are sure that he will come?"
+
+"He is following on my heels," said she.
+
+The man started up. A sort of illumination appeared on his countenance.
+
+"Wife!" he exclaimed, "you hear. Here is the philanthropist. Extinguish
+the fire."
+
+The stupefied mother did not stir.
+
+The father, with the agility of an acrobat, seized a broken-nosed jug
+which stood on the chimney, and flung the water on the brands.
+
+Then, addressing his eldest daughter:--
+
+"Here you! Pull the straw off that chair!"
+
+His daughter did not understand.
+
+He seized the chair, and with one kick he rendered it seatless. His leg
+passed through it.
+
+As he withdrew his leg, he asked his daughter:--
+
+"Is it cold?"
+
+"Very cold. It is snowing."
+
+The father turned towards the younger girl who sat on the bed near the
+window, and shouted to her in a thundering voice:--
+
+"Quick! get off that bed, you lazy thing! will you never do anything?
+Break a pane of glass!"
+
+The little girl jumped off the bed with a shiver.
+
+"Break a pane!" he repeated.
+
+The child stood still in bewilderment.
+
+"Do you hear me?" repeated her father, "I tell you to break a pane!"
+
+The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, rose on tiptoe, and
+struck a pane with her fist. The glass broke and fell with a loud
+clatter.
+
+"Good," said the father.
+
+He was grave and abrupt. His glance swept rapidly over all the crannies
+of the garret. One would have said that he was a general making the
+final preparation at the moment when the battle is on the point of
+beginning.
+
+The mother, who had not said a word so far, now rose and demanded in
+a dull, slow, languid voice, whence her words seemed to emerge in a
+congealed state:--
+
+"What do you mean to do, my dear?"
+
+"Get into bed," replied the man.
+
+His intonation admitted of no deliberation. The mother obeyed, and threw
+herself heavily on one of the pallets.
+
+In the meantime, a sob became audible in one corner.
+
+"What's that?" cried the father.
+
+The younger daughter exhibited her bleeding fist, without quitting the
+corner in which she was cowering. She had wounded herself while breaking
+the window; she went off, near her mother's pallet and wept silently.
+
+It was now the mother's turn to start up and exclaim:--
+
+"Just see there! What follies you commit! She has cut herself breaking
+that pane for you!"
+
+"So much the better!" said the man. "I foresaw that."
+
+"What? So much the better?" retorted his wife.
+
+"Peace!" replied the father, "I suppress the liberty of the press."
+
+Then tearing the woman's chemise which he was wearing, he made a strip
+of cloth with which he hastily swathed the little girl's bleeding wrist.
+
+That done, his eye fell with a satisfied expression on his torn chemise.
+
+"And the chemise too," said he, "this has a good appearance."
+
+An icy breeze whistled through the window and entered the room. The
+outer mist penetrated thither and diffused itself like a whitish sheet
+of wadding vaguely spread by invisible fingers. Through the broken pane
+the snow could be seen falling. The snow promised by the Candlemas sun
+of the preceding day had actually come.
+
+The father cast a glance about him as though to make sure that he had
+forgotten nothing. He seized an old shovel and spread ashes over the wet
+brands in such a manner as to entirely conceal them.
+
+Then drawing himself up and leaning against the chimney-piece:--
+
+"Now," said he, "we can receive the philanthropist."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE RAY OF LIGHT IN THE HOVEL
+
+The big girl approached and laid her hand in her father's.
+
+"Feel how cold I am," said she.
+
+"Bah!" replied the father, "I am much colder than that."
+
+The mother exclaimed impetuously:--
+
+"You always have something better than any one else, so you do! even bad
+things."
+
+"Down with you!" said the man.
+
+The mother, being eyed after a certain fashion, held her tongue.
+
+Silence reigned for a moment in the hovel. The elder girl was removing
+the mud from the bottom of her mantle, with a careless air; her younger
+sister continued to sob; the mother had taken the latter's head between
+her hands, and was covering it with kisses, whispering to her the
+while:--
+
+"My treasure, I entreat you, it is nothing of consequence, don't cry,
+you will anger your father."
+
+"No!" exclaimed the father, "quite the contrary! sob! sob! that's
+right."
+
+Then turning to the elder:--
+
+"There now! He is not coming! What if he were not to come! I shall have
+extinguished my fire, wrecked my chair, torn my shirt, and broken my
+pane all for nothing."
+
+"And wounded the child!" murmured the mother.
+
+"Do you know," went on the father, "that it's beastly cold in this
+devil's garret! What if that man should not come! Oh! See there, you! He
+makes us wait! He says to himself: 'Well! they will wait for me!
+That's what they're there for.' Oh! how I hate them, and with what joy,
+jubilation, enthusiasm, and satisfaction I could strangle all those rich
+folks! all those rich folks! These men who pretend to be charitable,
+who put on airs, who go to mass, who make presents to the priesthood,
+preachy, preachy, in their skullcaps, and who think themselves above
+us, and who come for the purpose of humiliating us, and to bring us
+'clothes,' as they say! old duds that are not worth four sous! And
+bread! That's not what I want, pack of rascals that they are, it's
+money! Ah! money! Never! Because they say that we would go off and drink
+it up, and that we are drunkards and idlers! And they! What are they,
+then, and what have they been in their time! Thieves! They never could
+have become rich otherwise! Oh! Society ought to be grasped by the four
+corners of the cloth and tossed into the air, all of it! It would all
+be smashed, very likely, but at least, no one would have anything,
+and there would be that much gained! But what is that blockhead of
+a benevolent gentleman doing? Will he come? Perhaps the animal has
+forgotten the address! I'll bet that that old beast--"
+
+At that moment there came a light tap at the door, the man rushed to it
+and opened it, exclaiming, amid profound bows and smiles of adoration:--
+
+"Enter, sir! Deign to enter, most respected benefactor, and your
+charming young lady, also."
+
+A man of ripe age and a young girl made their appearance on the
+threshold of the attic.
+
+Marius had not quitted his post. His feelings for the moment surpassed
+the powers of the human tongue.
+
+It was She!
+
+Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meanings contained in those
+three letters of that word: She.
+
+It was certainly she. Marius could hardly distinguish her through the
+luminous vapor which had suddenly spread before his eyes. It was that
+sweet, absent being, that star which had beamed upon him for six months;
+it was those eyes, that brow, that mouth, that lovely vanished face
+which had created night by its departure. The vision had been eclipsed,
+now it reappeared.
+
+It reappeared in that gloom, in that garret, in that misshapen attic, in
+all that horror.
+
+Marius shuddered in dismay. What! It was she! The palpitations of his
+heart troubled his sight. He felt that he was on the brink of bursting
+into tears! What! He beheld her again at last, after having sought her
+so long! It seemed to him that he had lost his soul, and that he had
+just found it again.
+
+She was the same as ever, only a little pale; her delicate face was
+framed in a bonnet of violet velvet, her figure was concealed beneath
+a pelisse of black satin. Beneath her long dress, a glimpse could be
+caught of her tiny foot shod in a silken boot.
+
+She was still accompanied by M. Leblanc.
+
+She had taken a few steps into the room, and had deposited a tolerably
+bulky parcel on the table.
+
+The eldest Jondrette girl had retired behind the door, and was staring
+with sombre eyes at that velvet bonnet, that silk mantle, and that
+charming, happy face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--JONDRETTE COMES NEAR WEEPING
+
+The hovel was so dark, that people coming from without felt on entering
+it the effect produced on entering a cellar. The two new-comers
+advanced, therefore, with a certain hesitation, being hardly able
+to distinguish the vague forms surrounding them, while they could be
+clearly seen and scrutinized by the eyes of the inhabitants of the
+garret, who were accustomed to this twilight.
+
+M. Leblanc approached, with his sad but kindly look, and said to
+Jondrette the father:--
+
+"Monsieur, in this package you will find some new clothes and some
+woollen stockings and blankets."
+
+"Our angelic benefactor overwhelms us," said Jondrette, bowing to the
+very earth.
+
+Then, bending down to the ear of his eldest daughter, while the two
+visitors were engaged in examining this lamentable interior, he added in
+a low and rapid voice:--
+
+"Hey? What did I say? Duds! No money! They are all alike! By the way,
+how was the letter to that old blockhead signed?"
+
+"Fabantou," replied the girl.
+
+"The dramatic artist, good!"
+
+It was lucky for Jondrette, that this had occurred to him, for at the
+very moment, M. Leblanc turned to him, and said to him with the air of a
+person who is seeking to recall a name:--
+
+"I see that you are greatly to be pitied, Monsieur--"
+
+"Fabantou," replied Jondrette quickly.
+
+"Monsieur Fabantou, yes, that is it. I remember."
+
+"Dramatic artist, sir, and one who has had some success."
+
+Here Jondrette evidently judged the moment propitious for capturing the
+"philanthropist." He exclaimed with an accent which smacked at the same
+time of the vainglory of the mountebank at fairs, and the humility of
+the mendicant on the highway:--
+
+"A pupil of Talma! Sir! I am a pupil of Talma! Fortune formerly smiled
+on me--Alas! Now it is misfortune's turn. You see, my benefactor, no
+bread, no fire. My poor babes have no fire! My only chair has no seat! A
+broken pane! And in such weather! My spouse in bed! Ill!"
+
+"Poor woman!" said M. Leblanc.
+
+"My child wounded!" added Jondrette.
+
+The child, diverted by the arrival of the strangers, had fallen to
+contemplating "the young lady," and had ceased to sob.
+
+"Cry! bawl!" said Jondrette to her in a low voice.
+
+At the same time he pinched her sore hand. All this was done with the
+talent of a juggler.
+
+The little girl gave vent to loud shrieks.
+
+The adorable young girl, whom Marius, in his heart, called "his Ursule,"
+approached her hastily.
+
+"Poor, dear child!" said she.
+
+"You see, my beautiful young lady," pursued Jondrette "her bleeding
+wrist! It came through an accident while working at a machine to earn
+six sous a day. It may be necessary to cut off her arm."
+
+"Really?" said the old gentleman, in alarm.
+
+The little girl, taking this seriously, fell to sobbing more violently
+than ever.
+
+"Alas! yes, my benefactor!" replied the father.
+
+For several minutes, Jondrette had been scrutinizing "the benefactor"
+in a singular fashion. As he spoke, he seemed to be examining the other
+attentively, as though seeking to summon up his recollections. All at
+once, profiting by a moment when the new-comers were questioning the
+child with interest as to her injured hand, he passed near his wife,
+who lay in her bed with a stupid and dejected air, and said to her in a
+rapid but very low tone:--
+
+"Take a look at that man!"
+
+Then, turning to M. Leblanc, and continuing his lamentations:--
+
+"You see, sir! All the clothing that I have is my wife's chemise! And
+all torn at that! In the depths of winter! I can't go out for lack of a
+coat. If I had a coat of any sort, I would go and see Mademoiselle Mars,
+who knows me and is very fond of me. Does she not still reside in the
+Rue de la Tour-des-Dames? Do you know, sir? We played together in the
+provinces. I shared her laurels. Celimene would come to my succor, sir!
+Elmire would bestow alms on Belisaire! But no, nothing! And not a sou in
+the house! My wife ill, and not a sou! My daughter dangerously injured,
+not a sou! My wife suffers from fits of suffocation. It comes from her
+age, and besides, her nervous system is affected. She ought to have
+assistance, and my daughter also! But the doctor! But the apothecary!
+How am I to pay them? I would kneel to a penny, sir! Such is the
+condition to which the arts are reduced. And do you know, my charming
+young lady, and you, my generous protector, do you know, you who breathe
+forth virtue and goodness, and who perfume that church where my daughter
+sees you every day when she says her prayers?--For I have brought up my
+children religiously, sir. I did not want them to take to the theatre.
+Ah! the hussies! If I catch them tripping! I do not jest, that I don't!
+I read them lessons on honor, on morality, on virtue! Ask them! They
+have got to walk straight. They are none of your unhappy wretches who
+begin by having no family, and end by espousing the public. One is
+Mamselle Nobody, and one becomes Madame Everybody. Deuce take it! None
+of that in the Fabantou family! I mean to bring them up virtuously, and
+they shall be honest, and nice, and believe in God, by the sacred name!
+Well, sir, my worthy sir, do you know what is going to happen to-morrow?
+To-morrow is the fourth day of February, the fatal day, the last day of
+grace allowed me by my landlord; if by this evening I have not paid my
+rent, to-morrow my oldest daughter, my spouse with her fever, my child
+with her wound,--we shall all four be turned out of here and thrown into
+the street, on the boulevard, without shelter, in the rain, in the snow.
+There, sir. I owe for four quarters--a whole year! that is to say, sixty
+francs."
+
+Jondrette lied. Four quarters would have amounted to only forty francs,
+and he could not owe four, because six months had not elapsed since
+Marius had paid for two.
+
+M. Leblanc drew five francs from his pocket and threw them on the table.
+
+Jondrette found time to mutter in the ear of his eldest daughter:--
+
+"The scoundrel! What does he think I can do with his five francs?
+That won't pay me for my chair and pane of glass! That's what comes of
+incurring expenses!"
+
+In the meanwhile, M. Leblanc had removed the large brown great-coat
+which he wore over his blue coat, and had thrown it over the back of the
+chair.
+
+"Monsieur Fabantou," he said, "these five francs are all that I have
+about me, but I shall now take my daughter home, and I will return this
+evening,--it is this evening that you must pay, is it not?"
+
+Jondrette's face lighted up with a strange expression. He replied
+vivaciously:--
+
+"Yes, respected sir. At eight o'clock, I must be at my landlord's."
+
+"I will be here at six, and I will fetch you the sixty francs."
+
+"My benefactor!" exclaimed Jondrette, overwhelmed. And he added, in a
+low tone: "Take a good look at him, wife!"
+
+M. Leblanc had taken the arm of the young girl, once more, and had
+turned towards the door.
+
+"Farewell until this evening, my friends!" said he.
+
+"Six o'clock?" said Jondrette.
+
+"Six o'clock precisely."
+
+At that moment, the overcoat lying on the chair caught the eye of the
+elder Jondrette girl.
+
+"You are forgetting your coat, sir," said she.
+
+Jondrette darted an annihilating look at his daughter, accompanied by a
+formidable shrug of the shoulders.
+
+M. Leblanc turned back and said, with a smile:--
+
+"I have not forgotten it, I am leaving it."
+
+"O my protector!" said Jondrette, "my august benefactor, I melt into
+tears! Permit me to accompany you to your carriage."
+
+"If you come out," answered M. Leblanc, "put on this coat. It really is
+very cold."
+
+Jondrette did not need to be told twice. He hastily donned the brown
+great-coat. And all three went out, Jondrette preceding the two
+strangers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--TARIFF OF LICENSED CABS: TWO FRANCS AN HOUR
+
+Marius had lost nothing of this entire scene, and yet, in reality, had
+seen nothing. His eyes had remained fixed on the young girl, his heart
+had, so to speak, seized her and wholly enveloped her from the moment of
+her very first step in that garret. During her entire stay there, he
+had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material perceptions and
+precipitates the whole soul on a single point. He contemplated, not that
+girl, but that light which wore a satin pelisse and a velvet bonnet. The
+star Sirius might have entered the room, and he would not have been any
+more dazzled.
+
+While the young girl was engaged in opening the package, unfolding the
+clothing and the blankets, questioning the sick mother kindly, and the
+little injured girl tenderly, he watched her every movement, he sought
+to catch her words. He knew her eyes, her brow, her beauty, her form,
+her walk, he did not know the sound of her voice. He had once fancied
+that he had caught a few words at the Luxembourg, but he was not
+absolutely sure of the fact. He would have given ten years of his life
+to hear it, in order that he might bear away in his soul a little of
+that music. But everything was drowned in the lamentable exclamations
+and trumpet bursts of Jondrette. This added a touch of genuine wrath
+to Marius' ecstasy. He devoured her with his eyes. He could not believe
+that it really was that divine creature whom he saw in the midst of
+those vile creatures in that monstrous lair. It seemed to him that he
+beheld a humming-bird in the midst of toads.
+
+When she took her departure, he had but one thought, to follow her, to
+cling to her trace, not to quit her until he learned where she
+lived, not to lose her again, at least, after having so miraculously
+re-discovered her. He leaped down from the commode and seized his hat.
+As he laid his hand on the lock of the door, and was on the point of
+opening it, a sudden reflection caused him to pause. The corridor was
+long, the staircase steep, Jondrette was talkative, M. Leblanc had,
+no doubt, not yet regained his carriage; if, on turning round in the
+corridor, or on the staircase, he were to catch sight of him, Marius,
+in that house, he would, evidently, take the alarm, and find means to
+escape from him again, and this time it would be final. What was he
+to do? Should he wait a little? But while he was waiting, the carriage
+might drive off. Marius was perplexed. At last he accepted the risk and
+quitted his room.
+
+There was no one in the corridor. He hastened to the stairs. There was
+no one on the staircase. He descended in all haste, and reached the
+boulevard in time to see a fiacre turning the corner of the Rue du
+Petit-Banquier, on its way back to Paris.
+
+Marius rushed headlong in that direction. On arriving at the angle of
+the boulevard, he caught sight of the fiacre again, rapidly descending
+the Rue Mouffetard; the carriage was already a long way off, and there
+was no means of overtaking it; what! run after it? Impossible; and
+besides, the people in the carriage would assuredly notice an individual
+running at full speed in pursuit of a fiacre, and the father would
+recognize him. At that moment, wonderful and unprecedented good luck,
+Marius perceived an empty cab passing along the boulevard. There was but
+one thing to be done, to jump into this cab and follow the fiacre. That
+was sure, efficacious, and free from danger.
+
+Marius made the driver a sign to halt, and called to him:--
+
+"By the hour?"
+
+Marius wore no cravat, he had on his working-coat, which was destitute
+of buttons, his shirt was torn along one of the plaits on the bosom.
+
+The driver halted, winked, and held out his left hand to Marius, rubbing
+his forefinger gently with his thumb.
+
+"What is it?" said Marius.
+
+"Pay in advance," said the coachman.
+
+Marius recollected that he had but sixteen sous about him.
+
+"How much?" he demanded.
+
+"Forty sous."
+
+"I will pay on my return."
+
+The driver's only reply was to whistle the air of La Palisse and to whip
+up his horse.
+
+Marius stared at the retreating cabriolet with a bewildered air. For the
+lack of four and twenty sous, he was losing his joy, his happiness,
+his love! He had seen, and he was becoming blind again. He reflected
+bitterly, and it must be confessed, with profound regret, on the five
+francs which he had bestowed, that very morning, on that miserable girl.
+If he had had those five francs, he would have been saved, he would have
+been born again, he would have emerged from the limbo and darkness, he
+would have made his escape from isolation and spleen, from his widowed
+state; he might have re-knotted the black thread of his destiny to that
+beautiful golden thread, which had just floated before his eyes and
+had broken at the same instant, once more! He returned to his hovel in
+despair.
+
+He might have told himself that M. Leblanc had promised to return in
+the evening, and that all he had to do was to set about the matter more
+skilfully, so that he might follow him on that occasion; but, in his
+contemplation, it is doubtful whether he had heard this.
+
+As he was on the point of mounting the staircase, he perceived, on the
+other side of the boulevard, near the deserted wall skirting the Rue De
+la Barriere-des-Gobelins, Jondrette, wrapped in the "philanthropist's"
+great-coat, engaged in conversation with one of those men of disquieting
+aspect who have been dubbed by common consent, prowlers of the barriers;
+people of equivocal face, of suspicious monologues, who present the
+air of having evil minds, and who generally sleep in the daytime, which
+suggests the supposition that they work by night.
+
+These two men, standing there motionless and in conversation, in the
+snow which was falling in whirlwinds, formed a group that a policeman
+would surely have observed, but which Marius hardly noticed.
+
+Still, in spite of his mournful preoccupation, he could not refrain from
+saying to himself that this prowler of the barriers with whom Jondrette
+was talking resembled a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias
+Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once pointed out to him as a very
+dangerous nocturnal roamer. This man's name the reader has learned in
+the preceding book. This Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille,
+figured later on in many criminal trials, and became a notorious rascal.
+He was at that time only a famous rascal. To-day he exists in the state
+of tradition among ruffians and assassins. He was at the head of
+a school towards the end of the last reign. And in the evening, at
+nightfall, at the hour when groups form and talk in whispers, he was
+discussed at La Force in the Fosse-aux-Lions. One might even, in
+that prison, precisely at the spot where the sewer which served the
+unprecedented escape, in broad daylight, of thirty prisoners, in 1843,
+passes under the culvert, read his name, PANCHAUD, audaciously carved
+by his own hand on the wall of the sewer, during one of his attempts at
+flight. In 1832, the police already had their eye on him, but he had not
+as yet made a serious beginning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--OFFERS OF SERVICE FROM MISERY TO WRETCHEDNESS
+
+Marius ascended the stairs of the hovel with slow steps; at the moment
+when he was about to re-enter his cell, he caught sight of the elder
+Jondrette girl following him through the corridor. The very sight of
+this girl was odious to him; it was she who had his five francs, it was
+too late to demand them back, the cab was no longer there, the fiacre
+was far away. Moreover, she would not have given them back. As for
+questioning her about the residence of the persons who had just been
+there, that was useless; it was evident that she did not know, since the
+letter signed Fabantou had been addressed "to the benevolent gentleman
+of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."
+
+Marius entered his room and pushed the door to after him.
+
+It did not close; he turned round and beheld a hand which held the door
+half open.
+
+"What is it?" he asked, "who is there?"
+
+It was the Jondrette girl.
+
+"Is it you?" resumed Marius almost harshly, "still you! What do you want
+with me?"
+
+She appeared to be thoughtful and did not look at him. She no longer had
+the air of assurance which had characterized her that morning. She did
+not enter, but held back in the darkness of the corridor, where Marius
+could see her through the half-open door.
+
+"Come now, will you answer?" cried Marius. "What do you want with me?"
+
+She raised her dull eyes, in which a sort of gleam seemed to flicker
+vaguely, and said:--
+
+"Monsieur Marius, you look sad. What is the matter with you?"
+
+"With me!" said Marius.
+
+"Yes, you."
+
+"There is nothing the matter with me."
+
+"Yes, there is!"
+
+"No."
+
+"I tell you there is!"
+
+"Let me alone!"
+
+Marius gave the door another push, but she retained her hold on it.
+
+"Stop," said she, "you are in the wrong. Although you are not rich, you
+were kind this morning. Be so again now. You gave me something to eat,
+now tell me what ails you. You are grieved, that is plain. I do not want
+you to be grieved. What can be done for it? Can I be of any service?
+Employ me. I do not ask for your secrets, you need not tell them to me,
+but I may be of use, nevertheless. I may be able to help you, since I
+help my father. When it is necessary to carry letters, to go to houses,
+to inquire from door to door, to find out an address, to follow any one,
+I am of service. Well, you may assuredly tell me what is the matter with
+you, and I will go and speak to the persons; sometimes it is enough if
+some one speaks to the persons, that suffices to let them understand
+matters, and everything comes right. Make use of me."
+
+An idea flashed across Marius' mind. What branch does one disdain when
+one feels that one is falling?
+
+He drew near to the Jondrette girl.
+
+"Listen--" he said to her.
+
+She interrupted him with a gleam of joy in her eyes.
+
+"Oh yes, do call me thou! I like that better."
+
+"Well," he resumed, "thou hast brought hither that old gentleman and his
+daughter!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Dost thou know their address?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Find it for me."
+
+The Jondrette's dull eyes had grown joyous, and they now became gloomy.
+
+"Is that what you want?" she demanded.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you know them?"
+
+"No."
+
+"That is to say," she resumed quickly, "you do not know her, but you
+wish to know her."
+
+This them which had turned into her had something indescribably
+significant and bitter about it.
+
+"Well, can you do it?" said Marius.
+
+"You shall have the beautiful lady's address."
+
+There was still a shade in the words "the beautiful lady" which troubled
+Marius. He resumed:--
+
+"Never mind, after all, the address of the father and daughter. Their
+address, indeed!"
+
+She gazed fixedly at him.
+
+"What will you give me?"
+
+"Anything you like."
+
+"Anything I like?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You shall have the address."
+
+She dropped her head; then, with a brusque movement, she pulled to the
+door, which closed behind her.
+
+Marius found himself alone.
+
+He dropped into a chair, with his head and both elbows on his bed,
+absorbed in thoughts which he could not grasp, and as though a prey to
+vertigo. All that had taken place since the morning, the appearance of
+the angel, her disappearance, what that creature had just said to him, a
+gleam of hope floating in an immense despair,--this was what filled his
+brain confusedly.
+
+All at once he was violently aroused from his revery.
+
+He heard the shrill, hard voice of Jondrette utter these words, which
+were fraught with a strange interest for him:--
+
+"I tell you that I am sure of it, and that I recognized him."
+
+Of whom was Jondrette speaking? Whom had he recognized? M. Leblanc? The
+father of "his Ursule"? What! Did Jondrette know him? Was Marius about
+to obtain in this abrupt and unexpected fashion all the information
+without which his life was so dark to him? Was he about to learn at last
+who it was that he loved, who that young girl was? Who her father
+was? Was the dense shadow which enwrapped them on the point of being
+dispelled? Was the veil about to be rent? Ah! Heavens!
+
+He bounded rather than climbed upon his commode, and resumed his post
+near the little peep-hole in the partition wall.
+
+Again he beheld the interior of Jondrette's hovel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--THE USE MADE OF M. LEBLANC'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE
+
+Nothing in the aspect of the family was altered, except that the wife
+and daughters had levied on the package and put on woollen stockings and
+jackets. Two new blankets were thrown across the two beds.
+
+Jondrette had evidently just returned. He still had the breathlessness
+of out of doors. His daughters were seated on the floor near the
+fireplace, the elder engaged in dressing the younger's wounded hand. His
+wife had sunk back on the bed near the fireplace, with a face indicative
+of astonishment. Jondrette was pacing up and down the garret with long
+strides. His eyes were extraordinary.
+
+The woman, who seemed timid and overwhelmed with stupor in the presence
+of her husband, turned to say:--
+
+"What, really? You are sure?"
+
+"Sure! Eight years have passed! But I recognize him! Ah! I recognize
+him. I knew him at once! What! Didn't it force itself on you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But I told you: 'Pay attention!' Why, it is his figure, it is his face,
+only older,--there are people who do not grow old, I don't know how they
+manage it,--it is the very sound of his voice. He is better dressed,
+that is all! Ah! you mysterious old devil, I've got you, that I have!"
+
+He paused, and said to his daughters:--
+
+"Get out of here, you!--It's queer that it didn't strike you!"
+
+They arose to obey.
+
+The mother stammered:--
+
+"With her injured hand."
+
+"The air will do it good," said Jondrette. "Be off."
+
+It was plain that this man was of the sort to whom no one offers to
+reply. The two girls departed.
+
+At the moment when they were about to pass through the door, the father
+detained the elder by the arm, and said to her with a peculiar accent:--
+
+"You will be here at five o'clock precisely. Both of you. I shall need
+you."
+
+Marius redoubled his attention.
+
+On being left alone with his wife, Jondrette began to pace the room
+again, and made the tour of it two or three times in silence. Then he
+spent several minutes in tucking the lower part of the woman's chemise
+which he wore into his trousers.
+
+All at once, he turned to the female Jondrette, folded his arms and
+exclaimed:--
+
+"And would you like to have me tell you something? The young lady--"
+
+"Well, what?" retorted his wife, "the young lady?"
+
+Marius could not doubt that it was really she of whom they were
+speaking. He listened with ardent anxiety. His whole life was in his
+ears.
+
+But Jondrette had bent over and spoke to his wife in a whisper. Then he
+straightened himself up and concluded aloud:--
+
+"It is she!"
+
+"That one?" said his wife.
+
+"That very one," said the husband.
+
+No expression can reproduce the significance of the mother's words.
+Surprise, rage, hate, wrath, were mingled and combined in one monstrous
+intonation. The pronunciation of a few words, the name, no doubt, which
+her husband had whispered in her ear, had sufficed to rouse this huge,
+somnolent woman, and from being repulsive she became terrible.
+
+"It is not possible!" she cried. "When I think that my daughters are
+going barefoot, and have not a gown to their backs! What! A satin
+pelisse, a velvet bonnet, boots, and everything; more than two hundred
+francs' worth of clothes! so that one would think she was a lady! No,
+you are mistaken! Why, in the first place, the other was hideous, and
+this one is not so bad-looking! She really is not bad-looking! It can't
+be she!"
+
+"I tell you that it is she. You will see."
+
+At this absolute assertion, the Jondrette woman raised her large, red,
+blonde face and stared at the ceiling with a horrible expression.
+At that moment, she seemed to Marius even more to be feared than her
+husband. She was a sow with the look of a tigress.
+
+"What!" she resumed, "that horrible, beautiful young lady, who gazed at
+my daughters with an air of pity,--she is that beggar brat! Oh! I should
+like to kick her stomach in for her!"
+
+She sprang off of the bed, and remained standing for a moment, her
+hair in disorder, her nostrils dilating, her mouth half open, her fists
+clenched and drawn back. Then she fell back on the bed once more. The
+man paced to and fro and paid no attention to his female.
+
+After a silence lasting several minutes, he approached the female
+Jondrette, and halted in front of her, with folded arms, as he had done
+a moment before:--
+
+"And shall I tell you another thing?"
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+He answered in a low, curt voice:--
+
+"My fortune is made."
+
+The woman stared at him with the look that signifies: "Is the person who
+is addressing me on the point of going mad?"
+
+He went on:--
+
+"Thunder! It was not so very long ago that I was a parishioner of
+the parish of
+die-of-hunger-if-you-have-a-fire,-die-of-cold-if-you-have-bread! I have
+had enough of misery! my share and other people's share! I am not joking
+any longer, I don't find it comic any more, I've had enough of puns,
+good God! no more farces, Eternal Father! I want to eat till I am full,
+I want to drink my fill! to gormandize! to sleep! to do nothing! I want
+to have my turn, so I do, come now! before I die! I want to be a bit of
+a millionnaire!"
+
+He took a turn round the hovel, and added:--
+
+"Like other people."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" asked the woman.
+
+He shook his head, winked, screwed up one eye, and raised his voice like
+a medical professor who is about to make a demonstration:--
+
+"What do I mean by that? Listen!"
+
+"Hush!" muttered the woman, "not so loud! These are matters which must
+not be overheard."
+
+"Bah! Who's here? Our neighbor? I saw him go out a little while ago.
+Besides, he doesn't listen, the big booby. And I tell you that I saw him
+go out."
+
+Nevertheless, by a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice,
+although not sufficiently to prevent Marius hearing his words. One
+favorable circumstance, which enabled Marius not to lose a word of this
+conversation was the falling snow which deadened the sound of vehicles
+on the boulevard.
+
+This is what Marius heard:--
+
+"Listen carefully. The Croesus is caught, or as good as caught! That's
+all settled already. Everything is arranged. I have seen some people. He
+will come here this evening at six o'clock. To bring sixty francs, the
+rascal! Did you notice how I played that game on him, my sixty francs,
+my landlord, my fourth of February? I don't even owe for one quarter!
+Isn't he a fool! So he will come at six o'clock! That's the hour when
+our neighbor goes to his dinner. Mother Bougon is off washing dishes in
+the city. There's not a soul in the house. The neighbor never comes home
+until eleven o'clock. The children shall stand on watch. You shall help
+us. He will give in."
+
+"And what if he does not give in?" demanded his wife.
+
+Jondrette made a sinister gesture, and said:--
+
+"We'll fix him."
+
+And he burst out laughing.
+
+This was the first time Marius had seen him laugh. The laugh was cold
+and sweet, and provoked a shudder.
+
+Jondrette opened a cupboard near the fireplace, and drew from it an old
+cap, which he placed on his head, after brushing it with his sleeve.
+
+"Now," said he, "I'm going out. I have some more people that I must see.
+Good ones. You'll see how well the whole thing will work. I shall be
+away as short a time as possible, it's a fine stroke of business, do you
+look after the house."
+
+And with both fists thrust into the pockets of his trousers, he stood
+for a moment in thought, then exclaimed:--
+
+"Do you know, it's mighty lucky, by the way, that he didn't recognize
+me! If he had recognized me on his side, he would not have come back
+again. He would have slipped through our fingers! It was my beard that
+saved us! my romantic beard! my pretty little romantic beard!"
+
+And again he broke into a laugh.
+
+He stepped to the window. The snow was still falling, and streaking the
+gray of the sky.
+
+"What beastly weather!" said he.
+
+Then lapping his overcoat across his breast:--
+
+"This rind is too large for me. Never mind," he added, "he did a
+devilish good thing in leaving it for me, the old scoundrel! If it
+hadn't been for that, I couldn't have gone out, and everything would
+have gone wrong! What small points things hang on, anyway!"
+
+And pulling his cap down over his eyes, he quitted the room.
+
+He had barely had time to take half a dozen steps from the door, when
+the door opened again, and his savage but intelligent face made its
+appearance once more in the opening.
+
+"I came near forgetting," said he. "You are to have a brazier of
+charcoal ready."
+
+And he flung into his wife's apron the five-franc piece which the
+"philanthropist" had left with him.
+
+"A brazier of charcoal?" asked his wife.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How many bushels?"
+
+"Two good ones."
+
+"That will come to thirty sous. With the rest I will buy something for
+dinner."
+
+"The devil, no."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Don't go and spend the hundred-sou piece."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I shall have to buy something, too."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Something."
+
+"How much shall you need?"
+
+"Whereabouts in the neighborhood is there an ironmonger's shop?"
+
+"Rue Mouffetard."
+
+"Ah! yes, at the corner of a street; I can see the shop."
+
+"But tell me how much you will need for what you have to purchase?"
+
+"Fifty sous--three francs."
+
+"There won't be much left for dinner."
+
+"Eating is not the point to-day. There's something better to be done."
+
+"That's enough, my jewel."
+
+At this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door again, and this
+time, Marius heard his step die away in the corridor of the hovel, and
+descend the staircase rapidly.
+
+At that moment, one o'clock struck from the church of Saint-Medard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--SOLUS CUM SOLO, IN LOCO REMOTO, NON COGITABUNTUR ORARE
+PATER NOSTER
+
+Marius, dreamer as he was, was, as we have said, firm and energetic by
+nature. His habits of solitary meditation, while they had developed in
+him sympathy and compassion, had, perhaps, diminished the faculty for
+irritation, but had left intact the power of waxing indignant; he had
+the kindliness of a brahmin, and the severity of a judge; he took pity
+upon a toad, but he crushed a viper. Now, it was into a hole of vipers
+that his glance had just been directed, it was a nest of monsters that
+he had beneath his eyes.
+
+"These wretches must be stamped upon," said he.
+
+Not one of the enigmas which he had hoped to see solved had been
+elucidated; on the contrary, all of them had been rendered more dense,
+if anything; he knew nothing more about the beautiful maiden of the
+Luxembourg and the man whom he called M. Leblanc, except that Jondrette
+was acquainted with them. Athwart the mysterious words which had been
+uttered, the only thing of which he caught a distinct glimpse was the
+fact that an ambush was in course of preparation, a dark but terrible
+trap; that both of them were incurring great danger, she probably, her
+father certainly; that they must be saved; that the hideous plots of the
+Jondrettes must be thwarted, and the web of these spiders broken.
+
+He scanned the female Jondrette for a moment. She had pulled an old
+sheet-iron stove from a corner, and she was rummaging among the old heap
+of iron.
+
+He descended from the commode as softly as possible, taking care not to
+make the least noise. Amid his terror as to what was in preparation, and
+in the horror with which the Jondrettes had inspired him, he experienced
+a sort of joy at the idea that it might be granted to him perhaps to
+render a service to the one whom he loved.
+
+But how was it to be done? How warn the persons threatened? He did not
+know their address. They had reappeared for an instant before his eyes,
+and had then plunged back again into the immense depths of Paris. Should
+he wait for M. Leblanc at the door that evening at six o'clock, at the
+moment of his arrival, and warn him of the trap? But Jondrette and his
+men would see him on the watch, the spot was lonely, they were stronger
+than he, they would devise means to seize him or to get him away, and
+the man whom Marius was anxious to save would be lost. One o'clock had
+just struck, the trap was to be sprung at six. Marius had five hours
+before him.
+
+There was but one thing to be done.
+
+He put on his decent coat, knotted a silk handkerchief round his neck,
+took his hat, and went out, without making any more noise than if he had
+been treading on moss with bare feet.
+
+Moreover, the Jondrette woman continued to rummage among her old iron.
+
+Once outside of the house, he made for the Rue du Petit-Banquier.
+
+He had almost reached the middle of this street, near a very low wall
+which a man can easily step over at certain points, and which abuts on
+a waste space, and was walking slowly, in consequence of his preoccupied
+condition, and the snow deadened the sound of his steps; all at once he
+heard voices talking very close by. He turned his head, the street was
+deserted, there was not a soul in it, it was broad daylight, and yet he
+distinctly heard voices.
+
+It occurred to him to glance over the wall which he was skirting.
+
+There, in fact, sat two men, flat on the snow, with their backs against
+the wall, talking together in subdued tones.
+
+These two persons were strangers to him; one was a bearded man in a
+blouse, and the other a long-haired individual in rags. The bearded man
+had on a fez, the other's head was bare, and the snow had lodged in his
+hair.
+
+By thrusting his head over the wall, Marius could hear their remarks.
+
+The hairy one jogged the other man's elbow and said:--
+
+"--With the assistance of Patron-Minette, it can't fail."
+
+"Do you think so?" said the bearded man.
+
+And the long-haired one began again:--
+
+"It's as good as a warrant for each one, of five hundred balls, and the
+worst that can happen is five years, six years, ten years at the most!"
+
+The other replied with some hesitation, and shivering beneath his fez:--
+
+"That's a real thing. You can't go against such things."
+
+"I tell you that the affair can't go wrong," resumed the long-haired
+man. "Father What's-his-name's team will be already harnessed."
+
+Then they began to discuss a melodrama that they had seen on the
+preceding evening at the Gaite Theatre.
+
+Marius went his way.
+
+It seemed to him that the mysterious words of these men, so strangely
+hidden behind that wall, and crouching in the snow, could not but bear
+some relation to Jondrette's abominable projects. That must be the
+affair.
+
+He directed his course towards the faubourg Saint-Marceau and asked at
+the first shop he came to where he could find a commissary of police.
+
+He was directed to Rue de Pontoise, No. 14.
+
+Thither Marius betook himself.
+
+As he passed a baker's shop, he bought a two-penny roll, and ate it,
+foreseeing that he should not dine.
+
+On the way, he rendered justice to Providence. He reflected that had he
+not given his five francs to the Jondrette girl in the morning, he
+would have followed M. Leblanc's fiacre, and consequently have remained
+ignorant of everything, and that there would have been no obstacle to
+the trap of the Jondrettes and that M. Leblanc would have been lost, and
+his daughter with him, no doubt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--IN WHICH A POLICE AGENT BESTOWS TWO FISTFULS ON A LAWYER
+
+On arriving at No. 14, Rue de Pontoise, he ascended to the first floor
+and inquired for the commissary of police.
+
+"The commissary of police is not here," said a clerk; "but there is an
+inspector who takes his place. Would you like to speak to him? Are you
+in haste?"
+
+"Yes," said Marius.
+
+The clerk introduced him into the commissary's office. There stood a
+tall man behind a grating, leaning against a stove, and holding up with
+both hands the tails of a vast topcoat, with three collars. His face
+was square, with a thin, firm mouth, thick, gray, and very ferocious
+whiskers, and a look that was enough to turn your pockets inside out.
+Of that glance it might have been well said, not that it penetrated, but
+that it searched.
+
+This man's air was not much less ferocious nor less terrible than
+Jondrette's; the dog is, at times, no less terrible to meet than the
+wolf.
+
+"What do you want?" he said to Marius, without adding "monsieur."
+
+"Is this Monsieur le Commissaire de Police?"
+
+"He is absent. I am here in his stead."
+
+"The matter is very private."
+
+"Then speak."
+
+"And great haste is required."
+
+"Then speak quick."
+
+This calm, abrupt man was both terrifying and reassuring at one and the
+same time. He inspired fear and confidence. Marius related the adventure
+to him: That a person with whom he was not acquainted otherwise than by
+sight, was to be inveigled into a trap that very evening; that, as he
+occupied the room adjoining the den, he, Marius Pontmercy, a lawyer,
+had heard the whole plot through the partition; that the wretch who
+had planned the trap was a certain Jondrette; that there would be
+accomplices, probably some prowlers of the barriers, among others a
+certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille; that Jondrette's
+daughters were to lie in wait; that there was no way of warning the
+threatened man, since he did not even know his name; and that, finally,
+all this was to be carried out at six o'clock that evening, at the most
+deserted point of the Boulevard de l'Hopital, in house No. 50-52.
+
+At the sound of this number, the inspector raised his head, and said
+coldly:--
+
+"So it is in the room at the end of the corridor?"
+
+"Precisely," answered Marius, and he added: "Are you acquainted with
+that house?"
+
+The inspector remained silent for a moment, then replied, as he warmed
+the heel of his boot at the door of the stove:--
+
+"Apparently."
+
+He went on, muttering between his teeth, and not addressing Marius so
+much as his cravat:--
+
+"Patron-Minette must have had a hand in this."
+
+This word struck Marius.
+
+"Patron-Minette," said he, "I did hear that word pronounced, in fact."
+
+And he repeated to the inspector the dialogue between the long-haired
+man and the bearded man in the snow behind the wall of the Rue du
+Petit-Banquier.
+
+The inspector muttered:--
+
+"The long-haired man must be Brujon, and the bearded one Demi-Liard,
+alias Deux-Milliards."
+
+He had dropped his eyelids again, and became absorbed in thought.
+
+"As for Father What's-his-name, I think I recognize him. Here, I've
+burned my coat. They always have too much fire in these cursed stoves.
+Number 50-52. Former property of Gorbeau."
+
+Then he glanced at Marius.
+
+"You saw only that bearded and that long-haired man?"
+
+"And Panchaud."
+
+"You didn't see a little imp of a dandy prowling about the premises?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor a big lump of matter, resembling an elephant in the Jardin des
+Plantes?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor a scamp with the air of an old red tail?"
+
+"No."
+
+"As for the fourth, no one sees him, not even his adjutants, clerks, and
+employees. It is not surprising that you did not see him."
+
+"No. Who are all those persons?" asked Marius.
+
+The inspector answered:--
+
+"Besides, this is not the time for them."
+
+He relapsed into silence, then resumed:--
+
+"50-52. I know that barrack. Impossible to conceal ourselves inside
+it without the artists seeing us, and then they will get off simply
+by countermanding the vaudeville. They are so modest! An audience
+embarrasses them. None of that, none of that. I want to hear them sing
+and make them dance."
+
+This monologue concluded, he turned to Marius, and demanded, gazing at
+him intently the while:--
+
+"Are you afraid?"
+
+"Of what?" said Marius.
+
+"Of these men?"
+
+"No more than yourself!" retorted Marius rudely, who had begun to notice
+that this police agent had not yet said "monsieur" to him.
+
+The inspector stared still more intently at Marius, and continued with
+sententious solemnity:--
+
+"There, you speak like a brave man, and like an honest man. Courage does
+not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority."
+
+Marius interrupted him:--
+
+"That is well, but what do you intend to do?"
+
+The inspector contented himself with the remark:--
+
+"The lodgers have pass-keys with which to get in at night. You must have
+one."
+
+"Yes," said Marius.
+
+"Have you it about you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Give it to me," said the inspector.
+
+Marius took his key from his waistcoat pocket, handed it to the
+inspector and added:--
+
+"If you will take my advice, you will come in force."
+
+The inspector cast on Marius such a glance as Voltaire might have
+bestowed on a provincial academician who had suggested a rhyme to him;
+with one movement he plunged his hands, which were enormous, into the
+two immense pockets of his top-coat, and pulled out two small steel
+pistols, of the sort called "knock-me-downs." Then he presented them to
+Marius, saying rapidly, in a curt tone:--
+
+"Take these. Go home. Hide in your chamber, so that you may be supposed
+to have gone out. They are loaded. Each one carries two balls. You will
+keep watch; there is a hole in the wall, as you have informed me. These
+men will come. Leave them to their own devices for a time. When you
+think matters have reached a crisis, and that it is time to put a stop
+to them, fire a shot. Not too soon. The rest concerns me. A shot into
+the ceiling, the air, no matter where. Above all things, not too soon.
+Wait until they begin to put their project into execution; you are a
+lawyer; you know the proper point." Marius took the pistols and put them
+in the side pocket of his coat.
+
+"That makes a lump that can be seen," said the inspector. "Put them in
+your trousers pocket."
+
+Marius hid the pistols in his trousers pockets.
+
+"Now," pursued the inspector, "there is not a minute more to be lost by
+any one. What time is it? Half-past two. Seven o'clock is the hour?"
+
+"Six o'clock," answered Marius.
+
+"I have plenty of time," said the inspector, "but no more than enough.
+Don't forget anything that I have said to you. Bang. A pistol shot."
+
+"Rest easy," said Marius.
+
+And as Marius laid his hand on the handle of the door on his way out,
+the inspector called to him:--
+
+"By the way, if you have occasion for my services between now and then,
+come or send here. You will ask for Inspector Javert."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV--JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASES
+
+A few moments later, about three o'clock, Courfeyrac chanced to be
+passing along the Rue Mouffetard in company with Bossuet. The snow had
+redoubled in violence, and filled the air. Bossuet was just saying to
+Courfeyrac:--
+
+"One would say, to see all these snow-flakes fall, that there was a
+plague of white butterflies in heaven." All at once, Bossuet caught
+sight of Marius coming up the street towards the barrier with a peculiar
+air.
+
+"Hold!" said Bossuet. "There's Marius."
+
+"I saw him," said Courfeyrac. "Don't let's speak to him."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He is busy."
+
+"With what?"
+
+"Don't you see his air?"
+
+"What air?"
+
+"He has the air of a man who is following some one."
+
+"That's true," said Bossuet.
+
+"Just see the eyes he is making!" said Courfeyrac.
+
+"But who the deuce is he following?"
+
+"Some fine, flowery bonneted wench! He's in love."
+
+"But," observed Bossuet, "I don't see any wench nor any flowery bonnet
+in the street. There's not a woman round."
+
+Courfeyrac took a survey, and exclaimed:--
+
+"He's following a man!"
+
+A man, in fact, wearing a gray cap, and whose gray beard could be
+distinguished, although they only saw his back, was walking along about
+twenty paces in advance of Marius.
+
+This man was dressed in a great-coat which was perfectly new and too
+large for him, and in a frightful pair of trousers all hanging in rags
+and black with mud.
+
+Bossuet burst out laughing.
+
+"Who is that man?"
+
+"He?" retorted Courfeyrac, "he's a poet. Poets are very fond of wearing
+the trousers of dealers in rabbit skins and the overcoats of peers of
+France."
+
+"Let's see where Marius will go," said Bossuet; "let's see where the man
+is going, let's follow them, hey?"
+
+"Bossuet!" exclaimed Courfeyrac, "eagle of Meaux! You are a prodigious
+brute. Follow a man who is following another man, indeed!"
+
+They retraced their steps.
+
+Marius had, in fact, seen Jondrette passing along the Rue Mouffetard,
+and was spying on his proceedings.
+
+Jondrette walked straight ahead, without a suspicion that he was already
+held by a glance.
+
+He quitted the Rue Mouffetard, and Marius saw him enter one of the most
+terrible hovels in the Rue Gracieuse; he remained there about a quarter
+of an hour, then returned to the Rue Mouffetard. He halted at
+an ironmonger's shop, which then stood at the corner of the Rue
+Pierre-Lombard, and a few minutes later Marius saw him emerge from the
+shop, holding in his hand a huge cold chisel with a white wood handle,
+which he concealed beneath his great-coat. At the top of the Rue
+Petit-Gentilly he turned to the left and proceeded rapidly to the Rue du
+Petit-Banquier. The day was declining; the snow, which had ceased for a
+moment, had just begun again. Marius posted himself on the watch at the
+very corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, which was deserted, as usual,
+and did not follow Jondrette into it. It was lucky that he did so,
+for, on arriving in the vicinity of the wall where Marius had heard the
+long-haired man and the bearded man conversing, Jondrette turned round,
+made sure that no one was following him, did not see him, then sprang
+across the wall and disappeared.
+
+The waste land bordered by this wall communicated with the back yard of
+an ex-livery stable-keeper of bad repute, who had failed and who still
+kept a few old single-seated berlins under his sheds.
+
+Marius thought that it would be wise to profit by Jondrette's absence to
+return home; moreover, it was growing late; every evening, Ma'am Bougon
+when she set out for her dish-washing in town, had a habit of locking
+the door, which was always closed at dusk. Marius had given his key to
+the inspector of police; it was important, therefore, that he should
+make haste.
+
+Evening had arrived, night had almost closed in; on the horizon and in
+the immensity of space, there remained but one spot illuminated by the
+sun, and that was the moon.
+
+It was rising in a ruddy glow behind the low dome of Salpetriere.
+
+Marius returned to No. 50-52 with great strides. The door was still open
+when he arrived. He mounted the stairs on tip-toe and glided along the
+wall of the corridor to his chamber. This corridor, as the reader will
+remember, was bordered on both sides by attics, all of which were, for
+the moment, empty and to let. Ma'am Bougon was in the habit of leaving
+all the doors open. As he passed one of these attics, Marius thought
+he perceived in the uninhabited cell the motionless heads of four men,
+vaguely lighted up by a remnant of daylight, falling through a dormer
+window.
+
+Marius made no attempt to see, not wishing to be seen himself. He
+succeeded in reaching his chamber without being seen and without making
+any noise. It was high time. A moment later he heard Ma'am Bougon take
+her departure, locking the door of the house behind her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE WORDS TO AN ENGLISH AIR WHICH
+WAS IN FASHION IN 1832
+
+Marius seated himself on his bed. It might have been half-past five
+o'clock. Only half an hour separated him from what was about to happen.
+He heard the beating of his arteries as one hears the ticking of a watch
+in the dark. He thought of the double march which was going on at that
+moment in the dark,--crime advancing on one side, justice coming up on
+the other. He was not afraid, but he could not think without a shudder
+of what was about to take place. As is the case with all those who are
+suddenly assailed by an unforeseen adventure, the entire day produced
+upon him the effect of a dream, and in order to persuade himself that he
+was not the prey of a nightmare, he had to feel the cold barrels of the
+steel pistols in his trousers pockets.
+
+It was no longer snowing; the moon disengaged itself more and more
+clearly from the mist, and its light, mingled with the white reflection
+of the snow which had fallen, communicated to the chamber a sort of
+twilight aspect.
+
+There was a light in the Jondrette den. Marius saw the hole in the wall
+shining with a reddish glow which seemed bloody to him.
+
+It was true that the light could not be produced by a candle. However,
+there was not a sound in the Jondrette quarters, not a soul was moving
+there, not a soul speaking, not a breath; the silence was glacial and
+profound, and had it not been for that light, he might have thought
+himself next door to a sepulchre.
+
+Marius softly removed his boots and pushed them under his bed.
+
+Several minutes elapsed. Marius heard the lower door turn on its hinges;
+a heavy step mounted the staircase, and hastened along the corridor; the
+latch of the hovel was noisily lifted; it was Jondrette returning.
+
+Instantly, several voices arose. The whole family was in the garret.
+Only, it had been silent in the master's absence, like wolf whelps in
+the absence of the wolf.
+
+"It's I," said he.
+
+"Good evening, daddy," yelped the girls.
+
+"Well?" said the mother.
+
+"All's going first-rate," responded Jondrette, "but my feet are beastly
+cold. Good! You have dressed up. You have done well! You must inspire
+confidence."
+
+"All ready to go out."
+
+"Don't forget what I told you. You will do everything sure?"
+
+"Rest easy."
+
+"Because--" said Jondrette. And he left the phrase unfinished.
+
+Marius heard him lay something heavy on the table, probably the chisel
+which he had purchased.
+
+"By the way," said Jondrette, "have you been eating here?"
+
+"Yes," said the mother. "I got three large potatoes and some salt. I
+took advantage of the fire to cook them."
+
+"Good," returned Jondrette. "To-morrow I will take you out to dine with
+me. We will have a duck and fixings. You shall dine like Charles the
+Tenth; all is going well!"
+
+Then he added:--
+
+"The mouse-trap is open. The cats are there."
+
+He lowered his voice still further, and said:--
+
+"Put this in the fire."
+
+Marius heard a sound of charcoal being knocked with the tongs or some
+iron utensil, and Jondrette continued:--
+
+"Have you greased the hinges of the door so that they will not squeak?"
+
+"Yes," replied the mother.
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"Nearly six. The half-hour struck from Saint-Medard a while ago."
+
+"The devil!" ejaculated Jondrette; "the children must go and watch. Come
+you, do you listen here."
+
+A whispering ensued.
+
+Jondrette's voice became audible again:--
+
+"Has old Bougon left?"
+
+"Yes," said the mother.
+
+"Are you sure that there is no one in our neighbor's room?"
+
+"He has not been in all day, and you know very well that this is his
+dinner hour."
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+"All the same," said Jondrette, "there's no harm in going to see whether
+he is there. Here, my girl, take the candle and go there."
+
+Marius fell on his hands and knees and crawled silently under his bed.
+
+Hardly had he concealed himself, when he perceived a light through the
+crack of his door.
+
+"P'pa," cried a voice, "he is not in here."
+
+He recognized the voice of the eldest daughter.
+
+"Did you go in?" demanded her father.
+
+"No," replied the girl, "but as his key is in the door, he must be out."
+
+The father exclaimed:--
+
+"Go in, nevertheless."
+
+The door opened, and Marius saw the tall Jondrette come in with a candle
+in her hand. She was as she had been in the morning, only still more
+repulsive in this light.
+
+She walked straight up to the bed. Marius endured an indescribable
+moment of anxiety; but near the bed there was a mirror nailed to the
+wall, and it was thither that she was directing her steps. She raised
+herself on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. In the neighboring room,
+the sound of iron articles being moved was audible.
+
+She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand, and smiled into the
+mirror, humming with her cracked and sepulchral voice:--
+
+ Nos amours ont dure toute une semaine,[28]
+ Mais que du bonheur les instants sont courts!
+ S'adorer huit jours, c' etait bien la peine!
+ Le temps des amours devait durer toujours!
+ Devrait durer toujours! devrait durer toujours!
+
+
+In the meantime, Marius trembled. It seemed impossible to him that she
+should not hear his breathing.
+
+She stepped to the window and looked out with the half-foolish way she
+had.
+
+"How ugly Paris is when it has put on a white chemise!" said she.
+
+She returned to the mirror and began again to put on airs before it,
+scrutinizing herself full-face and three-quarters face in turn.
+
+"Well!" cried her father, "what are you about there?"
+
+"I am looking under the bed and the furniture," she replied, continuing
+to arrange her hair; "there's no one here."
+
+"Booby!" yelled her father. "Come here this minute! And don't waste any
+time about it!"
+
+"Coming! Coming!" said she. "One has no time for anything in this
+hovel!"
+
+She hummed:--
+
+ Vous me quittez pour aller a la gloire;[29]
+ Mon triste coeur suivra partout.
+
+
+She cast a parting glance in the mirror and went out, shutting the door
+behind her.
+
+A moment more, and Marius heard the sound of the two young girls' bare
+feet in the corridor, and Jondrette's voice shouting to them:--
+
+"Pay strict heed! One on the side of the barrier, the other at the
+corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don't lose sight for a moment of
+the door of this house, and the moment you see anything, rush here on
+the instant! as hard as you can go! You have a key to get in."
+
+The eldest girl grumbled:--
+
+"The idea of standing watch in the snow barefoot!"
+
+"To-morrow you shall have some dainty little green silk boots!" said the
+father.
+
+They ran down stairs, and a few seconds later the shock of the outer
+door as it banged to announced that they were outside.
+
+There now remained in the house only Marius, the Jondrettes and
+probably, also, the mysterious persons of whom Marius had caught a
+glimpse in the twilight, behind the door of the unused attic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII--THE USE MADE OF MARIUS' FIVE-FRANC PIECE
+
+Marius decided that the moment had now arrived when he must resume his
+post at his observatory. In a twinkling, and with the agility of his
+age, he had reached the hole in the partition.
+
+He looked.
+
+The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a curious aspect, and
+Marius found an explanation of the singular light which he had noticed.
+A candle was burning in a candlestick covered with verdigris, but
+that was not what really lighted the chamber. The hovel was completely
+illuminated, as it were, by the reflection from a rather large
+sheet-iron brazier standing in the fireplace, and filled with burning
+charcoal, the brazier prepared by the Jondrette woman that morning. The
+charcoal was glowing hot and the brazier was red; a blue flame flickered
+over it, and helped him to make out the form of the chisel purchased by
+Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard, where it had been thrust into the
+brazier to heat. In one corner, near the door, and as though prepared
+for some definite use, two heaps were visible, which appeared to be, the
+one a heap of old iron, the other a heap of ropes. All this would have
+caused the mind of a person who knew nothing of what was in preparation,
+to waver between a very sinister and a very simple idea. The lair thus
+lighted up more resembled a forge than a mouth of hell, but Jondrette,
+in this light, had rather the air of a demon than of a smith.
+
+The heat of the brazier was so great, that the candle on the table was
+melting on the side next the chafing-dish, and was drooping over. An old
+dark-lantern of copper, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche, stood on
+the chimney-piece.
+
+The brazier, placed in the fireplace itself, beside the nearly extinct
+brands, sent its vapors up the chimney, and gave out no odor.
+
+The moon, entering through the four panes of the window, cast its
+whiteness into the crimson and flaming garret; and to the poetic spirit
+of Marius, who was dreamy even in the moment of action, it was like a
+thought of heaven mingled with the misshapen reveries of earth.
+
+A breath of air which made its way in through the open pane, helped to
+dissipate the smell of the charcoal and to conceal the presence of the
+brazier.
+
+The Jondrette lair was, if the reader recalls what we have said of the
+Gorbeau building, admirably chosen to serve as the theatre of a violent
+and sombre deed, and as the envelope for a crime. It was the most
+retired chamber in the most isolated house on the most deserted
+boulevard in Paris. If the system of ambush and traps had not already
+existed, they would have been invented there.
+
+The whole thickness of a house and a multitude of uninhabited rooms
+separated this den from the boulevard, and the only window that existed
+opened on waste lands enclosed with walls and palisades.
+
+Jondrette had lighted his pipe, seated himself on the seatless chair,
+and was engaged in smoking. His wife was talking to him in a low tone.
+
+If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those men who
+laugh on every occasion in life, he would have burst with laughter when
+his gaze fell on the Jondrette woman. She had on a black bonnet with
+plumes not unlike the hats of the heralds-at-arms at the coronation of
+Charles X., an immense tartan shawl over her knitted petticoat, and the
+man's shoes which her daughter had scorned in the morning. It was this
+toilette which had extracted from Jondrette the exclamation: "Good! You
+have dressed up. You have done well. You must inspire confidence!"
+
+As for Jondrette, he had not taken off the new surtout, which was too
+large for him, and which M. Leblanc had given him, and his costume
+continued to present that contrast of coat and trousers which
+constituted the ideal of a poet in Courfeyrac's eyes.
+
+All at once, Jondrette lifted up his voice:--
+
+"By the way! Now that I think of it. In this weather, he will come in a
+carriage. Light the lantern, take it and go down stairs. You will stand
+behind the lower door. The very moment that you hear the carriage stop,
+you will open the door, instantly, he will come up, you will light the
+staircase and the corridor, and when he enters here, you will go down
+stairs again as speedily as possible, you will pay the coachman, and
+dismiss the fiacre."
+
+"And the money?" inquired the woman.
+
+Jondrette fumbled in his trousers pocket and handed her five francs.
+
+"What's this?" she exclaimed.
+
+Jondrette replied with dignity:--
+
+"That is the monarch which our neighbor gave us this morning."
+
+And he added:--
+
+"Do you know what? Two chairs will be needed here."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To sit on."
+
+Marius felt a cold chill pass through his limbs at hearing this mild
+answer from Jondrette.
+
+"Pardieu! I'll go and get one of our neighbor's."
+
+And with a rapid movement, she opened the door of the den, and went out
+into the corridor.
+
+Marius absolutely had not the time to descend from the commode, reach
+his bed, and conceal himself beneath it.
+
+"Take the candle," cried Jondrette.
+
+"No," said she, "it would embarrass me, I have the two chairs to carry.
+There is moonlight."
+
+Marius heard Mother Jondrette's heavy hand fumbling at his lock in the
+dark. The door opened. He remained nailed to the spot with the shock and
+with horror.
+
+The Jondrette entered.
+
+The dormer window permitted the entrance of a ray of moonlight between
+two blocks of shadow. One of these blocks of shadow entirely covered the
+wall against which Marius was leaning, so that he disappeared within it.
+
+Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two
+chairs, the only ones which Marius possessed, and went away, letting the
+door fall heavily to behind her.
+
+She re-entered the lair.
+
+"Here are the two chairs."
+
+"And here is the lantern. Go down as quick as you can."
+
+She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.
+
+He placed the two chairs on opposite sides of the table, turned the
+chisel in the brazier, set in front of the fireplace an old screen which
+masked the chafing-dish, then went to the corner where lay the pile
+of rope, and bent down as though to examine something. Marius then
+recognized the fact, that what he had taken for a shapeless mass was a
+very well-made rope-ladder, with wooden rungs and two hooks with which
+to attach it.
+
+This ladder, and some large tools, veritable masses of iron, which were
+mingled with the old iron piled up behind the door, had not been in the
+Jondrette hovel in the morning, and had evidently been brought thither
+in the afternoon, during Marius' absence.
+
+"Those are the utensils of an edge-tool maker," thought Marius.
+
+Had Marius been a little more learned in this line, he would have
+recognized in what he took for the engines of an edge-tool maker,
+certain instruments which will force a lock or pick a lock, and others
+which will cut or slice, the two families of tools which burglars call
+cadets and fauchants.
+
+The fireplace and the two chairs were exactly opposite Marius. The
+brazier being concealed, the only light in the room was now furnished
+by the candle; the smallest bit of crockery on the table or on the
+chimney-piece cast a large shadow. There was something indescribably
+calm, threatening, and hideous about this chamber. One felt that there
+existed in it the anticipation of something terrible.
+
+Jondrette had allowed his pipe to go out, a serious sign of
+preoccupation, and had again seated himself. The candle brought out the
+fierce and the fine angles of his countenance. He indulged in scowls and
+in abrupt unfoldings of the right hand, as though he were responding to
+the last counsels of a sombre inward monologue. In the course of one of
+these dark replies which he was making to himself, he pulled the table
+drawer rapidly towards him, took out a long kitchen knife which was
+concealed there, and tried the edge of its blade on his nail. That done,
+he put the knife back in the drawer and shut it.
+
+Marius, on his side, grasped the pistol in his right pocket, drew it out
+and cocked it.
+
+The pistol emitted a sharp, clear click, as he cocked it.
+
+Jondrette started, half rose, listened a moment, then began to laugh and
+said:--
+
+"What a fool I am! It's the partition cracking!"
+
+Marius kept the pistol in his hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII--MARIUS' TWO CHAIRS FORM A VIS-A-VIS
+
+Suddenly, the distant and melancholy vibration of a clock shook the
+panes. Six o'clock was striking from Saint-Medard.
+
+Jondrette marked off each stroke with a toss of his head. When the sixth
+had struck, he snuffed the candle with his fingers.
+
+Then he began to pace up and down the room, listened at the corridor,
+walked on again, then listened once more.
+
+"Provided only that he comes!" he muttered, then he returned to his
+chair.
+
+He had hardly reseated himself when the door opened.
+
+Mother Jondrette had opened it, and now remained in the corridor making
+a horrible, amiable grimace, which one of the holes of the dark-lantern
+illuminated from below.
+
+"Enter, sir," she said.
+
+"Enter, my benefactor," repeated Jondrette, rising hastily.
+
+M. Leblanc made his appearance.
+
+He wore an air of serenity which rendered him singularly venerable.
+
+He laid four louis on the table.
+
+"Monsieur Fabantou," said he, "this is for your rent and your most
+pressing necessities. We will attend to the rest hereafter."
+
+"May God requite it to you, my generous benefactor!" said Jondrette.
+
+And rapidly approaching his wife:--
+
+"Dismiss the carriage!"
+
+She slipped out while her husband was lavishing salutes and offering
+M. Leblanc a chair. An instant later she returned and whispered in his
+ear:--
+
+"'Tis done."
+
+The snow, which had not ceased falling since the morning, was so deep
+that the arrival of the fiacre had not been audible, and they did not
+now hear its departure.
+
+Meanwhile, M. Leblanc had seated himself.
+
+Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair, facing M. Leblanc.
+
+Now, in order to form an idea of the scene which is to follow, let the
+reader picture to himself in his own mind, a cold night, the solitudes
+of the Salpetriere covered with snow and white as winding-sheets in
+the moonlight, the taper-like lights of the street lanterns which shone
+redly here and there along those tragic boulevards, and the long rows
+of black elms, not a passer-by for perhaps a quarter of a league around,
+the Gorbeau hovel, at its highest pitch of silence, of horror, and of
+darkness; in that building, in the midst of those solitudes, in the
+midst of that darkness, the vast Jondrette garret lighted by a single
+candle, and in that den two men seated at a table, M. Leblanc tranquil,
+Jondrette smiling and alarming, the Jondrette woman, the female wolf,
+in one corner, and, behind the partition, Marius, invisible, erect, not
+losing a word, not missing a single movement, his eye on the watch, and
+pistol in hand.
+
+However, Marius experienced only an emotion of horror, but no fear. He
+clasped the stock of the pistol firmly and felt reassured. "I shall be
+able to stop that wretch whenever I please," he thought.
+
+He felt that the police were there somewhere in ambuscade, waiting for
+the signal agreed upon and ready to stretch out their arm.
+
+Moreover, he was in hopes, that this violent encounter between Jondrette
+and M. Leblanc would cast some light on all the things which he was
+interested in learning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX--OCCUPYING ONE'S SELF WITH OBSCURE DEPTHS
+
+Hardly was M. Leblanc seated, when he turned his eyes towards the
+pallets, which were empty.
+
+"How is the poor little wounded girl?" he inquired.
+
+"Bad," replied Jondrette with a heart-broken and grateful smile, "very
+bad, my worthy sir. Her elder sister has taken her to the Bourbe to
+have her hurt dressed. You will see them presently; they will be back
+immediately."
+
+"Madame Fabantou seems to me to be better," went on M. Leblanc, casting
+his eyes on the eccentric costume of the Jondrette woman, as she stood
+between him and the door, as though already guarding the exit, and gazed
+at him in an attitude of menace and almost of combat.
+
+"She is dying," said Jondrette. "But what do you expect, sir! She has so
+much courage, that woman has! She's not a woman, she's an ox."
+
+The Jondrette, touched by his compliment, deprecated it with the
+affected airs of a flattered monster.
+
+"You are always too good to me, Monsieur Jondrette!"
+
+"Jondrette!" said M. Leblanc, "I thought your name was Fabantou?"
+
+"Fabantou, alias Jondrette!" replied the husband hurriedly. "An artistic
+sobriquet!"
+
+And launching at his wife a shrug of the shoulders which M. Leblanc did
+not catch, he continued with an emphatic and caressing inflection of
+voice:--
+
+"Ah! we have had a happy life together, this poor darling and I! What
+would there be left for us if we had not that? We are so wretched, my
+respectable sir! We have arms, but there is no work! We have the will,
+no work! I don't know how the government arranges that, but, on my word
+of honor, sir, I am not Jacobin, sir, I am not a bousingot.[30] I don't
+wish them any evil, but if I were the ministers, on my most sacred word,
+things would be different. Here, for instance, I wanted to have my
+girls taught the trade of paper-box makers. You will say to me: 'What!
+a trade?' Yes! A trade! A simple trade! A bread-winner! What a fall,
+my benefactor! What a degradation, when one has been what we have been!
+Alas! There is nothing left to us of our days of prosperity! One thing
+only, a picture, of which I think a great deal, but which I am willing
+to part with, for I must live! Item, one must live!"
+
+While Jondrette thus talked, with an apparent incoherence which
+detracted nothing from the thoughtful and sagacious expression of his
+physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at the other end of
+the room a person whom he had not seen before. A man had just entered,
+so softly that the door had not been heard to turn on its hinges. This
+man wore a violet knitted vest, which was old, worn, spotted, cut and
+gaping at every fold, wide trousers of cotton velvet, wooden shoes on
+his feet, no shirt, had his neck bare, his bare arms tattooed, and his
+face smeared with black. He had seated himself in silence on the nearest
+bed, and, as he was behind Jondrette, he could only be indistinctly
+seen.
+
+That sort of magnetic instinct which turns aside the gaze, caused M.
+Leblanc to turn round almost at the same moment as Marius. He could not
+refrain from a gesture of surprise which did not escape Jondrette.
+
+"Ah! I see!" exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with an air of
+complaisance, "you are looking at your overcoat? It fits me! My faith,
+but it fits me!"
+
+"Who is that man?" said M. Leblanc.
+
+"Him?" ejaculated Jondrette, "he's a neighbor of mine. Don't pay any
+attention to him."
+
+The neighbor was a singular-looking individual. However, manufactories
+of chemical products abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Many of the
+workmen might have black faces. Besides this, M. Leblanc's whole person
+was expressive of candid and intrepid confidence.
+
+He went on:--
+
+"Excuse me; what were you saying, M. Fabantou?"
+
+"I was telling you, sir, and dear protector," replied Jondrette placing
+his elbows on the table and contemplating M. Leblanc with steady and
+tender eyes, not unlike the eyes of the boa-constrictor, "I was telling
+you, that I have a picture to sell."
+
+A slight sound came from the door. A second man had just entered and
+seated himself on the bed, behind Jondrette.
+
+Like the first, his arms were bare, and he had a mask of ink or
+lampblack.
+
+Although this man had, literally, glided into the room, he had not been
+able to prevent M. Leblanc catching sight of him.
+
+"Don't mind them," said Jondrette, "they are people who belong in the
+house. So I was saying, that there remains in my possession a valuable
+picture. But stop, sir, take a look at it."
+
+He rose, went to the wall at the foot of which stood the panel which we
+have already mentioned, and turned it round, still leaving it supported
+against the wall. It really was something which resembled a picture, and
+which the candle illuminated, somewhat. Marius could make nothing out of
+it, as Jondrette stood between the picture and him; he only saw a coarse
+daub, and a sort of principal personage colored with the harsh crudity
+of foreign canvasses and screen paintings.
+
+"What is that?" asked M. Leblanc.
+
+Jondrette exclaimed:--
+
+"A painting by a master, a picture of great value, my benefactor! I am
+as much attached to it as I am to my two daughters; it recalls souvenirs
+to me! But I have told you, and I will not take it back, that I am so
+wretched that I will part with it."
+
+Either by chance, or because he had begun to feel a dawning uneasiness,
+M. Leblanc's glance returned to the bottom of the room as he examined
+the picture.
+
+There were now four men, three seated on the bed, one standing near the
+door-post, all four with bare arms and motionless, with faces smeared
+with black. One of those on the bed was leaning against the wall, with
+closed eyes, and it might have been supposed that he was asleep. He
+was old; his white hair contrasting with his blackened face produced a
+horrible effect. The other two seemed to be young; one wore a beard, the
+other wore his hair long. None of them had on shoes; those who did not
+wear socks were barefooted.
+
+Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on these men.
+
+"They are friends. They are neighbors," said he. "Their faces are black
+because they work in charcoal. They are chimney-builders. Don't trouble
+yourself about them, my benefactor, but buy my picture. Have pity on
+my misery. I will not ask you much for it. How much do you think it is
+worth?"
+
+"Well," said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette full in the eye, and with the
+manner of a man who is on his guard, "it is some signboard for a tavern,
+and is worth about three francs."
+
+Jondrette replied sweetly:--
+
+"Have you your pocket-book with you? I should be satisfied with a
+thousand crowns."
+
+M. Leblanc sprang up, placed his back against the wall, and cast a rapid
+glance around the room. He had Jondrette on his left, on the side next
+the window, and the Jondrette woman and the four men on his right, on
+the side next the door. The four men did not stir, and did not even seem
+to be looking on.
+
+Jondrette had again begun to speak in a plaintive tone, with so vague
+an eye, and so lamentable an intonation, that M. Leblanc might have
+supposed that what he had before him was a man who had simply gone mad
+with misery.
+
+"If you do not buy my picture, my dear benefactor," said Jondrette, "I
+shall be left without resources; there will be nothing left for me but
+to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wanted to have my
+two girls taught the middle-class paper-box trade, the making of boxes
+for New Year's gifts! Well! A table with a board at the end to keep the
+glasses from falling off is required, then a special stove is needed, a
+pot with three compartments for the different degrees of strength of
+the paste, according as it is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a
+paring-knife to cut the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to
+nail the steels, pincers, how the devil do I know what all? And all that
+in order to earn four sous a day! And you have to work fourteen hours a
+day! And each box passes through the workwoman's hands thirteen times!
+And you can't wet the paper! And you mustn't spot anything! And you must
+keep the paste hot. The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day! How do you
+suppose a man is to live?"
+
+As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing
+him. M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's eye was
+fixed on the door. Marius' eager attention was transferred from one
+to the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: "Is this man an
+idiot?" Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner
+of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order: "There
+is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river! I went down
+three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz the other day for
+that purpose."
+
+All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash; the little
+man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step toward M. Leblanc
+and cried in a voice of thunder: "That has nothing to do with the
+question! Do you know me?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX--THE TRAP
+
+The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view of
+three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks of black
+paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the
+second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the
+handle, with the blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for slaughtering
+cattle. The third, a man with thick-set shoulders, not so slender as
+the first, held in his hand an enormous key stolen from the door of some
+prison.
+
+It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had been
+waiting for. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man with the
+cudgel, the thin one.
+
+"Is everything ready?" said Jondrette.
+
+"Yes," replied the thin man.
+
+"Where is Montparnasse?"
+
+"The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl."
+
+"Which?"
+
+"The eldest."
+
+"Is there a carriage at the door?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is the team harnessed?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"With two good horses?"
+
+"Excellent."
+
+"Is it waiting where I ordered?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Good," said Jondrette.
+
+M. Leblanc was very pale. He was scrutinizing everything around him in
+the den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into, and his
+head, directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him, moved
+on his neck with an astonished and attentive slowness, but there
+was nothing in his air which resembled fear. He had improvised
+an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but an instant
+previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly old man, had
+suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust fist on the
+back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.
+
+This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a
+danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous
+as they are kind, both easily and simply. The father of a woman whom we
+love is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of that unknown man.
+
+Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said: "They are
+chimney-builders," had armed themselves from the pile of old iron, one
+with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third
+with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without
+uttering a syllable. The old man had remained on the bed, and had merely
+opened his eyes. The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside him.
+
+Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention
+would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling, in the
+direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.
+
+Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,
+turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question, accompanying
+it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh which was peculiar to
+him:--
+
+"So you do not recognize me?"
+
+M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:--
+
+"No."
+
+Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,
+crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M.
+Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing M.
+Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is about to
+bite, he exclaimed:--
+
+"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is
+Thenardier. I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! Do you understand?
+Thenardier! Now do you know me?"
+
+An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he replied
+with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level,
+with his accustomed placidity:--
+
+"No more than before."
+
+Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at that moment
+through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard,
+stupid, thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: "My name is
+Thenardier," Marius had trembled in every limb, and had leaned against
+the wall, as though he felt the cold of a steel blade through his heart.
+Then his right arm, all ready to discharge the signal shot, dropped
+slowly, and at the moment when Jondrette repeated, "Thenardier, do you
+understand?" Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol
+fall. Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc,
+but he had quite upset Marius. That name of Thenardier, with which M.
+Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well. Let the reader
+recall what that name meant to him! That name he had worn on his heart,
+inscribed in his father's testament! He bore it at the bottom of his
+mind, in the depths of his memory, in that sacred injunction: "A certain
+Thenardier saved my life. If my son encounters him, he will do him all
+the good that lies in his power." That name, it will be remembered,
+was one of the pieties of his soul; he mingled it with the name of
+his father in his worship. What! This man was that Thenardier, that
+inn-keeper of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so vainly sought! He
+had found him at last, and how? His father's saviour was a ruffian!
+That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote himself, was
+a monster! That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the point
+of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet, clearly
+comprehend, but which resembled an assassination! And against whom,
+great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mockery of fate! His father
+had commanded him from the depths of his coffin to do all the good in
+his power to this Thenardier, and for four years Marius had cherished
+no other thought than to acquit this debt of his father's, and at the
+moment when he was on the eve of having a brigand seized in the very
+act of crime by justice, destiny cried to him: "This is Thenardier!"
+He could at last repay this man for his father's life, saved amid a
+hail-storm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it
+with the scaffold! He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that
+Thenardier, he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet;
+and now he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over
+to the executioner! His father said to him: "Succor Thenardier!" And he
+replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thenardier! He was
+about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of that man who
+had torn him from death at the peril of his own life, executed on the
+Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son, of that Marius to whom
+he had entrusted that man by his will! And what a mockery to have so
+long worn on his breast his father's last commands, written in his own
+hand, only to act in so horribly contrary a sense! But, on the other
+hand, now look on that trap and not prevent it! Condemn the victim and
+to spare the assassin! Could one be held to any gratitude towards so
+miserable a wretch? All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the
+last four years were pierced through and through, as it were, by this
+unforeseen blow.
+
+He shuddered. Everything depended on him. Unknown to themselves, he
+held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there before his
+eyes. If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved, and Thenardier lost;
+if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed, and, who knows?
+Thenardier would escape. Should he dash down the one or allow the other
+to fall? Remorse awaited him in either case.
+
+What was he to do? What should he choose? Be false to the most imperious
+souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most sacred duty,
+to the most venerated text! Should he ignore his father's testament,
+or allow the perpetration of a crime! On the one hand, it seemed to him
+that he heard "his Ursule" supplicating for her father and on the other,
+the colonel commending Thenardier to his care. He felt that he was going
+mad. His knees gave way beneath him. And he had not even the time for
+deliberation, so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes
+was hastening to its catastrophe. It was like a whirlwind of which he
+had thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away. He
+was on the verge of swooning.
+
+In the meantime, Thenardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no other
+name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of frenzy
+and wild triumph.
+
+He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece with
+so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished, and the
+tallow bespattered the wall.
+
+Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out these
+words:--
+
+"Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked! Spitchcocked!"
+
+And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.
+
+"Ah!" he cried, "so I've found you again at last, Mister philanthropist!
+Mister threadbare millionnaire! Mister giver of dolls! you old
+ninny! Ah! so you don't recognize me! No, it wasn't you who came to
+Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823! It
+wasn't you who carried off that Fantine's child from me! The Lark! It
+wasn't you who had a yellow great-coat! No! Nor a package of duds in
+your hand, as you had this morning here! Say, wife, it seems to be his
+mania to carry packets of woollen stockings into houses! Old charity
+monger, get out with you! Are you a hosier, Mister millionnaire? You
+give away your stock in trade to the poor, holy man! What bosh! merry
+Andrew! Ah! and you don't recognize me? Well, I recognize you, that I
+do! I recognized you the very moment you poked your snout in here. Ah!
+you'll find out presently, that it isn't all roses to thrust yourself
+in that fashion into people's houses, under the pretext that they are
+taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a poor man, to whom one
+would give a sou, to deceive persons, to play the generous, to take away
+their means of livelihood, and to make threats in the woods, and you
+can't call things quits because afterwards, when people are ruined, you
+bring a coat that is too large, and two miserable hospital blankets, you
+old blackguard, you child-stealer!"
+
+He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment. One would
+have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole, like the Rhone;
+then, as though he were concluding aloud the things which he had been
+saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table with his fist, and
+shouted:--
+
+"And with his goody-goody air!"
+
+And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:--
+
+"Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my
+misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and
+who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a
+great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live
+on all my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything that
+I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual
+row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all
+the wine folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it!
+Well, never mind! Say, now! You must have thought me ridiculous when you
+went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel in the forest. You were the
+stronger. Revenge. I'm the one to hold the trumps to-day! You're in a
+sorry case, my good fellow! Oh, but I can laugh! Really, I laugh! Didn't
+he fall into the trap! I told him that I was an actor, that my name was
+Fabantou, that I had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle
+Muche, that my landlord insisted on being paid tomorrow, the 4th of
+February, and he didn't even notice that the 8th of January, and not the
+4th of February is the time when the quarter runs out! Absurd idiot!
+And the four miserable Philippes which he has brought me! Scoundrel!
+He hadn't the heart even to go as high as a hundred francs! And how
+he swallowed my platitudes! That did amuse me. I said to myself:
+'Blockhead! Come, I've got you! I lick your paws this morning, but I'll
+gnaw your heart this evening!'"
+
+Thenardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest panted
+like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble happiness of a
+feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that it can, at last,
+harass what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of
+a dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the head of Goliath, the
+joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick bull, so nearly dead
+that he can no longer defend himself, but sufficiently alive to suffer
+still.
+
+M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:--
+
+"I do not know what you mean to say. You are mistaken in me. I am a very
+poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you. You are
+mistaking me for some other person."
+
+"Ah!" roared Thenardier hoarsely, "a pretty lie! You stick to that
+pleasantry, do you! You're floundering, my old buck! Ah! You don't
+remember! You don't see who I am?"
+
+"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at
+that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see that you are
+a villain!"
+
+Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
+susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word
+"villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier grasped
+his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you
+stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:--
+
+"Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop!
+it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no
+bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It's three
+days since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain! Ah! you folks
+warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats,
+like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have
+porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch
+in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when
+you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what
+the engineer Chevalier's thermometer says about it. We, it is we who are
+thermometers. We don't need to go out and look on the quay at the corner
+of the Tour de l'Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold;
+we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our
+hearts, and we say: 'There is no God!' And you come to our caverns, yes
+our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! But we'll devour
+you! But we'll devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister
+millionnaire: I have been a solid man, I have held a license, I have
+been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it's quite possible
+that you are not!"
+
+Here Thenardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door, and
+added with a shudder:--
+
+"When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me like a
+cobbler!"
+
+Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:--
+
+"And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I'm not a suspicious
+character, not a bit of it! I'm not a man whose name nobody knows, and
+who comes and abducts children from houses! I'm an old French soldier,
+I ought to have been decorated! I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the
+battle I saved a general called the Comte of I don't know what. He told
+me his name, but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn't hear. All I
+caught was Merci [thanks]. I'd rather have had his name than his thanks.
+That would have helped me to find him again. The picture that you see
+here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,--do you know what
+it represents? It represents me. David wished to immortalize that
+feat of prowess. I have that general on my back, and I am carrying him
+through the grape-shot. There's the history of it! That general never
+did a single thing for me; he was no better than the rest! But none the
+less, I saved his life at the risk of my own, and I have the certificate
+of the fact in my pocket! I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies!
+And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let's have an
+end of it. I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous
+lot of money, or I'll exterminate you, by the thunder of the good God!"
+
+Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish, and was
+listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. It certainly
+was the Thenardier of the will. Marius shuddered at that reproach of
+ingratitude directed against his father, and which he was on the point
+of so fatally justifying. His perplexity was redoubled.
+
+Moreover, there was in all these words of Thenardier, in his accent, in
+his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word, there
+was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything, in that
+mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage
+and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in
+that immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous delights
+of violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul, in that
+conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds, something
+which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending as the truth.
+
+The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had proposed
+that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else, as the reader has
+divined, than the sign of his tavern painted, as it will be remembered,
+by himself, the only relic which he had preserved from his shipwreck at
+Montfermeil.
+
+As he had ceased to intercept Marius' visual ray, Marius could examine
+this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize a battle, a
+background of smoke, and a man carrying another man. It was the group
+composed of Pontmercy and Thenardier; the sergeant the rescuer, the
+colonel rescued. Marius was like a drunken man; this picture restored
+his father to life in some sort; it was no longer the signboard of the
+wine-shop at Montfermeil, it was a resurrection; a tomb had yawned, a
+phantom had risen there. Marius heard his heart beating in his temples,
+he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears, his bleeding father, vaguely
+depicted on that sinister panel terrified him, and it seemed to him that
+the misshapen spectre was gazing intently at him.
+
+When Thenardier had recovered his breath, he turned his bloodshot eyes
+on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice:--
+
+"What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?"
+
+M. Leblanc held his peace.
+
+In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this lugubrious
+sarcasm from the corridor:--
+
+"If there's any wood to be split, I'm there!"
+
+It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.
+
+At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made its
+appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited not teeth,
+but fangs.
+
+It was the face of the man with the butcher's axe.
+
+"Why have you taken off your mask?" cried Thenardier in a rage.
+
+"For fun," retorted the man.
+
+For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be watching and
+following all the movements of Thenardier, who, blinded and dazzled by
+his own rage, was stalking to and fro in the den with full confidence
+that the door was guarded, and of holding an unarmed man fast, he being
+armed himself, of being nine against one, supposing that the female
+Thenardier counted for but one man.
+
+During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had turned his back
+to M. Leblanc.
+
+M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair with his foot and
+the table with his fist, and with one bound, with prodigious agility,
+before Thenardier had time to turn round, he had reached the window. To
+open it, to scale the frame, to bestride it, was the work of a second
+only. He was half out when six robust fists seized him and dragged
+him back energetically into the hovel. These were the three
+"chimney-builders," who had flung themselves upon him. At the same time
+the Thenardier woman had wound her hands in his hair.
+
+At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up from the
+corridor. The old man on the bed, who seemed under the influence
+of wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up, with a
+stone-breaker's hammer in his hand.
+
+One of the "chimney-builders," whose smirched face was lighted up by
+the candle, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of his daubing,
+Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, lifted above M. Leblanc's
+head a sort of bludgeon made of two balls of lead, at the two ends of a
+bar of iron.
+
+Marius could not resist this sight. "My father," he thought, "forgive
+me!"
+
+And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.
+
+The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thenardier's voice
+shouted:--
+
+"Don't harm him!"
+
+This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thenardier,
+had calmed him. There existed in him two men, the ferocious man and
+the adroit man. Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph in the
+presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did not
+stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled and
+tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.
+
+"Don't hurt him!" he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first
+success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged, and to
+paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the case disappeared,
+and who, in the face of this new phase, saw no inconvenience in waiting
+a while longer.
+
+Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him
+from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule's father to perish, or
+of destroying the colonel's saviour?
+
+A herculean struggle had begun. With one blow full in the chest, M.
+Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of the
+room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown two
+more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees; the wretches
+were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure as under a granite
+millstone; but the other four had seized the formidable old man by both
+arms and the back of his neck, and were holding him doubled up over the
+two "chimney-builders" on the floor.
+
+Thus, the master of some and mastered by the rest, crushing those
+beneath him and stifling under those on top of him, endeavoring in vain
+to shake off all the efforts which were heaped upon him, M. Leblanc
+disappeared under the horrible group of ruffians like the wild boar
+beneath a howling pile of dogs and hounds.
+
+They succeeded in overthrowing him upon the bed nearest the window, and
+there they held him in awe. The Thenardier woman had not released her
+clutch on his hair.
+
+"Don't you mix yourself up in this affair," said Thenardier. "You'll
+tear your shawl."
+
+The Thenardier obeyed, as the female wolf obeys the male wolf, with a
+growl.
+
+"Now," said Thenardier, "search him, you other fellows!"
+
+M. Leblanc seemed to have renounced the idea of resistance.
+
+They searched him.
+
+He had nothing on his person except a leather purse containing six
+francs, and his handkerchief.
+
+Thenardier put the handkerchief into his own pocket.
+
+"What! No pocket-book?" he demanded.
+
+"No, nor watch," replied one of the "chimney-builders."
+
+"Never mind," murmured the masked man who carried the big key, in the
+voice of a ventriloquist, "he's a tough old fellow."
+
+Thenardier went to the corner near the door, picked up a bundle of ropes
+and threw them at the men.
+
+"Tie him to the leg of the bed," said he.
+
+And, catching sight of the old man who had been stretched across the
+room by the blow from M. Leblanc's fist, and who made no movement, he
+added:--
+
+"Is Boulatruelle dead?"
+
+"No," replied Bigrenaille, "he's drunk."
+
+"Sweep him into a corner," said Thenardier.
+
+Two of the "chimney-builders" pushed the drunken man into the corner
+near the heap of old iron with their feet.
+
+"Babet," said Thenardier in a low tone to the man with the cudgel, "why
+did you bring so many; they were not needed."
+
+"What can you do?" replied the man with the cudgel, "they all wanted to
+be in it. This is a bad season. There's no business going on."
+
+The pallet on which M. Leblanc had been thrown was a sort of hospital
+bed, elevated on four coarse wooden legs, roughly hewn.
+
+M. Leblanc let them take their own course.
+
+The ruffians bound him securely, in an upright attitude, with his feet
+on the ground at the head of the bed, the end which was most remote from
+the window, and nearest to the fireplace.
+
+When the last knot had been tied, Thenardier took a chair and seated
+himself almost facing M. Leblanc.
+
+Thenardier no longer looked like himself; in the course of a few moments
+his face had passed from unbridled violence to tranquil and cunning
+sweetness.
+
+Marius found it difficult to recognize in that polished smile of a man
+in official life the almost bestial mouth which had been foaming but a
+moment before; he gazed with amazement on that fantastic and alarming
+metamorphosis, and he felt as a man might feel who should behold a tiger
+converted into a lawyer.
+
+"Monsieur--" said Thenardier.
+
+And dismissing with a gesture the ruffians who still kept their hands on
+M. Leblanc:--
+
+"Stand off a little, and let me have a talk with the gentleman."
+
+All retired towards the door.
+
+He went on:--
+
+"Monsieur, you did wrong to try to jump out of the window. You might
+have broken your leg. Now, if you will permit me, we will converse
+quietly. In the first place, I must communicate to you an observation
+which I have made which is, that you have not uttered the faintest cry."
+
+Thenardier was right, this detail was correct, although it had escaped
+Marius in his agitation. M. Leblanc had barely pronounced a few words,
+without raising his voice, and even during his struggle with the six
+ruffians near the window he had preserved the most profound and singular
+silence.
+
+Thenardier continued:--
+
+"Mon Dieu! You might have shouted 'stop thief' a bit, and I should not
+have thought it improper. 'Murder!' That, too, is said occasionally,
+and, so far as I am concerned, I should not have taken it in bad part.
+It is very natural that you should make a little row when you find
+yourself with persons who don't inspire you with sufficient confidence.
+You might have done that, and no one would have troubled you on that
+account. You would not even have been gagged. And I will tell you why.
+This room is very private. That's its only recommendation, but it has
+that in its favor. You might fire off a mortar and it would produce
+about as much noise at the nearest police station as the snores of a
+drunken man. Here a cannon would make a boum, and the thunder would make
+a pouf. It's a handy lodging. But, in short, you did not shout, and
+it is better so. I present you my compliments, and I will tell you the
+conclusion that I draw from that fact: My dear sir, when a man shouts,
+who comes? The police. And after the police? Justice. Well! You have not
+made an outcry; that is because you don't care to have the police and
+the courts come in any more than we do. It is because,--I have long
+suspected it,--you have some interest in hiding something. On our side
+we have the same interest. So we can come to an understanding."
+
+As he spoke thus, it seemed as though Thenardier, who kept his eyes
+fixed on M. Leblanc, were trying to plunge the sharp points which darted
+from the pupils into the very conscience of his prisoner. Moreover, his
+language, which was stamped with a sort of moderated, subdued insolence
+and crafty insolence, was reserved and almost choice, and in that
+rascal, who had been nothing but a robber a short time previously, one
+now felt "the man who had studied for the priesthood."
+
+The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had been
+carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his own life, that
+resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature, which is to utter
+a cry, all this, it must be confessed, now that his attention had
+been called to it, troubled Marius, and affected him with painful
+astonishment.
+
+Thenardier's well-grounded observation still further obscured for Marius
+the dense mystery which enveloped that grave and singular person on whom
+Courfeyrac had bestowed the sobriquet of Monsieur Leblanc.
+
+But whoever he was, bound with ropes, surrounded with executioners, half
+plunged, so to speak, in a grave which was closing in upon him to the
+extent of a degree with every moment that passed, in the presence
+of Thenardier's wrath, as in the presence of his sweetness, this man
+remained impassive; and Marius could not refrain from admiring at such a
+moment the superbly melancholy visage.
+
+Here, evidently, was a soul which was inaccessible to terror, and which
+did not know the meaning of despair. Here was one of those men who
+command amazement in desperate circumstances. Extreme as was the crisis,
+inevitable as was the catastrophe, there was nothing here of the agony
+of the drowning man, who opens his horror-filled eyes under the water.
+
+Thenardier rose in an unpretending manner, went to the fireplace, shoved
+aside the screen, which he leaned against the neighboring pallet, and
+thus unmasked the brazier full of glowing coals, in which the prisoner
+could plainly see the chisel white-hot and spotted here and there with
+tiny scarlet stars.
+
+Then Thenardier returned to his seat beside M. Leblanc.
+
+"I continue," said he. "We can come to an understanding. Let us arrange
+this matter in an amicable way. I was wrong to lose my temper just now,
+I don't know what I was thinking of, I went a great deal too far, I said
+extravagant things. For example, because you are a millionnaire, I told
+you that I exacted money, a lot of money, a deal of money. That would
+not be reasonable. Mon Dieu, in spite of your riches, you have expenses
+of your own--who has not? I don't want to ruin you, I am not a greedy
+fellow, after all. I am not one of those people who, because they have
+the advantage of the position, profit by the fact to make themselves
+ridiculous. Why, I'm taking things into consideration and making a
+sacrifice on my side. I only want two hundred thousand francs."
+
+M. Leblanc uttered not a word.
+
+Thenardier went on:--
+
+"You see that I put not a little water in my wine; I'm very moderate. I
+don't know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you don't stick
+at money, and a benevolent man like yourself can certainly give two
+hundred thousand francs to the father of a family who is out of luck.
+Certainly, you are reasonable, too; you haven't imagined that I should
+take all the trouble I have to-day and organized this affair this
+evening, which has been labor well bestowed, in the opinion of these
+gentlemen, merely to wind up by asking you for enough to go and drink
+red wine at fifteen sous and eat veal at Desnoyer's. Two hundred
+thousand francs--it's surely worth all that. This trifle once out of
+your pocket, I guarantee you that that's the end of the matter, and that
+you have no further demands to fear. You will say to me: 'But I haven't
+two hundred thousand francs about me.' Oh! I'm not extortionate. I don't
+demand that. I only ask one thing of you. Have the goodness to write
+what I am about to dictate to you."
+
+Here Thenardier paused; then he added, emphasizing his words, and
+casting a smile in the direction of the brazier:--
+
+"I warn you that I shall not admit that you don't know how to write."
+
+A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.
+
+Thenardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took an inkstand,
+a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half open, and
+in which gleamed the long blade of the knife.
+
+He placed the sheet of paper before M. Leblanc.
+
+"Write," said he.
+
+The prisoner spoke at last.
+
+"How do you expect me to write? I am bound."
+
+"That's true, excuse me!" ejaculated Thenardier, "you are quite right."
+
+And turning to Bigrenaille:--
+
+"Untie the gentleman's right arm."
+
+Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, executed Thenardier's
+order.
+
+When the prisoner's right arm was free, Thenardier dipped the pen in the
+ink and presented it to him.
+
+"Understand thoroughly, sir, that you are in our power, at our
+discretion, that no human power can get you out of this, and that we
+shall be really grieved if we are forced to proceed to disagreeable
+extremities. I know neither your name, nor your address, but I warn you,
+that you will remain bound until the person charged with carrying the
+letter which you are about to write shall have returned. Now, be so good
+as to write."
+
+"What?" demanded the prisoner.
+
+"I will dictate."
+
+M. Leblanc took the pen.
+
+Thenardier began to dictate:--
+
+"My daughter--"
+
+The prisoner shuddered, and raised his eyes to Thenardier.
+
+"Put down 'My dear daughter'--" said Thenardier.
+
+M. Leblanc obeyed.
+
+Thenardier continued:--
+
+"Come instantly--"
+
+He paused:--
+
+"You address her as thou, do you not?"
+
+"Who?" asked M. Leblanc.
+
+"Parbleu!" cried Thenardier, "the little one, the Lark."
+
+M. Leblanc replied without the slightest apparent emotion:--
+
+"I do not know what you mean."
+
+"Go on, nevertheless," ejaculated Thenardier, and he continued to
+dictate:--
+
+"Come immediately, I am in absolute need of thee. The person who will
+deliver this note to thee is instructed to conduct thee to me. I am
+waiting for thee. Come with confidence."
+
+M. Leblanc had written the whole of this.
+
+Thenardier resumed:--
+
+"Ah! erase 'come with confidence'; that might lead her to suppose that
+everything was not as it should be, and that distrust is possible."
+
+M. Leblanc erased the three words.
+
+"Now," pursued Thenardier, "sign it. What's your name?"
+
+The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded:--
+
+"For whom is this letter?"
+
+"You know well," retorted Thenardier, "for the little one I just told
+you so."
+
+It was evident that Thenardier avoided naming the young girl in
+question. He said "the Lark," he said "the little one," but he did not
+pronounce her name--the precaution of a clever man guarding his secret
+from his accomplices. To mention the name was to deliver the whole
+"affair" into their hands, and to tell them more about it than there was
+any need of their knowing.
+
+He went on:--
+
+"Sign. What is your name?"
+
+"Urbain Fabre," said the prisoner.
+
+Thenardier, with the movement of a cat, dashed his hand into his pocket
+and drew out the handkerchief which had been seized on M. Leblanc. He
+looked for the mark on it, and held it close to the candle.
+
+"U. F. That's it. Urbain Fabre. Well, sign it U. F."
+
+The prisoner signed.
+
+"As two hands are required to fold the letter, give it to me, I will
+fold it."
+
+That done, Thenardier resumed:--
+
+"Address it, 'Mademoiselle Fabre,' at your house. I know that you live
+a long distance from here, near Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas, because you go
+to mass there every day, but I don't know in what street. I see that
+you understand your situation. As you have not lied about your name, you
+will not lie about your address. Write it yourself."
+
+The prisoner paused thoughtfully for a moment, then he took the pen and
+wrote:--
+
+"Mademoiselle Fabre, at M. Urbain Fabre's, Rue Saint-Dominique-D'Enfer,
+No. 17."
+
+Thenardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion.
+
+"Wife!" he cried.
+
+The Thenardier woman hastened to him.
+
+"Here's the letter. You know what you have to do. There is a carriage at
+the door. Set out at once, and return ditto."
+
+And addressing the man with the meat-axe:--
+
+"Since you have taken off your nose-screen, accompany the mistress. You
+will get up behind the fiacre. You know where you left the team?"
+
+"Yes," said the man.
+
+And depositing his axe in a corner, he followed Madame Thenardier.
+
+As they set off, Thenardier thrust his head through the half-open door,
+and shouted into the corridor:--
+
+"Above all things, don't lose the letter! remember that you carry two
+hundred thousand francs with you!"
+
+The Thenardier's hoarse voice replied:--
+
+"Be easy. I have it in my bosom."
+
+A minute had not elapsed, when the sound of the cracking of a whip was
+heard, which rapidly retreated and died away.
+
+"Good!" growled Thenardier. "They're going at a fine pace. At such a
+gallop, the bourgeoise will be back inside three-quarters of an hour."
+
+He drew a chair close to the fireplace, folding his arms, and presenting
+his muddy boots to the brazier.
+
+"My feet are cold!" said he.
+
+Only five ruffians now remained in the den with Thenardier and the
+prisoner.
+
+These men, through the black masks or paste which covered their faces,
+and made of them, at fear's pleasure, charcoal-burners, negroes, or
+demons, had a stupid and gloomy air, and it could be felt that they
+perpetrated a crime like a bit of work, tranquilly, without either wrath
+or mercy, with a sort of ennui. They were crowded together in one corner
+like brutes, and remained silent.
+
+Thenardier warmed his feet.
+
+The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturnity. A sombre calm had
+succeeded to the wild uproar which had filled the garret but a few
+moments before.
+
+The candle, on which a large "stranger" had formed, cast but a dim
+light in the immense hovel, the brazier had grown dull, and all those
+monstrous heads cast misshapen shadows on the walls and ceiling.
+
+No sound was audible except the quiet breathing of the old drunken man,
+who was fast asleep.
+
+Marius waited in a state of anxiety that was augmented by every trifle.
+The enigma was more impenetrable than ever.
+
+Who was this "little one" whom Thenardier had called the Lark? Was she
+his "Ursule"? The prisoner had not seemed to be affected by that word,
+"the Lark," and had replied in the most natural manner in the world:
+"I do not know what you mean." On the other hand, the two letters U. F.
+were explained; they meant Urbain Fabre; and Ursule was no longer named
+Ursule. This was what Marius perceived most clearly of all.
+
+A sort of horrible fascination held him nailed to his post, from which
+he was observing and commanding this whole scene. There he stood,
+almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though annihilated by the
+abominable things viewed at such close quarters. He waited, in the hope
+of some incident, no matter of what nature, since he could not collect
+his thoughts and did not know upon what course to decide.
+
+"In any case," he said, "if she is the Lark, I shall see her, for the
+Thenardier woman is to bring her hither. That will be the end, and then
+I will give my life and my blood if necessary, but I will deliver her!
+Nothing shall stop me."
+
+Nearly half an hour passed in this manner. Thenardier seemed to be
+absorbed in gloomy reflections, the prisoner did not stir. Still, Marius
+fancied that at intervals, and for the last few moments, he had heard a
+faint, dull noise in the direction of the prisoner.
+
+All at once, Thenardier addressed the prisoner:
+
+"By the way, Monsieur Fabre, I might as well say it to you at once."
+
+These few words appeared to be the beginning of an explanation. Marius
+strained his ears.
+
+"My wife will be back shortly, don't get impatient. I think that the
+Lark really is your daughter, and it seems to me quite natural that you
+should keep her. Only, listen to me a bit. My wife will go and hunt her
+up with your letter. I told my wife to dress herself in the way she did,
+so that your young lady might make no difficulty about following her.
+They will both enter the carriage with my comrade behind. Somewhere,
+outside the barrier, there is a trap harnessed to two very good horses.
+Your young lady will be taken to it. She will alight from the fiacre.
+My comrade will enter the other vehicle with her, and my wife will come
+back here to tell us: 'It's done.' As for the young lady, no harm will
+be done to her; the trap will conduct her to a place where she will be
+quiet, and just as soon as you have handed over to me those little two
+hundred thousand francs, she will be returned to you. If you have me
+arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark, that's
+all."
+
+The prisoner uttered not a syllable. After a pause, Thenardier
+continued:--
+
+"It's very simple, as you see. There'll be no harm done unless you wish
+that there should be harm done. I'm telling you how things stand. I warn
+you so that you may be prepared."
+
+He paused: the prisoner did not break the silence, and Thenardier
+resumed:--
+
+"As soon as my wife returns and says to me: 'The Lark is on the way,' we
+will release you, and you will be free to go and sleep at home. You see
+that our intentions are not evil."
+
+Terrible images passed through Marius' mind. What! That young girl whom
+they were abducting was not to be brought back? One of those monsters
+was to bear her off into the darkness? Whither? And what if it were she!
+
+It was clear that it was she. Marius felt his heart stop beating.
+
+What was he to do? Discharge the pistol? Place all those scoundrels in
+the hands of justice? But the horrible man with the meat-axe would, none
+the less, be out of reach with the young girl, and Marius reflected on
+Thenardier's words, of which he perceived the bloody significance: "If
+you have me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the
+Lark."
+
+Now, it was not alone by the colonel's testament, it was by his own
+love, it was by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt himself
+restrained.
+
+This frightful situation, which had already lasted above half an hour,
+was changing its aspect every moment.
+
+Marius had sufficient strength of mind to review in succession all the
+most heart-breaking conjectures, seeking hope and finding none.
+
+The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence of the
+den.
+
+In the midst of this silence, the door at the bottom of the staircase
+was heard to open and shut again.
+
+The prisoner made a movement in his bonds.
+
+"Here's the bourgeoise," said Thenardier.
+
+He had hardly uttered the words, when the Thenardier woman did in fact
+rush hastily into the room, red, panting, breathless, with flaming eyes,
+and cried, as she smote her huge hands on her thighs simultaneously:--
+
+"False address!"
+
+The ruffian who had gone with her made his appearance behind her and
+picked up his axe again.
+
+She resumed:--
+
+"Nobody there! Rue Saint-Dominique, No. 17, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre!
+They know not what it means!"
+
+She paused, choking, then went on:--
+
+"Monsieur Thenardier! That old fellow has duped you! You are too good,
+you see! If it had been me, I'd have chopped the beast in four quarters
+to begin with! And if he had acted ugly, I'd have boiled him alive! He
+would have been obliged to speak, and say where the girl is, and where
+he keeps his shiners! That's the way I should have managed matters!
+People are perfectly right when they say that men are a deal stupider
+than women! Nobody at No. 17. It's nothing but a big carriage gate! No
+Monsieur Fabre in the Rue Saint-Dominique! And after all that racing
+and fee to the coachman and all! I spoke to both the porter and the
+portress, a fine, stout woman, and they know nothing about him!"
+
+Marius breathed freely once more.
+
+She, Ursule or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her, was safe.
+
+While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thenardier had seated himself on
+the table.
+
+For several minutes he uttered not a word, but swung his right foot,
+which hung down, and stared at the brazier with an air of savage revery.
+
+Finally, he said to the prisoner, with a slow and singularly ferocious
+tone:
+
+"A false address? What did you expect to gain by that?"
+
+"To gain time!" cried the prisoner in a thundering voice, and at the
+same instant he shook off his bonds; they were cut. The prisoner was
+only attached to the bed now by one leg.
+
+Before the seven men had time to collect their senses and dash forward,
+he had bent down into the fireplace, had stretched out his hand to the
+brazier, and had then straightened himself up again, and now Thenardier,
+the female Thenardier, and the ruffians, huddled in amazement at the
+extremity of the hovel, stared at him in stupefaction, as almost free
+and in a formidable attitude, he brandished above his head the red-hot
+chisel, which emitted a threatening glow.
+
+The judicial examination to which the ambush in the Gorbeau house
+eventually gave rise, established the fact that a large sou piece, cut
+and worked in a peculiar fashion, was found in the garret, when the
+police made their descent on it. This sou piece was one of those marvels
+of industry, which are engendered by the patience of the galleys in
+the shadows and for the shadows, marvels which are nothing else than
+instruments of escape. These hideous and delicate products of wonderful
+art are to jewellers' work what the metaphors of slang are to poetry.
+There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the galleys, just as there are Villons
+in language. The unhappy wretch who aspires to deliverance finds means
+sometimes without tools, sometimes with a common wooden-handled knife,
+to saw a sou into two thin plates, to hollow out these plates without
+affecting the coinage stamp, and to make a furrow on the edge of the sou
+in such a manner that the plates will adhere again. This can be screwed
+together and unscrewed at will; it is a box. In this box he hides a
+watch-spring, and this watch-spring, properly handled, cuts good-sized
+chains and bars of iron. The unfortunate convict is supposed to possess
+merely a sou; not at all, he possesses liberty. It was a large sou of
+this sort which, during the subsequent search of the police, was found
+under the bed near the window. They also found a tiny saw of blue steel
+which would fit the sou.
+
+It is probable that the prisoner had this sou piece on his person at the
+moment when the ruffians searched him, that he contrived to conceal
+it in his hand, and that afterward, having his right hand free, he
+unscrewed it, and used it as a saw to cut the cords which fastened him,
+which would explain the faint noise and almost imperceptible movements
+which Marius had observed.
+
+As he had not been able to bend down, for fear of betraying himself, he
+had not cut the bonds of his left leg.
+
+The ruffians had recovered from their first surprise.
+
+"Be easy," said Bigrenaille to Thenardier. "He still holds by one leg,
+and he can't get away. I'll answer for that. I tied that paw for him."
+
+In the meanwhile, the prisoner had begun to speak:--
+
+"You are wretches, but my life is not worth the trouble of defending it.
+When you think that you can make me speak, that you can make me write
+what I do not choose to write, that you can make me say what I do not
+choose to say--"
+
+He stripped up his left sleeve, and added:--
+
+"See here."
+
+At the same moment he extended his arm, and laid the glowing chisel
+which he held in his left hand by its wooden handle on his bare flesh.
+
+The crackling of the burning flesh became audible, and the odor peculiar
+to chambers of torture filled the hovel.
+
+[Illustration: Red Hot Chisel 3b8-20-red-hot-chisel]
+
+Marius reeled in utter horror, the very ruffians shuddered, hardly a
+muscle of the old man's face contracted, and while the red-hot iron
+sank into the smoking wound, impassive and almost august, he fixed on
+Thenardier his beautiful glance, in which there was no hatred, and where
+suffering vanished in serene majesty.
+
+With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses
+when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth, and
+make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery force
+the captain to show himself.
+
+"Wretches!" said he, "have no more fear of me than I have for you!"
+
+And, tearing the chisel from the wound, he hurled it through the window,
+which had been left open; the horrible, glowing tool disappeared into
+the night, whirling as it flew, and fell far away on the snow.
+
+The prisoner resumed:--
+
+"Do what you please with me." He was disarmed.
+
+"Seize him!" said Thenardier.
+
+Two of the ruffians laid their hands on his shoulder, and the masked
+man with the ventriloquist's voice took up his station in front of him,
+ready to smash his skull at the slightest movement.
+
+At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the base of the partition,
+but so near that he could not see who was speaking, this colloquy
+conducted in a low tone:--
+
+"There is only one thing left to do."
+
+"Cut his throat."
+
+"That's it."
+
+It was the husband and wife taking counsel together.
+
+Thenardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer, and
+took out the knife. Marius fretted with the handle of his pistol.
+Unprecedented perplexity! For the last hour he had had two voices in his
+conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his father's testament, the
+other crying to him to rescue the prisoner. These two voices continued
+uninterruptedly that struggle which tormented him to agony. Up to that
+moment he had cherished a vague hope that he should find some means
+of reconciling these two duties, but nothing within the limits of
+possibility had presented itself.
+
+However, the peril was urgent, the last bounds of delay had been
+reached; Thenardier was standing thoughtfully a few paces distant from
+the prisoner.
+
+Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource of
+despair. All at once a shudder ran through him.
+
+At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full moon
+illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper. On this
+paper he read the following line written that very morning, in large
+letters, by the eldest of the Thenardier girls:--
+
+"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."
+
+An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient of which
+he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem which was
+torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.
+
+He knelt down on his commode, stretched out his arm, seized the sheet of
+paper, softly detached a bit of plaster from the wall, wrapped the paper
+round it, and tossed the whole through the crevice into the middle of
+the den.
+
+It was high time. Thenardier had conquered his last fears or his last
+scruples, and was advancing on the prisoner.
+
+"Something is falling!" cried the Thenardier woman.
+
+"What is it?" asked her husband.
+
+The woman darted forward and picked up the bit of plaster. She handed it
+to her husband.
+
+"Where did this come from?" demanded Thenardier.
+
+"Pardie!" ejaculated his wife, "where do you suppose it came from?
+Through the window, of course."
+
+"I saw it pass," said Bigrenaille.
+
+Thenardier rapidly unfolded the paper and held it close to the candle.
+
+"It's in Eponine's handwriting. The devil!"
+
+He made a sign to his wife, who hastily drew near, and showed her the
+line written on the sheet of paper, then he added in a subdued voice:--
+
+"Quick! The ladder! Let's leave the bacon in the mousetrap and decamp!"
+
+"Without cutting that man's throat?" asked, the Thenardier woman.
+
+"We haven't the time."
+
+"Through what?" resumed Bigrenaille.
+
+"Through the window," replied Thenardier. "Since Ponine has thrown the
+stone through the window, it indicates that the house is not watched on
+that side."
+
+The mask with the ventriloquist's voice deposited his huge key on the
+floor, raised both arms in the air, and opened and clenched his fists,
+three times rapidly without uttering a word.
+
+This was the signal like the signal for clearing the decks for action on
+board ship.
+
+The ruffians who were holding the prisoner released him; in the
+twinkling of an eye the rope ladder was unrolled outside the window, and
+solidly fastened to the sill by the two iron hooks.
+
+The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on around him. He
+seemed to be dreaming or praying.
+
+As soon as the ladder was arranged, Thenardier cried:
+
+"Come! the bourgeoise first!"
+
+And he rushed headlong to the window.
+
+But just as he was about to throw his leg over, Bigrenaille seized him
+roughly by the collar.
+
+"Not much, come now, you old dog, after us!"
+
+"After us!" yelled the ruffians.
+
+"You are children," said Thenardier, "we are losing time. The police are
+on our heels."
+
+"Well," said the ruffians, "let's draw lots to see who shall go down
+first."
+
+Thenardier exclaimed:--
+
+"Are you mad! Are you crazy! What a pack of boobies! You want to waste
+time, do you? Draw lots, do you? By a wet finger, by a short straw! With
+written names! Thrown into a hat!--"
+
+"Would you like my hat?" cried a voice on the threshold.
+
+All wheeled round. It was Javert.
+
+He had his hat in his hand, and was holding it out to them with a smile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI--ONE SHOULD ALWAYS BEGIN BY ARRESTING THE VICTIMS
+
+At nightfall, Javert had posted his men and had gone into ambush himself
+between the trees of the Rue de la Barrieredes-Gobelins which faced
+the Gorbeau house, on the other side of the boulevard. He had begun
+operations by opening "his pockets," and dropping into it the two young
+girls who were charged with keeping a watch on the approaches to the
+den. But he had only "caged" Azelma. As for Eponine, she was not at her
+post, she had disappeared, and he had not been able to seize her. Then
+Javert had made a point and had bent his ear to waiting for the signal
+agreed upon. The comings and goings of the fiacres had greatly agitated
+him. At last, he had grown impatient, and, sure that there was a nest
+there, sure of being in "luck," having recognized many of the ruffians
+who had entered, he had finally decided to go upstairs without waiting
+for the pistol-shot.
+
+It will be remembered that he had Marius' pass-key.
+
+He had arrived just in the nick of time.
+
+The terrified ruffians flung themselves on the arms which they had
+abandoned in all the corners at the moment of flight. In less than a
+second, these seven men, horrible to behold, had grouped themselves in
+an attitude of defence, one with his meat-axe, another with his key,
+another with his bludgeon, the rest with shears, pincers, and hammers.
+Thenardier had his knife in his fist. The Thenardier woman snatched up
+an enormous paving-stone which lay in the angle of the window and served
+her daughters as an ottoman.
+
+[Illustration: Snatched up a Paving Stone 3b8-21-paving-stone]
+
+Javert put on his hat again, and advanced a couple of paces into the
+room, with arms folded, his cane under one arm, his sword in its sheath.
+
+"Halt there," said he. "You shall not go out by the window, you shall go
+through the door. It's less unhealthy. There are seven of you, there
+are fifteen of us. Don't let's fall to collaring each other like men of
+Auvergne."
+
+Bigrenaille drew out a pistol which he had kept concealed under his
+blouse, and put it in Thenardier's hand, whispering in the latter's
+ear:--
+
+"It's Javert. I don't dare fire at that man. Do you dare?"
+
+"Parbleu!" replied Thenardier.
+
+"Well, then, fire."
+
+Thenardier took the pistol and aimed at Javert.
+
+Javert, who was only three paces from him, stared intently at him and
+contented himself with saying:--
+
+"Come now, don't fire. You'll miss fire."
+
+Thenardier pulled the trigger. The pistol missed fire.
+
+"Didn't I tell you so!" ejaculated Javert.
+
+Bigrenaille flung his bludgeon at Javert's feet.
+
+"You're the emperor of the fiends! I surrender."
+
+"And you?" Javert asked the rest of the ruffians.
+
+They replied:--
+
+"So do we."
+
+Javert began again calmly:--
+
+"That's right, that's good, I said so, you are nice fellows."
+
+"I only ask one thing," said Bigrenaille, "and that is, that I may not
+be denied tobacco while I am in confinement."
+
+"Granted," said Javert.
+
+And turning round and calling behind him:--
+
+"Come in now!"
+
+A squad of policemen, sword in hand, and agents armed with bludgeons and
+cudgels, rushed in at Javert's summons. They pinioned the ruffians.
+
+This throng of men, sparely lighted by the single candle, filled the den
+with shadows.
+
+"Handcuff them all!" shouted Javert.
+
+"Come on!" cried a voice which was not the voice of a man, but of which
+no one would ever have said: "It is a woman's voice."
+
+The Thenardier woman had entrenched herself in one of the angles of the
+window, and it was she who had just given vent to this roar.
+
+The policemen and agents recoiled.
+
+She had thrown off her shawl, but retained her bonnet; her husband, who
+was crouching behind her, was almost hidden under the discarded
+shawl, and she was shielding him with her body, as she elevated the
+paving-stone above her head with the gesture of a giantess on the point
+of hurling a rock.
+
+"Beware!" she shouted.
+
+All crowded back towards the corridor. A broad open space was cleared in
+the middle of the garret.
+
+The Thenardier woman cast a glance at the ruffians who had allowed
+themselves to be pinioned, and muttered in hoarse and guttural
+accents:--
+
+"The cowards!"
+
+Javert smiled, and advanced across the open space which the Thenardier
+was devouring with her eyes.
+
+"Don't come near me," she cried, "or I'll crush you."
+
+"What a grenadier!" ejaculated Javert; "you've got a beard like a man,
+mother, but I have claws like a woman."
+
+And he continued to advance.
+
+The Thenardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far apart, threw
+herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone at Javert's head. Javert
+ducked, the stone passed over him, struck the wall behind, knocked off a
+huge piece of plastering, and, rebounding from angle to angle across the
+hovel, now luckily almost empty, rested at Javert's feet.
+
+At the same moment, Javert reached the Thenardier couple. One of his
+big hands descended on the woman's shoulder; the other on the husband's
+head.
+
+"The handcuffs!" he shouted.
+
+The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert's order
+had been executed.
+
+The Thenardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands, and
+at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor, and exclaimed,
+weeping:--
+
+"My daughters!"
+
+"They are in the jug," said Javert.
+
+In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man asleep
+behind the door, and were shaking him:--
+
+He awoke, stammering:--
+
+"Is it all over, Jondrette?"
+
+"Yes," replied Javert.
+
+The six pinioned ruffians were standing, and still preserved their
+spectral mien; all three besmeared with black, all three masked.
+
+"Keep on your masks," said Javert.
+
+And passing them in review with a glance of a Frederick II. at a Potsdam
+parade, he said to the three "chimney-builders":--
+
+"Good day, Bigrenaille! good day, Brujon! good day, Deuxmilliards!"
+
+Then turning to the three masked men, he said to the man with the
+meat-axe:--
+
+"Good day, Gueulemer!"
+
+And to the man with the cudgel:--
+
+"Good day, Babet!"
+
+And to the ventriloquist:--
+
+"Your health, Claquesous."
+
+At that moment, he caught sight of the ruffians' prisoner, who, ever
+since the entrance of the police, had not uttered a word, and had held
+his head down.
+
+"Untie the gentleman!" said Javert, "and let no one go out!"
+
+That said, he seated himself with sovereign dignity before the table,
+where the candle and the writing-materials still remained, drew a
+stamped paper from his pocket, and began to prepare his report.
+
+When he had written the first lines, which are formulas that never vary,
+he raised his eyes:--
+
+"Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward."
+
+The policemen glanced round them.
+
+"Well," said Javert, "where is he?"
+
+The prisoner of the ruffians, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre, the father of
+Ursule or the Lark, had disappeared.
+
+The door was guarded, but the window was not. As soon as he had found
+himself released from his bonds, and while Javert was drawing up his
+report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd, the darkness,
+and of a moment when the general attention was diverted from him, to
+dash out of the window.
+
+An agent sprang to the opening and looked out. He saw no one outside.
+
+The rope ladder was still shaking.
+
+"The devil!" ejaculated Javert between his teeth, "he must have been the
+most valuable of the lot."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII--THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO
+
+On the day following that on which these events took place in the house
+on the Boulevard de l'Hopital, a child, who seemed to be coming from the
+direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the side-alley on
+the right in the direction of the Barriere de Fontainebleau.
+
+Night had fully come.
+
+This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers in the month
+of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.
+
+At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was
+rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern; the
+child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:--
+
+"Hello! And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!"
+
+He pronounced the word enormous the second time with a jeering swell
+of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals: "an
+enormous, ENORMOUS dog."
+
+The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.
+
+"Nasty brat!" she grumbled. "If I hadn't been bending over, I know well
+where I would have planted my foot on you."
+
+The boy was already far away.
+
+"Kisss! kisss!" he cried. "After that, I don't think I was mistaken!"
+
+The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,
+and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face, all
+hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow's-feet meeting the corners
+of her mouth.
+
+Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. One
+would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a light
+from the night.
+
+The boy surveyed her.
+
+"Madame," said he, "does not possess that style of beauty which pleases
+me."
+
+He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:--
+
+ "Le roi Coupdesabot
+ S'en allait a la chasse,
+ A la chasse aux corbeaux--"
+
+
+At the end of these three lines he paused. He had arrived in front of
+No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it with
+resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man's shoes that
+he was wearing than the child's feet which he owned.
+
+In the meanwhile, the very old woman whom he had encountered at the
+corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier hastened up behind him, uttering
+clamorous cries and indulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.
+
+"What's this? What's this? Lord God! He's battering the door down! He's
+knocking the house down."
+
+The kicks continued.
+
+The old woman strained her lungs.
+
+"Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?"
+
+All at once she paused.
+
+She had recognized the gamin.
+
+"What! so it's that imp!"
+
+"Why, it's the old lady," said the lad. "Good day, Bougonmuche. I have
+come to see my ancestors."
+
+The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and a wonderful
+improvisation of hatred taking advantage of feebleness and ugliness,
+which was, unfortunately, wasted in the dark:--
+
+"There's no one here."
+
+"Bah!" retorted the boy, "where's my father?"
+
+"At La Force."
+
+"Come, now! And my mother?"
+
+"At Saint-Lazare."
+
+"Well! And my sisters?"
+
+"At the Madelonettes."
+
+The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma'am Bougon, and
+said:--
+
+"Ah!"
+
+Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old woman,
+who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his clear, young
+voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:--
+
+ "Le roi Coupdesabot[31]
+ S'en allait a la chasse,
+ A la chasse aux corbeaux,
+ Monte sur deux echasses.
+ Quand on passait dessous,
+ On lui payait deux sous."
+
+
+[THE END OF VOLUME III. "MARIUS"]
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME IV.--SAINT-DENIS.
+
+[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Four]
+
+[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Four]
+
+
+THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--WELL CUT
+
+1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the
+Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments
+of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those
+which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary
+grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses,
+the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and
+adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French
+formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm
+clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances
+and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance.
+At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried
+shining there.
+
+This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning to
+be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal
+lines even at the present day.
+
+We shall make the attempt.
+
+The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to
+define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult,
+and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a
+halting-place.
+
+These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to
+convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but
+repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,
+to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great
+events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we
+have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would
+exchange Caesar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. "What
+a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we have
+reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first
+change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with
+Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.
+
+Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which
+are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,
+what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of
+tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the same
+time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in
+their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars, they
+are, they exist, they have the right to install themselves in society,
+and they do install themselves therein; and most of the time, facts
+are the stewards of the household and fouriers[32] who do nothing but
+prepare lodgings for principles.
+
+This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--
+
+At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand
+guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men.
+
+This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this
+is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.
+
+These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded.
+Princes "grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things which
+gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts
+did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a
+glimpse of in 1814.
+
+The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell, had
+the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed, and
+that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House of
+Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing, and
+that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. was
+merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House of
+Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should
+please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should have
+felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come
+from it.
+
+This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an
+ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of a
+trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it looked
+glum. The people saw this.
+
+It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried
+away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive that
+it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not perceive
+that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.
+
+It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;
+it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots
+of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations.
+These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family,
+but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the
+throne.
+
+The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot in
+her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,
+and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without the
+Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; there
+had been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And how
+should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. reigned
+on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the
+battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes been
+so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine authority
+which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension here below
+which is called the right of kings denied to such a point the right from
+on high.
+
+A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more on the
+guarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it termed them.
+Sad. A sad thing! What it termed its concessions were our conquests;
+what it termed our encroachments were our rights.
+
+When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration, supposing
+itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in the country, that is
+to say, believing itself to be strong and deep, abruptly decided on its
+plan of action, and risked its stroke. One morning it drew itself up
+before the face of France, and, elevating its voice, it contested the
+collective title and the individual right of the nation to sovereignty,
+of the citizen to liberty. In other words, it denied to the nation
+that which made it a nation, and to the citizen that which made him a
+citizen.
+
+This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the
+ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.
+
+It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to
+all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with it
+alongside.
+
+Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm
+discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur
+in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and
+strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of
+Europe. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon
+had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles
+X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The wind
+ceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, the
+pure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and
+charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principles
+which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be
+seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the
+law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the
+accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until
+1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the
+hands of Providence.
+
+The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but
+on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, but
+without authority; their descent into the night was not one of those
+solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history; it
+was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream of
+Napoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, and
+retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. They
+lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. Charles
+X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table to be cut
+over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilled
+etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened
+devoted men who loved their persons, and serious men who honored their
+race. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning with
+weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection, felt itself in the possession
+of so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself,
+restrained itself, restored things to their places, the government to
+law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and then halted! It took the old king
+Charles X. from beneath that dais which had sheltered Louis XIV. and
+set him gently on the ground. It touched the royal personages only with
+sadness and precaution. It was not one man, it was not a few men, it
+was France, France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her
+victory, who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,
+before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume du
+Vair after the day of the Barricades:--
+
+"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors of the
+great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough, from an afflicted
+fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves harsh towards their
+Prince in his adversity; but as for me, the fortune of my Kings and
+especially of my afflicted Kings, will always be venerable to me."
+
+The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. As we have
+just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were. They faded out
+in the horizon.
+
+The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout the
+entire world. The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm, the
+others turned away, each according to his nature. At the first blush,
+the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes, wounded
+and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten. A fright which can be
+comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned. This strange revolution had
+hardly produced a shock; it had not even paid to vanquished royalty the
+honor of treating it as an enemy, and of shedding its blood. In the eyes
+of despotic governments, who are always interested in having liberty
+calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of being
+formidable and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was attempted or
+plotted against it. The most discontented, the most irritated, the most
+trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor may be, a
+mysterious respect springs from events in which we are sensible of the
+collaboration of some one who is working above man.
+
+The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. A
+thing which is full of splendor.
+
+Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution of
+1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need of being
+violent.
+
+Right is the just and the true.
+
+The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. The
+fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most
+thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact, and
+if it contain only too little of right, or none at all, is infallibly
+destined to become, in the course of time, deformed, impure, perhaps,
+even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of
+hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries,
+let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a
+demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact.
+And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the
+fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the
+presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.
+
+This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin
+of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with the
+humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the fact
+and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--BADLY SEWED
+
+But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
+The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.
+
+As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste to
+prepare the shipwreck.
+
+The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title of
+Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming somewhat
+of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact, that wherever
+there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness. To say "the
+skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."
+
+In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent to saying
+"traitors." If, then, we are to believe the skilful, revolutions like
+the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt ligature is
+indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken. Also, right
+once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened. Liberty once assured,
+attention must be directed to power.
+
+Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful, but they
+begin to be distrustful. Power, very good. But, in the first place, what
+is power? In the second, whence comes it? The skilful do not seem to
+hear the murmured objection, and they continue their manoeuvres.
+
+According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the mask
+of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement of a people
+after a revolution, when this people forms part of a monarchical
+continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty. In this way, say they,
+peace, that is to say, time to dress our wounds, and to repair
+the house, can be had after a revolution. The dynasty conceals the
+scaffolding and covers the ambulance. Now, it is not always easy to
+procure a dynasty.
+
+If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first
+man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of a
+king. You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.
+
+But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make a
+dynasty. There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity in
+a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.
+
+If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after
+making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
+qualities of the king which result from it? He may be and it is useful
+for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his own
+person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it, that
+he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein, that
+he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.
+
+What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is to
+say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed, but by
+reason of ideas accepted. It should be composed of past and be historic;
+be composed of future and be sympathetic.
+
+All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves with
+finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second absolutely
+insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick or the House of
+Orleans.
+
+Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
+bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.
+Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall
+bend down to the people.
+
+Such is the theory of the skilful.
+
+Here, then, lies the great art: to make a little render to success the
+sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may tremble
+from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken, to augment
+the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress, to dull
+that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm, to
+cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right, to envelop
+the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed very speedily, to
+impose a diet on that excess of health, to put Hercules on the treatment
+of a convalescent, to dilute the event with the expedient, to offer to
+spirits thirsting for the ideal that nectar thinned out with a potion,
+to take one's precautions against too much success, to garnish the
+revolution with a shade.
+
+1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.
+
+1830 is a revolution arrested midway. Half of progress, quasi-right.
+Now, logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the
+candle.
+
+Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?
+
+Why?
+
+Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.
+Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will be
+satiety.
+
+The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
+Charles X.
+
+The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the
+bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the
+people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair
+is not a caste.
+
+But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march
+of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.
+
+One is not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is not
+one of the divisions of the social order.
+
+Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to which that part
+of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired after the shock
+of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated with indifference and
+laziness, and which contains a little shame; it was not the slumber
+which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to dreams; it was
+the halt.
+
+The halt is a word formed of a singular double and almost contradictory
+sense: a troop on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is
+to say, repose.
+
+The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on the
+alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels and holds
+itself on its guard.
+
+The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of
+to-morrow.
+
+It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.
+
+What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.
+
+The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man who
+should express this word Halt. An Although-Because. A composite
+individuality, signifying revolution and signifying stability, in other
+terms, strengthening the present by the evident compatibility of the
+past with the future.
+
+This man was "already found." His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.
+
+The 221 made Louis Philippe King. Lafayette undertook the coronation.
+
+He called it the best of republics. The town-hall of Paris took the
+place of the Cathedral of Rheims.
+
+This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work of
+1830."
+
+When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their solution became
+apparent. All this had been accomplished outside the bounds of absolute
+right. Absolute right cried: "I protest!" then, terrible to say, it
+retired into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--LOUIS PHILIPPE
+
+Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly and
+choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced to the
+state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they nearly
+always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them from
+falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.
+
+Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may be
+deceived, and grave errors have been seen.
+
+Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck. In the
+establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had been
+cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was a
+rare man.
+
+The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
+circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of
+blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful
+of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing
+the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene,
+peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his
+wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing
+the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular
+sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate
+displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and,
+what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking
+them; an admirable representative of the "middle class," but
+outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent
+sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting
+most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race,
+very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly
+the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene
+Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in
+public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at
+bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own
+fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman,
+but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and
+his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly
+cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest
+range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of
+superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to
+put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under
+thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but
+with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in
+countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!
+Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming
+more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a
+disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns
+everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely
+repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves
+politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society
+from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious,
+indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the
+lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain,
+bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise
+with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste
+for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to
+chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms
+of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes;
+attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling. Brave as a
+grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the
+chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political
+adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising
+his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an
+intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not
+with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is
+to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating
+good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing
+incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Caesar,
+Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper
+names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the
+crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of
+souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents
+of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with
+France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too
+much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out
+of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas;
+mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and
+organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the
+founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and
+something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a
+prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness
+of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe
+will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be
+ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved
+glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to
+the same degree as the feeling for what is useful.
+
+Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained
+graceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the
+masses; he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he
+wore no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
+his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new; a
+mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830; Louis Philippe
+was transition reigning; he had preserved the ancient pronunciation
+and the ancient orthography which he placed at the service of opinions
+modern; he loved Poland and Hungary, but he wrote les Polonois, and he
+pronounced les Hongrais. He wore the uniform of the national guard, like
+Charles X., and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.
+
+He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera.
+Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers; this
+made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went out
+with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a part of
+his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, something
+of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his horse; Louis
+Philippe no more went about without his lancet, than did Henri IV.
+without his poniard. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous king, the
+first who had ever shed blood with the object of healing.
+
+For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction to be
+made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the reign,
+that which accuses the King; three columns which all give different
+totals. Democratic right confiscated, progress becomes a matter of
+secondary interest, the protests of the street violently repressed,
+military execution of insurrections, the rising passed over by arms, the
+Rue Transnonain, the counsels of war, the absorption of the real
+country by the legal country, on half shares with three hundred thousand
+privileged persons,--these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused,
+Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the
+English, with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith, to
+Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are the doings
+of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than national was the
+doing of the King.
+
+As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's
+charge is decreased.
+
+This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.
+
+Whence arises this fault?
+
+We will state it.
+
+Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
+of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of
+everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity,
+which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in their
+civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.
+
+Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
+first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his
+family was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy of
+admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. One of Louis
+Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name of her race among
+artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it among poets. She made of
+her soul a marble which she named Jeanne d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's
+daughters elicited from Metternich this eulogium: "They are young people
+such as are rarely seen, and princes such as are never seen."
+
+This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration, is
+the truth about Louis Philippe.
+
+To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction of
+the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of the
+revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power, therein lay
+the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830; never was there a more complete
+adaptation of a man to an event; the one entered into the other, and the
+incarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, he
+had in his favor that great recommendation to the throne, exile. He had
+been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In
+Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in France had
+sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gave
+lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and
+sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie
+enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage of
+Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV. He was the
+companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged
+to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Danton
+had said to him: "Young man!" At the age of four and twenty, in '93,
+being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the depth of a box,
+the trial of Louis XVI., so well named that poor tyrant. The blind
+clairvoyance of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the
+King with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce
+crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal, the
+public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply, the
+alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that sombre
+breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe, of those
+who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked on those
+things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen the centuries
+appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he had beheld, behind
+Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made responsible, the
+terrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the shadows; and there had
+lingered in his soul the respectful fear of these immense justices of
+the populace, which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.
+
+The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory was
+like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. One day,
+in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted to doubt, he
+rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical list
+of the Constituent Assembly.
+
+Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the
+press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.
+The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of the
+gnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to the
+light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty.
+
+Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
+is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is, as yet,
+only in the lower court.
+
+The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent, has
+not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a definite
+judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian Louis Blanc
+has himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis Philippe was
+elected by those two almosts which are called the 221 and 1830, that is
+to say, by a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution; and in any case,
+from the superior point of view where philosophy must place itself, we
+cannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above, except with certain
+reservations in the name of the absolute democratic principle; in the
+eyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the right of man in the
+first place, the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation;
+but what we can say, even at the present day, that after making these
+reserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is
+considered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view
+of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language of ancient
+history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.
+
+What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the
+king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times
+even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his gravest
+souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the
+continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted
+with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took a death
+sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering
+it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still
+greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He obstinately
+maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed the
+ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys,
+those chatterers of the law, as he called them. Sometimes the pile of
+sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was anguish to
+him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he said to
+the same witness to whom we have recently referred: "I won seven last
+night." During the early years of his reign, the death penalty was
+as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a violence
+committed against the King. The Greve having disappeared with the elder
+branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under the name
+of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques; "practical men" felt the necessity of
+a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the victories of
+Casimir Perier, who represented the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie,
+over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippe
+annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he
+exclaimed: "What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have
+pardoned!" On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by
+his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is
+one of the most generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it
+only remains for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis
+IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.
+
+Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
+the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.
+
+Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps, by
+others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present
+day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before
+history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently and
+above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a dead
+man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing of the
+same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly to
+be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: "This one
+flattered the other."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION
+
+At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point of
+penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which envelop
+the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary that there
+should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that this book should
+offer some explanation with regard to this king.
+
+Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
+without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue of a
+revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real aim of the
+Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans, exercised no personal
+initiative. He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have
+been elected King. He had not served this mandate on himself; he had not
+taken it; it had been offered to him, and he had accepted it; convinced,
+wrongly, to be sure, but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in
+accordance with right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance
+with duty. Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we say it in
+good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect good
+faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack, the amount
+of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither on the
+King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles resembles a clash of
+elements. The ocean defends the water, the hurricane defends the
+air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends the people; the
+relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the
+republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that which constitutes
+its suffering to-day will constitute its safety later on; and, in any
+case, those who combat are not to be blamed; one of the two parties is
+evidently mistaken; the right is not, like the Colossus of Rhodes, on
+two shores at once, with one foot on the republic, and one in Royalty;
+it is indivisible, and all on one side; but those who are in error are
+so sincerely; a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a
+ruffian. Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
+formidable collisions. Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
+human irresponsibility is mingled with them.
+
+Let us complete this exposition.
+
+The government of 1830 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it
+was obliged to fight to-day.
+
+Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague movements
+of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid, and so lacking in
+solidity.
+
+Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the
+preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased, and from
+being concealed it became patent.
+
+The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of
+France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have
+said.
+
+God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
+written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations of it;
+translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense.
+Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most sagacious, the
+calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when they arrive with
+their text, the task has long been completed; there are already twenty
+translations on the public place. From each remaining springs a party,
+and from each misinterpretation a faction; and each party thinks that it
+alone has the true text, and each faction thinks that it possesses the
+light.
+
+Power itself is often a faction.
+
+There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they are
+the old parties.
+
+For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think
+that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the
+right to revolt against them. Error. For in these revolutions, the one
+who revolts is not the people; it is the king. Revolution is precisely
+the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome,
+contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists
+sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives
+even when stained with blood.
+
+Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A
+revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it
+must be that it is.
+
+None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of
+1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. Errors
+make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable
+spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this
+revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: "Revolution, why this
+king?" Factions are blind men who aim correctly.
+
+This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from
+them, this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was
+clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.
+The enraged democracy reproached it with this.
+
+Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the
+establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute at
+loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries, on the other
+hand with eternal right.
+
+In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had
+become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe. To
+keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony established
+contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war. From this secret
+conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace,
+that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the
+European cabinets is suspicious in itself. The Royalty of July reared
+up, in spite of the fact that it caught it in the harness of European
+cabinets. Metternich would gladly have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed
+on in France by progress, it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers
+in Europe. After having been towed, it undertook to tow.
+
+Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary, education,
+penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman, wealth, misery,
+production, consumption, division, exchange, coin, credit, the rights of
+capital, the rights of labor,--all these questions were multiplied above
+society, a terrible slope.
+
+Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement became
+manifest. Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic fermentation.
+The elect felt troubled as well as the masses; in another manner, but
+quite as much.
+
+Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,
+traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with
+indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated,
+others united in families and almost in communion, turned over social
+questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners, who
+tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly
+disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they caught
+glimpses.
+
+This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated
+epoch.
+
+These men left to political parties the question of rights, they
+occupied themselves with the question of happiness.
+
+The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract from
+society.
+
+They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,
+of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization, such
+as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great deal by
+the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a
+manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,
+patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics. These men
+who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be
+designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that
+rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.
+
+From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works
+embraced everything. To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French
+Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.
+
+The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do not
+here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point of view, the
+questions raised by socialism. We confine ourselves to indicating them.
+
+All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves, cosmogonic
+visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be reduced to two
+principal problems.
+
+First problem: To produce wealth.
+
+Second problem: To share it.
+
+The first problem contains the question of work.
+
+The second contains the question of salary.
+
+In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.
+
+In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.
+
+From the proper employment of forces results public power.
+
+From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.
+
+By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must
+be understood.
+
+From these two things combined, the public power without, individual
+happiness within, results social prosperity.
+
+Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation
+great.
+
+England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth
+admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on
+one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence,
+monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the
+rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly,
+feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which
+sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State
+in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in
+which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral
+element enters.
+
+Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
+They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition
+abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made
+by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore
+impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is
+not the same thing as dividing it.
+
+The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The
+two problems must be combined and made but one.
+
+Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice, you will
+be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial power, or, like
+England, a material power; you will be the wicked rich man. You will die
+by an act of violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England
+will fall. And the world will allow to die and fall all that is merely
+selfishness, all that does not represent for the human race either a
+virtue or an idea.
+
+It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England, we
+designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
+superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations
+always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people, will live
+again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is
+immortal. That said, we continue.
+
+Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
+suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by
+the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who
+is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust,
+mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and
+compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science
+the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one
+and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render
+property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal,
+so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier
+matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce
+wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and
+material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.
+
+This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects which have
+gone astray; that is what it sought in facts, that is what it sketched
+out in minds.
+
+Efforts worthy of admiration! Sacred attempts!
+
+These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen
+necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account, confused
+evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system of politics to be
+created, which shall be in accord with the old world without too much
+disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal, a situation in which it
+became necessary to use Lafayette to defend Polignac, the intuition of
+progress transparent beneath the revolt, the chambers and streets, the
+competitions to be brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in
+the Revolution, perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the
+vague acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain of
+his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people, his
+own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully, and there were
+moments when strong and courageous as he was, he was overwhelmed by the
+difficulties of being a king.
+
+He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,
+nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.
+
+Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade, gradually drawing
+nearer, extended little by little over men, over things, over ideas;
+a shade which came from wraths and systems. Everything which had been
+hastily stifled was moving and fermenting. At times the conscience of
+the honest man resumed its breathing, so great was the discomfort
+of that air in which sophisms were intermingled with truths. Spirits
+trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm.
+The electric tension was such that at certain instants, the first comer,
+a stranger, brought light. Then the twilight obscurity closed in again.
+At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed
+as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.
+
+Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July, the year
+1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending and threatening.
+
+The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince
+de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus as
+Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French Prince
+and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred of Nicolas,
+behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in
+Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand over
+Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona, at the North no one
+knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up Poland in her coffin,
+irritated glances watching France narrowly all over Europe, England, a
+suspected ally, ready to give a push to that which was tottering and to
+hurl herself on that which should fall, the peerage sheltering itself
+behind Beccaria to refuse four heads to the law, the fleurs-de-lys
+erased from the King's carriage, the cross torn from Notre Dame,
+Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined, Benjamin Constant dead in
+indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the exhaustion of his power; political
+and social malady breaking out simultaneously in the two capitals of the
+kingdom, the one in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil;
+at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same
+glare of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;
+the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in
+la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera, added the sombre roar
+of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--FACTS WHENCE HISTORY SPRINGS AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES
+
+Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated. The
+fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830, petty partial
+revolts had been going on here and there, which were quickly suppressed,
+but ever bursting forth afresh, the sign of a vast underlying
+conflagration. Something terrible was in preparation. Glimpses could be
+caught of the features still indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a
+possible revolution. France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on
+the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
+
+The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning its
+ebullition.
+
+[Illustration: A Street Orator 4b1-5-street-orator]
+
+The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union of
+the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops, grave and
+stormy.
+
+The government was there purely and simply called in question. There
+people publicly discussed the question of fighting or of keeping quiet.
+There were back shops where workingmen were made to swear that they
+would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm, and "that they
+would fight without counting the number of the enemy." This engagement
+once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the wine-shop "assumed
+a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand! You have sworn!"
+
+Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor,
+and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made the
+initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as to the
+fathers of families. That was the formula.
+
+In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read. They treated the
+government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.
+
+Words like the following could be heard there:--
+
+"I don't know the names of the leaders. We folks shall not know the day
+until two hours beforehand." One workman said: "There are three hundred
+of us, let each contribute ten sous, that will make one hundred and
+fifty francs with which to procure powder and shot."
+
+Another said: "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two.
+In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government. With
+twenty-five thousand men we can face them." Another said: "I don't sleep
+at night, because I make cartridges all night." From time to time,
+men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats" came and "caused
+embarrassment," and with the air of "command," shook hands with the most
+important, and then went away. They never stayed more than ten minutes.
+Significant remarks were exchanged in a low tone: "The plot is ripe, the
+matter is arranged." "It was murmured by all who were there," to borrow
+the very expression of one of those who were present. The exaltation was
+such that one day, a workingman exclaimed, before the whole wine-shop:
+"We have no arms!" One of his comrades replied: "The soldiers have!"
+thus parodying without being aware of the fact, Bonaparte's proclamation
+to the army in Italy: "When they had anything of a more secret nature on
+hand," adds one report, "they did not communicate it to each other." It
+is not easy to understand what they could conceal after what they said.
+
+These reunions were sometimes periodical. At certain ones of them, there
+were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they were always
+the same. In others, any one entered who wished, and the room was
+so full that they were forced to stand. Some went thither through
+enthusiasm and passion; others because it was on their way to their
+work. As during the Revolution, there were patriotic women in some of
+these wine-shops who embraced new-comers.
+
+Other expressive facts came to light.
+
+A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:
+"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."
+
+Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue de
+Charonne. The balloting was carried on in their caps.
+
+Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons in
+the Rue de Cotte. There there was a trophy of arms formed of wooden
+broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils. One day, the buttons were removed
+from the foils.
+
+A workman said: "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't count
+on me, because I am looked upon as a machine." Later on, that machine
+became Quenisset.
+
+The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
+and indescribable notoriety. A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said
+to another woman: "For a long time, there has been a strong force busy
+making cartridges." In the open street, proclamation could be seen
+addressed to the National Guard in the departments. One of these
+proclamations was signed: Burtot, wine-merchant.
+
+One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
+accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the Marche
+Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to emanate from
+an occult power. Groups formed around him, and applauded.
+
+The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
+noted down. "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn, our
+bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The breakdown
+which has recently taken place in cottons has converted to us many
+mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in our obscure
+ranks."--"Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction, revolution or
+counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer believe either in
+inertia or in immobility. For the people against the people, that is the
+question. There is no other."--"On the day when we cease to suit you,
+break us, but up to that day, help us to march on." All this in broad
+daylight.
+
+Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
+people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832, a
+passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle of the
+Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: "I am a Babouvist!" But beneath
+Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.
+
+Among other things, this man said:--
+
+"Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly and
+treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side, it preaches
+revolution, it is democratic in order to escape being beaten, and
+royalist so that it may not have to fight. The republicans are beasts
+with feathers. Distrust the republicans, citizens of the laboring
+classes."
+
+"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.
+
+This shout put an end to the discourse.
+
+Mysterious incidents occurred.
+
+At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very well
+dressed man," who said to him: "Whither are you bound, citizen?" "Sir,"
+replied the workingman, "I have not the honor of your acquaintance." "I
+know you very well, however." And the man added: "Don't be alarmed, I
+am an agent of the committee. You are suspected of not being quite
+faithful. You know that if you reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on
+you." Then he shook hands with the workingman and went away, saying: "We
+shall meet again soon."
+
+The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues, not
+only in the wine-shops, but in the street.
+
+"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"There is going to be a shot to fire."
+
+Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies, fraught with
+evident Jacquerie:--
+
+"Who governs us?"
+
+"M. Philippe."
+
+"No, it is the bourgeoisie."
+
+The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie in a
+bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.
+
+On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
+passed by: "We have a good plan of attack."
+
+Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four men
+who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere du Trone:--
+
+"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris any
+more."
+
+Who was the he? Menacing obscurity.
+
+"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
+apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
+near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society
+aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving as
+intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
+
+Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these
+leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of
+this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:--
+
+"Who was your leader?"
+
+"I knew of none and I recognized none."
+
+There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle
+reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.
+
+A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground
+on which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly
+found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still
+legible the following lines:--
+
+
+The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections
+for the different societies.
+
+
+And, as a postscript:--
+
+
+We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere,
+No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house of a
+gunsmith in that court. The section owns no arms.
+
+
+What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
+neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up another
+paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of which we
+reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest attaching to
+these strange documents:--
+
+[Illustration: Code Table 4b1-5 page 26]
+
+ +------------------------------------------------------------+
+ | Q | C | D | E | Learn this list by heart. After so doing
+ | | | | | | you will tear it up. The men admitted
+ | | | | | | will do the same when you have transmitted
+ | | | | | | their orders to them.
+ | | | | | | Health and Fraternity,
+ | | | | | | u og a fe L. |
+ +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret of this
+find at the time, learned the significance of those four capital
+letters: quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs [scouts], and
+the sense of the letters: u og a fe, which was a date, and meant April
+15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed names followed by
+very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. Bannerel. 8 guns, 83 cartridges. A
+safe man.--C. Boubiere. 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.--D. Rollet. 1 foil,
+1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--E. Tessier. 1 sword, 1 cartridge-box.
+Exact.--Terreur. 8 guns. Brave, etc.
+
+Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure, a third
+paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly, this sort of
+enigmatical list:--
+
+ Unite: Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
+ Barra. Soize. Salle-au-Comte.
+ Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
+ J. J. R.
+ Caius Gracchus.
+ Right of revision. Dufond. Four.
+ Fall of the Girondists. Derbac. Maubuee.
+ Washington. Pinson. 1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
+ Marseillaise.
+ Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
+ Hoche.
+ Marceau. Plato. Arbre-Sec.
+ Warsaw. Tilly, crier of the Populaire.
+
+
+The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew its
+significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature of
+the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights
+of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections. To-day,
+when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than history,
+we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation of the
+Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to the date
+when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.
+
+Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to written
+notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.
+
+In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-abrac, there
+were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise
+and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this same
+gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card, on which was
+written the following:--
+
+ Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . . 12 ounces.
+ Sulphur . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.
+ Charcoal . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces and a half.
+ Water . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.
+
+
+The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong smell
+of powder.
+
+A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little package
+on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package was taken to
+the police station. It was opened, and in it were found two printed
+dialogues, signed Lahautiere, a song entitled: "Workmen, band together,"
+and a tin box full of cartridges.
+
+One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see how
+warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.
+
+In a ditch on the boulevard, between Pere-Lachaise and the Barriere
+du Trone, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
+discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood, a
+bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation of
+cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of hunting-powder,
+and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented evident traces of
+melted lead.
+
+Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
+o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon, who
+was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got himself
+killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing near his
+bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he was in the act of
+preparing.
+
+Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
+between the Barriere Picpus and the Barriere Charenton in a little lane
+between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there was a "Jeu
+de Siam."[33] One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse and handed it to
+the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed that the perspiration
+of his chest had made the powder damp. He primed the pistol and added
+more powder to what was already in the pan. Then the two men parted.
+
+A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the affair
+of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred cartridges and
+twenty-four flints.
+
+The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
+thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg. On
+the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. The
+remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to seize a
+single one.
+
+An intercepted letter read: "The day is not far distant when, within
+four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be under arms."
+
+All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. The
+approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the face of
+the government. No singularity was lacking to this still subterranean
+crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois talked peaceably to
+the working-classes of what was in preparation. They said: "How is the
+rising coming along?" in the same tone in which they would have said:
+"How is your wife?"
+
+A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: "Well, when are you
+going to make the attack?"
+
+Another shop-keeper said:--
+
+"The attack will be made soon."
+
+"I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there
+are twenty-five thousand." He offered his gun, and a neighbor offered a
+small pistol which he was willing to sell for seven francs.
+
+Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris nor
+in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere. Like
+those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form in the
+human body, the network of secret societies began to spread all over the
+country. From the associations of the Friends of the People, which was
+at the same time public and secret, sprang the Society of the Rights of
+Man, which also dated from one of the orders of the day: Pluviose, Year
+40 of the republican era, which was destined to survive even the mandate
+of the Court of Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which
+did not hesitate to bestow on its sections significant names like the
+following:--
+
+ Pikes.
+ Tocsin.
+ Signal cannon.
+ Phrygian cap.
+ January 21.
+ The beggars.
+ The vagabonds.
+ Forward march.
+ Robespierre.
+ Level.
+ Ca Ira.
+
+The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action. These
+were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead. Other
+associations sought to recruit themselves from the great mother
+societies. The members of sections complained that they were torn
+asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee of organization of
+the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the liberty of the press,
+for individual liberty, for the instruction of the people against
+indirect taxes. Then the Society of Equal Workingmen which was divided
+into three fractions, the levellers, the communists, the reformers.
+Then the Army of the Bastilles, a sort of cohort organized on a military
+footing, four men commanded by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by
+a sub-lieutenant, forty by a lieutenant; there were never more than
+five men who knew each other. Creation where precaution is combined with
+audacity and which seemed stamped with the genius of Venice.
+
+The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms, the Society
+of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.
+
+A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
+among these the republican affiliations. It was denounced and repudiated
+there.
+
+The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities, Lyons,
+Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society of the Rights of
+Man, the Charbonniere, and The Free Men. All had a revolutionary society
+which was called the Cougourde. We have already mentioned this word.
+
+In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with the
+Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than the
+faubourgs. A cafe in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop of the
+Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served as rallying
+points for the students. The Society of the Friends of the A B C
+affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the Cougourde of Aix,
+met, as we have seen, in the Cafe Musain. These same young men assembled
+also, as we have stated already, in a restaurant wine-shop of the Rue
+Mondetour which was called Corinthe. These meetings were secret. Others
+were as public as possible, and the reader can judge of their boldness
+from these fragments of an interrogatory undergone in one of the
+ulterior prosecutions: "Where was this meeting held?" "In the Rue de la
+Paix." "At whose house?" "In the street." "What sections were there?"
+"Only one." "Which?" "The Manuel section." "Who was its leader?"
+"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course of
+attacking the government. Where did your instructions come from?" "From
+the central committee."
+
+The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
+subsequently by the operations of Beford, Luneville, and Epinard. They
+counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth, on
+the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry. In Burgundy and
+in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree; that is to say, a
+pole surmounted by a red cap.
+
+Such was the situation.
+
+The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,
+as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made
+it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled like
+an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees, was
+quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult. Everything
+was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption, however, of
+the regular work. It is impossible to convey an idea of this lively yet
+sombre physiognomy. In this faubourg exists poignant distress hidden
+under attic roofs; there also exist rare and ardent minds. It is
+particularly in the matter of distress and intelligence that it is
+dangerous to have extremes meet.
+
+The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble; for it
+received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures, strikes,
+slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances. In times
+of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow which it deals
+rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue, capable to the
+highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly to arms, prompt to
+explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to be only awaiting the
+fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks float on the horizon chased
+by the wind of events, it is impossible not to think of the Faubourg
+Saint-Antoine and of the formidable chance which has placed at the very
+gates of Paris that powder-house of suffering and ideas.
+
+The wine-shops of the Faubourg Antoine, which have been more than
+once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused, possess
+historical notoriety. In troublous times people grow intoxicated there
+more on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic spirit and an afflatus
+of the future circulates there, swelling hearts and enlarging souls. The
+cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine resemble those taverns of Mont
+Aventine erected on the cave of the Sibyl and communicating with
+the profound and sacred breath; taverns where the tables were almost
+tripods, and where was drunk what Ennius calls the sibylline wine.
+
+The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary
+agitations create fissures there, through which trickles the popular
+sovereignty. This sovereignty may do evil; it can be mistaken like any
+other; but, even when led astray, it remains great. We may say of it as
+of the blind cyclops, Ingens.
+
+In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good or evil,
+according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm, there leaped
+forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions, now heroic
+bands.
+
+Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men, who in the
+early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling, wild, with
+uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves upon ancient Paris in
+an uproar, what did they want? They wanted an end to oppression, an
+end to tyranny, an end to the sword, work for men, instruction for the
+child, social sweetness for the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity,
+bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress;
+and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible
+wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist,
+a roar in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of
+civilization.
+
+They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with
+fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. They seemed
+barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask of
+night.
+
+Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but
+ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling,
+embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white
+plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on
+a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently on demeanor
+and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right,
+of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the death penalty, of war,
+glorifying in low tones and with politeness, the sword, the stake, and
+the scaffold. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between
+the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we
+should choose the barbarians.
+
+But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. No perpendicular
+fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.
+
+Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle slope.
+
+God takes care of that. God's whole policy consists in rendering slopes
+less steep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS
+
+It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible
+catastrophe, instituted a kind of mysterious census.
+
+All were present at a secret meeting at the Cafe Musain.
+
+Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical but
+significant metaphors:--
+
+"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we may
+count. If combatants are required, they must be provided. It can do no
+harm to have something with which to strike. Passers-by always have more
+chance of being gored when there are bulls on the road than when there
+are none. Let us, therefore, reckon a little on the herd. How many of us
+are there? There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.
+Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose.
+Let us mistrust the unexpected. Let us not be caught unprepared. We must
+go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they hold fast.
+This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac, you will see the
+polytechnic students. It is their day to go out. To-day is Wednesday.
+Feuilly, you will see those of the Glaciere, will you not? Combeferre
+has promised me to go to Picpus. There is a perfect swarm and an
+excellent one there. Bahorel will visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the
+masons are growing lukewarm; you will bring us news from the lodge of
+the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honore. Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical
+lecture, and feel the pulse of the medical school. Bossuet will take a
+little turn in the court and talk with the young law licentiates. I will
+take charge of the Cougourde myself."
+
+"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.
+
+"No."
+
+"What else is there?"
+
+"A very important thing."
+
+"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.
+
+"The Barriere du Maine," replied Enjolras.
+
+Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection, then he
+resumed:--
+
+"At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters, and
+journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic family,
+but liable to cool off. I don't know what has been the matter with
+them for some time past. They are thinking of something else. They are
+becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes. There is
+urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little, but
+with firmness. They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found there
+between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into a glow.
+For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius, who is a good
+fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us. I need some one for
+the Barriere du Maine. I have no one."
+
+"What about me?" said Grantaire. "Here am I."
+
+"You?"
+
+"I."
+
+"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown cold
+in the name of principle!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Are you good for anything?"
+
+"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.
+
+"You do not believe in everything."
+
+"I believe in you."
+
+"Grantaire will you do me a service?"
+
+"Anything. I'll black your boots."
+
+"Well, don't meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from your
+absinthe."
+
+"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."
+
+"You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine! You capable of it!"
+
+"I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place
+Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
+the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the Rue
+d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind me the
+Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries, of striding
+across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine, of passing
+the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that. My shoes are
+capable of that."
+
+"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"
+
+"Not much. We only address each other as thou."
+
+"What will you say to them?"
+
+"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton. Of principles."
+
+"You?"
+
+"I. But I don't receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible. I
+have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my constitution
+of the year Two by heart. 'The liberty of one citizen ends where the
+liberty of another citizen begins.' Do you take me for a brute? I have
+an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. The Rights of Man, the
+sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am even a bit of a Hebertist. I
+can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in
+hand."
+
+"Be serious," said Enjolras.
+
+"I am wild," replied Grantaire.
+
+Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man who
+has taken a resolution.
+
+"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you. You shall go to the
+Barriere du Maine."
+
+Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain. He went
+out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home to put on a
+Robespierre waistcoat.
+
+"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras. Then,
+with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of
+the waistcoat across his breast.
+
+And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--
+
+"Be easy."
+
+He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.
+
+A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain was
+deserted. All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his own
+direction, each to his own task. Enjolras, who had reserved the
+Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.
+
+Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met on the
+plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are so numerous in
+that side of Paris.
+
+As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation
+in review in his own mind. The gravity of events was self-evident. When
+facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady, move heavily,
+the slightest complication stops and entangles them. A phenomenon whence
+arises ruin and new births. Enjolras descried a luminous uplifting
+beneath the gloomy skirts of the future. Who knows? Perhaps the moment
+was at hand. The people were again taking possession of right, and
+what a fine spectacle! The revolution was again majestically taking
+possession of France and saying to the world: "The sequel to-morrow!"
+Enjolras was content. The furnace was being heated. He had at that
+moment a powder train of friends scattered all over Paris. He composed,
+in his own mind, with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating
+eloquence, Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash,
+Bahorel's smile, Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's
+sarcasms, a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at
+once. All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer to the effort.
+This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.
+
+"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barriere du Maine will not take me far
+out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's? Let us have
+a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he is getting on."
+
+One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
+reached the Richefeu smoking-room.
+
+He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door fall
+to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with tables,
+men, and smoke.
+
+A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another
+voice. It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.
+
+Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
+table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was
+hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--
+
+"Double-six."
+
+"Fours."
+
+"The pig! I have no more."
+
+"You are dead. A two."
+
+"Six."
+
+"Three."
+
+"One."
+
+"It's my move."
+
+"Four points."
+
+"Not much."
+
+"It's your turn."
+
+"I have made an enormous mistake."
+
+"You are doing well."
+
+"Fifteen."
+
+"Seven more."
+
+"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]
+
+"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it at the
+beginning, the whole play would have been changed."
+
+"A two again."
+
+"One."
+
+"One! Well, five."
+
+"I haven't any."
+
+"It was your play, I believe?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Blank."
+
+"What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long revery.] Two."
+
+"One."
+
+"Neither five nor one. That's bad for you."
+
+"Domino."
+
+"Plague take it!"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE LARK'S MEADOW
+
+Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon whose
+track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted the building,
+bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches, than Marius also
+glided out of the house. It was only nine o'clock in the evening. Marius
+betook himself to Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable
+inhabitant of the Latin Quarter, he had gone to live in the Rue de la
+Verrerie "for political reasons"; this quarter was one where, at that
+epoch, insurrection liked to install itself. Marius said to Courfeyrac:
+"I have come to sleep with you." Courfeyrac dragged a mattress off his
+bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on the floor, and said:
+"There."
+
+At seven o'clock on the following morning, Marius returned to the hovel,
+paid the quarter's rent which he owed to Ma'am Bougon, had his books,
+his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs loaded on a
+hand-cart and went off without leaving his address, so that when Javert
+returned in the course of the morning, for the purpose of questioning
+Marius as to the events of the preceding evening, he found only Ma'am
+Bougon, who answered: "Moved away!"
+
+Ma'am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an accomplice
+of the robbers who had been seized the night before. "Who would ever
+have said it?" she exclaimed to the portresses of the quarter, "a young
+man like that, who had the air of a girl!"
+
+Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence. The first
+was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he had beheld, so
+close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most ferocious development,
+a social deformity which is, perhaps, even more terrible than the wicked
+rich man, the wicked poor man. The second was, that he did not wish
+to figure in the lawsuit which would insue in all probability, and be
+brought in to testify against Thenardier.
+
+Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten, was
+afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home at the time
+of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him, however, but without
+success.
+
+A month passed, then another. Marius was still with Courfeyrac. He had
+learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter of the
+courts, that Thenardier was in close confinement. Every Monday,
+Marius had five francs handed in to the clerk's office of La Force for
+Thenardier.
+
+As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs from
+Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life that he had ever borrowed
+money. These periodical five francs were a double riddle to Courfeyrac
+who lent and to Thenardier who received them. "To whom can they go?"
+thought Courfeyrac. "Whence can this come to me?" Thenardier asked
+himself.
+
+Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through a
+trap-door once more. He no longer saw anything before him; his life
+was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly. He had for a
+moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity, the young girl whom
+he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father, those unknown beings,
+who were his only interest and his only hope in this world; and, at the
+very moment when he thought himself on the point of grasping them, a
+gust had swept all these shadows away. Not a spark of certainty and
+truth had been emitted even in the most terrible of collisions. No
+conjecture was possible. He no longer knew even the name that he thought
+he knew. It certainly was not Ursule. And the Lark was a nickname. And
+what was he to think of the old man? Was he actually in hiding from
+the police? The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the
+vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It now seemed probable
+that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person. So he
+disguised himself? That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides. Why
+had he not called for help? Why had he fled? Was he, or was he not,
+the father of the young girl? Was he, in short, the man whom Thenardier
+thought that he recognized? Thenardier might have been mistaken. These
+formed so many insoluble problems. All this, it is true, detracted
+nothing from the angelic charms of the young girl of the Luxembourg.
+Heart-rending distress; Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night
+over his eyes. He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not
+stir. All had vanished, save love. Of love itself he had lost the
+instincts and the sudden illuminations. Ordinarily, this flame which
+burns us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without.
+But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion. He never
+said to himself: "What if I were to go to such a place? What if I were
+to try such and such a thing?" The girl whom he could no longer call
+Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius in what direction
+he should seek her. His whole life was now summed up in two words;
+absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog. To see her once again;
+he still aspired to this, but he no longer expected it.
+
+To crown all, his poverty had returned. He felt that icy breath close to
+him, on his heels. In the midst of his torments, and long before
+this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than
+discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes. A habit which is easy
+to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.
+
+A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.
+It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes
+severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects
+the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there,
+binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But too much
+dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to
+fall entirely from thought into revery! He thinks that he can re-ascend
+with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same
+thing. Error!
+
+Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To
+replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.
+
+Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. Passion had
+supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimaeras
+without object or bottom. One no longer emerges from one's self except
+for the purpose of going off to dream. Idle production. Tumultuous and
+stagnant gulf. And, in proportion as labor diminishes, needs increase.
+This is a law. Man, in a state of revery, is generally prodigal and
+slack; the unstrung mind cannot hold life within close bounds.
+
+There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil, for if
+enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful. But the poor
+man who is generous and noble, and who does not work, is lost. Resources
+are exhausted, needs crop up.
+
+Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well as
+the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends in one of two
+holds, suicide or crime.
+
+By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes out to
+throw one's self in the water.
+
+Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.
+
+Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
+fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw. What we have just written seems
+strange, and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being kindles in
+the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it
+beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon;
+the star of the inner night. She--that was Marius' whole thought. He
+meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly conscious that his old coat
+was becoming an impossible coat, and that his new coat was growing old,
+that his shirts were wearing out, that his hat was wearing out, that his
+boots were giving out, and he said to himself: "If I could but see her
+once again before I die!"
+
+One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him, that her
+glance had told him so, that she did not know his name, but that she did
+know his soul, and that, wherever she was, however mysterious the place,
+she still loved him perhaps. Who knows whether she were not thinking of
+him as he was thinking of her? Sometimes, in those inexplicable hours
+such as are experienced by every heart that loves, though he had no
+reasons for anything but sadness and yet felt an obscure quiver of joy,
+he said to himself: "It is her thoughts that are coming to me!" Then he
+added: "Perhaps my thoughts reach her also."
+
+This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later, was
+sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times resembled hope,
+into his soul. From time to time, especially at that evening hour which
+is the most depressing to even the dreamy, he allowed the purest, the
+most impersonal, the most ideal of the reveries which filled his brain,
+to fall upon a notebook which contained nothing else. He called this
+"writing to her."
+
+It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged. Quite the
+contrary. He had lost the faculty of working and of moving firmly
+towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with more clear-sightedness
+and rectitude than ever. Marius surveyed by a calm and real, although
+peculiar light, what passed before his eyes, even the most indifferent
+deeds and men; he pronounced a just criticism on everything with a sort
+of honest dejection and candid disinterestedness. His judgment, which
+was almost wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared
+on high.
+
+In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him, and
+every moment he was discovering the foundation of life, of humanity, and
+of destiny. Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has
+given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed
+the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light
+has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.
+
+The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.
+
+However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself. It
+merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained to be
+traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant. He thought that
+he already distinctly perceived the brink of the bottomless abyss.
+
+"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before then!"
+
+When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on one
+side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance, you reach
+the Rue de la Sante, then the Glaciere, and, a little while before
+arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come to a sort of
+field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous chain of the
+boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdeel would be tempted to sit down.
+
+There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green
+meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter rags
+drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener's house, built in the
+time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly pierced with dormer
+windows, dilapidated palisades, a little water amid poplar-trees,
+women, voices, laughter; on the horizon the Pantheon, the pole of
+the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grace, black, squat, fantastic, amusing,
+magnificent, and in the background, the severe square crests of the
+towers of Notre Dame.
+
+As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither. Hardly one cart
+or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.
+
+It chanced that Marius' solitary strolls led him to this plot of
+ground, near the water. That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,
+a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty of
+the place, asked this passer-by:--"What is the name of this spot?"
+
+The person replied: "It is the Lark's meadow."
+
+And he added: "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess of Ivry."
+
+But after the word "Lark" Marius heard nothing more. These sudden
+congealments in the state of revery, which a single word suffices to
+evoke, do occur. The entire thought is abruptly condensed around an
+idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.
+
+The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths of
+Marius' melancholy.--"Stop," said he with a sort of unreasoning stupor
+peculiar to these mysterious asides, "this is her meadow. I shall know
+where she lives now."
+
+It was absurd, but irresistible.
+
+And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--EMBRYONIC FORMATION OF CRIMES IN THE INCUBATION OF PRISONS
+
+Javert's triumph in the Gorbeau hovel seemed complete, but had not been
+so.
+
+In the first place, and this constituted the principal anxiety, Javert
+had not taken the prisoner prisoner. The assassinated man who flees
+is more suspicious than the assassin, and it is probable that this
+personage, who had been so precious a capture for the ruffians, would be
+no less fine a prize for the authorities.
+
+And then, Montparnasse had escaped Javert.
+
+Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy" must be
+waited for. Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Eponine as she stood
+on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had led her off,
+preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather than Schinderhannes
+with the father. It was well that he did so. He was free. As for
+Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized; a mediocre consolation.
+Eponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.
+
+And finally, on the way from the Gorbeau house to La Force, one of the
+principal prisoners, Claquesous, had been lost. It was not known how
+this had been effected, the police agents and the sergeants "could
+not understand it at all." He had converted himself into vapor, he had
+slipped through the handcuffs, he had trickled through the crevices of
+the carriage, the fiacre was cracked, and he had fled; all that they
+were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison, there was no
+Claquesous. Either the fairies or the police had had a hand in it. Had
+Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake in water? Had there
+been unavowed connivance of the police agents? Did this man belong
+to the double enigma of order and disorder? Was he concentric with
+infraction and repression? Had this sphinx his fore paws in crime and
+his hind paws in authority? Javert did not accept such comminations, and
+would have bristled up against such compromises; but his squad included
+other inspectors besides himself, who were more initiated than he,
+perhaps, although they were his subordinates in the secrets of the
+Prefecture, and Claquesous had been such a villain that he might make
+a very good agent. It is an excellent thing for ruffianism and an
+admirable thing for the police to be on such intimate juggling terms
+with the night. These double-edged rascals do exist. However that may
+be, Claquesous had gone astray and was not found again. Javert appeared
+to be more irritated than amazed at this.
+
+As for Marius, "that booby of a lawyer," who had probably become
+frightened, and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert attached very
+little importance to him. Moreover, a lawyer can be hunted up at any
+time. But was he a lawyer after all?
+
+The investigation had begun.
+
+The magistrate had thought it advisable not to put one of these men of
+the band of Patron Minette in close confinement, in the hope that he
+would chatter. This man was Brujon, the long-haired man of the Rue du
+Petit-Banquier. He had been let loose in the Charlemagne courtyard, and
+the eyes of the watchers were fixed on him.
+
+This name of Brujon is one of the souvenirs of La Force. In that hideous
+courtyard, called the court of the Batiment-Neuf (New Building), which
+the administration called the court Saint-Bernard, and which the robbers
+called the Fosseaux-Lions (The Lion's Ditch), on that wall covered with
+scales and leprosy, which rose on the left to a level with the roofs,
+near an old door of rusty iron which led to the ancient chapel of the
+ducal residence of La Force, then turned in a dormitory for ruffians,
+there could still be seen, twelve years ago, a sort of fortress roughly
+carved in the stone with a nail, and beneath it this signature:--
+
+ BRUJON, 1811.
+
+
+The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.
+
+The latter, of whom the reader caught but a glimpse at the Gorbeau
+house, was a very cunning and very adroit young spark, with a bewildered
+and plaintive air. It was in consequence of this plaintive air that the
+magistrate had released him, thinking him more useful in the Charlemagne
+yard than in close confinement.
+
+Robbers do not interrupt their profession because they are in the hands
+of justice. They do not let themselves be put out by such a trifle as
+that. To be in prison for one crime is no reason for not beginning on
+another crime. They are artists, who have one picture in the salon, and
+who toil, none the less, on a new work in their studios.
+
+Brujon seemed to be stupefied by prison. He could sometimes be seen
+standing by the hour together in front of the sutler's window in the
+Charlemagne yard, staring like an idiot at the sordid list of prices
+which began with: garlic, 62 centimes, and ended with: cigar, 5
+centimes. Or he passed his time in trembling, chattering his teeth,
+saying that he had a fever, and inquiring whether one of the eight and
+twenty beds in the fever ward was vacant.
+
+All at once, towards the end of February, 1832, it was discovered that
+Brujon, that somnolent fellow, had had three different commissions
+executed by the errand-men of the establishment, not under his own name,
+but in the name of three of his comrades; and they had cost him in all
+fifty sous, an exorbitant outlay which attracted the attention of the
+prison corporal.
+
+Inquiries were instituted, and on consulting the tariff of commissions
+posted in the convict's parlor, it was learned that the fifty sous could
+be analyzed as follows: three commissions; one to the Pantheon, ten
+sous; one to Val-de-Grace, fifteen sous; and one to the Barriere de
+Grenelle, twenty-five sous. This last was the dearest of the whole
+tariff. Now, at the Pantheon, at the Val-de-Grace, and at the Barriere
+de Grenelle were situated the domiciles of the three very redoubtable
+prowlers of the barriers, Kruideniers, alias Bizarre, Glorieux, an
+ex-convict, and Barre-Carosse, upon whom the attention of the police was
+directed by this incident. It was thought that these men were members
+of Patron Minette; two of those leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, had been
+captured. It was supposed that the messages, which had been addressed,
+not to houses, but to people who were waiting for them in the street,
+must have contained information with regard to some crime that had been
+plotted. They were in possession of other indications; they laid hand on
+the three prowlers, and supposed that they had circumvented some one or
+other of Brujon's machinations.
+
+About a week after these measures had been taken, one night, as the
+superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower dormitory
+in the Batiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in the box--this
+was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen performed their
+duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be dropped into all the
+boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories--a watchman looked through
+the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld Brujon sitting on his bed and
+writing something by the light of the hall-lamp. The guardian entered,
+Brujon was put in a solitary cell for a month, but they were not able to
+seize what he had written. The police learned nothing further about it.
+
+What is certain is, that on the following morning, a "postilion"
+was flung from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions' Ditch, over the
+five-story building which separated the two court-yards.
+
+What prisoners call a "postilion" is a pellet of bread artistically
+moulded, which is sent into Ireland, that is to say, over the roofs of a
+prison, from one courtyard to another. Etymology: over England; from one
+land to another; into Ireland. This little pellet falls in the yard. The
+man who picks it up opens it and finds in it a note addressed to some
+prisoner in that yard. If it is a prisoner who finds the treasure, he
+forwards the note to its destination; if it is a keeper, or one of the
+prisoners secretly sold who are called sheep in prisons and foxes in the
+galleys, the note is taken to the office and handed over to the police.
+
+On this occasion, the postilion reached its address, although the person
+to whom it was addressed was, at that moment, in solitary confinement.
+This person was no other than Babet, one of the four heads of Patron
+Minette.
+
+The postilion contained a roll of paper on which only these two lines
+were written:--
+
+"Babet. There is an affair in the Rue Plumet. A gate on a garden."
+
+This is what Brujon had written the night before.
+
+In spite of male and female searchers, Babet managed to pass the note on
+from La Force to the Salpetriere, to a "good friend" whom he had and who
+was shut up there. This woman in turn transmitted the note to another
+woman of her acquaintance, a certain Magnon, who was strongly suspected
+by the police, though not yet arrested. This Magnon, whose name the
+reader has already seen, had relations with the Thenardier, which will
+be described in detail later on, and she could, by going to see Eponine,
+serve as a bridge between the Salpetriere and Les Madelonettes.
+
+It happened, that at precisely that moment, as proofs were wanting
+in the investigation directed against Thenardier in the matter of his
+daughters, Eponine and Azelma were released. When Eponine came out,
+Magnon, who was watching the gate of the Madelonettes, handed her
+Brujon's note to Babet, charging her to look into the matter.
+
+Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden,
+observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later, brought to
+Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit, which Magnon
+transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpetriere. A biscuit, in the
+shady symbolism of prisons, signifies: Nothing to be done.
+
+So that in less than a week from that time, as Brujon and Babet met in
+the circle of La Force, the one on his way to the examination, the other
+on his way from it:--
+
+"Well?" asked Brujon, "the Rue P.?"
+
+"Biscuit," replied Babet. Thus did the foetus of crime engendered by
+Brujon in La Force miscarry.
+
+This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly
+distinct from Brujon's programme. The reader will see what they were.
+
+Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite
+another.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF
+
+Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
+Father Mabeuf by chance.
+
+While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps which may be
+called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places without light, where
+the happy can be heard walking overhead, M. Mabeuf was descending on his
+side.
+
+The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all. The experiments on indigo
+had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz, which had
+a bad exposure. M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only a few plants which
+love shade and dampness. Nevertheless, he did not become discouraged. He
+had obtained a corner in the Jardin des Plantes, with a good exposure,
+to make his trials with indigo "at his own expense." For this purpose he
+had pawned his copperplates of the Flora. He had reduced his breakfast
+to two eggs, and he left one of these for his old servant, to whom he
+had paid no wages for the last fifteen months. And often his breakfast
+was his only meal. He no longer smiled with his infantile smile, he had
+grown morose and no longer received visitors. Marius did well not to
+dream of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on his
+way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man passed
+each other on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. They did not speak, and only
+exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A heart-breaking thing it is
+that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds! Two men who have
+been friends become two chance passers-by.
+
+Royal the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,
+his garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness,
+pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. This sufficed him for his
+living. He said to himself: "When I shall have made my balls of blueing,
+I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from the pawn-shop,
+I will put my Flora in vogue again with trickery, plenty of money and
+advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy, I know well where, a
+copy of Pierre de Medine's Art de Naviguer, with wood-cuts, edition of
+1655." In the meantime, he toiled all day over his plot of indigo, and
+at night he returned home to water his garden, and to read his books. At
+that epoch, M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.
+
+One evening he had a singular apparition.
+
+He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. Mother
+Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. He had dined
+on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit of bread that he
+had found on the kitchen table, and had seated himself on an overturned
+stone post, which took the place of a bench in his garden.
+
+Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens, a sort
+of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated, a rabbit-hutch on
+the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. There was nothing in the
+hutch, but there were a few apples in the fruit-closet,--the remains of
+the winter's provision.
+
+M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the aid of
+his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond and in which,
+a serious thing at his age, he was interested. His natural timidity
+rendered him accessible to the acceptance of superstitions in a certain
+degree. The first of these books was the famous treatise of President
+Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons; the other was a quarto by Mutor
+de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la
+Bievre. This last-mentioned old volume interested him all the more,
+because his garden had been one of the spots haunted by goblins in
+former times. The twilight had begun to whiten what was on high and to
+blacken all below. As he read, over the top of the book which he held
+in his hand, Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others a
+magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations; four days of
+heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed; the stalks were
+bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling; all this needed water,
+the rhododendron was particularly sad. Father Mabeuf was one of those
+persons for whom plants have souls. The old man had toiled all day over
+his indigo plot, he was worn out with fatigue, but he rose, laid
+his books on the bench, and walked, all bent over and with tottering
+footsteps, to the well, but when he had grasped the chain, he could not
+even draw it sufficiently to unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a
+glance of anguish toward heaven which was becoming studded with stars.
+
+The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
+beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night promised to
+be as arid as the day had been.
+
+"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud! Not a
+drop of water!"
+
+And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon his
+breast.
+
+He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--
+
+"A tear of dew! A little pity!"
+
+He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.
+
+At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--
+
+"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"
+
+At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became audible
+in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery a sort of tall,
+slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him and stared boldly at
+him. She had less the air of a human being than of a form which had just
+blossomed forth from the twilight.
+
+Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we have
+said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable, this
+being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness, had
+unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket, and filled the
+watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare
+feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds
+distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the
+leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that
+the rhododendron was happy now.
+
+The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third. She
+watered the whole garden.
+
+There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths, where
+her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms, and with
+her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.
+
+When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears in his
+eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.
+
+"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take care of
+the flowers."
+
+"No," she replied. "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."
+
+The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing her
+response:--
+
+"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can do nothing
+for you!"
+
+"You can do something," said she.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Tell me where M. Marius lives."
+
+The old man did not understand. "What Monsieur Marius?"
+
+He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something that had
+vanished.
+
+"A young man who used to come here."
+
+In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.
+
+"Ah! yes--" he exclaimed. "I know what you mean. Wait! Monsieur
+Marius--the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu! He lives,--or rather, he no
+longer lives,--ah well, I don't know."
+
+As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron, and he
+continued:--
+
+"Hold, I know now. He very often passes along the boulevard, and goes in
+the direction of the Glaciere, Rue Croulebarbe. The meadow of the Lark.
+Go there. It is not hard to meet him."
+
+When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any one
+there; the girl had disappeared.
+
+He was decidedly terrified.
+
+"Really," he thought, "if my garden had not been watered, I should think
+that she was a spirit."
+
+An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him, and as he fell
+asleep, at that confused moment when thought, like that fabulous bird
+which changes itself into a fish in order to cross the sea, little by
+little assumes the form of a dream in order to traverse slumber, he said
+to himself in a bewildered way:--
+
+"In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudiere narrates of the
+goblins. Could it have been a goblin?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--AN APPARITION TO MARIUS
+
+Some days after this visit of a "spirit" to Farmer Mabeuf, one
+morning,--it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the
+hundred-sou piece from Courfeyrac for Thenardier--Marius had put this
+coin in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk's office, he
+had gone "to take a little stroll," in the hope that this would make him
+work on his return. It was always thus, however. As soon as he rose, he
+seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper in order to scribble
+some translation; his task at that epoch consisted in turning into
+French a celebrated quarrel between Germans, the Gans and Savigny
+controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans, read four lines, tried to
+write one, could not, saw a star between him and his paper, and rose
+from his chair, saying: "I shall go out. That will put me in spirits."
+
+And off he went to the Lark's meadow.
+
+There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny and
+Gans.
+
+He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed;
+there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which
+were broken in his brain; then he said to himself: "I will not go out
+to-morrow. It prevents my working." And he went out every day.
+
+He lived in the Lark's meadow more than in Courfeyrac's lodgings. That
+was his real address: Boulevard de la Sante, at the seventh tree from
+the Rue Croulebarbe.
+
+That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself on
+the parapet of the River des Gobelins. A cheerful sunlight penetrated
+the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.
+
+He was dreaming of "Her." And his meditation turning to a reproach, fell
+back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness, his paralysis
+of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night which was growing
+more dense every moment before him, to such a point that he no longer
+even saw the sun.
+
+Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas which
+was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him, and he
+had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this melancholy
+absorption, sensations from without did reach him. He heard behind him,
+beneath him, on both banks of the river, the laundresses of the Gobelins
+beating their linen, and above his head, the birds chattering and
+singing in the elm-trees. On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the
+careless happiness of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the
+sound of toil. What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect,
+were two cheerful sounds.
+
+All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard a familiar
+voice saying:--
+
+"Come! Here he is!"
+
+He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to
+him one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Eponine; he knew
+her name now. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier,
+two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take. She had
+accomplished a double progress, towards the light and towards distress.
+She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely
+entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes
+were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice,
+the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and
+vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face
+that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a
+prison adds to wretchedness.
+
+She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through
+having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness, but because she
+had slept in the loft of some stable.
+
+And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou, O
+youth!
+
+In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace of joy
+in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.
+
+She stood for several moments as though incapable of speech.
+
+"So I have met you at last!" she said at length. "Father Mabeuf was
+right, it was on this boulevard! How I have hunted for you! If you only
+knew! Do you know? I have been in the jug. A fortnight! They let me out!
+seeing that there was nothing against me, and that, moreover, I had not
+reached years of discretion. I lack two months of it. Oh! how I have
+hunted for you! These six weeks! So you don't live down there any more?"
+
+"No," said Marius.
+
+"Ah! I understand. Because of that affair. Those take-downs are
+disagreeable. You cleared out. Come now! Why do you wear old hats like
+this! A young man like you ought to have fine clothes. Do you know,
+Monsieur Marius, Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius, I don't know
+what. It isn't true that you are a baron? Barons are old fellows, they
+go to the Luxembourg, in front of the chateau, where there is the most
+sun, and they read the Quotidienne for a sou. I once carried a letter to
+a baron of that sort. He was over a hundred years old. Say, where do you
+live now?"
+
+Marius made no reply.
+
+"Ah!" she went on, "you have a hole in your shirt. I must sew it up for
+you."
+
+She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:--
+
+"You don't seem glad to see me."
+
+Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then
+exclaimed:--
+
+"But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!"
+
+"What?" demanded Marius. "What do you mean?"
+
+"Ah! you used to call me thou," she retorted.
+
+"Well, then, what dost thou mean?"
+
+She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some sort
+of inward conflict. At last she appeared to come to a decision.
+
+"So much the worse, I don't care. You have a melancholy air, I want you
+to be pleased. Only promise me that you will smile. I want to see you
+smile and hear you say: 'Ah, well, that's good.' Poor Mr. Marius! you
+know? You promised me that you would give me anything I like--"
+
+"Yes! Only speak!"
+
+She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:--
+
+"I have the address."
+
+Marius turned pale. All the blood flowed back to his heart.
+
+"What address?"
+
+"The address that you asked me to get!"
+
+She added, as though with an effort:--
+
+"The address--you know very well!"
+
+"Yes!" stammered Marius.
+
+"Of that young lady."
+
+This word uttered, she sighed deeply.
+
+Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting and seized
+her hand distractedly.
+
+"Oh! Well! lead me thither! Tell me! Ask of me anything you wish! Where
+is it?"
+
+"Come with me," she responded. "I don't know the street or number very
+well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know the house
+well, I will take you to it."
+
+She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent
+the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius in his
+intoxicated and ecstatic state:--
+
+"Oh! how glad you are!"
+
+A cloud swept across Marius' brow. He seized Eponine by the arm:--
+
+"Swear one thing to me!"
+
+"Swear!" said she, "what does that mean? Come! You want me to swear?"
+
+And she laughed.
+
+"Your father! promise me, Eponine! Swear to me that you will not give
+this address to your father!"
+
+She turned to him with a stupefied air.
+
+"Eponine! How do you know that my name is Eponine?"
+
+"Promise what I tell you!"
+
+But she did not seem to hear him.
+
+"That's nice! You have called me Eponine!"
+
+Marius grasped both her arms at once.
+
+"But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am saying
+to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this address that
+you know!"
+
+"My father!" said she. "Ah yes, my father! Be at ease. He's in close
+confinement. Besides, what do I care for my father!"
+
+"But you do not promise me!" exclaimed Marius.
+
+"Let go of me!" she said, bursting into a laugh, "how you do shake me!
+Yes! Yes! I promise that! I swear that to you! What is that to me? I
+will not tell my father the address. There! Is that right? Is that it?"
+
+"Nor to any one?" said Marius.
+
+"Nor to any one."
+
+"Now," resumed Marius, "take me there."
+
+"Immediately?"
+
+"Immediately."
+
+"Come along. Ah! how pleased he is!" said she.
+
+After a few steps she halted.
+
+"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius. Let me go on ahead,
+and follow me so, without seeming to do it. A nice young man like you
+must not be seen with a woman like me."
+
+No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced
+by that child.
+
+She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined
+her. She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:--
+
+"By the way, you know that you promised me something?"
+
+Marius fumbled in his pocket. All that he owned in the world was the
+five francs intended for Thenardier the father. He took them and laid
+them in Eponine's hand.
+
+She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground, and gazed at
+him with a gloomy air.
+
+"I don't want your money," said she.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET
+
+About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament
+of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period
+the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois
+concealed them, had "a little house" built in the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue
+Plumet, not far from the spot which was then designated as Combat des
+Animaux.
+
+This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms on the
+ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen down stairs,
+a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a
+garden with a large gate opening on the street. This garden was about
+an acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen by
+passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and
+at the end of the courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and
+a cellar, a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse
+in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked
+door which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding
+corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden
+with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden enclosures and
+cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in
+another door, also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league
+away, almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue du
+Babylone.
+
+Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were
+spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the
+justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere, and
+would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go
+to the Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate
+had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,
+and consequently, without interference. Later on, he had sold in little
+parcels, for gardens and market gardens, the lots of ground adjoining
+the corridor, and the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought
+they had a party wall before their eyes, and did not even suspect the
+long, paved ribbon winding between two walls amid their flower-beds and
+their orchards. Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable
+that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal
+about the chief justice.
+
+The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted and
+furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned
+on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had something
+discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love
+and magistracy.
+
+This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in existence
+fifteen years ago. In '93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with
+the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the
+nation made him bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the
+coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell slowly
+to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man does not
+communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old furniture, was
+always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed
+through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible
+bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.
+
+Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have
+noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters on the
+first floor were open. The house was occupied, in fact. The windows had
+short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.
+
+In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented
+himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,
+the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. He
+had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.
+The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly furnished
+with the justice's old fitting; the new tenant had ordered some
+repairs, had added what was lacking here and there, had replaced the
+paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors, steps in the stairs,
+missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass in the lattice windows,
+and had finally installed himself there with a young girl and an elderly
+maid-servant, without commotion, rather like a person who is slipping
+in than like a man who is entering his own house. The neighbors did not
+gossip about him, for the reason that there were no neighbors.
+
+This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.
+The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved
+from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a
+stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had decided
+Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the house under the name
+of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. In all that has been
+related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than
+Thenardier to recognize Jean Valjean.
+
+Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What had
+happened?
+
+Nothing had happened.
+
+It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so
+happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw Cosette every
+day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within him more and more,
+he brooded over the soul of that child, he said to himself that she
+was his, that nothing could take her from him, that this would last
+indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, being thereto
+gently incited every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the
+universe for her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and
+that she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that
+he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation
+was possible. On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity. He
+interrogated himself. He asked himself if all that happiness were
+really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of another, of
+the happiness of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and
+stealing; if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child
+had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in
+advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under
+the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her
+ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation
+germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie
+to God. And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some
+day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come to
+hate him? A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the rest,
+but which was intolerable to him. He resolved to quit the convent.
+
+He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact that it was
+necessary. As for objections, there were none. Five years' sojourn
+between these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed
+or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly among men.
+He had grown old, and all had undergone a change. Who would recognize
+him now? And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself,
+and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason
+that he had been condemned to the galleys. Besides, what is danger in
+comparison with the right? Finally, nothing prevented his being prudent
+and taking his precautions.
+
+As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.
+
+His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It was not long
+in presenting itself. Old Fauchelevent died.
+
+Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told her
+that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his brother,
+which permitted him henceforth to live without working, he should leave
+the service of the convent and take his daughter with him; but that, as
+it was not just that Cosette, since she had not taken the vows, should
+have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend
+Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community, as indemnity,
+for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five
+thousand francs.
+
+It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual
+Adoration.
+
+On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise the
+key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit no porter to
+touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which
+proceeded from it.
+
+Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more. He always
+had it in his chamber. It was the first and only thing sometimes, that
+he carried off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at it,
+and called this valise his inseparable, saying: "I am jealous of it."
+
+Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without
+profound anxiety.
+
+He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from
+sight there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:--Ultime
+Fauchelevent.
+
+At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order that
+he might attract less attention than if he were to remain always in the
+same quarter, and so that he could, at need, take himself off at the
+slightest disquietude which should assail him, and in short, so that
+he might not again be caught unprovided as on the night when he had
+so miraculously escaped from Javert. These two apartments were very
+pitiable, poor in appearance, and in two quarters which were far remote
+from each other, the one in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de
+l'Homme Arme.
+
+He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, now to the
+Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without taking Toussaint.
+He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out as a
+gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having a little
+temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had three domiciles
+in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD
+
+However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he had
+arranged his existence there in the following fashion:--
+
+Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big
+sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the gilded
+fillets, the justice's drawing-room furnished with tapestries and vast
+arm-chairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a canopied bed of
+antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug purchased in
+the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher's, put into Cosette's
+chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these magnificent
+old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-a-brac all the gay and
+graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young girls, an etagere,
+a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an inkstand, a blotting-book,
+paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of pearl, a silver-gilt
+dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese porcelain. Long damask
+curtains with a red foundation and three colors, like those on the
+bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the ground floor, the
+curtains were of tapestry. All winter long, Cosette's little house was
+heated from top to bottom. Jean Valjean inhabited the sort of porter's
+lodge which was situated at the end of the back courtyard, with a
+mattress on a folding-bed, a white wood table, two straw chairs, an
+earthenware water-jug, a few old volumes on a shelf, his beloved valise
+in one corner, and never any fire. He dined with Cosette, and he had a
+loaf of black bread on the table for his own use.
+
+When Toussaint came, he had said to her: "It is the young lady who is
+the mistress of this house."--"And you, monsieur?" Toussaint replied in
+amazement.--"I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father."
+
+Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated
+their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put
+his arm through Cosette's and took her for a walk. He led her to the
+Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk, and every Sunday he took her
+to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that was a long way off.
+As it was a very poor quarter, he bestowed alms largely there, and the
+poor people surrounded him in church, which had drawn down upon him
+Thenardier's epistle: "To the benevolent gentleman of the church of
+Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas." He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the
+poor and the sick. No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue Plumet.
+Toussaint brought their provisions, and Jean Valjean went himself for
+water to a fountain near by on the boulevard. Their wood and wine were
+put into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work which lay near
+the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the chief-justice as
+a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and "Little Houses" no love was
+without a grotto.
+
+In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined for
+the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants of
+the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters, the
+entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a love
+affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited to
+the tax-collector's notices, and the summons of the guard. For M.
+Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national guard;
+he had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the census of
+1831. The municipal information collected at that time had even reached
+the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable and holy cloud,
+whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise, and, consequently,
+worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the townhall.
+
+Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and mounted
+guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct disguise which
+mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary. Jean Valjean had
+just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he
+did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape
+his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed
+no civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his
+identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we
+have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum
+of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes. This
+man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.
+
+Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with
+Cosette, he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of
+a retired officer. When he went out alone, which was generally at night,
+he was always dressed in a workingman's trousers and blouse, and wore
+a cap which concealed his face. Was this precaution or humility? Both.
+Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny, and
+hardly noticed her father's peculiarities. As for Toussaint, she
+venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.
+
+One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to
+her: "That's a queer fish." She replied: "He's a saint."
+
+Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged
+except by the door on the Rue de Babylone. Unless seen through the
+garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they lived in
+the Rue Plumet. That gate was always closed. Jean Valjean had left the
+garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.
+
+In this, possibly, he made a mistake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS
+
+The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become
+extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to
+gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its fresh
+and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often allowed
+his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of
+that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two
+green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of
+undecipherable arabesque.
+
+There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
+several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on
+the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass
+everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.
+Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of
+land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing
+in this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;
+venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over
+towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had
+inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that
+which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over
+towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,
+clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,
+married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep
+and close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the
+well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet
+square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
+This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is
+to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,
+quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a bouquet,
+solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.
+
+In Floreal[34] this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within
+its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered
+in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of
+cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in
+its veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,
+sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling
+steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,
+flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,
+perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and
+it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about
+there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of verdure,
+a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the
+twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the evening, a dreamy
+vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud of mist, a
+calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating perfume of the
+honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every part of it, like an
+exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals of the woodpeckers and
+the wagtails were audible as they dozed among the branches; one felt the
+sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice the
+leaves, by night the leaves protect the wings.
+
+In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and
+allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches
+and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
+visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
+under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this
+tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,
+liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old gate
+had the air of saying: "This garden belongs to me."
+
+It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every side,
+the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple of paces
+away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of Deputies
+not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the Rue
+Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in vain
+did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other's
+course at the neighboring cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;
+and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had passed
+over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness,
+forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to
+this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great
+crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles,
+uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths
+of the earth and to reappear between those four walls a certain
+indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts
+the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly
+where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle,
+to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force
+and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.
+
+Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
+and penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute
+satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause
+or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable
+ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.
+Everything toils at everything.
+
+Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits
+the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
+hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
+course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not
+determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal
+ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the
+reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches
+of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the
+little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision
+for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and things;
+in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despises
+the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away
+terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is
+doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.
+All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.
+Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with
+the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the
+birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope
+ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two possesses the larger field
+of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an
+ant-hill of stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented,
+exists between the things of the intelligence and the facts of
+substance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with
+each other, to such a point that the material and the moral world are
+brought eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually
+returning upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life
+goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible
+mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
+not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a
+planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of
+thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all,
+except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to the
+soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from
+summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the
+flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who
+knows? Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the
+comet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop
+of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of
+which is the gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--CHANGE OF GATE
+
+It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal wanton
+mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter chaste
+mysteries. There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens, or
+tunnels, or grottos; there was a magnificent, dishevelled obscurity
+falling like a veil over all. Paphos had been made over into Eden. It is
+impossible to say what element of repentance had rendered this retreat
+wholesome. This flower-girl now offered her blossom to the soul. This
+coquettish garden, formerly decidedly compromised, had returned to
+virginity and modesty. A justice assisted by a gardener, a goodman who
+thought that he was a continuation of Lamoignon, and another goodman who
+thought that he was a continuation of Lenotre, had turned it about, cut,
+ruffled, decked, moulded it to gallantry; nature had taken possession of
+it once more, had filled it with shade, and had arranged it for love.
+
+There was, also, in this solitude, a heart which was quite ready. Love
+had only to show himself; he had here a temple composed of verdure,
+grass, moss, the sight of birds, tender shadows, agitated branches, and
+a soul made of sweetness, of faith, of candor, of hope, of aspiration,
+and of illusion.
+
+Cosette had left the convent when she was still almost a child; she was
+a little more than fourteen, and she was at the "ungrateful age"; we
+have already said, that with the exception of her eyes, she was homely
+rather than pretty; she had no ungraceful feature, but she was awkward,
+thin, timid and bold at once, a grown-up little girl, in short.
+
+Her education was finished, that is to say, she has been taught
+religion, and even and above all, devotion; then "history," that is to
+say the thing that bears that name in convents, geography, grammar,
+the participles, the kings of France, a little music, a little drawing,
+etc.; but in all other respects she was utterly ignorant, which is a
+great charm and a great peril. The soul of a young girl should not be
+left in the dark; later on, mirages that are too abrupt and too lively
+are formed there, as in a dark chamber. She should be gently and
+discreetly enlightened, rather with the reflection of realities than
+with their harsh and direct light. A useful and graciously austere
+half-light which dissipates puerile fears and obviates falls. There is
+nothing but the maternal instinct, that admirable intuition composed of
+the memories of the virgin and the experience of the woman, which knows
+how this half-light is to be created and of what it should consist.
+
+Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world
+are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's
+soul.
+
+Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural.
+
+As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude; but
+he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.
+
+Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing a
+woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast ignorance
+which is called innocence!
+
+Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent. The convent
+turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown. The heart, thus
+thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself, since it cannot
+overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand. Hence visions,
+suppositions, conjectures, outlines of romances, a desire for
+adventures, fantastic constructions, edifices built wholly in the inner
+obscurity of the mind, sombre and secret abodes where the passions
+immediately find a lodgement as soon as the open gate permits them to
+enter. The convent is a compression which, in order to triumph over the
+human heart, should last during the whole life.
+
+On quitting the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more sweet and
+more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet. It was the continuation
+of solitude with the beginning of liberty; a garden that was closed, but
+a nature that was acrid, rich, voluptuous, and fragrant; the same dreams
+as in the convent, but with glimpses of young men; a grating, but one
+that opened on the street.
+
+Still, when she arrived there, we repeat, she was only a child. Jean
+Valjean gave this neglected garden over to her. "Do what you like with
+it," he said to her. This amused Cosette; she turned over all the clumps
+and all the stones, she hunted for "beasts"; she played in it, while
+awaiting the time when she would dream in it; she loved this garden
+for the insects that she found beneath her feet amid the grass, while
+awaiting the day when she would love it for the stars that she would see
+through the boughs above her head.
+
+And then, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean, with
+all her soul, with an innocent filial passion which made the goodman
+a beloved and charming companion to her. It will be remembered that M.
+Madeleine had been in the habit of reading a great deal. Jean Valjean
+had continued this practice; he had come to converse well; he possessed
+the secret riches and the eloquence of a true and humble mind which has
+spontaneously cultivated itself. He retained just enough sharpness to
+season his kindness; his mind was rough and his heart was soft. During
+their conversations in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of
+everything, drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had
+suffered. As she listened to him, Cosette's eyes wandered vaguely about.
+
+This simple man sufficed for Cosette's thought, the same as the wild
+garden sufficed for her eyes. When she had had a good chase after the
+butterflies, she came panting up to him and said: "Ah! How I have run!"
+He kissed her brow.
+
+Cosette adored the goodman. She was always at his heels. Where Jean
+Valjean was, there happiness was. Jean Valjean lived neither in the
+pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure in the paved back
+courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers, and in his little
+lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than in the great drawing-room
+hung with tapestry, against which stood tufted easy-chairs. Jean Valjean
+sometimes said to her, smiling at his happiness in being importuned: "Do
+go to your own quarters! Leave me alone a little!"
+
+She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are so graceful
+when they come from a daughter to her father.
+
+"Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don't you have a carpet here
+and a stove?"
+
+"Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I and who have
+not even a roof over their heads."
+
+"Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?"
+
+"Because you are a woman and a child."
+
+"Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?"
+
+"Certain men."
+
+"That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged to
+have a fire."
+
+And again she said to him:--
+
+"Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?"
+
+"Because, my daughter."
+
+"Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too."
+
+Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean ate
+white bread.
+
+Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood. She prayed
+morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known. The
+Thenardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures in a dream. She
+remembered that she had gone "one day, at night," to fetch water in a
+forest. She thought that it had been very far from Paris. It seemed to
+her that she had begun to live in an abyss, and that it was Jean Valjean
+who had rescued her from it. Her childhood produced upon her the effect
+of a time when there had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders,
+and serpents. When she meditated in the evening, before falling asleep,
+as she had not a very clear idea that she was Jean Valjean's daughter,
+and that he was her father, she fancied that the soul of her mother had
+passed into that good man and had come to dwell near her.
+
+When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and
+dropped a silent tear, saying to herself: "Perhaps this man is my
+mother."
+
+Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make, in the profound
+ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent,--maternity being also
+absolutely unintelligible to virginity,--had ended by fancying that she
+had had as little mother as possible. She did not even know her mother's
+name. Whenever she asked Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean remained silent. If
+she repeated her question, he responded with a smile. Once she insisted;
+the smile ended in a tear.
+
+This silence on the part of Jean Valjean covered Fantine with darkness.
+
+Was it prudence? Was it respect? Was it a fear that he should deliver
+this name to the hazards of another memory than his own?
+
+So long as Cosette had been small, Jean Valjean had been willing to talk
+to her of her mother; when she became a young girl, it was impossible
+for him to do so. It seemed to him that he no longer dared. Was it
+because of Cosette? Was it because of Fantine? He felt a certain
+religious horror at letting that shadow enter Cosette's thought; and of
+placing a third in their destiny. The more sacred this shade was to him,
+the more did it seem that it was to be feared. He thought of Fantine,
+and felt himself overwhelmed with silence.
+
+Through the darkness, he vaguely perceived something which appeared
+to have its finger on its lips. Had all the modesty which had been
+in Fantine, and which had violently quitted her during her lifetime,
+returned to rest upon her after her death, to watch in indignation over
+the peace of that dead woman, and in its shyness, to keep her in her
+grave? Was Jean Valjean unconsciously submitting to the pressure? We
+who believe in death, are not among the number who will reject this
+mysterious explanation.
+
+Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, that name of
+Fantine.
+
+One day Cosette said to him:--
+
+"Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night. She had two big wings.
+My mother must have been almost a saint during her life."
+
+"Through martyrdom," replied Jean Valjean.
+
+However, Jean Valjean was happy.
+
+When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud and happy,
+in the plenitude of her heart. Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within
+him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so
+wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated
+with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would
+last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered
+sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the
+depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a
+wretch, by that innocent being.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR
+
+One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mirror, and she said
+to herself: "Really!" It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This
+threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she
+had never thought of her face. She saw herself in her mirror, but she
+did not look at herself. And then, she had so often been told that she
+was homely; Jean Valjean alone said gently: "No indeed! no indeed!" At
+all events, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had grown up
+in that belief with the easy resignation of childhood. And here, all
+at once, was her mirror saying to her, as Jean Valjean had said: "No
+indeed!" That night, she did not sleep. "What if I were pretty!" she
+thought. "How odd it would be if I were pretty!" And she recalled those
+of her companions whose beauty had produced a sensation in the convent,
+and she said to herself: "What! Am I to be like Mademoiselle So-and-So?"
+
+The next morning she looked at herself again, not by accident this time,
+and she was assailed with doubts: "Where did I get such an idea?" said
+she; "no, I am ugly." She had not slept well, that was all, her eyes
+were sunken and she was pale. She had not felt very joyous on the
+preceding evening in the belief that she was beautiful, but it made her
+very sad not to be able to believe in it any longer. She did not look at
+herself again, and for more than a fortnight she tried to dress her hair
+with her back turned to the mirror.
+
+In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool or
+did some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean Valjean read
+beside her. Once she raised her eyes from her work, and was rendered
+quite uneasy by the manner in which her father was gazing at her.
+
+On another occasion, she was passing along the street, and it seemed
+to her that some one behind her, whom she did not see, said: "A pretty
+woman! but badly dressed." "Bah!" she thought, "he does not mean me.
+I am well dressed and ugly." She was then wearing a plush hat and her
+merino gown.
+
+At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old
+Toussaint saying: "Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?"
+Cosette did not hear her father's reply, but Toussaint's words caused
+a sort of commotion within her. She fled from the garden, ran up to
+her room, flew to the looking-glass,--it was three months since she
+had looked at herself,--and gave vent to a cry. She had just dazzled
+herself.
+
+She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with Toussaint
+and her mirror. Her figure was formed, her skin had grown white, her
+hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had been lighted in her blue
+eyes. The consciousness of her beauty burst upon her in an instant, like
+the sudden advent of daylight; other people noticed it also, Toussaint
+had said so, it was evidently she of whom the passer-by had spoken,
+there could no longer be any doubt of that; she descended to the garden
+again, thinking herself a queen, imagining that she heard the birds
+singing, though it was winter, seeing the sky gilded, the sun among
+the trees, flowers in the thickets, distracted, wild, in inexpressible
+delight.
+
+Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable oppression
+at heart.
+
+In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror that
+beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette's sweet
+face. The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.
+
+Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she became
+aware of it herself. But, from the very first day, that unexpected light
+which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole of the young girl's
+person, wounded Jean Valjean's sombre eye. He felt that it was a change
+in a happy life, a life so happy that he did not dare to move for fear
+of disarranging something. This man, who had passed through all manner
+of distresses, who was still all bleeding from the bruises of fate, who
+had been almost wicked and who had become almost a saint, who, after
+having dragged the chain of the galleys, was now dragging the invisible
+but heavy chain of indefinite misery, this man whom the law had not
+released from its grasp and who could be seized at any moment and
+brought back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad daylight of
+public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all, pardoned all, and
+merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law, of society, of nature,
+of the world, one thing, that Cosette might love him!
+
+That Cosette might continue to love him! That God would not prevent
+the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him!
+Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased, loaded
+with benefits, recompensed, crowned. Beloved by Cosette, it was well
+with him! He asked nothing more! Had any one said to him: "Do you want
+anything better?" he would have answered: "No." God might have said to
+him: "Do you desire heaven?" and he would have replied: "I should lose
+by it."
+
+Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,
+made him shudder like the beginning of something new. He had never
+known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means; but he
+understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.
+
+He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever more
+triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes, on the innocent
+and formidable brow of that child, from the depths of her homeliness, of
+his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.
+
+He said to himself: "How beautiful she is! What is to become of me?"
+
+There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the
+tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with anguish, a mother would have
+gazed upon with joy.
+
+The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.
+
+On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself:
+"Decidedly I am beautiful!" Cosette began to pay attention to her
+toilet. She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty, but badly
+dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had
+vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are
+destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is
+the other.
+
+With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her.
+She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat. Her
+father had never refused her anything. She at once acquired the whole
+science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff, the
+stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming, that science
+which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming, so deep, and so
+dangerous. The words heady woman were invented for the Parisienne.
+
+In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the Rue de
+Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one of the "best
+dressed" women in Paris, which means a great deal more.
+
+She would have liked to encounter her "passer-by," to see what he would
+say, and to "teach him a lesson!" The truth is, that she was ravishing
+in every respect, and that she distinguished the difference between a
+bonnet from Gerard and one from Herbaut in the most marvellous way.
+
+Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that
+he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings
+sprouting on Cosette.
+
+Moreover, from the mere inspection of Cosette's toilet, a woman
+would have recognized the fact that she had no mother. Certain little
+proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by
+Cosette. A mother, for instance, would have told her that a young girl
+does not dress in damask.
+
+The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown and mantle,
+and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm, gay, radiant,
+rosy, proud, dazzling. "Father," she said, "how do you like me in this
+guise?" Jean Valjean replied in a voice which resembled the bitter voice
+of an envious man: "Charming!" He was the same as usual during their
+walk. On their return home, he asked Cosette:--
+
+"Won't you put on that other gown and bonnet again,--you know the ones I
+mean?"
+
+This took place in Cosette's chamber. Cosette turned towards the
+wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl's clothes were hanging.
+
+"That disguise!" said she. "Father, what do you want me to do with it?
+Oh no, the idea! I shall never put on those horrors again. With that
+machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog."
+
+Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.
+
+From that moment forth, he noticed that Cosette, who had always
+heretofore asked to remain at home, saying: "Father, I enjoy myself more
+here with you," now was always asking to go out. In fact, what is the
+use of having a handsome face and a delicious costume if one does not
+display them?
+
+He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the back
+garden. Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike to promenade
+back and forth in front of the railed fence. Jean Valjean, who was shy,
+never set foot in the garden. He kept to his back yard, like a dog.
+
+Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the grace
+of ignoring it. An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness
+is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent
+creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise
+without being conscious of it. But what she had lost in ingenuous grace,
+she gained in pensive and serious charm. Her whole person, permeated
+with the joy of youth, of innocence, and of beauty, breathed forth a
+splendid melancholy.
+
+It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months, saw her
+once more at the Luxembourg.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE BATTLE BEGUN
+
+Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.
+Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
+these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
+electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love as
+two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow
+and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.
+
+The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally
+fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two
+beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way
+people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. The rest is
+nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these
+great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of
+that spark.
+
+At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance
+which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also launched
+a look which disturbed Cosette.
+
+He caused her the same good and the same evil.
+
+She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
+scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.
+Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to
+think Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, the young man
+was nothing to her.
+
+Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
+beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone of voice
+when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he held himself
+badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace that was all his
+own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole person
+was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he seemed
+to be poor, yet his air was fine.
+
+On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those
+first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps, Cosette did
+not immediately understand. She returned thoughtfully to the house in
+the Rue de l'Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had
+come to spend six weeks. The next morning, on waking, she thought of
+that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now seemed to
+pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her that this attention
+was the least in the world agreeable to her. She was, on the contrary,
+somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual. A
+substratum of war stirred within her. It struck her, and the idea caused
+her a wholly childish joy, that she was going to take her revenge at
+last.
+
+Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though
+in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with
+their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.
+
+The reader will recall Marius' hesitations, his palpitations, his
+terrors. He remained on his bench and did not approach. This vexed
+Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: "Father, let us stroll about
+a little in that direction." Seeing that Marius did not come to her,
+she went to him. In such cases, all women resemble Mahomet. And then,
+strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is
+timidity; in a young girl it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet
+nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each
+other and assuming, each the other's qualities.
+
+That day, Cosette's glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius'
+glance set Cosette to trembling. Marius went away confident, and Cosette
+uneasy. From that day forth, they adored each other.
+
+The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound
+melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the
+day before. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul in young
+girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It
+melts in love, which is its sun.
+
+Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered
+in its terrestrial sense. On the books of profane music which entered
+the convent, amour (love) was replaced by tambour (drum) or pandour.
+This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the big girls,
+such as: Ah, how delightful is the drum! or, Pity is not a pandour. But
+Cosette had left the convent too early to have occupied herself much
+with the "drum." Therefore, she did not know what name to give to what
+she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one does not know the name
+of one's malady?
+
+She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She
+did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or
+dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved. She
+would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: "You do not
+sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very bad! You
+have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not be! You
+blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at the
+end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!" She would not have
+understood, and she would have replied: "What fault is there of mine in
+a matter in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?"
+
+It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to
+the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute
+contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the apparition of
+youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining
+a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but
+having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor
+defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a
+chimaera with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have
+alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in
+the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the fears of children
+and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the convent, with
+which she had been permeated for the space of five years, was still in
+the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made everything
+tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he was not
+even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring Marius as
+something charming, luminous, and impossible.
+
+As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him with
+all frankness.
+
+Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with
+impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
+and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought
+when she said to Jean Valjean:--
+
+"What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!"
+
+Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not
+address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know
+each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are
+separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other.
+
+It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,
+beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty, and in
+ignorance of her love. She was a coquette to boot through her ignorance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF
+
+All situations have their instincts. Old and eternal Mother Nature
+warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. Jean Valjean
+shuddered to the very bottom of his soul. Jean Valjean saw nothing, knew
+nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention, the darkness
+in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him something in
+process of construction, and on the other, something which was crumbling
+away. Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with the deep law of God,
+by that same Mother Nature, did all he could to keep out of sight of
+"the father." Nevertheless, it came to pass that Jean Valjean sometimes
+espied him. Marius' manners were no longer in the least natural. He
+exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring. He no longer came quite
+close to them as formerly. He seated himself at a distance and pretended
+to be reading; why did he pretend that? Formerly he had come in his old
+coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure
+that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore
+gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.
+
+Cosette allowed nothing to be divined. Without knowing just what was the
+matter with her she was convinced that there was something in it, and
+that it must be concealed.
+
+There was a coincidence between the taste for the toilet which had
+recently come to Cosette, and the habit of new clothes developed by
+that stranger which was very repugnant to Jean Valjean. It might be
+accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.
+
+He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger. One day,
+however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague
+despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair, he
+said to her: "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"
+
+Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl, would have
+replied: "Why, no, he is charming." Ten years later, with the love
+of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: "A pedant, and
+insufferable to the sight! You are right!"--At the moment in life
+and the heart which she had then attained, she contented herself with
+replying, with supreme calmness: "That young man!"
+
+As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.
+
+"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean. "She had not noticed him. It is
+I who have pointed him out to her."
+
+Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!
+
+It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of
+those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles,
+that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap
+whatever, and that the young man falls into every one. Jean Valjean
+had instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with
+the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine. Jean
+Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him; he changed his hour, he changed
+his bench, he forgot his handkerchief, he came alone to the Luxembourg;
+Marius dashed headlong into all these snares; and to all the
+interrogation marks planted by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he
+ingenuously answered "yes." But Cosette remained immured in her apparent
+unconcern and in her imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean
+arrived at the following conclusion: "That ninny is madly in love with
+Cosette, but Cosette does not even know that he exists."
+
+None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor. The minute
+when Cosette would love might strike at any moment. Does not everything
+begin with indifference?
+
+Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him. He rose from his
+seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: "What,
+already?"
+
+Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he
+did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,
+he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so sweet
+to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the intoxicated
+Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw nothing in all
+the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean was fixing on
+Marius flashing and terrible eyes. He, who had finally come to believe
+himself incapable of a malevolent feeling, experienced moments when
+Marius was present, in which he thought he was becoming savage and
+ferocious once more, and he felt the old depths of his soul, which
+had formerly contained so much wrath, opening once more and rising up
+against that young man. It almost seemed to him that unknown craters
+were forming in his bosom.
+
+What! he was there, that creature! What was he there for? He came
+creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying! He came, saying: "Hey!
+Why not?" He came to prowl about his, Jean Valjean's, life! to prowl
+about his happiness, with the purpose of seizing it and bearing it away!
+
+Jean Valjean added: "Yes, that's it! What is he in search of? An
+adventure! What does he want? A love affair! A love affair! And I? What!
+I have been first, the most wretched of men, and then the most unhappy,
+and I have traversed sixty years of life on my knees, I have suffered
+everything that man can suffer, I have grown old without having been
+young, I have lived without a family, without relatives, without
+friends, without life, without children, I have left my blood on every
+stone, on every bramble, on every mile-post, along every wall, I have
+been gentle, though others have been hard to me, and kind, although
+others have been malicious, I have become an honest man once more, in
+spite of everything, I have repented of the evil that I have done and
+have forgiven the evil that has been done to me, and at the moment
+when I receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over, at the
+moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment when I have what
+I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid, I have earned it, all
+this is to take flight, all this will vanish, and I shall lose Cosette,
+and I shall lose my life, my joy, my soul, because it has pleased a
+great booby to come and lounge at the Luxembourg."
+
+Then his eyes were filled with a sad and extraordinary gleam.
+
+It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy
+surveying an enemy. It was a dog scanning a thief.
+
+The reader knows the rest. Marius pursued his senseless course. One day
+he followed Cosette to the Rue de l'Ouest. Another day he spoke to
+the porter. The porter, on his side, spoke, and said to Jean Valjean:
+"Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is asking for you?" On the
+morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius that glance which Marius at last
+perceived. A week later, Jean Valjean had taken his departure. He swore
+to himself that he would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg
+or in the Rue de l'Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.
+
+Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she
+did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point
+where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself. Jean
+Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries which
+are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted; the
+consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance of
+Cosette's silence.
+
+He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. On his
+side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.
+
+Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:--
+
+"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"
+
+A ray illuminated Cosette's pale face.
+
+"Yes," said she.
+
+They went thither. Three months had elapsed. Marius no longer went
+there. Marius was not there.
+
+On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:--
+
+"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"
+
+She replied, sadly and gently:--
+
+"No."
+
+Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken at this
+gentleness.
+
+What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so
+impenetrable? What was on its way there within? What was taking place
+in Cosette's soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean
+remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he passed
+whole nights asking himself: "What has Cosette in her mind?" and in
+thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.
+
+Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards that
+cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible
+glacier of virtue! How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy, that
+convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins, where
+all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven! How he adored that
+Eden forever closed against him, whence he had voluntarily and madly
+emerged! How he regretted his abnegation and his folly in having brought
+Cosette back into the world, poor hero of sacrifice, seized and hurled
+to the earth by his very self-devotion! How he said to himself, "What
+have I done?"
+
+However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette. No ill-temper,
+no harshness. His face was always serene and kind. Jean Valjean's
+manners were more tender and more paternal than ever. If anything could
+have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.
+
+On her side, Cosette languished. She suffered from the absence of Marius
+as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly being
+conscious of it. When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their customary
+strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the bottom of her
+heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and
+that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father
+would take her thither once more. But days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean
+Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette's tacit consent. She regretted it.
+It was too late. So Marius had disappeared; all was over. The day on
+which she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What
+was to be done? Should she ever find him again? She felt an anguish at
+her heart, which nothing relieved, and which augmented every day; she no
+longer knew whether it was winter or summer, whether it was raining or
+shining, whether the birds were singing, whether it was the season for
+dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming than
+the Tuileries, whether the linen which the laundress brought home
+was starched too much or not enough, whether Toussaint had done "her
+marketing" well or ill; and she remained dejected, absorbed, attentive
+to but a single thought, her eyes vague and staring as when one gazes by
+night at a black and fathomless spot where an apparition has vanished.
+
+However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,
+except her pallor.
+
+She still wore her sweet face for him.
+
+This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.
+Sometimes he asked her:--
+
+"What is the matter with you?"
+
+She replied: "There is nothing the matter with me."
+
+And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would
+add:--
+
+"And you, father--is there anything wrong with you?"
+
+"With me? Nothing," said he.
+
+These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so
+touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other
+now suffered side by side, each on the other's account; without
+acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and
+with a smile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE CHAIN-GANG
+
+Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its
+sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.
+
+At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It is
+the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear. He
+had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him. He
+would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm by
+some external and brilliant matter. These ideas, puerile, as we have
+just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very
+childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on
+the imaginations of young girls. He once chanced to see a general on
+horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the
+commandant of Paris. He envied that gilded man; what happiness it
+would be, he said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an
+incontestable thing; and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be
+dazzled, and when he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the
+Tuileries, the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice
+for Cosette, and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.
+
+An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.
+
+In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come to dwell
+in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit. They sometimes took
+a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild species of enjoyment which
+befits those who are entering life and those who are quitting it.
+
+For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
+to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added. The streets
+are deserted and the birds are singing. Cosette, a bird herself, liked
+to rise early. These matutinal excursions were planned on the preceding
+evening. He proposed, and she agreed. It was arranged like a plot, they
+set out before daybreak, and these trips were so many small delights for
+Cosette. These innocent eccentricities please young people.
+
+Jean Valjean's inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
+frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places. There then
+existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor
+meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in
+summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been
+gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but
+peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt these fields. Cosette was not bored
+there. It meant solitude to him and liberty to her. There, she became a
+little girl once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her
+hat, laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.
+She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
+gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl who
+cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has mercy on
+the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands of poppies, which she placed
+on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated with sunlight, glowing
+until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a crown of burning embers.
+
+Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom of early
+strolls.
+
+One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection of
+the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break of
+day near the Barriere du Maine. It was not dawn, it was daybreak; a
+delightful and stern moment. A few constellations here and there in the
+deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white, a quiver
+amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious chill of twilight. A
+lark, which seemed mingled with the stars, was carolling at a prodigious
+height, and one would have declared that that hymn of pettiness calmed
+immensity. In the East, the Valde-Grace projected its dark mass on the
+clear horizon with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant
+was rising behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape
+from a gloomy edifice.
+
+All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray
+laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to
+their work along the side-paths.
+
+Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at the
+gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway, his back
+towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the point of
+rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions in which the
+mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye, and which are
+equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be called
+vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return
+to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was
+thinking of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came
+between him and her, of the light with which she filled his life, a
+light which was but the emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in
+his revery. Cosette, who was standing beside him, was gazing at the
+clouds as they turned rosy.
+
+All at once Cosette exclaimed: "Father, I should think some one was
+coming yonder." Jean Valjean raised his eyes.
+
+Cosette was right. The causeway which leads to the ancient Barriere du
+Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue de Sevres,
+and is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard. At the elbow of the
+causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where it branches, they heard a
+noise which it was difficult to account for at that hour, and a sort of
+confused pile made its appearance. Some shapeless thing which was coming
+from the boulevard was turning into the road.
+
+It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner, though it was
+bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle, but its load could
+not be distinctly made out. There were horses, wheels, shouts; whips
+were cracking. By degrees the outlines became fixed, although bathed
+in shadows. It was a vehicle, in fact, which had just turned from the
+boulevard into the highway, and which was directing its course towards
+the barrier near which sat Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect,
+followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven chariots made their
+appearance in succession, the heads of the horses touching the rear of
+the wagon in front. Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were
+visible through the dusk as though there were naked swords there, a
+clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains, and as
+this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder, and it turned
+into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave of dreams.
+
+As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees
+with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
+which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap which
+was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures turned
+into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:--
+
+Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road. The first six were
+singularly constructed. They resembled coopers' drays; they consisted
+of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming barrows at their rear
+extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say, each ladder, was attached
+to four horses harnessed tandem. On these ladders strange clusters of
+men were being drawn. In the faint light, these men were to be divined
+rather than seen. Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back to
+back, facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was
+the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs
+they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on their
+necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar. Each man had
+his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these four and twenty
+men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk, they were seized with
+a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind over the ground
+with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after the fashion of millepeds.
+In the back and front of each vehicle, two men armed with muskets
+stood erect, each holding one end of the chain under his foot. The iron
+necklets were square. The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided baggage
+wagon, without a hood, had four wheels and six horses, and carried a
+sonorous pile of iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains,
+among which were mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at
+full length, and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all lattice-work,
+was garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for
+former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle of the road. On
+each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect, wearing
+three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory, shabby,
+covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of veterans and the
+trousers of undertakers' men, half gray, half blue, which were almost
+hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder belts, short sabres,
+muskets, and cudgels; they were a species of soldier-blackguards.
+These myrmidons seemed composed of the abjectness of the beggar and the
+authority of the executioner. The one who appeared to be their chief
+held a postilion's whip in his hand. All these details, blurred by the
+dimness of dawn, became more and more clearly outlined as the light
+increased. At the head and in the rear of the convoy rode mounted
+gendarmes, serious and with sword in fist.
+
+This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached the
+barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard. A throng,
+sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in a twinkling, as
+is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward from both sides of
+the road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes the shouts of people
+calling to each other and the wooden shoes of market-gardeners hastening
+up to gaze were audible.
+
+The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in
+silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen
+trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest
+of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements were
+horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin in
+rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps,
+and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the elbow;
+many wore women's headgear, others had baskets on their heads; hairy
+breasts were visible, and through the rent in their garments tattooed
+designs could be descried; temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids;
+eruptions and unhealthy red blotches could also be seen. Two or three
+had a straw rope attached to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended
+under them like a stirrup, which supported their feet. One of them held
+in his hand and raised to his mouth something which had the appearance
+of a black stone and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which
+he was eating. There were no eyes there which were not either dry,
+dulled, or flaming with an evil light. The escort troop cursed, the men
+in chains did not utter a syllable; from time to time the sound of
+a blow became audible as the cudgels descended on shoulder-blades or
+skulls; some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible;
+their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed
+together, their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their
+fists clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the
+rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.
+
+This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful. It
+was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain might
+descend, that it might be followed by another and another, and that
+their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked, these
+men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would not again
+get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to their bones by the
+downpour, that the water would fill their shoes, that no lashes from
+the whips would be able to prevent their jaws from chattering, that the
+chain would continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs would
+continue to dangle, and it was impossible not to shudder at the sight
+of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of
+autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the blast, to all the furies
+of the air, like trees and stones.
+
+Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick men,
+who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon,
+and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled with
+misery.
+
+Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
+burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all those
+ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration of grins,
+oaths, and songs exploded. The broad horizontal sheet of light severed
+the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies, leaving feet and
+wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their appearance on these faces;
+it was a terrible moment; visible demons with their masks removed,
+fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in
+gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through which they
+blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women; the dawn accentuated
+these lamentable profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there
+was not one of these creatures who was not deformed by reason of
+wretchedness; and the whole was so monstrous that one would have
+said that the sun's brilliancy had been changed into the glare of the
+lightning. The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a song,
+and were shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard joviality,
+a potpourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called The Vestal; the trees
+shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois
+listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by
+spectres.
+
+All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were to
+be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
+bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation, savage
+grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps, heads like those
+of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples, infantile visages,
+and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces, to which death
+alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro, who had been a slave,
+in all probability, and who could make a comparison of his chains. The
+frightful leveller from below, shame, had passed over these brows; at
+that degree of abasement, the last transformations were suffered by all
+in their extremest depths, and ignorance, converted into dulness, was
+the equal of intelligence converted into despair. There was no choice
+possible between these men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the
+mud. It was evident that the person who had had the ordering of that
+unclean procession had not classified them. These beings had been
+fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder, probably, and
+loaded hap-hazard on those carts. Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped
+together, always end by evolving a result; all additions of wretched men
+give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul, and each dray-load
+had its own physiognomy. By the side of the one where they were singing,
+there was one where they were howling; a third where they were begging;
+one could be seen in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load
+menaced the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent
+as the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles
+of hell on the march. The march of the damned to their tortures,
+performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot
+of the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet
+cart.
+
+One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
+pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth.
+An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five years
+old, and said to him: "Rascal, let that be a warning to you!"
+
+As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be the
+captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal a fearful
+dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail, fell upon the
+seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth; which redoubled
+the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up, a swarm of flies
+on these wounds.
+
+Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They were no
+longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects which replace the
+glance in the case of certain wretched men, which seem unconscious
+of reality, and in which flames the reflection of terrors and of
+catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a vision.
+He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not move his
+feet. Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and hold you
+fast. He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself,
+athwart confused and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral
+persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium which was
+pursuing him. All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a gesture
+habitual to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this
+was, in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to make this
+detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering royalty on the
+road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before, he had
+himself passed through that barrier.
+
+Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did not
+understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible; at
+length she cried:--
+
+"Father! What are those men in those carts?"
+
+Jean Valjean replied: "Convicts."
+
+"Whither are they going?"
+
+"To the galleys."
+
+At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, became
+zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled with it, it was a
+perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts bent before it, a hideous
+obedience was evoked by the torture, and all held their peace, darting
+glances like chained wolves.
+
+Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:--
+
+"Father, are they still men?"
+
+"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.
+
+It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak from
+Bicetre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid Fontainebleau,
+where the King then was. This caused the horrible journey to last three
+or four days longer; but torture may surely be prolonged with the object
+of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.
+
+Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such encounters are
+shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles a thorough
+shaking up.
+
+Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back to
+the Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him with other
+questions on the subject of what they had just seen; perhaps he was
+too much absorbed in his own dejection to notice her words and reply to
+them. But when Cosette was leaving him in the evening, to betake herself
+to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as though talking to
+herself: "It seems to me, that if I were to find one of those men in my
+pathway, oh, my God, I should die merely from the sight of him close at
+hand."
+
+Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,
+there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,--fetes in
+Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine, theatrical
+performances in the Champs-Elysees, fireworks at the Arc de l'Etoile,
+illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean did violence to his habits, and
+took Cosette to see these rejoicings, for the purpose of diverting her
+from the memory of the day before, and of effacing, beneath the smiling
+tumult of all Paris, the abominable thing which had passed before her.
+The review with which the festival was spiced made the presence of
+uniforms perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a
+national guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking
+himself to shelter. However, this trip seemed to attain its object.
+Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,
+moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion
+with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too
+disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fete; so that
+Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded, and that no
+trace of that hideous vision remained.
+
+Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly, and
+they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction of
+the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself, and
+to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had caused
+Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect in that
+negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls in an
+adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over a star;
+and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep, submitting
+to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking a daisy
+to pieces. Cosette did not know the delightful legend, I love a little,
+passionately, etc.--who was there who could have taught her? She was
+handling the flower instinctively, innocently, without a suspicion that
+to pluck a daisy apart is to do the same by a heart. If there were a
+fourth, and smiling Grace called Melancholy, she would have worn the air
+of that Grace. Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of those
+tiny fingers on that flower, and forgetful of everything in the radiance
+emitted by that child. A red-breast was warbling in the thicket, on one
+side. White cloudlets floated across the sky, so gayly, that one would
+have said that they had just been set at liberty. Cosette went on
+attentively tearing the leaves from her flower; she seemed to be
+thinking about something; but whatever it was, it must be something
+charming; all at once she turned her head over her shoulder with the
+delicate languor of a swan, and said to Jean Valjean: "Father, what are
+the galleys like?"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--A WOUND WITHOUT, HEALING WITHIN
+
+Thus their life clouded over by degrees.
+
+But one diversion, which had formerly been a happiness, remained to
+them, which was to carry bread to those who were hungry, and clothing
+to those who were cold. Cosette often accompanied Jean Valjean on these
+visits to the poor, on which they recovered some remnants of their
+former free intercourse; and sometimes, when the day had been a good
+one, and they had assisted many in distress, and cheered and warmed many
+little children, Cosette was rather merry in the evening. It was at this
+epoch that they paid their visit to the Jondrette den.
+
+On the day following that visit, Jean Valjean made his appearance in the
+pavilion in the morning, calm as was his wont, but with a large wound on
+his left arm which was much inflamed, and very angry, which resembled a
+burn, and which he explained in some way or other. This wound resulted
+in his being detained in the house for a month with fever. He would not
+call in a doctor. When Cosette urged him, "Call the dog-doctor," said
+he.
+
+Cosette dressed the wound morning and evening with so divine an air and
+such angelic happiness at being of use to him, that Jean Valjean felt
+all his former joy returning, his fears and anxieties dissipating, and
+he gazed at Cosette, saying: "Oh! what a kindly wound! Oh! what a good
+misfortune!"
+
+Cosette on perceiving that her father was ill, had deserted the pavilion
+and again taken a fancy to the little lodging and the back courtyard.
+She passed nearly all her days beside Jean Valjean and read to him
+the books which he desired. Generally they were books of travel. Jean
+Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving in these
+ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger, Cosette's
+coldness,--all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim. He had
+reached the point where he said to himself: "I imagined all that. I am
+an old fool."
+
+His happiness was so great that the horrible discovery of the
+Thenardiers made in the Jondrette hovel, unexpected as it was, had,
+after a fashion, glided over him unnoticed. He had succeeded in making
+his escape; all trace of him was lost--what more did he care for! he
+only thought of those wretched beings to pity them. "Here they are in
+prison, and henceforth they will be incapacitated for doing any harm,"
+he thought, "but what a lamentable family in distress!"
+
+As for the hideous vision of the Barriere du Maine, Cosette had not
+referred to it again.
+
+Sister Sainte-Mechtilde had taught Cosette music in the convent; Cosette
+had the voice of a linnet with a soul, and sometimes, in the evening,
+in the wounded man's humble abode, she warbled melancholy songs which
+delighted Jean Valjean.
+
+Spring came; the garden was so delightful at that season of the year,
+that Jean Valjean said to Cosette:--
+
+"You never go there; I want you to stroll in it."
+
+"As you like, father," said Cosette.
+
+And for the sake of obeying her father, she resumed her walks in the
+garden, generally alone, for, as we have mentioned, Jean Valjean, who
+was probably afraid of being seen through the fence, hardly ever went
+there.
+
+Jean Valjean's wound had created a diversion.
+
+When Cosette saw that her father was suffering less, that he was
+convalescing, and that he appeared to be happy, she experienced a
+contentment which she did not even perceive, so gently and naturally
+had it come. Then, it was in the month of March, the days were growing
+longer, the winter was departing, the winter always bears away with it a
+portion of our sadness; then came April, that daybreak of summer, fresh
+as dawn always is, gay like every childhood; a little inclined to weep
+at times like the new-born being that it is. In that month, nature
+has charming gleams which pass from the sky, from the trees, from the
+meadows and the flowers into the heart of man.
+
+Cosette was still too young to escape the penetrating influence of that
+April joy which bore so strong a resemblance to herself. Insensibly, and
+without her suspecting the fact, the blackness departed from her spirit.
+In spring, sad souls grow light, as light falls into cellars at midday.
+Cosette was no longer sad. However, though this was so, she did not
+account for it to herself. In the morning, about ten o'clock, after
+breakfast, when she had succeeded in enticing her father into the garden
+for a quarter of an hour, and when she was pacing up and down in the
+sunlight in front of the steps, supporting his left arm for him, she did
+not perceive that she laughed every moment and that she was happy.
+
+Jean Valjean, intoxicated, beheld her growing fresh and rosy once more.
+
+"Oh! What a good wound!" he repeated in a whisper.
+
+And he felt grateful to the Thenardiers.
+
+His wound once healed, he resumed his solitary twilight strolls.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that a person can stroll alone in that
+fashion in the uninhabited regions of Paris without meeting with some
+adventure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--MOTHER PLUTARQUE FINDS NO DIFFICULTY IN EXPLAINING A
+PHENOMENON
+
+One evening, little Gavroche had had nothing to eat; he remembered
+that he had not dined on the preceding day either; this was becoming
+tiresome. He resolved to make an effort to secure some supper. He
+strolled out beyond the Salpetriere into deserted regions; that is
+where windfalls are to be found; where there is no one, one always
+finds something. He reached a settlement which appeared to him to be the
+village of Austerlitz.
+
+In one of his preceding lounges he had noticed there an old garden
+haunted by an old man and an old woman, and in that garden, a passable
+apple-tree. Beside the apple-tree stood a sort of fruit-house, which was
+not securely fastened, and where one might contrive to get an apple. One
+apple is a supper; one apple is life. That which was Adam's ruin might
+prove Gavroche's salvation. The garden abutted on a solitary, unpaved
+lane, bordered with brushwood while awaiting the arrival of houses; the
+garden was separated from it by a hedge.
+
+Gavroche directed his steps towards this garden; he found the lane, he
+recognized the apple-tree, he verified the fruit-house, he examined the
+hedge; a hedge means merely one stride. The day was declining, there was
+not even a cat in the lane, the hour was propitious. Gavroche began
+the operation of scaling the hedge, then suddenly paused. Some one was
+talking in the garden. Gavroche peeped through one of the breaks in the
+hedge.
+
+[Illustration: Succor from Below 4b4-1-succor-from-below]
+
+A couple of paces distant, at the foot of the hedge on the other side,
+exactly at the point where the gap which he was meditating would have
+been made, there was a sort of recumbent stone which formed a bench, and
+on this bench was seated the old man of the garden, while the old woman
+was standing in front of him. The old woman was grumbling. Gavroche, who
+was not very discreet, listened.
+
+"Monsieur Mabeuf!" said the old woman.
+
+"Mabeuf!" thought Gavroche, "that name is a perfect farce."
+
+The old man who was thus addressed, did not stir. The old woman
+repeated:--
+
+"Monsieur Mabeuf!"
+
+The old man, without raising his eyes from the ground, made up his mind
+to answer:--
+
+"What is it, Mother Plutarque?"
+
+"Mother Plutarque!" thought Gavroche, "another farcical name."
+
+Mother Plutarque began again, and the old man was forced to accept the
+conversation:--
+
+"The landlord is not pleased."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"We owe three quarters rent."
+
+"In three months, we shall owe him for four quarters."
+
+"He says that he will turn you out to sleep."
+
+"I will go."
+
+"The green-grocer insists on being paid. She will no longer leave her
+fagots. What will you warm yourself with this winter? We shall have no
+wood."
+
+"There is the sun."
+
+"The butcher refuses to give credit; he will not let us have any more
+meat."
+
+"That is quite right. I do not digest meat well. It is too heavy."
+
+"What shall we have for dinner?"
+
+"Bread."
+
+"The baker demands a settlement, and says, 'no money, no bread.'"
+
+"That is well."
+
+"What will you eat?"
+
+"We have apples in the apple-room."
+
+"But, Monsieur, we can't live like that without money."
+
+"I have none."
+
+The old woman went away, the old man remained alone. He fell into
+thought. Gavroche became thoughtful also. It was almost dark.
+
+The first result of Gavroche's meditation was, that instead of scaling
+the hedge, he crouched down under it. The branches stood apart a little
+at the foot of the thicket.
+
+"Come," exclaimed Gavroche mentally, "here's a nook!" and he curled up
+in it. His back was almost in contact with Father Mabeuf's bench. He
+could hear the octogenarian breathe.
+
+Then, by way of dinner, he tried to sleep.
+
+It was a cat-nap, with one eye open. While he dozed, Gavroche kept on
+the watch.
+
+The twilight pallor of the sky blanched the earth, and the lane formed a
+livid line between two rows of dark bushes.
+
+All at once, in this whitish band, two figures made their appearance.
+One was in front, the other some distance in the rear.
+
+"There come two creatures," muttered Gavroche.
+
+The first form seemed to be some elderly bourgeois, who was bent and
+thoughtful, dressed more than plainly, and who was walking slowly
+because of his age, and strolling about in the open evening air.
+
+The second was straight, firm, slender. It regulated its pace by that
+of the first; but in the voluntary slowness of its gait, suppleness
+and agility were discernible. This figure had also something fierce and
+disquieting about it, the whole shape was that of what was then called
+an elegant; the hat was of good shape, the coat black, well cut,
+probably of fine cloth, and well fitted in at the waist. The head was
+held erect with a sort of robust grace, and beneath the hat the pale
+profile of a young man could be made out in the dim light. The profile
+had a rose in its mouth. This second form was well known to Gavroche; it
+was Montparnasse.
+
+He could have told nothing about the other, except that he was a
+respectable old man.
+
+Gavroche immediately began to take observations.
+
+One of these two pedestrians evidently had a project connected with
+the other. Gavroche was well placed to watch the course of events. The
+bedroom had turned into a hiding-place at a very opportune moment.
+
+Montparnasse on the hunt at such an hour, in such a place, betokened
+something threatening. Gavroche felt his gamin's heart moved with
+compassion for the old man.
+
+What was he to do? Interfere? One weakness coming to the aid of another!
+It would be merely a laughing matter for Montparnasse. Gavroche did not
+shut his eyes to the fact that the old man, in the first place, and the
+child in the second, would make but two mouthfuls for that redoubtable
+ruffian eighteen years of age.
+
+While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack took place, abruptly and
+hideously. The attack of the tiger on the wild ass, the attack of the
+spider on the fly. Montparnasse suddenly tossed away his rose, bounded
+upon the old man, seized him by the collar, grasped and clung to him,
+and Gavroche with difficulty restrained a scream. A moment later one of
+these men was underneath the other, groaning, struggling, with a knee
+of marble upon his breast. Only, it was not just what Gavroche had
+expected. The one who lay on the earth was Montparnasse; the one who
+was on top was the old man. All this took place a few paces distant from
+Gavroche.
+
+The old man had received the shock, had returned it, and that in such
+a terrible fashion, that in a twinkling, the assailant and the assailed
+had exchanged roles.
+
+"Here's a hearty veteran!" thought Gavroche.
+
+He could not refrain from clapping his hands. But it was applause
+wasted. It did not reach the combatants, absorbed and deafened as they
+were, each by the other, as their breath mingled in the struggle.
+
+Silence ensued. Montparnasse ceased his struggles. Gavroche indulged in
+this aside: "Can he be dead!"
+
+The goodman had not uttered a word, nor given vent to a cry. He rose to
+his feet, and Gavroche heard him say to Montparnasse:--
+
+"Get up."
+
+Montparnasse rose, but the goodman held him fast. Montparnasse's
+attitude was the humiliated and furious attitude of the wolf who has
+been caught by a sheep.
+
+Gavroche looked on and listened, making an effort to reinforce his eyes
+with his ears. He was enjoying himself immensely.
+
+He was repaid for his conscientious anxiety in the character of a
+spectator. He was able to catch on the wing a dialogue which borrowed
+from the darkness an indescribably tragic accent. The goodman
+questioned, Montparnasse replied.
+
+"How old are you?"
+
+"Nineteen."
+
+"You are strong and healthy. Why do you not work?"
+
+"It bores me."
+
+"What is your trade?"
+
+"An idler."
+
+"Speak seriously. Can anything be done for you? What would you like to
+be?"
+
+"A thief."
+
+A pause ensued. The old man seemed absorbed in profound thought. He
+stood motionless, and did not relax his hold on Montparnasse.
+
+Every moment the vigorous and agile young ruffian indulged in the
+twitchings of a wild beast caught in a snare. He gave a jerk, tried a
+crook of the knee, twisted his limbs desperately, and made efforts to
+escape.
+
+The old man did not appear to notice it, and held both his arms with one
+hand, with the sovereign indifference of absolute force.
+
+The old man's revery lasted for some time, then, looking steadily at
+Montparnasse, he addressed to him in a gentle voice, in the midst of the
+darkness where they stood, a solemn harangue, of which Gavroche did not
+lose a single syllable:--
+
+"My child, you are entering, through indolence, on one of the most
+laborious of lives. Ah! You declare yourself to be an idler! prepare to
+toil. There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it? It is
+the rolling-mill. You must be on your guard against it, it is crafty
+and ferocious; if it catches hold of the skirt of your coat, you will be
+drawn in bodily. That machine is laziness. Stop while there is yet time,
+and save yourself! Otherwise, it is all over with you; in a short time
+you will be among the gearing. Once entangled, hope for nothing more.
+Toil, lazybones! there is no more repose for you! The iron hand of
+implacable toil has seized you. You do not wish to earn your living, to
+have a task, to fulfil a duty! It bores you to be like other men? Well!
+You will be different. Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find
+ennui his torment. You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a
+slave. Toil lets go of you on one side only to grasp you again on the
+other. You do not desire to be its friend, you shall be its negro slave.
+Ah! You would have none of the honest weariness of men, you shall have
+the sweat of the damned. Where others sing, you will rattle in your
+throat. You will see afar off, from below, other men at work; it will
+seem to you that they are resting. The laborer, the harvester, the
+sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in glory like the blessed
+spirits in paradise. What radiance surrounds the forge! To guide the
+plough, to bind the sheaves, is joy. The bark at liberty in the wind,
+what delight! Do you, lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march! Drag your
+halter. You are a beast of burden in the team of hell! Ah! To do nothing
+is your object. Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour shall you have
+free from oppression. You will be able to lift nothing without anguish.
+Every minute that passes will make your muscles crack. What is a feather
+to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become steep
+acclivities. Life will become monstrous all about you. To go, to come,
+to breathe, will be just so many terrible labors. Your lungs will
+produce on you the effect of weighing a hundred pounds. Whether you
+shall walk here rather than there, will become a problem that must be
+solved. Any one who wants to go out simply gives his door a push, and
+there he is in the open air. If you wish to go out, you will be obliged
+to pierce your wall. What does every one who wants to step into the
+street do? He goes down stairs; you will tear up your sheets, little
+by little you will make of them a rope, then you will climb out of your
+window, and you will suspend yourself by that thread over an abyss, and
+it will be night, amid storm, rain, and the hurricane, and if the rope
+is too short, but one way of descending will remain to you, to fall. To
+drop hap-hazard into the gulf, from an unknown height, on what? On what
+is beneath, on the unknown. Or you will crawl up a chimney-flue, at the
+risk of burning; or you will creep through a sewer-pipe, at the risk of
+drowning; I do not speak of the holes that you will be obliged to mask,
+of the stones which you will have to take up and replace twenty times a
+day, of the plaster that you will have to hide in your straw pallet. A
+lock presents itself; the bourgeois has in his pocket a key made by a
+locksmith. If you wish to pass out, you will be condemned to execute a
+terrible work of art; you will take a large sou, you will cut it in
+two plates; with what tools? You will have to invent them. That is your
+business. Then you will hollow out the interior of these plates, taking
+great care of the outside, and you will make on the edges a thread, so
+that they can be adjusted one upon the other like a box and its cover.
+The top and bottom thus screwed together, nothing will be suspected. To
+the overseers it will be only a sou; to you it will be a box. What will
+you put in this box? A small bit of steel. A watch-spring, in which you
+will have cut teeth, and which will form a saw. With this saw, as long
+as a pin, and concealed in a sou, you will cut the bolt of the lock, you
+will sever bolts, the padlock of your chain, and the bar at your window,
+and the fetter on your leg. This masterpiece finished, this prodigy
+accomplished, all these miracles of art, address, skill, and patience
+executed, what will be your recompense if it becomes known that you
+are the author? The dungeon. There is your future. What precipices are
+idleness and pleasure! Do you know that to do nothing is a melancholy
+resolution? To live in idleness on the property of society! to be
+useless, that is to say, pernicious! This leads straight to the depth
+of wretchedness. Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite! He will
+become vermin! Ah! So it does not please you to work? Ah! You have but
+one thought, to drink well, to eat well, to sleep well. You will drink
+water, you will eat black bread, you will sleep on a plank with a fetter
+whose cold touch you will feel on your flesh all night long, riveted to
+your limbs. You will break those fetters, you will flee. That is well.
+You will crawl on your belly through the brushwood, and you will eat
+grass like the beasts of the forest. And you will be recaptured. And
+then you will pass years in a dungeon, riveted to a wall, groping for
+your jug that you may drink, gnawing at a horrible loaf of darkness
+which dogs would not touch, eating beans that the worms have eaten
+before you. You will be a wood-louse in a cellar. Ah! Have pity on
+yourself, you miserable young child, who were sucking at nurse less
+than twenty years ago, and who have, no doubt, a mother still alive! I
+conjure you, listen to me, I entreat you. You desire fine black cloth,
+varnished shoes, to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on
+your locks, to please low women, to be handsome. You will be shaven
+clean, and you will wear a red blouse and wooden shoes. You want rings
+on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck. If you
+glance at a woman, you will receive a blow. And you will enter there at
+the age of twenty. And you will come out at fifty! You will enter young,
+rosy, fresh, with brilliant eyes, and all your white teeth, and your
+handsome, youthful hair; you will come out broken, bent, wrinkled,
+toothless, horrible, with white locks! Ah! my poor child, you are on the
+wrong road; idleness is counselling you badly; the hardest of all work
+is thieving. Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of
+an idle man. It is not comfortable to become a rascal. It is less
+disagreeable to be an honest man. Now go, and ponder on what I have said
+to you. By the way, what did you want of me? My purse? Here it is."
+
+And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the latter's
+hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which he allowed it to
+slide gently into the back pocket of his coat, with the same mechanical
+precaution as though he had stolen it.
+
+All this having been said and done, the goodman turned his back and
+tranquilly resumed his stroll.
+
+"The blockhead!" muttered Montparnasse.
+
+Who was this goodman? The reader has, no doubt, already divined.
+
+Montparnasse watched him with amazement, as he disappeared in the dusk.
+This contemplation was fatal to him.
+
+While the old man was walking away, Gavroche drew near.
+
+Gavroche had assured himself, with a sidelong glance, that Father Mabeuf
+was still sitting on his bench, probably sound asleep. Then the gamin
+emerged from his thicket, and began to crawl after Montparnasse in the
+dark, as the latter stood there motionless. In this manner he came up
+to Montparnasse without being seen or heard, gently insinuated his hand
+into the back pocket of that frock-coat of fine black cloth, seized the
+purse, withdrew his hand, and having recourse once more to his crawling,
+he slipped away like an adder through the shadows. Montparnasse, who
+had no reason to be on his guard, and who was engaged in thought for the
+first time in his life, perceived nothing. When Gavroche had once more
+attained the point where Father Mabeuf was, he flung the purse over the
+hedge, and fled as fast as his legs would carry him.
+
+The purse fell on Father Mabeuf's foot. This commotion roused him.
+
+He bent over and picked up the purse.
+
+He did not understand in the least, and opened it.
+
+The purse had two compartments; in one of them there was some small
+change; in the other lay six napoleons.
+
+M. Mabeuf, in great alarm, referred the matter to his housekeeper.
+
+"That has fallen from heaven," said Mother Plutarque.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED
+
+Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five
+months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact, entered
+upon its convalescence. Nature, spring, youth, love for her father,
+the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something almost resembling
+forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop, into that soul, which
+was so virgin and so young. Was the fire wholly extinct there? Or was
+it merely that layers of ashes had formed? The truth is, that she hardly
+felt the painful and burning spot any longer.
+
+One day she suddenly thought of Marius: "Why!" said she, "I no longer
+think of him."
+
+That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers, with
+a wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl, a
+sword under his arm, waxed mustaches, and a glazed schapka, passing the
+gate. Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes, a round face,
+was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse of Marius. He
+had a cigar in his mouth. Cosette thought that this officer doubtless
+belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue de Babylone.
+
+On the following day, she saw him pass again. She took note of the hour.
+
+From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.
+
+The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in that "badly kept"
+garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature,
+who was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,--who is not
+unknown to the reader, and whose name was Theodule Gillenormand,--passed
+by.
+
+"See here!" they said to him, "there's a little creature there who is
+making eyes at you, look."
+
+"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls who
+look at me?"
+
+This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily
+towards agony, and was saying: "If I could but see her before I
+die!"--Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment
+gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word, and
+he would have expired with grief.
+
+Whose fault was it? No one's.
+
+Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in
+sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons who plunge into
+sorrow and emerge from it again.
+
+Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal
+phase of feminine revery abandoned to itself, in which the isolated
+heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling,
+as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of
+a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be
+she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances
+are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as
+many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune,
+is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand
+ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who
+has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but
+inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a
+block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the
+post of a drinking-shop.
+
+What did Cosette's soul contain? Passion calmed or lulled to sleep;
+something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth, and gloomy
+lower down. The image of the handsome officer was reflected in
+the surface. Did a souvenir linger in the depths?--Quite at the
+bottom?--Possibly. Cosette did not know.
+
+A singular incident supervened.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS
+
+During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. This,
+as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long intervals.
+He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. Where did he go? No
+one knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on the occasion of one of these
+departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as far as a
+little blind-alley at the corner of which she read: Impasse de la
+Planchette. There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back to the
+Rue de Babylone. It was usually when money was lacking in the house that
+Jean Valjean took these little trips.
+
+So Jean Valjean was absent. He had said: "I shall return in three days."
+
+That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get
+rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun to sing,
+accompanying herself the while, the chorus from Euryanthe: "Hunters
+astray in the wood!" which is probably the most beautiful thing in all
+the sphere of music. When she had finished, she remained wrapped in
+thought.
+
+All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps in
+the garden.
+
+It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,
+she was in bed, and it was ten o'clock at night.
+
+She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and
+laid her ear against it.
+
+It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was walking
+very softly.
+
+She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber, opened a
+small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was at
+the full. Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.
+
+There was no one there.
+
+She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was
+visible was that the street was deserted as usual.
+
+Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought that she had
+heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and
+magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified
+depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in which
+one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread of the
+huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.
+
+She thought no more about it.
+
+Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her
+veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs
+barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove.
+There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.
+
+On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was
+strolling in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which
+occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound similar
+to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were walking
+beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but she told
+herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass as the
+friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and she
+paid no heed to it. Besides, she could see nothing.
+
+She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn to
+regain the steps.
+
+The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow in
+front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.
+
+Cosette halted in alarm.
+
+Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another
+shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which
+had a round hat.
+
+It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border of
+the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.
+
+She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or
+stir, or turn her head.
+
+Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.
+
+There was no one there.
+
+She glanced on the ground. The figure had disappeared.
+
+She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as
+the gate, and found nothing.
+
+She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another
+hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might
+pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that
+the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom. Phantoms do not wear round
+hats.
+
+On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she
+thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see
+her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: "You are a little goose."
+
+Jean Valjean grew anxious.
+
+"It cannot be anything," said he.
+
+He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw
+him examining the gate with great attention.
+
+During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly
+heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window.
+She ran to her little wicket and opened it. In point of fact, there
+was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand. Just as she
+was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile. It was her
+father. She returned to her bed, saying to herself: "He is very uneasy!"
+
+Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the
+garden. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.
+
+On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise
+later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst
+of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--
+
+"Cosette!"
+
+She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her
+window.
+
+Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.
+
+"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he; "look,
+there is your shadow with the round hat."
+
+And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and
+which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man
+wearing a round hat. It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of
+sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.
+
+Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were
+allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father,
+she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron
+chimney-pots.
+
+Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did
+not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was
+really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she
+had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the sky.
+
+She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot
+which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some
+one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when Cosette
+had turned round, and Cosette had thought herself very sure of this.
+Cosette's serenity was fully restored. The proof appeared to her to
+be complete, and it quite vanished from her mind, whether there could
+possibly be any one walking in the garden during the evening or at
+night.
+
+A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT
+
+In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench,
+screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms,
+but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from the
+outside, past the trees and the gate.
+
+One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out;
+Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. The breeze was
+blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating; an objectless
+sadness was taking possession of her little by little, that invincible
+sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises, perhaps, who knows,
+from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at that hour.
+
+Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.
+
+Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on the
+grass drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the species of
+melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: "Really, one needs
+wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. One takes cold."
+
+She returned to the bench.
+
+As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the spot
+which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had, evidently, not
+been there a moment before.
+
+Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant. All at once
+the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench all by
+itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been thrust
+through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her. This time, the
+fear was genuine; the stone was there. No doubt was possible; she did
+not touch it, fled without glancing behind her, took refuge in the
+house, and immediately closed with shutter, bolt, and bar the door-like
+window opening on the flight of steps. She inquired of Toussaint:--
+
+"Has my father returned yet?"
+
+"Not yet, Mademoiselle."
+
+[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered.
+May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future. The musical
+notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]
+
+Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often
+returned quite late at night.
+
+"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly barricade
+the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars, in the evening,
+and to put the little iron things in the little rings that close them?"
+
+"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."
+
+Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware of the
+fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--
+
+"It is so solitary here."
+
+"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true. We might be
+assassinated before we had time to say ouf! And Monsieur does not sleep
+in the house, to boot. But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the shutters up
+like prisons. Lone women! That is enough to make one shudder, I believe
+you! Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter your chamber at
+night and say: 'Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut your throat. It's
+not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and that's all right;
+it's the abomination of feeling those people touch you. And then, their
+knives; they can't be able to cut well with them! Ah, good gracious!"
+
+"Be quiet," said Cosette. "Fasten everything thoroughly."
+
+Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and
+possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past week,
+which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: "Go and look at
+the stone which has been placed on the bench!" for fear of opening the
+garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter. She saw that all the doors
+and windows were carefully fastened, made Toussaint go all over the
+house from garret to cellar, locked herself up in her own chamber,
+bolted her door, looked under her couch, went to bed and slept badly.
+All night long she saw that big stone, as large as a mountain and full
+of caverns.
+
+At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh at all
+our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct proportion
+to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette, when she
+woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: "What have
+I been thinking of? It is like the footsteps that I thought I heard a
+week or two ago in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the
+chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?" The sun, which was glowing through
+the crevices in her shutters, and turning the damask curtains crimson,
+reassured her to such an extent that everything vanished from her
+thoughts, even the stone.
+
+"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round
+hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest."
+
+She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench, and
+broke out in a cold perspiration. The stone was there.
+
+But this lasted only for a moment. That which is terror by night is
+curiosity by day.
+
+"Bah!" said she, "come, let us see what it is."
+
+She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large. Beneath it was
+something which resembled a letter. It was a white envelope. Cosette
+seized it. There was no address on one side, no seal on the other.
+Yet the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. Papers could be seen
+inside.
+
+Cosette examined it. It was no longer alarm, it was no longer curiosity;
+it was a beginning of anxiety.
+
+Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook of paper,
+each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines in a very fine and
+rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.
+
+Cosette looked for a name; there was none. To whom was this addressed?
+To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench.
+From whom did it come? An irresistible fascination took possession
+of her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
+trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
+all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
+and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to
+herself that she must know what it contained.
+
+This is what she read.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A HEART BENEATH A STONE
+
+[Illustration: Cosette with Letter 4b4-5-cosette-after-letter]
+
+The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a
+single being even to God, that is love.
+
+
+Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
+
+
+How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!
+
+
+What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the
+world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could
+comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of
+all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.
+
+
+The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain
+is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.
+
+
+God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are
+black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being
+transparent.
+
+
+Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
+attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.
+
+
+Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which
+possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing
+each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude
+of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the
+birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of
+the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.
+And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is
+sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.
+
+Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.
+
+
+The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that
+is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite,
+the inexhaustible is requisite.
+
+
+Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like
+it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,
+imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is
+immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can
+extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and
+we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.
+
+
+Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
+other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances
+which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!
+strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have
+sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from
+the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of
+men.
+
+
+God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
+them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in
+fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable
+felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is
+impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the
+plenitude of man.
+
+
+You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because
+it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater
+mystery, woman.
+
+
+All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack
+air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.
+Suffocation of the soul.
+
+
+When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic
+unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are
+concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of
+the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the
+same spirit. Love, soar.
+
+
+On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she
+walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to
+think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.
+
+
+What love commences can be finished by God alone.
+
+
+True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a
+handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its
+hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely
+little.
+
+
+If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive
+plant; if you are a man, be love.
+
+
+Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we
+possess paradise, we desire heaven.
+
+Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand
+how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more
+than heaven, it has voluptuousness.
+
+
+"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church
+where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Does
+she still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she gone
+to dwell?"
+
+"She did not say."
+
+What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!
+
+Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame
+on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child
+of him!
+
+
+There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There
+is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.
+
+
+Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand
+in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a
+finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!
+
+
+Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live
+in it.
+
+
+Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.
+There is ecstasy in agony.
+
+
+Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.
+
+
+Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.
+
+
+Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long
+trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This
+destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the
+tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the
+definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive
+the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead.
+In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to
+him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will
+deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
+
+
+I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His
+hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled
+through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
+
+
+What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is
+to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer
+composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything
+that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more
+germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,
+inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds
+and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its
+vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels
+anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests
+of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.
+
+
+If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER
+
+As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought. At the very moment
+when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the
+handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,--it was his
+hour; Cosette thought him hideous.
+
+She resumed her contemplation of the book. It was written in the most
+charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with
+divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been
+added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days. It was,
+then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh, irregularly,
+without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard. Cosette
+had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she already
+perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a
+half-open sanctuary. Each one of these mysterious lines shone before
+her eyes and inundated her heart with a strange radiance. The education
+which she had received had always talked to her of the soul, and never
+of love, very much as one might talk of the firebrand and not of the
+flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed
+to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning,
+the end. It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly flung upon her
+a handful of rays of light. In these few lines she felt a passionate,
+ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, an immense sorrow, and
+an immense despair, a suffering heart, an ecstasy fully expanded. What
+was this manuscript? A letter. A letter without name, without address,
+without date, without signature, pressing and disinterested, an enigma
+composed of truths, a message of love made to be brought by an angel and
+read by a virgin, an appointment made beyond the bounds of earth, the
+love-letter of a phantom to a shade. It was an absent one, tranquil and
+dejected, who seemed ready to take refuge in death and who sent to the
+absent love, his lady, the secret of fate, the key of life, love. This
+had been written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven.
+These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what might
+be called drops of soul.
+
+Now, from whom could these pages come? Who could have penned them?
+
+Cosette did not hesitate a moment. One man only.
+
+He!
+
+Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. She felt an
+unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish. It was he! he who had written!
+he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust through that railing!
+While she was forgetful of him, he had found her again! But had she
+forgotten him? No, never! She was foolish to have thought so for a
+single moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire had
+been smothered, and had smouldered for a time, but she saw all plainly
+now; it had but made headway, and now it had burst forth afresh, and
+had inflamed her whole being. This note-book was like a spark which
+had fallen from that other soul into hers. She felt the conflagration
+starting up once more.
+
+She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: "Oh
+yes!" said she, "how perfectly I recognize all that! That is what I had
+already read in his eyes." As she was finishing it for the third time,
+Lieutenant Theodule passed the gate once more, and rattled his spurs
+upon the pavement. Cosette was forced to raise her eyes. She thought him
+insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and
+extremely ugly. The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.
+
+She turned away as in shame and indignation. She would gladly have
+thrown something at his head.
+
+She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her chamber to
+peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart, and to dream.
+When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed it and put it in her
+bosom.
+
+All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. The
+abyss of Eden had yawned once more.
+
+All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. She scarcely
+thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled skein in her brain,
+she could not manage to conjecture anything, she hoped through a tremor,
+what? vague things. She dared make herself no promises, and she did
+not wish to refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over her
+countenance, and shivers ran through her frame. It seemed to her, at
+intervals, that she was entering the land of chimaeras; she said to
+herself: "Is this reality?" Then she felt of the dear paper within her
+bosom under her gown, she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles
+against her flesh; and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he
+would have shuddered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy,
+which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.--"Oh yes!" she thought, "it
+is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for me!"
+
+And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a celestial
+chance, had given him back to her.
+
+Oh transfiguration of love! Oh dreams! That celestial chance, that
+intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed by one thief to
+another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard to the Lion's Ditch, over
+the roofs of La Force.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY
+
+When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She
+arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on a dress
+whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much, and which,
+through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning of her throat, and
+was, as young girls say, "a trifle indecent." It was not in the least
+indecent, but it was prettier than usual. She made her toilet thus
+without knowing why she did so.
+
+Did she mean to go out? No.
+
+Was she expecting a visitor? No.
+
+At dusk, she went down to the garden. Toussaint was busy in her kitchen,
+which opened on the back yard.
+
+She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside the branches
+from time to time with her hand, because there were some which hung very
+low.
+
+In this manner she reached the bench.
+
+The stone was still there.
+
+She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though she
+wished to caress and thank it.
+
+All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one
+undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she does
+not see the person.
+
+She turned her head and rose to her feet.
+
+It was he.
+
+His head was bare. He appeared to have grown thin and pale. His black
+clothes were hardly discernible. The twilight threw a wan light on
+his fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. Beneath a veil of
+incomparable sweetness, he had something about him that suggested death
+and night. His face was illuminated by the light of the dying day, and
+by the thought of a soul that is taking flight.
+
+He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.
+
+He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.
+
+Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry. She retreated slowly,
+for she felt herself attracted. He did not stir. By virtue of something
+ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his
+eyes which she could not see.
+
+Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. Had
+it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.
+
+Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,
+barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:--
+
+"Pardon me, here I am. My heart is full. I could not live on as I was
+living, and I have come. Have you read what I placed there on the bench?
+Do you recognize me at all? Have no fear of me. It is a long time, you
+remember the day, since you looked at me at the Luxembourg, near the
+Gladiator. And the day when you passed before me? It was on the 16th of
+June and the 2d of July. It is nearly a year ago. I have not seen you
+for a long time. I inquired of the woman who let the chairs, and she
+told me that she no longer saw you. You lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, on
+the third floor, in the front apartments of a new house,--you see that
+I know! I followed you. What else was there for me to do? And then you
+disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once, while I was reading the
+newspapers under the arcade of the Odeon. I ran after you. But no. It
+was a person who had a bonnet like yours. At night I came hither. Do
+not be afraid, no one sees me. I come to gaze upon your windows near
+at hand. I walk very softly, so that you may not hear, for you might be
+alarmed. The other evening I was behind you, you turned round, I fled.
+Once, I heard you singing. I was happy. Did it affect you because I
+heard you singing through the shutters? That could not hurt you. No,
+it is not so? You see, you are my angel! Let me come sometimes; I think
+that I am going to die. If you only knew! I adore you. Forgive me, I
+speak to you, but I do not know what I am saying; I may have displeased
+you; have I displeased you?"
+
+"Oh! my mother!" said she.
+
+And she sank down as though on the point of death.
+
+He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her close,
+without knowing what he was doing. He supported her, though he was
+tottering himself. It was as though his brain were full of smoke;
+lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed to him
+that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he was committing
+a profanation. Moreover, he had not the least passion for this lovely
+woman whose force he felt against his breast. He was beside himself with
+love.
+
+She took his hand and laid it on her heart. He felt the paper there, he
+stammered:--
+
+"You love me, then?"
+
+She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than a
+barely audible breath:--
+
+"Hush! Thou knowest it!"
+
+And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb and
+intoxicated young man.
+
+He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The
+stars were beginning to gleam. How did it come to pass that their lips
+met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that
+the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind the
+black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?
+
+A kiss, and that was all.
+
+Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.
+
+They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp
+earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts
+were full of thoughts. They had clasped hands unconsciously.
+
+She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there,
+and how he had made his way into the garden. It seemed so simple to her
+that he should be there!
+
+From time to time, Marius' knee touched Cosette's knee, and both
+shivered.
+
+At intervals, Cosette stammered a word. Her soul fluttered on her lips
+like a drop of dew on a flower.
+
+Little by little they began to talk to each other. Effusion followed
+silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid overhead.
+These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their
+dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras, their
+weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had
+longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each
+other. They confided to each other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing
+could augment, their most secret and most mysterious thoughts. They
+related to each other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that
+love, youth, and the remains of childhood which still lingered about
+them, suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves out
+into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a quarter of an
+hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's soul, and the young
+girl who had the young man's soul. Each became permeated with the other,
+they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.
+
+When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she
+laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:--
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"My name is Marius," said he. "And yours?"
+
+"My name is Cosette."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND
+
+Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way to shipwreck
+and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but
+in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thenardier pair had had two other
+children; both males. That made five; two girls and three boys.
+
+Madame Thenardier had got rid of the last two, while they were still
+young and very small, with remarkable luck.
+
+Got rid of is the word. There was but a mere fragment of nature in that
+woman. A phenomenon, by the way, of which there is more than one example
+extant. Like the Marechale de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the Thenardier was
+a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity ended. Her hatred of
+the human race began with her own sons. In the direction of her sons her
+evil disposition was uncompromising, and her heart had a lugubrious wall
+in that quarter. As the reader has seen, she detested the eldest; she
+cursed the other two. Why? Because. The most terrible of motives, the
+most unanswerable of retorts--Because. "I have no need of a litter of
+squalling brats," said this mother.
+
+Let us explain how the Thenardiers had succeeded in getting rid of their
+last two children; and even in drawing profit from the operation.
+
+The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back, was the
+same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two
+children which she had had. She lived on the Quai des Celestins, at the
+corner of this ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded her the
+opportunity of changing her evil repute into good odor. The reader will
+remember the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts
+of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago, and of which science took
+advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the efficacy of
+inhalations of alum, so beneficially replaced at the present day by the
+external tincture of iodine. During this epidemic, the Magnon lost both
+her boys, who were still very young, one in the morning, the other
+in the evening of the same day. This was a blow. These children were
+precious to their mother; they represented eighty francs a month. These
+eighty francs were punctually paid in the name of M. Gillenormand, by
+collector of his rents, M. Barge, a retired tip-staff, in the Rue du
+Roi-de-Sicile. The children dead, the income was at an end. The Magnon
+sought an expedient. In that dark free-masonry of evil of which she
+formed a part, everything is known, all secrets are kept, and all lend
+mutual aid. Magnon needed two children; the Thenardiers had two.
+The same sex, the same age. A good arrangement for the one, a good
+investment for the other. The little Thenardiers became little Magnons.
+Magnon quitted the Quai des Celestins and went to live in the Rue
+Clocheperce. In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to himself
+is broken between one street and another.
+
+The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections, and
+the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in the world.
+Only, the Thenardier exacted for this loan of her children, ten francs a
+month, which Magnon promised to pay, and which she actually did pay.
+It is unnecessary to add that M. Gillenormand continued to perform
+his compact. He came to see the children every six months. He did not
+perceive the change. "Monsieur," Magnon said to him, "how much they
+resemble you!"
+
+Thenardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion to become
+Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to
+discover that they had two little brothers. When a certain degree
+of misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort of spectral
+indifference, and one regards human beings as though they were spectres.
+Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague shadowy
+forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of life and easily
+confounded again with the invisible.
+
+On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two little
+ones to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them forever, the
+Thenardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple. She said to her
+husband: "But this is abandoning our children!" Thenardier, masterful
+and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this saying: "Jean Jacques
+Rousseau did even better!" From scruples, the mother proceeded to
+uneasiness: "But what if the police were to annoy us? Tell me, Monsieur
+Thenardier, is what we have done permissible?" Thenardier replied:
+"Everything is permissible. No one will see anything but true blue in
+it. Besides, no one has any interest in looking closely after children
+who have not a sou."
+
+Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime. She was
+careful about her toilet. She shared her lodgings, which were furnished
+in an affected and wretched style, with a clever gallicized English
+thief. This English woman, who had become a naturalized Parisienne,
+recommended by very wealthy relations, intimately connected with the
+medals in the Library and Mademoiselle Mar's diamonds, became celebrated
+later on in judicial accounts. She was called Mamselle Miss.
+
+The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason to
+complain of their lot. Recommended by the eighty francs, they were well
+cared for, as is everything from which profit is derived; they were
+neither badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated almost like
+"little gentlemen,"--better by their false mother than by their real
+one. Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves' slang in their
+presence.
+
+Thus passed several years. Thenardier augured well from the fact. One
+day, he chanced to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly stipend
+of ten francs: "The father must give them some education."
+
+All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time been
+protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly hurled
+into life and forced to begin it for themselves.
+
+A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret,
+necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent incarcerations,
+is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society
+which pursues its existence beneath public society; an adventure of this
+description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that sombre world. The
+Thenardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of Magnon.
+
+
+One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Eponine the note
+relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by the police in the
+Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also Mamselle Miss; and all
+the inhabitants of the house, which was of a suspicious character, were
+gathered into the net. While this was going on, the two little boys were
+playing in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. When they tried
+to enter the house again, they found the door fastened and the house
+empty. A cobbler opposite called them to him, and delivered to them a
+paper which "their mother" had left for them. On this paper there was an
+address: M. Barge, collector of rents, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, No. 8. The
+proprietor of the stall said to them: "You cannot live here any longer.
+Go there. It is near by. The first street on the left. Ask your way from
+this paper."
+
+The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his
+hand the paper which was to guide them. It was cold, and his benumbed
+little fingers could not close very firmly, and they did not keep a very
+good hold on the paper. At the corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust of
+wind tore it from him, and as night was falling, the child was not able
+to find it again.
+
+They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE
+GREAT
+
+Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which
+do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden
+the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs of
+cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly fitting
+door or window. It seems as though the gloomy door of winter had
+remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. In the
+spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic of this century
+broke out in Europe, these north gales were more harsh and piercing
+than ever. It was a door even more glacial than that of winter which
+was ajar. It was the door of the sepulchre. In these winds one felt the
+breath of the cholera.
+
+From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed this
+peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension.
+Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth at
+this epoch.
+
+One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree that
+January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had resumed their
+cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering gayly under his rags,
+was standing as though in ecstasy before a wig-maker's shop in the
+vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was adorned with a woman's
+woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where, and which he had converted
+into a neck comforter. Little Gavroche appeared to be engaged in intent
+admiration of a wax bride, in a low-necked dress, and crowned with
+orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her
+smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was
+taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he
+could not "prig" from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then
+proceed to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs. He had
+often managed to breakfast off of such a roll. He called his species of
+work, for which he possessed special aptitude, "shaving barbers."
+
+While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered
+between his teeth: "Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps
+it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday."
+
+No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.
+
+Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last
+occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now
+Friday.
+
+The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving
+a customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy, that
+freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were in his
+pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.
+
+While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of windsor
+soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed, and still
+smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years of age, the other
+five, timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, with a request for
+something or other, alms possibly, in a plaintive murmur which resembled
+a groan rather than a prayer. They both spoke at once, and their words
+were unintelligible because sobs broke the voice of the younger, and the
+teeth of the elder were chattering with cold. The barber wheeled round
+with a furious look, and without abandoning his razor, thrust back the
+elder with his left hand and the younger with his knee, and slammed
+his door, saying: "The idea of coming in and freezing everybody for
+nothing!"
+
+The two children resumed their march in tears. In the meantime, a cloud
+had risen; it had begun to rain.
+
+Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:--
+
+"What's the matter with you, brats?"
+
+"We don't know where we are to sleep," replied the elder.
+
+"Is that all?" said Gavroche. "A great matter, truly. The idea of
+bawling about that. They must be greenies!"
+
+And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather
+bantering, an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:--
+
+"Come along with me, young 'uns!"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the elder.
+
+And the two children followed him as they would have followed an
+archbishop. They had stopped crying.
+
+Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the
+Bastille.
+
+As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance at the
+barber's shop.
+
+"That fellow has no heart, the whiting,"[35] he muttered. "He's an
+Englishman."
+
+A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file, with
+Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter. This laugh was
+wanting in respect towards the group.
+
+"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.
+
+An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more, and he
+added:--
+
+"I am making a mistake in the beast; he's not a whiting, he's a serpent.
+Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and I'll have a bell hung to your
+tail."
+
+This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive. As he strode over a gutter,
+he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy to meet Faust on the
+Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.
+
+"Madam," said he, "so you are going out with your horse?"
+
+And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.
+
+"You scamp!" shouted the furious pedestrian.
+
+Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.
+
+"Is Monsieur complaining?"
+
+"Of you!" ejaculated the man.
+
+"The office is closed," said Gavroche, "I do not receive any more
+complaints."
+
+In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a
+beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short a
+gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled under a
+porte-cochere. The little girl was getting to be too old for such a
+thing. Growth does play these tricks. The petticoat becomes short at the
+moment when nudity becomes indecent.
+
+"Poor girl!" said Gavroche. "She hasn't even trousers. Hold on, take
+this."
+
+And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck,
+he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl, where
+the scarf became a shawl once more.
+
+The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl in
+silence. When a certain stage of distress has been reached in his
+misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer returns
+thanks for good.
+
+That done: "Brrr!" said Gavroche, who was shivering more than Saint
+Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.
+
+At this brrr! the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite, became
+furious. The wicked skies punish good deeds.
+
+"Ah, come now!" exclaimed Gavroche, "what's the meaning of this? It's
+re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop my
+subscription."
+
+And he set out on the march once more.
+
+"It's all right," he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl, as
+she coiled up under the shawl, "she's got a famous peel."
+
+And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:--
+
+"Caught!"
+
+The two children followed close on his heels.
+
+As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices, which indicate
+a baker's shop, for bread is put behind bars like gold, Gavroche turned
+round:--
+
+"Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?"
+
+"Monsieur," replied the elder, "we have had nothing to eat since this
+morning."
+
+"So you have neither father nor mother?" resumed Gavroche majestically.
+
+"Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don't know where
+they are."
+
+"Sometimes that's better than knowing where they are," said Gavroche,
+who was a thinker.
+
+"We have been wandering about these two hours," continued the elder, "we
+have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we have found
+nothing."
+
+"I know," ejaculated Gavroche, "it's the dogs who eat everything."
+
+He went on, after a pause:--
+
+"Ah! we have lost our authors. We don't know what we have done with
+them. This should not be, gamins. It's stupid to let old people stray
+off like that. Come now! we must have a snooze all the same."
+
+However, he asked them no questions. What was more simple than that they
+should have no dwelling place!
+
+The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered the
+prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:--
+
+"It's queer, all the same. Mamma told us that she would take us to get a
+blessed spray on Palm Sunday."
+
+"Bosh," said Gavroche.
+
+"Mamma," resumed the elder, "is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."
+
+"Tanflute!" retorted Gavroche.
+
+Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been
+feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.
+
+At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied,
+but which was triumphant, in reality.
+
+"Let us be calm, young 'uns. Here's supper for three."
+
+And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.
+
+Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed both of
+them before him into the baker's shop, and flung his sou on the counter,
+crying:--
+
+"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."
+
+The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a knife.
+
+"In three pieces, my boy!" went on Gavroche.
+
+And he added with dignity:--
+
+"There are three of us."
+
+And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers, had
+taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose with
+an inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the great
+Frederick's snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this indignant
+apostrophe full in the baker's face:--
+
+"Keksekca?"
+
+Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this interpellation
+of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or a Polish word, or one of those
+savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl at each other from
+bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes, are warned that it is a
+word which they [our readers] utter every day, and which takes the place
+of the phrase: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?" The baker understood
+perfectly, and replied:--
+
+"Well! It's bread, and very good bread of the second quality."
+
+"You mean larton brutal [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche, calmly and
+coldly disdainful. "White bread, boy! white bread [larton savonne]! I'm
+standing treat."
+
+The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread he
+surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.
+
+"Come, now, baker's boy!" said he, "what are you taking our measure like
+that for?"
+
+All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.
+
+When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer, and
+Gavroche said to the two children:--
+
+"Grub away."
+
+The little boys stared at him in surprise.
+
+Gavroche began to laugh.
+
+"Ah! hullo, that's so! they don't understand yet, they're too small."
+
+And he repeated:--
+
+"Eat away."
+
+At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.
+
+And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy of
+his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be
+relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added, as be
+handed him the largest share:--
+
+"Ram that into your muzzle."
+
+One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.
+
+The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished. As they tore their
+bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up the shop of the baker,
+who, now that they had paid their money, looked angrily at them.
+
+"Let's go into the street again," said Gavroche.
+
+They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.
+
+From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows, the smallest
+halted to look at the time on a leaden watch which was suspended from
+his neck by a cord.
+
+"Well, he is a very green 'un," said Gavroche.
+
+Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:--
+
+"All the same, if I had charge of the babes I'd lock 'em up better than
+that."
+
+Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached the
+angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end of which the low
+and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:--
+
+"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said some one.
+
+"Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.
+
+A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no other
+than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles, but recognizable to
+Gavroche.
+
+"The bow-wows!" went on Gavroche, "you've got a hide the color of a
+linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor. You're putting on style,
+'pon my word!"
+
+"Hush!" ejaculated Montparnasse, "not so loud."
+
+And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.
+
+The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other by the
+hand.
+
+When they were ensconced under the arch of a portecochere, sheltered
+from the rain and from all eyes:--
+
+"Do you know where I'm going?" demanded Montparnasse.
+
+"To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,"[36] replied Gavroche.
+
+"Joker!"
+
+And Montparnasse went on:--
+
+"I'm going to find Babet."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Gavroche, "so her name is Babet."
+
+Montparnasse lowered his voice:--
+
+"Not she, he."
+
+"Ah! Babet."
+
+"Yes, Babet."
+
+"I thought he was buckled."
+
+"He has undone the buckle," replied Montparnasse.
+
+And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very
+day, Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his
+escape, by turning to the left instead of to the right in "the police
+office."
+
+Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.
+
+"What a dentist!" he cried.
+
+Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet's flight, and ended with:--
+
+"Oh! That's not all."
+
+Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse held in
+his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part, and the blade of a
+dagger made its appearance.
+
+"Ah!" he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, "you have brought
+along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois."
+
+Montparnasse winked.
+
+"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "so you're going to have a bout with the
+bobbies?"
+
+"You can't tell," replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. "It's
+always a good thing to have a pin about one."
+
+Gavroche persisted:--
+
+"What are you up to to-night?"
+
+Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every syllable:
+"Things."
+
+And abruptly changing the conversation:--
+
+"By the way!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Something happened t'other day. Fancy. I meet a bourgeois. He makes
+me a present of a sermon and his purse. I put it in my pocket. A minute
+later, I feel in my pocket. There's nothing there."
+
+"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.
+
+"But you," went on Montparnasse, "where are you bound for now?"
+
+Gavroche pointed to his two proteges, and said:--
+
+"I'm going to put these infants to bed."
+
+"Whereabouts is the bed?"
+
+"At my house."
+
+"Where's your house?"
+
+"At my house."
+
+"So you have a lodging?"
+
+"Yes, I have."
+
+"And where is your lodging?"
+
+"In the elephant," said Gavroche.
+
+Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment, could not
+restrain an exclamation.
+
+"In the elephant!"
+
+"Well, yes, in the elephant!" retorted Gavroche. "Kekcaa?"
+
+This is another word of the language which no one writes, and which
+every one speaks.
+
+Kekcaa signifies: Quest que c'est que cela a? [What's the matter with
+that?]
+
+The urchin's profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness and
+good sense. He appeared to return to better sentiments with regard to
+Gavroche's lodging.
+
+"Of course," said he, "yes, the elephant. Is it comfortable there?"
+
+"Very," said Gavroche. "It's really bully there. There ain't any
+draughts, as there are under the bridges."
+
+"How do you get in?"
+
+"Oh, I get in."
+
+"So there is a hole?" demanded Montparnasse.
+
+"Parbleu! I should say so. But you mustn't tell. It's between the fore
+legs. The bobbies haven't seen it."
+
+"And you climb up? Yes, I understand."
+
+"A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it's all over, no one there."
+
+After a pause, Gavroche added:--
+
+"I shall have a ladder for these children."
+
+Montparnasse burst out laughing:--
+
+"Where the devil did you pick up those young 'uns?"
+
+Gavroche replied with great simplicity:--
+
+"They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of."
+
+Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:--
+
+"You recognized me very readily," he muttered.
+
+He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than
+two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.
+This gave him a different nose.
+
+"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you are less homely so, you
+ought to keep them on all the time."
+
+Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.
+
+"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do you like me so?"
+
+The sound of his voice was different also. In a twinkling, Montparnasse
+had become unrecognizable.
+
+"Oh! Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.
+
+The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being
+occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew
+near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and
+admiration.
+
+Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.
+
+He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing
+his words: "Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square with
+my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten sous on
+me, I wouldn't refuse to work, but this isn't Shrove Tuesday."
+
+This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He wheeled
+round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound
+attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to
+them a few paces off. Gavroche allowed an: "Ah! good!" to escape him,
+but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse's hand:--
+
+"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off to my elephant with my
+brats. Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and
+hunt me up there. I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter. You will
+inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."
+
+"Very good," said Montparnasse.
+
+And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of
+the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille. The little one of five,
+dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his
+head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went.
+
+The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche
+of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than
+the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms. This
+syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words of
+a phrase, means: "Take care, we can no longer talk freely." There was
+besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty which was
+lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue, a slang
+expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my wife,
+greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great century
+when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.
+
+Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of
+the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the
+ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has
+already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved
+to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a "member of the Institute,
+the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."
+
+We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model
+itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of
+Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown,
+on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had
+acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional
+aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and
+masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly
+painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind,
+and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the
+broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his
+enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under
+the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was a sort of
+symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and immense. It was
+some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside
+the invisible spectre of the Bastille.
+
+Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was
+falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself
+from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. "The aediles," as the
+expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.
+There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded
+by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks
+meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass
+flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been
+rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and
+continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns,
+it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way
+beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the
+eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There was
+something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out,
+and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated.
+As we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is the real element
+of everything that is dark. As soon as twilight descended, the old
+elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable
+appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows. Being of the past,
+he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.
+
+This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but assuredly
+majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and savage
+gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of gigantic
+stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre fortress
+with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal
+classes. It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol of an
+epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass away, people
+have already begun to understand that, if there can be force in a
+boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other words,
+that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but ideas.
+Harness locomotives to ideas,--that is well done; but do not mistake the
+horse for the rider.
+
+At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect
+of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the
+architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of
+bronze.
+
+This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called
+the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried,
+was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we
+regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed the
+task of isolating the elephant.
+
+It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection
+of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two "brats."
+
+The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him
+that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the
+tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage,
+and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep
+in this very elephant of the Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.
+
+On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the
+effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small,
+and said:--
+
+"Don't be scared, infants."
+
+Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's enclosure
+and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. The two
+children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a
+word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which
+had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.
+
+There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day served
+the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche raised it with
+remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant's forelegs.
+Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole in the belly
+of the colossus could be distinguished.
+
+Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to
+them:--
+
+"Climb up and go in."
+
+The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.
+
+"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.
+
+And he added:--
+
+"You shall see!"
+
+He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling, without
+deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the aperture. He
+entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared within,
+and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which looked pale,
+appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish
+spectre.
+
+"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns! You'll see how snug it is
+here! Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend you a hand."
+
+The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and inspired
+them with confidence at one and the same time, and then, it was raining
+very hard. The elder one undertook the risk. The younger, on seeing his
+brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of this
+huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not dare.
+
+The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder;
+Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations like a
+fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.
+
+"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet there!--Give us
+your hand here!--Boldly!"
+
+And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly and
+vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.
+
+"Nabbed!" said he.
+
+The brat had passed through the crack.
+
+"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me. Be so good as to take a seat,
+Monsieur."
+
+And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped down
+the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on his feet in
+the grass, grasped the child of five round the body, and planted him
+fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began to climb up behind
+him, shouting to the elder:--
+
+"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."
+
+And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled,
+thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself,
+and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick
+which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--
+
+"Here we are! Long live General Lafayette!"
+
+This explosion over, he added:--
+
+"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."
+
+Gavroche was at home, in fact.
+
+Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless! Charity of great things! Goodness
+of giants! This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the
+Emperor's, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been
+accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in
+their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond
+of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes:
+"What's the good of that?" It served to save from the cold, the frost,
+the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve
+from slumber in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the
+snow which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother,
+no bread, no clothes, no refuge. It served to receive the innocent whom
+society repulsed. It served to diminish public crime. It was a lair
+open to one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed as though the
+miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with
+warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned,
+condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a
+benevolent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity on that
+other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes to his feet,
+without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed
+on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good
+for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by
+God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In order
+to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass,
+iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and plaster
+sufficed for God. The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that
+Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its
+tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters, he
+wished to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he
+had lodged a child there.
+
+The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was
+hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated,
+beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was only cats and
+homeless children who could pass through it.
+
+"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not at
+home."
+
+And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is
+well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped up the
+aperture.
+
+Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity. The children heard the
+crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical
+match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade steel
+represented progress.
+
+A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to ignite one
+of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called cellar rats. The
+cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered the interior
+of the elephant confusedly visible.
+
+Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation which they
+experienced was something like that which one would feel if shut up in
+the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still, like what Jonah must have
+felt in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic skeleton
+appeared enveloping them. Above, a long brown beam, whence started at
+regular distances, massive, arching ribs, represented the vertebral
+column with its sides, stalactites of plaster depended from them like
+entrails, and vast spiders' webs stretching from side to side, formed
+dirty diaphragms. Here and there, in the corners, were visible large
+blackish spots which had the appearance of being alive, and which
+changed places rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.
+
+Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his belly had
+filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it as on a
+floor.
+
+The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered to
+him:--
+
+"It's black."
+
+This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche. The petrified air of the
+two brats rendered some shock necessary.
+
+"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed. "Are
+you scoffing at me? Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the
+tuileries? Are you brutes? Come, say! I warn you that I don't belong to
+the regiment of simpletons. Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope's
+establishment?"
+
+A little roughness is good in cases of fear. It is reassuring. The two
+children drew close to Gavroche.
+
+Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave to
+gentle, and addressing the smaller:--
+
+"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing
+intonation, "it's outside that it is black. Outside it's raining, here
+it does not rain; outside it's cold, here there's not an atom of wind;
+outside there are heaps of people, here there's no one; outside there
+ain't even the moon, here there's my candle, confound it!"
+
+The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror; but
+Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.
+
+"Quick," said he.
+
+And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call the
+end of the room.
+
+There stood his bed.
+
+Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress, a
+blanket, and an alcove with curtains.
+
+The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip of
+gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new. This is what the alcove
+consisted of:--
+
+Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish
+which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant, two
+in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits, so as to
+form a pyramidal bundle. This cluster supported a trellis-work of brass
+wire which was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied, and held
+by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three holes. A row
+of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor so that nothing
+could pass under it. This grating was nothing else than a piece of the
+brass screens with which aviaries are covered in menageries. Gavroche's
+bed stood as in a cage, behind this net. The whole resembled an
+Esquimaux tent.
+
+This trellis-work took the place of curtains.
+
+Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front,
+and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.
+
+"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.
+
+He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he crawled
+in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed the opening
+hermetically again.
+
+All three had stretched out on the mat. Gavroche still had the cellar
+rat in his hand.
+
+"Now," said he, "go to sleep! I'm going to suppress the candelabra."
+
+"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the
+netting, "what's that for?"
+
+"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for the rats. Go to sleep!"
+
+Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction for the
+benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--
+
+"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes. It's used for fierce animals.
+There's a whole shopful of them there. All you've got to do is to climb
+over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door. You can
+get as much as you want."
+
+As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold of the
+blanket, and the little one murmured:--
+
+"Oh! how good that is! It's warm!"
+
+Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.
+
+"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said he. "I took that from
+the monkeys."
+
+And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying, a very
+thick and admirably made mat, he added:--
+
+"That belonged to the giraffe."
+
+After a pause he went on:--
+
+"The beasts had all these things. I took them away from them. It didn't
+trouble them. I told them: 'It's for the elephant.'"
+
+He paused, and then resumed:--
+
+"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw for the government.
+So there now!"
+
+The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this
+intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves, isolated
+like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something admirable
+and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural to them, and whose
+physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank,
+mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.
+
+"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you are not afraid of the
+police, then?"
+
+Gavroche contented himself with replying:--
+
+"Brat! Nobody says 'police,' they say 'bobbies.'"
+
+The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As he was on
+the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the
+blanket round him as a mother might have done, and heightened the mat
+under his head with old rags, in such a way as to form a pillow for the
+child. Then he turned to the elder:--
+
+"Hey! We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"
+
+"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of
+a saved angel.
+
+The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow
+warm once more.
+
+"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what were you bawling about?"
+
+And pointing out the little one to his brother:--
+
+"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the idea of a big
+fellow like you crying! It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."
+
+"Gracious," replied the child, "we have no lodging."
+
+"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say 'lodgings,' you say 'crib.'"
+
+"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night."
+
+"You don't say 'night,' you say 'darkmans.'"
+
+"Thank you, sir," said the child.
+
+"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never bawl again over anything.
+I'll take care of you. You shall see what fun we'll have. In summer,
+we'll go to the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals, we'll bathe in
+the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at
+Austerlitz,--that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get
+mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the
+man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play. I'll take you to see
+Frederick Lemaitre. I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even
+played in a piece once. There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran
+under a cloth, and that made the sea. I'll get you an engagement at my
+theatre. We'll go to see the savages. They ain't real, those savages
+ain't. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you can see
+where their elbows have been darned with white. Then, we'll go to the
+Opera. We'll get in with the hired applauders. The Opera claque is well
+managed. I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard. At the
+Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies.
+They're called dishclouts. And then we'll go to see the guillotine work.
+I'll show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marais. Monsieur
+Sanson. He has a letter-box at his door. Ah! we'll have famous fun!"
+
+At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and recalled him
+to the realities of life.
+
+"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving out. Attention! I can't
+spend more than a sou a month on my lighting. When a body goes to bed,
+he must sleep. We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's
+romances. And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the
+porte-cochere, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."
+
+"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone dared talk to
+Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might fall in the straw, and we
+must look out and not burn the house down."
+
+"People don't say 'burn the house down,'" remarked Gavroche, "they say
+'blaze the crib.'"
+
+The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat upon the
+back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. "You're taken in, rain!"
+said Gavroche. "It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs of
+the house. Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses
+its labor, it can't wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old
+water-carrier that it is."
+
+This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche, in
+his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted, was
+followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a hint of it
+entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. Almost at the same
+instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. The two little creatures
+uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly that the network came near
+being displaced, but Gavroche turned his bold face to them, and took
+advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.
+
+"Calm down, children. Don't topple over the edifice. That's fine,
+first-class thunder; all right. That's no slouch of a streak of
+lightning. Bravo for the good God! Deuce take it! It's almost as good as
+it is at the Ambigu."
+
+That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children
+gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch them
+out at full length, and exclaimed:--
+
+"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Now,
+babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. It's very bad
+not to sleep. It'll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in
+fashionable society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the
+hide! I'm going to put out the light. Are you ready?"
+
+"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right. I seem to have feathers under
+my head."
+
+"People don't say 'head,'" cried Gavroche, "they say 'nut'."
+
+The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished
+arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then
+repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:--
+
+"Shut your peepers!"
+
+And he snuffed out his tiny light.
+
+Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began
+to affect the netting under which the three children lay.
+
+It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic
+sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was
+accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.
+
+The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and
+chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother
+had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little
+one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in
+a very low tone, and with bated breath:--
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.
+
+And he laid his head down on the mat again.
+
+The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the
+elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already
+mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as
+it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same
+as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good
+story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in
+throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun
+to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.
+
+Still the little one could not sleep.
+
+"Sir?" he began again.
+
+"Hey?" said Gavroche.
+
+"What are rats?"
+
+"They are mice."
+
+This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice in
+the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he
+lifted up his voice once more.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Hey?" said Gavroche again.
+
+"Why don't you have a cat?"
+
+"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate
+her."
+
+This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little
+fellow began to tremble again.
+
+The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--
+
+"Monsieur?"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Who was it that was eaten?"
+
+"The cat."
+
+"And who ate the cat?"
+
+"The rats."
+
+"The mice?"
+
+"Yes, the rats."
+
+The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate
+cats, pursued:--
+
+"Sir, would those mice eat us?"
+
+"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.
+
+The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:--
+
+"Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catch
+hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"
+
+At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand across his
+brother. The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.
+Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating
+themselves. Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their
+voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes,
+they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast
+asleep and heard nothing more.
+
+The hours of the night fled away. Darkness covered the vast Place de la
+Bastille. A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the
+patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks,
+and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence
+before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed
+into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good
+deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping
+children.
+
+In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must
+remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated at
+the other end of the square, and that what took place in the vicinity of
+the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.
+
+Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn, a
+man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit of the
+enclosure of the column of July, and glided between the palings until he
+was underneath the belly of the elephant. If any light had illuminated
+that man, it might have been divined from the thorough manner in which
+he was soaked that he had passed the night in the rain. Arrived beneath
+the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which did not belong to any
+human tongue, and which a paroquet alone could have imitated. Twice he
+repeated this cry, of whose orthography the following barely conveys an
+idea:--
+
+"Kirikikiou!"
+
+At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from the belly
+of the elephant:--
+
+"Yes!"
+
+Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,
+and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's leg, and fell
+briskly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.
+
+As for his cry of Kirikikiou,--that was, doubtless, what the child had
+meant, when he said:--
+
+"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."
+
+On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his
+"alcove," pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing it
+together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.
+
+The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom:
+Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--
+
+"We need you. Come, lend us a hand."
+
+The lad asked for no further enlightenment.
+
+"I'm with you," said he.
+
+And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence
+Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file of
+market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.
+
+The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons, amid the
+salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in their mufflers
+on account of the beating rain, did not even glance at these strange
+pedestrians.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT
+
+This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:--
+
+An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer, and
+Thenardier, although Thenardier was in close confinement. Babet had
+arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day, as the reader
+has seen from Montparnasse's account to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to
+help them from outside.
+
+Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell, had had
+time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second, to mature a
+plan. In former times, those severe places where the discipline of the
+prison delivers the convict into his own hands, were composed of four
+stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement, a camp bed, a grated
+window, and a door lined with iron, and were called dungeons; but the
+dungeon was judged to be too terrible; nowadays they are composed of an
+iron door, a grated window, a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone
+walls, and a stone ceiling, and are called chambers of punishment. A
+little light penetrates towards mid-day. The inconvenient point about
+these chambers which, as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that they
+allow the persons who should be at work to think.
+
+So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment with
+a rope. As he had the name of being very dangerous in the Charlemagne
+courtyard, he was placed in the New Building. The first thing he found
+in the New Building was Guelemer, the second was a nail; Guelemer, that
+is to say, crime; a nail, that is to say, liberty. Brujon, of whom it
+is high time that the reader should have a complete idea, was, with an
+appearance of delicate health and a profoundly premeditated languor, a
+polished, intelligent sprig, and a thief, who had a caressing glance,
+and an atrocious smile. His glance resulted from his will, and his
+smile from his nature. His first studies in his art had been directed
+to roofs. He had made great progress in the industry of the men who tear
+off lead, who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the process
+called double pickings.
+
+The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment peculiarly
+favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers were re-laying
+and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of the slates on the
+prison. The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer absolutely isolated
+from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. Up above there were
+scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the
+direction of liberty.
+
+The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be
+seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison. The walls
+were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the authorities had been
+obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories with a sheathing of wood,
+because stones were in the habit of becoming detached and falling on
+the prisoners in their beds. In spite of this antiquity, the authorities
+committed the error of confining in the New Building the most
+troublesome prisoners, of placing there "the hard cases," as they say in
+prison parlance.
+
+The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other, and a
+top story which was called the Bel-Air (Fine Air). A large chimney-flue,
+probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de la Force, started
+from the groundfloor, traversed all four stories, cut the dormitories,
+where it figured as a flattened pillar, into two portions, and finally
+pierced the roof.
+
+Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been placed, by
+way of precaution, on the lower story. Chance ordained that the heads of
+their beds should rest against the chimney.
+
+Thenardier was directly over their heads in the top story known as
+Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine,
+after passing the barracks of the firemen, in front of the porte-cochere
+of the bathing establishment, beholds a yard full of flowers and shrubs
+in wooden boxes, at the extremity of which spreads out a little white
+rotunda with two wings, brightened up with green shutters, the bucolic
+dream of Jean Jacques.
+
+Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda an enormous
+black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.
+
+This was the outer wall of La Force.
+
+This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.
+
+Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof, which
+could be seen beyond. This was the roof of the New Building. There
+one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars; they were the
+windows of the Fine-Air.
+
+A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed the
+dormitories.
+
+The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of large
+hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and double doors
+of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts. When one entered
+from the north end, one had on one's left the four dormer-windows, on
+one's right, facing the windows, at regular intervals, four square,
+tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages, built of masonry
+to about the height of the elbow, and the rest, up to the roof, of iron
+bars.
+
+Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since
+the night of the 3d of February. No one was ever able to discover how,
+and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a
+bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which
+a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or
+Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.
+
+There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers,
+half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police an
+unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.
+
+On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two lost
+children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had escaped that
+morning, was waiting for them in the street as well as Montparnasse,
+rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found, began to pierce
+the chimney against which their beds stood. The rubbish fell on Brujon's
+bed, so that they were not heard. Showers mingled with thunder shook
+the doors on their hinges, and created in the prison a terrible and
+opportune uproar. Those of the prisoners who woke, pretended to fall
+asleep again, and left Guelemer and Brujon to their own devices. Brujon
+was adroit; Guelemer was vigorous. Before any sound had reached the
+watcher, who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the
+dormitory, the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron
+grating which barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two
+redoubtable ruffians were on the roof. The wind and rain redoubled, the
+roof was slippery.
+
+"What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.
+
+An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from the
+surrounding wall. At the bottom of this abyss, they could see the musket
+of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom. They fastened one end of the
+rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon to the stumps of the iron bars
+which they had just wrenched off, flung the other over the outer wall,
+crossed the abyss at one bound, clung to the coping of the wall, got
+astride of it, let themselves slip, one after the other, along the rope,
+upon a little roof which touches the bath-house, pulled their rope after
+them, jumped down into the courtyard of the bath-house, traversed it,
+pushed open the porter's wicket, beside which hung his rope, pulled
+this, opened the porte-cochere, and found themselves in the street.
+
+Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen in bed in
+the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.
+
+A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse, who were
+prowling about the neighborhood.
+
+They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit of it
+remained attached to the chimney on the roof. They had sustained no
+other damage, however, than that of scratching nearly all the skin off
+their hands.
+
+That night, Thenardier was warned, without any one being able to explain
+how, and was not asleep.
+
+Towards one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw
+two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls, in front of
+the dormer-window which was opposite his cage. One halted at the window,
+long enough to dart in a glance. This was Brujon.
+
+Thenardier recognized him, and understood. This was enough.
+
+Thenardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution
+under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force, was
+kept in sight. The sentry, who was relieved every two hours, marched
+up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket. The Fine-Air was
+lighted by a skylight. The prisoner had on his feet fetters weighing
+fifty pounds. Every day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a jailer,
+escorted by two dogs,--this was still in vogue at that time,--entered
+his cage, deposited beside his bed a loaf of black bread weighing two
+pounds, a jug of water, a bowl filled with rather thin bouillon, in
+which swam a few Mayagan beans, inspected his irons and tapped the bars.
+This man and his dogs made two visits during the night.
+
+Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he
+used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve
+it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight,
+no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered
+afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: "It would be better to let
+him have only a wooden spike."
+
+At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was
+relieved, and replaced by a conscript. A few moments later, the man with
+the dogs paid his visit, and went off without noticing anything, except,
+possibly, the excessive youth and "the rustic air" of the "raw recruit."
+Two hours afterwards, at four o'clock, when they came to relieve the
+conscript, he was found asleep on the floor, lying like a log near
+Thenardier's cage. As for Thenardier, he was no longer there. There was
+a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the
+roof. One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably
+carried away with him, as it was not found. They also seized in his cell
+a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of the stupefying wine
+with which the soldier had been drugged. The soldier's bayonet had
+disappeared.
+
+At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that
+Thenardier was out of reach. The truth is, that he was no longer in the
+New Building, but that he was still in great danger.
+
+Thenardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found the
+remains of Brujon's rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the
+chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short, he had not
+been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and Guelemer had done.
+
+When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile,
+one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin. There stood on
+that spot, in the last century, a house of which only the back wall now
+remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises to the height of the
+third story between the adjoining buildings. This ruin can be recognized
+by two large square windows which are still to be seen there; the middle
+one, that nearest the right gable, is barred with a worm-eaten beam
+adjusted like a prop. Through these windows there was formerly visible a
+lofty and lugubrious wall, which was a fragment of the outer wall of La
+Force.
+
+The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is
+half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts.
+In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against the
+portion of the ruin which has remained standing. The fence has a gate,
+which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.
+
+It was the crest of this ruin that Thenardier had succeeded in reaching,
+a little after one o'clock in the morning.
+
+How had he got there? That is what no one has ever been able to explain
+or understand. The lightning must, at the same time, have hindered
+and helped him. Had he made use of the ladders and scaffoldings of the
+slaters to get from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from
+compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court,
+then to the buildings of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and
+thence to the hut on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary
+there existed breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility. Had
+he placed the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the
+Fine-Air to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping
+of the outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut?
+But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line;
+it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen's barracks, it rose
+towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings, it was not
+even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on the Rue Pavee;
+everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then, the sentinels must
+have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence, the route taken by
+Thenardier still remains rather inexplicable. In two manners, flight was
+impossible. Had Thenardier, spurred on by that thirst for liberty which
+changes precipices into ditches, iron bars into wattles of osier, a
+legless man into an athlete, a gouty man into a bird, stupidity into
+instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius, had
+Thenardier invented a third mode? No one has ever found out.
+
+The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for. The man who makes
+his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something of the star and
+of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight; the effort towards
+deliverance is no less surprising than the flight towards the sublime,
+and one says of the escaped thief: "How did he contrive to scale that
+wall?" in the same way that one says of Corneille: "Where did he find
+the means of dying?"
+
+At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain, with his
+clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows bleeding, his
+knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children, in their figurative
+language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin, there he had stretched
+himself out at full length, and there his strength had failed him. A
+steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the pavement of
+the street.
+
+The rope which he had was too short.
+
+There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair which
+he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling himself that
+the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea of hearing the
+neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within a few minutes, an
+hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the latter would be found
+asleep under the pierced roof, staring in horror at a terrible depth, at
+the light of the street lanterns, the wet, black pavement, that pavement
+longed for yet frightful, which meant death, and which meant liberty.
+
+He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded,
+if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance. He
+listened. With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed through
+the street since he had been there. Nearly the whole of the descent of
+the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne, from Vincennes,
+and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished through the Rue
+Saint-Antoine.
+
+Four o'clock struck. Thenardier shuddered. A few moments later, that
+terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery of an escape
+broke forth in the prison. The sound of doors opening and shutting, the
+creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult in the guard-house, the
+hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock of musket-butts on the pavement
+of the courts, reached his ears. Lights ascended and descended past the
+grated windows of the dormitories, a torch ran along the ridge-pole of
+the top story of the New Building, the firemen belonging in the barracks
+on the right had been summoned. Their helmets, which the torch lighted
+up in the rain, went and came along the roofs. At the same time,
+Thenardier perceived in the direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness
+lighting up the edge of the sky in doleful wise.
+
+He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the heavy
+rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir, subject to the
+giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror of a certain arrest,
+and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these
+ideas to the other: "Dead if I fall, caught if I stay." In the midst of
+this anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still dark, a man who
+was gliding along the walls and coming from the Rue Pavee, halt in the
+recess above which Thenardier was, as it were, suspended. Here this
+man was joined by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by
+a third, then by a fourth. When these men were re-united, one of them
+lifted the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered
+the enclosure in which the shanty stood. They halted directly under
+Thenardier. These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order
+that they might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the
+sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant. It
+must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in his box.
+Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their visages, lent an ear to
+their words with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels himself
+lost.
+
+Thenardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before his
+eyes,--these men conversed in slang.
+
+The first said in a low but distinct voice:--
+
+"Let's cut. What are we up to here?"
+
+The second replied: "It's raining hard enough to put out the very
+devil's fire. And the bobbies will be along instanter. There's a soldier
+on guard yonder. We shall get nabbed here."
+
+These two words, icigo and icicaille, both of which mean ici, and which
+belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second to the slang
+of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thenardier. By the icigo he
+recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers, by the icicaille
+he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been an old-clothes
+broker at the Temple.
+
+The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except in
+the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in all
+its purity. Had it not been for the icicaille, Thenardier would not have
+recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.
+
+In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.
+
+"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit. How do we know that he doesn't
+stand in need of us?"
+
+By this, which was nothing but French, Thenardier recognized
+Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand all
+slangs and to speak none of them.
+
+As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders betrayed
+him. Thenardier did not hesitate. It was Guelemer.
+
+Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--
+
+"What are you jabbering about? The tavern-keeper hasn't managed to cut
+his stick. He don't tumble to the racket, that he don't! You have to be
+a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up your sheet to make
+a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers, make false keys, file
+your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself, and disguise yourself!
+The old fellow hasn't managed to play it, he doesn't understand how to
+work the business."
+
+Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken by
+Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new, highly colored
+and risky argot used by Brujon what the language of Racine is to the
+language of Andre Chenier:--
+
+"Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act. You have to be
+knowing. He's only a greenhorn. He must have let himself be taken in
+by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as his pal.
+Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison? You have
+seen all those lights. He's recaptured, there! He'll get off with twenty
+years. I ain't afraid, I ain't a coward, but there ain't anything more
+to do, or otherwise they'd lead us a dance. Don't get mad, come with us,
+let's go drink a bottle of old wine together."
+
+"One doesn't desert one's friends in a scrape," grumbled Montparnasse.
+
+"I tell you he's nabbed!" retorted Brujon. "At the present moment, the
+inn-keeper ain't worth a ha'penny. We can't do nothing for him. Let's be
+off. Every minute I think a bobby has got me in his fist."
+
+Montparnasse no longer offered more than a feeble resistance; the fact
+is, that these four men, with the fidelity of ruffians who never abandon
+each other, had prowled all night long about La Force, great as was
+their peril, in the hope of seeing Thenardier make his appearance on the
+top of some wall. But the night, which was really growing too fine,--for
+the downpour was such as to render all the streets deserted,--the cold
+which was overpowering them, their soaked garments, their hole-ridden
+shoes, the alarming noise which had just burst forth in the prison, the
+hours which had elapsed, the patrol which they had encountered, the
+hope which was vanishing, all urged them to beat a retreat. Montparnasse
+himself, who was, perhaps, almost Thenardier's son-in-law, yielded. A
+moment more, and they would be gone. Thenardier was panting on his wall
+like the shipwrecked sufferers of the Meduse on their raft when they
+beheld the vessel which had appeared in sight vanish on the horizon.
+
+He dared not call to them; a cry might be heard and ruin everything. An
+idea occurred to him, a last idea, a flash of inspiration; he drew from
+his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached from the
+chimney of the New Building, and flung it into the space enclosed by the
+fence.
+
+This rope fell at their feet.
+
+"A widow,"[37] said Babet.
+
+"My tortouse!"[38] said Brujon.
+
+"The tavern-keeper is there," said Montparnasse.
+
+They raised their eyes. Thenardier thrust out his head a very little.
+
+"Quick!" said Montparnasse, "have you the other end of the rope,
+Brujon?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Knot the two pieces together, we'll fling him the rope, he can fasten
+it to the wall, and he'll have enough of it to get down with."
+
+Thenardier ran the risk, and spoke:--
+
+"I am paralyzed with cold."
+
+"We'll warm you up."
+
+"I can't budge."
+
+"Let yourself slide, we'll catch you."
+
+"My hands are benumbed."
+
+"Only fasten the rope to the wall."
+
+"I can't."
+
+"Then one of us must climb up," said Montparnasse.
+
+"Three stories!" ejaculated Brujon.
+
+An ancient plaster flue, which had served for a stove that had been used
+in the shanty in former times, ran along the wall and mounted almost
+to the very spot where they could see Thenardier. This flue, then much
+damaged and full of cracks, has since fallen, but the marks of it are
+still visible.
+
+It was very narrow.
+
+"One might get up by the help of that," said Montparnasse.
+
+"By that flue?" exclaimed Babet, "a grown-up cove, never! it would take
+a brat."
+
+"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.
+
+"Where are we to find a young 'un?" said Guelemer.
+
+"Wait," said Montparnasse. "I've got the very article."
+
+He opened the gate of the fence very softly, made sure that no one was
+passing along the street, stepped out cautiously, shut the gate behind
+him, and set off at a run in the direction of the Bastille.
+
+Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thenardier;
+Babet, Brujon, and Guelemer did not open their lips; at last the gate
+opened once more, and Montparnasse appeared, breathless, and followed by
+Gavroche. The rain still rendered the street completely deserted.
+
+Little Gavroche entered the enclosure and gazed at the forms of these
+ruffians with a tranquil air. The water was dripping from his hair.
+Guelemer addressed him:--
+
+"Are you a man, young 'un?"
+
+Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:--
+
+"A young 'un like me's a man, and men like you are babes."
+
+"The brat's tongue's well hung!" exclaimed Babet.
+
+"The Paris brat ain't made of straw," added Brujon.
+
+"What do you want?" asked Gavroche.
+
+Montparnasse answered:--
+
+"Climb up that flue."
+
+"With this rope," said Babet.
+
+"And fasten it," continued Brujon.
+
+"To the top of the wall," went on Babet.
+
+"To the cross-bar of the window," added Brujon.
+
+"And then?" said Gavroche.
+
+"There!" said Guelemer.
+
+The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windows, and made
+that indescribable and disdainful noise with his lips which signifies:--
+
+"Is that all!"
+
+"There's a man up there whom you are to save," resumed Montparnasse.
+
+"Will you?" began Brujon again.
+
+"Greenhorn!" replied the lad, as though the question appeared a most
+unprecedented one to him.
+
+And he took off his shoes.
+
+Guelemer seized Gavroche by one arm, set him on the roof of the shanty,
+whose worm-eaten planks bent beneath the urchin's weight, and handed
+him the rope which Brujon had knotted together during Montparnasse's
+absence. The gamin directed his steps towards the flue, which it was
+easy to enter, thanks to a large crack which touched the roof. At the
+moment when he was on the point of ascending, Thenardier, who saw life
+and safety approaching, bent over the edge of the wall; the first light
+of dawn struck white upon his brow dripping with sweat, upon his livid
+cheek-bones, his sharp and savage nose, his bristling gray beard, and
+Gavroche recognized him.
+
+"Hullo! it's my father! Oh, that won't hinder."
+
+And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.
+
+He reached the summit of the hut, bestrode the old wall as though it had
+been a horse, and knotted the rope firmly to the upper cross-bar of the
+window.
+
+A moment later, Thenardier was in the street.
+
+As soon as he touched the pavement, as soon as he found himself out
+of danger, he was no longer either weary, or chilled or trembling; the
+terrible things from which he had escaped vanished like smoke, all that
+strange and ferocious mind awoke once more, and stood erect and free,
+ready to march onward.
+
+These were this man's first words:--
+
+"Now, whom are we to eat?"
+
+It is useless to explain the sense of this frightfully transparent
+remark, which signifies both to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder. To
+eat, true sense: to devour.
+
+"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon. "Let's settle it in three
+words, and part at once. There was an affair that promised well in the
+Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated house, an old rotten gate on
+a garden, and lone women."
+
+"Well! why not?" demanded Thenardier.
+
+"Your girl, Eponine, went to see about the matter," replied Babet.
+
+"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Guelemer. "Nothing to be
+made there."
+
+"The girl's no fool," said Thenardier. "Still, it must be seen to."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."
+
+In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who, during
+this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence-posts; he waited
+a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would turn towards him,
+then he put on his shoes again, and said:--
+
+"Is that all? You don't want any more, my men? Now you're out of your
+scrape. I'm off. I must go and get my brats out of bed."
+
+And off he went.
+
+The five men emerged, one after another, from the enclosure.
+
+When Gavroche had disappeared at the corner of the Rue des Ballets,
+Babet took Thenardier aside.
+
+"Did you take a good look at that young 'un?" he asked.
+
+"What young 'un?"
+
+"The one who climbed the wall and carried you the rope."
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"Well, I don't know, but it strikes me that it was your son."
+
+"Bah!" said Thenardier, "do you think so?"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG
+
+[Illustration: Slang b7-1-slang]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--ORIGIN
+
+Pigritia is a terrible word.
+
+It engenders a whole world, la pegre, for which read theft, and a hell,
+la pegrenne, for which read hunger.
+
+Thus, idleness is the mother.
+
+She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.
+
+Where are we at this moment? In the land of slang.
+
+What is slang? It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect;
+it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.
+
+When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave and sombre
+history introduced into a work written with the same aim as this[39] a
+thief who talked argot, there arose amazement and clamor.--"What! How!
+Argot! Why, argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys,
+convicts, of everything that is most abominable in society!" etc., etc.
+
+We have never understood this sort of objections.
+
+Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a profound
+observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend of the people,
+Balzac and Eugene Sue, having represented their ruffians as talking
+their natural language, as the author of The Last Day of a Condemned
+Man did in 1828, the same objections have been raised. People repeated:
+"What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? Slang is odious! Slang
+makes one shudder!"
+
+Who denies that? Of course it does.
+
+When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when
+has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go to the bottom? We have
+always thought that it was sometimes a courageous act, and, at least, a
+simple and useful deed, worthy of the sympathetic attention which duty
+accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should one not explore everything,
+and study everything? Why should one halt on the way? The halt is a
+matter depending on the sounding-line, and not on the leadsman.
+
+Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to
+undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social order,
+where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins, to rummage in
+those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize and to fling, still
+quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with
+filth when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary each
+word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire and the
+shadows. Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in
+its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of
+slang. It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the
+night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks one beholds
+a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers, rustles,
+wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One word resembles a
+claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye, such and such a phrase
+seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this is alive with
+the hideous vitality of things which have been organized out of
+disorganization.
+
+Now, when has horror ever excluded study? Since when has malady banished
+medicine? Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the viper, the
+bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who would
+cast them back into their darkness, saying: "Oh! how ugly that is!" The
+thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon
+who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like
+a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher
+hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. For, it must be stated
+to those who are ignorant of the case, that argot is both a literary
+phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly speaking? It is
+the language of wretchedness.
+
+We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms, which is
+one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades, professions,
+it may be added, all the accidents of the social hierarchy and all
+forms of intelligence, have their own slang. The merchant who says:
+"Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality," the broker on 'change
+who says: "Assets at end of current month," the gambler who says: "Tiers
+et tout, refait de pique," the sheriff of the Norman Isles who says:
+"The holder in fee reverting to his landed estate cannot claim the
+fruits of that estate during the hereditary seizure of the real estate
+by the mortgagor," the playwright who says: "The piece was hissed,"
+the comedian who says: "I've made a hit," the philosopher who says:
+"Phenomenal triplicity," the huntsman who says: "Voileci allais,
+Voileci fuyant," the phrenologist who says: "Amativeness, combativeness,
+secretiveness," the infantry soldier who says: "My shooting-iron," the
+cavalry-man who says: "My turkey-cock," the fencing-master who says:
+"Tierce, quarte, break," the printer who says: "My shooting-stick and
+galley,"--all, printer, fencing-master, cavalry dragoon, infantry-man,
+phrenologist, huntsman, philosopher, comedian, playwright, sheriff,
+gambler, stock-broker, and merchant, speak slang. The painter who says:
+"My grinder," the notary who says: "My Skip-the-Gutter," the hairdresser
+who says: "My mealyback," the cobbler who says: "My cub," talks slang.
+Strictly speaking, if one absolutely insists on the point, all the
+different fashions of saying the right and the left, the sailor's port
+and starboard, the scene-shifter's court-side, and garden-side, the
+beadle's Gospel-side and Epistle-side, are slang. There is the slang of
+the affected lady as well as of the precieuses. The Hotel Rambouillet
+nearly adjoins the Cour des Miracles. There is a slang of duchesses,
+witness this phrase contained in a love-letter from a very great lady
+and a very pretty woman of the Restoration: "You will find in this
+gossip a fultitude of reasons why I should libertize."[40] Diplomatic
+ciphers are slang; the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome,
+grkztntgzyal for despatch, and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI. for the Due de
+Modena, speaks slang. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for
+carrot, radish, and turnip, said Opoponach, perfroschinum,
+reptitalmus, dracatholicum, angelorum, postmegorum, talked slang. The
+sugar-manufacturer who says: "Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common,
+burnt,"--this honest manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of
+criticism twenty years ago, which used to say: "Half of the works of
+Shakespeare consists of plays upon words and puns,"--talked slang. The
+poet, and the artist who, with profound understanding, would designate
+M. de Montmorency as "a bourgeois," if he were not a judge of verses and
+statues, speak slang. The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora,"
+fruits, "Pomona," the sea, "Neptune," love, "fires," beauty, "charms,"
+a horse, "a courser," the white or tricolored cockade, "the rose of
+Bellona," the three-cornered hat, "Mars' triangle,"--that classical
+Academician talks slang. Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their
+slang. The tongue which is employed on board ship, that wonderful
+language of the sea, which is so complete and so picturesque, which was
+spoken by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperre, which mingles with
+the whistling of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the
+shock of the boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind, the gale,
+the cannon, is wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which is to the
+fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the jackal.
+
+No doubt. But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word
+slang is an extension which every one will not admit. For our part,
+we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and
+determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang. The veritable
+slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can be
+coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing
+else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous,
+cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of wretchedness. There
+exists, at the extremity of all abasement and all misfortunes, a last
+misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter into conflict
+with the whole mass of fortunate facts and reigning rights; a fearful
+conflict, where, now cunning, now violent, unhealthy and ferocious
+at one and the same time, it attacks the social order with pin-pricks
+through vice, and with club-blows through crime. To meet the needs of
+this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is
+slang.
+
+To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf, were
+it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and which would,
+otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of
+which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated, to extend
+the records of social observation; is to serve civilization itself. This
+service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by making two
+Carthaginian soldiers talk Phoenician; that service Moliere rendered,
+by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of
+dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phoenician, very good!
+Levantine, quite right! Even dialect, let that pass! They are tongues
+which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! What is the use
+of preserving slang? What is the good of assisting slang "to survive"?
+
+To this we reply in one word, only. Assuredly, if the tongue which a
+nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language
+which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and
+study.
+
+It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example, for
+more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every possible
+human misery.
+
+And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and
+infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view to remedy,
+is not a business in which choice is permitted. The historian of manners
+and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events.
+The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts of crowns, the
+births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles, assemblages, great
+public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything on the exterior;
+the other historian has the interior, the depths, the people who toil,
+suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing child, the secret war
+between man and man, obscure ferocities, prejudices, plotted
+iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct tremors of multitudes, the
+die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of the law, the secret evolution of
+souls, the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans,
+the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms which roam through the
+darkness. He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity
+at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable
+casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed and those who deal the
+blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast and those
+who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict it. Have these
+historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior to the historians
+of external facts? Does any one think that Alighieri has any fewer
+things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization any
+less important than the upper side merely because it is deeper and more
+sombre? Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted
+with the cavern?
+
+Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words of what
+precedes a marked separation might be inferred between the two classes
+of historians which does not exist in our mind. No one is a good
+historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples,
+if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian
+of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the
+interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the
+exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history
+of events, and this is true reciprocally. They constitute two different
+orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always
+interlaced, and which often bring forth results. All the lineaments
+which providence traces on the surface of a nation have their parallels,
+sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of the depths
+produce ebullitions on the surface. True history being a mixture of all
+things, the true historian mingles in everything.
+
+Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double
+focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.
+
+Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some
+bad action to perform, disguises itself. There it clothes itself in
+word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.
+
+One finds it difficult to recognize. Is it really the French tongue, the
+great human tongue? Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to retort
+upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the repertory of
+evil. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the
+Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club; it is called
+vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have painted its face, it
+crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile. Henceforth, it is apt
+at all roles, it is made suspicious by the counterfeiter, covered with
+verdigris by the forger, blacked by the soot of the incendiary; and the
+murderer applies its rouge.
+
+When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society,
+one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside.
+One distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without
+understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents,
+but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.
+The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic
+bestiality. One thinks one hears hydras talking.
+
+It is unintelligible in the dark. It gnashes and whispers, completing
+the gloom with mystery. It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still
+in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang. Obscurity
+in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity in voices. Terrible,
+toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and
+stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain
+and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity, of
+suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.
+
+Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who
+am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And are
+you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The earth
+is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is not a
+recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is
+so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.
+
+Are you what is called a happy man? Well! you are sad every day. Each
+day has its own great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were
+trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear for your
+own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day after to-morrow
+the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of some
+friend; then the prevailing weather, then something that has been broken
+or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your vertebral
+column reproach you; again, the course of public affairs. This without
+reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it goes on. One cloud is
+dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day out of a hundred which
+is wholly joyous and sunny. And you belong to that small class who are
+happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.
+
+Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and
+the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another,
+there are no fortunate.
+
+The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish
+the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,--that
+is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading,
+means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.
+
+However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer
+in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn
+without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the marvel of genius.
+
+When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer.
+The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in
+darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--ROOTS
+
+Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.
+
+Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden
+to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic
+dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement
+made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of
+the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were,
+beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Some seem to be still smoking.
+Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of a
+thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid bare.
+Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are
+fugitives from justice. Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that one
+feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.
+
+Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange
+dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case
+of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as
+for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the
+public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a
+language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the
+fact that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain
+metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.
+
+That exquisite and celebrated verse--
+
+ Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
+ But where are the snows of years gone by?
+
+is a verse of slang. Antam--ante annum--is a word of Thunes slang, which
+signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. Thirty-five years
+ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there could
+be read in one of the cells at Bicetre, this maxim engraved with a
+nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys: Les dabs
+d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coesre. This means Kings in
+days gone by always went and had themselves anointed. In the opinion of
+that king, anointment meant the galleys.
+
+The word decarade, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles at
+a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word,
+which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a masterly
+onomatopoeia the whole of La Fontaine's admirable verse:--
+
+ Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
+ Six stout horses drew a coach.
+
+
+From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more
+curious and fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language
+within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft
+which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the
+old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side of
+the language. This is what may be called the first, the vulgar aspect of
+slang. But, for those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that
+is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a veritable
+alluvial deposit. According as one digs a longer or shorter distance
+into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular French, Provencal,
+Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports,
+English and German, the Romance language in its three varieties, French,
+Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque and Celtic. A
+profound and unique formation. A subterranean edifice erected in common
+by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each
+suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its
+pebble. A throng of evil, base, or irritated souls, who have traversed
+life and have vanished into eternity, linger there almost entirely
+visible still beneath the form of some monstrous word.
+
+Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is
+boffete, a box on the ear, which is derived from bofeton; vantane,
+window (later on vanterne), which comes from vantana; gat, cat, which
+comes from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceyte. Do you want
+Italian? Here is spade, sword, which comes from spada; carvel, boat,
+which comes from caravella. Do you want English? Here is bichot, which
+comes from bishop; raille, spy, which comes from rascal, rascalion;
+pilche, a case, which comes from pilcher, a sheath. Do you want German?
+Here is the caleur, the waiter, kellner; the hers, the master, herzog
+(duke). Do you want Latin? Here is frangir, to break, frangere; affurer,
+to steal, fur; cadene, chain, catena. There is one word which crops up
+in every language of the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and
+authority. It is the word magnus; the Scotchman makes of it his mac,
+which designates the chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane, Mac-Callumore, the
+great Farlane, the great Callumore[41]; slang turns it into meck and
+later le meg, that is to say, God. Would you like Basque? Here is
+gahisto, the devil, which comes from gaiztoa, evil; sorgabon, good
+night, which comes from gabon, good evening. Do you want Celtic? Here is
+blavin, a handkerchief, which comes from blavet, gushing water; menesse,
+a woman (in a bad sense), which comes from meinec, full of stones;
+barant, brook, from baranton, fountain; goffeur, locksmith, from goff,
+blacksmith; guedouze, death, which comes from guenn-du, black-white.
+Finally, would you like history? Slang calls crowns les malteses, a
+souvenir of the coin in circulation on the galleys of Malta.
+
+In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses
+other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the
+mind of man itself.
+
+In the first place, the direct creation of words. Therein lies the
+mystery of tongues. To paint with words, which contains figures
+one knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human
+languages, what may be called their granite.
+
+Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words, words
+created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom, without
+etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary, barbarous,
+sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular power of
+expression and which live. The executioner, le taule; the forest,
+le sabri; fear, flight, taf; the lackey, le larbin; the mineral,
+the prefect, the minister, pharos; the devil, le rabouin. Nothing is
+stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. Some, le rabouin,
+for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce on
+you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.
+
+In the second place, metaphor. The peculiarity of a language which is
+desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in figures.
+Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a stroke,
+the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom is more
+metaphorical than slang: devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist
+the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a
+rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure
+which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates long oblique
+lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the lancers, and
+which compresses into a single word the popular expression: it rains
+halberds. Sometimes, in proportion as slang progresses from the first
+epoch to the second, words pass from the primitive and savage sense to
+the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes
+le boulanger (the baker), who puts the bread into the oven. This is
+more witty, but less grand, something like Racine after Corneille, like
+Euripides after AEschylus. Certain slang phrases which participate
+in the two epochs and have at once the barbaric character and the
+metaphorical character resemble phantasmagories. Les sorgueuers vont
+solliciter des gails a la lune--the prowlers are going to steal horses
+by night,--this passes before the mind like a group of spectres. One
+knows not what one sees.
+
+In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language. It uses
+it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it
+often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and
+summary fashion. Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed and
+complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed, in
+which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding elements, the
+direct creation and the metaphor: le cab jaspine, je marronne que la
+roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, the dog is barking, I suspect
+that the diligence for Paris is passing through the woods. Le dab est
+sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere, la fee est bative, the bourgeois is
+stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty. Generally,
+to throw listeners off the track, slang confines itself to adding to
+all the words of the language without distinction, an ignoble tail, a
+termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue, or in uche. Thus: Vousiergue
+trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? Do you think that leg of mutton
+good? A phrase addressed by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out
+whether the sum offered for his escape suited him.
+
+The termination in mar has been added recently.
+
+Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted
+itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as
+it feels that it is understood, it changes its form. Contrary to what
+happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls
+upon it kills whatever it touches. Thus slang is in constant process of
+decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never
+pauses. It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten
+centuries. Thus le larton (bread) becomes le lartif; le gail (horse)
+becomes le gaye; la fertanche (straw) becomes la fertille; le momignard
+(brat), le momacque; les fiques (duds), frusques; la chique (the
+church), l'egrugeoir; le colabre (neck), le colas. The devil is at
+first, gahisto, then le rabouin, then the baker; the priest is a
+ratichon, then the boar (le sanglier); the dagger is le vingt-deux
+(twenty-two), then le surin, then le lingre; the police are railles,
+then roussins, then rousses, then marchands de lacets (dealers in
+stay-laces), then coquers, then cognes; the executioner is le taule,
+then Charlot, l'atigeur, then le becquillard. In the seventeenth
+century, to fight was "to give each other snuff"; in the nineteenth
+it is "to chew each other's throats." There have been twenty different
+phrases between these two extremes. Cartouche's talk would have been
+Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of this language are perpetually
+engaged in flight like the men who utter them.
+
+Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement,
+the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more. It has its
+headquarters where it maintains its sway. The Temple preserved the slang
+of the seventeenth century; Bicetre, when it was a prison, preserved the
+slang of Thunes. There one could hear the termination in anche of
+the old Thuneurs. Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), do you drink? But perpetual
+movement remains its law, nevertheless.
+
+If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of
+observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls
+into doleful and useful meditation. No study is more efficacious and
+more fecund in instruction. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in
+slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means
+to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.
+
+For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of
+darkness. The night is called la sorgue; man, l'orgue. Man is a
+derivative of the night.
+
+They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light
+of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of
+their liberty as one would speak of his health. A man under arrest is a
+sick man; one who is condemned is a dead man.
+
+The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which
+he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon
+the castus. In that funereal place, life outside always presents itself
+under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet; you
+think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet that one
+walks? No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one dances; so,
+when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first idea is that
+now he can dance, and he calls the saw the bastringue (public-house
+ball).--A name is a centre; profound assimilation.--The ruffian has two
+heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads him all his life
+long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on the day of his
+death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime la sorbonne,
+and the head which expiates it la tronche.--When a man has no longer
+anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has
+arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word
+blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for crime;
+he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his
+distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says
+un reguise.--What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell. The
+convict calls himself a fagot.--And finally, what name do malefactors
+give to their prison? The college. A whole penitentiary system can be
+evolved from that word.
+
+Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of the
+galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary lirlonfa, have
+had their birth?
+
+Let him listen to what follows:--
+
+There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cellar. This
+cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither
+windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door; men could enter
+there, air could not. This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and
+for floor ten inches of mud. It was flagged; but the pavement had rotted
+and cracked under the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the floor,
+a long and massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation from side
+to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart, chains three
+feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings for the
+neck. In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys were
+incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon. They were
+thrust under this beam, where each one found his fetters swinging in the
+darkness and waiting for him.
+
+The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands,
+caught the unhappy wretches by the throat. They were rivetted and
+left there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They
+remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that beam,
+almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their bread, jug,
+or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth flowing to their
+very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with thighs and knees giving
+way, clinging fast to the chain with their hands in order to obtain some
+rest, unable to sleep except when standing erect, and awakened every
+moment by the strangling of the collar; some woke no more. In order to
+eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to them in the mud, along
+their leg with their heel until it reached their hand.
+
+How long did they remain thus? One month, two months, six months
+sometimes; one stayed a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys.
+Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king. In this
+sepulchre-hell, what did they do? What man can do in a sepulchre, they
+went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they
+sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. In the waters
+of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before
+the sound of the oars. Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone
+through the prison-cellar of the Chatelet, said: "It was the rhymes that
+kept me up." Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?
+
+It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.
+It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Chatelet of Paris that comes
+the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: "Timaloumisaine,
+timaloumison." The majority of these:
+
+ Icicaille est la theatre Here is the theatre
+ Du petit dardant. Of the little archer (Cupid).
+
+
+Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart
+of man, love.
+
+In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. The secret is
+the thing above all others. The secret, in the eyes of these wretches,
+is unity which serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to
+tear from each member of this fierce community something of his own
+personality. To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is
+called: "to eat the bit." As though the informer drew to himself a
+little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each
+one's flesh.
+
+What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace metaphor
+replies: "It is to see thirty-six candles."
+
+Here slang intervenes and takes it up: Candle, camoufle. Thereupon, the
+ordinary tongue gives camouflet[42] as the synonym for soufflet. Thus,
+by a sort of infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor,
+that incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the
+Academy; and Poulailler saying: "I light my camoufle," causes Voltaire
+to write: "Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets."
+
+Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step. Study and
+investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of
+intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.
+
+The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I,
+whoever passes by; le pantre. (Pan, everybody.)
+
+Slang is language turned convict.
+
+That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it
+can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality,
+that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is
+sufficient to create consternation.
+
+Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!
+
+Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness?
+Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the liberator, the
+immense rider of Pegasi and hippo-griffs, the combatant of heroes of
+the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two wings, the radiant
+knight of the future? Will she forever summon in vain to her assistance
+the lance of light of the ideal? Is she condemned to hear the fearful
+approach of Evil through the density of the gulf, and to catch glimpses,
+nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the hideous water of that dragon's
+head, that maw streaked with foam, and that writhing undulation of
+claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain there, without a gleam
+of light, without hope, given over to that terrible approach, vaguely
+scented out by the monster, shuddering, dishevelled, wringing its arms,
+forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked
+amid the shadows!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS
+
+As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred
+years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre,
+symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful,
+now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those
+vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of
+their own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for
+instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves,
+a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of this
+tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsman
+on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whence
+emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy than these
+reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakes
+for the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the boiling of
+counterfeiters. The diverse forms assumed by thought in the realm
+of slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of this
+powerless and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of some
+of which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the point of
+evoking tears. The pegre is always the poor pegre, and he is always
+the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He hardly
+complains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has come
+down to us: "I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture
+his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry, without himself
+suffering torture."[43] The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes
+himself small before the low, and frail in the presence of society;
+he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to the side of
+compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.
+
+Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songs
+and thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial
+mien. The plaintive malure was replaced by the larifla. We find in the
+eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons,
+a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and lilting
+refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent
+gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest by a
+will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--
+
+ Miralabi suslababo
+ Mirliton ribonribette
+ Surlababi mirlababo
+ Mirliton ribonribo.
+
+
+This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a
+man's throat.
+
+A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of
+the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the grand
+meg and the grand dab. Given Louis XV. they call the King of France "le
+Marquis de Pantin." And behold, they are almost gay. A sort of gleam
+proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their consciences were
+not heavy within them any more. These lamentable tribes of darkness have
+no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the
+heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of
+their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers and dreamers,
+some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not of. A
+sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines and
+sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of their ugliness, while
+communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines. A sign, in short, of
+some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some diversion shall
+arise.
+
+Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth
+century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth
+century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot
+at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers,
+Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these are
+four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due
+to them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards
+the four cardinal points of progress. Diderot towards the beautiful,
+Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towards
+the just. But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were the
+sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock
+in the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the great
+books of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the
+court-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the King's
+sanction, no one knows what strangely disorganizing writings, which were
+eagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd to
+say, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret
+Library. These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the
+surface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger.
+It is obscure because it is underhand. Of all these writers, the one
+who probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery was
+Restif de La Bretonne.
+
+This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in
+Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed up
+by Schiller in his famous drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up
+in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious and
+false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd in
+reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them,
+after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of
+theory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and
+honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had prepared
+the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it. Whenever a fact
+of this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenders
+wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep,
+which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the
+unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made
+spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of
+society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.
+
+Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful
+commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely
+political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer
+the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of
+discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.
+
+Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.
+
+It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth
+century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut
+short.
+
+The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with
+the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the
+door of ill and opened the door of good.
+
+It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma,
+rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.
+
+It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a
+second soul, the right.
+
+The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and
+to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply
+impossible. Blind is he who announces it! Foolish is he who fears it!
+Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.
+
+Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and
+monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of
+the Middle Ages in our constitution. We no longer live in the days when
+terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet
+the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from
+mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the
+soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one
+suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.
+
+The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, once
+developed, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all is
+liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to
+Robespierre's admirable definition. Since '89, the whole people has
+been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who,
+possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels
+within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an
+internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns. Hence
+incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes
+heroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary wholesomeness
+is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a 10th of August,
+there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the enlightened and
+increasing throngs is: death to thieves! Progress is an honest man; the
+ideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were
+the wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By
+the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over
+the treasure. Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. In
+those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a
+hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded with
+diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond,
+which was worth thirty millions. Barefooted, they guarded that crown.
+
+Hence, no more Jacquerie. I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The
+old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth
+it can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of the
+red spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scares
+no longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures
+alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE
+
+This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not.
+There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood
+will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner
+in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis
+is there. Social phthisis is called misery.
+
+One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by
+lightning.
+
+Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget
+that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must
+understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking
+first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing,
+airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a
+magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in
+offering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness,
+in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of the
+universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limit
+to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in
+having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to
+the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that
+grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes,
+and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting
+salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is,
+that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need;
+in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more light and more
+comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.
+
+And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is
+this: labor cannot be a law without being a right.
+
+We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for
+that.
+
+If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.
+
+Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material
+improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity,
+truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science
+and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and
+minds which do not eat. If there is anything more heart-breaking than
+a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from
+hunger for the light.
+
+The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we
+shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge
+naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be
+accomplished by a simple elevation of level.
+
+We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.
+
+The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It censures.
+This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is walking and
+advancing. It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arrives
+with his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism, with his
+banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He advances, he
+threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not despair, on our
+side. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped.
+
+What have we to fear, we who believe?
+
+No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists
+a return of a river on its course.
+
+But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When
+they say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that
+they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are
+inoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejecting
+To-morrow, and that is to die.
+
+Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul
+never,--this is what we desire.
+
+Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem
+will be solved.
+
+Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be
+finished by the nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future
+blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a
+divinely fatal phenomenon.
+
+Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them
+within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of
+equilibrium; that is to say, to equity. A force composed of earth and
+heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker
+of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than
+extraordinary vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man,
+and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed
+by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem
+impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing a
+solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson
+from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that
+mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident
+face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre, and made the
+imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.
+
+In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the
+grandiose onward march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially
+in science and peace. Its object is, and its result must be, to dissolve
+wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it scrutinizes, it
+analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of
+reduction, discarding all hatred.
+
+More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind
+which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of
+nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,--and some fine
+day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all
+away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of
+Egypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are
+the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societies
+have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vice
+which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terrible
+deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no reply.
+Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they
+sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror that
+we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behind
+those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels,
+Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which
+emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and
+light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient
+civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own. Everywhere
+upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we
+lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once
+diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy.
+Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its
+prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved. It is
+already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.
+All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards
+this point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty--to auscultate
+civilization.
+
+We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this
+persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an
+austere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, we
+feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it has
+these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor
+because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do
+not kill man.
+
+And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his
+head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their
+hours of weakness.
+
+Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put
+this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy
+face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of
+the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite
+increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,
+a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the
+suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the
+soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing
+others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging
+its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and
+simple ignorance.
+
+Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point
+which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal
+is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated,
+imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces,
+monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the
+maw of the clouds.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--FULL LIGHT
+
+The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized
+through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither Magnon had
+sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from the Rue Plumet,
+and had then conducted Marius thither, and that, after many days spent
+in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on by that force which draws
+the iron to the magnet and a lover towards the stones of which is built
+the house of her whom he loves, had finally entered Cosette's garden as
+Romeo entered the garden of Juliet. This had even proved easier for him
+than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only
+to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which
+vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth.
+Marius was slender and readily passed through.
+
+As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never entered
+the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.
+
+Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed these
+two souls, Marius was there every evening. If, at that period of
+her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least
+unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are
+generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.
+One of woman's magnanimities is to yield. Love, at the height where it
+is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness
+of modesty. But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the
+heart, and we take the body. Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon
+it in the gloom with a shudder. Love has no middle course; it either
+ruins or it saves. All human destiny lies in this dilemma. This dilemma,
+ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than
+by love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same
+sentiment says "yes" and "no" in the human heart. Of all the things that
+God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light,
+alas! and the most darkness.
+
+God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves which
+save.
+
+Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832, there were
+there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden, beneath that
+thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day, two beings
+composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with all the
+felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind, pure,
+honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid the shadows.
+It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette
+had a nimbus. They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they
+clasped each other's hands, they pressed close to each other; but there
+was a distance which they did not pass. Not that they respected it;
+they did not know of its existence. Marius was conscious of a barrier,
+Cosette's innocence; and Cosette of a support, Marius' loyalty. The
+first kiss had also been the last. Marius, since that time, had not gone
+further than to touch Cosette's hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her
+hair, with his lips. For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman.
+He inhaled her. She refused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was
+happy, and Marius was satisfied. They lived in this ecstatic state which
+can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul. It was
+the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal. Two swans
+meeting on the Jungfrau.
+
+At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute,
+beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic
+Marius, would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised
+Cosette's robe to the height of her ankle. Once, in the moonlight,
+Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell
+apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat. Marius
+turned away his eyes.
+
+What took place between these two beings? Nothing. They adored each
+other.
+
+At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a sacred
+spot. All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense; and they
+opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers. The wanton and
+vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength and intoxication, around
+these two innocents, and they uttered words of love which set the trees
+to trembling.
+
+What words were these? Breaths. Nothing more. These breaths sufficed to
+trouble and to touch all nature round about. Magic power which we
+should find it difficult to understand were we to read in a book these
+conversations which are made to be borne away and dispersed like smoke
+wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves. Take from those murmurs of two
+lovers that melody which proceeds from the soul and which accompanies
+them like a lyre, and what remains is nothing more than a shade; you
+say: "What! is that all!" eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions,
+laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most
+sublime in the world! The only things which are worth the trouble of
+saying and hearing!
+
+The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these
+absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile and a malicious
+fellow. Cosette said to Marius:--
+
+"Dost thou know?--"
+
+[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without either
+of them being able to say how it had come about, they had begun to call
+each other thou.]
+
+"Dost thou know? My name is Euphrasie."
+
+"Euphrasie? Why, no, thy name is Cosette."
+
+"Oh! Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I was
+a little thing. But my real name is Euphrasie. Dost thou like that
+name--Euphrasie?"
+
+"Yes. But Cosette is not ugly."
+
+"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"
+
+"Why, yes."
+
+"Then I like it better too. Truly, it is pretty, Cosette. Call me
+Cosette."
+
+And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a
+grove situated in heaven. On another occasion she gazed intently at him
+and exclaimed:--
+
+"Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty, you
+are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am, but I bid
+you defiance with this word: I love you!"
+
+And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung by a
+star.
+
+Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she said to
+him:--
+
+"Don't cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without my
+permission. It's very naughty to cough and to disturb me. I want you to
+be well, because, in the first place, if you were not well, I should be
+very unhappy. What should I do then?"
+
+And this was simply divine.
+
+Once Marius said to Cosette:--
+
+"Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was Ursule."
+
+This made both of them laugh the whole evening.
+
+In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to exclaim:--
+
+"Oh! One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to finish breaking
+up a veteran!" But he stopped short, and went no further. He would have
+been obliged to speak to Cosette of her garter, and that was impossible.
+This bordered on a strange theme, the flesh, before which that immense
+and innocent love recoiled with a sort of sacred fright.
+
+Marius pictured life with Cosette to himself like this, without anything
+else; to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, to displace the old and
+accommodating bar of the chief-justice's gate, to sit elbow to elbow
+on that bench, to gaze through the trees at the scintillation of the
+on-coming night, to fit a fold of the knee of his trousers into the
+ample fall of Cosette's gown, to caress her thumb-nail, to call her
+thou, to smell of the same flower, one after the other, forever,
+indefinitely. During this time, clouds passed above their heads. Every
+time that the wind blows it bears with it more of the dreams of men than
+of the clouds of heaven.
+
+This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry, by any means.
+To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves is the first method of
+bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious who tries it. A compliment
+is something like a kiss through a veil. Voluptuousness mingles there
+with its sweet tiny point, while it hides itself. The heart draws back
+before voluptuousness only to love the more. Marius' blandishments, all
+saturated with fancy, were, so to speak, of azure hue. The birds when
+they fly up yonder, in the direction of the angels, must hear such
+words. There were mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all
+the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in
+the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical
+effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of
+cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and
+exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.
+
+"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are! I dare not look at you.
+It is all over with me when I contemplate you. You are a grace. I know
+not what is the matter with me. The hem of your gown, when the tip of
+your shoe peeps from beneath, upsets me. And then, what an enchanted
+gleam when you open your thought even but a little! You talk
+astonishingly good sense. It seems to me at times that you are a
+dream. Speak, I listen, I admire. Oh Cosette! how strange it is and how
+charming! I am really beside myself. You are adorable, Mademoiselle. I
+study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope."
+
+And Cosette answered:--
+
+"I have been loving a little more all the time that has passed since
+this morning."
+
+Questions and replies took care of themselves in this dialogue, which
+always turned with mutual consent upon love, as the little pith figures
+always turn on their peg.
+
+Cosette's whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency,
+whiteness, candor, radiance. It might have been said of Cosette that she
+was clear. She produced on those who saw her the sensation of April
+and dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of the
+auroral light in the form of a woman.
+
+It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her.
+But the truth is, that this little school-girl, fresh from the convent,
+talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts of
+true and delicate sayings. Her prattle was conversation. She never made
+a mistake about anything, and she saw things justly. The woman feels and
+speaks with the tender instinct of the heart, which is infallible.
+
+No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are, at
+once, both sweet and deep. Sweetness and depth, they are the whole of
+woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.
+
+In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. A
+crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of hawthorn
+broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled with
+melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep. The most
+sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times, almost
+unbearable.
+
+And, in addition to this,--all these contradictions are the lightning
+play of love,--they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily and with
+a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes presented the
+air of two boys.
+
+Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity, nature is
+always present and will not be forgotten. She is there with her brutal
+and sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one
+feels in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious
+shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.
+
+They idolized each other.
+
+The permanent and the immutable are persistent. People live, they smile,
+they laugh, they make little grimaces with the tips of their lips, they
+interlace their fingers, they call each other thou, and that does not
+prevent eternity.
+
+Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twilight, in the
+invisible, with the birds, with the roses; they fascinate each other in
+the darkness with their hearts which they throw into their eyes, they
+murmur, they whisper, and in the meantime, immense librations of the
+planets fill the infinite universe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE BEWILDERMENT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS
+
+They existed vaguely, frightened at their happiness. They did not notice
+the cholera which decimated Paris precisely during that very month. They
+had confided in each other as far as possible, but this had not extended
+much further than their names. Marius had told Cosette that he was an
+orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer, that
+he lived by writing things for publishers, that his father had been a
+colonel, that the latter had been a hero, and that he, Marius, was on
+bad terms with his grandfather who was rich. He had also hinted at being
+a baron, but this had produced no effect on Cosette. She did not
+know the meaning of the word. Marius was Marius. On her side, she
+had confided to him that she had been brought up at the Petit-Picpus
+convent, that her mother, like his own, was dead, that her father's name
+was M. Fauchelevent, that he was very good, that he gave a great deal
+to the poor, but that he was poor himself, and that he denied himself
+everything though he denied her nothing.
+
+Strange to say, in the sort of symphony which Marius had lived since he
+had been in the habit of seeing Cosette, the past, even the most recent
+past, had become so confused and distant to him, that what Cosette told
+him satisfied him completely. It did not even occur to him to tell her
+about the nocturnal adventure in the hovel, about Thenardier, about the
+burn, and about the strange attitude and singular flight of her father.
+Marius had momentarily forgotten all this; in the evening he did not
+even know that there had been a morning, what he had done, where he had
+breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ears which
+rendered him deaf to every other thought; he only existed at the hours
+when he saw Cosette. Then, as he was in heaven, it was quite natural
+that he should forget earth. Both bore languidly the indefinable burden
+of immaterial pleasures. Thus lived these somnambulists who are called
+lovers.
+
+Alas! Who is there who has not felt all these things? Why does there
+come an hour when one emerges from this azure, and why does life go on
+afterwards?
+
+Loving almost takes the place of thinking. Love is an ardent
+forgetfulness of all the rest. Then ask logic of passion if you will.
+There is no more absolute logical sequence in the human heart than there
+is a perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette
+and Marius nothing existed except Marius and Cosette. The universe
+around them had fallen into a hole. They lived in a golden minute. There
+was nothing before them, nothing behind. It hardly occurred to Marius
+that Cosette had a father. His brain was dazzled and obliterated. Of
+what did these lovers talk then? We have seen, of the flowers, and
+the swallows, the setting sun and the rising moon, and all sorts of
+important things. They had told each other everything except everything.
+The everything of lovers is nothing. But the father, the realities, that
+lair, the ruffians, that adventure, to what purpose? And was he very
+sure that this nightmare had actually existed? They were two, and they
+adored each other, and beyond that there was nothing. Nothing else
+existed. It is probable that this vanishing of hell in our rear is
+inherent to the arrival of paradise. Have we beheld demons? Are there
+any? Have we trembled? Have we suffered? We no longer know. A rosy cloud
+hangs over it.
+
+So these two beings lived in this manner, high aloft, with all that
+improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the
+zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in
+the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head to foot;
+already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily charged with
+humanity to disappear in the blue, suspended like atoms which are
+waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the bounds of destiny;
+ignorant of that rut; yesterday, to-day, to-morrow; amazed, rapturous,
+floating, soaring; at times so light that they could take their flight
+out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar away to all eternity.
+They slept wide-awake, thus sweetly lulled. Oh! splendid lethargy of the
+real overwhelmed by the ideal.
+
+Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her
+presence. The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.
+
+Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them.
+They considered that they had already arrived. It is a strange claim on
+man's part to wish that love should lead to something.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE BEGINNING OF SHADOW
+
+Jean Valjean suspected nothing.
+
+Cosette, who was rather less dreamy than Marius, was gay, and that
+sufficed for Jean Valjean's happiness. The thoughts which Cosette
+cherished, her tender preoccupations, Marius' image which filled her
+heart, took away nothing from the incomparable purity of her beautiful,
+chaste, and smiling brow. She was at the age when the virgin bears her
+love as the angel his lily. So Jean Valjean was at ease. And then, when
+two lovers have come to an understanding, things always go well; the
+third party who might disturb their love is kept in a state of perfect
+blindness by a restricted number of precautions which are always the
+same in the case of all lovers. Thus, Cosette never objected to any of
+Jean Valjean's proposals. Did she want to take a walk? "Yes, dear little
+father." Did she want to stay at home? Very good. Did he wish to pass
+the evening with Cosette? She was delighted. As he always went to bed at
+ten o'clock, Marius did not come to the garden on such occasions until
+after that hour, when, from the street, he heard Cosette open the long
+glass door on the veranda. Of course, no one ever met Marius in the
+daytime. Jean Valjean never even dreamed any longer that Marius was in
+existence. Only once, one morning, he chanced to say to Cosette: "Why,
+you have whitewash on your back!" On the previous evening, Marius, in a
+transport, had pushed Cosette against the wall.
+
+Old Toussaint, who retired early, thought of nothing but her sleep, and
+was as ignorant of the whole matter as Jean Valjean.
+
+Marius never set foot in the house. When he was with Cosette, they hid
+themselves in a recess near the steps, in order that they might neither
+be seen nor heard from the street, and there they sat, frequently
+contenting themselves, by way of conversation, with pressing each
+other's hands twenty times a minute as they gazed at the branches of the
+trees. At such times, a thunderbolt might have fallen thirty paces from
+them, and they would not have noticed it, so deeply was the revery of
+the one absorbed and sunk in the revery of the other.
+
+Limpid purity. Hours wholly white; almost all alike. This sort of love
+is a recollection of lily petals and the plumage of the dove.
+
+The whole extent of the garden lay between them and the street. Every
+time that Marius entered and left, he carefully adjusted the bar of the
+gate in such a manner that no displacement was visible.
+
+He usually went away about midnight, and returned to Courfeyrac's
+lodgings. Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:--
+
+"Would you believe it? Marius comes home nowadays at one o'clock in the
+morning."
+
+Bahorel replied:--
+
+"What do you expect? There's always a petard in a seminary fellow."
+
+At times, Courfeyrac folded his arms, assumed a serious air, and said to
+Marius:--
+
+"You are getting irregular in your habits, young man."
+
+Courfeyrac, being a practical man, did not take in good part this
+reflection of an invisible paradise upon Marius; he was not much in the
+habit of concealed passions; it made him impatient, and now and then he
+called upon Marius to come back to reality.
+
+One morning, he threw him this admonition:--
+
+"My dear fellow, you produce upon me the effect of being located in
+the moon, the realm of dreams, the province of illusions, capital,
+soap-bubble. Come, be a good boy, what's her name?"
+
+But nothing could induce Marius "to talk." They might have torn out his
+nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable
+name, Cosette, was composed. True love is as luminous as the dawn and as
+silent as the tomb. Only, Courfeyrac saw this change in Marius, that his
+taciturnity was of the beaming order.
+
+During this sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette learned to know these
+immense delights. To dispute and to say you for thou, simply that they
+might say thou the better afterwards. To talk at great length with very
+minute details, of persons in whom they took not the slightest interest
+in the world; another proof that in that ravishing opera called love,
+the libretto counts for almost nothing.
+
+For Marius, to listen to Cosette discussing finery.
+
+For Cosette, to listen to Marius talk in politics;
+
+To listen, knee pressed to knee, to the carriages rolling along the Rue
+de Babylone;
+
+To gaze upon the same planet in space, or at the same glowworm gleaming
+in the grass;
+
+To hold their peace together; a still greater delight than conversation;
+
+Etc., etc.
+
+In the meantime, divers complications were approaching.
+
+One evening, Marius was on his way to the rendezvous, by way of the
+Boulevard des Invalides. He habitually walked with drooping head. As he
+was on the point of turning the corner of the Rue Plumet, he heard some
+one quite close to him say:--
+
+"Good evening, Monsieur Marius."
+
+He raised his head and recognized Eponine.
+
+This produced a singular effect upon him. He had not thought of that
+girl a single time since the day when she had conducted him to the Rue
+Plumet, he had not seen her again, and she had gone completely out of
+his mind. He had no reasons for anything but gratitude towards her, he
+owed her his happiness, and yet, it was embarrassing to him to meet her.
+
+It is an error to think that passion, when it is pure and happy, leads
+man to a state of perfection; it simply leads him, as we have noted, to
+a state of oblivion. In this situation, man forgets to be bad, but
+he also forgets to be good. Gratitude, duty, matters essential and
+important to be remembered, vanish. At any other time, Marius would have
+behaved quite differently to Eponine. Absorbed in Cosette, he had not
+even clearly put it to himself that this Eponine was named Eponine
+Thenardier, and that she bore the name inscribed in his father's will,
+that name, for which, but a few months before, he would have so ardently
+sacrificed himself. We show Marius as he was. His father himself was
+fading out of his soul to some extent, under the splendor of his love.
+
+He replied with some embarrassment:--
+
+"Ah! so it's you, Eponine?"
+
+"Why do you call me you? Have I done anything to you?"
+
+"No," he answered.
+
+Certainly, he had nothing against her. Far from it. Only, he felt that
+he could not do otherwise, now that he used thou to Cosette, than say
+you to Eponine.
+
+As he remained silent, she exclaimed:--
+
+"Say--"
+
+Then she paused. It seemed as though words failed that creature formerly
+so heedless and so bold. She tried to smile and could not. Then she
+resumed:--
+
+"Well?"
+
+Then she paused again, and remained with downcast eyes.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Marius," said she suddenly and abruptly; and away she
+went.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG
+
+The following day was the 3d of June, 1832, a date which it is necessary
+to indicate on account of the grave events which at that epoch hung on
+the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds. Marius,
+at nightfall, was pursuing the same road as on the preceding evening,
+with the same thoughts of delight in his heart, when he caught sight
+of Eponine approaching, through the trees of the boulevard. Two days
+in succession--this was too much. He turned hastily aside, quitted the
+boulevard, changed his course and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue
+Monsieur.
+
+This caused Eponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which
+she had not yet done. Up to that time, she had contented herself with
+watching him on his passage along the boulevard without ever seeking to
+encounter him. It was only on the evening before that she had attempted
+to address him.
+
+So Eponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact. She saw him
+displace the bar and slip into the garden.
+
+She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and
+readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.
+
+She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--
+
+"None of that, Lisette!"
+
+She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the
+bar, as though she were guarding it. It was precisely at the point where
+the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in
+which Eponine was entirely concealed.
+
+She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without
+breathing, a prey to her thoughts.
+
+Towards ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who
+passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making
+haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute, as he skirted
+the garden railings and reached the angle which it made with the wall,
+heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--
+
+"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."
+
+The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into
+the black niche, and was greatly alarmed. He redoubled his pace.
+
+This passer-by had reason to make haste, for a very few instants later,
+six men, who were marching separately and at some distance from each
+other, along the wall, and who might have been taken for a gray patrol,
+entered the Rue Plumet.
+
+The first to arrive at the garden railing halted, and waited for the
+others; a second later, all six were reunited.
+
+These men began to talk in a low voice.
+
+"This is the place," said one of them.
+
+"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" asked another.
+
+"I don't know. In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make him
+eat."
+
+"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice of a
+ventriloquist.
+
+"So much the better," said the second who had spoken. "It won't screech
+under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."
+
+The sixth, who had not yet opened his lips, now began to inspect
+the gate, as Eponine had done an hour earlier, grasping each bar in
+succession, and shaking them cautiously.
+
+Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened. As he was on the
+point of grasping this bar, a hand emerged abruptly from the darkness,
+fell upon his arm; he felt himself vigorously thrust aside by a push
+in the middle of his breast, and a hoarse voice said to him, but not
+loudly:--
+
+"There's a dog."
+
+At the same moment, he perceived a pale girl standing before him.
+
+The man underwent that shock which the unexpected always brings. He
+bristled up in hideous wise; nothing is so formidable to behold as
+ferocious beasts who are uneasy; their terrified air evokes terror.
+
+He recoiled and stammered:--
+
+"What jade is this?"
+
+"Your daughter."
+
+It was, in fact, Eponine, who had addressed Thenardier.
+
+At the apparition of Eponine, the other five, that is to say,
+Claquesous, Guelemer, Babet, Brujon, and Montparnasse had noiselessly
+drawn near, without precipitation, without uttering a word, with the
+sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night.
+
+Some indescribable but hideous tools were visible in their hands.
+Guelemer held one of those pairs of curved pincers which prowlers call
+fanchons.
+
+"Ah, see here, what are you about there? What do you want with us? Are
+you crazy?" exclaimed Thenardier, as loudly as one can exclaim and still
+speak low; "what have you come here to hinder our work for?"
+
+Eponine burst out laughing, and threw herself on his neck.
+
+"I am here, little father, because I am here. Isn't a person allowed to
+sit on the stones nowadays? It's you who ought not to be here. What
+have you come here for, since it's a biscuit? I told Magnon so. There's
+nothing to be done here. But embrace me, my good little father! It's a
+long time since I've seen you! So you're out?"
+
+Thenardier tried to disentangle himself from Eponine's arms, and
+grumbled:--
+
+"That's good. You've embraced me. Yes, I'm out. I'm not in. Now, get
+away with you."
+
+But Eponine did not release her hold, and redoubled her caresses.
+
+"But how did you manage it, little pa? You must have been very clever to
+get out of that. Tell me about it! And my mother? Where is mother? Tell
+me about mamma."
+
+Thenardier replied:--
+
+"She's well. I don't know, let me alone, and be off, I tell you."
+
+"I won't go, so there now," pouted Eponine like a spoiled child; "you
+send me off, and it's four months since I saw you, and I've hardly had
+time to kiss you."
+
+And she caught her father round the neck again.
+
+"Come, now, this is stupid!" said Babet.
+
+"Make haste!" said Guelemer, "the cops may pass."
+
+The ventriloquist's voice repeated his distich:--
+
+
+ "Nous n' sommes pas le jour de l'an,
+ "This isn't New Year's day
+ A becoter papa, maman."
+ To peck at pa and ma."
+
+
+Eponine turned to the five ruffians.
+
+"Why, it's Monsieur Brujon. Good day, Monsieur Babet. Good day,
+Monsieur Claquesous. Don't you know me, Monsieur Guelemer? How goes it,
+Montparnasse?"
+
+"Yes, they know you!" ejaculated Thenardier. "But good day, good
+evening, sheer off! leave us alone!"
+
+"It's the hour for foxes, not for chickens," said Montparnasse.
+
+"You see the job we have on hand here," added Babet.
+
+Eponine caught Montparnasse's hand.
+
+"Take care," said he, "you'll cut yourself, I've a knife open."
+
+"My little Montparnasse," responded Eponine very gently, "you must have
+confidence in people. I am the daughter of my father, perhaps. Monsieur
+Babet, Monsieur Guelemer, I'm the person who was charged to investigate
+this matter."
+
+It is remarkable that Eponine did not talk slang. That frightful tongue
+had become impossible to her since she had known Marius.
+
+She pressed in her hand, small, bony, and feeble as that of a skeleton,
+Guelemer's huge, coarse fingers, and continued:--
+
+"You know well that I'm no fool. Ordinarily, I am believed. I have
+rendered you service on various occasions. Well, I have made inquiries;
+you will expose yourselves to no purpose, you see. I swear to you that
+there is nothing in this house."
+
+"There are lone women," said Guelemer.
+
+"No, the persons have moved away."
+
+"The candles haven't, anyway!" ejaculated Babet.
+
+And he pointed out to Eponine, across the tops of the trees, a light
+which was wandering about in the mansard roof of the pavilion. It was
+Toussaint, who had stayed up to spread out some linen to dry.
+
+Eponine made a final effort.
+
+"Well," said she, "they're very poor folks, and it's a hovel where there
+isn't a sou."
+
+"Go to the devil!" cried Thenardier. "When we've turned the house upside
+down and put the cellar at the top and the attic below, we'll tell
+you what there is inside, and whether it's francs or sous or
+half-farthings."
+
+And he pushed her aside with the intention of entering.
+
+"My good friend, Mr. Montparnasse," said Eponine, "I entreat you, you
+are a good fellow, don't enter."
+
+"Take care, you'll cut yourself," replied Montparnasse.
+
+Thenardier resumed in his decided tone:--
+
+"Decamp, my girl, and leave men to their own affairs!"
+
+Eponine released Montparnasse's hand, which she had grasped again, and
+said:--
+
+"So you mean to enter this house?"
+
+"Rather!" grinned the ventriloquist.
+
+Then she set her back against the gate, faced the six ruffians who were
+armed to the teeth, and to whom the night lent the visages of demons,
+and said in a firm, low voice:--
+
+"Well, I don't mean that you shall."
+
+They halted in amazement. The ventriloquist, however, finished his grin.
+She went on:--
+
+"Friends! Listen well. This is not what you want. Now I'm talking. In
+the first place, if you enter this garden, if you lay a hand on this
+gate, I'll scream, I'll beat on the door, I'll rouse everybody, I'll
+have the whole six of you seized, I'll call the police."
+
+"She'd do it, too," said Thenardier in a low tone to Brujon and the
+ventriloquist.
+
+She shook her head and added:--
+
+"Beginning with my father!"
+
+Thenardier stepped nearer.
+
+"Not so close, my good man!" said she.
+
+He retreated, growling between his teeth:--
+
+"Why, what's the matter with her?"
+
+And he added:--
+
+"Bitch!"
+
+She began to laugh in a terrible way:--
+
+"As you like, but you shall not enter here. I'm not the daughter of
+a dog, since I'm the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, what
+matters that to me? You are men. Well, I'm a woman. You don't frighten
+me. I tell you that you shan't enter this house, because it doesn't suit
+me. If you approach, I'll bark. I told you, I'm the dog, and I don't
+care a straw for you. Go your way, you bore me! Go where you please, but
+don't come here, I forbid it! You can use your knives. I'll use kicks;
+it's all the same to me, come on!"
+
+She advanced a pace nearer the ruffians, she was terrible, she burst out
+laughing:--
+
+"Pardine! I'm not afraid. I shall be hungry this summer, and I shall be
+cold this winter. Aren't they ridiculous, these ninnies of men, to think
+they can scare a girl! What! Scare? Oh, yes, much! Because you have
+finical poppets of mistresses who hide under the bed when you put on a
+big voice, forsooth! I ain't afraid of anything, that I ain't!"
+
+She fastened her intent gaze upon Thenardier and said:--
+
+"Not even of you, father!"
+
+Then she continued, as she cast her blood-shot, spectre-like eyes upon
+the ruffians in turn:--
+
+"What do I care if I'm picked up to-morrow morning on the pavement of
+the Rue Plumet, killed by the blows of my father's club, or whether I'm
+found a year from now in the nets at Saint-Cloud or the Isle of Swans in
+the midst of rotten old corks and drowned dogs?"
+
+She was forced to pause; she was seized by a dry cough, her breath came
+from her weak and narrow chest like the death-rattle.
+
+She resumed:--
+
+"I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang!
+There are six of you; I represent the whole world."
+
+Thenardier made a movement towards her.
+
+"Don't approach!" she cried.
+
+He halted, and said gently:--
+
+"Well, no; I won't approach, but don't speak so loud. So you intend to
+hinder us in our work, my daughter? But we must earn our living all the
+same. Have you no longer any kind feeling for your father?"
+
+"You bother me," said Eponine.
+
+"But we must live, we must eat--"
+
+"Burst!"
+
+So saying, she seated herself on the underpinning of the fence and
+hummed:--
+
+ "Mon bras si dodu, "My arm so plump,
+ Ma jambe bien faite My leg well formed,
+ Et le temps perdu." And time wasted."
+
+
+She had set her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she
+swung her foot with an air of indifference. Her tattered gown permitted
+a view of her thin shoulder-blades. The neighboring street lantern
+illuminated her profile and her attitude. Nothing more resolute and more
+surprising could be seen.
+
+The six rascals, speechless and gloomy at being held in check by a girl,
+retreated beneath the shadow cast by the lantern, and held counsel with
+furious and humiliated shrugs.
+
+In the meantime she stared at them with a stern but peaceful air.
+
+"There's something the matter with her," said Babet. "A reason. Is she
+in love with the dog? It's a shame to miss this, anyway. Two women, an
+old fellow who lodges in the back-yard, and curtains that ain't so bad
+at the windows. The old cove must be a Jew. I think the job's a good
+one."
+
+"Well, go in, then, the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse. "Do the
+job. I'll stay here with the girl, and if she fails us--"
+
+He flashed the knife, which he held open in his hand, in the light of
+the lantern.
+
+Thenardier said not a word, and seemed ready for whatever the rest
+pleased.
+
+Brujon, who was somewhat of an oracle, and who had, as the reader knows,
+"put up the job," had not as yet spoken. He seemed thoughtful. He had
+the reputation of not sticking at anything, and it was known that he
+had plundered a police post simply out of bravado. Besides this he made
+verses and songs, which gave him great authority.
+
+Babet interrogated him:--
+
+"You say nothing, Brujon?"
+
+Brujon remained silent an instant longer, then he shook his head in
+various ways, and finally concluded to speak:--
+
+"See here; this morning I came across two sparrows fighting, this
+evening I jostled a woman who was quarrelling. All that's bad. Let's
+quit."
+
+They went away.
+
+As they went, Montparnasse muttered:--
+
+"Never mind! if they had wanted, I'd have cut her throat."
+
+Babet responded
+
+"I wouldn't. I don't hit a lady."
+
+At the corner of the street they halted and exchanged the following
+enigmatical dialogue in a low tone:--
+
+"Where shall we go to sleep to-night?"
+
+"Under Pantin [Paris]."
+
+"Have you the key to the gate, Thenardier?"
+
+"Pardi."
+
+Eponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat by the
+road by which they had come. She rose and began to creep after them
+along the walls and the houses. She followed them thus as far as the
+boulevard.
+
+There they parted, and she saw these six men plunge into the gloom,
+where they appeared to melt away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THINGS OF THE NIGHT
+
+After the departure of the ruffians, the Rue Plumet resumed its
+tranquil, nocturnal aspect. That which had just taken place in this
+street would not have astonished a forest. The lofty trees, the copses,
+the heaths, the branches rudely interlaced, the tall grass, exist in
+a sombre manner; the savage swarming there catches glimpses of sudden
+apparitions of the invisible; that which is below man distinguishes,
+through the mists, that which is beyond man; and the things of which we
+living beings are ignorant there meet face to face in the night. Nature,
+bristling and wild, takes alarm at certain approaches in which she
+fancies that she feels the supernatural. The forces of the gloom know
+each other, and are strangely balanced by each other. Teeth and claws
+fear what they cannot grasp. Blood-drinking bestiality, voracious
+appetites, hunger in search of prey, the armed instincts of nails
+and jaws which have for source and aim the belly, glare and smell out
+uneasily the impassive spectral forms straying beneath a shroud, erect
+in its vague and shuddering robe, and which seem to them to live with
+a dead and terrible life. These brutalities, which are only matter,
+entertain a confused fear of having to deal with the immense obscurity
+condensed into an unknown being. A black figure barring the way stops
+the wild beast short. That which emerges from the cemetery intimidates
+and disconcerts that which emerges from the cave; the ferocious fear the
+sinister; wolves recoil when they encounter a ghoul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--MARIUS BECOMES PRACTICAL ONCE MORE TO THE EXTENT OF GIVING
+COSETTE HIS ADDRESS
+
+While this sort of a dog with a human face was mounting guard over the
+gate, and while the six ruffians were yielding to a girl, Marius was by
+Cosette's side.
+
+Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the
+trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had
+the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had
+all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the
+inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy,
+more ecstatic.
+
+But he had found Cosette sad; Cosette had been weeping. Her eyes were
+red.
+
+This was the first cloud in that wonderful dream.
+
+Marius' first word had been: "What is the matter?"
+
+And she had replied: "This."
+
+Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps, and while he
+tremblingly took his place beside her, she had continued:--
+
+"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness, because he
+has business, and we may go away from here."
+
+Marius shivered from head to foot.
+
+When one is at the end of one's life, to die means to go away; when one
+is at the beginning of it, to go away means to die.
+
+For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly, by degrees,
+taken possession of Cosette each day. As we have already explained, in
+the case of first love, the soul is taken long before the body; later
+on, one takes the body long before the soul; sometimes one does not take
+the soul at all; the Faublas and the Prudhommes add: "Because there is
+none"; but the sarcasm is, fortunately, a blasphemy. So Marius possessed
+Cosette, as spirits possess, but he enveloped her with all his soul, and
+seized her jealously with incredible conviction. He possessed her smile,
+her breath, her perfume, the profound radiance of her blue eyes, the
+sweetness of her skin when he touched her hand, the charming mark which
+she had on her neck, all her thoughts. Therefore, he possessed all
+Cosette's dreams.
+
+He incessantly gazed at, and he sometimes touched lightly with his
+breath, the short locks on the nape of her neck, and he declared to
+himself that there was not one of those short hairs which did not belong
+to him, Marius. He gazed upon and adored the things that she wore, her
+knot of ribbon, her gloves, her sleeves, her shoes, her cuffs, as sacred
+objects of which he was the master. He dreamed that he was the lord of
+those pretty shell combs which she wore in her hair, and he even said to
+himself, in confused and suppressed stammerings of voluptuousness which
+did not make their way to the light, that there was not a ribbon of her
+gown, not a mesh in her stockings, not a fold in her bodice, which was
+not his. Beside Cosette he felt himself beside his own property, his
+own thing, his own despot and his slave. It seemed as though they had
+so intermingled their souls, that it would have been impossible to tell
+them apart had they wished to take them back again.--"This is mine."
+"No, it is mine." "I assure you that you are mistaken. This is my
+property." "What you are taking as your own is myself."--Marius was
+something that made a part of Cosette, and Cosette was something which
+made a part of Marius. Marius felt Cosette within him. To have Cosette,
+to possess Cosette, this, to him, was not to be distinguished from
+breathing. It was in the midst of this faith, of this intoxication, of
+this virgin possession, unprecedented and absolute, of this sovereignty,
+that these words: "We are going away," fell suddenly, at a blow, and
+that the harsh voice of reality cried to him: "Cosette is not yours!"
+
+Marius awoke. For six weeks Marius had been living, as we have said,
+outside of life; those words, going away! caused him to re-enter it
+harshly.
+
+He found not a word to say. Cosette merely felt that his hand was very
+cold. She said to him in her turn: "What is the matter?"
+
+He replied in so low a tone that Cosette hardly heard him:--
+
+"I did not understand what you said."
+
+She began again:--
+
+"This morning my father told me to settle all my little affairs and to
+hold myself in readiness, that he would give me his linen to put in a
+trunk, that he was obliged to go on a journey, that we were to go away,
+that it is necessary to have a large trunk for me and a small one for
+him, and that all is to be ready in a week from now, and that we might
+go to England."
+
+"But this is outrageous!" exclaimed Marius.
+
+It is certain, that, at that moment, no abuse of power, no violence, not
+one of the abominations of the worst tyrants, no action of Busiris, of
+Tiberius, or of Henry VIII., could have equalled this in atrocity,
+in the opinion of Marius; M. Fauchelevent taking his daughter off to
+England because he had business there.
+
+He demanded in a weak voice:--
+
+"And when do you start?"
+
+"He did not say when."
+
+"And when shall you return?"
+
+"He did not say when."
+
+Marius rose and said coldly:--
+
+"Cosette, shall you go?"
+
+Cosette turned toward him her beautiful eyes, all filled with anguish,
+and replied in a sort of bewilderment:--
+
+"Where?"
+
+"To England. Shall you go?"
+
+"Why do you say you to me?"
+
+"I ask you whether you will go?"
+
+"What do you expect me to do?" she said, clasping her hands.
+
+"So, you will go?"
+
+"If my father goes."
+
+"So, you will go?"
+
+Cosette took Marius' hand, and pressed it without replying.
+
+"Very well," said Marius, "then I will go elsewhere."
+
+Cosette felt rather than understood the meaning of these words.
+She turned so pale that her face shone white through the gloom. She
+stammered:--
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+Marius looked at her, then raised his eyes to heaven, and answered:
+"Nothing."
+
+When his eyes fell again, he saw Cosette smiling at him. The smile of a
+woman whom one loves possesses a visible radiance, even at night.
+
+"How silly we are! Marius, I have an idea."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"If we go away, do you go too! I will tell you where! Come and join me
+wherever I am."
+
+Marius was now a thoroughly roused man. He had fallen back into reality.
+He cried to Cosette:--
+
+"Go away with you! Are you mad? Why, I should have to have money, and I
+have none! Go to England? But I am in debt now, I owe, I don't know how
+much, more than ten louis to Courfeyrac, one of my friends with whom you
+are not acquainted! I have an old hat which is not worth three francs,
+I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my
+elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I
+have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only
+see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the
+daytime, you would give me a sou! Go to England! Eh! I haven't enough to
+pay for a passport!"
+
+He threw himself against a tree which was close at hand, erect, his brow
+pressed close to the bark, feeling neither the wood which flayed his
+skin, nor the fever which was throbbing in his temples, and there he
+stood motionless, on the point of falling, like the statue of despair.
+
+He remained a long time thus. One could remain for eternity in such
+abysses. At last he turned round. He heard behind him a faint stifled
+noise, which was sweet yet sad.
+
+It was Cosette sobbing.
+
+She had been weeping for more than two hours beside Marius as he
+meditated.
+
+He came to her, fell at her knees, and slowly prostrating himself, he
+took the tip of her foot which peeped out from beneath her robe, and
+kissed it.
+
+She let him have his way in silence. There are moments when a woman
+accepts, like a sombre and resigned goddess, the religion of love.
+
+"Do not weep," he said.
+
+She murmured:--
+
+"Not when I may be going away, and you cannot come!"
+
+He went on:--
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+She replied, sobbing, by that word from paradise which is never more
+charming than amid tears:--
+
+"I adore you!"
+
+He continued in a tone which was an indescribable caress:--
+
+"Do not weep. Tell me, will you do this for me, and cease to weep?"
+
+"Do you love me?" said she.
+
+He took her hand.
+
+"Cosette, I have never given my word of honor to any one, because my
+word of honor terrifies me. I feel that my father is by my side. Well, I
+give you my most sacred word of honor, that if you go away I shall die."
+
+In the tone with which he uttered these words there lay a melancholy so
+solemn and so tranquil, that Cosette trembled. She felt that chill which
+is produced by a true and gloomy thing as it passes by. The shock made
+her cease weeping.
+
+"Now, listen," said he, "do not expect me to-morrow."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Do not expect me until the day after to-morrow."
+
+"Oh! Why?"
+
+"You will see."
+
+"A day without seeing you! But that is impossible!"
+
+"Let us sacrifice one day in order to gain our whole lives, perhaps."
+
+And Marius added in a low tone and in an aside:--
+
+"He is a man who never changes his habits, and he has never received any
+one except in the evening."
+
+"Of what man are you speaking?" asked Cosette.
+
+"I? I said nothing."
+
+"What do you hope, then?"
+
+"Wait until the day after to-morrow."
+
+"You wish it?"
+
+"Yes, Cosette."
+
+She took his head in both her hands, raising herself on tiptoe in order
+to be on a level with him, and tried to read his hope in his eyes.
+
+Marius resumed:--
+
+"Now that I think of it, you ought to know my address: something might
+happen, one never knows; I live with that friend named Courfeyrac, Rue
+de la Verrerie, No. 16."
+
+He searched in his pocket, pulled out his penknife, and with the blade
+he wrote on the plaster of the wall:--
+
+"16 Rue de la Verrerie."
+
+In the meantime, Cosette had begun to gaze into his eyes once more.
+
+"Tell me your thought, Marius; you have some idea. Tell it to me. Oh!
+tell me, so that I may pass a pleasant night."
+
+"This is my idea: that it is impossible that God should mean to part us.
+Wait; expect me the day after to-morrow."
+
+"What shall I do until then?" said Cosette. "You are outside, you go,
+and come! How happy men are! I shall remain entirely alone! Oh! How sad
+I shall be! What is it that you are going to do to-morrow evening? tell
+me."
+
+"I am going to try something."
+
+"Then I will pray to God and I will think of you here, so that you may
+be successful. I will question you no further, since you do not wish it.
+You are my master. I shall pass the evening to-morrow in singing that
+music from Euryanthe that you love, and that you came one evening to
+listen to, outside my shutters. But day after to-morrow you will come
+early. I shall expect you at dusk, at nine o'clock precisely, I warn
+you. Mon Dieu! how sad it is that the days are so long! On the stroke of
+nine, do you understand, I shall be in the garden."
+
+"And I also."
+
+And without having uttered it, moved by the same thought, impelled by
+those electric currents which place lovers in continual communication,
+both being intoxicated with delight even in their sorrow, they fell into
+each other's arms, without perceiving that their lips met while their
+uplifted eyes, overflowing with rapture and full of tears, gazed upon
+the stars.
+
+When Marius went forth, the street was deserted. This was the moment
+when Eponine was following the ruffians to the boulevard.
+
+While Marius had been dreaming with his head pressed to the tree, an
+idea had crossed his mind; an idea, alas! that he himself judged to be
+senseless and impossible. He had come to a desperate decision.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE OLD HEART AND THE YOUNG HEART IN THE PRESENCE OF EACH
+OTHER
+
+At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first
+birthday. He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue des
+Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned. He was, as
+the reader will remember, one of those antique old men who await death
+perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending, and whom even
+sorrow cannot curve.
+
+Still, his daughter had been saying for some time: "My father is
+sinking." He no longer boxed the maids' ears; he no longer thumped
+the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow in
+opening the door. The Revolution of July had exasperated him for the
+space of barely six months. He had viewed, almost tranquilly, that
+coupling of words, in the Moniteur: M. Humblot-Conte, peer of France.
+The fact is, that the old man was deeply dejected. He did not bend, he
+did not yield; this was no more a characteristic of his physical than
+of his moral nature, but he felt himself giving way internally. For four
+years he had been waiting for Marius, with his foot firmly planted, that
+is the exact word, in the conviction that that good-for-nothing young
+scamp would ring at his door some day or other; now he had reached
+the point, where, at certain gloomy hours, he said to himself, that
+if Marius made him wait much longer--It was not death that was
+insupportable to him; it was the idea that perhaps he should never see
+Marius again. The idea of never seeing Marius again had never entered
+his brain until that day; now the thought began to recur to him, and
+it chilled him. Absence, as is always the case in genuine and natural
+sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather's love for the
+ungrateful child, who had gone off like a flash. It is during December
+nights, when the cold stands at ten degrees, that one thinks oftenest of
+the son.
+
+M. Gillenormand was, or thought himself, above all things, incapable
+of taking a single step, he--the grandfather, towards his grandson; "I
+would die rather," he said to himself. He did not consider himself
+as the least to blame; but he thought of Marius only with profound
+tenderness, and the mute despair of an elderly, kindly old man who is
+about to vanish in the dark.
+
+He began to lose his teeth, which added to his sadness.
+
+M. Gillenormand, without however acknowledging it to himself, for it
+would have rendered him furious and ashamed, had never loved a mistress
+as he loved Marius.
+
+He had had placed in his chamber, opposite the head of his bed, so that
+it should be the first thing on which his eyes fell on waking, an
+old portrait of his other daughter, who was dead, Madame Pontmercy,
+a portrait which had been taken when she was eighteen. He gazed
+incessantly at that portrait. One day, he happened to say, as he gazed
+upon it:--
+
+"I think the likeness is strong."
+
+"To my sister?" inquired Mademoiselle Gillenormand. "Yes, certainly."
+
+"The old man added:--
+
+"And to him also."
+
+Once as he sat with his knees pressed together, and his eyes almost
+closed, in a despondent attitude, his daughter ventured to say to him:--
+
+"Father, are you as angry with him as ever?"
+
+She paused, not daring to proceed further.
+
+"With whom?" he demanded.
+
+"With that poor Marius."
+
+He raised his aged head, laid his withered and emaciated fist on the
+table, and exclaimed in his most irritated and vibrating tone:--
+
+"Poor Marius, do you say! That gentleman is a knave, a wretched
+scoundrel, a vain little ingrate, a heartless, soulless, haughty, and
+wicked man!"
+
+And he turned away so that his daughter might not see the tear that
+stood in his eye.
+
+Three days later he broke a silence which had lasted four hours, to say
+to his daughter point-blank:--
+
+"I had the honor to ask Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention him
+to me."
+
+Aunt Gillenormand renounced every effort, and pronounced this acute
+diagnosis: "My father never cared very much for my sister after her
+folly. It is clear that he detests Marius."
+
+"After her folly" meant: "after she had married the colonel."
+
+However, as the reader has been able to conjecture, Mademoiselle
+Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite, the
+officer of lancers, for Marius. The substitute, Theodule, had not been a
+success. M. Gillenormand had not accepted the quid pro quo. A vacancy
+in the heart does not accommodate itself to a stop-gap. Theodule, on his
+side, though he scented the inheritance, was disgusted at the task
+of pleasing. The goodman bored the lancer; and the lancer shocked the
+goodman. Lieutenant Theodule was gay, no doubt, but a chatter-box,
+frivolous, but vulgar; a high liver, but a frequenter of bad company; he
+had mistresses, it is true, and he had a great deal to say about them,
+it is true also; but he talked badly. All his good qualities had a
+defect. M. Gillenormand was worn out with hearing him tell about the
+love affairs that he had in the vicinity of the barracks in the Rue
+de Babylone. And then, Lieutenant Gillenormand sometimes came in his
+uniform, with the tricolored cockade. This rendered him downright
+intolerable. Finally, Father Gillenormand had said to his daughter:
+"I've had enough of that Theodule. I haven't much taste for warriors
+in time of peace. Receive him if you choose. I don't know but I prefer
+slashers to fellows that drag their swords. The clash of blades in
+battle is less dismal, after all, than the clank of the scabbard on
+the pavement. And then, throwing out your chest like a bully and
+lacing yourself like a girl, with stays under your cuirass, is doubly
+ridiculous. When one is a veritable man, one holds equally aloof
+from swagger and from affected airs. He is neither a blusterer nor a
+finnicky-hearted man. Keep your Theodule for yourself."
+
+It was in vain that his daughter said to him: "But he is your
+grandnephew, nevertheless,"--it turned out that M. Gillenormand, who
+was a grandfather to the very finger-tips, was not in the least a
+grand-uncle.
+
+In fact, as he had good sense, and as he had compared the two, Theodule
+had only served to make him regret Marius all the more.
+
+One evening,--it was the 24th of June, which did not prevent Father
+Gillenormand having a rousing fire on the hearth,--he had dismissed his
+daughter, who was sewing in a neighboring apartment. He was alone in
+his chamber, amid its pastoral scenes, with his feet propped on the
+andirons, half enveloped in his huge screen of coromandel lacquer, with
+its nine leaves, with his elbow resting on a table where burned two
+candles under a green shade, engulfed in his tapestry armchair, and in
+his hand a book which he was not reading. He was dressed, according
+to his wont, like an incroyable, and resembled an antique portrait by
+Garat. This would have made people run after him in the street, had not
+his daughter covered him up, whenever he went out, in a vast bishop's
+wadded cloak, which concealed his attire. At home, he never wore a
+dressing gown, except when he rose and retired. "It gives one a look of
+age," said he.
+
+Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius lovingly and bitterly; and,
+as usual, bitterness predominated. His tenderness once soured always
+ended by boiling and turning to indignation. He had reached the point
+where a man tries to make up his mind and to accept that which rends his
+heart. He was explaining to himself that there was no longer any reason
+why Marius should return, that if he intended to return, he should
+have done it long ago, that he must renounce the idea. He was trying to
+accustom himself to the thought that all was over, and that he should
+die without having beheld "that gentleman" again. But his whole nature
+revolted; his aged paternity would not consent to this. "Well!" said
+he,--this was his doleful refrain,--"he will not return!" His bald head
+had fallen upon his breast, and he fixed a melancholy and irritated gaze
+upon the ashes on his hearth.
+
+In the very midst of his revery, his old servant Basque entered, and
+inquired:--
+
+"Can Monsieur receive M. Marius?"
+
+The old man sat up erect, pallid, and like a corpse which rises under
+the influence of a galvanic shock. All his blood had retreated to his
+heart. He stammered:--
+
+"M. Marius what?"
+
+"I don't know," replied Basque, intimidated and put out of countenance
+by his master's air; "I have not seen him. Nicolette came in and said to
+me: 'There's a young man here; say that it is M. Marius.'"
+
+Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice:--
+
+"Show him in."
+
+And he remained in the same attitude, with shaking head, and his eyes
+fixed on the door. It opened once more. A young man entered. It was
+Marius.
+
+Marius halted at the door, as though waiting to be bidden to enter.
+
+His almost squalid attire was not perceptible in the obscurity caused by
+the shade. Nothing could be seen but his calm, grave, but strangely sad
+face.
+
+It was several minutes before Father Gillenormand, dulled with amazement
+and joy, could see anything except a brightness as when one is in the
+presence of an apparition. He was on the point of swooning; he saw
+Marius through a dazzling light. It certainly was he, it certainly was
+Marius.
+
+At last! After the lapse of four years! He grasped him entire, so to
+speak, in a single glance. He found him noble, handsome, distinguished,
+well-grown, a complete man, with a suitable mien and a charming air. He
+felt a desire to open his arms, to call him, to fling himself forward;
+his heart melted with rapture, affectionate words swelled and overflowed
+his breast; at length all his tenderness came to the light and reached
+his lips, and, by a contrast which constituted the very foundation of
+his nature, what came forth was harshness. He said abruptly:--
+
+"What have you come here for?"
+
+Marius replied with embarrassment:--
+
+"Monsieur--"
+
+M. Gillenormand would have liked to have Marius throw himself into his
+arms. He was displeased with Marius and with himself. He was conscious
+that he was brusque, and that Marius was cold. It caused the goodman
+unendurable and irritating anxiety to feel so tender and forlorn
+within, and only to be able to be hard outside. Bitterness returned. He
+interrupted Marius in a peevish tone:--
+
+"Then why did you come?"
+
+That "then" signified: If you do not come to embrace me. Marius looked
+at his grandfather, whose pallor gave him a face of marble.
+
+"Monsieur--"
+
+"Have you come to beg my pardon? Do you acknowledge your faults?"
+
+He thought he was putting Marius on the right road, and that "the child"
+would yield. Marius shivered; it was the denial of his father that was
+required of him; he dropped his eyes and replied:--
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Then," exclaimed the old man impetuously, with a grief that was
+poignant and full of wrath, "what do you want of me?"
+
+Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said in a feeble and
+trembling voice:--
+
+"Sir, have pity on me."
+
+These words touched M. Gillenormand; uttered a little sooner, they would
+have rendered him tender, but they came too late. The grandfather rose;
+he supported himself with both hands on his cane; his lips were white,
+his brow wavered, but his lofty form towered above Marius as he bowed.
+
+"Pity on you, sir! It is youth demanding pity of the old man of
+ninety-one! You are entering into life, I am leaving it; you go to the
+play, to balls, to the cafe, to the billiard-hall; you have wit, you
+please the women, you are a handsome fellow; as for me, I spit on my
+brands in the heart of summer; you are rich with the only riches that
+are really such, I possess all the poverty of age; infirmity, isolation!
+You have your thirty-two teeth, a good digestion, bright eyes, strength,
+appetite, health, gayety, a forest of black hair; I have no longer even
+white hair, I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my
+memory; there are three names of streets that I confound incessantly,
+the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue Saint-Claude, that
+is what I have come to; you have before you the whole future, full of
+sunshine, and I am beginning to lose my sight, so far am I advancing
+into the night; you are in love, that is a matter of course, I am
+beloved by no one in all the world; and you ask pity of me! Parbleu!
+Moliere forgot that. If that is the way you jest at the courthouse,
+Messieurs the lawyers, I sincerely compliment you. You are droll."
+
+And the octogenarian went on in a grave and angry voice:--
+
+"Come, now, what do you want of me?"
+
+"Sir," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but
+I have come merely to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away
+immediately."
+
+"You are a fool!" said the old man. "Who said that you were to go away?"
+
+This was the translation of the tender words which lay at the bottom of
+his heart:--
+
+"Ask my pardon! Throw yourself on my neck!"
+
+M. Gillenormand felt that Marius would leave him in a few moments, that
+his harsh reception had repelled the lad, that his hardness was driving
+him away; he said all this to himself, and it augmented his grief; and
+as his grief was straightway converted into wrath, it increased his
+harshness. He would have liked to have Marius understand, and Marius did
+not understand, which made the goodman furious.
+
+He began again:--
+
+"What! you deserted me, your grandfather, you left my house to go no
+one knows whither, you drove your aunt to despair, you went off, it is
+easily guessed, to lead a bachelor life; it's more convenient, to play
+the dandy, to come in at all hours, to amuse yourself; you have given me
+no signs of life, you have contracted debts without even telling me to
+pay them, you have become a smasher of windows and a blusterer, and, at
+the end of four years, you come to me, and that is all you have to say
+to me!"
+
+This violent fashion of driving a grandson to tenderness was productive
+only of silence on the part of Marius. M. Gillenormand folded his arms;
+a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious, and apostrophized
+Marius bitterly:--
+
+"Let us make an end of this. You have come to ask something of me, you
+say? Well, what? What is it? Speak!"
+
+"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is falling
+over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."
+
+M. Gillenormand rang the bell. Basque opened the door half-way.
+
+"Call my daughter."
+
+A second later, the door was opened once more, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
+did not enter, but showed herself; Marius was standing, mute, with
+pendant arms and the face of a criminal; M. Gillenormand was pacing back
+and forth in the room. He turned to his daughter and said to her:--
+
+"Nothing. It is Monsieur Marius. Say good day to him. Monsieur wishes to
+marry. That's all. Go away."
+
+The curt, hoarse sound of the old man's voice announced a strange degree
+of excitement. The aunt gazed at Marius with a frightened air, hardly
+appeared to recognize him, did not allow a gesture or a syllable to
+escape her, and disappeared at her father's breath more swiftly than a
+straw before the hurricane.
+
+In the meantime, Father Gillenormand had returned and placed his back
+against the chimney-piece once more.
+
+"You marry! At one and twenty! You have arranged that! You have only
+a permission to ask! a formality. Sit down, sir. Well, you have had a
+revolution since I had the honor to see you last. The Jacobins got the
+upper hand. You must have been delighted. Are you not a Republican since
+you are a Baron? You can make that agree. The Republic makes a good
+sauce for the barony. Are you one of those decorated by July? Have you
+taken the Louvre at all, sir? Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine,
+opposite the Rue des Nonamdieres, there is a cannon-ball incrusted in
+the wall of the third story of a house with this inscription: 'July
+28th, 1830.' Go take a look at that. It produces a good effect. Ah!
+those friends of yours do pretty things. By the way, aren't they
+erecting a fountain in the place of the monument of M. le Duc de Berry?
+So you want to marry? Whom? Can one inquire without indiscretion?"
+
+He paused, and, before Marius had time to answer, he added violently:--
+
+"Come now, you have a profession? A fortune made? How much do you earn
+at your trade of lawyer?"
+
+"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of firmness and resolution that was
+almost fierce.
+
+"Nothing? Then all that you have to live upon is the twelve hundred
+livres that I allow you?"
+
+Marius did not reply. M. Gillenormand continued:--
+
+"Then I understand the girl is rich?"
+
+"As rich as I am."
+
+"What! No dowry?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Expectations?"
+
+"I think not."
+
+"Utterly naked! What's the father?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"And what's her name?"
+
+"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."
+
+"Fauchewhat?"
+
+"Fauchelevent."
+
+"Pttt!" ejaculated the old gentleman.
+
+"Sir!" exclaimed Marius.
+
+M. Gillenormand interrupted him with the tone of a man who is speaking
+to himself:--
+
+"That's right, one and twenty years of age, no profession, twelve
+hundred livres a year, Madame la Baronne de Pontmercy will go and
+purchase a couple of sous' worth of parsley from the fruiterer."
+
+"Sir," repeated Marius, in the despair at the last hope, which was
+vanishing, "I entreat you! I conjure you in the name of Heaven, with
+clasped hands, sir, I throw myself at your feet, permit me to marry
+her!"
+
+The old man burst into a shout of strident and mournful laughter,
+coughing and laughing at the same time.
+
+"Ah! ah! ah! You said to yourself: 'Pardine! I'll go hunt up that old
+blockhead, that absurd numskull! What a shame that I'm not twenty-five!
+How I'd treat him to a nice respectful summons! How nicely I'd get along
+without him! It's nothing to me, I'd say to him: "You're only too happy
+to see me, you old idiot, I want to marry, I desire to wed Mamselle
+No-matter-whom, daughter of Monsieur No-matter-what, I have no shoes,
+she has no chemise, that just suits; I want to throw my career, my
+future, my youth, my life to the dogs; I wish to take a plunge into
+wretchedness with a woman around my neck, that's an idea, and you must
+consent to it!" and the old fossil will consent.' Go, my lad, do as
+you like, attach your paving-stone, marry your Pousselevent, your
+Coupelevent--Never, sir, never!"
+
+"Father--"
+
+"Never!"
+
+At the tone in which that "never" was uttered, Marius lost all hope. He
+traversed the chamber with slow steps, with bowed head, tottering and
+more like a dying man than like one merely taking his departure. M.
+Gillenormand followed him with his eyes, and at the moment when the
+door opened, and Marius was on the point of going out, he advanced four
+paces, with the senile vivacity of impetuous and spoiled old gentlemen,
+seized Marius by the collar, brought him back energetically into the
+room, flung him into an armchair and said to him:--
+
+"Tell me all about it!"
+
+"It was that single word "father" which had effected this revolution.
+
+Marius stared at him in bewilderment. M. Gillenormand's mobile face was
+no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable good-nature.
+The grandsire had given way before the grandfather.
+
+"Come, see here, speak, tell me about your love affairs, jabber, tell me
+everything! Sapristi! how stupid young folks are!"
+
+"Father--" repeated Marius.
+
+The old man's entire countenance lighted up with indescribable radiance.
+
+"Yes, that's right, call me father, and you'll see!"
+
+There was now something so kind, so gentle, so openhearted, and so
+paternal in this brusqueness, that Marius, in the sudden transition from
+discouragement to hope, was stunned and intoxicated by it, as it were.
+He was seated near the table, the light from the candles brought out
+the dilapidation of his costume, which Father Gillenormand regarded with
+amazement.
+
+"Well, father--" said Marius.
+
+"Ah, by the way," interrupted M. Gillenormand, "you really have not a
+penny then? You are dressed like a pickpocket."
+
+He rummaged in a drawer, drew forth a purse, which he laid on the table:
+"Here are a hundred louis, buy yourself a hat."
+
+"Father," pursued Marius, "my good father, if you only knew! I love her.
+You cannot imagine it; the first time I saw her was at the Luxembourg,
+she came there; in the beginning, I did not pay much heed to her, and
+then, I don't know how it came about, I fell in love with her. Oh! how
+unhappy that made me! Now, at last, I see her every day, at her own
+home, her father does not know it, just fancy, they are going away, it
+is in the garden that we meet, in the evening, her father means to take
+her to England, then I said to myself: 'I'll go and see my grandfather
+and tell him all about the affair. I should go mad first, I should die,
+I should fall ill, I should throw myself into the water. I absolutely
+must marry her, since I should go mad otherwise.' This is the whole
+truth, and I do not think that I have omitted anything. She lives in a
+garden with an iron fence, in the Rue Plumet. It is in the neighborhood
+of the Invalides."
+
+Father Gillenormand had seated himself, with a beaming countenance,
+beside Marius. As he listened to him and drank in the sound of his
+voice, he enjoyed at the same time a protracted pinch of snuff. At
+the words "Rue Plumet" he interrupted his inhalation and allowed the
+remainder of his snuff to fall upon his knees.
+
+"The Rue Plumet, the Rue Plumet, did you say?--Let us see!--Are there
+not barracks in that vicinity?--Why, yes, that's it. Your cousin
+Theodule has spoken to me about it. The lancer, the officer. A gay girl,
+my good friend, a gay girl!--Pardieu, yes, the Rue Plumet. It is what
+used to be called the Rue Blomet.--It all comes back to me now. I have
+heard of that little girl of the iron railing in the Rue Plumet. In a
+garden, a Pamela. Your taste is not bad. She is said to be a very tidy
+creature. Between ourselves, I think that simpleton of a lancer has been
+courting her a bit. I don't know where he did it. However, that's not
+to the purpose. Besides, he is not to be believed. He brags, Marius! I
+think it quite proper that a young man like you should be in love. It's
+the right thing at your age. I like you better as a lover than as a
+Jacobin. I like you better in love with a petticoat, sapristi! with
+twenty petticoats, than with M. de Robespierre. For my part, I will do
+myself the justice to say, that in the line of sans-culottes, I have
+never loved any one but women. Pretty girls are pretty girls, the deuce!
+There's no objection to that. As for the little one, she receives you
+without her father's knowledge. That's in the established order of
+things. I have had adventures of that same sort myself. More than one.
+Do you know what is done then? One does not take the matter ferociously;
+one does not precipitate himself into the tragic; one does not make
+one's mind to marriage and M. le Maire with his scarf. One simply
+behaves like a fellow of spirit. One shows good sense. Slip along,
+mortals; don't marry. You come and look up your grandfather, who is a
+good-natured fellow at bottom, and who always has a few rolls of louis
+in an old drawer; you say to him: 'See here, grandfather.' And the
+grandfather says: 'That's a simple matter. Youth must amuse itself, and
+old age must wear out. I have been young, you will be old. Come, my boy,
+you shall pass it on to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles.
+Amuse yourself, deuce take it!' Nothing better! That's the way the
+affair should be treated. You don't marry, but that does no harm. You
+understand me?"
+
+Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a syllable, made a sign with
+his head that he did not.
+
+The old man burst out laughing, winked his aged eye, gave him a slap on
+the knee, stared him full in the face with a mysterious and beaming air,
+and said to him, with the tenderest of shrugs of the shoulder:--
+
+"Booby! make her your mistress."
+
+Marius turned pale. He had understood nothing of what his grandfather
+had just said. This twaddle about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks,
+the lancer, had passed before Marius like a dissolving view. Nothing of
+all that could bear any reference to Cosette, who was a lily. The good
+man was wandering in his mind. But this wandering terminated in words
+which Marius did understand, and which were a mortal insult to Cosette.
+Those words, "make her your mistress," entered the heart of the strict
+young man like a sword.
+
+He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked to the
+door with a firm, assured step. There he turned round, bowed deeply to
+his grandfather, raised his head erect again, and said:--
+
+"Five years ago you insulted my father; to-day you have insulted my
+wife. I ask nothing more of you, sir. Farewell."
+
+Father Gillenormand, utterly confounded, opened his mouth, extended his
+arms, tried to rise, and before he could utter a word, the door closed
+once more, and Marius had disappeared.
+
+The old man remained for several minutes motionless and as though
+struck by lightning, without the power to speak or breathe, as though
+a clenched fist grasped his throat. At last he tore himself from his
+arm-chair, ran, so far as a man can run at ninety-one, to the door,
+opened it, and cried:--
+
+"Help! Help!"
+
+His daughter made her appearance, then the domestics. He began again,
+with a pitiful rattle: "Run after him! Bring him back! What have I done
+to him? He is mad! He is going away! Ah! my God! Ah! my God! This time
+he will not come back!"
+
+He went to the window which looked out on the street, threw it open with
+his aged and palsied hands, leaned out more than half-way, while Basque
+and Nicolette held him behind, and shouted:--
+
+"Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!"
+
+But Marius could no longer hear him, for at that moment he was turning
+the corner of the Rue Saint-Louis.
+
+The octogenarian raised his hands to his temples two or three times
+with an expression of anguish, recoiled tottering, and fell back into an
+arm-chair, pulseless, voiceless, tearless, with quivering head and lips
+which moved with a stupid air, with nothing in his eyes and nothing
+any longer in his heart except a gloomy and profound something which
+resembled night.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--JEAN VALJEAN
+
+That same day, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was
+sitting alone on the back side of one of the most solitary slopes in the
+Champ-de-Mars. Either from prudence, or from a desire to meditate, or
+simply in consequence of one of those insensible changes of habit which
+gradually introduce themselves into the existence of every one, he now
+rarely went out with Cosette. He had on his workman's waistcoat,
+and trousers of gray linen; and his long-visored cap concealed his
+countenance.
+
+He was calm and happy now beside Cosette; that which had, for a time,
+alarmed and troubled him had been dissipated; but for the last week or
+two, anxieties of another nature had come up. One day, while walking
+on the boulevard, he had caught sight of Thenardier; thanks to his
+disguise, Thenardier had not recognized him; but since that day, Jean
+Valjean had seen him repeatedly, and he was now certain that Thenardier
+was prowling about in their neighborhood.
+
+This had been sufficient to make him come to a decision.
+
+Moreover, Paris was not tranquil: political troubles presented this
+inconvenient feature, for any one who had anything to conceal in his
+life, that the police had grown very uneasy and very suspicious, and
+that while seeking to ferret out a man like Pepin or Morey, they might
+very readily discover a man like Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean had made up his mind to quit Paris, and even France, and go
+over to England.
+
+He had warned Cosette. He wished to set out before the end of the week.
+
+He had seated himself on the slope in the Champ-de-Mars, turning over
+all sorts of thoughts in his mind,--Thenardier, the police, the journey,
+and the difficulty of procuring a passport.
+
+He was troubled from all these points of view.
+
+Last of all, an inexplicable circumstance which had just attracted his
+attention, and from which he had not yet recovered, had added to his
+state of alarm.
+
+On the morning of that very day, when he alone of the household was
+stirring, while strolling in the garden before Cosette's shutters
+were open, he had suddenly perceived on the wall, the following line,
+engraved, probably with a nail:--
+
+16 Rue de la Verrerie.
+
+This was perfectly fresh, the grooves in the ancient black mortar were
+white, a tuft of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with the
+fine, fresh plaster.
+
+This had probably been written on the preceding night.
+
+What was this? A signal for others? A warning for himself?
+
+In any case, it was evident that the garden had been violated, and that
+strangers had made their way into it.
+
+He recalled the odd incidents which had already alarmed the household.
+
+His mind was now filling in this canvas.
+
+He took good care not to speak to Cosette of the line written on the
+wall, for fear of alarming her.
+
+In the midst of his preoccupations, he perceived, from a shadow cast by
+the sun, that some one had halted on the crest of the slope immediately
+behind him.
+
+He was on the point of turning round, when a paper folded in four fell
+upon his knees as though a hand had dropped it over his head.
+
+He took the paper, unfolded it, and read these words written in large
+characters, with a pencil:--
+
+"MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR HOUSE."
+
+Jean Valjean sprang hastily to his feet; there was no one on the slope;
+he gazed all around him and perceived a creature larger than a
+child, not so large as a man, clad in a gray blouse and trousers of
+dust-colored cotton velvet, who was jumping over the parapet and who
+slipped into the moat of the Champde-Mars.
+
+Jean Valjean returned home at once, in a very thoughtful mood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--MARIUS
+
+Marius had left M. Gillenormand in despair. He had entered the house
+with very little hope, and quitted it with immense despair.
+
+However, and those who have observed the depths of the human heart will
+understand this, the officer, the lancer, the ninny, Cousin Theodule,
+had left no trace in his mind. Not the slightest. The dramatic poet
+might, apparently, expect some complications from this revelation made
+point-blank by the grandfather to the grandson. But what the drama would
+gain thereby, truth would lose. Marius was at an age when one believes
+nothing in the line of evil; later on comes the age when one believes
+everything. Suspicions are nothing else than wrinkles. Early youth
+has none of them. That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over
+Candide. Suspect Cosette! There are hosts of crimes which Marius could
+sooner have committed.
+
+He began to wander about the streets, the resource of those who suffer.
+He thought of nothing, so far as he could afterwards remember. At two
+o'clock in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac's quarters and flung
+himself, without undressing, on his mattress. The sun was shining
+brightly when he sank into that frightful leaden slumber which permits
+ideas to go and come in the brain. When he awoke, he saw Courfeyrac,
+Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in the room with their hats
+on and all ready to go out.
+
+Courfeyrac said to him:--
+
+"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"
+
+It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.
+
+He went out some time after them. He put in his pocket the pistols which
+Javert had given him at the time of the adventure on the 3d of February,
+and which had remained in his hands. These pistols were still loaded. It
+would be difficult to say what vague thought he had in his mind when he
+took them with him.
+
+All day long he prowled about, without knowing where he was going; it
+rained at times, he did not perceive it; for his dinner, he purchased a
+penny roll at a baker's, put it in his pocket and forgot it. It appears
+that he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of it. There are
+moments when a man has a furnace within his skull. Marius was passing
+through one of those moments. He no longer hoped for anything; this
+step he had taken since the preceding evening. He waited for night with
+feverish impatience, he had but one idea clearly before his mind;--this
+was, that at nine o'clock he should see Cosette. This last happiness
+now constituted his whole future; after that, gloom. At intervals, as
+he roamed through the most deserted boulevards, it seemed to him that he
+heard strange noises in Paris. He thrust his head out of his revery and
+said: "Is there fighting on hand?"
+
+At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, as he had promised Cosette,
+he was in the Rue Plumet. When he approached the grating he forgot
+everything. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette; he was
+about to behold her once more; every other thought was effaced, and
+he felt only a profound and unheard-of joy. Those minutes in which one
+lives centuries always have this sovereign and wonderful property, that
+at the moment when they are passing they fill the heart completely.
+
+Marius displaced the bar, and rushed headlong into the garden. Cosette
+was not at the spot where she ordinarily waited for him. He traversed
+the thicket, and approached the recess near the flight of steps: "She
+is waiting for me there," said he. Cosette was not there. He raised his
+eyes, and saw that the shutters of the house were closed. He made the
+tour of the garden, the garden was deserted. Then he returned to
+the house, and, rendered senseless by love, intoxicated, terrified,
+exasperated with grief and uneasiness, like a master who returns home at
+an evil hour, he tapped on the shutters. He knocked and knocked again,
+at the risk of seeing the window open, and her father's gloomy face
+make its appearance, and demand: "What do you want?" This was nothing in
+comparison with what he dimly caught a glimpse of. When he had rapped,
+he lifted up his voice and called Cosette.--"Cosette!" he cried;
+"Cosette!" he repeated imperiously. There was no reply. All was over. No
+one in the garden; no one in the house.
+
+Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as
+black and as silent as a tomb and far more empty. He gazed at the stone
+seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then he
+seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled with sweetness
+and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his thought, and
+he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that there was left
+for him was to die.
+
+All at once he heard a voice which seemed to proceed from the street,
+and which was calling to him through the trees:--
+
+"Mr. Marius!"
+
+He started to his feet.
+
+"Hey?" said he.
+
+"Mr. Marius, are you there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Mr. Marius," went on the voice, "your friends are waiting for you at
+the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie."
+
+This voice was not wholly unfamiliar to him. It resembled the hoarse,
+rough voice of Eponine. Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside the
+movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw some one who
+appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at a run into the gloom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--M. MABEUF
+
+Jean Valjean's purse was of no use to M. Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf, in his
+venerable, infantile austerity, had not accepted the gift of the stars;
+he had not admitted that a star could coin itself into louis d'or. He
+had not divined that what had fallen from heaven had come from Gavroche.
+He had taken the purse to the police commissioner of the quarter, as
+a lost article placed by the finder at the disposal of claimants. The
+purse was actually lost. It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed
+it, and that it did not succor M. Mabeuf.
+
+Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.
+
+His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the Jardin des
+Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz. The year before he had owed
+his housekeeper's wages; now, as we have seen, he owed three quarters
+of his rent. The pawnshop had sold the plates of his Flora after the
+expiration of thirteen months. Some coppersmith had made stewpans of
+them. His copper plates gone, and being unable to complete even the
+incomplete copies of his Flora which were in his possession, he had
+disposed of the text, at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a
+second-hand bookseller. Nothing now remained to him of his life's work.
+He set to work to eat up the money for these copies. When he saw that
+this wretched resource was becoming exhausted, he gave up his garden
+and allowed it to run to waste. Before this, a long time before, he had
+given up his two eggs and the morsel of beef which he ate from time
+to time. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his
+furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding, his clothing and his
+blankets, then his herbariums and prints; but he still retained his most
+precious books, many of which were of the greatest rarity, among others,
+Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible, edition of 1560; La Concordance
+des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse; Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, of
+Jean de La Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book de
+la Charge et Dignite de l'Ambassadeur, by the Sieur de Villiers
+Hotman; a Florilegium Rabbinicum of 1644; a Tibullus of 1567, with this
+magnificent inscription: Venetiis, in aedibus Manutianis; and lastly, a
+Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, which contained the famous
+variant of the manuscript 411, thirteenth century, of the Vatican, and
+those of the two manuscripts of Venice, 393 and 394, consulted with
+such fruitful results by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in Doric
+dialect which are only found in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth
+century belonging to the Naples Library. M. Mabeuf never had any fire
+in his chamber, and went to bed at sundown, in order not to consume
+any candles. It seemed as though he had no longer any neighbors: people
+avoided him when he went out; he perceived the fact. The wretchedness of
+a child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a young man interests a
+young girl, the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. It is, of
+all distresses, the coldest. Still, Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost
+his childlike serenity. His eyes acquired some vivacity when they rested
+on his books, and he smiled when he gazed at the Diogenes Laertius,
+which was a unique copy. His bookcase with glass doors was the
+only piece of furniture which he had kept beyond what was strictly
+indispensable.
+
+One day, Mother Plutarque said to him:--
+
+"I have no money to buy any dinner."
+
+What she called dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.
+
+"On credit?" suggested M. Mabeuf.
+
+"You know well that people refuse me."
+
+M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase, took a long look at all his books, one
+after another, as a father obliged to decimate his children would gaze
+upon them before making a choice, then seized one hastily, put it
+in under his arm and went out. He returned two hours later, without
+anything under his arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said:--
+
+"You will get something for dinner."
+
+From that moment forth, Mother Plutarque saw a sombre veil, which was
+never more lifted, descend over the old man's candid face.
+
+On the following day, on the day after, and on the day after that, it
+had to be done again.
+
+M. Mabeuf went out with a book and returned with a coin. As the
+second-hand dealers perceived that he was forced to sell, they purchased
+of him for twenty sous that for which he had paid twenty francs,
+sometimes at those very shops. Volume by volume, the whole library
+went the same road. He said at times: "But I am eighty;" as though he
+cherished some secret hope that he should arrive at the end of his days
+before reaching the end of his books. His melancholy increased. Once,
+however, he had a pleasure. He had gone out with a Robert Estienne,
+which he had sold for thirty-five sous under the Quai Malaquais, and he
+returned with an Aldus which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des
+Gres.--"I owe five sous," he said, beaming on Mother Plutarque. That day
+he had no dinner.
+
+He belonged to the Horticultural Society. His destitution became known
+there. The president of the society came to see him, promised to
+speak to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce about him, and did
+so.--"Why, what!" exclaimed the Minister, "I should think so! An old
+savant! a botanist! an inoffensive man! Something must be done for him!"
+On the following day, M. Mabeuf received an invitation to dine with the
+Minister. Trembling with joy, he showed the letter to Mother Plutarque.
+"We are saved!" said he. On the day appointed, he went to the Minister's
+house. He perceived that his ragged cravat, his long, square coat, and
+his waxed shoes astonished the ushers. No one spoke to him, not even the
+Minister. About ten o'clock in the evening, while he was still waiting
+for a word, he heard the Minister's wife, a beautiful woman in a
+low-necked gown whom he had not ventured to approach, inquire: "Who is
+that old gentleman?" He returned home on foot at midnight, in a driving
+rain-storm. He had sold an Elzevir to pay for a carriage in which to go
+thither.
+
+He had acquired the habit of reading a few pages in his Diogenes
+Laertius every night, before he went to bed. He knew enough Greek to
+enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he owned. He had now no other
+enjoyment. Several weeks passed. All at once, Mother Plutarque fell ill.
+There is one thing sadder than having no money with which to buy bread
+at the baker's and that is having no money to purchase drugs at the
+apothecary's. One evening, the doctor had ordered a very expensive
+potion. And the malady was growing worse; a nurse was required. M.
+Mabeuf opened his bookcase; there was nothing there. The last volume had
+taken its departure. All that was left to him was Diogenes Laertius.
+He put this unique copy under his arm, and went out. It was the 4th of
+June, 1832; he went to the Porte Saint-Jacques, to Royal's successor,
+and returned with one hundred francs. He laid the pile of five-franc
+pieces on the old serving-woman's nightstand, and returned to his
+chamber without saying a word.
+
+On the following morning, at dawn, he seated himself on the overturned
+post in his garden, and he could be seen over the top of the hedge,
+sitting the whole morning motionless, with drooping head, his eyes
+vaguely fixed on the withered flower-beds. It rained at intervals; the
+old man did not seem to perceive the fact.
+
+In the afternoon, extraordinary noises broke out in Paris. They
+resembled shots and the clamors of a multitude.
+
+Father Mabeuf raised his head. He saw a gardener passing, and
+inquired:--
+
+"What is it?"
+
+The gardener, spade on back, replied in the most unconcerned tone:--
+
+"It is the riots."
+
+"What riots?"
+
+"Yes, they are fighting."
+
+"Why are they fighting?"
+
+"Ah, good Heavens!" ejaculated the gardener.
+
+"In what direction?" went on M. Mabeuf.
+
+"In the neighborhood of the Arsenal."
+
+Father Mabeuf went to his room, took his hat, mechanically sought for a
+book to place under his arm, found none, said: "Ah! truly!" and went off
+with a bewildered air.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION
+
+Of what is revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything. Of an
+electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly darting
+forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath encounters
+heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer, passions
+which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.
+
+Whither?
+
+At random. Athwart the state, the laws, athwart prosperity and the
+insolence of others.
+
+Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations,
+instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has
+been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change,
+the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to
+take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love,
+the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds, rancors,
+disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny has bankrupted
+it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitious that are hedged about, whoever
+hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short, at the very bottom, the
+rabble, that mud which catches fire,--such are the elements of revolt.
+That which is grandest and that which is basest; the beings who prowl
+outside of all bounds, awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants,
+vagabonds of the cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of
+houses with no other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who,
+each day, demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown
+of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong to
+revolt. Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against any deed
+whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate, is ripe for riot,
+and, as soon as it makes its appearance, he begins to quiver, and to
+feel himself borne away with the whirlwind.
+
+Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms
+suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies
+about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes,
+uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the
+feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw. Woe to him whom it
+bears away as well as to him whom it strikes! It breaks the one against
+the other.
+
+It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and
+extraordinary power. It fills the first-comer with the force of events;
+it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a
+rough stone, and a general of a porter.
+
+If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views, a little
+revolt is desirable from the point of view of power. System: revolt
+strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It puts
+the army to the test; it consecrates the bourgeoisie, it draws out
+the muscles of the police; it demonstrates the force of the social
+framework. It is an exercise in gymnastics; it is almost hygiene. Power
+is in better health after a revolt, as a man is after a good rubbing
+down.
+
+Revolt, thirty years ago, was regarded from still other points of view.
+
+There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself "good sense";
+Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and the
+true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which, because
+it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and is often
+only pedantry. A whole political school called "the golden mean" has
+been the outcome of this. As between cold water and hot water, it is
+the lukewarm water party. This school with its false depth, all on the
+surface, which dissects effects without going back to first causes,
+chides from its height of a demi-science, the agitation of the public
+square.
+
+If we listen to this school, "The riots which complicated the affair
+of 1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity. The
+Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed
+by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that
+revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into
+a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by
+fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered
+them perceptible. It might have been said: 'Ah! this is broken.' After
+the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of deliverance; after the
+riots, one was conscious of a catastrophe.
+
+"All revolt closes the shops, depresses the funds, throws the Exchange
+into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business, precipitates
+failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy, public credit
+shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing, work at a discount,
+fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. Hence gulfs. It has been
+calculated that the first day of a riot costs France twenty millions,
+the second day forty, the third sixty, a three days' uprising costs
+one hundred and twenty millions, that is to say, if only the financial
+result be taken into consideration, it is equivalent to a disaster, a
+shipwreck or a lost battle, which should annihilate a fleet of sixty
+ships of the line.
+
+"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the
+pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of
+thickets: in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the
+heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne.
+Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points
+of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students
+proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National Guard
+invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street urchins,
+contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and legions clashed
+together. After all, between the combatants, there was only a difference
+of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical men who died at the
+age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The
+army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity.
+Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also educated the courage
+of the bourgeois.
+
+"This is well. But is all this worth the bloodshed? And to the bloodshed
+add the future darkness, progress compromised, uneasiness among the
+best men, honest liberals in despair, foreign absolutism happy in these
+wounds dealt to revolution by its own hand, the vanquished of 1830
+triumphing and saying: 'We told you so!' Add Paris enlarged, possibly,
+but France most assuredly diminished. Add, for all must needs be told,
+the massacres which have too often dishonored the victory of order grown
+ferocious over liberty gone mad. To sum up all, uprisings have been
+disastrous."
+
+Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie,
+that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.
+
+For our parts, we reject this word uprisings as too large, and
+consequently as too convenient. We make a distinction between one
+popular movement and another popular movement. We do not inquire whether
+an uprising costs as much as a battle. Why a battle, in the first place?
+Here the question of war comes up. Is war less of a scourge than an
+uprising is of a calamity? And then, are all uprisings calamities? And
+what if the revolt of July did cost a hundred and twenty millions? The
+establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two milliards. Even at
+the same price, we should prefer the 14th of July. However, we reject
+these figures, which appear to be reasons and which are only words. An
+uprising being given, we examine it by itself. In all that is said by
+the doctrinarian objection above presented, there is no question of
+anything but effect, we seek the cause.
+
+We will be explicit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE ROOT OF THE MATTER
+
+There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as
+insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the
+wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states, the only ones
+which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction
+usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may
+proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions which result from
+collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is
+insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt;
+according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they
+are justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the
+populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of
+Vendemiaire. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality;
+the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true. That which
+universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty
+cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining
+purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted
+to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when
+directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot. The
+destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of
+rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the
+refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by
+students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is
+revolt. Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against
+Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that is
+insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against
+Christopher Columbus,--this is the same revolt; impious revolt;
+why? Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which
+Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander
+like Columbus, is finding a world. These gifts of a world to
+civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in
+that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to
+itself. The masses are traitors to the people. Is there, for example,
+anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in
+contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive
+moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,
+espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and, from having been an
+insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of
+ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and
+with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death to
+the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!" The assassins of
+Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of
+Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the
+assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of
+Jehu, the chevaliers of Brassard,--behold an uprising. La Vendee is
+a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is
+recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited
+masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not
+give out the sound of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances
+is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what
+direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may
+grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any
+other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a
+revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human
+race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements
+which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These
+pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis
+XIV. is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is revolt.
+
+Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as
+Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most
+fatal of crimes.
+
+There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
+often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.
+
+Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.
+Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.
+
+Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.
+
+The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
+modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space
+of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of
+peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it
+is capable. Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was
+Juvenal.
+
+The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.
+
+Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of
+the Annales. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his
+part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of the
+ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts on
+Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of
+the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may
+understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes
+the Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.
+
+As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The
+work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured
+into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.
+
+Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word that
+is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his style
+when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence
+there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought
+and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces
+conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a
+celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.
+
+Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
+augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed
+for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in
+the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his
+might.
+
+The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms
+as with lightning.
+
+Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed
+upon Caesar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus
+are two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be
+mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the
+stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Caesar is great, Tacitus
+is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to clash
+with one another. The guardian of justice, in striking Caesar, might
+strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it. The great wars
+of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization
+introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory
+covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine
+justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the
+formidable historian, sparing Caesar Tacitus, and according extenuating
+circumstances to genius.
+
+Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius.
+There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the moral pest is
+still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such reigns, nothing veils
+the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal,
+slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face, more usefully in the
+presence of all humanity.
+
+Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius and
+under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the
+repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a direct product
+of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein
+the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small;
+consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla,
+thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from
+the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor of the
+dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.
+
+Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;
+it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his
+appearance.
+
+But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in
+the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which
+is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
+
+In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
+insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;
+insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the
+stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in
+the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a
+true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains
+a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form. Shy
+although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it
+walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old
+men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and
+innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment of the people is a
+good object; to massacre them is a bad means.
+
+All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of
+August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before
+the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the
+insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends
+in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty
+mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason,
+right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from
+rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and
+increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
+insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a
+swamp.
+
+All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal suffrage
+has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception,
+and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms.
+The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the
+frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day may be,
+To-morrow will be peace.
+
+However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former
+and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such
+shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the
+revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be
+punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day
+as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the
+gloom face to face with the lion.
+
+Then the bourgeois shouts: "Long live the people!"
+
+This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
+so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?
+
+It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to
+say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
+and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and
+insurrection, the foundation.
+
+This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy
+extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an
+uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it
+is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be
+calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs
+undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a
+mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura,
+nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.
+
+This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of
+Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly a characteristic
+hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we enter
+on the recital.
+
+The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and
+living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time
+and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation,
+human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so
+to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of
+history. The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of
+this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not
+sounded the depths, for another reason than history. We shall therefore
+bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things
+which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed
+the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the
+actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the
+very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we
+shall be able to say: "We have seen this." We alter a few names, for
+history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall
+paint will be genuine. In accordance with the conditions of the book
+which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode,
+and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the
+6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may
+catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of
+the real form of this frightful public adventure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN
+
+In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all
+minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an
+indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe
+for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of
+artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the
+shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General
+Lamarque.
+
+Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession,
+under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery
+requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the
+bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a
+sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after
+upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and
+the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances
+of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the
+Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one
+of Napoleon's marshals in petto. The treaties of 1815 removed him as
+a personal offence. He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which
+pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically
+preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to
+intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to
+his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of
+the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque
+uttering the word country.
+
+His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and
+by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like
+everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what
+took place.
+
+On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day
+appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the
+procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This tumultuous
+network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed themselves as best
+they might. Joiners carried off door-weights of their establishment
+"to break down doors." One of them had made himself a dagger of a
+stocking-weaver's hook by breaking off the hook and sharpening the
+stump. Another, who was in a fever "to attack," slept wholly dressed
+for three days. A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade, who asked him:
+"Whither are you going?" "Eh! well, I have no weapons." "What then?"
+"I'm going to my timber-yard to get my compasses." "What for?" "I don't
+know," said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted
+some passing artisans: "Come here, you!" He treated them to ten sous'
+worth of wine and said: "Have you work?" "No." "Go to Filspierre,
+between the Barriere Charonne and the Barriere Montreuil, and you will
+find work." At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms. Certain
+well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say, running from
+one house to another, to collect their men. At Barthelemy's, near the
+Barriere du Trone, at Capel's, near the Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers
+accosted each other with a grave air. They were heard to say: "Have you
+your pistol?" "Under my blouse." "And you?" "Under my shirt." In the
+Rue Traversiere, in front of the Bland workshop, and in the yard of
+the Maison-Brulee, in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups whispered
+together. Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained
+more than a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him
+"because they were obliged to dispute with him every day." Mavot was
+killed on the following day at the barricade of the Rue Menilmontant.
+Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the struggle, seconded Mavot,
+and to the question: "What is your object?" he replied: "Insurrection."
+Workmen assembled at the corner of the Rue de Bercy, waited for a
+certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.
+Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.
+
+On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General
+Lamarque's funeral procession traversed Paris with official military
+pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions, with draped
+drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with their swords
+at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men.
+The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it, bearing laurel
+branches. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the
+sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical
+School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German,
+and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of
+banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who
+were on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their
+paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries, nearly
+all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres, without order
+and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again a column.
+Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with a pair of pistols in
+full view, seemed to pass the host in review, and the files separated
+before him. On the side alleys of the boulevards, in the branches of the
+trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men,
+women, and children; all eyes were filled with anxiety. An armed throng
+was passing, and a terrified throng looked on.
+
+The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with
+its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in
+the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their trumpets at their head,
+cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to march;
+in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal Guard
+echelonned from street to street; at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of
+dragoons; at the Greve half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other
+half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; and the
+courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery. The remainder of the troops
+were confined to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the
+environs of Paris. Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing
+multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand
+in the banlieue.
+
+Divers reports were in circulation in the cortege. Legitimist tricks
+were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked
+out for death at that very moment when the populace were designating
+him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has remained unknown,
+announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over,
+would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people. That
+which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority of those
+present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. Here and there, also, in
+that multitude given over to such violent but noble emotions, there were
+visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which said: "Let
+us plunder!" There are certain agitations which stir up the bottoms of
+marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water. A phenomenon to
+which "well drilled" policemen are no strangers.
+
+The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the
+deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained
+from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. Many
+incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column, stones thrown at
+the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his
+head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire,
+a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin,
+an officer of the 12th Light Infantry saying aloud: "I am a Republican,"
+the Polytechnic School coming up unexpectedly against orders to remain
+at home, the shouts of: "Long live the Polytechnique! Long live the
+Republic!" marked the passage of the funeral train. At the Bastille,
+long files of curious and formidable people who descended from the
+Faubourg Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the procession, and a
+certain terrible seething began to agitate the throng.
+
+One man was heard to say to another: "Do you see that fellow with a
+red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire." It
+appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quenisset
+affair, entrusted with this same function.
+
+The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached
+the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd,
+surveyed at that moment with a bird'seye view, would have presented the
+aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail spread
+out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was prolonged on
+the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle was traced
+around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette spoke and
+bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching and august instant, all
+heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.
+
+All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance
+in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike
+surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head.
+Exelmans quitted the procession.
+
+This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From
+the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors
+which resemble billows stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts went
+up: "Lamarque to the Pantheon!--Lafayette to the Town-hall!" Some young
+men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed themselves and
+began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and
+Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.
+
+In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed
+that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a centenarian
+afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who had fought at
+Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine under Lafayette.
+
+In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set
+in motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons
+emerged from the Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men
+who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them at the corner
+of the quay and shouted: "The dragoons!" The dragoons advanced at a
+walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in
+their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air
+of gloomy expectation.
+
+They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in
+which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it
+to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the
+crowd touched. The women fled in terror. What took place during that
+fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds come
+together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was
+heard in the direction of the Arsenal others that a blow from a dagger
+was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is, that three shots were
+suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet, chief of the squadron,
+the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her
+window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed:
+"They are beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron of dragoons
+which had remained in the barracks up to this time, was seen to debouch
+at a gallop with bared swords, through the Rue Bassompierre and the
+Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.
+
+Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade
+breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank, and
+pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of the
+Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand, bristle with combatants,
+stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun, the young men
+who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run,
+and the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their
+swords, the crowd disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to
+all four quarters of Paris, men shout: "To arms!" they run, tumble down,
+flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS
+
+Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot.
+Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it
+prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it? From
+the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there
+of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the throng
+and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is
+mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the shops are
+closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated
+shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cocheres,
+servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying:
+"There's going to be a row!"
+
+A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place
+at twenty different spots in Paris at once.
+
+In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded and
+with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later, carrying
+a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at their
+head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the third
+with a pike.
+
+In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a
+prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black
+beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not lie flat, offered
+cartridges publicly to passers-by.
+
+In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a
+black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:
+"Republic or Death!" In the Rue des Jeuneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue
+Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be
+distinguished in gold letters, the word section with a number. One of
+these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
+white between.
+
+They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and
+three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second in the
+Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few minutes,
+the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two hundred
+and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, and
+eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one man took the
+gun, the other the bayonet.
+
+Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets installed
+themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One
+of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making
+cartridges. One of these women relates: "I did not know what cartridges
+were; it was my husband who told me."
+
+One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des Vielles
+Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.
+
+The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de
+la Perle.
+
+And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the
+boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting
+men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and
+shouted: "To arms!" broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
+unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
+rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough
+slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.
+
+They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They entered the
+dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns
+of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting: "The
+arms have been delivered"; some signed "their names" to receipts for
+the guns and swords and said: "Send for them to-morrow at the Mayor's
+office." They disarmed isolated sentinels and National Guardsmen in
+the streets on their way to the Townhall. They tore the epaulets from
+officers. In the Rue du Cimitiere-Saint-Nicholas, an officer of the
+National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with clubs and foils,
+took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was only able to
+emerge at nightfall and in disguise.
+
+In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their
+hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Cafe du Progress,
+or descended to the Cafe des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins.
+There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone
+corner-posts, distributed arms. They plundered the timber-yard in the
+Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single
+point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
+and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with
+their own hands. At a single point the insurgents yielded; they
+abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on
+a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la
+Corderie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a
+package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National
+Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the
+points of their bayonets.
+
+All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place
+simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,
+like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less than
+an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the quarter
+of the Halles alone. In the centre was that famous house No. 50, which
+was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions, and which,
+flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and on the other
+by a barricade of the Rue Maubuee, commanded three streets, the Rue
+des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which
+it faced. The barricades at right angles fell back, the one of the
+Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the other of the Rue
+Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without reckoning innumerable
+barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in the Marais, at
+Mont-Sainte-Genevieve; one in the Rue Menilmontant, where was visible
+a porte cochere torn from its hinges; another near the little bridge of
+the Hotel-Dieu made with an "ecossais," which had been unharnessed and
+overthrown, three hundred paces from the Prefecture of Police.
+
+At the barricade of the Rue des Menetriers, a well-dressed man
+distributed money to the workmen. At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,
+a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be
+the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of
+silver. "Here," said he, "this is to pay expenses, wine, et caetera."
+A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to
+barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue
+police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the
+barricades, the wine-shops and porters' lodges were converted into
+guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most scientific
+military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full of angles
+and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the Halles, in
+particular, a network of streets more intricate than a forest. The
+Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said, undertaken to
+direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A man killed in
+the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a plan of Paris.
+
+That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a
+sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection
+had abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized
+nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a
+train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied,
+on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the
+whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the
+Chateau-d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,
+the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pelagie, the Place Maubert, the
+powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five
+o'clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the
+Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place
+des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Peres barracks, and the
+Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.
+
+The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as a
+result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers' shops hastily
+invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing of
+stones was continued with gun-shots.
+
+About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the field
+of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the other.
+They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer, the
+author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this volcano,
+found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that he had to
+protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two half-columns which
+separate the shops; he remained in this delicate situation for nearly
+half an hour.
+
+Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in
+haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from
+their barracks. Opposite the passage de l'Ancre a drummer received a
+blow from a dagger. Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by thirty
+young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword. Another was
+killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue-Michelle-Comte, three
+officers fell dead one after the other. Many of the Municipal Guards, on
+being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards, retreated.
+
+In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red
+flag bearing the following inscription: Republican revolution, No. 127.
+Was this a revolution, in fact?
+
+The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable,
+tortuous, colossal citadel.
+
+There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest
+was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there
+lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.
+
+In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the
+fearful uncertainty of the crisis. They recalled the popular ovation
+which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.
+Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General
+Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,
+composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the
+National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his scarf
+of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion. The insurgents,
+on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open spaces, and
+audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades. Each side was
+watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated;
+the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make
+itself heard. The Minister of War at that time, Marshal Soult, who had
+seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.
+
+These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvres and having as
+resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly
+disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called public
+wrath.
+
+The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A
+battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of
+the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School
+had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending
+from Vincennes.
+
+Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly
+serene.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--ORIGINALITY OF PARIS
+
+During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more
+than one insurrection. Nothing is, generally, more singularly calm than
+the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the bounds of
+the rebellious quarters. Paris very speedily accustoms herself to
+anything,--it is only a riot,--and Paris has so many affairs on hand,
+that she does not put herself out for so small a matter. These colossal
+cities alone can offer such spectacles. These immense enclosures alone
+can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable
+tranquillity. Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the
+shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he
+contents himself with the remark:--
+
+"There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin."
+
+Or:--
+
+"In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."
+
+Often he adds carelessly:--
+
+"Or somewhere in that direction."
+
+Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry and
+firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:--
+
+"It's getting hot! Hullo, it's getting hot!"
+
+A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up his
+shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say, he places
+his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.
+
+Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take and
+re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles the fronts
+of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds, corpses encumber the
+streets. A few streets away, the shock of billiard-balls can be heard in
+the cafes.
+
+The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious laugh
+and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with
+war. Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going to a dinner
+somewhere in town. Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is
+going on.
+
+In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.
+
+At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a
+little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored
+rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and
+came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade, offering
+his glasses of cocoa impartially,--now to the Government, now to
+anarchy.
+
+Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of uprisings
+in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this end, two
+things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. The city of
+Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.
+
+On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 25th, 1832, the
+great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. It
+was afraid.
+
+Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere, in the
+most distant and most "disinterested" quarters. The courageous took to
+arms, the poltroons hid. The busy and heedless passer-by disappeared.
+Many streets were empty at four o'clock in the morning.
+
+Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,--that
+they were masters of the Bank;--that there were six hundred of them
+in the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled in the
+church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand Carrel
+had been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: "Get a
+regiment first"; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had said to them,
+nevertheless: "I am with you. I will follow you wherever there is room
+for a chair"; that one must be on one's guard; that at night there would
+be people pillaging isolated dwellings in the deserted corners of Paris
+(there the imagination of the police, that Anne Radcliffe mixed up with
+the Government was recognizable); that a battery had been established
+in the Rue Aubry le Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud were putting their
+heads together, and that, at midnight, or at daybreak at latest, four
+columns would march simultaneously on the centre of the uprising, the
+first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte Saint-Martin,
+the third from the Greve, the fourth from the Halles; that perhaps,
+also, the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the Champ-de-Mars;
+that no one knew what would happen, but that this time, it certainly was
+serious.
+
+People busied themselves over Marshal Soult's hesitations. Why did not
+he attack at once? It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. The
+old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.
+
+Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with
+an air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons were
+arrested. By nine o'clock, more than eight hundred persons had been
+arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them, so was the
+Conciergerie, so was La Force.
+
+At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is called the
+Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon which lay a heap
+of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly.
+All that straw rustled by all these men, produced the sound of a heavy
+shower. Elsewhere prisoners slept in the open air in the meadows, piled
+on top of each other.
+
+Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not habitual
+with Paris.
+
+People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were
+uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this: "Ah! my God! He has not come
+home!" There was hardly even the distant rumble of a vehicle to be
+heard.
+
+People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts, the
+tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that were
+said: "It is cavalry," or: "Those are the caissons galloping," to the
+trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable
+alarm peal from Saint-Merry.
+
+They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of
+the streets and disappeared, shouting: "Go home!" And people made haste
+to bolt their doors. They said: "How will all this end?" From moment to
+moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take on
+a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S
+POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY
+
+At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the
+populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement
+in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following the
+hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards, weighed,
+so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a frightful ebb.
+The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their
+escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight.
+The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling,
+overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred
+streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.
+
+At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue
+Menilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which
+he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old
+holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-a-brac merchant's shop.
+
+"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."
+
+And off he ran with the pistol.
+
+Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing
+through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad
+brandishing his pistol and singing:--
+
+ La nuit on ne voit rien,
+ Le jour on voit tres bien,
+ D'un ecrit apocrypha
+ Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,
+ Pratiquez la vertu,
+ Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]
+
+
+It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.
+
+On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.
+
+Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march,
+and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We
+know not. Who does know? Himself, perhaps. However, Gavroche was well
+up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his
+own chirpings. An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of
+the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the repertory
+of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with
+thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been
+for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a
+commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche was a gamin
+of letters.
+
+Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered
+the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously
+rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of
+Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning;
+that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets
+at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically
+extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of
+breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding
+them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost
+entirely. On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same
+spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a
+farewell: "I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as
+they say at the court, I file off. If you don't find papa and mamma,
+young 'uns, come back here this evening. I'll scramble you up some
+supper, and I'll give you a shakedown." The two children, picked up by
+some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank,
+or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris,
+did not return. The lowest depths of the actual social world are full of
+these lost traces. Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve weeks
+had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the back
+of his head and said: "Where the devil are my two children?"
+
+In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du
+Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that
+street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook's
+shop. This presented a providential occasion to eat another
+apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in
+his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou,
+and began to shout: "Help!"
+
+It is hard to miss the last cake.
+
+Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.
+
+Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing the
+Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss of the
+apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged himself in the
+immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters in broad daylight.
+
+A little further on, on catching sight of a group of comfortable-looking
+persons, who seemed to be landed proprietors, he shrugged his shoulders
+and spit out at random before him this mouthful of philosophical bile as
+they passed:
+
+"How fat those moneyed men are! They're drunk! They just wallow in good
+dinners. Ask 'em what they do with their money. They don't know. They
+eat it, that's what they do! As much as their bellies will hold."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH
+
+The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one's hand in the
+open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche felt his
+fervor increasing with every moment. Amid the scraps of the Marseillaise
+which he was singing, he shouted:--
+
+"All goes well. I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I'm all broken
+up with rheumatism, but I'm satisfied, citizens. All that the bourgeois
+have to do is to bear themselves well, I'll sneeze them out subversive
+couplets. What are the police spies? Dogs. And I'd just like to have
+one of them at the end of my pistol. I'm just from the boulevard, my
+friends. It's getting hot there, it's getting into a little boil, it's
+simmering. It's time to skim the pot. Forward march, men! Let an impure
+blood inundate the furrows! I give my days to my country, I shall never
+see my concubine more, Nini, finished, yes, Nini? But never mind! Long
+live joy! Let's fight, crebleu! I've had enough of despotism."
+
+At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard having
+fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked up the
+man, then he assisted in raising the horse. After which he picked up his
+pistol and resumed his way. In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace and
+silence. This apathy, peculiar to the Marais, presented a contrast with
+the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips were chatting in a doorway.
+
+Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping
+hags; and the "Thou shalt be King" could be quite as mournfully hurled
+at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath of
+Armuyr. The croak would be almost identical.
+
+The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own
+concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker
+with her basket on her back.
+
+All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age,
+which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.
+
+The rag-picker was humble. In this open-air society, it is the
+rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. This is caused
+by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean, according to the will of
+the portresses, and after the fancy of the one who makes the heap. There
+may be kindness in the broom.
+
+This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what a
+smile! on the three portresses. Things of this nature were said:--
+
+"Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?"
+
+"Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It's
+the dogs who complain."
+
+"And people also."
+
+"But the fleas from a cat don't go after people."
+
+"That's not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year
+when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the
+newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great
+sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you remember
+the King of Rome?"
+
+"I liked the Duc de Bordeau better."
+
+"I knew Louis XVIII. I prefer Louis XVIII."
+
+"Meat is awfully dear, isn't it, Mother Patagon?"
+
+"Ah! don't mention it, the butcher's shop is a horror. A horrible
+horror--one can't afford anything but the poor cuts nowadays."
+
+Here the rag-picker interposed:--
+
+"Ladies, business is dull. The refuse heaps are miserable. No one throws
+anything away any more. They eat everything."
+
+"There are poorer people than you, la Vargouleme."
+
+"Ah, that's true," replied the rag-picker, with deference, "I have a
+profession."
+
+A pause succeeded, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity for
+boasting which lies at the bottom of man, added:--
+
+"In the morning, on my return home, I pick over my basket, I sort my
+things. This makes heaps in my room. I put the rags in a basket, the
+cores and stalks in a bucket, the linen in my cupboard, the woollen
+stuff in my commode, the old papers in the corner of the window,
+the things that are good to eat in my bowl, the bits of glass in my
+fireplace, the old shoes behind my door, and the bones under my bed."
+
+Gavroche had stopped behind her and was listening.
+
+"Old ladies," said he, "what do you mean by talking politics?"
+
+He was assailed by a broadside, composed of a quadruple howl.
+
+"Here's another rascal."
+
+"What's that he's got in his paddle? A pistol?"
+
+"Well, I'd like to know what sort of a beggar's brat this is?"
+
+"That sort of animal is never easy unless he's overturning the
+authorities."
+
+Gavroche disdainfully contented himself, by way of reprisal, with
+elevating the tip of his nose with his thumb and opening his hand wide.
+
+The rag-picker cried:--
+
+"You malicious, bare-pawed little wretch!"
+
+The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands together
+in horror.
+
+"There's going to be evil doings, that's certain. The errand-boy next
+door has a little pointed beard, I have seen him pass every day with a
+young person in a pink bonnet on his arm; to-day I saw him pass, and
+he had a gun on his arm. Mame Bacheux says, that last week there was a
+revolution at--at--at--where's the calf!--at Pontoise. And then, there
+you see him, that horrid scamp, with his pistol! It seems that the
+Celestins are full of pistols. What do you suppose the Government can
+do with good-for-nothings who don't know how to do anything but contrive
+ways of upsetting the world, when we had just begun to get a little
+quiet after all the misfortunes that have happened, good Lord! to that
+poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! And all this is going to
+make tobacco dearer. It's infamous! And I shall certainly go to see him
+beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!"
+
+"You've got the sniffles, old lady," said Gavroche. "Blow your
+promontory."
+
+And he passed on. When he was in the Rue Pavee, the rag-picker occurred
+to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:--
+
+"You're in the wrong to insult the revolutionists, Mother
+Dust-Heap-Corner. This pistol is in your interests. It's so that you may
+have more good things to eat in your basket."
+
+All at once, he heard a shout behind him; it was the portress Patagon
+who had followed him, and who was shaking her fist at him in the
+distance and crying:--
+
+"You're nothing but a bastard."
+
+"Oh! Come now," said Gavroche, "I don't care a brass farthing for that!"
+
+Shortly afterwards, he passed the Hotel Lamoignon. There he uttered this
+appeal:--
+
+"Forward march to the battle!"
+
+And he was seized with a fit of melancholy. He gazed at his pistol with
+an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:--
+
+"I'm going off," said he, "but you won't go off!"
+
+One dog may distract the attention from another dog.[45] A very gaunt
+poodle came along at the moment. Gavroche felt compassion for him.
+
+"My poor doggy," said he, "you must have gone and swallowed a cask, for
+all the hoops are visible."
+
+Then he directed his course towards l'Orme-Saint-Gervais.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER
+
+The worthy hair-dresser who had chased from his shop the two little
+fellows to whom Gavroche had opened the paternal interior of the
+elephant was at that moment in his shop engaged in shaving an old
+soldier of the legion who had served under the Empire. They were
+talking. The hair-dresser had, naturally, spoken to the veteran of the
+riot, then of General Lamarque, and from Lamarque they had passed to
+the Emperor. Thence sprang up a conversation between barber and
+soldier which Prudhomme, had he been present, would have enriched with
+arabesques, and which he would have entitled: "Dialogue between the
+razor and the sword."
+
+"How did the Emperor ride, sir?" said the barber.
+
+"Badly. He did not know how to fall--so he never fell."
+
+"Did he have fine horses? He must have had fine horses!"
+
+"On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. It was a
+racing mare, perfectly white. Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle
+deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly
+articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful
+crupper. A little more than fifteen hands in height."
+
+"A pretty horse," remarked the hair-dresser.
+
+"It was His Majesty's beast."
+
+The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence
+would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:--
+
+"The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?"
+
+The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who
+had been there:--
+
+"In the heel. At Ratisbon. I never saw him so well dressed as on that
+day. He was as neat as a new sou."
+
+"And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?"
+
+"I?" said the soldier, "ah! not to amount to anything. At Marengo, I
+received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right
+arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. At Friedland,
+a thrust from a bayonet, there,--at the Moskowa seven or eight
+lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed
+one of my fingers. Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaien in
+the thigh, that's all."
+
+"How fine that is!" exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents, "to
+die on the field of battle! On my word of honor, rather than die in bed,
+of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms,
+syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannon-ball in my
+belly!"
+
+"You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.
+
+He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop. The
+show-window had suddenly been fractured.
+
+The wig-maker turned pale.
+
+"Ah, good God!" he exclaimed, "it's one of them!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"A cannon-ball."
+
+"Here it is," said the soldier.
+
+And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor. It was a
+pebble.
+
+The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing
+at the full speed, towards the Marche Saint-Jean. As he passed the
+hair-dresser's shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind,
+had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him, and had
+flung a stone through his panes.
+
+"You see!" shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue,
+"that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it. What
+has any one done to that gamin?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN
+
+In the meantime, in the Marche Saint-Jean, where the post had already
+been disarmed, Gavroche had just "effected a junction" with a band led
+by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were armed after
+a fashion. Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found them and swelled the
+group. Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun, Combeferre the gun
+of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion, and in his belt,
+two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen, Jean Prouvaire
+an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac was brandishing an
+unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, with a naked sword in his hand, marched
+at their head shouting: "Long live Poland!"
+
+They reached the Quai Morland. Cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked
+by the rain, with lightning in their eyes. Gavroche accosted them
+calmly:--
+
+"Where are we going?"
+
+"Come along," said Courfeyrac.
+
+Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, who was like a fish
+in water in a riot. He wore a scarlet waistcoat, and indulged in
+the sort of words which break everything. His waistcoat astounded a
+passer-by, who cried in bewilderment:--
+
+"Here are the reds!"
+
+"The reds, the reds!" retorted Bahorel. "A queer kind of fear,
+bourgeois. For my part I don't tremble before a poppy, the little red
+hat inspires me with no alarm. Take my advice, bourgeois, let's leave
+fear of the red to horned cattle."
+
+He caught sight of a corner of the wall on which was placarded the
+most peaceable sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a
+Lenten admonition addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "flock."
+
+Bahorel exclaimed:--
+
+"'Flock'; a polite way of saying geese."
+
+And he tore the charge from the nail. This conquered Gavroche. From that
+instant Gavroche set himself to study Bahorel.
+
+"Bahorel," observed Enjolras, "you are wrong. You should have let that
+charge alone, he is not the person with whom we have to deal, you are
+wasting your wrath to no purpose. Take care of your supply. One does not
+fire out of the ranks with the soul any more than with a gun."
+
+"Each one in his own fashion, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. "This
+bishop's prose shocks me; I want to eat eggs without being permitted.
+Your style is the hot and cold; I am amusing myself. Besides, I'm not
+wasting myself, I'm getting a start; and if I tore down that charge,
+Hercle! 'twas only to whet my appetite."
+
+This word, Hercle, struck Gavroche. He sought all occasions for
+learning, and that tearer-down of posters possessed his esteem. He
+inquired of him:--
+
+"What does Hercle mean?"
+
+Bahorel answered:--
+
+"It means cursed name of a dog, in Latin."
+
+Here Bahorel recognized at a window a pale young man with a black beard
+who was watching them as they passed, probably a Friend of the A B C. He
+shouted to him:--
+
+"Quick, cartridges, para bellum."
+
+"A fine man! that's true," said Gavroche, who now understood Latin.
+
+A tumultuous retinue accompanied them,--students, artists, young men
+affiliated to the Cougourde of Aix, artisans, longshoremen, armed with
+clubs and bayonets; some, like Combeferre, with pistols thrust into
+their trousers.
+
+An old man, who appeared to be extremely aged, was walking in the band.
+
+He had no arms, and he made great haste, so that he might not be left
+behind, although he had a thoughtful air.
+
+Gavroche caught sight of him:--
+
+"Keksekca?" said he to Courfeyrac.
+
+"He's an old duffer."
+
+It was M. Mabeuf.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE OLD MAN
+
+Let us recount what had taken place.
+
+Enjolras and his friends had been on the Boulevard Bourdon, near the
+public storehouses, at the moment when the dragoons had made their
+charge. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre were among those who had
+taken to the Rue Bassompierre, shouting: "To the barricades!" In the Rue
+Lesdiguieres they had met an old man walking along. What had attracted
+their attention was that the goodman was walking in a zig-zag, as though
+he were intoxicated. Moreover, he had his hat in his hand, although it
+had been raining all the morning, and was raining pretty briskly at the
+very time. Courfeyrac had recognized Father Mabeuf. He knew him through
+having many times accompanied Marius as far as his door. As he was
+acquainted with the peaceful and more than timid habits of the old
+beadle-book-collector, and was amazed at the sight of him in the midst
+of that uproar, a couple of paces from the cavalry charges, almost in
+the midst of a fusillade, hatless in the rain, and strolling about among
+the bullets, he had accosted him, and the following dialogue had been
+exchanged between the rioter of fire and the octogenarian:--
+
+"M. Mabeuf, go to your home."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"There's going to be a row."
+
+"That's well."
+
+"Thrusts with the sword and firing, M. Mabeuf."
+
+"That is well."
+
+"Firing from cannon."
+
+"That is good. Where are the rest of you going?"
+
+"We are going to fling the government to the earth."
+
+"That is good."
+
+And he had set out to follow them. From that moment forth he had not
+uttered a word. His step had suddenly become firm; artisans had offered
+him their arms; he had refused with a sign of the head. He advanced
+nearly to the front rank of the column, with the movement of a man who
+is marching and the countenance of a man who is sleeping.
+
+"What a fierce old fellow!" muttered the students. The rumor spread
+through the troop that he was a former member of the Convention,--an old
+regicide. The mob had turned in through the Rue de la Verrerie.
+
+Little Gavroche marched in front with that deafening song which made of
+him a sort of trumpet.
+
+He sang: "Voici la lune qui paratt,
+ Quand irons-nous dans la foret?
+ Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.
+
+ Tou tou tou
+ Pour Chatou.
+ Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.
+
+ "Pour avoir bu de grand matin
+ La rosee a meme le thym,
+ Deux moineaux etaient en ribotte.
+
+ Zi zi zi
+ Pour Passy.
+ Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.
+
+ "Et ces deux pauvres petits loups,
+ Comme deux grives estaient souls;
+ Une tigre en riait dans sa grotte.
+
+ Don don don
+ Pour Meudon.
+ Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.
+
+ "L'un jurait et l'autre sacrait.
+ Quand irons nous dans la foret?
+ Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.
+
+ Tin tin tin
+ Pour Pantin.
+ Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte."[46]
+
+They directed their course towards Saint-Merry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--RECRUITS
+
+The band augmented every moment. Near the Rue des Billettes, a man of
+lofty stature, whose hair was turning gray, and whose bold and daring
+mien was remarked by Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre, but whom
+none of them knew, joined them. Gavroche, who was occupied in singing,
+whistling, humming, running on ahead and pounding on the shutters of the
+shops with the butt of his triggerless pistol; paid no attention to this
+man.
+
+It chanced that in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed in front of
+Courfeyrac's door.
+
+"This happens just right," said Courfeyrac, "I have forgotten my purse,
+and I have lost my hat."
+
+He quitted the mob and ran up to his quarters at full speed. He seized
+an old hat and his purse.
+
+He also seized a large square coffer, of the dimensions of a large
+valise, which was concealed under his soiled linen.
+
+As he descended again at a run, the portress hailed him:--
+
+"Monsieur de Courfeyrac!"
+
+"What's your name, portress?"
+
+The portress stood bewildered.
+
+"Why, you know perfectly well, I'm the concierge; my name is Mother
+Veuvain."
+
+"Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you
+Mother de Veuvain. Now speak, what's the matter? What do you want?"
+
+"There is some one who wants to speak with you."
+
+"Who is it?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"In my lodge."
+
+"The devil!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.
+
+"But the person has been waiting your return for over an hour," said the
+portress.
+
+At the same time, a sort of pale, thin, small, freckled, and youthful
+artisan, clad in a tattered blouse and patched trousers of ribbed
+velvet, and who had rather the air of a girl accoutred as a man than of
+a man, emerged from the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which
+was not the least in the world like a woman's voice:--
+
+"Monsieur Marius, if you please."
+
+"He is not here."
+
+"Will he return this evening?"
+
+"I know nothing about it."
+
+And Courfeyrac added:--
+
+"For my part, I shall not return."
+
+The young man gazed steadily at him and said:--
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because."
+
+"Where are you going, then?"
+
+"What business is that of yours?"
+
+"Would you like to have me carry your coffer for you?"
+
+"I am going to the barricades."
+
+"Would you like to have me go with you?"
+
+"If you like!" replied Courfeyrac. "The street is free, the pavements
+belong to every one."
+
+And he made his escape at a run to join his friends. When he had
+rejoined them, he gave the coffer to one of them to carry. It was only
+a quarter of an hour after this that he saw the young man, who had
+actually followed them.
+
+A mob does not go precisely where it intends. We have explained that
+a gust of wind carries it away. They overshot Saint-Merry and found
+themselves, without precisely knowing how, in the Rue Saint-Denis.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION
+
+The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end
+near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour, a
+basket-maker's shop having for its sign a basket in the form of Napoleon
+the Great with this inscription:--
+
+ NAPOLEON IS MADE
+ WHOLLY OF WILLOW,
+
+have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed
+hardly thirty years ago.
+
+It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds
+spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called Corinthe.
+
+The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade
+effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way, by the barricade
+Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade of the Rue de la
+Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity, that we are about to
+shed a little light.
+
+May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,
+to the simple means which we have already employed in the case of
+Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a tolerably exact
+manner the constitution of the houses which stood at that epoch near the
+Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of Paris,
+where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to
+imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis with its summit and the Halles
+with its base, and whose two vertical bars should form the Rue de la
+Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse
+bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue
+Mondetour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles,
+so that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed to
+form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and the Rue
+Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue
+des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut up, of
+varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely separated,
+like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.
+
+We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark,
+contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings. These
+buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue
+de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running
+from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter broad,
+the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet, skirting
+little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with iron hoops,
+excessive heaps of refuse, and gates armed with enormous, century-old
+gratings. The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.
+
+The name of Mondetour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of that
+whole set of streets. A little further on, they are found still better
+expressed by the Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondetour.
+
+The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue de
+la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though he had
+entered an elongated funnel. At the end of this street, which was very
+short, he found further passage barred in the direction of the Halles
+by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in a blind
+alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two dark cuts through
+which he could make his escape. This was the Rue Mondetour, which on
+one side ran into the Rue de Precheurs, and on the other into the Rue
+du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of
+cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be
+seen a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed a sort
+of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two stories only, that
+an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years
+before. This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old
+Theophilus described in the following couplet:--
+
+ La branle le squelette horrible
+ D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.[47]
+
+
+The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,
+from father to son.
+
+In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the
+Pot-aux-Roses, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its
+sign-board, a post (poteau) painted rose-color. In the last century, the
+worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised by the
+stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop at the
+very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted, by way of
+gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. The keeper of the
+cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had caused to be placed
+in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: "At the Bunch of Corinth
+Grapes" ("Au Raisin de Corinthe"). Hence the name of Corinthe. Nothing
+is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The ellipsis is the
+zig-zag of the phrase. Corinthe gradually dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses.
+The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no longer
+acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue.
+
+A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the first
+floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase piercing
+the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad
+daylight,--this was the style of this cabaret. A staircase with a
+trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. On the second floor were
+the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. They were reached by a staircase
+which was a ladder rather than a staircase, and had for their entrance
+only a private door in the large room on the first floor. Under the
+roof, in two mansard attics, were the nests for the servants. The
+kitchen shared the ground-floor with the tap-room.
+
+Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact is
+that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking alone
+in his wine-shop, they also ate there. Hucheloup had invented a capital
+thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps,
+which he called carpes au gras. These were eaten by the light of a
+tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., on tables to which
+were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths. People came thither
+from a distance. Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to notify
+passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped a brush in a pot of black
+paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as well as
+a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall this
+remarkable inscription:--
+
+ CARPES HO GRAS.
+
+
+One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to
+obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began
+the third; this is what remained:--
+
+ CARPE HO RAS.
+
+
+Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become
+a profound piece of advice.
+
+In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father
+Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his
+kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled
+Horace. And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant:
+"Enter my wine-shop."
+
+Nothing of all this is in existence now. The Mondetour labyrinth was
+disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer exists
+at the present moment. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe have
+disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.
+
+As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the
+rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire who had
+discovered Corinthe. He had entered it on account of the Carpe horas,
+and had returned thither on account of the Carpes au gras. There they
+drank, there they ate, there they shouted; they did not pay much, they
+paid badly, they did not pay at all, but they were always welcome.
+Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.
+
+Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper
+with a mustache; an amusing variety. He always had an ill-tempered air,
+seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people who
+entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking a quarrel
+with them than of serving them with soup. And yet, we insist upon
+the word, people were always welcome there. This oddity had attracted
+customers to his shop, and brought him young men, who said to each
+other: "Come hear Father Hucheloup growl." He had been a fencing-master.
+All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing. A big voice, a good
+fellow. He had a comic foundation under a tragic exterior, he asked
+nothing better than to frighten you, very much like those snuff-boxes
+which are in the shape of a pistol. The detonation makes one sneeze.
+
+Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.
+
+About 1830, Father Hucheloup died. With him disappeared the secret of
+stuffed carps. His inconsolable widow continued to keep the wine-shop.
+But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable; the wine, which had
+always been bad, became fearfully bad. Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his
+friends continued to go to Corinthe,--out of pity, as Bossuet said.
+
+The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given to rustic
+recollections. She deprived them of their flatness by her pronunciation.
+She had a way of her own of saying things, which spiced her
+reminiscences of the village and of her springtime. It had formerly been
+her delight, so she affirmed, to hear the loups-de-gorge (rouges-gorges)
+chanter dans les ogrepines (aubepines)--to hear the redbreasts sing in
+the hawthorn-trees.
+
+The hall on the first floor, where "the restaurant" was situated, was
+a large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches, and
+tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It was reached
+by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner of the room at a
+square hole like the hatchway of a ship.
+
+This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was
+always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed furniture
+comported itself as though it had but three legs--the whitewashed walls
+had for their only ornament the following quatrain in honor of Mame
+Hucheloup:--
+
+ Elle etonne a dix pas, elle epouvente a deux,
+ Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
+ On tremble a chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche
+ Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.[48]
+
+
+This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.
+
+Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till
+night before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity. Two
+serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,[49] and who had never been
+known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set on the tables
+the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths which were served to the
+hungry patrons in earthenware bowls. Matelote, large, plump, redhaired,
+and noisy, the favorite ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was
+homelier than any mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it
+becomes the servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was
+less homely than Mame Hucheloup. Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with a
+lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids, always
+languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called chronic lassitude,
+the first up in the house and the last in bed, waited on every one, even
+the other maid, silently and gently, smiling through her fatigue with a
+vague and sleepy smile.
+
+Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the
+following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:--
+
+ Regale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.[50]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--PRELIMINARY GAYETIES
+
+Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly than
+elsewhere. He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. The
+two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They had
+everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. They were, what
+the subordinate monks who accompany monks are called, bini. On the
+morning of the 5th of June, they went to Corinthe to breakfast. Joly,
+who was all stuffed up, had a catarrh which Laigle was beginning to
+share. Laigle's coat was threadbare, but Joly was well dressed.
+
+It was about nine o'clock in the morning, when they opened the door of
+Corinthe.
+
+They ascended to the first floor.
+
+Matelote and Gibelotte received them.
+
+"Oysters, cheese, and ham," said Laigle.
+
+And they seated themselves at a table.
+
+The wine-shop was empty; there was no one there but themselves.
+
+Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table.
+
+While they were busy with their first oysters, a head appeared at the
+hatchway of the staircase, and a voice said:--
+
+"I am passing by. I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie
+cheese. I enter." It was Grantaire.
+
+Grantaire took a stool and drew up to the table.
+
+At the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine on the
+table.
+
+That made three.
+
+"Are you going to drink those two bottles?" Laigle inquired of
+Grantaire.
+
+Grantaire replied:--
+
+"All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous. Two bottles never yet
+astonished a man."
+
+The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a
+bottle was rapidly gulped down.
+
+"So you have a hole in your stomach?" began Laigle again.
+
+"You have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.
+
+And after having emptied his glass, he added:--
+
+"Ah, by the way, Laigle of the funeral oration, your coat is old."
+
+"I should hope so," retorted Laigle. "That's why we get on well
+together, my coat and I. It has acquired all my folds, it does not bind
+me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities, it falls in with all my
+movements, I am only conscious of it because it keeps me warm. Old coats
+are just like old friends."
+
+"That's true," ejaculated Joly, striking into the dialogue, "an old goat
+is an old abi" (ami, friend).
+
+"Especially in the mouth of a man whose head is stuffed up," said
+Grantaire.
+
+"Grantaire," demanded Laigle, "have you just come from the boulevard?"
+
+"No."
+
+"We have just seen the head of the procession pass, Joly and I."
+
+"It's a marvellous sight," said Joly.
+
+"How quiet this street is!" exclaimed Laigle. "Who would suspect that
+Paris was turned upside down? How plainly it is to be seen that in
+former days there were nothing but convents here! In this neighborhood!
+Du Breul and Sauval give a list of them, and so does the Abbe Lebeuf.
+They were all round here, they fairly swarmed, booted and barefooted,
+shaven, bearded, gray, black, white, Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins,
+Carmelites, Little Augustines, Great Augustines, old Augustines--there
+was no end of them."
+
+"Don't let's talk of monks," interrupted Grantaire, "it makes one want
+to scratch one's self."
+
+Then he exclaimed:--
+
+"Bouh! I've just swallowed a bad oyster. Now hypochondria is taking
+possession of me again. The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly.
+I hate the human race. I just passed through the Rue Richelieu, in front
+of the big public library. That pile of oyster-shells which is called
+a library is disgusting even to think of. What paper! What ink! What
+scrawling! And all that has been written! What rascal was it who said
+that man was a featherless biped?[51] And then, I met a pretty girl of
+my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring, worthy to be called
+Floreal, and who is delighted, enraptured, as happy as the angels,
+because a wretch yesterday, a frightful banker all spotted with
+small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her! Alas! woman keeps on the
+watch for a protector as much as for a lover; cats chase mice as well
+as birds. Two months ago that young woman was virtuous in an attic, she
+adjusted little brass rings in the eyelet-holes of corsets, what do
+you call it? She sewed, she had a camp bed, she dwelt beside a pot
+of flowers, she was contented. Now here she is a bankeress. This
+transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning in
+high spirits. The hideous point about it is, that the jade is as pretty
+to-day as she was yesterday. Her financier did not show in her face.
+Roses have this advantage or disadvantage over women, that the traces
+left upon them by caterpillars are visible. Ah! there is no morality on
+earth. I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol of love, the laurel,
+the symbol of air, the olive, that ninny, the symbol of peace, the
+apple-tree which came nearest rangling Adam with its pips, and the
+fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats. As for right, do you know what
+right is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium, and demands
+what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus answers: 'The wrong that
+Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidenae did to you, the wrong that the
+Eques, the Volsci, and the Sabines have done to you. They were your
+neighbors. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighborliness just as
+you do. You have stolen Alba, we shall take Clusium.' Rome said: 'You
+shall not take Clusium.' Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: 'Vae victis!'
+That is what right is. Ah! what beasts of prey there are in this world!
+What eagles! It makes my flesh creep."
+
+He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then he drank and went on,
+having hardly been interrupted by this glass of wine, of which no one,
+not even himself, had taken any notice:--
+
+"Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker who takes the grisette
+is an eagle. There is no more modesty in the one case than in the other.
+So we believe in nothing. There is but one reality: drink. Whatever your
+opinion may be in favor of the lean cock, like the Canton of Uri, or
+in favor of the fat cock, like the Canton of Glaris, it matters little,
+drink. You talk to me of the boulevard, of that procession, et caetera,
+et caetera. Come now, is there going to be another revolution? This
+poverty of means on the part of the good God astounds me. He has to keep
+greasing the groove of events every moment. There is a hitch, it won't
+work. Quick, a revolution! The good God has his hands perpetually black
+with that cart-grease. If I were in his place, I'd be perfectly simple
+about it, I would not wind up my mechanism every minute, I'd lead the
+human race in a straightforward way, I'd weave matters mesh by mesh,
+without breaking the thread, I would have no provisional arrangements,
+I would have no extraordinary repertory. What the rest of you call
+progress advances by means of two motors, men and events. But, sad to
+say, from time to time, the exceptional becomes necessary. The ordinary
+troupe suffices neither for event nor for men: among men geniuses are
+required, among events revolutions. Great accidents are the law; the
+order of things cannot do without them; and, judging from the apparition
+of comets, one would be tempted to think that Heaven itself finds actors
+needed for its performance. At the moment when one expects it the least,
+God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some queer star
+turns up, underlined by an enormous tail. And that causes the death
+of Caesar. Brutus deals him a blow with a knife, and God a blow with a
+comet. Crac, and behold an aurora borealis, behold a revolution, behold
+a great man; '93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of 1811
+at the head of the poster. Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all studded
+with unexpected flashes! Boum! Boum! extraordinary show! Raise your
+eyes, boobies. Everything is in disorder, the star as well as the drama.
+Good God, it is too much and not enough. These resources, gathered from
+exception, seem magnificence and poverty. My friends, Providence has
+come down to expedients. What does a revolution prove? That God is in a
+quandry. He effects a coup d'etat because he, God, has not been able to
+make both ends meet. In fact, this confirms me in my conjectures as
+to Jehovah's fortune; and when I see so much distress in heaven and on
+earth, from the bird who has not a grain of millet to myself without a
+hundred thousand livres of income, when I see human destiny, which is
+very badly worn, and even royal destiny, which is threadbare, witness
+the Prince de Conde hung, when I see winter, which is nothing but a rent
+in the zenith through which the wind blows, when I see so many rags even
+in the perfectly new purple of the morning on the crests of hills, when
+I see the drops of dew, those mock pearls, when I see the frost, that
+paste, when I see humanity ripped apart and events patched up, and so
+many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon, when I see so
+much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. The appearance
+exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. He gives a revolution
+as a tradesman whose money-box is empty gives a ball. God must not be
+judged from appearances. Beneath the gilding of heaven I perceive
+a poverty-stricken universe. Creation is bankrupt. That is why I am
+discontented. Here it is the 4th of June, it is almost night; ever since
+this morning I have been waiting for daylight to come; it has not come,
+and I bet that it won't come all day. This is the inexactness of an
+ill-paid clerk. Yes, everything is badly arranged, nothing fits anything
+else, this old world is all warped, I take my stand on the opposition,
+everything goes awry; the universe is a tease. It's like children, those
+who want them have none, and those who don't want them have them. Total:
+I'm vexed. Besides, Laigle de Meaux, that bald-head, offends my sight.
+It humiliates me to think that I am of the same age as that baldy.
+However, I criticise, but I do not insult. The universe is what it is.
+I speak here without evil intent and to ease my conscience. Receive,
+Eternal Father, the assurance of my distinguished consideration. Ah!
+by all the saints of Olympus and by all the gods of paradise, I was not
+intended to be a Parisian, that is to say, to rebound forever, like a
+shuttlecock between two battledores, from the group of the loungers to
+the group of the roysterers. I was made to be a Turk, watching oriental
+houris all day long, executing those exquisite Egyptian dances, as
+sensuous as the dream of a chaste man, or a Beauceron peasant, or a
+Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentlewomen, or a petty German prince,
+furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and
+occupying his leisure with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to
+say, his frontier. Those are the positions for which I was born! Yes, I
+have said a Turk, and I will not retract. I do not understand how people
+can habitually take Turks in bad part; Mohammed had his good points;
+respect for the inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises with
+odalisques! Let us not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion which is
+ornamented with a hen-roost! Now, I insist on a drink. The earth is a
+great piece of stupidity. And it appears that they are going to fight,
+all those imbeciles, and to break each other's profiles and to massacre
+each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might
+go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of
+new-mown hay in the meadows! Really, people do commit altogether
+too many follies. An old broken lantern which I have just seen at a
+bric-a-brac merchant's suggests a reflection to my mind; it is time to
+enlighten the human race. Yes, behold me sad again. That's what comes
+of swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way! I am growing
+melancholy once more. Oh! frightful old world. People strive, turn each
+other out, prostitute themselves, kill each other, and get used to it!"
+
+And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing, which
+was well earned.
+
+"A propos of revolution," said Joly, "it is decidedly abberent that
+Barius is in lub."
+
+"Does any one know with whom?" demanded Laigle.
+
+"Do."
+
+"No?"
+
+"Do! I tell you."
+
+"Marius' love affairs!" exclaimed Grantaire. "I can imagine it. Marius
+is a fog, and he must have found a vapor. Marius is of the race of
+poets. He who says poet, says fool, madman, Tymbraeus Apollo. Marius and
+his Marie, or his Marion, or his Maria, or his Mariette. They must make
+a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in which
+they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They are souls
+possessed of senses. They lie among the stars."
+
+Grantaire was attacking his second bottle and, possibly, his second
+harangue, when a new personage emerged from the square aperture of the
+stairs. It was a boy less than ten years of age, ragged, very small,
+yellow, with an odd phiz, a vivacious eye, an enormous amount of hair
+drenched with rain, and wearing a contented air.
+
+The child unhesitatingly making his choice among the three, addressed
+himself to Laigle de Meaux.
+
+"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?"
+
+"That is my nickname," replied Laigle. "What do you want with me?"
+
+"This. A tall blonde fellow on the boulevard said to me: 'Do you know
+Mother Hucheloup?' I said: 'Yes, Rue Chanvrerie, the old man's widow;'
+he said to me: 'Go there. There you will find M. Bossuet. Tell him from
+me: "A B C".' It's a joke that they're playing on you, isn't it. He gave
+me ten sous."
+
+"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle; and, turning to Grantaire:
+"Grantaire, lend me ten sous."
+
+This made twenty sous, which Laigle handed to the lad.
+
+"Thank you, sir," said the urchin.
+
+"What is your name?" inquired Laigle.
+
+"Navet, Gavroche's friend."
+
+"Stay with us," said Laigle.
+
+"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire.
+
+The child replied:--
+
+"I can't, I belong in the procession, I'm the one to shout 'Down with
+Polignac!'"
+
+And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is the
+most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure.
+
+The child gone, Grantaire took the word:--
+
+"That is the pure-bred gamin. There are a great many varieties of the
+gamin species. The notary's gamin is called Skip-the-Gutter, the cook's
+gamin is called a scullion, the baker's gamin is called a mitron,
+the lackey's gamin is called a groom, the marine gamin is called the
+cabin-boy, the soldier's gamin is called the drummer-boy, the painter's
+gamin is called paint-grinder, the tradesman's gamin is called an
+errand-boy, the courtesan gamin is called the minion, the kingly gamin
+is called the dauphin, the god gamin is called the bambino."
+
+In the meantime, Laigle was engaged in reflection; he said half aloud:--
+
+"A B C, that is to say: the burial of Lamarque."
+
+"The tall blonde," remarked Grantaire, "is Enjolras, who is sending you
+a warning."
+
+"Shall we go?" ejaculated Bossuet.
+
+"It's raiding," said Joly. "I have sworn to go through fire, but not
+through water. I don't wand to ged a gold."
+
+"I shall stay here," said Grantaire. "I prefer a breakfast to a hearse."
+
+"Conclusion: we remain," said Laigle. "Well, then, let us drink.
+Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot."
+
+"Ah! the riot, I am with you!" cried Joly.
+
+Laigle rubbed his hands.
+
+"Now we're going to touch up the revolution of 1830. As a matter of
+fact, it does hurt the people along the seams."
+
+"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire. "I don't
+execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton
+night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, I think
+that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize his
+royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre end
+against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven."
+
+The room was dark, large clouds had just finished the extinction of
+daylight. There was no one in the wine-shop, or in the street, every one
+having gone off "to watch events."
+
+"Is it mid-day or midnight?" cried Bossuet. "You can't see your hand
+before your face. Gibelotte, fetch a light."
+
+Grantaire was drinking in a melancholy way.
+
+"Enjolras disdains me," he muttered. "Enjolras said: 'Joly is ill,
+Grantaire is drunk.' It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. If he had
+come for me, I would have followed him. So much the worse for Enjolras!
+I won't go to his funeral."
+
+This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not
+stir from the wine-shop. By two o'clock in the afternoon, the table at
+which they sat was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning
+on it, one in a flat copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the
+other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had seduced Joly and
+Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire back towards
+cheerfulness.
+
+As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate
+inspirer of dreams, ever since mid-day. Wine enjoys only a conventional
+popularity with serious drinkers. There is, in fact, in the matter
+of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic.
+Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible
+fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted
+him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The
+beer-glass is the abyss. Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and
+being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse
+to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the
+most terrible of lethargies. It is of these three vapors, beer, brandy,
+and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed. They are three
+grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there are formed
+there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat,
+three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the
+slumbering Psyche.
+
+Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He was
+tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses.
+Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas,
+a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with
+dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated
+astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn
+words at the big maid-servant Matelote:--
+
+"Let the doors of the palace be thrown open! Let every one be a member
+of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup.
+Let us drink."
+
+And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:--
+
+"Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate
+thee!"
+
+And Joly exclaimed:--
+
+"Matelote and Gibelotte, dod't gib Grantaire anything more to drink.
+He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two
+francs and ninety-five centibes."
+
+And Grantaire began again:--
+
+"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting
+them on the table in the guise of candles?"
+
+Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.
+
+He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the
+falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.
+
+All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of
+"To arms!" He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end
+of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and Gavroche
+with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his sword, and
+Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel
+with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which was following
+them.
+
+The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. Bossuet
+improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his
+mouth, and shouted:--
+
+"Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hohee!"
+
+Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few
+paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting: "What do you want?" which
+crossed a "Where are you going?"
+
+"To make a barricade," replied Courfeyrac.
+
+"Well, here! This is a good place! Make it here!"
+
+"That's true, Aigle," said Courfeyrac.
+
+And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue
+de la Chanvrerie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE
+
+The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street
+widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket
+without exit. Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondetour was easily
+barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible except
+from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full sight.
+Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.
+
+Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob. There
+was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight. In the space of a
+flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left, shops, stables,
+area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights, shutters of every
+description were closed, from the ground floor to the roof. A terrified
+old woman fixed a mattress in front of her window on two clothes-poles
+for drying linen, in order to deaden the effect of musketry. The
+wine-shop alone remained open; and that for a very good reason, that the
+mob had rushed into it.--"Ah my God! Ah my God!" sighed Mame Hucheloup.
+
+Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.
+
+Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:--
+
+"Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella. You will gatch
+gold."
+
+In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had
+been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of
+street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its passage,
+and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this dray
+contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the piles
+of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the widow
+Hucheloup's empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime; Feuilly,
+with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of fans, had
+backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of blocks of
+rough stone. Blocks which were improvised like the rest and procured
+no one knows where. The beams which served as props were torn from
+the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks. When Bossuet and
+Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred with
+a rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the hand of the
+populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.
+
+Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers. Gibelotte went and
+came loaded with rubbish. Her lassitude helped on the barricade. She
+served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.
+
+An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.
+
+Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver,
+made the passengers alight, offered his hand to "the ladies," dismissed
+the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the horses by the
+bridle.
+
+"Omnibuses," said he, "do not pass the Corinthe. Non licet omnibus adire
+Corinthum."
+
+An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at their
+will, through the Rue Mondetour, and the omnibus lying on its side
+completed the bar across the street.
+
+Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.
+
+Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she cried
+in a low tone. Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge from her
+throat.
+
+"The end of the world has come," she muttered.
+
+Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup's fat, red, wrinkled neck, and
+said to Grantaire: "My dear fellow, I have always regarded a woman's
+neck as an infinitely delicate thing."
+
+But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. Matelote
+had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized her round her
+waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at the window.
+
+"Matelote is homely!" he cried: "Matelote is of a dream of ugliness!
+Matelote is a chimaera. This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic
+Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals, fell in love with
+one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. He besought Love to
+give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens! She has
+chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian's mistress, and she is a good
+girl. I guarantee that she will fight well. Every good girl contains
+a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she's an old warrior. Look at her
+moustaches! She inherited them from her husband. A hussar indeed! She
+will fight too. These two alone will strike terror to the heart of the
+banlieue. Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true as there
+are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid and formic acid;
+however, that is a matter of perfect indifference to me. Gentlemen, my
+father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics.
+I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the good fellow.
+Having never had any money, I never acquired the habit of it, and the
+result is that I have never lacked it; but, if I had been rich, there
+would have been no more poor people! You would have seen! Oh, if the
+kind hearts only had fat purses, how much better things would go! I
+picture myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild's fortune! How much good he
+would do! Matelote, embrace me! You are voluptuous and timid! You have
+cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips which claim the kiss
+of a lover."
+
+"Hold your tongue, you cask!" said Courfeyrac.
+
+Grantaire retorted:--
+
+"I am the capitoul[52] and the master of the floral games!"
+
+Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand,
+raised his beautiful, austere face. Enjolras, as the reader knows, had
+something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He would
+have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda with
+Cromwell.
+
+"Grantaire," he shouted, "go get rid of the fumes of your wine somewhere
+else than here. This is the place for enthusiasm, not for drunkenness.
+Don't disgrace the barricade!"
+
+This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire. One would
+have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. He
+seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.
+
+He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at
+Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:--
+
+"Let me sleep here."
+
+"Go and sleep somewhere else," cried Enjolras.
+
+But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him,
+replied:--
+
+"Let me sleep here,--until I die."
+
+Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:--
+
+"Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of
+living, and of dying."
+
+Grantaire replied in a grave tone:--
+
+"You will see."
+
+He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily
+on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second period of
+inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly thrust him, an
+instant later he had fallen asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP
+
+Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:--
+
+"Here's the street in its low-necked dress! How well it looks!"
+
+Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent, sought to
+console the widowed proprietress.
+
+"Mother Hucheloup, weren't you complaining the other day because you
+had had a notice served on you for infringing the law, because Gibelotte
+shook a counterpane out of your window?"
+
+"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Ah! good Heavens, are you going
+to put that table of mine in your horror, too? And it was for the
+counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from the attic
+window into the street, that the government collected a fine of a
+hundred francs. If that isn't an abomination, what is!"
+
+"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you."
+
+Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly the benefit
+which she was to derive from these reprisals made on her account. She
+was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received
+a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and
+cried for vengeance, saying: "Father, you owe my husband affront for
+affront." The father asked: "On which cheek did you receive the blow?"
+"On the left cheek." The father slapped her right cheek and said: "Now
+you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter's
+ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife's."
+
+The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Workmen had brought under
+their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of
+vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with
+fire-pots, "left over from the King's festival." This festival was very
+recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these
+munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pepin.
+They smashed the only street lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
+the lantern corresponding to one in the Rue Saint-Denis, and all
+the lanterns in the surrounding streets, de Mondetour, du Cygne, des
+Precheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite-Truanderie.
+
+Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything. Two barricades
+were now in process of construction at once, both of them resting on the
+Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger shut off the Rue
+de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondetour, on the side of
+the Rue de Cygne. This last barricade, which was very narrow, was
+constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were about fifty
+workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for, on their way, they had
+effected a wholesale loan from an armorer's shop.
+
+Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley than this
+troop. One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two holster-pistols,
+another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn
+slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine sheets of gray paper
+and was armed with a saddler's awl. There was one who was shouting:
+"Let us exterminate them to the last man and die at the point of our
+bayonet." This man had no bayonet. Another spread out over his coat the
+cross-belt and cartridge-box of a National Guardsman, the cover of the
+cartridge-box being ornamented with this inscription in red worsted:
+Public Order. There were a great many guns bearing the numbers of the
+legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes. Add to
+this, all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young men, and bronzed
+longshoremen. All were in haste; and as they helped each other, they
+discussed the possible chances. That they would receive succor about
+three o'clock in the morning--that they were sure of one regiment, that
+Paris would rise. Terrible sayings with which was mingled a sort of
+cordial joviality. One would have pronounced them brothers, but they did
+not know each other's names. Great perils have this fine characteristic,
+that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers. A fire had been
+lighted in the kitchen, and there they were engaged in moulding into
+bullets, pewter mugs, spoons, forks, and all the brass table-ware of
+the establishment. In the midst of it all, they drank. Caps and
+buckshot were mixed pell-mell on the tables with glasses of wine. In
+the billiard-hall, Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously
+modified by terror, which had stupefied one, rendered another
+breathless, and roused the third, were tearing up old dish-cloths and
+making lint; three insurgents were assisting them, three bushy-haired,
+jolly blades with beards and moustaches, who plucked away at the linen
+with the fingers of seamstresses and who made them tremble.
+
+The man of lofty stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had
+observed at the moment when he joined the mob at the corner of the
+Rue des Billettes, was at work on the smaller barricade and was making
+himself useful there. Gavroche was working on the larger one. As for the
+young man who had been waiting for Courfeyrac at his lodgings, and who
+had inquired for M. Marius, he had disappeared at about the time when
+the omnibus had been overturned.
+
+Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had undertaken to get
+everything in readiness. He went, came, mounted, descended, re-mounted,
+whistled, and sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of
+all. Had he any incentive? Yes, certainly, his poverty; had he wings?
+yes, certainly, his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind. He was constantly
+visible, he was incessantly audible. He filled the air, as he was
+everywhere at once. He was a sort of almost irritating ubiquity; no halt
+was possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its haunches.
+He troubled the loungers, he excited the idle, he reanimated the weary,
+he grew impatient over the thoughtful, he inspired gayety in some,
+and breath in others, wrath in others, movement in all, now pricking
+a student, now biting an artisan; he alighted, paused, flew off again,
+hovered over the tumult, and the effort, sprang from one party to
+another, murmuring and humming, and harassed the whole company; a fly on
+the immense revolutionary coach.
+
+Perpetual motion was in his little arms and perpetual clamor in his
+little lungs.
+
+"Courage! more paving-stones! more casks! more machines! Where are you
+now? A hod of plaster for me to stop this hole with! Your barricade
+is very small. It must be carried up. Put everything on it, fling
+everything there, stick it all in. Break down the house. A barricade is
+Mother Gibou's tea. Hullo, here's a glass door."
+
+This elicited an exclamation from the workers.
+
+"A glass door? what do you expect us to do with a glass door, tubercle?"
+
+"Hercules yourselves!" retorted Gavroche. "A glass door is an excellent
+thing in a barricade. It does not prevent an attack, but it prevents the
+enemy taking it. So you've never prigged apples over a wall where there
+were broken bottles? A glass door cuts the corns of the National Guard
+when they try to mount on the barricade. Pardi! glass is a treacherous
+thing. Well, you haven't a very wildly lively imagination, comrades."
+
+However, he was furious over his triggerless pistol. He went from one to
+another, demanding: "A gun, I want a gun! Why don't you give me a gun?"
+
+"Give you a gun!" said Combeferre.
+
+"Come now!" said Gavroche, "why not? I had one in 1830 when we had a
+dispute with Charles X."
+
+Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"When there are enough for the men, we will give some to the children."
+
+Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:--
+
+"If you are killed before me, I shall take yours."
+
+"Gamin!" said Enjolras.
+
+"Greenhorn!" said Gavroche.
+
+A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the street
+created a diversion! Gavroche shouted to him:--
+
+"Come with us, young fellow! well now, don't we do anything for this old
+country of ours?"
+
+The dandy fled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--PREPARATIONS
+
+The journals of the day which said that that nearly impregnable
+structure, of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call
+it, reached to the level of the first floor, were mistaken. The fact is,
+that it did not exceed an average height of six or seven feet. It was
+built in such a manner that the combatants could, at their will, either
+disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale its crest by
+means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top of each other
+and arranged as steps in the interior. On the outside, the front of the
+barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones and casks bound together
+by beams and planks, which were entangled in the wheels of Anceau's dray
+and of the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and inextricable aspect.
+
+An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been made
+between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade which
+was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit was possible at this
+point. The pole of the omnibus was placed upright and held up with
+ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole, floated over the
+barricade.
+
+The little Mondetour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building,
+was not visible. The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt.
+Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other
+fragment of the Rue Mondetour which opens through the Rue des Precheurs
+an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve a possible
+communication with the outside, and not entertaining much fear of
+an attack through the dangerous and difficult street of the Rue des
+Precheurs.
+
+With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which
+constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed a
+branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged on the
+Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the wine-shop
+formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square, closed on all
+sides. There existed an interval of twenty paces between the grand
+barrier and the lofty houses which formed the background of the street,
+so that one might say that the barricade rested on these houses, all
+inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.
+
+All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than an hour,
+and without this handful of bold men seeing a single bear-skin cap or
+a single bayonet make their appearance. The very bourgeois who still
+ventured at this hour of riot to enter the Rue Saint-Denis cast a
+glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, caught sight of the barricade, and
+redoubled their pace.
+
+The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was
+dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table.
+Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. This
+coffer was filled with cartridges. When the mob saw the cartridges, a
+tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.
+
+Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.
+
+Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder, and set about
+making others with the bullets which they had run. As for the barrel of
+powder, it stood on a table on one side, near the door, and was held in
+reserve.
+
+The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it had
+finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which they no
+longer paid any attention. This noise retreated at times, and again drew
+near, with melancholy undulations.
+
+They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste, with
+solemn gravity. Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels outside the
+barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des
+Precheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.
+
+Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns
+loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those redoubtable
+streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded by those
+dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitated,
+enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was drawing on,
+in the midst of that silence through which something could be felt
+advancing, and which had about it something tragic and terrifying,
+isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--WAITING
+
+During those hours of waiting, what did they do?
+
+We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history.
+
+While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan
+of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a
+glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the
+barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an
+eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly,
+Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other out and
+united as in the most peaceful days of their conversations in their
+student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been
+converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt
+which they had built, with their carbines loaded and primed resting
+against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close to
+a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.
+
+What verses? These:--
+
+ Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,
+ Lorsque nous etions si jeunes tous deux,
+ Et que nous n'avions au coeur d'autre envie
+ Que d'etre bien mis et d'etre amoureux,
+
+ Lorsqu'en ajoutant votre age a mon age,
+ Nous ne comptions pas a deux quarante ans,
+ Et que, dans notre humble et petit menage,
+ Tout, meme l'hiver, nous etait printemps?
+
+ Beaux jours! Manuel etait fier et sage,
+ Paris s'asseyait a de saints banquets,
+ Foy lancait la foudre, et votre corsage
+ Avait une epingle ou je me piquais.
+
+ Tout vous contemplait. Avocat sans causes,
+ Quand je vous menais au Prado diner,
+ Vous etiez jolie au point que les roses
+ Me faisaient l'effet de se retourner.
+
+ Je les entendais dire: Est elle belle!
+ Comme elle sent bon! Quels cheveux a flots!
+ Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile,
+ Son bonnet charmant est a peine eclos.
+
+ J'errais avec toi, pressant ton bras souple.
+ Les passants crovaient que l'amour charme
+ Avait marie, dans notre heureux couple,
+ Le doux mois d'avril au beau mois de mai.
+
+ Nous vivions caches, contents, porte close,
+ Devorant l'amour, bon fruit defendu,
+ Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose
+ Que deja ton coeur avait repondu.
+
+ La Sorbonne etait l'endroit bucolique
+ Ou je t'adorais du soir au matin.
+ C'est ainsi qu'une ame amoureuse applique
+ La carte du Tendre au pays Latin.
+
+ O place Maubert! o place Dauphine!
+ Quand, dans le taudis frais et printanier,
+ Tu tirais ton bas sur ton jambe fine,
+ Je voyais un astre au fond du grenier.
+
+ J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste;
+ Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais,
+ Tu me demontrais la bonte celeste
+ Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.
+
+ Je t'obeissais, tu m' etais soumise;
+ O grenier dore! te lacer! te voir
+ Aller et venir des l'aube en chemise,
+ Mirant ton jeune front a ton vieux miroir.
+
+ Et qui done pourrait perde la memoire
+ De ces temps d'aurore et de firmament,
+ De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,
+ Ou l'amour begaye un argot charmant?
+
+ Nos jardins etaient un pot de tulipe;
+ Tu masquais la vitre avec un jupon;
+ Je prenais le bol de terre de pipe,
+ Et je te donnais le tasse en japon.
+
+ Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!
+ Ton manchon brule, ton boa perdu!
+ Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakespeare
+ Qu'un soir pour souper nons avons vendu!
+
+ J'etais mendiant et toi charitable.
+ Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.
+ Dante in folio nous servait de table
+ Pour manger gaiment un cent de marrons.
+
+ La premiere fois qu'en mon joyeux bouge
+ Je pris un baiser a ton levre en feu,
+ Quand tu t'en allais decoiffee et rouge,
+ Je restai tout pale et je crus en Dieu!
+
+ Te rappelles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,
+ Et tous ces fichus changes en chiffons?
+ Oh que de soupirs, de nos coeurs pleins d'ombre,
+ Se sont envoles dans les cieux profonds![53]
+
+
+The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars
+which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those deserted
+streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure, which was in
+preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low
+tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we have said, was a gentle
+poet.
+
+In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in
+the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on
+Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks, on their way
+to la Courtille. These torches, as the reader has seen, came from the
+Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
+
+The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed on
+three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such a fashion
+that all the light fell on the flag. The street and the barricade
+remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except the red flag
+formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern.
+
+This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable and
+terrible purple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES
+
+Night was fully come, nothing made its appearance. All that they heard
+was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare,
+badly sustained and distant. This respite, which was thus prolonged,
+was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting its
+forces. These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.
+
+Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls
+on the threshold of redoubtable events. He went in search of Gavroche,
+who had set to making cartridges in the tap-room, by the dubious light
+of two candles placed on the counter by way of precaution, on account of
+the powder which was scattered on the tables. These two candles cast no
+gleam outside. The insurgents had, moreover, taken pains not to have any
+light in the upper stories.
+
+Gavroche was deeply preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely with
+his cartridges. The man of the Rue des Billettes had just entered
+the tap-room and had seated himself at the table which was the least
+lighted. A musket of large model had fallen to his share, and he held it
+between his legs. Gavroche, who had been, up to that moment, distracted
+by a hundred "amusing" things, had not even seen this man.
+
+When he entered, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes,
+admiring his gun; then, all at once, when the man was seated, the street
+urchin sprang to his feet. Any one who had spied upon that man up to
+that moment, would have seen that he was observing everything in the
+barricade and in the band of insurgents, with singular attention; but,
+from the moment when he had entered this room, he had fallen into a sort
+of brown study, and no longer seemed to see anything that was going on.
+The gamin approached this pensive personage, and began to step around
+him on tiptoe, as one walks in the vicinity of a person whom one is
+afraid of waking. At the same time, over his childish countenance which
+was, at once so impudent and so serious, so giddy and so profound, so
+gay and so heart-breaking, passed all those grimaces of an old man which
+signify: Ah bah! impossible! My sight is bad! I am dreaming! can this
+be? no, it is not! but yes! why, no! etc. Gavroche balanced on his
+heels, clenched both fists in his pockets, moved his neck around like a
+bird, expended in a gigantic pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. He
+was astounded, uncertain, incredulous, convinced, dazzled. He had the
+mien of the chief of the eunuchs in the slave mart, discovering a
+Venus among the blowsy females, and the air of an amateur recognizing
+a Raphael in a heap of daubs. His whole being was at work, the instinct
+which scents out, and the intelligence which combines. It was evident
+that a great event had happened in Gavroche's life.
+
+It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras
+accosted him.
+
+"You are small," said Enjolras, "you will not be seen. Go out of the
+barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about a bit in the
+streets, and come back and tell me what is going on."
+
+Gavroche raised himself on his haunches.
+
+"So the little chaps are good for something! that's very lucky! I'll
+go! In the meanwhile, trust to the little fellows, and distrust the big
+ones." And Gavroche, raising his head and lowering his voice, added,
+as he indicated the man of the Rue des Billettes: "Do you see that big
+fellow there?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He's a police spy."
+
+"Are you sure of it?"
+
+"It isn't two weeks since he pulled me off the cornice of the Port
+Royal, where I was taking the air, by my ear."
+
+Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words in a very
+low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who chanced to be at hand.
+The man left the room, and returned almost immediately, accompanied by
+three others. The four men, four porters with broad shoulders, went
+and placed themselves without doing anything to attract his attention,
+behind the table on which the man of the Rue des Billettes was leaning
+with his elbows. They were evidently ready to hurl themselves upon him.
+
+Then Enjolras approached the man and demanded of him:--
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+At this abrupt query, the man started. He plunged his gaze deep into
+Enjolras' clear eyes and appeared to grasp the latter's meaning. He
+smiled with a smile than which nothing more disdainful, more energetic,
+and more resolute could be seen in the world, and replied with haughty
+gravity:--
+
+"I see what it is. Well, yes!"
+
+"You are a police spy?"
+
+"I am an agent of the authorities."
+
+"And your name?"
+
+"Javert."
+
+Enjolras made a sign to the four men. In the twinkling of an eye, before
+Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, thrown down, pinioned
+and searched.
+
+They found on him a little round card pasted between two pieces of
+glass, and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved, and with
+this motto: Supervision and vigilance, and on the other this note:
+"JAVERT, inspector of police, aged fifty-two," and the signature of the
+Prefect of Police of that day, M. Gisquet.
+
+Besides this, he had his watch and his purse, which contained several
+gold pieces. They left him his purse and his watch. Under the watch,
+at the bottom of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope,
+which Enjolras unfolded, and on which he read these five lines, written
+in the very hand of the Prefect of Police:--
+
+"As soon as his political mission is accomplished, Inspector Javert
+will make sure, by special supervision, whether it is true that the
+malefactors have instituted intrigues on the right bank of the Seine,
+near the Jena bridge."
+
+The search ended, they lifted Javert to his feet, bound his arms behind
+his back, and fastened him to that celebrated post in the middle of the
+room which had formerly given the wine-shop its name.
+
+Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had approved
+of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up to Javert and
+said to him:--
+
+"It's the mouse who has caught the cat."
+
+All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those about
+the wine-shop noticed it.
+
+Javert had not uttered a single cry.
+
+At the sight of Javert bound to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly,
+Combeferre, and the men scattered over the two barricades came running
+up.
+
+Javert, with his back to the post, and so surrounded with ropes that he
+could not make a movement, raised his head with the intrepid serenity of
+the man who has never lied.
+
+"He is a police spy," said Enjolras.
+
+And turning to Javert: "You will be shot ten minutes before the
+barricade is taken."
+
+Javert replied in his most imperious tone:--
+
+"Why not at once?"
+
+"We are saving our powder."
+
+"Then finish the business with a blow from a knife."
+
+"Spy," said the handsome Enjolras, "we are judges and not assassins."
+
+Then he called Gavroche:--
+
+"Here you! go about your business! Do what I told you!"
+
+"I'm going!" cried Gavroche.
+
+And halting as he was on the point of setting out:--
+
+"By the way, you will give me his gun!" and he added: "I leave you the
+musician, but I want the clarionet."
+
+The gamin made the military salute and passed gayly through the opening
+in the large barricade.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE
+CABUC WHOSE NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC
+
+The tragic picture which we have undertaken would not be complete, the
+reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs in a
+revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort,
+in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here
+outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred
+almost immediately after Gavroche's departure.
+
+Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect as they
+roll along, a throng of tumultuous men. These men do not ask each other
+whence they come. Among the passers-by who had joined the rabble led by
+Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there had been a person wearing
+the jacket of a street porter, which was very threadbare on the
+shoulders, who gesticulated and vociferated, and who had the look of a
+drunken savage. This man, whose name or nickname was Le Cabuc, and who
+was, moreover, an utter stranger to those who pretended to know him,
+was very drunk, or assumed the appearance of being so, and had seated
+himself with several others at a table which they had dragged outside
+of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while making those who vied with him drunk
+seemed to be examining with a thoughtful air the large house at the
+extremity of the barricade, whose five stories commanded the whole
+street and faced the Rue Saint-Denis. All at once he exclaimed:--
+
+"Do you know, comrades, it is from that house yonder that we must fire.
+When we are at the windows, the deuce is in it if any one can advance
+into the street!"
+
+"Yes, but the house is closed," said one of the drinkers.
+
+"Let us knock!"
+
+"They will not open."
+
+"Let us break in the door!"
+
+Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and knocks.
+The door opens not. He strikes a second blow. No one answers. A third
+stroke. The same silence.
+
+"Is there any one here?" shouts Cabuc.
+
+Nothing stirs.
+
+Then he seizes a gun and begins to batter the door with the butt end.
+
+It was an ancient alley door, low, vaulted, narrow, solid, entirely of
+oak, lined on the inside with a sheet of iron and iron stays, a genuine
+prison postern. The blows from the butt end of the gun made the house
+tremble, but did not shake the door.
+
+Nevertheless, it is probable that the inhabitants were disturbed, for a
+tiny, square window was finally seen to open on the third story, and at
+this aperture appeared the reverend and terrified face of a gray-haired
+old man, who was the porter, and who held a candle.
+
+The man who was knocking paused.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the porter, "what do you want?"
+
+"Open!" said Cabuc.
+
+"That cannot be, gentlemen."
+
+"Open, nevertheless."
+
+"Impossible, gentlemen."
+
+Le Cabuc took his gun and aimed at the porter; but as he was below, and
+as it was very dark, the porter did not see him.
+
+"Will you open, yes or no?"
+
+"No, gentlemen."
+
+"Do you say no?"
+
+"I say no, my goo--"
+
+The porter did not finish. The shot was fired; the ball entered under
+his chin and came out at the nape of his neck, after traversing the
+jugular vein.
+
+The old man fell back without a sigh. The candle fell and was
+extinguished, and nothing more was to be seen except a motionless head
+lying on the sill of the small window, and a little whitish smoke which
+floated off towards the roof.
+
+"There!" said Le Cabuc, dropping the butt end of his gun to the
+pavement.
+
+He had hardly uttered this word, when he felt a hand laid on his
+shoulder with the weight of an eagle's talon, and he heard a voice
+saying to him:--
+
+"On your knees."
+
+The murderer turned round and saw before him Enjolras' cold, white face.
+
+Enjolras held a pistol in his hand.
+
+He had hastened up at the sound of the discharge.
+
+He had seized Cabuc's collar, blouse, shirt, and suspender with his left
+hand.
+
+"On your knees!" he repeated.
+
+And, with an imperious motion, the frail young man of twenty years bent
+the thickset and sturdy porter like a reed, and brought him to his knees
+in the mire.
+
+Le Cabuc attempted to resist, but he seemed to have been seized by a
+superhuman hand.
+
+Enjolras, pale, with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman's
+face, had about him at that moment something of the antique Themis.
+His dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek
+profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity which,
+as the ancient world viewed the matter, befit Justice.
+
+The whole barricade hastened up, then all ranged themselves in a circle
+at a distance, feeling that it was impossible to utter a word in the
+presence of the thing which they were about to behold.
+
+Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer tried to struggle, and trembled in every
+limb.
+
+Enjolras released him and drew out his watch.
+
+"Collect yourself," said he. "Think or pray. You have one minute."
+
+"Mercy!" murmured the murderer; then he dropped his head and stammered a
+few inarticulate oaths.
+
+Enjolras never took his eyes off of him: he allowed a minute to pass,
+then he replaced his watch in his fob. That done, he grasped Le Cabuc
+by the hair, as the latter coiled himself into a ball at his knees and
+shrieked, and placed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those
+intrepid men, who had so tranquilly entered upon the most terrible of
+adventures, turned aside their heads.
+
+An explosion was heard, the assassin fell to the pavement face
+downwards.
+
+Enjolras straightened himself up, and cast a convinced and severe glance
+around him. Then he spurned the corpse with his foot and said:--
+
+"Throw that outside."
+
+Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still
+agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled,
+and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondetour.
+
+Enjolras was thoughtful. It is impossible to say what grandiose shadows
+slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity. All at once he raised his
+voice.
+
+A silence fell upon them.
+
+"Citizens," said Enjolras, "what that man did is frightful, what I have
+done is horrible. He killed, therefore I killed him. I had to do it,
+because insurrection must have its discipline. Assassination is even
+more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eyes of the
+Revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are the victims of
+duty, and must not be possible to slander our combat. I have, therefore,
+tried that man, and condemned him to death. As for myself, constrained
+as I am to do what I have done, and yet abhorring it, I have judged
+myself also, and you shall soon see to what I have condemned myself."
+
+Those who listened to him shuddered.
+
+"We will share thy fate," cried Combeferre.
+
+"So be it," replied Enjolras. "One word more. In executing this man,
+I have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world,
+necessity's name is Fatality. Now, the law of progress is, that monsters
+shall disappear before the angels, and that Fatality shall vanish before
+Fraternity. It is a bad moment to pronounce the word love. No matter, I
+do pronounce it. And I glorify it. Love, the future is thine. Death, I
+make use of thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, in the future there will
+be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor
+bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no
+more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth
+will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come,
+citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it
+will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to
+die."
+
+Enjolras ceased. His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time
+standing on the spot where he had shed blood, in marble immobility. His
+staring eye caused those about him to speak in low tones.
+
+Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other's hands silently, and,
+leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade, they watched
+with an admiration in which there was some compassion, that grave young
+man, executioner and priest, composed of light, like crystal, and also
+of rock.
+
+Let us say at once that later on, after the action, when the bodies were
+taken to the morgue and searched, a police agent's card was found on Le
+Cabuc. The author of this book had in his hands, in 1848, the special
+report on this subject made to the Prefect of Police in 1832.
+
+We will add, that if we are to believe a tradition of the police, which
+is strange but probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact
+is, that dating from the death of Le Cabuc, there was no longer any
+question of Claquesous. Claquesous had nowhere left any trace of his
+disappearance; he would seem to have amalgamated himself with the
+invisible. His life had been all shadows, his end was night.
+
+The whole insurgent group was still under the influence of the emotion
+of that tragic case which had been so quickly tried and so quickly
+terminated, when Courfeyrac again beheld on the barricade, the small
+young man who had inquired of him that morning for Marius.
+
+This lad, who had a bold and reckless air, had come by night to join the
+insurgents.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS
+
+The voice which had summoned Marius through the twilight to the
+barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had produced on him the effect
+of the voice of destiny. He wished to die; the opportunity presented
+itself; he knocked at the door of the tomb, a hand in the darkness
+offered him the key. These melancholy openings which take place in the
+gloom before despair, are tempting. Marius thrust aside the bar which
+had so often allowed him to pass, emerged from the garden, and said: "I
+will go."
+
+Mad with grief, no longer conscious of anything fixed or solid in his
+brain, incapable of accepting anything thenceforth of fate after those
+two months passed in the intoxication of youth and love, overwhelmed at
+once by all the reveries of despair, he had but one desire remaining, to
+make a speedy end of all.
+
+He set out at rapid pace. He found himself most opportunely armed, as he
+had Javert's pistols with him.
+
+The young man of whom he thought that he had caught a glimpse, had
+vanished from his sight in the street.
+
+Marius, who had emerged from the Rue Plumet by the boulevard, traversed
+the Esplanade and the bridge of the Invalides, the Champs Elysees, the
+Place Louis XV., and reached the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open
+there, the gas was burning under the arcades, women were making their
+purchases in the stalls, people were eating ices in the Cafe Laiter,
+and nibbling small cakes at the English pastry-cook's shop. Only a few
+posting-chaises were setting out at a gallop from the Hotel des Princes
+and the Hotel Meurice.
+
+Marius entered the Rue Saint-Honore through the Passage Delorme. There
+the shops were closed, the merchants were chatting in front of their
+half-open doors, people were walking about, the street lanterns were
+lighted, beginning with the first floor, all the windows were lighted as
+usual. There was cavalry on the Place du Palais-Royal.
+
+Marius followed the Rue Saint-Honore. In proportion as he left the
+Palais-Royal behind him, there were fewer lighted windows, the shops
+were fast shut, no one was chatting on the thresholds, the street grew
+sombre, and, at the same time, the crowd increased in density. For the
+passers-by now amounted to a crowd. No one could be seen to speak in
+this throng, and yet there arose from it a dull, deep murmur.
+
+Near the fountain of the Arbre-Sec, there were "assemblages", motionless
+and gloomy groups which were to those who went and came as stones in the
+midst of running water.
+
+At the entrance to the Rue des Prouvaires, the crowd no longer walked.
+It formed a resisting, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable
+block of people who were huddled together, and conversing in low tones.
+There were hardly any black coats or round hats now, but smock frocks,
+blouses, caps, and bristling and cadaverous heads. This multitude
+undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom. Its whisperings had the
+hoarse accent of a vibration. Although not one of them was walking, a
+dull trampling was audible in the mire. Beyond this dense portion of
+the throng, in the Rue du Roule, in the Rue des Prouvaires, and in the
+extension of the Rue Saint-Honore, there was no longer a single window
+in which a candle was burning. Only the solitary and diminishing rows
+of lanterns could be seen vanishing into the street in the distance. The
+lanterns of that date resembled large red stars, hanging to ropes, and
+shed upon the pavement a shadow which had the form of a huge spider.
+These streets were not deserted. There could be descried piles of guns,
+moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking. No curious observer passed that
+limit. There circulation ceased. There the rabble ended and the army
+began.
+
+Marius willed with the will of a man who hopes no more. He had been
+summoned, he must go. He found a means to traverse the throng and to
+pass the bivouac of the troops, he shunned the patrols, he avoided the
+sentinels. He made a circuit, reached the Rue de Bethisy, and directed
+his course towards the Halles. At the corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais,
+there were no longer any lanterns.
+
+After having passed the zone of the crowd, he had passed the limits of
+the troops; he found himself in something startling. There was no longer
+a passer-by, no longer a soldier, no longer a light, there was no one;
+solitude, silence, night, I know not what chill which seized hold upon
+one. Entering a street was like entering a cellar.
+
+He continued to advance.
+
+He took a few steps. Some one passed close to him at a run. Was it a
+man? Or a woman? Were there many of them? he could not have told. It had
+passed and vanished.
+
+Proceeding from circuit to circuit, he reached a lane which he judged
+to be the Rue de la Poterie; near the middle of this street, he came in
+contact with an obstacle. He extended his hands. It was an overturned
+wagon; his foot recognized pools of water, gullies, and paving-stones
+scattered and piled up. A barricade had been begun there and abandoned.
+He climbed over the stones and found himself on the other side of the
+barrier. He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along
+the walls of the houses. A little beyond the barricade, it seemed to him
+that he could make out something white in front of him. He approached,
+it took on a form. It was two white horses; the horses of the omnibus
+harnessed by Bossuet in the morning, who had been straying at random all
+day from street to street, and had finally halted there, with the weary
+patience of brutes who no more understand the actions of men, than man
+understands the actions of Providence.
+
+Marius left the horses behind him. As he was approaching a street which
+seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social, a shot coming no one
+knows whence, and traversing the darkness at random, whistled close by
+him, and the bullet pierced a brass shaving-dish suspended above his
+head over a hairdresser's shop. This pierced shaving-dish was still
+to be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the
+pillars of the market.
+
+This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered
+nothing more.
+
+The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.
+
+Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS
+
+A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of
+the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.
+
+All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a
+city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a
+thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their
+redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark and
+enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance
+fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the closed
+windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased.
+The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch everywhere,
+and maintained order, that is to say, night. The necessary tactics of
+insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply
+every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains. At
+dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. The light
+was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was
+stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses;
+and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not even the long rows of
+windows and stores, the indentations of the chimneys, and the roofs,
+and the vague reflections which are cast back by the wet and muddy
+pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows
+might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and there, at intervals,
+of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and eccentric lines, and
+profiles of singular buildings, something like the lights which go and
+come in ruins; it was at such points that the barricades were situated.
+The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal, above
+which, in motionless and melancholy outlines, rose the tower of
+Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more of those
+grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night makes phantoms.
+
+All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters
+where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a
+few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have
+distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble
+of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were
+swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was slowly
+drawing in and around the insurrection.
+
+The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous
+cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we
+have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing but
+darkness.
+
+A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,
+into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible to
+remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they awaited,
+where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. Invisible
+combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street; snares of the
+sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was over. No more
+light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the lightning of guns,
+no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid apparition of death.
+Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain and inevitable. In
+this place which had been marked out for the struggle, the Government
+and the insurrection, the National Guard, and popular societies, the
+bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into
+contact. The necessity was the same for both. The only possible issue
+thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors. A situation so
+extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt themselves
+seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.
+
+Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were
+equal. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of
+retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of
+flight.
+
+It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that
+triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection should
+prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The Government understood this
+as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it. Hence
+a thought of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable gloom of this
+quarter where all was at the point of being decided; hence a redoubled
+anxiety around that silence whence a catastrophe was on the point of
+emerging. Here only one sound was audible, a sound as heart-rending
+as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction, the tocsin of
+Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than the clamor of
+that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows.
+
+As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what
+men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect.
+The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their
+melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an
+immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.
+
+While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in the
+same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary events,
+while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name of
+principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were
+approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and
+throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and
+decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal
+quarter, in the most profound depths of the unfathomable cavities of
+that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendor of happy
+and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving
+utterance to a dull roar.
+
+A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute
+and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns the
+wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from
+on high like the voice of the thunder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE EXTREME EDGE
+
+Marius had reached the Halles.
+
+There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless than
+in the neighboring streets. One would have said that the glacial peace
+of the sepulchre had sprung forth from the earth and had spread over the
+heavens.
+
+Nevertheless, a red glow brought out against this black background the
+lofty roofs of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie on
+the Saint-Eustache side. It was the reflection of the torch which was
+burning in the Corinthe barricade. Marius directed his steps towards
+that red light. It had drawn him to the Marche-aux-Poirees, and he
+caught a glimpse of the dark mouth of the Rue des Precheurs. He entered
+it. The insurgents' sentinel, who was guarding the other end, did not
+see him. He felt that he was very close to that which he had come in
+search of, and he walked on tiptoe. In this manner he reached the elbow
+of that short section of the Rue Mondetour which was, as the reader will
+remember, the only communication which Enjolras had preserved with the
+outside world. At the corner of the last house, on his left, he thrust
+his head forward, and looked into the fragment of the Rue Mondetour.
+
+A little beyond the angle of the lane and the Rue de la Chanvrerie which
+cast a broad curtain of shadow, in which he was himself engulfed,
+he perceived some light on the pavement, a bit of the wine-shop, and
+beyond, a flickering lamp within a sort of shapeless wall, and men
+crouching down with guns on their knees. All this was ten fathoms
+distant from him. It was the interior of the barricade.
+
+The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest of
+the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.
+
+Marius had but a step more to take.
+
+Then the unhappy young man seated himself on a post, folded his arms,
+and fell to thinking about his father.
+
+He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy, who had been so proud a
+soldier, who had guarded the frontier of France under the Republic, and
+had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa,
+Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who
+had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops of that
+same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown gray
+before his time in discipline and command, who had lived with his
+sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade
+blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet, in barracks,
+in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who, at the expiration of
+twenty years, had returned from the great wars with a scarred cheek, a
+smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done
+everything for France and nothing against her.
+
+He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour had
+struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself
+brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast
+to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that
+he was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of battle,
+and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was the
+street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil war!
+
+He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he
+was about to fall. Then he shuddered.
+
+He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold to a
+second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. He said to
+himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done well to escape from
+him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom; that if it had thus fled, it
+was because it was intelligent and because it had foreseen the future;
+that it had had a presentiment of this rebellion, the war of the
+gutters, the war of the pavements, fusillades through cellar-windows,
+blows given and received in the rear; it was because, coming from
+Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish to go to the Rue de la
+Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it had done with the father, it
+did not wish to do this for the son! He told himself that if that sword
+were there, if after taking possession of it at his father's pillow,
+he had dared to take it and carry it off for this combat of darkness
+between Frenchmen in the streets, it would assuredly have scorched his
+hands and burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword of the angel!
+He told himself that it was fortunate that it was not there and that
+it had disappeared, that that was well, that that was just, that his
+grandfather had been the true guardian of his father's glory, and that
+it was far better that the colonel's sword should be sold at auction,
+sold to the old-clothes man, thrown among the old junk, than that it
+should, to-day, wound the side of his country.
+
+And then he fell to weeping bitterly.
+
+This was horrible. But what was he to do? Live without Cosette he could
+not. Since she was gone, he must needs die. Had he not given her his
+word of honor that he would die? She had gone knowing that; this meant
+that it pleased her that Marius should die. And then, it was clear that
+she no longer loved him, since she had departed thus without warning,
+without a word, without a letter, although she knew his address! What
+was the good of living, and why should he live now? And then, what!
+should he retreat after going so far? should he flee from danger after
+having approached it? should he slip away after having come and peeped
+into the barricade? slip away, all in a tremble, saying: "After all, I
+have had enough of it as it is. I have seen it, that suffices, this is
+civil war, and I shall take my leave!" Should he abandon his friends who
+were expecting him? Who were in need of him possibly! who were a mere
+handful against an army! Should he be untrue at once to his love, to
+country, to his word? Should he give to his cowardice the pretext of
+patriotism? But this was impossible, and if the phantom of his father
+was there in the gloom, and beheld him retreating, he would beat him on
+the loins with the flat of his sword, and shout to him: "March on, you
+poltroon!"
+
+Thus a prey to the conflicting movements of his thoughts, he dropped his
+head.
+
+All at once he raised it. A sort of splendid rectification had just been
+effected in his mind. There is a widening of the sphere of thought which
+is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave; it makes one see clearly to
+be near death. The vision of the action into which he felt that he
+was, perhaps, on the point of entering, appeared to him no more
+as lamentable, but as superb. The war of the street was suddenly
+transfigured by some unfathomable inward working of his soul, before the
+eye of his thought. All the tumultuous interrogation points of revery
+recurred to him in throngs, but without troubling him. He left none of
+them unanswered.
+
+Let us see, why should his father be indignant? Are there not cases
+where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? What was there that was
+degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the combat which was about
+to begin? It is no longer Montmirail nor Champaubert; it is something
+quite different. The question is no longer one of sacred territory,--but
+of a holy idea. The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds.
+But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty
+smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her
+wound. And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of
+view, why do we speak of civil war?
+
+Civil war--what does that mean? Is there a foreign war? Is not all war
+between men, war between brothers? War is qualified only by its object.
+There is no such thing as foreign or civil war; there is only just and
+unjust war. Until that day when the grand human agreement is concluded,
+war, that at least which is the effort of the future, which is hastening
+on against the past, which is lagging in the rear, may be necessary.
+What have we to reproach that war with? War does not become a disgrace,
+the sword does not become a disgrace, except when it is used for
+assassinating the right, progress, reason, civilization, truth. Then
+war, whether foreign or civil, is iniquitous; it is called crime.
+Outside the pale of that holy thing, justice, by what right does
+one form of man despise another? By what right should the sword of
+Washington disown the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Leonidas against the
+stranger, Timoleon against the tyrant, which is the greater? the one is
+the defender, the other the liberator. Shall we brand every appeal
+to arms within a city's limits without taking the object into a
+consideration? Then note the infamy of Brutus, Marcel, Arnould von
+Blankenheim, Coligny, Hedgerow war? War of the streets? Why not? That
+was the war of Ambiorix, of Artevelde, of Marnix, of Pelagius. But
+Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artevelde against France, Marnix against
+Spain, Pelagius against the Moors; all against the foreigner. Well, the
+monarchy is a foreigner; oppression is a stranger; the right divine is
+a stranger. Despotism violates the moral frontier, an invasion violates
+the geographical frontier. Driving out the tyrant or driving out the
+English, in both cases, regaining possession of one's own territory.
+There comes an hour when protestation no longer suffices; after
+philosophy, action is required; live force finishes what the idea
+has sketched out; Prometheus chained begins, Arostogeiton ends; the
+encyclopedia enlightens souls, the 10th of August electrifies them.
+After AEschylus, Thrasybulus; after Diderot, Danton. Multitudes have
+a tendency to accept the master. Their mass bears witness to apathy.
+A crowd is easily led as a whole to obedience. Men must be stirred up,
+pushed on, treated roughly by the very benefit of their deliverance,
+their eyes must be wounded by the true, light must be hurled at them
+in terrible handfuls. They must be a little thunderstruck themselves at
+their own well-being; this dazzling awakens them. Hence the necessity
+of tocsins and wars. Great combatants must rise, must enlighten nations
+with audacity, and shake up that sad humanity which is covered
+with gloom by the right divine, Caesarian glory, force, fanaticism,
+irresponsible power, and absolute majesty; a rabble stupidly occupied in
+the contemplation, in their twilight splendor, of these sombre triumphs
+of the night. Down with the tyrant! Of whom are you speaking? Do you
+call Louis Philippe the tyrant? No; no more than Louis XVI. Both of them
+are what history is in the habit of calling good kings; but principles
+are not to be parcelled out, the logic of the true is rectilinear, the
+peculiarity of truth is that it lacks complaisance; no concessions,
+then; all encroachments on man should be repressed. There is a divine
+right in Louis XVI., there is because a Bourbon in Louis Philippe; both
+represent in a certain measure the confiscation of right, and, in order
+to clear away universal insurrection, they must be combated; it must
+be done, France being always the one to begin. When the master falls
+in France, he falls everywhere. In short, what cause is more just, and
+consequently, what war is greater, than that which re-establishes
+social truth, restores her throne to liberty, restores the people to the
+people, restores sovereignty to man, replaces the purple on the head of
+France, restores equity and reason in their plenitude, suppresses every
+germ of antagonism by restoring each one to himself, annihilates the
+obstacle which royalty presents to the whole immense universal concord,
+and places the human race once more on a level with the right? These
+wars build up peace. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges,
+superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and
+darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred.
+It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To
+conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.
+
+There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case--the soul,--and
+therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity, has
+a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most violent
+extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and profound
+despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues, treat subjects
+and discuss theses. Logic is mingled with convulsion, and the thread
+of the syllogism floats, without breaking, in the mournful storm of
+thought. This was the situation of Marius' mind.
+
+As he meditated thus, dejected but resolute, hesitating in every
+direction, and, in short, shuddering at what he was about to do, his
+glance strayed to the interior of the barricade. The insurgents
+were here conversing in a low voice, without moving, and there
+was perceptible that quasi-silence which marks the last stage of
+expectation. Overhead, at the small window in the third story Marius
+descried a sort of spectator who appeared to him to be singularly
+attentive. This was the porter who had been killed by Le Cabuc. Below,
+by the lights of the torch, which was thrust between the paving-stones,
+this head could be vaguely distinguished. Nothing could be stranger, in
+that sombre and uncertain gleam, than that livid, motionless, astonished
+face, with its bristling hair, its eyes fixed and staring, and its
+yawning mouth, bent over the street in an attitude of curiosity. One
+would have said that the man who was dead was surveying those who were
+about to die. A long trail of blood which had flowed from that head,
+descended in reddish threads from the window to the height of the first
+floor, where it stopped.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR
+
+[Illustration: The Grandeurs of Despair 4b-14-1-despair]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE FLAG: ACT FIRST
+
+As yet, nothing had come. Ten o'clock had sounded from Saint-Merry.
+Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and seated themselves, carbines in
+hand, near the outlet of the grand barricade. They no longer addressed
+each other, they listened, seeking to catch even the faintest and most
+distant sound of marching.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of the dismal calm, a clear, gay, young voice,
+which seemed to come from the Rue Saint-Denis, rose and began to sing
+distinctly, to the old popular air of "By the Light of the Moon," this
+bit of poetry, terminated by a cry like the crow of a cock:--
+
+ Mon nez est en larmes,
+ Mon ami Bugeaud,
+ Prete moi tes gendarmes
+ Pour leur dire un mot.
+
+ En capote bleue,
+ La poule au shako,
+ Voici la banlieue!
+ Co-cocorico![54]
+
+
+They pressed each other's hands.
+
+"That is Gavroche," said Enjolras.
+
+"He is warning us," said Combeferre.
+
+A hasty rush troubled the deserted street; they beheld a being more
+agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the
+barricade, all breathless, saying:--
+
+"My gun! Here they are!"
+
+An electric quiver shot through the whole barricade, and the sound of
+hands seeking their guns became audible.
+
+"Would you like my carbine?" said Enjolras to the lad.
+
+"I want a big gun," replied Gavroche.
+
+And he seized Javert's gun.
+
+Two sentinels had fallen back, and had come in almost at the same moment
+as Gavroche. They were the sentinels from the end of the street, and the
+vidette of the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The vidette of the Lane des
+Precheurs had remained at his post, which indicated that nothing was
+approaching from the direction of the bridges and Halles.
+
+The Rue de la Chanvrerie, of which a few paving-stones alone were dimly
+visible in the reflection of the light projected on the flag, offered
+to the insurgents the aspect of a vast black door vaguely opened into a
+smoke.
+
+Each man had taken up his position for the conflict.
+
+Forty-three insurgents, among whom were Enjolras, Combeferre,
+Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were kneeling inside
+the large barricade, with their heads on a level with the crest of the
+barrier, the barrels of their guns and carbines aimed on the stones as
+though at loop-holes, attentive, mute, ready to fire. Six, commanded
+by Feuilly, had installed themselves, with their guns levelled at their
+shoulders, at the windows of the two stories of Corinthe.
+
+Several minutes passed thus, then a sound of footsteps, measured, heavy,
+and numerous, became distinctly audible in the direction of Saint-Leu.
+This sound, faint at first, then precise, then heavy and sonorous,
+approached slowly, without halt, without intermission, with a tranquil
+and terrible continuity. Nothing was to be heard but this. It was that
+combined silence and sound, of the statue of the commander, but this
+stony step had something indescribably enormous and multiple about it
+which awakened the idea of a throng, and, at the same time, the idea
+of a spectre. One thought one heard the terrible statue Legion marching
+onward. This tread drew near; it drew still nearer, and stopped. It
+seemed as though the breathing of many men could be heard at the end of
+the street. Nothing was to be seen, however, but at the bottom of that
+dense obscurity there could be distinguished a multitude of metallic
+threads, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about
+like those indescribable phosphoric networks which one sees beneath
+one's closed eyelids, in the first mists of slumber at the moment
+when one is dropping off to sleep. These were bayonets and gun-barrels
+confusedly illuminated by the distant reflection of the torch.
+
+A pause ensued, as though both sides were waiting. All at once, from the
+depths of this darkness, a voice, which was all the more sinister, since
+no one was visible, and which appeared to be the gloom itself speaking,
+shouted:--
+
+"Who goes there?"
+
+At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position,
+was heard.
+
+Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone:--
+
+"The French Revolution!"
+
+"Fire!" shouted the voice.
+
+A flash empurpled all the facades in the street as though the door of a
+furnace had been flung open, and hastily closed again.
+
+A fearful detonation burst forth on the barricade. The red flag fell.
+The discharge had been so violent and so dense that it had cut the
+staff, that is to say, the very tip of the omnibus pole.
+
+Bullets which had rebounded from the cornices of the houses penetrated
+the barricade and wounded several men.
+
+The impression produced by this first discharge was freezing. The attack
+had been rough, and of a nature to inspire reflection in the boldest.
+It was evident that they had to deal with an entire regiment at the very
+least.
+
+"Comrades!" shouted Courfeyrac, "let us not waste our powder. Let us
+wait until they are in the street before replying."
+
+"And, above all," said Enjolras, "let us raise the flag again."
+
+He picked up the flag, which had fallen precisely at his feet.
+
+Outside, the clatter of the ramrods in the guns could be heard; the
+troops were re-loading their arms.
+
+Enjolras went on:--
+
+"Who is there here with a bold heart? Who will plant the flag on the
+barricade again?"
+
+Not a man responded. To mount on the barricade at the very moment when,
+without any doubt, it was again the object of their aim, was simply
+death. The bravest hesitated to pronounce his own condemnation. Enjolras
+himself felt a thrill. He repeated:--
+
+"Does no one volunteer?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE FLAG: ACT SECOND
+
+Since they had arrived at Corinthe, and had begun the construction of
+the barricade, no attention had been paid to Father Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf
+had not quitted the mob, however; he had entered the ground-floor of the
+wine-shop and had seated himself behind the counter. There he had, so to
+speak, retreated into himself. He no longer seemed to look or to think.
+Courfeyrac and others had accosted him two or three times, warning him
+of his peril, beseeching him to withdraw, but he did not hear them.
+When they were not speaking to him, his mouth moved as though he were
+replying to some one, and as soon as he was addressed, his lips became
+motionless and his eyes no longer had the appearance of being alive.
+
+Several hours before the barricade was attacked, he had assumed an
+attitude which he did not afterwards abandon, with both fists planted
+on his knees and his head thrust forward as though he were gazing over a
+precipice. Nothing had been able to move him from this attitude; it did
+not seem as though his mind were in the barricade. When each had gone
+to take up his position for the combat, there remained in the tap-room
+where Javert was bound to the post, only a single insurgent with a naked
+sword, watching over Javert, and himself, Mabeuf. At the moment of the
+attack, at the detonation, the physical shock had reached him and had,
+as it were, awakened him; he started up abruptly, crossed the room,
+and at the instant when Enjolras repeated his appeal: "Does no one
+volunteer?" the old man was seen to make his appearance on the threshold
+of the wine-shop. His presence produced a sort of commotion in the
+different groups. A shout went up:--
+
+"It is the voter! It is the member of the Convention! It is the
+representative of the people!"
+
+It is probable that he did not hear them.
+
+He strode straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents withdrawing before him
+with a religious fear; he tore the flag from Enjolras, who recoiled in
+amazement and then, since no one dared to stop or to assist him, this
+old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot, began slowly to
+ascend the staircase of paving-stones arranged in the barricade. This
+was so melancholy and so grand that all around him cried: "Off with your
+hats!" At every step that he mounted, it was a frightful spectacle; his
+white locks, his decrepit face, his lofty, bald, and wrinkled brow,
+his amazed and open mouth, his aged arm upholding the red banner, rose
+through the gloom and were enlarged in the bloody light of the torch,
+and the bystanders thought that they beheld the spectre of '93 emerging
+from the earth, with the flag of terror in his hand.
+
+When he had reached the last step, when this trembling and terrible
+phantom, erect on that pile of rubbish in the presence of twelve hundred
+invisible guns, drew himself up in the face of death and as though
+he were more powerful than it, the whole barricade assumed amid the
+darkness, a supernatural and colossal form.
+
+There ensued one of those silences which occur only in the presence of
+prodigies. In the midst of this silence, the old man waved the red flag
+and shouted:--
+
+"Long live the Revolution! Long live the Republic! Fraternity! Equality!
+and Death!"
+
+Those in the barricade heard a low and rapid whisper, like the murmur
+of a priest who is despatching a prayer in haste. It was probably the
+commissary of police who was making the legal summons at the other end
+of the street.
+
+Then the same piercing voice which had shouted: "Who goes there?"
+shouted:--
+
+"Retire!"
+
+M. Mabeuf, pale, haggard, his eyes lighted up with the mournful flame of
+aberration, raised the flag above his head and repeated:--
+
+"Long live the Republic!"
+
+"Fire!" said the voice.
+
+A second discharge, similar to the first, rained down upon the
+barricade.
+
+The old man fell on his knees, then rose again, dropped the flag
+and fell backwards on the pavement, like a log, at full length, with
+outstretched arms.
+
+Rivulets of blood flowed beneath him. His aged head, pale and sad,
+seemed to be gazing at the sky.
+
+One of those emotions which are superior to man, which make him forget
+even to defend himself, seized upon the insurgents, and they approached
+the body with respectful awe.
+
+"What men these regicides were!" said Enjolras.
+
+Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras' ear:--
+
+"This is for yourself alone, I do not wish to dampen the enthusiasm. But
+this man was anything rather than a regicide. I knew him. His name was
+Father Mabeuf. I do not know what was the matter with him to-day. But he
+was a brave blockhead. Just look at his head."
+
+"The head of a blockhead and the heart of a Brutus," replied Enjolras.
+
+Then he raised his voice:--
+
+"Citizens! This is the example which the old give to the young. We
+hesitated, he came! We were drawing back, he advanced! This is what
+those who are trembling with age teach to those who tremble with fear!
+This aged man is august in the eyes of his country. He has had a long
+life and a magnificent death! Now, let us place the body under cover,
+that each one of us may defend this old man dead as he would his
+father living, and may his presence in our midst render the barricade
+impregnable!"
+
+A murmur of gloomy and energetic assent followed these words.
+
+Enjolras bent down, raised the old man's head, and fierce as he was, he
+kissed him on the brow, then, throwing wide his arms, and handling this
+dead man with tender precaution, as though he feared to hurt it, he
+removed his coat, showed the bloody holes in it to all, and said:--
+
+"This is our flag now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE
+
+They threw a long black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's over Father Mabeuf.
+Six men made a litter of their guns; on this they laid the body, and
+bore it, with bared heads, with solemn slowness, to the large table in
+the tap-room.
+
+These men, wholly absorbed in the grave and sacred task in which they
+were engaged, thought no more of the perilous situation in which they
+stood.
+
+When the corpse passed near Javert, who was still impassive, Enjolras
+said to the spy:--
+
+"It will be your turn presently!"
+
+During all this time, Little Gavroche, who alone had not quitted his
+post, but had remained on guard, thought he espied some men stealthily
+approaching the barricade. All at once he shouted:--
+
+"Look out!"
+
+Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel,
+Bossuet, and all the rest ran tumultuously from the wine-shop. It was
+almost too late. They saw a glistening density of bayonets undulating
+above the barricade. Municipal guards of lofty stature were making
+their way in, some striding over the omnibus, others through the cut,
+thrusting before them the urchin, who retreated, but did not flee.
+
+The moment was critical. It was that first, redoubtable moment of
+inundation, when the stream rises to the level of the levee and when the
+water begins to filter through the fissures of dike. A second more and
+the barricade would have been taken.
+
+Bahorel dashed upon the first municipal guard who was entering, and
+killed him on the spot with a blow from his gun; the second killed
+Bahorel with a blow from his bayonet. Another had already overthrown
+Courfeyrac, who was shouting: "Follow me!" The largest of all, a sort of
+colossus, marched on Gavroche with his bayonet fixed. The urchin took in
+his arms Javert's immense gun, levelled it resolutely at the giant, and
+fired. No discharge followed. Javert's gun was not loaded. The municipal
+guard burst into a laugh and raised his bayonet at the child.
+
+Before the bayonet had touched Gavroche, the gun slipped from the
+soldier's grasp, a bullet had struck the municipal guardsman in the
+centre of the forehead, and he fell over on his back. A second bullet
+struck the other guard, who had assaulted Courfeyrac in the breast, and
+laid him low on the pavement.
+
+This was the work of Marius, who had just entered the barricade.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE BARREL OF POWDER
+
+Marius, still concealed in the turn of the Rue Mondetour, had witnessed,
+shuddering and irresolute, the first phase of the combat. But he had not
+long been able to resist that mysterious and sovereign vertigo which may
+be designated as the call of the abyss. In the presence of the imminence
+of the peril, in the presence of the death of M. Mabeuf, that melancholy
+enigma, in the presence of Bahorel killed, and Courfeyrac shouting:
+"Follow me!" of that child threatened, of his friends to succor or to
+avenge, all hesitation had vanished, and he had flung himself into the
+conflict, his two pistols in hand. With his first shot he had saved
+Gavroche, and with the second delivered Courfeyrac.
+
+Amid the sound of the shots, amid the cries of the assaulted guards,
+the assailants had climbed the entrenchment, on whose summit Municipal
+Guards, soldiers of the line and National Guards from the suburbs could
+now be seen, gun in hand, rearing themselves to more than half the
+height of their bodies.
+
+They already covered more than two-thirds of the barrier, but they did
+not leap into the enclosure, as though wavering in the fear of some
+trap. They gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion's
+den. The light of the torch illuminated only their bayonets, their
+bear-skin caps, and the upper part of their uneasy and angry faces.
+
+Marius had no longer any weapons; he had flung away his discharged
+pistols after firing them; but he had caught sight of the barrel of
+powder in the tap-room, near the door.
+
+As he turned half round, gazing in that direction, a soldier took aim at
+him. At the moment when the soldier was sighting Marius, a hand was laid
+on the muzzle of the gun and obstructed it. This was done by some one
+who had darted forward,--the young workman in velvet trousers. The shot
+sped, traversed the hand and possibly, also, the workman, since he fell,
+but the ball did not strike Marius. All this, which was rather to be
+apprehended than seen through the smoke, Marius, who was entering the
+tap-room, hardly noticed. Still, he had, in a confused way, perceived
+that gun-barrel aimed at him, and the hand which had blocked it, and he
+had heard the discharge. But in moments like this, the things which one
+sees vacillate and are precipitated, and one pauses for nothing. One
+feels obscurely impelled towards more darkness still, and all is cloud.
+
+The insurgents, surprised but not terrified, had rallied. Enjolras had
+shouted: "Wait! Don't fire at random!" In the first confusion, they
+might, in fact, wound each other. The majority of them had ascended
+to the window on the first story and to the attic windows, whence they
+commanded the assailants.
+
+The most determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and
+Combeferre, had proudly placed themselves with their backs against the
+houses at the rear, unsheltered and facing the ranks of soldiers and
+guards who crowned the barricade.
+
+All this was accomplished without haste, with that strange and
+threatening gravity which precedes engagements. They took aim, point
+blank, on both sides: they were so close that they could talk together
+without raising their voices.
+
+When they had reached this point where the spark is on the brink of
+darting forth, an officer in a gorget extended his sword and said:--
+
+"Lay down your arms!"
+
+"Fire!" replied Enjolras.
+
+The two discharges took place at the same moment, and all disappeared in
+smoke.
+
+An acrid and stifling smoke in which dying and wounded lay with weak,
+dull groans. When the smoke cleared away, the combatants on both sides
+could be seen to be thinned out, but still in the same positions,
+reloading in silence. All at once, a thundering voice was heard,
+shouting:--
+
+"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"
+
+All turned in the direction whence the voice proceeded.
+
+Marius had entered the tap-room, and had seized the barrel of powder,
+then he had taken advantage of the smoke, and the sort of obscure mist
+which filled the entrenched enclosure, to glide along the barricade as
+far as that cage of paving-stones where the torch was fixed. To tear
+it from the torch, to replace it by the barrel of powder, to thrust the
+pile of stones under the barrel, which was instantly staved in, with
+a sort of horrible obedience,--all this had cost Marius but the time
+necessary to stoop and rise again; and now all, National Guards,
+Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, huddled at the other extremity of
+the barricade, gazed stupidly at him, as he stood with his foot on the
+stones, his torch in his hand, his haughty face illuminated by a fatal
+resolution, drooping the flame of the torch towards that redoubtable
+pile where they could make out the broken barrel of powder, and giving
+vent to that startling cry:--
+
+"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"
+
+Marius on that barricade after the octogenarian was the vision of the
+young revolution after the apparition of the old.
+
+"Blow up the barricade!" said a sergeant, "and yourself with it!"
+
+Marius retorted: "And myself also."
+
+And he dropped the torch towards the barrel of powder.
+
+But there was no longer any one on the barrier. The assailants,
+abandoning their dead and wounded, flowed back pell-mell and in disorder
+towards the extremity of the street, and there were again lost in the
+night. It was a headlong flight.
+
+The barricade was free.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--END OF THE VERSES OF JEAN PROUVAIRE
+
+All flocked around Marius. Courfeyrac flung himself on his neck.
+
+"Here you are!"
+
+"What luck!" said Combeferre.
+
+"You came in opportunely!" ejaculated Bossuet.
+
+"If it had not been for you, I should have been dead!" began Courfeyrac
+again.
+
+"If it had not been for you, I should have been gobbled up!" added
+Gavroche.
+
+Marius asked:--
+
+"Where is the chief?"
+
+"You are he!" said Enjolras.
+
+Marius had had a furnace in his brain all day long; now it was a
+whirlwind. This whirlwind which was within him, produced on him the
+effect of being outside of him and of bearing him away. It seemed to him
+that he was already at an immense distance from life. His two luminous
+months of joy and love, ending abruptly at that frightful precipice,
+Cosette lost to him, that barricade, M. Mabeuf getting himself killed
+for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents,--all these
+things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. He was obliged to
+make a mental effort to recall the fact that all that surrounded him was
+real. Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing
+is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always
+necessary to foresee is the unforeseen. He had looked on at his own
+drama as a piece which one does not understand.
+
+In the mists which enveloped his thoughts, he did not recognize Javert,
+who, bound to his post, had not so much as moved his head during the
+whole of the attack on the barricade, and who had gazed on the revolt
+seething around him with the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of
+a judge. Marius had not even seen him.
+
+In the meanwhile, the assailants did not stir, they could be heard
+marching and swarming through at the end of the street but they did not
+venture into it, either because they were awaiting orders or because
+they were awaiting reinforcements before hurling themselves afresh on
+this impregnable redoubt. The insurgents had posted sentinels, and some
+of them, who were medical students, set about caring for the wounded.
+
+They had thrown the tables out of the wine-shop, with the exception of
+the two tables reserved for lint and cartridges, and of the one on
+which lay Father Mabeuf; they had added them to the barricade, and had
+replaced them in the tap-room with mattresses from the bed of the
+widow Hucheloup and her servants. On these mattresses they had laid the
+wounded. As for the three poor creatures who inhabited Corinthe, no one
+knew what had become of them. They were finally found, however, hidden
+in the cellar.
+
+A poignant emotion clouded the joy of the disencumbered barricade.
+
+The roll was called. One of the insurgents was missing. And who was
+it? One of the dearest. One of the most valiant. Jean Prouvaire. He
+was sought among the wounded, he was not there. He was sought among the
+dead, he was not there. He was evidently a prisoner. Combeferre said to
+Enjolras:--
+
+"They have our friend; we have their agent. Are you set on the death of
+that spy?"
+
+"Yes," replied Enjolras; "but less so than on the life of Jean
+Prouvaire."
+
+This took place in the tap-room near Javert's post.
+
+"Well," resumed Combeferre, "I am going to fasten my handkerchief to
+my cane, and go as a flag of truce, to offer to exchange our man for
+theirs."
+
+"Listen," said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre's arm.
+
+At the end of the street there was a significant clash of arms.
+
+They heard a manly voice shout:--
+
+"Vive la France! Long live France! Long live the future!"
+
+They recognized the voice of Prouvaire.
+
+A flash passed, a report rang out.
+
+Silence fell again.
+
+"They have killed him," exclaimed Combeferre.
+
+Enjolras glanced at Javert, and said to him:--
+
+"Your friends have just shot you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE
+
+A peculiarity of this species of war is, that the attack of the
+barricades is almost always made from the front, and that the assailants
+generally abstain from turning the position, either because they
+fear ambushes, or because they are afraid of getting entangled in the
+tortuous streets. The insurgents' whole attention had been directed,
+therefore, to the grand barricade, which was, evidently, the spot always
+menaced, and there the struggle would infallibly recommence. But Marius
+thought of the little barricade, and went thither. It was deserted and
+guarded only by the fire-pot which trembled between the paving-stones.
+Moreover, the Mondetour alley, and the branches of the Rue de la Petite
+Truanderie and the Rue du Cygne were profoundly calm.
+
+As Marius was withdrawing, after concluding his inspection, he heard his
+name pronounced feebly in the darkness.
+
+"Monsieur Marius!"
+
+He started, for he recognized the voice which had called to him two
+hours before through the gate in the Rue Plumet.
+
+Only, the voice now seemed to be nothing more than a breath.
+
+He looked about him, but saw no one.
+
+Marius thought he had been mistaken, that it was an illusion added by
+his mind to the extraordinary realities which were clashing around
+him. He advanced a step, in order to quit the distant recess where the
+barricade lay.
+
+"Monsieur Marius!" repeated the voice.
+
+This time he could not doubt that he had heard it distinctly; he looked
+and saw nothing.
+
+"At your feet," said the voice.
+
+He bent down, and saw in the darkness a form which was dragging itself
+towards him.
+
+It was crawling along the pavement. It was this that had spoken to him.
+
+The fire-pot allowed him to distinguish a blouse, torn trousers of
+coarse velvet, bare feet, and something which resembled a pool of blood.
+Marius indistinctly made out a pale head which was lifted towards him
+and which was saying to him:--
+
+"You do not recognize me?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Eponine."
+
+Marius bent hastily down. It was, in fact, that unhappy child. She was
+dressed in men's clothes.
+
+"How come you here? What are you doing here?"
+
+"I am dying," said she.
+
+There are words and incidents which arouse dejected beings. Marius cried
+out with a start:--
+
+"You are wounded! Wait, I will carry you into the room! They will attend
+to you there. Is it serious? How must I take hold of you in order not
+to hurt you? Where do you suffer? Help! My God! But why did you come
+hither?"
+
+And he tried to pass his arm under her, in order to raise her.
+
+She uttered a feeble cry.
+
+"Have I hurt you?" asked Marius.
+
+"A little."
+
+"But I only touched your hand."
+
+She raised her hand to Marius, and in the middle of that hand Marius saw
+a black hole.
+
+"What is the matter with your hand?" said he.
+
+"It is pierced."
+
+"Pierced?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What with?"
+
+"A bullet."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Did you see a gun aimed at you?"
+
+"Yes, and a hand stopping it."
+
+"It was mine."
+
+Marius was seized with a shudder.
+
+"What madness! Poor child! But so much the better, if that is all, it is
+nothing, let me carry you to a bed. They will dress your wound; one does
+not die of a pierced hand."
+
+She murmured:--
+
+"The bullet traversed my hand, but it came out through my back. It is
+useless to remove me from this spot. I will tell you how you can care
+for me better than any surgeon. Sit down near me on this stone."
+
+He obeyed; she laid her head on Marius' knees, and, without looking at
+him, she said:--
+
+"Oh! How good this is! How comfortable this is! There; I no longer
+suffer."
+
+She remained silent for a moment, then she turned her face with an
+effort, and looked at Marius.
+
+"Do you know what, Monsieur Marius? It puzzled me because you entered
+that garden; it was stupid, because it was I who showed you that house;
+and then, I ought to have said to myself that a young man like you--"
+
+She paused, and overstepping the sombre transitions that undoubtedly
+existed in her mind, she resumed with a heartrending smile:--
+
+"You thought me ugly, didn't you?"
+
+She continued:--
+
+"You see, you are lost! Now, no one can get out of the barricade. It was
+I who led you here, by the way! You are going to die, I count upon that.
+And yet, when I saw them taking aim at you, I put my hand on the muzzle
+of the gun. How queer it is! But it was because I wanted to die before
+you. When I received that bullet, I dragged myself here, no one saw
+me, no one picked me up, I was waiting for you, I said: 'So he is not
+coming!' Oh, if you only knew. I bit my blouse, I suffered so! Now I am
+well. Do you remember the day I entered your chamber and when I
+looked at myself in your mirror, and the day when I came to you on the
+boulevard near the washerwomen? How the birds sang! That was a long time
+ago. You gave me a hundred sous, and I said to you: 'I don't want your
+money.' I hope you picked up your coin? You are not rich. I did not
+think to tell you to pick it up. The sun was shining bright, and it was
+not cold. Do you remember, Monsieur Marius? Oh! How happy I am! Every
+one is going to die."
+
+She had a mad, grave, and heart-breaking air. Her torn blouse disclosed
+her bare throat.
+
+As she talked, she pressed her pierced hand to her breast, where there
+was another hole, and whence there spurted from moment to moment a
+stream of blood, like a jet of wine from an open bung-hole.
+
+Marius gazed at this unfortunate creature with profound compassion.
+
+"Oh!" she resumed, "it is coming again, I am stifling!"
+
+She caught up her blouse and bit it, and her limbs stiffened on the
+pavement.
+
+At that moment the young cock's crow executed by little Gavroche
+resounded through the barricade.
+
+The child had mounted a table to load his gun, and was singing gayly the
+song then so popular:--
+
+
+ "En voyant Lafayette, "On beholding Lafayette,
+ Le gendarme repete:-- The gendarme repeats:--
+ Sauvons nous! sauvons nous! Let us flee! let us flee!
+ sauvons nous!" let us flee!
+
+
+Eponine raised herself and listened; then she murmured:--
+
+"It is he."
+
+And turning to Marius:--
+
+"My brother is here. He must not see me. He would scold me."
+
+"Your brother?" inquired Marius, who was meditating in the most bitter
+and sorrowful depths of his heart on the duties to the Thenardiers which
+his father had bequeathed to him; "who is your brother?"
+
+"That little fellow."
+
+"The one who is singing?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Marius made a movement.
+
+"Oh! don't go away," said she, "it will not be long now."
+
+She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low and broken by
+hiccoughs.
+
+At intervals, the death rattle interrupted her. She put her face as near
+that of Marius as possible. She added with a strange expression:--
+
+"Listen, I do not wish to play you a trick. I have a letter in my pocket
+for you. I was told to put it in the post. I kept it. I did not want to
+have it reach you. But perhaps you will be angry with me for it when we
+meet again presently? Take your letter."
+
+She grasped Marius' hand convulsively with her pierced hand, but she no
+longer seemed to feel her sufferings. She put Marius' hand in the pocket
+of her blouse. There, in fact, Marius felt a paper.
+
+"Take it," said she.
+
+Marius took the letter.
+
+She made a sign of satisfaction and contentment.
+
+"Now, for my trouble, promise me--"
+
+And she stopped.
+
+"What?" asked Marius.
+
+"Promise me!"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it."
+
+She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He
+thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All
+at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she
+slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death,
+and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from
+another world:--
+
+"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in
+love with you."
+
+She tried to smile once more and expired.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES
+
+Marius kept his promise. He dropped a kiss on that livid brow, where the
+icy perspiration stood in beads.
+
+This was no infidelity to Cosette; it was a gentle and pensive farewell
+to an unhappy soul.
+
+It was not without a tremor that he had taken the letter which Eponine
+had given him. He had immediately felt that it was an event of weight.
+He was impatient to read it. The heart of man is so constituted that the
+unhappy child had hardly closed her eyes when Marius began to think of
+unfolding this paper.
+
+He laid her gently on the ground, and went away. Something told him that
+he could not peruse that letter in the presence of that body.
+
+He drew near to a candle in the tap-room. It was a small note, folded
+and sealed with a woman's elegant care. The address was in a woman's
+hand and ran:--
+
+"To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac's, Rue de la
+Verrerie, No. 16."
+
+He broke the seal and read:--
+
+ "My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately.
+ We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7.
+ In a week we shall be in England. COSETTE. June 4th."
+
+Such was the innocence of their love that Marius was not even acquainted
+with Cosette's handwriting.
+
+What had taken place may be related in a few words. Eponine had been
+the cause of everything. After the evening of the 3d of June she had
+cherished a double idea, to defeat the projects of her father and the
+ruffians on the house of the Rue Plumet, and to separate Marius and
+Cosette. She had exchanged rags with the first young scamp she came
+across who had thought it amusing to dress like a woman, while Eponine
+disguised herself like a man. It was she who had conveyed to Jean
+Valjean in the Champ de Mars the expressive warning: "Leave your house."
+Jean Valjean had, in fact, returned home, and had said to Cosette:
+"We set out this evening and we go to the Rue de l'Homme Arme with
+Toussaint. Next week, we shall be in London." Cosette, utterly
+overwhelmed by this unexpected blow, had hastily penned a couple of
+lines to Marius. But how was she to get the letter to the post? She
+never went out alone, and Toussaint, surprised at such a commission,
+would certainly show the letter to M. Fauchelevent. In this dilemma,
+Cosette had caught sight through the fence of Eponine in man's clothes,
+who now prowled incessantly around the garden. Cosette had called to
+"this young workman" and had handed him five francs and the letter,
+saying: "Carry this letter immediately to its address." Eponine had put
+the letter in her pocket. The next day, on the 5th of June, she went
+to Courfeyrac's quarters to inquire for Marius, not for the purpose of
+delivering the letter, but,--a thing which every jealous and loving soul
+will comprehend,--"to see." There she had waited for Marius, or at least
+for Courfeyrac, still for the purpose of seeing. When Courfeyrac had
+told her: "We are going to the barricades," an idea flashed through her
+mind, to fling herself into that death, as she would have done into any
+other, and to thrust Marius into it also. She had followed Courfeyrac,
+had made sure of the locality where the barricade was in process of
+construction; and, quite certain, since Marius had received no warning,
+and since she had intercepted the letter, that he would go at dusk to
+his trysting place for every evening, she had betaken herself to the Rue
+Plumet, had there awaited Marius, and had sent him, in the name of his
+friends, the appeal which would, she thought, lead him to the barricade.
+She reckoned on Marius' despair when he should fail to find Cosette; she
+was not mistaken. She had returned to the Rue de la Chanvrerie herself.
+What she did there the reader has just seen. She died with the tragic
+joy of jealous hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death,
+and who say: "No one shall have him!"
+
+Marius covered Cosette's letter with kisses. So she loved him! For one
+moment the idea occurred to him that he ought not to die now. Then
+he said to himself: "She is going away. Her father is taking her to
+England, and my grandfather refuses his consent to the marriage. Nothing
+is changed in our fates." Dreamers like Marius are subject to supreme
+attacks of dejection, and desperate resolves are the result. The fatigue
+of living is insupportable; death is sooner over with. Then he reflected
+that he had still two duties to fulfil: to inform Cosette of his
+death and send her a final farewell, and to save from the impending
+catastrophe which was in preparation, that poor child, Eponine's brother
+and Thenardier's son.
+
+He had a pocket-book about him; the same one which had contained
+the note-book in which he had inscribed so many thoughts of love for
+Cosette. He tore out a leaf and wrote on it a few lines in pencil:--
+
+"Our marriage was impossible. I asked my grandfather, he refused; I have
+no fortune, neither hast thou. I hastened to thee, thou wert no longer
+there. Thou knowest the promise that I gave thee, I shall keep it. I
+die. I love thee. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee, and
+thou wilt smile."
+
+Having nothing wherewith to seal this letter, he contented himself with
+folding the paper in four, and added the address:--
+
+"To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de
+l'Homme Arme, No. 7."
+
+Having folded the letter, he stood in thought for a moment, drew out
+his pocket-book again, opened it, and wrote, with the same pencil, these
+four lines on the first page:--
+
+"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.
+Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."
+
+He put his pocketbook back in his pocket, then he called Gavroche.
+
+The gamin, at the sound of Marius' voice, ran up to him with his merry
+and devoted air.
+
+"Will you do something for me?"
+
+"Anything," said Gavroche. "Good God! if it had not been for you, I
+should have been done for."
+
+"Do you see this letter?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Take it. Leave the barricade instantly" (Gavroche began to scratch his
+ear uneasily) "and to-morrow morning, you will deliver it at its address
+to Mademoiselle Cosette, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de l'Homme Arme, No.
+7."
+
+The heroic child replied
+
+"Well, but! in the meanwhile the barricade will be taken, and I shall
+not be there."
+
+"The barricade will not be attacked until daybreak, according to all
+appearances, and will not be taken before to-morrow noon."
+
+The fresh respite which the assailants were granting to the barricade
+had, in fact, been prolonged. It was one of those intermissions which
+frequently occur in nocturnal combats, which are always followed by an
+increase of rage.
+
+"Well," said Gavroche, "what if I were to go and carry your letter
+to-morrow?"
+
+"It will be too late. The barricade will probably be blockaded, all
+the streets will be guarded, and you will not be able to get out. Go at
+once."
+
+Gavroche could think of no reply to this, and stood there in indecision,
+scratching his ear sadly.
+
+All at once, he took the letter with one of those birdlike movements
+which were common with him.
+
+"All right," said he.
+
+And he started off at a run through Mondetour lane.
+
+An idea had occurred to Gavroche which had brought him to a decision,
+but he had not mentioned it for fear that Marius might offer some
+objection to it.
+
+This was the idea:--
+
+"It is barely midnight, the Rue de l'Homme Arme is not far off; I will
+go and deliver the letter at once, and I shall get back in time."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--A DRINKER IS A BABBLER
+
+What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections
+of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people. Jean Valjean
+at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of
+gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling, like Paris,
+on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. A few hours
+had sufficed to bring this about. His destiny and his conscience had
+suddenly been covered with gloom. Of him also, as well as of Paris, it
+might have been said: "Two principles are face to face. The white angel
+and the black angel are about to seize each other on the bridge of the
+abyss. Which of the two will hurl the other over? Who will carry the
+day?"
+
+On the evening preceding this same 5th of June, Jean Valjean,
+accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint had installed himself in the Rue de
+l'Homme Arme. A change awaited him there.
+
+Cosette had not quitted the Rue Plumet without making an effort at
+resistance. For the first time since they had lived side by side,
+Cosette's will and the will of Jean Valjean had proved to be distinct,
+and had been in opposition, at least, if they had not clashed. There had
+been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other. The abrupt
+advice: "Leave your house," hurled at Jean Valjean by a stranger, had
+alarmed him to the extent of rendering him peremptory. He thought that
+he had been traced and followed. Cosette had been obliged to give way.
+
+Both had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme without opening their lips,
+and without uttering a word, each being absorbed in his own personal
+preoccupation; Jean Valjean so uneasy that he did not notice Cosette's
+sadness, Cosette so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's
+uneasiness.
+
+Jean Valjean had taken Toussaint with him, a thing which he had never
+done in his previous absences. He perceived the possibility of not
+returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind
+nor confide his secret to her. Besides, he felt that she was devoted and
+trustworthy. Treachery between master and servant begins in curiosity.
+Now Toussaint, as though she had been destined to be Jean Valjean's
+servant, was not curious. She stammered in her peasant dialect of
+Barneville: "I am made so; I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine."
+
+In this departure from the Rue Plumet, which had been almost a flight,
+Jean Valjean had carried away nothing but the little embalmed valise,
+baptized by Cosette "the inseparable." Full trunks would have required
+porters, and porters are witnesses. A fiacre had been summoned to the
+door on the Rue de Babylone, and they had taken their departure.
+
+It was with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission to pack up
+a little linen and clothes and a few toilet articles. Cosette had taken
+only her portfolio and her blotting-book.
+
+Jean Valjean, with a view to augmenting the solitude and the mystery of
+this departure, had arranged to quit the pavilion of the Rue Plumet only
+at dusk, which had allowed Cosette time to write her note to Marius.
+They had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme after night had fully
+fallen.
+
+They had gone to bed in silence.
+
+The lodgings in the Rue de l'Homme Arme were situated on a back
+court, on the second floor, and were composed of two sleeping-rooms, a
+dining-room and a kitchen adjoining the dining-room, with a garret
+where there was a folding-bed, and which fell to Toussaint's share. The
+dining-room was an antechamber as well, and separated the two bedrooms.
+The apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.
+
+People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature
+is so constituted. Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l'Homme
+Arme when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated. There
+are soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on the mind.
+An obscure street, peaceable inhabitants. Jean Valjean experienced an
+indescribable contagion of tranquillity in that alley of ancient Paris,
+which is so narrow that it is barred against carriages by a transverse
+beam placed on two posts, which is deaf and dumb in the midst of the
+clamorous city, dimly lighted at mid-day, and is, so to speak, incapable
+of emotions between two rows of lofty houses centuries old, which hold
+their peace like ancients as they are. There was a touch of stagnant
+oblivion in that street. Jean Valjean drew his breath once more there.
+How could he be found there?
+
+His first care was to place the inseparable beside him.
+
+He slept well. Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes. On the
+following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay. He thought the
+dining-room charming, though it was hideous, furnished with an old round
+table, a long sideboard surmounted by a slanting mirror, a dilapidated
+arm-chair, and several plain chairs which were encumbered with
+Toussaint's packages. In one of these packages Jean Valjean's uniform of
+a National Guard was visible through a rent.
+
+As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint take some broth to her room, and
+did not make her appearance until evening.
+
+About five o'clock, Toussaint, who was going and coming and busying
+herself with the tiny establishment, set on the table a cold chicken,
+which Cosette, out of deference to her father, consented to glance at.
+
+That done, Cosette, under the pretext of an obstinate sick headache,
+had bade Jean Valjean good night and had shut herself up in her chamber.
+Jean Valjean had eaten a wing of the chicken with a good appetite, and
+with his elbows on the table, having gradually recovered his serenity,
+had regained possession of his sense of security.
+
+While he was discussing this modest dinner, he had, twice or thrice,
+noticed in a confused way, Toussaint's stammering words as she said
+to him: "Monsieur, there is something going on, they are fighting in
+Paris." But absorbed in a throng of inward calculations, he had paid no
+heed to it. To tell the truth, he had not heard her. He rose and began
+to pace from the door to the window and from the window to the door,
+growing ever more serene.
+
+With this calm, Cosette, his sole anxiety, recurred to his thoughts. Not
+that he was troubled by this headache, a little nervous crisis, a young
+girl's fit of sulks, the cloud of a moment, there would be nothing left
+of it in a day or two; but he meditated on the future, and, as was his
+habit, he thought of it with pleasure. After all, he saw no obstacle to
+their happy life resuming its course. At certain hours, everything seems
+impossible, at others everything appears easy; Jean Valjean was in the
+midst of one of these good hours. They generally succeed the bad
+ones, as day follows night, by virtue of that law of succession and
+of contrast which lies at the very foundation of nature, and which
+superficial minds call antithesis. In this peaceful street where he had
+taken refuge, Jean Valjean got rid of all that had been troubling him
+for some time past. This very fact, that he had seen many shadows, made
+him begin to perceive a little azure. To have quitted the Rue
+Plumet without complications or incidents was one good step already
+accomplished. Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few
+months, and to set out for London. Well, they would go. What difference
+did it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he
+had Cosette beside him? Cosette was his nation. Cosette sufficed for
+his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for Cosette's
+happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his fever
+and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. He was in a
+state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he was fully entered
+on optimism. Cosette was by his side, she seemed to be his; an optical
+illusion which every one has experienced. He arranged in his own mind,
+with all sorts of felicitous devices, his departure for England with
+Cosette, and he beheld his felicity reconstituted wherever he pleased,
+in the perspective of his revery.
+
+As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly
+encountered something strange.
+
+In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard, he saw
+the four lines which follow:--
+
+"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We
+shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. In a week we
+shall be in England. COSETTE. June 4th."
+
+Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.
+
+Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard in
+front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief, had
+forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she had left
+it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she had laid to
+dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she had given in
+charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet. The writing had been
+printed off on the blotter.
+
+The mirror reflected the writing.
+
+The result was, what is called in geometry, the symmetrical image; so
+that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the mirror and
+presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean had beneath his eyes
+the letter written by Cosette to Marius on the preceding evening.
+
+It was simple and withering.
+
+Jean Valjean stepped up to the mirror. He read the four lines again, but
+he did not believe them. They produced on him the effect of appearing in
+a flash of lightning. It was a hallucination, it was impossible. It was
+not so.
+
+Little by little, his perceptions became more precise; he looked at
+Cosette's blotting-book, and the consciousness of the reality returned
+to him. He caught up the blotter and said: "It comes from there."
+He feverishly examined the four lines imprinted on the blotter, the
+reversal of the letters converted into an odd scrawl, and he saw no
+sense in it. Then he said to himself: "But this signifies nothing; there
+is nothing written here." And he drew a long breath with inexpressible
+relief. Who has not experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants?
+The soul does not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all
+illusions.
+
+He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight,
+almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the
+dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again, and again he
+beheld the vision. There were the four lines outlined with inexorable
+clearness. This time it was no mirage. The recurrence of a vision is a
+reality; it was palpable, it was the writing restored in the mirror. He
+understood.
+
+Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old
+arm-chair beside the buffet, with drooping head, and glassy eyes, in
+utter bewilderment. He told himself that it was plain, that the light of
+the world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette had written that
+to some one. Then he heard his soul, which had become terrible once
+more, give vent to a dull roar in the gloom. Try then the effect of
+taking from the lion the dog which he has in his cage!
+
+Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet received
+Cosette's letter; chance had treacherously carried it to Jean Valjean
+before delivering it to Marius. Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not
+been vanquished by trial. He had been subjected to fearful proofs; no
+violence of bad fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed
+with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him for her prey
+and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity when it had
+been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man,
+had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered
+everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a
+point that he might have been thought to be absent from himself like a
+martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have
+appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one who had beheld his
+spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at
+that moment. It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone
+in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him,
+this was the most terrible. Never had such pincers seized him hitherto.
+He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt
+the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say
+rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.
+
+Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as
+a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity
+the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he
+loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he
+loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to
+love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that
+sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the
+rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious,
+celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct,
+less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and invisible but real
+attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness
+for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and
+virgin.
+
+Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already
+indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of
+souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With the
+exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood,
+Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known anything of
+that which may be loved. The passions and loves which succeed each other
+had not produced in him those successive green growths, tender green or
+dark green, which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter
+and in men who pass fifty. In short, and we have insisted on it more
+than once, all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum
+total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to
+Cosette. A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the
+brother, and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom
+there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored
+her, and who held that child as his light, his home, his family, his
+country, his paradise.
+
+Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping
+from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding
+from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this
+crushing proof: "another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish
+of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her
+father, I no longer exist"; when he could no longer doubt, when he
+said to himself: "She is going away from me!" the grief which he felt
+surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done
+for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being nothing!
+Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him from
+head to foot. He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the immense
+reawakening of egotism, and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled.
+
+There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. A
+despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting
+aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are
+the very man himself. Grief, when it attains this shape, is a headlong
+flight of all the forces of the conscience. These are fatal crises. Few
+among us emerge from them still like ourselves and firm in duty. When
+the limit of endurance is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is
+disconcerted. Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself
+afresh; he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes,
+over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such
+a cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was
+crumbling away.
+
+He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of revery, with
+an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a
+man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.
+
+He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his
+having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding
+summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was
+still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at
+the bottom of it.
+
+The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had
+fallen without perceiving it. All the light of his life had departed,
+while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.
+
+His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances,
+certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part,
+and he said to himself: "It is he."
+
+The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses
+its aim. He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the
+name, but he found the man instantly. He distinctly perceived, in the
+background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the unknown
+prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love adventures, that
+idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come
+and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a father who loves
+them.
+
+After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at
+the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that
+quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so
+labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve
+all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his own
+breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.
+
+Great griefs contain something of dejection. They discourage one with
+existence. The man into whom they enter feels something within him
+withdraw from him. In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on
+they are sinister. Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood is
+hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like
+the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full
+thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats
+which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when all
+women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are before
+one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age, when
+the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when one
+begins to behold the stars of the tomb?
+
+While he was meditating, Toussaint entered. Jean Valjean rose and asked
+her:--
+
+"In what quarter is it? Do you know?"
+
+Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:--
+
+"What is it, sir?"
+
+Jean Valjean began again: "Did you not tell me that just now that there
+is fighting going on?"
+
+"Ah! yes, sir," replied Toussaint. "It is in the direction of
+Saint-Merry."
+
+There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously, from
+the most profound depths of our thought. It was, no doubt, under
+the impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he was hardly
+conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later, found himself in the
+street.
+
+Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house. He
+seemed to be listening.
+
+Night had come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT
+
+How long did he remain thus? What was the ebb and flow of this tragic
+meditation? Did he straighten up? Did he remain bowed? Had he been
+bent to breaking? Could he still rise and regain his footing in his
+conscience upon something solid? He probably would not have been able to
+tell himself.
+
+The street was deserted. A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly
+returning home, hardly saw him. Each one for himself in times of peril.
+The lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern which was situated
+precisely opposite the door of No. 7, and then went away. Jean Valjean
+would not have appeared like a living man to any one who had examined
+him in that shadow. He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as
+a form of ice. There is congealment in despair. The alarm bells and
+a vague and stormy uproar were audible. In the midst of all these
+convulsions of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of Saint-Paul
+struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is man; the
+hour is God. The passage of the hour produced no effect on Jean Valjean;
+Jean Valjean did not stir. Still, at about that moment, a brusque report
+burst forth in the direction of the Halles, a second yet more violent
+followed; it was probably that attack on the barricade in the Rue de la
+Chanvrerie which we have just seen repulsed by Marius. At this double
+discharge, whose fury seemed augmented by the stupor of the night, Jean
+Valjean started; he rose, turning towards the quarter whence the noise
+proceeded; then he fell back upon the post again, folded his arms, and
+his head slowly sank on his bosom again.
+
+He resumed his gloomy dialogue with himself.
+
+All at once, he raised his eyes; some one was walking in the street, he
+heard steps near him. He looked, and by the light of the lanterns, in
+the direction of the street which ran into the Rue-aux-Archives, he
+perceived a young, livid, and beaming face.
+
+Gavroche had just arrived in the Rue l'Homme Arme.
+
+Gavroche was staring into the air, apparently in search of something. He
+saw Jean Valjean perfectly well but he took no notice of him.
+
+Gavroche after staring into the air, stared below; he raised himself on
+tiptoe, and felt of the doors and windows of the ground floor; they were
+all shut, bolted, and padlocked. After having authenticated the fronts
+of five or six barricaded houses in this manner, the urchin shrugged his
+shoulders, and took himself to task in these terms:--
+
+"Pardi!"
+
+Then he began to stare into the air again.
+
+Jean Valjean, who, an instant previously, in his then state of mind,
+would not have spoken to or even answered any one, felt irresistibly
+impelled to accost that child.
+
+"What is the matter with you, my little fellow?" he said.
+
+"The matter with me is that I am hungry," replied Gavroche frankly. And
+he added: "Little fellow yourself."
+
+Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.
+
+But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species, and who skipped
+vivaciously from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. He
+had caught sight of the lantern.
+
+"See here," said he, "you still have your lanterns here. You are
+disobeying the regulations, my friend. This is disorderly. Smash that
+for me."
+
+And he flung the stone at the lantern, whose broken glass fell with
+such a clatter that the bourgeois in hiding behind their curtains in the
+opposite house cried: "There is 'Ninety-three' come again."
+
+The lantern oscillated violently, and went out. The street had suddenly
+become black.
+
+"That's right, old street," ejaculated Gavroche, "put on your
+night-cap."
+
+And turning to Jean Valjean:--
+
+"What do you call that gigantic monument that you have there at the end
+of the street? It's the Archives, isn't it? I must crumble up those big
+stupids of pillars a bit and make a nice barricade out of them."
+
+Jean Valjean stepped up to Gavroche.
+
+"Poor creature," he said in a low tone, and speaking to himself, "he is
+hungry."
+
+And he laid the hundred-sou piece in his hand.
+
+Gavroche raised his face, astonished at the size of this sou; he stared
+at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the big sou dazzled him.
+He knew five-franc pieces by hearsay; their reputation was agreeable to
+him; he was delighted to see one close to. He said:--
+
+"Let us contemplate the tiger."
+
+He gazed at it for several minutes in ecstasy; then, turning to Jean
+Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically to him:--
+
+"Bourgeois, I prefer to smash lanterns. Take back your ferocious beast.
+You can't bribe me. That has got five claws; but it doesn't scratch me."
+
+"Have you a mother?" asked Jean Valjean.
+
+Gavroche replied:--
+
+"More than you have, perhaps."
+
+"Well," returned Jean Valjean, "keep the money for your mother!"
+
+Gavroche was touched. Moreover, he had just noticed that the man who was
+addressing him had no hat, and this inspired him with confidence.
+
+"Truly," said he, "so it wasn't to keep me from breaking the lanterns?"
+
+"Break whatever you please."
+
+"You're a fine man," said Gavroche.
+
+And he put the five-franc piece into one of his pockets.
+
+His confidence having increased, he added:--
+
+"Do you belong in this street?"
+
+"Yes, why?"
+
+"Can you tell me where No. 7 is?"
+
+"What do you want with No. 7?"
+
+Here the child paused, he feared that he had said too much; he thrust
+his nails energetically into his hair and contented himself with
+replying:--
+
+"Ah! Here it is."
+
+An idea flashed through Jean Valjean's mind. Anguish does have these
+gleams. He said to the lad:--
+
+"Are you the person who is bringing a letter that I am expecting?"
+
+"You?" said Gavroche. "You are not a woman."
+
+"The letter is for Mademoiselle Cosette, is it not?"
+
+"Cosette," muttered Gavroche. "Yes, I believe that is the queer name."
+
+"Well," resumed Jean Valjean, "I am the person to whom you are to
+deliver the letter. Give it here."
+
+"In that case, you must know that I was sent from the barricade."
+
+"Of course," said Jean Valjean.
+
+Gavroche engulfed his hand in another of his pockets and drew out a
+paper folded in four.
+
+Then he made the military salute.
+
+"Respect for despatches," said he. "It comes from the Provisional
+Government."
+
+"Give it to me," said Jean Valjean.
+
+Gavroche held the paper elevated above his head.
+
+"Don't go and fancy it's a love letter. It is for a woman, but it's for
+the people. We men fight and we respect the fair sex. We are not as
+they are in fine society, where there are lions who send chickens[55] to
+camels."
+
+"Give it to me."
+
+"After all," continued Gavroche, "you have the air of an honest man."
+
+"Give it to me quick."
+
+"Catch hold of it."
+
+And he handed the paper to Jean Valjean.
+
+"And make haste, Monsieur What's-your-name, for Mamselle Cosette is
+waiting."
+
+Gavroche was satisfied with himself for having produced this remark.
+
+Jean Valjean began again:--
+
+"Is it to Saint-Merry that the answer is to be sent?"
+
+"There you are making some of those bits of pastry vulgarly called
+brioches [blunders]. This letter comes from the barricade of the Rue de
+la Chanvrerie, and I'm going back there. Good evening, citizen."
+
+That said, Gavroche took himself off, or, to describe it more exactly,
+fluttered away in the direction whence he had come with a flight like
+that of an escaped bird. He plunged back into the gloom as though he
+made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile; the alley of
+l'Homme Arme became silent and solitary once more; in a twinkling, that
+strange child, who had about him something of the shadow and of the
+dream, had buried himself in the mists of the rows of black houses, and
+was lost there, like smoke in the dark; and one might have thought that
+he had dissipated and vanished, had there not taken place, a few minutes
+after his disappearance, a startling shiver of glass, and had not the
+magnificent crash of a lantern rattling down on the pavement once more
+abruptly awakened the indignant bourgeois. It was Gavroche upon his way
+through the Rue du Chaume.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE ASLEEP
+
+Jean Valjean went into the house with Marius' letter.
+
+He groped his way up the stairs, as pleased with the darkness as an owl
+who grips his prey, opened and shut his door softly, listened to see
+whether he could hear any noise,--made sure that, to all appearances,
+Cosette and Toussaint were asleep, and plunged three or four matches
+into the bottle of the Fumade lighter before he could evoke a spark, so
+greatly did his hand tremble. What he had just done smacked of theft. At
+last the candle was lighted; he leaned his elbows on the table, unfolded
+the paper, and read.
+
+In violent emotions, one does not read, one flings to the earth, so to
+speak, the paper which one holds, one clutches it like a victim, one
+crushes it, one digs into it the nails of one's wrath, or of one's joy;
+one hastens to the end, one leaps to the beginning; attention is at
+fever heat; it takes up in the gross, as it were, the essential points;
+it seizes on one point, and the rest disappears. In Marius' note to
+Cosette, Jean Valjean saw only these words:--
+
+"I die. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee."
+
+In the presence of these two lines, he was horribly dazzled; he remained
+for a moment, crushed, as it were, by the change of emotion which
+was taking place within him, he stared at Marius' note with a sort of
+intoxicated amazement, he had before his eyes that splendor, the death
+of a hated individual.
+
+He uttered a frightful cry of inward joy. So it was all over. The
+catastrophe had arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. The being who
+obstructed his destiny was disappearing. That man had taken himself off
+of his own accord, freely, willingly. This man was going to his death,
+and he, Jean Valjean, had had no hand in the matter, and it was through
+no fault of his. Perhaps, even, he is already dead. Here his fever
+entered into calculations. No, he is not dead yet. The letter had
+evidently been intended for Cosette to read on the following morning;
+after the two discharges that were heard between eleven o'clock and
+midnight, nothing more has taken place; the barricade will not be
+attacked seriously until daybreak; but that makes no difference, from
+the moment when "that man" is concerned in this war, he is lost; he is
+caught in the gearing. Jean Valjean felt himself delivered. So he was
+about to find himself alone with Cosette once more. The rivalry would
+cease; the future was beginning again. He had but to keep this note in
+his pocket. Cosette would never know what had become of that man. All
+that there requires to be done is to let things take their own course.
+This man cannot escape. If he is not already dead, it is certain that he
+is about to die. What good fortune!
+
+Having said all this to himself, he became gloomy.
+
+Then he went down stairs and woke up the porter.
+
+About an hour later, Jean Valjean went out in the complete costume of
+a National Guard, and with his arms. The porter had easily found in the
+neighborhood the wherewithal to complete his equipment. He had a loaded
+gun and a cartridge-box filled with cartridges.
+
+He strode off in the direction of the markets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL
+
+In the meantime, Gavroche had had an adventure.
+
+Gavroche, after having conscientiously stoned the lantern in the Rue du
+Chaume, entered the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes, and not seeing "even a
+cat" there, he thought the opportunity a good one to strike up all the
+song of which he was capable. His march, far from being retarded by his
+singing, was accelerated by it. He began to sow along the sleeping or
+terrified houses these incendiary couplets:--
+
+ "L'oiseau medit dans les charmilles,
+ Et pretend qu'hier Atala
+ Avec un Russe s'en alla.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Mon ami Pierrot, tu babilles,
+ Parce que l'autre jour Mila
+ Cogna sa vitre et m'appela,
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Les drolesses sont fort gentilles,
+ Leur poison qui m'ensorcela
+ Griserait Monsieur Orfila.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "J'aime l'amour et les bisbilles,
+ J'aime Agnes, j'aime Pamela,
+ Lisa en m'allumant se brula.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Jadis, quand je vis les mantilles
+ De Suzette et de Zeila,
+ Mon ame aleurs plis se mela,
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Amour, quand dans l'ombre ou tu brilles,
+ Tu coiffes de roses Lola,
+ Je me damnerais pour cela.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Jeanne a ton miroir tu t'habilles!
+ Mon coeur un beau jour s'envola.
+ Je crois que c'est Jeanne qui l'a.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Le soir, en sortant des quadrilles,
+ Je montre aux etoiles Stella,
+ Et je leur dis: 'Regardez-la.'
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la."[56]
+
+Gavroche, as he sang, was lavish of his pantomime. Gesture is the strong
+point of the refrain. His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks,
+produced grimaces more convulsing and more fantastic than the rents of a
+cloth torn in a high gale. Unfortunately, as he was alone, and as it was
+night, this was neither seen nor even visible. Such wastes of riches do
+occur.
+
+All at once, he stopped short.
+
+"Let us interrupt the romance," said he.
+
+His feline eye had just descried, in the recess of a carriage door,
+what is called in painting, an ensemble, that is to say, a person and
+a thing; the thing was a hand-cart, the person was a man from Auvergene
+who was sleeping therein.
+
+The shafts of the cart rested on the pavement, and the Auvergnat's head
+was supported against the front of the cart. His body was coiled up on
+this inclined plane and his feet touched the ground.
+
+Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world, recognized
+a drunken man. He was some corner errand-man who had drunk too much and
+was sleeping too much.
+
+"There now," thought Gavroche, "that's what the summer nights are good
+for. We'll take the cart for the Republic, and leave the Auvergnat for
+the Monarchy."
+
+His mind had just been illuminated by this flash of light:--
+
+"How bully that cart would look on our barricade!"
+
+The Auvergnat was snoring.
+
+Gavroche gently tugged at the cart from behind, and at the Auvergnat
+from the front, that is to say, by the feet, and at the expiration of
+another minute the imperturbable Auvergnat was reposing flat on the
+pavement.
+
+The cart was free.
+
+Gavroche, habituated to facing the unexpected in all quarters, had
+everything about him. He fumbled in one of his pockets, and pulled from
+it a scrap of paper and a bit of red pencil filched from some carpenter.
+
+He wrote:--
+
+ "French Republic."
+
+ "Received thy cart."
+
+ And he signed it: "GAVROCHE."
+
+That done, he put the paper in the pocket of the still snoring
+Auvergnat's velvet vest, seized the cart shafts in both hands, and set
+off in the direction of the Halles, pushing the cart before him at a
+hard gallop with a glorious and triumphant uproar.
+
+This was perilous. There was a post at the Royal Printing Establishment.
+Gavroche did not think of this. This post was occupied by the National
+Guards of the suburbs. The squad began to wake up, and heads were raised
+from camp beds. Two street lanterns broken in succession, that ditty
+sung at the top of the lungs. This was a great deal for those cowardly
+streets, which desire to go to sleep at sunset, and which put the
+extinguisher on their candles at such an early hour. For the last hour,
+that boy had been creating an uproar in that peaceable arrondissement,
+the uproar of a fly in a bottle. The sergeant of the banlieue lent an
+ear. He waited. He was a prudent man.
+
+The mad rattle of the cart, filled to overflowing the possible measure
+of waiting, and decided the sergeant to make a reconnaisance.
+
+"There's a whole band of them there!" said he, "let us proceed gently."
+
+It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box and that
+it was stalking abroad through the quarter.
+
+And the sergeant ventured out of the post with cautious tread.
+
+All at once, Gavroche, pushing his cart in front of him, and at the very
+moment when he was about to turn into the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes,
+found himself face to face with a uniform, a shako, a plume, and a gun.
+
+For the second time, he stopped short.
+
+"Hullo," said he, "it's him. Good day, public order."
+
+Gavroche's amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.
+
+"Where are you going, you rascal?" shouted the sergeant.
+
+"Citizen," retorted Gavroche, "I haven't called you 'bourgeois' yet. Why
+do you insult me?"
+
+"Where are you going, you rogue?"
+
+"Monsieur," retorted Gavroche, "perhaps you were a man of wit yesterday,
+but you have degenerated this morning."
+
+"I ask you where are you going, you villain?"
+
+Gavroche replied:--
+
+"You speak prettily. Really, no one would suppose you as old as you are.
+You ought to sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That would
+yield you five hundred francs."
+
+"Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going, bandit?"
+
+Gavroche retorted again:--
+
+"What villainous words! You must wipe your mouth better the first time
+that they give you suck."
+
+The sergeant lowered his bayonet.
+
+"Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?"
+
+"General," said Gavroche "I'm on my way to look for a doctor for my wife
+who is in labor."
+
+"To arms!" shouted the sergeant.
+
+The master-stroke of strong men consists in saving themselves by the
+very means that have ruined them; Gavroche took in the whole situation
+at a glance. It was the cart which had told against him, it was the
+cart's place to protect him.
+
+At the moment when the sergeant was on the point of making his descent
+on Gavroche, the cart, converted into a projectile and launched with all
+the latter's might, rolled down upon him furiously, and the sergeant,
+struck full in the stomach, tumbled over backwards into the gutter while
+his gun went off in the air.
+
+The men of the post had rushed out pell-mell at the sergeant's shout;
+the shot brought on a general random discharge, after which they
+reloaded their weapons and began again.
+
+This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and
+killed several panes of glass.
+
+In the meanwhile, Gavroche, who had retraced his steps at full speed,
+halted five or six streets distant and seated himself, panting, on the
+stone post which forms the corner of the Enfants-Rouges.
+
+He listened.
+
+After panting for a few minutes, he turned in the direction where the
+fusillade was raging, lifted his left hand to a level with his nose and
+thrust it forward three times, as he slapped the back of his head with
+his right hand; an imperious gesture in which Parisian street-urchindom
+has condensed French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since it
+has already lasted half a century.
+
+This gayety was troubled by one bitter reflection.
+
+"Yes," said he, "I'm splitting with laughter, I'm twisting with
+delight, I abound in joy, but I'm losing my way, I shall have to take a
+roundabout way. If I only reach the barricade in season!"
+
+Thereupon he set out again on a run.
+
+And as he ran:--
+
+"Ah, by the way, where was I?" said he.
+
+And he resumed his ditty, as he plunged rapidly through the streets, and
+this is what died away in the gloom:--
+
+ "Mais il reste encore des bastilles,
+ Et je vais mettre le hola
+ Dans l'orde public que voila.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Quelqu'un veut-il jouer aux quilles?
+ Tout l'ancien monde s'ecroula
+ Quand la grosse boule roula.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Vieux bon peuple, a coups de bequilles,
+ Cassons ce Louvre ou s'etala
+ La monarchie en falbala.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la.
+
+ "Nous en avons force les grilles,
+ Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour la,
+ Tenait mal et se decolla.
+ Ou vont les belles filles,
+ Lon la."[57]
+
+The post's recourse to arms was not without result. The cart was
+conquered, the drunken man was taken prisoner. The first was put in the
+pound, the second was later on somewhat harassed before the councils
+of war as an accomplice. The public ministry of the day proved its
+indefatigable zeal in the defence of society, in this instance.
+
+Gavroche's adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters
+of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly
+bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: "The
+nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment."
+
+
+[THE END OF VOLUME IV. "SAINT DENIS"]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME V--JEAN VALJEAN
+
+[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Five ]
+
+[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Five ]
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF
+THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE
+
+The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies
+can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work
+is laid. These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two different
+aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at the time
+of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of the streets
+that history has ever beheld.
+
+It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to
+liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote,
+even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its
+anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of
+its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that
+great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the
+populace wages battle against, the people.
+
+Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.
+
+These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of night
+even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those words
+which are intended to be insults--beggars, canaille, ochlocracy,
+populace--exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the
+fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the
+fault of the disinherited.
+
+For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and
+without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they
+correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries. Athens
+was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the populace
+saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.
+
+There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences
+of the lower classes.
+
+It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of
+all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable
+people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this
+mysterious saying: "Fex urbis, lex orbis,"--the dregs of the city, the
+law of the earth.
+
+The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences
+contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its
+life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular coups
+d'etat and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself,
+and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But how
+excusable he feels it even while holding out against it! How he
+venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments
+when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something
+which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding
+further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though
+satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a
+pain at the heart.
+
+June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost
+impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the
+words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes
+a question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy
+anxiety of toil claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat it, and
+this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848,
+at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself.
+
+Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we,
+then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for a moment on the
+two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which
+characterized this insurrection.
+
+One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other
+defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these
+two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath the
+brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.
+
+The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,
+and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the faubourg,
+that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined, jagged,
+cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed with piles
+that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and there,
+powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the
+faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the
+formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades
+were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets
+behind this principal barricade. At the very sight of it, one felt the
+agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg, which had reached that
+point of extremity when a distress may become a catastrophe. Of what was
+that barricade made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses demolished
+expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others. It wore
+the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred, ruin. It might be
+asked: Who built this? It might also be said: Who destroyed this? It was
+the improvisation of the ebullition. Hold! take this door! this grating!
+this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this broken brazier! this cracked
+pot! Give all! cast away all! Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn,
+ruin everything! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of
+stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane,
+the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the
+malediction. It was grand and it was petty. It was the abyss parodied
+on the public place by hubbub. The mass beside the atom; the strip of
+ruined wall and the broken bowl,--threatening fraternization of
+every sort of rubbish. Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his
+potsherd. Terrible, in short. It was the acropolis of the barefooted.
+Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was
+spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a
+scar on that tumultuous facade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force,
+to the very summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of
+savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their
+terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what
+horses of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt,
+figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89,
+the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the
+11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation
+deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very
+spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it
+is thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this
+shapeless mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought one beheld hubbub
+petrified. One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though
+there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress.
+Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo
+seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was
+something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in
+that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the
+rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper,
+window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting
+the cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling
+topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very
+refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and
+nothingness. One would have said that it was the tatters of a people,
+rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint
+Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the
+broom making of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling headsman's
+blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having
+the form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish,
+amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the old
+tortures endured by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine converted
+everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could throw at the
+head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm;
+the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some
+blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the
+casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of
+the brass. This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an
+inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it
+was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming
+heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns, of
+sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag
+flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of
+drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving
+were to be heard there. It was huge and living, and, like the back of an
+electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The
+spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled
+that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange
+majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of
+filth and it was Sinai.
+
+As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the
+revolution--what? The revolution. It--that barricade, chance, hazard,
+disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown--had facing it the
+Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage,
+the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to
+the Marseillaise.
+
+Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.
+
+The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance. The faubourg
+shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the
+faubourg. The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which
+the strategy of the African generals dashed itself. Its caverns, its
+excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and
+grinned beneath the smoke. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the
+bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it;
+what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to
+the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of
+redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its
+enormous size.
+
+A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which
+debouches on the boulevard near the Chateaud'Eau, if one thrust one's
+head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne shop,
+one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which
+mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the rise, a
+strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts, a sort
+of hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as
+though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall in order
+to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of paving-stones. It was
+straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid
+out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case
+of certain Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture.
+The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base. From distance
+to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible
+loopholes which resembled black threads. These loopholes were separated
+from each other by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the
+eye could reach. All windows and doors were closed. In the background
+rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a
+motionless and tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible;
+not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.
+
+The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.
+
+It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.
+
+As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was
+impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before
+this mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated,
+rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal. Science and gloom met there. One
+felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.
+One looked at it and spoke low.
+
+From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the
+people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle
+was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he escaped the
+bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to ensconce itself in some closed
+shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or in the
+plaster of a wall. For the men in the barricade had made themselves two
+small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at
+one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of useless powder.
+Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there, and pools of
+blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came
+in the street. Summer does not abdicate.
+
+In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cocheres were
+encumbered with wounded.
+
+One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one
+understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.
+
+Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms
+at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the attacking
+column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal redoubt, this
+immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. Some crawled flat on
+their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the bridge, taking care
+that their shakos did not project beyond it.
+
+The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a
+shudder.--"How that is built!" he said to a Representative. "Not one
+paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor. It is made of porcelain."--At
+that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.
+
+"The cowards!" people said. "Let them show themselves. Let us see them!
+They dare not! They are hiding!"
+
+The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,
+attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth, they
+did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they came
+over the roofs, the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards
+thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the
+leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak presently.
+
+The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade
+of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts
+was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a
+maw; the other a mask.
+
+Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was composed
+of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first barricade the
+dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.
+
+These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the one,
+Cournet, the other, Barthelemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine
+barricade; Barthelemy the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image of
+the man who had built it.
+
+Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
+a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.
+Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men, the
+most formidable of combatants. War, strife, conflict, were the very air
+he breathed and put him in a good humor. He had been an officer in the
+navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined that he sprang
+from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he carried the
+hurricane on into battle. With the exception of the genius, there was
+in Cournet something of Danton, as, with the exception of the divinity,
+there was in Danton something of Hercules.
+
+Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic street
+urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for
+him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came
+out and made this barricade.
+
+Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all, Barthelemy
+slew Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards, caught in
+the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion
+plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice sees extenuating
+circumstances, and in which English justice sees only death, Barthelemy
+was hanged. The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to
+material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy being
+who possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began
+in France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows.
+Barthelemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE
+
+Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of insurrection, and
+June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it than June, 1832. So the
+barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline, and an embryo
+compared to the two colossal barricades which we have just sketched; but
+it was formidable for that epoch.
+
+The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked
+after anything, had made good use of the night. The barricade had been
+not only repaired, but augmented. They had raised it two feet. Bars
+of iron planted in the pavement resembled lances in rest. All sorts of
+rubbish brought and added from all directions complicated the external
+confusion. The redoubt had been cleverly made over, into a wall on the
+inside and a thicket on the outside.
+
+The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it like the
+wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.
+
+The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered, the
+kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the wounded
+completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables had been
+gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured, lint scraped, the
+fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior of the redoubt cleaned, the
+rubbish swept up, corpses removed.
+
+They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondetour lane, of which they were
+still the masters. The pavement was red for a long time at that spot.
+Among the dead there were four National Guardsmen of the suburbs.
+Enjolras had their uniforms laid aside.
+
+Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep. Advice from Enjolras was a
+command. Still, only three or four took advantage of it.
+
+Feuilly employed these two hours in engraving this inscription on the
+wall which faced the tavern:--
+
+ LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!
+
+These four words, hollowed out in the rough stone with a nail, could be
+still read on the wall in 1848.
+
+The three women had profited by the respite of the night to vanish
+definitely; which allowed the insurgents to breathe more freely.
+
+They had found means of taking refuge in some neighboring house.
+
+The greater part of the wounded were able, and wished, to fight still.
+On a litter of mattresses and trusses of straw in the kitchen, which had
+been converted into an ambulance, there were five men gravely wounded,
+two of whom were municipal guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen were
+attended to first.
+
+In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his black cloth and
+Javert bound to his post.
+
+"This is the hall of the dead," said Enjolras.
+
+In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end, the
+mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of
+vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and Mabeuf lying prone.
+
+The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the fusillade, was
+still sufficiently upright to admit of their fastening the flag to it.
+
+Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of always doing what
+he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden and bloody coat of the
+old man's.
+
+No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty
+men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty provisions of
+the wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had passed there. At a
+given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of la Meduse.
+They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had then reached
+the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June when, in the
+barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the insurgents who demanded
+bread, replied to all combatants crying: "Something to eat!" with: "Why?
+It is three o'clock; at four we shall be dead."
+
+As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink. He
+interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.
+
+They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed.
+Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. Combeferre when he came up again
+said:--"It's the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as
+a grocer."--"It must be real wine," observed Bossuet. "It's lucky that
+Grantaire is asleep. If he were on foot, there would be a good deal of
+difficulty in saving those bottles."--Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs,
+placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might
+touch them, he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf
+was lying.
+
+About two o'clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength. There
+were still thirty-seven of them.
+
+The day began to dawn. The torch, which had been replaced in its
+cavity in the pavement, had just been extinguished. The interior of the
+barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from the street,
+was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight
+horror, the deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, as they went
+and came, moved about there like black forms. Above that terrible
+nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute houses were lividly
+outlined; at the very top, the chimneys stood palely out. The sky was of
+that charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue. Birds
+flew about in it with cries of joy. The lofty house which formed the
+back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof a
+rosy reflection. The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head of
+the dead man at the third-story window.
+
+"I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished," said Courfeyrac
+to Feuilly. "That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the
+appearance of being afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom of
+cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles."
+
+Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.
+
+Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from
+it.
+
+"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God,
+having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And
+so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus
+the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected."
+
+Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking of the
+dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and
+of Enjolras' sad severity. He said:--
+
+"Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,
+Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was
+too late. Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a mystery that,
+even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if
+there be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses the
+joy of having served the human race."
+
+And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment
+later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire's verses,
+Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with
+Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages translated
+by Malfilatre, particularly the prodigies of Caesar's death; and at that
+word, Caesar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.
+
+"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly. Cicero was severe towards
+Caesar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoilus
+insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere,
+when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an
+old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts
+insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoilus and
+Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just
+as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword. For my own part, I blame that last
+justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. Caesar, the violator
+of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the dignities
+which emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of the
+senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac
+pene tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the
+better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His twenty-three wounds
+touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. Caesar is
+stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God
+through the greater outrage."
+
+Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit of a heap
+of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:--
+
+"Oh Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the
+AEantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a
+Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--LIGHT AND SHADOW
+
+Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out
+through Mondetour lane, gliding along close to the houses.
+
+The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope. The manner in which
+they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to
+almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn. They waited for it with
+a smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their
+cause. Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. They
+reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one
+of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the
+day which was at hand into three distinct phases. At six o'clock in the
+morning a regiment "which had been labored with," would turn; at noon,
+the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.
+
+They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent for
+an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade, the
+great one, Jeanne's, still held out.
+
+All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort of
+gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of
+bees.
+
+Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his sombre eagle flight into outer
+darkness. He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded arms, and
+one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of
+the dawn, he said:
+
+"The whole army of Paris is to strike. A third of the army is bearing
+down upon the barricades in which you now are. There is the National
+Guard in addition. I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the
+line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one hour you will
+be attacked. As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day
+it is not stirring. There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for.
+Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment. You are abandoned."
+
+These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them
+the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. A
+moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have been
+heard flitting by.
+
+This moment was brief.
+
+A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:
+
+"So be it. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and
+let us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses.
+Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans
+do not abandon the people."
+
+These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of
+individual anxieties. It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.
+
+No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some
+unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero, that
+great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social geneses
+who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the decisive word,
+and who vanishes into the shadows after having represented for a minute,
+in a lightning flash, the people and God.
+
+This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air of the
+6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour, on the barricade
+Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become a
+matter of history and which has been consigned to the documents in the
+case:--"What matters it whether they come to our assistance or not? Let
+us get ourselves killed here, to the very last man."
+
+As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated, were
+in communication with each other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE
+
+After the man who decreed the "protest of corpses" had spoken, and had
+given this formula of their common soul, there issued from all mouths a
+strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in sense and triumphant
+in tone:
+
+"Long live death! Let us all remain here!"
+
+"Why all?" said Enjolras.
+
+"All! All!"
+
+Enjolras resumed:
+
+"The position is good; the barricade is fine. Thirty men are enough. Why
+sacrifice forty?"
+
+They replied:
+
+"Because not one will go away."
+
+"Citizens," cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated vibration
+in his voice, "this republic is not rich enough in men to indulge in
+useless expenditure of them. Vain-glory is waste. If the duty of some is
+to depart, that duty should be fulfilled like any other."
+
+Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that sort of
+omnipotent power which emanates from the absolute. Still, great as was
+this omnipotence, a murmur arose. A leader to the very finger-tips,
+Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted. He resumed haughtily:
+
+"Let those who are afraid of not numbering more than thirty say so."
+
+The murmurs redoubled.
+
+"Besides," observed a voice in one group, "it is easy enough to talk
+about leaving. The barricade is hemmed in."
+
+"Not on the side of the Halles," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondetour is
+free, and through the Rue des Precheurs one can reach the Marche des
+Innocents."
+
+"And there," went on another voice, "you would be captured. You would
+fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs; they will spy
+a man passing in blouse and cap. 'Whence come you?' 'Don't you belong to
+the barricade?' And they will look at your hands. You smell of powder.
+Shot."
+
+Enjolras, without making any reply, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and
+the two entered the tap-room.
+
+They emerged thence a moment later. Enjolras held in his outstretched
+hands the four uniforms which he had laid aside. Combeferre followed,
+carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.
+
+"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks and
+escape; here is enough for four." And he flung on the ground, deprived
+of its pavement, the four uniforms.
+
+No wavering took place in his stoical audience. Combeferre took the
+word.
+
+"Come," said he, "you must have a little pity. Do you know what the
+question is here? It is a question of women. See here. Are there
+women or are there not? Are there children or are there not? Are there
+mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot and who have a lot
+of little ones around them? Let that man of you who has never beheld a
+nurse's breast raise his hand. Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so
+do I--I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms
+of women wreathing their arms around me. Die, if you will, but
+don't make others die. Suicides like that which is on the brink of
+accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not
+admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide
+is murder. Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks.
+Listen, Enjolras has just told me that he saw at the corner of the Rue
+du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window, on the fifth
+floor, and on the pane the quivering shadow of the head of an old woman,
+who had the air of having spent the night in watching. Perhaps she is
+the mother of some one of you. Well, let that man go, and make haste, to
+say to his mother: 'Here I am, mother!' Let him feel at ease, the task
+here will be performed all the same. When one supports one's relatives
+by one's toil, one has not the right to sacrifice one's self. That
+is deserting one's family. And those who have daughters! what are you
+thinking of? You get yourselves killed, you are dead, that is well. And
+tomorrow? Young girls without bread--that is a terrible thing. Man begs,
+woman sells. Ah! those charming and gracious beings, so gracious and so
+sweet, who have bonnets of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who
+sing and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence
+of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, that Jeanne,
+that Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures who are your
+blessings and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger! What do
+you want me to say to you? There is a market for human flesh; and it
+is not with your shadowy hands, shuddering around them, that you
+will prevent them from entering it! Think of the street, think of the
+pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past which women
+go and come with necks all bare, and through the mire. These women,
+too, were pure once. Think of your sisters, those of you who have them.
+Misery, prostitution, the police, Saint-Lazare--that is what those
+beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels of modesty, gentleness
+and loveliness, fresher than lilacs in the month of May, will come to.
+Ah! you have got yourselves killed! You are no longer on hand! That
+is well; you have wished to release the people from Royalty, and you
+deliver over your daughters to the police. Friends, have a care, have
+mercy. Women, unhappy women, we are not in the habit of bestowing much
+thought on them. We trust to the women not having received a man's
+education, we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we
+prevent their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them
+from going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies?
+Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands
+with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend to
+this affair. I know well that courage is required to leave, that it is
+hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. You say: 'I have a
+gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse, I shall remain there.' So
+much the worse is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow; you will
+not be here to-morrow, but your families will; and what sufferings! See,
+here is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple, who babbles,
+prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and
+do you know what becomes of him when he is abandoned? I have seen one,
+a very small creature, no taller than that. His father was dead. Poor
+people had taken him in out of charity, but they had bread only for
+themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He did not cry.
+You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire,
+and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. His breathing
+was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent. He
+said nothing. If you spoke to him, he did not answer. He is dead. He was
+taken to the Necker Hospital, where I saw him. I was house-surgeon in
+that hospital. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose
+happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in
+their robust hand, let each one of those fathers imagine that this child
+is his own. That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when
+he lay nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin
+like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery. A sort of mud was found
+in his stomach. There were ashes in his teeth. Come, let us examine
+ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. Statistics
+show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent.
+I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns
+young girls, it concerns little children. Who is talking to you of
+yourselves? We know well what you are; we know well that you are all
+brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your souls the joy and
+the glory of giving your life for the great cause; we know well that you
+feel yourselves elected to die usefully and magnificently, and that each
+one of you clings to his share in the triumph. Very well. But you are
+not alone in this world. There are other beings of whom you must think.
+You must not be egoists."
+
+All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.
+
+Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments.
+Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He recalled the mothers
+of other men, and forgot his own. He was about to get himself killed. He
+was "an egoist."
+
+Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged in succession from all hope,
+and having been stranded in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks, and
+saturated with violent emotions and conscious that the end was near,
+had plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor which always
+precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted.
+
+A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that
+febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science, and which is
+to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. Despair, also, has its
+ecstasy. Marius had reached this point. He looked on at everything as
+from without; as we have said, things which passed before him seemed far
+away; he made out the whole, but did not perceive the details. He beheld
+men going and coming as through a flame. He heard voices speaking as at
+the bottom of an abyss.
+
+But this moved him. There was in this scene a point which pierced and
+roused even him. He had but one idea now, to die; and he did not wish to
+be turned aside from it, but he reflected, in his gloomy somnambulism,
+that while destroying himself, he was not prohibited from saving some
+one else.
+
+He raised his voice.
+
+"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no unnecessary sacrifice.
+I join them, and you must make haste. Combeferre has said convincing
+things to you. There are some among you who have families, mothers,
+sisters, wives, children. Let such leave the ranks."
+
+No one stirred.
+
+"Married men and the supporters of families, step out of the ranks!"
+repeated Marius.
+
+His authority was great. Enjolras was certainly the head of the
+barricade, but Marius was its savior.
+
+"I order it," cried Enjolras.
+
+"I entreat you," said Marius.
+
+Then, touched by Combeferre's words, shaken by Enjolras' order, touched
+by Marius' entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce each other.--"It
+is true," said one young man to a full grown man, "you are the father
+of a family. Go."--"It is your duty rather," retorted the man, "you have
+two sisters whom you maintain."--And an unprecedented controversy broke
+forth. Each struggled to determine which should not allow himself to be
+placed at the door of the tomb.
+
+"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it will be
+too late."
+
+"Citizens," pursued Enjolras, "this is the Republic, and universal
+suffrage reigns. Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."
+
+They obeyed. After the expiration of a few minutes, five were
+unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.
+
+"There are five of them!" exclaimed Marius.
+
+There were only four uniforms.
+
+"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."
+
+And then a struggle arose as to who should remain, and who should find
+reasons for the others not remaining. The generous quarrel began afresh.
+
+"You have a wife who loves you."--"You have your aged mother."--" You
+have neither father nor mother, and what is to become of your three
+little brothers?"--"You are the father of five children."--"You have a
+right to live, you are only seventeen, it is too early for you to die."
+
+These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism.
+The improbable was simple there. These men did not astonish each other.
+
+"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.
+
+Men shouted to Marius from the groups:
+
+"Do you designate who is to remain."
+
+"Yes," said the five, "choose. We will obey you."
+
+Marius did not believe that he was capable of another emotion. Still,
+at this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood rushed back
+to his heart. He would have turned pale, had it been possible for him to
+become any paler.
+
+He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his
+eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the depths of history
+hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:
+
+"Me! me! me!"
+
+And Marius stupidly counted them; there were still five of them! Then
+his glance dropped to the four uniforms.
+
+At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the other
+four.
+
+The fifth man was saved.
+
+Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.
+
+Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.
+
+He had arrived by way of Mondetour lane, whither by dint of inquiries
+made, or by instinct, or chance. Thanks to his dress of a National
+Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.
+
+The sentinel stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondetour had no
+occasion to give the alarm for a single National Guardsman, and he had
+allowed the latter to entangle himself in the street, saying to himself:
+"Probably it is a reinforcement, in any case it is a prisoner." The
+moment was too grave to admit of the sentinel abandoning his duty and
+his post of observation.
+
+At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed
+him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms.
+Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he had silently removed his
+coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.
+
+The emotion aroused was indescribable.
+
+"Who is this man?" demanded Bossuet.
+
+"He is a man who saves others," replied Combeferre.
+
+Marius added in a grave voice:
+
+"I know him."
+
+This guarantee satisfied every one.
+
+Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.
+
+"Welcome, citizen."
+
+And he added:
+
+"You know that we are about to die."
+
+Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent whom he was saving
+to don his uniform.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE
+
+The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place, had as
+result and culminating point Enjolras' supreme melancholy.
+
+Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution; he was
+incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so; he had too much
+of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots; still,
+his mind, in the society of the Friends of the A B C, had ended by
+undergoing a certain polarization from Combeferre's ideas; for some time
+past, he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and
+had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress,
+and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution,
+the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense
+human republic. As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent
+situation being given, he wished to be violent; on that point, he never
+varied; and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is
+summed up in the words: "Eighty-three." Enjolras was standing erect on
+the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of
+his gun. He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of
+prophetic breaths; places where death is have these effects of tripods.
+A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an
+inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell
+back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they
+were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo, and
+Enjolras cried:
+
+"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of
+cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations
+sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the
+present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full
+equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience
+become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the
+school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for
+all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers! To
+conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second.
+Reflect on what progress has already accomplished. Formerly, the
+first human races beheld with terror the hydra pass before their eyes,
+breathing on the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who
+was the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle
+and the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man. Man,
+nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence, and
+finally conquered these monsters. We have vanquished the hydra, and
+it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing the
+griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon. On the day
+when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have
+definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity, the
+hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire,
+and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which
+the ancient gods formerly were to him. Courage, and onward! Citizens,
+whither are we going? To science made government, to the force of things
+become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself its
+sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawn
+of truth corresponding to a dawn of day. We are advancing to the union
+of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. No more fictions;
+no more parasites. The real governed by the true, that is the goal.
+Civilization will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and,
+later on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament of the
+intelligence. Something similar has already been seen. The amphictyons
+had two sittings a year, one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other
+at Thermopylae, the place of heroes. Europe will have her amphictyons;
+the globe will have its amphictyons. France bears this sublime future in
+her breast. This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. That which
+Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. Listen to me,
+you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I revere you. Yes, you
+clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. You had neither father
+nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother and right
+for your father. You are about to die, that is to say to triumph, here.
+Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as
+through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create.
+As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the
+whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have
+just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of
+view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over
+himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where
+two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But
+in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a
+certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right.
+This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession
+which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing
+else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This
+protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of
+intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society.
+This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence what
+is called the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same
+thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a
+bond. Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty
+is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not wholly a
+surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a
+proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally
+speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity;
+politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously,
+it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an
+organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet,
+that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed
+on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an
+identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction!
+light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.
+Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century
+will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old,
+we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion,
+a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of
+civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary
+tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because
+of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face
+to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we
+shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising
+from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the
+sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events.
+One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy.
+The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe
+accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul
+and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet
+around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing
+you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future.
+A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up,
+consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry
+of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is
+the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this
+barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of
+iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here
+misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: 'I
+am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.' From the embrace
+of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their
+agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are
+about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies
+in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded
+with the dawn."
+
+Enjolras paused rather than became silent; his lips continued to move
+silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused them all
+to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. There was no
+applause; but they whispered together for a long time. Speech being a
+breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling of leaves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC
+
+Let us narrate what was passing in Marius' thoughts.
+
+Let the reader recall the state of his soul. We have just recalled it,
+everything was a vision to him now. His judgment was disturbed. Marius,
+let us insist on this point, was under the shadow of the great, dark
+wings which are spread over those in the death agony. He felt that he
+had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he was already on the other
+side of the wall, and he no longer beheld the faces of the living except
+with the eyes of one dead.
+
+How did M. Fauchelevent come there? Why was he there? What had he come
+there to do? Marius did not address all these questions to himself.
+Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity, that it envelops others
+as well as ourselves, it seemed logical to him that all the world should
+come thither to die.
+
+Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.
+
+However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him, and
+had not even the air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice to
+say: "I know him."
+
+As far as Marius was concerned, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent was
+comforting, and, if such a word can be used for such impressions,
+we should say that it pleased him. He had always felt the absolute
+impossibility of addressing that enigmatical man, who was, in his eyes,
+both equivocal and imposing. Moreover, it had been a long time since
+he had seen him; and this still further augmented the impossibility for
+Marius' timid and reserved nature.
+
+The five chosen men left the barricade by way of Mondetour lane; they
+bore a perfect resemblance to members of the National Guard. One of them
+wept as he took his leave. Before setting out, they embraced those who
+remained.
+
+When the five men sent back to life had taken their departure, Enjolras
+thought of the man who had been condemned to death.
+
+He entered the tap-room. Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged in
+meditation.
+
+"Do you want anything?" Enjolras asked him.
+
+Javert replied: "When are you going to kill me?"
+
+"Wait. We need all our cartridges just at present."
+
+"Then give me a drink," said Javert.
+
+Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert was
+pinioned, he helped him to drink.
+
+"Is that all?" inquired Enjolras.
+
+"I am uncomfortable against this post," replied Javert. "You are not
+tender to have left me to pass the night here. Bind me as you please,
+but you surely might lay me out on a table like that other man."
+
+And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body of M. Mabeuf.
+
+There was, as the reader will remember, a long, broad table at the
+end of the room, on which they had been running bullets and making
+cartridges. All the cartridges having been made, and all the powder
+used, this table was free.
+
+At Enjolras' command, four insurgents unbound Javert from the post.
+While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet against his breast.
+
+Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a
+slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting
+the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches in
+length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room, where
+they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.
+
+By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck,
+they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt
+at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons a
+martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach, and meets
+the hands, after passing between the legs.
+
+While they were binding Javert, a man standing on the threshold was
+surveying him with singular attention. The shadow cast by this man made
+Javert turn his head. He raised his eyes, and recognized Jean Valjean.
+He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly and confined himself
+to the remark: "It is perfectly simple."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED
+
+The daylight was increasing rapidly. Not a window was opened, not a door
+stood ajar; it was the dawn but not the awaking. The end of the Rue de
+la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had been evacuated by the
+troops, as we have stated it seemed to be free, and presented itself to
+passers-by with a sinister tranquillity. The Rue Saint-Denis was as
+dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. Not a living being in the
+cross-roads, which gleamed white in the light of the sun. Nothing is so
+mournful as this light in deserted streets. Nothing was to be seen, but
+there was something to be heard. A mysterious movement was going on at
+a certain distance. It was evident that the critical moment was
+approaching. As on the previous evening, the sentinels had come in; but
+this time all had come.
+
+The barricade was stronger than on the occasion of the first attack.
+Since the departure of the five, they had increased its height still
+further.
+
+On the advice of the sentinel who had examined the region of the
+Halles, Enjolras, for fear of a surprise in the rear, came to a serious
+decision. He had the small gut of the Mondetour lane, which had been
+left open up to that time, barricaded. For this purpose, they tore up
+the pavement for the length of several houses more. In this manner,
+the barricade, walled on three streets, in front on the Rue de
+la Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues du Cygne and de la Petite
+Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondetour, was really almost
+impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. It
+had three fronts, but no exit.--"A fortress but a rat hole too," said
+Courfeyrac with a laugh.
+
+Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones "torn up in excess," said
+Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.
+
+The silence was now so profound in the quarter whence the attack must
+needs come, that Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.
+
+An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.
+
+Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. Each
+man selects his place as though at the theatre. They jostle, and elbow
+and crowd each other. There are some who make stalls of paving-stones.
+Here is a corner of the wall which is in the way, it is removed; here
+is a redan which may afford protection, they take shelter behind it.
+Left-handed men are precious; they take the places that are inconvenient
+to the rest. Many arrange to fight in a sitting posture. They wish to be
+at ease to kill, and to die comfortably. In the sad war of June, 1848,
+an insurgent who was a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the
+top of a terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair brought there for
+his use; a charge of grape-shot found him out there.
+
+As soon as the leader has given the order to clear the decks for action,
+all disorderly movements cease; there is no more pulling from one
+another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is no more
+holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in, and changes
+into, a waiting for the assailants. A barricade before the arrival of
+danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself. Peril produces
+order.
+
+As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle, and had
+placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved for himself,
+all the rest held their peace. A series of faint, sharp noises resounded
+confusedly along the wall of paving-stones. It was the men cocking their
+guns.
+
+Moreover, their attitudes were prouder, more confident than ever; the
+excess of sacrifice strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope,
+but they had despair, despair,--the last weapon, which sometimes gives
+victory; Virgil has said so. Supreme resources spring from extreme
+resolutions. To embark in death is sometimes the means of escaping a
+shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank of safety.
+
+As on the preceding evening, the attention of all was directed, we
+might almost say leaned upon, the end of the street, now lighted up and
+visible.
+
+They had not long to wait. A stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu
+quarter, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. A
+clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass, the click of brass
+skipping along the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar, announced that
+some sinister construction of iron was approaching. There arose a tremor
+in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets, pierced and built for the
+fertile circulation of interests and ideas, and which are not made for
+the horrible rumble of the wheels of war.
+
+The fixity of eye in all the combatants upon the extremity of the street
+became ferocious.
+
+A cannon made its appearance.
+
+Artillery-men were pushing the piece; it was in firing trim; the
+fore-carriage had been detached; two upheld the gun-carriage, four were
+at the wheels; others followed with the caisson. They could see the
+smoke of the burning lint-stock.
+
+"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.
+
+The whole barricade fired, the report was terrible; an avalanche of
+smoke covered and effaced both cannon and men; after a few seconds, the
+cloud dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the gun-crew had
+just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste, into position
+facing the barricade. Not one of them had been struck. Then the captain
+of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order to raise the muzzle,
+began to point the cannon with the gravity of an astronomer levelling a
+telescope.
+
+"Bravo for the cannoneers!" cried Bossuet.
+
+And the whole barricade clapped their hands.
+
+A moment later, squarely planted in the very middle of the street,
+astride of the gutter, the piece was ready for action. A formidable pair
+of jaws yawned on the barricade.
+
+"Come, merrily now!" ejaculated Courfeyrac. "That's the brutal part of
+it. After the fillip on the nose, the blow from the fist. The army is
+reaching out its big paw to us. The barricade is going to be severely
+shaken up. The fusillade tries, the cannon takes."
+
+"It is a piece of eight, new model, brass," added Combeferre. "Those
+pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of ten parts of tin
+to one hundred of brass is exceeded. The excess of tin renders them too
+tender. Then it comes to pass that they have caves and chambers when
+looked at from the vent hole. In order to obviate this danger, and
+to render it possible to force the charge, it may become necessary
+to return to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping, and to
+encircle the piece on the outside with a series of unwelded steel bands,
+from the breech to the trunnions. In the meantime, they remedy this
+defect as best they may; they manage to discover where the holes are
+located in the vent of a cannon, by means of a searcher. But there is a
+better method, with Gribeauval's movable star."
+
+"In the sixteenth century," remarked Bossuet, "they used to rifle
+cannon."
+
+"Yes," replied Combeferre, "that augments the projectile force, but
+diminishes the accuracy of the firing. In firing at short range,
+the trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired, the parabola is
+exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no longer sufficiently
+rectilinear to allow of its striking intervening objects, which is,
+nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance of which increases
+with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation of the discharge.
+This defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile in the rifled
+cannon of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness of the charge;
+small charges for that sort of engine are imposed by the ballistic
+necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation of the
+gun-carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do all that
+it desires; force is a great weakness. A cannon-ball only travels
+six hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand leagues a
+second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."
+
+"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.
+
+How was the casing of the barricade going to behave under the
+cannon-balls? Would they effect a breach? That was the question. While
+the insurgents were reloading their guns, the artillery-men were loading
+the cannon.
+
+The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.
+
+The shot sped the report burst forth.
+
+"Present!" shouted a joyous voice.
+
+And Gavroche flung himself into the barricade just as the ball dashed
+against it.
+
+He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly
+climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth of
+the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.
+
+Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than the
+cannon-ball.
+
+The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish. At the most there was an
+omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. On seeing
+this, the barricade burst into a laugh.
+
+"Go on!" shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY
+
+They flocked round Gavroche. But he had no time to tell anything. Marius
+drew him aside with a shudder.
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"Hullo!" said the child, "what are you doing here yourself?"
+
+And he stared at Marius intently with his epic effrontery. His eyes grew
+larger with the proud light within them.
+
+It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:
+
+"Who told you to come back? Did you deliver my letter at the address?"
+
+Gavroche was not without some compunctions in the matter of that letter.
+In his haste to return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather
+than delivered it. He was forced to acknowledge to himself that he had
+confided it rather lightly to that stranger whose face he had not been
+able to make out. It is true that the man was bareheaded, but that was
+not sufficient. In short, he had been administering to himself little
+inward remonstrances and he feared Marius' reproaches. In order to
+extricate himself from the predicament, he took the simplest course; he
+lied abominably.
+
+"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter. The lady was asleep. She
+will have the letter when she wakes up."
+
+Marius had had two objects in sending that letter: to bid farewell to
+Cosette and to save Gavroche. He was obliged to content himself with the
+half of his desire.
+
+The despatch of his letter and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the
+barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. He pointed out M.
+Fauchelevent to Gavroche.
+
+"Do you know that man?"
+
+"No," said Gavroche.
+
+Gavroche had, in fact, as we have just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean only
+at night.
+
+The troubled and unhealthy conjectures which had outlined themselves in
+Marius' mind were dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions?
+Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican. Hence his very natural
+presence in this combat.
+
+In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting, at the other end of the
+barricade: "My gun!"
+
+Courfeyrac had it returned to him.
+
+Gavroche warned "his comrades" as he called them, that the barricade was
+blocked. He had had great difficulty in reaching it. A battalion of the
+line whose arms were piled in the Rue de la Petite Truanderie was on
+the watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the opposite side, the
+municipal guard occupied the Rue des Precheurs. The bulk of the army was
+facing them in front.
+
+This information given, Gavroche added:
+
+"I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack."
+
+Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his
+embrasure.
+
+The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt, with their shot, had not
+repeated it.
+
+A company of infantry of the line had come up and occupied the end of
+the street behind the piece of ordnance. The soldiers were tearing up
+the pavement and constructing with the stones a small, low wall, a
+sort of side-work not more than eighteen inches high, and facing the
+barricade. In the angle at the left of this epaulement, there was
+visible the head of the column of a battalion from the suburbs massed in
+the Rue Saint-Denis.
+
+Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar sound
+which is produced when the shells of grape-shot are drawn from the
+caissons, and he saw the commander of the piece change the elevation
+and incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. Then the
+cannoneers began to load the piece. The chief seized the lint-stock
+himself and lowered it to the vent.
+
+"Down with your heads, hug the wall!" shouted Enjolras, "and all on your
+knees along the barricade!"
+
+The insurgents who were straggling in front of the wine-shop, and
+who had quitted their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival, rushed
+pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras' order could be
+executed, the discharge took place with the terrifying rattle of a round
+of grape-shot. This is what it was, in fact.
+
+The charge had been aimed at the cut in the redoubt, and had there
+rebounded from the wall; and this terrible rebound had produced two dead
+and three wounded.
+
+If this were continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. The
+grape-shot made its way in.
+
+A murmur of consternation arose.
+
+"Let us prevent the second discharge," said Enjolras.
+
+And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun, who, at
+that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun and rectifying
+and definitely fixing its pointing.
+
+The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery, very
+young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent air peculiar
+to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which, by dint of perfecting
+itself in horror, must end in killing war.
+
+Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this young
+man.
+
+"What a pity!" said Combeferre. "What hideous things these butcheries
+are! Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war.
+Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant, you are not looking at
+him. Fancy, he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; it is evident
+that he is thoughtful; those young artillery-men are very well educated;
+he has a father, a mother, a family; he is probably in love; he is not
+more than five and twenty at the most; he might be your brother."
+
+"He is," said Enjolras.
+
+"Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too. Well, let us not kill him."
+
+"Let me alone. It must be done."
+
+And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.
+
+At the same moment, he pressed the trigger of his rifle. The flame
+leaped forth. The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms extended in
+front of him, his head uplifted, as though for breath, then he fell with
+his side on the gun, and lay there motionless. They could see his back,
+from the centre of which there flowed directly a stream of blood. The
+ball had traversed his breast from side to side. He was dead.
+
+He had to be carried away and replaced by another. Several minutes were
+thus gained, in fact.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT
+INFALLIBLE MARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796
+
+Opinions were exchanged in the barricade. The firing from the gun was
+about to begin again. Against that grape-shot, they could not hold out
+a quarter of an hour longer. It was absolutely necessary to deaden the
+blows.
+
+Enjolras issued this command:
+
+"We must place a mattress there."
+
+"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are lying on them."
+
+Jean Valjean, who was seated apart on a stone post, at the corner of the
+tavern, with his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment, taken
+no part in anything that was going on. He did not appear to hear the
+combatants saying around him: "Here is a gun that is doing nothing."
+
+At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.
+
+It will be remembered that, on the arrival of the rabble in the Rue
+de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placed her
+mattress in front of her window. This window, an attic window, was on
+the roof of a six-story house situated a little beyond the barricade.
+The mattress, placed cross-wise, supported at the bottom on two poles
+for drying linen, was upheld at the top by two ropes, which, at that
+distance, looked like two threads, and which were attached to two nails
+planted in the window frames. These ropes were distinctly visible, like
+hairs, against the sky.
+
+"Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?" said Jean Valjean.
+
+Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to him.
+
+Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.
+
+One of the mattress ropes was cut.
+
+The mattress now hung by one thread only.
+
+Jean Valjean fired the second charge. The second rope lashed the panes
+of the attic window. The mattress slipped between the two poles and fell
+into the street.
+
+The barricade applauded.
+
+All voices cried:
+
+"Here is a mattress!"
+
+"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"
+
+The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside the barricade, between
+besiegers and besieged. Now, the death of the sergeant of artillery
+having exasperated the troop, the soldiers had, for several minutes,
+been lying flat on their stomachs behind the line of paving-stones which
+they had erected, and, in order to supply the forced silence of
+the piece, which was quiet while its service was in course of
+reorganization, they had opened fire on the barricade. The insurgents
+did not reply to this musketry, in order to spare their ammunition The
+fusillade broke against the barricade; but the street, which it filled,
+was terrible.
+
+Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut, entered the street, traversed the
+storm of bullets, walked up to the mattress, hoisted it upon his back,
+and returned to the barricade.
+
+He placed the mattress in the cut with his own hands. He fixed it there
+against the wall in such a manner that the artillery-men should not see
+it.
+
+That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.
+
+It was not long in coming.
+
+The cannon vomited forth its package of buck-shot with a roar. But there
+was no rebound. The effect which they had foreseen had been attained.
+The barricade was saved.
+
+"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the Republic thanks you."
+
+Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed:
+
+"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of
+that which yields over that which strikes with lightning. But never
+mind, glory to the mattress which annuls a cannon!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--DAWN
+
+At that moment, Cosette awoke.
+
+Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window,
+facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.
+
+Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris. She had not been
+there on the preceding evening, and she had already retired to her
+chamber when Toussaint had said:
+
+"It appears that there is a row."
+
+Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly. She had had sweet
+dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very
+white. Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to her in the light. She
+awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first, produced on her the
+effect of being a continuation of her dream. Her first thought on
+emerging from this dream was a smiling one. Cosette felt herself
+thoroughly reassured. Like Jean Valjean, she had, a few hours
+previously, passed through that reaction of the soul which absolutely
+will not hear of unhappiness. She began to cherish hope, with all her
+might, without knowing why. Then she felt a pang at her heart. It was
+three days since she had seen Marius. But she said to herself that he
+must have received her letter, that he knew where she was, and that
+he was so clever that he would find means of reaching her.--And that
+certainly to-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight,
+but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that it was very
+early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to receive Marius.
+
+She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that, consequently,
+that was sufficient and that Marius would come. No objection was valid.
+All this was certain. It was monstrous enough already to have suffered
+for three days. Marius absent three days, this was horrible on the part
+of the good God. Now, this cruel teasing from on high had been gone
+through with. Marius was about to arrive, and he would bring good news.
+Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless
+and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future in the presence
+of an unknown quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it to be
+happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.
+
+Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her on
+the subject of this absence which was to last only one day, and what
+explanation of it he had given her. Every one has noticed with what
+nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and
+hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are
+thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of
+our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to
+lay the memory on them. Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless little
+effort made by her memory. She told herself, that it was very naughty
+and very wicked of her, to have forgotten the words uttered by Marius.
+
+She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul and
+body, her prayers and her toilet.
+
+One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into a nuptial
+chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it,
+prose must not.
+
+It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness
+in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be
+gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the
+bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity
+which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a
+slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though
+a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and
+conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing
+vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn,
+those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite
+affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there
+is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as
+the clouds of dawn,--it is not fitting that all this should be narrated,
+and it is too much to have even called attention to it.
+
+The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising of a
+young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility
+of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. The down on the
+peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal of the snow, the wing
+of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarse compared to that
+chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. The young girl is
+only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. Her bed-chamber is
+hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a glance
+brutalizes this vague penumbra. Here, contemplation is profanation.
+
+We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter of
+Cosette's rising.
+
+An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God, but that
+Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and she was ashamed and
+turned crimson. We are of the number who fall speechless in the presence
+of young girls and flowers, since we think them worthy of veneration.
+
+Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair, which
+was a very simple matter in those days, when women did not swell out
+their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and did not put crinoline
+in their locks. Then she opened the window and cast her eyes around her
+in every direction, hoping to descry some bit of the street, an angle of
+the house, an edge of pavement, so that she might be able to watch for
+Marius there. But no view of the outside was to be had. The back court
+was surrounded by tolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on
+several gardens. Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous: for the first
+time in her life, she found flowers ugly. The smallest scrap of the
+gutter of the street would have met her wishes better. She decided to
+gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might come from that
+quarter.
+
+All at once, she burst into tears. Not that this was fickleness of
+soul; but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. She had a
+confused consciousness of something horrible. Thoughts were rife in the
+air, in fact. She told herself that she was not sure of anything, that
+to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost; and the idea that Marius
+could return to her from heaven appeared to her no longer charming but
+mournful.
+
+Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her, and hope
+and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trust in God.
+
+Every one in the house was still asleep. A country-like silence reigned.
+Not a shutter had been opened. The porter's lodge was closed. Toussaint
+had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that her father was
+asleep. She must have suffered much, and she must have still been
+suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that her father had been
+unkind; but she counted on Marius. The eclipse of such a light was
+decidedly impossible. Now and then, she heard sharp shocks in the
+distance, and she said: "It is odd that people should be opening and
+shutting their carriage gates so early." They were the reports of the
+cannon battering the barricade.
+
+A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectly black
+cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curve of this nest
+formed a little projection beyond the cornice, so that from above it
+was possible to look into this little paradise. The mother was there,
+spreading her wings like a fan over her brood; the father fluttered
+about, flew away, then came back, bearing in his beak food and kisses.
+The dawning day gilded this happy thing, the great law, "Multiply," lay
+there smiling and august, and that sweet mystery unfolded in the
+glory of the morning. Cosette, with her hair in the sunlight, her
+soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn
+without, bent over mechanically, and almost without daring to avow to
+herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to gaze
+at these birds, at this family, at that male and female, that mother and
+her little ones, with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a
+virgin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE
+
+The assailants' fire continued. Musketry and grape-shot alternated, but
+without committing great ravages, to tell the truth. The top alone of
+the Corinthe facade suffered; the window on the first floor, and the
+attic window in the roof, riddled with buck-shot and biscaiens, were
+slowly losing their shape. The combatants who had been posted there had
+been obliged to withdraw. However, this is according to the tactics
+of barricades; to fire for a long while, in order to exhaust the
+insurgents' ammunition, if they commit the mistake of replying. When it
+is perceived, from the slackening of their fire, that they have no more
+powder and ball, the assault is made. Enjolras had not fallen into this
+trap; the barricade did not reply.
+
+At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche puffed out his cheek with his
+tongue, a sign of supreme disdain.
+
+"Good for you," said he, "rip up the cloth. We want some lint."
+
+Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to order for the little effect which it
+produced, and said to the cannon:
+
+"You are growing diffuse, my good fellow."
+
+One gets puzzled in battle, as at a ball. It is probable that this
+silence on the part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy,
+and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt the
+necessity of getting a clear view behind that heap of paving-stones, and
+of knowing what was going on behind that impassable wall which received
+blows without retorting. The insurgents suddenly perceived a helmet
+glittering in the sun on a neighboring roof. A fireman had placed his
+back against a tall chimney, and seemed to be acting as sentinel. His
+glance fell directly down into the barricade.
+
+"There's an embarrassing watcher," said Enjolras.
+
+Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras' rifle, but he had his own gun.
+
+Without saying a word, he took aim at the fireman, and, a second later,
+the helmet, smashed by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street. The
+terrified soldier made haste to disappear. A second observer took his
+place. This one was an officer. Jean Valjean, who had re-loaded his
+gun, took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer's casque to join the
+soldier's. The officer did not persist, and retired speedily. This time
+the warning was understood. No one made his appearance thereafter on
+that roof; and the idea of spying on the barricade was abandoned.
+
+"Why did you not kill the man?" Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean made no reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER
+
+Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear:
+
+"He did not answer my question."
+
+"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.
+
+Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch
+know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against
+insurrections. It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of
+June, 1832. A certain good dram-shop keeper of Pantin des Vertus or
+la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been closed by the riots, became
+leonine at the sight of his deserted dance-hall, and got himself killed
+to preserve the order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and
+heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests
+had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing
+from the bravery of the movement. The diminution of a pile of crowns
+made bankers sing the Marseillaise. They shed their blood lyrically for
+the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive
+of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.
+
+At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not
+extremely serious. It was social elements entering into strife, while
+awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.
+
+Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism
+[the barbarous name of the correct party]. People were for order in
+combination with lack of discipline.
+
+The drum suddenly beat capricious calls, at the command of such or
+such a Colonel of the National Guard; such and such a captain went into
+action through inspiration; such and such National Guardsmen fought,
+"for an idea," and on their own account. At critical moments, on "days"
+they took counsel less of their leaders than of their instincts. There
+existed in the army of order, veritable guerilleros, some of the sword,
+like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrede.
+
+Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather by an
+aggregation of interests than by a group of principles, was or thought
+itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm; each, constituting himself
+a centre, defended it, succored it, and protected it with his own head;
+and the first comer took it upon himself to save society.
+
+Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination. A platoon of the National
+Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council of
+war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes. It
+was an improvisation of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. Fierce
+Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach the rest,
+for it has been applied by the Republic in America, as well as by the
+monarchy in Europe. This Lynch law was complicated with mistakes. On one
+day of rioting, a young poet, named Paul Aime Garnier, was pursued
+in the Place Royale, with a bayonet at his loins, and only escaped by
+taking refuge under the porte-cochere of No. 6. They shouted:--"There's
+another of those Saint-Simonians!" and they wanted to kill him. Now, he
+had under his arm a volume of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon.
+A National Guard had read the words Saint-Simon on the book, and had
+shouted: "Death!"
+
+On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of the National Guards from the
+suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned, had itself
+decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice and its own good
+pleasure. This fact, singular though it may seem, was proved at the
+judicial investigation opened in consequence of the insurrection of
+1832. Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a sort of
+condottiere of the order of those whom we have just characterized,
+a fanatical and intractable governmentalist, could not resist the
+temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition of capturing the
+barricade alone and unaided, that is to say, with his company.
+Exasperated by the successive apparition of the red flag and the old
+coat which he took for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and
+chiefs of the corps, who were holding council and did not think that the
+moment for the decisive assault had arrived, and who were allowing "the
+insurrection to fry in its own fat," to use the celebrated expression
+of one of them. For his part, he thought the barricade ripe, and as that
+which is ripe ought to fall, he made the attempt.
+
+He commanded men as resolute as himself, "raging fellows," as a witness
+said. His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet, was
+the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street. At the
+moment when they were least expecting it, the captain launched his men
+against the barricade. This movement, executed with more good will than
+strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear. Before it had traversed two
+thirds of the street it was received by a general discharge from the
+barricade. Four, the most audacious, who were running on in front,
+were mown down point-blank at the very foot of the redoubt, and this
+courageous throng of National Guards, very brave men but lacking in
+military tenacity, were forced to fall back, after some hesitation,
+leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. This momentary hesitation gave
+the insurgents time to re-load their weapons, and a second and very
+destructive discharge struck the company before it could regain the
+corner of the street, its shelter. A moment more, and it was caught
+between two fires, and it received the volley from the battery piece
+which, not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.
+
+The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this
+grape-shot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.
+
+This attack, which was more furious than serious, irritated
+Enjolras.--"The fools!" said he. "They are getting their own men killed
+and they are using up our ammunition for nothing."
+
+Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he
+was. Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons.
+Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number
+of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. An empty
+cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced. As repression has the
+army, it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes, it does not
+count its shots. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has
+men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge-boxes. Thus
+they are struggles of one against a hundred, which always end in
+crushing the barricade; unless the revolution, uprising suddenly,
+flings into the balance its flaming archangel's sword. This does happen
+sometimes. Then everything rises, the pavements begin to seethe, popular
+redoubts abound. Paris quivers supremely, the quid divinum is given
+forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the air, a
+wonderful light appears, the yawning maw of force draws back, and the
+army, that lion, sees before it, erect and tranquil, that prophet,
+France.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--PASSING GLEAMS
+
+In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there
+is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor,
+enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above
+all, intermittences of hope.
+
+One of these intermittences, one of these vague quivers of hope suddenly
+traversed the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie at the moment when
+it was least expected.
+
+"Listen," suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch, "it seems
+to me that Paris is waking up."
+
+It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection
+broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent. The obstinacy
+of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated some fancies. Barricades
+were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the Rue des Gravilliers. In front
+of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a rifle, attacked
+alone a squadron of cavalry. In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he
+placed one knee on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the
+commander of the squadron, and turned away, saying: "There's another who
+will do us no more harm."
+
+He was put to the sword. In the Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the
+National Guard from behind a lowered blind. The slats of the blind could
+be seen to tremble at every shot. A child fourteen years of age
+was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of
+cartridges. Many posts were attacked. At the entrance to the Rue
+Bertin-Poiree, a very lively and utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed
+a regiment of cuirrassiers, at whose head marched Marshal General
+Cavaignac de Barague. In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces
+of pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a
+bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's
+old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at
+Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre
+on our heads."
+
+These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment when
+it was thought that the uprising had been rendered local, this fever
+of wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above those deep
+masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs of Paris,--all
+this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs. They made haste to
+stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.
+
+They delayed the attack on the barricades Maubuee, de la Chanvrerie and
+Saint-Merry until these sparks had been extinguished, in order that they
+might have to deal with the barricades only and be able to finish
+them at one blow. Columns were thrown into the streets where there was
+fermentation, sweeping the large, sounding the small, right and left,
+now slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. The troops broke in
+the doors of houses whence shots had been fired; at the same time,
+manoeuvres by the cavalry dispersed the groups on the boulevards. This
+repression was not effected without some commotion, and without that
+tumultuous uproar peculiar to collisions between the army and the
+people. This was what Enjolras had caught in the intervals of the
+cannonade and the musketry. Moreover, he had seen wounded men passing
+the end of the street in litters, and he said to Courfeyrac:--"Those
+wounded do not come from us."
+
+Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed. In less
+than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was a flash of
+lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents felt that sort of
+leaden cope, which the indifference of the people casts over obstinate
+and deserted men, fall over them once more.
+
+The general movement, which seemed to have assumed a vague outline, had
+miscarried; and the attention of the minister of war and the strategy of
+the generals could now be concentrated on the three or four barricades
+which still remained standing.
+
+The sun was mounting above the horizon.
+
+An insurgent hailed Enjolras.
+
+"We are hungry here. Are we really going to die like this, without
+anything to eat?"
+
+Enjolras, who was still leaning on his elbows at his embrasure, made an
+affirmative sign with his head, but without taking his eyes from the end
+of the street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS
+
+Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued to
+insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles
+which is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible sound he
+assailed it with a burst of irony.
+
+"You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me,
+you are wasting your row. That's not thunder, it's a cough."
+
+And the bystanders laughed.
+
+Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave good humor increased with the peril,
+like Madame Scarron, replaced nourishment with pleasantry, and, as wine
+was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.
+
+"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet. "His impassive temerity astounds
+me. He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps; Enjolras
+complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. The rest of us
+have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy, that is to say, brave.
+When a man is as much in love as a tiger, the least that he can do is to
+fight like a lion. That is one way of taking our revenge for the capers
+that mesdames our grisettes play on us. Roland gets himself killed for
+Angelique; all our heroism comes from our women. A man without a woman
+is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off.
+Well, Enjolras has no woman. He is not in love, and yet he manages to be
+intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice
+and as bold as fire."
+
+Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him,
+that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice: "Patria."
+
+Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:
+
+"News!"
+
+And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:
+
+"My name is Eight-Pounder."
+
+In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene. This was a second
+piece of ordnance.
+
+The artillery-men rapidly performed their manoeuvres in force and placed
+this second piece in line with the first.
+
+This outlined the catastrophe.
+
+A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing
+point-blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and of the
+soldiers from the suburbs sustained the artillery.
+
+Another cannonade was audible at some distance. At the same time that
+the two guns were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue de la
+Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from the Rue Saint-Denis,
+the other from the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling the Saint-Merry
+barricade. The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.
+
+The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.
+
+One of the two pieces which was now battering the barricade on the Rue
+de la Chanvrerie was firing grape-shot, the other balls.
+
+The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high, and the aim
+was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper
+crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down upon the insurgents,
+mingled with bursts of grape-shot.
+
+The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents from
+the summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the
+interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.
+
+The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls,
+and from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns
+could venture into the street without being picked off, perhaps, even,
+without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the redoubt, as on
+the preceding evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise.
+
+"It is absolutely necessary that the inconvenience of those guns
+should be diminished," said Enjolras, and he shouted: "Fire on the
+artillery-men!"
+
+All were ready. The barricade, which had long been silent, poured forth
+a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort of
+rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke, and, at the end
+of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked with flame, two thirds
+of the gunners could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels of the
+cannons. Those who were left standing continued to serve the pieces with
+severe tranquillity, but the fire had slackened.
+
+"Things are going well now," said Bossuet to Enjolras. "Success."
+
+Enjolras shook his head and replied:
+
+"Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not be any
+cartridges left in the barricade."
+
+It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV--GAVROCHE OUTSIDE
+
+Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base of the
+barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.
+
+Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made his
+way out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full
+cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been killed on the
+slope of the redoubt, into his basket.
+
+"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.
+
+Gavroche raised his face:--
+
+"I'm filling my basket, citizen."
+
+"Don't you see the grape-shot?"
+
+Gavroche replied:
+
+"Well, it is raining. What then?"
+
+Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"
+
+"Instanter," said Gavroche.
+
+And with a single bound he plunged into the street.
+
+It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind it a trail
+of bodies. Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the pavement,
+through the whole length of the street. Twenty cartouches for Gavroche
+meant a provision of cartridges for the barricade.
+
+The smoke in the street was like a fog. Whoever has beheld a cloud which
+has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments can
+imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows of
+lofty houses. It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a
+twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants
+could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other,
+short as it was.
+
+This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on by the
+commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade, was useful
+to Gavroche.
+
+Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size,
+he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. He
+rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.
+
+He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket
+in his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to
+another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey opens a
+nut.
+
+They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade, which
+was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.
+
+On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.
+
+"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.
+
+By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the fusillade
+became transparent. So that the sharpshooters of the line ranged on
+the outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the sharpshooters of the
+banlieue massed at the corner of the street suddenly pointed out to each
+other something moving through the smoke.
+
+At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying near
+a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.
+
+"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche. "They are killing my dead men for me."
+
+A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.--A third
+overturned his basket.
+
+Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.
+
+He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind,
+his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who were
+firing, and sang:
+
+ "On est laid a Nanterre, "Men are ugly at Nanterre,
+ C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
+ Et bete a Palaiseau, And dull at Palaiseau,
+ C'est la faute a Rousseau." 'Tis the fault of Rousseau."
+
+
+Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had fallen
+from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards the
+fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There a fourth
+bullet missed him, again. Gavroche sang:
+
+ "Je ne suis pas notaire, "I am not a notary,
+ C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
+ Je suis un petit oiseau, I'm a little bird,
+ C'est la faute a Rousseau." 'Tis the fault of Rousseau."
+
+A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.
+
+ "Joie est mon caractere, "Joy is my character,
+ C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
+ Misere est mon trousseau, Misery is my trousseau,
+ C'est la faute a Rousseau." 'Tis the fault of Rousseau."
+
+
+Thus it went on for some time.
+
+It was a charming and terrible sight. Gavroche, though shot at, was
+teasing the fusillade. He had the air of being greatly diverted. It was
+the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen. To each discharge he retorted
+with a couplet. They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him. The
+National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at him. He
+lay down, sprang to his feet, hid in the corner of a doorway, then made
+a bound, disappeared, re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to
+the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on
+pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his
+basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their
+eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a child, he was not
+a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the
+invulnerable dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after him, he was more
+nimble than they. He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death;
+every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the
+urchin administered to it a fillip.
+
+One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest,
+finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child. Gavroche was seen to
+stagger, then he sank to the earth. The whole barricade gave vent to a
+cry; but there was something of Antaeus in that pygmy; for the gamin
+to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant to touch the earth;
+Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he remained in a sitting
+posture, a long thread of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms
+in the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had come, and began
+to sing:
+
+
+ "Je suis tombe par terre, "I have fallen to the earth,
+ C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
+ Le nez dans le ruisseau, With my nose in the gutter,
+ C'est la faute a . . . " 'Tis the fault of . . . "
+
+
+He did not finish. A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him
+short. This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no
+more. This grand little soul had taken its flight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI--HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER
+
+At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,--for the gaze of
+the drama must be everywhere present,--two children were holding each
+other by the hand. One might have been seven years old, the other five.
+The rain having soaked them, they were walking along the paths on
+the sunny side; the elder was leading the younger; they were pale and
+ragged; they had the air of wild birds. The smaller of them said: "I am
+very hungry."
+
+The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his
+brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.
+
+They were alone in the garden. The garden was deserted, the gates had
+been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. The
+troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the exigencies of
+combat.
+
+How did those children come there? Perhaps they had escaped from some
+guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at
+the Barriere d'Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l'Observatoire, or in the
+neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be read:
+Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum, some mountebank's booth from which
+they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening, escaped the
+eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had
+passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the
+papers? The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free. To be
+astray and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little creatures were,
+in fact, lost.
+
+These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to
+some trouble, as the reader will recollect. Children of the Thenardiers,
+leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves
+fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by
+the wind. Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day, and
+which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been
+converted into rags.
+
+Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as "Abandoned
+children," whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again
+on the pavements of Paris.
+
+It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these
+miserable little creatures being in that garden. If the superintendents
+had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor
+little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect
+that, as children, they have a right to flowers.
+
+These children were there, thanks to the locked gates. They were there
+contrary to the regulations. They had slipped into the garden and there
+they remained. Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight
+is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the
+inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the
+outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not
+seen the two delinquents.
+
+It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But
+in June, showers do not count for much. An hour after a storm, it can
+hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. The earth, in
+summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of
+the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It
+takes everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself
+with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thirsty. A shower
+is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up. In the
+morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered
+over.
+
+Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and
+wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness. The gardens and
+meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become
+perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at
+once. Everything smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently
+intoxicated. The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man
+to have patience.
+
+There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having
+the azure of heaven, say: "It is enough!" dreamers absorbed in the
+wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to good and
+evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful of man, who do not
+understand how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of these,
+and the thirst of those, with the nudity of the poor in winter, with the
+lymphatic curvature of the little spinal column, with the pallet, the
+attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when they
+can dream beneath the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits they, and
+pitilessly satisfied. Strange to say, the infinite suffices them. That
+great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore.
+The finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not
+think about. The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine
+combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided that
+they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Joy never, ecstasy
+forever. Their life lies in surrendering their personality in
+contemplation. The history of humanity is for them only a detailed
+plan. All is not there; the true All remains without; what is the use
+of busying oneself over that detail, man? Man suffers, that is quite
+possible; but look at Aldebaran rising! The mother has no more milk, the
+new-born babe is dying. I know nothing about that, but just look at this
+wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under
+the microscope! Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you
+can! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives with them to such
+a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child. God eclipses
+their souls. This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and
+petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe. La Fontaine perhaps;
+magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who
+do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the
+funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the
+search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor
+the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since
+there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple
+and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are
+determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the songs of
+the birds are exhausted.
+
+These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be
+pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They
+are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being
+at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star
+on his brow.
+
+The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some, a superior
+philosophy. That may be; but in this superiority there is some
+infirmity. One may be immortal and yet limp: witness Vulcan. One may
+be more than man and less than man. There is incomplete immensity in
+nature. Who knows whether the sun is not a blind man?
+
+But then, what? In whom can we trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?
+Who shall dare to say that the sun is false? Thus certain geniuses,
+themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken? That
+which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that which
+sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little, sees badly, sees
+not at all? Is not this a desperate state of things? No. But what is
+there, then, above the sun? The god.
+
+On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o'clock in the morning, the
+Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. The quincunxes and
+flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty into the sunlight. The
+branches, wild with the brilliant glow of midday, seemed endeavoring
+to embrace. In the sycamores there was an uproar of linnets, sparrows
+triumphed, woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees, administering
+little pecks on the bark. The flower-beds accepted the legitimate
+royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is that which
+emanates from whiteness. The peppery odor of the carnations was
+perceptible. The old crows of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall
+trees. The sun gilded, empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips,
+which are nothing but all the varieties of flame made into flowers. All
+around the banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers,
+hummed. All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse,
+by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined to
+profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged in the
+charming threat of flying low. He who was there aspired to happiness;
+life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor, help, assistance,
+paternity, caress, dawn. The thoughts which fell from heaven were as
+sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one kisses it.
+
+The statues under the trees, white and nude, had robes of shadow pierced
+with light; these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight; rays hung
+from them on all sides. Around the great fountain, the earth was already
+dried up to the point of being burnt. There was sufficient breeze to
+raise little insurrections of dust here and there. A few yellow leaves,
+left over from the autumn, chased each other merrily, and seemed to be
+playing tricks on each other.
+
+This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring about it.
+Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious, beneath creation,
+of the enormous size of the source; in all these breaths permeated with
+love, in this interchange of reverberations and reflections, in this
+marvellous expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of liquid
+gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible; and, behind this
+splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that
+millionaire of stars.
+
+Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain,
+there was not a grain of ashes. The clumps of blossoms had just been
+bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish, which springs
+from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. This
+magnificence was cleanly. The grand silence of happy nature filled the
+garden. A celestial silence that is compatible with a thousand sorts of
+music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the flutterings of
+the breeze. All the harmony of the season was complete in one gracious
+whole; the entrances and exits of spring took place in proper order; the
+lilacs ended; the jasmines began; some flowers were tardy, some insects
+in advance of their time; the van-guard of the red June butterflies
+fraternized with the rear-guard of the white butterflies of May. The
+plantain trees were getting their new skins. The breeze hollowed out
+undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. It
+was splendid. A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing
+through the fence, said: "Here is the Spring presenting arms and in full
+uniform."
+
+All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; this was its hour;
+the great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth
+on earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly. God was serving
+the universal repast. Each creature had his pasture or his mess. The
+ring-dove found his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet, the
+goldfinch found chickweed, the red-breast found worms, the green finch
+found flies, the fly found infusoriae, the bee found flowers. They ate
+each other somewhat, it is true, which is the misery of evil mixed with
+good; but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.
+
+The two little abandoned creatures had arrived in the vicinity of the
+grand fountain, and, rather bewildered by all this light, they tried to
+hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the weak in the presence
+of even impersonal magnificence; and they kept behind the swans' hutch.
+
+Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort
+of tumultuous death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows, which
+were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly. Smoke hung over
+the roofs in the direction of the Halles. A bell, which had the air of
+an appeal, was ringing in the distance.
+
+These children did not appear to notice these noises. The little one
+repeated from time to time: "I am hungry."
+
+Almost at the same instant with the children, another couple approached
+the great basin. They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years of age,
+who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six. No doubt, a father
+and his son. The little man of six had a big brioche.
+
+At that epoch, certain houses abutting on the river, in the Rues Madame
+and d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxembourg garden, of which the lodgers
+enjoyed the use when the gates were shut, a privilege which was
+suppressed later on. This father and son came from one of these houses,
+no doubt.
+
+The two poor little creatures watched "that gentleman" approaching, and
+hid themselves a little more thoroughly.
+
+He was a bourgeois. The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had one day
+heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin, counselling
+his son "to avoid excesses." He had an affable and haughty air, and a
+mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. This mechanical
+smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth
+rather than the soul. The child, with his brioche, which he had bitten
+into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. The child was dressed
+as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection, and the father had
+remained clad as a bourgeois out of prudence.
+
+Father and son halted near the fountain where two swans were sporting.
+This bourgeois appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans.
+He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like them.
+
+For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their principal
+talent, and they were superb.
+
+If the two poor little beings had listened and if they had been of an
+age to understand, they might have gathered the words of this grave man.
+The father was saying to his son:
+
+"The sage lives content with little. Look at me, my son. I do not love
+pomp. I am never seen in clothes decked with gold lace and stones; I
+leave that false splendor to badly organized souls."
+
+Here the deep shouts which proceeded from the direction of the Halles
+burst out with fresh force of bell and uproar.
+
+"What is that?" inquired the child.
+
+The father replied:
+
+"It is the Saturnalia."
+
+All at once, he caught sight of the two little ragged boys behind the
+green swan-hutch.
+
+"There is the beginning," said he.
+
+And, after a pause, he added:
+
+"Anarchy is entering this garden."
+
+In the meanwhile, his son took a bite of his brioche, spit it out, and,
+suddenly burst out crying.
+
+"What are you crying about?" demanded his father.
+
+"I am not hungry any more," said the child.
+
+The father's smile became more accentuated.
+
+"One does not need to be hungry in order to eat a cake."
+
+"My cake tires me. It is stale."
+
+"Don't you want any more of it?"
+
+"No."
+
+The father pointed to the swans.
+
+"Throw it to those palmipeds."
+
+The child hesitated. A person may not want any more of his cake; but
+that is no reason for giving it away.
+
+The father went on:
+
+"Be humane. You must have compassion on animals."
+
+And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into the basin.
+
+The cake fell very near the edge.
+
+The swans were far away, in the centre of the basin, and busy with some
+prey. They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.
+
+The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being wasted, and
+moved by this useless shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic agitation,
+which finally attracted the attention of the swans.
+
+They perceived something floating, steered for the edge like ships, as
+they are, and slowly directed their course toward the brioche, with the
+stupid majesty which befits white creatures.
+
+"The swans [cygnes] understand signs [signes]," said the bourgeois,
+delighted to make a jest.
+
+At that moment, the distant tumult of the city underwent another sudden
+increase. This time it was sinister. There are some gusts of wind which
+speak more distinctly than others. The one which was blowing at that
+moment brought clearly defined drum-beats, clamors, platoon firing, and
+the dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. This coincided with a
+black cloud which suddenly veiled the sun.
+
+The swans had not yet reached the brioche.
+
+"Let us return home," said the father, "they are attacking the
+Tuileries."
+
+He grasped his son's hand again. Then he continued:
+
+"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is but the distance which
+separates Royalty from the peerage; that is not far. Shots will soon
+rain down."
+
+He glanced at the cloud.
+
+"Perhaps it is rain itself that is about to shower down; the sky
+is joining in; the younger branch is condemned. Let us return home
+quickly."
+
+"I should like to see the swans eat the brioche," said the child.
+
+The father replied:
+
+"That would be imprudent."
+
+And he led his little bourgeois away.
+
+The son, regretting the swans, turned his head back toward the basin
+until a corner of the quincunxes concealed it from him.
+
+In the meanwhile, the two little waifs had approached the brioche at
+the same time as the swans. It was floating on the water. The smaller of
+them stared at the cake, the elder gazed after the retreating bourgeois.
+
+Father and son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to the grand
+flight of steps near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.
+
+As soon as they had disappeared from view, the elder child hastily
+flung himself flat on his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin, and
+clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over the water, on the
+verge of falling in, he stretched out his right hand with his stick
+towards the cake. The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste, and in so
+doing, they produced an effect of their breasts which was of service to
+the little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans, and one of
+these gentle concentric undulations softly floated the brioche towards
+the child's wand. Just as the swans came up, the stick touched the cake.
+The child gave it a brisk rap, drew in the brioche, frightened away the
+swans, seized the cake, and sprang to his feet. The cake was wet;
+but they were hungry and thirsty. The elder broke the cake into two
+portions, a large one and a small one, took the small one for himself,
+gave the large one to his brother, and said to him:
+
+"Ram that into your muzzle."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII--MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT
+
+Marius dashed out of the barricade, Combeferre followed him. But he
+was too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the basket of
+cartridges; Marius bore the child.
+
+"Alas!" he thought, "that which the father had done for his father, he
+was requiting to the son; only, Thenardier had brought back his father
+alive; he was bringing back the child dead."
+
+When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his face,
+like the child, was inundated with blood.
+
+At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had grazed
+his head; he had not noticed it.
+
+Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with it bandaged Marius' brow.
+
+They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and spread over the
+two corpses the black shawl. There was enough of it for both the old man
+and the child.
+
+Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he had
+brought in.
+
+This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.
+
+Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his stone post.
+When Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.
+
+"Here's a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras.
+"He finds a way of not fighting in this barricade."
+
+"Which does not prevent him from defending it," responded Enjolras.
+
+"Heroism has its originals," resumed Combeferre.
+
+And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:
+
+"He is another sort from Father Mabeuf."
+
+One thing which must be noted is, that the fire which was battering the
+barricade hardly disturbed the interior. Those who have never traversed
+the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea of the singular
+moments of tranquillity mingled with these convulsions. Men go and
+come, they talk, they jest, they lounge. Some one whom we know heard a
+combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot: "We are here as
+at a bachelor breakfast." The redoubt of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we
+repeat, seemed very calm within. All mutations and all phases had been,
+or were about to be, exhausted. The position, from critical, had become
+menacing, and, from menacing, was probably about to become desperate. In
+proportion as the situation grew gloomy, the glow of heroism empurpled
+the barricade more and more. Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it,
+in the attitude of a young Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the
+sombre genius, Epidotas.
+
+Combeferre, wearing an apron, was dressing the wounds: Bossuet and
+Feuilly were making cartridges with the powder-flask picked up by
+Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to Feuilly: "We are soon
+to take the diligence for another planet"; Courfeyrac was disposing and
+arranging on some paving-stones which he had reserved for himself near
+Enjolras, a complete arsenal, his sword-cane, his gun, two holster
+pistols, and a cudgel, with the care of a young girl setting a small
+dunkerque in order. Jean Valjean stared silently at the wall opposite
+him. An artisan was fastening Mother Hucheloup's big straw hat on his
+head with a string, "for fear of sun-stroke," as he said. The young
+men from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves,
+as though eager to speak patois for the last time. Joly, who had taken
+Widow Hucheloup's mirror from the wall, was examining his tongue in it.
+Some combatants, having discovered a few crusts of rather mouldy bread,
+in a drawer, were eagerly devouring them. Marius was disturbed with
+regard to what his father was about to say to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII--THE VULTURE BECOME PREY
+
+We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to barricades.
+Nothing which is characteristic of that surprising war of the streets
+should be omitted.
+
+Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquillity which we have
+just mentioned, the barricade, for those who are inside it, remains,
+none the less, a vision.
+
+There is something of the apocalypse in civil war, all the mists of the
+unknown are commingled with fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes,
+and any one who has passed through a barricade thinks he has traversed a
+dream.
+
+The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed out
+in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences; they are both
+more and less than life. On emerging from a barricade, one no longer
+knows what one has seen there. One has been terrible, but one knows
+it not. One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas which had human
+faces; one's head has been in the light of the future. There were
+corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect. The hours were
+colossal and seemed hours of eternity. One has lived in death. Shadows
+have passed by. What were they?
+
+One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a deafening
+horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open mouths which
+shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace; one was in the
+midst of smoke, of night, perhaps. One fancied that one had touched the
+sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one's
+finger nails. One no longer remembers anything.
+
+Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
+
+All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock
+striking the hour became audible.
+
+"It is midday," said Combeferre.
+
+The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang to his
+feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering shout:
+
+"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the
+roofs with them. Half the men to their guns, the other half to the
+paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost."
+
+A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made their
+appearance in battle array at the end of the street.
+
+This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? The
+attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition of
+the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.
+
+They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which M.
+Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."
+
+Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar
+to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape
+is impossible. In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones which
+Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been carried up to
+the first floor and the attic, and before a second minute had elapsed,
+these stones, artistically set one upon the other, walled up the
+sash-window on the first floor and the windows in the roof to half their
+height. A few loop-holes carefully planned by Feuilly, the principal
+architect, allowed of the passage of the gun-barrels. This armament of
+the windows could be effected all the more easily since the firing of
+grape-shot had ceased. The two cannons were now discharging ball
+against the centre of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if
+possible, a breach for the assault.
+
+When the stones destined to the final defence were in place, Enjolras
+had the bottles which he had set under the table where Mabeuf lay,
+carried to the first floor.
+
+"Who is to drink that?" Bossuet asked him.
+
+"They," replied Enjolras.
+
+Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron
+cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.
+
+The fortress was complete. The barricade was the rampart, the wine-shop
+was the dungeon. With the stones which remained they stopped up the
+outlet.
+
+As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing of
+their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants
+combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose
+themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more than in
+reality, and take their ease. The preparations for attack are always
+made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which, the lightning
+strikes.
+
+This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything and
+to perfect everything. He felt that, since such men were to die, their
+death ought to be a masterpiece.
+
+He said to Marius: "We are the two leaders. I will give the last orders
+inside. Do you remain outside and observe."
+
+Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.
+
+Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance, as the
+reader will remember, nailed up.
+
+"No splashing of the wounded," he said.
+
+He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly
+tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.
+
+"On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase.
+Have you them?"
+
+"Yes," said Feuilly.
+
+"How many?"
+
+"Two axes and a pole-axe."
+
+"That is good. There are now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. How
+many guns are there?"
+
+"Thirty-four."
+
+"Eight too many. Keep those eight guns loaded like the rest and at
+hand. Swords and pistols in your belts. Twenty men to the barricade. Six
+ambushed in the attic windows, and at the window on the first floor to
+fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in the stones. Let not a
+single worker remain inactive here. Presently, when the drum beats the
+assault, let the twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. The first to
+arrive will have the best places."
+
+These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:
+
+"I am not forgetting you."
+
+And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:
+
+"The last man to leave this room will smash the skull of this spy."
+
+"Here?" inquired a voice.
+
+"No, let us not mix their corpses with our own. The little barricade of
+the Mondetour lane can be scaled. It is only four feet high. The man is
+well pinioned. He shall be taken thither and put to death."
+
+There was some one who was more impassive at that moment than Enjolras,
+it was Javert. Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.
+
+He had been lost among the group of insurgents. He stepped forth and
+said to Enjolras:
+
+"You are the commander?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You thanked me a while ago."
+
+"In the name of the Republic. The barricade has two saviors, Marius
+Pontmercy and yourself."
+
+"Do you think that I deserve a recompense?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Well, I request one."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"That I may blow that man's brains out."
+
+Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an almost imperceptible
+movement, and said:
+
+"That is just."
+
+As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load his rifle; he cut his eyes
+about him:
+
+"No objections."
+
+And he turned to Jean Valjean:
+
+"Take the spy."
+
+Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert, by seating
+himself on the end of the table. He seized the pistol, and a faint click
+announced that he had cocked it.
+
+Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became audible.
+
+"Take care!" shouted Marius from the top of the barricade.
+
+Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar to
+him, and gazing intently at the insurgents, he said to them:
+
+"You are in no better case than I am."
+
+"All out!" shouted Enjolras.
+
+The insurgents poured out tumultuously, and, as they went, received in
+the back,--may we be permitted the expression,--this sally of Javert's:
+
+"We shall meet again shortly!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX--JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE
+
+When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope which
+fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body, and the knot of
+which was under the table. After this he made him a sign to rise.
+
+Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of
+enchained authority is condensed.
+
+Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take a beast of
+burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter after him, emerged
+from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert, with his impeded limbs, could
+take only very short steps.
+
+Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.
+
+In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. The
+insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent, had their
+backs turned to these two.
+
+Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of the
+barricade, saw them pass. This group of victim and executioner was
+illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.
+
+Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold for
+a single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the little
+entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.
+
+When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone in the
+lane. No one saw them. Among the heap they could distinguish a livid
+face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and the half nude breast of a
+woman. It was Eponine. The corner of the houses hid them from the
+insurgents. The corpses carried away from the barricade formed a
+terrible pile a few paces distant.
+
+Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in a low
+tone:
+
+"It strikes me that I know that girl."
+
+Then he turned to Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert a look
+which it required no words to interpret: "Javert, it is I."
+
+Javert replied:
+
+"Take your revenge."
+
+Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.
+
+"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right. That suits you
+better."
+
+Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then he
+cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut the cord on his
+feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:
+
+"You are free."
+
+Javert was not easily astonished. Still, master of himself though
+he was, he could not repress a start. He remained open-mouthed and
+motionless.
+
+Jean Valjean continued:
+
+"I do not think that I shall escape from this place. But if, by chance,
+I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme
+Arme, No. 7."
+
+Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner of his
+mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:
+
+"Have a care."
+
+"Go," said Jean Valjean.
+
+Javert began again:
+
+"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"
+
+"Number 7."
+
+Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."
+
+He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness
+between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and, supporting
+his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction of the Halles.
+Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:
+
+A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:
+
+"You annoy me. Kill me, rather."
+
+Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean
+as "thou."
+
+"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.
+
+Javert retreated slowly. A moment later he turned the corner of the Rue
+des Precheurs.
+
+When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.
+
+Then he returned to the barricade and said:
+
+"It is done."
+
+In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.
+
+Marius, more intent on the outside than on the interior, had not, up to
+that time, taken a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark background
+of the tap-room.
+
+When he beheld him in broad daylight, striding over the barricade in
+order to proceed to his death, he recognized him. Something suddenly
+recurred to his mind. He recalled the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise,
+and the two pistols which the latter had handed to him and which he,
+Marius, had used in this very barricade, and not only did he recall his
+face, but his name as well.
+
+This recollection was misty and troubled, however, like all his ideas.
+
+It was not an affirmation that he made, but a question which he put to
+himself:
+
+"Is not that the inspector of police who told me that his name was
+Javert?"
+
+Perhaps there was still time to intervene in behalf of that man. But, in
+the first place, he must know whether this was Javert.
+
+Marius called to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself at the other
+extremity of the barricade:
+
+"Enjolras!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"What is the name of yonder man?"
+
+"What man?"
+
+"The police agent. Do you know his name?"
+
+"Of course. He told us."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Javert."
+
+Marius sprang to his feet.
+
+At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.
+
+Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried: "It is done."
+
+A gloomy chill traversed Marius' heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX--THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE
+WRONG
+
+The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.
+
+Everything contributed to its tragic majesty at that supreme moment; a
+thousand mysterious crashes in the air, the breath of armed masses set
+in movement in the streets which were not visible, the intermittent
+gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock of artillery on the march, the firing
+by squads, and the cannonades crossing each other in the labyrinth
+of Paris, the smokes of battle mounting all gilded above the roofs,
+indescribable and vaguely terrible cries, lightnings of menace
+everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which now had the accents of a
+sob, the mildness of the weather, the splendor of the sky filled with
+sun and clouds, the beauty of the day, and the alarming silence of the
+houses.
+
+For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue
+de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed,
+windows closed, shutters closed.
+
+In those days, so different from those in which we live, when the hour
+was come, when the people wished to put an end to a situation, which had
+lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a legal country, when
+universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city consented
+to the tearing up of the pavements, when insurrection made the
+bourgeoisie smile by whispering its password in its ear, then the
+inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated with the revolt, so to speak, was
+the auxiliary of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the
+improvised fortress which rested on it. When the situation was not
+ripe, when the insurrection was not decidedly admitted, when the masses
+disowned the movement, all was over with the combatants, the city was
+changed into a desert around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges
+were nailed up, and the street turned into a defile to help the army to
+take the barricade.
+
+A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly than
+it chooses. Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand! A people does not
+let itself go at random. Then it abandons the insurrection to itself.
+The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague. A house is an
+escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears,
+sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge.
+It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.
+They seem dead, they are living. Life which is, as it were, suspended
+there, persists there. No one has gone out of them for four and twenty
+hours, but no one is missing from them. In the interior of that rock,
+people go and come, go to bed and rise again; they are a family party
+there; there they eat and drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! Fear
+excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is mixed with it, an
+extenuating circumstance. Sometimes, even, and this has been actually
+seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change into fury, as prudence
+does into rage; hence this wise saying: "The enraged moderates." There
+are outbursts of supreme terror, whence springs wrath like a mournful
+smoke.--"What do these people want? What have they come there to do?
+Let them get out of the scrape. So much the worse for them. It is their
+fault. They are only getting what they deserve. It does not concern
+us. Here is our poor street all riddled with balls. They are a pack of
+rascals. Above all things, don't open the door."--And the house assumes
+the air of a tomb. The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of
+that house; he sees the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if
+he cries, he knows that they are listening to him, and that no one will
+come; there stand walls which might protect him, there are men who might
+save him; and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels
+of stone.
+
+Whom shall he reproach?
+
+No one and every one.
+
+The incomplete times in which we live.
+
+It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into
+revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and
+from Minerva turns to Pallas.
+
+The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits
+it; it almost always comes too soon. Then it becomes resigned, and
+stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph. It serves those who
+deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates
+them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. It is
+indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.
+
+Is this ingratitude, however?
+
+Yes, from the point of view of the human race.
+
+No, from the point of view of the individual.
+
+Progress is man's mode of existence. The general life of the human race
+is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called
+Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial
+journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting
+places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it
+meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled
+on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the
+poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the
+human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken
+that slumbering Progress.
+
+"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of
+these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption
+of movement for the death of Being.
+
+He who despairs is in the wrong. Progress infallibly awakes, and, in
+short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep, for it has
+increased in size. When we behold it erect once more, we find it taller.
+To be always peaceful does not depend on progress any more than it does
+on the stream; erect no barriers, cast in no boulders; obstacles make
+water froth and humanity boil. Hence arise troubles; but after these
+troubles, we recognize the fact that ground has been gained. Until
+order, which is nothing else than universal peace, has been established,
+until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions as its
+halting-places.
+
+What, then, is progress? We have just enunciated it; the permanent life
+of the peoples.
+
+Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals offers
+resistance to the eternal life of the human race.
+
+Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct
+interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and
+defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary
+life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to
+the future. The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth,
+is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal,
+after all, who will have their turn later on.--"I exist," murmurs that
+some one whose name is All. "I am young and in love, I am old and I
+wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am
+successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the
+government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all
+this, I desire to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a
+profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.
+
+Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when it makes
+war. It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure, battle,
+from the lie of yesterday. It, the future, behaves like the past. It,
+pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. It complicates its heroism with
+a violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a
+violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which
+it is fatally punished. The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old
+military code in its fist; it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it
+suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness. It makes
+use of death, a serious matter. It seems as though Utopia had no longer
+any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force. It
+strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every blade has two
+edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.
+
+Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is
+impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the
+glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia. Even when
+they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in
+failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in
+accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic
+defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other
+sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is
+greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.
+
+It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the
+vanquished.
+
+We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they
+fail.
+
+Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems
+a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their
+ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are
+reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning
+social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs,
+of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow
+in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout
+to them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply:
+"That is because our barricade is made of good intentions."
+
+The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution. In short, let us
+agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is
+a good will which renders society uneasy. But it depends on society
+to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make our appeal.
+No violent remedy is necessary. To study evil amiably, to prove its
+existence, then to cure it. It is to this that we invite it.
+
+However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men,
+who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are
+striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal,
+are august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they
+accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the
+appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who answers
+to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager, they enter the
+tomb. And this hopeless combat, this stoical disappearance they accept
+in order to bring about the supreme and universal consequences, the
+magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the 14th of July,
+1789; these soldiers are priests. The French revolution is an act of
+God.
+
+Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to the
+distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,--there are accepted
+revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused
+revolutions, which are called riots.
+
+An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its
+examination before the people. If the people lets fall a black ball, the
+idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.
+
+Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it, is
+not the thing for the peoples. Nations have not always and at every hour
+the temperament of heroes and martyrs.
+
+They are positive. A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them, in the
+first place, because it often results in a catastrophe, in the second
+place, because it always has an abstraction as its point of departure.
+
+Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal, and for
+the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus sacrifice
+themselves. An insurrection is an enthusiasm. Enthusiasm may wax wroth;
+hence the appeal to arms. But every insurrection, which aims at a
+government or a regime, aims higher. Thus, for instance, and we
+insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and, in
+particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie were
+combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe. The majority of them,
+when talking freely, did justice to this king who stood midway between
+monarchy and revolution; no one hated him. But they attacked the younger
+branch of the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked its
+elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they wished to overturn in
+overturning royalty in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation
+of man over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe.
+Paris without a king has as result the world without despots. This is
+the manner in which they reasoned. Their aim was distant no doubt,
+vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts; but it was
+great.
+
+Thus it is. And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are
+almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which,
+after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves
+into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are
+about to do. Who knows? We may succeed. We are few in number, we have a
+whole army arrayed against us; but we are defending right, the natural
+law, the sovereignty of each one over himself from which no abdication
+is possible, justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the
+three hundred Spartans. We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas.
+And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw
+back, and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an
+unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again,
+the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance; and in the
+event of the worst, Thermopylae.
+
+These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck,
+and we have just explained why. The crowd is restive in the presence of
+the impulses of paladins. Heavy masses, the multitudes which are fragile
+because of their very weight, fear adventures; and there is a touch of
+adventure in the ideal.
+
+Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very
+friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Sometimes the
+stomach paralyzes the heart.
+
+The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from
+the stomach than other nations: she more easily knots the rope about her
+loins. She is the first awake, the last asleep. She marches forwards.
+She is a seeker.
+
+This arises from the fact that she is an artist.
+
+The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic, the same as the
+beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are
+also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to see the light. That is why
+the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne by
+Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who handed it on to France. Divine,
+illuminating nations of scouts! Vitaelampada tradunt.
+
+It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of
+its progress. The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity
+of imagination. Only, a civilizing people should remain a manly people.
+Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no. Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a
+bastard. He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be
+artistic. In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must
+sublime. On this condition, one gives to the human race the pattern of
+the ideal.
+
+The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science. It is
+through science that it will realize that august vision of the poets,
+the socially beautiful. Eden will be reconstructed by A+B. At the point
+which civilization has now reached, the exact is a necessary element
+of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but
+completed by the scientific organ; dreams must be calculated. Art, which
+is the conqueror, should have for support science, which is the walker;
+the solidity of the creature which is ridden is of importance. The
+modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its
+vehicle; Alexander on the elephant.
+
+Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit to
+guide civilization. Genuflection before the idol or before money wastes
+away the muscles which walk and the will which advances. Hieratic or
+mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance, lowers its
+horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence,
+at once both human and divine of the universal goal, which makes
+missionaries of nations. Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal.
+Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of
+the centuries, halos of civilization.
+
+France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy. She is
+Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. Moreover,
+she is good. She gives herself. Oftener than is the case with other
+races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice. Only, this
+humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. And therein lies the
+great peril for those who run when she desires only to walk, or who walk
+on when she desires to halt. France has her relapses into materialism,
+and, at certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain
+have no longer anything which recalls French greatness and are of the
+dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is to be done in
+such a case? The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her
+freaks of pettiness. That is all.
+
+To this there is nothing to say. Peoples, like planets, possess the
+right to an eclipse. And all is well, provided that the light
+returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and
+resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is identical
+with the persistence of the _I_.
+
+Let us state these facts calmly. Death on the barricade or the tomb in
+exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. The real name of
+devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned allow themselves to
+be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us
+confine ourselves to entreating great nations not to retreat too far,
+when they do retreat. One must not push too far in descent under pretext
+of a return to reason.
+
+Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists;
+but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom. The life of the moment has
+its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. Alas! the
+fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in
+history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes
+the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked
+how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:
+"Because I love statesmen."
+
+One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.
+
+A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing else
+than a convulsion towards the ideal. Progress trammelled is sickly, and
+is subject to these tragic epilepsies. With that malady of progress,
+civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact in our passage. This
+is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr'acte of that drama
+whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is
+Progress.
+
+Progress!
+
+The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought; and,
+at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which it
+contains having still more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps,
+permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its
+light to shine through.
+
+The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from
+one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its
+intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from
+the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,
+from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.
+Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the
+beginning, the angel at the end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI--THE HEROES
+
+All at once, the drum beat the charge.
+
+The attack was a hurricane. On the evening before, in the darkness,
+the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa. Now, in broad
+daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible,
+rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the
+roar, the army hurled itself on the barricade. Fury now became skill.
+A powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular
+intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot,
+and supported by serried masses which could be heard though not seen,
+debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating, trumpets
+braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head, and,
+imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight for the barricade
+with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.
+
+The wall held firm.
+
+The insurgents fired impetuously. The barricade once scaled had a mane
+of lightning flashes. The assault was so furious, that for one moment,
+it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the
+lion shakes off the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as
+the cliff is covered with foam, to re-appear, a moment later, beetling,
+black and formidable.
+
+The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street,
+unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible
+discharge of musketry. Any one who has seen fireworks will recall the
+sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. Let
+the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but
+horizontal, bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaien at the tip of each
+one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men one after another
+from its clusters of lightning. The barricade was underneath it.
+
+On both sides, the resolution was equal. The bravery exhibited there
+was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity
+which began by the sacrifice of self.
+
+This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave.
+The troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of
+fighting. The acceptance of the death agony in the flower of youth and
+in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. In this fray, each
+one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. The street was
+strewn with corpses.
+
+The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at the
+other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved
+and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after the other, under
+his embrasure, without having even seen him; Marius fought unprotected.
+He made himself a target. He stood with more than half his body above
+the breastworks. There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious
+man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in
+action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. In battle he
+was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in
+firing a gun.
+
+The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. In
+this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.
+
+Courfeyrac was bare-headed.
+
+"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him.
+
+Courfeyrac replied:
+
+"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."
+
+Or they uttered haughty comments.
+
+"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those men,--[and
+he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging
+to the old army]--who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid
+us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals, and
+who abandon us!"
+
+And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.
+
+"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the
+stars, from a great distance."
+
+The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that
+one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.
+
+The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position.
+They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon
+the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in
+the escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably
+buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men
+hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly
+recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably
+nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army
+closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the wine-press.
+
+One assault followed another. The horror of the situation kept
+increasing.
+
+Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that Rue de la
+Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard, ragged,
+exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat for four and twenty hours, who
+had not slept, who had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling
+in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, nearly all
+of whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged with black and
+blood-stained linen, with holes in their clothes from which the blood
+trickled, and who were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords,
+became Titans. The barricade was ten times attacked, approached,
+assailed, scaled, and never captured.
+
+In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to imagine
+fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze at the
+conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace;
+there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances were extraordinary.
+The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants flamed forth
+there, and it was formidable to behold the going and coming in that red
+glow of those salamanders of the fray.
+
+The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we
+renounce all attempts at depicting. The epic alone has the right to fill
+twelve thousand verses with a battle.
+
+One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism, the most
+redoubtable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of
+Swords.
+
+They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows of
+the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from above,
+from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses, from the
+windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows, whither some had
+crawled. They were one against sixty.
+
+The facade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous. The window,
+tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing now
+but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.
+
+Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed;
+Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the breast at
+the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier, had only time to
+cast a glance to heaven when he expired.
+
+Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in the
+head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood, and one would
+have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.
+
+Enjolras alone was not struck. When he had no longer any weapon, he
+reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust some arm
+or other into his fist. All he had left was the stumps of four swords;
+one more than Francois I. at Marignan. Homer says: "Diomedes cuts
+the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy Arisba;
+Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios,
+Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the blameless
+Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius; Antilochus, Ablerus;
+Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene; and Teucer, Aretaon.
+Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus' pike. Agamemnon, king
+of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos, born in the rocky city which
+is laved by the sounding river Satnois." In our old poems of exploits,
+Esplandian attacks the giant marquis Swantibore with a cobbler's
+shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter defends himself by stoning the
+hero with towers which he plucks up by the roots. Our ancient mural
+frescoes show us the two Dukes of Bretagne and Bourbon, armed,
+emblazoned and crested in war-like guise, on horseback and approaching
+each other, their battle-axes in hand, masked with iron, gloved with
+iron, booted with iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the other draped
+in azure: Bretagne with his lion between the two horns of his crown,
+Bourbon helmeted with a monster fleur de lys on his visor. But, in order
+to be superb, it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion,
+to have in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles,
+father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a good suit of
+mail, a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it suffices to give
+one's life for a conviction or a loyalty. This ingenuous little
+soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who prowls with his
+clasp-knife by his side, around the children's nurses in the Luxembourg
+garden, this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book,
+a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,--take both of them,
+breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face in the
+Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray, and let the
+one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let both of
+them imagine that they are fighting for their country; the struggle will
+be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit and this sawbones
+in conflict will produce in that grand epic field where humanity
+is striving, will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, King of Lycia,
+tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the immense body of Ajax, equal to
+the gods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII--FOOT TO FOOT
+
+When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive, except Enjolras
+and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade, the centre, which
+had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly and Combeferre,
+gave way. The cannon, though it had not effected a practicable breach,
+had made a rather large hollow in the middle of the redoubt; there, the
+summit of the wall had disappeared before the balls, and had crumbled
+away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now inside, now outside, had,
+as it accumulated, formed two piles in the nature of slopes on the two
+sides of the barrier, one on the inside, the other on the outside. The
+exterior slope presented an inclined plane to the attack.
+
+A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded. The
+mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run, came up with
+irresistible force, and the serried front of battle of the attacking
+column made its appearance through the smoke on the crest of the
+battlements. This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents who
+were defending the centre retreated in confusion.
+
+Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them. Many,
+finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns, did not
+wish to die. This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation
+emits howls, when the beast re-appears in men. They were hemmed in by
+the lofty, six-story house which formed the background of their redoubt.
+This house might prove their salvation. The building was barricaded, and
+walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before the troops of the line
+had reached the interior of the redoubt, there was time for a door to
+open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning was sufficient for
+that, and the door of that house, suddenly opened a crack and closed
+again instantly, was life for these despairing men. Behind this house,
+there were streets, possible flight, space. They set to knocking at that
+door with the butts of their guns, and with kicks, shouting, calling,
+entreating, wringing their hands. No one opened. From the little window
+on the third floor, the head of the dead man gazed down upon them.
+
+But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about them,
+sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras had shouted to the soldiers:
+"Don't advance!" and as an officer had not obeyed, Enjolras had killed
+the officer. He was now in the little inner court of the redoubt, with
+his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword in one hand,
+a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the wine-shop which he
+barred against assailants. He shouted to the desperate men:--"There is
+but one door open; this one."--And shielding them with his body, and
+facing an entire battalion alone, he made them pass in behind him. All
+precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with his rifle,
+which he now used like a cane, what single-stick players call a "covered
+rose" round his head, levelled the bayonets around and in front of him,
+and was the last to enter; and then ensued a horrible moment, when the
+soldiers tried to make their way in, and the insurgents strove to bar
+them out. The door was slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back
+into its frame, it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been
+clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.
+
+Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his collar bone, he
+felt that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes already
+shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the swoon
+in which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought,
+mingled with a last memory of Cosette:--"I am taken prisoner. I shall be
+shot."
+
+Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the
+wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had reached a moment when each
+man has not the time to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the
+bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and
+chain, while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
+with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The
+assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the wine-shop was
+now beginning.
+
+The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.
+
+The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then, a still
+more melancholy circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded
+the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents were
+mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body of
+a soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
+accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
+which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.
+
+When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:
+
+"Let us sell our lives dearly."
+
+Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath
+the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,
+the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the
+cold folds of the shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding
+sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.
+
+Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had kissed
+his brow on the preceding evening.
+
+These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of
+his life.
+
+Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes;
+the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances are
+dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible. Men are willing to die,
+provided their opponent will kill them.
+
+When Suchet says:--"Capitulate,"--Palafox replies: "After the war with
+cannon, the war with knives." Nothing was lacking in the capture by
+assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from
+the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers
+by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and
+the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door yielded,
+the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing into the
+wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door which had been
+beaten in and flung on the ground, found not a single combatant there.
+The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the middle of
+the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing their last, every
+one who was not killed was on the first floor, and from there, through
+the hole in the ceiling, which had formed the entrance of the stairs,
+a terrific fire burst forth. It was the last of their cartridges. When
+they were exhausted, when these formidable men on the point of death had
+no longer either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands two of the
+bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of which we have spoken, and
+held the scaling party in check with these frightfully fragile clubs.
+They were bottles of aquafortis.
+
+We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The
+besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did
+not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war
+is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the
+besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below
+upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily
+surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking
+streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost
+produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express horror
+when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this
+conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants matched
+with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons
+attacked, spectres resisted.
+
+It was heroism become monstrous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII--ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK
+
+At length, by dint of mounting on each other's backs, aiding themselves
+with the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging to
+the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink of the trap-door, the last
+one who offered resistance, a score of assailants, soldiers, National
+Guardsmen, municipal guardsmen, in utter confusion, the majority
+disfigured by wounds in the face during that redoubtable ascent, blinded
+by blood, furious, rendered savage, made an irruption into the apartment
+on the first floor. There they found only one man still on his feet,
+Enjolras. Without cartridges, without sword, he had nothing in his hand
+now but the barrel of his gun whose stock he had broken over the head
+of those who were entering. He had placed the billiard table between his
+assailants and himself; he had retreated into the corner of the room,
+and there, with haughty eye, and head borne high, with this stump of a
+weapon in his hand, he was still so alarming as to speedily create an
+empty space around him. A cry arose:
+
+"He is the leader! It was he who slew the artillery-man. It is well that
+he has placed himself there. Let him remain there. Let us shoot him down
+on the spot."
+
+"Shoot me," said Enjolras.
+
+And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel, and folding his arms, he
+offered his breast.
+
+The audacity of a fine death always affects men. As soon as Enjolras
+folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in
+the room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort of sepulchral
+solemnity. The menacing majesty of Enjolras disarmed and motionless,
+appeared to oppress this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody,
+and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as indifferent as an
+invulnerable being, seemed, by the authority of his tranquil glance, to
+constrain this sinister rabble to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at
+that moment augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh
+and rosy after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just elapsed,
+as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded. It was of him,
+possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of
+war: "There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." A National
+Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying: "It
+seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower."
+
+Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras, and
+silently made ready their guns.
+
+Then a sergeant shouted:
+
+"Take aim!"
+
+An officer intervened.
+
+"Wait."
+
+And addressing Enjolras:
+
+"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.
+
+Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep ever since the
+preceding evening in the upper room of the wine-shop, seated on a chair
+and leaning on the table.
+
+He realized in its fullest sense the old metaphor of "dead drunk." The
+hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown him into a
+lethargy. His table being small, and not suitable for the barricade,
+he had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture,
+with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms,
+surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles. His was the overwhelming
+slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had had any
+effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the
+grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room where
+he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault. He merely replied to
+the cannonade, now and then, by a snore. He seemed to be waiting there
+for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking. Many corpses
+were strewn around him; and, at the first glance, there was nothing to
+distinguish him from those profound sleepers of death.
+
+Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him. The fall
+of everything around him only augmented Grantaire's prostration; the
+crumbling of all things was his lullaby. The sort of halt which the
+tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy
+slumber. It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which
+suddenly comes to a dead stop. The persons dozing within it wake up.
+Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed
+his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.
+
+A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn
+away. One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has
+concealed. All suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard
+who has known nothing of what has been taking place during the last
+twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly
+informed. Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration
+of intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is
+dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity
+of realities.
+
+Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the
+billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not
+even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his
+order: "Take aim!" when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout
+beside them:
+
+"Long live the Republic! I'm one of them."
+
+Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he
+had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant
+glance of the transfigured drunken man.
+
+He repeated: "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm
+stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.
+
+"Finish both of us at one blow," said he.
+
+And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:
+
+"Do you permit it?"
+
+Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.
+
+This smile was not ended when the report resounded.
+
+Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall,
+as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed.
+
+Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.
+
+A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining
+insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired
+into the attic through a wooden lattice. They fought under the very
+roof. They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the
+windows. Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus,
+were slain by two shots fired from the attic. A man in a blouse was
+flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed
+his last on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slipped together
+on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release each
+other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace. A similar conflict
+went on in the cellar. Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. Then silence.
+The barricade was captured.
+
+The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the
+fugitives.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV--PRISONER
+
+Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.
+
+The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt
+at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of Jean
+Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose
+himself in it. Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase
+of agony, would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere
+present in the carnage, like a providence, those who fell were picked
+up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for. In the intervals, he
+reappeared on the barricade. But nothing which could resemble a blow,
+an attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands. He held his
+peace and lent succor. Moreover he had received only a few scratches.
+The bullets would have none of him. If suicide formed part of what he
+had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he had
+not succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an
+irreligious act.
+
+Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to see
+Marius; the truth is, that he never took his eyes from the latter. When
+a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the agility of
+a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.
+
+The whirlwind of the attack was, at that moment, so violently
+concentrated upon Enjolras and upon the door of the wine-shop, that
+no one saw Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his arms,
+traverse the unpaved field of the barricade and disappear behind the
+angle of the Corinthe building.
+
+The reader will recall this angle which formed a sort of cape on the
+street; it afforded shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot, and all
+eyes, and a few square feet of space. There is sometimes a chamber
+which does not burn in the midst of a conflagration, and in the midst of
+raging seas, beyond a promontory or at the extremity of a blind alley
+of shoals, a tranquil nook. It was in this sort of fold in the interior
+trapezium of the barricade, that Eponine had breathed her last.
+
+There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground, placed his
+back against the wall, and cast his eyes about him.
+
+The situation was alarming.
+
+For an instant, for two or three perhaps, this bit of wall was a
+shelter, but how was he to escape from this massacre? He recalled the
+anguish which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight years before,
+and in what manner he had contrived to make his escape; it was difficult
+then, to-day it was impossible. He had before him that deaf and
+implacable house, six stories in height, which appeared to be inhabited
+only by a dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the
+rather low barricade, which shut off the Rue de la Petite Truanderie;
+to pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest of the barrier a
+line of bayonets was visible. The troops of the line were posted on the
+watch behind that barricade. It was evident, that to pass the barricade
+was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon, and that any head which
+should run the risk of lifting itself above the top of that wall of
+stones would serve as a target for sixty shots. On his left he had the
+field of battle. Death lurked round the corner of that wall.
+
+What was to be done?
+
+Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament.
+
+And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some expedient,
+to come to some decision. Fighting was going on a few paces away;
+fortunately, all were raging around a single point, the door of the
+wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier, to one single soldier,
+to turn the corner of the house, or to attack him on the flank, all was
+over.
+
+Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the barricade at
+one side of him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of the
+last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would have liked to pierce
+a hole there with his eyes.
+
+By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony began
+to assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had been a power
+of glance which made the thing desired unfold. A few paces distant he
+perceived, at the base of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and
+watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones
+which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a level
+with the soil. This grating, made of stout, transverse bars, was about
+two feet square. The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been
+torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.
+
+Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture, something like
+the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted
+forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination.
+To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who
+was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this
+burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that
+sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon
+which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind
+him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below the
+surface,--all this was executed like that which one does in dreams, with
+the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle; this took only a
+few minutes.
+
+Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious, in a
+sort of long, subterranean corridor.
+
+There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.
+
+The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling from the
+wall into the convent recurred to him. Only, what he was carrying to-day
+was not Cosette; it was Marius. He could barely hear the formidable
+tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA
+
+Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this without
+metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With
+no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no
+reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its
+intestine? The sewer.
+
+Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the
+valuations of special science have set upon it.
+
+Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most
+fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure.
+The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not
+a Chinese peasant--it is Eckberg who says this,--goes to town without
+bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two
+full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the
+earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese
+wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable
+in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most
+mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment
+of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our
+manure, on the other hand, is gold.
+
+What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.
+
+Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung
+of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element
+of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human and
+animal manure which the world wastes, restored to the land instead of
+being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.
+
+Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which
+jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street
+department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the
+pavements hide from you,--do you know what they are? They are the meadow
+in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game,
+they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the
+evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the
+bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are
+health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that mysterious
+creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.
+
+Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from
+it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.
+
+You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me
+ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.
+
+Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit of
+half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths of her
+rivers. Note this: with five hundred millions we could pay one quarter
+of the expenses of our budget. The cleverness of man is such that he
+prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter. It is
+the very substance of the people that is carried off, here drop by
+drop, there wave after wave, the wretched outpour of our sewers into the
+rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into the ocean. Every
+hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs. From this spring two
+results, the land impoverished, and the water tainted. Hunger arising
+from the furrow, and disease from the stream.
+
+It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames is
+poisoning London.
+
+So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late, to
+transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the last bridge.
+
+A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices, sucking up
+and driving back, a system of elementary drainage, simple as the lungs
+of a man, and which is already in full working order in many communities
+in England, would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields into
+our cities, and to send back to the fields the rich water of the cities,
+and this easy exchange, the simplest in the world, would retain among us
+the five hundred millions now thrown away. People are thinking of other
+things.
+
+The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good.
+The intention is good, the result is melancholy. Thinking to purge the
+city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. A sewer
+is a mistake. When drainage, everywhere, with its double function,
+restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a
+simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined with the data
+of a now social economy, the product of the earth will be increased
+tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly lightened. Add the
+suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.
+
+In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river, and leakage
+takes place. Leakage is the word. Europe is being ruined in this manner
+by exhaustion.
+
+As for France, we have just cited its figures. Now, Paris contains one
+twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian guano being
+the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value the loss on
+the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half milliard which
+France annually rejects. These twenty-five millions, employed in
+assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris. The
+city spends them in sewers. So that we may say that Paris's great
+prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its
+stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence,
+is its sewer system.
+
+It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political economy,
+we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost in the gulfs the
+well-being of all. There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public
+fortune.
+
+Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: Paris is
+a spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged
+capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that
+metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of
+impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that
+nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of
+Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his
+shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.
+
+Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.
+
+Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris
+is itself an imitator.
+
+These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel; this is no
+young folly. The ancients did like the moderns. "The sewers of Rome,"
+says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant."
+When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted
+Italy, and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she poured in Sicily,
+then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.
+This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city and the universe. Urbi
+et orbi. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.
+
+Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.
+
+Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar to
+intelligent towns.
+
+For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we have
+just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris
+of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares, its
+blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire and
+minus the human form.
+
+For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there
+is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity; and,
+if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of might,
+Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels, it also
+contains Lutetia, the city of mud.
+
+However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of
+Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity
+by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness.
+
+The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would
+present the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge has no more
+partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six
+leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. Not to
+mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar, not to mention
+the inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes, without reckoning the vast
+tubular system for the distribution of fresh water which ends in the
+pillar fountains, the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work
+under the two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding
+thread.
+
+There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product to
+which Paris has given birth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER
+
+Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean
+net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks
+a species of large branch grafted on the river. On the right bank, the
+belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary ducts will
+form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.
+
+This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right angle, which
+is the customary angle of this species of subterranean ramifications,
+being very rare in vegetation.
+
+A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can be formed
+by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental alphabet,
+as intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows, and the
+misshapen letters should be welded one to another in apparent confusion,
+and as at haphazard, now by their angles, again by their extremities.
+
+Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages, in the Lower
+Empire and in the Orient of old. The masses regarded these beds of
+decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death, with a fear that was
+almost religious. The vermin ditch of Benares is no less conducive to
+giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according
+to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh. It was from the
+sewer of Munster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it
+was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the
+veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused his false sun to emerge.
+
+The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers. The
+Germoniae[58] narrated Rome. The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and
+formidable thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum.
+Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought,
+theft, all that human laws persecute or have persecuted, is hidden in
+that hole; the maillotins in the fourteenth century, the tire-laine of
+the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin's illuminated in
+the seventeenth, the chauffeurs [brigands] in the eighteenth. A
+hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the
+pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had
+its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as the
+adjunct of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither,
+fierce and sly, through the Maubuee outlet, as into a bed-chamber.
+
+It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset,
+[Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene of
+their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night the culvert
+of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of
+souvenirs. All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary
+corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are
+breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.
+
+The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and
+of all attempts. Political economy therein spies a detritus, social
+philosophy there beholds a residuum.
+
+The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges
+and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but
+there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at
+least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor,
+that it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask
+of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its
+strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated
+by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor. All the
+uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this
+trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends. They are
+there engulfed, but they display themselves there. This mixture is a
+confession. There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is
+possible, filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout
+all illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really
+exists, presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end.
+There, the bottom of a bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle
+tells a tale of domesticity; there the core of an apple which has
+entertained literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more; the
+effigy on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris, Caiphas'
+spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes from
+the gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end of the
+suicide. A livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles which
+danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has pronounced
+judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which was formerly
+Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization, it is equivalent
+to addressing each other as thou. All which was formerly rouged, is
+washed free. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It tells
+everything.
+
+The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul. When one has
+passed one's time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the great airs
+which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity, human justice,
+professional probity, the austerities of situation, incorruptible robes
+all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer and to behold the mire which
+befits it.
+
+This is instructive at the same time. We have just said that history
+passes through the sewer. The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there,
+drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations,
+political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage
+of civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the
+thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous
+penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for
+an apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI. is there with
+Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,
+Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is
+there, Hebert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying
+to make the traces of their actions disappear. Beneath these vaults one
+hears the brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness
+of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.
+There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.
+
+The social observer should enter these shadows. They form a part of
+his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything
+desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is
+useless. What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful
+side. Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does
+not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration of things
+which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish, it recognizes
+all. It reconstructs the purple from the rag, and the woman from the
+scrap of her dress. From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from
+mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora
+or the jug. By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it
+recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse
+from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It re-discovers in what remains that
+which has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace,
+the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel, trials
+undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth, the turn which
+characters have taken as they became abased, the trace of prostitution
+in souls of which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the
+vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's elbowing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--BRUNESEAU
+
+The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth
+century, Henri II. attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years
+ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself,
+and fared as best it might.
+
+Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision,
+and to gropings. It was tolerably stupid for a long time. Later on, '89
+showed how understanding comes to cities. But in the good, old times,
+the capital had not much head. It did not know how to manage its own
+affairs either morally or materially, and could not sweep out filth
+any better than it could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle,
+everything raised a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory to
+every itinerary. One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer
+than one could understand one's position in the city; above the
+unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues
+there reigned the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.
+
+Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though this
+misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. There
+occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At times, that
+stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool flowed back into
+the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth.
+These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they
+were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed indignant
+at the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that the filth should
+return. Drive it out better.
+
+The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians of
+the age of eighty. The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des
+Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue
+Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees,
+the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue
+Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt,
+through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through
+the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue des
+Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the
+South, through the vent of the Seine, performing its functions in
+inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and
+the Rue des Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and
+nine metres, a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had
+lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the
+King. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where
+it rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the
+water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it
+spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.
+
+At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a
+mysterious place. Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this case its
+evil renown reached the verge of the terrible. Paris knew, in a confused
+way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. People talked of it as
+of that monstrous bed of Thebes in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long
+feet in length, and which might have served Behemoth for a bathtub.
+The great boots of the sewermen never ventured further than certain
+well-known points. We were then very near the epoch when the scavenger's
+carts, from the summit of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis
+de Crequi, discharged their loads directly into the sewer. As for
+cleaning out,--that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which
+encumbered rather than swept away. Rome left some poetry to her sewer,
+and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the
+Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. The
+Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The goblin
+was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the
+corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie;
+Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the great
+hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in
+the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the Gallant Messenger.
+The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for
+the pestilences which had their source there; with its grating of iron,
+with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a dragon's maw
+in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men. The popular
+imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with some indescribably
+hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom. The sewer
+was the lower world. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not
+even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet
+into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss--who
+would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, some one did present
+himself. The cess-pool had its Christopher Columbus.
+
+One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor
+made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decres or Cretet or
+other, came to the master's intimate levee. In the Carrousel there was
+audible the clanking of swords of all those extraordinary soldiers of
+the great Republic, and of the great Empire; then Napoleon's door was
+blocked with heroes; men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the
+Adige, and from the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau,
+of Hoche, of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of
+Mayence, the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had
+looked down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered
+with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at anchor
+in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi,
+others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua, others had
+preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. The whole army of that
+day was present there, in the court-yard of the Tuileries, represented
+by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon in repose; and that
+was the splendid epoch when the grand army had Marengo behind it and
+Austerlitz before it.--"Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to
+Napoleon, "yesterday I saw the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What
+man is that?" said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He
+wants to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of
+Paris."
+
+This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--BRUNESEAU.
+
+The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle
+against pestilence and suffocation. It was, at the same time, a voyage
+of discovery. One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent
+workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with
+regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged
+to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of official
+style. The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely
+rudimentary. Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of
+that subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused
+to go any further. The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the
+necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same
+time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings
+and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the
+currents at the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds
+of the divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal
+sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain, and the
+width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom, in order
+to determine the arrangements with regard to the level of each
+water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on the soil of the
+street. They advanced with toil. The lanterns pined away in the foul
+atmosphere. From time to time, a fainting sewerman was carried out.
+At certain points, there were precipices. The soil had given away, the
+pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a bottomless well;
+they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly; they had great
+difficulty in getting him out again. On the advice of Fourcroy, they
+lighted large cages filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time,
+in spots which had been sufficiently disinfected. In some places, the
+wall was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors; the
+very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.
+
+Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill. At the point of
+separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered
+upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone indicated the
+limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. with visiting the
+subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of
+the sixteenth century on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of
+the seventeenth century once more in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue
+Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of
+the eighteenth in the western section of the collecting canal, walled
+and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that
+of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt
+sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of
+Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris, an
+advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first valet
+de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.
+
+Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought they
+recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the very sewer
+itself. Hideous place! An iron neck-collar was hanging in one of these
+cells. They walled them all up. Some of their finds were singular; among
+others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from the
+Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with
+the famous and indisputable apparition of the devil in the Rue des
+Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil
+had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.
+
+Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion,
+a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration of all
+connoisseurs. Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came to handle
+with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and
+silver, precious stones, coins. If a giant had filtered this cesspool,
+he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. At the point
+where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
+separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on
+one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a wolf
+with a tiara on his head.
+
+The most surprising encounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer.
+This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but
+the hinges remained. From one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless
+rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there
+in the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart. Bruneseau
+held his lantern close to this rag and examined it. It was of very fine
+batiste, and in one of the corners, less frayed than the rest, they
+made out a heraldic coronet and embroidered above these seven letters:
+LAVBESP. The crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters
+signified Laubespine. They recognized the fact, that what they had
+before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat. Marat in his
+youth had had amorous intrigues. This was when he was a member of the
+household of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the
+Stables. From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great
+lady, he had retained this sheet. As a waif or a souvenir. At his death,
+as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house,
+they buried him in it. Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb in
+that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people had enjoyed
+voluptuousness. Bruneseau passed on. They left that rag where it hung;
+they did not put the finishing touch to it. Did this arise from scorn
+or from respect? Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there
+sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it. Besides, the
+things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which they select. In
+short, the relic was a strange one. A Marquise had slept in it; Marat
+had rotted in it; it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats
+of the sewer. This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have
+joyfully sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed
+gaze of Dante.
+
+The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris lasted
+seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew,
+directed, and completed considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the arch
+of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating new lines, he pushed the
+sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of
+the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the
+Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue
+du Mail, under the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812,
+under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same
+time, he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful. In
+the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his
+son-in-law Nargaud.
+
+It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society
+cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. There
+was that much clean, at all events.
+
+Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies,
+jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid,
+wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements
+and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was, retrospectively viewed, the
+antique sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings,
+of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum,
+blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby
+sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness;
+nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive
+apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a
+titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind
+mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has
+been splendor.
+
+This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--PRESENT PROGRESS
+
+To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes
+the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable." It
+is proper and grayish; laid out by rule and line; one might almost say
+as though it came out of a bandbox. It resembles a tradesman who has
+become a councillor of state. One can almost see distinctly there. The
+mire there comports itself with decency. At first, one might readily
+mistake it for one of those subterranean corridors, which were so common
+in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes, in
+those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." The present
+sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical
+rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have
+taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of
+that long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de
+Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer. However, if the geometrical
+line is in place anywhere, it is certainly in the drainage trench of
+a great city. There, everything should be subordinated to the shortest
+road. The sewer has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. The
+very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject, no longer
+are wanting in respect towards it. The words which characterize it in
+administrative language are sonorous and dignified. What used to be
+called a gut is now called a gallery; what used to be called a hole is
+now called a surveying orifice. Villon would no longer meet with his
+ancient temporary provisional lodging. This net-work of cellars has its
+immemorial population of prowlers, rodents, swarming in greater numbers
+than ever; from time to time, an aged and veteran rat risks his head at
+the window of the sewer and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin
+grow tame, so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace. The
+cesspool no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity. The rain,
+which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it. Nevertheless, do
+not trust yourself too much to it. Miasmas still inhabit it. It is
+more hypocritical than irreproachable. The prefecture of police and
+the commission of health have done their best. But, in spite of all the
+processes of disinfection, it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like
+Tartuffe after confession.
+
+Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage
+which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view,
+Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the Augean stables, it is
+certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.
+
+It is more than progress; it is transmutation. Between the ancient
+and the present sewer there is a revolution. What has effected this
+revolution?
+
+The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned,
+Bruneseau.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--FUTURE PROGRESS
+
+The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last
+ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a
+termination, any more than they have been able to finish Paris. The
+sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the growth of Paris.
+Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a
+thousand antennae, which expands below as the city expands above. Every
+time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The
+old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand three hundred
+metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this respect on the
+first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall
+shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and
+prosecuted; Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight
+hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred
+and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six;
+Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of
+1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present
+government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time,
+two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres;
+sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris. An obscure
+ramification ever at work; a construction which is immense and ignored.
+
+As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day
+more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is
+difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts which
+have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of relative
+perfection in which it now is. It was with great difficulty that the
+ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten years of
+the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded in
+perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed previous to 1806.
+All sorts of obstacles hindered this operation, some peculiar to the
+soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the laborious population
+of Paris. Paris is built upon a soil which is singularly rebellious to
+the pick, the hoe, the bore, and to human manipulation. There is nothing
+more difficult to pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation
+upon which is superposed the marvellous historical formation called
+Paris; as soon as work in any form whatsoever is begun and adventures
+upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. There
+are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires
+which special science calls moutardes.[59] The pick advances laboriously
+through the calcareous layers alternating with very slender threads of
+clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the
+contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans. Sometimes a rivulet suddenly
+bursts through a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers;
+or a layer of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a
+cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass. Quite
+recently, at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting
+sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or
+emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal, water
+suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond
+the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send a diver to
+explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow entrance of the
+grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty that it was stopped
+up. Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a considerable distance
+from the river, as for instance, at Belleville, Grand-Rue and Lumiere
+Passage, quicksands are encountered in which one sticks fast, and in
+which a man sinks visibly. Add suffocation by miasmas, burial by slides,
+and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the typhus, with which the
+workmen become slowly impregnated. In our own day, after having
+excavated the gallery of Clichy, with a banquette to receive the
+principal water-conduit of Ourcq, a piece of work which was executed in
+a trench ten metres deep; after having, in the midst of land-slides, and
+with the aid of excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted
+the Bievre from the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as the Seine; after
+having, in order to deliver Paris from the floods of Montmartre and in
+order to provide an outlet for that river-like pool nine hectares in
+extent, which crouched near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having, let
+us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche to
+the road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night, at a
+depth of eleven metres; after having--a thing heretofore unseen--made a
+subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench, six
+metres below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. After having
+vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters of the city, from
+the Rue Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine, after having
+freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard from inundations of rain by means
+of the branch of the Arbalete, after having built the Saint-Georges
+sewer, on rock and concrete in the fluid sands, after having directed
+the formidable lowering of the flooring of the vault timber in the
+Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch, Duleau the engineer died. There are no
+bulletins for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful,
+nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.
+
+The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are to-day.
+Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera was required to
+bring about the vast reconstruction which took place later on. It is
+surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, a part of the belt sewer,
+called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered
+to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was only in 1821 that the city
+of Paris found in its pocket the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty
+francs and six centimes required for covering this mass of filth. The
+three absorbing wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mande, with
+their discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their
+depuratory branches, only date from 1836. The intestinal sewer of Paris
+has been made over anew, and, as we have said, it has been extended more
+than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.
+
+Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of
+June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer.
+A very great number of streets which are now convex were then sunken
+causeways. At the end of a slope, where the tributaries of a street or
+cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large, square gratings
+with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps of the throng,
+gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and caused horses to fall.
+The official language of the Roads and Bridges gave to these gratings
+the expressive name of Cassis.[60]
+
+In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue
+Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue
+Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,
+the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches,
+the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame
+des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the
+Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic
+sewer still cynically displayed its maw. It consisted of enormous
+voids of stone catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone posts, with
+monumental effrontery.
+
+Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated in
+1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms. After Bruneseau, on the 1st
+of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. Between
+1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average, seven hundred and
+fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of
+galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small stones, with
+hydraulic mortar which hardens under water, on a cement foundation. At
+two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the
+present day represent forty-eight millions.
+
+In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated at the
+beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected with that
+immense question: the sewers of Paris.
+
+Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air.
+The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground, but
+already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green clay
+situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer may
+be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference; a
+multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine, the
+Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the
+Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. The sheet of water
+is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first place and next from the
+earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the
+miasms of the cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence
+this bad breath. The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has been
+scientifically proved, is purer than the air taken from above Paris. In
+a given time, with the aid of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and
+as light increases, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the
+sheet of air; that is to say, to wash the sewer. The reader knows, that
+by "washing the sewer" we mean: the restitution of the filth to the
+earth; the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields.
+Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a
+diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour,
+the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the
+Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.
+
+We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease
+of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The
+popular instinct has never been deceived in it. The occupation of
+sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the
+people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror
+and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary to induce
+a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool
+cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form:
+"to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of
+hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with
+terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions
+of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found
+vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of
+Marat.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES
+
+It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
+
+Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean,
+the diver may disappear there.
+
+The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city,
+Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye,
+in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed
+from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from
+tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of
+the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of
+the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute
+obscurity.
+
+An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door
+of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that
+sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He
+remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.
+The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial
+goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery. Adorable
+ambuscades of providence!
+
+Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
+whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a
+dead corpse.
+
+His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sudden, he could see
+nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf.
+He no longer heard anything. The frantic storm of murder which had been
+let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the
+thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said,
+otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the
+depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;
+but that was enough. He extended one arm and then the other, touched
+the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he
+slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put
+forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that
+the paving continued. A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in
+which he stood.
+
+After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind. A little light
+fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes
+became accustomed to this cavern. He began to distinguish something. The
+passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the
+situation--was walled in behind him. It was one of those blind alleys,
+which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was
+another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten
+or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast
+a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer. Beyond,
+the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an
+entrance into it appeared like an engulfment. A man could, however,
+plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do. Haste was
+even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he
+had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of
+the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance. They also might
+descend into that well and search it. There was not a minute to be lost.
+He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,--that is
+the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set
+out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom.
+
+The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils
+of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance. After
+the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and
+traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle
+of hell into another.
+
+When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem
+presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he
+encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which
+should he take? Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he
+to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which
+we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its
+slope. To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.
+
+This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.
+
+He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that
+if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would
+arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine
+between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would
+make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot
+in Paris. Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection
+of streets. Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men
+emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to
+arms of the neighboring post of guards. Thus they would be seized before
+they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth,
+to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence
+for the outcome.
+
+He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.
+
+When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an
+air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more,
+and he became blind again. Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as
+possible. Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's
+feet dragged behind him. He held both these arms with one hand, and
+groped along the wall with the other. Marius' cheek touched his, and
+clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius
+trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes. But a
+humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched,
+indicated respiration, and consequently, life. The passage along which
+Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean
+Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the
+preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little
+torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall
+in order not to have his feet in the water.
+
+Thus he proceeded in the gloom. He resembled the beings of the night
+groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.
+
+Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
+emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his
+eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned
+to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall
+which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing. The
+pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends
+by finding God there.
+
+It was not easy to direct his course.
+
+The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets
+which lie above it. There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred
+streets. Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
+branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at
+that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven
+leagues. We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the
+special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
+leagues in extent.
+
+Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder. He thought that he was
+beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under
+the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis
+XIII. and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand
+Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the
+ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer,
+whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie
+the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has
+never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended
+at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was
+entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself abound. The Montmartre
+sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the ancient network.
+Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets
+whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of a multitude of
+parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but he had before him more
+than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--for
+they are streets--presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation
+point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of
+Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs
+under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far
+as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the
+curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which
+are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the
+Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and
+proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand crypt of
+the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every direction; and
+lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, without
+counting little ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer,
+which alone could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be
+safe.
+
+Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he
+would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was
+not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the
+ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal
+even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and
+mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under
+his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone
+filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred
+francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits
+materiaux--small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.
+
+He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing
+nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.
+
+By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom
+which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This
+aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.
+It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean
+Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing
+it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How
+was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time?
+would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow
+itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some
+unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable
+and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of
+hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two
+skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these
+questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris
+form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.
+
+All at once, he had a surprise. At the most unforeseen moment, and
+without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he
+was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against
+his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now
+descending. Why? Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine? This
+danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.
+He continued to advance.
+
+It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding. The ridge which
+the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its water-sheds
+into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this
+ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very
+capricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of
+separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue
+Michelle-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and
+in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point
+that Jean Valjean had reached. He was directing his course towards the
+belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know it.
+
+Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if
+he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the
+passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route,
+rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind
+alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say,
+the outlet. Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
+the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.
+
+At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath
+the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had
+suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and
+normal Paris. Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
+but continuous. It was the rumbling of vehicles.
+
+He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the
+calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought of
+rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding Marius.
+The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth reassured
+him.
+
+All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him. It was outlined on
+a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the
+flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his
+right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied,
+he turned round.
+
+Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed
+through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense
+obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying
+him.
+
+It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.
+
+In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a
+confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--EXPLANATION
+
+On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been
+ordered. It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for
+refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General
+Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which
+exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented
+above by the army and below by the police. Three squads of agents and
+sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris, the first on the
+right bank, the second on the left bank, the third in the city. The
+agents of police were armed with carabines, with bludgeons, swords and
+poignards.
+
+That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the lantern
+of the patrol of the right bank.
+
+This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three blind
+alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were passing
+their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean had
+encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery, had perceived
+that it was narrower than the principal passage and had not penetrated
+thither. He had passed on. The police, on emerging from the gallery
+du Cadran, had fancied that they heard the sound of footsteps in the
+direction of the belt sewer. They were, in fact, the steps of Jean
+Valjean. The sergeant in command of the patrol had raised his lantern,
+and the squad had begun to gaze into the mist in the direction whence
+the sound proceeded.
+
+This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.
+
+Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. It
+was light and he was shadow. He was very far off, and mingled with the
+darkness of the place. He hugged the wall and halted. Moreover, he did
+not understand what it was that was moving behind him. The lack of sleep
+and food, and his emotions had caused him also to pass into the state of
+a visionary. He beheld a gleam, and around that gleam, forms. What was
+it? He did not comprehend.
+
+Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.
+
+The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked and saw
+nothing. They held a consultation.
+
+There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre sewer a sort
+of cross-roads called de service, which was afterwards suppressed, on
+account of the little interior lake which formed there, swallowing up
+the torrent of rain in heavy storms. The patrol could form a cluster in
+this open space. Jean Valjean saw these spectres form a sort of circle.
+These bull-dogs' heads approached each other closely and whispered
+together.
+
+The result of this council held by the watch dogs was, that they had
+been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that it was useless to get
+entangled in the belt sewer, that it would only be a waste of time,
+but that they ought to hasten towards Saint-Merry; that if there
+was anything to do, and any "bousingot" to track out, it was in that
+quarter.
+
+From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults. In 1832, the word
+bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin, which had become
+obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since rendered such excellent
+service.
+
+The sergeant gave orders to turn to the left, towards the watershed of
+the Seine.
+
+If it had occurred to them to separate into two squads, and to go in
+both directions, Jean Valjean would have been captured. All hung on
+that thread. It is probable that the instructions of the prefecture,
+foreseeing a possibility of combat and insurgents in force, had
+forbidden the patrol to part company. The patrol resumed its march,
+leaving Jean Valjean behind it. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean
+perceived nothing, except the eclipse of the lantern which suddenly
+wheeled round.
+
+Before taking his departure, the Sergeant, in order to acquit his
+policeman's conscience, discharged his gun in the direction of Jean
+Valjean. The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt, like the
+rumbling of that titanic entrail. A bit of plaster which fell into the
+stream and splashed up the water a few paces away from Jean Valjean,
+warned him that the ball had struck the arch over his head.
+
+Slow and measured steps resounded for some time on the timber work,
+gradually dying away as they retreated to a greater distance; the group
+of black forms vanished, a glimmer of light oscillated and floated,
+communicating to the vault a reddish glow which grew fainter, then
+disappeared; the silence became profound once more, the obscurity became
+complete, blindness and deafness resumed possession of the shadows;
+and Jean Valjean, not daring to stir as yet, remained for a long time
+leaning with his back against the wall, with straining ears, and dilated
+pupils, watching the disappearance of that phantom patrol.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE "SPUN" MAN
+
+This justice must be rendered to the police of that period, that even in
+the most serious public junctures, it imperturbably fulfilled its duties
+connected with the sewers and surveillance. A revolt was, in its eyes,
+no pretext for allowing malefactors to take the bit in their own mouths,
+and for neglecting society for the reason that the government was in
+peril. The ordinary service was performed correctly in company with the
+extraordinary service, and was not troubled by the latter. In the midst
+of an incalculable political event already begun, under the pressure of
+a possible revolution, a police agent, "spun" a thief without allowing
+himself to be distracted by insurrection and barricades.
+
+It was something precisely parallel which took place on the afternoon
+of the 6th of June on the banks of the Seine, on the slope of the right
+shore, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides.
+
+There is no longer any bank there now. The aspect of the locality has
+changed.
+
+On that bank, two men, separated by a certain distance, seemed to be
+watching each other while mutually avoiding each other. The one who was
+in advance was trying to get away, the one in the rear was trying to
+overtake the other.
+
+It was like a game of checkers played at a distance and in silence.
+Neither seemed to be in any hurry, and both walked slowly, as though
+each of them feared by too much haste to make his partner redouble his
+pace.
+
+One would have said that it was an appetite following its prey, and
+purposely without wearing the air of doing so. The prey was crafty and
+on its guard.
+
+The proper relations between the hunted pole-cat and the hunting dog
+were observed. The one who was seeking to escape had an insignificant
+mien and not an impressive appearance; the one who was seeking to seize
+him was rude of aspect, and must have been rude to encounter.
+
+The first, conscious that he was the more feeble, avoided the second;
+but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one who
+could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the sombre
+hostility of flight, and all the menace that fear contains.
+
+The shore was deserted; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman nor
+a lighter-man was in the skiffs which were moored here and there.
+
+It was not easy to see these two men, except from the quay opposite, and
+to any person who had scrutinized them at that distance, the man who was
+in advance would have appeared like a bristling, tattered, and equivocal
+being, who was uneasy and trembling beneath a ragged blouse, and the
+other like a classic and official personage, wearing the frock-coat of
+authority buttoned to the chin.
+
+Perchance the reader might recognize these two men, if he were to see
+them closer at hand.
+
+What was the object of the second man?
+
+Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.
+
+When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order
+to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole
+question lies in the color. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be
+dressed in red is disagreeable.
+
+There is a purple from below.
+
+It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this sort which
+the first man is desirous of shirking.
+
+If the other allowed him to walk on, and had not seized him as yet, it
+was, judging from all appearances, in the hope of seeing him lead up to
+some significant meeting-place and to some group worth catching. This
+delicate operation is called "spinning."
+
+What renders this conjecture entirely probable is that the buttoned-up
+man, on catching sight from the shore of a hackney-coach on the quay
+as it was passing along empty, made a sign to the driver; the driver
+understood, evidently recognized the person with whom he had to deal,
+turned about and began to follow the two men at the top of the quay,
+at a foot-pace. This was not observed by the slouching and tattered
+personage who was in advance.
+
+The hackney-coach rolled along the trees of the Champs-Elysees. The
+bust of the driver, whip in hand, could be seen moving along above the
+parapet.
+
+One of the secret instructions of the police authorities to their agents
+contains this article: "Always have on hand a hackney-coach, in case of
+emergency."
+
+While these two men were manoeuvring, each on his own side, with
+irreproachable strategy, they approached an inclined plane on the quay
+which descended to the shore, and which permitted cab-drivers arriving
+from Passy to come to the river and water their horses. This inclined
+plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry; horses may die
+of thirst, but the eye is gratified.
+
+It is probable that the man in the blouse had intended to ascend
+this inclined plane, with a view to making his escape into the
+Champs-Elysees, a place ornamented with trees, but, in return, much
+infested with policemen, and where the other could easily exercise
+violence.
+
+This point on the quay is not very far distant from the house brought to
+Paris from Moret in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and designated as "the house
+of Francois I." A guard house is situated close at hand.
+
+To the great surprise of his watcher, the man who was being tracked did
+not mount by the inclined plane for watering. He continued to advance
+along the quay on the shore.
+
+His position was visibly becoming critical.
+
+What was he intending to do, if not to throw himself into the Seine?
+
+Henceforth, there existed no means of ascending to the quay; there was
+no other inclined plane, no staircase; and they were near the spot,
+marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont de Jena, where the
+bank, growing constantly narrower, ended in a slender tongue, and
+was lost in the water. There he would inevitably find himself blocked
+between the perpendicular wall on his right, the river on his left and
+in front of him, and the authorities on his heels.
+
+It is true that this termination of the shore was hidden from sight by a
+heap of rubbish six or seven feet in height, produced by some demolition
+or other. But did this man hope to conceal himself effectually behind
+that heap of rubbish, which one need but skirt? The expedient would
+have been puerile. He certainly was not dreaming of such a thing. The
+innocence of thieves does not extend to that point.
+
+The pile of rubbish formed a sort of projection at the water's edge,
+which was prolonged in a promontory as far as the wall of the quay.
+
+The man who was being followed arrived at this little mound and went
+round it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.
+
+The latter, as he did not see, could not be seen; he took advantage of
+this fact to abandon all dissimulation and to walk very rapidly. In a
+few moments, he had reached the rubbish heap and passed round it. There
+he halted in sheer amazement. The man whom he had been pursuing was no
+longer there.
+
+Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.
+
+The shore, beginning with the rubbish heap, was only about thirty paces
+long, then it plunged into the water which beat against the wall of the
+quay. The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine without
+being seen by the man who was following him. What had become of him?
+
+The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the extremity of the shore,
+and remained there in thought for a moment, his fists clenched, his eyes
+searching. All at once he smote his brow. He had just perceived, at the
+point where the land came to an end and the water began, a large iron
+grating, low, arched, garnished with a heavy lock and with three massive
+hinges. This grating, a sort of door pierced at the base of the quay,
+opened on the river as well as on the shore. A blackish stream passed
+under it. This stream discharged into the Seine.
+
+Beyond the heavy, rusty iron bars, a sort of dark and vaulted corridor
+could be descried. The man folded his arms and stared at the grating
+with an air of reproach.
+
+As this gaze did not suffice, he tried to thrust it aside; he shook
+it, it resisted solidly. It is probable that it had just been opened,
+although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance in so rusty a
+grating; but it is certain that it had been closed again. This indicated
+that the man before whom that door had just opened had not a hook but a
+key.
+
+This evidence suddenly burst upon the mind of the man who was trying to
+move the grating, and evoked from him this indignant ejaculation:
+
+"That is too much! A government key!"
+
+Then, immediately regaining his composure, he expressed a whole world
+of interior ideas by this outburst of monosyllables accented almost
+ironically: "Come! Come! Come! Come!"
+
+That said, and in the hope of something or other, either that he should
+see the man emerge or other men enter, he posted himself on the watch
+behind a heap of rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.
+
+The hackney-coach, which regulated all its movements on his, had, in its
+turn, halted on the quay above him, close to the parapet. The coachman,
+foreseeing a prolonged wait, encased his horses' muzzles in the bag of
+oats which is damp at the bottom, and which is so familiar to Parisians,
+to whom, be it said in parenthesis, the Government sometimes applies it.
+The rare passers-by on the Pont de Jena turned their heads, before they
+pursued their way, to take a momentary glance at these two motionless
+items in the landscape, the man on the shore, the carriage on the quay.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS
+
+Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.
+
+This march became more and more laborious. The level of these vaults
+varies; the average height is about five feet, six inches, and has been
+calculated for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend
+over, in order not to strike Marius against the vault; at every step
+he had to bend, then to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall. The
+moisture of the stones, and the viscous nature of the timber framework
+furnished but poor supports to which to cling, either for hand or foot.
+He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city. The intermittent
+gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were
+so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all
+the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean Valjean was both
+hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea, was a
+place full of water where a man cannot drink. His strength, which was
+prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased
+by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way,
+nevertheless. Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his strength
+decreased, it made the weight of his burden increase. Marius, who was,
+perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert bodies weigh. Jean Valjean
+held him in such a manner that his chest was not oppressed, and so that
+respiration could proceed as well as possible. Between his legs he felt
+the rapid gliding of the rats. One of them was frightened to such a
+degree that he bit him. From time to time, a breath of fresh air reached
+him through the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated
+him.
+
+It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the
+belt-sewer.
+
+He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening. He found himself,
+all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach
+the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. The
+Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.
+
+At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other
+subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence, and that of the
+Abattoir, form a square. Between these four ways, a less sagacious man
+would have remained undecided. Jean Valjean selected the broadest, that
+is to say, the belt-sewer. But here the question again came up--should
+he descend or ascend? He thought that the situation required haste, and
+that he must now gain the Seine at any risk. In other terms, he must
+descend. He turned to the left.
+
+It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose that the
+belt-sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction of Bercy, the other
+towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the subterranean
+girdle of the Paris on the right bank. The Grand Sewer, which is, it
+must be remembered, nothing else than the old brook of Menilmontant,
+terminates, if one ascends it, in a blind sack, that is to say, at its
+ancient point of departure which was its source, at the foot of the
+knoll of Menilmontant. There is no direct communication with the
+branch which collects the waters of Paris beginning with the Quartier
+Popincourt, and which falls into the Seine through the Amelot sewer
+above the ancient Isle Louviers. This branch, which completes the
+collecting sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Menilmontant
+itself, by a pile which marks the dividing point of the waters, between
+upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery he
+would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, and broken down with
+fatigue, and in an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a wall. He would
+have been lost.
+
+In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way, and entering
+the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition that he did not
+hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour Boucherat, and by
+taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles gut on the left,
+then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian gallery, he
+might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided that he did
+not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the Bastille, he might
+have attained the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But in order
+to do this, he must have been thoroughly familiar with the enormous
+madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications and in all its openings.
+Now, we must again insist that he knew nothing of that frightful drain
+which he was traversing; and had any one asked him in what he was, he
+would have answered: "In the night."
+
+His instinct served him well. To descend was, in fact, possible safety.
+
+He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch out in the
+form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges and the
+long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussee d'Antin.
+
+A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine branch,
+he halted. He was extremely weary. A passably large air-hole, probably
+the man-hole in the Rue d'Anjou, furnished a light that was almost
+vivid. Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement which a brother
+would exercise towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the
+banquette of the sewer. Marius' blood-stained face appeared under the
+wan light of the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. His
+eyes were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples like a
+painter's brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp and dead. A
+clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; his limbs were
+cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of his mouth; his shirt had
+thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth of his coat was chafing the
+yawning gashes in the living flesh. Jean Valjean, pushing aside the
+garments with the tips of his fingers, laid his hand upon Marius'
+breast; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean tore up his shirt,
+bandaged the young man's wounds as well as he was able and stopped the
+flowing blood; then bending over Marius, who still lay unconscious
+and almost without breathing, in that half light, he gazed at him with
+inexpressible hatred.
+
+On disarranging Marius' garments, he had found two things in his
+pockets, the roll which had been forgotten there on the preceding
+evening, and Marius' pocketbook. He ate the roll and opened the
+pocketbook. On the first page he found the four lines written by Marius.
+The reader will recall them:
+
+"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.
+Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."
+
+Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole, and
+remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought, repeating in a low
+tone: "Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6, Monsieur Gillenormand." He
+replaced the pocketbook in Marius' pocket. He had eaten, his strength
+had returned to him; he took Marius up once more upon his back, placed
+the latter's head carefully on his right shoulder, and resumed his
+descent of the sewer.
+
+The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley of
+Menilmontant, is about two leagues long. It is paved throughout a
+notable portion of its extent.
+
+This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which we are
+illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean march, Jean
+Valjean himself did not possess. Nothing told him what zone of the city
+he was traversing, nor what way he had made. Only the growing pallor of
+the pools of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to
+him that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement, and that the day
+would soon be over; and the rolling of vehicles overhead, having become
+intermittent instead of continuous, then having almost ceased, he
+concluded that he was no longer under central Paris, and that he
+was approaching some solitary region, in the vicinity of the outer
+boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. Where there are fewer houses and
+streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes. The gloom deepened around Jean
+Valjean. Nevertheless, he continued to advance, groping his way in the
+dark.
+
+Suddenly this darkness became terrible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS
+WHICH IS TREACHEROUS
+
+He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a
+pavement under his feet, but only mud.
+
+It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a
+man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on the
+beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past,
+he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is
+like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is
+bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he takes,
+as soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water. The
+eye, however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is smooth and
+tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes the
+soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little
+cloud of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the
+passer-by.
+
+The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors
+to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is
+conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every
+step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three
+inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get his
+bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared.
+The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries
+to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than
+before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it
+and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings
+himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with
+indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a
+quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which
+neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he
+have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late,
+the sand is above his knees.
+
+He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually
+gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if
+the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero in the neighborhood,
+all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is condemned to that
+terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible
+to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come
+to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which
+drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at
+every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air
+of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces
+a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the
+horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on
+the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly
+and sing, the sun and the sky. This engulfment is the sepulchre which
+assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the earth towards
+a living man. Each minute is an inexorable layer-out of the dead. The
+wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down, to climb; every movement
+that he makes buries him deeper; he straightens himself up, he sinks; he
+feels that he is being swallowed up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the
+clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in the sand up
+to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now.
+He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the
+beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows
+in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically;
+the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand
+reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries
+aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand
+closes them, night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above
+the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and
+disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man.
+
+Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is
+swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck
+elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man. The earth,
+permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the
+guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to
+these treacheries.
+
+This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also
+possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.
+
+Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain
+of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.
+
+The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were
+particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in
+the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,
+having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of this
+sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a
+certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a
+fontis, in the special tongue. What is a fontis? It is the quicksands of
+the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of the earth; it is
+the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked soil is in a
+state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in suspension in soft
+medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The depth is sometimes very
+great. Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. If the
+water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swallowed up; if earth
+predominates, death is slow.
+
+Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the
+earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool? Instead of
+the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,
+those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried
+in the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable
+passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,--instead
+of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb
+already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation
+by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and
+clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;
+slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the
+hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's
+teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that
+enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head!
+
+Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems
+his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in
+shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb
+attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.
+But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme
+floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is
+petty, ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is
+permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.
+To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going
+through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows
+enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and
+the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre
+or a frog.
+
+Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.
+
+The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their
+density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.
+Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten;
+sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost solid,
+there almost liquid. In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a
+day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by
+the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less, according to its
+density. A child can escape where a man will perish. The first law of
+safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every sewerman who felt the
+ground giving way beneath him began by flinging away his sack of tools,
+or his back-basket, or his hod.
+
+The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;
+some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer
+rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.
+Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil
+forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to
+bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under
+this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthenon,
+obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Genevieve
+hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the
+mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,
+like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was
+developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the
+cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be
+promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior ravages
+were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the
+sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer, they were
+liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several scavengers
+who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many names; among
+others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a quagmire under
+the man-hole of the Rue Careme-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain; this
+Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last
+grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents, in 1785,
+the epoch when that cemetery expired.
+
+There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, of whom we
+have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where they
+delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.
+D'Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin's, the Duchess de
+Sourdis', was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which
+he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis,
+when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to
+weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is no love
+which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash the
+body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and
+says: "Phew!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE FONTIS
+
+Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.
+
+This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the
+Champs-Elysees, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad
+preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its
+excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the
+sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by
+a stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata,
+infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid
+that the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des
+Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, the old stone
+sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honore, in which we now see Jean
+Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the
+quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees as far as the
+Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly
+six months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside,
+particularly those who had hotels and carriages. The work was more than
+unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a
+half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.
+
+The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the downpour
+of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the subjacent
+sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water.
+Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated bottom
+had sunk into the ooze. To what extent? Impossible to say. The obscurity
+was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in a cavern of
+night.
+
+Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered
+this slime. There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom. He must
+pass it. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was dying, and Jean
+Valjean exhausted. Besides, where was he to go? Jean Valjean advanced.
+Moreover, the pit seemed, for the first few steps, not to be very deep.
+But in proportion as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper. Soon he had
+the slime up to his calves and water above his knees. He walked on,
+raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he could. The mire
+now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer
+retreat. This mud, dense enough for one man, could not, obviously,
+uphold two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have stood a chance of
+extricating themselves singly. Jean Valjean continued to advance,
+supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps, a corpse.
+
+The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking; it was
+only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze which
+he had now reached. The density, which was his support, was also
+an obstacle. He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of
+expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had only
+his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius. In the
+old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.
+
+He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the
+water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had
+seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a
+mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of the
+drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort and
+launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point of
+support. It was high time.
+
+He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of
+support with a sort of fury. This produced upon him the effect of the
+first step in a staircase leading back to life.
+
+The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme
+moment, was the beginning of the other water-shed of the pavement, which
+had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water
+like a plank and in a single piece. Well built pavements form a vault
+and possess this sort of firmness. This fragment of the vaulting, partly
+submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once on this
+plane, he was safe. Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane and reached
+the other side of the quagmire.
+
+As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell
+upon his knees. He reflected that this was but just, and he remained
+there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.
+
+He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath
+the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime,
+and his soul filled with a strange light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS
+DISEMBARKING
+
+He set out on his way once more.
+
+However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed
+to have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had
+exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause
+for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once
+he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius'
+position, and he thought that he should have to remain there. But if his
+vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.
+
+He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred
+paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with
+the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the
+turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes,
+and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him,
+he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was
+good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.
+
+A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly
+perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt.
+It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that
+radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no
+longer felt Marius' weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran
+rather than walked. As he approached, the outlet became more and more
+distinctly defined. It was a pointed arch, lower than the vault, which
+gradually narrowed, and narrower than the gallery, which closed in as
+the vault grew lower. The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel;
+a faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries,
+logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been
+corrected.
+
+Jean Valjean reached the outlet.
+
+There he halted.
+
+It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.
+
+The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all
+appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone
+jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous
+brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in
+the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those
+prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.
+
+Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore,
+very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that
+gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty.
+On the right, down stream, the bridge of Jena was discernible, on the
+left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a
+propitious one in which to await the night and to escape. It was one
+of the most solitary points in Paris; the shore which faces the
+Grand-Caillou. Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of the
+grating.
+
+It might have been half-past eight o'clock in the evening. The day was
+declining.
+
+Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion of the
+vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both fists round the
+bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied, but it did not move. The
+grating did not stir. Jean Valjean seized the bars one after the other,
+in the hope that he might be able to tear away the least solid, and to
+make of it a lever wherewith to raise the door or to break the lock. Not
+a bar stirred. The teeth of a tiger are not more firmly fixed in their
+sockets. No lever; no prying possible. The obstacle was invincible.
+There was no means of opening the gate.
+
+Must he then stop there? What was he to do? What was to become of him?
+He had not the strength to retrace his steps, to recommence the journey
+which he had already taken. Besides, how was he to again traverse that
+quagmire whence he had only extricated himself as by a miracle? And
+after the quagmire, was there not the police patrol, which assuredly
+could not be twice avoided? And then, whither was he to go? What
+direction should he pursue? To follow the incline would not conduct
+him to his goal. If he were to reach another outlet, he would find it
+obstructed by a plug or a grating. Every outlet was, undoubtedly, closed
+in that manner. Chance had unsealed the grating through which he had
+entered, but it was evident that all the other sewer mouths were barred.
+He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.
+
+All was over. Everything that Jean Valjean had done was useless.
+Exhaustion had ended in failure.
+
+They were both caught in the immense and gloomy web of death, and Jean
+Valjean felt the terrible spider running along those black strands and
+quivering in the shadows. He turned his back to the grating, and fell
+upon the pavement, hurled to earth rather than seated, close to Marius,
+who still made no movement, and with his head bent between his knees.
+This was the last drop of anguish.
+
+Of what was he thinking during this profound depression? Neither of
+himself nor of Marius. He was thinking of Cosette.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE TORN COAT-TAIL
+
+In the midst of this prostration, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a
+low voice said to him:
+
+"Half shares."
+
+Some person in that gloom? Nothing so closely resembles a dream as
+despair. Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming. He had heard no
+footsteps. Was it possible? He raised his eyes.
+
+A man stood before him.
+
+This man was clad in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes
+in his left hand; he had evidently removed them in order to reach Jean
+Valjean, without allowing his steps to be heard.
+
+Jean Valjean did not hesitate for an instant. Unexpected as was this
+encounter, this man was known to him. The man was Thenardier.
+
+Although awakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed
+to alarms, and steeled to unforeseen shocks that must be promptly
+parried, instantly regained possession of his presence of mind.
+Moreover, the situation could not be made worse, a certain degree of
+distress is no longer capable of a crescendo, and Thenardier himself
+could add nothing to this blackness of this night.
+
+A momentary pause ensued.
+
+Thenardier, raising his right hand to a level with his forehead, formed
+with it a shade, then he brought his eyelashes together, by screwing up
+his eyes, a motion which, in connection with a slight contraction of the
+mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who is endeavoring
+to recognize another man. He did not succeed. Jean Valjean, as we have
+just stated, had his back turned to the light, and he was, moreover,
+so disfigured, so bemired, so bleeding that he would have been
+unrecognizable in full noonday. On the contrary, illuminated by the
+light from the grating, a cellar light, it is true, livid, yet precise
+in its lividness, Thenardier, as the energetic popular metaphor
+expresses it, immediately "leaped into" Jean Valjean's eyes. This
+inequality of conditions sufficed to assure some advantage to Jean
+Valjean in that mysterious duel which was on the point of beginning
+between the two situations and the two men. The encounter took place
+between Jean Valjean veiled and Thenardier unmasked.
+
+Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thenardier did not recognize
+him.
+
+They surveyed each other for a moment in that half-gloom, as though
+taking each other's measure. Thenardier was the first to break the
+silence.
+
+"How are you going to manage to get out?"
+
+Jean Valjean made no reply. Thenardier continued:
+
+"It's impossible to pick the lock of that gate. But still you must get
+out of this."
+
+"That is true," said Jean Valjean.
+
+"Well, half shares then."
+
+"What do you mean by that?"
+
+"You have killed that man; that's all right. I have the key."
+
+Thenardier pointed to Marius. He went on:
+
+"I don't know you, but I want to help you. You must be a friend."
+
+Jean Valjean began to comprehend. Thenardier took him for an assassin.
+
+Thenardier resumed:
+
+"Listen, comrade. You didn't kill that man without looking to see what
+he had in his pockets. Give me my half. I'll open the door for you."
+
+And half drawing from beneath his tattered blouse a huge key, he added:
+
+"Do you want to see how a key to liberty is made? Look here."
+
+Jean Valjean "remained stupid"--the expression belongs to the elder
+Corneille--to such a degree that he doubted whether what he beheld was
+real. It was providence appearing in horrible guise, and his good angel
+springing from the earth in the form of Thenardier.
+
+Thenardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under his
+blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.
+
+"Hold on," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."
+
+"What is the rope for?"
+
+"You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside. There's a
+heap of rubbish."
+
+"What am I to do with a stone?"
+
+"Idiot, you'll want to sling that stiff into the river, you'll need a
+stone and a rope, otherwise it would float on the water."
+
+Jean Valjean took the rope. There is no one who does not occasionally
+accept in this mechanical way.
+
+Thenardier snapped his fingers as though an idea had suddenly occurred
+to him.
+
+"Ah, see here, comrade, how did you contrive to get out of that slough
+yonder? I haven't dared to risk myself in it. Phew! you don't smell
+good."
+
+After a pause he added:
+
+"I'm asking you questions, but you're perfectly right not to answer.
+It's an apprenticeship against that cursed quarter of an hour before the
+examining magistrate. And then, when you don't talk at all, you run no
+risk of talking too loud. That's no matter, as I can't see your face and
+as I don't know your name, you are wrong in supposing that I don't know
+who you are and what you want. I twig. You've broken up that gentleman
+a bit; now you want to tuck him away somewhere. The river, that great
+hider of folly, is what you want. I'll get you out of your scrape.
+Helping a good fellow in a pinch is what suits me to a hair."
+
+While expressing his approval of Jean Valjean's silence, he endeavored
+to force him to talk. He jostled his shoulder in an attempt to catch a
+sight of his profile, and he exclaimed, without, however, raising his
+tone:
+
+"Apropos of that quagmire, you're a hearty animal. Why didn't you toss
+the man in there?"
+
+Jean Valjean preserved silence.
+
+Thenardier resumed, pushing the rag which served him as a cravat to the
+level of his Adam's apple, a gesture which completes the capable air of
+a serious man:
+
+"After all, you acted wisely. The workmen, when they come to-morrow to
+stop up that hole, would certainly have found the stiff abandoned there,
+and it might have been possible, thread by thread, straw by straw, to
+pick up the scent and reach you. Some one has passed through the sewer.
+Who? Where did he get out? Was he seen to come out? The police are full
+of cleverness. The sewer is treacherous and tells tales of you. Such a
+find is a rarity, it attracts attention, very few people make use of
+the sewers for their affairs, while the river belongs to everybody. The
+river is the true grave. At the end of a month they fish up your man
+in the nets at Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for that? It's
+carrion! Who killed that man? Paris. And justice makes no inquiries. You
+have done well."
+
+The more loquacious Thenardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.
+
+Again Thenardier shook him by the shoulder.
+
+"Now let's settle this business. Let's go shares. You have seen my key,
+show me your money."
+
+Thenardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing, yet
+amicable.
+
+There was one singular circumstance; Thenardier's manners were not
+simple; he had not the air of being wholly at his ease; while affecting
+an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time he laid his finger on
+his mouth, and muttered, "hush!" It was difficult to divine why. There
+was no one there except themselves. Jean Valjean thought that other
+ruffians might possibly be concealed in some nook, not very far off, and
+that Thenardier did not care to share with them.
+
+Thenardier resumed:
+
+"Let's settle up. How much did the stiff have in his bags?"
+
+Jean Valjean searched his pockets.
+
+It was his habit, as the reader will remember, to always have some
+money about him. The mournful life of expedients to which he had been
+condemned imposed this as a law upon him. On this occasion, however,
+he had been caught unprepared. When donning his uniform of a National
+Guardsman on the preceding evening, he had forgotten, dolefully absorbed
+as he was, to take his pocket-book. He had only some small change in his
+fob. He turned out his pocket, all soaked with ooze, and spread out on
+the banquette of the vault one louis d'or, two five-franc pieces, and
+five or six large sous.
+
+Thenardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant twist of the
+neck.
+
+"You knocked him over cheap," said he.
+
+He set to feeling the pockets of Jean Valjean and Marius, with the
+greatest familiarity. Jean Valjean, who was chiefly concerned in keeping
+his back to the light, let him have his way.
+
+While handling Marius' coat, Thenardier, with the skill of a pickpocket,
+and without being noticed by Jean Valjean, tore off a strip which he
+concealed under his blouse, probably thinking that this morsel of
+stuff might serve, later on, to identify the assassinated man and the
+assassin. However, he found no more than the thirty francs.
+
+"That's true," said he, "both of you together have no more than that."
+
+And, forgetting his motto: "half shares," he took all.
+
+He hesitated a little over the large sous. After due reflection, he took
+them also, muttering:
+
+"Never mind! You cut folks' throats too cheap altogether."
+
+That done, he once more drew the big key from under his blouse.
+
+"Now, my friend, you must leave. It's like the fair here, you pay when
+you go out. You have paid, now clear out."
+
+And he began to laugh.
+
+Had he, in lending to this stranger the aid of his key, and in making
+some other man than himself emerge from that portal, the pure and
+disinterested intention of rescuing an assassin? We may be permitted to
+doubt this.
+
+Thenardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders, then
+he betook himself to the grating on tiptoe, and barefooted, making Jean
+Valjean a sign to follow him, looked out, laid his finger on his mouth,
+and remained for several seconds, as though in suspense; his inspection
+finished, he placed the key in the lock. The bolt slipped back and the
+gate swung open. It neither grated nor squeaked. It moved very softly.
+
+It was obvious that this gate and those hinges, carefully oiled, were
+in the habit of opening more frequently than was supposed. This
+softness was suspicious; it hinted at furtive goings and comings, silent
+entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolf-like tread of crime.
+
+The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some mysterious band. This
+taciturn grating was a receiver of stolen goods.
+
+Thenardier opened the gate a little way, allowing just sufficient space
+for Jean Valjean to pass out, closed the grating again, gave the key
+a double turn in the lock and plunged back into the darkness, without
+making any more noise than a breath. He seemed to walk with the velvet
+paws of a tiger.
+
+A moment later, that hideous providence had retreated into the
+invisibility.
+
+Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--MARIUS PRODUCES ON SOME ONE WHO IS A JUDGE OF THE MATTER,
+THE EFFECT OF BEING DEAD
+
+He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.
+
+They were in the open air!
+
+The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him. The pure, healthful,
+living, joyous air that was easy to breathe inundated him. Everywhere
+around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when the sun has
+set in an unclouded azure sky. Twilight had descended; night was drawing
+on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those who need a mantle of
+darkness that they may escape from an anguish. The sky presented itself
+in all directions like an enormous calm. The river flowed to his feet
+with the sound of a kiss. The aerial dialogue of the nests bidding each
+other good night in the elms of the Champs-Elysees was audible. A few
+stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the zenith, and visible to
+revery alone, formed imperceptible little splendors amid the immensity.
+Evening was unfolding over the head of Jean Valjean all the sweetness of
+the infinite.
+
+It was that exquisite and undecided hour which says neither yes nor no.
+Night was already sufficiently advanced to render it possible to lose
+oneself at a little distance and yet there was sufficient daylight to
+permit of recognition at close quarters.
+
+For several seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by that
+august and caressing serenity; such moments of oblivion do come to men;
+suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch; everything is
+eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer like night; and,
+beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation of the sky which is
+illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars. Jean Valjean could
+not refrain from contemplating that vast, clear shadow which rested
+over him; thoughtfully he bathed in the sea of ecstasy and prayer in the
+majestic silence of the eternal heavens. Then he bent down swiftly
+to Marius, as though the sentiment of duty had returned to him, and,
+dipping up water in the hollow of his hand, he gently sprinkled a
+few drops on the latter's face. Marius' eyelids did not open; but his
+half-open mouth still breathed.
+
+Jean Valjean was on the point of dipping his hand in the river once
+more, when, all at once, he experienced an indescribable embarrassment,
+such as a person feels when there is some one behind him whom he does
+not see.
+
+We have already alluded to this impression, with which everyone is
+familiar.
+
+He turned round.
+
+Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a short while
+before.
+
+A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with folded arms,
+and bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which the leaden head was
+visible, stood a few paces in the rear of the spot where Jean Valjean
+was crouching over Marius.
+
+With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition. An
+ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight, a
+thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon. Jean Valjean recognized
+Javert.
+
+The reader has divined, no doubt, that Thenardier's pursuer was no other
+than Javert. Javert, after his unlooked-for escape from the barricade,
+had betaken himself to the prefecture of police, had rendered a
+verbal account to the Prefect in person in a brief audience, had then
+immediately gone on duty again, which implied--the note, the reader will
+recollect, which had been captured on his person--a certain surveillance
+of the shore on the right bank of the Seine near the Champs-Elysees,
+which had, for some time past, aroused the attention of the police.
+There he had caught sight of Thenardier and had followed him. The reader
+knows the rest.
+
+Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so obligingly
+opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness on Thenardier's part.
+Thenardier intuitively felt that Javert was still there; the man spied
+upon has a scent which never deceives him; it was necessary to fling
+a bone to that sleuth-hound. An assassin, what a godsend! Such an
+opportunity must never be allowed to slip. Thenardier, by putting Jean
+Valjean outside in his stead, provided a prey for the police, forced
+them to relinquish his scent, made them forget him in a bigger
+adventure, repaid Javert for his waiting, which always flatters a spy,
+earned thirty francs, and counted with certainty, so far as he himself
+was concerned, on escaping with the aid of this diversion.
+
+Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.
+
+These two encounters, this falling one after the other, from Thenardier
+upon Javert, was a rude shock.
+
+Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we have stated, no longer
+looked like himself. He did not unfold his arms, he made sure of his
+bludgeon in his fist, by an imperceptible movement, and said in a curt,
+calm voice:
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"I."
+
+"Who is 'I'?"
+
+"Jean Valjean."
+
+Javert thrust his bludgeon between his teeth, bent his knees, inclined
+his body, laid his two powerful hands on the shoulders of Jean Valjean,
+which were clamped within them as in a couple of vices, scrutinized
+him, and recognized him. Their faces almost touched. Javert's look was
+terrible.
+
+Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert's grasp, like a lion
+submitting to the claws of a lynx.
+
+"Inspector Javert," said he, "you have me in your power. Moreover, I
+have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning. I did not
+give you my address with any intention of escaping from you. Take me.
+Only grant me one favor."
+
+Javert did not appear to hear him. He kept his eyes riveted on Jean
+Valjean. His chin being contracted, thrust his lips upwards towards
+his nose, a sign of savage revery. At length he released Jean Valjean,
+straightened himself stiffly up without bending, grasped his bludgeon
+again firmly, and, as though in a dream, he murmured rather than uttered
+this question:
+
+"What are you doing here? And who is this man?"
+
+He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as thou.
+
+Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse
+Javert:
+
+"It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you. Dispose of me
+as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home. That is all that I
+ask of you."
+
+Javert's face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed to
+think him capable of making a concession. Nevertheless, he did not say
+"no."
+
+Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which
+he moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius'
+blood-stained brow.
+
+"This man was at the barricade," said he in a low voice and as though
+speaking to himself. "He is the one they called Marius."
+
+A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to
+everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was to
+die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his elbows
+leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.
+
+He seized Marius' hand and felt his pulse.
+
+"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.
+
+"He is a dead man," said Javert.
+
+Jean Valjean replied:
+
+"No. Not yet."
+
+"So you have brought him thither from the barricade?" remarked Javert.
+
+His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not to
+insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him not to
+even notice Jean Valjean's silence after his question.
+
+Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought. He resumed:
+
+"He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his
+grandfather. I do not recollect his name."
+
+Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius' coat, pulled out his pocket-book, opened
+it at the page which Marius had pencilled, and held it out to Javert.
+
+There was still sufficient light to admit of reading. Besides this,
+Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night
+birds. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered:
+"Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du Calvaire, No. 6."
+
+Then he exclaimed: "Coachman!"
+
+The reader will remember that the hackney-coach was waiting in case of
+need.
+
+Javert kept Marius' pocket-book.
+
+A moment later, the carriage, which had descended by the inclined plane
+of the watering-place, was on the shore. Marius was laid upon the back
+seat, and Javert seated himself on the front seat beside Jean Valjean.
+
+The door slammed, and the carriage drove rapidly away, ascending the
+quays in the direction of the Bastille.
+
+They quitted the quays and entered the streets. The coachman, a black
+form on his box, whipped up his thin horses. A glacial silence reigned
+in the carriage. Marius, motionless, with his body resting in the
+corner, and his head drooping on his breast, his arms hanging, his legs
+stiff, seemed to be awaiting only a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of
+shadow, and Javert of stone, and in that vehicle full of night, whose
+interior, every time that it passed in front of a street lantern,
+appeared to be turned lividly wan, as by an intermittent flash of
+lightning, chance had united and seemed to be bringing face to face
+the three forms of tragic immobility, the corpse, the spectre, and the
+statue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--RETURN OF THE SON WHO WAS PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE
+
+At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled from Marius'
+hair.
+
+Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at No. 6, Rue des
+Filles-du-Calvaire.
+
+Javert was the first to alight; he made sure with one glance of the
+number on the carriage gate, and, raising the heavy knocker of beaten
+iron, embellished in the old style, with a male goat and a satyr
+confronting each other, he gave a violent peal. The gate opened a little
+way and Javert gave it a push. The porter half made his appearance
+yawning, vaguely awake, and with a candle in his hand.
+
+Everyone in the house was asleep. People go to bed betimes in the
+Marais, especially on days when there is a revolt. This good, old
+quarter, terrified at the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber, as
+children, when they hear the Bugaboo coming, hide their heads hastily
+under their coverlet.
+
+In the meantime Jean Valjean and the coachman had taken Marius out of
+the carriage, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits, and the
+coachman under the knees.
+
+As they thus bore Marius, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under the
+latter's clothes, which were broadly rent, felt his breast, and assured
+himself that his heart was still beating. It was even beating a little
+less feebly, as though the movement of the carriage had brought about a
+certain fresh access of life.
+
+Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the
+presence of the porter of a factious person.
+
+"Some person whose name is Gillenormand?"
+
+"Here. What do you want with him?"
+
+"His son is brought back."
+
+"His son?" said the porter stupidly.
+
+"He is dead."
+
+Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom
+the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his
+head that this was not so.
+
+The porter did not appear to understand either Javert's words or Jean
+Valjean's sign.
+
+Javert continued:
+
+"He went to the barricade, and here he is."
+
+"To the barricade?" ejaculated the porter.
+
+"He has got himself killed. Go waken his father."
+
+The porter did not stir.
+
+"Go along with you!" repeated Javert.
+
+And he added:
+
+"There will be a funeral here to-morrow."
+
+For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically
+classed, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance, and each
+contingency had its own compartment; all possible facts were arranged
+in drawers, as it were, whence they emerged on occasion, in variable
+quantities; in the street, uproar, revolt, carnival, and funeral.
+
+The porter contented himself with waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette;
+Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.
+
+As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, thinking that he would
+hear about the matter early enough in any case.
+
+Marius was carried up to the first floor, without any one in the other
+parts of the house being aware of the fact, and deposited on an old sofa
+in M. Gillenormand's antechamber; and while Basque went in search of a
+physician, and while Nicolette opened the linen-presses, Jean Valjean
+felt Javert touch him on the shoulder. He understood and descended the
+stairs, having behind him the step of Javert who was following him.
+
+The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their
+arrival, in terrified somnolence.
+
+They entered the carriage once more, and the coachman mounted his box.
+
+"Inspector Javert," said Jean, "grant me yet another favor."
+
+"What is it?" demanded Javert roughly.
+
+"Let me go home for one instant. Then you shall do whatever you like
+with me."
+
+Javert remained silent for a few moments, with his chin drawn back into
+the collar of his great-coat, then he lowered the glass and front:
+
+"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE
+
+They did not open their lips again during the whole space of their ride.
+
+What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had begun; to warn
+Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, to give her, possibly, some other
+useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures. As
+for himself, so far as he was personally concerned, all was over; he had
+been seized by Javert and had not resisted; any other man than himself
+in like situation would, perhaps, have had some vague thoughts connected
+with the rope which Thenardier had given him, and of the bars of the
+first cell that he should enter; but, let us impress it upon the
+reader, after the Bishop, there had existed in Jean Valjean a profound
+hesitation in the presence of any violence, even when directed against
+himself.
+
+Suicide, that mysterious act of violence against the unknown which may
+contain, in a measure, the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean
+Valjean.
+
+At the entrance to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, the carriage halted, the way
+being too narrow to admit of the entrance of vehicles. Javert and Jean
+Valjean alighted.
+
+The coachman humbly represented to "monsieur l'Inspecteur," that the
+Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all spotted with the blood of the
+assassinated man, and with mire from the assassin. That is the way he
+understood it. He added that an indemnity was due him. At the same time,
+drawing his certificate book from his pocket, he begged the inspector to
+have the goodness to write him "a bit of an attestation."
+
+Javert thrust aside the book which the coachman held out to him, and
+said:
+
+"How much do you want, including your time of waiting and the drive?"
+
+"It comes to seven hours and a quarter," replied the man, "and my velvet
+was perfectly new. Eighty francs, Mr. Inspector."
+
+Javert drew four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the carriage.
+
+Jean Valjean fancied that it was Javert's intention to conduct him on
+foot to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post of the Archives,
+both of which are close at hand.
+
+They entered the street. It was deserted as usual. Javert followed Jean
+Valjean. They reached No. 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened.
+
+"It is well," said Javert. "Go up stairs."
+
+He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting an
+effort in speaking in this manner:
+
+"I will wait for you here."
+
+Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This mode of procedure was but little in
+accord with Javert's habits. However, he could not be greatly surprised
+that Javert should now have a sort of haughty confidence in him, the
+confidence of the cat which grants the mouse liberty to the length of
+its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had made up his mind to surrender
+himself and to make an end of it. He pushed open the door, entered the
+house, called to the porter who was in bed and who had pulled the cord
+from his couch: "It is I!" and ascended the stairs.
+
+On arriving at the first floor, he paused. All sorrowful roads
+have their stations. The window on the landing-place, which was a
+sash-window, was open. As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its
+light from without and had a view on the street. The street-lantern,
+situated directly opposite, cast some light on the stairs, and thus
+effected some economy in illumination.
+
+Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically,
+thrust his head out of this window. He leaned out over the street. It
+is short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end. Jean Valjean was
+overwhelmed with amazement; there was no longer any one there.
+
+Javert had taken his departure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--THE GRANDFATHER
+
+Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room, as he
+still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which he had been
+placed on his arrival. The doctor who had been sent for had hastened
+thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.
+
+Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and
+incapable of doing anything but saying: "Heavens! is it possible?" At
+times she added: "Everything will be covered with blood." When her first
+horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation penetrated
+her mind, and took form in the exclamation: "It was bound to end in this
+way!" She did not go so far as: "I told you so!" which is customary on
+this sort of occasion. At the physician's orders, a camp bed had been
+prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and after having
+found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded man had no very
+deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on the corners of his lips
+proceeded from his nostrils, he had him placed flat on the bed, without
+a pillow, with his head on the same level as his body, and even a
+trifle lower, and with his bust bare in order to facilitate respiration.
+Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing
+Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her beads in her own
+chamber.
+
+The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by
+the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a
+hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not
+dangerous. The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation
+of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The arms
+had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar disfigured his face;
+but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the result of
+these wounds on the head? Would they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or
+would they attack the brain? As yet, this could not be decided. A grave
+symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always
+recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted
+by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the barricade had protected the
+lower part of the body from injury.
+
+Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette
+sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor, for
+the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside
+the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical
+instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius' face and hair with
+cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter, candle
+in hand, lighted them.
+
+The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time, he made a
+negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which
+he had inwardly addressed to himself.
+
+A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the doctor
+with himself.
+
+At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and lightly
+touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the end
+of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.
+
+This was the grandfather.
+
+The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and
+engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep
+on the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the
+evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in
+the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through
+sheer fatigue.
+
+Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined the
+drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken,
+the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he
+saw under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way
+thither.
+
+He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
+half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering,
+his body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as
+destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom
+who is gazing into a tomb.
+
+He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white with
+a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid lips,
+stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds, motionless
+and brilliantly lighted up.
+
+The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
+limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae were yellow on account of
+his great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole
+face assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell
+pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed
+by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which quivered
+all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing, through
+the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs, all
+bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:
+
+"Marius!"
+
+"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to the
+barricade, and . . ."
+
+"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice. "Ah! The rascal!"
+
+Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
+centenarian as erect as a young man.
+
+"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He
+is dead, is he not?"
+
+The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.
+
+M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.
+
+"He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on
+the barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You
+blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he
+is dead!"
+
+He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
+and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to the
+night:
+
+"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at
+that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I
+had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed
+his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had
+only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and that
+I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing what
+to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but to
+return and to say: 'It is I,' and you would have been the master of the
+house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have done
+whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew
+that well, and you said:
+
+"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,
+and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what
+I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed
+then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening."
+
+The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted
+Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm.
+The grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
+exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:
+
+"I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of
+Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that is
+to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You will
+have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions,
+progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of the press,
+and this is the way that your children will be brought home to you. Ah!
+Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A barricade! Ah, the
+scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe? Oh! I know you well.
+I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to tell you. You are
+wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into a rage against a
+dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I have reared.
+I was already old while he was very young. He played in the Tuileries
+garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and in order that
+the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes that he made in
+the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he exclaimed: Down with
+Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of mine. He was all rosy
+and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever noticed that all little
+children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son of one of those brigands
+of the Loire, but children are innocent of their fathers' crimes.
+I remember when he was no higher than that. He could not manage
+to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was so sweet and
+indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird chirping. I
+remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese, people formed a
+circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so handsome, was that
+child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I talked in a deep
+voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it
+was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he entered my room, I
+grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot
+defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you
+fast, they never let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a
+cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for your Lafayettes, your
+Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles who have killed him?
+This cannot be allowed to pass in this fashion."
+
+He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom
+the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The
+old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the
+passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death
+agony:
+
+"Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!"
+
+Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.
+
+Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions
+should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the
+grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his
+voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other
+side of an abyss:
+
+"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And
+to think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been
+delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing
+himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down
+like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to
+dance at the Chaumiere, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What's
+the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!
+Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two
+funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself arranged
+like this for the sake of General Lamarque's handsome eyes! What had
+that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box! To get
+oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn't enough to drive any one
+mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning his
+head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That's the
+way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, now-adays. Perish
+in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that is what
+I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old, I am
+a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought, by
+rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So all
+is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale ammonia
+and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you fool of
+a doctor! Come, he's dead, completely dead. I know all about it, I
+am dead myself too. He hasn't done things by half. Yes, this age is
+infamous, infamous and that's what I think of you, of your ideas, of
+your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of your
+scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all the
+revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening
+the flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting
+yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do
+you understand, you assassin?"
+
+At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still
+dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.
+
+"Marius!" cried the old man. "Marius! My little Marius! my child! my
+well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,
+thanks!"
+
+And he fell fainting.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--JAVERT
+
+Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l'Homme Arme.
+
+He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and
+likewise, for the first time in his life, with his hands behind his
+back.
+
+Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon's attitudes, only that
+which is expressive of resolution, with arms folded across the chest;
+that which is expressive of uncertainty--with the hands behind the
+back--had been unknown to him. Now, a change had taken place; his whole
+person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.
+
+He plunged into the silent streets.
+
+Nevertheless, he followed one given direction.
+
+He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes,
+skirted the quay, passed the Greve, and halted at some distance from
+the post of the Place du Chatelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame.
+There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand,
+and the Quai de la Megisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, the
+Seine forms a sort of square lake, traversed by a rapid.
+
+This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more
+dangerous than this rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated by
+the piles of the mill on the bridge, now demolished. The two bridges,
+situated thus close together, augment the peril; the water hurries in
+formidable wise through the arches. It rolls in vast and terrible waves;
+it accumulates and piles up there; the flood attacks the piles of the
+bridges as though in an effort to pluck them up with great liquid ropes.
+Men who fall in there never re-appear; the best of swimmers are drowned
+there.
+
+Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting in both
+hands, and, while his nails were mechanically twined in the abundance of
+his whiskers, he meditated.
+
+A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the
+depths of his being; and he had something upon which to examine himself.
+
+Javert was undergoing horrible suffering.
+
+For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled;
+that brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; that
+crystal was clouded. Javert felt duty divided within his conscience, and
+he could not conceal the fact from himself. When he had so unexpectedly
+encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there had been in
+him something of the wolf which regains his grip on his prey, and of the
+dog who finds his master again.
+
+He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld
+two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known
+more than one straight line. And, the poignant anguish lay in this, that
+the two paths were contrary to each other. One of these straight lines
+excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?
+
+His situation was indescribable.
+
+To owe his life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to repay it; to
+be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice, and to
+repay his service with another service; to allow it to be said to him,
+"Go," and to say to the latter in his turn: "Be free"; to sacrifice to
+personal motives duty, that general obligation, and to be conscious,
+in those personal motives, of something that was also general, and,
+perchance, superior, to betray society in order to remain true to his
+conscience; that all these absurdities should be realized and should
+accumulate upon him,--this was what overwhelmed him.
+
+One thing had amazed him,--this was that Jean Valjean should have done
+him a favor, and one thing petrified him,--that he, Javert, should have
+done Jean Valjean a favor.
+
+Where did he stand? He sought to comprehend his position, and could no
+longer find his bearings.
+
+What was he to do now? To deliver up Jean Valjean was bad; to leave Jean
+Valjean at liberty was bad. In the first case, the man of authority fell
+lower than the man of the galleys, in the second, a convict rose above
+the law, and set his foot upon it. In both cases, dishonor for him,
+Javert. There was disgrace in any resolution at which he might arrive.
+Destiny has some extremities which rise perpendicularly from the
+impossible, and beyond which life is no longer anything but a precipice.
+Javert had reached one of those extremities.
+
+One of his anxieties consisted in being constrained to think. The very
+violence of all these conflicting emotions forced him to it. Thought was
+something to which he was unused, and which was peculiarly painful.
+
+In thought there always exists a certain amount of internal rebellion;
+and it irritated him to have that within him.
+
+Thought on any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of his
+functions, would have been for him in any case useless and a fatigue;
+thought on the day which had just passed was a torture. Nevertheless, it
+was indispensable that he should take a look into his conscience, after
+such shocks, and render to himself an account of himself.
+
+What he had just done made him shudder. He, Javert, had seen fit to
+decide, contrary to all the regulations of the police, contrary to the
+whole social and judicial organization, contrary to the entire code,
+upon a release; this had suited him; he had substituted his own affairs
+for the affairs of the public; was not this unjustifiable? Every time
+that he brought himself face to face with this deed without a name which
+he had committed, he trembled from head to foot. Upon what should he
+decide? One sole resource remained to him; to return in all haste to
+the Rue de l'Homme Arme, and commit Jean Valjean to prison. It was clear
+that that was what he ought to do. He could not.
+
+Something barred his way in that direction.
+
+Something? What? Is there in the world, anything outside of the
+tribunals, executory sentences, the police and the authorities? Javert
+was overwhelmed.
+
+A galley-slave sacred! A convict who could not be touched by the law!
+And that the deed of Javert!
+
+Was it not a fearful thing that Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to
+proceed with vigor, the man made to submit,--that these two men who were
+both the things of the law, should have come to such a pass, that both
+of them had set themselves above the law? What then! such enormities
+were to happen and no one was to be punished! Jean Valjean, stronger
+than the whole social order, was to remain at liberty, and he, Javert,
+was to go on eating the government's bread!
+
+His revery gradually became terrible.
+
+He might, athwart this revery, have also reproached himself on
+the subject of that insurgent who had been taken to the Rue des
+Filles-du-Calvaire; but he never even thought of that. The lesser fault
+was lost in the greater. Besides, that insurgent was, obviously, a dead
+man, and, legally, death puts an end to pursuit.
+
+Jean Valjean was the load which weighed upon his spirit.
+
+Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as
+points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence
+of this man. Jean Valjean's generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him.
+Other facts which he now recalled, and which he had formerly treated
+as lies and folly, now recurred to him as realities. M. Madeleine
+re-appeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were superposed in
+such fashion that they now formed but one, which was venerable. Javert
+felt that something terrible was penetrating his soul--admiration for
+a convict. Respect for a galley-slave--is that a possible thing? He
+shuddered at it, yet could not escape from it. In vain did he struggle,
+he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity of that
+wretch. This was odious.
+
+A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict,
+returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity
+to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy,
+saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more
+nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit
+to himself that this monster existed.
+
+Things could not go on in this manner.
+
+Certainly, and we insist upon this point, he had not yielded without
+resistance to that monster, to that infamous angel, to that hideous
+hero, who enraged almost as much as he amazed him. Twenty times, as he
+sat in that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the legal tiger had
+roared within him. A score of times he had been tempted to fling himself
+upon Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is to say, to
+arrest him. What more simple, in fact? To cry out at the first post that
+they passed:--"Here is a fugitive from justice, who has broken his ban!"
+to summon the gendarmes and say to them: "This man is yours!" then to
+go off, leaving that condemned man there, to ignore the rest and not to
+meddle further in the matter. This man is forever a prisoner of the law;
+the law may do with him what it will. What could be more just? Javert
+had said all this to himself; he had wished to pass beyond, to act, to
+apprehend the man, and then, as at present, he had not been able to do
+it; and every time that his arm had been raised convulsively towards
+Jean Valjean's collar, his hand had fallen back again, as beneath an
+enormous weight, and in the depths of his thought he had heard a voice,
+a strange voice crying to him:--"It is well. Deliver up your savior.
+Then have the basin of Pontius Pilate brought and wash your claws."
+
+Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean
+glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded.
+
+A convict was his benefactor!
+
+But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? He had
+the right to be killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that
+right. It would have been better to summon the other insurgents to his
+succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot by force.
+
+His supreme anguish was the loss of certainty. He felt that he had been
+uprooted. The code was no longer anything more than a stump in his hand.
+He had to deal with scruples of an unknown species. There had taken
+place within him a sentimental revelation entirely distinct from legal
+affirmation, his only standard of measurement hitherto. To remain in his
+former uprightness did not suffice. A whole order of unexpected facts
+had cropped up and subjugated him. A whole new world was dawning on
+his soul: kindness accepted and repaid, devotion, mercy, indulgence,
+violences committed by pity on austerity, respect for persons, no more
+definitive condemnation, no more conviction, the possibility of a tear
+in the eye of the law, no one knows what justice according to God,
+running in inverse sense to justice according to men. He perceived amid
+the shadows the terrible rising of an unknown moral sun; it horrified
+and dazzled him. An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle.
+
+He said to himself that it was true that there were exceptional cases,
+that authority might be put out of countenance, that the rule might
+be inadequate in the presence of a fact, that everything could not
+be framed within the text of the code, that the unforeseen compelled
+obedience, that the virtue of a convict might set a snare for the virtue
+of the functionary, that destiny did indulge in such ambushes, and
+he reflected with despair that he himself had not even been fortified
+against a surprise.
+
+He was forced to acknowledge that goodness did exist. This convict had
+been good. And he himself, unprecedented circumstance, had just been
+good also. So he was becoming depraved.
+
+He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself.
+
+Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was
+to be irreproachable.
+
+Now, he had just failed in this.
+
+How had he come to such a pass? How had all this happened? He could not
+have told himself. He clasped his head in both hands, but in spite of
+all that he could do, he could not contrive to explain it to himself.
+
+He had certainly always entertained the intention of restoring Jean
+Valjean to the law of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which
+he, Javert, was the slave. Not for a single instant while he held him
+in his grasp had he confessed to himself that he entertained the idea of
+releasing him. It was, in some sort, without his consciousness, that his
+hand had relaxed and had let him go free.
+
+All sorts of interrogation points flashed before his eyes. He put
+questions to himself, and made replies to himself, and his replies
+frightened him. He asked himself: "What has that convict done, that
+desperate fellow, whom I have pursued even to persecution, and who has
+had me under his foot, and who could have avenged himself, and who
+owed it both to his rancor and to his safety, in leaving me my life, in
+showing mercy upon me? His duty? No. Something more. And I in showing
+mercy upon him in my turn--what have I done? My duty? No. Something
+more. So there is something beyond duty?" Here he took fright; his
+balance became disjointed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the
+other rose heavenward, and Javert was no less terrified by the one which
+was on high than by the one which was below. Without being in the least
+in the world what is called Voltairian or a philosopher, or incredulous,
+being, on the contrary, respectful by instinct, towards the established
+church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social whole; order
+was his dogma, and sufficed for him; ever since he had attained to man's
+estate and the rank of a functionary, he had centred nearly all his
+religion in the police. Being,--and here we employ words without the
+least irony and in their most serious acceptation, being, as we have
+said, a spy as other men are priests. He had a superior, M. Gisquet; up
+to that day he had never dreamed of that other superior, God.
+
+This new chief, God, he became unexpectedly conscious of, and he felt
+embarrassed by him. This unforeseen presence threw him off his bearings;
+he did not know what to do with this superior, he, who was not ignorant
+of the fact that the subordinate is bound always to bow, that he must
+not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that, in the presence of a
+superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior has no other resource
+than that of handing in his resignation.
+
+But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God?
+
+However things might stand,--and it was to this point that he reverted
+constantly,--one fact dominated everything else for him, and that was,
+that he had just committed a terrible infraction of the law. He had just
+shut his eyes on an escaped convict who had broken his ban. He had just
+set a galley-slave at large. He had just robbed the laws of a man who
+belonged to them. That was what he had done. He no longer understood
+himself. The very reasons for his action escaped him; only their vertigo
+was left with him. Up to that moment he had lived with that blind faith
+which gloomy probity engenders. This faith had quitted him, this probity
+had deserted him. All that he had believed in melted away. Truths which
+he did not wish to recognize were besieging him, inexorably. Henceforth,
+he must be a different man. He was suffering from the strange pains of
+a conscience abruptly operated on for the cataract. He saw that which
+it was repugnant to him to behold. He felt himself emptied, useless, put
+out of joint with his past life, turned out, dissolved. Authority was
+dead within him. He had no longer any reason for existing.
+
+A terrible situation! to be touched.
+
+To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast in one
+piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the fact
+that one cherishes beneath one's breast of bronze something absurd
+and disobedient which almost resembles a heart! To come to the pass of
+returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that day
+that that good is evil! to be the watch-dog, and to lick the intruder's
+hand! to be ice and melt! to be the pincers and to turn into a hand!
+to suddenly feel one's fingers opening! to relax one's grip,--what a
+terrible thing!
+
+The man-projectile no longer acquainted with his route and retreating!
+
+To be obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not
+infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said
+when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated
+with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but
+men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! to behold a rift in
+the immense blue pane of the firmament!
+
+That which was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear
+conscience, the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity which
+had been irresistibly launched in a straight line and was breaking
+against God. It certainly was singular that the stoker of order, that
+the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its
+rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immovable,
+the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect,
+could bend! that there should exist for the locomotive a road to
+Damascus!
+
+God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the
+false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to
+remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the veritable
+absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute, humanity
+which cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible; that splendid
+phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did Javert
+understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for it
+to himself? Evidently he did not. But beneath the pressure of that
+incontestable incomprehensibility he felt his brain bursting.
+
+He was less the man transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. In all
+this he perceived only the tremendous difficulty of existence. It seemed
+to him that, henceforth, his respiration was repressed forever. He was
+not accustomed to having something unknown hanging over his head.
+
+Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze, merely a
+smooth, limpid and simple surface; there was nothing incomprehensible,
+nothing obscure; nothing that was not defined, regularly disposed,
+linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited, closed, fully provided
+for; authority was a plane surface; there was no fall in it, no
+dizziness in its presence. Javert had never beheld the unknown except
+from below. The irregular, the unforeseen, the disordered opening of
+chaos, the possible slip over a precipice--this was the work of the
+lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked, of wretches. Now Javert threw
+himself back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unprecedented
+apparition: a gulf on high.
+
+What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! one was disconcerted,
+absolutely! In what could one trust! That which had been agreed upon was
+giving way! What! the defect in society's armor could be discovered by
+a magnanimous wretch! What! an honest servitor of the law could suddenly
+find himself caught between two crimes--the crime of allowing a man to
+escape and the crime of arresting him! everything was not settled in
+the orders given by the State to the functionary! There might be
+blind alleys in duty! What,--all this was real! was it true that an
+ex-ruffian, weighed down with convictions, could rise erect and end by
+being in the right? Was this credible? were there cases in which the law
+should retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its excuses?--Yes,
+that was the state of the case! and Javert saw it! and Javert had
+touched it! and not only could he not deny it, but he had taken part
+in it. These were realities. It was abominable that actual facts could
+reach such deformity. If facts did their duty, they would confine
+themselves to being proofs of the law; facts--it is God who sends them.
+Was anarchy, then, on the point of now descending from on high?
+
+Thus,--and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion
+of consternation, all that might have corrected and restrained this
+impression was effaced, and society, and the human race, and the
+universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one simple and
+terrible feature,--thus the penal laws, the thing judged, the force due
+to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy,
+the government, prevention, repression, official cruelty, wisdom, legal
+infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which rest
+political and civil security, sovereignty, justice, public truth, all
+this was rubbish, a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert, the spy
+of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog
+providence of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at
+the summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a
+halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which he had
+come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.
+
+Was this to be endured? No.
+
+A violent state, if ever such existed. There were only two ways of
+escaping from it. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and restore
+to his cell the convict from the galleys. The other . . .
+
+Javert quitted the parapet, and, with head erect this time, betook
+himself, with a firm tread, towards the station-house indicated by a
+lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Chatelet.
+
+On arriving there, he saw through the window a sergeant of police, and
+he entered. Policemen recognize each other by the very way in which they
+open the door of a station-house. Javert mentioned his name, showed his
+card to the sergeant, and seated himself at the table of the post on
+which a candle was burning. On a table lay a pen, a leaden inkstand and
+paper, provided in the event of possible reports and the orders of the
+night patrols. This table, still completed by its straw-seated chair,
+is an institution; it exists in all police stations; it is invariably
+ornamented with a box-wood saucer filled with sawdust and a wafer box
+of cardboard filled with red wafers, and it forms the lowest stage of
+official style. It is there that the literature of the State has its
+beginning.
+
+Javert took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. This is what
+he wrote:
+
+ A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE.
+
+
+ "In the first place: I beg Monsieur le Prefet to cast his eyes
+ on this.
+
+ "Secondly: prisoners, on arriving after examination, take off
+ their shoes and stand barefoot on the flagstones while they are
+ being searched. Many of them cough on their return to prison.
+ This entails hospital expenses.
+
+ "Thirdly: the mode of keeping track of a man with relays of police
+ agents from distance to distance, is good, but, on important occasions,
+ it is requisite that at least two agents should never lose sight
+ of each other, so that, in case one agent should, for any cause,
+ grow weak in his service, the other may supervise him and take
+ his place.
+
+ "Fourthly: it is inexplicable why the special regulation of the prison
+ of the Madelonettes interdicts the prisoner from having a chair,
+ even by paying for it.
+
+ "Fifthly: in the Madelonettes there are only two bars to the canteen,
+ so that the canteen woman can touch the prisoners with her hand.
+
+ "Sixthly: the prisoners called barkers, who summon the other
+ prisoners to the parlor, force the prisoner to pay them two sous
+ to call his name distinctly. This is a theft.
+
+ "Seventhly: for a broken thread ten sous are withheld in the
+ weaving shop; this is an abuse of the contractor, since the cloth
+ is none the worse for it.
+
+ "Eighthly: it is annoying for visitors to La Force to be
+ obliged to traverse the boys' court in order to reach the parlor
+ of Sainte-Marie-l'Egyptienne.
+
+ "Ninthly: it is a fact that any day gendarmes can be overheard
+ relating in the court-yard of the prefecture the interrogations put
+ by the magistrates to prisoners. For a gendarme, who should be
+ sworn to secrecy, to repeat what he has heard in the examination
+ room is a grave disorder.
+
+ "Tenthly: Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very neat;
+ but it is bad to have a woman keep the wicket to the mouse-trap
+ of the secret cells. This is unworthy of the Conciergerie of a
+ great civilization."
+
+ Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct chirography,
+ not omitting a single comma, and making the paper screech under his pen.
+ Below the last line he signed:
+
+ "JAVERT,
+ "Inspector of the 1st class.
+ "The Post of the Place du Chatelet.
+ "June 7th, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning."
+
+
+Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter, sealed
+it, wrote on the back: Note for the administration, left it on the
+table, and quitted the post. The glazed and grated door fell to behind
+him.
+
+Again he traversed the Place du Chatelet diagonally, regained the quay,
+and returned with automatic precision to the very point which he had
+abandoned a quarter of an hour previously, leaned on his elbows and
+found himself again in the same attitude on the same paving-stone of the
+parapet. He did not appear to have stirred.
+
+The darkness was complete. It was the sepulchral moment which follows
+midnight. A ceiling of clouds concealed the stars. Not a single light
+burned in the houses of the city; no one was passing; all of the streets
+and quays which could be seen were deserted; Notre-Dame and the towers
+of the Court-House seemed features of the night. A street lantern
+reddened the margin of the quay. The outlines of the bridges lay
+shapeless in the mist one behind the other. Recent rains had swollen the
+river.
+
+The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered, situated
+precisely over the rapids of the Seine, perpendicularly above that
+formidable spiral of whirlpools which loose and knot themselves again
+like an endless screw.
+
+Javert bent his head and gazed. All was black. Nothing was to be
+distinguished. A sound of foam was audible; but the river could not be
+seen. At moments, in that dizzy depth, a gleam of light appeared, and
+undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light, no one
+knows whence, and converting it into a snake. The light vanished, and
+all became indistinct once more. Immensity seemed thrown open there.
+What lay below was not water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay,
+abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from
+sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing was
+to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of
+the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The
+flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering
+of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the
+imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow was full of
+horror.
+
+Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening
+of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled
+attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed
+it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which
+a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom,
+appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the
+Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the
+shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret
+of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath
+the water.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN
+
+Some time after the events which we have just recorded, Sieur
+Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.
+
+Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader
+has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.
+
+Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who
+was occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and
+damaged travellers on the highway.
+
+Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed in
+the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to
+find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meanwhile, he
+lived to search the pockets of passers-by.
+
+Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent. He had just escaped
+neatly. He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up in Jondrette's
+garret in company with the other ruffians. Utility of a vice: his
+drunkenness had been his salvation. The authorities had never been able
+to make out whether he had been there in the quality of a robber or a
+man who had been robbed. An order of nolle prosequi, founded on his well
+authenticated state of intoxication on the evening of the ambush, had
+set him at liberty. He had taken to his heels. He had returned to his
+road from Gagny to Lagny, to make, under administrative supervision,
+broken stone for the good of the state, with downcast mien, in a very
+pensive mood, his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but he was addicted
+none the less tenderly to the wine which had recently saved him.
+
+As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time after
+his return to his road-mender's turf-thatched cot, here it is:
+
+One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont, to his
+work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before daybreak caught
+sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man, whose back alone
+he saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it seemed to him at that
+distance and in the early dusk, was not entirely unfamiliar to him.
+Boulatruelle, although intoxicated, had a correct and lucid memory, a
+defensive arm that is indispensable to any one who is at all in conflict
+with legal order.
+
+"Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?" he said
+to himself. But he could make himself no answer, except that the man
+resembled some one of whom his memory preserved a confused trace.
+
+However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,
+Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did
+not belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. On foot,
+evidently. No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil at that hour.
+He had walked all night. Whence came he? Not from a very great distance;
+for he had neither haversack, nor bundle. From Paris, no doubt. Why was
+he in these woods? why was he there at such an hour? what had he come
+there for?
+
+Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of ransacking his memory,
+he recalled in a vague way that he had already, many years before, had
+a similar alarm in connection with a man who produced on him the effect
+that he might well be this very individual.
+
+"By the deuce," said Boulatruelle, "I'll find him again. I'll discover
+the parish of that parishioner. This prowler of Patron-Minette has a
+reason, and I'll know it. People can't have secrets in my forest if I
+don't have a finger in the pie."
+
+He took his pick-axe which was very sharply pointed.
+
+"There now," he grumbled, "is something that will search the earth and a
+man."
+
+And, as one knots one thread to another thread, he took up the line of
+march at his best pace in the direction which the man must follow, and
+set out across the thickets.
+
+When he had compassed a hundred strides, the day, which was already
+beginning to break, came to his assistance. Footprints stamped in the
+sand, weeds trodden down here and there, heather crushed, young branches
+in the brushwood bent and in the act of straightening themselves up
+again with the graceful deliberation of the arms of a pretty woman who
+stretches herself when she wakes, pointed out to him a sort of track. He
+followed it, then lost it. Time was flying. He plunged deeper into the
+woods and came to a sort of eminence. An early huntsman who was passing
+in the distance along a path, whistling the air of Guillery, suggested
+to him the idea of climbing a tree. Old as he was, he was agile. There
+stood close at hand a beech-tree of great size, worthy of Tityrus and of
+Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle ascended the beech as high as he was able.
+
+The idea was a good one. On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side
+where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly
+caught sight of his man.
+
+Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.
+
+The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a
+considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which
+Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near
+a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with
+a sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. This glade was the one
+which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones, destined
+for no one knows what employment, which was visible there thirty years
+ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of stones in
+longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary expedients.
+What a reason for lasting!
+
+Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended
+from the tree. The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize the
+beast. That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.
+
+It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which
+indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an
+hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense,
+very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was
+necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.
+He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which
+ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the
+best road.
+
+"Let's take to the wolves' Rue de Rivoli," said he.
+
+Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this occasion
+guilty of the fault of going straight.
+
+He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.
+
+He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,
+thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.
+
+At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to
+traverse.
+
+At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes,
+sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.
+
+There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of
+stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.
+
+As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
+Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.
+
+And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of
+the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe,
+abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.
+
+The hole was empty.
+
+"Thief!" shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC
+WAR
+
+For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive. For many weeks he
+lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral
+symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by
+the wounds themselves.
+
+He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity
+of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The extent of some of
+the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds
+being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill
+the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of
+weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.
+
+"Above all things," he repeated, "let the wounded man be subjected to no
+emotion." The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult,
+the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been
+invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet "as big as the
+ceiling," as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty
+that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the
+gangrene. As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in
+despair at his grandson's pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor
+dead.
+
+Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with
+white hair,--such was the description given by the porter,--came to
+inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the
+dressings.
+
+Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the
+sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a
+dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.
+Convalescence began. But Marius was forced to remain for two months more
+stretched out on a long chair, on account of the results called up by
+the fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like that
+which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings indefinitely, to
+the great annoyance of the sick person.
+
+However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him
+from all pursuit. In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public
+character, which six months will not extinguish. Revolts, in the present
+state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they are
+followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.
+
+Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined doctors
+to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged public
+opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all, the wounded
+were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception
+of those who had been made prisoners in the very act of combat, the
+councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. So Marius was left in
+peace.
+
+M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish, and then
+through every form of ecstasy. It was found difficult to prevent his
+passing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big arm-chair
+carried to Marius' bedside; he required his daughter to take the
+finest linen in the house for compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle
+Gillenormand, like a sage and elderly person, contrived to spare the
+fine linen, while allowing the grandfather to think that he was obeyed.
+M. Gillenormand would not permit any one to explain to him, that for the
+preparation of lint batiste is not nearly so good as coarse linen,
+nor new linen as old linen. He was present at all the dressings of the
+wounds from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself.
+When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said: "Aie! aie!"
+Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle, senile palsy,
+offer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught. He overwhelmed the
+doctor with questions. He did not observe that he asked the same ones
+over and over again.
+
+On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was out of
+danger, the good man was in a delirium. He made his porter a present of
+three louis. That evening, on his return to his own chamber, he danced
+a gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets, and he sang the
+following song:
+
+ "Jeanne est nee a Fougere "Amour, tu vis en elle;
+ Vrai nid d'une bergere; Car c'est dans sa prunelle
+ J'adore son jupon, Que tu mets ton carquois.
+ Fripon. Narquois!
+
+ "Moi, je la chante, et j'aime,
+ Plus que Diane meme,
+ Jeanne et ses durs tetons
+ Bretons."[61]
+
+
+"Love, thou dwellest in her; For 'tis in her eyes that thou placest thy
+quiver, sly scamp!
+
+"As for me, I sing her, and I love, more than Diana herself, Jeanne and
+her firm Breton breasts."
+
+
+Then he knelt upon a chair, and Basque, who was watching him through the
+half-open door, made sure that he was praying.
+
+Up to that time, he had not believed in God.
+
+At each succeeding phase of improvement, which became more and more
+pronounced, the grandfather raved. He executed a multitude of mechanical
+actions full of joy; he ascended and descended the stairs, without
+knowing why. A pretty female neighbor was amazed one morning at
+receiving a big bouquet; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it to
+her. The husband made a jealous scene. M. Gillenormand tried to draw
+Nicolette upon his knees. He called Marius, "M. le Baron." He shouted:
+"Long live the Republic!"
+
+Every moment, he kept asking the doctor: "Is he no longer in danger?"
+He gazed upon Marius with the eyes of a grandmother. He brooded over him
+while he ate. He no longer knew himself, he no longer rendered himself
+an account of himself. Marius was the master of the house, there was
+abdication in his joy, he was the grandson of his grandson.
+
+In the state of joy in which he then was, he was the most venerable of
+children. In his fear lest he might fatigue or annoy the convalescent,
+he stepped behind him to smile. He was content, joyous, delighted,
+charming, young. His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay
+radiance of his visage. When grace is mingled with wrinkles, it is
+adorable. There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.
+
+As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and care for him,
+he had but one fixed idea: Cosette.
+
+After the fever and delirium had left him, he did not again pronounce
+her name, and it might have been supposed that he no longer thought of
+her. He held his peace, precisely because his soul was there.
+
+He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair of the
+Rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows that were
+almost indistinct, floated through his mind, Eponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf,
+the Thenardiers, all his friends gloomily intermingled with the smoke
+of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent through that
+adventure produced on him the effect of a puzzle in a tempest; he
+understood nothing connected with his own life, he did not know how nor
+by whom he had been saved, and no one of those around him knew this; all
+that they had been able to tell him was, that he had been brought home
+at night in a hackney-coach, to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; past,
+present, future were nothing more to him than the mist of a vague idea;
+but in that fog there was one immovable point, one clear and precise
+outline, something made of granite, a resolution, a will; to find
+Cosette once more. For him, the idea of life was not distinct from the
+idea of Cosette. He had decreed in his heart that he would not accept
+the one without the other, and he was immovably resolved to exact of
+any person whatever, who should desire to force him to live,--from his
+grandfather, from fate, from hell,--the restitution of his vanished
+Eden.
+
+He did not conceal from himself the fact that obstacles existed.
+
+Let us here emphasize one detail, he was not won over and was but little
+softened by all the solicitude and tenderness of his grandfather. In
+the first place, he was not in the secret; then, in his reveries of
+an invalid, which were still feverish, possibly, he distrusted this
+tenderness as a strange and novel thing, which had for its object his
+conquest. He remained cold. The grandfather absolutely wasted his poor
+old smile. Marius said to himself that it was all right so long as he,
+Marius, did not speak, and let things take their course; but that when
+it became a question of Cosette, he would find another face, and that
+his grandfather's true attitude would be unmasked. Then there would
+be an unpleasant scene; a recrudescence of family questions, a
+confrontation of positions, every sort of sarcasm and all manner of
+objections at one and the same time, Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune,
+poverty, a stone about his neck, the future. Violent resistance;
+conclusion: a refusal. Marius stiffened himself in advance.
+
+And then, in proportion as he regained life, the old ulcers of his
+memory opened once more, he reflected again on the past, Colonel
+Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand and him,
+Marius, he told himself that he had no true kindness to expect from
+a person who had been so unjust and so hard to his father. And
+with health, there returned to him a sort of harshness towards his
+grandfather. The old man was gently pained by this. M. Gillenormand,
+without however allowing it to appear, observed that Marius, ever since
+the latter had been brought back to him and had regained consciousness,
+had not once called him father. It is true that he did not say
+"monsieur" to him; but he contrived not to say either the one or the
+other, by means of a certain way of turning his phrases. Obviously, a
+crisis was approaching.
+
+As almost always happens in such cases, Marius skirmished before giving
+battle, by way of proving himself. This is called "feeling the ground."
+One morning it came to pass that M. Gillenormand spoke slightingly of
+the Convention, apropos of a newspaper which had fallen into his
+hands, and gave vent to a Royalist harangue on Danton, Saint-Juste and
+Robespierre.--"The men of '93 were giants," said Marius with severity.
+The old man held his peace, and uttered not a sound during the remainder
+of that day.
+
+Marius, who had always present to his mind the inflexible grandfather of
+his early years, interpreted this silence as a profound concentration
+of wrath, augured from it a hot conflict, and augmented his preparations
+for the fray in the inmost recesses of his mind.
+
+He decided that, in case of a refusal, he would tear off his bandages,
+dislocate his collar-bone, that he would lay bare all the wounds which
+he had left, and would reject all food. His wounds were his munitions of
+war. He would have Cosette or die.
+
+He awaited the propitious moment with the crafty patience of the sick.
+
+That moment arrived.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--MARIUS ATTACKED
+
+One day, M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was putting in order the
+phials and cups on the marble of the commode, bent over Marius and said
+to him in his tenderest accents: "Look here, my little Marius, if I were
+in your place, I would eat meat now in preference to fish. A fried sole
+is excellent to begin a convalescence with, but a good cutlet is needed
+to put a sick man on his feet."
+
+Marius, who had almost entirely recovered his strength, collected
+the whole of it, drew himself up into a sitting posture, laid his two
+clenched fists on the sheets of his bed, looked his grandfather in the
+face, assumed a terrible air, and said:
+
+"This leads me to say something to you."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"That I wish to marry."
+
+"Agreed," said his grandfather.--And he burst out laughing.
+
+"How agreed?"
+
+"Yes, agreed. You shall have your little girl."
+
+Marius, stunned and overwhelmed with the dazzling shock, trembled in
+every limb.
+
+M. Gillenormand went on:
+
+"Yes, you shall have her, that pretty little girl of yours. She comes
+every day in the shape of an old gentleman to inquire after you. Ever
+since you were wounded, she has passed her time in weeping and making
+lint. I have made inquiries. She lives in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No.
+7. Ah! There we have it! Ah! so you want her! Well, you shall have
+her. You're caught. You had arranged your little plot, you had said to
+yourself:--'I'm going to signify this squarely to my grandfather, to
+that mummy of the Regency and of the Directory, to that ancient beau,
+to that Dorante turned Geronte; he has indulged in his frivolities also,
+that he has, and he has had his love affairs, and his grisettes and his
+Cosettes; he has made his rustle, he has had his wings, he has eaten of
+the bread of spring; he certainly must remember it.' Ah! you take the
+cockchafer by the horns. That's good. I offer you a cutlet and you
+answer me: 'By the way, I want to marry.' There's a transition for
+you! Ah! you reckoned on a bickering! You do not know that I am an old
+coward. What do you say to that? You are vexed? You did not expect to
+find your grandfather still more foolish than yourself, you are wasting
+the discourse which you meant to bestow upon me, Mr. Lawyer, and that's
+vexatious. Well, so much the worse, rage away. I'll do whatever
+you wish, and that cuts you short, imbecile! Listen. I have made my
+inquiries, I'm cunning too; she is charming, she is discreet, it is not
+true about the lancer, she has made heaps of lint, she's a jewel, she
+adores you, if you had died, there would have been three of us, her
+coffin would have accompanied mine. I have had an idea, ever since you
+have been better, of simply planting her at your bedside, but it is only
+in romances that young girls are brought to the bedsides of handsome
+young wounded men who interest them. It is not done. What would your
+aunt have said to it? You were nude three quarters of the time, my good
+fellow. Ask Nicolette, who has not left you for a moment, if there was
+any possibility of having a woman here. And then, what would the doctor
+have said? A pretty girl does not cure a man of fever. In short, it's
+all right, let us say no more about it, all's said, all's done, it's all
+settled, take her. Such is my ferocity. You see, I perceived that you
+did not love me. I said to myself: 'Here now, I have my little Cosette
+right under my hand, I'm going to give her to him, he will be obliged
+to love me a little then, or he must tell the reason why.' Ah! so you
+thought that the old man was going to storm, to put on a big voice,
+to shout no, and to lift his cane at all that aurora. Not a bit of it.
+Cosette, so be it; love, so be it; I ask nothing better. Pray take the
+trouble of getting married, sir. Be happy, my well-beloved child."
+
+That said, the old man burst forth into sobs.
+
+And he seized Marius' head, and pressed it with both arms against his
+breast, and both fell to weeping. This is one of the forms of supreme
+happiness.
+
+"Father!" cried Marius.
+
+"Ah, so you love me!" said the old man.
+
+An ineffable moment ensued. They were choking and could not speak.
+
+At length the old man stammered:
+
+"Come! his mouth is unstopped at last. He has said: 'Father' to me."
+
+Marius disengaged his head from his grandfather's arms, and said gently:
+
+"But, father, now that I am quite well, it seems to me that I might see
+her."
+
+"Agreed again, you shall see her to-morrow."
+
+"Father!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Why not to-day?"
+
+"Well, to-day then. Let it be to-day. You have called me 'father' three
+times, and it is worth it. I will attend to it. She shall be brought
+hither. Agreed, I tell you. It has already been put into verse. This is
+the ending of the elegy of the 'Jeune Malade' by Andre Chenier, by Andre
+Chenier whose throat was cut by the ras . . . by the giants of '93."
+
+M. Gillenormand fancied that he detected a faint frown on the part of
+Marius, who, in truth, as we must admit, was no longer listening to him,
+and who was thinking far more of Cosette than of 1793.
+
+The grandfather, trembling at having so inopportunely introduced Andre
+Chenier, resumed precipitately:
+
+"Cut his throat is not the word. The fact is that the great
+revolutionary geniuses, who were not malicious, that is incontestable,
+who were heroes, pardi! found that Andre Chenier embarrassed them
+somewhat, and they had him guillot . . . that is to say, those great
+men on the 7th of Thermidor, besought Andre Chenier, in the interests of
+public safety, to be so good as to go . . ."
+
+M. Gillenormand, clutched by the throat by his own phrase, could not
+proceed. Being able neither to finish it nor to retract it, while his
+daughter arranged the pillow behind Marius, who was overwhelmed with so
+many emotions, the old man rushed headlong, with as much rapidity as
+his age permitted, from the bed-chamber, shut the door behind him, and,
+purple, choking and foaming at the mouth, his eyes starting from his
+head, he found himself nose to nose with honest Basque, who was blacking
+boots in the anteroom. He seized Basque by the collar, and shouted full
+in his face in fury:--"By the hundred thousand Javottes of the devil,
+those ruffians did assassinate him!"
+
+"Who, sir?"
+
+"Andre Chenier!"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Basque in alarm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND ENDS BY NO LONGER THINKING IT A
+BAD THING THAT M. FAUCHELEVENT SHOULD HAVE ENTERED WITH SOMETHING UNDER
+HIS ARM
+
+Cosette and Marius beheld each other once more.
+
+What that interview was like we decline to say. There are things which
+one must not attempt to depict; the sun is one of them.
+
+The entire family, including Basque and Nicolette, were assembled in
+Marius' chamber at the moment when Cosette entered it.
+
+Precisely at that moment, the grandfather was on the point of blowing
+his nose; he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief, and
+gazing over it at Cosette.
+
+She appeared on the threshold; it seemed to him that she was surrounded
+by a glory.
+
+"Adorable!" he exclaimed.
+
+Then he blew his nose noisily.
+
+Cosette was intoxicated, delighted, frightened, in heaven. She was as
+thoroughly alarmed as any one can be by happiness. She stammered all
+pale, yet flushed, she wanted to fling herself into Marius' arms, and
+dared not. Ashamed of loving in the presence of all these people. People
+are pitiless towards happy lovers; they remain when the latter most
+desire to be left alone. Lovers have no need of any people whatever.
+
+With Cosette, and behind her, there had entered a man with white hair
+who was grave yet smiling, though with a vague and heartrending smile.
+It was "Monsieur Fauchelevent"; it was Jean Valjean.
+
+He was very well dressed, as the porter had said, entirely in black, in
+perfectly new garments, and with a white cravat.
+
+The porter was a thousand leagues from recognizing in this correct
+bourgeois, in this probable notary, the fear-inspiring bearer of the
+corpse, who had sprung up at his door on the night of the 7th of June,
+tattered, muddy, hideous, haggard, his face masked in blood and mire,
+supporting in his arms the fainting Marius; still, his porter's scent
+was aroused. When M. Fauchelevent arrived with Cosette, the porter had
+not been able to refrain from communicating to his wife this aside: "I
+don't know why it is, but I can't help fancying that I've seen that face
+before."
+
+M. Fauchelevent in Marius' chamber, remained apart near the door. He
+had under his arm, a package which bore considerable resemblance to an
+octavo volume enveloped in paper. The enveloping paper was of a greenish
+hue, and appeared to be mouldy.
+
+"Does the gentleman always have books like that under his arm?"
+Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who did not like books, demanded in a low
+tone of Nicolette.
+
+"Well," retorted M. Gillenormand, who had overheard her, in the same
+tone, "he's a learned man. What then? Is that his fault? Monsieur
+Boulard, one of my acquaintances, never walked out without a book under
+his arm either, and he always had some old volume hugged to his heart
+like that."
+
+And, with a bow, he said aloud:
+
+"Monsieur Tranchelevent . . ."
+
+Father Gillenormand did not do it intentionally, but inattention to
+proper names was an aristocratic habit of his.
+
+"Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of asking you, on behalf of my
+grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, for the hand of Mademoiselle."
+
+Monsieur Tranchelevent bowed.
+
+"That's settled," said the grandfather.
+
+And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended in blessing,
+he cried:
+
+"Permission to adore each other!"
+
+They did not require him to repeat it twice. So much the worse! the
+chirping began. They talked low. Marius, resting on his elbow on his
+reclining chair, Cosette standing beside him. "Oh, heavens!" murmured
+Cosette, "I see you once again! it is thou! it is you! The idea of going
+and fighting like that! But why? It is horrible. I have been dead for
+four months. Oh! how wicked it was of you to go to that battle! What had
+I done to you? I pardon you, but you will never do it again. A little
+while ago, when they came to tell us to come to you, I still thought
+that I was about to die, but it was from joy. I was so sad! I have not
+taken the time to dress myself, I must frighten people with my looks!
+What will your relatives say to see me in a crumpled collar? Do speak!
+You let me do all the talking. We are still in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.
+It seems that your shoulder was terrible. They told me that you could
+put your fist in it. And then, it seems that they cut your flesh with
+the scissors. That is frightful. I have cried till I have no eyes left.
+It is queer that a person can suffer like that. Your grandfather has a
+very kindly air. Don't disturb yourself, don't rise on your elbow, you
+will injure yourself. Oh! how happy I am! So our unhappiness is over!
+I am quite foolish. I had things to say to you, and I no longer know in
+the least what they were. Do you still love me? We live in the Rue de
+l'Homme Arme. There is no garden. I made lint all the time; stay, sir,
+look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my fingers."
+
+"Angel!" said Marius.
+
+Angel is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out. No
+other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make of it.
+
+Then as there were spectators, they paused and said not a word more,
+contenting themselves with softly touching each other's hands.
+
+M. Gillenormand turned towards those who were in the room and cried:
+
+"Talk loud, the rest of you. Make a noise, you people behind the scenes.
+Come, a little uproar, the deuce! so that the children can chatter at
+their ease."
+
+And, approaching Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a very low
+voice:
+
+"Call each other thou. Don't stand on ceremony."
+
+Aunt Gillenormand looked on in amazement at this irruption of light
+in her elderly household. There was nothing aggressive about this
+amazement; it was not the least in the world like the scandalized and
+envious glance of an owl at two turtle-doves, it was the stupid eye of a
+poor innocent seven and fifty years of age; it was a life which had been
+a failure gazing at that triumph, love.
+
+"Mademoiselle Gillenormand senior," said her father to her, "I told you
+that this is what would happen to you."
+
+He remained silent for a moment, and then added:
+
+"Look at the happiness of others."
+
+Then he turned to Cosette.
+
+"How pretty she is! how pretty she is! She's a Greuze. So you are going
+to have that all to yourself, you scamp! Ah! my rogue, you are getting
+off nicely with me, you are happy; if I were not fifteen years too old,
+we would fight with swords to see which of us should have her. Come now!
+I am in love with you, mademoiselle. It's perfectly simple. It is your
+right. You are in the right. Ah! what a sweet, charming little wedding
+this will make! Our parish is Saint-Denis du Saint Sacrament, but I will
+get a dispensation so that you can be married at Saint-Paul. The church
+is better. It was built by the Jesuits. It is more coquettish. It is
+opposite the fountain of Cardinal de Birague. The masterpiece of Jesuit
+architecture is at Namur. It is called Saint-Loup. You must go there
+after you are married. It is worth the journey. Mademoiselle, I am quite
+of your mind, I think girls ought to marry; that is what they are made
+for. There is a certain Sainte-Catherine whom I should always like to
+see uncoiffed.[62] It's a fine thing to remain a spinster, but it is
+chilly. The Bible says: Multiply. In order to save the people, Jeanne
+d'Arc is needed; but in order to make people, what is needed is Mother
+Goose. So, marry, my beauties. I really do not see the use in remaining
+a spinster! I know that they have their chapel apart in the church,
+and that they fall back on the Society of the Virgin; but, sapristi, a
+handsome husband, a fine fellow, and at the expiration of a year, a
+big, blond brat who nurses lustily, and who has fine rolls of fat on his
+thighs, and who musses up your breast in handfuls with his little rosy
+paws, laughing the while like the dawn,--that's better than holding a
+candle at vespers, and chanting Turris eburnea!"
+
+The grandfather executed a pirouette on his eighty-year-old heels, and
+began to talk again like a spring that has broken loose once more:
+
+ "Ainsi, bornant les cours de tes revasseries,
+ Alcippe, il est donc vrai, dans peu tu te maries."[63]
+
+
+"By the way!"
+
+"What is it, father?"
+
+"Have not you an intimate friend?"
+
+"Yes, Courfeyrac."
+
+"What has become of him?"
+
+"He is dead."
+
+"That is good."
+
+He seated himself near them, made Cosette sit down, and took their four
+hands in his aged and wrinkled hands:
+
+"She is exquisite, this darling. She's a masterpiece, this Cosette!
+She is a very little girl and a very great lady. She will only be a
+Baroness, which is a come down for her; she was born a Marquise. What
+eyelashes she has! Get it well fixed in your noddles, my children, that
+you are in the true road. Love each other. Be foolish about it. Love is
+the folly of men and the wit of God. Adore each other. Only," he added,
+suddenly becoming gloomy, "what a misfortune! It has just occurred to
+me! More than half of what I possess is swallowed up in an annuity; so
+long as I live, it will not matter, but after my death, a score of years
+hence, ah! my poor children, you will not have a sou! Your beautiful
+white hands, Madame la Baronne, will do the devil the honor of pulling
+him by the tail."[64]
+
+At this point they heard a grave and tranquil voice say:
+
+"Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent possesses six hundred thousand
+francs."
+
+It was the voice of Jean Valjean.
+
+So far he had not uttered a single word, no one seemed to be aware that
+he was there, and he had remained standing erect and motionless, behind
+all these happy people.
+
+"What has Mademoiselle Euphrasie to do with the question?" inquired the
+startled grandfather.
+
+"I am she," replied Cosette.
+
+"Six hundred thousand francs?" resumed M. Gillenormand.
+
+"Minus fourteen or fifteen thousand francs, possibly," said Jean
+Valjean.
+
+And he laid on the table the package which Mademoiselle Gillenormand had
+mistaken for a book.
+
+Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank-notes.
+They were turned over and counted. There were five hundred notes for a
+thousand francs each, and one hundred and sixty-eight of five hundred.
+In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.
+
+"This is a fine book," said M. Gillenormand.
+
+"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" murmured the aunt.
+
+"This arranges things well, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
+senior?" said the grandfather. "That devil of a Marius has ferreted out
+the nest of a millionaire grisette in his tree of dreams! Just trust
+to the love affairs of young folks now, will you! Students find
+studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino works better
+than Rothschild."
+
+"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" repeated Mademoiselle
+Gillenormand, in a low tone. "Five hundred and eighty-four! one might as
+well say six hundred thousand!"
+
+As for Marius and Cosette, they were gazing at each other while this was
+going on; they hardly heeded this detail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY
+
+The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a lengthy
+explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been
+able, thanks to his first escape of a few days' duration, to come to
+Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte, the
+sum earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at
+Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,--which
+eventually happened--he had buried and hidden that sum in the forest
+of Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom. The sum,
+six hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills, was not very
+bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order to preserve the
+box from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer filled with chestnut
+shavings. In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the
+Bishop's candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had carried off
+the candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The man
+seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean Valjean.
+Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went to get it
+in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have mentioned. He had
+a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place known to himself
+alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling that the hour was at
+hand, when that money might prove of service, he had gone to get it;
+it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but on
+this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening. Boulatreulle
+inherited his pickaxe.
+
+The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred
+francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.--"We
+shall see hereafter," he thought.
+
+The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand
+francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten years,
+from 1823 to 1833. The five years of his stay in the convent had cost
+only five thousand francs.
+
+Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they
+glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.
+
+Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The
+story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in
+the Moniteur, how a police inspector named Javert had been found drowned
+under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au Change
+and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man, otherwise
+irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed to a fit
+of mental aberration and a suicide.--"In fact," thought Jean Valjean,
+"since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power, he must
+have been already mad."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN
+FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY
+
+Everything was made ready for the wedding. The doctor, on being
+consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was then
+December. A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.
+
+The grandfather was not the least happy of them all. He remained for a
+quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.
+
+"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed. "And she has so sweet and
+good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that I
+have ever seen in my life. Later on, she'll have virtues with an odor of
+violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with such
+a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to
+pettifogging, I beg of you."
+
+Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise.
+The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,
+had they not been dazzled by it.
+
+"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius to Cosette.
+
+"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me that the good God is caring
+for us."
+
+Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty, arranged
+everything, made everything easy. He hastened towards Cosette's
+happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with as much joy, as
+Cosette herself.
+
+As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
+problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted, Cosette's
+civil status. If he were to announce her origin bluntly, it might
+prevent the marriage, who knows? He extricated Cosette from all
+difficulties. He concocted for her a family of dead people, a sure means
+of not encountering any objections. Cosette was the only scion of an
+extinct family; Cosette was not his own daughter, but the daughter of
+the other Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners to
+the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent; the
+very best information and the most respectable references abounded; the
+good nuns, not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions of
+paternity, and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never
+understood exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the
+daughter. They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal. An
+acte de notoriete was drawn up. Cosette became in the eyes of the law,
+Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan, both
+father and mother being dead. Jean Valjean so arranged it that he was
+appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette's guardian, with
+M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.
+
+As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted
+a legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired to
+remain unknown. The original legacy had consisted of five hundred and
+ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been expended
+on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand francs of that
+amount having been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited in
+the hands of a third party, was to be turned over to Cosette at her
+majority, or at the date of her marriage. This, taken as a whole, was
+very acceptable, as the reader will perceive, especially when the sum
+due was half a million. There were some peculiarities here and there,
+it is true, but they were not noticed; one of the interested parties
+had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand
+francs.
+
+Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man whom she
+had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman; another Fauchelevent
+was her real father. At any other time this would have broken her heart.
+But at the ineffable moment which she was then passing through, it cast
+but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she was so full of joy that the
+cloud did not last long. She had Marius. The young man arrived, the old
+man was effaced; such is life.
+
+And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing enigmas
+around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is always
+prepared for certain renunciations.
+
+Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.
+
+Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father Gillenormand.
+It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant compliments and
+presents. While Jean Valjean was building up for Cosette a normal
+situation in society and an unassailable status, M. Gillenormand was
+superintending the basket of wedding gifts. Nothing so amused him as
+being magnificent. He had given to Cosette a robe of Binche guipure
+which had descended to him from his own grandmother.
+
+"These fashions come up again," said he, "ancient things are the
+rage, and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my
+childhood."
+
+He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer, with
+swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.--"Let us hear the
+confession of these dowagers," he said, "let us see what they have in
+their paunches." He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers of all
+his wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. Pekins,
+damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India
+kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a
+right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alencon point lace,
+parures in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented
+with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons--he lavished everything on
+Cosette. Cosette, amazed, desperately in love with Marius, and wild with
+gratitude towards M. Gillenormand, dreamed of a happiness without limit
+clothed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket seemed to her to be
+upheld by seraphim. Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with wings
+of Mechlin lace.
+
+The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have already
+said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather. A sort of flourish of trumpets
+went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
+
+Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather to
+Cosette. All possible knickknacks glittered around her.
+
+One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst of his
+bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:
+
+"The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige of
+the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them seems to me
+an antique memory."
+
+"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman. "Thanks, Marius. That is
+precisely the idea of which I was in search."
+
+And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored moire
+antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.
+
+From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.
+
+"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with
+it. The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the
+necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A
+palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand
+waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a
+duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred
+thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you
+can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also
+to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry
+bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the
+useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. I
+remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall
+as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness to
+indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and
+which, after having struck midday, or midnight,--midday, the hour of the
+sun, or midnight, the hour of love,--or any other hour that you like,
+gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and
+fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a host of things which emerged from a
+niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and
+Eponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played
+on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it
+sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing
+why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to
+that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
+and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."
+
+M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all
+the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his
+dithyrambs.
+
+"You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know how to
+organize a day of enjoyment in this age," he exclaimed. "Your nineteenth
+century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores the rich, it ignores the
+noble. In everything it is clean-shaven. Your third estate is insipid,
+colorless, odorless, and shapeless. The dreams of your bourgeois who
+set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet,
+ebony and calico. Make way! Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying
+Mademoiselle Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d'or has
+been stuck to a candle. There's the epoch for you. My demand is that I
+may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians. Ah! in 1787, I predict that all
+was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Leon,
+Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Sonbise, Vicomte de Thouars,
+peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits.
+In this century, men attend to business, they gamble on 'Change, they
+win money, they are stingy. People take care of their surfaces and
+varnish them; every one is dressed as though just out of a band-box,
+washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed,
+brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble,
+discreet, neat, and at the same time, death of my life, in the depths of
+their consciences they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to
+make a cow-herd who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to
+this age the device: 'Dirty Cleanliness.' Don't be vexed, Marius, give
+me permission to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am
+always harping on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit
+of a slap to the bourgeoisie. I belong to it. He who loves well lashes
+well. Thereupon, I say plainly, that now-a-days people marry, but that
+they no longer know how to marry. Ah! it is true, I regret the grace
+of the ancient manners. I regret everything about them, their elegance,
+their chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury
+which every one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony
+above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous
+faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the songs, the
+fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil's own row, the huge knots of
+ribbon. I regret the bride's garter. The bride's garter is cousin to the
+girdle of Venus. On what does the war of Troy turn? On Helen's garter,
+parbleu! Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over
+the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did
+Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances?
+Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette's garter,
+Homer would construct the Iliad. He would put in his poem, a loquacious
+old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. My friends, in bygone
+days, in those amiable days of yore, people married wisely; they had a
+good contract, and then they had a good carouse. As soon as Cujas had
+taken his departure, Gamacho entered. But, in sooth! the stomach is
+an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which wants to have its
+wedding also. People supped well, and had at table a beautiful neighbor
+without a guimpe so that her throat was only moderately concealed. Oh!
+the large laughing mouths, and how gay we were in those days! youth was
+a bouquet; every young man terminated in a branch of lilacs or a tuft
+of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a warrior; and if, by chance,
+one was a captain of dragoons, one found means to call oneself Florian.
+People thought much of looking well. They embroidered and tinted
+themselves. A bourgeois had the air of a flower, a Marquis had the air
+of a precious stone. People had no straps to their boots, they had no
+boots. They were spruce, shining, waved, lustrous, fluttering, dainty,
+coquettish, which did not at all prevent their wearing swords by their
+sides. The humming-bird has beak and claws. That was the day of the
+Galland Indies. One of the sides of that century was delicate, the other
+was magnificent; and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves.
+To-day, people are serious. The bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise
+is a prude; your century is unfortunate. People would drive away the
+Graces as being too low in the neck. Alas! beauty is concealed as
+though it were ugliness. Since the revolution, everything, including the
+ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave;
+your rigadoons are doctrinarian. It is necessary to be majestic. People
+would be greatly annoyed if they did not carry their chins in their
+cravats. The ideal of an urchin of twenty when he marries, is to
+resemble M. Royer-Collard. And do you know what one arrives at with
+that majesty? at being petty. Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is
+great. But be in love gayly then, what the deuce! marry, when you marry,
+with fever and giddiness, and tumult, and the uproar of happiness! Be
+grave in church, well and good. But, as soon as the mass is finished,
+sarpejou! you must make a dream whirl around the bride. A marriage
+should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from
+the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I have a horror
+of a paltry wedding. Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day,
+at least. Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs. Games and
+Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends, every recently
+made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique
+minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the
+eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the
+bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don't economize on the nuptials, do not prune
+them of their splendors; don't scrimp on the day when you beam. The
+wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy,
+it would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees. Here is
+my programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with the festival
+the rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids. The
+nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks
+and entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a
+chariot drawn by marine monsters.
+
+ "Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque
+ Des sons si ravissants qu'il ravissait quiconque!"[65]
+
+--there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else I know
+nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"
+
+While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to
+himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at
+each other.
+
+Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity.
+Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain amount
+of emotions. Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius
+brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius
+reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wedding
+a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs had been her last
+surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first communion
+returned to her. She went regularly to service, told her beads, read her
+euchology, mumbled Aves in one corner of the house, while I love you
+was being whispered in the other, and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a
+vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was herself.
+
+There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,
+neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the
+business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant
+or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes. This
+devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his daughter, corresponds to
+a cold in the head. You smell nothing of life. Neither any bad, nor any
+good odor.
+
+Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly
+spinster's indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking her
+so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the matter of
+consent to Marius' marriage. He had acted impetuously, according to his
+wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a single thought,--to satisfy
+Marius. As for the aunt,--it had not even occurred to him that the aunt
+existed, and that she could have an opinion of her own, and, sheep as
+she was, this had vexed her. Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but
+impassive externally, she had said to herself: "My father has settled
+the question of the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle the
+question of the inheritance without consulting him." She was rich, in
+fact, and her father was not. She had reserved her decision on this
+point. It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would
+have left him poor. "So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding a
+beggar, let him be a beggar himself!" But Cosette's half-million pleased
+the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this pair of lovers
+were concerned. One owes some consideration to six hundred thousand
+francs, and it was evident that she could not do otherwise than leave
+her fortune to these young people, since they did not need it.
+
+It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather--M.
+Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the finest in
+the house. "That will make me young again," he said. "It's an old plan
+of mine. I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in my
+chamber."
+
+He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. He had
+the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff, which he had by
+him in the piece, and which he believed to have emanated from Utrecht
+with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered with velvet auricula
+blossoms.--"It was with that stuff," said he, "that the bed of the
+Duchesse d'Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped."--On the chimney-piece,
+he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her
+nude stomach.
+
+M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which Marius
+needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council of
+the order.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS
+
+The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.
+Fauchelevent.--"This is reversing things," said Mademoiselle
+Gillenormand, "to have the bride come to the house to do the courting
+like this." But Marius' convalescence had caused the habit to become
+established, and the arm-chairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
+better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de l'Homme
+Arme, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other, but did
+not address each other. It seemed as though this had been agreed upon.
+Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come without
+M. Fauchelevent. In Marius' eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the condition
+attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing political
+matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of view of the
+general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to say a little
+more than "yes" and "no." Once, on the subject of education, which
+Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied under all forms
+lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a word, respirable
+for the entire population, they were in unison, and they almost
+conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a certain
+loftiness of language--still he lacked something indescribable. M.
+Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than a
+man of the world.
+
+Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with
+all sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
+benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own
+recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black
+spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.--Many things had been
+lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it were
+really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so calm a
+man, in the barricade.
+
+This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the
+disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be supposed
+that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory which
+force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly behind
+us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have
+vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius clasped his
+face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past traversed the
+twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld Mabeuf fall, he
+heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt beneath his lips the
+cold brow of Eponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre,
+Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect before him, then
+dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear, sorrowful, valiant,
+charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they actually existed? The
+revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke. These great fevers create
+great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt himself; all these vanished
+realities made him dizzy. Where were they all then? was it really true
+that all were dead? A fall into the shadows had carried off all except
+himself. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind the
+curtain of a theatre. There are curtains like this which drop in life.
+God passes on to the following act.
+
+And he himself--was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was
+rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry
+Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had
+entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb
+the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the
+past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and overshadowed
+him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his serenity; but nothing
+less than this felicity could have sufficed to efface that catastrophe.
+
+M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.
+Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was
+the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely
+beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares
+occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However,
+the natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.
+Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him. We
+have already indicated this characteristic detail.
+
+Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit
+agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is
+commonly supposed.
+
+Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the
+conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,
+he said to him:
+
+"Of course, you are acquainted with that street?"
+
+"What street?"
+
+"The Rue de la Chanvrerie."
+
+"I have no idea of the name of that street," replied M. Fauchelevent, in
+the most natural manner in the world.
+
+The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the
+street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really
+was.
+
+"Decidedly," thought he, "I have been dreaming. I have been subject to
+a hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was
+not there."'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND
+
+Marius' enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his mind
+other pre-occupations.
+
+While the wedding was in preparation, and while awaiting the date fixed
+upon, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective researches to be
+made.
+
+He owed gratitude in various quarters; he owed it on his father's
+account, he owed it on his own.
+
+There was Thenardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him,
+Marius, back to M. Gillenormand.
+
+Marius endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry, to
+be happy, and to forget them, and fearing that, were these debts of
+gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on his life, which
+promised so brightly for the future.
+
+It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears of suffering behind
+him, and he wished, before entering joyously into the future, to obtain
+a quittance from the past.
+
+That Thenardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact that he
+had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thenardier was a ruffian in the eyes of all
+the world except Marius.
+
+And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field of Waterloo,
+was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father, so far as
+Thenardier was concerned was in the strange position of being indebted
+to the latter for his life, without being indebted to him for any
+gratitude.
+
+None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in discovering
+any trace of Thenardier. Obliteration appeared to be complete in
+that quarter. Madame Thenardier had died in prison pending the trial.
+Thenardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two remaining of that
+lamentable group, had plunged back into the gloom. The gulf of the
+social unknown had silently closed above those beings. On the surface
+there was not visible so much as that quiver, that trembling, those
+obscure concentric circles which announce that something has fallen in,
+and that the plummet may be dropped.
+
+Madame Thenardier being dead, Boulatruelle being eliminated from the
+case, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal persons accused
+having escaped from prison, the trial connected with the ambush in the
+Gorbeau house had come to nothing.
+
+That affair had remained rather obscure. The bench of Assizes had been
+obliged to content themselves with two subordinates. Panchaud, alias
+Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, alias Deux-Milliards, who
+had been inconsistently condemned, after a hearing of both sides of
+the case, to ten years in the galleys. Hard labor for life had been the
+sentence pronounced against the escaped and contumacious accomplices.
+
+Thenardier, the head and leader, had been, through contumacy, likewise
+condemned to death.
+
+This sentence was the only information remaining about Thenardier,
+casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside a
+bier.
+
+Moreover, by thrusting Thenardier back into the very remotest depths,
+through a fear of being re-captured, this sentence added to the density
+of the shadows which enveloped this man.
+
+As for the other person, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius,
+the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came to
+an abrupt conclusion. They succeeded in finding the carriage which had
+brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the evening of the
+6th of June.
+
+The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience to the
+commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o'clock in the
+afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Elysees, above the
+outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o'clock in the evening,
+the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank of the river, had
+opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on his shoulders
+another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent, who was on the watch
+at that point, had arrested the living man and had seized the dead man;
+that, at the order of the police-agent, he, the coachman, had taken "all
+those folks" into his carriage; that they had first driven to the Rue
+des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had there deposited the dead man; that
+the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the coachman, recognized
+him perfectly, although he was alive "this time"; that afterwards, they
+had entered the vehicle again, that he had whipped up his horses; a few
+paces from the gate of the Archives, they had called to him to halt;
+that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him, and that the
+police-agent had led the other man away; that he knew nothing more; that
+the night had been very dark.
+
+Marius, as we have said, recalled nothing. He only remembered that he
+had been seized from behind by an energetic hand at the moment when he
+was falling backwards into the barricade; then, everything vanished so
+far as he was concerned.
+
+He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand's.
+
+He was lost in conjectures.
+
+He could not doubt his own identity. Still, how had it come to pass
+that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked
+up by the police-agent on the banks of the Seine, near the Pont des
+Invalides?
+
+Some one had carried him from the Quartier des Halles to the
+Champs-Elysees. And how? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion!
+
+Some one? Who?
+
+This was the man for whom Marius was searching.
+
+Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; not a trace; not the faintest
+indication.
+
+Marius, although forced to preserve great reserve, in that direction,
+pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture of police. There, no more
+than elsewhere, did the information obtained lead to any enlightenment.
+
+The prefecture knew less about the matter than did the hackney-coachman.
+They had no knowledge of any arrest having been made on the 6th of June
+at the mouth of the Grand Sewer.
+
+No report of any agent had been received there upon this matter, which
+was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable
+was attributed to the coachman.
+
+A coachman who wants a gratuity is capable of anything, even of
+imagination. The fact was assured, nevertheless, and Marius could not
+doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said.
+
+Everything about this singular enigma was inexplicable.
+
+What had become of that man, that mysterious man, whom the coachman had
+seen emerge from the grating of the Grand Sewer bearing upon his back
+the unconscious Marius, and whom the police-agent on the watch had
+arrested in the very act of rescuing an insurgent? What had become of
+the agent himself?
+
+Why had this agent preserved silence? Had the man succeeded in making
+his escape? Had he bribed the agent? Why did this man give no sign of
+life to Marius, who owed everything to him? His disinterestedness was no
+less tremendous than his devotion. Why had not that man appeared again?
+Perhaps he was above compensation, but no one is above gratitude. Was he
+dead? Who was the man? What sort of a face had he? No one could tell him
+this.
+
+The coachman answered: "The night was very dark." Basque and Nicolette,
+all in a flutter, had looked only at their young master all covered with
+blood.
+
+The porter, whose candle had lighted the tragic arrival of Marius, had
+been the only one to take note of the man in question, and this is the
+description that he gave:
+
+"That man was terrible."
+
+Marius had the blood-stained clothing which he had worn when he had been
+brought back to his grandfather preserved, in the hope that it would
+prove of service in his researches.
+
+On examining the coat, it was found that one skirt had been torn in a
+singular way. A piece was missing.
+
+One evening, Marius was speaking in the presence of Cosette and Jean
+Valjean of the whole of that singular adventure, of the innumerable
+inquiries which he had made, and of the fruitlessness of his efforts.
+The cold countenance of "Monsieur Fauchelevent" angered him.
+
+He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it:
+
+"Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime. Do you know what
+he did, sir? He intervened like an archangel. He must have flung himself
+into the midst of the battle, have stolen me away, have opened the
+sewer, have dragged me into it and have carried me through it! He
+must have traversed more than a league and a half in those frightful
+subterranean galleries, bent over, weighed down, in the dark, in the
+cess-pool,--more than a league and a half, sir, with a corpse upon his
+back! And with what object? With the sole object of saving the corpse.
+And that corpse I was. He said to himself: 'There may still be a
+glimpse of life there, perchance; I will risk my own existence for that
+miserable spark!' And his existence he risked not once but twenty times!
+And every step was a danger. The proof of it is, that on emerging from
+the sewer, he was arrested. Do you know, sir, that that man did all
+this? And he had no recompense to expect. What was I? An insurgent.
+What was I? One of the conquered. Oh! if Cosette's six hundred thousand
+francs were mine . . ."
+
+"They are yours," interrupted Jean Valjean.
+
+"Well," resumed Marius, "I would give them all to find that man once
+more."
+
+Jean Valjean remained silent.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833
+
+The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a blessed
+night. Above its shadows heaven stood open. It was the wedding night of
+Marius and Cosette.
+
+The day had been adorable.
+
+It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather, a fairy
+spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over the heads of the
+bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject of a painting to be
+placed over a door; but it had been sweet and smiling.
+
+The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day. France
+had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy of carrying off
+one's wife, of fleeing, on coming out of church, of hiding oneself with
+shame from one's happiness, and of combining the ways of a bankrupt with
+the delights of the Song of Songs. People had not yet grasped to the
+full the chastity, exquisiteness, and decency of jolting their paradise
+in a posting-chaise, of breaking up their mystery with clic-clacs, of
+taking for a nuptial bed the bed of an inn, and of leaving behind them,
+in a commonplace chamber, at such a night, the most sacred of
+the souvenirs of life mingled pell-mell with the tete-a-tete of the
+conductor of the diligence and the maid-servant of the inn.
+
+In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we are now
+living, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law
+and God no longer suffice; they must be eked out by the Postilion de
+Lonjumeau; a blue waistcoat turned up with red, and with bell buttons,
+a plaque like a vantbrace, knee-breeches of green leather, oaths to the
+Norman horses with their tails knotted up, false galloons, varnished
+hat, long powdered locks, an enormous whip and tall boots. France does
+not yet carry elegance to the length of doing like the English nobility,
+and raining down on the post-chaise of the bridal pair a hail storm
+of slippers trodden down at heel and of worn-out shoes, in memory of
+Churchill, afterwards Marlborough, or Malbrouck, who was assailed on
+his wedding-day by the wrath of an aunt which brought him good luck.
+Old shoes and slippers do not, as yet, form a part of our nuptial
+celebrations; but patience, as good taste continues to spread, we shall
+come to that.
+
+In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at a full trot.
+
+Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was
+a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not
+spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be
+honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a
+good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies whence
+a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that the
+household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness.
+
+And people were so immodest as to marry in their own homes.
+
+The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this now
+superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand's house.
+
+Natural and commonplace as this matter of marrying is, the banns to
+publish, the papers to be drawn up, the mayoralty, and the church
+produce some complication. They could not get ready before the 16th of
+February.
+
+Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being exact, it
+chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday. Hesitations, scruples,
+particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.
+
+"Shrove Tuesday!" exclaimed the grandfather, "so much the better. There
+is a proverb:
+
+ "'Mariage un Mardi gras
+ N'aura point enfants ingrats.'[66]
+
+
+Let us proceed. Here goes for the 16th! Do you want to delay, Marius?"
+
+"No, certainly not!" replied the lover.
+
+"Let us marry, then," cried the grandfather.
+
+Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the
+public merrymaking. It rained that day, but there is always in the sky
+a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even
+when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.
+
+On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence
+of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.
+
+As the marriage was taking place under the regime of community of
+property, the papers had been simple.
+
+Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette inherited
+her and promoted her to the rank of lady's maid.
+
+As for Jean Valjean, a beautiful chamber in the Gillenormand house had
+been furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said to him in such
+an irresistible manner: "Father, I entreat you," that she had almost
+persuaded him to promise that he would come and occupy it.
+
+A few days before that fixed on for the marriage, an accident happened
+to Jean Valjean; he crushed the thumb of his right hand. This was not a
+serious matter; and he had not allowed any one to trouble himself
+about it, nor to dress it, nor even to see his hurt, not even Cosette.
+Nevertheless, this had forced him to swathe his hand in a linen bandage,
+and to carry his arm in a sling, and had prevented his signing. M.
+Gillenormand, in his capacity of Cosette's supervising-guardian, had
+supplied his place.
+
+We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor's office or to the
+church. One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent, and one is
+accustomed to turn one's back on the drama as soon as it puts a wedding
+nosegay in its buttonhole. We will confine ourselves to noting an
+incident which, though unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the
+transit from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of Saint-Paul.
+
+At that epoch, the northern extremity of the Rue Saint-Louis was in
+process of repaving. It was barred off, beginning with the Rue du
+Pare-Royal. It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly
+to Saint-Paul. They were obliged to alter their course, and the simplest
+way was to turn through the boulevard. One of the invited guests
+observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a jam
+of vehicles.--"Why?" asked M. Gillenormand--"Because of the
+maskers."--"Capital," said the grandfather, "let us go that way. These
+young folks are on the way to be married; they are about to enter the
+serious part of life. This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the
+masquerade."
+
+They went by way of the boulevard. The first wedding coach held Cosette
+and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. Marius, still
+separated from his betrothed according to usage, did not come until
+the second. The nuptial train, on emerging from the Rue des
+Filles-du-Calvaire, became entangled in a long procession of vehicles
+which formed an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille, and
+from the Bastille to the Madeleine. Maskers abounded on the boulevard.
+In spite of the fact that it was raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew,
+Pantaloon and Clown persisted. In the good humor of that winter of 1833,
+Paris had disguised itself as Venice. Such Shrove Tuesdays are no
+longer to be seen now-a-days. Everything which exists being a scattered
+Carnival, there is no longer any Carnival.
+
+The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows with
+curious spectators. The terraces which crown the peristyles of the
+theatres were bordered with spectators. Besides the maskers, they stared
+at that procession--peculiar to Shrove Tuesday as to Longchamps,--of
+vehicles of every description, citadines, tapissieres, carioles,
+cabriolets marching in order, rigorously riveted to each other by the
+police regulations, and locked into rails, as it were. Any one in
+these vehicles is at once a spectator and a spectacle. Police-sergeants
+maintained, on the sides of the boulevard, these two interminable
+parallel files, moving in contrary directions, and saw to it that
+nothing interfered with that double current, those two brooks of
+carriages, flowing, the one down stream, the other up stream, the
+one towards the Chaussee d'Antin, the other towards the Faubourg
+Saint-Antoine. The carriages of the peers of France and of the
+Ambassadors, emblazoned with coats of arms, held the middle of the way,
+going and coming freely. Certain joyous and magnificent trains, notably
+that of the Boeuf Gras, had the same privilege. In this gayety of Paris,
+England cracked her whip; Lord Seymour's post-chaise, harassed by a
+nickname from the populace, passed with great noise.
+
+In the double file, along which the municipal guards galloped like
+sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down with great-aunts and
+grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of children in
+disguise, Clowns of seven years of age, Columbines of six, ravishing
+little creatures, who felt that they formed an official part of the
+public mirth, who were imbued with the dignity of their harlequinade,
+and who possessed the gravity of functionaries.
+
+From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession of
+vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until the knot
+was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze the whole
+line. Then they set out again on the march.
+
+The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards the Bastille,
+and skirting the right side of the Boulevard. At the top of the
+Pont-aux-Choux, there was a stoppage. Nearly at the same moment, the
+other file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine, halted also. At
+that point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers.
+
+These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads of
+maskers are very familiar to Parisians. If they were missing on a Shrove
+Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent, it would be taken in bad part, and people
+would say: "There's something behind that. Probably the ministry
+is about to undergo a change." A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and
+Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible
+grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting
+Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just
+as the Maenads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights,
+dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot
+tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on
+hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of
+shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what
+that institution was like.
+
+Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands in need of
+the hackney-coach of Vade.
+
+Everything can be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of
+antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove
+Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves
+and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a
+divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her shape under
+the soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be called the
+Jack-pudding.
+
+The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the most ancient
+days of the monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the bailiff of
+the palace "twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of mascarades
+in the cross-roads." In our day, these noisy heaps of creatures are
+accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient cuckoo carriage,
+whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a hired landau, with
+its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups. Twenty of them ride
+in a carriage intended for six. They cling to the seats, to the rumble,
+on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts. They even bestride the
+carriage lamps. They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up in a
+knot, and their legs hanging. The women sit on the men's laps. Far
+away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is visible. These
+carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of the rout. Colle,
+Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang. This carriage which
+has become colossal through its freight, has an air of conquest. Uproar
+reigns in front, tumult behind. People vociferate, shout, howl, there
+they break forth and writhe with enjoyment; gayety roars; sarcasm flames
+forth, joviality is flaunted like a red flag; two jades there drag farce
+blossomed forth into an apotheosis; it is the triumphal car of laughter.
+
+A laughter that is too cynical to be frank. In truth, this laughter is
+suspicious. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the
+Carnival to the Parisians.
+
+These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows,
+set the philosopher to thinking. There is government therein. There one
+lays one's finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and public
+women.
+
+It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total
+of gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should
+be enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids to
+prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them, that the
+crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags, half
+dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing, that they
+should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames, that there
+would be no festival for the populace, did not the police promenade in
+their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy. But what can be
+done about it? These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are
+insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public. The laughter of all
+is the accomplice of universal degradation. Certain unhealthy festivals
+disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace. And
+populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The King has Roquelaure,
+the populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a great, mad city on every
+occasion that it is a great sublime city. There the Carnival forms
+part of politics. Paris,--let us confess it--willingly allows infamy to
+furnish it with comedy. She only demands of her masters--when she has
+masters--one thing: "Paint me the mud." Rome was of the same mind. She
+loved Nero. Nero was a titanic lighterman.
+
+Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless
+clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash, should
+halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train halted on the
+right. The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage
+containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side of the
+boulevard.
+
+"Hullo!" said a masker, "here's a wedding."
+
+"A sham wedding," retorted another. "We are the genuine article."
+
+And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also,
+the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.
+
+At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their
+hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd's caress
+to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the
+throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of
+projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous
+verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of metaphors took
+place between the maskers and the crowd.
+
+In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard
+with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache, and a
+gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a loup,[67] had
+also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by
+were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue in a low voice.
+
+Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. The gusts of
+rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the
+breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked
+gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.
+
+Here is their dialogue:
+
+"Say, now."
+
+"What, daddy?"
+
+"Do you see that old cove?"
+
+"What old cove?"
+
+"Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side."
+
+"The one with his arm hung up in a black cravat?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I'm sure that I know him."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"I'm willing that they should cut my throat, and I'm ready to swear that
+I never said either you, thou, or I, in my life, if I don't know that
+Parisian." [pantinois.]
+
+"Paris in Pantin to-day."
+
+"Can you see the bride if you stoop down?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And the bridegroom?"
+
+"There's no bridegroom in that trap."
+
+"Bah!"
+
+"Unless it's the old fellow."
+
+"Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low."
+
+"I can't."
+
+"Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter with his paw I
+know, and that I'm positive."
+
+"And what good does it do to know him?"
+
+"No one can tell. Sometimes it does!"
+
+"I don't care a hang for old fellows, that I don't!"
+
+"I know him."
+
+"Know him, if you want to."
+
+"How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding party?"
+
+"We are in it, too."
+
+"Where does that wedding come from?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"Listen."
+
+"Well, what?"
+
+"There's one thing you ought to do."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Get off of our trap and spin that wedding."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To find out where it goes, and what it is. Hurry up and jump down,
+trot, my girl, your legs are young."
+
+"I can't quit the vehicle."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I'm hired."
+
+"Ah, the devil!"
+
+"I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture."
+
+"That's true."
+
+"If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his eye on me will
+arrest me. You know that well enough."
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"I'm bought by the government for to-day."
+
+"All the same, that old fellow bothers me."
+
+"Do the old fellows bother you? But you're not a young girl."
+
+"He's in the first carriage."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"In the bride's trap."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"So he is the father."
+
+"What concern is that of mine?"
+
+"I tell you that he's the father."
+
+"As if he were the only father."
+
+"Listen."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I can't go out otherwise than masked. Here I'm concealed, no one knows
+that I'm here. But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers. It's Ash
+Wednesday. I run the risk of being nabbed. I must sneak back into my
+hole. But you are free."
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"More than I am, at any rate."
+
+"Well, what of that?"
+
+"You must try to find out where that wedding-party went to."
+
+"Where it went?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Where is it going then?"
+
+"To the Cadran-Bleu."
+
+"In the first place, it's not in that direction."
+
+"Well! to la Rapee."
+
+"Or elsewhere."
+
+"It's free. Wedding-parties are at liberty."
+
+"That's not the point at all. I tell you that you must try to learn for
+me what that wedding is, who that old cove belongs to, and where that
+wedding pair lives."
+
+"I like that! that would be queer. It's so easy to find out a
+wedding-party that passed through the street on a Shrove Tuesday, a week
+afterwards. A pin in a hay-mow! It ain't possible!"
+
+"That don't matter. You must try. You understand me, Azelma."
+
+The two files resumed their movement on both sides of the boulevard, in
+opposite directions, and the carriage of the maskers lost sight of the
+"trap" of the bride.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING
+
+To realize one's dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be
+elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to
+ourselves; the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been elected.
+
+Cosette, both at the mayor's office and at church, was dazzling and
+touching. Toussaint, assisted by Nicolette, had dressed her.
+
+Cosette wore over a petticoat of white taffeta, her robe of Binche
+guipure, a veil of English point, a necklace of fine pearls, a wreath
+of orange flowers; all this was white, and, from the midst of that
+whiteness she beamed forth. It was an exquisite candor expanding and
+becoming transfigured in the light. One would have pronounced her a
+virgin on the point of turning into a goddess.
+
+Marius' handsome hair was lustrous and perfumed; here and there, beneath
+the thick curls, pale lines--the scars of the barricade--were visible.
+
+The grandfather, haughty, with head held high, amalgamating more than
+ever in his toilet and his manners all the elegances of the epoch of
+Barras, escorted Cosette. He took the place of Jean Valjean, who, on
+account of his arm being still in a sling, could not give his hand to
+the bride.
+
+Jean Valjean, dressed in black, followed them with a smile.
+
+"Monsieur Fauchelevent," said the grandfather to him, "this is a fine
+day. I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows. Henceforth, there
+must be no sadness anywhere. Pardieu, I decree joy! Evil has no right to
+exist. That there should be any unhappy men is, in sooth, a disgrace
+to the azure of the sky. Evil does not come from man, who is good at
+bottom. All human miseries have for their capital and central government
+hell, otherwise, known as the Devil's Tuileries. Good, here I am
+uttering demagogical words! As far as I am concerned, I have no longer
+any political opinions; let all me be rich, that is to say, mirthful,
+and I confine myself to that."
+
+When, at the conclusion of all the ceremonies, after having pronounced
+before the mayor and before the priest all possible "yesses," after
+having signed the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy,
+after having exchanged their rings, after having knelt side by side
+under the pall of white moire in the smoke of the censer, they arrived,
+hand in hand, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white,
+preceded by the suisse, with the epaulets of a colonel, tapping the
+pavement with his halberd, between two rows of astonished spectators, at
+the portals of the church, both leaves of which were thrown wide open,
+ready to enter their carriage again, and all being finished, Cosette
+still could not believe that it was real. She looked at Marius, she
+looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky: it seemed as though she
+feared that she should wake up from her dream. Her amazed and uneasy air
+added something indescribably enchanting to her beauty. They entered the
+same carriage to return home, Marius beside Cosette; M. Gillenormand
+and Jean Valjean sat opposite them; Aunt Gillenormand had withdrawn one
+degree, and was in the second vehicle.
+
+"My children," said the grandfather, "here you are, Monsieur le Baron
+and Madame la Baronne, with an income of thirty thousand livres."
+
+And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an angelic
+whisper: "So it is true. My name is Marius. I am Madame Thou."
+
+These two creatures were resplendent. They had reached that irrevocable
+and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection of all youth and
+all joy. They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty
+years old taken together. It was marriage sublimated; these two children
+were two lilies. They did not see each other, they did not contemplate
+each other. Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glory; Marius
+perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar, and in that glory, the
+two apotheoses mingling, in the background, one knows not how, behind a
+cloud for Cosette, in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the
+real thing, the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow.
+All the torments through which they had passed came back to them in
+intoxication. It seemed to them that their sorrows, their sleepless
+nights, their tears, their anguish, their terrors, their despair,
+converted into caresses and rays of light, rendered still more charming
+the charming hour which was approaching; and that their griefs were but
+so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy. How good it is
+to have suffered! Their unhappiness formed a halo round their happiness.
+The long agony of their love was terminating in an ascension.
+
+It was the same enchantment in two souls, tinged with voluptuousness
+in Marius, and with modesty in Cosette. They said to each other in low
+tones: "We will go back to take a look at our little garden in the Rue
+Plumet." The folds of Cosette's gown lay across Marius.
+
+Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality. One
+possesses and one supposes. One still has time before one to divine. The
+emotion on that day, of being at mid-day and of dreaming of midnight
+is indescribable. The delights of these two hearts overflowed upon the
+crowd, and inspired the passers-by with cheerfulness.
+
+People halted in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in front of Saint-Paul, to gaze
+through the windows of the carriage at the orange-flowers quivering on
+Cosette's head.
+
+Then they returned home to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Marius,
+triumphant and radiant, mounted side by side with Cosette the staircase
+up which he had been borne in a dying condition. The poor, who had
+trooped to the door, and who shared their purses, blessed them. There
+were flowers everywhere. The house was no less fragrant than the church;
+after the incense, roses. They thought they heard voices carolling in
+the infinite; they had God in their hearts; destiny appeared to them
+like a ceiling of stars; above their heads they beheld the light of a
+rising sun. All at once, the clock struck. Marius glanced at Cosette's
+charming bare arm, and at the rosy things which were vaguely visible
+through the lace of her bodice, and Cosette, intercepting Marius'
+glance, blushed to her very hair.
+
+Quite a number of old family friends of the Gillenormand family had
+been invited; they pressed about Cosette. Each one vied with the rest in
+saluting her as Madame la Baronne.
+
+The officer, Theodule Gillenormand, now a captain, had come from
+Chartres, where he was stationed in garrison, to be present at the
+wedding of his cousin Pontmercy. Cosette did not recognize him.
+
+He, on his side, habituated as he was to have women consider him
+handsome, retained no more recollection of Cosette than of any other
+woman.
+
+"How right I was not to believe in that story about the lancer!" said
+Father Gillenormand, to himself.
+
+Cosette had never been more tender with Jean Valjean. She was in unison
+with Father Gillenormand; while he erected joy into aphorisms and
+maxims, she exhaled goodness like a perfume. Happiness desires that all
+the world should be happy.
+
+She regained, for the purpose of addressing Jean Valjean, inflections of
+voice belonging to the time when she was a little girl. She caressed him
+with her smile.
+
+A banquet had been spread in the dining-room.
+
+Illumination as brilliant as the daylight is the necessary seasoning of
+a great joy. Mist and obscurity are not accepted by the happy. They do
+not consent to be black. The night, yes; the shadows, no. If there is no
+sun, one must be made.
+
+The dining-room was full of gay things. In the centre, above the white
+and glittering table, was a Venetian lustre with flat plates, with all
+sorts of colored birds, blue, violet, red, and green, perched amid the
+candles; around the chandelier, girandoles, on the walls, sconces with
+triple and quintuple branches; mirrors, silverware, glassware, plate,
+porcelain, faience, pottery, gold and silversmith's work, all was
+sparkling and gay. The empty spaces between the candelabra were filled
+in with bouquets, so that where there was not a light, there was a
+flower.
+
+In the antechamber, three violins and a flute softly played quartettes
+by Haydn.
+
+Jean Valjean had seated himself on a chair in the drawing-room, behind
+the door, the leaf of which folded back upon him in such a manner as to
+nearly conceal him. A few moments before they sat down to table, Cosette
+came, as though inspired by a sudden whim, and made him a deep courtesy,
+spreading out her bridal toilet with both hands, and with a tenderly
+roguish glance, she asked him:
+
+"Father, are you satisfied?"
+
+"Yes," said Jean Valjean, "I am content!"
+
+"Well, then, laugh."
+
+Jean Valjean began to laugh.
+
+A few moments later, Basque announced that dinner was served.
+
+The guests, preceded by M. Gillenormand with Cosette on his arm, entered
+the dining-room, and arranged themselves in the proper order around the
+table.
+
+Two large arm-chairs figured on the right and left of the bride, the
+first for M. Gillenormand, the other for Jean Valjean. M. Gillenormand
+took his seat. The other arm-chair remained empty.
+
+They looked about for M. Fauchelevent.
+
+He was no longer there.
+
+M. Gillenormand questioned Basque.
+
+"Do you know where M. Fauchelevent is?"
+
+"Sir," replied Basque, "I do, precisely. M. Fauchelevent told me to say
+to you, sir, that he was suffering, his injured hand was paining him
+somewhat, and that he could not dine with Monsieur le Baron and Madame
+la Baronne. That he begged to be excused, that he would come to-morrow.
+He has just taken his departure."
+
+That empty arm-chair chilled the effusion of the wedding feast for a
+moment. But, if M. Fauchelevent was absent, M. Gillenormand was present,
+and the grandfather beamed for two. He affirmed that M. Fauchelevent had
+done well to retire early, if he were suffering, but that it was only a
+slight ailment. This declaration sufficed. Moreover, what is an obscure
+corner in such a submersion of joy? Cosette and Marius were passing
+through one of those egotistical and blessed moments when no other
+faculty is left to a person than that of receiving happiness. And then,
+an idea occurred to M. Gillenormand.--"Pardieu, this armchair is empty.
+Come hither, Marius. Your aunt will permit it, although she has a
+right to you. This armchair is for you. That is legal and delightful.
+Fortunatus beside Fortunata."--Applause from the whole table. Marius
+took Jean Valjean's place beside Cosette, and things fell out so that
+Cosette, who had, at first, been saddened by Jean Valjean's absence,
+ended by being satisfied with it. From the moment when Marius took his
+place, and was the substitute, Cosette would not have regretted God
+himself. She set her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius'
+foot.
+
+The arm-chair being occupied, M. Fauchelevent was obliterated; and
+nothing was lacking.
+
+And, five minutes afterward, the whole table from one end to the other,
+was laughing with all the animation of forgetfulness.
+
+At dessert, M. Gillenormand, rising to his feet, with a glass of
+champagne in his hand--only half full so that the palsy of his eighty
+years might not cause an overflow,--proposed the health of the married
+pair.
+
+"You shall not escape two sermons," he exclaimed. "This morning you
+had one from the cure, this evening you shall have one from your
+grandfather. Listen to me; I will give you a bit of advice: Adore each
+other. I do not make a pack of gyrations, I go straight to the mark,
+be happy. In all creation, only the turtle-doves are wise. Philosophers
+say: 'Moderate your joys.' I say: 'Give rein to your joys.' Be as
+much smitten with each other as fiends. Be in a rage about it. The
+philosophers talk stuff and nonsense. I should like to stuff their
+philosophy down their gullets again. Can there be too many perfumes,
+too many open rose-buds, too many nightingales singing, too many green
+leaves, too much aurora in life? can people love each other too much?
+can people please each other too much? Take care, Estelle, thou art too
+pretty! Have a care, Nemorin, thou art too handsome! Fine stupidity,
+in sooth! Can people enchant each other too much, cajole each other too
+much, charm each other too much? Can one be too much alive, too happy?
+Moderate your joys. Ah, indeed! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom
+consists in jubilation. Make merry, let us make merry. Are we happy
+because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? Is the Sancy
+diamond called the Sancy because it belonged to Harley de Sancy, or
+because it weighs six hundred carats? I know nothing about it, life is
+full of such problems; the important point is to possess the Sancy and
+happiness. Let us be happy without quibbling and quirking. Let us obey
+the sun blindly. What is the sun? It is love. He who says love, says
+woman. Ah! ah! behold omnipotence--women. Ask that demagogue of a Marius
+if he is not the slave of that little tyrant of a Cosette. And of his
+own free will, too, the coward! Woman! There is no Robespierre who keeps
+his place but woman reigns. I am no longer Royalist except towards that
+royalty. What is Adam? The kingdom of Eve. No '89 for Eve. There has
+been the royal sceptre surmounted by a fleur-de-lys, there has been the
+imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe, there has been the sceptre of
+Charlemagne, which was of iron, there has been the sceptre of Louis the
+Great, which was of gold,--the revolution twisted them between its thumb
+and forefinger, ha'penny straws; it is done with, it is broken, it lies
+on the earth, there is no longer any sceptre, but make me a revolution
+against that little embroidered handkerchief, which smells of patchouli!
+I should like to see you do it. Try. Why is it so solid? Because it is a
+gewgaw. Ah! you are the nineteenth century? Well, what then? And we
+have been as foolish as you. Do not imagine that you have effected
+much change in the universe, because your trip-gallant is called the
+cholera-morbus, and because your pourree is called the cachuca. In fact,
+the women must always be loved. I defy you to escape from that. These
+friends are our angels. Yes, love, woman, the kiss forms a circle from
+which I defy you to escape; and, for my own part, I should be only
+too happy to re-enter it. Which of you has seen the planet Venus, the
+coquette of the abyss, the Celimene of the ocean, rise in the infinite,
+calming all here below? The ocean is a rough Alcestis. Well, grumble
+as he will, when Venus appears he is forced to smile. That brute beast
+submits. We are all made so. Wrath, tempest, claps of thunder, foam to
+the very ceiling. A woman enters on the scene, a planet rises; flat on
+your face! Marius was fighting six months ago; to-day he is married.
+That is well. Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are in the right. Exist
+boldly for each other, make us burst with rage that we cannot do the
+same, idealize each other, catch in your beaks all the tiny blades of
+felicity that exist on earth, and arrange yourselves a nest for life.
+Pardi, to love, to be loved, what a fine miracle when one is young!
+Don't imagine that you have invented that. I, too, have had my dream, I,
+too, have meditated, I, too, have sighed; I, too, have had a moonlight
+soul. Love is a child six thousand years old. Love has the right to a
+long white beard. Methusalem is a street arab beside Cupid. For sixty
+centuries men and women have got out of their scrape by loving. The
+devil, who is cunning, took to hating man; man, who is still more
+cunning, took to loving woman. In this way he does more good than
+the devil does him harm. This craft was discovered in the days of
+the terrestrial paradise. The invention is old, my friends, but it is
+perfectly new. Profit by it. Be Daphnis and Chloe, while waiting to
+become Philemon and Baucis. Manage so that, when you are with each
+other, nothing shall be lacking to you, and that Cosette may be the sun
+for Marius, and that Marius may be the universe to Cosette. Cosette, let
+your fine weather be the smile of your husband; Marius, let your rain
+be your wife's tears. And let it never rain in your household. You have
+filched the winning number in the lottery; you have gained the great
+prize, guard it well, keep it under lock and key, do not squander it,
+adore each other and snap your fingers at all the rest. Believe what I
+say to you. It is good sense. And good sense cannot lie. Be a religion
+to each other. Each man has his own fashion of adoring God. Saperlotte!
+the best way to adore God is to love one's wife. I love thee! that's
+my catechism. He who loves is orthodox. The oath of Henri IV. places
+sanctity somewhere between feasting and drunkenness. Ventre-saint-gris!
+I don't belong to the religion of that oath. Woman is forgotten in it.
+This astonishes me on the part of Henri IV. My friends, long live women!
+I am old, they say; it's astonishing how much I feel in the mood to
+be young. I should like to go and listen to the bagpipes in the woods.
+Children who contrive to be beautiful and contented,--that intoxicates
+me. I would like greatly to get married, if any one would have me. It is
+impossible to imagine that God could have made us for anything but this:
+to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves, to be dove-like, to be dainty,
+to bill and coo our loves from morn to night, to gaze at one's image in
+one's little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant, to plume oneself; that
+is the aim of life. There, let not that displease you which we used to
+think in our day, when we were young folks. Ah! vertu-bamboche! what
+charming women there were in those days, and what pretty little faces
+and what lovely lasses! I committed my ravages among them. Then love
+each other. If people did not love each other, I really do not see what
+use there would be in having any springtime; and for my own part, I
+should pray the good God to shut up all the beautiful things that he
+shows us, and to take away from us and put back in his box, the flowers,
+the birds, and the pretty maidens. My children, receive an old man's
+blessing."
+
+The evening was gay, lively and agreeable. The grandfather's sovereign
+good humor gave the key-note to the whole feast, and each person
+regulated his conduct on that almost centenarian cordiality. They danced
+a little, they laughed a great deal; it was an amiable wedding. Goodman
+Days of Yore might have been invited to it. However, he was present in
+the person of Father Gillenormand.
+
+There was a tumult, then silence.
+
+The married pair disappeared.
+
+A little after midnight, the Gillenormand house became a temple.
+
+Here we pause. On the threshold of wedding nights stands a smiling angel
+with his finger on his lips.
+
+The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where the
+celebration of love takes place.
+
+There should be flashes of light athwart such houses. The joy which
+they contain ought to make its escape through the stones of the walls in
+brilliancy, and vaguely illuminate the gloom. It is impossible that this
+sacred and fatal festival should not give off a celestial radiance to
+the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible wherein the fusion of the man
+and the woman takes place; the being one, the being triple, the being
+final, the human trinity proceeds from it. This birth of two souls into
+one, ought to be an emotion for the gloom. The lover is the priest;
+the ravished virgin is terrified. Something of that joy ascends to God.
+Where true marriage is, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal
+enters in. A nuptial bed makes a nook of dawn amid the shadows. If it
+were given to the eye of the flesh to scan the formidable and charming
+visions of the upper life, it is probable that we should behold the
+forms of night, the winged unknowns, the blue passers of the invisible,
+bend down, a throng of sombre heads, around the luminous house,
+satisfied, showering benedictions, pointing out to each other the virgin
+wife gently alarmed, sweetly terrified, and bearing the reflection of
+human bliss upon their divine countenances. If at that supreme hour, the
+wedded pair, dazzled with voluptuousness and believing themselves alone,
+were to listen, they would hear in their chamber a confused rustling of
+wings. Perfect happiness implies a mutual understanding with the angels.
+That dark little chamber has all heaven for its ceiling. When two
+mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible
+that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering
+throughout the immense mystery of stars.
+
+These felicities are the true ones. There is no joy outside of these
+joys. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps.
+
+To love, or to have loved,--this suffices. Demand nothing more. There
+is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a
+fulfilment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE INSEPARABLE
+
+What had become of Jean Valjean?
+
+Immediately after having laughed, at Cosette's graceful command, when
+no one was paying any heed to him, Jean Valjean had risen and had gained
+the antechamber unperceived. This was the very room which, eight months
+before, he had entered black with mud, with blood and powder, bringing
+back the grandson to the grandfather. The old wainscoting was garlanded
+with foliage and flowers; the musicians were seated on the sofa on which
+they had laid Marius down. Basque, in a black coat, knee-breeches, white
+stockings and white gloves, was arranging roses round all of the dishes
+that were to be served. Jean Valjean pointed to his arm in its sling,
+charged Basque to explain his absence, and went away.
+
+The long windows of the dining-room opened on the street. Jean Valjean
+stood for several minutes, erect and motionless in the darkness, beneath
+those radiant windows. He listened. The confused sounds of the banquet
+reached his ear. He heard the loud, commanding tones of the grandfather,
+the violins, the clatter of the plates, the bursts of laughter, and
+through all that merry uproar, he distinguished Cosette's sweet and
+joyous voice.
+
+He quitted the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and returned to the Rue de
+l'Homme Arme.
+
+In order to return thither, he took the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue
+Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and the Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little
+longer, but it was the road through which, for the last three months,
+he had become accustomed to pass every day on his way from the Rue de
+l'Homme Arme to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, in order to avoid the
+obstructions and the mud in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple.
+
+This road, through which Cosette had passed, excluded for him all
+possibility of any other itinerary.
+
+Jean Valjean entered his lodgings. He lighted his candle and mounted
+the stairs. The apartment was empty. Even Toussaint was no longer there.
+Jean Valjean's step made more noise than usual in the chambers. All the
+cupboards stood open. He penetrated to Cosette's bedroom. There were no
+sheets on the bed. The pillow, covered with ticking, and without a case
+or lace, was laid on the blankets folded up on the foot of the mattress,
+whose covering was visible, and on which no one was ever to sleep again.
+All the little feminine objects which Cosette was attached to had been
+carried away; nothing remained except the heavy furniture and the four
+walls. Toussaint's bed was despoiled in like manner. One bed only was
+made up, and seemed to be waiting some one, and this was Jean Valjean's
+bed.
+
+Jean Valjean looked at the walls, closed some of the cupboard doors, and
+went and came from one room to another.
+
+Then he sought his own chamber once more, and set his candle on a table.
+
+He had disengaged his arm from the sling, and he used his right hand as
+though it did not hurt him.
+
+He approached his bed, and his eyes rested, was it by chance? was it
+intentionally? on the inseparable of which Cosette had been jealous, on
+the little portmanteau which never left him. On his arrival in the Rue
+de l'Homme Arme, on the 4th of June, he had deposited it on a round
+table near the head of his bed. He went to this table with a sort of
+vivacity, took a key from his pocket, and opened the valise.
+
+From it he slowly drew forth the garments in which, ten years before,
+Cosette had quitted Montfermeil; first the little gown, then the black
+fichu, then the stout, coarse child's shoes which Cosette might almost
+have worn still, so tiny were her feet, then the fustian bodice, which
+was very thick, then the knitted petticoat, next the apron with pockets,
+then the woollen stockings. These stockings, which still preserved the
+graceful form of a tiny leg, were no longer than Jean Valjean's hand.
+All this was black of hue. It was he who had brought those garments to
+Montfermeil for her. As he removed them from the valise, he laid them on
+the bed. He fell to thinking. He called up memories. It was in winter,
+in a very cold month of December, she was shivering, half-naked, in
+rags, her poor little feet were all red in their wooden shoes. He, Jean
+Valjean, had made her abandon those rags to clothe herself in these
+mourning habiliments. The mother must have felt pleased in her grave, to
+see her daughter wearing mourning for her, and, above all, to see that
+she was properly clothed, and that she was warm. He thought of that
+forest of Montfermeil; they had traversed it together, Cosette and he;
+he thought of what the weather had been, of the leafless trees, of the
+wood destitute of birds, of the sunless sky; it mattered not, it was
+charming. He arranged the tiny garments on the bed, the fichu next to
+the petticoat, the stockings beside the shoes, and he looked at them,
+one after the other. She was no taller than that, she had her big doll
+in her arms, she had put her louis d'or in the pocket of that apron, she
+had laughed, they walked hand in hand, she had no one in the world but
+him.
+
+Then his venerable, white head fell forward on the bed, that stoical old
+heart broke, his face was engulfed, so to speak, in Cosette's garments,
+and if any one had passed up the stairs at that moment, he would have
+heard frightful sobs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE IMMORTAL LIVER [68]
+
+The old and formidable struggle, of which we have already witnessed so
+many phases, began once more.
+
+Jacob struggled with the angel but one night. Alas! how many times have
+we beheld Jean Valjean seized bodily by his conscience, in the darkness,
+and struggling desperately against it!
+
+Unheard-of conflict! At certain moments the foot slips; at other moments
+the ground crumbles away underfoot. How many times had that conscience,
+mad for the good, clasped and overthrown him! How many times had the
+truth set her knee inexorably upon his breast! How many times, hurled
+to earth by the light, had he begged for mercy! How many times had
+that implacable spark, lighted within him, and upon him by the Bishop,
+dazzled him by force when he had wished to be blind! How many times
+had he risen to his feet in the combat, held fast to the rock, leaning
+against sophism, dragged in the dust, now getting the upper hand of his
+conscience, again overthrown by it! How many times, after an equivoque,
+after the specious and treacherous reasoning of egotism, had he heard
+his irritated conscience cry in his ear: "A trip! you wretch!" How many
+times had his refractory thoughts rattled convulsively in his throat,
+under the evidence of duty! Resistance to God. Funereal sweats. What
+secret wounds which he alone felt bleed! What excoriations in his
+lamentable existence! How many times he had risen bleeding, bruised,
+broken, enlightened, despair in his heart, serenity in his soul!
+and, vanquished, he had felt himself the conqueror. And, after having
+dislocated, broken, and rent his conscience with red-hot pincers, it had
+said to him, as it stood over him, formidable, luminous, and tranquil:
+"Now, go in peace!"
+
+But on emerging from so melancholy a conflict, what a lugubrious peace,
+alas!
+
+Nevertheless, that night Jean Valjean felt that he was passing through
+his final combat.
+
+A heart-rending question presented itself.
+
+Predestinations are not all direct; they do not open out in a straight
+avenue before the predestined man; they have blind courts, impassable
+alleys, obscure turns, disturbing crossroads offering the choice of many
+ways. Jean Valjean had halted at that moment at the most perilous of
+these crossroads.
+
+He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that
+gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had
+happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out
+before him, the one tempting, the other alarming.
+
+Which was he to take?
+
+He was counselled to the one which alarmed him by that mysterious index
+finger which we all perceive whenever we fix our eyes on the darkness.
+
+Once more, Jean Valjean had the choice between the terrible port and the
+smiling ambush.
+
+Is it then true? the soul may recover; but not fate. Frightful thing! an
+incurable destiny!
+
+This is the problem which presented itself to him:
+
+In what manner was Jean Valjean to behave in relation to the happiness
+of Cosette and Marius? It was he who had willed that happiness, it was
+he who had brought it about; he had, himself, buried it in his entrails,
+and at that moment, when he reflected on it, he was able to enjoy the
+sort of satisfaction which an armorer would experience on recognizing
+his factory mark on a knife, on withdrawing it, all smoking, from his
+own breast.
+
+Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette. They had everything, even
+riches. And this was his doing.
+
+But what was he, Jean Valjean, to do with this happiness, now that
+it existed, now that it was there? Should he force himself on this
+happiness? Should he treat it as belonging to him? No doubt, Cosette did
+belong to another; but should he, Jean Valjean, retain of Cosette all
+that he could retain? Should he remain the sort of father, half seen but
+respected, which he had hitherto been? Should he, without saying a
+word, bring his past to that future? Should he present himself there,
+as though he had a right, and should he seat himself, veiled, at that
+luminous fireside? Should he take those innocent hands into his tragic
+hands, with a smile? Should he place upon the peaceful fender of the
+Gillenormand drawing-room those feet of his, which dragged behind them
+the disgraceful shadow of the law? Should he enter into participation in
+the fair fortunes of Cosette and Marius? Should he render the obscurity
+on his brow and the cloud upon theirs still more dense? Should he
+place his catastrophe as a third associate in their felicity? Should he
+continue to hold his peace? In a word, should he be the sinister mute of
+destiny beside these two happy beings?
+
+We must have become habituated to fatality and to encounters with it, in
+order to have the daring to raise our eyes when certain questions appear
+to us in all their horrible nakedness. Good or evil stands behind
+this severe interrogation point. What are you going to do? demands the
+sphinx.
+
+This habit of trial Jean Valjean possessed. He gazed intently at the
+sphinx.
+
+He examined the pitiless problem under all its aspects.
+
+Cosette, that charming existence, was the raft of this shipwreck. What
+was he to do? To cling fast to it, or to let go his hold?
+
+If he clung to it, he should emerge from disaster, he should ascend
+again into the sunlight, he should let the bitter water drip from his
+garments and his hair, he was saved, he should live.
+
+And if he let go his hold?
+
+Then the abyss.
+
+Thus he took sad council with his thoughts. Or, to speak more correctly,
+he fought; he kicked furiously internally, now against his will, now
+against his conviction.
+
+Happily for Jean Valjean that he had been able to weep. That relieved
+him, possibly. But the beginning was savage. A tempest, more furious
+than the one which had formerly driven him to Arras, broke loose within
+him. The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared
+them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man
+writhed.
+
+He felt that he had been stopped short.
+
+Alas! in this fight to the death between our egotism and our duty, when
+we thus retreat step by step before our immutable ideal, bewildered,
+furious, exasperated at having to yield, disputing the ground, hoping
+for a possible flight, seeking an escape, what an abrupt and sinister
+resistance does the foot of the wall offer in our rear!
+
+To feel the sacred shadow which forms an obstacle!
+
+The invisible inexorable, what an obsession!
+
+Then, one is never done with conscience. Make your choice, Brutus; make
+your choice, Cato. It is fathomless, since it is God. One flings into
+that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in one's fortune,
+one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success, one flings in
+one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's well-being, one flings
+in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! More! more! more! Empty the
+vase! tip the urn! One must finish by flinging in one's heart.
+
+Somewhere in the fog of the ancient hells, there is a tun like that.
+
+Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses! Can the inexhaustible
+have any right? Are not chains which are endless above human strength?
+Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying: "It is enough!"
+
+The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit to the
+obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, can perpetual
+self-sacrifice be exacted?
+
+The first step is nothing, it is the last which is difficult. What was
+the Champmathieu affair in comparison with Cosette's marriage and of
+that which it entailed? What is a re-entrance into the galleys, compared
+to entrance into the void?
+
+Oh, first step that must be descended, how sombre art thou! Oh, second
+step, how black art thou!
+
+How could he refrain from turning aside his head this time?
+
+Martyrdom is sublimation, corrosive sublimation. It is a torture which
+consecrates. One can consent to it for the first hour; one seats oneself
+on the throne of glowing iron, one places on one's head the crown of hot
+iron, one accepts the globe of red hot iron, one takes the sceptre of
+red hot iron, but the mantle of flame still remains to be donned, and
+comes there not a moment when the miserable flesh revolts and when one
+abdicates from suffering?
+
+At length, Jean Valjean entered into the peace of exhaustion.
+
+He weighed, he reflected, he considered the alternatives, the mysterious
+balance of light and darkness.
+
+Should he impose his galleys on those two dazzling children, or should
+he consummate his irremediable engulfment by himself? On one side lay
+the sacrifice of Cosette, on the other that of himself.
+
+At what solution should he arrive? What decision did he come to?
+
+What resolution did he take? What was his own inward definitive response
+to the unbribable interrogatory of fatality? What door did he decide to
+open? Which side of his life did he resolve upon closing and condemning?
+Among all the unfathomable precipices which surrounded him, which was
+his choice? What extremity did he accept? To which of the gulfs did he
+nod his head?
+
+His dizzy revery lasted all night long.
+
+He remained there until daylight, in the same attitude, bent double over
+that bed, prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, crushed, perchance,
+alas! with clenched fists, with arms outspread at right angles, like a
+man crucified who has been un-nailed, and flung face down on the earth.
+There he remained for twelve hours, the twelve long hours of a long
+winter's night, ice-cold, without once raising his head, and without
+uttering a word. He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts
+wallowed on the earth and soared, now like the hydra, now like the
+eagle. Any one to behold him thus motionless would have pronounced him
+dead; all at once he shuddered convulsively, and his mouth, glued to
+Cosette's garments, kissed them; then it could be seen that he was
+alive.
+
+Who could see? Since Jean Valjean was alone, and there was no one there.
+
+The One who is in the shadows.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP
+
+[Illustration: Last Drop from the Cup 5b7-1-last-drop]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN
+
+The days that follow weddings are solitary. People respect the
+meditations of the happy pair. And also, their tardy slumbers, to some
+degree. The tumult of visits and congratulations only begins later on.
+On the morning of the 17th of February, it was a little past midday when
+Basque, with napkin and feather-duster under his arm, busy in setting
+his antechamber to rights, heard a light tap at the door. There had been
+no ring, which was discreet on such a day. Basque opened the door, and
+beheld M. Fauchelevent. He introduced him into the drawing-room, still
+encumbered and topsy-turvy, and which bore the air of a field of battle
+after the joys of the preceding evening.
+
+"Dame, sir," remarked Basque, "we all woke up late."
+
+"Is your master up?" asked Jean Valjean.
+
+"How is Monsieur's arm?" replied Basque.
+
+"Better. Is your master up?"
+
+"Which one? the old one or the new one?"
+
+"Monsieur Pontmercy."
+
+"Monsieur le Baron," said Basque, drawing himself up.
+
+A man is a Baron most of all to his servants. He counts for something
+with them; they are what a philosopher would call, bespattered with the
+title, and that flatters them. Marius, be it said in passing, a militant
+republican as he had proved, was now a Baron in spite of himself. A
+small revolution had taken place in the family in connection with
+this title. It was now M. Gillenormand who clung to it, and Marius who
+detached himself from it. But Colonel Pontmercy had written: "My son
+will bear my title." Marius obeyed. And then, Cosette, in whom the woman
+was beginning to dawn, was delighted to be a Baroness.
+
+"Monsieur le Baron?" repeated Basque. "I will go and see. I will tell
+him that M. Fauchelevent is here."
+
+"No. Do not tell him that it is I. Tell him that some one wishes to
+speak to him in private, and mention no name."
+
+"Ah!" ejaculated Basque.
+
+"I wish to surprise him."
+
+"Ah!" ejaculated Basque once more, emitting his second "ah!" as an
+explanation of the first.
+
+And he left the room.
+
+Jean Valjean remained alone.
+
+The drawing-room, as we have just said, was in great disorder. It seemed
+as though, by lending an air, one might still hear the vague noise of
+the wedding. On the polished floor lay all sorts of flowers which
+had fallen from garlands and head-dresses. The wax candles, burned
+to stumps, added stalactites of wax to the crystal drops of the
+chandeliers. Not a single piece of furniture was in its place. In the
+corners, three or four arm-chairs, drawn close together in a circle,
+had the appearance of continuing a conversation. The whole effect was
+cheerful. A certain grace still lingers round a dead feast. It has been
+a happy thing. On the chairs in disarray, among those fading flowers,
+beneath those extinct lights, people have thought of joy. The sun
+had succeeded to the chandelier, and made its way gayly into the
+drawing-room.
+
+Several minutes elapsed. Jean Valjean stood motionless on the spot where
+Basque had left him. He was very pale. His eyes were hollow, and so
+sunken in his head by sleeplessness that they nearly disappeared in
+their orbits. His black coat bore the weary folds of a garment that
+has been up all night. The elbows were whitened with the down which the
+friction of cloth against linen leaves behind it.
+
+Jean Valjean stared at the window outlined on the polished floor at his
+feet by the sun.
+
+There came a sound at the door, and he raised his eyes.
+
+Marius entered, his head well up, his mouth smiling, an indescribable
+light on his countenance, his brow expanded, his eyes triumphant. He had
+not slept either.
+
+"It is you, father!" he exclaimed, on catching sight of Jean Valjean;
+"that idiot of a Basque had such a mysterious air! But you have come too
+early. It is only half past twelve. Cosette is asleep."
+
+That word: "Father," said to M. Fauchelevent by Marius, signified:
+supreme felicity. There had always existed, as the reader knows, a lofty
+wall, a coldness and a constraint between them; ice which must be broken
+or melted. Marius had reached that point of intoxication when the wall
+was lowered, when the ice dissolved, and when M. Fauchelevent was to
+him, as to Cosette, a father.
+
+He continued: his words poured forth, as is the peculiarity of divine
+paroxysms of joy.
+
+"How glad I am to see you! If you only knew how we missed you yesterday!
+Good morning, father. How is your hand? Better, is it not?"
+
+And, satisfied with the favorable reply which he had made to himself, he
+pursued:
+
+"We have both been talking about you. Cosette loves you so dearly! You
+must not forget that you have a chamber here, We want nothing more to
+do with the Rue de l'Homme Arme. We will have no more of it at all. How
+could you go to live in a street like that, which is sickly, which is
+disagreeable, which is ugly, which has a barrier at one end, where one
+is cold, and into which one cannot enter? You are to come and install
+yourself here. And this very day. Or you will have to deal with Cosette.
+She means to lead us all by the nose, I warn you. You have your own
+chamber here, it is close to ours, it opens on the garden; the trouble
+with the clock has been attended to, the bed is made, it is all ready,
+you have only to take possession of it. Near your bed Cosette has placed
+a huge, old, easy-chair covered with Utrecht velvet and she has said to
+it: 'Stretch out your arms to him.' A nightingale comes to the clump of
+acacias opposite your windows, every spring. In two months more you will
+have it. You will have its nest on your left and ours on your right. By
+night it will sing, and by day Cosette will prattle. Your chamber faces
+due South. Cosette will arrange your books for you, your Voyages of
+Captain Cook and the other,--Vancouver's and all your affairs. I believe
+that there is a little valise to which you are attached, I have fixed
+upon a corner of honor for that. You have conquered my grandfather, you
+suit him. We will live together. Do you play whist? you will overwhelm
+my grandfather with delight if you play whist. It is you who shall take
+Cosette to walk on the days when I am at the courts, you shall give her
+your arm, you know, as you used to, in the Luxembourg. We are absolutely
+resolved to be happy. And you shall be included in it, in our happiness,
+do you hear, father? Come, will you breakfast with us to-day?"
+
+"Sir," said Jean Valjean, "I have something to say to you. I am an
+ex-convict."
+
+The limit of shrill sounds perceptible can be overleaped, as well in
+the case of the mind as in that of the ear. These words: "I am an
+ex-convict," proceeding from the mouth of M. Fauchelevent and entering
+the ear of Marius overshot the possible. It seemed to him that something
+had just been said to him; but he did not know what. He stood with his
+mouth wide open.
+
+Then he perceived that the man who was addressing him was frightful.
+Wholly absorbed in his own dazzled state, he had not, up to that moment,
+observed the other man's terrible pallor.
+
+Jean Valjean untied the black cravat which supported his right arm,
+unrolled the linen from around his hand, bared his thumb and showed it
+to Marius.
+
+"There is nothing the matter with my hand," said he.
+
+Marius looked at the thumb.
+
+"There has not been anything the matter with it," went on Jean Valjean.
+
+There was, in fact, no trace of any injury.
+
+Jean Valjean continued:
+
+"It was fitting that I should be absent from your marriage. I absented
+myself as much as was in my power. So I invented this injury in order
+that I might not commit a forgery, that I might not introduce a flaw
+into the marriage documents, in order that I might escape from signing."
+
+Marius stammered.
+
+"What is the meaning of this?"
+
+"The meaning of it is," replied Jean Valjean, "that I have been in the
+galleys."
+
+"You are driving me mad!" exclaimed Marius in terror.
+
+"Monsieur Pontmercy," said Jean Valjean, "I was nineteen years in the
+galleys. For theft. Then, I was condemned for life for theft, for a
+second offence. At the present moment, I have broken my ban."
+
+In vain did Marius recoil before the reality, refuse the fact, resist
+the evidence, he was forced to give way. He began to understand, and, as
+always happens in such cases, he understood too much. An inward shudder
+of hideous enlightenment flashed through him; an idea which made him
+quiver traversed his mind. He caught a glimpse of a wretched destiny for
+himself in the future.
+
+"Say all, say all!" he cried. "You are Cosette's father!"
+
+And he retreated a couple of paces with a movement of indescribable
+horror.
+
+Jean Valjean elevated his head with so much majesty of attitude that he
+seemed to grow even to the ceiling.
+
+"It is necessary that you should believe me here, sir; although our oath
+to others may not be received in law . . ."
+
+Here he paused, then, with a sort of sovereign and sepulchral authority,
+he added, articulating slowly, and emphasizing the syllables:
+
+". . . You will believe me. I the father of Cosette! before God, no.
+Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy, I am a peasant of Faverolles. I earned my
+living by pruning trees. My name is not Fauchelevent, but Jean Valjean.
+I am not related to Cosette. Reassure yourself."
+
+Marius stammered:
+
+"Who will prove that to me?"
+
+"I. Since I tell you so."
+
+Marius looked at the man. He was melancholy yet tranquil. No lie could
+proceed from such a calm. That which is icy is sincere. The truth could
+be felt in that chill of the tomb.
+
+"I believe you," said Marius.
+
+Jean Valjean bent his head, as though taking note of this, and
+continued:
+
+"What am I to Cosette? A passer-by. Ten years ago, I did not know that
+she was in existence. I love her, it is true. One loves a child whom one
+has seen when very young, being old oneself. When one is old, one feels
+oneself a grandfather towards all little children. You may, it seems to
+me, suppose that I have something which resembles a heart. She was an
+orphan. Without either father or mother. She needed me. That is why I
+began to love her. Children are so weak that the first comer, even a man
+like me, can become their protector. I have fulfilled this duty towards
+Cosette. I do not think that so slight a thing can be called a good
+action; but if it be a good action, well, say that I have done it.
+Register this attenuating circumstance. To-day, Cosette passes out of my
+life; our two roads part. Henceforth, I can do nothing for her. She is
+Madame Pontmercy. Her providence has changed. And Cosette gains by the
+change. All is well. As for the six hundred thousand francs, you do not
+mention them to me, but I forestall your thought, they are a deposit.
+How did that deposit come into my hands? What does that matter? I
+restore the deposit. Nothing more can be demanded of me. I complete
+the restitution by announcing my true name. That concerns me. I have a
+reason for desiring that you should know who I am."
+
+And Jean Valjean looked Marius full in the face.
+
+All that Marius experienced was tumultuous and incoherent. Certain gusts
+of destiny produce these billows in our souls.
+
+We have all undergone moments of trouble in which everything within us
+is dispersed; we say the first things that occur to us, which are
+not always precisely those which should be said. There are sudden
+revelations which one cannot bear, and which intoxicate like baleful
+wine. Marius was stupefied by the novel situation which presented itself
+to him, to the point of addressing that man almost like a person who was
+angry with him for this avowal.
+
+"But why," he exclaimed, "do you tell me all this? Who forces you to
+do so? You could have kept your secret to yourself. You are neither
+denounced, nor tracked nor pursued. You have a reason for wantonly
+making such a revelation. Conclude. There is something more. In what
+connection do you make this confession? What is your motive?"
+
+"My motive?" replied Jean Valjean in a voice so low and dull that one
+would have said that he was talking to himself rather than to Marius.
+"From what motive, in fact, has this convict just said 'I am a convict'?
+Well, yes! the motive is strange. It is out of honesty. Stay, the
+unfortunate point is that I have a thread in my heart, which keeps me
+fast. It is when one is old that that sort of thread is particularly
+solid. All life falls in ruin around one; one resists. Had I been able
+to tear out that thread, to break it, to undo the knot or to cut it, to
+go far away, I should have been safe. I had only to go away; there are
+diligences in the Rue Bouloy; you are happy; I am going. I have tried
+to break that thread, I have jerked at it, it would not break, I tore my
+heart with it. Then I said: 'I cannot live anywhere else than here.' I
+must stay. Well, yes, you are right, I am a fool, why not simply
+remain here? You offer me a chamber in this house, Madame Pontmercy is
+sincerely attached to me, she said to the arm-chair: 'Stretch out your
+arms to him,' your grandfather demands nothing better than to have me, I
+suit him, we shall live together, and take our meals in common, I shall
+give Cosette my arm . . . Madame Pontmercy, excuse me, it is a habit, we
+shall have but one roof, one table, one fire, the same chimney-corner
+in winter, the same promenade in summer, that is joy, that is happiness,
+that is everything. We shall live as one family. One family!"
+
+At that word, Jean Valjean became wild. He folded his arms, glared at
+the floor beneath his feet as though he would have excavated an abyss
+therein, and his voice suddenly rose in thundering tones:
+
+"As one family! No. I belong to no family. I do not belong to yours.
+I do not belong to any family of men. In houses where people are among
+themselves, I am superfluous. There are families, but there is nothing
+of the sort for me. I am an unlucky wretch; I am left outside. Did I
+have a father and mother? I almost doubt it. On the day when I gave that
+child in marriage, all came to an end. I have seen her happy, and that
+she is with a man whom she loves, and that there exists here a kind old
+man, a household of two angels, and all joys in that house, and that it
+was well, I said to myself: 'Enter thou not.' I could have lied, it is
+true, have deceived you all, and remained Monsieur Fauchelevent. So long
+as it was for her, I could lie; but now it would be for myself, and I
+must not. It was sufficient for me to hold my peace, it is true, and all
+would go on. You ask me what has forced me to speak? a very odd thing;
+my conscience. To hold my peace was very easy, however. I passed the
+night in trying to persuade myself to it; you questioned me, and what I
+have just said to you is so extraordinary that you have the right to do
+it; well, yes, I have passed the night in alleging reasons to myself,
+and I gave myself very good reasons, I have done what I could. But there
+are two things in which I have not succeeded; in breaking the thread
+that holds me fixed, riveted and sealed here by the heart, or in
+silencing some one who speaks softly to me when I am alone. That is why
+I have come hither to tell you everything this morning. Everything or
+nearly everything. It is useless to tell you that which concerns only
+myself; I keep that to myself. You know the essential points. So I have
+taken my mystery and have brought it to you. And I have disembowelled my
+secret before your eyes. It was not a resolution that was easy to take.
+I struggled all night long. Ah! you think that I did not tell myself
+that this was no Champmathieu affair, that by concealing my name I was
+doing no one any injury, that the name of Fauchelevent had been given to
+me by Fauchelevent himself, out of gratitude for a service rendered to
+him, and that I might assuredly keep it, and that I should be happy in
+that chamber which you offer me, that I should not be in any one's way,
+that I should be in my own little corner, and that, while you would have
+Cosette, I should have the idea that I was in the same house with her.
+Each one of us would have had his share of happiness. If I continued to
+be Monsieur Fauchelevent, that would arrange everything. Yes, with the
+exception of my soul. There was joy everywhere upon my surface, but the
+bottom of my soul remained black. It is not enough to be happy, one must
+be content. Thus I should have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, thus
+I should have concealed my true visage, thus, in the presence of your
+expansion, I should have had an enigma, thus, in the midst of your full
+noonday, I should have had shadows, thus, without crying ''ware,' I
+should have simply introduced the galleys to your fireside, I should
+have taken my seat at your table with the thought that if you knew who
+I was, you would drive me from it, I should have allowed myself to
+be served by domestics who, had they known, would have said: 'How
+horrible!' I should have touched you with my elbow, which you have a
+right to dislike, I should have filched your clasps of the hand! There
+would have existed in your house a division of respect between venerable
+white locks and tainted white locks; at your most intimate hours, when
+all hearts thought themselves open to the very bottom to all the rest,
+when we four were together, your grandfather, you two and myself, a
+stranger would have been present! I should have been side by side with
+you in your existence, having for my only care not to disarrange the
+cover of my dreadful pit. Thus, I, a dead man, should have thrust myself
+upon you who are living beings. I should have condemned her to myself
+forever. You and Cosette and I would have had all three of our heads in
+the green cap! Does it not make you shudder? I am only the most crushed
+of men; I should have been the most monstrous of men. And I should have
+committed that crime every day! And I should have had that face of night
+upon my visage every day! every day! And I should have communicated to
+you a share in my taint every day! every day! to you, my dearly beloved,
+my children, to you, my innocent creatures! Is it nothing to hold one's
+peace? is it a simple matter to keep silence? No, it is not simple.
+There is a silence which lies. And my lie, and my fraud and my
+indignity, and my cowardice and my treason and my crime, I should have
+drained drop by drop, I should have spit it out, then swallowed it
+again, I should have finished at midnight and have begun again at
+midday, and my 'good morning' would have lied, and my 'good night' would
+have lied, and I should have slept on it, I should have eaten it, with
+my bread, and I should have looked Cosette in the face, and I should
+have responded to the smile of the angel by the smile of the damned
+soul, and I should have been an abominable villain! Why should I do
+it? in order to be happy. In order to be happy. Have I the right to be
+happy? I stand outside of life, Sir."
+
+Jean Valjean paused. Marius listened. Such chains of ideas and of
+anguishes cannot be interrupted. Jean Valjean lowered his voice once
+more, but it was no longer a dull voice--it was a sinister voice.
+
+"You ask why I speak? I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked,
+you say. Yes! I am denounced! yes! I am tracked! By whom? By myself.
+It is I who bar the passage to myself, and I drag myself, and I push
+myself, and I arrest myself, and I execute myself, and when one holds
+oneself, one is firmly held."
+
+And, seizing a handful of his own coat by the nape of the neck and
+extending it towards Marius:
+
+"Do you see that fist?" he continued. "Don't you think that it holds
+that collar in such a wise as not to release it? Well! conscience
+is another grasp! If one desires to be happy, sir, one must never
+understand duty; for, as soon as one has comprehended it, it is
+implacable. One would say that it punished you for comprehending it;
+but no, it rewards you; for it places you in a hell, where you feel God
+beside you. One has no sooner lacerated his own entrails than he is at
+peace with himself."
+
+And, with a poignant accent, he added:
+
+"Monsieur Pontmercy, this is not common sense, I am an honest man. It is
+by degrading myself in your eyes that I elevate myself in my own. This
+has happened to me once before, but it was less painful then; it was
+a mere nothing. Yes, an honest man. I should not be so if, through my
+fault, you had continued to esteem me; now that you despise me, I am so.
+I have that fatality hanging over me that, not being able to ever have
+anything but stolen consideration, that consideration humiliates me,
+and crushes me inwardly, and, in order that I may respect myself, it is
+necessary that I should be despised. Then I straighten up again. I am
+a galley-slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that that is most
+improbable. But what would you have me do about it? it is the fact.
+I have entered into engagements with myself; I keep them. There are
+encounters which bind us, there are chances which involve us in duties.
+You see, Monsieur Pontmercy, various things have happened to me in the
+course of my life."
+
+Again Jean Valjean paused, swallowing his saliva with an effort, as
+though his words had a bitter after-taste, and then he went on:
+
+"When one has such a horror hanging over one, one has not the right to
+make others share it without their knowledge, one has not the right to
+make them slip over one's own precipice without their perceiving it,
+one has not the right to let one's red blouse drag upon them, one has no
+right to slyly encumber with one's misery the happiness of others. It is
+hideous to approach those who are healthy, and to touch them in the dark
+with one's ulcer. In spite of the fact that Fauchelevent lent me his
+name, I have no right to use it; he could give it to me, but I could not
+take it. A name is an _I_. You see, sir, that I have thought somewhat, I
+have read a little, although I am a peasant; and you see that I
+express myself properly. I understand things. I have procured myself an
+education. Well, yes, to abstract a name and to place oneself under it
+is dishonest. Letters of the alphabet can be filched, like a purse or a
+watch. To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a living false
+key, to enter the house of honest people by picking their lock, never
+more to look straightforward, to forever eye askance, to be infamous
+within the _I_, no! no! no! no! no! It is better to suffer, to bleed, to
+weep, to tear one's skin from the flesh with one's nails, to pass nights
+writhing in anguish, to devour oneself body and soul. That is why I have
+just told you all this. Wantonly, as you say."
+
+He drew a painful breath, and hurled this final word:
+
+"In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live; to-day, in
+order to live, I will not steal a name."
+
+"To live!" interrupted Marius. "You do not need that name in order to
+live?"
+
+"Ah! I understand the matter," said Jean Valjean, raising and lowering
+his head several times in succession.
+
+A silence ensued. Both held their peace, each plunged in a gulf of
+thoughts. Marius was sitting near a table and resting the corner of his
+mouth on one of his fingers, which was folded back. Jean Valjean was
+pacing to and fro. He paused before a mirror, and remained motionless.
+Then, as though replying to some inward course of reasoning, he said, as
+he gazed at the mirror, which he did not see:
+
+"While, at present, I am relieved."
+
+He took up his march again, and walked to the other end of the
+drawing-room. At the moment when he turned round, he perceived that
+Marius was watching his walk. Then he said, with an inexpressible
+intonation:
+
+"I drag my leg a little. Now you understand why!"
+
+Then he turned fully round towards Marius:
+
+"And now, sir, imagine this: I have said nothing, I have remained
+Monsieur Fauchelevent, I have taken my place in your house, I am one of
+you, I am in my chamber, I come to breakfast in the morning in slippers,
+in the evening all three of us go to the play, I accompany Madame
+Pontmercy to the Tuileries, and to the Place Royale, we are together,
+you think me your equal; one fine day you are there, and I am there, we
+are conversing, we are laughing; all at once, you hear a voice shouting
+this name: 'Jean Valjean!' and behold, that terrible hand, the police,
+darts from the darkness, and abruptly tears off my mask!"
+
+Again he paused; Marius had sprung to his feet with a shudder. Jean
+Valjean resumed:
+
+"What do you say to that?"
+
+Marius' silence answered for him.
+
+Jean Valjean continued:
+
+"You see that I am right in not holding my peace. Be happy, be
+in heaven, be the angel of an angel, exist in the sun, be content
+therewith, and do not trouble yourself about the means which a poor
+damned wretch takes to open his breast and force his duty to come forth;
+you have before you, sir, a wretched man."
+
+Marius slowly crossed the room, and, when he was quite close to Jean
+Valjean, he offered the latter his hand.
+
+But Marius was obliged to step up and take that hand which was not
+offered, Jean Valjean let him have his own way, and it seemed to Marius
+that he pressed a hand of marble.
+
+"My grandfather has friends," said Marius; "I will procure your pardon."
+
+"It is useless," replied Jean Valjean. "I am believed to be dead, and
+that suffices. The dead are not subjected to surveillance. They are
+supposed to rot in peace. Death is the same thing as pardon."
+
+And, disengaging the hand which Marius held, he added, with a sort of
+inexorable dignity:
+
+"Moreover, the friend to whom I have recourse is the doing of my duty;
+and I need but one pardon, that of my conscience."
+
+At that moment, a door at the other end of the drawing-room opened
+gently half way, and in the opening Cosette's head appeared. They saw
+only her sweet face, her hair was in charming disorder, her eyelids were
+still swollen with sleep. She made the movement of a bird, which thrusts
+its head out of its nest, glanced first at her husband, then at Jean
+Valjean, and cried to them with a smile, so that they seemed to behold a
+smile at the heart of a rose:
+
+"I will wager that you are talking politics. How stupid that is, instead
+of being with me!"
+
+Jean Valjean shuddered.
+
+"Cosette! . . ." stammered Marius.
+
+And he paused. One would have said that they were two criminals.
+
+Cosette, who was radiant, continued to gaze at both of them. There was
+something in her eyes like gleams of paradise.
+
+"I have caught you in the very act," said Cosette. "Just now, I heard my
+father Fauchelevent through the door saying: 'Conscience . . . doing my
+duty . . .' That is politics, indeed it is. I will not have it. People
+should not talk politics the very next day. It is not right."
+
+"You are mistaken. Cosette," said Marius, "we are talking business. We
+are discussing the best investment of your six hundred thousand
+francs . . ."
+
+"That is not it at all," interrupted Cosette. "I am coming. Does any
+body want me here?"
+
+And, passing resolutely through the door, she entered the drawing-room.
+She was dressed in a voluminous white dressing-gown, with a thousand
+folds and large sleeves which, starting from the neck, fell to her feet.
+In the golden heavens of some ancient gothic pictures, there are these
+charming sacks fit to clothe the angels.
+
+She contemplated herself from head to foot in a long mirror, then
+exclaimed, in an outburst of ineffable ecstasy:
+
+"There was once a King and a Queen. Oh! how happy I am!"
+
+That said, she made a curtsey to Marius and to Jean Valjean.
+
+"There," said she, "I am going to install myself near you in an
+easy-chair, we breakfast in half an hour, you shall say anything you
+like, I know well that men must talk, and I will be very good."
+
+Marius took her by the arm and said lovingly to her:
+
+"We are talking business."
+
+"By the way," said Cosette, "I have opened my window, a flock of
+pierrots has arrived in the garden,--Birds, not maskers. To-day is
+Ash-Wednesday; but not for the birds."
+
+"I tell you that we are talking business, go, my little Cosette, leave
+us alone for a moment. We are talking figures. That will bore you."
+
+"You have a charming cravat on this morning, Marius. You are very
+dandified, monseigneur. No, it will not bore me."
+
+"I assure you that it will bore you."
+
+"No. Since it is you. I shall not understand you, but I shall listen
+to you. When one hears the voices of those whom one loves, one does not
+need to understand the words that they utter. That we should be here
+together--that is all that I desire. I shall remain with you, bah!"
+
+"You are my beloved Cosette! Impossible."
+
+"Impossible!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Very good," said Cosette. "I was going to tell you some news. I could
+have told you that your grandfather is still asleep, that your aunt is
+at mass, that the chimney in my father Fauchelevent's room smokes, that
+Nicolette has sent for the chimney-sweep, that Toussaint and Nicolette
+have already quarrelled, that Nicolette makes sport of Toussaint's
+stammer. Well, you shall know nothing. Ah! it is impossible? you shall
+see, gentlemen, that I, in my turn, can say: It is impossible. Then who
+will be caught? I beseech you, my little Marius, let me stay here with
+you two."
+
+"I swear to you, that it is indispensable that we should be alone."
+
+"Well, am I anybody?"
+
+Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word. Cosette turned to him:
+
+"In the first place, father, I want you to come and embrace me. What do
+you mean by not saying anything instead of taking my part? who gave me
+such a father as that? You must perceive that my family life is very
+unhappy. My husband beats me. Come, embrace me instantly."
+
+Jean Valjean approached.
+
+Cosette turned toward Marius.
+
+"As for you, I shall make a face at you."
+
+Then she presented her brow to Jean Valjean.
+
+Jean Valjean advanced a step toward her.
+
+Cosette recoiled.
+
+"Father, you are pale. Does your arm hurt you?"
+
+"It is well," said Jean Valjean.
+
+"Did you sleep badly?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you sad?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Embrace me if you are well, if you sleep well, if you are content, I
+will not scold you."
+
+And again she offered him her brow.
+
+Jean Valjean dropped a kiss upon that brow whereon rested a celestial
+gleam.
+
+"Smile."
+
+Jean Valjean obeyed. It was the smile of a spectre.
+
+"Now, defend me against my husband."
+
+"Cosette! . . ." ejaculated Marius.
+
+"Get angry, father. Say that I must stay. You can certainly talk before
+me. So you think me very silly. What you say is astonishing! business,
+placing money in a bank a great matter truly. Men make mysteries out of
+nothing. I am very pretty this morning. Look at me, Marius."
+
+And with an adorable shrug of the shoulders, and an indescribably
+exquisite pout, she glanced at Marius.
+
+"I love you!" said Marius.
+
+"I adore you!" said Cosette.
+
+And they fell irresistibly into each other's arms.
+
+"Now," said Cosette, adjusting a fold of her dressing-gown, with a
+triumphant little grimace, "I shall stay."
+
+"No, not that," said Marius, in a supplicating tone. "We have to finish
+something."
+
+"Still no?"
+
+Marius assumed a grave tone:
+
+"I assure you, Cosette, that it is impossible."
+
+"Ah! you put on your man's voice, sir. That is well, I go. You, father,
+have not upheld me. Monsieur my father, monsieur my husband, you are
+tyrants. I shall go and tell grandpapa. If you think that I am going to
+return and talk platitudes to you, you are mistaken. I am proud. I shall
+wait for you now. You shall see, that it is you who are going to be
+bored without me. I am going, it is well."
+
+And she left the room.
+
+Two seconds later, the door opened once more, her fresh and rosy head
+was again thrust between the two leaves, and she cried to them:
+
+"I am very angry indeed."
+
+The door closed again, and the shadows descended once more.
+
+It was as though a ray of sunlight should have suddenly traversed the
+night, without itself being conscious of it.
+
+Marius made sure that the door was securely closed.
+
+"Poor Cosette!" he murmured, "when she finds out . . ."
+
+At that word Jean Valjean trembled in every limb. He fixed on Marius a
+bewildered eye.
+
+"Cosette! oh yes, it is true, you are going to tell Cosette about this.
+That is right. Stay, I had not thought of that. One has the strength for
+one thing, but not for another. Sir, I conjure you, I entreat now, sir,
+give me your most sacred word of honor, that you will not tell her. Is
+it not enough that you should know it? I have been able to say it myself
+without being forced to it, I could have told it to the universe, to the
+whole world,--it was all one to me. But she, she does not know what
+it is, it would terrify her. What, a convict! we should be obliged to
+explain matters to her, to say to her: 'He is a man who has been in the
+galleys.' She saw the chain-gang pass by one day. Oh! My God!" . . . He
+dropped into an arm-chair and hid his face in his hands.
+
+His grief was not audible, but from the quivering of his shoulders it
+was evident that he was weeping. Silent tears, terrible tears.
+
+There is something of suffocation in the sob. He was seized with a sort
+of convulsion, he threw himself against the back of the chair as though
+to gain breath, letting his arms fall, and allowing Marius to see his
+face inundated with tears, and Marius heard him murmur, so low that his
+voice seemed to issue from fathomless depths:
+
+"Oh! would that I could die!"
+
+"Be at your ease," said Marius, "I will keep your secret for myself
+alone." And, less touched, perhaps, than he ought to have been, but
+forced, for the last hour, to familiarize himself with something
+as unexpected as it was dreadful, gradually beholding the convict
+superposed before his very eyes, upon M. Fauchelevent, overcome,
+little by little, by that lugubrious reality, and led, by the natural
+inclination of the situation, to recognize the space which had just been
+placed between that man and himself, Marius added:
+
+"It is impossible that I should not speak a word to you with regard to
+the deposit which you have so faithfully and honestly remitted. That is
+an act of probity. It is just that some recompense should be bestowed on
+you. Fix the sum yourself, it shall be counted out to you. Do not fear
+to set it very high."
+
+"I thank you, sir," replied Jean Valjean, gently.
+
+He remained in thought for a moment, mechanically passing the tip of his
+fore-finger across his thumb-nail, then he lifted up his voice:
+
+"All is nearly over. But one last thing remains for me . . ."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+Jean Valjean struggled with what seemed a last hesitation, and, without
+voice, without breath, he stammered rather than said:
+
+"Now that you know, do you think, sir, you, who are the master, that I
+ought not to see Cosette any more?"
+
+"I think that would be better," replied Marius coldly.
+
+"I shall never see her more," murmured Jean Valjean. And he directed his
+steps towards the door.
+
+He laid his hand on the knob, the latch yielded, the door opened. Jean
+Valjean pushed it open far enough to pass through, stood motionless for
+a second, then closed the door again and turned to Marius.
+
+He was no longer pale, he was livid. There were no longer any tears
+in his eyes, but only a sort of tragic flame. His voice had regained a
+strange composure.
+
+"Stay, sir," he said. "If you will allow it, I will come to see her. I
+assure you that I desire it greatly. If I had not cared to see Cosette,
+I should not have made to you the confession that I have made, I should
+have gone away; but, as I desired to remain in the place where Cosette
+is, and to continue to see her, I had to tell you about it honestly. You
+follow my reasoning, do you not? it is a matter easily understood. You
+see, I have had her with me for more than nine years. We lived first
+in that hut on the boulevard, then in the convent, then near the
+Luxembourg. That was where you saw her for the first time. You remember
+her blue plush hat. Then we went to the Quartier des Invalides, where
+there was a railing on a garden, the Rue Plumet. I lived in a little
+back court-yard, whence I could hear her piano. That was my life. We
+never left each other. That lasted for nine years and some months. I
+was like her own father, and she was my child. I do not know whether
+you understand, Monsieur Pontmercy, but to go away now, never to see her
+again, never to speak to her again, to no longer have anything, would
+be hard. If you do not disapprove of it, I will come to see Cosette from
+time to time. I will not come often. I will not remain long. You shall
+give orders that I am to be received in the little waiting-room. On the
+ground floor. I could enter perfectly well by the back door, but that
+might create surprise perhaps, and it would be better, I think, for me
+to enter by the usual door. Truly, sir, I should like to see a little
+more of Cosette. As rarely as you please. Put yourself in my place,
+I have nothing left but that. And then, we must be cautious. If I
+no longer come at all, it would produce a bad effect, it would be
+considered singular. What I can do, by the way, is to come in the
+afternoon, when night is beginning to fall."
+
+"You shall come every evening," said Marius, "and Cosette will be
+waiting for you."
+
+"You are kind, sir," said Jean Valjean.
+
+Marius saluted Jean Valjean, happiness escorted despair to the door, and
+these two men parted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE OBSCURITIES WHICH A REVELATION CAN CONTAIN
+
+Marius was quite upset.
+
+The sort of estrangement which he had always felt towards the man beside
+whom he had seen Cosette, was now explained to him. There was something
+enigmatic about that person, of which his instinct had warned him.
+
+This enigma was the most hideous of disgraces, the galleys. This M.
+Fauchelevent was the convict Jean Valjean.
+
+To abruptly find such a secret in the midst of one's happiness resembles
+the discovery of a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves.
+
+Was the happiness of Marius and Cosette thenceforth condemned to such a
+neighborhood? Was this an accomplished fact? Did the acceptance of that
+man form a part of the marriage now consummated? Was there nothing to be
+done?
+
+Had Marius wedded the convict as well?
+
+In vain may one be crowned with light and joy, in vain may one taste the
+grand purple hour of life, happy love, such shocks would force even the
+archangel in his ecstasy, even the demigod in his glory, to shudder.
+
+As is always the case in changes of view of this nature, Marius asked
+himself whether he had nothing with which to reproach himself. Had he
+been wanting in divination? Had he been wanting in prudence? Had he
+involuntarily dulled his wits? A little, perhaps. Had he entered upon
+this love affair, which had ended in his marriage to Cosette, without
+taking sufficient precautions to throw light upon the surroundings? He
+admitted,--it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves
+in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,--he
+admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of
+internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms
+of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes,
+and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing
+more than a conscience bathed in a mist. We have more than once
+indicated this characteristic element of Marius' individuality.
+
+He recalled that, in the intoxication of his love, in the Rue Plumet,
+during those six or seven ecstatic weeks, he had not even spoke to
+Cosette of that drama in the Gorbeau hovel, where the victim had taken
+up such a singular line of silence during the struggle and the ensuing
+flight. How had it happened that he had not mentioned this to Cosette?
+Yet it was so near and so terrible! How had it come to pass that he had
+not even named the Thenardiers, and, particularly, on the day when he
+had encountered Eponine? He now found it almost difficult to explain his
+silence of that time. Nevertheless, he could account for it. He recalled
+his benumbed state, his intoxication with Cosette, love absorbing
+everything, that catching away of each other into the ideal, and perhaps
+also, like the imperceptible quantity of reason mingled with this
+violent and charming state of the soul, a vague, dull instinct impelling
+him to conceal and abolish in his memory that redoubtable adventure,
+contact with which he dreaded, in which he did not wish to play any
+part, his agency in which he had kept secret, and in which he could be
+neither narrator nor witness without being an accuser.
+
+Moreover, these few weeks had been a flash of lightning; there had been
+no time for anything except love.
+
+In short, having weighed everything, turned everything over in his mind,
+examined everything, whatever might have been the consequences if he had
+told Cosette about the Gorbeau ambush, even if he had discovered that
+Jean Valjean was a convict, would that have changed him, Marius? Would
+that have changed her, Cosette? Would he have drawn back? Would he have
+adored her any the less? Would he have refrained from marrying her? No.
+Then there was nothing to regret, nothing with which he need reproach
+himself. All was well. There is a deity for those drunken men who are
+called lovers. Marius blind, had followed the path which he would have
+chosen had he been in full possession of his sight. Love had bandaged
+his eyes, in order to lead him whither? To paradise.
+
+But this paradise was henceforth complicated with an infernal
+accompaniment.
+
+Marius' ancient estrangement towards this man, towards this Fauchelevent
+who had turned into Jean Valjean, was at present mingled with horror.
+
+In this horror, let us state, there was some pity, and even a certain
+surprise.
+
+This thief, this thief guilty of a second offence, had restored that
+deposit. And what a deposit! Six hundred thousand francs.
+
+He alone was in the secret of that deposit. He might have kept it all,
+he had restored it all.
+
+Moreover, he had himself revealed his situation. Nothing forced him to
+this. If any one learned who he was, it was through himself. In this
+avowal there was something more than acceptance of humiliation, there
+was acceptance of peril. For a condemned man, a mask is not a mask, it
+is a shelter. A false name is security, and he had rejected that false
+name. He, the galley-slave, might have hidden himself forever in an
+honest family; he had withstood this temptation. And with what motive?
+Through a conscientious scruple. He himself explained this with the
+irresistible accents of truth. In short, whatever this Jean Valjean
+might be, he was, undoubtedly, a conscience which was awakening. There
+existed some mysterious re-habilitation which had begun; and, to all
+appearances, scruples had for a long time already controlled this man.
+Such fits of justice and goodness are not characteristic of vulgar
+natures. An awakening of conscience is grandeur of soul.
+
+Jean Valjean was sincere. This sincerity, visible, palpable,
+irrefragable, evident from the very grief that it caused him, rendered
+inquiries useless, and conferred authority on all that that man had
+said.
+
+Here, for Marius, there was a strange reversal of situations. What
+breathed from M. Fauchelevent? distrust. What did Jean Valjean inspire?
+confidence.
+
+In the mysterious balance of this Jean Valjean which the pensive Marius
+struck, he admitted the active principle, he admitted the passive
+principle, and he tried to reach a balance.
+
+But all this went on as in a storm. Marius, while endeavoring to form a
+clear idea of this man, and while pursuing Jean Valjean, so to speak, in
+the depths of his thought, lost him and found him again in a fatal mist.
+
+The deposit honestly restored, the probity of the confession--these were
+good. This produced a lightening of the cloud, then the cloud became
+black once more.
+
+Troubled as were Marius' memories, a shadow of them returned to him.
+
+After all, what was that adventure in the Jondrette attic? Why had that
+man taken to flight on the arrival of the police, instead of entering a
+complaint?
+
+Here Marius found the answer. Because that man was a fugitive from
+justice, who had broken his ban.
+
+Another question: Why had that man come to the barricade?
+
+For Marius now once more distinctly beheld that recollection which had
+re-appeared in his emotions like sympathetic ink at the application of
+heat. This man had been in the barricade. He had not fought there. What
+had he come there for? In the presence of this question a spectre sprang
+up and replied: "Javert."
+
+Marius recalled perfectly now that funereal sight of Jean Valjean
+dragging the pinioned Javert out of the barricade, and he still heard
+behind the corner of the little Rue Mondetour that frightful pistol
+shot. Obviously, there was hatred between that police spy and the
+galley-slave. The one was in the other's way. Jean Valjean had gone to
+the barricade for the purpose of revenging himself. He had arrived late.
+He probably knew that Javert was a prisoner there. The Corsican vendetta
+has penetrated to certain lower strata and has become the law there; it
+is so simple that it does not astonish souls which are but half turned
+towards good; and those hearts are so constituted that a criminal, who
+is in the path of repentance, may be scrupulous in the matter of theft
+and unscrupulous in the matter of vengeance. Jean Valjean had killed
+Javert. At least, that seemed to be evident.
+
+This was the final question, to be sure; but to this there was no reply.
+This question Marius felt like pincers. How had it come to pass that
+Jean Valjean's existence had elbowed that of Cosette for so long a
+period?
+
+What melancholy sport of Providence was that which had placed that child
+in contact with that man? Are there then chains for two which are forged
+on high? and does God take pleasure in coupling the angel with the
+demon? So a crime and an innocence can be room-mates in the mysterious
+galleys of wretchedness? In that defiling of condemned persons which
+is called human destiny, can two brows pass side by side, the one
+ingenuous, the other formidable, the one all bathed in the divine
+whiteness of dawn, the other forever blemished by the flash of an
+eternal lightning? Who could have arranged that inexplicable pairing
+off? In what manner, in consequence of what prodigy, had any community
+of life been established between this celestial little creature and that
+old criminal?
+
+Who could have bound the lamb to the wolf, and, what was still more
+incomprehensible, have attached the wolf to the lamb? For the wolf loved
+the lamb, for the fierce creature adored the feeble one, for, during
+the space of nine years, the angel had had the monster as her point of
+support. Cosette's childhood and girlhood, her advent in the daylight,
+her virginal growth towards life and light, had been sheltered by
+that hideous devotion. Here questions exfoliated, so to speak, into
+innumerable enigmas, abysses yawned at the bottoms of abysses, and
+Marius could no longer bend over Jean Valjean without becoming dizzy.
+What was this man-precipice?
+
+The old symbols of Genesis are eternal; in human society, such as it now
+exists, and until a broader day shall effect a change in it, there will
+always be two men, the one superior, the other subterranean; the one
+which is according to good is Abel; the other which is according to evil
+is Cain. What was this tender Cain? What was this ruffian religiously
+absorbed in the adoration of a virgin, watching over her, rearing her,
+guarding her, dignifying her, and enveloping her, impure as he was
+himself, with purity?
+
+What was that cess-pool which had venerated that innocence to such a
+point as not to leave upon it a single spot? What was this Jean Valjean
+educating Cosette? What was this figure of the shadows which had for its
+only object the preservation of the rising of a star from every shadow
+and from every cloud?
+
+That was Jean Valjean's secret; that was also God's secret.
+
+In the presence of this double secret, Marius recoiled. The one, in some
+sort, reassured him as to the other. God was as visible in this affair
+as was Jean Valjean. God has his instruments. He makes use of the tool
+which he wills. He is not responsible to men. Do we know how God sets
+about the work? Jean Valjean had labored over Cosette. He had, to some
+extent, made that soul. That was incontestable. Well, what then? The
+workman was horrible; but the work was admirable. God produces his
+miracles as seems good to him. He had constructed that charming Cosette,
+and he had employed Jean Valjean. It had pleased him to choose this
+strange collaborator for himself. What account have we to demand of him?
+Is this the first time that the dung-heap has aided the spring to create
+the rose?
+
+Marius made himself these replies, and declared to himself that they
+were good. He had not dared to press Jean Valjean on all the points
+which we have just indicated, but he did not confess to himself that he
+did not dare to do it. He adored Cosette, he possessed Cosette, Cosette
+was splendidly pure. That was sufficient for him. What enlightenment did
+he need? Cosette was a light. Does light require enlightenment? He had
+everything; what more could he desire? All,--is not that enough? Jean
+Valjean's personal affairs did not concern him.
+
+And bending over the fatal shadow of that man, he clung fast,
+convulsively, to the solemn declaration of that unhappy wretch: "I
+am nothing to Cosette. Ten years ago I did not know that she was in
+existence."
+
+Jean Valjean was a passer-by. He had said so himself. Well, he had
+passed. Whatever he was, his part was finished.
+
+Henceforth, there remained Marius to fulfil the part of Providence to
+Cosette. Cosette had sought the azure in a person like herself, in her
+lover, her husband, her celestial male. Cosette, as she took her flight,
+winged and transfigured, left behind her on the earth her hideous and
+empty chrysalis, Jean Valjean.
+
+In whatever circle of ideas Marius revolved, he always returned to a
+certain horror for Jean Valjean. A sacred horror, perhaps, for, as we
+have just pointed out, he felt a quid divinum in that man. But do what
+he would, and seek what extenuation he would, he was certainly forced to
+fall back upon this: the man was a convict; that is to say, a being who
+has not even a place in the social ladder, since he is lower than the
+very lowest rung. After the very last of men comes the convict. The
+convict is no longer, so to speak, in the semblance of the living. The
+law has deprived him of the entire quantity of humanity of which it can
+deprive a man.
+
+Marius, on penal questions, still held to the inexorable system, though
+he was a democrat and he entertained all the ideas of the law on the
+subject of those whom the law strikes. He had not yet accomplished all
+progress, we admit. He had not yet come to distinguish between that
+which is written by man and that which is written by God, between law
+and right. He had not examined and weighed the right which man takes to
+dispose of the irrevocable and the irreparable. He was not shocked by
+the word vindicte. He found it quite simple that certain breaches of the
+written law should be followed by eternal suffering, and he accepted,
+as the process of civilization, social damnation. He still stood at this
+point, though safe to advance infallibly later on, since his nature was
+good, and, at bottom, wholly formed of latent progress.
+
+In this stage of his ideas, Jean Valjean appeared to him hideous and
+repulsive. He was a man reproved, he was the convict. That word was
+for him like the sound of the trump on the Day of Judgment; and, after
+having reflected upon Jean Valjean for a long time, his final gesture
+had been to turn away his head. Vade retro.
+
+Marius, if we must recognize and even insist upon the fact, while
+interrogating Jean Valjean to such a point that Jean Valjean had said:
+"You are confessing me," had not, nevertheless, put to him two or three
+decisive questions.
+
+It was not that they had not presented themselves to his mind, but that
+he had been afraid of them. The Jondrette attic? The barricade? Javert?
+Who knows where these revelations would have stopped? Jean Valjean did
+not seem like a man who would draw back, and who knows whether Marius,
+after having urged him on, would not have himself desired to hold him
+back?
+
+Has it not happened to all of us, in certain supreme conjunctures, to
+stop our ears in order that we may not hear the reply, after we have
+asked a question? It is especially when one loves that one gives way
+to these exhibitions of cowardice. It is not wise to question sinister
+situations to the last point, particularly when the indissoluble side of
+our life is fatally intermingled with them. What a terrible light might
+have proceeded from the despairing explanations of Jean Valjean, and who
+knows whether that hideous glare would not have darted forth as far
+as Cosette? Who knows whether a sort of infernal glow would not have
+lingered behind it on the brow of that angel? The spattering of a
+lightning-flash is of the thunder also. Fatality has points of juncture
+where innocence itself is stamped with crime by the gloomy law of the
+reflections which give color. The purest figures may forever preserve
+the reflection of a horrible association. Rightly or wrongly, Marius
+had been afraid. He already knew too much. He sought to dull his senses
+rather than to gain further light.
+
+In dismay he bore off Cosette in his arms and shut his eyes to Jean
+Valjean.
+
+That man was the night, the living and horrible night. How should he
+dare to seek the bottom of it? It is a terrible thing to interrogate
+the shadow. Who knows what its reply will be? The dawn may be blackened
+forever by it.
+
+In this state of mind the thought that that man would, henceforth, come
+into any contact whatever with Cosette was a heartrending perplexity to
+Marius.
+
+He now almost reproached himself for not having put those formidable
+questions, before which he had recoiled, and from which an implacable
+and definitive decision might have sprung. He felt that he was too good,
+too gentle, too weak, if we must say the word. This weakness had led him
+to an imprudent concession. He had allowed himself to be touched. He
+had been in the wrong. He ought to have simply and purely rejected
+Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean played the part of fire, and that is what he
+should have done, and have freed his house from that man.
+
+He was vexed with himself, he was angry with that whirlwind of emotions
+which had deafened, blinded, and carried him away. He was displeased
+with himself.
+
+What was he to do now? Jean Valjean's visits were profoundly repugnant
+to him. What was the use in having that man in his house? What did the
+man want? Here, he became dismayed, he did not wish to dig down, he did
+not wish to penetrate deeply; he did not wish to sound himself. He
+had promised, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a promise; Jean
+Valjean held his promise; one must keep one's word even to a convict,
+above all to a convict. Still, his first duty was to Cosette. In short,
+he was carried away by the repugnance which dominated him.
+
+Marius turned over all this confusion of ideas in his mind, passing
+from one to the other, and moved by all of them. Hence arose a profound
+trouble.
+
+It was not easy for him to hide this trouble from Cosette, but love is a
+talent, and Marius succeeded in doing it.
+
+However, without any apparent object, he questioned Cosette, who was as
+candid as a dove is white and who suspected nothing; he talked of her
+childhood and her youth, and he became more and more convinced that that
+convict had been everything good, paternal and respectable that a man
+can be towards Cosette. All that Marius had caught a glimpse of and had
+surmised was real. That sinister nettle had loved and protected that
+lily.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT
+
+[Illustration: The Twilight Decline 5b8-1-decline]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE LOWER CHAMBER
+
+On the following day, at nightfall, Jean Valjean knocked at the carriage
+gate of the Gillenormand house. It was Basque who received him. Basque
+was in the courtyard at the appointed hour, as though he had received
+his orders. It sometimes happens that one says to a servant: "You will
+watch for Mr. So and So, when he arrives."
+
+Basque addressed Jean Valjean without waiting for the latter to approach
+him:
+
+"Monsieur le Baron has charged me to inquire whether monsieur desires to
+go upstairs or to remain below?"
+
+"I will remain below," replied Jean Valjean.
+
+Basque, who was perfectly respectful, opened the door of the
+waiting-room and said:
+
+"I will go and inform Madame."
+
+The room which Jean Valjean entered was a damp, vaulted room on the
+ground floor, which served as a cellar on occasion, which opened on the
+street, was paved with red squares and was badly lighted by a grated
+window.
+
+This chamber was not one of those which are harassed by the
+feather-duster, the pope's head brush, and the broom. The dust rested
+tranquilly there. Persecution of the spiders was not organized there. A
+fine web, which spread far and wide, and was very black and ornamented
+with dead flies, formed a wheel on one of the window-panes. The room,
+which was small and low-ceiled, was furnished with a heap of empty
+bottles piled up in one corner.
+
+The wall, which was daubed with an ochre yellow wash, was scaling off in
+large flakes. At one end there was a chimney-piece painted in black
+with a narrow shelf. A fire was burning there; which indicated that Jean
+Valjean's reply: "I will remain below," had been foreseen.
+
+Two arm-chairs were placed at the two corners of the fireplace. Between
+the chairs an old bedside rug, which displayed more foundation thread
+than wool, had been spread by way of a carpet.
+
+The chamber was lighted by the fire on the hearth and the twilight
+falling through the window.
+
+Jean Valjean was fatigued. For days he had neither eaten nor slept. He
+threw himself into one of the arm-chairs.
+
+Basque returned, set a lighted candle on the chimney-piece and retired.
+Jean Valjean, his head drooping and his chin resting on his breast,
+perceived neither Basque nor the candle.
+
+All at once, he drew himself up with a start. Cosette was standing
+beside him.
+
+He had not seen her enter, but he had felt that she was there.
+
+He turned round. He gazed at her. She was adorably lovely. But what he
+was contemplating with that profound gaze was not her beauty but her
+soul.
+
+"Well," exclaimed Cosette, "father, I knew that you were peculiar, but
+I never should have expected this. What an idea! Marius told me that you
+wish me to receive you here."
+
+"Yes, it is my wish."
+
+"I expected that reply. Good. I warn you that I am going to make a scene
+for you. Let us begin at the beginning. Embrace me, father."
+
+And she offered him her cheek.
+
+Jean Valjean remained motionless.
+
+"You do not stir. I take note of it. Attitude of guilt. But never mind,
+I pardon you. Jesus Christ said: Offer the other cheek. Here it is."
+
+And she presented her other cheek.
+
+Jean Valjean did not move. It seemed as though his feet were nailed to
+the pavement.
+
+"This is becoming serious," said Cosette. "What have I done to you? I
+declare that I am perplexed. You owe me reparation. You will dine with
+us."
+
+"I have dined."
+
+"That is not true. I will get M. Gillenormand to scold you. Grandfathers
+are made to reprimand fathers. Come. Go upstairs with me to the
+drawing-room. Immediately."
+
+"Impossible."
+
+Here Cosette lost ground a little. She ceased to command and passed to
+questioning.
+
+"But why? and you choose the ugliest chamber in the house in which to
+see me. It's horrible here."
+
+"Thou knowest . . ."
+
+Jean Valjean caught himself up.
+
+"You know, madame, that I am peculiar, I have my freaks."
+
+Cosette struck her tiny hands together.
+
+"Madame! . . . You know! . . . more novelties! What is the meaning of
+this?"
+
+Jean Valjean directed upon her that heartrending smile to which he
+occasionally had recourse:
+
+"You wished to be Madame. You are so."
+
+"Not for you, father."
+
+"Do not call me father."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Call me 'Monsieur Jean.' 'Jean,' if you like."
+
+"You are no longer my father? I am no longer Cosette? 'Monsieur Jean'?
+What does this mean? why, these are revolutions, aren't they? what has
+taken place? come, look me in the face. And you won't live with us!
+And you won't have my chamber! What have I done to you? Has anything
+happened?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Well then?"
+
+"Everything is as usual."
+
+"Why do you change your name?"
+
+"You have changed yours, surely."
+
+He smiled again with the same smile as before and added:
+
+"Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I certainly can be Monsieur Jean."
+
+"I don't understand anything about it. All this is idiotic. I shall ask
+permission of my husband for you to be 'Monsieur Jean.' I hope that he
+will not consent to it. You cause me a great deal of pain. One does
+have freaks, but one does not cause one's little Cosette grief. That is
+wrong. You have no right to be wicked, you who are so good."
+
+He made no reply.
+
+She seized his hands with vivacity, and raising them to her face with
+an irresistible movement, she pressed them against her neck beneath her
+chin, which is a gesture of profound tenderness.
+
+"Oh!" she said to him, "be good!"
+
+And she went on:
+
+"This is what I call being good: being nice and coming and living
+here,--there are birds here as there are in the Rue Plumet,--living with
+us, quitting that hole of a Rue de l'Homme Arme, not giving us riddles
+to guess, being like all the rest of the world, dining with us,
+breakfasting with us, being my father."
+
+He loosed her hands.
+
+"You no longer need a father, you have a husband."
+
+Cosette became angry.
+
+"I no longer need a father! One really does not know what to say to
+things like that, which are not common sense!"
+
+"If Toussaint were here," resumed Jean Valjean, like a person who is
+driven to seek authorities, and who clutches at every branch, "she would
+be the first to agree that it is true that I have always had ways of my
+own. There is nothing new in this. I always have loved my black corner."
+
+"But it is cold here. One cannot see distinctly. It is abominable, that
+it is, to wish to be Monsieur Jean! I will not have you say 'you' to me.
+
+"Just now, as I was coming hither," replied Jean Valjean, "I saw a piece
+of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis. It was at a cabinet-maker's. If I
+were a pretty woman, I would treat myself to that bit of furniture. A
+very neat toilet table in the reigning style. What you call rosewood, I
+think. It is inlaid. The mirror is quite large. There are drawers. It is
+pretty."
+
+"Hou! the villainous bear!" replied Cosette.
+
+And with supreme grace, setting her teeth and drawing back her lips, she
+blew at Jean Valjean. She was a Grace copying a cat.
+
+"I am furious," she resumed. "Ever since yesterday, you have made me
+rage, all of you. I am greatly vexed. I don't understand. You do not
+defend me against Marius. Marius will not uphold me against you. I am
+all alone. I arrange a chamber prettily. If I could have put the good
+God there I would have done it. My chamber is left on my hands. My
+lodger sends me into bankruptcy. I order a nice little dinner of
+Nicolette. We will have nothing to do with your dinner, Madame. And my
+father Fauchelevent wants me to call him 'Monsieur Jean,' and to receive
+him in a frightful, old, ugly cellar, where the walls have beards, and
+where the crystal consists of empty bottles, and the curtains are of
+spiders' webs! You are singular, I admit, that is your style, but people
+who get married are granted a truce. You ought not to have begun being
+singular again instantly. So you are going to be perfectly contented in
+your abominable Rue de l'Homme Arme. I was very desperate indeed there,
+that I was. What have you against me? You cause me a great deal of
+grief. Fi!"
+
+And, becoming suddenly serious, she gazed intently at Jean Valjean and
+added:
+
+"Are you angry with me because I am happy?"
+
+Ingenuousness sometimes unconsciously penetrates deep. This question,
+which was simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. Cosette had
+meant to scratch, and she lacerated.
+
+Jean Valjean turned pale.
+
+He remained for a moment without replying, then, with an inexpressible
+intonation, and speaking to himself, he murmured:
+
+"Her happiness was the object of my life. Now God may sign my dismissal.
+Cosette, thou art happy; my day is over."
+
+"Ah, you have said thou to me!" exclaimed Cosette.
+
+And she sprang to his neck.
+
+Jean Valjean, in bewilderment, strained her wildly to his breast. It
+almost seemed to him as though he were taking her back.
+
+"Thanks, father!" said Cosette.
+
+This enthusiastic impulse was on the point of becoming poignant for Jean
+Valjean. He gently removed Cosette's arms, and took his hat.
+
+"Well?" said Cosette.
+
+"I leave you, Madame, they are waiting for you."
+
+And, from the threshold, he added:
+
+"I have said thou to you. Tell your husband that this shall not happen
+again. Pardon me."
+
+Jean Valjean quitted the room, leaving Cosette stupefied at this
+enigmatical farewell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--ANOTHER STEP BACKWARDS
+
+On the following day, at the same hour, Jean Valjean came.
+
+Cosette asked him no questions, was no longer astonished, no longer
+exclaimed that she was cold, no longer spoke of the drawing-room, she
+avoided saying either "father" or "Monsieur Jean." She allowed herself
+to be addressed as you. She allowed herself to be called Madame. Only,
+her joy had undergone a certain diminution. She would have been sad, if
+sadness had been possible to her.
+
+It is probable that she had had with Marius one of those conversations
+in which the beloved man says what he pleases, explains nothing, and
+satisfies the beloved woman. The curiosity of lovers does not extend
+very far beyond their own love.
+
+The lower room had made a little toilet. Basque had suppressed the
+bottles, and Nicolette the spiders.
+
+All the days which followed brought Jean Valjean at the same hour. He
+came every day, because he had not the strength to take Marius' words
+otherwise than literally. Marius arranged matters so as to be absent at
+the hours when Jean Valjean came. The house grew accustomed to the novel
+ways of M. Fauchelevent. Toussaint helped in this direction: "Monsieur
+has always been like that," she repeated. The grandfather issued this
+decree:--"He's an original." And all was said. Moreover, at the age of
+ninety-six, no bond is any longer possible, all is merely juxtaposition;
+a newcomer is in the way. There is no longer any room; all habits are
+acquired. M. Fauchelevent, M. Tranchelevent, Father Gillenormand
+asked nothing better than to be relieved from "that gentleman." He
+added:--"Nothing is more common than those originals. They do all sorts
+of queer things. They have no reason. The Marquis de Canaples was still
+worse. He bought a palace that he might lodge in the garret. These are
+fantastic appearances that people affect."
+
+No one caught a glimpse of the sinister foundation. And moreover, who
+could have guessed such a thing? There are marshes of this description
+in India. The water seems extraordinary, inexplicable, rippling though
+there is no wind, and agitated where it should be calm. One gazes at the
+surface of these causeless ebullitions; one does not perceive the hydra
+which crawls on the bottom.
+
+Many men have a secret monster in this same manner, a dragon which gnaws
+them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles
+other men, he goes and comes. No one knows that he bears within him a
+frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth, which lives within the
+unhappy man, and of which he is dying. No one knows that this man is a
+gulf. He is stagnant but deep. From time to time, a trouble of which
+the onlooker understands nothing appears on his surface. A mysterious
+wrinkle is formed, then vanishes, then re-appears; an air-bubble rises
+and bursts. It is the breathing of the unknown beast.
+
+Certain strange habits: arriving at the hour when other people are
+taking their leave, keeping in the background when other people
+are displaying themselves, preserving on all occasions what may be
+designated as the wall-colored mantle, seeking the solitary walk,
+preferring the deserted street, avoiding any share in conversation,
+avoiding crowds and festivals, seeming at one's ease and living poorly,
+having one's key in one's pocket, and one's candle at the porter's
+lodge, however rich one may be, entering by the side door, ascending
+the private staircase,--all these insignificant singularities, fugitive
+folds on the surface, often proceed from a formidable foundation.
+
+Many weeks passed in this manner. A new life gradually took possession
+of Cosette: the relations which marriage creates, visits, the care
+of the house, pleasures, great matters. Cosette's pleasures were not
+costly, they consisted in one thing: being with Marius. The great
+occupation of her life was to go out with him, to remain with him. It
+was for them a joy that was always fresh, to go out arm in arm, in the
+face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding themselves, before
+the whole world, both of them completely alone.
+
+Cosette had one vexation. Toussaint could not get on with Nicolette, the
+soldering of two elderly maids being impossible, and she went away.
+The grandfather was well; Marius argued a case here and there; Aunt
+Gillenormand peacefully led that life aside which sufficed for her,
+beside the new household. Jean Valjean came every day.
+
+The address as thou disappeared, the you, the "Madame," the "Monsieur
+Jean," rendered him another person to Cosette. The care which he had
+himself taken to detach her from him was succeeding. She became more and
+more gay and less and less tender. Yet she still loved him sincerely,
+and he felt it.
+
+One day she said to him suddenly: "You used to be my father, you are
+no longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle, you
+were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean. Who are you then? I don't
+like all this. If I did not know how good you are, I should be afraid of
+you."
+
+He still lived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, because he could not make up
+his mind to remove to a distance from the quarter where Cosette dwelt.
+
+At first, he only remained a few minutes with Cosette, and then went
+away.
+
+Little by little he acquired the habit of making his visits less brief.
+One would have said that he was taking advantage of the authorization of
+the days which were lengthening, he arrived earlier and departed later.
+
+One day Cosette chanced to say "father" to him. A flash of joy
+illuminated Jean Valjean's melancholy old countenance. He caught her
+up: "Say Jean."--"Ah! truly," she replied with a burst of laughter,
+"Monsieur Jean."--"That is right," said he. And he turned aside so that
+she might not see him wipe his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THEY RECALL THE GARDEN OF THE RUE PLUMET
+
+This was the last time. After that last flash of light, complete
+extinction ensued. No more familiarity, no more good-morning with a
+kiss, never more that word so profoundly sweet: "My father!" He was at
+his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his
+happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after
+having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose
+her again in detail.
+
+The eye eventually becomes accustomed to the light of a cellar. In
+short, it sufficed for him to have an apparition of Cosette every day.
+His whole life was concentrated in that one hour.
+
+He seated himself close to her, he gazed at her in silence, or he talked
+to her of years gone by, of her childhood, of the convent, of her little
+friends of those bygone days.
+
+One afternoon,--it was on one of those early days in April, already
+warm and fresh, the moment of the sun's great gayety, the gardens which
+surrounded the windows of Marius and Cosette felt the emotion of waking,
+the hawthorn was on the point of budding, a jewelled garniture of
+gillyflowers spread over the ancient walls, snapdragons yawned through
+the crevices of the stones, amid the grass there was a charming
+beginning of daisies, and buttercups, the white butterflies of the
+year were making their first appearance, the wind, that minstrel of the
+eternal wedding, was trying in the trees the first notes of that grand,
+auroral symphony which the old poets called the springtide,--Marius said
+to Cosette:--"We said that we would go back to take a look at our garden
+in the Rue Plumet. Let us go thither. We must not be ungrateful."--And
+away they flitted, like two swallows towards the spring. This garden of
+the Rue Plumet produced on them the effect of the dawn. They already
+had behind them in life something which was like the springtime of their
+love. The house in the Rue Plumet being held on a lease, still belonged
+to Cosette. They went to that garden and that house. There they
+found themselves again, there they forgot themselves. That
+evening, at the usual hour, Jean Valjean came to the Rue des
+Filles-du-Calvaire.--"Madame went out with Monsieur and has not yet
+returned," Basque said to him. He seated himself in silence, and waited
+an hour. Cosette did not return. He departed with drooping head.
+
+Cosette was so intoxicated with her walk to "their garden," and so
+joyous at having "lived a whole day in her past," that she talked of
+nothing else on the morrow. She did not notice that she had not seen
+Jean Valjean.
+
+"In what way did you go thither?" Jean Valjean asked her."
+
+"On foot."
+
+"And how did you return?"
+
+"In a hackney carriage."
+
+For some time, Jean Valjean had noticed the economical life led by the
+young people. He was troubled by it. Marius' economy was severe, and
+that word had its absolute meaning for Jean Valjean. He hazarded a
+query:
+
+"Why do you not have a carriage of your own? A pretty coupe would only
+cost you five hundred francs a month. You are rich."
+
+"I don't know," replied Cosette.
+
+"It is like Toussaint," resumed Jean Valjean. "She is gone. You have not
+replaced her. Why?"
+
+"Nicolette suffices."
+
+"But you ought to have a maid."
+
+"Have I not Marius?"
+
+"You ought to have a house of your own, your own servants, a carriage, a
+box at the theatre. There is nothing too fine for you. Why not profit by
+your riches? Wealth adds to happiness."
+
+Cosette made no reply.
+
+Jean Valjean's visits were not abridged. Far from it. When it is the
+heart which is slipping, one does not halt on the downward slope.
+
+When Jean Valjean wished to prolong his visit and to induce
+forgetfulness of the hour, he sang the praises of Marius; he pronounced
+him handsome, noble, courageous, witty, eloquent, good. Cosette outdid
+him. Jean Valjean began again. They were never weary. Marius--that word
+was inexhaustible; those six letters contained volumes. In this manner,
+Jean Valjean contrived to remain a long time.
+
+It was so sweet to see Cosette, to forget by her side! It alleviated his
+wounds. It frequently happened that Basque came twice to announce:
+"M. Gillenormand sends me to remind Madame la Baronne that dinner is
+served."
+
+On those days, Jean Valjean was very thoughtful on his return home.
+
+Was there, then, any truth in that comparison of the chrysalis which
+had presented itself to the mind of Marius? Was Jean Valjean really a
+chrysalis who would persist, and who would come to visit his butterfly?
+
+One day he remained still longer than usual. On the following day he
+observed that there was no fire on the hearth.--"Hello!" he thought. "No
+fire."--And he furnished the explanation for himself.--"It is perfectly
+simple. It is April. The cold weather has ceased."
+
+"Heavens! how cold it is here!" exclaimed Cosette when she entered.
+
+"Why, no," said Jean Valjean.
+
+"Was it you who told Basque not to make a fire then?"
+
+"Yes, since we are now in the month of May."
+
+"But we have a fire until June. One is needed all the year in this
+cellar."
+
+"I thought that a fire was unnecessary."
+
+"That is exactly like one of your ideas!" retorted Cosette.
+
+On the following day there was a fire. But the two arm-chairs were
+arranged at the other end of the room near the door. "--What is the
+meaning of this?" thought Jean Valjean.
+
+He went for the arm-chairs and restored them to their ordinary place
+near the hearth.
+
+This fire lighted once more encouraged him, however. He prolonged the
+conversation even beyond its customary limits. As he rose to take his
+leave, Cosette said to him:
+
+"My husband said a queer thing to me yesterday."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"He said to me: 'Cosette, we have an income of thirty thousand livres.
+Twenty-seven that you own, and three that my grandfather gives me.' I
+replied: 'That makes thirty.' He went on: 'Would you have the courage to
+live on the three thousand?' I answered: 'Yes, on nothing. Provided
+that it was with you.' And then I asked: 'Why do you say that to me?' He
+replied: 'I wanted to know.'"
+
+Jean Valjean found not a word to answer. Cosette probably expected some
+explanation from him; he listened in gloomy silence. He went back to the
+Rue de l'Homme Arme; he was so deeply absorbed that he mistook the
+door and instead of entering his own house, he entered the adjoining
+dwelling. It was only after having ascended nearly two stories that he
+perceived his error and went down again.
+
+His mind was swarming with conjectures. It was evident that Marius had
+his doubts as to the origin of the six hundred thousand francs, that
+he feared some source that was not pure, who knows? that he had even,
+perhaps, discovered that the money came from him, Jean Valjean, that he
+hesitated before this suspicious fortune, and was disinclined to take
+it as his own,--preferring that both he and Cosette should remain poor,
+rather than that they should be rich with wealth that was not clean.
+
+Moreover, Jean Valjean began vaguely to surmise that he was being shown
+the door.
+
+On the following day, he underwent something like a shock on entering
+the ground-floor room. The arm-chairs had disappeared. There was not a
+single chair of any sort.
+
+"Ah, what's this!" exclaimed Cosette as she entered, "no chairs! Where
+are the arm-chairs?"
+
+"They are no longer here," replied Jean Valjean.
+
+"This is too much!"
+
+Jean Valjean stammered:
+
+"It was I who told Basque to remove them."
+
+"And your reason?"
+
+"I have only a few minutes to stay to-day."
+
+"A brief stay is no reason for remaining standing."
+
+"I think that Basque needed the chairs for the drawing-room."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You have company this evening, no doubt."
+
+"We expect no one."
+
+Jean Valjean had not another word to say.
+
+Cosette shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"To have the chairs carried off! The other day you had the fire put out.
+How odd you are!"
+
+"Adieu!" murmured Jean Valjean.
+
+He did not say: "Adieu, Cosette." But he had not the strength to say:
+"Adieu, Madame."
+
+He went away utterly overwhelmed.
+
+This time he had understood.
+
+On the following day he did not come. Cosette only observed the fact in
+the evening.
+
+"Why," said she, "Monsieur Jean has not been here today."
+
+And she felt a slight twinge at her heart, but she hardly perceived it,
+being immediately diverted by a kiss from Marius.
+
+On the following day he did not come.
+
+Cosette paid no heed to this, passed her evening and slept well that
+night, as usual, and thought of it only when she woke. She was so happy!
+She speedily despatched Nicolette to M. Jean's house to inquire whether
+he were ill, and why he had not come on the previous evening. Nicolette
+brought back the reply of M. Jean that he was not ill. He was busy. He
+would come soon. As soon as he was able. Moreover, he was on the point
+of taking a little journey. Madame must remember that it was his custom
+to take trips from time to time. They were not to worry about him. They
+were not to think of him.
+
+Nicolette on entering M. Jean's had repeated to him her mistress' very
+words. That Madame had sent her to inquire why M. Jean bad not come on
+the preceding evening."--It is two days since I have been there," said
+Jean Valjean gently.
+
+But the remark passed unnoticed by Nicolette, who did not report it to
+Cosette.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION
+
+During the last months of spring and the first months of summer in 1833,
+the rare passersby in the Marais, the petty shopkeepers, the loungers on
+thresholds, noticed an old man neatly clad in black, who emerged every
+day at the same hour, towards nightfall, from the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
+on the side of the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, passed in front
+of the Blancs Manteaux, gained the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and,
+on arriving at the Rue de l'Echarpe, turned to the left, and entered the
+Rue Saint-Louis.
+
+There he walked at a slow pace, with his head strained forward, seeing
+nothing, hearing nothing, his eye immovably fixed on a point which
+seemed to be a star to him, which never varied, and which was no
+other than the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The nearer he
+approached the corner of the street the more his eye lighted up; a sort
+of joy illuminated his pupils like an inward aurora, he had a fascinated
+and much affected air, his lips indulged in obscure movements, as though
+he were talking to some one whom he did not see, he smiled vaguely and
+advanced as slowly as possible. One would have said that, while desirous
+of reaching his destination, he feared the moment when he should be
+close at hand. When only a few houses remained between him and that
+street which appeared to attract him his pace slackened, to such a
+degree that, at times, one might have thought that he was no longer
+advancing at all. The vacillation of his head and the fixity of his
+eyeballs suggested the thought of the magnetic needle seeking the pole.
+Whatever time he spent on arriving, he was obliged to arrive at last; he
+reached the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; then he halted, he trembled, he
+thrust his head with a sort of melancholy timidity round the corner of
+the last house, and gazed into that street, and there was in that tragic
+look something which resembled the dazzling light of the impossible,
+and the reflection from a paradise that was closed to him. Then a tear,
+which had slowly gathered in the corner of his lids, and had become
+large enough to fall, trickled down his cheek, and sometimes stopped at
+his mouth. The old man tasted its bitter flavor. Thus he remained for
+several minutes as though made of stone, then he returned by the same
+road and with the same step, and, in proportion as he retreated, his
+glance died out.
+
+Little by little, this old man ceased to go as far as the corner of the
+Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; he halted half way in the Rue Saint-Louis;
+sometimes a little further off, sometimes a little nearer.
+
+One day he stopped at the corner of the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine and
+looked at the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire from a distance. Then he
+shook his head slowly from right to left, as though refusing himself
+something, and retraced his steps.
+
+Soon he no longer came as far as the Rue Saint-Louis. He got as far as
+the Rue Pavee, shook his head and turned back; then he went no
+further than the Rue des Trois-Pavillons; then he did not overstep the
+Blancs-Manteaux. One would have said that he was a pendulum which was
+no longer wound up, and whose oscillations were growing shorter before
+ceasing altogether.
+
+Every day he emerged from his house at the same hour, he undertook the
+same trip, but he no longer completed it, and, perhaps without
+himself being aware of the fact, he constantly shortened it. His whole
+countenance expressed this single idea: What is the use?--His eye was
+dim; no more radiance. His tears were also exhausted; they no longer
+collected in the corner of his eye-lid; that thoughtful eye was dry. The
+old man's head was still craned forward; his chin moved at times; the
+folds in his gaunt neck were painful to behold. Sometimes, when the
+weather was bad, he had an umbrella under his arm, but he never opened
+it.
+
+The good women of the quarter said: "He is an innocent." The children
+followed him and laughed.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--PITY FOR THE UNHAPPY, BUT INDULGENCE FOR THE HAPPY
+
+It is a terrible thing to be happy! How content one is! How
+all-sufficient one finds it! How, being in possession of the false
+object of life, happiness, one forgets the true object, duty!
+
+Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he to blame
+Marius.
+
+Marius, as we have explained, before his marriage, had put no questions
+to M. Fauchelevent, and, since that time, he had feared to put any to
+Jean Valjean. He had regretted the promise into which he had allowed
+himself to be drawn. He had often said to himself that he had done
+wrong in making that concession to despair. He had confined himself to
+gradually estranging Jean Valjean from his house and to effacing him,
+as much as possible, from Cosette's mind. He had, in a manner, always
+placed himself between Cosette and Jean Valjean, sure that, in this
+way, she would not perceive nor think of the latter. It was more than
+effacement, it was an eclipse.
+
+Marius did what he considered necessary and just. He thought that he had
+serious reasons which the reader has already seen, and others which will
+be seen later on, for getting rid of Jean Valjean without harshness, but
+without weakness.
+
+Chance having ordained that he should encounter, in a case which he had
+argued, a former employee of the Laffitte establishment, he had acquired
+mysterious information, without seeking it, which he had not been
+able, it is true, to probe, out of respect for the secret which he had
+promised to guard, and out of consideration for Jean Valjean's perilous
+position. He believed at that moment that he had a grave duty to
+perform: the restitution of the six hundred thousand francs to some
+one whom he sought with all possible discretion. In the meanwhile, he
+abstained from touching that money.
+
+As for Cosette, she had not been initiated into any of these secrets;
+but it would be harsh to condemn her also.
+
+There existed between Marius and her an all-powerful magnetism, which
+caused her to do, instinctively and almost mechanically, what Marius
+wished. She was conscious of Marius' will in the direction of "Monsieur
+Jean," she conformed to it. Her husband had not been obliged to say
+anything to her; she yielded to the vague but clear pressure of his
+tacit intentions, and obeyed blindly. Her obedience in this instance
+consisted in not remembering what Marius forgot. She was not obliged to
+make any effort to accomplish this. Without her knowing why herself, and
+without his having any cause to accuse her of it, her soul had become
+so wholly her husband's that that which was shrouded in gloom in Marius'
+mind became overcast in hers.
+
+Let us not go too far, however; in what concerns Jean Valjean, this
+forgetfulness and obliteration were merely superficial. She was rather
+heedless than forgetful. At bottom, she was sincerely attached to the
+man whom she had so long called her father; but she loved her husband
+still more dearly. This was what had somewhat disturbed the balance of
+her heart, which leaned to one side only.
+
+It sometimes happened that Cosette spoke of Jean Valjean and expressed
+her surprise. Then Marius calmed her: "He is absent, I think. Did not
+he say that he was setting out on a journey?"--"That is true," thought
+Cosette. "He had a habit of disappearing in this fashion. But not for so
+long." Two or three times she despatched Nicolette to inquire in the
+Rue de l'Homme Arme whether M. Jean had returned from his journey. Jean
+Valjean caused the answer "no" to be given.
+
+Cosette asked nothing more, since she had but one need on earth, Marius.
+
+Let us also say that, on their side, Cosette and Marius had also
+been absent. They had been to Vernon. Marius had taken Cosette to his
+father's grave.
+
+Marius gradually won Cosette away from Jean Valjean. Cosette allowed it.
+
+Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain cases, the
+ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so deserving of reproach
+as it is supposed. It is the ingratitude of nature. Nature, as we have
+elsewhere said, "looks before her." Nature divides living beings into
+those who are arriving and those who are departing. Those who are
+departing are turned towards the shadows, those who are arriving towards
+the light. Hence a gulf which is fatal on the part of the old, and
+involuntary on the part of the young. This breach, at first insensible,
+increases slowly, like all separations of branches. The boughs, without
+becoming detached from the trunk, grow away from it. It is no fault of
+theirs. Youth goes where there is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love.
+Old age goes towards the end. They do not lose sight of each other, but
+there is no longer a close connection. Young people feel the cooling
+off of life; old people, that of the tomb. Let us not blame these poor
+children.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--LAST FLICKERINGS OF A LAMP WITHOUT OIL
+
+One day, Jean Valjean descended his staircase, took three steps in the
+street, seated himself on a post, on that same stone post where Gavroche
+had found him meditating on the night between the 5th and the 6th of
+June; he remained there a few moments, then went up stairs again. This
+was the last oscillation of the pendulum. On the following day he did
+not leave his apartment. On the day after that, he did not leave his
+bed.
+
+His portress, who prepared his scanty repasts, a few cabbages or
+potatoes with bacon, glanced at the brown earthenware plate and
+exclaimed:
+
+"But you ate nothing yesterday, poor, dear man!"
+
+"Certainly I did," replied Jean Valjean.
+
+"The plate is quite full."
+
+"Look at the water jug. It is empty."
+
+"That proves that you have drunk; it does not prove that you have
+eaten."
+
+"Well," said Jean Valjean, "what if I felt hungry only for water?"
+
+"That is called thirst, and, when one does not eat at the same time, it
+is called fever."
+
+"I will eat to-morrow."
+
+"Or at Trinity day. Why not to-day? Is it the thing to say: 'I will eat
+to-morrow'? The idea of leaving my platter without even touching it! My
+ladyfinger potatoes were so good!"
+
+Jean Valjean took the old woman's hand:
+
+"I promise you that I will eat them," he said, in his benevolent voice.
+
+"I am not pleased with you," replied the portress.
+
+Jean Valjean saw no other human creature than this good woman. There are
+streets in Paris through which no one ever passes, and houses to which
+no one ever comes. He was in one of those streets and one of those
+houses.
+
+While he still went out, he had purchased of a coppersmith, for a few
+sous, a little copper crucifix which he had hung up on a nail opposite
+his bed. That gibbet is always good to look at.
+
+A week passed, and Jean Valjean had not taken a step in his room. He
+still remained in bed. The portress said to her husband:--"The good man
+upstairs yonder does not get up, he no longer eats, he will not last
+long. That man has his sorrows, that he has. You won't get it out of my
+head that his daughter has made a bad marriage."
+
+The porter replied, with the tone of marital sovereignty:
+
+"If he's rich, let him have a doctor. If he is not rich, let him go
+without. If he has no doctor he will die."
+
+"And if he has one?"
+
+"He will die," said the porter.
+
+The portress set to scraping away the grass from what she called her
+pavement, with an old knife, and, as she tore out the blades, she
+grumbled:
+
+"It's a shame. Such a neat old man! He's as white as a chicken."
+
+She caught sight of the doctor of the quarter as he passed the end of
+the street; she took it upon herself to request him to come up stairs.
+
+"It's on the second floor," said she. "You have only to enter. As the
+good man no longer stirs from his bed, the door is always unlocked."
+
+The doctor saw Jean Valjean and spoke with him.
+
+When he came down again the portress interrogated him:
+
+"Well, doctor?"
+
+"Your sick man is very ill indeed."
+
+"What is the matter with him?"
+
+"Everything and nothing. He is a man who, to all appearances, has lost
+some person who is dear to him. People die of that."
+
+"What did he say to you?"
+
+"He told me that he was in good health."
+
+"Shall you come again, doctor?"
+
+"Yes," replied the doctor. "But some one else besides must come."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--A PEN IS HEAVY TO THE MAN WHO LIFTED THE FAUCHELEVENT'S
+CART
+
+One evening Jean Valjean found difficulty in raising himself on his
+elbow; he felt of his wrist and could not find his pulse; his breath
+was short and halted at times; he recognized the fact that he was weaker
+than he had ever been before. Then, no doubt under the pressure of some
+supreme preoccupation, he made an effort, drew himself up into a sitting
+posture and dressed himself. He put on his old workingman's clothes. As
+he no longer went out, he had returned to them and preferred them. He
+was obliged to pause many times while dressing himself; merely putting
+his arms through his waistcoat made the perspiration trickle from his
+forehead.
+
+Since he had been alone, he had placed his bed in the antechamber, in
+order to inhabit that deserted apartment as little as possible.
+
+He opened the valise and drew from it Cosette's outfit.
+
+He spread it out on his bed.
+
+The Bishop's candlesticks were in their place on the chimney-piece. He
+took from a drawer two wax candles and put them in the candlesticks.
+Then, although it was still broad daylight,--it was summer,--he lighted
+them. In the same way candles are to be seen lighted in broad daylight
+in chambers where there is a corpse.
+
+Every step that he took in going from one piece of furniture to another
+exhausted him, and he was obliged to sit down. It was not ordinary
+fatigue which expends the strength only to renew it; it was the remnant
+of all movement possible to him, it was life drained which flows away
+drop by drop in overwhelming efforts and which will never be renewed.
+
+The chair into which he allowed himself to fall was placed in front of
+that mirror, so fatal for him, so providential for Marius, in which
+he had read Cosette's reversed writing on the blotting book. He caught
+sight of himself in this mirror, and did not recognize himself. He was
+eighty years old; before Marius' marriage, he would have hardly been
+taken for fifty; that year had counted for thirty. What he bore on his
+brow was no longer the wrinkles of age, it was the mysterious mark of
+death. The hollowing of that pitiless nail could be felt there. His
+cheeks were pendulous; the skin of his face had the color which would
+lead one to think that it already had earth upon it; the corners of his
+mouth drooped as in the mask which the ancients sculptured on tombs. He
+gazed into space with an air of reproach; one would have said that he
+was one of those grand tragic beings who have cause to complain of some
+one.
+
+He was in that condition, the last phase of dejection, in which sorrow
+no longer flows; it is coagulated, so to speak; there is something on
+the soul like a clot of despair.
+
+Night had come. He laboriously dragged a table and the old arm-chair to
+the fireside, and placed upon the table a pen, some ink and some paper.
+
+That done, he had a fainting fit. When he recovered consciousness, he
+was thirsty. As he could not lift the jug, he tipped it over painfully
+towards his mouth, and swallowed a draught.
+
+As neither the pen nor the ink had been used for a long time, the point
+of the pen had curled up, the ink had dried away, he was forced to rise
+and put a few drops of water in the ink, which he did not accomplish
+without pausing and sitting down two or three times, and he was
+compelled to write with the back of the pen. He wiped his brow from time
+to time.
+
+Then he turned towards the bed, and, still seated, for he could not
+stand, he gazed at the little black gown and all those beloved objects.
+
+These contemplations lasted for hours which seemed minutes.
+
+All at once he shivered, he felt that a child was taking possession of
+him; he rested his elbows on the table, which was illuminated by the
+Bishop's candles and took up the pen. His hand trembled. He wrote slowly
+the few following lines:
+
+"Cosette, I bless thee. I am going to explain to thee. Thy husband was
+right in giving me to understand that I ought to go away; but there is
+a little error in what he believed, though he was in the right. He is
+excellent. Love him well even after I am dead. Monsieur Pontmercy, love
+my darling child well. Cosette, this paper will be found; this is what
+I wish to say to thee, thou wilt see the figures, if I have the strength
+to recall them, listen well, this money is really thine. Here is the
+whole matter: White jet comes from Norway, black jet comes from England,
+black glass jewellery comes from Germany. Jet is the lightest, the most
+precious, the most costly. Imitations can be made in France as well as
+in Germany. What is needed is a little anvil two inches square, and a
+lamp burning spirits of wine to soften the wax. The wax was formerly
+made with resin and lampblack, and cost four livres the pound. I
+invented a way of making it with gum shellac and turpentine. It does not
+cost more than thirty sous, and is much better. Buckles are made with
+a violet glass which is stuck fast, by means of this wax, to a little
+framework of black iron. The glass must be violet for iron jewellery,
+and black for gold jewellery. Spain buys a great deal of it. It is the
+country of jet . . ."
+
+Here he paused, the pen fell from his fingers, he was seized by one of
+those sobs which at times welled up from the very depths of his being;
+the poor man clasped his head in both hands, and meditated.
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed within himself [lamentable cries, heard by God
+alone], "all is over. I shall never see her more. She is a smile which
+passed over me. I am about to plunge into the night without even seeing
+her again. Oh! one minute, one instant, to hear her voice, to touch her
+dress, to gaze upon her, upon her, the angel! and then to die! It is
+nothing to die, what is frightful is to die without seeing her. She
+would smile on me, she would say a word to me, would that do any harm to
+any one? No, all is over, and forever. Here I am all alone. My God! My
+God! I shall never see her again!" At that moment there came a knock at
+the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY SUCCEEDED IN WHITENING
+
+That same day, or to speak more accurately, that same evening, as Marius
+left the table, and was on the point of withdrawing to his study, having
+a case to look over, Basque handed him a letter saying: "The person who
+wrote the letter is in the antechamber."
+
+Cosette had taken the grandfather's arm and was strolling in the garden.
+
+A letter, like a man, may have an unprepossessing exterior. Coarse
+paper, coarsely folded--the very sight of certain missives is
+displeasing.
+
+The letter which Basque had brought was of this sort.
+
+Marius took it. It smelled of tobacco. Nothing evokes a memory like an
+odor. Marius recognized that tobacco. He looked at the superscription:
+"To Monsieur, Monsieur le Baron Pommerci. At his hotel." The recognition
+of the tobacco caused him to recognize the writing as well. It may be
+said that amazement has its lightning flashes.
+
+Marius was, as it were, illuminated by one of these flashes.
+
+The sense of smell, that mysterious aid to memory, had just revived a
+whole world within him. This was certainly the paper, the fashion
+of folding, the dull tint of ink; it was certainly the well-known
+handwriting, especially was it the same tobacco.
+
+The Jondrette garret rose before his mind.
+
+Thus, strange freak of chance! one of the two scents which he had so
+diligently sought, the one in connection with which he had lately again
+exerted so many efforts and which he supposed to be forever lost, had
+come and presented itself to him of its own accord.
+
+He eagerly broke the seal, and read:
+
+
+ "Monsieur le Baron:--If the Supreme Being had given me the talents,
+ I might have been baron Thenard, member of the Institute [academy
+ of ciences], but I am not. I only bear the same as him, happy if
+ this memory recommends me to the eccellence of your kindnesses.
+ The benefit with which you will honor me will be reciprocle.
+ I am in possession of a secret concerning an individual.
+ This individual concerns you. I hold the secret at your disposal
+ desiring to have the honor to be huseful to you. I will furnish
+ you with the simple means of driving from your honorabel family
+ that individual who has no right there, madame la baronne being
+ of lofty birth. The sanctuary of virtue cannot cohabit longer
+ with crime without abdicating.
+
+ "I awate in the entichamber the orders of monsieur le baron.
+
+ "With respect."
+
+
+The letter was signed "Thenard."
+
+This signature was not false. It was merely a trifle abridged.
+
+Moreover, the rigmarole and the orthography completed the revelation.
+The certificate of origin was complete.
+
+Marius' emotion was profound. After a start of surprise, he underwent a
+feeling of happiness. If he could now but find that other man of whom he
+was in search, the man who had saved him, Marius, there would be nothing
+left for him to desire.
+
+He opened the drawer of his secretary, took out several bank-notes,
+put them in his pocket, closed the secretary again, and rang the bell.
+Basque half opened the door.
+
+"Show the man in," said Marius.
+
+Basque announced:
+
+"Monsieur Thenard."
+
+A man entered.
+
+A fresh surprise for Marius. The man who entered was an utter stranger
+to him.
+
+This man, who was old, moreover, had a thick nose, his chin swathed in a
+cravat, green spectacles with a double screen of green taffeta over his
+eyes, and his hair was plastered and flattened down on his brow on
+a level with his eyebrows like the wigs of English coachmen in "high
+life." His hair was gray. He was dressed in black from head to foot, in
+garments that were very threadbare but clean; a bunch of seals depending
+from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. He held in his hand an old
+hat! He walked in a bent attitude, and the curve in his spine augmented
+the profundity of his bow.
+
+The first thing that struck the observer was, that this personage's
+coat, which was too ample although carefully buttoned, had not been made
+for him.
+
+Here a short digression becomes necessary.
+
+There was in Paris at that epoch, in a low-lived old lodging in the Rue
+Beautreillis, near the Arsenal, an ingenious Jew whose profession was
+to change villains into honest men. Not for too long, which might have
+proved embarrassing for the villain. The change was on sight, for a day
+or two, at the rate of thirty sous a day, by means of a costume which
+resembled the honesty of the world in general as nearly as possible.
+This costumer was called "the Changer"; the pickpockets of Paris
+had given him this name and knew him by no other. He had a tolerably
+complete wardrobe. The rags with which he tricked out people were almost
+probable. He had specialties and categories; on each nail of his
+shop hung a social status, threadbare and worn; here the suit of a
+magistrate, there the outfit of a Cure, beyond the outfit of a banker,
+in one corner the costume of a retired military man, elsewhere
+the habiliments of a man of letters, and further on the dress of a
+statesman.
+
+This creature was the costumer of the immense drama which knavery plays
+in Paris. His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged, and into
+which roguery retreated. A tattered knave arrived at this dressing-room,
+deposited his thirty sous and selected, according to the part which
+he wished to play, the costume which suited him, and on descending the
+stairs once more, the knave was a somebody. On the following day, the
+clothes were faithfully returned, and the Changer, who trusted the
+thieves with everything, was never robbed. There was one inconvenience
+about these clothes, they "did not fit"; not having been made for those
+who wore them, they were too tight for one, too loose for another and
+did not adjust themselves to any one. Every pickpocket who exceeded or
+fell short of the human average was ill at his ease in the Changer's
+costumes. It was necessary that one should not be either too fat or
+too lean. The changer had foreseen only ordinary men. He had taken the
+measure of the species from the first rascal who came to hand, who is
+neither stout nor thin, neither tall nor short. Hence adaptations which
+were sometimes difficult and from which the Changer's clients extricated
+themselves as best they might. So much the worse for the exceptions!
+The suit of the statesman, for instance, black from head to foot, and
+consequently proper, would have been too large for Pitt and too small
+for Castelcicala. The costume of a statesman was designated as follows
+in the Changer's catalogue; we copy:
+
+"A coat of black cloth, trowsers of black wool, a silk waistcoat, boots
+and linen." On the margin there stood: ex-ambassador, and a note
+which we also copy: "In a separate box, a neatly frizzed peruke, green
+glasses, seals, and two small quills an inch long, wrapped in cotton."
+All this belonged to the statesman, the ex-ambassador. This whole
+costume was, if we may so express ourselves, debilitated; the seams were
+white, a vague button-hole yawned at one of the elbows; moreover, one of
+the coat buttons was missing on the breast; but this was only detail; as
+the hand of the statesman should always be thrust into his coat and laid
+upon his heart, its function was to conceal the absent button.
+
+If Marius had been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris, he
+would instantly have recognized upon the back of the visitor whom
+Basque had just shown in, the statesman's suit borrowed from the
+pick-me-down-that shop of the Changer.
+
+Marius' disappointment on beholding another man than the one whom he
+expected to see turned to the newcomer's disadvantage.
+
+He surveyed him from head to foot, while that personage made exaggerated
+bows, and demanded in a curt tone:
+
+"What do you want?"
+
+The man replied with an amiable grin of which the caressing smile of a
+crocodile will furnish some idea:
+
+"It seems to me impossible that I should not have already had the honor
+of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society. I think I actually did meet
+monsieur personally, several years ago, at the house of Madame la
+Princesse Bagration and in the drawing-rooms of his Lordship the Vicomte
+Dambray, peer of France."
+
+It is always a good bit of tactics in knavery to pretend to recognize
+some one whom one does not know.
+
+Marius paid attention to the manner of this man's speech. He spied
+on his accent and gesture, but his disappointment increased; the
+pronunciation was nasal and absolutely unlike the dry, shrill tone which
+he had expected.
+
+He was utterly routed.
+
+"I know neither Madame Bagration nor M. Dambray," said he. "I have never
+set foot in the house of either of them in my life."
+
+The reply was ungracious. The personage, determined to be gracious at
+any cost, insisted.
+
+"Then it must have been at Chateaubriand's that I have seen Monsieur! I
+know Chateaubriand very well. He is very affable. He sometimes says to
+me: 'Thenard, my friend . . . won't you drink a glass of wine with me?'"
+
+Marius' brow grew more and more severe:
+
+"I have never had the honor of being received by M. de Chateaubriand.
+Let us cut it short. What do you want?"
+
+The man bowed lower at that harsh voice.
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, deign to listen to me. There is in America, in a
+district near Panama, a village called la Joya. That village is composed
+of a single house, a large, square house of three stories, built of
+bricks dried in the sun, each side of the square five hundred feet in
+length, each story retreating twelve feet back of the story below, in
+such a manner as to leave in front a terrace which makes the circuit
+of the edifice, in the centre an inner court where the provisions and
+munitions are kept; no windows, loopholes, no doors, ladders, ladders
+to mount from the ground to the first terrace, and from the first to the
+second, and from the second to the third, ladders to descend into the
+inner court, no doors to the chambers, trap-doors, no staircases to the
+chambers, ladders; in the evening the traps are closed, the ladders
+are withdrawn carbines and blunderbusses trained from the loopholes;
+no means of entering, a house by day, a citadel by night, eight hundred
+inhabitants,--that is the village. Why so many precautions? because the
+country is dangerous; it is full of cannibals. Then why do people go
+there? because the country is marvellous; gold is found there."
+
+"What are you driving at?" interrupted Marius, who had passed from
+disappointment to impatience.
+
+"At this, Monsieur le Baron. I am an old and weary diplomat. Ancient
+civilization has thrown me on my own devices. I want to try savages."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, egotism is the law of the world. The proletarian
+peasant woman, who toils by the day, turns round when the diligence
+passes by, the peasant proprietress, who toils in her field, does not
+turn round. The dog of the poor man barks at the rich man, the dog
+of the rich man barks at the poor man. Each one for himself.
+Self-interest--that's the object of men. Gold, that's the loadstone."
+
+"What then? Finish."
+
+"I should like to go and establish myself at la Joya. There are three
+of us. I have my spouse and my young lady; a very beautiful girl. The
+journey is long and costly. I need a little money."
+
+"What concern is that of mine?" demanded Marius.
+
+The stranger stretched his neck out of his cravat, a gesture
+characteristic of the vulture, and replied with an augmented smile.
+
+"Has not Monsieur le Baron perused my letter?"
+
+There was some truth in this. The fact is, that the contents of the
+epistle had slipped Marius' mind. He had seen the writing rather than
+read the letter. He could hardly recall it. But a moment ago a fresh
+start had been given him. He had noted that detail: "my spouse and my
+young lady."
+
+He fixed a penetrating glance on the stranger. An examining judge could
+not have done the look better. He almost lay in wait for him.
+
+He confined himself to replying:
+
+"State the case precisely."
+
+The stranger inserted his two hands in both his fobs, drew himself up
+without straightening his dorsal column, but scrutinizing Marius in his
+turn, with the green gaze of his spectacles.
+
+"So be it, Monsieur le Baron. I will be precise. I have a secret to sell
+to you."
+
+"A secret?"
+
+"A secret."
+
+"Which concerns me?"
+
+"Somewhat."
+
+"What is the secret?"
+
+Marius scrutinized the man more and more as he listened to him.
+
+"I commence gratis," said the stranger. "You will see that I am
+interesting."
+
+"Speak."
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, you have in your house a thief and an assassin."
+
+Marius shuddered.
+
+"In my house? no," said he.
+
+The imperturbable stranger brushed his hat with his elbow and went on:
+
+"An assassin and a thief. Remark, Monsieur le Baron, that I do not here
+speak of ancient deeds, deeds of the past which have lapsed, which can
+be effaced by limitation before the law and by repentance before God.
+I speak of recent deeds, of actual facts as still unknown to justice
+at this hour. I continue. This man has insinuated himself into your
+confidence, and almost into your family under a false name. I am about
+to tell you his real name. And to tell it to you for nothing."
+
+"I am listening."
+
+"His name is Jean Valjean."
+
+"I know it."
+
+"I am going to tell you, equally for nothing, who he is."
+
+"Say on."
+
+"He is an ex-convict."
+
+"I know it."
+
+"You know it since I have had the honor of telling you."
+
+"No. I knew it before."
+
+Marius' cold tone, that double reply of "I know it," his laconicism,
+which was not favorable to dialogue, stirred up some smouldering wrath
+in the stranger. He launched a furious glance on the sly at Marius,
+which was instantly extinguished. Rapid as it was, this glance was of
+the kind which a man recognizes when he has once beheld it; it did not
+escape Marius. Certain flashes can only proceed from certain souls;
+the eye, that vent-hole of the thought, glows with it; spectacles hide
+nothing; try putting a pane of glass over hell!
+
+The stranger resumed with a smile:
+
+"I will not permit myself to contradict Monsieur le Baron. In any case,
+you ought to perceive that I am well informed. Now what I have to tell
+you is known to myself alone. This concerns the fortune of Madame la
+Baronne. It is an extraordinary secret. It is for sale--I make you the
+first offer of it. Cheap. Twenty thousand francs."
+
+"I know that secret as well as the others," said Marius.
+
+The personage felt the necessity of lowering his price a trifle.
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, say ten thousand francs and I will speak."
+
+"I repeat to you that there is nothing which you can tell me. I know
+what you wish to say to me."
+
+A fresh flash gleamed in the man's eye. He exclaimed:
+
+"But I must dine to-day, nevertheless. It is an extraordinary secret,
+I tell you. Monsieur le Baron, I will speak. I speak. Give me twenty
+francs."
+
+Marius gazed intently at him:
+
+"I know your extraordinary secret, just as I knew Jean Valjean's name,
+just as I know your name."
+
+"My name?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That is not difficult, Monsieur le Baron. I had the honor to write to
+you and to tell it to you. Thenard."
+
+"--Dier."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Thenardier."
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+In danger the porcupine bristles up, the beetle feigns death, the old
+guard forms in a square; this man burst into laughter.
+
+Then he flicked a grain of dust from the sleeve of his coat with a
+fillip.
+
+Marius continued:
+
+"You are also Jondrette the workman, Fabantou the comedian, Genflot the
+poet, Don Alvares the Spaniard, and Mistress Balizard."
+
+"Mistress what?"
+
+"And you kept a pot-house at Montfermeil."
+
+"A pot-house! Never."
+
+"And I tell you that your name is Thenardier."
+
+"I deny it."
+
+"And that you are a rascal. Here."
+
+And Marius drew a bank-note from his pocket and flung it in his face.
+
+"Thanks! Pardon me! five hundred francs! Monsieur le Baron!"
+
+And the man, overcome, bowed, seized the note and examined it.
+
+"Five hundred francs!" he began again, taken aback. And he stammered in
+a low voice: "An honest rustler."[69]
+
+Then brusquely:
+
+"Well, so be it!" he exclaimed. "Let us put ourselves at our ease."
+
+And with the agility of a monkey, flinging back his hair, tearing off
+his spectacles, and withdrawing from his nose by sleight of hand the two
+quills of which mention was recently made, and which the reader has also
+met with on another page of this book, he took off his face as the man
+takes off his hat.
+
+His eye lighted up; his uneven brow, with hollows in some places and
+bumps in others, hideously wrinkled at the top, was laid bare, his nose
+had become as sharp as a beak; the fierce and sagacious profile of the
+man of prey reappeared.
+
+"Monsieur le Baron is infallible," he said in a clear voice whence all
+nasal twang had disappeared, "I am Thenardier."
+
+And he straightened up his crooked back.
+
+Thenardier, for it was really he, was strangely surprised; he would have
+been troubled, had he been capable of such a thing. He had come to bring
+astonishment, and it was he who had received it. This humiliation had
+been worth five hundred francs to him, and, taking it all in all, he
+accepted it; but he was none the less bewildered.
+
+He beheld this Baron Pontmercy for the first time, and, in spite of
+his disguise, this Baron Pontmercy recognized him, and recognized
+him thoroughly. And not only was this Baron perfectly informed as to
+Thenardier, but he seemed well posted as to Jean Valjean. Who was this
+almost beardless young man, who was so glacial and so generous, who knew
+people's names, who knew all their names, and who opened his purse to
+them, who bullied rascals like a judge, and who paid them like a dupe?
+
+Thenardier, the reader will remember, although he had been Marius'
+neighbor, had never seen him, which is not unusual in Paris; he had
+formerly, in a vague way, heard his daughters talk of a very poor young
+man named Marius who lived in the house. He had written to him, without
+knowing him, the letter with which the reader is acquainted.
+
+No connection between that Marius and M. le Baron Pontmercy was possible
+in his mind.
+
+As for the name Pontmercy, it will be recalled that, on the battlefield
+of Waterloo, he had only heard the last two syllables, for which he
+always entertained the legitimate scorn which one owes to what is merely
+an expression of thanks.
+
+However, through his daughter Azelma, who had started on the scent of
+the married pair on the 16th of February, and through his own personal
+researches, he had succeeded in learning many things, and, from the
+depths of his own gloom, he had contrived to grasp more than one
+mysterious clew. He had discovered, by dint of industry, or, at least,
+by dint of induction, he had guessed who the man was whom he had
+encountered on a certain day in the Grand Sewer. From the man he had
+easily reached the name. He knew that Madame la Baronne Pontmercy was
+Cosette. But he meant to be discreet in that quarter.
+
+Who was Cosette? He did not know exactly himself. He did, indeed, catch
+an inkling of illegitimacy, the history of Fantine had always seemed to
+him equivocal; but what was the use of talking about that? in order to
+cause himself to be paid for his silence? He had, or thought he had,
+better wares than that for sale. And, according to all appearances, if
+he were to come and make to the Baron Pontmercy this revelation--and
+without proof: "Your wife is a bastard," the only result would be to
+attract the boot of the husband towards the loins of the revealer.
+
+From Thenardier's point of view, the conversation with Marius had not
+yet begun. He ought to have drawn back, to have modified his strategy,
+to have abandoned his position, to have changed his front; but nothing
+essential had been compromised as yet, and he had five hundred francs
+in his pocket. Moreover, he had something decisive to say, and, even
+against this very well-informed and well-armed Baron Pontmercy, he felt
+himself strong. For men of Thenardier's nature, every dialogue is
+a combat. In the one in which he was about to engage, what was his
+situation? He did not know to whom he was speaking, but he did know of
+what he was speaking, he made this rapid review of his inner forces, and
+after having said: "I am Thenardier," he waited.
+
+Marius had become thoughtful. So he had hold of Thenardier at last.
+That man whom he had so greatly desired to find was before him. He could
+honor Colonel Pontmercy's recommendation.
+
+He felt humiliated that that hero should have owned anything to this
+villain, and that the letter of change drawn from the depths of the tomb
+by his father upon him, Marius, had been protested up to that day. It
+also seemed to him, in the complex state of his mind towards Thenardier,
+that there was occasion to avenge the Colonel for the misfortune of
+having been saved by such a rascal. In any case, he was content. He
+was about to deliver the Colonel's shade from this unworthy creditor
+at last, and it seemed to him that he was on the point of rescuing his
+father's memory from the debtors' prison. By the side of this duty there
+was another--to elucidate, if possible, the source of Cosette's fortune.
+The opportunity appeared to present itself. Perhaps Thenardier knew
+something. It might prove useful to see the bottom of this man.
+
+He commenced with this.
+
+Thenardier had caused the "honest rustler" to disappear in his fob, and
+was gazing at Marius with a gentleness that was almost tender.
+
+Marius broke the silence.
+
+"Thenardier, I have told you your name. Now, would you like to have me
+tell you your secret--the one that you came here to reveal to me? I have
+information of my own, also. You shall see that I know more about it
+than you do. Jean Valjean, as you have said, is an assassin and a thief.
+A thief, because he robbed a wealthy manufacturer, whose ruin he brought
+about. An assassin, because he assassinated police-agent Javert."
+
+"I don't understand, sir," ejaculated Thenardier.
+
+"I will make myself intelligible. In a certain arrondissement of the Pas
+de Calais, there was, in 1822, a man who had fallen out with justice,
+and who, under the name of M. Madeleine, had regained his status and
+rehabilitated himself. This man had become a just man in the full force
+of the term. In a trade, the manufacture of black glass goods, he
+made the fortune of an entire city. As far as his personal fortune was
+concerned he made that also, but as a secondary matter, and in some
+sort, by accident. He was the foster-father of the poor. He founded
+hospitals, opened schools, visited the sick, dowered young girls,
+supported widows, and adopted orphans; he was like the guardian angel of
+the country. He refused the cross, he was appointed Mayor. A liberated
+convict knew the secret of a penalty incurred by this man in former
+days; he denounced him, and had him arrested, and profited by the arrest
+to come to Paris and cause the banker Laffitte,--I have the fact from
+the cashier himself,--by means of a false signature, to hand over to
+him the sum of over half a million which belonged to M. Madeleine. This
+convict who robbed M. Madeleine was Jean Valjean. As for the other fact,
+you have nothing to tell me about it either. Jean Valjean killed the
+agent Javert; he shot him with a pistol. I, the person who is speaking
+to you, was present."
+
+Thenardier cast upon Marius the sovereign glance of a conquered man who
+lays his hand once more upon the victory, and who has just regained, in
+one instant, all the ground which he has lost. But the smile returned
+instantly. The inferior's triumph in the presence of his superior must
+be wheedling.
+
+Thenardier contented himself with saying to Marius:
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track."
+
+And he emphasized this phrase by making his bunch of seals execute an
+expressive whirl.
+
+"What!" broke forth Marius, "do you dispute that? These are facts."
+
+"They are chimeras. The confidence with which Monsieur le Baron honors
+me renders it my duty to tell him so. Truth and justice before all
+things. I do not like to see folks accused unjustly. Monsieur le Baron,
+Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean did not kill
+Javert."
+
+"This is too much! How is this?"
+
+"For two reasons."
+
+"What are they? Speak."
+
+"This is the first: he did not rob M. Madeleine, because it is Jean
+Valjean himself who was M. Madeleine."
+
+"What tale are you telling me?"
+
+"And this is the second: he did not assassinate Javert, because the
+person who killed Javert was Javert."
+
+"What do you mean to say?"
+
+"That Javert committed suicide."
+
+"Prove it! prove it!" cried Marius beside himself.
+
+Thenardier resumed, scanning his phrase after the manner of the ancient
+Alexandrine measure:
+
+
+"Police-agent-Ja-vert-was-found-drowned-un-der-a-boat-of-the-Pont-au-Change."
+
+"But prove it!"
+
+Thenardier drew from his pocket a large envelope of gray paper, which
+seemed to contain sheets folded in different sizes.
+
+"I have my papers," he said calmly.
+
+And he added:
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, in your interests I desired to know Jean Valjean
+thoroughly. I say that Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine are one and the
+same man, and I say that Javert had no other assassin than Javert. If
+I speak, it is because I have proofs. Not manuscript proofs--writing is
+suspicious, handwriting is complaisant,--but printed proofs."
+
+As he spoke, Thenardier extracted from the envelope two copies of
+newspapers, yellow, faded, and strongly saturated with tobacco. One of
+these two newspapers, broken at every fold and falling into rags, seemed
+much older than the other.
+
+"Two facts, two proofs," remarked Thenardier. And he offered the two
+newspapers, unfolded, to Marius.
+
+The reader is acquainted with these two papers. One, the most ancient, a
+number of the Drapeau Blanc of the 25th of July, 1823, the text of
+which can be seen in the first volume, established the identity of M.
+Madeleine and Jean Valjean.
+
+The other, a Moniteur of the 15th of June, 1832, announced the suicide
+of Javert, adding that it appeared from a verbal report of Javert to the
+prefect that, having been taken prisoner in the barricade of the Rue de
+la Chanvrerie, he had owed his life to the magnanimity of an insurgent
+who, holding him under his pistol, had fired into the air, instead of
+blowing out his brains.
+
+Marius read. He had evidence, a certain date, irrefragable proof, these
+two newspapers had not been printed expressly for the purpose of backing
+up Thenardier's statements; the note printed in the Moniteur had been an
+administrative communication from the Prefecture of Police. Marius could
+not doubt.
+
+The information of the cashier-clerk had been false, and he himself had
+been deceived.
+
+Jean Valjean, who had suddenly grown grand, emerged from his cloud.
+Marius could not repress a cry of joy.
+
+"Well, then this unhappy wretch is an admirable man! the whole of that
+fortune really belonged to him! he is Madeleine, the providence of a
+whole countryside! he is Jean Valjean, Javert's savior! he is a hero! he
+is a saint!"
+
+"He's not a saint, and he's not a hero!" said Thenardier. "He's an
+assassin and a robber."
+
+And he added, in the tone of a man who begins to feel that he possesses
+some authority:
+
+"Let us be calm."
+
+Robber, assassin--those words which Marius thought had disappeared and
+which returned, fell upon him like an ice-cold shower-bath.
+
+"Again!" said he.
+
+"Always," ejaculated Thenardier. "Jean Valjean did not rob Madeleine,
+but he is a thief. He did not kill Javert, but he is a murderer."
+
+"Will you speak," retorted Marius, "of that miserable theft, committed
+forty years ago, and expiated, as your own newspapers prove, by a whole
+life of repentance, of self-abnegation and of virtue?"
+
+"I say assassination and theft, Monsieur le Baron, and I repeat that I
+am speaking of actual facts. What I have to reveal to you is absolutely
+unknown. It belongs to unpublished matter. And perhaps you will find in
+it the source of the fortune so skilfully presented to Madame la Baronne
+by Jean Valjean. I say skilfully, because, by a gift of that nature it
+would not be so very unskilful to slip into an honorable house whose
+comforts one would then share, and, at the same stroke, to conceal one's
+crime, and to enjoy one's theft, to bury one's name and to create for
+oneself a family."
+
+"I might interrupt you at this point," said Marius, "but go on."
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, I will tell you all, leaving the recompense to your
+generosity. This secret is worth massive gold. You will say to me: 'Why
+do not you apply to Jean Valjean?' For a very simple reason; I know
+that he has stripped himself, and stripped himself in your favor, and I
+consider the combination ingenious; but he has no longer a son, he would
+show me his empty hands, and, since I am in need of some money for
+my trip to la Joya, I prefer you, you who have it all, to him who has
+nothing. I am a little fatigued, permit me to take a chair."
+
+Marius seated himself and motioned to him to do the same.
+
+Thenardier installed himself on a tufted chair, picked up his two
+newspapers, thrust them back into their envelope, and murmured as he
+pecked at the Drapeau Blanc with his nail: "It cost me a good deal of
+trouble to get this one."
+
+That done he crossed his legs and stretched himself out on the back of
+the chair, an attitude characteristic of people who are sure of what
+they are saying, then he entered upon his subject gravely, emphasizing
+his words:
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, on the 6th of June, 1832, about a year ago, on the
+day of the insurrection, a man was in the Grand Sewer of Paris, at the
+point where the sewer enters the Seine, between the Pont des Invalides
+and the Pont de Jena."
+
+Marius abruptly drew his chair closer to that of Thenardier. Thenardier
+noticed this movement and continued with the deliberation of an orator
+who holds his interlocutor and who feels his adversary palpitating under
+his words:
+
+"This man, forced to conceal himself, and for reasons, moreover, which
+are foreign to politics, had adopted the sewer as his domicile and had
+a key to it. It was, I repeat, on the 6th of June; it might have been
+eight o'clock in the evening. The man hears a noise in the sewer.
+Greatly surprised, he hides himself and lies in wait. It was the sound
+of footsteps, some one was walking in the dark, and coming in his
+direction. Strange to say, there was another man in the sewer besides
+himself. The grating of the outlet from the sewer was not far off.
+A little light which fell through it permitted him to recognize the
+newcomer, and to see that the man was carrying something on his back.
+He was walking in a bent attitude. The man who was walking in a bent
+attitude was an ex-convict, and what he was dragging on his shoulders
+was a corpse. Assassination caught in the very act, if ever there was
+such a thing. As for the theft, that is understood; one does not kill
+a man gratis. This convict was on his way to fling the body into the
+river. One fact is to be noticed, that before reaching the exit
+grating, this convict, who had come a long distance in the sewer, must,
+necessarily, have encountered a frightful quagmire where it seems as
+though he might have left the body, but the sewermen would have found
+the assassinated man the very next day, while at work on the quagmire,
+and that did not suit the assassin's plans. He had preferred to
+traverse that quagmire with his burden, and his exertions must have been
+terrible, for it is impossible to risk one's life more completely; I
+don't understand how he could have come out of that alive."
+
+Marius' chair approached still nearer. Thenardier took advantage of this
+to draw a long breath. He went on:
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, a sewer is not the Champ de Mars. One lacks
+everything there, even room. When two men are there, they must meet.
+That is what happened. The man domiciled there and the passer-by were
+forced to bid each other good-day, greatly to the regret of both. The
+passer-by said to the inhabitant:--"You see what I have on my back, I
+must get out, you have the key, give it to me." That convict was a man
+of terrible strength. There was no way of refusing. Nevertheless, the
+man who had the key parleyed, simply to gain time. He examined the dead
+man, but he could see nothing, except that the latter was young, well
+dressed, with the air of being rich, and all disfigured with blood.
+While talking, the man contrived to tear and pull off behind, without
+the assassin perceiving it, a bit of the assassinated man's coat. A
+document for conviction, you understand; a means of recovering the trace
+of things and of bringing home the crime to the criminal. He put
+this document for conviction in his pocket. After which he opened the
+grating, made the man go out with his embarrassment on his back, closed
+the grating again, and ran off, not caring to be mixed up with the
+remainder of the adventure and above all, not wishing to be present
+when the assassin threw the assassinated man into the river. Now you
+comprehend. The man who was carrying the corpse was Jean Valjean; the
+one who had the key is speaking to you at this moment; and the piece of
+the coat . . ."
+
+Thenardier completed his phrase by drawing from his pocket, and holding,
+on a level with his eyes, nipped between his two thumbs and his two
+forefingers, a strip of torn black cloth, all covered with dark spots.
+
+Marius had sprung to his feet, pale, hardly able to draw his breath,
+with his eyes riveted on the fragment of black cloth, and, without
+uttering a word, without taking his eyes from that fragment, he
+retreated to the wall and fumbled with his right hand along the wall for
+a key which was in the lock of a cupboard near the chimney.
+
+He found the key, opened the cupboard, plunged his arm into it without
+looking, and without his frightened gaze quitting the rag which
+Thenardier still held outspread.
+
+But Thenardier continued:
+
+"Monsieur le Baron, I have the strongest of reasons for believing that
+the assassinated young man was an opulent stranger lured into a trap by
+Jean Valjean, and the bearer of an enormous sum of money."
+
+"The young man was myself, and here is the coat!" cried Marius, and he
+flung upon the floor an old black coat all covered with blood.
+
+Then, snatching the fragment from the hands of Thenardier, he crouched
+down over the coat, and laid the torn morsel against the tattered skirt.
+The rent fitted exactly, and the strip completed the coat.
+
+Thenardier was petrified.
+
+This is what he thought: "I'm struck all of a heap."
+
+Marius rose to his feet trembling, despairing, radiant.
+
+He fumbled in his pocket and stalked furiously to Thenardier, presenting
+to him and almost thrusting in his face his fist filled with bank-notes
+for five hundred and a thousand francs.
+
+"You are an infamous wretch! you are a liar, a calumniator, a villain.
+You came to accuse that man, you have only justified him; you wanted to
+ruin him, you have only succeeded in glorifying him. And it is you who
+are the thief! And it is you who are the assassin! I saw you, Thenardier
+Jondrette, in that lair on the Rue de l'Hopital. I know enough about
+you to send you to the galleys and even further if I choose. Here are a
+thousand francs, bully that you are!"
+
+And he flung a thousand franc note at Thenardier.
+
+"Ah! Jondrette Thenardier, vile rascal! Let this serve you as a lesson,
+you dealer in second-hand secrets, merchant of mysteries, rummager of
+the shadows, wretch! Take these five hundred francs and get out of here!
+Waterloo protects you."
+
+"Waterloo!" growled Thenardier, pocketing the five hundred francs along
+with the thousand.
+
+"Yes, assassin! You there saved the life of a Colonel. . ."
+
+"Of a General," said Thenardier, elevating his head.
+
+"Of a Colonel!" repeated Marius in a rage. "I wouldn't give a ha'penny
+for a general. And you come here to commit infamies! I tell you that
+you have committed all crimes. Go! disappear! Only be happy, that is all
+that I desire. Ah! monster! here are three thousand francs more. Take
+them. You will depart to-morrow, for America, with your daughter;
+for your wife is dead, you abominable liar. I shall watch over your
+departure, you ruffian, and at that moment I will count out to you
+twenty thousand francs. Go get yourself hung elsewhere!"
+
+"Monsieur le Baron!" replied Thenardier, bowing to the very earth,
+"eternal gratitude." And Thenardier left the room, understanding
+nothing, stupefied and delighted with this sweet crushing beneath sacks
+of gold, and with that thunder which had burst forth over his head in
+bank-bills.
+
+Struck by lightning he was, but he was also content; and he would
+have been greatly angered had he had a lightning rod to ward off such
+lightning as that.
+
+Let us finish with this man at once.
+
+Two days after the events which we are at this moment narrating, he set
+out, thanks to Marius' care, for America under a false name, with his
+daughter Azelma, furnished with a draft on New York for twenty thousand
+francs.
+
+The moral wretchedness of Thenardier, the bourgeois who had missed
+his vocation, was irremediable. He was in America what he had been in
+Europe. Contact with an evil man sometimes suffices to corrupt a good
+action and to cause evil things to spring from it. With Marius' money,
+Thenardier set up as a slave-dealer.
+
+As soon as Thenardier had left the house, Marius rushed to the garden,
+where Cosette was still walking.
+
+"Cosette! Cosette!" he cried. "Come! come quick! Let us go. Basque, a
+carriage! Cosette, come. Ah! My God! It was he who saved my life! Let us
+not lose a minute! Put on your shawl."
+
+Cosette thought him mad and obeyed.
+
+He could not breathe, he laid his hand on his heart to restrain its
+throbbing. He paced back and forth with huge strides, he embraced
+Cosette:
+
+"Ah! Cosette! I am an unhappy wretch!" said he.
+
+Marius was bewildered. He began to catch a glimpse in Jean Valjean of
+some indescribably lofty and melancholy figure. An unheard-of virtue,
+supreme and sweet, humble in its immensity, appeared to him. The convict
+was transfigured into Christ.
+
+Marius was dazzled by this prodigy. He did not know precisely what he
+beheld, but it was grand.
+
+In an instant, a hackney-carriage stood in front of the door.
+
+Marius helped Cosette in and darted in himself.
+
+"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, Number 7."
+
+The carriage drove off.
+
+"Ah! what happiness!" ejaculated Cosette. "Rue de l'Homme Arme, I did
+not dare to speak to you of that. We are going to see M. Jean."
+
+"Thy father! Cosette, thy father more than ever. Cosette, I guess it.
+You told me that you had never received the letter that I sent you by
+Gavroche. It must have fallen into his hands. Cosette, he went to the
+barricade to save me. As it is a necessity with him to be an angel, he
+saved others also; he saved Javert. He rescued me from that gulf to give
+me to you. He carried me on his back through that frightful sewer. Ah! I
+am a monster of ingratitude. Cosette, after having been your providence,
+he became mine. Just imagine, there was a terrible quagmire enough to
+drown one a hundred times over, to drown one in mire. Cosette! he made
+me traverse it. I was unconscious; I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I
+could know nothing of my own adventure. We are going to bring him back,
+to take him with us, whether he is willing or not, he shall never leave
+us again. If only he is at home! Provided only that we can find him,
+I will pass the rest of my life in venerating him. Yes, that is how it
+should be, do you see, Cosette? Gavroche must have delivered my letter
+to him. All is explained. You understand."
+
+Cosette did not understand a word.
+
+"You are right," she said to him.
+
+Meanwhile the carriage rolled on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH THERE IS DAY
+
+Jean Valjean turned round at the knock which he heard on his door.
+
+"Come in," he said feebly.
+
+The door opened.
+
+Cosette and Marius made their appearance.
+
+Cosette rushed into the room.
+
+Marius remained on the threshold, leaning against the jamb of the door.
+
+"Cosette!" said Jean Valjean.
+
+And he sat erect in his chair, his arms outstretched and trembling,
+haggard, livid, gloomy, an immense joy in his eyes.
+
+Cosette, stifling with emotion, fell upon Jean Valjean's breast.
+
+"Father!" said she.
+
+Jean Valjean, overcome, stammered:
+
+"Cosette! she! you! Madame! it is thou! Ah! my God!"
+
+And, pressed close in Cosette's arms, he exclaimed:
+
+"It is thou! thou art here! Thou dost pardon me then!"
+
+Marius, lowering his eyelids, in order to keep his tears from flowing,
+took a step forward and murmured between lips convulsively contracted to
+repress his sobs:
+
+"My father!"
+
+"And you also, you pardon me!" Jean Valjean said to him.
+
+Marius could find no words, and Jean Valjean added:
+
+"Thanks."
+
+Cosette tore off her shawl and tossed her hat on the bed.
+
+"It embarrasses me," said she.
+
+And, seating herself on the old man's knees, she put aside his white
+locks with an adorable movement, and kissed his brow.
+
+Jean Valjean, bewildered, let her have her own way.
+
+Cosette, who only understood in a very confused manner, redoubled her
+caresses, as though she desired to pay Marius' debt.
+
+Jean Valjean stammered:
+
+"How stupid people are! I thought that I should never see her again.
+Imagine, Monsieur Pontmercy, at the very moment when you entered, I
+was saying to myself: 'All is over. Here is her little gown, I am a
+miserable man, I shall never see Cosette again,' and I was saying that
+at the very moment when you were mounting the stairs. Was not I an
+idiot? Just see how idiotic one can be! One reckons without the good
+God. The good God says:
+
+"'You fancy that you are about to be abandoned, stupid! No. No, things
+will not go so. Come, there is a good man yonder who is in need of an
+angel.' And the angel comes, and one sees one's Cosette again! and one
+sees one's little Cosette once more! Ah! I was very unhappy."
+
+For a moment he could not speak, then he went on:
+
+"I really needed to see Cosette a little bit now and then. A heart needs
+a bone to gnaw. But I was perfectly conscious that I was in the way. I
+gave myself reasons: 'They do not want you, keep in your own course,
+one has not the right to cling eternally.' Ah! God be praised, I see her
+once more! Dost thou know, Cosette, thy husband is very handsome? Ah!
+what a pretty embroidered collar thou hast on, luckily. I am fond of
+that pattern. It was thy husband who chose it, was it not? And then,
+thou shouldst have some cashmere shawls. Let me call her thou, Monsieur
+Pontmercy. It will not be for long."
+
+And Cosette began again:
+
+"How wicked of you to have left us like that! Where did you go? Why have
+you stayed away so long? Formerly your journeys only lasted three or
+four days. I sent Nicolette, the answer always was: 'He is absent.' How
+long have you been back? Why did you not let us know? Do you know that
+you are very much changed? Ah! what a naughty father! he has been ill,
+and we have not known it! Stay, Marius, feel how cold his hand is!"
+
+"So you are here! Monsieur Pontmercy, you pardon me!" repeated Jean
+Valjean.
+
+At that word which Jean Valjean had just uttered once more, all that was
+swelling Marius' heart found vent.
+
+He burst forth:
+
+"Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And
+do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He
+has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and
+after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He
+has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate,
+to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks!
+Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too
+little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all
+that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through
+all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself.
+Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses!
+Cosette, that man is an angel!"
+
+"Hush! hush!" said Jean Valjean in a low voice. "Why tell all that?"
+
+"But you!" cried Marius with a wrath in which there was veneration, "why
+did you not tell it to me? It is your own fault, too. You save people's
+lives, and you conceal it from them! You do more, under the pretext of
+unmasking yourself, you calumniate yourself. It is frightful."
+
+"I told the truth," replied Jean Valjean.
+
+"No," retorted Marius, "the truth is the whole truth; and that you did
+not tell. You were Monsieur Madeleine, why not have said so? You saved
+Javert, why not have said so? I owed my life to you, why not have said
+so?"
+
+"Because I thought as you do. I thought that you were in the right. It
+was necessary that I should go away. If you had known about that affair,
+of the sewer, you would have made me remain near you. I was therefore
+forced to hold my peace. If I had spoken, it would have caused
+embarrassment in every way."
+
+"It would have embarrassed what? embarrassed whom?" retorted Marius. "Do
+you think that you are going to stay here? We shall carry you off. Ah!
+good heavens! when I reflect that it was by an accident that I have
+learned all this. You form a part of ourselves. You are her father,
+and mine. You shall not pass another day in this dreadful house. Do not
+imagine that you will be here to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow," said Jean Valjean, "I shall not be here, but I shall not be
+with you."
+
+"What do you mean?" replied Marius. "Ah! come now, we are not going to
+permit any more journeys. You shall never leave us again. You belong to
+us. We shall not loose our hold of you."
+
+"This time it is for good," added Cosette. "We have a carriage at the
+door. I shall run away with you. If necessary, I shall employ force."
+
+And she laughingly made a movement to lift the old man in her arms.
+
+"Your chamber still stands ready in our house," she went on. "If you
+only knew how pretty the garden is now! The azaleas are doing very
+well there. The walks are sanded with river sand; there are tiny violet
+shells. You shall eat my strawberries. I water them myself. And no
+more 'madame,' no more 'Monsieur Jean,' we are living under a Republic,
+everybody says thou, don't they, Marius? The programme is changed. If
+you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow, there was a robin redbreast
+which had made her nest in a hole in the wall, and a horrible cat ate
+her. My poor, pretty, little robin red-breast which used to put her head
+out of her window and look at me! I cried over it. I should have liked
+to kill the cat. But now nobody cries any more. Everybody laughs,
+everybody is happy. You are going to come with us. How delighted
+grandfather will be! You shall have your plot in the garden, you shall
+cultivate it, and we shall see whether your strawberries are as fine as
+mine. And, then, I shall do everything that you wish, and then, you will
+obey me prettily."
+
+Jean Valjean listened to her without hearing her. He heard the music of
+her voice rather than the sense of her words; one of those large tears
+which are the sombre pearls of the soul welled up slowly in his eyes.
+
+He murmured:
+
+"The proof that God is good is that she is here."
+
+"Father!" said Cosette.
+
+Jean Valjean continued:
+
+"It is quite true that it would be charming for us to live together.
+Their trees are full of birds. I would walk with Cosette. It is sweet to
+be among living people who bid each other 'good-day,' who call to each
+other in the garden. People see each other from early morning. We
+should each cultivate our own little corner. She would make me eat her
+strawberries. I would make her gather my roses. That would be charming.
+Only . . ."
+
+He paused and said gently:
+
+"It is a pity."
+
+The tear did not fall, it retreated, and Jean Valjean replaced it with a
+smile.
+
+Cosette took both the old man's hands in hers.
+
+"My God!" said she, "your hands are still colder than before. Are you
+ill? Do you suffer?"
+
+"I? No," replied Jean Valjean. "I am very well. Only . . ."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Only what?"
+
+"I am going to die presently."
+
+Cosette and Marius shuddered.
+
+"To die!" exclaimed Marius.
+
+"Yes, but that is nothing," said Jean Valjean.
+
+He took breath, smiled and resumed:
+
+"Cosette, thou wert talking to me, go on, so thy little robin red-breast
+is dead? Speak, so that I may hear thy voice."
+
+Marius gazed at the old man in amazement.
+
+Cosette uttered a heartrending cry.
+
+"Father! my father! you will live. You are going to live. I insist upon
+your living, do you hear?"
+
+Jean Valjean raised his head towards her with adoration.
+
+"Oh! yes, forbid me to die. Who knows? Perhaps I shall obey. I was on
+the verge of dying when you came. That stopped me, it seemed to me that
+I was born again."
+
+"You are full of strength and life," cried Marius. "Do you imagine that
+a person can die like this? You have had sorrow, you shall have no more.
+It is I who ask your forgiveness, and on my knees! You are going to
+live, and to live with us, and to live a long time. We take possession
+of you once more. There are two of us here who will henceforth have no
+other thought than your happiness."
+
+"You see," resumed Cosette, all bathed in tears, "that Marius says that
+you shall not die."
+
+Jean Valjean continued to smile.
+
+"Even if you were to take possession of me, Monsieur Pontmercy, would
+that make me other than I am? No, God has thought like you and myself,
+and he does not change his mind; it is useful for me to go. Death is
+a good arrangement. God knows better than we what we need. May you be
+happy, may Monsieur Pontmercy have Cosette, may youth wed the morning,
+may there be around you, my children, lilacs and nightingales; may your
+life be a beautiful, sunny lawn, may all the enchantments of heaven fill
+your souls, and now let me, who am good for nothing, die; it is certain
+that all this is right. Come, be reasonable, nothing is possible now, I
+am fully conscious that all is over. And then, last night, I drank that
+whole jug of water. How good thy husband is, Cosette! Thou art much
+better off with him than with me."
+
+A noise became audible at the door.
+
+It was the doctor entering.
+
+"Good-day, and farewell, doctor," said Jean Valjean. "Here are my poor
+children."
+
+Marius stepped up to the doctor. He addressed to him only this single
+word: "Monsieur? . . ." But his manner of pronouncing it contained a
+complete question.
+
+The doctor replied to the question by an expressive glance.
+
+"Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no
+reason for being unjust towards God."
+
+A silence ensued.
+
+All breasts were oppressed.
+
+Jean Valjean turned to Cosette. He began to gaze at her as though he
+wished to retain her features for eternity.
+
+In the depths of the shadow into which he had already descended, ecstasy
+was still possible to him when gazing at Cosette. The reflection of that
+sweet face lighted up his pale visage.
+
+The doctor felt of his pulse.
+
+"Ah! it was you that he wanted!" he murmured, looking at Cosette and
+Marius.
+
+And bending down to Marius' ear, he added in a very low voice:
+
+"Too late."
+
+Jean Valjean surveyed the doctor and Marius serenely, almost without
+ceasing to gaze at Cosette.
+
+These barely articulate words were heard to issue from his mouth:
+
+"It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live."
+
+All at once he rose to his feet. These accesses of strength are
+sometimes the sign of the death agony. He walked with a firm step to
+the wall, thrusting aside Marius and the doctor who tried to help him,
+detached from the wall a little copper crucifix which was suspended
+there, and returned to his seat with all the freedom of movement of
+perfect health, and said in a loud voice, as he laid the crucifix on the
+table:
+
+"Behold the great martyr."
+
+Then his chest sank in, his head wavered, as though the intoxication of
+the tomb were seizing hold upon him.
+
+His hands, which rested on his knees, began to press their nails into
+the stuff of his trousers.
+
+Cosette supported his shoulders, and sobbed, and tried to speak to him,
+but could not.
+
+Among the words mingled with that mournful saliva which accompanies
+tears, they distinguished words like the following:
+
+"Father, do not leave us. Is it possible that we have found you only to
+lose you again?"
+
+It might be said that agony writhes. It goes, comes, advances towards
+the sepulchre, and returns towards life. There is groping in the action
+of dying.
+
+Jean Valjean rallied after this semi-swoon, shook his brow as though
+to make the shadows fall away from it and became almost perfectly lucid
+once more.
+
+He took a fold of Cosette's sleeve and kissed it.
+
+"He is coming back! doctor, he is coming back," cried Marius.
+
+"You are good, both of you," said Jean Valjean. "I am going to tell you
+what has caused me pain. What has pained me, Monsieur Pontmercy, is that
+you have not been willing to touch that money. That money really belongs
+to your wife. I will explain to you, my children, and for that reason,
+also, I am glad to see you. Black jet comes from England, white jet
+comes from Norway. All this is in this paper, which you will read. For
+bracelets, I invented a way of substituting for slides of soldered sheet
+iron, slides of iron laid together. It is prettier, better and less
+costly. You will understand how much money can be made in that way. So
+Cosette's fortune is really hers. I give you these details, in order
+that your mind may be set at rest."
+
+The portress had come upstairs and was gazing in at the half-open door.
+The doctor dismissed her.
+
+But he could not prevent this zealous woman from exclaiming to the dying
+man before she disappeared: "Would you like a priest?"
+
+"I have had one," replied Jean Valjean.
+
+And with his finger he seemed to indicate a point above his head where
+one would have said that he saw some one.
+
+It is probable, in fact, that the Bishop was present at this death
+agony.
+
+Cosette gently slipped a pillow under his loins.
+
+Jean Valjean resumed:
+
+"Have no fear, Monsieur Pontmercy, I adjure you. The six hundred
+thousand francs really belong to Cosette. My life will have been wasted
+if you do not enjoy them! We managed to do very well with those glass
+goods. We rivalled what is called Berlin jewellery. However, we could
+not equal the black glass of England. A gross, which contains twelve
+hundred very well cut grains, only costs three francs."
+
+When a being who is dear to us is on the point of death, we gaze upon
+him with a look which clings convulsively to him and which would fain
+hold him back.
+
+Cosette gave her hand to Marius, and both, mute with anguish, not
+knowing what to say to the dying man, stood trembling and despairing
+before him.
+
+Jean Valjean sank moment by moment. He was failing; he was drawing near
+to the gloomy horizon.
+
+His breath had become intermittent; a little rattling interrupted it.
+He found some difficulty in moving his forearm, his feet had lost all
+movement, and in proportion as the wretchedness of limb and feebleness
+of body increased, all the majesty of his soul was displayed and spread
+over his brow. The light of the unknown world was already visible in his
+eyes.
+
+His face paled and smiled. Life was no longer there, it was something
+else.
+
+His breath sank, his glance grew grander. He was a corpse on which the
+wings could be felt.
+
+He made a sign to Cosette to draw near, then to Marius; the last minute
+of the last hour had, evidently, arrived.
+
+He began to speak to them in a voice so feeble that it seemed to come
+from a distance, and one would have said that a wall now rose between
+them and him.
+
+"Draw near, draw near, both of you. I love you dearly. Oh! how good it
+is to die like this! And thou lovest me also, my Cosette. I knew well
+that thou still felt friendly towards thy poor old man. How kind it was
+of thee to place that pillow under my loins! Thou wilt weep for me a
+little, wilt thou not? Not too much. I do not wish thee to have any real
+griefs. You must enjoy yourselves a great deal, my children. I forgot
+to tell you that the profit was greater still on the buckles without
+tongues than on all the rest. A gross of a dozen dozens cost ten francs
+and sold for sixty. It really was a good business. So there is no
+occasion for surprise at the six hundred thousand francs, Monsieur
+Pontmercy. It is honest money. You may be rich with a tranquil mind.
+Thou must have a carriage, a box at the theatres now and then, and
+handsome ball dresses, my Cosette, and then, thou must give good dinners
+to thy friends, and be very happy. I was writing to Cosette a while ago.
+She will find my letter. I bequeath to her the two candlesticks which
+stand on the chimney-piece. They are of silver, but to me they are gold,
+they are diamonds; they change candles which are placed in them into
+wax-tapers. I do not know whether the person who gave them to me is
+pleased with me yonder on high. I have done what I could. My children,
+you will not forget that I am a poor man, you will have me buried in the
+first plot of earth that you find, under a stone to mark the spot. This
+is my wish. No name on the stone. If Cosette cares to come for a little
+while now and then, it will give me pleasure. And you too, Monsieur
+Pontmercy. I must admit that I have not always loved you. I ask your
+pardon for that. Now she and you form but one for me. I feel very
+grateful to you. I am sure that you make Cosette happy. If you only
+knew, Monsieur Pontmercy, her pretty rosy cheeks were my delight; when I
+saw her in the least pale, I was sad. In the chest of drawers, there is
+a bank-bill for five hundred francs. I have not touched it. It is for
+the poor. Cosette, dost thou see thy little gown yonder on the bed? dost
+thou recognize it? That was ten years ago, however. How time flies! We
+have been very happy. All is over. Do not weep, my children, I am not
+going very far, I shall see you from there, you will only have to
+look at night, and you will see me smile. Cosette, dost thou remember
+Montfermeil? Thou wert in the forest, thou wert greatly terrified; dost
+thou remember how I took hold of the handle of the water-bucket? That
+was the first time that I touched thy poor, little hand. It was so cold!
+Ah! your hands were red then, mademoiselle, they are very white now. And
+the big doll! dost thou remember? Thou didst call her Catherine. Thou
+regrettedest not having taken her to the convent! How thou didst make
+me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had been raining, thou didst
+float bits of straw on the gutters, and watch them pass away. One day
+I gave thee a willow battledore and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and
+green feathers. Thou hast forgotten it. Thou wert roguish so young! Thou
+didst play. Thou didst put cherries in thy ears. Those are things of
+the past. The forests through which one has passed with one's child, the
+trees under which one has strolled, the convents where one has concealed
+oneself, the games, the hearty laughs of childhood, are shadows. I
+imagined that all that belonged to me. In that lay my stupidity. Those
+Thenardiers were wicked. Thou must forgive them. Cosette, the moment
+has come to tell thee the name of thy mother. She was called Fantine.
+Remember that name--Fantine. Kneel whenever thou utterest it. She
+suffered much. She loved thee dearly. She had as much unhappiness as
+thou hast had happiness. That is the way God apportions things. He is
+there on high, he sees us all, and he knows what he does in the midst of
+his great stars. I am on the verge of departure, my children. Love each
+other well and always. There is nothing else but that in the world: love
+for each other. You will think sometimes of the poor old man who died
+here. Oh my Cosette, it is not my fault, indeed, that I have not seen
+thee all this time, it cut me to the heart; I went as far as the corner
+of the street, I must have produced a queer effect on the people who
+saw me pass, I was like a madman, I once went out without my hat. I no
+longer see clearly, my children, I had still other things to say, but
+never mind. Think a little of me. Come still nearer. I die happy. Give
+me your dear and well-beloved heads, so that I may lay my hands upon
+them."
+
+Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, in despair, suffocating with
+tears, each beneath one of Jean Valjean's hands. Those august hands no
+longer moved.
+
+He had fallen backwards, the light of the candles illuminated him.
+
+His white face looked up to heaven, he allowed Cosette and Marius to
+cover his hands with kisses.
+
+He was dead.
+
+The night was starless and extremely dark. No doubt, in the gloom, some
+immense angel stood erect with wings outspread, awaiting that soul.
+
+[Illustration: Darkness 5b9-1-Darkness]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE GRASS COVERS AND THE RAIN EFFACES
+
+In the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, in the vicinity of the common grave,
+far from the elegant quarter of that city of sepulchres, far from all
+the tombs of fancy which display in the presence of eternity all the
+hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner, beside an old wall,
+beneath a great yew tree over which climbs the wild convolvulus, amid
+dandelions and mosses, there lies a stone. That stone is no more exempt
+than others from the leprosy of time, of dampness, of the lichens and
+from the defilement of the birds. The water turns it green, the air
+blackens it. It is not near any path, and people are not fond of
+walking in that direction, because the grass is high and their feet
+are immediately wet. When there is a little sunshine, the lizards
+come thither. All around there is a quivering of weeds. In the spring,
+linnets warble in the trees.
+
+This stone is perfectly plain. In cutting it the only thought was the
+requirements of the tomb, and no other care was taken than to make the
+stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.
+
+No name is to be read there.
+
+Only, many years ago, a hand wrote upon it in pencil these four lines,
+which have become gradually illegible beneath the rain and the dust, and
+which are, to-day, probably effaced:
+
+ Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien etrange,
+ Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut plus son ange.
+ La chose simplement d'elle-meme arriva,
+ Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va.[70]
+
+
+
+
+
+LETTER TO M. DAELLI
+
+Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables in Milan.
+
+ HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.
+
+
+You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Miserables is written for
+all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote
+it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as
+well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which
+have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems
+overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which
+cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the
+map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place
+where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of
+the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm
+him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: "Open to
+me, I come for you."
+
+At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which
+is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all
+climes, and he is groaning in all languages.
+
+Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your
+admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism,
+that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are
+more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to
+fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin,
+Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a
+heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities,
+you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin.
+Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky
+does not prevent rags on man.
+
+Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms,
+blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of
+the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled
+with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone.
+The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less
+deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social
+hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in
+England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo
+is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty
+nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same
+thing as to understand the Gospel badly.
+
+Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism
+be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance
+below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance,
+whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their
+mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where
+is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization
+acknowledges?
+
+Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to
+read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public
+schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent
+war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that
+passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience?
+military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of
+firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy?
+Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it
+stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the
+woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these
+two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization
+is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in
+Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what
+amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so
+fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public
+prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the
+death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and
+Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons.
+Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and
+politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes!
+Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass
+miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich
+as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious
+condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed
+by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great
+nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves,
+Miserables.
+
+From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more
+distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the
+priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.
+
+I resume. This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours.
+Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,--I
+understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that
+does not prevent them from being of use.
+
+As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own
+country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other
+nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I
+become more and more patriotic for humanity.
+
+This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance
+of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French,
+Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more,
+human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.
+
+Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition
+which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste
+and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.
+
+In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight,
+with having transgressed the bounds of what they call "French taste"; I
+should be glad if this eulogium were merited.
+
+In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal
+suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a
+man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"
+
+This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and
+for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one
+phrase in your letter. You write:--
+
+"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: 'This book, Les
+Miserables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French
+read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"--Alas! I repeat,
+whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since
+history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery
+has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived
+for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the
+Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe
+of the dawn.
+
+If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and
+in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it,
+sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished
+sentiments.
+
+ VICTOR HUGO.
+
+
+*****
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Patois of the French Alps: chat de maraude, rascally
+marauder.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Liege: a cork-tree. Pau: a jest on peau, skin.]
+
+[Footnote 3: She belonged to that circle where cuckoos and carriages
+share the same fate; and a jade herself, she lived, as jades live, for
+the space of a morning (or jade).]
+
+[Footnote 4: An ex-convict.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This parenthesis is due to Jean Valjean.]
+
+[Footnote 6: A bullet as large as an egg.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Walter Scott, Lamartine, Vaulabelle, Charras, Quinet,
+Thiers.]
+
+[Footnote 8: This is the inscription:--
+
+ D. O. M.
+ CY A ETE ECRASE
+ PAR MALHEUR
+ SOUS UN CHARIOT,
+ MONSIEUR BERNARD
+ DE BRYE MARCHAND
+ A BRUXELLE LE [Illegible]
+ FEVRIER 1637.]
+
+[Footnote 9: A heavy rifled gun.]
+
+[Footnote 10: "A battle terminated, a day finished, false measures
+repaired, greater successes assured for the morrow,--all was lost by a
+moment of panic, terror."--Napoleon, Dictees de Sainte Helene.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Five winning numbers in a lottery]
+
+[Footnote 12: Literally "made cuirs"; i. e., pronounced a t or an s at
+the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used either
+one of them where neither exists.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a
+writ of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him
+nearly as follows, etc.]
+
+[Footnote 14: This is the factory of Goblet Junior:
+ Come choose your jugs and crocks,
+ Flower-pots, pipes, bricks.
+ The Heart sells Diamonds to every comer.]
+
+[Footnote 15: On the boughs hang three bodies of unequal merits: Dismas
+and Gesmas, between is the divine power. Dismas seeks the heights,
+Gesmas, unhappy man, the lowest regions; the highest power will preserve
+us and our effects. If you repeat this verse, you will not lose your
+things by theft.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Instead of porte cochere and porte batarde.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Jesus-my-God-bandy-leg--down with the moon!]
+
+[Footnote 18: Chicken: slang allusion to the noise made in calling
+poultry.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that day
+as having a pear-shaped head.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging
+out. Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.]
+
+[Footnote 21: In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on
+its base, soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must be
+changed.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Suspendu, suspended; pendu, hung.]
+
+[Footnote 23: L'Aile, wing.]
+
+[Footnote 24: The slang term for a painter's assistant.]
+
+[Footnote 25: If Cesar had given me glory and war, and I were obliged
+to quit my mother's love, I would say to great Caesar, "Take back thy
+sceptre and thy chariot; I prefer the love of my mother."]
+
+[Footnote 26: Whether the sun shines brightly or dim, the bear returns
+to his cave.]
+
+[Footnote 27: The peep-hole is a Judas in French. Hence the half-punning
+allusion.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Our love has lasted a whole week, but how short are the
+instants of happiness! To adore each other for eight days was hardly
+worth the while! The time of love should last forever.]
+
+[Footnote 29: You leave me to go to glory; my sad heart will follow you
+everywhere.]
+
+[Footnote 30: A democrat.]
+
+[Footnote 31: King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two
+stilts. When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.]
+
+[Footnote 32: In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
+the Court and allotted the lodgings.]
+
+[Footnote 33: A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is
+smaller than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes
+a curve on the ground.]
+
+[Footnote 34: From April 19 to May 20.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Merlan: a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they are
+white with powder.]
+
+[Footnote 36: The scaffold.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Argot of the Temple.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Argot of the barriers.]
+
+[Footnote 39: The Last Day of a Condemned Man.]
+
+[Footnote 40: "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-la, une foultitude de
+raisons pour que je me libertise."]
+
+[Footnote 41: It must be observed, however, that mac in Celtic means
+son.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.]
+
+[Footnote 43: Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des
+orgues, peut atiger ses momes et ses momignards et les locher criblant
+sans etre agite lui-meme.]
+
+[Footnote 44: At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well;
+the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue,
+tutu, pointed hat!]
+
+[Footnote 45: Chien, dog, trigger.]
+
+[Footnote 46: Here is the morn appearing. When shall we go to the
+forest, Charlot asked Charlotte. Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but
+one God, one King, one half-farthing, and one boot. And these two poor
+little wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme
+very early in the morning. And these two poor little things were as
+drunk as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave.
+The one cursed, the other swore. When shall we go to the forest? Charlot
+asked Charlotte.]
+
+[Footnote 47: There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who
+hung himself.]
+
+[Footnote 48: She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart
+inhabits her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should
+blow it at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her
+mouth.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Matelote: a culinary preparation of various fishes.
+Gibelotte: stewed rabbits.]
+
+[Footnote 50: Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Bipede sans plume: biped without feathers--pen.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Municipal officer of Toulouse.]
+
+[Footnote 53: Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so
+young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well
+dressed and in love? When, by adding your age to my age, we could
+not count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny
+household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days!
+Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched
+thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself.
+Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the
+Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn
+round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she smells!
+What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing. Her charming
+bonnet is hardly unfolded. I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple
+arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our happy
+couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May. We lived
+concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love, that sweet
+forbidden fruit. My mouth had not uttered a thing when thy heart had
+already responded. The Sorbonne was the bucolic spot where I adored thee
+from eve till morn. 'Tis thus that an amorous soul applies the chart of
+the Tender to the Latin country. O Place Maubert! O Place Dauphine!
+When in the fresh spring-like hut thou didst draw thy stocking on thy
+delicate leg, I saw a star in the depths of the garret. I have read
+a great deal of Plato, but nothing of it remains by me; better than
+Malebranche and then Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me celestial
+goodness with a flower which thou gavest to me, I obeyed thee, thou
+didst submit to me; oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to behold thee going
+and coming from dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy young brow in thine
+ancient mirror! And who, then, would forego the memory of those days of
+aurora and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze and of moire, when love
+stammers a charming slang? Our gardens consisted of a pot of tulips;
+thou didst mask the window with thy petticoat; I took the earthenware
+bowl and I gave thee the Japanese cup. And those great misfortunes which
+made us laugh! Thy cuff scorched, thy boa lost! And that dear portrait
+of the divine Shakespeare which we sold one evening that we might sup! I
+was a beggar and thou wert charitable. I kissed thy fresh round arms
+in haste. A folio Dante served us as a table on which to eat merrily a
+centime's worth of chestnuts. The first time that, in my joyous den, I
+snatched a kiss from thy fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled
+and blushing, I turned deathly pale and I believed in God. Dost thou
+recall our innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags? Oh!
+what sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly
+depths!]
+
+[Footnote 54: My nose is in tears, my friend Bugeaud, lend me thy
+gendarmes that I may say a word to them. With a blue capote and a
+chicken in his shako, here's the banlieue, co-cocorico.]
+
+[Footnote 55: Love letters.]
+
+[Footnote 56:
+
+ "The bird slanders in the elms,
+ And pretends that yesterday, Atala
+ Went off with a Russian,
+ Where fair maids go.
+ Lon la.
+
+My friend Pierrot, thou pratest, because Mila knocked at her pane the
+other day and called me. The jades are very charming, their poison which
+bewitched me would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila. I'm fond of love and its
+bickerings, I love Agnes, I love Pamela, Lise burned herself in setting
+me aflame. In former days when I saw the mantillas of Suzette and of
+Zeila, my soul mingled with their folds. Love, when thou gleamest in
+the dark thou crownest Lola with roses, I would lose my soul for that.
+Jeanne, at thy mirror thou deckest thyself! One fine day, my heart flew
+forth. I think that it is Jeanne who has it. At night, when I come from
+the quadrilles, I show Stella to the stars, and I say to them: "Behold
+her." Where fair maids go, lon la.]
+
+
+[Footnote 57: But some prisons still remain, and I am going to put
+a stop to this sort of public order. Does any one wish to play at
+skittles? The whole ancient world fell in ruin, when the big ball
+rolled. Good old folks, let us smash with our crutches that Louvre where
+the monarchy displayed itself in furbelows. We have forced its gates. On
+that day, King Charles X. did not stick well and came unglued.]
+
+[Footnote 58: Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which
+the bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to be thrown into
+the Tiber.]
+
+[Footnote 59: Mustards.]
+
+[Footnote 60: From casser, to break: break-necks.]
+
+[Footnote 61: "Jeanne was born at Fougere, a true shepherd's nest; I
+adore her petticoat, the rogue."]
+
+[Footnote 62: In allusion to the expression, coiffer Sainte-Catherine,
+"to remain unmarried."]
+
+[Footnote 63: "Thus, hemming in the course of thy musings, Alcippus, it
+is true that thou wilt wed ere long."]
+
+[Footnote 64: Tirer le diable par la queue, "to live from hand to
+mouth."]
+
+[Footnote 65: "Triton trotted on before, and drew from his conch-shell
+sounds so ravishing that he delighted everyone!"]
+
+[Footnote 66: "A Shrove-Tuesday marriage will have no ungrateful
+children."]
+
+[Footnote 67: A short mask.]
+
+[Footnote 68: In allusion to the story of Prometheus.]
+
+[Footnote 69: Un fafiot serieux. Fafiot is the slang term for a
+bank-bill, derived from its rustling noise.]
+
+[Footnote 70: He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived.
+He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply,
+of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISERABLES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 135.txt or 135.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+ http://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/135/
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+ the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+ you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
+ owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+ has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+ Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
+ must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+ prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+ returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+ sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+ address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+ the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+ you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+ does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+ License. You must require such a user to return or
+ destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+ and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+ Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+ money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+ electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+ of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+ distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+ Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+ Chief Executive and Director
+ gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+ http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville\r
-\r
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with\r
-almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or\r
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included\r
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-\r
-Title: Moby Dick; or The Whale\r
-\r
-Author: Herman Melville\r
-\r
-Last Updated: January 3, 2009\r
-Posting Date: December 25, 2008 [EBook #2701]\r
-Release Date: June, 2001\r
-\r
-Language: English\r
-\r
-\r
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Produced by Daniel Lazarus and Jonesey\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE\r
-\r
-By Herman Melville\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Original Transcriber's Notes:\r
-\r
-This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS\r
-project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg's archives. The\r
-proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide\r
-Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext\r
-was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.\r
-\r
-In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol\r
-for the British pound, a unit of currency.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-ETYMOLOGY.\r
-\r
-(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)\r
-\r
-The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him\r
-now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer\r
-handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all\r
-the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it\r
-somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.\r
-\r
-"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what\r
-name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through\r
-ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of\r
-the word, you deliver that which is not true." --HACKLUYT\r
-\r
-"WHALE.... Sw. and Dan. HVAL. This animal is named from roundness or\r
-rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted." --WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY\r
-\r
-"WHALE.... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. WALLEN; A.S.\r
-WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow." --RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY\r
-\r
- KETOS, GREEK.\r
- CETUS, LATIN.\r
- WHOEL, ANGLO-SAXON.\r
- HVALT, DANISH.\r
- WAL, DUTCH.\r
- HWAL, SWEDISH.\r
- WHALE, ICELANDIC.\r
- WHALE, ENGLISH.\r
- BALEINE, FRENCH.\r
- BALLENA, SPANISH.\r
- PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, FEGEE.\r
- PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, ERROMANGOAN.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).\r
-\r
-It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a\r
-poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans\r
-and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to\r
-whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or\r
-profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the\r
-higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these\r
-extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the\r
-ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these\r
-extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing\r
-bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,\r
-and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our\r
-own.\r
-\r
-So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou\r
-belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world\r
-will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong;\r
-but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too;\r
-and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes\r
-and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness--Give it up,\r
-Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world,\r
-by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could\r
-clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your\r
-tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends\r
-who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and\r
-making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against\r
-your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together--there, ye\r
-shall strike unsplinterable glasses!\r
-\r
-\r
-EXTRACTS.\r
-\r
-"And God created great whales." --GENESIS.\r
-\r
-"Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to\r
-be hoary." --JOB.\r
-\r
-"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah." --JONAH.\r
-\r
-"There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play\r
-therein." --PSALMS.\r
-\r
-"In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,\r
-shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked\r
-serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." --ISAIAH\r
-\r
-"And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster's\r
-mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that\r
-foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his\r
-paunch." --HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S MORALS.\r
-\r
-"The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among\r
-which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in\r
-length as four acres or arpens of land." --HOLLAND'S PLINY.\r
-\r
-"Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a\r
-great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the\r
-former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us,\r
-open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before\r
-him into a foam." --TOOKE'S LUCIAN. "THE TRUE HISTORY."\r
-\r
-"He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,\r
-which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought\r
-some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of\r
-which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was\r
-one of six who had killed sixty in two days." --OTHER OR OTHER'S VERBAL\r
-NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM HIS MOUTH BY KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.\r
-\r
-"And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that\r
-enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are\r
-immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in\r
-great security, and there sleeps." --MONTAIGNE. --APOLOGY FOR RAIMOND\r
-SEBOND.\r
-\r
-"Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan described\r
-by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job." --RABELAIS.\r
-\r
-"This whale's liver was two cartloads." --STOWE'S ANNALS.\r
-\r
-"The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan."\r
---LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.\r
-\r
-"Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received\r
-nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible\r
-quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale." --IBID. "HISTORY OF\r
-LIFE AND DEATH."\r
-\r
-"The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise."\r
---KING HENRY.\r
-\r
-"Very like a whale." --HAMLET.\r
-\r
- "Which to secure, no skill of leach's art\r
- Mote him availle, but to returne againe\r
- To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart,\r
- Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,\r
- Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."\r
- --THE FAERIE QUEEN.\r
-\r
-"Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful\r
-calm trouble the ocean til it boil." --SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. PREFACE TO\r
-GONDIBERT.\r
-\r
-"What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned\r
-Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit."\r
---SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE. VIDE HIS V.\r
-E.\r
-\r
- "Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail\r
- He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.\r
- ...\r
- Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears,\r
- And on his back a grove of pikes appears."\r
- --WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE SUMMER ISLANDS.\r
-\r
-"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or\r
-State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." --OPENING\r
-SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.\r
-\r
-"Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat\r
-in the mouth of a whale." --PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.\r
-\r
- "That sea beast\r
- Leviathan, which God of all his works\r
- Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." --PARADISE LOST.\r
-\r
- ---"There Leviathan,\r
- Hugest of living creatures, in the deep\r
- Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,\r
- And seems a moving land; and at his gills\r
- Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea." --IBID.\r
-\r
-"The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil\r
-swimming in them." --FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE.\r
-\r
- "So close behind some promontory lie\r
- The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,\r
- And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,\r
- Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."\r
- --DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS.\r
-\r
-"While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his\r
-head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it\r
-will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water." --THOMAS EDGE'S TEN\r
-VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.\r
-\r
-"In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in\r
-wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which\r
-nature has placed on their shoulders." --SIR T. HERBERT'S VOYAGES INTO\r
-ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL.\r
-\r
-"Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to\r
-proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship\r
-upon them." --SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.\r
-\r
-"We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The\r
-Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but that\r
-is a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they\r
-can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains....\r
-I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of\r
-herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught\r
-once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over." --A VOYAGE TO\r
-GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.\r
-\r
-"Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one\r
-eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was\r
-informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of\r
-baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren."\r
---SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.\r
-\r
-"Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this\r
-Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was\r
-killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness." --RICHARD\r
-STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS. A.D. 1668.\r
-\r
-"Whales in the sea God's voice obey." --N. E. PRIMER.\r
-\r
-"We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those\r
-southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the\r
-northward of us." --CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729.\r
-\r
-"... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an\r
-insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain." --ULLOA'S\r
-SOUTH AMERICA.\r
-\r
- "To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,\r
- We trust the important charge, the petticoat.\r
- Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,\r
- Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale."\r
- --RAPE OF THE LOCK.\r
-\r
-"If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those\r
-that take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear\r
-contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest\r
-animal in creation." --GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.\r
-\r
-"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them\r
-speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.\r
-\r
-"In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was\r
-found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then\r
-towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the\r
-whale, in order to avoid being seen by us." --COOK'S VOYAGES.\r
-\r
-"The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so\r
-great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to\r
-mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,\r
-and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to\r
-terrify and prevent their too near approach." --UNO VON TROIL'S LETTERS\r
-ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.\r
-\r
-"The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce\r
-animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen."\r
---THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.\r
-\r
-"And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?" --EDMUND BURKE'S\r
-REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY.\r
-\r
-"Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe." --EDMUND BURKE.\r
-(SOMEWHERE.)\r
-\r
-"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on\r
-the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates\r
-and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon.\r
-And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the\r
-property of the king." --BLACKSTONE.\r
-\r
- "Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:\r
- Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends\r
- The barbed steel, and every turn attends."\r
- --FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.\r
-\r
- "Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,\r
- And rockets blew self driven,\r
- To hang their momentary fire\r
- Around the vault of heaven.\r
-\r
- "So fire with water to compare,\r
- The ocean serves on high,\r
- Up-spouted by a whale in air,\r
- To express unwieldy joy." --COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S\r
- VISIT TO LONDON.\r
-\r
-"Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at\r
-a stroke, with immense velocity." --JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE\r
-DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)\r
-\r
-"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the\r
-water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage\r
-through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood\r
-gushing from the whale's heart." --PALEY'S THEOLOGY.\r
-\r
-"The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet." --BARON CUVIER.\r
-\r
-"In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take\r
-any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."\r
---COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI WHALE\r
-FISHERY.\r
-\r
- "In the free element beneath me swam,\r
- Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,\r
- Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;\r
- Which language cannot paint, and mariner\r
- Had never seen; from dread Leviathan\r
- To insect millions peopling every wave:\r
- Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,\r
- Led by mysterious instincts through that waste\r
- And trackless region, though on every side\r
- Assaulted by voracious enemies,\r
- Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,\r
- With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs."\r
- --MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.\r
-\r
- "Io! Paean! Io! sing.\r
- To the finny people's king.\r
- Not a mightier whale than this\r
- In the vast Atlantic is;\r
- Not a fatter fish than he,\r
- Flounders round the Polar Sea."\r
- --CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE.\r
-\r
-"In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the\r
-whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:\r
-there--pointing to the sea--is a green pasture where our children's\r
-grand-children will go for bread." --OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF NANTUCKET.\r
-\r
-"I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form\r
-of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones." --HAWTHORNE'S\r
-TWICE TOLD TALES.\r
-\r
-"She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed\r
-by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago." --IBID.\r
-\r
-"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he threw\r
-up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at.\r
-He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!" --COOPER'S PILOT.\r
-\r
-"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette\r
-that whales had been introduced on the stage there." --ECKERMANN'S\r
-CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.\r
-\r
-"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been stove\r
-by a whale." --"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF\r
-NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM\r
-WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF\r
-SAID VESSEL. NEW YORK, 1821.\r
-\r
- "A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,\r
- The wind was piping free;\r
- Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,\r
- And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,\r
- As it floundered in the sea."\r
- --ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.\r
-\r
-"The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture\r
-of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six\r
-English miles....\r
-\r
-"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,\r
-cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles."\r
---SCORESBY.\r
-\r
-"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the\r
-infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head,\r
-and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes\r
-at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast\r
-swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter of great\r
-astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting,\r
-and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm\r
-Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited\r
-so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent\r
-observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant\r
-and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes."\r
---THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.\r
-\r
-"The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True\r
-Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon\r
-at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a\r
-disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so\r
-artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the\r
-most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe."\r
---FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840.\r
-\r
- October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.\r
- "Where away?" demanded the captain.\r
- "Three points off the lee bow, sir."\r
- "Raise up your wheel. Steady!" "Steady, sir."\r
- "Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?"\r
- "Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she\r
- breaches!"\r
- "Sing out! sing out every time!"\r
- "Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there--there--THAR she\r
- blows--bowes--bo-o-os!"\r
- "How far off?"\r
- "Two miles and a half."\r
- "Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands."\r
- --J. ROSS BROWNE'S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846.\r
-\r
-"The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid\r
-transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of\r
-Nantucket." --"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS.\r
-A.D. 1828.\r
-\r
-Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the\r
-assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length\r
-rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping\r
-into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable." --MISSIONARY\r
-JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.\r
-\r
-"Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and peculiar\r
-portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine\r
-thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year\r
-to the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry."\r
---REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE, ON THE\r
-APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET. 1828.\r
-\r
-"The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment."\r
---"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES AND THE\r
-WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE\r
-PREBLE." BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.\r
-\r
-"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will send\r
-you to hell." --LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS BROTHER,\r
-WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.\r
-\r
-"The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order,\r
-if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they\r
-failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale."\r
---MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.\r
-\r
-"These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward\r
-again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem\r
-to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West\r
-Passage." --FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED.\r
-\r
-"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck\r
-by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at\r
-the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a\r
-totally different air from those engaged in regular voyage." --CURRENTS\r
-AND WHALING. U.S. EX. EX.\r
-\r
-"Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect\r
-having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form\r
-arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps\r
-have been told that these were the ribs of whales." --TALES OF A WHALE\r
-VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.\r
-\r
-"It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,\r
-that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages\r
-enrolled among the crew." --NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING\r
-OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.\r
-\r
-"It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels\r
-(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they\r
-departed." --CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.\r
-\r
-"Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up\r
-perpendicularly into the air. It was the while." --MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE\r
-WHALE FISHERMAN.\r
-\r
-"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would\r
-manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied\r
-to the root of his tail." --A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND TRUCKS.\r
-\r
-"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and\r
-female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone's\r
-throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the beech tree\r
-extended its branches." --DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.\r
-\r
-"'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the\r
-distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat,\r
-threatening it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your lives!'"\r
---WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.\r
-\r
-"So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold\r
-harpooneer is striking the whale!" --NANTUCKET SONG.\r
-\r
- "Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale\r
- In his ocean home will be\r
- A giant in might, where might is right,\r
- And King of the boundless sea."\r
- --WHALE SONG.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 1. Loomings.\r
-\r
-\r
-Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having\r
-little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on\r
-shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of\r
-the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating\r
-the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;\r
-whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find\r
-myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up\r
-the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get\r
-such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to\r
-prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically\r
-knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea\r
-as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a\r
-philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly\r
-take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew\r
-it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very\r
-nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.\r
-\r
-There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by\r
-wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with\r
-her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme\r
-downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and\r
-cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.\r
-Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.\r
-\r
-Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears\r
-Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What\r
-do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand\r
-thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some\r
-leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some\r
-looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the\r
-rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these\r
-are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to\r
-counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are\r
-the green fields gone? What do they here?\r
-\r
-But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and\r
-seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the\r
-extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder\r
-warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water\r
-as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of\r
-them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets\r
-and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.\r
-Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all\r
-those ships attract them thither?\r
-\r
-Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take\r
-almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a\r
-dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic\r
-in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest\r
-reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will\r
-infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.\r
-Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this\r
-experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical\r
-professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for\r
-ever.\r
-\r
-But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,\r
-quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of\r
-the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees,\r
-each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and\r
-here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder\r
-cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a\r
-mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their\r
-hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though\r
-this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's\r
-head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the\r
-magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores\r
-on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the\r
-one charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were\r
-Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to\r
-see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two\r
-handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly\r
-needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why\r
-is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at\r
-some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a\r
-passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first\r
-told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the\r
-old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate\r
-deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.\r
-And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because\r
-he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain,\r
-plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see\r
-in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of\r
-life; and this is the key to it all.\r
-\r
-Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin\r
-to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs,\r
-I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.\r
-For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is\r
-but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get\r
-sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do not enjoy\r
-themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a passenger;\r
-nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a\r
-Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction\r
-of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all\r
-honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind\r
-whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,\r
-without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.\r
-And as for going as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory\r
-in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board--yet, somehow,\r
-I never fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously\r
-buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who\r
-will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled\r
-fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old\r
-Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the\r
-mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.\r
-\r
-No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,\r
-plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.\r
-True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to\r
-spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort\r
-of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour,\r
-particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the\r
-Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all,\r
-if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been\r
-lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand\r
-in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a\r
-schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and\r
-the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in\r
-time.\r
-\r
-What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom\r
-and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed,\r
-I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel\r
-Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and\r
-respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't\r
-a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may\r
-order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I have the\r
-satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is\r
-one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical\r
-or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is\r
-passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and\r
-be content.\r
-\r
-Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of\r
-paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single\r
-penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must\r
-pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying\r
-and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable\r
-infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING\r
-PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man\r
-receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly\r
-believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account\r
-can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves\r
-to perdition!\r
-\r
-Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome\r
-exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world,\r
-head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is,\r
-if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the\r
-Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from\r
-the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not\r
-so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many\r
-other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.\r
-But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a\r
-merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling\r
-voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the\r
-constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me\r
-in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any one else. And,\r
-doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand\r
-programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as\r
-a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances.\r
-I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:\r
-\r
-\r
-"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.\r
-\r
-"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.\r
-\r
-"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."\r
-\r
-\r
-Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the\r
-Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others\r
-were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and\r
-easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though\r
-I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the\r
-circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives\r
-which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced\r
-me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the\r
-delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill\r
-and discriminating judgment.\r
-\r
-Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great\r
-whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my\r
-curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island\r
-bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all\r
-the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped\r
-to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not\r
-have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting\r
-itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on\r
-barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a\r
-horror, and could still be social with it--would they let me--since it\r
-is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place\r
-one lodges in.\r
-\r
-By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the\r
-great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild\r
-conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into\r
-my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them\r
-all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.\r
-\r
-\r
-I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm,\r
-and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of\r
-old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in\r
-December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet\r
-for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place\r
-would offer, till the following Monday.\r
-\r
-As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at\r
-this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well\r
-be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was\r
-made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a\r
-fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous\r
-old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has\r
-of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though\r
-in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket\r
-was her great original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the place where the\r
-first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket\r
-did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to\r
-give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that\r
-first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported\r
-cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to\r
-discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?\r
-\r
-Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me\r
-in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a\r
-matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a\r
-very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold\r
-and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had\r
-sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,--So,\r
-wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of\r
-a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the\r
-north with the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you\r
-may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire\r
-the price, and don't be too particular.\r
-\r
-With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The\r
-Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further\r
-on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn," there came such\r
-fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from\r
-before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches\r
-thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck\r
-my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless\r
-service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too\r
-expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the\r
-broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses\r
-within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away\r
-from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I\r
-went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for\r
-there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.\r
-\r
-Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand,\r
-and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At\r
-this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of\r
-the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light\r
-proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly\r
-open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the\r
-public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an\r
-ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost\r
-choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The\r
-Crossed Harpoons," and "The Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the\r
-sign of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice\r
-within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.\r
-\r
-It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black\r
-faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel\r
-of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the\r
-preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and\r
-wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out,\r
-Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'\r
-\r
-Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks,\r
-and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging\r
-sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing\r
-a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath--"The\r
-Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."\r
-\r
-Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought\r
-I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this\r
-Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and\r
-the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little\r
-wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from\r
-the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a\r
-poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very\r
-spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.\r
-\r
-It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side palsied\r
-as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner,\r
-where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever\r
-it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a\r
-mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob\r
-quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that tempestuous wind called\r
-Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose works I possess the only copy\r
-extant--"it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at\r
-it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether\r
-thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both\r
-sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough,\r
-thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou\r
-reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is\r
-the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies\r
-though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late\r
-to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone\r
-is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus\r
-there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and\r
-shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears\r
-with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not\r
-keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his\r
-red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What\r
-a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them\r
-talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give\r
-me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.\r
-\r
-But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up\r
-to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra\r
-than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the\r
-line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in\r
-order to keep out this frost?\r
-\r
-Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the\r
-door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be\r
-moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a\r
-Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a\r
-temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.\r
-\r
-But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is\r
-plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet,\r
-and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.\r
-\r
-\r
-Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,\r
-low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of\r
-the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large\r
-oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the\r
-unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent\r
-study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of\r
-the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its\r
-purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first\r
-you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New\r
-England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint\r
-of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and\r
-especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the\r
-entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however\r
-wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.\r
-\r
-But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,\r
-black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three\r
-blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy,\r
-soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.\r
-Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable\r
-sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily\r
-took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting\r
-meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you\r
-through.--It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural\r
-combat of the four primal elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a\r
-Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream\r
-of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous\r
-something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest\r
-were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic\r
-fish? even the great leviathan himself?\r
-\r
-In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,\r
-partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom\r
-I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a\r
-great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three\r
-dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to\r
-spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself\r
-upon the three mast-heads.\r
-\r
-The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish\r
-array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with\r
-glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of\r
-human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round\r
-like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You\r
-shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage\r
-could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying\r
-implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons\r
-all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long\r
-lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen\r
-whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon--so like a\r
-corkscrew now--was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale,\r
-years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered\r
-nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a\r
-man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the\r
-hump.\r
-\r
-Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut\r
-through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with\r
-fireplaces all round--you enter the public room. A still duskier place\r
-is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled\r
-planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's\r
-cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored\r
-old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like\r
-table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities\r
-gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the\r
-further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den--the bar--a rude\r
-attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands the\r
-vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive\r
-beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters,\r
-bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another\r
-cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little\r
-withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors\r
-deliriums and death.\r
-\r
-Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though\r
-true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses\r
-deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians\r
-rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to\r
-THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so\r
-on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for\r
-a shilling.\r
-\r
-Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about\r
-a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of SKRIMSHANDER. I\r
-sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a\r
-room, received for answer that his house was full--not a bed unoccupied.\r
-"But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections\r
-to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin'\r
-a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing."\r
-\r
-I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should\r
-ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and\r
-that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the\r
-harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander\r
-further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with\r
-the half of any decent man's blanket.\r
-\r
-"I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?--you want supper?\r
-Supper'll be ready directly."\r
-\r
-I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the\r
-Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with\r
-his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space\r
-between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but\r
-he didn't make much headway, I thought.\r
-\r
-At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an\r
-adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord\r
-said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each\r
-in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and\r
-hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But\r
-the fare was of the most substantial kind--not only meat and potatoes,\r
-but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in\r
-a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful\r
-manner.\r
-\r
-"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead\r
-sartainty."\r
-\r
-"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"\r
-\r
-"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooneer\r
-is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't--he eats\r
-nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."\r
-\r
-"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?"\r
-\r
-"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.\r
-\r
-I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark\r
-complexioned" harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so\r
-turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into\r
-bed before I did.\r
-\r
-Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not\r
-what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening\r
-as a looker on.\r
-\r
-Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord\r
-cried, "That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing\r
-this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now\r
-we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."\r
-\r
-A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open,\r
-and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy\r
-watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all\r
-bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an\r
-eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat,\r
-and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they\r
-made a straight wake for the whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled\r
-little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all\r
-round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah\r
-mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a\r
-sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how\r
-long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the\r
-weather side of an ice-island.\r
-\r
-The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even\r
-with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering\r
-about most obstreperously.\r
-\r
-I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though\r
-he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own\r
-sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise\r
-as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods\r
-had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a\r
-sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will\r
-here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet\r
-in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have\r
-seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt,\r
-making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep\r
-shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give\r
-him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner,\r
-and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall\r
-mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry\r
-of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away\r
-unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the\r
-sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and\r
-being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised\r
-a cry of "Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of\r
-the house in pursuit of him.\r
-\r
-It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost\r
-supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself\r
-upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance\r
-of the seamen.\r
-\r
-No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal\r
-rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but\r
-people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to\r
-sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange\r
-town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely\r
-multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should\r
-sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep\r
-two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they\r
-all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and\r
-cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.\r
-\r
-The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the\r
-thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a\r
-harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of\r
-the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.\r
-Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be\r
-home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at\r
-midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?\r
-\r
-"Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't sleep\r
-with him. I'll try the bench here."\r
-\r
-"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a\r
-mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots and\r
-notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's plane\r
-there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough." So saying\r
-he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting\r
-the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while grinning\r
-like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the\r
-plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was\r
-near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's sake to quit--the\r
-bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing\r
-in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the\r
-shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in\r
-the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a\r
-brown study.\r
-\r
-I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too\r
-short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too\r
-narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher\r
-than the planed one--so there was no yoking them. I then placed the\r
-first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,\r
-leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I\r
-soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under\r
-the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially\r
-as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window,\r
-and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate\r
-vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.\r
-\r
-The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal\r
-a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be\r
-wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon\r
-second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next\r
-morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be\r
-standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!\r
-\r
-Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending\r
-a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I began to think\r
-that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against\r
-this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be dropping\r
-in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may\r
-become jolly good bedfellows after all--there's no telling.\r
-\r
-But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes,\r
-and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.\r
-\r
-"Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep such\r
-late hours?" It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.\r
-\r
-The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to\r
-be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. "No," he\r
-answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to\r
-rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out\r
-a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late,\r
-unless, may be, he can't sell his head."\r
-\r
-"Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you\r
-are telling me?" getting into a towering rage. "Do you pretend to say,\r
-landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday\r
-night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?"\r
-\r
-"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't\r
-sell it here, the market's overstocked."\r
-\r
-"With what?" shouted I.\r
-\r
-"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"\r
-\r
-"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better\r
-stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."\r
-\r
-"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I\r
-rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a\r
-slanderin' his head."\r
-\r
-"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at this\r
-unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.\r
-\r
-"It's broke a'ready," said he.\r
-\r
-"Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"\r
-\r
-"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."\r
-\r
-"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a\r
-snow-storm--"landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one\r
-another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a\r
-bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half\r
-belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I\r
-have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and\r
-exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling\r
-towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of connexion,\r
-landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest\r
-degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this\r
-harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the\r
-night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay\r
-that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good\r
-evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping\r
-with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean, landlord, YOU, sir, by trying\r
-to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to\r
-a criminal prosecution."\r
-\r
-"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty long\r
-sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy,\r
-this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from\r
-the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads\r
-(great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one\r
-he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not\r
-do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to\r
-churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was\r
-goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the\r
-airth like a string of inions."\r
-\r
-This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed\r
-that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me--but at\r
-the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a\r
-Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal\r
-business as selling the heads of dead idolators?\r
-\r
-"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."\r
-\r
-"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting dreadful\r
-late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed; Sal and me\r
-slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's plenty of room\r
-for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big bed that. Why,\r
-afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the\r
-foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and\r
-somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.\r
-Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a\r
-glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards\r
-me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a\r
-clock in the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that\r
-harpooneer to-night; he's come to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO\r
-come; WON'T ye come?"\r
-\r
-I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was\r
-ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough,\r
-with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers\r
-to sleep abreast.\r
-\r
-"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest\r
-that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there, make\r
-yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye." I turned round from\r
-eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.\r
-\r
-Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the\r
-most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced\r
-round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see\r
-no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four\r
-walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of\r
-things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed\r
-up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman's bag,\r
-containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk.\r
-Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf\r
-over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.\r
-\r
-But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the\r
-light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive\r
-at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to\r
-nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little\r
-tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an\r
-Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat,\r
-as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible\r
-that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the\r
-streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try\r
-it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and\r
-thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer\r
-had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass\r
-stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore\r
-myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.\r
-\r
-I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this\r
-head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on\r
-the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in\r
-the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought\r
-a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now,\r
-half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about\r
-the harpooneer's not coming home at all that night, it being so very\r
-late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and\r
-then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the\r
-care of heaven.\r
-\r
-Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,\r
-there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep\r
-for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty\r
-nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy\r
-footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room\r
-from under the door.\r
-\r
-Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal\r
-head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word\r
-till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New\r
-Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without\r
-looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the\r
-floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords\r
-of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all\r
-eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while\r
-employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This accomplished, however, he\r
-turned round--when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of\r
-a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large\r
-blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible\r
-bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is,\r
-just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face\r
-so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be\r
-sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were\r
-stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this;\r
-but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of\r
-a white man--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been\r
-tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his\r
-distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,\r
-thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any\r
-sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that\r
-part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the\r
-squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of\r
-tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man\r
-into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas;\r
-and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the\r
-skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,\r
-this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty\r
-having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled\r
-out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing\r
-these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New\r
-Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed it down into the bag.\r
-He now took off his hat--a new beaver hat--when I came nigh singing out\r
-with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head--none to speak of at\r
-least--nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His\r
-bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.\r
-Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted\r
-out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.\r
-\r
-Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but\r
-it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of\r
-this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.\r
-Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and\r
-confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him\r
-as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at\r
-the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not\r
-game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer\r
-concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed\r
-his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered\r
-with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same\r
-dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just\r
-escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very\r
-legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up\r
-the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some\r
-abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South\r
-Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.\r
-A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might\r
-take a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!\r
-\r
-But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about\r
-something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that\r
-he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or\r
-dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the\r
-pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with\r
-a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days' old Congo\r
-baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that\r
-this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But\r
-seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal\r
-like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden\r
-idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the\r
-empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this\r
-little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The\r
-chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I\r
-thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel\r
-for his Congo idol.\r
-\r
-I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but\r
-ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow. First he takes\r
-about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places\r
-them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on\r
-top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into\r
-a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire,\r
-and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be\r
-scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit;\r
-then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of\r
-it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such\r
-dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange\r
-antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the\r
-devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some\r
-pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the\r
-most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol\r
-up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as\r
-carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.\r
-\r
-All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and\r
-seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business\r
-operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,\r
-now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which\r
-I had so long been bound.\r
-\r
-But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.\r
-Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an\r
-instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle,\r
-he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light\r
-was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth,\r
-sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving\r
-a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.\r
-\r
-Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him\r
-against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might\r
-be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his\r
-guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my\r
-meaning.\r
-\r
-"Who-e debel you?"--he at last said--"you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e."\r
-And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the\r
-dark.\r
-\r
-"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord! Watch!\r
-Coffin! Angels! save me!"\r
-\r
-"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled the\r
-cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the\r
-hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire.\r
-But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light\r
-in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.\r
-\r
-"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here wouldn't\r
-harm a hair of your head."\r
-\r
-"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that that\r
-infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"\r
-\r
-"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads\r
-around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look\r
-here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"\r
-\r
-"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and\r
-sitting up in bed.\r
-\r
-"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and\r
-throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil\r
-but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment.\r
-For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking\r
-cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to\r
-myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason\r
-to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober\r
-cannibal than a drunken Christian.\r
-\r
-"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or\r
-whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will\r
-turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed with me.\r
-It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured."\r
-\r
-This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely\r
-motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to\r
-say--"I won't touch a leg of ye."\r
-\r
-"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."\r
-\r
-I turned in, and never slept better in my life.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.\r
-\r
-\r
-Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown\r
-over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost\r
-thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of\r
-odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his\r
-tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure,\r
-no two parts of which were of one precise shade--owing I suppose to\r
-his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt\r
-sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times--this same arm of his, I\r
-say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.\r
-Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could\r
-hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and\r
-it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that\r
-Queequeg was hugging me.\r
-\r
-My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a\r
-child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;\r
-whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.\r
-The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other--I\r
-think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little\r
-sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,\r
-was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--my\r
-mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to\r
-bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,\r
-the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But\r
-there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the\r
-third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time,\r
-and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.\r
-\r
-I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse\r
-before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the\r
-small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the\r
-sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the\r
-streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse\r
-and worse--at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my\r
-stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself\r
-at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good\r
-slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie\r
-abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most\r
-conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For\r
-several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I\r
-have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At\r
-last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly\r
-waking from it--half steeped in dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before\r
-sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock\r
-running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was\r
-to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung\r
-over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form\r
-or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my\r
-bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with\r
-the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking\r
-that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be\r
-broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me;\r
-but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for\r
-days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding\r
-attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle\r
-myself with it.\r
-\r
-Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the\r
-supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to\r
-those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan\r
-arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly\r
-recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to\r
-the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm--unlock his\r
-bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly,\r
-as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse\r
-him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over,\r
-my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a\r
-slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk\r
-sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A\r
-pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the\r
-broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!--in the name of\r
-goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and\r
-loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his\r
-hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in\r
-extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself\r
-all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,\r
-stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he\r
-did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim\r
-consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over\r
-him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings\r
-now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at\r
-last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow,\r
-and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon\r
-the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that,\r
-if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress\r
-afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg,\r
-under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the\r
-truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what\r
-you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this\r
-particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much\r
-civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;\r
-staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for\r
-the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless,\r
-a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well\r
-worth unusual regarding.\r
-\r
-He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one,\r
-by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--he hunted up his boots.\r
-What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next\r
-movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under the bed;\r
-when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was\r
-hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever\r
-heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his\r
-boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition\r
-stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized\r
-to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His\r
-education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not\r
-been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled\r
-himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage,\r
-he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At\r
-last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his\r
-eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not\r
-being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide\r
-ones--probably not made to order either--rather pinched and tormented\r
-him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.\r
-\r
-Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the\r
-street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view\r
-into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that\r
-Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on;\r
-I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat,\r
-and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He\r
-complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the\r
-morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to\r
-my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his\r
-chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a\r
-piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water\r
-and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept\r
-his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner,\r
-slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little\r
-on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall,\r
-begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks\r
-I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance.\r
-Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of\r
-what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp\r
-the long straight edges are always kept.\r
-\r
-The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of\r
-the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his\r
-harpoon like a marshal's baton.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.\r
-\r
-\r
-I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the\r
-grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,\r
-though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my\r
-bedfellow.\r
-\r
-However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a\r
-good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own\r
-proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be\r
-backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in\r
-that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him,\r
-be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.\r
-\r
-The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the\r
-night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were\r
-nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and\r
-sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers,\r
-and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an\r
-unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.\r
-\r
-You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This\r
-young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and\r
-would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days\r
-landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades\r
-lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the\r
-complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached\r
-withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show\r
-a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the\r
-Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates,\r
-zone by zone.\r
-\r
-"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went\r
-to breakfast.\r
-\r
-They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease\r
-in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard,\r
-the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all\r
-men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the\r
-mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or\r
-the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart\r
-of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances--this kind of\r
-travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social\r
-polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had\r
-anywhere.\r
-\r
-These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that\r
-after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some\r
-good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every\r
-man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked\r
-embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the\r
-slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas--entire\r
-strangers to them--and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here\r
-they sat at a social breakfast table--all of the same calling, all of\r
-kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they\r
-had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains.\r
-A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!\r
-\r
-But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the head of\r
-the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot\r
-say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially\r
-justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it\r
-there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent\r
-jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But\r
-THAT was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in\r
-most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.\r
-\r
-We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he eschewed\r
-coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks,\r
-done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the\r
-rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting\r
-there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I\r
-sallied out for a stroll.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 6. The Street.\r
-\r
-\r
-If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish\r
-an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a\r
-civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first\r
-daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.\r
-\r
-In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will\r
-frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign\r
-parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners\r
-will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not\r
-unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live\r
-Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water\r
-Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors;\r
-but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;\r
-savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It\r
-makes a stranger stare.\r
-\r
-But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,\r
-and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft\r
-which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still\r
-more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town\r
-scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain\r
-and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames;\r
-fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch\r
-the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they\r
-came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look\r
-there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and\r
-swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here\r
-comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.\r
-\r
-No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a\r
-downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his\r
-two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a\r
-country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished\r
-reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the\r
-comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his\r
-sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his\r
-canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps\r
-in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and\r
-all, down the throat of the tempest.\r
-\r
-But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and\r
-bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer\r
-place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this\r
-day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador.\r
-As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they\r
-look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live\r
-in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like\r
-Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with\r
-milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in\r
-spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like\r
-houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came\r
-they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?\r
-\r
-Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty\r
-mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses\r
-and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.\r
-One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom\r
-of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?\r
-\r
-In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their\r
-daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.\r
-You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say,\r
-they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly\r
-burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.\r
-\r
-In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples--long\r
-avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and\r
-bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their\r
-tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art;\r
-which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces\r
-of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final\r
-day.\r
-\r
-And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But\r
-roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks\r
-is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that\r
-bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young\r
-girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off\r
-shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of\r
-the Puritanic sands.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.\r
-\r
-\r
-In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are\r
-the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who\r
-fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.\r
-\r
-Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this\r
-special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving\r
-sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called\r
-bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I\r
-found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and\r
-widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks\r
-of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from\r
-the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The\r
-chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and\r
-women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders,\r
-masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran\r
-something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:--\r
-\r
-SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was\r
-lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November\r
-1st, 1836. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.\r
-\r
-SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN,\r
-WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats'\r
-crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the\r
-Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is\r
-here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.\r
-\r
-SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows\r
-of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, AUGUST\r
-3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.\r
-\r
-Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself\r
-near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near\r
-me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze\r
-of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only\r
-person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only\r
-one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid\r
-inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen\r
-whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not;\r
-but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly\r
-did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings\r
-of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were\r
-assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak\r
-tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.\r
-\r
-Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among\r
-flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation\r
-that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those\r
-black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those\r
-immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in\r
-the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to\r
-the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might\r
-those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.\r
-\r
-In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;\r
-why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no\r
-tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is\r
-that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix\r
-so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if\r
-he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the\r
-Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what\r
-eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies\r
-antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we\r
-still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are\r
-dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all\r
-the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a\r
-whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.\r
-\r
-But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these\r
-dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.\r
-\r
-It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a\r
-Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky\r
-light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen\r
-who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But\r
-somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine\r
-chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an\r
-immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling--a\r
-speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what\r
-then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.\r
-Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true\r
-substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too\r
-much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that\r
-thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my\r
-better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not\r
-me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and\r
-stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.\r
-\r
-\r
-I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable\r
-robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon\r
-admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,\r
-sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it\r
-was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he\r
-was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his\r
-youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.\r
-At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a\r
-healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second\r
-flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone\r
-certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure\r
-peeping forth even beneath February's snow. No one having previously\r
-heard his history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without\r
-the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical\r
-peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life\r
-he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and\r
-certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down\r
-with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to\r
-drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed.\r
-However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up\r
-in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit,\r
-he quietly approached the pulpit.\r
-\r
-Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a\r
-regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor,\r
-seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect,\r
-it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the\r
-pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like\r
-those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling\r
-captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted\r
-man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and\r
-stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what\r
-manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for\r
-an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the\r
-ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards,\r
-and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand\r
-over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.\r
-\r
-The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with\r
-swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood,\r
-so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the\r
-pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship,\r
-these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not\r
-prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn\r
-round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder\r
-step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him\r
-impregnable in his little Quebec.\r
-\r
-I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.\r
-Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,\r
-that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks\r
-of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this\r
-thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be,\r
-then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual\r
-withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?\r
-Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful\r
-man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold--a lofty\r
-Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.\r
-\r
-But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,\r
-borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings. Between the marble\r
-cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back\r
-was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating\r
-against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy\r
-breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there\r
-floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel's\r
-face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the\r
-ship's tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into\r
-the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. "Ah, noble ship," the angel\r
-seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy\r
-helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling\r
-off--serenest azure is at hand."\r
-\r
-Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that\r
-had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in\r
-the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a\r
-projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed\r
-beak.\r
-\r
-What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this earth's\r
-foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the\r
-world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first\r
-descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is\r
-the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds.\r
-Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete;\r
-and the pulpit is its prow.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.\r
-\r
-\r
-Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered\r
-the scattered people to condense. "Starboard gangway, there! side away\r
-to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!"\r
-\r
-There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a\r
-still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and\r
-every eye on the preacher.\r
-\r
-He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large\r
-brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered\r
-a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the\r
-bottom of the sea.\r
-\r
-This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of\r
-a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he\r
-commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards\r
-the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy--\r
-\r
- "The ribs and terrors in the whale,\r
- Arched over me a dismal gloom,\r
- While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,\r
- And lift me deepening down to doom.\r
-\r
- "I saw the opening maw of hell,\r
- With endless pains and sorrows there;\r
- Which none but they that feel can tell--\r
- Oh, I was plunging to despair.\r
-\r
- "In black distress, I called my God,\r
- When I could scarce believe him mine,\r
- He bowed his ear to my complaints--\r
- No more the whale did me confine.\r
-\r
- "With speed he flew to my relief,\r
- As on a radiant dolphin borne;\r
- Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone\r
- The face of my Deliverer God.\r
-\r
- "My song for ever shall record\r
- That terrible, that joyful hour;\r
- I give the glory to my God,\r
- His all the mercy and the power."\r
-\r
-\r
-Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the\r
-howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned\r
-over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon\r
-the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the\r
-first chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up\r
-Jonah.'"\r
-\r
-"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is one\r
-of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what\r
-depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant\r
-lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the\r
-fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods\r
-surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;\r
-sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But WHAT is this\r
-lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded\r
-lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot\r
-of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it\r
-is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the\r
-swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and\r
-joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of\r
-Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never\r
-mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard\r
-command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to\r
-do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to\r
-persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in\r
-this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.\r
-\r
-"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at\r
-God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will\r
-carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains\r
-of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship\r
-that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded\r
-meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city\r
-than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is\r
-Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa,\r
-as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the\r
-Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa,\r
-shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the\r
-Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the\r
-westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye\r
-not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God?\r
-Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with\r
-slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the\r
-shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered,\r
-self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those\r
-days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested\r
-ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a\r
-hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf\r
-with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the\r
-Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on\r
-board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment\r
-desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye.\r
-Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence;\r
-in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure\r
-the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious\r
-way, one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe,\r
-do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the\r
-adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing\r
-murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck\r
-against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering\r
-five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and\r
-containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah\r
-to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,\r
-prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and\r
-summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a\r
-coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong\r
-suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him\r
-not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends\r
-into the cabin.\r
-\r
-"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making\r
-out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless\r
-question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.\r
-But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon\r
-sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah,\r
-though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that\r
-hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We sail with the\r
-next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing\r
-him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any honest man that goes a\r
-passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls away\r
-the Captain from that scent. 'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the\r
-passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.' For it is particularly\r
-written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this\r
-history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And\r
-taken with the context, this is full of meaning.\r
-\r
-"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime\r
-in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this\r
-world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without\r
-a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.\r
-So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he\r
-judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented\r
-to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same\r
-time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when\r
-Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the\r
-Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any\r
-way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 'Point out my\r
-state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.'\r
-'Thou lookest like it,' says the Captain, 'there's thy room.' Jonah\r
-enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing\r
-him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and\r
-mutters something about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed\r
-to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws\r
-himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost\r
-resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in\r
-that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah\r
-feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale\r
-shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.\r
-\r
-"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly\r
-oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf\r
-with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,\r
-though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with\r
-reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it\r
-but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp\r
-alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes\r
-roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no\r
-refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more\r
-and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.\r
-'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it\r
-burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'\r
-\r
-"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still\r
-reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the\r
-Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as\r
-one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish,\r
-praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid\r
-the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the\r
-man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there's naught\r
-to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah's prodigy\r
-of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.\r
-\r
-"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and\r
-from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening,\r
-glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded\r
-smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not\r
-bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to\r
-break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;\r
-when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind\r
-is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with\r
-trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah\r
-sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not\r
-the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the\r
-mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after\r
-him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship--a\r
-berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the\r
-frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, 'What\r
-meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that\r
-direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck,\r
-grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is\r
-sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after\r
-wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring\r
-fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.\r
-And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep\r
-gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing\r
-bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the\r
-tormented deep.\r
-\r
-"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing\r
-attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark\r
-him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last,\r
-fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven,\r
-they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was\r
-upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they\r
-mob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation? Whence comest\r
-thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior\r
-of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where\r
-from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions,\r
-but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the\r
-unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is\r
-upon him.\r
-\r
-"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven\r
-who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well\r
-mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN! Straightway, he now goes on to\r
-make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more\r
-appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating\r
-God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his\r
-deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him\r
-forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this great tempest\r
-was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to\r
-save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder;\r
-then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not\r
-unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.\r
-\r
-"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;\r
-when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea\r
-is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth\r
-water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless\r
-commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into\r
-the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory\r
-teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto\r
-the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a\r
-weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for\r
-direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He\r
-leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that\r
-spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy\r
-temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not\r
-clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to\r
-God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of\r
-him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before\r
-you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model\r
-for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like\r
-Jonah."\r
-\r
-While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,\r
-slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,\r
-when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.\r
-His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the\r
-warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his\r
-swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple\r
-hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.\r
-\r
-There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves\r
-of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed\r
-eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.\r
-\r
-But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,\r
-with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these\r
-words:\r
-\r
-"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press\r
-upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that\r
-Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me,\r
-for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down\r
-from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and\r
-listen as you listen, while some one of you reads ME that other and more\r
-awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the living God.\r
-How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and\r
-bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a\r
-wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled\r
-from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking\r
-ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we\r
-have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to\r
-living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the\r
-midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand\r
-fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the\r
-watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of\r
-any plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the whale grounded upon\r
-the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting\r
-prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the\r
-shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching\r
-up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and\r
-earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the\r
-Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like\r
-two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--Jonah\r
-did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the\r
-Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!\r
-\r
-"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of\r
-the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from\r
-Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God\r
-has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than\r
-to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe\r
-to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would\r
-not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him\r
-who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is\r
-himself a castaway!"\r
-\r
-He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his\r
-face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with\r
-a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of\r
-every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,\r
-than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than\r
-the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward\r
-delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever\r
-stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong\r
-arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has\r
-gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the\r
-truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out\r
-from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,--top-gallant\r
-delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his\r
-God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the\r
-waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake\r
-from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness\r
-will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final\r
-breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal,\r
-here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or\r
-mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man\r
-that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"\r
-\r
-He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with\r
-his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,\r
-and he was left alone in the place.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.\r
-\r
-\r
-Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there\r
-quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time.\r
-He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove\r
-hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little\r
-negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife\r
-gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his\r
-heathenish way.\r
-\r
-But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going\r
-to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap\r
-began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth\r
-page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and\r
-giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He\r
-would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number\r
-one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was\r
-only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his\r
-astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.\r
-\r
-With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and\r
-hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his countenance\r
-yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot\r
-hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw\r
-the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,\r
-fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a\r
-thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing\r
-about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.\r
-He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.\r
-Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn\r
-out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it\r
-otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was\r
-his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous,\r
-but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular\r
-busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope\r
-from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two\r
-long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington\r
-cannibalistically developed.\r
-\r
-Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be\r
-looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence,\r
-never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared\r
-wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.\r
-Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night\r
-previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found\r
-thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference\r
-of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not\r
-know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm\r
-self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed\r
-also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the\r
-other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have\r
-no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck\r
-me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something\r
-almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from\r
-home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is--which was the only way he could\r
-get there--thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in\r
-the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving\r
-the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to\r
-himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he\r
-had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be\r
-true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or\r
-so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself\r
-out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he\r
-must have "broken his digester."\r
-\r
-As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that\r
-mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then\r
-only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering\r
-round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain;\r
-the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of\r
-strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart\r
-and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing\r
-savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a\r
-nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.\r
-Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself\r
-mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have\r
-repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I'll\r
-try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but\r
-hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs\r
-and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little\r
-noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last\r
-night's hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be\r
-bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps\r
-a little complimented.\r
-\r
-We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to\r
-him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures\r
-that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went\r
-to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen\r
-in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing\r
-his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat\r
-exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly\r
-passing between us.\r
-\r
-If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's\r
-breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left\r
-us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as\r
-I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against\r
-mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were\r
-married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends;\r
-he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this\r
-sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing\r
-to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would\r
-not apply.\r
-\r
-After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room\r
-together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his\r
-enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out\r
-some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and\r
-mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them\r
-towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he\r
-silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them stay.\r
-He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed\r
-the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed\r
-anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I\r
-deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or\r
-otherwise.\r
-\r
-I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible\r
-Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in\r
-worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do\r
-you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and\r
-earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an\r
-insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?--to do\r
-the will of God--THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to\r
-my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me--THAT is the\r
-will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that\r
-this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular\r
-Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him\r
-in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped\r
-prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with\r
-Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that\r
-done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences\r
-and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.\r
-\r
-How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential\r
-disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very\r
-bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie\r
-and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts'\r
-honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving pair.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.\r
-\r
-\r
-We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and\r
-Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs\r
-over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free\r
-and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what\r
-little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like\r
-getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.\r
-\r
-Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position\r
-began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves\r
-sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the\r
-head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two\r
-noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt\r
-very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;\r
-indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the\r
-room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some\r
-small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world\r
-that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If\r
-you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so\r
-a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if,\r
-like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown\r
-of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general\r
-consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this\r
-reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which\r
-is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this\r
-sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and\r
-your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the\r
-one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.\r
-\r
-We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at\r
-once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether\r
-by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always\r
-keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness\r
-of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright\r
-except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element\r
-of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon\r
-opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created\r
-darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated\r
-twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did\r
-I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to\r
-strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt\r
-a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said,\r
-that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the\r
-bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when\r
-love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to\r
-have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full\r
-of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for\r
-the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed\r
-confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real\r
-friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed\r
-the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a\r
-blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit\r
-lamp.\r
-\r
-Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far\r
-distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and,\r
-eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly\r
-complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his\r
-words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with\r
-his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as\r
-it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 12. Biographical.\r
-\r
-\r
-Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and\r
-South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.\r
-\r
-When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in\r
-a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green\r
-sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire\r
-to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His\r
-father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the\r
-maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable\r
-warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins--royal stuff; though\r
-sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his\r
-untutored youth.\r
-\r
-A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a\r
-passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of\r
-seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence\r
-could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled\r
-off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when\r
-she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low\r
-tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the\r
-water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its\r
-prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the\r
-ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with\r
-one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up\r
-the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled\r
-a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.\r
-\r
-In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a\r
-cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and\r
-Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild\r
-desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told\r
-him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage--this sea\r
-Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin. They put him down among\r
-the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to\r
-toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming\r
-ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his\r
-untutored countrymen. For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a\r
-profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to\r
-make his people still happier than they were; and more than that,\r
-still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon\r
-convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked;\r
-infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in\r
-old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on\r
-to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also,\r
-poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in\r
-all meridians; I'll die a pagan.\r
-\r
-And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,\r
-wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer\r
-ways about him, though now some time from home.\r
-\r
-By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having\r
-a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he\r
-being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet;\r
-and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had\r
-unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan\r
-Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,--as soon as\r
-he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to\r
-sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a\r
-harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.\r
-\r
-I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future\r
-movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon\r
-this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my\r
-intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for\r
-an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany\r
-me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch,\r
-the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap;\r
-with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.\r
-To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt\r
-for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not\r
-fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant\r
-of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as\r
-known to merchant seamen.\r
-\r
-His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg embraced\r
-me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we\r
-rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were\r
-sleeping.\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.\r
-\r
-\r
-Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,\r
-for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my\r
-comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed\r
-amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between\r
-me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories\r
-about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person\r
-whom I now companied with.\r
-\r
-We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own\r
-poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went\r
-down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the\r
-wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg\r
-so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their\r
-streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we\r
-heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg\r
-now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked\r
-him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and\r
-whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in\r
-substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet\r
-he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of\r
-assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate\r
-with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers\r
-and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their own\r
-scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--even so, Queequeg,\r
-for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.\r
-\r
-Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about\r
-the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners\r
-of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his\r
-heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the\r
-thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in\r
-which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it\r
-fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why,"\r
-said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would\r
-think. Didn't the people laugh?"\r
-\r
-Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of\r
-Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water\r
-of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and\r
-this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided\r
-mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once\r
-touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts, a very\r
-stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain--this\r
-commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a\r
-pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding\r
-guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage, this Captain\r
-marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, placed himself over\r
-against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the\r
-King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,--for those people have their\r
-grace as well as we--though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such\r
-times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the\r
-ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say,\r
-being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony\r
-of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers\r
-into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself\r
-placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking\r
-himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain precedence over a\r
-mere island King, especially in the King's own house--the Captain coolly\r
-proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I suppose for a\r
-huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?--Didn't our\r
-people laugh?"\r
-\r
-At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.\r
-Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New\r
-Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all\r
-glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on\r
-casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering\r
-whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others\r
-came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and\r
-forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the\r
-start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a\r
-second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever\r
-and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all\r
-earthly effort.\r
-\r
-Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little\r
-Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings.\r
-How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that turnpike earth!--that\r
-common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and\r
-hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will\r
-permit no records.\r
-\r
-At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.\r
-His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.\r
-On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the\r
-blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways\r
-leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the\r
-two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of\r
-this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that\r
-for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a\r
-lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so\r
-companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a\r
-whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who,\r
-by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of\r
-all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him\r
-behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping\r
-his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost\r
-miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air;\r
-then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with\r
-bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him,\r
-lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.\r
-\r
-"Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;\r
-"Capting, Capting, here's the devil."\r
-\r
-"Hallo, _you_ sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking\r
-up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you\r
-might have killed that chap?"\r
-\r
-"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.\r
-\r
-"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there," pointing\r
-to the still shivering greenhorn.\r
-\r
-"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly\r
-expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e\r
-so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"\r
-\r
-"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if you\r
-try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."\r
-\r
-But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to\r
-mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted\r
-the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to\r
-side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor\r
-fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all\r
-hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it,\r
-seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost\r
-in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of\r
-snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of\r
-being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the\r
-boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the\r
-midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and\r
-crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one\r
-end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it\r
-round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar\r
-was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the\r
-wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg,\r
-stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of\r
-a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,\r
-throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing\r
-his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand\r
-and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone\r
-down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now\r
-took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters\r
-were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again,\r
-one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form.\r
-The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands\r
-voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that\r
-hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took\r
-his last long dive.\r
-\r
-Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at\r
-all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only\r
-asked for water--fresh water--something to wipe the brine off; that\r
-done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the\r
-bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying\r
-to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We\r
-cannibals must help these Christians."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.\r
-\r
-\r
-Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a\r
-fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.\r
-\r
-Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of\r
-the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely\r
-than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock, and elbow of\r
-sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than\r
-you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some\r
-gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they\r
-don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have\r
-to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that\r
-pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true\r
-cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,\r
-to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an\r
-oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand\r
-shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up,\r
-belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island\r
-of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will\r
-sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these\r
-extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.\r
-\r
-Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was\r
-settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle\r
-swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant\r
-Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne\r
-out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same\r
-direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they\r
-discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,--the\r
-poor little Indian's skeleton.\r
-\r
-What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take\r
-to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in\r
-the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more\r
-experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,\r
-launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world;\r
-put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in\r
-at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared\r
-everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the\r
-flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea\r
-Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that\r
-his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and\r
-malicious assaults!\r
-\r
-And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from\r
-their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like\r
-so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and\r
-Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add\r
-Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm\r
-all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds\r
-of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he\r
-owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of\r
-way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but\r
-floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea\r
-as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of\r
-the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the\r
-bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on\r
-the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and\r
-fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his home; THERE\r
-lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it\r
-overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie\r
-cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as\r
-chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so\r
-that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more\r
-strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull,\r
-that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows;\r
-so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails,\r
-and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of\r
-walruses and whales.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 15. Chowder.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly\r
-to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no\r
-business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of\r
-the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the\r
-Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept\r
-hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin\r
-Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he\r
-plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at\r
-the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow\r
-warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the\r
-larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a\r
-corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first\r
-man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very\r
-much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg\r
-insisted that the yellow warehouse--our first point of departure--must\r
-be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to\r
-say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little\r
-in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant\r
-to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no\r
-mistaking.\r
-\r
-Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,\r
-swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an\r
-old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other\r
-side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.\r
-Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I\r
-could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of\r
-crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, TWO\r
-of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A\r
-Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones\r
-staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair\r
-of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints\r
-touching Tophet?\r
-\r
-I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman\r
-with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,\r
-under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured\r
-eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen\r
-shirt.\r
-\r
-"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"\r
-\r
-"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."\r
-\r
-And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving\r
-Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon\r
-making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing\r
-further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and\r
-seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded\r
-repast, turned round to us and said--"Clam or Cod?"\r
-\r
-"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.\r
-\r
-"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.\r
-\r
-"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?"\r
-says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter\r
-time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"\r
-\r
-But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple\r
-Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing\r
-but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to\r
-the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.\r
-\r
-"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us\r
-both on one clam?"\r
-\r
-However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the\r
-apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder\r
-came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!\r
-hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than\r
-hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into\r
-little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned\r
-with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty\r
-voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food\r
-before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched\r
-it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking\r
-me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try\r
-a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word\r
-"cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the\r
-savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good\r
-time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.\r
-\r
-We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I\r
-to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head?\r
-What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look,\r
-Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"\r
-\r
-Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved\r
-its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for\r
-breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you\r
-began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area\r
-before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished\r
-necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books\r
-bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk,\r
-too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening\r
-to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw\r
-Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the\r
-sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod,\r
-I assure ye.\r
-\r
-Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey\r
-concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede\r
-me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his\r
-harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why not?" said I;\r
-"every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why not?" "Because\r
-it's dangerous," says she. "Ever since young Stiggs coming from that\r
-unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with\r
-only three barrels of _ile_, was found dead in my first floor back, with\r
-his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take\r
-sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg" (for\r
-she had learned his name), "I will just take this here iron, and keep\r
-it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for\r
-breakfast, men?"\r
-\r
-"Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of\r
-variety."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 16. The Ship.\r
-\r
-\r
-In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and\r
-no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been\r
-diligently consulting Yojo--the name of his black little god--and Yojo\r
-had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it\r
-everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in\r
-harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo\r
-earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly\r
-with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to\r
-do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I,\r
-Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it\r
-had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship\r
-myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.\r
-\r
-I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great\r
-confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising forecast\r
-of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good\r
-sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all\r
-cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.\r
-\r
-Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection\r
-of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied\r
-upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry\r
-us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced\r
-no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly\r
-prepared to set about this business with a determined rushing sort\r
-of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling little\r
-affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our\r
-little bedroom--for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan,\r
-or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that\r
-day; HOW it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself\r
-to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX\r
-Articles--leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo\r
-warming himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among\r
-the shipping. After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries,\r
-I learnt that there were three ships up for three-years' voyages--The\r
-Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. DEVIL-DAM, I do not know the\r
-origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt remember, was\r
-the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct\r
-as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her,\r
-hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod,\r
-looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very\r
-ship for us.\r
-\r
-You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I\r
-know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box\r
-galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a\r
-rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old\r
-school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look\r
-about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms\r
-of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French\r
-grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable\r
-bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan,\r
-where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood\r
-stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her\r
-ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped\r
-flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these\r
-her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining\r
-to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.\r
-Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded\r
-another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the\r
-principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his\r
-chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid\r
-it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched\r
-by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She\r
-was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with\r
-pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of\r
-a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All\r
-round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous\r
-jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for\r
-pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not\r
-through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of\r
-sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported\r
-there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved\r
-from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who\r
-steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds\r
-back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a\r
-most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.\r
-\r
-Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,\r
-in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw\r
-nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or\r
-rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only\r
-a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten\r
-feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken\r
-from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.\r
-Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced\r
-together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in\r
-a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the\r
-top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening\r
-faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a\r
-complete view forward.\r
-\r
-And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who\r
-by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and\r
-the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of\r
-command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all\r
-over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a\r
-stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was\r
-constructed.\r
-\r
-There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of\r
-the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,\r
-and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;\r
-only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest\r
-wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from\r
-his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to\r
-windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed\r
-together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.\r
-\r
-"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of\r
-the tent.\r
-\r
-"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?"\r
-he demanded.\r
-\r
-"I was thinking of shipping."\r
-\r
-"Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in a\r
-stove boat?"\r
-\r
-"No, Sir, I never have."\r
-\r
-"Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?\r
-\r
-"Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I've been several\r
-voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"\r
-\r
-"Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that\r
-leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of\r
-the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now\r
-ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships.\r
-But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?--it looks\r
-a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not been a pirate, hast\r
-thou?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?--Dost not think of\r
-murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?"\r
-\r
-I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask\r
-of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated\r
-Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather\r
-distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the\r
-Vineyard.\r
-\r
-"But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of\r
-shipping ye."\r
-\r
-"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world."\r
-\r
-"Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?"\r
-\r
-"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."\r
-\r
-"I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself."\r
-\r
-"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,\r
-young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted\r
-out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We\r
-are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest\r
-to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of\r
-finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap\r
-eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one\r
-leg."\r
-\r
-"What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?"\r
-\r
-"Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,\r
-chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a\r
-boat!--ah, ah!"\r
-\r
-I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at\r
-the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I\r
-could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know\r
-there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed\r
-I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident."\r
-\r
-"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou\r
-dost not talk shark a bit. SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure of\r
-that?"\r
-\r
-"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the\r
-merchant--"\r
-\r
-"Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant\r
-service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it. But let us understand each\r
-other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel\r
-inclined for it?"\r
-\r
-"I do, sir."\r
-\r
-"Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's\r
-throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!"\r
-\r
-"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be\r
-got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."\r
-\r
-"Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find\r
-out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to\r
-see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just\r
-step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back\r
-to me and tell me what ye see there."\r
-\r
-For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not\r
-knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But\r
-concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started\r
-me on the errand.\r
-\r
-Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the\r
-ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely\r
-pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but\r
-exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I\r
-could see.\r
-\r
-"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye\r
-see?"\r
-\r
-"Not much," I replied--"nothing but water; considerable horizon though,\r
-and there's a squall coming up, I think."\r
-\r
-"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go\r
-round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where\r
-you stand?"\r
-\r
-I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the\r
-Pequod was as good a ship as any--I thought the best--and all this I now\r
-repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness\r
-to ship me.\r
-\r
-"And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off," he added--"come\r
-along with ye." And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.\r
-\r
-Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and\r
-surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with\r
-Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other\r
-shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd\r
-of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each\r
-owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail\r
-or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling\r
-vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks\r
-bringing in good interest.\r
-\r
-Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a\r
-Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to\r
-this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the\r
-peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified\r
-by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same\r
-Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They\r
-are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.\r
-\r
-So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture\r
-names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in childhood\r
-naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker\r
-idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure\r
-of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown\r
-peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a\r
-Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things\r
-unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain\r
-and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion\r
-of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath\r
-constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think\r
-untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or\r
-savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding\r
-breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental\r
-advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language--that man makes\r
-one in a whole nation's census--a mighty pageant creature, formed for\r
-noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically\r
-regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems\r
-a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all\r
-men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure\r
-of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But,\r
-as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and\r
-still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another\r
-phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.\r
-\r
-Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.\r
-But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called\r
-serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the\r
-veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally\r
-educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all\r
-his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island\r
-creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this native born\r
-Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his\r
-vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of\r
-common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though refusing, from\r
-conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself\r
-had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe\r
-to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns\r
-upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his\r
-days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do\r
-not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably\r
-he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's\r
-religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This\r
-world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes\r
-of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat;\r
-from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a\r
-ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous\r
-career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of\r
-sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his\r
-well-earned income.\r
-\r
-Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an\r
-incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard\r
-task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a\r
-curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,\r
-upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore\r
-exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was\r
-certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,\r
-though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate\r
-quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a\r
-chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made\r
-you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something--a hammer\r
-or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other,\r
-never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own\r
-person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his\r
-long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard,\r
-his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his\r
-broad-brimmed hat.\r
-\r
-Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I\r
-followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks\r
-was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so,\r
-and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was\r
-placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was\r
-buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in\r
-reading from a ponderous volume.\r
-\r
-"Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been\r
-studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain\r
-knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?"\r
-\r
-As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,\r
-Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and\r
-seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.\r
-\r
-"He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."\r
-\r
-"Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.\r
-\r
-"I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.\r
-\r
-"What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.\r
-\r
-"He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at\r
-his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.\r
-\r
-I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg,\r
-his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said\r
-nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest,\r
-and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink before him,\r
-and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time\r
-to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the\r
-voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no\r
-wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of\r
-the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the\r
-degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's\r
-company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own\r
-lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea,\r
-could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that\r
-from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that\r
-is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever\r
-that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they\r
-call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a\r
-lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out\r
-on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which I would\r
-not have to pay one stiver.\r
-\r
-It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely\r
-fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those\r
-that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the\r
-world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim\r
-sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay\r
-would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I\r
-been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.\r
-\r
-But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about\r
-receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard\r
-something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;\r
-how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore\r
-the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the\r
-whole management of the ship's affairs to these two. And I did not know\r
-but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about\r
-shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod,\r
-quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his\r
-own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his\r
-jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was\r
-such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded\r
-us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, "LAY not up for\r
-yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth--"\r
-\r
-"Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay\r
-shall we give this young man?"\r
-\r
-"Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and\r
-seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust do\r
-corrupt, but LAY--'"\r
-\r
-LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and\r
-seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,\r
-shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do corrupt.\r
-It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though from the\r
-magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet\r
-the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and\r
-seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make\r
-a TEENTH of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and\r
-seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven\r
-hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.\r
-\r
-"Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to\r
-swindle this young man! he must have more than that."\r
-\r
-"Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without lifting\r
-his eyes; and then went on mumbling--"for where your treasure is, there\r
-will your heart be also."\r
-\r
-"I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do ye\r
-hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say."\r
-\r
-Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,\r
-"Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the\r
-duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship--widows and orphans,\r
-many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this\r
-young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those\r
-orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg."\r
-\r
-"Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the\r
-cabin. "Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these\r
-matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be\r
-heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape\r
-Horn."\r
-\r
-"Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing\r
-ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art still\r
-an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be\r
-but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the\r
-fiery pit, Captain Peleg."\r
-\r
-"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye\r
-insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that\r
-he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and\r
-start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a live goat with\r
-all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured\r
-son of a wooden gun--a straight wake with ye!"\r
-\r
-As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous\r
-oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.\r
-\r
-Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and\r
-responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up\r
-all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily\r
-commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who,\r
-I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened\r
-wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the\r
-transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of\r
-withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As\r
-for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more\r
-left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a\r
-little as if still nervously agitated. "Whew!" he whistled at last--"the\r
-squall's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at\r
-sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs\r
-the grindstone. That's he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man,\r
-Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael,\r
-for the three hundredth lay."\r
-\r
-"Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship\r
-too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"\r
-\r
-"To be sure," said Peleg. "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."\r
-\r
-"What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in\r
-which he had again been burying himself.\r
-\r
-"Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg. "Has he ever\r
-whaled it any?" turning to me.\r
-\r
-"Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."\r
-\r
-"Well, bring him along then."\r
-\r
-And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I\r
-had done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the identical\r
-ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.\r
-\r
-But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain\r
-with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in\r
-many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all\r
-her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving\r
-to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the\r
-shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have\r
-a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble\r
-himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till\r
-all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at\r
-him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back\r
-I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.\r
-\r
-"And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough; thou\r
-art shipped."\r
-\r
-"Yes, but I should like to see him."\r
-\r
-"But I don't think thou wilt be able to at present. I don't know exactly\r
-what's the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort\r
-of sick, and yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't sick; but no, he\r
-isn't well either. Any how, young man, he won't always see me, so I\r
-don't suppose he will thee. He's a queer man, Captain Ahab--so some\r
-think--but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no\r
-fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak\r
-much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be\r
-forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as\r
-'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed\r
-his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance!\r
-aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't\r
-Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab\r
-of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"\r
-\r
-"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did\r
-they not lick his blood?"\r
-\r
-"Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance in\r
-his eye that almost startled me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on board\r
-the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself.\r
-'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died\r
-when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at\r
-Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps,\r
-other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It's a\r
-lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago;\r
-I know what he is--a good man--not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but\r
-a swearing good man--something like me--only there's a good deal more of\r
-him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on\r
-the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it\r
-was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that\r
-about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost\r
-his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of\r
-moody--desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass\r
-off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's\r
-better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So\r
-good-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to\r
-have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife--not three voyages\r
-wedded--a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that\r
-old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless\r
-harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his\r
-humanities!"\r
-\r
-As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been\r
-incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain\r
-wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time,\r
-I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know what,\r
-unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange\r
-awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was\r
-not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did\r
-not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed\r
-like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However,\r
-my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the\r
-present dark Ahab slipped my mind.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.\r
-\r
-\r
-As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all\r
-day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I\r
-cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations,\r
-never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue\r
-even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other\r
-creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism\r
-quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of\r
-a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate\r
-possessions yet owned and rented in his name.\r
-\r
-I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these\r
-things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,\r
-pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these\r
-subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most\r
-absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--but what of that? Queequeg\r
-thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content;\r
-and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let\r
-him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans\r
-alike--for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and\r
-sadly need mending.\r
-\r
-Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and\r
-rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but\r
-no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. "Queequeg,"\r
-said I softly through the key-hole:--all silent. "I say, Queequeg! why\r
-don't you speak? It's I--Ishmael." But all remained still as before. I\r
-began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought\r
-he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but\r
-the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect\r
-was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the\r
-foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I\r
-was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of\r
-Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken\r
-from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's strange, thought I;\r
-but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or\r
-never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no\r
-possible mistake.\r
-\r
-"Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all still. Something must have happened.\r
-Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.\r
-Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person\r
-I met--the chamber-maid. "La! la!" she cried, "I thought something must\r
-be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was\r
-locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever\r
-since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your\r
-baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma'am!--Mistress! murder! Mrs.\r
-Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I\r
-following.\r
-\r
-Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a\r
-vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation\r
-of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.\r
-\r
-"Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch\r
-something to pry open the door--the axe!--the axe! he's had a stroke;\r
-depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs\r
-again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and\r
-vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.\r
-\r
-"What's the matter with you, young man?"\r
-\r
-"Get the axe! For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry\r
-it open!"\r
-\r
-"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet,\r
-so as to have one hand free; "look here; are you talking about prying\r
-open any of my doors?"--and with that she seized my arm. "What's the\r
-matter with you? What's the matter with you, shipmate?"\r
-\r
-In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the\r
-whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her\r
-nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed--"No! I haven't seen\r
-it since I put it there." Running to a little closet under the landing\r
-of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's\r
-harpoon was missing. "He's killed himself," she cried. "It's unfort'nate\r
-Stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane--God pity his poor\r
-mother!--it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister?\r
-Where's that girl?--there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell\r
-him to paint me a sign, with--"no suicides permitted here, and no\r
-smoking in the parlor;"--might as well kill both birds at once. Kill?\r
-The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What's that noise there? You, young\r
-man, avast there!"\r
-\r
-And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force\r
-open the door.\r
-\r
-"I don't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the\r
-locksmith, there's one about a mile from here. But avast!" putting her\r
-hand in her side-pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's\r
-see." And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg's\r
-supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.\r
-\r
-"Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry a\r
-little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing\r
-I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a\r
-sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.\r
-\r
-With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming\r
-against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good\r
-heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right\r
-in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on\r
-top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat\r
-like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.\r
-\r
-"Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter with\r
-you?"\r
-\r
-"He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.\r
-\r
-But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt\r
-like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost\r
-intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;\r
-especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of\r
-eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.\r
-\r
-"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so leave us, if you\r
-please, and I will see to this strange affair myself."\r
-\r
-Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon\r
-Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could\r
-do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--he would not move a peg,\r
-nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in\r
-the slightest way.\r
-\r
-I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do\r
-they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so;\r
-yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he'll\r
-get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't last for ever, thank God,\r
-and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don't believe it's very\r
-punctual then.\r
-\r
-I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long\r
-stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as\r
-they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,\r
-confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after\r
-listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, I went\r
-up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must\r
-certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he\r
-was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to\r
-grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be\r
-sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room,\r
-holding a piece of wood on his head.\r
-\r
-"For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have\r
-some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg." But not a\r
-word did he reply.\r
-\r
-Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;\r
-and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to\r
-turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as\r
-it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary\r
-round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into\r
-the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought\r
-of Queequeg--not four feet off--sitting there in that uneasy position,\r
-stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of\r
-it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his\r
-hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!\r
-\r
-But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of\r
-day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he\r
-had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of\r
-sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints,\r
-but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his\r
-forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.\r
-\r
-Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion,\r
-be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any\r
-other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when\r
-a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment\r
-to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to\r
-lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and\r
-argue the point with him.\r
-\r
-And just so I now did with Queequeg. "Queequeg," said I, "get into bed\r
-now, and lie and listen to me." I then went on, beginning with the rise\r
-and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various\r
-religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show\r
-Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in\r
-cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless\r
-for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and\r
-common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an\r
-extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained\r
-me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan\r
-of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the\r
-spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be\r
-half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish\r
-such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg,\r
-said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested\r
-apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary\r
-dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.\r
-\r
-I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with\r
-dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it\r
-in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great\r
-feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle\r
-wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o'clock in the\r
-afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.\r
-\r
-"No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew the\r
-inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had\r
-visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when\r
-a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the\r
-yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed\r
-in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with\r
-breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were\r
-sent round with the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as\r
-though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.\r
-\r
-After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much\r
-impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed\r
-dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his\r
-own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one\r
-third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he\r
-no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than\r
-I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and\r
-compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible\r
-young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.\r
-\r
-At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty\r
-breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not\r
-make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the\r
-Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 18. His Mark.\r
-\r
-\r
-As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg\r
-carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us\r
-from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,\r
-and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft,\r
-unless they previously produced their papers.\r
-\r
-"What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the\r
-bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.\r
-\r
-"I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."\r
-\r
-"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from\r
-behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. "He must show that he's converted.\r
-Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art thou at present in\r
-communion with any Christian church?"\r
-\r
-"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church." Here\r
-be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at\r
-last come to be converted into the churches.\r
-\r
-"First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in\r
-Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking\r
-out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana\r
-handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the\r
-wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at\r
-Queequeg.\r
-\r
-"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not very\r
-long, I rather guess, young man."\r
-\r
-"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it would\r
-have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."\r
-\r
-"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of\r
-Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it\r
-every Lord's day."\r
-\r
-"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said\r
-I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First\r
-Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."\r
-\r
-"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me--explain\r
-thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me."\r
-\r
-Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. "I mean, sir, the same\r
-ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,\r
-and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of\r
-us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole\r
-worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some\r
-queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in THAT we all join\r
-hands."\r
-\r
-"Splice, thou mean'st SPLICE hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer. "Young\r
-man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand;\r
-I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy--why Father Mapple\r
-himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned something. Come aboard, come\r
-aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there--what's\r
-that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what\r
-a harpoon he's got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it\r
-about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand\r
-in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"\r
-\r
-Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon\r
-the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats\r
-hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his\r
-harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:--\r
-\r
-"Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well,\r
-spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at it, he\r
-darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across the\r
-ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.\r
-\r
-"Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, "spos-ee him whale-e\r
-eye; why, dad whale dead."\r
-\r
-"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close\r
-vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.\r
-"Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have\r
-Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog,\r
-we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a\r
-harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."\r
-\r
-So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon\r
-enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.\r
-\r
-When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for\r
-signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't know how\r
-to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or\r
-make thy mark?"\r
-\r
-But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken\r
-part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the\r
-offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact\r
-counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so\r
-that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative,\r
-it stood something like this:--\r
-\r
-Quohog. his X mark.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,\r
-and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his\r
-broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting\r
-one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose," placed it in\r
-Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,\r
-looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, "Son of darkness, I must do my\r
-duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the\r
-souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I\r
-sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn\r
-the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind\r
-thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!"\r
-\r
-Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language,\r
-heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.\r
-\r
-"Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,"\r
-cried Peleg. "Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers--it takes the shark\r
-out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish.\r
-There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all\r
-Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to\r
-good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and\r
-sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove\r
-and went to Davy Jones."\r
-\r
-"Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou thyself,\r
-as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what\r
-it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this\r
-ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this\r
-same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan,\r
-that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not\r
-think of Death and the Judgment then?"\r
-\r
-"Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and\r
-thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,--"hear him, all of ye.\r
-Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink!\r
-Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an\r
-everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us,\r
-fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think\r
-about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of;\r
-and how to save all hands--how to rig jury-masts--how to get into the\r
-nearest port; that was what I was thinking of."\r
-\r
-Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck,\r
-where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some\r
-sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then\r
-he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which\r
-otherwise might have been wasted.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?"\r
-\r
-Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from\r
-the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when\r
-the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,\r
-levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but\r
-shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a\r
-black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all\r
-directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed\r
-bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.\r
-\r
-"Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated.\r
-\r
-"You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a little\r
-more time for an uninterrupted look at him.\r
-\r
-"Aye, the Pequod--that ship there," he said, drawing back his whole\r
-arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed\r
-bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.\r
-\r
-"Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."\r
-\r
-"Anything down there about your souls?"\r
-\r
-"About what?"\r
-\r
-"Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter though,\r
-I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to 'em; and they are\r
-all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon."\r
-\r
-"What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I.\r
-\r
-"HE'S got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort\r
-in other chaps," abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis\r
-upon the word HE.\r
-\r
-"Queequeg," said I, "let's go; this fellow has broken loose from\r
-somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know."\r
-\r
-"Stop!" cried the stranger. "Ye said true--ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder\r
-yet, have ye?"\r
-\r
-"Who's Old Thunder?" said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness\r
-of his manner.\r
-\r
-"Captain Ahab."\r
-\r
-"What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye\r
-hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?"\r
-\r
-"No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but is getting better, and will be\r
-all right again before long."\r
-\r
-"All right again before long!" laughed the stranger, with a solemnly\r
-derisive sort of laugh. "Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then\r
-this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."\r
-\r
-"What do you know about him?"\r
-\r
-"What did they TELL you about him? Say that!"\r
-\r
-"They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that he's\r
-a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew."\r
-\r
-"That's true, that's true--yes, both true enough. But you must jump when\r
-he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go--that's the word with\r
-Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape\r
-Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;\r
-nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in\r
-Santa?--heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash\r
-he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage,\r
-according to the prophecy. Didn't ye hear a word about them matters and\r
-something more, eh? No, I don't think ye did; how could ye? Who knows\r
-it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell\r
-about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare\r
-say. Oh yes, THAT every one knows a'most--I mean they know he's only one\r
-leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off."\r
-\r
-"My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I\r
-don't know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must be a\r
-little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of\r
-that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about\r
-the loss of his leg."\r
-\r
-"ALL about it, eh--sure you do?--all?"\r
-\r
-"Pretty sure."\r
-\r
-With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like\r
-stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a\r
-little, turned and said:--"Ye've shipped, have ye? Names down on the\r
-papers? Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will be;\r
-and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all. Anyhow, it's all fixed\r
-and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I\r
-suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity 'em! Morning to ye,\r
-shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm sorry I stopped\r
-ye."\r
-\r
-"Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell\r
-us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are\r
-mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say."\r
-\r
-"And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way;\r
-you are just the man for him--the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates,\r
-morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell 'em I've concluded not to make one\r
-of 'em."\r
-\r
-"Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way--you can't fool us. It\r
-is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great\r
-secret in him."\r
-\r
-"Morning to ye, shipmates, morning."\r
-\r
-"Morning it is," said I. "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this crazy\r
-man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?"\r
-\r
-"Elijah."\r
-\r
-Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each\r
-other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was\r
-nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone\r
-perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and\r
-looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,\r
-though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I\r
-said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my\r
-comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner\r
-that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging\r
-us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This\r
-circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing,\r
-shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments\r
-and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain\r
-Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver\r
-calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship\r
-the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage\r
-we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.\r
-\r
-I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really\r
-dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,\r
-and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without\r
-seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it\r
-seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 20. All Astir.\r
-\r
-\r
-A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.\r
-Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on\r
-board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything\r
-betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain\r
-Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp\r
-look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing\r
-at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging were\r
-working till long after night-fall.\r
-\r
-On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given at\r
-all the inns where the ship's company were stopping, that their chests\r
-must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon\r
-the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,\r
-resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they\r
-always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail\r
-for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and\r
-there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod\r
-was fully equipped.\r
-\r
-Every one knows what a multitude of things--beds, sauce-pans, knives\r
-and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are\r
-indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,\r
-which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean,\r
-far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And\r
-though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means\r
-to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of the\r
-whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the\r
-fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors\r
-usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling\r
-vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially\r
-to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of\r
-the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare\r
-lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain\r
-and duplicate ship.\r
-\r
-At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the\r
-Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water,\r
-fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time\r
-there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and\r
-ends of things, both large and small.\r
-\r
-Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain\r
-Bildad's sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable\r
-spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if SHE\r
-could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once\r
-fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar\r
-of pickles for the steward's pantry; another time with a bunch of quills\r
-for the chief mate's desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a\r
-roll of flannel for the small of some one's rheumatic back. Never did\r
-any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as\r
-everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this charitable\r
-Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand\r
-and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and\r
-consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother\r
-Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of\r
-well-saved dollars.\r
-\r
-But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on\r
-board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and\r
-a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor\r
-Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him\r
-a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down\r
-went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a\r
-while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men\r
-down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then\r
-concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.\r
-\r
-During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the\r
-craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when\r
-he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would\r
-answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard\r
-every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend\r
-to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been\r
-downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart\r
-that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage,\r
-without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute\r
-dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea.\r
-But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be\r
-already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his\r
-suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said\r
-nothing, and tried to think nothing.\r
-\r
-At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would\r
-certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we\r
-drew nigh the wharf.\r
-\r
-"There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right," said I to\r
-Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on!"\r
-\r
-"Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind\r
-us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself\r
-between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight,\r
-strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.\r
-\r
-"Going aboard?"\r
-\r
-"Hands off, will you," said I.\r
-\r
-"Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go 'way!"\r
-\r
-"Ain't going aboard, then?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you know,\r
-Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"\r
-\r
-"No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and\r
-wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable\r
-glances.\r
-\r
-"Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We\r
-are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be\r
-detained."\r
-\r
-"Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?"\r
-\r
-"He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."\r
-\r
-"Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few\r
-paces.\r
-\r
-"Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."\r
-\r
-But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my\r
-shoulder, said--"Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that\r
-ship a while ago?"\r
-\r
-Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, "Yes,\r
-I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure."\r
-\r
-"Very dim, very dim," said Elijah. "Morning to ye."\r
-\r
-Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and\r
-touching my shoulder again, said, "See if you can find 'em now, will ye?\r
-\r
-"Find who?"\r
-\r
-"Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off. "Oh! I\r
-was going to warn ye against--but never mind, never mind--it's all one,\r
-all in the family too;--sharp frost this morning, ain't it? Good-bye to\r
-ye. Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand\r
-Jury." And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for\r
-the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.\r
-\r
-At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound\r
-quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the\r
-hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward\r
-to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a\r
-light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a\r
-tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his\r
-face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber\r
-slept upon him.\r
-\r
-"Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said I,\r
-looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf,\r
-Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would\r
-have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter,\r
-were it not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the\r
-thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg\r
-that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish\r
-himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though\r
-feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly\r
-down there.\r
-\r
-"Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.\r
-\r
-"Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt him\r
-face."\r
-\r
-"Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance then;\r
-but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you\r
-are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look,\r
-he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake."\r
-\r
-Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and\r
-lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing\r
-over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him\r
-in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his\r
-land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king,\r
-chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some\r
-of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in\r
-that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay\r
-them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on\r
-an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible\r
-into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and\r
-desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps\r
-in some damp marshy place.\r
-\r
-While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk\r
-from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's head.\r
-\r
-"What's that for, Queequeg?"\r
-\r
-"Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!"\r
-\r
-He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,\r
-which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed\r
-his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The\r
-strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began\r
-to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed\r
-troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and\r
-rubbed his eyes.\r
-\r
-"Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"\r
-\r
-"Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain\r
-came aboard last night."\r
-\r
-"What Captain?--Ahab?"\r
-\r
-"Who but him indeed?"\r
-\r
-I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we\r
-heard a noise on deck.\r
-\r
-"Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate,\r
-that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to." And so\r
-saying he went on deck, and we followed.\r
-\r
-It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and\r
-threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively\r
-engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various\r
-last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly\r
-enshrined within his cabin.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.\r
-\r
-\r
-At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's riggers,\r
-and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the\r
-ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last\r
-gift--a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a\r
-spare Bible for the steward--after all this, the two Captains, Peleg\r
-and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg\r
-said:\r
-\r
-"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is\r
-all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more to be got from shore, eh?\r
-Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here--blast 'em!"\r
-\r
-"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad,\r
-"but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."\r
-\r
-How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain\r
-Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the\r
-quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as\r
-well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of\r
-him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then,\r
-the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the\r
-ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was\r
-not at all his proper business, but the pilot's; and as he was not\r
-yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore, Captain Ahab stayed\r
-below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant\r
-service many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable\r
-time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table,\r
-having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends, before they\r
-quit the ship for good with the pilot.\r
-\r
-But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain\r
-Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and\r
-commanding, and not Bildad.\r
-\r
-"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered at\r
-the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, drive'em aft."\r
-\r
-"Strike the tent there!"--was the next order. As I hinted before, this\r
-whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the\r
-Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to\r
-be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.\r
-\r
-"Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command, and\r
-the crew sprang for the handspikes.\r
-\r
-Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot\r
-is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it\r
-known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots\r
-of the port--he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in\r
-order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned\r
-in, for he never piloted any other craft--Bildad, I say, might now\r
-be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching\r
-anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody,\r
-to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of\r
-a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will.\r
-Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that no\r
-profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in\r
-getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice\r
-copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.\r
-\r
-Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped\r
-and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would\r
-sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused\r
-on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the\r
-perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a\r
-pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious\r
-Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and\r
-seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and\r
-turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the\r
-act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first\r
-kick.\r
-\r
-"Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared.\r
-"Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don't ye\r
-spring, I say, all of ye--spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red\r
-whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I\r
-say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!" And so saying, he moved\r
-along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while\r
-imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I,\r
-Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.\r
-\r
-At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It\r
-was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into\r
-night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose\r
-freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of\r
-teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white\r
-ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from\r
-the bows.\r
-\r
-Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the\r
-old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost\r
-all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady\r
-notes were heard,--\r
-\r
-"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green.\r
-So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between."\r
-\r
-\r
-Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They\r
-were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the\r
-boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was\r
-yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads\r
-and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring,\r
-untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.\r
-\r
-At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed\r
-no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging\r
-alongside.\r
-\r
-It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at\r
-this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet;\r
-very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a\r
-voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of\r
-his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate\r
-sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to\r
-encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to\r
-a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,--poor old Bildad\r
-lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the\r
-cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and\r
-looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only\r
-bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards\r
-the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere\r
-and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin,\r
-convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern,\r
-for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say,\r
-"Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can."\r
-\r
-As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all\r
-his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern\r
-came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck--now\r
-a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.\r
-\r
-But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look\r
-about him,--"Captain Bildad--come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the\r
-main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now!\r
-Careful, careful!--come, Bildad, boy--say your last. Luck to ye,\r
-Starbuck--luck to ye, Mr. Stubb--luck to ye, Mr. Flask--good-bye and\r
-good luck to ye all--and this day three years I'll have a hot supper\r
-smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!"\r
-\r
-"God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men," murmured old\r
-Bildad, almost incoherently. "I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so\r
-that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye--a pleasant sun is all\r
-he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go.\r
-Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don't stave the boats needlessly,\r
-ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.\r
-within the year. Don't forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind\r
-that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in\r
-the green locker! Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't\r
-miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good gifts. Have an\r
-eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought.\r
-If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye,\r
-good-bye! Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr.\r
-Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter--twenty cents the\r
-pound it was, and mind ye, if--"\r
-\r
-"Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,--away!" and with that,\r
-Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.\r
-\r
-Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a\r
-screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave\r
-three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone\r
-Atlantic.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.\r
-\r
-\r
-Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded\r
-mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.\r
-\r
-When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive\r
-bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her\r
-helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon\r
-the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous\r
-voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another\r
-tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest\r
-things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this\r
-six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say\r
-that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably\r
-drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port\r
-is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm\r
-blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale,\r
-the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all\r
-hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make\r
-her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail\r
-off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would\r
-blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again;\r
-for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her\r
-bitterest foe!\r
-\r
-Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally\r
-intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid\r
-effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while\r
-the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the\r
-treacherous, slavish shore?\r
-\r
-But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,\r
-indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite,\r
-than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!\r
-For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of\r
-the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart,\r
-O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy\r
-ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.\r
-\r
-\r
-As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;\r
-and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among\r
-landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I\r
-am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done\r
-to us hunters of whales.\r
-\r
-In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish\r
-the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not\r
-accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a\r
-stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,\r
-it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were\r
-he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation\r
-of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm\r
-Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed\r
-pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.\r
-\r
-Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us\r
-whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a\r
-butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we\r
-are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is\r
-true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been\r
-all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour. And\r
-as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall\r
-soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown,\r
-and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship\r
-at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even\r
-granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery\r
-decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those\r
-battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies'\r
-plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit\r
-of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran\r
-who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the\r
-apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air\r
-over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared\r
-with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!\r
-\r
-But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it\r
-unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding\r
-adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round\r
-the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!\r
-\r
-But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of\r
-scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.\r
-\r
-Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling\r
-fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit\r
-out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some\r
-score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did\r
-Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties\r
-upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of\r
-America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world;\r
-sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen\r
-thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,\r
-at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our\r
-harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if\r
-there be not something puissant in whaling?\r
-\r
-But this is not the half; look again.\r
-\r
-I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,\r
-point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty\r
-years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in\r
-one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way\r
-and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so\r
-continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may\r
-well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves\r
-pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to\r
-catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past\r
-the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and\r
-least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes\r
-which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If\r
-American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage\r
-harbors, let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of the\r
-whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted\r
-between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes\r
-of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that\r
-scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were\r
-as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their\r
-succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,\r
-and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin\r
-wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would\r
-not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old\r
-South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of\r
-our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates\r
-three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the\r
-ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!\r
-\r
-Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,\r
-scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and\r
-the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.\r
-It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the\r
-Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it\r
-might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the\r
-liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and\r
-the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.\r
-\r
-That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given\r
-to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born\r
-discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores\r
-as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The\r
-whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover,\r
-in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were\r
-several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the\r
-whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted\r
-isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage\r
-to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the\r
-merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their\r
-first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become\r
-hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due;\r
-for already she is on the threshold.\r
-\r
-But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no\r
-aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to\r
-shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet\r
-every time.\r
-\r
-The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you\r
-will say.\r
-\r
-THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote\r
-the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed\r
-the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than\r
-Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from\r
-Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our\r
-glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!\r
-\r
-True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no\r
-good blood in their veins.\r
-\r
-NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than royal\r
-blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;\r
-afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers\r
-of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and\r
-harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the\r
-barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.\r
-\r
-Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not\r
-respectable.\r
-\r
-WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory\r
-law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*\r
-\r
-Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any\r
-grand imposing way.\r
-\r
-THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the mighty\r
-triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital,\r
-the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were\r
-the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.\r
-\r
-\r
-Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real\r
-dignity in whaling.\r
-\r
-NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens\r
-attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your\r
-hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I\r
-know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty\r
-whales. I account that man more honourable than that great captain of\r
-antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.\r
-\r
-And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered\r
-prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small\r
-but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if\r
-hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather\r
-have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or\r
-more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here\r
-I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a\r
-whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 25. Postscript.\r
-\r
-\r
-In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but\r
-substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who\r
-should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might\r
-tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be\r
-blameworthy?\r
-\r
-It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern\r
-ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is\r
-gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there\r
-may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows?\r
-Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his\r
-coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they\r
-anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint\r
-machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential\r
-dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but\r
-meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably\r
-smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,\r
-unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him\r
-somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.\r
-\r
-But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is\r
-used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil,\r
-nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What\r
-then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted\r
-state, the sweetest of all oils?\r
-\r
-Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and\r
-queens with coronation stuff!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.\r
-\r
-\r
-The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a\r
-Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy\r
-coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard\r
-as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would\r
-not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of\r
-general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which\r
-his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those\r
-summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his\r
-thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and\r
-cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely\r
-the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the\r
-contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped\r
-up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified\r
-Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come,\r
-and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like\r
-a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well\r
-in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet\r
-lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted\r
-through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a\r
-telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for\r
-all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities\r
-in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to\r
-overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and\r
-endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his\r
-life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that\r
-sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to\r
-spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents\r
-and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the\r
-welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories\r
-of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the\r
-original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those\r
-latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush\r
-of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous\r
-vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my boat," said\r
-Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean,\r
-not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises\r
-from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly\r
-fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as careful\r
-a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery." But we shall ere long\r
-see what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a man like\r
-Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.\r
-\r
-Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a\r
-sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all\r
-mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this\r
-business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of\r
-the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted.\r
-Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor\r
-for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting\r
-him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill\r
-whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that\r
-hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was\r
-his own father's? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn\r
-limbs of his brother?\r
-\r
-With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain\r
-superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which\r
-could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But\r
-it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such\r
-terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature\r
-that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in\r
-him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its\r
-confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it\r
-was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which,\r
-while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or\r
-whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet\r
-cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,\r
-which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and\r
-mighty man.\r
-\r
-But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete\r
-abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to\r
-write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose\r
-the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint\r
-stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;\r
-men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble\r
-and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any\r
-ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their\r
-costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves,\r
-so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character\r
-seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of\r
-a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,\r
-completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this\r
-august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but\r
-that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it\r
-shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic\r
-dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The\r
-great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His\r
-omnipresence, our divine equality!\r
-\r
-If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall\r
-hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic\r
-graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them\r
-all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch\r
-that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow\r
-over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear\r
-me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal\r
-mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great\r
-democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the\r
-pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves\r
-of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who\r
-didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a\r
-war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all\r
-Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from\r
-the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.\r
-\r
-\r
-Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,\r
-according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;\r
-neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an\r
-indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the\r
-chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged\r
-for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his\r
-whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his\r
-crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable\r
-arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the\r
-snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of\r
-the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as\r
-a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes\r
-while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had,\r
-for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he\r
-thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of\r
-it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his\r
-mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor,\r
-he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir\r
-themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed\r
-the order, and not sooner.\r
-\r
-What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,\r
-unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a\r
-world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs;\r
-what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that\r
-thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black\r
-little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would\r
-almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his\r
-nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready\r
-loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he\r
-turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from\r
-the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in\r
-readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his\r
-legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.\r
-\r
-I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his\r
-peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether\r
-ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of\r
-the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the\r
-cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their\r
-mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco\r
-smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.\r
-\r
-The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A\r
-short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,\r
-who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally\r
-and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of\r
-honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost\r
-was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic\r
-bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of\r
-any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,\r
-the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least\r
-water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small\r
-application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This\r
-ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in\r
-the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a\r
-three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted\r
-that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought\r
-nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask\r
-was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They\r
-called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could\r
-be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic\r
-whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted\r
-into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those\r
-battering seas.\r
-\r
-Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous\r
-men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the\r
-Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which\r
-Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,\r
-these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with\r
-their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers;\r
-even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.\r
-\r
-And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic\r
-Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,\r
-who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when\r
-the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and\r
-moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy\r
-and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set\r
-down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of\r
-them belonged.\r
-\r
-First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected\r
-for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.\r
-\r
-Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly\r
-promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last\r
-remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring\r
-island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the\r
-fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's\r
-long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding\r
-eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their\r
-glittering expression--all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor\r
-of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest\r
-of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal\r
-forests of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild\r
-beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great\r
-whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the\r
-infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe\r
-snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of\r
-the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son\r
-of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second\r
-mate's squire.\r
-\r
-Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black\r
-negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended\r
-from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called\r
-them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to\r
-them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,\r
-lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been\r
-anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors\r
-most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold\r
-life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what\r
-manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,\r
-and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six\r
-feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at\r
-him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to\r
-beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus\r
-Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man\r
-beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that\r
-at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the\r
-mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though\r
-pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the\r
-American whale fishery as with the American army and military and\r
-merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction\r
-of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all\r
-these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest\r
-of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of\r
-these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound\r
-Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy\r
-peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers\r
-sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to\r
-receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards,\r
-they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but\r
-Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders\r
-in the Pequod, ISOLATOES too, I call such, not acknowledging the common\r
-continent of men, but each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his\r
-own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!\r
-An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all\r
-the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the\r
-world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever\r
-come back. Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went before. Poor\r
-Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him,\r
-beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for,\r
-to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and\r
-beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 28. Ahab.\r
-\r
-\r
-For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen\r
-of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,\r
-and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the\r
-only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin\r
-with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they\r
-but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was\r
-there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate\r
-into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.\r
-\r
-Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly\r
-gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague\r
-disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the\r
-sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened\r
-at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly\r
-recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived\r
-of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was\r
-almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish\r
-prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or\r
-uneasiness--to call it so--which I felt, yet whenever I came to look\r
-about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such\r
-emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,\r
-were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the\r
-tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me\r
-acquainted with, still I ascribed this--and rightly ascribed it--to the\r
-fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation\r
-in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect\r
-of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most\r
-forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce\r
-confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three\r
-better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way,\r
-could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a\r
-Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the\r
-ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,\r
-though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every\r
-degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that\r
-merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one\r
-of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the\r
-transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water\r
-with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I\r
-mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I\r
-levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.\r
-Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.\r
-\r
-There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the\r
-recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when\r
-the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,\r
-or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His\r
-whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an\r
-unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out\r
-from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his\r
-tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,\r
-you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that\r
-perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of\r
-a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and\r
-without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top\r
-to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly\r
-alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it\r
-was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.\r
-By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was\r
-made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old\r
-Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till\r
-he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and\r
-then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in\r
-an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially\r
-negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,\r
-who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this\r
-laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the\r
-immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with\r
-preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously\r
-contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should\r
-be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he\r
-muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would\r
-find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.\r
-\r
-So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid\r
-brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted\r
-that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric\r
-white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that\r
-this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of\r
-the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old\r
-Gay-Head Indian once; "but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another\r
-mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."\r
-\r
-I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of\r
-the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there\r
-was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank.\r
-His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a\r
-shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the\r
-ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude,\r
-a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,\r
-forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his\r
-officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures\r
-and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,\r
-consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that,\r
-but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his\r
-face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.\r
-\r
-Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.\r
-But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either\r
-standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or\r
-heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to\r
-grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as\r
-if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry\r
-bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it\r
-came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,\r
-for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck,\r
-he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was\r
-only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling\r
-preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so\r
-that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite\r
-Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that\r
-layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the\r
-loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the\r
-pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from\r
-his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May,\r
-trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest,\r
-most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green\r
-sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the\r
-end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More\r
-than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any\r
-other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.\r
-\r
-\r
-Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now\r
-went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost\r
-perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic.\r
-The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days,\r
-were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--flaked up, with\r
-rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in\r
-jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their\r
-absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man,\r
-'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.\r
-But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new\r
-spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the\r
-soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory\r
-shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.\r
-And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's\r
-texture.\r
-\r
-Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less\r
-man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders,\r
-the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the\r
-night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he\r
-seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits\r
-were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. "It feels\r
-like going down into one's tomb,"--he would mutter to himself--"for an\r
-old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my\r
-grave-dug berth."\r
-\r
-So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were\r
-set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;\r
-and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors\r
-flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt\r
-it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when\r
-this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the\r
-silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man\r
-would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.\r
-Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these,\r
-he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his\r
-wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such\r
-would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that\r
-their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once,\r
-the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy,\r
-lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast,\r
-Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a certain\r
-unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was\r
-pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might\r
-be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and\r
-hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the\r
-ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.\r
-\r
-"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me that\r
-fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave;\r
-where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at\r
-last.--Down, dog, and kennel!"\r
-\r
-Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly\r
-scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, "I\r
-am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like\r
-it, sir."\r
-\r
-"Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,\r
-as if to avoid some passionate temptation.\r
-\r
-"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called\r
-a dog, sir."\r
-\r
-"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone,\r
-or I'll clear the world of thee!"\r
-\r
-As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in\r
-his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.\r
-\r
-"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,"\r
-muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. "It's\r
-very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go\r
-back and strike him, or--what's that?--down here on my knees and pray\r
-for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the\r
-first time I ever DID pray. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too;\r
-aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever\r
-sailed with. How he flashed at me!--his eyes like powder-pans! is he\r
-mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be\r
-something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more\r
-than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't\r
-that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds\r
-the old man's hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets\r
-down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the\r
-pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on\r
-it? A hot old man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore call\r
-a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say--worse nor a\r
-toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me\r
-from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the\r
-after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's\r
-that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in\r
-the hold? Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old\r
-game--Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be\r
-born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think\r
-of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of\r
-queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But\r
-that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and\r
-sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes again. But how's that?\r
-didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and\r
-piled a lot of jackasses on top of THAT! He might as well have kicked\r
-me, and done with it. Maybe he DID kick me, and I didn't observe it,\r
-I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a\r
-bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with me? I don't stand right\r
-on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong\r
-side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though--How? how?\r
-how?--but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again;\r
-and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by\r
-daylight."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.\r
-\r
-\r
-When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the\r
-bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor\r
-of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe.\r
-Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the\r
-weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.\r
-\r
-In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were\r
-fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one\r
-look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking\r
-him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of\r
-the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.\r
-\r
-Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth\r
-in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How\r
-now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no\r
-longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be\r
-gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring--aye, and\r
-ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with\r
-such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the\r
-strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe?\r
-This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours\r
-among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll\r
-smoke no more--"\r
-\r
-He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the\r
-waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe\r
-made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.\r
-\r
-\r
-Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.\r
-\r
-"Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man's\r
-ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick\r
-back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then,\r
-presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking\r
-at it. But what was still more curious, Flask--you know how curious all\r
-dreams are--through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be\r
-thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that\r
-kick from Ahab. 'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the row? It's not a real leg,\r
-only a false leg.' And there's a mighty difference between a living\r
-thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the hand, Flask,\r
-fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living\r
-member--that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to\r
-myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against\r
-that cursed pyramid--so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all\r
-the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but\r
-a cane--a whalebone cane. Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful\r
-cudgelling--in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me--not a base\r
-kick. Besides,' thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end of it--the foot\r
-part--what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer\r
-kicked me, THERE'S a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled\r
-down to a point only.' But now comes the greatest joke of the\r
-dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of\r
-badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the\r
-shoulders, and slews me round. 'What are you 'bout?' says he. Slid! man,\r
-but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over\r
-the fright. 'What am I about?' says I at last. 'And what business is\r
-that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do YOU want a kick?'\r
-By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his\r
-stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a\r
-clout--what do you think, I saw?--why thunder alive, man, his stern\r
-was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second\r
-thoughts, 'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.' 'Wise Stubb,' said he,\r
-'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of\r
-his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying\r
-over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to\r
-kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it,\r
-when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!' 'Halloa,' says I, 'what's\r
-the matter now, old fellow?' 'Look ye here,' says he; 'let's argue\r
-the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says\r
-I--'right HERE it was.' 'Very good,' says he--'he used his ivory leg,\r
-didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb,\r
-what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it\r
-wasn't a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were\r
-kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an\r
-honour; I consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the\r
-greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made\r
-garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by\r
-old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him;\r
-account his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you can't\r
-help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see that pyramid?' With that, he\r
-all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into\r
-the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what\r
-do you think of that dream, Flask?"\r
-\r
-"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"\r
-\r
-"May be; may be. But it's made a wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see Ahab\r
-standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing\r
-you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him,\r
-whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"\r
-\r
-"Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!\r
-\r
-"If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!\r
-\r
-"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of\r
-something queer about that, eh? A white whale--did ye mark that, man?\r
-Look ye--there's something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask.\r
-Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 32. Cetology.\r
-\r
-\r
-Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost\r
-in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the\r
-Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the\r
-leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost\r
-indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more\r
-special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to\r
-follow.\r
-\r
-It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,\r
-that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The\r
-classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here\r
-essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.\r
-\r
-"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled\r
-Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.\r
-\r
-"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the\r
-inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and\r
-families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal"\r
-(sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.\r
-\r
-"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."\r
-"Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field\r
-strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to\r
-torture us naturalists."\r
-\r
-Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,\r
-those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real\r
-knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in\r
-some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are\r
-the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at\r
-large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:--The Authors\r
-of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;\r
-Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;\r
-Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier;\r
-John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the\r
-Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what\r
-ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited\r
-extracts will show.\r
-\r
-Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen\r
-ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional\r
-harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate\r
-subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing\r
-authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great\r
-sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy\r
-mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper\r
-upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest\r
-of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the\r
-profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the\r
-then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to\r
-this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats\r
-and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference\r
-to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days,\r
-will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to\r
-them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new\r
-proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,--the\r
-Greenland whale is deposed,--the great sperm whale now reigneth!\r
-\r
-There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living\r
-sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree\r
-succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in\r
-their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and\r
-reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found\r
-in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of\r
-excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As\r
-yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete\r
-in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an\r
-unwritten life.\r
-\r
-Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular\r
-comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the\r
-present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent\r
-laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I\r
-hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;\r
-because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very\r
-reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical\r
-description of the various species, or--in this place at least--to much\r
-of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a\r
-systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.\r
-\r
-But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office\r
-is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them;\r
-to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very\r
-pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should\r
-essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job\r
-might well appal me. Will he the (leviathan) make a covenant with thee?\r
-Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and\r
-sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible\r
-hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to\r
-settle.\r
-\r
-First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology\r
-is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it\r
-still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of\r
-Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate the whales from\r
-the fish." But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,\r
-sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict,\r
-were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the\r
-Leviathan.\r
-\r
-The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from\r
-the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm bilocular\r
-heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem\r
-intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege naturae jure\r
-meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley\r
-Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and\r
-they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether\r
-insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.\r
-\r
-Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned\r
-ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.\r
-This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal\r
-respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus has given\r
-you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;\r
-whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.\r
-\r
-Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as\r
-conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a\r
-whale is A SPOUTING FISH WITH A HORIZONTAL TAIL. There you have\r
-him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded\r
-meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a\r
-fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is\r
-still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have\r
-noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a\r
-vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail,\r
-though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal\r
-position.\r
-\r
-By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude\r
-from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified\r
-with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other\r
-hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.*\r
-Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be\r
-included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand\r
-divisions of the entire whale host.\r
-\r
-\r
-*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and\r
-Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included\r
-by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy,\r
-contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on\r
-wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials\r
-as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the\r
-Kingdom of Cetology.\r
-\r
-\r
-First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary\r
-BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all,\r
-both small and large.\r
-\r
-I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.\r
-\r
-As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the\r
-GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.\r
-\r
-FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:--I. The SPERM\r
-WHALE; II. the RIGHT WHALE; III. the FIN-BACK WHALE; IV. the HUMP-BACKED\r
-WHALE; V. the RAZOR-BACK WHALE; VI. the SULPHUR-BOTTOM WHALE.\r
-\r
-BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER I. (SPERM WHALE).--This whale, among the\r
-English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter\r
-whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the\r
-French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the\r
-Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe;\r
-the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in\r
-aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being\r
-the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is\r
-obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged\r
-upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically\r
-considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was\r
-almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil\r
-was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days\r
-spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a\r
-creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland\r
-or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that\r
-quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of\r
-the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was\r
-exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment\r
-and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays\r
-buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the\r
-true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still\r
-retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so\r
-strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at\r
-last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti\r
-was really derived.\r
-\r
-BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER II. (RIGHT WHALE).--In one respect this is the\r
-most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted\r
-by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and\r
-the oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior article in commerce.\r
-Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the\r
-following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale;\r
-the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of\r
-obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously\r
-baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in the second species\r
-of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the\r
-Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the\r
-French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale\r
-which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and\r
-English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen\r
-have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor'\r
-West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them\r
-Right Whale Cruising Grounds.\r
-\r
-Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the\r
-English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree\r
-in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single\r
-determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by\r
-endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that\r
-some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The\r
-right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference\r
-to elucidating the sperm whale.\r
-\r
-BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER III. (FIN-BACK).--Under this head I reckon\r
-a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and\r
-Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale\r
-whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the\r
-Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and\r
-in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less\r
-portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips\r
-present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds\r
-of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which\r
-he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some\r
-three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the\r
-back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if\r
-not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated\r
-fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When\r
-the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples,\r
-and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled\r
-surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it\r
-somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on\r
-it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not\r
-gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very\r
-shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the\r
-remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet\r
-rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with\r
-such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present\r
-pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable\r
-Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From\r
-having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with\r
-the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated WHALEBONE WHALES,\r
-that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there\r
-would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little\r
-known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched\r
-whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen's\r
-names for a few sorts.\r
-\r
-In connection with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of\r
-great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be\r
-convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is\r
-in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon\r
-either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those\r
-marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford\r
-the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached\r
-bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How\r
-then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose\r
-peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales,\r
-without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other\r
-and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked\r
-whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same\r
-humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen;\r
-but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the\r
-other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such\r
-irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached,\r
-such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general\r
-methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the\r
-whale-naturalists has split.\r
-\r
-But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the\r
-whale, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall be able to hit the\r
-right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the\r
-Greenland whale's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have\r
-seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the\r
-Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various\r
-leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as\r
-available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.\r
-What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in\r
-their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is\r
-the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can\r
-possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.\r
-\r
-BOOK I. (FOLIO) CHAPTER IV. (HUMP-BACK).--This whale is often seen on\r
-the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and\r
-towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you\r
-might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular\r
-name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm\r
-whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very\r
-valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of\r
-all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any\r
-other of them.\r
-\r
-BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER V. (RAZOR-BACK).--Of this whale little is known\r
-but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring\r
-nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he\r
-has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long\r
-sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody\r
-else.\r
-\r
-BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER VI. (SULPHUR-BOTTOM).--Another retiring\r
-gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the\r
-Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;\r
-at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,\r
-and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is\r
-never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are\r
-told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true\r
-of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.\r
-\r
-Thus ends BOOK I. (FOLIO), and now begins BOOK II. (OCTAVO).\r
-\r
-OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which\r
-present may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III.,\r
-the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER.\r
-\r
-\r
-*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.\r
-Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of\r
-the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them\r
-in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned form\r
-does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume\r
-does.\r
-\r
-\r
-BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).--Though this fish, whose\r
-loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb\r
-to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not\r
-popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive\r
-features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one.\r
-He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet\r
-in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in\r
-herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in\r
-quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is\r
-regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.\r
-\r
-BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER II. (BLACK FISH).--I give the popular\r
-fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.\r
-Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so,\r
-and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called,\r
-because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the\r
-Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the\r
-circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he\r
-carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale\r
-averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost\r
-all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin\r
-in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more\r
-profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena\r
-whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment--as\r
-some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by\r
-themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their\r
-blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of\r
-thirty gallons of oil.\r
-\r
-BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER III. (NARWHALE), that is, NOSTRIL\r
-WHALE.--Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose\r
-from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The\r
-creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five\r
-feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly\r
-speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw\r
-in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only\r
-found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner\r
-something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What\r
-precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to\r
-say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and\r
-bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for\r
-a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin\r
-said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the\r
-surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his\r
-horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these\r
-surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided\r
-horn may really be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would\r
-certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.\r
-The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and\r
-the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism\r
-to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain\r
-cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn\r
-was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison,\r
-and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also\r
-distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the\r
-horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it\r
-was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells\r
-me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when\r
-Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window\r
-of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir\r
-Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on bended knees\r
-he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale,\r
-which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An Irish\r
-author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise\r
-present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the\r
-unicorn nature.\r
-\r
-The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a\r
-milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.\r
-His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and\r
-he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.\r
-\r
-BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).--Of this whale little is\r
-precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed\r
-naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say\r
-that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage--a sort of\r
-Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and\r
-hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The\r
-Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception\r
-might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground\r
-of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea;\r
-Bonapartes and Sharks included.\r
-\r
-BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER V. (THRASHER).--This gentleman is famous for\r
-his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts\r
-the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by\r
-flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar\r
-process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both\r
-are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.\r
-\r
-Thus ends BOOK II. (OCTAVO), and begins BOOK III. (DUODECIMO).\r
-\r
-DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise.\r
-II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.\r
-\r
-To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may\r
-possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five\r
-feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word, which, in the popular\r
-sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set\r
-down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my\r
-definition of what a whale is--i.e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal\r
-tail.\r
-\r
-BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 1. (HUZZA PORPOISE).--This is the\r
-common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own\r
-bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something\r
-must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always\r
-swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing\r
-themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their\r
-appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine\r
-spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They\r
-are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a\r
-lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding\r
-these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly\r
-gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will\r
-yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid\r
-extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among\r
-jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise\r
-meat is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that\r
-a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very\r
-readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and\r
-you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.\r
-\r
-BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER II. (ALGERINE PORPOISE).--A pirate. Very\r
-savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger\r
-than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him,\r
-and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but\r
-never yet saw him captured.\r
-\r
-BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER III. (MEALY-MOUTHED PORPOISE).--The\r
-largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is\r
-known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated,\r
-is that of the fishers--Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that\r
-he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs\r
-in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly\r
-girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has\r
-no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail,\r
-and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils\r
-all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable,\r
-yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called\r
-the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two\r
-separate colours, black above and white below. The white comprises part\r
-of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he\r
-had just escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and\r
-mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.\r
-\r
-\r
-Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as\r
-the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the\r
-Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,\r
-half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by\r
-reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their\r
-fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to\r
-future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If\r
-any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then\r
-he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio,\r
-Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:--The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale;\r
-the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon\r
-Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the\r
-Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic,\r
-Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of\r
-uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit\r
-them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for\r
-mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.\r
-\r
-Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be\r
-here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have\r
-kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus\r
-unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the\r
-crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small\r
-erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true\r
-ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever\r
-completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay, but the\r
-draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 33. The Specksynder.\r
-\r
-\r
-Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place\r
-as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising\r
-from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown\r
-of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.\r
-\r
-The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced\r
-by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries\r
-and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in\r
-the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an\r
-officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter;\r
-usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In\r
-those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation\r
-and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting\r
-department and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer\r
-reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted\r
-title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but\r
-his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply\r
-as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain's more\r
-inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the\r
-harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since\r
-in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat,\r
-but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the\r
-command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the grand political\r
-maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from\r
-the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their\r
-professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as\r
-their social equal.\r
-\r
-Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is\r
-this--the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and\r
-merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and\r
-so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in\r
-the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the\r
-captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.\r
-\r
-Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest\r
-of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and\r
-the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high\r
-or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their\r
-common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and\r
-hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less\r
-rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind\r
-how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some\r
-primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious\r
-externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed,\r
-and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in\r
-which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated\r
-grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost\r
-as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the\r
-shabbiest of pilot-cloth.\r
-\r
-And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least\r
-given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage\r
-he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he\r
-required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon\r
-the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar\r
-circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he\r
-addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or IN\r
-TERROREM, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means\r
-unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.\r
-\r
-Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those\r
-forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally\r
-making use of them for other and more private ends than they were\r
-legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain,\r
-which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through\r
-those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible\r
-dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will,\r
-it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men,\r
-without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always,\r
-in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever\r
-keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and\r
-leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who\r
-become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice\r
-hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted\r
-superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks\r
-in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them,\r
-that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted\r
-potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown\r
-of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian\r
-herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the\r
-tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest\r
-sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in\r
-his art, as the one now alluded to.\r
-\r
-But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket\r
-grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and\r
-Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old\r
-whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings\r
-and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it\r
-must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and\r
-featured in the unbodied air!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.\r
-\r
-\r
-It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread\r
-face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and\r
-master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an\r
-observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the\r
-smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on\r
-the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the\r
-tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But\r
-presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to\r
-the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr.\r
-Starbuck," disappears into the cabin.\r
-\r
-When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the\r
-first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck\r
-rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after\r
-a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness,\r
-"Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges\r
-about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to\r
-see whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise\r
-takes up the old burden, and with a rapid "Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows\r
-after his predecessors.\r
-\r
-But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,\r
-seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all\r
-sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his\r
-shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right\r
-over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching\r
-his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so\r
-far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other\r
-processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into\r
-the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and,\r
-then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's presence,\r
-in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.\r
-\r
-It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense\r
-artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck\r
-some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and\r
-defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those\r
-very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that\r
-same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say\r
-deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of\r
-the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this\r
-difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of\r
-Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,\r
-therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he\r
-who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own\r
-private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power\r
-and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of\r
-state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who\r
-has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It\r
-is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now,\r
-if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a\r
-ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that\r
-peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.\r
-\r
-Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned\r
-sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still\r
-deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be\r
-served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,\r
-there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind,\r
-their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife, as he carved\r
-the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they\r
-would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even\r
-upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his\r
-knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby\r
-motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his meat as\r
-though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started\r
-if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it\r
-noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like\r
-the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly\r
-dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were\r
-somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab\r
-forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was\r
-to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And\r
-poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary\r
-family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have\r
-been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this\r
-must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had\r
-he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have\r
-been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,\r
-strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself,\r
-the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did\r
-Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners\r
-of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,\r
-sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such\r
-marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for\r
-him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!\r
-\r
-Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask\r
-is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was badly\r
-jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him;\r
-and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb\r
-even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small\r
-appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask\r
-must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day;\r
-for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.\r
-Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he\r
-had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never\r
-known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what\r
-he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.\r
-Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from\r
-my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of\r
-old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the\r
-mast. There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory:\r
-there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any mere\r
-sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official\r
-capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance,\r
-was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin\r
-sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.\r
-\r
-Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table\r
-in the Pequod's cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted\r
-order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was\r
-restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three\r
-harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees.\r
-They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the high and mighty\r
-cabin.\r
-\r
-In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless\r
-invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire care-free\r
-license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows\r
-the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the\r
-sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food\r
-with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords;\r
-they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.\r
-Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out\r
-the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was\r
-fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of\r
-the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with\r
-a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of\r
-accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once\r
-Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy's memory by\r
-snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty\r
-wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the\r
-circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous,\r
-shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny\r
-of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing\r
-spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous\r
-visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life was one\r
-continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished\r
-with all things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into\r
-his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the\r
-blinds of its door, till all was over.\r
-\r
-It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing\r
-his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the\r
-floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low\r
-carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin\r
-framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a\r
-ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,\r
-not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively\r
-small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,\r
-baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed\r
-strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his\r
-dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by\r
-beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a\r
-mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating--an ugly sound enough--so\r
-much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether\r
-any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear\r
-Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be\r
-picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging\r
-round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the\r
-whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their\r
-lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they\r
-would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at\r
-all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his\r
-Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some\r
-murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the\r
-white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on\r
-his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight,\r
-the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous,\r
-fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every\r
-step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.\r
-\r
-But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived\r
-there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were\r
-scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time,\r
-when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.\r
-\r
-In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale\r
-captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights\r
-the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that\r
-anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth,\r
-the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to\r
-have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it\r
-was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for\r
-a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,\r
-residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin\r
-was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally\r
-included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He\r
-lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled\r
-Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of\r
-the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter\r
-there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age,\r
-Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the\r
-sullen paws of its gloom!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the\r
-other seamen my first mast-head came round.\r
-\r
-In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost\r
-simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may\r
-have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper\r
-cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage\r
-she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial\r
-even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her\r
-skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether\r
-relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.\r
-\r
-Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very\r
-ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.\r
-I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old\r
-Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.\r
-For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by\r
-their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,\r
-or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great\r
-stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread\r
-gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders\r
-priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of\r
-mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among\r
-archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical\r
-purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like\r
-formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious\r
-long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount\r
-to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a\r
-modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In\r
-Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him\r
-a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of\r
-his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a\r
-tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless\r
-stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs\r
-or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to\r
-the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads\r
-we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who,\r
-though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely\r
-incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange\r
-sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome,\r
-stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air;\r
-careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis\r
-Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on\r
-his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars,\r
-his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals\r
-will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his\r
-mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that\r
-London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for\r
-where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor\r
-Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however\r
-madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks\r
-upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits\r
-penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals\r
-and what rocks must be shunned.\r
-\r
-It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head\r
-standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is\r
-not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole\r
-historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,\r
-that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly\r
-launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty\r
-spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means\r
-of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few\r
-years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand,\r
-who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh\r
-the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the\r
-one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads\r
-are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their\r
-regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two\r
-hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant\r
-the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There\r
-you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the\r
-deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and\r
-between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even\r
-as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old\r
-Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with\r
-nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the\r
-drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the\r
-most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests\r
-you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts\r
-of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear\r
-of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are\r
-never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner--for\r
-all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and\r
-your bill of fare is immutable.\r
-\r
-In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years'\r
-voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the\r
-mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be\r
-deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion\r
-of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute\r
-of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a\r
-comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,\r
-a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small\r
-and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your\r
-most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you\r
-stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called\r
-the t' gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner\r
-feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure,\r
-in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of\r
-a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more\r
-of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its\r
-fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out\r
-of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim\r
-crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of\r
-a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You\r
-cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you\r
-make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.\r
-\r
-Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a\r
-southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents\r
-or pulpits, called CROW'S-NESTS, in which the look-outs of a Greenland\r
-whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In\r
-the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among the\r
-Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the\r
-re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in\r
-this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with\r
-a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented\r
-CROW'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good\r
-craft. He called it the SLEET'S CROW'S-NEST, in honour of himself; he\r
-being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous\r
-false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our\r
-own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so\r
-likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we\r
-may beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a large\r
-tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with\r
-a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale.\r
-Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a\r
-little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the\r
-stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for\r
-umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which\r
-to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical\r
-conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this\r
-crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him\r
-(also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for\r
-the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns\r
-infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from\r
-the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon\r
-them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love\r
-for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed\r
-conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many\r
-of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his\r
-experiments in this crow's-nest, with a small compass he kept there for\r
-the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called\r
-the "local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to\r
-the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship's planks, and in the\r
-Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down\r
-blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very\r
-discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned "binnacle\r
-deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate errors,"\r
-he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed\r
-in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted\r
-occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely\r
-tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand.\r
-Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the\r
-honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he\r
-should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend\r
-and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded\r
-head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest\r
-within three or four perches of the pole.\r
-\r
-But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as\r
-Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is\r
-greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those\r
-seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used\r
-to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a\r
-chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;\r
-then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the\r
-top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at\r
-last mount to my ultimate destination.\r
-\r
-Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but\r
-sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how\r
-could I--being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering\r
-altitude--how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all\r
-whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out\r
-every time."\r
-\r
-And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of\r
-Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with\r
-lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who\r
-offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware\r
-of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be\r
-killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes\r
-round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor\r
-are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery\r
-furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded\r
-young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking\r
-sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches\r
-himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and\r
-in moody phrase ejaculates:--\r
-\r
-"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand\r
-blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."\r
-\r
-Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded\r
-young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient\r
-"interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost\r
-to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would\r
-rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young\r
-Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are\r
-short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have\r
-left their opera-glasses at home.\r
-\r
-"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been\r
-cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale\r
-yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here."\r
-Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in\r
-the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of\r
-vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending\r
-cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;\r
-takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,\r
-blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every\r
-strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every\r
-dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him\r
-the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by\r
-continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs\r
-away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like\r
-Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every\r
-shore the round globe over.\r
-\r
-There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a\r
-gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from\r
-the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye,\r
-move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity\r
-comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps,\r
-at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you\r
-drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise\r
-for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.\r
-\r
-\r
-(ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL)\r
-\r
-\r
-It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one\r
-morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the\r
-cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that\r
-hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the\r
-garden.\r
-\r
-Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old\r
-rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over\r
-dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did\r
-you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,\r
-you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints of his one\r
-unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.\r
-\r
-But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as\r
-his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his\r
-thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the\r
-main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought\r
-turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely\r
-possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every\r
-outer movement.\r
-\r
-"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him pecks\r
-the shell. 'Twill soon be out."\r
-\r
-The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the\r
-deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.\r
-\r
-It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the\r
-bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with\r
-one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.\r
-\r
-"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on\r
-ship-board except in some extraordinary case.\r
-\r
-"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!"\r
-\r
-When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious and not\r
-wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike\r
-the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly\r
-glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew,\r
-started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him\r
-resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched\r
-hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among\r
-the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have\r
-summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But\r
-this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:--\r
-\r
-"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"\r
-\r
-"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed\r
-voices.\r
-\r
-"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the\r
-hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically\r
-thrown them.\r
-\r
-"And what do ye next, men?"\r
-\r
-"Lower away, and after him!"\r
-\r
-"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"\r
-\r
-"A dead whale or a stove boat!"\r
-\r
-More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the\r
-countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began\r
-to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they\r
-themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.\r
-\r
-But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his\r
-pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost\r
-convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:--\r
-\r
-"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white\r
-whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?"--holding up a\r
-broad bright coin to the sun--"it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye\r
-see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul."\r
-\r
-While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was\r
-slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if\r
-to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile\r
-lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and\r
-inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his\r
-vitality in him.\r
-\r
-Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast\r
-with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the\r
-other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: "Whosoever of ye\r
-raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;\r
-whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes\r
-punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me\r
-that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"\r
-\r
-"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they\r
-hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.\r
-\r
-"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul:\r
-"a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water;\r
-if ye see but a bubble, sing out."\r
-\r
-All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even\r
-more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention\r
-of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was\r
-separately touched by some specific recollection.\r
-\r
-"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that\r
-some call Moby Dick."\r
-\r
-"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?"\r
-\r
-"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said the\r
-Gay-Header deliberately.\r
-\r
-"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, even for a\r
-parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"\r
-\r
-"And he have one, two, three--oh! good many iron in him hide, too,\r
-Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like\r
-him--him--" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and\r
-round as though uncorking a bottle--"like him--him--"\r
-\r
-"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted\r
-and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole\r
-shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the\r
-great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a\r
-split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have\r
-seen--Moby Dick--Moby Dick!"\r
-\r
-"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far\r
-been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed\r
-struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. "Captain\r
-Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby Dick that took off\r
-thy leg?"\r
-\r
-"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my\r
-hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that\r
-brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with\r
-a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose;\r
-"Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor\r
-pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with\r
-measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him\r
-round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and\r
-round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have\r
-shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and\r
-over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.\r
-What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look\r
-brave."\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the\r
-excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for\r
-Moby Dick!"\r
-\r
-"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless ye,\r
-men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what's this long\r
-face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not\r
-game for Moby Dick?"\r
-\r
-"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain\r
-Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I\r
-came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels\r
-will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it\r
-will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."\r
-\r
-"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest\r
-a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the\r
-accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by\r
-girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let\r
-me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium HERE!"\r
-\r
-"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it\r
-rings most vast, but hollow."\r
-\r
-"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee\r
-from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,\r
-Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."\r
-\r
-"Hark ye yet again--the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,\r
-are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the\r
-undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth\r
-the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man\r
-will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside\r
-except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that\r
-wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But\r
-'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength,\r
-with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is\r
-chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale\r
-principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,\r
-man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that,\r
-then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play\r
-herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man,\r
-is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off\r
-thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish\r
-stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to\r
-anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing\r
-unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I\r
-meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of\r
-spotted tawn--living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan\r
-leopards--the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek,\r
-and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the\r
-crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale?\r
-See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it.\r
-Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot,\r
-Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no\r
-wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt,\r
-then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back,\r
-when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings\r
-seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!--Aye, aye!\r
-thy silence, then, THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my\r
-dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine;\r
-cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."\r
-\r
-"God keep me!--keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.\r
-\r
-But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab\r
-did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the\r
-hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage;\r
-nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment\r
-their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast eyes lighted up with\r
-the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds\r
-blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah,\r
-ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But\r
-rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much\r
-predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things\r
-within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost\r
-necessities in our being, these still drive us on.\r
-\r
-"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.\r
-\r
-Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he\r
-ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near\r
-the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates\r
-stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company\r
-formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly\r
-eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the\r
-bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere\r
-he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to\r
-fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.\r
-\r
-"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the\r
-nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short\r
-draughts--long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it\r
-goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the\r
-serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this\r
-way it comes. Hand it me--here's a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so\r
-brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!\r
-\r
-"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and\r
-ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there\r
-with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some\r
-sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you\r
-will yet see that--Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand\r
-it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, were't not thou St.\r
-Vitus' imp--away, thou ague!\r
-\r
-"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let\r
-me touch the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the\r
-three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,\r
-suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from\r
-Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some\r
-nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the\r
-same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic\r
-life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic\r
-aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of\r
-Starbuck fell downright.\r
-\r
-"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but\r
-once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, THAT had\r
-perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye\r
-dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do\r
-appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there--yon three\r
-most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain\r
-the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using\r
-his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, THAT\r
-shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings\r
-and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!"\r
-\r
-Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the\r
-detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs\r
-up, before him.\r
-\r
-"Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye\r
-not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers,\r
-advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!" Forthwith,\r
-slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon\r
-sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.\r
-\r
-"Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow\r
-them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!\r
-Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon\r
-it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful\r
-whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt\r
-Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted;\r
-and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were\r
-simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and\r
-shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds\r
-among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all\r
-dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 37. Sunset.\r
-\r
-\r
-THE CABIN; BY THE STERN WINDOWS; AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT.\r
-\r
-\r
-I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I\r
-sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;\r
-but first I pass.\r
-\r
-Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine.\r
-The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun--slow dived from noon--goes\r
-down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then,\r
-the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is\r
-it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but\r
-darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron--that\r
-I know--not gold. 'Tis split, too--that I feel; the jagged edge galls\r
-me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull,\r
-mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!\r
-\r
-Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred\r
-me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me;\r
-all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with\r
-the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly\r
-and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night--good\r
-night! (WAVING HIS HAND, HE MOVES FROM THE WINDOW.)\r
-\r
-'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least;\r
-but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they\r
-revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all\r
-stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the\r
-match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and\r
-what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad--Starbuck does; but I'm\r
-demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm\r
-to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered;\r
-and--Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my\r
-dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That's\r
-more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye\r
-cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes!\r
-I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies--Take some one of your own\r
-size; don't pommel ME! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but\r
-YE have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have\r
-no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see\r
-if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve\r
-yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is\r
-laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded\r
-gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds,\r
-unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron\r
-way!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 38. Dusk.\r
-\r
-\r
-BY THE MAINMAST; STARBUCK LEANING AGAINST IT.\r
-\r
-\r
-My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman!\r
-Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But\r
-he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see\r
-his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I,\r
-the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no\r
-knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him, he cries;--aye, he would\r
-be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I\r
-plainly see my miserable office,--to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,\r
-to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would\r
-shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide.\r
-The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small\r
-gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may\r
-wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole\r
-clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to\r
-lift again.\r
-\r
-\r
-[A BURST OF REVELRY FROM THE FORECASTLE.]\r
-\r
-\r
-Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human\r
-mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale\r
-is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward!\r
-mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost\r
-through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering\r
-bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his\r
-sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further\r
-on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through!\r
-Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like\r
-this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,--as wild, untutored\r
-things are forced to feed--Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent\r
-horror in thee! but 'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with the\r
-soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim,\r
-phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch.\r
-\r
-Fore-Top.\r
-\r
-(STUBB SOLUS, AND MENDING A BRACE.)\r
-\r
-\r
-Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!--I've been thinking over it\r
-ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why so? Because a\r
-laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what\r
-will, one comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is, it's all\r
-predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor\r
-eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure\r
-the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the\r
-gift, might readily have prophesied it--for when I clapped my eye upon\r
-his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, WISE Stubb--that's my title--well,\r
-Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be\r
-coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish\r
-leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,\r
-skirra! What's my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes\r
-out?--Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as\r
-a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh--\r
-\r
-We'll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting\r
-As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the lips while\r
-meeting.\r
-\r
-\r
-A brave stave that--who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir--(ASIDE) he's\r
-my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.--Aye, aye, sir, just\r
-through with this job--coming.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.\r
-\r
-HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.\r
-\r
-(FORESAIL RISES AND DISCOVERS THE WATCH STANDING, LOUNGING, LEANING, AND\r
-LYING IN VARIOUS ATTITUDES, ALL SINGING IN CHORUS.)\r
-\r
- Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!\r
- Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!\r
- Our captain's commanded.--\r
-\r
-1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the\r
-digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! (SINGS, AND ALL FOLLOW)\r
-\r
- Our captain stood upon the deck,\r
- A spy-glass in his hand,\r
- A viewing of those gallant whales\r
- That blew at every strand.\r
- Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,\r
- And by your braces stand,\r
- And we'll have one of those fine whales,\r
- Hand, boys, over hand!\r
- So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!\r
- While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!\r
-\r
-MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!\r
-\r
-2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear,\r
-bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me\r
-call the watch. I've the sort of mouth for that--the hogshead mouth.\r
-So, so, (THRUSTS HIS HEAD DOWN THE SCUTTLE,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!\r
-Eight bells there below! Tumble up!\r
-\r
-DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I\r
-mark this in our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as\r
-filliping to others. We sing; they sleep--aye, lie down there, like\r
-ground-tier butts. At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail\r
-'em through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em\r
-it's the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment.\r
-That's the way--THAT'S it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating\r
-Amsterdam butter.\r
-\r
-FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to\r
-anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand\r
-by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!\r
-\r
-PIP. (SULKY AND SLEEPY) Don't know where it is.\r
-\r
-FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men,\r
-I say; merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance? Form, now,\r
-Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs!\r
-legs!\r
-\r
-ICELAND SAILOR. I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my\r
-taste. I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to throw cold water on the\r
-subject; but excuse me.\r
-\r
-MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would take\r
-his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I\r
-must have partners!\r
-\r
-SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!--then I'll hop with ye; yea,\r
-turn grasshopper!\r
-\r
-LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us.\r
-Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here\r
-comes the music; now for it!\r
-\r
-AZORE SAILOR. (ASCENDING, AND PITCHING THE TAMBOURINE UP THE SCUTTLE.)\r
-Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now,\r
-boys! (THE HALF OF THEM DANCE TO THE TAMBOURINE; SOME GO BELOW; SOME\r
-SLEEP OR LIE AMONG THE COILS OF RIGGING. OATHS A-PLENTY.)\r
-\r
-AZORE SAILOR. (DANCING) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it,\r
-stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!\r
-\r
-PIP. Jinglers, you say?--there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.\r
-\r
-CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of\r
-thyself.\r
-\r
-\r
-FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!\r
-Split jibs! tear yourselves!\r
-\r
-TASHTEGO. (QUIETLY SMOKING) That's a white man; he calls that fun:\r
-humph! I save my sweat.\r
-\r
-OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what\r
-they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will--that's\r
-the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round\r
-corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled\r
-crews! Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have\r
-it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're\r
-young; I was once.\r
-\r
-3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!--whew! this is worse than pulling after\r
-whales in a calm--give us a whiff, Tash.\r
-\r
-(THEY CEASE DANCING, AND GATHER IN CLUSTERS. MEANTIME THE SKY\r
-DARKENS--THE WIND RISES.)\r
-\r
-LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,\r
-high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!\r
-\r
-MALTESE SAILOR. (RECLINING AND SHAKING HIS CAP.) It's the waves--the\r
-snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now\r
-would all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them\r
-evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth--heaven may not match\r
-it!--as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the\r
-over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.\r
-\r
-SICILIAN SAILOR. (RECLINING.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad--fleet\r
-interlacings of the limbs--lithe swayings--coyings--flutterings! lip!\r
-heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,\r
-else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (NUDGING.)\r
-\r
-TAHITAN SAILOR. (RECLINING ON A MAT.) Hail, holy nakedness of our\r
-dancing girls!--the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I\r
-still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven\r
-in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn\r
-and wilted quite. Ah me!--not thou nor I can bear the change! How\r
-then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from\r
-Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the\r
-villages?--The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (LEAPS TO HIS\r
-FEET.)\r
-\r
-PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand\r
-by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell\r
-they'll go lunging presently.\r
-\r
-DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou\r
-holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more\r
-afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic\r
-with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!\r
-\r
-4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old\r
-Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a\r
-waterspout with a pistol--fire your ship right into it!\r
-\r
-ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove! We are the\r
-lads to hunt him up his whale!\r
-\r
-ALL. Aye! aye!\r
-\r
-OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort\r
-of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there's none\r
-but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort\r
-of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea.\r
-Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the\r
-sky--lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.\r
-\r
-DAGGOO. What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried\r
-out of it!\r
-\r
-SPANISH SAILOR. (ASIDE.) He wants to bully, ah!--the old grudge makes\r
-me touchy (ADVANCING.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark\r
-side of mankind--devilish dark at that. No offence.\r
-\r
-DAGGOO (GRIMLY). None.\r
-\r
-ST. JAGO'S SAILOR. That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or\r
-else in his one case our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat long in\r
-working.\r
-\r
-5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What's that I saw--lightning? Yes.\r
-\r
-SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.\r
-\r
-DAGGOO (SPRINGING). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!\r
-\r
-SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small\r
-spirit!\r
-\r
-ALL. A row! a row! a row!\r
-\r
-TASHTEGO (WITH A WHIFF). A row a'low, and a row aloft--Gods and\r
-men--both brawlers! Humph!\r
-\r
-BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge\r
-in with ye!\r
-\r
-ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's knife! A ring, a ring!\r
-\r
-OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring\r
-Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad'st thou\r
-the ring?\r
-\r
-MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in\r
-top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!\r
-\r
-ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (THEY SCATTER.)\r
-\r
-\r
-PIP (SHRINKING UNDER THE WINDLASS). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!\r
-Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower,\r
-Pip, here comes the royal yard! It's worse than being in the whirled\r
-woods, the last day of the year! Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now?\r
-But there they go, all cursing, and here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em;\r
-they're on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall!\r
-But those chaps there are worse yet--they are your white squalls, they.\r
-White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their\r
-chat just now, and the white whale--shirr! shirr!--but spoken of\r
-once! and only this evening--it makes me jingle all over like my\r
-tambourine--that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh,\r
-thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on\r
-this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no\r
-bowels to feel fear!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.\r
-\r
-\r
-I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;\r
-my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more\r
-did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A\r
-wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud\r
-seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous\r
-monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of\r
-violence and revenge.\r
-\r
-For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,\r
-secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly\r
-frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his\r
-existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;\r
-while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to\r
-him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers;\r
-the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery\r
-circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along\r
-solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or\r
-more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort;\r
-the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the\r
-times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct\r
-and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide\r
-whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby\r
-Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have\r
-encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,\r
-a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after\r
-doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to\r
-some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in\r
-question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the\r
-Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent\r
-instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster\r
-attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave\r
-battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were\r
-content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to\r
-the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual\r
-cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and\r
-the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.\r
-\r
-And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance\r
-caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of\r
-them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other\r
-whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these\r
-assaults--not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or\r
-devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those\r
-repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors\r
-upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many\r
-brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.\r
-\r
-Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more\r
-horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do\r
-fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising\r
-terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in\r
-maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound,\r
-wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the\r
-sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses\r
-every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness\r
-of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen\r
-as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary\r
-to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most\r
-directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing\r
-in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but,\r
-hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that\r
-though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you\r
-would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath\r
-that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too\r
-such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all\r
-tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.\r
-\r
-No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over\r
-the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did\r
-in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,\r
-and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which\r
-eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything\r
-that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally\r
-strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White\r
-Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his\r
-jaw.\r
-\r
-But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.\r
-Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm\r
-Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the\r
-leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are\r
-those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous\r
-enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would\r
-perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or\r
-timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are\r
-plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing\r
-under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm\r
-Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to\r
-the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their\r
-hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest\r
-and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the\r
-pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more\r
-feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.\r
-\r
-And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former\r
-legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book\r
-naturalists--Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to\r
-be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so\r
-incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor\r
-even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar\r
-impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself\r
-affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are\r
-"struck with the most lively terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of\r
-their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to\r
-cause instantaneous death." And however the general experiences in the\r
-fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness,\r
-even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in\r
-them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of\r
-the hunters.\r
-\r
-So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of\r
-the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days\r
-of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long\r
-practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring\r
-warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be\r
-hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition\r
-as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would\r
-be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are\r
-some remarkable documents that may be consulted.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things\r
-were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,\r
-chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the\r
-specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious\r
-accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if\r
-offered.\r
-\r
-One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked\r
-with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined,\r
-was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had\r
-actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same\r
-instant of time.\r
-\r
-Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether\r
-without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets\r
-of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to\r
-the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale\r
-when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his\r
-pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and\r
-contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the\r
-mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports\r
-himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.\r
-\r
-It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and\r
-as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby,\r
-that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose\r
-bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland\r
-seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has\r
-been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could\r
-not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been\r
-believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem\r
-to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real\r
-living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of\r
-the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said\r
-to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface);\r
-and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near\r
-Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land\r
-by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully\r
-equalled by the realities of the whalemen.\r
-\r
-Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing\r
-that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped\r
-alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should\r
-go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only\r
-ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that\r
-though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still\r
-swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick\r
-blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in\r
-unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would\r
-once more be seen.\r
-\r
-But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in\r
-the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike\r
-the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his\r
-uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,\r
-but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiar snow-white wrinkled\r
-forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent\r
-features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he\r
-revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.\r
-\r
-The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with\r
-the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive\r
-appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by\r
-his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue\r
-sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden\r
-gleamings.\r
-\r
-Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his\r
-deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,\r
-as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific\r
-accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than\r
-all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught\r
-else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every\r
-apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn\r
-round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to\r
-splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.\r
-\r
-Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar\r
-disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual\r
-in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's\r
-infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death\r
-that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an\r
-unintelligent agent.\r
-\r
-Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of\r
-his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed\r
-boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the\r
-white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating\r
-sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.\r
-\r
-His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the\r
-eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had\r
-dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking\r
-with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.\r
-That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his\r
-sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's\r
-leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no\r
-hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.\r
-Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal\r
-encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale,\r
-all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came\r
-to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his\r
-intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before\r
-him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which\r
-some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with\r
-half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been\r
-from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe\r
-one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced\r
-in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them;\r
-but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he\r
-pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and\r
-torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice\r
-in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle\r
-demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly\r
-personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon\r
-the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt\r
-by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a\r
-mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.\r
-\r
-It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at\r
-the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the\r
-monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate,\r
-corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he\r
-probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.\r
-Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long\r
-months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one\r
-hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape;\r
-then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another;\r
-and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward\r
-voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems\r
-all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage,\r
-he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital\r
-strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified\r
-by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even\r
-there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung\r
-to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable\r
-latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the\r
-tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed\r
-left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his\r
-dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that\r
-firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once\r
-again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even\r
-then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a\r
-cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but\r
-become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy\r
-subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson,\r
-when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the\r
-Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of\r
-Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not\r
-one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living\r
-agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may\r
-stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it,\r
-and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far\r
-from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a\r
-thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon\r
-any one reasonable object.\r
-\r
-This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.\r
-But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding\r
-far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where\r
-we here stand--however grand and wonderful, now quit it;--and take your\r
-way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;\r
-where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root\r
-of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique\r
-buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken\r
-throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he\r
-patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of\r
-ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud,\r
-sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled\r
-royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.\r
-\r
-Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means\r
-are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or\r
-change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long\r
-dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling\r
-was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.\r
-Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when\r
-with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him\r
-otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the\r
-terrible casualty which had overtaken him.\r
-\r
-The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly\r
-ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which\r
-always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the\r
-present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely,\r
-that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on\r
-account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent\r
-isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he\r
-was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full\r
-of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and\r
-scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable\r
-idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart\r
-his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.\r
-Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,\r
-yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on\r
-his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is,\r
-that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in\r
-him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only\r
-and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his\r
-old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him\r
-then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the\r
-ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the\r
-profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an\r
-audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.\r
-\r
-Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a\r
-Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made\r
-up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally enfeebled\r
-also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in\r
-Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in\r
-Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered,\r
-seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him\r
-to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded\r
-to the old man's ire--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,\r
-that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much\r
-their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be--what the White\r
-Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in\r
-some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon\r
-of the seas of life,--all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than\r
-Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one\r
-tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his\r
-pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow\r
-of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the\r
-abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to\r
-encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest\r
-ill.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.\r
-\r
-\r
-What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he\r
-was to me, as yet remains unsaid.\r
-\r
-Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which\r
-could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there\r
-was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,\r
-which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and\r
-yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of\r
-putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale\r
-that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself\r
-here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all\r
-these chapters might be naught.\r
-\r
-Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as\r
-if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas,\r
-and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a\r
-certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old\r
-kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants" above all\r
-their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings\r
-of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard;\r
-and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;\r
-and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,\r
-having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this\r
-pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white\r
-man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all\r
-this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among\r
-the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal\r
-sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many\r
-touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age;\r
-though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt\r
-of wampum was the deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes,\r
-whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,\r
-and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by\r
-milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most\r
-august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness\r
-and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being\r
-held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove\r
-himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the\r
-noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was\r
-by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful\r
-creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit\r
-with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from\r
-the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of\r
-one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the\r
-cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is\r
-specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though\r
-in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and\r
-the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white\r
-throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all\r
-these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable,\r
-and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea\r
-of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness\r
-which affrights in blood.\r
-\r
-This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when\r
-divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object\r
-terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.\r
-Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics;\r
-what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent\r
-horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an\r
-abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb\r
-gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his\r
-heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or\r
-shark.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him\r
-who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not\r
-the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable\r
-hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness,\r
-it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the\r
-irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the\r
-fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together\r
-two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us\r
-with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true;\r
-yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified\r
-terror.\r
-\r
-As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that\r
-creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the\r
-same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly\r
-hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish\r
-mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam" (eternal rest), whence\r
-REQUIEM denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now,\r
-in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and\r
-the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him REQUIN.\r
-\r
-\r
-Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual\r
-wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all\r
-imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,\r
-unflattering laureate, Nature.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged\r
-gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch\r
-below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the\r
-main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and\r
-with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth\r
-its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous\r
-flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered\r
-cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its\r
-inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took\r
-hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white\r
-thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled\r
-waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of\r
-towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only\r
-hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and\r
-turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!\r
-never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious\r
-thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I\r
-learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no\r
-possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those\r
-mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our\r
-deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be\r
-an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little\r
-brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.\r
-\r
-I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird\r
-chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,\r
-that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;\r
-and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I\r
-beheld the Antarctic fowl.\r
-\r
-But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will\r
-tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea.\r
-At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern\r
-tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting\r
-it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was\r
-taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding,\r
-the invoking, and adoring cherubim!\r
-\r
-\r
-Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of\r
-the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,\r
-large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a\r
-thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the\r
-elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those\r
-days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At\r
-their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which\r
-every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his\r
-mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more\r
-resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A\r
-most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western\r
-world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the\r
-glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,\r
-bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid\r
-his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly\r
-streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his\r
-circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White\r
-Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his\r
-cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the\r
-bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor\r
-can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble\r
-horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him\r
-with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though\r
-commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.\r
-\r
-But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that\r
-accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and\r
-Albatross.\r
-\r
-What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks\r
-the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It\r
-is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name\r
-he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men--has no substantive\r
-deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him\r
-more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?\r
-\r
-Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but\r
-not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces\r
-this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the\r
-gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White\r
-Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice\r
-omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of\r
-that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their\r
-faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the\r
-market-place!\r
-\r
-Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all\r
-mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It\r
-cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of\r
-the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering\r
-there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of\r
-consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And\r
-from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud\r
-in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to\r
-throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a\r
-milk-white fog--Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even\r
-the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his\r
-pallid horse.\r
-\r
-Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious\r
-thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest\r
-idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.\r
-\r
-But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to\r
-account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then,\r
-by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of\r
-whiteness--though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped\r
-of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,\r
-but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however\r
-modified;--can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us\r
-to the hidden cause we seek?\r
-\r
-Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,\r
-and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And\r
-though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about\r
-to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were\r
-entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to\r
-recall them now.\r
-\r
-Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely\r
-acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention\r
-of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless\r
-processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with\r
-new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the\r
-Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or\r
-a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?\r
-\r
-Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and\r
-kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White\r
-Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of\r
-an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its\r
-neighbors--the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer\r
-towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods,\r
-comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of\r
-that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft,\r
-dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and\r
-longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness\r
-over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal\r
-thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by\r
-the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly\r
-unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading\r
-the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the\r
-Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the\r
-green of the groves--why is this phantom more terrible than all the\r
-whooping imps of the Blocksburg?\r
-\r
-Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling\r
-earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the\r
-tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide\r
-field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop\r
-(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of\r
-house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;--it\r
-is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,\r
-saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and\r
-there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,\r
-this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful\r
-greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid\r
-pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.\r
-\r
-I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness\r
-is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of\r
-objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught\r
-of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost\r
-solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under\r
-any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean\r
-by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the\r
-following examples.\r
-\r
-First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by\r
-night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just\r
-enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely\r
-similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his\r
-ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness--as if from\r
-encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round\r
-him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom\r
-of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the\r
-lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go\r
-down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is\r
-the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of\r
-striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so\r
-stirred me?"\r
-\r
-Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the\r
-snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the\r
-mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast\r
-altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be\r
-to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the\r
-backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an\r
-unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig\r
-to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the\r
-scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick\r
-of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half\r
-shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,\r
-views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean\r
-ice monuments and splintered crosses.\r
-\r
-But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but\r
-a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,\r
-Ishmael.\r
-\r
-Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of\r
-Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the\r
-sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that\r
-he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness--why\r
-will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies\r
-of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild\r
-creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he\r
-smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of\r
-former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black\r
-bisons of distant Oregon?\r
-\r
-No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the\r
-knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from\r
-Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison\r
-herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which\r
-this instant they may be trampling into dust.\r
-\r
-Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings\r
-of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the\r
-windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking\r
-of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!\r
-\r
-Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic\r
-sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere\r
-those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible\r
-world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.\r
-\r
-But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and\r
-learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange\r
-and far more portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the\r
-most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the\r
-Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in\r
-things the most appalling to mankind.\r
-\r
-Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids\r
-and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the\r
-thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky\r
-way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as\r
-the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all\r
-colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,\r
-full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour\r
-of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory\r
-of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately\r
-or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,\r
-and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of\r
-young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent\r
-in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature\r
-absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but\r
-the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that\r
-the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great\r
-principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and\r
-if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even\r
-tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the\r
-palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in\r
-Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their\r
-eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental\r
-white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these\r
-things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery\r
-hunt?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 43. Hark!\r
-\r
-\r
-"HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"\r
-\r
-It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a\r
-cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the\r
-scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets\r
-to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed\r
-precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle\r
-their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence,\r
-only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the\r
-unceasingly advancing keel.\r
-\r
-It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose\r
-post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the\r
-words above.\r
-\r
-"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"\r
-\r
-"Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"\r
-\r
-"There it is again--under the hatches--don't you hear it--a cough--it\r
-sounded like a cough."\r
-\r
-"Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket."\r
-\r
-"There again--there it is!--it sounds like two or three sleepers turning\r
-over, now!"\r
-\r
-"Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits\r
-ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye--nothing else. Look to the\r
-bucket!"\r
-\r
-"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."\r
-\r
-"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old\r
-Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you're\r
-the chap."\r
-\r
-"Grin away; we'll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody\r
-down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect\r
-our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one\r
-morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind."\r
-\r
-"Tish! the bucket!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 44. The Chart.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that\r
-took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose\r
-with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom,\r
-and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread\r
-them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before\r
-it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and\r
-shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace\r
-additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he\r
-would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down\r
-the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various\r
-ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.\r
-\r
-While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his\r
-head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw\r
-shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it\r
-almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses\r
-on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and\r
-courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.\r
-\r
-But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his\r
-cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were\r
-brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and\r
-others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before\r
-him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to\r
-the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.\r
-\r
-Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,\r
-it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary\r
-creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it\r
-seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby\r
-calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also, calling\r
-to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular\r
-latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to\r
-certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground\r
-in search of his prey.\r
-\r
-So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the\r
-sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that,\r
-could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the\r
-logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated,\r
-then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in\r
-invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.\r
-On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory\r
-charts of the sperm whale.*\r
-\r
- *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne\r
- out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of\r
- the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By\r
- that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in\r
- course of completion; and portions of it are presented in\r
- the circular. "This chart divides the ocean into districts\r
- of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;\r
- perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve\r
- columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each\r
- of which districts are three lines; one to show the number\r
- of days that have been spent in each month in every\r
- district, and the two others to show the number of days in\r
- which whales, sperm or right, have been seen."\r
-\r
-Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the\r
-sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather, secret\r
-intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in VEINS, as they are called;\r
-continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating\r
-exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with\r
-one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the\r
-direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel,\r
-and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own\r
-unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary VEIN in which at these\r
-times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width\r
-(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but\r
-never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's mast-heads,\r
-when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at\r
-particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating\r
-whales may with great confidence be looked for.\r
-\r
-And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate\r
-feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing\r
-the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his\r
-art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly\r
-without prospect of a meeting.\r
-\r
-There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his\r
-delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,\r
-perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons\r
-for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the\r
-herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,\r
-say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found\r
-there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable\r
-instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the\r
-same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries\r
-and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby\r
-Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the\r
-Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese\r
-Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of\r
-those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly\r
-encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where\r
-he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual\r
-stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged\r
-abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have\r
-hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever\r
-way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular\r
-set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become\r
-probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next\r
-thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined\r
-in the one technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,\r
-for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,\r
-lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,\r
-loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There\r
-it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had\r
-taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was\r
-that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive\r
-to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering\r
-vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering\r
-hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one\r
-crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those\r
-hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his\r
-unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.\r
-\r
-Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the\r
-Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander\r
-to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running\r
-down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time\r
-to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.\r
-Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been\r
-correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of\r
-things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days\r
-and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently\r
-enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance\r
-the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his\r
-periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the\r
-Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other\r
-waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers,\r
-Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might\r
-blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's\r
-circumnavigating wake.\r
-\r
-But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not\r
-but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary\r
-whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual\r
-recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the\r
-thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar\r
-snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but\r
-be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter\r
-to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he\r
-would throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?\r
-His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear! And\r
-here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness\r
-and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the\r
-deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances\r
-of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved\r
-revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own\r
-bloody nails in his palms.\r
-\r
-Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid\r
-dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through\r
-the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them\r
-round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing\r
-of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes\r
-the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its\r
-base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and\r
-lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among\r
-them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be\r
-heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his\r
-state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these,\r
-perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent\r
-weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens\r
-of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming,\r
-unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had\r
-gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from\r
-it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or\r
-soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the\r
-characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer\r
-vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching\r
-contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no\r
-longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with\r
-the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up\r
-all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose,\r
-by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and\r
-devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay,\r
-could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was\r
-conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.\r
-Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when\r
-what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated\r
-thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be\r
-sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in\r
-itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature\r
-in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a\r
-vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature\r
-he creates.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.\r
-\r
-\r
-So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as\r
-indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars\r
-in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier\r
-part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the\r
-leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly\r
-enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to\r
-take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire\r
-subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main\r
-points of this affair.\r
-\r
-I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall\r
-be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of\r
-items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these\r
-citations, I take it--the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of\r
-itself.\r
-\r
-First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after\r
-receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an\r
-interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by\r
-the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same\r
-private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where\r
-three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I\r
-think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted\r
-them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to\r
-Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far\r
-into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years,\r
-often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas,\r
-with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of\r
-unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have\r
-been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,\r
-brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.\r
-This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the\r
-other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that\r
-is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack,\r
-saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards\r
-taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out\r
-that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time\r
-distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale's\r
-eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three years,\r
-but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three instances,\r
-then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many\r
-other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no\r
-good ground to impeach.\r
-\r
-Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant\r
-the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable\r
-historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at\r
-distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became\r
-thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily\r
-peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar\r
-in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his\r
-peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly\r
-valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences\r
-of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about\r
-such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that\r
-most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their\r
-tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,\r
-without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some\r
-poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they\r
-make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they\r
-pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump for\r
-their presumption.\r
-\r
-But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual\r
-celebrity--Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he\r
-famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death,\r
-but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of\r
-a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so,\r
-O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long\r
-did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft\r
-seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack!\r
-thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of\r
-the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty\r
-jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross\r
-against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked\r
-like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain\r
-prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean\r
-History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.\r
-\r
-But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various\r
-times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were\r
-finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed\r
-by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with\r
-that express object as much in view, as in setting out through the\r
-Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture\r
-that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the\r
-Indian King Philip.\r
-\r
-I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make\r
-mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in\r
-printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the\r
-whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For\r
-this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full\r
-as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of\r
-the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without\r
-some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the\r
-fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still\r
-worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.\r
-\r
-First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general\r
-perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid\r
-conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur.\r
-One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and\r
-deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,\r
-however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose\r
-that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the\r
-whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the\r
-bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan--do you suppose that that\r
-poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read\r
-to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular\r
-between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be\r
-called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you\r
-that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many\r
-others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a\r
-death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each\r
-lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and\r
-candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was\r
-spilled for it.\r
-\r
-Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is\r
-an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when\r
-narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness,\r
-they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I\r
-declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,\r
-when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.\r
-\r
-But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon\r
-testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm\r
-Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously\r
-malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and\r
-sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale HAS done it.\r
-\r
-First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket,\r
-was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her\r
-boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of\r
-the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping\r
-from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the\r
-ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in\r
-less than "ten minutes" she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving\r
-plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of\r
-the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last,\r
-Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another\r
-ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and\r
-breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith\r
-forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain\r
-Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was\r
-chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his\r
-plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all\r
-this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: "Every fact seemed\r
-to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which\r
-directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at\r
-a short interval between them, both of which, according to their\r
-direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made\r
-ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock;\r
-to effect which, the exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His\r
-aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He\r
-came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in\r
-which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge\r
-for their sufferings." Again: "At all events, the whole circumstances\r
-taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the\r
-time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the\r
-part of the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall),\r
-induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion."\r
-\r
-Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during\r
-a black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any\r
-hospitable shore. "The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the\r
-fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed\r
-upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful\r
-contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought; the\r
-dismal looking wreck, and THE HORRID ASPECT AND REVENGE OF THE WHALE,\r
-wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance."\r
-\r
-In another place--p. 45,--he speaks of "THE MYSTERIOUS AND MORTAL ATTACK\r
-OF THE ANIMAL."\r
-\r
-\r
-Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807\r
-totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic\r
-particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter,\r
-though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions\r
-to it.\r
-\r
-Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J---, then\r
-commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be\r
-dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in\r
-the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales,\r
-the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength\r
-ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily\r
-denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war\r
-as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there\r
-is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this\r
-impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a\r
-portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments' confidential business\r
-with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such\r
-a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest\r
-port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider\r
-the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul\r
-of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the\r
-sperm whale will stand no nonsense.\r
-\r
-I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance\r
-in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you\r
-must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's\r
-famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century.\r
-Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:\r
-\r
-"By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day\r
-we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very\r
-clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on\r
-our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not\r
-till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An\r
-uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself,\r
-lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any\r
-one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail,\r
-was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking\r
-against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this\r
-gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at\r
-least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,\r
-while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding\r
-that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster\r
-sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D'Wolf\r
-applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel\r
-had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily\r
-it had escaped entirely uninjured."\r
-\r
-Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in\r
-question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual\r
-adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of\r
-Dorchester near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I\r
-have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.\r
-He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large\r
-one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my\r
-uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.\r
-\r
-In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too,\r
-of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier's\r
-old chums--I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted\r
-from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a\r
-corroborative example, if such be needed.\r
-\r
-Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando," as he calls\r
-the modern Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither," he says, "about four\r
-o'clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues\r
-from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our\r
-men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were\r
-or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed,\r
-the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the\r
-ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little\r
-over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground..... The\r
-suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and\r
-several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who\r
-lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then\r
-goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate\r
-the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about\r
-that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But\r
-I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the\r
-morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically\r
-bumping the hull from beneath.\r
-\r
-I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to\r
-me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more\r
-than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing\r
-boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long\r
-withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship\r
-Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength,\r
-let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a\r
-running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and\r
-secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a\r
-horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if\r
-the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts,\r
-not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of\r
-destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent\r
-indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently\r
-open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several\r
-consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one more and a\r
-concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant one, by which\r
-you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in\r
-this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these\r
-marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for\r
-the millionth time we say amen with Solomon--Verily there is nothing new\r
-under the sun.\r
-\r
-In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate\r
-of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius\r
-general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work\r
-every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been\r
-considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in\r
-some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently\r
-to be mentioned.\r
-\r
-Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term\r
-of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured\r
-in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed\r
-vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty\r
-years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be\r
-gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species\r
-this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as\r
-well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly\r
-inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long\r
-time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the\r
-Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am\r
-certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the\r
-present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious\r
-resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in\r
-modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the\r
-sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that\r
-on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found\r
-the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes\r
-through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,\r
-pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.\r
-\r
-In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance\r
-called BRIT is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have\r
-every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--squid or\r
-cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures,\r
-but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its\r
-surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and\r
-reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all\r
-human reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove\r
-the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm\r
-whale.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 46. Surmises.\r
-\r
-\r
-Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his\r
-thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;\r
-though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one\r
-passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long\r
-habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to\r
-abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if\r
-this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more\r
-influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even\r
-considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the\r
-White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all\r
-sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he\r
-multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would\r
-prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed\r
-exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though\r
-not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet\r
-were by no means incapable of swaying him.\r
-\r
-To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in\r
-the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew,\r
-for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was\r
-over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual\r
-man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual\r
-mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a\r
-sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will\r
-were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still\r
-he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his\r
-captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from\r
-it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse\r
-ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck\r
-would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his\r
-captain's leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial\r
-influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle\r
-insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly\r
-manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing\r
-that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that\r
-strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that\r
-the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure\r
-background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation\r
-unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches,\r
-his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby\r
-Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the\r
-announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less\r
-capricious and unreliable--they live in the varying outer weather, and\r
-they inhale its fickleness--and when retained for any object remote and\r
-blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the\r
-end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and\r
-employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the\r
-final dash.\r
-\r
-Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion\r
-mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.\r
-The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought\r
-Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the\r
-hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even\r
-breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the\r
-love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food\r
-for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and\r
-chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two\r
-thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without\r
-committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious\r
-perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final\r
-and romantic object--that final and romantic object, too many would have\r
-turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all\r
-hopes of cash--aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months\r
-go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same\r
-quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon\r
-cashier Ahab.\r
-\r
-Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related\r
-to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps\r
-somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the\r
-Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing,\r
-he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of\r
-usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew\r
-if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further\r
-obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From\r
-even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible\r
-consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must\r
-of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection\r
-could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand,\r
-backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute\r
-atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected\r
-to.\r
-\r
-For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be\r
-verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good\r
-degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's\r
-voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force\r
-himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general\r
-pursuit of his profession.\r
-\r
-Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three\r
-mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit\r
-reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging\r
-about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters.\r
-Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,\r
-for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet\r
-somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie\r
-lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own\r
-invisible self.\r
-\r
-I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I\r
-kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between\r
-the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as\r
-Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword\r
-between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and\r
-unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did\r
-there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by\r
-the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were\r
-the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving\r
-and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp\r
-subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and\r
-that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending\r
-of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here,\r
-thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own\r
-destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,\r
-indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly,\r
-or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference\r
-in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final\r
-aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I,\r
-which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this\r
-easy, indifferent sword must be chance--aye, chance, free will, and\r
-necessity--nowise incompatible--all interweavingly working together.\r
-The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate\r
-course--its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;\r
-free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and\r
-chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of\r
-necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though\r
-thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the\r
-last featuring blow at events.\r
-\r
-\r
-Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so\r
-strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball\r
-of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds\r
-whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was\r
-that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward,\r
-his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he\r
-continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment\r
-perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's\r
-look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could\r
-that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from\r
-Tashtego the Indian's.\r
-\r
-As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and\r
-eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some\r
-prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries\r
-announcing their coming.\r
-\r
-"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"\r
-\r
-"Where-away?"\r
-\r
-"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"\r
-\r
-Instantly all was commotion.\r
-\r
-The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and\r
-reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from\r
-other tribes of his genus.\r
-\r
-"There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales\r
-disappeared.\r
-\r
-"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!"\r
-\r
-Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact\r
-minute to Ahab.\r
-\r
-The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling\r
-before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to\r
-leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of\r
-our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale\r
-when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while\r
-concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the\r
-opposite quarter--this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action;\r
-for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had\r
-been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of\r
-the men selected for shipkeepers--that is, those not appointed to the\r
-boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The\r
-sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed\r
-in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed,\r
-and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over\r
-high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand\r
-clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale.\r
-So look the long line of man-of-war's men about to throw themselves on\r
-board an enemy's ship.\r
-\r
-But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took\r
-every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was\r
-surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.\r
-\r
-\r
-The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side\r
-of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the\r
-tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always\r
-been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the\r
-captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The\r
-figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white\r
-tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese\r
-jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers\r
-of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a\r
-glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled\r
-round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of\r
-this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to\r
-some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;--a race notorious for\r
-a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners\r
-supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the\r
-water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be\r
-elsewhere.\r
-\r
-While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers,\r
-Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, "All ready\r
-there, Fedallah?"\r
-\r
-"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.\r
-\r
-"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck. "Lower away\r
-there, I say."\r
-\r
-Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men\r
-sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a\r
-wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous,\r
-off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors,\r
-goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats\r
-below.\r
-\r
-Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth\r
-keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and\r
-showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern,\r
-loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely,\r
-so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again\r
-riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other\r
-boats obeyed not the command.\r
-\r
-"Captain Ahab?--" said Starbuck.\r
-\r
-"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask,\r
-pull out more to leeward!"\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round\r
-his great steering oar. "Lay back!" addressing his crew.\r
-"There!--there!--there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay\r
-back!"\r
-\r
-"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."\r
-\r
-"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now.\r
-Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What\r
-say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."\r
-\r
-"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little\r
-ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom\r
-still showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you break your backbones,\r
-my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They\r
-are only five more hands come to help us--never mind from where--the\r
-more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone--devils\r
-are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke\r
-for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah\r
-for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men--all hearts\r
-alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry--don't be in a hurry. Why don't\r
-you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so,\r
-then:--softly, softly! That's it--that's it! long and strong. Give way\r
-there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are\r
-all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull,\r
-can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes\r
-don't ye pull?--pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out!\r
-Here!" whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; "every mother's son\r
-of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That's\r
-it--that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits.\r
-Start her--start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!"\r
-\r
-Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had\r
-rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in\r
-inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this\r
-specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions\r
-with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief\r
-peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a\r
-tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so\r
-calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such\r
-queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for\r
-the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and\r
-indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly\r
-gaped--open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning\r
-commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.\r
-Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity\r
-is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their\r
-guard in the matter of obeying them.\r
-\r
-In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely\r
-across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were\r
-pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.\r
-\r
-"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye\r
-please!"\r
-\r
-"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he\r
-spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set\r
-like a flint from Stubb's.\r
-\r
-"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!\r
-\r
-"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,\r
-boys!)" in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: "A sad\r
-business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,\r
-Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what\r
-will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.\r
-Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the\r
-play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand."\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the boats\r
-diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so. Aye, and that's\r
-what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long\r
-suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the bottom\r
-of it. Well, well, so be it! Can't be helped! All right! Give way, men!\r
-It ain't the White Whale to-day! Give way!"\r
-\r
-Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant\r
-as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably\r
-awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship's\r
-company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time previous got\r
-abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some\r
-small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge\r
-of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way\r
-of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from\r
-superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for\r
-all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the\r
-matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious\r
-shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket\r
-dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.\r
-\r
-Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the\r
-furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a\r
-circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger\r
-yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five\r
-trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which\r
-periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst\r
-boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen\r
-pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and\r
-displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the\r
-gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery\r
-horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a\r
-fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any\r
-tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in\r
-a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at once\r
-the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed,\r
-while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and\r
-crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the\r
-rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily\r
-down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the\r
-movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.\r
-\r
-"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Thou, Queequeg,\r
-stand up!"\r
-\r
-Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage\r
-stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the\r
-spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme\r
-stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with\r
-the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing\r
-himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently\r
-eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.\r
-\r
-Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still; its\r
-commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout\r
-sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the\r
-level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the\r
-whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a man's hand,\r
-and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the\r
-mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little\r
-King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was\r
-full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point\r
-of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.\r
-\r
-"I can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to\r
-that."\r
-\r
-Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his\r
-way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty\r
-shoulders for a pedestal.\r
-\r
-"Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?"\r
-\r
-"That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you\r
-fifty feet taller."\r
-\r
-Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the\r
-boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to\r
-Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed head\r
-and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous\r
-fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was\r
-Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a\r
-breastband to lean against and steady himself by.\r
-\r
-At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous\r
-habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect\r
-posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously\r
-perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily\r
-perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the\r
-sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;\r
-for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,\r
-barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously\r
-rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed\r
-a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly\r
-vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then\r
-stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to\r
-the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the\r
-living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her\r
-seasons for that.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing\r
-solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,\r
-not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,\r
-Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the\r
-languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,\r
-where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed\r
-home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match\r
-across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,\r
-whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly\r
-dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a\r
-quick phrensy of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!--there they are!"\r
-\r
-To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been\r
-visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white\r
-water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and\r
-suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white\r
-rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it\r
-were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this\r
-atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of\r
-water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other\r
-indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their forerunning\r
-couriers and detached flying outriders.\r
-\r
-All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled\r
-water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on,\r
-as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the\r
-hills.\r
-\r
-"Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but\r
-intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance\r
-from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two\r
-visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much\r
-to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the\r
-silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his\r
-peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.\r
-\r
-How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and say something,\r
-my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their\r
-black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my\r
-Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys.\r
-Lay me on--lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad!\r
-See! see that white water!" And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his\r
-head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far\r
-off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's\r
-stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.\r
-\r
-"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his\r
-unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a\r
-short distance, followed after--"He's got fits, that Flask has. Fits?\r
-yes, give him fits--that's the very word--pitch fits into 'em. Merrily,\r
-merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;--merry's the word.\r
-Pull, babes--pull, sucklings--pull, all. But what the devil are you\r
-hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and\r
-keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your\r
-knives in two--that's all. Take it easy--why don't ye take it easy, I\r
-say, and burst all your livers and lungs!"\r
-\r
-But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of\r
-his--these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed\r
-light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious\r
-seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of\r
-red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of\r
-Flask to "that whale," as he called the fictitious monster which\r
-he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its\r
-tail--these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that\r
-they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look\r
-over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen\r
-must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage\r
-pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but\r
-arms, in these critical moments.\r
-\r
-It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the\r
-omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along\r
-the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green;\r
-the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on\r
-the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening\r
-to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and\r
-hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite\r
-hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these,\r
-with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps\r
-of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing\r
-down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her\r
-screaming brood;--all this was thrilling.\r
-\r
-Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever\r
-heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the\r
-first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel\r
-stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first\r
-time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the\r
-hunted sperm whale.\r
-\r
-The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more\r
-visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows\r
-flung upon the sea. The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted\r
-everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.\r
-The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales\r
-running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still\r
-rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through\r
-the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to\r
-escape being torn from the row-locks.\r
-\r
-Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship\r
-nor boat to be seen.\r
-\r
-"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet\r
-of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.\r
-There's white water again!--close to! Spring!"\r
-\r
-Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted\r
-that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when\r
-with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: "Stand up!" and\r
-Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.\r
-\r
-Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril\r
-so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance\r
-of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent\r
-instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of\r
-fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still\r
-booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like\r
-the erected crests of enraged serpents.\r
-\r
-"That's his hump. THERE, THERE, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.\r
-\r
-A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of\r
-Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from\r
-astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail\r
-collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by;\r
-something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole\r
-crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the\r
-white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all\r
-blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.\r
-\r
-Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round\r
-it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,\r
-tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the\r
-water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes\r
-the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom\r
-of the ocean.\r
-\r
-The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;\r
-the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white\r
-fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal\r
-in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar\r
-to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those\r
-boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew\r
-darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.\r
-The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were\r
-useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.\r
-So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures\r
-Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching\r
-it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this\r
-forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in\r
-the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign\r
-and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the\r
-midst of despair.\r
-\r
-Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,\r
-we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over\r
-the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.\r
-Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.\r
-We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by\r
-the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly\r
-parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as\r
-the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a\r
-distance of not much more than its length.\r
-\r
-Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it\r
-tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at the base of a\r
-cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no\r
-more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed\r
-against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on\r
-board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from\r
-their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us\r
-up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of\r
-our perishing,--an oar or a lance pole.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.\r
-\r
-\r
-There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair\r
-we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical\r
-joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than\r
-suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However,\r
-nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts\r
-down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard\r
-things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of\r
-potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small\r
-difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of\r
-life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly,\r
-good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen\r
-and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking\r
-of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes\r
-in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might\r
-have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the\r
-general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this\r
-free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now\r
-regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its\r
-object.\r
-\r
-"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,\r
-and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;\r
-"Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?"\r
-Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to\r
-understand that such things did often happen.\r
-\r
-"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his\r
-oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I\r
-think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief\r
-mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose\r
-then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy\r
-squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"\r
-\r
-"Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape\r
-Horn."\r
-\r
-"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close\r
-by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell\r
-me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an\r
-oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's\r
-jaws?"\r
-\r
-"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask. "Yes, that's the law.\r
-I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale face\r
-foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind\r
-that!"\r
-\r
-Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement\r
-of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings\r
-in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters\r
-of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the\r
-superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my\r
-life into the hands of him who steered the boat--oftentimes a fellow who\r
-at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling\r
-the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the\r
-particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed\r
-to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,\r
-and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his\r
-great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this\r
-uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a\r
-devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all\r
-things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a\r
-rough draft of my will. "Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my\r
-lawyer, executor, and legatee."\r
-\r
-It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their\r
-last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more\r
-fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life\r
-that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon\r
-the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away\r
-from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good\r
-as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary\r
-clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived\r
-myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked\r
-round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean\r
-conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.\r
-\r
-Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,\r
-here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the\r
-devil fetch the hindmost.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but one leg\r
-you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole\r
-with my timber toe. Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"\r
-\r
-"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask.\r
-"If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.\r
-That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other\r
-left, you know."\r
-\r
-"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."\r
-\r
-\r
-Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering\r
-the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is\r
-right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils\r
-of the chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their\r
-eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the\r
-thickest of the fight.\r
-\r
-But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering\r
-that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;\r
-considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and\r
-extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then\r
-comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any\r
-maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the\r
-joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.\r
-\r
-Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of\r
-his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of\r
-the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving\r
-his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually\r
-apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt--above all for\r
-Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's\r
-crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads\r
-of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's\r
-crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.\r
-Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all\r
-that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little\r
-foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out\r
-of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the\r
-whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then\r
-found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his\r
-own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even\r
-solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is\r
-running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was\r
-observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra\r
-coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better\r
-withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety\r
-he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is\r
-sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the\r
-knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed\r
-how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the\r
-semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel\r
-gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these\r
-things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But\r
-almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness\r
-in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick;\r
-for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster\r
-in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest\r
-suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that boat.\r
-\r
-Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned\r
-away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such\r
-unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown\r
-nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of\r
-whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway\r
-creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,\r
-oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that\r
-Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin\r
-to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable\r
-excitement in the forecastle.\r
-\r
-But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate\r
-phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were\r
-somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained\r
-a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like\r
-this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be\r
-linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort\r
-of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even\r
-authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain\r
-an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as\r
-civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their\r
-dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide\r
-among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles\r
-to the east of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable\r
-countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the\r
-ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of\r
-the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,\r
-unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of\r
-the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though,\r
-according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of\r
-men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane\r
-amours.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.\r
-\r
-\r
-Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly\r
-swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the\r
-Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the\r
-Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality,\r
-southerly from St. Helena.\r
-\r
-It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and\r
-moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver;\r
-and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery\r
-silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen\r
-far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it\r
-looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from\r
-the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight\r
-nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a\r
-look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet,\r
-though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred\r
-would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions,\r
-then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual\r
-hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after\r
-spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights\r
-without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his\r
-unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every\r
-reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had\r
-lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!"\r
-Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet\r
-still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most\r
-unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously\r
-exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a\r
-lowering.\r
-\r
-Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the\r
-t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The\r
-best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head\r
-manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange,\r
-upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows\r
-of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air\r
-beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic\r
-influences were struggling in her--one to mount direct to heaven, the\r
-other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched\r
-Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two\r
-different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes\r
-along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap.\r
-On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly\r
-sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot,\r
-yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he\r
-saw it once, but not a second time.\r
-\r
-This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days\r
-after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it\r
-was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it\r
-disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after\r
-night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously\r
-jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;\r
-disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow\r
-seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and\r
-further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.\r
-\r
-Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance\r
-with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested\r
-the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that\r
-whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however\r
-far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast\r
-by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there\r
-reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition,\r
-as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the\r
-monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest\r
-and most savage seas.\r
-\r
-These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous\r
-potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath\r
-all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as\r
-for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely\r
-mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed\r
-vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.\r
-\r
-But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling\r
-around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are\r
-there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and\r
-gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips,\r
-the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity\r
-of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.\r
-\r
-Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither\r
-before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And\r
-every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and\r
-spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,\r
-as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing\r
-appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their\r
-homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the\r
-black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane\r
-soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had\r
-bred.\r
-\r
-Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called\r
-of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had\r
-attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea,\r
-where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed\r
-condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat\r
-that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying;\r
-still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us\r
-on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.\r
-\r
-During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the\r
-time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,\r
-manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed\r
-his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and\r
-aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await\r
-the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.\r
-So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one\r
-hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand\r
-gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow\r
-would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew\r
-driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that\r
-burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in\r
-the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man\r
-had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which\r
-he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the\r
-silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore\r
-on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves.\r
-By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the\r
-ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still\r
-wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed\r
-demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never\r
-could Starbuck forget the old man's aspect, when one night going down\r
-into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with\r
-closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain\r
-and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before\r
-emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the\r
-table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents\r
-which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly\r
-clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so\r
-that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale\r
-that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the\r
-compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the\r
-course of the ship.\r
-\r
-\r
-Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this\r
-gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.\r
-\r
-\r
-South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising\r
-ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)\r
-by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the\r
-fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro\r
-in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.\r
-\r
-As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the\r
-skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral\r
-appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her\r
-spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over\r
-with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to\r
-see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed\r
-clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had\r
-survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to\r
-the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when\r
-the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air\r
-came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the\r
-mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking\r
-fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own\r
-look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.\r
-\r
-"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"\r
-\r
-But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the\r
-act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand\r
-into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make\r
-himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the\r
-distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod\r
-were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first\r
-mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a\r
-moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat\r
-to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking\r
-advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and\r
-knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and\r
-shortly bound home, he loudly hailed--"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod,\r
-bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the\r
-Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them\r
-to address them to--"\r
-\r
-At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then,\r
-in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish,\r
-that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted\r
-away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and\r
-aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual\r
-voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to\r
-any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.\r
-\r
-"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.\r
-There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep\r
-helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But\r
-turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the\r
-wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,--"Up\r
-helm! Keep her off round the world!"\r
-\r
-Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;\r
-but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through\r
-numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that\r
-we left behind secure, were all the time before us.\r
-\r
-Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for\r
-ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange\r
-than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise\r
-in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in\r
-tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims\r
-before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they\r
-either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 53. The Gam.\r
-\r
-\r
-The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had\r
-spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had\r
-this not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded\r
-her--judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions--if so it\r
-had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative\r
-answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he\r
-cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain,\r
-except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly\r
-sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not\r
-something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when\r
-meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common\r
-cruising-ground.\r
-\r
-If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the\r
-equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering\r
-each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of\r
-them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment\r
-to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while\r
-and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the\r
-illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling\r
-vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth--off lone\r
-Fanning's Island, or the far away King's Mills; how much more natural,\r
-I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only\r
-interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and\r
-sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of\r
-course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains,\r
-officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each other;\r
-and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.\r
-\r
-For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on\r
-board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a\r
-date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn\r
-files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would\r
-receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to\r
-which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And\r
-in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing\r
-each other's track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they\r
-are equally long absent from home. For one of them may have received a\r
-transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and\r
-some of those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets.\r
-Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable\r
-chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors,\r
-but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common\r
-pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.\r
-\r
-Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;\r
-that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case\r
-with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of\r
-English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they\r
-do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your\r
-Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that\r
-sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers\r
-sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American\r
-whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript\r
-provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority\r
-in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,\r
-seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than\r
-all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless\r
-little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does\r
-not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few\r
-foibles himself.\r
-\r
-So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the\r
-whalers have most reason to be sociable--and they are so. Whereas, some\r
-merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will\r
-oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,\r
-mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in\r
-Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon\r
-each other's rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea,\r
-they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such\r
-a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down\r
-hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching\r
-Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run\r
-away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they\r
-chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is--"How many\r
-skulls?"--the same way that whalers hail--"How many barrels?" And that\r
-question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are\r
-infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each\r
-other's villanous likenesses.\r
-\r
-But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,\r
-free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another\r
-whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a "GAM," a thing so\r
-utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name\r
-even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and\r
-repeat gamesome stuff about "spouters" and "blubber-boilers," and such\r
-like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also\r
-all Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such\r
-a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be\r
-hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to\r
-know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about\r
-it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the\r
-gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has\r
-no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude,\r
-that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that\r
-assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.\r
-\r
-But what is a GAM? You might wear out your index-finger running up and\r
-down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson\r
-never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it.\r
-Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in\r
-constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly,\r
-it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With\r
-that view, let me learnedly define it.\r
-\r
-GAM. NOUN--A SOCIAL MEETING OF TWO (OR MORE) WHALESHIPS, GENERALLY ON A\r
-CRUISING-GROUND; WHEN, AFTER EXCHANGING HAILS, THEY EXCHANGE VISITS BY\r
-BOATS' CREWS; THE TWO CAPTAINS REMAINING, FOR THE TIME, ON BOARD OF ONE\r
-SHIP, AND THE TWO CHIEF MATES ON THE OTHER.\r
-\r
-There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten\r
-here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so\r
-has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when\r
-the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern\r
-sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often\r
-steers himself with a pretty little milliner's tiller decorated with\r
-gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of\r
-that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling\r
-captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen\r
-in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of\r
-any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew\r
-must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of\r
-the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and\r
-the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit\r
-all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being\r
-conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from\r
-the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the\r
-importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is\r
-this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting\r
-steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the\r
-after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus\r
-completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself\r
-sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent\r
-pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of\r
-foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a\r
-spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again,\r
-it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would\r
-never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying\r
-himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with\r
-his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he\r
-generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being\r
-generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.\r
-Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too,\r
-where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or\r
-two, in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's\r
-hair, and hold on there like grim death.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story.\r
-\r
-\r
-(AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN)\r
-\r
-\r
-The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is\r
-much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet\r
-more travellers than in any other part.\r
-\r
-It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another\r
-homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned\r
-almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave\r
-us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White\r
-Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's\r
-story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain\r
-wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God\r
-which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance,\r
-with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the\r
-secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears\r
-of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was\r
-unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private\r
-property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it\r
-seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,\r
-but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed\r
-so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well\r
-withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing\r
-have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of\r
-it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in\r
-this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never\r
-transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its proper\r
-place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the\r
-ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting\r
-record.\r
-\r
-\r
-*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,\r
-still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.\r
-\r
-\r
-For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated\r
-it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,\r
-smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those\r
-fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer\r
-terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally\r
-put, and which are duly answered at the time.\r
-\r
-"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about\r
-rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,\r
-was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward\r
-from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the\r
-northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to\r
-daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than\r
-common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the\r
-captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck\r
-awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit\r
-them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though,\r
-indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down\r
-as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her\r
-cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals;\r
-but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet\r
-undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking\r
-some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest\r
-harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.\r
-\r
-"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance\r
-favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,\r
-because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at\r
-them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free;\r
-never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the\r
-whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the\r
-Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port\r
-without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the\r
-brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly\r
-provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.\r
-\r
-"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'\r
-said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.\r
-\r
-"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your\r
-courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,\r
-gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as\r
-large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far\r
-Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet\r
-been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly\r
-connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate,\r
-those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and\r
-Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many\r
-of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of\r
-races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,\r
-even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great\r
-contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime\r
-approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted\r
-all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries,\r
-and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the\r
-fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their\r
-beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out\r
-their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient\r
-and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines\r
-of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric\r
-beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes\r
-to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and\r
-Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the\r
-full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,\r
-and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as\r
-direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,\r
-for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many\r
-a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though\r
-an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured;\r
-as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his\r
-infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse\r
-at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our\r
-austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as\r
-vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh\r
-from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this\r
-Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a\r
-mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible\r
-firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition\r
-which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had\r
-long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved\r
-so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt--but,\r
-gentlemen, you shall hear.\r
-\r
-"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing\r
-her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again\r
-increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps\r
-every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our\r
-Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole\r
-way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of\r
-the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability\r
-would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on\r
-account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the\r
-solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it\r
-altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in\r
-full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie\r
-along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat\r
-is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of\r
-the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her\r
-captain begins to feel a little anxious.\r
-\r
-"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found\r
-gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by\r
-several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded\r
-the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way\r
-expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a\r
-coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness\r
-touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or\r
-on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when\r
-he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the\r
-seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in\r
-her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on\r
-this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood\r
-with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water;\r
-clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps\r
-ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee\r
-scupper-holes.\r
-\r
-"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional\r
-world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command\r
-over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his\r
-superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he\r
-conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a\r
-chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and\r
-make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,\r
-gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a\r
-head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings\r
-of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and\r
-a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he\r
-been born son to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly\r
-as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love\r
-Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.\r
-\r
-"Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the\r
-rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with\r
-his gay banterings.\r
-\r
-"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one\r
-of ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling! I tell\r
-ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it! he had best cut away\r
-his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish\r
-only began the job; he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters,\r
-saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of 'em\r
-are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making\r
-improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump\r
-overboard and scatter 'em. They're playing the devil with his estate, I\r
-can tell him. But he's a simple old soul,--Rad, and a beauty too. Boys,\r
-they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I\r
-wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.'\r
-\r
-"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney,\r
-pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. 'Thunder away at it!'\r
-\r
-"'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. 'Lively, boys,\r
-lively, now!' And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines;\r
-the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping\r
-of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's\r
-utmost energies.\r
-\r
-"Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went\r
-forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face\r
-fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his\r
-brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney\r
-to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know\r
-not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate\r
-commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a\r
-shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig\r
-to run at large.\r
-\r
-"Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household\r
-work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every\r
-evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually\r
-foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of\r
-sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom\r
-would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all\r
-vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys,\r
-if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho\r
-that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being\r
-the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly\r
-assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have\r
-been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical\r
-duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these\r
-particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood\r
-between the two men.\r
-\r
-"But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as\r
-plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat\r
-in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will\r
-understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully\r
-comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for\r
-a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and\r
-perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match\r
-silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all\r
-this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper\r
-passionateness in any already ireful being--a repugnance most felt, when\r
-felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved--this nameless\r
-phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.\r
-\r
-"Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily\r
-exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping\r
-the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without\r
-at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary\r
-sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or\r
-nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most\r
-domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his\r
-command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an\r
-uplifted cooper's club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.\r
-\r
-"Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for\r
-all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt\r
-could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still\r
-smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained\r
-doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the\r
-hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do\r
-his bidding.\r
-\r
-"Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily\r
-followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his\r
-intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not\r
-the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his\r
-twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to\r
-no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass;\r
-when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had\r
-now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on\r
-the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:\r
-\r
-"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to\r
-yourself.' But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where\r
-the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of\r
-his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.\r
-Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye\r
-with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching\r
-his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his\r
-persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would\r
-murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter\r
-by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant\r
-the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch\r
-spouting blood like a whale.\r
-\r
-"Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays\r
-leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their\r
-mastheads. They were both Canallers.\r
-\r
-"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whale-ships in our\r
-harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are\r
-they?'\r
-\r
-"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You\r
-must have heard of it.'\r
-\r
-"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary\r
-land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'\r
-\r
-"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and\r
-ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such\r
-information may throw side-light upon my story.'\r
-\r
-"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire\r
-breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and\r
-most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and\r
-affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room\r
-and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman\r
-arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or\r
-broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk\r
-counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires\r
-stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly\r
-corrupt and often lawless life. There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen;\r
-there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;\r
-under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches.\r
-For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan\r
-freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so\r
-sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.\r
-\r
-"'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the\r
-crowded plazza, with humorous concern.\r
-\r
-"'Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in\r
-Lima,' laughed Don Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'\r
-\r
-"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the name of all\r
-us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by\r
-no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima\r
-for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look\r
-surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast--"Corrupt as\r
-Lima." It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than\r
-billiard-tables, and for ever open--and "Corrupt as Lima." So, too,\r
-Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.\r
-Mark!--St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you\r
-pour out again.'\r
-\r
-"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make\r
-a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like\r
-Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile,\r
-he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra,\r
-ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this\r
-effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly\r
-sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.\r
-A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he\r
-floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.\r
-Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of\r
-these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful;\r
-but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of\r
-violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger\r
-in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the\r
-wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that\r
-our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates,\r
-and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much\r
-distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the\r
-curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and\r
-young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal\r
-furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian\r
-corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric\r
-seas.\r
-\r
-"'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha\r
-upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel! The world's one Lima. I\r
-had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold\r
-and holy as the hills.--But the story.'\r
-\r
-"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly\r
-had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the\r
-four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the\r
-ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and\r
-sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the\r
-sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued;\r
-while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and down\r
-with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious\r
-scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran\r
-close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into\r
-the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his\r
-resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them\r
-all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily\r
-slewing about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass,\r
-these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.\r
-\r
-"'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing them\r
-with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. 'Come\r
-out of that, ye cut-throats!'\r
-\r
-"Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,\r
-defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to\r
-understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would be the signal\r
-for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart\r
-lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but\r
-still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.\r
-\r
-"'Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their\r
-ringleader.\r
-\r
-"'Turn to! turn to!--I make no promise;--to your duty! Do you want to\r
-sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!' and he\r
-once more raised a pistol.\r
-\r
-"'Sink the ship?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us\r
-turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say\r
-ye, men?' turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.\r
-\r
-"The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye\r
-on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:--'It's not our\r
-fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was\r
-boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to\r
-prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his\r
-cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,\r
-men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to\r
-yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; forget it all; we are ready\r
-to turn to; treat us decently, and we're your men; but we won't be\r
-flogged.'\r
-\r
-"'Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!'\r
-\r
-"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,\r
-'there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped\r
-for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our\r
-discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row; it's\r
-not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we\r
-won't be flogged.'\r
-\r
-"'Turn to!' roared the Captain.\r
-\r
-"Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:--'I tell you what\r
-it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby\r
-rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till\r
-you say the word about not flogging us, we don't do a hand's turn.'\r
-\r
-"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there till\r
-ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'\r
-\r
-"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against\r
-it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down\r
-into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.\r
-\r
-"As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain\r
-and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide\r
-of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called\r
-for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the\r
-companionway.\r
-\r
-"Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something\r
-down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them--ten in\r
-number--leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained\r
-neutral.\r
-\r
-"All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and\r
-aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which\r
-last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking\r
-through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace;\r
-the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps,\r
-whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night\r
-dismally resounded through the ship.\r
-\r
-"At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned\r
-the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then\r
-lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed\r
-after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the\r
-Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days\r
-this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and\r
-then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and\r
-suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready\r
-to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united\r
-perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to\r
-surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his\r
-demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to\r
-stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth\r
-morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the\r
-desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left.\r
-\r
-"'Better turn to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.\r
-\r
-"'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.\r
-\r
-"'Oh certainly,' said the Captain, and the key clicked.\r
-\r
-"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven\r
-of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last\r
-hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as\r
-the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two\r
-Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of\r
-their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their\r
-keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle\r
-at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any\r
-devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he\r
-would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the\r
-last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no\r
-opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for\r
-that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender.\r
-And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck,\r
-when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as\r
-fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as\r
-his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter;\r
-and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one\r
-man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants\r
-must come out.\r
-\r
-"Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own\r
-separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece\r
-of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be\r
-the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and\r
-thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit.\r
-But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to\r
-the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed\r
-their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader\r
-fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three\r
-sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords;\r
-and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.\r
-\r
-"Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and\r
-all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a\r
-few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still\r
-struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious\r
-allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man who had been\r
-fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along\r
-the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the\r
-mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till\r
-morning. 'Damn ye,' cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,\r
-'the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!'\r
-\r
-"At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled\r
-from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that\r
-he had a good mind to flog them all round--thought, upon the whole,\r
-he would do so--he ought to--justice demanded it; but for the present,\r
-considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a\r
-reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.\r
-\r
-"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the three men in the\r
-rigging--'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;' and,\r
-seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the\r
-two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads\r
-sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.\r
-\r
-"'My wrist is sprained with ye!' he cried, at last; 'but there is still\r
-rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give up. Take\r
-that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.'\r
-\r
-"For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his\r
-cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort\r
-of hiss, 'What I say is this--and mind it well--if you flog me, I murder\r
-you!'\r
-\r
-"'Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me'--and the Captain drew off with\r
-the rope to strike.\r
-\r
-"'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman.\r
-\r
-"'But I must,'--and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.\r
-\r
-"Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;\r
-who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly\r
-two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, 'I\r
-won't do it--let him go--cut him down: d'ye hear?'\r
-\r
-"But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man,\r
-with a bandaged head, arrested them--Radney the chief mate. Ever since\r
-the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the tumult\r
-on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole\r
-scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak;\r
-but mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the\r
-captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his\r
-pinioned foe.\r
-\r
-"'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman.\r
-\r
-"'So I am, but take that.' The mate was in the very act of striking,\r
-when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing\r
-no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's threat, whatever that\r
-might have been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned\r
-to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as\r
-before.\r
-\r
-"Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor\r
-was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up,\r
-besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew.\r
-Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own\r
-instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no\r
-sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed,\r
-that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain\r
-the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the\r
-ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the\r
-speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing--namely,\r
-not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For,\r
-spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still\r
-maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to\r
-lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the\r
-cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his\r
-berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the\r
-vital jaw of the whale.\r
-\r
-"But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of\r
-passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all\r
-was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who\r
-had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief\r
-mate's watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than\r
-half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted,\r
-against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head\r
-of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances,\r
-Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.\r
-\r
-"During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the\r
-bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of\r
-the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side.\r
-In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a\r
-considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between\r
-this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next\r
-trick at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the\r
-third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure,\r
-he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his\r
-watches below.\r
-\r
-"'What are you making there?' said a shipmate.\r
-\r
-"'What do you think? what does it look like?'\r
-\r
-"'Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me.'\r
-\r
-"'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length\r
-before him; 'but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough\r
-twine,--have you any?'\r
-\r
-"But there was none in the forecastle.\r
-\r
-"'Then I must get some from old Rad;' and he rose to go aft.\r
-\r
-"'You don't mean to go a begging to HIM!' said a sailor.\r
-\r
-"'Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help himself\r
-in the end, shipmate?' and going to the mate, he looked at him\r
-quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given\r
-him--neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night\r
-an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the\r
-Lakeman's monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for\r
-a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm--nigh\r
-to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to\r
-the seaman's hand--that fatal hour was then to come; and in the\r
-fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and\r
-stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.\r
-\r
-"But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody\r
-deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the\r
-avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in\r
-to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have\r
-done.\r
-\r
-"It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second\r
-day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man,\r
-drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, 'There she\r
-rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.\r
-\r
-"'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do\r
-whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'\r
-\r
-"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;--but\r
-that would be too long a story.'\r
-\r
-"'How? how?' cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.\r
-\r
-"'Nay, Dons, Dons--nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more\r
-into the air, Sirs.'\r
-\r
-"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend looks\r
-faint;--fill up his empty glass!'\r
-\r
-"No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen,\r
-so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the\r
-ship--forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of the\r
-moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted\r
-his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been\r
-plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.\r
-'The White Whale--the White Whale!' was the cry from captain, mates,\r
-and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious\r
-to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed\r
-askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass,\r
-that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like\r
-a living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality\r
-pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out\r
-before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the\r
-mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him, while\r
-Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken\r
-the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats were\r
-lowered, the mate's got the start; and none howled more fiercely with\r
-delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff\r
-pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to\r
-the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his\r
-bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost back. Nothing\r
-loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that\r
-blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as\r
-against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate.\r
-That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted,\r
-and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the\r
-sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray,\r
-and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to\r
-remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round\r
-in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing\r
-high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.\r
-\r
-"Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had\r
-slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly\r
-looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,\r
-downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He\r
-cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose\r
-again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen shirt, caught in the\r
-teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the\r
-whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.\r
-\r
-"In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port--a savage, solitary\r
-place--where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the\r
-Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted\r
-among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double\r
-war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.\r
-\r
-"The ship's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called\r
-upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving\r
-down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over\r
-their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both\r
-by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent,\r
-that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a\r
-weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so\r
-heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the\r
-ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon\r
-from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the\r
-Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with\r
-him, and setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight\r
-before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a\r
-reinforcement to his crew.\r
-\r
-"On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed\r
-to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but\r
-the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt\r
-hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain\r
-presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes,\r
-the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so\r
-much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.\r
-\r
-"'What do you want of me?' cried the captain.\r
-\r
-"'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt;\r
-'no lies.'\r
-\r
-"'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.'\r
-\r
-"'Very good. Let me board you a moment--I come in peace.' With that he\r
-leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood\r
-face to face with the captain.\r
-\r
-"'Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me.\r
-As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder\r
-island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightning strike\r
-me!'\r
-\r
-"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman. 'Adios, Senor!' and leaping\r
-into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.\r
-\r
-"Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the\r
-roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time\r
-arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck befriended\r
-him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially\r
-in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They\r
-embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he\r
-been at all minded to work them legal retribution.\r
-\r
-"Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,\r
-and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized\r
-Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small\r
-native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all\r
-right there, again resumed his cruisings.\r
-\r
-"Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of\r
-Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses\r
-to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that\r
-destroyed him.\r
-\r
-"'Are you through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly.\r
-\r
-"'I am, Don.'\r
-\r
-"'Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,\r
-this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful!\r
-Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to\r
-press.'\r
-\r
-"'Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don\r
-Sebastian's suit,' cried the company, with exceeding interest.\r
-\r
-"'Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?'\r
-\r
-"'Nay,' said Don Sebastian; 'but I know a worthy priest near by, who\r
-will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised?\r
-this may grow too serious.'\r
-\r
-"'Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?'\r
-\r
-"'Though there are no Auto-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said one of the company\r
-to another; 'I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy.\r
-Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.'\r
-\r
-"'Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg\r
-that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists\r
-you can.'\r
-\r
-"'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian,\r
-gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.\r
-\r
-"'Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light,\r
-and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.\r
-\r
-"'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye,\r
-gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be\r
-true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have\r
-seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.'"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.\r
-\r
-\r
-I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,\r
-something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the\r
-eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored\r
-alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.\r
-It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those\r
-curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day\r
-confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the\r
-world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all\r
-wrong.\r
-\r
-It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will\r
-be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For\r
-ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble\r
-panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,\r
-medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of\r
-chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's; ever\r
-since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not\r
-only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific\r
-presentations of him.\r
-\r
-Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to\r
-be the whale's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta,\r
-in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of\r
-that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable\r
-avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came\r
-into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of\r
-whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale\r
-referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the\r
-incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the\r
-Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so\r
-as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is\r
-all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the\r
-broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.\r
-\r
-But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's\r
-portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian\r
-Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the\r
-sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange\r
-creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his\r
-own "Perseus Descending," make out one whit better. The huge corpulence\r
-of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing\r
-one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its\r
-distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be\r
-taken for the Traitors' Gate leading from the Thames by water into the\r
-Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and\r
-Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of\r
-old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the book-binder's whale\r
-winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor--as\r
-stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both\r
-old and new--that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature,\r
-imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases.\r
-Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this\r
-book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended\r
-when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old\r
-Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival\r
-of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively\r
-late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the\r
-Leviathan.\r
-\r
-In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will\r
-at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner\r
-of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden,\r
-come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the\r
-original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some\r
-curious whales.\r
-\r
-But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those\r
-pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,\r
-by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some\r
-plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,\r
-entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the\r
-Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." In one of those plates the\r
-whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles,\r
-with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the\r
-prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular\r
-flukes.\r
-\r
-Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett,\r
-a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape Horn\r
-into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale\r
-Fisheries." In this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of\r
-a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the\r
-coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck." I doubt not the\r
-captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines.\r
-To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which\r
-applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm\r
-whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet\r
-long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out\r
-of that eye!\r
-\r
-Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for\r
-the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of\r
-mistake. Look at that popular work "Goldsmith's Animated Nature." In the\r
-abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale"\r
-and a "narwhale." I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly\r
-whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one\r
-glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century\r
-such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent\r
-public of schoolboys.\r
-\r
-Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great\r
-naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are\r
-several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these\r
-are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland\r
-whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long\r
-experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its\r
-counterpart in nature.\r
-\r
-But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was\r
-reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous\r
-Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he\r
-gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that\r
-picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary\r
-retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not\r
-a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of\r
-a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that\r
-picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor\r
-in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that\r
-is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil\r
-those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.\r
-\r
-As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the\r
-shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally\r
-Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting\r
-on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners:\r
-their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.\r
-\r
-But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very\r
-surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have\r
-been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a\r
-drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent\r
-the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.\r
-Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan\r
-has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale,\r
-in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in\r
-unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight,\r
-like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a\r
-thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the\r
-air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not\r
-to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young\r
-sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the\r
-case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such\r
-is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that\r
-his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.\r
-\r
-But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded\r
-whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all.\r
-For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that\r
-his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy\r
-Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of\r
-his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian\r
-old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics;\r
-yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's\r
-articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton\r
-of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded\r
-animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes\r
-it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some\r
-part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously\r
-displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to\r
-the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four\r
-regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But\r
-all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human\r
-fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may\r
-sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly\r
-said to handle us without mittens."\r
-\r
-For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs\r
-conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world\r
-which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit\r
-the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very\r
-considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding\r
-out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in\r
-which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is\r
-by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of\r
-being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had\r
-best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True\r
-Pictures of Whaling Scenes.\r
-\r
-\r
-In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly\r
-tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of\r
-them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,\r
-especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass\r
-that matter by.\r
-\r
-I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;\r
-Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous\r
-chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far\r
-better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's\r
-drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the\r
-picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second\r
-chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no\r
-doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is\r
-admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm\r
-Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they\r
-are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.\r
-\r
-Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they\r
-are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has\r
-but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because\r
-it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive\r
-anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living\r
-hunters.\r
-\r
-But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details\r
-not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to\r
-be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed,\r
-and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent\r
-attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble\r
-Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath\r
-the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air\r
-upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of\r
-the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon\r
-the monster's spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single\r
-incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the\r
-incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if\r
-from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and\r
-true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden\r
-poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the\r
-swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions\r
-of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down\r
-upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details\r
-of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not\r
-draw so good a one.\r
-\r
-In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside\r
-the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black\r
-weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian\r
-cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so\r
-abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave\r
-supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the\r
-small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the\r
-Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while\r
-the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of\r
-tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock\r
-in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean\r
-steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in\r
-admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the\r
-drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of\r
-a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily\r
-hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.\r
-\r
-Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he\r
-was either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously\r
-tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for\r
-painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and\r
-where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion\r
-on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder\r
-fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of\r
-France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the\r
-successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned\r
-centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea\r
-battle-pieces of Garnery.\r
-\r
-The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of\r
-things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings\r
-they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England's\r
-experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the\r
-Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only\r
-finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of\r
-the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale\r
-draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline\r
-of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as\r
-picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching\r
-the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right\r
-whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,\r
-and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats\r
-us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives,\r
-and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck\r
-submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of\r
-magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent\r
-voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it\r
-was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a\r
-sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.\r
-\r
-In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other\r
-French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself\r
-"H. Durand." One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present\r
-purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet\r
-noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored,\r
-inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails\r
-of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both\r
-drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when\r
-considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under\r
-one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is\r
-quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the\r
-very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the\r
-vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a\r
-quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is\r
-about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances\r
-lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its\r
-hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands\r
-half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the\r
-smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke\r
-over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up\r
-with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the\r
-excited seamen.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in\r
-Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.\r
-\r
-\r
-On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a\r
-crippled beggar (or KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board\r
-before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg.\r
-There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed\r
-to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being\r
-crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years,\r
-they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that\r
-stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has\r
-now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in\r
-Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you\r
-will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on\r
-that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with\r
-downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.\r
-\r
-Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and\r
-Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and\r
-whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth,\r
-or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other\r
-like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little\r
-ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material,\r
-in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes\r
-of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the\r
-skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their\r
-jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,\r
-they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's\r
-fancy.\r
-\r
-Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man\r
-to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.\r
-Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a\r
-savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready\r
-at any moment to rebel against him.\r
-\r
-Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic\r
-hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian\r
-war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of\r
-carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.\r
-For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that\r
-miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has\r
-cost steady years of steady application.\r
-\r
-As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the\r
-same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, of\r
-his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not\r
-quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design,\r
-as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit\r
-and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert\r
-Durer.\r
-\r
-Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of\r
-the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles\r
-of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.\r
-\r
-At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung\r
-by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is\r
-sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking\r
-whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some\r
-old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for\r
-weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all\r
-intents and purposes so labelled with "HANDS OFF!" you cannot examine\r
-them closely enough to decide upon their merit.\r
-\r
-In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken\r
-cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the\r
-plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the\r
-Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against\r
-them in a surf of green surges.\r
-\r
-Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually\r
-girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky\r
-point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of\r
-whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough\r
-whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish\r
-to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact\r
-intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else\r
-so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise,\r
-previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the\r
-Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed\r
-Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.\r
-\r
-Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out\r
-great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as\r
-when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies\r
-locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased\r
-Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright\r
-points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic\r
-skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the\r
-starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying\r
-Fish.\r
-\r
-With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for\r
-spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to\r
-see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie\r
-encamped beyond my mortal sight!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 58. Brit.\r
-\r
-\r
-Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows\r
-of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale\r
-largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we\r
-seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.\r
-\r
-On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from\r
-the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly\r
-swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that\r
-wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated\r
-from the water that escaped at the lip.\r
-\r
-As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance\r
-their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these\r
-monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving\r
-behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks" does\r
-not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there\r
-being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable\r
-meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually\r
-floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.\r
-\r
-\r
-But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all\r
-reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they\r
-paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked\r
-more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the\r
-great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will\r
-sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them\r
-to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even\r
-so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the\r
-leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their immense\r
-magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses\r
-of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort\r
-of life that lives in a dog or a horse.\r
-\r
-Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the\r
-deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though\r
-some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are\r
-of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of\r
-the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for\r
-example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to\r
-the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any\r
-generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.\r
-\r
-But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the\r
-seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and\r
-repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,\r
-so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his\r
-one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific\r
-of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen\r
-tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;\r
-though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man\r
-may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering\r
-future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,\r
-to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize\r
-the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the\r
-continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense\r
-of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.\r
-\r
-The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese\r
-vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.\r
-That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships\r
-of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided;\r
-two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.\r
-\r
-Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a\r
-miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,\r
-when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened\r
-and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in\r
-precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.\r
-\r
-But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it\r
-is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who\r
-murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath\r
-spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her\r
-own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks,\r
-and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No\r
-mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad\r
-battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the\r
-globe.\r
-\r
-Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide\r
-under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden\r
-beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish\r
-brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the\r
-dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more,\r
-the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each\r
-other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.\r
-\r
-Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile\r
-earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a\r
-strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean\r
-surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular\r
-Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the\r
-half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst\r
-never return!\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 59. Squid.\r
-\r
-\r
-Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her\r
-way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling\r
-her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering\r
-masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a\r
-plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,\r
-alluring jet would be seen.\r
-\r
-But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural\r
-spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when\r
-the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid\r
-across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered\r
-together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible\r
-sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.\r
-\r
-In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and\r
-higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before\r
-our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening\r
-for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,\r
-and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?\r
-thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once\r
-more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the\r
-negro yelled out--"There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead!\r
-The White Whale, the White Whale!"\r
-\r
-Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the\r
-bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on\r
-the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave\r
-his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction\r
-indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.\r
-\r
-Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had\r
-gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the\r
-ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular\r
-whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed\r
-him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly\r
-perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave\r
-orders for lowering.\r
-\r
-The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all\r
-swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with\r
-oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same\r
-spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for\r
-the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous\r
-phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind.\r
-A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing\r
-cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating\r
-from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as\r
-if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible\r
-face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or\r
-instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,\r
-chance-like apparition of life.\r
-\r
-As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still\r
-gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice\r
-exclaimed--"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to\r
-have seen thee, thou white ghost!"\r
-\r
-"What was it, Sir?" said Flask.\r
-\r
-"The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and\r
-returned to their ports to tell of it."\r
-\r
-But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;\r
-the rest as silently following.\r
-\r
-Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with\r
-the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being\r
-so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with\r
-portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them\r
-declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few\r
-of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and\r
-form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale\r
-his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above\r
-water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti\r
-whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and\r
-only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that\r
-food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what\r
-are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus\r
-exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that\r
-the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to\r
-the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is\r
-supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.\r
-\r
-There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop\r
-Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in\r
-which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with\r
-some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond.\r
-But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he\r
-assigns it.\r
-\r
-By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious\r
-creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish,\r
-to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong,\r
-but only as the Anak of the tribe.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 60. The Line.\r
-\r
-\r
-With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as\r
-for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented,\r
-I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.\r
-\r
-The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly\r
-vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary\r
-ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to\r
-the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the\r
-sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity\r
-too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must\r
-be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general\r
-by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it\r
-may give it compactness and gloss.\r
-\r
-Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost\r
-entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not\r
-so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and\r
-I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more\r
-handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark\r
-fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian\r
-to behold.\r
-\r
-The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first\r
-sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment\r
-its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and\r
-twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal\r
-to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something\r
-over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally\r
-coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so\r
-as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or\r
-layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart,"\r
-or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least\r
-tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take\r
-somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used\r
-in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an\r
-entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then\r
-reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act\r
-of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.\r
-\r
-In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line\r
-being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this;\r
-because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the\r
-boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly\r
-three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky\r
-freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for\r
-the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up\r
-a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated\r
-one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub,\r
-the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great\r
-wedding-cake to present to the whales.\r
-\r
-Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an\r
-eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the\r
-tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything.\r
-This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First:\r
-In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a\r
-neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as\r
-to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the\r
-harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug\r
-of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the\r
-first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This\r
-arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the\r
-lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the\r
-whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking\r
-minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed\r
-boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of\r
-the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.\r
-\r
-Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is\r
-taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again\r
-carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon\r
-the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist\r
-in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at\r
-the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme\r
-pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a\r
-common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs\r
-in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat\r
-again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled\r
-upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a\r
-little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp--the rope\r
-which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that\r
-connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious\r
-to detail.\r
-\r
-Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,\r
-twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the\r
-oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid\r
-eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest\r
-snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal\r
-woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies,\r
-and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any\r
-unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible\r
-contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus\r
-circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones\r
-to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit--strange thing! what\r
-cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes,\r
-and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you\r
-will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus\r
-hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before\r
-King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death,\r
-with a halter around every neck, as you may say.\r
-\r
-Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for\r
-those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are casually\r
-chronicled--of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the\r
-line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in\r
-the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings\r
-of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and\r
-wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the\r
-heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and\r
-you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning;\r
-and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of\r
-volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run\r
-away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.\r
-\r
-Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and\r
-prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;\r
-for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and\r
-contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal\r
-powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the\r
-line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought\r
-into actual play--this is a thing which carries more of true terror than\r
-any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men\r
-live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their\r
-necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death,\r
-that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.\r
-And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would\r
-not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before\r
-your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.\r
-\r
-\r
-If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to\r
-Queequeg it was quite a different object.\r
-\r
-"When you see him 'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow\r
-of his hoisted boat, "then you quick see him 'parm whale."\r
-\r
-The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special\r
-to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep\r
-induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through\r
-which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground;\r
-that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish,\r
-and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the\r
-Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.\r
-\r
-It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders\r
-leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in\r
-what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that\r
-dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my\r
-body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long\r
-after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.\r
-\r
-Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen\r
-at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last\r
-all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing\r
-that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman.\r
-The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance\r
-of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.\r
-\r
-Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my\r
-hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me;\r
-with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty\r
-fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the\r
-capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,\r
-glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in\r
-the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury\r
-jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm\r
-afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some\r
-enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once\r
-started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts\r
-of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted\r
-forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted\r
-the sparkling brine into the air.\r
-\r
-"Clear away the boats! Luff!" cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he\r
-dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.\r
-\r
-The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere\r
-the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,\r
-but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he\r
-swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave\r
-orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in\r
-whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,\r
-we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the\r
-noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the\r
-monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and\r
-then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.\r
-\r
-"There go flukes!" was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by\r
-Stubb's producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was\r
-granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale\r
-rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker's boat, and much\r
-nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour\r
-of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become\r
-aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no\r
-longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And\r
-still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.\r
-\r
-Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy,\r
-he was going "head out"; that part obliquely projecting from the mad\r
-yeast which he brewed.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance\r
-the entire interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists. Though\r
-apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about\r
-him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does\r
-so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the\r
-upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water\r
-formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he\r
-thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish\r
-galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty of\r
-time--but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that's all," cried\r
-Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. "Start her, now; give 'em\r
-the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy--start\r
-her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--cucumbers is the word--easy,\r
-easy--only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the\r
-buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys--that's all. Start\r
-her!"\r
-\r
-"Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some\r
-old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat\r
-involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke\r
-which the eager Indian gave.\r
-\r
-But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. "Kee-hee!\r
-Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,\r
-like a pacing tiger in his cage.\r
-\r
-"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a\r
-mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels\r
-cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still\r
-encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from\r
-his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the\r
-welcome cry was heard--"Stand up, Tashtego!--give it to him!" The\r
-harpoon was hurled. "Stern all!" The oarsmen backed water; the same\r
-moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists.\r
-It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two\r
-additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its\r
-increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled\r
-with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and\r
-round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it\r
-blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands, from\r
-which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at\r
-these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's\r
-sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving\r
-to wrest it out of your clutch.\r
-\r
-"Wet the line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated\r
-by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More\r
-turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now\r
-flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego\r
-here changed places--stem for stern--a staggering business truly in that\r
-rocking commotion.\r
-\r
-\r
-*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be\r
-stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the\r
-running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or\r
-bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most\r
-convenient.\r
-\r
-\r
-From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of\r
-the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would\r
-have thought the craft had two keels--one cleaving the water, the other\r
-the air--as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once.\r
-A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in\r
-her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a little\r
-finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale\r
-into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging\r
-to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of\r
-Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring\r
-down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed\r
-as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened\r
-his flight.\r
-\r
-"Haul in--haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round\r
-towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet\r
-the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly\r
-planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the\r
-flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning\r
-out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for\r
-another fling.\r
-\r
-The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a\r
-hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled\r
-and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing\r
-upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every\r
-face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all\r
-the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the\r
-spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of\r
-the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked\r
-lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and\r
-again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again\r
-sent it into the whale.\r
-\r
-"Pull up--pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale\r
-relaxed in his wrath. "Pull up!--close to!" and the boat ranged along\r
-the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned\r
-his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully\r
-churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold\r
-watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of\r
-breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the\r
-innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from\r
-his trance into that unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster\r
-horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable,\r
-mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping\r
-astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied\r
-twilight into the clear air of the day.\r
-\r
-And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view;\r
-surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his\r
-spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush\r
-after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red\r
-wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping\r
-down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!\r
-\r
-"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.\r
-\r
-"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth,\r
-Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood\r
-thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 62. The Dart.\r
-\r
-\r
-A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.\r
-\r
-According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes\r
-off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary\r
-steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost\r
-oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous\r
-arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called\r
-a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of\r
-twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase,\r
-the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost;\r
-indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the\r
-rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid\r
-exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's\r
-compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started--what\r
-that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl\r
-very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this\r
-straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once\r
-the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry--"Stand up, and give it\r
-to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his\r
-centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little\r
-strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No\r
-wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty\r
-fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many\r
-hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some\r
-of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that\r
-some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder\r
-that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the\r
-harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his\r
-body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!\r
-\r
-Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,\r
-that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer\r
-likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of\r
-themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and\r
-the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper\r
-station in the bows of the boat.\r
-\r
-Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish\r
-and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to\r
-last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing\r
-whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious\r
-to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss\r
-of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more\r
-than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures\r
-in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the\r
-whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has\r
-caused them.\r
-\r
-To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this\r
-world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of\r
-toil.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.\r
-\r
-\r
-Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in\r
-productive subjects, grow the chapters.\r
-\r
-The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.\r
-It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which\r
-is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow,\r
-for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the\r
-harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow.\r
-Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it\r
-up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from\r
-the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch,\r
-respectively called the first and second irons.\r
-\r
-But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with\r
-the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one\r
-instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming\r
-drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a\r
-doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the\r
-instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving\r
-the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however\r
-lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him.\r
-Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line,\r
-and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be\r
-anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the\r
-most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water,\r
-it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned\r
-in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently\r
-practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the\r
-saddest and most fatal casualties.\r
-\r
-Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown\r
-overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,\r
-skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,\r
-or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.\r
-Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is\r
-fairly captured and a corpse.\r
-\r
-Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging\r
-one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these\r
-qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of\r
-such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be\r
-simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied\r
-with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one\r
-be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are\r
-faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several\r
-most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be\r
-painted.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 64. Stubb's Supper.\r
-\r
-\r
-Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was\r
-a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow\r
-business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men\r
-with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers,\r
-slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the\r
-sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals;\r
-good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we\r
-moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call\r
-it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky\r
-freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we\r
-towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.\r
-\r
-Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's\r
-main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab\r
-dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing\r
-the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing\r
-it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way\r
-into the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.\r
-\r
-Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had\r
-evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature\r
-was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed\r
-working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that\r
-Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were\r
-brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand,\r
-monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound on\r
-the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in\r
-the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust\r
-rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast\r
-corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the\r
-stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black\r
-hull close to the vessel's and seen through the darkness of the night,\r
-which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two--ship and whale,\r
-seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while\r
-the other remains standing.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most\r
-reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside,\r
-is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part\r
-is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its\r
-flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so\r
-that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to\r
-put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a\r
-small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and\r
-a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By\r
-adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side\r
-of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily\r
-made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked\r
-fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with\r
-its broad flukes or lobes.\r
-\r
-\r
-If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known\r
-on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an\r
-unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was\r
-he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned\r
-to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping\r
-cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest.\r
-Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale\r
-as a flavorish thing to his palate.\r
-\r
-"A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut\r
-me one from his small!"\r
-\r
-Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general\r
-thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray\r
-the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds\r
-of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers\r
-who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale\r
-designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.\r
-\r
-About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two\r
-lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper\r
-at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb\r
-the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings\r
-with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming\r
-round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few\r
-sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping\r
-of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers'\r
-hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you\r
-heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on\r
-their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the\r
-bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all\r
-but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they\r
-contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the\r
-universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale,\r
-may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking\r
-for a screw.\r
-\r
-Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks\r
-will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs\r
-round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down\r
-every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant\r
-butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's\r
-live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks,\r
-also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away\r
-under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole\r
-affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that\r
-is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and\r
-though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships\r
-crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in\r
-case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently\r
-buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down,\r
-touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most\r
-socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no\r
-conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless\r
-numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm\r
-whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never\r
-seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of\r
-devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.\r
-\r
-But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was\r
-going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his\r
-own epicurean lips.\r
-\r
-"Cook, cook!--where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening\r
-his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper;\r
-and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing\r
-with his lance; "cook, you cook!--sail this way, cook!"\r
-\r
-The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously\r
-roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling\r
-along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something\r
-the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like\r
-his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and\r
-limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy\r
-fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered\r
-along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on\r
-the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, with both hands folded\r
-before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back\r
-still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as\r
-to bring his best ear into play.\r
-\r
-"Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his\r
-mouth, "don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been\r
-beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I always say\r
-that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks\r
-now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a\r
-shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to 'em; tell 'em they are\r
-welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must\r
-keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and\r
-deliver my message. Here, take this lantern," snatching one from his\r
-sideboard; "now then, go and preach to 'em!"\r
-\r
-Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck\r
-to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the\r
-sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand\r
-he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a\r
-mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling\r
-behind, overheard all that was said.\r
-\r
-"Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam\r
-noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin' ob de lips! Massa Stubb say\r
-dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you\r
-must stop dat dam racket!"\r
-\r
-"Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap\r
-on the shoulder,--"Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear that way\r
-when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, cook!"\r
-\r
-"Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to go.\r
-\r
-"No, cook; go on, go on."\r
-\r
-"Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:"--\r
-\r
-"Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it; try that," and\r
-Fleece continued.\r
-\r
-"Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,\r
-fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness--'top dat dam slappin' ob de\r
-tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and\r
-bitin' dare?"\r
-\r
-"Cook," cried Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing. Talk to\r
-'em gentlemanly."\r
-\r
-Once more the sermon proceeded.\r
-\r
-"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat\r
-is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de\r
-pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den\r
-you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned.\r
-Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping\r
-yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your\r
-neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat\r
-whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale\r
-belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger\r
-dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat\r
-de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber\r
-for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help\r
-demselves."\r
-\r
-"Well done, old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; go on."\r
-\r
-"No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a scougin' and slappin' each\r
-oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no use a-preaching to\r
-such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is full, and dare\r
-bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get 'em full, dey wont hear you\r
-den; for den dey sink in the sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and\r
-can't hear noting at all, no more, for eber and eber."\r
-\r
-"Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,\r
-Fleece, and I'll away to my supper."\r
-\r
-Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his\r
-shrill voice, and cried--\r
-\r
-"Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill\r
-your dam bellies 'till dey bust--and den die."\r
-\r
-"Now, cook," said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; "stand\r
-just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular\r
-attention."\r
-\r
-"All 'dention," said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the\r
-desired position.\r
-\r
-"Well," said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; "I shall now go\r
-back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you,\r
-cook?"\r
-\r
-"What dat do wid de 'teak," said the old black, testily.\r
-\r
-"Silence! How old are you, cook?"\r
-\r
-"'Bout ninety, dey say," he gloomily muttered.\r
-\r
-"And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook,\r
-and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak?" rapidly bolting another\r
-mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the\r
-question. "Where were you born, cook?"\r
-\r
-"'Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin' ober de Roanoke."\r
-\r
-"Born in a ferry-boat! That's queer, too. But I want to know what\r
-country you were born in, cook!"\r
-\r
-"Didn't I say de Roanoke country?" he cried sharply.\r
-\r
-"No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what I'm coming to, cook.\r
-You must go home and be born over again; you don't know how to cook a\r
-whale-steak yet."\r
-\r
-"Bress my soul, if I cook noder one," he growled, angrily, turning round\r
-to depart.\r
-\r
-"Come back here, cook;--here, hand me those tongs;--now take that bit of\r
-steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be?\r
-Take it, I say"--holding the tongs towards him--"take it, and taste it."\r
-\r
-Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro\r
-muttered, "Best cooked 'teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy."\r
-\r
-"Cook," said Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the\r
-church?"\r
-\r
-"Passed one once in Cape-Down," said the old man sullenly.\r
-\r
-"And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where\r
-you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his\r
-beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and\r
-tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?" said Stubb. "Where\r
-do you expect to go to, cook?"\r
-\r
-"Go to bed berry soon," he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.\r
-\r
-"Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an awful question. Now\r
-what's your answer?"\r
-\r
-"When dis old brack man dies," said the negro slowly, changing his whole\r
-air and demeanor, "he hisself won't go nowhere; but some bressed angel\r
-will come and fetch him."\r
-\r
-"Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch\r
-him where?"\r
-\r
-"Up dere," said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and\r
-keeping it there very solemnly.\r
-\r
-"So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you\r
-are dead? But don't you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets?\r
-Main-top, eh?"\r
-\r
-"Didn't say dat t'all," said Fleece, again in the sulks.\r
-\r
-"You said up there, didn't you? and now look yourself, and see where\r
-your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by\r
-crawling through the lubber's hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don't\r
-get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a\r
-ticklish business, but must be done, or else it's no go. But none of\r
-us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye\r
-hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t'other a'top of your heart,\r
-when I'm giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?--that's\r
-your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!--that's it--now you have it. Hold it there\r
-now, and pay attention."\r
-\r
-"All 'dention," said the old black, with both hands placed as desired,\r
-vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at\r
-one and the same time.\r
-\r
-"Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad,\r
-that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don't\r
-you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my\r
-private table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to\r
-spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal\r
-to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow,\r
-cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get\r
-the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the\r
-flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go."\r
-\r
-But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.\r
-\r
-"Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch.\r
-D'ye hear? away you sail, then.--Halloa! stop! make a bow before you\r
-go.--Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast--don't forget."\r
-\r
-"Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if\r
-he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man,\r
-limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.\r
-\r
-\r
-That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,\r
-like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so\r
-outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and\r
-philosophy of it.\r
-\r
-It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right\r
-Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large\r
-prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a certain cook of the\r
-court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be\r
-eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of\r
-whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The\r
-meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well\r
-seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.\r
-The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great\r
-porpoise grant from the crown.\r
-\r
-The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all\r
-hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but\r
-when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet\r
-long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men\r
-like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not\r
-so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare\r
-old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous\r
-doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly\r
-juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who\r
-long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel--that\r
-these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of\r
-whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among\r
-the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which, indeed,\r
-they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something\r
-like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They\r
-have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly\r
-keep his hands off.\r
-\r
-But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his\r
-exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be\r
-delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as\r
-the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid\r
-pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that\r
-is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the\r
-third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for\r
-butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into\r
-some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try\r
-watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their\r
-ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many\r
-a good supper have I thus made.\r
-\r
-In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.\r
-The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,\r
-whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings),\r
-they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess,\r
-in flavor somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among\r
-some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the\r
-epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to\r
-have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a\r
-calf's head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon\r
-discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an\r
-intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow one of the\r
-saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at\r
-him, with an "Et tu Brute!" expression.\r
-\r
-It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively\r
-unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence;\r
-that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before\r
-mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea,\r
-and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever\r
-murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if\r
-he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and\r
-he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market\r
-of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the\r
-long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of\r
-the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will\r
-be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in\r
-his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that\r
-provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized\r
-and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest\r
-on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.\r
-\r
-But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is\r
-adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my\r
-civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is\r
-that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the very ox\r
-you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring\r
-that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did\r
-the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders\r
-formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two\r
-that that society passed a resolution to patronise nothing but steel\r
-pens.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.\r
-\r
-\r
-When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and\r
-weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general\r
-thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting\r
-him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very\r
-soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the\r
-common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then send\r
-every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that,\r
-until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for\r
-an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see\r
-that all goes well.\r
-\r
-But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will\r
-not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather\r
-round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a\r
-stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning.\r
-In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so\r
-largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably\r
-diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades,\r
-a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to\r
-tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the\r
-present case with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man\r
-unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night,\r
-would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and\r
-those sharks the maggots in it.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was\r
-concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman\r
-came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for\r
-immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering\r
-three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid\r
-sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an\r
-incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep\r
-into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy\r
-confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not\r
-always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the\r
-incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each\r
-other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit\r
-their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by\r
-the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was\r
-this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these\r
-creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in\r
-their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual\r
-life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin,\r
-one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried\r
-to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.\r
-\r
-\r
-*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel;\r
-is about the bigness of a man's spread hand; and in general shape,\r
-corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its\r
-sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than\r
-the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when\r
-being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a\r
-stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Queequeg no care what god made him shark," said the savage, agonizingly\r
-lifting his hand up and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de\r
-god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio\r
-professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was\r
-turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would\r
-have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.\r
-\r
-In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous\r
-things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which\r
-no single man can possibly lift--this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up\r
-to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest\r
-point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like rope\r
-winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass,\r
-and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to\r
-this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was\r
-attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb,\r
-the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the\r
-body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two\r
-side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole,\r
-the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild\r
-chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When\r
-instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in\r
-her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she\r
-trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More\r
-and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the\r
-windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last,\r
-a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls\r
-upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises\r
-into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the\r
-first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely\r
-as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body\r
-precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the\r
-strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale\r
-rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip\r
-uniformly peels off along the line called the "scarf," simultaneously\r
-cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as\r
-it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the\r
-time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the\r
-main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment\r
-or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let\r
-down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge\r
-it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong\r
-overboard.\r
-\r
-One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon\r
-called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices\r
-out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this\r
-hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked\r
-so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what\r
-follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to\r
-stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few\r
-sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain;\r
-so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip,\r
-called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering.\r
-The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is\r
-peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly\r
-slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway\r
-right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into\r
-this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long\r
-blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.\r
-And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering\r
-simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing,\r
-the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship\r
-straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the\r
-general friction.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.\r
-\r
-\r
-I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of\r
-the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen\r
-afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains\r
-unchanged; but it is only an opinion.\r
-\r
-The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you\r
-know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence\r
-of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and\r
-ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.\r
-\r
-Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's\r
-skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point\r
-of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you\r
-cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but\r
-that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if\r
-reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred\r
-dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely\r
-thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds\r
-of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is,\r
-previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but\r
-becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which\r
-I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before;\r
-and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself\r
-with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is\r
-pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may\r
-say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin,\r
-isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the\r
-whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as\r
-the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say,\r
-that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender\r
-than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.\r
-\r
-Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,\r
-as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one\r
-hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or\r
-rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths,\r
-and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had\r
-of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere\r
-integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels\r
-to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters\r
-of the stuff of the whale's skin.\r
-\r
-In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among\r
-the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely\r
-crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,\r
-something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these\r
-marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above\r
-mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved\r
-upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick,\r
-observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but\r
-afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical;\r
-that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids\r
-hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present\r
-connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm\r
-Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old\r
-Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on\r
-the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the\r
-mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian\r
-rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which\r
-the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the\r
-back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the\r
-regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,\r
-altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New\r
-England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks\r
-of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs--I should say,\r
-that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this\r
-particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are\r
-probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most\r
-remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.\r
-\r
-A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of\r
-the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long\r
-pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very\r
-happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber\r
-as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho\r
-slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this\r
-cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself\r
-comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would\r
-become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the\r
-North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are\r
-found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it\r
-observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies\r
-are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of\r
-an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire;\r
-whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood,\r
-and he dies. How wonderful is it then--except after explanation--that\r
-this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it\r
-is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed\r
-to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall\r
-overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly\r
-frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued\r
-in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by\r
-experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a\r
-Borneo negro in summer.\r
-\r
-It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong\r
-individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare\r
-virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after\r
-the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in\r
-this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood\r
-fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the\r
-great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.\r
-\r
-But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,\r
-how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the\r
-whale!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.\r
-\r
-\r
-Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!\r
-\r
-The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the\r
-beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,\r
-it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.\r
-Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and\r
-splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious\r
-flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting\r
-poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further\r
-and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem\r
-square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous\r
-din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous\r
-sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair\r
-face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass\r
-of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.\r
-\r
-There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in\r
-pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled.\r
-In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if\r
-peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they\r
-most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not\r
-the mightiest whale is free.\r
-\r
-Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost\r
-survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or\r
-blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the\r
-swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in\r
-the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the\r
-whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the\r
-log--SHOALS, ROCKS, AND BREAKERS HEREABOUTS: BEWARE! And for years\r
-afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly\r
-sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there\r
-when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your\r
-utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of\r
-old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in\r
-the air! There's orthodoxy!\r
-\r
-Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror\r
-to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a\r
-world.\r
-\r
-Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than\r
-the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in\r
-them.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.\r
-\r
-\r
-It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping\r
-the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the\r
-Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced\r
-whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.\r
-\r
-Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck;\r
-on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that\r
-very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the\r
-surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening\r
-between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a\r
-discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear\r
-in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many\r
-feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so\r
-much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus\r
-made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts,\r
-and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion\r
-into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he\r
-demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?\r
-\r
-When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable\r
-till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale\r
-it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full\r
-grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale's head embraces\r
-nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a\r
-burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as\r
-vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales.\r
-\r
-The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was\r
-hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so that\r
-it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And there\r
-with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the\r
-enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm\r
-on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that\r
-blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the giant\r
-Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.\r
-\r
-When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went\r
-below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but\r
-now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow\r
-lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon\r
-the sea.\r
-\r
-A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone\r
-from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to\r
-gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he\r
-took Stubb's long spade--still remaining there after the whale's\r
-Decapitation--and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended\r
-mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood\r
-leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.\r
-\r
-It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so\r
-intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast\r
-and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a\r
-beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head,\r
-and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast\r
-dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has\r
-moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies\r
-rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this\r
-frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there,\r
-in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast\r
-been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side,\r
-where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou\r
-saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart\r
-to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when\r
-heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed\r
-by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper\r
-midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on\r
-unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that\r
-would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O\r
-head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of\r
-Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"\r
-\r
-"Sail ho!" cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.\r
-\r
-"Aye? Well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting\r
-himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow.\r
-"That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better\r
-man.--Where away?"\r
-\r
-"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to\r
-us!\r
-\r
-"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way,\r
-and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man!\r
-how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest\r
-atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam's Story.\r
-\r
-\r
-Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than\r
-the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.\r
-\r
-By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-heads\r
-proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting\r
-by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could\r
-not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would\r
-be made.\r
-\r
-Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of\r
-the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals\r
-being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels\r
-attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale\r
-commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at\r
-considerable distances and with no small facility.\r
-\r
-The Pequod's signal was at last responded to by the stranger's setting\r
-her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring\r
-her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod's lee, and\r
-lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being\r
-rigged by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting captain, the\r
-stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern in token\r
-of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that\r
-the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her\r
-captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though\r
-himself and boat's crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half\r
-a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing\r
-between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the\r
-land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the\r
-Pequod.\r
-\r
-But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an\r
-interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam's\r
-boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the\r
-Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew\r
-very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by\r
-the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some\r
-way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings\r
-again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a\r
-conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not\r
-without still another interruption of a very different sort.\r
-\r
-Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular\r
-appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities\r
-make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled\r
-all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A\r
-long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped\r
-him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A\r
-deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.\r
-\r
-So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had\r
-exclaimed--"That's he! that's he!--the long-togged scaramouch the\r
-Town-Ho's company told us of!" Stubb here alluded to a strange story\r
-told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time\r
-previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account\r
-and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in\r
-question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the\r
-Jeroboam. His story was this:\r
-\r
-He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna\r
-Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret\r
-meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a\r
-trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he\r
-carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,\r
-was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim\r
-having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with\r
-that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense\r
-exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the\r
-Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon\r
-the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a\r
-freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded\r
-the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby\r
-he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and\r
-vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he\r
-declared these things;--the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited\r
-imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united\r
-to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant\r
-crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of\r
-him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship,\r
-especially as he refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous\r
-captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that\r
-individual's intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the\r
-archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials--devoting the ship\r
-and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was\r
-carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew,\r
-that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel\r
-was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore\r
-forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any\r
-way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass that\r
-Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all\r
-this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and\r
-mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand\r
-than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole\r
-command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure.\r
-The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before\r
-him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal\r
-homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however\r
-wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking\r
-in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as\r
-his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But\r
-it is time to return to the Pequod.\r
-\r
-"I fear not thy epidemic, man," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain\r
-Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern; "come on board."\r
-\r
-But now Gabriel started to his feet.\r
-\r
-"Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible\r
-plague!"\r
-\r
-"Gabriel! Gabriel!" cried Captain Mayhew; "thou must either--" But\r
-that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings\r
-drowned all speech.\r
-\r
-"Hast thou seen the White Whale?" demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted\r
-back.\r
-\r
-"Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible\r
-tail!"\r
-\r
-"I tell thee again, Gabriel, that--" But again the boat tore ahead as if\r
-dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession\r
-of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices\r
-of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm\r
-whale's head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing\r
-it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to\r
-warrant.\r
-\r
-When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story\r
-concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from\r
-Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed\r
-leagued with him.\r
-\r
-It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking\r
-a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby\r
-Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence,\r
-Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White\r
-Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity,\r
-pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God\r
-incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two\r
-afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the\r
-chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself\r
-being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all\r
-the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in\r
-persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after\r
-much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last\r
-succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to\r
-the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and\r
-hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants\r
-of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his\r
-boat's bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting\r
-his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance\r
-for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its\r
-quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies\r
-of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious\r
-life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his\r
-descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a\r
-chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's head; but the\r
-mate for ever sank.\r
-\r
-It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the\r
-Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.\r
-Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated;\r
-oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the\r
-headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But\r
-strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one,\r
-when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is\r
-discernible; the man being stark dead.\r
-\r
-The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried\r
-from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek--"The vial! the vial!" Gabriel\r
-called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the\r
-whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence;\r
-because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically\r
-fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any\r
-one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the\r
-wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.\r
-\r
-Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to\r
-him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he\r
-intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which\r
-Ahab answered--"Aye." Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started\r
-to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with\r
-downward pointed finger--"Think, think of the blasphemer--dead, and down\r
-there!--beware of the blasphemer's end!"\r
-\r
-Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, "Captain, I have\r
-just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy\r
-officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag."\r
-\r
-Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships,\r
-whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends\r
-upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus,\r
-most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after\r
-attaining an age of two or three years or more.\r
-\r
-Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled,\r
-damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence\r
-of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death\r
-himself might well have been the post-boy.\r
-\r
-"Can'st not read it?" cried Ahab. "Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it's but\r
-a dim scrawl;--what's this?" As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a\r
-long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to\r
-insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without\r
-its coming any closer to the ship.\r
-\r
-Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, "Mr. Har--yes, Mr.\r
-Harry--(a woman's pinny hand,--the man's wife, I'll wager)--Aye--Mr.\r
-Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;--why it's Macey, and he's dead!"\r
-\r
-"Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife," sighed Mayhew; "but let\r
-me have it."\r
-\r
-"Nay, keep it thyself," cried Gabriel to Ahab; "thou art soon going that\r
-way."\r
-\r
-"Curses throttle thee!" yelled Ahab. "Captain Mayhew, stand by now to\r
-receive it"; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck's hands, he\r
-caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat.\r
-But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat\r
-drifted a little towards the ship's stern; so that, as if by magic, the\r
-letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He clutched it\r
-in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it,\r
-sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then\r
-Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in\r
-that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.\r
-\r
-As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket\r
-of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild\r
-affair.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.\r
-\r
-\r
-In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there\r
-is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are\r
-wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying\r
-in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done\r
-everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description\r
-of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned\r
-that upon first breaking ground in the whale's back, the blubber-hook\r
-was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the\r
-mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook\r
-get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend\r
-Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the\r
-monster's back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many\r
-cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the\r
-whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The\r
-whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the\r
-immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the\r
-level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the\r
-whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill\r
-beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the\r
-Highland costume--a shirt and socks--in which to my eyes, at least,\r
-he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to\r
-observe him, as will presently be seen.\r
-\r
-Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar\r
-in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to\r
-attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead\r
-whale's back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by\r
-a long cord. Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg\r
-down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery\r
-a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his\r
-waist.\r
-\r
-It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we\r
-proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at\r
-both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow\r
-leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were\r
-wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage\r
-and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag\r
-me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us.\r
-Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get\r
-rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.\r
-\r
-So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that\r
-while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive\r
-that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of\r
-two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's\r
-mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster\r
-and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in\r
-Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an\r
-injustice. And yet still further pondering--while I jerked him now\r
-and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam\r
-him--still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine\r
-was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most\r
-cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality\r
-of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by\r
-mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say\r
-that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the\r
-multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's\r
-monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came\r
-very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I\r
-would, I only had the management of one end of it.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod\r
-that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement\r
-upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb,\r
-in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible\r
-guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.\r
-\r
-\r
-I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the\r
-whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant\r
-rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy\r
-he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the\r
-night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent\r
-blood which began to flow from the carcass--the rabid creatures swarmed\r
-round it like bees in a beehive.\r
-\r
-And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them\r
-aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were\r
-it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise\r
-miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a\r
-ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them.\r
-Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked\r
-the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed\r
-a peculiarly ferocious shark--he was provided with still another\r
-protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego\r
-and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen\r
-whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could\r
-reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and\r
-benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg's best happiness, I admit; but\r
-in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both\r
-he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water,\r
-those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg\r
-than a tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there\r
-with that great iron hook--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his\r
-Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.\r
-\r
-Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in\r
-and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea--what matters\r
-it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men\r
-in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those\r
-sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks\r
-and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.\r
-\r
-But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as\r
-with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs\r
-up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over\r
-the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory\r
-glance hands him--what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands\r
-him a cup of tepid ginger and water!\r
-\r
-"Ginger? Do I smell ginger?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near.\r
-"Yes, this must be ginger," peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then\r
-standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the\r
-astonished steward slowly saying, "Ginger? ginger? and will you have\r
-the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger?\r
-Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire\r
-in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!--what the devil is ginger?\r
-Sea-coal? firewood?--lucifer matches?--tinder?--gunpowder?--what the\r
-devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg\r
-here."\r
-\r
-"There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this\r
-business," he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just\r
-come from forward. "Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of it,\r
-if you please." Then watching the mate's countenance, he added, "The\r
-steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap\r
-to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an\r
-apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by\r
-which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?"\r
-\r
-"I trust not," said Starbuck, "it is poor stuff enough."\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug a\r
-harpooneer; none of your apothecary's medicine here; you want to poison\r
-us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder\r
-us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?"\r
-\r
-"It was not me," cried Dough-Boy, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the\r
-ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but\r
-only this ginger-jub--so she called it."\r
-\r
-"Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye\r
-to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr.\r
-Starbuck. It is the captain's orders--grog for the harpooneer on a\r
-whale."\r
-\r
-"Enough," replied Starbuck, "only don't hit him again, but--"\r
-\r
-"Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of\r
-that sort; and this fellow's a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?"\r
-\r
-"Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself."\r
-\r
-When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort\r
-of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was\r
-handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity's gift, and that was\r
-freely given to the waves.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk\r
-Over Him.\r
-\r
-\r
-It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale's\r
-prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it\r
-continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it.\r
-For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the\r
-head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.\r
-\r
-Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually\r
-drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit,\r
-gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the\r
-Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking\r
-anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of\r
-those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to\r
-cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near\r
-the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale\r
-had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the\r
-announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if\r
-opportunity offered.\r
-\r
-Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two\r
-boats, Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further\r
-and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at\r
-the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of\r
-tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or\r
-both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in\r
-plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the\r
-towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at\r
-first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a\r
-maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from\r
-view, as if diving under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the cry from the\r
-ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being\r
-brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But having plenty\r
-of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they\r
-paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their\r
-might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was\r
-intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened line\r
-in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending\r
-strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance\r
-they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when\r
-instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the\r
-keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose\r
-to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its\r
-drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water,\r
-while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were\r
-free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering\r
-his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after\r
-him, so that they performed a complete circuit.\r
-\r
-Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close\r
-flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for\r
-lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the\r
-multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's body,\r
-rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every\r
-new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that\r
-poured from the smitten rock.\r
-\r
-At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he\r
-turned upon his back a corpse.\r
-\r
-While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,\r
-and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some\r
-conversation ensued between them.\r
-\r
-"I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard," said\r
-Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so\r
-ignoble a leviathan.\r
-\r
-"Wants with it?" said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat's bow,\r
-"did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale's\r
-head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale's\r
-on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never\r
-afterwards capsize?"\r
-\r
-"Why not?\r
-\r
-"I don't know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so,\r
-and he seems to know all about ships' charms. But I sometimes think\r
-he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half like that chap,\r
-Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into\r
-a snake's head, Stubb?"\r
-\r
-"Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a\r
-dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look\r
-down there, Flask"--pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of\r
-both hands--"Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in\r
-disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been\r
-stowed away on board ship? He's the devil, I say. The reason why you\r
-don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries\r
-it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of\r
-it, he's always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots."\r
-\r
-"He sleeps in his boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've\r
-seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging."\r
-\r
-"No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye\r
-see, in the eye of the rigging."\r
-\r
-"What's the old man have so much to do with him for?"\r
-\r
-"Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose."\r
-\r
-"Bargain?--about what?"\r
-\r
-"Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and\r
-the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away\r
-his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he'll\r
-surrender Moby Dick."\r
-\r
-"Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?"\r
-\r
-"I don't know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked\r
-one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the\r
-old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and\r
-gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he\r
-was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching\r
-his hoofs, up and says, 'I want John.' 'What for?' says the old\r
-governor. 'What business is that of yours,' says the devil, getting\r
-mad,--'I want to use him.' 'Take him,' says the governor--and by the\r
-Lord, Flask, if the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before\r
-he got through with him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look\r
-sharp--ain't you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get\r
-the whale alongside."\r
-\r
-"I think I remember some such story as you were telling," said Flask,\r
-when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden\r
-towards the ship, "but I can't remember where."\r
-\r
-"Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soladoes? Did\r
-ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?"\r
-\r
-"No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me,\r
-Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was\r
-the same you say is now on board the Pequod?"\r
-\r
-"Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live\r
-for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see\r
-any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a\r
-latch-key to get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can\r
-crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?"\r
-\r
-"How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?"\r
-\r
-"Do you see that mainmast there?" pointing to the ship; "well, that's\r
-the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string\r
-along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that\r
-wouldn't begin to be Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation\r
-couldn't show hoops enough to make oughts enough."\r
-\r
-"But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you\r
-meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if\r
-he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going\r
-to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard--tell me\r
-that?\r
-\r
-"Give him a good ducking, anyhow."\r
-\r
-"But he'd crawl back."\r
-\r
-"Duck him again; and keep ducking him."\r
-\r
-"Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though--yes, and\r
-drown you--what then?"\r
-\r
-"I should like to see him try it; I'd give him such a pair of black eyes\r
-that he wouldn't dare to show his face in the admiral's cabin again for\r
-a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and\r
-hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil,\r
-Flask; so you suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of\r
-him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him and put him in\r
-double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping\r
-people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil\r
-kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor!"\r
-\r
-"Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?"\r
-\r
-"Do I suppose it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now\r
-to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious\r
-going on, I'll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say--Look\r
-here, Beelzebub, you don't do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord\r
-I'll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan,\r
-and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short\r
-off at the stump--do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds\r
-himself docked in that queer fashion, he'll sneak off without the poor\r
-satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs."\r
-\r
-"And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?"\r
-\r
-"Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;--what else?"\r
-\r
-"Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?"\r
-\r
-"Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship."\r
-\r
-The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where\r
-fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing\r
-him.\r
-\r
-"Didn't I tell you so?" said Flask; "yes, you'll soon see this right\r
-whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's."\r
-\r
-In good time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply\r
-leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of\r
-both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may\r
-well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go\r
-over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come\r
-back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep\r
-trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard,\r
-and then you will float light and right.\r
-\r
-In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the\r
-ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the\r
-case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off\r
-whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and\r
-hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is\r
-called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case,\r
-had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and\r
-the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of\r
-overburdening panniers.\r
-\r
-Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever\r
-and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own\r
-hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow;\r
-while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to\r
-blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish\r
-speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing\r
-things.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale's Head--Contrasted View.\r
-\r
-\r
-Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us\r
-join them, and lay together our own.\r
-\r
-Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right\r
-Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly\r
-hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all\r
-the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between\r
-them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this\r
-moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one\r
-to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like\r
-to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology\r
-than here?\r
-\r
-In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these\r
-heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain\r
-mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly\r
-lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold\r
-it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point\r
-of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is\r
-heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit,\r
-giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what\r
-the fishermen technically call a "grey-headed whale."\r
-\r
-Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads--namely, the two\r
-most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of\r
-the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you\r
-narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would\r
-fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the\r
-magnitude of the head.\r
-\r
-Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is\r
-plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more\r
-than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale's\r
-eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for\r
-yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects\r
-through your ears. You would find that you could only command some\r
-thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight;\r
-and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking\r
-straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not\r
-be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from\r
-behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the\r
-same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the\r
-front of a man--what, indeed, but his eyes?\r
-\r
-Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes\r
-are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to\r
-produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of\r
-the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of\r
-solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating\r
-two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the\r
-impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore,\r
-must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct\r
-picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and\r
-nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world\r
-from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the\r
-whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct\r
-windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's\r
-eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be\r
-remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.\r
-\r
-A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this\r
-visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a\r
-hint. So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing\r
-is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing\r
-whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience\r
-will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of\r
-things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively,\r
-and completely, to examine any two things--however large or however\r
-small--at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side\r
-by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two\r
-objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in\r
-order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to\r
-bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary\r
-consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes,\r
-in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more\r
-comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same\r
-moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one\r
-side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he\r
-can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able\r
-simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems\r
-in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this\r
-comparison.\r
-\r
-It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the\r
-extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when\r
-beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer\r
-frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly\r
-proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their\r
-divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.\r
-\r
-But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an\r
-entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads\r
-for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf\r
-whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so\r
-wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With\r
-respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed\r
-between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has\r
-an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered\r
-over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.\r
-\r
-Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the\r
-world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which\r
-is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of\r
-Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of\r
-cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of\r
-hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind?\r
-Subtilize it.\r
-\r
-Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant\r
-over the sperm whale's head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending\r
-by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not\r
-that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we\r
-might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But\r
-let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What\r
-a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling,\r
-lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as\r
-bridal satins.\r
-\r
-But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems\r
-like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one\r
-end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead,\r
-and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such,\r
-alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these\r
-spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold,\r
-when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there\r
-suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging\r
-straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a\r
-ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of\r
-sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his\r
-jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a\r
-reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon\r
-him.\r
-\r
-In most cases this lower jaw--being easily unhinged by a practised\r
-artist--is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting\r
-the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone\r
-with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,\r
-including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.\r
-\r
-With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an\r
-anchor; and when the proper time comes--some few days after the other\r
-work--Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists,\r
-are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances\r
-the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being\r
-rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag\r
-stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two\r
-teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled\r
-after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and\r
-piled away like joists for building houses.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale's Head--Contrasted View.\r
-\r
-\r
-Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's\r
-head.\r
-\r
-As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a\r
-Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);\r
-so, at a broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant\r
-resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an\r
-old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And\r
-in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with\r
-the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her\r
-progeny.\r
-\r
-But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different\r
-aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and\r
-look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head\r
-for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its\r
-sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,\r
-crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass--this green,\r
-barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the "crown," and the\r
-Southern fishers the "bonnet" of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes\r
-solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,\r
-with a bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live\r
-crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost\r
-sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the\r
-technical term "crown" also bestowed upon it; in which case you will\r
-take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a\r
-diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for\r
-him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very\r
-sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip!\r
-what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's\r
-measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout\r
-that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.\r
-\r
-A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.\r
-The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an\r
-important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes\r
-caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold,\r
-we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should\r
-take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the\r
-road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a\r
-pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while\r
-these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half\r
-vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a\r
-side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown\r
-bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily\r
-mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres,\r
-through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose\r
-intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through\r
-the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they\r
-stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves,\r
-hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age,\r
-as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this\r
-criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical\r
-probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater\r
-age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.\r
-\r
-In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies\r
-concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous\r
-"whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth;* another, "hogs' bristles"; a\r
-third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:\r
-"There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his\r
-upper CHOP, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth."\r
-\r
-\r
-*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or\r
-rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the\r
-upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these\r
-tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn\r
-countenance.\r
-\r
-\r
-As every one knows, these same "hogs' bristles," "fins," "whiskers,"\r
-"blinds," or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and\r
-other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has\r
-long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's time that the bone was\r
-in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those\r
-ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as\r
-you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we\r
-nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a\r
-tent spread over the same bone.\r
-\r
-But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing\r
-in the Right Whale's mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these\r
-colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think\r
-you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its\r
-thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest\r
-Turkey--the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the\r
-mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting\r
-it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I\r
-should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that\r
-amount of oil.\r
-\r
-Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started\r
-with--that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely\r
-different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale's there is no great\r
-well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a\r
-lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any\r
-of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a\r
-tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm\r
-Whale only one.\r
-\r
-Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie\r
-together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will\r
-not be very long in following.\r
-\r
-Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same\r
-he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem\r
-now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like\r
-placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the\r
-other head's expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident\r
-against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not\r
-this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in\r
-facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm\r
-Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.\r
-\r
-\r
-Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale's head, I would have\r
-you, as a sensible physiologist, simply--particularly remark its front\r
-aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate\r
-it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,\r
-intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged\r
-there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle\r
-this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of\r
-the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be\r
-found in all recorded history.\r
-\r
-You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,\r
-the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the\r
-water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably\r
-backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which\r
-receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely\r
-under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth\r
-were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has\r
-no external nose; and that what nose he has--his spout hole--is on the\r
-top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides\r
-of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front.\r
-Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm\r
-Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender\r
-prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider\r
-that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of\r
-the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you\r
-get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial\r
-development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad.\r
-Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise\r
-the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of\r
-the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy.\r
-In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the\r
-body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head;\r
-but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so\r
-thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not\r
-handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by\r
-the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though\r
-the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not\r
-think that any sensation lurks in it.\r
-\r
-Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen\r
-chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the\r
-sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming\r
-contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold\r
-there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest\r
-and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which\r
-would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By\r
-itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But\r
-supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that\r
-as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them,\r
-capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale,\r
-as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too,\r
-the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head\r
-altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out\r
-of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope;\r
-considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically\r
-occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there\r
-may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with\r
-the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and\r
-contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to\r
-which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.\r
-\r
-Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable\r
-wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a\r
-mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood\r
-is--by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest\r
-insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the\r
-specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this\r
-expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable\r
-braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant\r
-incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale\r
-stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic\r
-with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For\r
-unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist\r
-in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to\r
-encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell\r
-the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Lais?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.\r
-\r
-\r
-Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must\r
-know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated\r
-upon.\r
-\r
-Regarding the Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an\r
-inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower\r
-is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an\r
-unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the\r
-expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the\r
-forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two\r
-almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal\r
-wall of a thick tendinous substance.\r
-\r
-\r
-*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical\r
-mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a\r
-solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the\r
-steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both\r
-sides.\r
-\r
-\r
-The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb\r
-of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand\r
-infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole\r
-extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great\r
-Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is\r
-mystically carved in front, so the whale's vast plaited forehead forms\r
-innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his\r
-wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished\r
-with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun\r
-of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages;\r
-namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid,\r
-and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed\r
-in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly\r
-fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to\r
-concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the\r
-first thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A large whale's\r
-case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from\r
-unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and\r
-dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business\r
-of securing what you can.\r
-\r
-I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun\r
-was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not\r
-possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the\r
-lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale's\r
-case.\r
-\r
-It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale\r
-embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since--as\r
-has been elsewhere set forth--the head embraces one third of the whole\r
-length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for\r
-a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth\r
-of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's\r
-side.\r
-\r
-As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close\r
-to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti\r
-magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,\r
-untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its\r
-invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which\r
-is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by\r
-the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side,\r
-make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.\r
-\r
-Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and--in\r
-this particular instance--almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm\r
-Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.\r
-\r
-\r
-Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect\r
-posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the\r
-part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried\r
-with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts,\r
-travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that\r
-it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it\r
-is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down\r
-the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he\r
-lands on the summit of the head. There--still high elevated above the\r
-rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries--he seems some Turkish\r
-Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A\r
-short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches\r
-for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business\r
-he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,\r
-sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time\r
-this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like\r
-a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other\r
-end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three\r
-alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian,\r
-to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this\r
-pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun,\r
-till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the\r
-whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail\r
-of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted\r
-vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large\r
-tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until\r
-the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to\r
-ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun,\r
-until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.\r
-\r
-Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;\r
-several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a\r
-queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian,\r
-was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed\r
-hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the\r
-place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil\r
-One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular\r
-reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden,\r
-as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor\r
-Tashtego--like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,\r
-dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with\r
-a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!\r
-\r
-"Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first\r
-came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!" and putting one foot\r
-into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip\r
-itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost\r
-before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime,\r
-there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before\r
-lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea,\r
-as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only\r
-the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous\r
-depth to which he had sunk.\r
-\r
-At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing\r
-the whip--which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles--a\r
-sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all,\r
-one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with\r
-a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship\r
-reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook,\r
-upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be\r
-on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent\r
-motions of the head.\r
-\r
-"Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand\r
-holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he\r
-would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,\r
-rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the\r
-buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.\r
-\r
-"In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming home a cartridge\r
-there?--Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on\r
-top of his head? Avast, will ye!"\r
-\r
-"Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting of a\r
-rocket.\r
-\r
-Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass\r
-dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the\r
-suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering\r
-copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging--now over the\r
-sailors' heads, and now over the water--Daggoo, through a thick mist of\r
-spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,\r
-buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea!\r
-But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a naked figure\r
-with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen\r
-hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my\r
-brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the\r
-side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and\r
-no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now\r
-jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.\r
-\r
-"Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch\r
-overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust\r
-upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust\r
-forth from the grass over a grave.\r
-\r
-"Both! both!--it is both!"--cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and\r
-soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and\r
-with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the\r
-waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was\r
-long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.\r
-\r
-Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after\r
-the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made\r
-side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then\r
-dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards,\r
-and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first\r
-thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that\r
-was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;--he had\r
-thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a\r
-somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in\r
-the good old way--head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was\r
-doing as well as could be expected.\r
-\r
-And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,\r
-the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully\r
-accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently\r
-hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.\r
-Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,\r
-riding and rowing.\r
-\r
-I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to\r
-seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either\r
-seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore; an accident\r
-which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the\r
-Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the\r
-Sperm Whale's well.\r
-\r
-But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought\r
-the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and\r
-most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of\r
-a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at\r
-all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been\r
-nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense\r
-tendinous wall of the well--a double welded, hammered substance, as I\r
-have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which\r
-sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this\r
-substance was in the present instance materially counteracted by the\r
-other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank\r
-very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance\r
-for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it\r
-was a running delivery, so it was.\r
-\r
-Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious\r
-perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant\r
-spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber\r
-and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be\r
-recalled--the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey\r
-in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that\r
-leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.\r
-How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and\r
-sweetly perished there?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.\r
-\r
-\r
-To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this\r
-Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as\r
-yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for\r
-Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar,\r
-or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the\r
-Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats\r
-of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces\r
-of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the\r
-modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and\r
-his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the\r
-phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore,\r
-though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these\r
-two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things;\r
-I achieve what I can.\r
-\r
-Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.\r
-He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most\r
-conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and\r
-finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its\r
-entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect\r
-the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,\r
-cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable\r
-to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in\r
-keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose\r
-from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless,\r
-Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so\r
-stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were\r
-hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A\r
-nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical\r
-voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble\r
-conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a\r
-nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon\r
-obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.\r
-\r
-In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to\r
-be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This\r
-aspect is sublime.\r
-\r
-In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the\r
-morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a\r
-touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the\r
-elephant's brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as\r
-that great golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees.\r
-It signifies--"God: done this day by my hand." But in most creatures,\r
-nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine\r
-land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like\r
-Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the\r
-eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all\r
-above them in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered\r
-thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the\r
-snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and\r
-mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified,\r
-that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the\r
-dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living\r
-nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is\r
-revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper;\r
-nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with\r
-riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men.\r
-Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way\r
-viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you\r
-plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the\r
-forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of genius.\r
-\r
-But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written\r
-a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his\r
-doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his\r
-pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale\r
-been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by\r
-their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile,\r
-because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no\r
-tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of\r
-protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure\r
-back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly\r
-enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted\r
-hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale\r
-shall lord it.\r
-\r
-Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is\r
-no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's\r
-face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing\r
-fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could\r
-not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle\r
-meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of\r
-the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you\r
-can.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 80. The Nut.\r
-\r
-\r
-If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his\r
-brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.\r
-\r
-In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet\r
-in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as\r
-the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level\r
-base. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined plane is\r
-angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent\r
-mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to\r
-bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater--in\r
-another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in\r
-depth--reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at\r
-least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden\r
-away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the\r
-amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it\r
-secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny\r
-that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance\r
-of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange\r
-folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more\r
-in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part\r
-of him as the seat of his intelligence.\r
-\r
-It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in\r
-the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his\r
-true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The\r
-whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common\r
-world.\r
-\r
-If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view\r
-of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its\r
-resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from\r
-the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down\r
-to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would\r
-involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on\r
-one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say--This\r
-man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations,\r
-considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and\r
-power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most\r
-exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.\r
-\r
-But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain, you\r
-deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea\r
-for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine,\r
-you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung\r
-necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the\r
-skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely\r
-undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it\r
-the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once\r
-pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with\r
-the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the\r
-beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have\r
-omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the\r
-cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's\r
-character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel\r
-your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine\r
-never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the\r
-firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.\r
-\r
-Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial\r
-cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra\r
-the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being\r
-eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As\r
-it passes through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but\r
-for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course,\r
-this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance--the\r
-spinal cord--as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain.\r
-And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's\r
-cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost\r
-equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be\r
-unreasonable to survey and map out the whale's spine phrenologically?\r
-For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his\r
-brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative\r
-magnitude of his spinal cord.\r
-\r
-But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I\r
-would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the\r
-Sperm Whale's hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one\r
-of the larger vertebrae, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer\r
-convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this\r
-high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale.\r
-And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to\r
-know.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.\r
-\r
-\r
-The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick\r
-De Deer, master, of Bremen.\r
-\r
-At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and\r
-Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide\r
-intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with\r
-their flag in the Pacific.\r
-\r
-For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.\r
-While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a\r
-boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the\r
-bows instead of the stern.\r
-\r
-"What has he in his hand there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something\r
-wavingly held by the German. "Impossible!--a lamp-feeder!"\r
-\r
-"Not that," said Stubb, "no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's\r
-coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big\r
-tin can there alongside of him?--that's his boiling water. Oh! he's all\r
-right, is the Yarman."\r
-\r
-"Go along with you," cried Flask, "it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.\r
-He's out of oil, and has come a-begging."\r
-\r
-However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the\r
-whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old\r
-proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing\r
-really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did\r
-indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.\r
-\r
-As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all\r
-heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German\r
-soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately\r
-turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some\r
-remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in\r
-profound darkness--his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a\r
-single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding\r
-by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically\r
-called a CLEAN one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of\r
-Jungfrau or the Virgin.\r
-\r
-His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his\r
-ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the\r
-mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that\r
-without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed\r
-round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.\r
-\r
-Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German\r
-boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's\r
-keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger,\r
-they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind,\r
-rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness.\r
-They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great\r
-wide parchment upon the sea.\r
-\r
-Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,\r
-humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as\r
-by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted\r
-with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged\r
-to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for\r
-such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck\r
-to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him,\r
-because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one,\r
-like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was\r
-short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush,\r
-and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean\r
-commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried\r
-extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.\r
-\r
-"Who's got some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the stomach-ache, I'm\r
-afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse\r
-winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul wind\r
-I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before?\r
-it must be, he's lost his tiller."\r
-\r
-As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck\r
-load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her\r
-way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly\r
-turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious\r
-wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost\r
-that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.\r
-\r
-"Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded\r
-arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.\r
-\r
-"Mind he don't sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "Give way, or the\r
-German will have him."\r
-\r
-With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this\r
-one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most\r
-valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were\r
-going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit\r
-for the time. At this juncture the Pequod's keels had shot by the three\r
-German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick's\r
-boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign\r
-rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so\r
-nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they\r
-could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite\r
-confident that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding\r
-gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.\r
-\r
-"The ungracious and ungrateful dog!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks and dares\r
-me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!"--then\r
-in his old intense whisper--"Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!"\r
-\r
-"I tell ye what it is, men"--cried Stubb to his crew--"it's against\r
-my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villainous\r
-Yarman--Pull--won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do\r
-ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come,\r
-why don't some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an\r
-anchor overboard--we don't budge an inch--we're becalmed. Halloo, here's\r
-grass growing in the boat's bottom--and by the Lord, the mast there's\r
-budding. This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of\r
-it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?"\r
-\r
-"Oh! see the suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down--"What\r
-a hump--Oh, DO pile on the beef--lays like a log! Oh! my lads, DO\r
-spring--slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads--baked\r
-clams and muffins--oh, DO, DO, spring,--he's a hundred barreller--don't\r
-lose him now--don't oh, DON'T!--see that Yarman--Oh, won't ye pull for\r
-your duff, my lads--such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm?\r
-There goes three thousand dollars, men!--a bank!--a whole bank! The bank\r
-of England!--Oh, DO, DO, DO!--What's that Yarman about now?"\r
-\r
-At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the\r
-advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view\r
-of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically\r
-accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.\r
-\r
-"The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb. "Pull now, men, like fifty\r
-thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d'ye say,\r
-Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces\r
-for the honour of old Gayhead? What d'ye say?"\r
-\r
-"I say, pull like god-dam,"--cried the Indian.\r
-\r
-Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's\r
-three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,\r
-momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of\r
-the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up\r
-proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry\r
-of, "There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with\r
-the Yarman! Sail over him!"\r
-\r
-But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all\r
-their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not\r
-a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade\r
-of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free\r
-his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to\r
-capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;--that was\r
-a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a\r
-mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter.\r
-An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's\r
-immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the\r
-foaming swell that he made.\r
-\r
-It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was\r
-now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual\r
-tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of\r
-fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight,\r
-and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the\r
-sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I\r
-seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the\r
-air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a\r
-voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear\r
-of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him;\r
-he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle,\r
-and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his\r
-amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to\r
-appal the stoutest man who so pitied.\r
-\r
-Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's\r
-boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick\r
-chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart,\r
-ere the last chance would for ever escape.\r
-\r
-But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three\r
-tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang to their feet,\r
-and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and\r
-darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket\r
-irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and white-fire! The\r
-three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped\r
-the German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled\r
-harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.\r
-\r
-"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing\r
-glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up presently--all\r
-right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--relieve\r
-distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a\r
-sunbeam! Hurrah!--Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad\r
-cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on\r
-a plain--makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that\r
-way; and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a\r
-hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy\r
-Jones--all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale\r
-carries the everlasting mail!"\r
-\r
-But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he\r
-tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round\r
-the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;\r
-while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would\r
-soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they\r
-caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at\r
-last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of\r
-the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue--the\r
-gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three\r
-sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound,\r
-for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more\r
-line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have\r
-been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding on," as it\r
-is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from\r
-the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising\r
-again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril\r
-of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the\r
-best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken\r
-whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the\r
-enormous surface of him--in a full grown sperm whale something less than\r
-2000 square feet--the pressure of the water is immense. We all know\r
-what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even\r
-here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale,\r
-bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at\r
-least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated\r
-it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns,\r
-and stores, and men on board.\r
-\r
-As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down\r
-into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any\r
-sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;\r
-what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and\r
-placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in\r
-agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.\r
-Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan\r
-was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and\r
-to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was\r
-once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?\r
-or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot\r
-hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as\r
-straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;\r
-he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh!\r
-that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength\r
-of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the\r
-mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!\r
-\r
-In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats\r
-sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad\r
-enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the\r
-wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!\r
-\r
-"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly\r
-vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by\r
-magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every\r
-oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part\r
-from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce\r
-upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are\r
-scared from it into the sea.\r
-\r
-"Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."\r
-\r
-The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth\r
-could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all\r
-dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two\r
-ship's lengths of the hunters.\r
-\r
-His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals\r
-there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby\r
-when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in\r
-certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities\r
-it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so\r
-that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly\r
-drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is\r
-heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance\r
-below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant\r
-streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant\r
-and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and\r
-bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will\r
-flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible\r
-hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously\r
-drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him,\r
-they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept\r
-continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only\r
-at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the\r
-air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him\r
-had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was\r
-untouched.\r
-\r
-As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of\r
-his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly\r
-revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were\r
-beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the\r
-noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes\r
-had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.\r
-But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his\r
-blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the\r
-gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the\r
-solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.\r
-Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely\r
-discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the\r
-flank.\r
-\r
-"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."\r
-\r
-"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"\r
-\r
-But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an\r
-ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than\r
-sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury\r
-blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews\r
-all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the\r
-bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by\r
-loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had\r
-made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,\r
-then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up\r
-the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most\r
-piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water\r
-is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled\r
-melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the\r
-ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale.\r
-\r
-Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body\r
-showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,\r
-by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so\r
-that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a\r
-few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when\r
-the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was\r
-strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain\r
-that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the\r
-bottom.\r
-\r
-It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,\r
-the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh,\r
-on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of\r
-harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales,\r
-with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any\r
-kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been\r
-some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for\r
-the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a\r
-lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron,\r
-the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And\r
-when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before\r
-America was discovered.\r
-\r
-What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous\r
-cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further\r
-discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways\r
-to the sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink.\r
-However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the\r
-last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship\r
-would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the\r
-body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such was\r
-the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and\r
-cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime\r
-everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the\r
-deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship\r
-groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and\r
-cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation.\r
-In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable\r
-fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low\r
-had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all\r
-approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to\r
-the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.\r
-\r
-"Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such\r
-a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go\r
-for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run\r
-one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains."\r
-\r
-"Knife? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's heavy\r
-hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing\r
-at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were\r
-given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific\r
-snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.\r
-\r
-Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm\r
-Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately\r
-accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great\r
-buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the\r
-surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and\r
-broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their\r
-bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that\r
-this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so\r
-sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it\r
-is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with\r
-noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of\r
-life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant\r
-heroes do sometimes sink.\r
-\r
-Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this\r
-accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty\r
-Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in\r
-no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale;\r
-his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this\r
-incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances\r
-where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale\r
-again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this\r
-is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious\r
-magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could\r
-hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among\r
-the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they\r
-fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone\r
-down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.\r
-\r
-It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from\r
-the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering\r
-her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back,\r
-belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its\r
-incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so\r
-similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is often\r
-mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in\r
-valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail,\r
-made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to\r
-leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.\r
-\r
-Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.\r
-\r
-\r
-There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true\r
-method.\r
-\r
-The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up\r
-to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its\r
-great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many\r
-great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other\r
-have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection\r
-that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a\r
-fraternity.\r
-\r
-The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and\r
-to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale\r
-attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those\r
-were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to\r
-succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one\r
-knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda,\r
-the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as\r
-Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince\r
-of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered\r
-and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely\r
-achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this\r
-Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this\r
-Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,\r
-in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton\r
-of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to\r
-be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans\r
-took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What\r
-seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this:\r
-it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.\r
-\r
-Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed\r
-to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and\r
-the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many\r
-old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and\r
-often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a\r
-dragon of the sea," saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;\r
-in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it\r
-would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but\r
-encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle\r
-with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a\r
-Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly\r
-up to a whale.\r
-\r
-Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though\r
-the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely\r
-represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted\r
-on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance\r
-of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;\r
-and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have\r
-crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal\r
-ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;\r
-bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible\r
-with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to\r
-hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In\r
-fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will\r
-fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by\r
-name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and\r
-both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or\r
-fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even\r
-a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we\r
-harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order\r
-of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honourable\r
-company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a\r
-whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with\r
-disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are\r
-much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.\r
-\r
-Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long\r
-remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that\r
-antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer of rejoicing good\r
-deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether\r
-that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere\r
-appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed,\r
-from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary\r
-whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I\r
-claim him for one of our clan.\r
-\r
-But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of\r
-Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more\r
-ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly\r
-they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?\r
-\r
-Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole\r
-roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal\r
-kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing\r
-short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now\r
-to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one\r
-of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine\r
-Vishnoo himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten\r
-earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.\r
-When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate\r
-the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to\r
-Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books,\r
-whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before\r
-beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained\r
-something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these\r
-Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became\r
-incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths,\r
-rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even\r
-as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?\r
-\r
-Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll\r
-for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.\r
-\r
-\r
-Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the\r
-preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical\r
-story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks\r
-and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,\r
-equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the\r
-dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those\r
-traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.\r
-\r
-One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew\r
-story was this:--He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,\r
-embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented\r
-Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head--a peculiarity only true\r
-with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the\r
-varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this\r
-saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small.\r
-But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not\r
-necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the\r
-whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And\r
-this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the\r
-Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and\r
-comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have\r
-ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right\r
-Whale is toothless.\r
-\r
-Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his\r
-want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in\r
-reference to his incarcerated body and the whale's gastric juices. But\r
-this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist\r
-supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a\r
-DEAD whale--even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned\r
-their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has\r
-been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was\r
-thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape\r
-to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head;\r
-and, I would add, possibly called "The Whale," as some craft are\r
-nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there\r
-been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned\r
-in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver--an inflated bag\r
-of wind--which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a\r
-watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But\r
-he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I\r
-remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean\r
-Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days'\r
-journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three\r
-days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast.\r
-How is that?\r
-\r
-But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that\r
-short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the\r
-way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through\r
-the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the\r
-Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete\r
-circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris\r
-waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to\r
-swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope\r
-at so early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that great\r
-headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make\r
-modern history a liar.\r
-\r
-But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his\r
-foolish pride of reason--a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing\r
-that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the\r
-sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and\r
-abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a\r
-Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh\r
-via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of\r
-the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly\r
-enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And\r
-some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages,\r
-speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour of Jonah, in which Mosque was\r
-a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.\r
-\r
-\r
-To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are\r
-anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an\r
-analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it\r
-to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly\r
-be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are\r
-hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to\r
-make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing\r
-his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau\r
-disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling\r
-under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the\r
-unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from\r
-the craft's bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some\r
-particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.\r
-\r
-Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to\r
-them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight,\r
-as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.\r
-\r
-Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great\r
-exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the\r
-stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal\r
-flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the\r
-planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became\r
-imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But\r
-to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and\r
-furious. What then remained?\r
-\r
-Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and\r
-countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,\r
-none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small\r
-sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It\r
-is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand\r
-fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is\r
-accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme\r
-headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve\r
-feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon,\r
-and also of a lighter material--pine. It is furnished with a small rope\r
-called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to\r
-the hand after darting.\r
-\r
-But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though\r
-the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it\r
-is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful,\r
-on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as\r
-compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a\r
-general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any\r
-pitchpoling comes into play.\r
-\r
-Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and\r
-equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel\r
-in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the\r
-flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.\r
-Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its\r
-length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up\r
-the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his\r
-grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before\r
-his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering\r
-him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby\r
-elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his\r
-palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler,\r
-balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless\r
-impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming\r
-distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of\r
-sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.\r
-\r
-"That drove the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb. "'Tis July's immortal\r
-Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old\r
-Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then,\r
-Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we'd drink\r
-round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch in the\r
-spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the\r
-living stuff."\r
-\r
-Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated,\r
-the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful\r
-leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is\r
-slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and\r
-mutely watches the monster die.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.\r
-\r
-\r
-That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions of ages\r
-before--the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea,\r
-and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so\r
-many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,\r
-thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the\r
-whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings--that all this should\r
-be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter\r
-minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D.\r
-1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings\r
-are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour--this is surely a\r
-noteworthy thing.\r
-\r
-Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items\r
-contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their\r
-gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is\r
-combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod\r
-might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface.\r
-But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular\r
-lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the\r
-disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for\r
-his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree\r
-breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm\r
-Whale's mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and\r
-what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he\r
-breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.\r
-\r
-If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function\r
-indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a\r
-certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the\r
-blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I\r
-shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.\r
-Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be\r
-aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not\r
-fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then\r
-live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the\r
-case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full\r
-hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or\r
-so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has\r
-no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine\r
-he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of\r
-vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are\r
-completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more,\r
-a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in\r
-him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus\r
-supply of drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs.\r
-The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the\r
-supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more\r
-cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of\r
-that leviathan in HAVING HIS SPOUTINGS OUT, as the fishermen phrase\r
-it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the\r
-Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform\r
-with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and\r
-jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he\r
-rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to\r
-a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that\r
-he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his regular\r
-allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he\r
-finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however, that\r
-in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one\r
-they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his\r
-spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere\r
-descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the\r
-whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For\r
-not by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing\r
-a thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O\r
-hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!\r
-\r
-In man, breathing is incessantly going on--one breath only serving\r
-for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to\r
-attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the\r
-Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.\r
-\r
-It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if\r
-it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then\r
-I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell\r
-seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all\r
-answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged\r
-with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of\r
-smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout--whether it be water or\r
-whether it be vapour--no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on\r
-this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper\r
-olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no\r
-Cologne-water in the sea.\r
-\r
-Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting\r
-canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal--is furnished\r
-with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of\r
-air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice;\r
-unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles,\r
-he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say?\r
-Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to\r
-this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a\r
-living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!\r
-\r
-Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it\r
-is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,\r
-horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little\r
-to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down\r
-in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether this\r
-gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the\r
-Sperm Whale is the mere vapour of the exhaled breath, or whether that\r
-exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and\r
-discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly\r
-communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this\r
-is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because\r
-the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he\r
-accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath\r
-the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if\r
-you regard him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find\r
-that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods\r
-of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.\r
-\r
-But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!\r
-You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not\r
-tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to\r
-settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the\r
-knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in\r
-it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.\r
-\r
-The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping\r
-it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it,\r
-when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view\r
-of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading\r
-all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really\r
-perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are\r
-not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you know that they\r
-are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole\r
-fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale's head? For\r
-even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with\r
-his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even then,\r
-the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under\r
-a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with\r
-rain.\r
-\r
-Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the\r
-precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering\r
-into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to\r
-this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into\r
-slight contact with the outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, which will\r
-often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of\r
-the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer\r
-contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view,\r
-or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.\r
-Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to\r
-evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt\r
-it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.\r
-The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let\r
-this deadly spout alone.\r
-\r
-Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My\r
-hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides\r
-other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations\r
-touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale;\r
-I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed\r
-fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other\r
-whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am\r
-convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as\r
-Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes\r
-up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep\r
-thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the\r
-curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there,\r
-a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my\r
-head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,\r
-after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon;\r
-this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.\r
-\r
-And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to\r
-behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild\r
-head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable\r
-contemplations, and that vapour--as you will sometimes see it--glorified\r
-by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.\r
-For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate\r
-vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my\r
-mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a\r
-heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;\r
-but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts\r
-of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this\r
-combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who\r
-regards them both with equal eye.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 86. The Tail.\r
-\r
-\r
-Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,\r
-and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I\r
-celebrate a tail.\r
-\r
-Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of\r
-the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises\r
-upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The\r
-compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms\r
-or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.\r
-At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways\r
-recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In\r
-no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in\r
-the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the\r
-full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.\r
-\r
-The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut\r
-into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:--upper,\r
-middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are\r
-long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running\r
-crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as\r
-anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman\r
-walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin\r
-course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful\r
-relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the\r
-great strength of the masonry.\r
-\r
-But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough,\r
-the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of\r
-muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins\r
-and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and\r
-largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent\r
-measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.\r
-Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.\r
-\r
-Nor does this--its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful\r
-flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through\r
-a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most\r
-appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony,\r
-but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,\r
-strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that\r
-all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its\r
-charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the\r
-naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the\r
-man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God\r
-the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever\r
-they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,\r
-hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most\r
-successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all\r
-brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine\r
-one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form\r
-the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.\r
-\r
-Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether\r
-wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it\r
-be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no\r
-fairy's arm can transcend it.\r
-\r
-Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for\r
-progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;\r
-Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.\r
-\r
-First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in\r
-a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never\r
-wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the\r
-whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled\r
-forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this\r
-which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when\r
-furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.\r
-\r
-Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only\r
-fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his\r
-conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In\r
-striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the\r
-blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed\r
-air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply\r
-irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only\r
-salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the\r
-opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale\r
-boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed\r
-plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most\r
-serious result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the\r
-fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one strips off\r
-a frock, and the hole is stopped.\r
-\r
-Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale\r
-the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect\r
-there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the\r
-elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of\r
-sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft\r
-slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface\r
-of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor,\r
-whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch!\r
-Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of\r
-Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with\r
-low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their\r
-zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not\r
-possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet\r
-another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk\r
-and extracted the dart.\r
-\r
-Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the\r
-middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence\r
-of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a\r
-hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of\r
-his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the\r
-thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great\r
-gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapour\r
-from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was\r
-the smoke from the touch-hole.\r
-\r
-Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes\r
-lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely\r
-out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into\r
-the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are\r
-tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they\r
-downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime BREACH--somewhere\r
-else to be described--this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the\r
-grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless\r
-profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the\r
-highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth\r
-his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in\r
-gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in\r
-the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the\r
-archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that\r
-crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east,\r
-all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with\r
-peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment\r
-of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of\r
-the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African\r
-elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout\r
-of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of\r
-antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the\r
-profoundest silence.\r
-\r
-The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the\r
-elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk\r
-of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two\r
-opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they\r
-respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier\r
-to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the\r
-stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant's trunk were as\r
-the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash\r
-of the sperm whale's ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have\r
-one after the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews\r
-into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale\r
-and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the\r
-elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to\r
-the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious\r
-similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant\r
-will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it,\r
-jet it forth in a stream.\r
-\r
-\r
-The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability\r
-to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they\r
-would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an\r
-extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures,\r
-that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason\r
-signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods\r
-intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other\r
-motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and\r
-unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may,\r
-then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know\r
-not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more,\r
-how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back\r
-parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I\r
-cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about\r
-his face, I say again he has no face.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.\r
-\r
-\r
-The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from\r
-the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia.\r
-In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of\r
-Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a\r
-vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia,\r
-and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded\r
-oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports\r
-for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the\r
-straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels\r
-bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.\r
-\r
-Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing\r
-midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green\r
-promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond\r
-to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and\r
-considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels,\r
-and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental\r
-sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such\r
-treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the\r
-appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping\r
-western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied\r
-with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the\r
-Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these\r
-Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from\r
-the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries\r
-past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra\r
-and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while\r
-they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce\r
-their claim to more solid tribute.\r
-\r
-Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among\r
-the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the\r
-vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the\r
-point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they\r
-have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these\r
-corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present\r
-day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in\r
-those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.\r
-\r
-With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these\r
-straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and\r
-thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and\r
-there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and\r
-gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there.\r
-By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the\r
-known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending\r
-upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled\r
-in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the\r
-sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most\r
-reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.\r
-\r
-But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew\r
-drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now,\r
-the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs\r
-no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the\r
-whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be\r
-transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries\r
-no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a\r
-whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with\r
-utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She\r
-carries years' water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which,\r
-when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to\r
-drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from\r
-the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may\r
-have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score\r
-of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted\r
-one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like\r
-themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had\r
-come; they would only answer--"Well, boys, here's the ark!"\r
-\r
-Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of\r
-Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of\r
-the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an\r
-excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more\r
-and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and\r
-admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the\r
-land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils\r
-the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was\r
-descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game\r
-hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the\r
-customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of\r
-singular magnificence saluted us.\r
-\r
-But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which\r
-of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales,\r
-instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in\r
-former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes\r
-embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if\r
-numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual\r
-assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into\r
-such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the\r
-best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months\r
-together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly\r
-saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.\r
-\r
-Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and\r
-forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon,\r
-a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the\r
-noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right\r
-Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft\r
-drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the\r
-Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually\r
-rising and falling away to leeward.\r
-\r
-Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of\r
-the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the\r
-air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed\r
-like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried\r
-of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.\r
-\r
-As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,\r
-accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in\r
-their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain;\r
-even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through\r
-the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and\r
-swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.\r
-\r
-Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers\r
-handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their\r
-yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that\r
-chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy\r
-into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their\r
-number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby\r
-Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped\r
-white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with\r
-stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans\r
-before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly\r
-directing attention to something in our wake.\r
-\r
-Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.\r
-It seemed formed of detached white vapours, rising and falling something\r
-like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and\r
-go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling\r
-his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole,\r
-crying, "Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the\r
-sails;--Malays, sir, and after us!"\r
-\r
-As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should\r
-fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot\r
-pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift\r
-Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very\r
-kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to\r
-her own chosen pursuit,--mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they\r
-were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his\r
-forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the\r
-bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed\r
-his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in\r
-which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that\r
-gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that\r
-same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end;\r
-and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and\r
-inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their\r
-curses;--when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's\r
-brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some\r
-stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm\r
-thing from its place.\r
-\r
-But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and\r
-when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the\r
-Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra\r
-side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the\r
-harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining\r
-upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained\r
-upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at\r
-length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them;\r
-and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But\r
-no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm\r
-Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,--though\r
-as yet a mile in their rear,--than they rallied again, and forming\r
-in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like\r
-flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.\r
-\r
-Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and\r
-after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase,\r
-when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating\r
-token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange\r
-perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive\r
-it in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns\r
-in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now\r
-broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus' elephants in the\r
-Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation.\r
-In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly\r
-swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they\r
-plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was still more\r
-strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed\r
-as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the\r
-sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over\r
-the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced\r
-such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic\r
-of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of\r
-thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a\r
-solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded\r
-together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at the\r
-slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,\r
-trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best,\r
-therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales\r
-before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not\r
-infinitely outdone by the madness of men.\r
-\r
-Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,\r
-yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor\r
-retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in\r
-those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one\r
-lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time,\r
-Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray\r
-in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight\r
-for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the\r
-whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and\r
-indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present\r
-one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift\r
-monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid\r
-adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.\r
-\r
-As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of\r
-speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we\r
-thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by\r
-the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was\r
-like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer\r
-through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what\r
-moment it may be locked in and crushed.\r
-\r
-But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off\r
-from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away\r
-from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the\r
-time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our\r
-way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time\r
-to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted\r
-duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the\r
-shouting part of the business. "Out of the way, Commodore!" cried one,\r
-to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface,\r
-and for an instant threatened to swamp us. "Hard down with your tail,\r
-there!" cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed\r
-calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.\r
-\r
-All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented\r
-by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood\r
-of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each\r
-other's grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then\r
-attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line\r
-being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly\r
-among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales\r
-are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm\r
-whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must\r
-kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing\r
-them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it\r
-is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat\r
-was furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully\r
-darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the\r
-enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like\r
-malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the\r
-act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one\r
-of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it\r
-away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from\r
-under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we\r
-stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for\r
-the time.\r
-\r
-It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were\r
-it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way greatly\r
-diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from the\r
-circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that\r
-when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways\r
-vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we\r
-glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if\r
-from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here\r
-the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard\r
-but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth\r
-satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture\r
-thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now\r
-in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every\r
-commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of\r
-the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight\r
-or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of\r
-horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic\r
-circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have\r
-gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing\r
-whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no\r
-possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for\r
-a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only\r
-admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake,\r
-we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women\r
-and children of this routed host.\r
-\r
-Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving\r
-outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in\r
-any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by\r
-the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square\r
-miles. At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might be\r
-deceptive--spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that\r
-seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this\r
-circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely\r
-locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the\r
-herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its\r
-stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way\r
-innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller\r
-whales--now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the\r
-lake--evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still\r
-becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household\r
-dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and\r
-touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly\r
-domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched\r
-their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the\r
-time refrained from darting it.\r
-\r
-But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still\r
-stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended\r
-in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the\r
-whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to\r
-become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth\r
-exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly\r
-and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different\r
-lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still\r
-spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the\r
-young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if\r
-we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their\r
-sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little\r
-infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might\r
-have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in\r
-girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet\r
-recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the\r
-maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final\r
-spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate\r
-side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the\r
-plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign\r
-parts.\r
-\r
-"Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; "him fast! him\r
-fast!--Who line him! Who struck?--Two whale; one big, one little!"\r
-\r
-"What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck.\r
-\r
-"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down.\r
-\r
-As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of\r
-fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows\r
-the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the\r
-air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame\r
-Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not\r
-seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with\r
-the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that\r
-the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas\r
-seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan\r
-amours in the deep.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike\r
-most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation\r
-which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a\r
-time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and\r
-Jacob:--a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously\r
-situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves\r
-extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a\r
-nursing whale are cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk\r
-and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet\r
-and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.\r
-When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute MORE HOMINUM.\r
-\r
-\r
-And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations\r
-and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and\r
-fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled\r
-in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of\r
-my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and\r
-while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and\r
-deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic\r
-spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,\r
-still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or\r
-possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of\r
-room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight\r
-of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro\r
-across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is\r
-sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful\r
-and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or\r
-maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled\r
-cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again.\r
-A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not\r
-effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along\r
-with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of\r
-the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone\r
-mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay\r
-wherever he went.\r
-\r
-But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle\r
-enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to\r
-inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the\r
-intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that\r
-by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had\r
-become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run\r
-away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope\r
-attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the\r
-harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose\r
-from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning\r
-through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and\r
-tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own\r
-comrades.\r
-\r
-This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their\r
-stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake\r
-began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted\r
-by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to\r
-heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished;\r
-in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central\r
-circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was\r
-departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the\r
-tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in\r
-Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre,\r
-as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck\r
-and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.\r
-\r
-"Oars! Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm--"gripe your\r
-oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off,\r
-you Queequeg--the whale there!--prick him!--hit him! Stand up--stand\r
-up, and stay so! Spring, men--pull, men; never mind their backs--scrape\r
-them!--scrape away!"\r
-\r
-The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a\r
-narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor\r
-we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly,\r
-and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many\r
-similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had\r
-just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales,\r
-all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply\r
-purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while standing in the bows\r
-to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by\r
-the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close\r
-by.\r
-\r
-Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon\r
-resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having\r
-clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their\r
-onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but\r
-the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales\r
-might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had\r
-killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which\r
-are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand,\r
-are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to\r
-mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should\r
-the boats of any other ship draw near.\r
-\r
-The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious\r
-saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less fish. Of all the\r
-drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for\r
-the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other\r
-craft than the Pequod.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.\r
-\r
-\r
-The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm\r
-Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those\r
-vast aggregations.\r
-\r
-Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must\r
-have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are\r
-occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.\r
-Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those\r
-composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young\r
-vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.\r
-\r
-In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a\r
-male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces\r
-his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his\r
-ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about\r
-over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces\r
-and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and\r
-his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest\r
-leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not\r
-more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are\r
-comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen\r
-yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the\r
-whole they are hereditarily entitled to EMBONPOINT.\r
-\r
-It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent\r
-ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely\r
-search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower\r
-of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from\r
-spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all\r
-unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and\r
-down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental\r
-waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other\r
-excessive temperature of the year.\r
-\r
-When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange\r
-suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his\r
-interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming\r
-that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies,\r
-with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!\r
-High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be\r
-permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the\r
-Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed;\r
-for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the\r
-most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales,\r
-who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with\r
-their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving\r
-for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not\r
-a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,--furrowed\r
-heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and\r
-dislocated mouths.\r
-\r
-But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at\r
-the first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch\r
-that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and\r
-revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario,\r
-like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.\r
-Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give\r
-chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish\r
-of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the\r
-sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must\r
-take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For\r
-like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord\r
-Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so,\r
-being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the\r
-world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour\r
-of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends\r
-her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated\r
-Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our\r
-Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life,\r
-forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old\r
-soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his\r
-prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.\r
-\r
-Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so\r
-is the lord and master of that school technically known as the\r
-schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably\r
-satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad\r
-inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title,\r
-schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed\r
-upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first\r
-thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of\r
-Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that\r
-famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of\r
-those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.\r
-\r
-The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale\r
-betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm\r
-Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale--as a solitary Leviathan is\r
-called--proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone,\r
-he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to\r
-wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though\r
-she keeps so many moody secrets.\r
-\r
-The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously\r
-mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while\r
-those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or\r
-forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious\r
-of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;\r
-excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,\r
-and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.\r
-\r
-The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like\r
-a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,\r
-tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no\r
-prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous\r
-lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though,\r
-and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in\r
-quest of settlements, that is, harems.\r
-\r
-Another point of difference between the male and female schools is\r
-still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a\r
-Forty-barrel-bull--poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike\r
-a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with\r
-every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as\r
-themselves to fall a prey.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.\r
-\r
-\r
-The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,\r
-necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale\r
-fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.\r
-\r
-It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,\r
-a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed\r
-and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised\r
-many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For\r
-example,--after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale,\r
-the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and\r
-drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a\r
-calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus\r
-the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between\r
-the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,\r
-undisputed law applicable to all cases.\r
-\r
-Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative\r
-enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in\r
-A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling\r
-law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and\r
-lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse\r
-comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of\r
-the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's\r
-Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing,\r
-or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.\r
-\r
-I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.\r
-\r
-II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.\r
-\r
-But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable\r
-brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to\r
-expound it.\r
-\r
-First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast,\r
-when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all\r
-controllable by the occupant or occupants,--a mast, an oar, a nine-inch\r
-cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.\r
-Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other\r
-recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly\r
-evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their\r
-intention so to do.\r
-\r
-These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen\r
-themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks--the\r
-Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and\r
-honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases,\r
-where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim\r
-possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But\r
-others are by no means so scrupulous.\r
-\r
-Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated\r
-in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of\r
-a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had\r
-succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of\r
-their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat\r
-itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up\r
-with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it\r
-before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were\r
-remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs'\r
-teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done,\r
-he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained\r
-attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the\r
-plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line,\r
-harpoons, and boat.\r
-\r
-Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was\r
-the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on\r
-to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con.\r
-case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife's\r
-viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in\r
-the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to\r
-recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he\r
-then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally\r
-harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the\r
-great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet\r
-abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore\r
-when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that\r
-subsequent gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have\r
-been found sticking in her.\r
-\r
-Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale\r
-and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.\r
-\r
-These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very\r
-learned Judge in set terms decided, to wit,--That as for the boat, he\r
-awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it\r
-to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale,\r
-harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because\r
-it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons\r
-and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish)\r
-acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards\r
-took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took\r
-the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.\r
-\r
-A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might\r
-possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the\r
-matter, the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws\r
-previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in\r
-the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,\r
-I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human\r
-jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture,\r
-the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two\r
-props to stand on.\r
-\r
-Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law:\r
-that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often\r
-possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of\r
-Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is\r
-the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last\r
-mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion\r
-with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the\r
-ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone,\r
-the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation;\r
-what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of\r
-Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese\r
-of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven\r
-without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular L100,000 but a\r
-Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets\r
-but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor\r
-Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother\r
-Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not\r
-Possession the whole of the law?\r
-\r
-But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable,\r
-the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is\r
-internationally and universally applicable.\r
-\r
-What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the\r
-Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?\r
-What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India\r
-to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All\r
-Loose-Fish.\r
-\r
-What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but\r
-Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is\r
-the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to\r
-the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but\r
-Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what\r
-are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.\r
-\r
-\r
-"De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam."\r
-BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.\r
-\r
-\r
-Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the\r
-context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of\r
-that land, the King, as Honourary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,\r
-and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which,\r
-in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate\r
-remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in\r
-force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly\r
-touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of\r
-in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts\r
-the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially\r
-reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in\r
-curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in\r
-force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within\r
-the last two years.\r
-\r
-It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one\r
-of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and\r
-beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from\r
-the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the\r
-jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.\r
-Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal\r
-emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment\r
-his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.\r
-Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his\r
-perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of\r
-them.\r
-\r
-Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their\r
-trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat\r
-fish high and dry, promising themselves a good L150 from the precious\r
-oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good\r
-ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up\r
-steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with\r
-a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale's head,\r
-he says--"Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it\r
-as the Lord Warden's." Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful\r
-consternation--so truly English--knowing not what to say, fall to\r
-vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing\r
-from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter,\r
-or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy\r
-of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching about for\r
-his ideas, made bold to speak,\r
-\r
-"Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"\r
-\r
-"The Duke."\r
-\r
-"But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?"\r
-\r
-"It is his."\r
-\r
-"We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is\r
-all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing at all for our\r
-pains but our blisters?"\r
-\r
-"It is his."\r
-\r
-"Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of\r
-getting a livelihood?"\r
-\r
-"It is his."\r
-\r
-"I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of\r
-this whale."\r
-\r
-"It is his."\r
-\r
-"Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"\r
-\r
-"It is his."\r
-\r
-In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of\r
-Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular\r
-lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be\r
-deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman\r
-of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to\r
-take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To\r
-which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)\r
-that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be\r
-obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend\r
-gentleman) would decline meddling with other people's business. Is\r
-this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three\r
-kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?\r
-\r
-It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the\r
-Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs\r
-inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with\r
-that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives\r
-us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to\r
-the King and Queen, "because of its superior excellence." And by the\r
-soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such\r
-matters.\r
-\r
-But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason\r
-for that, ye lawyers!\r
-\r
-In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench\r
-author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye Queen's,\r
-that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone." Now this\r
-was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or\r
-Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this same bone\r
-is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for\r
-a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be\r
-presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.\r
-\r
-There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers--the whale\r
-and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and\r
-nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's ordinary revenue.\r
-I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by\r
-inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same\r
-way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head\r
-peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be\r
-humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there\r
-seems a reason in all things, even in law.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.\r
-\r
-\r
-"In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan,\r
-insufferable fetor denying not inquiry." SIR T. BROWNE, V.E.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we\r
-were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, mid-day sea, that the many\r
-noses on the Pequod's deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the\r
-three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was\r
-smelt in the sea.\r
-\r
-"I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are\r
-some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they\r
-would keel up before long."\r
-\r
-Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance\r
-lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be\r
-alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from\r
-his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and\r
-hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside\r
-must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that\r
-has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.\r
-It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must\r
-exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are\r
-incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded\r
-by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.\r
-Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that\r
-the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and\r
-by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.\r
-\r
-Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman\r
-had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more\r
-of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of\r
-those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort\r
-of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies\r
-almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the\r
-proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn\r
-up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted\r
-whales in general.\r
-\r
-The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed\r
-he recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were\r
-knotted round the tail of one of these whales.\r
-\r
-"There's a pretty fellow, now," he banteringly laughed, standing in the\r
-ship's bows, "there's a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes\r
-of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering\r
-their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes,\r
-and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of\r
-tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they\r
-will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's wick into; aye, we all\r
-know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our\r
-leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with\r
-scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor\r
-devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a present\r
-of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from\r
-that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not\r
-in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get\r
-more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than\r
-he'll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it\r
-may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris.\r
-I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes,\r
-I'm for it;" and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.\r
-\r
-By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether\r
-or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of\r
-escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb\r
-now called his boat's crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing\r
-across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French\r
-taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a\r
-huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper\r
-spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a\r
-symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in\r
-large gilt letters, he read "Bouton de Rose,"--Rose-button, or Rose-bud;\r
-and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.\r
-\r
-Though Stubb did not understand the BOUTON part of the inscription, yet\r
-the word ROSE, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently\r
-explained the whole to him.\r
-\r
-"A wooden rose-bud, eh?" he cried with his hand to his nose, "that will\r
-do very well; but how like all creation it smells!"\r
-\r
-Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he\r
-had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to\r
-the blasted whale; and so talk over it.\r
-\r
-Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he\r
-bawled--"Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that\r
-speak English?"\r
-\r
-"Yes," rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be\r
-the chief-mate.\r
-\r
-"Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?"\r
-\r
-"WHAT whale?"\r
-\r
-"The WHITE Whale--a Sperm Whale--Moby Dick, have ye seen him?\r
-\r
-"Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale--no."\r
-\r
-"Very good, then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a minute."\r
-\r
-Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning\r
-over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands\r
-into a trumpet and shouted--"No, Sir! No!" Upon which Ahab retired, and\r
-Stubb returned to the Frenchman.\r
-\r
-He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the\r
-chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of\r
-bag.\r
-\r
-"What's the matter with your nose, there?" said Stubb. "Broke it?"\r
-\r
-"I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!" answered\r
-the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very\r
-much. "But what are you holding YOURS for?"\r
-\r
-"Oh, nothing! It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain't it?\r
-Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye,\r
-Bouton-de-Rose?"\r
-\r
-"What in the devil's name do you want here?" roared the Guernseyman,\r
-flying into a sudden passion.\r
-\r
-"Oh! keep cool--cool? yes, that's the word! why don't you pack those\r
-whales in ice while you're working at 'em? But joking aside, though; do\r
-you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of\r
-such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his\r
-whole carcase."\r
-\r
-"I know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe\r
-it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But\r
-come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me; and so I'll\r
-get out of this dirty scrape."\r
-\r
-"Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow," rejoined Stubb,\r
-and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented\r
-itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the\r
-heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow\r
-and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their\r
-noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms.\r
-Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the\r
-mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the\r
-plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their\r
-nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short\r
-off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it\r
-constantly filled their olfactories.\r
-\r
-Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from\r
-the Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a\r
-fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within.\r
-This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating\r
-against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's\r
-round-house (CABINET he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could\r
-not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.\r
-\r
-Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the\r
-Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate\r
-expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus,\r
-who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.\r
-Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man\r
-had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore\r
-held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and\r
-confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan\r
-for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all\r
-dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan\r
-of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter's office, was\r
-to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as\r
-for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in\r
-him during the interview.\r
-\r
-By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a\r
-small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with\r
-large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest\r
-with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely\r
-introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the\r
-aspect of interpreting between them.\r
-\r
-"What shall I say to him first?" said he.\r
-\r
-"Why," said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, "you\r
-may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,\r
-though I don't pretend to be a judge."\r
-\r
-"He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his\r
-captain, "that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain\r
-and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a\r
-blasted whale they had brought alongside."\r
-\r
-Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.\r
-\r
-"What now?" said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.\r
-\r
-"Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him\r
-carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no more fit to command a\r
-whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he's a\r
-baboon."\r
-\r
-"He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is\r
-far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us,\r
-as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish."\r
-\r
-Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his\r
-crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose\r
-the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.\r
-\r
-"What now?" said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to\r
-them.\r
-\r
-"Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that--that--in\r
-fact, tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody\r
-else."\r
-\r
-"He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any service to\r
-us."\r
-\r
-Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties\r
-(meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his\r
-cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.\r
-\r
-"He wants you to take a glass of wine with him," said the interpreter.\r
-\r
-"Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink\r
-with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him I must go."\r
-\r
-"He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking; but\r
-that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had\r
-best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for\r
-it's so calm they won't drift."\r
-\r
-By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed\r
-the Guernsey-man to this effect,--that having a long tow-line in his\r
-boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter\r
-whale of the two from the ship's side. While the Frenchman's boats,\r
-then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed\r
-away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most\r
-unusually long tow-line.\r
-\r
-Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;\r
-hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the\r
-Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly\r
-pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of\r
-his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous\r
-cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the\r
-body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was\r
-digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck\r
-against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and\r
-pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat's crew were all in high\r
-excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as\r
-gold-hunters.\r
-\r
-And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and\r
-screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning\r
-to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when\r
-suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint\r
-stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without\r
-being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with\r
-another, without at all blending with it for a time.\r
-\r
-"I have it, I have it," cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in\r
-the subterranean regions, "a purse! a purse!"\r
-\r
-Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls\r
-of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old\r
-cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with\r
-your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good\r
-friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.\r
-Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the\r
-sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for\r
-impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board,\r
-else the ship would bid them good bye.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.\r
-\r
-\r
-Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as\r
-an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain\r
-Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that\r
-subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,\r
-the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem\r
-to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for\r
-grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though\r
-at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland\r
-soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides,\r
-amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for\r
-mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft,\r
-waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in\r
-perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.\r
-The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same\r
-purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine\r
-merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.\r
-\r
-Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale\r
-themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick\r
-whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and\r
-by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such\r
-a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four\r
-boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as\r
-laborers do in blasting rocks.\r
-\r
-I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain\r
-hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors'\r
-trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing\r
-more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.\r
-\r
-Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be\r
-found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that\r
-saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption;\r
-how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise\r
-call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh\r
-the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of\r
-ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the\r
-worst.\r
-\r
-I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,\r
-owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen,\r
-and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be\r
-considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of\r
-the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous\r
-aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout\r
-a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They\r
-hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma\r
-originate?\r
-\r
-I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the\r
-Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because\r
-those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as\r
-the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in\r
-small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry\r
-it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas,\r
-and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding\r
-any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold,\r
-and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a\r
-savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an\r
-old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital.\r
-\r
-I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be\r
-likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former\r
-times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which\r
-latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great\r
-work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer,\r
-fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a\r
-place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without\r
-being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of\r
-furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full\r
-operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is\r
-quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four\r
-years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not,\r
-perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the\r
-state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that\r
-living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by\r
-no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the\r
-people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by\r
-the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant,\r
-when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance\r
-of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the\r
-open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water\r
-dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a\r
-warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance,\r
-considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with\r
-jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian\r
-town to do honour to Alexander the Great?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most\r
-significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an\r
-event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes\r
-madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying\r
-prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.\r
-\r
-Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some\r
-few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work\r
-the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing,\r
-these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats'\r
-crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous\r
-wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It\r
-was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by\r
-abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember\r
-his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.\r
-\r
-In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a\r
-white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in\r
-one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and\r
-torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom\r
-very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to\r
-his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with\r
-finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar\r
-should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and\r
-New Year's Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was\r
-brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous\r
-ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's\r
-peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he\r
-had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his\r
-brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily\r
-subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by\r
-strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the\r
-natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut,\r
-he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at\r
-melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon\r
-into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day,\r
-suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop\r
-will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you\r
-the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy\r
-ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural\r
-gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then\r
-the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies,\r
-looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to\r
-the story.\r
-\r
-It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman\r
-chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;\r
-and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.\r
-\r
-The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;\r
-but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and\r
-therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing\r
-him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness\r
-to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.\r
-\r
-Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as\r
-the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which\r
-happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat. The\r
-involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in\r
-hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale\r
-line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as\r
-to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That\r
-instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly\r
-straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks\r
-of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken\r
-several turns around his chest and neck.\r
-\r
-Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He\r
-hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath,\r
-he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,\r
-exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?" Meantime Pip's blue, choked face\r
-plainly looked, Do, for God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less than\r
-half a minute, this entire thing happened.\r
-\r
-"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was\r
-saved.\r
-\r
-So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed\r
-by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these\r
-irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like,\r
-but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done,\r
-unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never\r
-jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the\r
-soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, STICK TO THE BOAT, is your\r
-true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM\r
-THE BOAT, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he\r
-should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving\r
-him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped\r
-all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, "Stick to the boat,\r
-Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We\r
-can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for\r
-thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and\r
-don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that\r
-though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which\r
-propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.\r
-\r
-But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was\r
-under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time\r
-he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to\r
-run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk.\r
-Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous,\r
-blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away,\r
-all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the\r
-extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed\r
-like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly\r
-astern. Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was\r
-winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between\r
-Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his\r
-crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though\r
-the loftiest and the brightest.\r
-\r
-Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the\r
-practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful\r
-lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the\r
-middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how\r
-when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea--mark how closely they\r
-hug their ship and only coast along her sides.\r
-\r
-But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he\r
-did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake,\r
-and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very\r
-quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards\r
-oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested\r
-by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not\r
-unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so\r
-called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to\r
-military navies and armies.\r
-\r
-But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly\r
-spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and\r
-Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent\r
-upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him\r
-miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but\r
-from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at\r
-least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body\r
-up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.\r
-Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of\r
-the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;\r
-and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the\r
-joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous,\r
-God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters\r
-heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the\r
-loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's\r
-insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man\r
-comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and\r
-frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his\r
-God.\r
-\r
-For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that\r
-fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what\r
-like abandonment befell myself.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.\r
-\r
-\r
-That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to\r
-the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations\r
-previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of\r
-the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.\r
-\r
-While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed\r
-in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and\r
-when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated\r
-ere going to the try-works, of which anon.\r
-\r
-It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several\r
-others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found\r
-it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the\r
-liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.\r
-A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was\r
-such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a\r
-softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for\r
-only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to\r
-serpentine and spiralise.\r
-\r
-As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter\r
-exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under\r
-indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among\r
-those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within\r
-the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their\r
-opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that\r
-uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of spring\r
-violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky\r
-meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible\r
-sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit\r
-the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying\r
-the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from\r
-all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.\r
-\r
-Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm\r
-till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a\r
-strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly\r
-squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the\r
-gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving\r
-feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually\r
-squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as\r
-much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish\r
-any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come;\r
-let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into\r
-each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and\r
-sperm of kindness.\r
-\r
-Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by\r
-many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases\r
-man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable\r
-felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in\r
-the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the\r
-country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case\r
-eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of\r
-angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.\r
-\r
-Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things\r
-akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the\r
-try-works.\r
-\r
-First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering\r
-part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It\r
-is tough with congealed tendons--a wad of muscle--but still contains\r
-some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first\r
-cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like\r
-blocks of Berkshire marble.\r
-\r
-Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the\r
-whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and\r
-often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is\r
-a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name\r
-imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked\r
-snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and\r
-purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason,\r
-it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole\r
-behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive\r
-a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted,\r
-supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison\r
-season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an\r
-unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.\r
-\r
-There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in\r
-the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling\r
-adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation\r
-original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance.\r
-It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the\r
-tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.\r
-I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case,\r
-coalescing.\r
-\r
-Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but\r
-sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the\r
-dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland\r
-or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior\r
-souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.\r
-\r
-Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary.\r
-But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is\r
-a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of\r
-Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is\r
-about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the\r
-oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless\r
-blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.\r
-\r
-But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once\r
-to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.\r
-This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the\r
-blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper\r
-time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of\r
-terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull\r
-lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally\r
-go in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is\r
-similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is\r
-something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a\r
-sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship\r
-pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet\r
-itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This\r
-spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless;\r
-the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from\r
-him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his\r
-assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among\r
-veteran blubber-room men.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this\r
-post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the\r
-windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small\r
-curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen\r
-there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous\r
-cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower\r
-jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so\r
-surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,--longer than\r
-a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black\r
-as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or,\r
-rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in\r
-the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,\r
-King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it\r
-for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th\r
-chapter of the First Book of Kings.\r
-\r
-Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted\r
-by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it,\r
-and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier\r
-carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle\r
-deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an\r
-African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside\r
-out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to\r
-double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging,\r
-to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it,\r
-towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes\r
-at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer\r
-now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.\r
-Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately\r
-protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.\r
-\r
-That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the\r
-pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted\r
-endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into\r
-which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's\r
-desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent\r
-on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a\r
-Pope were this mincer!*\r
-\r
-\r
-*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates\r
-to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as\r
-thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of\r
-boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably\r
-increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.\r
-\r
-\r
-Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished\r
-by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid\r
-masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship.\r
-It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her\r
-planks.\r
-\r
-The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most\r
-roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,\r
-fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and\r
-mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The\r
-foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly\r
-secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all\r
-sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased\r
-with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened\r
-hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in\r
-number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are\r
-kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone\r
-and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the\r
-night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil\r
-themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them--one\r
-man in each pot, side by side--many confidential communications\r
-are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound\r
-mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod,\r
-with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first\r
-indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies\r
-gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from\r
-any point in precisely the same time.\r
-\r
-Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare\r
-masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of\r
-the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted\r
-with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented\r
-from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir\r
-extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel\r
-inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as\r
-fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct\r
-from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.\r
-\r
-It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were\r
-first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee\r
-the business.\r
-\r
-"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the\r
-works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his\r
-shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that\r
-in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a\r
-time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick\r
-ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the\r
-crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains\r
-considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.\r
-Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once\r
-ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.\r
-Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to\r
-inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in\r
-it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such\r
-as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left\r
-wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.\r
-\r
-By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the\r
-carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean\r
-darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce\r
-flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and\r
-illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek\r
-fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to\r
-some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the\r
-bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad\r
-sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and\r
-folded them in conflagrations.\r
-\r
-The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth\r
-in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the\r
-pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge pronged\r
-poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or\r
-stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out\r
-of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen\r
-heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil,\r
-which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth\r
-of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the\r
-windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not\r
-otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their\r
-eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all\r
-begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting\r
-barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in\r
-the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other\r
-their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth;\r
-as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the\r
-flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers\r
-wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the\r
-wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and\r
-yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness\r
-of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in\r
-her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing\r
-Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning\r
-a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the\r
-material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.\r
-\r
-So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently\r
-guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval,\r
-in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the\r
-ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before\r
-me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred\r
-visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable\r
-drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.\r
-\r
-But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)\r
-thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was\r
-horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote\r
-my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails,\r
-just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I\r
-was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically\r
-stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see\r
-no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I\r
-had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.\r
-Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by\r
-flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,\r
-rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as\r
-rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of\r
-death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with\r
-the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way,\r
-inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief\r
-sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern, with\r
-my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just\r
-in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very\r
-probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this\r
-unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being\r
-brought by the lee!\r
-\r
-Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy\r
-hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first\r
-hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its\r
-redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,\r
-the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking\r
-flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the\r
-glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp--all others but liars!\r
-\r
-Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's\r
-accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of\r
-deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,\r
-which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this\r
-earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow\r
-in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped. With\r
-books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the\r
-truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered\r
-steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold\r
-of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and\r
-jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of\r
-operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all\r
-of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as\r
-passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted to sit\r
-down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably\r
-wondrous Solomon.\r
-\r
-But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way\r
-of understanding shall remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the\r
-congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it\r
-invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom\r
-that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill\r
-eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges,\r
-and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.\r
-And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the\r
-mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still\r
-higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's\r
-forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single\r
-moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some\r
-illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay\r
-in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a\r
-score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.\r
-\r
-In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of\r
-queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in\r
-darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he\r
-seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an\r
-Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night\r
-the ship's black hull still houses an illumination.\r
-\r
-See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of\r
-lamps--often but old bottles and vials, though--to the copper cooler at\r
-the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He\r
-burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,\r
-unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral\r
-contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He\r
-goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and\r
-genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own\r
-supper of game.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.\r
-\r
-\r
-Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off\r
-descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and\r
-slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside\r
-and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of\r
-old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded\r
-surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he\r
-is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his\r
-spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;--but now it\r
-remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by\r
-rehearsing--singing, if I may--the romantic proceeding of decanting off\r
-his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where\r
-once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along\r
-beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.\r
-\r
-While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the\r
-six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling\r
-this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed\r
-round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot\r
-across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last\r
-man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap,\r
-rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, EX OFFICIO,\r
-every sailor is a cooper.\r
-\r
-At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great\r
-hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down\r
-go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are\r
-replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.\r
-\r
-In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable\r
-incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with\r
-freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of\r
-the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as\r
-in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the\r
-bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire\r
-ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is\r
-deafening.\r
-\r
-But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this\r
-self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works,\r
-you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a\r
-most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses\r
-a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never\r
-look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides,\r
-from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is\r
-readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale\r
-remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands\r
-go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags\r
-restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower\r
-rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise\r
-faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed\r
-upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of\r
-sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined\r
-and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship's company, the\r
-whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew\r
-themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to\r
-toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as\r
-bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.\r
-\r
-Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and\r
-humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics;\r
-propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not\r
-to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to\r
-such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short\r
-of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and\r
-bring us napkins!\r
-\r
-But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent\r
-on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again\r
-soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot\r
-somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest\r
-uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through\r
-for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their\r
-wrists with all day rowing on the Line,--they only step to the deck to\r
-carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea,\r
-and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined\r
-fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the\r
-heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the\r
-ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor\r
-fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by\r
-the cry of "There she blows!" and away they fly to fight another whale,\r
-and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this\r
-is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long\r
-toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable\r
-sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its\r
-defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul;\r
-hardly is this done, when--THERE SHE BLOWS!--the ghost is spouted up,\r
-and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's\r
-old routine again.\r
-\r
-Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two\r
-thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with\r
-thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage--and, foolish as I am, taught\r
-thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.\r
-\r
-\r
-Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,\r
-taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but\r
-in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been\r
-added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood,\r
-he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely\r
-eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the\r
-binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass,\r
-that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his\r
-purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast,\r
-then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin\r
-there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed\r
-with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.\r
-\r
-But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly\r
-attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as\r
-though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in\r
-some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some\r
-certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little\r
-worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by\r
-the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in\r
-the Milky Way.\r
-\r
-Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the\r
-heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the\r
-head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all\r
-the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet,\r
-untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito\r
-glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed\r
-by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick\r
-darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every\r
-sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was\r
-set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton\r
-in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white\r
-whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by\r
-night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever\r
-live to spend it.\r
-\r
-Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun\r
-and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks\r
-and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in\r
-luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to\r
-derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through\r
-those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.\r
-\r
-It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example\r
-of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL\r
-ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the\r
-middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;\r
-and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that\r
-knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three\r
-Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a\r
-crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned\r
-zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the\r
-keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.\r
-\r
-Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now\r
-pausing.\r
-\r
-"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and\r
-all other grand and lofty things; look here,--three peaks as proud as\r
-Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the\r
-courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all\r
-are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,\r
-which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but\r
-mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those\r
-who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now\r
-this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign\r
-of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a\r
-former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in\r
-throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be\r
-it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then."\r
-\r
-"No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must\r
-have left their mouldings there since yesterday," murmured Starbuck\r
-to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old man seems to read\r
-Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly.\r
-He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty,\r
-heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint\r
-earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over\r
-all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a\r
-hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;\r
-but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.\r
-Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain\r
-snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin\r
-speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it,\r
-lest Truth shake me falsely."\r
-\r
-"There now's the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, "he's\r
-been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with\r
-faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long.\r
-And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on\r
-Negro Hill or in Corlaer's Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere\r
-spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as\r
-queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons\r
-of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your\r
-doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold\r
-moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What\r
-then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing\r
-wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here's signs and\r
-wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the\r
-zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac and\r
-as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try\r
-my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with\r
-the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see now. Signs and\r
-wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem, hem, hem; here they\r
-are--here they go--all alive:--Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull\r
-and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he\r
-wheels among 'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold\r
-between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there;\r
-the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the\r
-bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That's my\r
-small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's\r
-navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if\r
-there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There's\r
-a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you,\r
-Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter;\r
-and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To\r
-begin: there's Aries, or the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us; then,\r
-Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the\r
-Twins--that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes\r
-Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo,\r
-a roaring Lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly\r
-dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our\r
-first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes\r
-Libra, or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we\r
-are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the\r
-Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang\r
-come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing\r
-himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the\r
-battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing,\r
-and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours\r
-out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the\r
-Fishes, we sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the\r
-sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and\r
-hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and\r
-so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for aye! Adieu,\r
-Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the\r
-try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have to say. There; he's\r
-before it; he'll out with something presently. So, so; he's beginning."\r
-\r
-"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises\r
-a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this\r
-staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; and at\r
-two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke\r
-dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and\r
-sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."\r
-\r
-"Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a\r
-foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort\r
-of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old\r
-hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He\r
-luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side\r
-of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he's\r
-back again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering--voice like an old\r
-worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"\r
-\r
-"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when\r
-the sun stands in some one of these signs. I've studied signs, and know\r
-their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch\r
-in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe\r
-sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what's the\r
-horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign--the roaring and\r
-devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee."\r
-\r
-"There's another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men\r
-in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--all\r
-tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the\r
-Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;\r
-thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I\r
-suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country.\r
-And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--I\r
-guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don't know what to make\r
-of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king's trowsers.\r
-But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out\r
-of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he\r
-say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows\r
-himself; there is a sun on the coin--fire worshipper, depend upon it.\r
-Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip--poor boy! would he had died,\r
-or I; he's half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these\r
-interpreters--myself included--and look now, he comes to read, with that\r
-unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!"\r
-\r
-"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."\r
-\r
-"Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind,\r
-poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!"\r
-\r
-"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."\r
-\r
-"Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again."\r
-\r
-"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."\r
-\r
-"Well, that's funny."\r
-\r
-"And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow,\r
-especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw!\r
-caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare-crow? There he\r
-stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked\r
-into the sleeves of an old jacket."\r
-\r
-"Wonder if he means me?--complimentary!--poor lad!--I could go hang\r
-myself. Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can stand\r
-the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty for my\r
-sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering."\r
-\r
-"Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire\r
-to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what's the consequence? Then\r
-again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught's nailed to\r
-the mast it's a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab!\r
-the White Whale; he'll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old\r
-Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown\r
-over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring. How did it get there? And\r
-so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old\r
-mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the\r
-shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green\r
-miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds\r
-blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,\r
-hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.\r
-\r
-The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?"\r
-\r
-So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing\r
-down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his\r
-hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger\r
-captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was\r
-a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or\r
-thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in\r
-festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed\r
-behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar's surcoat.\r
-\r
-"Hast seen the White Whale!"\r
-\r
-"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,\r
-he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head\r
-like a mallet.\r
-\r
-"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near\r
-him--"Stand by to lower!"\r
-\r
-In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his\r
-crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.\r
-But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the\r
-moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never\r
-once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was\r
-always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to\r
-the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other\r
-vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter\r
-for anybody--except those who are almost hourly used to it, like\r
-whalemen--to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for\r
-the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and\r
-then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived\r
-of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied\r
-with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a\r
-clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height\r
-he could hardly hope to attain.\r
-\r
-It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward\r
-circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his\r
-luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And\r
-in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the\r
-two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the\r
-perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a\r
-pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem\r
-to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to\r
-use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,\r
-because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,\r
-cried out, "I see, I see!--avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing\r
-over the cutting-tackle."\r
-\r
-As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two\r
-previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved\r
-blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This\r
-was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his\r
-solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the\r
-fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the\r
-word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his\r
-own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of\r
-the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and\r
-gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust\r
-forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his\r
-ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades)\r
-cried out in his walrus way, "Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones\r
-together!--an arm and a leg!--an arm that never can shrink, d'ye\r
-see; and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see the White\r
-Whale?--how long ago?"\r
-\r
-"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards\r
-the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a\r
-telescope; "there I saw him, on the Line, last season."\r
-\r
-"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from\r
-the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so.\r
-\r
-"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"\r
-\r
-"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"\r
-\r
-"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,"\r
-began the Englishman. "I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.\r
-Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat\r
-fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went\r
-milling and milling round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish,\r
-by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches\r
-from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white\r
-head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."\r
-\r
-"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended\r
-breath.\r
-\r
-"And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin."\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye--they were mine--MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but on!"\r
-\r
-"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well,\r
-this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam\r
-into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!\r
-\r
-"Aye, I see!--wanted to part it; free the fast-fish--an old trick--I\r
-know him."\r
-\r
-"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not know;\r
-but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow;\r
-but we didn't know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the\r
-line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale's;\r
-that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and\r
-what a noble great whale it was--the noblest and biggest I ever saw,\r
-sir, in my life--I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage\r
-he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or\r
-the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's\r
-crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped\r
-into my first mate's boat--Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way,\r
-Captain--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain);--as I was saying, I jumped\r
-into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale\r
-with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old\r
-great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls\r
-alive, man--the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both\r
-eyes out--all befogged and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail\r
-looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble\r
-steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with\r
-a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the\r
-second iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail like a Lima\r
-tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and,\r
-flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was\r
-all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized\r
-hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that\r
-like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same\r
-instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a\r
-flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me\r
-caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); "yes,\r
-caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's flames, I was\r
-thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript\r
-its way along the flesh--clear along the whole length of my arm--came\r
-out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell\r
-you the rest (by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon: Bunger,\r
-my lad,--the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn."\r
-\r
-The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the\r
-time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his\r
-gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober\r
-one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched\r
-trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a\r
-marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,\r
-occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two\r
-crippled captains. But, at his superior's introduction of him to Ahab,\r
-he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding.\r
-\r
-"It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking my\r
-advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy--"\r
-\r
-"Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed\r
-captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."\r
-\r
-"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot\r
-weather there on the Line. But it was no use--I did all I could; sat up\r
-with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet--"\r
-\r
-"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering\r
-his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he\r
-couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas\r
-over, about three o'clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with\r
-me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very\r
-dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why\r
-don't ye? You know you're a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead,\r
-boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man."\r
-\r
-"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--said the\r
-imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab--"is apt to\r
-be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But\r
-I may as well say--en passant, as the French remark--that I myself--that\r
-is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy--am a strict total\r
-abstinence man; I never drink--"\r
-\r
-"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to\r
-him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on--go on with\r
-the arm story."\r
-\r
-"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly. "I was about observing,\r
-sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my\r
-best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the\r
-truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more\r
-than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line.\r
-In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came.\r
-But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is\r
-against all rule"--pointing at it with the marlingspike--"that is the\r
-captain's work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had\r
-that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one's brains\r
-out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical\r
-passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir"--removing his hat, and\r
-brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull,\r
-but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever\r
-having been a wound--"Well, the captain there will tell you how that\r
-came here; he knows."\r
-\r
-"No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born with\r
-it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you--you Bunger! was there ever such another\r
-Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in\r
-pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal."\r
-\r
-"What became of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been\r
-impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.\r
-\r
-"Oh!" cried the one-armed captain, "oh, yes! Well; after he sounded,\r
-we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I\r
-didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till\r
-some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby\r
-Dick--as some call him--and then I knew it was he."\r
-\r
-"Did'st thou cross his wake again?"\r
-\r
-"Twice."\r
-\r
-"But could not fasten?"\r
-\r
-"Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without\r
-this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he\r
-swallows."\r
-\r
-"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to\r
-get the right. Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely and mathematically\r
-bowing to each Captain in succession--"Do you know, gentlemen, that the\r
-digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine\r
-Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest\r
-even a man's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the\r
-White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means\r
-to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But\r
-sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine\r
-in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let\r
-one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth\r
-or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks,\r
-d'ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully\r
-incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if\r
-you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the\r
-sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that\r
-case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you\r
-shortly, that's all."\r
-\r
-"No, thank ye, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to the\r
-arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then; but not to\r
-another one. No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and\r
-that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know\r
-that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye,\r
-he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?"--glancing at the\r
-ivory leg.\r
-\r
-"He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let\r
-alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a\r
-magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last? Which way heading?"\r
-\r
-"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly\r
-walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; "this man's\r
-blood--bring the thermometer!--it's at the boiling point!--his pulse\r
-makes these planks beat!--sir!"--taking a lancet from his pocket, and\r
-drawing near to Ahab's arm.\r
-\r
-"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks--"Man the boat!\r
-Which way heading?"\r
-\r
-"Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.\r
-"What's the matter? He was heading east, I think.--Is your Captain\r
-crazy?" whispering Fedallah.\r
-\r
-But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to\r
-take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle\r
-towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.\r
-\r
-In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men\r
-were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him.\r
-With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own,\r
-Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.\r
-\r
-\r
-Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that\r
-she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,\r
-merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of\r
-Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not\r
-far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point\r
-of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our\r
-Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous\r
-fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted\r
-out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale;\r
-though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant\r
-Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets\r
-pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not\r
-elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were\r
-the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm\r
-Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the\r
-whole globe who so harpooned him.\r
-\r
-In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,\r
-and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape\r
-Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any\r
-sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one;\r
-and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the\r
-Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American,\r
-and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open.\r
-But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house again\r
-bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only\r
-knows--and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their\r
-expense, the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war\r
-Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded\r
-by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and\r
-did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In\r
-1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to\r
-go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship--well\r
-called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus\r
-that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known.\r
-The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a\r
-Nantucketer.\r
-\r
-All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to\r
-the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have\r
-slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.\r
-\r
-The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast\r
-sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight\r
-somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the\r
-forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps--every\r
-soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine\r
-gam I had--long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his\r
-ivory heel--it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that\r
-ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever\r
-lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it\r
-at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it's\r
-squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were\r
-called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each\r
-other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our\r
-jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the\r
-howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts\r
-did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we\r
-had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down\r
-the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my\r
-taste.\r
-\r
-The beef was fine--tough, but with body in it. They said it was\r
-bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for\r
-certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,\r
-symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you\r
-could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed.\r
-If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out\r
-of you like billiard-balls. The bread--but that couldn't be helped;\r
-besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the\r
-only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it\r
-was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all\r
-in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the\r
-cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft,\r
-I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty;\r
-fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to\r
-hat-band.\r
-\r
-But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other\r
-English whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous, hospitable\r
-ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the\r
-joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing?\r
-I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers\r
-is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of\r
-historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.\r
-\r
-The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,\r
-Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant\r
-in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,\r
-touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English\r
-merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in\r
-the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural,\r
-but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special\r
-origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.\r
-\r
-During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an\r
-ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I\r
-knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I\r
-concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam\r
-cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was\r
-reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one\r
-"Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man,\r
-professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and\r
-St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box\r
-of sperm candles for his trouble--this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he\r
-spied the book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper,"\r
-but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book\r
-treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained\r
-a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it\r
-was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list of the\r
-outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from\r
-which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:\r
-\r
-400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock\r
-fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins\r
-of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese\r
-(probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of\r
-beer.\r
-\r
-Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in\r
-the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,\r
-barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.\r
-\r
-At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all\r
-this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were\r
-incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic\r
-application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my\r
-own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by\r
-every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen\r
-whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and\r
-Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their\r
-naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the\r
-nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game\r
-in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country\r
-where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.\r
-\r
-The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those\r
-polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that\r
-climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,\r
-including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much\r
-exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet\r
-of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say,\r
-we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks'\r
-allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.\r
-Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might\r
-fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in\r
-a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem\r
-somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But\r
-this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with\r
-the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would\r
-be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his\r
-boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.\r
-\r
-But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers\r
-of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English\r
-whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when\r
-cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the\r
-world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the\r
-decanter.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.\r
-\r
-\r
-Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly\r
-dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail\r
-upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough\r
-sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still\r
-further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,\r
-and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost\r
-bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his\r
-unconditional skeleton.\r
-\r
-But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the\r
-fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the\r
-whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures\r
-on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a\r
-specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land\r
-a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a\r
-roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,\r
-Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;\r
-the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,\r
-ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of\r
-leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and\r
-cheeseries in his bowels.\r
-\r
-I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far\r
-beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed\r
-with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged\r
-to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his\r
-poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the\r
-heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my\r
-boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the\r
-contents of that young cub?\r
-\r
-And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their\r
-gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted\r
-to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.\r
-For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey\r
-of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with\r
-the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side\r
-glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his\r
-capital.\r
-\r
-Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted\r
-with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought\r
-together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his\r
-people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,\r
-chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;\r
-and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the\r
-wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.\r
-\r
-Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an\r
-unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his\r
-head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings\r
-seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of\r
-its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,\r
-then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a\r
-grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.\r
-\r
-The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with\r
-Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests\r
-kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head\r
-again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the\r
-terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung\r
-sword that so affrighted Damocles.\r
-\r
-It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy\r
-Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the\r
-industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet\r
-on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and\r
-the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden\r
-branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying\r
-air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the\r
-leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied\r
-verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--whither\r
-flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless\r
-toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--but one single word with\r
-thee! Nay--the shuttle flies--the figures float from forth the loom; the\r
-freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves;\r
-and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and\r
-by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only\r
-when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through\r
-it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that\r
-are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly\r
-heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby\r
-have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in\r
-all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be\r
-overheard afar.\r
-\r
-Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the\r
-great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler! Yet,\r
-as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around\r
-him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven\r
-over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but\r
-himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim\r
-god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.\r
-\r
-Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the\r
-skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real\r
-jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as\r
-an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests\r
-should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced\r
-before this skeleton--brushed the vines aside--broke through the\r
-ribs--and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid\r
-its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was\r
-out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.\r
-I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.\r
-\r
-Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.\r
-From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the\r
-altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure\r
-this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests--well, how long do ye make\r
-him, then?" But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning\r
-feet and inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their\r
-yard-sticks--the great skull echoed--and seizing that lucky chance, I\r
-quickly concluded my own admeasurements.\r
-\r
-These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be\r
-it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied\r
-measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can\r
-refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell\r
-me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where\r
-they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I\r
-have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have\r
-what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or\r
-River Whale in the United States." Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire,\r
-England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has\r
-in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size,\r
-by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.\r
-\r
-In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons\r
-belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar\r
-grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir\r
-Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir\r
-Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a\r
-great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony\r
-cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan--and swing all day\r
-upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and\r
-shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of\r
-keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at\r
-the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo\r
-in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view\r
-from his forehead.\r
-\r
-The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied\r
-verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild\r
-wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving\r
-such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished\r
-the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was\r
-then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not\r
-trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all\r
-enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.\r
-\r
-\r
-In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain\r
-statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we\r
-are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.\r
-\r
-According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base\r
-upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest\r
-sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful\r
-calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between\r
-eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty\r
-feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least\r
-ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would\r
-considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one\r
-thousand one hundred inhabitants.\r
-\r
-Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this\r
-leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination?\r
-\r
-Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,\r
-jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now\r
-simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his\r
-unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large\r
-a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the\r
-most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in\r
-this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your\r
-arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the\r
-general structure we are about to view.\r
-\r
-In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two\r
-Feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have\r
-been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one\r
-fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet,\r
-his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of\r
-plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a\r
-third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once\r
-enclosed his vitals.\r
-\r
-To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,\r
-extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled\r
-the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty\r
-of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the\r
-time, but a long, disconnected timber.\r
-\r
-The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck,\r
-was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each\r
-successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one\r
-of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From\r
-that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only\r
-spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore\r
-a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most\r
-arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay\r
-footpath bridges over small streams.\r
-\r
-In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the\r
-circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of\r
-the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of\r
-the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish\r
-which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the\r
-invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen\r
-feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight\r
-feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the\r
-living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw\r
-but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of\r
-added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the\r
-ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the\r
-weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!\r
-\r
-How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try\r
-to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead\r
-attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the\r
-heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry\r
-flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale\r
-be truly and livingly found out.\r
-\r
-But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a\r
-crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now\r
-it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.\r
-\r
-There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are\r
-not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on\r
-a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest,\r
-a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth\r
-more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the\r
-tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white\r
-billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they\r
-had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children,\r
-who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the\r
-spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple\r
-child's play.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.\r
-\r
-\r
-From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon\r
-to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not\r
-compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial\r
-folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail,\r
-and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic\r
-involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great\r
-cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a\r
-line-of-battle-ship.\r
-\r
-Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me\r
-to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not\r
-overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him\r
-out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him\r
-in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it\r
-now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and\r
-antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the\r
-Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed\r
-unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is\r
-altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest\r
-words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been\r
-convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have\r
-invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased\r
-for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal\r
-bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author\r
-like me.\r
-\r
-One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,\r
-though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing\r
-of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard\r
-capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an\r
-inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my\r
-thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their\r
-outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole\r
-circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and\r
-mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas\r
-of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its\r
-suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal\r
-theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose\r
-a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the\r
-flea, though many there be who have tried it.\r
-\r
-Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials\r
-as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been\r
-a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells,\r
-wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of\r
-preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier\r
-geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost\r
-completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called\r
-the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted\r
-links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote\r
-posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales\r
-hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last\r
-preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them\r
-precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet\r
-sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking\r
-rank as Cetacean fossils.\r
-\r
-Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones\r
-and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been\r
-found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in\r
-Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.\r
-Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the\r
-year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street\r
-opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones\r
-disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's\r
-time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly\r
-unknown Leviathanic species.\r
-\r
-But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost\r
-complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on\r
-the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous\r
-slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen\r
-angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed\r
-upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being\r
-taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out\r
-that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A\r
-significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this\r
-book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the\r
-shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster\r
-Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society,\r
-pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures\r
-which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.\r
-\r
-When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,\r
-jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to\r
-the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on\r
-the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical\r
-Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back\r
-to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;\r
-for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I\r
-obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged\r
-bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in\r
-all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable\r
-hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the\r
-whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines\r
-of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?\r
-Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems\r
-a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck\r
-at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of\r
-the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after\r
-all humane ages are over.\r
-\r
-But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the\r
-stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his\r
-ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim\r
-for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable\r
-print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,\r
-some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a\r
-sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and\r
-dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the\r
-moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there\r
-swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.\r
-\r
-Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity\r
-of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by\r
-the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.\r
-\r
-"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams\r
-of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are\r
-oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that\r
-by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale can pass it\r
-without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either\r
-side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea,\r
-and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a Whale's Rib\r
-of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with\r
-its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be\r
-reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said\r
-to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians\r
-affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple,\r
-and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth\r
-by the Whale at the Base of the Temple."\r
-\r
-In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a\r
-Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish?\r
-\r
-\r
-Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from\r
-the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,\r
-in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the\r
-original bulk of his sires.\r
-\r
-But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the\r
-present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are\r
-found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period\r
-prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those\r
-belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier\r
-ones.\r
-\r
-Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the\r
-Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than\r
-seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,\r
-that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large\r
-sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that\r
-Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of\r
-capture.\r
-\r
-But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an\r
-advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may\r
-it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?\r
-\r
-Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such\r
-gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny\r
-tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus\r
-of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--Rope Walks and\r
-Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander,\r
-Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences\r
-setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies)\r
-at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet.\r
-And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales,\r
-in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at\r
-one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work\r
-was published so late as A.D. 1825.\r
-\r
-But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is\r
-as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I go where Pliny\r
-is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so.\r
-Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies\r
-that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not\r
-measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;\r
-and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian\r
-and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are\r
-drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle\r
-of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest\r
-of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of\r
-all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.\r
-\r
-But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more\r
-recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs\r
-at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through\r
-Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers\r
-of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all\r
-continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure\r
-so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last\r
-be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man,\r
-smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.\r
-\r
-Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,\r
-which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies\r
-of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with\r
-their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,\r
-where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such\r
-a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that\r
-the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.\r
-\r
-But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a\r
-period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois\r
-exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day\r
-not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the\r
-cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far\r
-different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an\r
-end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for\r
-forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God,\r
-if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days\r
-of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when\r
-the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and\r
-a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of\r
-months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain\r
-not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need\r
-were, could be statistically stated.\r
-\r
-Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the\r
-gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years\r
-(the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in\r
-small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in\r
-consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more\r
-remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales,\r
-influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense\r
-caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and\r
-pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely\r
-separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems\r
-the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer\r
-haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that\r
-species also is declining. For they are only being driven from\r
-promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with\r
-their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very\r
-recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.\r
-\r
-Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two\r
-firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain\r
-impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss\r
-have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and\r
-glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to\r
-their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and\r
-walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle\r
-of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.\r
-\r
-But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one\r
-cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this\r
-positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.\r
-But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than\r
-13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'-west coast by the Americans\r
-alone; yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance\r
-of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.\r
-\r
-Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness\r
-of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to\r
-Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the\r
-King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are\r
-numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no\r
-reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for\r
-thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the\r
-successive monarchs of the East--if they still survive there in great\r
-numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he\r
-has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all\r
-Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles\r
-of the sea combined.\r
-\r
-Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity\r
-of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,\r
-therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations\r
-must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea\r
-of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of\r
-creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children\r
-who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to\r
-the present human population of the globe.\r
-\r
-Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his\r
-species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas\r
-before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the\r
-Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah's flood he\r
-despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like\r
-the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still\r
-survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood,\r
-spout his frothed defiance to the skies.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 106. Ahab's Leg.\r
-\r
-\r
-The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel\r
-Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to\r
-his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his\r
-boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And\r
-when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so\r
-vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it\r
-was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then,\r
-the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench,\r
-that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet\r
-Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.\r
-\r
-And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his\r
-pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the\r
-condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not\r
-been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he\r
-had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible;\r
-by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his\r
-ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise\r
-smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme\r
-difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.\r
-\r
-Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all\r
-the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a\r
-former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous\r
-reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest\r
-songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable\r
-events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought\r
-Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the\r
-ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is\r
-an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural\r
-enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world,\r
-but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of\r
-all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still\r
-fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs\r
-beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an\r
-inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while\r
-even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying\r
-pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic\r
-significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their\r
-diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the\r
-genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the\r
-sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the\r
-glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must\r
-needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad.\r
-The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of\r
-sorrow in the signers.\r
-\r
-Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more\r
-properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other\r
-particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some,\r
-why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing\r
-of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like\r
-exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as\r
-it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited\r
-reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed,\r
-as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every revelation partook more of\r
-significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all\r
-came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at\r
-the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that\r
-ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed\r
-the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the\r
-above hinted casualty--remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by\r
-Ahab--invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land\r
-of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had\r
-all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of\r
-this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable\r
-interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks.\r
-\r
-But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,\r
-or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not\r
-with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain\r
-practical procedures;--he called the carpenter.\r
-\r
-And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay\r
-set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied\r
-with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus\r
-far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection\r
-of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the\r
-carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to\r
-provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to\r
-the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be\r
-hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate\r
-the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the\r
-forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.\r
-\r
-\r
-Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high\r
-abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But\r
-from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they\r
-seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.\r
-But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of\r
-the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate;\r
-hence, he now comes in person on this stage.\r
-\r
-Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging\r
-to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,\r
-alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own;\r
-the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all\r
-those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an\r
-auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic\r
-remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in\r
-those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring\r
-in a large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized\r
-and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary\r
-duties:--repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of\r
-clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails\r
-in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly\r
-pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly\r
-expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and\r
-capricious.\r
-\r
-The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,\r
-was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several\r
-vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times\r
-except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed\r
-athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.\r
-\r
-A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:\r
-the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway\r
-files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board,\r
-and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and\r
-cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking\r
-cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a\r
-soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon\r
-the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood,\r
-the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes\r
-a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears.\r
-Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping\r
-one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow\r
-unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the\r
-handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in\r
-that, if he would have him draw the tooth.\r
-\r
-Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent\r
-and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he\r
-deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But\r
-while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such\r
-liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some\r
-uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was\r
-this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as\r
-it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding\r
-infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity\r
-discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active\r
-in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you,\r
-though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible\r
-stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying\r
-heartlessness;--yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,\r
-crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now\r
-and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served\r
-to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle\r
-of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long\r
-wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss;\r
-but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings\r
-might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an\r
-unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without\r
-premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost\r
-say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of\r
-unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so\r
-much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to\r
-it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by\r
-a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure\r
-manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early\r
-oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of\r
-those unreasoning but still highly useful, MULTUM IN PARVO, Sheffield\r
-contrivances, assuming the exterior--though a little swelled--of a\r
-common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,\r
-but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,\r
-nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the\r
-carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part\r
-of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the\r
-legs, and there they were.\r
-\r
-Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,\r
-was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a\r
-common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously\r
-did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few\r
-drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it\r
-had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same\r
-unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept\r
-him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning\r
-wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a\r
-sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the\r
-time to keep himself awake.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.\r
-\r
-The Deck--First Night Watch.\r
-\r
-\r
-(CARPENTER STANDING BEFORE HIS VICE-BENCH, AND BY THE LIGHT OF TWO\r
-LANTERNS BUSILY FILING THE IVORY JOIST FOR THE LEG, WHICH JOIST IS\r
-FIRMLY FIXED IN THE VICE. SLABS OF IVORY, LEATHER STRAPS, PADS, SCREWS,\r
-AND VARIOUS TOOLS OF ALL SORTS LYING ABOUT THE BENCH. FORWARD, THE RED\r
-FLAME OF THE FORGE IS SEEN, WHERE THE BLACKSMITH IS AT WORK.)\r
-\r
-\r
-Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft,\r
-and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and\r
-shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works better (SNEEZES).\r
-Halloa, this bone dust is (SNEEZES)--why it's (SNEEZES)--yes it's\r
-(SNEEZES)--bless my soul, it won't let me speak! This is what an old\r
-fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and\r
-you don't get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don't get it\r
-(SNEEZES). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have\r
-that ferule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky\r
-now (SNEEZES) there's no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little;\r
-but a mere shinbone--why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should\r
-like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I\r
-could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever (SNEEZES) scraped to a lady\r
-in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in shop\r
-windows wouldn't compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of\r
-course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (SNEEZES) with washes and\r
-lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must\r
-call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right;\r
-too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that's the heel; we are in luck;\r
-here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's certain.\r
-\r
-AHAB (ADVANCING)\r
-\r
-(DURING THE ENSUING SCENE, THE CARPENTER CONTINUES SNEEZING AT TIMES)\r
-\r
-\r
-Well, manmaker!\r
-\r
-Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length.\r
-Let me measure, sir.\r
-\r
-Measured for a leg! good. Well, it's not the first time. About it!\r
-There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here,\r
-carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.\r
-\r
-Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware!\r
-\r
-No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this\r
-slippery world that can hold, man. What's Prometheus about there?--the\r
-blacksmith, I mean--what's he about?\r
-\r
-He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.\r
-\r
-Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a\r
-fierce red flame there!\r
-\r
-Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.\r
-\r
-Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that\r
-old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a\r
-blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's made in fire must\r
-properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable. How the soot flies!\r
-This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter,\r
-when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel\r
-shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.\r
-\r
-Sir?\r
-\r
-Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a\r
-desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest\r
-modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay\r
-in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all,\r
-brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let\r
-me see--shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on\r
-top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.\r
-\r
-Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he speaking to, I should like\r
-to know? Shall I keep standing here? (ASIDE).\r
-\r
-'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one. No,\r
-no, no; I must have a lantern.\r
-\r
-Ho, ho! That's it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.\r
-\r
-What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man?\r
-Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.\r
-\r
-I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.\r
-\r
-\r
-Carpenter? why that's--but no;--a very tidy, and, I may say,\r
-an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here,\r
-carpenter;--or would'st thou rather work in clay?\r
-\r
-Sir?--Clay? clay, sir? That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.\r
-\r
-The fellow's impious! What art thou sneezing about?\r
-\r
-Bone is rather dusty, sir.\r
-\r
-Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under\r
-living people's noses.\r
-\r
-Sir?--oh! ah!--I guess so;--yes--dear!\r
-\r
-Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good\r
-workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well\r
-for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall\r
-nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that\r
-is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst\r
-thou not drive that old Adam away?\r
-\r
-Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard\r
-something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never\r
-entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still\r
-pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?\r
-\r
-It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once\r
-was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the\r
-soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a\r
-hair, do I. Is't a riddle?\r
-\r
-I should humbly call it a poser, sir.\r
-\r
-Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing\r
-may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where\r
-thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most\r
-solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't\r
-speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now\r
-so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery\r
-pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!\r
-\r
-Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again;\r
-I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir.\r
-\r
-Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.--How long before the\r
-leg is done?\r
-\r
-Perhaps an hour, sir.\r
-\r
-Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (TURNS TO GO). Oh, Life! Here\r
-I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for\r
-a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will\r
-not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the\r
-whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with\r
-the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was\r
-the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By\r
-heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to\r
-one small, compendious vertebra. So.\r
-\r
-CARPENTER (RESUMING HIS WORK).\r
-\r
-\r
-Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says\r
-he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's\r
-queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into\r
-Mr. Starbuck all the time--queer--sir--queer, queer, very queer. And\r
-here's his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow! has\r
-a stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he'll stand\r
-on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and\r
-all three places standing in one hell--how was that? Oh! I don't wonder\r
-he looked so scornful at me! I'm a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes,\r
-they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body\r
-like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall,\r
-heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick,\r
-and there's a great cry for life-boats. And here's the heron's leg!\r
-long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts\r
-a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a\r
-tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab;\r
-oh he's a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the\r
-other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there,\r
-you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and let's finish it\r
-before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for\r
-all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer\r
-barrels, to fill 'em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real\r
-live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he'll be standing on this\r
-to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the\r
-little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So,\r
-so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.\r
-\r
-\r
-According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no\r
-inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have\r
-sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into\r
-the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*\r
-\r
-\r
-*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it\r
-is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench\r
-the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is\r
-removed by the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept\r
-damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the\r
-mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.\r
-\r
-\r
-Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and\r
-the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from\r
-the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with\r
-a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him;\r
-and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the\r
-Japanese islands--Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new\r
-ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long\r
-pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his\r
-back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old\r
-courses again.\r
-\r
-"Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round\r
-to it. "On deck! Begone!"\r
-\r
-"Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We\r
-must up Burtons and break out."\r
-\r
-"Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here\r
-for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?"\r
-\r
-"Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good\r
-in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving,\r
-sir."\r
-\r
-"So it is, so it is; if we get it."\r
-\r
-"I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."\r
-\r
-"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak!\r
-I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks,\r
-but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far worse plight\r
-than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can\r
-find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if\r
-found, in this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons\r
-hoisted."\r
-\r
-"What will the owners say, sir?"\r
-\r
-"Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What\r
-cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck,\r
-about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But\r
-look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,\r
-my conscience is in this ship's keel.--On deck!"\r
-\r
-"Captain Ahab," said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin,\r
-with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed\r
-not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation\r
-of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself;\r
-"A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly\r
-enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab."\r
-\r
-"Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?--On\r
-deck!"\r
-\r
-"Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir--to be forbearing!\r
-Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?"\r
-\r
-Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most\r
-South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,\r
-exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one\r
-Captain that is lord over the Pequod.--On deck!"\r
-\r
-For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks,\r
-you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of\r
-the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose,\r
-and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: "Thou hast\r
-outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of\r
-Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of\r
-thyself, old man."\r
-\r
-"He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!"\r
-murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he said--Ahab\r
-beware of Ahab--there's something there!" Then unconsciously using the\r
-musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little\r
-cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and\r
-returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.\r
-\r
-"Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck," he said lowly to the mate;\r
-then raising his voice to the crew: "Furl the t'gallant-sails, and\r
-close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton,\r
-and break out in the main-hold."\r
-\r
-It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting\r
-Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him;\r
-or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously\r
-forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,\r
-in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders\r
-were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.\r
-\r
-\r
-Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold\r
-were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it\r
-being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the\r
-slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight\r
-sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they\r
-go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost\r
-puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask\r
-containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards,\r
-vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after\r
-tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and\r
-iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks\r
-were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if\r
-you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea\r
-like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless\r
-student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons\r
-did not visit them then.\r
-\r
-Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast\r
-bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh\r
-to his endless end.\r
-\r
-Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;\r
-dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the\r
-higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as\r
-harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but--as\r
-we have elsewhere seen--mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and\r
-finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating\r
-all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the\r
-clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,\r
-the harpooneers are the holders, so called.\r
-\r
-Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should\r
-have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,\r
-stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about\r
-amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom\r
-of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor\r
-pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he\r
-caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after\r
-some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill\r
-of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few\r
-long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his\r
-frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones\r
-grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller;\r
-they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply\r
-looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that\r
-immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like\r
-circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes\r
-seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that\r
-cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this\r
-waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who\r
-were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and\r
-fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing\r
-near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last\r
-revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.\r
-So that--let us say it again--no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and\r
-holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping\r
-over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying\r
-hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final\r
-rest, and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher\r
-towards his destined heaven.\r
-\r
-Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,\r
-what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he\r
-asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was\r
-just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he\r
-had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich\r
-war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all\r
-whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,\r
-and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not\r
-unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior,\r
-stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to\r
-the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars\r
-are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild,\r
-uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the\r
-white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at\r
-the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual\r
-sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks.\r
-No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial\r
-to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes\r
-were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and\r
-much lee-way adown the dim ages.\r
-\r
-Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter\r
-was at once commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might\r
-include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard,\r
-which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal\r
-groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin\r
-was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of\r
-the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent\r
-promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took\r
-Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg's\r
-person as he shifted the rule.\r
-\r
-"Ah! poor fellow! he'll have to die now," ejaculated the Long Island\r
-sailor.\r
-\r
-Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general\r
-reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin\r
-was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches\r
-at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools,\r
-and to work.\r
-\r
-When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted,\r
-he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring\r
-whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.\r
-\r
-Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the\r
-people on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one's\r
-consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to\r
-him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some\r
-dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will\r
-shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be\r
-indulged.\r
-\r
-Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with\r
-an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock\r
-drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along\r
-with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also,\r
-biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water\r
-was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in\r
-the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a\r
-pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he\r
-might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving\r
-a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little\r
-god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he\r
-called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him.\r
-The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg\r
-in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. "Rarmai"\r
-(it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced\r
-in his hammock.\r
-\r
-But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this\r
-while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him\r
-by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.\r
-\r
-"Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where\r
-go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where\r
-the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little\r
-errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think\r
-he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he\r
-must be very sad; for look! he's left his tambourine behind;--I found\r
-it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye your dying\r
-march."\r
-\r
-"I have heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in\r
-violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues;\r
-and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their\r
-wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken\r
-in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip,\r
-in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all\r
-our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?--Hark! he speaks\r
-again: but more wildly now."\r
-\r
-"Form two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon?\r
-Lay it across here.--Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock\r
-now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!--mind ye that;\r
-Queequeg dies game!--take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I\r
-say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all\r
-a'shiver;--out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles\r
-he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from\r
-a whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail\r
-him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all\r
-cowards--shame upon them! Let 'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a\r
-whale-boat. Shame! shame!"\r
-\r
-During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip\r
-was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.\r
-\r
-But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now\r
-that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon\r
-there seemed no need of the carpenter's box: and thereupon, when some\r
-expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the\r
-cause of his sudden convalescence was this;--at a critical moment, he\r
-had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;\r
-and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,\r
-he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of\r
-his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word,\r
-it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere\r
-sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some\r
-violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.\r
-\r
-Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;\r
-that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,\r
-generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.\r
-So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after\r
-sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a\r
-vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms\r
-and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then\r
-springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon,\r
-pronounced himself fit for a fight.\r
-\r
-With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and\r
-emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.\r
-Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of\r
-grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was\r
-striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on\r
-his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and\r
-seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on\r
-his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical\r
-treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own\r
-proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but\r
-whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart\r
-beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in\r
-the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were\r
-inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must\r
-have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when\r
-one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg--"Oh, devilish\r
-tantalization of the gods!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.\r
-\r
-\r
-When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South\r
-Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific\r
-with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was\r
-answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues\r
-of blue.\r
-\r
-There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently\r
-awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those\r
-fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.\r
-John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery\r
-prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should\r
-rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed\r
-shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that\r
-we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like\r
-slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their\r
-restlessness.\r
-\r
-To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must\r
-ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of\r
-the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same\r
-waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday\r
-planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still\r
-gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between\r
-float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown\r
-Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine\r
-Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay\r
-to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal\r
-swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.\r
-\r
-But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing like an\r
-iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one\r
-nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles\r
-(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other\r
-consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in\r
-which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at\r
-length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese\r
-cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips\r
-met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled\r
-like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through\r
-the vaulted hull, "Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.\r
-\r
-\r
-Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in\r
-these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active\r
-pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old\r
-blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after\r
-concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still retained\r
-it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost\r
-incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do\r
-some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their\r
-various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an\r
-eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads,\r
-harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement,\r
-as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded\r
-by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from\r
-him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically\r
-broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the\r
-heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it\r
-was.--Most miserable!\r
-\r
-A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing\r
-yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the\r
-curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted\r
-questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every\r
-one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.\r
-\r
-Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road\r
-running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt\r
-the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,\r
-dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both\r
-feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four\r
-acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth\r
-act of the grief of his life's drama.\r
-\r
-He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly\r
-encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin. He had been\r
-an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house\r
-and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three\r
-blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church,\r
-planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further\r
-concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into\r
-his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to\r
-tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into\r
-his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that\r
-fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for\r
-prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in\r
-the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so\r
-that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no\r
-unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of\r
-her young-armed old husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by\r
-passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly,\r
-in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's\r
-infants were rocked to slumber.\r
-\r
-Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst\r
-thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon\r
-him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a\r
-truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and\r
-all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some\r
-virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the\r
-responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless\r
-old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to\r
-harvest.\r
-\r
-Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more\r
-and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last;\r
-the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly\r
-gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the\r
-forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived\r
-down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her\r
-thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond\r
-in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen\r
-curls!\r
-\r
-Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death\r
-is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but\r
-the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the\r
-Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of\r
-such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against\r
-suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly\r
-spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and\r
-wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite\r
-Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither,\r
-broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate\r
-death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come\r
-hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and\r
-abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put\r
-up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we\r
-marry thee!"\r
-\r
-Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall\r
-of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went\r
-a-whaling.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 113. The Forge.\r
-\r
-\r
-With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about\r
-mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter\r
-placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the\r
-coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab came\r
-along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While\r
-yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last,\r
-Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the\r
-anvil--the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,\r
-some of which flew close to Ahab.\r
-\r
-"Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying\r
-in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;--look here, they\r
-burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them without a scorch."\r
-\r
-"Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab," answered Perth, resting\r
-for a moment on his hammer; "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou\r
-scorch a scar."\r
-\r
-"Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful\r
-to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others\r
-that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou\r
-not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet\r
-hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?--What wert thou making there?"\r
-\r
-"Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it."\r
-\r
-"And can'st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard\r
-usage as it had?"\r
-\r
-"I think so, sir."\r
-\r
-"And I suppose thou can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never\r
-mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one."\r
-\r
-"Look ye here, then," cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning\r
-with both hands on Perth's shoulders; "look ye here--HERE--can ye\r
-smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith," sweeping one hand across his\r
-ribbed brow; "if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay\r
-my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes.\r
-Answer! Can'st thou smoothe this seam?"\r
-\r
-"Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for\r
-though thou only see'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the\r
-bone of my skull--THAT is all wrinkles! But, away with child's play; no\r
-more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!" jingling the leathern bag,\r
-as if it were full of gold coins. "I, too, want a harpoon made; one that\r
-a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will\r
-stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There's the stuff," flinging\r
-the pouch upon the anvil. "Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered\r
-nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses."\r
-\r
-"Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the\r
-best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work."\r
-\r
-"I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the\r
-melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me\r
-first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these\r
-twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I'll\r
-blow the fire."\r
-\r
-When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by\r
-spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. "A\r
-flaw!" rejecting the last one. "Work that over again, Perth."\r
-\r
-This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when\r
-Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then,\r
-with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to\r
-him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge\r
-shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and\r
-bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or\r
-some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.\r
-\r
-"What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?" muttered Stubb,\r
-looking on from the forecastle. "That Parsee smells fire like a fusee;\r
-and smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan."\r
-\r
-At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as\r
-Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near\r
-by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's bent face.\r
-\r
-"Would'st thou brand me, Perth?" wincing for a moment with the pain;\r
-"have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?"\r
-\r
-"Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this\r
-harpoon for the White Whale?"\r
-\r
-"For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them\r
-thyself, man. Here are my razors--the best of steel; here, and make the\r
-barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea."\r
-\r
-For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain\r
-not use them.\r
-\r
-"Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,\r
-nor pray till--but here--to work!"\r
-\r
-Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the\r
-shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith\r
-was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he\r
-cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.\r
-\r
-"No, no--no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy,\r
-there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me\r
-as much blood as will cover this barb?" holding it high up. A cluster of\r
-dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh,\r
-and the White Whale's barbs were then tempered.\r
-\r
-"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!"\r
-deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the\r
-baptismal blood.\r
-\r
-Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory,\r
-with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of\r
-the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of\r
-it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing\r
-his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly\r
-bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, "Good! and\r
-now for the seizings."\r
-\r
-At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns\r
-were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole\r
-was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope\r
-was traced half-way along the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with\r
-intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope--like the Three\r
-Fates--remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the\r
-weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole,\r
-both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin,\r
-light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh,\r
-Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange\r
-mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the\r
-melancholy ship, and mocked it!\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.\r
-\r
-\r
-Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising\r
-ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,\r
-pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the\r
-stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing,\r
-or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy\r
-minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success\r
-for their pains.\r
-\r
-At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow\r
-heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so\r
-sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone\r
-cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy\r
-quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the\r
-ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and\r
-would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a\r
-remorseless fang.\r
-\r
-These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a\r
-certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he\r
-regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing\r
-only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high\r
-rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when\r
-the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their\r
-hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.\r
-\r
-The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these\r
-there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied\r
-children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when\r
-the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most\r
-mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,\r
-and form one seamless whole.\r
-\r
-Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as\r
-temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem\r
-to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon\r
-them prove but tarnishing.\r
-\r
-Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in\r
-ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye,\r
-men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some\r
-few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.\r
-Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling\r
-threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a\r
-storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this\r
-life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one\r
-pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless\r
-faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then\r
-disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once\r
-gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men,\r
-and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no\r
-more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will\r
-never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like\r
-those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of\r
-our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.\r
-\r
-And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that\r
-same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:--\r
-\r
-"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's\r
-eye!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping\r
-cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep\r
-down and do believe."\r
-\r
-And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same\r
-golden light:--\r
-\r
-"I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that\r
-he has always been jolly!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.\r
-\r
-\r
-And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down\r
-before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.\r
-\r
-It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her\r
-last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad\r
-holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing\r
-round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to\r
-pointing her prow for home.\r
-\r
-The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting\r
-at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down;\r
-and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the\r
-last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours\r
-were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of\r
-her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her\r
-top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious\r
-fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.\r
-\r
-As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising\r
-success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same\r
-seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a\r
-single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to\r
-make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental\r
-casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were\r
-stowed along the deck, and in the captain's and officers' state-rooms.\r
-Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the\r
-cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the\r
-floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually\r
-caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously\r
-added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and\r
-filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled\r
-it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and\r
-filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the\r
-captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands\r
-into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.\r
-\r
-As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the\r
-barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing\r
-still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge\r
-try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like POKE or stomach skin of\r
-the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched\r
-hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were\r
-dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the\r
-Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured\r
-aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with\r
-glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious\r
-jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy at\r
-the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been\r
-removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed\r
-Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and\r
-mortar were being hurled into the sea.\r
-\r
-Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the\r
-ship's elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was\r
-full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual\r
-diversion.\r
-\r
-And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,\r
-with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's\r
-wakes--one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings\r
-as to things to come--their two captains in themselves impersonated the\r
-whole striking contrast of the scene.\r
-\r
-"Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting\r
-a glass and a bottle in the air.\r
-\r
-"Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab in reply.\r
-\r
-"No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all," said the other\r
-good-humoredly. "Come aboard!"\r
-\r
-"Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?"\r
-\r
-"Not enough to speak of--two islanders, that's all;--but come aboard,\r
-old hearty, come along. I'll soon take that black from your brow. Come\r
-along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and homeward-bound."\r
-\r
-"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art\r
-a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty\r
-ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there!\r
-Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!"\r
-\r
-And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other\r
-stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew\r
-of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding\r
-Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively\r
-revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the\r
-homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and\r
-then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two\r
-remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket\r
-soundings.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.\r
-\r
-\r
-Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favourites\r
-sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the\r
-rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed\r
-it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor,\r
-whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.\r
-\r
-It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson\r
-fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun\r
-and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such\r
-plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that\r
-it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of\r
-the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had\r
-gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.\r
-\r
-Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned\r
-off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now\r
-tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales\r
-dying--the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring--that strange\r
-spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a\r
-wondrousness unknown before.\r
-\r
-"He turns and turns him to it,--how slowly, but how steadfastly, his\r
-homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too\r
-worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!--Oh\r
-that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights.\r
-Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe;\r
-in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks\r
-furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still\r
-rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the\r
-Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but\r
-see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads\r
-some other way.\r
-\r
-"Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded\r
-thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas;\r
-thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the\r
-wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor\r
-has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round\r
-again, without a lesson to me.\r
-\r
-"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed\r
-jet!--that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh\r
-whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that\r
-only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker\r
-half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable\r
-imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living\r
-things, exhaled as air, but water now.\r
-\r
-"Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild\r
-fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though\r
-hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.\r
-\r
-\r
-The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to\r
-windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These\r
-last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one\r
-could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay\r
-by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab's.\r
-\r
-The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and\r
-the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare\r
-upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which\r
-gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.\r
-\r
-Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching\r
-in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the\r
-whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound\r
-like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of\r
-Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.\r
-\r
-Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and\r
-hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a\r
-flooded world. "I have dreamed it again," said he.\r
-\r
-"Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor\r
-coffin can be thine?"\r
-\r
-"And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"\r
-\r
-"But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two\r
-hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by\r
-mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in\r
-America."\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:--a hearse and its plumes\r
-floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a\r
-sight we shall not soon see."\r
-\r
-"Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man."\r
-\r
-"And what was that saying about thyself?"\r
-\r
-"Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."\r
-\r
-"And when thou art so gone before--if that ever befall--then ere I can\r
-follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?--Was it not\r
-so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two\r
-pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."\r
-\r
-"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up\r
-like fire-flies in the gloom--"Hemp only can kill thee."\r
-\r
-"The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried\r
-Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--"Immortal on land and on sea!"\r
-\r
-Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the\r
-slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead\r
-whale was brought to the ship.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.\r
-\r
-\r
-The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,\r
-coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would\r
-ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to\r
-the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed\r
-on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship's\r
-prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high\r
-noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was\r
-about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his\r
-latitude.\r
-\r
-Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of\r
-effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing\r
-focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks\r
-lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness\r
-of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne.\r
-Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through\r
-which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form\r
-to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument\r
-placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to\r
-catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian.\r
-Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling\r
-beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's,\r
-was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded\r
-their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness.\r
-At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon\r
-his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that\r
-precise instant. Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked up\r
-towards the sun and murmured to himself: "Thou sea-mark! thou high and\r
-mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I AM--but canst thou cast the\r
-least hint where I SHALL be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing\r
-besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou\r
-must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is\r
-even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally\r
-beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!"\r
-\r
-Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its\r
-numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:\r
-"Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and\r
-Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what\r
-after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou\r
-thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds\r
-thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water\r
-or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence\r
-thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed\r
-be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live\r
-vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched\r
-with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the\r
-glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God\r
-had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!"\r
-dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee;\r
-the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by\r
-line; THESE shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,"\r
-lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry\r
-thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"\r
-\r
-As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live\r
-and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a\r
-fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself--these passed over\r
-the mute, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away;\r
-while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered\r
-together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck,\r
-shouted out--"To the braces! Up helm!--square in!"\r
-\r
-In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon\r
-her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon\r
-her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one\r
-sufficient steed.\r
-\r
-Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's\r
-tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck.\r
-\r
-"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of\r
-its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down,\r
-to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine,\r
-what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"\r
-\r
-"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr.\r
-Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab\r
-mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine;\r
-swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but\r
-thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 119. The Candles.\r
-\r
-\r
-Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal\r
-crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent\r
-but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes\r
-that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these\r
-resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all\r
-storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless\r
-sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.\r
-\r
-Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and\r
-bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly\r
-ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the\r
-thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts\r
-fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the\r
-tempest had left for its after sport.\r
-\r
-Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every\r
-flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster\r
-might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask\r
-were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the\r
-boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very\r
-top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape.\r
-A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship's high\r
-teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern, and left it\r
-again, all dripping through like a sieve.\r
-\r
-"Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,\r
-"but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see,\r
-Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all\r
-round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all\r
-the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never\r
-mind; it's all in fun: so the old song says;"--(SINGS.)\r
-\r
- Oh! jolly is the gale,\r
- And a joker is the whale,\r
- A' flourishin' his tail,--\r
- Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!\r
-\r
- The scud all a flyin',\r
- That's his flip only foamin';\r
- When he stirs in the spicin',--\r
- Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!\r
-\r
- Thunder splits the ships,\r
- But he only smacks his lips,\r
- A tastin' of this flip,--\r
- Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!\r
-\r
-\r
-"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his\r
-harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy\r
-peace."\r
-\r
-"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;\r
-and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr.\r
-Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my\r
-throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a\r
-wind-up."\r
-\r
-"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."\r
-\r
-"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never\r
-mind how foolish?"\r
-\r
-"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his\r
-hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale comes from\r
-the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very\r
-course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is\r
-that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand--his\r
-stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou\r
-must!\r
-\r
-"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"\r
-\r
-"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to\r
-Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's\r
-question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it\r
-into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward,\r
-all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up\r
-there; but not with the lightning."\r
-\r
-At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following\r
-the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same\r
-instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.\r
-\r
-"Who's there?"\r
-\r
-"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his\r
-pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed\r
-lances of fire.\r
-\r
-Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off\r
-the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some\r
-ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But\r
-as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may\r
-avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly\r
-towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering\r
-not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the\r
-vessel's way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a\r
-ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made\r
-in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the\r
-chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.\r
-\r
-"The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to\r
-vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux,\r
-to light Ahab to his post. "Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and\r
-aft. Quick!"\r
-\r
-"Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker\r
-side. Yet I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that\r
-all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir."\r
-\r
-"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!"\r
-\r
-All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each\r
-tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of\r
-the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like\r
-three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.\r
-\r
-"Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing\r
-sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently\r
-jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. "Blast it!"--but\r
-slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and\r
-immediately shifting his tone he cried--"The corpusants have mercy on us\r
-all!"\r
-\r
-To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of\r
-the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses\r
-from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething\r
-sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when\r
-God's burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His "Mene, Mene,\r
-Tekel Upharsin" has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.\r
-\r
-While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the\r
-enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,\r
-all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away\r
-constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic\r
-jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed\r
-the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of\r
-Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as\r
-if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the\r
-preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue\r
-flames on his body.\r
-\r
-The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more\r
-the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment\r
-or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It\r
-was Stubb. "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the\r
-same in the song."\r
-\r
-"No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I\r
-hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?--have\r
-they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck--but it's too dark\r
-to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign\r
-of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be\r
-chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will\r
-work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will\r
-yet be as three spermaceti candles--that's the good promise we saw."\r
-\r
-At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning\r
-to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and once\r
-more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled\r
-supernaturalness in their pallor.\r
-\r
-"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.\r
-\r
-At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame,\r
-the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away\r
-from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where\r
-they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,\r
-arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a\r
-knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted\r
-attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in\r
-Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes\r
-upcast.\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white\r
-flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast\r
-links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it;\r
-blood against fire! So."\r
-\r
-Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot\r
-upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he\r
-stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.\r
-\r
-"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian\r
-once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to\r
-this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now\r
-know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence\r
-wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all\r
-are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless,\r
-placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will\r
-dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the\r
-personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at\r
-best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live,\r
-the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war\r
-is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will\r
-kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power;\r
-and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that\r
-in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy\r
-fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to\r
-thee."\r
-\r
-[SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP LENGTHWISE\r
-TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST, CLOSES HIS EYES,\r
-HIS RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]\r
-\r
-"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung\r
-from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then\r
-grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of\r
-these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning\r
-flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten\r
-brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh!\r
-Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou\r
-leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping\r
-out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the\r
-flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou\r
-art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what\r
-hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.\r
-Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten;\r
-certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I\r
-know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent.\r
-There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom\r
-all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through\r
-thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou\r
-foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable\r
-riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read\r
-my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with\r
-thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"\r
-\r
-"The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, old man!"\r
-\r
-Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed\r
-in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's\r
-bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather\r
-sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a\r
-levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there\r
-like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm--"God, God\r
-is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill\r
-continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a\r
-fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this."\r
-\r
-Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the\r
-braces--though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast\r
-mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But\r
-dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the\r
-burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to\r
-transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's end.\r
-Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart\r
-that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:--\r
-\r
-"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and\r
-heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye\r
-may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out\r
-the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the\r
-flame.\r
-\r
-As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of\r
-some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so\r
-much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts;\r
-so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him\r
-in a terror of dismay.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.\r
-\r
-AHAB STANDING BY THE HELM. STARBUCK APPROACHING HIM.\r
-\r
-\r
-"We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose\r
-and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?"\r
-\r
-"Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up\r
-now."\r
-\r
-"Sir!--in God's name!--sir?"\r
-\r
-"Well."\r
-\r
-"The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?"\r
-\r
-"Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises,\r
-but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.--By\r
-masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some\r
-coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest\r
-trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now\r
-sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards\r
-send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft\r
-there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic\r
-is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 121. Midnight.--The Forecastle Bulwarks.\r
-\r
-\r
-STUBB AND FLASK MOUNTED ON THEM, AND PASSING ADDITIONAL LASHINGS OVER\r
-THE ANCHORS THERE HANGING.\r
-\r
-\r
-"No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you\r
-will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long\r
-ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn't you once say that\r
-whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its\r
-insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft\r
-and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn't you say so?"\r
-\r
-"Well, suppose I did? What then? I've part changed my flesh since that\r
-time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we ARE loaded with powder\r
-barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get\r
-afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have\r
-pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now. Shake yourself; you're\r
-Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat\r
-collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine\r
-Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But\r
-hark, again, and I'll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off\r
-from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope;\r
-now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's\r
-lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn't\r
-got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don't you see, you timber-head,\r
-that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first\r
-struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred\r
-carries rods, and Ahab,--aye, man, and all of us,--were in no more\r
-danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand\r
-ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would\r
-have every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running\r
-up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered feather,\r
-and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's\r
-easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be\r
-sensible."\r
-\r
-"I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard."\r
-\r
-"Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be sensible, that's\r
-a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the\r
-turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors\r
-now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two\r
-anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what\r
-big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists,\r
-hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is\r
-anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable,\r
-though. There, hammer that knot down, and we've done. So; next to\r
-touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just\r
-wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs\r
-so, Flask; but seems to me, a Long tailed coat ought always to be worn\r
-in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry\r
-off the water, d'ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end\r
-eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I\r
-must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew!\r
-there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come\r
-from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.--Thunder and Lightning.\r
-\r
-\r
-THE MAIN-TOP-SAIL YARD.--TASHTEGO PASSING NEW LASHINGS AROUND IT.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's\r
-the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give\r
-us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 123. The Musket.\r
-\r
-\r
-During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's\r
-jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by\r
-its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached\r
-to it--for they were slack--because some play to the tiller was\r
-indispensable.\r
-\r
-In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock\r
-to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the\r
-compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the\r
-Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice\r
-the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is\r
-a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted\r
-emotion.\r
-\r
-Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the\r
-strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--one engaged forward and the\r
-other aft--the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails\r
-were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like\r
-the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when\r
-that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.\r
-\r
-The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a\r
-storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through\r
-the water with some precision again; and the course--for the present,\r
-East-south-east--which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more\r
-given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only\r
-steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the\r
-ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo!\r
-a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze\r
-became fair!\r
-\r
-Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "HO! THE\r
-FAIR WIND! OH-YE-HO, CHEERLY MEN!" the crew singing for joy, that so\r
-promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents\r
-preceding it.\r
-\r
-In compliance with the standing order of his commander--to report\r
-immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change\r
-in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to\r
-the breeze--however reluctantly and gloomily,--than he mechanically went\r
-below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.\r
-\r
-Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it\r
-a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was\r
-burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted\r
-door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels.\r
-The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming\r
-silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of\r
-the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as\r
-they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,\r
-upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw\r
-the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with\r
-its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew\r
-it for itself.\r
-\r
-"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very musket\r
-that he pointed at me;--that one with the studded stock; let me touch\r
-it--lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances,\r
-strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and\r
-powder in the pan;--that's not good. Best spill it?--wait. I'll cure\r
-myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I think.--I come\r
-to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and\r
-doom,--THAT'S fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for\r
-that accursed fish.--The very tube he pointed at me!--the very one;\r
-THIS one--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I\r
-handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say\r
-he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly\r
-quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere\r
-dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did\r
-he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed\r
-old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom\r
-with him?--Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and\r
-more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my\r
-soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this\r
-instant--put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in\r
-his sleep? Yes, just there,--in there, he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye,\r
-but still alive, and soon awake again. I can't withstand thee, then, old\r
-man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to;\r
-all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is\r
-all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd thy vow; say'st\r
-all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!--But is there no other way? no\r
-lawful way?--Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest\r
-this old man's living power from his own living hands? Only a fool\r
-would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes\r
-and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would\r
-be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the\r
-sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself,\r
-inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What,\r
-then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan\r
-the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and\r
-a whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye, 'tis so.--Is heaven\r
-a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed,\r
-tindering sheets and skin together?--And would I be a murderer, then,\r
-if"--and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the\r
-loaded musket's end against the door.\r
-\r
-"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A\r
-touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--Oh\r
-Mary! Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death, old man,\r
-who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week\r
-may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall\r
-I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails\r
-are reefed and set; she heads her course."\r
-\r
-"Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"\r
-\r
-Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's\r
-tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream\r
-to speak.\r
-\r
-The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;\r
-Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he\r
-placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.\r
-\r
-"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell\r
-him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know'st what to say."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 124. The Needle.\r
-\r
-\r
-Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of\r
-mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on\r
-like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded\r
-so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world\r
-boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible\r
-sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his\r
-bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian\r
-kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of\r
-molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.\r
-\r
-Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time\r
-the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye\r
-the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by\r
-the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun's rearward place, and how\r
-the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.\r
-\r
-"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of\r
-the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!\r
-Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!"\r
-\r
-But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the\r
-helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.\r
-\r
-"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.\r
-\r
-"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist. "Heading East at this\r
-hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"\r
-\r
-Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then\r
-observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very\r
-blinding palpableness must have been the cause.\r
-\r
-Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse\r
-of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost\r
-seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two\r
-compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.\r
-\r
-But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew,\r
-the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened\r
-before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our compasses--that's\r
-all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."\r
-\r
-"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale mate,\r
-gloomily.\r
-\r
-Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than\r
-one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as\r
-developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, essentially one with\r
-the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled\r
-at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has\r
-actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and\r
-rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal;\r
-all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic\r
-steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in\r
-either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original\r
-virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected,\r
-the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were\r
-the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.\r
-\r
-Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed\r
-compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took\r
-the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were\r
-exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's course to be\r
-changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod\r
-thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair\r
-one had only been juggling her.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing,\r
-but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask--who\r
-in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings--likewise\r
-unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly\r
-rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as\r
-ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed;\r
-or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their\r
-congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.\r
-\r
-For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But\r
-chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper\r
-sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.\r
-\r
-"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked\r
-thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But\r
-Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck--a lance without\r
-a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's needles.\r
-Quick!"\r
-\r
-Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about\r
-to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to\r
-revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a\r
-matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old\r
-man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily\r
-practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors,\r
-without some shudderings and evil portents.\r
-\r
-"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed\r
-him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's\r
-needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that\r
-will point as true as any."\r
-\r
-Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this\r
-was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might\r
-follow. But Starbuck looked away.\r
-\r
-With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the\r
-lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade\r
-him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul,\r
-after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the\r
-blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered\r
-that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then\r
-going through some small strange motions with it--whether indispensable\r
-to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe\r
-of the crew, is uncertain--he called for linen thread; and moving to the\r
-binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally\r
-suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards.\r
-At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at\r
-either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had\r
-been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the\r
-binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look\r
-ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun\r
-is East, and that compass swears it!"\r
-\r
-One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could\r
-persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk\r
-away.\r
-\r
-In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his\r
-fatal pride.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.\r
-\r
-\r
-While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log\r
-and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance\r
-upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some merchantmen,\r
-and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the\r
-log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake than\r
-anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the\r
-course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of\r
-progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden\r
-reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the\r
-railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and\r
-wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that\r
-hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he\r
-happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,\r
-and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic\r
-oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly;\r
-astern the billows rolled in riots.\r
-\r
-"Forward, there! Heave the log!"\r
-\r
-Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. "Take\r
-the reel, one of ye, I'll heave."\r
-\r
-They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the\r
-deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into\r
-the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.\r
-\r
-The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting\r
-handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so\r
-stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.\r
-\r
-Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty\r
-turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old\r
-Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to\r
-speak.\r
-\r
-"Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have\r
-spoiled it."\r
-\r
-"'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?\r
-Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it."\r
-\r
-"I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these\r
-grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a\r
-superior, who'll ne'er confess."\r
-\r
-"What's that? There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's\r
-granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient. Where wert\r
-thou born?"\r
-\r
-"In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."\r
-\r
-"Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that."\r
-\r
-"I know not, sir, but I was born there."\r
-\r
-"In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a man\r
-from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;\r
-which is sucked in--by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall\r
-butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So."\r
-\r
-The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long\r
-dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In\r
-turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing\r
-resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.\r
-\r
-"Hold hard!"\r
-\r
-Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging\r
-log was gone.\r
-\r
-"I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad\r
-sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian;\r
-reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and\r
-mend thou the line. See to it."\r
-\r
-"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer\r
-seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in,\r
-Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and\r
-dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"\r
-\r
-"Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip's missing.\r
-Let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman. It drags\r
-hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul\r
-in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet!\r
-a hatchet! cut it off--we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,\r
-sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."\r
-\r
-"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.\r
-"Away from the quarter-deck!"\r
-\r
-"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.\r
-"Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?\r
-\r
-"Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!"\r
-\r
-"And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of\r
-thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve\r
-through! Who art thou, boy?"\r
-\r
-"Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip!\r
-One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high--looks\r
-cowardly--quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip the\r
-coward?"\r
-\r
-"There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look\r
-down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him,\r
-ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home\r
-henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou\r
-art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down."\r
-\r
-"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand,\r
-and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,\r
-perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope;\r
-something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come\r
-and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I\r
-will not let this go."\r
-\r
-"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse\r
-horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in\r
-gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods\r
-oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not\r
-what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come!\r
-I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an\r
-Emperor's!"\r
-\r
-"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with\r
-strength, the other daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten\r
-line--all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new\r
-line altogether. I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.\r
-\r
-\r
-Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel, and her progress\r
-solely determined by Ahab's level log and line; the Pequod held on\r
-her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such\r
-unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled\r
-by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed\r
-the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.\r
-\r
-At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the\r
-Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the\r
-dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch--then headed\r
-by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly--like\r
-half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered\r
-Innocents--that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for\r
-the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly\r
-listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained\r
-within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was\r
-mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled.\r
-Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that the wild\r
-thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men\r
-in the sea.\r
-\r
-Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when\r
-he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not\r
-unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus\r
-explained the wonder.\r
-\r
-Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers\r
-of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams\r
-that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company\r
-with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this\r
-only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a\r
-very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their\r
-peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their\r
-round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from\r
-the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have\r
-more than once been mistaken for men.\r
-\r
-But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible\r
-confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At\r
-sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;\r
-and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for\r
-sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus\r
-with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he\r
-had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard--a cry and a\r
-rushing--and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and\r
-looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the\r
-sea.\r
-\r
-The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the stern, where it\r
-always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it,\r
-and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it\r
-slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and\r
-the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to\r
-yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.\r
-\r
-And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out\r
-for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own peculiar ground; that man\r
-was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the\r
-time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at\r
-least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil\r
-in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They\r
-declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had\r
-heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.\r
-\r
-The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see\r
-to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as\r
-in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of\r
-the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly\r
-connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be;\r
-therefore, they were going to leave the ship's stern unprovided with a\r
-buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint\r
-concerning his coffin.\r
-\r
-"A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting.\r
-\r
-"Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb.\r
-\r
-"It will make a good enough one," said Flask, "the carpenter here can\r
-arrange it easily."\r
-\r
-"Bring it up; there's nothing else for it," said Starbuck, after a\r
-melancholy pause. "Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so--the coffin,\r
-I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it."\r
-\r
-"And shall I nail down the lid, sir?" moving his hand as with a hammer.\r
-\r
-"Aye."\r
-\r
-"And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his hand as with a\r
-caulking-iron.\r
-\r
-"Aye."\r
-\r
-"And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?" moving his hand as\r
-with a pitch-pot.\r
-\r
-"Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and\r
-no more.--Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me."\r
-\r
-"He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks.\r
-Now I don't like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it\r
-like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won't put\r
-his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin?\r
-And now I'm ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old\r
-coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don't like this\r
-cobbling sort of business--I don't like it at all; it's undignified;\r
-it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their\r
-betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square\r
-mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and\r
-is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not\r
-a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at\r
-the end. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord!\r
-what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of\r
-sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that's\r
-the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when\r
-I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their\r
-lonely old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at\r
-sea but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay\r
-over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the\r
-snap-spring over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before\r
-with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied\r
-up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I'm made of knotty\r
-Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing\r
-about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make\r
-bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We\r
-work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask\r
-the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling,\r
-and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I'll do the job, now, tenderly.\r
-I'll have me--let's see--how many in the ship's company, all told? But\r
-I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate, Turk's-headed\r
-life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then,\r
-if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for\r
-one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer,\r
-caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let's to it."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 127. The Deck.\r
-\r
-\r
-THE COFFIN LAID UPON TWO LINE-TUBS, BETWEEN THE VICE-BENCH AND THE OPEN\r
-HATCHWAY; THE CARPENTER CAULKING ITS SEAMS; THE STRING OF TWISTED OAKUM\r
-SLOWLY UNWINDING FROM A LARGE ROLL OF IT PLACED IN THE BOSOM OF\r
-HIS FROCK.--AHAB COMES SLOWLY FROM THE CABIN-GANGWAY, AND HEARS PIP\r
-FOLLOWING HIM.\r
-\r
-\r
-"Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand\r
-complies with my humor more genially than that boy.--Middle aisle of a\r
-church! What's here?"\r
-\r
-"Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the\r
-hatchway!"\r
-\r
-"Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault."\r
-\r
-"Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does."\r
-\r
-"Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy\r
-shop?"\r
-\r
-"I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?"\r
-\r
-"Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but\r
-they've set me now to turning it into something else."\r
-\r
-"Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,\r
-monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the\r
-next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those\r
-same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a\r
-jack-of-all-trades."\r
-\r
-"But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do."\r
-\r
-"The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a\r
-coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the\r
-craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in\r
-hand. Dost thou never?"\r
-\r
-"Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but\r
-the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there\r
-was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark\r
-to it."\r
-\r
-"Aye, and that's because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what in\r
-all things makes the sounding-board is this--there's naught beneath. And\r
-yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.\r
-Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against\r
-the churchyard gate, going in?\r
-\r
-"Faith, sir, I've--"\r
-\r
-"Faith? What's that?"\r
-\r
-"Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like--that's all,\r
-sir."\r
-\r
-"Um, um; go on."\r
-\r
-"I was about to say, sir, that--"\r
-\r
-"Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?\r
-Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight."\r
-\r
-"He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot\r
-latitudes. I've heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos,\r
-is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of\r
-Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He's always under\r
-the Line--fiery hot, I tell ye! He's looking this way--come, oakum;\r
-quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I'm the\r
-professor of musical glasses--tap, tap!"\r
-\r
-(AHAB TO HIMSELF.)\r
-\r
-"There's a sight! There's a sound! The grey-headed woodpecker tapping\r
-the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that\r
-thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag,\r
-that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all\r
-materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here\r
-now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made\r
-the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life.\r
-A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some\r
-spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!\r
-I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth,\r
-that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain\r
-twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed\r
-sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return\r
-again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous\r
-philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds\r
-must empty into thee!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.\r
-\r
-\r
-Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down\r
-upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the\r
-time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the\r
-broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all\r
-fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from\r
-the smitten hull.\r
-\r
-"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old Manxman. But ere her\r
-commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he\r
-could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard.\r
-\r
-"Hast seen the White Whale?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?"\r
-\r
-Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question;\r
-and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain\r
-himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen descending her\r
-side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod's\r
-main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by\r
-Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.\r
-\r
-"Where was he?--not killed!--not killed!" cried Ahab, closely advancing.\r
-"How was it?"\r
-\r
-It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while\r
-three of the stranger's boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which\r
-had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were\r
-yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had\r
-suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon,\r
-the fourth rigged boat--a reserved one--had been instantly lowered in\r
-chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat--the swiftest\r
-keeled of all--seemed to have succeeded in fastening--at least, as\r
-well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the\r
-distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam\r
-of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was\r
-concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with\r
-his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no\r
-positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging;\r
-darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward\r
-boats--ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite\r
-direction--the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to\r
-its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance\r
-from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded\r
-all sail--stunsail on stunsail--after the missing boat; kindling a fire\r
-in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out.\r
-But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the\r
-presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then\r
-paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding\r
-anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and\r
-though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least\r
-glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.\r
-\r
-The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his\r
-object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his\r
-own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles\r
-apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.\r
-\r
-"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some one\r
-in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best coat; mayhap, his\r
-watch--he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two\r
-pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of\r
-the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks--pale in the\r
-very buttons of his eyes--look--it wasn't the coat--it must have been\r
-the--"\r
-\r
-"My boy, my own boy is among them. For God's sake--I beg, I\r
-conjure"--here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far\r
-had but icily received his petition. "For eight-and-forty hours let me\r
-charter your ship--I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it--if\r
-there be no other way--for eight-and-forty hours only--only that--you\r
-must, oh, you must, and you SHALL do this thing."\r
-\r
-"His son!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his son he's lost! I take back the\r
-coat and watch--what says Ahab? We must save that boy."\r
-\r
-"He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night," said the old Manx\r
-sailor standing behind them; "I heard; all of ye heard their spirits."\r
-\r
-Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's\r
-the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the\r
-Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among\r
-the number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other\r
-hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase,\r
-there had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched\r
-father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which\r
-was only solved for him by his chief mate's instinctively adopting the\r
-ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when\r
-placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the\r
-majority first. But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason,\r
-had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by\r
-Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad,\r
-but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving\r
-hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought to\r
-initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially\r
-the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that\r
-Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them,\r
-for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than\r
-their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall\r
-be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely\r
-partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.\r
-\r
-Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;\r
-and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without\r
-the least quivering of his own.\r
-\r
-"I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me. Do to me\r
-as you would have me do to you in the like case. For YOU too have a boy,\r
-Captain Ahab--though but a child, and nestling safely at home now--a\r
-child of your old age too--Yes, yes, you relent; I see it--run, run,\r
-men, now, and stand by to square in the yards."\r
-\r
-"Avast," cried Ahab--"touch not a rope-yarn"; then in a voice that\r
-prolongingly moulded every word--"Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.\r
-Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I\r
-forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch,\r
-and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers:\r
-then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before."\r
-\r
-Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,\r
-leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter\r
-rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment,\r
-Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his\r
-boat, and returned to his ship.\r
-\r
-Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel\r
-was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,\r
-however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round;\r
-starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a\r
-head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her\r
-masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry\r
-trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.\r
-\r
-But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw\r
-that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.\r
-She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.\r
-\r
-\r
-(AHAB MOVING TO GO ON DECK; PIP CATCHES HIM BY THE HAND TO FOLLOW.)\r
-\r
-"Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming\r
-when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him.\r
-There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.\r
-Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired\r
-health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if\r
-thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed\r
-chair; another screw to it, thou must be."\r
-\r
-"No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for\r
-your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a\r
-part of ye."\r
-\r
-"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless\r
-fidelity of man!--and a black! and crazy!--but methinks like-cures-like\r
-applies to him too; he grows so sane again."\r
-\r
-"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose\r
-drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.\r
-But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with\r
-ye."\r
-\r
-"If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him.\r
-I tell thee no; it cannot be."\r
-\r
-"Oh good master, master, master!\r
-\r
-"Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.\r
-Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still\r
-know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!--Met! True art\r
-thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless\r
-thee; and if it come to that,--God for ever save thee, let what will\r
-befall."\r
-\r
-(AHAB GOES; PIP STEPS ONE STEP FORWARD.)\r
-\r
-\r
-"Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,--but I'm alone. Now\r
-were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip!\r
-Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip? He must be up here; let's try the\r
-door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there's no opening\r
-it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this\r
-screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll seat me, against the transom,\r
-in the ship's full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me.\r
-Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great\r
-admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and\r
-lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come\r
-crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs!\r
-What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men with gold\r
-lace upon their coats!--Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?--a little\r
-negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a\r
-whale-boat once;--seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and\r
-let's drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them!\r
-Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.--Hist! above there,\r
-I hear ivory--Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk\r
-over me. But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they\r
-bulge through; and oysters come to join me."\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 130. The Hat.\r
-\r
-\r
-And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a\r
-preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters swept--seemed to\r
-have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely\r
-there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and\r
-longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a\r
-vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually\r
-encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his successive meetings with\r
-various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference\r
-with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned\r
-against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes,\r
-which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting\r
-polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night\r
-sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now\r
-fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It\r
-domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,\r
-fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a\r
-single spear or leaf.\r
-\r
-In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,\r
-vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove\r
-to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to\r
-finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of\r
-Ahab's iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever\r
-conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them.\r
-\r
-But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when\r
-he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that\r
-even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance\r
-awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.\r
-Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah\r
-now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious\r
-at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal\r
-substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen\r
-being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by\r
-night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go\r
-below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan\r
-but wondrous eyes did plainly say--We two watchmen never rest.\r
-\r
-Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the\r
-deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or\r
-exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,--the main-mast\r
-and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,--his\r
-living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched\r
-heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the\r
-days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock;\r
-yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly\r
-whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether\r
-he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in\r
-the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp\r
-gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The\r
-clothes that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him;\r
-and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath\r
-the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.\r
-\r
-He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,--breakfast and\r
-dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew\r
-all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow\r
-idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though\r
-his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's\r
-mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never\r
-seemed to speak--one man to the other--unless at long intervals some\r
-passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell\r
-seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew,\r
-they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word;\r
-by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal\r
-interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they\r
-stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by\r
-the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the\r
-Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned\r
-substance.\r
-\r
-And yet, somehow, did Ahab--in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,\r
-and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,--Ahab\r
-seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both\r
-seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade\r
-siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel\r
-was solid Ahab.\r
-\r
-At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard\r
-from aft,--"Man the mast-heads!"--and all through the day, till after\r
-sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of\r
-the helmsman's bell, was heard--"What d'ye see?--sharp! sharp!"\r
-\r
-But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the\r
-children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac\r
-old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least, of nearly\r
-all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether\r
-Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if\r
-these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally\r
-expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.\r
-\r
-"I will have the first sight of the whale myself,"--he said. "Aye!\r
-Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest\r
-of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved\r
-block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the\r
-downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for\r
-the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that\r
-end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon\r
-his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon\r
-Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his\r
-firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,--"Take the rope, sir--I give\r
-it into thy hands, Starbuck." Then arranging his person in the basket,\r
-he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being\r
-the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And\r
-thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad\r
-upon the sea for miles and miles,--ahead, astern, this side, and\r
-that,--within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.\r
-\r
-When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in\r
-the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is\r
-hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these\r
-circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge\r
-to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a\r
-wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft\r
-cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the\r
-deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes\r
-cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if,\r
-unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some\r
-carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the\r
-sea. So Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only\r
-strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one\r
-only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the\r
-slightest degree approaching to decision--one of those too, whose\r
-faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;--it was\r
-strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;\r
-freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's\r
-hands.\r
-\r
-Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten\r
-minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly\r
-incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these\r
-latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head\r
-in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet\r
-straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying\r
-again round his head.\r
-\r
-But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed\r
-not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked\r
-it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least\r
-heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every\r
-sight.\r
-\r
-"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who\r
-being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though\r
-somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing\r
-them.\r
-\r
-But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes; the long\r
-hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with\r
-his prize.\r
-\r
-An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace\r
-it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would\r
-be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen\r
-accounted good. Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and\r
-on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while\r
-from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly\r
-discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.\r
-\r
-\r
-The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the\r
-life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably\r
-misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were\r
-fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships,\r
-cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to\r
-carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.\r
-\r
-Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and\r
-some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you\r
-now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,\r
-half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.\r
-\r
-"Hast seen the White Whale?"\r
-\r
-"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with\r
-his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.\r
-\r
-"Hast killed him?"\r
-\r
-"The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," answered the\r
-other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered\r
-sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.\r
-\r
-"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab\r
-held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold\r
-his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs;\r
-and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin,\r
-where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"\r
-\r
-"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--pointing to the\r
-hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only\r
-yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only THAT one I bury; the rest were\r
-buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." Then turning to his\r
-crew--"Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and\r
-lift the body; so, then--Oh! God"--advancing towards the hammock with\r
-uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life--"\r
-\r
-"Brace forward! Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.\r
-\r
-But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound\r
-of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so\r
-quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled\r
-her hull with their ghostly baptism.\r
-\r
-As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy\r
-hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.\r
-\r
-"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.\r
-"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your\r
-taffrail to show us your coffin!"\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.\r
-\r
-\r
-It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were\r
-hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was\r
-transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and\r
-man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's\r
-chest in his sleep.\r
-\r
-Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,\r
-unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;\r
-but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed\r
-mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,\r
-troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.\r
-\r
-But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and\r
-shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,\r
-that distinguished them.\r
-\r
-Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle\r
-air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the\r
-girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--most seen\r
-here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving\r
-alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.\r
-\r
-Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm\r
-and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the\r
-ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the\r
-morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's\r
-forehead of heaven.\r
-\r
-Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged\r
-creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how\r
-oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen\r
-little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around\r
-their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on\r
-the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.\r
-\r
-Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and\r
-watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more\r
-and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely\r
-aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment,\r
-the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome\r
-sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long\r
-cruel--forbidding--now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck,\r
-and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however\r
-wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to\r
-bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea;\r
-nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.\r
-\r
-Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;\r
-and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that\r
-stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch\r
-him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.\r
-\r
-Ahab turned.\r
-\r
-"Starbuck!"\r
-\r
-"Sir."\r
-\r
-"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such\r
-a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck my first whale--a\r
-boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty--forty--forty years ago!--ago! Forty\r
-years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and\r
-storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab\r
-forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors\r
-of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not\r
-spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation\r
-of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's\r
-exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the\r
-green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of\r
-solitary command!--when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so\r
-keenly known to me before--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry\r
-salted fare--fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!--when the\r
-poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the\r
-world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts--away, whole oceans away, from\r
-that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn\r
-the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--wife?\r
-wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor\r
-girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy,\r
-the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand\r
-lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey--more a\r
-demon than a man!--aye, aye! what a forty years' fool--fool--old fool,\r
-has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy\r
-the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or\r
-better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this\r
-weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under\r
-me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.\r
-Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look\r
-very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and\r
-humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled\r
-centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!--crack my heart!--stave my\r
-brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have\r
-I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?\r
-Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is\r
-better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By\r
-the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass,\r
-man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on\r
-board!--lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick.\r
-That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see\r
-in that eye!"\r
-\r
-"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why\r
-should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us\r
-fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are\r
-Starbuck's--wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow\r
-youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,\r
-longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!--this instant let me alter\r
-the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl\r
-on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such\r
-mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."\r
-\r
-"They have, they have. I have seen them--some summer days in the\r
-morning. About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--the boy\r
-vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of\r
-cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back\r
-to dance him again."\r
-\r
-"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning,\r
-should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's\r
-sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my\r
-Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face\r
-from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!"\r
-\r
-But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and\r
-cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.\r
-\r
-"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what\r
-cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor\r
-commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep\r
-pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly\r
-making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not\r
-so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this\r
-arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy\r
-in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power;\r
-how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think\r
-thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that\r
-living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in\r
-this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all\r
-the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon\r
-Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where\r
-do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged\r
-to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and\r
-the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been\r
-making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the\r
-mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how\r
-we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid\r
-greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut\r
-swaths--Starbuck!"\r
-\r
-But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.\r
-\r
-Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at\r
-two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly\r
-leaning over the same rail.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 133. The Chase--First Day.\r
-\r
-\r
-That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man--as his wont at\r
-intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went\r
-to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing\r
-up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to\r
-some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that\r
-peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the\r
-living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner\r
-surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and\r
-then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible,\r
-Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the\r
-sail to be shortened.\r
-\r
-The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated\r
-at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and\r
-lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery\r
-wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift\r
-tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.\r
-\r
-"Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!"\r
-\r
-Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle\r
-deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they\r
-seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear\r
-with their clothes in their hands.\r
-\r
-"What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.\r
-\r
-"Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.\r
-\r
-"T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"\r
-\r
-All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for\r
-swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were\r
-hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft,\r
-and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the\r
-main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the\r
-air. "There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is\r
-Moby Dick!"\r
-\r
-Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three\r
-look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous\r
-whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final\r
-perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just\r
-beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian's\r
-head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the whale\r
-was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing\r
-his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the\r
-air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had\r
-so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.\r
-\r
-"And did none of ye see it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched men\r
-all around him.\r
-\r
-"I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I\r
-cried out," said Tashtego.\r
-\r
-"Not the same instant; not the same--no, the doubloon is mine, Fate\r
-reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the\r
-White Whale first. There she blows!--there she blows!--there she blows!\r
-There again!--there again!" he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic\r
-tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets.\r
-"He's going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by\r
-three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship.\r
-Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go\r
-flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by,\r
-stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,--quick, quicker!" and he\r
-slid through the air to the deck.\r
-\r
-"He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from\r
-us; cannot have seen the ship yet."\r
-\r
-"Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!--brace up!\r
-Shiver her!--shiver her!--So; well that! Boats, boats!"\r
-\r
-Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails\r
-set--all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to\r
-leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up\r
-Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.\r
-\r
-Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;\r
-but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew\r
-still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a\r
-noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came\r
-so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump\r
-was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing,\r
-and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish\r
-foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head\r
-beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went\r
-the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical\r
-rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters\r
-interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;\r
-and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But\r
-these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly\r
-feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to\r
-some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but\r
-shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back;\r
-and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and\r
-to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and\r
-rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.\r
-\r
-A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested\r
-the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with\r
-ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering\r
-eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,\r
-rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that\r
-great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so\r
-divinely swam.\r
-\r
-On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once\r
-leaving him, then flowed so wide away--on each bright side, the whale\r
-shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who\r
-namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured\r
-to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of\r
-tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all\r
-who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way\r
-thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.\r
-\r
-And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among\r
-waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby\r
-Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his\r
-submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.\r
-But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant\r
-his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural\r
-Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the\r
-grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly\r
-halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered\r
-over the agitated pool that he left.\r
-\r
-With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the\r
-three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance.\r
-\r
-"An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed\r
-beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing\r
-vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed\r
-whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now\r
-freshened; the sea began to swell.\r
-\r
-"The birds!--the birds!" cried Tashtego.\r
-\r
-In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were\r
-now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began\r
-fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,\r
-expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover\r
-no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its\r
-depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white\r
-weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose,\r
-till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked\r
-rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable\r
-bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast,\r
-shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The\r
-glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble\r
-tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled\r
-the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon\r
-Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and\r
-seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and\r
-stand by to stern.\r
-\r
-Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its\r
-bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale's head while yet\r
-under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that\r
-malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself,\r
-as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath\r
-the boat.\r
-\r
-Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for\r
-an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of\r
-a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his\r
-mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into\r
-the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish\r
-pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's\r
-head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale\r
-now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With\r
-unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the\r
-tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the\r
-uttermost stern.\r
-\r
-And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the\r
-whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his\r
-body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from\r
-the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and\r
-while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis\r
-impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with\r
-this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and\r
-helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized\r
-the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from\r
-its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the\r
-frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an\r
-enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain,\r
-and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two\r
-floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew\r
-at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast\r
-to the oars to lash them across.\r
-\r
-At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first\r
-to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a\r
-movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand\r
-had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only\r
-slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over sideways as it\r
-slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of\r
-it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.\r
-\r
-Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little\r
-distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the\r
-billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;\r
-so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--some twenty or more feet\r
-out of the water--the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,\r
-dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray\r
-still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel\r
-billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to\r
-overleap its summit with their scud.\r
-\r
-\r
-*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation\r
-(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down\r
-poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously\r
-described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively\r
-view whatever objects may be encircling him.\r
-\r
-\r
-But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round\r
-and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful\r
-wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault.\r
-The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of\r
-grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book\r
-of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's\r
-insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,--though he could still\r
-keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless\r
-Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock\r
-might burst. From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and\r
-mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not\r
-succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.\r
-For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so\r
-planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed\r
-horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed,\r
-still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to\r
-strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of\r
-the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they\r
-themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on\r
-the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old\r
-man's head.\r
-\r
-Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's\r
-mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;\r
-and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--"Sail on\r
-the"--but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and\r
-whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing\r
-to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him\r
-off!"\r
-\r
-The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she\r
-effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam\r
-off, the boats flew to the rescue.\r
-\r
-Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine\r
-caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily strength did\r
-crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a time, lying\r
-all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot\r
-of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as\r
-desolate sounds from out ravines.\r
-\r
-But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more\r
-abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense\r
-to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused\r
-through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary\r
-in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their\r
-life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous\r
-intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures\r
-contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.\r
-\r
-"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one\r
-bended arm--"is it safe?"\r
-\r
-"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.\r
-\r
-"Lay it before me;--any missing men?"\r
-\r
-"One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here are\r
-five men."\r
-\r
-"That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there!\r
-there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--Hands off from me!\r
-The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! Set the sail; out oars;\r
-the helm!"\r
-\r
-It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked\r
-up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus\r
-continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But\r
-the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale,\r
-for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a\r
-velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances,\r
-pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a\r
-hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an\r
-unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable\r
-only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it\r
-sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of\r
-overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were\r
-soon swayed up to their cranes--the two parts of the wrecked boat having\r
-been previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her\r
-side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it\r
-with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the\r
-Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known,\r
-methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly announced\r
-from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone\r
-down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch\r
-in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired, his\r
-voice was heard.--"Whose is the doubloon now? D'ye see him?" and if the\r
-reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his\r
-perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless;\r
-anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.\r
-\r
-As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft,\r
-or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still\r
-greater breadth--thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at\r
-every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon\r
-the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern.\r
-At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh\r
-troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man's face\r
-there now stole some such added gloom as this.\r
-\r
-Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to\r
-evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in\r
-his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed--"The\r
-thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!"\r
-\r
-"What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did\r
-I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear\r
-thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck."\r
-\r
-"Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'tis a solemn sight; an omen,\r
-and an ill one."\r
-\r
-"Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to\r
-man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and\r
-give an old wives' darkling hint.--Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles\r
-of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and\r
-ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of\r
-the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold--I\r
-shiver!--How now? Aloft there! D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout,\r
-though he spout ten times a second!"\r
-\r
-The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.\r
-Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.\r
-\r
-"Can't see the spout now, sir;--too dark"--cried a voice from the air.\r
-\r
-"How heading when last seen?"\r
-\r
-"As before, sir,--straight to leeward."\r
-\r
-"Good! he will travel slower now 'tis night. Down royals and top-gallant\r
-stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he's\r
-making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her\r
-full before the wind!--Aloft! come down!--Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand\r
-to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning."--Then advancing\r
-towards the doubloon in the main-mast--"Men, this gold is mine, for I\r
-earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead;\r
-and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be\r
-killed, this gold is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise\r
-him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away\r
-now!--the deck is thine, sir!"\r
-\r
-And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and\r
-slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals\r
-rousing himself to see how the night wore on.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 134. The Chase--Second Day.\r
-\r
-\r
-At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.\r
-\r
-"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light\r
-to spread.\r
-\r
-"See nothing, sir."\r
-\r
-"Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought\r
-for;--the top-gallant sails!--aye, they should have been kept on her all\r
-night. But no matter--'tis but resting for the rush."\r
-\r
-Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,\r
-continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing\r
-by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the\r
-wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence\r
-acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders;\r
-that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they\r
-will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both\r
-the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of\r
-sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period.\r
-And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of\r
-a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires\r
-shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this\r
-pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the\r
-cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright\r
-the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the\r
-fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and\r
-diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night\r
-obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness\r
-is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the\r
-pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the\r
-proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all\r
-desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the\r
-mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in\r
-its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as\r
-doctors that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or\r
-the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour;\r
-even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that\r
-other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his\r
-speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have\r
-gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of\r
-latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in\r
-the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what\r
-present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that\r
-assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his\r
-port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile\r
-matters touching the chase of whales.\r
-\r
-The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a\r
-cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level\r
-field.\r
-\r
-"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck\r
-creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two\r
-brave fellows!--Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,\r
-on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait\r
-that leaves no dust behind!"\r
-\r
-"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!" was now the\r
-mast-head cry.\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and\r
-split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your\r
-trump--blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller\r
-shuts his watergate upon the stream!"\r
-\r
-And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies\r
-of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine\r
-worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might\r
-have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the\r
-growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,\r
-as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand\r
-of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of\r
-the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed,\r
-unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging\r
-towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled\r
-along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the\r
-vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of\r
-that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.\r
-\r
-They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;\r
-though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple,\r
-and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each\r
-other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and\r
-directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of\r
-the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all\r
-varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal\r
-goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.\r
-\r
-The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were\r
-outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one\r
-hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others,\r
-shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking\r
-yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for\r
-their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to\r
-seek out the thing that might destroy them!\r
-\r
-"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after\r
-the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.\r
-"Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet\r
-that way, and then disappears."\r
-\r
-It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some\r
-other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for\r
-hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its\r
-pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the\r
-air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant\r
-halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--much nearer to the ship\r
-than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick\r
-bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not\r
-by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White\r
-Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon\r
-of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,\r
-the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of\r
-air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the\r
-distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged\r
-waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his\r
-act of defiance.\r
-\r
-"There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the cry, as in his\r
-immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to\r
-Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved\r
-against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for\r
-the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and\r
-stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling\r
-intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.\r
-\r
-"Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and\r
-thy harpoon are at hand!--Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore.\r
-The boats!--stand by!"\r
-\r
-Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like\r
-shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and\r
-halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from\r
-his perch.\r
-\r
-"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one,\r
-rigged the afternoon previous. "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine--keep\r
-away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!"\r
-\r
-As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first\r
-assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the\r
-three crews. Ahab's boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them\r
-he would take the whale head-and-head,--that is, pull straight up to his\r
-forehead,--a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such\r
-a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision.\r
-But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were\r
-plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning\r
-himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing\r
-among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling\r
-battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every\r
-boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which\r
-those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling\r
-like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him;\r
-though, at times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's\r
-unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.\r
-\r
-But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed\r
-and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three\r
-lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,\r
-warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now\r
-for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more\r
-tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more\r
-line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again--hoping\r
-that way to disencumber it of some snarls--when lo!--a sight more savage\r
-than the embattled teeth of sharks!\r
-\r
-Caught and twisted--corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons\r
-and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing\r
-and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's boat. Only one\r
-thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached\r
-within--through--and then, without--the rays of steel; dragged in\r
-the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice\r
-sundering the rope near the chocks--dropped the intercepted fagot of\r
-steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White\r
-Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines;\r
-by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and\r
-Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on\r
-a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in\r
-a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of\r
-the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly\r
-stirred bowl of punch.\r
-\r
-While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after\r
-the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while\r
-aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his\r
-legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily\r
-singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man's\r
-line--now parting--admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to\r
-rescue whom he could;--in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand\r
-concreted perils,--Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards\r
-Heaven by invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly\r
-from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its\r
-bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell\r
-again--gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men struggled out from under\r
-it, like seals from a sea-side cave.\r
-\r
-The first uprising momentum of the whale--modifying its direction as\r
-he struck the surface--involuntarily launched him along it, to a little\r
-distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his\r
-back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from\r
-side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip\r
-or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and\r
-came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work\r
-for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the\r
-ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his\r
-leeward way at a traveller's methodic pace.\r
-\r
-As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again\r
-came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the\r
-floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and\r
-safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and\r
-ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable\r
-intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there;\r
-but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As\r
-with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to\r
-his boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor\r
-did it so exhaust him as the previous day's mishap.\r
-\r
-But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as\r
-instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of\r
-Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory\r
-leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he\r
-will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has."\r
-\r
-"The ferrule has not stood, sir," said the carpenter, now coming up; "I\r
-put good work into that leg."\r
-\r
-"But no bones broken, sir, I hope," said Stubb with true concern.\r
-\r
-"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!--d'ye see it.--But even with\r
-a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of\r
-mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor white whale,\r
-nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and\r
-inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape\r
-yonder roof?--Aloft there! which way?"\r
-\r
-"Dead to leeward, sir."\r
-\r
-"Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of\r
-the spare boats and rig them--Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's\r
-crews."\r
-\r
-"Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir."\r
-\r
-"Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the\r
-unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!"\r
-\r
-"Sir?"\r
-\r
-"My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane--there, that\r
-shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet.\r
-By heaven it cannot be!--missing?--quick! call them all."\r
-\r
-The old man's hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the\r
-Parsee was not there.\r
-\r
-"The Parsee!" cried Stubb--"he must have been caught in--"\r
-\r
-"The black vomit wrench thee!--run all of ye above, alow, cabin,\r
-forecastle--find him--not gone--not gone!"\r
-\r
-But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was\r
-nowhere to be found.\r
-\r
-"Aye, sir," said Stubb--"caught among the tangles of your line--I\r
-thought I saw him dragging under."\r
-\r
-"MY line! MY line? Gone?--gone? What means that little word?--What\r
-death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.\r
-The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--d'ye see it?--the forged\r
-iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,--blistered fool! this hand did\r
-dart it!--'tis in the fish!--Aloft there! Keep him nailed--Quick!--all\r
-hands to the rigging of the boats--collect the oars--harpooneers!\r
-the irons, the irons!--hoist the royals higher--a pull on all the\r
-sheets!--helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll ten times girdle\r
-the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay\r
-him yet!\r
-\r
-"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck;\r
-"never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--In Jesus' name no more of\r
-this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove\r
-to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil\r
-shadow gone--all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:--\r
-\r
-"What more wouldst thou have?--Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish\r
-till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom\r
-of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh,\r
-oh,--Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"\r
-\r
-"Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that\r
-hour we both saw--thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this\r
-matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this\r
-hand--a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This\r
-whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion\r
-years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act\r
-under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.--Stand round\r
-me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered\r
-lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab--his body's part; but\r
-Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel\r
-strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale;\r
-and I may look so. But ere I break, ye'll hear me crack; and till ye hear\r
-THAT, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in\r
-the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they\r
-drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again,\r
-to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick--two days he's floated--tomorrow\r
-will be the third. Aye, men, he'll rise once more,--but only to spout\r
-his last! D'ye feel brave men, brave?"\r
-\r
-"As fearless fire," cried Stubb.\r
-\r
-"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he\r
-muttered on: "The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same\r
-to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek\r
-to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!--The\r
-Parsee--the Parsee!--gone, gone? and he was to go before:--but still was\r
-to be seen again ere I could perish--How's that?--There's a riddle now\r
-might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line\r
-of judges:--like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'LL, I'LL solve it,\r
-though!"\r
-\r
-When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.\r
-\r
-So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as\r
-on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the\r
-grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns\r
-in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening\r
-their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of\r
-Ahab's wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as\r
-on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his\r
-hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due\r
-eastward for the earliest sun.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-CHAPTER 135. The Chase.--Third Day.\r
-\r
-\r
-The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the\r
-solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the\r
-daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.\r
-\r
-"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.\r
-\r
-"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm\r
-there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day\r
-again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the\r
-angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a\r
-fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had\r
-Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels;\r
-THAT'S tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has\r
-that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a\r
-calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much\r
-for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm--frozen\r
-calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents\r
-turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this\r
-moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort\r
-of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of\r
-Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip\r
-it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they\r
-cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison\r
-corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and\r
-now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!--it's\r
-tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable\r
-world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a\r
-noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight\r
-it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run\r
-through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not\r
-stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing--a nobler\r
-thing than THAT. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things\r
-that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are\r
-bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most\r
-special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I\r
-say again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and\r
-gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the\r
-clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous\r
-mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of\r
-the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift\r
-and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal\r
-Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these\r
-Trades, or something like them--something so unchangeable, and full as\r
-strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d'ye see?"\r
-\r
-"Nothing, sir."\r
-\r
-"Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun!\r
-Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye,\r
-he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM--that's bad; I might have known it, too.\r
-Fool! the lines--the harpoons he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by\r
-last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look\r
-outs! Man the braces!"\r
-\r
-Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's\r
-quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced\r
-ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own\r
-white wake.\r
-\r
-"Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck to\r
-himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. "God keep\r
-us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my\r
-flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"\r
-\r
-"Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket.\r
-"We should meet him soon."\r
-\r
-"Aye, aye, sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once\r
-more Ahab swung on high.\r
-\r
-A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held\r
-long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the\r
-weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three\r
-mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced\r
-it.\r
-\r
-"Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck\r
-there!--brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too\r
-far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that\r
-helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But\r
-let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's\r
-time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and\r
-not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of\r
-Nantucket! The same!--the same!--the same to Noah as to me. There's\r
-a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead\r
-somewhere--to something else than common land, more palmy than the\r
-palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward,\r
-then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old\r
-mast-head! What's this?--green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks.\r
-No such green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now\r
-between man's old age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow old\r
-together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus\r
-a leg, that's all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live\r
-flesh every way. I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships made\r
-of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of\r
-vital fathers. What's that he said? he should still go before me, my\r
-pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the\r
-bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all\r
-night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye,\r
-like many more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee;\r
-but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head--keep a good\r
-eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay,\r
-to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail."\r
-\r
-He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered\r
-through the cloven blue air to the deck.\r
-\r
-In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop's\r
-stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the\r
-mate,--who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck--and bade him pause.\r
-\r
-"Starbuck!"\r
-\r
-"Sir?"\r
-\r
-"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."\r
-\r
-"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."\r
-\r
-"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,\r
-Starbuck!"\r
-\r
-"Truth, sir: saddest truth."\r
-\r
-"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of\r
-the flood;--and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb,\r
-Starbuck. I am old;--shake hands with me, man."\r
-\r
-Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.\r
-\r
-"Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a\r
-brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"\r
-\r
-"Lower away!"--cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by\r
-the crew!"\r
-\r
-In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.\r
-\r
-"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;\r
-"O master, my master, come back!"\r
-\r
-But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the\r
-boat leaped on.\r
-\r
-Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when\r
-numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath\r
-the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they\r
-dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their\r
-bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in\r
-those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in\r
-the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching\r
-regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been\r
-observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried;\r
-and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow\r
-barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the\r
-sharks--a matter sometimes well known to affect them,--however it was,\r
-they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.\r
-\r
-"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and\r
-following with his eyes the receding boat--"canst thou yet ring boldly\r
-to that sight?--lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by\r
-them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?--For\r
-when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure\r
-the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening\r
-and the end of that thing--be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what\r
-is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet\r
-expectant,--fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me,\r
-as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.\r
-Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to\r
-see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem\r
-clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming? My legs\r
-feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,--beats\r
-it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--stave it off--move, move!\r
-speak aloud!--Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the\r
-hill?--Crazed;--aloft there!--keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--\r
-\r
-"Mark well the whale!--Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he\r
-tears the vane"--pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha!\r
-he soars away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,\r
-oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"\r
-\r
-The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--a\r
-downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but\r
-intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little\r
-sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest\r
-silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the\r
-opposing bow.\r
-\r
-"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads\r
-drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no\r
-hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!"\r
-\r
-Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then\r
-quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of\r
-ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a\r
-subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with\r
-trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,\r
-but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it\r
-hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back\r
-into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for\r
-an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of\r
-flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the\r
-marble trunk of the whale.\r
-\r
-"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to\r
-the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in\r
-him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell\r
-from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad\r
-white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;\r
-as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more\r
-flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two\r
-mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,\r
-but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.\r
-\r
-While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the\r
-whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he\r
-shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round\r
-and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,\r
-during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines\r
-around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment\r
-frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.\r
-\r
-The harpoon dropped from his hand.\r
-\r
-"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--"Aye, Parsee! I\r
-see thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the\r
-hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of\r
-thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those\r
-boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to\r
-me; if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but\r
-offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are\r
-not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--Where's the\r
-whale? gone down again?"\r
-\r
-But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the\r
-corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had\r
-been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily\r
-swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,--which thus far had\r
-been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present\r
-her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost\r
-velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the\r
-sea.\r
-\r
-"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third\r
-day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that\r
-madly seekest him!"\r
-\r
-Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to\r
-leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding\r
-by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he\r
-leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow\r
-him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he\r
-saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three\r
-mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats\r
-which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in\r
-repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,\r
-he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves\r
-on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he\r
-heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving\r
-a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or\r
-flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had\r
-just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer\r
-and nails, and so nail it to the mast.\r
-\r
-Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance\r
-to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some\r
-latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White\r
-Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly\r
-nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not been\r
-so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the\r
-unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the\r
-boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became\r
-jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost\r
-every dip.\r
-\r
-"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on!\r
-'tis the better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water."\r
-\r
-"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"\r
-\r
-"They will last long enough! pull on!--But who can tell"--he\r
-muttered--"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on\r
-Ahab?--But pull on! Aye, all alive, now--we near him. The helm! take the\r
-helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward\r
-to the bows of the still flying boat.\r
-\r
-At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along\r
-with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its\r
-advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab was fairly within the\r
-smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled\r
-round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when,\r
-with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the\r
-poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the\r
-hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked\r
-into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh\r
-flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly\r
-canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the\r
-gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed\r
-into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the\r
-precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its\r
-effects--these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of\r
-them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing\r
-wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly\r
-dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.\r
-\r
-Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,\r
-instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering\r
-sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with\r
-the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their\r
-seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line\r
-felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!\r
-\r
-"What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!\r
-Burst in upon him!"\r
-\r
-Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled\r
-round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,\r
-catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing\r
-in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it--it may be--a\r
-larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing\r
-prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.\r
-\r
-Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind; hands!\r
-stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night?"\r
-\r
-"The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.\r
-\r
-"Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for\r
-ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see:\r
-the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?"\r
-\r
-But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the\r
-sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks\r
-burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat\r
-lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying\r
-hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.\r
-\r
-Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's mast-head hammer\r
-remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as\r
-with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own\r
-forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the\r
-bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon\r
-as he.\r
-\r
-"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air,\r
-now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's\r
-fainting fit. Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the\r
-end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab,\r
-Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again!\r
-He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one,\r
-whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!"\r
-\r
-"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help\r
-Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!\r
-Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking\r
-eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too\r
-soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou\r
-grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of\r
-as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet\r
-ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou\r
-grinning whale, but there'll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye\r
-not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in\r
-his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;--cherries!\r
-cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"\r
-\r
-"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope\r
-my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will\r
-now come to her, for the voyage is up."\r
-\r
-From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,\r
-bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their\r
-hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their\r
-enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely\r
-vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading\r
-semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance,\r
-eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal\r
-man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's\r
-starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their\r
-faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook\r
-on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters\r
-pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.\r
-\r
-"The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;\r
-"its wood could only be American!"\r
-\r
-Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its\r
-keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far\r
-off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a\r
-time, he lay quiescent.\r
-\r
-"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer.\r
-Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only\r
-god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed\r
-prow,--death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I\r
-cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh,\r
-lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in\r
-my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in,\r
-ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber\r
-of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering\r
-whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at\r
-thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins\r
-and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let\r
-me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee,\r
-thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!"\r
-\r
-The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting\r
-velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to\r
-clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the\r
-neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was\r
-shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the\r
-heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty\r
-tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its\r
-depths.\r
-\r
-For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The\r
-ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering\r
-mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana;\r
-only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or\r
-fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers\r
-still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric\r
-circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating\r
-oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all\r
-round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod\r
-out of sight.\r
-\r
-But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the\r
-sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the\r
-erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag,\r
-which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying\r
-billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red arm and a hammer\r
-hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing\r
-the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that\r
-tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home\r
-among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there;\r
-this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the\r
-hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill,\r
-the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen\r
-there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his\r
-imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the\r
-flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink\r
-to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and\r
-helmeted herself with it.\r
-\r
-Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white\r
-surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great\r
-shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Epilogue\r
-\r
-"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.\r
-\r
-The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?--Because one\r
-did survive the wreck.\r
-\r
-It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the\r
-Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman\r
-assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three\r
-men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So,\r
-floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it,\r
-when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then,\r
-but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had\r
-subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting\r
-towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling\r
-circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital\r
-centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of\r
-its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great\r
-force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and\r
-floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day\r
-and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks,\r
-they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks\r
-sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer,\r
-and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in\r
-her retracing search after her missing children, only found another\r
-orphan.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-End of Project Gutenberg's Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville\r
-\r
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***\r
-\r
-***** This file should be named 2701.txt or 2701.zip *****\r
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:\r
- http://www.gutenberg.org/2/7/0/2701/\r
-\r
-Produced by Daniel Lazarus and Jonesey\r
-\r
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions\r
-will be renamed.\r
-\r
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no\r
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation\r
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without\r
-permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,\r
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to\r
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to\r
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project\r
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you\r
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you\r
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the\r
-rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose\r
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and\r
-research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do\r
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is\r
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial\r
-redistribution.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***\r
-\r
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE\r
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK\r
-\r
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free\r
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work\r
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project\r
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at\r
-http://gutenberg.org/license).\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic works\r
-\r
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to\r
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property\r
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all\r
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy\r
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.\r
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the\r
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or\r
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.\r
-\r
-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be\r
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who\r
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few\r
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works\r
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See\r
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement\r
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works. See paragraph 1.E below.\r
-\r
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"\r
-or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the\r
-collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an\r
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are\r
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from\r
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative\r
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg\r
-are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by\r
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of\r
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with\r
-the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by\r
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.\r
-\r
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern\r
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in\r
-a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check\r
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement\r
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or\r
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning\r
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United\r
-States.\r
-\r
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:\r
-\r
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate\r
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently\r
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the\r
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project\r
-Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,\r
-copied or distributed:\r
-\r
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with\r
-almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or\r
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included\r
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived\r
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is\r
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied\r
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees\r
-or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work\r
-with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the\r
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1\r
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or\r
-1.E.9.\r
-\r
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted\r
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution\r
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional\r
-terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked\r
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the\r
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.\r
-\r
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this\r
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.\r
-\r
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this\r
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without\r
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with\r
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License.\r
-\r
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,\r
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any\r
-word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or\r
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than\r
-"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version\r
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),\r
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a\r
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon\r
-request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other\r
-form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.\r
-\r
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,\r
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works\r
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.\r
-\r
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing\r
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided\r
-that\r
-\r
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from\r
- the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method\r
- you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is\r
- owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he\r
- has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the\r
- Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments\r
- must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you\r
- prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax\r
- returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and\r
- sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the\r
- address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to\r
- the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."\r
-\r
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies\r
- you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he\r
- does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
- License. You must require such a user to return or\r
- destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium\r
- and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of\r
- Project Gutenberg-tm works.\r
-\r
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any\r
- money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the\r
- electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days\r
- of receipt of the work.\r
-\r
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free\r
- distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.\r
-\r
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set\r
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from\r
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael\r
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the\r
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.\r
-\r
-1.F.\r
-\r
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable\r
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread\r
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain\r
-"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or\r
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual\r
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a\r
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by\r
-your equipment.\r
-\r
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right\r
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project\r
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all\r
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal\r
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT\r
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE\r
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE\r
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE\r
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR\r
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH\r
-DAMAGE.\r
-\r
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a\r
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can\r
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a\r
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you\r
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with\r
-your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with\r
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a\r
-refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity\r
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to\r
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy\r
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further\r
-opportunities to fix the problem.\r
-\r
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth\r
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER\r
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO\r
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.\r
-\r
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied\r
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.\r
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the\r
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be\r
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by\r
-the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any\r
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.\r
-\r
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the\r
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone\r
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance\r
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,\r
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,\r
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,\r
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do\r
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of\r
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers\r
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists\r
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from\r
-people in all walks of life.\r
-\r
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the\r
-assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's\r
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will\r
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project\r
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure\r
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.\r
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation\r
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4\r
-and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive\r
-Foundation\r
-\r
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit\r
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the\r
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal\r
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification\r
-number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at\r
-http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg\r
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent\r
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.\r
-\r
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.\r
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered\r
-throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at\r
-809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email\r
-business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact\r
-information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official\r
-page at http://pglaf.org\r
-\r
-For additional contact information:\r
- Dr. Gregory B. Newby\r
- Chief Executive and Director\r
- gbnewby@pglaf.org\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg\r
-Literary Archive Foundation\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide\r
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of\r
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be\r
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest\r
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations\r
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt\r
-status with the IRS.\r
-\r
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating\r
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United\r
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a\r
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up\r
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations\r
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To\r
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any\r
-particular state visit http://pglaf.org\r
-\r
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we\r
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition\r
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who\r
-approach us with offers to donate.\r
-\r
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make\r
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from\r
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.\r
-\r
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation\r
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other\r
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.\r
-To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works.\r
-\r
-Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared\r
-with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.\r
-\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed\r
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.\r
-unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily\r
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.\r
-\r
-\r
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:\r
-\r
- http://www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,\r
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary\r
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to\r
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.\r
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Moby Dick; or The Whale
+
+Author: Herman Melville
+
+Last Updated: January 3, 2009
+Posting Date: December 25, 2008 [EBook #2701]
+Release Date: June, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Daniel Lazarus and Jonesey
+
+
+
+
+
+MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE
+
+By Herman Melville
+
+
+
+
+Original Transcriber's Notes:
+
+This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS
+project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg's archives. The
+proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide
+Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext
+was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.
+
+In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol
+for the British pound, a unit of currency.
+
+
+
+
+ETYMOLOGY.
+
+(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
+
+The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him
+now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer
+handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all
+the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it
+somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
+
+"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what
+name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through
+ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of
+the word, you deliver that which is not true." --HACKLUYT
+
+"WHALE.... Sw. and Dan. HVAL. This animal is named from roundness or
+rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted." --WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY
+
+"WHALE.... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. WALLEN; A.S.
+WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow." --RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY
+
+ KETOS, GREEK.
+ CETUS, LATIN.
+ WHOEL, ANGLO-SAXON.
+ HVALT, DANISH.
+ WAL, DUTCH.
+ HWAL, SWEDISH.
+ WHALE, ICELANDIC.
+ WHALE, ENGLISH.
+ BALEINE, FRENCH.
+ BALLENA, SPANISH.
+ PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, FEGEE.
+ PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, ERROMANGOAN.
+
+
+
+
+EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
+
+It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a
+poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans
+and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to
+whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or
+profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the
+higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these
+extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the
+ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these
+extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing
+bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
+and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our
+own.
+
+So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
+belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world
+will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong;
+but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too;
+and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes
+and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness--Give it up,
+Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world,
+by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could
+clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your
+tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends
+who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and
+making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against
+your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together--there, ye
+shall strike unsplinterable glasses!
+
+
+EXTRACTS.
+
+"And God created great whales." --GENESIS.
+
+"Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to
+be hoary." --JOB.
+
+"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah." --JONAH.
+
+"There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
+therein." --PSALMS.
+
+"In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
+shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked
+serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." --ISAIAH
+
+"And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster's
+mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that
+foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his
+paunch." --HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S MORALS.
+
+"The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among
+which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in
+length as four acres or arpens of land." --HOLLAND'S PLINY.
+
+"Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
+great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the
+former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us,
+open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before
+him into a foam." --TOOKE'S LUCIAN. "THE TRUE HISTORY."
+
+"He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
+which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought
+some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of
+which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was
+one of six who had killed sixty in two days." --OTHER OR OTHER'S VERBAL
+NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM HIS MOUTH BY KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.
+
+"And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that
+enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are
+immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
+great security, and there sleeps." --MONTAIGNE. --APOLOGY FOR RAIMOND
+SEBOND.
+
+"Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan described
+by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job." --RABELAIS.
+
+"This whale's liver was two cartloads." --STOWE'S ANNALS.
+
+"The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan."
+--LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.
+
+"Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
+nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible
+quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale." --IBID. "HISTORY OF
+LIFE AND DEATH."
+
+"The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise."
+--KING HENRY.
+
+"Very like a whale." --HAMLET.
+
+ "Which to secure, no skill of leach's art
+ Mote him availle, but to returne againe
+ To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart,
+ Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
+ Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."
+ --THE FAERIE QUEEN.
+
+"Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
+calm trouble the ocean til it boil." --SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. PREFACE TO
+GONDIBERT.
+
+"What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
+Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit."
+--SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE. VIDE HIS V.
+E.
+
+ "Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail
+ He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
+ ...
+ Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears,
+ And on his back a grove of pikes appears."
+ --WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE SUMMER ISLANDS.
+
+"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
+State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." --OPENING
+SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.
+
+"Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat
+in the mouth of a whale." --PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
+
+ "That sea beast
+ Leviathan, which God of all his works
+ Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." --PARADISE LOST.
+
+ ---"There Leviathan,
+ Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
+ Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
+ And seems a moving land; and at his gills
+ Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea." --IBID.
+
+"The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil
+swimming in them." --FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE.
+
+ "So close behind some promontory lie
+ The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
+ And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
+ Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."
+ --DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS.
+
+"While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his
+head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it
+will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water." --THOMAS EDGE'S TEN
+VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.
+
+"In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
+wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
+nature has placed on their shoulders." --SIR T. HERBERT'S VOYAGES INTO
+ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL.
+
+"Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to
+proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship
+upon them." --SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.
+
+"We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
+Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but that
+is a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they
+can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains....
+I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of
+herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught
+once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over." --A VOYAGE TO
+GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.
+
+"Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
+eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was
+informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
+baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren."
+--SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.
+
+"Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
+Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was
+killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness." --RICHARD
+STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS. A.D. 1668.
+
+"Whales in the sea God's voice obey." --N. E. PRIMER.
+
+"We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
+southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the
+northward of us." --CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729.
+
+"... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
+insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain." --ULLOA'S
+SOUTH AMERICA.
+
+ "To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,
+ We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
+ Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
+ Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale."
+ --RAPE OF THE LOCK.
+
+"If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those
+that take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
+contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
+animal in creation." --GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.
+
+"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them
+speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.
+
+"In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was
+found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then
+towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the
+whale, in order to avoid being seen by us." --COOK'S VOYAGES.
+
+"The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so
+great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to
+mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,
+and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to
+terrify and prevent their too near approach." --UNO VON TROIL'S LETTERS
+ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.
+
+"The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
+animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen."
+--THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.
+
+"And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?" --EDMUND BURKE'S
+REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY.
+
+"Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe." --EDMUND BURKE.
+(SOMEWHERE.)
+
+"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on
+the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates
+and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon.
+And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the
+property of the king." --BLACKSTONE.
+
+ "Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
+ Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends
+ The barbed steel, and every turn attends."
+ --FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.
+
+ "Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
+ And rockets blew self driven,
+ To hang their momentary fire
+ Around the vault of heaven.
+
+ "So fire with water to compare,
+ The ocean serves on high,
+ Up-spouted by a whale in air,
+ To express unwieldy joy." --COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S
+ VISIT TO LONDON.
+
+"Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at
+a stroke, with immense velocity." --JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE
+DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)
+
+"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
+water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
+through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
+gushing from the whale's heart." --PALEY'S THEOLOGY.
+
+"The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet." --BARON CUVIER.
+
+"In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take
+any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."
+--COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI WHALE
+FISHERY.
+
+ "In the free element beneath me swam,
+ Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
+ Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;
+ Which language cannot paint, and mariner
+ Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
+ To insect millions peopling every wave:
+ Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,
+ Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
+ And trackless region, though on every side
+ Assaulted by voracious enemies,
+ Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,
+ With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs."
+ --MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.
+
+ "Io! Paean! Io! sing.
+ To the finny people's king.
+ Not a mightier whale than this
+ In the vast Atlantic is;
+ Not a fatter fish than he,
+ Flounders round the Polar Sea."
+ --CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE.
+
+"In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
+whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:
+there--pointing to the sea--is a green pasture where our children's
+grand-children will go for bread." --OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF NANTUCKET.
+
+"I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form
+of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones." --HAWTHORNE'S
+TWICE TOLD TALES.
+
+"She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed
+by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago." --IBID.
+
+"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he threw
+up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at.
+He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!" --COOPER'S PILOT.
+
+"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette
+that whales had been introduced on the stage there." --ECKERMANN'S
+CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.
+
+"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been stove
+by a whale." --"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF
+NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM
+WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF
+SAID VESSEL. NEW YORK, 1821.
+
+ "A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
+ The wind was piping free;
+ Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
+ And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
+ As it floundered in the sea."
+ --ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.
+
+"The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture
+of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six
+English miles....
+
+"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
+cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles."
+--SCORESBY.
+
+"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
+infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head,
+and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes
+at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast
+swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter of great
+astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting,
+and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm
+Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited
+so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
+observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant
+and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes."
+--THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.
+
+"The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True
+Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon
+at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
+disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so
+artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the
+most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe."
+--FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840.
+
+ October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.
+ "Where away?" demanded the captain.
+ "Three points off the lee bow, sir."
+ "Raise up your wheel. Steady!" "Steady, sir."
+ "Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?"
+ "Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she
+ breaches!"
+ "Sing out! sing out every time!"
+ "Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there--there--THAR she
+ blows--bowes--bo-o-os!"
+ "How far off?"
+ "Two miles and a half."
+ "Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands."
+ --J. ROSS BROWNE'S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846.
+
+"The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid
+transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
+Nantucket." --"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS.
+A.D. 1828.
+
+Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
+assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length
+rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping
+into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable." --MISSIONARY
+JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.
+
+"Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and peculiar
+portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine
+thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year
+to the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry."
+--REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE, ON THE
+APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET. 1828.
+
+"The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment."
+--"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES AND THE
+WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE
+PREBLE." BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.
+
+"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will send
+you to hell." --LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS BROTHER,
+WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.
+
+"The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order,
+if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they
+failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale."
+--MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.
+
+"These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward
+again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem
+to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West
+Passage." --FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED.
+
+"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck
+by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at
+the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a
+totally different air from those engaged in regular voyage." --CURRENTS
+AND WHALING. U.S. EX. EX.
+
+"Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
+having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form
+arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps
+have been told that these were the ribs of whales." --TALES OF A WHALE
+VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.
+
+"It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
+that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
+enrolled among the crew." --NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING
+OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.
+
+"It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
+(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
+departed." --CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.
+
+"Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
+perpendicularly into the air. It was the while." --MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE
+WHALE FISHERMAN.
+
+"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
+manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied
+to the root of his tail." --A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND TRUCKS.
+
+"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and
+female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone's
+throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the beech tree
+extended its branches." --DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.
+
+"'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the
+distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat,
+threatening it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your lives!'"
+--WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.
+
+"So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold
+harpooneer is striking the whale!" --NANTUCKET SONG.
+
+ "Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
+ In his ocean home will be
+ A giant in might, where might is right,
+ And King of the boundless sea."
+ --WHALE SONG.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
+
+
+Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having
+little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on
+shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of
+the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating
+the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
+whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
+myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up
+the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get
+such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to
+prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically
+knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea
+as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a
+philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly
+take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew
+it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very
+nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
+
+There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
+wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with
+her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme
+downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and
+cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.
+Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
+
+Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
+Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What
+do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand
+thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some
+leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some
+looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the
+rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these
+are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to
+counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are
+the green fields gone? What do they here?
+
+But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
+seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the
+extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder
+warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water
+as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of
+them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets
+and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.
+Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all
+those ships attract them thither?
+
+Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take
+almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a
+dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic
+in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest
+reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will
+infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.
+Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this
+experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
+professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for
+ever.
+
+But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
+quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
+the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees,
+each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
+here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder
+cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a
+mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their
+hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though
+this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's
+head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the
+magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores
+on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the
+one charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were
+Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to
+see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
+handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly
+needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why
+is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at
+some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a
+passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first
+told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the
+old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate
+deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
+And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because
+he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain,
+plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see
+in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of
+life; and this is the key to it all.
+
+Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin
+to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs,
+I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.
+For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is
+but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get
+sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do not enjoy
+themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a passenger;
+nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
+Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction
+of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all
+honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind
+whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
+without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.
+And as for going as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory
+in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board--yet, somehow,
+I never fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously
+buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who
+will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled
+fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old
+Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the
+mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
+
+No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
+plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
+True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
+spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort
+of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour,
+particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the
+Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all,
+if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been
+lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand
+in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a
+schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and
+the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in
+time.
+
+What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom
+and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed,
+I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel
+Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
+respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't
+a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may
+order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I have the
+satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is
+one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical
+or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is
+passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and
+be content.
+
+Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
+paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single
+penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must
+pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying
+and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable
+infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING
+PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man
+receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly
+believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account
+can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves
+to perdition!
+
+Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
+exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world,
+head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is,
+if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
+Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from
+the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not
+so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
+other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.
+But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a
+merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling
+voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the
+constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me
+in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any one else. And,
+doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand
+programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as
+a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances.
+I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
+
+
+"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
+
+"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
+
+"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
+
+
+Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the
+Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others
+were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and
+easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though
+I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the
+circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives
+which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced
+me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the
+delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill
+and discriminating judgment.
+
+Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
+whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my
+curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island
+bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all
+the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped
+to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not
+have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting
+itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on
+barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a
+horror, and could still be social with it--would they let me--since it
+is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place
+one lodges in.
+
+By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
+great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
+conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into
+my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them
+all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
+
+
+I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm,
+and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of
+old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in
+December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet
+for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place
+would offer, till the following Monday.
+
+As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at
+this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well
+be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was
+made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a
+fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous
+old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has
+of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though
+in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket
+was her great original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the place where the
+first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket
+did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to
+give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that
+first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
+cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to
+discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?
+
+Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me
+in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a
+matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a
+very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold
+and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had
+sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,--So,
+wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of
+a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the
+north with the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you
+may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire
+the price, and don't be too particular.
+
+With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The
+Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further
+on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn," there came such
+fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from
+before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches
+thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck
+my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless
+service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too
+expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the
+broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses
+within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away
+from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I
+went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for
+there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
+
+Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand,
+and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At
+this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of
+the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light
+proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly
+open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the
+public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an
+ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost
+choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The
+Crossed Harpoons," and "The Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the
+sign of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice
+within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
+
+It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black
+faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel
+of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the
+preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and
+wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out,
+Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'
+
+Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks,
+and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging
+sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing
+a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath--"The
+Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."
+
+Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought
+I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this
+Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and
+the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little
+wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from
+the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a
+poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very
+spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
+
+It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side palsied
+as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner,
+where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever
+it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a
+mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob
+quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that tempestuous wind called
+Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose works I possess the only copy
+extant--"it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at
+it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether
+thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both
+sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough,
+thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou
+reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is
+the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies
+though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late
+to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone
+is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus
+there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and
+shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears
+with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not
+keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his
+red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What
+a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them
+talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give
+me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
+
+But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up
+to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra
+than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the
+line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in
+order to keep out this frost?
+
+Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the
+door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be
+moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a
+Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
+temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
+
+But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is
+plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet,
+and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
+
+
+Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
+low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
+the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
+oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
+unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent
+study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of
+the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
+purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
+you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
+England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint
+of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
+especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
+entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however
+wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
+
+But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,
+black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three
+blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy,
+soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.
+Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable
+sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily
+took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting
+meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you
+through.--It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural
+combat of the four primal elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a
+Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream
+of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous
+something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest
+were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
+fish? even the great leviathan himself?
+
+In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
+partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom
+I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a
+great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three
+dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to
+spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself
+upon the three mast-heads.
+
+The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
+array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with
+glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of
+human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round
+like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You
+shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage
+could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying
+implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons
+all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long
+lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen
+whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon--so like a
+corkscrew now--was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale,
+years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered
+nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a
+man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the
+hump.
+
+Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut
+through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
+fireplaces all round--you enter the public room. A still duskier place
+is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled
+planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's
+cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored
+old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like
+table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
+gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the
+further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den--the bar--a rude
+attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands the
+vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive
+beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters,
+bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another
+cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little
+withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors
+deliriums and death.
+
+Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though
+true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses
+deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians
+rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to
+THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so
+on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for
+a shilling.
+
+Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about
+a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of SKRIMSHANDER. I
+sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a
+room, received for answer that his house was full--not a bed unoccupied.
+"But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections
+to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin'
+a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing."
+
+I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should
+ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and
+that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
+harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
+further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with
+the half of any decent man's blanket.
+
+"I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?--you want supper?
+Supper'll be ready directly."
+
+I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the
+Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with
+his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space
+between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but
+he didn't make much headway, I thought.
+
+At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
+adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord
+said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each
+in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and
+hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But
+the fare was of the most substantial kind--not only meat and potatoes,
+but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in
+a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful
+manner.
+
+"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead
+sartainty."
+
+"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"
+
+"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooneer
+is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't--he eats
+nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."
+
+"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?"
+
+"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.
+
+I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark
+complexioned" harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so
+turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into
+bed before I did.
+
+Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not
+what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening
+as a looker on.
+
+Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord
+cried, "That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing
+this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now
+we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."
+
+A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open,
+and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy
+watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all
+bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an
+eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat,
+and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they
+made a straight wake for the whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled
+little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all
+round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah
+mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a
+sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how
+long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the
+weather side of an ice-island.
+
+The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even
+with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering
+about most obstreperously.
+
+I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though
+he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own
+sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise
+as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods
+had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a
+sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will
+here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet
+in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have
+seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt,
+making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep
+shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give
+him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner,
+and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall
+mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry
+of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away
+unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the
+sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and
+being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised
+a cry of "Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of
+the house in pursuit of him.
+
+It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
+supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself
+upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance
+of the seamen.
+
+No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal
+rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but
+people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to
+sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange
+town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely
+multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should
+sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep
+two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they
+all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and
+cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
+
+The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
+thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a
+harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of
+the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.
+Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be
+home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at
+midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
+
+"Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't sleep
+with him. I'll try the bench here."
+
+"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a
+mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots and
+notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's plane
+there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough." So saying
+he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting
+the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while grinning
+like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the
+plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was
+near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's sake to quit--the
+bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing
+in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the
+shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in
+the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a
+brown study.
+
+I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
+short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too
+narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher
+than the planed one--so there was no yoking them. I then placed the
+first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,
+leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I
+soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under
+the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially
+as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window,
+and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate
+vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
+
+The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal
+a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be
+wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon
+second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next
+morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be
+standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!
+
+Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending
+a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I began to think
+that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against
+this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be dropping
+in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may
+become jolly good bedfellows after all--there's no telling.
+
+But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes,
+and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
+
+"Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep such
+late hours?" It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.
+
+The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to
+be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. "No," he
+answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to
+rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out
+a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late,
+unless, may be, he can't sell his head."
+
+"Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
+are telling me?" getting into a towering rage. "Do you pretend to say,
+landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday
+night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?"
+
+"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't
+sell it here, the market's overstocked."
+
+"With what?" shouted I.
+
+"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"
+
+"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better
+stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."
+
+"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I
+rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a
+slanderin' his head."
+
+"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at this
+unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.
+
+"It's broke a'ready," said he.
+
+"Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"
+
+"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."
+
+"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
+snow-storm--"landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one
+another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a
+bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
+belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I
+have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and
+exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
+towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of connexion,
+landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest
+degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
+harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the
+night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay
+that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good
+evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping
+with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean, landlord, YOU, sir, by trying
+to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to
+a criminal prosecution."
+
+"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty long
+sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy,
+this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from
+the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads
+(great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one
+he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not
+do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to
+churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was
+goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the
+airth like a string of inions."
+
+This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed
+that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me--but at
+the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a
+Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
+business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
+
+"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."
+
+"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting dreadful
+late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed; Sal and me
+slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's plenty of room
+for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big bed that. Why,
+afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the
+foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and
+somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.
+Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a
+glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards
+me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a
+clock in the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that
+harpooneer to-night; he's come to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO
+come; WON'T ye come?"
+
+I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
+ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough,
+with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers
+to sleep abreast.
+
+"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest
+that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there, make
+yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye." I turned round from
+eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
+
+Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the
+most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced
+round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see
+no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four
+walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of
+things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed
+up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman's bag,
+containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk.
+Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf
+over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
+
+But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the
+light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive
+at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to
+nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little
+tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an
+Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat,
+as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible
+that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the
+streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try
+it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and
+thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer
+had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass
+stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore
+myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.
+
+I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
+head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on
+the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in
+the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought
+a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now,
+half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about
+the harpooneer's not coming home at all that night, it being so very
+late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and
+then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the
+care of heaven.
+
+Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,
+there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep
+for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty
+nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy
+footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room
+from under the door.
+
+Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
+head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word
+till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New
+Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without
+looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the
+floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords
+of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all
+eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while
+employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This accomplished, however, he
+turned round--when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of
+a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large
+blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible
+bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is,
+just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face
+so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be
+sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were
+stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this;
+but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of
+a white man--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been
+tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his
+distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,
+thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any
+sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that
+part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the
+squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of
+tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man
+into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas;
+and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the
+skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,
+this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty
+having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled
+out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing
+these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New
+Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed it down into the bag.
+He now took off his hat--a new beaver hat--when I came nigh singing out
+with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head--none to speak of at
+least--nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His
+bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.
+Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted
+out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.
+
+Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but
+it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of
+this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.
+Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and
+confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him
+as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at
+the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not
+game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer
+concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
+
+Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed
+his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered
+with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same
+dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just
+escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very
+legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up
+the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some
+abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South
+Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.
+A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might
+take a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!
+
+But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
+something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that
+he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or
+dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
+pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with
+a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days' old Congo
+baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that
+this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But
+seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal
+like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden
+idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the
+empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this
+little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The
+chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I
+thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel
+for his Congo idol.
+
+I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but
+ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow. First he takes
+about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places
+them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on
+top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into
+a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire,
+and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be
+scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit;
+then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of
+it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such
+dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange
+antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the
+devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some
+pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the
+most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol
+up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as
+carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
+
+All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
+seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
+operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
+now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which
+I had so long been bound.
+
+But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.
+Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an
+instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle,
+he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light
+was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth,
+sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving
+a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
+
+Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
+against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
+be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his
+guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my
+meaning.
+
+"Who-e debel you?"--he at last said--"you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e."
+And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the
+dark.
+
+"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord! Watch!
+Coffin! Angels! save me!"
+
+"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled the
+cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the
+hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire.
+But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light
+in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
+
+"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here wouldn't
+harm a hair of your head."
+
+"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that that
+infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"
+
+"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads
+around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look
+here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"
+
+"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
+sitting up in bed.
+
+"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
+throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil
+but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment.
+For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking
+cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to
+myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason
+to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober
+cannibal than a drunken Christian.
+
+"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or
+whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will
+turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed with me.
+It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured."
+
+This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
+motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to
+say--"I won't touch a leg of ye."
+
+"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."
+
+I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
+
+
+Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown
+over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost
+thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of
+odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his
+tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure,
+no two parts of which were of one precise shade--owing I suppose to
+his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt
+sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times--this same arm of his, I
+say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.
+Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could
+hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and
+it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that
+Queequeg was hugging me.
+
+My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a
+child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
+whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.
+The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other--I
+think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little
+sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,
+was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--my
+mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to
+bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,
+the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But
+there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the
+third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time,
+and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.
+
+I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse
+before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the
+small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the
+sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the
+streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse
+and worse--at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my
+stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself
+at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good
+slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie
+abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most
+conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For
+several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I
+have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At
+last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly
+waking from it--half steeped in dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before
+sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock
+running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was
+to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung
+over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form
+or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my
+bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with
+the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking
+that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be
+broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me;
+but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for
+days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding
+attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle
+myself with it.
+
+Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
+supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to
+those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan
+arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly
+recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to
+the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm--unlock his
+bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly,
+as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse
+him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over,
+my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a
+slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk
+sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A
+pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the
+broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!--in the name of
+goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and
+loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his
+hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in
+extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself
+all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,
+stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he
+did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
+consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over
+him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings
+now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at
+last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow,
+and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon
+the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that,
+if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress
+afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg,
+under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the
+truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what
+you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this
+particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much
+civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;
+staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for
+the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless,
+a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well
+worth unusual regarding.
+
+He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one,
+by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--he hunted up his boots.
+What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next
+movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under the bed;
+when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was
+hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever
+heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his
+boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition
+stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
+to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His
+education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not
+been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled
+himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage,
+he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At
+last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his
+eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not
+being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide
+ones--probably not made to order either--rather pinched and tormented
+him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.
+
+Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
+street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view
+into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
+Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on;
+I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat,
+and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He
+complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the
+morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to
+my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his
+chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a
+piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water
+and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept
+his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner,
+slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little
+on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall,
+begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks
+I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance.
+Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of
+what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp
+the long straight edges are always kept.
+
+The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of
+the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his
+harpoon like a marshal's baton.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
+
+
+I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the
+grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,
+though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my
+bedfellow.
+
+However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a
+good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own
+proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be
+backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in
+that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him,
+be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
+
+The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the
+night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were
+nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and
+sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers,
+and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an
+unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.
+
+You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This
+young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and
+would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days
+landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades
+lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the
+complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached
+withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show
+a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the
+Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates,
+zone by zone.
+
+"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went
+to breakfast.
+
+They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease
+in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard,
+the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all
+men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the
+mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or
+the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart
+of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances--this kind of
+travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social
+polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had
+anywhere.
+
+These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that
+after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some
+good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every
+man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked
+embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the
+slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas--entire
+strangers to them--and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here
+they sat at a social breakfast table--all of the same calling, all of
+kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they
+had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains.
+A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!
+
+But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the head of
+the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot
+say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially
+justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it
+there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent
+jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But
+THAT was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in
+most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
+
+We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he eschewed
+coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks,
+done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the
+rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting
+there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I
+sallied out for a stroll.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 6. The Street.
+
+
+If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
+an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a
+civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first
+daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
+
+In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
+frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign
+parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners
+will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not
+unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live
+Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water
+Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors;
+but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
+savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It
+makes a stranger stare.
+
+But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,
+and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft
+which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still
+more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
+scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain
+and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames;
+fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch
+the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
+came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look
+there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
+swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here
+comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.
+
+No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a
+downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
+two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a
+country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished
+reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the
+comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his
+sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his
+canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps
+in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and
+all, down the throat of the tempest.
+
+But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
+bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer
+place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this
+day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador.
+As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they
+look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live
+in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like
+Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with
+milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in
+spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like
+houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came
+they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
+
+Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
+mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses
+and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
+One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom
+of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
+
+In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
+daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.
+You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say,
+they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly
+burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
+
+In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples--long
+avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and
+bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their
+tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art;
+which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
+of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final
+day.
+
+And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But
+roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks
+is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that
+bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young
+girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off
+shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of
+the Puritanic sands.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
+
+
+In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are
+the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who
+fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
+
+Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
+special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving
+sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called
+bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I
+found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and
+widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks
+of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from
+the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The
+chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and
+women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders,
+masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran
+something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:--
+
+SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was
+lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November
+1st, 1836. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.
+
+SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN,
+WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats'
+crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the
+Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is
+here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.
+
+SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows
+of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, AUGUST
+3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
+
+Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself
+near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near
+me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze
+of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only
+person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only
+one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid
+inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen
+whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not;
+but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly
+did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings
+of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were
+assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak
+tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
+
+Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among
+flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation
+that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those
+black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
+immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in
+the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to
+the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might
+those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
+
+In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;
+why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no
+tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is
+that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix
+so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
+he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the
+Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what
+eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies
+antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we
+still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are
+dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all
+the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a
+whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
+
+But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these
+dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
+
+It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
+Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
+light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen
+who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But
+somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine
+chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an
+immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling--a
+speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what
+then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.
+Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true
+substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too
+much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that
+thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my
+better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not
+me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and
+stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
+
+
+I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
+robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
+admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
+sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it
+was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he
+was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his
+youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.
+At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a
+healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
+flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone
+certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure
+peeping forth even beneath February's snow. No one having previously
+heard his history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without
+the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical
+peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life
+he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and
+certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down
+with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to
+drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed.
+However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up
+in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit,
+he quietly approached the pulpit.
+
+Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
+regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor,
+seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect,
+it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the
+pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like
+those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling
+captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted
+man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and
+stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what
+manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for
+an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the
+ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards,
+and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand
+over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
+
+The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with
+swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood,
+so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the
+pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship,
+these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not
+prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn
+round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder
+step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him
+impregnable in his little Quebec.
+
+I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
+Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,
+that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks
+of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this
+thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be,
+then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual
+withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?
+Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful
+man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold--a lofty
+Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.
+
+But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
+borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings. Between the marble
+cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back
+was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating
+against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy
+breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there
+floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel's
+face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
+ship's tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into
+the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. "Ah, noble ship," the angel
+seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy
+helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling
+off--serenest azure is at hand."
+
+Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that
+had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in
+the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a
+projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed
+beak.
+
+What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this earth's
+foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the
+world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first
+descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is
+the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds.
+Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete;
+and the pulpit is its prow.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
+
+
+Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered
+the scattered people to condense. "Starboard gangway, there! side away
+to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!"
+
+There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a
+still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and
+every eye on the preacher.
+
+He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large
+brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered
+a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the
+bottom of the sea.
+
+This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of
+a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he
+commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
+the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy--
+
+ "The ribs and terrors in the whale,
+ Arched over me a dismal gloom,
+ While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
+ And lift me deepening down to doom.
+
+ "I saw the opening maw of hell,
+ With endless pains and sorrows there;
+ Which none but they that feel can tell--
+ Oh, I was plunging to despair.
+
+ "In black distress, I called my God,
+ When I could scarce believe him mine,
+ He bowed his ear to my complaints--
+ No more the whale did me confine.
+
+ "With speed he flew to my relief,
+ As on a radiant dolphin borne;
+ Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
+ The face of my Deliverer God.
+
+ "My song for ever shall record
+ That terrible, that joyful hour;
+ I give the glory to my God,
+ His all the mercy and the power."
+
+
+Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
+howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
+over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon
+the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the
+first chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up
+Jonah.'"
+
+"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is one
+of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what
+depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant
+lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the
+fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods
+surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;
+sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But WHAT is this
+lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded
+lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot
+of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it
+is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the
+swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and
+joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of
+Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never
+mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard
+command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to
+do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to
+persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in
+this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
+
+"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at
+God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will
+carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains
+of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship
+that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded
+meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city
+than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is
+Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa,
+as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the
+Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa,
+shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the
+Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the
+westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye
+not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God?
+Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with
+slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the
+shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered,
+self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those
+days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested
+ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a
+hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf
+with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the
+Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on
+board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment
+desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye.
+Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence;
+in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure
+the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious
+way, one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe,
+do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the
+adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing
+murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck
+against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering
+five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and
+containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah
+to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,
+prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and
+summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a
+coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong
+suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him
+not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends
+into the cabin.
+
+"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
+out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless
+question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.
+But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon
+sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah,
+though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that
+hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We sail with the
+next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing
+him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any honest man that goes a
+passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls away
+the Captain from that scent. 'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the
+passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.' For it is particularly
+written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this
+history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And
+taken with the context, this is full of meaning.
+
+"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime
+in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this
+world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without
+a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
+So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he
+judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented
+to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same
+time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when
+Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the
+Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any
+way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 'Point out my
+state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.'
+'Thou lookest like it,' says the Captain, 'there's thy room.' Jonah
+enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing
+him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and
+mutters something about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed
+to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws
+himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost
+resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in
+that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah
+feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale
+shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.
+
+"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
+oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf
+with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,
+though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with
+reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it
+but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp
+alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes
+roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no
+refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more
+and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
+'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it
+burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'
+
+"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
+reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the
+Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
+one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish,
+praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid
+the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the
+man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there's naught
+to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah's prodigy
+of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
+
+"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and
+from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening,
+glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded
+smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not
+bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to
+break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;
+when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind
+is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with
+trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah
+sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not
+the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the
+mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after
+him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship--a
+berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the
+frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, 'What
+meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that
+direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck,
+grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is
+sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after
+wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring
+fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.
+And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep
+gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing
+bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the
+tormented deep.
+
+"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing
+attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark
+him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last,
+fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven,
+they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was
+upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they
+mob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation? Whence comest
+thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior
+of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where
+from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions,
+but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the
+unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is
+upon him.
+
+"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven
+who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well
+mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN! Straightway, he now goes on to
+make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more
+appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating
+God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his
+deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him
+forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this great tempest
+was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to
+save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder;
+then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not
+unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
+
+"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;
+when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea
+is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth
+water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless
+commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into
+the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory
+teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto
+the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a
+weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for
+direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He
+leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that
+spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy
+temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not
+clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to
+God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of
+him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before
+you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model
+for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like
+Jonah."
+
+While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
+slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,
+when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.
+His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the
+warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his
+swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple
+hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.
+
+There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves
+of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed
+eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
+
+But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,
+with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these
+words:
+
+"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press
+upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that
+Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me,
+for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down
+from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and
+listen as you listen, while some one of you reads ME that other and more
+awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the living God.
+How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and
+bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a
+wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled
+from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking
+ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we
+have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to
+living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the
+midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand
+fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the
+watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of
+any plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the whale grounded upon
+the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting
+prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the
+shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching
+up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and
+earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the
+Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like
+two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--Jonah
+did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the
+Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
+
+"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
+the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from
+Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God
+has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than
+to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe
+to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would
+not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him
+who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is
+himself a castaway!"
+
+He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
+face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with
+a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of
+every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,
+than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than
+the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward
+delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever
+stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong
+arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
+gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the
+truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out
+from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,--top-gallant
+delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his
+God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the
+waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake
+from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness
+will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
+breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal,
+here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or
+mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man
+that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
+
+He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
+his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,
+and he was left alone in the place.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
+
+
+Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
+quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time.
+He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove
+hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little
+negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife
+gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his
+heathenish way.
+
+But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going
+to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap
+began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth
+page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and
+giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He
+would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number
+one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was
+only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his
+astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
+
+With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and
+hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his countenance
+yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot
+hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw
+the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,
+fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a
+thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing
+about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.
+He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
+Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn
+out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it
+otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was
+his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous,
+but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular
+busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope
+from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two
+long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington
+cannibalistically developed.
+
+Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
+looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence,
+never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared
+wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.
+Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night
+previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found
+thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference
+of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not
+know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm
+self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed
+also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
+other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have
+no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck
+me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something
+almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from
+home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is--which was the only way he could
+get there--thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in
+the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving
+the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to
+himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he
+had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be
+true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or
+so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself
+out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he
+must have "broken his digester."
+
+As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that
+mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then
+only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering
+round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain;
+the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of
+strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart
+and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing
+savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a
+nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.
+Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself
+mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have
+repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I'll
+try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but
+hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs
+and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little
+noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last
+night's hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
+bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps
+a little complimented.
+
+We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to
+him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
+that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went
+to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen
+in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing
+his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat
+exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly
+passing between us.
+
+If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's
+breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left
+us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as
+I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against
+mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were
+married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends;
+he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this
+sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing
+to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would
+not apply.
+
+After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
+together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his
+enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out
+some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
+mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them
+towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he
+silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them stay.
+He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed
+the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
+anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I
+deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or
+otherwise.
+
+I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
+Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
+worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do
+you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
+earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an
+insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?--to do
+the will of God--THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to
+my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me--THAT is the
+will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that
+this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular
+Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him
+in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped
+prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with
+Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that
+done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences
+and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
+
+How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
+disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very
+bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie
+and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts'
+honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving pair.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
+
+
+We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
+Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
+over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
+and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what
+little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like
+getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
+
+Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
+began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
+sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
+head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
+noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt
+very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;
+indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the
+room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
+small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world
+that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If
+you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so
+a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if,
+like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown
+of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general
+consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this
+reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which
+is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this
+sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and
+your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the
+one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
+
+We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
+once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether
+by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
+keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness
+of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright
+except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element
+of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon
+opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created
+darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated
+twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did
+I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
+strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt
+a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said,
+that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the
+bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when
+love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to
+have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full
+of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for
+the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed
+confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real
+friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
+the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a
+blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit
+lamp.
+
+Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far
+distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and,
+eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly
+complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his
+words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with
+his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as
+it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
+
+
+Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and
+South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
+
+When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in
+a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
+sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire
+to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His
+father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the
+maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable
+warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins--royal stuff; though
+sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his
+untutored youth.
+
+A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a
+passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of
+seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence
+could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled
+off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when
+she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low
+tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the
+water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its
+prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the
+ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with
+one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up
+the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled
+a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
+
+In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
+cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and
+Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild
+desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told
+him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage--this sea
+Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin. They put him down among
+the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to
+toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming
+ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his
+untutored countrymen. For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a
+profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to
+make his people still happier than they were; and more than that,
+still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon
+convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked;
+infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in
+old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on
+to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also,
+poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in
+all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
+
+And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
+wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer
+ways about him, though now some time from home.
+
+By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having
+a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he
+being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet;
+and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had
+unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan
+Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,--as soon as
+he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to
+sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a
+harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
+
+I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
+movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon
+this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
+intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for
+an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany
+me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch,
+the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap;
+with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.
+To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt
+for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not
+fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant
+of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as
+known to merchant seamen.
+
+His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg embraced
+me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we
+rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were
+sleeping.
+
+
+CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
+
+
+Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
+for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my
+comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
+amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between
+me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories
+about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
+whom I now companied with.
+
+We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
+poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went
+down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the
+wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg
+so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
+streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we
+heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
+now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked
+him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
+whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
+substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet
+he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of
+assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate
+with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers
+and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their own
+scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--even so, Queequeg,
+for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
+
+Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about
+the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners
+of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his
+heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the
+thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in
+which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it
+fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why,"
+said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would
+think. Didn't the people laugh?"
+
+Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of
+Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water
+of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and
+this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided
+mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once
+touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts, a very
+stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain--this
+commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a
+pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding
+guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage, this Captain
+marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, placed himself over
+against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the
+King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,--for those people have their
+grace as well as we--though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such
+times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the
+ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say,
+being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony
+of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers
+into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself
+placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking
+himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain precedence over a
+mere island King, especially in the King's own house--the Captain coolly
+proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I suppose for a
+huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?--Didn't our
+people laugh?"
+
+At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
+Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New
+Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all
+glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on
+casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering
+whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others
+came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and
+forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the
+start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a
+second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever
+and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all
+earthly effort.
+
+Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
+Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings.
+How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that turnpike earth!--that
+common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and
+hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will
+permit no records.
+
+At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
+His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.
+On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the
+blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways
+leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the
+two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of
+this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that
+for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a
+lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so
+companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a
+whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who,
+by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of
+all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him
+behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping
+his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost
+miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air;
+then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with
+bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him,
+lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.
+
+"Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;
+"Capting, Capting, here's the devil."
+
+"Hallo, _you_ sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking
+up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you
+might have killed that chap?"
+
+"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
+
+"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there," pointing
+to the still shivering greenhorn.
+
+"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
+expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e
+so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"
+
+"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if you
+try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."
+
+But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
+mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted
+the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to
+side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor
+fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all
+hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it,
+seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost
+in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of
+snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of
+being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the
+boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the
+midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and
+crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one
+end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it
+round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar
+was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the
+wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg,
+stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of
+a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,
+throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing
+his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand
+and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone
+down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now
+took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters
+were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again,
+one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form.
+The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands
+voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that
+hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took
+his last long dive.
+
+Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at
+all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only
+asked for water--fresh water--something to wipe the brine off; that
+done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the
+bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying
+to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We
+cannibals must help these Christians."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
+
+
+Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
+fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
+
+Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of
+the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely
+than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock, and elbow of
+sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than
+you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
+gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
+don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have
+to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that
+pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true
+cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,
+to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an
+oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand
+shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up,
+belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island
+of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will
+sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these
+extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
+
+Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
+settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle
+swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant
+Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne
+out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same
+direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they
+discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,--the
+poor little Indian's skeleton.
+
+What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take
+to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in
+the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more
+experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,
+launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world;
+put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in
+at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared
+everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
+flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea
+Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that
+his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and
+malicious assaults!
+
+And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from
+their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like
+so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and
+Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add
+Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm
+all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds
+of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he
+owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of
+way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but
+floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea
+as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of
+the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the
+bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on
+the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and
+fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his home; THERE
+lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it
+overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie
+cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as
+chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so
+that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more
+strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull,
+that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows;
+so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails,
+and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of
+walruses and whales.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
+
+
+It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly
+to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
+business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of
+the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the
+Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept
+hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin
+Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he
+plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at
+the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow
+warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the
+larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a
+corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first
+man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very
+much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg
+insisted that the yellow warehouse--our first point of departure--must
+be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to
+say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little
+in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant
+to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no
+mistaking.
+
+Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,
+swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
+old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other
+side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
+Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I
+could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of
+crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, TWO
+of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A
+Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones
+staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair
+of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints
+touching Tophet?
+
+I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman
+with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
+under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured
+eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen
+shirt.
+
+"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"
+
+"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."
+
+And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving
+Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon
+making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing
+further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and
+seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded
+repast, turned round to us and said--"Clam or Cod?"
+
+"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.
+
+"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.
+
+"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?"
+says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
+time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"
+
+But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
+Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing
+but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to
+the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.
+
+"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us
+both on one clam?"
+
+However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
+apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
+came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
+hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
+hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into
+little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned
+with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty
+voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food
+before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched
+it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking
+me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try
+a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word
+"cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the
+savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good
+time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.
+
+We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I
+to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head?
+What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look,
+Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"
+
+Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved
+its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for
+breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you
+began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area
+before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished
+necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books
+bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk,
+too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening
+to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw
+Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the
+sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod,
+I assure ye.
+
+Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
+concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede
+me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his
+harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why not?" said I;
+"every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why not?" "Because
+it's dangerous," says she. "Ever since young Stiggs coming from that
+unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with
+only three barrels of _ile_, was found dead in my first floor back, with
+his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take
+sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg" (for
+she had learned his name), "I will just take this here iron, and keep
+it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for
+breakfast, men?"
+
+"Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of
+variety."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
+
+
+In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and
+no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
+diligently consulting Yojo--the name of his black little god--and Yojo
+had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
+everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
+harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo
+earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly
+with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to
+do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I,
+Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it
+had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship
+myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.
+
+I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
+confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising forecast
+of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good
+sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all
+cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
+
+Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection
+of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied
+upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry
+us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced
+no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly
+prepared to set about this business with a determined rushing sort
+of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling little
+affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our
+little bedroom--for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan,
+or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that
+day; HOW it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself
+to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX
+Articles--leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo
+warming himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among
+the shipping. After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries,
+I learnt that there were three ships up for three-years' voyages--The
+Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. DEVIL-DAM, I do not know the
+origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt remember, was
+the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct
+as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her,
+hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod,
+looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very
+ship for us.
+
+You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
+know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
+galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
+rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old
+school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look
+about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms
+of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French
+grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable
+bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan,
+where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood
+stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her
+ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped
+flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these
+her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining
+to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.
+Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded
+another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the
+principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his
+chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid
+it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched
+by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She
+was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with
+pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of
+a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All
+round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous
+jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for
+pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not
+through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of
+sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported
+there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved
+from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who
+steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds
+back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a
+most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
+
+Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,
+in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw
+nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or
+rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only
+a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten
+feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken
+from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.
+Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced
+together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in
+a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the
+top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening
+faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a
+complete view forward.
+
+And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who
+by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and
+the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
+command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all
+over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a
+stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
+constructed.
+
+There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
+the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
+and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
+only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
+wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from
+his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
+windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
+together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
+
+"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of
+the tent.
+
+"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?"
+he demanded.
+
+"I was thinking of shipping."
+
+"Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in a
+stove boat?"
+
+"No, Sir, I never have."
+
+"Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?
+
+"Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I've been several
+voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"
+
+"Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that
+leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of
+the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now
+ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships.
+But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?--it looks
+a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not been a pirate, hast
+thou?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?--Dost not think of
+murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?"
+
+I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask
+of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
+Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
+distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
+Vineyard.
+
+"But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
+shipping ye."
+
+"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world."
+
+"Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?"
+
+"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"
+
+"Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."
+
+"I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself."
+
+"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,
+young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted
+out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We
+are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest
+to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of
+finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap
+eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one
+leg."
+
+"What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?"
+
+"Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,
+chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a
+boat!--ah, ah!"
+
+I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at
+the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I
+could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know
+there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed
+I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident."
+
+"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou
+dost not talk shark a bit. SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure of
+that?"
+
+"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the
+merchant--"
+
+"Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant
+service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it. But let us understand each
+other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel
+inclined for it?"
+
+"I do, sir."
+
+"Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's
+throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!"
+
+"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be
+got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."
+
+"Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find
+out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to
+see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just
+step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back
+to me and tell me what ye see there."
+
+For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
+knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But
+concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started
+me on the errand.
+
+Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
+ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
+pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but
+exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
+could see.
+
+"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye
+see?"
+
+"Not much," I replied--"nothing but water; considerable horizon though,
+and there's a squall coming up, I think."
+
+"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go
+round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where
+you stand?"
+
+I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the
+Pequod was as good a ship as any--I thought the best--and all this I now
+repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness
+to ship me.
+
+"And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off," he added--"come
+along with ye." And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
+
+Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
+surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with
+Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other
+shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd
+of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each
+owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail
+or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling
+vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks
+bringing in good interest.
+
+Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
+Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to
+this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the
+peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified
+by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same
+Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They
+are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
+
+So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture
+names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in childhood
+naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker
+idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure
+of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
+peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
+Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things
+unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain
+and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion
+of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath
+constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think
+untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or
+savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
+breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
+advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language--that man makes
+one in a whole nation's census--a mighty pageant creature, formed for
+noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically
+regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems
+a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all
+men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure
+of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But,
+as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and
+still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another
+phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
+
+Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
+But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called
+serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
+veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally
+educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all
+his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island
+creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this native born
+Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his
+vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of
+common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though refusing, from
+conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself
+had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe
+to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns
+upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his
+days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
+not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably
+he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's
+religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This
+world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes
+of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat;
+from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a
+ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous
+career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of
+sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his
+well-earned income.
+
+Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
+incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
+task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
+curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
+upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore
+exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was
+certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
+though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate
+quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a
+chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made
+you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something--a hammer
+or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other,
+never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own
+person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his
+long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard,
+his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his
+broad-brimmed hat.
+
+Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
+followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks
+was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so,
+and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was
+placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was
+buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in
+reading from a ponderous volume.
+
+"Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been
+studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain
+knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?"
+
+As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,
+Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and
+seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
+
+"He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."
+
+"Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
+
+"I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
+
+"What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.
+
+"He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at
+his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.
+
+I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg,
+his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said
+nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest,
+and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink before him,
+and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time
+to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the
+voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no
+wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of
+the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the
+degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's
+company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own
+lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea,
+could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that
+from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that
+is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever
+that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they
+call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a
+lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out
+on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which I would
+not have to pay one stiver.
+
+It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
+fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those
+that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the
+world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim
+sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay
+would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I
+been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.
+
+But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
+receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard
+something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;
+how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore
+the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the
+whole management of the ship's affairs to these two. And I did not know
+but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about
+shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod,
+quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his
+own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his
+jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was
+such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded
+us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, "LAY not up for
+yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth--"
+
+"Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay
+shall we give this young man?"
+
+"Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust do
+corrupt, but LAY--'"
+
+LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,
+shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do corrupt.
+It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though from the
+magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet
+the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and
+seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make
+a TEENTH of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven
+hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
+
+"Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to
+swindle this young man! he must have more than that."
+
+"Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without lifting
+his eyes; and then went on mumbling--"for where your treasure is, there
+will your heart be also."
+
+"I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do ye
+hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say."
+
+Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
+"Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the
+duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship--widows and orphans,
+many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this
+young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those
+orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg."
+
+"Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
+cabin. "Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these
+matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be
+heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape
+Horn."
+
+"Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing
+ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art still
+an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be
+but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the
+fiery pit, Captain Peleg."
+
+"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye
+insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that
+he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and
+start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a live goat with
+all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured
+son of a wooden gun--a straight wake with ye!"
+
+As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous
+oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
+
+Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
+responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up
+all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
+commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who,
+I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened
+wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the
+transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of
+withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As
+for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more
+left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a
+little as if still nervously agitated. "Whew!" he whistled at last--"the
+squall's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at
+sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs
+the grindstone. That's he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man,
+Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael,
+for the three hundredth lay."
+
+"Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship
+too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"
+
+"To be sure," said Peleg. "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."
+
+"What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in
+which he had again been burying himself.
+
+"Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg. "Has he ever
+whaled it any?" turning to me.
+
+"Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."
+
+"Well, bring him along then."
+
+And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I
+had done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the identical
+ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.
+
+But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain
+with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in
+many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all
+her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving
+to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the
+shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have
+a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble
+himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till
+all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at
+him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back
+I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
+
+"And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough; thou
+art shipped."
+
+"Yes, but I should like to see him."
+
+"But I don't think thou wilt be able to at present. I don't know exactly
+what's the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort
+of sick, and yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't sick; but no, he
+isn't well either. Any how, young man, he won't always see me, so I
+don't suppose he will thee. He's a queer man, Captain Ahab--so some
+think--but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no
+fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak
+much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be
+forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as
+'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed
+his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance!
+aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't
+Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab
+of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"
+
+"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did
+they not lick his blood?"
+
+"Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance in
+his eye that almost startled me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on board
+the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself.
+'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died
+when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at
+Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps,
+other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It's a
+lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago;
+I know what he is--a good man--not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but
+a swearing good man--something like me--only there's a good deal more of
+him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on
+the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it
+was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that
+about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost
+his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of
+moody--desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass
+off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's
+better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So
+good-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to
+have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife--not three voyages
+wedded--a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that
+old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless
+harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his
+humanities!"
+
+As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been
+incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
+wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time,
+I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know what,
+unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange
+awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was
+not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did
+not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed
+like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However,
+my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the
+present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
+
+
+As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all
+day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I
+cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations,
+never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue
+even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other
+creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism
+quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of
+a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate
+possessions yet owned and rented in his name.
+
+I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
+things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
+pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
+subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most
+absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--but what of that? Queequeg
+thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content;
+and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let
+him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans
+alike--for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and
+sadly need mending.
+
+Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and
+rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but
+no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. "Queequeg,"
+said I softly through the key-hole:--all silent. "I say, Queequeg! why
+don't you speak? It's I--Ishmael." But all remained still as before. I
+began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought
+he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but
+the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect
+was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the
+foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I
+was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of
+Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken
+from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's strange, thought I;
+but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or
+never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no
+possible mistake.
+
+"Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all still. Something must have happened.
+Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.
+Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person
+I met--the chamber-maid. "La! la!" she cried, "I thought something must
+be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was
+locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever
+since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
+baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma'am!--Mistress! murder! Mrs.
+Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I
+following.
+
+Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
+vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation
+of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.
+
+"Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch
+something to pry open the door--the axe!--the axe! he's had a stroke;
+depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs
+again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and
+vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.
+
+"What's the matter with you, young man?"
+
+"Get the axe! For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry
+it open!"
+
+"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet,
+so as to have one hand free; "look here; are you talking about prying
+open any of my doors?"--and with that she seized my arm. "What's the
+matter with you? What's the matter with you, shipmate?"
+
+In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the
+whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her
+nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed--"No! I haven't seen
+it since I put it there." Running to a little closet under the landing
+of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's
+harpoon was missing. "He's killed himself," she cried. "It's unfort'nate
+Stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane--God pity his poor
+mother!--it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister?
+Where's that girl?--there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell
+him to paint me a sign, with--"no suicides permitted here, and no
+smoking in the parlor;"--might as well kill both birds at once. Kill?
+The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What's that noise there? You, young
+man, avast there!"
+
+And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force
+open the door.
+
+"I don't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the
+locksmith, there's one about a mile from here. But avast!" putting her
+hand in her side-pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's
+see." And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg's
+supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.
+
+"Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry a
+little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing
+I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a
+sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.
+
+With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming
+against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good
+heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right
+in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on
+top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat
+like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.
+
+"Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter with
+you?"
+
+"He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.
+
+But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt
+like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
+intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;
+especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of
+eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.
+
+"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so leave us, if you
+please, and I will see to this strange affair myself."
+
+Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon
+Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could
+do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--he would not move a peg,
+nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in
+the slightest way.
+
+I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do
+they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so;
+yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he'll
+get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't last for ever, thank God,
+and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don't believe it's very
+punctual then.
+
+I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long
+stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as
+they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,
+confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after
+listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, I went
+up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
+certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he
+was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to
+grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be
+sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room,
+holding a piece of wood on his head.
+
+"For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have
+some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg." But not a
+word did he reply.
+
+Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;
+and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to
+turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as
+it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary
+round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into
+the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought
+of Queequeg--not four feet off--sitting there in that uneasy position,
+stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of
+it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his
+hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
+
+But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of
+day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he
+had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of
+sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints,
+but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his
+forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.
+
+Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion,
+be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any
+other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when
+a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment
+to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to
+lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and
+argue the point with him.
+
+And just so I now did with Queequeg. "Queequeg," said I, "get into bed
+now, and lie and listen to me." I then went on, beginning with the rise
+and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various
+religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show
+Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in
+cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless
+for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and
+common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an
+extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained
+me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan
+of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the
+spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be
+half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish
+such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg,
+said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested
+apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary
+dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
+
+I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with
+dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it
+in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great
+feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle
+wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o'clock in the
+afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.
+
+"No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew the
+inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had
+visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when
+a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the
+yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed
+in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with
+breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were
+sent round with the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as
+though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.
+
+After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
+impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed
+dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his
+own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one
+third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he
+no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than
+I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
+compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible
+young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
+
+At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
+breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not
+make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the
+Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
+
+
+As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
+carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
+from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,
+and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft,
+unless they previously produced their papers.
+
+"What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the
+bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
+
+"I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."
+
+"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from
+behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. "He must show that he's converted.
+Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art thou at present in
+communion with any Christian church?"
+
+"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church." Here
+be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at
+last come to be converted into the churches.
+
+"First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in
+Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking
+out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana
+handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the
+wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at
+Queequeg.
+
+"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not very
+long, I rather guess, young man."
+
+"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it would
+have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."
+
+"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of
+Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it
+every Lord's day."
+
+"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said
+I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
+Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."
+
+"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me--explain
+thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me."
+
+Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. "I mean, sir, the same
+ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,
+and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of
+us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
+worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some
+queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in THAT we all join
+hands."
+
+"Splice, thou mean'st SPLICE hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer. "Young
+man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand;
+I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy--why Father Mapple
+himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned something. Come aboard, come
+aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there--what's
+that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what
+a harpoon he's got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it
+about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand
+in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"
+
+Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon
+the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats
+hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his
+harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:--
+
+"Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well,
+spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at it, he
+darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across the
+ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
+
+"Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, "spos-ee him whale-e
+eye; why, dad whale dead."
+
+"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close
+vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
+"Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have
+Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog,
+we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a
+harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."
+
+So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon
+enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.
+
+When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
+signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't know how
+to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or
+make thy mark?"
+
+But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
+part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the
+offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact
+counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so
+that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative,
+it stood something like this:--
+
+Quohog. his X mark.
+
+Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
+and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
+broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting
+one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose," placed it in
+Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
+looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, "Son of darkness, I must do my
+duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the
+souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I
+sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn
+the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind
+thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!"
+
+Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language,
+heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.
+
+"Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,"
+cried Peleg. "Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers--it takes the shark
+out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish.
+There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all
+Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to
+good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and
+sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove
+and went to Davy Jones."
+
+"Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou thyself,
+as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what
+it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this
+ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this
+same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan,
+that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not
+think of Death and the Judgment then?"
+
+"Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
+thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,--"hear him, all of ye.
+Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink!
+Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an
+everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us,
+fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think
+about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of;
+and how to save all hands--how to rig jury-masts--how to get into the
+nearest port; that was what I was thinking of."
+
+Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck,
+where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
+sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then
+he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which
+otherwise might have been wasted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
+
+
+"Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?"
+
+Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from
+the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when
+the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,
+levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but
+shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a
+black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
+directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed
+bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
+
+"Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated.
+
+"You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a little
+more time for an uninterrupted look at him.
+
+"Aye, the Pequod--that ship there," he said, drawing back his whole
+arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
+bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
+
+"Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."
+
+"Anything down there about your souls?"
+
+"About what?"
+
+"Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter though,
+I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to 'em; and they are
+all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon."
+
+"What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I.
+
+"HE'S got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort
+in other chaps," abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis
+upon the word HE.
+
+"Queequeg," said I, "let's go; this fellow has broken loose from
+somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know."
+
+"Stop!" cried the stranger. "Ye said true--ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder
+yet, have ye?"
+
+"Who's Old Thunder?" said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness
+of his manner.
+
+"Captain Ahab."
+
+"What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?"
+
+"Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye
+hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?"
+
+"No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but is getting better, and will be
+all right again before long."
+
+"All right again before long!" laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
+derisive sort of laugh. "Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
+this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."
+
+"What do you know about him?"
+
+"What did they TELL you about him? Say that!"
+
+"They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that he's
+a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew."
+
+"That's true, that's true--yes, both true enough. But you must jump when
+he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go--that's the word with
+Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape
+Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;
+nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in
+Santa?--heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash
+he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage,
+according to the prophecy. Didn't ye hear a word about them matters and
+something more, eh? No, I don't think ye did; how could ye? Who knows
+it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell
+about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare
+say. Oh yes, THAT every one knows a'most--I mean they know he's only one
+leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off."
+
+"My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
+don't know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must be a
+little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of
+that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about
+the loss of his leg."
+
+"ALL about it, eh--sure you do?--all?"
+
+"Pretty sure."
+
+With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
+stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
+little, turned and said:--"Ye've shipped, have ye? Names down on the
+papers? Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will be;
+and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all. Anyhow, it's all fixed
+and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I
+suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity 'em! Morning to ye,
+shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm sorry I stopped
+ye."
+
+"Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell
+us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are
+mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say."
+
+"And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way;
+you are just the man for him--the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates,
+morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell 'em I've concluded not to make one
+of 'em."
+
+"Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way--you can't fool us. It
+is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great
+secret in him."
+
+"Morning to ye, shipmates, morning."
+
+"Morning it is," said I. "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this crazy
+man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?"
+
+"Elijah."
+
+Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each
+other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was
+nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone
+perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and
+looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,
+though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I
+said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my
+comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner
+that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging
+us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This
+circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing,
+shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments
+and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain
+Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver
+calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship
+the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage
+we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.
+
+I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
+dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,
+and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
+seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
+seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
+
+
+A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.
+Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on
+board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything
+betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain
+Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp
+look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing
+at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging were
+working till long after night-fall.
+
+On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given at
+all the inns where the ship's company were stopping, that their chests
+must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon
+the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,
+resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they
+always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail
+for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
+there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod
+was fully equipped.
+
+Every one knows what a multitude of things--beds, sauce-pans, knives
+and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
+indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,
+which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean,
+far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And
+though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means
+to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of the
+whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the
+fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors
+usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling
+vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially
+to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of
+the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare
+lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain
+and duplicate ship.
+
+At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
+Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water,
+fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time
+there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
+ends of things, both large and small.
+
+Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain
+Bildad's sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable
+spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if SHE
+could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once
+fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar
+of pickles for the steward's pantry; another time with a bunch of quills
+for the chief mate's desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a
+roll of flannel for the small of some one's rheumatic back. Never did
+any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as
+everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this charitable
+Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand
+and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and
+consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother
+Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of
+well-saved dollars.
+
+But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
+board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and
+a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
+Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him
+a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down
+went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a
+while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men
+down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then
+concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
+
+During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
+craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when
+he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would
+answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard
+every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend
+to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been
+downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart
+that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage,
+without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute
+dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea.
+But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be
+already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his
+suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said
+nothing, and tried to think nothing.
+
+At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would
+certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
+
+
+It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we
+drew nigh the wharf.
+
+"There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right," said I to
+Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on!"
+
+"Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind
+us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself
+between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight,
+strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
+
+"Going aboard?"
+
+"Hands off, will you," said I.
+
+"Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go 'way!"
+
+"Ain't going aboard, then?"
+
+"Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you know,
+Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"
+
+"No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and
+wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable
+glances.
+
+"Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We
+are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be
+detained."
+
+"Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?"
+
+"He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."
+
+"Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few
+paces.
+
+"Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."
+
+But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my
+shoulder, said--"Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that
+ship a while ago?"
+
+Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, "Yes,
+I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure."
+
+"Very dim, very dim," said Elijah. "Morning to ye."
+
+Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
+touching my shoulder again, said, "See if you can find 'em now, will ye?
+
+"Find who?"
+
+"Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off. "Oh! I
+was going to warn ye against--but never mind, never mind--it's all one,
+all in the family too;--sharp frost this morning, ain't it? Good-bye to
+ye. Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand
+Jury." And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for
+the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.
+
+At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound
+quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the
+hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward
+to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a
+light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
+tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his
+face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber
+slept upon him.
+
+"Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said I,
+looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf,
+Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would
+have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter,
+were it not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the
+thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg
+that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish
+himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though
+feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly
+down there.
+
+"Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.
+
+"Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt him
+face."
+
+"Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance then;
+but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you
+are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look,
+he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake."
+
+Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and
+lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing
+over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him
+in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his
+land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king,
+chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some
+of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in
+that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay
+them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on
+an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible
+into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and
+desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps
+in some damp marshy place.
+
+While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
+from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's head.
+
+"What's that for, Queequeg?"
+
+"Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!"
+
+He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
+which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed
+his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The
+strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began
+to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed
+troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and
+rubbed his eyes.
+
+"Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"
+
+"Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"
+
+"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain
+came aboard last night."
+
+"What Captain?--Ahab?"
+
+"Who but him indeed?"
+
+I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
+heard a noise on deck.
+
+"Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate,
+that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to." And so
+saying he went on deck, and we followed.
+
+It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and
+threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively
+engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various
+last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly
+enshrined within his cabin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
+
+
+At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's riggers,
+and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the
+ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last
+gift--a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a
+spare Bible for the steward--after all this, the two Captains, Peleg
+and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg
+said:
+
+"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is
+all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more to be got from shore, eh?
+Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here--blast 'em!"
+
+"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad,
+"but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."
+
+How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain
+Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the
+quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as
+well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of
+him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then,
+the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the
+ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was
+not at all his proper business, but the pilot's; and as he was not
+yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore, Captain Ahab stayed
+below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant
+service many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable
+time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table,
+having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends, before they
+quit the ship for good with the pilot.
+
+But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain
+Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and
+commanding, and not Bildad.
+
+"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered at
+the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, drive'em aft."
+
+"Strike the tent there!"--was the next order. As I hinted before, this
+whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the
+Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to
+be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
+
+"Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command, and
+the crew sprang for the handspikes.
+
+Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot
+is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it
+known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots
+of the port--he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in
+order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned
+in, for he never piloted any other craft--Bildad, I say, might now
+be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching
+anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody,
+to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of
+a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will.
+Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that no
+profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in
+getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice
+copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.
+
+Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped
+and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would
+sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused
+on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the
+perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a
+pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious
+Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and
+turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the
+act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first
+kick.
+
+"Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared.
+"Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don't ye
+spring, I say, all of ye--spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red
+whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I
+say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!" And so saying, he moved
+along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while
+imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I,
+Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
+
+At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It
+was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into
+night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose
+freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of
+teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white
+ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from
+the bows.
+
+Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the
+old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost
+all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady
+notes were heard,--
+
+"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green.
+So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between."
+
+
+Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They
+were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the
+boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was
+yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads
+and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring,
+untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
+
+At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed
+no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging
+alongside.
+
+It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at
+this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet;
+very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a
+voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of
+his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate
+sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to
+encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to
+a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,--poor old Bildad
+lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the
+cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and
+looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only
+bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards
+the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere
+and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin,
+convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern,
+for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say,
+"Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can."
+
+As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all
+his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern
+came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck--now
+a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
+
+But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look
+about him,--"Captain Bildad--come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the
+main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now!
+Careful, careful!--come, Bildad, boy--say your last. Luck to ye,
+Starbuck--luck to ye, Mr. Stubb--luck to ye, Mr. Flask--good-bye and
+good luck to ye all--and this day three years I'll have a hot supper
+smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!"
+
+"God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men," murmured old
+Bildad, almost incoherently. "I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so
+that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye--a pleasant sun is all
+he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go.
+Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don't stave the boats needlessly,
+ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.
+within the year. Don't forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind
+that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in
+the green locker! Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't
+miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good gifts. Have an
+eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought.
+If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye,
+good-bye! Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr.
+Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter--twenty cents the
+pound it was, and mind ye, if--"
+
+"Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,--away!" and with that,
+Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
+
+Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
+screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave
+three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone
+Atlantic.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
+
+
+Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
+mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
+
+When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
+bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her
+helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon
+the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous
+voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another
+tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest
+things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this
+six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say
+that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably
+drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port
+is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm
+blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale,
+the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all
+hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make
+her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail
+off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would
+blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again;
+for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her
+bitterest foe!
+
+Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
+intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
+effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while
+the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the
+treacherous, slavish shore?
+
+But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
+indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
+than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
+For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of
+the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart,
+O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
+ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
+
+
+As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;
+and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among
+landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I
+am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done
+to us hunters of whales.
+
+In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
+the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
+accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a
+stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,
+it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were
+he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation
+of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm
+Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
+pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
+
+Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us
+whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a
+butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we
+are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is
+true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been
+all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour. And
+as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall
+soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown,
+and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship
+at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even
+granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery
+decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
+battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies'
+plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit
+of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran
+who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the
+apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air
+over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared
+with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
+
+But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
+unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
+adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round
+the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
+
+But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
+scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.
+
+Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling
+fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit
+out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some
+score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did
+Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties
+upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of
+America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world;
+sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen
+thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
+at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our
+harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if
+there be not something puissant in whaling?
+
+But this is not the half; look again.
+
+I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
+point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty
+years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in
+one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way
+and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
+continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may
+well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
+pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to
+catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past
+the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and
+least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
+which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If
+American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage
+harbors, let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of the
+whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
+between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes
+of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that
+scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were
+as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their
+succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,
+and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin
+wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would
+not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old
+South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of
+our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates
+three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the
+ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
+
+Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
+scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and
+the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.
+It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the
+Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it
+might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the
+liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and
+the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
+
+That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given
+to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born
+discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores
+as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The
+whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover,
+in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were
+several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the
+whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted
+isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage
+to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the
+merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their
+first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become
+hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due;
+for already she is on the threshold.
+
+But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no
+aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to
+shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet
+every time.
+
+The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
+will say.
+
+THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote
+the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed
+the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than
+Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from
+Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our
+glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
+
+True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no
+good blood in their veins.
+
+NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than royal
+blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
+afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers
+of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
+harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the
+barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
+
+Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
+respectable.
+
+WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
+law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*
+
+Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any
+grand imposing way.
+
+THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the mighty
+triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital,
+the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were
+the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
+
+
+*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
+
+
+Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
+dignity in whaling.
+
+NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens
+attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your
+hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
+know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty
+whales. I account that man more honourable than that great captain of
+antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
+
+And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
+prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
+but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if
+hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather
+have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or
+more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here
+I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a
+whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
+
+
+In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
+substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
+should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might
+tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be
+blameworthy?
+
+It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern
+ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is
+gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there
+may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows?
+Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his
+coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they
+anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint
+machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential
+dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but
+meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably
+smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,
+unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him
+somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.
+
+But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is
+used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil,
+nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What
+then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
+state, the sweetest of all oils?
+
+Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
+queens with coronation stuff!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
+
+
+The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
+Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy
+coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard
+as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would
+not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of
+general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which
+his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those
+summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
+thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and
+cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely
+the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the
+contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped
+up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified
+Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come,
+and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like
+a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well
+in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet
+lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted
+through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a
+telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for
+all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities
+in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to
+overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and
+endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his
+life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that
+sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to
+spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents
+and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the
+welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories
+of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the
+original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those
+latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush
+of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous
+vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my boat," said
+Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean,
+not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises
+from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly
+fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
+
+"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as careful
+a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery." But we shall ere long
+see what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a man like
+Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
+
+Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
+sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all
+mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this
+business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of
+the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted.
+Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor
+for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting
+him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill
+whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that
+hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was
+his own father's? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn
+limbs of his brother?
+
+With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
+superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
+could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But
+it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such
+terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature
+that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in
+him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its
+confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it
+was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which,
+while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
+whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet
+cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
+which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and
+mighty man.
+
+But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
+abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to
+write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
+the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
+stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
+men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
+and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any
+ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
+costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves,
+so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character
+seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of
+a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
+completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this
+august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but
+that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it
+shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic
+dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The
+great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His
+omnipresence, our divine equality!
+
+If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
+hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
+graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them
+all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch
+that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow
+over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear
+me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal
+mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great
+democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
+pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves
+of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who
+didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
+war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all
+Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
+the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
+
+
+Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
+according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
+neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
+indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
+chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
+for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
+whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
+crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
+arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the
+snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of
+the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as
+a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes
+while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had,
+for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he
+thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of
+it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his
+mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor,
+he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir
+themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed
+the order, and not sooner.
+
+What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
+unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
+world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
+what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
+thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black
+little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would
+almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
+nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
+loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he
+turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from
+the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
+readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
+legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
+
+I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
+peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
+ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of
+the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the
+cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their
+mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco
+smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.
+
+The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A
+short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
+who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally
+and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
+honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost
+was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
+bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
+any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
+the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least
+water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
+application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
+ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
+the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a
+three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted
+that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought
+nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
+was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
+called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
+be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic
+whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted
+into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
+battering seas.
+
+Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
+men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
+Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
+Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
+these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with
+their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers;
+even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
+
+And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
+Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
+who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when
+the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
+moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
+and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set
+down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
+them belonged.
+
+First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected
+for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
+
+Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
+promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last
+remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring
+island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the
+fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's
+long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding
+eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their
+glittering expression--all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor
+of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest
+of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal
+forests of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild
+beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great
+whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the
+infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe
+snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of
+the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son
+of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second
+mate's squire.
+
+Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
+negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended
+from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called
+them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to
+them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
+lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been
+anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors
+most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
+life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
+manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,
+and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six
+feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at
+him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to
+beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus
+Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
+beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that
+at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the
+mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though
+pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the
+American whale fishery as with the American army and military and
+merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction
+of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all
+these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest
+of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of
+these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound
+Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy
+peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers
+sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to
+receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards,
+they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but
+Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders
+in the Pequod, ISOLATOES too, I call such, not acknowledging the common
+continent of men, but each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his
+own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!
+An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all
+the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the
+world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever
+come back. Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went before. Poor
+Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him,
+beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for,
+to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and
+beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
+
+
+For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen
+of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
+and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
+only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
+with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they
+but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was
+there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate
+into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
+
+Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
+gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
+disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the
+sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened
+at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
+recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
+of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was
+almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
+prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
+uneasiness--to call it so--which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
+about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such
+emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,
+were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
+tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
+acquainted with, still I ascribed this--and rightly ascribed it--to the
+fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation
+in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect
+of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most
+forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce
+confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three
+better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way,
+could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
+Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the
+ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,
+though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every
+degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that
+merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one
+of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the
+transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water
+with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I
+mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I
+levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.
+Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
+
+There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
+recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when
+the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
+or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
+whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
+unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out
+from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his
+tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,
+you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that
+perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of
+a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and
+without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top
+to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly
+alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it
+was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.
+By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was
+made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old
+Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till
+he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
+then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in
+an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially
+negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,
+who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this
+laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the
+immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with
+preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously
+contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should
+be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he
+muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would
+find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
+
+So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
+brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted
+that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric
+white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that
+this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of
+the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old
+Gay-Head Indian once; "but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
+mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."
+
+I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
+the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there
+was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank.
+His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a
+shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the
+ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude,
+a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
+forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
+officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures
+and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
+consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that,
+but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
+face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
+
+Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.
+But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either
+standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or
+heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to
+grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as
+if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry
+bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it
+came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,
+for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck,
+he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was
+only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
+preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so
+that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite
+Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that
+layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the
+loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
+
+Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
+pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from
+his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May,
+trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest,
+most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green
+sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the
+end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More
+than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any
+other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
+
+
+Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now
+went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost
+perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic.
+The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days,
+were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--flaked up, with
+rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
+jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their
+absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man,
+'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.
+But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new
+spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the
+soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory
+shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.
+And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's
+texture.
+
+Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
+man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders,
+the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the
+night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he
+seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
+were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. "It feels
+like going down into one's tomb,"--he would mutter to himself--"for an
+old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my
+grave-dug berth."
+
+So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
+set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
+and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
+flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt
+it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when
+this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the
+silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man
+would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.
+Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these,
+he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his
+wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such
+would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that
+their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once,
+the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy,
+lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast,
+Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a certain
+unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was
+pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might
+be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and
+hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the
+ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.
+
+"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me that
+fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave;
+where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at
+last.--Down, dog, and kennel!"
+
+Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
+scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, "I
+am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like
+it, sir."
+
+"Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,
+as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
+
+"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called
+a dog, sir."
+
+"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone,
+or I'll clear the world of thee!"
+
+As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in
+his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
+
+"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,"
+muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. "It's
+very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go
+back and strike him, or--what's that?--down here on my knees and pray
+for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the
+first time I ever DID pray. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too;
+aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever
+sailed with. How he flashed at me!--his eyes like powder-pans! is he
+mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be
+something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more
+than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't
+that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds
+the old man's hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets
+down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the
+pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on
+it? A hot old man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore call
+a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say--worse nor a
+toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me
+from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the
+after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's
+that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in
+the hold? Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old
+game--Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be
+born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think
+of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of
+queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But
+that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and
+sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes again. But how's that?
+didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and
+piled a lot of jackasses on top of THAT! He might as well have kicked
+me, and done with it. Maybe he DID kick me, and I didn't observe it,
+I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a
+bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with me? I don't stand right
+on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong
+side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though--How? how?
+how?--but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again;
+and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by
+daylight."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
+
+
+When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the
+bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor
+of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe.
+Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the
+weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
+
+In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
+fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one
+look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking
+him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of
+the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
+
+Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth
+in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How
+now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no
+longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be
+gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring--aye, and
+ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with
+such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the
+strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe?
+This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours
+among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll
+smoke no more--"
+
+He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the
+waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe
+made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
+
+
+Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
+
+"Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man's
+ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick
+back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then,
+presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking
+at it. But what was still more curious, Flask--you know how curious all
+dreams are--through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be
+thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
+kick from Ahab. 'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the row? It's not a real leg,
+only a false leg.' And there's a mighty difference between a living
+thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the hand, Flask,
+fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living
+member--that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to
+myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against
+that cursed pyramid--so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all
+the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but
+a cane--a whalebone cane. Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful
+cudgelling--in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me--not a base
+kick. Besides,' thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end of it--the foot
+part--what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer
+kicked me, THERE'S a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled
+down to a point only.' But now comes the greatest joke of the
+dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of
+badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the
+shoulders, and slews me round. 'What are you 'bout?' says he. Slid! man,
+but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over
+the fright. 'What am I about?' says I at last. 'And what business is
+that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do YOU want a kick?'
+By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his
+stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a
+clout--what do you think, I saw?--why thunder alive, man, his stern
+was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second
+thoughts, 'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.' 'Wise Stubb,' said he,
+'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of
+his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying
+over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to
+kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it,
+when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!' 'Halloa,' says I, 'what's
+the matter now, old fellow?' 'Look ye here,' says he; 'let's argue
+the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says
+I--'right HERE it was.' 'Very good,' says he--'he used his ivory leg,
+didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb,
+what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it
+wasn't a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were
+kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an
+honour; I consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the
+greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made
+garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by
+old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him;
+account his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you can't
+help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see that pyramid?' With that, he
+all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into
+the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what
+do you think of that dream, Flask?"
+
+"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"
+
+"May be; may be. But it's made a wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see Ahab
+standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing
+you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him,
+whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"
+
+"Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
+
+"If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
+
+"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of
+something queer about that, eh? A white whale--did ye mark that, man?
+Look ye--there's something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask.
+Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
+
+
+Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost
+in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the
+Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the
+leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost
+indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more
+special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to
+follow.
+
+It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
+that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
+classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
+essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
+
+"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
+Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
+
+"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the
+inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and
+families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal"
+(sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
+
+"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."
+"Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field
+strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to
+torture us naturalists."
+
+Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,
+those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
+knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in
+some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are
+the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at
+large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:--The Authors
+of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;
+Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
+Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier;
+John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the
+Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what
+ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited
+extracts will show.
+
+Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen
+ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
+harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate
+subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
+authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great
+sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy
+mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper
+upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest
+of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the
+profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the
+then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to
+this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
+and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
+to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days,
+will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to
+them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new
+proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,--the
+Greenland whale is deposed,--the great sperm whale now reigneth!
+
+There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living
+sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree
+succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in
+their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and
+reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found
+in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of
+excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As
+yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete
+in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an
+unwritten life.
+
+Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
+comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the
+present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
+laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I
+hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;
+because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
+reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical
+description of the various species, or--in this place at least--to much
+of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a
+systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.
+
+But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office
+is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them;
+to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very
+pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should
+essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job
+might well appal me. Will he the (leviathan) make a covenant with thee?
+Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and
+sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible
+hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to
+settle.
+
+First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
+is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it
+still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of
+Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate the whales from
+the fish." But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,
+sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict,
+were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the
+Leviathan.
+
+The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from
+the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm bilocular
+heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
+intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege naturae jure
+meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
+Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and
+they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether
+insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
+
+Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
+ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
+This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
+respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus has given
+you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;
+whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
+
+Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
+conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a
+whale is A SPOUTING FISH WITH A HORIZONTAL TAIL. There you have
+him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded
+meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a
+fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is
+still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have
+noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a
+vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail,
+though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal
+position.
+
+By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
+from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
+with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
+hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.*
+Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be
+included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand
+divisions of the entire whale host.
+
+
+*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
+Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included
+by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy,
+contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on
+wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials
+as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the
+Kingdom of Cetology.
+
+
+First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary
+BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all,
+both small and large.
+
+I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
+
+As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the
+GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.
+
+FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:--I. The SPERM
+WHALE; II. the RIGHT WHALE; III. the FIN-BACK WHALE; IV. the HUMP-BACKED
+WHALE; V. the RAZOR-BACK WHALE; VI. the SULPHUR-BOTTOM WHALE.
+
+BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER I. (SPERM WHALE).--This whale, among the
+English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter
+whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the
+French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
+Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe;
+the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
+aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being
+the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
+obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
+upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically
+considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
+almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
+was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
+spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
+creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland
+or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that
+quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of
+the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
+exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment
+and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays
+buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the
+true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still
+retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so
+strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at
+last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti
+was really derived.
+
+BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER II. (RIGHT WHALE).--In one respect this is the
+most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted
+by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and
+the oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior article in commerce.
+Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the
+following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale;
+the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of
+obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously
+baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in the second species
+of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the
+Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the
+French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale
+which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and
+English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen
+have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor'
+West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them
+Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
+
+Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
+English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree
+in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
+determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
+endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
+some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The
+right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference
+to elucidating the sperm whale.
+
+BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER III. (FIN-BACK).--Under this head I reckon
+a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
+Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
+whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
+Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and
+in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less
+portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips
+present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds
+of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which
+he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some
+three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the
+back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if
+not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated
+fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When
+the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples,
+and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled
+surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it
+somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on
+it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not
+gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very
+shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the
+remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet
+rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with
+such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present
+pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable
+Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From
+having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with
+the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated WHALEBONE WHALES,
+that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there
+would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little
+known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched
+whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen's
+names for a few sorts.
+
+In connection with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of
+great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be
+convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is
+in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon
+either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those
+marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford
+the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached
+bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How
+then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose
+peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales,
+without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other
+and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked
+whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same
+humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen;
+but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the
+other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such
+irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached,
+such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general
+methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the
+whale-naturalists has split.
+
+But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the
+whale, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall be able to hit the
+right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the
+Greenland whale's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have
+seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the
+Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various
+leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as
+available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.
+What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in
+their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is
+the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can
+possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.
+
+BOOK I. (FOLIO) CHAPTER IV. (HUMP-BACK).--This whale is often seen on
+the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and
+towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you
+might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular
+name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm
+whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very
+valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of
+all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any
+other of them.
+
+BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER V. (RAZOR-BACK).--Of this whale little is known
+but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring
+nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he
+has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long
+sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody
+else.
+
+BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER VI. (SULPHUR-BOTTOM).--Another retiring
+gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
+Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;
+at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,
+and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is
+never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are
+told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true
+of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
+
+Thus ends BOOK I. (FOLIO), and now begins BOOK II. (OCTAVO).
+
+OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which
+present may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III.,
+the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER.
+
+
+*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
+Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of
+the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them
+in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned form
+does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume
+does.
+
+
+BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).--Though this fish, whose
+loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb
+to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not
+popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive
+features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one.
+He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet
+in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in
+herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in
+quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is
+regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.
+
+BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER II. (BLACK FISH).--I give the popular
+fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
+Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so,
+and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called,
+because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the
+Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the
+circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he
+carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale
+averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
+all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin
+in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more
+profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
+whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment--as
+some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by
+themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their
+blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of
+thirty gallons of oil.
+
+BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER III. (NARWHALE), that is, NOSTRIL
+WHALE.--Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose
+from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The
+creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five
+feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly
+speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw
+in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only
+found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner
+something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What
+precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to
+say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and
+bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for
+a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin
+said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
+surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his
+horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these
+surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided
+horn may really be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would
+certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.
+The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and
+the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism
+to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain
+cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn
+was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison,
+and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also
+distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the
+horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it
+was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells
+me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when
+Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window
+of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir
+Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on bended knees
+he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale,
+which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An Irish
+author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise
+present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the
+unicorn nature.
+
+The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
+milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.
+His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and
+he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
+
+BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).--Of this whale little is
+precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed
+naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say
+that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage--a sort of
+Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and
+hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The
+Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception
+might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground
+of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea;
+Bonapartes and Sharks included.
+
+BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER V. (THRASHER).--This gentleman is famous for
+his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts
+the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by
+flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar
+process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both
+are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.
+
+Thus ends BOOK II. (OCTAVO), and begins BOOK III. (DUODECIMO).
+
+DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise.
+II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
+
+To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
+possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
+feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word, which, in the popular
+sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set
+down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my
+definition of what a whale is--i.e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal
+tail.
+
+BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 1. (HUZZA PORPOISE).--This is the
+common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own
+bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something
+must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always
+swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing
+themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their
+appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine
+spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They
+are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a
+lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding
+these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly
+gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will
+yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid
+extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among
+jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise
+meat is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that
+a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
+readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and
+you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
+
+BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER II. (ALGERINE PORPOISE).--A pirate. Very
+savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger
+than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him,
+and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but
+never yet saw him captured.
+
+BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER III. (MEALY-MOUTHED PORPOISE).--The
+largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is
+known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated,
+is that of the fishers--Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that
+he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs
+in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly
+girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has
+no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail,
+and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils
+all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable,
+yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called
+the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two
+separate colours, black above and white below. The white comprises part
+of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he
+had just escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and
+mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.
+
+
+Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as
+the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the
+Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,
+half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
+reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their
+fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to
+future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If
+any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then
+he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio,
+Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:--The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale;
+the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon
+Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the
+Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic,
+Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of
+uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit
+them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for
+mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.
+
+Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be
+here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have
+kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus
+unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the
+crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small
+erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true
+ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
+completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay, but the
+draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 33. The Specksynder.
+
+
+Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place
+as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising
+from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown
+of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
+
+The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced
+by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries
+and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in
+the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an
+officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter;
+usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In
+those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation
+and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting
+department and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer
+reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted
+title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but
+his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply
+as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain's more
+inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the
+harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since
+in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat,
+but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the
+command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the grand political
+maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from
+the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
+professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as
+their social equal.
+
+Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is
+this--the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and
+merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and
+so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
+the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the
+captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.
+
+Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest
+of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and
+the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high
+or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their
+common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and
+hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less
+rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind
+how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some
+primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious
+externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed,
+and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in
+which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated
+grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost
+as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the
+shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
+
+And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least
+given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage
+he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he
+required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon
+the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar
+circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he
+addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or IN
+TERROREM, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means
+unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.
+
+Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those
+forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally
+making use of them for other and more private ends than they were
+legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain,
+which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through
+those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible
+dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will,
+it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men,
+without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always,
+in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever
+keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and
+leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who
+become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice
+hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted
+superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks
+in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them,
+that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted
+potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown
+of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian
+herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the
+tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest
+sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in
+his art, as the one now alluded to.
+
+But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
+grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
+Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
+whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
+and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it
+must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
+featured in the unbodied air!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
+
+
+It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread
+face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and
+master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an
+observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the
+smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on
+the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the
+tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
+presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to
+the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr.
+Starbuck," disappears into the cabin.
+
+When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the
+first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck
+rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after
+a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness,
+"Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges
+about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to
+see whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise
+takes up the old burden, and with a rapid "Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows
+after his predecessors.
+
+But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,
+seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all
+sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his
+shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right
+over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching
+his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so
+far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other
+processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into
+the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and,
+then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's presence,
+in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
+
+It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
+artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck
+some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and
+defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those
+very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that
+same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
+deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of
+the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
+difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
+Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
+therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he
+who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
+private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power
+and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of
+state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who
+has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It
+is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now,
+if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a
+ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that
+peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
+
+Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned
+sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still
+deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be
+served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,
+there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind,
+their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife, as he carved
+the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they
+would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even
+upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his
+knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby
+motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his meat as
+though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started
+if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it
+noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like
+the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly
+dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were
+somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab
+forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was
+to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And
+poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary
+family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have
+been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this
+must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had
+he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have
+been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,
+strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself,
+the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did
+Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners
+of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,
+sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
+marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for
+him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
+
+Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask
+is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was badly
+jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him;
+and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb
+even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small
+appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask
+must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day;
+for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.
+Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he
+had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never
+known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what
+he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.
+Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from
+my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of
+old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the
+mast. There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory:
+there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any mere
+sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official
+capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance,
+was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin
+sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
+
+Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table
+in the Pequod's cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted
+order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was
+restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three
+harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees.
+They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the high and mighty
+cabin.
+
+In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless
+invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire care-free
+license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows
+the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
+sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food
+with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords;
+they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.
+Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out
+the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was
+fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of
+the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with
+a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of
+accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once
+Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy's memory by
+snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty
+wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the
+circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous,
+shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny
+of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing
+spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous
+visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life was one
+continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished
+with all things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into
+his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the
+blinds of its door, till all was over.
+
+It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing
+his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the
+floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low
+carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin
+framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a
+ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,
+not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively
+small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,
+baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed
+strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his
+dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by
+beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a
+mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating--an ugly sound enough--so
+much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether
+any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear
+Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be
+picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging
+round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the
+whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their
+lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they
+would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at
+all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his
+Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some
+murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the
+white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on
+his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight,
+the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous,
+fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every
+step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
+
+But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
+there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
+scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time,
+when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
+
+In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale
+captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights
+the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that
+anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth,
+the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to
+have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it
+was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for
+a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,
+residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin
+was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally
+included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He
+lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
+Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of
+the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter
+there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age,
+Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the
+sullen paws of its gloom!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
+
+
+It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
+other seamen my first mast-head came round.
+
+In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
+simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may
+have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
+cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage
+she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial
+even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her
+skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether
+relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
+
+Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very
+ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.
+I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old
+Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
+For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by
+their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,
+or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great
+stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread
+gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders
+priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of
+mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among
+archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical
+purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like
+formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious
+long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount
+to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a
+modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In
+Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him
+a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of
+his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a
+tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless
+stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs
+or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to
+the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads
+we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who,
+though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely
+incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange
+sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome,
+stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air;
+careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis
+Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on
+his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars,
+his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals
+will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his
+mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that
+London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for
+where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor
+Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however
+madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks
+upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits
+penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals
+and what rocks must be shunned.
+
+It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head
+standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is
+not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole
+historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,
+that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly
+launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty
+spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means
+of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few
+years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand,
+who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh
+the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the
+one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads
+are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their
+regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two
+hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant
+the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There
+you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the
+deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and
+between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even
+as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old
+Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with
+nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the
+drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the
+most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests
+you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts
+of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear
+of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are
+never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner--for
+all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and
+your bill of fare is immutable.
+
+In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years'
+voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the
+mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be
+deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion
+of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute
+of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a
+comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,
+a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small
+and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your
+most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you
+stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called
+the t' gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner
+feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure,
+in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of
+a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more
+of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its
+fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out
+of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim
+crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of
+a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You
+cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you
+make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.
+
+Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
+southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents
+or pulpits, called CROW'S-NESTS, in which the look-outs of a Greenland
+whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In
+the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among the
+Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the
+re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in
+this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with
+a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
+CROW'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good
+craft. He called it the SLEET'S CROW'S-NEST, in honour of himself; he
+being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous
+false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our
+own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so
+likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we
+may beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a large
+tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with
+a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale.
+Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a
+little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the
+stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for
+umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which
+to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical
+conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this
+crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him
+(also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for
+the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns
+infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from
+the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon
+them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love
+for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed
+conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many
+of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his
+experiments in this crow's-nest, with a small compass he kept there for
+the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called
+the "local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to
+the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship's planks, and in the
+Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down
+blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very
+discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned "binnacle
+deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate errors,"
+he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed
+in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted
+occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely
+tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand.
+Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the
+honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he
+should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend
+and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded
+head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest
+within three or four perches of the pole.
+
+But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
+Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is
+greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those
+seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used
+to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a
+chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;
+then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the
+top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at
+last mount to my ultimate destination.
+
+Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but
+sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how
+could I--being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering
+altitude--how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all
+whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out
+every time."
+
+And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of
+Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
+lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
+offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware
+of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be
+killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes
+round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
+are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery
+furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
+young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
+sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
+himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and
+in moody phrase ejaculates:--
+
+"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
+blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."
+
+Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded
+young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
+"interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost
+to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would
+rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young
+Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
+short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have
+left their opera-glasses at home.
+
+"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been
+cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
+yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here."
+Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
+the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
+vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
+cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
+takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
+blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every
+strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
+dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him
+the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
+continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs
+away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like
+Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every
+shore the round globe over.
+
+There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
+gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from
+the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye,
+move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity
+comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps,
+at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you
+drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise
+for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
+
+
+(ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL)
+
+
+It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one
+morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the
+cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that
+hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the
+garden.
+
+Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
+rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
+dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
+you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
+you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints of his one
+unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
+
+But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as
+his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his
+thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the
+main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought
+turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely
+possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every
+outer movement.
+
+"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him pecks
+the shell. 'Twill soon be out."
+
+The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the
+deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
+
+It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the
+bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with
+one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.
+
+"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on
+ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
+
+"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!"
+
+When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious and not
+wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike
+the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly
+glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew,
+started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him
+resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched
+hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among
+the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
+summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But
+this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:--
+
+"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"
+
+"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed
+voices.
+
+"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the
+hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically
+thrown them.
+
+"And what do ye next, men?"
+
+"Lower away, and after him!"
+
+"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"
+
+"A dead whale or a stove boat!"
+
+More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
+countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began
+to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
+themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
+
+But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
+pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost
+convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:--
+
+"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white
+whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?"--holding up a
+broad bright coin to the sun--"it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye
+see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul."
+
+While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was
+slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if
+to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile
+lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and
+inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his
+vitality in him.
+
+Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
+with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the
+other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: "Whosoever of ye
+raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
+whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes
+punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
+that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"
+
+"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they
+hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
+
+"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul:
+"a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water;
+if ye see but a bubble, sing out."
+
+All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even
+more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention
+of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was
+separately touched by some specific recollection.
+
+"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that
+some call Moby Dick."
+
+"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?"
+
+"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said the
+Gay-Header deliberately.
+
+"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, even for a
+parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"
+
+"And he have one, two, three--oh! good many iron in him hide, too,
+Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like
+him--him--" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and
+round as though uncorking a bottle--"like him--him--"
+
+"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted
+and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole
+shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the
+great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a
+split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have
+seen--Moby Dick--Moby Dick!"
+
+"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far
+been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed
+struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. "Captain
+Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby Dick that took off
+thy leg?"
+
+"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my
+hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that
+brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with
+a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose;
+"Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor
+pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with
+measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him
+round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and
+round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have
+shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and
+over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.
+What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look
+brave."
+
+"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
+excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for
+Moby Dick!"
+
+"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless ye,
+men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what's this long
+face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not
+game for Moby Dick?"
+
+"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
+Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I
+came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels
+will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it
+will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."
+
+"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest
+a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the
+accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
+girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let
+me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium HERE!"
+
+"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it
+rings most vast, but hollow."
+
+"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee
+from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
+Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."
+
+"Hark ye yet again--the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
+are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the
+undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth
+the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man
+will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside
+except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that
+wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But
+'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength,
+with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is
+chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale
+principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,
+man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that,
+then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play
+herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man,
+is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off
+thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish
+stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to
+anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing
+unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I
+meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of
+spotted tawn--living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan
+leopards--the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek,
+and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the
+crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale?
+See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it.
+Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot,
+Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no
+wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt,
+then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back,
+when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings
+seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!--Aye, aye!
+thy silence, then, THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my
+dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine;
+cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."
+
+"God keep me!--keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.
+
+But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab
+did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the
+hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage;
+nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment
+their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast eyes lighted up with
+the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds
+blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah,
+ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But
+rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much
+predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things
+within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost
+necessities in our being, these still drive us on.
+
+"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.
+
+Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he
+ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near
+the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates
+stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company
+formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly
+eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the
+bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere
+he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to
+fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
+
+"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
+nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
+draughts--long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it
+goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
+serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
+way it comes. Hand it me--here's a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
+brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
+
+"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and
+ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there
+with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some
+sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you
+will yet see that--Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand
+it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, were't not thou St.
+Vitus' imp--away, thou ague!
+
+"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let
+me touch the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the
+three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,
+suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
+Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
+nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the
+same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic
+life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic
+aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of
+Starbuck fell downright.
+
+"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but
+once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, THAT had
+perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye
+dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do
+appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there--yon three
+most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain
+the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using
+his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, THAT
+shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings
+and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!"
+
+Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
+detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs
+up, before him.
+
+"Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye
+not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers,
+advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!" Forthwith,
+slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon
+sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
+
+"Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
+them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
+Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon
+it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful
+whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt
+Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted;
+and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were
+simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
+shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
+among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all
+dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
+
+
+THE CABIN; BY THE STERN WINDOWS; AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT.
+
+
+I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I
+sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;
+but first I pass.
+
+Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine.
+The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun--slow dived from noon--goes
+down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then,
+the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is
+it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but
+darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron--that
+I know--not gold. 'Tis split, too--that I feel; the jagged edge galls
+me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull,
+mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
+
+Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred
+me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me;
+all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with
+the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly
+and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night--good
+night! (WAVING HIS HAND, HE MOVES FROM THE WINDOW.)
+
+'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least;
+but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
+revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all
+stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the
+match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and
+what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad--Starbuck does; but I'm
+demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm
+to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered;
+and--Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my
+dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That's
+more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye
+cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes!
+I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies--Take some one of your own
+size; don't pommel ME! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but
+YE have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have
+no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see
+if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve
+yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is
+laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded
+gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds,
+unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron
+way!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
+
+
+BY THE MAINMAST; STARBUCK LEANING AGAINST IT.
+
+
+My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman!
+Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But
+he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see
+his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I,
+the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no
+knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him, he cries;--aye, he would
+be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I
+plainly see my miserable office,--to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,
+to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would
+shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide.
+The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small
+gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may
+wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole
+clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to
+lift again.
+
+
+[A BURST OF REVELRY FROM THE FORECASTLE.]
+
+
+Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human
+mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale
+is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward!
+mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost
+through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering
+bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his
+sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further
+on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through!
+Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like
+this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,--as wild, untutored
+things are forced to feed--Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent
+horror in thee! but 'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with the
+soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim,
+phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch.
+
+Fore-Top.
+
+(STUBB SOLUS, AND MENDING A BRACE.)
+
+
+Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!--I've been thinking over it
+ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why so? Because a
+laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what
+will, one comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is, it's all
+predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor
+eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure
+the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the
+gift, might readily have prophesied it--for when I clapped my eye upon
+his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, WISE Stubb--that's my title--well,
+Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be
+coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish
+leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
+skirra! What's my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes
+out?--Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as
+a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh--
+
+We'll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting
+As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the lips while
+meeting.
+
+
+A brave stave that--who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir--(ASIDE) he's
+my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.--Aye, aye, sir, just
+through with this job--coming.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
+
+HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
+
+(FORESAIL RISES AND DISCOVERS THE WATCH STANDING, LOUNGING, LEANING, AND
+LYING IN VARIOUS ATTITUDES, ALL SINGING IN CHORUS.)
+
+ Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
+ Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
+ Our captain's commanded.--
+
+1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the
+digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! (SINGS, AND ALL FOLLOW)
+
+ Our captain stood upon the deck,
+ A spy-glass in his hand,
+ A viewing of those gallant whales
+ That blew at every strand.
+ Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
+ And by your braces stand,
+ And we'll have one of those fine whales,
+ Hand, boys, over hand!
+ So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
+ While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!
+
+MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!
+
+2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear,
+bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me
+call the watch. I've the sort of mouth for that--the hogshead mouth.
+So, so, (THRUSTS HIS HEAD DOWN THE SCUTTLE,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!
+Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
+
+DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I
+mark this in our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as
+filliping to others. We sing; they sleep--aye, lie down there, like
+ground-tier butts. At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail
+'em through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em
+it's the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment.
+That's the way--THAT'S it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating
+Amsterdam butter.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to
+anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand
+by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
+
+PIP. (SULKY AND SLEEPY) Don't know where it is.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men,
+I say; merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance? Form, now,
+Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs!
+legs!
+
+ICELAND SAILOR. I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my
+taste. I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to throw cold water on the
+subject; but excuse me.
+
+MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would take
+his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I
+must have partners!
+
+SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!--then I'll hop with ye; yea,
+turn grasshopper!
+
+LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us.
+Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here
+comes the music; now for it!
+
+AZORE SAILOR. (ASCENDING, AND PITCHING THE TAMBOURINE UP THE SCUTTLE.)
+Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now,
+boys! (THE HALF OF THEM DANCE TO THE TAMBOURINE; SOME GO BELOW; SOME
+SLEEP OR LIE AMONG THE COILS OF RIGGING. OATHS A-PLENTY.)
+
+AZORE SAILOR. (DANCING) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it,
+stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
+
+PIP. Jinglers, you say?--there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.
+
+CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of
+thyself.
+
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
+Split jibs! tear yourselves!
+
+TASHTEGO. (QUIETLY SMOKING) That's a white man; he calls that fun:
+humph! I save my sweat.
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
+they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will--that's
+the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round
+corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled
+crews! Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have
+it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're
+young; I was once.
+
+3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!--whew! this is worse than pulling after
+whales in a calm--give us a whiff, Tash.
+
+(THEY CEASE DANCING, AND GATHER IN CLUSTERS. MEANTIME THE SKY
+DARKENS--THE WIND RISES.)
+
+LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
+high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
+
+MALTESE SAILOR. (RECLINING AND SHAKING HIS CAP.) It's the waves--the
+snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now
+would all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them
+evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth--heaven may not match
+it!--as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the
+over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
+
+SICILIAN SAILOR. (RECLINING.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad--fleet
+interlacings of the limbs--lithe swayings--coyings--flutterings! lip!
+heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,
+else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (NUDGING.)
+
+TAHITAN SAILOR. (RECLINING ON A MAT.) Hail, holy nakedness of our
+dancing girls!--the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I
+still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven
+in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn
+and wilted quite. Ah me!--not thou nor I can bear the change! How
+then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from
+Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the
+villages?--The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (LEAPS TO HIS
+FEET.)
+
+PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand
+by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
+they'll go lunging presently.
+
+DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou
+holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more
+afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic
+with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
+
+4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old
+Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a
+waterspout with a pistol--fire your ship right into it!
+
+ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove! We are the
+lads to hunt him up his whale!
+
+ALL. Aye! aye!
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort
+of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there's none
+but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort
+of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea.
+Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the
+sky--lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.
+
+DAGGOO. What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried
+out of it!
+
+SPANISH SAILOR. (ASIDE.) He wants to bully, ah!--the old grudge makes
+me touchy (ADVANCING.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark
+side of mankind--devilish dark at that. No offence.
+
+DAGGOO (GRIMLY). None.
+
+ST. JAGO'S SAILOR. That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or
+else in his one case our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat long in
+working.
+
+5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What's that I saw--lightning? Yes.
+
+SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
+
+DAGGOO (SPRINGING). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
+
+SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small
+spirit!
+
+ALL. A row! a row! a row!
+
+TASHTEGO (WITH A WHIFF). A row a'low, and a row aloft--Gods and
+men--both brawlers! Humph!
+
+BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge
+in with ye!
+
+ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's knife! A ring, a ring!
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring
+Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad'st thou
+the ring?
+
+MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in
+top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
+
+ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (THEY SCATTER.)
+
+
+PIP (SHRINKING UNDER THE WINDLASS). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!
+Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower,
+Pip, here comes the royal yard! It's worse than being in the whirled
+woods, the last day of the year! Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now?
+But there they go, all cursing, and here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em;
+they're on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall!
+But those chaps there are worse yet--they are your white squalls, they.
+White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their
+chat just now, and the white whale--shirr! shirr!--but spoken of
+once! and only this evening--it makes me jingle all over like my
+tambourine--that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh,
+thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on
+this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no
+bowels to feel fear!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
+
+
+I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
+my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
+did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A
+wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud
+seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous
+monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of
+violence and revenge.
+
+For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
+secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
+frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his
+existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;
+while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to
+him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers;
+the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery
+circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
+solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or
+more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort;
+the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the
+times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct
+and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide
+whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby
+Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have
+encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,
+a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after
+doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to
+some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in
+question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the
+Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent
+instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
+attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
+battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were
+content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to
+the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual
+cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and
+the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
+
+And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
+caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of
+them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other
+whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
+assaults--not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or
+devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those
+repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors
+upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many
+brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
+
+Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
+horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
+fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
+terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in
+maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound,
+wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the
+sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses
+every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness
+of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen
+as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary
+to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most
+directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing
+in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but,
+hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that
+though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you
+would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath
+that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too
+such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all
+tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
+
+No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over
+the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did
+in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,
+and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
+eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything
+that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally
+strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White
+Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his
+jaw.
+
+But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
+Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm
+Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the
+leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are
+those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous
+enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would
+perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
+timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are
+plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing
+under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm
+Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to
+the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their
+hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest
+and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the
+pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more
+feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
+
+And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
+legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
+naturalists--Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to
+be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so
+incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor
+even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar
+impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself
+affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are
+"struck with the most lively terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of
+their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to
+cause instantaneous death." And however the general experiences in the
+fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness,
+even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in
+them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of
+the hunters.
+
+So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of
+the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
+of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
+practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring
+warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be
+hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition
+as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would
+be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are
+some remarkable documents that may be consulted.
+
+Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things
+were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,
+chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the
+specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
+accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if
+offered.
+
+One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked
+with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined,
+was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had
+actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same
+instant of time.
+
+Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
+without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets
+of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to
+the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale
+when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his
+pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and
+contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the
+mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports
+himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
+
+It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and
+as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby,
+that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose
+bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland
+seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has
+been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could
+not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been
+believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem
+to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real
+living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of
+the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said
+to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface);
+and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near
+Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land
+by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully
+equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
+
+Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing
+that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped
+alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should
+go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only
+ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that
+though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still
+swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick
+blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in
+unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would
+once more be seen.
+
+But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
+the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike
+the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his
+uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,
+but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiar snow-white wrinkled
+forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent
+features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he
+revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
+
+The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with
+the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
+appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by
+his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue
+sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
+gleamings.
+
+Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
+deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,
+as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific
+accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than
+all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught
+else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every
+apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn
+round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to
+splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.
+
+Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar
+disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual
+in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's
+infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death
+that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an
+unintelligent agent.
+
+Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of
+his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed
+boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the
+white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating
+sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
+
+His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
+eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had
+dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking
+with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.
+That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his
+sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's
+leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no
+hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.
+Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
+encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale,
+all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came
+to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
+intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before
+him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which
+some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with
+half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been
+from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe
+one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced
+in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them;
+but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he
+pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and
+torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice
+in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle
+demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
+personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
+the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt
+by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a
+mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
+
+It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at
+the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the
+monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate,
+corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he
+probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.
+Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long
+months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one
+hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape;
+then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another;
+and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward
+voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems
+all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage,
+he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital
+strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified
+by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even
+there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung
+to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable
+latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the
+tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed
+left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his
+dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that
+firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once
+again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even
+then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a
+cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but
+become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy
+subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson,
+when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the
+Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of
+Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not
+one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living
+agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may
+stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it,
+and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far
+from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a
+thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon
+any one reasonable object.
+
+This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.
+But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding
+far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where
+we here stand--however grand and wonderful, now quit it;--and take your
+way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
+where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root
+of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique
+buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken
+throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he
+patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of
+ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud,
+sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled
+royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
+
+Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means
+are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or
+change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long
+dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling
+was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.
+Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when
+with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him
+otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the
+terrible casualty which had overtaken him.
+
+The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
+ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which
+always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the
+present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely,
+that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on
+account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent
+isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he
+was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full
+of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and
+scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable
+idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart
+his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.
+Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,
+yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on
+his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is,
+that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in
+him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only
+and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his
+old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him
+then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the
+ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the
+profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an
+audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.
+
+Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a
+Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made
+up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally enfeebled
+also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in
+Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in
+Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered,
+seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him
+to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded
+to the old man's ire--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
+that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much
+their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be--what the White
+Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in
+some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon
+of the seas of life,--all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than
+Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one
+tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his
+pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow
+of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the
+abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to
+encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest
+ill.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.
+
+
+What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
+was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
+
+Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
+could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there
+was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
+which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and
+yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of
+putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale
+that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself
+here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all
+these chapters might be naught.
+
+Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as
+if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas,
+and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a
+certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old
+kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants" above all
+their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings
+of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard;
+and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;
+and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,
+having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this
+pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white
+man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all
+this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among
+the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal
+sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many
+touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age;
+though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt
+of wampum was the deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes,
+whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,
+and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by
+milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
+august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
+and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being
+held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove
+himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the
+noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was
+by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
+creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit
+with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from
+the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of
+one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
+cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
+specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though
+in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and
+the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white
+throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all
+these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable,
+and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea
+of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness
+which affrights in blood.
+
+This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
+divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
+terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
+Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics;
+what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent
+horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an
+abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb
+gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his
+heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or
+shark.*
+
+
+*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him
+who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not
+the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
+hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness,
+it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the
+irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
+fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together
+two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us
+with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true;
+yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified
+terror.
+
+As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
+creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
+same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly
+hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish
+mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam" (eternal rest), whence
+REQUIEM denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now,
+in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and
+the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him REQUIN.
+
+
+Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
+wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
+imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,
+unflattering laureate, Nature.*
+
+
+*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged
+gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch
+below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
+main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
+with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth
+its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous
+flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
+cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its
+inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took
+hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white
+thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
+waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of
+towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only
+hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and
+turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!
+never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious
+thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I
+learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no
+possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those
+mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our
+deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be
+an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little
+brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
+
+I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
+chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,
+that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;
+and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I
+beheld the Antarctic fowl.
+
+But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
+tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea.
+At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern
+tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting
+it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was
+taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding,
+the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
+
+
+Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of
+the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
+large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
+thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the
+elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
+days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At
+their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which
+every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his
+mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
+resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A
+most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
+world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
+glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
+bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
+his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
+streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
+circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
+Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his
+cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the
+bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor
+can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble
+horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him
+with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though
+commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
+
+But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
+accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
+Albatross.
+
+What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
+the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It
+is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name
+he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men--has no substantive
+deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him
+more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
+
+Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but
+not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces
+this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the
+gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
+Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
+omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
+that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
+faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
+market-place!
+
+Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
+mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It
+cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
+the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
+there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
+consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And
+from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud
+in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to
+throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a
+milk-white fog--Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even
+the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his
+pallid horse.
+
+Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious
+thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
+idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
+
+But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to
+account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then,
+by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of
+whiteness--though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
+of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
+but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
+modified;--can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us
+to the hidden cause we seek?
+
+Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
+and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
+though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about
+to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
+entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to
+recall them now.
+
+Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
+acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention
+of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless
+processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with
+new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the
+Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or
+a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
+
+Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and
+kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White
+Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of
+an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
+neighbors--the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer
+towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods,
+comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of
+that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft,
+dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and
+longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness
+over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal
+thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by
+the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly
+unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading
+the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the
+Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the
+green of the groves--why is this phantom more terrible than all the
+whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
+
+Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
+earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the
+tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
+field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop
+(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of
+house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;--it
+is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
+saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and
+there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
+this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful
+greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid
+pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
+
+I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness
+is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of
+objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught
+of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost
+solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under
+any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean
+by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the
+following examples.
+
+First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by
+night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just
+enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely
+similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his
+ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness--as if from
+encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round
+him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom
+of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the
+lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go
+down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is
+the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of
+striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so
+stirred me?"
+
+Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
+snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
+mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
+altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be
+to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
+backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
+unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
+to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
+scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick
+of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
+shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
+views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean
+ice monuments and splintered crosses.
+
+But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but
+a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,
+Ishmael.
+
+Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
+Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the
+sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that
+he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness--why
+will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies
+of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
+creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
+smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
+former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black
+bisons of distant Oregon?
+
+No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
+knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from
+Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison
+herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which
+this instant they may be trampling into dust.
+
+Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings
+of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
+windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking
+of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
+
+Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic
+sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
+those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
+world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
+
+But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
+learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange
+and far more portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the
+most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
+Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
+things the most appalling to mankind.
+
+Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
+and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
+thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
+way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as
+the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
+colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
+full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour
+of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory
+of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately
+or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
+and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
+young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
+in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
+absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but
+the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
+the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
+principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and
+if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
+tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the
+palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
+Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their
+eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
+white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
+things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
+hunt?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 43. Hark!
+
+
+"HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"
+
+It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a
+cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the
+scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets
+to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed
+precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle
+their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence,
+only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the
+unceasingly advancing keel.
+
+It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose
+post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the
+words above.
+
+"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"
+
+"Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"
+
+"There it is again--under the hatches--don't you hear it--a cough--it
+sounded like a cough."
+
+"Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket."
+
+"There again--there it is!--it sounds like two or three sleepers turning
+over, now!"
+
+"Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits
+ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye--nothing else. Look to the
+bucket!"
+
+"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."
+
+"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old
+Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you're
+the chap."
+
+"Grin away; we'll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody
+down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect
+our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one
+morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind."
+
+"Tish! the bucket!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
+
+
+Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
+took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose
+with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom,
+and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread
+them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before
+it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and
+shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace
+additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he
+would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down
+the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various
+ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.
+
+While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
+head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw
+shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it
+almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses
+on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and
+courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
+
+But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
+cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
+brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and
+others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before
+him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to
+the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
+
+Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
+it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
+creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it
+seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby
+calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also, calling
+to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular
+latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to
+certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground
+in search of his prey.
+
+So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
+sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that,
+could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the
+logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated,
+then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in
+invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.
+On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory
+charts of the sperm whale.*
+
+ *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne
+ out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of
+ the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By
+ that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in
+ course of completion; and portions of it are presented in
+ the circular. "This chart divides the ocean into districts
+ of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;
+ perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
+ columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each
+ of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
+ of days that have been spent in each month in every
+ district, and the two others to show the number of days in
+ which whales, sperm or right, have been seen."
+
+Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
+sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather, secret
+intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in VEINS, as they are called;
+continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
+exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with
+one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the
+direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel,
+and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own
+unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary VEIN in which at these
+times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width
+(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but
+never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's mast-heads,
+when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at
+particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating
+whales may with great confidence be looked for.
+
+And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
+feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
+the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
+art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly
+without prospect of a meeting.
+
+There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
+delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
+perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
+for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
+herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
+say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found
+there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
+instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the
+same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries
+and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
+Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
+Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese
+Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of
+those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly
+encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where
+he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual
+stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged
+abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have
+hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever
+way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular
+set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
+probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next
+thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined
+in the one technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,
+for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,
+lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,
+loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There
+it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had
+taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
+that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive
+to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering
+vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering
+hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one
+crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
+hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
+unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
+
+Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
+Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
+to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running
+down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time
+to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
+Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been
+correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of
+things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days
+and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently
+enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance
+the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his
+periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the
+Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other
+waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers,
+Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might
+blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's
+circumnavigating wake.
+
+But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
+but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary
+whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual
+recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the
+thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar
+snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but
+be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter
+to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he
+would throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?
+His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear! And
+here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness
+and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the
+deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances
+of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved
+revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own
+bloody nails in his palms.
+
+Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
+dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through
+the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them
+round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing
+of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes
+the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its
+base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and
+lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among
+them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be
+heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his
+state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these,
+perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent
+weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens
+of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming,
+unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had
+gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from
+it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or
+soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the
+characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer
+vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching
+contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no
+longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with
+the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up
+all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose,
+by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and
+devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay,
+could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was
+conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.
+Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when
+what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated
+thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be
+sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in
+itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature
+in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a
+vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature
+he creates.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
+
+
+So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as
+indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars
+in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier
+part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the
+leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly
+enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to
+take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire
+subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main
+points of this affair.
+
+I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall
+be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of
+items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these
+citations, I take it--the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of
+itself.
+
+First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
+receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
+interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by
+the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same
+private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where
+three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I
+think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted
+them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to
+Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far
+into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years,
+often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas,
+with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of
+unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have
+been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,
+brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.
+This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the
+other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that
+is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack,
+saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards
+taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out
+that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time
+distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale's
+eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three years,
+but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three instances,
+then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many
+other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no
+good ground to impeach.
+
+Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant
+the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable
+historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at
+distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
+thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
+peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar
+in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
+peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly
+valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences
+of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about
+such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that
+most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their
+tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,
+without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some
+poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they
+make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they
+pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump for
+their presumption.
+
+But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
+celebrity--Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he
+famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death,
+but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of
+a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so,
+O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long
+did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft
+seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack!
+thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of
+the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty
+jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross
+against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked
+like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain
+prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean
+History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
+
+But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
+times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
+finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed
+by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with
+that express object as much in view, as in setting out through the
+Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture
+that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the
+Indian King Philip.
+
+I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
+mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
+printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
+whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For
+this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full
+as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of
+the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without
+some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
+fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still
+worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
+
+First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
+perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
+conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur.
+One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and
+deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
+however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose
+that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the
+whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the
+bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan--do you suppose that that
+poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read
+to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular
+between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be
+called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you
+that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many
+others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a
+death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each
+lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and
+candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was
+spilled for it.
+
+Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is
+an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when
+narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness,
+they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I
+declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
+when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.
+
+But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
+testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
+Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
+malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and
+sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale HAS done it.
+
+First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket,
+was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her
+boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of
+the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping
+from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the
+ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in
+less than "ten minutes" she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving
+plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of
+the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last,
+Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another
+ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and
+breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith
+forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain
+Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was
+chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his
+plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all
+this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*
+
+
+*The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: "Every fact seemed
+to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which
+directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at
+a short interval between them, both of which, according to their
+direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made
+ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock;
+to effect which, the exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His
+aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He
+came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in
+which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge
+for their sufferings." Again: "At all events, the whole circumstances
+taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the
+time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the
+part of the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall),
+induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion."
+
+Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during
+a black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
+hospitable shore. "The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the
+fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed
+upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful
+contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought; the
+dismal looking wreck, and THE HORRID ASPECT AND REVENGE OF THE WHALE,
+wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance."
+
+In another place--p. 45,--he speaks of "THE MYSTERIOUS AND MORTAL ATTACK
+OF THE ANIMAL."
+
+
+Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807
+totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic
+particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter,
+though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions
+to it.
+
+Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J---, then
+commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be
+dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in
+the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales,
+the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength
+ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily
+denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war
+as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there
+is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this
+impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a
+portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments' confidential business
+with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such
+a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
+port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider
+the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul
+of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the
+sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
+
+I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance
+in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you
+must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's
+famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century.
+Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:
+
+"By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day
+we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very
+clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on
+our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not
+till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An
+uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself,
+lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any
+one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail,
+was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking
+against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this
+gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at
+least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,
+while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding
+that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster
+sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D'Wolf
+applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel
+had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily
+it had escaped entirely uninjured."
+
+Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in
+question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual
+adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of
+Dorchester near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I
+have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
+He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large
+one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my
+uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
+
+In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too,
+of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier's
+old chums--I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted
+from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
+corroborative example, if such be needed.
+
+Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando," as he calls
+the modern Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither," he says, "about four
+o'clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues
+from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our
+men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were
+or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed,
+the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the
+ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little
+over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground..... The
+suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and
+several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who
+lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then
+goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate
+the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about
+that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But
+I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the
+morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically
+bumping the hull from beneath.
+
+I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to
+me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more
+than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing
+boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
+withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship
+Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength,
+let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a
+running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
+secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
+horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if
+the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts,
+not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of
+destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent
+indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently
+open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several
+consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one more and a
+concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant one, by which
+you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in
+this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these
+marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for
+the millionth time we say amen with Solomon--Verily there is nothing new
+under the sun.
+
+In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate
+of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius
+general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work
+every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been
+considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in
+some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently
+to be mentioned.
+
+Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term
+of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured
+in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed
+vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty
+years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be
+gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species
+this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as
+well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly
+inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long
+time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
+Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am
+certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the
+present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious
+resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in
+modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the
+sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that
+on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found
+the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
+through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,
+pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
+
+In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance
+called BRIT is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have
+every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--squid or
+cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures,
+but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its
+surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and
+reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all
+human reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove
+the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm
+whale.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
+
+
+Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
+thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
+though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one
+passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long
+habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to
+abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if
+this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
+influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
+considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the
+White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
+sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
+multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would
+prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed
+exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though
+not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet
+were by no means incapable of swaying him.
+
+To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in
+the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew,
+for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
+over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual
+man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual
+mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a
+sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will
+were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still
+he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his
+captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from
+it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse
+ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck
+would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his
+captain's leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
+influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle
+insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly
+manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing
+that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that
+strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that
+the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure
+background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation
+unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches,
+his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby
+Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the
+announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less
+capricious and unreliable--they live in the varying outer weather, and
+they inhale its fickleness--and when retained for any object remote and
+blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the
+end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and
+employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the
+final dash.
+
+Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
+mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
+The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
+Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
+hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
+breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the
+love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food
+for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and
+chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two
+thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without
+committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious
+perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final
+and romantic object--that final and romantic object, too many would have
+turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all
+hopes of cash--aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months
+go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same
+quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon
+cashier Ahab.
+
+Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related
+to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
+somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the
+Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing,
+he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of
+usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew
+if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further
+obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From
+even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible
+consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must
+of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection
+could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand,
+backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute
+atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected
+to.
+
+For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be
+verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good
+degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's
+voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force
+himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general
+pursuit of his profession.
+
+Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three
+mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
+reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
+
+
+It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
+about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters.
+Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
+for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet
+somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie
+lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own
+invisible self.
+
+I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I
+kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between
+the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as
+Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword
+between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and
+unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did
+there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by
+the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were
+the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving
+and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp
+subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and
+that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending
+of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here,
+thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own
+destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,
+indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly,
+or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference
+in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final
+aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I,
+which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this
+easy, indifferent sword must be chance--aye, chance, free will, and
+necessity--nowise incompatible--all interweavingly working together.
+The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate
+course--its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;
+free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and
+chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
+necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
+thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the
+last featuring blow at events.
+
+
+Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so
+strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball
+of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
+whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was
+that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward,
+his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he
+continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment
+perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's
+look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could
+that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from
+Tashtego the Indian's.
+
+As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and
+eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some
+prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries
+announcing their coming.
+
+"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"
+
+"Where-away?"
+
+"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"
+
+Instantly all was commotion.
+
+The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
+reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from
+other tribes of his genus.
+
+"There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales
+disappeared.
+
+"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!"
+
+Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact
+minute to Ahab.
+
+The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling
+before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
+leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
+our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
+when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
+concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
+opposite quarter--this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action;
+for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had
+been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of
+the men selected for shipkeepers--that is, those not appointed to the
+boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The
+sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed
+in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed,
+and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over
+high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand
+clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale.
+So look the long line of man-of-war's men about to throw themselves on
+board an enemy's ship.
+
+But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
+every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was
+surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
+
+
+The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side
+of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the
+tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always
+been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the
+captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The
+figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white
+tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese
+jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers
+of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a
+glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled
+round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of
+this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to
+some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;--a race notorious for
+a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners
+supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the
+water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be
+elsewhere.
+
+While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers,
+Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, "All ready
+there, Fedallah?"
+
+"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.
+
+"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck. "Lower away
+there, I say."
+
+Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men
+sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a
+wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous,
+off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors,
+goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats
+below.
+
+Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth
+keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and
+showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern,
+loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely,
+so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again
+riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other
+boats obeyed not the command.
+
+"Captain Ahab?--" said Starbuck.
+
+"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask,
+pull out more to leeward!"
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round
+his great steering oar. "Lay back!" addressing his crew.
+"There!--there!--there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay
+back!"
+
+"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."
+
+"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now.
+Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What
+say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."
+
+"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little
+ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom
+still showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you break your backbones,
+my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They
+are only five more hands come to help us--never mind from where--the
+more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone--devils
+are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke
+for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah
+for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men--all hearts
+alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry--don't be in a hurry. Why don't
+you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so,
+then:--softly, softly! That's it--that's it! long and strong. Give way
+there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are
+all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull,
+can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes
+don't ye pull?--pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out!
+Here!" whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; "every mother's son
+of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That's
+it--that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits.
+Start her--start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!"
+
+Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had
+rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in
+inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
+specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
+with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
+peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a
+tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so
+calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such
+queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for
+the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and
+indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly
+gaped--open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning
+commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.
+Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity
+is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their
+guard in the matter of obeying them.
+
+In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
+across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were
+pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
+
+"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
+please!"
+
+"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he
+spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set
+like a flint from Stubb's.
+
+"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!
+
+"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,
+boys!)" in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: "A sad
+business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,
+Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what
+will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
+Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the
+play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand."
+
+"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
+diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so. Aye, and that's
+what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
+suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the bottom
+of it. Well, well, so be it! Can't be helped! All right! Give way, men!
+It ain't the White Whale to-day! Give way!"
+
+Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant
+as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
+awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship's
+company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time previous got
+abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some
+small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge
+of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way
+of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
+superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for
+all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the
+matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious
+shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket
+dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.
+
+Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the
+furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a
+circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger
+yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five
+trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which
+periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst
+boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
+pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
+displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the
+gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery
+horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a
+fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any
+tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in
+a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at once
+the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed,
+while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and
+crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the
+rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily
+down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the
+movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.
+
+"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Thou, Queequeg,
+stand up!"
+
+Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage
+stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the
+spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme
+stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with
+the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing
+himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently
+eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.
+
+Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still; its
+commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout
+sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the
+level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the
+whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a man's hand,
+and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the
+mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little
+King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was
+full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point
+of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
+
+"I can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to
+that."
+
+Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his
+way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
+shoulders for a pedestal.
+
+"Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?"
+
+"That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you
+fifty feet taller."
+
+Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
+boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to
+Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed head
+and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous
+fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was
+Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a
+breastband to lean against and steady himself by.
+
+At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
+habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
+posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously
+perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily
+perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the
+sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;
+for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
+barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously
+rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed
+a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly
+vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then
+stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to
+the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the
+living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her
+seasons for that.
+
+Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing
+solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,
+not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,
+Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
+languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,
+where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
+home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match
+across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,
+whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly
+dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a
+quick phrensy of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!--there they are!"
+
+To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
+visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
+water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and
+suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
+rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it
+were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
+atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
+water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
+indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their forerunning
+couriers and detached flying outriders.
+
+All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled
+water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on,
+as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the
+hills.
+
+"Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but
+intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance
+from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two
+visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much
+to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the
+silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his
+peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.
+
+How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and say something,
+my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their
+black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my
+Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys.
+Lay me on--lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad!
+See! see that white water!" And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his
+head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far
+off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's
+stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.
+
+"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
+unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a
+short distance, followed after--"He's got fits, that Flask has. Fits?
+yes, give him fits--that's the very word--pitch fits into 'em. Merrily,
+merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;--merry's the word.
+Pull, babes--pull, sucklings--pull, all. But what the devil are you
+hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and
+keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your
+knives in two--that's all. Take it easy--why don't ye take it easy, I
+say, and burst all your livers and lungs!"
+
+But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
+his--these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed
+light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious
+seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of
+red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
+
+Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of
+Flask to "that whale," as he called the fictitious monster which
+he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its
+tail--these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that
+they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look
+over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen
+must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage
+pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but
+arms, in these critical moments.
+
+It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
+omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along
+the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green;
+the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on
+the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening
+to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and
+hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite
+hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these,
+with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps
+of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing
+down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
+screaming brood;--all this was thrilling.
+
+Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever
+heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the
+first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel
+stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first
+time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the
+hunted sperm whale.
+
+The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
+visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows
+flung upon the sea. The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted
+everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
+The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales
+running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still
+rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through
+the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
+escape being torn from the row-locks.
+
+Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship
+nor boat to be seen.
+
+"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet
+of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.
+There's white water again!--close to! Spring!"
+
+Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
+that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when
+with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: "Stand up!" and
+Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
+
+Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril
+so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance
+of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent
+instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of
+fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still
+booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
+the erected crests of enraged serpents.
+
+"That's his hump. THERE, THERE, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.
+
+A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
+Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
+astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
+collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by;
+something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
+crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
+white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
+blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
+
+Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
+it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
+tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the
+water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
+the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom
+of the ocean.
+
+The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
+the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
+fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
+in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar
+to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those
+boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew
+darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
+The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were
+useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.
+So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures
+Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching
+it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this
+forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in
+the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign
+and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the
+midst of despair.
+
+Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,
+we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over
+the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.
+Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.
+We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by
+the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly
+parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as
+the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a
+distance of not much more than its length.
+
+Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it
+tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at the base of a
+cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no
+more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed
+against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on
+board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from
+their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us
+up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of
+our perishing,--an oar or a lance pole.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
+
+
+There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
+we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical
+joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than
+suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However,
+nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts
+down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard
+things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of
+potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small
+difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of
+life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly,
+good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen
+and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking
+of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes
+in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might
+have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the
+general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this
+free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now
+regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its
+object.
+
+"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,
+and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;
+"Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?"
+Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to
+understand that such things did often happen.
+
+"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
+oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I
+think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
+mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
+then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
+squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"
+
+"Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape
+Horn."
+
+"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close
+by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell
+me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an
+oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's
+jaws?"
+
+"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask. "Yes, that's the law.
+I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale face
+foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
+that!"
+
+Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
+of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
+in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters
+of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
+superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my
+life into the hands of him who steered the boat--oftentimes a fellow who
+at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling
+the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the
+particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed
+to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,
+and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his
+great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this
+uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a
+devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all
+things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a
+rough draft of my will. "Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my
+lawyer, executor, and legatee."
+
+It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their
+last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more
+fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life
+that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon
+the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away
+from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good
+as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary
+clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived
+myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked
+round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean
+conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
+
+Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
+here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
+devil fetch the hindmost.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
+
+
+"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but one leg
+you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole
+with my timber toe. Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"
+
+"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask.
+"If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
+That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other
+left, you know."
+
+"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."
+
+
+Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
+the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is
+right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils
+of the chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their
+eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the
+thickest of the fight.
+
+But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering
+that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
+considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
+extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
+comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any
+maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
+joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
+
+Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
+his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of
+the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving
+his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
+apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt--above all for
+Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's
+crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
+of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's
+crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
+Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all
+that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little
+foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out
+of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
+whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
+found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
+own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
+solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
+running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
+observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
+coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
+withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
+he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
+sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the
+knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed
+how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
+semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel
+gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
+things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
+almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness
+in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick;
+for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster
+in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest
+suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that boat.
+
+Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
+away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
+unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
+nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
+whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
+creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
+oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
+Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin
+to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
+excitement in the forecastle.
+
+But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
+phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
+somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained
+a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like
+this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be
+linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort
+of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even
+authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain
+an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as
+civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their
+dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide
+among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles
+to the east of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable
+countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the
+ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of
+the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
+unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of
+the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though,
+according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of
+men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane
+amours.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
+
+
+Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly
+swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the
+Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the
+Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality,
+southerly from St. Helena.
+
+It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
+moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver;
+and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery
+silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen
+far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it
+looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
+the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight
+nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a
+look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet,
+though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred
+would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions,
+then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual
+hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after
+spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights
+without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his
+unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every
+reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had
+lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!"
+Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet
+still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most
+unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously
+exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a
+lowering.
+
+Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
+t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The
+best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head
+manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange,
+upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows
+of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air
+beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
+influences were struggling in her--one to mount direct to heaven, the
+other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched
+Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two
+different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes
+along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap.
+On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly
+sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot,
+yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he
+saw it once, but not a second time.
+
+This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
+after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it
+was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
+disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
+night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously
+jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;
+disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow
+seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and
+further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.
+
+Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance
+with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested
+the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that
+whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however
+far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast
+by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there
+reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition,
+as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the
+monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest
+and most savage seas.
+
+These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
+potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath
+all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as
+for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely
+mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed
+vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.
+
+But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling
+around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are
+there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and
+gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips,
+the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity
+of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
+
+Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
+before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
+every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
+spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
+as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing
+appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their
+homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the
+black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane
+soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had
+bred.
+
+Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called
+of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had
+attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea,
+where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed
+condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat
+that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying;
+still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us
+on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.
+
+During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
+time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
+manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed
+his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and
+aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await
+the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.
+So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one
+hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand
+gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow
+would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew
+driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that
+burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in
+the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man
+had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which
+he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the
+silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore
+on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves.
+By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the
+ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still
+wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed
+demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never
+could Starbuck forget the old man's aspect, when one night going down
+into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with
+closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain
+and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before
+emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the
+table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents
+which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly
+clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so
+that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale
+that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*
+
+
+*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the
+compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
+course of the ship.
+
+
+Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this
+gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
+
+
+South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
+ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)
+by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
+fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro
+in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
+
+As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
+skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
+appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her
+spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
+with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to
+see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed
+clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had
+survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to
+the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when
+the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air
+came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the
+mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking
+fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own
+look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
+
+"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"
+
+But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
+act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand
+into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
+himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the
+distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod
+were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first
+mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a
+moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat
+to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking
+advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and
+knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and
+shortly bound home, he loudly hailed--"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod,
+bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the
+Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them
+to address them to--"
+
+At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then,
+in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish,
+that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted
+away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and
+aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual
+voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to
+any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
+
+"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
+There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep
+helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But
+turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the
+wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,--"Up
+helm! Keep her off round the world!"
+
+Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
+but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
+numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that
+we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
+
+Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
+ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange
+than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise
+in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
+tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims
+before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they
+either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
+
+
+The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had
+spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had
+this not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded
+her--judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions--if so it
+had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative
+answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he
+cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain,
+except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly
+sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not
+something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when
+meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common
+cruising-ground.
+
+If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the
+equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering
+each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of
+them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment
+to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while
+and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the
+illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling
+vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth--off lone
+Fanning's Island, or the far away King's Mills; how much more natural,
+I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only
+interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and
+sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of
+course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains,
+officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each other;
+and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.
+
+For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
+board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a
+date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn
+files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would
+receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to
+which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And
+in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing
+each other's track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they
+are equally long absent from home. For one of them may have received a
+transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and
+some of those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets.
+Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable
+chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors,
+but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common
+pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.
+
+Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;
+that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case
+with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of
+English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they
+do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
+Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that
+sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
+sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American
+whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript
+provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority
+in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,
+seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than
+all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless
+little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does
+not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few
+foibles himself.
+
+So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the
+whalers have most reason to be sociable--and they are so. Whereas, some
+merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
+oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
+mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in
+Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon
+each other's rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea,
+they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such
+a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down
+hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching
+Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run
+away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they
+chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is--"How many
+skulls?"--the same way that whalers hail--"How many barrels?" And that
+question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are
+infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each
+other's villanous likenesses.
+
+But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
+free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
+whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a "GAM," a thing so
+utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name
+even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and
+repeat gamesome stuff about "spouters" and "blubber-boilers," and such
+like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also
+all Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such
+a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be
+hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to
+know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about
+it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the
+gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has
+no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude,
+that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that
+assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
+
+But what is a GAM? You might wear out your index-finger running up and
+down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson
+never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it.
+Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
+constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly,
+it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With
+that view, let me learnedly define it.
+
+GAM. NOUN--A SOCIAL MEETING OF TWO (OR MORE) WHALESHIPS, GENERALLY ON A
+CRUISING-GROUND; WHEN, AFTER EXCHANGING HAILS, THEY EXCHANGE VISITS BY
+BOATS' CREWS; THE TWO CAPTAINS REMAINING, FOR THE TIME, ON BOARD OF ONE
+SHIP, AND THE TWO CHIEF MATES ON THE OTHER.
+
+There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
+here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
+has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when
+the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern
+sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
+steers himself with a pretty little milliner's tiller decorated with
+gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of
+that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling
+captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen
+in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of
+any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew
+must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of
+the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and
+the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit
+all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being
+conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from
+the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the
+importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is
+this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting
+steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the
+after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus
+completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
+sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent
+pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of
+foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a
+spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again,
+it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would
+never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying
+himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with
+his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
+generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being
+generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.
+Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too,
+where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or
+two, in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's
+hair, and hold on there like grim death.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story.
+
+
+(AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN)
+
+
+The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
+much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet
+more travellers than in any other part.
+
+It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
+homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned
+almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave
+us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White
+Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's
+story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain
+wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God
+which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance,
+with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the
+secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears
+of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was
+unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private
+property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it
+seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,
+but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed
+so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well
+withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing
+have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of
+it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in
+this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never
+transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its proper
+place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the
+ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting
+record.
+
+
+*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
+still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
+
+
+For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated
+it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,
+smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those
+fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer
+terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally
+put, and which are duly answered at the time.
+
+"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
+rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
+was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward
+from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
+northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to
+daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than
+common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the
+captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck
+awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit
+them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though,
+indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down
+as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her
+cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals;
+but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet
+undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking
+some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest
+harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
+
+"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
+favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,
+because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at
+them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free;
+never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the
+whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the
+Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
+without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the
+brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly
+provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
+
+"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'
+said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
+
+"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your
+courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
+gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
+large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
+Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet
+been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
+connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate,
+those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
+Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many
+of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
+races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
+even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great
+contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime
+approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted
+all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries,
+and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the
+fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their
+beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out
+their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient
+and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines
+of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric
+beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes
+to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and
+Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the
+full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
+and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as
+direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
+for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many
+a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though
+an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured;
+as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his
+infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse
+at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our
+austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as
+vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh
+from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this
+Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
+mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
+firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition
+which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had
+long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved
+so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt--but,
+gentlemen, you shall hear.
+
+"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing
+her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again
+increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
+every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our
+Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole
+way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of
+the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability
+would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on
+account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the
+solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it
+altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in
+full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie
+along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat
+is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of
+the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her
+captain begins to feel a little anxious.
+
+"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
+gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
+several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded
+the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way
+expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a
+coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness
+touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or
+on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when
+he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the
+seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in
+her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on
+this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood
+with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water;
+clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps
+ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee
+scupper-holes.
+
+"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
+world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command
+over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
+superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
+conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a
+chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and
+make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
+gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
+head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings
+of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and
+a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he
+been born son to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly
+as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love
+Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
+
+"Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
+rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with
+his gay banterings.
+
+"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one
+of ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling! I tell
+ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it! he had best cut away
+his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish
+only began the job; he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters,
+saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of 'em
+are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making
+improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump
+overboard and scatter 'em. They're playing the devil with his estate, I
+can tell him. But he's a simple old soul,--Rad, and a beauty too. Boys,
+they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I
+wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.'
+
+"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney,
+pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. 'Thunder away at it!'
+
+"'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. 'Lively, boys,
+lively, now!' And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines;
+the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping
+of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's
+utmost energies.
+
+"Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
+forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face
+fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his
+brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney
+to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know
+not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate
+commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a
+shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig
+to run at large.
+
+"Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household
+work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every
+evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually
+foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of
+sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom
+would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all
+vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys,
+if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho
+that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being
+the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly
+assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have
+been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical
+duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these
+particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood
+between the two men.
+
+"But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as
+plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat
+in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will
+understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully
+comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for
+a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and
+perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match
+silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all
+this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper
+passionateness in any already ireful being--a repugnance most felt, when
+felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved--this nameless
+phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
+
+"Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
+exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping
+the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without
+at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary
+sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or
+nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most
+domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his
+command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an
+uplifted cooper's club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.
+
+"Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
+all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt
+could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still
+smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained
+doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the
+hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
+his bidding.
+
+"Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
+followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his
+intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not
+the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his
+twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to
+no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass;
+when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had
+now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on
+the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
+
+"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
+yourself.' But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
+the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of
+his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
+Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
+with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching
+his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his
+persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
+murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
+by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant
+the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch
+spouting blood like a whale.
+
+"Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
+leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
+mastheads. They were both Canallers.
+
+"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whale-ships in our
+harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
+they?'
+
+"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You
+must have heard of it.'
+
+"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
+land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'
+
+"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and
+ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such
+information may throw side-light upon my story.'
+
+"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
+breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and
+most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and
+affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room
+and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
+arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or
+broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
+counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
+stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
+corrupt and often lawless life. There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
+there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
+under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches.
+For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan
+freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so
+sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.
+
+"'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
+crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
+
+"'Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in
+Lima,' laughed Don Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'
+
+"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the name of all
+us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by
+no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima
+for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look
+surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast--"Corrupt as
+Lima." It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
+billiard-tables, and for ever open--and "Corrupt as Lima." So, too,
+Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.
+Mark!--St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you
+pour out again.'
+
+"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make
+a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like
+Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile,
+he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra,
+ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this
+effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly
+sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.
+A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he
+floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.
+Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of
+these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful;
+but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of
+violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger
+in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the
+wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that
+our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates,
+and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much
+distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the
+curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and
+young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal
+furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian
+corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
+seas.
+
+"'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha
+upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel! The world's one Lima. I
+had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold
+and holy as the hills.--But the story.'
+
+"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
+had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the
+four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the
+ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and
+sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the
+sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued;
+while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and down
+with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
+scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran
+close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into
+the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his
+resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them
+all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily
+slewing about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass,
+these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.
+
+"'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing them
+with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. 'Come
+out of that, ye cut-throats!'
+
+"Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
+defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to
+understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would be the signal
+for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart
+lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but
+still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
+
+"'Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their
+ringleader.
+
+"'Turn to! turn to!--I make no promise;--to your duty! Do you want to
+sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!' and he
+once more raised a pistol.
+
+"'Sink the ship?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us
+turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say
+ye, men?' turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.
+
+"The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye
+on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:--'It's not our
+fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was
+boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to
+prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his
+cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,
+men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to
+yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; forget it all; we are ready
+to turn to; treat us decently, and we're your men; but we won't be
+flogged.'
+
+"'Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!'
+
+"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
+'there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped
+for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
+discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row; it's
+not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we
+won't be flogged.'
+
+"'Turn to!' roared the Captain.
+
+"Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:--'I tell you what
+it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby
+rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till
+you say the word about not flogging us, we don't do a hand's turn.'
+
+"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there till
+ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'
+
+"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against
+it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down
+into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.
+
+"As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain
+and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide
+of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called
+for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the
+companionway.
+
+"Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something
+down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them--ten in
+number--leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained
+neutral.
+
+"All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and
+aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which
+last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking
+through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace;
+the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps,
+whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night
+dismally resounded through the ship.
+
+"At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned
+the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then
+lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed
+after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the
+Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days
+this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and
+then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and
+suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready
+to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united
+perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to
+surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his
+demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to
+stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth
+morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the
+desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left.
+
+"'Better turn to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
+
+"'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.
+
+"'Oh certainly,' said the Captain, and the key clicked.
+
+"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven
+of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last
+hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as
+the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two
+Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of
+their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their
+keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle
+at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any
+devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he
+would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the
+last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no
+opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for
+that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender.
+And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck,
+when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as
+fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as
+his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter;
+and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one
+man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants
+must come out.
+
+"Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
+separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece
+of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be
+the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and
+thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit.
+But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to
+the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed
+their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader
+fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three
+sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords;
+and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.
+
+"Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and
+all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a
+few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still
+struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious
+allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man who had been
+fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along
+the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the
+mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till
+morning. 'Damn ye,' cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,
+'the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!'
+
+"At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled
+from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that
+he had a good mind to flog them all round--thought, upon the whole,
+he would do so--he ought to--justice demanded it; but for the present,
+considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a
+reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.
+
+"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the three men in the
+rigging--'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;' and,
+seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the
+two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads
+sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
+
+"'My wrist is sprained with ye!' he cried, at last; 'but there is still
+rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give up. Take
+that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.'
+
+"For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
+cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort
+of hiss, 'What I say is this--and mind it well--if you flog me, I murder
+you!'
+
+"'Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me'--and the Captain drew off with
+the rope to strike.
+
+"'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman.
+
+"'But I must,'--and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
+
+"Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;
+who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly
+two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, 'I
+won't do it--let him go--cut him down: d'ye hear?'
+
+"But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man,
+with a bandaged head, arrested them--Radney the chief mate. Ever since
+the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the tumult
+on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
+scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak;
+but mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the
+captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his
+pinioned foe.
+
+"'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman.
+
+"'So I am, but take that.' The mate was in the very act of striking,
+when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing
+no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's threat, whatever that
+might have been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned
+to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as
+before.
+
+"Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor
+was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up,
+besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew.
+Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own
+instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no
+sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed,
+that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain
+the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the
+ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the
+speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing--namely,
+not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For,
+spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still
+maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to
+lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the
+cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his
+berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the
+vital jaw of the whale.
+
+"But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
+passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all
+was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who
+had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief
+mate's watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than
+half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted,
+against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head
+of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances,
+Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.
+
+"During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
+bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of
+the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side.
+In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a
+considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between
+this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next
+trick at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the
+third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure,
+he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his
+watches below.
+
+"'What are you making there?' said a shipmate.
+
+"'What do you think? what does it look like?'
+
+"'Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me.'
+
+"'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length
+before him; 'but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough
+twine,--have you any?'
+
+"But there was none in the forecastle.
+
+"'Then I must get some from old Rad;' and he rose to go aft.
+
+"'You don't mean to go a begging to HIM!' said a sailor.
+
+"'Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help himself
+in the end, shipmate?' and going to the mate, he looked at him
+quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given
+him--neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night
+an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the
+Lakeman's monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for
+a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm--nigh
+to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to
+the seaman's hand--that fatal hour was then to come; and in the
+fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
+stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.
+
+"But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody
+deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
+avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in
+to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have
+done.
+
+"It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
+day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man,
+drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, 'There she
+rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
+
+"'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do
+whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'
+
+"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;--but
+that would be too long a story.'
+
+"'How? how?' cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
+
+"'Nay, Dons, Dons--nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more
+into the air, Sirs.'
+
+"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend looks
+faint;--fill up his empty glass!'
+
+"No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen,
+so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the
+ship--forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of the
+moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted
+his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been
+plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.
+'The White Whale--the White Whale!' was the cry from captain, mates,
+and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious
+to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed
+askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass,
+that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like
+a living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality
+pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out
+before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the
+mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him, while
+Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken
+the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats were
+lowered, the mate's got the start; and none howled more fiercely with
+delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff
+pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to
+the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his
+bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost back. Nothing
+loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that
+blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as
+against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate.
+That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted,
+and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the
+sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray,
+and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to
+remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round
+in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing
+high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.
+
+"Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had
+slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
+looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,
+downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He
+cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose
+again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen shirt, caught in the
+teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the
+whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
+
+"In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port--a savage, solitary
+place--where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
+Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted
+among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double
+war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.
+
+"The ship's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called
+upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving
+down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over
+their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both
+by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent,
+that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a
+weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so
+heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the
+ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon
+from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the
+Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with
+him, and setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight
+before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a
+reinforcement to his crew.
+
+"On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed
+to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but
+the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt
+hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain
+presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes,
+the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so
+much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.
+
+"'What do you want of me?' cried the captain.
+
+"'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt;
+'no lies.'
+
+"'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.'
+
+"'Very good. Let me board you a moment--I come in peace.' With that he
+leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood
+face to face with the captain.
+
+"'Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me.
+As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
+island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightning strike
+me!'
+
+"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman. 'Adios, Senor!' and leaping
+into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
+
+"Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
+roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time
+arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck befriended
+him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially
+in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They
+embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he
+been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
+
+"Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
+and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
+Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small
+native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
+right there, again resumed his cruisings.
+
+"Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
+Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses
+to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
+destroyed him.
+
+"'Are you through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly.
+
+"'I am, Don.'
+
+"'Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
+this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful!
+Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to
+press.'
+
+"'Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don
+Sebastian's suit,' cried the company, with exceeding interest.
+
+"'Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?'
+
+"'Nay,' said Don Sebastian; 'but I know a worthy priest near by, who
+will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised?
+this may grow too serious.'
+
+"'Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?'
+
+"'Though there are no Auto-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said one of the company
+to another; 'I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy.
+Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.'
+
+"'Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg
+that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists
+you can.'
+
+"'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian,
+gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
+
+"'Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light,
+and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
+
+"'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye,
+gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be
+true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have
+seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.'"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
+
+
+I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,
+something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the
+eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored
+alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.
+It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those
+curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day
+confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the
+world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
+wrong.
+
+It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will
+be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For
+ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble
+panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,
+medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of
+chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's; ever
+since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not
+only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
+presentations of him.
+
+Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to
+be the whale's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta,
+in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of
+that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable
+avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came
+into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of
+whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale
+referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the
+incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the
+Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so
+as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is
+all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the
+broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.
+
+But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's
+portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian
+Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the
+sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange
+creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his
+own "Perseus Descending," make out one whit better. The huge corpulence
+of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing
+one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its
+distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be
+taken for the Traitors' Gate leading from the Thames by water into the
+Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and
+Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of
+old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the book-binder's whale
+winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor--as
+stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both
+old and new--that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature,
+imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases.
+Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this
+book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended
+when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old
+Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival
+of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively
+late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the
+Leviathan.
+
+In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
+at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner
+of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden,
+come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the
+original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some
+curious whales.
+
+But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
+pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
+by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some
+plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
+entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the
+Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." In one of those plates the
+whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles,
+with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the
+prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular
+flukes.
+
+Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett,
+a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape Horn
+into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale
+Fisheries." In this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of
+a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the
+coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck." I doubt not the
+captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines.
+To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which
+applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm
+whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet
+long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out
+of that eye!
+
+Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for
+the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
+mistake. Look at that popular work "Goldsmith's Animated Nature." In the
+abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale"
+and a "narwhale." I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly
+whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one
+glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century
+such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent
+public of schoolboys.
+
+Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great
+naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
+several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these
+are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland
+whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long
+experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its
+counterpart in nature.
+
+But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
+reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous
+Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he
+gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that
+picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary
+retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not
+a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of
+a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that
+picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor
+in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that
+is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil
+those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
+
+As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the
+shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
+Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting
+on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners:
+their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.
+
+But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
+surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have
+been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a
+drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent
+the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.
+Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan
+has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale,
+in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in
+unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight,
+like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a
+thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the
+air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not
+to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young
+sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the
+case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such
+is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that
+his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.
+
+But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
+whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all.
+For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that
+his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy
+Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of
+his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian
+old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics;
+yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's
+articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton
+of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded
+animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes
+it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some
+part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously
+displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to
+the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four
+regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But
+all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human
+fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may
+sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly
+said to handle us without mittens."
+
+For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
+conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world
+which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit
+the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very
+considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding
+out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in
+which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is
+by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of
+being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had
+best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
+Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
+
+
+In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
+tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of
+them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
+especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass
+that matter by.
+
+I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
+Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous
+chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far
+better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's
+drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the
+picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second
+chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no
+doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is
+admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm
+Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they
+are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.
+
+Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
+are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has
+but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because
+it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive
+anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living
+hunters.
+
+But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details
+not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to
+be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed,
+and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent
+attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble
+Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath
+the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air
+upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of
+the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon
+the monster's spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single
+incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
+incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if
+from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and
+true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden
+poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the
+swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
+of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down
+upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details
+of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not
+draw so good a one.
+
+In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
+the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black
+weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian
+cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so
+abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave
+supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the
+small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the
+Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while
+the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
+tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock
+in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean
+steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in
+admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the
+drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of
+a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily
+hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.
+
+Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
+was either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
+tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for
+painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and
+where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion
+on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder
+fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of
+France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the
+successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned
+centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea
+battle-pieces of Garnery.
+
+The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
+things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
+they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England's
+experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
+Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
+finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of
+the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale
+draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline
+of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as
+picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching
+the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right
+whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,
+and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats
+us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives,
+and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck
+submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of
+magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent
+voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it
+was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a
+sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.
+
+In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
+French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself
+"H. Durand." One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present
+purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet
+noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored,
+inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails
+of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both
+drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when
+considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under
+one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is
+quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the
+very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the
+vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a
+quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is
+about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances
+lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its
+hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands
+half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the
+smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke
+over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up
+with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the
+excited seamen.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
+Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
+
+
+On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a
+crippled beggar (or KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board
+before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg.
+There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed
+to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being
+crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years,
+they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that
+stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has
+now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in
+Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you
+will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on
+that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with
+downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
+
+Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and
+Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
+whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth,
+or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other
+like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
+ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material,
+in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes
+of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
+skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
+jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
+they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's
+fancy.
+
+Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
+to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.
+Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a
+savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready
+at any moment to rebel against him.
+
+Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
+hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian
+war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of
+carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.
+For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that
+miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has
+cost steady years of steady application.
+
+As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
+same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, of
+his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
+quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design,
+as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit
+and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert
+Durer.
+
+Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
+the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles
+of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.
+
+At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
+by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is
+sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking
+whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some
+old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for
+weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
+intents and purposes so labelled with "HANDS OFF!" you cannot examine
+them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
+
+In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
+cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the
+plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
+Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against
+them in a surf of green surges.
+
+Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually
+girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky
+point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of
+whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough
+whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish
+to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact
+intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else
+so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise,
+previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the
+Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed
+Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.
+
+Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out
+great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as
+when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies
+locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased
+Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright
+points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic
+skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the
+starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying
+Fish.
+
+With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for
+spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to
+see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie
+encamped beyond my mortal sight!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 58. Brit.
+
+
+Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows
+of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale
+largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we
+seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
+
+On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from
+the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
+swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that
+wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
+from the water that escaped at the lip.
+
+As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance
+their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these
+monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving
+behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
+
+
+*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks" does
+not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there
+being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable
+meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually
+floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.
+
+
+But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
+reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
+paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked
+more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the
+great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will
+sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them
+to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even
+so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the
+leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their immense
+magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses
+of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort
+of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
+
+Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the
+deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though
+some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are
+of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of
+the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for
+example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to
+the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any
+generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
+
+But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the
+seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
+repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,
+so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his
+one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific
+of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen
+tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
+though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man
+may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
+future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,
+to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize
+the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the
+continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense
+of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
+
+The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
+vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.
+That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships
+of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided;
+two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
+
+Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
+miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
+when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened
+and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
+precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
+
+But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it
+is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who
+murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
+spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her
+own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks,
+and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No
+mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad
+battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the
+globe.
+
+Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide
+under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden
+beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
+brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
+dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more,
+the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each
+other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
+
+Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile
+earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a
+strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean
+surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular
+Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
+half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
+never return!
+
+
+CHAPTER 59. Squid.
+
+
+Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
+way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling
+her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering
+masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a
+plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
+alluring jet would be seen.
+
+But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
+spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when
+the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid
+across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered
+together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible
+sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
+
+In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
+higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
+our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening
+for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,
+and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?
+thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
+more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the
+negro yelled out--"There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead!
+The White Whale, the White Whale!"
+
+Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the
+bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on
+the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave
+his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction
+indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
+
+Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
+gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
+ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular
+whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed
+him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly
+perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave
+orders for lowering.
+
+The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all
+swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with
+oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same
+spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for
+the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous
+phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind.
+A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
+cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating
+from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as
+if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible
+face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or
+instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,
+chance-like apparition of life.
+
+As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
+gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
+exclaimed--"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to
+have seen thee, thou white ghost!"
+
+"What was it, Sir?" said Flask.
+
+"The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and
+returned to their ports to tell of it."
+
+But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;
+the rest as silently following.
+
+Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with
+the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being
+so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
+portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
+declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few
+of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
+form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale
+his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above
+water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti
+whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and
+only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that
+food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what
+are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus
+exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that
+the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to
+the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is
+supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
+
+There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
+Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in
+which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with
+some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond.
+But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he
+assigns it.
+
+By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
+creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish,
+to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong,
+but only as the Anak of the tribe.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 60. The Line.
+
+
+With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as
+for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented,
+I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
+
+The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
+vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
+ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to
+the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the
+sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity
+too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must
+be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general
+by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it
+may give it compactness and gloss.
+
+Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost
+entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not
+so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and
+I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more
+handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark
+fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian
+to behold.
+
+The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first
+sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment
+its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and
+twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal
+to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something
+over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally
+coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so
+as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or
+layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart,"
+or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least
+tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take
+somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used
+in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an
+entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then
+reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act
+of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.
+
+In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line
+being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this;
+because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the
+boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly
+three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky
+freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for
+the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up
+a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated
+one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub,
+the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great
+wedding-cake to present to the whales.
+
+Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an
+eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the
+tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything.
+This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First:
+In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a
+neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as
+to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the
+harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug
+of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the
+first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This
+arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the
+lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the
+whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking
+minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed
+boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of
+the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.
+
+Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is
+taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again
+carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon
+the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist
+in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at
+the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme
+pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a
+common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs
+in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat
+again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled
+upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a
+little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp--the rope
+which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that
+connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious
+to detail.
+
+Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
+twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the
+oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid
+eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest
+snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal
+woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies,
+and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
+unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
+contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus
+circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones
+to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit--strange thing! what
+cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes,
+and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you
+will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus
+hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before
+King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death,
+with a halter around every neck, as you may say.
+
+Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for
+those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are casually
+chronicled--of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the
+line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in
+the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings
+of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and
+wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the
+heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and
+you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning;
+and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of
+volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run
+away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.
+
+Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and
+prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;
+for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and
+contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal
+powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the
+line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
+into actual play--this is a thing which carries more of true terror than
+any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men
+live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
+necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death,
+that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
+And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would
+not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before
+your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
+
+
+If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
+Queequeg it was quite a different object.
+
+"When you see him 'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow
+of his hoisted boat, "then you quick see him 'parm whale."
+
+The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special
+to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep
+induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through
+which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground;
+that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish,
+and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the
+Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
+
+It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
+leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in
+what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that
+dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my
+body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long
+after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
+
+Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen
+at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last
+all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing
+that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman.
+The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance
+of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
+
+Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
+hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me;
+with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty
+fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the
+capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,
+glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in
+the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury
+jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm
+afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some
+enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once
+started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts
+of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted
+forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted
+the sparkling brine into the air.
+
+"Clear away the boats! Luff!" cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he
+dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
+
+The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere
+the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
+but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he
+swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave
+orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in
+whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,
+we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the
+noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the
+monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and
+then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
+
+"There go flukes!" was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by
+Stubb's producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was
+granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale
+rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker's boat, and much
+nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour
+of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become
+aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no
+longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And
+still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.
+
+Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy,
+he was going "head out"; that part obliquely projecting from the mad
+yeast which he brewed.*
+
+
+*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance
+the entire interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists. Though
+apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about
+him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does
+so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the
+upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water
+formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he
+thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish
+galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
+
+
+"Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty of
+time--but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that's all," cried
+Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. "Start her, now; give 'em
+the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy--start
+her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--cucumbers is the word--easy,
+easy--only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the
+buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys--that's all. Start
+her!"
+
+"Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some
+old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat
+involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke
+which the eager Indian gave.
+
+But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. "Kee-hee!
+Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
+like a pacing tiger in his cage.
+
+"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a
+mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels
+cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still
+encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from
+his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the
+welcome cry was heard--"Stand up, Tashtego!--give it to him!" The
+harpoon was hurled. "Stern all!" The oarsmen backed water; the same
+moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists.
+It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two
+additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its
+increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled
+with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and
+round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it
+blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands, from
+which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at
+these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's
+sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving
+to wrest it out of your clutch.
+
+"Wet the line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated
+by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More
+turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now
+flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego
+here changed places--stem for stern--a staggering business truly in that
+rocking commotion.
+
+
+*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be
+stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the
+running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or
+bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most
+convenient.
+
+
+From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of
+the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would
+have thought the craft had two keels--one cleaving the water, the other
+the air--as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once.
+A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in
+her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a little
+finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale
+into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging
+to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of
+Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring
+down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed
+as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened
+his flight.
+
+"Haul in--haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round
+towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet
+the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly
+planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the
+flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning
+out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for
+another fling.
+
+The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a
+hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled
+and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing
+upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every
+face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all
+the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the
+spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of
+the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked
+lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and
+again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again
+sent it into the whale.
+
+"Pull up--pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale
+relaxed in his wrath. "Pull up!--close to!" and the boat ranged along
+the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned
+his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully
+churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold
+watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of
+breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the
+innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from
+his trance into that unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster
+horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable,
+mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping
+astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied
+twilight into the clear air of the day.
+
+And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view;
+surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his
+spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush
+after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red
+wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping
+down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
+
+"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.
+
+"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth,
+Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood
+thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
+
+
+A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
+
+According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
+off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
+steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost
+oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous
+arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called
+a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of
+twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase,
+the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost;
+indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the
+rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid
+exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's
+compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started--what
+that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl
+very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this
+straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once
+the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry--"Stand up, and give it
+to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his
+centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little
+strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No
+wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty
+fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many
+hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some
+of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that
+some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder
+that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the
+harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his
+body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!
+
+Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
+that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
+likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
+themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and
+the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper
+station in the bows of the boat.
+
+Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish
+and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to
+last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing
+whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious
+to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss
+of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more
+than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures
+in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the
+whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has
+caused them.
+
+To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this
+world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of
+toil.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
+
+
+Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in
+productive subjects, grow the chapters.
+
+The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.
+It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which
+is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow,
+for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the
+harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow.
+Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it
+up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from
+the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch,
+respectively called the first and second irons.
+
+But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
+the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one
+instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming
+drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a
+doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the
+instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving
+the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however
+lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him.
+Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line,
+and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be
+anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the
+most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water,
+it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned
+in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently
+practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the
+saddest and most fatal casualties.
+
+Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown
+overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
+skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,
+or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.
+Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is
+fairly captured and a corpse.
+
+Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging
+one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these
+qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of
+such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
+simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied
+with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one
+be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
+faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several
+most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be
+painted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 64. Stubb's Supper.
+
+
+Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was
+a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow
+business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men
+with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers,
+slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the
+sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals;
+good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we
+moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call
+it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky
+freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we
+towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.
+
+Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's
+main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
+dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing
+the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing
+it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way
+into the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.
+
+Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
+evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature
+was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed
+working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that
+Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were
+brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand,
+monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound on
+the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in
+the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust
+rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast
+corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the
+stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black
+hull close to the vessel's and seen through the darkness of the night,
+which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two--ship and whale,
+seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while
+the other remains standing.*
+
+
+*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most
+reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside,
+is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part
+is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its
+flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so
+that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to
+put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a
+small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and
+a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By
+adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side
+of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily
+made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked
+fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with
+its broad flukes or lobes.
+
+
+If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known
+on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an
+unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was
+he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned
+to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping
+cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest.
+Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale
+as a flavorish thing to his palate.
+
+"A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut
+me one from his small!"
+
+Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general
+thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray
+the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds
+of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers
+who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
+designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.
+
+About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two
+lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper
+at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb
+the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings
+with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming
+round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few
+sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping
+of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers'
+hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you
+heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on
+their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the
+bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all
+but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they
+contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the
+universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale,
+may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking
+for a screw.
+
+Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
+will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs
+round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down
+every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant
+butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's
+live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks,
+also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away
+under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole
+affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that
+is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and
+though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
+crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in
+case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently
+buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down,
+touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most
+socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no
+conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless
+numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
+whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never
+seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
+devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
+
+But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was
+going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his
+own epicurean lips.
+
+"Cook, cook!--where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening
+his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper;
+and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing
+with his lance; "cook, you cook!--sail this way, cook!"
+
+The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously
+roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling
+along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something
+the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like
+his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and
+limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy
+fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered
+along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on
+the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, with both hands folded
+before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back
+still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as
+to bring his best ear into play.
+
+"Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his
+mouth, "don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been
+beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I always say
+that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks
+now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a
+shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to 'em; tell 'em they are
+welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must
+keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
+deliver my message. Here, take this lantern," snatching one from his
+sideboard; "now then, go and preach to 'em!"
+
+Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck
+to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the
+sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand
+he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a
+mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling
+behind, overheard all that was said.
+
+"Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam
+noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin' ob de lips! Massa Stubb say
+dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you
+must stop dat dam racket!"
+
+"Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap
+on the shoulder,--"Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear that way
+when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, cook!"
+
+"Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to go.
+
+"No, cook; go on, go on."
+
+"Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:"--
+
+"Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it; try that," and
+Fleece continued.
+
+"Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
+fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness--'top dat dam slappin' ob de
+tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and
+bitin' dare?"
+
+"Cook," cried Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing. Talk to
+'em gentlemanly."
+
+Once more the sermon proceeded.
+
+"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat
+is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de
+pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den
+you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned.
+Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping
+yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your
+neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat
+whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale
+belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger
+dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat
+de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber
+for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help
+demselves."
+
+"Well done, old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; go on."
+
+"No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a scougin' and slappin' each
+oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no use a-preaching to
+such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is full, and dare
+bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get 'em full, dey wont hear you
+den; for den dey sink in the sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and
+can't hear noting at all, no more, for eber and eber."
+
+"Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,
+Fleece, and I'll away to my supper."
+
+Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
+shrill voice, and cried--
+
+"Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill
+your dam bellies 'till dey bust--and den die."
+
+"Now, cook," said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; "stand
+just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular
+attention."
+
+"All 'dention," said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
+desired position.
+
+"Well," said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; "I shall now go
+back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you,
+cook?"
+
+"What dat do wid de 'teak," said the old black, testily.
+
+"Silence! How old are you, cook?"
+
+"'Bout ninety, dey say," he gloomily muttered.
+
+"And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook,
+and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak?" rapidly bolting another
+mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the
+question. "Where were you born, cook?"
+
+"'Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin' ober de Roanoke."
+
+"Born in a ferry-boat! That's queer, too. But I want to know what
+country you were born in, cook!"
+
+"Didn't I say de Roanoke country?" he cried sharply.
+
+"No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what I'm coming to, cook.
+You must go home and be born over again; you don't know how to cook a
+whale-steak yet."
+
+"Bress my soul, if I cook noder one," he growled, angrily, turning round
+to depart.
+
+"Come back here, cook;--here, hand me those tongs;--now take that bit of
+steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be?
+Take it, I say"--holding the tongs towards him--"take it, and taste it."
+
+Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro
+muttered, "Best cooked 'teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy."
+
+"Cook," said Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the
+church?"
+
+"Passed one once in Cape-Down," said the old man sullenly.
+
+"And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where
+you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his
+beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and
+tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?" said Stubb. "Where
+do you expect to go to, cook?"
+
+"Go to bed berry soon," he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
+
+"Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an awful question. Now
+what's your answer?"
+
+"When dis old brack man dies," said the negro slowly, changing his whole
+air and demeanor, "he hisself won't go nowhere; but some bressed angel
+will come and fetch him."
+
+"Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch
+him where?"
+
+"Up dere," said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and
+keeping it there very solemnly.
+
+"So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you
+are dead? But don't you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets?
+Main-top, eh?"
+
+"Didn't say dat t'all," said Fleece, again in the sulks.
+
+"You said up there, didn't you? and now look yourself, and see where
+your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by
+crawling through the lubber's hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don't
+get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a
+ticklish business, but must be done, or else it's no go. But none of
+us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye
+hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t'other a'top of your heart,
+when I'm giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?--that's
+your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!--that's it--now you have it. Hold it there
+now, and pay attention."
+
+"All 'dention," said the old black, with both hands placed as desired,
+vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at
+one and the same time.
+
+"Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad,
+that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don't
+you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my
+private table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to
+spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal
+to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow,
+cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get
+the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the
+flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go."
+
+But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
+
+"Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch.
+D'ye hear? away you sail, then.--Halloa! stop! make a bow before you
+go.--Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast--don't forget."
+
+"Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if
+he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man,
+limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
+
+
+That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
+like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
+outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and
+philosophy of it.
+
+It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right
+Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large
+prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a certain cook of the
+court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
+eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of
+whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The
+meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well
+seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.
+The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great
+porpoise grant from the crown.
+
+The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all
+hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but
+when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet
+long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men
+like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not
+so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare
+old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous
+doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly
+juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who
+long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel--that
+these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of
+whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among
+the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which, indeed,
+they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something
+like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They
+have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly
+keep his hands off.
+
+But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
+exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be
+delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as
+the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
+pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that
+is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the
+third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for
+butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into
+some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try
+watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their
+ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many
+a good supper have I thus made.
+
+In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.
+The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,
+whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings),
+they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess,
+in flavor somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among
+some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the
+epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to
+have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a
+calf's head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon
+discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an
+intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow one of the
+saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at
+him, with an "Et tu Brute!" expression.
+
+It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
+unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence;
+that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before
+mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea,
+and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever
+murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if
+he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and
+he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market
+of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the
+long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of
+the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will
+be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in
+his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that
+provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized
+and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest
+on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.
+
+But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is
+adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my
+civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is
+that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
+you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring
+that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did
+the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders
+formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two
+that that society passed a resolution to patronise nothing but steel
+pens.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
+
+
+When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and
+weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general
+thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting
+him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very
+soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the
+common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then send
+every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that,
+until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for
+an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see
+that all goes well.
+
+But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will
+not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather
+round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a
+stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning.
+In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so
+largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
+diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades,
+a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to
+tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the
+present case with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man
+unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night,
+would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and
+those sharks the maggots in it.
+
+Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
+concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman
+came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for
+immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering
+three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid
+sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an
+incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep
+into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy
+confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not
+always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the
+incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each
+other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit
+their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by
+the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was
+this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these
+creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in
+their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual
+life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin,
+one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried
+to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
+
+
+*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel;
+is about the bigness of a man's spread hand; and in general shape,
+corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
+sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than
+the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when
+being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a
+stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
+
+
+"Queequeg no care what god made him shark," said the savage, agonizingly
+lifting his hand up and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de
+god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
+
+
+It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio
+professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
+turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would
+have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
+
+In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
+things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which
+no single man can possibly lift--this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up
+to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest
+point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like rope
+winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass,
+and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to
+this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was
+attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb,
+the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the
+body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two
+side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole,
+the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild
+chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When
+instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in
+her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she
+trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More
+and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the
+windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last,
+a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls
+upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises
+into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the
+first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely
+as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body
+precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the
+strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale
+rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip
+uniformly peels off along the line called the "scarf," simultaneously
+cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as
+it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the
+time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the
+main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment
+or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let
+down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge
+it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong
+overboard.
+
+One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
+called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices
+out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this
+hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked
+so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what
+follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to
+stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few
+sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain;
+so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip,
+called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering.
+The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is
+peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly
+slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway
+right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into
+this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long
+blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.
+And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering
+simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing,
+the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship
+straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the
+general friction.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
+
+
+I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of
+the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen
+afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains
+unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
+
+The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you
+know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence
+of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and
+ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
+
+Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's
+skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point
+of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you
+cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but
+that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if
+reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred
+dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely
+thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds
+of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is,
+previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but
+becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which
+I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before;
+and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself
+with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is
+pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may
+say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin,
+isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the
+whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as
+the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say,
+that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender
+than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.
+
+Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,
+as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
+hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or
+rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths,
+and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had
+of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere
+integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels
+to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters
+of the stuff of the whale's skin.
+
+In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
+the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely
+crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,
+something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these
+marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
+mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved
+upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick,
+observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but
+afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical;
+that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids
+hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present
+connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm
+Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old
+Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on
+the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the
+mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian
+rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which
+the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the
+back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the
+regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
+altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New
+England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks
+of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs--I should say,
+that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this
+particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are
+probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most
+remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.
+
+A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of
+the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
+pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very
+happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber
+as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho
+slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this
+cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself
+comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would
+become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the
+North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are
+found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it
+observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies
+are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of
+an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire;
+whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood,
+and he dies. How wonderful is it then--except after explanation--that
+this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it
+is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed
+to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall
+overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly
+frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued
+in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by
+experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a
+Borneo negro in summer.
+
+It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
+individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
+virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after
+the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in
+this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood
+fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the
+great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
+
+But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
+how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the
+whale!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
+
+
+Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!
+
+The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
+beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
+it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.
+Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
+splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious
+flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
+poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further
+and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem
+square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous
+din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous
+sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair
+face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass
+of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
+
+There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in
+pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled.
+In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if
+peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they
+most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not
+the mightiest whale is free.
+
+Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
+survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or
+blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the
+swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
+the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the
+whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the
+log--SHOALS, ROCKS, AND BREAKERS HEREABOUTS: BEWARE! And for years
+afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly
+sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
+when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your
+utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of
+old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
+the air! There's orthodoxy!
+
+Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror
+to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a
+world.
+
+Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
+the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in
+them.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
+
+
+It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
+the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
+Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced
+whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
+
+Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck;
+on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that
+very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the
+surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening
+between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a
+discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear
+in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many
+feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so
+much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus
+made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts,
+and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion
+into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he
+demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
+
+When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable
+till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale
+it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full
+grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale's head embraces
+nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a
+burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as
+vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales.
+
+The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was
+hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so that
+it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And there
+with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the
+enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm
+on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that
+blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the giant
+Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.
+
+When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
+below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but
+now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow
+lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon
+the sea.
+
+A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone
+from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to
+gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he
+took Stubb's long spade--still remaining there after the whale's
+Decapitation--and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended
+mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood
+leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
+
+It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
+intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast
+and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a
+beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head,
+and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast
+dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has
+moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies
+rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this
+frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there,
+in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast
+been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side,
+where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou
+saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart
+to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when
+heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed
+by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper
+midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on
+unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that
+would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O
+head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of
+Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"
+
+"Sail ho!" cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
+
+"Aye? Well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting
+himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow.
+"That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better
+man.--Where away?"
+
+"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to
+us!
+
+"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way,
+and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man!
+how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest
+atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam's Story.
+
+
+Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than
+the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.
+
+By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-heads
+proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting
+by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could
+not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would
+be made.
+
+Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of
+the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals
+being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels
+attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale
+commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at
+considerable distances and with no small facility.
+
+The Pequod's signal was at last responded to by the stranger's setting
+her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring
+her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod's lee, and
+lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being
+rigged by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting captain, the
+stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern in token
+of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that
+the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her
+captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though
+himself and boat's crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half
+a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing
+between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the
+land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the
+Pequod.
+
+But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
+interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam's
+boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the
+Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew
+very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by
+the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some
+way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings
+again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
+conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not
+without still another interruption of a very different sort.
+
+Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular
+appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities
+make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled
+all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A
+long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped
+him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A
+deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
+
+So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had
+exclaimed--"That's he! that's he!--the long-togged scaramouch the
+Town-Ho's company told us of!" Stubb here alluded to a strange story
+told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time
+previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account
+and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in
+question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
+Jeroboam. His story was this:
+
+He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna
+Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret
+meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a
+trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
+carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,
+was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim
+having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with
+that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense
+exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the
+Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon
+the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a
+freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded
+the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby
+he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and
+vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he
+declared these things;--the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited
+imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united
+to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant
+crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of
+him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship,
+especially as he refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous
+captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that
+individual's intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the
+archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials--devoting the ship
+and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was
+carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew,
+that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel
+was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore
+forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any
+way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass that
+Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all
+this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and
+mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand
+than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole
+command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure.
+The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before
+him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal
+homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however
+wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking
+in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as
+his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But
+it is time to return to the Pequod.
+
+"I fear not thy epidemic, man," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
+Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern; "come on board."
+
+But now Gabriel started to his feet.
+
+"Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible
+plague!"
+
+"Gabriel! Gabriel!" cried Captain Mayhew; "thou must either--" But
+that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings
+drowned all speech.
+
+"Hast thou seen the White Whale?" demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted
+back.
+
+"Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible
+tail!"
+
+"I tell thee again, Gabriel, that--" But again the boat tore ahead as if
+dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession
+of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices
+of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm
+whale's head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing
+it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to
+warrant.
+
+When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story
+concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from
+Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed
+leagued with him.
+
+It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking
+a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby
+Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence,
+Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White
+Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity,
+pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God
+incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two
+afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the
+chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself
+being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all
+the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in
+persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after
+much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last
+succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to
+the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and
+hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants
+of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his
+boat's bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting
+his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance
+for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its
+quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies
+of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious
+life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his
+descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a
+chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's head; but the
+mate for ever sank.
+
+It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
+Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.
+Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated;
+oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the
+headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But
+strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one,
+when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is
+discernible; the man being stark dead.
+
+The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried
+from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek--"The vial! the vial!" Gabriel
+called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the
+whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence;
+because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically
+fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any
+one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the
+wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.
+
+Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to
+him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he
+intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which
+Ahab answered--"Aye." Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started
+to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with
+downward pointed finger--"Think, think of the blasphemer--dead, and down
+there!--beware of the blasphemer's end!"
+
+Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, "Captain, I have
+just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy
+officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag."
+
+Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships,
+whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends
+upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus,
+most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after
+attaining an age of two or three years or more.
+
+Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled,
+damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence
+of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death
+himself might well have been the post-boy.
+
+"Can'st not read it?" cried Ahab. "Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it's but
+a dim scrawl;--what's this?" As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a
+long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to
+insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without
+its coming any closer to the ship.
+
+Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, "Mr. Har--yes, Mr.
+Harry--(a woman's pinny hand,--the man's wife, I'll wager)--Aye--Mr.
+Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;--why it's Macey, and he's dead!"
+
+"Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife," sighed Mayhew; "but let
+me have it."
+
+"Nay, keep it thyself," cried Gabriel to Ahab; "thou art soon going that
+way."
+
+"Curses throttle thee!" yelled Ahab. "Captain Mayhew, stand by now to
+receive it"; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck's hands, he
+caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat.
+But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat
+drifted a little towards the ship's stern; so that, as if by magic, the
+letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He clutched it
+in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it,
+sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then
+Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in
+that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
+
+As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket
+of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild
+affair.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
+
+
+In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there
+is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are
+wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying
+in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done
+everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description
+of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned
+that upon first breaking ground in the whale's back, the blubber-hook
+was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the
+mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook
+get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend
+Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the
+monster's back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many
+cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the
+whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The
+whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the
+immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the
+level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the
+whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill
+beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the
+Highland costume--a shirt and socks--in which to my eyes, at least,
+he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to
+observe him, as will presently be seen.
+
+Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar
+in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to
+attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead
+whale's back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by
+a long cord. Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg
+down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery
+a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his
+waist.
+
+It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
+proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at
+both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow
+leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were
+wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage
+and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag
+me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us.
+Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get
+rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.
+
+So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that
+while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive
+that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of
+two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's
+mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster
+and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in
+Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an
+injustice. And yet still further pondering--while I jerked him now
+and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam
+him--still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine
+was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most
+cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality
+of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by
+mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say
+that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the
+multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's
+monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came
+very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I
+would, I only had the management of one end of it.*
+
+
+*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod
+that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement
+upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb,
+in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible
+guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
+
+
+I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the
+whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant
+rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy
+he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the
+night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent
+blood which began to flow from the carcass--the rabid creatures swarmed
+round it like bees in a beehive.
+
+And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them
+aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were
+it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise
+miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.
+
+Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a
+ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them.
+Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked
+the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed
+a peculiarly ferocious shark--he was provided with still another
+protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego
+and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen
+whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could
+reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and
+benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg's best happiness, I admit; but
+in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both
+he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water,
+those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg
+than a tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there
+with that great iron hook--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his
+Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
+
+Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in
+and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea--what matters
+it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men
+in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those
+sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks
+and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
+
+But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as
+with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs
+up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over
+the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory
+glance hands him--what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands
+him a cup of tepid ginger and water!
+
+"Ginger? Do I smell ginger?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near.
+"Yes, this must be ginger," peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then
+standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the
+astonished steward slowly saying, "Ginger? ginger? and will you have
+the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger?
+Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire
+in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!--what the devil is ginger?
+Sea-coal? firewood?--lucifer matches?--tinder?--gunpowder?--what the
+devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg
+here."
+
+"There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this
+business," he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just
+come from forward. "Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of it,
+if you please." Then watching the mate's countenance, he added, "The
+steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap
+to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an
+apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
+which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?"
+
+"I trust not," said Starbuck, "it is poor stuff enough."
+
+"Aye, aye, steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug a
+harpooneer; none of your apothecary's medicine here; you want to poison
+us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder
+us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?"
+
+"It was not me," cried Dough-Boy, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the
+ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but
+only this ginger-jub--so she called it."
+
+"Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye
+to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr.
+Starbuck. It is the captain's orders--grog for the harpooneer on a
+whale."
+
+"Enough," replied Starbuck, "only don't hit him again, but--"
+
+"Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of
+that sort; and this fellow's a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?"
+
+"Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself."
+
+When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort
+of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was
+handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity's gift, and that was
+freely given to the waves.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
+Over Him.
+
+
+It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale's
+prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it
+continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it.
+For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the
+head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
+
+Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
+drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit,
+gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the
+Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
+anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of
+those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to
+cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near
+the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale
+had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
+announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if
+opportunity offered.
+
+Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
+boats, Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further
+and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at
+the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of
+tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or
+both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
+plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the
+towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at
+first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a
+maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from
+view, as if diving under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the cry from the
+ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being
+brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But having plenty
+of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they
+paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their
+might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was
+intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened line
+in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending
+strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance
+they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when
+instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the
+keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose
+to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its
+drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water,
+while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were
+free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering
+his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after
+him, so that they performed a complete circuit.
+
+Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close
+flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for
+lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the
+multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's body,
+rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every
+new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that
+poured from the smitten rock.
+
+At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
+turned upon his back a corpse.
+
+While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
+and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
+conversation ensued between them.
+
+"I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard," said
+Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
+ignoble a leviathan.
+
+"Wants with it?" said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat's bow,
+"did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale's
+head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale's
+on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never
+afterwards capsize?"
+
+"Why not?
+
+"I don't know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so,
+and he seems to know all about ships' charms. But I sometimes think
+he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half like that chap,
+Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into
+a snake's head, Stubb?"
+
+"Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
+dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look
+down there, Flask"--pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of
+both hands--"Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in
+disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been
+stowed away on board ship? He's the devil, I say. The reason why you
+don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries
+it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of
+it, he's always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots."
+
+"He sleeps in his boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've
+seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging."
+
+"No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye
+see, in the eye of the rigging."
+
+"What's the old man have so much to do with him for?"
+
+"Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose."
+
+"Bargain?--about what?"
+
+"Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and
+the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away
+his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he'll
+surrender Moby Dick."
+
+"Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?"
+
+"I don't know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked
+one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the
+old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and
+gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he
+was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching
+his hoofs, up and says, 'I want John.' 'What for?' says the old
+governor. 'What business is that of yours,' says the devil, getting
+mad,--'I want to use him.' 'Take him,' says the governor--and by the
+Lord, Flask, if the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before
+he got through with him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look
+sharp--ain't you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get
+the whale alongside."
+
+"I think I remember some such story as you were telling," said Flask,
+when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden
+towards the ship, "but I can't remember where."
+
+"Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soladoes? Did
+ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?"
+
+"No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me,
+Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was
+the same you say is now on board the Pequod?"
+
+"Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live
+for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see
+any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a
+latch-key to get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can
+crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?"
+
+"How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?"
+
+"Do you see that mainmast there?" pointing to the ship; "well, that's
+the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string
+along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that
+wouldn't begin to be Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation
+couldn't show hoops enough to make oughts enough."
+
+"But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you
+meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if
+he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going
+to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard--tell me
+that?
+
+"Give him a good ducking, anyhow."
+
+"But he'd crawl back."
+
+"Duck him again; and keep ducking him."
+
+"Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though--yes, and
+drown you--what then?"
+
+"I should like to see him try it; I'd give him such a pair of black eyes
+that he wouldn't dare to show his face in the admiral's cabin again for
+a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and
+hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil,
+Flask; so you suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of
+him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him and put him in
+double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping
+people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil
+kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor!"
+
+"Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?"
+
+"Do I suppose it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now
+to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious
+going on, I'll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say--Look
+here, Beelzebub, you don't do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord
+I'll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan,
+and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short
+off at the stump--do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds
+himself docked in that queer fashion, he'll sneak off without the poor
+satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs."
+
+"And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?"
+
+"Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;--what else?"
+
+"Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?"
+
+"Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship."
+
+The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where
+fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing
+him.
+
+"Didn't I tell you so?" said Flask; "yes, you'll soon see this right
+whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's."
+
+In good time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply
+leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of
+both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may
+well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go
+over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come
+back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep
+trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard,
+and then you will float light and right.
+
+In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
+ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the
+case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off
+whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and
+hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is
+called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case,
+had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and
+the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of
+overburdening panniers.
+
+Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever
+and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own
+hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow;
+while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to
+blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
+speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing
+things.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale's Head--Contrasted View.
+
+
+Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us
+join them, and lay together our own.
+
+Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
+Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly
+hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all
+the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between
+them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this
+moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one
+to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like
+to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology
+than here?
+
+In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these
+heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain
+mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly
+lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold
+it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point
+of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is
+heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit,
+giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what
+the fishermen technically call a "grey-headed whale."
+
+Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads--namely, the two
+most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of
+the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you
+narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would
+fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the
+magnitude of the head.
+
+Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is
+plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more
+than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale's
+eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for
+yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects
+through your ears. You would find that you could only command some
+thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight;
+and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking
+straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not
+be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from
+behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the
+same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the
+front of a man--what, indeed, but his eyes?
+
+Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes
+are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to
+produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of
+the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of
+solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating
+two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the
+impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore,
+must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct
+picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and
+nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world
+from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the
+whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct
+windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's
+eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be
+remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.
+
+A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
+visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
+hint. So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing
+is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
+whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience
+will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of
+things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively,
+and completely, to examine any two things--however large or however
+small--at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side
+by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two
+objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in
+order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to
+bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
+consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes,
+in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
+comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same
+moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one
+side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he
+can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able
+simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems
+in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this
+comparison.
+
+It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
+extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when
+beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer
+frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly
+proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their
+divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.
+
+But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
+entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads
+for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
+whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
+wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With
+respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed
+between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has
+an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered
+over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
+
+Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the
+world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which
+is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of
+Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of
+cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
+hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind?
+Subtilize it.
+
+Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
+over the sperm whale's head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending
+by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not
+that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we
+might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But
+let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What
+a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling,
+lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as
+bridal satins.
+
+But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems
+like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one
+end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead,
+and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such,
+alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these
+spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold,
+when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there
+suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging
+straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a
+ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of
+sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his
+jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a
+reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon
+him.
+
+In most cases this lower jaw--being easily unhinged by a practised
+artist--is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting
+the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone
+with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
+including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
+
+With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
+anchor; and when the proper time comes--some few days after the other
+work--Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists,
+are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances
+the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being
+rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
+stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two
+teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled
+after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and
+piled away like joists for building houses.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale's Head--Contrasted View.
+
+
+Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's
+head.
+
+As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a
+Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);
+so, at a broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant
+resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an
+old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And
+in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with
+the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her
+progeny.
+
+But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
+aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and
+look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head
+for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
+sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,
+crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass--this green,
+barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the "crown," and the
+Southern fishers the "bonnet" of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes
+solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,
+with a bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live
+crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost
+sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the
+technical term "crown" also bestowed upon it; in which case you will
+take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a
+diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for
+him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very
+sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip!
+what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's
+measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout
+that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
+
+A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.
+The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an
+important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes
+caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold,
+we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should
+take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the
+road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a
+pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while
+these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half
+vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a
+side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown
+bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
+mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres,
+through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose
+intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through
+the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they
+stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves,
+hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age,
+as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this
+criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical
+probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater
+age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.
+
+In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
+concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
+"whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth;* another, "hogs' bristles"; a
+third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
+"There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
+upper CHOP, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth."
+
+
+*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
+rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the
+upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these
+tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn
+countenance.
+
+
+As every one knows, these same "hogs' bristles," "fins," "whiskers,"
+"blinds," or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
+other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has
+long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's time that the bone was
+in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those
+ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as
+you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
+nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a
+tent spread over the same bone.
+
+But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing
+in the Right Whale's mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these
+colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think
+you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
+thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest
+Turkey--the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the
+mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
+it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
+should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
+amount of oil.
+
+Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
+with--that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
+different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale's there is no great
+well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a
+lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any
+of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a
+tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm
+Whale only one.
+
+Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
+together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will
+not be very long in following.
+
+Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same
+he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem
+now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like
+placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the
+other head's expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident
+against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not
+this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in
+facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm
+Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
+
+
+Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale's head, I would have
+you, as a sensible physiologist, simply--particularly remark its front
+aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate
+it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,
+intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged
+there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle
+this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of
+the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be
+found in all recorded history.
+
+You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,
+the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
+water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
+backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
+receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
+under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth
+were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has
+no external nose; and that what nose he has--his spout hole--is on the
+top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides
+of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front.
+Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm
+Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender
+prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider
+that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of
+the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you
+get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial
+development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad.
+Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise
+the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of
+the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy.
+In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the
+body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head;
+but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so
+thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not
+handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by
+the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though
+the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not
+think that any sensation lurks in it.
+
+Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen
+chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the
+sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
+contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold
+there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest
+and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which
+would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By
+itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But
+supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
+as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them,
+capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale,
+as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too,
+the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head
+altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out
+of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope;
+considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically
+occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there
+may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with
+the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and
+contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to
+which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.
+
+Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable
+wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a
+mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood
+is--by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest
+insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
+specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
+expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable
+braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant
+incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale
+stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic
+with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For
+unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist
+in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to
+encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell
+the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Lais?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
+
+
+Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must
+know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
+upon.
+
+Regarding the Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
+inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower
+is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
+unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
+expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the
+forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two
+almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
+wall of a thick tendinous substance.
+
+
+*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical
+mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a
+solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the
+steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both
+sides.
+
+
+The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb
+of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand
+infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole
+extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great
+Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is
+mystically carved in front, so the whale's vast plaited forehead forms
+innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his
+wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished
+with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun
+of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages;
+namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid,
+and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed
+in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly
+fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to
+concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the
+first thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A large whale's
+case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from
+unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and
+dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business
+of securing what you can.
+
+I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun
+was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not
+possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the
+lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale's
+case.
+
+It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
+embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since--as
+has been elsewhere set forth--the head embraces one third of the whole
+length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for
+a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth
+of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's
+side.
+
+As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close
+to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
+magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
+untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
+invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which
+is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by
+the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side,
+make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.
+
+Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and--in
+this particular instance--almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm
+Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
+
+
+Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
+posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the
+part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried
+with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts,
+travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that
+it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it
+is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down
+the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he
+lands on the summit of the head. There--still high elevated above the
+rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries--he seems some Turkish
+Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
+short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches
+for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business
+he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,
+sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time
+this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like
+a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other
+end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three
+alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian,
+to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this
+pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun,
+till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the
+whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail
+of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted
+vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large
+tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until
+the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to
+ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun,
+until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.
+
+Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
+several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a
+queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian,
+was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed
+hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the
+place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil
+One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular
+reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden,
+as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor
+Tashtego--like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
+dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with
+a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!
+
+"Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first
+came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!" and putting one foot
+into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip
+itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost
+before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime,
+there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
+lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea,
+as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only
+the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous
+depth to which he had sunk.
+
+At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing
+the whip--which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles--a
+sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all,
+one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with
+a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship
+reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook,
+upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be
+on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent
+motions of the head.
+
+"Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand
+holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he
+would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,
+rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
+buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.
+
+"In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming home a cartridge
+there?--Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on
+top of his head? Avast, will ye!"
+
+"Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting of a
+rocket.
+
+Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass
+dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the
+suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering
+copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging--now over the
+sailors' heads, and now over the water--Daggoo, through a thick mist of
+spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,
+buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea!
+But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a naked figure
+with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen
+hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my
+brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the
+side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and
+no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now
+jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.
+
+"Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch
+overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust
+upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust
+forth from the grass over a grave.
+
+"Both! both!--it is both!"--cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and
+soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and
+with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the
+waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was
+long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.
+
+Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after
+the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made
+side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then
+dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards,
+and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first
+thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that
+was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;--he had
+thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a
+somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in
+the good old way--head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was
+doing as well as could be expected.
+
+And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,
+the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully
+accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently
+hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.
+Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,
+riding and rowing.
+
+I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to
+seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either
+seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore; an accident
+which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the
+Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the
+Sperm Whale's well.
+
+But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought
+the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and
+most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of
+a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at
+all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been
+nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense
+tendinous wall of the well--a double welded, hammered substance, as I
+have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which
+sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this
+substance was in the present instance materially counteracted by the
+other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank
+very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance
+for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it
+was a running delivery, so it was.
+
+Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
+perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
+spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber
+and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be
+recalled--the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey
+in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that
+leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.
+How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and
+sweetly perished there?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
+
+
+To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
+Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as
+yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for
+Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar,
+or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the
+Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats
+of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces
+of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
+modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and
+his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the
+phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore,
+though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these
+two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things;
+I achieve what I can.
+
+Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.
+He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most
+conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and
+finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its
+entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect
+the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
+cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable
+to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in
+keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose
+from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless,
+Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so
+stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were
+hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A
+nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical
+voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble
+conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a
+nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon
+obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.
+
+In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
+be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This
+aspect is sublime.
+
+In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
+morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a
+touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the
+elephant's brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as
+that great golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees.
+It signifies--"God: done this day by my hand." But in most creatures,
+nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine
+land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like
+Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the
+eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all
+above them in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered
+thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the
+snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and
+mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified,
+that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the
+dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living
+nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is
+revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper;
+nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with
+riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men.
+Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way
+viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you
+plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the
+forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of genius.
+
+But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written
+a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his
+doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
+pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale
+been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by
+their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile,
+because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no
+tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of
+protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure
+back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly
+enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted
+hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale
+shall lord it.
+
+Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is
+no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's
+face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing
+fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could
+not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle
+meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of
+the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you
+can.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
+
+
+If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
+brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
+
+In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
+in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as
+the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level
+base. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined plane is
+angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
+mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to
+bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater--in
+another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in
+depth--reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at
+least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden
+away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the
+amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it
+secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny
+that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance
+of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange
+folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more
+in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part
+of him as the seat of his intelligence.
+
+It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in
+the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his
+true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The
+whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common
+world.
+
+If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
+of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its
+resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from
+the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down
+to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would
+involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on
+one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say--This
+man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations,
+considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and
+power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most
+exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.
+
+But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain, you
+deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea
+for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine,
+you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung
+necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the
+skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely
+undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it
+the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
+pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with
+the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
+beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have
+omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the
+cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's
+character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel
+your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine
+never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the
+firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
+
+Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
+cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
+the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being
+eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As
+it passes through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but
+for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course,
+this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance--the
+spinal cord--as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain.
+And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's
+cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost
+equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be
+unreasonable to survey and map out the whale's spine phrenologically?
+For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his
+brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative
+magnitude of his spinal cord.
+
+But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I
+would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the
+Sperm Whale's hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one
+of the larger vertebrae, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer
+convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this
+high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale.
+And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to
+know.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
+
+
+The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick
+De Deer, master, of Bremen.
+
+At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
+Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide
+intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with
+their flag in the Pacific.
+
+For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
+While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
+boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
+bows instead of the stern.
+
+"What has he in his hand there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something
+wavingly held by the German. "Impossible!--a lamp-feeder!"
+
+"Not that," said Stubb, "no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's
+coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big
+tin can there alongside of him?--that's his boiling water. Oh! he's all
+right, is the Yarman."
+
+"Go along with you," cried Flask, "it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.
+He's out of oil, and has come a-begging."
+
+However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
+whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
+proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
+really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
+indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
+
+As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all
+heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German
+soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately
+turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some
+remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in
+profound darkness--his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a
+single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding
+by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically
+called a CLEAN one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of
+Jungfrau or the Virgin.
+
+His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
+ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
+mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that
+without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed
+round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
+
+Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German
+boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's
+keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger,
+they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind,
+rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness.
+They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great
+wide parchment upon the sea.
+
+Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,
+humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
+by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
+with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged
+to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for
+such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck
+to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him,
+because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one,
+like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was
+short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush,
+and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean
+commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried
+extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.
+
+"Who's got some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the stomach-ache, I'm
+afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse
+winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul wind
+I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before?
+it must be, he's lost his tiller."
+
+As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck
+load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her
+way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly
+turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious
+wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost
+that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.
+
+"Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded
+arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
+
+"Mind he don't sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "Give way, or the
+German will have him."
+
+With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
+one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
+valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were
+going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit
+for the time. At this juncture the Pequod's keels had shot by the three
+German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick's
+boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign
+rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so
+nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they
+could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite
+confident that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding
+gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.
+
+"The ungracious and ungrateful dog!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks and dares
+me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!"--then
+in his old intense whisper--"Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!"
+
+"I tell ye what it is, men"--cried Stubb to his crew--"it's against
+my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villainous
+Yarman--Pull--won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do
+ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come,
+why don't some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an
+anchor overboard--we don't budge an inch--we're becalmed. Halloo, here's
+grass growing in the boat's bottom--and by the Lord, the mast there's
+budding. This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of
+it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?"
+
+"Oh! see the suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down--"What
+a hump--Oh, DO pile on the beef--lays like a log! Oh! my lads, DO
+spring--slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads--baked
+clams and muffins--oh, DO, DO, spring,--he's a hundred barreller--don't
+lose him now--don't oh, DON'T!--see that Yarman--Oh, won't ye pull for
+your duff, my lads--such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm?
+There goes three thousand dollars, men!--a bank!--a whole bank! The bank
+of England!--Oh, DO, DO, DO!--What's that Yarman about now?"
+
+At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
+advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view
+of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically
+accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.
+
+"The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb. "Pull now, men, like fifty
+thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d'ye say,
+Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces
+for the honour of old Gayhead? What d'ye say?"
+
+"I say, pull like god-dam,"--cried the Indian.
+
+Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's
+three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,
+momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of
+the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up
+proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry
+of, "There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with
+the Yarman! Sail over him!"
+
+But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all
+their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not
+a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade
+of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free
+his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to
+capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;--that was
+a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a
+mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter.
+An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's
+immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the
+foaming swell that he made.
+
+It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was
+now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual
+tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of
+fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight,
+and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the
+sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I
+seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the
+air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a
+voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear
+of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him;
+he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle,
+and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his
+amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to
+appal the stoutest man who so pitied.
+
+Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's
+boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick
+chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart,
+ere the last chance would for ever escape.
+
+But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three
+tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang to their feet,
+and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and
+darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket
+irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and white-fire! The
+three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped
+the German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled
+harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.
+
+"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing
+glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up presently--all
+right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--relieve
+distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a
+sunbeam! Hurrah!--Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad
+cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on
+a plain--makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that
+way; and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a
+hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy
+Jones--all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale
+carries the everlasting mail!"
+
+But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he
+tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round
+the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;
+while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would
+soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they
+caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at
+last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of
+the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue--the
+gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three
+sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound,
+for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more
+line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have
+been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding on," as it
+is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from
+the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising
+again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril
+of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the
+best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken
+whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the
+enormous surface of him--in a full grown sperm whale something less than
+2000 square feet--the pressure of the water is immense. We all know
+what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even
+here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale,
+bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at
+least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated
+it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns,
+and stores, and men on board.
+
+As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
+into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any
+sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;
+what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and
+placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
+agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
+Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
+was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and
+to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
+once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
+or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot
+hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as
+straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
+he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh!
+that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength
+of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the
+mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!
+
+In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
+sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad
+enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the
+wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
+
+"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
+vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
+magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
+oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part
+from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
+upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
+scared from it into the sea.
+
+"Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."
+
+The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth
+could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
+dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two
+ship's lengths of the hunters.
+
+His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
+there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby
+when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in
+certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities
+it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so
+that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly
+drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is
+heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance
+below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant
+streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant
+and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and
+bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will
+flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible
+hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously
+drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him,
+they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept
+continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only
+at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the
+air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him
+had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was
+untouched.
+
+As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of
+his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly
+revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were
+beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the
+noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes
+had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.
+But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his
+blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the
+gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the
+solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
+Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
+discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the
+flank.
+
+"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."
+
+"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"
+
+But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an
+ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than
+sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury
+blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews
+all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the
+bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by
+loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
+made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,
+then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up
+the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most
+piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water
+is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled
+melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the
+ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale.
+
+Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
+showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,
+by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so
+that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a
+few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when
+the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was
+strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain
+that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the
+bottom.
+
+It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,
+the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh,
+on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of
+harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales,
+with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any
+kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been
+some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for
+the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
+lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron,
+the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And
+when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before
+America was discovered.
+
+What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
+cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
+discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways
+to the sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink.
+However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the
+last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship
+would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the
+body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such was
+the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and
+cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime
+everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the
+deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship
+groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and
+cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation.
+In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable
+fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low
+had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all
+approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to
+the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
+
+"Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such
+a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go
+for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run
+one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains."
+
+"Knife? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's heavy
+hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing
+at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were
+given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific
+snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
+
+Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
+Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
+accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great
+buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the
+surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and
+broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their
+bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that
+this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so
+sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it
+is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with
+noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of
+life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant
+heroes do sometimes sink.
+
+Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
+accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty
+Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in
+no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale;
+his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
+incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances
+where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale
+again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this
+is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious
+magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could
+hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among
+the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they
+fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone
+down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.
+
+It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from
+the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering
+her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back,
+belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its
+incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so
+similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is often
+mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
+valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail,
+made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to
+leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
+
+Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.
+
+
+There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
+method.
+
+The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
+to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its
+great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many
+great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other
+have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection
+that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a
+fraternity.
+
+The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and
+to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale
+attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those
+were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to
+succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one
+knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda,
+the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as
+Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince
+of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered
+and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely
+achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this
+Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this
+Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,
+in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton
+of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to
+be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans
+took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What
+seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this:
+it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
+
+Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed
+to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and
+the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many
+old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and
+often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a
+dragon of the sea," saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;
+in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it
+would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but
+encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle
+with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a
+Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly
+up to a whale.
+
+Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though
+the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
+represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
+on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance
+of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
+and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have
+crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
+ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;
+bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible
+with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
+hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In
+fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will
+fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by
+name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and
+both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or
+fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even
+a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we
+harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order
+of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honourable
+company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a
+whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with
+disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are
+much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.
+
+Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
+remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
+antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer of rejoicing good
+deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether
+that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere
+appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed,
+from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary
+whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I
+claim him for one of our clan.
+
+But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
+Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more
+ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly
+they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?
+
+Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
+roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal
+kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing
+short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now
+to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one
+of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine
+Vishnoo himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
+earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
+When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate
+the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to
+Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books,
+whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before
+beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
+something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these
+Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became
+incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths,
+rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even
+as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
+
+Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll
+for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
+
+
+Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the
+preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical
+story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks
+and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,
+equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the
+dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those
+traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
+
+One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
+story was this:--He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
+embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
+Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head--a peculiarity only true
+with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the
+varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this
+saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small.
+But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not
+necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the
+whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And
+this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the
+Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and
+comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have
+ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right
+Whale is toothless.
+
+Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his
+want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
+reference to his incarcerated body and the whale's gastric juices. But
+this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
+supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a
+DEAD whale--even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
+their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has
+been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was
+thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape
+to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head;
+and, I would add, possibly called "The Whale," as some craft are
+nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there
+been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned
+in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver--an inflated bag
+of wind--which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a
+watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But
+he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I
+remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean
+Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days'
+journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three
+days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast.
+How is that?
+
+But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that
+short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the
+way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through
+the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the
+Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete
+circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris
+waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to
+swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope
+at so early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that great
+headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make
+modern history a liar.
+
+But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his
+foolish pride of reason--a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing
+that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the
+sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
+abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
+Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh
+via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of
+the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly
+enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And
+some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages,
+speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour of Jonah, in which Mosque was
+a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
+
+
+To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are
+anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an
+analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it
+to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly
+be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are
+hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
+make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
+his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau
+disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling
+under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the
+unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from
+the craft's bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some
+particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.
+
+Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
+them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight,
+as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.
+
+Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great
+exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the
+stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal
+flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
+planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
+imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But
+to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and
+furious. What then remained?
+
+Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
+countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
+none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small
+sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It
+is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand
+fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is
+accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme
+headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve
+feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon,
+and also of a lighter material--pine. It is furnished with a small rope
+called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to
+the hand after darting.
+
+But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though
+the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it
+is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful,
+on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as
+compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a
+general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any
+pitchpoling comes into play.
+
+Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
+equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel
+in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the
+flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.
+Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its
+length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up
+the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his
+grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before
+his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering
+him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby
+elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his
+palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler,
+balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless
+impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming
+distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of
+sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
+
+"That drove the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb. "'Tis July's immortal
+Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old
+Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then,
+Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we'd drink
+round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch in the
+spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the
+living stuff."
+
+Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated,
+the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful
+leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is
+slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and
+mutely watches the monster die.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
+
+
+That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions of ages
+before--the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea,
+and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so
+many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,
+thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the
+whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings--that all this should
+be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter
+minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D.
+1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings
+are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour--this is surely a
+noteworthy thing.
+
+Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items
+contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their
+gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is
+combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod
+might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface.
+But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular
+lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the
+disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for
+his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree
+breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm
+Whale's mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and
+what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he
+breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.
+
+If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function
+indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a
+certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the
+blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I
+shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.
+Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be
+aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not
+fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then
+live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the
+case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full
+hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or
+so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has
+no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
+he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of
+vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are
+completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more,
+a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in
+him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus
+supply of drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs.
+The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the
+supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more
+cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of
+that leviathan in HAVING HIS SPOUTINGS OUT, as the fishermen phrase
+it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the
+Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform
+with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and
+jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he
+rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to
+a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that
+he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his regular
+allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he
+finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however, that
+in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one
+they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
+spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
+descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
+whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For
+not by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing
+a thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O
+hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!
+
+In man, breathing is incessantly going on--one breath only serving
+for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
+attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
+Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
+
+It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if
+it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then
+I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell
+seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all
+answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged
+with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of
+smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout--whether it be water or
+whether it be vapour--no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on
+this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper
+olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no
+Cologne-water in the sea.
+
+Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
+canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal--is furnished
+with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of
+air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice;
+unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles,
+he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say?
+Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to
+this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
+living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
+
+Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it
+is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,
+horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little
+to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down
+in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether this
+gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the
+Sperm Whale is the mere vapour of the exhaled breath, or whether that
+exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and
+discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly
+communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this
+is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because
+the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he
+accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath
+the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if
+you regard him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find
+that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods
+of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.
+
+But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!
+You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not
+tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to
+settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the
+knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in
+it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.
+
+The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
+it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it,
+when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view
+of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading
+all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really
+perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are
+not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you know that they
+are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole
+fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale's head? For
+even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with
+his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even then,
+the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under
+a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with
+rain.
+
+Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
+precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering
+into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
+this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
+slight contact with the outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, which will
+often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of
+the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer
+contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view,
+or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.
+Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
+evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
+it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.
+The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let
+this deadly spout alone.
+
+Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
+hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides
+other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations
+touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale;
+I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed
+fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
+whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am
+convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as
+Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes
+up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep
+thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the
+curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there,
+a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my
+head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
+after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon;
+this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.
+
+And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
+behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild
+head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable
+contemplations, and that vapour--as you will sometimes see it--glorified
+by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
+For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate
+vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
+mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a
+heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
+but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts
+of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this
+combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who
+regards them both with equal eye.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
+
+
+Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,
+and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I
+celebrate a tail.
+
+Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of
+the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises
+upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The
+compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms
+or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.
+At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways
+recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In
+no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in
+the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the
+full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.
+
+The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut
+into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:--upper,
+middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are
+long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running
+crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as
+anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman
+walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin
+course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful
+relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the
+great strength of the masonry.
+
+But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough,
+the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
+muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins
+and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and
+largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent
+measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.
+Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
+
+Nor does this--its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful
+flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through
+a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most
+appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony,
+but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,
+strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that
+all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its
+charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the
+naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the
+man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God
+the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever
+they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,
+hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
+successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all
+brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine
+one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form
+the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.
+
+Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
+wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it
+be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no
+fairy's arm can transcend it.
+
+Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
+progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
+Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
+
+First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in
+a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never
+wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
+whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled
+forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this
+which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when
+furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
+
+Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only
+fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his
+conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In
+striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the
+blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed
+air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply
+irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only
+salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the
+opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale
+boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed
+plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most
+serious result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the
+fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one strips off
+a frock, and the hole is stopped.
+
+Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale
+the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect
+there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the
+elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of
+sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft
+slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface
+of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor,
+whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch!
+Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of
+Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with
+low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their
+zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not
+possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet
+another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk
+and extracted the dart.
+
+Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the
+middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence
+of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a
+hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of
+his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the
+thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great
+gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapour
+from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was
+the smoke from the touch-hole.
+
+Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes
+lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely
+out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into
+the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are
+tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they
+downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime BREACH--somewhere
+else to be described--this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the
+grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless
+profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
+highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth
+his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in
+gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in
+the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the
+archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that
+crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east,
+all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with
+peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment
+of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of
+the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African
+elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout
+of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of
+antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the
+profoundest silence.
+
+The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
+elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk
+of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two
+opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they
+respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier
+to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the
+stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant's trunk were as
+the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash
+of the sperm whale's ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have
+one after the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews
+into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*
+
+
+*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale
+and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the
+elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to
+the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious
+similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant
+will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it,
+jet it forth in a stream.
+
+
+The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability
+to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they
+would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an
+extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures,
+that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason
+signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods
+intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other
+motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and
+unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may,
+then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know
+not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more,
+how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back
+parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I
+cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about
+his face, I say again he has no face.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
+
+
+The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from
+the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia.
+In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of
+Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a
+vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia,
+and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded
+oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports
+for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the
+straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels
+bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.
+
+Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
+midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
+promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond
+to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and
+considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels,
+and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental
+sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such
+treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the
+appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping
+western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied
+with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the
+Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these
+Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from
+the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries
+past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
+and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while
+they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce
+their claim to more solid tribute.
+
+Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among
+the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the
+vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the
+point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they
+have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these
+corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present
+day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in
+those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
+
+With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
+straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and
+thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and
+there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and
+gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there.
+By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the
+known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending
+upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled
+in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the
+sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most
+reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
+
+But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew
+drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now,
+the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs
+no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the
+whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be
+transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries
+no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
+whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with
+utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She
+carries years' water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which,
+when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to
+drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from
+the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may
+have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score
+of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted
+one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like
+themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had
+come; they would only answer--"Well, boys, here's the ark!"
+
+Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
+Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of
+the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
+excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more
+and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
+admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the
+land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils
+the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was
+descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game
+hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the
+customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of
+singular magnificence saluted us.
+
+But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which
+of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales,
+instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in
+former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes
+embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if
+numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual
+assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into
+such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the
+best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months
+together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly
+saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
+
+Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
+forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon,
+a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
+noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right
+Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft
+drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the
+Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually
+rising and falling away to leeward.
+
+Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of
+the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the
+air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed
+like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried
+of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.
+
+As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
+accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in
+their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain;
+even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through
+the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and
+swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
+
+Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers
+handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their
+yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that
+chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy
+into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their
+number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby
+Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
+white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with
+stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans
+before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly
+directing attention to something in our wake.
+
+Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.
+It seemed formed of detached white vapours, rising and falling something
+like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and
+go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling
+his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole,
+crying, "Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the
+sails;--Malays, sir, and after us!"
+
+As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should
+fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot
+pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift
+Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very
+kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to
+her own chosen pursuit,--mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they
+were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his
+forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the
+bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed
+his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in
+which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that
+gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that
+same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end;
+and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and
+inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their
+curses;--when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's
+brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some
+stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm
+thing from its place.
+
+But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and
+when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
+Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra
+side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the
+harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining
+upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained
+upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at
+length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them;
+and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But
+no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm
+Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,--though
+as yet a mile in their rear,--than they rallied again, and forming
+in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like
+flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.
+
+Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
+after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase,
+when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating
+token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange
+perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive
+it in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns
+in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now
+broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus' elephants in the
+Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation.
+In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly
+swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they
+plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was still more
+strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed
+as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the
+sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over
+the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced
+such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic
+of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of
+thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a
+solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded
+together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at the
+slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
+trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best,
+therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales
+before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
+infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
+
+Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
+yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
+retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in
+those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one
+lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time,
+Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray
+in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight
+for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the
+whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and
+indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present
+one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift
+monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid
+adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.
+
+As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
+speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
+thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
+the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was
+like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer
+through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what
+moment it may be locked in and crushed.
+
+But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off
+from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away
+from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the
+time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our
+way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time
+to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted
+duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the
+shouting part of the business. "Out of the way, Commodore!" cried one,
+to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface,
+and for an instant threatened to swamp us. "Hard down with your tail,
+there!" cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed
+calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.
+
+All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented
+by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood
+of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each
+other's grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then
+attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line
+being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly
+among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales
+are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm
+whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must
+kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing
+them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it
+is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat
+was furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully
+darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the
+enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like
+malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the
+act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one
+of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it
+away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from
+under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we
+stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for
+the time.
+
+It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were
+it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way greatly
+diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from the
+circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that
+when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways
+vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we
+glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if
+from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here
+the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard
+but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth
+satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture
+thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now
+in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every
+commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of
+the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight
+or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of
+horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic
+circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have
+gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing
+whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no
+possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for
+a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only
+admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake,
+we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women
+and children of this routed host.
+
+Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
+outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in
+any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by
+the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square
+miles. At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might be
+deceptive--spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that
+seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this
+circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely
+locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the
+herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its
+stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way
+innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller
+whales--now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the
+lake--evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still
+becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household
+dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and
+touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly
+domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched
+their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the
+time refrained from darting it.
+
+But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
+stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended
+in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
+whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to
+become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
+exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly
+and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different
+lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still
+spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the
+young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if
+we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their
+sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little
+infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might
+have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in
+girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet
+recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the
+maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final
+spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate
+side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the
+plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign
+parts.
+
+"Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; "him fast! him
+fast!--Who line him! Who struck?--Two whale; one big, one little!"
+
+"What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck.
+
+"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down.
+
+As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of
+fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows
+the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the
+air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
+Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not
+seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with
+the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that
+the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas
+seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan
+amours in the deep.*
+
+
+*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
+most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation
+which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a
+time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and
+Jacob:--a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously
+situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves
+extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a
+nursing whale are cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk
+and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet
+and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.
+When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute MORE HOMINUM.
+
+
+And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations
+and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and
+fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled
+in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of
+my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and
+while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and
+deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
+
+Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
+spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,
+still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or
+possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of
+room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight
+of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro
+across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is
+sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful
+and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or
+maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled
+cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again.
+A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not
+effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along
+with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of
+the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone
+mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay
+wherever he went.
+
+But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle
+enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to
+inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the
+intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that
+by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had
+become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run
+away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope
+attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the
+harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose
+from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning
+through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and
+tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own
+comrades.
+
+This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their
+stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake
+began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted
+by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to
+heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished;
+in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central
+circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was
+departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the
+tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in
+Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre,
+as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck
+and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.
+
+"Oars! Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm--"gripe your
+oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off,
+you Queequeg--the whale there!--prick him!--hit him! Stand up--stand
+up, and stay so! Spring, men--pull, men; never mind their backs--scrape
+them!--scrape away!"
+
+The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a
+narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor
+we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly,
+and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many
+similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had
+just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales,
+all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply
+purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while standing in the bows
+to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by
+the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close
+by.
+
+Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
+resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having
+clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their
+onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but
+the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales
+might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had
+killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which
+are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand,
+are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to
+mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should
+the boats of any other ship draw near.
+
+The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
+saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less fish. Of all the
+drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for
+the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other
+craft than the Pequod.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
+
+
+The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
+Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
+vast aggregations.
+
+Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must
+have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are
+occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.
+Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those
+composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young
+vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
+
+In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
+male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
+his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his
+ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
+over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces
+and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and
+his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
+leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not
+more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
+comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen
+yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
+whole they are hereditarily entitled to EMBONPOINT.
+
+It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
+ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely
+search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower
+of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from
+spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all
+unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and
+down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental
+waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other
+excessive temperature of the year.
+
+When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
+suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
+interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming
+that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies,
+with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!
+High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be
+permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the
+Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed;
+for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the
+most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales,
+who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with
+their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving
+for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not
+a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,--furrowed
+heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and
+dislocated mouths.
+
+But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
+the first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch
+that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and
+revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario,
+like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.
+Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give
+chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish
+of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the
+sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must
+take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For
+like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord
+Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so,
+being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the
+world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour
+of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends
+her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated
+Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our
+Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life,
+forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old
+soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his
+prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.
+
+Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so
+is the lord and master of that school technically known as the
+schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably
+satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad
+inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title,
+schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed
+upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first
+thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of
+Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that
+famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of
+those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
+
+The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
+betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm
+Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale--as a solitary Leviathan is
+called--proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone,
+he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to
+wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though
+she keeps so many moody secrets.
+
+The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
+mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while
+those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
+forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious
+of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
+excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,
+and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
+
+The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like
+a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
+tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
+prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous
+lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though,
+and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in
+quest of settlements, that is, harems.
+
+Another point of difference between the male and female schools is
+still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a
+Forty-barrel-bull--poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike
+a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with
+every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as
+themselves to fall a prey.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
+
+
+The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,
+necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale
+fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
+
+It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,
+a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed
+and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised
+many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For
+example,--after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale,
+the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and
+drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a
+calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus
+the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between
+the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,
+undisputed law applicable to all cases.
+
+Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative
+enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in
+A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling
+law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and
+lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse
+comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of
+the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's
+Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing,
+or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
+
+I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
+
+II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
+
+But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
+brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to
+expound it.
+
+First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast,
+when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all
+controllable by the occupant or occupants,--a mast, an oar, a nine-inch
+cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.
+Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other
+recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly
+evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their
+intention so to do.
+
+These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
+themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks--the
+Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
+honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases,
+where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
+possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
+others are by no means so scrupulous.
+
+Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated
+in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of
+a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
+succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
+their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
+itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up
+with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it
+before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were
+remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs'
+teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done,
+he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained
+attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the
+plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line,
+harpoons, and boat.
+
+Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was
+the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on
+to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con.
+case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife's
+viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in
+the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to
+recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he
+then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally
+harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the
+great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet
+abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore
+when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that
+subsequent gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have
+been found sticking in her.
+
+Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale
+and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
+
+These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
+learned Judge in set terms decided, to wit,--That as for the boat, he
+awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it
+to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale,
+harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because
+it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons
+and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish)
+acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards
+took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took
+the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.
+
+A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
+possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the
+matter, the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws
+previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in
+the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,
+I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human
+jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture,
+the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two
+props to stand on.
+
+Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law:
+that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often
+possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of
+Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is
+the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last
+mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion
+with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the
+ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone,
+the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation;
+what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of
+Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese
+of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven
+without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular L100,000 but a
+Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets
+but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor
+Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother
+Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not
+Possession the whole of the law?
+
+But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable,
+the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
+internationally and universally applicable.
+
+What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the
+Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?
+What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India
+to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All
+Loose-Fish.
+
+What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but
+Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is
+the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to
+the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
+Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what
+are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
+
+
+"De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam."
+BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.
+
+
+Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
+context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
+that land, the King, as Honourary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
+and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which,
+in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate
+remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in
+force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
+touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of
+in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts
+the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
+reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in
+curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in
+force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within
+the last two years.
+
+It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one
+of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and
+beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from
+the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
+jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.
+Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal
+emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment
+his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.
+Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his
+perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of
+them.
+
+Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
+trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
+fish high and dry, promising themselves a good L150 from the precious
+oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good
+ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up
+steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with
+a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale's head,
+he says--"Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it
+as the Lord Warden's." Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful
+consternation--so truly English--knowing not what to say, fall to
+vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing
+from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter,
+or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy
+of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching about for
+his ideas, made bold to speak,
+
+"Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"
+
+"The Duke."
+
+"But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?"
+
+"It is his."
+
+"We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is
+all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing at all for our
+pains but our blisters?"
+
+"It is his."
+
+"Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
+getting a livelihood?"
+
+"It is his."
+
+"I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of
+this whale."
+
+"It is his."
+
+"Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"
+
+"It is his."
+
+In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
+Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
+lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
+deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman
+of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to
+take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To
+which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)
+that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be
+obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend
+gentleman) would decline meddling with other people's business. Is
+this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three
+kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?
+
+It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the
+Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs
+inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with
+that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives
+us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to
+the King and Queen, "because of its superior excellence." And by the
+soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such
+matters.
+
+But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
+for that, ye lawyers!
+
+In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench
+author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye Queen's,
+that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone." Now this
+was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or
+Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this same bone
+is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for
+a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
+presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
+
+There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers--the whale
+and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
+nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's ordinary revenue.
+I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by
+inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same
+way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head
+peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be
+humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there
+seems a reason in all things, even in law.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
+
+
+"In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan,
+insufferable fetor denying not inquiry." SIR T. BROWNE, V.E.
+
+
+It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we
+were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, mid-day sea, that the many
+noses on the Pequod's deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the
+three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was
+smelt in the sea.
+
+"I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are
+some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they
+would keel up before long."
+
+Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
+lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be
+alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from
+his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and
+hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
+must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that
+has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.
+It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must
+exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are
+incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded
+by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.
+Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that
+the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and
+by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.
+
+Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
+had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more
+of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of
+those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort
+of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies
+almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the
+proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn
+up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted
+whales in general.
+
+The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed
+he recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were
+knotted round the tail of one of these whales.
+
+"There's a pretty fellow, now," he banteringly laughed, standing in the
+ship's bows, "there's a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes
+of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering
+their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes,
+and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of
+tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they
+will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's wick into; aye, we all
+know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our
+leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with
+scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor
+devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a present
+of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from
+that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not
+in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get
+more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than
+he'll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it
+may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris.
+I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes,
+I'm for it;" and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.
+
+By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether
+or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of
+escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb
+now called his boat's crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing
+across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French
+taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a
+huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper
+spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a
+symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in
+large gilt letters, he read "Bouton de Rose,"--Rose-button, or Rose-bud;
+and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.
+
+Though Stubb did not understand the BOUTON part of the inscription, yet
+the word ROSE, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently
+explained the whole to him.
+
+"A wooden rose-bud, eh?" he cried with his hand to his nose, "that will
+do very well; but how like all creation it smells!"
+
+Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he
+had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to
+the blasted whale; and so talk over it.
+
+Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he
+bawled--"Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that
+speak English?"
+
+"Yes," rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be
+the chief-mate.
+
+"Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?"
+
+"WHAT whale?"
+
+"The WHITE Whale--a Sperm Whale--Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
+
+"Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale--no."
+
+"Very good, then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a minute."
+
+Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning
+over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands
+into a trumpet and shouted--"No, Sir! No!" Upon which Ahab retired, and
+Stubb returned to the Frenchman.
+
+He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the
+chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of
+bag.
+
+"What's the matter with your nose, there?" said Stubb. "Broke it?"
+
+"I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!" answered
+the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very
+much. "But what are you holding YOURS for?"
+
+"Oh, nothing! It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain't it?
+Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye,
+Bouton-de-Rose?"
+
+"What in the devil's name do you want here?" roared the Guernseyman,
+flying into a sudden passion.
+
+"Oh! keep cool--cool? yes, that's the word! why don't you pack those
+whales in ice while you're working at 'em? But joking aside, though; do
+you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of
+such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his
+whole carcase."
+
+"I know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe
+it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But
+come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me; and so I'll
+get out of this dirty scrape."
+
+"Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow," rejoined Stubb,
+and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented
+itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the
+heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow
+and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their
+noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms.
+Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the
+mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the
+plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their
+nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short
+off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it
+constantly filled their olfactories.
+
+Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from
+the Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a
+fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within.
+This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating
+against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's
+round-house (CABINET he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could
+not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.
+
+Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
+Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
+expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus,
+who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
+Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man
+had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore
+held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and
+confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan
+for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all
+dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan
+of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter's office, was
+to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as
+for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in
+him during the interview.
+
+By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a
+small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with
+large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest
+with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely
+introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the
+aspect of interpreting between them.
+
+"What shall I say to him first?" said he.
+
+"Why," said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, "you
+may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,
+though I don't pretend to be a judge."
+
+"He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
+captain, "that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain
+and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a
+blasted whale they had brought alongside."
+
+Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
+
+"What now?" said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
+
+"Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
+carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no more fit to command a
+whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he's a
+baboon."
+
+"He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is
+far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us,
+as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish."
+
+Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his
+crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose
+the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.
+
+"What now?" said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to
+them.
+
+"Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that--that--in
+fact, tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody
+else."
+
+"He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any service to
+us."
+
+Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
+(meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his
+cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
+
+"He wants you to take a glass of wine with him," said the interpreter.
+
+"Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink
+with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him I must go."
+
+"He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking; but
+that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had
+best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for
+it's so calm they won't drift."
+
+By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
+the Guernsey-man to this effect,--that having a long tow-line in his
+boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter
+whale of the two from the ship's side. While the Frenchman's boats,
+then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed
+away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most
+unusually long tow-line.
+
+Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
+hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the
+Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly
+pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of
+his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous
+cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the
+body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was
+digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck
+against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and
+pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat's crew were all in high
+excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as
+gold-hunters.
+
+And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
+screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning
+to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when
+suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint
+stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without
+being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with
+another, without at all blending with it for a time.
+
+"I have it, I have it," cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in
+the subterranean regions, "a purse! a purse!"
+
+Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls
+of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old
+cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with
+your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good
+friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.
+Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the
+sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for
+impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board,
+else the ship would bid them good bye.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
+
+
+Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as
+an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain
+Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that
+subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,
+the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem
+to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for
+grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though
+at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland
+soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides,
+amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for
+mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft,
+waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in
+perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.
+The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same
+purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine
+merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
+
+Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
+themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick
+whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and
+by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such
+a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four
+boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as
+laborers do in blasting rocks.
+
+I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain
+hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors'
+trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing
+more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
+
+Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be
+found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that
+saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption;
+how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise
+call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh
+the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of
+ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the
+worst.
+
+I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,
+owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen,
+and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be
+considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of
+the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous
+aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout
+a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They
+hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma
+originate?
+
+I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
+Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because
+those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as
+the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in
+small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry
+it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas,
+and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding
+any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold,
+and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a
+savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an
+old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital.
+
+I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
+likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
+times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
+latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
+work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer,
+fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a
+place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without
+being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of
+furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full
+operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is
+quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four
+years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not,
+perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the
+state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that
+living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by
+no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the
+people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by
+the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant,
+when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance
+of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the
+open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water
+dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a
+warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance,
+considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with
+jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian
+town to do honour to Alexander the Great?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
+
+
+It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
+significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an
+event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
+madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
+prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.
+
+Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some
+few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work
+the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing,
+these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats'
+crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous
+wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It
+was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by
+abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember
+his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
+
+In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
+white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
+one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and
+torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
+very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to
+his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with
+finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar
+should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and
+New Year's Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was
+brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
+ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's
+peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he
+had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
+brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily
+subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by
+strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the
+natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut,
+he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at
+melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon
+into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day,
+suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop
+will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you
+the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy
+ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural
+gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then
+the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies,
+looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to
+the story.
+
+It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman
+chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;
+and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
+
+The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
+but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
+therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
+him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness
+to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.
+
+Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as
+the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which
+happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat. The
+involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in
+hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale
+line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as
+to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That
+instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly
+straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks
+of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken
+several turns around his chest and neck.
+
+Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He
+hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath,
+he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,
+exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?" Meantime Pip's blue, choked face
+plainly looked, Do, for God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less than
+half a minute, this entire thing happened.
+
+"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
+saved.
+
+So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed
+by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these
+irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like,
+but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done,
+unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never
+jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the
+soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, STICK TO THE BOAT, is your
+true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM
+THE BOAT, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he
+should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving
+him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped
+all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, "Stick to the boat,
+Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We
+can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for
+thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and
+don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that
+though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which
+propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
+
+But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
+under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time
+he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to
+run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk.
+Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous,
+blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away,
+all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the
+extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed
+like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly
+astern. Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was
+winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between
+Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his
+crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though
+the loftiest and the brightest.
+
+Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
+practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful
+lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
+middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how
+when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea--mark how closely they
+hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
+
+But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
+did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake,
+and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very
+quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
+oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested
+by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
+unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so
+called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to
+military navies and armies.
+
+But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
+spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and
+Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent
+upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him
+miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but
+from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at
+least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body
+up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.
+Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of
+the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
+and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the
+joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous,
+God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters
+heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the
+loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's
+insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man
+comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and
+frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his
+God.
+
+For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
+fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
+like abandonment befell myself.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
+
+
+That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to
+the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations
+previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of
+the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
+
+While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed
+in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and
+when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated
+ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
+
+It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
+others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found
+it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the
+liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.
+A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was
+such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a
+softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for
+only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to
+serpentine and spiralise.
+
+As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
+exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under
+indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among
+those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within
+the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their
+opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that
+uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of spring
+violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky
+meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible
+sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit
+the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying
+the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from
+all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
+
+Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
+till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
+strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
+squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
+gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
+feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
+squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as
+much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish
+any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come;
+let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
+each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
+sperm of kindness.
+
+Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
+many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases
+man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable
+felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in
+the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the
+country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case
+eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
+angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
+
+Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things
+akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the
+try-works.
+
+First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
+part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It
+is tough with congealed tendons--a wad of muscle--but still contains
+some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first
+cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like
+blocks of Berkshire marble.
+
+Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
+whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and
+often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is
+a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name
+imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked
+snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and
+purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason,
+it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole
+behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive
+a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted,
+supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
+season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an
+unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
+
+There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in
+the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling
+adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation
+original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance.
+It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the
+tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.
+I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case,
+coalescing.
+
+Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
+sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the
+dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland
+or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior
+souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
+
+Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary.
+But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is
+a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of
+Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is
+about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the
+oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless
+blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.
+
+But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
+to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.
+This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the
+blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper
+time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of
+terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull
+lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally
+go in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is
+similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is
+something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a
+sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship
+pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet
+itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This
+spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless;
+the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from
+him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his
+assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among
+veteran blubber-room men.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
+
+
+Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
+post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the
+windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
+curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
+there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
+cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower
+jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so
+surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,--longer than
+a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black
+as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or,
+rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in
+the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,
+King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it
+for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th
+chapter of the First Book of Kings.
+
+Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted
+by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it,
+and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier
+carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle
+deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an
+African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside
+out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to
+double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging,
+to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it,
+towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes
+at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer
+now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.
+Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately
+protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
+
+That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the
+pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted
+endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into
+which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's
+desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent
+on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a
+Pope were this mincer!*
+
+
+*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates
+to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as
+thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of
+boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably
+increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
+
+
+Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished
+by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid
+masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship.
+It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her
+planks.
+
+The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
+roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
+fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and
+mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The
+foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly
+secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all
+sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased
+with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened
+hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in
+number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are
+kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone
+and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the
+night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil
+themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them--one
+man in each pot, side by side--many confidential communications
+are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound
+mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod,
+with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first
+indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies
+gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from
+any point in precisely the same time.
+
+Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare
+masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of
+the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted
+with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented
+from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir
+extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel
+inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as
+fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct
+from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.
+
+It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were
+first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee
+the business.
+
+"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the
+works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his
+shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that
+in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a
+time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick
+ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the
+crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains
+considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.
+Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
+ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
+Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to
+inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in
+it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such
+as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left
+wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
+
+By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
+carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
+darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
+flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
+illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek
+fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to
+some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the
+bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad
+sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
+folded them in conflagrations.
+
+The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth
+in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the
+pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge pronged
+poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or
+stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out
+of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen
+heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil,
+which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth
+of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the
+windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not
+otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their
+eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all
+begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting
+barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in
+the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other
+their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth;
+as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the
+flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers
+wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the
+wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and
+yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness
+of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in
+her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing
+Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning
+a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
+material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
+
+So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
+guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval,
+in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the
+ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before
+me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred
+visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable
+drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
+
+But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
+thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was
+horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote
+my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails,
+just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I
+was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically
+stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see
+no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I
+had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.
+Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by
+flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,
+rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
+rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of
+death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with
+the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way,
+inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief
+sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern, with
+my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just
+in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very
+probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this
+unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being
+brought by the lee!
+
+Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
+hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first
+hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its
+redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,
+the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking
+flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
+glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp--all others but liars!
+
+Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's
+accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
+deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,
+which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this
+earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow
+in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped. With
+books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the
+truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered
+steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold
+of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and
+jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of
+operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all
+of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as
+passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted to sit
+down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably
+wondrous Solomon.
+
+But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way
+of understanding shall remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the
+congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it
+invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom
+that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill
+eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges,
+and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.
+And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the
+mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still
+higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
+
+
+Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's
+forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single
+moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some
+illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay
+in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a
+score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
+
+In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of
+queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in
+darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he
+seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an
+Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night
+the ship's black hull still houses an illumination.
+
+See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
+lamps--often but old bottles and vials, though--to the copper cooler at
+the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He
+burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,
+unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral
+contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He
+goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
+genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
+supper of game.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
+
+
+Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
+descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
+slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside
+and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of
+old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded
+surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he
+is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his
+spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;--but now it
+remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by
+rehearsing--singing, if I may--the romantic proceeding of decanting off
+his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where
+once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along
+beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
+
+While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
+six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling
+this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed
+round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot
+across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last
+man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap,
+rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, EX OFFICIO,
+every sailor is a cooper.
+
+At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great
+hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down
+go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are
+replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
+
+In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable
+incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with
+freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of
+the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as
+in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the
+bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire
+ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is
+deafening.
+
+But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
+self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works,
+you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a
+most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses
+a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never
+look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides,
+from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is
+readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale
+remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands
+go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags
+restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower
+rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise
+faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed
+upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of
+sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined
+and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship's company, the
+whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew
+themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to
+toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as
+bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.
+
+Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
+humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics;
+propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not
+to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to
+such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short
+of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and
+bring us napkins!
+
+But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent
+on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again
+soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot
+somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest
+uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through
+for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their
+wrists with all day rowing on the Line,--they only step to the deck to
+carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea,
+and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined
+fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the
+heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the
+ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor
+fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by
+the cry of "There she blows!" and away they fly to fight another whale,
+and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this
+is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long
+toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable
+sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its
+defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul;
+hardly is this done, when--THERE SHE BLOWS!--the ghost is spouted up,
+and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's
+old routine again.
+
+Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two
+thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with
+thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage--and, foolish as I am, taught
+thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
+
+
+Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,
+taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but
+in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been
+added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood,
+he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely
+eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the
+binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass,
+that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his
+purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast,
+then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin
+there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed
+with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.
+
+But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
+attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as
+though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in
+some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some
+certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little
+worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by
+the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in
+the Milky Way.
+
+Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the
+heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the
+head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all
+the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet,
+untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito
+glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed
+by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick
+darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every
+sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was
+set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton
+in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white
+whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by
+night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever
+live to spend it.
+
+Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
+and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks
+and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in
+luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to
+derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through
+those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
+
+It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
+of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL
+ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the
+middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;
+and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that
+knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three
+Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a
+crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned
+zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the
+keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
+
+Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
+pausing.
+
+"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and
+all other grand and lofty things; look here,--three peaks as proud as
+Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
+courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all
+are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
+which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but
+mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those
+who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now
+this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign
+of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a
+former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in
+throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be
+it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then."
+
+"No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must
+have left their mouldings there since yesterday," murmured Starbuck
+to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old man seems to read
+Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly.
+He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty,
+heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
+earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over
+all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a
+hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;
+but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.
+Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain
+snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin
+speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it,
+lest Truth shake me falsely."
+
+"There now's the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, "he's
+been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with
+faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long.
+And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on
+Negro Hill or in Corlaer's Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere
+spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as
+queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons
+of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your
+doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold
+moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What
+then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing
+wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here's signs and
+wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the
+zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac and
+as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try
+my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with
+the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see now. Signs and
+wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem, hem, hem; here they
+are--here they go--all alive:--Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull
+and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he
+wheels among 'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold
+between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there;
+the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the
+bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That's my
+small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's
+navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if
+there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There's
+a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you,
+Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter;
+and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To
+begin: there's Aries, or the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us; then,
+Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the
+Twins--that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes
+Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo,
+a roaring Lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly
+dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our
+first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes
+Libra, or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we
+are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the
+Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang
+come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing
+himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the
+battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing,
+and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours
+out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the
+Fishes, we sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the
+sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and
+hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and
+so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for aye! Adieu,
+Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the
+try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have to say. There; he's
+before it; he'll out with something presently. So, so; he's beginning."
+
+"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises
+a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this
+staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; and at
+two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke
+dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and
+sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."
+
+"Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
+foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort
+of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old
+hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He
+luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side
+of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he's
+back again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering--voice like an old
+worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"
+
+"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when
+the sun stands in some one of these signs. I've studied signs, and know
+their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch
+in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe
+sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what's the
+horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign--the roaring and
+devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee."
+
+"There's another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men
+in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--all
+tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
+Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
+thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I
+suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country.
+And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--I
+guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don't know what to make
+of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king's trowsers.
+But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out
+of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he
+say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows
+himself; there is a sun on the coin--fire worshipper, depend upon it.
+Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip--poor boy! would he had died,
+or I; he's half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these
+interpreters--myself included--and look now, he comes to read, with that
+unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!"
+
+"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
+
+"Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind,
+poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!"
+
+"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
+
+"Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again."
+
+"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
+
+"Well, that's funny."
+
+"And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow,
+especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw!
+caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare-crow? There he
+stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked
+into the sleeves of an old jacket."
+
+"Wonder if he means me?--complimentary!--poor lad!--I could go hang
+myself. Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can stand
+the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty for my
+sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering."
+
+"Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire
+to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what's the consequence? Then
+again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught's nailed to
+the mast it's a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab!
+the White Whale; he'll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old
+Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown
+over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring. How did it get there? And
+so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old
+mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the
+shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green
+miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds
+blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,
+hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
+
+The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.
+
+
+"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?"
+
+So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing
+down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his
+hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger
+captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was
+a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
+thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in
+festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed
+behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar's surcoat.
+
+"Hast seen the White Whale!"
+
+"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
+he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head
+like a mallet.
+
+"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
+him--"Stand by to lower!"
+
+In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
+crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.
+But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
+moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never
+once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was
+always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
+the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other
+vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter
+for anybody--except those who are almost hourly used to it, like
+whalemen--to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for
+the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and
+then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived
+of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied
+with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a
+clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height
+he could hardly hope to attain.
+
+It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
+circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
+luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And
+in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the
+two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
+perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a
+pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem
+to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to
+use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,
+because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,
+cried out, "I see, I see!--avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing
+over the cutting-tackle."
+
+As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
+previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
+blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This
+was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his
+solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the
+fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the
+word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his
+own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of
+the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and
+gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust
+forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his
+ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades)
+cried out in his walrus way, "Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones
+together!--an arm and a leg!--an arm that never can shrink, d'ye
+see; and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see the White
+Whale?--how long ago?"
+
+"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
+the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
+telescope; "there I saw him, on the Line, last season."
+
+"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from
+the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so.
+
+"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"
+
+"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"
+
+"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,"
+began the Englishman. "I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.
+Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat
+fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went
+milling and milling round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish,
+by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches
+from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white
+head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."
+
+"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
+breath.
+
+"And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin."
+
+"Aye, aye--they were mine--MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but on!"
+
+"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well,
+this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam
+into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
+
+"Aye, I see!--wanted to part it; free the fast-fish--an old trick--I
+know him."
+
+"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not know;
+but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow;
+but we didn't know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the
+line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale's;
+that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and
+what a noble great whale it was--the noblest and biggest I ever saw,
+sir, in my life--I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage
+he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or
+the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's
+crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped
+into my first mate's boat--Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way,
+Captain--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain);--as I was saying, I jumped
+into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale
+with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old
+great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls
+alive, man--the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both
+eyes out--all befogged and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail
+looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
+steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with
+a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the
+second iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail like a Lima
+tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and,
+flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
+all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized
+hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that
+like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same
+instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a
+flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me
+caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); "yes,
+caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's flames, I was
+thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript
+its way along the flesh--clear along the whole length of my arm--came
+out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell
+you the rest (by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon: Bunger,
+my lad,--the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn."
+
+The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the
+time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his
+gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober
+one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched
+trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a
+marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
+occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
+crippled captains. But, at his superior's introduction of him to Ahab,
+he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding.
+
+"It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking my
+advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy--"
+
+"Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed
+captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."
+
+"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
+weather there on the Line. But it was no use--I did all I could; sat up
+with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet--"
+
+"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering
+his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he
+couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas
+over, about three o'clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with
+me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very
+dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why
+don't ye? You know you're a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead,
+boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man."
+
+"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--said the
+imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab--"is apt to
+be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But
+I may as well say--en passant, as the French remark--that I myself--that
+is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy--am a strict total
+abstinence man; I never drink--"
+
+"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to
+him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on--go on with
+the arm story."
+
+"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly. "I was about observing,
+sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my
+best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the
+truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more
+than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line.
+In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came.
+But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is
+against all rule"--pointing at it with the marlingspike--"that is the
+captain's work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had
+that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one's brains
+out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
+passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir"--removing his hat, and
+brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull,
+but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever
+having been a wound--"Well, the captain there will tell you how that
+came here; he knows."
+
+"No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born with
+it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you--you Bunger! was there ever such another
+Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
+pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal."
+
+"What became of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
+impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
+
+"Oh!" cried the one-armed captain, "oh, yes! Well; after he sounded,
+we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I
+didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till
+some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby
+Dick--as some call him--and then I knew it was he."
+
+"Did'st thou cross his wake again?"
+
+"Twice."
+
+"But could not fasten?"
+
+"Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without
+this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he
+swallows."
+
+"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to
+get the right. Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely and mathematically
+bowing to each Captain in succession--"Do you know, gentlemen, that the
+digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
+Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest
+even a man's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the
+White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means
+to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But
+sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine
+in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let
+one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth
+or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks,
+d'ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully
+incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if
+you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the
+sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that
+case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you
+shortly, that's all."
+
+"No, thank ye, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to the
+arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then; but not to
+another one. No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and
+that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know
+that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye,
+he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?"--glancing at the
+ivory leg.
+
+"He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let
+alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a
+magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last? Which way heading?"
+
+"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly
+walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; "this man's
+blood--bring the thermometer!--it's at the boiling point!--his pulse
+makes these planks beat!--sir!"--taking a lancet from his pocket, and
+drawing near to Ahab's arm.
+
+"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks--"Man the boat!
+Which way heading?"
+
+"Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
+"What's the matter? He was heading east, I think.--Is your Captain
+crazy?" whispering Fedallah.
+
+But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to
+take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
+towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.
+
+In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men
+were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him.
+With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own,
+Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
+
+
+Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that
+she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
+merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
+Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not
+far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point
+of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our
+Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
+fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted
+out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale;
+though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant
+Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets
+pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not
+elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were
+the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm
+Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the
+whole globe who so harpooned him.
+
+In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
+and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
+Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any
+sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one;
+and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the
+Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American,
+and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open.
+But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house again
+bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only
+knows--and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their
+expense, the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war
+Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded
+by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and
+did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In
+1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to
+go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship--well
+called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus
+that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known.
+The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a
+Nantucketer.
+
+All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
+the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have
+slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
+
+The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast
+sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
+somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
+forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps--every
+soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine
+gam I had--long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
+ivory heel--it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
+ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
+lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
+at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it's
+squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were
+called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each
+other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
+jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
+howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts
+did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we
+had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down
+the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my
+taste.
+
+The beef was fine--tough, but with body in it. They said it was
+bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
+certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
+symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you
+could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed.
+If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out
+of you like billiard-balls. The bread--but that couldn't be helped;
+besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the
+only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it
+was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all
+in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the
+cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft,
+I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty;
+fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to
+hat-band.
+
+But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
+English whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous, hospitable
+ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the
+joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing?
+I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers
+is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of
+historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
+
+The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
+Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant
+in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
+touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English
+merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in
+the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural,
+but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special
+origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.
+
+During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
+ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I
+knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I
+concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
+cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was
+reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one
+"Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man,
+professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and
+St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box
+of sperm candles for his trouble--this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he
+spied the book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper,"
+but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book
+treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained
+a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it
+was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list of the
+outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from
+which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
+
+400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock
+fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins
+of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
+(probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of
+beer.
+
+Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
+the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
+barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
+
+At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
+this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
+incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
+application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
+own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by
+every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
+whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and
+Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their
+naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the
+nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game
+in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country
+where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
+
+The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
+polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
+climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
+including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much
+exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet
+of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say,
+we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks'
+allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.
+Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might
+fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in
+a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem
+somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But
+this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with
+the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would
+be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his
+boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
+
+But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers
+of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
+whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when
+cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the
+world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the
+decanter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
+
+
+Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
+dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
+upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
+sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still
+further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,
+and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost
+bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
+unconditional skeleton.
+
+But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the
+fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the
+whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures
+on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a
+specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land
+a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a
+roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
+Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;
+the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,
+ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of
+leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and
+cheeseries in his bowels.
+
+I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
+beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
+with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged
+to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his
+poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
+heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my
+boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the
+contents of that young cub?
+
+And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
+gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted
+to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.
+For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey
+of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with
+the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side
+glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his
+capital.
+
+Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
+with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought
+together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his
+people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,
+chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;
+and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
+wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
+
+Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
+unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
+head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
+seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of
+its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,
+then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a
+grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
+
+The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with
+Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
+kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head
+again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the
+terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung
+sword that so affrighted Damocles.
+
+It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy
+Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
+industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet
+on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and
+the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden
+branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying
+air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the
+leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied
+verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--whither
+flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless
+toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--but one single word with
+thee! Nay--the shuttle flies--the figures float from forth the loom; the
+freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves;
+and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and
+by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only
+when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through
+it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that
+are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly
+heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby
+have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in
+all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be
+overheard afar.
+
+Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
+great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler! Yet,
+as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
+him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven
+over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but
+himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim
+god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
+
+Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
+skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real
+jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as
+an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests
+should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced
+before this skeleton--brushed the vines aside--broke through the
+ribs--and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
+its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was
+out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.
+I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.
+
+Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
+From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
+altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure
+this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests--well, how long do ye make
+him, then?" But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning
+feet and inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their
+yard-sticks--the great skull echoed--and seizing that lucky chance, I
+quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
+
+These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be
+it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
+measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can
+refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell
+me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where
+they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I
+have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have
+what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or
+River Whale in the United States." Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire,
+England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has
+in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size,
+by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.
+
+In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons
+belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
+grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir
+Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir
+Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
+great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
+cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan--and swing all day
+upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and
+shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of
+keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at
+the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo
+in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view
+from his forehead.
+
+The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
+verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
+wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
+such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished
+the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was
+then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not
+trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
+enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.
+
+
+In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
+statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
+are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
+
+According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
+upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest
+sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
+calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
+eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
+feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least
+ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
+considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
+thousand one hundred inhabitants.
+
+Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
+leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination?
+
+Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,
+jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
+simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
+unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large
+a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the
+most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in
+this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your
+arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the
+general structure we are about to view.
+
+In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
+Feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
+been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one
+fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet,
+his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of
+plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a
+third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once
+enclosed his vitals.
+
+To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
+extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled
+the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty
+of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the
+time, but a long, disconnected timber.
+
+The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck,
+was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each
+successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one
+of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From
+that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only
+spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore
+a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most
+arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay
+footpath bridges over small streams.
+
+In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
+circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of
+the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of
+the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish
+which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
+invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen
+feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight
+feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the
+living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw
+but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of
+added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the
+ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the
+weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!
+
+How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
+to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead
+attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the
+heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
+flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
+be truly and livingly found out.
+
+But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a
+crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now
+it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.
+
+There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are
+not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on
+a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest,
+a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth
+more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the
+tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white
+billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they
+had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children,
+who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the
+spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple
+child's play.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
+
+
+From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
+to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
+compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
+folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail,
+and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
+involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great
+cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a
+line-of-battle-ship.
+
+Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me
+to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
+overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
+out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him
+in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it
+now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and
+antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the
+Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed
+unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is
+altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest
+words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been
+convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have
+invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased
+for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal
+bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author
+like me.
+
+One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
+though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing
+of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
+capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an
+inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
+thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
+outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
+circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
+mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas
+of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its
+suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal
+theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose
+a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the
+flea, though many there be who have tried it.
+
+Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials
+as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been
+a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells,
+wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of
+preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier
+geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
+completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called
+the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted
+links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
+posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales
+hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last
+preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
+precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet
+sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking
+rank as Cetacean fossils.
+
+Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
+and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been
+found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
+Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
+Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the
+year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street
+opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
+disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's
+time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly
+unknown Leviathanic species.
+
+But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
+complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on
+the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous
+slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen
+angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed
+upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being
+taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out
+that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A
+significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this
+book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the
+shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster
+Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society,
+pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures
+which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.
+
+When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
+jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to
+the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on
+the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
+Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back
+to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;
+for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I
+obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged
+bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in
+all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable
+hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the
+whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines
+of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?
+Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems
+a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck
+at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of
+the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after
+all humane ages are over.
+
+But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
+stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
+ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
+for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
+print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
+some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a
+sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and
+dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the
+moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there
+swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
+
+Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
+of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by
+the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
+
+"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
+of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
+oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that
+by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale can pass it
+without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either
+side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea,
+and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a Whale's Rib
+of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with
+its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be
+reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said
+to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians
+affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple,
+and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth
+by the Whale at the Base of the Temple."
+
+In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
+Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish?
+
+
+Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
+the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
+in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the
+original bulk of his sires.
+
+But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
+present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
+found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
+prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
+belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier
+ones.
+
+Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
+Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
+seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,
+that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large
+sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that
+Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of
+capture.
+
+But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
+advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may
+it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?
+
+Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
+gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny
+tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus
+of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--Rope Walks and
+Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander,
+Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences
+setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies)
+at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet.
+And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales,
+in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at
+one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work
+was published so late as A.D. 1825.
+
+But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is
+as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I go where Pliny
+is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so.
+Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies
+that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not
+measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
+and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian
+and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are
+drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle
+of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest
+of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of
+all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.
+
+But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
+recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs
+at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through
+Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers
+of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all
+continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure
+so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last
+be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man,
+smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
+
+Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
+which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
+of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
+their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
+where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such
+a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that
+the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
+
+But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a
+period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois
+exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day
+not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
+cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
+different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an
+end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for
+forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God,
+if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days
+of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when
+the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and
+a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of
+months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain
+not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need
+were, could be statistically stated.
+
+Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the
+gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years
+(the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in
+small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in
+consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more
+remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales,
+influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense
+caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and
+pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely
+separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems
+the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer
+haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that
+species also is declining. For they are only being driven from
+promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with
+their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very
+recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
+
+Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
+firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain
+impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss
+have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and
+glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to
+their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and
+walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle
+of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
+
+But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
+cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
+positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.
+But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than
+13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'-west coast by the Americans
+alone; yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance
+of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.
+
+Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness
+of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to
+Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the
+King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are
+numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no
+reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for
+thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the
+successive monarchs of the East--if they still survive there in great
+numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he
+has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all
+Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles
+of the sea combined.
+
+Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity
+of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,
+therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations
+must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea
+of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of
+creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children
+who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to
+the present human population of the globe.
+
+Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
+species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas
+before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the
+Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah's flood he
+despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like
+the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still
+survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood,
+spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 106. Ahab's Leg.
+
+
+The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
+Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to
+his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his
+boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And
+when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so
+vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it
+was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then,
+the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench,
+that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet
+Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
+
+And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
+pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the
+condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
+been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he
+had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible;
+by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his
+ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise
+smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme
+difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.
+
+Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
+the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a
+former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous
+reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
+songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
+events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought
+Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the
+ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is
+an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural
+enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world,
+but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of
+all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still
+fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs
+beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an
+inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while
+even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying
+pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic
+significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their
+diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the
+genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the
+sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the
+glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must
+needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad.
+The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of
+sorrow in the signers.
+
+Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
+properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other
+particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some,
+why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing
+of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like
+exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as
+it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited
+reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed,
+as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every revelation partook more of
+significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all
+came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at
+the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that
+ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed
+the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the
+above hinted casualty--remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by
+Ahab--invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land
+of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had
+all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of
+this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable
+interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks.
+
+But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
+or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not
+with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain
+practical procedures;--he called the carpenter.
+
+And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay
+set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied
+with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus
+far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection
+of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the
+carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to
+provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to
+the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be
+hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate
+the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the
+forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
+
+
+Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
+abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
+from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
+seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
+But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
+the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate;
+hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
+
+Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
+to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
+alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own;
+the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all
+those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an
+auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic
+remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in
+those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring
+in a large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized
+and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary
+duties:--repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of
+clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails
+in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly
+pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly
+expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and
+capricious.
+
+The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
+was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
+vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
+except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
+athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
+
+A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:
+the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway
+files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board,
+and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and
+cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking
+cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
+soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon
+the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood,
+the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes
+a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears.
+Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
+one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow
+unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the
+handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in
+that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
+
+Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
+and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
+deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But
+while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such
+liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some
+uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was
+this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as
+it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding
+infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity
+discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active
+in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you,
+though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible
+stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying
+heartlessness;--yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
+crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now
+and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served
+to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle
+of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long
+wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss;
+but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings
+might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an
+unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without
+premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost
+say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of
+unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so
+much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to
+it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by
+a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure
+manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early
+oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of
+those unreasoning but still highly useful, MULTUM IN PARVO, Sheffield
+contrivances, assuming the exterior--though a little swelled--of a
+common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
+but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
+nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
+carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part
+of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the
+legs, and there they were.
+
+Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
+was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a
+common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously
+did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few
+drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it
+had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
+unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept
+him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning
+wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a
+sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the
+time to keep himself awake.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
+
+The Deck--First Night Watch.
+
+
+(CARPENTER STANDING BEFORE HIS VICE-BENCH, AND BY THE LIGHT OF TWO
+LANTERNS BUSILY FILING THE IVORY JOIST FOR THE LEG, WHICH JOIST IS
+FIRMLY FIXED IN THE VICE. SLABS OF IVORY, LEATHER STRAPS, PADS, SCREWS,
+AND VARIOUS TOOLS OF ALL SORTS LYING ABOUT THE BENCH. FORWARD, THE RED
+FLAME OF THE FORGE IS SEEN, WHERE THE BLACKSMITH IS AT WORK.)
+
+
+Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft,
+and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and
+shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works better (SNEEZES).
+Halloa, this bone dust is (SNEEZES)--why it's (SNEEZES)--yes it's
+(SNEEZES)--bless my soul, it won't let me speak! This is what an old
+fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and
+you don't get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don't get it
+(SNEEZES). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have
+that ferule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky
+now (SNEEZES) there's no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little;
+but a mere shinbone--why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should
+like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I
+could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever (SNEEZES) scraped to a lady
+in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in shop
+windows wouldn't compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of
+course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (SNEEZES) with washes and
+lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must
+call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right;
+too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that's the heel; we are in luck;
+here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's certain.
+
+AHAB (ADVANCING)
+
+(DURING THE ENSUING SCENE, THE CARPENTER CONTINUES SNEEZING AT TIMES)
+
+
+Well, manmaker!
+
+Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length.
+Let me measure, sir.
+
+Measured for a leg! good. Well, it's not the first time. About it!
+There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here,
+carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.
+
+Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware!
+
+No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this
+slippery world that can hold, man. What's Prometheus about there?--the
+blacksmith, I mean--what's he about?
+
+He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
+
+Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a
+fierce red flame there!
+
+Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
+
+Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that
+old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a
+blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's made in fire must
+properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable. How the soot flies!
+This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter,
+when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel
+shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.
+
+Sir?
+
+Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a
+desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest
+modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay
+in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all,
+brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let
+me see--shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on
+top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.
+
+Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he speaking to, I should like
+to know? Shall I keep standing here? (ASIDE).
+
+'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one. No,
+no, no; I must have a lantern.
+
+Ho, ho! That's it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.
+
+What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man?
+Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.
+
+I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.
+
+
+Carpenter? why that's--but no;--a very tidy, and, I may say,
+an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here,
+carpenter;--or would'st thou rather work in clay?
+
+Sir?--Clay? clay, sir? That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
+
+The fellow's impious! What art thou sneezing about?
+
+Bone is rather dusty, sir.
+
+Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under
+living people's noses.
+
+Sir?--oh! ah!--I guess so;--yes--dear!
+
+Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
+workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well
+for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall
+nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that
+is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst
+thou not drive that old Adam away?
+
+Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
+something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
+entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still
+pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
+
+It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once
+was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the
+soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a
+hair, do I. Is't a riddle?
+
+I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
+
+Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing
+may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where
+thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
+solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't
+speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now
+so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery
+pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!
+
+Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again;
+I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir.
+
+Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.--How long before the
+leg is done?
+
+Perhaps an hour, sir.
+
+Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (TURNS TO GO). Oh, Life! Here
+I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for
+a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will
+not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the
+whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with
+the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was
+the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By
+heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to
+one small, compendious vertebra. So.
+
+CARPENTER (RESUMING HIS WORK).
+
+
+Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says
+he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's
+queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into
+Mr. Starbuck all the time--queer--sir--queer, queer, very queer. And
+here's his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow! has
+a stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he'll stand
+on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and
+all three places standing in one hell--how was that? Oh! I don't wonder
+he looked so scornful at me! I'm a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes,
+they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body
+like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall,
+heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick,
+and there's a great cry for life-boats. And here's the heron's leg!
+long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts
+a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a
+tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab;
+oh he's a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the
+other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there,
+you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and let's finish it
+before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for
+all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer
+barrels, to fill 'em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real
+live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he'll be standing on this
+to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the
+little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So,
+so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
+
+
+According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
+inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
+sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into
+the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*
+
+
+*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it
+is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench
+the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is
+removed by the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept
+damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the
+mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.
+
+
+Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
+the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from
+the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with
+a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him;
+and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the
+Japanese islands--Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new
+ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
+pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his
+back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old
+courses again.
+
+"Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round
+to it. "On deck! Begone!"
+
+"Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We
+must up Burtons and break out."
+
+"Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
+for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?"
+
+"Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good
+in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving,
+sir."
+
+"So it is, so it is; if we get it."
+
+"I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."
+
+"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak!
+I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks,
+but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far worse plight
+than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can
+find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if
+found, in this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons
+hoisted."
+
+"What will the owners say, sir?"
+
+"Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
+cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck,
+about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But
+look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,
+my conscience is in this ship's keel.--On deck!"
+
+"Captain Ahab," said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin,
+with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed
+not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation
+of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself;
+"A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly
+enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab."
+
+"Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?--On
+deck!"
+
+"Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir--to be forbearing!
+Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?"
+
+Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
+South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
+exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one
+Captain that is lord over the Pequod.--On deck!"
+
+For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks,
+you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of
+the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose,
+and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: "Thou hast
+outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of
+Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of
+thyself, old man."
+
+"He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!"
+murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he said--Ahab
+beware of Ahab--there's something there!" Then unconsciously using the
+musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little
+cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
+returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
+
+"Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck," he said lowly to the mate;
+then raising his voice to the crew: "Furl the t'gallant-sails, and
+close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton,
+and break out in the main-hold."
+
+It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
+Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him;
+or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously
+forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,
+in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders
+were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
+
+
+Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold
+were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it
+being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
+slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight
+sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they
+go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost
+puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask
+containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards,
+vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after
+tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and
+iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks
+were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if
+you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea
+like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless
+student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons
+did not visit them then.
+
+Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
+bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh
+to his endless end.
+
+Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
+dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the
+higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as
+harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but--as
+we have elsewhere seen--mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and
+finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating
+all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
+clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,
+the harpooneers are the holders, so called.
+
+Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should
+have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,
+stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about
+amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom
+of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor
+pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he
+caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after
+some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill
+of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few
+long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his
+frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones
+grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller;
+they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply
+looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that
+immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like
+circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes
+seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that
+cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this
+waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who
+were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and
+fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing
+near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last
+revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.
+So that--let us say it again--no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and
+holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping
+over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying
+hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final
+rest, and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher
+towards his destined heaven.
+
+Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
+what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he
+asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was
+just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he
+had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich
+war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all
+whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,
+and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not
+unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior,
+stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to
+the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars
+are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild,
+uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the
+white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at
+the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual
+sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks.
+No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial
+to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes
+were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and
+much lee-way adown the dim ages.
+
+Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter
+was at once commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might
+include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard,
+which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal
+groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin
+was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of
+the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent
+promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took
+Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg's
+person as he shifted the rule.
+
+"Ah! poor fellow! he'll have to die now," ejaculated the Long Island
+sailor.
+
+Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
+reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin
+was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches
+at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools,
+and to work.
+
+When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted,
+he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring
+whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.
+
+Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the
+people on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one's
+consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to
+him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some
+dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will
+shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
+indulged.
+
+Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with
+an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock
+drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along
+with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also,
+biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water
+was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in
+the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a
+pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he
+might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving
+a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little
+god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he
+called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him.
+The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg
+in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. "Rarmai"
+(it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced
+in his hammock.
+
+But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this
+while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him
+by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.
+
+"Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where
+go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where
+the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little
+errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think
+he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he
+must be very sad; for look! he's left his tambourine behind;--I found
+it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye your dying
+march."
+
+"I have heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in
+violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues;
+and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their
+wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken
+in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip,
+in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all
+our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?--Hark! he speaks
+again: but more wildly now."
+
+"Form two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon?
+Lay it across here.--Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock
+now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!--mind ye that;
+Queequeg dies game!--take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I
+say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all
+a'shiver;--out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles
+he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from
+a whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail
+him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all
+cowards--shame upon them! Let 'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a
+whale-boat. Shame! shame!"
+
+During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip
+was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
+
+But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now
+that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon
+there seemed no need of the carpenter's box: and thereupon, when some
+expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the
+cause of his sudden convalescence was this;--at a critical moment, he
+had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
+and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,
+he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of
+his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word,
+it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere
+sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some
+violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
+
+Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
+that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,
+generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.
+So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after
+sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a
+vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
+and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then
+springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon,
+pronounced himself fit for a fight.
+
+With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
+emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
+Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
+grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
+striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
+his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and
+seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on
+his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical
+treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own
+proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but
+whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart
+beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in
+the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were
+inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must
+have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when
+one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg--"Oh, devilish
+tantalization of the gods!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
+
+
+When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South
+Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific
+with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was
+answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues
+of blue.
+
+There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
+awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
+fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
+John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
+prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should
+rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed
+shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that
+we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like
+slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their
+restlessness.
+
+To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
+ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of
+the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same
+waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday
+planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still
+gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between
+float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown
+Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine
+Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay
+to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal
+swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
+
+But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing like an
+iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one
+nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles
+(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other
+consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in
+which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at
+length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
+cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips
+met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled
+like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through
+the vaulted hull, "Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
+
+
+Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
+these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active
+pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old
+blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after
+concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still retained
+it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost
+incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do
+some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their
+various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an
+eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads,
+harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement,
+as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded
+by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from
+him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically
+broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the
+heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it
+was.--Most miserable!
+
+A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing
+yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
+curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted
+questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every
+one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.
+
+Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road
+running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt
+the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,
+dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both
+feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four
+acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth
+act of the grief of his life's drama.
+
+He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
+encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin. He had been
+an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house
+and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three
+blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church,
+planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further
+concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into
+his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to
+tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into
+his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that
+fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for
+prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in
+the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so
+that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no
+unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of
+her young-armed old husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by
+passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly,
+in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's
+infants were rocked to slumber.
+
+Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst
+thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon
+him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a
+truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and
+all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some
+virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the
+responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless
+old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to
+harvest.
+
+Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more
+and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last;
+the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly
+gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the
+forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived
+down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her
+thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond
+in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen
+curls!
+
+Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death
+is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but
+the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the
+Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of
+such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against
+suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly
+spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and
+wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite
+Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither,
+broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate
+death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come
+hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
+abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put
+up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we
+marry thee!"
+
+Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall
+of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went
+a-whaling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
+
+
+With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
+mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter
+placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the
+coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab came
+along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While
+yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last,
+Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the
+anvil--the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,
+some of which flew close to Ahab.
+
+"Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying
+in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;--look here, they
+burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them without a scorch."
+
+"Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab," answered Perth, resting
+for a moment on his hammer; "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou
+scorch a scar."
+
+"Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful
+to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others
+that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou
+not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet
+hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?--What wert thou making there?"
+
+"Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it."
+
+"And can'st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard
+usage as it had?"
+
+"I think so, sir."
+
+"And I suppose thou can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never
+mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?"
+
+"Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one."
+
+"Look ye here, then," cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning
+with both hands on Perth's shoulders; "look ye here--HERE--can ye
+smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith," sweeping one hand across his
+ribbed brow; "if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay
+my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes.
+Answer! Can'st thou smoothe this seam?"
+
+"Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?"
+
+"Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for
+though thou only see'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the
+bone of my skull--THAT is all wrinkles! But, away with child's play; no
+more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!" jingling the leathern bag,
+as if it were full of gold coins. "I, too, want a harpoon made; one that
+a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will
+stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There's the stuff," flinging
+the pouch upon the anvil. "Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered
+nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses."
+
+"Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the
+best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work."
+
+"I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the
+melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me
+first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these
+twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I'll
+blow the fire."
+
+When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by
+spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. "A
+flaw!" rejecting the last one. "Work that over again, Perth."
+
+This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when
+Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then,
+with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to
+him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge
+shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and
+bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or
+some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.
+
+"What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?" muttered Stubb,
+looking on from the forecastle. "That Parsee smells fire like a fusee;
+and smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan."
+
+At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as
+Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near
+by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's bent face.
+
+"Would'st thou brand me, Perth?" wincing for a moment with the pain;
+"have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?"
+
+"Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this
+harpoon for the White Whale?"
+
+"For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them
+thyself, man. Here are my razors--the best of steel; here, and make the
+barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea."
+
+For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain
+not use them.
+
+"Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,
+nor pray till--but here--to work!"
+
+Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the
+shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith
+was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he
+cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
+
+"No, no--no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy,
+there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me
+as much blood as will cover this barb?" holding it high up. A cluster of
+dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh,
+and the White Whale's barbs were then tempered.
+
+"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!"
+deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
+baptismal blood.
+
+Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory,
+with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of
+the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of
+it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing
+his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly
+bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, "Good! and
+now for the seizings."
+
+At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
+were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole
+was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope
+was traced half-way along the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with
+intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope--like the Three
+Fates--remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the
+weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole,
+both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin,
+light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh,
+Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange
+mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the
+melancholy ship, and mocked it!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
+
+
+Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
+ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
+pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the
+stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing,
+or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy
+minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success
+for their pains.
+
+At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
+heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
+sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
+cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
+quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the
+ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and
+would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a
+remorseless fang.
+
+These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
+certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
+regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing
+only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high
+rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when
+the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their
+hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
+
+The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these
+there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied
+children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when
+the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most
+mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,
+and form one seamless whole.
+
+Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
+temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem
+to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon
+them prove but tarnishing.
+
+Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in
+ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye,
+men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some
+few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.
+Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling
+threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a
+storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this
+life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one
+pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless
+faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then
+disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once
+gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men,
+and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
+more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
+never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like
+those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of
+our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
+
+And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that
+same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:--
+
+"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's
+eye!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping
+cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep
+down and do believe."
+
+And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same
+golden light:--
+
+"I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that
+he has always been jolly!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
+
+
+And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
+before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.
+
+It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
+last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad
+holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing
+round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to
+pointing her prow for home.
+
+The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting
+at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down;
+and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the
+last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours
+were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of
+her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her
+top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious
+fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.
+
+As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
+success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same
+seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a
+single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to
+make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental
+casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were
+stowed along the deck, and in the captain's and officers' state-rooms.
+Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the
+cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the
+floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually
+caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously
+added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and
+filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled
+it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and
+filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the
+captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands
+into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.
+
+As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
+barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
+still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
+try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like POKE or stomach skin of
+the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched
+hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were
+dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the
+Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured
+aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with
+glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
+jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy at
+the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been
+removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed
+Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and
+mortar were being hurled into the sea.
+
+Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the
+ship's elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was
+full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual
+diversion.
+
+And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,
+with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's
+wakes--one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings
+as to things to come--their two captains in themselves impersonated the
+whole striking contrast of the scene.
+
+"Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting
+a glass and a bottle in the air.
+
+"Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab in reply.
+
+"No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all," said the other
+good-humoredly. "Come aboard!"
+
+"Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?"
+
+"Not enough to speak of--two islanders, that's all;--but come aboard,
+old hearty, come along. I'll soon take that black from your brow. Come
+along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and homeward-bound."
+
+"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art
+a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty
+ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there!
+Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!"
+
+And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other
+stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew
+of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding
+Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively
+revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the
+homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and
+then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two
+remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket
+soundings.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
+
+
+Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favourites
+sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the
+rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed
+it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor,
+whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.
+
+It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson
+fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun
+and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such
+plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that
+it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of
+the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had
+gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.
+
+Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned
+off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now
+tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales
+dying--the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring--that strange
+spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a
+wondrousness unknown before.
+
+"He turns and turns him to it,--how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
+homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too
+worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!--Oh
+that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights.
+Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe;
+in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
+furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still
+rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the
+Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but
+see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads
+some other way.
+
+"Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
+thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas;
+thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
+wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor
+has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
+again, without a lesson to me.
+
+"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed
+jet!--that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh
+whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that
+only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker
+half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable
+imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living
+things, exhaled as air, but water now.
+
+"Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild
+fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though
+hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
+
+
+The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to
+windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These
+last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one
+could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay
+by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab's.
+
+The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and
+the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare
+upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which
+gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
+
+Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching
+in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the
+whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound
+like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of
+Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.
+
+Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and
+hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a
+flooded world. "I have dreamed it again," said he.
+
+"Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor
+coffin can be thine?"
+
+"And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"
+
+"But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
+hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
+mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
+America."
+
+"Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:--a hearse and its plumes
+floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a
+sight we shall not soon see."
+
+"Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man."
+
+"And what was that saying about thyself?"
+
+"Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."
+
+"And when thou art so gone before--if that ever befall--then ere I can
+follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?--Was it not
+so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two
+pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."
+
+"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
+like fire-flies in the gloom--"Hemp only can kill thee."
+
+"The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried
+Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--"Immortal on land and on sea!"
+
+Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the
+slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead
+whale was brought to the ship.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
+
+
+The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
+coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
+ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to
+the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed
+on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship's
+prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high
+noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was
+about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his
+latitude.
+
+Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of
+effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing
+focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks
+lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness
+of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne.
+Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through
+which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form
+to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument
+placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to
+catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian.
+Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling
+beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's,
+was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded
+their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness.
+At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon
+his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that
+precise instant. Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked up
+towards the sun and murmured to himself: "Thou sea-mark! thou high and
+mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I AM--but canst thou cast the
+least hint where I SHALL be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing
+besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou
+must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is
+even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally
+beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!"
+
+Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
+numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
+"Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and
+Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what
+after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou
+thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds
+thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water
+or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence
+thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed
+be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live
+vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched
+with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the
+glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God
+had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!"
+dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee;
+the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by
+line; THESE shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,"
+lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry
+thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"
+
+As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live
+and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
+fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself--these passed over
+the mute, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away;
+while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered
+together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck,
+shouted out--"To the braces! Up helm!--square in!"
+
+In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon
+her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon
+her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one
+sufficient steed.
+
+Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's
+tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck.
+
+"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of
+its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down,
+to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine,
+what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"
+
+"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr.
+Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab
+mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine;
+swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but
+thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
+
+
+Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
+crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent
+but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes
+that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these
+resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all
+storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless
+sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
+
+Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
+bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
+ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
+thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
+fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
+tempest had left for its after sport.
+
+Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
+flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster
+might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask
+were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the
+boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very
+top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape.
+A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship's high
+teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern, and left it
+again, all dripping through like a sieve.
+
+"Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
+"but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see,
+Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all
+round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all
+the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never
+mind; it's all in fun: so the old song says;"--(SINGS.)
+
+ Oh! jolly is the gale,
+ And a joker is the whale,
+ A' flourishin' his tail,--
+ Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+ The scud all a flyin',
+ That's his flip only foamin';
+ When he stirs in the spicin',--
+ Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+ Thunder splits the ships,
+ But he only smacks his lips,
+ A tastin' of this flip,--
+ Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+
+"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his
+harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy
+peace."
+
+"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;
+and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr.
+Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my
+throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a
+wind-up."
+
+"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."
+
+"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
+mind how foolish?"
+
+"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
+hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale comes from
+the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very
+course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is
+that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand--his
+stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou
+must!
+
+"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"
+
+"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
+Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
+question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it
+into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward,
+all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up
+there; but not with the lightning."
+
+At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following
+the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same
+instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
+
+"Who's there?"
+
+"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
+pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
+lances of fire.
+
+Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off
+the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some
+ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But
+as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may
+avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly
+towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering
+not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the
+vessel's way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a
+ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made
+in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the
+chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.
+
+"The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to
+vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux,
+to light Ahab to his post. "Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and
+aft. Quick!"
+
+"Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker
+side. Yet I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that
+all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir."
+
+"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!"
+
+All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
+tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
+the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
+three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
+
+"Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing
+sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
+jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. "Blast it!"--but
+slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
+immediately shifting his tone he cried--"The corpusants have mercy on us
+all!"
+
+To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
+the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses
+from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething
+sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when
+God's burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His "Mene, Mene,
+Tekel Upharsin" has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.
+
+While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the
+enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
+all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
+constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
+jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed
+the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of
+Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as
+if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the
+preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue
+flames on his body.
+
+The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more
+the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment
+or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It
+was Stubb. "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the
+same in the song."
+
+"No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I
+hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?--have
+they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck--but it's too dark
+to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign
+of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be
+chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will
+work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will
+yet be as three spermaceti candles--that's the good promise we saw."
+
+At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning
+to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and once
+more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled
+supernaturalness in their pallor.
+
+"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.
+
+At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame,
+the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away
+from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where
+they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,
+arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a
+knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted
+attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in
+Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes
+upcast.
+
+"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white
+flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast
+links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it;
+blood against fire! So."
+
+Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot
+upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he
+stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
+
+"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
+once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to
+this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now
+know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence
+wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all
+are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless,
+placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will
+dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the
+personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at
+best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live,
+the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war
+is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will
+kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power;
+and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that
+in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy
+fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to
+thee."
+
+[SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP LENGTHWISE
+TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST, CLOSES HIS EYES,
+HIS RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]
+
+"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung
+from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then
+grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of
+these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning
+flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten
+brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh!
+Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou
+leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping
+out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the
+flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou
+art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what
+hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.
+Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten;
+certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I
+know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent.
+There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom
+all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through
+thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou
+foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable
+riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read
+my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with
+thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"
+
+"The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, old man!"
+
+Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed
+in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's
+bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather
+sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a
+levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there
+like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm--"God, God
+is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill
+continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a
+fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this."
+
+Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the
+braces--though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast
+mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But
+dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the
+burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to
+transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's end.
+Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
+that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:--
+
+"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
+heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye
+may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out
+the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the
+flame.
+
+As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
+some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so
+much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts;
+so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him
+in a terror of dismay.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
+
+AHAB STANDING BY THE HELM. STARBUCK APPROACHING HIM.
+
+
+"We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose
+and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?"
+
+"Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up
+now."
+
+"Sir!--in God's name!--sir?"
+
+"Well."
+
+"The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?"
+
+"Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises,
+but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.--By
+masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some
+coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest
+trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now
+sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards
+send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft
+there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic
+is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 121. Midnight.--The Forecastle Bulwarks.
+
+
+STUBB AND FLASK MOUNTED ON THEM, AND PASSING ADDITIONAL LASHINGS OVER
+THE ANCHORS THERE HANGING.
+
+
+"No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you
+will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long
+ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn't you once say that
+whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its
+insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft
+and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn't you say so?"
+
+"Well, suppose I did? What then? I've part changed my flesh since that
+time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we ARE loaded with powder
+barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
+afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have
+pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now. Shake yourself; you're
+Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat
+collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine
+Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But
+hark, again, and I'll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off
+from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope;
+now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's
+lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn't
+got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don't you see, you timber-head,
+that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first
+struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred
+carries rods, and Ahab,--aye, man, and all of us,--were in no more
+danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand
+ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would
+have every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running
+up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered feather,
+and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's
+easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be
+sensible."
+
+"I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard."
+
+"Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be sensible, that's
+a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the
+turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors
+now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two
+anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what
+big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists,
+hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is
+anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable,
+though. There, hammer that knot down, and we've done. So; next to
+touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just
+wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs
+so, Flask; but seems to me, a Long tailed coat ought always to be worn
+in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry
+off the water, d'ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end
+eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I
+must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew!
+there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come
+from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.--Thunder and Lightning.
+
+
+THE MAIN-TOP-SAIL YARD.--TASHTEGO PASSING NEW LASHINGS AROUND IT.
+
+
+"Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's
+the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give
+us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
+
+
+During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's
+jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by
+its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached
+to it--for they were slack--because some play to the tiller was
+indispensable.
+
+In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock
+to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the
+compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the
+Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice
+the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is
+a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted
+emotion.
+
+Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
+strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--one engaged forward and the
+other aft--the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails
+were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like
+the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when
+that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.
+
+The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
+storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through
+the water with some precision again; and the course--for the present,
+East-south-east--which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
+given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only
+steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the
+ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo!
+a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze
+became fair!
+
+Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "HO! THE
+FAIR WIND! OH-YE-HO, CHEERLY MEN!" the crew singing for joy, that so
+promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents
+preceding it.
+
+In compliance with the standing order of his commander--to report
+immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change
+in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to
+the breeze--however reluctantly and gloomily,--than he mechanically went
+below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.
+
+Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it
+a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was
+burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted
+door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels.
+The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming
+silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of
+the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as
+they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,
+upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw
+the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with
+its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew
+it for itself.
+
+"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very musket
+that he pointed at me;--that one with the studded stock; let me touch
+it--lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances,
+strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and
+powder in the pan;--that's not good. Best spill it?--wait. I'll cure
+myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I think.--I come
+to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and
+doom,--THAT'S fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for
+that accursed fish.--The very tube he pointed at me!--the very one;
+THIS one--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I
+handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say
+he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly
+quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere
+dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did
+he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed
+old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom
+with him?--Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and
+more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my
+soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this
+instant--put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in
+his sleep? Yes, just there,--in there, he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye,
+but still alive, and soon awake again. I can't withstand thee, then, old
+man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to;
+all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is
+all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd thy vow; say'st
+all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!--But is there no other way? no
+lawful way?--Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest
+this old man's living power from his own living hands? Only a fool
+would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes
+and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would
+be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the
+sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself,
+inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What,
+then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan
+the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and
+a whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye, 'tis so.--Is heaven
+a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed,
+tindering sheets and skin together?--And would I be a murderer, then,
+if"--and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the
+loaded musket's end against the door.
+
+"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A
+touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--Oh
+Mary! Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death, old man,
+who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week
+may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall
+I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails
+are reefed and set; she heads her course."
+
+"Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"
+
+Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's
+tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream
+to speak.
+
+The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;
+Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
+placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
+
+"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell
+him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know'st what to say."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
+
+
+Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
+mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on
+like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded
+so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world
+boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible
+sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his
+bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian
+kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of
+molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
+
+Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
+the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye
+the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by
+the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun's rearward place, and how
+the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.
+
+"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of
+the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!
+Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!"
+
+But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the
+helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
+
+"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.
+
+"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist. "Heading East at this
+hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"
+
+Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
+observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
+blinding palpableness must have been the cause.
+
+Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse
+of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost
+seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two
+compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
+
+But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew,
+the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened
+before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our compasses--that's
+all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."
+
+"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale mate,
+gloomily.
+
+Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
+one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
+developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, essentially one with
+the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled
+at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has
+actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and
+rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal;
+all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic
+steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in
+either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original
+virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected,
+the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were
+the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.
+
+Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
+compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took
+the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were
+exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's course to be
+changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod
+thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair
+one had only been juggling her.
+
+Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing,
+but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask--who
+in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings--likewise
+unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly
+rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as
+ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed;
+or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their
+congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.
+
+For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But
+chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper
+sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
+
+"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked
+thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But
+Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck--a lance without
+a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's needles.
+Quick!"
+
+Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about
+to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
+revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a
+matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old
+man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
+practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors,
+without some shudderings and evil portents.
+
+"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed
+him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's
+needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that
+will point as true as any."
+
+Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this
+was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might
+follow. But Starbuck looked away.
+
+With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
+lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade
+him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul,
+after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the
+blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered
+that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then
+going through some small strange motions with it--whether indispensable
+to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe
+of the crew, is uncertain--he called for linen thread; and moving to the
+binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally
+suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards.
+At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at
+either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had
+been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the
+binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look
+ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun
+is East, and that compass swears it!"
+
+One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could
+persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk
+away.
+
+In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his
+fatal pride.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
+
+
+While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
+and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
+upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some merchantmen,
+and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the
+log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake than
+anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the
+course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
+progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden
+reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the
+railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and
+wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that
+hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he
+happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,
+and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic
+oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly;
+astern the billows rolled in riots.
+
+"Forward, there! Heave the log!"
+
+Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. "Take
+the reel, one of ye, I'll heave."
+
+They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the
+deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into
+the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
+
+The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
+handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so
+stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.
+
+Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
+turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
+Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
+speak.
+
+"Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
+spoiled it."
+
+"'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
+Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it."
+
+"I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these
+grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a
+superior, who'll ne'er confess."
+
+"What's that? There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's
+granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient. Where wert
+thou born?"
+
+"In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."
+
+"Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that."
+
+"I know not, sir, but I was born there."
+
+"In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a man
+from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
+which is sucked in--by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall
+butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So."
+
+The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
+dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
+turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
+resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
+
+"Hold hard!"
+
+Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging
+log was gone.
+
+"I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad
+sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian;
+reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and
+mend thou the line. See to it."
+
+"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer
+seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in,
+Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and
+dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"
+
+"Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip's missing.
+Let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman. It drags
+hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul
+in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet!
+a hatchet! cut it off--we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
+sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."
+
+"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
+"Away from the quarter-deck!"
+
+"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.
+"Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
+
+"Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!"
+
+"And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of
+thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve
+through! Who art thou, boy?"
+
+"Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip!
+One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high--looks
+cowardly--quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip the
+coward?"
+
+"There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look
+down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him,
+ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home
+henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou
+art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down."
+
+"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand,
+and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,
+perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope;
+something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come
+and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I
+will not let this go."
+
+"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
+horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in
+gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
+oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not
+what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come!
+I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
+Emperor's!"
+
+"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with
+strength, the other daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten
+line--all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new
+line altogether. I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
+
+
+Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel, and her progress
+solely determined by Ahab's level log and line; the Pequod held on
+her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
+unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled
+by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed
+the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.
+
+At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
+Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
+dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch--then headed
+by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly--like
+half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered
+Innocents--that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for
+the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly
+listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained
+within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was
+mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled.
+Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that the wild
+thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men
+in the sea.
+
+Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when
+he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
+unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
+explained the wonder.
+
+Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers
+of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams
+that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company
+with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this
+only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a
+very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their
+peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their
+round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from
+the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have
+more than once been mistaken for men.
+
+But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
+confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At
+sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;
+and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for
+sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus
+with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he
+had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard--a cry and a
+rushing--and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and
+looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the
+sea.
+
+The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the stern, where it
+always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it,
+and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it
+slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and
+the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to
+yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
+
+And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out
+for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own peculiar ground; that man
+was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the
+time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at
+least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil
+in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They
+declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had
+heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
+
+The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see
+to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as
+in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of
+the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly
+connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be;
+therefore, they were going to leave the ship's stern unprovided with a
+buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint
+concerning his coffin.
+
+"A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting.
+
+"Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb.
+
+"It will make a good enough one," said Flask, "the carpenter here can
+arrange it easily."
+
+"Bring it up; there's nothing else for it," said Starbuck, after a
+melancholy pause. "Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so--the coffin,
+I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it."
+
+"And shall I nail down the lid, sir?" moving his hand as with a hammer.
+
+"Aye."
+
+"And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his hand as with a
+caulking-iron.
+
+"Aye."
+
+"And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?" moving his hand as
+with a pitch-pot.
+
+"Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and
+no more.--Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me."
+
+"He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks.
+Now I don't like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it
+like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won't put
+his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin?
+And now I'm ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old
+coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don't like this
+cobbling sort of business--I don't like it at all; it's undignified;
+it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their
+betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square
+mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and
+is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not
+a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at
+the end. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord!
+what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of
+sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that's
+the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when
+I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their
+lonely old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at
+sea but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay
+over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the
+snap-spring over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before
+with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied
+up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I'm made of knotty
+Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing
+about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make
+bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We
+work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask
+the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling,
+and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I'll do the job, now, tenderly.
+I'll have me--let's see--how many in the ship's company, all told? But
+I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate, Turk's-headed
+life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then,
+if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for
+one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer,
+caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let's to it."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
+
+
+THE COFFIN LAID UPON TWO LINE-TUBS, BETWEEN THE VICE-BENCH AND THE OPEN
+HATCHWAY; THE CARPENTER CAULKING ITS SEAMS; THE STRING OF TWISTED OAKUM
+SLOWLY UNWINDING FROM A LARGE ROLL OF IT PLACED IN THE BOSOM OF
+HIS FROCK.--AHAB COMES SLOWLY FROM THE CABIN-GANGWAY, AND HEARS PIP
+FOLLOWING HIM.
+
+
+"Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand
+complies with my humor more genially than that boy.--Middle aisle of a
+church! What's here?"
+
+"Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
+hatchway!"
+
+"Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault."
+
+"Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does."
+
+"Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy
+shop?"
+
+"I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?"
+
+"Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?"
+
+"Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
+they've set me now to turning it into something else."
+
+"Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
+monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the
+next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
+same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
+jack-of-all-trades."
+
+"But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do."
+
+"The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a
+coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the
+craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in
+hand. Dost thou never?"
+
+"Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but
+the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there
+was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark
+to it."
+
+"Aye, and that's because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what in
+all things makes the sounding-board is this--there's naught beneath. And
+yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.
+Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against
+the churchyard gate, going in?
+
+"Faith, sir, I've--"
+
+"Faith? What's that?"
+
+"Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like--that's all,
+sir."
+
+"Um, um; go on."
+
+"I was about to say, sir, that--"
+
+"Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?
+Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight."
+
+"He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
+latitudes. I've heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos,
+is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of
+Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He's always under
+the Line--fiery hot, I tell ye! He's looking this way--come, oakum;
+quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I'm the
+professor of musical glasses--tap, tap!"
+
+(AHAB TO HIMSELF.)
+
+"There's a sight! There's a sound! The grey-headed woodpecker tapping
+the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that
+thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag,
+that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
+materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
+now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made
+the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life.
+A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some
+spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
+I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth,
+that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain
+twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed
+sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return
+again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
+philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds
+must empty into thee!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
+
+
+Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
+upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the
+time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the
+broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
+fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from
+the smitten hull.
+
+"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
+commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he
+could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard.
+
+"Hast seen the White Whale?"
+
+"Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?"
+
+Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question;
+and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain
+himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen descending her
+side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod's
+main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by
+Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.
+
+"Where was he?--not killed!--not killed!" cried Ahab, closely advancing.
+"How was it?"
+
+It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while
+three of the stranger's boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which
+had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were
+yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had
+suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon,
+the fourth rigged boat--a reserved one--had been instantly lowered in
+chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat--the swiftest
+keeled of all--seemed to have succeeded in fastening--at least, as
+well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the
+distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam
+of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was
+concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with
+his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no
+positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging;
+darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward
+boats--ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite
+direction--the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to
+its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance
+from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded
+all sail--stunsail on stunsail--after the missing boat; kindling a fire
+in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out.
+But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the
+presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then
+paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding
+anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and
+though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least
+glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.
+
+The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his
+object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his
+own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles
+apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
+
+"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some one
+in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best coat; mayhap, his
+watch--he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two
+pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of
+the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks--pale in the
+very buttons of his eyes--look--it wasn't the coat--it must have been
+the--"
+
+"My boy, my own boy is among them. For God's sake--I beg, I
+conjure"--here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far
+had but icily received his petition. "For eight-and-forty hours let me
+charter your ship--I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it--if
+there be no other way--for eight-and-forty hours only--only that--you
+must, oh, you must, and you SHALL do this thing."
+
+"His son!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his son he's lost! I take back the
+coat and watch--what says Ahab? We must save that boy."
+
+"He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night," said the old Manx
+sailor standing behind them; "I heard; all of ye heard their spirits."
+
+Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's
+the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the
+Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among
+the number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other
+hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase,
+there had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched
+father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which
+was only solved for him by his chief mate's instinctively adopting the
+ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when
+placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the
+majority first. But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason,
+had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by
+Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad,
+but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving
+hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought to
+initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially
+the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that
+Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them,
+for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than
+their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall
+be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely
+partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
+
+Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;
+and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without
+the least quivering of his own.
+
+"I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me. Do to me
+as you would have me do to you in the like case. For YOU too have a boy,
+Captain Ahab--though but a child, and nestling safely at home now--a
+child of your old age too--Yes, yes, you relent; I see it--run, run,
+men, now, and stand by to square in the yards."
+
+"Avast," cried Ahab--"touch not a rope-yarn"; then in a voice that
+prolongingly moulded every word--"Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
+Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I
+forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch,
+and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers:
+then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before."
+
+Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,
+leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter
+rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment,
+Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his
+boat, and returned to his ship.
+
+Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
+was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,
+however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round;
+starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a
+head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her
+masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry
+trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
+
+But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw
+that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.
+She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
+
+
+(AHAB MOVING TO GO ON DECK; PIP CATCHES HIM BY THE HAND TO FOLLOW.)
+
+"Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming
+when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him.
+There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.
+Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired
+health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if
+thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed
+chair; another screw to it, thou must be."
+
+"No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for
+your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a
+part of ye."
+
+"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
+fidelity of man!--and a black! and crazy!--but methinks like-cures-like
+applies to him too; he grows so sane again."
+
+"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
+drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
+But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with
+ye."
+
+"If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him.
+I tell thee no; it cannot be."
+
+"Oh good master, master, master!
+
+"Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
+Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still
+know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!--Met! True art
+thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless
+thee; and if it come to that,--God for ever save thee, let what will
+befall."
+
+(AHAB GOES; PIP STEPS ONE STEP FORWARD.)
+
+
+"Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,--but I'm alone. Now
+were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip!
+Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip? He must be up here; let's try the
+door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there's no opening
+it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this
+screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll seat me, against the transom,
+in the ship's full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me.
+Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great
+admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and
+lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come
+crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs!
+What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men with gold
+lace upon their coats!--Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?--a little
+negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a
+whale-boat once;--seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and
+let's drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them!
+Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.--Hist! above there,
+I hear ivory--Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk
+over me. But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they
+bulge through; and oysters come to join me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
+
+
+And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
+preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters swept--seemed to
+have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely
+there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
+longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a
+vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
+encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his successive meetings with
+various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference
+with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned
+against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes,
+which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting
+polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night
+sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now
+fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
+domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,
+fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
+single spear or leaf.
+
+In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
+vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove
+to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to
+finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of
+Ahab's iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever
+conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them.
+
+But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when
+he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that
+even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance
+awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.
+Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah
+now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious
+at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal
+substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen
+being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
+night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go
+below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan
+but wondrous eyes did plainly say--We two watchmen never rest.
+
+Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
+deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
+exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,--the main-mast
+and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,--his
+living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched
+heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the
+days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock;
+yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly
+whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether
+he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in
+the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp
+gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The
+clothes that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him;
+and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath
+the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.
+
+He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,--breakfast and
+dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew
+all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow
+idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though
+his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's
+mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never
+seemed to speak--one man to the other--unless at long intervals some
+passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell
+seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew,
+they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word;
+by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal
+interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they
+stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by
+the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the
+Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned
+substance.
+
+And yet, somehow, did Ahab--in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
+and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,--Ahab
+seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
+seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade
+siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel
+was solid Ahab.
+
+At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
+from aft,--"Man the mast-heads!"--and all through the day, till after
+sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of
+the helmsman's bell, was heard--"What d'ye see?--sharp! sharp!"
+
+But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
+children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
+old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least, of nearly
+all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether
+Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if
+these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
+expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
+
+"I will have the first sight of the whale myself,"--he said. "Aye!
+Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest
+of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved
+block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the
+downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for
+the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that
+end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon
+his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon
+Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his
+firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,--"Take the rope, sir--I give
+it into thy hands, Starbuck." Then arranging his person in the basket,
+he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being
+the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And
+thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad
+upon the sea for miles and miles,--ahead, astern, this side, and
+that,--within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.
+
+When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in
+the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is
+hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these
+circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge
+to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a
+wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
+cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the
+deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes
+cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if,
+unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some
+carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the
+sea. So Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only
+strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one
+only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the
+slightest degree approaching to decision--one of those too, whose
+faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;--it was
+strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;
+freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
+hands.
+
+Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
+minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
+incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
+latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head
+in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet
+straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying
+again round his head.
+
+But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
+not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked
+it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least
+heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
+sight.
+
+"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
+being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though
+somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing
+them.
+
+But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes; the long
+hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
+his prize.
+
+An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace
+it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would
+be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen
+accounted good. Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and
+on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while
+from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly
+discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
+
+
+The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
+life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
+misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were
+fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships,
+cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to
+carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
+
+Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
+some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you
+now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
+half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
+
+"Hast seen the White Whale?"
+
+"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with
+his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
+
+"Hast killed him?"
+
+"The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," answered the
+other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered
+sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
+
+"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab
+held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold
+his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs;
+and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin,
+where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"
+
+"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--pointing to the
+hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
+yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only THAT one I bury; the rest were
+buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." Then turning to his
+crew--"Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and
+lift the body; so, then--Oh! God"--advancing towards the hammock with
+uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life--"
+
+"Brace forward! Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
+
+But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound
+of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so
+quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled
+her hull with their ghostly baptism.
+
+As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
+hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.
+
+"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.
+"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your
+taffrail to show us your coffin!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
+
+
+It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were
+hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
+transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and
+man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's
+chest in his sleep.
+
+Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
+unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
+but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
+mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,
+troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
+
+But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
+shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
+that distinguished them.
+
+Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle
+air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the
+girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--most seen
+here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving
+alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
+
+Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
+and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the
+ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the
+morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's
+forehead of heaven.
+
+Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
+creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
+oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
+little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
+their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on
+the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
+
+Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
+watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more
+and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely
+aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment,
+the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome
+sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long
+cruel--forbidding--now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck,
+and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however
+wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to
+bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea;
+nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
+
+Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
+and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that
+stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch
+him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
+
+Ahab turned.
+
+"Starbuck!"
+
+"Sir."
+
+"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such
+a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck my first whale--a
+boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty--forty--forty years ago!--ago! Forty
+years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
+storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab
+forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
+of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not
+spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation
+of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's
+exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the
+green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of
+solitary command!--when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so
+keenly known to me before--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry
+salted fare--fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!--when the
+poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the
+world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts--away, whole oceans away, from
+that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn
+the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--wife?
+wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor
+girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy,
+the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand
+lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey--more a
+demon than a man!--aye, aye! what a forty years' fool--fool--old fool,
+has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy
+the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or
+better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this
+weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under
+me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.
+Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look
+very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and
+humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled
+centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!--crack my heart!--stave my
+brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have
+I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?
+Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is
+better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By
+the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass,
+man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on
+board!--lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick.
+That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see
+in that eye!"
+
+"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why
+should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us
+fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are
+Starbuck's--wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
+youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,
+longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!--this instant let me alter
+the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl
+on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such
+mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."
+
+"They have, they have. I have seen them--some summer days in the
+morning. About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--the boy
+vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
+cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back
+to dance him again."
+
+"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning,
+should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's
+sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my
+Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face
+from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!"
+
+But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and
+cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
+
+"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
+cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
+commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep
+pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly
+making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not
+so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this
+arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
+in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power;
+how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
+thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
+living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in
+this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all
+the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon
+Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where
+do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged
+to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and
+the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been
+making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the
+mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how
+we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid
+greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut
+swaths--Starbuck!"
+
+But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
+
+Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
+two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
+leaning over the same rail.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 133. The Chase--First Day.
+
+
+That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man--as his wont at
+intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
+to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
+up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to
+some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that
+peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the
+living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
+surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and
+then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible,
+Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the
+sail to be shortened.
+
+The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
+at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
+lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
+wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
+tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
+
+"Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!"
+
+Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
+deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
+seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
+with their clothes in their hands.
+
+"What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
+
+"Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.
+
+"T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"
+
+All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
+swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were
+hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft,
+and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
+main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the
+air. "There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is
+Moby Dick!"
+
+Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
+look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
+whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final
+perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just
+beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian's
+head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the whale
+was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
+his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the
+air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had
+so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
+
+"And did none of ye see it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched men
+all around him.
+
+"I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
+cried out," said Tashtego.
+
+"Not the same instant; not the same--no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
+reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the
+White Whale first. There she blows!--there she blows!--there she blows!
+There again!--there again!" he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic
+tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets.
+"He's going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by
+three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship.
+Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go
+flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by,
+stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,--quick, quicker!" and he
+slid through the air to the deck.
+
+"He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from
+us; cannot have seen the ship yet."
+
+"Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!--brace up!
+Shiver her!--shiver her!--So; well that! Boats, boats!"
+
+Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails
+set--all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to
+leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up
+Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
+
+Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
+but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
+still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
+noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came
+so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump
+was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing,
+and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish
+foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head
+beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went
+the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical
+rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters
+interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;
+and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But
+these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly
+feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to
+some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but
+shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back;
+and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and
+to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and
+rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.
+
+A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
+the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
+ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
+eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
+rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
+great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
+divinely swam.
+
+On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once
+leaving him, then flowed so wide away--on each bright side, the whale
+shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
+namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured
+to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
+tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all
+who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way
+thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
+
+And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among
+waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
+Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his
+submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.
+But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant
+his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural
+Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the
+grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly
+halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered
+over the agitated pool that he left.
+
+With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the
+three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance.
+
+"An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed
+beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
+vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed
+whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now
+freshened; the sea began to swell.
+
+"The birds!--the birds!" cried Tashtego.
+
+In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were
+now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began
+fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
+expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover
+no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its
+depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white
+weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose,
+till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked
+rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable
+bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast,
+shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The
+glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble
+tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled
+the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon
+Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and
+seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and
+stand by to stern.
+
+Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its
+bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale's head while yet
+under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that
+malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself,
+as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath
+the boat.
+
+Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
+an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of
+a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
+mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into
+the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish
+pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's
+head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale
+now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With
+unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the
+tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the
+uttermost stern.
+
+And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
+whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
+body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from
+the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and
+while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
+impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with
+this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
+helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
+the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from
+its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the
+frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an
+enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain,
+and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two
+floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew
+at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast
+to the oars to lash them across.
+
+At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first
+to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a
+movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand
+had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only
+slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over sideways as it
+slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of
+it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.
+
+Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
+distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
+billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;
+so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--some twenty or more feet
+out of the water--the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
+dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray
+still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel
+billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to
+overleap its summit with their scud.
+
+
+*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
+(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down
+poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
+described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively
+view whatever objects may be encircling him.
+
+
+But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
+and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
+wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault.
+The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of
+grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book
+of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's
+insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,--though he could still
+keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless
+Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock
+might burst. From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and
+mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not
+succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.
+For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so
+planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed
+horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed,
+still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to
+strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of
+the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they
+themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on
+the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old
+man's head.
+
+Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's
+mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;
+and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--"Sail on
+the"--but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and
+whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing
+to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him
+off!"
+
+The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she
+effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam
+off, the boats flew to the rescue.
+
+Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine
+caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily strength did
+crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a time, lying
+all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot
+of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
+desolate sounds from out ravines.
+
+But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
+abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense
+to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
+through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary
+in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their
+life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous
+intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures
+contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
+
+"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one
+bended arm--"is it safe?"
+
+"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.
+
+"Lay it before me;--any missing men?"
+
+"One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here are
+five men."
+
+"That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there!
+there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--Hands off from me!
+The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! Set the sail; out oars;
+the helm!"
+
+It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
+up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus
+continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But
+the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale,
+for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a
+velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances,
+pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a
+hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an
+unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable
+only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it
+sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of
+overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were
+soon swayed up to their cranes--the two parts of the wrecked boat having
+been previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her
+side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it
+with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the
+Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known,
+methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly announced
+from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone
+down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch
+in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired, his
+voice was heard.--"Whose is the doubloon now? D'ye see him?" and if the
+reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his
+perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless;
+anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
+
+As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft,
+or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still
+greater breadth--thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at
+every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon
+the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern.
+At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh
+troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man's face
+there now stole some such added gloom as this.
+
+Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
+evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in
+his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed--"The
+thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!"
+
+"What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did
+I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear
+thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck."
+
+"Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'tis a solemn sight; an omen,
+and an ill one."
+
+"Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
+man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
+give an old wives' darkling hint.--Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles
+of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and
+ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of
+the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold--I
+shiver!--How now? Aloft there! D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout,
+though he spout ten times a second!"
+
+The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
+Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
+
+"Can't see the spout now, sir;--too dark"--cried a voice from the air.
+
+"How heading when last seen?"
+
+"As before, sir,--straight to leeward."
+
+"Good! he will travel slower now 'tis night. Down royals and top-gallant
+stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he's
+making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her
+full before the wind!--Aloft! come down!--Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand
+to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning."--Then advancing
+towards the doubloon in the main-mast--"Men, this gold is mine, for I
+earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead;
+and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be
+killed, this gold is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise
+him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away
+now!--the deck is thine, sir!"
+
+And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
+slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals
+rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 134. The Chase--Second Day.
+
+
+At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
+
+"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light
+to spread.
+
+"See nothing, sir."
+
+"Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought
+for;--the top-gallant sails!--aye, they should have been kept on her all
+night. But no matter--'tis but resting for the rush."
+
+Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,
+continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing
+by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the
+wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence
+acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders;
+that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they
+will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both
+the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of
+sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period.
+And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of
+a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires
+shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this
+pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the
+cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright
+the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the
+fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and
+diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night
+obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness
+is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
+pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the
+proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all
+desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the
+mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in
+its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as
+doctors that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or
+the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour;
+even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that
+other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his
+speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have
+gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of
+latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in
+the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what
+present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that
+assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his
+port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile
+matters touching the chase of whales.
+
+The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
+cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level
+field.
+
+"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck
+creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two
+brave fellows!--Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,
+on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait
+that leaves no dust behind!"
+
+"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!" was now the
+mast-head cry.
+
+"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and
+split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your
+trump--blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller
+shuts his watergate upon the stream!"
+
+And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies
+of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine
+worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might
+have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the
+growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,
+as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand
+of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of
+the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed,
+unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging
+towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled
+along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the
+vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of
+that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
+
+They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
+though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple,
+and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each
+other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and
+directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of
+the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
+varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal
+goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
+
+The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
+outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one
+hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others,
+shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking
+yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for
+their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to
+seek out the thing that might destroy them!
+
+"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after
+the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
+"Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet
+that way, and then disappears."
+
+It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
+other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
+hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
+pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the
+air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
+halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--much nearer to the ship
+than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick
+bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not
+by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White
+Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon
+of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,
+the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of
+air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the
+distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged
+waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his
+act of defiance.
+
+"There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the cry, as in his
+immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
+Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
+against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for
+the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and
+stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling
+intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
+
+"Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and
+thy harpoon are at hand!--Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore.
+The boats!--stand by!"
+
+Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
+shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and
+halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from
+his perch.
+
+"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one,
+rigged the afternoon previous. "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine--keep
+away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!"
+
+As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first
+assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the
+three crews. Ahab's boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them
+he would take the whale head-and-head,--that is, pull straight up to his
+forehead,--a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such
+a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision.
+But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were
+plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning
+himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing
+among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling
+battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every
+boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which
+those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling
+like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him;
+though, at times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's
+unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
+
+But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed
+and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three
+lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,
+warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now
+for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more
+tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more
+line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again--hoping
+that way to disencumber it of some snarls--when lo!--a sight more savage
+than the embattled teeth of sharks!
+
+Caught and twisted--corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons
+and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing
+and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's boat. Only one
+thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached
+within--through--and then, without--the rays of steel; dragged in
+the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice
+sundering the rope near the chocks--dropped the intercepted fagot of
+steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White
+Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines;
+by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and
+Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on
+a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in
+a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of
+the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly
+stirred bowl of punch.
+
+While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
+the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while
+aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his
+legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily
+singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man's
+line--now parting--admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to
+rescue whom he could;--in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand
+concreted perils,--Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards
+Heaven by invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly
+from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its
+bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell
+again--gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men struggled out from under
+it, like seals from a sea-side cave.
+
+The first uprising momentum of the whale--modifying its direction as
+he struck the surface--involuntarily launched him along it, to a little
+distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his
+back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from
+side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip
+or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and
+came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work
+for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the
+ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his
+leeward way at a traveller's methodic pace.
+
+As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again
+came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the
+floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and
+safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and
+ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable
+intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there;
+but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As
+with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to
+his boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor
+did it so exhaust him as the previous day's mishap.
+
+But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as
+instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of
+Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory
+leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
+
+"Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he
+will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has."
+
+"The ferrule has not stood, sir," said the carpenter, now coming up; "I
+put good work into that leg."
+
+"But no bones broken, sir, I hope," said Stubb with true concern.
+
+"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!--d'ye see it.--But even with
+a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of
+mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor white whale,
+nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
+inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape
+yonder roof?--Aloft there! which way?"
+
+"Dead to leeward, sir."
+
+"Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of
+the spare boats and rig them--Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's
+crews."
+
+"Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir."
+
+"Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
+unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane--there, that
+shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet.
+By heaven it cannot be!--missing?--quick! call them all."
+
+The old man's hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the
+Parsee was not there.
+
+"The Parsee!" cried Stubb--"he must have been caught in--"
+
+"The black vomit wrench thee!--run all of ye above, alow, cabin,
+forecastle--find him--not gone--not gone!"
+
+But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was
+nowhere to be found.
+
+"Aye, sir," said Stubb--"caught among the tangles of your line--I
+thought I saw him dragging under."
+
+"MY line! MY line? Gone?--gone? What means that little word?--What
+death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.
+The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--d'ye see it?--the forged
+iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,--blistered fool! this hand did
+dart it!--'tis in the fish!--Aloft there! Keep him nailed--Quick!--all
+hands to the rigging of the boats--collect the oars--harpooneers!
+the irons, the irons!--hoist the royals higher--a pull on all the
+sheets!--helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll ten times girdle
+the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay
+him yet!
+
+"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck;
+"never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--In Jesus' name no more of
+this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove
+to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil
+shadow gone--all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:--
+
+"What more wouldst thou have?--Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish
+till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom
+of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh,
+oh,--Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"
+
+"Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that
+hour we both saw--thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this
+matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this
+hand--a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This
+whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
+years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act
+under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.--Stand round
+me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered
+lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab--his body's part; but
+Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel
+strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale;
+and I may look so. But ere I break, ye'll hear me crack; and till ye hear
+THAT, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in
+the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they
+drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again,
+to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick--two days he's floated--tomorrow
+will be the third. Aye, men, he'll rise once more,--but only to spout
+his last! D'ye feel brave men, brave?"
+
+"As fearless fire," cried Stubb.
+
+"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he
+muttered on: "The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same
+to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek
+to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!--The
+Parsee--the Parsee!--gone, gone? and he was to go before:--but still was
+to be seen again ere I could perish--How's that?--There's a riddle now
+might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line
+of judges:--like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'LL, I'LL solve it,
+though!"
+
+When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
+
+So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as
+on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the
+grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns
+in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening
+their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of
+Ahab's wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as
+on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his
+hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due
+eastward for the earliest sun.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 135. The Chase.--Third Day.
+
+
+The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
+solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
+daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
+
+"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
+
+"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm
+there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day
+again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the
+angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a
+fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had
+Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels;
+THAT'S tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has
+that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a
+calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much
+for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm--frozen
+calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents
+turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this
+moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort
+of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of
+Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip
+it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they
+cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison
+corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and
+now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!--it's
+tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable
+world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a
+noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight
+it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run
+through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not
+stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing--a nobler
+thing than THAT. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things
+that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are
+bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most
+special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I
+say again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and
+gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the
+clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous
+mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of
+the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift
+and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal
+Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these
+Trades, or something like them--something so unchangeable, and full as
+strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d'ye see?"
+
+"Nothing, sir."
+
+"Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun!
+Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye,
+he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM--that's bad; I might have known it, too.
+Fool! the lines--the harpoons he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by
+last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look
+outs! Man the braces!"
+
+Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's
+quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
+ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
+white wake.
+
+"Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck to
+himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. "God keep
+us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my
+flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"
+
+"Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket.
+"We should meet him soon."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once
+more Ahab swung on high.
+
+A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held
+long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the
+weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three
+mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced
+it.
+
+"Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
+there!--brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too
+far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that
+helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But
+let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's
+time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and
+not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of
+Nantucket! The same!--the same!--the same to Noah as to me. There's
+a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead
+somewhere--to something else than common land, more palmy than the
+palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward,
+then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old
+mast-head! What's this?--green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks.
+No such green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now
+between man's old age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow old
+together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus
+a leg, that's all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live
+flesh every way. I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships made
+of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of
+vital fathers. What's that he said? he should still go before me, my
+pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the
+bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all
+night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye,
+like many more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee;
+but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head--keep a good
+eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay,
+to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail."
+
+He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
+through the cloven blue air to the deck.
+
+In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop's
+stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
+mate,--who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck--and bade him pause.
+
+"Starbuck!"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."
+
+"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."
+
+"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
+Starbuck!"
+
+"Truth, sir: saddest truth."
+
+"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of
+the flood;--and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb,
+Starbuck. I am old;--shake hands with me, man."
+
+Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.
+
+"Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a
+brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"
+
+"Lower away!"--cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by
+the crew!"
+
+In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
+
+"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;
+"O master, my master, come back!"
+
+But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
+boat leaped on.
+
+Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
+numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath
+the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they
+dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their
+bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in
+those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in
+the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching
+regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been
+observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried;
+and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow
+barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the
+sharks--a matter sometimes well known to affect them,--however it was,
+they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.
+
+"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
+following with his eyes the receding boat--"canst thou yet ring boldly
+to that sight?--lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by
+them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?--For
+when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure
+the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening
+and the end of that thing--be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what
+is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
+expectant,--fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me,
+as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
+Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to
+see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
+clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming? My legs
+feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,--beats
+it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--stave it off--move, move!
+speak aloud!--Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the
+hill?--Crazed;--aloft there!--keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--
+
+"Mark well the whale!--Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he
+tears the vane"--pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha!
+he soars away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,
+oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"
+
+The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--a
+downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but
+intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little
+sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest
+silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the
+opposing bow.
+
+"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
+drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no
+hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!"
+
+Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
+quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of
+ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
+subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
+trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,
+but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
+hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back
+into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for
+an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of
+flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the
+marble trunk of the whale.
+
+"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
+the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in
+him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
+from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
+white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
+as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
+flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two
+mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
+but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.
+
+While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
+whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
+shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round
+and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,
+during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines
+around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment
+frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
+
+The harpoon dropped from his hand.
+
+"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--"Aye, Parsee! I
+see thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the
+hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of
+thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those
+boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to
+me; if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but
+offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
+not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--Where's the
+whale? gone down again?"
+
+But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the
+corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had
+been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily
+swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,--which thus far had
+been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present
+her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost
+velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the
+sea.
+
+"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third
+day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that
+madly seekest him!"
+
+Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to
+leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding
+by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he
+leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow
+him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he
+saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three
+mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats
+which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in
+repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,
+he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves
+on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he
+heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving
+a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or
+flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had
+just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer
+and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
+
+Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance
+to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some
+latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White
+Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly
+nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not been
+so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the
+unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the
+boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became
+jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost
+every dip.
+
+"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on!
+'tis the better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water."
+
+"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"
+
+"They will last long enough! pull on!--But who can tell"--he
+muttered--"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
+Ahab?--But pull on! Aye, all alive, now--we near him. The helm! take the
+helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward
+to the bows of the still flying boat.
+
+At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along
+with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
+advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab was fairly within the
+smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled
+round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when,
+with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
+poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
+hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
+into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh
+flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly
+canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the
+gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed
+into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the
+precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its
+effects--these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of
+them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing
+wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly
+dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
+
+Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
+instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering
+sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with
+the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their
+seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line
+felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!
+
+"What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!
+Burst in upon him!"
+
+Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled
+round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
+catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing
+in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it--it may be--a
+larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
+prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
+
+Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind; hands!
+stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night?"
+
+"The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.
+
+"Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for
+ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see:
+the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?"
+
+But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
+sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks
+burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat
+lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying
+hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.
+
+Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's mast-head hammer
+remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as
+with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
+forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
+bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon
+as he.
+
+"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air,
+now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's
+fainting fit. Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the
+end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab,
+Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again!
+He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one,
+whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!"
+
+"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help
+Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!
+Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking
+eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too
+soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou
+grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of
+as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet
+ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou
+grinning whale, but there'll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye
+not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in
+his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;--cherries!
+cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"
+
+"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope
+my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will
+now come to her, for the voyage is up."
+
+From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
+bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their
+hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their
+enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely
+vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading
+semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance,
+eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal
+man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's
+starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their
+faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook
+on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters
+pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.
+
+"The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;
+"its wood could only be American!"
+
+Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
+keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
+off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a
+time, he lay quiescent.
+
+"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer.
+Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only
+god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed
+prow,--death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I
+cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh,
+lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in
+my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in,
+ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber
+of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering
+whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at
+thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins
+and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let
+me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee,
+thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!"
+
+The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
+velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to
+clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the
+neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was
+shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the
+heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty
+tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
+depths.
+
+For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The
+ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering
+mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana;
+only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or
+fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers
+still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric
+circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating
+oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all
+round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod
+out of sight.
+
+But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
+sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
+erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag,
+which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying
+billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red arm and a hammer
+hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing
+the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that
+tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home
+among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there;
+this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the
+hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill,
+the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen
+there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his
+imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the
+flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink
+to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and
+helmeted herself with it.
+
+Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
+surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
+shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
+
+
+
+
+Epilogue
+
+"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.
+
+The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?--Because one
+did survive the wreck.
+
+It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the
+Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman
+assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three
+men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So,
+floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it,
+when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then,
+but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had
+subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting
+towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling
+circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital
+centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of
+its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great
+force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and
+floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day
+and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks,
+they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks
+sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer,
+and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in
+her retracing search after her missing children, only found another
+orphan.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 2701.txt or 2701.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+ http://www.gutenberg.org/2/7/0/2701/
+
+Produced by Daniel Lazarus and Jonesey
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+ the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+ you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
+ owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+ has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+ Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
+ must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+ prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+ returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+ sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+ address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+ the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+ you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+ does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+ License. You must require such a user to return or
+ destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+ and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+ Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+ money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+ electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+ of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+ distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+ Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+ Chief Executive and Director
+ gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+ http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ulysses, by James Joyce\r
-\r
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with\r
-almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or\r
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included\r
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-\r
-Title: Ulysses\r
-\r
-Author: James Joyce\r
-\r
-Posting Date: August 1, 2008 [EBook #4300]\r
-Release Date: July, 2003\r
-[Last updated: November 17, 2011]\r
-\r
-Language: English\r
-\r
-\r
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ULYSSES ***\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Produced by Col Choat\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-ULYSSES\r
-\r
-by James Joyce\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
--- I --\r
-\r
-Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of\r
-lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,\r
-ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He\r
-held the bowl aloft and intoned:\r
-\r
---_Introibo ad altare Dei_.\r
-\r
-Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:\r
-\r
---Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!\r
-\r
-Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about\r
-and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the\r
-awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent\r
-towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat\r
-and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned\r
-his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking\r
-gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light\r
-untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the\r
-bowl smartly.\r
-\r
---Back to barracks! he said sternly.\r
-\r
-He added in a preacher's tone:\r
-\r
---For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul\r
-and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One\r
-moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.\r
-\r
-He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused\r
-awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there\r
-with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered\r
-through the calm.\r
-\r
---Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off\r
-the current, will you?\r
-\r
-He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering\r
-about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and\r
-sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages.\r
-A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.\r
-\r
---The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!\r
-\r
-He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet,\r
-laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily\r
-halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as\r
-he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and\r
-lathered cheeks and neck.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.\r
-\r
---My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a\r
-Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself.\r
-We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out\r
-twenty quid?\r
-\r
-He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:\r
-\r
---Will he come? The jejune jesuit!\r
-\r
-Ceasing, he began to shave with care.\r
-\r
---Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.\r
-\r
---Yes, my love?\r
-\r
---How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.\r
-\r
---God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks\r
-you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money\r
-and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you\r
-have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you\r
-is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.\r
-\r
-He shaved warily over his chin.\r
-\r
---He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is\r
-his guncase?\r
-\r
---A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?\r
-\r
---I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark\r
-with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a\r
-black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If\r
-he stays on here I am off.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down\r
-from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.\r
-\r
---Scutter! he cried thickly.\r
-\r
-He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper\r
-pocket, said:\r
-\r
---Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.\r
-\r
-Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a\r
-dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.\r
-Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:\r
-\r
---The bard's noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.\r
-You can almost taste it, can't you?\r
-\r
-He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair\r
-oakpale hair stirring slightly.\r
-\r
---God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey\r
-sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. _Epi oinopa\r
-ponton_. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them\r
-in the original. _Thalatta! Thalatta_! She is our great sweet mother.\r
-Come and look.\r
-\r
-Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked\r
-down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of\r
-Kingstown.\r
-\r
---Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said.\r
-\r
-He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's\r
-face.\r
-\r
---The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't\r
-let me have anything to do with you.\r
-\r
---Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.\r
-\r
---You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother\r
-asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to\r
-think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and\r
-pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you...\r
-\r
-He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant\r
-smile curled his lips.\r
-\r
---But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest\r
-mummer of them all!\r
-\r
-He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.\r
-\r
-Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against\r
-his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve.\r
-Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in\r
-a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its\r
-loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her\r
-breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of\r
-wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a\r
-great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay\r
-and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had\r
-stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had\r
-torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.\r
-\r
---Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt\r
-and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?\r
-\r
---They fit well enough, Stephen answered.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.\r
-\r
---The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God\r
-knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair\r
-stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You\r
-look damn well when you're dressed.\r
-\r
---Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.\r
-\r
---He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror.\r
-Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey\r
-trousers.\r
-\r
-He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the\r
-smooth skin.\r
-\r
-Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its\r
-smokeblue mobile eyes.\r
-\r
---That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan,\r
-says you have g.p.i. He's up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General\r
-paralysis of the insane!\r
-\r
-He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad\r
-in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and\r
-the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong\r
-wellknit trunk.\r
-\r
---Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!\r
-\r
-Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by\r
-a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this\r
-face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.\r
-\r
---I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her\r
-all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead\r
-him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.\r
-\r
-Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.\r
-\r
---The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If\r
-Wilde were only alive to see you!\r
-\r
-Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:\r
-\r
---It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him\r
-round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he\r
-had thrust them.\r
-\r
---It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly.\r
-God knows you have more spirit than any of them.\r
-\r
-Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The\r
-cold steelpen.\r
-\r
---Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap\r
-downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and\r
-thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling\r
-jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I\r
-could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise\r
-it.\r
-\r
-Cranly's arm. His arm.\r
-\r
---And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one\r
-that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you\r
-up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I'll\r
-bring down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave\r
-Clive Kempthorpe.\r
-\r
-Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces:\r
-they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. O, I shall\r
-expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit\r
-ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the\r
-table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the\r
-tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't\r
-want to be debagged! Don't you play the giddy ox with me!\r
-\r
-Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf\r
-gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower\r
-on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.\r
-\r
-To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.\r
-\r
---Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at\r
-night.\r
-\r
---Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I'm\r
-quite frank with you. What have you against me now?\r
-\r
-They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the\r
-water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.\r
-\r
---Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.\r
-\r
---Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything.\r
-\r
-He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow,\r
-fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of\r
-anxiety in his eyes.\r
-\r
-Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:\r
-\r
---Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's\r
-death?\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:\r
-\r
---What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and\r
-sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?\r
-\r
---You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to\r
-get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the\r
-drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.\r
-\r
---Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.\r
-\r
---You said, Stephen answered, _O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is\r
-beastly dead._\r
-\r
-A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck\r
-Mulligan's cheek.\r
-\r
---Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?\r
-\r
-He shook his constraint from him nervously.\r
-\r
---And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You\r
-saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and\r
-Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a beastly\r
-thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel\r
-down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why?\r
-Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it's injected the\r
-wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes\r
-are not functioning. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks\r
-buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her\r
-last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like\r
-some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I\r
-didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.\r
-\r
-He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping\r
-wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:\r
-\r
---I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.\r
-\r
---Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.\r
-\r
---Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.\r
-\r
---O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.\r
-\r
-He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post,\r
-gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew\r
-dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt\r
-the fever of his cheeks.\r
-\r
-A voice within the tower called loudly:\r
-\r
---Are you up there, Mulligan?\r
-\r
---I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered.\r
-\r
-He turned towards Stephen and said:\r
-\r
---Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola,\r
-Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.\r
-\r
-His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level\r
-with the roof:\r
-\r
---Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the\r
-moody brooding.\r
-\r
-His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of\r
-the stairhead:\r
-\r
- _And no more turn aside and brood\r
- Upon love's bitter mystery\r
- For Fergus rules the brazen cars._\r
-\r
-\r
-Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the\r
-stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of\r
-water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of\r
-the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the\r
-harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words\r
-shimmering on the dim tide.\r
-\r
-A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in\r
-deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song:\r
-I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her\r
-door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity\r
-I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those\r
-words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.\r
-\r
-Where now?\r
-\r
-Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk,\r
-a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny\r
-window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the\r
-pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:\r
-\r
- _I am the boy\r
- That can enjoy\r
- Invisibility._\r
-\r
-\r
-Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.\r
-\r
-_And no more turn aside and brood._\r
-\r
-\r
-Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his\r
-brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had\r
-approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar,\r
-roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely\r
-fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's\r
-shirts.\r
-\r
-In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its\r
-loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath,\r
-bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.\r
-\r
-Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me\r
-alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured\r
-face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on\r
-their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. _Liliata rutilantium te\r
-confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat._\r
-\r
-Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!\r
-\r
-No, mother! Let me be and let me live.\r
-\r
---Kinch ahoy!\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the\r
-staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry,\r
-heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.\r
-\r
---Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is\r
-apologising for waking us last night. It's all right.\r
-\r
---I'm coming, Stephen said, turning.\r
-\r
---Do, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our\r
-sakes.\r
-\r
-His head disappeared and reappeared.\r
-\r
---I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch\r
-him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.\r
-\r
---I get paid this morning, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.\r
-\r
---If you want it, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll\r
-have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent\r
-sovereigns.\r
-\r
-He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of\r
-tune with a Cockney accent:\r
-\r
- _O, won't we have a merry time,\r
- Drinking whisky, beer and wine!\r
- On coronation,\r
- Coronation day!\r
- O, won't we have a merry time\r
- On coronation day!_\r
-\r
-\r
-Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone,\r
-forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there\r
-all day, forgotten friendship?\r
-\r
-He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,\r
-smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck.\r
-So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and\r
-yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.\r
-\r
-In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form\r
-moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its\r
-yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor\r
-from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of\r
-coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.\r
-\r
---We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?\r
-\r
-Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the\r
-hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open\r
-the inner doors.\r
-\r
---Have you the key? a voice asked.\r
-\r
---Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked!\r
-\r
-He howled, without looking up from the fire:\r
-\r
---Kinch!\r
-\r
---It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.\r
-\r
-The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been\r
-set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the\r
-doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and\r
-sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside\r
-him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set\r
-them down heavily and sighed with relief.\r
-\r
---I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when... But, hush! Not a\r
-word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines,\r
-come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.\r
-Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.\r
-\r
-Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from\r
-the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.\r
-\r
---What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.\r
-\r
---We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There's a lemon in the\r
-locker.\r
-\r
---O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove\r
-milk.\r
-\r
-Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:\r
-\r
---That woman is coming up with the milk.\r
-\r
---The blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his\r
-chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here,\r
-I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.\r
-\r
-He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three\r
-plates, saying:\r
-\r
---_In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._\r
-\r
-Haines sat down to pour out the tea.\r
-\r
---I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do\r
-make strong tea, don't you?\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's\r
-wheedling voice:\r
-\r
---When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I\r
-makes water I makes water.\r
-\r
---By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:\r
-\r
---_So I do, Mrs Cahill,_ says she. _Begob, ma'am,_ says Mrs Cahill, _God\r
-send you don't make them in the one pot._\r
-\r
-He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled\r
-on his knife.\r
-\r
---That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five\r
-lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of\r
-Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.\r
-\r
-He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his\r
-brows:\r
-\r
---Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken\r
-of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?\r
-\r
---I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.\r
-\r
---Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?\r
-\r
---I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the\r
-Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.\r
-\r
---Charming! he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth\r
-and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming!\r
-\r
-Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened\r
-rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:\r
-\r
- _--For old Mary Ann\r
- She doesn't care a damn.\r
- But, hising up her petticoats..._\r
-\r
-\r
-He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.\r
-\r
-The doorway was darkened by an entering form.\r
-\r
---The milk, sir!\r
-\r
---Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.\r
-\r
-An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow.\r
-\r
---That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.\r
-\r
---To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure!\r
-\r
-Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.\r
-\r
---The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of\r
-the collector of prepuces.\r
-\r
---How much, sir? asked the old woman.\r
-\r
---A quart, Stephen said.\r
-\r
-He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white\r
-milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and\r
-a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe\r
-a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out.\r
-Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her\r
-toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed\r
-about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old\r
-woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of\r
-an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common\r
-cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid,\r
-whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.\r
-\r
---It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.\r
-\r
---Taste it, sir, she said.\r
-\r
-He drank at her bidding.\r
-\r
---If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat\r
-loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten\r
-guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with\r
-dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.\r
-\r
---Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.\r
-\r
---I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered.\r
-\r
---Look at that now, she said.\r
-\r
-Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice\r
-that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she\r
-slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there\r
-is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in\r
-God's likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids\r
-her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.\r
-\r
---Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.\r
-\r
---Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.\r
-\r
-Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.\r
-\r
---Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?\r
-\r
---I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the\r
-west, sir?\r
-\r
---I am an Englishman, Haines answered.\r
-\r
---He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak\r
-Irish in Ireland.\r
-\r
---Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak\r
-the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.\r
-\r
---Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill\r
-us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am?\r
-\r
---No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the\r
-milkcan on her forearm and about to go.\r
-\r
-Haines said to her:\r
-\r
---Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we?\r
-\r
-Stephen filled again the three cups.\r
-\r
---Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at\r
-twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three\r
-mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a\r
-shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly\r
-buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his\r
-trouser pockets.\r
-\r
---Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him, smiling.\r
-\r
-Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the\r
-thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in\r
-his fingers and cried:\r
-\r
---A miracle!\r
-\r
-He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:\r
-\r
---Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.\r
-\r
-Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.\r
-\r
---We'll owe twopence, he said.\r
-\r
---Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good\r
-morning, sir.\r
-\r
-She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant:\r
-\r
- _--Heart of my heart, were it more,\r
- More would be laid at your feet._\r
-\r
-\r
-He turned to Stephen and said:\r
-\r
---Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring\r
-us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland\r
-expects that every man this day will do his duty.\r
-\r
---That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your\r
-national library today.\r
-\r
---Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.\r
-\r
-He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:\r
-\r
---Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?\r
-\r
-Then he said to Haines:\r
-\r
---The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.\r
-\r
---All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey\r
-trickle over a slice of the loaf.\r
-\r
-Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the\r
-loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:\r
-\r
---I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.\r
-\r
-Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.\r
-Conscience. Yet here's a spot.\r
-\r
---That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol\r
-of Irish art is deuced good.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth\r
-of tone:\r
-\r
---Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.\r
-\r
---Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just\r
-thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.\r
-\r
---Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.\r
-\r
-Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of\r
-the hammock, said:\r
-\r
---I don't know, I'm sure.\r
-\r
-He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and\r
-said with coarse vigour:\r
-\r
---You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?\r
-\r
---Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the\r
-milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.\r
-\r
---I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along\r
-with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.\r
-\r
---I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.\r
-\r
---From me, Kinch, he said.\r
-\r
-In a suddenly changed tone he added:\r
-\r
---To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they\r
-are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all.\r
-Let us get out of the kip.\r
-\r
-He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying\r
-resignedly:\r
-\r
---Mulligan is stripped of his garments.\r
-\r
-He emptied his pockets on to the table.\r
-\r
---There's your snotrag, he said.\r
-\r
-And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them,\r
-chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and\r
-rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God,\r
-we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and\r
-green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I\r
-contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of\r
-his talking hands.\r
-\r
---And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.\r
-\r
-Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the\r
-doorway:\r
-\r
---Are you coming, you fellows?\r
-\r
---I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,\r
-Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out\r
-with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:\r
-\r
---And going forth he met Butterly.\r
-\r
-Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out\r
-and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and\r
-locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.\r
-\r
-At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:\r
-\r
---Did you bring the key?\r
-\r
---I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.\r
-\r
-He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy\r
-bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.\r
-\r
---Down, sir! How dare you, sir!\r
-\r
-Haines asked:\r
-\r
---Do you pay rent for this tower?\r
-\r
---Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.\r
-\r
---To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.\r
-\r
-They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:\r
-\r
---Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?\r
-\r
---Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on\r
-the sea. But ours is the _omphalos_.\r
-\r
---What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.\r
-\r
---No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas\r
-and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I\r
-have a few pints in me first.\r
-\r
-He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his\r
-primrose waistcoat:\r
-\r
---You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?\r
-\r
---It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.\r
-\r
---You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?\r
-\r
---Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.\r
-It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is\r
-Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own\r
-father.\r
-\r
---What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in\r
-loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear:\r
-\r
---O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!\r
-\r
---We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is\r
-rather long to tell.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.\r
-\r
---The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.\r
-\r
---I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this\r
-tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. _That beetles\r
-o'er his base into the sea,_ isn't it?\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did\r
-not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in\r
-cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.\r
-\r
---It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.\r
-\r
-Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.\r
-The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the\r
-smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail\r
-tacking by the Muglins.\r
-\r
---I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.\r
-The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the\r
-Father.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked\r
-at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had\r
-suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved\r
-a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and\r
-began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:\r
-\r
- _--I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.\r
- My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.\r
- With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.\r
- So here's to disciples and Calvary._\r
-\r
-\r
-He held up a forefinger of warning.\r
-\r
- _--If anyone thinks that I amn't divine\r
- He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine\r
- But have to drink water and wish it were plain\r
- That i make when the wine becomes water again._\r
-\r
-\r
-He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward\r
-to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or\r
-wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:\r
-\r
- _--Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said\r
- And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.\r
- What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly\r
- And Olivet's breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye!_\r
-\r
-\r
-He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his\r
-winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh\r
-wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.\r
-\r
-Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and\r
-said:\r
-\r
---We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a\r
-believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of\r
-it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?\r
-\r
---The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.\r
-\r
---O, Haines said, you have heard it before?\r
-\r
---Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.\r
-\r
---You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in\r
-the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a\r
-personal God.\r
-\r
---There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.\r
-\r
-Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a\r
-green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.\r
-\r
---Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.\r
-\r
-Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his\r
-sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang\r
-it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk\r
-towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.\r
-\r
---Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe\r
-or you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a\r
-personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?\r
-\r
---You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible\r
-example of free thought.\r
-\r
-He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his\r
-side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels.\r
-My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line\r
-along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark.\r
-He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt\r
-bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his\r
-eyes.\r
-\r
---After all, Haines began...\r
-\r
-Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not\r
-all unkind.\r
-\r
---After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your\r
-own master, it seems to me.\r
-\r
---I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an\r
-Italian.\r
-\r
---Italian? Haines said.\r
-\r
-A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.\r
-\r
---And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.\r
-\r
---Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?\r
-\r
---The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and\r
-the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.\r
-\r
-Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he\r
-spoke.\r
-\r
---I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think\r
-like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather\r
-unfairly. It seems history is to blame.\r
-\r
-The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph\r
-of their brazen bells: _et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam\r
-ecclesiam:_ the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own\r
-rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the\r
-mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in\r
-affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church\r
-militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies\r
-fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of\r
-whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the\r
-consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning\r
-Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who\r
-held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken\r
-a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void\r
-awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a\r
-worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host,\r
-who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their\r
-shields.\r
-\r
-Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. _Zut! Nom de Dieu!_\r
-\r
---Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, and I feel as one. I\r
-don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either.\r
-That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.\r
-\r
-Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman.\r
-\r
---She's making for Bullock harbour.\r
-\r
-The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.\r
-\r
---There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way\r
-when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today.\r
-\r
-The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting\r
-for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face,\r
-saltwhite. Here I am.\r
-\r
-They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on\r
-a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder.\r
-A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise\r
-his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.\r
-\r
---Is the brother with you, Malachi?\r
-\r
---Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.\r
-\r
---Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young\r
-thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.\r
-\r
---Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near\r
-the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones,\r
-water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water\r
-rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black\r
-sagging loincloth.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines\r
-and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips\r
-and breastbone.\r
-\r
---Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of\r
-rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.\r
-\r
---Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said.\r
-\r
---Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?\r
-\r
---Yes.\r
-\r
---Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with\r
-money.\r
-\r
---Is she up the pole?\r
-\r
---Better ask Seymour that.\r
-\r
---Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said.\r
-\r
-He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying\r
-tritely:\r
-\r
---Redheaded women buck like goats.\r
-\r
-He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.\r
-\r
---My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the _Uebermensch._ Toothless\r
-Kinch and I, the supermen.\r
-\r
-He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his\r
-clothes lay.\r
-\r
---Are you going in here, Malachi?\r
-\r
---Yes. Make room in the bed.\r
-\r
-The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached\r
-the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a\r
-stone, smoking.\r
-\r
---Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.\r
-\r
---Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.\r
-\r
-Stephen turned away.\r
-\r
---I'm going, Mulligan, he said.\r
-\r
---Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.\r
-\r
-Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped\r
-clothes.\r
-\r
---And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.\r
-\r
-Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck\r
-Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:\r
-\r
---He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake\r
-Zarathustra.\r
-\r
-His plump body plunged.\r
-\r
---We'll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the\r
-path and smiling at wild Irish.\r
-\r
-Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.\r
-\r
---The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.\r
-\r
---Good, Stephen said.\r
-\r
-He walked along the upwardcurving path.\r
-\r
- _Liliata rutilantium.\r
- Turma circumdet.\r
- Iubilantium te virginum._\r
-\r
-\r
-The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will\r
-not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.\r
-\r
-A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning\r
-the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a\r
-seal's, far out on the water, round.\r
-\r
-Usurper.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
---You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?\r
-\r
---Tarentum, sir.\r
-\r
---Very good. Well?\r
-\r
---There was a battle, sir.\r
-\r
---Very good. Where?\r
-\r
-The boy's blank face asked the blank window.\r
-\r
-Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as\r
-memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings\r
-of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling\r
-masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?\r
-\r
---I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.\r
-\r
---Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the\r
-gorescarred book.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir. And he said: _Another victory like that and we are done\r
-for._\r
-\r
-That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From\r
-a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers,\r
-leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.\r
-\r
---You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?\r
-\r
---End of Pyrrhus, sir?\r
-\r
---I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.\r
-\r
---Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?\r
-\r
-A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel. He curled them\r
-between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to\r
-the tissue of his lips. A sweetened boy's breath. Welloff people, proud\r
-that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico road, Dalkey.\r
-\r
---Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.\r
-\r
-All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round\r
-at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh\r
-more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.\r
-\r
---Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book,\r
-what is a pier.\r
-\r
---A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the water. A kind of a\r
-bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.\r
-\r
-Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench\r
-whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent.\r
-All. With envy he watched their faces: Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their\r
-likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets\r
-tittering in the struggle.\r
-\r
---Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.\r
-\r
-The words troubled their gaze.\r
-\r
---How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.\r
-\r
-For Haines's chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild\r
-drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A\r
-jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a\r
-clement master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly\r
-for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other\r
-too often heard, their land a pawnshop.\r
-\r
-Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not\r
-been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has\r
-branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite\r
-possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing\r
-that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?\r
-Weave, weaver of the wind.\r
-\r
---Tell us a story, sir.\r
-\r
---O, do, sir. A ghoststory.\r
-\r
---Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.\r
-\r
--_-Weep no more,_ Comyn said.\r
-\r
---Go on then, Talbot.\r
-\r
---And the story, sir?\r
-\r
---After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.\r
-\r
-A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork\r
-of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text:\r
-\r
- _--Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more\r
- For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,\r
- Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor..._\r
-\r
-\r
-It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.\r
-Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated\r
-out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he\r
-had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow\r
-a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains\r
-about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and\r
-in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of\r
-brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of\r
-thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the\r
-soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of\r
-forms.\r
-\r
-Talbot repeated:\r
-\r
- _--Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,\r
- Through the dear might..._\r
-\r
-\r
---Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don't see anything.\r
-\r
---What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.\r
-\r
-His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again, having\r
-just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these\r
-craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and\r
-on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the\r
-tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long\r
-look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the\r
-church's looms. Ay.\r
-\r
- _Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.\r
- My father gave me seeds to sow._\r
-\r
-\r
-Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.\r
-\r
---Have I heard all? Stephen asked.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.\r
-\r
---Half day, sir. Thursday.\r
-\r
---Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.\r
-\r
-They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.\r
-Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling\r
-gaily:\r
-\r
---A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.\r
-\r
---O, ask me, sir.\r
-\r
---A hard one, sir.\r
-\r
---This is the riddle, Stephen said:\r
-\r
- _The cock crew,\r
- The sky was blue:\r
- The bells in heaven\r
- Were striking eleven.\r
- 'Tis time for this poor soul\r
- To go to heaven._\r
-\r
-\r
-What is that?\r
-\r
---What, sir?\r
-\r
---Again, sir. We didn't hear.\r
-\r
-Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence\r
-Cochrane said:\r
-\r
---What is it, sir? We give it up.\r
-\r
-Stephen, his throat itching, answered:\r
-\r
---The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.\r
-\r
-He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries\r
-echoed dismay.\r
-\r
-A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:\r
-\r
---Hockey!\r
-\r
-They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly\r
-they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and\r
-clamour of their boots and tongues.\r
-\r
-Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open\r
-copybook. His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness\r
-and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his\r
-cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent\r
-and damp as a snail's bed.\r
-\r
-He held out his copybook. The word _Sums_ was written on the headline.\r
-Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with\r
-blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.\r
-\r
---Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them\r
-to you, sir.\r
-\r
-Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.\r
-\r
---Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.\r
-\r
---Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to\r
-copy them off the board, sir.\r
-\r
---Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.\r
-\r
---No, sir.\r
-\r
-Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's\r
-bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.\r
-But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot,\r
-a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained\r
-from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His\r
-mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode.\r
-She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire,\r
-an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being\r
-trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul\r
-gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek\r
-of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth,\r
-listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.\r
-\r
-Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra\r
-that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered askance\r
-through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the\r
-hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.\r
-\r
-Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of\r
-their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,\r
-traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from\r
-the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement,\r
-flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a\r
-darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.\r
-\r
---Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?\r
-\r
---Yes, sir.\r
-\r
-In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word\r
-of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of\r
-shame flickering behind his dull skin. _Amor matris:_ subjective and\r
-objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed\r
-him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.\r
-\r
-Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My\r
-childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or\r
-lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony\r
-sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their\r
-tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.\r
-\r
-The sum was done.\r
-\r
---It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.\r
-\r
-He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his\r
-copybook back to his bench.\r
-\r
---You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said\r
-as he followed towards the door the boy's graceless form.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir.\r
-\r
-In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.\r
-\r
---Sargent!\r
-\r
---Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.\r
-\r
-He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy\r
-field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and\r
-Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When\r
-he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him. He\r
-turned his angry white moustache.\r
-\r
---What is it now? he cried continually without listening.\r
-\r
---Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore\r
-order here.\r
-\r
-And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man's voice\r
-cried sternly:\r
-\r
---What is the matter? What is it now?\r
-\r
-Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms closed\r
-round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head.\r
-\r
-Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather\r
-of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As it was\r
-in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins,\r
-base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their spooncase\r
-of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all the\r
-gentiles: world without end.\r
-\r
-A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his\r
-rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.\r
-\r
---First, our little financial settlement, he said.\r
-\r
-He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It\r
-slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and\r
-laid them carefully on the table.\r
-\r
---Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.\r
-\r
-And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen's embarrassed hand moved\r
-over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money\r
-cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir's turban, and\r
-this, the scallop of saint James. An old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure,\r
-hollow shells.\r
-\r
-A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.\r
-\r
---Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand.\r
-These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for\r
-shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.\r
-\r
-He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.\r
-\r
---Three twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right.\r
-\r
---Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy\r
-haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.\r
-\r
---No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.\r
-\r
-Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too\r
-of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket: symbols soiled by greed and\r
-misery.\r
-\r
---Don't carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You'll pull it out somewhere\r
-and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them very\r
-handy.\r
-\r
-Answer something.\r
-\r
---Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.\r
-\r
-The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times\r
-now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this instant\r
-if I will.\r
-\r
---Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't\r
-know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I\r
-have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?\r
-_Put but money in thy purse._\r
-\r
---Iago, Stephen murmured.\r
-\r
-He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.\r
-\r
---He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but\r
-an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you\r
-know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's\r
-mouth?\r
-\r
-The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems\r
-history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.\r
-\r
---That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.\r
-\r
---Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He\r
-tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.\r
-\r
---I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. _I paid\r
-my way._\r
-\r
-Good man, good man.\r
-\r
-_--I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life._ Can you feel\r
-that? _I owe nothing._ Can you?\r
-\r
-Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.\r
-Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings.\r
-Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob\r
-Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five\r
-weeks' board. The lump I have is useless.\r
-\r
---For the moment, no, Stephen answered.\r
-\r
-Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.\r
-\r
---I knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it.\r
-We are a generous people but we must also be just.\r
-\r
---I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.\r
-\r
-Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the\r
-shapely bulk of a man in tartan filibegs: Albert Edward, prince of\r
-Wales.\r
-\r
---You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said.\r
-I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine in\r
-'46. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the\r
-union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your\r
-communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.\r
-\r
-Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the\r
-splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the\r
-planters' covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie\r
-down.\r
-\r
-Stephen sketched a brief gesture.\r
-\r
---I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But\r
-I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are\r
-all Irish, all kings' sons.\r
-\r
---Alas, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---_Per vias rectas_, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for\r
-it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do\r
-so.\r
-\r
- _Lal the ral the ra\r
- The rocky road to Dublin._\r
-\r
-\r
-A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John!\r
-Soft day, your honour!... Day!... Day!... Two topboots jog dangling\r
-on to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra. Lal the ral the raddy.\r
-\r
---That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus,\r
-with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press.\r
-Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.\r
-\r
-He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read\r
-off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.\r
-\r
---Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, _the dictates of\r
-common sense._ Just a moment.\r
-\r
-He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow\r
-and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly,\r
-sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.\r
-\r
-Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed\r
-around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek\r
-heads poised in air: lord Hastings' Repulse, the duke of Westminster's\r
-Shotover, the duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, _prix de Paris_, 1866. Elfin\r
-riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds, backing king's\r
-colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds.\r
-\r
---Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. But prompt ventilation of this\r
-allimportant question...\r
-\r
-Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the\r
-mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek\r
-of the canteen, over the motley slush. Fair Rebel! Fair Rebel! Even\r
-money the favourite: ten to one the field. Dicers and thimbleriggers\r
-we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past\r
-the meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of\r
-orange.\r
-\r
-Shouts rang shrill from the boys' playfield and a whirring whistle.\r
-\r
-Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley,\r
-the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother's darling who seems\r
-to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock.\r
-Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain,\r
-a shout of spearspikes baited with men's bloodied guts.\r
-\r
---Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.\r
-\r
-He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.\r
-\r
---I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about\r
-the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two\r
-opinions on the matter.\r
-\r
-May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of _laissez faire_\r
-which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old\r
-industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.\r
-European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of\r
-the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of\r
-agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who\r
-was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.\r
-\r
---I don't mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.\r
-\r
-Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus.\r
-Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at Murzsteg,\r
-lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous\r
-offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In\r
-every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the\r
-hospitality of your columns.\r
-\r
---I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the\r
-next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can\r
-be cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is\r
-regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They\r
-offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with\r
-the department. Now I'm going to try publicity. I am surrounded by\r
-difficulties, by... intrigues by... backstairs influence by...\r
-\r
-He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.\r
-\r
---Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the\r
-jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are\r
-the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the\r
-nation's vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure\r
-as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of\r
-destruction. Old England is dying.\r
-\r
-He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a\r
-broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.\r
-\r
---Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.\r
-\r
- _The harlot's cry from street to street\r
- Shall weave old England's windingsheet._\r
-\r
-\r
-His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which\r
-he halted.\r
-\r
---A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or\r
-gentile, is he not?\r
-\r
---They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see\r
-the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the\r
-earth to this day.\r
-\r
-On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting\r
-prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud,\r
-uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk\r
-hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full\r
-slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but\r
-knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain\r
-patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard\r
-heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their\r
-years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.\r
-\r
---Who has not? Stephen said.\r
-\r
---What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.\r
-\r
-He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell\r
-sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.\r
-\r
---History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.\r
-\r
-From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.\r
-What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?\r
-\r
---The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human\r
-history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.\r
-\r
-Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:\r
-\r
---That is God.\r
-\r
-Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!\r
-\r
---What? Mr Deasy asked.\r
-\r
---A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.\r
-\r
-Mr Deasy looked down and held for awhile the wings of his nose tweaked\r
-between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.\r
-\r
---I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and\r
-many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no\r
-better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten\r
-years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the\r
-strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough's wife and her leman, O'Rourke,\r
-prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many\r
-failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my\r
-days. But I will fight for the right till the end.\r
-\r
- _For Ulster will fight\r
- And Ulster will be right._\r
-\r
-\r
-Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.\r
-\r
---Well, sir, he began...\r
-\r
---I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long\r
-at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am\r
-wrong.\r
-\r
---A learner rather, Stephen said.\r
-\r
-And here what will you learn more?\r
-\r
-Mr Deasy shook his head.\r
-\r
---Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great\r
-teacher.\r
-\r
-Stephen rustled the sheets again.\r
-\r
---As regards these, he began.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them\r
-published at once.\r
-\r
-_ Telegraph. Irish Homestead._\r
-\r
---I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two\r
-editors slightly.\r
-\r
---That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field,\r
-M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders' association today at the\r
-City Arms hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You\r
-see if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?\r
-\r
-_--The Evening Telegraph..._\r
-\r
---That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to\r
-answer that letter from my cousin.\r
-\r
---Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.\r
-Thank you.\r
-\r
---Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I\r
-like to break a lance with you, old as I am.\r
-\r
---Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.\r
-\r
-He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees,\r
-hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield.\r
-The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate:\r
-toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub\r
-me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.\r
-\r
---Mr Dedalus!\r
-\r
-Running after me. No more letters, I hope.\r
-\r
---Just one moment.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.\r
-\r
-Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.\r
-\r
---I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of\r
-being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know\r
-that? No. And do you know why?\r
-\r
-He frowned sternly on the bright air.\r
-\r
---Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.\r
-\r
---Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.\r
-\r
-A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a\r
-rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing,\r
-his lifted arms waving to the air.\r
-\r
---She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he\r
-stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That's why.\r
-\r
-On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung\r
-spangles, dancing coins.\r
-\r
-\r
-Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought\r
-through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn\r
-and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver,\r
-rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.\r
-Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By\r
-knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a\r
-millionaire, _maestro di color che sanno_. Limit of the diaphane in. Why\r
-in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it\r
-is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.\r
-\r
-\r
-Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and\r
-shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time.\r
-A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six:\r
-the _nacheinander_. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the\r
-audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles\r
-o'er his base, fell through the _nebeneinander_ ineluctably! I am\r
-getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with\r
-it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs,\r
-_nebeneinander_. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of _Los Demiurgos_.\r
-Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick,\r
-crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'. Won't you come to\r
-Sandymount, Madeline the mare?\r
-\r
-\r
-Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs\r
-marching. No, agallop: _deline the mare_.\r
-\r
-Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I\r
-open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. _Basta_! I will see if I\r
-can see.\r
-\r
-See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world\r
-without end.\r
-\r
-They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, _Frauenzimmer_:\r
-and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in\r
-the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother.\r
-Number one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp poked in\r
-the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe,\r
-relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One\r
-of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing.\r
-What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed\r
-in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of\r
-all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your\r
-omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha:\r
-nought, nought, one.\r
-\r
-Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.\r
-Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum,\r
-no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to\r
-everlasting. Womb of sin.\r
-\r
-Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man\r
-with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.\r
-They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages\r
-He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A _lex eterna_ stays\r
-about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are\r
-consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring\r
-his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred\r
-heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia.\r
-With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of\r
-a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.\r
-\r
-Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves.\r
-The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of\r
-Mananaan.\r
-\r
-I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half\r
-twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.\r
-\r
-Yes, I must.\r
-\r
-His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara's or not? My\r
-consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist\r
-brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with\r
-his aunt Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and\r
-and tell us, Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the things I\r
-married into! De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer\r
-and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers! And\r
-skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less! Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir.\r
-Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ!\r
-\r
-I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take\r
-me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.\r
-\r
---It's Stephen, sir.\r
-\r
---Let him in. Let Stephen in.\r
-\r
-A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.\r
-\r
---We thought you were someone else.\r
-\r
-In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over the\r
-hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the\r
-upper moiety.\r
-\r
---Morrow, nephew.\r
-\r
-He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for\r
-the eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and\r
-common searches and a writ of _Duces Tecum_. A bogoak frame over his\r
-bald head: Wilde's _Requiescat_. The drone of his misleading whistle\r
-brings Walter back.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir?\r
-\r
---Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?\r
-\r
---Bathing Crissie, sir.\r
-\r
-Papa's little bedpal. Lump of love.\r
-\r
---No, uncle Richie...\r
-\r
---Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!\r
-\r
---Uncle Richie, really...\r
-\r
---Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you down.\r
-\r
-Walter squints vainly for a chair.\r
-\r
---He has nothing to sit down on, sir.\r
-\r
---He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.\r
-Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs\r
-here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the\r
-better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.\r
-\r
-_All'erta_!\r
-\r
-He drones bars of Ferrando's _aria di sortita_. The grandest number,\r
-Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.\r
-\r
-His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the air,\r
-his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.\r
-\r
-This wind is sweeter.\r
-\r
-Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you\r
-had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of\r
-them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's\r
-library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom?\r
-The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind\r
-ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon,\r
-his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine\r
-faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas\r
-father,--furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff!\r
-_Descende, calve, ut ne amplius decalveris_. A garland of grey hair\r
-on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace\r
-(_descende_!), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, baldpoll!\r
-A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns,\r
-the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured\r
-and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.\r
-\r
-And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating\r
-it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.\r
-Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own\r
-cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,\r
-invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled\r
-his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his\r
-second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and,\r
-rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang\r
-in diphthong.\r
-\r
-Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were\r
-awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you\r
-might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue\r
-that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the\r
-wet street. _O si, certo_! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned\r
-round a squaw. More tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram\r
-alone crying to the rain: Naked women! _naked women_! What about that,\r
-eh?\r
-\r
-What about what? What else were they invented for?\r
-\r
-Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.\r
-You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause\r
-earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one\r
-saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles.\r
-Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O\r
-yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply\r
-deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the\r
-world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few\r
-thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very\r
-like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one\r
-feels that one is at one with one who once...\r
-\r
-The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again\r
-a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the\r
-unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.\r
-Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing\r
-upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a\r
-midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle\r
-stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel:\r
-isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze\r
-of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the\r
-higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams\r
-of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.\r
-\r
-He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there?\r
-Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand\r
-towards the Pigeonhouse.\r
-\r
-_--Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?_\r
-\r
-_--c'est le pigeon, Joseph._\r
-\r
-Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon.\r
-Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he\r
-lapped the sweet _lait chaud_ with pink young tongue, plump bunny's\r
-face. Lap, _lapin._ He hopes to win in the _gros lots_. About the nature\r
-of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me _La Vie de Jesus_ by\r
-M. Leo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.\r
-\r
-_--C'est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas\r
-en l'existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire a mon p-re._\r
-\r
-_--Il croit?_\r
-\r
-_--Mon pere, oui._\r
-\r
-_Schluss_. He laps.\r
-\r
-My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want\r
-puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other\r
-devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: _physiques, chimiques et\r
-naturelles_. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of _mou en civet_, fleshpots\r
-of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural\r
-tone: when I was in Paris; _boul' Mich'_, I used to. Yes, used to\r
-carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder\r
-somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the\r
-prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me.\r
-Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. _Lui, c'est moi_. You seem to have enjoyed\r
-yourself.\r
-\r
-Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a\r
-dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging\r
-door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger\r
-toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Ferme_. Hired\r
-dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered\r
-walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not\r
-hurt? O, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's\r
-all right. Shake a shake. O, that's all only all right.\r
-\r
-You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery\r
-Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt from\r
-their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing: _Euge! Euge_! Pretending to speak\r
-broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across\r
-the slimy pier at Newhaven. _Comment?_ Rich booty you brought back; _Le\r
-Tutu_, five tattered numbers of _Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge_; a\r
-blue French telegram, curiosity to show:\r
-\r
---Mother dying come home father.\r
-\r
-The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't.\r
-\r
- _Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt\r
- And I'll tell you the reason why.\r
- She always kept things decent in\r
- The Hannigan famileye._\r
-\r
-\r
-His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by\r
-the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone\r
-mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is\r
-there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.\r
-\r
-Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of\r
-farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court\r
-the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the\r
-kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In\r
-Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering\r
-with gold teeth _chaussons_ of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the\r
-_pus_ of _flan breton_. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased\r
-pleasers, curled conquistadores.\r
-\r
-Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers\r
-smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his\r
-white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. _Un demi\r
-setier!_ A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me\r
-at his beck. _Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais,\r
-nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui!_ She thought you wanted a cheese\r
-_hollandais_. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial.\r
-There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call\r
-it his postprandial. Well: _slainte_! Around the slabbed tables the\r
-tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our\r
-saucestained plates, the green fairy's fang thrusting between his lips.\r
-Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith\r
-now, A E, pimander, good shepherd of men. To yoke me as his yokefellow,\r
-our crimes our common cause. You're your father's son. I know the voice.\r
-His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at\r
-his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called\r
-queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. _Vieille ogresse_\r
-with the _dents jaunes_. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, _La Patrie_, M.\r
-Millevoye, Felix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken,\r
-_bonne a tout faire_, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala.\r
-_Moi faire_, she said, _Tous les messieurs_. Not this _Monsieur_, I\r
-said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn't let\r
-my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes,\r
-I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.\r
-\r
-The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose\r
-tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw\r
-facebones under his peep of day boy's hat. How the head centre got away,\r
-authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil, orangeblossoms,\r
-drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the\r
-betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.\r
-\r
-Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you.\r
-I'll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love he\r
-prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls\r
-of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward\r
-in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides,\r
-Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations,\r
-the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps\r
-short night in, rue de la Goutte-d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of\r
-the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy\r
-without her outcast man, madame in rue Git-le-Coeur, canary and two\r
-buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's.\r
-Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won't you? I wanted to\r
-get poor Pat a job one time. _Mon fils_, soldier of France. I taught him\r
-to sing _The boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades_. Know that old\r
-lay? I taught Patrice that. Old Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow's\r
-castle on the Nore. Goes like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by\r
-the hand.\r
-\r
- _O, O THE BOYS OF\r
- KILKENNY..._\r
-\r
-\r
-Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them.\r
-Remembering thee, O Sion.\r
-\r
-He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.\r
-The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of\r
-seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship,\r
-am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the\r
-quaking soil. Turn back.\r
-\r
-Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly\r
-in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the\r
-barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my\r
-feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk,\r
-nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait,\r
-their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned\r
-platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when\r
-this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their--blind\r
-bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted his\r
-feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take\r
-all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's\r
-midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing\r
-Elsinore's tempting flood.\r
-\r
-The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back\r
-then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge\r
-and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a\r
-grike.\r
-\r
-A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the\r
-gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. _Un coche ensablé_ Louis Veuillot\r
-called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind\r
-have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren\r
-of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and\r
-stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout's toys. Mind you don't get one\r
-bang on the ear. I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well\r
-boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz\r
-an Iridzman.\r
-\r
-A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.\r
-Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not\r
-be master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From\r
-farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures,\r
-two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes.\r
-Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?\r
-\r
-Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their\r
-bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings,\r
-torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the\r
-collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon,\r
-spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city\r
-a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives, running,\r
-scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and\r
-slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among\r
-them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering\r
-resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.\r
-\r
-The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I\r
-just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. _Terribilia meditans_. A\r
-primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you\r
-pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The\r
-Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck,\r
-York's false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of\r
-a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion\r
-crowned. All kings' sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved\r
-men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers\r
-who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of...\r
-We don't want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he\r
-did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. _Natürlich_, put there for you.\r
-Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off\r
-Maiden's rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I\r
-would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft.\r
-When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can't see! Who's\r
-behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in\r
-on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If\r
-I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be\r
-mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his\r
-death. I... With him together down... I could not save her. Waters:\r
-bitter death: lost.\r
-\r
-A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.\r
-\r
-Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on\r
-all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made\r
-off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a\r
-lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He\r
-turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a\r
-field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of\r
-the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His\r
-snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented\r
-towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking,\r
-plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.\r
-\r
-Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping,\r
-soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped\r
-running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again\r
-reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as\r
-they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from\r
-his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a\r
-calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked\r
-round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like\r
-a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes\r
-on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies\r
-poor dogsbody's body.\r
-\r
---Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel!\r
-\r
-The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless\r
-kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He\r
-slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he\r
-lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed\r
-against it. He trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed\r
-quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His\r
-hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.\r
-Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand,\r
-dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand\r
-again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in\r
-spousebreach, vulturing the dead.\r
-\r
-After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway.\r
-Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That\r
-man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my\r
-face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red\r
-carpet spread. You will see who.\r
-\r
-Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet\r
-out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler\r
-strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the\r
-ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and\r
-shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face hair trailed.\r
-Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing awast to Romeville. When night hides\r
-her body's flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway\r
-where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in\r
-O'Loughlin's of Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogues' rum lingo, for, O,\r
-my dimber wapping dell! A shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags.\r
-Fumbally's lane that night: the tanyard smells.\r
-\r
- _White thy fambles, red thy gan\r
- And thy quarrons dainty is.\r
- Couch a hogshead with me then.\r
- In the darkmans clip and kiss._\r
-\r
-\r
-Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, _frate porcospino_.\r
-Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him: _thy quarrons\r
-dainty is_. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads jabber\r
-on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.\r
-\r
-Passing now.\r
-\r
-A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I\r
-am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming\r
-sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps,\r
-trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in\r
-her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, _oinopa\r
-ponton_, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep\r
-the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of\r
-death, ghostcandled. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. He comes, pale vampire,\r
-through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her\r
-mouth's kiss.\r
-\r
-Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.\r
-\r
-No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss.\r
-\r
-His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb.\r
-Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:\r
-ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring\r
-wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's\r
-letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off.\r
-Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and\r
-scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library\r
-counter.\r
-\r
-His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till\r
-the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness\r
-shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there\r
-with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid\r
-sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.\r
-I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back.\r
-Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who\r
-ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field.\r
-Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne\r
-took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with\r
-coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat:\r
-yes, that's right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat\r
-I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly, frozen in\r
-stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is\r
-in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our\r
-sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the\r
-more.\r
-\r
-She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue\r
-hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of\r
-the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges\r
-Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you\r
-were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the\r
-braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with a grief\r
-and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else, Stevie: a\r
-pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and\r
-yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumplings,\r
-_piuttosto_. Where are your wits?\r
-\r
-Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me\r
-soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.\r
-Sad too. Touch, touch me.\r
-\r
-He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled\r
-note and pencil into a pock his hat. His hat down on his eyes. That is\r
-Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep. _Et\r
-vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona_. Alo! _Bonjour_. Welcome as the flowers\r
-in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the\r
-southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal\r
-noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the\r
-tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.\r
-\r
- _And no more turn aside and brood._\r
-\r
-His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs,\r
-_nebeneinander_. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein\r
-another's foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in\r
-tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's\r
-shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. _Tiens, quel petit pied!_\r
-Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde's love that dare not speak its\r
-name. His arm: Cranly's arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I\r
-am. As I am. All or not at all.\r
-\r
-In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering\r
-greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float\r
-away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the\r
-low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a\r
-fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of\r
-waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops:\r
-flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It\r
-flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.\r
-\r
-Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and\r
-sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water\r
-swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night:\r
-lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to,\r
-they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting,\r
-awaiting the fullness of their times, _diebus ac noctibus iniurias\r
-patiens ingemiscit_. To no end gathered; vainly then released,\r
-forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of\r
-lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a\r
-toil of waters.\r
-\r
-Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he\r
-said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose\r
-drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising\r
-saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise landward.\r
-There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath the watery\r
-floor. We have him. Easy now.\r
-\r
-Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a\r
-spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly.\r
-God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed\r
-mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a\r
-urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes\r
-upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to\r
-the sun.\r
-\r
-A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths\r
-known to man. Old Father Ocean. _Prix de paris_: beware of imitations.\r
-Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.\r
-\r
-Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there?\r
-Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect,\r
-_Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum_. No. My cockle hat and staff and\r
-hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.\r
-\r
-He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying\r
-still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make\r
-their end. By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest\r
-day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn\r
-Tennyson, gentleman poet. _Già_. For the old hag with the yellow teeth.\r
-And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. _Già_. My teeth are very\r
-bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a\r
-dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the\r
-superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?\r
-\r
-My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?\r
-\r
-His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn't. Better buy one.\r
-\r
-He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock,\r
-carefully. For the rest let look who will.\r
-\r
-Behind. Perhaps there is someone.\r
-\r
-He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the\r
-air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees,\r
-homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. +\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
--- II --\r
-\r
-Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.\r
-He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,\r
-liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all\r
-he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of\r
-faintly scented urine.\r
-\r
-Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting\r
-her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the\r
-kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel\r
-a bit peckish.\r
-\r
-The coals were reddening.\r
-\r
-Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like\r
-her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off\r
-the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat,\r
-its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked\r
-stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.\r
-\r
---Mkgnao!\r
-\r
---O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.\r
-\r
-The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the\r
-table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my\r
-head. Prr.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see:\r
-the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her\r
-tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his\r
-knees.\r
-\r
---Milk for the pussens, he said.\r
-\r
---Mrkgnao! the cat cried.\r
-\r
-They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we\r
-understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too.\r
-Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder\r
-what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.\r
-\r
---Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the\r
-chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.\r
-\r
-Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.\r
-\r
---Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.\r
-\r
-She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively\r
-and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits\r
-narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to\r
-the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him,\r
-poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.\r
-\r
---Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.\r
-\r
-He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped\r
-three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they\r
-can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or\r
-kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.\r
-\r
-He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this\r
-drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a\r
-mutton kidney at Buckley's. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better\r
-a pork kidney at Dlugacz's. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped\r
-slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough?\r
-To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced round\r
-him. No.\r
-\r
-On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by\r
-the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter\r
-she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way.\r
-\r
-He said softly in the bare hall:\r
-\r
---I'm going round the corner. Be back in a minute.\r
-\r
-And when he had heard his voice say it he added:\r
-\r
---You don't want anything for breakfast?\r
-\r
-A sleepy soft grunt answered:\r
-\r
---Mn.\r
-\r
-No. She didn't want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer,\r
-as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled.\r
-Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar.\r
-Forgotten any little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for\r
-it. Old style. Ah yes! of course. Bought it at the governor's auction.\r
-Got a short knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At\r
-Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I'm proud of it.\r
-Still he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was\r
-farseeing.\r
-\r
-His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat\r
-and his lost property office secondhand waterproof. Stamps: stickyback\r
-pictures. Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too. Course they do.\r
-The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto's\r
-high grade ha. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip\r
-of paper. Quite safe.\r
-\r
-On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there.\r
-In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe.\r
-No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled\r
-the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped\r
-gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I\r
-come back anyhow.\r
-\r
-He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number\r
-seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George's church. Be a\r
-warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black\r
-conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn't go in\r
-that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as\r
-he walked in happy warmth. Boland's breadvan delivering with trays our\r
-daily but she prefers yesterday's loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.\r
-Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at\r
-dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep\r
-it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand,\r
-strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old\r
-Tweedy's big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of a spear. Wander\r
-through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet\r
-shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled\r
-pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel,\r
-sherbet. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well,\r
-meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among the\r
-pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal,\r
-the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches me from\r
-her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High\r
-wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet, colour of Molly's\r
-new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments\r
-what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass.\r
-\r
-Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track\r
-of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What\r
-Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the _Freeman_ leader: a\r
-homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank\r
-of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule\r
-sun rising up in the north-west.\r
-\r
-He approached Larry O'Rourke's. From the cellar grating floated up the\r
-flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out\r
-whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the\r
-end of the city traffic. For instance M'Auley's down there: n. g. as\r
-position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from\r
-the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.\r
-\r
-Baldhead over the blind. Cute old codger. No use canvassing him for an\r
-ad. Still he knows his own business best. There he is, sure enough, my\r
-bold Larry, leaning against the sugarbin in his shirtsleeves watching\r
-the aproned curate swab up with mop and bucket. Simon Dedalus takes him\r
-off to a tee with his eyes screwed up. Do you know what I'm going to\r
-tell you? What's that, Mr O'Rourke? Do you know what? The Russians,\r
-they'd only be an eight o'clock breakfast for the Japanese.\r
-\r
-Stop and say a word: about the funeral perhaps. Sad thing about poor\r
-Dignam, Mr O'Rourke.\r
-\r
-Turning into Dorset street he said freshly in greeting through the\r
-doorway:\r
-\r
---Good day, Mr O'Rourke.\r
-\r
---Good day to you.\r
-\r
---Lovely weather, sir.\r
-\r
---'Tis all that.\r
-\r
-Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county\r
-Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold,\r
-they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then thin of the\r
-competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without\r
-passing a pub. Save it they can't. Off the drunks perhaps. Put down\r
-three and carry five. What is that, a bob here and there, dribs and\r
-drabs. On the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with the\r
-town travellers. Square it you with the boss and we'll split the job,\r
-see?\r
-\r
-How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten barrels\r
-of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. O more. Fifteen. He passed Saint\r
-Joseph's National school. Brats' clamour. Windows open. Fresh air\r
-helps memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee\r
-doubleyou. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At\r
-their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom.\r
-\r
-He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring at the hanks of sausages,\r
-polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The figures whitened\r
-in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links,\r
-packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the\r
-lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs' blood.\r
-\r
-A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He\r
-stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling\r
-the items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda. And a pound and\r
-a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips.\r
-Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood.\r
-No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the\r
-clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt\r
-swings at each whack.\r
-\r
-The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with\r
-blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there: like a stallfed heifer.\r
-\r
-He took a page up from the pile of cut sheets: the model farm at\r
-Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter\r
-sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round\r
-it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting:\r
-read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page\r
-rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the\r
-beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the\r
-breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm\r
-on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in\r
-their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and\r
-his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging,\r
-whack by whack by whack.\r
-\r
-The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime\r
-sausages and made a red grimace.\r
-\r
---Now, my miss, he said.\r
-\r
-She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.\r
-\r
---Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you,\r
-please?\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went\r
-slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the\r
-morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood\r
-outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He\r
-sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted\r
-toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways.\r
-The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For\r
-another: a constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles lane. They like\r
-them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the\r
-wood.\r
-\r
---Threepence, please.\r
-\r
-His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket.\r
-Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers' pocket and laid them\r
-on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid,\r
-disc by disc, into the till.\r
-\r
---Thank you, sir. Another time.\r
-\r
-A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze\r
-after an instant. No: better not: another time.\r
-\r
---Good morning, he said, moving away.\r
-\r
---Good morning, sir.\r
-\r
-No sign. Gone. What matter?\r
-\r
-He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim:\r
-planters' company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish\r
-government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel\r
-and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa.\r
-You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives,\r
-oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial\r
-irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered\r
-for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the\r
-balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15.\r
-\r
-Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.\r
-\r
-He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silverpowdered\r
-olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. Olives are packed in\r
-jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows\r
-the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons\r
-too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade. And Mastiansky\r
-with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron's\r
-basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it\r
-to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild\r
-perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too,\r
-Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times.\r
-Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar,\r
-Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa,\r
-chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in\r
-soiled dungarees. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn't\r
-see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that\r
-Norwegian captain's. Wonder if I'll meet him today. Watering cart. To\r
-provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.\r
-\r
-A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.\r
-\r
-No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead\r
-sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those\r
-waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it\r
-raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead\r
-names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the\r
-oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a\r
-naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over\r
-all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born\r
-everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old\r
-woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.\r
-\r
-Desolation.\r
-\r
-Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned\r
-into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins,\r
-chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here\r
-now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of\r
-the bed. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. On the hands down.\r
-Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that?\r
-Valuation is only twenty-eight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur:\r
-parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell\r
-the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her\r
-ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.\r
-\r
-Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim\r
-sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a\r
-girl with gold hair on the wind.\r
-\r
-Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered\r
-them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand.\r
-Mrs Marion.\r
-\r
---Poldy!\r
-\r
-Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm\r
-yellow twilight towards her tousled head.\r
-\r
---Who are the letters for?\r
-\r
-He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly.\r
-\r
---A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And\r
-a letter for you.\r
-\r
-He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of her\r
-knees.\r
-\r
---Do you want the blind up?\r
-\r
-Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her\r
-glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.\r
-\r
---That do? he asked, turning.\r
-\r
-She was reading the card, propped on her elbow.\r
-\r
---She got the things, she said.\r
-\r
-He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back\r
-slowly with a snug sigh.\r
-\r
---Hurry up with that tea, she said. I'm parched.\r
-\r
---The kettle is boiling, he said.\r
-\r
-But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled\r
-linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed.\r
-\r
-As he went down the kitchen stairs she called:\r
-\r
---Poldy!\r
-\r
---What?\r
-\r
---Scald the teapot.\r
-\r
-On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded and\r
-rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting the\r
-kettle then to let the water flow in. Having set it to draw he took off\r
-the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump\r
-of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed\r
-hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won't mouse. Say they\r
-won't eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to\r
-her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He\r
-sprinkled it through his fingers ringwise from the chipped eggcup.\r
-\r
-Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks:\r
-new tam: Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan's\r
-seaside girls.\r
-\r
-The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown\r
-\r
-Derby, smiling. Silly Milly's birthday gift. Only five she was then. No,\r
-wait: four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces\r
-of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring.\r
-\r
- _O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.\r
- You are my lookingglass from night to morning.\r
- I'd rather have you without a farthing\r
- Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden._\r
-\r
-\r
-Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous\r
-old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And\r
-the little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into\r
-the parlour. O, look what I found in professor Goodwin's hat! All we\r
-laughed. Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.\r
-\r
-He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over: then fitted the\r
-teapot on the tray. Its hump bumped as he took it up. Everything on\r
-it? Bread and butter, four, sugar, spoon, her cream. Yes. He carried it\r
-upstairs, his thumb hooked in the teapot handle.\r
-\r
-Nudging the door open with his knee he carried the tray in and set it on\r
-the chair by the bedhead.\r
-\r
---What a time you were! she said.\r
-\r
-She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on\r
-the pillow. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft\r
-bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder. The warmth\r
-of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the\r
-tea she poured.\r
-\r
-A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the\r
-act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.\r
-\r
---Who was the letter from? he asked.\r
-\r
-Bold hand. Marion.\r
-\r
---O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.\r
-\r
---What are you singing?\r
-\r
---_La ci darem_ with J. C. Doyle, she said, and _Love's Old Sweet Song_.\r
-\r
-Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves\r
-next day. Like foul flowerwater.\r
-\r
---Would you like the window open a little?\r
-\r
-She doubled a slice of bread into her mouth, asking:\r
-\r
---What time is the funeral?\r
-\r
---Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn't see the paper.\r
-\r
-Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled\r
-drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a\r
-stocking: rumpled, shiny sole.\r
-\r
---No: that book.\r
-\r
-Other stocking. Her petticoat.\r
-\r
---It must have fell down, she said.\r
-\r
-He felt here and there. _Voglio e non vorrei_. Wonder if she pronounces\r
-that right: _voglio_. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped\r
-and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of\r
-the orangekeyed chamberpot.\r
-\r
---Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There's a word I wanted to\r
-ask you.\r
-\r
-She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and,\r
-having wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the\r
-text with the hairpin till she reached the word.\r
-\r
---Met him what? he asked.\r
-\r
---Here, she said. What does that mean?\r
-\r
-He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.\r
-\r
---Metempsychosis?\r
-\r
---Yes. Who's he when he's at home?\r
-\r
---Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It's Greek: from the Greek. That\r
-means the transmigration of souls.\r
-\r
---O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.\r
-\r
-He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eyes. The same young eyes.\r
-The first night after the charades. Dolphin's Barn. He turned over\r
-the smudged pages. _Ruby: the Pride of the Ring_. Hello. Illustration.\r
-Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor\r
-naked. Sheet kindly lent. _The monster Maffei desisted and flung his\r
-victim from him with an oath_. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals.\r
-Trapeze at Hengler's. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your\r
-neck and we'll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so\r
-they metamspychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man's\r
-soul after he dies. Dignam's soul...\r
-\r
---Did you finish it? he asked.\r
-\r
---Yes, she said. There's nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the\r
-first fellow all the time?\r
-\r
---Never read it. Do you want another?\r
-\r
---Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has.\r
-\r
-She poured more tea into her cup, watching it flow sideways.\r
-\r
-Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they'll write to\r
-Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation: that's the word.\r
-\r
---Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body\r
-after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That\r
-we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other\r
-planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past\r
-lives.\r
-\r
-The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Bette remind\r
-her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be better. An example?\r
-\r
-The _Bath of the Nymph_ over the bed. Given away with the Easter number\r
-of _Photo Bits_: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you\r
-put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six\r
-I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked\r
-nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then.\r
-\r
-He turned the pages back.\r
-\r
---Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They\r
-used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for\r
-instance. What they called nymphs, for example.\r
-\r
-Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her,\r
-inhaling through her arched nostrils.\r
-\r
---There's a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?\r
-\r
---The kidney! he cried suddenly.\r
-\r
-He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes\r
-against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping\r
-hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork's legs. Pungent smoke shot\r
-up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of the\r
-fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back.\r
-Only a little burnt. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the\r
-scanty brown gravy trickle over it.\r
-\r
-Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf.\r
-He shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a\r
-forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant\r
-meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of bread,\r
-sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth. What was that about\r
-some young student and a picnic? He creased out the letter at his side,\r
-reading it slowly as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in the\r
-gravy and raising it to his mouth.\r
-\r
-Dearest Papli\r
-\r
-Thanks ever so much for the lovely birthday present. It suits me\r
-splendid. Everyone says I am quite the belle in my new tam. I got\r
-mummy's Iovely box of creams and am writing. They are lovely. I am\r
-getting on swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of me\r
-and Mrs. Will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair day\r
-and all the beef to the heels were in. We are going to lough Owel on\r
-Monday with a few friends to make a scrap picnic. Give my love to\r
-mummy and to yourself a big kiss and thanks. I hear them at the piano\r
-downstairs. There is to be a concert in the Greville Arms on Saturday.\r
-There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his\r
-cousins or something are big swells and he sings Boylan's (I was on the\r
-pop of writing Blazes Boylan's) song about those seaside girls. Tell him\r
-silly Milly sends my best respects. I must now close with fondest love\r
-\r
-Your fond daughter, MILLY.\r
-\r
-P. S. Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Byby. M.\r
-\r
-Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too. Her first\r
-birthday away from home. Separation. Remember the summer morning she\r
-was born, running to knock up Mrs Thornton in Denzille street. Jolly old\r
-woman. Lot of babies she must have helped into the world. She knew from\r
-the first poor little Rudy wouldn't live. Well, God is good, sir. She\r
-knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived.\r
-\r
-His vacant face stared pityingly at the postscript. Excuse bad writing.\r
-Hurry. Piano downstairs. Coming out of her shell. Row with her in the\r
-XL Cafe about the bracelet. Wouldn't eat her cakes or speak or look.\r
-Saucebox. He sopped other dies of bread in the gravy and ate piece after\r
-piece of kidney. Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still, she might do\r
-worse. Music hall stage. Young student. He drank a draught of cooler tea\r
-to wash down his meal. Then he read the letter again: twice.\r
-\r
-O, well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has\r
-happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case till it does. A wild\r
-piece of goods. Her slim legs running up the staircase. Destiny.\r
-Ripening now.\r
-\r
-Vain: very.\r
-\r
-He smiled with troubled affection at the kitchen window. Day I caught\r
-her in the street pinching her cheeks to make them red. Anemic a little.\r
-Was given milk too long. On the ERIN'S KING that day round the Kish.\r
-Damned old tub pitching about. Not a bit funky. Her pale blue scarf\r
-loose in the wind with her hair. _All dimpled cheeks and curls, Your\r
-head it simply swirls._\r
-\r
-\r
-Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers' pockets,\r
-jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says.\r
-Pier with lamps, summer evening, band,\r
-\r
- _Those girls, those girls,\r
- Those lovely seaside girls._\r
-\r
-\r
-Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion.\r
-Reading, lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling,\r
-braiding.\r
-\r
-A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen,\r
-yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen\r
-too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now.\r
-Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman's lips.\r
-\r
-Better where she is down there: away. Occupy her. Wanted a dog to pass\r
-the time. Might take a trip down there. August bank holiday, only two\r
-and six return. Six weeks off, however. Might work a press pass. Or\r
-through M'Coy.\r
-\r
-The cat, having cleaned all her fur, returned to the meatstained paper,\r
-nosed at it and stalked to the door. She looked back at him, mewing.\r
-Wants to go out. Wait before a door sometime it will open. Let her wait.\r
-Has the fidgets. Electric. Thunder in the air. Was washing at her ear\r
-with her back to the fire too.\r
-\r
-He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up,\r
-undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.\r
-\r
---Miaow! he said in answer. Wait till I'm ready.\r
-\r
-Heaviness: hot day coming. Too much trouble to fag up the stairs to the\r
-landing.\r
-\r
-A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as\r
-I'm.\r
-\r
-In the tabledrawer he found an old number of _Titbits_. He folded it\r
-under his armpit, went to the door and opened it. The cat went up in\r
-soft bounds. Ah, wanted to go upstairs, curl up in a ball on the bed.\r
-\r
-Listening, he heard her voice:\r
-\r
---Come, come, pussy. Come.\r
-\r
-He went out through the backdoor into the garden: stood to listen\r
-towards the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry.\r
-The maid was in the garden. Fine morning.\r
-\r
-He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall.\r
-Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to\r
-manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur.\r
-All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this\r
-that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top\r
-dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are\r
-fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid\r
-gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in\r
-that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still gardens\r
-have their drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday.\r
-\r
-He walked on. Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the\r
-peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny I don't remember that. Hallstand\r
-too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters.\r
-Drago's shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown\r
-brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder\r
-have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox\r
-there got away James Stephens, they say. O'Brien.\r
-\r
-Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. Agendath what is it? Now, my miss.\r
-Enthusiast.\r
-\r
-He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get\r
-these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head\r
-under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy\r
-limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he\r
-peered through a chink up at the nextdoor windows. The king was in his\r
-countinghouse. Nobody.\r
-\r
-Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over\r
-on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a\r
-bit. Our prize titbit: _Matcham's Masterstroke_. Written by Mr Philip\r
-Beaufoy, Playgoers' Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea\r
-a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds\r
-three. Three pounds, thirteen and six.\r
-\r
-Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but\r
-resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he\r
-allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still\r
-patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's\r
-not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One\r
-tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch\r
-him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly\r
-season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat\r
-certainly. _Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the\r
-laughing witch who now_. Begins and ends morally. _Hand in hand_. Smart.\r
-He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water\r
-flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and\r
-received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six.\r
-\r
-Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for\r
-some proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she\r
-said dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving. Biting\r
-her nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her. 9.l5.\r
-Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy on? 9.23. What\r
-possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I'm swelled after that cabbage. A\r
-speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.\r
-\r
-Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stockinged calf. Morning\r
-after the bazaar dance when May's band played Ponchielli's dance of the\r
-hours. Explain that: morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then\r
-night hours. Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her head\r
-dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that Boylan well off? He has money.\r
-Why? I noticed he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing. No use\r
-humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind of music that last night. The\r
-mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen\r
-vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into it. Lines in her eyes.\r
-It wouldn't pan out somehow.\r
-\r
-Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then: black with daggers\r
-and eyemasks. Poetical idea: pink, then golden, then grey, then black.\r
-Still, true to life also. Day: then the night.\r
-\r
-He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.\r
-Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled\r
-back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom\r
-into the air.\r
-\r
-In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he eyed carefully his\r
-black trousers: the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees. What time\r
-is the funeral? Better find out in the paper.\r
-\r
-A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George's\r
-church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron.\r
-\r
- _Heigho! Heigho!\r
- Heigho! Heigho!\r
- Heigho! Heigho!_\r
-\r
-\r
-Quarter to. There again: the overtone following through the air, third.\r
-\r
-Poor Dignam!\r
-\r
-\r
-By lorries along sir John Rogerson's quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past\r
-Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office.\r
-Could have given that address too. And past the sailors' home. He turned\r
-from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street.\r
-By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal\r
-linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema\r
-on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell\r
-him if he smokes he won't grow. O let him! His life isn't such a bed of\r
-roses. Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da.\r
-Slack hour: won't be many there. He crossed Townsend street, passed\r
-the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth. And past\r
-Nichols' the undertaker. At eleven it is. Time enough. Daresay Corny\r
-Kelleher bagged the job for O'Neill's. Singing with his eyes shut.\r
-Corny. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout.\r
-Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay.\r
-O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my\r
-tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.\r
-\r
-\r
-In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental\r
-Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend,\r
-finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom\r
-Kernan. Couldn't ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read\r
-blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his\r
-right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning.\r
-Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather\r
-headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand came down\r
-into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card behind the\r
-headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket.\r
-\r
-So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and\r
-hair. Then he put on his hat again, relieved: and read again: choice\r
-blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it\r
-must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on,\r
-cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like\r
-that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in _dolce far niente_,\r
-not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot\r
-to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The\r
-air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants.\r
-Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on\r
-roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap\r
-I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his\r
-back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so\r
-thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of\r
-the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the\r
-volume is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in\r
-High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum.\r
-Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight?\r
-Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second\r
-per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It's the force of\r
-gravity of the earth is the weight.\r
-\r
-He turned away and sauntered across the road. How did she walk with her\r
-sausages? Like that something. As he walked he took the folded _Freeman_\r
-from his sidepocket, unfolded it, rolled it lengthwise in a baton and\r
-tapped it at each sauntering step against his trouserleg. Careless air:\r
-just drop in to see. Per second per second. Per second for every second\r
-it means. From the curbstone he darted a keen glance through the door of\r
-the postoffice. Too late box. Post here. No-one. In.\r
-\r
-He handed the card through the brass grill.\r
-\r
---Are there any letters for me? he asked.\r
-\r
-While the postmistress searched a pigeonhole he gazed at the recruiting\r
-poster with soldiers of all arms on parade: and held the tip of his\r
-baton against his nostrils, smelling freshprinted rag paper. No answer\r
-probably. Went too far last time.\r
-\r
-The postmistress handed him back through the grill his card with a\r
-letter. He thanked her and glanced rapidly at the typed envelope.\r
-\r
-Henry Flower Esq, c/o P. O. Westland Row, City.\r
-\r
-Answered anyhow. He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket,\r
-reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where's old Tweedy's regiment?\r
-Castoff soldier. There: bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he's a\r
-grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats.\r
-Too showy. That must be why the women go after them. Uniform. Easier to\r
-enlist and drill. Maud Gonne's letter about taking them off O'Connell\r
-street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith's paper is on\r
-the same tack now: an army rotten with venereal disease: overseas or\r
-halfseasover empire. Half baked they look: hypnotised like. Eyes front.\r
-Mark time. Table: able. Bed: ed. The King's own. Never see him dressed\r
-up as a fireman or a bobby. A mason, yes.\r
-\r
-He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. Talk: as if\r
-that would mend matters. His hand went into his pocket and a forefinger\r
-felt its way under the flap of the envelope, ripping it open in jerks.\r
-Women will pay a lot of heed, I don't think. His fingers drew forth the\r
-letter the letter and crumpled the envelope in his pocket. Something\r
-pinned on: photo perhaps. Hair? No.\r
-\r
-M'Coy. Get rid of him quickly. Take me out of my way. Hate company when\r
-you.\r
-\r
---Hello, Bloom. Where are you off to?\r
-\r
---Hello, M'Coy. Nowhere in particular.\r
-\r
---How's the body?\r
-\r
---Fine. How are you?\r
-\r
---Just keeping alive, M'Coy said.\r
-\r
-His eyes on the black tie and clothes he asked with low respect:\r
-\r
---Is there any... no trouble I hope? I see you're...\r
-\r
---O, no, Mr Bloom said. Poor Dignam, you know. The funeral is today.\r
-\r
---To be sure, poor fellow. So it is. What time?\r
-\r
-A photo it isn't. A badge maybe.\r
-\r
---E... eleven, Mr Bloom answered.\r
-\r
---I must try to get out there, M'Coy said. Eleven, is it? I only heard\r
-it last night. Who was telling me? Holohan. You know Hoppy?\r
-\r
---I know.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door\r
-of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She\r
-stood still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her,\r
-searched his pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll\r
-collar, warm for a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless\r
-stand of her with her hands in those patch pockets. Like that haughty\r
-creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot.\r
-Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable\r
-Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch\r
-out of her.\r
-\r
---I was with Bob Doran, he's on one of his periodical bends, and what do\r
-you call him Bantam Lyons. Just down there in Conway's we were.\r
-\r
-Doran Lyons in Conway's. She raised a gloved hand to her hair. In came\r
-Hoppy. Having a wet. Drawing back his head and gazing far from beneath\r
-his vailed eyelids he saw the bright fawn skin shine in the glare, the\r
-braided drums. Clearly I can see today. Moisture about gives long sight\r
-perhaps. Talking of one thing or another. Lady's hand. Which side will\r
-she get up?\r
-\r
---And he said: _Sad thing about our poor friend Paddy! What Paddy?_ I\r
-said. _Poor little Paddy Dignam_, he said.\r
-\r
-Off to the country: Broadstone probably. High brown boots with laces\r
-dangling. Wellturned foot. What is he foostering over that change for?\r
-Sees me looking. Eye out for other fellow always. Good fallback. Two\r
-strings to her bow.\r
-\r
---_Why?_ I said. _What's wrong with him?_ I said.\r
-\r
-Proud: rich: silk stockings.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-He moved a little to the side of M'Coy's talking head. Getting up in a\r
-minute.\r
-\r
---_What's wrong with him_? He said. _He's dead_, he said. And, faith,\r
-he filled up. _Is it Paddy Dignam_? I said. I couldn't believe it when I\r
-heard it. I was with him no later than Friday last or Thursday was it in\r
-the Arch. _Yes,_ he said. _He's gone. He died on Monday, poor fellow_.\r
-Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!\r
-\r
-A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between.\r
-\r
-Lost it. Curse your noisy pugnose. Feels locked out of it. Paradise and\r
-the peri. Always happening like that. The very moment. Girl in Eustace\r
-street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering\r
-the display of _esprit de corps_. Well, what are you gaping at?\r
-\r
---Yes, yes, Mr Bloom said after a dull sigh. Another gone.\r
-\r
---One of the best, M'Coy said.\r
-\r
-The tram passed. They drove off towards the Loop Line bridge, her rich\r
-gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker: the laceflare of her\r
-hat in the sun: flicker, flick.\r
-\r
---Wife well, I suppose? M'Coy's changed voice said.\r
-\r
---O, yes, Mr Bloom said. Tiptop, thanks.\r
-\r
-He unrolled the newspaper baton idly and read idly:\r
-\r
-_What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete With it an\r
-abode of bliss._\r
-\r
---My missus has just got an engagement. At least it's not settled yet.\r
-\r
-Valise tack again. By the way no harm. I'm off that, thanks.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom turned his largelidded eyes with unhasty friendliness.\r
-\r
---My wife too, he said. She's going to sing at a swagger affair in the\r
-Ulster Hall, Belfast, on the twenty-fifth.\r
-\r
---That so? M'Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who's getting it up?\r
-\r
-Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and.\r
-No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady\r
-and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.\r
-\r
- _Love's\r
- Old\r
- Sweet\r
- Song\r
- Comes lo-ove's old..._\r
-\r
---It's a kind of a tour, don't you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully.\r
-_Sweeeet song_. There's a committee formed. Part shares and part\r
-profits.\r
-\r
-M'Coy nodded, picking at his moustache stubble.\r
-\r
---O, well, he said. That's good news.\r
-\r
-He moved to go.\r
-\r
---Well, glad to see you looking fit, he said. Meet you knocking around.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
---Tell you what, M'Coy said. You might put down my name at the funeral,\r
-will you? I'd like to go but I mightn't be able, you see. There's a\r
-drowning case at Sandycove may turn up and then the coroner and myself\r
-would have to go down if the body is found. You just shove in my name if\r
-I'm not there, will you?\r
-\r
---I'll do that, Mr Bloom said, moving to get off. That'll be all right.\r
-\r
---Right, M'Coy said brightly. Thanks, old man. I'd go if I possibly\r
-could. Well, tolloll. Just C. P. M'Coy will do.\r
-\r
---That will be done, Mr Bloom answered firmly.\r
-\r
-Didn't catch me napping that wheeze. The quick touch. Soft mark. I'd\r
-like my job. Valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped\r
-corners, rivetted edges, double action lever lock. Bob Cowley lent him\r
-his for the Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings of\r
-it from that good day to this.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, strolling towards Brunswick street, smiled. My missus has just\r
-got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its\r
-way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don't you know:\r
-in the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can't\r
-he hear the difference? Think he's that way inclined a bit. Against\r
-my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that\r
-smallpox up there doesn't get worse. Suppose she wouldn't let herself be\r
-vaccinated again. Your wife and my wife.\r
-\r
-Wonder is he pimping after me?\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured\r
-hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery's Summer\r
-Sale. No, he's going on straight. Hello. _Leah_ tonight. Mrs Bandmann\r
-Palmer. Like to see her again in that. _Hamlet_ she played last night.\r
-Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed\r
-suicide. Poor papa! How he used to talk of Kate Bateman in that. Outside\r
-the Adelphi in London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before\r
-I was born that was: sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What is this the\r
-right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The scene he was\r
-always talking about where the old blind Abraham recognises the voice\r
-and puts his fingers on his face.\r
-\r
-Nathan's voice! His son's voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his\r
-father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his\r
-father and left the God of his father.\r
-\r
-Every word is so deep, Leopold.\r
-\r
-Poor papa! Poor man! I'm glad I didn't go into the room to look at his\r
-face. That day! O, dear! O, dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was best for\r
-him.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of the\r
-hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time. Wish I hadn't met\r
-that M'Coy fellow.\r
-\r
-He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing\r
-teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet\r
-oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they\r
-know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags.\r
-Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss.\r
-Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their\r
-haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they\r
-look. Still their neigh can be very irritating.\r
-\r
-He drew the letter from his pocket and folded it into the newspaper he\r
-carried. Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer.\r
-\r
-He passed the cabman's shelter. Curious the life of drifting cabbies.\r
-All weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their own. _Voglio\r
-e non_. Like to give them an odd cigarette. Sociable. Shout a few flying\r
-syllables as they pass. He hummed:\r
-\r
- _La ci darem la mano\r
- La la lala la la._\r
-\r
-He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in the\r
-lee of the station wall. No-one. Meade's timberyard. Piled balks. Ruins\r
-and tenements. With careful tread he passed over a hopscotch court with\r
-its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted\r
-child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise\r
-tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb\r
-them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it.\r
-And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame's school. She\r
-liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis's. And Mr? He opened the letter within the\r
-newspaper.\r
-\r
-A flower. I think it's a. A yellow flower with flattened petals. Not\r
-annoyed then? What does she say?\r
-\r
-Dear Henry\r
-\r
-I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it. I am sorry\r
-you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am\r
-awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called\r
-you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me\r
-what is the real meaning of that word? Are you not happy in your home\r
-you poor little naughty boy? I do wish I could do something for you.\r
-Please tell me what you think of poor me. I often think of the beautiful\r
-name you have. Dear Henry, when will we meet? I think of you so often\r
-you have no idea. I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as\r
-you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me\r
-more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what I\r
-will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote. O how I long to\r
-meet you. Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are\r
-exhausted. Then I will tell you all. Goodbye now, naughty darling, I\r
-have such a bad headache. today. and write _by return_ to your longing\r
-\r
-Martha\r
-\r
-P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to\r
-know.\r
-\r
-He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell\r
-and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it\r
-because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then\r
-walking slowly forward he read the letter again, murmuring here and\r
-there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus\r
-if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses\r
-when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume.\r
-Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his\r
-sidepocket.\r
-\r
-Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder did she\r
-wrote it herself. Doing the indignant: a girl of good family like me,\r
-respectable character. Could meet one Sunday after the rosary. Thank\r
-you: not having any. Usual love scrimmage. Then running round corners.\r
-Bad as a row with Molly. Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic. Go\r
-further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course.\r
-Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.\r
-\r
-Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it.\r
-Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere:\r
-pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses\r
-without thorns.\r
-\r
-Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the\r
-Coombe, linked together in the rain.\r
-\r
- _O, Mary lost the pin of her drawers.\r
- She didn't know what to do\r
- To keep it up\r
- To keep it up._\r
-\r
-It? Them. Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all\r
-day typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves. What perfume does your wife\r
-use. Now could you make out a thing like that?\r
-\r
- _To keep it up._\r
-\r
-Martha, Mary. I saw that picture somewhere I forget now old master or\r
-faked for money. He is sitting in their house, talking. Mysterious. Also\r
-the two sluts in the Coombe would listen.\r
-\r
- _To keep it up._\r
-\r
-Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there:\r
-quiet dusk: let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have been,\r
-strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper:\r
-fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of a well, stonecold like the hole\r
-in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the\r
-trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and\r
-more: all. Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.\r
-\r
-Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly\r
-in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered\r
-away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank.\r
-\r
-Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in the\r
-same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure\r
-cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be\r
-made out of porter. Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change\r
-his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. A\r
-million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart,\r
-eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter.\r
-One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen millions\r
-of barrels of porter.\r
-\r
-What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the same.\r
-\r
-An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach.\r
-Barrels bumped in his head: dull porter slopped and churned inside.\r
-The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing\r
-together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy\r
-pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.\r
-\r
-He had reached the open backdoor of All Hallows. Stepping into the porch\r
-he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it again\r
-behind the leather headband. Damn it. I might have tried to work M'Coy\r
-for a pass to Mullingar.\r
-\r
-Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S.J.\r
-on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African Mission. Prayers for the\r
-conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious. The\r
-protestants are the same. Convert Dr William J. Walsh D.D. to the true\r
-religion. Save China's millions. Wonder how they explain it to the\r
-heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for\r
-them. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy\r
-with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo. Crown\r
-of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks?\r
-Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguishedlooking. Sorry I\r
-didn't work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of that\r
-Father Farley who looked a fool but wasn't. They're taught that. He's\r
-not going out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to baptise\r
-blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see\r
-them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still\r
-life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.\r
-\r
-The cold smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps,\r
-pushed the swingdoor and entered softly by the rere.\r
-\r
-Something going on: some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place\r
-to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour? Jammed by the hour to slow\r
-music. That woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Women knelt in the\r
-benches with crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch\r
-knelt at the altarrails. The priest went along by them, murmuring,\r
-holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a\r
-communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it\r
-neatly into her mouth. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one. Her hat\r
-sank at once. Then the next one: a small old woman. The priest bent down\r
-to put it into her mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next one.\r
-Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? _Corpus:_ body. Corpse. Good\r
-idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They\r
-don't seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a\r
-corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it.\r
-\r
-He stood aside watching their blind masks pass down the aisle, one by\r
-one, and seek their places. He approached a bench and seated himself in\r
-its corner, nursing his hat and newspaper. These pots we have to wear.\r
-We ought to have hats modelled on our heads. They were about him here\r
-and there, with heads still bowed in their crimson halters, waiting for\r
-it to melt in their stomachs. Something like those mazzoth: it's that\r
-sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes\r
-them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called.\r
-There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel.\r
-First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family\r
-party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of\r
-that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish.\r
-Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure,\r
-waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old\r
-fellow asleep near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith.\r
-Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next\r
-year.\r
-\r
-He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an\r
-instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace\r
-affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn't know what\r
-to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S.\r
-Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have\r
-suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.\r
-\r
-Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up with\r
-a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be here\r
-with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the\r
-sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen's evidence on the\r
-invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion\r
-every morning. This very church. Peter Carey, yes. No, Peter Claver I am\r
-thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six children\r
-at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those crawthumpers,\r
-now that's a good name for them, there's always something shiftylooking\r
-about them. They're not straight men of business either. O, no, she's\r
-not here: the flower: no, no. By the way, did I tear up that envelope?\r
-Yes: under the bridge.\r
-\r
-The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs\r
-smartly. Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank\r
-what they are used to Guinness's porter or some temperance beverage\r
-Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale\r
-(aromatic). Doesn't give them any of it: shew wine: only the other.\r
-Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they'd have one old\r
-booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink. Queer the\r
-whole atmosphere of the. Quite right. Perfectly right that is.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom looked back towards the choir. Not going to be any music. Pity.\r
-Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make that\r
-instrument talk, the _vibrato_: fifty pounds a year they say he had in\r
-Gardiner street. Molly was in fine voice that day, the _Stabat Mater_\r
-of Rossini. Father Bernard Vaughan's sermon first. Christ or Pilate?\r
-Christ, but don't keep us all night over it. Music they wanted.\r
-Footdrill stopped. Could hear a pin drop. I told her to pitch her voice\r
-against that corner. I could feel the thrill in the air, the full, the\r
-people looking up:\r
-\r
-_Quis est homo._\r
-\r
-Some of that old sacred music splendid. Mercadante: seven last words.\r
-Mozart's twelfth mass: _Gloria_ in that. Those old popes keen on music,\r
-on art and statues and pictures of all kinds. Palestrina for example\r
-too. They had a gay old time while it lasted. Healthy too, chanting,\r
-regular hours, then brew liqueurs. Benedictine. Green Chartreuse. Still,\r
-having eunuchs in their choir that was coming it a bit thick. What kind\r
-of voice is it? Must be curious to hear after their own strong basses.\r
-Connoisseurs. Suppose they wouldn't feel anything after. Kind of a\r
-placid. No worry. Fall into flesh, don't they? Gluttons, tall, long\r
-legs. Who knows? Eunuch. One way out of it.\r
-\r
-He saw the priest bend down and kiss the altar and then face about and\r
-bless all the people. All crossed themselves and stood up. Mr Bloom\r
-glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand\r
-up at the gospel of course. Then all settled down on their knees again\r
-and he sat back quietly in his bench. The priest came down from the\r
-altar, holding the thing out from him, and he and the massboy answered\r
-each other in Latin. Then the priest knelt down and began to read off a\r
-card:\r
-\r
---O God, our refuge and our strength...\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom put his face forward to catch the words. English. Throw them\r
-the bone. I remember slightly. How long since your last mass? Glorious\r
-and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More\r
-interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful\r
-organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants\r
-to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon\r
-in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I\r
-schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look\r
-down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears.\r
-Husband learn to his surprise. God's little joke. Then out she comes.\r
-Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy\r
-Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes. Salvation\r
-army blatant imitation. Reformed prostitute will address the meeting.\r
-How I found the Lord. Squareheaded chaps those must be in Rome: they\r
-work the whole show. And don't they rake in the money too? Bequests\r
-also: to the P.P. for the time being in his absolute discretion.\r
-Masses for the repose of my soul to be said publicly with open doors.\r
-Monasteries and convents. The priest in that Fermanagh will case in the\r
-witnessbox. No browbeating him. He had his answer pat for everything.\r
-Liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the church. The doctors of the\r
-church: they mapped out the whole theology of it.\r
-\r
-The priest prayed:\r
-\r
---Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict. Be\r
-our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil (may God\r
-restrain him, we humbly pray!): and do thou, O prince of the heavenly\r
-host, by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those\r
-other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.\r
-\r
-The priest and the massboy stood up and walked off. All over. The women\r
-remained behind: thanksgiving.\r
-\r
-Better be shoving along. Brother Buzz. Come around with the plate\r
-perhaps. Pay your Easter duty.\r
-\r
-He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the\r
-time? Women enjoy it. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there's a\r
-(whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked.\r
-Glimpses of the moon. Annoyed if you don't. Why didn't you tell me\r
-before. Still like you better untidy. Good job it wasn't farther south.\r
-He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the aisle and out through the main\r
-door into the light. He stood a moment unseeing by the cold black marble\r
-bowl while before him and behind two worshippers dipped furtive hands in\r
-the low tide of holy water. Trams: a car of Prescott's dyeworks: a widow\r
-in her weeds. Notice because I'm in mourning myself. He covered himself.\r
-How goes the time? Quarter past. Time enough yet. Better get that lotion\r
-made up. Where is this? Ah yes, the last time. Sweny's in Lincoln place.\r
-Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir.\r
-Hamilton Long's, founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot churchyard\r
-near there. Visit some day.\r
-\r
-He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the other\r
-trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair.\r
-O well, poor fellow, it's not his fault. When was it I got it made up\r
-last? Wait. I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it must\r
-have been or the second. O, he can look it up in the prescriptions book.\r
-\r
-The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems\r
-to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher's stone. The\r
-alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why?\r
-Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.\r
-Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his\r
-alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid.\r
-Smell almost cure you like the dentist's doorbell. Doctor Whack. He\r
-ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow\r
-that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to\r
-be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue\r
-litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts.\r
-Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the\r
-phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever\r
-of nature.\r
-\r
---About a fortnight ago, sir?\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-He waited by the counter, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs, the\r
-dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs. Lot of time taken up telling\r
-your aches and pains.\r
-\r
---Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then\r
-orangeflower water...\r
-\r
-It certainly did make her skin so delicate white like wax.\r
-\r
---And white wax also, he said.\r
-\r
-Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to\r
-her eyes, Spanish, smelling herself, when I was fixing the links in my\r
-cuffs. Those homely recipes are often the best: strawberries for the\r
-teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk.\r
-Skinfood. One of the old queen's sons, duke of Albany was it? had only\r
-one skin. Leopold, yes. Three we have. Warts, bunions and pimples to\r
-make it worse. But you want a perfume too. What perfume does your? _Peau\r
-d'Espagne_. That orangeflower water is so fresh. Nice smell these soaps\r
-have. Pure curd soap. Time to get a bath round the corner. Hammam.\r
-Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice\r
-girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing\r
-I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time for\r
-massage. Feel fresh then all the day. Funeral be rather glum.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, the chemist said. That was two and nine. Have you brought a\r
-bottle?\r
-\r
---No, Mr Bloom said. Make it up, please. I'll call later in the day and\r
-I'll take one of these soaps. How much are they?\r
-\r
---Fourpence, sir.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax.\r
-\r
---I'll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, the chemist said. You can pay all together, sir, when you\r
-come back.\r
-\r
---Good, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the\r
-coolwrappered soap in his left hand.\r
-\r
-At his armpit Bantam Lyons' voice and hand said:\r
-\r
---Hello, Bloom. What's the best news? Is that today's? Show us a minute.\r
-\r
-Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove! Long cold upper lip. To look\r
-younger. He does look balmy. Younger than I am.\r
-\r
-Bantam Lyons's yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a\r
-wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears'\r
-soap? Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling.\r
-\r
---I want to see about that French horse that's running today, Bantam\r
-Lyons said. Where the bugger is it?\r
-\r
-He rustled the pleated pages, jerking his chin on his high collar.\r
-Barber's itch. Tight collar he'll lose his hair. Better leave him the\r
-paper and get shut of him.\r
-\r
---You can keep it, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
---Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum the\r
-second.\r
-\r
---I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly.\r
-\r
---What's that? his sharp voice said.\r
-\r
---I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away\r
-that moment.\r
-\r
-Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread\r
-sheets back on Mr Bloom's arms.\r
-\r
---I'll risk it, he said. Here, thanks.\r
-\r
-He sped off towards Conway's corner. God speed scut.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap\r
-in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of it\r
-lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large\r
-tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming\r
-embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now.\r
-They never come back. Fleshpots of Egypt.\r
-\r
-He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a\r
-mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He\r
-eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park: cyclist doubled\r
-up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round\r
-like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big:\r
-college. Something to catch the eye.\r
-\r
-There's Hornblower standing at the porter's lodge. Keep him on hands:\r
-might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr Hornblower? How\r
-do you do, sir?\r
-\r
-Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather.\r
-Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it\r
-here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the\r
-Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more\r
-in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the\r
-floor. Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which\r
-in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.\r
-\r
-Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid\r
-stream. This is my body.\r
-\r
-He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of\r
-warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his\r
-trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward,\r
-lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of\r
-his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of\r
-thousands, a languid floating flower.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking\r
-carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after\r
-him, curving his height with care.\r
-\r
---Come on, Simon.\r
-\r
---After you, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus covered himself quickly and got in, saying:\r
-\r
-Yes, yes.\r
-\r
---Are we all here now? Martin Cunningham asked. Come along, Bloom.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to\r
-after him and slammed it twice till it shut tight. He passed an arm\r
-through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriagewindow\r
-at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman\r
-peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she\r
-was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad\r
-to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them.\r
-Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipperslappers for fear he'd\r
-wake. Then getting it ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making\r
-the bed. Pull it more to your side. Our windingsheet. Never know who\r
-will touch you dead. Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the nails and\r
-the hair. Keep a bit in an envelope. Grows all the same after. Unclean\r
-job.\r
-\r
-All waited. Nothing was said. Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am\r
-sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap: in my hip pocket. Better shift\r
-it out of that. Wait for an opportunity.\r
-\r
-All waited. Then wheels were heard from in front, turning: then nearer:\r
-then horses' hoofs. A jolt. Their carriage began to move, creaking and\r
-swaying. Other hoofs and creaking wheels started behind. The blinds of\r
-the avenue passed and number nine with its craped knocker, door ajar. At\r
-walking pace.\r
-\r
-They waited still, their knees jogging, till they had turned and were\r
-passing along the tramtracks. Tritonville road. Quicker. The wheels\r
-rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook\r
-rattling in the doorframes.\r
-\r
---What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.\r
-\r
---Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.\r
-\r
---That's a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died\r
-out.\r
-\r
-All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by\r
-passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the\r
-smoother road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man,\r
-clad in mourning, a wide hat.\r
-\r
---There's a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said.\r
-\r
---Who is that?\r
-\r
---Your son and heir.\r
-\r
---Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over across.\r
-\r
-The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway\r
-before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner and, swerving back\r
-to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels. Mr Dedalus\r
-fell back, saying:\r
-\r
---Was that Mulligan cad with him? His _fidus Achates_!\r
-\r
---No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone.\r
-\r
---Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose, Mr Dedalus said, the Goulding\r
-faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump\r
-of dung, the wise child that knows her own father.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros: the\r
-bottleworks: Dodder bridge.\r
-\r
-Richie Goulding and the legal bag. Goulding, Collis and Ward he calls\r
-the firm. His jokes are getting a bit damp. Great card he was. Waltzing\r
-in Stamer street with Ignatius Gallaher on a Sunday morning, the\r
-landlady's two hats pinned on his head. Out on the rampage all night.\r
-Beginning to tell on him now: that backache of his, I fear. Wife ironing\r
-his back. Thinks he'll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they are.\r
-About six hundred per cent profit.\r
-\r
---He's in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a\r
-contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks\r
-all over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I'll\r
-make it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother\r
-or his aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a gate.\r
-I'll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.\r
-\r
-He cried above the clatter of the wheels:\r
-\r
---I won't have her bastard of a nephew ruin my son. A counterjumper's\r
-son. Selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M'Swiney's. Not likely.\r
-\r
-He ceased. Mr Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to Mr Power's mild\r
-face and Martin Cunningham's eyes and beard, gravely shaking. Noisy\r
-selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If\r
-little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house.\r
-Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange\r
-feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must have been that morning\r
-in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs at it by\r
-the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up. She had\r
-that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch,\r
-Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins.\r
-\r
-Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her.\r
-I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn\r
-German too.\r
-\r
---Are we late? Mr Power asked.\r
-\r
---Ten minutes, Martin Cunningham said, looking at his watch.\r
-\r
-Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down. Her tomboy oaths. O jumping\r
-Jupiter! Ye gods and little fishes! Still, she's a dear girl. Soon be a\r
-woman. Mullingar. Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes: a woman too.\r
-Life, life.\r
-\r
-The carriage heeled over and back, their four trunks swaying.\r
-\r
---Corny might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
---He might, Mr Dedalus said, if he hadn't that squint troubling him. Do\r
-you follow me?\r
-\r
-He closed his left eye. Martin Cunningham began to brush away\r
-crustcrumbs from under his thighs.\r
-\r
---What is this, he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?\r
-\r
---Someone seems to have been making a picnic party here lately, Mr Power\r
-said.\r
-\r
-All raised their thighs and eyed with disfavour the mildewed buttonless\r
-leather of the seats. Mr Dedalus, twisting his nose, frowned downward\r
-and said:\r
-\r
---Unless I'm greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?\r
-\r
---It struck me too, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom set his thigh down. Glad I took that bath. Feel my feet quite\r
-clean. But I wish Mrs Fleming had darned these socks better.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus sighed resignedly.\r
-\r
---After all, he said, it's the most natural thing in the world.\r
-\r
---Did Tom Kernan turn up? Martin Cunningham asked, twirling the peak of\r
-his beard gently.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom answered. He's behind with Ned Lambert and Hynes.\r
-\r
---And Corny Kelleher himself? Mr Power asked.\r
-\r
---At the cemetery, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
---I met M'Coy this morning, Mr Bloom said. He said he'd try to come.\r
-\r
-The carriage halted short.\r
-\r
---What's wrong?\r
-\r
---We're stopped.\r
-\r
---Where are we?\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom put his head out of the window.\r
-\r
---The grand canal, he said.\r
-\r
-Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got\r
-it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions. Shame\r
-really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed\r
-tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don't miss\r
-this chance. Dogs' home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos,\r
-Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave.\r
-A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men's\r
-dogs usually are.\r
-\r
-A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of shower\r
-spray dots over the grey flags. Apart. Curious. Like through a colander.\r
-I thought it would. My boots were creaking I remember now.\r
-\r
---The weather is changing, he said quietly.\r
-\r
---A pity it did not keep up fine, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
---Wanted for the country, Mr Power said. There's the sun again coming\r
-out.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus, peering through his glasses towards the veiled sun, hurled a\r
-mute curse at the sky.\r
-\r
---It's as uncertain as a child's bottom, he said.\r
-\r
---We're off again.\r
-\r
-The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed\r
-gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.\r
-\r
---Tom Kernan was immense last night, he said. And Paddy Leonard taking\r
-him off to his face.\r
-\r
---O, draw him out, Martin, Mr Power said eagerly. Wait till you hear\r
-him, Simon, on Ben Dollard's singing of _The Croppy Boy_.\r
-\r
---Immense, Martin Cunningham said pompously. _His singing of that simple\r
-ballad, Martin, is the most trenchant rendering I ever heard in the\r
-whole course of my experience._\r
-\r
---Trenchant, Mr Power said laughing. He's dead nuts on that. And the\r
-retrospective arrangement.\r
-\r
---Did you read Dan Dawson's speech? Martin Cunningham asked.\r
-\r
---I did not then, Mr Dedalus said. Where is it?\r
-\r
---In the paper this morning.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom took the paper from his inside pocket. That book I must change\r
-for her.\r
-\r
---No, no, Mr Dedalus said quickly. Later on please.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom's glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the\r
-deaths: Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what\r
-Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne's? no, Sexton,\r
-Urbright. Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper.\r
-Thanks to the Little Flower. Sadly missed. To the inexpressible grief of\r
-his. Aged 88 after a long and tedious illness. Month's mind: Quinlan. On\r
-whose soul Sweet Jesus have mercy.\r
-\r
-_It is now a month since dear Henry fled To his home up above in the sky\r
-While his family weeps and mourns his loss Hoping some day to meet him\r
-on high._\r
-\r
-I tore up the envelope? Yes. Where did I put her letter after I read it\r
-in the bath? He patted his waistcoatpocket. There all right. Dear Henry\r
-fled. Before my patience are exhausted.\r
-\r
-National school. Meade's yard. The hazard. Only two there now. Nodding.\r
-Full as a tick. Too much bone in their skulls. The other trotting round\r
-with a fare. An hour ago I was passing there. The jarvies raised their\r
-hats.\r
-\r
-A pointsman's back straightened itself upright suddenly against a\r
-tramway standard by Mr Bloom's window. Couldn't they invent something\r
-automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow\r
-would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job\r
-making the new invention?\r
-\r
-Antient concert rooms. Nothing on there. A man in a buff suit with a\r
-crape armlet. Not much grief there. Quarter mourning. People in law\r
-perhaps.\r
-\r
-They went past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway\r
-bridge, past the Queen's theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene\r
-Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder.\r
-I said I. Or the _Lily of Killarney_? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big\r
-powerful change. Wet bright bills for next week. _Fun on the Bristol_.\r
-Martin Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have to stand a\r
-drink or two. As broad as it's long.\r
-\r
-He's coming in the afternoon. Her songs.\r
-\r
-Plasto's. Sir Philip Crampton's memorial fountain bust. Who was he?\r
-\r
---How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in\r
-salute.\r
-\r
---He doesn't see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?\r
-\r
---Who? Mr Dedalus asked.\r
-\r
---Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.\r
-\r
-Just that moment I was thinking.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the\r
-white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: spruce figure: passed.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right\r
-hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees?\r
-Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes\r
-feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I\r
-am just looking at them: well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body\r
-getting a bit softy. I would notice that: from remembering. What causes\r
-that? I suppose the skin can't contract quickly enough when the flesh\r
-falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders.\r
-Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks\r
-behind.\r
-\r
-He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant\r
-glance over their faces.\r
-\r
-Mr Power asked:\r
-\r
---How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?\r
-\r
---O, very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It's a good\r
-idea, you see...\r
-\r
---Are you going yourself?\r
-\r
---Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the\r
-county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the\r
-chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.\r
-\r
---Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now.\r
-\r
-Have you good artists?\r
-\r
---Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we'll have all\r
-topnobbers. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in\r
-fact.\r
-\r
---And _Madame_, Mr Power said smiling. Last but not least.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and clasped\r
-them. Smith O'Brien. Someone has laid a bunch of flowers there. Woman.\r
-Must be his deathday. For many happy returns. The carriage wheeling by\r
-Farrell's statue united noiselessly their unresisting knees.\r
-\r
-Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his\r
-mouth opening: oot.\r
-\r
---Four bootlaces for a penny.\r
-\r
-Wonder why he was struck off the rolls. Had his office in Hume street.\r
-Same house as Molly's namesake, Tweedy, crown solicitor for Waterford.\r
-Has that silk hat ever since. Relics of old decency. Mourning too.\r
-Terrible comedown, poor wretch! Kicked about like snuff at a wake.\r
-O'Callaghan on his last legs.\r
-\r
-And _Madame_. Twenty past eleven. Up. Mrs Fleming is in to clean. Doing\r
-her hair, humming. _voglio e non vorrei_. No. _vorrei e non_. Looking at\r
-the tips of her hairs to see if they are split. _Mi trema un poco\r
-il_. Beautiful on that _tre_ her voice is: weeping tone. A thrush. A\r
-throstle. There is a word throstle that expresses that.\r
-\r
-His eyes passed lightly over Mr Power's goodlooking face. Greyish over\r
-the ears. _Madame_: smiling. I smiled back. A smile goes a long way.\r
-Only politeness perhaps. Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the\r
-woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it\r
-told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played\r
-out pretty quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her\r
-a pound of rumpsteak. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury's. Or the\r
-Moira, was it?\r
-\r
-They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator's form.\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham nudged Mr Power.\r
-\r
---Of the tribe of Reuben, he said.\r
-\r
-A tall blackbearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner\r
-of Elvery's Elephant house, showed them a curved hand open on his spine.\r
-\r
---In all his pristine beauty, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:\r
-\r
---The devil break the hasp of your back!\r
-\r
-Mr Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as the\r
-carriage passed Gray's statue.\r
-\r
---We have all been there, Martin Cunningham said broadly.\r
-\r
-His eyes met Mr Bloom's eyes. He caressed his beard, adding:\r
-\r
---Well, nearly all of us.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions' faces.\r
-\r
---That's an awfully good one that's going the rounds about Reuben J and\r
-the son.\r
-\r
---About the boatman? Mr Power asked.\r
-\r
---Yes. Isn't it awfully good?\r
-\r
---What is that? Mr Dedalus asked. I didn't hear it.\r
-\r
---There was a girl in the case, Mr Bloom began, and he determined to\r
-send him to the Isle of Man out of harm's way but when they were both\r
-...\r
-\r
---What? Mr Dedalus asked. That confirmed bloody hobbledehoy is it?\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said. They were both on the way to the boat and he tried\r
-to drown...\r
-\r
---Drown Barabbas! Mr Dedalus cried. I wish to Christ he did!\r
-\r
-Mr Power sent a long laugh down his shaded nostrils.\r
-\r
---No, Mr Bloom said, the son himself...\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham thwarted his speech rudely:\r
-\r
---Reuben and the son were piking it down the quay next the river on\r
-their way to the Isle of Man boat and the young chiseller suddenly got\r
-loose and over the wall with him into the Liffey.\r
-\r
---For God's sake! Mr Dedalus exclaimed in fright. Is he dead?\r
-\r
---Dead! Martin Cunningham cried. Not he! A boatman got a pole and fished\r
-him out by the slack of the breeches and he was landed up to the father\r
-on the quay more dead than alive. Half the town was there.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said. But the funny part is...\r
-\r
---And Reuben J, Martin Cunningham said, gave the boatman a florin for\r
-saving his son's life.\r
-\r
-A stifled sigh came from under Mr Power's hand.\r
-\r
---O, he did, Martin Cunningham affirmed. Like a hero. A silver florin.\r
-\r
---Isn't it awfully good? Mr Bloom said eagerly.\r
-\r
---One and eightpence too much, Mr Dedalus said drily.\r
-\r
-Mr Power's choked laugh burst quietly in the carriage.\r
-\r
-Nelson's pillar.\r
-\r
---Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny!\r
-\r
---We had better look a little serious, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus sighed.\r
-\r
---Ah then indeed, he said, poor little Paddy wouldn't grudge us a laugh.\r
-Many a good one he told himself.\r
-\r
---The Lord forgive me! Mr Power said, wiping his wet eyes with his\r
-fingers. Poor Paddy! I little thought a week ago when I saw him last and\r
-he was in his usual health that I'd be driving after him like this. He's\r
-gone from us.\r
-\r
---As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said. He went\r
-very suddenly.\r
-\r
---Breakdown, Martin Cunningham said. Heart.\r
-\r
-He tapped his chest sadly.\r
-\r
-Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red nose.\r
-Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. A lot of money he spent\r
-colouring it.\r
-\r
-Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful apprehension.\r
-\r
---He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said.\r
-\r
---The best death, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-Their wide open eyes looked at him.\r
-\r
---No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.\r
-\r
-No-one spoke.\r
-\r
-Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents,\r
-temperance hotel, Falconer's railway guide, civil service college,\r
-Gill's, catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or\r
-wind. At night too. Chummies and slaveys. Under the patronage of the\r
-late Father Mathew. Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart.\r
-\r
-White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner,\r
-galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning\r
-coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for\r
-a nun.\r
-\r
---Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.\r
-\r
-A dwarf's face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy's was. Dwarf's body,\r
-weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society\r
-pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant\r
-nothing. Mistake of nature. If it's healthy it's from the mother. If not\r
-from the man. Better luck next time.\r
-\r
---Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It's well out of it.\r
-\r
-The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle his\r
-bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.\r
-\r
---In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
---But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own\r
-life.\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.\r
-\r
---The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.\r
-\r
---Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We\r
-must take a charitable view of it.\r
-\r
---They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.\r
-\r
---It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham's\r
-large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent.\r
-Like Shakespeare's face. Always a good word to say. They have no mercy\r
-on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive\r
-a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken\r
-already. Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the riverbed\r
-clutching rushes. He looked at me. And that awful drunkard of a wife\r
-of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the\r
-furniture on him every Saturday almost. Leading him the life of the\r
-damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday morning. Start\r
-afresh. Shoulder to the wheel. Lord, she must have looked a sight\r
-that night Dedalus told me he was in there. Drunk about the place and\r
-capering with Martin's umbrella.\r
-\r
- _And they call me the jewel of Asia,\r
- Of Asia,\r
- The Geisha._\r
-\r
-He looked away from me. He knows. Rattle his bones.\r
-\r
-That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The\r
-room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through\r
-the slats of the Venetian blind. The coroner's sunlit ears, big and\r
-hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw like\r
-yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed.\r
-Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son\r
-Leopold.\r
-\r
-No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns.\r
-\r
-The carriage rattled swiftly along Blessington street. Over the stones.\r
-\r
---We are going the pace, I think, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
---God grant he doesn't upset us on the road, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
---I hope not, Martin Cunningham said. That will be a great race tomorrow\r
-in Germany. The Gordon Bennett.\r
-\r
---Yes, by Jove, Mr Dedalus said. That will be worth seeing, faith.\r
-\r
-As they turned into Berkeley street a streetorgan near the Basin sent\r
-over and after them a rollicking rattling song of the halls. Has anybody\r
-here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy. Dead March from _Saul._ He's\r
-as bad as old Antonio. He left me on my ownio. Pirouette! The _Mater\r
-Misericordiae_. Eccles street. My house down there. Big place. Ward for\r
-incurables there. Very encouraging. Our Lady's Hospice for the dying.\r
-Deadhouse handy underneath. Where old Mrs Riordan died. They look\r
-terrible the women. Her feeding cup and rubbing her mouth with the\r
-spoon. Then the screen round her bed for her to die. Nice young student\r
-that was dressed that bite the bee gave me. He's gone over to the\r
-lying-in hospital they told me. From one extreme to the other. The\r
-carriage galloped round a corner: stopped.\r
-\r
---What's wrong now?\r
-\r
-A divided drove of branded cattle passed the windows, lowing, slouching\r
-by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony\r
-croups. Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating their\r
-fear.\r
-\r
---Emigrants, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
---Huuuh! the drover's voice cried, his switch sounding on their flanks.\r
-\r
-Huuuh! out of that!\r
-\r
-Thursday, of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers. Cuffe sold them\r
-about twentyseven quid each. For Liverpool probably. Roastbeef for old\r
-England. They buy up all the juicy ones. And then the fifth quarter\r
-lost: all that raw stuff, hide, hair, horns. Comes to a big thing in a\r
-year. Dead meat trade. Byproducts of the slaughterhouses for tanneries,\r
-soap, margarine. Wonder if that dodge works now getting dicky meat off\r
-the train at Clonsilla.\r
-\r
-The carriage moved on through the drove.\r
-\r
---I can't make out why the corporation doesn't run a tramline from the\r
-parkgate to the quays, Mr Bloom said. All those animals could be taken\r
-in trucks down to the boats.\r
-\r
---Instead of blocking up the thoroughfare, Martin Cunningham said. Quite\r
-right. They ought to.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said, and another thing I often thought, is to have\r
-municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line\r
-out to the cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage\r
-and all. Don't you see what I mean?\r
-\r
---O, that be damned for a story, Mr Dedalus said. Pullman car and saloon\r
-diningroom.\r
-\r
---A poor lookout for Corny, Mr Power added.\r
-\r
---Why? Mr Bloom asked, turning to Mr Dedalus. Wouldn't it be more decent\r
-than galloping two abreast?\r
-\r
---Well, there's something in that, Mr Dedalus granted.\r
-\r
---And, Martin Cunningham said, we wouldn't have scenes like that when\r
-the hearse capsized round Dunphy's and upset the coffin on to the road.\r
-\r
---That was terrible, Mr Power's shocked face said, and the corpse fell\r
-about the road. Terrible!\r
-\r
---First round Dunphy's, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett cup.\r
-\r
---Praises be to God! Martin Cunningham said piously.\r
-\r
-Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy Dignam\r
-shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too large\r
-for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what's up now.\r
-Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides decompose\r
-quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also. With wax.\r
-The sphincter loose. Seal up all.\r
-\r
---Dunphy's, Mr Power announced as the carriage turned right.\r
-\r
-Dunphy's corner. Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief. A\r
-pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we'll pull up\r
-here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation.\r
-Elixir of life.\r
-\r
-But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him\r
-in the knocking about? He would and he wouldn't, I suppose. Depends on\r
-where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery. It\r
-would be better to bury them in red: a dark red.\r
-\r
-In silence they drove along Phibsborough road. An empty hearse trotted\r
-by, coming from the cemetery: looks relieved.\r
-\r
-Crossguns bridge: the royal canal.\r
-\r
-Water rushed roaring through the sluices. A man stood on his\r
-dropping barge, between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a\r
-slacktethered horse. Aboard of the _Bugabu._\r
-\r
-Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his\r
-raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of\r
-reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar,\r
-Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or\r
-cycle down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at\r
-the auction but a lady's. Developing waterways. James M'Cann's hobby\r
-to row me o'er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats.\r
-Camping out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without\r
-writing. Come as a surprise, Leixlip, Clonsilla. Dropping down lock by\r
-lock to Dublin. With turf from the midland bogs. Salute. He lifted his\r
-brown straw hat, saluting Paddy Dignam.\r
-\r
-They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.\r
-\r
---I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
---Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.\r
-\r
---How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping, I suppose?\r
-\r
---Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.\r
-\r
-The carriage steered left for Finglas road.\r
-\r
-The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of\r
-land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands,\r
-knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence:\r
-appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and\r
-sculptor.\r
-\r
-Passed.\r
-\r
-On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary, the sexton's, an old tramp sat,\r
-grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown\r
-yawning boot. After life's journey.\r
-\r
-Gloomy gardens then went by: one by one: gloomy houses.\r
-\r
-Mr Power pointed.\r
-\r
---That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.\r
-\r
---So it is, Mr Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off.\r
-Murdered his brother. Or so they said.\r
-\r
---The crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
---Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham added. That's the maxim of the\r
-law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person\r
-to be wrongfully condemned.\r
-\r
-They looked. Murderer's ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless,\r
-unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder.\r
-The murderer's image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about\r
-it. Man's head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met\r
-her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer is still at large.\r
-Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out.\r
-\r
-Cramped in this carriage. She mightn't like me to come that way without\r
-letting her know. Must be careful about women. Catch them once with\r
-their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen.\r
-\r
-The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars,\r
-rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the\r
-trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain\r
-gestures on the air.\r
-\r
-The felly harshed against the curbstone: stopped. Martin Cunningham put\r
-out his arm and, wrenching back the handle, shoved the door open with\r
-his knee. He stepped out. Mr Power and Mr Dedalus followed.\r
-\r
-Change that soap now. Mr Bloom's hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly\r
-and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket.\r
-He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other hand\r
-still held.\r
-\r
-Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages. It's all the same.\r
-Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley. Pomp of death.\r
-Beyond the hind carriage a hawker stood by his barrow of cakes and\r
-fruit. Simnel cakes those are, stuck together: cakes for the dead.\r
-Dogbiscuits. Who ate them? Mourners coming out.\r
-\r
-He followed his companions. Mr Kernan and Ned Lambert followed, Hynes\r
-walking after them. Corny Kelleher stood by the opened hearse and took\r
-out the two wreaths. He handed one to the boy.\r
-\r
-Where is that child's funeral disappeared to?\r
-\r
-A team of horses passed from Finglas with toiling plodding tread,\r
-dragging through the funereal silence a creaking waggon on which lay a\r
-granite block. The waggoner marching at their head saluted.\r
-\r
-Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at it\r
-with his plume skeowways. Dull eye: collar tight on his neck, pressing\r
-on a bloodvessel or something. Do they know what they cart out here\r
-every day? Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount\r
-Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every\r
-minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands\r
-every hour. Too many in the world.\r
-\r
-Mourners came out through the gates: woman and a girl. Leanjawed harpy,\r
-hard woman at a bargain, her bonnet awry. Girl's face stained with dirt\r
-and tears, holding the woman's arm, looking up at her for a sign to cry.\r
-Fish's face, bloodless and livid.\r
-\r
-The mutes shouldered the coffin and bore it in through the gates. So\r
-much dead weight. Felt heavier myself stepping out of that bath. First\r
-the stiff: then the friends of the stiff. Corny Kelleher and the\r
-boy followed with their wreaths. Who is that beside them? Ah, the\r
-brother-in-law.\r
-\r
-All walked after.\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham whispered:\r
-\r
---I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.\r
-\r
---What? Mr Power whispered. How so?\r
-\r
---His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham whispered. Had the\r
-Queen's hotel in Ennis. You heard him say he was going to Clare.\r
-Anniversary.\r
-\r
---O God! Mr Power whispered. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself?\r
-\r
-He glanced behind him to where a face with dark thinking eyes followed\r
-towards the cardinal's mausoleum. Speaking.\r
-\r
---Was he insured? Mr Bloom asked.\r
-\r
---I believe so, Mr Kernan answered. But the policy was heavily\r
-mortgaged. Martin is trying to get the youngster into Artane.\r
-\r
---How many children did he leave?\r
-\r
---Five. Ned Lambert says he'll try to get one of the girls into Todd's.\r
-\r
---A sad case, Mr Bloom said gently. Five young children.\r
-\r
---A great blow to the poor wife, Mr Kernan added.\r
-\r
---Indeed yes, Mr Bloom agreed.\r
-\r
-Has the laugh at him now.\r
-\r
-He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had\r
-outlived him. Lost her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must\r
-outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women than men in the\r
-world. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you'll soon follow\r
-him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who\r
-knows after. Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on\r
-a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But\r
-in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of\r
-hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the\r
-substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back,\r
-waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and\r
-lie no more in her warm bed.\r
-\r
---How are you, Simon? Ned Lambert said softly, clasping hands. Haven't\r
-seen you for a month of Sundays.\r
-\r
---Never better. How are all in Cork's own town?\r
-\r
---I was down there for the Cork park races on Easter Monday, Ned Lambert\r
-said. Same old six and eightpence. Stopped with Dick Tivy.\r
-\r
---And how is Dick, the solid man?\r
-\r
---Nothing between himself and heaven, Ned Lambert answered.\r
-\r
---By the holy Paul! Mr Dedalus said in subdued wonder. Dick Tivy bald?\r
-\r
---Martin is going to get up a whip for the youngsters, Ned Lambert said,\r
-pointing ahead. A few bob a skull. Just to keep them going till the\r
-insurance is cleared up.\r
-\r
---Yes, yes, Mr Dedalus said dubiously. Is that the eldest boy in front?\r
-\r
---Yes, Ned Lambert said, with the wife's brother. John Henry Menton is\r
-behind. He put down his name for a quid.\r
-\r
---I'll engage he did, Mr Dedalus said. I often told poor Paddy he ought\r
-to mind that job. John Henry is not the worst in the world.\r
-\r
---How did he lose it? Ned Lambert asked. Liquor, what?\r
-\r
---Many a good man's fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.\r
-\r
-They halted about the door of the mortuary chapel. Mr Bloom stood behind\r
-the boy with the wreath looking down at his sleekcombed hair and at the\r
-slender furrowed neck inside his brandnew collar. Poor boy! Was he there\r
-when the father? Both unconscious. Lighten up at the last moment\r
-and recognise for the last time. All he might have done. I owe three\r
-shillings to O'Grady. Would he understand? The mutes bore the coffin\r
-into the chapel. Which end is his head?\r
-\r
-After a moment he followed the others in, blinking in the screened\r
-light. The coffin lay on its bier before the chancel, four tall yellow\r
-candles at its corners. Always in front of us. Corny Kelleher, laying a\r
-wreath at each fore corner, beckoned to the boy to kneel. The mourners\r
-knelt here and there in prayingdesks. Mr Bloom stood behind near the\r
-font and, when all had knelt, dropped carefully his unfolded newspaper\r
-from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. He fitted his black\r
-hat gently on his left knee and, holding its brim, bent over piously.\r
-\r
-A server bearing a brass bucket with something in it came out through a\r
-door. The whitesmocked priest came after him, tidying his stole with one\r
-hand, balancing with the other a little book against his toad's belly.\r
-Who'll read the book? I, said the rook.\r
-\r
-They halted by the bier and the priest began to read out of his book\r
-with a fluent croak.\r
-\r
-Father Coffey. I knew his name was like a coffin. _Domine-namine._ Bully\r
-about the muzzle he looks. Bosses the show. Muscular christian. Woe\r
-betide anyone that looks crooked at him: priest. Thou art Peter. Burst\r
-sideways like a sheep in clover Dedalus says he will. With a belly on\r
-him like a poisoned pup. Most amusing expressions that man finds. Hhhn:\r
-burst sideways.\r
-\r
-_--Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo, Domine._\r
-\r
-Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin. Requiem mass.\r
-Crape weepers. Blackedged notepaper. Your name on the altarlist. Chilly\r
-place this. Want to feed well, sitting in there all the morning in the\r
-gloom kicking his heels waiting for the next please. Eyes of a toad too.\r
-What swells him up that way? Molly gets swelled after cabbage. Air of\r
-the place maybe. Looks full up of bad gas. Must be an infernal lot\r
-of bad gas round the place. Butchers, for instance: they get like raw\r
-beefsteaks. Who was telling me? Mervyn Browne. Down in the vaults of\r
-saint Werburgh's lovely old organ hundred and fifty they have to bore a\r
-hole in the coffins sometimes to let out the bad gas and burn it. Out it\r
-rushes: blue. One whiff of that and you're a goner.\r
-\r
-My kneecap is hurting me. Ow. That's better.\r
-\r
-The priest took a stick with a knob at the end of it out of the boy's\r
-bucket and shook it over the coffin. Then he walked to the other end and\r
-shook it again. Then he came back and put it back in the bucket. As you\r
-were before you rested. It's all written down: he has to do it.\r
-\r
-_--Et ne nos inducas in tentationem._\r
-\r
-The server piped the answers in the treble. I often thought it would be\r
-better to have boy servants. Up to fifteen or so. After that, of course\r
-...\r
-\r
-Holy water that was, I expect. Shaking sleep out of it. He must be fed\r
-up with that job, shaking that thing over all the corpses they trot up.\r
-What harm if he could see what he was shaking it over. Every mortal\r
-day a fresh batch: middleaged men, old women, children, women dead in\r
-childbirth, men with beards, baldheaded businessmen, consumptive girls\r
-with little sparrows' breasts. All the year round he prayed the same\r
-thing over them all and shook water on top of them: sleep. On Dignam\r
-now.\r
-\r
-_--In paradisum._\r
-\r
-Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over\r
-everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.\r
-\r
-The priest closed his book and went off, followed by the server. Corny\r
-Kelleher opened the sidedoors and the gravediggers came in, hoisted the\r
-coffin again, carried it out and shoved it on their cart. Corny Kelleher\r
-gave one wreath to the boy and one to the brother-in-law. All followed\r
-them out of the sidedoors into the mild grey air. Mr Bloom came last\r
-folding his paper again into his pocket. He gazed gravely at the ground\r
-till the coffincart wheeled off to the left. The metal wheels ground the\r
-gravel with a sharp grating cry and the pack of blunt boots followed the\r
-trundled barrow along a lane of sepulchres.\r
-\r
-The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn't lilt here.\r
-\r
---The O'Connell circle, Mr Dedalus said about him.\r
-\r
-Mr Power's soft eyes went up to the apex of the lofty cone.\r
-\r
---He's at rest, he said, in the middle of his people, old Dan O'. But\r
-his heart is buried in Rome. How many broken hearts are buried here,\r
-Simon!\r
-\r
---Her grave is over there, Jack, Mr Dedalus said. I'll soon be stretched\r
-beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes.\r
-\r
-Breaking down, he began to weep to himself quietly, stumbling a little\r
-in his walk. Mr Power took his arm.\r
-\r
---She's better where she is, he said kindly.\r
-\r
---I suppose so, Mr Dedalus said with a weak gasp. I suppose she is in\r
-heaven if there is a heaven.\r
-\r
-Corny Kelleher stepped aside from his rank and allowed the mourners to\r
-plod by.\r
-\r
---Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head.\r
-\r
---The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I suppose we can\r
-do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a treacherous place.\r
-\r
-They covered their heads.\r
-\r
---The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don't you think?\r
-Mr Kernan said with reproof.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom nodded gravely looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret\r
-eyes, secretsearching. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We\r
-are the last. In the same boat. Hope he'll say something else.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan added:\r
-\r
---The service of the Irish church used in Mount Jerome is simpler, more\r
-impressive I must say.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan said with solemnity:\r
-\r
---_I am the resurrection and the life_. That touches a man's inmost\r
-heart.\r
-\r
---It does, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two\r
-with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections.\r
-Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood\r
-every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of\r
-them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn\r
-the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are\r
-dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come\r
-forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day!\r
-Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the\r
-rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of\r
-powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.\r
-\r
-Corny Kelleher fell into step at their side.\r
-\r
---Everything went off A1, he said. What?\r
-\r
-He looked on them from his drawling eye. Policeman's shoulders. With\r
-your tooraloom tooraloom.\r
-\r
---As it should be, Mr Kernan said.\r
-\r
---What? Eh? Corny Kelleher said.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan assured him.\r
-\r
---Who is that chap behind with Tom Kernan? John Henry Menton asked. I\r
-know his face.\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert glanced back.\r
-\r
---Bloom, he said, Madame Marion Tweedy that was, is, I mean, the\r
-soprano. She's his wife.\r
-\r
---O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven't seen her for some\r
-time. He was a finelooking woman. I danced with her, wait, fifteen\r
-seventeen golden years ago, at Mat Dillon's in Roundtown. And a good\r
-armful she was.\r
-\r
-He looked behind through the others.\r
-\r
---What is he? he asked. What does he do? Wasn't he in the stationery\r
-line? I fell foul of him one evening, I remember, at bowls.\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert smiled.\r
-\r
---Yes, he was, he said, in Wisdom Hely's. A traveller for blottingpaper.\r
-\r
---In God's name, John Henry Menton said, what did she marry a coon like\r
-that for? She had plenty of game in her then.\r
-\r
---Has still, Ned Lambert said. He does some canvassing for ads.\r
-\r
-John Henry Menton's large eyes stared ahead.\r
-\r
-The barrow turned into a side lane. A portly man, ambushed among the\r
-grasses, raised his hat in homage. The gravediggers touched their caps.\r
-\r
---John O'Connell, Mr Power said pleased. He never forgets a friend.\r
-\r
-Mr O'Connell shook all their hands in silence. Mr Dedalus said:\r
-\r
---I am come to pay you another visit.\r
-\r
---My dear Simon, the caretaker answered in a low voice. I don't want\r
-your custom at all.\r
-\r
-Saluting Ned Lambert and John Henry Menton he walked on at Martin\r
-Cunningham's side puzzling two long keys at his back.\r
-\r
---Did you hear that one, he asked them, about Mulcahy from the Coombe?\r
-\r
---I did not, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
-They bent their silk hats in concert and Hynes inclined his ear. The\r
-caretaker hung his thumbs in the loops of his gold watchchain and spoke\r
-in a discreet tone to their vacant smiles.\r
-\r
---They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy\r
-evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for\r
-Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After\r
-traipsing about in the fog they found the grave sure enough. One of the\r
-drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking\r
-up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up.\r
-\r
-The caretaker blinked up at one of the sepulchres they passed. He\r
-resumed:\r
-\r
---And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, _Not a bloody bit like\r
-the man_, says he. _That's not Mulcahy_, says he, _whoever done it_.\r
-\r
-Rewarded by smiles he fell back and spoke with Corny Kelleher, accepting\r
-the dockets given him, turning them over and scanning them as he walked.\r
-\r
---That's all done with a purpose, Martin Cunningham explained to Hynes.\r
-\r
---I know, Hynes said. I know that.\r
-\r
---To cheer a fellow up, Martin Cunningham said. It's pure\r
-goodheartedness: damn the thing else.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom admired the caretaker's prosperous bulk. All want to be on good\r
-terms with him. Decent fellow, John O'Connell, real good sort. Keys:\r
-like Keyes's ad: no fear of anyone getting out. No passout checks.\r
-_Habeas corpus_. I must see about that ad after the funeral. Did I\r
-write Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me\r
-writing to Martha? Hope it's not chucked in the dead letter office. Be\r
-the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That's the first sign when\r
-the hairs come out grey. And temper getting cross. Silver threads among\r
-the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to\r
-any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It\r
-might thrill her first. Courting death... Shades of night hovering\r
-here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when\r
-churchyards yawn and Daniel O'Connell must be a descendant I suppose\r
-who is this used to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the\r
-same like a big giant in the dark. Will o' the wisp. Gas of graves.\r
-Want to keep her mind off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so\r
-touchy. Tell her a ghost story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever\r
-seen a ghost? Well, I have. It was a pitchdark night. The clock was on\r
-the stroke of twelve. Still they'd kiss all right if properly keyed up.\r
-Whores in Turkish graveyards. Learn anything if taken young. You might\r
-pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones.\r
-Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both\r
-ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to\r
-the starving. Gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting\r
-to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.\r
-\r
-He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field\r
-after field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing.\r
-Sitting or kneeling you couldn't. Standing? His head might come up some\r
-day above ground in a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed\r
-the ground must be: oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too: trim\r
-grass and edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well,\r
-so it is. Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant\r
-poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic\r
-Gardens are just over there. It's the blood sinking in the earth gives\r
-new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every\r
-man his price. Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable\r
-for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcass of William Wilkinson, auditor\r
-and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and six. With\r
-thanks.\r
-\r
-I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh,\r
-nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot\r
-quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy\r
-kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of\r
-them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they\r
-are go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to\r
-feed on feed on themselves.\r
-\r
-But they must breed a devil of a lot of maggots. Soil must be simply\r
-swirling with them. Your head it simply swurls. Those pretty little\r
-seaside gurls. He looks cheerful enough over it. Gives him a sense of\r
-power seeing all the others go under first. Wonder how he looks at life.\r
-Cracking his jokes too: warms the cockles of his heart. The one about\r
-the bulletin. Spurgeon went to heaven 4 a.m. this morning. 11 p.m.\r
-(closing time). Not arrived yet. Peter. The dead themselves the men\r
-anyhow would like to hear an odd joke or the women to know what's in\r
-fashion. A juicy pear or ladies' punch, hot, strong and sweet. Keep\r
-out the damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way.\r
-Gravediggers in _Hamlet_. Shows the profound knowledge of the human\r
-heart. Daren't joke about the dead for two years at least. _De mortuis\r
-nil nisi prius_. Go out of mourning first. Hard to imagine his funeral.\r
-Seems a sort of a joke. Read your own obituary notice they say you live\r
-longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.\r
-\r
---How many have-you for tomorrow? the caretaker asked.\r
-\r
---Two, Corny Kelleher said. Half ten and eleven.\r
-\r
-The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to\r
-trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping\r
-with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its\r
-nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.\r
-\r
-Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He\r
-doesn't know who is here nor care. Now who is that lankylooking galoot\r
-over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now I'd\r
-give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never\r
-dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he\r
-could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he\r
-could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No, ants too. First\r
-thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to\r
-life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you\r
-come to look at it.\r
-\r
- _O, poor Robinson Crusoe!\r
- How could you possibly do so?_\r
-\r
-Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of\r
-them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could\r
-invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding, let it down that\r
-way. Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow's.\r
-They're so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from\r
-the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one\r
-coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible\r
-even in the earth. The Irishman's house is his coffin. Embalming in\r
-catacombs, mummies the same idea.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads.\r
-Twelve. I'm thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death's\r
-number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn't in the chapel, that\r
-I'll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.\r
-\r
-Nice soft tweed Ned Lambert has in that suit. Tinge of purple. I had\r
-one like that when we lived in Lombard street west. Dressy fellow he was\r
-once. Used to change three suits in the day. Must get that grey suit\r
-of mine turned by Mesias. Hello. It's dyed. His wife I forgot he's not\r
-married or his landlady ought to have picked out those threads for him.\r
-\r
-The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the\r
-gravetrestles. They struggled up and out: and all uncovered. Twenty.\r
-\r
-Pause.\r
-\r
-If we were all suddenly somebody else.\r
-\r
-Far away a donkey brayed. Rain. No such ass. Never see a dead one, they\r
-say. Shame of death. They hide. Also poor papa went away.\r
-\r
-Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The\r
-boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in\r
-the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker.\r
-Wellcut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next.\r
-Well, it is a long rest. Feel no more. It's the moment you feel. Must be\r
-damned unpleasant. Can't believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone\r
-else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven't yet. Then\r
-darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you\r
-like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid\r
-all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his\r
-lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the\r
-soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the\r
-floor since he's doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner's death showing\r
-him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of _Lucia.\r
-Shall i nevermore behold thee_? Bam! He expires. Gone at last. People\r
-talk about you a bit: forget you. Don't forget to pray for him. Remember\r
-him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow:\r
-dropping into a hole, one after the other.\r
-\r
-We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and\r
-not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the\r
-fire of purgatory.\r
-\r
-Does he ever think of the hole waiting for himself? They say you do when\r
-you shiver in the sun. Someone walking over it. Callboy's warning. Near\r
-you. Mine over there towards Finglas, the plot I bought. Mamma, poor\r
-mamma, and little Rudy.\r
-\r
-The gravediggers took up their spades and flung heavy clods of clay in\r
-on the coffin. Mr Bloom turned away his face. And if he was alive all\r
-the time? Whew! By jingo, that would be awful! No, no: he is dead, of\r
-course. Of course he is dead. Monday he died. They ought to have\r
-some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an electric clock or\r
-a telephone in the coffin and some kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of\r
-distress. Three days. Rather long to keep them in summer. Just as well\r
-to get shut of them as soon as you are sure there's no.\r
-\r
-The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.\r
-\r
-The caretaker moved away a few paces and put on his hat. Had enough of\r
-it. The mourners took heart of grace, one by one, covering themselves\r
-without show. Mr Bloom put on his hat and saw the portly figure make its\r
-way deftly through the maze of graves. Quietly, sure of his ground, he\r
-traversed the dismal fields.\r
-\r
-Hynes jotting down something in his notebook. Ah, the names. But he\r
-knows them all. No: coming to me.\r
-\r
---I am just taking the names, Hynes said below his breath. What is your\r
-christian name? I'm not sure.\r
-\r
---L, Mr Bloom said. Leopold. And you might put down M'Coy's name too. He\r
-asked me to.\r
-\r
---Charley, Hynes said writing. I know. He was on the _Freeman_ once.\r
-\r
-So he was before he got the job in the morgue under Louis Byrne. Good\r
-idea a postmortem for doctors. Find out what they imagine they know.\r
-He died of a Tuesday. Got the run. Levanted with the cash of a few ads.\r
-Charley, you're my darling. That was why he asked me to. O well, does\r
-no harm. I saw to that, M'Coy. Thanks, old chap: much obliged. Leave him\r
-under an obligation: costs nothing.\r
-\r
---And tell us, Hynes said, do you know that fellow in the, fellow was\r
-over there in the...\r
-\r
-He looked around.\r
-\r
---Macintosh. Yes, I saw him, Mr Bloom said. Where is he now?\r
-\r
---M'Intosh, Hynes said scribbling. I don't know who he is. Is that his\r
-name?\r
-\r
-He moved away, looking about him.\r
-\r
---No, Mr Bloom began, turning and stopping. I say, Hynes!\r
-\r
-Didn't hear. What? Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well of all\r
-the. Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good\r
-Lord, what became of him?\r
-\r
-A seventh gravedigger came beside Mr Bloom to take up an idle spade.\r
-\r
---O, excuse me!\r
-\r
-He stepped aside nimbly.\r
-\r
-Clay, brown, damp, began to be seen in the hole. It rose. Nearly over.\r
-A mound of damp clods rose more, rose, and the gravediggers rested their\r
-spades. All uncovered again for a few instants. The boy propped\r
-his wreath against a corner: the brother-in-law his on a lump. The\r
-gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards\r
-the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent\r
-to pluck from the haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates,\r
-walked slowly on with shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing.\r
-Silently at the gravehead another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord.\r
-The brother-in-law, turning away, placed something in his free hand.\r
-Thanks in silence. Sorry, sir: trouble. Headshake. I know that. For\r
-yourselves just.\r
-\r
-The mourners moved away slowly without aim, by devious paths, staying at\r
-whiles to read a name on a tomb.\r
-\r
---Let us go round by the chief's grave, Hynes said. We have time.\r
-\r
---Let us, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
-They turned to the right, following their slow thoughts. With awe Mr\r
-Power's blank voice spoke:\r
-\r
---Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled\r
-with stones. That one day he will come again.\r
-\r
-Hynes shook his head.\r
-\r
---Parnell will never come again, he said. He's there, all that was\r
-mortal of him. Peace to his ashes.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses,\r
-broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes,\r
-old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some\r
-charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody\r
-really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then\r
-lump them together to save time. All souls' day. Twentyseventh I'll be\r
-at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds.\r
-Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death's\r
-door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of\r
-their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the\r
-bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and So,\r
-wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the\r
-pound. Or a woman's with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew.\r
-Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it\r
-Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it.\r
-Old Dr Murren's. The great physician called him home. Well it's God's\r
-acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted.\r
-Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the _Church Times._ Marriage\r
-ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of\r
-bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more\r
-poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses\r
-nothing. Immortelles.\r
-\r
-A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the\r
-wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hoo! Not a budge out of him.\r
-Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder.\r
-Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a\r
-daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.\r
-\r
-The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve. Ought to be\r
-sideways and red it should be painted like a real heart. Ireland was\r
-dedicated to it or whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this\r
-infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with the basket\r
-of fruit but he said no because they ought to have been afraid of the\r
-boy. Apollo that was.\r
-\r
-How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As\r
-you are now so once were we.\r
-\r
-Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the\r
-voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in\r
-the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather.\r
-Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain\r
-hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph\r
-reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remember the face after\r
-fifteen years, say. For instance who? For instance some fellow that died\r
-when I was in Wisdom Hely's.\r
-\r
-Rtststr! A rattle of pebbles. Wait. Stop!\r
-\r
-He looked down intently into a stone crypt. Some animal. Wait. There he\r
-goes.\r
-\r
-An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the\r
-pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes. The grey\r
-alive crushed itself in under the plinth, wriggled itself in under it.\r
-Good hidingplace for treasure.\r
-\r
-Who lives there? Are laid the remains of Robert Emery. Robert Emmet was\r
-buried here by torchlight, wasn't he? Making his rounds.\r
-\r
-Tail gone now.\r
-\r
-One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones\r
-clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat\r
-gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that\r
-_Voyages in China_ that the Chinese say a white man smells like a\r
-corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the\r
-other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the\r
-plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes.\r
-Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds.\r
-Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole\r
-life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the\r
-air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder does the news go about\r
-whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned\r
-that from them. Wouldn't be surprised. Regular square feed for them.\r
-Flies come before he's well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn't care\r
-about the smell of it. Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste\r
-like raw white turnips.\r
-\r
-The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again.\r
-Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. Last time I\r
-was here was Mrs Sinico's funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills.\r
-And even scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case\r
-I read of to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied with running\r
-gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit. I will appear to you after\r
-death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after\r
-death. There is another world after death named hell. I do not like that\r
-other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel\r
-yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty\r
-beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm\r
-fullblooded life.\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham emerged from a sidepath, talking gravely.\r
-\r
-Solicitor, I think. I know his face. Menton, John Henry, solicitor,\r
-commissioner for oaths and affidavits. Dignam used to be in his office.\r
-Mat Dillon's long ago. Jolly Mat. Convivial evenings. Cold fowl, cigars,\r
-the Tantalus glasses. Heart of gold really. Yes, Menton. Got his rag out\r
-that evening on the bowlinggreen because I sailed inside him. Pure fluke\r
-of mine: the bias. Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate\r
-at first sight. Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree,\r
-laughing. Fellow always like that, mortified if women are by.\r
-\r
-Got a dinge in the side of his hat. Carriage probably.\r
-\r
---Excuse me, sir, Mr Bloom said beside them.\r
-\r
-They stopped.\r
-\r
---Your hat is a little crushed, Mr Bloom said pointing.\r
-\r
-John Henry Menton stared at him for an instant without moving.\r
-\r
---There, Martin Cunningham helped, pointing also. John Henry Menton took\r
-off his hat, bulged out the dinge and smoothed the nap with care on his\r
-coatsleeve. He clapped the hat on his head again.\r
-\r
---It's all right now, Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
-John Henry Menton jerked his head down in acknowledgment.\r
-\r
---Thank you, he said shortly.\r
-\r
-They walked on towards the gates. Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind\r
-a few paces so as not to overhear. Martin laying down the law. Martin\r
-could wind a sappyhead like that round his little finger, without his\r
-seeing it.\r
-\r
-Oyster eyes. Never mind. Be sorry after perhaps when it dawns on him.\r
-Get the pull over him that way.\r
-\r
-Thank you. How grand we are this morning!\r
-\r
-\r
-IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS\r
-\r
-\r
-Before Nelson's pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started\r
-for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure,\r
-Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines,\r
-Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross. The hoarse Dublin United\r
-Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off:\r
-\r
---Rathgar and Terenure!\r
-\r
---Come on, Sandymount Green!\r
-\r
-Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck\r
-moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.\r
-\r
---Start, Palmerston Park!\r
-\r
-\r
-THE WEARER OF THE CROWN\r
-\r
-\r
-Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and\r
-polished. Parked in North Prince's street His Majesty's vermilion\r
-mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received\r
-loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured\r
-and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery.\r
-\r
-GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS\r
-\r
-\r
-Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores\r
-and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped\r
-dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's\r
-stores.\r
-\r
---There it is, Red Murray said. Alexander Keyes.\r
-\r
---Just cut it out, will you? Mr Bloom said, and I'll take it round to\r
-the _Telegraph_ office.\r
-\r
-The door of Ruttledge's office creaked again. Davy Stephens, minute in a\r
-large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets, passed out with\r
-a roll of papers under his cape, a king's courier.\r
-\r
-Red Murray's long shears sliced out the advertisement from the newspaper\r
-in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.\r
-\r
---I'll go through the printingworks, Mr Bloom said, taking the cut\r
-square.\r
-\r
---Of course, if he wants a par, Red Murray said earnestly, a pen behind\r
-his ear, we can do him one.\r
-\r
---Right, Mr Bloom said with a nod. I'll rub that in.\r
-\r
-We.\r
-\r
-WILLIAM BRAYDEN, ESQUIRE, OF OAKLANDS, SANDYMOUNT\r
-\r
-\r
-Red Murray touched Mr Bloom's arm with the shears and whispered:\r
-\r
---Brayden.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom turned and saw the liveried porter raise his lettered cap as a\r
-stately figure entered between the newsboards of the _Weekly Freeman\r
-and National Press_ and the _Freeman's Journal and National Press_.\r
-Dullthudding Guinness's barrels. It passed statelily up the staircase,\r
-steered by an umbrella, a solemn beardframed face. The broadcloth back\r
-ascended each step: back. All his brains are in the nape of his neck,\r
-Simon Dedalus says. Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck,\r
-fat, neck, fat, neck.\r
-\r
---Don't you think his face is like Our Saviour? Red Murray whispered.\r
-\r
-The door of Ruttledge's office whispered: ee: cree. They always build\r
-one door opposite another for the wind to. Way in. Way out.\r
-\r
-Our Saviour: beardframed oval face: talking in the dusk. Mary, Martha.\r
-Steered by an umbrella sword to the footlights: Mario the tenor.\r
-\r
---Or like Mario, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
---Yes, Red Murray agreed. But Mario was said to be the picture of Our\r
-Saviour.\r
-\r
-Jesusmario with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs. Hand on his\r
-heart. In _Martha._\r
-\r
- _Co-ome thou lost one,\r
- Co-ome thou dear one!_\r
-\r
-THE CROZIER AND THE PEN\r
-\r
-\r
---His grace phoned down twice this morning, Red Murray said gravely.\r
-\r
-They watched the knees, legs, boots vanish. Neck.\r
-\r
-A telegram boy stepped in nimbly, threw an envelope on the counter and\r
-stepped off posthaste with a word:\r
-\r
-_--Freeman!_\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom said slowly:\r
-\r
---Well, he is one of our saviours also.\r
-\r
-A meek smile accompanied him as he lifted the counterflap, as he passed\r
-in through a sidedoor and along the warm dark stairs and passage,\r
-along the now reverberating boards. But will he save the circulation?\r
-Thumping. Thumping.\r
-\r
-He pushed in the glass swingdoor and entered, stepping over strewn\r
-packing paper. Through a lane of clanking drums he made his way towards\r
-Nannetti's reading closet.\r
-\r
-WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS WE ANNOUNCE THE DISSOLUTION OF A MOST\r
-RESPECTED DUBLIN BURGESS\r
-\r
-\r
-Hynes here too: account of the funeral probably. Thumping. Thump. This\r
-morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man\r
-to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries\r
-are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working\r
-away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in.\r
-\r
-HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT\r
-\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom halted behind the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy\r
-crown.\r
-\r
-Strange he never saw his real country. Ireland my country. Member for\r
-College green. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was worth.\r
-It's the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the\r
-official gazette. Queen Anne is dead. Published by authority in the year\r
-one thousand and. Demesne situate in the townland of Rosenallis, barony\r
-of Tinnahinch. To all whom it may concern schedule pursuant to statute\r
-showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina.\r
-Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story. Uncle\r
-Toby's page for tiny tots. Country bumpkin's queries. Dear Mr Editor,\r
-what is a good cure for flatulence? I'd like that part. Learn a lot\r
-teaching others. The personal note. M. A. P. Mainly all pictures.\r
-Shapely bathers on golden strand. World's biggest balloon. Double\r
-marriage of sisters celebrated. Two bridegrooms laughing heartily at\r
-each other. Cuprani too, printer. More Irish than the Irish.\r
-\r
-The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he\r
-got paralysed there and no-one knew how to stop them they'd clank on and\r
-on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the\r
-whole thing. Want a cool head.\r
-\r
---Well, get it into the evening edition, councillor, Hynes said.\r
-\r
-Soon be calling him my lord mayor. Long John is backing him, they say.\r
-\r
-The foreman, without answering, scribbled press on a corner of the sheet\r
-and made a sign to a typesetter. He handed the sheet silently over the\r
-dirty glass screen.\r
-\r
---Right: thanks, Hynes said moving off.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom stood in his way.\r
-\r
---If you want to draw the cashier is just going to lunch, he said,\r
-pointing backward with his thumb.\r
-\r
---Did you? Hynes asked.\r
-\r
---Mm, Mr Bloom said. Look sharp and you'll catch him.\r
-\r
---Thanks, old man, Hynes said. I'll tap him too.\r
-\r
-He hurried on eagerly towards the _Freeman's Journal_.\r
-\r
-Three bob I lent him in Meagher's. Three weeks. Third hint.\r
-\r
-WE SEE THE CANVASSER AT WORK\r
-\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom laid his cutting on Mr Nannetti's desk.\r
-\r
---Excuse me, councillor, he said. This ad, you see. Keyes, you remember?\r
-\r
-Mr Nannetti considered the cutting awhile and nodded.\r
-\r
---He wants it in for July, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-The foreman moved his pencil towards it.\r
-\r
---But wait, Mr Bloom said. He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants\r
-two keys at the top.\r
-\r
-Hell of a racket they make. He doesn't hear it. Nannan. Iron nerves.\r
-Maybe he understands what I.\r
-\r
-The foreman turned round to hear patiently and, lifting an elbow, began\r
-to scratch slowly in the armpit of his alpaca jacket.\r
-\r
---Like that, Mr Bloom said, crossing his forefingers at the top.\r
-\r
-Let him take that in first.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, glancing sideways up from the cross he had made, saw the\r
-foreman's sallow face, think he has a touch of jaundice, and beyond the\r
-obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles\r
-of it unreeled. What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels:\r
-various uses, thousand and one things.\r
-\r
-Slipping his words deftly into the pauses of the clanking he drew\r
-swiftly on the scarred woodwork.\r
-\r
-HOUSE OF KEY(E)S\r
-\r
-\r
---Like that, see. Two crossed keys here. A circle. Then here the name.\r
-Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant. So on.\r
-\r
-Better not teach him his own business.\r
-\r
---You know yourself, councillor, just what he wants. Then round the top\r
-in leaded: the house of keys. You see? Do you think that's a good idea?\r
-\r
-The foreman moved his scratching hand to his lower ribs and scratched\r
-there quietly.\r
-\r
---The idea, Mr Bloom said, is the house of keys. You know, councillor,\r
-the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the\r
-isle of Man. Catches the eye, you see. Can you do that?\r
-\r
-I could ask him perhaps about how to pronounce that _voglio._ But then\r
-if he didn't know only make it awkward for him. Better not.\r
-\r
---We can do that, the foreman said. Have you the design?\r
-\r
---I can get it, Mr Bloom said. It was in a Kilkenny paper. He has a\r
-house there too. I'll just run out and ask him. Well, you can do that\r
-and just a little par calling attention. You know the usual. Highclass\r
-licensed premises. Longfelt want. So on.\r
-\r
-The foreman thought for an instant.\r
-\r
---We can do that, he said. Let him give us a three months' renewal.\r
-\r
-A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it\r
-silently. Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching\r
-the silent typesetters at their cases.\r
-\r
-ORTHOGRAPHICAL\r
-\r
-\r
-Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot\r
-to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view\r
-the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a\r
-harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear\r
-under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on\r
-account of the symmetry.\r
-\r
-I should have said when he clapped on his topper. Thank you. I ought\r
-to have said something about an old hat or something. No. I could have\r
-said. Looks as good as new now. See his phiz then.\r
-\r
-Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its\r
-flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost\r
-human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak.\r
-That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its\r
-own way. Sllt.\r
-\r
-NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR\r
-\r
-\r
-The foreman handed back the galleypage suddenly, saying:\r
-\r
---Wait. Where's the archbishop's letter? It's to be repeated in the\r
-_Telegraph._ Where's what's his name?\r
-\r
-He looked about him round his loud unanswering machines.\r
-\r
---Monks, sir? a voice asked from the castingbox.\r
-\r
---Ay. Where's Monks?\r
-\r
---Monks!\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom took up his cutting. Time to get out.\r
-\r
---Then I'll get the design, Mr Nannetti, he said, and you'll give it a\r
-good place I know.\r
-\r
---Monks!\r
-\r
---Yes, sir.\r
-\r
-Three months' renewal. Want to get some wind off my chest first. Try it\r
-anyhow. Rub in August: good idea: horseshow month. Ballsbridge. Tourists\r
-over for the show.\r
-\r
-A DAYFATHER\r
-\r
-\r
-He walked on through the caseroom passing an old man, bowed, spectacled,\r
-aproned. Old Monks, the dayfather. Queer lot of stuff he must have put\r
-through his hands in his time: obituary notices, pubs' ads, speeches,\r
-divorce suits, found drowned. Nearing the end of his tether now. Sober\r
-serious man with a bit in the savingsbank I'd say. Wife a good cook and\r
-washer. Daughter working the machine in the parlour. Plain Jane, no damn\r
-nonsense. AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF THE PASSOVER\r
-\r
-\r
-He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type.\r
-Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice\r
-that. mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards\r
-with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear!\r
-All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt\r
-and into the house of bondage _Alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu_.\r
-No, that's the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob's sons. And then\r
-the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the\r
-butcher. And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the\r
-ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look\r
-into it well. Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else.\r
-That's what life is after all. How quickly he does that job. Practice\r
-makes perfect. Seems to see with his fingers.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom passed on out of the clanking noises through the gallery on to\r
-the landing. Now am I going to tram it out all the way and then catch\r
-him out perhaps. Better phone him up first. Number? Yes. Same as\r
-Citron's house. Twentyeight. Twentyeight double four.\r
-\r
-ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP\r
-\r
-\r
-He went down the house staircase. Who the deuce scrawled all over those\r
-walls with matches? Looks as if they did it for a bet. Heavy greasy\r
-smell there always is in those works. Lukewarm glue in Thom's next door\r
-when I was there.\r
-\r
-He took out his handkerchief to dab his nose. Citronlemon? Ah, the soap\r
-I put there. Lose it out of that pocket. Putting back his handkerchief\r
-he took out the soap and stowed it away, buttoned, into the hip pocket\r
-of his trousers.\r
-\r
-What perfume does your wife use? I could go home still: tram: something\r
-I forgot. Just to see: before: dressing. No. Here. No.\r
-\r
-A sudden screech of laughter came from the _Evening Telegraph_ office.\r
-Know who that is. What's up? Pop in a minute to phone. Ned Lambert it\r
-is.\r
-\r
-He entered softly.\r
-\r
-ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA\r
-\r
-\r
---The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to\r
-the dusty windowpane.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus, staring from the empty fireplace at Ned Lambert's quizzing\r
-face, asked of it sourly:\r
-\r
---Agonising Christ, wouldn't it give you a heartburn on your arse?\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert, seated on the table, read on:\r
-\r
---_Or again, note the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles\r
-on its way, tho' quarrelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling\r
-waters of Neptune's blue domain, 'mid mossy banks, fanned by gentlest\r
-zephyrs, played on by the glorious sunlight or 'neath the shadows cast\r
-o'er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of\r
-the forest_. What about that, Simon? he asked over the fringe of his\r
-newspaper. How's that for high?\r
-\r
---Changing his drink, Mr Dedalus said.\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert, laughing, struck the newspaper on his knees, repeating:\r
-\r
---_The pensive bosom and the overarsing leafage_. O boys! O boys!\r
-\r
---And Xenophon looked upon Marathon, Mr Dedalus said, looking again on\r
-the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon looked on the sea.\r
-\r
---That will do, professor MacHugh cried from the window. I don't want to\r
-hear any more of the stuff.\r
-\r
-He ate off the crescent of water biscuit he had been nibbling and,\r
-hungered, made ready to nibble the biscuit in his other hand.\r
-\r
-High falutin stuff. Bladderbags. Ned Lambert is taking a day off I see.\r
-Rather upsets a man's day, a funeral does. He has influence they\r
-say. Old Chatterton, the vicechancellor, is his granduncle or his\r
-greatgranduncle. Close on ninety they say. Subleader for his death\r
-written this long time perhaps. Living to spite them. Might go first\r
-himself. Johnny, make room for your uncle. The right honourable Hedges\r
-Eyre Chatterton. Daresay he writes him an odd shaky cheque or two on\r
-gale days. Windfall when he kicks out. Alleluia.\r
-\r
---Just another spasm, Ned Lambert said.\r
-\r
---What is it? Mr Bloom asked.\r
-\r
---A recently discovered fragment of Cicero, professor MacHugh answered\r
-with pomp of tone. _Our lovely land_. SHORT BUT TO THE POINT\r
-\r
-\r
---Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply.\r
-\r
---Most pertinent question, the professor said between his chews. With an\r
-accent on the whose.\r
-\r
---Dan Dawson's land Mr Dedalus said.\r
-\r
---Is it his speech last night? Mr Bloom asked.\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert nodded.\r
-\r
---But listen to this, he said.\r
-\r
-The doorknob hit Mr Bloom in the small of the back as the door was\r
-pushed in.\r
-\r
---Excuse me, J. J. O'Molloy said, entering.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom moved nimbly aside.\r
-\r
---I beg yours, he said.\r
-\r
---Good day, Jack.\r
-\r
---Come in. Come in.\r
-\r
---Good day.\r
-\r
---How are you, Dedalus?\r
-\r
---Well. And yourself?\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy shook his head.\r
-\r
-SAD\r
-\r
-\r
-Cleverest fellow at the junior bar he used to be. Decline, poor chap.\r
-That hectic flush spells finis for a man. Touch and go with him. What's\r
-in the wind, I wonder. Money worry.\r
-\r
---_Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks._\r
-\r
---You're looking extra.\r
-\r
---Is the editor to be seen? J. J. O'Molloy asked, looking towards the\r
-inner door.\r
-\r
---Very much so, professor MacHugh said. To be seen and heard. He's in\r
-his sanctum with Lenehan.\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy strolled to the sloping desk and began to turn back the\r
-pink pages of the file.\r
-\r
-Practice dwindling. A mighthavebeen. Losing heart. Gambling. Debts of\r
-honour. Reaping the whirlwind. Used to get good retainers from D. and T.\r
-Fitzgerald. Their wigs to show the grey matter. Brains on their sleeve\r
-like the statue in Glasnevin. Believe he does some literary work for the\r
-_Express_ with Gabriel Conroy. Wellread fellow. Myles Crawford began\r
-on the _Independent._ Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when\r
-they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same\r
-breath. Wouldn't know which to believe. One story good till you hear\r
-the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows\r
-over. Hail fellow well met the next moment.\r
-\r
---Ah, listen to this for God' sake, Ned Lambert pleaded. _Or again if we\r
-but climb the serried mountain peaks..._\r
-\r
---Bombast! the professor broke in testily. Enough of the inflated\r
-windbag!\r
-\r
---_Peaks_, Ned Lambert went on, _towering high on high, to bathe our\r
-souls, as it were..._\r
-\r
---Bathe his lips, Mr Dedalus said. Blessed and eternal God! Yes? Is he\r
-taking anything for it?\r
-\r
-_--As 'twere, in the peerless panorama of Ireland's portfolio,\r
-unmatched, despite their wellpraised prototypes in other vaunted prize\r
-regions, for very beauty, of bosky grove and undulating plain and\r
-luscious pastureland of vernal green, steeped in the transcendent\r
-translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight..._\r
-\r
-HIS NATIVE DORIC\r
-\r
-\r
---The moon, professor MacHugh said. He forgot Hamlet.\r
-\r
-_--That mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of\r
-the moon shine forth to irradiate her silver effulgence..._\r
-\r
---O! Mr Dedalus cried, giving vent to a hopeless groan. Shite and\r
-onions! That'll do, Ned. Life is too short.\r
-\r
-He took off his silk hat and, blowing out impatiently his bushy\r
-moustache, welshcombed his hair with raking fingers.\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert tossed the newspaper aside, chuckling with delight. An\r
-instant after a hoarse bark of laughter burst over professor MacHugh's\r
-unshaven blackspectacled face.\r
-\r
---Doughy Daw! he cried.\r
-\r
-WHAT WETHERUP SAID\r
-\r
-\r
-All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it goes down like hot\r
-cake that stuff. He was in the bakery line too, wasn't he? Why they call\r
-him Doughy Daw. Feathered his nest well anyhow. Daughter engaged to that\r
-chap in the inland revenue office with the motor. Hooked that nicely.\r
-Entertainments. Open house. Big blowout. Wetherup always said that. Get\r
-a grip of them by the stomach.\r
-\r
-The inner door was opened violently and a scarlet beaked face, crested\r
-by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in. The bold blue eyes stared\r
-about them and the harsh voice asked:\r
-\r
---What is it?\r
-\r
---And here comes the sham squire himself! professor MacHugh said\r
-grandly.\r
-\r
---Getonouthat, you bloody old pedagogue! the editor said in recognition.\r
-\r
---Come, Ned, Mr Dedalus said, putting on his hat. I must get a drink\r
-after that.\r
-\r
---Drink! the editor cried. No drinks served before mass.\r
-\r
---Quite right too, Mr Dedalus said, going out. Come on, Ned.\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert sidled down from the table. The editor's blue eyes roved\r
-towards Mr Bloom's face, shadowed by a smile.\r
-\r
---Will you join us, Myles? Ned Lambert asked.\r
-\r
-MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED\r
-\r
-\r
---North Cork militia! the editor cried, striding to the mantelpiece. We\r
-won every time! North Cork and Spanish officers!\r
-\r
---Where was that, Myles? Ned Lambert asked with a reflective glance at\r
-his toecaps.\r
-\r
---In Ohio! the editor shouted.\r
-\r
---So it was, begad, Ned Lambert agreed.\r
-\r
-Passing out he whispered to J. J. O'Molloy:\r
-\r
---Incipient jigs. Sad case.\r
-\r
---Ohio! the editor crowed in high treble from his uplifted scarlet face.\r
-My Ohio!\r
-\r
---A perfect cretic! the professor said. Long, short and long.\r
-\r
-O, HARP EOLIAN!\r
-\r
-\r
-He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking\r
-off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant\r
-unwashed teeth.\r
-\r
---Bingbang, bangbang.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, seeing the coast clear, made for the inner door.\r
-\r
---Just a moment, Mr Crawford, he said. I just want to phone about an ad.\r
-\r
-He went in.\r
-\r
---What about that leader this evening? professor MacHugh asked, coming\r
-to the editor and laying a firm hand on his shoulder.\r
-\r
---That'll be all right, Myles Crawford said more calmly. Never you fret.\r
-Hello, Jack. That's all right.\r
-\r
---Good day, Myles, J. J. O'Molloy said, letting the pages he held slip\r
-limply back on the file. Is that Canada swindle case on today?\r
-\r
-The telephone whirred inside.\r
-\r
---Twentyeight... No, twenty... Double four... Yes.\r
-\r
-SPOT THE WINNER\r
-\r
-\r
-Lenehan came out of the inner office with SPORT'S tissues.\r
-\r
---Who wants a dead cert for the Gold cup? he asked. Sceptre with O.\r
-Madden up.\r
-\r
-He tossed the tissues on to the table.\r
-\r
-Screams of newsboys barefoot in the hall rushed near and the door was\r
-flung open.\r
-\r
---Hush, Lenehan said. I hear feetstoops.\r
-\r
-Professor MacHugh strode across the room and seized the cringing urchin\r
-by the collar as the others scampered out of the hall and down the\r
-steps. The tissues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air\r
-blue scrawls and under the table came to earth.\r
-\r
---It wasn't me, sir. It was the big fellow shoved me, sir.\r
-\r
---Throw him out and shut the door, the editor said. There's a hurricane\r
-blowing.\r
-\r
-Lenehan began to paw the tissues up from the floor, grunting as he\r
-stooped twice.\r
-\r
---Waiting for the racing special, sir, the newsboy said. It was Pat\r
-Farrell shoved me, sir.\r
-\r
-He pointed to two faces peering in round the doorframe.\r
-\r
---Him, sir.\r
-\r
---Out of this with you, professor MacHugh said gruffly.\r
-\r
-He hustled the boy out and banged the door to.\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy turned the files crackingly over, murmuring, seeking:\r
-\r
---Continued on page six, column four.\r
-\r
---Yes, _Evening Telegraph_ here, Mr Bloom phoned from the inner office.\r
-Is the boss...? Yes, _Telegraph_... To where? Aha! Which auction rooms\r
-?... Aha! I see... Right. I'll catch him.\r
-\r
-A COLLISION ENSUES\r
-\r
-\r
-The bell whirred again as he rang off. He came in quickly and bumped\r
-against Lenehan who was struggling up with the second tissue.\r
-\r
---_Pardon, monsieur_, Lenehan said, clutching him for an instant and\r
-making a grimace.\r
-\r
---My fault, Mr Bloom said, suffering his grip. Are you hurt? I'm in a\r
-hurry.\r
-\r
---Knee, Lenehan said.\r
-\r
-He made a comic face and whined, rubbing his knee:\r
-\r
---The accumulation of the _anno Domini_.\r
-\r
---Sorry, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-He went to the door and, holding it ajar, paused. J. J. O'Molloy slapped\r
-the heavy pages over. The noise of two shrill voices, a mouthorgan,\r
-echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the doorsteps:\r
-\r
- _--We are the boys of Wexford\r
- Who fought with heart and hand._\r
-\r
-EXIT BLOOM\r
-\r
-\r
---I'm just running round to Bachelor's walk, Mr Bloom said, about this\r
-ad of Keyes's. Want to fix it up. They tell me he's round there in\r
-Dillon's.\r
-\r
-He looked indecisively for a moment at their faces. The editor who,\r
-leaning against the mantelshelf, had propped his head on his hand,\r
-suddenly stretched forth an arm amply.\r
-\r
---Begone! he said. The world is before you.\r
-\r
---Back in no time, Mr Bloom said, hurrying out.\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy took the tissues from Lenehan's hand and read them,\r
-blowing them apart gently, without comment.\r
-\r
---He'll get that advertisement, the professor said, staring through his\r
-blackrimmed spectacles over the crossblind. Look at the young scamps\r
-after him.\r
-\r
---Show. Where? Lenehan cried, running to the window.\r
-\r
-A STREET CORTEGE\r
-\r
-\r
-Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr\r
-Bloom's wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a\r
-tail of white bowknots.\r
-\r
---Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said,\r
-and you'll kick. O, my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the\r
-walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks.\r
-\r
-He began to mazurka in swift caricature across the floor on sliding\r
-feet past the fireplace to J. J. O'Molloy who placed the tissues in his\r
-receiving hands.\r
-\r
---What's that? Myles Crawford said with a start. Where are the other two\r
-gone?\r
-\r
---Who? the professor said, turning. They're gone round to the Oval for a\r
-drink. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Came over last night.\r
-\r
---Come on then, Myles Crawford said. Where's my hat?\r
-\r
-He walked jerkily into the office behind, parting the vent of his\r
-jacket, jingling his keys in his back pocket. They jingled then in the\r
-air and against the wood as he locked his desk drawer.\r
-\r
---He's pretty well on, professor MacHugh said in a low voice.\r
-\r
---Seems to be, J. J. O'Molloy said, taking out a cigarettecase in\r
-murmuring meditation, but it is not always as it seems. Who has the most\r
-matches?\r
-\r
-THE CALUMET OF PEACE\r
-\r
-\r
-He offered a cigarette to the professor and took one himself. Lenehan\r
-promptly struck a match for them and lit their cigarettes in turn. J. J.\r
-O'Molloy opened his case again and offered it.\r
-\r
---_Thanky vous_, Lenehan said, helping himself.\r
-\r
-The editor came from the inner office, a straw hat awry on his brow. He\r
-declaimed in song, pointing sternly at professor MacHugh:\r
-\r
-_--'Twas rank and fame that tempted thee, 'Twas empire charmed thy\r
-heart._\r
-\r
-The professor grinned, locking his long lips.\r
-\r
---Eh? You bloody old Roman empire? Myles Crawford said.\r
-\r
-He took a cigarette from the open case. Lenehan, lighting it for him\r
-with quick grace, said:\r
-\r
---Silence for my brandnew riddle!\r
-\r
---_Imperium romanum_, J. J. O'Molloy said gently. It sounds nobler than\r
-British or Brixton. The word reminds one somehow of fat in the fire.\r
-\r
-Myles Crawford blew his first puff violently towards the ceiling.\r
-\r
---That's it, he said. We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire.\r
-We haven't got the chance of a snowball in hell.\r
-\r
-THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME\r
-\r
-\r
---Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We\r
-mustn't be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome,\r
-imperial, imperious, imperative.\r
-\r
-He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs, pausing:\r
-\r
---What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers.\r
-The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: _It is meet\r
-to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah_. The Roman, like the\r
-Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on\r
-which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal\r
-obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: _It is meet to be\r
-here. Let us construct a watercloset._\r
-\r
---Which they accordingly did do, Lenehan said. Our old ancient\r
-ancestors, as we read in the first chapter of Guinness's, were partial\r
-to the running stream.\r
-\r
---They were nature's gentlemen, J. J. O'Molloy murmured. But we have\r
-also Roman law.\r
-\r
---And Pontius Pilate is its prophet, professor MacHugh responded.\r
-\r
---Do you know that story about chief baron Palles? J. J. O'Molloy asked.\r
-It was at the royal university dinner. Everything was going swimmingly\r
-...\r
-\r
---First my riddle, Lenehan said. Are you ready?\r
-\r
-Mr O'Madden Burke, tall in copious grey of Donegal tweed, came in from\r
-the hallway. Stephen Dedalus, behind him, uncovered as he entered.\r
-\r
---_Entrez, mes enfants!_ Lenehan cried.\r
-\r
---I escort a suppliant, Mr O'Madden Burke said melodiously. Youth led by\r
-Experience visits Notoriety.\r
-\r
---How do you do? the editor said, holding out a hand. Come in. Your\r
-governor is just gone.???\r
-\r
-\r
-Lenehan said to all:\r
-\r
---Silence! What opera resembles a railwayline? Reflect, ponder,\r
-excogitate, reply.\r
-\r
-Stephen handed over the typed sheets, pointing to the title and\r
-signature.\r
-\r
---Who? the editor asked.\r
-\r
-Bit torn off.\r
-\r
---Mr Garrett Deasy, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---That old pelters, the editor said. Who tore it? Was he short taken?\r
-\r
- _On swift sail flaming\r
- From storm and south\r
- He comes, pale vampire,\r
- Mouth to my mouth._\r
-\r
---Good day, Stephen, the professor said, coming to peer over their\r
-shoulders. Foot and mouth? Are you turned...?\r
-\r
-Bullockbefriending bard.\r
-\r
-SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT\r
-\r
-\r
---Good day, sir, Stephen answered blushing. The letter is not mine. Mr\r
-Garrett Deasy asked me to...\r
-\r
---O, I know him, Myles Crawford said, and I knew his wife too. The\r
-bloodiest old tartar God ever made. By Jesus, she had the foot and mouth\r
-disease and no mistake! The night she threw the soup in the waiter's\r
-face in the Star and Garter. Oho!\r
-\r
-A woman brought sin into the world. For Helen, the runaway wife of\r
-Menelaus, ten years the Greeks. O'Rourke, prince of Breffni.\r
-\r
---Is he a widower? Stephen asked.\r
-\r
---Ay, a grass one, Myles Crawford said, his eye running down the\r
-typescript. Emperor's horses. Habsburg. An Irishman saved his life on\r
-the ramparts of Vienna. Don't you forget! Maximilian Karl O'Donnell,\r
-graf von Tirconnell in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king\r
-an Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day. Wild\r
-geese. O yes, every time. Don't you forget that!\r
-\r
---The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O'Molloy said quietly,\r
-turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a thank you job.\r
-\r
-Professor MacHugh turned on him.\r
-\r
---And if not? he said.\r
-\r
---I'll tell you how it was, Myles Crawford began. A Hungarian it was one\r
-day... LOST CAUSES\r
-\r
-NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED\r
-\r
-\r
---We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for\r
-us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never\r
-loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin\r
-language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is\r
-the maxim: time is money. Material domination. _Dominus!_ Lord! Where is\r
-the spirituality? Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury? A sofa in a westend club.\r
-But the Greek!\r
-\r
-KYRIE ELEISON!\r
-\r
-\r
-A smile of light brightened his darkrimmed eyes, lengthened his long\r
-lips.\r
-\r
---The Greek! he said again. _Kyrios!_ Shining word! The vowels the\r
-Semite and the Saxon know not. _Kyrie!_ The radiance of the intellect.\r
-I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind. _Kyrie eleison!_ The\r
-closetmaker and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We\r
-are liege subjects of the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at\r
-Trafalgar and of the empire of the spirit, not an _imperium,_ that\r
-went under with the Athenian fleets at Aegospotami. Yes, yes. They went\r
-under. Pyrrhus, misled by an oracle, made a last attempt to retrieve the\r
-fortunes of Greece. Loyal to a lost cause.\r
-\r
-He strode away from them towards the window.\r
-\r
---They went forth to battle, Mr O'Madden Burke said greyly, but they\r
-always fell.\r
-\r
---Boohoo! Lenehan wept with a little noise. Owing to a brick received in\r
-the latter half of the _matinée_. Poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus!\r
-\r
-He whispered then near Stephen's ear:\r
-\r
-LENEHAN'S LIMERICK\r
-\r
-\r
- _There's a ponderous pundit MacHugh\r
- Who wears goggles of ebony hue.\r
- As he mostly sees double\r
- To wear them why trouble?\r
- I can't see the Joe Miller. Can you?_\r
-\r
-In mourning for Sallust, Mulligan says. Whose mother is beastly dead.\r
-\r
-Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a sidepocket.\r
-\r
---That'll be all right, he said. I'll read the rest after. That'll be\r
-all right.\r
-\r
-Lenehan extended his hands in protest.\r
-\r
---But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railwayline?\r
-\r
---Opera? Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled.\r
-\r
-Lenehan announced gladly:\r
-\r
---_The Rose of Castile_. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!\r
-\r
-He poked Mr O'Madden Burke mildly in the spleen. Mr O'Madden Burke fell\r
-back with grace on his umbrella, feigning a gasp.\r
-\r
---Help! he sighed. I feel a strong weakness.\r
-\r
-Lenehan, rising to tiptoe, fanned his face rapidly with the rustling\r
-tissues.\r
-\r
-The professor, returning by way of the files, swept his hand across\r
-Stephen's and Mr O'Madden Burke's loose ties.\r
-\r
---Paris, past and present, he said. You look like communards.\r
-\r
---Like fellows who had blown up the Bastile, J. J. O'Molloy said in\r
-quiet mockery. Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between\r
-you? You look as though you had done the deed. General Bobrikoff.\r
-\r
-OMNIUM GATHERUM\r
-\r
-\r
---We were only thinking about it, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---All the talents, Myles Crawford said. Law, the classics...\r
-\r
---The turf, Lenehan put in.\r
-\r
---Literature, the press.\r
-\r
---If Bloom were here, the professor said. The gentle art of\r
-advertisement.\r
-\r
---And Madam Bloom, Mr O'Madden Burke added. The vocal muse. Dublin's\r
-prime favourite.\r
-\r
-Lenehan gave a loud cough.\r
-\r
---Ahem! he said very softly. O, for a fresh of breath air! I caught a\r
-cold in the park. The gate was open.\r
-\r
-YOU CAN DO IT!\r
-\r
-\r
-The editor laid a nervous hand on Stephen's shoulder.\r
-\r
---I want you to write something for me, he said. Something with a bite\r
-in it. You can do it. I see it in your face. _In the lexicon of youth_\r
-...\r
-\r
-See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.\r
-\r
---Foot and mouth disease! the editor cried in scornful invective. Great\r
-nationalist meeting in Borris-in-Ossory. All balls! Bulldosing the\r
-public! Give them something with a bite in it. Put us all into it, damn\r
-its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy.\r
-\r
---We can all supply mental pabulum, Mr O'Madden Burke said.\r
-\r
-Stephen raised his eyes to the bold unheeding stare.\r
-\r
---He wants you for the pressgang, J. J. O'Molloy said.\r
-\r
-THE GREAT GALLAHER\r
-\r
-\r
---You can do it, Myles Crawford repeated, clenching his hand in\r
-emphasis. Wait a minute. We'll paralyse Europe as Ignatius Gallaher\r
-used to say when he was on the shaughraun, doing billiardmarking in the\r
-Clarence. Gallaher, that was a pressman for you. That was a pen. You\r
-know how he made his mark? I'll tell you. That was the smartest piece of\r
-journalism ever known. That was in eightyone, sixth of May, time of\r
-the invincibles, murder in the Phoenix park, before you were born, I\r
-suppose. I'll show you.\r
-\r
-He pushed past them to the files.\r
-\r
---Look at here, he said turning. The _New York World_ cabled for a\r
-special. Remember that time?\r
-\r
-Professor MacHugh nodded.\r
-\r
---_New York World_, the editor said, excitedly pushing back his straw\r
-hat. Where it took place. Tim Kelly, or Kavanagh I mean. Joe Brady and\r
-the rest of them. Where Skin-the-Goat drove the car. Whole route, see?\r
-\r
---Skin-the-Goat, Mr O'Madden Burke said. Fitzharris. He has that\r
-cabman's shelter, they say, down there at Butt bridge. Holohan told me.\r
-You know Holohan?\r
-\r
---Hop and carry one, is it? Myles Crawford said.\r
-\r
---And poor Gumley is down there too, so he told me, minding stones for\r
-the corporation. A night watchman.\r
-\r
-Stephen turned in surprise.\r
-\r
---Gumley? he said. You don't say so? A friend of my father's, is it?\r
-\r
---Never mind Gumley, Myles Crawford cried angrily. Let Gumley mind\r
-the stones, see they don't run away. Look at here. What did Ignatius\r
-Gallaher do? I'll tell you. Inspiration of genius. Cabled right away.\r
-Have you _Weekly Freeman_ of 17 March? Right. Have you got that?\r
-\r
-He flung back pages of the files and stuck his finger on a point.\r
-\r
---Take page four, advertisement for Bransome's coffee, let us say. Have\r
-you got that? Right.\r
-\r
-The telephone whirred.\r
-\r
-A DISTANT VOICE\r
-\r
-\r
---I'll answer it, the professor said, going.\r
-\r
---B is parkgate. Good.\r
-\r
-His finger leaped and struck point after point, vibrating.\r
-\r
---T is viceregal lodge. C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon\r
-gate.\r
-\r
-The loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock's wattles. An illstarched\r
-dicky jutted up and with a rude gesture he thrust it back into his\r
-waistcoat.\r
-\r
---Hello? _Evening Telegraph_ here... Hello?... Who's there?... Yes...\r
-Yes... Yes.\r
-\r
---F to P is the route Skin-the-Goat drove the car for an alibi,\r
-Inchicore, Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh. F.A.B.P.\r
-Got that? X is Davy's publichouse in upper Leeson street.\r
-\r
-The professor came to the inner door.\r
-\r
---Bloom is at the telephone, he said.\r
-\r
---Tell him go to hell, the editor said promptly. X is Davy's\r
-publichouse, see? CLEVER, VERY\r
-\r
-\r
---Clever, Lenehan said. Very.\r
-\r
---Gave it to them on a hot plate, Myles Crawford said, the whole bloody\r
-history.\r
-\r
-Nightmare from which you will never awake.\r
-\r
---I saw it, the editor said proudly. I was present. Dick Adams, the\r
-besthearted bloody Corkman the Lord ever put the breath of life in, and\r
-myself.\r
-\r
-Lenehan bowed to a shape of air, announcing:\r
-\r
---Madam, I'm Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba.\r
-\r
---History! Myles Crawford cried. The Old Woman of Prince's street was\r
-there first. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth over that. Out of\r
-an advertisement. Gregor Grey made the design for it. That gave him the\r
-leg up. Then Paddy Hooper worked Tay Pay who took him on to the _Star._\r
-Now he's got in with Blumenfeld. That's press. That's talent. Pyatt! He\r
-was all their daddies!\r
-\r
---The father of scare journalism, Lenehan confirmed, and the\r
-brother-in-law of Chris Callinan.\r
-\r
---Hello?... Are you there?... Yes, he's here still. Come across\r
-yourself.\r
-\r
---Where do you find a pressman like that now, eh? the editor cried. He\r
-flung the pages down.\r
-\r
---Clamn dever, Lenehan said to Mr O'Madden Burke.\r
-\r
---Very smart, Mr O'Madden Burke said.\r
-\r
-Professor MacHugh came from the inner office.\r
-\r
---Talking about the invincibles, he said, did you see that some hawkers\r
-were up before the recorder?\r
-\r
---O yes, J. J. O'Molloy said eagerly. Lady Dudley was walking home\r
-through the park to see all the trees that were blown down by that\r
-cyclone last year and thought she'd buy a view of Dublin. And it\r
-turned out to be a commemoration postcard of Joe Brady or Number One or\r
-Skin-the-Goat. Right outside the viceregal lodge, imagine!\r
-\r
---They're only in the hook and eye department, Myles Crawford said.\r
-Psha! Press and the bar! Where have you a man now at the bar like those\r
-fellows, like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O'Hagan.\r
-Eh? Ah, bloody nonsense. Psha! Only in the halfpenny place.\r
-\r
-His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain.\r
-\r
-Would anyone wish that mouth for her kiss? How do you know? Why did you\r
-write it then?\r
-\r
-RHYMES AND REASONS\r
-\r
-\r
-Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth? Must be\r
-some. South, pout, out, shout, drouth. Rhymes: two men dressed the same,\r
-looking the same, two by two.\r
-\r
- _........................ la tua pace\r
- .................. che parlar ti piace\r
- .... mentreché il vento, come fa, si tace._\r
-\r
-He saw them three by three, approaching girls, in green, in rose, in\r
-russet, entwining, _per l'aer perso_, in mauve, in purple, _quella\r
-pacifica oriafiamma_, gold of oriflamme, _di rimirar fe piu ardenti._\r
-But I old men, penitent, leadenfooted, underdarkneath the night: mouth\r
-south: tomb womb.\r
-\r
---Speak up for yourself, Mr O'Madden Burke said.\r
-\r
-SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY...\r
-\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy, smiling palely, took up the gage.\r
-\r
---My dear Myles, he said, flinging his cigarette aside, you put a false\r
-construction on my words. I hold no brief, as at present advised, for\r
-the third profession qua profession but your Cork legs are running away\r
-with you. Why not bring in Henry Grattan and Flood and Demosthenes and\r
-Edmund Burke? Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his Chapelizod boss,\r
-Harmsworth of the farthing press, and his American cousin of the Bowery\r
-guttersheet not to mention _Paddy Kelly's Budget, Pue's Occurrences_\r
-and our watchful friend _The Skibbereen Eagle_. Why bring in a master\r
-of forensic eloquence like Whiteside? Sufficient for the day is the\r
-newspaper thereof. LINKS WITH BYGONE DAYS OF YORE\r
-\r
-\r
---Grattan and Flood wrote for this very paper, the editor cried in his\r
-face. Irish volunteers. Where are you now? Established 1763. Dr Lucas.\r
-Who have you now like John Philpot Curran? Psha!\r
-\r
---Well, J. J. O'Molloy said, Bushe K.C., for example.\r
-\r
---Bushe? the editor said. Well, yes: Bushe, yes. He has a strain of it\r
-in his blood. Kendal Bushe or I mean Seymour Bushe.\r
-\r
---He would have been on the bench long ago, the professor said, only for\r
-... But no matter.\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:\r
-\r
---One of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life\r
-fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide,\r
-the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him. _And in the porches of mine\r
-ear did pour._\r
-\r
-\r
-By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or the other\r
-story, beast with two backs?\r
-\r
---What was that? the professor asked.\r
-\r
-ITALIA, MAGISTRA ARTIUM\r
-\r
-\r
---He spoke on the law of evidence, J. J. O'Molloy said, of Roman justice\r
-as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the _lex talionis_. And he\r
-cited the Moses of Michelangelo in the vatican.\r
-\r
---Ha.\r
-\r
---A few wellchosen words, Lenehan prefaced. Silence!\r
-\r
-Pause. J. J. O'Molloy took out his cigarettecase.\r
-\r
-False lull. Something quite ordinary.\r
-\r
-Messenger took out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar.\r
-\r
-I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that\r
-it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match,\r
-that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives. A POLISHED\r
-PERIOD\r
-\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy resumed, moulding his words:\r
-\r
---He said of it: _that stony effigy in frozen music, horned and\r
-terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and\r
-of prophecy which, if aught that the imagination or the hand of sculptor\r
-has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring\r
-deserves to live, deserves to live._\r
-\r
-His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall.\r
-\r
---Fine! Myles Crawford said at once.\r
-\r
---The divine afflatus, Mr O'Madden Burke said.\r
-\r
---You like it? J. J. O'Molloy asked Stephen.\r
-\r
-Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed. He\r
-took a cigarette from the case. J. J. O'Molloy offered his case to Myles\r
-Crawford. Lenehan lit their cigarettes as before and took his trophy,\r
-saying:\r
-\r
---Muchibus thankibus.\r
-\r
-A MAN OF HIGH MORALE\r
-\r
-\r
---Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O'Molloy said\r
-to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal\r
-hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it.\r
-She was a nice old bag of tricks. A. E. has been telling some yankee\r
-interviewer that you came to him in the small hours of the morning to\r
-ask him about planes of consciousness. Magennis thinks you must have\r
-been pulling A. E.'s leg. He is a man of the very highest morale,\r
-Magennis.\r
-\r
-Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he say\r
-about me? Don't ask.\r
-\r
---No, thanks, professor MacHugh said, waving the cigarettecase aside.\r
-Wait a moment. Let me say one thing. The finest display of oratory I\r
-ever heard was a speech made by John F Taylor at the college historical\r
-society. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had\r
-spoken and the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days),\r
-advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.\r
-\r
-He turned towards Myles Crawford and said:\r
-\r
---You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. Then you can imagine the style of his\r
-discourse.\r
-\r
---He is sitting with Tim Healy, J. J. O'Molloy said, rumour has it, on\r
-the Trinity college estates commission.\r
-\r
---He is sitting with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford said, in a child's\r
-frock. Go on. Well?\r
-\r
---It was the speech, mark you, the professor said, of a finished orator,\r
-full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction I will\r
-not say the vials of his wrath but pouring the proud man's contumely\r
-upon the new movement. It was then a new movement. We were weak,\r
-therefore worthless.\r
-\r
-He closed his long thin lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised\r
-an outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and\r
-ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new\r
-focus.\r
-\r
-IMPROMPTU\r
-\r
-\r
-In ferial tone he addressed J. J. O'Molloy:\r
-\r
---Taylor had come there, you must know, from a sickbed. That he\r
-had prepared his speech I do not believe for there was not even one\r
-shorthandwriter in the hall. His dark lean face had a growth of shaggy\r
-beard round it. He wore a loose white silk neckcloth and altogether he\r
-looked (though he was not) a dying man.\r
-\r
-His gaze turned at once but slowly from J. J. O'Molloy's towards\r
-Stephen's face and then bent at once to the ground, seeking. His\r
-unglazed linen collar appeared behind his bent head, soiled by his\r
-withering hair. Still seeking, he said:\r
-\r
---When Fitzgibbon's speech had ended John F Taylor rose to reply.\r
-Briefly, as well as I can bring them to mind, his words were these.\r
-\r
-He raised his head firmly. His eyes bethought themselves once more.\r
-Witless shellfish swam in the gross lenses to and fro, seeking outlet.\r
-\r
-He began:\r
-\r
-_--Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in\r
-listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment\r
-since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported\r
-into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from\r
-this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the\r
-speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses._\r
-\r
-His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes\r
-ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. _And let our\r
-crooked smokes._ Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand\r
-at it yourself?\r
-\r
-_--And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian\r
-highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard\r
-his words and their meaning was revealed to me._\r
-\r
-FROM THE FATHERS\r
-\r
-\r
-It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted\r
-which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good\r
-could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That's saint Augustine.\r
-\r
-_--Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our\r
-language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You\r
-have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and\r
-our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise\r
-furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from\r
-primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong\r
-history and a polity._\r
-\r
-Nile.\r
-\r
-Child, man, effigy.\r
-\r
-By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple\r
-in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.\r
-\r
-_--You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and\r
-mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra.\r
-Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel\r
-is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her\r
-arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at\r
-our name._\r
-\r
-A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it\r
-boldly:\r
-\r
-_--But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and\r
-accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will\r
-and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have\r
-brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed\r
-the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the\r
-Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai's mountaintop nor ever have come down\r
-with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in\r
-his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw._\r
-\r
-He ceased and looked at them, enjoying a silence.\r
-\r
-OMINOUS--FOR HIM!\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy said not without regret:\r
-\r
---And yet he died without having entered the land of promise.\r
-\r
---A sudden--at--the--moment--though--from--lingering--illness--often--\r
-previously--expectorated--demise, Lenehan added. And with a great future\r
-behind him.\r
-\r
-The troop of bare feet was heard rushing along the hallway and pattering\r
-up the staircase.\r
-\r
---That is oratory, the professor said uncontradicted. Gone with the\r
-wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of\r
-porches. The tribune's words, howled and scattered to the four winds.\r
-A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all\r
-that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.\r
-\r
-I have money.\r
-\r
---Gentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I\r
-suggest that the house do now adjourn?\r
-\r
---You take my breath away. It is not perchance a French compliment?\r
-Mr O'Madden Burke asked. 'Tis the hour, methinks, when the winejug,\r
-metaphorically speaking, is most grateful in Ye ancient hostelry.\r
-\r
---That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved. All that are in favour\r
-say ay, Lenehan announced. The contrary no. I declare it carried. To\r
-which particular boosing shed?... My casting vote is: Mooney's!\r
-\r
-He led the way, admonishing:\r
-\r
---We will sternly refuse to partake of strong waters, will we not? Yes,\r
-we will not. By no manner of means.\r
-\r
-Mr O'Madden Burke, following close, said with an ally's lunge of his\r
-umbrella:\r
-\r
---Lay on, Macduff!\r
-\r
---Chip of the old block! the editor cried, clapping Stephen on the\r
-shoulder. Let us go. Where are those blasted keys?\r
-\r
-He fumbled in his pocket pulling out the crushed typesheets.\r
-\r
---Foot and mouth. I know. That'll be all right. That'll go in. Where are\r
-they? That's all right.\r
-\r
-He thrust the sheets back and went into the inner office. LET US HOPE\r
-\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy, about to follow him in, said quietly to Stephen:\r
-\r
---I hope you will live to see it published. Myles, one moment.\r
-\r
-He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him.\r
-\r
---Come along, Stephen, the professor said. That is fine, isn't it? It\r
-has the prophetic vision. _Fuit Ilium!_ The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms\r
-of this world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.\r
-\r
-The first newsboy came pattering down the stairs at their heels and\r
-rushed out into the street, yelling:\r
-\r
---Racing special!\r
-\r
-Dublin. I have much, much to learn.\r
-\r
-They turned to the left along Abbey street.\r
-\r
---I have a vision too, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---Yes? the professor said, skipping to get into step. Crawford will\r
-follow.\r
-\r
-Another newsboy shot past them, yelling as he ran:\r
-\r
---Racing special!\r
-\r
-DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN\r
-\r
-\r
-Dubliners.\r
-\r
---Two Dublin vestals, Stephen said, elderly and pious, have lived fifty\r
-and fiftythree years in Fumbally's lane.\r
-\r
---Where is that? the professor asked.\r
-\r
---Off Blackpitts, Stephen said.\r
-\r
-Damp night reeking of hungry dough. Against the wall. Face glistering\r
-tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts. Akasic records. Quicker,\r
-darlint!\r
-\r
-On now. Dare it. Let there be life.\r
-\r
---They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar.\r
-They save up three and tenpence in a red tin letterbox moneybox. They\r
-shake out the threepenny bits and sixpences and coax out the pennies\r
-with the blade of a knife. Two and three in silver and one and seven\r
-in coppers. They put on their bonnets and best clothes and take their\r
-umbrellas for fear it may come on to rain.\r
-\r
---Wise virgins, professor MacHugh said.\r
-\r
-LIFE ON THE RAW\r
-\r
-\r
---They buy one and fourpenceworth of brawn and four slices of panloaf at\r
-the north city diningrooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins,\r
-proprietress... They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl\r
-at the foot of Nelson's pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They\r
-give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin\r
-to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each\r
-other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the\r
-brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down,\r
-peeping at the airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that\r
-high.\r
-\r
-Their names are Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe. Anne Kearns has the\r
-lumbago for which she rubs on Lourdes water, given her by a lady who got\r
-a bottleful from a passionist father. Florence MacCabe takes a crubeen\r
-and a bottle of double X for supper every Saturday.\r
-\r
---Antithesis, the professor said nodding twice. Vestal virgins. I can\r
-see them. What's keeping our friend?\r
-\r
-He turned.\r
-\r
-A bevy of scampering newsboys rushed down the steps, scattering in all\r
-directions, yelling, their white papers fluttering. Hard after them\r
-Myles Crawford appeared on the steps, his hat aureoling his scarlet\r
-face, talking with J. J. O'Molloy.\r
-\r
---Come along, the professor cried, waving his arm.\r
-\r
-He set off again to walk by Stephen's side. RETURN OF BLOOM\r
-\r
-\r
---Yes, he said. I see them.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, breathless, caught in a whirl of wild newsboys near the\r
-offices of the _Irish Catholic and Dublin Penny Journal_, called:\r
-\r
---Mr Crawford! A moment!\r
-\r
---_Telegraph_! Racing special!\r
-\r
---What is it? Myles Crawford said, falling back a pace.\r
-\r
-A newsboy cried in Mr Bloom's face:\r
-\r
---Terrible tragedy in Rathmines! A child bit by a bellows!\r
-\r
-INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITOR\r
-\r
-\r
---Just this ad, Mr Bloom said, pushing through towards the steps,\r
-puffing, and taking the cutting from his pocket. I spoke with Mr Keyes\r
-just now. He'll give a renewal for two months, he says. After he'll\r
-see. But he wants a par to call attention in the _Telegraph_ too,\r
-the Saturday pink. And he wants it copied if it's not too late I told\r
-councillor Nannetti from the _Kilkenny People_. I can have access to\r
-it in the national library. House of keys, don't you see? His name is\r
-Keyes. It's a play on the name. But he practically promised he'd give\r
-the renewal. But he wants just a little puff. What will I tell him, Mr\r
-Crawford? K.M.A.\r
-\r
-\r
---Will you tell him he can kiss my arse? Myles Crawford said throwing\r
-out his arm for emphasis. Tell him that straight from the stable.\r
-\r
-A bit nervy. Look out for squalls. All off for a drink. Arm in arm.\r
-Lenehan's yachting cap on the cadge beyond. Usual blarney. Wonder is\r
-that young Dedalus the moving spirit. Has a good pair of boots on him\r
-today. Last time I saw him he had his heels on view. Been walking in\r
-muck somewhere. Careless chap. What was he doing in Irishtown?\r
-\r
---Well, Mr Bloom said, his eyes returning, if I can get the design I\r
-suppose it's worth a short par. He'd give the ad, I think. I'll tell him\r
-... K.M.R.I.A.\r
-\r
-\r
---He can kiss my royal Irish arse, Myles Crawford cried loudly over his\r
-shoulder. Any time he likes, tell him.\r
-\r
-While Mr Bloom stood weighing the point and about to smile he strode on\r
-jerkily.\r
-\r
-RAISING THE WIND\r
-\r
-\r
---_Nulla bona_, Jack, he said, raising his hand to his chin. I'm up to\r
-here. I've been through the hoop myself. I was looking for a fellow to\r
-back a bill for me no later than last week. Sorry, Jack. You must take\r
-the will for the deed. With a heart and a half if I could raise the wind\r
-anyhow.\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy pulled a long face and walked on silently. They caught up\r
-on the others and walked abreast.\r
-\r
---When they have eaten the brawn and the bread and wiped their twenty\r
-fingers in the paper the bread was wrapped in they go nearer to the\r
-railings.\r
-\r
---Something for you, the professor explained to Myles Crawford. Two old\r
-Dublin women on the top of Nelson's pillar.\r
-\r
-SOME COLUMN!--THAT'S WHAT WADDLER ONE SAID\r
-\r
-\r
---That's new, Myles Crawford said. That's copy. Out for the waxies\r
-Dargle. Two old trickies, what?\r
-\r
---But they are afraid the pillar will fall, Stephen went on. They see\r
-the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines'\r
-blue dome, Adam and Eve's, saint Laurence O'Toole's. But it makes them\r
-giddy to look so they pull up their skirts...\r
-\r
-THOSE SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES\r
-\r
-\r
---Easy all, Myles Crawford said. No poetic licence. We're in the\r
-archdiocese here.\r
-\r
---And settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue\r
-of the onehandled adulterer.\r
-\r
---Onehandled adulterer! the professor cried. I like that. I see the\r
-idea. I see what you mean.\r
-\r
-DAMES DONATE DUBLIN'S CITS SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS AEROLITHS, BELIEF\r
-\r
-\r
---It gives them a crick in their necks, Stephen said, and they are too\r
-tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between\r
-them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with\r
-their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and\r
-spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.\r
-\r
-He gave a sudden loud young laugh as a close. Lenehan and Mr O'Madden\r
-Burke, hearing, turned, beckoned and led on across towards Mooney's.\r
-\r
---Finished? Myles Crawford said. So long as they do no worse.\r
-\r
-SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH\r
-MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP.\r
-\r
-\r
---You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of\r
-Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he were\r
-bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a noble\r
-and a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of\r
-beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope.\r
-\r
-Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich.\r
-\r
-They made ready to cross O'Connell street.\r
-\r
-HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!\r
-\r
-\r
-At various points along the eight lines tramcars with motionless\r
-trolleys stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines,\r
-Rathfarnham, Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Sandymount Green, Ringsend\r
-and Sandymount Tower, Donnybrook, Palmerston Park and Upper Rathmines,\r
-all still, becalmed in short circuit. Hackney cars, cabs, delivery\r
-waggons, mailvans, private broughams, aerated mineral water floats with\r
-rattling crates of bottles, rattled, rolled, horsedrawn, rapidly.\r
-\r
-WHAT?--AND LIKEWISE--WHERE?\r
-\r
-\r
---But what do you call it? Myles Crawford asked. Where did they get the\r
-plums?\r
-\r
-VIRGILIAN, SAYS PEDAGOGUE. SOPHOMORE PLUMPS FOR OLD MAN MOSES.\r
-\r
-\r
---Call it, wait, the professor said, opening his long lips wide to\r
-reflect. Call it, let me see. Call it: _deus nobis haec otia fecit._\r
-\r
---No, Stephen said. I call it _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the\r
-Parable of The Plums._\r
-\r
---I see, the professor said.\r
-\r
-He laughed richly.\r
-\r
---I see, he said again with new pleasure. Moses and the promised land.\r
-We gave him that idea, he added to J. J. O'Molloy.\r
-\r
-HORATIO IS CYNOSURE THIS FAIR JUNE DAY\r
-\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy sent a weary sidelong glance towards the statue and held\r
-his peace.\r
-\r
---I see, the professor said.\r
-\r
-He halted on sir John Gray's pavement island and peered aloft at Nelson\r
-through the meshes of his wry smile.\r
-\r
-DIMINISHED DIGITS PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES,\r
-FLO WANGLES--YET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?\r
-\r
-\r
---Onehandled adulterer, he said smiling grimly. That tickles me, I must\r
-say.\r
-\r
---Tickled the old ones too, Myles Crawford said, if the God Almighty's\r
-truth was known.\r
-\r
-\r
-Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl\r
-shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school\r
-treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His\r
-Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red\r
-jujubes white.\r
-\r
-\r
-A sombre Y.M.C.A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of\r
-Graham Lemon's, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.\r
-\r
-Heart to heart talks.\r
-\r
-Bloo... Me? No.\r
-\r
-Blood of the Lamb.\r
-\r
-His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are\r
-washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen,\r
-martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering,\r
-druids' altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of\r
-the church in Zion is coming.\r
-\r
-_Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!! All heartily welcome._ Paying game.\r
-Torry and Alexander last year. Polygamy. His wife will put the stopper\r
-on that. Where was that ad some Birmingham firm the luminous crucifix.\r
-Our Saviour. Wake up in the dead of night and see him on the wall,\r
-hanging. Pepper's ghost idea. Iron nails ran in.\r
-\r
-\r
-Phosphorus it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for\r
-instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to the\r
-pantry in the kitchen. Don't like all the smells in it waiting to rush\r
-out. What was it she wanted? The Malaga raisins. Thinking of Spain.\r
-Before Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny. Very good\r
-for the brain.\r
-\r
-From Butler's monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor's walk.\r
-Dedalus' daughter there still outside Dillon's auctionrooms. Must be\r
-selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father.\r
-Lobbing about waiting for him. Home always breaks up when the mother\r
-goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That's in their\r
-theology or the priest won't give the poor woman the confession, the\r
-absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat\r
-you out of house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on the\r
-fat of the land. Their butteries and larders. I'd like to see them do\r
-the black fast Yom Kippur. Crossbuns. One meal and a collation for fear\r
-he'd collapse on the altar. A housekeeper of one of those fellows if you\r
-could pick it out of her. Never pick it out of her. Like getting l.s.d.\r
-out of him. Does himself well. No guests. All for number one. Watching\r
-his water. Bring your own bread and butter. His reverence: mum's the\r
-word.\r
-\r
-Good Lord, that poor child's dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks\r
-too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It's after they feel it.\r
-Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution.\r
-\r
-As he set foot on O'Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from\r
-the parapet. Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea air sours it,\r
-I heard. Be interesting some day get a pass through Hancock to see the\r
-brewery. Regular world in itself. Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in\r
-too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on\r
-the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians. Imagine drinking\r
-that! Rats: vats. Well, of course, if we knew all the things.\r
-\r
-Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt\r
-quaywalls, gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down? Reuben\r
-J's son must have swallowed a good bellyful of that sewage. One and\r
-eightpence too much. Hhhhm. It's the droll way he comes out with the\r
-things. Knows how to tell a story too.\r
-\r
-They wheeled lower. Looking for grub. Wait.\r
-\r
-He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet\r
-per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of\r
-swells, floated under by the bridgepiers. Not such damn fools. Also the\r
-day I threw that stale cake out of the Erin's King picked it up in the\r
-wake fifty yards astern. Live by their wits. They wheeled, flapping.\r
-\r
- _The hungry famished gull\r
- Flaps o'er the waters dull._\r
-\r
-That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has\r
-no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts.\r
-Solemn.\r
-\r
-\r
- _Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit\r
- Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth._\r
- --Two apples a penny! Two for a penny!\r
-\r
-\r
-His gaze passed over the glazed apples serried on her stand. Australians\r
-they must be this time of year. Shiny peels: polishes them up with a rag\r
-or a handkerchief.\r
-\r
-Wait. Those poor birds.\r
-\r
-He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes for\r
-a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down into\r
-the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all from\r
-their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel.\r
-\r
-Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his\r
-hands. They never expected that. Manna. Live on fish, fishy flesh they\r
-have, all seabirds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from Anna Liffey swim down\r
-here sometimes to preen themselves. No accounting for tastes. Wonder\r
-what kind is swanmeat. Robinson Crusoe had to live on them.\r
-\r
-They wheeled flapping weakly. I'm not going to throw any more. Penny\r
-quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw. They spread foot and\r
-mouth disease too. If you cram a turkey say on chestnutmeal it tastes\r
-like that. Eat pig like pig. But then why is it that saltwater fish are\r
-not salty? How is that?\r
-\r
-His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor\r
-on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.\r
-\r
-_Kino's_ 11/- _Trousers_\r
-\r
-Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you\r
-own water really? It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which\r
-in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. All kinds of\r
-places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck\r
-up in all the greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly confidential. Dr\r
-Hy Franks. Didn't cost him a red like Maginni the dancing master self\r
-advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or stick them up himself for\r
-that matter on the q. t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight.\r
-Just the place too. POST NO BILLS. POST 110 PILLS. Some chap with a dose\r
-burning him.\r
-\r
-If he...?\r
-\r
-O!\r
-\r
-Eh?\r
-\r
-No... No.\r
-\r
-No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely?\r
-\r
-No, no.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about\r
-that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time.\r
-Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never\r
-exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek:\r
-parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her\r
-about the transmigration. O rocks!\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballastoffice. She's right\r
-after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.\r
-She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking.\r
-Still, I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone\r
-voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a\r
-barrel. Now, isn't that wit. They used to call him big Ben. Not half as\r
-witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get\r
-outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at stowing away number\r
-one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.\r
-\r
-A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him\r
-along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like\r
-that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He\r
-read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S.\r
-Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his\r
-foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our\r
-staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after\r
-street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are\r
-not Boyl: no, M Glade's men. Doesn't bring in any business either.\r
-I suggested to him about a transparent showcart with two smart girls\r
-sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I\r
-bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the\r
-eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she's writing. Get twenty of\r
-them round you if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women\r
-too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he\r
-didn't think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a\r
-false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted\r
-under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't lick 'em. What?\r
-Our envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson,\r
-I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser _Kansell,_ sold\r
-by Hely's Ltd, 85 Dame street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a\r
-job it was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent.\r
-That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her small\r
-head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love by her eyes.\r
-Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman. I disturbed her at her\r
-devotions that morning. But glad to communicate with the outside world.\r
-Our great day, she said. Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name\r
-too: caramel. She knew I, I think she knew by the way she. If she had\r
-married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of\r
-money. Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for\r
-them. My heart's broke eating dripping. They like buttering themselves\r
-in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the\r
-pawnbroker's daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed wire.\r
-\r
-He crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by. Rover\r
-cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil\r
-Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait: was in Thom's.\r
-Got the job in Wisdom Hely's year we married. Six years. Ten years ago:\r
-ninetyfour he died yes that's right the big fire at Arnott's. Val Dillon\r
-was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O'Reilly emptying\r
-the port into his soup before the flag fell. Bobbob lapping it for the\r
-inner alderman. Couldn't hear what the band played. For what we have\r
-already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly\r
-had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with\r
-selfcovered buttons. She didn't like it because I sprained my ankle\r
-first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old\r
-Goodwin's tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies' picnic\r
-too. Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove,\r
-shoulders and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we\r
-had that day. People looking after her.\r
-\r
-Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the red wallpaper.\r
-Dockrell's, one and ninepence a dozen. Milly's tubbing night. American\r
-soap I bought: elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny she\r
-looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor papa's\r
-daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.\r
-\r
-He walked along the curbstone.\r
-\r
-Stream of life. What was the name of that priestylooking chap was always\r
-squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in Citron's saint\r
-Kevin's parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is getting. Pen\r
-...? Of course it's years ago. Noise of the trams probably. Well, if he\r
-couldn't remember the dayfather's name that he sees every day.\r
-\r
-Bartell d'Arcy was the tenor, just coming out then. Seeing her home\r
-after practice. Conceited fellow with his waxedup moustache. Gave her\r
-that song _Winds that blow from the south_.\r
-\r
-Windy night that was I went to fetch her there was that lodge meeting on\r
-about those lottery tickets after Goodwin's concert in the supperroom or\r
-oakroom of the Mansion house. He and I behind. Sheet of her music blew\r
-out of my hand against the High school railings. Lucky it didn't.\r
-Thing like that spoils the effect of a night for her. Professor Goodwin\r
-linking her in front. Shaky on his pins, poor old sot. His farewell\r
-concerts. Positively last appearance on any stage. May be for months and\r
-may be for never. Remember her laughing at the wind, her blizzard collar\r
-up. Corner of Harcourt road remember that gust. Brrfoo! Blew up all her\r
-skirts and her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin. She did get flushed\r
-in the wind. Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up\r
-those pieces of lap of mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she\r
-liked. And the mulled rum. Could see her in the bedroom from the hearth\r
-unclamping the busk of her stays: white.\r
-\r
-Swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed. Always warm from her.\r
-Always liked to let her self out. Sitting there after till near two\r
-taking out her hairpins. Milly tucked up in beddyhouse. Happy. Happy.\r
-That was the night...\r
-\r
---O, Mr Bloom, how do you do?\r
-\r
---O, how do you do, Mrs Breen?\r
-\r
---No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven't seen her for\r
-ages.\r
-\r
---In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily. Milly has a position down in\r
-Mullingar, you know.\r
-\r
---Go away! Isn't that grand for her?\r
-\r
---Yes. In a photographer's there. Getting on like a house on fire. How\r
-are all your charges?\r
-\r
---All on the baker's list, Mrs Breen said.\r
-\r
-How many has she? No other in sight.\r
-\r
---You're in black, I see. You have no...\r
-\r
---No, Mr Bloom said. I have just come from a funeral.\r
-\r
-Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who's dead, when and what did he\r
-die of? Turn up like a bad penny.\r
-\r
---O, dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn't any near relation.\r
-\r
-May as well get her sympathy.\r
-\r
---Dignam, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly,\r
-poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning.\r
-\r
-_Your funeral's tomorrow While you're coming through the rye.\r
-Diddlediddle dumdum Diddlediddle..._\r
-\r
---Sad to lose the old friends, Mrs Breen's womaneyes said melancholily.\r
-\r
-Now that's quite enough about that. Just: quietly: husband.\r
-\r
---And your lord and master?\r
-\r
-Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn't lost them anyhow.\r
-\r
---O, don't be talking! she said. He's a caution to rattlesnakes. He's\r
-in there now with his lawbooks finding out the law of libel. He has me\r
-heartscalded. Wait till I show you.\r
-\r
-Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured\r
-out from Harrison's. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr Bloom's\r
-gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar,\r
-or they'd taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot\r
-arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of\r
-hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork\r
-chained to the table.\r
-\r
-Opening her handbag, chipped leather. Hatpin: ought to have a guard on\r
-those things. Stick it in a chap's eye in the tram. Rummaging. Open.\r
-Money. Please take one. Devils if they lose sixpence. Raise Cain.\r
-Husband barging. Where's the ten shillings I gave you on Monday? Are\r
-you feeding your little brother's family? Soiled handkerchief:\r
-medicinebottle. Pastille that was fell. What is she?...\r
-\r
---There must be a new moon out, she said. He's always bad then. Do you\r
-know what he did last night?\r
-\r
-Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him, wide in\r
-alarm, yet smiling.\r
-\r
---What? Mr Bloom asked.\r
-\r
-Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me.\r
-\r
---Woke me up in the night, she said. Dream he had, a nightmare.\r
-\r
-Indiges.\r
-\r
---Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs.\r
-\r
---The ace of spades! Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-She took a folded postcard from her handbag.\r
-\r
---Read that, she said. He got it this morning.\r
-\r
---What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U.P.?\r
-\r
---U.P.: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It's a great\r
-shame for them whoever he is.\r
-\r
---Indeed it is, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-She took back the card, sighing.\r
-\r
---And now he's going round to Mr Menton's office. He's going to take an\r
-action for ten thousand pounds, he says.\r
-\r
-She folded the card into her untidy bag and snapped the catch.\r
-\r
-Same blue serge dress she had two years ago, the nap bleaching. Seen its\r
-best days. Wispish hair over her ears. And that dowdy toque: three old\r
-grapes to take the harm out of it. Shabby genteel. She used to be a\r
-tasty dresser. Lines round her mouth. Only a year or so older than\r
-Molly.\r
-\r
-See the eye that woman gave her, passing. Cruel. The unfair sex.\r
-\r
-He looked still at her, holding back behind his look his discontent.\r
-Pungent mockturtle oxtail mulligatawny. I'm hungry too. Flakes of pastry\r
-on the gusset of her dress: daub of sugary flour stuck to her cheek.\r
-Rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior. Josie Powell\r
-that was. In Luke Doyle's long ago. Dolphin's Barn, the charades. U.P.:\r
-up.\r
-\r
-Change the subject.\r
-\r
---Do you ever see anything of Mrs Beaufoy? Mr Bloom asked.\r
-\r
---Mina Purefoy? she said.\r
-\r
-Philip Beaufoy I was thinking. Playgoers' Club. Matcham often thinks of\r
-the masterstroke. Did I pull the chain? Yes. The last act.\r
-\r
---Yes.\r
-\r
---I just called to ask on the way in is she over it. She's in the\r
-lying-in hospital in Holles street. Dr Horne got her in. She's three\r
-days bad now.\r
-\r
---O, Mr Bloom said. I'm sorry to hear that.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mrs Breen said. And a houseful of kids at home. It's a very stiff\r
-birth, the nurse told me.\r
-\r
----O, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in\r
-compassion. Dth! Dth!\r
-\r
---I'm sorry to hear that, he said. Poor thing! Three days! That's\r
-terrible for her.\r
-\r
-Mrs Breen nodded.\r
-\r
---She was taken bad on the Tuesday...\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom touched her funnybone gently, warning her:\r
-\r
---Mind! Let this man pass.\r
-\r
-A bony form strode along the curbstone from the river staring with a\r
-rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavystringed glass. Tight as a\r
-skullpiece a tiny hat gripped his head. From his arm a folded dustcoat,\r
-a stick and an umbrella dangled to his stride.\r
-\r
---Watch him, Mr Bloom said. He always walks outside the lampposts.\r
-Watch!\r
-\r
---Who is he if it's a fair question? Mrs Breen asked. Is he dotty?\r
-\r
---His name is Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Mr\r
-Bloom said smiling. Watch!\r
-\r
---He has enough of them, she said. Denis will be like that one of these\r
-days.\r
-\r
-She broke off suddenly.\r
-\r
---There he is, she said. I must go after him. Goodbye. Remember me to\r
-Molly, won't you?\r
-\r
---I will, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-He watched her dodge through passers towards the shopfronts. Denis Breen\r
-in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison's\r
-hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old\r
-times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust\r
-his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke\r
-earnestly.\r
-\r
-Meshuggah. Off his chump.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom walked on again easily, seeing ahead of him in sunlight the\r
-tight skullpiece, the dangling stickumbrelladustcoat. Going the two\r
-days. Watch him! Out he goes again. One way of getting on in the world.\r
-And that other old mosey lunatic in those duds. Hard time she must have\r
-with him.\r
-\r
-U.P.: up. I'll take my oath that's Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding. Wrote\r
-it for a lark in the Scotch house I bet anything. Round to Menton's\r
-office. His oyster eyes staring at the postcard. Be a feast for the\r
-gods.\r
-\r
-He passed the _Irish Times_. There might be other answers Iying there.\r
-Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code. At their lunch\r
-now. Clerk with the glasses there doesn't know me. O, leave them there\r
-to simmer. Enough bother wading through fortyfour of them. Wanted, smart\r
-lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work. I called you naughty\r
-darling because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is\r
-the meaning. Please tell me what perfume does your wife. Tell me who\r
-made the world. The way they spring those questions on you. And the\r
-other one Lizzie Twigg. My literary efforts have had the good fortune to\r
-meet with the approval of the eminent poet A. E. (Mr Geo. Russell). No\r
-time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry.\r
-\r
-Best paper by long chalks for a small ad. Got the provinces now. Cook\r
-and general, exc. cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit\r
-counter. Resp. girl (R.C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop.\r
-James Carlisle made that. Six and a half per cent dividend. Made a big\r
-deal on Coates's shares. Ca' canny. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All the\r
-toady news. Our gracious and popular vicereine. Bought the _Irish Field_\r
-now. Lady Mountcashel has quite recovered after her confinement and\r
-rode out with the Ward Union staghounds at the enlargement yesterday\r
-at Rathoath. Uneatable fox. Pothunters too. Fear injects juices make\r
-it tender enough for them. Riding astride. Sit her horse like a man.\r
-Weightcarrying huntress. No sidesaddle or pillion for her, not for Joe.\r
-First to the meet and in at the death. Strong as a brood mare some of\r
-those horsey women. Swagger around livery stables. Toss off a glass\r
-of brandy neat while you'd say knife. That one at the Grosvenor this\r
-morning. Up with her on the car: wishswish. Stonewall or fivebarred gate\r
-put her mount to it. Think that pugnosed driver did it out of spite. Who\r
-is this she was like? O yes! Mrs Miriam Dandrade that sold me her old\r
-wraps and black underclothes in the Shelbourne hotel. Divorced Spanish\r
-American. Didn't take a feather out of her my handling them. As if I was\r
-her clotheshorse. Saw her in the viceregal party when Stubbs the park\r
-ranger got me in with Whelan of the _Express._ Scavenging what the\r
-quality left. High tea. Mayonnaise I poured on the plums thinking it was\r
-custard. Her ears ought to have tingled for a few weeks after. Want to\r
-be a bull for her. Born courtesan. No nursery work for her, thanks.\r
-\r
-Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness. Saffron bun\r
-and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy. Y. M. C. A. Eating\r
-with a stopwatch, thirtytwo chews to the minute. And still his\r
-muttonchop whiskers grew. Supposed to be well connected. Theodore's\r
-cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family. Hardy\r
-annuals he presents her with. Saw him out at the Three Jolly Topers\r
-marching along bareheaded and his eldest boy carrying one in a\r
-marketnet. The squallers. Poor thing! Then having to give the breast\r
-year after year all hours of the night. Selfish those t.t's are. Dog in\r
-the manger. Only one lump of sugar in my tea, if you please.\r
-\r
-He stood at Fleet street crossing. Luncheon interval. A sixpenny at\r
-Rowe's? Must look up that ad in the national library. An eightpenny in\r
-the Burton. Better. On my way.\r
-\r
-He walked on past Bolton's Westmoreland house. Tea. Tea. Tea. I forgot\r
-to tap Tom Kernan.\r
-\r
-Sss. Dth, dth, dth! Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a\r
-vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out. Phew!\r
-Dreadful simply! Child's head too big: forceps. Doubled up inside her\r
-trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out. Kill me\r
-that would. Lucky Molly got over hers lightly. They ought to invent\r
-something to stop that. Life with hard labour. Twilight sleep idea:\r
-queen Victoria was given that. Nine she had. A good layer. Old\r
-woman that lived in a shoe she had so many children. Suppose he was\r
-consumptive. Time someone thought about it instead of gassing about the\r
-what was it the pensive bosom of the silver effulgence. Flapdoodle to\r
-feed fools on. They could easily have big establishments whole thing\r
-quite painless out of all the taxes give every child born five quid at\r
-compound interest up to twentyone five per cent is a hundred shillings\r
-and five tiresome pounds multiply by twenty decimal system encourage\r
-people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit twentyone years\r
-want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum more than you think.\r
-\r
-Not stillborn of course. They are not even registered. Trouble for\r
-nothing.\r
-\r
-Funny sight two of them together, their bellies out. Molly and Mrs\r
-Moisel. Mothers' meeting. Phthisis retires for the time being, then\r
-returns. How flat they look all of a sudden after. Peaceful eyes. Weight\r
-off their mind. Old Mrs Thornton was a jolly old soul. All my babies,\r
-she said. The spoon of pap in her mouth before she fed them. O, that's\r
-nyumnyum. Got her hand crushed by old Tom Wall's son. His first bow to\r
-the public. Head like a prize pumpkin. Snuffy Dr Murren. People knocking\r
-them up at all hours. For God' sake, doctor. Wife in her throes. Then\r
-keep them waiting months for their fee. To attendance on your wife. No\r
-gratitude in people. Humane doctors, most of them.\r
-\r
-Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament a flock of\r
-pigeons flew. Their little frolic after meals. Who will we do it on? I\r
-pick the fellow in black. Here goes. Here's good luck. Must be thrilling\r
-from the air. Apjohn, myself and Owen Goldberg up in the trees near\r
-Goose green playing the monkeys. Mackerel they called me.\r
-\r
-A squad of constables debouched from College street, marching in Indian\r
-file. Goosestep. Foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their\r
-truncheons. After their feed with a good load of fat soup under their\r
-belts. Policeman's lot is oft a happy one. They split up in groups and\r
-scattered, saluting, towards their beats. Let out to graze. Best moment\r
-to attack one in pudding time. A punch in his dinner. A squad of others,\r
-marching irregularly, rounded Trinity railings making for the station.\r
-Bound for their troughs. Prepare to receive cavalry. Prepare to receive\r
-soup.\r
-\r
-He crossed under Tommy Moore's roguish finger. They did right to put him\r
-up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women.\r
-Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. _There is not in this\r
-wide world a vallee_. Great song of Julia Morkan's. Kept her voice up to\r
-the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe's, wasn't she?\r
-\r
-He gazed after the last broad tunic. Nasty customers to tackle. Jack\r
-Power could a tale unfold: father a G man. If a fellow gave them trouble\r
-being lagged they let him have it hot and heavy in the bridewell.\r
-Can't blame them after all with the job they have especially the young\r
-hornies. That horsepoliceman the day Joe Chamberlain was given his\r
-degree in Trinity he got a run for his money. My word he did! His\r
-horse's hoofs clattering after us down Abbey street. Lucky I had the\r
-presence of mind to dive into Manning's or I was souped. He did come a\r
-wallop, by George. Must have cracked his skull on the cobblestones. I\r
-oughtn't to have got myself swept along with those medicals. And the\r
-Trinity jibs in their mortarboards. Looking for trouble. Still I got to\r
-know that young Dixon who dressed that sting for me in the Mater and now\r
-he's in Holles street where Mrs Purefoy. Wheels within wheels. Police\r
-whistle in my ears still. All skedaddled. Why he fixed on me. Give me in\r
-charge. Right here it began.\r
-\r
---Up the Boers!\r
-\r
---Three cheers for De Wet!\r
-\r
---We'll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree.\r
-\r
-Silly billies: mob of young cubs yelling their guts out. Vinegar hill.\r
-The Butter exchange band. Few years' time half of them magistrates and\r
-civil servants. War comes on: into the army helterskelter: same fellows\r
-used to. Whether on the scaffold high.\r
-\r
-Never know who you're talking to. Corny Kelleher he has Harvey Duff in\r
-his eye. Like that Peter or Denis or James Carey that blew the gaff on\r
-the invincibles. Member of the corporation too. Egging raw youths on to\r
-get in the know all the time drawing secret service pay from the castle.\r
-Drop him like a hot potato. Why those plainclothes men are always\r
-courting slaveys. Easily twig a man used to uniform. Squarepushing up\r
-against a backdoor. Maul her a bit. Then the next thing on the menu. And\r
-who is the gentleman does be visiting there? Was the young master saying\r
-anything? Peeping Tom through the keyhole. Decoy duck. Hotblooded young\r
-student fooling round her fat arms ironing.\r
-\r
---Are those yours, Mary?\r
-\r
---I don't wear such things... Stop or I'll tell the missus on you. Out\r
-half the night.\r
-\r
---There are great times coming, Mary. Wait till you see.\r
-\r
---Ah, gelong with your great times coming.\r
-\r
-Barmaids too. Tobaccoshopgirls.\r
-\r
-James Stephens' idea was the best. He knew them. Circles of ten so that\r
-a fellow couldn't round on more than his own ring. Sinn Fein. Back out\r
-you get the knife. Hidden hand. Stay in. The firing squad. Turnkey's\r
-daughter got him out of Richmond, off from Lusk. Putting up in the\r
-Buckingham Palace hotel under their very noses. Garibaldi.\r
-\r
-You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a\r
-squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about\r
-our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bakery Company's tearoom.\r
-Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government.\r
-That the language question should take precedence of the economic\r
-question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house. Stuff them\r
-up with meat and drink. Michaelmas goose. Here's a good lump of thyme\r
-seasoning under the apron for you. Have another quart of goosegrease\r
-before it gets too cold. Halffed enthusiasts. Penny roll and a walk with\r
-the band. No grace for the carver. The thought that the other chap pays\r
-best sauce in the world. Make themselves thoroughly at home. Show us\r
-over those apricots, meaning peaches. The not far distant day. Homerule\r
-sun rising up in the northwest.\r
-\r
-His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly,\r
-shadowing Trinity's surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing,\r
-outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day:\r
-squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies\r
-mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a\r
-bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second\r
-somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes.\r
-Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the\r
-blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.\r
-\r
-Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other\r
-coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of\r
-pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that.\r
-Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets\r
-his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have\r
-all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age\r
-after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese\r
-wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling\r
-suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses built of breeze. Shelter,\r
-for the night.\r
-\r
-No-one is anything.\r
-\r
-This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate\r
-this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.\r
-\r
-Provost's house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in\r
-there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn't live in it if they paid me. Hope\r
-they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.\r
-\r
-The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silverware\r
-opposite in Walter Sexton's window by which John Howard Parnell passed,\r
-unseeing.\r
-\r
-There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that's a\r
-coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don't\r
-meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. No-one knows him. Must be a\r
-corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal's\r
-uniform since he got the job. Charley Kavanagh used to come out on\r
-his high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the\r
-woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a\r
-pain. Great man's brother: his brother's brother. He'd look nice on the\r
-city charger. Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess\r
-there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to\r
-pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That's the\r
-fascination: the name. All a bit touched. Mad Fanny and his other sister\r
-Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness. Bolt upright lik\r
-surgeon M'Ardle. Still David Sheehy beat him for south Meath. Apply\r
-for the Chiltern Hundreds and retire into public life. The patriot's\r
-banquet. Eating orangepeels in the park. Simon Dedalus said when they\r
-put him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the grave and\r
-lead him out of the house of commons by the arm.\r
-\r
---Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which\r
-the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with\r
-a Scotch accent. The tentacles...\r
-\r
-They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bicycle.\r
-Young woman.\r
-\r
-And there he is too. Now that's really a coincidence: second time.\r
-Coming events cast their shadows before. With the approval of the\r
-eminent poet, Mr Geo. Russell. That might be Lizzie Twigg with him. A.\r
-E.: what does that mean? Initials perhaps. Albert Edward, Arthur Edmund,\r
-Alphonsus Eb Ed El Esquire. What was he saying? The ends of the world\r
-with a Scotch accent. Tentacles: octopus. Something occult: symbolism.\r
-Holding forth. She's taking it all in. Not saying a word. To aid\r
-gentleman in literary work.\r
-\r
-His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle,\r
-a listening woman at his side. Coming from the vegetarian. Only\r
-weggebobbles and fruit. Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of\r
-that cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it's healthier.\r
-Windandwatery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as\r
-a bloater. Dreams all night. Why do they call that thing they gave me\r
-nutsteak? Nutarians. Fruitarians. To give you the idea you are eating\r
-rumpsteak. Absurd. Salty too. They cook in soda. Keep you sitting by the\r
-tap all night.\r
-\r
-Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so tasteless.\r
-Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy,\r
-symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn't be surprised if it was that\r
-kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical.\r
-For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts\r
-you couldn't squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don't know what poetry\r
-is even. Must be in a certain mood.\r
-\r
- _The dreamy cloudy gull\r
- Waves o'er the waters dull._\r
-\r
-He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of Yeates\r
-and Son, pricing the fieldglasses. Or will I drop into old Harris's and\r
-have a chat with young Sinclair? Wellmannered fellow. Probably at his\r
-lunch. Must get those old glasses of mine set right. Goerz lenses six\r
-guineas. Germans making their way everywhere. Sell on easy terms to\r
-capture trade. Undercutting. Might chance on a pair in the railway lost\r
-property office. Astonishing the things people leave behind them in\r
-trains and cloakrooms. What do they be thinking about? Women too.\r
-Incredible. Last year travelling to Ennis had to pick up that farmer's\r
-daughter's ba and hand it to her at Limerick junction. Unclaimed money\r
-too. There's a little watch up there on the roof of the bank to test\r
-those glasses by.\r
-\r
-\r
-His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can't see it. If you\r
-imagine it's there you can almost see it. Can't see it.\r
-\r
-He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right\r
-hand at arm's length towards the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes:\r
-completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun's disk.\r
-Must be the focus where the rays cross. If I had black glasses.\r
-Interesting. There was a lot of talk about those sunspots when we\r
-were in Lombard street west. Looking up from the back garden. Terrific\r
-explosions they are. There will be a total eclipse this year: autumn\r
-some time.\r
-\r
-Now that I come to think of it that ball falls at Greenwich time. It's\r
-the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink. Must go out there\r
-some first Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to\r
-professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to:\r
-man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman\r
-proud to be descended from some king's mistress. His foremother. Lay it\r
-on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt\r
-out what you know you're not to: what's parallax? Show this gentleman\r
-the door.\r
-\r
-Ah.\r
-\r
-His hand fell to his side again.\r
-\r
-Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about,\r
-crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then solid:\r
-then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock,\r
-like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she said. I\r
-believe there is.\r
-\r
-He went on by la maison Claire.\r
-\r
-Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly there\r
-is a new moon. Walking down by the Tolka. Not bad for a Fairview moon.\r
-She was humming. The young May moon she's beaming, love. He other side\r
-of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm's la-amp is gleaming, love. Touch.\r
-Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes.\r
-\r
-Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, quickbreathing, slowlier walking passed Adam court.\r
-\r
-With a keep quiet relief his eyes took note this is the street here\r
-middle of the day of Bob Doran's bottle shoulders. On his annual bend,\r
-M Coy said. They drink in order to say or do something or _cherchez la\r
-femme_. Up in the Coombe with chummies and streetwalkers and then the\r
-rest of the year sober as a judge.\r
-\r
-Yes. Thought so. Sloping into the Empire. Gone. Plain soda would do him\r
-good. Where Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the\r
-Queen's. Broth of a boy. Dion Boucicault business with his harvestmoon\r
-face in a poky bonnet. Three Purty Maids from School. How time flies,\r
-eh? Showing long red pantaloons under his skirts. Drinkers, drinking,\r
-laughed spluttering, their drink against their breath. More power, Pat.\r
-Coarse red: fun for drunkards: guffaw and smoke. Take off that white\r
-hat. His parboiled eyes. Where is he now? Beggar somewhere. The harp\r
-that once did starve us all.\r
-\r
-I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She\r
-twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could\r
-never like it again after Rudy. Can't bring back time. Like holding\r
-water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then.\r
-Would you? Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy?\r
-Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the library.\r
-\r
-Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints,\r
-silkdames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in the\r
-baking causeway. Thick feet that woman has in the white stockings. Hope\r
-the rain mucks them up on her. Countrybred chawbacon. All the beef to\r
-the heels were in. Always gives a woman clumsy feet. Molly looks out of\r
-plumb.\r
-\r
-He passed, dallying, the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers. Cascades\r
-of ribbons. Flimsy China silks. A tilted urn poured from its mouth a\r
-flood of bloodhued poplin: lustrous blood. The huguenots brought that\r
-here. _La causa è santa_! Tara tara. Great chorus that. Taree tara. Must\r
-be washed in rainwater. Meyerbeer. Tara: bom bom bom.\r
-\r
-Pincushions. I'm a long time threatening to buy one. Sticking them all\r
-over the place. Needles in window curtains.\r
-\r
-He bared slightly his left forearm. Scrape: nearly gone. Not today\r
-anyhow. Must go back for that lotion. For her birthday perhaps.\r
-Junejulyaugseptember eighth. Nearly three months off. Then she mightn't\r
-like it. Women won't pick up pins. Say it cuts lo.\r
-\r
-Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk\r
-stockings.\r
-\r
-Useless to go back. Had to be. Tell me all.\r
-\r
-High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman, home and\r
-houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim.\r
-Wealth of the world.\r
-\r
-A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded.\r
-Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he\r
-mutely craved to adore.\r
-\r
-Duke street. Here we are. Must eat. The Burton. Feel better then.\r
-\r
-He turned Combridge's corner, still pursued. Jingling, hoofthuds.\r
-Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields,\r
-tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements, along sofas,\r
-creaking beds.\r
-\r
---Jack, love!\r
-\r
---Darling!\r
-\r
---Kiss me, Reggy!\r
-\r
---My boy!\r
-\r
---Love!\r
-\r
-His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink\r
-gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slush of greens. See\r
-the animals feed.\r
-\r
-Men, men, men.\r
-\r
-Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables\r
-calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy\r
-food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced\r
-young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New\r
-set of microbes. A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round\r
-him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his\r
-plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump\r
-chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser's eyes. Bitten\r
-off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see\r
-us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don't! O! A bone!\r
-That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself\r
-at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something\r
-galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't\r
-swallow it all however.\r
-\r
---Roast beef and cabbage.\r
-\r
---One stew.\r
-\r
-Smells of men. His gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish\r
-cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale\r
-of ferment.\r
-\r
-Couldn't eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork to eat all\r
-before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing\r
-the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then\r
-on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it\r
-off the plate, man! Get out of this.\r
-\r
-He gazed round the stooled and tabled eaters, tightening the wings of\r
-his nose.\r
-\r
---Two stouts here.\r
-\r
---One corned and cabbage.\r
-\r
-That fellow ramming a knifeful of cabbage down as if his life depended\r
-on it. Good stroke. Give me the fidgets to look. Safer to eat from his\r
-three hands. Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born with a\r
-silver knife in his mouth. That's witty, I think. Or no. Silver means\r
-born rich. Born with a knife. But then the allusion is lost.\r
-\r
-An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the head\r
-bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard. Well\r
-up: it splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork upright,\r
-elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the foodlift\r
-across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him something\r
-with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I munched hum un\r
-thu Unchster Bunk un Munchday. Ha? Did you, faith?\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom raised two fingers doubtfully to his lips. His eyes said:\r
-\r
---Not here. Don't see him.\r
-\r
-Out. I hate dirty eaters.\r
-\r
-He backed towards the door. Get a light snack in Davy Byrne's. Stopgap.\r
-Keep me going. Had a good breakfast.\r
-\r
---Roast and mashed here.\r
-\r
---Pint of stout.\r
-\r
-Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff.\r
-\r
-He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat\r
-or be eaten. Kill! Kill!\r
-\r
-Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting down\r
-with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the\r
-street. John Howard Parnell example the provost of Trinity every\r
-mother's son don't talk of your provosts and provost of Trinity women\r
-and children cabmen priests parsons fieldmarshals archbishops. From\r
-Ailesbury road, Clyde road, artisans' dwellings, north Dublin union,\r
-lord mayor in his gingerbread coach, old queen in a bathchair. My\r
-plate's empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir\r
-Philip Crampton's fountain. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief.\r
-Next chap rubs on a new batch with his. Father O'Flynn would make\r
-hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children\r
-fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as big as the\r
-Phoenix park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of it. Hate\r
-people all round you. City Arms hotel _table d'hôte_ she called it.\r
-Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you're chewing. Then\r
-who'd wash up all the plates and forks? Might be all feeding on tabloids\r
-that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.\r
-\r
-After all there's a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from\r
-the earth garlic of course it stinks after Italian organgrinders crisp\r
-of onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw\r
-fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe\r
-to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering\r
-bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers' buckets wobbly lights. Give us that\r
-brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed\r
-sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling\r
-nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don't maul them pieces,\r
-young one.\r
-\r
-Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed.\r
-Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.\r
-\r
-Ah, I'm hungry.\r
-\r
-He entered Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now\r
-and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.\r
-\r
-What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?\r
-\r
---Hello, Bloom, Nosey Flynn said from his nook.\r
-\r
---Hello, Flynn.\r
-\r
---How's things?\r
-\r
---Tiptop... Let me see. I'll take a glass of burgundy and... let me\r
-see.\r
-\r
-Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham\r
-and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted meats. What is home\r
-without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the\r
-obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam's potted meat.\r
-Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like\r
-pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be\r
-tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch the effect. _There was\r
-a right royal old nigger. Who ate or something the somethings of the\r
-reverend Mr MacTrigger_. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what\r
-concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle\r
-find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what\r
-they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and\r
-war depend on some fellow's digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and\r
-geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards\r
-full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese.\r
-\r
---Have you a cheese sandwich?\r
-\r
---Yes, sir.\r
-\r
-Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of\r
-burgundy take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber,\r
-Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served\r
-me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made\r
-food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.\r
-\r
---Wife well?\r
-\r
---Quite well, thanks... A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?\r
-\r
---Yes, sir.\r
-\r
-Nosey Flynn sipped his grog.\r
-\r
---Doing any singing those times?\r
-\r
-Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear. Flap ears to match.\r
-Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him.\r
-Does no harm. Free ad.\r
-\r
---She's engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard\r
-perhaps.\r
-\r
---No. O, that's the style. Who's getting it up?\r
-\r
-The curate served.\r
-\r
---How much is that?\r
-\r
---Seven d., sir... Thank you, sir.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. _Mr MacTrigger_. Easier\r
-than the dreamy creamy stuff. _His five hundred wives. Had the time of\r
-their lives._\r
-\r
---Mustard, sir?\r
-\r
---Thank you.\r
-\r
-He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. _Their lives_. I have\r
-it. _It grew bigger and bigger and bigger_.\r
-\r
---Getting it up? he said. Well, it's like a company idea, you see. Part\r
-shares and part profits.\r
-\r
---Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flynn said, putting his hand in his pocket\r
-to scratch his groin. Who is this was telling me? Isn't Blazes Boylan\r
-mixed up in it?\r
-\r
-A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart. He\r
-raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock\r
-five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.\r
-\r
-His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly,\r
-longingly.\r
-\r
-Wine.\r
-\r
-He smellsipped the cordial juice and, bidding his throat strongly to\r
-speed it, set his wineglass delicately down.\r
-\r
---Yes, he said. He's the organiser in point of fact.\r
-\r
-No fear: no brains.\r
-\r
-Nosey Flynn snuffled and scratched. Flea having a good square meal.\r
-\r
---He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that\r
-boxingmatch Myler Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello\r
-barracks. By God, he had the little kipper down in the county Carlow he\r
-was telling me...\r
-\r
-Hope that dewdrop doesn't come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up.\r
-\r
---For near a month, man, before it came off. Sucking duck eggs by God\r
-till further orders. Keep him off the boose, see? O, by God, Blazes is a\r
-hairy chap.\r
-\r
-Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirtsleeves,\r
-cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring's blush. Whose\r
-smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete. Too much fat\r
-on the parsnips.\r
-\r
---And here's himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give\r
-us a good one for the Gold cup?\r
-\r
---I'm off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a\r
-horse.\r
-\r
---You're right there, Nosey Flynn said.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of\r
-disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his\r
-wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather\r
-with the chill off.\r
-\r
-Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like\r
-the way it curves there.\r
-\r
---I wouldn't do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined\r
-many a man, the same horses.\r
-\r
-Vintners' sweepstake. Licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits\r
-for consumption on the premises. Heads I win tails you lose.\r
-\r
---True for you, Nosey Flynn said. Unless you're in the know. There's\r
-no straight sport going now. Lenehan gets some good ones. He's giving\r
-Sceptre today. Zinfandel's the favourite, lord Howard de Walden's, won\r
-at Epsom. Morny Cannon is riding him. I could have got seven to one\r
-against Saint Amant a fortnight before.\r
-\r
---That so? Davy Byrne said...\r
-\r
-He went towards the window and, taking up the pettycash book, scanned\r
-its pages.\r
-\r
---I could, faith, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. That was a rare bit of\r
-horseflesh. Saint Frusquin was her sire. She won in a thunderstorm,\r
-Rothschild's filly, with wadding in her ears. Blue jacket and yellow\r
-cap. Bad luck to big Ben Dollard and his John O'Gaunt. He put me off it.\r
-Ay.\r
-\r
-He drank resignedly from his tumbler, running his fingers down the\r
-flutes.\r
-\r
---Ay, he said, sighing.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, champing, standing, looked upon his sigh. Nosey numbskull.\r
-Will I tell him that horse Lenehan? He knows already. Better let him\r
-forget. Go and lose more. Fool and his money. Dewdrop coming down again.\r
-Cold nose he'd have kissing a woman. Still they might like. Prickly\r
-beards they like. Dogs' cold noses. Old Mrs Riordan with the rumbling\r
-stomach's Skye terrier in the City Arms hotel. Molly fondling him in her\r
-lap. O, the big doggybowwowsywowsy!\r
-\r
-Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish\r
-cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath\r
-of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can.\r
-Six. Six. Time will be gone then. She...\r
-\r
-Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so\r
-off colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins: sardines, gaudy\r
-lobsters' claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of\r
-shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the\r
-French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing\r
-in a thousand years. If you didn't know risky putting anything into your\r
-mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good.\r
-Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it\r
-on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit.\r
-Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial\r
-irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters. Unsightly like\r
-a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them\r
-out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect\r
-on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red Bank this morning. Was he\r
-oysters old fish at table perhaps he young flesh in bed no June has\r
-no ar no oysters. But there are people like things high. Tainted game.\r
-Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old,\r
-blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might\r
-mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it no\r
-yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the\r
-scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course aristocrats,\r
-then the others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour.\r
-Raw pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in\r
-the sea to keep up the price. Cheap no-one would buy. Caviare. Do the\r
-grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom\r
-pearls. The _élite. Crème de la crème_. They want special dishes to\r
-pretend they're. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings\r
-of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff,\r
-Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send\r
-him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the\r
-Rolls' kitchen area. Whitehatted _chef_ like a rabbi. Combustible duck.\r
-Curly cabbage _à la duchesse de Parme_. Just as well to write it on the\r
-bill of fare so you can know what you've eaten. Too many drugs spoil the\r
-broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated soup. Geese\r
-stuffed silly for them. Lobsters boiled alive. Do ptake some ptarmigan.\r
-Wouldn't mind being a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress,\r
-halfnaked ladies. May I tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole,\r
-miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect\r
-that. A miss Dubedat lived in Killiney, I remember. _Du, de la_ French.\r
-Still it's the same fish perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped\r
-the guts out of making money hand over fist finger in fishes' gills\r
-can't write his name on a cheque think he was painting the landscape\r
-with his mouth twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha ignorant as a kish of\r
-brogues, worth fifty thousand pounds.\r
-\r
-Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.\r
-\r
-Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress\r
-grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me\r
-memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns\r
-on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple\r
-by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton.\r
-Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities.\r
-Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub\r
-my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with\r
-ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn\r
-away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth.\r
-Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed.\r
-Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate\r
-it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky\r
-gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles\r
-fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a\r
-nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns\r
-she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips,\r
-her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's\r
-veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was\r
-kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.\r
-\r
-Me. And me now.\r
-\r
-Stuck, the flies buzzed.\r
-\r
-His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty:\r
-it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the\r
-world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall,\r
-naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don't care what man looks. All\r
-to see. Never speaking. I mean to say to fellows like Flynn. Suppose she\r
-did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first? Mortal! Put you in\r
-your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all\r
-ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and\r
-turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods'\r
-food. Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we\r
-stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung,\r
-earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never\r
-looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something drop\r
-see if she.\r
-\r
-Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to\r
-do there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and\r
-walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men\r
-lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to the yard.\r
-\r
-When the sound of his boots had ceased Davy Byrne said from his book:\r
-\r
---What is this he is? Isn't he in the insurance line?\r
-\r
---He's out of that long ago, Nosey Flynn said. He does canvassing for\r
-the _Freeman._\r
-\r
---I know him well to see, Davy Byrne said. Is he in trouble?\r
-\r
---Trouble? Nosey Flynn said. Not that I heard of. Why?\r
-\r
---I noticed he was in mourning.\r
-\r
---Was he? Nosey Flynn said. So he was, faith. I asked him how was all at\r
-home. You're right, by God. So he was.\r
-\r
---I never broach the subject, Davy Byrne said humanely, if I see a\r
-gentleman is in trouble that way. It only brings it up fresh in their\r
-minds.\r
-\r
---It's not the wife anyhow, Nosey Flynn said. I met him the day before\r
-yesterday and he coming out of that Irish farm dairy John Wyse Nolan's\r
-wife has in Henry street with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home\r
-to his better half. She's well nourished, I tell you. Plovers on toast.\r
-\r
---And is he doing for the _Freeman?_ Davy Byrne said.\r
-\r
-Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.\r
-\r
----He doesn't buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of\r
-that.\r
-\r
---How so? Davy Byrne asked, coming from his book.\r
-\r
-Nosey Flynn made swift passes in the air with juggling fingers. He\r
-winked.\r
-\r
---He's in the craft, he said.\r
-\r
----Do you tell me so? Davy Byrne said.\r
-\r
---Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. He's\r
-an excellent brother. Light, life and love, by God. They give him a leg\r
-up. I was told that by a--well, I won't say who.\r
-\r
---Is that a fact?\r
-\r
---O, it's a fine order, Nosey Flynn said. They stick to you when you're\r
-down. I know a fellow was trying to get into it. But they're as close as\r
-damn it. By God they did right to keep the women out of it.\r
-\r
-Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one:\r
-\r
---Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!\r
-\r
---There was one woman, Nosey Flynn said, hid herself in a clock to find\r
-out what they do be doing. But be damned but they smelt her out and\r
-swore her in on the spot a master mason. That was one of the saint\r
-Legers of Doneraile.\r
-\r
-Davy Byrne, sated after his yawn, said with tearwashed eyes:\r
-\r
---And is that a fact? Decent quiet man he is. I often saw him in here\r
-and I never once saw him--you know, over the line.\r
-\r
---God Almighty couldn't make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips\r
-off when the fun gets too hot. Didn't you see him look at his watch? Ah,\r
-you weren't there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does\r
-he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to God he\r
-does.\r
-\r
---There are some like that, Davy Byrne said. He's a safe man, I'd say.\r
-\r
---He's not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He's been known\r
-to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O,\r
-Bloom has his good points. But there's one thing he'll never do.\r
-\r
-His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside his grog.\r
-\r
---I know, Davy Byrne said.\r
-\r
---Nothing in black and white, Nosey Flynn said.\r
-\r
-Paddy Leonard and Bantam Lyons came in. Tom Rochford followed frowning,\r
-a plaining hand on his claret waistcoat.\r
-\r
---Day, Mr Byrne.\r
-\r
---Day, gentlemen.\r
-\r
-They paused at the counter.\r
-\r
---Who's standing? Paddy Leonard asked.\r
-\r
---I'm sitting anyhow, Nosey Flynn answered.\r
-\r
---Well, what'll it be? Paddy Leonard asked.\r
-\r
---I'll take a stone ginger, Bantam Lyons said.\r
-\r
---How much? Paddy Leonard cried. Since when, for God' sake? What's\r
-yours, Tom?\r
-\r
---How is the main drainage? Nosey Flynn asked, sipping.\r
-\r
-For answer Tom Rochford pressed his hand to his breastbone and\r
-hiccupped.\r
-\r
---Would I trouble you for a glass of fresh water, Mr Byrne? he said.\r
-\r
---Certainly, sir.\r
-\r
-Paddy Leonard eyed his alemates.\r
-\r
---Lord love a duck, he said. Look at what I'm standing drinks to! Cold\r
-water and gingerpop! Two fellows that would suck whisky off a sore leg.\r
-He has some bloody horse up his sleeve for the Gold cup. A dead snip.\r
-\r
---Zinfandel is it? Nosey Flynn asked.\r
-\r
-Tom Rochford spilt powder from a twisted paper into the water set before\r
-him.\r
-\r
---That cursed dyspepsia, he said before drinking.\r
-\r
---Breadsoda is very good, Davy Byrne said.\r
-\r
-Tom Rochford nodded and drank.\r
-\r
---Is it Zinfandel?\r
-\r
---Say nothing! Bantam Lyons winked. I'm going to plunge five bob on my\r
-own.\r
-\r
---Tell us if you're worth your salt and be damned to you, Paddy Leonard\r
-said. Who gave it to you?\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom on his way out raised three fingers in greeting.\r
-\r
---So long! Nosey Flynn said.\r
-\r
-The others turned.\r
-\r
---That's the man now that gave it to me, Bantam Lyons whispered.\r
-\r
---Prrwht! Paddy Leonard said with scorn. Mr Byrne, sir, we'll take two\r
-of your small Jamesons after that and a...\r
-\r
---Stone ginger, Davy Byrne added civilly.\r
-\r
---Ay, Paddy Leonard said. A suckingbottle for the baby.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson street, his tongue brushing his teeth\r
-smooth. Something green it would have to be: spinach, say. Then with\r
-those Rontgen rays searchlight you could.\r
-\r
-At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the\r
-cobblestones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks\r
-having fully digested the contents. First sweet then savoury. Mr Bloom\r
-coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they move.\r
-Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his?\r
-Wasting time explaining it to Flynn's mouth. Lean people long mouths.\r
-Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent\r
-free. Course then you'd have all the cranks pestering.\r
-\r
-He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo the closes of the bars:\r
-\r
-_Don Giovanni, a cenar teco M'invitasti._\r
-\r
-Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up. Who distilled first? Some chap\r
-in the blues. Dutch courage. That _Kilkenny People_ in the national\r
-library now I must.\r
-\r
-Bare clean closestools waiting in the window of William Miller, plumber,\r
-turned back his thoughts. They could: and watch it all the way down,\r
-swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round the\r
-body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric juice coils of\r
-intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to stand all the\r
-time with his insides entrails on show. Science.\r
-\r
---_A cenar teco._\r
-\r
-What does that _teco_ mean? Tonight perhaps.\r
-\r
- _Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited\r
- To come to supper tonight,\r
- The rum the rumdum._\r
-\r
-Doesn't go properly.\r
-\r
-Keyes: two months if I get Nannetti to. That'll be two pounds ten about\r
-two pounds eight. Three Hynes owes me. Two eleven. Prescott's dyeworks\r
-van over there. If I get Billy Prescott's ad: two fifteen. Five guineas\r
-about. On the pig's back.\r
-\r
-Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new\r
-garters.\r
-\r
-Today. Today. Not think.\r
-\r
-Tour the south then. What about English wateringplaces? Brighton,\r
-Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely\r
-seaside girls. Against John Long's a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy\r
-thought, gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages.\r
-Will eat anything.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom turned at Gray's confectioner's window of unbought tarts and\r
-passed the reverend Thomas Connellan's bookstore. _Why I left the church\r
-of Rome? Birds' Nest._ Women run him. They say they used to give pauper\r
-children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight.\r
-Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same\r
-bait. Why we left the church of Rome.\r
-\r
-A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No\r
-tram in sight. Wants to cross.\r
-\r
---Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.\r
-\r
-The blind stripling did not answer. His wallface frowned weakly. He\r
-moved his head uncertainly.\r
-\r
---You're in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite.\r
-Do you want to cross? There's nothing in the way.\r
-\r
-The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom's eye followed its\r
-line and saw again the dyeworks' van drawn up before Drago's. Where I\r
-saw his brillantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in\r
-John Long's. Slaking his drouth.\r
-\r
---There's a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it's not moving. I'll see you\r
-across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?\r
-\r
---Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street.\r
-\r
---Come, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-He touched the thin elbow gently: then took the limp seeing hand to\r
-guide it forward.\r
-\r
-Say something to him. Better not do the condescending. They mistrust\r
-what you tell them. Pass a common remark.\r
-\r
---The rain kept off.\r
-\r
-No answer.\r
-\r
-Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose. Tastes all different\r
-for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child's hand, his hand. Like\r
-Milly's was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand. Wonder\r
-if he has a name. Van. Keep his cane clear of the horse's legs: tired\r
-drudge get his doze. That's right. Clear. Behind a bull: in front of a\r
-horse.\r
-\r
---Thanks, sir.\r
-\r
-Knows I'm a man. Voice.\r
-\r
---Right now? First turn to the left.\r
-\r
-The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing\r
-his cane back, feeling again.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone\r
-tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there?\r
-Must have felt it. See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense\r
-of volume. Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark. Wonder\r
-would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of\r
-Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he walk\r
-in a beeline if he hadn't that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow\r
-going in to be a priest.\r
-\r
-Penrose! That was that chap's name.\r
-\r
-Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers.\r
-Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a\r
-deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say.\r
-Of course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets. People\r
-ought to help. Workbasket I could buy for Molly's birthday. Hates\r
-sewing. Might take an objection. Dark men they call them.\r
-\r
-Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched\r
-together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring,\r
-the summer: smells. Tastes? They say you can't taste wines with your\r
-eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no\r
-pleasure.\r
-\r
-And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl\r
-passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have\r
-them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his\r
-mind's eye. The voice, temperatures: when he touches her with his\r
-fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair,\r
-for instance. Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black.\r
-Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of\r
-white.\r
-\r
-Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two\r
-shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer's just here\r
-too. Wait. Think over it.\r
-\r
-With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above\r
-his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt\r
-the skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough.\r
-The belly is the smoothest. No-one about. There he goes into Frederick\r
-street. Perhaps to Levenston's dancing academy piano. Might be settling\r
-my braces.\r
-\r
-Walking by Doran's publichouse he slid his hand between his waistcoat\r
-and trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of\r
-his belly. But I know it's whitey yellow. Want to try in the dark to\r
-see.\r
-\r
-He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.\r
-\r
-Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would\r
-he have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being\r
-born that way? All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned\r
-and drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration\r
-for sins you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pike hoses.\r
-Dear, dear, dear. Pity, of course: but somehow you can't cotton on to\r
-them someway.\r
-\r
-Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons' hall. Solemn as Troy.\r
-After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking\r
-a magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat\r
-school. I sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he'd turn up his nose\r
-at that stuff I drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a\r
-dusty bottle. Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder's court.\r
-Wellmeaning old man. Police chargesheets crammed with cases get their\r
-percentage manufacturing crime. Sends them to the rightabout. The devil\r
-on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a great strawcalling. Now he's really\r
-what they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers\r
-in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.\r
-\r
-Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His Excellency the lord lieutenant.\r
-Sixteenth. Today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer's hospital. _The\r
-Messiah_ was first given for that. Yes. Handel. What about going out\r
-there: Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a\r
-leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.\r
-\r
-Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.\r
-\r
-His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to\r
-the right.\r
-\r
-Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too\r
-heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.\r
-\r
-Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes.\r
-Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?\r
-\r
-Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.\r
-\r
-The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold\r
-statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.\r
-\r
-No. Didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate.\r
-\r
-My heart!\r
-\r
-His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas\r
-Deane was the Greek architecture.\r
-\r
-Look for something I.\r
-\r
-His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded\r
-Agendath Netaim. Where did I?\r
-\r
-Busy looking.\r
-\r
-He thrust back quick Agendath.\r
-\r
-Afternoon she said.\r
-\r
-I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. _Freeman._\r
-Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?\r
-\r
-Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.\r
-\r
-His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap\r
-lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.\r
-\r
-Safe!\r
-\r
-\r
-Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:\r
-\r
-\r
---And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of _Wilhelm Meister_.\r
-A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms\r
-against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in\r
-real life.\r
-\r
-He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step\r
-backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.\r
-\r
-A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a\r
-noiseless beck.\r
-\r
---Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful\r
-ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always\r
-feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.\r
-\r
-Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door\r
-he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words: heard them: and was\r
-gone.\r
-\r
-Two left.\r
-\r
---Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes\r
-before his death.\r
-\r
---Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with\r
-elder's gall, to write _Paradise Lost_ at your dictation? _The Sorrows\r
-of Satan_ he calls it.\r
-\r
-Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.\r
-\r
- _First he tickled her\r
- Then he patted her\r
- Then he passed the female catheter.\r
- For he was a medical\r
- Jolly old medi..._\r
-\r
---I feel you would need one more for _Hamlet._ Seven is dear to the\r
-mystic mind. The shining seven W.B. calls them.\r
-\r
-Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought\r
-the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed\r
-low: a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered.\r
-\r
- _Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood\r
- Tears such as angels weep.\r
- Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta._\r
-\r
-He holds my follies hostage.\r
-\r
-Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed\r
-Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house.\r
-And one more to hail him: _ave, rabbi_: the Tinahely twelve. In the\r
-shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night\r
-by night. God speed. Good hunting.\r
-\r
-Mulligan has my telegram.\r
-\r
-Folly. Persist.\r
-\r
---Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a\r
-figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though\r
-I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.\r
-\r
---All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his\r
-shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.\r
-Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal\r
-to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a\r
-work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of\r
-Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley,\r
-the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal\r
-wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of\r
-schoolboys for schoolboys.\r
-\r
-A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike\r
-me!\r
-\r
---The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.\r
-Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.\r
-\r
---And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One\r
-can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.\r
-\r
-He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.\r
-\r
-Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the\r
-heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who\r
-suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon\r
-the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.\r
-\r
-Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name\r
-Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no\r
-secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching\r
-to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of\r
-light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the\r
-plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P.\r
-must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very\r
-illustrious sister H.P.B.'s elemental.\r
-\r
-O, fie! Out on't! _Pfuiteufel!_ You naughtn't to look, missus, so you\r
-naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.\r
-\r
-Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with\r
-grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.\r
-\r
---That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about\r
-the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and\r
-undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.\r
-\r
-John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:\r
-\r
---Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle\r
-with Plato.\r
-\r
---Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his\r
-commonwealth?\r
-\r
-Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of\r
-allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the\r
-street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through\r
-spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after\r
-Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a\r
-shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to\r
-the past.\r
-\r
-Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.\r
-\r
---Haines is gone, he said.\r
-\r
---Is he?\r
-\r
---I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't\r
-you know, about Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht._ I couldn't bring him in\r
-to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.\r
-\r
- _Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick\r
- To greet the callous public.\r
- Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish\r
- In lean unlovely English._\r
-\r
---The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.\r
-\r
-We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green\r
-twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.\r
-\r
---People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of\r
-Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the\r
-world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the\r
-hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the\r
-living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the\r
-sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower\r
-of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the\r
-poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.\r
-\r
-From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.\r
-\r
---Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose\r
-poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about\r
-_Hamlet._ He says: _il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même_, don't\r
-you know, _reading the book of himself_. He describes _Hamlet_ given in\r
-a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.\r
-\r
-His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.\r
-\r
- _HAMLET\r
- ou\r
- LE DISTRAIT\r
- Pièce de Shakespeare_\r
-\r
-He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:\r
-\r
---_Pièce de Shakespeare_, don't you know. It's so French. The French\r
-point of view. _Hamlet ou_...\r
-\r
---The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.\r
-\r
-John Eglinton laughed.\r
-\r
---Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but\r
-distressingly shortsighted in some matters.\r
-\r
-Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.\r
-\r
---A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not\r
-for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and\r
-spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one.\r
-Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to\r
-shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the\r
-concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.\r
-\r
-Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.\r
-\r
-_Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we had spared..._\r
-\r
-Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.\r
-\r
---He will have it that _Hamlet_ is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said\r
-for Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our\r
-flesh creep.\r
-\r
-_List! List! O List!_\r
-\r
-My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.\r
-\r
-_If thou didst ever..._\r
-\r
---What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded\r
-into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of\r
-manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris\r
-lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from _limbo patrum_, returning\r
-to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?\r
-\r
-John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.\r
-\r
-Lifted.\r
-\r
---It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with\r
-a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the\r
-bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.\r
-Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the\r
-groundlings.\r
-\r
-Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.\r
-\r
---Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks\r
-by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the\r
-pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon\r
-has other thoughts.\r
-\r
-Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!\r
-\r
---The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the\r
-castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the\r
-ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who\r
-has studied _Hamlet_ all the years of his life which were not vanity in\r
-order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,\r
-the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,\r
-calling him by a name:\r
-\r
-_Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,_\r
-\r
-bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,\r
-young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has\r
-died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.\r
-\r
-Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in\r
-the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words\r
-to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been\r
-prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that\r
-he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you\r
-are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the\r
-guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?\r
-\r
---But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began\r
-impatiently.\r
-\r
-Art thou there, truepenny?\r
-\r
---Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I\r
-mean when we read the poetry of _King Lear_ what is it to us how the\r
-poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de\r
-l'Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day,\r
-the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have _King Lear_: and it is\r
-immortal.\r
-\r
-Mr Best's face, appealed to, agreed.\r
-\r
-_Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, Mananaan, Mananaan\r
-MacLir..._\r
-\r
-How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?\r
-\r
-Marry, I wanted it.\r
-\r
-Take thou this noble.\r
-\r
-Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's\r
-daughter. Agenbite of inwit.\r
-\r
-Do you intend to pay it back?\r
-\r
-O, yes.\r
-\r
-When? Now?\r
-\r
-Well... No.\r
-\r
-When, then?\r
-\r
-I paid my way. I paid my way.\r
-\r
-Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe\r
-it.\r
-\r
-Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got\r
-pound.\r
-\r
-Buzz. Buzz.\r
-\r
-But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under\r
-everchanging forms.\r
-\r
-I that sinned and prayed and fasted.\r
-\r
-A child Conmee saved from pandies.\r
-\r
-I, I and I. I.\r
-\r
-A.E.I.O.U.\r
-\r
---Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?\r
-John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid\r
-for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.\r
-\r
---She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She\r
-saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore\r
-his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed\r
-when he lay on his deathbed.\r
-\r
-Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into\r
-this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. _Liliata\r
-rutilantium._\r
-\r
-I wept alone.\r
-\r
-John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.\r
-\r
---The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got\r
-out of it as quickly and as best he could.\r
-\r
---Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His\r
-errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.\r
-\r
-Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,\r
-softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.\r
-\r
---A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of\r
-discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn\r
-from Xanthippe?\r
-\r
---Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts\r
-into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (_absit\r
-nomen!_), Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever\r
-know. But neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlelectures saved him\r
-from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.\r
-\r
---But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem\r
-to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.\r
-\r
-His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to\r
-chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless\r
-though maligned.\r
-\r
---He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory.\r
-He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling\r
-_The girl I left behind me._ If the earthquake did not time it we should\r
-know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds,\r
-the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, _Venus and\r
-Adonis_, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London.\r
-Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and\r
-beautiful. Do you think the writer of _Antony and Cleopatra_, a\r
-passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose\r
-the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her\r
-and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy.\r
-Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He\r
-was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way.\r
-By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and\r
-twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping\r
-to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford\r
-wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.\r
-\r
-And my turn? When?\r
-\r
-Come!\r
-\r
---Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,\r
-brightly.\r
-\r
-He murmured then with blond delight for all:\r
-\r
-_Between the acres of the rye These pretty countryfolk would lie._\r
-\r
-Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.\r
-\r
-A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its\r
-cooperative watch.\r
-\r
---I am afraid I am due at the _Homestead._\r
-\r
-Whither away? Exploitable ground.\r
-\r
---Are you going? John Eglinton's active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you\r
-at Moore's tonight? Piper is coming.\r
-\r
---Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?\r
-\r
-Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.\r
-\r
---I don't know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get\r
-away in time.\r
-\r
-Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. _Isis Unveiled._ Their Pali book we\r
-tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an\r
-Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma.\r
-The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship,\r
-ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies\r
-tend them i'the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god,\r
-he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls,\r
-shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled,\r
-whirling, they bewail.\r
-\r
- _In quintessential triviality\r
- For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt._\r
-\r
---They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian\r
-said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering\r
-together a sheaf of our younger poets' verses. We are all looking\r
-forward anxiously.\r
-\r
-Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces,\r
-lighted, shone.\r
-\r
-See this. Remember.\r
-\r
-Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his\r
-ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with\r
-two index fingers. Aristotle's experiment. One or two? Necessity is that\r
-in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal,\r
-one hat is one hat.\r
-\r
-Listen.\r
-\r
-Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part.\r
-Longworth will give it a good puff in the _Express._ O, will he? I liked\r
-Colum's _Drover._ Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do you\r
-think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: _As in wild earth\r
-a Grecian vase_. Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi\r
-Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear\r
-Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's\r
-wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and\r
-Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says.\r
-Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in\r
-Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the\r
-grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever\r
-sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.\r
-\r
-Cordelia. _Cordoglio._ Lir's loneliest daughter.\r
-\r
-Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.\r
-\r
---Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be\r
-so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...\r
-\r
---O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much\r
-correspondence.\r
-\r
---I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.\r
-\r
-God ild you. The pigs' paper. Bullockbefriending.\r
-\r
-Synge has promised me an article for _Dana_ too. Are we going to be\r
-read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope\r
-you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.\r
-\r
-Stephen sat down.\r
-\r
-The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask said:\r
-\r
---Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.\r
-\r
-He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a\r
-chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:\r
-\r
---Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?\r
-\r
-Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?\r
-\r
---Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been\r
-first a sundering.\r
-\r
---Yes.\r
-\r
-Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,\r
-from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women\r
-he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices,\r
-bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack\r
-dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as\r
-cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow\r
-grave and unforgiven.\r
-\r
---Yes. So you think...\r
-\r
-The door closed behind the outgoer.\r
-\r
-Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and\r
-brooding air.\r
-\r
-A vestal's lamp.\r
-\r
-Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do\r
-had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of\r
-the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when\r
-he lived among women.\r
-\r
-Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.\r
-Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the\r
-voice of that Egyptian highpriest. _In painted chambers loaded with\r
-tilebooks._\r
-\r
-They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of\r
-death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak\r
-their will.\r
-\r
---Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most\r
-enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so\r
-much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.\r
-\r
---But _Hamlet_ is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind\r
-of private paper, don't you know, of his private life. I mean, I don't\r
-care a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty...\r
-\r
-He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his\r
-defiance. His private papers in the original. _Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim\r
-in mo shagart_. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.\r
-\r
-Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:\r
-\r
---I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but\r
-I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that\r
-Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.\r
-\r
-Bear with me.\r
-\r
-Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under\r
-wrinkled brows. A basilisk. _E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca_. Messer\r
-Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.\r
-\r
---As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said,\r
-from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist\r
-weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where\r
-it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff\r
-time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image\r
-of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination,\r
-when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that\r
-which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the\r
-future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but\r
-by reflection from that which then I shall be.\r
-\r
-Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness\r
-might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from\r
-the son.\r
-\r
-Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.\r
-\r
---That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.\r
-\r
-John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.\r
-\r
---If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a\r
-drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan\r
-admired so much breathe another spirit.\r
-\r
---The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.\r
-\r
---There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a\r
-sundering.\r
-\r
-Said that.\r
-\r
---If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over\r
-the hell of time of _King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida,_\r
-look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a\r
-man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles,\r
-prince of Tyre?\r
-\r
-Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.\r
-\r
---A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.\r
-\r
---The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant\r
-quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead\r
-to the town.\r
-\r
-Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypherjugglers\r
-going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good\r
-masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the\r
-sun, west of the moon: _Tir na n-og_. Booted the twain and staved.\r
-\r
-_How many miles to Dublin? Three score and ten, sir. Will we be there by\r
-candlelight?_\r
-\r
---Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing\r
-period.\r
-\r
---Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his\r
-name is, say of it?\r
-\r
---Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,\r
-that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter's\r
-child. _My dearest wife_, Pericles says, _was like this maid._ Will any\r
-man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?\r
-\r
---The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. _l'art d'être\r
-grand_...\r
-\r
---Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,\r
-another image?\r
-\r
-Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all\r
-men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus\r
-...\r
-\r
---His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of\r
-all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The\r
-images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them\r
-grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.\r
-\r
-The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.\r
-\r
---I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of\r
-the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George\r
-Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on\r
-Shakespeare in the _Saturday Review_ were surely brilliant. Oddly\r
-enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the\r
-sonnets. The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I own\r
-that if the poet must be rejected such a rejection would seem more in\r
-harmony with--what shall I say?--our notions of what ought not to have\r
-been.\r
-\r
-Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk's egg, prize\r
-of their fray.\r
-\r
-He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost\r
-love thy man?\r
-\r
---That may be too, Stephen said. There's a saying of Goethe's which Mr\r
-Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because\r
-you will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is\r
-a _buonaroba,_ a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a\r
-scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord\r
-of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and he had written\r
-_Romeo and Juliet_. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He\r
-was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say) and he will\r
-never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game\r
-of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will not save him. No later\r
-undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded\r
-him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there\r
-remains to her woman's invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words,\r
-some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow\r
-of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like\r
-fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.\r
-\r
-They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.\r
-\r
---The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the\r
-porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot\r
-know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls\r
-with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast\r
-with two backs that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were\r
-he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech\r
-(his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward.\r
-Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from\r
-Lucrece's bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its\r
-mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up\r
-to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because\r
-loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished\r
-personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he\r
-has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by\r
-Elsinore's rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard\r
-only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son\r
-consubstantial with the father.\r
-\r
---Amen! was responded from the doorway.\r
-\r
-Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?\r
-\r
-_Entr'acte_.\r
-\r
-A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forward, then\r
-blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.\r
-\r
---You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he\r
-asked of Stephen.\r
-\r
-Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble.\r
-\r
-They make him welcome. _Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen._\r
-\r
-Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.\r
-\r
-He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself,\r
-Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends,\r
-stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on\r
-crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven\r
-and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His\r
-Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead\r
-when all the quick shall be dead already.\r
-\r
-Glo--o--ri--a in ex--cel--sis De--o.\r
-\r
-He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells\r
-aquiring.\r
-\r
---Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion.\r
-Mr Mulligan, I'll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of\r
-Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.\r
-\r
-He smiled on all sides equally.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:\r
-\r
---Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.\r
-\r
-A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.\r
-\r
---To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like\r
-Synge.\r
-\r
-Mr Best turned to him.\r
-\r
---Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at\r
-the D. B. C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht_.\r
-\r
---I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?\r
-\r
---The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired\r
-perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played\r
-Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining\r
-held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an\r
-Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He\r
-swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.\r
-\r
---The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said,\r
-lifting his brilliant notebook. That _Portrait of Mr W. H._ where he\r
-proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.\r
-\r
---For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.\r
-\r
-Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H.: who am I?\r
-\r
---I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of\r
-course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues,\r
-the colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very\r
-essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.\r
-\r
-His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.\r
-Tame essence of Wilde.\r
-\r
-You're darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan\r
-Deasy's ducats.\r
-\r
-How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.\r
-\r
-For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.\r
-\r
-Wit. You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks\r
-in. Lineaments of gratified desire.\r
-\r
-There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime\r
-send them. Yea, turtledove her.\r
-\r
-Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.\r
-\r
---Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking.\r
-The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.\r
-\r
-They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan's again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head\r
-wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His\r
-mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.\r
-\r
---Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!\r
-\r
-He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:\r
-\r
---_The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the\r
-immense debtorship for a thing done._ Signed: Dedalus. Where did you\r
-launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four\r
-quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram!\r
-Malachi Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer!\r
-O, you priestified Kinchite!\r
-\r
-Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a\r
-querulous brogue:\r
-\r
---It's what I'm telling you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were,\r
-Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did\r
-for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I'm thinking, and he limp with\r
-leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery's\r
-sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.\r
-\r
-He wailed:\r
-\r
---And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your\r
-conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the\r
-drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.\r
-\r
-Stephen laughed.\r
-\r
-Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.\r
-\r
---The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He\r
-heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to\r
-murder you.\r
-\r
---Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping\r
-ceiling.\r
-\r
---Murder you! he laughed.\r
-\r
-Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash\r
-of lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words,\r
-palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,\r
-brandishing a winebottle. _C'est vendredi saint!_ Murthering Irish. His\r
-image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i'the forest.\r
-\r
---Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.\r
-\r
---... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his\r
-_Diary of Master William Silence_ has found the hunting terms... Yes?\r
-What is it?\r
-\r
---There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and\r
-offering a card. From the _Freeman._ He wants to see the files of the\r
-_Kilkenny People_ for last year.\r
-\r
---Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman?...\r
-\r
-He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,\r
-asked, creaked, asked:\r
-\r
---Is he?... O, there!\r
-\r
-Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked\r
-with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most\r
-honest broadbrim.\r
-\r
---This gentleman? _Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People?_ To be sure. Good\r
-day, sir. _Kilkenny_... We have certainly...\r
-\r
-A patient silhouette waited, listening.\r
-\r
---All the leading provincial... _Northern Whig, Cork Examiner,\r
-Enniscorthy Guardian,_ 1903... Will you please?... Evans, conduct this\r
-gentleman... If you just follow the atten... Or, please allow me...\r
-This way... Please, sir...\r
-\r
-Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing\r
-dark figure following his hasty heels.\r
-\r
-The door closed.\r
-\r
---The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.\r
-\r
-He jumped up and snatched the card.\r
-\r
---What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.\r
-\r
-He rattled on:\r
-\r
---Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the\r
-museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that\r
-has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her.\r
-_Life of life, thy lips enkindle._\r
-\r
-Suddenly he turned to Stephen:\r
-\r
---He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker\r
-than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.\r
-Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! _The god pursuing the\r
-maiden hid_.\r
-\r
---We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval.\r
-We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if\r
-at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.\r
-\r
---Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty\r
-from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy\r
-in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty\r
-years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary\r
-equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His\r
-art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the\r
-art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar\r
-of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter\r
-Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his\r
-back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had\r
-underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied\r
-there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love\r
-and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's story of the burgher's\r
-wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in _Richard\r
-III_ and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing,\r
-took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate,\r
-answered from the capon's blankets: _William the conqueror came before\r
-Richard III_. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O,\r
-and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is\r
-suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.\r
-\r
-Cours la Reine. _Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.\r
-Minette? Tu veux?_\r
-\r
---The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's\r
-mother with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:\r
-\r
---Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!\r
-\r
---And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from\r
-neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those\r
-twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing\r
-behind the diamond panes?\r
-\r
-Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,\r
-he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of\r
-Juno's eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do.\r
-Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.\r
-\r
---Whom do you suspect? he challenged.\r
-\r
---Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice\r
-spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.\r
-\r
-Love that dare not speak its name.\r
-\r
---As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a\r
-lord.\r
-\r
-Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.\r
-\r
---It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all\r
-other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the\r
-stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a\r
-shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two\r
-deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained\r
-yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet\r
-Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.\r
-\r
-Stephen turned boldly in his chair.\r
-\r
---The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you\r
-deny that in the fifth scene of _Hamlet_ he has branded her with infamy\r
-tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years\r
-between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those\r
-women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her\r
-poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the\r
-first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her\r
-sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use\r
-granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.\r
-\r
-O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in\r
-royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her\r
-father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he\r
-has commended her to posterity.\r
-\r
-He faced their silence.\r
-\r
- To whom thus Eglinton:\r
- You mean the will.\r
- But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.\r
- She was entitled to her widow's dower\r
- At common law. His legal knowledge was great\r
- Our judges tell us.\r
- Him Satan fleers,\r
- Mocker:\r
- And therefore he left out her name\r
- From the first draft but he did not leave out\r
- The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,\r
- For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford\r
- And in London. And therefore when he was urged,\r
- As I believe, to name her\r
- He left her his\r
- Secondbest\r
- Bed.\r
- _Punkt._\r
- Leftherhis\r
- Secondbest\r
- Leftherhis\r
- Bestabed\r
- Secabest\r
- Leftabed.\r
-\r
-\r
-Woa!\r
-\r
---Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as\r
-they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.\r
-\r
---He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms\r
-and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist\r
-shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her\r
-his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in\r
-peace?\r
-\r
---It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr\r
-Secondbest Best said finely.\r
-\r
---_Separatio a mensa et a thalamo_, bettered Buck Mulligan and was\r
-smiled on.\r
-\r
---Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.\r
-Let me think.\r
-\r
---Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,\r
-Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays\r
-tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his\r
-dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget\r
-Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.\r
-\r
---Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...\r
-\r
---He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for\r
-a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!\r
-\r
---What? asked Besteglinton.\r
-\r
-William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For\r
-terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...\r
-\r
---Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought\r
-of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands\r
-and said: _All we can say is that life ran very high in those days._\r
-Lovely!\r
-\r
-Catamite.\r
-\r
---The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to\r
-ugling Eglinton.\r
-\r
-Steadfast John replied severe:\r
-\r
---The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake\r
-and have it.\r
-\r
-Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?\r
-\r
---And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his\r
-own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself\r
-a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the\r
-famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship\r
-mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.\r
-He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted\r
-his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could\r
-Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to\r
-his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging\r
-and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked\r
-forth while the sheeny was yet alive: _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ with\r
-the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for\r
-witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in _Love's Labour Lost_.\r
-His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking\r
-enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter's theory\r
-of equivocation. The _Sea Venture_ comes home from Bermudas and the play\r
-Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.\r
-The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise\r
-carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired _The Merry Wives of\r
-Windsor_, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid\r
-meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.\r
-\r
-I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of\r
-theolologicophilolological. _Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere._\r
-\r
---Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared,'expectantly. Your dean\r
-of studies holds he was a holy Roman.\r
-\r
-_Sufflaminandus sum._\r
-\r
---He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French\r
-polisher of Italian scandals.\r
-\r
---A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him\r
-myriadminded.\r
-\r
-_Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia\r
-inter multos._\r
-\r
---Saint Thomas, Stephen began...\r
-\r
---_Ora pro nobis_, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.\r
-\r
-There he keened a wailing rune.\r
-\r
---_Pogue mahone! Acushla machree!_ It's destroyed we are from this day!\r
-It's destroyed we are surely!\r
-\r
-All smiled their smiles.\r
-\r
---Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy\r
-reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different\r
-from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his\r
-wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the\r
-love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some\r
-stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with\r
-avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations\r
-are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the\r
-jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their\r
-affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old\r
-Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly\r
-to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold\r
-tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his\r
-wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his\r
-manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.\r
-\r
---Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.\r
-\r
---Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.\r
-\r
---Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.\r
-\r
---The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's\r
-widow, is the will to die.\r
-\r
-_--Requiescat!_ Stephen prayed.\r
-\r
- _What of all the will to do?\r
- It has vanished long ago..._\r
-\r
---She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the\r
-mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as\r
-rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven\r
-parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her\r
-at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in\r
-which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She\r
-read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the _Merry\r
-Wives_ and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought\r
-over _Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches_ and _The most Spiritual\r
-Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze_. Venus has twisted her\r
-lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age\r
-of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.\r
-\r
---History shows that to be true, _inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos_. The\r
-ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's\r
-worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that\r
-Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say\r
-that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man.\r
-I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.\r
-\r
-Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping\r
-with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it\r
-him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman\r
-to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter\r
-Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with\r
-a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten\r
-forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.\r
-\r
-Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.\r
-\r
-Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I\r
-touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is\r
-attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.\r
-\r
---A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary\r
-evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.\r
-If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with\r
-thirtyfive years of life, _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_, with\r
-fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then\r
-you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No.\r
-The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to\r
-hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised\r
-that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first\r
-and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of\r
-conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an\r
-apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that\r
-mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect\r
-flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably\r
-because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.\r
-Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. _Amor matris_, subjective and\r
-objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be\r
-a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love\r
-him or he any son?\r
-\r
-What the hell are you driving at?\r
-\r
-I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.\r
-\r
-_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea._\r
-\r
-Are you condemned to do this?\r
-\r
---They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal\r
-annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,\r
-hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,\r
-lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with\r
-grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son\r
-unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases\r
-care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth\r
-his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.\r
-\r
-In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.\r
-\r
---What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.\r
-\r
-Am I a father? If I were?\r
-\r
-Shrunken uncertain hand.\r
-\r
---Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the\r
-field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of\r
-Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if\r
-the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a\r
-father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet\r
-of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote _Hamlet_ he was not the\r
-father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt\r
-himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather,\r
-the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was\r
-born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.\r
-\r
-Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly\r
-glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.\r
-\r
-Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.\r
-\r
---Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with\r
-child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The\r
-play's the thing! Let me parturiate!\r
-\r
-He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.\r
-\r
---As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the\r
-forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in\r
-_Coriolanus._ His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in\r
-_King John._ Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the\r
-girls in _The Tempest_, in _Pericles,_ in _Winter's Tale_ are we know.\r
-Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may\r
-guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.\r
-\r
---The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.\r
-\r
-The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with\r
-haste, quake, quack.\r
-\r
-Door closed. Cell. Day.\r
-\r
-They list. Three. They.\r
-\r
-I you he they.\r
-\r
-Come, mess.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his\r
-old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer\r
-one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up\r
-in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage\r
-filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are\r
-recorded in the works of sweet William.\r
-\r
-MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What's in a name?\r
-\r
-BEST: That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to\r
-say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake. _(Laughter)_\r
-\r
-\r
-BUCKMULLIGAN: (_Piano, diminuendo_)\r
-\r
- _Then outspoke medical Dick\r
- To his comrade medical Davy..._\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,\r
-Richard Crookback, Edmund in _King Lear_, two bear the wicked uncles'\r
-names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his\r
-brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.\r
-\r
-BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name\r
-...\r
-\r
-_(Laughter)_\r
-\r
-QUAKERLYSTER: (_A tempo_) But he that filches from me my good name...\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Stringendo)_ He has hidden his own name, a fair name,\r
-William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old\r
-Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in\r
-the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name\r
-is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend\r
-sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer\r
-than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name?\r
-That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that\r
-we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.\r
-It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the\r
-night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent\r
-constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His\r
-eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as\r
-he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from\r
-Shottery and from her arms.\r
-\r
-Both satisfied. I too.\r
-\r
-Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.\r
-\r
-And from her arms.\r
-\r
-Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?\r
-\r
-Read the skies. _Autontimorumenos. Bous Stephanoumenos._ Where's your\r
-configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: _sua donna.\r
-Già: di lui. gelindo risolve di non amare_ S. D.\r
-\r
---What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a\r
-celestial phenomenon?\r
-\r
---A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.\r
-\r
-What more's to speak?\r
-\r
-Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.\r
-\r
-_Stephanos,_ my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my\r
-feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.\r
-\r
---You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is\r
-strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.\r
-\r
-Me, Magee and Mulligan.\r
-\r
-Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?\r
-Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.\r
-_Pater, ait._ Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing\r
-be.\r
-\r
-Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:\r
-\r
---That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know,\r
-we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three\r
-brothers Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The\r
-third brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best\r
-prize.\r
-\r
-Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.\r
-\r
-The quaker librarian springhalted near.\r
-\r
---I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand you\r
-to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps\r
-I am anticipating?\r
-\r
-He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.\r
-\r
-An attendant from the doorway called:\r
-\r
---Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...\r
-\r
---O, Father Dineen! Directly.\r
-\r
-Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.\r
-\r
-John Eglinton touched the foil.\r
-\r
---Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund.\r
-You kept them for the last, didn't you?\r
-\r
---In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and\r
-nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A\r
-brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.\r
-\r
-Lapwing.\r
-\r
-Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then\r
-Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They\r
-mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.\r
-\r
-Lapwing.\r
-\r
-I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.\r
-\r
-On.\r
-\r
---You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he\r
-took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?\r
-Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann\r
-(what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard\r
-the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The\r
-other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his\r
-kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence,\r
-the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of _King Lear_ in which\r
-Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's _Arcadia_ and spatchcocked on to a\r
-Celtic legend older than history?\r
-\r
---That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine\r
-a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. _Que\r
-voulez-vous?_ Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes\r
-Ulysses quote Aristotle.\r
-\r
---Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or\r
-the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to\r
-Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of\r
-banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds\r
-uninterruptedly from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ onward till Prospero\r
-breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his\r
-book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in\r
-another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.\r
-It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married\r
-daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it\r
-was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will\r
-and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of\r
-my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin,\r
-committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the\r
-lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under\r
-which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty\r
-and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in\r
-the world he has created, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, twice in _As you\r
-like It_, in _The Tempest_, in _Hamlet,_ in _Measure for Measure_--and\r
-in all the other plays which I have not read.\r
-\r
-He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.\r
-\r
-Judge Eglinton summed up.\r
-\r
---The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He\r
-is all in all.\r
-\r
---He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.\r
-All in all. In _Cymbeline,_ in _Othello_ he is bawd and cuckold. He acts\r
-and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he\r
-kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago\r
-ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.\r
-\r
---Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!\r
-\r
-Dark dome received, reverbed.\r
-\r
---And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When\r
-all is said Dumas _fils_ (or is it Dumas _père?)_ is right. After God\r
-Shakespeare has created most.\r
-\r
---Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after\r
-a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has\r
-always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of\r
-life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The\r
-motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet _(père?)_ and Hamlet _fils._\r
-A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what\r
-though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for,\r
-Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom\r
-they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it:\r
-prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of\r
-love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the\r
-place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world\r
-without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck\r
-says: _If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated\r
-on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps\r
-will tend._ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through\r
-ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives,\r
-widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright\r
-who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light\r
-first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom\r
-the most Roman of catholics call _dio boia_, hangman god, is doubtless\r
-all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and\r
-cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there\r
-are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife\r
-unto himself.\r
-\r
-_--Eureka!_ Buck Mulligan cried. _Eureka!_\r
-\r
-Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's\r
-desk.\r
-\r
---May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.\r
-\r
-He began to scribble on a slip of paper.\r
-\r
-Take some slips from the counter going out.\r
-\r
---Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one,\r
-shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.\r
-\r
-He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.\r
-\r
-Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his\r
-variorum edition of _The Taming of the Shrew._\r
-\r
---You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have\r
-brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe\r
-your own theory?\r
-\r
---No, Stephen said promptly.\r
-\r
---Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a\r
-dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.\r
-\r
-John Eclecticon doubly smiled.\r
-\r
---Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect payment\r
-for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is\r
-some mystery in _Hamlet_ but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man\r
-Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes\r
-that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to\r
-visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor\r
-wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he\r
-believes his theory.\r
-\r
-I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help\r
-me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? _Egomen._ Who to unbelieve? Other\r
-chap.\r
-\r
---You are the only contributor to _Dana_ who asks for pieces of silver.\r
-Then I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an\r
-article on economics.\r
-\r
-Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.\r
-\r
---For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then\r
-gravely said, honeying malice:\r
-\r
---I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper\r
-Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the _Summa contra\r
-Gentiles_ in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and\r
-Rosalie, the coalquay whore.\r
-\r
-He broke away.\r
-\r
---Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Aengus of the birds.\r
-\r
-Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts\r
-and offals.\r
-\r
-Stephen rose.\r
-\r
-Life is many days. This will end.\r
-\r
---We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. _Notre ami_ Moore says\r
-Malachi Mulligan must be there.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.\r
-\r
---Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of\r
-Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk\r
-straight?\r
-\r
-Laughing, he...\r
-\r
-Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.\r
-\r
-Lubber...\r
-\r
-Stephen followed a lubber...\r
-\r
-One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His\r
-lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe.\r
-\r
-Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt\r
-head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of\r
-no thought.\r
-\r
-What have I learned? Of them? Of me?\r
-\r
-Walk like Haines now.\r
-\r
-The constant readers' room. In the readers' book Cashel Boyle O'Connor\r
-Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet\r
-mad? The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.\r
-\r
---O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...\r
-\r
-Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding:\r
-\r
---A pleased bottom.\r
-\r
-The turnstile.\r
-\r
-Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...\r
-\r
-The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius.\r
-\r
-Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:\r
-\r
-_John Eglinton, my jo, John, Why won't you wed a wife?_\r
-\r
-He spluttered to the air:\r
-\r
---O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their\r
-playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a\r
-new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre! I\r
-smell the pubic sweat of monks.\r
-\r
-He spat blank.\r
-\r
-Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And\r
-left the _femme de trente ans._ And why no other children born? And his\r
-first child a girl?\r
-\r
-Afterwit. Go back.\r
-\r
-The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,\r
-minion of pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair.\r
-\r
-Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...\r
-\r
---Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there...\r
-\r
-Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:\r
-\r
- _I hardly hear the purlieu cry\r
- Or a tommy talk as I pass one by\r
- Before my thoughts begin to run\r
- On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,\r
- The same that had the wooden leg\r
- And that filibustering filibeg\r
- That never dared to slake his drouth,\r
- Magee that had the chinless mouth.\r
- Being afraid to marry on earth\r
- They masturbated for all they were worth._\r
-\r
-\r
-Jest on. Know thyself.\r
-\r
-Halted, below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.\r
-\r
---Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing\r
-black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.\r
-\r
-A laugh tripped over his lips.\r
-\r
---Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that\r
-old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets you\r
-a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus.\r
-Couldn't you do the Yeats touch?\r
-\r
-He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:\r
-\r
---The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.\r
-One thinks of Homer.\r
-\r
-He stopped at the stairfoot.\r
-\r
---I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.\r
-\r
-The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's morrice\r
-with caps of indices.\r
-\r
-In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet: _Everyman His\r
-own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three\r
-orgasms) by Ballocky Mulligan._\r
-\r
-\r
-He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying:\r
-\r
---The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.\r
-\r
-He read, _marcato:_\r
-\r
---Characters:\r
-\r
- TODY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)\r
- CRAB (a bushranger)\r
- MEDICAL DICK )\r
- and ) (two birds with one stone)\r
- MEDICAL DAVY )\r
- MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)\r
- FRESH NELLY\r
- and\r
- ROSALIE (the coalquay whore).\r
-\r
-He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen:\r
-and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:\r
-\r
---O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to\r
-lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,\r
-multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!\r
-\r
---The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted\r
-them.\r
-\r
-About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.\r
-\r
-Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,\r
-if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must\r
-come to, ineluctably.\r
-\r
-My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.\r
-\r
-A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.\r
-\r
---Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.\r
-\r
-The portico.\r
-\r
-Here I watched the birds for augury. Aengus of the birds. They go, they\r
-come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots\r
-after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.\r
-\r
---The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you\r
-see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient\r
-mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.\r
-\r
-Manner of Oxenford.\r
-\r
-Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.\r
-\r
-A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the gateway,\r
-under portcullis barbs.\r
-\r
-They followed.\r
-\r
-Offend me still. Speak on.\r
-\r
-Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail\r
-from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw\r
-of softness softly were blown.\r
-\r
-Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic:\r
-from wide earth an altar.\r
-\r
- _Laud we the gods\r
- And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils\r
- From our bless'd altars._\r
-\r
-\r
-The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch\r
-in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to\r
-three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy's name again?\r
-Dignam. Yes. _Vere dignum et iustum est._ Brother Swan was the person\r
-to see. Mr Cunningham's letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good\r
-practical catholic: useful at mission time.\r
-\r
-A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his\r
-crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the\r
-sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very\r
-reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his\r
-purse held, he knew, one silver crown.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long,\r
-of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs,\r
-ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey's words:\r
-_If I had served my God as I have served my king He would not have\r
-abandoned me in my old days._ He walked by the treeshade of sunnywinking\r
-leaves: and towards him came the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.\r
-\r
---Very well, indeed, father. And you, father?\r
-\r
-Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton\r
-probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at\r
-Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that.\r
-And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to\r
-be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was\r
-very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O,\r
-yes: a very great success. A wonderful man really.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.\r
-Iooking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M.P.\r
-Yes, he would certainly call.\r
-\r
---Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee doffed his silk hat and smiled, as he took leave, at the\r
-jet beads of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again,\r
-in going. He had cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father\r
-Bernard Vaughan's droll eyes and cockney voice.\r
-\r
---Pilate! Wy don't you old back that owlin mob?\r
-\r
-A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his\r
-way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish.\r
-Of good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?\r
-\r
-O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy\r
-square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house. Aha. And were\r
-they good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his\r
-name? Jack Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little man?\r
-His name was Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to Master Brunny Lynam and\r
-pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.\r
-\r
---But mind you don't post yourself into the box, little man, he said.\r
-\r
-The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed:\r
-\r
---O, sir.\r
-\r
---Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.\r
-\r
-Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee's letter\r
-to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox. Father\r
-Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square\r
-east.\r
-\r
-Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, in silk hat, slate\r
-frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender\r
-trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave\r
-deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady\r
-Maxwell at the corner of Dignam's court.\r
-\r
-Was that not Mrs M'Guinness?\r
-\r
-Mrs M'Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the\r
-farther footpath along which she sailed. And Father Conmee smiled and\r
-saluted. How did she do?\r
-\r
-A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to\r
-think that she was a pawnbroker! Well, now! Such a... what should he\r
-say?... such a queenly mien.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee walked down Great Charles street and glanced at the shutup\r
-free church on his left. The reverend T. R. Greene B.A. will (D.V.)\r
-speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on him to say\r
-a few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible ignorance. They\r
-acted according to their lights.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North Circular\r
-road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an important\r
-thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.\r
-\r
-A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All\r
-raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly.\r
-Christian brother boys.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee smelt incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint\r
-Joseph's church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females.\r
-Father Conmee raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous: but\r
-occasionally they were also badtempered.\r
-\r
-Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift\r
-nobleman. And now it was an office or something.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted\r
-by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father\r
-Conmee saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came\r
-from baconflitches and ample cools of butter. He passed Grogan's the\r
-Tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful\r
-catastrophe in New York. In America those things were continually\r
-happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared. Still, an\r
-act of perfect contrition.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin's publichouse against the window of\r
-which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and were saluted.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee passed H. J. O'Neill's funeral establishment where Corny\r
-Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay.\r
-A constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted\r
-the constable. In Youkstetter's, the porkbutcher's, Father Conmee\r
-observed pig's puddings, white and black and red, lie neatly curled in\r
-tubes.\r
-\r
-Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a\r
-turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty\r
-straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above\r
-him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of\r
-the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it\r
-out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor\r
-people.\r
-\r
-On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S.J. of saint Francis\r
-Xavier's church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound\r
-tram.\r
-\r
-Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of\r
-saint Agatha's church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.\r
-\r
-At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for\r
-he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked with\r
-care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a sixpence\r
-and five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into his purse.\r
-Passing the ivy church he reflected that the ticket inspector usually\r
-made his visit when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket. The\r
-solemnity of the occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive\r
-for a journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum.\r
-\r
-It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father\r
-Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee\r
-supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with\r
-the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently,\r
-tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily,\r
-sweetly.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also that\r
-the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of the\r
-seat.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the\r
-mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.\r
-\r
-At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an old\r
-woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled the\r
-bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and\r
-a marketnet: and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and\r
-basket down: and Father Conmee thought that, as she had nearly passed\r
-the end of the penny fare, she was one of those good souls who had\r
-always to be told twice _bless you, my child,_ that they have been\r
-absolved, _pray for me._ But they had so many worries in life, so many\r
-cares, poor creatures.\r
-\r
-From the hoardings Mr Eugene Stratton grimaced with thick niggerlips at\r
-Father Conmee.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow men and\r
-of his sermon on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African mission and of\r
-the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and brown and\r
-yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last\r
-hour came like a thief in the night. That book by the Belgian jesuit,\r
-_Le Nombre des Élus,_ seemed to Father Conmee a reasonable plea. Those\r
-were millions of human souls created by God in His Own likeness to\r
-whom the faith had not (D.V.) been brought. But they were God's souls,\r
-created by God. It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all\r
-be lost, a waste, if one might say.\r
-\r
-At the Howth road stop Father Conmee alighted, was saluted by the\r
-conductor and saluted in his turn.\r
-\r
-The Malahide road was quiet. It pleased Father Conmee, road and name.\r
-The joybells were ringing in gay Malahide. Lord Talbot de Malahide,\r
-immediate hereditary lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining.\r
-Then came the call to arms and she was maid, wife and widow in one day.\r
-Those were old worldish days, loyal times in joyous townlands, old times\r
-in the barony.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee, walking, thought of his little book _Old Times in the\r
-Barony_ and of the book that might be written about jesuit houses and of\r
-Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere.\r
-\r
-A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough Ennel,\r
-Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening,\r
-not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the\r
-jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed\r
-adultery fully, _eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris,_ with\r
-her husband's brother? She would half confess if she had not all sinned\r
-as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband's brother.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for\r
-man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our ways.\r
-\r
-Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and\r
-honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at\r
-smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit\r
-clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble,\r
-were impalmed by Don John Conmee.\r
-\r
-It was a charming day.\r
-\r
-The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages,\r
-curtseying to him with ample underleaves. The sky showed him a flock of\r
-small white clouds going slowly down the wind. _Moutonner,_ the French\r
-said. A just and homely word.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee, reading his office, watched a flock of muttoning clouds\r
-over Rathcoffey. His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble of\r
-Clongowes field. He walked there, reading in the evening, and heard\r
-the cries of the boys' lines at their play, young cries in the quiet\r
-evening. He was their rector: his reign was mild.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee drew off his gloves and took his rededged breviary out. An\r
-ivory bookmark told him the page.\r
-\r
-Nones. He should have read that before lunch. But lady Maxwell had come.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee read in secret _Pater_ and _Ave_ and crossed his breast.\r
-_Deus in adiutorium._\r
-\r
-He walked calmly and read mutely the nones, walking and reading till he\r
-came to _Res_ in _Beati immaculati: Principium verborum tuorum veritas:\r
-in eternum omnia indicia iustitiae tuae._\r
-\r
-A flushed young man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came a\r
-young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man raised\r
-his cap abruptly: the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care\r
-detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee blessed both gravely and turned a thin page of his\r
-breviary. _Sin: Principes persecuti sunt me gratis: et a verbis tuis\r
-formidavit cor meum._\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Corny Kelleher closed his long daybook and glanced with his drooping eye\r
-at a pine coffinlid sentried in a corner. He pulled himself erect,\r
-went to it and, spinning it on its axle, viewed its shape and brass\r
-furnishings. Chewing his blade of hay he laid the coffinlid by and came\r
-to the doorway. There he tilted his hatbrim to give shade to his eyes\r
-and leaned against the doorcase, looking idly out.\r
-\r
-Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge.\r
-\r
-Corny Kelleher locked his largefooted boots and gazed, his hat\r
-downtilted, chewing his blade of hay.\r
-\r
-Constable 57C, on his beat, stood to pass the time of day.\r
-\r
---That's a fine day, Mr Kelleher.\r
-\r
---Ay, Corny Kelleher said.\r
-\r
---It's very close, the constable said.\r
-\r
-Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth\r
-while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a\r
-coin.\r
-\r
---What's the best news? he asked.\r
-\r
---I seen that particular party last evening, the constable said with\r
-bated breath.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-A onelegged sailor crutched himself round MacConnell's corner, skirting\r
-Rabaiotti's icecream car, and jerked himself up Eccles street. Towards\r
-Larry O'Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, he growled unamiably:\r
-\r
---_For England_...\r
-\r
-He swung himself violently forward past Katey and Boody Dedalus, halted\r
-and growled:\r
-\r
---_home and beauty._\r
-\r
-J. J. O'Molloy's white careworn face was told that Mr Lambert was in the\r
-warehouse with a visitor.\r
-\r
-A stout lady stopped, took a copper coin from her purse and dropped it\r
-into the cap held out to her. The sailor grumbled thanks, glanced sourly\r
-at the unheeding windows, sank his head and swung himself forward four\r
-strides.\r
-\r
-He halted and growled angrily:\r
-\r
---_For England_...\r
-\r
-Two barefoot urchins, sucking long liquorice laces, halted near him,\r
-gaping at his stump with their yellowslobbered mouths.\r
-\r
-He swung himself forward in vigorous jerks, halted, lifted his head\r
-towards a window and bayed deeply:\r
-\r
---_home and beauty._\r
-\r
-The gay sweet chirping whistling within went on a bar or two, ceased.\r
-The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card _Unfurnished Apartments_\r
-slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm shone, was\r
-seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut shiftstraps. A\r
-woman's hand flung forth a coin over the area railings. It fell on the\r
-path.\r
-\r
-One of the urchins ran to it, picked it up and dropped it into the\r
-minstrel's cap, saying:\r
-\r
---There, sir.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Katey and Boody Dedalus shoved in the door of the closesteaming kitchen.\r
-\r
---Did you put in the books? Boody asked.\r
-\r
-Maggy at the range rammed down a greyish mass beneath bubbling suds\r
-twice with her potstick and wiped her brow.\r
-\r
---They wouldn't give anything on them, she said.\r
-\r
-Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields, his thinsocked ankles\r
-tickled by stubble.\r
-\r
---Where did you try? Boody asked.\r
-\r
---M'Guinness's.\r
-\r
-Boody stamped her foot and threw her satchel on the table.\r
-\r
---Bad cess to her big face! she cried.\r
-\r
-Katey went to the range and peered with squinting eyes.\r
-\r
---What's in the pot? she asked.\r
-\r
---Shirts, Maggy said.\r
-\r
-Boody cried angrily:\r
-\r
---Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?\r
-\r
-Katey, lifting the kettlelid in a pad of her stained skirt, asked:\r
-\r
---And what's in this?\r
-\r
-A heavy fume gushed in answer.\r
-\r
---Peasoup, Maggy said.\r
-\r
---Where did you get it? Katey asked.\r
-\r
---Sister Mary Patrick, Maggy said.\r
-\r
-The lacquey rang his bell.\r
-\r
---Barang!\r
-\r
-Boody sat down at the table and said hungrily:\r
-\r
---Give us it here.\r
-\r
-Maggy poured yellow thick soup from the kettle into a bowl. Katey,\r
-sitting opposite Boody, said quietly, as her fingertip lifted to her\r
-mouth random crumbs:\r
-\r
---A good job we have that much. Where's Dilly?\r
-\r
---Gone to meet father, Maggy said.\r
-\r
-Boody, breaking big chunks of bread into the yellow soup, added:\r
-\r
---Our father who art not in heaven.\r
-\r
-Maggy, pouring yellow soup in Katey's bowl, exclaimed:\r
-\r
---Boody! For shame!\r
-\r
-A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the\r
-Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed\r
-around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains,\r
-between the Customhouse old dock and George's quay.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-The blond girl in Thornton's bedded the wicker basket with rustling\r
-fibre. Blazes Boylan handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper\r
-and a small jar.\r
-\r
---Put these in first, will you? he said.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, the blond girl said. And the fruit on top.\r
-\r
---That'll do, game ball, Blazes Boylan said.\r
-\r
-She bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe\r
-shamefaced peaches.\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the\r
-fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red\r
-tomatoes, sniffing smells.\r
-\r
-H. E. L. Y.'S filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane,\r
-plodding towards their goal.\r
-\r
-He turned suddenly from a chip of strawberries, drew a gold watch from\r
-his fob and held it at its chain's length.\r
-\r
---Can you send them by tram? Now?\r
-\r
-A darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the hawker's\r
-cart.\r
-\r
---Certainly, sir. Is it in the city?\r
-\r
---O, yes, Blazes Boylan said. Ten minutes.\r
-\r
-The blond girl handed him a docket and pencil.\r
-\r
---Will you write the address, sir?\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan at the counter wrote and pushed the docket to her.\r
-\r
---Send it at once, will you? he said. It's for an invalid.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir. I will, sir.\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan rattled merry money in his trousers' pocket.\r
-\r
---What's the damage? he asked.\r
-\r
-The blond girl's slim fingers reckoned the fruits.\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He took\r
-a red carnation from the tall stemglass.\r
-\r
---This for me? he asked gallantly.\r
-\r
-The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie\r
-a bit crooked, blushing.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, she said.\r
-\r
-Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches.\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the\r
-red flower between his smiling teeth.\r
-\r
---May I say a word to your telephone, missy? he asked roguishly.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-_--Ma!_ Almidano Artifoni said.\r
-\r
-He gazed over Stephen's shoulder at Goldsmith's knobby poll.\r
-\r
-Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore,\r
-gripping the handrests. Palefaces. Men's arms frankly round their\r
-stunted forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned porch of\r
-the bank of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed.\r
-\r
---_Anch'io ho avuto di queste idee, ALMIDANO ARTIFONI SAID, quand' ero\r
-giovine come Lei. Eppoi mi sono convinto che il mondo è una bestia.\r
-É peccato. Perchè la sua voce... sarebbe un cespite di rendita, via.\r
-Invece, Lei si sacrifica._\r
-\r
---_Sacrifizio incruento,_ Stephen said smiling, swaying his ashplant in\r
-slow swingswong from its midpoint, lightly.\r
-\r
-_--Speriamo,_ the round mustachioed face said pleasantly. _Ma, dia retta\r
-a me. Ci rifletta_.\r
-\r
-By the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram\r
-unloaded straggling Highland soldiers of a band.\r
-\r
---_Ci rifletterò,_ Stephen said, glancing down the solid trouserleg.\r
-\r
---_Ma, sul serio, eh?_ Almidano Artifoni said.\r
-\r
-His heavy hand took Stephen's firmly. Human eyes. They gazed curiously\r
-an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram.\r
-\r
-_--Eccolo,_ Almidano Artifoni said in friendly haste. _Venga a trovarmi\r
-e ci pensi. Addio, caro._\r
-\r
---_Arrivederla, maestro,_ Stephen said, raising his hat when his hand\r
-was freed. _E grazie._\r
-\r
---_Di che?_ Almidano Artifoni said. _Scusi, eh? Tante belle cose!_\r
-\r
-Almidano Artifoni, holding up a baton of rolled music as a signal,\r
-trotted on stout trousers after the Dalkey tram. In vain he trotted,\r
-signalling in vain among the rout of barekneed gillies smuggling\r
-implements of music through Trinity gates.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of _The Woman in White_\r
-far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her\r
-typewriter.\r
-\r
-Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion?\r
-Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.\r
-\r
-The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled them:\r
-six.\r
-\r
-Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:\r
-\r
---16 June 1904.\r
-\r
-Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny's corner and the slab\r
-where Wolfe Tone's statue was not, eeled themselves turning H. E. L.\r
-Y.'S and plodded back as they had come.\r
-\r
-Then she stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming\r
-soubrette, and, listlessly lolling, scribbled on the jotter sixteens and\r
-capital esses. Mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She's not nicelooking,\r
-is she? The way she's holding up her bit of a skirt. Wonder will that\r
-fellow be at the band tonight. If I could get that dressmaker to make a\r
-concertina skirt like Susy Nagle's. They kick out grand. Shannon and\r
-all the boatclub swells never took his eyes off her. Hope to goodness he\r
-won't keep me here till seven.\r
-\r
-The telephone rang rudely by her ear.\r
-\r
---Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five. Only\r
-those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir. Then I can go\r
-after six if you're not back. A quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven and\r
-six. I'll tell him. Yes: one, seven, six.\r
-\r
-She scribbled three figures on an envelope.\r
-\r
---Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from SPORT was in looking for you. Mr\r
-Lenehan, yes. He said he'll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes, sir.\r
-I'll ring them up after five.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Two pink faces turned in the flare of the tiny torch.\r
-\r
---Who's that? Ned Lambert asked. Is that Crotty?\r
-\r
---Ringabella and Crosshaven, a voice replied groping for foothold.\r
-\r
---Hello, Jack, is that yourself? Ned Lambert said, raising in salute his\r
-pliant lath among the flickering arches. Come on. Mind your steps there.\r
-\r
-The vesta in the clergyman's uplifted hand consumed itself in a long\r
-soft flame and was let fall. At their feet its red speck died: and\r
-mouldy air closed round them.\r
-\r
---How interesting! a refined accent said in the gloom.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, Ned Lambert said heartily. We are standing in the historic\r
-council chamber of saint Mary's abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed\r
-himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin.\r
-O'Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days.\r
-The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and\r
-the original jews' temple was here too before they built their synagogue\r
-over in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were you?\r
-\r
---No, Ned.\r
-\r
---He rode down through Dame walk, the refined accent said, if my memory\r
-serves me. The mansion of the Kildares was in Thomas court.\r
-\r
---That's right, Ned Lambert said. That's quite right, sir.\r
-\r
---If you will be so kind then, the clergyman said, the next time to\r
-allow me perhaps...\r
-\r
---Certainly, Ned Lambert said. Bring the camera whenever you like. I'll\r
-get those bags cleared away from the windows. You can take it from here\r
-or from here.\r
-\r
-In the still faint light he moved about, tapping with his lath the piled\r
-seedbags and points of vantage on the floor.\r
-\r
-From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.\r
-\r
---I'm deeply obliged, Mr Lambert, the clergyman said. I won't trespass\r
-on your valuable time...\r
-\r
---You're welcome, sir, Ned Lambert said. Drop in whenever you like. Next\r
-week, say. Can you see?\r
-\r
---Yes, yes. Good afternoon, Mr Lambert. Very pleased to have met you.\r
-\r
---Pleasure is mine, sir, Ned Lambert answered.\r
-\r
-He followed his guest to the outlet and then whirled his lath away among\r
-the pillars. With J. J. O'Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary's abbey\r
-where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut meal,\r
-O'Connor, Wexford.\r
-\r
-He stood to read the card in his hand.\r
-\r
---The reverend Hugh C. Love, Rathcoffey. Present address: Saint\r
-Michael's, Sallins. Nice young chap he is. He's writing a book about the\r
-Fitzgeralds he told me. He's well up in history, faith.\r
-\r
-The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging\r
-twig.\r
-\r
---I thought you were at a new gunpowder plot, J. J. O'Molloy said.\r
-\r
-Ned Lambert cracked his fingers in the air.\r
-\r
---God! he cried. I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare\r
-after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? _I'm bloody\r
-sorry I did it,_ says he, _but I declare to God I thought the archbishop\r
-was inside._ He mightn't like it, though. What? God, I'll tell him\r
-anyhow. That was the great earl, the Fitzgerald Mor. Hot members they\r
-were all of them, the Geraldines.\r
-\r
-The horses he passed started nervously under their slack harness. He\r
-slapped a piebald haunch quivering near him and cried:\r
-\r
---Woa, sonny!\r
-\r
-He turned to J. J. O'Molloy and asked:\r
-\r
---Well, Jack. What is it? What's the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.\r
-\r
-With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an\r
-instant, sneezed loudly.\r
-\r
---Chow! he said. Blast you!\r
-\r
---The dust from those sacks, J. J. O'Molloy said politely.\r
-\r
---No, Ned Lambert gasped, I caught a... cold night before... blast\r
-your soul... night before last... and there was a hell of a lot of\r
-draught...\r
-\r
-He held his handkerchief ready for the coming...\r
-\r
---I was... Glasnevin this morning... poor little... what do you call\r
-him... Chow!... Mother of Moses!\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Tom Rochford took the top disk from the pile he clasped against his\r
-claret waistcoat.\r
-\r
---See? he said. Say it's turn six. In here, see. Turn Now On.\r
-\r
-He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove, wobbled\r
-a while, ceased, ogling them: six.\r
-\r
-Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the\r
-consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying\r
-the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the\r
-admiralty division of king's bench to the court of appeal an elderly\r
-female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of\r
-great amplitude.\r
-\r
---See? he said. See now the last one I put in is over here: Turns Over.\r
-The impact. Leverage, see?\r
-\r
-He showed them the rising column of disks on the right.\r
-\r
---Smart idea, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. So a fellow coming in late\r
-can see what turn is on and what turns are over.\r
-\r
---See? Tom Rochford said.\r
-\r
-He slid in a disk for himself: and watched it shoot, wobble, ogle, stop:\r
-four. Turn Now On.\r
-\r
---I'll see him now in the Ormond, Lenehan said, and sound him. One good\r
-turn deserves another.\r
-\r
---Do, Tom Rochford said. Tell him I'm Boylan with impatience.\r
-\r
---Goodnight, M'Coy said abruptly. When you two begin\r
-\r
-Nosey Flynn stooped towards the lever, snuffling at it.\r
-\r
---But how does it work here, Tommy? he asked.\r
-\r
---Tooraloo, Lenehan said. See you later.\r
-\r
-He followed M'Coy out across the tiny square of Crampton court.\r
-\r
---He's a hero, he said simply.\r
-\r
---I know, M'Coy said. The drain, you mean.\r
-\r
---Drain? Lenehan said. It was down a manhole.\r
-\r
-They passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie Kendall, charming\r
-soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile.\r
-\r
-Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall\r
-Lenehan showed M'Coy how the whole thing was. One of those manholes like\r
-a bloody gaspipe and there was the poor devil stuck down in it, half\r
-choked with sewer gas. Down went Tom Rochford anyhow, booky's vest and\r
-all, with the rope round him. And be damned but he got the rope round\r
-the poor devil and the two were hauled up.\r
-\r
---The act of a hero, he said.\r
-\r
-At the Dolphin they halted to allow the ambulance car to gallop past\r
-them for Jervis street.\r
-\r
---This way, he said, walking to the right. I want to pop into Lynam's\r
-to see Sceptre's starting price. What's the time by your gold watch and\r
-chain?\r
-\r
-M'Coy peered into Marcus Tertius Moses' sombre office, then at O'Neill's\r
-clock.\r
-\r
---After three, he said. Who's riding her?\r
-\r
---O. Madden, Lenehan said. And a game filly she is.\r
-\r
-While he waited in Temple bar M'Coy dodged a banana peel with gentle\r
-pushes of his toe from the path to the gutter. Fellow might damn easy\r
-get a nasty fall there coming along tight in the dark.\r
-\r
-The gates of the drive opened wide to give egress to the viceregal\r
-cavalcade.\r
-\r
---Even money, Lenehan said returning. I knocked against Bantam Lyons\r
-in there going to back a bloody horse someone gave him that hasn't an\r
-earthly. Through here.\r
-\r
-They went up the steps and under Merchants' arch. A darkbacked figure\r
-scanned books on the hawker's cart.\r
-\r
---There he is, Lenehan said.\r
-\r
---Wonder what he's buying, M'Coy said, glancing behind.\r
-\r
---_Leopoldo or the Bloom is on the Rye,_ Lenehan said.\r
-\r
---He's dead nuts on sales, M'Coy said. I was with him one day and he\r
-bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were\r
-fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and\r
-comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about.\r
-\r
-Lenehan laughed.\r
-\r
---I'll tell you a damn good one about comets' tails, he said. Come over\r
-in the sun.\r
-\r
-They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by the\r
-riverwall.\r
-\r
-Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's,\r
-carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.\r
-\r
---There was a long spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said\r
-eagerly. The annual dinner, you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord\r
-mayor was there, Val Dillon it was, and sir Charles Cameron and Dan\r
-Dawson spoke and there was music. Bartell d'Arcy sang and Benjamin\r
-Dollard...\r
-\r
---I know, M'Coy broke in. My missus sang there once.\r
-\r
---Did she? Lenehan said.\r
-\r
-A card _Unfurnished Apartments_ reappeared on the windowsash of number 7\r
-Eccles street.\r
-\r
-He checked his tale a moment but broke out in a wheezy laugh.\r
-\r
---But wait till I tell you, he said. Delahunt of Camden street had the\r
-catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were\r
-there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and curacao to\r
-which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came\r
-solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies...\r
-\r
---I know, M'Coy said. The year the missus was there...\r
-\r
-Lenehan linked his arm warmly.\r
-\r
---But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after\r
-all the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o'clock the\r
-morning after the night before. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter's\r
-night on the Featherbed Mountain. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one\r
-side of the car and I was with the wife on the other. We started singing\r
-glees and duets: _Lo, the early beam of morning_. She was well primed\r
-with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband. Every jolt the\r
-bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell's delights! She\r
-has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.\r
-\r
-He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:\r
-\r
---I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time.\r
-Know what I mean?\r
-\r
-His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in\r
-delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.\r
-\r
---The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey\r
-mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets\r
-in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and\r
-Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was\r
-lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last\r
-she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. _And what star is that,\r
-Poldy?_ says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. _That one, is it?_\r
-says Chris Callinan, _sure that's only what you might call a pinprick._\r
-By God, he wasn't far wide of the mark.\r
-\r
-Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.\r
-\r
---I'm weak, he gasped.\r
-\r
-M'Coy's white face smiled about it at instants and grew grave. Lenehan\r
-walked on again. He lifted his yachtingcap and scratched his hindhead\r
-rapidly. He glanced sideways in the sunlight at M'Coy.\r
-\r
---He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one\r
-of your common or garden... you know... There's a touch of the artist\r
-about old Bloom.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of _The Awful Disclosures of Maria\r
-Monk,_ then of Aristotle's _Masterpiece._ Crooked botched print. Plates:\r
-infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered\r
-cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All\r
-butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute\r
-somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.\r
-\r
-He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: _Tales of the Ghetto_\r
-by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.\r
-\r
---That I had, he said, pushing it by.\r
-\r
-The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.\r
-\r
---Them are two good ones, he said.\r
-\r
-Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth.\r
-He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his\r
-unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.\r
-\r
-On O'Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay\r
-apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. _Fair Tyrants_ by James\r
-Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.\r
-\r
-He opened it. Thought so.\r
-\r
-A woman's voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen: the man.\r
-\r
-No: she wouldn't like that much. Got her it once.\r
-\r
-He read the other title: _Sweets of Sin_. More in her line. Let us see.\r
-\r
-He read where his finger opened.\r
-\r
-_--All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on\r
-wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For raoul!_\r
-\r
-Yes. This. Here. Try.\r
-\r
---_Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands\r
-felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé._\r
-\r
-Yes. Take this. The end.\r
-\r
---_You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.\r
-The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her\r
-queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played\r
-round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly._\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom read again: _The beautiful woman._\r
-\r
-Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amply\r
-amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched\r
-themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (_for Him! For Raoul!_).\r
-Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (_her heaving embonpoint!_).\r
-Feel! Press! Crushed! Sulphur dung of lions!\r
-\r
-Young! Young!\r
-\r
-An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of\r
-chancery, king's bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in\r
-the lord chancellor's court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the\r
-admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the\r
-Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal\r
-reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident\r
-and Guarantee Corporation.\r
-\r
-Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy\r
-curtains. The shopman's uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven\r
-reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, puked phlegm on the\r
-floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it,\r
-and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom beheld it.\r
-\r
-Mastering his troubled breath, he said:\r
-\r
---I'll take this one.\r
-\r
-The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.\r
-\r
---_Sweets of Sin,_ he said, tapping on it. That's a good one.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell\r
-twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet.\r
-\r
-Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the\r
-bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely\r
-curtains. Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas. Any\r
-advance on five shillings? Going for five shillings.\r
-\r
-The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:\r
-\r
---Barang!\r
-\r
-Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint.\r
-J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched\r
-necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus, tugging a long moustache, came round from Williams's row. He\r
-halted near his daughter.\r
-\r
---It's time for you, she said.\r
-\r
---Stand up straight for the love of the lord Jesus, Mr Dedalus said.\r
-Are you trying to imitate your uncle John, the cornetplayer, head upon\r
-shoulder? Melancholy God!\r
-\r
-Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr Dedalus placed his hands on them and\r
-held them back.\r
-\r
---Stand up straight, girl, he said. You'll get curvature of the spine.\r
-Do you know what you look like?\r
-\r
-He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulders\r
-and dropping his underjaw.\r
-\r
---Give it up, father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.\r
-\r
---Did you get any money? Dilly asked.\r
-\r
---Where would I get money? Mr Dedalus said. There is no-one in Dublin\r
-would lend me fourpence.\r
-\r
---You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.\r
-\r
---How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along\r
-James's street.\r
-\r
---I know you did, Dilly answered. Were you in the Scotch house now?\r
-\r
---I was not, then, Mr Dedalus said, smiling. Was it the little nuns\r
-taught you to be so saucy? Here.\r
-\r
-He handed her a shilling.\r
-\r
---See if you can do anything with that, he said.\r
-\r
---I suppose you got five, Dilly said. Give me more than that.\r
-\r
---Wait awhile, Mr Dedalus said threateningly. You're like the rest of\r
-them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother\r
-died. But wait awhile. You'll all get a short shrift and a long day from\r
-me. Low blackguardism! I'm going to get rid of you. Wouldn't care if I\r
-was stretched out stiff. He's dead. The man upstairs is dead.\r
-\r
-He left her and walked on. Dilly followed quickly and pulled his coat.\r
-\r
---Well, what is it? he said, stopping.\r
-\r
-The lacquey rang his bell behind their backs.\r
-\r
---Barang!\r
-\r
---Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried, turning on him.\r
-\r
-The lacquey, aware of comment, shook the lolling clapper of his bell but\r
-feebly:\r
-\r
---Bang!\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus stared at him.\r
-\r
---Watch him, he said. It's instructive. I wonder will he allow us to\r
-talk.\r
-\r
---You got more than that, father, Dilly said.\r
-\r
---I'm going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I'll leave\r
-you all where Jesus left the jews. Look, there's all I have. I got\r
-two shillings from Jack Power and I spent twopence for a shave for the\r
-funeral.\r
-\r
-He drew forth a handful of copper coins, nervously.\r
-\r
---Can't you look for some money somewhere? Dilly said.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus thought and nodded.\r
-\r
---I will, he said gravely. I looked all along the gutter in O'Connell\r
-street. I'll try this one now.\r
-\r
---You're very funny, Dilly said, grinning.\r
-\r
---Here, Mr Dedalus said, handing her two pennies. Get a glass of milk\r
-for yourself and a bun or a something. I'll be home shortly.\r
-\r
-He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on.\r
-\r
-The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of\r
-Parkgate.\r
-\r
---I'm sure you have another shilling, Dilly said.\r
-\r
-The lacquey banged loudly.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus amid the din walked off, murmuring to himself with a pursing\r
-mincing mouth gently:\r
-\r
---The little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn't do\r
-anything! O, sure they wouldn't really! Is it little sister Monica!\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-From the sundial towards James's gate walked Mr Kernan, pleased with the\r
-order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James's street,\r
-past Shackleton's offices. Got round him all right. How do you do, Mr\r
-Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other\r
-establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping alive.\r
-Lovely weather we're having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country. Those\r
-farmers are always grumbling. I'll just take a thimbleful of your best\r
-gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that\r
-General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And\r
-heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal\r
-thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most\r
-scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the\r
-firehose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever\r
-allowed a boat like that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins.\r
-You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look\r
-at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were\r
-bad here.\r
-\r
-I smiled at him. _America,_ I said quietly, just like that. _What is\r
-it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true?_\r
-That's a fact.\r
-\r
-Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there's money going there's\r
-always someone to pick it up.\r
-\r
-Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy\r
-appearance. Bowls them over.\r
-\r
---Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?\r
-\r
---Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter\r
-Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson\r
-street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built\r
-under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street\r
-club toff had it probably. John Mulligan, the manager of the Hibernian\r
-bank, gave me a very sharp eye yesterday on Carlisle bridge as if he\r
-remembered me.\r
-\r
-Aham! Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road.\r
-Gentleman. And now, Mr Crimmins, may we have the honour of your custom\r
-again, sir. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying\r
-has it.\r
-\r
-North wall and sir John Rogerson's quay, with hulls and anchorchains,\r
-sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the\r
-ferrywash, Elijah is coming.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course.\r
-Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy\r
-body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Ned\r
-Lambert's brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He's as like it as damn\r
-it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash\r
-like that. Damn like him.\r
-\r
-Aham! Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good\r
-drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his\r
-fat strut.\r
-\r
-Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope.\r
-Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant's wife\r
-drove by in her noddy.\r
-\r
-Bad times those were. Well, well. Over and done with. Great topers too.\r
-Fourbottle men.\r
-\r
-Let me see. Is he buried in saint Michan's? Or no, there was a midnight\r
-burial in Glasnevin. Corpse brought in through a secret door in the\r
-wall. Dignam is there now. Went out in a puff. Well, well. Better turn\r
-down here. Make a detour.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by\r
-the corner of Guinness's visitors' waitingroom. Outside the Dublin\r
-Distillers Company's stores an outside car without fare or jarvey stood,\r
-the reins knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some Tipperary\r
-bosthoon endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway horse.\r
-\r
-Denis Breen with his tomes, weary of having waited an hour in John\r
-Henry Menton's office, led his wife over O'Connell bridge, bound for the\r
-office of Messrs Collis and Ward.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan approached Island street.\r
-\r
-Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those\r
-reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington. When you look back on it all\r
-now in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly's. No\r
-cardsharping then. One of those fellows got his hand nailed to the table\r
-by a dagger. Somewhere here lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from major\r
-Sirr. Stables behind Moira house.\r
-\r
-Damn good gin that was.\r
-\r
-Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that\r
-sham squire, with his violet gloves gave him away. Course they were\r
-on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that\r
-is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad\r
-touchingly. Masterly rendition.\r
-\r
-_At the siege of Ross did my father fall._\r
-\r
-A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping,\r
-leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades.\r
-\r
-Mr Kernan hurried forward, blowing pursily.\r
-\r
-His Excellency! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it! What a\r
-pity!\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers\r
-prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust\r
-darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept\r
-on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies,\r
-leprous and winedark stones.\r
-\r
-Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights\r
-shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of\r
-their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest\r
-them.\r
-\r
-She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman,\r
-rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed\r
-silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her\r
-hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.\r
-\r
-Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished again his gem, turned it\r
-and held it at the point of his Moses' beard. Grandfather ape gloating\r
-on a stolen hoard.\r
-\r
-And you who wrest old images from the burial earth? The brainsick words\r
-of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat\r
-standing from everlasting to everlasting.\r
-\r
-Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through\r
-Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded tired umbrella,\r
-one with a midwife's bag in which eleven cockles rolled.\r
-\r
-The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the\r
-powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always\r
-without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I\r
-between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.\r
-Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me\r
-you who can. Bawd and butcher were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A\r
-look around.\r
-\r
-Yes, quite true. Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time. You say\r
-right, sir. A Monday morning, 'twas so, indeed.\r
-\r
-Stephen went down Bedford row, the handle of the ash clacking against\r
-his shoulderblade. In Clohissey's window a faded 1860 print of Heenan\r
-boxing Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood\r
-round the roped prizering. The heavyweights in tight loincloths proposed\r
-gently each to other his bulbous fists. And they are throbbing: heroes'\r
-hearts.\r
-\r
-He turned and halted by the slanted bookcart.\r
-\r
---Twopence each, the huckster said. Four for sixpence.\r
-\r
-Tattered pages. _The Irish Beekeeper. Life and Miracles of the Curé of\r
-Ars. Pocket Guide to Killarney._\r
-\r
-I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes. _Stephano Dedalo,\r
-alumno optimo, palmam ferenti._\r
-\r
-Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet\r
-of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.\r
-\r
-Binding too good probably. What is this? Eighth and ninth book of Moses.\r
-Secret of all secrets. Seal of King David. Thumbed pages: read and read.\r
-Who has passed here before me? How to soften chapped hands. Recipe for\r
-white wine vinegar. How to win a woman's love. For me this. Say the\r
-following talisman three times with hands folded:\r
-\r
---_Se el yilo nebrakada femininum! Amor me solo! Sanktus! Amen._\r
-\r
-Who wrote this? Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter\r
-Salanka to all true believers divulged. As good as any other abbot's\r
-charms, as mumbling Joachim's. Down, baldynoddle, or we'll wool your\r
-wool.\r
-\r
---What are you doing here, Stephen?\r
-\r
-Dilly's high shoulders and shabby dress.\r
-\r
-Shut the book quick. Don't let see.\r
-\r
---What are you doing? Stephen said.\r
-\r
-A Stuart face of nonesuch Charles, lank locks falling at its sides. It\r
-glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots. I told her\r
-of Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a\r
-pinchbeck bracelet, Dan Kelly's token. _Nebrakada femininum._\r
-\r
---What have you there? Stephen asked.\r
-\r
---I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing\r
-nervously. Is it any good?\r
-\r
-My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far and daring.\r
-Shadow of my mind.\r
-\r
-He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal's French primer.\r
-\r
---What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?\r
-\r
-She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.\r
-\r
-Show no surprise. Quite natural.\r
-\r
---Here, Stephen said. It's all right. Mind Maggy doesn't pawn it on you.\r
-I suppose all my books are gone.\r
-\r
---Some, Dilly said. We had to.\r
-\r
-She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will\r
-drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me,\r
-my heart, my soul. Salt green death.\r
-\r
-We.\r
-\r
-Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite.\r
-\r
-Misery! Misery!\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
---Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?\r
-\r
---Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.\r
-\r
-They clasped hands loudly outside Reddy and Daughter's. Father Cowley\r
-brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand.\r
-\r
---What's the best news? Mr Dedalus said.\r
-\r
---Why then not much, Father Cowley said. I'm barricaded up, Simon, with\r
-two men prowling around the house trying to effect an entrance.\r
-\r
---Jolly, Mr Dedalus said. Who is it?\r
-\r
---O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance.\r
-\r
---With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked.\r
-\r
---The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk. I'm just\r
-waiting for Ben Dollard. He's going to say a word to long John to get\r
-him to take those two men off. All I want is a little time.\r
-\r
-He looked with vague hope up and down the quay, a big apple bulging in\r
-his neck.\r
-\r
---I know, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Poor old bockedy Ben! He's always\r
-doing a good turn for someone. Hold hard!\r
-\r
-He put on his glasses and gazed towards the metal bridge an instant.\r
-\r
---There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.\r
-\r
-Ben Dollard's loose blue cutaway and square hat above large slops\r
-crossed the quay in full gait from the metal bridge. He came towards\r
-them at an amble, scratching actively behind his coattails.\r
-\r
-As he came near Mr Dedalus greeted:\r
-\r
---Hold that fellow with the bad trousers.\r
-\r
---Hold him now, Ben Dollard said.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus eyed with cold wandering scorn various points of Ben\r
-Dollard's figure. Then, turning to Father Cowley with a nod, he muttered\r
-sneeringly:\r
-\r
---That's a pretty garment, isn't it, for a summer's day?\r
-\r
---Why, God eternally curse your soul, Ben Dollard growled furiously, I\r
-threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw.\r
-\r
-He stood beside them beaming, on them first and on his roomy clothes\r
-from points of which Mr Dedalus flicked fluff, saying:\r
-\r
---They were made for a man in his health, Ben, anyhow.\r
-\r
---Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard said. Thanks be to\r
-God he's not paid yet.\r
-\r
---And how is that _basso profondo_, Benjamin? Father Cowley asked.\r
-\r
-Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring,\r
-glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.\r
-\r
-Ben Dollard frowned and, making suddenly a chanter's mouth, gave forth a\r
-deep note.\r
-\r
---Aw! he said.\r
-\r
---That's the style, Mr Dedalus said, nodding to its drone.\r
-\r
---What about that? Ben Dollard said. Not too dusty? What?\r
-\r
-He turned to both.\r
-\r
---That'll do, Father Cowley said, nodding also.\r
-\r
-The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint\r
-Mary's abbey past James and Charles Kennedy's, rectifiers, attended by\r
-Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of\r
-hurdles.\r
-\r
-Ben Dollard with a heavy list towards the shopfronts led them forward,\r
-his joyful fingers in the air.\r
-\r
---Come along with me to the subsheriff's office, he said. I want to\r
-show you the new beauty Rock has for a bailiff. He's a cross between\r
-Lobengula and Lynchehaun. He's well worth seeing, mind you. Come along.\r
-I saw John Henry Menton casually in the Bodega just now and it will cost\r
-me a fall if I don't... Wait awhile... We're on the right lay, Bob,\r
-believe you me.\r
-\r
---For a few days tell him, Father Cowley said anxiously.\r
-\r
-Ben Dollard halted and stared, his loud orifice open, a dangling button\r
-of his coat wagging brightbacked from its thread as he wiped away the\r
-heavy shraums that clogged his eyes to hear aright.\r
-\r
---What few days? he boomed. Hasn't your landlord distrained for rent?\r
-\r
---He has, Father Cowley said.\r
-\r
---Then our friend's writ is not worth the paper it's printed on, Ben\r
-Dollard said. The landlord has the prior claim. I gave him all the\r
-particulars. 29 Windsor avenue. Love is the name?\r
-\r
---That's right, Father Cowley said. The reverend Mr Love. He's a\r
-minister in the country somewhere. But are you sure of that?\r
-\r
---You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that\r
-writ where Jacko put the nuts.\r
-\r
-He led Father Cowley boldly forward, linked to his bulk.\r
-\r
---Filberts I believe they were, Mr Dedalus said, as he dropped his\r
-glasses on his coatfront, following them.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
---The youngster will be all right, Martin Cunningham said, as they\r
-passed out of the Castleyard gate.\r
-\r
-The policeman touched his forehead.\r
-\r
---God bless you, Martin Cunningham said, cheerily.\r
-\r
-He signed to the waiting jarvey who chucked at the reins and set on\r
-towards Lord Edward street.\r
-\r
-Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head, appeared above\r
-the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.\r
-\r
---Yes, Martin Cunningham said, fingering his beard. I wrote to Father\r
-Conmee and laid the whole case before him.\r
-\r
---You could try our friend, Mr Power suggested backward.\r
-\r
---Boyd? Martin Cunningham said shortly. Touch me not.\r
-\r
-John Wyse Nolan, lagging behind, reading the list, came after them\r
-quickly down Cork hill.\r
-\r
-On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed\r
-Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.\r
-\r
-The castle car wheeled empty into upper Exchange street.\r
-\r
---Look here, Martin, John Wyse Nolan said, overtaking them at the _Mail_\r
-office. I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings.\r
-\r
---Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the\r
-five shillings too.\r
-\r
---Without a second word either, Mr Power said.\r
-\r
---Strange but true, Martin Cunningham added.\r
-\r
-John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes.\r
-\r
---I'll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted, elegantly.\r
-\r
-They went down Parliament street.\r
-\r
---There's Jimmy Henry, Mr Power said, just heading for Kavanagh's.\r
-\r
---Righto, Martin Cunningham said. Here goes.\r
-\r
-Outside _la Maison Claire_ Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney's\r
-brother-in-law, humpy, tight, making for the liberties.\r
-\r
-John Wyse Nolan fell back with Mr Power, while Martin Cunningham took\r
-the elbow of a dapper little man in a shower of hail suit, who walked\r
-uncertainly, with hasty steps past Micky Anderson's watches.\r
-\r
---The assistant town clerk's corns are giving him some trouble, John\r
-Wyse Nolan told Mr Power.\r
-\r
-They followed round the corner towards James Kavanagh's winerooms. The\r
-empty castle car fronted them at rest in Essex gate. Martin Cunningham,\r
-speaking always, showed often the list at which Jimmy Henry did not\r
-glance.\r
-\r
---And long John Fanning is here too, John Wyse Nolan said, as large as\r
-life.\r
-\r
-The tall form of long John Fanning filled the doorway where he stood.\r
-\r
---Good day, Mr Subsheriff, Martin Cunningham said, as all halted and\r
-greeted.\r
-\r
-Long John Fanning made no way for them. He removed his large Henry Clay\r
-decisively and his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all\r
-their faces.\r
-\r
---Are the conscript fathers pursuing their peaceful deliberations? he\r
-said with rich acrid utterance to the assistant town clerk.\r
-\r
-Hell open to christians they were having, Jimmy Henry said pettishly,\r
-about their damned Irish language. Where was the marshal, he wanted\r
-to know, to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the\r
-macebearer laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order,\r
-no quorum even, and Hutchinson, the lord mayor, in Llandudno and little\r
-Lorcan Sherlock doing _locum tenens_ for him. Damned Irish language,\r
-language of our forefathers.\r
-\r
-Long John Fanning blew a plume of smoke from his lips.\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham spoke by turns, twirling the peak of his beard, to the\r
-assistant town clerk and the subsheriff, while John Wyse Nolan held his\r
-peace.\r
-\r
---What Dignam was that? long John Fanning asked.\r
-\r
-Jimmy Henry made a grimace and lifted his left foot.\r
-\r
---O, my corns! he said plaintively. Come upstairs for goodness' sake\r
-till I sit down somewhere. Uff! Ooo! Mind!\r
-\r
-Testily he made room for himself beside long John Fanning's flank and\r
-passed in and up the stairs.\r
-\r
---Come on up, Martin Cunningham said to the subsheriff. I don't think\r
-you knew him or perhaps you did, though.\r
-\r
-With John Wyse Nolan Mr Power followed them in.\r
-\r
---Decent little soul he was, Mr Power said to the stalwart back of long\r
-John Fanning ascending towards long John Fanning in the mirror.\r
-\r
---Rather lowsized. Dignam of Menton's office that was, Martin Cunningham\r
-said.\r
-\r
-Long John Fanning could not remember him.\r
-\r
-Clatter of horsehoofs sounded from the air.\r
-\r
---What's that? Martin Cunningham said.\r
-\r
-All turned where they stood. John Wyse Nolan came down again. From the\r
-cool shadow of the doorway he saw the horses pass Parliament street,\r
-harness and glossy pasterns in sunlight shimmering. Gaily they went past\r
-before his cool unfriendly eyes, not quickly. In saddles of the leaders,\r
-leaping leaders, rode outriders.\r
-\r
---What was it? Martin Cunningham asked, as they went on up the\r
-staircase.\r
-\r
---The lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland, John Wyse\r
-Nolan answered from the stairfoot.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind his\r
-Panama to Haines:\r
-\r
---Parnell's brother. There in the corner.\r
-\r
-They chose a small table near the window, opposite a longfaced man whose\r
-beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard.\r
-\r
---Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mulligan said. That's John Howard, his brother, our city marshal.\r
-\r
-John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw\r
-went up again to his forehead whereat it rested. An instant after, under\r
-its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell\r
-once more upon a working corner.\r
-\r
---I'll take a _mélange,_ Haines said to the waitress.\r
-\r
---Two _mélanges,_ Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and\r
-butter and some cakes as well.\r
-\r
-When she had gone he said, laughing:\r
-\r
---We call it D.B.C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed\r
-Dedalus on _Hamlet._\r
-\r
-Haines opened his newbought book.\r
-\r
---I'm sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all\r
-minds that have lost their balance.\r
-\r
-The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street:\r
-\r
---_England expects_...\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan's primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter.\r
-\r
---You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance.\r
-Wandering Aengus I call him.\r
-\r
---I am sure he has an _idée fixe,_ Haines said, pinching his chin\r
-thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it\r
-would be likely to be. Such persons always have.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely.\r
-\r
---They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never\r
-capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white\r
-death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet.\r
-The joy of creation...\r
-\r
---Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him\r
-this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw.\r
-It's rather interesting because professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an\r
-interesting point out of that.\r
-\r
-Buck Mulligan's watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to\r
-unload her tray.\r
-\r
---He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid\r
-the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny,\r
-of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does\r
-he write anything for your movement?\r
-\r
-He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream.\r
-Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its\r
-smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.\r
-\r
---Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write\r
-something in ten years.\r
-\r
---Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon.\r
-Still, I shouldn't wonder if he did after all.\r
-\r
-He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.\r
-\r
---This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don't\r
-want to be imposed on.\r
-\r
-Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of\r
-ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping\r
-street past Benson's ferry, and by the threemasted schooner _Rosevean_\r
-from Bridgwater with bricks.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell's yard.\r
-Behind him Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, with\r
-stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith's\r
-house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him a\r
-blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College park.\r
-\r
-Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as\r
-Mr Lewis Werner's cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along\r
-Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling.\r
-\r
-At the corner of Wilde's house he halted, frowned at Elijah's name\r
-announced on the Metropolitan hall, frowned at the distant pleasance of\r
-duke's lawn. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. With ratsteeth\r
-bared he muttered:\r
-\r
---_Coactus volui._\r
-\r
-He strode on for Clare street, grinding his fierce word.\r
-\r
-As he strode past Mr Bloom's dental windows the sway of his dustcoat\r
-brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards,\r
-having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly\r
-face after the striding form.\r
-\r
---God's curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You're blinder\r
-nor I am, you bitch's bastard!\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-Opposite Ruggy O'Donohoe's Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, pawing the\r
-pound and a half of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's, porksteaks he had been\r
-sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too blooming\r
-dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and Mrs\r
-MacDowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and sipping\r
-sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from Tunney's.\r
-And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the whole\r
-blooming time and sighing.\r
-\r
-After Wicklow lane the window of Madame Doyle, courtdress milliner,\r
-stopped him. He stood looking in at the two puckers stripped to their\r
-pelts and putting up their props. From the sidemirrors two mourning\r
-Masters Dignam gaped silently. Myler Keogh, Dublin's pet lamb, will\r
-meet sergeantmajor Bennett, the Portobello bruiser, for a purse of fifty\r
-sovereigns. Gob, that'd be a good pucking match to see. Myler Keogh,\r
-that's the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bar\r
-entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. Master\r
-Dignam on his left turned as he turned. That's me in mourning. When\r
-is it? May the twentysecond. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He\r
-turned to the right and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap awry,\r
-his collar sticking up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the\r
-image of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, beside the two puckers. One\r
-of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old\r
-fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found out.\r
-\r
-Master Dignam got his collar down and dawdled on. The best pucker going\r
-for strength was Fitzsimons. One puck in the wind from that fellow would\r
-knock you into the middle of next week, man. But the best pucker for\r
-science was Jem Corbet before Fitzsimons knocked the stuffings out of\r
-him, dodging and all.\r
-\r
-In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff's mouth and\r
-a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was\r
-telling him and grinning all the time.\r
-\r
-No Sandymount tram.\r
-\r
-Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to\r
-his other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The\r
-blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming\r
-end to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I'm not going tomorrow\r
-either, stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice\r
-I'm in mourning? Uncle Barney said he'd get it into the paper tonight.\r
-Then they'll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa's\r
-name.\r
-\r
-His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a\r
-fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they\r
-were screwing the screws into the coffin: and the bumps when they were\r
-bringing it downstairs.\r
-\r
-Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling\r
-the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and\r
-heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was standing\r
-on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney's for\r
-to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him\r
-again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be\r
-a good son to ma. I couldn't hear the other things he said but I saw\r
-his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was\r
-Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he's in purgatory now because he went to\r
-confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.\r
-\r
-* * * * *\r
-\r
-William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by\r
-lieutenantcolonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the viceregal\r
-lodge. In the following carriage were the honourable Mrs Paget, Miss de\r
-Courcy and the honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C. in attendance.\r
-\r
-The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by\r
-obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern\r
-quays. The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the\r
-metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river greeted\r
-him vainly from afar Between Queen's and Whitworth bridges lord Dudley's\r
-viceregal carriages passed and were unsaluted by Mr Dudley White, B.\r
-L., M. A., who stood on Arran quay outside Mrs M. E. White's, the\r
-pawnbroker's, at the corner of Arran street west stroking his nose with\r
-his forefinger, undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough\r
-more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot\r
-through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. In the\r
-porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costbag of Goulding,\r
-Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the\r
-doorstep of the office of Reuben J Dodd, solicitor, agent for the\r
-Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed\r
-her plan and retracing her steps by King's windows smiled credulously\r
-on the representative of His Majesty. From its sluice in Wood quay wall\r
-under Tom Devan's office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of\r
-liquid sewage. Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze,\r
-Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head watched and admired. On Ormond\r
-quay Mr Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse for the\r
-subsheriff's office, stood still in midstreet and brought his hat low.\r
-His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus' greeting. From Cahill's\r
-corner the reverend Hugh C. Love, M.A., made obeisance unperceived,\r
-mindful of lords deputies whose hands benignant had held of yore rich\r
-advowsons. On Grattan bridge Lenehan and M'Coy, taking leave of each\r
-other, watched the carriages go by. Passing by Roger Greene's office and\r
-Dollard's big red printinghouse Gerty MacDowell, carrying the Catesby's\r
-cork lino letters for her father who was laid up, knew by the style\r
-it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn't see what Her\r
-Excellency had on because the tram and Spring's big yellow furniture van\r
-had to stop in front of her on account of its being the lord lieutenant.\r
-Beyond Lundy Foot's from the shaded door of Kavanagh's winerooms\r
-John Wyse Nolan smiled with unseen coldness towards the lord\r
-lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland. The Right Honourable\r
-William Humble, earl of Dudley, G. C. V. O., passed Micky Anderson's all\r
-times ticking watches and Henry and James's wax smartsuited freshcheeked\r
-models, the gentleman Henry, _dernier cri_ James. Over against Dame gate\r
-Tom Rochford and Nosey Flynn watched the approach of the cavalcade. Tom\r
-Rochford, seeing the eyes of lady Dudley fixed on him, took his thumbs\r
-quickly out of the pockets of his claret waistcoat and doffed his cap to\r
-her. A charming _soubrette,_ great Marie Kendall, with dauby cheeks and\r
-lifted skirt smiled daubily from her poster upon William Humble, earl\r
-of Dudley, and upon lieutenantcolonel H. G. Heseltine, and also upon\r
-the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. From the window of the D. B. C. Buck\r
-Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely, gazed down on the viceregal equipage\r
-over the shoulders of eager guests, whose mass of forms darkened the\r
-chessboard whereon John Howard Parnell looked intently. In Fownes's\r
-street Dilly Dedalus, straining her sight upward from Chardenal's first\r
-French primer, saw sunshades spanned and wheelspokes spinning in the\r
-glare. John Henry Menton, filling the doorway of Commercial Buildings,\r
-stared from winebig oyster eyes, holding a fat gold hunter watch not\r
-looked at in his fat left hand not feeling it. Where the foreleg of King\r
-Billy's horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her hastening husband\r
-back from under the hoofs of the outriders. She shouted in his ear the\r
-tidings. Understanding, he shifted his tomes to his left breast\r
-and saluted the second carriage. The honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C.,\r
-agreeably surprised, made haste to reply. At Ponsonby's corner a jaded\r
-white flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind\r
-him, E.L.Y'S, while outriders pranced past and carriages. Opposite\r
-Pigott's music warerooms Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c,\r
-gaily apparelled, gravely walked, outpassed by a viceroy and unobserved.\r
-By the provost's wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes\r
-and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of _My girl's a Yorkshire\r
-girl._\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan presented to the leaders' skyblue frontlets and high\r
-action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a\r
-suit of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute\r
-but he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and\r
-the red flower between his lips. As they drove along Nassau street His\r
-Excellency drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of\r
-music which was being discoursed in College park. Unseen brazen highland\r
-laddies blared and drumthumped after the _cortège_:\r
-\r
- _But though she's a factory lass\r
- And wears no fancy clothes.\r
- Baraabum.\r
- Yet I've a sort of a\r
- Yorkshire relish for\r
- My little Yorkshire rose.\r
- Baraabum._\r
-\r
-Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H.\r
-Shrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F. Stevenson,\r
-C. Adderly and W. C. Huggard, started in pursuit. Striding past Finn's\r
-hotel Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a\r
-fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons\r
-in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate. Deep in Leinster\r
-street by Trinity's postern a loyal king's man, Hornblower, touched\r
-his tallyho cap. As the glossy horses pranced by Merrion square Master\r
-Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent\r
-with the topper and raised also his new black cap with fingers greased\r
-by porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up. The viceroy, on his way to\r
-inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer's hospital,\r
-drove with his following towards Lower Mount street. He passed a blind\r
-stripling opposite Broadbent's. In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a\r
-brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across\r
-the viceroy's path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding,\r
-Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to\r
-Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted\r
-themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view\r
-with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain.\r
-On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged\r
-punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small\r
-schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired\r
-by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the\r
-prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy\r
-trousers swallowed by a closing door.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.\r
-\r
-Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.\r
-\r
-Horrid! And gold flushed more.\r
-\r
-A husky fifenote blew.\r
-\r
-Blew. Blue bloom is on the.\r
-\r
-Goldpinnacled hair.\r
-\r
-A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.\r
-\r
-Trilling, trilling: Idolores.\r
-\r
-Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?\r
-\r
-Tink cried to bronze in pity.\r
-\r
-And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.\r
-\r
-Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping\r
-answer.\r
-\r
-O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.\r
-\r
-Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.\r
-\r
-Coin rang. Clock clacked.\r
-\r
-Avowal. _Sonnez._ I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. _La\r
-cloche!_ Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!\r
-\r
-Jingle. Bloo.\r
-\r
-Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.\r
-\r
-A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.\r
-\r
-Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.\r
-\r
-Horn. Hawhorn.\r
-\r
-When first he saw. Alas!\r
-\r
-Full tup. Full throb.\r
-\r
-Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.\r
-\r
-Martha! Come!\r
-\r
-Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappyclap.\r
-\r
-Goodgod henev erheard inall.\r
-\r
-Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.\r
-\r
-A moonlit nightcall: far, far.\r
-\r
-I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.\r
-\r
-Listen!\r
-\r
-The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each, and for other,\r
-plash and silent roar.\r
-\r
-Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.\r
-\r
-You don't?\r
-\r
-Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.\r
-\r
-Black. Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.\r
-\r
-Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.\r
-\r
-But wait!\r
-\r
-Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.\r
-\r
-Naminedamine. Preacher is he:\r
-\r
-All gone. All fallen.\r
-\r
-Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.\r
-\r
-Amen! He gnashed in fury.\r
-\r
-Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.\r
-\r
-Bronzelydia by Minagold.\r
-\r
-By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.\r
-\r
-One rapped, one tapped, with a carra, with a cock.\r
-\r
-Pray for him! Pray, good people!\r
-\r
-His gouty fingers nakkering.\r
-\r
-Big Benaben. Big Benben.\r
-\r
-Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.\r
-\r
-Pwee! Little wind piped wee.\r
-\r
-True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your\r
-tschink with tschunk.\r
-\r
-Fff! Oo!\r
-\r
-Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?\r
-\r
-Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.\r
-\r
-Then not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.\r
-\r
-Done.\r
-\r
-Begin!\r
-\r
-Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's head, over the\r
-crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing\r
-steel.\r
-\r
---Is that her? asked miss Kennedy.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl grey and _eau de Nil._\r
-\r
---Exquisite contrast, miss Kennedy said.\r
-\r
-When all agog miss Douce said eagerly:\r
-\r
---Look at the fellow in the tall silk.\r
-\r
---Who? Where? gold asked more eagerly.\r
-\r
---In the second carriage, miss Douce's wet lips said, laughing in the\r
-sun.\r
-\r
-He's looking. Mind till I see.\r
-\r
-She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face against\r
-the pane in a halo of hurried breath.\r
-\r
-Her wet lips tittered:\r
-\r
---He's killed looking back.\r
-\r
-She laughed:\r
-\r
---O wept! Aren't men frightful idiots?\r
-\r
-With sadness.\r
-\r
-Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair\r
-behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a\r
-hair.\r
-\r
-Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear.\r
-\r
---It's them has the fine times, sadly then she said.\r
-\r
-A man.\r
-\r
-Bloowho went by by Moulang's pipes bearing in his breast the sweets\r
-of sin, by Wine's antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by\r
-Carroll's dusky battered plate, for Raoul.\r
-\r
-The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came. For them\r
-unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china. And\r
-\r
---There's your teas, he said.\r
-\r
-Miss Kennedy with manners transposed the teatray down to an upturned\r
-lithia crate, safe from eyes, low.\r
-\r
---What is it? loud boots unmannerly asked.\r
-\r
---Find out, miss Douce retorted, leaving her spyingpoint.\r
-\r
---Your _beau,_ is it?\r
-\r
-A haughty bronze replied:\r
-\r
---I'll complain to Mrs de Massey on you if I hear any more of your\r
-impertinent insolence.\r
-\r
---Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootssnout sniffed rudely, as he retreated as\r
-she threatened as he had come.\r
-\r
-Bloom.\r
-\r
-On her flower frowning miss Douce said:\r
-\r
---Most aggravating that young brat is. If he doesn't conduct himself\r
-I'll wring his ear for him a yard long.\r
-\r
-Ladylike in exquisite contrast.\r
-\r
---Take no notice, miss Kennedy rejoined.\r
-\r
-She poured in a teacup tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered\r
-under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned,\r
-waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black\r
-satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and two and\r
-seven.\r
-\r
-Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs\r
-ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel.\r
-\r
---Am I awfully sunburnt?\r
-\r
-Miss bronze unbloused her neck.\r
-\r
---No, said miss Kennedy. It gets brown after. Did you try the borax with\r
-the cherry laurel water?\r
-\r
-Miss Douce halfstood to see her skin askance in the barmirror\r
-gildedlettered where hock and claret glasses shimmered and in their\r
-midst a shell.\r
-\r
---And leave it to my hands, she said.\r
-\r
---Try it with the glycerine, miss Kennedy advised.\r
-\r
-Bidding her neck and hands adieu miss Douce\r
-\r
---Those things only bring out a rash, replied, reseated. I asked that\r
-old fogey in Boyd's for something for my skin.\r
-\r
-Miss Kennedy, pouring now a fulldrawn tea, grimaced and prayed:\r
-\r
---O, don't remind me of him for mercy' sake!\r
-\r
---But wait till I tell you, miss Douce entreated.\r
-\r
-Sweet tea miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears\r
-with little fingers.\r
-\r
---No, don't, she cried.\r
-\r
---I won't listen, she cried.\r
-\r
-But Bloom?\r
-\r
-Miss Douce grunted in snuffy fogey's tone:\r
-\r
---For your what? says he.\r
-\r
-Miss Kennedy unplugged her ears to hear, to speak: but said, but prayed\r
-again:\r
-\r
---Don't let me think of him or I'll expire. The hideous old wretch! That\r
-night in the Antient Concert Rooms.\r
-\r
-She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped, sweet tea.\r
-\r
---Here he was, miss Douce said, cocking her bronze head three quarters,\r
-ruffling her nosewings. Hufa! Hufa!\r
-\r
-Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from miss Kennedy's throat. Miss Douce\r
-huffed and snorted down her nostrils that quivered imperthnthn like a\r
-snout in quest.\r
-\r
---O! shrieking, miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget his goggle eye?\r
-\r
-Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting:\r
-\r
---And your other eye!\r
-\r
-Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner's name. Why do I always think\r
-Figather? Gathering figs, I think. And Prosper Lore's huguenot name.\r
-By Bassi's blessed virgins Bloom's dark eyes went by. Bluerobed, white\r
-under, come to me. God they believe she is: or goddess. Those today. I\r
-could not see. That fellow spoke. A student. After with Dedalus' son.\r
-He might be Mulligan. All comely virgins. That brings those rakes of\r
-fellows in: her white.\r
-\r
-By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets.\r
-\r
-Of sin.\r
-\r
-In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy\r
-your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let\r
-freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each other,\r
-high piercing notes.\r
-\r
-Ah, panting, sighing, sighing, ah, fordone, their mirth died down.\r
-\r
-Miss Kennedy lipped her cup again, raised, drank a sip and\r
-gigglegiggled. Miss Douce, bending over the teatray, ruffled again her\r
-nose and rolled droll fattened eyes. Again Kennygiggles, stooping,\r
-her fair pinnacles of hair, stooping, her tortoise napecomb showed,\r
-spluttered out of her mouth her tea, choking in tea and laughter,\r
-coughing with choking, crying:\r
-\r
---O greasy eyes! Imagine being married to a man like that! she cried.\r
-With his bit of beard!\r
-\r
-Douce gave full vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman,\r
-delight, joy, indignation.\r
-\r
---Married to the greasy nose! she yelled.\r
-\r
-Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each\r
-each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze,\r
-shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I\r
-knows. Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and\r
-pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!),\r
-panting, sweating (O!), all breathless.\r
-\r
-Married to Bloom, to greaseabloom.\r
-\r
---O saints above! miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I\r
-wished\r
-\r
-I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet.\r
-\r
---O, miss Douce! miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing!\r
-\r
-And flushed yet more (you horrid!), more goldenly.\r
-\r
-By Cantwell's offices roved Greaseabloom, by Ceppi's virgins, bright of\r
-their oils. Nannetti's father hawked those things about, wheedling at\r
-doors as I. Religion pays. Must see him for that par. Eat first. I want.\r
-Not yet. At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On.\r
-Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. On. For Raoul. Eat. If I net five\r
-guineas with those ads. The violet silk petticoats. Not yet. The sweets\r
-of sin.\r
-\r
-Flushed less, still less, goldenly paled.\r
-\r
-Into their bar strolled Mr Dedalus. Chips, picking chips off one of his\r
-rocky thumbnails. Chips. He strolled.\r
-\r
---O, welcome back, miss Douce.\r
-\r
-He held her hand. Enjoyed her holidays?\r
-\r
---Tiptop.\r
-\r
-He hoped she had nice weather in Rostrevor.\r
-\r
---Gorgeous, she said. Look at the holy show I am. Lying out on the\r
-strand all day.\r
-\r
-Bronze whiteness.\r
-\r
---That was exceedingly naughty of you, Mr Dedalus told her and pressed\r
-her hand indulgently. Tempting poor simple males.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce of satin douced her arm away.\r
-\r
---O go away! she said. You're very simple, I don't think.\r
-\r
-He was.\r
-\r
---Well now I am, he mused. I looked so simple in the cradle they\r
-christened me simple Simon.\r
-\r
---You must have been a doaty, miss Douce made answer. And what did the\r
-doctor order today?\r
-\r
---Well now, he mused, whatever you say yourself. I think I'll trouble\r
-you for some fresh water and a half glass of whisky.\r
-\r
-Jingle.\r
-\r
---With the greatest alacrity, miss Douce agreed.\r
-\r
-With grace of alacrity towards the mirror gilt Cantrell and Cochrane's\r
-she turned herself. With grace she tapped a measure of gold whisky from\r
-her crystal keg. Forth from the skirt of his coat Mr Dedalus brought\r
-pouch and pipe. Alacrity she served. He blew through the flue two husky\r
-fifenotes.\r
-\r
---By Jove, he mused, I often wanted to see the Mourne mountains. Must\r
-be a great tonic in the air down there. But a long threatening comes at\r
-last, they say. Yes. Yes.\r
-\r
-Yes. He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into the\r
-bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute.\r
-\r
-None nought said nothing. Yes.\r
-\r
-Gaily miss Douce polished a tumbler, trilling:\r
-\r
---_O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seas!_\r
-\r
---Was Mr Lidwell in today?\r
-\r
-In came Lenehan. Round him peered Lenehan. Mr Bloom reached Essex\r
-bridge. Yes, Mr Bloom crossed bridge of Yessex. To Martha I must write.\r
-Buy paper. Daly's. Girl there civil. Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue bloom is on\r
-the rye.\r
-\r
---He was in at lunchtime, miss Douce said.\r
-\r
-Lenehan came forward.\r
-\r
---Was Mr Boylan looking for me?\r
-\r
-He asked. She answered:\r
-\r
---Miss Kennedy, was Mr Boylan in while I was upstairs?\r
-\r
-She asked. Miss voice of Kennedy answered, a second teacup poised, her\r
-gaze upon a page:\r
-\r
---No. He was not.\r
-\r
-Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard, not seen, read on. Lenehan round the\r
-sandwichbell wound his round body round.\r
-\r
---Peep! Who's in the corner?\r
-\r
-No glance of Kennedy rewarding him he yet made overtures. To mind her\r
-stops. To read only the black ones: round o and crooked ess.\r
-\r
-Jingle jaunty jingle.\r
-\r
-Girlgold she read and did not glance. Take no notice. She took no notice\r
-while he read by rote a solfa fable for her, plappering flatly:\r
-\r
---Ah fox met ah stork. Said thee fox too thee stork: Will you put your\r
-bill down inn my troath and pull upp ah bone?\r
-\r
-He droned in vain. Miss Douce turned to her tea aside.\r
-\r
-He sighed aside:\r
-\r
---Ah me! O my!\r
-\r
-He greeted Mr Dedalus and got a nod.\r
-\r
---Greetings from the famous son of a famous father.\r
-\r
---Who may he be? Mr Dedalus asked.\r
-\r
-Lenehan opened most genial arms. Who?\r
-\r
---Who may he be? he asked. Can you ask? Stephen, the youthful bard.\r
-\r
-Dry.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus, famous father, laid by his dry filled pipe.\r
-\r
---I see, he said. I didn't recognise him for the moment. I hear he is\r
-keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?\r
-\r
-He had.\r
-\r
---I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day, said Lenehan. In\r
-Mooney's _en ville_ and in Mooney's _sur mer._ He had received the rhino\r
-for the labour of his muse.\r
-\r
-He smiled at bronze's teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes:\r
-\r
---The _élite_ of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit, Hugh\r
-\r
-MacHugh, Dublin's most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy\r
-of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the\r
-O'Madden Burke.\r
-\r
-After an interval Mr Dedalus raised his grog and\r
-\r
---That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see.\r
-\r
-He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye. Set down his\r
-glass.\r
-\r
-He looked towards the saloon door.\r
-\r
---I see you have moved the piano.\r
-\r
---The tuner was in today, miss Douce replied, tuning it for the smoking\r
-concert and I never heard such an exquisite player.\r
-\r
---Is that a fact?\r
-\r
---Didn't he, miss Kennedy? The real classical, you know. And blind too,\r
-poor fellow. Not twenty I'm sure he was.\r
-\r
---Is that a fact? Mr Dedalus said.\r
-\r
-He drank and strayed away.\r
-\r
---So sad to look at his face, miss Douce condoled.\r
-\r
-God's curse on bitch's bastard.\r
-\r
-Tink to her pity cried a diner's bell. To the door of the bar and\r
-diningroom came bald Pat, came bothered Pat, came Pat, waiter of Ormond.\r
-Lager for diner. Lager without alacrity she served.\r
-\r
-With patience Lenehan waited for Boylan with impatience, for\r
-jinglejaunty blazes boy.\r
-\r
-Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique\r
-triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her\r
-hand), soft pedalling, a triple of keys to see the thicknesses of felt\r
-advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action.\r
-\r
-Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in\r
-Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not\r
-happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means\r
-something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is.\r
-Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed\r
-on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke\r
-mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man.\r
-For Raoul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a\r
-jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence.\r
-\r
-Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond quay.\r
-Follow. Risk it. Go quick. At four. Near now. Out.\r
-\r
---Twopence, sir, the shopgirl dared to say.\r
-\r
---Aha... I was forgetting... Excuse...\r
-\r
---And four.\r
-\r
-At four she. Winsomely she on Bloohimwhom smiled. Bloo smi qui go.\r
-Ternoon. Think you're the only pebble on the beach? Does that to all.\r
-\r
-For men.\r
-\r
-In drowsy silence gold bent on her page.\r
-\r
-From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the\r
-tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now\r
-poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly\r
-and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call.\r
-\r
-Pat paid for diner's popcorked bottle: and over tumbler, tray and\r
-popcorked bottle ere he went he whispered, bald and bothered, with miss\r
-\r
-Douce.\r
-\r
---_The bright stars fade_...\r
-\r
-A voiceless song sang from within, singing:\r
-\r
---... _the morn is breaking._\r
-\r
-A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive\r
-hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording,\r
-called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love's\r
-leavetaking, life's, love's morn.\r
-\r
---_The dewdrops pearl_...\r
-\r
-Lenehan's lips over the counter lisped a low whistle of decoy.\r
-\r
---But look this way, he said, rose of Castile.\r
-\r
-Jingle jaunted by the curb and stopped.\r
-\r
-She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile: fretted, forlorn,\r
-dreamily rose.\r
-\r
---Did she fall or was she pushed? he asked her.\r
-\r
-She answered, slighting:\r
-\r
---Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.\r
-\r
-Like lady, ladylike.\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode.\r
-Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew and\r
-hailed him:\r
-\r
---See the conquering hero comes.\r
-\r
-Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered\r
-hero. See me he might. The seat he sat on: warm. Black wary hecat walked\r
-towards Richie Goulding's legal bag, lifted aloft, saluting.\r
-\r
---_And I from thee_...\r
-\r
---I heard you were round, said Blazes Boylan.\r
-\r
-He touched to fair miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She smiled\r
-on him. But sister bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her richer\r
-hair, a bosom and a rose.\r
-\r
-Smart Boylan bespoke potions.\r
-\r
---What's your cry? Glass of bitter? Glass of bitter, please, and a\r
-sloegin for me. Wire in yet?\r
-\r
-Not yet. At four she. Who said four?\r
-\r
-Cowley's red lugs and bulging apple in the door of the sheriff's office.\r
-\r
-Avoid. Goulding a chance. What is he doing in the Ormond? Car waiting.\r
-\r
-Wait.\r
-\r
-Hello. Where off to? Something to eat? I too was just. In here. What,\r
-Ormond? Best value in Dublin. Is that so? Diningroom. Sit tight there.\r
-See, not be seen. I think I'll join you. Come on. Richie led on. Bloom\r
-followed bag. Dinner fit for a prince.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce reached high to take a flagon, stretching her satin arm, her\r
-bust, that all but burst, so high.\r
-\r
---O! O! jerked Lenehan, gasping at each stretch. O!\r
-\r
-But easily she seized her prey and led it low in triumph.\r
-\r
---Why don't you grow? asked Blazes Boylan.\r
-\r
-Shebronze, dealing from her oblique jar thick syrupy liquor for his\r
-lips, looked as it flowed (flower in his coat: who gave him?), and\r
-syrupped with her voice:\r
-\r
---Fine goods in small parcels.\r
-\r
-That is to say she. Neatly she poured slowsyrupy sloe.\r
-\r
---Here's fortune, Blazes said.\r
-\r
-He pitched a broad coin down. Coin rang.\r
-\r
---Hold on, said Lenehan, till I...\r
-\r
---Fortune, he wished, lifting his bubbled ale.\r
-\r
---Sceptre will win in a canter, he said.\r
-\r
---I plunged a bit, said Boylan winking and drinking. Not on my own, you\r
-know. Fancy of a friend of mine.\r
-\r
-Lenehan still drank and grinned at his tilted ale and at miss Douce's\r
-lips that all but hummed, not shut, the oceansong her lips had trilled.\r
-\r
-Idolores. The eastern seas.\r
-\r
-Clock whirred. Miss Kennedy passed their way (flower, wonder who gave),\r
-bearing away teatray. Clock clacked.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce took Boylan's coin, struck boldly the cashregister. It\r
-clanged. Clock clacked. Fair one of Egypt teased and sorted in the till\r
-and hummed and handed coins in change. Look to the west. A clack. For\r
-me.\r
-\r
---What time is that? asked Blazes Boylan. Four?\r
-\r
-O'clock.\r
-\r
-Lenehan, small eyes ahunger on her humming, bust ahumming, tugged Blazes\r
-Boylan's elbowsleeve.\r
-\r
---Let's hear the time, he said.\r
-\r
-The bag of Goulding, Collis, Ward led Bloom by ryebloom flowered tables.\r
-Aimless he chose with agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table near\r
-the door. Be near. At four. Has he forgotten? Perhaps a trick. Not come:\r
-whet appetite. I couldn't do. Wait, wait. Pat, waiter, waited.\r
-\r
-Sparkling bronze azure eyed Blazure's skyblue bow and eyes.\r
-\r
---Go on, pressed Lenehan. There's no-one. He never heard.\r
-\r
---... _to Flora's lips did hie._\r
-\r
-High, a high note pealed in the treble clear.\r
-\r
-Bronzedouce communing with her rose that sank and rose sought\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan's flower and eyes.\r
-\r
---Please, please.\r
-\r
-He pleaded over returning phrases of avowal.\r
-\r
---_I could not leave thee_...\r
-\r
---Afterwits, miss Douce promised coyly.\r
-\r
---No, now, urged Lenehan. _Sonnezlacloche!_ O do! There's no-one.\r
-\r
-She looked. Quick. Miss Kenn out of earshot. Sudden bent. Two kindling\r
-faces watched her bend.\r
-\r
-Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord,\r
-and lost and found it, faltering.\r
-\r
---Go on! Do! _Sonnez!_\r
-\r
-Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted\r
-them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes.\r
-\r
-_--Sonnez!_\r
-\r
-Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter\r
-smackwarm against her smackable a woman's warmhosed thigh.\r
-\r
---_La Cloche!_ cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust\r
-there.\r
-\r
-She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren't men?), but, lightward\r
-gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.\r
-\r
---You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.\r
-\r
-Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his\r
-chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound\r
-eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by\r
-mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering,\r
-a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze.\r
-\r
-Yes, bronze from anearby.\r
-\r
---... _Sweetheart, goodbye!_\r
-\r
---I'm off, said Boylan with impatience.\r
-\r
-He slid his chalice brisk away, grasped his change.\r
-\r
---Wait a shake, begged Lenehan, drinking quickly. I wanted to tell you.\r
-\r
-Tom Rochford...\r
-\r
---Come on to blazes, said Blazes Boylan, going.\r
-\r
-Lenehan gulped to go.\r
-\r
---Got the horn or what? he said. Wait. I'm coming.\r
-\r
-He followed the hasty creaking shoes but stood by nimbly by the\r
-threshold, saluting forms, a bulky with a slender.\r
-\r
---How do you do, Mr Dollard?\r
-\r
---Eh? How do? How do? Ben Dollard's vague bass answered, turning an\r
-instant from Father Cowley's woe. He won't give you any trouble, Bob.\r
-Alf Bergan will speak to the long fellow. We'll put a barleystraw in\r
-that Judas Iscariot's ear this time.\r
-\r
-Sighing Mr Dedalus came through the saloon, a finger soothing an eyelid.\r
-\r
---Hoho, we will, Ben Dollard yodled jollily. Come on, Simon. Give us a\r
-ditty. We heard the piano.\r
-\r
-Bald Pat, bothered waiter, waited for drink orders. Power for Richie.\r
-And Bloom? Let me see. Not make him walk twice. His corns. Four now. How\r
-warm this black is. Course nerves a bit. Refracts (is it?) heat. Let me\r
-see. Cider. Yes, bottle of cider.\r
-\r
---What's that? Mr Dedalus said. I was only vamping, man.\r
-\r
---Come on, come on, Ben Dollard called. Begone dull care. Come, Bob.\r
-\r
-He ambled Dollard, bulky slops, before them (hold that fellow with the:\r
-hold him now) into the saloon. He plumped him Dollard on the stool. His\r
-gouty paws plumped chords. Plumped, stopped abrupt.\r
-\r
-Bald Pat in the doorway met tealess gold returning. Bothered, he wanted\r
-Power and cider. Bronze by the window, watched, bronze from afar.\r
-\r
-Jingle a tinkle jaunted.\r
-\r
-Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom\r
-sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle.\r
-Hear.\r
-\r
---Love and War, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. God be with old times.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce's brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind, smitten\r
-by sunlight. Gone. Pensive (who knows?), smitten (the smiting light),\r
-she lowered the dropblind with a sliding cord. She drew down pensive\r
-(why did he go so quick when I?) about her bronze, over the bar where\r
-bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast inexquisite\r
-nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow, _eau de\r
-Nil._\r
-\r
---Poor old Goodwin was the pianist that night, Father Cowley reminded\r
-them. There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and the\r
-Collard grand.\r
-\r
-There was.\r
-\r
---A symposium all his own, Mr Dedalus said. The devil wouldn't stop him.\r
-He was a crotchety old fellow in the primary stage of drink.\r
-\r
---God, do you remember? Ben bulky Dollard said, turning from the\r
-punished keyboard. And by Japers I had no wedding garment.\r
-\r
-They laughed all three. He had no wed. All trio laughed. No wedding\r
-garment.\r
-\r
---Our friend Bloom turned in handy that night, Mr Dedalus said. Where's\r
-my pipe, by the way?\r
-\r
-He wandered back to the bar to the lost chord pipe. Bald Pat carried two\r
-diners' drinks, Richie and Poldy. And Father Cowley laughed again.\r
-\r
---I saved the situation, Ben, I think.\r
-\r
---You did, averred Ben Dollard. I remember those tight trousers too.\r
-That was a brilliant idea, Bob.\r
-\r
-Father Cowley blushed to his brilliant purply lobes. He saved the situa.\r
-Tight trou. Brilliant ide.\r
-\r
---I knew he was on the rocks, he said. The wife was playing the piano in\r
-the coffee palace on Saturdays for a very trifling consideration and\r
-who was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business? Do you\r
-remember? We had to search all Holles street to find them till the\r
-chap in Keogh's gave us the number. Remember? Ben remembered, his broad\r
-visage wondering.\r
-\r
---By God, she had some luxurious operacloaks and things there.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus wandered back, pipe in hand.\r
-\r
---Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court dresses. He\r
-wouldn't take any money either. What? Any God's quantity of cocked hats\r
-and boleros and trunkhose. What?\r
-\r
---Ay, ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of\r
-all descriptions.\r
-\r
-Jingle jaunted down the quays. Blazes sprawled on bounding tyres.\r
-\r
-Liver and bacon. Steak and kidney pie. Right, sir. Right, Pat.\r
-\r
-Mrs Marion. Met him pike hoses. Smell of burn. Of Paul de Kock. Nice\r
-name he.\r
-\r
---What's this her name was? A buxom lassy. Marion...\r
-\r
---Tweedy.\r
-\r
---Yes. Is she alive?\r
-\r
---And kicking.\r
-\r
---She was a daughter of...\r
-\r
---Daughter of the regiment.\r
-\r
---Yes, begad. I remember the old drummajor.\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed, lit, puffed savoury puff after\r
-\r
---Irish? I don't know, faith. Is she, Simon?\r
-\r
-Puff after stiff, a puff, strong, savoury, crackling.\r
-\r
---Buccinator muscle is... What?... Bit rusty... O, she is... My\r
-Irish Molly, O.\r
-\r
-He puffed a pungent plumy blast.\r
-\r
---From the rock of Gibraltar... all the way.\r
-\r
-They pined in depth of ocean shadow, gold by the beerpull, bronze\r
-by maraschino, thoughtful all two. Mina Kennedy, 4 Lismore terrace,\r
-Drumcondra with Idolores, a queen, Dolores, silent.\r
-\r
-Pat served, uncovered dishes. Leopold cut liverslices. As said before he\r
-ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cods' roes while\r
-Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward ate steak and kidney, steak then kidney,\r
-bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate.\r
-\r
-Bloom with Goulding, married in silence, ate. Dinners fit for princes.\r
-\r
-By Bachelor's walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun in\r
-heat, mare's glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres:\r
-sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the?\r
-Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn.\r
-\r
-Over their voices Dollard bassooned attack, booming over bombarding\r
-chords:\r
-\r
---_When love absorbs my ardent soul_...\r
-\r
-Roll of Bensoulbenjamin rolled to the quivery loveshivery roofpanes.\r
-\r
---War! War! cried Father Cowley. You're the warrior.\r
-\r
---So I am, Ben Warrior laughed. I was thinking of your landlord. Love or\r
-money.\r
-\r
-He stopped. He wagged huge beard, huge face over his blunder huge.\r
-\r
---Sure, you'd burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said\r
-through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours.\r
-\r
-In bearded abundant laughter Dollard shook upon the keyboard. He would.\r
-\r
---Not to mention another membrane, Father Cowley added. Half time, Ben.\r
-_Amoroso ma non troppo._ Let me there.\r
-\r
-Miss Kennedy served two gentlemen with tankards of cool stout. She\r
-passed a remark. It was indeed, first gentleman said, beautiful weather.\r
-They drank cool stout. Did she know where the lord lieutenant was going?\r
-And heard steelhoofs ringhoof ring. No, she couldn't say. But it would\r
-be in the paper. O, she need not trouble. No trouble. She waved about\r
-her outspread _Independent,_ searching, the lord lieutenant, her\r
-pinnacles of hair slowmoving, lord lieuten. Too much trouble,\r
-first gentleman said. O, not in the least. Way he looked that. Lord\r
-lieutenant. Gold by bronze heard iron steel.\r
-\r
- --............ _my ardent soul_\r
- _I care not foror the morrow._\r
-\r
-In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and War someone is.\r
-Ben Dollard's famous. Night he ran round to us to borrow a dress suit\r
-for that concert. Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical porkers.\r
-Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the bed,\r
-screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show. O saints above,\r
-I'm drenched! O, the women in the front row! O, I never laughed so many!\r
-Well, of course that's what gives him the base barreltone. For instance\r
-eunuchs. Wonder who's playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical.\r
-Knows whatever note you play. Bad breath he has, poor chap. Stopped.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce, engaging, Lydia Douce, bowed to suave solicitor, George\r
-Lidwell, gentleman, entering. Good afternoon. She gave her moist (a\r
-lady's) hand to his firm clasp. Afternoon. Yes, she was back. To the old\r
-dingdong again.\r
-\r
---Your friends are inside, Mr Lidwell.\r
-\r
-George Lidwell, suave, solicited, held a lydiahand.\r
-\r
-Bloom ate liv as said before. Clean here at least. That chap in the\r
-Burton, gummy with gristle. No-one here: Goulding and I. Clean tables,\r
-flowers, mitres of napkins. Pat to and fro. Bald Pat. Nothing to do.\r
-Best value in Dub.\r
-\r
-Piano again. Cowley it is. Way he sits in to it, like one together,\r
-mutual understanding. Tiresome shapers scraping fiddles, eye on the\r
-bowend, sawing the cello, remind you of toothache. Her high long snore.\r
-Night we were in the box. Trombone under blowing like a grampus, between\r
-the acts, other brass chap unscrewing, emptying spittle. Conductor's\r
-legs too, bagstrousers, jiggedy jiggedy. Do right to hide them.\r
-\r
-Jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty.\r
-\r
-Only the harp. Lovely. Gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of a\r
-lovely. Gravy's rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that\r
-once or twice. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their\r
-harps. I. He. Old. Young.\r
-\r
---Ah, I couldn't, man, Mr Dedalus said, shy, listless.\r
-\r
-Strongly.\r
-\r
---Go on, blast you! Ben Dollard growled. Get it out in bits.\r
-\r
---_M'appari,_ Simon, Father Cowley said.\r
-\r
-Down stage he strode some paces, grave, tall in affliction, his long\r
-arms outheld. Hoarsely the apple of his throat hoarsed softly. Softly he\r
-sang to a dusty seascape there: _A Last Farewell._ A headland, a ship, a\r
-sail upon the billows. Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the\r
-wind upon the headland, wind around her.\r
-\r
-Cowley sang:\r
-\r
- _--M'appari tutt'amor:\r
- Il mio sguardo l'incontr..._\r
-\r
-She waved, unhearing Cowley, her veil, to one departing, dear one, to\r
-wind, love, speeding sail, return.\r
-\r
---Go on, Simon.\r
-\r
---Ah, sure, my dancing days are done, Ben... Well...\r
-\r
-Mr Dedalus laid his pipe to rest beside the tuningfork and, sitting,\r
-touched the obedient keys.\r
-\r
---No, Simon, Father Cowley turned. Play it in the original. One flat.\r
-\r
-The keys, obedient, rose higher, told, faltered, confessed, confused.\r
-\r
-Up stage strode Father Cowley.\r
-\r
---Here, Simon, I'll accompany you, he said. Get up.\r
-\r
-By Graham Lemon's pineapple rock, by Elvery's elephant jingly jogged.\r
-Steak, kidney, liver, mashed, at meat fit for princes sat princes Bloom\r
-and Goulding. Princes at meat they raised and drank, Power and cider.\r
-\r
-Most beautiful tenor air ever written, Richie said: _Sonnambula._ He\r
-heard Joe Maas sing that one night. Ah, what M'Guckin! Yes. In his way.\r
-Choirboy style. Maas was the boy. Massboy. A lyrical tenor if you like.\r
-Never forget it. Never.\r
-\r
-Tenderly Bloom over liverless bacon saw the tightened features strain.\r
-Backache he. Bright's bright eye. Next item on the programme. Paying the\r
-piper. Pills, pounded bread, worth a guinea a box. Stave it off awhile.\r
-Sings too: _Down among the dead men._ Appropriate. Kidney pie. Sweets to\r
-the. Not making much hand of it. Best value in. Characteristic of him.\r
-Power. Particular about his drink. Flaw in the glass, fresh Vartry\r
-water. Fecking matches from counters to save. Then squander a sovereign\r
-in dribs and drabs. And when he's wanted not a farthing. Screwed\r
-refusing to pay his fare. Curious types.\r
-\r
-Never would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived: never. In the\r
-gods of the old Royal with little Peake. And when the first note.\r
-\r
-Speech paused on Richie's lips.\r
-\r
-Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all.\r
-\r
-Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good\r
-memory.\r
-\r
---Which air is that? asked Leopold Bloom.\r
-\r
---_All is lost now_.\r
-\r
-Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee\r
-murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth\r
-he's proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two\r
-notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my\r
-motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all.\r
-Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he\r
-whistled. Fall, surrender, lost.\r
-\r
-Bloom bent leopold ear, turning a fringe of doyley down under the vase.\r
-Order. Yes, I remember. Lovely air. In sleep she went to him. Innocence\r
-in the moon. Brave. Don't know their danger. Still hold her back. Call\r
-name. Touch water. Jingle jaunty. Too late. She longed to go. That's\r
-why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost.\r
-\r
---A beautiful air, said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.\r
-\r
-Never in all his life had Richie Goulding.\r
-\r
-He knows it well too. Or he feels. Still harping on his daughter. Wise\r
-child that knows her father, Dedalus said. Me?\r
-\r
-Bloom askance over liverless saw. Face of the all is lost. Rollicking\r
-Richie once. Jokes old stale now. Wagging his ear. Napkinring in his\r
-eye. Now begging letters he sends his son with. Crosseyed Walter sir I\r
-did sir. Wouldn't trouble only I was expecting some money. Apologise.\r
-\r
-Piano again. Sounds better than last time I heard. Tuned probably.\r
-Stopped again.\r
-\r
-Dollard and Cowley still urged the lingering singer out with it.\r
-\r
---With it, Simon.\r
-\r
---It, Simon.\r
-\r
---Ladies and gentlemen, I am most deeply obliged by your kind\r
-solicitations.\r
-\r
---It, Simon.\r
-\r
---I have no money but if you will lend me your attention I shall\r
-endeavour to sing to you of a heart bowed down.\r
-\r
-By the sandwichbell in screening shadow Lydia, her bronze and rose, a\r
-lady's grace, gave and withheld: as in cool glaucous _eau de Nil_ Mina\r
-to tankards two her pinnacles of gold.\r
-\r
-The harping chords of prelude closed. A chord, longdrawn, expectant,\r
-drew a voice away.\r
-\r
---_When first I saw that form endearing_...\r
-\r
-Richie turned.\r
-\r
---Si Dedalus' voice, he said.\r
-\r
-Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow\r
-endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to\r
-Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the\r
-bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting\r
-to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.\r
-\r
---_Sorrow from me seemed to depart._\r
-\r
-Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves\r
-in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem\r
-dulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their\r
-each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each\r
-seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw,\r
-lost Richie Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person wouldn't expect\r
-it in the least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved word.\r
-\r
-Love that is singing: love's old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the\r
-elastic band of his packet. Love's old sweet _sonnez la_ gold. Bloom\r
-wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound\r
-it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.\r
-\r
---_Full of hope and all delighted_...\r
-\r
-Tenors get women by the score. Increase their flow. Throw flower at his\r
-feet. When will we meet? My head it simply. Jingle all delighted. He\r
-can't sing for tall hats. Your head it simply swurls. Perfumed for him.\r
-What perfume does your wife? I want to know. Jing. Stop. Knock. Last\r
-look at mirror always before she answers the door. The hall. There? How\r
-do you? I do well. There? What? Or? Phial of cachous, kissing comfits,\r
-in her satchel. Yes? Hands felt for the opulent.\r
-\r
-Alas the voice rose, sighing, changed: loud, full, shining, proud.\r
-\r
---_But alas, 'twas idle dreaming_...\r
-\r
-Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly\r
-man! Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out\r
-his wife: now sings. But hard to tell. Only the two themselves. If he\r
-doesn't break down. Keep a trot for the avenue. His hands and feet sing\r
-too. Drink. Nerves overstrung. Must be abstemious to sing. Jenny Lind\r
-soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half pint of cream. For creamy dreamy.\r
-\r
-Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling, full it throbbed. That's the chat.\r
-Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.\r
-\r
-Words? Music? No: it's what's behind.\r
-\r
-Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded.\r
-\r
-Bloom. Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music\r
-out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her\r
-tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy\r
-the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood,\r
-gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love.\r
-\r
---... _ray of hope is_...\r
-\r
-Beaming. Lydia for Lidwell squeak scarcely hear so ladylike the muse\r
-unsqueaked a ray of hopk.\r
-\r
-_Martha_ it is. Coincidence. Just going to write. Lionel's song.\r
-Lovely name you have. Can't write. Accept my little pres. Play on her\r
-heartstrings pursestrings too. She's a. I called you naughty boy. Still\r
-the name: Martha. How strange! Today.\r
-\r
-The voice of Lionel returned, weaker but unwearied. It sang again to\r
-Richie Poldy Lydia Lidwell also sang to Pat open mouth ear waiting to\r
-wait. How first he saw that form endearing, how sorrow seemed to part,\r
-how look, form, word charmed him Gould Lidwell, won Pat Bloom's heart.\r
-\r
-Wish I could see his face, though. Explain better. Why the barber in\r
-Drago's always looked my face when I spoke his face in the glass. Still\r
-hear it better here than in the bar though farther.\r
-\r
---_Each graceful look_...\r
-\r
-First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon's in Terenure. Yellow,\r
-black lace she wore. Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. After her.\r
-Fate.\r
-\r
-Round and round slow. Quick round. We two. All looked. Halt. Down she\r
-sat. All ousted looked. Lips laughing. Yellow knees.\r
-\r
---_Charmed my eye_...\r
-\r
-Singing. _Waiting_ she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume\r
-of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat\r
-warbling. First I saw. She thanked me. Why did she me? Fate. Spanishy\r
-eyes. Under a peartree alone patio this hour in old Madrid one side in\r
-shadow Dolores shedolores. At me. Luring. Ah, alluring.\r
-\r
---_Martha! Ah, Martha!_\r
-\r
-Quitting all languor Lionel cried in grief, in cry of passion dominant\r
-to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony. In\r
-cry of lionel loneliness that she should know, must martha feel. For\r
-only her he waited. Where? Here there try there here all try where.\r
-Somewhere.\r
-\r
- --_Co-ome, thou lost one!\r
- Co-ome, thou dear one!_\r
-\r
-Alone. One love. One hope. One comfort me. Martha, chestnote, return!\r
-\r
-_--Come!_\r
-\r
-It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb\r
-it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too\r
-long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent,\r
-aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the\r
-etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all\r
-soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...\r
-\r
---_To me!_\r
-\r
-Siopold!\r
-\r
-Consumed.\r
-\r
-Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to her,\r
-you too, me, us.\r
-\r
---Bravo! Clapclap. Good man, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore! Clapclipclap\r
-clap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap. Encore, enclap, said,\r
-cried, clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George Lidwell, Pat, Mina\r
-Kennedy, two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley, first gent with tank\r
-and bronze miss Douce and gold MJiss Mina.\r
-\r
-Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, said before.\r
-Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson,\r
-reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted, as said before just now.\r
-Atrot, in heat, heatseated. _Cloche. Sonnez la. Cloche. Sonnez la._\r
-Slower the mare went up the hill by the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too\r
-slow for Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the mare.\r
-\r
-An afterclang of Cowley's chords closed, died on the air made richer.\r
-\r
-And Richie Goulding drank his Power and Leopold Bloom his cider drank,\r
-Lidwell his Guinness, second gentleman said they would partake of two\r
-more tankards if she did not mind. Miss Kennedy smirked, disserving,\r
-coral lips, at first, at second. She did not mind.\r
-\r
---Seven days in jail, Ben Dollard said, on bread and water. Then you'd\r
-sing, Simon, like a garden thrush.\r
-\r
-Lionel Simon, singer, laughed. Father Bob Cowley played. Mina Kennedy\r
-served. Second gentleman paid. Tom Kernan strutted in. Lydia, admired,\r
-admired. But Bloom sang dumb.\r
-\r
-Admiring.\r
-\r
-Richie, admiring, descanted on that man's glorious voice. He remembered\r
-one night long ago. Never forget that night. Si sang _'Twas rank and\r
-fame_: in Ned Lambert's 'twas. Good God he never heard in all his life a\r
-note like that he never did _then false one we had better part_ so clear\r
-so God he never heard _since love lives not_ a clinking voice lives not\r
-ask Lambert he can tell you too.\r
-\r
-Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale, told Mr Bloom, face of the\r
-night, Si in Ned Lambert's, Dedalus house, sang _'Twas rank and fame._\r
-\r
-He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr Bloom, of\r
-the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing 'TWAS RANK AND FAME in\r
-his, Ned Lambert's, house.\r
-\r
-Brothers-in-law: relations. We never speak as we pass by. Rift in the\r
-lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more.\r
-The night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful,\r
-more than all others.\r
-\r
-That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It's in the silence after you\r
-feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.\r
-\r
-Bloom ungyved his crisscrossed hands and with slack fingers plucked the\r
-slender catgut thong. He drew and plucked. It buzz, it twanged. While\r
-Goulding talked of Barraclough's voice production, while Tom Kernan,\r
-harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement talked to listening\r
-Father Cowley, who played a voluntary, who nodded as he played. While\r
-big Ben Dollard talked with Simon Dedalus, lighting, who nodded as he\r
-smoked, who smoked.\r
-\r
-Thou lost one. All songs on that theme. Yet more Bloom stretched his\r
-string. Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on.\r
-Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat.\r
-Human life. Dignam. Ugh, that rat's tail wriggling! Five bob I gave.\r
-_Corpus paradisum._ Corncrake croaker: belly like a poisoned pup. Gone.\r
-They sing. Forgotten. I too; And one day she with. Leave her: get\r
-tired. Suffer then. Snivel. Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing. Her\r
-wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:'d.\r
-\r
-Yet too much happy bores. He stretched more, more. Are you not happy in\r
-your? Twang. It snapped.\r
-\r
-Jingle into Dorset street.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce withdrew her satiny arm, reproachful, pleased.\r
-\r
---Don't make half so free, said she, till we are better acquainted.\r
-\r
-George Lidwell told her really and truly: but she did not believe.\r
-\r
-First gentleman told Mina that was so. She asked him was that so. And\r
-second tankard told her so. That that was so.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce, miss Lydia, did not believe: miss Kennedy, Mina, did not\r
-believe: George Lidwell, no: miss Dou did not: the first, the first:\r
-gent with the tank: believe, no, no: did not, miss Kenn: Lidlydiawell:\r
-the tank.\r
-\r
-Better write it here. Quills in the postoffice chewed and twisted.\r
-\r
-Bald Pat at a sign drew nigh. A pen and ink. He went. A pad. He went. A\r
-pad to blot. He heard, deaf Pat.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said, teasing the curling catgut line. It certainly is.\r
-Few lines will do. My present. All that Italian florid music is. Who\r
-is this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper,\r
-envelope: unconcerned. It's so characteristic.\r
-\r
---Grandest number in the whole opera, Goulding said.\r
-\r
---It is, Bloom said.\r
-\r
-Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two\r
-divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two\r
-plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always\r
-find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't\r
-see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you\r
-think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like:\r
-Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite\r
-flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.\r
-\r
-Instance he's playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like, till you\r
-hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right: then hear\r
-chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks, over barrels,\r
-through wirefences, obstacle race. Time makes the tune. Question of mood\r
-you're in. Still always nice to hear. Except scales up and down, girls\r
-learning. Two together nextdoor neighbours. Ought to invent dummy pianos\r
-for that. _Blumenlied_ I bought for her. The name. Playing it slow,\r
-a girl, night I came home, the girl. Door of the stables near Cecilia\r
-street. Milly no taste. Queer because we both, I mean.\r
-\r
-Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Pat set with ink pen quite\r
-flat pad. Pat took plate dish knife fork. Pat went.\r
-\r
-It was the only language Mr Dedalus said to Ben. He heard them as a\r
-boy in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles.\r
-Queenstown harbour full of Italian ships. Walking, you know, Ben, in the\r
-moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices. God, such\r
-music, Ben. Heard as a boy. Cross Ringabella haven mooncarole.\r
-\r
-Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed a\r
-moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying.\r
-\r
-Down the edge of his _Freeman_ baton ranged Bloom's, your other eye,\r
-scanning for where did I see that. Callan, Coleman, Dignam Patrick.\r
-Heigho! Heigho! Fawcett. Aha! Just I was looking...\r
-\r
-Hope he's not looking, cute as a rat. He held unfurled his _Freeman._\r
-Can't see now. Remember write Greek ees. Bloom dipped, Bloo mur: dear\r
-sir. Dear Henry wrote: dear Mady. Got your lett and flow. Hell did I\r
-put? Some pock or oth. It is utterl imposs. Underline _imposs._ To write\r
-today.\r
-\r
-Bore this. Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting\r
-fingers on flat pad Pat brought.\r
-\r
-On. Know what I mean. No, change that ee. Accep my poor litt pres\r
-enclos. Ask her no answ. Hold on. Five Dig. Two about here. Penny the\r
-gulls. Elijah is com. Seven Davy Byrne's. Is eight about. Say half a\r
-crown. My poor little pres: p. o. two and six. Write me a long. Do you\r
-despise? Jingle, have you the? So excited. Why do you call me naught?\r
-You naughty too? O, Mairy lost the string of her. Bye for today. Yes,\r
-yes, will tell you. Want to. To keep it up. Call me that other. Other\r
-world she wrote. My patience are exhaust. To keep it up. You must\r
-believe. Believe. The tank. It. Is. True.\r
-\r
-Folly am I writing? Husbands don't. That's marriage does, their wives.\r
-Because I'm away from. Suppose. But how? She must. Keep young. If she\r
-found out. Card in my high grade ha. No, not tell all. Useless pain. If\r
-they don't see. Woman. Sauce for the gander.\r
-\r
-A hackney car, number three hundred and twentyfour, driver Barton James\r
-of number one Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, on which sat a fare, a young\r
-gentleman, stylishly dressed in an indigoblue serge suit made by George\r
-Robert Mesias, tailor and cutter, of number five Eden quay, and wearing\r
-a straw hat very dressy, bought of John Plasto of number one Great\r
-Brunswick street, hatter. Eh? This is the jingle that joggled and\r
-jingled. By Dlugacz' porkshop bright tubes of Agendath trotted a\r
-gallantbuttocked mare.\r
-\r
---Answering an ad? keen Richie's eyes asked Bloom.\r
-\r
---Yes, Mr Bloom said. Town traveller. Nothing doing, I expect.\r
-\r
-Bloom mur: best references. But Henry wrote: it will excite me. You\r
-know how. In haste. Henry. Greek ee. Better add postscript. What is he\r
-playing now? Improvising. Intermezzo. P. S. The rum tum tum. How will\r
-you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack by. Tell me I want\r
-to. Know. O. Course if I didn't I wouldn't ask. La la la ree. Trails off\r
-there sad in minor. Why minor sad? Sign H. They like sad tail at end. P.\r
-P. S. La la la ree. I feel so sad today. La ree. So lonely. Dee.\r
-\r
-He blotted quick on pad of Pat. Envel. Address. Just copy out of paper.\r
-Murmured: Messrs Callan, Coleman and Co, limited. Henry wrote:\r
-\r
-Miss Martha Clifford c/o P. O. Dolphin's Barn Lane Dublin\r
-\r
-Blot over the other so he can't read. There. Right. Idea prize titbit.\r
-Something detective read off blottingpad. Payment at the rate of guinea\r
-per col. Matcham often thinks the laughing witch. Poor Mrs Purefoy. U.\r
-P: up.\r
-\r
-Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms.\r
-Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be.\r
-Wisdom while you wait.\r
-\r
-In Gerard's rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is\r
-all. One body. Do. But do.\r
-\r
-Done anyhow. Postal order, stamp. Postoffice lower down. Walk now.\r
-Enough. Barney Kiernan's I promised to meet them. Dislike that job.\r
-\r
-House of mourning. Walk. Pat! Doesn't hear. Deaf beetle he is.\r
-\r
-Car near there now. Talk. Talk. Pat! Doesn't. Settling those napkins.\r
-Lot of ground he must cover in the day. Paint face behind on him then\r
-he'd be two. Wish they'd sing more. Keep my mind off.\r
-\r
-Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his\r
-hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He\r
-waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits\r
-while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait.\r
-Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.\r
-\r
-Douce now. Douce Lydia. Bronze and rose.\r
-\r
-She had a gorgeous, simply gorgeous, time. And look at the lovely shell\r
-she brought.\r
-\r
-To the end of the bar to him she bore lightly the spiked and winding\r
-seahorn that he, George Lidwell, solicitor, might hear.\r
-\r
---Listen! she bade him.\r
-\r
-Under Tom Kernan's ginhot words the accompanist wove music slow.\r
-Authentic fact. How Walter Bapty lost his voice. Well, sir, the husband\r
-took him by the throat. _Scoundrel,_ said he, _You'll sing no more\r
-lovesongs._ He did, faith, sir Tom. Bob Cowley wove. Tenors get wom.\r
-Cowley lay back.\r
-\r
-Ah, now he heard, she holding it to his ear. Hear! He heard.\r
-\r
-Wonderful. She held it to her own. And through the sifted light pale\r
-gold in contrast glided. To hear.\r
-\r
-Tap.\r
-\r
-Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more\r
-faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for\r
-other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.\r
-\r
-Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened.\r
-\r
-Her ear too is a shell, the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside.\r
-Lovely seaside girls. Skin tanned raw. Should have put on coldcream\r
-first make it brown. Buttered toast. O and that lotion mustn't forget.\r
-Fever near her mouth. Your head it simply. Hair braided over: shell with\r
-seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks the\r
-mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet. Yashmak. Find the way in. A cave.\r
-No admittance except on business.\r
-\r
-The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse in\r
-the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands.\r
-\r
-Wonderful really. So distinct. Again. George Lidwell held its murmur,\r
-hearing: then laid it by, gently.\r
-\r
---What are the wild waves saying? he asked her, smiled.\r
-\r
-Charming, seasmiling and unanswering Lydia on Lidwell smiled.\r
-\r
-Tap.\r
-\r
-By Larry O'Rourke's, by Larry, bold Larry O', Boylan swayed and Boylan\r
-turned.\r
-\r
-From the forsaken shell miss Mina glided to her tankards waiting. No,\r
-she was not so lonely archly miss Douce's head let Mr Lidwell know.\r
-Walks in the moonlight by the sea. No, not alone. With whom? She nobly\r
-answered: with a gentleman friend.\r
-\r
-Bob Cowley's twinkling fingers in the treble played again. The landlord\r
-has the prior. A little time. Long John. Big Ben. Lightly he played a\r
-light bright tinkling measure for tripping ladies, arch and smiling,\r
-and for their gallants, gentlemen friends. One: one, one, one, one, one:\r
-two, one, three, four.\r
-\r
-Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattlemarket,\r
-cocks, hens don't crow, snakes hissss. There's music everywhere.\r
-Ruttledge's door: ee creaking. No, that's noise. Minuet of _Don\r
-Giovanni_ he's playing now. Court dresses of all descriptions in castle\r
-chambers dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating\r
-dockleaves. Nice that is. Look: look, look, look, look, look: you look\r
-at us.\r
-\r
-That's joyful I can feel. Never have written it. Why? My joy is other\r
-joy. But both are joys. Yes, joy it must be. Mere fact of music shows\r
-you are. Often thought she was in the dumps till she began to lilt. Then\r
-know.\r
-\r
-M'Coy valise. My wife and your wife. Squealing cat. Like tearing silk.\r
-Tongue when she talks like the clapper of a bellows. They can't manage\r
-men's intervals. Gap in their voices too. Fill me. I'm warm, dark, open.\r
-Molly in _quis est homo_: Mercadante. My ear against the wall to hear.\r
-Want a woman who can deliver the goods.\r
-\r
-Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue\r
-clocks came light to earth.\r
-\r
-O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that.\r
-It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is.\r
-Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the\r
-resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to\r
-the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian,\r
-gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle.\r
-Hissss. Now. Maybe now. Before.\r
-\r
-One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock\r
-with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock.\r
-\r
-Tap.\r
-\r
---_Qui sdegno,_ Ben, said Father Cowley.\r
-\r
---No, Ben, Tom Kernan interfered. _The Croppy Boy._ Our native Doric.\r
-\r
---Ay do, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. Good men and true.\r
-\r
---Do, do, they begged in one.\r
-\r
-I'll go. Here, Pat, return. Come. He came, he came, he did not stay. To\r
-me. How much?\r
-\r
---What key? Six sharps?\r
-\r
---F sharp major, Ben Dollard said.\r
-\r
-Bob Cowley's outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords.\r
-\r
-Must go prince Bloom told Richie prince. No, Richie said. Yes, must. Got\r
-money somewhere. He's on for a razzle backache spree. Much? He seehears\r
-lipspeech. One and nine. Penny for yourself. Here. Give him twopence\r
-tip. Deaf, bothered. But perhaps he has wife and family waiting, waiting\r
-Patty come home. Hee hee hee hee. Deaf wait while they wait.\r
-\r
-But wait. But hear. Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the\r
-dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic.\r
-\r
-The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth's fatigue made grave approach\r
-and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men\r
-and true. The priest he sought. With him would he speak a word.\r
-\r
-Tap.\r
-\r
-Ben Dollard's voice. Base barreltone. Doing his level best to say it.\r
-Croak of vast manless moonless womoonless marsh. Other comedown. Big\r
-ships' chandler's business he did once. Remember: rosiny ropes, ships'\r
-lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh\r
-home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him.\r
-\r
-The priest's at home. A false priest's servant bade him welcome. Step\r
-in. The holy father. With bows a traitor servant. Curlycues of chords.\r
-\r
-Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their days\r
-in. Hushaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die.\r
-\r
-The voice of warning, solemn warning, told them the youth had entered\r
-a lonely hall, told them how solemn fell his footsteps there, told them\r
-the gloomy chamber, the vested priest sitting to shrive.\r
-\r
-Decent soul. Bit addled now. Thinks he'll win in _Answers,_ poets'\r
-picture puzzle. We hand you crisp five pound note. Bird sitting hatching\r
-in a nest. Lay of the last minstrel he thought it was. See blank tee\r
-what domestic animal? Tee dash ar most courageous mariner. Good voice he\r
-has still. No eunuch yet with all his belongings.\r
-\r
-Listen. Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door deaf\r
-Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened. The chords harped slower.\r
-\r
-The voice of penance and of grief came slow, embellished, tremulous.\r
-Ben's contrite beard confessed. _in nomine Domini,_ in God's name he\r
-knelt. He beat his hand upon his breast, confessing: _mea culpa._\r
-\r
-Latin again. That holds them like birdlime. Priest with the communion\r
-corpus for those women. Chap in the mortuary, coffin or coffey,\r
-_corpusnomine._ Wonder where that rat is by now. Scrape.\r
-\r
-Tap.\r
-\r
-They listened. Tankards and miss Kennedy. George Lidwell, eyelid well\r
-expressive, fullbusted satin. Kernan. Si.\r
-\r
-The sighing voice of sorrow sang. His sins. Since Easter he had cursed\r
-three times. You bitch's bast. And once at masstime he had gone to play.\r
-Once by the churchyard he had passed and for his mother's rest he had\r
-not prayed. A boy. A croppy boy.\r
-\r
-Bronze, listening, by the beerpull gazed far away. Soulfully. Doesn't\r
-half know I'm. Molly great dab at seeing anyone looking.\r
-\r
-Bronze gazed far sideways. Mirror there. Is that best side of her face?\r
-They always know. Knock at the door. Last tip to titivate.\r
-\r
-Cockcarracarra.\r
-\r
-What do they think when they hear music? Way to catch rattlesnakes.\r
-Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked\r
-that best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too.\r
-Custom his country perhaps. That's music too. Not as bad as it sounds.\r
-Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless,\r
-gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile\r
-music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin's name.\r
-\r
-She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore lowcut, belongings on show.\r
-Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question.\r
-Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa's. Hypnotised,\r
-listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle staring down\r
-into her with his operaglass for all he was worth. Beauty of music you\r
-must hear twice. Nature woman half a look. God made the country man the\r
-tune. Met him pike hoses. Philosophy. O rocks!\r
-\r
-All gone. All fallen. At the siege of Ross his father, at Gorey all his\r
-brothers fell. To Wexford, we are the boys of Wexford, he would. Last of\r
-his name and race.\r
-\r
-I too. Last of my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps. No\r
-son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?\r
-\r
-He bore no hate.\r
-\r
-Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old. Big Ben his voice\r
-unfolded. Great voice Richie Goulding said, a flush struggling in his\r
-pale, to Bloom soon old. But when was young?\r
-\r
-Ireland comes now. My country above the king. She listens. Who fears to\r
-speak of nineteen four? Time to be shoving. Looked enough.\r
-\r
---_Bless me, father,_ Dollard the croppy cried. _Bless me and let me\r
-go._\r
-\r
-Tap.\r
-\r
-Bloom looked, unblessed to go. Got up to kill: on eighteen bob a week.\r
-Fellows shell out the dibs. Want to keep your weathereye open. Those\r
-girls, those lovely. By the sad sea waves. Chorusgirl's romance. Letters\r
-read out for breach of promise. From Chickabiddy's owny Mumpsypum.\r
-Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you.\r
-\r
-Low sank the music, air and words. Then hastened. The false priest\r
-rustling soldier from his cassock. A yeoman captain. They know it all by\r
-heart. The thrill they itch for. Yeoman cap.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
-Thrilled she listened, bending in sympathy to hear.\r
-\r
-Blank face. Virgin should say: or fingered only. Write something on it:\r
-page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young.\r
-Even admire themselves. See. Play on her. Lip blow. Body of white woman,\r
-a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes, all women. Goddess I\r
-didn't see. They want it. Not too much polite. That's why he gets them.\r
-Gold in your pocket, brass in your face. Say something. Make her hear.\r
-With look to look. Songs without words. Molly, that hurdygurdy boy.\r
-She knew he meant the monkey was sick. Or because so like the Spanish.\r
-Understand animals too that way. Solomon did. Gift of nature.\r
-\r
-Ventriloquise. My lips closed. Think in my stom. What?\r
-\r
-Will? You? I. Want. You. To.\r
-\r
-With hoarse rude fury the yeoman cursed, swelling in apoplectic bitch's\r
-bastard. A good thought, boy, to come. One hour's your time to live,\r
-your last.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
-Thrill now. Pity they feel. To wipe away a tear for martyrs that want\r
-to, dying to, die. For all things dying, for all things born. Poor Mrs\r
-Purefoy. Hope she's over. Because their wombs.\r
-\r
-A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly,\r
-hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder\r
-river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave (her heaving embon) red\r
-rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is\r
-life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.\r
-\r
-But look. The bright stars fade. O rose! Castile. The morn. Ha. Lidwell.\r
-For him then not for. Infatuated. I like that? See her from here though.\r
-Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of empties.\r
-\r
-On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave\r
-it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over\r
-the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and\r
-finger passed in pity: passed, reposed and, gently touching, then slid\r
-so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding\r
-through their sliding ring.\r
-\r
-With a cock with a carra.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
-I hold this house. Amen. He gnashed in fury. Traitors swing.\r
-\r
-The chords consented. Very sad thing. But had to be. Get out before the\r
-end. Thanks, that was heavenly. Where's my hat. Pass by her. Can leave\r
-that Freeman. Letter I have. Suppose she were the? No. Walk, walk,\r
-walk. Like Cashel Boylo Connoro Coylo Tisdall Maurice Tisntdall Farrell.\r
-Waaaaaaalk.\r
-\r
-Well, I must be. Are you off? Yrfmstbyes. Blmstup. O'er ryehigh blue.\r
-Ow. Bloom stood up. Soap feeling rather sticky behind. Must have\r
-sweated: music. That lotion, remember. Well, so long. High grade. Card\r
-inside. Yes.\r
-\r
-By deaf Pat in the doorway straining ear Bloom passed.\r
-\r
-At Geneva barrack that young man died. At Passage was his body laid.\r
-Dolor! O, he dolores! The voice of the mournful chanter called to\r
-dolorous prayer.\r
-\r
-By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand, by slops, by empties,\r
-by popped corks, greeting in going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and\r
-faint gold in deepseashadow, went Bloom, soft Bloom, I feel so lonely\r
-Bloom.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
-Pray for him, prayed the bass of Dollard. You who hear in peace. Breathe\r
-a prayer, drop a tear, good men, good people. He was the croppy boy.\r
-\r
-Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond hallway\r
-heard the growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all\r
-treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill to\r
-wash it down. Glad I avoided.\r
-\r
---Come on, Ben, Simon Dedalus cried. By God, you're as good as ever you\r
-were.\r
-\r
---Better, said Tomgin Kernan. Most trenchant rendition of that ballad,\r
-upon my soul and honour It is.\r
-\r
---Lablache, said Father Cowley.\r
-\r
-Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed\r
-and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering\r
-castagnettes in the air.\r
-\r
-Big Benaben Dollard. Big Benben. Big Benben.\r
-\r
-Rrr.\r
-\r
-And deepmoved all, Simon trumping compassion from foghorn nose, all\r
-laughing they brought him forth, Ben Dollard, in right good cheer.\r
-\r
---You're looking rubicund, George Lidwell said.\r
-\r
-Miss Douce composed her rose to wait.\r
-\r
---Ben machree, said Mr Dedalus, clapping Ben's fat back shoulderblade.\r
-Fit as a fiddle only he has a lot of adipose tissue concealed about his\r
-person.\r
-\r
-Rrrrrrrsss.\r
-\r
---Fat of death, Simon, Ben Dollard growled.\r
-\r
-Richie rift in the lute alone sat: Goulding, Collis, Ward. Uncertainly\r
-he waited. Unpaid Pat too.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
-Miss Mina Kennedy brought near her lips to ear of tankard one.\r
-\r
---Mr Dollard, they murmured low.\r
-\r
---Dollard, murmured tankard.\r
-\r
-Tank one believed: miss Kenn when she: that doll he was: she doll: the\r
-tank.\r
-\r
-He murmured that he knew the name. The name was familiar to him, that\r
-is to say. That was to say he had heard the name of. Dollard, was it?\r
-Dollard, yes.\r
-\r
-Yes, her lips said more loudly, Mr Dollard. He sang that song lovely,\r
-murmured Mina. Mr Dollard. And _The last rose of summer_ was a lovely\r
-song. Mina loved that song. Tankard loved the song that Mina.\r
-\r
-'Tis the last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round\r
-inside.\r
-\r
-Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait. Postoffice near Reuben J's\r
-one and eightpence too. Get shut of it. Dodge round by Greek street.\r
-Wish I hadn't promised to meet. Freer in air. Music. Gets on your\r
-nerves. Beerpull. Her hand that rocks the cradle rules the. Ben Howth.\r
-That rules the world.\r
-\r
-Far. Far. Far. Far.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
-Up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for Mady, with\r
-sweets of sin with frillies for Raoul with met him pike hoses went Poldy\r
-on.\r
-\r
-Tap blind walked tapping by the tap the curbstone tapping, tap by tap.\r
-\r
-Cowley, he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness. Better give way\r
-only half way the way of a man with a maid. Instance enthusiasts. All\r
-ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Dotty.\r
-You daren't budge. Thinking strictly prohibited. Always talking shop.\r
-Fiddlefaddle about notes.\r
-\r
-All a kind of attempt to talk. Unpleasant when it stops because you\r
-never know exac. Organ in Gardiner street. Old Glynn fifty quid a year.\r
-Queer up there in the cockloft, alone, with stops and locks and keys.\r
-Seated all day at the organ. Maunder on for hours, talking to himself or\r
-the other fellow blowing the bellows. Growl angry, then shriek cursing\r
-(want to have wadding or something in his no don't she cried), then all\r
-of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind.\r
-\r
-Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom's little wee.\r
-\r
---Was he? Mr Dedalus said, returning with fetched pipe. I was with him\r
-this morning at poor little Paddy Dignam's...\r
-\r
---Ay, the Lord have mercy on him.\r
-\r
---By the bye there's a tuningfork in there on the...\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
---The wife has a fine voice. Or had. What? Lidwell asked.\r
-\r
---O, that must be the tuner, Lydia said to Simonlionel first I saw,\r
-forgot it when he was here.\r
-\r
-Blind he was she told George Lidwell second I saw. And played so\r
-exquisitely, treat to hear. Exquisite contrast: bronzelid, minagold.\r
-\r
---Shout! Ben Dollard shouted, pouring. Sing out!\r
-\r
---'lldo! cried Father Cowley.\r
-\r
-Rrrrrr.\r
-\r
-I feel I want...\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap\r
-\r
---Very, Mr Dedalus said, staring hard at a headless sardine.\r
-\r
-Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last\r
-sardine of summer. Bloom alone.\r
-\r
---Very, he stared. The lower register, for choice.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.\r
-\r
-Bloom went by Barry's. Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I had.\r
-Twentyfour solicitors in that one house. Counted them. Litigation. Love\r
-one another. Piles of parchment. Messrs Pick and Pocket have power of\r
-attorney. Goulding, Collis, Ward.\r
-\r
-But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation: Mickey\r
-Rooney's band. Wonder how it first struck him. Sitting at home after\r
-pig's cheek and cabbage nursing it in the armchair. Rehearsing his band\r
-part. Pom. Pompedy. Jolly for the wife. Asses' skins. Welt them through\r
-life, then wallop after death. Pom. Wallop. Seems to be what you call\r
-yashmak or I mean kismet. Fate.\r
-\r
-Tap. Tap. A stripling, blind, with a tapping cane came taptaptapping by\r
-Daly's window where a mermaid hair all streaming (but he couldn't see)\r
-blew whiffs of a mermaid (blind couldn't), mermaid, coolest whiff of\r
-all.\r
-\r
-Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then blow. Even\r
-comb and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of. Molly in her shift in\r
-Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its\r
-own, don't you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? _Cloche.\r
-Sonnez la._ Shepherd his pipe. Pwee little wee. Policeman a whistle.\r
-Locks and keys! Sweep! Four o'clock's all's well! Sleep! All is lost\r
-now. Drum? Pompedy. Wait. I know. Towncrier, bumbailiff. Long John.\r
-Waken the dead. Pom. Dignam. Poor little _nominedomine._ Pom. It is\r
-music. I mean of course it's all pom pom pom very much what they call\r
-_da capo._ Still you can hear. As we march, we march along, march along.\r
-Pom.\r
-\r
-I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of\r
-custom shah of Persia. Breathe a prayer, drop a tear. All the same\r
-he must have been a bit of a natural not to see it was a yeoman cap.\r
-Muffled up. Wonder who was that chap at the grave in the brown macin. O,\r
-the whore of the lane!\r
-\r
-A frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily in the day\r
-along the quay towards Mr Bloom. When first he saw that form endearing?\r
-Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane. Horn. Who had\r
-the? Heehaw shesaw. Off her beat here. What is she? Hope she. Psst! Any\r
-chance of your wash. Knew Molly. Had me decked. Stout lady does be with\r
-you in the brown costume. Put you off your stroke, that. Appointment\r
-we made knowing we'd never, well hardly ever. Too dear too near to home\r
-sweet home. Sees me, does she? Looks a fright in the day. Face like dip.\r
-Damn her. O, well, she has to live like the rest. Look in here.\r
-\r
-In Lionel Marks's antique saleshop window haughty Henry Lionel Leopold\r
-dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged battered\r
-candlesticks melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags. Bargain: six bob. Might\r
-learn to play. Cheap. Let her pass. Course everything is dear if you\r
-don't want it. That's what good salesman is. Make you buy what he wants\r
-to sell. Chap sold me the Swedish razor he shaved me with. Wanted to\r
-charge me for the edge he gave it. She's passing now. Six bob.\r
-\r
-Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund.\r
-\r
-Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking\r
-glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia's tempting last\r
-rose of summer, rose of Castile. First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth:\r
-Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and big Ben Dollard.\r
-\r
-Tap. A youth entered a lonely Ormond hall.\r
-\r
-Bloom viewed a gallant pictured hero in Lionel Marks's window. Robert\r
-Emmet's last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.\r
-\r
---True men like you men.\r
-\r
---Ay, ay, Ben.\r
-\r
---Will lift your glass with us.\r
-\r
-They lifted.\r
-\r
-Tschink. Tschunk.\r
-\r
-Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He saw\r
-not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor Richie\r
-nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee. He did not see.\r
-\r
-Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. _When my country takes\r
-her place among._\r
-\r
-Prrprr.\r
-\r
-Must be the bur.\r
-\r
-Fff! Oo. Rrpr.\r
-\r
-_Nations of the earth._ No-one behind. She's passed. _Then and not till\r
-then._ Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm\r
-sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two. _Let my epitaph be._ Kraaaaaa.\r
-_Written. I have._\r
-\r
-Pprrpffrrppffff.\r
-\r
-_Done._\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the\r
-corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along\r
-and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have\r
-the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter\r
-only Joe Hynes.\r
-\r
---Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody\r
-chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?\r
-\r
---Soot's luck, says Joe. Who's the old ballocks you were talking to?\r
-\r
---Old Troy, says I, was in the force. I'm on two minds not to give that\r
-fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and\r
-ladders.\r
-\r
---What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Devil a much, says I. There's a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the\r
-garrison church at the corner of Chicken lane--old Troy was just giving\r
-me a wrinkle about him--lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar\r
-to pay three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a\r
-hop-of-my-thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury\r
-street.\r
-\r
---Circumcised? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I'm\r
-hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can't get a penny\r
-out of him.\r
-\r
---That the lay you're on now? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Ay, says I. How are the mighty fallen! Collector of bad and doubtful\r
-debts. But that's the most notorious bloody robber you'd meet in a day's\r
-walk and the face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain.\r
-_Tell him,_ says he, _I dare him,_ says he, _and I doubledare him\r
-to send you round here again or if he does,_ says he, _I'll have\r
-him summonsed up before the court, so I will, for trading without a\r
-licence._ And he after stuffing himself till he's fit to burst. Jesus,\r
-I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out. _He drink me my\r
-teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my moneys?_\r
-\r
-For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of 13 Saint Kevin's\r
-parade in the city of Dublin, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter\r
-called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty,\r
-esquire, of 29 Arbour hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward,\r
-gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds\r
-avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings and no pence per\r
-pound avoirdupois and three stone avoirdupois of sugar, crushed crystal,\r
-at threepence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the\r
-said vendor of one pound five shillings and sixpence sterling for value\r
-received which amount shall be paid by said purchaser to said vendor in\r
-weekly instalments every seven calendar days of three shillings and no\r
-pence sterling: and the said nonperishable goods shall not be pawned or\r
-pledged or sold or otherwise alienated by the said purchaser but shall\r
-be and remain and be held to be the sole and exclusive property of the\r
-said vendor to be disposed of at his good will and pleasure until the\r
-said amount shall have been duly paid by the said purchaser to the said\r
-vendor in the manner herein set forth as this day hereby agreed between\r
-the said vendor, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the one\r
-part and the said purchaser, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns\r
-of the other part.\r
-\r
---Are you a strict t.t.? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Not taking anything between drinks, says I.\r
-\r
---What about paying our respects to our friend? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Who? says I. Sure, he's out in John of God's off his head, poor man.\r
-\r
---Drinking his own stuff? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Ay, says I. Whisky and water on the brain.\r
-\r
---Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe. I want to see the citizen.\r
-\r
---Barney mavourneen's be it, says I. Anything strange or wonderful, Joe?\r
-\r
---Not a word, says Joe. I was up at that meeting in the City Arms.\r
-\r
----What was that, Joe? says I.\r
-\r
---Cattle traders, says Joe, about the foot and mouth disease. I want to\r
-give the citizen the hard word about it.\r
-\r
-So we went around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the\r
-courthouse talking of one thing or another. Decent fellow Joe when he\r
-has it but sure like that he never has it. Jesus, I couldn't get over\r
-that bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber. For trading without a\r
-licence, says he.\r
-\r
-In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There\r
-rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in\r
-life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land\r
-it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the\r
-gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the\r
-grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse\r
-fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to\r
-be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty\r
-trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty\r
-sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic\r
-eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which\r
-that region is thoroughly well supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close\r
-proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs\r
-while they play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden\r
-ingots, silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings,\r
-creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And heroes\r
-voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy, the peerless\r
-princes of unfettered Munster and of Connacht the just and of smooth\r
-sleek Leinster and of Cruahan's land and of Armagh the splendid and of\r
-the noble district of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.\r
-\r
-And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen\r
-by mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for\r
-that purpose, and thither come all herds and fatlings and firstfruits\r
-of that land for O'Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them, a chieftain\r
-descended from chieftains. Thither the extremely large wains bring\r
-foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach,\r
-pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs,\r
-drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale,\r
-York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of\r
-mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red\r
-green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and\r
-chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious,\r
-and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.\r
-\r
-I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him. Come out here, Geraghty, you\r
-notorious bloody hill and dale robber!\r
-\r
-And by that way wend the herds innumerable of bellwethers and flushed\r
-ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium steers\r
-and roaring mares and polled calves and longwoods and storesheep and\r
-Cuffe's prime springers and culls and sowpigs and baconhogs and the\r
-various different varieties of highly distinguished swine and Angus\r
-heifers and polly bulllocks of immaculate pedigree together with prime\r
-premiated milchcows and beeves: and there is ever heard a trampling,\r
-cackling, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting,\r
-champing, chewing, of sheep and pigs and heavyhooved kine from\r
-pasturelands of Lusk and Rush and Carrickmines and from the streamy\r
-vales of Thomond, from the M'Gillicuddy's reeks the inaccessible and\r
-lordly Shannon the unfathomable, and from the gentle declivities of the\r
-place of the race of Kiar, their udders distended with superabundance of\r
-milk and butts of butter and rennets of cheese and farmer's firkins and\r
-targets of lamb and crannocks of corn and oblong eggs in great hundreds,\r
-various in size, the agate with this dun.\r
-\r
-So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there, sure enough, was the\r
-citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that\r
-bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would\r
-drop in the way of drink.\r
-\r
---There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his\r
-load of papers, working for the cause.\r
-\r
-The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be\r
-a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody\r
-dog. I'm told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a\r
-constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper\r
-about a licence.\r
-\r
---Stand and deliver, says he.\r
-\r
---That's all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here.\r
-\r
---Pass, friends, says he.\r
-\r
-Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he:\r
-\r
---What's your opinion of the times?\r
-\r
-Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to\r
-the occasion.\r
-\r
---I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his\r
-fork.\r
-\r
-So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:\r
-\r
---Foreign wars is the cause of it.\r
-\r
-And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:\r
-\r
---It's the Russians wish to tyrannise.\r
-\r
---Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I. I've a thirst on me\r
-I wouldn't sell for half a crown.\r
-\r
---Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Wine of the country, says he.\r
-\r
---What's yours? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.\r
-\r
---Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how's the old heart, citizen? says\r
-he.\r
-\r
---Never better, _a chara_, says he. What Garry? Are we going to win? Eh?\r
-\r
-And with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck\r
-and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.\r
-\r
-The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was\r
-that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired\r
-freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded\r
-deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed\r
-hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his\r
-rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his\r
-body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in\r
-hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (_Ulex Europeus_).\r
-The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue\r
-projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous\r
-obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes\r
-in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the\r
-dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath\r
-issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth\r
-while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his\r
-formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of\r
-the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and\r
-tremble.\r
-\r
-He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching\r
-to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by\r
-a girdle of plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this he wore trews of\r
-deerskin, roughly stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased\r
-in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod\r
-with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same\r
-beast. From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every\r
-movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude\r
-yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of\r
-antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages,\r
-Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill,\r
-Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell,\r
-Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy\r
-Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff,\r
-Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain\r
-Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan,\r
-Marshal MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the\r
-Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for\r
-Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap,\r
-The Woman Who Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L.\r
-Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir\r
-Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of\r
-Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick\r
-W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez,\r
-Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas\r
-Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig\r
-Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly\r
-Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve,\r
-Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama\r
-Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye,\r
-the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah\r
-O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare. A couched spear of\r
-acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet reposed a savage\r
-animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was\r
-sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and\r
-spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time\r
-by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of\r
-paleolithic stone.\r
-\r
-So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the\r
-sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid O, as true as\r
-I'm telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.\r
-\r
---And there's more where that came from, says he.\r
-\r
---Were you robbing the poorbox, Joe? says I.\r
-\r
---Sweat of my brow, says Joe. 'Twas the prudent member gave me the\r
-wheeze.\r
-\r
---I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and\r
-Greek street with his cod's eye counting up all the guts of the fish.\r
-\r
-Who comes through Michan's land, bedight in sable armour? O'Bloom,\r
-the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of the\r
-prudent soul.\r
-\r
---For the old woman of Prince's street, says the citizen, the subsidised\r
-organ. The pledgebound party on the floor of the house. And look at this\r
-blasted rag, says he. Look at this, says he. _The Irish Independent,_ if\r
-you please, founded by Parnell to be the workingman's friend. Listen to\r
-the births and deaths in the _Irish all for Ireland Independent,_ and\r
-I'll thank you and the marriages.\r
-\r
-And he starts reading them out:\r
-\r
---Gordon, Barnfield crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's\r
-on Sea: the wife of William T Redmayne of a son. How's that, eh? Wright\r
-and Flint, Vincent and Gillett to Rotha Marion daughter of Rosa and the\r
-late George Alfred Gillett, 179 Clapham road, Stockwell, Playwood and\r
-Ridsdale at Saint Jude's, Kensington by the very reverend Dr Forrest,\r
-dean of Worcester. Eh? Deaths. Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London: Carr,\r
-Stoke Newington, of gastritis and heart disease: Cockburn, at the Moat\r
-house, Chepstow...\r
-\r
---I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience.\r
-\r
---Cockburn. Dimsey, wife of David Dimsey, late of the admiralty: Miller,\r
-Tottenham, aged eightyfive: Welsh, June 12, at 35 Canning street,\r
-Liverpool, Isabella Helen. How's that for a national press, eh, my brown\r
-son! How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?\r
-\r
---Ah, well, says Joe, handing round the boose. Thanks be to God they had\r
-the start of us. Drink that, citizen.\r
-\r
---I will, says he, honourable person.\r
-\r
---Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.\r
-\r
-Ah! Ow! Don't be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint.\r
-Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.\r
-\r
-And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came\r
-swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him\r
-there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred\r
-scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage,\r
-fairest of her race.\r
-\r
-Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney's\r
-snug, squeezed up with the laughing. And who was sitting up there in\r
-the corner that I hadn't seen snoring drunk blind to the world only Bob\r
-Doran. I didn't know what was up and Alf kept making signs out of the\r
-door. And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen\r
-in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and\r
-the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a\r
-poodle. I thought Alf would split.\r
-\r
---Look at him, says he. Breen. He's traipsing all round Dublin with a\r
-postcard someone sent him with U. p: up on it to take a li...\r
-\r
-And he doubled up.\r
-\r
---Take a what? says I.\r
-\r
---Libel action, says he, for ten thousand pounds.\r
-\r
---O hell! says I.\r
-\r
-The bloody mongrel began to growl that'd put the fear of God in you\r
-seeing something was up but the citizen gave him a kick in the ribs.\r
-\r
-_--Bi i dho husht,_ says he.\r
-\r
---Who? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Breen, says Alf. He was in John Henry Menton's and then he went round\r
-to Collis and Ward's and then Tom Rochford met him and sent him round to\r
-the subsheriff's for a lark. O God, I've a pain laughing. U. p: up. The\r
-long fellow gave him an eye as good as a process and now the bloody old\r
-lunatic is gone round to Green street to look for a G man.\r
-\r
---When is long John going to hang that fellow in Mountjoy? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Bergan, says Bob Doran, waking up. Is that Alf Bergan?\r
-\r
---Yes, says Alf. Hanging? Wait till I show you. Here, Terry, give us a\r
-pony. That bloody old fool! Ten thousand pounds. You should have seen\r
-long John's eye. U. p...\r
-\r
-And he started laughing.\r
-\r
---Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran. Is that Bergan?\r
-\r
---Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf.\r
-\r
-Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup\r
-full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and\r
-Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of\r
-deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and\r
-mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour\r
-juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day\r
-from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.\r
-\r
-Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born,\r
-that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that\r
-thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals.\r
-\r
-But he, the young chief of the O'Bergan's, could ill brook to be outdone\r
-in generous deeds but gave therefor with gracious gesture a testoon of\r
-costliest bronze. Thereon embossed in excellent smithwork was seen\r
-the image of a queen of regal port, scion of the house of Brunswick,\r
-Victoria her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the\r
-United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions\r
-beyond the sea, queen, defender of the faith, Empress of India, even\r
-she, who bore rule, a victress over many peoples, the wellbeloved, for\r
-they knew and loved her from the rising of the sun to the going down\r
-thereof, the pale, the dark, the ruddy and the ethiop.\r
-\r
---What's that bloody freemason doing, says the citizen, prowling up and\r
-down outside?\r
-\r
---What's that? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. Talking about hanging,\r
-I'll show you something you never saw. Hangmen's letters. Look at here.\r
-\r
-So he took a bundle of wisps of letters and envelopes out of his pocket.\r
-\r
---Are you codding? says I.\r
-\r
---Honest injun, says Alf. Read them.\r
-\r
-So Joe took up the letters.\r
-\r
---Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran.\r
-\r
-So I saw there was going to be a bit of a dust Bob's a queer chap when\r
-the porter's up in him so says I just to make talk:\r
-\r
---How's Willy Murray those times, Alf?\r
-\r
---I don't know, says Alf I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy\r
-Dignam. Only I was running after that...\r
-\r
---You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?\r
-\r
---With Dignam, says Alf.\r
-\r
---Is it Paddy? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Yes, says Alf. Why?\r
-\r
---Don't you know he's dead? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Paddy Dignam dead! says Alf.\r
-\r
---Ay, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as\r
-a pikestaff.\r
-\r
---Who's dead? says Bob Doran.\r
-\r
---You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.\r
-\r
---What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five... What?... And Willy Murray\r
-with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's... What? Dignam\r
-dead?\r
-\r
---What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about...?\r
-\r
---Dead! says Alf. He's no more dead than you are.\r
-\r
---Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning\r
-anyhow.\r
-\r
---Paddy? says Alf.\r
-\r
---Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him.\r
-\r
---Good Christ! says Alf.\r
-\r
-Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted.\r
-\r
-In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by\r
-tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing\r
-luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of\r
-the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge\r
-of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was\r
-effected through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery\r
-and scarlet rays emanating from the sacral region and solar plexus.\r
-Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heavenworld he\r
-stated that he was now on the path of pr l ya or return but was still\r
-submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the\r
-lower astral levels. In reply to a question as to his first sensations\r
-in the great divide beyond he stated that previously he had seen as in a\r
-glass darkly but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities\r
-of atmic development opened up to them. Interrogated as to whether life\r
-there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard\r
-from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were\r
-equipped with every modern home comfort such as talafana, alavatar,\r
-hatakalda, wataklasat and that the highest adepts were steeped in\r
-waves of volupcy of the very purest nature. Having requested a quart of\r
-buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief. Asked if he\r
-had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the\r
-wrong side of Maya to acknowledge the true path for it was reported\r
-in devanic circles that Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the\r
-eastern angle where the ram has power. It was then queried whether there\r
-were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was:\r
-_We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C. K.\r
-doesn't pile it on._ It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr\r
-Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H. J. O'Neill's popular\r
-funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been\r
-responsible for the carrying out of the interment arrangements. Before\r
-departing he requested that it should be told to his dear son Patsy that\r
-the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the\r
-commode in the return room and that the pair should be sent to Cullen's\r
-to be soled only as the heels were still good. He stated that this had\r
-greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly\r
-requested that his desire should be made known.\r
-\r
-Assurances were given that the matter would be attended to and it was\r
-intimated that this had given satisfaction.\r
-\r
-He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was\r
-his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with\r
-your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.\r
-\r
---There he is again, says the citizen, staring out.\r
-\r
---Who? says I.\r
-\r
---Bloom, says he. He's on point duty up and down there for the last ten\r
-minutes.\r
-\r
-And, begob, I saw his physog do a peep in and then slidder off again.\r
-\r
-Little Alf was knocked bawways. Faith, he was.\r
-\r
---Good Christ! says he. I could have sworn it was him.\r
-\r
-And says Bob Doran, with the hat on the back of his poll, lowest\r
-blackguard in Dublin when he's under the influence:\r
-\r
---Who said Christ is good?\r
-\r
---I beg your parsnips, says Alf.\r
-\r
---Is that a good Christ, says Bob Doran, to take away poor little Willy\r
-Dignam?\r
-\r
---Ah, well, says Alf, trying to pass it off. He's over all his troubles.\r
-\r
-But Bob Doran shouts out of him.\r
-\r
---He's a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.\r
-\r
-Terry came down and tipped him the wink to keep quiet, that they didn't\r
-want that kind of talk in a respectable licensed premises. And Bob Doran\r
-starts doing the weeps about Paddy Dignam, true as you're there.\r
-\r
---The finest man, says he, snivelling, the finest purest character.\r
-\r
-The tear is bloody near your eye. Talking through his bloody hat. Fitter\r
-for him go home to the little sleepwalking bitch he married, Mooney, the\r
-bumbailiff's daughter, mother kept a kip in Hardwicke street, that\r
-used to be stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told me that was\r
-stopping there at two in the morning without a stitch on her, exposing\r
-her person, open to all comers, fair field and no favour.\r
-\r
---The noblest, the truest, says he. And he's gone, poor little Willy,\r
-poor little Paddy Dignam.\r
-\r
-And mournful and with a heavy heart he bewept the extinction of that\r
-beam of heaven.\r
-\r
-Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing round\r
-the door.\r
-\r
---Come in, come on, he won't eat you, says the citizen.\r
-\r
-So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry was\r
-Martin Cunningham there.\r
-\r
---O, Christ M'Keown, says Joe, reading one of the letters. Listen to\r
-this, will you?\r
-\r
-And he starts reading out one.\r
-\r
-_7 Hunter Street, Liverpool. To the High Sheriff of Dublin, Dublin._\r
-\r
-_Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful\r
-case i hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail on the 12 of Febuary 1900 and i\r
-hanged..._\r
-\r
---Show us, Joe, says I.\r
-\r
---_... private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in\r
-Pentonville prison and i was assistant when..._\r
-\r
---Jesus, says I.\r
-\r
---_... Billington executed the awful murderer Toad Smith..._\r
-\r
-The citizen made a grab at the letter.\r
-\r
---Hold hard, says Joe, _i have a special nack of putting the noose once\r
-in he can't get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my\r
-terms is five ginnees._\r
-\r
-_H. RUMBOLD, MASTER BARBER._\r
-\r
---And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.\r
-\r
---And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe. Here, says he, take them\r
-to hell out of my sight, Alf. Hello, Bloom, says he, what will you have?\r
-\r
-So they started arguing about the point, Bloom saying he wouldn't and he\r
-couldn't and excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said well\r
-he'd just take a cigar. Gob, he's a prudent member and no mistake.\r
-\r
---Give us one of your prime stinkers, Terry, says Joe.\r
-\r
-And Alf was telling us there was one chap sent in a mourning card with a\r
-black border round it.\r
-\r
---They're all barbers, says he, from the black country that would hang\r
-their own fathers for five quid down and travelling expenses.\r
-\r
-And he was telling us there's two fellows waiting below to pull his\r
-heels down when he gets the drop and choke him properly and then they\r
-chop up the rope after and sell the bits for a few bob a skull.\r
-\r
-In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor. Their\r
-deadly coil they grasp: yea, and therein they lead to Erebus whatsoever\r
-wight hath done a deed of blood for I will on nowise suffer it even so\r
-saith the Lord.\r
-\r
-So they started talking about capital punishment and of course Bloom\r
-comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the\r
-business and the old dog smelling him all the time I'm told those jewies\r
-does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don't\r
-know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on.\r
-\r
---There's one thing it hasn't a deterrent effect on, says Alf.\r
-\r
---What's that? says Joe.\r
-\r
---The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged, says Alf.\r
-\r
---That so? says Joe.\r
-\r
---God's truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in\r
-\r
-Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when\r
-they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like\r
-a poker.\r
-\r
---Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said.\r
-\r
---That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It's only a natural\r
-phenomenon, don't you see, because on account of the...\r
-\r
-And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and\r
-this phenomenon and the other phenomenon.\r
-\r
-The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered\r
-medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the\r
-cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would,\r
-according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be\r
-calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent\r
-ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus,\r
-thereby causing the elastic pores of the _corpora cavernosa_ to rapidly\r
-dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood\r
-to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ\r
-resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty\r
-a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection _in articulo\r
-mortis per diminutionem capitis._\r
-\r
-So of course the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and\r
-he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old guard and\r
-the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of ninetyeight and Joe with\r
-him about all the fellows that were hanged, drawn and transported for\r
-the cause by drumhead courtmartial and a new Ireland and new this, that\r
-and the other. Talking about new Ireland he ought to go and get a new\r
-dog so he ought. Mangy ravenous brute sniffing and sneezing all round\r
-the place and scratching his scabs. And round he goes to Bob Doran that\r
-was standing Alf a half one sucking up for what he could get. So of\r
-course Bob Doran starts doing the bloody fool with him:\r
-\r
---Give us the paw! Give the paw, doggy! Good old doggy! Give the paw\r
-here! Give us the paw!\r
-\r
-Arrah, bloody end to the paw he'd paw and Alf trying to keep him from\r
-tumbling off the bloody stool atop of the bloody old dog and he talking\r
-all kinds of drivel about training by kindness and thoroughbred dog and\r
-intelligent dog: give you the bloody pip. Then he starts scraping a few\r
-bits of old biscuit out of the bottom of a Jacobs' tin he told Terry to\r
-bring. Gob, he golloped it down like old boots and his tongue hanging\r
-out of him a yard long for more. Near ate the tin and all, hungry bloody\r
-mongrel.\r
-\r
-And the citizen and Bloom having an argument about the point, the\r
-brothers Sheares and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet\r
-and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara Curran and\r
-she's far from the land. And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown\r
-cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Phenomenon! The fat heap he\r
-married is a nice old phenomenon with a back on her like a ballalley.\r
-Time they were stopping up in the _City Arms_ pisser Burke told me there\r
-was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom\r
-trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bézique\r
-to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a\r
-Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw and taking the\r
-lout out for a walk. And one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and,\r
-by the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought him home as\r
-drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of\r
-alcohol and by herrings, if the three women didn't near roast him, it's\r
-a queer story, the old one, Bloom's wife and Mrs O'Dowd that kept the\r
-hotel. Jesus, I had to laugh at pisser Burke taking them off chewing\r
-the fat. And Bloom with his _but don't you see?_ and _but on the other\r
-hand_. And sure, more be token, the lout I'm told was in Power's after,\r
-the blender's, round in Cope street going home footless in a cab five\r
-times in the week after drinking his way through all the samples in the\r
-bloody establishment. Phenomenon!\r
-\r
---The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and\r
-glaring at Bloom.\r
-\r
---Ay, ay, says Joe.\r
-\r
---You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is...\r
-\r
---_Sinn Fein!_ says the citizen. _Sinn Fein amhain!_ The friends we love\r
-are by our side and the foes we hate before us.\r
-\r
-The last farewell was affecting in the extreme. From the belfries far\r
-and near the funereal deathbell tolled unceasingly while all around the\r
-gloomy precincts rolled the ominous warning of a hundred muffled drums\r
-punctuated by the hollow booming of pieces of ordnance. The deafening\r
-claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up\r
-the ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its\r
-supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle. A torrential rain\r
-poured down from the floodgates of the angry heavens upon the\r
-bared heads of the assembled multitude which numbered at the\r
-lowest computation five hundred thousand persons. A posse of Dublin\r
-Metropolitan police superintended by the Chief Commissioner in person\r
-maintained order in the vast throng for whom the York street brass and\r
-reed band whiled away the intervening time by admirably rendering on\r
-their blackdraped instruments the matchless melody endeared to us from\r
-the cradle by Speranza's plaintive muse. Special quick excursion trains\r
-and upholstered charabancs had been provided for the comfort of our\r
-country cousins of whom there were large contingents. Considerable\r
-amusement was caused by the favourite Dublin streetsingers L-n-h-n and\r
-M-ll-g-n who sang _The Night before Larry was stretched_ in their usual\r
-mirth-provoking fashion. Our two inimitable drolls did a roaring trade\r
-with their broadsheets among lovers of the comedy element and nobody\r
-who has a corner in his heart for real Irish fun without vulgarity\r
-will grudge them their hardearned pennies. The children of the Male and\r
-Female Foundling Hospital who thronged the windows overlooking the scene\r
-were delighted with this unexpected addition to the day's entertainment\r
-and a word of praise is due to the Little Sisters of the Poor for their\r
-excellent idea of affording the poor fatherless and motherless children\r
-a genuinely instructive treat. The viceregal houseparty which included\r
-many wellknown ladies was chaperoned by Their Excellencies to the most\r
-favourable positions on the grandstand while the picturesque foreign\r
-delegation known as the Friends of the Emerald Isle was accommodated\r
-on a tribune directly opposite. The delegation, present in full force,\r
-consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed\r
-_doyen_ of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a\r
-powerful steam crane), Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker\r
-Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von\r
-Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi,\r
-Hiram Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh\r
-Rahat Lokum Effendi, Senor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras\r
-y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri, Hi Hung\r
-Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps, Pan Poleaxe\r
-Paddyrisky, Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch, Borus\r
-Hupinkoff, Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli,\r
-Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivatdocent\r
--generalhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein. All the\r
-delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest\r
-possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which\r
-they had been called upon to witness. An animated altercation (in which\r
-all took part) ensued among the F. O. T. E. I. as to whether the eighth\r
-or the ninth of March was the correct date of the birth of Ireland's\r
-patron saint. In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars,\r
-boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas,\r
-catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to\r
-and blows were freely exchanged. The baby policeman, Constable\r
-MacFadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly\r
-restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth\r
-of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending\r
-parties. The readywitted ninefooter's suggestion at once appealed to all\r
-and was unanimously accepted. Constable MacFadden was heartily\r
-congratulated by all the F.O.T.E.I., several of whom were bleeding\r
-profusely. Commendatore Beninobenone having been extricated from\r
-underneath the presidential armchair, it was explained by his legal\r
-adviser Avvocato Pagamimi that the various articles secreted in his\r
-thirtytwo pockets had been abstracted by him during the affray from the\r
-pockets of his junior colleagues in the hope of bringing them to their\r
-senses. The objects (which included several hundred ladies' and\r
-gentlemen's gold and silver watches) were promptly restored to their\r
-rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme.\r
-\r
-Quietly, unassumingly Rumbold stepped on to the scaffold in faultless\r
-morning dress and wearing his favourite flower, the _Gladiolus\r
-Cruentus_. He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough\r
-which so many have tried (unsuccessfully) to imitate--short,\r
-painstaking yet withal so characteristic of the man. The arrival of the\r
-worldrenowned headsman was greeted by a roar of acclamation from the\r
-huge concourse, the viceregal ladies waving their handkerchiefs in\r
-their excitement while the even more excitable foreign delegates\r
-cheered vociferously in a medley of cries, _hoch, banzai, eljen, zivio,\r
-chinchin, polla kronia, hiphip, vive, Allah_, amid which the ringing\r
-_evviva_ of the delegate of the land of song (a high double F recalling\r
-those piercingly lovely notes with which the eunuch Catalani beglamoured\r
-our greatgreatgrandmothers) was easily distinguishable. It was exactly\r
-seventeen o'clock. The signal for prayer was then promptly given by\r
-megaphone and in an instant all heads were bared, the commendatore's\r
-patriarchal sombrero, which has been in the possession of his family\r
-since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by his medical adviser\r
-in attendance, Dr Pippi. The learned prelate who administered the last\r
-comforts of holy religion to the hero martyr when about to pay the death\r
-penalty knelt in a most christian spirit in a pool of rainwater, his\r
-cassock above his hoary head, and offered up to the throne of grace\r
-fervent prayers of supplication. Hand by the block stood the grim figure\r
-of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot\r
-with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered\r
-furiously. As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his\r
-horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated\r
-in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been provided by the\r
-admirers of his fell but necessary office. On a handsome mahogany table\r
-near him were neatly arranged the quartering knife, the various\r
-finely tempered disembowelling appliances (specially supplied by the\r
-worldfamous firm of cutlers, Messrs John Round and Sons, Sheffield),\r
-a terra cotta saucepan for the reception of the duodenum, colon,\r
-blind intestine and appendix etc when successfully extracted and two\r
-commodious milkjugs destined to receive the most precious blood of the\r
-most precious victim. The housesteward of the amalgamated cats' and\r
-dogs' home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished\r
-to that beneficent institution. Quite an excellent repast consisting of\r
-rashers and eggs, fried steak and onions, done to a nicety, delicious\r
-hot breakfast rolls and invigorating tea had been considerately provided\r
-by the authorities for the consumption of the central figure of the\r
-tragedy who was in capital spirits when prepared for death and evinced\r
-the keenest interest in the proceedings from beginning to end but he,\r
-with an abnegation rare in these our times, rose nobly to the occasion\r
-and expressed the dying wish (immediately acceded to) that the meal\r
-should be divided in aliquot parts among the members of the sick and\r
-indigent roomkeepers' association as a token of his regard and esteem.\r
-The _nec_ and _non plus ultra_ of emotion were reached when the blushing\r
-bride elect burst her way through the serried ranks of the bystanders\r
-and flung herself upon the muscular bosom of him who was about to be\r
-launched into eternity for her sake. The hero folded her willowy form in\r
-a loving embrace murmuring fondly _Sheila, my own_. Encouraged by\r
-this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various\r
-suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb\r
-permitted her ardour to reach. She swore to him as they mingled the salt\r
-streams of their tears that she would ever cherish his memory, that she\r
-would never forget her hero boy who went to his death with a song on his\r
-lips as if he were but going to a hurling match in Clonturk park. She\r
-brought back to his recollection the happy days of blissful childhood\r
-together on the banks of Anna Liffey when they had indulged in the\r
-innocent pastimes of the young and, oblivious of the dreadful present,\r
-they both laughed heartily, all the spectators, including the venerable\r
-pastor, joining in the general merriment. That monster audience simply\r
-rocked with delight. But anon they were overcome with grief and clasped\r
-their hands for the last time. A fresh torrent of tears burst from their\r
-lachrymal ducts and the vast concourse of people, touched to the inmost\r
-core, broke into heartrending sobs, not the least affected being the\r
-aged prebendary himself. Big strong men, officers of the peace and\r
-genial giants of the royal Irish constabulary, were making frank use of\r
-their handkerchiefs and it is safe to say that there was not a dry eye\r
-in that record assemblage. A most romantic incident occurred when a\r
-handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair\r
-sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook\r
-and genealogical tree, solicited the hand of the hapless young lady,\r
-requesting her to name the day, and was accepted on the spot. Every lady\r
-in the audience was presented with a tasteful souvenir of the occasion\r
-in the shape of a skull and crossbones brooch, a timely and generous\r
-act which evoked a fresh outburst of emotion: and when the gallant young\r
-Oxonian (the bearer, by the way, of one of the most timehonoured names\r
-in Albion's history) placed on the finger of his blushing _fiancée_ an\r
-expensive engagement ring with emeralds set in the form of a\r
-fourleaved shamrock the excitement knew no bounds. Nay, even the\r
-ster provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan\r
-Tomlinson, who presided on the sad occasion, he who had blown a\r
-considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching,\r
-could not now restrain his natural emotion. With his mailed gauntlet\r
-he brushed away a furtive tear and was overheard, by those privileged\r
-burghers who happened to be in his immediate _entourage,_ to murmur to\r
-himself in a faltering undertone:\r
-\r
---God blimey if she aint a clinker, that there bleeding tart. Blimey it\r
-makes me kind of bleeding cry, straight, it does, when I sees her cause\r
-I thinks of my old mashtub what's waiting for me down Limehouse way.\r
-\r
-So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish language and the\r
-corporation meeting and all to that and the shoneens that can't speak\r
-their own language and Joe chipping in because he stuck someone for a\r
-quid and Bloom putting in his old goo with his twopenny stump that\r
-he cadged off of Joe and talking about the Gaelic league and the\r
-antitreating league and drink, the curse of Ireland. Antitreating is\r
-about the size of it. Gob, he'd let you pour all manner of drink down\r
-his throat till the Lord would call him before you'd ever see the froth\r
-of his pint. And one night I went in with a fellow into one of their\r
-musical evenings, song and dance about she could get up on a truss of\r
-hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was a fellow with a Ballyhooly\r
-blue ribbon badge spiffing out of him in Irish and a lot of colleen\r
-bawns going about with temperance beverages and selling medals\r
-and oranges and lemonade and a few old dry buns, gob, flahoolagh\r
-entertainment, don't be talking. Ireland sober is Ireland free. And\r
-then an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the gougers\r
-shuffling their feet to the tune the old cow died of. And one or two\r
-sky pilots having an eye around that there was no goings on with the\r
-females, hitting below the belt.\r
-\r
-So howandever, as I was saying, the old dog seeing the tin was empty\r
-starts mousing around by Joe and me. I'd train him by kindness, so I\r
-would, if he was my dog. Give him a rousing fine kick now and again\r
-where it wouldn't blind him.\r
-\r
---Afraid he'll bite you? says the citizen, jeering.\r
-\r
---No, says I. But he might take my leg for a lamppost.\r
-\r
-So he calls the old dog over.\r
-\r
---What's on you, Garry? says he.\r
-\r
-Then he starts hauling and mauling and talking to him in Irish and the\r
-old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera.\r
-Such growling you never heard as they let off between them. Someone that\r
-has nothing better to do ought to write a letter _pro bono publico_ to\r
-the papers about the muzzling order for a dog the like of that. Growling\r
-and grousing and his eye all bloodshot from the drouth is in it and the\r
-hydrophobia dropping out of his jaws.\r
-\r
-All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the\r
-lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not\r
-missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the\r
-famous old Irish red setter wolfdog formerly known by the _sobriquet_ of\r
-Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and\r
-acquaintances Owen Garry. The exhibition, which is the result of years\r
-of training by kindness and a carefully thoughtout dietary system,\r
-comprises, among other achievements, the recitation of verse. Our\r
-greatest living phonetic expert (wild horses shall not drag it from us!)\r
-has left no stone unturned in his efforts to delucidate and compare\r
-the verse recited and has found it bears a _striking_ resemblance (the\r
-italics are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards. We are not\r
-speaking so much of those delightful lovesongs with which the writer who\r
-conceals his identity under the graceful pseudonym of the Little\r
-Sweet Branch has familiarised the bookloving world but rather (as\r
-a contributor D. O. C. points out in an interesting communication\r
-published by an evening contemporary) of the harsher and more personal\r
-note which is found in the satirical effusions of the famous Raftery and\r
-of Donal MacConsidine to say nothing of a more modern lyrist at present\r
-very much in the public eye. We subjoin a specimen which has been\r
-rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we\r
-are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will\r
-find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical\r
-system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative\r
-and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more\r
-complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has\r
-been well caught. Perhaps it should be added that the effect is greatly\r
-increased if Owen's verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indistinctly in\r
-a tone suggestive of suppressed rancour.\r
-\r
- _The curse of my curses\r
- Seven days every day\r
- And seven dry Thursdays\r
- On you, Barney Kiernan,\r
- Has no sup of water\r
- To cool my courage,\r
- And my guts red roaring\r
- After Lowry's lights._\r
-\r
-So he told Terry to bring some water for the dog and, gob, you could\r
-hear him lapping it up a mile off. And Joe asked him would he have\r
-another.\r
-\r
---I will, says he, _a chara_, to show there's no ill feeling.\r
-\r
-Gob, he's not as green as he's cabbagelooking. Arsing around from one\r
-pub to another, leaving it to your own honour, with old Giltrap's dog\r
-and getting fed up by the ratepayers and corporators. Entertainment for\r
-man and beast. And says Joe:\r
-\r
---Could you make a hole in another pint?\r
-\r
---Could a swim duck? says I.\r
-\r
---Same again, Terry, says Joe. Are you sure you won't have anything in\r
-the way of liquid refreshment? says he.\r
-\r
---Thank you, no, says Bloom. As a matter of fact I just wanted to meet\r
-Martin Cunningham, don't you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam's.\r
-Martin asked me to go to the house. You see, he, Dignam, I mean, didn't\r
-serve any notice of the assignment on the company at the time and\r
-nominally under the act the mortgagee can't recover on the policy.\r
-\r
---Holy Wars, says Joe, laughing, that's a good one if old Shylock is\r
-landed. So the wife comes out top dog, what?\r
-\r
---Well, that's a point, says Bloom, for the wife's admirers.\r
-\r
---Whose admirers? says Joe.\r
-\r
---The wife's advisers, I mean, says Bloom.\r
-\r
-Then he starts all confused mucking it up about mortgagor under the act\r
-like the lord chancellor giving it out on the bench and for the benefit\r
-of the wife and that a trust is created but on the other hand that\r
-Dignam owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow\r
-contested the mortgagee's right till he near had the head of me addled\r
-with his mortgagor under the act. He was bloody safe he wasn't run in\r
-himself under the act that time as a rogue and vagabond only he had a\r
-friend in court. Selling bazaar tickets or what do you call it royal\r
-Hungarian privileged lottery. True as you're there. O, commend me to an\r
-israelite! Royal and privileged Hungarian robbery.\r
-\r
-So Bob Doran comes lurching around asking Bloom to tell Mrs Dignam he\r
-was sorry for her trouble and he was very sorry about the funeral and\r
-to tell her that he said and everyone who knew him said that there was\r
-never a truer, a finer than poor little Willy that's dead to tell her.\r
-Choking with bloody foolery. And shaking Bloom's hand doing the tragic\r
-to tell her that. Shake hands, brother. You're a rogue and I'm another.\r
-\r
---Let me, said he, so far presume upon our acquaintance which, however\r
-slight it may appear if judged by the standard of mere time, is founded,\r
-as I hope and believe, on a sentiment of mutual esteem as to request of\r
-you this favour. But, should I have overstepped the limits of reserve\r
-let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness.\r
-\r
---No, rejoined the other, I appreciate to the full the motives which\r
-actuate your conduct and I shall discharge the office you entrust to\r
-me consoled by the reflection that, though the errand be one of sorrow,\r
-this proof of your confidence sweetens in some measure the bitterness of\r
-the cup.\r
-\r
---Then suffer me to take your hand, said he. The goodness of your heart,\r
-I feel sure, will dictate to you better than my inadequate words\r
-the expressions which are most suitable to convey an emotion whose\r
-poignancy, were I to give vent to my feelings, would deprive me even of\r
-speech.\r
-\r
-And off with him and out trying to walk straight. Boosed at five\r
-o'clock. Night he was near being lagged only Paddy Leonard knew the\r
-bobby, 14A. Blind to the world up in a shebeen in Bride street after\r
-closing time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on guard, drinking\r
-porter out of teacups. And calling himself a Frenchy for the shawls,\r
-Joseph Manuo, and talking against the Catholic religion, and he serving\r
-mass in Adam and Eve's when he was young with his eyes shut, who wrote\r
-the new testament, and the old testament, and hugging and smugging. And\r
-the two shawls killed with the laughing, picking his pockets, the bloody\r
-fool and he spilling the porter all over the bed and the two shawls\r
-screeching laughing at one another. _How is your testament? Have you got\r
-an old testament?_ Only Paddy was passing there, I tell you what. Then\r
-see him of a Sunday with his little concubine of a wife, and she wagging\r
-her tail up the aisle of the chapel with her patent boots on her, no\r
-less, and her violets, nice as pie, doing the little lady. Jack Mooney's\r
-sister. And the old prostitute of a mother procuring rooms to street\r
-couples. Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told him if he didn't patch up\r
-the pot, Jesus, he'd kick the shite out of him.\r
-\r
-So Terry brought the three pints.\r
-\r
---Here, says Joe, doing the honours. Here, citizen.\r
-\r
---_Slan leat_, says he.\r
-\r
---Fortune, Joe, says I. Good health, citizen.\r
-\r
-Gob, he had his mouth half way down the tumbler already. Want a small\r
-fortune to keep him in drinks.\r
-\r
---Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty, Alf? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Friend of yours, says Alf.\r
-\r
---Nannan? says Joe. The mimber?\r
-\r
---I won't mention any names, says Alf.\r
-\r
---I thought so, says Joe. I saw him up at that meeting now with William\r
-Field, M. P., the cattle traders.\r
-\r
---Hairy Iopas, says the citizen, that exploded volcano, the darling of\r
-all countries and the idol of his own.\r
-\r
-So Joe starts telling the citizen about the foot and mouth disease\r
-and the cattle traders and taking action in the matter and the citizen\r
-sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his\r
-sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the\r
-guaranteed remedy for timber tongue. Because he was up one time in a\r
-knacker's yard. Walking about with his book and pencil here's my head\r
-and my heels are coming till Joe Cuffe gave him the order of the boot\r
-for giving lip to a grazier. Mister Knowall. Teach your grandmother how\r
-to milk ducks. Pisser Burke was telling me in the hotel the wife used\r
-to be in rivers of tears some times with Mrs O'Dowd crying her eyes out\r
-with her eight inches of fat all over her. Couldn't loosen her farting\r
-strings but old cod's eye was waltzing around her showing her how to do\r
-it. What's your programme today? Ay. Humane methods. Because the poor\r
-animals suffer and experts say and the best known remedy that doesn't\r
-cause pain to the animal and on the sore spot administer gently. Gob,\r
-he'd have a soft hand under a hen.\r
-\r
-Ga Ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Black Liz is our hen. She lays eggs for\r
-us. When she lays her egg she is so glad. Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Then\r
-comes good uncle Leo. He puts his hand under black Liz and takes her\r
-fresh egg. Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook.\r
-\r
---Anyhow, says Joe, Field and Nannetti are going over tonight to London\r
-to ask about it on the floor of the house of commons.\r
-\r
---Are you sure, says Bloom, the councillor is going? I wanted to see\r
-him, as it happens.\r
-\r
---Well, he's going off by the mailboat, says Joe, tonight.\r
-\r
---That's too bad, says Bloom. I wanted particularly. Perhaps only Mr\r
-Field is going. I couldn't phone. No. You're sure?\r
-\r
---Nannan's going too, says Joe. The league told him to ask a question\r
-tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the\r
-park. What do you think of that, citizen? _The Sluagh na h-Eireann_.\r
-\r
-Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat.): Arising out of the question of\r
-my honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right\r
-honourable gentleman whether the government has issued orders that these\r
-animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming\r
-as to their pathological condition?\r
-\r
-Mr Allfours (Tamoshant. Con.): Honourable members are already in\r
-possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole\r
-house. I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the\r
-honourable member's question is in the affirmative.\r
-\r
-Mr Orelli O'Reilly (Montenotte. Nat.): Have similar orders been issued\r
-for the slaughter of human animals who dare to play Irish games in the\r
-Phoenix park?\r
-\r
-Mr Allfours: The answer is in the negative.\r
-\r
-Mr Cowe Conacre: Has the right honourable gentleman's famous\r
-Mitchelstown telegram inspired the policy of gentlemen on the Treasury\r
-bench? (O! O!)\r
-\r
-Mr Allfours: I must have notice of that question.\r
-\r
-Mr Staylewit (Buncombe. Ind.): Don't hesitate to shoot.\r
-\r
-(Ironical opposition cheers.)\r
-\r
-The speaker: Order! Order!\r
-\r
-(The house rises. Cheers.)\r
-\r
---There's the man, says Joe, that made the Gaelic sports revival. There\r
-he is sitting there. The man that got away James Stephens. The champion\r
-of all Ireland at putting the sixteen pound shot. What was your best\r
-throw, citizen?\r
-\r
---_Na bacleis_, says the citizen, letting on to be modest. There was a\r
-time I was as good as the next fellow anyhow.\r
-\r
---Put it there, citizen, says Joe. You were and a bloody sight better.\r
-\r
---Is that really a fact? says Alf.\r
-\r
---Yes, says Bloom. That's well known. Did you not know that?\r
-\r
-So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of\r
-lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil\r
-and building up a nation once again and all to that. And of course Bloom\r
-had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent\r
-exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw\r
-from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: _Look at, Bloom. Do you\r
-see that straw? That's a straw_. Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it\r
-for an hour so he would and talk steady.\r
-\r
-A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of _Brian\r
-O'ciarnain's_ in _Sraid na Bretaine Bheag_, under the auspices of\r
-_Sluagh na h-Eireann_, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the\r
-importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and\r
-ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race.\r
-The venerable president of the noble order was in the chair and the\r
-attendance was of large dimensions. After an instructive discourse by\r
-the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed,\r
-a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual high standard\r
-of excellence ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of\r
-the ancient games and sports of our ancient Panceltic forefathers. The\r
-wellknown and highly respected worker in the cause of our old tongue, Mr\r
-Joseph M'Carthy Hynes, made an eloquent appeal for the resuscitation of\r
-the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes, practised morning and evening\r
-by Finn MacCool, as calculated to revive the best traditions of manly\r
-strength and prowess handed down to us from ancient ages. L. Bloom, who\r
-met with a mixed reception of applause and hisses, having espoused the\r
-negative the vocalist chairman brought the discussion to a close, in\r
-response to repeated requests and hearty plaudits from all parts of\r
-a bumper house, by a remarkably noteworthy rendering of the immortal\r
-Thomas Osborne Davis' evergreen verses (happily too familiar to need\r
-recalling here) _A nation once again_ in the execution of which the\r
-veteran patriot champion may be said without fear of contradiction\r
-to have fairly excelled himself. The Irish Caruso-Garibaldi was in\r
-superlative form and his stentorian notes were heard to the greatest\r
-advantage in the timehonoured anthem sung as only our citizen can sing\r
-it. His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly\r
-enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously\r
-applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many\r
-prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press\r
-and the bar and the other learned professions. The proceedings then\r
-terminated.\r
-\r
-Amongst the clergy present were the very rev. William Delany, S. J., L.\r
-L. D.; the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D. D.; the rev. P. J. Kavanagh, C. S.\r
-Sp.; the rev. T. Waters, C. C.; the rev. John M. Ivers, P. P.; the rev.\r
-P. J. Cleary, O. S. F.; the rev. L. J. Hickey, O. P.; the very rev. Fr.\r
-Nicholas, O. S. F. C.; the very rev. B. Gorman, O. D. C.; the rev. T.\r
-Maher, S. J.; the very rev. James Murphy, S. J.; the rev. John Lavery,\r
-V. F.; the very rev. William Doherty, D. D.; the rev. Peter Fagan, O.\r
-M.; the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A.; the rev. J. Flavin, C. C.; the\r
-rev. M. A. Hackett, C. C.; the rev. W. Hurley, C. C.; the rt rev. Mgr\r
-M'Manus, V. G.; the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. I.; the very rev. M.\r
-D. Scally, P. P.; the rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P.; the very rev. Timothy\r
-canon Gorman, P. P.; the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C. The laity included P.\r
-Fay, T. Quirke, etc., etc.\r
-\r
---Talking about violent exercise, says Alf, were you at that\r
-Keogh-Bennett match?\r
-\r
---No, says Joe.\r
-\r
---I heard So and So made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf.\r
-\r
---Who? Blazes? says Joe.\r
-\r
-And says Bloom:\r
-\r
---What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training\r
-the eye.\r
-\r
---Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on the beer to run up\r
-the odds and he swatting all the time.\r
-\r
---We know him, says the citizen. The traitor's son. We know what put\r
-English gold in his pocket.\r
-\r
----True for you, says Joe.\r
-\r
-And Bloom cuts in again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the\r
-blood, asking Alf:\r
-\r
---Now, don't you think, Bergan?\r
-\r
---Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf. Heenan and Sayers was only\r
-a bloody fool to it. Handed him the father and mother of a beating. See\r
-the little kipper not up to his navel and the big fellow swiping. God,\r
-he gave him one last puck in the wind, Queensberry rules and all, made\r
-him puke what he never ate.\r
-\r
-It was a historic and a hefty battle when Myler and Percy were scheduled\r
-to don the gloves for the purse of fifty sovereigns. Handicapped as he\r
-was by lack of poundage, Dublin's pet lamb made up for it by superlative\r
-skill in ringcraft. The final bout of fireworks was a gruelling for both\r
-champions. The welterweight sergeantmajor had tapped some lively claret\r
-in the previous mixup during which Keogh had been receivergeneral of\r
-rights and lefts, the artilleryman putting in some neat work on the\r
-pet's nose, and Myler came on looking groggy. The soldier got to\r
-business, leading off with a powerful left jab to which the Irish\r
-gladiator retaliated by shooting out a stiff one flush to the point of\r
-Bennett's jaw. The redcoat ducked but the Dubliner lifted him with a\r
-left hook, the body punch being a fine one. The men came to handigrips.\r
-Myler quickly became busy and got his man under, the bout ending with\r
-the bulkier man on the ropes, Myler punishing him. The Englishman, whose\r
-right eye was nearly closed, took his corner where he was liberally\r
-drenched with water and when the bell went came on gamey and brimful of\r
-pluck, confident of knocking out the fistic Eblanite in jigtime. It was\r
-a fight to a finish and the best man for it. The two fought like tigers\r
-and excitement ran fever high. The referee twice cautioned Pucking Percy\r
-for holding but the pet was tricky and his footwork a treat to watch.\r
-After a brisk exchange of courtesies during which a smart upper cut of\r
-the military man brought blood freely from his opponent's mouth the\r
-lamb suddenly waded in all over his man and landed a terrific left to\r
-Battling Bennett's stomach, flooring him flat. It was a knockout clean\r
-and clever. Amid tense expectation the Portobello bruiser was being\r
-counted out when Bennett's second Ole Pfotts Wettstein threw in the\r
-towel and the Santry boy was declared victor to the frenzied cheers of\r
-the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly mobbed him with\r
-delight.\r
-\r
---He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he's\r
-running a concert tour now up in the north.\r
-\r
---He is, says Joe. Isn't he?\r
-\r
---Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That's quite true. Yes, a kind of summer\r
-tour, you see. Just a holiday.\r
-\r
---Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn't she? says Joe.\r
-\r
---My wife? says Bloom. She's singing, yes. I think it will be a success\r
-too.\r
-\r
-He's an excellent man to organise. Excellent.\r
-\r
-Hoho begob says I to myself says I. That explains the milk in the\r
-cocoanut and absence of hair on the animal's chest. Blazes doing the\r
-tootle on the flute. Concert tour. Dirty Dan the dodger's son off Island\r
-bridge that sold the same horses twice over to the government to fight\r
-the Boers. Old Whatwhat. I called about the poor and water rate, Mr\r
-Boylan. You what? The water rate, Mr Boylan. You whatwhat? That's the\r
-bucko that'll organise her, take my tip. 'Twixt me and you Caddareesh.\r
-\r
-Pride of Calpe's rocky mount, the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy. There\r
-grew she to peerless beauty where loquat and almond scent the air. The\r
-gardens of Alameda knew her step: the garths of olives knew and bowed.\r
-The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.\r
-\r
-And lo, there entered one of the clan of the O'Molloy's, a comely hero\r
-of white face yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty's counsel learned\r
-in the law, and with him the prince and heir of the noble line of\r
-Lambert.\r
-\r
---Hello, Ned.\r
-\r
---Hello, Alf.\r
-\r
---Hello, Jack.\r
-\r
---Hello, Joe.\r
-\r
---God save you, says the citizen.\r
-\r
---Save you kindly, says J. J. What'll it be, Ned?\r
-\r
---Half one, says Ned.\r
-\r
-So J. J. ordered the drinks.\r
-\r
---Were you round at the court? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Yes, says J. J. He'll square that, Ned, says he.\r
-\r
---Hope so, says Ned.\r
-\r
-Now what were those two at? J. J. getting him off the grand jury list\r
-and the other give him a leg over the stile. With his name in Stubbs's.\r
-Playing cards, hobnobbing with flash toffs with a swank glass in their\r
-eye, adrinking fizz and he half smothered in writs and garnishee orders.\r
-Pawning his gold watch in Cummins of Francis street where no-one would\r
-know him in the private office when I was there with Pisser releasing\r
-his boots out of the pop. What's your name, sir? Dunne, says he. Ay, and\r
-done says I. Gob, he'll come home by weeping cross one of those days,\r
-I'm thinking.\r
-\r
---Did you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there? says Alf. U. p: up.\r
-\r
---Yes, says J. J. Looking for a private detective.\r
-\r
---Ay, says Ned. And he wanted right go wrong to address the court only\r
-Corny Kelleher got round him telling him to get the handwriting examined\r
-first.\r
-\r
---Ten thousand pounds, says Alf, laughing. God, I'd give anything to\r
-hear him before a judge and jury.\r
-\r
---Was it you did it, Alf? says Joe. The truth, the whole truth and\r
-nothing but the truth, so help you Jimmy Johnson.\r
-\r
---Me? says Alf. Don't cast your nasturtiums on my character.\r
-\r
---Whatever statement you make, says Joe, will be taken down in evidence\r
-against you.\r
-\r
---Of course an action would lie, says J. J. It implies that he is not\r
-_compos mentis_. U. p: up.\r
-\r
-_--Compos_ your eye! says Alf, laughing. Do you know that he's balmy?\r
-Look at his head. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat\r
-on with a shoehorn.\r
-\r
---Yes, says J. J., but the truth of a libel is no defence to an\r
-indictment for publishing it in the eyes of the law.\r
-\r
---Ha ha, Alf, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Still, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.\r
-\r
---Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half\r
-and half.\r
-\r
---How half and half? says Bloom. Do you mean he...\r
-\r
---Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A fellow that's neither fish\r
-nor flesh.\r
-\r
---Nor good red herring, says Joe.\r
-\r
---That what's I mean, says the citizen. A pishogue, if you know what\r
-that is.\r
-\r
-Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explaining he meant on\r
-account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the\r
-old stuttering fool. Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody\r
-povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him,\r
-bringing down the rain. And she with her nose cockahoop after she\r
-married him because a cousin of his old fellow's was pewopener to the\r
-pope. Picture of him on the wall with his Smashall Sweeney's moustaches,\r
-the signior Brini from Summerhill, the eyetallyano, papal Zouave to the\r
-Holy Father, has left the quay and gone to Moss street. And who was\r
-he, tell us? A nobody, two pair back and passages, at seven shillings a\r
-week, and he covered with all kinds of breastplates bidding defiance to\r
-the world.\r
-\r
---And moreover, says J. J., a postcard is publication. It was held to\r
-be sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. Hole. In my\r
-opinion an action might lie.\r
-\r
-Six and eightpence, please. Who wants your opinion? Let us drink our\r
-pints in peace. Gob, we won't be let even do that much itself.\r
-\r
---Well, good health, Jack, says Ned.\r
-\r
---Good health, Ned, says J. J.\r
-\r
----There he is again, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Where? says Alf.\r
-\r
-And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter\r
-and the wife beside him and Corny Kelleher with his wall eye looking in\r
-as they went past, talking to him like a father, trying to sell him a\r
-secondhand coffin.\r
-\r
---How did that Canada swindle case go off? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Remanded, says J. J.\r
-\r
-One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James\r
-Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers\r
-saying he'd give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. What? Do you see\r
-any green in the white of my eye? Course it was a bloody barney. What?\r
-Swindled them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and\r
-his own kidney too. J. J. was telling us there was an ancient Hebrew\r
-Zaretsky or something weeping in the witnessbox with his hat on him,\r
-swearing by the holy Moses he was stuck for two quid.\r
-\r
---Who tried the case? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Recorder, says Ned.\r
-\r
---Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.\r
-\r
---Heart as big as a lion, says Ned. Tell him a tale of woe about arrears\r
-of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he'll dissolve\r
-in tears on the bench.\r
-\r
---Ay, says Alf. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the dock\r
-the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for\r
-the corporation there near Butt bridge.\r
-\r
-And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry:\r
-\r
---A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children?\r
-Ten, did you say?\r
-\r
---Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid.\r
-\r
---And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court\r
-immediately, sir. No, sir, I'll make no order for payment. How dare you,\r
-sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking\r
-industrious man! I dismiss the case.\r
-\r
-And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and\r
-in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,\r
-the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first\r
-quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the\r
-halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave\r
-his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury in the\r
-probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the first\r
-chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and\r
-final testamentary disposition _in re_ the real and personal estate of\r
-the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased, versus Livingstone,\r
-an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of\r
-Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there\r
-about the hour of five o'clock to administer the law of the brehons at\r
-the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the\r
-county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim\r
-of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of\r
-Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the\r
-tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and\r
-of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of\r
-Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the\r
-tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he\r
-conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and\r
-truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their\r
-sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict\r
-give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the book. And\r
-they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and they swore by\r
-the name of Him Who is from everlasting that they would do His\r
-rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from\r
-their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended\r
-in consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and\r
-foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge\r
-against him for he was a malefactor.\r
-\r
---Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland\r
-filling the country with bugs.\r
-\r
-So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe,\r
-telling him he needn't trouble about that little matter till the first\r
-but if he would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high\r
-and holy by this and by that he'd do the devil and all.\r
-\r
---Because, you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have\r
-repetition. That's the whole secret.\r
-\r
---Rely on me, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We\r
-want no more strangers in our house.\r
-\r
---O, I'm sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It's just that\r
-Keyes, you see.\r
-\r
---Consider that done, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Very kind of you, says Bloom.\r
-\r
---The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in.\r
-We brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon\r
-robbers here.\r
-\r
---Decree _nisi,_ says J. J.\r
-\r
-And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a\r
-spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling\r
-after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and\r
-when.\r
-\r
---A dishonoured wife, says the citizen, that's what's the cause of all\r
-our misfortunes.\r
-\r
---And here she is, says Alf, that was giggling over the _Police Gazette_\r
-with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.\r
-\r
---Give us a squint at her, says I.\r
-\r
-And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off\r
-of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Misconduct\r
-of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago contractor, finds\r
-pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor. Belle in her\r
-bloomers misconducting herself, and her fancyman feeling for her tickles\r
-and Norman W. Tupper bouncing in with his peashooter just in time to be\r
-late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.\r
-\r
---O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, how short your shirt is!\r
-\r
---There's hair, Joe, says I. Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off\r
-of that one, what?\r
-\r
-So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a face on\r
-him as long as a late breakfast.\r
-\r
---Well, says the citizen, what's the latest from the scene of action?\r
-What did those tinkers in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide\r
-about the Irish language?\r
-\r
-O'Nolan, clad in shining armour, low bending made obeisance to the\r
-puissant and high and mighty chief of all Erin and did him to wit of\r
-that which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient\r
-city, second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there, after\r
-due prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken solemn\r
-counsel whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once more into\r
-honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael.\r
-\r
---It's on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal\r
-Sassenachs and their _patois._\r
-\r
-So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till\r
-you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy, putting your\r
-blind eye to the telescope and drawing up a bill of attainder to impeach\r
-a nation, and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and botheration and\r
-their colonies and their civilisation.\r
-\r
---Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with\r
-them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody\r
-thicklugged sons of whores' gets! No music and no art and no literature\r
-worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us.\r
-Tonguetied sons of bastards' ghosts.\r
-\r
---The European family, says J. J....\r
-\r
---They're not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin\r
-Egan of Paris. You wouldn't see a trace of them or their language\r
-anywhere in Europe except in a _cabinet d'aisance._\r
-\r
-And says John Wyse:\r
-\r
---Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.\r
-\r
-And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo:\r
-\r
---_Conspuez les Anglais! Perfide Albion!_\r
-\r
-He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the\r
-medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan _Lamh\r
-Dearg Abu_, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty\r
-valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster\r
-silent as the deathless gods.\r
-\r
---What's up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had\r
-lost a bob and found a tanner.\r
-\r
---Gold cup, says he.\r
-\r
---Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.\r
-\r
-_--Throwaway,_ says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest\r
-nowhere.\r
-\r
---And Bass's mare? says Terry.\r
-\r
---Still running, says he. We're all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid\r
-on my tip _Sceptre_ for himself and a lady friend.\r
-\r
---I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on _Zinfandel_ that Mr Flynn\r
-gave me. Lord Howard de Walden's.\r
-\r
---Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. _Throwaway,_\r
-says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name\r
-is _Sceptre._\r
-\r
-So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was\r
-anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his\r
-luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.\r
-\r
---Not there, my child, says he.\r
-\r
---Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She'd have won the money only for the\r
-other dog.\r
-\r
-And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom\r
-sticking in an odd word.\r
-\r
---Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they\r
-can't see the beam in their own.\r
-\r
---_Raimeis_, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow\r
-that won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing\r
-twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost\r
-tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world!\r
-And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax\r
-and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our\r
-tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our\r
-Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk\r
-and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent\r
-in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the\r
-Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar\r
-now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to\r
-sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even\r
-Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from\r
-Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish\r
-hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for\r
-the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe\r
-us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the\r
-Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and\r
-bog to make us all die of consumption?\r
-\r
---As treeless as Portugal we'll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland\r
-with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land.\r
-Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was\r
-reading a report of lord Castletown's...\r
-\r
---Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain\r
-elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the\r
-trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of\r
-Eire, O.\r
-\r
---Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.\r
-\r
-The fashionable international world attended EN MASSE this afternoon\r
-at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief\r
-ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine\r
-Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash,\r
-Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde\r
-Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia\r
-Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs\r
-Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss\r
-Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel\r
-Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall,\r
-Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana\r
-Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis\r
-graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was given away by\r
-her father, the M'Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in\r
-a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip\r
-of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with\r
-a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by\r
-bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss\r
-Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very\r
-becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty _motif_ of plume rose being\r
-worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the\r
-jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinted coral.\r
-Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the organ with his wellknown ability\r
-and, in addition to the prescribed numbers of the nuptial mass, played\r
-a new and striking arrangement of _Woodman, spare that tree_ at the\r
-conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre _in\r
-Horto_ after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a\r
-playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow,\r
-ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs\r
-Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.\r
-\r
---And our eyes are on Europe, says the citizen. We had our trade with\r
-Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were\r
-pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.\r
-\r
---And will again, says Joe.\r
-\r
---And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the\r
-citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty will be full\r
-again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom\r
-of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with\r
-a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the\r
-O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with\r
-the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when the\r
-first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to\r
-the fore, none of your Henry Tudor's harps, no, the oldest flag afloat,\r
-the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue\r
-field, the three sons of Milesius.\r
-\r
-And he took the last swig out of the pint. Moya. All wind and piss like\r
-a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody\r
-life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled\r
-multitude in Shanagolden where he daren't show his nose with the Molly\r
-Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the\r
-holding of an evicted tenant.\r
-\r
---Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?\r
-\r
---An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.\r
-\r
---Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you\r
-asleep?\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir.\r
-\r
-Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead of\r
-attending to the general public. Picture of a butting match, trying to\r
-crack their bloody skulls, one chap going for the other with his head\r
-down like a bull at a gate. And another one: _Black Beast Burned in\r
-Omaha, Ga_. A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a\r
-Sambo strung up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under\r
-him. Gob, they ought to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and\r
-crucify him to make sure of their job.\r
-\r
---But what about the fighting navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at\r
-bay?\r
-\r
---I'll tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is.\r
-Read the revelations that's going on in the papers about flogging on\r
-the training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself\r
-_Disgusted One_.\r
-\r
-So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew\r
-of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the\r
-parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad\r
-brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend of\r
-a gun.\r
-\r
---A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John\r
-Beresford called it but the modern God's Englishman calls it caning on\r
-the breech.\r
-\r
-And says John Wyse:\r
-\r
---'Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.\r
-\r
-Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane\r
-and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad\r
-till he yells meila murder.\r
-\r
---That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the\r
-earth.\r
-\r
-The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber\r
-on the face of God's earth and their land in the hands of a dozen\r
-gamehogs and cottonball barons. That's the great empire they boast about\r
-of drudges and whipped serfs.\r
-\r
---On which the sun never rises, says Joe.\r
-\r
---And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, they believe it. The\r
-unfortunate yahoos believe it.\r
-\r
-They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth,\r
-and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast,\r
-born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified,\r
-flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose\r
-again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till\r
-further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.\r
-\r
---But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere. I mean wouldn't\r
-it be the same here if you put force against force?\r
-\r
-Didn't I tell you? As true as I'm drinking this porter if he was at his\r
-last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living.\r
-\r
---We'll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater\r
-Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the\r
-black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid\r
-low by the batteringram and the _Times_ rubbed its hands and told the\r
-whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as\r
-redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the\r
-Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full\r
-of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro. Ay,\r
-they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in\r
-the coffinships. But those that came to the land of the free remember\r
-the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance, no\r
-cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan.\r
-\r
---Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was...\r
-\r
---We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the\r
-poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at\r
-Killala.\r
-\r
---Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that reneged us\r
-against the Williamites and they betrayed us. Remember Limerick and the\r
-broken treatystone. We gave our best blood to France and Spain, the\r
-wild geese. Fontenoy, eh? And Sarsfield and O'Donnell, duke of Tetuan\r
-in Spain, and Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria\r
-Teresa. But what did we ever get for it?\r
-\r
---The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters! Do you know\r
-what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. Aren't they\r
-trying to make an _Entente cordiale_ now at Tay Pay's dinnerparty with\r
-perfidious Albion? Firebrands of Europe and they always were.\r
-\r
---_Conspuez les Français_, says Lenehan, nobbling his beer.\r
-\r
---And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven't we\r
-had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the\r
-elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that's dead?\r
-\r
-Jesus, I had to laugh at the way he came out with that about the old one\r
-with the winkers on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of\r
-God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting\r
-her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the\r
-whiskers and singing him old bits of songs about _Ehren on the Rhine_\r
-and come where the boose is cheaper.\r
-\r
---Well, says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.\r
-\r
---Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There's a bloody sight more pox\r
-than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin!\r
-\r
---And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests\r
-and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic\r
-Majesty's racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his\r
-jockeys rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.\r
-\r
---They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little\r
-Alf.\r
-\r
-And says J. J.:\r
-\r
---Considerations of space influenced their lordships' decision.\r
-\r
---Will you try another, citizen? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Yes, sir, says he. I will.\r
-\r
---You? says Joe.\r
-\r
---Beholden to you, Joe, says I. May your shadow never grow less.\r
-\r
---Repeat that dose, says Joe.\r
-\r
-Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with\r
-his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.\r
-\r
---Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it.\r
-Perpetuating national hatred among nations.\r
-\r
---But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.\r
-\r
---Yes, says Bloom.\r
-\r
---What is it? says John Wyse.\r
-\r
---A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same\r
-place.\r
-\r
---By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm\r
-living in the same place for the past five years.\r
-\r
-So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck\r
-out of it:\r
-\r
---Or also living in different places.\r
-\r
---That covers my case, says Joe.\r
-\r
---What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.\r
-\r
---Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.\r
-\r
-The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and,\r
-gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.\r
-\r
---After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to\r
-swab himself dry.\r
-\r
---Here you are, citizen, says Joe. Take that in your right hand and\r
-repeat after me the following words.\r
-\r
-The muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth\r
-attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og MacDonogh, authors\r
-of the Book of Ballymote, was then carefully produced and called forth\r
-prolonged admiration. No need to dwell on the legendary beauty of the\r
-cornerpieces, the acme of art, wherein one can distinctly discern each\r
-of the four evangelists in turn presenting to each of the four masters\r
-his evangelical symbol, a bogoak sceptre, a North American puma (a far\r
-nobler king of beasts than the British article, be it said in passing),\r
-a Kerry calf and a golden eagle from Carrantuohill. The scenes depicted\r
-on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs\r
-and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as\r
-wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo\r
-illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in\r
-the time of the Barmecides. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney,\r
-the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins,\r
-Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh Patrick, the brewery\r
-of Messrs Arthur Guinness, Son and Company (Limited), Lough Neagh's\r
-banks, the vale of Ovoca, Isolde's tower, the Mapas obelisk, Sir Patrick\r
-Dun's hospital, Cape Clear, the glen of Aherlow, Lynch's castle, the\r
-Scotch house, Rathdown Union Workhouse at Loughlinstown, Tullamore jail,\r
-Castleconnel rapids, Kilballymacshonakill, the cross at Monasterboice,\r
-Jury's Hotel, S. Patrick's Purgatory, the Salmon Leap, Maynooth college\r
-refectory, Curley's hole, the three birthplaces of the first duke of\r
-Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the bog of Allen, the Henry Street\r
-Warehouse, Fingal's Cave--all these moving scenes are still there for us\r
-today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have\r
-passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time.\r
-\r
---Show us over the drink, says I. Which is which?\r
-\r
---That's mine, says Joe, as the devil said to the dead policeman.\r
-\r
---And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted.\r
-Also now. This very moment. This very instant.\r
-\r
-Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.\r
-\r
---Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs\r
-to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold\r
-by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.\r
-\r
---Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.\r
-\r
---I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.\r
-\r
---Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.\r
-\r
-That's an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old\r
-lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he'd adorn a\r
-sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse's apron on him. And\r
-then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as\r
-limp as a wet rag.\r
-\r
---But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not\r
-life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's\r
-the very opposite of that that is really life.\r
-\r
---What? says Alf.\r
-\r
---Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says\r
-he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is\r
-there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment.\r
-\r
-Who's hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.\r
-\r
---A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.\r
-\r
---Well, says John Wyse. Isn't that what we're told. Love your neighbour.\r
-\r
---That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love,\r
-moya! He's a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.\r
-\r
-Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A\r
-loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M.\r
-B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo,\r
-the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear\r
-trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the\r
-brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her\r
-Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love\r
-a certain person. And this person loves that other person because\r
-everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.\r
-\r
---Well, Joe, says I, your very good health and song. More power,\r
-citizen.\r
-\r
---Hurrah, there, says Joe.\r
-\r
---The blessing of God and Mary and Patrick on you, says the citizen.\r
-\r
-And he ups with his pint to wet his whistle.\r
-\r
---We know those canters, says he, preaching and picking your pocket.\r
-What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women\r
-and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text _God is love_\r
-pasted round the mouth of his cannon? The bible! Did you read that skit\r
-in the _United Irishman_ today about that Zulu chief that's visiting\r
-England?\r
-\r
---What's that? says Joe.\r
-\r
-So the citizen takes up one of his paraphernalia papers and he starts\r
-reading out:\r
-\r
---A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented\r
-yesterday to His Majesty the Alaki of Abeakuta by Gold Stick in Waiting,\r
-Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs, to tender to His Majesty the heartfelt\r
-thanks of British traders for the facilities afforded them in his\r
-dominions. The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion of which\r
-the dusky potentate, in the course of a happy speech, freely translated\r
-by the British chaplain, the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones,\r
-tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasised the cordial\r
-relations existing between Abeakuta and the British empire, stating that\r
-he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible,\r
-the volume of the word of God and the secret of England's greatness,\r
-graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the great squaw\r
-Victoria, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the Royal\r
-Donor. The Alaki then drank a lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh to the\r
-toast _Black and White_ from the skull of his immediate predecessor in\r
-the dynasty Kakachakachak, surnamed Forty Warts, after which he visited\r
-the chief factory of Cottonopolis and signed his mark in the visitors'\r
-book, subsequently executing a charming old Abeakutic wardance, in the\r
-course of which he swallowed several knives and forks, amid hilarious\r
-applause from the girl hands.\r
-\r
---Widow woman, says Ned. I wouldn't doubt her. Wonder did he put that\r
-bible to the same use as I would.\r
-\r
---Same only more so, says Lenehan. And thereafter in that fruitful land\r
-the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.\r
-\r
---Is that by Griffith? says John Wyse.\r
-\r
---No, says the citizen. It's not signed Shanganagh. It's only\r
-initialled: P.\r
-\r
---And a very good initial too, says Joe.\r
-\r
---That's how it's worked, says the citizen. Trade follows the flag.\r
-\r
---Well, says J. J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the\r
-Congo Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man\r
-what's this his name is?\r
-\r
---Casement, says the citizen. He's an Irishman.\r
-\r
---Yes, that's the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and\r
-flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can\r
-out of them.\r
-\r
---I know where he's gone, says Lenehan, cracking his fingers.\r
-\r
---Who? says I.\r
-\r
---Bloom, says he. The courthouse is a blind. He had a few bob on\r
-_Throwaway_ and he's gone to gather in the shekels.\r
-\r
---Is it that whiteeyed kaffir? says the citizen, that never backed a\r
-horse in anger in his life?\r
-\r
---That's where he's gone, says Lenehan. I met Bantam Lyons going to back\r
-that horse only I put him off it and he told me Bloom gave him the tip.\r
-Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings to five on. He's the\r
-only man in Dublin has it. A dark horse.\r
-\r
---He's a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Mind, Joe, says I. Show us the entrance out.\r
-\r
---There you are, says Terry.\r
-\r
-Goodbye Ireland I'm going to Gort. So I just went round the back of\r
-the yard to pumpship and begob (hundred shillings to five) while I was\r
-letting off my _(Throwaway_ twenty to) letting off my load gob says I\r
-to myself I knew he was uneasy in his (two pints off of Joe and one in\r
-Slattery's off) in his mind to get off the mark to (hundred shillings\r
-is five quid) and when they were in the (dark horse) pisser Burke was\r
-telling me card party and letting on the child was sick (gob, must have\r
-done about a gallon) flabbyarse of a wife speaking down the tube _she's\r
-better_ or _she's_ (ow!) all a plan so he could vamoose with the pool if\r
-he won or (Jesus, full up I was) trading without a licence (ow!) Ireland\r
-my nation says he (hoik! phthook!) never be up to those bloody (there's\r
-the last of it) Jerusalem (ah!) cuckoos.\r
-\r
-So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it\r
-was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper\r
-all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off\r
-of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk\r
-about selling Irish industries. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gob, that\r
-puts the bloody kybosh on it if old sloppy eyes is mucking up the show.\r
-Give us a bloody chance. God save Ireland from the likes of that bloody\r
-mouseabout. Mr Bloom with his argol bargol. And his old fellow before\r
-him perpetrating frauds, old Methusalem Bloom, the robbing bagman, that\r
-poisoned himself with the prussic acid after he swamping the country\r
-with his baubles and his penny diamonds. Loans by post on easy terms.\r
-Any amount of money advanced on note of hand. Distance no object. No\r
-security. Gob, he's like Lanty MacHale's goat that'd go a piece of the\r
-road with every one.\r
-\r
---Well, it's a fact, says John Wyse. And there's the man now that'll\r
-tell you all about it, Martin Cunningham.\r
-\r
-Sure enough the castle car drove up with Martin on it and Jack Power\r
-with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of\r
-the collector general's, an orangeman Blackburn does have on the\r
-registration and he drawing his pay or Crawford gallivanting around the\r
-country at the king's expense.\r
-\r
-Our travellers reached the rustic hostelry and alighted from their\r
-palfreys.\r
-\r
---Ho, varlet! cried he, who by his mien seemed the leader of the party.\r
-Saucy knave! To us!\r
-\r
-So saying he knocked loudly with his swordhilt upon the open lattice.\r
-\r
-Mine host came forth at the summons, girding him with his tabard.\r
-\r
---Give you good den, my masters, said he with an obsequious bow.\r
-\r
---Bestir thyself, sirrah! cried he who had knocked. Look to our steeds.\r
-And for ourselves give us of your best for ifaith we need it.\r
-\r
---Lackaday, good masters, said the host, my poor house has but a bare\r
-larder. I know not what to offer your lordships.\r
-\r
---How now, fellow? cried the second of the party, a man of pleasant\r
-countenance, So servest thou the king's messengers, master Taptun?\r
-\r
-An instantaneous change overspread the landlord's visage.\r
-\r
---Cry you mercy, gentlemen, he said humbly. An you be the king's\r
-messengers (God shield His Majesty!) you shall not want for aught. The\r
-king's friends (God bless His Majesty!) shall not go afasting in my\r
-house I warrant me.\r
-\r
---Then about! cried the traveller who had not spoken, a lusty\r
-trencherman by his aspect. Hast aught to give us?\r
-\r
-Mine host bowed again as he made answer:\r
-\r
---What say you, good masters, to a squab pigeon pasty, some collops of\r
-venison, a saddle of veal, widgeon with crisp hog's bacon, a boar's head\r
-with pistachios, a bason of jolly custard, a medlar tansy and a flagon\r
-of old Rhenish?\r
-\r
---Gadzooks! cried the last speaker. That likes me well. Pistachios!\r
-\r
---Aha! cried he of the pleasant countenance. A poor house and a bare\r
-larder, quotha! 'Tis a merry rogue.\r
-\r
-So in comes Martin asking where was Bloom.\r
-\r
---Where is he? says Lenehan. Defrauding widows and orphans.\r
-\r
---Isn't that a fact, says John Wyse, what I was telling the citizen\r
-about Bloom and the Sinn Fein?\r
-\r
---That's so, says Martin. Or so they allege.\r
-\r
---Who made those allegations? says Alf.\r
-\r
---I, says Joe. I'm the alligator.\r
-\r
---And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like\r
-the next fellow?\r
-\r
---Why not? says J. J., when he's quite sure which country it is.\r
-\r
---Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the\r
-hell is he? says Ned. Or who is he? No offence, Crofton.\r
-\r
---Who is Junius? says J. J.\r
-\r
---We don't want him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian.\r
-\r
---He's a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was\r
-he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that\r
-in the castle.\r
-\r
---Isn't he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power.\r
-\r
---Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag, the\r
-father's name that poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the\r
-father did.\r
-\r
---That's the new Messiah for Ireland! says the citizen. Island of saints\r
-and sages!\r
-\r
---Well, they're still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that\r
-matter so are we.\r
-\r
---Yes, says J. J., and every male that's born they think it may be their\r
-Messiah. And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till\r
-he knows if he's a father or a mother.\r
-\r
---Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan.\r
-\r
---O, by God, says Ned, you should have seen Bloom before that son of his\r
-that died was born. I met him one day in the south city markets buying a\r
-tin of Neave's food six weeks before the wife was delivered.\r
-\r
---_En ventre sa mère_, says J. J.\r
-\r
---Do you call that a man? says the citizen.\r
-\r
---I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe.\r
-\r
---Well, there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power.\r
-\r
---And who does he suspect? says the citizen.\r
-\r
-Gob, there's many a true word spoken in jest. One of those mixed\r
-middlings he is. Lying up in the hotel Pisser was telling me once a\r
-month with headache like a totty with her courses. Do you know what I'm\r
-telling you? It'd be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow the like\r
-of that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, so it\r
-would. Then sloping off with his five quid without putting up a pint of\r
-stuff like a man. Give us your blessing. Not as much as would blind your\r
-eye.\r
-\r
---Charity to the neighbour, says Martin. But where is he? We can't wait.\r
-\r
---A wolf in sheep's clothing, says the citizen. That's what he is. Virag\r
-from Hungary! Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God.\r
-\r
---Have you time for a brief libation, Martin? says Ned.\r
-\r
---Only one, says Martin. We must be quick. J. J. and S.\r
-\r
---You, Jack? Crofton? Three half ones, Terry.\r
-\r
---Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us,\r
-says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our\r
-shores.\r
-\r
---Well, says Martin, rapping for his glass. God bless all here is my\r
-prayer.\r
-\r
---Amen, says the citizen.\r
-\r
---And I'm sure He will, says Joe.\r
-\r
-And at the sound of the sacring bell, headed by a crucifer with\r
-acolytes, thurifers, boatbearers, readers, ostiarii, deacons and\r
-subdeacons, the blessed company drew nigh of mitred abbots and priors\r
-and guardians and monks and friars: the monks of Benedict of Spoleto,\r
-Carthusians and Camaldolesi, Cistercians and Olivetans, Oratorians\r
-and Vallombrosans, and the friars of Augustine, Brigittines,\r
-Premonstratensians, Servi, Trinitarians, and the children of Peter\r
-Nolasco: and therewith from Carmel mount the children of Elijah prophet\r
-led by Albert bishop and by Teresa of Avila, calced and other: and\r
-friars, brown and grey, sons of poor Francis, capuchins, cordeliers,\r
-minimes and observants and the daughters of Clara: and the sons of\r
-Dominic, the friars preachers, and the sons of Vincent: and the monks\r
-of S. Wolstan: and Ignatius his children: and the confraternity of the\r
-christian brothers led by the reverend brother Edmund Ignatius Rice. And\r
-after came all saints and martyrs, virgins and confessors: S. Cyr and\r
-S. Isidore Arator and S. James the Less and S. Phocas of Sinope and S.\r
-Julian Hospitator and S. Felix de Cantalice and S. Simon Stylites and\r
-S. Stephen Protomartyr and S. John of God and S. Ferreol and S. Leugarde\r
-and S. Theodotus and S. Vulmar and S. Richard and S. Vincent de Paul and\r
-S. Martin of Todi and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and\r
-S. Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence\r
-and S. Edward and S. Owen Caniculus and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous\r
-and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S.\r
-Synonymous and S. Laurence O'Toole and S. James of Dingle and\r
-Compostella and S. Columcille and S. Columba and S. Celestine and S.\r
-Colman and S. Kevin and S. Brendan and S. Frigidian and S. Senan and S.\r
-Fachtna and S. Columbanus and S. Gall and S. Fursey and S. Fintan and S.\r
-Fiacre and S. John Nepomuc and S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Ives of Brittany\r
-and S. Michan and S. Herman-Joseph and the three patrons of holy youth\r
-S. Aloysius Gonzaga and S. Stanislaus Kostka and S. John Berchmans\r
-and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S.\r
-Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr\r
-and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother\r
-Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S.\r
-Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and\r
-S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and\r
-the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S.\r
-Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. And all came\r
-with nimbi and aureoles and gloriae, bearing palms and harps and swords\r
-and olive crowns, in robes whereon were woven the blessed symbols of\r
-their efficacies, inkhorns, arrows, loaves, cruses, fetters, axes,\r
-trees, bridges, babes in a bathtub, shells, wallets, shears, keys,\r
-dragons, lilies, buckshot, beards, hogs, lamps, bellows, beehives,\r
-soupladles, stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline, bells, crutches,\r
-forceps, stags' horns, watertight boots, hawks, millstones, eyes on a\r
-dish, wax candles, aspergills, unicorns. And as they wended their way by\r
-Nelson's Pillar, Henry street, Mary street, Capel street, Little Britain\r
-street chanting the introit in _Epiphania Domini_ which beginneth\r
-_Surge, illuminare_ and thereafter most sweetly the gradual _Omnes_\r
-which saith _de Saba venient_ they did divers wonders such as casting\r
-out devils, raising the dead to life, multiplying fishes, healing the\r
-halt and the blind, discovering various articles which had been mislaid,\r
-interpreting and fulfilling the scriptures, blessing and prophesying.\r
-And last, beneath a canopy of cloth of gold came the reverend Father\r
-O'Flynn attended by Malachi and Patrick. And when the good fathers\r
-had reached the appointed place, the house of Bernard Kiernan and Co,\r
-limited, 8, 9 and 10 little Britain street, wholesale grocers, wine\r
-and brandy shippers, licensed fo the sale of beer, wine and spirits for\r
-consumption on the premises, the celebrant blessed the house and censed\r
-the mullioned windows and the groynes and the vaults and the arrises and\r
-the capitals and the pediments and the cornices and the engrailed arches\r
-and the spires and the cupolas and sprinkled the lintels thereof with\r
-blessed water and prayed that God might bless that house as he had\r
-blessed the house of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and make the angels of\r
-His light to inhabit therein. And entering he blessed the viands and the\r
-beverages and the company of all the blessed answered his prayers.\r
-\r
---_Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini._\r
-\r
---_Qui fecit coelum et terram._\r
-\r
---_Dominus vobiscum._\r
-\r
---_Et cum spiritu tuo._\r
-\r
-And he laid his hands upon that he blessed and gave thanks and he prayed\r
-and they all with him prayed:\r
-\r
---_Deus, cuius verbo sanctificantur omnia, benedictionem tuam effunde\r
-super creaturas istas: et praesta ut quisquis eis secundum legem et\r
-voluntatem Tuam cum gratiarum actione usus fuerit per invocationem\r
-sanctissimi nominis Tui corporis sanitatem et animae tutelam Te auctore\r
-percipiat per Christum Dominum nostrum._\r
-\r
---And so say all of us, says Jack.\r
-\r
---Thousand a year, Lambert, says Crofton or Crawford.\r
-\r
---Right, says Ned, taking up his John Jameson. And butter for fish.\r
-\r
-I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike when\r
-be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a hurry.\r
-\r
---I was just round at the courthouse, says he, looking for you. I hope\r
-I'm not...\r
-\r
---No, says Martin, we're ready.\r
-\r
-Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver.\r
-Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There's\r
-a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to\r
-five.\r
-\r
---Don't tell anyone, says the citizen,\r
-\r
---Beg your pardon, says he.\r
-\r
---Come on boys, says Martin, seeing it was looking blue. Come along now.\r
-\r
---Don't tell anyone, says the citizen, letting a bawl out of him. It's a\r
-secret.\r
-\r
-And the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.\r
-\r
---Bye bye all, says Martin.\r
-\r
-And he got them out as quick as he could, Jack Power and Crofton or\r
-whatever you call him and him in the middle of them letting on to be all\r
-at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car.\r
-\r
----Off with you, says\r
-\r
-Martin to the jarvey.\r
-\r
-The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the\r
-helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward\r
-with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew\r
-nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of\r
-the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning\r
-wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the\r
-equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them\r
-all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they\r
-ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did\r
-they come and set them, those willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And\r
-they laughed, sporting in a circle of their foam: and the bark clave the\r
-waves.\r
-\r
-But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the\r
-citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the\r
-dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and\r
-candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf\r
-round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.\r
-\r
---Let me alone, says he.\r
-\r
-And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he bawls\r
-out of him:\r
-\r
---Three cheers for Israel!\r
-\r
-Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ' sake\r
-and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's\r
-always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about\r
-bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it\r
-would.\r
-\r
-And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and\r
-Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf\r
-and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and\r
-the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit\r
-down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over\r
-his eye starts singing _If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew_ and\r
-a slut shouts out of her:\r
-\r
---Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!\r
-\r
-And says he:\r
-\r
---Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And\r
-the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.\r
-\r
---He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.\r
-\r
---Whose God? says the citizen.\r
-\r
---Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a\r
-jew like me.\r
-\r
-Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.\r
-\r
---By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy\r
-name.\r
-\r
-By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.\r
-\r
---Stop! Stop! says Joe.\r
-\r
-A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from\r
-the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid\r
-farewell to Nagyasagos uram Lipoti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander\r
-Thom's, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of his departure\r
-for the distant clime of Szazharminczbrojugulyas-Dugulas (Meadow of\r
-Murmuring Waters). The ceremony which went off with great _éclat_ was\r
-characterised by the most affecting cordiality. An illuminated scroll\r
-of ancient Irish vellum, the work of Irish artists, was presented to\r
-the distinguished phenomenologist on behalf of a large section of the\r
-community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver casket, tastefully\r
-executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work which reflects\r
-every credit on the makers, Messrs Jacob _agus_ Jacob. The departing\r
-guest was the recipient of a hearty ovation, many of those who were\r
-present being visibly moved when the select orchestra of Irish pipes\r
-struck up the wellknown strains of _Come back to Erin_, followed\r
-immediately by _Rakoczsy's March_. Tarbarrels and bonfires were lighted\r
-along the coastline of the four seas on the summits of the Hill of\r
-Howth, Three Rock Mountain, Sugarloaf, Bray Head, the mountains of\r
-Mourne, the Galtees, the Ox and Donegal and Sperrin peaks, the Nagles\r
-and the Bograghs, the Connemara hills, the reeks of M Gillicuddy, Slieve\r
-Aughty, Slieve Bernagh and Slieve Bloom. Amid cheers that rent the\r
-welkin, responded to by answering cheers from a big muster of\r
-henchmen on the distant Cambrian and Caledonian hills, the mastodontic\r
-pleasureship slowly moved away saluted by a final floral tribute from\r
-the representatives of the fair sex who were present in large numbers\r
-while, as it proceeded down the river, escorted by a flotilla of barges,\r
-the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute\r
-as were also those of the electrical power station at the\r
-Pigeonhouse and the Poolbeg Light. _Visszontlátásra, kedves baráton!\r
-Visszontlátásra!_ Gone but not forgotten.\r
-\r
-Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin\r
-anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he\r
-shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play in the Queen's\r
-royal theatre:\r
-\r
---Where is he till I murder him?\r
-\r
-And Ned and J. J. paralysed with the laughing.\r
-\r
---Bloody wars, says I, I'll be in for the last gospel.\r
-\r
-But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag's head round the other\r
-way and off with him.\r
-\r
---Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop!\r
-\r
-Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the\r
-sun was in his eyes or he'd have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it\r
-into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old\r
-mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and\r
-laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.\r
-\r
-The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The\r
-observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth\r
-grade of Mercalli's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar\r
-seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year\r
-of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have been\r
-that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay ward and\r
-parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods\r
-and one square pole or perch. All the lordly residences in the vicinity\r
-of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself,\r
-in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in\r
-progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to be\r
-feared all the occupants have been buried alive. From the reports of\r
-eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by\r
-a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character. An article of\r
-headgear since ascertained to belong to the much respected clerk of the\r
-crown and peace Mr George Fottrell and a silk umbrella with gold handle\r
-with the engraved initials, crest, coat of arms and house number of\r
-the erudite and worshipful chairman of quarter sessions sir Frederick\r
-Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, have been discovered by search parties\r
-in remote parts of the island respectively, the former on the third\r
-basaltic ridge of the giant's causeway, the latter embedded to the\r
-extent of one foot three inches in the sandy beach of Holeopen bay near\r
-the old head of Kinsale. Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed\r
-an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the\r
-atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest\r
-by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received\r
-from all parts of the different continents and the sovereign pontiff has\r
-been graciously pleased to decree that a special _missa pro defunctis_\r
-shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of each and every\r
-cathedral church of all the episcopal dioceses subject to the spiritual\r
-authority of the Holy See in suffrage of the souls of those faithful\r
-departed who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst.\r
-The work of salvage, removal of _débris,_ human remains etc has been\r
-entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159 Great Brunswick street,\r
-and Messrs T. and C. Martin, 77, 78, 79 and 80 North Wall, assisted by\r
-the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall's light infantry under the\r
-general supervision of H. R. H., rear admiral, the right honourable sir\r
-Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson, K. G., K. P., K. T., P. C., K.\r
-C. B., M. P, J. P., M. B., D. S. O., S. O. D., M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B.\r
-L., Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D., F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I. and F.\r
-R. C. S. I.\r
-\r
-You never saw the like of it in all your born puff. Gob, if he got that\r
-lottery ticket on the side of his poll he'd remember the gold cup, he\r
-would so, but begob the citizen would have been lagged for assault and\r
-battery and Joe for aiding and abetting. The jarvey saved his life by\r
-furious driving as sure as God made Moses. What? O, Jesus, he did. And\r
-he let a volley of oaths after him.\r
-\r
---Did I kill him, says he, or what?\r
-\r
-And he shouting to the bloody dog:\r
-\r
---After him, Garry! After him, boy!\r
-\r
-And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old\r
-sheepsface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his\r
-lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb.\r
-Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the value of it out of him, I promise\r
-you.\r
-\r
-When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld\r
-the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in\r
-the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment\r
-as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not\r
-look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: _Elijah!\r
-Elijah!_ And He answered with a main cry: _Abba! Adonai!_ And they\r
-beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend\r
-to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over\r
-Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious\r
-embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of\r
-all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud\r
-promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on\r
-the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on\r
-the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness\r
-the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to\r
-the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.\r
-\r
-The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening\r
-scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly. Many a time and\r
-oft were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy\r
-chat beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine, Cissy\r
-Caffrey and Edy Boardman with the baby in the pushcar and Tommy and\r
-Jacky Caffrey, two little curlyheaded boys, dressed in sailor suits with\r
-caps to match and the name H.M.S. Belleisle printed on both. For Tommy\r
-and Jacky Caffrey were twins, scarce four years old and very noisy and\r
-spoiled twins sometimes but for all that darling little fellows with\r
-bright merry faces and endearing ways about them. They were dabbling in\r
-the sand with their spades and buckets, building castles as children do,\r
-or playing with their big coloured ball, happy as the day was long. And\r
-Edy Boardman was rocking the chubby baby to and fro in the pushcar while\r
-that young gentleman fairly chuckled with delight. He was but eleven\r
-months and nine days old and, though still a tiny toddler, was just\r
-beginning to lisp his first babyish words. Cissy Caffrey bent over to\r
-him to tease his fat little plucks and the dainty dimple in his chin.\r
-\r
---Now, baby, Cissy Caffrey said. Say out big, big. I want a drink of\r
-water.\r
-\r
-And baby prattled after her:\r
-\r
---A jink a jink a jawbo.\r
-\r
-Cissy Caffrey cuddled the wee chap for she was awfully fond of children,\r
-so patient with little sufferers and Tommy Caffrey could never be got to\r
-take his castor oil unless it was Cissy Caffrey that held his nose and\r
-promised him the scatty heel of the loaf or brown bread with golden\r
-syrup on. What a persuasive power that girl had! But to be sure baby\r
-Boardman was as good as gold, a perfect little dote in his new fancy\r
-bib. None of your spoilt beauties, Flora MacFlimsy sort, was Cissy\r
-Caffrey. A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with\r
-a laugh in her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe\r
-red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme. And Edy Boardman laughed too at\r
-the quaint language of little brother.\r
-\r
-But just then there was a slight altercation between Master Tommy and\r
-Master Jacky. Boys will be boys and our two twins were no exception\r
-to this golden rule. The apple of discord was a certain castle of sand\r
-which Master Jacky had built and Master Tommy would have it right go\r
-wrong that it was to be architecturally improved by a frontdoor like the\r
-Martello tower had. But if Master Tommy was headstrong Master Jacky was\r
-selfwilled too and, true to the maxim that every little Irishman's house\r
-is his castle, he fell upon his hated rival and to such purpose that the\r
-wouldbe assailant came to grief and (alas to relate!) the coveted castle\r
-too. Needless to say the cries of discomfited Master Tommy drew the\r
-attention of the girl friends.\r
-\r
---Come here, Tommy, his sister called imperatively. At once! And you,\r
-Jacky, for shame to throw poor Tommy in the dirty sand. Wait till I\r
-catch you for that.\r
-\r
-His eyes misty with unshed tears Master Tommy came at her call for their\r
-big sister's word was law with the twins. And in a sad plight he was\r
-too after his misadventure. His little man-o'-war top and unmentionables\r
-were full of sand but Cissy was a past mistress in the art of smoothing\r
-over life's tiny troubles and very quickly not one speck of sand was to\r
-be seen on his smart little suit. Still the blue eyes were glistening\r
-with hot tears that would well up so she kissed away the hurtness and\r
-shook her hand at Master Jacky the culprit and said if she was near him\r
-she wouldn't be far from him, her eyes dancing in admonition.\r
-\r
---Nasty bold Jacky! she cried.\r
-\r
-She put an arm round the little mariner and coaxed winningly:\r
-\r
---What's your name? Butter and cream?\r
-\r
---Tell us who is your sweetheart, spoke Edy Boardman. Is Cissy your\r
-sweetheart?\r
-\r
---Nao, tearful Tommy said.\r
-\r
---Is Edy Boardman your sweetheart? Cissy queried.\r
-\r
---Nao, Tommy said.\r
-\r
---I know, Edy Boardman said none too amiably with an arch glance from\r
-her shortsighted eyes. I know who is Tommy's sweetheart. Gerty is\r
-Tommy's sweetheart.\r
-\r
---Nao, Tommy said on the verge of tears.\r
-\r
-Cissy's quick motherwit guessed what was amiss and she whispered to\r
-Edy Boardman to take him there behind the pushcar where the gentleman\r
-couldn't see and to mind he didn't wet his new tan shoes.\r
-\r
-But who was Gerty?\r
-\r
-Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought,\r
-gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen\r
-of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced\r
-beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was\r
-more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful,\r
-inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking\r
-of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch's\r
-female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to\r
-get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost\r
-spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine\r
-Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster\r
-with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments\r
-could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves\r
-in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once to\r
-Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers drawn\r
-with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to\r
-time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not to let on whatever\r
-she did that it was her that told her or she'd never speak to her\r
-again. No. Honour where honour is due. There was an innate refinement,\r
-a languid queenly _hauteur_ about Gerty which was unmistakably evidenced\r
-in her delicate hands and higharched instep. Had kind fate but willed\r
-her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in her own right and had\r
-she only received the benefit of a good education Gerty MacDowell might\r
-easily have held her own beside any lady in the land and have seen\r
-herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors\r
-at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to her.\r
-Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her\r
-softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning,\r
-that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm\r
-few could resist. Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty's were of\r
-the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive\r
-brows. Time was when those brows were not so silkily seductive. It\r
-was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the\r
-Princess Novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which\r
-gave that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders\r
-of fashion, and she had never regretted it. Then there was blushing\r
-scientifically cured and how to be tall increase your height and you\r
-have a beautiful face but your nose? That would suit Mrs Dignam because\r
-she had a button one. But Gerty's crowning glory was her wealth of\r
-wonderful hair. It was dark brown with a natural wave in it. She had cut\r
-it that very morning on account of the new moon and it nestled about\r
-her pretty head in a profusion of luxuriant clusters and pared her nails\r
-too, Thursday for wealth. And just now at Edy's words as a telltale\r
-flush, delicate as the faintest rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she\r
-looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness that of a surety God's\r
-fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal.\r
-\r
-For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast eyes. She\r
-was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue.\r
-Inclination prompted her to speak out: dignity told her to be silent.\r
-The pretty lips pouted awhile but then she glanced up and broke out into\r
-a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May\r
-morning. She knew right well, no-one better, what made squinty Edy\r
-say that because of him cooling in his attentions when it was simply a\r
-lovers' quarrel. As per usual somebody's nose was out of joint about the\r
-boy that had the bicycle off the London bridge road always riding up\r
-and down in front of her window. Only now his father kept him in in the\r
-evenings studying hard to get an exhibition in the intermediate that was\r
-on and he was going to go to Trinity college to study for a doctor when\r
-he left the high school like his brother W. E. Wylie who was racing\r
-in the bicycle races in Trinity college university. Little recked he\r
-perhaps for what she felt, that dull aching void in her heart sometimes,\r
-piercing to the core. Yet he was young and perchance he might learn\r
-to love her in time. They were protestants in his family and of course\r
-Gerty knew Who came first and after Him the Blessed Virgin and then\r
-Saint Joseph. But he was undeniably handsome with an exquisite nose and\r
-he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the shape of his head too\r
-at the back without his cap on that she would know anywhere something\r
-off the common and the way he turned the bicycle at the lamp with his\r
-hands off the bars and also the nice perfume of those good cigarettes\r
-and besides they were both of a size too he and she and that was why Edy\r
-Boardman thought she was so frightfully clever because he didn't go and\r
-ride up and down in front of her bit of a garden.\r
-\r
-Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary of\r
-Dame Fashion for she felt that there was just a might that he might be\r
-out. A neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes (because it\r
-was expected in the _Lady's Pictorial_ that electric blue would be worn)\r
-with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket (in\r
-which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her\r
-favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy\r
-threequarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim graceful figure\r
-to perfection. She wore a coquettish little love of a hat of wideleaved\r
-nigger straw contrast trimmed with an underbrim of eggblue chenille and\r
-at the side a butterfly bow of silk to tone. All Tuesday week afternoon\r
-she was hunting to match that chenille but at last she found what she\r
-wanted at Clery's summer sales, the very it, slightly shopsoiled but you\r
-would never notice, seven fingers two and a penny. She did it up all by\r
-herself and what joy was hers when she tried it on then, smiling at the\r
-lovely reflection which the mirror gave back to her! And when she put\r
-it on the waterjug to keep the shape she knew that that would take the\r
-shine out of some people she knew. Her shoes were the newest thing in\r
-footwear (Edy Boardman prided herself that she was very _petite_ but she\r
-never had a foot like Gerty MacDowell, a five, and never would ash,\r
-oak or elm) with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle over\r
-her higharched instep. Her wellturned ankle displayed its perfect\r
-proportions beneath her skirt and just the proper amount and no more of\r
-her shapely limbs encased in finespun hose with highspliced heels and\r
-wide garter tops. As for undies they were Gerty's chief care and who\r
-that knows the fluttering hopes and fears of sweet seventeen (though\r
-Gerty would never see seventeen again) can find it in his heart to\r
-blame her? She had four dinky sets with awfully pretty stitchery,\r
-three garments and nighties extra, and each set slotted with different\r
-coloured ribbons, rosepink, pale blue, mauve and peagreen, and she aired\r
-them herself and blued them when they came home from the wash and ironed\r
-them and she had a brickbat to keep the iron on because she wouldn't\r
-trust those washerwomen as far as she'd see them scorching the things.\r
-She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own colour\r
-and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere on her because\r
-the green she wore that day week brought grief because his father\r
-brought him in to study for the intermediate exhibition and because\r
-she thought perhaps he might be out because when she was dressing that\r
-morning she nearly slipped up the old pair on her inside out and that\r
-was for luck and lovers' meeting if you put those things on inside\r
-out or if they got untied that he was thinking about you so long as it\r
-wasn't of a Friday.\r
-\r
-And yet and yet! That strained look on her face! A gnawing sorrow is\r
-there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give\r
-worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where,\r
-giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup\r
-feelingsthough not too much because she knew how to cry nicely before\r
-the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it said. The paly light of evening\r
-falls upon a face infinitely sad and wistful. Gerty MacDowell yearns\r
-in vain. Yes, she had known from the very first that her daydream of a\r
-marriage has been arranged and the weddingbells ringing for Mrs Reggy\r
-Wylie T. C. D. (because the one who married the elder brother would be\r
-Mrs Wylie) and in the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was\r
-wearing a sumptuous confection of grey trimmed with expensive blue fox\r
-was not to be. He was too young to understand. He would not believe in\r
-love, a woman's birthright. The night of the party long ago in Stoer's\r
-(he was still in short trousers) when they were alone and he stole\r
-an arm round her waist she went white to the very lips. He called her\r
-little one in a strangely husky voice and snatched a half kiss (the\r
-first!) but it was only the end of her nose and then he hastened from\r
-the room with a remark about refreshments. Impetuous fellow! Strength of\r
-character had never been Reggy Wylie's strong point and he who would\r
-woo and win Gerty MacDowell must be a man among men. But waiting, always\r
-waiting to be asked and it was leap year too and would soon be over. No\r
-prince charming is her beau ideal to lay a rare and wondrous love at her\r
-feet but rather a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found\r
-his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly flecked with grey, and who would\r
-understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all\r
-the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long\r
-long kiss. It would be like heaven. For such a one she yearns this balmy\r
-summer eve. With all the heart of her she longs to be his only, his\r
-affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness in health, till death\r
-us two part, from this to this day forward.\r
-\r
-And while Edy Boardman was with little Tommy behind the pushcar she was\r
-just thinking would the day ever come when she could call herself his\r
-little wife to be. Then they could talk about her till they went blue in\r
-the face, Bertha Supple too, and Edy, little spitfire, because she would\r
-be twentytwo in November. She would care for him with creature comforts\r
-too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that\r
-feeling of hominess. Her griddlecakes done to a goldenbrown hue and\r
-queen Ann's pudding of delightful creaminess had won golden opinions\r
-from all because she had a lucky hand also for lighting a fire, dredge\r
-in the fine selfraising flour and always stir in the same direction,\r
-then cream the milk and sugar and whisk well the white of eggs though\r
-she didn't like the eating part when there were any people that made her\r
-shy and often she wondered why you couldn't eat something poetical like\r
-violets or roses and they would have a beautifully appointed drawingroom\r
-with pictures and engravings and the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap's\r
-lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked it was so human and chintz\r
-covers for the chairs and that silver toastrack in Clery's summer\r
-jumble sales like they have in rich houses. He would be tall with\r
-broad shoulders (she had always admired tall men for a husband) with\r
-glistening white teeth under his carefully trimmed sweeping moustache\r
-and they would go on the continent for their honeymoon (three wonderful\r
-weeks!) and then, when they settled down in a nice snug and cosy little\r
-homely house, every morning they would both have brekky, simple but\r
-perfectly served, for their own two selves and before he went out to\r
-business he would give his dear little wifey a good hearty hug and gaze\r
-for a moment deep down into her eyes.\r
-\r
-Edy Boardman asked Tommy Caffrey was he done and he said yes so then she\r
-buttoned up his little knickerbockers for him and told him to run off\r
-and play with Jacky and to be good now and not to fight. But Tommy said\r
-he wanted the ball and Edy told him no that baby was playing with the\r
-ball and if he took it there'd be wigs on the green but Tommy said it\r
-was his ball and he wanted his ball and he pranced on the ground, if\r
-you please. The temper of him! O, he was a man already was little Tommy\r
-Caffrey since he was out of pinnies. Edy told him no, no and to be off\r
-now with him and she told Cissy Caffrey not to give in to him.\r
-\r
---You're not my sister, naughty Tommy said. It's my ball.\r
-\r
-But Cissy Caffrey told baby Boardman to look up, look up high at her\r
-finger and she snatched the ball quickly and threw it along the sand and\r
-Tommy after it in full career, having won the day.\r
-\r
---Anything for a quiet life, laughed Ciss.\r
-\r
-And she tickled tiny tot's two cheeks to make him forget and played\r
-here's the lord mayor, here's his two horses, here's his gingerbread\r
-carriage and here he walks in, chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper\r
-chin. But Edy got as cross as two sticks about him getting his own way\r
-like that from everyone always petting him.\r
-\r
---I'd like to give him something, she said, so I would, where I won't\r
-say.\r
-\r
---On the beeoteetom, laughed Cissy merrily.\r
-\r
-Gerty MacDowell bent down her head and crimsoned at the idea of Cissy\r
-saying an unladylike thing like that out loud she'd be ashamed of her\r
-life to say, flushing a deep rosy red, and Edy Boardman said she was\r
-sure the gentleman opposite heard what she said. But not a pin cared\r
-Ciss.\r
-\r
---Let him! she said with a pert toss of her head and a piquant tilt of\r
-her nose. Give it to him too on the same place as quick as I'd look at\r
-him.\r
-\r
-Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls. You had to laugh at her sometimes.\r
-For instance when she asked you would you have some more Chinese tea and\r
-jaspberry ram and when she drew the jugs too and the men's faces on her\r
-nails with red ink make you split your sides or when she wanted to go\r
-where you know she said she wanted to run and pay a visit to the Miss\r
-White. That was just like Cissycums. O, and will you ever forget her the\r
-evening she dressed up in her father's suit and hat and the burned cork\r
-moustache and walked down Tritonville road, smoking a cigarette. There\r
-was none to come up to her for fun. But she was sincerity itself, one of\r
-the bravest and truest hearts heaven ever made, not one of your twofaced\r
-things, too sweet to be wholesome.\r
-\r
-And then there came out upon the air the sound of voices and the pealing\r
-anthem of the organ. It was the men's temperance retreat conducted\r
-by the missioner, the reverend John Hughes S. J., rosary, sermon and\r
-benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. They were there gathered\r
-together without distinction of social class (and a most edifying\r
-spectacle it was to see) in that simple fane beside the waves, after the\r
-storms of this weary world, kneeling before the feet of the immaculate,\r
-reciting the litany of Our Lady of Loreto, beseeching her to intercede\r
-for them, the old familiar words, holy Mary, holy virgin of virgins. How\r
-sad to poor Gerty's ears! Had her father only avoided the clutches of\r
-the demon drink, by taking the pledge or those powders the drink habit\r
-cured in Pearson's Weekly, she might now be rolling in her carriage,\r
-second to none. Over and over had she told herself that as she mused by\r
-the dying embers in a brown study without the lamp because she hated two\r
-lights or oftentimes gazing out of the window dreamily by the hour at\r
-the rain falling on the rusty bucket, thinking. But that vile decoction\r
-which has ruined so many hearths and homes had cist its shadow over her\r
-childhood days. Nay, she had even witnessed in the home circle deeds of\r
-violence caused by intemperance and had seen her own father, a prey to\r
-the fumes of intoxication, forget himself completely for if there was\r
-one thing of all things that Gerty knew it was that the man who lifts\r
-his hand to a woman save in the way of kindness, deserves to be branded\r
-as the lowest of the low.\r
-\r
-And still the voices sang in supplication to the Virgin most powerful,\r
-Virgin most merciful. And Gerty, rapt in thought, scarce saw or heard\r
-her companions or the twins at their boyish gambols or the gentleman\r
-off Sandymount green that Cissy Caffrey called the man that was so like\r
-himself passing along the strand taking a short walk. You never saw him\r
-any way screwed but still and for all that she would not like him for a\r
-father because he was too old or something or on account of his face\r
-(it was a palpable case of Doctor Fell) or his carbuncly nose with the\r
-pimples on it and his sandy moustache a bit white under his nose. Poor\r
-father! With all his faults she loved him still when he sang _Tell me,\r
-Mary, how to woo thee_ or _My love and cottage near Rochelle_ and they\r
-had stewed cockles and lettuce with Lazenby's salad dressing for\r
-supper and when he sang _The moon hath raised_ with Mr Dignam that\r
-died suddenly and was buried, God have mercy on him, from a stroke. Her\r
-mother's birthday that was and Charley was home on his holidays and Tom\r
-and Mr Dignam and Mrs and Patsy and Freddy Dignam and they were to have\r
-had a group taken. No-one would have thought the end was so near. Now he\r
-was laid to rest. And her mother said to him to let that be a warning to\r
-him for the rest of his days and he couldn't even go to the funeral on\r
-account of the gout and she had to go into town to bring him the\r
-letters and samples from his office about Catesby's cork lino, artistic,\r
-standard designs, fit for a palace, gives tiptop wear and always bright\r
-and cheery in the home.\r
-\r
-A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the\r
-house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in\r
-gold. And when her mother had those raging splitting headaches who was\r
-it rubbed the menthol cone on her forehead but Gerty though she didn't\r
-like her mother's taking pinches of snuff and that was the only single\r
-thing they ever had words about, taking snuff. Everyone thought the\r
-world of her for her gentle ways. It was Gerty who turned off the gas at\r
-the main every night and it was Gerty who tacked up on the wall of that\r
-place where she never forgot every fortnight the chlorate of lime Mr\r
-Tunney the grocer's christmas almanac, the picture of halcyon days\r
-where a young gentleman in the costume they used to wear then with a\r
-threecornered hat was offering a bunch of flowers to his ladylove with\r
-oldtime chivalry through her lattice window. You could see there was a\r
-story behind it. The colours were done something lovely. She was in\r
-a soft clinging white in a studied attitude and the gentleman was in\r
-chocolate and he looked a thorough aristocrat. She often looked at them\r
-dreamily when she went there for a certain purpose and felt her own\r
-arms that were white and soft just like hers with the sleeves back\r
-and thought about those times because she had found out in Walker's\r
-pronouncing dictionary that belonged to grandpapa Giltrap about the\r
-halcyon days what they meant.\r
-\r
-The twins were now playing in the most approved brotherly fashion\r
-till at last Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was\r
-no getting behind that deliberately kicked the ball as hard as ever he\r
-could down towards the seaweedy rocks. Needless to say poor Tommy was\r
-not slow to voice his dismay but luckily the gentleman in black who was\r
-sitting there by himself came gallantly to the rescue and intercepted\r
-the ball. Our two champions claimed their plaything with lusty cries and\r
-to avoid trouble Cissy Caffrey called to the gentleman to throw it to\r
-her please. The gentleman aimed the ball once or twice and then threw\r
-it up the strand towards Cissy Caffrey but it rolled down the slope and\r
-stopped right under Gerty's skirt near the little pool by the rock. The\r
-twins clamoured again for it and Cissy told her to kick it away and\r
-let them fight for it so Gerty drew back her foot but she wished their\r
-stupid ball hadn't come rolling down to her and she gave a kick but she\r
-missed and Edy and Cissy laughed.\r
-\r
---If you fail try again, Edy Boardman said.\r
-\r
-Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip. A delicate pink crept into her\r
-pretty cheek but she was determined to let them see so she just lifted\r
-her skirt a little but just enough and took good aim and gave the ball a\r
-jolly good kick and it went ever so far and the two twins after it down\r
-towards the shingle. Pure jealousy of course it was nothing else to draw\r
-attention on account of the gentleman opposite looking. She felt the\r
-warm flush, a danger signal always with Gerty MacDowell, surging and\r
-flaming into her cheeks. Till then they had only exchanged glances of\r
-the most casual but now under the brim of her new hat she ventured a\r
-look at him and the face that met her gaze there in the twilight, wan\r
-and strangely drawn, seemed to her the saddest she had ever seen.\r
-\r
-Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted\r
-and with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of\r
-original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray\r
-for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. And\r
-careworn hearts were there and toilers for their daily bread and many\r
-who had erred and wandered, their eyes wet with contrition but for all\r
-that bright with hope for the reverend father Father Hughes had told\r
-them what the great saint Bernard said in his famous prayer of Mary, the\r
-most pious Virgin's intercessory power that it was not recorded in any\r
-age that those who implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned\r
-by her.\r
-\r
-The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of\r
-childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy Caffrey played with\r
-baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep\r
-she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy\r
-gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah! and, my word,\r
-didn't the little chap enjoy that! And then she told him to say papa.\r
-\r
---Say papa, baby. Say pa pa pa pa pa pa pa.\r
-\r
-And baby did his level best to say it for he was very intelligent for\r
-eleven months everyone said and big for his age and the picture of\r
-health, a perfect little bunch of love, and he would certainly turn out\r
-to be something great, they said.\r
-\r
---Haja ja ja haja.\r
-\r
-Cissy wiped his little mouth with the dribbling bib and wanted him to\r
-sit up properly and say pa pa pa but when she undid the strap she cried\r
-out, holy saint Denis, that he was possing wet and to double the half\r
-blanket the other way under him. Of course his infant majesty was most\r
-obstreperous at such toilet formalities and he let everyone know it:\r
-\r
---Habaa baaaahabaaa baaaa.\r
-\r
-And two great big lovely big tears coursing down his cheeks. It was all\r
-no use soothering him with no, nono, baby, no and telling him about the\r
-geegee and where was the puffpuff but Ciss, always readywitted, gave\r
-him in his mouth the teat of the suckingbottle and the young heathen was\r
-quickly appeased.\r
-\r
-Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out\r
-of that and not get on her nerves, no hour to be out, and the little\r
-brats of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the\r
-paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured\r
-chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the\r
-evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to\r
-hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned\r
-in the church like a kind of waft. And while she gazed her heart went\r
-pitapat. Yes, it was her he was looking at, and there was meaning in his\r
-look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through\r
-and through, read her very soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly\r
-expressive, but could you trust them? People were so queer. She could\r
-see at once by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he\r
-was a foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the\r
-matinee idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she\r
-wasn't stagestruck like Winny Rippingham that wanted they two to always\r
-dress the same on account of a play but she could not see whether he had\r
-an aquiline nose or a slightly _retroussé_ from where he was sitting.\r
-He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting\r
-sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know what\r
-it was. He was looking up so intently, so still, and he saw her kick the\r
-ball and perhaps he could see the bright steel buckles of her shoes if\r
-she swung them like that thoughtfully with the toes down. She was glad\r
-that something told her to put on the transparent stockings thinking\r
-Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of which\r
-she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on\r
-her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he\r
-was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him,\r
-her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had\r
-suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had\r
-been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a\r
-protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved\r
-her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm. She was a\r
-womanly woman not like other flighty girls unfeminine he had known,\r
-those cyclists showing off what they hadn't got and she just yearned to\r
-know all, to forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her,\r
-make him forget the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her\r
-gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her,\r
-his ownest girlie, for herself alone.\r
-\r
-Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the afflicted. _Ora pro nobis_. Well\r
-has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy\r
-can never be lost or cast away: and fitly is she too a haven of refuge\r
-for the afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced\r
-her own heart. Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the\r
-stained glass windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue\r
-banners of the blessed Virgin's sodality and Father Conroy was helping\r
-Canon O'Hanlon at the altar, carrying things in and out with his eyes\r
-cast down. He looked almost a saint and his confessionbox was so quiet\r
-and clean and dark and his hands were just like white wax and if ever\r
-she became a Dominican nun in their white habit perhaps he might come to\r
-the convent for the novena of Saint Dominic. He told her that time when\r
-she told him about that in confession, crimsoning up to the roots of her\r
-hair for fear he could see, not to be troubled because that was only the\r
-voice of nature and we were all subject to nature's laws, he said, in\r
-this life and that that was no sin because that came from the nature of\r
-woman instituted by God, he said, and that Our Blessed Lady herself said\r
-to the archangel Gabriel be it done unto me according to Thy Word. He\r
-was so kind and holy and often and often she thought and thought could\r
-she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered floral design for him as a\r
-present or a clock but they had a clock she noticed on the mantelpiece\r
-white and gold with a canarybird that came out of a little house to tell\r
-the time the day she went there about the flowers for the forty hours'\r
-adoration because it was hard to know what sort of a present to give or\r
-perhaps an album of illuminated views of Dublin or some place.\r
-\r
-The exasperating little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky\r
-threw the ball out towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little\r
-monkeys common as ditchwater. Someone ought to take them and give them\r
-a good hiding for themselves to keep them in their places, the both of\r
-them. And Cissy and Edy shouted after them to come back because they\r
-were afraid the tide might come in on them and be drowned.\r
-\r
---Jacky! Tommy!\r
-\r
-Not they! What a great notion they had! So Cissy said it was the very\r
-last time she'd ever bring them out. She jumped up and called them and\r
-she ran down the slope past him, tossing her hair behind her which had\r
-a good enough colour if there had been more of it but with all the\r
-thingamerry she was always rubbing into it she couldn't get it to grow\r
-long because it wasn't natural so she could just go and throw her hat at\r
-it. She ran with long gandery strides it was a wonder she didn't rip up\r
-her skirt at the side that was too tight on her because there was a lot\r
-of the tomboy about Cissy Caffrey and she was a forward piece whenever\r
-she thought she had a good opportunity to show and just because she was\r
-a good runner she ran like that so that he could see all the end of her\r
-petticoat running and her skinny shanks up as far as possible. It\r
-would have served her just right if she had tripped up over something\r
-accidentally on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to\r
-make her look tall and got a fine tumble. _Tableau!_ That would have\r
-been a very charming expose for a gentleman like that to witness.\r
-\r
-Queen of angels, queen of patriarchs, queen of prophets, of all saints,\r
-they prayed, queen of the most holy rosary and then Father Conroy handed\r
-the thurible to Canon O'Hanlon and he put in the incense and censed the\r
-Blessed Sacrament and Cissy Caffrey caught the two twins and she was\r
-itching to give them a ringing good clip on the ear but she didn't\r
-because she thought he might be watching but she never made a bigger\r
-mistake in all her life because Gerty could see without looking that\r
-he never took his eyes off of her and then Canon O'Hanlon handed the\r
-thurible back to Father Conroy and knelt down looking up at the Blessed\r
-Sacrament and the choir began to sing the _Tantum ergo_ and she just\r
-swung her foot in and out in time as the music rose and fell to\r
-the _Tantumer gosa cramen tum_. Three and eleven she paid for those\r
-stockings in Sparrow's of George's street on the Tuesday, no the Monday\r
-before Easter and there wasn't a brack on them and that was what he\r
-was looking at, transparent, and not at her insignificant ones that had\r
-neither shape nor form (the cheek of her!) because he had eyes in his\r
-head to see the difference for himself.\r
-\r
-Cissy came up along the strand with the two twins and their ball with\r
-her hat anyhow on her to one side after her run and she did look a\r
-streel tugging the two kids along with the flimsy blouse she bought only\r
-a fortnight before like a rag on her back and a bit of her petticoat\r
-hanging like a caricature. Gerty just took off her hat for a moment to\r
-settle her hair and a prettier, a daintier head of nutbrown tresses was\r
-never seen on a girl's shoulders--a radiant little vision, in sooth,\r
-almost maddening in its sweetness. You would have to travel many a long\r
-mile before you found a head of hair the like of that. She could almost\r
-see the swift answering flash of admiration in his eyes that set her\r
-tingling in every nerve. She put on her hat so that she could see from\r
-underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath\r
-caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eying her as a\r
-snake eyes its prey. Her woman's instinct told her that she had raised\r
-the devil in him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from throat\r
-to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose.\r
-\r
-Edy Boardman was noticing it too because she was squinting at Gerty,\r
-half smiling, with her specs like an old maid, pretending to nurse the\r
-baby. Irritable little gnat she was and always would be and that was why\r
-no-one could get on with her poking her nose into what was no concern of\r
-hers. And she said to Gerty:\r
-\r
---A penny for your thoughts.\r
-\r
---What? replied Gerty with a smile reinforced by the whitest of teeth. I\r
-was only wondering was it late.\r
-\r
-Because she wished to goodness they'd take the snottynosed twins and\r
-their babby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just\r
-gave a gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy\r
-asked her the time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half\r
-past kissing time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because\r
-they were told to be in early.\r
-\r
---Wait, said Cissy, I'll run ask my uncle Peter over there what's the\r
-time by his conundrum.\r
-\r
-So over she went and when he saw her coming she could see him take his\r
-hand out of his pocket, getting nervous, and beginning to play with his\r
-watchchain, looking up at the church. Passionate nature though he was\r
-Gerty could see that he had enormous control over himself. One moment he\r
-had been there, fascinated by a loveliness that made him gaze, and the\r
-next moment it was the quiet gravefaced gentleman, selfcontrol expressed\r
-in every line of his distinguishedlooking figure.\r
-\r
-Cissy said to excuse her would he mind please telling her what was the\r
-right time and Gerty could see him taking out his watch, listening to it\r
-and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his\r
-watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the\r
-sun was set. His voice had a cultured ring in it and though he spoke in\r
-measured accents there was a suspicion of a quiver in the mellow tones.\r
-Cissy said thanks and came back with her tongue out and said uncle said\r
-his waterworks were out of order.\r
-\r
-Then they sang the second verse of the _Tantum ergo_ and Canon O'Hanlon\r
-got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told\r
-Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire to the\r
-flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right and she could\r
-see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she\r
-swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he\r
-could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch\r
-or whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands\r
-back into his pockets. She felt a kind of a sensation rushing all over\r
-her and she knew by the feel of her scalp and that irritation against\r
-her stays that that thing must be coming on because the last time too\r
-was when she clipped her hair on account of the moon. His dark eyes\r
-fixed themselves on her again drinking in her every contour, literally\r
-worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a\r
-man's passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man's face.\r
-It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it.\r
-\r
-Edy began to get ready to go and it was high time for her and Gerty\r
-noticed that that little hint she gave had had the desired effect\r
-because it was a long way along the strand to where there was the place\r
-to push up the pushcar and Cissy took off the twins' caps and tidied\r
-their hair to make herself attractive of course and Canon O'Hanlon stood\r
-up with his cope poking up at his neck and Father Conroy handed him the\r
-card to read off and he read out _Panem de coelo praestitisti eis_ and\r
-Edy and Cissy were talking about the time all the time and asking her\r
-but Gerty could pay them back in their own coin and she just answered\r
-with scathing politeness when Edy asked her was she heartbroken about\r
-her best boy throwing her over. Gerty winced sharply. A brief cold blaze\r
-shone from her eyes that spoke volumes of scorn immeasurable. It hurt--O\r
-yes, it cut deep because Edy had her own quiet way of saying things\r
-like that she knew would wound like the confounded little cat she was.\r
-Gerty's lips parted swiftly to frame the word but she fought back\r
-the sob that rose to her throat, so slim, so flawless, so beautifully\r
-moulded it seemed one an artist might have dreamed of. She had loved him\r
-better than he knew. Lighthearted deceiver and fickle like all his sex\r
-he would never understand what he had meant to her and for an instant\r
-there was in the blue eyes a quick stinging of tears. Their eyes were\r
-probing her mercilessly but with a brave effort she sparkled back in\r
-sympathy as she glanced at her new conquest for them to see.\r
-\r
---O, responded Gerty, quick as lightning, laughing, and the proud head\r
-flashed up. I can throw my cap at who I like because it's leap year.\r
-\r
-Her words rang out crystalclear, more musical than the cooing of the\r
-ringdove, but they cut the silence icily. There was that in her young\r
-voice that told that she was not a one to be lightly trifled with. As\r
-for Mr Reggy with his swank and his bit of money she could just chuck\r
-him aside as if he was so much filth and never again would she cast as\r
-much as a second thought on him and tear his silly postcard into a dozen\r
-pieces. And if ever after he dared to presume she could give him one\r
-look of measured scorn that would make him shrivel up on the spot. Miss\r
-puny little Edy's countenance fell to no slight extent and Gerty could\r
-see by her looking as black as thunder that she was simply in a towering\r
-rage though she hid it, the little kinnatt, because that shaft had\r
-struck home for her petty jealousy and they both knew that she was\r
-something aloof, apart, in another sphere, that she was not of them and\r
-never would be and there was somebody else too that knew it and saw it\r
-so they could put that in their pipe and smoke it.\r
-\r
-Edy straightened up baby Boardman to get ready to go and Cissy tucked in\r
-the ball and the spades and buckets and it was high time too because the\r
-sandman was on his way for Master Boardman junior. And Cissy told him\r
-too that billy winks was coming and that baby was to go deedaw and baby\r
-looked just too ducky, laughing up out of his gleeful eyes, and Cissy\r
-poked him like that out of fun in his wee fat tummy and baby, without as\r
-much as by your leave, sent up his compliments to all and sundry on to\r
-his brandnew dribbling bib.\r
-\r
---O my! Puddeny pie! protested Ciss. He has his bib destroyed.\r
-\r
-The slight _contretemps_ claimed her attention but in two twos she set\r
-that little matter to rights.\r
-\r
-Gerty stifled a smothered exclamation and gave a nervous cough and Edy\r
-asked what and she was just going to tell her to catch it while it was\r
-flying but she was ever ladylike in her deportment so she simply passed\r
-it off with consummate tact by saying that that was the benediction\r
-because just then the bell rang out from the steeple over the quiet\r
-seashore because Canon O'Hanlon was up on the altar with the veil that\r
-Father Conroy put round his shoulders giving the benediction with the\r
-Blessed Sacrament in his hands.\r
-\r
-How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse\r
-of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same\r
-time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither,\r
-thither, with a tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of\r
-the lighthouses so picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of\r
-paints because it was easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter\r
-would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along\r
-by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked and lighting the\r
-lamp near her window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like\r
-she read in that book _The Lamplighter_ by Miss Cummins, author of\r
-_Mabel Vaughan_ and other tales. For Gerty had her dreams that no-one\r
-knew of. She loved to read poetry and when she got a keepsake from\r
-Bertha Supple of that lovely confession album with the coralpink cover\r
-to write her thoughts in she laid it in the drawer of her toilettable\r
-which, though it did not err on the side of luxury, was scrupulously\r
-neat and clean. It was there she kept her girlish treasure trove, the\r
-tortoiseshell combs, her child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the\r
-eyebrowleine, her alabaster pouncetbox and the ribbons to change\r
-when her things came home from the wash and there were some beautiful\r
-thoughts written in it in violet ink that she bought in Hely's of Dame\r
-Street for she felt that she too could write poetry if she could only\r
-express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that\r
-she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the\r
-potherbs. _Art thou real, my ideal?_ it was called by Louis J Walsh,\r
-Magherafelt, and after there was something about _twilight, wilt thou\r
-ever?_ and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient\r
-loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears for she felt that\r
-the years were slipping by for her, one by one, and but for that one\r
-shortcoming she knew she need fear no competition and that was an\r
-accident coming down Dalkey hill and she always tried to conceal it.\r
-But it must end, she felt. If she saw that magic lure in his eyes there\r
-would be no holding back for her. Love laughs at locksmiths. She\r
-would make the great sacrifice. Her every effort would be to share his\r
-thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his\r
-days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was\r
-dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife\r
-or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land\r
-of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind.\r
-But even if--what then? Would it make a very great difference? From\r
-everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively\r
-recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the\r
-accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and\r
-coarse men with no respect for a girl's honour, degrading the sex and\r
-being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be\r
-just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other\r
-in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess. Perhaps it was\r
-an old flame he was in mourning for from the days beyond recall. She\r
-thought she understood. She would try to understand him because men were\r
-so different. The old love was waiting, waiting with little white\r
-hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would\r
-follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he\r
-was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was\r
-the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be\r
-wild, untrammelled, free.\r
-\r
-Canon O'Hanlon put the Blessed Sacrament back into the tabernacle and\r
-genuflected and the choir sang _Laudate Dominum omnes gentes_ and then\r
-he locked the tabernacle door because the benediction was over and\r
-Father Conroy handed him his hat to put on and crosscat Edy asked wasn't\r
-she coming but Jacky Caffrey called out:\r
-\r
---O, look, Cissy!\r
-\r
-And they all looked was it sheet lightning but Tommy saw it too over the\r
-trees beside the church, blue and then green and purple.\r
-\r
---It's fireworks, Cissy Caffrey said.\r
-\r
-And they all ran down the strand to see over the houses and the church,\r
-helterskelter, Edy with the pushcar with baby Boardman in it and Cissy\r
-holding Tommy and Jacky by the hand so they wouldn't fall running.\r
-\r
---Come on, Gerty, Cissy called. It's the bazaar fireworks.\r
-\r
-But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and\r
-call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could\r
-see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set her\r
-pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and\r
-a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion\r
-silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left\r
-alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could\r
-be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible\r
-honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremour\r
-went over her. She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were\r
-and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up\r
-and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her\r
-graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately\r
-rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse\r
-breathing, because she knew too about the passion of men like that,\r
-hotblooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made\r
-her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with\r
-them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of\r
-papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do\r
-something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But\r
-this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was\r
-all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to\r
-his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there\r
-was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being\r
-married and there ought to be women priests that would understand\r
-without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy\r
-kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny\r
-Rippingham so mad about actors' photographs and besides it was on\r
-account of that other thing coming on the way it did.\r
-\r
-And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back\r
-and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and\r
-they all saw it and they all shouted to look, look, there it was and\r
-she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was\r
-flying through the air, a soft thing, to and fro, dark. And she saw a\r
-long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense\r
-hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and\r
-higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high,\r
-high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an\r
-entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things\r
-too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than\r
-those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being\r
-white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high\r
-it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from\r
-being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee\r
-where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn't ashamed\r
-and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way like that because he\r
-couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like\r
-those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he\r
-kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly,\r
-held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on\r
-her white brow, the cry of a young girl's love, a little strangled cry,\r
-wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a\r
-rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle\r
-burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures\r
-and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they\r
-shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so\r
-lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!\r
-\r
-Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She\r
-glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of\r
-piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl He\r
-was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he)\r
-stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a\r
-brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him\r
-and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been!\r
-He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes,\r
-for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and\r
-wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their\r
-secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to\r
-know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening\r
-to and fro and little bats don't tell.\r
-\r
-Cissy Caffrey whistled, imitating the boys in the football field to show\r
-what a great person she was: and then she cried:\r
-\r
---Gerty! Gerty! We're going. Come on. We can see from farther up.\r
-\r
-Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into\r
-her kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of\r
-course without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he's too\r
-far to. She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet\r
-again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her\r
-dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls\r
-met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full\r
-of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She\r
-half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged\r
-on tears, and then they parted.\r
-\r
-Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy,\r
-to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was\r
-darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and\r
-slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic\r
-of her but with care and very slowly because--because Gerty MacDowell\r
-was...\r
-\r
-Tight boots? No. She's lame! O!\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That's why she's\r
-left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was\r
-wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse\r
-in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn't know it when she was on\r
-show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn't mind. Curiosity like a\r
-nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate.\r
-Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish. I have such\r
-a bad headache today. Where did I put the letter? Yes, all right. All\r
-kinds of crazy longings. Licking pennies. Girl in Tranquilla convent\r
-that nun told me liked to smell rock oil. Virgins go mad in the end I\r
-suppose. Sister? How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she.\r
-Something in the air. That's the moon. But then why don't all women\r
-menstruate at the same time with the same moon, I mean? Depends on the\r
-time they were born I suppose. Or all start scratch then get out of\r
-step. Sometimes Molly and Milly together. Anyhow I got the best of that.\r
-Damned glad I didn't do it in the bath this morning over her silly I\r
-will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning. That\r
-gouger M'Coy stopping me to say nothing. And his wife engagement in the\r
-country valise, voice like a pickaxe. Thankful for small mercies.\r
-Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves. Their\r
-natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices.\r
-Reserve better. Don't want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O.\r
-Pity they can't see themselves. A dream of wellfilled hose. Where was\r
-that? Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping\r
-Tom. Willy's hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot those\r
-girls or is it all a fake? _Lingerie_ does it. Felt for the curves\r
-inside her _deshabillé._ Excites them also when they're. I'm all clean\r
-come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice.\r
-Milly delighted with Molly's new blouse. At first. Put them all on to\r
-take them all off. Molly. Why I bought her the violet garters. Us too:\r
-the tie he wore, his lovely socks and turnedup trousers. He wore a pair\r
-of gaiters the night that first we met. His lovely shirt was shining\r
-beneath his what? of jet. Say a woman loses a charm with every pin she\r
-takes out. Pinned together. O, Mairy lost the pin of her. Dressed up to\r
-the nines for somebody. Fashion part of their charm. Just changes when\r
-you're on the track of the secret. Except the east: Mary, Martha: now as\r
-then. No reasonable offer refused. She wasn't in a hurry either. Always\r
-off to a fellow when they are. They never forget an appointment. Out on\r
-spec probably. They believe in chance because like themselves. And the\r
-others inclined to give her an odd dig. Girl friends at school, arms\r
-round each other's necks or with ten fingers locked, kissing and\r
-whispering secrets about nothing in the convent garden. Nuns with\r
-whitewashed faces, cool coifs and their rosaries going up and down,\r
-vindictive too for what they can't get. Barbed wire. Be sure now and\r
-write to me. And I'll write to you. Now won't you? Molly and Josie\r
-Powell. Till Mr Right comes along, then meet once in a blue moon.\r
-_Tableau!_ O, look who it is for the love of God! How are you at all?\r
-What have you been doing with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss,\r
-to see you. Picking holes in each other's appearance. You're looking\r
-splendid. Sister souls. Showing their teeth at one another. How many\r
-have you left? Wouldn't lend each other a pinch of salt.\r
-\r
-Ah!\r
-\r
-Devils they are when that's coming on them. Dark devilish appearance.\r
-Molly often told me feel things a ton weight. Scratch the sole of my\r
-foot. O that way! O, that's exquisite! Feel it myself too. Good to rest\r
-once in a way. Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. Safe in one way.\r
-Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants I\r
-read in a garden. Besides they say if the flower withers she wears she's\r
-a flirt. All are. Daresay she felt 1. When you feel like that you often\r
-meet what you feel. Liked me or what? Dress they look at. Always know a\r
-fellow courting: collars and cuffs. Well cocks and lions do the same\r
-and stags. Same time might prefer a tie undone or something. Trousers?\r
-Suppose I when I was? No. Gently does it. Dislike rough and tumble. Kiss\r
-in the dark and never tell. Saw something in me. Wonder what. Sooner\r
-have me as I am than some poet chap with bearsgrease plastery hair,\r
-lovelock over his dexter optic. To aid gentleman in literary. Ought to\r
-attend to my appearance my age. Didn't let her see me in profile. Still,\r
-you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying. Beauty and the\r
-beast. Besides I can't be so if Molly. Took off her hat to show her\r
-hair. Wide brim. Bought to hide her face, meeting someone might know\r
-her, bend down or carry a bunch of flowers to smell. Hair strong in rut.\r
-Ten bob I got for Molly's combings when we were on the rocks in Holles\r
-street. Why not? Suppose he gave her money. Why not? All a prejudice.\r
-She's worth ten, fifteen, more, a pound. What? I think so. All that for\r
-nothing. Bold hand: Mrs Marion. Did I forget to write address on\r
-that letter like the postcard I sent to Flynn? And the day I went to\r
-Drimmie's without a necktie. Wrangle with Molly it was put me off. No,\r
-I remember. Richie Goulding: he's another. Weighs on his mind. Funny\r
-my watch stopped at half past four. Dust. Shark liver oil they use to\r
-clean. Could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she?\r
-\r
-O, he did. Into her. She did. Done.\r
-\r
-Ah!\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little\r
-limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. Aftereffect not pleasant.\r
-Still you have to get rid of it someway. They don't care. Complimented\r
-perhaps. Go home to nicey bread and milky and say night prayers with the\r
-kiddies. Well, aren't they? See her as she is spoil all. Must have\r
-the stage setting, the rouge, costume, position, music. The name too.\r
-_Amours_ of actresses. Nell Gwynn, Mrs Bracegirdle, Maud Branscombe.\r
-Curtain up. Moonlight silver effulgence. Maiden discovered with pensive\r
-bosom. Little sweetheart come and kiss me. Still, I feel. The strength\r
-it gives a man. That's the secret of it. Good job I let off there behind\r
-the wall coming out of Dignam's. Cider that was. Otherwise I couldn't\r
-have. Makes you want to sing after. _Lacaus esant taratara_. Suppose I\r
-spoke to her. What about? Bad plan however if you don't know how to end\r
-the conversation. Ask them a question they ask you another. Good idea if\r
-you're stuck. Gain time. But then you're in a cart. Wonderful of course\r
-if you say: good evening, and you see she's on for it: good evening. O\r
-but the dark evening in the Appian way I nearly spoke to Mrs Clinch O\r
-thinking she was. Whew! Girl in Meath street that night. All the dirty\r
-things I made her say. All wrong of course. My arks she called it. It's\r
-so hard to find one who. Aho! If you don't answer when they solicit must\r
-be horrible for them till they harden. And kissed my hand when I gave\r
-her the extra two shillings. Parrots. Press the button and the bird will\r
-squeak. Wish she hadn't called me sir. O, her mouth in the dark! And you\r
-a married man with a single girl! That's what they enjoy. Taking a man\r
-from another woman. Or even hear of it. Different with me. Glad to get\r
-away from other chap's wife. Eating off his cold plate. Chap in the\r
-Burton today spitting back gumchewed gristle. French letter still in\r
-my pocketbook. Cause of half the trouble. But might happen sometime,\r
-I don't think. Come in, all is prepared. I dreamt. What? Worst is\r
-beginning. How they change the venue when it's not what they like. Ask\r
-you do you like mushrooms because she once knew a gentleman who. Or ask\r
-you what someone was going to say when he changed his mind and stopped.\r
-Yet if I went the whole hog, say: I want to, something like that.\r
-Because I did. She too. Offend her. Then make it up. Pretend to want\r
-something awfully, then cry off for her sake. Flatters them. She must\r
-have been thinking of someone else all the time. What harm? Must since\r
-she came to the use of reason, he, he and he. First kiss does the trick.\r
-The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop. Mushy like, tell\r
-by their eye, on the sly. First thoughts are best. Remember that till\r
-their dying day. Molly, lieutenant Mulvey that kissed her under the\r
-Moorish wall beside the gardens. Fifteen she told me. But her breasts\r
-were developed. Fell asleep then. After Glencree dinner that was when we\r
-drove home. Featherbed mountain. Gnashing her teeth in sleep. Lord mayor\r
-had his eye on her too. Val Dillon. Apoplectic.\r
-\r
-There she is with them down there for the fireworks. My fireworks. Up\r
-like a rocket, down like a stick. And the children, twins they must\r
-be, waiting for something to happen. Want to be grownups. Dressing in\r
-mother's clothes. Time enough, understand all the ways of the world. And\r
-the dark one with the mop head and the nigger mouth. I knew she could\r
-whistle. Mouth made for that. Like Molly. Why that highclass whore in\r
-Jammet's wore her veil only to her nose. Would you mind, please, telling\r
-me the right time? I'll tell you the right time up a dark lane.\r
-Say prunes and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips.\r
-Caressing the little boy too. Onlookers see most of the game. Of course\r
-they understand birds, animals, babies. In their line.\r
-\r
-Didn't look back when she was going down the strand. Wouldn't give that\r
-satisfaction. Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls. Fine\r
-eyes she had, clear. It's the white of the eye brings that out not so\r
-much the pupil. Did she know what I? Course. Like a cat sitting beyond\r
-a dog's jump. Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school\r
-drawing a picture of Venus with all his belongings on show. Call that\r
-innocence? Poor idiot! His wife has her work cut out for her. Never see\r
-them sit on a bench marked _Wet Paint_. Eyes all over them. Look under\r
-the bed for what's not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives.\r
-Sharp as needles they are. When I said to Molly the man at the corner of\r
-Cuffe street was goodlooking, thought she might like, twigged at once he\r
-had a false arm. Had, too. Where do they get that? Typist going up Roger\r
-Greene's stairs two at a time to show her understandings. Handed down\r
-from father to, mother to daughter, I mean. Bred in the bone. Milly for\r
-example drying her handkerchief on the mirror to save the ironing. Best\r
-place for an ad to catch a woman's eye on a mirror. And when I sent\r
-her for Molly's Paisley shawl to Prescott's by the way that ad I must,\r
-carrying home the change in her stocking! Clever little minx. I never\r
-told her. Neat way she carries parcels too. Attract men, small thing\r
-like that. Holding up her hand, shaking it, to let the blood flow back\r
-when it was red. Who did you learn that from? Nobody. Something the\r
-nurse taught me. O, don't they know! Three years old she was in front of\r
-Molly's dressingtable, just before we left Lombard street west. Me have\r
-a nice pace. Mullingar. Who knows? Ways of the world. Young student.\r
-Straight on her pins anyway not like the other. Still she was game.\r
-Lord, I am wet. Devil you are. Swell of her calf. Transparent stockings,\r
-stretched to breaking point. Not like that frump today. A. E. Rumpled\r
-stockings. Or the one in Grafton street. White. Wow! Beef to the heel.\r
-\r
-A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads and\r
-zrads, zrads, zrads. And Cissy and Tommy and Jacky ran out to see and\r
-Edy after with the pushcar and then Gerty beyond the curve of the rocks.\r
-Will she? Watch! Watch! See! Looked round. She smelt an onion. Darling,\r
-I saw, your. I saw all.\r
-\r
-Lord!\r
-\r
-Did me good all the same. Off colour after Kiernan's, Dignam's. For\r
-this relief much thanks. In _Hamlet,_ that is. Lord! It was all things\r
-combined. Excitement. When she leaned back, felt an ache at the butt\r
-of my tongue. Your head it simply swirls. He's right. Might have made a\r
-worse fool of myself however. Instead of talking about nothing. Then\r
-I will tell you all. Still it was a kind of language between us. It\r
-couldn't be? No, Gerty they called her. Might be false name however like\r
-my name and the address Dolphin's barn a blind.\r
-\r
-_Her maiden name was Jemina Brown And she lived with her mother in\r
-Irishtown._\r
-\r
-Place made me think of that I suppose. All tarred with the same brush\r
-Wiping pens in their stockings. But the ball rolled down to her as if\r
-it understood. Every bullet has its billet. Course I never could throw\r
-anything straight at school. Crooked as a ram's horn. Sad however\r
-because it lasts only a few years till they settle down to potwalloping\r
-and papa's pants will soon fit Willy and fuller's earth for the baby\r
-when they hold him out to do ah ah. No soft job. Saves them. Keeps\r
-them out of harm's way. Nature. Washing child, washing corpse. Dignam.\r
-Children's hands always round them. Cocoanut skulls, monkeys, not even\r
-closed at first, sour milk in their swaddles and tainted curds. Oughtn't\r
-to have given that child an empty teat to suck. Fill it up with wind.\r
-Mrs Beaufoy, Purefoy. Must call to the hospital. Wonder is nurse Callan\r
-there still. She used to look over some nights when Molly was in the\r
-Coffee Palace. That young doctor O'Hare I noticed her brushing his coat.\r
-And Mrs Breen and Mrs Dignam once like that too, marriageable. Worst\r
-of all at night Mrs Duggan told me in the City Arms. Husband rolling in\r
-drunk, stink of pub off him like a polecat. Have that in your nose in\r
-the dark, whiff of stale boose. Then ask in the morning: was I drunk\r
-last night? Bad policy however to fault the husband. Chickens come home\r
-to roost. They stick by one another like glue. Maybe the women's fault\r
-also. That's where Molly can knock spots off them. It's the blood of the\r
-south. Moorish. Also the form, the figure. Hands felt for the opulent.\r
-Just compare for instance those others. Wife locked up at home, skeleton\r
-in the cupboard. Allow me to introduce my. Then they trot you out some\r
-kind of a nondescript, wouldn't know what to call her. Always see a\r
-fellow's weak point in his wife. Still there's destiny in it, falling\r
-in love. Have their own secrets between them. Chaps that would go to the\r
-dogs if some woman didn't take them in hand. Then little chits of girls,\r
-height of a shilling in coppers, with little hubbies. As God made them\r
-he matched them. Sometimes children turn out well enough. Twice nought\r
-makes one. Or old rich chap of seventy and blushing bride. Marry in May\r
-and repent in December. This wet is very unpleasant. Stuck. Well the\r
-foreskin is not back. Better detach.\r
-\r
-Ow!\r
-\r
-Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket. Long and\r
-the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch.\r
-Wristwatches are always going wrong. Wonder is there any magnetic\r
-influence between the person because that was about the time he. Yes, I\r
-suppose, at once. Cat's away, the mice will play. I remember looking\r
-in Pill lane. Also that now is magnetism. Back of everything magnetism.\r
-Earth for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement.\r
-And time, well that's the time the movement takes. Then if one thing\r
-stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it's all\r
-arranged. Magnetic needle tells you what's going on in the sun, the\r
-stars. Little piece of steel iron. When you hold out the fork. Come.\r
-Come. Tip. Woman and man that is. Fork and steel. Molly, he. Dress up\r
-and look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you're\r
-a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming, legs, look, look and if you\r
-have any guts in you. Tip. Have to let fly.\r
-\r
-Wonder how is she feeling in that region. Shame all put on before third\r
-person. More put out about a hole in her stocking. Molly, her underjaw\r
-stuck out, head back, about the farmer in the ridingboots and spurs at\r
-the horse show. And when the painters were in Lombard street west.\r
-Fine voice that fellow had. How Giuglini began. Smell that I did. Like\r
-flowers. It was too. Violets. Came from the turpentine probably in the\r
-paint. Make their own use of everything. Same time doing it scraped her\r
-slipper on the floor so they wouldn't hear. But lots of them can't kick\r
-the beam, I think. Keep that thing up for hours. Kind of a general all\r
-round over me and half down my back.\r
-\r
-Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That's her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I leave\r
-you this to think of me when I'm far away on the pillow. What is it?\r
-Heliotrope? No. Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She'd like scent of that\r
-kind. Sweet and cheap: soon sour. Why Molly likes opoponax. Suits her,\r
-with a little jessamine mixed. Her high notes and her low notes. At the\r
-dance night she met him, dance of the hours. Heat brought it out. She\r
-was wearing her black and it had the perfume of the time before. Good\r
-conductor, is it? Or bad? Light too. Suppose there's some connection.\r
-For instance if you go into a cellar where it's dark. Mysterious thing\r
-too. Why did I smell it only now? Took its time in coming like herself,\r
-slow but sure. Suppose it's ever so many millions of tiny grains\r
-blown across. Yes, it is. Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this\r
-morning, smell them leagues off. Tell you what it is. It's like a fine\r
-fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you\r
-call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them, fine as\r
-anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it. Clings to everything\r
-she takes off. Vamp of her stockings. Warm shoe. Stays. Drawers: little\r
-kick, taking them off. Byby till next time. Also the cat likes to sniff\r
-in her shift on the bed. Know her smell in a thousand. Bathwater too.\r
-Reminds me of strawberries and cream. Wonder where it is really. There\r
-or the armpits or under the neck. Because you get it out of all holes\r
-and corners. Hyacinth perfume made of oil of ether or something.\r
-Muskrat. Bag under their tails. One grain pour off odour for years. Dogs\r
-at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm.\r
-Very well, thank you. Animals go by that. Yes now, look at it that way.\r
-We're the same. Some women, instance, warn you off when they have their\r
-period. Come near. Then get a hogo you could hang your hat on. Like\r
-what? Potted herrings gone stale or. Boof! Please keep off the grass.\r
-\r
-Perhaps they get a man smell off us. What though? Cigary gloves long\r
-John had on his desk the other day. Breath? What you eat and drink gives\r
-that. No. Mansmell, I mean. Must be connected with that because priests\r
-that are supposed to be are different. Women buzz round it like flies\r
-round treacle. Railed off the altar get on to it at any cost. The tree\r
-of forbidden priest. O, father, will you? Let me be the first to. That\r
-diffuses itself all through the body, permeates. Source of life. And\r
-it's extremely curious the smell. Celery sauce. Let me.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom inserted his nose. Hm. Into the. Hm. Opening of his waistcoat.\r
-Almonds or. No. Lemons it is. Ah no, that's the soap.\r
-\r
-O by the by that lotion. I knew there was something on my mind. Never\r
-went back and the soap not paid. Dislike carrying bottles like that hag\r
-this morning. Hynes might have paid me that three shillings. I could\r
-mention Meagher's just to remind him. Still if he works that paragraph.\r
-Two and nine. Bad opinion of me he'll have. Call tomorrow. How much do\r
-I owe you? Three and nine? Two and nine, sir. Ah. Might stop him giving\r
-credit another time. Lose your customers that way. Pubs do. Fellows run\r
-up a bill on the slate and then slinking around the back streets into\r
-somewhere else.\r
-\r
-Here's this nobleman passed before. Blown in from the bay. Just went as\r
-far as turn back. Always at home at dinnertime. Looks mangled out: had a\r
-good tuck in. Enjoying nature now. Grace after meals. After supper walk\r
-a mile. Sure he has a small bank balance somewhere, government sit. Walk\r
-after him now make him awkward like those newsboys me today. Still you\r
-learn something. See ourselves as others see us. So long as women don't\r
-mock what matter? That's the way to find out. Ask yourself who is he\r
-now. _The Mystery Man on the Beach_, prize titbit story by Mr Leopold\r
-Bloom. Payment at the rate of one guinea per column. And that fellow\r
-today at the graveside in the brown macintosh. Corns on his kismet\r
-however. Healthy perhaps absorb all the. Whistle brings rain they say.\r
-Must be some somewhere. Salt in the Ormond damp. The body feels the\r
-atmosphere. Old Betty's joints are on the rack. Mother Shipton's\r
-prophecy that is about ships around they fly in the twinkling. No. Signs\r
-of rain it is. The royal reader. And distant hills seem coming nigh.\r
-\r
-Howth. Bailey light. Two, four, six, eight, nine. See. Has to change or\r
-they might think it a house. Wreckers. Grace Darling. People afraid of\r
-the dark. Also glowworms, cyclists: lightingup time. Jewels diamonds\r
-flash better. Women. Light is a kind of reassuring. Not going to hurt\r
-you. Better now of course than long ago. Country roads. Run you through\r
-the small guts for nothing. Still two types there are you bob against.\r
-Scowl or smile. Pardon! Not at all. Best time to spray plants too in\r
-the shade after the sun. Some light still. Red rays are longest. Roygbiv\r
-Vance taught us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A\r
-star I see. Venus? Can't tell yet. Two. When three it's night. Were\r
-those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No.\r
-Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting\r
-sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native land,\r
-goodnight.\r
-\r
-Dew falling. Bad for you, dear, to sit on that stone. Brings on white\r
-fluxions. Never have little baby then less he was big strong fight his\r
-way up through. Might get piles myself. Sticks too like a summer cold,\r
-sore on the mouth. Cut with grass or paper worst. Friction of the\r
-position. Like to be that rock she sat on. O sweet little, you don't\r
-know how nice you looked. I begin to like them at that age. Green\r
-apples. Grab at all that offer. Suppose it's the only time we cross\r
-legs, seated. Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs\r
-under them. But it's the evening influence. They feel all that. Open\r
-like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, in\r
-ballrooms, chandeliers, avenues under the lamps. Nightstock in Mat\r
-Dillon's garden where I kissed her shoulder. Wish I had a full length\r
-oilpainting of her then. June that was too I wooed. The year returns.\r
-History repeats itself. Ye crags and peaks I'm with you once again.\r
-Life, love, voyage round your own little world. And now? Sad about her\r
-lame of course but must be on your guard not to feel too much pity. They\r
-take advantage.\r
-\r
-All quiet on Howth now. The distant hills seem. Where we. The\r
-rhododendrons. I am a fool perhaps. He gets the plums, and I the\r
-plumstones. Where I come in. All that old hill has seen. Names change:\r
-that's all. Lovers: yum yum.\r
-\r
-Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of\r
-me, little wretch. She kissed me. Never again. My youth. Only once it\r
-comes. Or hers. Take the train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the\r
-same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I want. Nothing\r
-new under the sun. Care of P. O. Dolphin's Barn. Are you not happy in\r
-your? Naughty darling. At Dolphin's barn charades in Luke Doyle's house.\r
-Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy,\r
-Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. And the old\r
-major, partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an\r
-only child. So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself.\r
-Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she.\r
-Circus horse walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in\r
-Henny Doyle's overcoat. Van: breadvan delivering. Winkle: cockles and\r
-periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned on the\r
-sideboard watching. Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow.\r
-All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew.\r
-\r
-Ba. What is that flying about? Swallow? Bat probably. Thinks I'm a tree,\r
-so blind. Have birds no smell? Metempsychosis. They believed you could\r
-be changed into a tree from grief. Weeping willow. Ba. There he goes.\r
-Funny little beggar. Wonder where he lives. Belfry up there. Very\r
-likely. Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity. Bell scared him\r
-out, I suppose. Mass seems to be over. Could hear them all at it. Pray\r
-for us. And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same\r
-thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us. Yes, there's the light in\r
-the priest's house. Their frugal meal. Remember about the mistake in the\r
-valuation when I was in Thom's. Twentyeight it is. Two houses they have.\r
-Gabriel Conroy's brother is curate. Ba. Again. Wonder why they come out\r
-at night like mice. They're a mixed breed. Birds are like hopping mice.\r
-What frightens them, light or noise? Better sit still. All instinct\r
-like the bird in drouth got water out of the end of a jar by throwing\r
-in pebbles. Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands. Weeny\r
-bones. Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white. Colours depend\r
-on the light you see. Stare the sun for example like the eagle then look\r
-at a shoe see a blotch blob yellowish. Wants to stamp his trademark on\r
-everything. Instance, that cat this morning on the staircase. Colour of\r
-brown turf. Say you never see them with three colours. Not true. That\r
-half tabbywhite tortoiseshell in the _City Arms_ with the letter em on\r
-her forehead. Body fifty different colours. Howth a while ago amethyst.\r
-Glass flashing. That's how that wise man what's his name with the\r
-burning glass. Then the heather goes on fire. It can't be tourists'\r
-matches. What? Perhaps the sticks dry rub together in the wind and\r
-light. Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the sun.\r
-Archimedes. I have it! My memory's not so bad.\r
-\r
-Ba. Who knows what they're always flying for. Insects? That bee last\r
-week got into the room playing with his shadow on the ceiling. Might\r
-be the one bit me, come back to see. Birds too. Never find out. Or what\r
-they say. Like our small talk. And says she and says he. Nerve they have\r
-to fly over the ocean and back. Lots must be killed in storms, telegraph\r
-wires. Dreadful life sailors have too. Big brutes of oceangoing steamers\r
-floundering along in the dark, lowing out like seacows. _Faugh a\r
-Ballagh!_ Out of that, bloody curse to you! Others in vessels, bit of\r
-a handkerchief sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when the stormy\r
-winds do blow. Married too. Sometimes away for years at the ends of the\r
-earth somewhere. No ends really because it's round. Wife in every port\r
-they say. She has a good job if she minds it till Johnny comes marching\r
-home again. If ever he does. Smelling the tail end of ports. How can\r
-they like the sea? Yet they do. The anchor's weighed. Off he sails with\r
-a scapular or a medal on him for luck. Well. And the tephilim no what's\r
-this they call it poor papa's father had on his door to touch. That\r
-brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage.\r
-Something in all those superstitions because when you go out never know\r
-what dangers. Hanging on to a plank or astride of a beam for grim life,\r
-lifebelt round him, gulping salt water, and that's the last of his nibs\r
-till the sharks catch hold of him. Do fish ever get seasick?\r
-\r
-Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid,\r
-crew and cargo in smithereens, Davy Jones' locker, moon looking down so\r
-peaceful. Not my fault, old cockalorum.\r
-\r
-A last lonely candle wandered up the sky from Mirus bazaar in search of\r
-funds for Mercer's hospital and broke, drooping, and shed a cluster\r
-of violet but one white stars. They floated, fell: they faded. The\r
-shepherd's hour: the hour of folding: hour of tryst. From house to\r
-house, giving his everwelcome double knock, went the nine o'clock\r
-postman, the glowworm's lamp at his belt gleaming here and there through\r
-the laurel hedges. And among the five young trees a hoisted lintstock\r
-lit the lamp at Leahy's terrace. By screens of lighted windows, by equal\r
-gardens a shrill voice went crying, wailing: _Evening Telegraph, stop\r
-press edition! Result of the Gold Cup race!_ and from the door of\r
-Dignam's house a boy ran out and called. Twittering the bat flew here,\r
-flew there. Far out over the sands the coming surf crept, grey. Howth\r
-settled for slumber, tired of long days, of yumyum rhododendrons (he was\r
-old) and felt gladly the night breeze lift, ruffle his fell of ferns.\r
-He lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing,\r
-slumberous but awake. And far on Kish bank the anchored lightship\r
-twinkled, winked at Mr Bloom.\r
-\r
-Life those chaps out there must have, stuck in the same spot. Irish\r
-Lights board. Penance for their sins. Coastguards too. Rocket and\r
-breeches buoy and lifeboat. Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in\r
-the Erin's King, throwing them the sack of old papers. Bears in the zoo.\r
-Filthy trip. Drunkards out to shake up their livers. Puking overboard\r
-to feed the herrings. Nausea. And the women, fear of God in their faces.\r
-Milly, no sign of funk. Her blue scarf loose, laughing. Don't know what\r
-death is at that age. And then their stomachs clean. But being lost they\r
-fear. When we hid behind the tree at Crumlin. I didn't want to. Mamma!\r
-Mamma! Babes in the wood. Frightening them with masks too. Throwing them\r
-up in the air to catch them. I'll murder you. Is it only half fun? Or\r
-children playing battle. Whole earnest. How can people aim guns at each\r
-other. Sometimes they go off. Poor kids! Only troubles wildfire and\r
-nettlerash. Calomel purge I got her for that. After getting better\r
-asleep with Molly. Very same teeth she has. What do they love? Another\r
-themselves? But the morning she chased her with the umbrella. Perhaps so\r
-as not to hurt. I felt her pulse. Ticking. Little hand it was: now big.\r
-Dearest Papli. All that the hand says when you touch. Loved to count\r
-my waistcoat buttons. Her first stays I remember. Made me laugh to see.\r
-Little paps to begin with. Left one is more sensitive, I think. Mine\r
-too. Nearer the heart? Padding themselves out if fat is in fashion. Her\r
-growing pains at night, calling, wakening me. Frightened she was when\r
-her nature came on her first. Poor child! Strange moment for the mother\r
-too. Brings back her girlhood. Gibraltar. Looking from Buena Vista.\r
-O'Hara's tower. The seabirds screaming. Old Barbary ape that gobbled all\r
-his family. Sundown, gunfire for the men to cross the lines. Looking\r
-out over the sea she told me. Evening like this, but clear, no clouds.\r
-I always thought I'd marry a lord or a rich gentleman coming with a\r
-private yacht. _Buenas noches, señorita. El hombre ama la muchacha\r
-hermosa_. Why me? Because you were so foreign from the others.\r
-\r
-Better not stick here all night like a limpet. This weather makes you\r
-dull. Must be getting on for nine by the light. Go home. Too late for\r
-_Leah, Lily of Killarney._ No. Might be still up. Call to the hospital\r
-to see. Hope she's over. Long day I've had. Martha, the bath, funeral,\r
-house of Keyes, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus' song. Then that\r
-bawler in Barney Kiernan's. Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what\r
-I said about his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No.\r
-Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in\r
-company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look\r
-at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant.\r
-Three cheers for Israel. Three cheers for the sister-in-law he hawked\r
-about, three fangs in her mouth. Same style of beauty. Particularly nice\r
-old party for a cup of tea. The sister of the wife of the wild man of\r
-Borneo has just come to town. Imagine that in the early morning at close\r
-range. Everyone to his taste as Morris said when he kissed the cow. But\r
-Dignam's put the boots on it. Houses of mourning so depressing because\r
-you never know. Anyhow she wants the money. Must call to those Scottish\r
-Widows as I promised. Strange name. Takes it for granted we're going to\r
-pop off first. That widow on Monday was it outside Cramer's that\r
-looked at me. Buried the poor husband but progressing favourably on\r
-the premium. Her widow's mite. Well? What do you expect her to do? Must\r
-wheedle her way along. Widower I hate to see. Looks so forlorn. Poor man\r
-O'Connor wife and five children poisoned by mussels here. The sewage.\r
-Hopeless. Some good matronly woman in a porkpie hat to mother him. Take\r
-him in tow, platter face and a large apron. Ladies' grey flannelette\r
-bloomers, three shillings a pair, astonishing bargain. Plain and loved,\r
-loved for ever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be\r
-handsome for tomorrow we die. See him sometimes walking about trying to\r
-find out who played the trick. U. p: up. Fate that is. He, not me. Also\r
-a shop often noticed. Curse seems to dog it. Dreamt last night? Wait.\r
-Something confused. She had red slippers on. Turkish. Wore the breeches.\r
-Suppose she does? Would I like her in pyjamas? Damned hard to answer.\r
-Nannetti's gone. Mailboat. Near Holyhead by now. Must nail that ad\r
-of Keyes's. Work Hynes and Crawford. Petticoats for Molly. She has\r
-something to put in them. What's that? Might be money.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom stooped and turned over a piece of paper on the strand. He\r
-brought it near his eyes and peered. Letter? No. Can't read. Better go.\r
-Better. I'm tired to move. Page of an old copybook. All those holes and\r
-pebbles. Who could count them? Never know what you find. Bottle with\r
-story of a treasure in it, thrown from a wreck. Parcels post. Children\r
-always want to throw things in the sea. Trust? Bread cast on the waters.\r
-What's this? Bit of stick.\r
-\r
-O! Exhausted that female has me. Not so young now. Will she come here\r
-tomorrow? Wait for her somewhere for ever. Must come back. Murderers do.\r
-Will I?\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write a\r
-message for her. Might remain. What?\r
-\r
-I.\r
-\r
-Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide\r
-comes here. Saw a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark\r
-mirror, breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and\r
-letters. O, those transparent! Besides they don't know. What is the\r
-meaning of that other world. I called you naughty boy because I do not\r
-like.\r
-\r
-AM. A.\r
-\r
-No room. Let it go.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand.\r
-Nothing grows in it. All fades. No fear of big vessels coming up here.\r
-Except Guinness's barges. Round the Kish in eighty days. Done half by\r
-design.\r
-\r
-He flung his wooden pen away. The stick fell in silted sand, stuck. Now\r
-if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn't. Chance.\r
-We'll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made\r
-me feel so young.\r
-\r
-Short snooze now if I had. Must be near nine. Liverpool boat long gone..\r
-Not even the smoke. And she can do the other. Did too. And Belfast. I\r
-won't go. Race there, race back to Ennis. Let him. Just close my eyes\r
-a moment. Won't sleep, though. Half dream. It never comes the same. Bat\r
-again. No harm in him. Just a few.\r
-\r
-O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do\r
-love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met\r
-him pike hoses frillies for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave\r
-under embon _señorita_ young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan Winkle\r
-red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end\r
-Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in\r
-her next her next.\r
-\r
-A bat flew. Here. There. Here. Far in the grey a bell chimed. Mr Bloom\r
-with open mouth, his left boot sanded sideways, leaned, breathed. Just\r
-for a few\r
-\r
- _Cuckoo\r
- Cuckoo\r
- Cuckoo._\r
-\r
-The clock on the mantelpiece in the priest's house cooed where Canon\r
-O'Hanlon and Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S. J. were\r
-taking tea and sodabread and butter and fried mutton chops with catsup\r
-and talking about\r
-\r
- _Cuckoo\r
- Cuckoo\r
- Cuckoo._\r
-\r
-Because it was a little canarybird that came out of its little house\r
-to tell the time that Gerty MacDowell noticed the time she was there\r
-because she was as quick as anything about a thing like that, was Gerty\r
-MacDowell, and she noticed at once that that foreign gentleman that was\r
-sitting on the rocks looking was\r
-\r
- _Cuckoo\r
- Cuckoo\r
- Cuckoo._\r
-\r
-\r
-Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.\r
-\r
-Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send\r
-us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us\r
-bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.\r
-\r
-Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!\r
-\r
-Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive\r
-concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by\r
-mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that\r
-which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in\r
-them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain\r
-when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being\r
-equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more\r
-efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may\r
-have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent\r
-continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately\r
-present constitutes the certain sign of omnipotent nature's incorrupted\r
-benefaction. For who is there who anything of some significance has\r
-apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the\r
-surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone\r
-so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature's boon\r
-can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just\r
-citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and\r
-to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently\r
-commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence\r
-accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced\r
-the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of\r
-profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the\r
-hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone\r
-be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously\r
-command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance\r
-or with diminution's menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating\r
-function ever irrevocably enjoined?\r
-\r
-It is not why therefore we shall wonder if, as the best historians\r
-relate, among the Celts, who nothing that was not in its nature\r
-admirable admired, the art of medicine shall have been highly honoured.\r
-Not to speak of hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers, plaguegraves,\r
-their greatest doctors, the O'Shiels, the O'Hickeys, the O'Lees,\r
-have sedulously set down the divers methods by which the sick and the\r
-relapsed found again health whether the malady had been the trembling\r
-withering or loose boyconnell flux. Certainly in every public work which\r
-in it anything of gravity contains preparation should be with importance\r
-commensurate and therefore a plan was by them adopted (whether by having\r
-preconsidered or as the maturation of experience it is difficult in\r
-being said which the discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not\r
-up to the present congrued to render manifest) whereby maternity was so\r
-far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient\r
-in that all hardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely\r
-for the copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently\r
-moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and\r
-for an inconsiderable emolument was provided.\r
-\r
-To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to be\r
-molestful for this chiefly felt all citizens except with proliferent\r
-mothers prosperity at all not to can be and as they had received\r
-eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the\r
-case was so hoving itself, parturient in vehicle thereward carrying\r
-desire immense among all one another was impelling on of her to be\r
-received into that domicile. O thing of prudent nation not merely in\r
-being seen but also even in being related worthy of being praised that\r
-they her by anticipation went seeing mother, that she by them suddenly\r
-to be about to be cherished had been begun she felt!\r
-\r
-Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that\r
-one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with\r
-wholesome food reposeful, cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were\r
-now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs\r
-there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her\r
-case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various\r
-latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine\r
-and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence\r
-conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of\r
-mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her\r
-thereto to lie in, her term up.\r
-\r
-Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of\r
-Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark\r
-ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.\r
-\r
-Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming\r
-mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale\r
-so God's angel to Mary quoth. Watchers tway there walk, white sisters\r
-in ward sleepless. Smarts they still, sickness soothing: in twelve moons\r
-thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding\r
-wariest ward.\r
-\r
-In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising\r
-with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping\r
-lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin. Full she drad that\r
-God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins.\r
-Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe\r
-infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in\r
-Horne's house.\r
-\r
-Loth to irk in Horne's hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow he\r
-ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land\r
-and seafloor nine years had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe\r
-meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with\r
-good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so\r
-young then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes\r
-his word winning.\r
-\r
-As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad\r
-after she was that ere adread was. Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor tidings\r
-sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O'Hare\r
-Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so\r
-heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for\r
-friend so young, algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay.\r
-She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with\r
-masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men's oil to his limbs.\r
-The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was\r
-died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona Island\r
-through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God\r
-the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her\r
-sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in\r
-wanhope sorrowing one with other.\r
-\r
-Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the\r
-dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came\r
-naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the\r
-last for to go as he came.\r
-\r
-The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and\r
-he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed.\r
-The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman was in throes\r
-now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth to bear\r
-but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she had\r
-seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman's\r
-birth. Then she set it all forth to him for because she knew the man\r
-that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words\r
-for he felt with wonder women's woe in the travail that they have of\r
-motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a fair face for\r
-any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine\r
-twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.\r
-\r
-And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed\r
-them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came\r
-against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon. And\r
-the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they\r
-had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this\r
-learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be\r
-healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a\r
-horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make\r
-a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he\r
-said now that he should go in to that castle for to make merry with\r
-them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go\r
-otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtile. Also the lady\r
-was of his avis and repreved the learningknight though she trowed well\r
-that the traveller had said thing that was false for his subtility. But\r
-the learningknight would not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have\r
-him in aught contrarious to his list and he said how it was a marvellous\r
-castle. And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him\r
-for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers\r
-lands and sometime venery.\r
-\r
-And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy\r
-and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not\r
-move more for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and\r
-knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white\r
-flames that they fix then in the horns of buffalos and stags that there\r
-abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by magic of\r
-Mahound out of seasand and the air by a warlock with his breath that he\r
-blases in to them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich was on\r
-the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there was\r
-a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange\r
-fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible\r
-thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie\r
-in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness\r
-that therein is like to the juices of the olivepress. And also it was\r
-a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of\r
-fecund wheatkidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits\r
-that they do in to it swells up wondrously like to a vast mountain. And\r
-they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks\r
-out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a\r
-brewage like to mead.\r
-\r
-And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp\r
-thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe\r
-Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat\r
-in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and\r
-anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and\r
-his neighbour nist not of this wile. And he sat down in that castle with\r
-them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.\r
-\r
-This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the\r
-reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for\r
-there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied\r
-fast. Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what\r
-cry that it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it\r
-be not come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw\r
-a franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than\r
-any of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the\r
-one emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full\r
-gently. But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His\r
-bounty and have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long.\r
-And the franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her\r
-next. Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never\r
-none asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully\r
-delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both's health for\r
-he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold that was the\r
-goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars' hall and that was the meekest\r
-man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was\r
-the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service\r
-to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup. Woman's woe with wonder\r
-pondering.\r
-\r
-Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be\r
-drunken an they might. There was a sort of scholars along either side\r
-the board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary Merciable's\r
-with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, scholars of medicine, and the\r
-franklin that hight Lenehan and one from Alba Longa, one Crotthers, and\r
-young Stephen that had mien of a frere that was at head of the board\r
-and Costello that men clepen Punch Costello all long of a mastery of\r
-him erewhile gested (and of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the\r
-most drunken that demanded still of more mead) and beside the meek sir\r
-Leopold. But on young Malachi they waited for that he promised to have\r
-come and such as intended to no goodness said how he had broke his avow.\r
-And sir Leopold sat with them for he bore fast friendship to sir Simon\r
-and to this his son young Stephen and for that his languor becalmed him\r
-there after longest wanderings insomuch as they feasted him for that\r
-time in the honourablest manner. Ruth red him, love led on with will to\r
-wander, loth to leave.\r
-\r
-For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen\r
-other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that\r
-put such case it were hard the wife to die (for so it had fallen out a\r
-matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne's house that\r
-now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her\r
-death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case). And\r
-they said farther she should live because in the beginning, they said,\r
-the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of\r
-this imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had\r
-conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch\r
-were in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never\r
-other howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his\r
-judges did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said\r
-but all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife\r
-should live and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot\r
-upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking but the\r
-franklin Lenehan was prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the\r
-least way mirth might not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole\r
-affair and said how that she was dead and how for holy religion sake by\r
-rede of palmer and bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of\r
-Arbraccan her goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were\r
-all wondrous grieved. To whom young Stephen had these words following:\r
-Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now\r
-glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire.\r
-But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly\r
-impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord\r
-and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means\r
-to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.\r
-Then said Dixon junior to Punch Costello wist he what ends. But he had\r
-overmuch drunken and the best word he could have of him was that he\r
-would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if\r
-it so fortuned him to be delivered of his spleen of lustihead. Whereat\r
-Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi's praise of that beast the\r
-unicorn how once in the millennium he cometh by his horn, the other all\r
-this while, pricked forward with their jibes wherewith they did malice\r
-him, witnessing all and several by saint Foutinus his engines that\r
-he was able to do any manner of thing that lay in man to do. Thereat\r
-laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen and sir Leopold which\r
-never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange humour which he would\r
-not bewray and also for that he rued for her that bare whoso she might\r
-be or wheresoever. Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church\r
-that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith,\r
-patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness\r
-or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the\r
-influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she lie\r
-with a woman which her man has but lain with, _effectu secuto_, or\r
-peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses\r
-Maimonides. He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul\r
-was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for God's\r
-greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam to bear\r
-beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman's\r
-seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages\r
-founded. All they bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would he in like\r
-case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life. A wariness of\r
-mind he would answer as fitted all and, laying hand to jaw, he said\r
-dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed him, who had ever\r
-loved the art of physic as might a layman, and agreeing also with his\r
-experience of so seldomseen an accident it was good for that mother\r
-Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence and in such sort\r
-deliverly he scaped their questions. That is truth, pardy, said Dixon,\r
-and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young Stephen was a\r
-marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor\r
-lendeth to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he was drunken and\r
-that he was now in that taking it appeared eftsoons.\r
-\r
-But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had\r
-pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour\r
-and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only\r
-manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art\r
-could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart\r
-for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of\r
-lamb's wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and\r
-lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now Sir\r
-Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his\r
-friend's son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness and\r
-as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all\r
-accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure\r
-for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and\r
-murdered his goods with whores.\r
-\r
-About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty\r
-so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed\r
-their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for\r
-the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the\r
-vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray. Now drink we,\r
-quod he, of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel\r
-of my body but my soul's bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them\r
-that live by bread alone. Be not afeard neither for any want for this\r
-will comfort more than the other will dismay. See ye here. And he showed\r
-them glistering coins of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of\r
-two pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he\r
-writ. They all admired to see the foresaid riches in such dearth of\r
-money as was herebefore. His words were then these as followeth: Know\r
-all men, he said, time's ruins build eternity's mansions. What means\r
-this? Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a\r
-bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman's\r
-womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh\r
-that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the\r
-postcreation. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. No question but her name is\r
-puissant who aventried the dear corse of our Agenbuyer, Healer and Herd,\r
-our mighty mother and mother most venerable and Bernardus saith aptly\r
-that She hath an _omnipotentiam deiparae supplicem_, that is to wit, an\r
-almightiness of petition because she is the second Eve and she won\r
-us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are\r
-linked up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all,\r
-seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin. But here is the matter\r
-now. Or she knew him, that second I say, and was but creature of her\r
-creature, _vergine madre, figlia di tuo figlio_, or she knew him not and\r
-then stands she in the one denial or ignorancy with Peter Piscator who\r
-lives in the house that Jack built and with Joseph the joiner patron of\r
-the happy demise of all unhappy marriages, _parceque M. Léo Taxil nous\r
-a dit que qui l'avait mise dans cette fichue position c'était le\r
-sacre pigeon, ventre de Dieu! Entweder_ transubstantiality ODER\r
-consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality. And all cried out\r
-upon it for a very scurvy word. A pregnancy without joy, he said, a\r
-birth without pangs, a body without blemish, a belly without bigness.\r
-Let the lewd with faith and fervour worship. With will will we\r
-withstand, withsay.\r
-\r
-Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would\r
-sing a bawdy catch _Staboo Stabella_ about a wench that was put in pod\r
-of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack:\r
-_The first three months she was not well, Staboo,_ when here nurse\r
-Quigley from the door angerly bid them hist ye should shame you nor\r
-was it not meet as she remembered them being her mind was to have all\r
-orderly against lord Andrew came for because she was jealous that\r
-no gasteful turmoil might shorten the honour of her guard. It was an\r
-ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking,\r
-in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage, nor did her\r
-hortative want of it effect for incontinently Punch Costello was of them\r
-all embraided and they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and\r
-shaked him with menace of blandishments others whiles they all chode\r
-with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou\r
-chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling,\r
-thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up\r
-his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir\r
-Leopold that had for his cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain\r
-gentle, advising also the time's occasion as most sacred and most worthy\r
-to be most sacred. In Horne's house rest should reign.\r
-\r
-To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in\r
-Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he\r
-had not cided to take friar's vows and he answered him obedience in the\r
-womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days. Master\r
-Lenehan at this made return that he had heard of those nefarious deeds\r
-and how, as he heard hereof counted, he had besmirched the lily virtue\r
-of a confiding female which was corruption of minors and they all\r
-intershowed it too, waxing merry and toasting to his fathership. But he\r
-said very entirely it was clean contrary to their suppose for he was\r
-the eternal son and ever virgin. Thereat mirth grew in them the more and\r
-they rehearsed to him his curious rite of wedlock for the disrobing and\r
-deflowering of spouses, as the priests use in Madagascar island, she\r
-to be in guise of white and saffron, her groom in white and grain, with\r
-burning of nard and tapers, on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and\r
-the anthem _Ut novetur sexus omnis corporis mysterium_ till she was\r
-there unmaided. He gave them then a much admirable hymen minim by those\r
-delicate poets Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont that is\r
-in their _Maid's Tragedy_ that was writ for a like twining of lovers:\r
-_To bed, to bed_ was the burden of it to be played with accompanable\r
-concent upon the virginals. An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most\r
-mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous\r
-flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium\r
-of connubial communion. Well met they were, said Master Dixon, joyed,\r
-but, harkee, young sir, better were they named Beau Mount and Lecher\r
-for, by my troth, of such a mingling much might come. Young Stephen said\r
-indeed to his best remembrance they had but the one doxy between them\r
-and she of the stews to make shift with in delights amorous for life ran\r
-very high in those days and the custom of the country approved with it.\r
-Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his\r
-wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that\r
-effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters\r
-to the university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom\r
-mankind was more beholden. Bring a stranger within thy tower it will\r
-go hard but thou wilt have the secondbest bed. _Orate, fratres, pro\r
-memetipso_. And all the people shall say, Amen. Remember, Erin, thy\r
-generations and thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by\r
-my word and broughtedst in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication\r
-in my sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou\r
-sinned against my light and hast made me, thy lord, to be the slave of\r
-servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian. Why\r
-hast thou done this abomination before me that thou didst spurn me for\r
-a merchant of jalaps and didst deny me to the Roman and to the Indian of\r
-dark speech with whom thy daughters did lie luxuriously? Look forth now,\r
-my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and\r
-from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk\r
-and money. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my\r
-sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever\r
-in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou\r
-kissed my mouth. This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say,\r
-hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as\r
-mentioned for the Orient from on high Which brake hell's gates visited a\r
-darkness that was foraneous. Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as Tully\r
-saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no\r
-blister of combustion. The adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt's\r
-plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is their\r
-most proper _ubi_ and _quomodo_. And as the ends and ultimates of\r
-all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and\r
-originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth\r
-from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing\r
-and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it\r
-with our subsolar being. The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail,\r
-batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they\r
-bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed\r
-of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted\r
-sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage. And as\r
-no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall\r
-thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way\r
-is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness\r
-the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.\r
-\r
-Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly _Etienne chanson_ but he loudly\r
-bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic\r
-longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie\r
-order, a penny for him who finds the pea.\r
-\r
- _Behold the mansion reared by dedal Jack\r
- See the malt stored in many a refluent sack,\r
- In the proud cirque of Jackjohn's bivouac._\r
-\r
-A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on\r
-left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm\r
-that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and\r
-witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And\r
-he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed wan as they might all\r
-mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift\r
-was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the\r
-cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some\r
-mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which\r
-Master Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and\r
-a blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an\r
-old Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would\r
-not lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as\r
-cowed he crouched in Horne's hall. He drank indeed at one draught to\r
-pluck up a heart of any grace for it thundered long rumblingly over all\r
-the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked\r
-him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the\r
-braggart's side, spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear,\r
-advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard,\r
-the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken\r
-place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon.\r
-\r
-But was young Boasthard's fear vanquished by Calmer's words? No, for he\r
-had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be\r
-done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the\r
-other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But\r
-could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the\r
-bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed no for Grace was not\r
-there to find that bottle. Heard he then in that clap the voice of the\r
-god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard?\r
-Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube\r
-Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that\r
-he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die\r
-as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to\r
-die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must nor\r
-would he make more shows according as men do with wives which Phenomenon\r
-has commanded them to do by the book Law. Then wotted he nought of that\r
-other land which is called Believe-on-Me, that is the land of promise\r
-which behoves to the king Delightful and shall be for ever where there\r
-is no death and no birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall\r
-come as many as believe on it? Yes, Pious had told him of that land and\r
-Chaste had pointed him to the way but the reason was that in the way he\r
-fell in with a certain whore of an eyepleasing exterior whose name, she\r
-said, is Bird-in-the-Hand and she beguiled him wrongways from the true\r
-path by her flatteries that she said to him as, Ho, you pretty man, turn\r
-aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so\r
-flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush\r
-or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence.\r
-\r
-This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse\r
-of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore\r
-Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a\r
-wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and\r
-know her. For regarding Believe-on-Me they said it was nought else\r
-but notion and they could conceive no thought of it for, first,\r
-Two-in-the-Bush whither she ticed them was the very goodliest grot and\r
-in it were four pillows on which were four tickets with these words\r
-printed on them, Pickaback and Topsyturvy and Shameface and Cheek by\r
-Jowl and, second, for that foul plague Allpox and the monsters they\r
-cared not for them for Preservative had given them a stout shield of\r
-oxengut and, third, that they might take no hurt neither from Offspring\r
-that was that wicked devil by virtue of this same shield which was\r
-named Killchild. So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr\r
-Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon,\r
-Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer. Wherein, O wretched company,\r
-were ye all deceived for that was the voice of the god that was in a\r
-very grievous rage that he would presently lift his arm up and\r
-spill their souls for their abuses and their spillings done by them\r
-contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly biddeth.\r
-\r
-So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and\r
-after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a\r
-fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won't sprout, fields\r
-athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too.\r
-Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle\r
-this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The rosy buds\r
-all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag\r
-and faggots that would catch at first fire. All the world saying, for\r
-aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the\r
-land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness. But by and\r
-by, as said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the\r
-west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the\r
-weatherwise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and\r
-after, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and\r
-in a brace of shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking\r
-shower, the men making shelter for their straws with a clout or\r
-kerchief, womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the\r
-pour came. In Ely place, Baggot street, Duke's lawn, thence through\r
-Merrion green up to Holles street a swash of water flowing that was\r
-before bonedry and not one chair or coach or fiacre seen about but\r
-no more crack after that first. Over against the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice\r
-Fitzgibbon's door (that is to sit with Mr Healy the lawyer upon the\r
-college lands) Mal. Mulligan a gentleman's gentleman that had but come\r
-from Mr Moore's the writer's (that was a papish but is now, folk say,\r
-a good Williamite) chanced against Alec. Bannon in a cut bob (which are\r
-now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green) that was new got to town from\r
-Mullingar with the stage where his coz and Mal M's brother will stay a\r
-month yet till Saint Swithin and asks what in the earth he does there,\r
-he bound home and he to Andrew Horne's being stayed for to crush a cup\r
-of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a skittish heifer, big of\r
-her age and beef to the heel, and all this while poured with rain and\r
-so both together on to Horne's. There Leop. Bloom of Crawford's journal\r
-sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun.,\r
-scholar of my lady of Mercy's, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden,\r
-T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom\r
-there for a languor he had but was now better, be having dreamed tonight\r
-a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll with red slippers on in a pair of\r
-Turkey trunks which is thought by those in ken to be for a change and\r
-Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through pleading her belly, and now\r
-on the stools, poor body, two days past her term, the midwives sore put\r
-to it and can't deliver, she queasy for a bowl of riceslop that is a\r
-shrewd drier up of the insides and her breath very heavy more than good\r
-and should be a bullyboy from the knocks, they say, but God give her\r
-soon issue. 'Tis her ninth chick to live, I hear, and Lady day bit off\r
-her last chick's nails that was then a twelvemonth and with other three\r
-all breastfed that died written out in a fair hand in the king's bible.\r
-Her hub fifty odd and a methodist but takes the sacrament and is to\r
-be seen any fair sabbath with a pair of his boys off Bullock harbour\r
-dapping on the sound with a heavybraked reel or in a punt he has\r
-trailing for flounder and pollock and catches a fine bag, I hear. In sum\r
-an infinite great fall of rain and all refreshed and will much increase\r
-the harvest yet those in ken say after wind and water fire shall come\r
-for a prognostication of Malachi's almanac (and I hear that Mr Russell\r
-has done a prophetical charm of the same gist out of the Hindustanish\r
-for his farmer's gazette) to have three things in all but this a mere\r
-fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes\r
-they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.\r
-\r
-With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter\r
-was in that night's gazette and he made a show to find it about him\r
-(for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on\r
-Stephen's persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit near\r
-by which he did mighty brisk. He was a kind of sport gentleman that\r
-went for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women,\r
-horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean\r
-in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses\r
-and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul's men, runners,\r
-flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the\r
-game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights\r
-till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose\r
-gossip. He took his ordinary at a boilingcook's and if he had but gotten\r
-into him a mess of broken victuals or a platter of tripes with a bare\r
-tester in his purse he could always bring himself off with his tongue,\r
-some randy quip he had from a punk or whatnot that every mother's son of\r
-them would burst their sides. The other, Costello that is, hearing this\r
-talk asked was it poetry or a tale. Faith, no, he says, Frank (that was\r
-his name), 'tis all about Kerry cows that are to be butchered along of\r
-the plague. But they can go hang, says he with a wink, for me with their\r
-bully beef, a pox on it. There's as good fish in this tin as ever came\r
-out of it and very friendly he offered to take of some salty sprats that\r
-stood by which he had eyed wishly in the meantime and found the place\r
-which was indeed the chief design of his embassy as he was sharpset.\r
-_Mort aux vaches_, says Frank then in the French language that had been\r
-indentured to a brandyshipper that has a winelodge in Bordeaux and he\r
-spoke French like a gentleman too. From a child this Frank had been\r
-a donought that his father, a headborough, who could ill keep him to\r
-school to learn his letters and the use of the globes, matriculated at\r
-the university to study the mechanics but he took the bit between his\r
-teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar with the justiciary and the\r
-parish beadle than with his volumes. One time he would be a playactor,\r
-then a sutler or a welsher, then nought would keep him from the bearpit\r
-and the cocking main, then he was for the ocean sea or to hoof it on\r
-the roads with the romany folk, kidnapping a squire's heir by favour of\r
-moonlight or fecking maids' linen or choking chicken behind a hedge. He\r
-had been off as many times as a cat has lives and back again with naked\r
-pockets as many more to his father the headborough who shed a pint\r
-of tears as often as he saw him. What, says Mr Leopold with his hands\r
-across, that was earnest to know the drift of it, will they slaughter\r
-all? I protest I saw them but this day morning going to the Liverpool\r
-boats, says he. I can scarce believe 'tis so bad, says he. And he had\r
-experience of the like brood beasts and of springers, greasy hoggets and\r
-wether wool, having been some years before actuary for Mr Joseph Cuffe,\r
-a worthy salesmaster that drove his trade for live stock and meadow\r
-auctions hard by Mr Gavin Low's yard in Prussia street. I question with\r
-you there, says he. More like 'tis the hoose or the timber tongue. Mr\r
-Stephen, a little moved but very handsomely told him no such matter and\r
-that he had dispatches from the emperor's chief tailtickler thanking\r
-him for the hospitality, that was sending over Doctor Rinderpest, the\r
-bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy, with a bolus or two of physic to\r
-take the bull by the horns. Come, come, says Mr Vincent, plain dealing.\r
-He'll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a\r
-bull that's Irish, says he. Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr\r
-Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English\r
-chinashop. I conceive you, says Mr Dixon. It is that same bull that was\r
-sent to our island by farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattlebreeder of them\r
-all, with an emerald ring in his nose. True for you, says Mr Vincent\r
-cross the table, and a bullseye into the bargain, says he, and a plumper\r
-and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock. He had horns\r
-galore, a coat of cloth of gold and a sweet smoky breath coming out of\r
-his nostrils so that the women of our island, leaving doughballs and\r
-rollingpins, followed after him hanging his bulliness in daisychains.\r
-What for that, says Mr Dixon, but before he came over farmer Nicholas\r
-that was a eunuch had him properly gelded by a college of doctors who\r
-were no better off than himself. So be off now, says he, and do all my\r
-cousin german the lord Harry tells you and take a farmer's blessing, and\r
-with that he slapped his posteriors very soundly. But the slap and the\r
-blessing stood him friend, says Mr Vincent, for to make up he taught him\r
-a trick worth two of the other so that maid, wife, abbess and widow to\r
-this day affirm that they would rather any time of the month whisper\r
-in his ear in the dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his\r
-long holy tongue than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in\r
-the four fields of all Ireland. Another then put in his word: And they\r
-dressed him, says he, in a point shift and petticoat with a tippet and\r
-girdle and ruffles on his wrists and clipped his forelock and rubbed him\r
-all over with spermacetic oil and built stables for him at every turn of\r
-the road with a gold manger in each full of the best hay in the market\r
-so that he could doss and dung to his heart's content. By this time the\r
-father of the faithful (for so they called him) was grown so heavy that\r
-he could scarce walk to pasture. To remedy which our cozening dames and\r
-damsels brought him his fodder in their apronlaps and as soon as his\r
-belly was full he would rear up on his hind uarters to show their\r
-ladyships a mystery and roar and bellow out of him in bulls' language\r
-and they all after him. Ay, says another, and so pampered was he that he\r
-would suffer nought to grow in all the land but green grass for himself\r
-(for that was the only colour to his mind) and there was a board put up\r
-on a hillock in the middle of the island with a printed notice, saying:\r
-By the Lord Harry, Green is the grass that grows on the ground. And,\r
-says Mr Dixon, if ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or\r
-the wilds of Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was sowing as much\r
-as a handful of mustard or a bag of rapeseed out he'd run amok over half\r
-the countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all\r
-by lord Harry's orders. There was bad blood between them at first, says\r
-Mr Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all the old Nicks\r
-in the world and an old whoremaster that kept seven trulls in his house\r
-and I'll meddle in his matters, says he. I'll make that animal smell\r
-hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But\r
-one evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal\r
-pelt to go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for\r
-himself but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row\r
-with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull\r
-and on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry\r
-he found sure enough that he was a lefthanded descendant of the famous\r
-champion bull of the Romans, _Bos Bovum_, which is good bog Latin for\r
-boss of the show. After that, says Mr Vincent, the lord Harry put his\r
-head into a cow's drinkingtrough in the presence of all his courtiers\r
-and pulling it out again told them all his new name. Then, with the\r
-water running off him, he got into an old smock and skirt that had\r
-belonged to his grandmother and bought a grammar of the bulls' language\r
-to study but he could never learn a word of it except the first personal\r
-pronoun which he copied out big and got off by heart and if ever he went\r
-out for a walk he filled his pockets with chalk to write it upon what\r
-took his fancy, the side of a rock or a teahouse table or a bale of\r
-cotton or a corkfloat. In short, he and the bull of Ireland were soon as\r
-fast friends as an arse and a shirt. They were, says Mr Stephen, and\r
-the end was that the men of the island seeing no help was toward, as\r
-the ungrate women were all of one mind, made a wherry raft, loaded\r
-themselves and their bundles of chattels on shipboard, set all masts\r
-erect, manned the yards, sprang their luff, heaved to, spread three\r
-sheets in the wind, put her head between wind and water, weighed anchor,\r
-ported her helm, ran up the jolly Roger, gave three times three, let the\r
-bullgine run, pushed off in their bumboat and put to sea to recover\r
-the main of America. Which was the occasion, says Mr Vincent, of the\r
-composing by a boatswain of that rollicking chanty:\r
-\r
- _--Pope Peter's but a pissabed.\r
- A man's a man for a' that._\r
-\r
-Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway\r
-as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend\r
-whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon,\r
-who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a\r
-cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil\r
-enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a\r
-project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched\r
-on. Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards\r
-which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend\r
-printed in fair italics: _Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator.\r
-Lambay Island_. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw\r
-from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir\r
-Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself\r
-to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well,\r
-let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it\r
-smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. 'Tis as cheap sitting as\r
-standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon\r
-his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by\r
-a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the\r
-prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal\r
-vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the\r
-prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities\r
-acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch\r
-defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable\r
-females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who hide their\r
-flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly\r
-bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might\r
-multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of\r
-their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he\r
-assured them, made his heart weep. To curb this inconvenient (which\r
-he concluded due to a suppression of latent heat), having advised with\r
-certain counsellors of worth and inspected into this matter, he had\r
-resolved to purchase in fee simple for ever the freehold of Lambay\r
-island from its holder, lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of\r
-note much in favour with our ascendancy party. He proposed to set up\r
-there a national fertilising farm to be named _Omphalos_ with an obelisk\r
-hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful\r
-yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life\r
-soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the\r
-functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he\r
-take a penny for his pains. The poorest kitchenwench no less than the\r
-opulent lady of fashion, if so be their constructions and their tempers\r
-were warm persuaders for their petitions, would find in him their man.\r
-For his nutriment he shewed how he would feed himself exclusively upon a\r
-diet of savoury tubercles and fish and coneys there, the flesh of these\r
-latter prolific rodents being highly recommended for his purpose, both\r
-broiled and stewed with a blade of mace and a pod or two of capsicum\r
-chillies. After this homily which he delivered with much warmth of\r
-asseveration Mr Mulligan in a trice put off from his hat a kerchief with\r
-which he had shielded it. They both, it seems, had been overtaken by the\r
-rain and for all their mending their pace had taken water, as might be\r
-observed by Mr Mulligan's smallclothes of a hodden grey which was now\r
-somewhat piebald. His project meanwhile was very favourably entertained\r
-by his auditors and won hearty eulogies from all though Mr Dixon of\r
-Mary's excepted to it, asking with a finicking air did he purpose also\r
-to carry coals to Newcastle. Mr Mulligan however made court to the\r
-scholarly by an apt quotation from the classics which, as it dwelt\r
-upon his memory, seemed to him a sound and tasteful support of his\r
-contention: _Talis ac tanta depravatio hujus seculi, O quirites,\r
-ut matresfamiliarum nostrae lascivas cujuslibet semiviri libici\r
-titillationes testibus ponderosis atque excelsis erectionibus\r
-centurionum Romanorum magnopere anteponunt_, while for those of ruder\r
-wit he drove home his point by analogies of the animal kingdom more\r
-suitable to their stomach, the buck and doe of the forest glade, the\r
-farmyard drake and duck.\r
-\r
-Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper\r
-man of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with\r
-animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics\r
-while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had\r
-advanced. The young gentleman, his friend, overjoyed as he was at a\r
-passage that had late befallen him, could not forbear to tell it his\r
-nearest neighbour. Mr Mulligan, now perceiving the table, asked for whom\r
-were those loaves and fishes and, seeing the stranger, he made him\r
-a civil bow and said, Pray, sir, was you in need of any professional\r
-assistance we could give? Who, upon his offer, thanked him very\r
-heartily, though preserving his proper distance, and replied that he was\r
-come there about a lady, now an inmate of Horne's house, that was in an\r
-interesting condition, poor body, from woman's woe (and here he fetched\r
-a deep sigh) to know if her happiness had yet taken place. Mr Dixon,\r
-to turn the table, took on to ask of Mr Mulligan himself whether\r
-his incipient ventripotence, upon which he rallied him, betokened an\r
-ovoblastic gestation in the prostatic utricle or male womb or was due,\r
-as with the noted physician, Mr Austin Meldon, to a wolf in the stomach.\r
-For answer Mr Mulligan, in a gale of laughter at his smalls, smote\r
-himself bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an admirable droll\r
-mimic of Mother Grogan (the most excellent creature of her sex though\r
-'tis pity she's a trollop): There's a belly that never bore a bastard.\r
-This was so happy a conceit that it renewed the storm of mirth and threw\r
-the whole room into the most violent agitations of delight. The spry\r
-rattle had run on in the same vein of mimicry but for some larum in the\r
-antechamber.\r
-\r
-Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student, a little\r
-fume of a fellow, blond as tow, congratulated in the liveliest fashion\r
-with the young gentleman and, interrupting the narrative at a salient\r
-point, having desired his visavis with a polite beck to have the\r
-obligingness to pass him a flagon of cordial waters at the same time by\r
-a questioning poise of the head (a whole century of polite breeding had\r
-not achieved so nice a gesture) to which was united an equivalent but\r
-contrary balance of the bottle asked the narrator as plainly as was ever\r
-done in words if he might treat him with a cup of it. _Mais bien sûr_,\r
-noble stranger, said he cheerily, _et mille compliments_. That you may\r
-and very opportunely. There wanted nothing but this cup to crown my\r
-felicity. But, gracious heaven, was I left with but a crust in my wallet\r
-and a cupful of water from the well, my God, I would accept of them and\r
-find it in my heart to kneel down upon the ground and give thanks to\r
-the powers above for the happiness vouchsafed me by the Giver of good\r
-things. With these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a\r
-complacent draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his\r
-bosom, out popped a locket that hung from a silk riband, that very\r
-picture which he had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein.\r
-Gazing upon those features with a world of tenderness, Ah, Monsieur, he\r
-said, had you but beheld her as I did with these eyes at that affecting\r
-instant with her dainty tucker and her new coquette cap (a gift for her\r
-feastday as she told me prettily) in such an artless disorder, of so\r
-melting a tenderness, 'pon my conscience, even you, Monsieur, had been\r
-impelled by generous nature to deliver yourself wholly into the hands of\r
-such an enemy or to quit the field for ever. I declare, I was never so\r
-touched in all my life. God, I thank thee, as the Author of my days!\r
-Thrice happy will he be whom so amiable a creature will bless with her\r
-favours. A sigh of affection gave eloquence to these words and, having\r
-replaced the locket in his bosom, he wiped his eye and sighed again.\r
-Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how great\r
-and universal must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in\r
-thrall the free and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb,\r
-the lover in the heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer\r
-years. But indeed, sir, I wander from the point. How mingled and\r
-imperfect are all our sublunary joys. Maledicity! he exclaimed in\r
-anguish. Would to God that foresight had but remembered me to take my\r
-cloak along! I could weep to think of it. Then, though it had poured\r
-seven showers, we were neither of us a penny the worse. But beshrew me,\r
-he cried, clapping hand to his forehead, tomorrow will be a new day and,\r
-thousand thunders, I know of a _marchand de capotes_, Monsieur Poyntz,\r
-from whom I can have for a livre as snug a cloak of the French fashion\r
-as ever kept a lady from wetting. Tut, tut! cries Le Fecondateur,\r
-tripping in, my friend Monsieur Moore, that most accomplished traveller\r
-(I have just cracked a half bottle AVEC LUI in a circle of the best wits\r
-of the town), is my authority that in Cape Horn, _ventre biche_, they\r
-have a rain that will wet through any, even the stoutest cloak. A\r
-drenching of that violence, he tells me, _sans blague_, has sent more\r
-than one luckless fellow in good earnest posthaste to another world.\r
-Pooh! A _livre!_ cries Monsieur Lynch. The clumsy things are dear at a\r
-sou. One umbrella, were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom, is worth ten\r
-such stopgaps. No woman of any wit would wear one. My dear Kitty told me\r
-today that she would dance in a deluge before ever she would starve in\r
-such an ark of salvation for, as she reminded me (blushing piquantly and\r
-whispering in my ear though there was none to snap her words but giddy\r
-butterflies), dame Nature, by the divine blessing, has implanted it in\r
-our hearts and it has become a household word that _il y a deux choses_\r
-for which the innocence of our original garb, in other circumstances a\r
-breach of the proprieties, is the fittest, nay, the only garment. The\r
-first, said she (and here my pretty philosopher, as I handed her to her\r
-tilbury, to fix my attention, gently tipped with her tongue the outer\r
-chamber of my ear), the first is a bath... But at this point a bell\r
-tinkling in the hall cut short a discourse which promised so bravely for\r
-the enrichment of our store of knowledge.\r
-\r
-Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while\r
-all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and,\r
-having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with\r
-a profound bow to the company. The presence even for a moment among a\r
-party of debauchees of a woman endued with every quality of modesty and\r
-not less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of\r
-the most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of\r
-ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled.\r
-A monstrous fine bit of cowflesh! I'll be sworn she has rendezvoused\r
-you. What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad's bud, immensely\r
-so, said Mr Lynch. The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater\r
-hospice. Demme, does not Doctor O'Gargle chuck the nuns there under the\r
-chin. As I look to be saved I had it from my Kitty who has been wardmaid\r
-there any time these seven months. Lawksamercy, doctor, cried the young\r
-blood in the primrose vest, feigning a womanish simper and with immodest\r
-squirmings of his body, how you do tease a body! Drat the man! Bless\r
-me, I'm all of a wibbly wobbly. Why, you're as bad as dear little Father\r
-Cantekissem, that you are! May this pot of four half choke me, cried\r
-Costello, if she aint in the family way. I knows a lady what's got a\r
-white swelling quick as I claps eyes on her. The young surgeon, however,\r
-rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just\r
-then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence\r
-had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was\r
-_enceinte_ which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had\r
-given birth to a bouncing boy. I want patience, said he, with those\r
-who, without wit to enliven or learning to instruct, revile an ennobling\r
-profession which, saving the reverence due to the Deity, is the greatest\r
-power for happiness upon the earth. I am positive when I say that if\r
-need were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the excellence of\r
-her noble exercitations which, so far from being a byword, should be a\r
-glorious incentive in the human breast. I cannot away with them. What?\r
-Malign such an one, the amiable Miss Callan, who is the lustre of\r
-her own sex and the astonishment of ours? And at an instant the most\r
-momentous that can befall a puny child of clay? Perish the thought! I\r
-shudder to think of the future of a race where the seeds of such malice\r
-have been sown and where no right reverence is rendered to mother and\r
-maid in house of Horne. Having delivered himself of this rebuke he\r
-saluted those present on the by and repaired to the door. A murmur\r
-of approval arose from all and some were for ejecting the low soaker\r
-without more ado, a design which would have been effected nor would\r
-he have received more than his bare deserts had he not abridged his\r
-transgression by affirming with a horrid imprecation (for he swore a\r
-round hand) that he was as good a son of the true fold as ever drew\r
-breath. Stap my vitals, said he, them was always the sentiments of\r
-honest Frank Costello which I was bred up most particular to honour thy\r
-father and thy mother that had the best hand to a rolypoly or a hasty\r
-pudding as you ever see what I always looks back on with a loving heart.\r
-\r
-To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of\r
-some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits\r
-of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not\r
-pity. The young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies\r
-as overgrown children: the words of their tumultuary discussions\r
-were difficultly understood and not often nice: their testiness and\r
-outrageous _mots_ were such that his intellects resiled from: nor were\r
-they scrupulously sensible of the proprieties though their fund of\r
-strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf. But the word of Mr Costello\r
-was an unwelcome language for him for he nauseated the wretch that\r
-seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity, born out\r
-of wedlock and thrust like a crookback toothed and feet first into the\r
-world, which the dint of the surgeon's pliers in his skull lent indeed\r
-a colour to, so as to put him in thought of that missing link of\r
-creation's chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin. It was now\r
-for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed\r
-through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary\r
-ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart\r
-to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them\r
-with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude\r
-of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find\r
-tolerable and but tolerable. To those who create themselves wits at the\r
-cost of feminine delicacy (a habit of mind which he never did hold\r
-with) to them he would concede neither to bear the name nor to herit\r
-the tradition of a proper breeding: while for such that, having lost\r
-all forbearance, can lose no more, there remained the sharp antidote of\r
-experience to cause their insolency to beat a precipitate and inglorious\r
-retreat. Not but what he could feel with mettlesome youth which, caring\r
-nought for the mows of dotards or the gruntlings of the severe, is ever\r
-(as the chaste fancy of the Holy Writer expresses it) for eating of the\r
-tree forbid it yet not so far forth as to pretermit humanity upon any\r
-condition soever towards a gentlewoman when she was about her lawful\r
-occasions. To conclude, while from the sister's words he had reckoned\r
-upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must be owned, not a little\r
-alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so auspicated after an\r
-ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the mercy as well as to\r
-the bounty of the Supreme Being.\r
-\r
-Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express\r
-his notion of the thing, his opinion (who ought not perchance to express\r
-one) was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not\r
-to be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement\r
-since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. The dressy\r
-young blade said it was her husband's that put her in that expectation\r
-or at least it ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I\r
-must acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, clapping on the table so as to\r
-evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory Allelujurum was round\r
-again today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring through his\r
-nose a request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I\r
-bade him hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst anon.\r
-'Slife, I'll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile potency of\r
-the old bucko that could still knock another child out of her. All fell\r
-to praising of it, each after his own fashion, though the same young\r
-blade held with his former view that another than her conjugial had\r
-been the man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy (virtuous) or\r
-an itinerant vendor of articles needed in every household. Singular,\r
-communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of\r
-metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal dormitory and the\r
-dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity, that the\r
-mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a\r
-pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of\r
-an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. But,\r
-he further added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup feelings that in\r
-common oppress them for I have more than once observed that birds of a\r
-feather laugh together.\r
-\r
-But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron,\r
-has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted\r
-to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our\r
-internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have\r
-counselled? During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary\r
-advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that\r
-moment to discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a tenant\r
-at will while he trembled for the security of his four per cents? Has he\r
-forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is it that from\r
-being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is,\r
-if report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from\r
-candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daughter of\r
-a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections upon her\r
-virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it was indeed highly his\r
-interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy woman, she has been\r
-too long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to\r
-listen to his objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of\r
-the desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his\r
-piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt\r
-illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata\r
-of society! Nay, had the hussy's scouringbrush not been her tutelary\r
-angel, it had gone with her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian! In the\r
-question of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in\r
-Mr Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing\r
-retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill\r
-becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield\r
-that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible\r
-at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must\r
-dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste\r
-to restore to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his\r
-practice consist better with the doctrines that now engross him. His\r
-marital breast is the repository of secrets which decorum is reluctant\r
-to adduce. The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for\r
-a consort neglected and debauched but this new exponent of morals and\r
-healer of ills is at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in\r
-its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm\r
-but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their\r
-quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid\r
-and inoperative.\r
-\r
-The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial\r
-usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the\r
-junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the\r
-delegation that an heir had been born, When he had betaken himself\r
-to the women's apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the\r
-afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic\r
-affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous\r
-exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length and\r
-solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would\r
-palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and\r
-obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of\r
-tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring\r
-to urge, to mollify, to refrain. The moment was too propitious for the\r
-display of that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union among\r
-tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was successively\r
-eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean\r
-section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form,\r
-with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs\r
-Murder and rendered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate\r
-Bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the\r
-rights of primogeniture and king's bounty touching twins and triplets,\r
-miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated, the acardiac\r
-_foetus in foetu_ and aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnathia\r
-of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan) in\r
-consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial\r
-line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the\r
-benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of labour\r
-pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the\r
-premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the\r
-actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial\r
-insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent\r
-upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetration of the species in\r
-the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing\r
-manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers _Sturzgeburt,_ the\r
-recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births\r
-conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents--in\r
-a word all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified\r
-in his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations. The gravest\r
-problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much\r
-animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as\r
-the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest,\r
-by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and\r
-the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and\r
-ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her\r
-person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation.\r
-The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro's\r
-inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were alleged by one as a\r
-_prima facie_ and natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded\r
-(the case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or doghaired\r
-infants occasionally born. The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced\r
-by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of\r
-the land he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic\r
-development at some stage antecedent to the human. An outlandish\r
-delegate sustained against both these views, with such heat as almost\r
-carried conviction, the theory of copulation between women and the males\r
-of brutes, his authority being his own avouchment in support of fables\r
-such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet\r
-has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The impression\r
-made by his words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily\r
-as it had been evoked by an allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in\r
-that vein of pleasantry which none better than he knew how to affect,\r
-postulating as the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man.\r
-Contemporaneously, a heated argument having arisen between Mr Delegate\r
-Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and theological\r
-dilemma created in the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other,\r
-the difficulty by mutual consent was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom\r
-for instant submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent,\r
-whether the better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity\r
-of the garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward\r
-voice, he delivered briefly and, as some thought, perfunctorily the\r
-ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God has\r
-joined.\r
-\r
-But Malachias' tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the\r
-scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and\r
-in the recess appeared... Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh\r
-creep! He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the\r
-other a phial marked _Poison._ Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted\r
-on all faces while he eyed them with a ghostly grin. I anticipated some\r
-such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems,\r
-history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel\r
-Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. This\r
-is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting\r
-at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back\r
-with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a\r
-bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland's, is in this life. It is what I tried\r
-to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language\r
-(he recited some), laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips), camping\r
-out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope... Ah!\r
-Destruction! The black panther! With a cry he suddenly vanished and the\r
-panel slid back. An instant later his head appeared in the door opposite\r
-and said: Meet me at Westland Row station at ten past eleven. He was\r
-gone. Tears gushed from the eyes of the dissipated host. The seer\r
-raised his hand to heaven, murmuring: The vendetta of Mananaun! The\r
-sage repeated: _Lex talionis_. The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy\r
-without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Malachias,\r
-overcome by emotion, ceased. The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the\r
-third brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself\r
-the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this\r
-relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited.\r
-No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in the solitude.\r
-The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted.\r
-Murderer's ground.\r
-\r
-What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the\r
-chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the\r
-merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as\r
-her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing\r
-the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a\r
-modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is\r
-young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within\r
-a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then\r
-is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old\r
-house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on\r
-him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's\r
-thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first\r
-hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged\r
-traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented\r
-handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas!\r
-a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this\r
-or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for\r
-a budding virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his\r
-studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark\r
-eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission\r
-to the head of the firm, seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in\r
-the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating),\r
-reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a\r
-month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young\r
-knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny speck within the\r
-mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his\r
-sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a\r
-drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the\r
-first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine\r
-and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear\r
-the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal\r
-university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever\r
-remember the night: first night, the bridenight. They are entwined\r
-in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed, and in an instant\r
-(_fiat_!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay,\r
-fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but--hold! Back! It must not be! In\r
-terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of\r
-darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe\r
-of day. No, Leopold. Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful\r
-illusion of thy strength was taken from thee--and in vain. No son of thy\r
-loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was\r
-for Rudolph.\r
-\r
-The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the\r
-infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions\r
-of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight\r
-ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her\r
-dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with\r
-ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms\r
-are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely\r
-haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They\r
-fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of\r
-screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And\r
-on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion,\r
-the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads\r
-them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and\r
-yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come\r
-trooping to the sunken sea, _Lacus Mortis_. Ominous revengeful zodiacal\r
-host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the\r
-trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter\r
-and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning\r
-multitude, murderers of the sun.\r
-\r
-Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible\r
-gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent\r
-grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven's own\r
-magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And lo, wonder\r
-of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the\r
-daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one,\r
-Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now\r
-arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour,\r
-shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call\r
-it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it\r
-streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents\r
-of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling,\r
-writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad\r
-metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign\r
-upon the forehead of Taurus.\r
-\r
-Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at\r
-school together in Conmee's time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades,\r
-Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the\r
-past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them\r
-into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to\r
-my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending\r
-bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair\r
-with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those\r
-leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something\r
-more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius\r
-father. All who wish you well hope this for you. All desire to see\r
-you bring forth the work you meditate, to acclaim you Stephaneforos. I\r
-heartily wish you may not fail them. O no, Vincent Lenehan said, laying\r
-a hand on the shoulder near him. Have no fear. He could not leave his\r
-mother an orphan. The young man's face grew dark. All could see how hard\r
-it was for him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent loss. He\r
-would have withdrawn from the feast had not the noise of voices allayed\r
-the smart. Madden had lost five drachmas on Sceptre for a whim of the\r
-rider's name: Lenehan as much more. He told them of the race. The flag\r
-fell and, huuh! off, scamper, the mare ran out freshly with 0. Madden\r
-up. She was leading the field. All hearts were beating. Even Phyllis\r
-could not contain herself. She waved her scarf and cried: Huzzah!\r
-Sceptre wins! But in the straight on the run home when all were in close\r
-order the dark horse Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped her. All\r
-was lost now. Phyllis was silent: her eyes were sad anemones. Juno, she\r
-cried, I am undone. But her lover consoled her and brought her a bright\r
-casket of gold in which lay some oval sugarplums which she partook. A\r
-tear fell: one only. A whacking fine whip, said Lenehan, is W. Lane.\r
-Four winners yesterday and three today. What rider is like him? Mount\r
-him on the camel or the boisterous buffalo the victory in a hack canter\r
-is still his. But let us bear it as was the ancient wont. Mercy on the\r
-luckless! Poor Sceptre! he said with a light sigh. She is not the filly\r
-that she was. Never, by this hand, shall we behold such another. By gad,\r
-sir, a queen of them. Do you remember her, Vincent? I wish you could\r
-have seen my queen today, Vincent said. How young she was and radiant\r
-(Lalage were scarce fair beside her) in her yellow shoes and frock of\r
-muslin, I do not know the right name of it. The chestnuts that shaded\r
-us were in bloom: the air drooped with their persuasive odour and with\r
-pollen floating by us. In the sunny patches one might easily have\r
-cooked on a stone a batch of those buns with Corinth fruit in them that\r
-Periplipomenes sells in his booth near the bridge. But she had nought\r
-for her teeth but the arm with which I held her and in that she nibbled\r
-mischievously when I pressed too close. A week ago she lay ill, four\r
-days on the couch, but today she was free, blithe, mocked at peril.\r
-She is more taking then. Her posies tool Mad romp that she is, she had\r
-pulled her fill as we reclined together. And in your ear, my friend, you\r
-will not think who met us as we left the field. Conmee himself! He was\r
-walking by the hedge, reading, I think a brevier book with, I doubt not,\r
-a witty letter in it from Glycera or Chloe to keep the page. The sweet\r
-creature turned all colours in her confusion, feigning to reprove a\r
-slight disorder in her dress: a slip of underwood clung there for the\r
-very trees adore her. When Conmee had passed she glanced at her lovely\r
-echo in that little mirror she carries. But he had been kind. In going\r
-by he had blessed us. The gods too are ever kind, Lenehan said. If I had\r
-poor luck with Bass's mare perhaps this draught of his may serve me more\r
-propensely. He was laying his hand upon a winejar: Malachi saw it and\r
-withheld his act, pointing to the stranger and to the scarlet label.\r
-Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. His soul is far\r
-away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be\r
-born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the\r
-incorruptible eon of the gods. Do you not think it, Stephen? Theosophos\r
-told me so, Stephen answered, whom in a previous existence Egyptian\r
-priests initiated into the mysteries of karmic law. The lords of the\r
-moon, Theosophos told me, an orangefiery shipload from planet Alpha\r
-of the lunar chain would not assume the etheric doubles and these\r
-were therefore incarnated by the rubycoloured egos from the second\r
-constellation.\r
-\r
-However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him\r
-being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which\r
-was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was\r
-not the case at all. The individual whose visual organs while the above\r
-was going on were at this juncture commencing to exhibit symptoms of\r
-animation was as astute if not astuter than any man living and anybody\r
-that conjectured the contrary would have found themselves pretty\r
-speedily in the wrong shop. During the past four minutes or thereabouts\r
-he had been staring hard at a certain amount of number one Bass bottled\r
-by Messrs Bass and Co at Burton-on-Trent which happened to be situated\r
-amongst a lot of others right opposite to where he was and which was\r
-certainly calculated to attract anyone's remark on account of its\r
-scarlet appearance. He was simply and solely, as it subsequently\r
-transpired for reasons best known to himself, which put quite an\r
-altogether different complexion on the proceedings, after the moment\r
-before's observations about boyhood days and the turf, recollecting two\r
-or three private transactions of his own which the other two were as\r
-mutually innocent of as the babe unborn. Eventually, however, both\r
-their eyes met and as soon as it began to dawn on him that the other was\r
-endeavouring to help himself to the thing he involuntarily determined\r
-to help him himself and so he accordingly took hold of the neck of the\r
-mediumsized glass recipient which contained the fluid sought after and\r
-made a capacious hole in it by pouring a lot of it out with, also at the\r
-same time, however, a considerable degree of attentiveness in order not\r
-to upset any of the beer that was in it about the place.\r
-\r
-The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the\r
-course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The\r
-debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on\r
-the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne's house had never\r
-beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the\r
-old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so\r
-encyclopaedic. A gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at\r
-the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing\r
-from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him,\r
-was Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity\r
-and premature wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to\r
-Costello, the eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose\r
-the squat form of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant\r
-before the hearth but on either flank of it the figure of Bannon in\r
-explorer's kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted\r
-sharply with the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi\r
-Roland St John Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young\r
-poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical\r
-inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while\r
-to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator,\r
-fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the\r
-dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible\r
-dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril\r
-or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that voluptuous\r
-loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages\r
-yet to come.\r
-\r
-It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted\r
-transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus' (Div. Scep.) contentions\r
-would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to\r
-accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated,\r
-deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the\r
-street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain\r
-them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questions which\r
-science cannot answer--at present--such as the first problem submitted\r
-by Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future determination of sex.\r
-Must we accept the view of Empedocles of Trinacria that the right ovary\r
-(the postmenstrual period, assert others) is responsible for the birth\r
-of males or are the too long neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the\r
-differentiating factors or is it, as most embryologists incline to\r
-opine, such as Culpepper, Spallanzani, Blumenbach, Lusk, Hertwig,\r
-Leopold and Valenti, a mixture of both? This would be tantamount to\r
-a cooperation (one of nature's favourite devices) between the _nisus\r
-formativus_ of the nemasperm on the one hand and on the other a happily\r
-chosen position, _succubitus felix_ of the passive element. The other\r
-problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant\r
-mortality. It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we\r
-are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways. Mr M.\r
-Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames the sanitary conditions in which\r
-our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by\r
-inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleged,\r
-and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity\r
-posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers\r
-and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspended carcases of\r
-dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas--these, he\r
-said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of\r
-the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted\r
-and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature,\r
-light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of\r
-the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured\r
-photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable\r
-ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months\r
-in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes\r
-some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers\r
-subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in\r
-the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or official,\r
-culminating in the exposure of newborn infants, the practice of criminal\r
-abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former\r
-(we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he\r
-cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity\r
-is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the\r
-wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they\r
-do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which\r
-often baulk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is\r
-that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and\r
-mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements,\r
-lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in\r
-fine, in nature's vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun\r
-to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our\r
-public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.\r
-Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy\r
-parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs\r
-unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the same\r
-marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet's words, give us pause.\r
-Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for\r
-whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law\r
-of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken\r
-up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the\r
-plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an\r
-increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement which, though\r
-productive of pain to some of our feelings (notably the maternal), is\r
-nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial to the\r
-race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest. Mr S.\r
-Dedalus' (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be called an interruption?)\r
-that an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and\r
-apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect\r
-imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females\r
-emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak\r
-of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find gastric\r
-relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought\r
-else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to.\r
-For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately acquainted with\r
-the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and\r
-embryo philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things\r
-scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides\r
-himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in\r
-the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed victuallers signifies the\r
-cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother. In\r
-a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took\r
-place in the commons' hall of the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30\r
-and 31 Holles street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in\r
-Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported\r
-by eyewitnesses as having stated that once a woman has let the cat\r
-into the bag (an esthete's allusion, presumably, to one of the most\r
-complicated and marvellous of all nature's processes--the act of sexual\r
-congress) she must let it out again or give it life, as he phrased it,\r
-to save her own. At the risk of her own, was the telling rejoinder of\r
-his interlocutor, none the less effective for the moderate and measured\r
-tone in which it was delivered.\r
-\r
-Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a\r
-happy _accouchement._ It had been a weary weary while both for patient\r
-and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave\r
-woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and\r
-now she was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone\r
-before, are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching\r
-scene. Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight\r
-in her eyes, that longing hunger for baby fingers (a pretty sight it is\r
-to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent\r
-prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her\r
-loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have\r
-her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that\r
-mite of God's clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces. He is older now\r
-(you and I may whisper it) and a trifle stooped in the shoulders yet\r
-in the whirligig of years a grave dignity has come to the conscientious\r
-second accountant of the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O Doady,\r
-loved one of old, faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that\r
-faroff time of the roses! With the old shake of her pretty head she\r
-recalls those days. God! How beautiful now across the mist of years! But\r
-their children are grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers\r
-and his, Charley, Mary Alice, Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy,\r
-Budgy (Victoria Frances), Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little\r
-Bobsy (called after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs\r
-of Waterford and Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a\r
-Purefoy if ever there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful\r
-will be christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of\r
-Mr Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer's office, Dublin Castle. And so\r
-time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no sigh\r
-break from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes from\r
-your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for\r
-you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read\r
-in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so with a tranquil\r
-heart to bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His own good time. You\r
-too have fought the good fight and played loyally your man's part. Sir,\r
-to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant!\r
-\r
-There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil\r
-memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart\r
-but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim,\r
-let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself\r
-that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will\r
-call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the\r
-most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel\r
-and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the\r
-evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine.\r
-Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under\r
-her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded\r
-in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.\r
-\r
-The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of\r
-that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied\r
-trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an\r
-unhealthiness, a _flair,_ for the cruder things of life. A scene\r
-disengages itself in the observer's memory, evoked, it would seem, by\r
-a word of so natural a homeliness as if those days were really present\r
-there (as some thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space\r
-of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at\r
-Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but\r
-with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over\r
-the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert\r
-shock. And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at times\r
-in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey,\r
-Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in\r
-her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent\r
-from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily\r
-against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey\r
-(blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long\r
-the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by\r
-that circle of girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young\r
-man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but\r
-must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the\r
-PIAZZETTA giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness\r
-or of reproach (_alles Vergangliche_) in her glad look.\r
-\r
-Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that\r
-antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their\r
-faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of\r
-custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant\r
-watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long\r
-ago. But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with\r
-preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended,\r
-compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field\r
-and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an\r
-instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the\r
-thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the\r
-transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the\r
-word.\r
-\r
-Burke's! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and\r
-bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor,\r
-punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear,\r
-ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and\r
-what not. A dedale of lusty youth, noble every student there. Nurse\r
-Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon\r
-coming downstairs with news of placentation ended, a full pound if a\r
-milligramme. They hark him on. The door! It is open? Ha! They are out,\r
-tumultuously, off for a minute's race, all bravely legging it, Burke's\r
-of Denzille and Holles their ulterior goal. Dixon follows giving them\r
-sharp language but raps out an oath, he too, and on. Bloom stays with\r
-nurse a thought to send a kind word to happy mother and nurseling up\r
-there. Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet. Looks she too not other now? Ward\r
-of watching in Horne's house has told its tale in that washedout pallor.\r
-Then all being gone, a glance of motherwit helping, he whispers close in\r
-going: Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?\r
-\r
-The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence\r
-celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny _coelum._\r
-God's air, the Allfather's air, scintillant circumambient cessile air.\r
-Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a\r
-doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor\r
-barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle.\r
-Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which\r
-thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her!\r
-Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all\r
-Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping\r
-under thy load, bemoiled with butcher's bills at home and ingots (not\r
-thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt\r
-gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy\r
-Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed\r
-curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead\r
-gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer.\r
-Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the\r
-innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile\r
-cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary\r
-pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever,\r
-bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious\r
-attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and\r
-trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty\r
-years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that\r
-will and would and wait and never--do. Thou sawest thy America, thy\r
-lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How\r
-saith Zarathustra? _Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die\r
-süsse Milch des Euters_. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink,\r
-man, an udderful! Mother's milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk\r
-too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour,\r
-punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk\r
-of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan's land. Thy cow's dug was tough,\r
-what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this\r
-but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! _Per deam\r
-Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum_!\r
-\r
-All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides.\r
-Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole\r
-Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil's\r
-sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o' me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward\r
-to the ribbon counter. Where's Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the\r
-drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal! _Benedicat vos\r
-omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius_. A make, mister. The Denzille lane\r
-boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto, Isaacs, shove em out of the\r
-bleeding limelight. Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou\r
-heap good man. Allee samee dis bunch. _En avant, mes enfants_! Fire\r
-away number one on the gun. Burke's! Burke's! Thence they advanced five\r
-parasangs. Slattery's mounted foot. Where's that bleeding awfur? Parson\r
-Steve, apostates' creed! No, no, Mulligan! Abaft there! Shove ahead.\r
-Keep a watch on the clock. Chuckingout time. Mullee! What's on you? _Ma\r
-mère m'a mariée._ British Beatitudes! _Retamplatan Digidi Boumboum_.\r
-Ayes have it. To be printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two\r
-designing females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art\r
-shades. Most beautiful book come out of Ireland my time. _Silentium!_\r
-Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to nearest canteen and there annex\r
-liquor stores. March! Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are (atitudes!)\r
-parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs battleships, buggery\r
-and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beer, beef, trample the\r
-bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampellers. Thunderation! Keep\r
-the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops boosebox. Halt! Heave to.\r
-Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my tootsies! You hurt? Most\r
-amazingly sorry!\r
-\r
-Query. Who's astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare\r
-misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week\r
-gone. Yours? Mead of our fathers for the _Übermensch._ Dittoh. Five\r
-number ones. You, sir? Ginger cordial. Chase me, the cabby's caudle.\r
-Stimulate the caloric. Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go\r
-again when the old. Absinthe for me, savvy? _Caramba!_ Have an eggnog or\r
-a prairie oyster. Enemy? Avuncular's got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated\r
-awful. Don't mention it. Got a pectoral trauma, eh, Dix? Pos fact. Got\r
-bet be a boomblebee whenever he wus settin sleepin in hes bit garten.\r
-Digs up near the Mater. Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin I do.\r
-Full of a dure. See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey\r
-lovekin. None of your lean kine, not much. Pull down the blind, love.\r
-Two Ardilauns. Same here. Look slippery. If you fall don't wait to get\r
-up. Five, seven, nine. Fine! Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And\r
-her take me to rests and her anker of rum. Must be seen to be believed.\r
-Your starving eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O\r
-gluepot. Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you'll scuse me\r
-saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear thee beest a gert vool. Well, doc?\r
-Back fro Lapland? Your corporosity sagaciating O K? How's the squaws\r
-and papooses? Womanbody after going on the straw? Stand and deliver.\r
-Password. There's hair. Ours the white death and the ruddy birth. Hi!\r
-Spit in your own eye, boss! Mummer's wire. Cribbed out of Meredith.\r
-Jesified, orchidised, polycimical jesuit! Aunty mine's writing Pa Kinch.\r
-Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi.\r
-\r
-Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw\r
-Hielentman's your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot\r
-boil! My tipple. _Merci._ Here's to us. How's that? Leg before wicket.\r
-Don't stain my brandnew sitinems. Give's a shake of peppe, you there.\r
-Catch aholt. Caraway seed to carry away. Twig? Shrieks of silence. Every\r
-cove to his gentry mort. Venus Pandemos. _Les petites femmes_. Bold bad\r
-girl from the town of Mullingar. Tell her I was axing at her. Hauding\r
-Sara by the wame. On the road to Malahide. Me? If she who seduced me had\r
-left but the name. What do you want for ninepence? Machree, macruiskeen.\r
-Smutty Moll for a mattress jig. And a pull all together. _Ex!_\r
-\r
-Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like,\r
-seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He've got the\r
-chink _ad lib_. Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn.\r
-Us come right in on your invite, see? Up to you, matey. Out with the\r
-oof. Two bar and a wing. You larn that go off of they there Frenchy\r
-bilks? Won't wash here for nuts nohow. Lil chile velly solly. Ise de\r
-cutest colour coon down our side. Gawds teruth, Chawley. We are nae fou.\r
-We're nae tha fou. Au reservoir, mossoo. Tanks you.\r
-\r
-'Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam,\r
-two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn! Have a glint, do.\r
-Gum, I'm jiggered. And been to barber he have. Too full for words. With\r
-a railway bloke. How come you so? Opera he'd like? Rose of Castile. Rows\r
-of cast. Police! Some H2O for a gent fainted. Look at Bantam's flowers.\r
-Gemini. He's going to holler. The colleen bawn. My colleen bawn. O,\r
-cheese it! Shut his blurry Dutch oven with a firm hand. Had the winner\r
-today till I tipped him a dead cert. The ruffin cly the nab of Stephen\r
-Hand as give me the jady coppaleen. He strike a telegramboy paddock wire\r
-big bug Bass to the depot. Shove him a joey and grahamise. Mare on form\r
-hot order. Guinea to a goosegog. Tell a cram, that. Gospeltrue. Criminal\r
-diversion? I think that yes. Sure thing. Land him in chokeechokee if the\r
-harman beck copped the game. Madden back Madden's a maddening back. O\r
-lust our refuge and our strength. Decamping. Must you go? Off to mammy.\r
-Stand by. Hide my blushes someone. All in if he spots me. Come ahome,\r
-our Bantam. Horryvar, mong vioo. Dinna forget the cowslips for hersel.\r
-Cornfide. Wha gev ye thon colt? Pal to pal. Jannock. Of John Thomas, her\r
-spouse. No fake, old man Leo. S'elp me, honest injun. Shiver my timbers\r
-if I had. There's a great big holy friar. Vyfor you no me tell? Vel,\r
-I ses, if that aint a sheeny nachez, vel, I vil get misha mishinnah.\r
-Through yerd our lord, Amen.\r
-\r
-You move a motion? Steve boy, you're going it some. More bluggy\r
-drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of\r
-most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate\r
-one expensive inaugurated libation? Give's a breather. Landlord,\r
-landlord, have you good wine, staboo? Hoots, mon, a wee drap to pree.\r
-Cut and come again. Right. Boniface! Absinthe the lot. _Nos omnes\r
-biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posterioria nostria_.\r
-Closingtime, gents. Eh? Rome boose for the Bloom toff. I hear you say\r
-onions? Bloo? Cadges ads. Photo's papli, by all that's gorgeous. Play\r
-low, pardner. Slide. _Bonsoir la compagnie_. And snares of the poxfiend.\r
-Where's the buck and Namby Amby? Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e'en\r
-gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower. Kind Kristyann wil yu help\r
-yung man hoose frend tuk bungellow kee tu find plais whear tu lay crown\r
-of his hed 2 night. Crickey, I'm about sprung. Tarnally dog gone my\r
-shins if this beent the bestest puttiest longbreak yet. Item, curate,\r
-couple of cookies for this child. Cot's plood and prandypalls, none! Not\r
-a pite of sheeses? Thrust syphilis down to hell and with him those other\r
-licensed spirits. Time, gents! Who wander through the world. Health all!\r
-_a la vôtre_!\r
-\r
-Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep\r
-at his wearables. By mighty! What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril,\r
-by James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the\r
-Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis.\r
-Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once\r
-a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all\r
-forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh\r
-of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies.\r
-Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal? Chum o' yourn passed in his checks?\r
-Ludamassy! Pore piccaninnies! Thou'll no be telling me thot, Pold veg!\r
-Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos fren Padney was took off in black\r
-bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never see the like\r
-since I was born. _Tiens, tiens_, but it is well sad, that, my faith,\r
-yes. O, get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives are souped.\r
-Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow. Jappies? High\r
-angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him, says he, nor\r
-any Rooshian. Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward,\r
-woozy wobblers! Night. Night. May Allah the Excellent One your soul this\r
-night ever tremendously conserve.\r
-\r
-Your attention! We're nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The\r
-least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable\r
-regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.\r
-\r
-Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes.\r
-Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not\r
-come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!\r
-\r
-Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o' me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for\r
-Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is.\r
-Righto, any old time. _Laetabuntur in cubilibus suis_. You coming long?\r
-Whisper, who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds? Hush! Sinned\r
-against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to\r
-judge the world by fire. Pflaap! _Ut implerentur scripturae_. Strike\r
-up a ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy.\r
-Christicle, who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion\r
-hall? Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you\r
-winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you\r
-dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed\r
-fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple\r
-extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie, that's my name, that's\r
-yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok.\r
-The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He's on the\r
-square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing\r
-yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You'll\r
-need to rise precious early you sinner there, if you want to diddle the\r
-Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch\r
-in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-_The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches\r
-an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green\r
-will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping\r
-doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice\r
-gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which\r
-are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly.\r
-Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the\r
-murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer._\r
-\r
-THE CALLS: Wait, my love, and I'll be with you.\r
-\r
-THE ANSWERS: Round behind the stable.\r
-\r
-_(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling,\r
-jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. A chain of children 's hands\r
-imprisons him.)_\r
-\r
-THE CHILDREN: Kithogue! Salute!\r
-\r
-THE IDIOT: _(Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles)_ Grhahute!\r
-\r
-THE CHILDREN: Where's the great light?\r
-\r
-THE IDIOT: _(Gobbing)_ Ghaghahest.\r
-\r
-_(They release him. He jerks on. A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung\r
-between two railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and\r
-muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and\r
-snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches\r
-to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky\r
-oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his\r
-booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone\r
-makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the\r
-doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts,\r
-clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands\r
-the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in\r
-shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate\r
-crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter,\r
-cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a\r
-candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair\r
-of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey's voice, still young, sings shrill\r
-from a lane.)_\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY:\r
-\r
- _I gave it to Molly\r
- Because she was jolly,\r
- The leg of the duck,\r
- The leg of the duck._\r
-\r
-_(Private Carr and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters,\r
-as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their\r
-mouths a volleyed fart. Laughter of men from the lane. A hoarse virago\r
-retorts.)_\r
-\r
-THE VIRAGO: Signs on you, hairy arse. More power the Cavan girl.\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet. _(She\r
-sings)_\r
-\r
- _I gave it to Nelly\r
- To stick in her belly,\r
- The leg of the duck,\r
- The leg of the duck._\r
-\r
-_(Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their tunics\r
-bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped\r
-polls. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close to the\r
-redcoats.)_\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Jerks his finger)_ Way for the parson.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Turns and calls)_ What ho, parson!\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: _(Her voice soaring higher)_\r
-\r
- _She has it, she got it,\r
- Wherever she put it,\r
- The leg of the duck._\r
-\r
-_(Stephen, flourishing the ashplant in his left hand, chants with joy\r
-the_ introit _for paschal time. Lynch, his jockeycap low on his brow,\r
-attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia_.\r
-\r
-_(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a\r
-doorway.)_\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: _(Her voice whispering huskily)_ Sst! Come here till I tell\r
-you. Maidenhead inside. Sst!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Altius aliquantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista_.\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: _(Spits in their trail her jet of venom)_ Trinity medicals.\r
-Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.\r
-\r
-_(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws her shawl\r
-across her nostrils.)_\r
-\r
-EDY BOARDMAN: _(Bickering)_ And says the one: I seen you up Faithful\r
-place with your squarepusher, the greaser off the railway, in his\r
-cometobed hat. Did you, says I. That's not for you to say, says I. You\r
-never seen me in the mantrap with a married highlander, says I. The\r
-likes of her! Stag that one is! Stubborn as a mule! And her walking with\r
-two fellows the one time, Kilbride, the enginedriver, and lancecorporal\r
-Oliphant.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Ttriumphaliter) Salvi facti sunt._\r
-\r
-_(He flourishes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light\r
-over the world. A liver and white spaniel on the prowl slinks after him,\r
-growling. Lynch scares it with a kick.)_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: So that?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: (_Looks behind_) So that gesture, not music not odour, would be\r
-a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay\r
-sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburgh street!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even\r
-the allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of\r
-love.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Ba!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug?\r
-This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar.\r
-Hold my stick.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Lecherous lynx, _to la belle dame sans merci,_ Georgina\r
-Johnson, _ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam._\r
-\r
-_(Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands,\r
-his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down\r
-turned, in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left\r
-being higher.)_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That or the\r
-customhouse. Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch and walk.\r
-\r
-_(They pass. Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a gaslamp and, clasping, climbs\r
-in spasms. From the top spur he slides down. Jacky Caffrey clasps to\r
-climb. The navvy lurches against the lamp. The twins scuttle off in the\r
-dark. The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his\r
-nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot.\r
-Shouldering the lamp he staggers away through the crowd with his flaring\r
-cresset._\r
-\r
-_Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools,\r
-middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow leaps in the south\r
-beyond the seaward reaches of the river. The navvy, staggering forward,\r
-cleaves the crowd and lurches towards the tramsiding on the farther side\r
-under the railway bridge bloom appears, flushed, panting, cramming bread\r
-and chocolate into a sidepocket. From Gillen's hairdresser's window a\r
-composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image. A concave mirror\r
-at the side presents to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. Grave\r
-Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom. he passes, struck by the\r
-stare of truculent Wellington, but in the convex mirror grin unstruck\r
-the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy._\r
-\r
-_At Antonio Pabaiotti's door Bloom halts, sweated under the bright\r
-arclamp. He disappears. In a moment he reappears and hurries on.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Fish and taters. N. g. Ah!\r
-\r
-_(He disappears into Olhausen's, the porkbutcher's, under the downcoming\r
-rollshutter. A few moments later he emerges from under the shutter,\r
-puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. In each hand he holds a parcel, one\r
-containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the other a cold sheep's trotter,\r
-sprinkled with wholepepper. He gasps, standing upright. Then bending to\r
-one side he presses a parcel against his ribs and groans.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Stitch in my side. Why did I run?\r
-\r
-_(He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards the lampset\r
-siding. The glow leaps again.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: What is that? A flasher? Searchlight.\r
-\r
-_(He stands at Cormack's corner, watching)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _Aurora borealis_ or a steel foundry? Ah, the brigade, of course.\r
-South side anyhow. Big blaze. Might be his house. Beggar's bush. We're\r
-safe. _(He hums cheerfully)_ London's burning, London's burning! On\r
-fire, on fire! (_He catches sight of the navvy lurching through the\r
-crowd at the farther side of Talbot street_) I'll miss him. Run. Quick.\r
-Better cross here.\r
-\r
-_(He darts to cross the road. Urchins shout.)_\r
-\r
-THE URCHINS: Mind out, mister! (_Two cyclists, with lighted paper\r
-lanterns aswing, swim by him, grazing him, their bells rattling_)\r
-\r
-THE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Halts erect, stung by a spasm)_ Ow!\r
-\r
-_(He looks round, darts forward suddenly. Through rising fog a dragon\r
-sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon him,\r
-its huge red headlight winking, its trolley hissing on the wire. The\r
-motorman bangs his footgong.)_\r
-\r
-THE GONG: Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.\r
-\r
-_(The brake cracks violently. Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved\r
-hand, blunders stifflegged out of the track. The motorman, thrown\r
-forward, pugnosed, on the guidewheel, yells as he slides past over\r
-chains and keys.)_\r
-\r
-THE MOTORMAN: Hey, shitbreeches, are you doing the hat trick?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a\r
-mudflake from his cheek with a parcelled hand.)_ No thoroughfare. Close\r
-shave that but cured the stitch. Must take up Sandow's exercises again.\r
-On the hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential.\r
-_(He feels his trouser pocket)_ Poor mamma's panacea. Heel easily catch\r
-in track or bootlace in a cog. Day the wheel of the black Maria peeled\r
-off my shoe at Leonard's corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick.\r
-Insolent driver. I ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous.\r
-Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman. Same\r
-style of beauty. Quick of him all the same. The stiff walk. True word\r
-spoken in jest. That awful cramp in Lad lane. Something poisonous I\r
-ate. Emblem of luck. Why? Probably lost cattle. Mark of the beast. _(He\r
-closes his eyes an instant)_ Bit light in the head. Monthly or effect of\r
-the other. Brainfogfag. That tired feeling. Too much for me now. Ow!\r
-\r
-(A sinister figure leans on plaited legs against o'beirne's wall, a\r
-visage unknown, injected with dark mercury. From under a wideleaved\r
-sombrero the figure regards him with evil eye.)\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta?_\r
-\r
-THE FIGURE: (_Impassive, raises a signal arm_) Password. _Sraid Mabbot._\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Haha. _Merci._ Esperanto. _Slan leath. (He mutters)_ Gaelic\r
-league spy, sent by that fireeater.\r
-\r
-_(He steps forward. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path. He steps\r
-left, ragsackman left.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I beg. (_He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on_.)\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Keep to the right, right, right. If there is a signpost planted\r
-by the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon? I who\r
-lost my way and contributed to the columns of the _Irish Cyclist_ the\r
-letter headed _In darkest Stepaside_. Keep, keep, keep to the right.\r
-Rags and bones at midnight. A fence more likely. First place murderer\r
-makes for. Wash off his sins of the world.\r
-\r
-_(Jacky Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs full tilt against\r
-Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: O\r
-\r
-_(Shocked, on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jacky vanish there, there.\r
-Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoket,\r
-sweets of sin, potato soap.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves' dodge. Collide. Then snatch\r
-your purse.\r
-\r
-_(The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the ground. A sprawled form\r
-sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan\r
-of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels. Horned\r
-spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are\r
-on the drawn face.)_\r
-\r
-RUDOLPH: Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with\r
-drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen,\r
-feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi._\r
-\r
-RUDOLPH: What you making down this place? Have you no soul? _(with\r
-feeble vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom)_ Are you not\r
-my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold\r
-who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham\r
-and Jacob?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(With precaution)_ I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that's\r
-left of him.\r
-\r
-RUDOLPH: _(Severely)_ One night they bring you home drunk as dog after\r
-spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips,\r
-narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent's sterling silver\r
-waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one\r
-side of him coated with stiffening mud)_ Harriers, father. Only that\r
-once.\r
-\r
-RUDOLPH: Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make\r
-you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Weakly)_ They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I\r
-slipped.\r
-\r
-RUDOLPH: _(With contempt) Goim nachez_! Nice spectacles for your poor\r
-mother!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Mamma!\r
-\r
-ELLEN BLOOM: _(In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow Twankey's\r
-crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind,\r
-grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net,\r
-appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand,\r
-and cries out in shrill alarm)_ O blessed Redeemer, what have they done\r
-to him! My smelling salts! _(She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks\r
-the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a\r
-shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out)_ Sacred Heart of Mary,\r
-where were you at all at all?\r
-\r
-_(Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast, begins to bestow his parcels in\r
-his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)_\r
-\r
-A VOICE: _(Sharply)_ Poldy!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Who? _(He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily)_ At your service.\r
-\r
-_(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in\r
-Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet\r
-trousers and jacket, slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles\r
-her. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free\r
-only her large dark eyes and raven hair.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Molly!\r
-\r
-MARION: Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to\r
-me. _(Satirically)_ Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shifts from foot to foot)_ No, no. Not the least little bit.\r
-\r
-_(He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, questions,\r
-hopes, crubeens for her supper, things to tell her, excuse, desire,\r
-spellbound. A coin gleams on her forehead. On her feet are jewelled\r
-toerings. Her ankles are linked by a slender fetterchain. Beside her\r
-a camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. A silk ladder of\r
-innumerable rungs climbs to his bobbing howdah. He ambles near with\r
-disgruntled hindquarters. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her goldcurb\r
-wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)_\r
-\r
-MARION: Nebrakada! Femininum!\r
-\r
-_(The camel, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a tree a large mango fruit,\r
-offers it to his mistress, blinking, in his cloven hoof, then droops his\r
-head and, grunting, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. Bloom stoops\r
-his back for leapfrog.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I can give you... I mean as your business menagerer... Mrs\r
-Marion... if you...\r
-\r
-MARION: So you notice some change? _(Her hands passing slowly over her\r
-trinketed stomacher, a slow friendly mockery in her eyes)_ O Poldy,\r
-Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud! Go and see life. See the\r
-wide world.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower\r
-water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the\r
-morning. _(He pats divers pockets)_ This moving kidney. Ah!\r
-\r
-_(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon\r
-soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)_\r
-\r
-THE SOAP: We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the\r
-earth. I polish the sky.\r
-\r
-\r
-_(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the\r
-soapsun.)_\r
-\r
-SWENY: Three and a penny, please.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.\r
-\r
-MARION: _(Softly)_ Poldy!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Yes, ma'am?\r
-\r
-MARION: _ti trema un poco il cuore?_\r
-\r
-_(In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon,\r
-humming the duet from_ Don Giovanni.)\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Are you sure about that _voglio_? I mean the pronunciati...\r
-\r
-_(He follows, followed by the sniffing terrier. The elderly bawd seizes\r
-his sleeve, the bristles of her chinmole glittering.)_\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched.\r
-Fifteen. There's no-one in it only her old father that's dead drunk.\r
-\r
-_(She points. In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie\r
-Kelly stands.)_\r
-\r
-BRIDIE: Hatch street. Any good in your mind?\r
-\r
-_(With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. A burly rough pursues\r
-with booted strides. He stumbles on the steps, recovers, plunges into\r
-gloom. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.)_\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: _(Her wolfeyes shining)_ He's getting his pleasure. You won't\r
-get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don't be all night\r
-before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.\r
-\r
-_(Leering, Gerty Macdowell limps forward. She draws from behind, ogling,\r
-and shows coyly her bloodied clout.)_\r
-\r
-GERTY: With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. _(She murmurs)_ You\r
-did that. I hate you.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I? When? You're dreaming. I never saw you.\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman\r
-false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take\r
-the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.\r
-\r
-GERTY: _(To Bloom)_ When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer.\r
-_(She paws his sleeve, slobbering)_ Dirty married man! I love you for\r
-doing that to me.\r
-\r
-_(She glides away crookedly. Mrs Breen in man's frieze overcoat\r
-with loose bellows pockets, stands in the causeway, her roguish eyes\r
-wideopen, smiling in all her herbivorous buckteeth.)_\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: Mr...\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Coughs gravely)_ Madam, when we last had this pleasure by\r
-letter dated the sixteenth instant...\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: Mr Bloom! You down here in the haunts of sin! I caught you\r
-nicely! Scamp!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Hurriedly)_ Not so loud my name. Whatever do you think of me?\r
-Don't give me away. Walls have ears. How do you do? It's ages since I.\r
-You're looking splendid. Absolutely it. Seasonable weather we are having\r
-this time of year. Black refracts heat. Short cut home here. Interesting\r
-quarter. Rescue of fallen women. Magdalen asylum. I am the secretary...\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(Holds up a finger)_ Now, don't tell a big fib! I know\r
-somebody won't like that. O just wait till I see Molly! _(Slily)_\r
-Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Looks behind)_ She often said she'd like to visit. Slumming.\r
-The exotic, you see. Negro servants in livery too if she had money.\r
-Othello black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at\r
-the Livermore christies. Bohee brothers. Sweep for that matter.\r
-\r
-_(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks,\r
-upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes,\r
-leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands\r
-jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they\r
-rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to\r
-back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)_\r
-\r
-TOM AND SAM:\r
-\r
- There's someone in the house with Dina\r
- There's someone in the house, I know,\r
- There's someone in the house with Dina\r
- Playing on the old banjo.\r
-\r
-_(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling,\r
-chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(With a sour tenderish smile)_ A little frivol, shall we, if\r
-you are so inclined? Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a\r
-fraction of a second?\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(Screams gaily)_ O, you ruck! You ought to see yourself!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: For old sake' sake. I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage\r
-mingling of our different little conjugials. You know I had a soft\r
-corner for you. _(Gloomily)_ 'Twas I sent you that valentine of the dear\r
-gazelle.\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: Glory Alice, you do look a holy show! Killing simply. _(She\r
-puts out her hand inquisitively)_ What are you hiding behind your back?\r
-Tell us, there's a dear.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Seizes her wrist with his free hand)_ Josie Powell that was,\r
-prettiest deb in Dublin. How time flies by! Do you remember, harking\r
-back in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina\r
-Simpson's housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game,\r
-finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading? Subject, what is in this\r
-snuffbox?\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: You were the lion of the night with your seriocomic\r
-recitation and you looked the part. You were always a favourite with the\r
-ladies.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Squire of dames, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings,\r
-blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pearl\r
-studs, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand)_ Ladies and\r
-gentlemen, I give you Ireland, home and beauty.\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: The dear dead days beyond recall. Love's old sweet song.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Meaningfully dropping his voice)_ I confess I'm teapot with\r
-curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a little teapot\r
-at present.\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(Gushingly)_ Tremendously teapot! London's teapot and I'm\r
-simply teapot all over me! _(She rubs sides with him)_ After the parlour\r
-mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase\r
-ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon, his\r
-fingers and thumb passing slowly down to her soft moist meaty palm which\r
-she surrenders gently)_ The witching hour of night. I took the splinter\r
-out of this hand, carefully, slowly. _(Tenderly, as he slips on her\r
-finger a ruby ring) Là ci darem la mano._\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, a\r
-tinsel sylph's diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside\r
-her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly)\r
-Voglio e non._ You're hot! You're scalding! The left hand nearest the\r
-heart.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: When you made your present choice they said it was beauty and\r
-the beast. I can never forgive you for that. _(His clenched fist at\r
-his brow)_ Think what it means. All you meant to me then. _(Hoarsely)_\r
-Woman, it's breaking me!\r
-\r
-_(Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards,\r
-shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his dull beard thrust out,\r
-muttering to right and left. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the pall of\r
-the ace of spades, dogs him to left and right, doubled in laughter.)_\r
-\r
-ALF BERGAN: _(Points jeering at the sandwichboards)_ U. p: Up.\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(To Bloom)_ High jinks below stairs. _(She gives him the\r
-glad eye)_ Why didn't you kiss the spot to make it well? You wanted to.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shocked)_ Molly's best friend! Could you?\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss)_\r
-Hnhn. The answer is a lemon. Have you a little present for me there?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Offhandedly)_ Kosher. A snack for supper. The home without\r
-potted meat is incomplete. I was at _Leah._ Mrs Bandmann Palmer.\r
-Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. Unfortunately threw away the\r
-programme. Rattling good place round there for pigs' feet. Feel.\r
-\r
-_(Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his head, appears\r
-weighted to one side by the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which\r
-a skull and crossbones are painted in white limewash. He opens it\r
-and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and\r
-tightpacked pills.)_\r
-\r
-RICHIE: Best value in Dub.\r
-\r
-_(Bald Pat, bothered beetle, stands on the curbstone, folding his\r
-napkin, waiting to wait.)_\r
-\r
-PAT: _(Advances with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy)_ Steak and\r
-kidney. Bottle of lager. Hee hee hee. Wait till I wait.\r
-\r
-RICHIE: Goodgod. Inev erate inall...\r
-\r
-_(With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. The navvy, lurching by,\r
-gores him with his flaming pronghorn.)_\r
-\r
-RICHIE: _(With a cry of pain, his hand to his back)_ Ah! Bright's!\r
-Lights!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Ooints to the navvy)_ A spy. Don't attract attention. I hate\r
-stupid crowds. I am not on pleasure bent. I am in a grave predicament.\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: Humbugging and deluthering as per usual with your cock and\r
-bull story.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I want to tell you a little secret about how I came to be here.\r
-But you must never tell. Not even Molly. I have a most particular\r
-reason.\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(All agog)_ O, not for worlds.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Let's walk on. Shall us?\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: Let's.\r
-\r
-_(The bawd makes an unheeded sign. Bloom walks on with Mrs Breen. The\r
-terrier follows, whining piteously, wagging his tail.)_\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: Jewman's melt!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In an oatmeal sporting suit, a sprig of woodbine in the lapel,\r
-tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white\r
-spats, fawn dustcoat on his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in\r
-bandolier and a grey billycock hat)_ Do you remember a long long time,\r
-years and years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was\r
-weaned when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was it?\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(In smart Saxe tailormade, white velours hat and spider\r
-veil)_ Leopardstown.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I mean, Leopardstown. And Molly won seven shillings on a three\r
-year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old\r
-fiveseater shanderadan of a waggonette you were in your heyday then and\r
-you had on that new hat of white velours with a surround of molefur that\r
-Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down to nineteen and\r
-eleven, a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and I'll lay you what\r
-you like she did it on purpose...\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: She did, of course, the cat! Don't tell me! Nice adviser!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the other ducky\r
-little tammy toque with the bird of paradise wing in it that I admired\r
-on you and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was a\r
-pity to kill it, you cruel naughty creature, little mite of a thing with\r
-a heart the size of a fullstop.\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(Squeezes his arm, simpers)_ Naughty cruel I was!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Low, secretly, ever more rapidly)_ And Molly was eating a\r
-sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Frankly,\r
-though she had her advisers or admirers, I never cared much for her\r
-style. She was...\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: Too...\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Yes. And Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O'Reilly\r
-were mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses,\r
-the tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses\r
-was her name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I\r
-ever heard or read or knew or came across...\r
-\r
-MRS BREEN: _(Eagerly)_ Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.\r
-\r
-_(She fades from his side. Followed by the whining dog he walks on\r
-towards hellsgates. In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her\r
-feet apart, pisses cowily. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers\r
-listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous\r
-humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed\r
-sodden playfight.)_\r
-\r
-THE GAFFER: _(Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout)_ And when Cairns\r
-came down from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing\r
-it into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the\r
-shavings for Derwan's plasterers.\r
-\r
-THE LOITERERS: _(Guffaw with cleft palates)_ O jays!\r
-\r
-_(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Spattered with size and lime of their\r
-lodges they frisk limblessly about him.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Coincidence too. They think it funny. Anything but that. Broad\r
-daylight. Trying to walk. Lucky no woman.\r
-\r
-THE LOITERERS: Jays, that's a good one. Glauber salts. O jays, into the\r
-men's porter.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom passes. Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled,\r
-call from lanes, doors, corners.)_\r
-\r
-THE WHORES:\r
-\r
- Are you going far, queer fellow?\r
- How's your middle leg?\r
- Got a match on you?\r
- Eh, come here till I stiffen it for you.\r
-\r
-\r
-_(He plodges through their sump towards the lighted street beyond. From\r
-a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk.\r
-In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the navvy and the two\r
-redcoats.)_\r
-\r
-THE NAVVY: _(Belching)_ Where's the bloody house?\r
-\r
-THE SHEBEENKEEPER: Purdon street. Shilling a bottle of stout.\r
-Respectable woman.\r
-\r
-THE NAVVY: _(Gripping the two redcoats, staggers forward with them)_\r
-Come on, you British army!\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Behind his back)_ He aint half balmy.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Laughs)_ What ho!\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(To the navvy)_ Portobello barracks canteen. You ask for\r
-Carr. Just Carr.\r
-\r
-THE NAVVY: _(Shouts)_\r
-\r
-We are the boys. Of Wexford.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: Say! What price the sergeantmajor?\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: Bennett? He's my pal. I love old Bennett.\r
-\r
-THE NAVVY: _(Shouts)_\r
-\r
- The galling chain.\r
- And free our native land.\r
-\r
-_(He staggers forward, dragging them with him. Bloom stops, at fault.\r
-The dog approaches, his tongue outlolling, panting)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Wildgoose chase this. Disorderly houses. Lord knows where they\r
-are gone. Drunks cover distance double quick. Nice mixup. Scene at\r
-Westland row. Then jump in first class with third ticket. Then too far.\r
-Train with engine behind. Might have taken me to Malahide or a siding\r
-for the night or collision. Second drink does it. Once is a dose. What\r
-am I following him for? Still, he's the best of that lot. If I hadn't\r
-heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have\r
-met. Kismet. He'll lose that cash. Relieving office here. Good biz for\r
-cheapjacks, organs. What do ye lack? Soon got, soon gone. Might have\r
-lost my life too with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only\r
-for presence of mind. Can't always save you, though. If I had passed\r
-Truelock's window that day two minutes later would have been shot.\r
-Absence of body. Still if bullet only went through my coat get damages\r
-for shock, five hundred pounds. What was he? Kildare street club toff.\r
-God help his gamekeeper.\r
-\r
-_(He gazes ahead, reading on the wall a scrawled chalk legend_ Wet Dream\r
-_and a phallic design._) Odd! Molly drawing on the frosted carriagepane\r
-at Kingstown. What's that like? _(Gaudy dollwomen loll in the lighted\r
-doorways, in window embrasures, smoking birdseye cigarettes. The\r
-odour of the sicksweet weed floats towards him in slow round ovalling\r
-wreaths.)_\r
-\r
-THE WREATHS: Sweet are the sweets. Sweets of sin.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: My spine's a bit limp. Go or turn? And this food? Eat it and get\r
-all pigsticky. Absurd I am. Waste of money. One and eightpence too\r
-much. _(The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand,\r
-wagging his tail.)_ Strange how they take to me. Even that brute today.\r
-Better speak to him first. Like women they like _rencontres._ Stinks\r
-like a polecat. _Chacun son gout_. He might be mad. Dogdays. Uncertain\r
-in his movements. Good fellow! Fido! Good fellow! Garryowen! _(The\r
-wolfdog sprawls on his back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his\r
-long black tongue lolling out.)_ Influence of his surroundings. Give\r
-and have done with it. Provided nobody. _(Calling encouraging words he\r
-shambles back with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the setter into\r
-a dark stalestunk corner. He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the\r
-crubeen softly but holds back and feels the trotter.)_ Sizeable for\r
-threepence. But then I have it in my left hand. Calls for more effort.\r
-Why? Smaller from want of use. O, let it slide. Two and six.\r
-\r
-_(With regret he lets the unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. The\r
-mastiff mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed,\r
-crunching the bones. Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant.\r
-They murmur together.)_\r
-\r
-THE WATCH: Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom.\r
-\r
-_(Each lays hand on Bloom's shoulder.)_\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Stammers)_ I am doing good to others.\r
-\r
-_(A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises hungrily from Liffey slime with\r
-Banbury cakes in their beaks.)_\r
-\r
-THE GULLS: Kaw kave kankury kake.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: The friend of man. Trained by kindness.\r
-\r
-_(He points. Bob Doran, toppling from a high barstool, sways over the\r
-munching spaniel.)_\r
-\r
-BOB DORAN: Towser. Give us the paw. Give the paw.\r
-\r
-_(The bulldog growls, his scruff standing, a gobbet of pig's knuckle\r
-between his molars through which rabid scumspittle dribbles. Bob Doran\r
-fills silently into an area.)_\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: Prevention of cruelty to animals.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Enthusiastically)_ A noble work! I scolded that tramdriver on\r
-Harold's cross bridge for illusing the poor horse with his harness scab.\r
-Bad French I got for my pains. Of course it was frosty and the last\r
-tram. All tales of circus life are highly demoralising.\r
-\r
-_(Signor Maffei, passionpale, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs\r
-in his shirtfront, steps forward, holding a circus paperhoop, a\r
-curling carriagewhip and a revolver with which he covers the gorging\r
-boarhound.)_\r
-\r
-SIGNOR MAFFEI: _(With a sinister smile)_ Ladies and gentlemen, my\r
-educated greyhound. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my\r
-patent spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted\r
-thong. Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to\r
-heel, no matter how fractious, even _Leo ferox_ there, the Libyan\r
-maneater. A redhot crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part\r
-produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the thinking hyena. _(He glares)_ I possess\r
-the Indian sign. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers.\r
-_(With a bewitching smile)_ I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the pride\r
-of the ring.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: Come. Name and address.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I have forgotten for the moment. Ah, yes! _(He takes off his high\r
-grade hat, saluting)_ Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. You have heard\r
-of von Blum Pasha. Umpteen millions. _Donnerwetter!_ Owns half Austria.\r
-Egypt. Cousin.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: Proof.\r
-\r
-_(A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's hat.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In red fez, cadi's dress coat with broad green sash, wearing\r
-a false badge of the Legion of Honour, picks up the card hastily and\r
-offers it)_ Allow me. My club is the Junior Army and Navy. Solicitors:\r
-Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: _(Reads)_ Henry Flower. No fixed abode. Unlawfully watching\r
-and besetting.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: An alibi. You are cautioned.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Produces from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower)_ This\r
-is the flower in question. It was given me by a man I don't know his\r
-name. _(Plausibly)_ You know that old joke, rose of Castile. Bloom. The\r
-change of name. Virag. _(He murmurs privately and confidentially)_ We\r
-are engaged you see, sergeant. Lady in the case. Love entanglement. _(He\r
-shoulders the second watch gently)_ Dash it all. It's a way we gallants\r
-have in the navy. Uniform that does it. _(He turns gravely to the first\r
-watch)_ Still, of course, you do get your Waterloo sometimes. Drop in\r
-some evening and have a glass of old Burgundy. _(To the second watch\r
-gaily)_ I'll introduce you, inspector. She's game. Do it in the shake of\r
-a lamb's tail.\r
-\r
-_(A dark mercurialised face appears, leading a veiled figure.)_\r
-\r
-THE DARK MERCURY: The Castle is looking for him. He was drummed out of\r
-the army.\r
-\r
-MARTHA: _(Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck, a copy of\r
-the_ Irish Times _in her hand, in tone of reproach, pointing)_ Henry!\r
-Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: _(Sternly)_ Come to the station.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Scared, hats himself, steps back, then, plucking at his heart\r
-and lifting his right forearm on the square, he gives the sign and\r
-dueguard of fellowcraft)_ No, no, worshipful master, light of love.\r
-Mistaken identity. The Lyons mail. Lesurques and Dubosc. You remember\r
-the Childs fratricide case. We medical men. By striking him dead with\r
-a hatchet. I am wrongfully accused. Better one guilty escape than\r
-ninetynine wrongfully condemned.\r
-\r
-MARTHA: _(Sobbing behind her veil)_ Breach of promise. My real name\r
-is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I'll tell my\r
-brother, the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Behind his hand)_ She's drunk. The woman is inebriated. _(He\r
-murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim)_ Shitbroleeth.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: _(Tears in his eyes, to Bloom)_ You ought to be thoroughly\r
-well ashamed of yourself.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare's nest. I am\r
-a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable\r
-married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street.\r
-My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant\r
-upstanding gentleman, what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy,\r
-one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his\r
-majority for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: Regiment.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Turns to the gallery)_ The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the\r
-earth, known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms\r
-up there among you. The R. D. F., with our own Metropolitan police,\r
-guardians of our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men,\r
-as physique, in the service of our sovereign.\r
-\r
-A VOICE: Turncoat! Up the Boers! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(His hand on the shoulder of the first watch)_ My old dad too\r
-was a J. P. I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with\r
-the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under general\r
-Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was\r
-mentioned in dispatches. I did all a white man could. _(With quiet\r
-feeling)_ Jim Bludso. Hold her nozzle again the bank.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: Profession or trade.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Well, I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist. In fact\r
-we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the\r
-inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected\r
-with the British and Irish press. If you ring up...\r
-\r
-_(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a quill between his teeth. His\r
-scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat. He dangles\r
-a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds with the other hand a\r
-telephone receiver nozzle to his ear.)_\r
-\r
-MYLES CRAWFORD: _(His cock's wattles wagging)_ Hello, seventyseven\r
-eightfour. Hello. _Freeman's Urinal_ and _Weekly Arsewipe_ here.\r
-Paralyse Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?\r
-\r
-_(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate\r
-morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing,\r
-creased lavender trousers and patent boots. He carries a large portfolio\r
-labelled_ Matcham's Masterstrokes.)\r
-\r
-BEAUFOY: _(Drawls)_ No, you aren't. Not by a long shot if I know it.\r
-I don't see it that's all. No born gentleman, no-one with the most\r
-rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly\r
-loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak\r
-masquerading as a litterateur. It's perfectly obvious that with the most\r
-inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling copy, really\r
-gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath\r
-suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions, with which\r
-your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the\r
-kingdom.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Murmurs with hangdog meekness glum)_ That bit about the\r
-laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may...\r
-\r
-BEAUFOY: _(His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court)_ You\r
-funny ass, you! You're too beastly awfully weird for words! I don't\r
-think you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard.\r
-My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my\r
-lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses' fees, shan't we? We are\r
-considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw\r
-of Rheims, who has not even been to a university.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Indistinctly)_ University of life. Bad art.\r
-\r
-BEAUFOY: _(Shouts)_ It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral\r
-rottenness of the man! _(He extends his portfolio)_ We have here damning\r
-evidence, the _corpus delicti_, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work\r
-disfigured by the hallmark of the beast.\r
-\r
-A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY:\r
-\r
-Moses, Moses, king of the jews, Wiped his arse in the Daily News.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Bravely)_ Overdrawn.\r
-\r
-BEAUFOY: You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you\r
-rotter! _(To the court)_ Why, look at the man's private life! Leading\r
-a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be\r
-mentioned in mixed society! The archconspirator of the age!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(To the court)_ And he, a bachelor, how...\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.\r
-\r
-THE CRIER: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!\r
-\r
-_(Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket\r
-on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand.)_\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: Another! Are you of the unfortunate class?\r
-\r
-MARY DRISCOLL: _(Indignantly)_ I'm not a bad one. I bear a respectable\r
-character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation,\r
-six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had to leave\r
-owing to his carryings on.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with?\r
-\r
-MARY DRISCOLL: He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself\r
-as poor as I am.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless\r
-slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled: softly)_ I treated you white.\r
-I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station.\r
-Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering.\r
-There's a medium in all things. Play cricket.\r
-\r
-MARY DRISCOLL: _(Excitedly)_ As God is looking down on me this night if\r
-ever I laid a hand to them oysters!\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Did something happen?\r
-\r
-MARY DRISCOLL: He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour,\r
-when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety\r
-pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he\r
-interfered twict with my clothing.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: She counterassaulted.\r
-\r
-MARY DRISCOLL: _(Scornfully)_ I had more respect for the scouringbrush,\r
-so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked: keep it\r
-quiet.\r
-\r
-_(General laughter.)_\r
-\r
-GEORGE FOTTRELL: _(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly)_ Order in\r
-court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins\r
-a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in\r
-his stirring address to the grand jury. He was down and out but, though\r
-branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to\r
-retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to\r
-nature as a purely domestic animal. A sevenmonths' child, he had been\r
-carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There\r
-might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over\r
-a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post,\r
-to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the\r
-affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An\r
-acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate\r
-of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain\r
-refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of\r
-loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly\r
-rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one\r
-and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to\r
-the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or\r
-model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour\r
-reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the\r
-boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what\r
-times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with\r
-four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain\r
-ever..._\r
-\r
-_(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that\r
-they cannot hear.)_\r
-\r
-LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: _(Without looking up from their notebooks)_\r
-Loosen his boots.\r
-\r
-PROFESSOR MACHUGH: _(From the presstable, coughs and calls)_ Cough it\r
-up, man. Get it out in bits.\r
-\r
-_(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket. A large bucket.\r
-Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street Gripe, yes. Quite bad.\r
-A plasterer's bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery.\r
-Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial\r
-moment. He did not look in the bucket Nobody. Rather a mess. Not\r
-completely._ A Titbits _back number_.)\r
-\r
-_(Uproar and catcalls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash,\r
-dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of stickingplaster across\r
-his nose, talks inaudibly.)_\r
-\r
-J. J. O'MOLLOY: _(In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with\r
-a voice of pained protest)_ This is no place for indecent levity at\r
-the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a\r
-beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My\r
-client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as\r
-a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up\r
-misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on\r
-by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence\r
-being quite permitted in my client's native place, the land of the\r
-Pharaoh. _Prima facie_, I put it to you that there was no attempt at\r
-carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of\r
-by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would\r
-deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and\r
-somnambulism in my client's family. If the accused could speak he could\r
-a tale unfold--one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between\r
-the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from\r
-cobbler's weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian\r
-extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar's vest and trousers,\r
-apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and looks about\r
-him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches\r
-his belt sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes\r
-the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.)_ Him makee velly muchee fine\r
-night. _(He begins to lilt simply)_\r
-\r
- Li li poo lil chile\r
- Blingee pigfoot evly night\r
- Payee two shilly...\r
-\r
-_(He is howled down.)_\r
-\r
-J. J. O'MOLLOY: _(Hotly to the populace)_ This is a lonehand fight. By\r
-Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this\r
-fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has\r
-superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically,\r
-without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused\r
-was not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered\r
-with. The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very\r
-own daughter. _(Bloom takes J. J. O'Molloy's hand and raises it to his\r
-lips.)_ I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the\r
-hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My\r
-client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to\r
-do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or\r
-cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard,\r
-responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. He\r
-wants to go straight. I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down\r
-on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property\r
-at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be\r
-shown. _(To Bloom)_ I suggest that you will do the handsome thing.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: A penny in the pound.\r
-\r
-_(The image of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in\r
-silver haze is projected on the wall. Moses Dlugacz, ferreteyed albino,\r
-in blue dungarees, stands up in the gallery, holding in each hand an\r
-orange citron and a pork kidney.)_\r
-\r
-DLUGACZ: _(Hoarsely)_ Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W.13.\r
-\r
-_(J. J. O'Molloy steps on to a low plinth and holds the lapel of his\r
-coat with solemnity. His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with\r
-sunken eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F.\r
-Taylor. He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the\r
-galloping tide of rosepink blood.)_\r
-\r
-J.J.O'MOLLOY: _(Almost voicelessly)_ Excuse me. I am suffering from a\r
-severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words.\r
-_(He assumes the avine head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of\r
-Seymour Bushe.)_ When the angel's book comes to be opened if aught\r
-that the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of\r
-soultransfiguring deserves to live I say accord the prisoner at the bar\r
-the sacred benefit of the doubt. _(A paper with something written on it\r
-is handed into court._)\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In court dress)_ Can give best references. Messrs Callan,\r
-Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon,\r
-ex lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the\r
-highest... Queens of Dublin society. _(Carelessly)_ I was just chatting\r
-this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and\r
-lady Ball, astronomer royal at the levee. Sir Bob, I said...\r
-\r
-MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength\r
-ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a comb of\r
-brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair)_ Arrest him, constable. He\r
-wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was\r
-in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James\r
-Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as\r
-I sat in a box of the _Theatre Royal_ at a command performance of _La\r
-Cigale_. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures\r
-to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following\r
-Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the post a work\r
-of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled _The Girl with the Three\r
-Pairs of Stays_.\r
-\r
-MRS BELLINGHAM: _(In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the\r
-nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell\r
-quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff)_\r
-Also to me. Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because\r
-he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day\r
-during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the\r
-wastepipe and the ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently\r
-he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said,\r
-in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the\r
-information that it was ablossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined\r
-from a forcingcase of the model farm.\r
-\r
-MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Shame on him!\r
-\r
-_(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward)_\r
-\r
-THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: _(Screaming)_ Stop thief! Hurrah there,\r
-Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: _(Produces handcuffs)_ Here are the darbies.\r
-\r
-MRS BELLINGHAM: He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome\r
-compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my\r
-frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself\r
-as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate\r
-proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery\r
-and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable,\r
-a buck's head couped or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether\r
-extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and\r
-eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which,\r
-he said, he could conjure up. He urged me (stating that he felt it\r
-his mission in life to urge me) to defile the marriage bed, to commit\r
-adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.\r
-\r
-THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(In amazon costume, hard hat,\r
-jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets\r
-with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she\r
-strikes her welt constantly)_ Also me. Because he saw me on the polo\r
-ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of\r
-Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger\r
-Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob\r
-_Centaur._ This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car\r
-and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold\r
-after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still.\r
-It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as\r
-he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit\r
-intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me\r
-to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He\r
-implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise\r
-him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most\r
-vicious horsewhipping.\r
-\r
-MRS BELLINGHAM: Me too.\r
-\r
-MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too.\r
-\r
-_(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters\r
-received from Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Stamps her jingling spurs in a\r
-sudden paroxysm of fury)_ I will, by the God above me. I'll scourge the\r
-pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(His eyes closing, quails expectantly)_ Here? _(He squirms)_\r
-Again! _(He pants cringing)_ I love the danger.\r
-\r
-THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: Very much so! I'll make it hot for\r
-you. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.\r
-\r
-MRS BELLINGHAM: Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and\r
-stripes on it!\r
-\r
-MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Disgraceful! There's no excuse for him! A married\r
-man!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling\r
-glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.\r
-\r
-THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Laughs derisively)_ O, did you, my\r
-fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your\r
-life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained\r
-for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.\r
-\r
-MRS BELLINGHAM: _(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively)_\r
-Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within\r
-an inch of his life. The cat-o'-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien)_ O\r
-cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet.\r
-Let me off this once. _(He offers the other cheek)_\r
-\r
-MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(Severely)_ Don't do so on any account, Mrs\r
-Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!\r
-\r
-THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Unbuttoning her gauntlet\r
-violently)_ I'll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since\r
-he was pupped! To dare address me! I'll flog him black and blue in\r
-the public streets. I'll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a\r
-wellknown cuckold. _(She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air)_\r
-Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick!\r
-Ready?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Trembling, beginning to obey)_ The weather has been so warm.\r
-\r
-_(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)_\r
-\r
-DAVY STEPHENS: _Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph_\r
-with Saint Patrick's Day supplement. Containing the new addresses of all\r
-the cuckolds in Dublin.\r
-\r
-_(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and\r
-exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend\r
-John Hughes S.J. bend low.)_\r
-\r
-THE TIMEPIECE: _(Unportalling)_\r
-\r
- Cuckoo.\r
- Cuckoo.\r
- Cuckoo.\r
-\r
-_(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)_\r
-\r
-THE QUOITS: Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.\r
-\r
-_(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the jurybox\r
-the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon\r
-Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford,\r
-Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the featureless face of a\r
-Nameless One.)_\r
-\r
-THE NAMELESS ONE: Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised\r
-her.\r
-\r
-THE JURORS: _(All their heads turned to his voice)_ Really?\r
-\r
-THE NAMELESS ONE: _(Snarls)_ Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.\r
-\r
-THE JURORS: _(All their heads lowered in assent)_ Most of us thought as\r
-much.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: He is a marked man. Another girl's plait cut. Wanted: Jack\r
-the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: _(Awed, whispers)_ And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.\r
-\r
-THE CRIER: _(Loudly)_ Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a\r
-wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public\r
-nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of\r
-assizes the most honourable...\r
-\r
-_(His Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial\r
-garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded. He bears in his\r
-arms an umbrella sceptre. From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic\r
-ramshorns.)_\r
-\r
-THE RECORDER: I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid\r
-Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! _(He dons the black cap)_ Let\r
-him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and\r
-detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure\r
-and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not\r
-at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him. _(A\r
-black skullcap descends upon his head.)_\r
-\r
-_(The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry\r
-Clay.)_\r
-\r
-LONG JOHN FANNING: _(Scowls and calls with rich rolling utterance)_\r
-Who'll hang Judas Iscariot?\r
-\r
-_(H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's\r
-apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life\r
-preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs\r
-grimly his grappling hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)_\r
-\r
-RUMBOLD: _(To the recorder with sinister familiarity)_ Hanging Harry,\r
-your Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or\r
-nothing.\r
-\r
-_(The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)_\r
-\r
-THE BELLS: Heigho! Heigho!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Desperately)_ Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence.\r
-Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzee. _(Breathlessly)_ Pelvic\r
-basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. _(Overcome with emotion)_ I left\r
-the precincts. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing) Hynes, may\r
-I speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you\r
-want a little more...\r
-\r
-HYNES: _(Coldly)_ You are a perfect stranger.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: _(Points to the corner)_ The bomb is here.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: Infernal machine with a time fuse.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: No, no. Pig's feet. I was at a funeral.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: _(Draws his truncheon)_ Liar!\r
-\r
-_(The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy\r
-Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath.\r
-He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown\r
-mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all\r
-the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)_\r
-\r
-PADDY DIGNAM: _(In a hollow voice)_ It is true. It was my funeral.\r
-Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease\r
-from natural causes.\r
-\r
-_(He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In triumph)_ You hear?\r
-\r
-PADDY DIGNAM: Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: The voice is the voice of Esau.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: _(Blesses himself)_ How is that possible?\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: It is not in the penny catechism.\r
-\r
-PADDY DIGNAM: By metempsychosis. Spooks.\r
-\r
-A VOICE: O rocks.\r
-\r
-PADDY DIGNAM: _(Earnestly)_ Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton,\r
-solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk.\r
-Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The\r
-poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that\r
-bottle of sherry. _(He looks round him)_ A lamp. I must satisfy an\r
-animal need. That buttermilk didn't agree with me.\r
-\r
-_(The portly figure of John O'Connell, caretaker, stands forth, holding\r
-a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey,\r
-chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap,\r
-holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.)_\r
-\r
-FATHER COFFEY: _(Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak)_ Namine.\r
-Jacobs. Vobiscuits. Amen.\r
-\r
-JOHN O'CONNELL: _(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone)_ Dignam,\r
-Patrick T, deceased.\r
-\r
-PADDY DIGNAM: _(With pricked up ears, winces)_ Overtones. _(He wriggles\r
-forward and places an ear to the ground)_ My master's voice!\r
-\r
-JOHN O'CONNELL: Burial docket letter number U. P. eightyfive thousand.\r
-Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.\r
-\r
-_(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail\r
-stiffpointcd, his ears cocked.)_\r
-\r
-PADDY DIGNAM: Pray for the repose of his soul.\r
-\r
-_(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether\r
-over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on\r
-fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam's voice, muffled, is\r
-heard baying under ground:_ Dignam's dead and gone below. _Tom Rochford,\r
-robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his twocolumned\r
-machine.)_\r
-\r
-TOM ROCHFORD: _(A hand to his breastbone, bows)_ Reuben J. A florin I\r
-find him. _(He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare)_ My turn now on.\r
-Follow me up to Carlow.\r
-\r
-_(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the\r
-coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble, eyes of nought. All recedes.\r
-Bloom plodges forward again through the sump. Kisses chirp amid\r
-the rifts of fog a piano sounds. He stands before a lighted house,\r
-listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers fly about him,\r
-twittering, warbling, cooing.)_\r
-\r
-THE KISSES: _(Warbling)_ Leo! _(Twittering)_ Icky licky micky sticky for\r
-Leo! _(Cooing)_ Coo coocoo! Yummyyum, Womwom! _(Warbling)_ Big comebig!\r
-Pirouette! Leopopold! _(Twittering)_ Leeolee! _(Warbling)_ O Leo!\r
-\r
-_(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks,\r
-silvery sequins.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.\r
-\r
-_(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three\r
-bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips\r
-down the steps and accosts him.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: Are you looking for someone? He's inside with his friend.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Is this Mrs Mack's?\r
-\r
-ZOE: No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse.\r
-Mother Slipperslapper. _(Familiarly)_ She's on the job herself tonight\r
-with the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for\r
-her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today.\r
-_(Suspiciously)_ You're not his father, are you?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Not I!\r
-\r
-ZOE: You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?\r
-\r
-_(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand glides over his\r
-left thigh.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: How's the nuts?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier, I suppose.\r
-One in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(In sudden alarm)_ You've a hard chancre.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Not likely.\r
-\r
-ZOE: I feel it.\r
-\r
-_(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard\r
-black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist\r
-lips.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: A talisman. Heirloom.\r
-\r
-ZOE: For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?\r
-\r
-_(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm,\r
-cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by\r
-note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her\r
-eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: You'll know me the next time.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Forlornly)_ I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to...\r
-\r
-_(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round\r
-their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong\r
-hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by\r
-the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity nude, white,\r
-still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth\r
-roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes,\r
-strangely murmuring.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously\r
-smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater) Schorach ani wenowach,\r
-benoith Hierushaloim._\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Fascinated)_ I thought you were of good stock by your accent.\r
-\r
-ZOE: And you know what thought did?\r
-\r
-_(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, sending on\r
-him a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a\r
-sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat\r
-awkward hand)_ Are you a Dublin girl?\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil)_ No bloody\r
-fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(As before)_ Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish\r
-device. _(Lewdly)_ The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder\r
-of rank weed.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating\r
-tie and apache cap)_ Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Ralegh brought\r
-from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of\r
-pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart,\r
-memory, will understanding, all. That is to say he brought the poison\r
-a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the\r
-food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!\r
-\r
-_(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)_\r
-\r
-THE CHIMES: Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In alderman's gown and chain)_ Electors of Arran Quay, Inns\r
-Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I say,\r
-from the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future.\r
-That's my programme. _Cui bono_? But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in\r
-their phantom ship of finance...\r
-\r
-AN ELECTOR: Three times three for our future chief magistrate!\r
-\r
-_(The aurora borealis of the torchlight procession leaps.)_\r
-\r
-THE TORCHBEARERS: Hooray!\r
-\r
-_(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the city\r
-shake hands with Bloom and congratulate him. Timothy Harrington, late\r
-thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold chain and\r
-white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens.\r
-They nod vigorously in agreement.)_\r
-\r
-LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON: _(In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral\r
-chain and large white silk scarf)_ That alderman sir Leo Bloom's speech\r
-be printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which\r
-he was born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the\r
-thoroughfare hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth\r
-designated Boulevard Bloom.\r
-\r
-COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK: Carried unanimously.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Impassionedly)_ These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as\r
-they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they?\r
-Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving\r
-apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual\r
-murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts\r
-upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are\r
-grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges\r
-in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for\r
-rever and ever and ev...\r
-\r
-_(Prolonged applause. Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring\r
-up. A streamer bearing the legends_ Cead Mile Failte _and_ Mah Ttob\r
-Melek Israel _Spans the street. All the windows are thronged with\r
-sightseers, chiefly ladies. Along the route the regiments of the\r
-royal Dublin Fusiliers, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the Cameron\r
-Highlanders and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back\r
-the crowd. Boys from High school are perched on the lampposts,\r
-telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings,\r
-rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the cloud appears. A\r
-fife and drum band is heard in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. The\r
-beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and\r
-waving oriental palms. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high,\r
-surrounded by pennons of the civic flag. The van of the procession\r
-appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard\r
-tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are\r
-followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of\r
-Dublin, his lordship the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the\r
-mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish\r
-representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth\r
-of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the\r
-saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop\r
-of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of\r
-Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William\r
-Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief\r
-rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist, anabaptist,\r
-methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society\r
-of friends. After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands\r
-with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper\r
-canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers,\r
-chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers,\r
-Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers,\r
-undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters,\r
-assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers,\r
-fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository\r
-hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers,\r
-egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. After\r
-them march gentlemen of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter,\r
-Gold Stick, the master of horse, the lord great chamberlain, the earl\r
-marshal, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's\r
-iron crown, the chalice and bible. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet.\r
-Beefeaters reply, winding clarions of welcome. Under an arch of triumph\r
-Bloom appears, bareheaded, in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with\r
-ermine, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the dove,\r
-the curtana. He is seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson\r
-tail, richly caparisoned, with golden headstall. Wild excitement. The\r
-ladies from their balconies throw down rosepetals. The air is perfumed\r
-with essences. The men cheer. Bloom's boys run amid the bystanders with\r
-branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM'S BOYS:\r
-\r
- The wren, the wren,\r
- The king of all birds,\r
- Saint Stephen's his day\r
- Was caught in the furze.\r
-\r
-\r
-A BLACKSMITH: _(Murmurs)_ For the honour of God! And is that Bloom? He\r
-scarcely looks thirtyone.\r
-\r
-A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER: That's the famous Bloom now, the world's greatest\r
-reformer. Hats off!\r
-\r
-_(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)_\r
-\r
-A MILLIONAIRESS: _(Richly)_ Isn't he simply wonderful?\r
-\r
-A NOBLEWOMAN: _(Nobly)_ All that man has seen!\r
-\r
-A FEMINIST: _(Masculinely)_ And done!\r
-\r
-A BELLHANGER: A classic face! He has the forehead of a thinker.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom's weather. A sunburst appears in the northwest.)_\r
-\r
-THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted\r
-emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very\r
-puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!\r
-\r
-ALL: God save Leopold the First!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and\r
-Connor, with dignity)_ Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.\r
-\r
-WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: _(In purple stock and shovel hat)_\r
-Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your\r
-judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears)_ So may the\r
-Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.\r
-\r
-MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: _(Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom's\r
-head) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem._ Leopold,\r
-Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!\r
-\r
-_(Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He\r
-ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put\r
-on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ\r
-church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar\r
-fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic\r
-designs. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and\r
-genuflecting.)_\r
-\r
-THE PEERS: I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly\r
-worship.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor\r
-diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless\r
-intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception\r
-of message.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix\r
-hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated\r
-our former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess\r
-Selene, the splendour of night.\r
-\r
-_(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black\r
-Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her\r
-head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of\r
-cheering.)_\r
-\r
-JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: _(Raises the royal standard)_ Illustrious Bloom!\r
-Successor to my famous brother!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Embraces John Howard Parnell)_ We thank you from our heart,\r
-John, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of\r
-our common ancestors.\r
-\r
-_(The freedom of the city is presented to him embodied in a charter. The\r
-keys of Dublin, crossed on a crimson cushion, are given to him. He shows\r
-all that he is wearing green socks.)_\r
-\r
-TOM KERNAN: You deserve it, your honour.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at\r
-Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with\r
-telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do\r
-we yield? No! We drive them headlong! Lo! We charge! Deploying to the\r
-left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering\r
-their warcry _Bonafide Sabaoth_, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.\r
-\r
-THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Hear! Hear!\r
-\r
-JOHN WYSE NOLAN: There's the man that got away James Stephens.\r
-\r
-A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: Bravo!\r
-\r
-AN OLD RESIDENT: You're a credit to your country, sir, that's what you\r
-are.\r
-\r
-AN APPLEWOMAN: He's a man like Ireland wants.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell\r
-you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall\r
-ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem\r
-in the Nova Hibernia of the future.\r
-\r
-_(Thirtytwo workmen, wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland,\r
-under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem.\r
-It is a colossal edifice with crystal roof, built in the shape of a\r
-huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its\r
-extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Government\r
-offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses\r
-are razed to the ground. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and\r
-boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L. B. several paupers\r
-fill from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin, crowded with loyal\r
-sightseers, collapses.)_\r
-\r
-THE SIGHTSEERS: _(Dying) Morituri te salutant. (They die)_\r
-\r
-_(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an\r
-elongated finger at Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Don't you believe a word he says. That man is\r
-Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M'Intosh!\r
-\r
-_(A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his\r
-sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many\r
-powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing\r
-committees, are reported. Bloom's bodyguard distribute Maundy money,\r
-commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive\r
-Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in\r
-sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock,_\r
-billets doux _in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers\r
-of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days'\r
-indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes,\r
-season tickets available for all tramlines, coupons of the royal and\r
-privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of\r
-the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz (politic), Care of the\r
-Baby (infantilic), 50 Meals for 7/6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth?\r
-(historic), Expel that Pain (medic), Infant's Compendium of the\r
-Universe (cosmic), Let's All Chortle (hilaric), Canvasser's Vade Mecum\r
-(journalic), Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic), Who's Who in\r
-Space (astric), Songs that Reached Our Heart (melodic), Pennywise's Way\r
-to Wealth (parsimonic). A general rush and scramble. Women press forward\r
-to touch the hem of Bloom's robe. The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts\r
-through the throng, leaps on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks\r
-amid great acclamation. A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken.\r
-Babes and sucklings are held up.)_\r
-\r
-THE WOMEN: Little father! Little father!\r
-\r
-THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS:\r
-\r
- Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,\r
- Cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.\r
-\r
-\r
-_(Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the stomach.)_\r
-\r
-BABY BOARDMAN: _(Hiccups, curdled milk flowing from his mouth)_\r
-Hajajaja.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shaking hands with a blind stripling)_ My more than Brother!\r
-_(Placing his arms round the shoulders of an old couple)_ Dear old\r
-friends! _(He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls)_\r
-Peep! Bopeep! _(He wheels twins in a perambulator)_ Ticktacktwo\r
-wouldyousetashoe? _(He performs juggler's tricks, draws red, orange,\r
-yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet silk handkerchiefs from his\r
-mouth)_ Roygbiv. 32 feet per second. _(He consoles a widow)_ Absence\r
-makes the heart grow younger. _(He dances the Highland fling with\r
-grotesque antics)_ Leg it, ye devils! _(He kisses the bedsores of a\r
-palsied veteran_) Honourable wounds! _(He trips up a fit policeman)_\r
-U. p: up. U. p: up. _(He whispers in the ear of a blushing waitress and\r
-laughs kindly)_ Ah, naughty, naughty! _(He eats a raw turnip offered\r
-him by Maurice Butterly, farmer)_ Fine! Splendid! _(He refuses to\r
-accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Hynes, journalist)_ My dear\r
-fellow, not at all! (He gives his coat to a beggar) Please accept. _(He\r
-takes part in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples)_\r
-Come on, boys! Wriggle it, girls!\r
-\r
-THE CITIZEN: _(Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald\r
-muffler)_ May the good God bless him!\r
-\r
-_(The rams' horns sound for silence. The standard of Zion is hoisted.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and\r
-reads solemnly)_ Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom\r
-Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim\r
-Meshuggah Talith.\r
-\r
-_(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town\r
-clerk.)_\r
-\r
-JIMMY HENRY: The Court of Conscience is now open. His Most Catholic\r
-Majesty will now administer open air justice. Free medical and legal\r
-advice, solution of doubles and other problems. All cordially invited.\r
-Given at this our loyal city of Dublin in the year I of the Paradisiacal\r
-Era.\r
-\r
-PADDY LEONARD: What am I to do about my rates and taxes?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Pay them, my friend.\r
-\r
-PADDY LEONARD: Thank you.\r
-\r
-NOSEY FLYNN: Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Obdurately)_ Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are\r
-bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five\r
-pounds.\r
-\r
-J. J. O'MOLLOY: A Daniel did I say? Nay! A Peter O'Brien!\r
-\r
-NOSEY FLYNN: Where do I draw the five pounds?\r
-\r
-PISSER BURKE: For bladder trouble?\r
-\r
-BLOOM:\r
-\r
- _Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil.,_ 20 minims\r
- _Tinct. nux vom.,_ 5 minims\r
- _Extr. taraxel. iiq.,_ 30 minims.\r
- _Aq. dis. ter in die._\r
-\r
-CHRIS CALLINAN: What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of\r
-Aldebaran?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. II.\r
-\r
-JOE HYNES: Why aren't you in uniform?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the\r
-Austrian despot in a dank prison where was yours?\r
-\r
-BEN DOLLARD: Pansies?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Embellish (beautify) suburban gardens.\r
-\r
-BEN DOLLARD: When twins arrive?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Father (pater, dad) starts thinking.\r
-\r
-LARRY O'ROURKE: An eightday licence for my new premises. You remember\r
-me, sir Leo, when you were in number seven. I'm sending around a dozen\r
-of stout for the missus.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Coldly)_ You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no\r
-presents.\r
-\r
-CROFTON: This is indeed a festivity.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Solemnly)_ You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.\r
-\r
-ALEXANDER KEYES: When will we have our own house of keys?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten\r
-commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile.\r
-Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses.\r
-Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and\r
-night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy\r
-must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence,\r
-bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal\r
-brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.\r
-Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay\r
-state.\r
-\r
-O'MADDEN BURKE: Free fox in a free henroost.\r
-\r
-DAVY BYRNE: _(Yawning)_ Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Mixed races and mixed marriage.\r
-\r
-LENEHAN: What about mixed bathing?\r
-\r
-_(bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration.\r
-All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street Museum appears,\r
-dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked\r
-goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and\r
-plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce,\r
-Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural\r
-Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments,\r
-Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.)_\r
-\r
-FATHER FARLEY: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian\r
-seeking to overthrow our holy faith.\r
-\r
-MRS RIORDAN: _(Tears up her will)_ I'm disappointed in you! You bad man!\r
-\r
-MOTHER GROGAN: _(Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom)_ You beast! You\r
-abominable person!\r
-\r
-NOSEY FLYNN: Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(With rollicking humour)_\r
-\r
- I vowed that I never would leave her,\r
- She turned out a cruel deceiver.\r
- With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.\r
-\r
-HOPPY HOLOHAN: Good old Bloom! There's nobody like him after all.\r
-\r
-PADDY LEONARD: Stage Irishman!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of\r
-Casteele._(Laughter.)_\r
-\r
-LENEHAN: Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!\r
-\r
-THE VEILED SIBYL: _(Enthusiastically)_ I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it.\r
-I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest\r
-man on earth.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Winks at the bystanders)_ I bet she's a bonny lassie.\r
-\r
-THEODORE PUREFOY: _(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket)_ He employs a\r
-mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.\r
-\r
-THE VEILED SIBYL: _(Stabs herself)_ My hero god! _(She dies)_\r
-\r
-_(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by\r
-stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening\r
-their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from\r
-the top of Nelson's Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness's brewery,\r
-asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging\r
-themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different\r
-storeys.)_\r
-\r
-ALEXANDER J DOWIE: _(Violently)_ Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the\r
-man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian\r
-men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat\r
-of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the\r
-cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite,\r
-bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse.\r
-A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his\r
-nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him.\r
-Caliban!\r
-\r
-THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He's as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!\r
-\r
-_(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper\r
-and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value,\r
-hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep's\r
-tails, odd pieces of fat.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Excitedly)_ This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again.\r
-By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry.\r
-He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the\r
-viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, _sgenl inn ban bata\r
-coisde gan capall._ I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex\r
-specialist, to give medical testimony on my behalf.\r
-\r
-DR MULLIGAN: _(In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow)_ Dr\r
-Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's\r
-private asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary\r
-epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of\r
-elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. There are\r
-marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also\r
-latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in\r
-consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a\r
-family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him\r
-to be more sinned against than sinning. I have made a pervaginal\r
-examination and, after application of the acid test to 5427 anal,\r
-axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be _virgo intacta._\r
-\r
-_(Bloom holds his high grade hat over his genital organs.)_\r
-\r
-DR MADDEN: Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming\r
-generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in\r
-spirits of wine in the national teratological museum.\r
-\r
-DR CROTTHERS: I have examined the patient's urine. It is albuminoid.\r
-Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent.\r
-\r
-DR PUNCH COSTELLO: The _fetor judaicus_ is most perceptible.\r
-\r
-DR DIXON: _(Reads a bill of health)_ Professor Bloom is a finished\r
-example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable.\r
-Many have found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint\r
-fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense.\r
-He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court\r
-missionary of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up\r
-everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that\r
-he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried\r
-grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt of pure Irish manufacture winter and\r
-summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one\r
-time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report\r
-states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the\r
-name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon\r
-to speak. He is about to have a baby.\r
-\r
-_(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American\r
-makes a street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, blank\r
-cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange,\r
-I. O. U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets\r
-are rapidly collected.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: O, I so want to be a mother.\r
-\r
-MRS THORNTON: _(In nursetender's gown)_ Embrace me tight, dear. You'll\r
-be soon over it. Tight, dear.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white\r
-children. They appear on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive\r
-plants. All the octuplets are handsome, with valuable metallic faces,\r
-wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern\r
-languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. Each\r
-has his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro,\r
-Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber,\r
-Vifargent, Panargyros. They are immediately appointed to positions of\r
-high public trust in several different countries as managing directors\r
-of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability\r
-companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates.)_\r
-\r
-A VOICE: Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Darkly)_ You have said it.\r
-\r
-BROTHER BUZZ: Then perform a miracle like Father Charles.\r
-\r
-BANTAM LYONS: Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes\r
-through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the top ledge\r
-by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals\r
-several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face so as to resemble\r
-many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler,\r
-Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip\r
-van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild,\r
-Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot\r
-simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back,\r
-eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)_\r
-\r
-BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: _(In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as\r
-breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches\r
-and brown paper mitre) Leopoldi autem generatio._ Moses begat Noah\r
-and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O'Halloran and O'Halloran begat\r
-Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and\r
-Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat\r
-MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz\r
-and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat\r
-Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy\r
-Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat\r
-O'Donnell Magnus and O'Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum\r
-begat ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes\r
-begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat\r
-Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone\r
-begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely\r
-begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom _et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel._\r
-\r
-A DEADHAND: _(Writes on the wall)_ Bloom is a cod.\r
-\r
-CRAB: _(In bushranger's kit)_ What did you do in the cattlecreep behind\r
-Kilbarrack?\r
-\r
-A FEMALE INFANT: _(Shakes a rattle)_ And under Ballybough bridge?\r
-\r
-A HOLLYBUSH: And in the devil's glen?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears\r
-filling from his left eye)_ Spare my past.\r
-\r
-THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: _(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook\r
-fair shillelaghs)_ Sjambok him!\r
-\r
-_(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms,\r
-his feet protruding. He whistles_ Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. _Artane\r
-orphans, joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate\r
-Mission, joining hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)_\r
-\r
-THE ARTANE ORPHANS:\r
-\r
- You hig, you hog, you dirty dog!\r
- You think the ladies love you!\r
- THE PRISON GATE GIRLS:\r
-\r
-\r
- If you see Kay\r
- Tell him he may\r
- See you in tea\r
- Tell him from me.\r
-\r
-HORNBLOWER: _(In ephod and huntingcap, announces)_ And he shall carry\r
-the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness,\r
-and to Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him,\r
-yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.\r
-\r
-_(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide\r
-travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky\r
-and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their\r
-beards at Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Belial! Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah!\r
-Abulafia! Recant!\r
-\r
-_(George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, a tailor's goose under his\r
-arm, presenting a bill)_\r
-\r
-MESIAS: To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Rubs his hands cheerfully)_ Just like old times. Poor Bloom!\r
-\r
-_(Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his\r
-shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)_\r
-\r
-REUBEN J: _(Whispers hoarsely)_ The squeak is out. A split is gone for\r
-the flatties. Nip the first rattler.\r
-\r
-THE FIRE BRIGADE: Pflaap!\r
-\r
-BROTHER BUZZ: _(Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of\r
-painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round\r
-his neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying)_ Forgive him his\r
-trespasses.\r
-\r
-_(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets\r
-fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)_\r
-\r
-THE CITIZEN: Thank heaven!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid\r
-phoenix flames)_ Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.\r
-\r
-_(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of\r
-Erin, in black garments, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles\r
-in their hands, kneel down and pray.)_\r
-\r
-THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN:\r
-\r
- Kidney of Bloom, pray for us\r
- Flower of the Bath, pray for us\r
- Mentor of Menton, pray for us\r
- Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us\r
- Charitable Mason, pray for us\r
- Wandering Soap, pray for us\r
- Sweets of Sin, pray for us\r
- Music without Words, pray for us\r
- Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us\r
- Friend of all Frillies, pray for us\r
- Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us\r
- Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.\r
-\r
-_(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings\r
-the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the lord god omnipotent\r
-reigneth, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute,\r
-shrunken, carbonised.)_\r
-\r
-\r
-ZOE: Talk away till you're black in the face.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an\r
-emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak\r
-pig by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye)_ Let me be going now, woman of\r
-the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the\r
-father and mother of a bating. _(With a tear in his eye)_ All insanity.\r
-Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not\r
-to be. Life's dream is o'er. End it peacefully. They can live on. _(He\r
-gazes far away mournfully)_ I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The\r
-blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. _(He breathes softly)_ No\r
-more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet)_ Honest? Till the next\r
-time. _(She sneers)_ Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or\r
-came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Bitterly)_ Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.\r
-I'm sick of it. Let everything rip.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(In sudden sulks)_ I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a\r
-bleeding whore a chance.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Repentantly)_ I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil.\r
-Where are you from? London?\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Glibly)_ Hog's Norton where the pigs plays the organs. I'm\r
-Yorkshire born. _(She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple)_\r
-I say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a\r
-short time? Ten shillings?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Smiles, nods slowly)_ More, houri, more.\r
-\r
-ZOE: And more's mother? _(She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws)_\r
-Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll\r
-peel off.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled\r
-embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled\r
-pears)_ Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed\r
-monster. _(Earnestly)_ You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Flattered)_ What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for.\r
-_(She pats him)_ Come.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Babby!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair,\r
-fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a\r
-chubby finger, his moist tongue lolling and lisping)_ One two tlee: tlee\r
-tlwo tlone.\r
-\r
-THE BUCKLES: Love me. Love me not. Love me.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Silent means consent. _(With little parted talons she captures his\r
-hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor,\r
-luring him to doom.)_ Hot hands cold gizzard.\r
-\r
-_(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards\r
-the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her\r
-painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the\r
-lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)_\r
-\r
-THE MALE BRUTES: _(Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their\r
-loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro)_\r
-Good!\r
-\r
-_(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated.\r
-They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to\r
-his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Her lucky hand instantly saving him)_ Hoopsa! Don't fall\r
-upstairs.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: The just man falls seven times. _(He stands aside at the\r
-threshold)_ After you is good manners.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Ladies first, gentlemen after.\r
-\r
-_(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out\r
-her hands, draws him over. He hops. On the antlered rack of the hall\r
-hang a man 's hat and waterproof. Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing\r
-them, frowns, then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is\r
-flung open. A man in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes\r
-with an ape's gait, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a\r
-full waterjugjar, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting\r
-his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel\r
-eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe\r
-into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the\r
-chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The\r
-floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar\r
-rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel,\r
-heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet\r
-without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls\r
-are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate\r
-is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on\r
-the hearthrug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he\r
-beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume,\r
-doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in\r
-her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and\r
-glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag\r
-of her corsetlace hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates\r
-mockingly the couple at the piano.)_\r
-\r
-KITTY: _(Coughs behind her hand)_ She's a bit imbecillic. _(She signs\r
-with a waggling forefinger)_ Blemblem. _(Lynch lifts up her skirt and\r
-white petticoat with his wand she settles them down quickly.)_ Respect\r
-yourself. _(She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which\r
-her hair glows, red with henna)_ O, excuse!\r
-\r
-ZOE: More limelight, Charley. _(She goes to the chandelier and turns the\r
-gas full cock)_\r
-\r
-KITTY: _(Peers at the gasjet)_ What ails it tonight?\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Deeply)_ Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Clap on the back for Zoe.\r
-\r
-_(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at\r
-the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he\r
-repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond\r
-feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry,\r
-lolls spreadeagle in the sofacorner, her limp forearm pendent over the\r
-bolster, listening. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)_\r
-\r
-KITTY: _(Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot)_ O, excuse!\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Promptly)_ Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.\r
-\r
-_(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over\r
-her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled\r
-caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances\r
-behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto\r
-Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an\r
-old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate _Coela enarrant gloriam Domini._\r
-It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and\r
-mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's\r
-that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip\r
-from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his\r
-almightiness. _Mais nom de nom,_ that is another pair of trousers.\r
-_Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at\r
-Lynch's cap, smiles, laughs)_ Which side is your knowledge bump?\r
-\r
-THE CAP: _(With saturnine spleen)_ Bah! It is because it is. Woman's\r
-reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form\r
-of life. Bah!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes.\r
-How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!\r
-\r
-THE CAP: Bah!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Here's another for you. _(He frowns)_ The reason is because\r
-the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible\r
-interval which...\r
-\r
-THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can't.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(With an effort)_ Interval which. Is the greatest possible\r
-ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.\r
-\r
-THE CAP: Which?\r
-\r
-_(Outside the gramophone begins to blare_ The Holy City.)\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Abruptly)_ What went forth to the ends of the world to\r
-traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller,\r
-having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a\r
-moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self\r
-which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. _Ecco!_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe\r
-Higgins)_ What a learned speech, eh?\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Briskly)_ God help your head, he knows more than you have\r
-forgotten.\r
-\r
-_(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)_\r
-\r
-FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this summer.\r
-\r
-KITTY: No!\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Explodes in laughter)_ Great unjust God!\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Offended)_ Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my\r
-foot's tickling.\r
-\r
-_(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past,\r
-yelling.)_\r
-\r
-THE NEWSBOYS: Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea\r
-serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.\r
-\r
-_(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: A time, times and half a time.\r
-\r
-_(Reuben I Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open on his\r
-spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim's wallet from\r
-which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his\r
-shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden\r
-huddled mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from\r
-the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello,\r
-hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead\r
-and Ally Sloper nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering\r
-darkness.)_\r
-\r
-ALL: What?\r
-\r
-THE HOBGOBLIN: _(His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his\r
-eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then\r
-all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs) Il\r
-vient! C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene! (He whirls round\r
-and round with dervish howls) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He\r
-crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux\r
-sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks) Rien\r
-va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He\r
-springs off into vacuum.)_\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly)_ The end of\r
-the world!\r
-\r
-_(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity\r
-occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares\r
-over coughs and feetshuffling.)_\r
-\r
-THE GRAMOPHONE: Jerusalem!\r
-\r
-Open your gates and sing\r
-\r
-Hosanna...\r
-\r
-_(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star fills from it,\r
-proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah.\r
-Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End\r
-of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan\r
-filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the\r
-Three Legs of Man.)_\r
-\r
-THE END OF THE WORLD: _(with a Scotch accent)_ Wha'll dance the keel\r
-row, the keel row, the keel row?\r
-\r
-_(Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, harsh\r
-as a corncrake's, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with\r
-funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the\r
-banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)_\r
-\r
-ELIJAH: No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole\r
-Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths\r
-shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's\r
-time is 12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play\r
-a slick ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the\r
-nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the\r
-second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen\r
-Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to\r
-you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos?\r
-No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something\r
-within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama,\r
-an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once\r
-nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back\r
-number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever\r
-was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line\r
-out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know\r
-and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.\r
-J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K.\r
-Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up\r
-by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. _(He shouts)_\r
-Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! _(He\r
-sings)_ Jeru...\r
-\r
-THE GRAMOPHONE: _(Drowning his voice)_ Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh...\r
-_(The disc rasps gratingly against the needle)_\r
-\r
-THE THREE WHORES: _(Covering their ears, squawk)_ Ahhkkk!\r
-\r
-ELIJAH: _(In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top\r
-of his voice, his arms uplifted)_ Big Brother up there, Mr President,\r
-you hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of\r
-believe strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss\r
-Higgins and Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems\r
-to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been,\r
-Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long\r
-and help me save our sisters dear. _(He winks at his audience)_ Our Mr\r
-President, he twig the whole lot and he aint saying nothing.\r
-\r
-KITTY-KATE: I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did\r
-on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop and enrolled in\r
-the brown scapular. My mother's sister married a Montmorency. It was a\r
-working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.\r
-\r
-ZOE-FANNY: I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.\r
-\r
-FLORRY-TERESA: It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of\r
-Hennessy's three star. I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the\r
-bed.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without\r
-end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.\r
-\r
-_(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon,\r
-Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast,\r
-goosestepping, tramp fist past in noisy marching)_\r
-\r
-THE BEATITUDES: _(Incoherently)_ Beer beef battledog buybull businum\r
-barnum buggerum bishop.\r
-\r
-LYSTER: _(In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says\r
-discreetly)_ He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the\r
-light.\r
-\r
-_(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily\r
-laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a\r
-mandarin's kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda\r
-hat.)_\r
-\r
-BEST: _(Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown\r
-of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot)_ I was\r
-just beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know,\r
-Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.\r
-\r
-JOHN EGLINTON: _(Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it\r
-towards a corner: with carping accent)_ Esthetics and cosmetics are for\r
-the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee\r
-wants the facts and means to get them.\r
-\r
-_(In the cone of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave,\r
-holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees.\r
-He rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mouth. About his\r
-head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His\r
-right hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by\r
-its two talons.)_\r
-\r
-MANANAUN MACLIR: _(With a voice of waves)_ Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor!\r
-Ma! White yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos.\r
-_(With a voice of whistling seawind)_ Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't\r
-have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult\r
-of Shakti. _(With a cry of stormbirds)_ Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father!\r
-_(He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its\r
-cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with\r
-the vehemence of the ocean.)_ Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the\r
-homestead! I am the dreamery creamery butter.\r
-\r
-_(A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to\r
-mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)_\r
-\r
-THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!\r
-\r
-_(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the\r
-mantle.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: Who has a fag as I'm here?\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Tossing a cigarette on to the table)_ Here.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Her head perched aside in mock pride)_ Is that the way to hand\r
-the _pot_ to a lady? _(She stretches up to light the cigarette over the\r
-flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch\r
-with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up\r
-her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly\r
-at her cigarette.)_ Can you see the beautyspot of my behind?\r
-\r
-LYNCH: I'm not looking\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Makes sheep's eyes)_ No? You wouldn't do a less thing. Would you\r
-suck a lemon?\r
-\r
-_(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom,\r
-then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue\r
-fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously,\r
-twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her\r
-spittle and, gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag,\r
-basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts\r
-two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several\r
-overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of\r
-parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor\r
-Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent.\r
-Two quills project over his ears.)_\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Heels together, bows)_ My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely.\r
-_(He coughs thoughtfully, drily)_ Promiscuous nakedness is much in\r
-evidence hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact\r
-that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you\r
-are a particular devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you\r
-perceived? Good.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Granpapachi. But...\r
-\r
-VIRAG: Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and\r
-coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of\r
-gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I\r
-should opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always\r
-understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of\r
-lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a\r
-word. Hippogriff. Am I right?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: She is rather lean.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Not unpleasantly)_ Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier\r
-pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest\r
-bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull\r
-has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the\r
-attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you\r
-can wear today. Parallax! _(With a nervous twitch of his head)_ Did you\r
-hear my brain go snap? Pollysyllabax!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek)_\r
-She seems sad.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left\r
-eye with a finger and barks hoarsely)_ Hoax! Beware of the flapper\r
-and bogus mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button\r
-discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon.\r
-_(More genially)_ Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item\r
-number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe\r
-the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she\r
-bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and deep in keel.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Regretfully)_ When you come out without your gun.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your\r
-money, take your choice. How happy could you be with either...\r
-\r
-BLOOM: With...?\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(His tongue upcurling)_ Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. She\r
-is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in\r
-weight of bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two\r
-protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the\r
-noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional\r
-protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation,\r
-which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts\r
-are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers\r
-reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and\r
-gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their\r
-brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That\r
-suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in\r
-it. Lycopodium. _(His throat twitches)_ Slapbang! There he goes again.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: The stye I dislike.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Arches his eyebrows)_ Contact with a goldring, they say.\r
-_Argumentum ad feminam_, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece\r
-in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosauros. For the rest Eve's\r
-sovereign remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. _(He twitches)_ It\r
-is a funny sound. _(He coughs encouragingly)_ But possibly it is only a\r
-wart. I presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on\r
-that head? Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Reflecting)_ Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This\r
-searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of\r
-accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said...\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking)_ Stop\r
-twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten.\r
-Exercise your mnemotechnic. _La causa è santa_. Tara. Tara. _(Aside)_ He\r
-will surely remember.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over\r
-parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a\r
-deadhand cures. Mnemo?\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Excitedly)_ I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. _(He taps his\r
-parchmentroll energetically)_ This book tells you how to act with all\r
-descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite,\r
-melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about\r
-amputation. Our old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with\r
-horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar\r
-and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike\r
-women in male habiliments? _(With a dry snigger)_ You intended to devote\r
-an entire year to the study of the religious problem and the summer\r
-months of 1886 to square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate!\r
-From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say?\r
-Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Or, put we the case,\r
-those complicated combinations, camiknickers? _(He crows derisively)_\r
-Keekeereekee!\r
-\r
-_(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores then gazes at the veiled\r
-mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence\r
-this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is\r
-will then morrow as now was be past yester.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Prompts in a pig's whisper)_ Insects of the day spend their\r
-brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the\r
-inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve\r
-in dorsal region. Pretty Poll! _(His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally)_\r
-They had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand\r
-five hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will\r
-attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt\r
-vinegar. Bear's buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time\r
-we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. _(He coughs and, bending\r
-his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand)_ You shall\r
-find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember\r
-their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the\r
-seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion\r
-which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to\r
-example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That\r
-is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley!\r
-_(He blows into bloom's ear)_ Buzz!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self\r
-then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I...\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key)_ Splendid!\r
-Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. _(He gobbles\r
-gluttonously with turkey wattles)_ Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are\r
-we? Open Sesame! Cometh forth! _(He unrolls his parchment rapidly and\r
-reads, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the letters which he\r
-claws)_ Stay, good friend. I bring thee thy answer. Redbank oysters will\r
-shortly be upon us. I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may\r
-help us and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister\r
-omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or\r
-viragitis. Though they stink yet they sting. _(He wags his head with\r
-cackling raillery)_ Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular. _(He\r
-sneezes)_ Amen!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Absently)_ Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open\r
-sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve\r
-and the serpent contradicts. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy\r
-to my idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way\r
-through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like\r
-those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly\r
-closed, psalms in outlandish monotone)_ That the cows with their those\r
-distended udders that they have been the the known...\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. _(He repeats)_\r
-Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their\r
-teats to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. _(Profoundly)_ Instinct\r
-rules the world. In life. In death.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Head askew, arches his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers\r
-at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a horning claw and cries)_\r
-Who's moth moth? Who's dear Gerald? Dear Ger, that you? O dear, he is\r
-Gerald. O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe\r
-pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass\r
-tablenumpkin? _(He mews)_ Puss puss puss puss! _(He sighs, draws back\r
-and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw)_ Well, well. He doth\r
-rest anon. (He snaps his jaws suddenly on the air)\r
-\r
-THE MOTH:\r
-\r
- I'm a tiny tiny thing\r
- Ever flying in the spring\r
- Round and round a ringaring.\r
- Long ago I was a king\r
- Now I do this kind of thing\r
- On the wing, on the wing!\r
- Bing!\r
-\r
-_(He rushes against the mauve shade, flapping noisily)_ Pretty pretty\r
-pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.\r
-\r
-_(From left upper entrance with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes\r
-forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed\r
-sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed\r
-bamboo Jacob's pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears\r
-dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour's\r
-face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and\r
-sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles\r
-down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his\r
-amorous tongue.)_\r
-\r
-HENRY: _(In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar)_\r
-There is a flower that bloometh.\r
-\r
-_(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards\r
-Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendant dewlap to the piano.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(To himself)_ Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my\r
-belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my.\r
-Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old\r
-Deasy or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep\r
-impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially\r
-drunk, by the way. _(He touches the keys again)_ Minor chord comes now.\r
-Yes. Not much however.\r
-\r
-_(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous\r
-moustachework.)_\r
-\r
-ARTIFONI: _Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto._\r
-\r
-FLORRY: Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you\r
-the letter about the lute?\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Smirking)_ The bird that can sing and won't sing.\r
-\r
-_(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two Oxford dons with\r
-lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew\r
-Arnold's face.)_\r
-\r
-PHILIP SOBER: Take a fool's advice. All is not well. Work it out with\r
-the buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve\r
-you got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew.\r
-Mooney's en ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street\r
-hospital, Burke's. Eh? I am watching you.\r
-\r
-PHILIP DRUNK: _(Impatiently)_ Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way.\r
-If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality.\r
-Who was it told me his name? _(His lawnmower begins to purr)_ Aha, yes.\r
-_Zoe mou sas agapo_. Have a notion I was here before. When was it not\r
-Atkinson his card I have somewhere. Mac Somebody. Unmack I have it. He\r
-told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it, no?\r
-\r
-FLORRY: And the song?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Out of it now. _(To himself)_ Clever.\r
-\r
-PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: _(Their lawnmowers purring with a\r
-rigadoon of grasshalms)_ Clever ever. Out of it out of it. By the\r
-bye have you the book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes.\r
-Cleverever outofitnow. Keep in condition. Do like us.\r
-\r
-ZOE: There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of\r
-business with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to\r
-him. I know you've a Roman collar.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. _(Harshly,\r
-his pupils waxing)_ To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I\r
-am the Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. Why\r
-I left the church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the\r
-Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty Jippert. _(He wriggles)_ Woman, undoing\r
-with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's\r
-lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat.\r
-Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni\r
-fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. _(He cries) Coactus volui._\r
-Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman's wrist.\r
-Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat\r
-yadgana. _(He chases his tail)_ Piffpaff! Popo! _(He stops, sneezes)_\r
-Pchp! _(He worries his butt)_ Prrrrrht!\r
-\r
-LYNCH: I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for\r
-shooting a bishop.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils)_ He couldn't get a\r
-connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Poor man!\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Lightly)_ Only for what happened him.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: How?\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage,\r
-cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.)\r
-Verfluchte Goim!_ He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig\r
-God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the\r
-pope's bastard. _(He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid,\r
-his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world)_\r
-A son of a whore. Apocalypse.\r
-\r
-KITTY: And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from\r
-Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow\r
-and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all\r
-subscribed for the funeral.\r
-\r
-PHILIP DRUNK: _(Gravely) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position,\r
-Philippe?_\r
-\r
-PHILIP SOBER: _(Gaily) c'était le sacré pigeon, Philippe._\r
-\r
-_(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.\r
-And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a\r
-whore's shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Laughs)_ And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated\r
-anthropoid apes.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Nods)_ Locomotor ataxy.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Gaily)_ O, my dictionary.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Three wise virgins.\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony\r
-epileptic lips)_ She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther,\r
-the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. _(He sticks out\r
-a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork)_\r
-Messiah! He burst her tympanum. _(With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks\r
-his hips in the cynical spasm)_ Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!\r
-\r
-_(Ben Jumbo Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled,\r
-hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands\r
-forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing\r
-bagslops.)_\r
-\r
-BEN DOLLARD: _(Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels\r
-jovially in base barreltone)_ When love absorbs my ardent soul.\r
-\r
-_(The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the\r
-ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)_\r
-\r
-THE VIRGINS: _(Gushingly)_ Big Ben! Ben my Chree!\r
-\r
-A VOICE: Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.\r
-\r
-BEN DOLLARD: _(Smites his thigh in abundant laughter)_ Hold him now.\r
-\r
-HENRY: _(Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs)_ Thine\r
-heart, mine love. _(He plucks his lutestrings)_ When first I saw...\r
-\r
-VIRAG: _(Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting)_ Rats!\r
-_(He yawns, showing a coalblack throat, and closes his jaws by an upward\r
-push of his parchmentroll)_ After having said which I took my departure.\r
-Farewell. Fare thee well. _Dreck!_\r
-\r
-_(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb\r
-and gives a cow's lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to\r
-the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two\r
-ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the\r
-wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)_\r
-\r
-THE FLYBILL: K. II. Post No Bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.\r
-\r
-HENRY: All is lost now.\r
-\r
-_(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)_\r
-\r
-VIRAG'S HEAD: Quack!\r
-\r
-_(Exeunt severally.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Over his shoulder to zoe)_ You would have preferred\r
-the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware\r
-Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The\r
-agony in the closet.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: All one and the same God to her.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Devoutly)_ And sovereign Lord of all things.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(To Stephen)_ I'm sure you're a spoiled priest. Or a monk.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: He is. A cardinal's son.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.\r
-\r
-_(His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland,\r
-appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven\r
-dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train,\r
-peeping under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His\r
-thumbs are stuck in his armpits and his palms outspread. Round his\r
-neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his breast in a corkscrew cross.\r
-Releasing his thumbs, he invokes grace from on high with large wave\r
-gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp:)_\r
-\r
-THE CARDINAL:\r
-\r
- Conservio lies captured\r
- He lies in the lowest dungeon\r
- With manacles and chains around his limbs\r
- Weighing upwards of three tons.\r
-\r
-_(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left\r
-cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and\r
-fro, arms akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour:)_\r
-\r
- O, the poor little fellow\r
- Hihihihihis legs they were yellow\r
- He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a snake\r
- But some bloody savage\r
- To graize his white cabbage\r
- He murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.\r
-\r
-_(A multitude of midges swarms white over his robe. He scratches himself\r
-with crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims:)_\r
-\r
-I'm suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to\r
-Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous. If they were they'd\r
-walk me off the face of the bloody globe.\r
-\r
-_(His head aslant he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers,\r
-imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying\r
-his hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his\r
-trainbearers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling,\r
-Easterkissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar,\r
-merciful male, melodious:)_\r
-\r
- Shall carry my heart to thee,\r
- Shall carry my heart to thee,\r
- And the breath of the balmy night\r
- Shall carry my heart to thee!\r
- _(The trick doorhandle turns.)_\r
-\r
-\r
-THE DOORHANDLE: Theeee!\r
-\r
-ZOE: The devil is in that door.\r
-\r
-_(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking\r
-the waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily\r
-and, half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his\r
-pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Sniffs his hair briskly)_ Hmmm! Thank your mother for the\r
-rabbits. I'm very fond of what I like.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep,\r
-pricks his ears)_ If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double\r
-event?\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Tears open the silverfoil)_ Fingers was made before forks. _(She\r
-breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then\r
-turns kittenishly to Lynch)_ No objection to French lozenges? _(He nods.\r
-She taunts him.)_ Have it now or wait till you get it? _(He opens his\r
-mouth, his head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head\r
-follows. She whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.)_ Catch!\r
-\r
-_(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it\r
-through with a crack.)_\r
-\r
-KITTY: _(Chewing)_ The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have\r
-lovely ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with\r
-his lady. The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic\r
-forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance\r
-towards the door. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a swift\r
-pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing\r
-his right arm downwards from his left shoulder.)_ Go, go, go, I conjure\r
-you, whoever you are!\r
-\r
-_(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside.\r
-Bloom's features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing\r
-calmly. Zoe offers him chocolate.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Solemnly)_ Thanks.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Do as you're bid. Here!\r
-\r
-_(A firm heelclacking tread is heard on the stairs.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Takes the chocolate)_ Aphrodisiac? Tansy and pennyroyal. But I\r
-bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red\r
-influences lupus. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This\r
-black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. _(He eats)_ Influence\r
-taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That\r
-priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews.\r
-\r
-_(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters. She\r
-is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with\r
-tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like\r
-Minnie Hauck in_ Carmen. _On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings.\r
-Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her\r
-olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted\r
-nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)_\r
-\r
-BELLA: My word! I'm all of a mucksweat.\r
-\r
-_(She glances round her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with\r
-hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck\r
-and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)_\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Flirting quickly, then slowly)_ Married, I see.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Yes. Partly, I have mislaid...\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Half opening, then closing)_ And the missus is master.\r
-Petticoat government.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Looks down with a sheepish grin)_ That is so.\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Folding together, rests against her left eardrop)_ Have you\r
-forgotten me?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Yes. Yo.\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Folded akimbo against her waist)_ Is me her was you dreamed\r
-before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now\r
-we?\r
-\r
-_(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Wincing)_ Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which\r
-women love.\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Tapping)_ We have met. You are mine. It is fate.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Cowed)_ Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your\r
-domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to\r
-speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before\r
-the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door\r
-and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per\r
-second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant\r
-a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family.\r
-Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed\r
-in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the\r
-end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with\r
-Athos, faithful after death. A dog's spittle as you probably... _(He\r
-winces)_ Ah!\r
-\r
-RICHIE GOULDING: _(Bagweighted, passes the door)_ Mocking is catch. Best\r
-value in Dub. Fit for a prince's. Liver and kidney.\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Tapping)_ All things end. Be mine. Now.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Undecided)_ All now? I should not have parted with my talisman.\r
-Rain, exposure at dewfall on the searocks, a peccadillo at my time of\r
-life. Every phenomenon has a natural cause.\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Points downwards slowly)_ You may.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace)_ We are\r
-observed.\r
-\r
-THE FAN: _(Points downwards quickly)_ You must.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(With desire, with reluctance)_ I can make a true black knot.\r
-Learned when I served my time and worked the mail order line for\r
-Kellett's. Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy.\r
-I knelt once before today. Ah!\r
-\r
-_(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the\r
-edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked.\r
-Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers\r
-draws out and in her laces.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Murmurs lovingly)_ To be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my\r
-love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace\r
-up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so\r
-incredibly impossibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model\r
-Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb\r
-toe, as worn in Paris.\r
-\r
-THE HOOF: Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Crosslacing)_ Too tight?\r
-\r
-THE HOOF: If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar\r
-dance. Bad luck. Hook in wrong tache of her... person you mentioned.\r
-That night she met... Now!\r
-\r
-_(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises\r
-his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in midbrow. His eyes grow\r
-dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Mumbles)_ Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen,...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice)_ Hound of\r
-dishonour!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Infatuated)_ Empress!\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(His heavy cheekchops sagging)_ Adorer of the adulterous rump!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Plaintively)_ Hugeness!\r
-\r
-BELLO: Dungdevourer!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(With sinews semiflexed)_ Magmagnificence!\r
-\r
-BELLO: Down! _(He taps her on the shoulder with his fan)_ Incline feet\r
-forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling.\r
-On the hands down!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps)_\r
-Truffles!\r
-\r
-_(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting,\r
-snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut\r
-tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most\r
-excellent master.)_\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(With bobbed hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his\r
-shaven mouth, in mountaineer's puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport\r
-skirt and alpine hat with moorcock's feather, his hands stuck deep in\r
-his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in)_\r
-Footstool! Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of\r
-your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Enthralled, bleats)_ I promise never to disobey.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Laughs loudly)_ Holy smoke! You little know what's in store for\r
-you. I'm the Tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I'll bet\r
-Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me,\r
-I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be\r
-inflicted in gym costume.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Widening her slip to screen her)_ She's not here.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Closing her eyes)_ She's not here.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Hiding her with her gown)_ She didn't mean it, Mr Bello.\r
-She'll be good, sir.\r
-\r
-KITTY: Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Coaxingly)_ Come, ducky dear, I want a word with you, darling,\r
-just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk,\r
-sweety. _(Bloom puts out her timid head)_ There's a good girly now.\r
-_(Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward)_ I only want\r
-to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender\r
-behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Fainting)_ Don't tear my...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Savagely)_ The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging\r
-hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian\r
-slave of old. You're in for it this time! I'll make you remember me for\r
-the balance of your natural life. _(His forehead veins swollen, his face\r
-congested)_ I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after\r
-my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle\r
-of Guinness's porter. _(He belches)_ And suck my thumping good Stock\r
-Exchange cigar while I read the _Licensed Victualler's Gazette_. Very\r
-possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and\r
-enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted\r
-and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will\r
-hurt you. _(He twists her arm. Bloom squeals, turning turtle.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't!\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Twisting)_ Another!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Screams)_ O, it's hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches\r
-like mad!\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Shouts)_ Good, by the rumping jumping general! That's the best\r
-bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don't keep me waiting, damn\r
-you! _(He slaps her face)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Whimpers)_ You're after hitting me. I'll tell...\r
-\r
-BELLO: Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Yes. Walk on him! I will.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: I will. Don't be greedy.\r
-\r
-KITTY: No, me. Lend him to me.\r
-\r
-_(The brothel cook, mrs keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib,\r
-men's grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck\r
-with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)_\r
-\r
-MRS KEOGH: _(Ferociously)_ Can I help? _(They hold and pinion Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Squats with a grunt on Bloom's upturned face, puffing\r
-cigarsmoke, nursing a fat leg)_ I see Keating Clay is elected\r
-vicechairman of the Richmond asylum and by the by Guinness's preference\r
-shares are at sixteen three quaffers. Curse me for a fool that didn't\r
-buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck,\r
-curse it. And that Goddamned outsider _Throwaway_ at twenty to one.\r
-_(He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear)_ Where's that Goddamned\r
-cursed ashtray?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Goaded, buttocksmothered)_ O! O! Monsters! Cruel one!\r
-\r
-BELLO: Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg. Pray for it as you never\r
-prayed before. _(He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar)_ Here,\r
-kiss that. Both. Kiss. _(He throws a leg astride and, pressing with\r
-horseman's knees, calls in a hard voice)_ Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury\r
-cross. I'll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. _(He bends sideways and\r
-squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting)_ Ho! Off we pop! I'll\r
-nurse you in proper fashion. _(He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the\r
-saddle)_ The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot\r
-and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Pulls at Bello)_ Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked\r
-before you.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Pulling at florry)_ Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet,\r
-suckeress?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Stifling)_ Can't.\r
-\r
-BELLO: Well, I'm not. Wait. _(He holds in his breath)_ Curse it. Here.\r
-This bung's about burst. _(He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting\r
-his features, farts loudly)_ Take that! _(He recorks himself)_ Yes, by\r
-Jingo, sixteen three quarters.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(A sweat breaking out over him)_ Not man. _(He sniffs)_ Woman.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Stands up)_ No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has\r
-come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing\r
-under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male\r
-garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously\r
-rustling over head and shoulders. And quickly too!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shrinks)_ Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I\r
-tiptouch it with my nails?\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Points to his whores)_ As they are now so will you be, wigged,\r
-singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape\r
-measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel\r
-force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to\r
-the diamondtrimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure,\r
-plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks,\r
-pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course,\r
-with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice\r
-scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be\r
-a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly\r
-flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you...\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large\r
-male hands and nose, leering mouth)_ I tried her things on only twice,\r
-a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hard up I washed them to\r
-save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Jeers)_ Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh? And showed\r
-off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds\r
-your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender,\r
-eh? Ho! ho! I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and\r
-short trunkleg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that\r
-Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne hotel, eh?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Miriam. Black. Demimondaine.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Guffaws)_ Christ Almighty it's too tickling, this! You were\r
-a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and\r
-lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be\r
-violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell M.\r
-P., signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy,\r
-Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Croesus, the\r
-varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland\r
-and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. _(He guffaws again)_ Christ,\r
-wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Her hands and features working)_ It was Gerald converted me to\r
-be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School\r
-play _Vice Versa_. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by\r
-sister's stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his\r
-eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(With wicked glee)_ Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you\r
-took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the\r
-smoothworn throne.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. _(Earnestly)_\r
-And really it's better the position... because often I used to wet...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Sternly)_ No insubordination! The sawdust is there in the\r
-corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it\r
-standing, sir! I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a\r
-trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a\r
-martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.\r
-\r
-THE SINS OF THE PAST: _(In a medley of voices)_ He went through a form\r
-of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the\r
-Black church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn\r
-at an address in D'Olier street while he presented himself indecently to\r
-the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he frankly encouraged\r
-a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary\r
-outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences\r
-he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all\r
-strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did\r
-he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and\r
-what and how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar,\r
-gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to\r
-him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order?\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Whistles loudly)_ Say! What was the most revolting piece of\r
-obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be\r
-candid for once.\r
-\r
-_(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering,\r
-Booloohoom. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny Cassidy's hag, blind\r
-stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other,\r
-the...)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Don't ask me! Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought\r
-the half of the... I swear on my sacred oath...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Peremptorily)_ Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing.\r
-Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a\r
-line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how\r
-many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr...\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Docile, gurgles)_ I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Imperiously)_ O, get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak\r
-when you're spoken to.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Bows)_ Master! Mistress! Mantamer!\r
-\r
-_(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fill.)_\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Satirically)_ By day you will souse and bat our smelling\r
-underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines\r
-with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won't that be\r
-nice? _(He places a ruby ring on her finger)_ And there now! With this\r
-ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Thank you, mistress.\r
-\r
-BELLO: You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in\r
-the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one.\r
-Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne.\r
-Drink me piping hot. Hop! You will dance attendance or I'll lecture you\r
-on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss,\r
-with the hairbrush. You'll be taught the error of your ways. At night\r
-your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves\r
-newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such\r
-favours knights of old laid down their lives. _(He chuckles)_ My boys\r
-will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above\r
-all, when they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new\r
-attraction in gilded heels. First I'll have a go at you myself. A man I\r
-know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just\r
-now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is\r
-on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust.\r
-Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? _(He points)_ For that lot. Trained\r
-by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. _(He bares his arm and\r
-plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva)_ There's fine depth for you!\r
-What, boys? That give you a hardon? _(He shoves his arm in a bidder's\r
-face)_ Here wet the deck and wipe it round!\r
-\r
-A BIDDER: A florin.\r
-\r
-_(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)_\r
-\r
-THE LACQUEY: Barang!\r
-\r
-A VOICE: One and eightpence too much.\r
-\r
-CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Gives a rap with his gavel)_ Two bar. Rockbottom figure and\r
-cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine his points.\r
-Handle him. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If\r
-I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid\r
-gallons a day. A pure stockgetter, due to lay within the hour. His\r
-sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks.\r
-Whoa my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! _(He brands his initial C on Bloom's\r
-croup)_ So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen?\r
-\r
-A DARKVISAGED MAN: _(In disguised accent)_ Hoondert punt sterlink.\r
-\r
-VOICES: _(Subdued)_ For the Caliph. Haroun Al Raschid.\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Gaily)_ Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short\r
-skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a\r
-potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the\r
-long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better\r
-instincts of the _blasé_ man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk\r
-on four inch Louis Quinze heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup,\r
-the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your powers of\r
-fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with\r
-forefinger in mouth)_ O, I know what you're hinting at now!\r
-\r
-BELLO: What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? _(He\r
-stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds\r
-of Bloom's haunches)_ Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your\r
-curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy,\r
-sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy\r
-a bucket or sell your pump. _(Loudly)_ Can you do a man's job?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Eccles street...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Sarcastically)_ I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but\r
-there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my\r
-gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for\r
-you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all\r
-over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee,\r
-belly to belly, bubs to breast! He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he\r
-has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months,\r
-my lad! Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts\r
-already! That makes you wild, don't it? Touches the spot? _(He spits in\r
-contempt)_ Spittoon!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I was indecently treated, I... Inform the police. Hundred\r
-pounds. Unmentionable. I...\r
-\r
-BELLO: Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want not your\r
-drizzle.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll... We... Still...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Ruthlessly)_ No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will\r
-since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years.\r
-Return and see.\r
-\r
-_(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)_\r
-\r
-SLEEPY HOLLOW: Rip van Wink! Rip van Winkle!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In tattered mocassins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing,\r
-fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond\r
-panes, cries out)_ I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's!\r
-But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Laughs mockingly)_ That's your daughter, you owl, with a\r
-Mullingar student.\r
-\r
-_(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf\r
-in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and\r
-calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)_\r
-\r
-MILLY: My! It's Papli! But, O Papli, how old you've grown!\r
-\r
-BELLO: Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writingtable where we never wrote,\r
-aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and\r
-his menfriends are living there in clover. The _Cuckoos' Rest!_ Why not?\r
-How many women had you, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot,\r
-exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you male prostitute?\r
-Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the\r
-goose, my gander O.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: They... I...\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Cuttingly)_ Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet\r
-you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to\r
-find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue\r
-you carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. They will violate\r
-the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook\r
-of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten\r
-shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return.\r
-I will prove...\r
-\r
-A VOICE: Swear!\r
-\r
-_(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowieknife between his\r
-teeth.)_\r
-\r
-BELLO: As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your\r
-secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You\r
-are down and out and don't you forget it, old bean.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody...? _(He bites his\r
-thumb)_\r
-\r
-BELLO: Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency\r
-or grace about you. I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you\r
-skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have!\r
-If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We'll bury\r
-you in our shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck\r
-Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and\r
-sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands,\r
-whatever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the one cesspool. _(He\r
-explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh)_ We'll manure you, Mr Flower! _(He\r
-pipes scoffingly)_ Byby, Poldy! Byby, Papli!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Clasps his head)_ My willpower! Memory! I have sinned! I have\r
-suff...\r
-\r
-_(He weeps tearlessly)_\r
-\r
-BELLO: _(Sneers)_ Crybabby! Crocodile tears!\r
-\r
-_(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to\r
-the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the\r
-circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M.\r
-Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M.\r
-Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold\r
-Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the\r
-recreant Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-THE CIRCUMCISED: _(In dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit\r
-upon him, no flowers) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad._\r
-\r
-VOICES: _(Sighing)_ So he's gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never\r
-heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah,\r
-yes.\r
-\r
-_(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of\r
-incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oakframe a nymph with\r
-hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from her\r
-grotto and passing under interlacing yews stands over Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: _(Their leaves whispering)_ Sister. Our sister. Ssh!\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Softly)_ Mortal! _(Kindly)_ Nay, dost not weepest!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight,\r
-with dignity)_ This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of\r
-habit.\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: Mortal! You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster\r
-picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in\r
-fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical\r
-act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt\r
-of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to\r
-disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads,\r
-proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured\r
-gentleman. Useful hints to the married.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Lifts a turtle head towards her lap)_ We have met before. On\r
-another star.\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Sadly)_ Rubber goods. Neverrip brand as supplied to the\r
-aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited\r
-testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber. My bust\r
-developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: You mean _Photo Bits?_\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me\r
-above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in\r
-four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my\r
-shame.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Humbly kisses her long hair)_ Your classic curves, beautiful\r
-immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty,\r
-almost to pray.\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: During dark nights I heard your praise.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Quickly)_ Yes, yes. You mean that I... Sleep reveals the worst\r
-side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of bed\r
-or rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest\r
-there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days\r
-ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive\r
-vent. _(He sighs)_ 'Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Her fingers in her ears)_ And words. They are not in my\r
-dictionary.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: You understood them?\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: Ssh!\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Covers her face with her hands)_ What have I not seen in\r
-that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Apologetically)_ I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up\r
-with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea long ago.\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Bends her head)_ Worse, worse!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Reflects precautiously)_ That antiquated commode. It wasn't her\r
-weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds\r
-after weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd\r
-orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle.\r
-\r
-_(The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.)_\r
-\r
-THE WATERFALL:\r
-\r
- Poulaphouca Poulaphouca\r
- Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: _(Mingling their boughs)_ Listen. Whisper. She is right, our\r
-sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous\r
-summer days.\r
-\r
-\r
-JOHN WYSE NOLAN: _(In the background, in Irish National Forester's\r
-uniform, doffs his plumed hat)_ Prosper! Give shade on languorous days,\r
-trees of Ireland!\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: _(Murmuring)_ Who came to Poulaphouca with the High School\r
-excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Scared)_ High School of Poula? Mnemo? Not in full possession of\r
-faculties. Concussion. Run over by tram.\r
-\r
-THE ECHO: Sham!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in nondescript\r
-juvenile grey and black striped suit, too small for him, white tennis\r
-shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops and a red schoolcap with\r
-badge)_ I was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a\r
-jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory,\r
-the throng penned tight on the old Royal stairs (for they love crushes,\r
-instinct of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles\r
-vice), even a pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat. There were\r
-sunspots that summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days.\r
-\r
-_(Halcyon days, high school boys in blue and white football jerseys and\r
-shorts, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen\r
-Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a clearing\r
-of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.)_\r
-\r
-THE HALCYON DAYS: Mackerel! Live us again. Hurray! _(They cheer)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent\r
-snowballs, struggles to rise)_ Again! I feel sixteen! What a lark! Let's\r
-ring all the bells in Montague street. _(He cheers feebly)_ Hurray for\r
-the High School!\r
-\r
-THE ECHO: Fool!\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: _(Rustling)_ She is right, our sister. Whisper. _(Whispered\r
-kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from\r
-the boles and among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.)_ Who\r
-profaned our silent shade?\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Coyly, through parting fingers)_ There? In the open air?\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: _(Sweeping downward)_ Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward.\r
-\r
-THE WATERFALL:\r
-\r
- Poulaphouca Poulaphouca\r
- Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(With wide fingers)_ O, infamy!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of\r
-the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing\r
-time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke,\r
-flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains\r
-with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled\r
-downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits.\r
-She climbed their crooked tree and I... A saint couldn't resist it. The\r
-demon possessed me. Besides, who saw?\r
-\r
-_(Staggering Bob, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with\r
-humid nostrils through the foliage.)_\r
-\r
-STAGGERING BOB: (LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES,\r
-SNIVELS) Me. Me see.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Simply satisfying a need I... _(With pathos)_ No girl would when\r
-I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play...\r
-\r
-_(High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes,\r
-plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.)_\r
-\r
-THE NANNYGOAT: _(Bleats)_ Megeggaggegg! Nannannanny!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Hatless, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and\r
-gorsespine)_ Regularly engaged. Circumstances alter cases. _(He gazes\r
-intently downwards on the water)_ Thirtytwo head over heels per second.\r
-Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government\r
-printer's clerk. _(Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom,\r
-rolled in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the Lion's Head cliff into the\r
-purple waiting waters.)_\r
-\r
-THE DUMMYMUMMY: Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg!\r
-\r
-_(Far out in the bay between bailey and kish lights the_ Erin's King\r
-_sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards\r
-the land.)_\r
-\r
-COUNCILLOR NANNETII: _(Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced,\r
-his hand in his waistcoat opening, declaims)_ When my country takes her\r
-place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my\r
-epitaph be written. I have...\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Done. Prff!\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Loftily)_ We immortals, as you saw today, have not such\r
-a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat\r
-electric light. _(She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing\r
-her forefinger in her mouth)_ Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then\r
-could you...?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Pawing the heather abjectly)_ O, I have been a perfect pig.\r
-Enemas too I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia to which\r
-add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long's\r
-syringe, the ladies' friend.\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: In my presence. The powderpuff. _(She blushes and makes a\r
-knee)_ And the rest!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Dejected)_ Yes. _Peccavi!_ I have paid homage on that living\r
-altar where the back changes name. _(With sudden fervour)_ For why\r
-should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules...?\r
-\r
-_(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the treestems,\r
-cooeeing)_\r
-\r
-THE VOICE OF KITTY: _(In the thicket)_ Show us one of them cushions.\r
-\r
-THE VOICE OF FLORRY: Here.\r
-\r
-_(A grouse wings clumsily through the underwood.)_\r
-\r
-THE VOICE OF LYNCH: _(In the thicket)_ Whew! Piping hot!\r
-\r
-THE VOICE OF ZOE: _(From the thicket)_ Came from a hot place.\r
-\r
-THE VOICE OF VIRAG: _(A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war\r
-panoply with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over\r
-beechmast and acorns)_ Hot! Hot! Ware Sitting Bull!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit\r
-where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to\r
-grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted\r
-white sateen coatpans. So womanly, full. It fills me full.\r
-\r
-THE WATERFALL:\r
-\r
- _Phillaphulla Poulaphouca\r
- Poulaphouca Poulaphouca._\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: Ssh! Sister, speak!\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Eyeless, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple,\r
-softly, with remote eyes)_ Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount\r
-Carmel. The apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. _(She\r
-reclines her head, sighing)_ Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull\r
-waves o'er the waters dull.\r
-\r
-_(Bloom half rises. His back trouserbutton snaps.)_\r
-\r
-THE BUTTON: Bip!\r
-\r
-_(Two sluts of the coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.)_\r
-\r
-THE SLUTS:\r
-\r
- O, Leopold lost the pin of his drawers\r
- He didn't know what to do,\r
- To keep it up,\r
- To keep it up.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Coldly)_ You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there\r
-were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy\r
-but willing like an ass pissing.\r
-\r
-THE YEWS: _(Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms\r
-aging and swaying)_ Deciduously!\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(Her features hardening, gropes in the folds of her habit)_\r
-Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! _(A large moist stain appears on her\r
-robe)_ Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a\r
-pure woman. _(She clutches again in her robe)_ Wait. Satan, you'll sing\r
-no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. _(She draws a poniard and,\r
-clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his\r
-loins)_ Nekum!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Starts up, seizes her hand)_ Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat o' nine lives!\r
-Fair play, madam. No pruningknife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What\r
-do you lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? _(He\r
-clutches her veil)_ A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener,\r
-or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier, or good mother Alphonsus,\r
-eh Reynard?\r
-\r
-THE NYMPH: _(With a cry flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast\r
-cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks)_ Poli...!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Calls after her)_ As if you didn't get it on the double\r
-yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it.\r
-Your strength our weakness. What's our studfee? What will you pay on\r
-the nail? You fee mendancers on the Riviera, I read. _(The fleeing nymph\r
-raises a keen)_ Eh? I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind\r
-me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool\r
-someone else, not me. _(He sniffs)_ Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.\r
-\r
-_(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)_\r
-\r
-BELLA: You'll know me the next time.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Composed, regards her) Passée._ Mutton dressed as lamb. Long\r
-in the tooth and superfluous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night\r
-would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your\r
-eyes are as vapid as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox. They have the\r
-dimensions of your other features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw\r
-propeller.\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Contemptuously)_ You're not game, in fact. _(Her sowcunt\r
-barks)_ Fbhracht!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Contemptuously)_ Clean your nailless middle finger first, your\r
-bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of\r
-hay and wipe yourself.\r
-\r
-BELLA: I know you, canvasser! Dead cod!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Turns to the piano)_ Which of you was playing the dead march\r
-from _Saul?_\r
-\r
-ZOE: Me. Mind your cornflowers. _(She darts to the piano and bangs\r
-chords on it with crossed arms)_ The cat's ramble through the slag.\r
-_(She glances back)_ Eh? Who's making love to my sweeties? _(She darts\r
-back to the table)_ What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.\r
-\r
-_(Kitty, disconcerted, coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom\r
-approaches Zoe.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Gently)_ Give me back that potato, will you?\r
-\r
-ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(With feeling)_ It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma.\r
-\r
-ZOE:\r
-\r
- Give a thing and take it back\r
- God'll ask you where is that\r
- You'll say you don't know\r
- God'll send you down below.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: To have or not to have that is the question.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Here. _(She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh,\r
-and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking)_ Those that hides\r
-knows where to find.\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Frowns)_ Here. This isn't a musical peepshow. And don't you\r
-smash that piano. Who's paying here?\r
-\r
-_(She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in his pocket and, taking out\r
-a banknote by its corner, hands it to her.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(With exaggerated politeness)_ This silken purse I made out\r
-of the sow's ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. _(He\r
-indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom)_ We are all in the same sweepstake,\r
-Kinch and Lynch. _Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état_.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Calls from the hearth)_ Dedalus! Give her your blessing for me.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Hands Bella a coin)_ Gold. She has it.\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Looks at the money, then at Stephen, then at Zoe, Florry and\r
-Kitty)_ Do you want three girls? It's ten shillings here.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Delightedly)_ A hundred thousand apologies. _(He fumbles\r
-again and takes out and hands her two crowns)_ Permit, _brevi manu_, my\r
-sight is somewhat troubled.\r
-\r
-_(Bella goes to the table to count the money while Stephen talks to\r
-himself in monosyllables. Zoe bends over the table. Kitty leans over\r
-Zoe's neck. Lynch gets up, rights his cap and, clasping Kitty's waist,\r
-adds his head to the group.)_\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Strives heavily to rise)_ Ow! My foot's asleep. _(She limps\r
-over to the table. Bloom approaches.)_\r
-\r
-BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: _(Chattering and squabbling)_ The\r
-gentleman... ten shillings... paying for the three... allow me a\r
-moment... this gentleman pays separate... who's touching it?... ow!\r
-... mind who you're pinching... are you staying the night or a short\r
-time?... who did?... you're a liar, excuse me... the gentleman paid\r
-down like a gentleman... drink... it's long after eleven.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(At the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence)_ No bottles!\r
-What, eleven? A riddle!\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Lifting up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the\r
-top of her stocking)_ Hard earned on the flat of my back.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Lifting Kitty from the table)_ Come!\r
-\r
-KITTY: Wait. _(She clutches the two crowns)_\r
-\r
-FLORRY: And me?\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Hoopla! _(He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the\r
-sofa.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN:\r
-\r
- The fox crew, the cocks flew,\r
- The bells in heaven\r
- Were striking eleven.\r
- 'Tis time for her poor soul\r
- To get out of heaven.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table between bella and\r
-florry)_ So. Allow me. _(He takes up the poundnote)_ Three times ten.\r
-We're square.\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Admiringly)_ You're such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss\r
-you.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Points)_ Him? Deep as a drawwell. _(Lynch bends Kitty back over\r
-the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with the poundnote to Stephen.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: This is yours.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: How is that? _Les distrait_ or absentminded beggar. _(He\r
-fumbles again in his pocket and draws out a handful of coins. An object\r
-fills.)_ That fell.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Stooping, picks up and hands a box of matches)_ This.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Lucifer. Thanks.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Quietly)_ You had better hand over that cash to me to take care\r
-of. Why pay more?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Hands him all his coins)_ Be just before you are generous.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I will but is it wise? _(He counts)_ One, seven, eleven, and\r
-five. Six. Eleven. I don't answer for what you may have lost.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next\r
-Lessing says. Thirsty fox. _(He laughs loudly)_ Burying his grandmother.\r
-Probably he killed her.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Doesn't matter a rambling damn.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: No, but...\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Comes to the table)_ Cigarette, please. _(Lynch tosses a\r
-cigarette from the sofa to the table)_ And so Georgina Johnson is dead\r
-and married. _(A cigarette appears on the table. Stephen looks at it)_\r
-Wonder. Parlour magic. Married. Hm. _(He strikes a match and proceeds to\r
-light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy)_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Watching him)_ You would have a better chance of lighting it if\r
-you held the match nearer.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Brings the match near his eye)_ Lynx eye. Must get glasses.\r
-Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all\r
-flat. _(He draws the match away. It goes out.)_ Brain thinks. Near:\r
-far. Ineluctable modality of the visible. _(He frowns mysteriously)_ Hm.\r
-Sphinx. The beast that has twobacks at midnight. Married.\r
-\r
-ZOE: It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with\r
-him.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Nods)_ Mr Lambe from London.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Embracing Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply) Dona nobis pacem._\r
-\r
-_(The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Bloom picks it up and\r
-throws it in the grate.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Don't smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. _(To Zoe)_ You\r
-have nothing?\r
-\r
-ZOE: Is he hungry?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Extends his hand to her smiling and chants to the air of the\r
-bloodoath in the_ Dusk of the Gods)\r
-\r
- Hangende Hunger,\r
- Fragende Frau,\r
- Macht uns alle kaputt.\r
-\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Tragically)_ Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet! _(She takes\r
-his hand)_ Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand. _(She points to his\r
-forehead)_ No wit, no wrinkles. _(She counts)_ Two, three, Mars, that's\r
-courage. _(Stephen shakes his head)_ No kid.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and\r
-shake. _(To Zoe)_ Who taught you palmistry?\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Turns)_ Ask my ballocks that I haven't got. _(To Stephen)_ I see\r
-it in your face. The eye, like that. _(She frowns with lowered head)_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice)_ Like that. Pandybat.\r
-\r
-_(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open,\r
-the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up.)_\r
-\r
-FATHER DOLAN: Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little\r
-schemer. See it in your eye.\r
-\r
-_(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the head of Don John Conmee rises\r
-from the pianola coffin.)_\r
-\r
-DON JOHN CONMEE: Now, Father Dolan! Now. I'm sure that Stephen is a very\r
-good little boy!\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Examining Stephen's palm)_ Woman's hand.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Murmurs)_ Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read\r
-His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock.\r
-\r
-ZOE: What day were you born?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Thursday. Today.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Thursday's child has far to go. _(She traces lines on his hand)_\r
-Line of fate. Influential friends.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Pointing)_ Imagination.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Mount of the moon. You'll meet with a... _(She peers at his hands\r
-abruptly)_ I won't tell you what's not good for you. Or do you want to\r
-know?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Detaches her fingers and offers his palm)_ More harm than good.\r
-Here. Read mine.\r
-\r
-BELLA: Show. _(She turns up bloom's hand)_ I thought so. Knobby knuckles\r
-for the women.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Peering at bloom's palm)_ Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and\r
-marry money.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Wrong.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Quickly)_ O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That\r
-wrong?\r
-\r
-_(Black Liz, a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle, rises,\r
-stretches her wings and clucks.)_\r
-\r
-BLACK LIZ: Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook.\r
-\r
-_(She sidles from her newlaid egg and waddles off)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Points to his hand)_ That weal there is an accident. Fell and\r
-cut it twentytwo years ago. I was sixteen.\r
-\r
-ZOE: I see, says the blind man. Tell us news.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago\r
-he was twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Twentytwo\r
-years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. _(He winces)_ Hurt my hand\r
-somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money?\r
-\r
-_(Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and\r
-writes idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)_\r
-\r
-FLORRY: What?\r
-\r
-_(A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a\r
-gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue,\r
-Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the\r
-sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the\r
-crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)_\r
-\r
-THE BOOTS: _(Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers)_\r
-Haw haw have you the horn?\r
-\r
-_(Bronze by gold they whisper.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(To Florry)_ Whisper.\r
-\r
-_(They whisper again)_\r
-\r
-_(Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw set\r
-sideways, a red flower in his mouth. Lenehan in yachtsman's cap and\r
-white shoes officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat\r
-shoulder.)_\r
-\r
-LENEHAN: Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a\r
-few quims?\r
-\r
-BOYLAN: _(Seated, smiles)_ Plucking a turkey.\r
-\r
-LENEHAN: A good night's work.\r
-\r
-BOYLAN: _(Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, winks)_ Blazes\r
-Kate! Up to sample or your money back. _(He holds out a forefinger)_\r
-Smell that.\r
-\r
-LENEHAN: _(Smells gleefully)_ Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah!\r
-\r
-ZOE AND FLORRY: _(Laugh together)_ Ha ha ha ha.\r
-\r
-BOYLAN: _(Jumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear)_\r
-Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom dressed yet?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(In flunkey's prune plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings\r
-and powdered wig)_ I'm afraid not, sir. The last articles...\r
-\r
-BOYLAN: _(Tosses him sixpence)_ Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash.\r
-_(He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom's antlered head)_ Show me\r
-in. I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.\r
-\r
-MARION: He ought to feel himself highly honoured. _(She plops splashing\r
-out of the water)_ Raoul darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only\r
-my new hat and a carriage sponge.\r
-\r
-BOYLAN: _(A merry twinkle in his eye)_ Topping!\r
-\r
-BELLA: What? What is it?\r
-\r
-_(Zoe whispers to her.)_\r
-\r
-MARION: Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I'll\r
-write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to\r
-raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed\r
-and stamped receipt.\r
-\r
-BOYLAN: (clasps himself) Here, I can't hold this little lot much longer.\r
-(he strides off on stiff cavalry legs)\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Laughing)_ Ho ho ho ho.\r
-\r
-BOYLAN: _(To Bloom, over his shoulder)_ You can apply your eye to the\r
-keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness\r
-the deed and take a snapshot? _(He holds out an ointment jar)_ Vaseline,\r
-sir? Orangeflower...? Lukewarm water...?\r
-\r
-KITTY: _(From the sofa)_ Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What.\r
-\r
-_(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping\r
-loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)_\r
-\r
-MINA KENNEDY: _(Her eyes upturned)_ O, it must be like the scent of\r
-geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her!\r
-Stuck together! Covered with kisses!\r
-\r
-LYDIA DOUCE: _(Her mouth opening)_ Yumyum. O, he's carrying her round\r
-the room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and\r
-New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.\r
-\r
-KITTY: _(Laughing)_ Hee hee hee.\r
-\r
-BOYLAN'S VOICE: _(Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach)_ Ah!\r
-Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht!\r
-\r
-MARION'S VOICE: _(Hoarsely, sweetly, rising to her throat)_ O!\r
-Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself)_ Show! Hide! Show!\r
-Plough her! More! Shoot!\r
-\r
-BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee!\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Points)_ The mirror up to nature. _(He laughs)_ Hu hu hu hu hu!\r
-\r
-_(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare,\r
-beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the\r
-reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)_\r
-\r
-SHAKESPEARE: _(In dignified ventriloquy)_ 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks\r
-the vacant mind. _(To Bloom)_ Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest\r
-invisible. Gaze. _(He crows with a black capon's laugh)_ Iagogo! How my\r
-Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Smiles yellowly at the three whores)_ When will I hear the\r
-joke?\r
-\r
-ZOE: Before you're twice married and once a widower.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon when measurements\r
-were taken next the skin after his death...\r
-\r
-_(Mrs Dignam, widow woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with\r
-deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds,\r
-her bonnet awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose, a\r
-pen chivvying her brood of cygnets. Beneath her skirt appear her late\r
-husband's everyday trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. She holds\r
-a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a large marquee umbrella under\r
-which her brood run with her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his collar\r
-loose, a hank of porksteaks dangling, freddy whimpering, Susy with a\r
-crying cod's mouth, Alice struggling with the baby. She cuffs them on,\r
-her streamers flaunting aloft.)_\r
-\r
-FREDDY: Ah, ma, you're dragging me along!\r
-\r
-SUSY: Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over!\r
-\r
-SHAKESPEARE: _(With paralytic rage)_ Weda seca whokilla farst.\r
-\r
-_(The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare's\r
-beardless face. The marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the children run\r
-aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and\r
-kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily.)_\r
-\r
-MRS CUNNINGHAM: _(Sings)_\r
-\r
-And they call me the jewel of Asia!\r
-\r
-MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: _(Gazes on her, impassive)_ Immense! Most bloody\r
-awful demirep!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti._ Queens lay with prize bulls.\r
-Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first\r
-confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions\r
-of the house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was\r
-open.\r
-\r
-BELLA: None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Let him alone. He's back from Paris.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Runs to stephen and links him)_ O go on! Give us some parleyvoo.\r
-\r
-_(Stephen claps hat on head and leaps over to the fireplace where he\r
-stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile\r
-on his face.)_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Oommelling on the sofa)_ Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Gabbles with marionette jerks)_ Thousand places of\r
-entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves\r
-and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable\r
-house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about\r
-princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries\r
-extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english\r
-how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous.\r
-Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show\r
-with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night.\r
-Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in\r
-universal world. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then\r
-disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young\r
-with _dessous troublants_. _(He clacks his tongue loudly)_ _Ho, la la!\r
-Ce pif qu'il a!_\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _Vive le vampire!_\r
-\r
-THE WHORES: Bravo! Parleyvoo!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Grimacing with head back, laughs loudly, clapping himself)_\r
-Great success of laughing. Angels much prostitutes like and holy\r
-apostles big damn ruffians. _Demimondaines_ nicely handsome sparkling of\r
-diamonds very amiable costumed. Or do you are fond better what belongs\r
-they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans? _(He points about him with\r
-grotesque gestures which Lynch and the whores reply to)_ Caoutchouc\r
-statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very\r
-lesbic the kiss five ten times. Enter, gentleman, to see in mirror every\r
-positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act\r
-awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on\r
-the belly _pièce de Shakespeare._\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Clapping her belly sinks back on the sofa, with a shout of\r
-laughter)_ An omelette on the... Ho! ho! ho! ho!... omelette on the...\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Mincingly)_ I love you, sir darling. Speak you englishman\r
-tongue for _double entente cordiale._ O yes, _mon loup_. How much cost?\r
-Waterloo. Watercloset. _(He ceases suddenly and holds up a forefinger)_\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Laughing)_ Omelette...\r
-\r
-THE WHORES: _(Laughing)_ Encore! Encore!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.\r
-\r
-ZOE: Go abroad and love a foreign lady.\r
-\r
-LYNCH: Across the world for a wife.\r
-\r
-FLORRY: Dreams goes by contraries.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Extends his arms)_ It was here. Street of harlots. In\r
-Serpentine avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the\r
-red carpet spread?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Approaching Stephen)_ Look...\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World\r
-without end. _(He cries) P_ater! Free!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I say, look...\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Break my spirit, will he? _O merde alors! (He cries, his\r
-vulture talons sharpened)_ Hola! Hillyho!\r
-\r
-_(Simon Dedalus' voice hilloes in answer, somewhat sleepy but ready.)_\r
-\r
-SIMON: That's all right. _(He swoops uncertainly through the air,\r
-wheeling, uttering cries of heartening, on strong ponderous buzzard\r
-wings)_ Ho, boy! Are you going to win? Hoop! Pschatt! Stable with those\r
-halfcastes. Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ass. Head up! Keep\r
-our flag flying! An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed.\r
-Ulster king at arms! Haihoop! _(He makes the beagle's call, giving\r
-tongue)_ Bulbul! Burblblburblbl! Hai, boy!\r
-\r
-_(The fronds and spaces of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.\r
-A stout fox, drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his\r
-grandmother, runs swift for the open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth,\r
-under the leaves. The pack of staghounds follows, nose to the ground,\r
-sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded. Ward\r
-Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, hot for a kill. From Six\r
-Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty\r
-sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips,\r
-bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes\r
-waving torches. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players,\r
-thimbleriggers, broadsmen. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high\r
-wizard hats clamour deafeningly.)_\r
-\r
-THE CROWD:\r
-\r
- Card of the races. Racing card!\r
- Ten to one the field!\r
- Tommy on the clay here! Tommy on the clay!\r
- Ten to one bar one! Ten to one bar one!\r
- Try your luck on Spinning Jenny!\r
- Ten to one bar one!\r
- Sell the monkey, boys! Sell the monkey!\r
- I'll give ten to one!\r
- Ten to one bar one!\r
-\r
-_(A dark horse, riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost,\r
-his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars. The field follows, a bunch of\r
-bucking mounts. Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel,\r
-the Duke of Westminster's Shotover, Repulse, the Duke of Beaufort's\r
-Ceylon, prix de Paris. Dwarfs ride them, rustyarmoured, leaping, leaping\r
-in their, in their saddles. Last in a drizzle of rain on a brokenwinded\r
-isabelle nag, Cock of the North, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket,\r
-orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a hockeystick at\r
-the ready. His nag on spavined whitegaitered feet jogs along the rocky\r
-road.)_\r
-\r
-THE ORANGE LODGES: _(Jeering)_ Get down and push, mister. Last lap!\r
-You'll be home the night!\r
-\r
-GARRETT DEASY: _(Bolt upright, his nailscraped face plastered with\r
-postagestamps, brandishes his hockeystick, his blue eyes flashing in the\r
-prism of the chandelier as his mount lopes by at schooling gallop)_\r
-\r
-_Per vias rectas!_\r
-\r
-_(A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and his rearing nag a torrent\r
-of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips,\r
-potatoes.)_\r
-\r
-THE GREEN LODGES: Soft day, sir John! Soft day, your honour!\r
-\r
-_(Private Carr, Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the\r
-windows, singing in discord.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Hark! Our friend noise in the street.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Holds up her hand)_ Stop!\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY:\r
-\r
-Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire relish for...\r
-\r
-ZOE: That's me. _(She claps her hands)_ Dance! Dance! _(She runs to the\r
-pianola)_ Who has twopence?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Who'll...?\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Handing her coins)_ Here.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Cracking his fingers impatiently)_ Quick! Quick! Where's my\r
-augur's rod? _(He runs to the piano and takes his ashplant, beating his\r
-foot in tripudium)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Turns the drumhandle)_ There.\r
-\r
-_(She drops two pennies in the slot. Gold, pink and violet lights\r
-start forth. The drum turns purring in low hesitation waltz. Professor\r
-Goodwin, in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained\r
-inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the\r
-room, his hands fluttering. He sits tinily on the pianostool and lifts\r
-and beats handless sticks of arms on the keyboard, nodding with damsel's\r
-grace, his bowknot bobbing)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Twirls round herself, heeltapping)_ Dance. Anybody here for\r
-there? Who'll dance? Clear the table.\r
-\r
-_(The pianola with changing lights plays in waltz time the prelude of_\r
-My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl. _Stephen throws his ashplant on the table\r
-and seizes Zoe round the waist. Florry and Bella push the table towards\r
-the fireplace. Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, begins to\r
-waltz her round the room. Bloom stands aside. Her sleeve filling from\r
-gracing arms reveals a white fleshflower of vaccination. Between the\r
-curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins\r
-a silk hat. With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and\r
-jauntyhatted skates in. He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk\r
-lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green lowcut waistcoat, stock collar\r
-with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary\r
-gloves. In his buttonhole is an immense dahlia. He twirls in reversed\r
-directions a clouded cane, then wedges it tight in his oxter. He places\r
-a hand lightly on his breastbone, bows, and fondles his flower and\r
-buttons.)_\r
-\r
-MAGINNI: The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. No connection\r
-with Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's. Fancy dress balls arranged.\r
-Deportment. The Katty Lanner step. So. Watch me! My terpsichorean\r
-abilities. _(He minuets forward three paces on tripping bee's feet) Tout\r
-le monde en avant! Révérence! Tout le monde en place!_\r
-\r
-_(The prelude ceases. Professor Goodwin, beating vague arms shrivels,\r
-sinks, his live cape filling about the stool. The air in firmer waltz\r
-time sounds. Stephen and Zoe circle freely. The lights change, glow,\r
-fide gold rosy violet.)_\r
-\r
-THE PIANOLA:\r
-\r
-Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls,\r
-Sweethearts they'd left behind...\r
-\r
-_(From a corner the morning hours run out, goldhaired, slimsandalled,\r
-in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance,\r
-twirling their skipping ropes. The hours of noon follow in amber gold.\r
-Laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking\r
-mirrors, lifting their arms.)_\r
-\r
-MAGINNI: _(Clipclaps glovesilent hands) Carré! Avant deux!_ Breathe\r
-evenly! _Balance!_\r
-\r
-_(The morning and noon hours waltz in their places, turning, advancing\r
-to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. Cavaliers behind\r
-them arch and suspend their arms, with hands descending to, touching,\r
-rising from their shoulders.)_\r
-\r
-HOURS: You may touch my.\r
-\r
-CAVALIERS: May I touch your?\r
-\r
-HOURS: O, but lightly!\r
-\r
-CAVALIERS: O, so lightly!\r
-\r
-THE PIANOLA:\r
-\r
-My little shy little lass has a waist.\r
-\r
-_(Zoe and Stephen turn boldly with looser swing. The twilight hours\r
-advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their\r
-cheeks delicate with cipria and false faint bloom. They are in grey\r
-gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the land breeze.)_\r
-\r
-MAGINNI: _Avant huit! Traversé! Salut! Cours de mains! Croisé!_\r
-\r
-_(The night hours, one by one, steal to the last place. Morning, noon\r
-and twilight hours retreat before them. They are masked, with daggered\r
-hair and bracelets of dull bells. Weary they curchycurchy under veils.)_\r
-\r
-THE BRACELETS: Heigho! Heigho!\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Twirling, her hand to her brow)_ O!\r
-\r
-MAGINNI: _Les tiroirs! Chaîne de dames! La corbeille! Dos à dos!_\r
-\r
-_(Arabesquing wearily they weave a pattern on the floor, weaving,\r
-unweaving, curtseying, twirling, simply swirling.)_\r
-\r
-ZOE: I'm giddy!\r
-\r
-_(She frees herself, droops on a chair. Stephen seizes Florry and turns\r
-with her.)_\r
-\r
-MAGINNI: Boulangère! Les ronds! Les ponts! Chevaux de bois! Escargots!\r
-\r
-_(Twining, receding, with interchanging hands the night hours link each\r
-each with arching arms in a mosaic of movements. Stephen and Florry turn\r
-cumbrously.)_\r
-\r
-MAGINNI: _Dansez avec vos dames! Changez de dames! Donnez le petit\r
-bouquet à votre dame! Remerciez!_\r
-\r
-THE PIANOLA:\r
-\r
- Best, best of all,\r
- Baraabum!\r
-\r
-KITTY: (JUMPS UP) O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus\r
-bazaar!\r
-\r
-_(She runs to Stephen. He leaves florry brusquely and seizes Kitty.\r
-A screaming bittern's harsh high whistle shrieks. Groangrousegurgling\r
-Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the\r
-room.)_\r
-\r
-THE PIANOLA:\r
-\r
- My girl's a Yorkshire girl.\r
-\r
-ZOE:\r
-\r
-Yorkshire through and through.\r
-\r
-Come on all!\r
-\r
-_(She seizes Florry and waltzes her.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _Pas seul!_\r
-\r
-_(He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, snatches up his ashplant from\r
-the table and takes the floor. All wheel whirl waltz twirl. Bloombella\r
-Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women. Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits\r
-in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under\r
-thigh. With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow\r
-flashes Toft's cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded\r
-snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall\r
-again.)_\r
-\r
-THE PIANOLA:\r
-\r
- Though she's a factory lass\r
- And wears no fancy clothes.\r
-\r
-_(Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they\r
-scootlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!)_\r
-\r
-TUTTI: Encore! Bis! Bravo! Encore!\r
-\r
-SIMON: Think of your mother's people!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Dance of death.\r
-\r
-_(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, horse, nag, steer, piglings,\r
-Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded\r
-ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through. Baraabum! On\r
-nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin Steel shark stone\r
-onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram\r
-filling bawling gum he's a champion. Fuseblue peer from barrel rev.\r
-evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly\r
-with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last switchback lumbering up\r
-and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber\r
-bumpshire rose. Baraabum!)_\r
-\r
-_(The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes\r
-closed he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn\r
-roundabout. Bright midges dance on walls. He stops dead.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Ho!\r
-\r
-_(Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper\r
-grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her\r
-face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and\r
-lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens\r
-her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and\r
-confessors sing voicelessly.)_\r
-\r
-THE CHOIR:\r
-\r
- Liliata rutilantium te confessorum...\r
- Iubilantium te virginum...\r
-\r
-_(from the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester's dress\r
-of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands gaping at\r
-her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)_\r
-\r
-BUCK MULLIGAN: She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the\r
-afflicted mother. _(He upturns his eyes)_ Mercurial Malachi!\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: _(With the subtle smile of death's madness)_ I was once the\r
-beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Horrorstruck)_ Lemur, who are you? No. What bogeyman's trick\r
-is this?\r
-\r
-BUCK MULLIGAN: _(Shakes his curling capbell)_ The mockery of it! Kinch\r
-dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. _(Tears of molten\r
-butter fall from his eyes on to the scone)_ Our great sweet mother! _Epi\r
-oinopa ponton._\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: _(Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of\r
-wetted ashes)_ All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in\r
-the world. You too. Time will come.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Choking with fright, remorse and horror)_ They say I killed\r
-you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: _(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth)_\r
-You sang that song to me. _Love's bitter mystery._\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Eagerly)_ Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word\r
-known to all men.\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at\r
-Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the\r
-strangers? Prayer is allpowerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the\r
-Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: The ghoul! Hyena!\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that\r
-boiled rice every night after your brainwork. Years and years I loved\r
-you, O, my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Fanning herself with the grate fan)_ I'm melting!\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(Points to Stephen)_ Look! He's white.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Goes to the window to open it more)_ Giddy.\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: _(With smouldering eyes)_ Repent! O, the fire of hell!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Panting)_ His noncorrosive sublimate! The corpsechewer! Raw\r
-head and bloody bones.\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: _(Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen\r
-breath)_ Beware! _(She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly\r
-towards Stephen's breast with outstretched finger)_ Beware God's hand!\r
-_(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in\r
-Stephen's heart.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Strangled with rage)_ Shite! _(His features grow drawn grey\r
-and old)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(At the window)_ What?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _Ah non, par exemple!_ The intellectual imagination! With me\r
-all or not at all. _Non serviam!_\r
-\r
-FLORRY: Give him some cold water. Wait. _(She rushes out)_\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: _(Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately)_ O Sacred\r
-Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred\r
-Heart!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: No! No! No! Break my spirit, all of you, if you can! I'll bring\r
-you all to heel!\r
-\r
-THE MOTHER: _(In the agony of her deathrattle)_ Have mercy on Stephen,\r
-Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love,\r
-grief and agony on Mount Calvary.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _Nothung_!\r
-\r
-_(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier.\r
-Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of\r
-all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)_\r
-\r
-THE GASJET: Pwfungg!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Stop!\r
-\r
-LYNCH: _(Rushes forward and seizes Stephen's hand)_ Here! Hold on! Don't\r
-run amok!\r
-\r
-BELLA: Police!\r
-\r
-_(Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown back stark,\r
-beats the ground and flies from the room, past the whores at the door.)_\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Screams)_ After him!\r
-\r
-_(The two whores rush to the halldoor. Lynch and Kitty and Zoe stampede\r
-from the room. They talk excitedly. Bloom follows, returns.)_\r
-\r
-THE WHORES: _(Jammed in the doorway, pointing)_ Down there.\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(Pointing)_ There. There's something up.\r
-\r
-BELLA: Who pays for the lamp? _(She seizes Bloom's coattail)_ Here, you\r
-were with him. The lamp's broken.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Rushes to the hall, rushes back)_ What lamp, woman?\r
-\r
-A WHORE: He tore his coat.\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points)_ Who's to pay\r
-for that? Ten shillings. You're a witness.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Snatches up Stephen's ashplant)_ Me? Ten shillings? Haven't you\r
-lifted enough off him? Didn't he...?\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Loudly)_ Here, none of your tall talk. This isn't a brothel. A\r
-ten shilling house.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(His head under the lamp, pulls the chain. Puling, the gasjet\r
-lights up a crushed mauve purple shade. He raises the ashplant.)_ Only\r
-the chimney's broken. Here is all he...\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Shrinks back and screams)_ Jesus! Don't!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Warding off a blow)_ To show you how he hit the paper. There's\r
-not sixpenceworth of damage done. Ten shillings!\r
-\r
-FLORRY: _(With a glass of water, enters)_ Where is he?\r
-\r
-BELLA: Do you want me to call the police?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student.\r
-Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. _(He makes\r
-a masonic sign)_ Know what I mean? Nephew of the vice-chancellor. You\r
-don't want a scandal.\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Angrily)_ Trinity. Coming down here ragging after the boatraces\r
-and paying nothing. Are you my commander here or? Where is he? I'll\r
-charge him! Disgrace him, I will! (She Shouts) Zoe! Zoe!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Urgently)_ And if it were your own son in Oxford? _(Warningly)_\r
-I know.\r
-\r
-BELLA: _(Almost speechless)_ Who are. Incog!\r
-\r
-ZOE: _(In the doorway)_ There's a row on.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: What? Where? _(He throws a shilling on the table and starts)_\r
-That's for the chimney. Where? I need mountain air.\r
-\r
-_(He hurries out through the hall. The whores point. Florry follows,\r
-spilling water from her tilted tumbler. On the doorstep all the whores\r
-clustered talk volubly, pointing to the right where the fog has cleared\r
-off. From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. It slows to in front\r
-of the house. Bloom at the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher who is\r
-about to dismount from the car with two silent lechers. He averts\r
-his face. Bella from within the hall urges on her whores. They blow\r
-ickylickysticky yumyum kisses. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghastly\r
-lewd smile. The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Zoe and Kitty\r
-still point right. Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws his caliph's hood\r
-and poncho and hurries down the steps with sideways face. Incog Haroun\r
-al Raschid he flits behind the silent lechers and hastens on by the\r
-railings with fleet step of a pard strewing the drag behind him, torn\r
-envelopes drenched in aniseed. The ashplant marks his stride. A pack\r
-of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in\r
-tallyho cap and an old pair of grey trousers, follow from fir, picking\r
-up the scent, nearer, baying, panting, at fault, breaking away, throwing\r
-their tongues, biting his heels, leaping at his tail. He walks,\r
-runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back. He is pelted with gravel,\r
-cabbagestumps, biscuitboxes, eggs, potatoes, dead codfish, woman's\r
-slipperslappers. After him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops\r
-in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C, 66 C, night watch, John Henry\r
-Menton, Wisdom Hely, V. B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes,\r
-Larry O'rourke, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The Nameless One,\r
-Mrs Riordan, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface,\r
-Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir\r
-Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Bartell d'Arcy, Joe Hynes,\r
-red Murray, editor Brayden, T. M. Healy, Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, John\r
-Howard Parnell, the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs\r
-Breen, Denis Breen, Theodore Purefoy, Mina Purefoy, the Westland\r
-Row postmistress, C. P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan,\r
-maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver,\r
-rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Joe\r
-Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy,\r
-Father Cowley, Crofton out of the Collector-general's, Dan Dawson,\r
-dental surgeon Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Bob Doran, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs\r
-Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwide\r
-behindinClonskeatram, the bookseller of_ Sweets of Sin, _Miss\r
-Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck,\r
-the managing clerk of Drimmie's, Wetherup, colonel Hayes, Mastiansky,\r
-Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty,\r
-Inspector Troy, Mrs Galbraith, the constable off Eccles Street corner,\r
-old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the mystery man on the beach, a\r
-retriever, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers.)_\r
-\r
-THE HUE AND CRY: _(Helterskelterpelterwelter)_ He's Bloom! Stop Bloom!\r
-Stopabloom! Stopperrobber! Hi! Hi! Stophim on the corner!\r
-\r
-_(At the corner of Beaver Street beneath the scaffolding Bloom panting\r
-stops on the fringe of the noisy quarrelling knot, a lot not knowing a\r
-jot what hi! hi! row and wrangle round the whowhat brawlaltogether.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly)_ You\r
-are my guests. Uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh\r
-of Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(To Cissy Caffrey)_ Was he insulting you?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Addressed her in vocative feminine. Probably neuter.\r
-Ungenitive.\r
-\r
-VOICES: No, he didn't. I seen him. The girl there. He was in Mrs\r
-Cohen's. What's up? Soldier and civilian.\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to\r
-do--you know, and the young man run up behind me. But I'm faithful to\r
-the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Catches sight of Lynch's and Kitty's heads)_ Hail, Sisyphus.\r
-_(He points to himself and the others)_ Poetic. Uropoetic.\r
-\r
-VOICES: Shes faithfultheman.\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: Yes, to go with him. And me with a soldier friend.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: He doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter. Biff\r
-him one, Harry.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(To Cissy)_ Was he insulting you while me and him was\r
-having a piss?\r
-\r
-LORD TENNYSON: _(Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket\r
-flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded)_ Theirs not to reason why.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: Biff him, Harry.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(To Private Compton)_ I don't know your name but you are quite\r
-right. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their\r
-shirts. Shirt is synechdoche. Part for the whole.\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: _(To The Crowd)_ No, I was with the privates.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Amiably)_ Why not? The bold soldier boy. In my opinion every\r
-lady for example...\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(His cap awry, advances to Stephen)_ Say, how would it\r
-be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Looks up to the sky)_ How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of\r
-selfpretence. Personally, I detest action. _(He waves his hand)_ Hand\r
-hurts me slightly. _Enfin ce sont vos oignons._ _(To Cissy Caffrey)_\r
-Some trouble is on here. What is it precisely?\r
-\r
-DOLLY GRAY: _(From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving the sign\r
-of the heroine of Jericho)_ Rahab. Cook's son, goodbye. Safe home to\r
-Dolly. Dream of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.\r
-\r
-_(The soldiers turn their swimming eyes.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Elbowing through the crowd, plucks Stephen's sleeve\r
-vigorously)_ Come now, professor, that carman is waiting.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Turns)_ Eh? _(He disengages himself)_ Why should I not speak\r
-to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange?\r
-_(He points his finger)_ I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see\r
-his eye. Retaining the perpendicular.\r
-\r
-_(He staggers a pace back)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Propping him)_ Retain your own.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Laughs emptily)_ My centre of gravity is displaced. I have\r
-forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle\r
-for life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the\r
-tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. _(He taps his\r
-brow)_ But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.\r
-\r
-BIDDY THE CLAP: Did you hear what the professor said? He's a professor\r
-out of the college.\r
-\r
-CUNTY KATE: I did. I heard that.\r
-\r
-BIDDY THE CLAP: He expresses himself with such marked refinement of\r
-phraseology.\r
-\r
-CUNTY KATE: Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite\r
-trenchancy.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Pulls himself free and comes forward)_ What's that\r
-you're saying about my king?\r
-\r
-_(Edward the Seventh appears in an archway. He wars a white jersey on\r
-which an image of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the insignia of\r
-Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's\r
-and Probyn's horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable\r
-artillery company of Massachusetts. He sucks a red jujube. He is robed\r
-as a grand elect perfect and sublime mason with trowel and apron,\r
-marked_ made in Germany. _In his left hand he holds a plasterer's bucket\r
-on which is printed_ Défense d'uriner. _A roar of welcome greets him.)_\r
-\r
-EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly)_ Peace, perfect\r
-peace. For identification, bucket in my hand. Cheerio, boys. _(He turns\r
-to his subjects)_ We have come here to witness a clean straight fight\r
-and we heartily wish both men the best of good luck. Mahak makar a bak.\r
-\r
-_(He shakes hands with Private Carr, Private Compton, Stephen, Bloom and\r
-Lynch. General applause. Edward the Seventh lifts his bucket graciously\r
-in acknowledgment.)_\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(To Stephen)_ Say it again.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up)_ I understand your point\r
-of view though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age of\r
-patent medicines. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the\r
-point. You die for your country. Suppose. _(He places his arm on Private\r
-Carr's sleeve)_ Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country\r
-die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die.\r
-Damn death. Long live life!\r
-\r
-EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Levitates over heaps of slain, in the garb and\r
-with the halo of Joking Jesus, a white jujube in his phosphorescent\r
-face)_\r
-\r
-My methods are new and are causing surprise. To make the blind see I\r
-throw dust in their eyes.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Kings and unicorns! _(He fills back a pace)_ Come somewhere and\r
-we'll... What was that girl saying?...\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: Eh, Harry, give him a kick in the knackers. Stick one\r
-into Jerry.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(To the privates, softly)_ He doesn't know what he's saying.\r
-Taken a little more than is good for him. Absinthe. Greeneyed monster. I\r
-know him. He's a gentleman, a poet. It's all right.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Nods, smiling and laughing)_ Gentleman, patriot, scholar and\r
-judge of impostors.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: I don't give a bugger who he is.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: We don't give a bugger who he is.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: I seem to annoy them. Green rag to a bull.\r
-\r
-_(Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-day\r
-boy's hat signs to Stephen.)_\r
-\r
-KEVIN EGAN: H'lo! _Bonjour!_ The _vieille ogresse_ with the _dents\r
-jaunes_.\r
-\r
-_(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his rabbitface nibbling a quince\r
-leaf.)_\r
-\r
-PATRICE: _Socialiste!_\r
-\r
-DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: _(In medieval hauberk,\r
-two wild geese volant on his helm, with noble indignation points a\r
-mailed hand against the privates)_ Werf those eykes to footboden, big\r
-grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(To Stephen)_ Come home. You'll get into trouble.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Swaying)_ I don't avoid it. He provokes my intelligence.\r
-\r
-BIDDY THE CLAP: One immediately observes that he is of patrician\r
-lineage.\r
-\r
-THE VIRAGO: Green above the red, says he. Wolfe Tone.\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: The red's as good as the green. And better. Up the soldiers!\r
-Up King Edward!\r
-\r
-A ROUGH: _(Laughs)_ Ay! Hands up to De Wet.\r
-\r
-THE CITIZEN: _(With a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls)_\r
-\r
- May the God above\r
- Send down a dove\r
- With teeth as sharp as razors\r
- To slit the throats\r
- Of the English dogs\r
- That hanged our Irish leaders.\r
-\r
-THE CROPPY BOY: _(The ropenoose round his neck, gripes in his issuing\r
-bowels with both hands)_\r
-\r
-I bear no hate to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the king.\r
-\r
-RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER: _(Accompanied by two blackmasked assistants,\r
-advances with gladstone bag which he opens)_ Ladies and gents,\r
-cleaver purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg. Knife with which Voisin\r
-dismembered the wife of a compatriot and hid remains in a sheet in the\r
-cellar, the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear. Phial\r
-containing arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon\r
-to the gallows.\r
-\r
-_(He jerks the rope. The assistants leap at the victim's legs and drag\r
-him downward, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.)_\r
-\r
-THE CROPPY BOY:\r
-\r
-Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.\r
-\r
-_(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts\r
-of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs\r
-Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys\r
-rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)_\r
-\r
-RUMBOLD: I'm near it myself. _(He undoes the noose)_ Rope which hanged\r
-the awful rebel. Ten shillings a time. As applied to Her Royal Highness.\r
-_(He plunges his head into the gaping belly of the hanged and draws out\r
-his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails)_ My painful\r
-duty has now been done. God save the king!\r
-\r
-EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Dances slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket, and\r
-sings with soft contentment)_\r
-\r
-On coronation day, on coronation day, O, won't we have a merry time,\r
-Drinking whisky, beer and wine!\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: Here. What are you saying about my king?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Throws up his hands)_ O, this is too monotonous! Nothing.\r
-He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for\r
-some brutish empire of his. Money I haven't. _(He searches his pockets\r
-vaguely)_ GAVE IT TO SOMEONE.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: Who wants your bleeding money?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Tries to move off)_ Will someone tell me where I am least\r
-likely to meet these necessary evils? _Ça se voit aussi à paris._ Not\r
-that I... But, by Saint Patrick...!\r
-\r
-_(The women's heads coalesce. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears\r
-seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her\r
-breast.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Aha! I know you, gammer! Hamlet, revenge! The old sow that eats\r
-her farrow!\r
-\r
-OLD GUMMY GRANNY: _(Rocking to and fro)_ Ireland's sweetheart, the king\r
-of Spain's daughter, alanna. Strangers in my house, bad manners to them!\r
-_(She keens with banshee woe)_ Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the kine! _(She\r
-wails)_ You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: How do I stand you? The hat trick! Where's the third person of\r
-the Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow.\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: _(Shrill)_ Stop them from fighting!\r
-\r
-A ROUGH: Our men retreated.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Tugging at his belt)_ I'll wring the neck of any fucker\r
-says a word against my fucking king.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Terrified)_ He said nothing. Not a word. A pure\r
-misunderstanding.\r
-\r
-THE CITIZEN: _Erin go bragh!_\r
-\r
-_(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other medals,\r
-decorations, trophies of war, wounds. Both salute with fierce\r
-hostility.)_\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye. He's a proboer.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Did I? When?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(To the redcoats)_ We fought for you in South Africa, Irish\r
-missile troops. Isn't that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by\r
-our monarch.\r
-\r
-THE NAVVY: _(Staggering past)_ O, yes! O God, yes! O, make the kwawr a\r
-krowawr! O! Bo!\r
-\r
-_(Casqued halberdiers in armour thrust forward a pentice of gutted\r
-spearpoints. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in\r
-bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with epaulettes, gilt\r
-chevrons and sabretaches, his breast bright with medals, toes the line.\r
-He gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of the knights templars.)_\r
-\r
-MAJOR TWEEDY: _(Growls gruffly)_ Rorke's Drift! Up, guards, and at them!\r
-Mahar shalal hashbaz.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: I'll do him in.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Waves the crowd back)_ Fair play, here. Make a\r
-bleeding butcher's shop of the bugger.\r
-\r
-_(Massed bands blare_ Garryowen _and_ God save the King.)\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: They're going to fight. For me!\r
-\r
-CUNTY KATE: The brave and the fair.\r
-\r
-BIDDY THE CLAP: Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best.\r
-\r
-CUNTY KATE: _(Blushing deeply)_ Nay, madam. The gules doublet and merry\r
-saint George for me!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN:\r
-\r
-The harlot's cry from street to street Shall weave Old Ireland's\r
-windingsheet.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Loosening his belt, shouts)_ I'll wring the neck of any\r
-fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shakes Cissy Caffrey's shoulders)_ Speak, you! Are you struck\r
-dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman,\r
-sacred lifegiver!\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: _(Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve)_ Amn't I with\r
-you? Amn't I your girl? Cissy's your girl. _(She cries)_ Police!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Ecstatically, to Cissy Caffrey)_\r
-\r
- White thy fambles, red thy gan\r
- And thy quarrons dainty is.\r
-\r
-\r
-VOICES: Police!\r
-\r
-DISTANT VOICES: Dublin's burning! Dublin's burning! On fire, on fire!\r
-\r
-_(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns\r
-boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse\r
-commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech.\r
-Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on\r
-cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. Birds of prey, winging from the sea,\r
-rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets,\r
-cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins,\r
-blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese. The\r
-midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin\r
-from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black\r
-goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless\r
-yawn. Tom Rochford, winner, in athlete's singlet and breeches, arrives\r
-at the head of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void.\r
-He is followed by a race of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they\r
-spring from the brink. Their bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy\r
-clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their\r
-skirts above their heads to protect themselves. Laughing witches in red\r
-cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters\r
-blisters. It rains dragons' teeth. Armed heroes spring up from furrows.\r
-They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the red cross and fight\r
-duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith\r
-O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt,\r
-Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond,\r
-John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord\r
-Gerald Fitzedward, The O'Donoghue of the Glens against The Glens of The\r
-O'Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the feldaltar\r
-of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns.\r
-From the high barbacans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the\r
-smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of\r
-unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly.\r
-Father Malachi O'Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his\r
-two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr\r
-Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his head\r
-and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrant's head an open\r
-umbrella.)_\r
-\r
-FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: _Introibo ad altare diaboli._\r
-\r
-THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: To the devil which hath made glad my young\r
-days.\r
-\r
-FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: _(Takes from the chalice and elevates a\r
-blooddripping host) Corpus meum._\r
-\r
-THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: _(Raises high behind the celebrant's\r
-petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot\r
-is stuck)_ My body.\r
-\r
-THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED: Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof,\r
-Aiulella!\r
-\r
-_(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)_\r
-\r
-ADONAI: Dooooooooooog!\r
-\r
-THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent\r
-reigneth!\r
-\r
-_(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)_\r
-\r
-ADONAI: Goooooooooood!\r
-\r
-_(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions\r
-sing_ Kick the Pope _and_ Daily, daily sing to Mary.)\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(With ferocious articulation)_ I'll do him in, so help me\r
-fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking\r
-windpipe!\r
-\r
-OLD GUMMY GRANNY: _(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand)_ Remove\r
-him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be\r
-free. _(She prays)_ O good God, take him!\r
-\r
-(THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.)\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Runs to lynch)_ Can't you get him away?\r
-\r
-LYNCH: He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty! _(To Bloom)_\r
-Get him away, you. He won't listen to me.\r
-\r
-_(He drags Kitty away.)_\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Points) exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit._\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Runs to Stephen)_ Come along with me now before worse happens.\r
-Here's your stick.\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: Stick, no. Reason. This feast of pure reason.\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: _(Pulling Private Carr)_ Come on, you're boosed. He\r
-insulted me but I forgive him. _(Shouting in his ear)_ I forgive him for\r
-insulting me.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Over Stephen's shoulder)_ Yes, go. You see he's incapable.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Breaks loose)_ I'll insult him.\r
-\r
-_(He rushes towards Stephen, fist outstretched, and strikes him in the\r
-face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls, stunned. He lies prone, his\r
-face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and picks it\r
-up.)_\r
-\r
-MAJOR TWEEDY: _(Loudly)_ Carbine in bucket! Cease fire! Salute!\r
-\r
-THE RETRIEVER: _(Barking furiously)_ Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute.\r
-\r
-THE CROWD: Let him up! Don't strike him when he's down! Air! Who? The\r
-soldier hit him. He's a professor. Is he hurted? Don't manhandle him!\r
-He's fainted!\r
-\r
-A HAG: What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under\r
-the influence. Let them go and fight the Boers!\r
-\r
-THE BAWD: Listen to who's talking! Hasn't the soldier a right to go with\r
-his girl? He gave him the coward's blow.\r
-\r
-_(They grab at each other's hair, claw at each other and spit)_\r
-\r
-THE RETRIEVER: _(Barking)_ Wow wow wow.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shoves them back, loudly)_ Get back, stand back!\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Tugging his comrade)_ Here. Bugger off, Harry. Here's\r
-the cops! _(Two raincaped watch, tall, stand in the group.)_\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: What's wrong here?\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: We were with this lady. And he insulted us. And\r
-assaulted my chum. _(The retriever barks)_ Who owns the bleeding tyke?\r
-\r
-CISSY CAFFREY: _(With expectation)_ Is he bleeding!\r
-\r
-A MAN: _(Rising from his knees)_ No. Gone off. He'll come to all right.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Glances sharply at the man)_ Leave him to me. I can easily...\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: Who are you? Do you know him?\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Lurches towards the watch)_ He insulted my lady friend.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Angrily)_ You hit him without provocation. I'm a witness.\r
-Constable, take his regimental number.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: I don't want your instructions in the discharge of my\r
-duty.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Pulling his comrade)_ Here, bugger off Harry. Or\r
-Bennett'll shove you in the lockup.\r
-\r
-PRIVATE CARR: _(Staggering as he is pulled away)_ God fuck old Bennett.\r
-He's a whitearsed bugger. I don't give a shit for him.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: _(Takes out his notebook)_ What's his name?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Peering over the crowd)_ I just see a car there. If you give me\r
-a hand a second, sergeant...\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: Name and address.\r
-\r
-_(Corny Kelleker, weepers round his hat, a death wreath in his hand,\r
-appears among the bystanders.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Quickly)_ O, the very man! _(He whispers)_ Simon Dedalus' son.\r
-A bit sprung. Get those policemen to move those loafers back.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: Night, Mr Kelleher.\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: _(To the watch, with drawling eye)_ That's all right.\r
-I know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold cup. Throwaway. _(He laughs)_\r
-Twenty to one. Do you follow me?\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: _(Turns to the crowd)_ Here, what are you all gaping at?\r
-Move on out of that.\r
-\r
-_(The crowd disperses slowly, muttering, down the lane.)_\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: Leave it to me, sergeant. That'll be all right. _(He\r
-laughs, shaking his head)_ We were often as bad ourselves, ay or worse.\r
-What? Eh, what?\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: _(Laughs)_ I suppose so.\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: _(Nudges the second watch)_ Come and wipe your name off\r
-the slate. _(He lilts, wagging his head)_ With my tooraloom tooraloom\r
-tooraloom tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me?\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: _(Genially)_ Ah, sure we were too.\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: _(Winking)_ Boys will be boys. I've a car round there.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: All right, Mr Kelleher. Good night.\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: I'll see to that.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Shakes hands with both of the watch in turn)_ Thank you very\r
-much, gentlemen. Thank you. _(He mumbles confidentially)_ We don't want\r
-any scandal, you understand. Father is a wellknown highly respected\r
-citizen. Just a little wild oats, you understand.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: O. I understand, sir.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: That's all right, sir.\r
-\r
-FIRST WATCH: It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report\r
-it at the station.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Nods rapidly)_ Naturally. Quite right. Only your bounden duty.\r
-\r
-SECOND WATCH: It's our duty.\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: Good night, men.\r
-\r
-THE WATCH: _(Saluting together)_ Night, gentlemen. _(They move off with\r
-slow heavy tread)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Blows)_ Providential you came on the scene. You have a car?...\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: _(Laughs, pointing his thumb over his right shoulder to\r
-the car brought up against the scaffolding)_ Two commercials that were\r
-standing fizz in Jammet's. Like princes, faith. One of them lost two\r
-quid on the race. Drowning his grief. And were on for a go with the\r
-jolly girls. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: I was just going home by Gardiner street when I happened to...\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: _(Laughs)_ Sure they wanted me to join in with the mots.\r
-No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. _(He\r
-laughs again and leers with lacklustre eye)_ Thanks be to God we have it\r
-in the house, what, eh, do you follow me? Hah, hah, hah!\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Tries to laugh)_ He, he, he! Yes. Matter of fact I was just\r
-visiting an old friend of mine there, Virag, you don't know him (poor\r
-fellow, he's laid up for the past week) and we had a liquor together and\r
-I was just making my way home...\r
-\r
-_(The horse neighs.)_\r
-\r
-THE HORSE: Hohohohohohoh! Hohohohome!\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: Sure it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after\r
-we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and\r
-got off to see. _(He laughs)_ Sober hearsedrivers a speciality. Will I\r
-give him a lift home? Where does he hang out? Somewhere in Cabra, what?\r
-\r
-BLOOM: No, in Sandycove, I believe, from what he let drop.\r
-\r
-_(Stephen, prone, breathes to the stars. Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls\r
-at the horse. Bloom, in gloom, looms down.)_\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: _(Scratches his nape)_ Sandycove! _(He bends down and\r
-calls to Stephen)_ Eh! _(He calls again)_ Eh! He's covered with shavings\r
-anyhow. Take care they didn't lift anything off him.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: No, no, no. I have his money and his hat here and stick.\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: Ah, well, he'll get over it. No bones broken. Well, I'll\r
-shove along. _(He laughs)_ I've a rendezvous in the morning. Burying the\r
-dead. Safe home!\r
-\r
-THE HORSE: _(Neighs)_ Hohohohohome.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Good night. I'll just wait and take him along in a few...\r
-\r
-_(Corny Kelleher returns to the outside car and mounts it. The horse\r
-harness jingles.)_\r
-\r
-CORNY KELLEHER: _(From the car, standing)_ Night.\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Night.\r
-\r
-_(The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his whip encouragingly. The\r
-car and horse back slowly, awkwardly, and turn. Corny Kelleher on the\r
-sideseat sways his head to and fro in sign of mirth at Bloom's plight.\r
-The jarvey joins in the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the\r
-farther seat. Bloom shakes his head in mute mirthful reply. With thumb\r
-and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the two bobbies will allow the\r
-sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a slow nod Bloom\r
-conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. The car\r
-jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tooraloom lane. Corny Kelleher\r
-again reassuralooms with his hand. Bloom with his hand assuralooms Corny\r
-Kelleher that he is reassuraloomtay. The tinkling hoofs and jingling\r
-harness grow fainter with their tooralooloo looloo lay. Bloom, holding\r
-in his hand Stephen's hat, festooned with shavings, and ashplant, stands\r
-irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Eh! Ho! _(There is no answer; he bends again)_ Mr Dedalus!\r
-_(There is no answer)_ The name if you call. Somnambulist. _(He bends\r
-again and hesitating, brings his mouth near the face of the prostrate\r
-form)_ Stephen! _(There is no answer. He calls again.)_ Stephen!\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Groans)_ Who? Black panther. Vampire. _(He sighs and\r
-stretches himself, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels)_\r
-\r
- Who... drive... Fergus now\r
- And pierce... wood's woven shade?...\r
-\r
-_(He turns on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: Poetry. Well educated. Pity. _(He bends again and undoes\r
-the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat)_ To breathe. _(He brushes the\r
-woodshavings from Stephen's clothes with light hand and fingers)_ One\r
-pound seven. Not hurt anyhow. _(He listens)_ What?\r
-\r
-STEPHEN: _(Murmurs)_\r
-\r
- ... shadows... the woods\r
- ... white breast... dim sea.\r
-\r
-_(He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body. Bloom,\r
-holding the hat and ashplant, stands erect. A dog barks in the distance.\r
-Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on\r
-Stephen's face and form.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Communes with the night)_ Face reminds me of his poor mother.\r
-In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A\r
-girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him. _(He murmurs)_... swear\r
-that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts,\r
-art or arts... _(He murmurs)_... in the rough sands of the sea... a\r
-cabletow's length from the shore... where the tide ebbs... and flows\r
-...\r
-\r
-_(Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips\r
-in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears\r
-slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an\r
-eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book\r
-in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the\r
-page.)_\r
-\r
-BLOOM: _(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly)_ Rudy!\r
-\r
-RUDY: _(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing,\r
-smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and\r
-ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a\r
-violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)_\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
--- III --\r
-\r
-Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of\r
-the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up\r
-generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed. His\r
-(Stephen's) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit\r
-unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr\r
-Bloom in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water\r
-available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes hit upon an\r
-expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman's\r
-shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt bridge\r
-where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and\r
-soda or a mineral. But how to get there was the rub. For the nonce he\r
-was rather nonplussed but inasmuch as the duty plainly devolved upon him\r
-to take some measures on the subject he pondered suitable ways and means\r
-during which Stephen repeatedly yawned. So far as he could see he was\r
-rather pale in the face so that it occurred to him as highly advisable\r
-to get a conveyance of some description which would answer in their\r
-then condition, both of them being e.d.ed, particularly Stephen, always\r
-assuming that there was such a thing to be found. Accordingly after a\r
-few such preliminaries as brushing, in spite of his having forgotten\r
-to take up his rather soapsuddy handkerchief after it had done yeoman\r
-service in the shaving line, they both walked together along Beaver\r
-street or, more properly, lane as far as the farrier's and the\r
-distinctly fetid atmosphere of the livery stables at the corner of\r
-Montgomery street where they made tracks to the left from thence\r
-debouching into Amiens street round by the corner of Dan Bergin's. But\r
-as he confidently anticipated there was not a sign of a Jehu plying for\r
-hire anywhere to be seen except a fourwheeler, probably engaged by some\r
-fellows inside on the spree, outside the North Star hotel and there was\r
-no symptom of its budging a quarter of an inch when Mr Bloom, who was\r
-anything but a professional whistler, endeavoured to hail it by emitting\r
-a kind of a whistle, holding his arms arched over his head, twice.\r
-\r
-This was a quandary but, bringing common sense to bear on it, evidently\r
-there was nothing for it but put a good face on the matter and foot it\r
-which they accordingly did. So, bevelling around by Mullett's and the\r
-Signal House which they shortly reached, they proceeded perforce in the\r
-direction of Amiens street railway terminus, Mr Bloom being handicapped\r
-by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had,\r
-to vary the timehonoured adage, gone the way of all buttons though,\r
-entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he heroically made\r
-light of the mischance. So as neither of them were particularly pressed\r
-for time, as it happened, and the temperature refreshing since it\r
-cleared up after the recent visitation of Jupiter Pluvius, they dandered\r
-along past by where the empty vehicle was waiting without a fare or a\r
-jarvey. As it so happened a Dublin United Tramways Company's sandstrewer\r
-happened to be returning and the elder man recounted to his companion _à\r
-propos_ of the incident his own truly miraculous escape of some little\r
-while back. They passed the main entrance of the Great Northern railway\r
-station, the starting point for Belfast, where of course all traffic was\r
-suspended at that late hour and passing the backdoor of the morgue\r
-(a not very enticing locality, not to say gruesome to a degree, more\r
-especially at night) ultimately gained the Dock Tavern and in due course\r
-turned into Store street, famous for its C division police station.\r
-Between this point and the high at present unlit warehouses of Beresford\r
-place Stephen thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird's the\r
-stonecutter's in his mind somehow in Talbot place, first turning on the\r
-right, while the other who was acting as his _fidus Achates_ inhaled\r
-with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke's city bakery,\r
-situated quite close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed\r
-of our daily bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and\r
-most indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, O tell me\r
-where is fancy bread, at Rourke's the baker's it is said.\r
-\r
-_En route_ to his taciturn and, not to put too fine a point on it, not\r
-yet perfectly sober companion Mr Bloom who at all events was in complete\r
-possession of his faculties, never more so, in fact disgustingly sober,\r
-spoke a word of caution re the dangers of nighttown, women of ill fame\r
-and swell mobsmen, which, barely permissible once in a while though not\r
-as a habitual practice, was of the nature of a regular deathtrap for\r
-young fellows of his age particularly if they had acquired drinking\r
-habits under the influence of liquor unless you knew a little jiujitsu\r
-for every contingency as even a fellow on the broad of his back could\r
-administer a nasty kick if you didn't look out. Highly providential\r
-was the appearance on the scene of Corny Kelleher when Stephen was\r
-blissfully unconscious but for that man in the gap turning up at the\r
-eleventh hour the finis might have been that he might have been a\r
-candidate for the accident ward or, failing that, the bridewell and\r
-an appearance in the court next day before Mr Tobias or, he being the\r
-solicitor rather, old Wall, he meant to say, or Mahony which simply\r
-spelt ruin for a chap when it got bruited about. The reason he mentioned\r
-the fact was that a lot of those policemen, whom he cordially disliked,\r
-were admittedly unscrupulous in the service of the Crown and, as Mr\r
-Bloom put it, recalling a case or two in the A division in Clanbrassil\r
-street, prepared to swear a hole through a ten gallon pot. Never on\r
-the spot when wanted but in quiet parts of the city, Pembroke road for\r
-example, the\r
-\r
-guardians of the law were well in evidence, the obvious reason being\r
-they were paid to protect the upper classes. Another thing he commented\r
-on was equipping soldiers with firearms or sidearms of any description\r
-liable to go off at any time which was tantamount to inciting them\r
-against civilians should by any chance they fall out over anything. You\r
-frittered away your time, he very sensibly maintained, and health and\r
-also character besides which, the squandermania of the thing, fast women\r
-of the _demimonde_ ran away with a lot of l s. d. into the bargain and\r
-the greatest danger of all was who you got drunk with though, touching\r
-the much vexed question of stimulants, he relished a glass of choice old\r
-wine in season as both\r
-\r
-nourishing and bloodmaking and possessing aperient virtues (notably a\r
-good burgundy which he was a staunch believer in) still never beyond\r
-a certain point where he invariably drew the line as it simply led to\r
-trouble all round to say nothing of your being at the tender mercy of\r
-others practically. Most of all he commented adversely on the desertion\r
-of Stephen by all his pubhunting _confreres_ but one, a most glaring\r
-piece of ratting on the part of his brother medicos under all the circs.\r
-\r
---And that one was Judas, Stephen said, who up to then had said nothing\r
-whatsoever of any kind.\r
-\r
-Discussing these and kindred topics they made a beeline across the back\r
-of the Customhouse and passed under the Loop Line bridge where a brazier\r
-of coke burning in front of a sentrybox or something like one attracted\r
-their rather lagging footsteps. Stephen of his own accord stopped for\r
-no special reason to look at the heap of barren cobblestones and by\r
-the light emanating from the brazier he could just make out the darker\r
-figure of the corporation watchman inside the gloom of the sentrybox. He\r
-began to remember that this had happened or had been mentioned as having\r
-happened before but it cost him no small effort before he remembered\r
-that he recognised in the sentry a quondam friend of his father's,\r
-Gumley. To avoid a meeting he drew nearer to the pillars of the railway\r
-bridge.\r
-\r
---Someone saluted you, Mr Bloom said.\r
-\r
-A figure of middle height on the prowl evidently under the arches\r
-saluted again, calling:\r
-\r
---_Night!_\r
-\r
-Stephen of course started rather dizzily and stopped to return the\r
-compliment. Mr Bloom actuated by motives of inherent delicacy inasmuch\r
-as he always believed in minding his own business moved off but\r
-nevertheless remained on the _qui vive_ with just a shade of anxiety\r
-though not funkyish in the least. Though unusual in the Dublin area he\r
-knew that it was not by any means unknown for desperadoes who had next\r
-to nothing to live on to be abroad waylaying and generally terrorising\r
-peaceable pedestrians by placing a pistol at their head in some\r
-secluded spot outside the city proper, famished loiterers of the\r
-Thames embankment category they might be hanging about there or simply\r
-marauders ready to decamp with whatever boodle they could in one fell\r
-swoop at a moment's notice, your money or your life, leaving you there\r
-to point a moral, gagged and garrotted.\r
-\r
-Stephen, that is when the accosting figure came to close quarters,\r
-though he was not in an over sober state himself recognised Corley's\r
-breath redolent of rotten cornjuice. Lord John Corley some called him\r
-and his genealogy came about in this wise. He was the eldest son of\r
-inspector Corley of the G division, lately deceased, who had married\r
-a certain Katherine Brophy, the daughter of a Louth farmer. His\r
-grandfather Patrick Michael Corley of New Ross had married the widow\r
-of a publican there whose maiden name had been Katherine (also) Talbot.\r
-Rumour had it (though not proved) that she descended from the house of\r
-the lords Talbot de Malahide in whose mansion, really an unquestionably\r
-fine residence of its kind and well worth seeing, her mother or aunt or\r
-some relative, a woman, as the tale went, of extreme beauty, had enjoyed\r
-the distinction of being in service in the washkitchen. This therefore\r
-was the reason why the still comparatively young though dissolute\r
-man who now addressed Stephen was spoken of by some with facetious\r
-proclivities as Lord John Corley.\r
-\r
-Taking Stephen on one side he had the customary doleful ditty to tell.\r
-Not as much as a farthing to purchase a night's lodgings. His friends\r
-had all deserted him. Furthermore he had a row with Lenehan and called\r
-him to Stephen a mean bloody swab with a sprinkling of a number of other\r
-uncalledfor expressions. He was out of a job and implored of Stephen to\r
-tell him where on God's earth he could get something, anything at all,\r
-to do. No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that\r
-was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected\r
-through the mother in some way, both occurrences happening at the same\r
-time if the whole thing wasn't a complete fabrication from start to\r
-finish. Anyhow he was all in.\r
-\r
---I wouldn't ask you only, pursued he, on my solemn oath and God knows\r
-I'm on the rocks.\r
-\r
---There'll be a job tomorrow or next day, Stephen told him, in a boys'\r
-school at Dalkey for a gentleman usher. Mr Garrett Deasy. Try it. You\r
-may mention my name.\r
-\r
---Ah, God, Corley replied, sure I couldn't teach in a school, man. I was\r
-never one of your bright ones, he added with a half laugh. I got stuck\r
-twice in the junior at the christian brothers.\r
-\r
---I have no place to sleep myself, Stephen informed him.\r
-\r
-Corley at the first go-off was inclined to suspect it was something to\r
-do with Stephen being fired out of his digs for bringing in a bloody\r
-tart off the street. There was a dosshouse in Marlborough street, Mrs\r
-Maloney's, but it was only a tanner touch and full of undesirables but\r
-M'Conachie told him you got a decent enough do in the Brazen Head over\r
-in Winetavern street (which was distantly suggestive to the person\r
-addressed of friar Bacon) for a bob. He was starving too though he\r
-hadn't said a word about it.\r
-\r
-Though this sort of thing went on every other night or very near it\r
-still Stephen's feelings got the better of him in a sense though he knew\r
-that Corley's brandnew rigmarole on a par with the others was hardly\r
-deserving of much credence. However _haud ignarus malorum miseris\r
-succurrere disco_ etcetera as the Latin poet remarks especially as luck\r
-would have it he got paid his screw after every middle of the month on\r
-the sixteenth which was the date of the month as a matter of fact though\r
-a good bit of the wherewithal was demolished. But the cream of the joke\r
-was nothing would get it out of Corley's head that he was living in\r
-affluence and hadn't a thing to do but hand out the needful. Whereas.\r
-He put his hand in a pocket anyhow not with the idea of finding any food\r
-there but thinking he might lend him anything up to a bob or so in lieu\r
-so that he might endeavour at all events and get sufficient to eat but\r
-the result was in the negative for, to his chagrin, he found his cash\r
-missing. A few broken biscuits were all the result of his investigation.\r
-He tried his hardest to recollect for the moment whether he had lost\r
-as well he might have or left because in that contingency it was not a\r
-pleasant lookout, very much the reverse in fact. He was altogether too\r
-fagged out to institute a thorough search though he tried to recollect.\r
-About biscuits he dimly remembered. Who now exactly gave them he\r
-wondered or where was or did he buy. However in another pocket he came\r
-across what he surmised in the dark were pennies, erroneously however,\r
-as it turned out.\r
-\r
---Those are halfcrowns, man, Corley corrected him.\r
-\r
-And so in point of fact they turned out to be. Stephen anyhow lent him\r
-one of them.\r
-\r
---Thanks, Corley answered, you're a gentleman. I'll pay you back one\r
-time. Who's that with you? I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse\r
-in Camden street with Boylan, the billsticker. You might put in a good\r
-word for us to get me taken on there. I'd carry a sandwichboard only\r
-the girl in the office told me they're full up for the next three weeks,\r
-man. God, you've to book ahead, man, you'd think it was for the Carl\r
-Rosa. I don't give a shite anyway so long as I get a job, even as a\r
-crossing sweeper.\r
-\r
-Subsequently being not quite so down in the mouth after the two and six\r
-he got he informed Stephen about a fellow by the name of Bags Comisky\r
-that he said Stephen knew well out of Fullam's, the shipchandler's,\r
-bookkeeper there that used to be often round in Nagle's back with O'Mara\r
-and a little chap with a stutter the name of Tighe. Anyhow he was lagged\r
-the night before last and fined ten bob for a drunk and disorderly and\r
-refusing to go with the constable.\r
-\r
-210\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom in the meanwhile kept dodging about in the vicinity of the\r
-cobblestones near the brazier of coke in front of the corporation\r
-watchman's sentrybox who evidently a glutton for work, it struck him,\r
-was having a quiet forty winks for all intents and purposes on his own\r
-private account while Dublin slept. He threw an odd eye at the same time\r
-now and then at Stephen's anything but immaculately attired interlocutor\r
-as if he had seen that nobleman somewhere or other though where he was\r
-not in a position to truthfully state nor had he the remotest idea when.\r
-Being a levelheaded individual who could give points to not a few in\r
-point of shrewd observation he also remarked on his very dilapidated\r
-hat and slouchy wearing apparel generally testifying to a chronic\r
-impecuniosity. Palpably he was one of his hangerson but for the\r
-matter of that it was merely a question of one preying on his nextdoor\r
-neighbour all round, in every deep, so to put it, a deeper depth and for\r
-the matter of that if the man in the street chanced to be in the dock\r
-himself penal servitude with or without the option of a fine would be\r
-a very rara avis altogether. In any case he had a consummate amount of\r
-cool assurance intercepting people at that hour of the night or morning.\r
-Pretty thick that was certainly.\r
-\r
-The pair parted company and Stephen rejoined Mr Bloom who, with his\r
-practised eye, was not without perceiving that he had succumbed to the\r
-blandiloquence of the other parasite. Alluding to the encounter he said,\r
-laughingly, Stephen, that is:\r
-\r
---He is down on his luck. He asked me to ask you to ask somebody named\r
-Boylan, a billsticker, to give him a job as a sandwichman.\r
-\r
-At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr\r
-Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the\r
-direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana,\r
-moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair,\r
-whereupon he observed evasively:\r
-\r
---Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say. Now you mention it\r
-his face was familiar to me. But, leaving that for the moment, how much\r
-did you part with, he queried, if I am not too inquisitive?\r
-\r
---Half a crown, Stephen responded. I daresay he needs it to sleep\r
-somewhere.\r
-\r
---Needs! Mr Bloom ejaculated, professing not the least surprise at\r
-the intelligence, I can quite credit the assertion and I guarantee he\r
-invariably does. Everyone according to his needs or everyone according\r
-to his deeds. But, talking about things in general, where, added he with\r
-a smile, will you sleep yourself? Walking to Sandycove is out of\r
-the question. And even supposing you did you won't get in after what\r
-occurred at Westland Row station. Simply fag out there for nothing. I\r
-don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why\r
-did you leave your father's house?\r
-\r
---To seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer.\r
-\r
---I met your respected father on a recent occasion, Mr Bloom\r
-diplomatically returned, today in fact, or to be strictly accurate, on\r
-yesterday. Where does he live at present? I gathered in the course of\r
-conversation that he had moved.\r
-\r
---I believe he is in Dublin somewhere, Stephen answered unconcernedly.\r
-Why?\r
-\r
---A gifted man, Mr Bloom said of Mr Dedalus senior, in more respects\r
-than one and a born _raconteur_ if ever there was one. He takes great\r
-pride, quite legitimate, out of you. You could go back perhaps, he\r
-hasarded, still thinking of the very unpleasant scene at Westland Row\r
-terminus when it was perfectly evident that the other two, Mulligan,\r
-that is, and that English tourist friend of his, who eventually euchred\r
-their third companion, were patently trying as if the whole bally\r
-station belonged to them to give Stephen the slip in the confusion,\r
-which they did.\r
-\r
-There was no response forthcoming to the suggestion however, such as it\r
-was, Stephen's mind's eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his\r
-family hearth the last time he saw it with his sister Dilly sitting by\r
-the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell\r
-cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he\r
-could drink it with the oatmealwater for milk after the Friday herrings\r
-they had eaten at two a penny with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and\r
-Katey, the cat meanwhile under the mangle devouring a mess of eggshells\r
-and charred fish heads and bones on a square of brown paper, in\r
-accordance with the third precept of the church to fast and abstain\r
-on the days commanded, it being quarter tense or if not, ember days or\r
-something like that.\r
-\r
---No, Mr Bloom repeated again, I wouldn't personally repose much trust\r
-in that boon companion of yours who contributes the humorous element, Dr\r
-Mulligan, as a guide, philosopher and friend if I were in your shoes. He\r
-knows which side his bread is buttered on though in all probability he\r
-never realised what it is to be without regular meals. Of course you\r
-didn't notice as much as I did. But it wouldn't occasion me the least\r
-surprise to learn that a pinch of tobacco or some narcotic was put in\r
-your drink for some ulterior object.\r
-\r
-He understood however from all he heard that Dr Mulligan was a versatile\r
-allround man, by no means confined to medicine only, who was rapidly\r
-coming to the fore in his line and, if the report was verified, bade\r
-fair to enjoy a flourishing practice in the not too distant future as\r
-a tony medical practitioner drawing a handsome fee for his services\r
-in addition to which professional status his rescue of that man from\r
-certain drowning by artificial respiration and what they call first\r
-aid at Skerries, or Malahide was it?, was, he was bound to admit, an\r
-exceedingly plucky deed which he could not too highly praise, so that\r
-frankly he was utterly at a loss to fathom what earthly reason could be\r
-at the back of it except he put it down to sheer cussedness or jealousy,\r
-pure and simple.\r
-\r
---Except it simply amounts to one thing and he is what they call picking\r
-your brains, he ventured to throw out.\r
-\r
-The guarded glance of half solicitude half curiosity augmented by\r
-friendliness which he gave at Stephen's at present morose expression\r
-of features did not throw a flood of light, none at all in fact on the\r
-problem as to whether he had let himself be badly bamboozled to judge by\r
-two or three lowspirited remarks he let drop or the other way about saw\r
-through the affair and for some reason or other best known to himself\r
-allowed matters to more or less. Grinding poverty did have that effect\r
-and he more than conjectured that, high educational abilities though he\r
-possessed, he experienced no little difficulty in making both ends meet.\r
-\r
-Adjacent to the men's public urinal they perceived an icecream car round\r
-which a group of presumably Italians in heated altercation were getting\r
-rid of voluble expressions in their vivacious language in a particularly\r
-animated way, there being some little differences between the parties.\r
-\r
---_Puttana madonna, che ci dia i quattrini! Ho ragione? Culo rotto!_\r
-\r
-_--Intendiamoci. Mezzo sovrano piu..._\r
-\r
-_--Dice lui, pero!_\r
-\r
-_--Mezzo._\r
-\r
-_--Farabutto! Mortacci sui!_\r
-\r
-_--Ma ascolta! Cinque la testa piu..._\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom and Stephen entered the cabman's shelter, an unpretentious\r
-wooden structure, where, prior to then, he had rarely if ever been\r
-before, the former having previously whispered to the latter a few\r
-hints anent the keeper of it said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat\r
-Fitzharris, the invincible, though he could not vouch for the actual\r
-facts which quite possibly there was not one vestige of truth in. A few\r
-moments later saw our two noctambules safely seated in a discreet corner\r
-only to be greeted by stares from the decidedly miscellaneous collection\r
-of waifs and strays and other nondescript specimens of the genus _homo_\r
-already there engaged in eating and drinking diversified by conversation\r
-for whom they seemingly formed an object of marked curiosity.\r
-\r
---Now touching a cup of coffee, Mr Bloom ventured to plausibly suggest\r
-to break the ice, it occurs to me you ought to sample something in the\r
-shape of solid food, say, a roll of some description.\r
-\r
-Accordingly his first act was with characteristic _sangfroid_ to order\r
-these commodities quietly. The _hoi polloi_ of jarvies or stevedores\r
-or whatever they were after a cursory examination turned their eyes\r
-apparently dissatisfied, away though one redbearded bibulous individual\r
-portion of whose hair was greyish, a sailor probably, still stared for\r
-some appreciable time before transferring his rapt attention to the\r
-floor. Mr Bloom, availing himself of the right of free speech, he having\r
-just a bowing acquaintance with the language in dispute, though, to be\r
-sure, rather in a quandary over _voglio_, remarked to his _protégé_ in\r
-an audible tone of voice _a propos_ of the battle royal in the street\r
-which was still raging fast and furious:\r
-\r
---A beautiful language. I mean for singing purposes. Why do you not\r
-write your poetry in that language? _Bella Poetria_! It is so melodious\r
-and full. _Belladonna. Voglio._\r
-\r
-Stephen, who was trying his dead best to yawn if he could, suffering\r
-from lassitude generally, replied:\r
-\r
---To fill the ear of a cow elephant. They were haggling over money.\r
-\r
---Is that so? Mr Bloom asked. Of course, he subjoined pensively, at the\r
-inward reflection of there being more languages to start with than were\r
-absolutely necessary, it may be only the southern glamour that surrounds\r
-it.\r
-\r
-The keeper of the shelter in the middle of this _tête-â-tête_ put a\r
-boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table\r
-and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed. After\r
-which he beat a retreat to his counter, Mr Bloom determining to have\r
-a good square look at him later on so as not to appear to. For which\r
-reason he encouraged Stephen to proceed with his eyes while he did\r
-the honours by surreptitiously pushing the cup of what was temporarily\r
-supposed to be called coffee gradually nearer him.\r
-\r
---Sounds are impostures, Stephen said after a pause of some little time,\r
-like names. Cicero, Podmore. Napoleon, Mr Goodbody. Jesus, Mr Doyle.\r
-Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What's in a name?\r
-\r
---Yes, to be sure, Mr Bloom unaffectedly concurred. Of course. Our name\r
-was changed too, he added, pushing the socalled roll across.\r
-\r
-The redbearded sailor who had his weather eye on the newcomers boarded\r
-Stephen, whom he had singled out for attention in particular, squarely\r
-by asking:\r
-\r
---And what might your name be?\r
-\r
-Just in the nick of time Mr Bloom touched his companion's boot but\r
-Stephen, apparently disregarding the warm pressure from an unexpected\r
-quarter, answered:\r
-\r
---Dedalus.\r
-\r
-The sailor stared at him heavily from a pair of drowsy baggy eyes,\r
-rather bunged up from excessive use of boose, preferably good old\r
-Hollands and water.\r
-\r
---You know Simon Dedalus? he asked at length.\r
-\r
---I've heard of him, Stephen said.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom was all at sea for a moment, seeing the others evidently\r
-eavesdropping too.\r
-\r
---He's Irish, the seaman bold affirmed, staring still in much the same\r
-way and nodding. All Irish.\r
-\r
---All too Irish, Stephen rejoined.\r
-\r
-As for Mr Bloom he could neither make head or tail of the whole business\r
-and he was just asking himself what possible connection when the sailor\r
-of his own accord turned to the other occupants of the shelter with the\r
-remark:\r
-\r
---I seen him shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over his\r
-shoulder. The lefthand dead shot.\r
-\r
-Though he was slightly hampered by an occasional stammer and his\r
-gestures being also clumsy as it was still he did his best to explain.\r
-\r
---Bottles out there, say. Fifty yards measured. Eggs on the bottles.\r
-Cocks his gun over his shoulder. Aims.\r
-\r
-He turned his body half round, shut up his right eye completely. Then he\r
-screwed his features up someway sideways and glared out into the night\r
-with an unprepossessing cast of countenance.\r
-\r
---Pom! he then shouted once.\r
-\r
-The entire audience waited, anticipating an additional detonation, there\r
-being still a further egg.\r
-\r
---Pom! he shouted twice.\r
-\r
-Egg two evidently demolished, he nodded and winked, adding\r
-bloodthirstily:\r
-\r
-_--Buffalo Bill shoots to kill, Never missed nor he never will._\r
-\r
-A silence ensued till Mr Bloom for agreeableness' sake just felt like\r
-asking him whether it was for a marksmanship competition like the\r
-Bisley.\r
-\r
---Beg pardon, the sailor said.\r
-\r
---Long ago? Mr Bloom pursued without flinching a hairsbreadth.\r
-\r
---Why, the sailor replied, relaxing to a certain extent under the magic\r
-influence of diamond cut diamond, it might be a matter of ten years. He\r
-toured the wide world with Hengler's Royal Circus. I seen him do that in\r
-Stockholm.\r
-\r
---Curious coincidence, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen unobtrusively.\r
-\r
---Murphy's my name, the sailor continued. D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe.\r
-Know where that is?\r
-\r
---Queenstown harbour, Stephen replied.\r
-\r
---That's right, the sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That's\r
-where I hails from. I belongs there. That's where I hails from. My\r
-little woman's down there. She's waiting for me, I know. _For England,\r
-home and beauty_. She's my own true wife I haven't seen for seven years\r
-now, sailing about.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene, the homecoming\r
-to the mariner's roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones,\r
-a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a\r
-number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic,\r
-Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc\r
-O'Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece by the way of\r
-poor John Casey and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way.\r
-Never about the runaway wife coming back, however much devoted to the\r
-absentee. The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he\r
-finally did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon him anent\r
-his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but\r
-I've come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grasswidow,\r
-at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead, rocked in the cradle of the\r
-deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the\r
-publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and\r
-onions. No chair for father. Broo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on\r
-her knee, _post mortem_ child. With a high ro! and a randy ro! and my\r
-galloping tearing tandy, O! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I\r
-remain with much love your brokenhearted husband D B Murphy.\r
-\r
-The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one\r
-of the jarvies with the request:\r
-\r
---You don't happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you?\r
-\r
-The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the keeper took a die of\r
-plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was\r
-passed from hand to hand.\r
-\r
---Thank you, the sailor said.\r
-\r
-He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow\r
-stammers, proceeded:\r
-\r
---We come up this morning eleven o'clock. The threemaster _Rosevean_\r
-from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this\r
-afternoon. There's my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.\r
-\r
-In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket\r
-and handed to his neighbour a not very cleanlooking folded document.\r
-\r
---You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked,\r
-leaning on the counter.\r
-\r
---Why, the sailor answered upon reflection upon it, I've circumnavigated\r
-a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and\r
-North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage.\r
-I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea,\r
-the Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever\r
-scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. _Gospodi pomilyou_. That's how the\r
-Russians prays.\r
-\r
---You seen queer sights, don't be talking, put in a jarvey.\r
-\r
---Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen\r
-queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an\r
-anchor same as I chew that quid.\r
-\r
-He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his\r
-teeth, bit ferociously:\r
-\r
---Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and\r
-the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent\r
-me.\r
-\r
-He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to\r
-be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The\r
-printed matter on it stated: _Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia._\r
-\r
-All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage\r
-women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning,\r
-sleeping amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of\r
-them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.\r
-\r
---Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs\r
-like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can't bear no more\r
-children.\r
-\r
-See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse's liver\r
-raw.\r
-\r
-His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for\r
-several minutes if not more.\r
-\r
---Know how to keep them off? he inquired generally.\r
-\r
-Nobody volunteering a statement he winked, saying:\r
-\r
---Glass. That boggles 'em. Glass.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the\r
-card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran\r
-as follows: _Tarjeta Postal, Señor A Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago,\r
-Chile._ There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice.\r
-Though not an implicit believer in the lurid story narrated (or the\r
-eggsniping transaction for that matter despite William Tell and the\r
-Lazarillo-Don Cesar de Bazan incident depicted in _Maritana_ on which\r
-occasion the former's ball passed through the latter's hat) having\r
-detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person\r
-he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours\r
-after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere) and\r
-the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some\r
-suspicions of our friend's _bona fides_ nevertheless it reminded him in\r
-a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday\r
-or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had\r
-ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a\r
-born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained\r
-a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest.\r
-Martin Cunningham frequently said he would work a pass through Egan but\r
-some deuced hitch or other eternally cropped up with the net result that\r
-the scheme fell through. But even suppose it did come to planking\r
-down the needful and breaking Boyd's heart it was not so dear, purse\r
-permitting, a few guineas at the outside considering the fare to\r
-Mullingar where he figured on going was five and six, there and back.\r
-The trip would benefit health on account of the bracing ozone and be in\r
-every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a chap whose liver was\r
-out of order, seeing the different places along the route, Plymouth,\r
-Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of\r
-the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon\r
-where doubtless he would see the greatest improvement, tower, abbey,\r
-wealth of Park lane to renew acquaintance with. Another thing just\r
-struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around\r
-on the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert\r
-tour of summer music embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts,\r
-Margate with mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne,\r
-Scarborough, Margate and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel\r
-islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative.\r
-Not, of course, with a hole and corner scratch company or local ladies\r
-on the job, witness Mrs C P M'Coy type lend me your valise and I'll post\r
-you the ticket. No, something top notch, an all star Irish caste, the\r
-Tweedy-Flower grand opera company with his own legal consort as leading\r
-lady as a sort of counterblast to the Elster Grimes and Moody-Manners,\r
-perfectly simple matter and he was quite sanguine of success, providing\r
-puffs in the local papers could be managed by some fellow with a bit of\r
-bounce who could pull the indispensable wires and thus combine business\r
-with pleasure. But who? That was the rub. Also, without being actually\r
-positive, it struck him a great field was to be opened up in the line\r
-of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times _apropos_ of the\r
-Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the\r
-_tapis_ in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red\r
-tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A\r
-great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet\r
-the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e.\r
-Brown, Robinson and Co.\r
-\r
-It was a subject of regret and absurd as well on the face of it and no\r
-small blame to our vaunted society that the man in the street, when the\r
-system really needed toning up, for the matter of a couple of paltry\r
-pounds was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead\r
-of being always and ever cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me\r
-for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum\r
-months of it and merited a radical change of _venue_ after the grind\r
-of city life in the summertime for choice when dame Nature is at her\r
-spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life.\r
-There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home\r
-island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora\r
-of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around\r
-Dublin and its picturesque environs even, Poulaphouca to which there was\r
-a steamtram, but also farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow,\r
-rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly\r
-wheelmen so long as it didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal\r
-where if report spoke true the _coup d'oeil_ was exceedingly grand\r
-though the lastnamed locality was not easily getatable so that the\r
-influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the\r
-signal benefits to be derived from it while Howth with its historic\r
-associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O'Malley, George IV,\r
-rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt\r
-with all sorts and conditions of men especially in the spring when young\r
-men's fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the\r
-cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left\r
-leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour's run from the\r
-pillar. Because of course uptodate tourist travelling was as yet merely\r
-in its infancy, so to speak, and the accommodation left much to be\r
-desired. Interesting to fathom it seemed to him from a motive of\r
-curiosity, pure and simple, was whether it was the traffic that created\r
-the route or viceversa or the two sides in fact. He turned back the\r
-other side of the card, picture, and passed it along to Stephen.\r
-\r
---I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that had\r
-little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened and\r
-every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house,\r
-another was a flower. Cooks rats in your soup, he appetisingly added,\r
-the chinks does.\r
-\r
-Possibly perceiving an expression of dubiosity on their faces the\r
-globetrotter went on, adhering to his adventures.\r
-\r
---And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his\r
-back. Knife like that.\r
-\r
-Whilst speaking he produced a dangerouslooking claspknife quite in\r
-keeping with his character and held it in the striking position.\r
-\r
---In a knockingshop it was count of a tryon between two smugglers.\r
-Fellow hid behind a door, come up behind him. Like that. _Prepare to\r
-meet your God_, says he. Chuk! It went into his back up to the butt.\r
-\r
-His heavy glance drowsily roaming about kind of defied their further\r
-questions even should they by any chance want to.\r
-\r
---That's a good bit of steel, repeated he, examining his formidable\r
-_stiletto_.\r
-\r
-After which harrowing _denouement_ sufficient to appal the stoutest he\r
-snapped the blade to and stowed the weapon in question away as before in\r
-his chamber of horrors, otherwise pocket.\r
-\r
---They're great for the cold steel, somebody who was evidently quite in\r
-the dark said for the benefit of them all. That was why they thought\r
-the park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of\r
-them using knives.\r
-\r
-At this remark passed obviously in the spirit of _where ignorance\r
-is bliss_ Mr B. and Stephen, each in his own particular way, both\r
-instinctively exchanged meaning glances, in a religious silence of the\r
-strictly _entre nous_ variety however, towards where Skin-the-Goat,\r
-_alias_ the keeper, not turning a hair, was drawing spurts of liquid\r
-from his boiler affair. His inscrutable face which was really a work\r
-of art, a perfect study in itself, beggaring description, conveyed\r
-the impression that he didn't understand one jot of what was going on.\r
-Funny, very!\r
-\r
-There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading in fits and\r
-starts a stained by coffee evening journal, another the card with the\r
-natives _choza de_, another the seaman's discharge. Mr Bloom, so far\r
-as he was personally concerned, was just pondering in pensive mood. He\r
-vividly recollected when the occurrence alluded to took place as well\r
-as yesterday, roughly some score of years previously in the days of the\r
-land troubles, when it took the civilised world by storm, figuratively\r
-speaking, early in the eighties, eightyone to be correct, when he was\r
-just turned fifteen.\r
-\r
---Ay, boss, the sailor broke in. Give us back them papers.\r
-\r
-The request being complied with he clawed them up with a scrape.\r
-\r
---Have you seen the rock of Gibraltar? Mr Bloom inquired.\r
-\r
-The sailor grimaced, chewing, in a way that might be read as yes, ay or\r
-no.\r
-\r
---Ah, you've touched there too, Mr Bloom said, Europa point, thinking he\r
-had, in the hope that the rover might possibly by some reminiscences but\r
-he failed to do so, simply letting spirt a jet of spew into the sawdust,\r
-and shook his head with a sort of lazy scorn.\r
-\r
---What year would that be about? Mr B interrogated. Can you recall the\r
-boats?\r
-\r
-Our _soi-disant_ sailor munched heavily awhile hungrily before\r
-answering:\r
-\r
---I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and ships.\r
-Salt junk all the time.\r
-\r
-Tired seemingly, he ceased. His questioner perceiving that he was not\r
-likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer,\r
-fell to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the\r
-globe, suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed,\r
-it covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly\r
-what it meant to rule the waves. On more than one occasion, a dozen\r
-at the lowest, near the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a\r
-superannuated old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the\r
-not particularly redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obliviously at\r
-it and it at him, dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new as someone\r
-somewhere sings. And it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to\r
-find out the secret for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes\r
-and all that sort of thing and over and under, well, not exactly under,\r
-tempting the fates. And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no\r
-secret about it at all. Nevertheless, without going into the _minutiae_\r
-of the business, the eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in\r
-all its glory and in the natural course of things somebody or other had\r
-to sail on it and fly in the face of providence though it merely went\r
-to show how people usually contrived to load that sort of onus on to the\r
-other fellow like the hell idea and the lottery and insurance which were\r
-run on identically the same lines so that for that very reason if no\r
-other lifeboat Sunday was a highly laudable institution to which the\r
-public at large, no matter where living inland or seaside, as the case\r
-might be, having it brought home to them like that should extend its\r
-gratitude also to the harbourmasters and coastguard service who had\r
-to man the rigging and push off and out amid the elements whatever the\r
-season when duty called _Ireland expects that every man_ and so on and\r
-sometimes had a terrible time of it in the wintertime not forgetting the\r
-Irish lights, Kish and others, liable to capsize at any moment, rounding\r
-which he once with his daughter had experienced some remarkably choppy,\r
-not to say stormy, weather.\r
-\r
---There was a fellow sailed with me in the Rover, the old seadog,\r
-himself a rover, proceeded, went ashore and took up a soft job as\r
-gentleman's valet at six quid a month. Them are his trousers I've on\r
-me and he gave me an oilskin and that jackknife. I'm game for that job,\r
-shaving and brushup. I hate roaming about. There's my son now, Danny,\r
-run off to sea and his mother got him took in a draper's in Cork where\r
-he could be drawing easy money.\r
-\r
---What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the\r
-side, bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away\r
-from the carking cares of office, unwashed of course and in a seedy\r
-getup and a strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage.\r
-\r
---Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance, my son, Danny?\r
-He'd be about eighteen now, way I figure it.\r
-\r
-The Skibbereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow\r
-shirt with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to\r
-be seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink intended to represent an\r
-anchor.\r
-\r
---There was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater, he remarked, sure as nuts.\r
-I must get a wash tomorrow or next day. It's them black lads I objects\r
-to. I hate those buggers. Suck your blood dry, they does.\r
-\r
-Seeing they were all looking at his chest he accommodatingly dragged\r
-his shirt more open so that on top of the timehonoured symbol of the\r
-mariner's hope and rest they had a full view of the figure 16 and a\r
-young man's sideface looking frowningly rather.\r
-\r
---Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were Iying\r
-becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton. Fellow, the\r
-name of Antonio, done that. There he is himself, a Greek.\r
-\r
---Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor.\r
-\r
-That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the.\r
-Someway in his. Squeezing or.\r
-\r
---See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And\r
-there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his\r
-fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn.\r
-\r
-And in point of fact the young man named Antonio's livid face did\r
-actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the\r
-unreserved admiration of everybody including Skin-the-Goat, who this\r
-time stretched over.\r
-\r
---Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He's gone\r
-too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay.\r
-\r
-He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression\r
-of before.\r
-\r
---Neat bit of work, one longshoreman said.\r
-\r
---And what's the number for? loafer number two queried.\r
-\r
---Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor.\r
-\r
---Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this\r
-time with some sort of a half smile for a brief duration only in the\r
-direction of the questioner about the number. Ate. A Greek he was.\r
-\r
-And then he added with rather gallowsbird humour considering his alleged\r
-end:\r
-\r
-_--As bad as old Antonio, For he left me on my ownio._\r
-\r
-The face of a streetwalker glazed and haggard under a black straw hat\r
-peered askew round the door of the shelter palpably reconnoitring on\r
-her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr\r
-Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment\r
-flusterfied but outwardly calm, and, picking up from the table the pink\r
-sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had\r
-laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though\r
-why pink. His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment\r
-round the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that\r
-afternoon on Ormond quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the\r
-lane who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B.)\r
-and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing which seemed\r
-rather vague than not, your washing. Still candour compelled him to\r
-admit he had washed his wife's undergarments when soiled in Holles\r
-street and women would and did too a man's similar garments initialled\r
-with Bewley and Draper's marking ink (hers were, that is) if they really\r
-loved him, that is to say, love me, love my dirty shirt. Still just\r
-then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female's room more than her\r
-company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a rude\r
-sign to take herself off. Round the side of the Evening Telegraph he\r
-just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side of the door\r
-with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all\r
-there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round skipper\r
-Murphy's nautical chest and then there was no more of her.\r
-\r
---The gunboat, the keeper said.\r
-\r
---It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking,\r
-how a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with\r
-disease can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober\r
-senses, if he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature! Of\r
-course I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition.\r
-Still no matter what the cause is from...\r
-\r
-Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely\r
-remarking:\r
-\r
---In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a\r
-roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to\r
-buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.\r
-\r
-The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a prude,\r
-said it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be put a\r
-stop to _instanter_ to say that women of that stamp (quite apart from\r
-any oldmaidish squeamishness on the subject), a necessary evil, w ere\r
-not licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a thing,\r
-he could truthfully state, he, as a _paterfamilias_, was a stalwart\r
-advocate of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a policy of\r
-the sort, he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would confer a\r
-lasting boon on everybody concerned.\r
-\r
---You as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe\r
-in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such,\r
-as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I\r
-believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as\r
-the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such\r
-inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?\r
-\r
-Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try\r
-and concentrate and remember before he could say:\r
-\r
---They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and\r
-therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the\r
-possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause Who, from all I\r
-can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other\r
-practical jokes, _corruptio per se_ and _corruptio per accidens_ both\r
-being excluded by court etiquette.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the\r
-mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still\r
-he felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly\r
-rejoining:\r
-\r
---Simple? I shouldn't think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant\r
-you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a\r
-blue moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for\r
-instance to invent those rays Rontgen did or the telescope like Edison,\r
-though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean,\r
-and the same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural\r
-phenomenon such as electricity but it's a horse of quite another colour\r
-to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.\r
-\r
---O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several\r
-of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial\r
-evidence.\r
-\r
-On this knotty point however the views of the pair, poles apart as they\r
-were both in schooling and everything else with the marked difference in\r
-their respective ages, clashed.\r
-\r
---Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his\r
-original point with a smile of unbelief. I'm not so sure about that.\r
-That's a matter for everyman's opinion and, without dragging in the\r
-sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you _in toto_\r
-there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were\r
-genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it's the\r
-big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them\r
-like _Hamlet_ and Bacon, as, you who know your Shakespeare infinitely\r
-better than I, of course I needn't tell you. Can't you drink that\r
-coffee, by the way? Let me stir it. And take a piece of that bun. It's\r
-like one of our skipper's bricks disguised. Still no-one can give what\r
-he hasn't got. Try a bit.\r
-\r
---Couldn't, Stephen contrived to get out, his mental organs for the\r
-moment refusing to dictate further.\r
-\r
-Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat Mr Bloom thought well to stir\r
-or try to the clotted sugar from the bottom and reflected with something\r
-approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance (and\r
-lucrative) work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or\r
-nay did a world of good, shelters such as the present one they were in\r
-run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic evenings\r
-and useful lectures (admittance free) by qualified men for the lower\r
-orders. On the other hand he had a distinct and painful recollection\r
-they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been prominently\r
-associated with it at one time, a very modest remuneration indeed for\r
-her pianoplaying. The idea, he was strongly inclined to believe, was\r
-to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak\r
-of. Sulphate of copper poison SO4 or something in some dried peas he\r
-remembered reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but he couldn't\r
-remember when it was or where. Anyhow inspection, medical inspection,\r
-of all eatables seemed to him more than ever necessary which possibly\r
-accounted for the vogue of Dr Tibble's Vi-Cocoa on account of the\r
-medical analysis involved.\r
-\r
---Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being\r
-stirred.\r
-\r
-Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it Stephen lifted the heavy mug\r
-from the brown puddle it clopped out of when taken up by the handle and\r
-took a sip of the offending beverage.\r
-\r
---Still it's solid food, his good genius urged, I'm a stickler for solid\r
-food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but\r
-regular meals as the _sine qua non_ for any kind of proper work, mental\r
-or manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different\r
-man.\r
-\r
---Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But O, oblige me by taking away that\r
-knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.\r
-\r
-Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article,\r
-a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or\r
-antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least\r
-conspicuous point about it.\r
-\r
---Our mutual friend's stories are like himself, Mr Bloom _apropos_ of\r
-knives remarked to his _confidante sotto voce_. Do you think they are\r
-genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and\r
-lie like old boots. Look at him.\r
-\r
-Yet still though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air life was\r
-full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it\r
-was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an\r
-entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent\r
-probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly\r
-accurate gospel.\r
-\r
-He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and\r
-Sherlockholmesing him up ever since he clapped eyes on him. Though a\r
-wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness,\r
-there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a jail\r
-delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to associate\r
-such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill fraternity. He\r
-might even have done for his man supposing it was his own case he told,\r
-as people often did about others, namely, that he killed him himself\r
-and had served his four or five goodlooking years in durance vile to say\r
-nothing of the Antonio personage (no relation to the dramatic personage\r
-of identical name who sprang from the pen of our national poet) who\r
-expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above described. On the\r
-other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable weakness because\r
-meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like those jarvies waiting\r
-news from abroad would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean\r
-seas to draw the long bow about the schooner _Hesperus_ and etcetera.\r
-And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself\r
-couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers\r
-other fellows coined about him.\r
-\r
---Mind you, I'm not saying that it's all a pure invention, he resumed.\r
-Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants,\r
-though that is rather a far cry, you see once in a way, Marcella the\r
-midget queen. In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some\r
-Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged, they couldn't straighten\r
-their legs if you paid them because the muscles here, you see, he\r
-proceeded, indicating on his companion the brief outline of the sinews\r
-or whatever you like to call them behind the right knee, were utterly\r
-powerless from sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as\r
-gods. There's an example again of simple souls.\r
-\r
-However reverting to friend Sinbad and his horrifying adventures (who\r
-reminded him a bit of Ludwig, _alias_ Ledwidge, when he occupied\r
-the boards of the Gaiety when Michael Gunn was identified with the\r
-management in the _Flying Dutchman_, a stupendous success, and his host\r
-of admirers came in large numbers, everyone simply flocking to hear him\r
-though ships of any sort, phantom or the reverse, on the stage usually\r
-fell a bit flat as also did trains) there was nothing intrinsically\r
-incompatible about it, he conceded. On the contrary that stab in the\r
-back touch was quite in keeping with those italianos though candidly he\r
-was none the less free to admit those icecreamers and friers in the fish\r
-way not to mention the chip potato variety and so forth over in little\r
-Italy there near the Coombe were sober thrifty hardworking fellows\r
-except perhaps a bit too given to pothunting the harmless necessary\r
-animal of the feline persuasion of others at night so as to have a good\r
-old succulent tuckin with garlic _de rigueur_ off him or her next day on\r
-the quiet and, he added, on the cheap.\r
-\r
---Spaniards, for instance, he continued, passionate temperaments like\r
-that, impetuous as Old Nick, are given to taking the law into their own\r
-hands and give you your quietus doublequick with those poignards they\r
-carry in the abdomen. It comes from the great heat, climate generally.\r
-My wife is, so to speak, Spanish, half that is. Point of fact she could\r
-actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in\r
-(technically) Spain, i.e. Gibraltar. She has the Spanish type. Quite\r
-dark, regular brunette, black. I for one certainly believe climate\r
-accounts for character. That's why I asked you if you wrote your poetry\r
-in Italian.\r
-\r
---The temperaments at the door, Stephen interposed with, were very\r
-passionate about ten shillings. _Roberto ruba roba sua_.\r
-\r
---Quite so, Mr Bloom dittoed.\r
-\r
---Then, Stephen said staring and rambling on to himself or some unknown\r
-listener somewhere, we have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles\r
-triangle miss Portinari he fell in love with and Leonardo and san\r
-Tommaso Mastino.\r
-\r
---It's in the blood, Mr Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the\r
-blood of the sun. Coincidence I just happened to be in the Kildare\r
-street museum 890 today, shortly prior to our meeting if I can so call\r
-it, and I was just looking at those antique statues there. The splendid\r
-proportions of hips, bosom. You simply don't knock against those kind of\r
-women here. An exception here and there. Handsome yes, pretty in a way\r
-you find but what I'm talking about is the female form. Besides they\r
-have so little taste in dress, most of them, which greatly enhances a\r
-woman's natural beauty, no matter what you say. Rumpled stockings, it\r
-may be, possibly is, a foible of mine but still it's a thing I simply\r
-hate to see.\r
-\r
-Interest, however, was starting to flag somewhat all round and then the\r
-others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in a fog,\r
-goo collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing. Shipahoy of course\r
-had his own say to say. He had doubled the cape a few odd times and\r
-weathered a monsoon, a kind of wind, in the China seas and through all\r
-those perils of the deep there was one thing, he declared, stood to him\r
-or words to that effect, a pious medal he had that saved him.\r
-\r
-So then after that they drifted on to the wreck off Daunt's rock, wreck\r
-of that illfated Norwegian barque nobody could think of her name for\r
-the moment till the jarvey who had really quite a look of Henry Campbell\r
-remembered it _Palme_ on Booterstown strand. That was the talk of the\r
-town that year (Albert William Quill wrote a fine piece of original\r
-verse of 910 distinctive merit on the topic for the Irish _Times_),\r
-breakers running over her and crowds and crowds on the shore in\r
-commotion petrified with horror. Then someone said something about the\r
-case of the s. s. _Lady Cairns_ of Swansea run into by the _Mona_ which\r
-was on an opposite tack in rather muggyish weather and lost with all\r
-hands on deck. No aid was given. Her master, the _Mona's_, said he\r
-was afraid his collision bulkhead would give way. She had no water, it\r
-appears, in her hold.\r
-\r
-At this stage an incident happened. It having become necessary for him\r
-to unfurl a reef the sailor vacated his seat.\r
-\r
---Let me cross your bows mate, he said to his neighbour who was just\r
-gently dropping off into a peaceful doze.\r
-\r
-He made tracks heavily, slowly with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door,\r
-stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore\r
-due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings Mr Bloom who\r
-noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ship's\r
-rum sticking one out of each pocket for the private consumption of his\r
-burning interior, saw him produce a bottle and uncork it or unscrew and,\r
-applying its nozz1e to his lips, take a good old delectable swig out of\r
-it with a gurgling noise. The irrepressible Bloom, who also had a\r
-shrewd suspicion that the old stager went out on a manoeuvre after the\r
-counterattraction in the shape of a female who however had disappeared\r
-to all intents and purposes, could by straining just perceive him, when\r
-duly refreshed by his rum puncheon exploit, gaping up at the piers and\r
-girders of the Loop line rather out of his depth as of course it was all\r
-radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved. Some person\r
-or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the\r
-cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but after a brief\r
-space of time during which silence reigned supreme the sailor, evidently\r
-giving it a wide berth, eased himself closer at hand, the noise of his\r
-bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where\r
-it apparently awoke a horse of the cabrank. A hoof scooped anyway for\r
-new foothold after sleep and harness jingled. Slightly disturbed in his\r
-sentrybox by the brazier of live coke the watcher of the corporation\r
-stones who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other\r
-in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the\r
-parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human\r
-probability from dictates of humanity knowing him before shifted about\r
-and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again in to the arms\r
-of Morpheus, a truly amazing piece of hard lines in its most virulent\r
-form on a fellow most respectably connected and familiarised with decent\r
-home comforts all his life who came in for a cool 100 pounds a year\r
-at one time which of course the doublebarrelled ass proceeded to make\r
-general ducks and drakes of. And there he was at the end of his tether\r
-after having often painted the town tolerably pink without a beggarly\r
-stiver. He drank needless to be told and it pointed only once more a\r
-moral when he might quite easily be in a large way of business if--a\r
-big if, however--he had contrived to cure himself of his particular\r
-partiality.\r
-\r
-All meantime were loudly lamenting the falling off in Irish shipping,\r
-coastwise and foreign as well, which was all part and parcel of the same\r
-thing. A Palgrave Murphy boat was put off the ways at Alexandra basin,\r
-the only launch that year. Right enough the harbours were there only no\r
-ships ever called.\r
-\r
-There were wrecks and wreckers, the keeper said, who was evidently _au\r
-fait_.\r
-\r
-What he wanted to ascertain was why that ship ran bang against the only\r
-rock in Galway bay when the Galway harbour scheme was mooted by a Mr\r
-Worthington or some name like that, eh? Ask the then captain, he advised\r
-them, how much palmoil the British government gave him for that day's\r
-work, Captain John Lever of the Lever Line.\r
-\r
---Am I right, skipper? he queried of the sailor, now returning after his\r
-private potation and the rest of his exertions.\r
-\r
-That worthy picking up the scent of the fagend of the song or words\r
-growled in wouldbe music but with great vim some kind of chanty or other\r
-in seconds or thirds. Mr Bloom's sharp ears heard him then expectorate\r
-the plug probably (which it was), so that he must have lodged it for the\r
-time being in his fist while he did the drinking and making water jobs\r
-and found it a bit sour after the liquid fire in question. Anyhow in\r
-he rolled after his successful libation-_cum_-potation, introducing an\r
-atmosphere of drink into the _soirée_, boisterously trolling, like a\r
-veritable son of a seacook:\r
-\r
- _--The biscuits was as hard as brass\r
- And the beef as salt as Lot's wife's arse.\r
- O, Johnny Lever!\r
- Johnny Lever, O!_\r
-\r
-After which effusion the redoubtable specimen duly arrived on the scene\r
-and regaining his seat he sank rather than sat heavily on the form\r
-provided. Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to\r
-grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent\r
-the natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort which he\r
-described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on\r
-the face of God's earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in\r
-large quantities, six million pounds worth of pork exported every year,\r
-ten millions between butter and eggs and all the riches drained out of\r
-it by England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the\r
-nose always and gobbling up the best meat in the market and a lot more\r
-surplus steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became\r
-general and all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any mortal\r
-thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there was that colonel Everard down\r
-there in Navan growing tobacco. Where would you find anywhere the like\r
-of Irish bacon? But a day of reckoning, he stated _crescendo_ with no\r
-uncertain voice, thoroughly monopolising all the conversation, was in\r
-store for mighty England, despite her power of pelf on account of her\r
-crimes. There would be a fall and the greatest fall in history.\r
-The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he\r
-affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was\r
-toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel,\r
-which he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the\r
-Greek hero, a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped\r
-their attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His\r
-advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work\r
-for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare\r
-a single one of her sons.\r
-\r
-Silence all round marked the termination of his _finale_. The impervious\r
-navigator heard these lurid tidings, undismayed.\r
-\r
---Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a\r
-bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism.\r
-\r
-To which cold douche referring to downfall and so on the keeper\r
-concurred but nevertheless held to his main view.\r
-\r
---Who's the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately\r
-interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and\r
-generals we've got? Tell me that.\r
-\r
---The Irish, for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial\r
-blemishes apart.\r
-\r
---That's right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic\r
-peasant. He's the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?\r
-\r
-While allowing him his individual opinions as everyman the keeper added\r
-he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no Irishman\r
-worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few\r
-irascible words when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing\r
-to the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long\r
-as they didn't indulge in recriminations and come to blows.\r
-\r
-From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was\r
-rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for,\r
-pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was\r
-fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel,\r
-unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather\r
-concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with\r
-the quixotic idea in certain quarters that in a hundred million years\r
-the coal seam of the sister island would be played out and if, as\r
-time went on, that turned out to be how the cat jumped all he could\r
-personally say on the matter was that as a host of contingencies,\r
-equally relevant to the issue, might occur ere then it was highly\r
-advisable in the interim to try to make the most of both countries even\r
-though poles apart. Another little interesting point, the amours of\r
-whores and chummies, to put it in common parlance, reminded him Irish\r
-soldiers had as often fought for England as against her, more so, in\r
-fact. And now, why? So the scene between the pair of them, the licensee\r
-of the place rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous\r
-invincible, and the other, obviously bogus, reminded him forcibly as\r
-being on all fours with the confidence trick, supposing, that is, it was\r
-prearranged as the lookeron, a student of the human soul if anything,\r
-the others seeing least of the game. And as for the lessee or keeper,\r
-who probably wasn't the other person at all, he (B.) couldn't help\r
-feeling and most properly it was better to give people like that the\r
-goby unless you were a blithering idiot altogether and refuse to have\r
-anything to do with them as a golden rule in private life and their\r
-felonsetting, there always being the offchance of a Dannyman coming\r
-forward and turning queen's evidence or king's now like Denis or Peter\r
-Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from that he disliked\r
-those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet, though such\r
-criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any\r
-shape or form, he certainly did feel and no denying it (while inwardly\r
-remaining what he was) a certain kind of admiration for a man who\r
-had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his\r
-political convictions (though, personally, he would never be a party to\r
-any such thing), off the same bat as those love vendettas of the south,\r
-have her or swing for her, when the husband frequently, after some words\r
-passed between the two concerning her relations with the other lucky\r
-mortal (he having had the pair watched), inflicted fatal injuries on\r
-his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial _liaison_\r
-by plunging his knife into her, until it just struck him that\r
-Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car for the actual\r
-perpetrators of the outrage and so was not, if he was reliably informed,\r
-actually party to the ambush which, in point of fact, was the plea some\r
-legal luminary saved his skin on. In any case that was very ancient\r
-history by now and as for our friend, the pseudo Skin-the-etcetera, he\r
-had transparently outlived his welcome. He ought to have either died\r
-naturally or on the scaffold high. Like actresses, always farewell\r
-positively last performance then come up smiling again. Generous to a\r
-fault of course, temperamental, no economising or any idea of the sort,\r
-always snapping at the bone for the shadow. So similarly he had a very\r
-shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever got rid of some l s d. in the\r
-course of his perambulations round the docks in the congenial atmosphere\r
-of the _Old Ireland_ tavern, come back to Erin and so on. Then as for\r
-the other he had heard not so long before the same identical lingo as he\r
-told Stephen how he simply but effectually silenced the offender.\r
-\r
---He took umbrage at something or other, that muchinjured but on the\r
-whole eventempered person declared, I let slip. He called me a jew and\r
-in a heated fashion offensively. So I without deviating from plain facts\r
-in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his\r
-family like me though in reality I'm not. That was one for him. A soft\r
-answer turns away wrath. He hadn't a word to say for himself as everyone\r
-saw. Am I not right?\r
-\r
-He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride\r
-at the soft impeachment with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to\r
-glean in a kind of a way that it wasn't all exactly.\r
-\r
---_Ex quibus_, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or\r
-four eyes conversing, _Christus_ or Bloom his name is or after all any\r
-other, _secundum carnem_.\r
-\r
---Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides\r
-of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to\r
-right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is\r
-though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the\r
-government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all\r
-very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality.\r
-I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never\r
-reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due\r
-instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate\r
-people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular,\r
-in the next house so to speak.\r
-\r
---Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes' war, Stephen\r
-assented, between Skinner's alley and Ormond market.\r
-\r
-Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that\r
-was overwhelmingly right. And the whole world was full of that sort of\r
-thing.\r
-\r
---You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of\r
-conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn't remotely...\r
-\r
-All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up\r
-bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind,\r
-erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were\r
-very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of\r
-everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.\r
-\r
---They accuse, remarked he audibly.\r
-\r
-He turned away from the others who probably and spoke nearer to, so as\r
-the others in case they.\r
-\r
---Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of\r
-ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, would\r
-you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the\r
-inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell,\r
-an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for,\r
-imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They\r
-are practical and are proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any\r
-because you know the standard works on the subject and then orthodox as\r
-you are. But in the economic, not touching religion, domain the priest\r
-spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead\r
-America. Turks. It's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd\r
-go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better, at least\r
-so I think. That's the juggle on which the p.p's raise the wind on false\r
-pretences. I'm, he resumed with dramatic force, as good an Irishman\r
-as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see\r
-everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes _pro rata_ having a\r
-comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something\r
-in the neighbourhood of 300 pounds per annum. That's the vital issue\r
-at stake and it's feasible and would be provocative of friendlier\r
-intercourse between man and man. At least that's my idea for what it's\r
-worth. I call that patriotism. _Ubi patria_, as we learned a smattering\r
-of in our classical days in _Alma Mater, vita bene_. Where you can live\r
-well, the sense is, if you work.\r
-\r
-Over his untastable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this\r
-synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular.\r
-He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those\r
-crabs about Ringsend in the morning burrowing quickly into all colours\r
-of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere\r
-beneath or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or\r
-didn't say the words the voice he heard said, if you work.\r
-\r
---Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work.\r
-\r
-The eyes were surprised at this observation because as he, the person\r
-who owned them pro tem. observed or rather his voice speaking did, all\r
-must work, have to, together.\r
-\r
---I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest\r
-possible sense. Also literary labour not merely for the kudos of\r
-the thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel\r
-nowadays. That's work too. Important work. After all, from the little\r
-I know of you, after all the money expended on your education you are\r
-entitled to recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit\r
-as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the\r
-peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn.\r
-Each is equally important.\r
-\r
---You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may\r
-be important because I belong to the _faubourg Saint Patrice_ called\r
-Ireland for short.\r
-\r
---I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.\r
-\r
---But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important\r
-because it belongs to me.\r
-\r
---What belongs, queried Mr Bloom bending, fancying he was perhaps under\r
-some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately, I didn't catch the\r
-latter portion. What was it you...?\r
-\r
-Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of\r
-coffee or whatever you like to call it none too politely, adding: 1170\r
-\r
---We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.\r
-\r
-At this pertinent suggestion Mr Bloom, to change the subject, looked\r
-down but in a quandary, as he couldn't tell exactly what construction\r
-to put on belongs to which sounded rather a far cry. The rebuke of some\r
-kind was clearer than the other part. Needless to say the fumes of\r
-his recent orgy spoke then with some asperity in a curious bitter way\r
-foreign to his sober state. Probably the homelife to which Mr B attached\r
-the utmost importance had not been all that was needful or he hadn't\r
-been familiarised with the right sort of people. With a touch of fear\r
-for the young man beside him whom he furtively scrutinised with an air\r
-of some consternation remembering he had just come back from Paris,\r
-the eyes more especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister,\r
-failing to throw much light on the subject, however, he brought to mind\r
-instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the\r
-bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves. For instance\r
-there was the case of O'Callaghan, for one, the halfcrazy faddist,\r
-respectably connected though of inadequate means, with his mad vagaries\r
-among whose other gay doings when rotto and making himself a nuisance\r
-to everybody all round he was in the habit of ostentatiously sporting in\r
-public a suit of brown paper (a fact). And then the usual _denouement_\r
-after the fun had gone on fast and furious he got 1190 landed into hot\r
-water and had to be spirited away by a few friends, after a strong hint\r
-to a blind horse from John Mallon of Lower Castle Yard, so as not to\r
-be made amenable under section two of the criminal law amendment act,\r
-certain names of those subpoenaed being handed in but not divulged\r
-for reasons which will occur to anyone with a pick of brains. Briefly,\r
-putting two and two together, six sixteen which he pointedly turned a\r
-deaf ear to, Antonio and so forth, jockeys and esthetes and the tattoo\r
-which was all the go in the seventies or thereabouts even in the house\r
-of lords because early in life the occupant of the throne, then heir\r
-apparent, the other members of the upper ten and other high personages\r
-simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state, he reflected\r
-about the errors of notorieties and crowned heads running counter to\r
-morality such as the Cornwall case a number of years before under their\r
-veneer in a way scarcely intended by nature, a thing good Mrs Grundy,\r
-as the law stands, was terribly down on though not for the reason they\r
-thought they were probably whatever it was except women chiefly who were\r
-always fiddling more or less at one another it being largely a matter of\r
-dress and all the rest of it. Ladies who like distinctive underclothing\r
-should, and every welltailored man must, trying to make the gap wider\r
-between them by innuendo and give more of a genuine filip to acts of\r
-impropriety between the two, she unbuttoned his and then he untied her,\r
-mind the pin, whereas savages in the cannibal islands, say, at ninety\r
-degrees in the shade not caring a continental. However, reverting to the\r
-original, there were on the other hand others who had forced their way\r
-to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps. Sheer\r
-force of natural genius, that. With brains, sir.\r
-\r
-For which and further reasons he felt it was his interest and duty even\r
-to wait on and profit by the unlookedfor occasion though why he could\r
-not exactly tell being as it was already several shillings to the\r
-bad having in fact let himself in for it. Still to cultivate the\r
-acquaintance of someone of no uncommon calibre who could provide food\r
-for reflection would amply repay any small. Intellectual stimulation,\r
-as such, was, he felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind.\r
-Added to which was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row,\r
-old salt of the here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the\r
-whole galaxy of events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the\r
-world we live in especially as the lives of the submerged tenth, viz.\r
-coalminers, divers, scavengers etc., were very much under the microscope\r
-lately. To improve the shining hour he wondered whether he might meet\r
-with anything approaching the same luck as Mr Philip Beaufoy if taken\r
-down in writing suppose he were to pen something out of the common\r
-groove (as he fully intended doing) at the rate of one guinea per\r
-column. _My Experiences_, let us say, _in a Cabman's Shelter_.\r
-\r
-The pink edition extra sporting of the _Telegraph_ tell a graphic lie\r
-lay, as luck would have it, beside his elbow and as he was just puzzling\r
-again, far from satisfied, over a country belonging to him and the\r
-preceding rebus the vessel came from Bridgwater and the postcard was\r
-addressed A. Boudin find the captain's age, his eyes went aimlessly\r
-over the respective captions which came under his special province the\r
-allembracing give us this day our daily press. First he got a bit of a\r
-start but it turned out to be only something about somebody named H.\r
-du Boyes, agent for typewriters or something like that. Great battle,\r
-Tokio. Lovemaking in Irish, 200 pounds damages. Gordon Bennett.\r
-Emigration Swindle. Letter from His Grace. William. Ascot meeting,\r
-the Gold Cup. Victory of outsider _Throwaway_ recalls Derby of '92 when\r
-Capt. Marshall's dark horse _Sir Hugo_ captured the blue ribband at long\r
-odds. New York disaster. Thousand lives lost. Foot and Mouth. Funeral of\r
-the late Mr Patrick Dignam.\r
-\r
-So to change the subject he read about Dignam R. I. P. which, he\r
-reflected, was anything but a gay sendoff. Or a change of address\r
-anyway.\r
-\r
---_This morning_ (Hynes put it in of course) _the remains of the late Mr\r
-Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue,\r
-Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a\r
-most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise after a\r
-brief illness came as a great shock to citizens of all classes by whom\r
-he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the\r
-deceased were present, were carried out_ (certainly Hynes wrote it with\r
-a nudge from Corny) _by Messrs H. J. O'Neill and Son, 164 North Strand\r
-Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan\r
-(brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr, Martin Cunningham, John\r
-Power, eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora_ (must be where he called\r
-Monks the dayfather about Keyes's ad) _Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus,\r
-Stephen Dedalus B.,4., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius T. Kelleher, Joseph\r
-M'C Hynes, L. Boom, CP M'Coy,--M'lntosh and several others_.\r
-\r
-Nettled not a little by L. _Boom_ (as it incorrectly stated) and the\r
-line of bitched type but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M'Coy\r
-and Stephen Dedalus B. A. who were conspicuous, needless to say, by\r
-their total absence (to say nothing of M'Intosh) L. Boom pointed it\r
-out to his companion B. A. engaged in stifling another yawn, half\r
-nervousness, not forgetting the usual crop of nonsensical howlers of\r
-misprints.\r
-\r
---Is that first epistle to the Hebrews, he asked as soon as his bottom\r
-jaw would let him, in? Text: open thy mouth and put thy foot in it.\r
-\r
---It is. Really, Mr Bloom said (though first he fancied he alluded to\r
-the archbishop till he added about foot and mouth with which there could\r
-be no possible connection) overjoyed to set his mind at rest and a bit\r
-flabbergasted at Myles Crawford's after all managing to. There.\r
-\r
-While the other was reading it on page two Boom (to give him for the\r
-nonce his new misnomer) whiled away a few odd leisure moments in fits\r
-and starts with the account of the third event at Ascot on page three,\r
-his side. Value 1000 sovs with 3000 sovs in specie added. For entire\r
-colts and fillies. Mr F. Alexander's _Throwaway_, b. h. by _Rightaway_,\r
-5 yrs, 9 st 4 lbs (W. Lane) 1, lord Howard de Walden's _Zinfandel_ (M.\r
-Cannon) z, Mr W. Bass's _Sceptre_ 3. Betting 5 to 4 on _Zinfandel_,\r
-20 to 1 _Throwaway_ (off). _Sceptre_ a shade heavier, 5 to 4 on\r
-_Zinfandel_, 20 to 1 _Throwaway_ (off). _Throwaway_ and _Zinfandel_\r
-stood close order. It was anybody's race then the rank outsider drew to\r
-the fore, got long lead, beating lord Howard de Walden's chestnut\r
-colt and Mr W. Bass's bay filly Sceptre on a 2 1/2 mile course. Winner\r
-trained by Braime so that Lenehan's version of the business was all pure\r
-buncombe. Secured the verdict cleverly by a length. 1000 sovs with\r
-3000 in specie. Also ran: J de Bremond's (French horse Bantam Lyons was\r
-anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any minute) _Maximum\r
-II_. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking damages. Though\r
-that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get\r
-left. Of course gambling eminently lent itself to that sort of thing\r
-though as the event turned out the poor fool hadn't much reason to\r
-congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork it reduced\r
-itself to eventually.\r
-\r
---There was every indication they would arrive at that, he, Bloom, said.\r
-\r
---Who? the other, whose hand by the way was hurt, said.\r
-\r
-One morning you would open the paper, the cabman affirmed, and read:\r
-_Return of Parnell_. He bet them what they liked. A Dublin fusilier was\r
-in that shelter one night and said he saw him in South Africa. Pride it\r
-was killed him. He ought to have done away with himself or lain low for\r
-a time after committee room no 15 until he was his old self again with\r
-no-one to point a finger at him. Then they would all to a man have gone\r
-down on their marrowbones to him to come back when he had recovered\r
-his senses. Dead he wasn't. Simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they\r
-brought over was full of stones. He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer\r
-general. He made a mistake to fight the priests. And so forth and so on.\r
-\r
-All the same Bloom (properly so dubbed) was rather surprised at their\r
-memories for in nine cases out of ten it was a case of tarbarrels and\r
-not singly but in their thousands and then complete oblivion because it\r
-was twenty odd years. Highly unlikely of course there was even a shadow\r
-of truth in the stones and, even supposing, he thought a return highly\r
-inadvisable, all things considered. Something evidently riled them in\r
-his death. Either he petered out too tamely of acute pneumonia just when\r
-his various different political arrangements were nearing completion\r
-or whether it transpired he owed his death to his having neglected to\r
-change his boots and clothes-after a wetting when a cold resulted and\r
-failing to consult a specialist he being confined to his room till he\r
-eventually died of it amid widespread regret before a fortnight was at\r
-an end or quite possibly they were distressed to find the job was taken\r
-out of their hands. Of course nobody being acquainted with his movements\r
-even before there was absolutely no clue as to his whereabouts which\r
-were decidedly of the _Alice, where art thou_ order even prior to his\r
-starting to go under several aliases such as Fox and Stewart so the\r
-remark which emanated from friend cabby might be within the bounds of\r
-possibility. Naturally then it would prey on his mind as a born leader\r
-of men which undoubtedly he was and a commanding figure, a sixfooter\r
-or at any rate five feet ten or eleven in his stockinged feet, whereas\r
-Messrs So and So who, though they weren't even a patch on the former\r
-man, ruled the roost after their redeeming features were very few and\r
-far between. It certainly pointed a moral, the idol with feet of clay,\r
-and then seventytwo of his trusty henchmen rounding on him with mutual\r
-mudslinging. And the identical same with murderers. You had to come\r
-back. That haunting sense kind of drew you. To show the understudy in\r
-the title _rôle_ how to. He saw him once on the auspicious occasion\r
-when they broke up the type in the _Insuppressible_ or was it _United\r
-Ireland_, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact,\r
-handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said _Thank you_,\r
-excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid exterior notwithstanding\r
-the little misadventure mentioned between the cup and the lip: what's\r
-bred in the bone. Still as regards return. You were a lucky dog if\r
-they didn't set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of\r
-shillyshally usually followed, Tom for and Dick and Harry against. And\r
-then, number one, you came up against the man in possession and had to\r
-produce your credentials like the claimant in the Tichborne case,\r
-Roger Charles Tichborne, _Bella_ was the boat's name to the best of his\r
-recollection he, the heir, went down in as the evidence went to show\r
-and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, lord Bellew was it, as he\r
-might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship\r
-and then, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce\r
-himself with: _Excuse me, my name is So and So_ or some such commonplace\r
-remark. A more prudent course, as Bloom said to the not over effusive,\r
-in fact like the distinguished personage under discussion beside him,\r
-would have been to sound the lie of the land first.\r
-\r
---That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor\r
-commented. She put the first nail in his coffin.\r
-\r
---Fine lump of a woman all the same, the _soi-disant_ townclerk Henry\r
-Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. She loosened many a man's thighs.\r
-I seen her picture in a barber's. The husband was a captain or an\r
-officer.\r
-\r
---Ay, Skin-the-Goat amusingly added, he was and a cottonball one.\r
-\r
-This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character occasioned a fair\r
-amount of laughter among his _entourage_. As regards Bloom he, without\r
-the faintest suspicion of a smile, merely gazed in the direction of\r
-the door and reflected upon the historic story which had aroused\r
-extraordinary interest at the time when the facts, to make matters\r
-worse, were made public with the usual affectionate letters that passed\r
-between them full of sweet nothings. First it was strictly Platonic till\r
-nature intervened and an attachment sprang up between them till bit by\r
-bit matters came to a climax and the matter became the talk of the town\r
-till the staggering blow came as a welcome intelligence to not a few\r
-evildisposed, however, who were resolved upon encompassing his downfall\r
-though the thing was public property all along though not to anything\r
-like the sensational extent that it subsequently blossomed into. Since\r
-their names were coupled, though, since he was her declared favourite,\r
-where was the particular necessity to proclaim it to the rank and file\r
-from the housetops, the fact, namely, that he had shared her bedroom\r
-which came out in the witnessbox on oath when a thrill went through the\r
-packed court literally electrifying everybody in the shape of witnesses\r
-swearing to having witnessed him on such and such a particular date in\r
-the act of scrambling out of an upstairs apartment with the assistance\r
-of a ladder in night apparel, having gained admittance in the same\r
-fashion, a fact the weeklies, addicted to the lubric a little, simply\r
-coined shoals of money out of. Whereas the simple fact of the case was\r
-it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch, with\r
-nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man\r
-arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim\r
-to her siren charms and forgetting home ties, the usual sequel, to bask\r
-in the loved one's smiles. The eternal question of the life connubial,\r
-needless to say, cropped up. Can real love, supposing there happens to\r
-be another chap in the case, exist between married folk? Poser.\r
-Though it was no concern of theirs absolutely if he regarded her with\r
-affection, carried away by a wave of folly. A magnificent specimen of\r
-manhood he was truly augmented obviously by gifts of a high order, as\r
-compared with the other military supernumerary that is (who was just the\r
-usual everyday _farewell, my gallant captain_ kind of an individual in\r
-the light dragoons, the 18th hussars to be accurate) and inflammable\r
-doubtless (the fallen leader, that is, not the other) in his own\r
-peculiar way which she of course, woman, quickly perceived as highly\r
-likely to carve his way to fame which he almost bid fair to do till the\r
-priests and ministers of the gospel as a whole, his erstwhile staunch\r
-adherents, and his beloved evicted tenants for whom he had done yeoman\r
-service in the rural parts of the country by taking up the cudgels on\r
-their behalf in a way that exceeded their most sanguine expectations,\r
-very effectually cooked his matrimonial goose, thereby heaping coals of\r
-fire on his head much in the same way as the fabled ass's kick. Looking\r
-back now in a retrospective kind of arrangement all seemed a kind of\r
-dream. And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did because it\r
-went without saying you would feel out of place as things always moved\r
-with the times. Why, as he reflected, Irishtown strand, a locality he\r
-had not been in for quite a number of years looked different somehow\r
-since, as it happened, he went to reside on the north side. North or\r
-south, however, it was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and\r
-simple, upsetting the applecart with a vengeance and just bore out the\r
-very thing he was saying as she also was Spanish or half so, types that\r
-wouldn't do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting\r
-every shred of decency to the winds.\r
-\r
---Just bears out what I was saying, he, with glowing bosom said to\r
-Stephen, about blood and the sun. And, if I don't greatly mistake she\r
-was Spanish too.\r
-\r
---The king of Spain's daughter, Stephen answered, adding something or\r
-other rather muddled about farewell and adieu to you Spanish onions and\r
-the first land called the Deadman and from Ramhead to Scilly was so and\r
-so many.\r
-\r
---Was she? Bloom ejaculated, surprised though not astonished by any\r
-means, I never heard that rumour before. Possible, especially there, it\r
-was as she lived there. So, Spain.\r
-\r
-Carefully avoiding a book in his pocket _Sweets of_, which reminded him\r
-by the by of that Cap l street library book out of date, he took out his\r
-pocketbook and, turning over the various contents it contained rapidly\r
-finally he.\r
-\r
---Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded\r
-photo which he laid on the table, that a Spanish type?\r
-\r
-Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large\r
-sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she\r
-was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously\r
-low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than\r
-vision of breasts, her full lips parted and some perfect teeth, standing\r
-near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was _In Old\r
-Madrid_, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her\r
-(the lady's) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about\r
-something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin's\r
-premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic\r
-execution.\r
-\r
---Mrs Bloom, my wife the _prima donna_ Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom\r
-indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about ninety six. Very like\r
-her then.\r
-\r
-Beside the young man he looked also at the photo of the lady now his\r
-1440 legal wife who, he intimated, was the accomplished daughter of\r
-Major Brian Tweedy and displayed at an early age remarkable proficiency\r
-as a singer having even made her bow to the public when her years\r
-numbered barely sweet sixteen. As for the face it was a speaking\r
-likeness in expression but it did not do justice to her figure which\r
-came in for a lot of notice usually and which did not come out to the\r
-best advantage in that getup. She could without difficulty, he said,\r
-have posed for the ensemble, not to dwell on certain opulent curves of\r
-the. He dwelt, being a bit of an artist in his spare time, on the female\r
-form in general developmentally because, as it so happened, no later\r
-than that afternoon he had seen those Grecian statues, 1450 perfectly\r
-developed as works of art, in the National Museum. Marble could give\r
-the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry, all the rest. Yes,\r
-puritanisme, it does though Saint Joseph's sovereign thievery alors\r
-(Bandez!) Figne toi trop. Whereas no photo could because it simply\r
-wasn't art in a word.\r
-\r
-The spirit moving him he would much have liked to follow Jack Tar's good\r
-example and leave the likeness there for a very few minutes to speak for\r
-itself on the plea he so that the other could drink in the beauty for\r
-himself, her stage presence being, frankly, a treat in itself which the\r
-camera could not at all do justice to. But it was scarcely professional\r
-etiquette so. Though it was a warm pleasant sort of a night now yet\r
-wonderfully cool for the season considering, for sunshine after storm.\r
-And he did feel a kind of need there and then to follow suit like a\r
-kind of inward voice and satisfy a possible need by moving a motion.\r
-Nevertheless he sat tight just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased\r
-by opulent curves, none the worse for wear however, and looked away\r
-thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the\r
-other's possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving\r
-_embonpoint_. In fact the slight soiling was only an added charm like\r
-the case of linen slightly soiled, good as new, much better in fact\r
-with the starch out. Suppose she was gone when he? I looked for the lamp\r
-which she told me came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of\r
-his because he then recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and\r
-the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses (_sic_) in it which must\r
-have fell down sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot\r
-with apologies to Lindley Murray.\r
-\r
-The vicinity of the young man he certainly relished, educated,\r
-_distingué_ and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the\r
-bunch though you wouldn't think he had it in him yet you would. Besides\r
-he said the picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was though\r
-at the moment she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of\r
-makebelieve went on about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur\r
-with the usual splash page of gutterpress about the same old matrimonial\r
-tangle alleging misconduct with professional golfer or the newest\r
-stage favourite instead of being honest and aboveboard about the whole\r
-business. How they were fated to meet and an attachment sprang up\r
-between the two so that their names were coupled in the public eye\r
-was told in court with letters containing the habitual mushy and\r
-compromising expressions leaving no loophole to show that they openly\r
-cohabited two or three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and\r
-relations, when the thing ran its normal course, became in due course\r
-intimate. Then the decree _nisi_ and the King's proctor tries to show\r
-cause why and, he failing to quash it, _nisi_ was made absolute. But as\r
-for that the two misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one\r
-another, could safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till\r
-the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor who filed a petition for\r
-the party wronged in due course. He, B, enjoyed the distinction of being\r
-close to Erin's uncrowned king in the flesh when the thing occurred on\r
-the historic _fracas_ when the fallen leader's, who notoriously stuck to\r
-his guns to the last drop even when clothed in the mantle of adultery,\r
-(leader's) trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a dozen or\r
-possibly even more than that penetrated into the printing works of the\r
-_Insuppressible_ or no it was _United Ireland_ (a by no means by the\r
-by appropriate appellative) and broke up the typecases with hammers or\r
-something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from\r
-the facile pens of the O'Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging\r
-occupation reflecting on the erstwhile tribune's private morals. Though\r
-palpably a radically altered man he was still a commanding figure though\r
-carelessly garbed as usual with that look of settled purpose which went\r
-a long way with the shillyshallyers till they discovered to their vast\r
-discomfiture that their idol had feet of clay after placing him upon a\r
-pedestal which she, however, was the first to perceive. As those were\r
-particularly hot times in the general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a\r
-minor injury from a nasty prod of some chap's elbow in the crowd that\r
-of course congregated lodging some place about the pit of the stomach,\r
-fortunately not of a grave character. His hat (Parnell's) a silk one was\r
-inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was\r
-the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence\r
-meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost\r
-celerity) who panting and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away\r
-from his hat at the time all the same being a gentleman born with a\r
-stake in the country he, as a matter of fact, having gone into it more\r
-for the kudos of the thing than anything else, what's bred in the bone\r
-instilled into him in infancy at his mother's knee in the shape of\r
-knowing what good form was came out at once because he turned round to\r
-the donor and thanked him with perfect _aplomb_, saying: _Thank you,\r
-sir_, though in a very different tone of voice from the ornament of the\r
-legal profession whose headgear Bloom also set to rights earlier in the\r
-course of the day, history repeating itself with a difference, after\r
-the burial of a mutual friend when they had left him alone in his glory\r
-after the grim task of having committed his remains to the grave.\r
-\r
-On the other hand what incensed him more inwardly was the blatant jokes\r
-of the cabman and so on who passed it all off as a jest, laughing 1530\r
-immoderately, pretending to understand everything, the why and the\r
-wherefore, and in reality not knowing their own minds, it being a case\r
-for the two parties themselves unless it ensued that the legitimate\r
-husband happened to be a party to it owing to some anonymous letter from\r
-the usual boy Jones, who happened to come across them at the crucial\r
-moment in a loving position locked in one another's arms, drawing\r
-attention to their illicit proceedings and leading up to a domestic\r
-rumpus and the erring fair one begging forgiveness of her lord and\r
-master upon her knees and promising to sever the connection and not\r
-receive his visits any more if only the aggrieved husband would overlook\r
-the matter and let bygones be bygones with tears in her eyes though\r
-possibly with her tongue in her fair cheek at the same time as quite\r
-possibly there were several others. He personally, being of a sceptical\r
-bias, believed and didn't make the smallest bones about saying so either\r
-that man or men in the plural were always hanging around on the waiting\r
-list about a lady, even supposing she was the best wife in the world\r
-and they got on fairly well together for the sake of argument, when,\r
-neglecting her duties, she chose to be tired of wedded life and was on\r
-for a little flutter in polite debauchery to press their attentions on\r
-her with improper intent, the upshot being that her affections centred\r
-on another, the cause of many _liaisons_ between still attractive\r
-married women getting on for fair and forty and younger men, no doubt as\r
-several famous cases of feminine infatuation proved up to the hilt.\r
-\r
-It was a thousand pities a young fellow, blessed with an allowance of\r
-brains as his neighbour obviously was, should waste his valuable time\r
-with profligate women who might present him with a nice dose to last him\r
-his lifetime. In the nature of single blessedness he would one day take\r
-unto himself a wife when Miss Right came on the scene but in the interim\r
-ladies' society was a _conditio sine qua non_ though he had the gravest\r
-possible doubts, not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen\r
-about Miss Ferguson (who was very possibly the particular lodestar who\r
-brought him down to Irishtown so early in the morning), as to whether he\r
-would find much satisfaction basking in the boy and girl courtship idea\r
-and the company of smirking misses without a penny to their names bi or\r
-triweekly with the orthodox preliminary canter of complimentplaying and\r
-walking out leading up to fond lovers' ways and flowers and chocs. To\r
-think of him house and homeless, rooked by some landlady worse than any\r
-stepmother, was really too bad at his age. The queer suddenly things\r
-he popped out with attracted the elder man who was several years the\r
-other's senior or like his father but something substantial he certainly\r
-ought to eat even were it only an eggflip made on unadulterated maternal\r
-nutriment or, failing that, the homely Humpty Dumpty boiled.\r
-\r
---At what o'clock did you dine? he questioned of the slim form and tired\r
-though unwrinkled face.\r
-\r
---Some time yesterday, Stephen said.\r
-\r
---Yesterday! exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow\r
-Friday. Ah, you mean it's after twelve!\r
-\r
---The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself.\r
-\r
-Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence Bloom reflected.\r
-Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy there\r
-somehow was as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the\r
-one train of thought. At his age when dabbling in politics roughly\r
-some score of years previously when he had been a _quasi_ aspirant to\r
-parliamentary honours in the Buckshot Foster days he too recollected in\r
-retrospect (which was a source of keen satisfaction in itself) he had\r
-a sneaking regard for those same ultra ideas. For instance when the\r
-evicted tenants question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in\r
-people's mind though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper\r
-or pinning his faith absolutely to its dictums, some of which wouldn't\r
-exactly hold water, he at the outset in principle at all events was in\r
-thorough sympathy with peasant possession as voicing the trend of modern\r
-opinion (a partiality, however, which, realising his mistake, he was\r
-subsequently partially cured of) and even was twitted with going a\r
-step farther than Michael Davitt in the striking views he at one time\r
-inculcated as a backtothelander, which was one reason he strongly\r
-resented the innuendo put upon him in so barefaced a fashion by our\r
-friend at the gathering of the clans in Barney Kiernan's so that he,\r
-though often considerably misunderstood and the least pugnacious of\r
-mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give\r
-him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though, so far as politics\r
-themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties\r
-invariably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity\r
-and the misery and suffering it entailed as a foregone conclusion on\r
-fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word.\r
-\r
-Anyhow upon weighing up the pros and cons, getting on for one, as it\r
-was, it was high time to be retiring for the night. The crux was it\r
-was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue\r
-(somebody having a temper of her own sometimes) and spoil the hash\r
-altogether as on the night he misguidedly brought home a dog (breed\r
-unknown) with a lame paw (not that the cases were either identical or\r
-the reverse though he had hurt his hand too) to Ontario Terrace as he\r
-very distinctly remembered, having been there, so to speak. On the\r
-other hand it was altogether far and away too late for the Sandymount\r
-or Sandycove suggestion so that he was in some perplexity as to which of\r
-the two alternatives. Everything pointed to the fact that it behoved him\r
-to avail himself to the full of the opportunity, all things considered.\r
-His initial impression was he was a shade standoffish or not over\r
-effusive but it grew on him someway. For one thing he mightn't what you\r
-call jump at the idea, if approached, and what mostly worried him was\r
-he didn't know how to lead up to it or word it exactly, supposing he\r
-did entertain the proposal, as it would afford him very great personal\r
-pleasure if he would allow him to help to put coin in his way or some\r
-wardrobe, if found suitable. At all events he wound up by concluding,\r
-eschewing for the nonce hidebound precedent, a cup of Epps's cocoa and\r
-a shakedown for the night plus the use of a rug or two and overcoat\r
-doubled into a pillow at least he would be in safe hands and as warm as\r
-a toast on a trivet he failed to perceive any very vast amount of harm\r
-in that always with the proviso no rumpus of any sort was kicked up.\r
-A move had to be made because that merry old soul, the grasswidower\r
-in question who appeared to be glued to the spot, didn't appear in any\r
-particular hurry to wend his way home to his dearly beloved Queenstown\r
-and it was highly likely some sponger's bawdyhouse of retired beauties\r
-where age was no bar off Sheriff street lower would be the best clue\r
-to that equivocal character's whereabouts for a few days to come,\r
-alternately racking their feelings (the mermaids') with sixchamber\r
-revolver anecdotes verging on the tropical calculated to freeze\r
-the marrow of anybody's bones and mauling their largesized charms\r
-betweenwhiles with rough and tumble gusto to the accompaniment of large\r
-potations of potheen and the usual blarney about himself for as to who\r
-he in reality was let x equal my right name and address, as Mr Algebra\r
-remarks _passim_. At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his gentle\r
-repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his god being a jew.\r
-People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled\r
-them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender\r
-Achilles. Your god was a jew. Because mostly they appeared to imagine he\r
-came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhereabouts in the county Sligo.\r
-\r
---I propose, our hero eventually suggested after mature reflection while\r
-prudently pocketing her photo, as it's rather stuffy here you just come\r
-home with me and talk things over. My diggings are quite close in the\r
-vicinity. You can't drink that stuff. Do you like cocoa? Wait. I'll just\r
-pay this lot.\r
-\r
-The best plan clearly being to clear out, the remainder being plain\r
-sailing, he beckoned, while prudently pocketing the photo, to the keeper\r
-of the shanty who didn't seem to.\r
-\r
---Yes, that's the best, he assured Stephen to whom for the matter of\r
-that Brazen Head or him or anywhere else was all more or less.\r
-\r
-All kinds of Utopian plans were flashing through his (B's) busy brain,\r
-education (the genuine article), literature, journalism, prize titbits,\r
-up to date billing, concert tours in English watering resorts packed\r
-with hydros and seaside theatres, turning money away, duets in Italian\r
-with the accent perfectly true to nature and a quantity of other\r
-things, no necessity, of course, to tell the world and his wife from the\r
-housetops about it, and a slice of luck. An opening was all was wanted.\r
-Because he more than suspected he had his father's voice to bank his\r
-hopes on which it was quite on the cards he had so it would be just as\r
-well, by the way no harm, to trail the conversation in the direction of\r
-that particular red herring just to.\r
-\r
-The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former\r
-viceroy, earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers' association\r
-dinner in London somewhere. Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this\r
-thrilling announcement. Then the old specimen in the corner who appeared\r
-to have some spark of vitality left read out that sir Anthony MacDonnell\r
-had left Euston for the chief secretary's lodge or words to that effect.\r
-To which absorbing piece of intelligence echo answered why.\r
-\r
---Give us a squint at that literature, grandfather, the ancient mariner\r
-put in, manifesting some natural impatience.\r
-\r
---And welcome, answered the elderly party thus addressed.\r
-\r
-The sailor lugged out from a case he had a pair of greenish goggles\r
-which he very slowly hooked over his nose and both ears.\r
-\r
---Are you bad in the eyes? the sympathetic personage like the townclerk\r
-queried.\r
-\r
---Why, answered the seafarer with the tartan beard, who seemingly was\r
-a bit of a literary cove in his own small way, staring out of seagreen\r
-portholes as you might well describe them as, I uses goggles reading.\r
-Sand in the Red Sea done that. One time I could read a book in the dark,\r
-manner of speaking. _The Arabian Nights Entertainment_ was my favourite\r
-and _Red as a Rose is She._\r
-\r
-Hereupon he pawed the journal open and pored upon Lord only knows what,\r
-found drowned or the exploits of King Willow, Iremonger having made a\r
-hundred and something second wicket not out for Notts, during which\r
-time (completely regardless of Ire) the keeper was intensely occupied\r
-loosening an apparently new or secondhand boot which manifestly pinched\r
-him as he muttered against whoever it was sold it, all of them who were\r
-sufficiently awake enough to be picked out by their facial expressions,\r
-that is to say, either simply looking on glumly or passing a trivial\r
-remark.\r
-\r
-To cut a long story short Bloom, grasping the situation, was the first\r
-to rise from his seat so as not to outstay their welcome having first\r
-and foremost, being as good as his word that he would foot the bill for\r
-the occasion, taken the wise precaution to unobtrusively motion to mine\r
-host as a parting shot a scarcely perceptible sign when the others were\r
-not looking to the effect that the amount due was forthcoming, making a\r
-grand total of fourpence (the amount he deposited unobtrusively in\r
-four coppers, literally the last of the Mohicans), he having previously\r
-spotted on the printed pricelist for all who ran to read opposite him\r
-in unmistakable figures, coffee 2d, confectionery do, and honestly well\r
-worth twice the money once in a way, as Wetherup used to remark.\r
-\r
---Come, he counselled to close the _séance_.\r
-\r
-Seeing that the ruse worked and the coast was clear they left the\r
-shelter or shanty together and the _élite_ society of oilskin and\r
-company whom nothing short of an earthquake would move out of their\r
-_dolce far niente_. Stephen, who confessed to still feeling poorly and\r
-fagged out, paused at the, for a moment, the door.\r
-\r
---One thing I never understood, he said to be original on the spur of\r
-the moment. Why they put tables upside down at night, I mean chairs\r
-upside down, on the tables in cafes. To which impromptu the neverfailing\r
-Bloom replied without a moment's hesitation, saying straight off:\r
-\r
---To sweep the floor in the morning.\r
-\r
-So saying he skipped around, nimbly considering, frankly at the same\r
-time apologetic to get on his companion's right, a habit of his, by the\r
-bye, his right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles. The\r
-night air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit\r
-weak on his pins.\r
-\r
---It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in\r
-a moment. The only thing is to walk then you'll feel a different man.\r
-Come. It's not far. Lean on me.\r
-\r
-Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen's right and led him on\r
-accordingly.\r
-\r
---Yes, Stephen said uncertainly because he thought he felt a strange\r
-kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and\r
-all that.\r
-\r
-Anyhow they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier etc. where\r
-the municipal supernumerary, ex Gumley, was still to all intents and\r
-purposes wrapped in the arms of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming\r
-of fresh fields and pastures new. And _apropos_ of coffin of stones the\r
-analogy was not at all bad as it was in fact a stoning to death on the\r
-part of seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that ratted at the\r
-time of the split and chiefly the belauded peasant class, probably the\r
-selfsame evicted tenants he had put in their holdings.\r
-\r
-So they turned on to chatting about music, a form of art for which\r
-Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made\r
-tracks arm in arm across Beresford place. Wagnerian music, though\r
-confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to\r
-follow at the first go-off but the music of Mercadante's _Huguenots_,\r
-Meyerbeer's _Seven Last Words on the Cross_ and Mozart's _Twelfth Mass_\r
-he simply revelled in, the _Gloria_ in that being, to his mind, the acme\r
-of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into\r
-a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the sacred music of the catholic\r
-church to anything the opposite shop could offer in that line such as\r
-those Moody and Sankey hymns or _Bid me to live and i will live\r
-thy protestant to be_. He also yielded to none in his admiration of\r
-Rossini's _Stabat Mater_, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers,\r
-in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable\r
-sensation, he might safely say, greatly adding to her other laureis and\r
-putting the others totally in the shade, in the jesuit fathers' church\r
-in upper Gardiner street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the\r
-doors to hear her with virtuosos, or _virtuosi_ rather. There was the\r
-unanimous opinion that there was none to come up to her and suffice it\r
-to say in a place of worship for music of a sacred character there was\r
-a generally voiced desire for an encore. On the whole though favouring\r
-preferably light opera of the _Don Giovanni_ description and _Martha_,\r
-a gem in its line, he had a _penchant_, though with only a surface\r
-knowledge, for the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn. And\r
-talking of that, taking it for granted he knew all about the old\r
-favourites, he mentioned _par excellence_ Lionel's air in _Martha,\r
-M'appari_, which, curiously enough, he had heard or overheard, to be\r
-more accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the\r
-lips of Stephen's respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the\r
-number, in fact, which made all the others take a back seat. Stephen, in\r
-reply to a politely put query, said he didn't sing it but launched\r
-out into praises of Shakespeare's songs, at least of in or about that\r
-period, the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter lane near Gerard the\r
-herbalist, who _anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus_, an instrument he was\r
-contemplating purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch, whom B. did not quite\r
-recall though the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixtyfive guineas\r
-and Farnaby and son with their _dux_ and _comes_ conceits and Byrd\r
-(William) who played the virginals, he said, in the Queen's chapel or\r
-anywhere else he found them and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and\r
-John Bull.\r
-\r
-On the roadway which they were approaching whilst still speaking beyond\r
-the swingchains a horse, dragging a sweeper, paced on the paven ground,\r
-brushing a long swathe of mire up so that with the noise Bloom was not\r
-perfectly certain whether he had caught aright the allusion to sixtyfive\r
-guineas and John Bull. He inquired if it was John Bull the political\r
-celebrity of that ilk, as it struck him, the two identical names, as a\r
-striking coincidence.\r
-\r
-By the chains the horse slowly swerved to turn, which perceiving, Bloom,\r
-who was keeping a sharp lookout as usual, plucked the other's sleeve\r
-gently, jocosely remarking:\r
-\r
---Our lives are in peril tonight. Beware of the steamroller.\r
-\r
-They thereupon stopped. Bloom looked at the head of a horse not worth\r
-anything like sixtyfive guineas, suddenly in evidence in the dark quite\r
-near so that it seemed new, a different grouping of bones and even flesh\r
-because palpably it was a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a\r
-taildangler, a headhanger putting his hind foot foremost the while the\r
-lord of his creation sat on the perch, busy with his thoughts. But such\r
-a good poor brute he was sorry he hadn't a lump of sugar but, as he\r
-wisely reflected, you could scarcely be prepared for every emergency\r
-that might crop up. He was just a big nervous foolish noodly kind of a\r
-horse, without a second care in the world. But even a dog, he reflected,\r
-take that mongrel in Barney Kiernan's, of the same size, would be a holy\r
-horror to face. But it was no animal's fault in particular if he was\r
-built that way like the camel, ship of the desert, distilling grapes\r
-into potheen in his hump. Nine tenths of them all could be caged or\r
-trained, nothing beyond the art of man barring the bees. Whale with a\r
-harpoon hairpin, alligator tickle the small of his back and he sees the\r
-joke, chalk a circle for a rooster, tiger my eagle eye. These timely\r
-reflections anent the brutes of the field occupied his mind somewhat\r
-distracted from Stephen's words while the ship of the street was\r
-manoeuvring and Stephen went on about the highly interesting old.\r
-\r
---What's this I was saying? Ah, yes! My wife, he intimated, plunging\r
-_in medias res_, would have the greatest of pleasure in making your\r
-acquaintance as she is passionately attached to music of any kind.\r
-\r
-He looked sideways in a friendly fashion at the sideface of Stephen,\r
-image of his mother, which was not quite the same as the usual handsome\r
-blackguard type they unquestionably had an insatiable hankering after as\r
-he was perhaps not that way built.\r
-\r
-Still, supposing he had his father's gift as he more than suspected,\r
-it opened up new vistas in his mind such as Lady Fingall's Irish\r
-industries, concert on the preceding Monday, and aristocracy in general.\r
-\r
-Exquisite variations he was now describing on an air _Youth here has\r
-End_ by Jans Pieter Sweelinck, a Dutchman of Amsterdam where the frows\r
-come from. Even more he liked an old German song of _Johannes Jeep_\r
-about the clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men,\r
-which boggled Bloom a bit:\r
-\r
- _Von der Sirenen Listigkeit\r
- Tun die Poeten dichten._\r
-\r
-These opening bars he sang and translated _extempore_. Bloom, nodding,\r
-said he perfectly understood and begged him to go on by all means which\r
-he did.\r
-\r
-A phenomenally beautiful tenor voice like that, the rarest of boons,\r
-which Bloom appreciated at the very first note he got out, could easily,\r
-if properly handled by some recognised authority on voice production\r
-such as Barraclough and being able to read music into the bargain,\r
-command its own price where baritones were ten a penny and procure for\r
-its fortunate possessor in the near future an _entrée_ into fashionable\r
-houses in the best residential quarters of financial magnates in a large\r
-way of business and titled people where with his university degree of\r
-B. A. (a huge ad in its way) and gentlemanly bearing to all the more\r
-influence the good impression he would infallibly score a distinct\r
-success, being blessed with brains which also could be utilised for the\r
-purpose and other requisites, if his clothes were properly attended\r
-to so as to the better worm his way into their good graces as he, a\r
-youthful tyro in--society's sartorial niceties, hardly understood how a\r
-little thing like that could militate against you. It was in fact only a\r
-matter of months and he could easily foresee him participating in their\r
-musical and artistic _conversaziones_ during the festivities of the\r
-Christmas season, for choice, causing a slight flutter in the dovecotes\r
-of the fair sex and being made a lot of by ladies out for sensation,\r
-cases of which, as he happened to know, were on record--in fact, without\r
-giving the show away, he himself once upon a time, if he cared to, could\r
-easily have. Added to which of course would be the pecuniary emolument\r
-by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition\r
-fees. Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need\r
-necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy\r
-space of time. But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or\r
-nay and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his\r
-dignity in the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to\r
-be handed a cheque at a muchneeded moment when every little helped.\r
-Besides, though taste latterly had deteriorated to a degree, original\r
-music like that, different from the conventional rut, would rapidly\r
-have a great vogue as it would be a decided novelty for Dublin's musical\r
-world after the usual hackneyed run of catchy tenor solos foisted on a\r
-confiding public by Ivan St Austell and Hilton St Just and their _genus\r
-omne_. Yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt he could with all the cards in\r
-his hand and he had a capital opening to make a name for himself and win\r
-a high place in the city's esteem where he could command a stiff figure\r
-and, booking ahead, give a grand concert for the patrons of the King\r
-street house, given a backerup, if one were forthcoming to kick him\r
-upstairs, so to speak, a big _if_, however, with some impetus of the\r
-goahead sort to obviate the inevitable procrastination which often\r
-tripped-up a too much fêted prince of good fellows. And it need not\r
-detract from the other by one iota as, being his own master, he would\r
-have heaps of time to practise literature in his spare moments when\r
-desirous of so doing without its clashing with his vocal career or\r
-containing anything derogatory whatsoever as it was a matter for himself\r
-alone. In fact, he had the ball at his feet and that was the very reason\r
-why the other, possessed of a remarkably sharp nose for smelling a rat\r
-of any sort, hung on to him at all.\r
-\r
-The horse was just then. And later on at a propitious opportunity he\r
-purposed (Bloom did), without anyway prying into his private affairs on\r
-the _fools step in where angels_ principle, advising him to sever his\r
-connection with a certain budding practitioner who, he noticed, was\r
-prone to disparage and even to a slight extent with some hilarious\r
-pretext when not present, deprecate him, or whatever you like to call it\r
-which in Bloom's humble opinion threw a nasty sidelight on that side of\r
-a person's character, no pun intended.\r
-\r
-The horse having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted and,\r
-rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on\r
-the floor which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking\r
-globes of turds. Slowly three times, one after another, from a full\r
-crupper he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had\r
-ended, patient in his scythed car.\r
-\r
-Side by side Bloom, profiting by the _contretemps_, with Stephen passed\r
-through the gap of the chains, divided by the upright, and, stepping\r
-over a strand of mire, went across towards Gardiner street lower,\r
-Stephen singing more boldly, but not loudly, the end of the ballad.\r
-\r
-_Und alle Schiffe brücken._\r
-\r
-The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely\r
-watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black,\r
-one full, one lean, walk towards the railway bridge, _to be married by\r
-Father Maher_. As they walked they at times stopped and walked again\r
-continuing their _tête-à-tête_ (which, of course, he was utterly out\r
-of) about sirens enemies of man's reason, mingled with a number of other\r
-topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind\r
-while the man in the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the\r
-sleeper car who in any case couldn't possibly hear because they were too\r
-far simply sat in his seat near the end of lower Gardiner street _and\r
-looked after their lowbacked car_.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?\r
-\r
-Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they\r
-followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and\r
-Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left,\r
-Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of\r
-Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing\r
-right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching,\r
-disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before\r
-George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than\r
-the arc which it subtends.\r
-\r
-\r
-Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?\r
-\r
-Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman,\r
-prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and\r
-glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed\r
-corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church,\r
-ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers,\r
-the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the\r
-presabbath, Stephen's collapse.\r
-\r
-Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective\r
-like and unlike reactions to experience?\r
-\r
-Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, musical in preference to\r
-plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner\r
-of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both\r
-indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of\r
-heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox\r
-religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted\r
-the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual\r
-magnetism.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were their views on some points divergent?\r
-\r
-Stephen dissented openly from Bloom's views on the importance of dietary\r
-and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen's views\r
-on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature. Bloom\r
-assented covertly to Stephen's rectification of the anachronism\r
-involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to\r
-christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus,\r
-son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of\r
-Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt (died\r
-266 A.D.), suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment at Sletty\r
-and interred at Rossnaree. The collapse which Bloom ascribed to\r
-gastric inanition and certain chemical compounds of varying degrees of\r
-adulteration and alcoholic strength, accelerated by mental exertion and\r
-the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere, Stephen\r
-attributed to the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both\r
-from two different points of observation Sandycove and Dublin) at first\r
-no bigger than a woman's hand.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?\r
-\r
-The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining\r
-paraheliotropic trees.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in\r
-the past?\r
-\r
-In 1884 with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public\r
-thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard's corner and Leonard's\r
-corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield avenue.\r
-\r
-In 1885 with Percy Apjohn in the evenings, reclined against the wall\r
-between Gibraltar villa and Bloomfield house in Crumlin, barony\r
-of Uppercross. In 1886 occasionally with casual acquaintances and\r
-prospective purchasers on doorsteps, in front parlours, in third class\r
-railway carriages of suburban lines. In 1888 frequently with major Brian\r
-Tweedy and his daughter Miss Marion Tweedy, together and separately on\r
-the lounge in Matthew Dillon's house in Roundtown. Once in 1892 and once\r
-in 1893 with Julius (Juda) Mastiansky, on both occasions in the parlour\r
-of his (Bloom's) house in Lombard street, west.\r
-\r
-\r
-What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885,\r
-1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at\r
-their destination?\r
-\r
-He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual\r
-development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction\r
-of the converse domain of interindividual relations.\r
-\r
-\r
-As in what ways?\r
-\r
-From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received:\r
-existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence\r
-to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.\r
-\r
-What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?\r
-\r
-At the housesteps of the 4th Of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number\r
-7 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket\r
-of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was it there?\r
-\r
-It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on\r
-the day but one preceding.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why was he doubly irritated?\r
-\r
-Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded\r
-himself twice not to forget.\r
-\r
-\r
-What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly\r
-(respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?\r
-\r
-To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.\r
-\r
-\r
-Bloom's decision?\r
-\r
-A stratagem. Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the\r
-area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at\r
-the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its\r
-length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches\r
-of the area pavement and allowed his body to move freely in space by\r
-separating himself from the railings and crouching in preparation for\r
-the impact of the fall.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he fall?\r
-\r
-By his body's known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in\r
-avoirdupois measure, as certified by the graduated machine for\r
-periodical selfweighing in the premises of Francis Froedman,\r
-pharmaceutical chemist of 19 Frederick street, north, on the last feast\r
-of the Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year\r
-one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era (jewish era five\r
-thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three\r
-hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9,\r
-dominical letters C B, Roman indiction 2, Julian period 6617, MCMIV.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he rise uninjured by concussion?\r
-\r
-Regaining new stable equilibrium he rose uninjured though concussed by\r
-the impact, raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force\r
-at its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied\r
-at its fulcrum, gained retarded access to the kitchen through the\r
-subadjacent scullery, ignited a lucifer match by friction, set free\r
-inflammable coal gas by turningon the ventcock, lit a high flame which,\r
-by regulating, he reduced to quiescent candescence and lit finally a\r
-portable candle.\r
-\r
-\r
-What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?\r
-\r
-Reclined against the area railings he perceived through the transparent\r
-kitchen panes a man regulating a gasflame of 14 CP, a man lighting a\r
-candle of 1 CP, a man removing in turn each of his two boots, a man\r
-leaving the kitchen holding a candle.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did the man reappear elsewhere?\r
-\r
-After a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible\r
-through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the\r
-halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space\r
-of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did Stephen obey his sign?\r
-\r
-Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed\r
-softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted\r
-candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down\r
-a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's\r
-house.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did Bloom do?\r
-\r
-He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its\r
-flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for\r
-Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when\r
-necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid\r
-resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons\r
-of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs\r
-Flower and M'Donald of 14 D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting\r
-points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing\r
-the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and\r
-hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.\r
-\r
-\r
-Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?\r
-\r
-Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two,\r
-had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the\r
-college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the\r
-county of Kildare: of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room\r
-of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street:\r
-of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss\r
-Julia Morkan at 15 Usher's Island: of his aunt Sara, wife of Richie\r
-(Richard) Goulding, in the kitchen of their lodgings at 62 Clanbrassil\r
-street: of his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of\r
-number twelve North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of\r
-Saint Francis Xavier 1898: of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the\r
-physics' theatre of university College, 16 Stephen's Green, north: of\r
-his sister Dilly (Delia) in his father's house in Cabra.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from\r
-the fire towards the opposite wall?\r
-\r
-Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope,\r
-stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the\r
-chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs\r
-folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of\r
-ladies' grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual\r
-position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer\r
-extremities and the third at their point of junction.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did Bloom see on the range?\r
-\r
-On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left\r
-(larger) hob a black iron kettle.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did Bloom do at the range?\r
-\r
-He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron\r
-kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to\r
-let it flow.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did it flow?\r
-\r
-Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of\r
-2400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of\r
-filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial\r
-plant cost of 5 pounds per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown,\r
-Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan,\r
-a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of\r
-relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at\r
-Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth\r
-and daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below\r
-the sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and\r
-waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E., on the instructions of\r
-the waterworks committee had prohibited the use of municipal water for\r
-purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of\r
-recourse being had to the impotable water of the Grand and Royal canals\r
-as in 1893) particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding\r
-their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch\r
-meter, had been convicted of a wastage of 20,000 gallons per night by\r
-a reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of\r
-the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the\r
-detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers,\r
-solvent, sound.\r
-\r
-What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier,\r
-returning to the range, admire?\r
-\r
-Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature\r
-in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's\r
-projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific\r
-exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface\r
-particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence\r
-of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic\r
-quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides:\r
-its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar\r
-icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance:\r
-its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its\r
-indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region\r
-below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability\r
-of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve\r
-and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of\r
-tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and\r
-islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas\r
-and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and\r
-volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns:\r
-its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones:\r
-its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and\r
-confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic\r
-currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence\r
-in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies,\r
-freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers,\r
-cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts:\r
-its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and\r
-latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments\r
-and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown\r
-gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its\r
-composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part\r
-of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead\r
-Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate\r
-dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst\r
-and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and\r
-paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow,\r
-hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs\r
-and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and\r
-archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and\r
-arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility\r
-in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power\r
-stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals,\r
-rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality\r
-derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level\r
-to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe),\r
-numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its\r
-ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness\r
-of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded\r
-flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.\r
-\r
-\r
-Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he\r
-return to the stillflowing tap?\r
-\r
-To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of\r
-Barrington's lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered, (bought\r
-thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh\r
-cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a\r
-long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.\r
-\r
-\r
-What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom's offer?\r
-\r
-That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by\r
-submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month\r
-of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of\r
-glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.\r
-\r
-\r
-What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and\r
-prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a\r
-preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with\r
-rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region\r
-in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most\r
-sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?\r
-\r
-The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.\r
-\r
-\r
-What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?\r
-\r
-Dietary: concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric\r
-energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the\r
-lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.\r
-\r
-\r
-Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?\r
-\r
-Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and\r
-recuperation.\r
-\r
-\r
-What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the\r
-agency of fire?\r
-\r
-The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of\r
-ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was\r
-communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral\r
-masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the\r
-foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn\r
-derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat\r
-(radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous\r
-ether. Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such\r
-combustion, was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source\r
-of calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated\r
-through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part\r
-reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising\r
-the temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in\r
-temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal\r
-units needed to raise 1 pound of water from 50 degrees to 212 degrees\r
-Fahrenheit.\r
-\r
-\r
-What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?\r
-\r
-A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at\r
-both sides simultaneously.\r
-\r
-\r
-For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?\r
-\r
-To shave himself.\r
-\r
-\r
-What advantages attended shaving by night?\r
-\r
-A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from\r
-shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly\r
-encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours:\r
-quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when\r
-awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and\r
-perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper\r
-read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a\r
-shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might\r
-cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with\r
-precision cut and humected and applied adhered: which was to be done.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?\r
-\r
-Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine\r
-feminine passive active hand.\r
-\r
-\r
-What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting\r
-influence?\r
-\r
-The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human\r
-blood even when the end justified the means, preferring, in their\r
-natural order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic\r
-surgery.\r
-\r
-\r
-What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the\r
-kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?\r
-\r
-On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal\r
-breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a\r
-moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white\r
-goldrimmed eggcups, an open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly\r
-copper, and a phial of aromatic (violet) comfits. On the middle shelf\r
-a chipped eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four\r
-conglomerated black olives in oleaginous paper, an empty pot of\r
-Plumtree's potted meat, an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and\r
-containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and\r
-Co's white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue\r
-paper, a packet of Epps's soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne Lynch's\r
-choice tea at 2/- per lb in a crinkled leadpaper bag, a cylindrical\r
-canister containing the best crystallised lump sugar, two onions, one,\r
-the larger, Spanish, entire, the other, smaller, Irish, bisected with\r
-augmented surface and more redolent, a jar of Irish Model Dairy's cream,\r
-a jug of brown crockery containing a naggin and a quarter of soured\r
-adulterated milk, converted by heat into water, acidulous serum and\r
-semisolidified curds, which added to the quantity subtracted for Mr\r
-Bloom's and Mrs Fleming's breakfasts, made one imperial pint, the total\r
-quantity originally delivered, two cloves, a halfpenny and a small dish\r
-containing a slice of fresh ribsteak. On the upper shelf a battery of\r
-jamjars (empty) of various sizes and proveniences.\r
-\r
-\r
-What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?\r
-\r
-Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets,\r
-numbered 8 87, 88 6.\r
-\r
-\r
-What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?\r
-\r
-Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction,\r
-preindicative of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official\r
-and definitive result of which he had read in the _Evening Telegraph_,\r
-late pink edition, in the cabman's shelter, at Butt bridge.\r
-\r
-\r
-Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected,\r
-been received by him?\r
-\r
-In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 little Britain\r
-street: in David Byrne's licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O'Connell\r
-street lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in\r
-his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah,\r
-restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of\r
-F. W. Sweny and Co (Limited), dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick\r
-M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and\r
-restituted the copy of the current issue of the _Freeman's Journal and\r
-National Press_ which he had been about to throw away (subsequently\r
-thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of\r
-the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of\r
-inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the\r
-secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.\r
-\r
-What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?\r
-\r
-The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event\r
-followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the\r
-electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss\r
-by failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding\r
-originally from a successful interpretation.\r
-\r
-\r
-His mood?\r
-\r
-He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he\r
-was satisfied.\r
-\r
-\r
-What satisfied him?\r
-\r
-To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to\r
-others. Light to the gentiles.\r
-\r
-\r
-How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?\r
-\r
-He poured into two teacups two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Epps's\r
-soluble cocoa and proceeded according to the directions for use printed\r
-on the label, to each adding after sufficient time for infusion the\r
-prescribed ingredients for diffusion in the manner and in the quantity\r
-prescribed.\r
-\r
-\r
-What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his\r
-guest?\r
-\r
-Relinquishing his symposiarchal right to the moustache cup of imitation\r
-Crown Derby presented to him by his only daughter, Millicent (Milly),\r
-he substituted a cup identical with that of his guest and served\r
-extraordinarily to his guest and, in reduced measure, to himself the\r
-viscous cream ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion\r
-(Molly).\r
-\r
-\r
-Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of\r
-hospitality?\r
-\r
-His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely, and he accepted\r
-them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps's massproduct,\r
-the creature cocoa.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were there marks of hospitality which he contemplated but suppressed,\r
-reserving them for another and for himself on future occasions to\r
-complete the act begun?\r
-\r
-The reparation of a fissure of the length of 1 1/2 inches in the right\r
-side of his guest's jacket. A gift to his guest of one of the four\r
-lady's handkerchiefs, if and when ascertained to be in a presentable\r
-condition.\r
-\r
-\r
-Who drank more quickly?\r
-\r
-Bloom, having the advantage of ten seconds at the initiation and taking,\r
-from the concave surface of a spoon along the handle of which a steady\r
-flow of heat was conducted, three sips to his opponent's one, six to\r
-two, nine to three.\r
-\r
-\r
-What cerebration accompanied his frequentative act?\r
-\r
-Concluding by inspection but erroneously that his silent companion was\r
-engaged in mental composition he reflected on the pleasures derived from\r
-literature of instruction rather than of amusement as he himself had\r
-applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the\r
-solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had he found their solution?\r
-\r
-In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages,\r
-aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text,\r
-the answers not bearing in all points.\r
-\r
-\r
-What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him,\r
-potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering\r
-of three prizes of 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively for competition by the\r
-_Shamrock_, a weekly newspaper?\r
-\r
- _An ambition to squint\r
- At my verses in print\r
- Makes me hope that for these you'll find room?.\r
- If you so condescend\r
- Then please place at the end\r
- The name of yours truly, L. Bloom._\r
-\r
-Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him?\r
-\r
-Name, age, race, creed.\r
-\r
-\r
-What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?\r
-\r
- Leopold Bloom\r
- Ellpodbomool\r
- Molldopeloob\r
- Bollopedoom\r
- Old Ollebo, M. P.\r
-\r
-\r
-What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic\r
-poet) sent to Miss Marion (Molly) Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?\r
-\r
- _Poets oft have sung in rhyme\r
- Of music sweet their praise divine.\r
- Let them hymn it nine times nine.\r
- Dearer far than song or wine.\r
- You are mine. The world is mine._\r
-\r
-\r
-What had prevented him from completing a topical song (music by R. G.\r
-Johnston) on the events of the past, or fixtures for the actual, years,\r
-entitled _If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin now_,\r
-commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48,\r
-49 South King street, and to be introduced into the sixth scene, the\r
-valley of diamonds, of the second edition (30 January 1893) of the grand\r
-annual Christmas pantomime _Sinbad the Sailor_ (produced by R Shelton\r
-26 December 1892, written by Greenleaf Whittier, scenery by George\r
-A. Jackson and Cecil Hicks, costumes by Mrs and Miss Whelan under\r
-the personal supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir,\r
-harlequinade by Thomas Otto) and sung by Nelly Bouverist, principal\r
-girl?\r
-\r
-Firstly, oscillation between events of imperial and of local interest,\r
-the anticipated diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria (born 1820, acceded\r
-1837) and the posticipated opening of the new municipal fish market:\r
-secondly, apprehension of opposition from extreme circles on the\r
-questions of the respective visits of Their Royal Highnesses the\r
-duke and duchess of York (real) and of His Majesty King Brian Boru\r
-(imaginary): thirdly, a conflict between professional etiquette and\r
-professional emulation concerning the recent erections of the Grand\r
-Lyric Hall on Burgh Quay and the Theatre Royal in Hawkins street:\r
-fourthly, distraction resultant from compassion for Nelly Bouverist's\r
-non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical expression of countenance\r
-and concupiscence caused by Nelly Bouverist's revelations of white\r
-articles of non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical underclothing\r
-while she (Nelly Bouverist) was in the articles: fifthly, the\r
-difficulties of the selection of appropriate music and humorous\r
-allusions from _Everybody's Book of Jokes_ (1000 pages and a laugh in\r
-every one): sixthly, the rhymes, homophonous and cacophonous, associated\r
-with the names of the new lord mayor, Daniel Tallon, the new high\r
-sheriff, Thomas Pile and the new solicitorgeneral, Dunbar Plunket\r
-Barton.\r
-\r
-\r
-What relation existed between their ages?\r
-\r
-16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen's present age Stephen\r
-was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom's present\r
-age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54\r
-their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13\r
-1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according\r
-as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in\r
-1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then\r
-1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen\r
-would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when\r
-Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom,\r
-being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have\r
-surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah,\r
-969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would\r
-attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to\r
-have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in\r
-the year 81,396 B.C.\r
-\r
-\r
-What events might nullify these calculations?\r
-\r
-The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a\r
-new era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent\r
-extermination of the human species, inevitable but impredictable.\r
-\r
-\r
-How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance?\r
-\r
-Two. The first in the lilacgarden of Matthew Dillon's house, Medina\r
-Villa, Kimmage road, Roundtown, in 1887, in the company of Stephen's\r
-mother, Stephen being then of the age of 5 and reluctant to give his\r
-hand in salutation. The second in the coffeeroom of Breslin's hotel on a\r
-rainy Sunday in the January of 1892, in the company of Stephen's father\r
-and Stephen's granduncle, Stephen being then 5 years older.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and\r
-afterwards seconded by the father?\r
-\r
-Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative\r
-gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a\r
-third connecting link between them?\r
-\r
-Mrs Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the\r
-house of Stephen's parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and\r
-had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms\r
-Hotel owned by Elizabeth O'Dowd of 54 Prussia street where, during parts\r
-of the years 1893 and 1894, she had been a constant informant of Bloom\r
-who resided also in the same hotel, being at that time a clerk in the\r
-employment of Joseph Cuffe of 5 Smithfield for the superintendence of\r
-sales in the adjacent Dublin Cattle market on the North Circular road.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?\r
-\r
-He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow\r
-of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair\r
-with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North\r
-Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low's place of business where she had\r
-remained for a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular\r
-fieldglasses unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles\r
-equipped with inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems,\r
-private and hired landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from\r
-the city to the Phoenix Park and vice versa.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?\r
-\r
-Because in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel\r
-of bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with\r
-continual changes of the thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds,\r
-velocipedes, vehicles, passing slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round\r
-and round the rim of a round and round precipitous globe.\r
-\r
-\r
-What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years\r
-deceased?\r
-\r
-The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her\r
-suppositious wealth, her lapses of responsiveness and incipient\r
-catarrhal deafness: the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue\r
-of the Immaculate Conception, her green and maroon brushes for Charles\r
-Stewart Parnell and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve the rejuvenation\r
-which these reminiscences divulged to a younger companion rendered the\r
-more desirable?\r
-\r
-The indoor exercises, formerly intermittently practised, subsequently\r
-abandoned, prescribed in Eugen Sandow's _Physical Strength and How to\r
-Obtain It_ which, designed particularly for commercial men engaged in\r
-sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in\r
-front of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of\r
-muscles and produce successively a pleasant rigidity, a more pleasant\r
-relaxation and the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?\r
-\r
-Though ringweight lifting had been beyond his strength and the full\r
-circle gyration beyond his courage yet as a High school scholar he\r
-had excelled in his stable and protracted execution of the half lever\r
-movement on the parallel bars in consequence of his abnormally developed\r
-abdominal muscles.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did either openly allude to their racial difference?\r
-\r
-Neither.\r
-\r
-\r
-What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts\r
-about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen's thoughts about\r
-Bloom's thoughts about Stephen?\r
-\r
-He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he\r
-knew that he knew that he was not.\r
-\r
-\r
-What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective\r
-parentages?\r
-\r
-Bloom, only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag (subsequently\r
-Rudolph Bloom) of Szombathely, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, London and\r
-Dublin and of Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius Higgins (born\r
-Karoly) and Fanny Higgins (born Hegarty). Stephen, eldest surviving male\r
-consubstantial heir of Simon Dedalus of Cork and Dublin and of Mary,\r
-daughter of Richard and Christina Goulding (born Grier).\r
-\r
-\r
-Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or\r
-layman?\r
-\r
-Bloom (three times), by the reverend Mr Gilmer Johnston M. A., alone,\r
-in the protestant church of Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe, by James\r
-O'Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump\r
-in the village of Swords, and by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., in\r
-the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar. Stephen (once) by the reverend\r
-Charles Malone C. C., alone, in the church of the Three Patrons,\r
-Rathgar.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did they find their educational careers similar?\r
-\r
-Substituting Stephen for Bloom Stoom would have passed successively\r
-through a dame's school and the high school. Substituting Bloom for\r
-Stephen Blephen would have passed successively through the preparatory,\r
-junior, middle and senior grades of the intermediate and through the\r
-matriculation, first arts, second arts and arts degree courses of the\r
-royal university.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why did Bloom refrain from stating that he had frequented the university\r
-of life?\r
-\r
-Because of his fluctuating incertitude as to whether this observation\r
-had or had not been already made by him to Stephen or by Stephen to him.\r
-\r
-\r
-What two temperaments did they individually represent?\r
-\r
-The scientific. The artistic.\r
-\r
-\r
-What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards\r
-applied, rather than towards pure, science?\r
-\r
-Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining\r
-in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his\r
-appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once\r
-revolutionary, for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting\r
-telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water\r
-siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were these inventions principally intended for an improved scheme of\r
-kindergarten?\r
-\r
-Yes, rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard,\r
-catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the\r
-twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature\r
-mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical\r
-to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls,\r
-historically costumed dolls.\r
-\r
-\r
-What also stimulated him in his cogitations?\r
-\r
-The financial success achieved by Ephraim Marks and Charles A. James,\r
-the former by his 1d bazaar at 42 George's street, south, the latter\r
-at his 6 1/2d shop and world's fancy fair and waxwork exhibition at 30\r
-Henry street, admission 2d, children 1d: and the infinite possibilities\r
-hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement if condensed\r
-in triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility\r
-(divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of\r
-magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to\r
-convince, to decide.\r
-\r
-\r
-Such as?\r
-\r
-K. II. Kino's 11/- Trousers. House of Keys. Alexander J. Keyes.\r
-\r
-\r
-Such as not?\r
-\r
-Look at this long candle. Calculate when it burns out and you receive\r
-gratis 1 pair of our special non-compo boots, guaranteed 1 candle power.\r
-Address: Barclay and Cook, 18 Talbot street.\r
-\r
-Bacilikil (Insect Powder). Veribest (Boot Blacking). Uwantit (Combined\r
-pocket twoblade penknife with corkscrew, nailfile and pipecleaner).\r
-\r
-\r
-Such as never?\r
-\r
-What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat?\r
-\r
-Incomplete.\r
-\r
-With it an abode of bliss.\r
-\r
-Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in\r
-4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda\r
-Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries\r
-of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot,\r
-registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat.\r
-Plamtroo.\r
-\r
-\r
-Which example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that\r
-originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably\r
-conduce to success?\r
-\r
-His own ideated and rejected project of an illuminated showcart, drawn\r
-by a beast of burden, in which two smartly dressed girls were to be\r
-seated engaged in writing.\r
-\r
-\r
-What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?\r
-\r
-Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark\r
-corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She\r
-sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks.\r
-On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs.\r
-Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He\r
-seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads.\r
-Solitary.\r
-\r
-\r
-What?\r
-\r
-In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel, Queen's\r
-Hotel. Queen's Ho...\r
-\r
-\r
-What suggested scene was then reconstructed by Bloom?\r
-\r
-The Queen's Hotel, Ennis, county Clare, where Rudolph Bloom (Rudolf\r
-Virag) died on the evening of the 27 June 1886, at some hour unstated,\r
-in consequence of an overdose of monkshood (aconite) selfadministered in\r
-the form of a neuralgic liniment composed of 2 parts of aconite liniment\r
-to I of chloroform liniment (purchased by him at 10.20 a.m. on the\r
-morning of 27 June 1886 at the medical hall of Francis Dennehy, 17\r
-Church street, Ennis) after having, though not in consequence of having,\r
-purchased at 3.15 p.m. on the afternoon of 27 June 1886 a new boater\r
-straw hat, extra smart (after having, though not in consequence of\r
-having, purchased at the hour and in the place aforesaid, the toxin\r
-aforesaid), at the general drapery store of James Cullen, 4 Main street,\r
-Ennis.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or\r
-intuition?\r
-\r
-Coincidence.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?\r
-\r
-He preferred himself to see another's face and listen to another's\r
-words by which potential narration was realised and kinetic temperament\r
-relieved.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he see only a second coincidence in the second scene narrated to\r
-him, described by the narrator as _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The\r
-Parable of the Plums_?\r
-\r
-It, with the preceding scene and with others unnarrated but existent by\r
-implication, to which add essays on various subjects or moral apothegms\r
-(e.g. _My Favourite Hero or Procrastination is the Thief of Time_)\r
-composed during schoolyears, seemed to him to contain in itself and\r
-in conjunction with the personal equation certain possibilities of\r
-financial, social, personal and sexual success, whether specially\r
-collected and selected as model pedagogic themes (of cent per cent\r
-merit) for the use of preparatory and junior grade students or\r
-contributed in printed form, following the precedent of Philip Beaufoy\r
-or Doctor Dick or Heblon's _Studies in Blue_, to a publication of\r
-certified circulation and solvency or employed verbally as intellectual\r
-stimulation for sympathetic auditors, tacitly appreciative of successful\r
-narrative and confidently augurative of successful achievement, during\r
-the increasingly longer nights gradually following the summer solstice\r
-on the day but three following, videlicet, Tuesday, 21 June (S. Aloysius\r
-Gonzaga), sunrise 3.33 a.m., sunset 8.29 p.m.\r
-\r
-\r
-Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other\r
-frequently engaged his mind?\r
-\r
-What to do with our wives.\r
-\r
-\r
-What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?\r
-\r
-Parlour games (dominos, halma, tiddledywinks, spilikins, cup and ball,\r
-nap, spoil five, bezique, twentyfive, beggar my neighbour, draughts,\r
-chess or backgammon): embroidery, darning or knitting for the\r
-policeaided clothing society: musical duets, mandoline and guitar, piano\r
-and flute, guitar and piano: legal scrivenery or envelope addressing:\r
-biweekly visits to variety entertainments: commercial activity as\r
-pleasantly commanding and pleasingly obeyed mistress proprietress in\r
-a cool dairy shop or warm cigar divan: the clandestine satisfaction of\r
-erotic irritation in masculine brothels, state inspected and medically\r
-controlled: social visits, at regular infrequent prevented intervals\r
-and with regular frequent preventive superintendence, to and from female\r
-acquaintances of recognised respectability in the vicinity: courses of\r
-evening instruction specially designed to render liberal instruction\r
-agreeable.\r
-\r
-\r
-What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him\r
-in favour of the lastmentioned (ninth) solution?\r
-\r
-In disoccupied moments she had more than once covered a sheet of paper\r
-with signs and hieroglyphics which she stated were Greek and Irish and\r
-Hebrew characters. She had interrogated constantly at varying intervals\r
-as to the correct method of writing the capital initial of the name of\r
-a city in Canada, Quebec. She understood little of political\r
-complications, internal, or balance of power, external. In calculating\r
-the addenda of bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid.\r
-After completion of laconic epistolary compositions she abandoned\r
-the implement of calligraphy in the encaustic pigment, exposed to\r
-the corrosive action of copperas, green vitriol and nutgall. Unusual\r
-polysyllables of foreign origin she interpreted phonetically or by false\r
-analogy or by both: metempsychosis (met him pike hoses), _alias_ (a\r
-mendacious person mentioned in sacred scripture).\r
-\r
-\r
-What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and\r
-such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?\r
-\r
-The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all\r
-balances, proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her\r
-proficiency of judgment regarding one person, proved true by experiment.\r
-\r
-\r
-How had he attempted to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?\r
-\r
-Variously. By leaving in a conspicuous place a certain book open at a\r
-certain page: by assuming in her, when alluding explanatorily, latent\r
-knowledge: by open ridicule in her presence of some absent other's\r
-ignorant lapse.\r
-\r
-\r
-With what success had he attempted direct instruction?\r
-\r
-She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest\r
-comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty\r
-remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated\r
-with error.\r
-\r
-\r
-What system had proved more effective?\r
-\r
-Indirect suggestion implicating selfinterest.\r
-\r
-\r
-Example?\r
-\r
-She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she\r
-disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat, he bought new\r
-hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat.\r
-\r
-\r
-Accepting the analogy implied in his guest's parable which examples of\r
-postexilic eminence did he adduce?\r
-\r
-Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides,\r
-author of _More Nebukim_ (Guide of the Perplexed) and Moses Mendelssohn\r
-of such eminence that from Moses (of Egypt) to Moses (Mendelssohn) there\r
-arose none like Moses (Maimonides).\r
-\r
-\r
-What statement was made, under correction, by Bloom concerning a fourth\r
-seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by\r
-Stephen?\r
-\r
-That the seeker mentioned had been a pupil of a rabbinical philosopher,\r
-name uncertain.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a\r
-selected or rejected race mentioned?\r
-\r
-Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn (composer), Baruch Spinoza (philosopher),\r
-Mendoza (pugilist), Ferdinand Lassalle (reformer, duellist).\r
-\r
-\r
-What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish\r
-languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts\r
-by guest to host and by host to guest?\r
-\r
-By Stephen: _suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus suil go cuin_\r
-(walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care).\r
-\r
-\r
-By Bloom: _Kkifeloch, harimon rakatejch m'baad l'zamatejch_ (thy temple\r
-amid thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate).\r
-\r
-\r
-How was a glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages\r
-made in substantiation of the oral comparison?\r
-\r
-By juxtaposition. On the penultimate blank page of a book of inferior\r
-literary style, entituled _Sweets of Sin_ (produced by Bloom and so\r
-manipulated that its front cover came in contact with the surface of\r
-the table) with a pencil (supplied by Stephen) Stephen wrote the Irish\r
-characters for gee, eh, dee, em, simple and modified, and Bloom in turn\r
-wrote the Hebrew characters ghimel, aleph, daleth and (in the absence of\r
-mem) a substituted qoph, explaining their arithmetical values as ordinal\r
-and cardinal numbers, videlicet 3, 1, 4, and 100.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the\r
-extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?\r
-\r
-Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence\r
-and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary.\r
-\r
-\r
-What points of contact existed between these languages and between the\r
-peoples who spoke them?\r
-\r
-The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and\r
-servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having been\r
-taught on the plain of Shinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary\r
-instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel,\r
-and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland: their\r
-archaeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homiletic,\r
-toponomastic, historical and religious literatures comprising the works\r
-of rabbis and culdees, Torah, Talmud (Mischna and Ghemara), Massor,\r
-Pentateuch, Book of the Dun Cow, Book of Ballymote, Garland of Howth,\r
-Book of Kells: their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the\r
-isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S.\r
-Mary's Abbey) and masshouse (Adam and Eve's tavern): the proscription\r
-of their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts: the\r
-restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of Irish\r
-political autonomy or devolution.\r
-\r
-\r
-What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple,\r
-ethnically irreducible consummation?\r
-\r
- _Kolod balejwaw pnimah\r
- Nefesch, jehudi, homijah._\r
-\r
-\r
-Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?\r
-\r
-In consequence of defective mnemotechnic.\r
-\r
-\r
-How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?\r
-\r
-By a periphrastic version of the general text.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?\r
-\r
-The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic\r
-hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of\r
-modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions\r
-(Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic). Did\r
-the guest comply with his host's request?\r
-\r
-Doubly, by appending his signature in Irish and Roman characters.\r
-\r
-What was Stephen's auditive sensation?\r
-\r
-He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation\r
-of the past.\r
-\r
-\r
-What was Bloom's visual sensation?\r
-\r
-He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a\r
-future.\r
-\r
-\r
-What were Stephen's and Bloom's quasisimultaneous volitional\r
-quasisensations of concealed identities?\r
-\r
-Visually, Stephen's: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted\r
-by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as\r
-leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair. Auditively, Bloom's: The\r
-traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.\r
-\r
-\r
-What future careers had been possible for Bloom in the past and with\r
-what exemplars?\r
-\r
-In the church, Roman, Anglican or Nonconformist: exemplars, the very\r
-reverend John Conmee S. J., the reverend T. Salmon, D. D., provost of\r
-Trinity college, Dr Alexander J. Dowie. At the bar, English or Irish:\r
-exemplars, Seymour Bushe, K. C., Rufus Isaacs, K. C. On the stage modern\r
-or Shakespearean: exemplars, Charles Wyndham, high comedian Osmond\r
-Tearle (died 1901), exponent of Shakespeare.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did the host encourage his guest to chant in a modulated voice a strange\r
-legend on an allied theme?\r
-\r
-Reassuringly, their place, where none could hear them talk, being\r
-secluded, reassured, the decocted beverages, allowing for subsolid\r
-residual sediment of a mechanical mixture, water plus sugar plus cream\r
-plus cocoa, having been consumed.\r
-\r
-\r
-Recite the first (major) part of this chanted legend.\r
-\r
- _Little Harry Hughes and his schoolfellows all\r
- Went out for to play ball.\r
- And the very first ball little Harry Hughes played\r
- He drove it o'er the jew's garden wall.\r
- And the very second ball little Harry Hughes played\r
- He broke the jew's windows all._\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part?\r
-\r
-\r
-With unmixed feeling. Smiling, a jew he heard with pleasure and saw the\r
-unbroken kitchen window.\r
-\r
-\r
-Recite the second part (minor) of the legend.\r
-\r
- _Then out there came the jew's daughter\r
- And she all dressed in green.\r
- "Come back, come back, you pretty little boy,\r
- And play your ball again."\r
-\r
- "I can't come back and I won't come back\r
- Without my schoolfellows all.\r
- For if my master he did hear\r
- He'd make it a sorry ball."\r
-\r
- She took him by the lilywhite hand\r
- And led him along the hall\r
- Until she led him to a room\r
- Where none could hear him call.\r
-\r
- She took a penknife out of her pocket\r
- And cut off his little head.\r
- And now he'll play his ball no more\r
- For he lies among the dead._\r
-\r
-\r
-How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?\r
-\r
-With mixed feelings. Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew's\r
-daughter, all dressed in green.\r
-\r
-\r
-Condense Stephen's commentary.\r
-\r
-One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by\r
-inadvertence twice by design he challenges his destiny. It comes when he\r
-is abandoned and challenges him reluctant and, as an apparition of hope\r
-and youth, holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation,\r
-to a secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him,\r
-consenting.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?\r
-\r
-He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him\r
-should by him not be told.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why was the host (reluctant, unresisting) still?\r
-\r
-In accordance with the law of the conservation of energy.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?\r
-\r
-He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the\r
-incitations of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the\r
-propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of\r
-opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of\r
-atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism,\r
-hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.\r
-\r
-\r
-From which (if any) of these mental or physical disorders was he not\r
-totally immune?\r
-\r
-From hypnotic suggestion: once, waking, he had not recognised his\r
-sleeping apartment: more than once, waking, he had been for an\r
-indefinite time incapable of moving or uttering sounds. From\r
-somnambulism: once, sleeping, his body had risen, crouched and\r
-crawled in the direction of a heatless fire and, having attained\r
-its destination, there, curled, unheated, in night attire had lain,\r
-sleeping.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member\r
-of his family?\r
-\r
-Twice, in Holles street and in Ontario terrace, his daughter Millicent\r
-(Milly) at the ages of 6 and 8 years had uttered in sleep an exclamation\r
-of terror and had replied to the interrogations of two figures in night\r
-attire with a vacant mute expression.\r
-\r
-\r
-What other infantile memories had he of her?\r
-\r
-15 June 1889. A querulous newborn female infant crying to cause and\r
-lessen congestion. A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks\r
-her moneybox: counted his three free moneypenny buttons, one, tloo,\r
-tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away: blond, born of two dark,\r
-she had blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau,\r
-Austrian army, proximate, a hallucination, lieutenant Mulvey, British\r
-navy.\r
-\r
-\r
-What endemic characteristics were present?\r
-\r
-Conversely the nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct\r
-line of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant\r
-intervals to more distant intervals to its most distant intervals.\r
-\r
-\r
-What memories had he of her adolescence?\r
-\r
-She relegated her hoop and skippingrope to a recess. On the duke's lawn,\r
-entreated by an English visitor, she declined to permit him to make and\r
-take away her photographic image (objection not stated). On the South\r
-Circular road in the company of Elsa Potter, followed by an individual\r
-of sinister aspect, she went half way down Stamer street and turned\r
-abruptly back (reason of change not stated). On the vigil of the 15th\r
-anniversary of her birth she wrote a letter from Mullingar, county\r
-Westmeath, making a brief allusion to a local student (faculty and year\r
-not stated).\r
-\r
-\r
-Did that first division, portending a second division, afflict him?\r
-\r
-Less than he had imagined, more than he had hoped.\r
-\r
-\r
-What second departure was contemporaneously perceived by him similarly,\r
-if differently?\r
-\r
-A temporary departure of his cat.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why similarly, why differently?\r
-\r
-Similarly, because actuated by a secret purpose the quest of a new male\r
-\r
-(Mullingar student) or of a healing herb (valerian). Differently,\r
-because of different possible returns to the inhabitants or to the\r
-habitation.\r
-\r
-\r
-In other respects were their differences similar?\r
-\r
-In passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in\r
-unexpectedness.\r
-\r
-\r
-As?\r
-\r
-Inasmuch as leaning she sustained her blond hair for him to ribbon it\r
-for her (cf neckarching cat). Moreover, on the free surface of the lake\r
-in Stephen's green amid inverted reflections of trees her uncommented\r
-spit, describing concentric circles of waterrings, indicated by the\r
-constancy of its permanence the locus of a somnolent prostrate fish (cf\r
-mousewatching cat).\r
-\r
-Again, in order to remember the date, combatants, issue and consequences\r
-of a famous military engagement she pulled a plait of her hair (cf\r
-earwashing cat). Furthermore, silly Milly, she dreamed of having had\r
-an unspoken unremembered conversation with a horse whose name had been\r
-Joseph to whom (which) she had offered a tumblerful of lemonade which\r
-it (he) had appeared to have accepted (cf hearthdreaming cat). Hence, in\r
-passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in unexpectedness,\r
-their differences were similar.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what way had he utilised gifts (1) an owl, (2) a clock, given as\r
-matrimonial auguries, to interest and to instruct her?\r
-\r
-As object lessons to explain: 1) the nature and habits of oviparous\r
-animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of\r
-vision, the secular process of imbalsamation: 2) the principle of the\r
-pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation\r
-in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of\r
-clockwise moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the\r
-recurrence per hour of an instant in each hour when the longer and the\r
-shorter indicator were at the same angle of inclination, _videlicet_, 5\r
-5/11 minutes past each hour per hour in arithmetical progression.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what manners did she reciprocate?\r
-\r
-She remembered: on the 27th anniversary of his birth she presented to\r
-him a breakfast moustachecup of imitation Crown Derby porcelain ware.\r
-She provided: at quarter day or thereabouts if or when purchases\r
-had been made by him not for her she showed herself attentive to his\r
-necessities, anticipating his desires. She admired: a natural phenomenon\r
-having been explained by him to her she expressed the immediate desire\r
-to possess without gradual acquisition a fraction of his science, the\r
-moiety, the quarter, a thousandth part.\r
-\r
-\r
-What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make\r
-to Stephen, noctambulist?\r
-\r
-To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday (proper) and\r
-Friday (normal) on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately\r
-above the kitchen and immediately adjacent to the sleeping apartment of\r
-his host and hostess.\r
-\r
-\r
-What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation\r
-of such an extemporisation?\r
-\r
-For the guest: security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the\r
-host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the\r
-hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian\r
-pronunciation.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and\r
-a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent\r
-eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew's\r
-daughter?\r
-\r
-Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother\r
-through daughter.\r
-\r
-\r
-To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest\r
-return a monosyllabic negative answer?\r
-\r
-If he had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at Sydney\r
-Parade railway station, 14 October 1903.\r
-\r
-\r
-What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the\r
-host?\r
-\r
-A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of the interment\r
-of Mrs Mary Dedalus (born Goulding), 26 June 1903, vigil of the\r
-anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag).\r
-\r
-\r
-Was the proposal of asylum accepted?\r
-\r
-Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.\r
-What exchange of money took place between host and guest?\r
-\r
-The former returned to the latter, without interest, a sum of money\r
-(1-7-0), one pound seven shillings sterling, advanced by the latter to\r
-the former.\r
-\r
-\r
-What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified,\r
-declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?\r
-\r
-To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place\r
-the residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal\r
-instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate\r
-a series of static semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues,\r
-places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident in\r
-the same place), the Ship hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street (W. and\r
-E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10 Kildare\r
-street, the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, a\r
-public garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a conjunction of two\r
-or more public thoroughfares, the point of bisection of a right line\r
-drawn between their residences (if both speakers were resident in\r
-different places).\r
-\r
-\r
-What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually\r
-selfexcluding propositions?\r
-\r
-The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert\r
-Hengler's circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive\r
-particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring\r
-to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had\r
-publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his\r
-(the clown's) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the\r
-summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches\r
-on the milled edge and tendered it m payment of an account due to and\r
-received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand\r
-Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible,\r
-circuitous or direct, return.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was the clown Bloom's son?\r
-\r
-No.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had Bloom's coin returned?\r
-\r
-Never.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?\r
-\r
-Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to\r
-amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and\r
-international animosity. He believed then that human life was infinitely\r
-perfectible, eliminating these conditions?\r
-\r
-There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct\r
-from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of\r
-destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of\r
-the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and\r
-death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human\r
-females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable\r
-accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies\r
-and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital\r
-criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make\r
-terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres\r
-of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital\r
-growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis, from infancy through\r
-maturity to decay.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why did he desist from speculation?\r
-\r
-Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other\r
-more acceptable phenomena in the place of the less acceptable phenomena\r
-to be removed.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did Stephen participate in his dejection?\r
-\r
-He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding\r
-syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational\r
-reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the\r
-incertitude of the void.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?\r
-\r
-Not verbally. Substantially.\r
-\r
-\r
-What comforted his misapprehension?\r
-\r
-That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from\r
-the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus\r
-from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?\r
-\r
-Lighted Candle in Stick borne by\r
-\r
-BLOOM\r
-\r
-Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by\r
-\r
-STEPHEN:\r
-\r
-\r
-With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?\r
-\r
-The 113th, _modus peregrinus: In exitu Israel de Egypto: domus Jacob de\r
-populo barbaro_.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did each do at the door of egress?\r
-\r
-Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.\r
-\r
-\r
-For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?\r
-\r
-For a cat.\r
-\r
-\r
-What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the\r
-guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from\r
-the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?\r
-\r
-The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.\r
-\r
-\r
-With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his\r
-companion of various constellations?\r
-\r
-Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in\r
-incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous\r
-scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an\r
-observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000\r
-ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius\r
-(alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant\r
-and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the\r
-precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and\r
-nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund\r
-and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging\r
-towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic\r
-drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from\r
-immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with\r
-which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a\r
-parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?\r
-\r
-Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the\r
-earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed\r
-in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds,\r
-of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable\r
-trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained\r
-by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe\r
-of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves\r
-universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in\r
-continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was\r
-again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends\r
-and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the\r
-progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?\r
-\r
-Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem\r
-of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a\r
-number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude\r
-and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that,\r
-the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000\r
-pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to\r
-be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed\r
-integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands,\r
-hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions,\r
-billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series\r
-containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost\r
-kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he find the problems of the inhabitability of the planets and their\r
-satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and\r
-moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?\r
-\r
-Of a different order of difficulty. Conscious that the human organism,\r
-normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of 19 tons,\r
-when elevated to a considerable altitude in the terrestrial atmosphere\r
-suffered with arithmetical progression of intensity, according as\r
-the line of demarcation between troposphere and stratosphere was\r
-approximated from nasal hemorrhage, impeded respiration and vertigo,\r
-when proposing this problem for solution, he had conjectured as a\r
-working hypothesis which could not be proved impossible that a more\r
-adaptable and differently anatomically constructed race of beings might\r
-subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian,\r
-Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though\r
-an apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite\r
-differences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would\r
-probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to\r
-vanities, to vanities of vanities and to all that is vanity.\r
-\r
- And the problem of possible redemption?\r
- The minor was proved by the major.\r
-\r
-\r
-Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?\r
-\r
-The various colours significant of various degrees of vitality (white,\r
-yellow, crimson, vermilion, cinnabar): their degrees of brilliancy:\r
-their magnitudes revealed up to and including the 7th: their positions:\r
-the waggoner's star: Walsingham way: the chariot of David: the annular\r
-cinctures of Saturn: the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns: the\r
-interdependent gyrations of double suns: the independent synchronous\r
-discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel,\r
-Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes\r
-of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite\r
-compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive\r
-and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of\r
-meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth\r
-of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric showers\r
-about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence (martyr, lo August): the\r
-monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon in her arms:\r
-the posited influence of celestial on human bodies: the appearance of a\r
-star (1st magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night and\r
-day (a new luminous sun generated by the collision and amalgamation in\r
-incandescence of two nonluminous exsuns) about the period of the\r
-birth of William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent neversetting\r
-constellation of Cassiopeia and of a star (2nd magnitude) of similar\r
-origin but of lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and disappeared\r
-from the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about the period\r
-of the birth of Leopold Bloom and of other stars of (presumably) similar\r
-origin which had (effectively or presumably) appeared in and disappeared\r
-from the constellation of Andromeda about the period of the birth of\r
-Stephen Dedalus, and in and from the constellation of Auriga some years\r
-after the birth and death of Rudolph Bloom, junior, and in and from\r
-other constellations some years before or after the birth or death of\r
-other persons: the attendant phenomena of eclipses, solar and lunar,\r
-from immersion to emersion, abatement of wind, transit of shadow,\r
-taciturnity of winged creatures, emergence of nocturnal or crepuscular\r
-animals, persistence of infernal light, obscurity of terrestrial waters,\r
-pallor of human beings.\r
-\r
-\r
-His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing\r
-for possible error?\r
-\r
-That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not\r
-a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from\r
-the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the\r
-suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of\r
-different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space,\r
-remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a\r
-present before its probable spectators had entered actual present\r
-existence.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?\r
-\r
-Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the\r
-delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection\r
-invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the\r
-satellite of their planet.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological\r
-influences upon sublunary disasters?\r
-\r
-It seemed to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the\r
-nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to\r
-verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the\r
-sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity.\r
-\r
-\r
-What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and\r
-woman?\r
-\r
-Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian\r
-generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence:\r
-her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising\r
-and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced\r
-invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative\r
-interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power\r
-to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to\r
-incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her\r
-visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent\r
-propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her\r
-light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her\r
-arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction,\r
-when invisible.\r
-\r
-\r
-What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom's, who attracted Stephen's,\r
-gaze?\r
-\r
-In the second storey (rere) of his (Bloom's) house the light of a\r
-paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller\r
-blind supplied by Frank O'Hara, window blind, curtain pole and revolving\r
-shutter manufacturer, 16 Aungier street.\r
-\r
-\r
-How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his\r
-wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?\r
-\r
-With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued\r
-affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with\r
-suggestion.\r
-\r
-\r
-Both then were silent?\r
-\r
-Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal\r
-flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were they indefinitely inactive?\r
-\r
-At Stephen's suggestion, at Bloom's instigation both, first Stephen,\r
-then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs\r
-of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition,\r
-their gazes, first Bloom's, then Stephen's, elevated to the projected\r
-luminous and semiluminous shadow.\r
-\r
-\r
-Similarly?\r
-\r
-The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations\r
-were dissimilar: Bloom's longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of\r
-the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate\r
-year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point\r
-of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the\r
-institution, 210 scholars: Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the\r
-ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption\r
-an insistent vesical pressure.\r
-\r
-\r
-What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the\r
-invisible audible collateral organ of the other?\r
-\r
-To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity,\r
-reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pilosity.\r
-\r
-To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised\r
-(I January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from\r
-unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine\r
-prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic\r
-church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of\r
-the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine\r
-excrescences as hair and toenails.\r
-\r
-\r
-What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?\r
-\r
-A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament\r
-from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress\r
-of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.\r
-\r
-\r
-How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal\r
-departer?\r
-\r
-By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an\r
-unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and\r
-turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its\r
-staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and\r
-revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress.\r
-\r
-\r
-How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?\r
-\r
-Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its\r
-base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and\r
-forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.\r
-\r
-\r
-What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their\r
-(respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?\r
-\r
-The sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the bells\r
-in the church of Saint George.\r
-\r
-\r
-What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?\r
-\r
-By Stephen:\r
-\r
-_Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet. Iubilantium te virginum. Chorus\r
-excipiat._\r
-\r
-By Bloom:\r
-\r
- _Heigho, heigho,\r
- Heigho, heigho._\r
-\r
-\r
-Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day\r
-at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south\r
-to Glasnevin in the north?\r
-\r
-Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in bed),\r
-Ned Lambert (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Joe Hynes (in bed), John\r
-Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Patsy Dignam (in bed),\r
-Paddy Dignam (in the grave).\r
-\r
-\r
-Alone, what did Bloom hear?\r
-\r
-The double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the\r
-double vibration of a jew's harp in the resonant lane.\r
-\r
-\r
-Alone, what did Bloom feel?\r
-\r
-The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing\r
-point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur: the\r
-incipient intimations of proximate dawn.\r
-\r
-\r
-Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind\r
-him?\r
-\r
-Of companions now in various manners in different places defunct: Percy\r
-Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River), Philip Gilligan (phthisis,\r
-Jervis Street hospital), Matthew F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin\r
-Bay), Philip Moisel (pyemia, Heytesbury street), Michael Hart (phthisis,\r
-Mater Misericordiae hospital), Patrick Dignam (apoplexy, Sandymount).\r
-\r
-\r
-What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?\r
-\r
-The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the\r
-apparition of a new solar disk.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?\r
-\r
-Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of charades in the house\r
-of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition\r
-of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the\r
-direction of Mizrach, the east.\r
-\r
-\r
-He remembered the initial paraphenomena?\r
-\r
-More active air, a matutinal distant cock, ecclesiastical clocks at\r
-various points, avine music, the isolated tread of an early wayfarer,\r
-the visible diffusion of the light of an invisible luminous body, the\r
-first golden limb of the resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon.\r
-\r
-\r
-Did he remain?\r
-\r
-With deep inspiration he returned, retraversing the garden, reentering\r
-the passage, reclosing the door. With brief suspiration he reassumed the\r
-candle, reascended the stairs, reapproached the door of the front room,\r
-hallfloor, and reentered.\r
-\r
-\r
-What suddenly arrested his ingress?\r
-\r
-The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into\r
-contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible\r
-fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in\r
-consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered.\r
-\r
-\r
-Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of\r
-furniture.\r
-\r
-A sofa upholstered in prune plush had been translocated from opposite\r
-the door to the ingleside near the compactly furled Union Jack (an\r
-alteration which he had frequently intended to execute): the blue and\r
-white checker inlaid majolicatopped table had been placed opposite the\r
-door in the place vacated by the prune plush sofa: the walnut sideboard\r
-(a projecting angle of which had momentarily arrested his ingress) had\r
-been moved from its position beside the door to a more advantageous but\r
-more perilous position in front of the door: two chairs had been moved\r
-from right and left of the ingleside to the position originally occupied\r
-by the blue and white checker inlaid majolicatopped table.\r
-\r
-\r
-Describe them.\r
-\r
-One: a squat stuffed easychair, with stout arms extended and back\r
-slanted to the rere, which, repelled in recoil, had then upturned an\r
-irregular fringe of a rectangular rug and now displayed on its amply\r
-upholstered seat a centralised diffusing and diminishing discolouration.\r
-The other: a slender splayfoot chair of glossy cane curves, placed\r
-directly opposite the former, its frame from top to seat and from seat\r
-to base being varnished dark brown, its seat being a bright circle of\r
-white plaited rush.\r
-\r
-\r
-What significances attached to these two chairs?\r
-\r
-Significances of similitude, of posture, of symbolism, of circumstantial\r
-evidence, of testimonial supermanence.\r
-\r
-\r
-What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?\r
-\r
-A vertical piano (Cadby) with exposed keyboard, its closed coffin\r
-supporting a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves and an emerald ashtray\r
-containing four consumed matches, a partly consumed cigarette and two\r
-discoloured ends of cigarettes, its musicrest supporting the music in\r
-the key of G natural for voice and piano of _Love's Old Sweet Song_\r
-(words by G. Clifton Bingham, composed by J. L. Molloy, sung by Madam\r
-Antoinette Sterling) open at the last page with the final indications\r
-_ad libitum, forte_, pedal, _animato_, sustained pedal, _ritirando_,\r
-close.\r
-\r
-\r
-With what sensations did Bloom contemplate in rotation these objects?\r
-\r
-With strain, elevating a candlestick: with pain, feeling on his right\r
-temple a contused tumescence: with attention, focussing his gaze on\r
-a large dull passive and a slender bright active: with solicitation,\r
-bending and downturning the upturned rugfringe: with amusement,\r
-remembering Dr Malachi Mulligan's scheme of colour containing the\r
-gradation of green: with pleasure, repeating the words and antecedent\r
-act and perceiving through various channels of internal sensibility\r
-the consequent and concomitant tepid pleasant diffusion of gradual\r
-discolouration.\r
-\r
-\r
-His next proceeding?\r
-\r
-From an open box on the majolicatopped table he extracted a black\r
-diminutive cone, one inch in height, placed it on its circular base on\r
-a small tin plate, placed his candlestick on the right corner of the\r
-mantelpiece, produced from his waistcoat a folded page of prospectus\r
-(illustrated) entitled Agendath Netaim, unfolded the same, examined\r
-it superficially, rolled it into a thin cylinder, ignited it in the\r
-candleflame, applied it when ignited to the apex of the cone till the\r
-latter reached the stage of rutilance, placed the cylinder in the basin\r
-of the candlestick disposing its unconsumed part in such a manner as to\r
-facilitate total combustion.\r
-\r
-\r
-What followed this operation?\r
-\r
-The truncated conical crater summit of the diminutive volcano emitted a\r
-vertical and serpentine fume redolent of aromatic oriental incense.\r
-\r
-\r
-What homothetic objects, other than the candlestick, stood on the\r
-mantelpiece?\r
-\r
-A timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopped at the hour of 4.46\r
-a.m. on the 21 March 1896, matrimonial gift of Matthew Dillon: a dwarf\r
-tree of glacial arborescence under a transparent bellshade, matrimonial\r
-gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle: an embalmed owl, matrimonial gift of\r
-Alderman John Hooper.\r
-\r
-\r
-What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and\r
-Bloom?\r
-\r
-In the mirror of the giltbordered pierglass the undecorated back of the\r
-dwarf tree regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before\r
-the mirror the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper with a clear\r
-melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate gaze regarded Bloom\r
-while Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless compassionated\r
-gaze regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle.\r
-\r
-\r
-What composite asymmetrical image in the mirror then attracted his\r
-attention?\r
-\r
-The image of a solitary (ipsorelative) mutable (aliorelative) man.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why solitary (ipsorelative)?\r
-\r
-_Brothers and sisters had he none. Yet that man's father was his\r
-grandfather's son._\r
-\r
-\r
-Why mutable (aliorelative)?\r
-\r
-From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix.\r
-From maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal\r
-procreator.\r
-\r
-\r
-What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?\r
-\r
-The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged\r
-and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles\r
-on the two bookshelves opposite.\r
-\r
-\r
-Catalogue these books.\r
-\r
-_Thom's Dublin Post Office Directory, 1886_. Denis Florence M'Carthy's\r
-_Poetical Works_ (copper beechleaf bookmark at p. 5). Shakespeare's\r
-_Works_ (dark crimson morocco, goldtooled).\r
-\r
-_The Useful Ready Reckoner_ (brown cloth).\r
-\r
-_The Secret History of the Court of Charles II_ (red cloth, tooled\r
-binding). _The Child's Guide_ (blue cloth).\r
-\r
-_The Beauties of Killarney_ (wrappers).\r
-\r
-_When We Were Boys_ by William O'Brien M. P. (green cloth, slightly\r
-faded, envelope bookmark at p. 217).\r
-\r
-_Thoughts from Spinoza_ (maroon leather).\r
-\r
-_The Story of the Heavens_ by Sir Robert Ball (blue cloth). Ellis's\r
-_Three Trips to Madagascar_ (brown cloth, title obliterated).\r
-\r
-_The Stark-Munro Letters_ by A. Conan Doyle, property of the City of\r
-Dublin Public Library, 106 Capel street, lent 21 May (Whitsun Eve) 1904,\r
-due 4 June 1904, 13 days overdue (black cloth binding, bearing white\r
-letternumber ticket).\r
-\r
-_Voyages in China_ by "Viator" (recovered with brown paper, red ink\r
-title).\r
-\r
-_Philosophy of the Talmud_ (sewn pamphlet). Lockhart's _Life of\r
-Napoleon_ (cover wanting, marginal annotations, minimising victories,\r
-aggrandising defeats of the protagonist).\r
-\r
-_Soll und Haben_ by Gustav Freytag (black boards, Gothic characters,\r
-cigarette coupon bookmark at p. 24). Hozier's _History of the\r
-Russo-Turkish War_ (brown cloth, a volumes, with gummed label, Garrison\r
-Library, Governor's Parade, Gibraltar, on verso of cover).\r
-\r
-_Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland_ by William Allingham (second edition,\r
-green cloth, gilt trefoil design, previous owner's name on recto of\r
-flyleaf erased).\r
-\r
-_A Handbook of Astronomy_ (cover, brown leather, detached, S plates,\r
-antique letterpress long primer, author's footnotes nonpareil, marginal\r
-clues brevier, captions small pica).\r
-\r
-_The Hidden Life of Christ_ (black boards).\r
-\r
-_In the Track of the Sun_ (yellow cloth, titlepage missing, recurrent\r
-title intestation).\r
-\r
-_Physical Strength and How to Obtain It_ by Eugen Sandow (red cloth).\r
-\r
-_Short but yet Plain Elements of Geometry_ written in French by F.\r
-Ignat. Pardies and rendered into English by John Harris D. D. London,\r
-printed for R. Knaplock at the Bifhop's Head, MDCCXI, with dedicatory\r
-epiftle to his worthy friend Charles Cox, efquire, Member of Parliament\r
-for the burgh of Southwark and having ink calligraphed statement on the\r
-flyleaf certifying that the book was the property of Michael Gallagher,\r
-dated this 10th day of May 1822 and requefting the perfon who should\r
-find it, if the book should be loft or go aftray, to reftore it to\r
-Michael Gallagher, carpenter, Dufery Gate, Ennifcorthy, county Wicklow,\r
-the fineft place in the world.\r
-\r
-\r
-What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of\r
-the inverted volumes?\r
-\r
-The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its\r
-place: the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females:\r
-the incongruity of an apple incuneated in a tumbler and of an umbrella\r
-inclined in a closestool: the insecurity of hiding any secret document\r
-behind, beneath or between the pages of a book.\r
-\r
-\r
-Which volume was the largest in bulk?\r
-\r
-Hozier's _History of the Russo-Turkish war._\r
-\r
-\r
-What among other data did the second volume of the work in question\r
-contain?\r
-\r
-The name of a decisive battle (forgotten), frequently remembered by a\r
-decisive officer, major Brian Cooper Tweedy (remembered).\r
-\r
-\r
-Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?\r
-\r
-Firstly, in order to exercise mnemotechnic: secondly, because after an\r
-interval of amnesia, when, seated at the central table, about to consult\r
-the work in question, he remembered by mnemotechnic the name of the\r
-military engagement, Plevna.\r
-\r
-\r
-What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?\r
-\r
-The candour, nudity, pose, tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a\r
-statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus purchased\r
-by auction from P. A. Wren, 9 Bachelor's Walk.\r
-\r
-\r
-What caused him irritation in his sitting posture? Inhibitory pressure\r
-of collar (size 17) and waistcoat (5 buttons), two articles of clothing\r
-superfluous in the costume of mature males and inelastic to alterations\r
-of mass by expansion.\r
-\r
-\r
-How was the irritation allayed?\r
-\r
-He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible\r
-stud, from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He\r
-unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt\r
-and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hairs\r
-extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the\r
-circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial\r
-line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae,\r
-thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles\r
-described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits\r
-of the mammary prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus\r
-one braced trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete.\r
-\r
-\r
-What involuntary actions followed?\r
-\r
-He compressed between 2 fingers the flesh circumjacent to a cicatrice in\r
-the left infracostal region below the diaphragm resulting from a sting\r
-inflicted 2 weeks and 3 days previously (23 May 1904) by a bee.\r
-He scratched imprecisely with his right hand, though insensible of\r
-prurition, various points and surfaces of his partly exposed, wholly\r
-abluted skin. He inserted his left hand into the left lower pocket of\r
-his waistcoat and extracted and replaced a silver coin (I shilling),\r
-placed there (presumably) on the occasion (17 October 1903) of the\r
-interment of Mrs Emily Sinico, Sydney Parade.\r
-\r
-\r
-Compile the budget for 16 June 1904. DEBIT\r
-\r
- 1 Pork Kidney\r
- 1 Copy FREEMAN'S JOURNAL\r
- 1 Bath And Gratification\r
- Tramfare\r
- 1 In Memoriam Patrick Dignam\r
- 2 Banbury cakes\r
- 1 Lunch\r
- 1 Renewal fee for book\r
- 1 Packet Notepaper and Envelopes\r
- 1 Dinner and Gratification\r
- 1 Postal Order and Stamp\r
- Tramfare\r
- 1 Pig's Foot\r
- 1 Sheep's Trotter\r
- 1 Cake Fry's Plain Chocolate\r
- 1 Square Soda Bread\r
- 1 Coffee and Bun\r
- Loan (Stephen Dedalus) refunded\r
- BALANCE\r
-\r
-\r
- L. s. d.\r
- 0--0--3\r
- 0--0--1\r
- 0--1--6\r
- 0--0--1\r
- 0--5--0\r
- 0--0--1\r
- 0--0--7\r
- 0--1--0\r
- 0--0--2\r
- 0--2--0\r
- 0--2--8\r
- 0--0--1\r
- 0--0--4\r
- 0--0--3\r
- 0--0--1\r
- 0--0--4\r
- 0--0--4\r
- 1--7--0\r
- 0-17--5\r
- 2-19--3\r
- CREDIT\r
-\r
- Cash in hand\r
- Commission recd. _Freeman's Journal_\r
- Loan (Stephen Dedalus)\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
- L. s. d.\r
- 0--4--9\r
- 1--7--6\r
- 1--7--0\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
- 2-19--3\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Did the process of divestiture continue?\r
-\r
-Sensible of a benignant persistent ache in his footsoles he extended\r
-his foot to one side and observed the creases, protuberances and salient\r
-points caused by foot pressure in the course of walking repeatedly in\r
-several different directions, then, inclined, he disnoded the laceknots,\r
-unhooked and loosened the laces, took off each of his two boots for the\r
-second time, detached the partially moistened right sock through the\r
-fore part of which the nail of his great toe had again effracted, raised\r
-his right foot and, having unhooked a purple elastic sock suspender,\r
-took off his right sock, placed his unclothed right foot on the margin\r
-of the seat of his chair, picked at and gently lacerated the protruding\r
-part of the great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and\r
-inhaled the odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the\r
-lacerated ungual fragment.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why with satisfaction?\r
-\r
-Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other\r
-ungual fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs\r
-Ellis's juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of brief\r
-genuflection and nocturnal prayer and ambitious meditation.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions\r
-now coalesced?\r
-\r
-Not to inherit by right of primogeniture, gavelkind or borough English,\r
-or possess in perpetuity an extensive demesne of a sufficient number of\r
-acres, roods and perches, statute land measure (valuation 42 pounds), of\r
-grazing turbary surrounding a baronial hall with gatelodge and carriage\r
-drive nor, on the other hand, a terracehouse or semidetached villa,\r
-described as _Rus in Urbe_ or _Qui si sana_, but to purchase by private\r
-treaty in fee simple a thatched bungalowshaped 2 storey dwellinghouse of\r
-southerly aspect, surmounted by vane and lightning conductor, connected\r
-with the earth, with porch covered by parasitic plants (ivy or Virginia\r
-creeper), halldoor, olive green, with smart carriage finish and neat\r
-doorbrasses, stucco front with gilt tracery at eaves and gable, rising,\r
-if possible, upon a gentle eminence with agreeable prospect from balcony\r
-with stone pillar parapet over unoccupied and unoccupyable interjacent\r
-pastures and standing in 5 or 6 acres of its own ground, at such\r
-a distance from the nearest public thoroughfare as to render its\r
-houselights visible at night above and through a quickset hornbeam hedge\r
-of topiary cutting, situate at a given point not less than 1 statute\r
-mile from the periphery of the metropolis, within a time limit of not\r
-more than 15 minutes from tram or train line (e.g., Dundrum, south, or\r
-Sutton, north, both localities equally reported by trial to resemble the\r
-terrestrial poles in being favourable climates for phthisical subjects),\r
-the premises to be held under feefarm grant, lease 999 years, the\r
-messuage to consist of 1 drawingroom with baywindow (2 lancets),\r
-thermometer affixed, 1 sittingroom, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants' rooms, tiled\r
-kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen\r
-wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia\r
-Britannica and New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and\r
-oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite\r
-automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, handtufted\r
-Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with\r
-pillar and claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel\r
-chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer\r
-with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments,\r
-upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three\r
-banner Japanese screen and cuspidors (club style, rich winecoloured\r
-leather, gloss renewable with a minimum of labour by use of linseed\r
-oil and vinegar) and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre,\r
-bentwood perch with fingertame parrot (expurgated language), embossed\r
-mural paper at 10/- per dozen with transverse swags of carmine floral\r
-design and top crown frieze, staircase, three continuous flights at\r
-successive right angles, of varnished cleargrained oak, treads and\r
-risers, newel, balusters and handrail, with steppedup panel dado,\r
-dressed with camphorated wax: bathroom, hot and cold supply, reclining\r
-and shower: water closet on mezzanine provided with opaque singlepane\r
-oblong window, tipup seat, bracket lamp, brass tierod and brace,\r
-armrests, footstool and artistic oleograph on inner face of door:\r
-ditto, plain: servants' apartments with separate sanitary and hygienic\r
-necessaries for cook, general and betweenmaid (salary, rising by\r
-biennial unearned increments of 2 pounds, with comprehensive fidelity\r
-insurance, annual bonus (1 pound) and retiring allowance (based on\r
-the 65 system) after 30 years' service), pantry, buttery, larder,\r
-refrigerator, outoffices, coal and wood cellarage with winebin (still\r
-and sparkling vintages) for distinguished guests, if entertained to\r
-dinner (evening dress), carbon monoxide gas supply throughout.\r
-\r
-\r
-What additional attractions might the grounds contain?\r
-\r
-As addenda, a tennis and fives court, a shrubbery, a glass summerhouse\r
-with tropical palms, equipped in the best botanical manner, a rockery\r
-with waterspray, a beehive arranged on humane principles, oval\r
-flowerbeds in rectangular grassplots set with eccentric ellipses of\r
-scarlet and chrome tulips, blue scillas, crocuses, polyanthus, sweet\r
-William, sweet pea, lily of the valley (bulbs obtainable from sir James\r
-W. Mackey (Limited) wholesale and retail seed and bulb merchants and\r
-nurserymen, agents for chemical manures, 23 Sackville street, upper), an\r
-orchard, kitchen garden and vinery protected against illegal trespassers\r
-by glasstopped mural enclosures, a lumbershed with padlock for various\r
-inventoried implements.\r
-\r
-\r
-As?\r
-\r
-Eeltraps, lobsterpots, fishingrods, hatchet, steelyard, grindstone,\r
-clodcrusher, swatheturner, carriagesack, telescope ladder, 10 tooth\r
-rake, washing clogs, haytedder, tumbling rake, billhook, paintpot,\r
-brush, hoe and so on.\r
-\r
-What improvements might be subsequently introduced?\r
-\r
-A rabbitry and fowlrun, a dovecote, a botanical conservatory, 2 hammocks\r
-(lady's and gentleman's), a sundial shaded and sheltered by laburnum\r
-or lilac trees, an exotically harmonically accorded Japanese tinkle\r
-gatebell affixed to left lateral gatepost, a capacious waterbutt,\r
-a lawnmower with side delivery and grassbox, a lawnsprinkler with\r
-hydraulic hose.\r
-\r
-\r
-What facilities of transit were desirable?\r
-\r
-When citybound frequent connection by train or tram from their\r
-respective intermediate station or terminal. When countrybound\r
-velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar\r
-attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart\r
-phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).\r
-\r
-\r
-What might be the name of this erigible or erected residence?\r
-\r
-Bloom Cottage. Saint Leopold's. Flowerville.\r
-\r
-\r
-Could Bloom of 7 Eccles street foresee Bloom of Flowerville?\r
-\r
-In loose allwool garments with Harris tweed cap, price 8/6, and useful\r
-garden boots with elastic gussets and wateringcan, planting aligned\r
-young firtrees, syringing, pruning, staking, sowing hayseed, trundling a\r
-weedladen wheelbarrow without excessive fatigue at sunset amid the scent\r
-of newmown hay, ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom, achieving\r
-longevity.\r
-\r
-\r
-What syllabus of intellectual pursuits was simultaneously possible?\r
-\r
-Snapshot photography, comparative study of religions, folklore relative\r
-to various amatory and superstitious practices, contemplation of the\r
-celestial constellations.\r
-\r
-\r
-What lighter recreations?\r
-\r
-Outdoor: garden and fieldwork, cycling on level macadamised causeways\r
-ascents of moderately high hills, natation in secluded fresh water and\r
-unmolested river boating in secure wherry or light curricle with kedge\r
-anchor on reaches free from weirs and rapids (period of estivation),\r
-vespertinal perambulation or equestrian circumprocession with inspection\r
-of sterile landscape and contrastingly agreeable cottagers' fires of\r
-smoking peat turves (period of hibernation). Indoor: discussion in\r
-tepid security of unsolved historical and criminal problems: lecture of\r
-unexpurgated exotic erotic masterpieces: house carpentry with toolbox\r
-containing hammer, awl nails, screws, tintacks, gimlet, tweezers,\r
-bullnose plane and turnscrew. Might he become a gentleman farmer of\r
-field produce and live stock?\r
-\r
-Not impossibly, with 1 or 2 stripper cows, 1 pike of upland hay and\r
-requisite farming implements, e.g., an end-to-end churn, a turnip pulper\r
-etc.\r
-\r
-\r
-What would be his civic functions and social status among the county\r
-families and landed gentry?\r
-\r
-Arranged successively in ascending powers of hierarchical order, that\r
-of gardener, groundsman, cultivator, breeder, and at the zenith of his\r
-career, resident magistrate or justice of the peace with a family crest\r
-and coat of arms and appropriate classical motto _(Semper paratus_),\r
-duly recorded in the court directory (Bloom, Leopold P., M. P., P. C.,\r
-K. P., L. L. D. (_honoris causa_), Bloomville, Dundrum) and mentioned in\r
-court and fashionable intelligence (Mr and Mrs Leopold Bloom have left\r
-Kingstown for England).\r
-\r
-\r
-What course of action did he outline for himself in such capacity?\r
-\r
-A course that lay between undue clemency and excessive rigour:\r
-the dispensation in a heterogeneous society of arbitrary classes,\r
-incessantly rearranged in terms of greater and lesser social inequality,\r
-of unbiassed homogeneous indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants\r
-of the widest possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing\r
-with confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown. Loyal to\r
-the highest constituted power in the land, actuated by an innate love of\r
-rectitude his aims would be the strict maintenance of public order,\r
-the repression of many abuses though not of all simultaneously (every\r
-measure of reform or retrenchment being a preliminary solution to be\r
-contained by fluxion in the final solution), the upholding of the letter\r
-of the law (common, statute and law merchant) against all traversers in\r
-covin and trespassers acting in contravention of bylaws and regulations,\r
-all resuscitators (by trespass and petty larceny of kindlings) of\r
-venville rights, obsolete by desuetude, all orotund instigators\r
-of international persecution, all perpetuators of international\r
-animosities, all menial molestors of domestic conviviality, all\r
-recalcitrant violators of domestic connubiality.\r
-\r
-\r
-Prove that he had loved rectitude from his earliest youth.\r
-\r
-To Master Percy Apjohn at High School in 1880 he had divulged his\r
-disbelief in the tenets of the Irish (protestant) church (to which his\r
-father Rudolf Virag (later Rudolph Bloom) had been converted from the\r
-Israelitic faith and communion in 1865 by the Society for promoting\r
-Christianity among the jews) subsequently abjured by him in favour of\r
-Roman catholicism at the epoch of and with a view to his matrimony\r
-in 1888. To Daniel Magrane and Francis Wade in 1882 during a juvenile\r
-friendship (terminated by the premature emigration of the former) he\r
-had advocated during nocturnal perambulations the political theory of\r
-colonial (e.g. Canadian) expansion and the evolutionary theories of\r
-Charles Darwin, expounded in _The Descent of Man_ and _The Origin\r
-of Species_. In 1885 he had publicly expressed his adherence to the\r
-collective and national economic programme advocated by James Fintan\r
-Lalor, John Fisher Murray, John Mitchel, J. F. X. O'Brien and others,\r
-the agrarian policy of Michael Davitt, the constitutional agitation of\r
-Charles Stewart Parnell (M. P. for Cork City), the programme of\r
-peace, retrenchment and reform of William Ewart Gladstone (M. P. for\r
-Midlothian, N. B.) and, in support of his political convictions, had\r
-climbed up into a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree\r
-on Northumberland road to see the entrance (2 February 1888) into the\r
-capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession of 20,000 torchbearers,\r
-divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2000 torches in escort of\r
-the marquess of Ripon and (honest) John Morley.\r
-\r
-\r
-How much and how did he propose to pay for this country residence?\r
-\r
-As per prospectus of the Industrious Foreign Acclimatised Nationalised\r
-Friendly Stateaided Building Society (incorporated 1874), a maximum\r
-of 60 pounds per annum, being 1/6 of an assured income, derived from\r
-giltedged securities, representing at 5 % simple interest on capital of\r
-1200 pounds (estimate of price at 20 years' purchase), of which to be\r
-paid on acquisition and the balance in the form of annual rent, viz. 800\r
-pounds plus 2 1/2 % interest on the same, repayable quarterly in equal\r
-annual instalments until extinction by amortisation of loan advanced for\r
-purchase within a period of 20 years, amounting to an annual rental of\r
-64 pounds, headrent included, the titledeeds to remain in possession\r
-of the lender or lenders with a saving clause envisaging forced sale,\r
-foreclosure and mutual compensation in the event of protracted failure\r
-to pay the terms assigned, otherwise the messuage to become the absolute\r
-property of the tenant occupier upon expiry of the period of years\r
-stipulated.\r
-\r
-\r
-What rapid but insecure means to opulence might facilitate immediate\r
-purchase?\r
-\r
-A private wireless telegraph which would transmit by dot and dash system\r
-the result of a national equine handicap (flat or steeplechase) of I or\r
-more miles and furlongs won by an outsider at odds of 50 to 1 at 3 hr\r
-8 m p.m. at Ascot (Greenwich time), the message being received and\r
-available for betting purposes in Dublin at 2.59 p.m. (Dunsink time).\r
-The unexpected discovery of an object of great monetary value (precious\r
-stone, valuable adhesive or impressed postage stamps (7 schilling,\r
-mauve, imperforate, Hamburg, 1866: 4 pence, rose, blue paper, perforate,\r
-Great Britain, 1855: 1 franc, stone, official, rouletted, diagonal\r
-surcharge, Luxemburg, 1878), antique dynastical ring, unique relic) in\r
-unusual repositories or by unusual means: from the air (dropped by an\r
-eagle in flight), by fire (amid the carbonised remains of an incendiated\r
-edifice), in the sea (amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict), on\r
-earth (in the gizzard of a comestible fowl). A Spanish prisoner's\r
-donation of a distant treasure of valuables or specie or bullion lodged\r
-with a solvent banking corporation loo years previously at 5% compound\r
-interest of the collective worth of 5,000,000 pounds stg (five million\r
-pounds sterling). A contract with an inconsiderate contractee for the\r
-delivery of 32 consignments of some given commodity in consideration of\r
-cash payment on delivery per delivery at the initial rate of 1/4d to be\r
-increased constantly in the geometrical progression of 2 (1/4d, 1/2d,\r
-1d, 2d, 4d, 8d, 1s 4d, 2s 8d to 32 terms). A prepared scheme\r
-based on a study of the laws of probability to break the bank at Monte\r
-Carlo. A solution of the secular problem of the quadrature of the\r
-circle, government premium 1,000,000 pounds sterling.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?\r
-\r
-The reclamation of dunams of waste arenary soil, proposed in the\r
-prospectus of Agendath Netaim, Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. 15, by the\r
-cultivation of orange plantations and melonfields and reafforestation.\r
-The utilisation of waste paper, fells of sewer rodents, human excrement\r
-possessing chemical properties, in view of the vast production of the\r
-first, vast number of the second and immense quantity of the third,\r
-every normal human being of average vitality and appetite producing\r
-annually, cancelling byproducts of water, a sum total of 80 lbs. (mixed\r
-animal and vegetable diet), to be multiplied by 4,386,035, the total\r
-population of Ireland according to census returns of 1901.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were there schemes of wider scope?\r
-\r
-A scheme to be formulated and submitted for approval to the harbour\r
-commissioners for the exploitation of white coal (hydraulic power),\r
-obtained by hydroelectric plant at peak of tide at Dublin bar or at\r
-head of water at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt or catchment basins of main\r
-streams for the economic production of 500,000 W. H. P. of electricity.\r
-A scheme to enclose the peninsular delta of the North Bull at Dollymount\r
-and erect on the space of the foreland, used for golf links and rifle\r
-ranges, an asphalted esplanade with casinos, booths, shooting galleries,\r
-hotels, boardinghouses, readingrooms, establishments for mixed bathing.\r
-A scheme for the use of dogvans and goatvans for the delivery of early\r
-morning milk. A scheme for the development of Irish tourist traffic in\r
-and around Dublin by means of petrolpropelled riverboats, plying in the\r
-fluvial fairway between Island bridge and Ringsend, charabancs, narrow\r
-gauge local railways, and pleasure steamers for coastwise navigation\r
-(10/- per person per day, guide (trilingual) included). A scheme for\r
-the repristination of passenger and goods traffics over Irish waterways,\r
-when freed from weedbeds. A scheme to connect by tramline the Cattle\r
-Market (North Circular road and Prussia street) with the quays (Sheriff\r
-street, lower, and East Wall), parallel with the Link line railway\r
-laid (in conjunction with the Great Southern and Western railway line)\r
-between the cattle park, Liffey junction, and terminus of Midland Great\r
-Western Railway 43 to 45 North\r
-\r
-Wall, in proximity to the terminal stations or Dublin branches of Great\r
-Central Railway, Midland Railway of England, City of Dublin Steam Packet\r
-Company, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, Dublin and Glasgow\r
-Steam Packet Company, Glasgow, Dublin and Londonderry Steam Packet\r
-Company (Laird line), British and Irish Steam Packet Company, Dublin\r
-and Morecambe Steamers, London and North Western Railway Company, Dublin\r
-Port and Docks Board Landing Sheds and transit sheds of Palgrave, Murphy\r
-and Company, steamship owners, agents for steamers from Mediterranean,\r
-Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Holland and for Liverpool\r
-Underwriters' Association, the cost of acquired rolling stock for\r
-animal transport and of additional mileage operated by the Dublin United\r
-Tramways Company, limited, to be covered by graziers' fees.\r
-\r
-\r
-Positing what protasis would the contraction for such several schemes\r
-become a natural and necessary apodosis?\r
-\r
-Given a guarantee equal to the sum sought, the support, by deed of\r
-gift and transfer vouchers during donor's lifetime or by bequest\r
-after donor's painless extinction, of eminent financiers (Blum Pasha,\r
-Rothschild Guggenheim, Hirsch, Montefiore, Morgan, Rockefeller)\r
-possessing fortunes in 6 figures, amassed during a successful life, and\r
-joining capital with opportunity the thing required was done.\r
-\r
-\r
-What eventuality would render him independent of such wealth?\r
-\r
-The independent discovery of a goldseam of inexhaustible ore.\r
-\r
-\r
-For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation?\r
-\r
-It was one of his axioms that similar meditations or the automatic\r
-relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil\r
-recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for\r
-the night alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and\r
-renovated vitality.\r
-\r
-\r
-His justifications?\r
-\r
-As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human\r
-life at least 2/7, viz. 20 years are passed in sleep. As a philosopher\r
-he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an\r
-infinitesimal part of any person's desires has been realised. As a\r
-physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant\r
-agencies chiefly operative during somnolence.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did he fear?\r
-\r
-The committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration\r
-of the light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence\r
-situated in the cerebral convolutions.\r
-\r
-\r
-What were habitually his final meditations?\r
-\r
-Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in\r
-wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded,\r
-reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span\r
-of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did the first drawer unlocked contain?\r
-\r
-A Vere Foster's handwriting copybook, property of Milly (Millicent)\r
-Bloom, certain pages of which bore diagram drawings, marked _Papli_,\r
-which showed a large globular head with 5 hairs erect, 2 eyes in\r
-profile, the trunk full front with 3 large buttons, 1 triangular foot: 2\r
-fading photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe,\r
-actress and professional beauty: a Yuletide card, bearing on it a\r
-pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend _Mizpah_, the\r
-date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders: from Mr + Mrs M. Comerford, the\r
-versicle: _May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome\r
-glee_: a butt of red partly liquefied sealing wax, obtained from the\r
-stores department of Messrs Hely's, Ltd., 89, 90, and 91 Dame street:\r
-a box containing the remainder of a gross of gilt "J" pennibs, obtained\r
-from same department of same firm: an old sandglass which rolled\r
-containing sand which rolled: a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written\r
-by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of the passing into\r
-law of William Ewart Gladstone's Home Rule bill of 1886 (never passed\r
-into law): a bazaar ticket, no 2004, of S. Kevin's Charity Fair, price\r
-6d, 100 prizes: an infantile epistle, dated, small em monday, reading:\r
-capital pee Papli comma capital aitch How are you note of interrogation\r
-capital eye I am very well full stop new paragraph signature with\r
-flourishes capital em Milly no stop: a cameo brooch, property of Ellen\r
-Bloom (born Higgins), deceased: a cameo scarfpin, property of Rudolph\r
-Bloom (born Virag), deceased: 3 typewritten letters, addressee, Henry\r
-Flower, c/o. P. O. Westland Row, addresser, Martha Clifford, c/o. P. O.\r
-Dolphin's Barn: the transliterated name and address of the addresser\r
-of the 3 letters in reversed alphabetic boustrophedonic punctated\r
-quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels suppressed) N. IGS./WI. UU. OX/W. OKS.\r
-MH/Y. IM: a press cutting from an English weekly periodical _Modern\r
-Society_, subject corporal chastisement in girls' schools: a pink ribbon\r
-which had festooned an Easter egg in the year 1899: two partly uncoiled\r
-rubber preservatives with reserve pockets, purchased by post from Box\r
-32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: 1 pack of 1 dozen creamlaid\r
-envelopes and feintruled notepaper, watermarked, now reduced by 3: some\r
-assorted Austrian-Hungarian coins: 2 coupons of the Royal and Privileged\r
-Hungarian Lottery: a lowpower magnifying glass: 2 erotic photocards\r
-showing a) buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation,\r
-superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior\r
-position) b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes\r
-abject) of female religious (partly clothed, eyes direct), purchased by\r
-post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: a press cutting\r
-of recipe for renovation of old tan boots: a Id adhesive stamp,\r
-lavender, of the reign of Queen Victoria: a chart of the measurements\r
-of Leopold Bloom compiled before, during and after 2 months' consecutive\r
-use of Sandow-Whiteley's pulley exerciser (men's 15/-, athlete's 20/-)\r
-viz. chest 28 in and 29 1/2 in, biceps 9 in and 10 in, forearm 8 1/2 in\r
-and 9 in, thigh 10 in and 12 in, calf 11 in and 12 in: 1 prospectus of\r
-The Wonderworker, the world's greatest remedy for rectal complaints,\r
-direct from Wonderworker, Coventry House, South Place, London E C,\r
-addressed (erroneously) to Mrs L. Bloom with brief accompanying note\r
-commencing (erroneously): Dear Madam.\r
-\r
-\r
-Quote the textual terms in which the prospectus claimed advantages for\r
-this thaumaturgic remedy.\r
-\r
-It heals and soothes while you sleep, in case of trouble in breaking\r
-wind, assists nature in the most formidable way, insuring instant relief\r
-in discharge of gases, keeping parts clean and free natural action, an\r
-initial outlay of 7/6 making a new man of you and life worth living.\r
-Ladies find Wonderworker especially useful, a pleasant surprise when\r
-they note delightful result like a cool drink of fresh spring water on\r
-a sultry summer's day. Recommend it to your lady and gentlemen friends,\r
-lasts a lifetime. Insert long round end. Wonderworker.\r
-\r
-\r
-Were there testimonials?\r
-\r
-Numerous. From clergyman, British naval officer, wellknown author, city\r
-man, hospital nurse, lady, mother of five, absentminded beggar.\r
-\r
-\r
-How did absentminded beggar's concluding testimonial conclude?\r
-\r
-What a pity the government did not supply our men with wonderworkers\r
-during the South African campaign! What a relief it would have been!\r
-\r
-\r
-What object did Bloom add to this collection of objects?\r
-\r
-A 4th typewritten letter received by Henry Flower (let H. F. be L. B.)\r
-from Martha Clifford (find M. C.).\r
-\r
-\r
-What pleasant reflection accompanied this action?\r
-\r
-The reflection that, apart from the letter in question, his magnetic\r
-face, form and address had been favourably received during the course of\r
-the preceding day by a wife (Mrs Josephine Breen, born Josie Powell),\r
-a nurse, Miss Callan (Christian name unknown), a maid, Gertrude (Gerty,\r
-family name unknown).\r
-\r
-\r
-What possibility suggested itself?\r
-\r
-The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not\r
-immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in\r
-the company of an elegant courtesan, of corporal beauty, moderately\r
-mercenary, variously instructed, a lady by origin.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did the 2nd drawer contain?\r
-\r
-Documents: the birth certificate of Leopold Paula Bloom: an endowment\r
-assurance policy of 500 pounds in the Scottish Widows' Assurance\r
-Society, intestated Millicent (Milly) Bloom, coming into force at 25\r
-years as with profit policy of 430 pounds, 462/10/0 and 500 pounds at\r
-60 years or death, 65 years or death and death, respectively, or\r
-with profit policy (paidup) of 299/10/0 together with cash payment of\r
-133/10/0, at option: a bank passbook issued by the Ulster Bank, College\r
-Green branch showing statement of a/c for halfyear ending 31 December\r
-1903, balance in depositor's favour: 18/14/6 (eighteen pounds, fourteen\r
-shillings and sixpence, sterling), net personalty: certificate of\r
-possession of 900 pounds, Canadian 4 percent (inscribed) government\r
-stock (free of stamp duty): dockets of the Catholic Cemeteries'\r
-(Glasnevin) Committee, relative to a graveplot purchased: a local press\r
-cutting concerning change of name by deedpoll.\r
-\r
-\r
-Quote the textual terms of this notice.\r
-\r
-I, Rudolph Virag, now resident at no 52 Clanbrassil street, Dublin,\r
-formerly of Szombathely in the kingdom of Hungary, hereby give notice\r
-that I have assumed and intend henceforth upon all occasions and at all\r
-times to be known by the name of Rudolph Bloom.\r
-\r
-\r
-What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom (born Virag) were in the\r
-2nd drawer?\r
-\r
-An indistinct daguerreotype of Rudolf Virag and his father Leopold\r
-Virag executed in the year 1852 in the portrait atelier of their\r
-(respectively) 1st and 2nd cousin, Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar,\r
-Hungary. An ancient haggadah book in which a pair of hornrimmed convex\r
-spectacles inserted marked the passage of thanksgiving in the ritual\r
-prayers for Pessach (Passover): a photocard of the Queen's Hotel,\r
-Ennis, proprietor, Rudolph Bloom: an envelope addressed: _To My Dear Son\r
-Leopold_.\r
-\r
-\r
-What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those five whole words\r
-evoke?\r
-\r
-Tomorrow will be a week that I received... it is no use Leopold to be\r
-... with your dear mother... that is not more to stand... to her...\r
-all for me is out... be kind to Athos, Leopold... my dear son...\r
-always... of me... _das Herz... Gott... dein_...\r
-\r
-\r
-What reminiscences of a human subject suffering from progressive\r
-melancholia did these objects evoke in Bloom?\r
-\r
-An old man, widower, unkempt of hair, in bed, with head covered,\r
-sighing: an infirm dog, Athos: aconite, resorted to by increasing doses\r
-of grains and scruples as a palliative of recrudescent neuralgia: the\r
-face in death of a septuagenarian, suicide by poison.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?\r
-\r
-Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain\r
-beliefs and practices.\r
-\r
-\r
-As?\r
-\r
-The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal: the\r
-hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete\r
-mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of\r
-male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the\r
-ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity of the sabbath.\r
-\r
-\r
-How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?\r
-\r
-Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than\r
-other beliefs and practices now appeared.\r
-\r
-\r
-What first reminiscence had he of Rudolph Bloom (deceased)?\r
-\r
-Rudolph Bloom (deceased) narrated to his son Leopold Bloom (aged 6) a\r
-retrospective arrangement of migrations and settlements in and between\r
-Dublin, London, Florence, Milan, Vienna, Budapest, Szombathely with\r
-statements of satisfaction (his grandfather having seen Maria Theresia,\r
-empress of Austria, queen of Hungary), with commercial advice (having\r
-taken care of pence, the pounds having taken care of themselves).\r
-Leopold Bloom (aged 6) had accompanied these narrations by constant\r
-consultation of a geographical map of Europe (political) and by\r
-suggestions for the establishment of affiliated business premises in the\r
-various centres mentioned.\r
-\r
-\r
-Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these\r
-migrations in narrator and listener?\r
-\r
-In narrator by the access of years and in consequence of the use of\r
-narcotic toxin: in listener by the access of years and in consequence of\r
-the action of distraction upon vicarious experiences.\r
-\r
-\r
-What idiosyncracies of the narrator were concomitant products of\r
-amnesia?\r
-\r
-Occasionally he ate without having previously removed his hat.\r
-Occasionally he drank voraciously the juice of gooseberry fool from an\r
-inclined plate. Occasionally he removed from his lips the traces of food\r
-by means of a lacerated envelope or other accessible fragment of paper.\r
-\r
-\r
-What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent?\r
-\r
-The myopic digital calculation of coins, eructation consequent upon\r
-repletion.\r
-\r
-\r
-What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences?\r
-\r
-The endowment policy, the bank passbook, the certificate of the\r
-possession of scrip.\r
-\r
-\r
-Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which\r
-these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values\r
-to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.\r
-\r
-Successively, in descending helotic order: Poverty: that of the outdoor\r
-hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and\r
-doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy:\r
-that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d.\r
-in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant,\r
-insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated\r
-bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric\r
-public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded\r
-perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's House (Royal\r
-Hospital) Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson's Hospital for reduced but\r
-respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of\r
-misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic\r
-pauper.\r
-\r
-\r
-With which attendant indignities?\r
-\r
-The unsympathetic indifference of previously amiable females, the\r
-contempt of muscular males, the acceptance of fragments of bread,\r
-the simulated ignorance of casual acquaintances, the latration of\r
-illegitimate unlicensed vagabond dogs, the infantile discharge of\r
-decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing, nothing or less\r
-than nothing.\r
-\r
-\r
-By what could such a situation be precluded?\r
-\r
-By decease (change of state): by departure (change of place).\r
-\r
-\r
-Which preferably?\r
-\r
-The latter, by the line of least resistance.\r
-\r
-\r
-What considerations rendered departure not entirely undesirable?\r
-\r
-Constant cohabitation impeding mutual toleration of personal defects.\r
-The habit of independent purchase increasingly cultivated. The necessity\r
-to counteract by impermanent sojourn the permanence of arrest.\r
-\r
-\r
-What considerations rendered departure not irrational?\r
-\r
-The parties concerned, uniting, had increased and multiplied, which\r
-being done, offspring produced and educed to maturity, the parties, if\r
-not disunited were obliged to reunite for increase and multiplication,\r
-which was absurd, to form by reunion the original couple of uniting\r
-parties, which was impossible.\r
-\r
-\r
-What considerations rendered departure desirable?\r
-\r
-The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad,\r
-as represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or\r
-in special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and\r
-hachures.\r
-\r
-\r
-In Ireland?\r
-\r
-The cliffs of Moher, the windy wilds of Connemara, lough Neagh with\r
-submerged petrified city, the Giant's Causeway, Fort Camden and Fort\r
-Carlisle, the Golden Vale of Tipperary, the islands of Aran, the\r
-pastures of royal Meath, Brigid's elm in Kildare, the Queen's Island\r
-shipyard in Belfast, the Salmon Leap, the lakes of Killarney.\r
-\r
-\r
-Abroad?\r
-\r
-Ceylon (with spicegardens supplying tea to Thomas Kernan, agent for\r
-Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 2 Mincing Lane, London, E. C., 5 Dame\r
-street, Dublin), Jerusalem, the holy city (with mosque of Omar and gate\r
-of Damascus, goal of aspiration), the straits of Gibraltar (the unique\r
-birthplace of Marion Tweedy), the Parthenon (containing statues of nude\r
-Grecian divinities), the Wall street money market (which controlled\r
-international finance), the Plaza de Toros at La Linea, Spain (where\r
-O'Hara of the Camerons had slain the bull), Niagara (over which no human\r
-being had passed with impunity), the land of the Eskimos (eaters\r
-of soap), the forbidden country of Thibet (from which no traveller\r
-returns), the bay of Naples (to see which was to die), the Dead Sea.\r
-\r
-\r
-Under what guidance, following what signs?\r
-\r
-At sea, septentrional, by night the polestar, located at the point of\r
-intersection of the right line from beta to alpha in Ursa Maior produced\r
-and divided externally at omega and the hypotenuse of the rightangled\r
-triangle formed by the line alpha omega so produced and the line alpha\r
-delta of Ursa Maior. On land, meridional, a bispherical moon, revealed\r
-in imperfect varying phases of lunation through the posterior interstice\r
-of the imperfectly occluded skirt of a carnose negligent perambulating\r
-female, a pillar of the cloud by day.\r
-\r
-\r
-What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?\r
-\r
-5 pounds reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles\r
-street, missing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold\r
-(Poldy), height 5 ft 9 1/2 inches, full build, olive complexion, may\r
-have since grown a beard, when last seen was wearing a black suit. Above\r
-sum will be paid for information leading to his discovery.\r
-\r
-\r
-What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and\r
-nonentity?\r
-\r
-Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.\r
-\r
-\r
-What tributes his?\r
-\r
-Honour and gifts of strangers, the friends of Everyman. A nymph\r
-immortal, beauty, the bride of Noman.\r
-\r
-\r
-Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?\r
-\r
-Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his\r
-cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic\r
-planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of\r
-space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere\r
-imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey\r
-the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of\r
-the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the\r
-constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination\r
-return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark\r
-crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition)\r
-surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.\r
-\r
-\r
-What would render such return irrational?\r
-\r
-An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through\r
-reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible\r
-time.\r
-\r
-\r
-What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?\r
-\r
-The lateness of the hour, rendering procrastinatory: the obscurity\r
-of the night, rendering invisible: the uncertainty of thoroughfares,\r
-rendering perilous: the necessity for repose, obviating movement: the\r
-proximity of an occupied bed, obviating research: the anticipation of\r
-warmth (human) tempered with coolness (linen), obviating desire and\r
-rendering desirable: the statue of Narcissus, sound without echo,\r
-desired desire.\r
-\r
-\r
-What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an\r
-unoccupied bed?\r
-\r
-The removal of nocturnal solitude, the superior quality of human\r
-(mature female) to inhuman (hotwaterjar) calefaction, the stimulation of\r
-matutinal contact, the economy of mangling done on the premises in the\r
-case of trousers accurately folded and placed lengthwise between the\r
-spring mattress (striped) and the woollen mattress (biscuit section).\r
-\r
-\r
-What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of\r
-accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?\r
-\r
-The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and\r
-premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the\r
-funeral (rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and\r
-Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the visit to\r
-museum and national library (holy place): the bookhunt along Bedford\r
-row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the\r
-Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte\r
-in Bernard Kiernan's premises (holocaust): a blank period of time\r
-including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking\r
-(wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of\r
-Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering):\r
-the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone\r
-street, lower and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street\r
-(Armageddon)--nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter,\r
-Butt Bridge (atonement).\r
-\r
-\r
-What selfimposed enigma did Bloom about to rise in order to go so as to\r
-conclude lest he should not conclude involuntarily apprehend?\r
-\r
-The cause of a brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack emitted by\r
-the insentient material of a strainveined timber table.\r
-\r
-\r
-What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured\r
-multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not\r
-comprehend?\r
-\r
-Who was M'Intosh?\r
-\r
-\r
-What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30\r
-years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction\r
-of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?\r
-\r
-Where was Moses when the candle went out?\r
-\r
-\r
-What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, charged with\r
-collected articles of recently disvested male wearing apparel, silently,\r
-successively, enumerate?\r
-\r
-A provisional failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement: to obtain\r
-a certain quantity of tea from Thomas Kernan (agent for Pulbrook,\r
-Robertson and Co, 5 Dame Street, Dublin, and 2 Mincing Lane, London E.\r
-C.): to certify the presence or absence of posterior rectal orifice in\r
-the case of Hellenic female divinities: to obtain admission (gratuitous\r
-or paid) to the performance of Leah by Mrs Bandmann Palmer at the Gaiety\r
-Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street.\r
-\r
-\r
-What impression of an absent face did Bloom, arrested, silently recall?\r
-\r
-The face of her father, the late Major Brian Cooper Tweedy, Royal Dublin\r
-Fusiliers, of Gibraltar and Rehoboth, Dolphin's Barn.\r
-\r
-\r
-What recurrent impressions of the same were possible by hypothesis?\r
-\r
-Retreating, at the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, Amiens\r
-street, with constant uniform acceleration, along parallel lines\r
-meeting at infinity, if produced: along parallel lines, reproduced from\r
-infinity, with constant uniform retardation, at the terminus of the\r
-Great Northern Railway, Amiens street, returning.\r
-\r
-\r
-What miscellaneous effects of female personal wearing apparel were\r
-perceived by him?\r
-\r
-A pair of new inodorous halfsilk black ladies' hose, a pair of new\r
-violet garters, a pair of outsize ladies' drawers of India mull, cut on\r
-generous lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti's Turkish\r
-cigarettes and containing a long bright steel safety pin, folded\r
-curvilinear, a camisole of batiste with thin lace border, an accordion\r
-underskirt of blue silk moirette, all these objects being disposed\r
-irregularly on the top of a rectangular trunk, quadruple battened,\r
-having capped corners, with multicoloured labels, initialled on its fore\r
-side in white lettering B. C. T. (Brian Cooper Tweedy).\r
-\r
-\r
-What impersonal objects were perceived?\r
-\r
-A commode, one leg fractured, totally covered by square cretonne\r
-cutting, apple design, on which rested a lady's black straw hat.\r
-Orangekeyed ware, bought of Henry Price, basket, fancy goods, chinaware\r
-and ironmongery manufacturer, 21, 22, 23 Moore street, disposed\r
-irregularly on the washstand and floor and consisting of basin, soapdish\r
-and brushtray (on the washstand, together), pitcher and night article\r
-(on the floor, separate).\r
-\r
-\r
-Bloom's acts?\r
-\r
-He deposited the articles of clothing on a chair, removed his remaining\r
-articles of clothing, took from beneath the bolster at the head of the\r
-bed a folded long white nightshirt, inserted his head and arms into the\r
-proper apertures of the nightshirt, removed a pillow from the head to\r
-the foot of the bed, prepared the bedlinen accordingly and entered the\r
-bed.\r
-\r
-\r
-How?\r
-\r
-With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode (his own or\r
-not his own): with solicitude, the snakespiral springs of the mattress\r
-being old, the brass quoits and pendent viper radii loose and tremulous\r
-under stress and strain: prudently, as entering a lair or ambush of\r
-lust or adders: lightly, the less to disturb: reverently, the bed of\r
-conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of\r
-marriage, of sleep and of death.\r
-\r
-\r
-What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?\r
-\r
-New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form,\r
-female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs,\r
-some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.\r
-\r
-\r
-If he had smiled why would he have smiled?\r
-\r
-To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to\r
-enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if\r
-the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first,\r
-last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor\r
-alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.\r
-\r
-\r
-What preceding series?\r
-\r
-Assuming Mulvey to be the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell\r
-d'Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father\r
-Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show,\r
-Maggot O'Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon (Lord Mayor\r
-of Dublin), Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder,\r
-an unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon\r
-Dedalus, Andrew (Pisser) Burke, Joseph Cuffe, Wisdom Hely, Alderman John\r
-Hooper, Dr Francis Brady, Father Sebastian of Mount Argus, a bootblack\r
-at the General Post Office, Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and so\r
-on to no last term.\r
-\r
-\r
-What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and\r
-late occupant of the bed?\r
-\r
-Reflections on his vigour (a bounder), corporal proportion (a\r
-billsticker), commercial ability (a bester), impressionability (a\r
-boaster).\r
-\r
-\r
-Why for the observer impressionability in addition to vigour, corporal\r
-proportion and commercial ability?\r
-\r
-Because he had observed with augmenting frequency in the preceding\r
-members of the same series the same concupiscence, inflammably\r
-transmitted, first with alarm, then with understanding, then with\r
-desire, finally with fatigue, with alternating symptoms of epicene\r
-comprehension and apprehension.\r
-\r
-\r
-With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections\r
-affected?\r
-\r
-Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity.\r
-\r
-\r
-Envy?\r
-\r
-Of a bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the\r
-superincumbent posture of energetic human copulation and energetic\r
-piston and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction of\r
-a constant but not acute concupiscence resident in a bodily and mental\r
-female organism, passive but not obtuse.\r
-\r
-\r
-Jealousy?\r
-\r
-Because a nature full and volatile in its free state, was alternately\r
-the agent and reagent of attraction. Because attraction between agent(s)\r
-and reagent(s) at all instants varied, with inverse proportion of\r
-increase and decrease, with incessant circular extension and radial\r
-reentrance. Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of\r
-attraction produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure.\r
-\r
-\r
-Abnegation?\r
-\r
-In virtue of a) acquaintance initiated in September 1903 in the\r
-establishment of George Mesias, merchant tailor and outfitter, 5 Eden\r
-Quay, b) hospitality extended and received in kind, reciprocated and\r
-reappropriated in person, c) comparative youth subject to impulses of\r
-ambition and magnanimity, colleagual altruism and amorous egoism, d)\r
-extraracial attraction, intraracial inhibition, supraracial prerogative,\r
-e) an imminent provincial musical tour, common current expenses, net\r
-proceeds divided.\r
-\r
-\r
-Equanimity?\r
-\r
-As as natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or\r
-understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance\r
-with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity.\r
-As not so calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in\r
-consequence of a collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than\r
-theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money\r
-under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public\r
-money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of\r
-minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason,\r
-felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking,\r
-practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field,\r
-perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king's enemies,\r
-impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated\r
-murder. As not more abnormal than all other parallel processes of\r
-adaptation to altered conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal\r
-equilibrium between the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances,\r
-foods, beverages, acquired habits, indulged inclinations, significant\r
-disease. As more than inevitable, irreparable.\r
-\r
-\r
-Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?\r
-\r
-From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery) there arose nought but\r
-outrage (copulation) yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially\r
-violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the\r
-adulterously violated.\r
-\r
-\r
-What retribution, if any?\r
-\r
-Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by\r
-combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic\r
-bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses), not yet. Suit\r
-for damages by legal influence or simulation of assault with evidence of\r
-injuries sustained (selfinflicted), not impossibly. Hushmoney by moral\r
-influence possibly. If any, positively, connivance, introduction of\r
-emulation (material, a prosperous rival agency of publicity: moral,\r
-a successful rival agent of intimacy), depreciation, alienation,\r
-humiliation, separation protecting the one separated from the other,\r
-protecting the separator from both.\r
-\r
-\r
-By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of\r
-incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments?\r
-\r
-The preordained frangibility of the hymen: the presupposed intangibility\r
-of the thing in itself: the incongruity and disproportion between\r
-the selfprolonging tension of the thing proposed to be done and the\r
-selfabbreviating relaxation of the thing done; the fallaciously inferred\r
-debility of the female: the muscularity of the male: the variations of\r
-ethical codes: the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving\r
-no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as\r
-masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct\r
-feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist\r
-preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb\r
-and quasimonosyllabic onomatopoeic past participle with complementary\r
-masculine agent) in the passive voice: the continued product of\r
-seminators by generation: the continual production of semen by\r
-distillation: the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the\r
-inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy\r
-of the stars.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and\r
-reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?\r
-\r
-Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial\r
-hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored\r
-(the land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles of\r
-Greece, the land of promise), of adipose anterior and posterior female\r
-hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and\r
-seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude,\r
-insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression,\r
-expressive of mute immutable mature animality.\r
-\r
-\r
-The visible signs of antesatisfaction?\r
-\r
-An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a\r
-tentative revelation: a silent contemplation.\r
-\r
-\r
-Then?\r
-\r
-He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each\r
-plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure\r
-prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.\r
-\r
-\r
-The visible signs of postsatisfaction?\r
-\r
-A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a\r
-solicitous aversion: a proximate erection.\r
-\r
-\r
-What followed this silent action?\r
-\r
-Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation,\r
-catechetical interrogation.\r
-\r
-\r
-With what modifications did the narrator reply to this interrogation?\r
-\r
-Negative: he omitted to mention the clandestine correspondence between\r
-Martha Clifford and Henry Flower, the public altercation at, in and\r
-in the vicinity of the licensed premises of Bernard Kiernan and Co,\r
-Limited, 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street, the erotic provocation\r
-and response thereto caused by the exhibitionism of Gertrude (Gerty),\r
-surname unknown. Positive: he included mention of a performance by Mrs\r
-Bandmann Palmer of LEAH at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King\r
-street, an invitation to supper at Wynn's (Murphy's) Hotel, 35, 36 and\r
-37 Lower Abbey street, a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency\r
-entituled SWEETS OF SIN, anonymous author a gentleman of fashion, a\r
-temporary concussion caused by a falsely calculated movement in the\r
-course of a postcenal gymnastic display, the victim (since completely\r
-recovered) being Stephen Dedalus, professor and author, eldest surviving\r
-son of Simon Dedalus, of no fixed occupation, an aeronautical feat\r
-executed by him (narrator) in the presence of a witness, the professor\r
-and author aforesaid, with promptitude of decision and gymnastic\r
-flexibility.\r
-\r
-\r
-Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications?\r
-\r
-Absolutely.\r
-\r
-\r
-Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?\r
-\r
-Stephen Dedalus, professor and author.\r
-\r
-\r
-What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were\r
-perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the\r
-course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration?\r
-\r
-By the listener a limitation of fertility inasmuch as marriage had been\r
-celebrated 1 calendar month after the 18th anniversary of her birth (8\r
-September 1870), viz. 8 October, and consummated on the same date with\r
-female issue born 15 June 1889, having been anticipatorily consummated\r
-on the lo September of the same year and complete carnal intercourse,\r
-with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last\r
-taken place 5 weeks previous, viz. 27 November 1893, to the birth on 29\r
-December 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1894,\r
-aged 11 days, there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days\r
-during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation\r
-of semen within the natural female organ. By the narrator a limitation\r
-of activity, mental and corporal, inasmuch as complete mental\r
-intercourse between himself and the listener had not taken place since\r
-the consummation of puberty, indicated by catamenic hemorrhage, of the\r
-female issue of narrator and listener, 15 September 1903, there remained\r
-a period of 9 months and 1 day during which, in consequence of a\r
-preestablished natural comprehension in incomprehension between the\r
-consummated females (listener and issue), complete corporal liberty of\r
-action had been circumscribed.\r
-\r
-\r
-How?\r
-\r
-By various reiterated feminine interrogation concerning the masculine\r
-destination whither, the place where, the time at which, the duration\r
-for which, the object with which in the case of temporary absences,\r
-projected or effected.\r
-\r
-\r
-What moved visibly above the listener's and the narrator's invisible\r
-thoughts?\r
-\r
-The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of\r
-concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what directions did listener and narrator lie?\r
-\r
-Listener, S. E. by E.: Narrator, N. W. by W.: on the 53rd parallel\r
-of latitude, N., and 6th meridian of longitude, W.: at an angle of 45\r
-degrees to the terrestrial equator.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what state of rest or motion?\r
-\r
-At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each\r
-and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the\r
-proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of\r
-neverchanging space.\r
-\r
-\r
-In what posture?\r
-\r
-Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right\r
-leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the\r
-attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator:\r
-reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the index\r
-finger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in\r
-the attitude depicted in a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the\r
-childman weary, the manchild in the womb.\r
-\r
-\r
-Womb? Weary?\r
-\r
-He rests. He has travelled.\r
-\r
-\r
-With?\r
-\r
-Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and\r
-Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and\r
-Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad\r
-the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the\r
-Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.\r
-\r
-\r
-When?\r
-\r
-Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's\r
-egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the\r
-Brightdayler.\r
-\r
-\r
-Where?\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his\r
-breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the _City Arms_ hotel\r
-when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his\r
-highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan\r
-that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing\r
-all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually\r
-afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her\r
-ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes\r
-and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the\r
-world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks\r
-of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because\r
-no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder\r
-she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman\r
-certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there\r
-I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and\r
-always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like\r
-that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too\r
-hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything\r
-really serious the matter with him its much better for them to go into\r
-a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to dring it\r
-into him for a month yes and then wed have a hospital nurse next thing\r
-on the carpet have him staying there till they throw him out or a nun\r
-maybe like the smutty photo he has shes as much a nun as Im not yes\r
-because theyre so weak and puling when theyre sick they want a woman\r
-to get well if his nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic and that\r
-dyinglooking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at\r
-the choir party at the sugarloaf Mountain the day I wore that dress\r
-Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the\r
-bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with\r
-her old maids voice trying to imagine he was dying on account of her to\r
-never see thy face again though he looked more like a man with his beard\r
-a bit grown in the bed father was the same besides I hate bandaging and\r
-dosing when he cut his toe with the razor paring his corns afraid hed\r
-get bloodpoisoning but if it was a thing I was sick then wed see what\r
-attention only of course the woman hides it not to give all the trouble\r
-they do yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite anyway love its\r
-not or hed be off his feed thinking of her so either it was one of those\r
-night women if it was down there he was really and the hotel story he\r
-made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who did I\r
-meet ah yes I met do you remember Menton and who else who let me see\r
-that big babbyface I saw him and he not long married flirting with a\r
-young girl at Pooles Myriorama and turned my back on him when he slinked\r
-out looking quite conscious what harm but he had the impudence to make\r
-up to me one time well done to him mouth almighty and his boiled eyes of\r
-all the big stupoes I ever met and thats called a solicitor only for\r
-I hate having a long wrangle in bed or else if its not that its some\r
-little bitch or other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the\r
-sly if they only knew him as well as I do yes because the day before\r
-yesterday he was scribbling something a letter when I came into the\r
-front room to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something told\r
-me and he covered it up with the blottingpaper pretending to be thinking\r
-about business so very probably that was it to somebody who thinks\r
-she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age\r
-especially getting on to forty he is now so as to wheedle any money she\r
-can out of him no fool like an old fool and then the usual kissing my\r
-bottom was to hide it not that I care two straws now who he does it with\r
-or knew before that way though Id like to find out so long as I dont\r
-have the two of them under my nose all the time like that slut that Mary\r
-we had in Ontario terrace padding out her false bottom to excite him bad\r
-enough to get the smell of those painted women off him once or twice\r
-I had a suspicion by getting him to come near me when I found the\r
-long hair on his coat without that one when I went into the kitchen\r
-pretending he was drinking water 1 woman is not enough for them it was\r
-all his fault of course ruining servants then proposing that she could\r
-eat at our table on Christmas day if you please O no thank you not in my\r
-house stealing my potatoes and the oysters 2/6 per doz going out to see\r
-her aunt if you please common robbery so it was but I was sure he had\r
-something on with that one it takes me to find out a thing like that he\r
-said you have no proof it was her proof O yes her aunt was very fond of\r
-oysters but I told her what I thought of her suggesting me to go out to\r
-be alone with her I wouldnt lower myself to spy on them the garters I\r
-found in her room the Friday she was out that was enough for me a little\r
-bit too much her face swelled up on her with temper when I gave her her\r
-weeks notice I saw to that better do without them altogether do out the\r
-rooms myself quicker only for the damn cooking and throwing out the dirt\r
-I gave it to him anyhow either she or me leaves the house I couldnt even\r
-touch him if I thought he was with a dirty barefaced liar and sloven\r
-like that one denying it up to my face and singing about the place in\r
-the W C too because she knew she was too well off yes because he couldnt\r
-possibly do without it that long so he must do it somewhere and the last\r
-time he came on my bottom when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a\r
-great squeeze going along by the Tolka in my hand there steals another\r
-I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back\r
-singing the young May moon shes beaming love because he has an idea\r
-about him and me hes not such a fool he said Im dining out and going to\r
-the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in any case\r
-God knows hes a change in a way not to be always and ever wearing the\r
-same old hat unless I paid some nicelooking boy to do it since I cant do\r
-it myself a young boy would like me Id confuse him a little alone with\r
-him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn\r
-red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel with that down\r
-on their cheek doing that frigging drawing out the thing by the hour\r
-question and answer would you do this that and the other with the\r
-coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because I told him about some dean\r
-or bishop was sitting beside me in the jews temples gardens when I was\r
-knitting that woollen thing a stranger to Dublin what place was it and\r
-so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues encouraging\r
-him making him worse than he is who is in your mind now tell me who are\r
-you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the german\r
-Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to\r
-make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this\r
-age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it\r
-pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway\r
-and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with\r
-all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time\r
-after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it why\r
-cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes\r
-love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help\r
-yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there\r
-and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to\r
-your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used\r
-to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did\r
-where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your\r
-person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was\r
-it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and\r
-have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever\r
-way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the real father\r
-what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to God he had\r
-a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling it neither\r
-would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder did he know\r
-me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed\r
-never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre\r
-lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone\r
-them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of\r
-incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a priest if\r
-youre married hes too careful about himself then give something to H\r
-H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I\r
-didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall\r
-though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking\r
-of his fathers I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in\r
-it who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of\r
-drink not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick\r
-their bills up with some liqueur Id like to sip those richlooking green\r
-and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the\r
-opera hats I tasted once with my finger dipped out of that American that\r
-had the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to\r
-keep himself from falling asleep after the last time after we took the\r
-port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely\r
-and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped\r
-straight into bed till that thunder woke me up God be merciful to us\r
-I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish us when I\r
-blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in\r
-Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end and then they come and\r
-tell you theres no God what could you do if it was running and rushing\r
-about nothing only make an act of contrition the candle I lit that\r
-evening in Whitefriars street chapel for the month of May see it brought\r
-its luck though hed scoff if he heard because he never goes to church\r
-mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey\r
-matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes when I lit the\r
-lamp because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red\r
-brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they\r
-call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took\r
-off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and\r
-perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar\r
-standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he\r
-was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had\r
-one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole\r
-sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the\r
-middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all\r
-they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had\r
-to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in\r
-him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is\r
-so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last\r
-time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for\r
-him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it\r
-themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly nobody would\r
-believe cutting her teeth too and Mina Purefoys husband give us a swing\r
-out of your whiskers filling her up with a child or twins once a year\r
-as regular as the clock always with a smell of children off her the one\r
-they called budgers or something like a nigger with a shock of hair on\r
-it Jesusjack the child is a black the last time I was there a squad of\r
-them falling over one another and bawling you couldnt hear your ears\r
-supposed to be healthy not satisfied till they have us swollen out like\r
-elephants or I dont know what supposing I risked having another not off\r
-him though still if he was married Im sure hed have a fine strong child\r
-but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly\r
-I suppose it was meeting Josie Powell and the funeral and thinking about\r
-me and Boylan set him off well he can think what he likes now if thatll\r
-do him any good I know they were spooning a bit when I came on the scene\r
-he was dancing and sitting out with her the night of Georgina Simpsons\r
-housewarming and then he wanted to ram it down my neck it was on account\r
-of not liking to see her a wallflower that was why we had the standup\r
-row over politics he began it not me when he said about Our Lord being a\r
-carpenter at last he made me cry of course a woman is so sensitive about\r
-everything I was fuming with myself after for giving in only for I knew\r
-he was gone on me and the first socialist he said He was he annoyed me\r
-so much I couldnt put him into a temper still he knows a lot of mixedup\r
-things especially about the body and the inside I often wanted to study\r
-up that myself what we have inside us in that family physician I could\r
-always hear his voice talking when the room was crowded and watch him\r
-after that I pretended I had a coolness on with her over him because he\r
-used to be a bit on the jealous side whenever he asked who are you going\r
-to and I said over to Floey and he made me the present of Byron's poems\r
-and the three pairs of gloves so that finished that I could quite easily\r
-get him to make it up any time I know how Id even supposing he got in\r
-with her again and was going out to see her somewhere Id know if he\r
-refused to eat the onions I know plenty of ways ask him to tuck down the\r
-collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil and gloves on going out I\r
-kiss then would send them all spinning however alright well see then let\r
-him go to her she of course would only be too delighted to pretend shes\r
-mad in love with him that I wouldnt so much mind Id just go to her and\r
-ask her do you love him and look her square in the eyes she couldnt fool\r
-me but he might imagine he was and make a declaration to her with his\r
-plabbery kind of a manner like he did to me though I had the devils own\r
-job to get it out of him though I liked him for that it showed he could\r
-hold in and wasnt to be got for the asking he was on the pop of asking\r
-me too the night in the kitchen I was rolling the potato cake theres\r
-something I want to say to you only for I put him off letting on I was\r
-in a temper with my hands and arms full of pasty flour in any case I let\r
-out too much the night before talking of dreams so I didnt want to let\r
-him know more than was good for him she used to be always embracing me\r
-Josie whenever he was there meaning him of course glauming me over and\r
-when I said I washed up and down as far as possible asking me and did\r
-you wash possible the women are always egging on to that putting it on\r
-thick when hes there they know by his sly eye blinking a bit putting on\r
-the indifferent when they come out with something the kind he is what\r
-spoils him I dont wonder in the least because he was very handsome at\r
-that time trying to look like Lord Byron I said I liked though he\r
-was too beautiful for a man and he was a little before we got engaged\r
-afterwards though she didnt like it so much the day I was in fits of\r
-laughing with the giggles I couldnt stop about all my hairpins falling\r
-out one after another with the mass of hair I had youre always in great\r
-humour she said yes because it grigged her because she knew what it\r
-meant because I used to tell her a good bit of what went on between us\r
-not all but just enough to make her mouth water but that wasnt my fault\r
-she didnt darken the door much after we were married I wonder what shes\r
-got like now after living with that dotty husband of hers she had her\r
-face beginning to look drawn and run down the last time I saw her she\r
-must have been just after a row with him because I saw on the moment she\r
-was edging to draw down a conversation about husbands and talk about him\r
-to run him down what was it she told me O yes that sometimes he used to\r
-go to bed with his muddy boots on when the maggot takes him just imagine\r
-having to get into bed with a thing like that that might murder you\r
-any moment what a man well its not the one way everyone goes mad Poldy\r
-anyhow whatever he does always wipes his feet on the mat when he comes\r
-in wet or shine and always blacks his own boots too and he always takes\r
-off his hat when he comes up in the street like then and now hes going\r
-about in his slippers to look for 10000 pounds for a postcard U p up\r
-O sweetheart May wouldnt a thing like that simply bore you stiff to\r
-extinction actually too stupid even to take his boots off now what\r
-could you make of a man like that Id rather die 20 times over than marry\r
-another of their sex of course hed never find another woman like me to\r
-put up with him the way I do know me come sleep with me yes and he knows\r
-that too at the bottom of his heart take that Mrs Maybrick that poisoned\r
-her husband for what I wonder in love with some other man yes it was\r
-found out on her wasnt she the downright villain to go and do a thing\r
-like that of course some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad\r
-and always the worst word in the world what do they ask us to marry them\r
-for if were so bad as all that comes to yes because they cant get on\r
-without us white Arsenic she put in his tea off flypaper wasnt it I\r
-wonder why they call it that if I asked him hed say its from the Greek\r
-leave us as wise as we were before she must have been madly in love with\r
-the other fellow to run the chance of being hanged O she didnt care if\r
-that was her nature what could she do besides theyre not brutes enough\r
-to go and hang a woman surely are they\r
-\r
-theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he\r
-noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C\r
-with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both\r
-ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his\r
-two old maids of sisters when I stood up and asked the girl where it was\r
-what do I care with it dropping out of me and that black closed breeches\r
-he made me buy takes you half an hour to let them down wetting all\r
-myself always with some brandnew fad every other week such a long one I\r
-did I forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind that I never got after\r
-some robber of a woman and he wanted me to put it in the Irish times\r
-lost in the ladies lavatory D B C Dame street finder return to Mrs\r
-Marion Bloom and I saw his eyes on my feet going out through the turning\r
-door he was looking when I looked back and I went there for tea 2 days\r
-after in the hope but he wasnt now how did that excite him because I was\r
-crossing them when we were in the other room first he meant the shoes\r
-that are too tight to walk in my hand is nice like that if I only had a\r
-ring with the stone for my month a nice aquamarine Ill stick him for one\r
-and a gold bracelet I dont like my foot so much still I made him spend\r
-once with my foot the night after Goodwins botchup of a concert so cold\r
-and windy it was well we had that rum in the house to mull and the fire\r
-wasnt black out when he asked to take off my stockings lying on the\r
-hearthrug in Lombard street west and another time it was my muddy boots\r
-hed like me to walk in all the horses dung I could find but of course\r
-hes not natural like the rest of the world that I what did he say I\r
-could give 9 points in 10 to Katty Lanner and beat her what does that\r
-mean I asked him I forget what he said because the stoppress edition\r
-just passed and the man with the curly hair in the Lucan dairy thats so\r
-polite I think I saw his face before somewhere I noticed him when I was\r
-tasting the butter so I took my time Bartell dArcy too that he used to\r
-make fun of when he commenced kissing me on the choir stairs after I\r
-sang Gounods _Ave Maria_ what are we waiting for O my heart kiss me\r
-straight on the brow and part which is my brown part he was pretty hot\r
-for all his tinny voice too my low notes he was always raving about if\r
-you can believe him I liked the way he used his mouth singing then he\r
-said wasnt it terrible to do that there in a place like that I dont see\r
-anything so terrible about it Ill tell him about that some day not now\r
-and surprise him ay and Ill take him there and show him the very place\r
-too we did it so now there you are like it or lump it he thinks nothing\r
-can happen without him knowing he hadnt an idea about my mother till we\r
-were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did he was\r
-lo times worse himself anyhow begging me to give him a tiny bit cut off\r
-my drawers that was the evening coming along Kenilworth square he kissed\r
-me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions\r
-is it permitted to enquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it\r
-as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket\r
-of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen\r
-always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their\r
-skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with\r
-him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right\r
-against the sun so he could see every atom she had on when he saw me\r
-from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however\r
-standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on\r
-him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion\r
-and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing there\r
-where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from\r
-anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but\r
-they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him\r
-coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping\r
-away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I\r
-halfturned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my\r
-glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for\r
-the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers\r
-the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll\r
-to carry about in his waistcoat pocket _O Maria Santisima_ he did look\r
-a big fool dreeping in the rain splendid set of teeth he had made me\r
-hungry to look at them and beseeched of me to lift the orange petticoat\r
-I had on with the sunray pleats that there was nobody he said hed kneel\r
-down in the wet if I didnt so persevering he would too and ruin his new\r
-raincoat you never know what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so\r
-savage for it if anyone was passing so I lifted them a bit and touched\r
-his trousers outside the way I used to Gardner after with my ring hand\r
-to keep him from doing worse where it was too public I was dying to find\r
-out was he circumcised he was shaking like a jelly all over they want\r
-to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it and father\r
-waiting all the time for his dinner he told me to say I left my purse in\r
-the butchers and had to go back for it what a Deceiver then he wrote me\r
-that letter with all those words in it how could he have the face to any\r
-woman after his company manners making it so awkward after when we met\r
-asking me have I offended you with my eyelids down of course he saw I\r
-wasnt he had a few brains not like that other fool Henny Doyle he was\r
-always breaking or tearing something in the charades I hate an unlucky\r
-man and if I knew what it meant of course I had to say no for form sake\r
-dont understand you I said and wasnt it natural so it is of course\r
-it used to be written up with a picture of a womans on that wall in\r
-Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere only for children\r
-seeing it too young then writing every morning a letter sometimes twice\r
-a day I liked the way he made love then he knew the way to take a woman\r
-when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th then I wrote\r
-the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it\r
-simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth but he never knew how to\r
-embrace well like Gardner I hope hell come on Monday as he said at the\r
-same time four I hate people who come at all hours answer the door you\r
-think its the vegetables then its somebody and you all undressed or\r
-the door of the filthy sloppy kitchen blows open the day old frostyface\r
-Goodwin called about the concert in Lombard street and I just after\r
-dinner all flushed and tossed with boiling old stew dont look at me\r
-professor I had to say Im a fright yes but he was a real old gent in his\r
-way it was impossible to be more respectful nobody to say youre out you\r
-have to peep out through the blind like the messengerboy today I thought\r
-it was a putoff first him sending the port and the peaches first and I\r
-was just beginning to yawn with nerves thinking he was trying to make a\r
-fool of me when I knew his tattarrattat at the door he must have been\r
-a bit late because it was l/4 after 3 when I saw the 2 Dedalus girls\r
-coming from school I never know the time even that watch he gave me\r
-never seems to go properly Id want to get it looked after when I threw\r
-the penny to that lame sailor for England home and beauty when I was\r
-whistling there is a charming girl I love and I hadnt even put on my\r
-clean shift or powdered myself or a thing then this day week were to go\r
-to Belfast just as well he has to go to Ennis his fathers anniversary\r
-the 27th it wouldnt be pleasant if he did suppose our rooms at the hotel\r
-were beside each other and any fooling went on in the new bed I couldnt\r
-tell him to stop and not bother me with him in the next room or perhaps\r
-some protestant clergyman with a cough knocking on the wall then hed\r
-never believe the next day we didnt do something its all very well a\r
-husband but you cant fool a lover after me telling him we never did\r
-anything of course he didnt believe me no its better hes going where\r
-he is besides something always happens with him the time going to the\r
-Mallow concert at Maryborough ordering boiling soup for the two of\r
-us then the bell rang out he walks down the platform with the soup\r
-splashing about taking spoonfuls of it hadnt he the nerve and the waiter\r
-after him making a holy show of us screeching and confusion for the\r
-engine to start but he wouldnt pay till he finished it the two gentlemen\r
-in the 3rd class carriage said he was quite right so he was too hes so\r
-pigheaded sometimes when he gets a thing into his head a good job he was\r
-able to open the carriage door with his knife or theyd have taken us on\r
-to Cork I suppose that was done out of revenge on him O I love jaunting\r
-in a train or a car with lovely soft cushions I wonder will he take\r
-a 1st class for me he might want to do it in the train by tipping the\r
-guard well O I suppose therell be the usual idiots of men gaping at\r
-us with their eyes as stupid as ever they can possibly be that was an\r
-exceptional man that common workman that left us alone in the carriage\r
-that day going to Howth Id like to find out something about him l or 2\r
-tunnels perhaps then you have to look out of the window all the nicer\r
-then coming back suppose I never came back what would they say eloped\r
-with him that gets you on on the stage the last concert I sang at where\r
-its over a year ago when was it St Teresas hall Clarendon St little\r
-chits of missies they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her like\r
-on account of father being in the army and my singing the absentminded\r
-beggar and wearing a brooch for Lord Roberts when I had the map of it\r
-all and Poldy not Irish enough was it him managed it this time I wouldnt\r
-put it past him like he got me on to sing in the _Stabat Mater_ by going\r
-around saying he was putting Lead Kindly Light to music I put him up to\r
-that till the jesuits found out he was a freemason thumping the piano\r
-lead Thou me on copied from some old opera yes and he was going about\r
-with some of them Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves\r
-talking his usual trash and nonsense he says that little man he showed\r
-me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffiths is he\r
-well he doesnt look it thats all I can say still it must have been him\r
-he knew there was a boycott I hate the mention of their politics after\r
-the war that Pretoria and Ladysmith and Bloemfontein where Gardner lieut\r
-Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt of enteric fever he was a lovely\r
-fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave\r
-too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock\r
-my Irish beauty he was pale with excitement about going away or wed be\r
-seen from the road he couldnt stand properly and I so hot as I never\r
-felt they could have made their peace in the beginning or old oom Paul\r
-and the rest of the other old Krugers go and fight it out between them\r
-instead of dragging on for years killing any finelooking men there were\r
-with their fever if he was even decently shot it wouldnt have been so\r
-bad I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the\r
-Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely after looking across the bay\r
-from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies or those sham\r
-battles on the 15 acres the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the\r
-march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the\r
-lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela his father made his\r
-money over selling the horses for the cavalry well he could buy me a\r
-nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him theyve lovely linen up\r
-there or one of those nice kimono things I must buy a mothball like I\r
-had before to keep in the drawer with them it would be exciting going\r
-round with him shopping buying those things in a new city better leave\r
-this ring behind want to keep turning and turning to get it over the\r
-knuckle there or they might bell it round the town in their papers or\r
-tell the police on me but theyd think were married O let them all go and\r
-smother themselves for the fat lot I care he has plenty of money and hes\r
-not a marrying man so somebody better get it out of him if I could find\r
-out whether he likes me I looked a bit washy of course when I looked\r
-close in the handglass powdering a mirror never gives you the expression\r
-besides scrooching down on me like that all the time with his big\r
-hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest for this heat always having\r
-to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way\r
-Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do it and\r
-stick out her tongue as far as ever she could and he so quiet and mild\r
-with his tingating cither can you ever be up to men the way it takes\r
-them lovely stuff in that blue suit he had on and stylish tie and socks\r
-with the skyblue silk things on them hes certainly well off I know by\r
-the cut his clothes have and his heavy watch but he was like a perfect\r
-devil for a few minutes after he came back with the stoppress tearing up\r
-the tickets and swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost\r
-over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on account of\r
-Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits that sponger he was making\r
-free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long joult over\r
-the featherbed mountain after the lord Mayor looking at me with his\r
-dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at dessert\r
-when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I wished I could have picked\r
-every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it was so tasty\r
-and browned and as tender as anything only for I didnt want to eat\r
-everything on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked\r
-silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into\r
-my muff when I was playing with them then always hanging out of them for\r
-money in a restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to\r
-be thankful for our mangy cup of tea itself as a great compliment to be\r
-noticed the way the world is divided in any case if its going to go on I\r
-want at least two other good chemises for one thing and but I dont know\r
-what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think didnt he say yes and\r
-half the girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made\r
-them that Andalusian singing her Manola she didnt make much secret of\r
-what she hadnt yes and the second pair of silkette stockings is laddered\r
-after one days wear I could have brought them back to Lewers this\r
-morning and kicked up a row and made that one change them only not to\r
-upset myself and run the risk of walking into him and ruining the whole\r
-thing and one of those kidfitting corsets Id want advertised cheap in\r
-the Gentlewoman with elastic gores on the hips he saved the one I have\r
-but thats no good what did they say they give a delightful figure line\r
-11/6 obviating that unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to\r
-reduce flesh my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the\r
-stout at dinner or am I getting too fond of it the last they sent from\r
-ORourkes was as flat as a pancake he makes his money easy Larry they\r
-call him the old mangy parcel he sent at Xmas a cottage cake and a\r
-bottle of hogwash he tried to palm off as claret that he couldnt get\r
-anyone to drink God spare his spit for fear hed die of the drouth or\r
-I must do a few breathing exercises I wonder is that antifat any good\r
-might overdo it the thin ones are not so much the fashion now garters\r
-that much I have the violet pair I wore today thats all he bought me\r
-out of the cheque he got on the first O no there was the face lotion\r
-I finished the last of yesterday that made my skin like new I told him\r
-over and over again get that made up in the same place and dont forget\r
-it God only knows whether he did after all I said to him 111 know by\r
-the bottle anyway if not I suppose 111 only have to wash in my piss like\r
-beeftea or chickensoup with some of that opoponax and violet I thought\r
-it was beginning to look coarse or old a bit the skin underneath is much\r
-finer where it peeled off there on my finger after the burn its a pity\r
-it isnt all like that and the four paltry handkerchiefs about 6/- in all\r
-sure you cant get on in this world without style all going in food and\r
-rent when I get it Ill lash it around I tell you in fine style I always\r
-want to throw a handful of tea into the pot measuring and mincing if\r
-I buy a pair of old brogues itself do you like those new shoes yes how\r
-much were they Ive no clothes at all the brown costume and the skirt and\r
-jacket and the one at the cleaners 3 whats that for any woman cutting\r
-up this old hat and patching up the other the men wont look at you and\r
-women try to walk on you because they know youve no man then with all\r
-the things getting dearer every day for the 4 years more I have of life\r
-up to 35 no Im what am I at all 111 be 33 in September will I what O\r
-well look at that Mrs Galbraith shes much older than me I saw her when\r
-I was out last week her beautys on the wane she was a lovely woman\r
-magnificent head of hair on her down to her waist tossing it back like\r
-that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street 1st thing I did every morning\r
-to look across see her combing it as if she loved it and was full of it\r
-pity I only got to know her the day before we left and that Mrs Langtry\r
-the jersey lily the prince of Wales was in love with I suppose hes like\r
-the first man going the roads only for the name of a king theyre all\r
-made the one way only a black mans Id like to try a beauty up to what\r
-was she 45 there was some funny story about the jealous old husband what\r
-was it at all and an oyster knife he went no he made her wear a kind\r
-of a tin thing round her and the prince of Wales yes he had the oyster\r
-knife cant be true a thing like that like some of those books he brings\r
-me the works of Master Francois Somebody supposed to be a priest about\r
-a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out a nice word for\r
-any priest to write and her a--e as if any fool wouldnt know what that\r
-meant I hate that pretending of all things with that old blackguards\r
-face on him anybody can see its not true and that Ruby and Fair Tyrants\r
-he brought me that twice I remember when I came to page 5 o the part\r
-about where she hangs him up out of a hook with a cord flagellate\r
-sure theres nothing for a woman in that all invention made up about he\r
-drinking the champagne out of her slipper after the ball was over like\r
-the infant Jesus in the crib at Inchicore in the Blessed Virgins arms\r
-sure no woman could have a child that big taken out of her and I thought\r
-first it came out of her side because how could she go to the chamber\r
-when she wanted to and she a rich lady of course she felt honoured H R H\r
-he was in Gibraltar the year I was born I bet he found lilies there too\r
-where he planted the tree he planted more than that in his time he might\r
-have planted me too if hed come a bit sooner then I wouldnt be here as\r
-I am he ought to chuck that Freeman with the paltry few shillings\r
-he knocks out of it and go into an office or something where hed get\r
-regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count\r
-the money all the day of course he prefers plottering about the house\r
-so you cant stir with him any side whats your programme today I wish hed\r
-even smoke a pipe like father to get the smell of a man or pretending\r
-to be mooching about for advertisements when he could have been in Mr\r
-Cuffes still only for what he did then sending me to try and patch it up\r
-I could have got him promoted there to be the manager he gave me a great\r
-mirada once or twice first he was as stiff as the mischief really and\r
-truly Mrs Bloom only I felt rotten simply with the old rubbishy dress\r
-that I lost the leads out of the tails with no cut in it but theyre\r
-coming into fashion again I bought it simply to please him I knew it was\r
-no good by the finish pity I changed my mind of going to Todd and Bums\r
-as I said and not Lees it was just like the shop itself rummage sale a\r
-lot of trash I hate those rich shops get on your nerves nothing kills me\r
-altogether only he thinks he knows a great lot about a womans dress and\r
-cooking mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it if\r
-I went by his advices every blessed hat I put on does that suit me yes\r
-take that thats alright the one like a weddingcake standing up miles\r
-off my head he said suited me or the dishcover one coming down on my\r
-backside on pins and needles about the shopgirl in that place in Grafton\r
-street I had the misfortune to bring him into and she as insolent as\r
-ever she could be with her smirk saying Im afraid were giving you too\r
-much trouble what shes there for but I stared it out of her yes he was\r
-awfully stiff and no wonder but he changed the second time he looked\r
-Poldy pigheaded as usual like the soup but I could see him looking very\r
-hard at my chest when he stood up to open the door for me it was nice of\r
-him to show me out in any case Im extremely sorry Mrs Bloom believe me\r
-without making it too marked the first time after him being insulted and\r
-me being supposed to be his wife I just half smiled I know my chest was\r
-out that way at the door when he said Im extremely sorry and Im sure you\r
-were\r
-\r
-yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he\r
-made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow\r
-stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up\r
-and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him\r
-what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same\r
-in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there\r
-like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with\r
-her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks\r
-like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of\r
-him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a\r
-cabbageleaf that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market or\r
-that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue\r
-of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing\r
-standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side the\r
-Queens own they were a nice lot its well the Surreys relieved them\r
-theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed\r
-outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station just to\r
-try some fellow or other trying to catch my eye as if it was I of the\r
-7 wonders of the world O and the stink of those rotten places the night\r
-coming home with Poldy after the Comerfords party oranges and lemonade\r
-to make you feel nice and watery I went into r of them it was so biting\r
-cold I couldnt keep it when was that 93 the canal was frozen yes it was\r
-a few months after a pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see\r
-me squatting in the mens place meadero I tried to draw a picture of\r
-it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not\r
-afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang of something there the\r
-woman is beauty of course thats admitted when he said I could pose for a\r
-picture naked to some rich fellow in Holles street when he lost the\r
-job in Helys and I was selling the clothes and strumming in the coffee\r
-palace would I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only\r
-shes younger or Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo\r
-he has nymphs used they go about like that I asked him about her and\r
-that word met something with hoses in it and he came out with some\r
-jawbreakers about the incarnation he never can explain a thing simply\r
-the way a body can understand then he goes and burns the bottom out of\r
-the pan all for his Kidney this one not so much theres the mark of his\r
-teeth still where he tried to bite the nipple I had to scream out arent\r
-they fearful trying to hurt you I had a great breast of milk with Milly\r
-enough for two what was the reason of that he said I could have got a\r
-pound a week as a wet nurse all swelled out the morning that delicate\r
-looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose nearly\r
-caught me washing through the window only for I snapped up the towel to\r
-my face that was his studenting hurt me they used to weaning her till he\r
-got doctor Brady to give me the belladonna prescription I had to get him\r
-to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweeter and thicker than\r
-cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything I\r
-declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if I only could remember\r
-the I half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master\r
-Poldy yes and its so much smoother the skin much an hour he was at them\r
-Im sure by the clock like some kind of a big infant I had at me they\r
-want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a\r
-woman I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was\r
-here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel\r
-all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd\r
-time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes\r
-with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout\r
-out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look\r
-ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the way hed take it you\r
-want to feel your way with a man theyre not all like him thank God some\r
-of them want you to be so nice about it I noticed the contrast he does\r
-it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose\r
-from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage\r
-brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait\r
-till Monday\r
-\r
-frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines\r
-have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of\r
-them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men\r
-that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those\r
-roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of\r
-those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about\r
-hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C 111\r
-get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for\r
-the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last\r
-Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall\r
-making the place hotter than it is that rain was lovely and refreshing\r
-just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar\r
-my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night\r
-and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared\r
-with their 3 Rock mountain they think is so great with the red sentries\r
-here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the smell of the\r
-rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on\r
-you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from\r
-the B Marche paris what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on it\r
-she was very nice whats this her other name was just a p c to tell you I\r
-sent the little present have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very\r
-clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything\r
-to be back in Gib and hear you sing Waiting and in old Madrid Concone\r
-is the name of those exercises he bought me one of those new some word\r
-I couldnt make out shawls amusing things but tear for the least thing\r
-still there lovely I think dont you will always think of the lovely teas\r
-we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore\r
-well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out\r
-regards to your father also captain Grove with love yrs affly Hester x\r
-x x x x she didnt look a bit married just like a girl he was years older\r
-than her wogger he was awfully fond of me when he held down the wire\r
-with his foot for me to step over at the bullfight at La Linea when\r
-that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear these clothes we have to wear\r
-whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for\r
-example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in\r
-them in a crowd run or jump out of the way thats why I was afraid when\r
-that other ferocious old Bull began to charge the banderilleros with\r
-the sashes and the 2 things in their hats and the brutes of men shouting\r
-bravo toro sure the women were as bad in their nice white mantillas\r
-ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses I never heard of\r
-such a thing in all my life yes he used to break his heart at me taking\r
-off the dog barking in bell lane poor brute and it sick what became\r
-of them ever I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them its like all\r
-through a mist makes you feel so old I made the scones of course I had\r
-everything all to myself then a girl Hester we used to compare our hair\r
-mine was thicker than hers she showed me how to settle it at the back\r
-when I put it up and whats this else how to make a knot on a thread with\r
-the one hand we were like cousins what age was I then the night of the\r
-storm I slept in her bed she had her arms round me then we were fighting\r
-in the morning with the pillow what fun he was watching me whenever he\r
-got an opportunity at the band on the Alameda esplanade when I was with\r
-father and captain Grove I looked up at the church first and then at the\r
-windows then down and our eyes met I felt something go through me like\r
-all needles my eyes were dancing I remember after when I looked\r
-at myself in the glass hardly recognised myself the change he was\r
-attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent\r
-looking disappointed and gay at the same time he was like Thomas in\r
-the shadow of Ashlydyat I had a splendid skin from the sun and the\r
-excitement like a rose I didnt get a wink of sleep it wouldnt have been\r
-nice on account of her but I could have stopped it in time she gave me\r
-the Moonstone to read that was the first I read of Wilkie Collins East\r
-Lynne I read and the shadow of Ashlydyat Mrs Henry Wood Henry Dunbar by\r
-that other woman I lent him afterwards with Mulveys photo in it so as he\r
-see I wasnt without and Lord Lytton Eugene Aram Molly bawn she gave me\r
-by Mrs Hungerford on account of the name I dont like books with a Molly\r
-in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore\r
-always shoplifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it\r
-O this blanket is too heavy on me thats better I havent even one decent\r
-nightdress this thing gets all rolled under me besides him and his\r
-fooling thats better I used to be weltering then in the heat my shift\r
-drenched with the sweat stuck in the cheeks of my bottom on the chair\r
-when I stood up they were so fattish and firm when I got up on the sofa\r
-cushions to see with my clothes up and the bugs tons of them at night\r
-and the mosquito nets I couldnt read a line Lord how long ago it seems\r
-centuries of course they never came back and she didnt put her address\r
-right on it either she may have noticed her wogger people were always\r
-going away and we never I remember that day with the waves and the\r
-boats with their high heads rocking and the smell of ship those Officers\r
-uniforms on shore leave made me seasick he didnt say anything he was\r
-very serious I had the high buttoned boots on and my skirt was blowing\r
-she kissed me six or seven times didnt I cry yes I believe I did or near\r
-it my lips were taittering when I said goodbye she had a Gorgeous wrap\r
-of some special kind of blue colour on her for the voyage made very\r
-peculiarly to one side like and it was extremely pretty it got as dull\r
-as the devil after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out\r
-of it somewhere were never easy where we are father or aunt or marriage\r
-waiting always waiting to guiiiide him toooo me waiting nor speeeed\r
-his flying feet their damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop\r
-especially the Queens birthday and throwing everything down in all\r
-directions if you didnt open the windows when general Ulysses Grant\r
-whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the\r
-ship and old Sprague the consul that was there from before the flood\r
-dressed up poor man and he in mourning for the son then the same old\r
-bugles for reveille in the morning and drums rolling and the unfortunate\r
-poor devils of soldiers walking about with messtins smelling the place\r
-more than the old longbearded jews in their jellibees and levites\r
-assembly and sound clear and gunfire for the men to cross the lines and\r
-the warden marching with his keys to lock the gates and the bagpipes and\r
-only captain Groves and father talking about Rorkes drift and Plevna and\r
-sir Garnet Wolseley and Gordon at Khartoum lighting their pipes for\r
-them everytime they went out drunken old devil with his grog on the\r
-windowsill catch him leaving any of it picking his nose trying to think\r
-of some other dirty story to tell up in a corner but he never forgot\r
-himself when I was there sending me out of the room on some blind excuse\r
-paying his compliments the Bushmills whisky talking of course but hed\r
-do the same to the next woman that came along I suppose he died of\r
-galloping drink ages ago the days like years not a letter from a living\r
-soul except the odd few I posted to myself with bits of paper in them so\r
-bored sometimes I could fight with my nails listening to that old Arab\r
-with the one eye and his heass of an instrument singing his heah heah\r
-aheah all my compriments on your hotchapotch of your heass as bad as now\r
-with the hands hanging off me looking out of the window if there was a\r
-nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the\r
-nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show\r
-I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never\r
-understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster\r
-for them not even if you shake hands twice with the left he didnt\r
-recognise me either when I half frowned at him outside Westland row\r
-chapel where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know\r
-grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me those country\r
-gougers up in the City Arms intelligence they had a damn sight less than\r
-the bulls and cows they were selling the meat and the coalmans bell that\r
-noisy bugger trying to swindle me with the wrong bill he took out of his\r
-hat what a pair of paws and pots and pans and kettles to mend any broken\r
-bottles for a poor man today and no visitors or post ever except his\r
-cheques or some advertisement like that wonderworker they sent him\r
-addressed dear Madam only his letter and the card from Milly this\r
-morning see she wrote a letter to him who did I get the last letter from\r
-O Mrs Dwenn now what possessed her to write from Canada after so many\r
-years to know the recipe I had for pisto madrileno Floey Dillon since\r
-she wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect if Im to\r
-believe all I hear with a villa and eight rooms her father was an\r
-awfully nice man he was near seventy always goodhumoured well now Miss\r
-Tweedy or Miss Gillespie theres the piannyer that was a solid silver\r
-coffee service he had too on the mahogany sideboard then dying so far\r
-away I hate people that have always their poor story to tell everybody\r
-has their own troubles that poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute\r
-neumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend\r
-more than mine poor Nancy its a bother having to answer he always tells\r
-me the wrong things and no stops to say like making a speech your sad\r
-bereavement symphathy I always make that mistake and newphew with 2\r
-double yous in I hope hell write me a longer letter the next time if its\r
-a thing he really likes me O thanks be to the great God I got somebody\r
-to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no\r
-chances at all in this place like you used long ago I wish somebody\r
-would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he could write\r
-what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan in old Madrid stuff silly women\r
-believe love is sighing I am dying still if he wrote it I suppose thered\r
-be some truth in it true or no it fills up your whole day and life\r
-always something to think about every moment and see it all round you\r
-like a new world I could write the answer in bed to let him imagine me\r
-short just a few words not those long crossed letters Atty Dillon used\r
-to write to the fellow that was something in the four courts that jilted\r
-her after out of the ladies letterwriter when I told her to say a few\r
-simple words he could twist how he liked not acting with precipat precip\r
-itancy with equal candour the greatest earthly happiness answer to a\r
-gentlemans proposal affirmatively my goodness theres nothing else its\r
-all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre old\r
-they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.\r
-\r
-Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio\r
-brought it in with the coffee she stood there standing when I asked her\r
-to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the word a hairpin\r
-to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing and it staring her\r
-in the face with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her\r
-appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a loo her face a mass of wrinkles\r
-with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the\r
-Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack\r
-flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took\r
-all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in\r
-Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was\r
-a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed\r
-virgin with the silver dress and the sun dancing 3 times on Easter\r
-Sunday morning and when the priest was going by with the bell bringing\r
-the vatican to the dying blessing herself for his Majestad an admirer\r
-he signed it I near jumped out of my skin I wanted to pick him up when\r
-I saw him following me along the Calle Real in the shop window then\r
-he tipped me just in passing but I never thought hed write making an\r
-appointment I had it inside my petticoat bodice all day reading it up\r
-in every hole and corner while father was up at the drill instructing to\r
-find out by the handwriting or the language of stamps singing I remember\r
-shall I wear a white rose and I wanted to put on the old stupid clock to\r
-near the time he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my\r
-sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till\r
-he put his tongue in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young I put my\r
-knee up to him a few times to learn the way what did I tell him I was\r
-engaged for for fun to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de\r
-la Flora and he believed me that I was to be married to him in 3 years\r
-time theres many a true word spoken in jest there is a flower that\r
-bloometh a few things I told him true about myself just for him to be\r
-imagining the Spanish girls he didnt like I suppose one of them wouldnt\r
-have him I got him excited he crushed all the flowers on my bosom he\r
-brought me he couldnt count the pesetas and the perragordas till I\r
-taught him Cappoquin he came from he said on the black water but it was\r
-too short then the day before he left May yes it was May when the infant\r
-king of Spain was born Im always like that in the spring Id like a new\r
-fellow every year up on the tiptop under the rockgun near OHaras tower\r
-I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old Barbary apes\r
-they sent to Clapham without a tail careering all over the show on each\r
-others back Mrs Rubio said she was a regular old rock scorpion robbing\r
-the chickens out of Inces farm and throw stones at you if you went anear\r
-he was looking at me I had that white blouse on open in the front to\r
-encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just\r
-beginning to be plump I said I was tired we lay over the firtree cove\r
-a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the\r
-galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels\r
-cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down and\r
-ladders all the mud plotching my boots Im sure thats the way down the\r
-monkeys go under the sea to Africa when they die the ships out far like\r
-chips that was the Malta boat passing yes the sea and the sky you could\r
-do what you liked lie there for ever he caressed them outside they love\r
-doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white\r
-ricestraw hat to take the newness out of it the left side of my face the\r
-best my blouse open for his last day transparent kind of shirt he had I\r
-could see his chest pink he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment\r
-but I wouldnt lee him he was awfully put out first for fear you never\r
-know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant\r
-Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all after I tried\r
-with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me\r
-somewhere because they once took something down out of a woman that was\r
-up there for years covered with limesalts theyre all mad to get in there\r
-where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough up and\r
-then theyre done with you in a way till the next time yes because theres\r
-a wonderful feeling there so tender all the time how did we finish it\r
-off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to\r
-be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my\r
-petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the\r
-life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel\r
-rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was\r
-shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little\r
-when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and\r
-drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men\r
-down the middle on the wrong side of them Molly darling he called me\r
-what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant\r
-he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice so I went round to\r
-the whatyoucallit everything was whatyoucallit moustache had he he said\r
-hed come back Lord its just like yesterday to me and if I was married\r
-hed do it to me and I promised him yes faithfully Id let him block me\r
-now flying perhaps hes dead or killed or a captain or admiral its nearly\r
-20 years if I said firtree cove he would if he came up behind me and\r
-put his hands over my eyes to guess who I might recognise him hes young\r
-still about 40 perhaps hes married some girl on the black water and is\r
-quite changed they all do they havent half the character a woman has she\r
-little knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt\r
-of her in broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you might\r
-say they could have put an article about it in the Chronicle I was a bit\r
-wild after when I blew out the old bag the biscuits were in from Benady\r
-Bros and exploded it Lord what a bang all the woodcocks and pigeons\r
-screaming coming back the same way that we went over middle hill round\r
-by the old guardhouse and the jews burialplace pretending to read out\r
-the Hebrew on them I wanted to fire his pistol he said he hadnt one he\r
-didnt know what to make of me with his peak cap on that he always wore\r
-crooked as often as I settled it straight H M S Calypso swinging my hat\r
-that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans\r
-higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak\r
-caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money I\r
-suppose theyre called after him I never thought that would be my\r
-name Bloom when I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a\r
-visiting card or practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom youre\r
-looking blooming Josie used to say after I married him well its better\r
-than Breen or Briggs does brig or those awful names with bottom in them\r
-Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad\r
-about either or suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan my mother whoever she\r
-was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely\r
-one she had Lunita Laredo the fun we had running along Williss road to\r
-Europa point twisting in and out all round the other side of Jersey they\r
-were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now\r
-when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them I was jumping\r
-up at the pepper trees and the white poplars pulling the leaves off and\r
-throwing them at him he went to India he was to write the voyages those\r
-men have to make to the ends of the world and back its the least they\r
-might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be\r
-drowned or blown up somewhere I went up Windmill hill to the flats\r
-that Sunday morning with captain Rubios that was dead spyglass like the\r
-sentry had he said hed have one or two from on board I wore that frock\r
-from the B Marche paris and the coral necklace the straits shining I\r
-could see over to Morocco almost the bay of Tangier white and the Atlas\r
-mountain with snow on it and the straits like a river so clear Harry\r
-Molly darling I was thinking of him on the sea all the time after at\r
-mass when my petticoat began to slip down at the elevation weeks and\r
-weeks I kept the handkerchief under my pillow for the smell of him there\r
-was no decent perfume to be got in that Gibraltar only that cheap peau\r
-dEspagne that faded and left a stink on you more than anything else I\r
-wanted to give him a memento he gave me that clumsy Claddagh ring for\r
-luck that I gave Gardner going to south Africa where those Boers killed\r
-him with their war and fever but they were well beaten all the same as\r
-if it brought its bad luck with it like an opal or pearl still it must\r
-have been pure 18 carrot gold because it was very heavy but what could\r
-you get in a place like that the sandfrog shower from Africa and that\r
-derelict ship that came up to the harbour Marie the Marie whatyoucallit\r
-no he hadnt a moustache that was Gardner yes I can see his face\r
-cleanshaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train again weeping tone\r
-once in the dear deaead days beyondre call close my eyes breath my lips\r
-forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the world the mists began\r
-I hate that istsbeg comes loves sweet sooooooooooong Ill let that out\r
-full when I get in front of the footlights again Kathleen Kearney\r
-and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of\r
-sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much\r
-about as my backside anything in the world to make themselves someway\r
-interesting Irish homemade beauties soldiers daughter am I ay and whose\r
-are you bootmakers and publicans I beg your pardon coach I thought you\r
-were a wheelbarrow theyd die down dead off their feet if ever they got\r
-a chance of walking down the Alameda on an officers arm like me on the\r
-bandnight my eyes flash my bust that they havent passion God help their\r
-poor head I knew more about men and life when I was I S than theyll all\r
-know at 50 they dont know how to sing a song like that Gardner said no\r
-man could look at my mouth and teeth smiling like that and not think of\r
-it I was afraid he mightnt like my accent first he so English all father\r
-left me in spite of his stamps Ive my mothers eyes and figure anyhow\r
-he always said theyre so snotty about themselves some of those cads he\r
-wasnt a bit like that he was dead gone on my lips let them get a husband\r
-first thats fit to be looked at and a daughter like mine or see if they\r
-can excite a swell with money that can pick and choose whoever he wants\r
-like Boylan to do it 4 or 5 times locked in each others arms or the\r
-voice either I could have been a prima donna only I married him comes\r
-looooves old deep down chin back not too much make it double My Ladys\r
-Bower is too long for an encore about the moated grange at twilight and\r
-vaunted rooms yes Ill sing Winds that blow from the south that he gave\r
-after the choirstairs performance Ill change that lace on my black dress\r
-to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make\r
-them burst with envy my hole is itching me always when I think of him I\r
-feel I want to I feel some wind in me better go easy not wake him have\r
-him at it again slobbering after washing every bit of myself back belly\r
-and sides if we had even a bath itself or my own room anyway I wish hed\r
-sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room even\r
-to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that\r
-a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away\r
-pianissimo eeeee one more song\r
-\r
-that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if\r
-that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the\r
-heat I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in\r
-the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill\r
-my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all\r
-night I couldnt rest easy in my bed in Gibraltar even getting up to see\r
-why am I so damned nervous about that though I like it in the winter its\r
-more company O Lord it was rotten cold too that winter when I was\r
-only about ten was I yes I had the big doll with all the funny clothes\r
-dressing her up and undressing that icy wind skeeting across from those\r
-mountains the something Nevada sierra nevada standing at the fire with\r
-the little bit of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing\r
-about in it then make a race back into bed Im sure that fellow opposite\r
-used to be there the whole time watching with the lights out in the\r
-summer and I in my skin hopping around I used to love myself then\r
-stripped at the washstand dabbing and creaming only when it came to the\r
-chamber performance I put out the light too so then there were 2 of us\r
-goodbye to my sleep for this night anyhow I hope hes not going to get in\r
-with those medicals leading him astray to imagine hes young again coming\r
-in at 4 in the morning it must be if not more still he had the manners\r
-not to wake me what do they find to gabber about all night squandering\r
-money and getting drunker and drunker couldnt they drink water then he\r
-starts giving us his orders for eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot\r
-buttered toast I suppose well have him sitting up like the king of\r
-the country pumping the wrong end of the spoon up and down in his egg\r
-wherever he learned that from and I love to hear him falling up the\r
-stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the tray and then play\r
-with the cat she rubs up against you for her own sake I wonder has she\r
-fleas shes as bad as a woman always licking and lecking but I hate their\r
-claws I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring like that when\r
-she sits at the top of the stairs so long and listening as I wait always\r
-what a robber too that lovely fresh place I bought I think Ill get a bit\r
-of fish tomorrow or today is it Friday yes I will with some blancmange\r
-with black currant jam like long ago not those 2 lb pots of mixed plum\r
-and apple from the London and Newcastle Williams and Woods goes twice as\r
-far only for the bones I hate those eels cod yes Ill get a nice piece\r
-of cod Im always getting enough for 3 forgetting anyway Im sick of that\r
-everlasting butchers meat from Buckleys loin chops and leg beef and rib\r
-steak and scrag of mutton and calfs pluck the very name is enough or\r
-a picnic suppose we all gave 5/- each and or let him pay it and invite\r
-some other woman for him who Mrs Fleming and drove out to the furry glen\r
-or the strawberry beds wed have him examining all the horses toenails\r
-first like he does with the letters no not with Boylan there yes with\r
-some cold veal and ham mixed sandwiches there are little houses down\r
-at the bottom of the banks there on purpose but its as hot as blazes he\r
-says not a bank holiday anyhow I hate those ruck of Mary Ann coalboxes\r
-out for the day Whit Monday is a cursed day too no wonder that bee bit\r
-him better the seaside but Id never again in this life get into a boat\r
-with him after him at Bray telling the boatman he knew how to row if\r
-anyone asked could he ride the steeplechase for the gold cup hed say\r
-yes then it came on to get rough the old thing crookeding about and the\r
-weight all down my side telling me pull the right reins now pull the\r
-left and the tide all swamping in floods in through the bottom and his\r
-oar slipping out of the stirrup its a mercy we werent all drowned he can\r
-swim of course me no theres no danger whatsoever keep yourself calm in\r
-his flannel trousers Id like to have tattered them down off him before\r
-all the people and give him what that one calls flagellate till he was\r
-black and blue do him all the good in the world only for that longnosed\r
-chap I dont know who he is with that other beauty Burke out of the City\r
-Arms hotel was there spying around as usual on the slip always where he\r
-wasnt wanted if there was a row on youd vomit a better face there was no\r
-love lost between us thats 1 consolation I wonder what kind is that book\r
-he brought me Sweets of Sin by a gentleman of fashion some other Mr de\r
-Kock I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his\r
-tube from one woman to another I couldnt even change my new white shoes\r
-all ruined with the saltwater and the hat I had with that feather all\r
-blowy and tossed on me how annoying and provoking because the smell of\r
-the sea excited me of course the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay\r
-round the back of the rock they were fine all silver in the fishermens\r
-baskets old Luigi near a hundred they said came from Genoa and the tall\r
-old chap with the earrings I dont like a man you have to climb up to to\r
-get at I suppose theyre all dead and rotten long ago besides I dont like\r
-being alone in this big barracks of a place at night I suppose Ill have\r
-to put up with it I never brought a bit of salt in even when we moved\r
-in the confusion musical academy he was going to make on the first floor\r
-drawingroom with a brassplate or Blooms private hotel he suggested go\r
-and ruin himself altogether the way his father did down in Ennis like\r
-all the things he told father he was going to do and me but I saw\r
-through him telling me all the lovely places we could go for the\r
-honeymoon Venice by moonlight with the gondolas and the lake of Como he\r
-had a picture cut out of some paper of and mandolines and lanterns O\r
-how nice I said whatever I liked he was going to do immediately if\r
-not sooner will you be my man will you carry my can he ought to get a\r
-leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving\r
-us here all day youd never know what old beggar at the door for a crust\r
-with his long story might be a tramp and put his foot in the way to\r
-prevent me shutting it like that picture of that hardened criminal he\r
-was called in Lloyds Weekly news 20 years in jail then he comes out and\r
-murders an old woman for her money imagine his poor wife or mother or\r
-whoever she is such a face youd run miles away from I couldnt rest easy\r
-till I bolted all the doors and windows to make sure but its worse again\r
-being locked up like in a prison or a madhouse they ought to be all shot\r
-or the cat of nine tails a big brute like that that would attack a poor\r
-old woman to murder her in her bed Id cut them off him so I would not\r
-that hed be much use still better than nothing the night I was sure\r
-I heard burglars in the kitchen and he went down in his shirt with a\r
-candle and a poker as if he was looking for a mouse as white as a sheet\r
-frightened out of his wits making as much noise as he possibly could\r
-for the burglars benefit there isnt much to steal indeed the Lord knows\r
-still its the feeling especially now with Milly away such an idea for\r
-him to send the girl down there to learn to take photographs on account\r
-of his grandfather instead of sending her to Skerrys academy where shed\r
-have to learn not like me getting all IS at school only hed do a thing\r
-like that all the same on account of me and Boylan thats why he did\r
-it Im certain the way he plots and plans everything out I couldnt turn\r
-round with her in the place lately unless I bolted the door first gave\r
-me the fidgets coming in without knocking first when I put the chair\r
-against the door just as I was washing myself there below with the glove\r
-get on your nerves then doing the loglady all day put her in a glasscase\r
-with two at a time to look at her if he knew she broke off the hand off\r
-that little gimcrack statue with her roughness and carelessness before\r
-she left that I got that little Italian boy to mend so that you cant\r
-see the join for 2 shillings wouldnt even teem the potatoes for you of\r
-course shes right not to ruin her hands I noticed he was always talking\r
-to her lately at the table explaining things in the paper and she\r
-pretending to understand sly of course that comes from his side of the\r
-house he cant say I pretend things can he Im too honest as a matter of\r
-fact and helping her into her coat but if there was anything wrong with\r
-her its me shed tell not him I suppose he thinks Im finished out and\r
-laid on the shelf well Im not no nor anything like it well see well see\r
-now shes well on for flirting too with Tom Devans two sons imitating\r
-me whistling with those romps of Murray girls calling for her can Milly\r
-come out please shes in great demand to pick what they can out of her\r
-round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night its as well\r
-he sent her where she is she was just getting out of bounds wanting to\r
-go on the skatingrink and smoking their cigarettes through their nose I\r
-smelt it off her dress when I was biting off the thread of the button\r
-I sewed on to the bottom of her jacket she couldnt hide much from me I\r
-tell you only I oughtnt to have stitched it and it on her it brings a\r
-parting and the last plumpudding too split in 2 halves see it comes out\r
-no matter what they say her tongue is a bit too long for my taste\r
-your blouse is open too low she says to me the pan calling the kettle\r
-blackbottom and I had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on\r
-show on the windowsill before all the people passing they all look at\r
-her like me when I was her age of course any old rag looks well on\r
-you then a great touchmenot too in her own way at the Only Way in the\r
-Theatre royal take your foot away out of that I hate people touching\r
-me afraid of her life Id crush her skirt with the pleats a lot of that\r
-touching must go on in theatres in the crush in the dark theyre always\r
-trying to wiggle up to you that fellow in the pit at the Gaiety for\r
-Beerbohm Tree in Trilby the last time Ill ever go there to be squashed\r
-like that for any Trilby or her barebum every two minutes tipping me\r
-there and looking away hes a bit daft I think I saw him after trying to\r
-get near two stylishdressed ladies outside Switzers window at the same\r
-little game I recognised him on the moment the face and everything but\r
-he didnt remember me yes and she didnt even want me to kiss her at the\r
-Broadstone going away well I hope shell get someone to dance attendance\r
-on her the way I did when she was down with the mumps and her glands\r
-swollen wheres this and wheres that of course she cant feel anything\r
-deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the\r
-wrong place always only the usual girls nonsense and giggling that\r
-Conny Connolly writing to her in white ink on black paper sealed with\r
-sealingwax though she clapped when the curtain came down because he\r
-looked so handsome then we had Martin Harvey for breakfast dinner and\r
-supper I thought to myself afterwards it must be real love if a man\r
-gives up his life for her that way for nothing I suppose there are a\r
-few men like that left its hard to believe in it though unless it really\r
-happened to me the majority of them with not a particle of love in their\r
-natures to find two people like that nowadays full up of each other that\r
-would feel the same way as you do theyre usually a bit foolish in the\r
-head his father must have been a bit queer to go and poison himself\r
-after her still poor old man I suppose he felt lost shes always making\r
-love to my things too the few old rags I have wanting to put her hair up\r
-at I S my powder too only ruin her skin on her shes time enough for that\r
-all her life after of course shes restless knowing shes pretty with her\r
-lips so red a pity they wont stay that way I was too but theres no use\r
-going to the fair with the thing answering me like a fishwoman when\r
-I asked to go for a half a stone of potatoes the day we met Mrs Joe\r
-Gallaher at the trottingmatches and she pretended not to see us in her\r
-trap with Friery the solicitor we werent grand enough till I gave her 2\r
-damn fine cracks across the ear for herself take that now for answering\r
-me like that and that for your impudence she had me that exasperated of\r
-course contradicting I was badtempered too because how was it there was\r
-a weed in the tea or I didnt sleep the night before cheese I ate was it\r
-and I told her over and over again not to leave knives crossed like that\r
-because she has nobody to command her as she said herself well if he\r
-doesnt correct her faith I will that was the last time she turned on the\r
-teartap I was just like that myself they darent order me about the place\r
-its his fault of course having the two of us slaving here instead of\r
-getting in a woman long ago am I ever going to have a proper servant\r
-again of course then shed see him coming Id have to let her know or shed\r
-revenge it arent they a nuisance that old Mrs Fleming you have to be\r
-walking round after her putting the things into her hands sneezing and\r
-farting into the pots well of course shes old she cant help it a good\r
-job I found that rotten old smelly dishcloth that got lost behind the\r
-dresser I knew there was something and opened the area window to let out\r
-the smell bringing in his friends to entertain them like the night he\r
-walked home with a dog if you please that might have been mad especially\r
-Simon Dedalus son his father such a criticiser with his glasses up with\r
-his tall hat on him at the cricket match and a great big hole in his\r
-sock one thing laughing at the other and his son that got all those\r
-prizes for whatever he won them in the intermediate imagine climbing\r
-over the railings if anybody saw him that knew us I wonder he didnt tear\r
-a big hole in his grand funeral trousers as if the one nature gave wasnt\r
-enough for anybody hawking him down into the dirty old kitchen now is he\r
-right in his head I ask pity it wasnt washing day my old pair of drawers\r
-might have been hanging up too on the line on exhibition for all hed\r
-ever care with the ironmould mark the stupid old bundle burned on them\r
-he might think was something else and she never even rendered down the\r
-fat I told her and now shes going such as she was on account of her\r
-paralysed husband getting worse theres always something wrong with them\r
-disease or they have to go under an operation or if its not that its\r
-drink and he beats her Ill have to hunt around again for someone every\r
-day I get up theres some new thing on sweet God sweet God well when Im\r
-stretched out dead in my grave I suppose 111 have some peace I want to\r
-get up a minute if Im let wait O Jesus wait yes that thing has come on\r
-me yes now wouldnt that afflict you of course all the poking and rooting\r
-and ploughing he had up in me now what am I to do Friday Saturday Sunday\r
-wouldnt that pester the soul out of a body unless he likes it some men\r
-do God knows theres always something wrong with us 5 days every 3 or 4\r
-weeks usual monthly auction isnt it simply sickening that night it came\r
-on me like that the one and only time we were in a box that Michael Gunn\r
-gave him to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety something he\r
-did about insurance for him in Drimmies I was fit to be tied though I\r
-wouldnt give in with that gentleman of fashion staring down at me with\r
-his glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his\r
-soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I\r
-could all in a swamp leaning forward as if I was interested having to\r
-sit it out then to the last tag I wont forget that wife of Scarli in\r
-a hurry supposed to be a fast play about adultery that idiot in the\r
-gallery hissing the woman adulteress he shouted I suppose he went and\r
-had a woman in the next lane running round all the back ways after\r
-to make up for it I wish he had what I had then hed boo I bet the cat\r
-itself is better off than us have we too much blood up in us or what O\r
-patience above its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didnt make\r
-me pregnant as big as he is I dont want to ruin the clean sheets I just\r
-put on I suppose the clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it damn\r
-it and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin\r
-for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a\r
-widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry\r
-juice no thats too purply O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of\r
-sin whoever suggested that business for women what between clothes and\r
-cooking and children this damned old bed too jingling like the dickens\r
-I suppose they could hear us away over the other side of the park till I\r
-suggested to put the quilt on the floor with the pillow under my bottom\r
-I wonder is it nicer in the day I think it is easy I think Ill cut\r
-all this hair off me there scalding me I might look like a young girl\r
-wouldnt he get the great suckin the next time he turned up my clothes on\r
-me Id give anything to see his face wheres the chamber gone easy Ive a\r
-holy horror of its breaking under me after that old commode I wonder\r
-was I too heavy sitting on his knee I made him sit on the easychair\r
-purposely when I took off only my blouse and skirt first in the other\r
-room he was so busy where he oughtnt to be he never felt me I hope my\r
-breath was sweet after those kissing comfits easy God I remember one\r
-time I could scout it out straight whistling like a man almost easy O\r
-Lord how noisy I hope theyre bubbles on it for a wad of money from some\r
-fellow 111 have to perfume it in the morning dont forget I bet he\r
-never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are the\r
-smoothest place is right there between this bit here how soft like a\r
-peach easy God I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman\r
-O Lord what a row youre making like the jersey lily easy easy O how the\r
-waters come down at Lahore\r
-\r
-who knows is there anything the matter with my insides or have I\r
-something growing in me getting that thing like that every week when was\r
-it last I Whit Monday yes its only about 3 weeks I ought to go to the\r
-doctor only it would be like before I married him when I had that white\r
-thing coming from me and Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr\r
-Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I\r
-suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round\r
-those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little\r
-fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so\r
-theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in\r
-the world besides theres something queer about their children always\r
-smelling around those filthy bitches all sides asking me if what I did\r
-had an offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold\r
-maybe what a question if I smathered it all over his wrinkly old face\r
-for him with all my compriments I suppose hed know then and could you\r
-pass it easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of\r
-Gibraltar the way he put it thats a very nice invention too by the\r
-way only I like letting myself down after in the hole as far as I can\r
-squeeze and pull the chain then to flush it nice cool pins and needles\r
-still theres something in it I suppose I always used to know by Millys\r
-when she was a child whether she had worms or not still all the same\r
-paying him for that how much is that doctor one guinea please and asking\r
-me had I frequent omissions where do those old fellows get all the words\r
-they have omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I\r
-wouldnt trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else\r
-still I liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so\r
-severe his nose intelligent like that you be damned you lying strap O\r
-anything no matter who except an idiot he was clever enough to spot\r
-that of course that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters\r
-my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything\r
-underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever\r
-something he got out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at\r
-myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes and I said I hadnt are you sure\r
-O yes I said I am quite sure in a way that shut him up I knew what was\r
-coming next only natural weakness it was he excited me I dont know how\r
-the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we\r
-stood staring at one another for about lo minutes as if we met somewhere\r
-I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother he used\r
-to amuse me the things he said with the half sloothering smile on him\r
-and all the Doyles said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament\r
-O wasnt I the born fool to believe all his blather about home rule\r
-and the land league sending me that long strool of a song out of the\r
-Huguenots to sing in French to be more classy O beau pays de la Touraine\r
-that I never even sang once explaining and rigmaroling about religion\r
-and persecution he wont let you enjoy anything naturally then might he\r
-as a great favour the very 1st opportunity he got a chance in Brighton\r
-square running into my bedroom pretending the ink got on his hands to\r
-wash it off with the Albion milk and sulphur soap I used to use and the\r
-gelatine still round it O I laughed myself sick at him that day I better\r
-not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a\r
-natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly he kneels down to\r
-do it I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits\r
-he has look at the way hes sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he\r
-without a hard bolster its well he doesnt kick or he might knock out\r
-all my teeth breathing with his hand on his nose like that Indian god\r
-he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare street all\r
-yellow in a pinafore lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes\r
-sticking out that he said was a bigger religion than the jews and\r
-Our Lords both put together all over Asia imitating him as hes always\r
-imitating everybody I suppose he used to sleep at the foot of the bed\r
-too with his big square feet up in his wifes mouth damn this stinking\r
-thing anyway wheres this those napkins are ah yes I know I hope the old\r
-press doesnt creak ah I knew it would hes sleeping hard had a good time\r
-somewhere still she must have given him great value for his money of\r
-course he has to pay for it from her O this nuisance of a thing I hope\r
-theyll have something better for us in the other world tying ourselves\r
-up God help us thats all right for tonight now the lumpy old jingly\r
-bed always reminds me of old Cohen I suppose he scratched himself in it\r
-often enough and he thinks father bought it from Lord Napier that I used\r
-to admire when I was a little girl because I told him easy piano O\r
-I like my bed God here we are as bad as ever after 16 years how many\r
-houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard\r
-street and Holles street and he goes about whistling every time were on\r
-the run again his huguenots or the frogs march pretending to help the\r
-men with our 4 sticks of furniture and then the City Arms hotel worse\r
-and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on the landing always\r
-somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks after them\r
-always know who was in there last every time were just getting on right\r
-something happens or he puts his big foot in it Thoms and Helys and Mr\r
-Cuffes and Drimmies either hes going to be run into prison over his old\r
-lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations or he goes and gives\r
-impudence well have him coming home with the sack soon out of the\r
-Freeman too like the rest on account of those Sinner Fein or the\r
-freemasons then well see if the little man he showed me dribbling\r
-along in the wet all by himself round by Coadys lane will give him much\r
-consolation that he says is so capable and sincerely Irish he is indeed\r
-judging by the sincerity of the trousers I saw on him wait theres\r
-Georges church bells wait 3 quarters the hour l wait 2 oclock well\r
-thats a nice hour of the night for him to be coming home at to anybody\r
-climbing down into the area if anybody saw him Ill knock him off that\r
-little habit tomorrow first Ill look at his shirt to see or Ill see if\r
-he has that French letter still in his pocketbook I suppose he thinks I\r
-dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies\r
-then why should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you\r
-then tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece\r
-he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life\r
-without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more\r
-with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the\r
-kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about with not another thing in\r
-their empty heads they ought to get slow poison the half of them then\r
-tea and toast for him buttered on both sides and newlaid eggs I suppose\r
-Im nothing any more when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one\r
-night man man tyrant as ever for the one thing he slept on the floor\r
-half the night naked the way the jews used when somebody dies belonged\r
-to them and wouldnt eat any breakfast or speak a word wanting to be\r
-petted so I thought I stood out enough for one time and let him he does\r
-it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too\r
-flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do\r
-it again if he doesnt mind himself and lock him down to sleep in the\r
-coalcellar with the blackbeetles I wonder was it her Josie off her head\r
-with my castoffs hes such a born liar too no hed never have the courage\r
-with a married woman thats why he wants me and Boylan though as for her\r
-Denis as she calls him that forlornlooking spectacle you couldnt call\r
-him a husband yes its some little bitch hes got in with even when I was\r
-with him with Milly at the College races that Hornblower with the childs\r
-bonnet on the top of his nob let us into by the back way he was throwing\r
-his sheeps eyes at those two doing skirt duty up and down I tried to\r
-wink at him first no use of course and thats the way his money goes this\r
-is the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the\r
-grand funeral in the paper Boylan brought in if they saw a real officers\r
-funeral thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse\r
-walking behind in black L Boom and Tom Kernan that drunken little\r
-barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C drunk\r
-in some place or other and Martin Cunningham and the two Dedaluses and\r
-Fanny MCoys husband white head of cabbage skinny thing with a turn in\r
-her eye trying to sing my songs shed want to be born all over again and\r
-her old green dress with the lowneck as she cant attract them any other\r
-way like dabbling on a rainy day I see it all now plainly and they call\r
-that friendship killing and then burying one another and they all with\r
-their wives and families at home more especially Jack Power keeping that\r
-barmaid he does of course his wife is always sick or going to be sick\r
-or just getting better of it and hes a goodlooking man still though\r
-hes getting a bit grey over the ears theyre a nice lot all of them well\r
-theyre not going to get my husband again into their clutches if I can\r
-help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes\r
-on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every\r
-penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and\r
-family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same Im sorry in a\r
-way for him what are his wife and 5 children going to do unless he was\r
-insured comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub corner and\r
-her or her son waiting Bill Bailey wont you please come home her widows\r
-weeds wont improve her appearance theyre awfully becoming though if\r
-youre goodlooking what men wasnt he yes he was at the Glencree dinner\r
-and Ben Dollard base barreltone the night he borrowed the swallowtail\r
-to sing out of in Holles street squeezed and squashed into them and\r
-grinning all over his big Dolly face like a wellwhipped childs botty\r
-didnt he look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a\r
-spectacle on the stage imagine paying 5/- in the preserved seats for\r
-that to see him trotting off in his trowlers and Simon Dedalus too he\r
-was always turning up half screwed singing the second verse first the\r
-old love is the new was one of his so sweetly sang the maiden on the\r
-hawthorn bough he was always on for flirtyfying too when I sang Maritana\r
-with him at Freddy Mayers private opera he had a delicious glorious\r
-voice Phoebe dearest goodbye _sweet_heart sweetheart he always sang it\r
-not like Bartell Darcy sweet tart goodbye of course he had the gift of\r
-the voice so there was no art in it all over you like a warm showerbath\r
-O Maritana wildwood flower we sang splendidly though it was a bit too\r
-high for my register even transposed and he was married at the time to\r
-May Goulding but then hed say or do something to knock the good out of\r
-it hes a widower now I wonder what sort is his son he says hes an author\r
-and going to be a university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons\r
-what is he driving at now showing him my photo its not good of me I\r
-ought to have got it taken in drapery that never looks out of fashion\r
-still I look young in it I wonder he didnt make him a present of it\r
-altogether and me too after all why not I saw him driving down to the\r
-Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning thats\r
-11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into\r
-mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other the first cry was\r
-enough for me I heard the deathwatch too ticking in the wall of course\r
-he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by\r
-this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his\r
-lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage when I\r
-saw him at Mat Dillons he liked me too I remember they all do wait by\r
-God yes wait yes hold on he was on the cards this morning when I laid\r
-out the deck union with a young stranger neither dark nor fair you met\r
-before I thought it meant him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either\r
-besides my face was turned the other way what was the 7th card after\r
-that the 10 of spades for a journey by land then there was a letter on\r
-its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the 8 of diamonds for a rise\r
-in society yes wait it all came out and 2 red 8s for new garments look\r
-at that and didnt I dream something too yes there was something about\r
-poetry in it I hope he hasnt long greasy hair hanging into his eyes or\r
-standing up like a red Indian what do they go about like that for only\r
-getting themselves and their poetry laughed at I always liked poetry\r
-when I was a girl first I thought he was a poet like lord Byron and not\r
-an ounce of it in his composition I thought he was quite different I\r
-wonder is he too young hes about wait 88 I was married 88 Milly is 15\r
-yesterday 89 what age was he then at Dillons 5 or 6 about 88 I suppose\r
-hes 20 or more Im not too old for him if hes 23 or 24 I hope hes not\r
-that stuckup university student sort no otherwise he wouldnt go sitting\r
-down in the old kitchen with him taking Eppss cocoa and talking of\r
-course he pretended to understand it all probably he told him he was\r
-out of Trinity college hes very young to be a professor I hope hes not\r
-a professor like Goodwin was he was a potent professor of John Jameson\r
-they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont\r
-find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar where\r
-poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully\r
-coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point\r
-the guitar that fellow played was so expressive will I ever go back\r
-there again all new faces two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that\r
-for him theyre my eyes if hes anything of a poet two eyes as darkly\r
-bright as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves young star\r
-itll be a change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk\r
-to about yourself not always listening to him and Billy Prescotts ad\r
-and Keyess ad and Tom the Devils ad then if anything goes wrong in their\r
-business we have to suffer Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to\r
-meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those\r
-fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the\r
-side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something\r
-and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that\r
-thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he\r
-bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders\r
-his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you\r
-I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock\r
-there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was\r
-looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks\r
-with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went\r
-down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger besides hed\r
-be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose never dream of\r
-washing it from I years end to the other the most of them only thats\r
-what gives the women the moustaches Im sure itll be grand if I can only\r
-get in with a handsome young poet at my age Ill throw them the 1st thing\r
-in the morning till I see if the wishcard comes out or Ill try pairing\r
-the lady herself and see if he comes out Ill read and study all I can\r
-find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont think\r
-me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the\r
-other part Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under\r
-me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2\r
-photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous O but then what am\r
-I going to do about him though\r
-\r
-no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no\r
-nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because\r
-I didnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a\r
-cabbage thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place\r
-pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so\r
-barefaced without even asking permission and standing out that vulgar\r
-way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a\r
-butcher or those old hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course\r
-hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might\r
-as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something\r
-better to say for himself an old Lion would O well I suppose its because\r
-they were so plump and tempting in my short petticoat he couldnt resist\r
-they excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure\r
-they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I\r
-wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they\r
-have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you\r
-touch it my uncle John has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying\r
-passing the comer of Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy\r
-because it was dark and they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me\r
-blush why should it either its only nature and he puts his thing long\r
-into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle\r
-in a sweepingbrush men again all over they can pick and choose what they\r
-please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different\r
-tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be\r
-always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear\r
-once I start I tell you for their stupid husbands jealousy why cant we\r
-all remain friends over it instead of quarrelling her husband found it\r
-out what they did together well naturally and if he did can he undo it\r
-hes coronado anyway whatever he does and then he going to the other\r
-mad extreme about the wife in Fair Tyrants of course the man never even\r
-casts a 2nd thought on the husband or wife either its the woman he wants\r
-and he gets her what else were we given all those desires for Id like to\r
-know I cant help it if Im young still can I its a wonder Im not an old\r
-shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing\r
-me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I\r
-suppose who he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at\r
-him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent I atom of any\r
-kind of expression in us all of us the same 2 lumps of lard before ever\r
-Id do that to a man pfooh the dirty brutes the mere thought is enough\r
-I kiss the feet of you senorita theres some sense in that didnt he kiss\r
-our halldoor yes he did what a madman nobody understands his cracked\r
-ideas but me still of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day\r
-almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love\r
-or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the\r
-Lord God I was thinking would I go around by the quays there some dark\r
-evening where nobodyd know me and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be\r
-hot on for it and not care a pin whose I was only do it off up in a gate\r
-somewhere or one of those wildlooking gipsies in Rathfarnham had their\r
-camp pitched near the Bloomfield laundry to try and steal our things if\r
-they could I only sent mine there a few times for the name model\r
-laundry sending me back over and over some old ones odd stockings that\r
-blackguardlooking fellow with the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me\r
-in the dark and ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer\r
-anybody what they do themselves the fine gentlemen in their silk hats\r
-that K C lives up somewhere this way coming out of Hardwicke lane the\r
-night he gave us the fish supper on account of winning over the boxing\r
-match of course it was for me he gave it I knew him by his gaiters and\r
-the walk and when I turned round a minute after just to see there was\r
-a woman after coming out of it too some filthy prostitute then he goes\r
-home to his wife after that only I suppose the half of those sailors are\r
-rotten again with disease O move over your big carcass out of that for\r
-the love of Mike listen to him the winds that waft my sighs to thee so\r
-well he may sleep and sigh the great Suggester Don Poldo de la Flora if\r
-he knew how he came out on the cards this morning hed have something to\r
-sigh for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in prison for\r
-Lord knows what he does that I dont know and Im to be slooching around\r
-down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled\r
-up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running Id just like\r
-to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt\r
-I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be\r
-governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one\r
-another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk\r
-like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses\r
-yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they\r
-wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to\r
-be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be\r
-if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats\r
-why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books\r
-and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I\r
-suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that\r
-theyre not satisfied and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my\r
-fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind\r
-in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I\r
-suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I\r
-knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well\r
-Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same\r
-since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any\r
-more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the time it was\r
-somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting\r
-God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother wouldnt\r
-like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still its a\r
-lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of\r
-the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants\r
-what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I\r
-hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a\r
-dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us\r
-so snappy Im not like that he could easy have slept in there on the sofa\r
-in the other room I suppose he was as shy as a boy he being so young\r
-hardly 20 of me in the next room hed have heard me on the chamber arrah\r
-what harm Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz\r
-Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vilaplana of\r
-Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the Calle las\r
-Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a\r
-name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like\r
-her O my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and\r
-Rodgers ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small\r
-blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I\r
-dont feel a day older than then I wonder could I get my tongue round\r
-any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I havent\r
-forgotten it all I thought I had only for the grammar a noun is the\r
-name of any person place or thing pity I never tried to read that novel\r
-cantankerous Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all\r
-upside down the two ways I always knew wed go away in the end I can\r
-tell him the Spanish and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not\r
-so ignorant what a pity he didnt stay Im sure the poor fellow was dead\r
-tired and wanted a good sleep badly I could have brought him in his\r
-breakfast in bed with a bit of toast so long as I didnt do it on\r
-the knife for bad luck or if the woman was going her rounds with the\r
-watercress and something nice and tasty there are a few olives in the\r
-kitchen he might like I never could bear the look of them in Abrines\r
-I could do the criada the room looks all right since I changed it the\r
-other way you see something was telling me all the time Id have to\r
-introduce myself not knowing me from Adam very funny wouldnt it Im his\r
-wife or pretend we were in Spain with him half awake without a Gods\r
-notion where he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord the cracked things\r
-come into my head sometimes itd be great fun supposing he stayed with us\r
-why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room\r
-he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the\r
-scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning\r
-like me as hes making the breakfast for I he can make it for 2 Im sure\r
-Im not going to take in lodgers off the street for him if he takes\r
-a gesabo of a house like this Id love to have a long talk with an\r
-intelligent welleducated person Id have to get a nice pair of red\r
-slippers like those Turks with the fez used to sell or yellow and a\r
-nice semitransparent morning gown that I badly want or a peachblossom\r
-dressing jacket like the one long ago in Walpoles only 8/6 or 18/6 Ill\r
-just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning Im sick of\r
-Cohens old bed in any case I might go over to the markets to see all\r
-the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of\r
-splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the 1st\r
-man Id meet theyre out looking for it in the morning Mamy Dillon used\r
-to say they are and the night too that was her massgoing Id love a\r
-big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the\r
-longing way then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup\r
-she gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream\r
-too I know what Ill do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a\r
-bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to\r
-go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let\r
-him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill\r
-let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is I s l o fucked yes\r
-and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times\r
-handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt\r
-bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe\r
-me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a\r
-mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve\r
-him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in\r
-the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in\r
-this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they\r
-hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or\r
-He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he\r
-wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out\r
-in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole\r
-as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want LI or perhaps 30/-\r
-Ill tell him I want to buy underclothes then if he gives me that well he\r
-wont be too bad I dont want to soak it all out of him like other women\r
-do I could often have written out a fine cheque for myself and write his\r
-name on it for a couple of pounds a few times he forgot to lock it up\r
-besides he wont spend it Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he\r
-doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do\r
-the indifferent l or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like\r
-that he cant keep a thing back I know every turn in him Ill tighten my\r
-bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or\r
-the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes O wait\r
-now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay and friendly over it O\r
-but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing pfooh you wouldnt know\r
-which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum and apple no Ill have\r
-to wear the old things so much the better itll be more pointed hell\r
-never know whether he did it or not there thats good enough for you\r
-any old thing at all then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his\r
-omission then Ill go out Ill have him eying up at the ceiling where is\r
-she gone now make him want me thats the only way a quarter after what an\r
-unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out\r
-their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus\r
-theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two\r
-for his night office or the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering\r
-the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what\r
-kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper\r
-in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that\r
-something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again\r
-so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and\r
-get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he\r
-brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first\r
-I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im\r
-asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I\r
-must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear\r
-a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich\r
-big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them\r
-and the pinky sugar I Id a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the\r
-middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them\r
-not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in\r
-roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then\r
-the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields\r
-of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going\r
-about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers\r
-all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the\r
-ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no\r
-God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why\r
-dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever\r
-they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then\r
-they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre\r
-afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them\r
-well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody\r
-that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you\r
-are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun\r
-shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on\r
-Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to\r
-propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth\r
-and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long\r
-kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain\r
-yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he\r
-said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I\r
-liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew\r
-I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could\r
-leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first\r
-only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many\r
-things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and\r
-old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop\r
-and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front\r
-of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil\r
-half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their\r
-tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and\r
-the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and\r
-Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons\r
-and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the\r
-cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts\r
-of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those\r
-handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit\r
-down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the\r
-posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron\r
-and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we\r
-missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his\r
-lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson\r
-sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the\r
-Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink\r
-and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and\r
-geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower\r
-of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian\r
-girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the\r
-Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked\r
-him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to\r
-say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and\r
-drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his\r
-heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.\r
-\r
-Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ulysses, by James Joyce\r
-\r
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ULYSSES ***\r
-\r
-***** This file should be named 4300-8.txt or 4300-8.zip *****\r
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:\r
- http://www.gutenberg.org/4/3/0/4300/\r
-\r
-Produced by Col Choat\r
-\r
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions\r
-will be renamed.\r
-\r
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no\r
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation\r
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without\r
-permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,\r
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to\r
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to\r
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project\r
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you\r
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you\r
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the\r
-rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose\r
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and\r
-research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do\r
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is\r
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial\r
-redistribution.\r
-\r
-\r
-\r
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***\r
-\r
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE\r
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK\r
-\r
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free\r
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work\r
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project\r
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at\r
-http://gutenberg.org/license).\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic works\r
-\r
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to\r
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property\r
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all\r
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy\r
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.\r
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the\r
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or\r
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.\r
-\r
-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be\r
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who\r
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few\r
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works\r
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See\r
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement\r
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works. See paragraph 1.E below.\r
-\r
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"\r
-or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the\r
-collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an\r
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are\r
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from\r
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative\r
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg\r
-are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by\r
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of\r
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with\r
-the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by\r
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.\r
-\r
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern\r
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in\r
-a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check\r
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement\r
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or\r
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning\r
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United\r
-States.\r
-\r
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:\r
-\r
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate\r
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently\r
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the\r
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project\r
-Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,\r
-copied or distributed:\r
-\r
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with\r
-almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or\r
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included\r
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived\r
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is\r
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied\r
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees\r
-or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work\r
-with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the\r
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1\r
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or\r
-1.E.9.\r
-\r
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted\r
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution\r
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional\r
-terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked\r
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the\r
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.\r
-\r
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this\r
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.\r
-\r
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this\r
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without\r
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with\r
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm License.\r
-\r
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,\r
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any\r
-word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or\r
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than\r
-"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version\r
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),\r
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a\r
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon\r
-request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other\r
-form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.\r
-\r
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,\r
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works\r
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.\r
-\r
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing\r
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided\r
-that\r
-\r
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from\r
- the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method\r
- you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is\r
- owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he\r
- has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the\r
- Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments\r
- must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you\r
- prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax\r
- returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and\r
- sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the\r
- address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to\r
- the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."\r
-\r
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies\r
- you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he\r
- does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm\r
- License. You must require such a user to return or\r
- destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium\r
- and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of\r
- Project Gutenberg-tm works.\r
-\r
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any\r
- money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the\r
- electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days\r
- of receipt of the work.\r
-\r
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free\r
- distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.\r
-\r
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set\r
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from\r
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael\r
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the\r
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.\r
-\r
-1.F.\r
-\r
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable\r
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread\r
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain\r
-"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or\r
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual\r
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a\r
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by\r
-your equipment.\r
-\r
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right\r
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project\r
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all\r
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal\r
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT\r
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE\r
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE\r
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE\r
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR\r
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH\r
-DAMAGE.\r
-\r
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a\r
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can\r
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a\r
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you\r
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with\r
-your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with\r
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a\r
-refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity\r
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to\r
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy\r
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further\r
-opportunities to fix the problem.\r
-\r
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth\r
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER\r
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO\r
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.\r
-\r
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied\r
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.\r
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the\r
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be\r
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by\r
-the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any\r
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.\r
-\r
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the\r
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone\r
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance\r
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,\r
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,\r
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,\r
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do\r
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of\r
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers\r
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists\r
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from\r
-people in all walks of life.\r
-\r
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the\r
-assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's\r
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will\r
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project\r
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure\r
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.\r
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation\r
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4\r
-and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive\r
-Foundation\r
-\r
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit\r
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the\r
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal\r
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification\r
-number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at\r
-http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg\r
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent\r
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.\r
-\r
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.\r
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered\r
-throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at\r
-809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email\r
-business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact\r
-information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official\r
-page at http://pglaf.org\r
-\r
-For additional contact information:\r
- Dr. Gregory B. Newby\r
- Chief Executive and Director\r
- gbnewby@pglaf.org\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg\r
-Literary Archive Foundation\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide\r
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of\r
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be\r
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest\r
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations\r
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt\r
-status with the IRS.\r
-\r
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating\r
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United\r
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a\r
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up\r
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations\r
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To\r
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any\r
-particular state visit http://pglaf.org\r
-\r
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we\r
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition\r
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who\r
-approach us with offers to donate.\r
-\r
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make\r
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from\r
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.\r
-\r
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation\r
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other\r
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.\r
-To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate\r
-\r
-\r
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic\r
-works.\r
-\r
-Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm\r
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared\r
-with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project\r
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.\r
-\r
-\r
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed\r
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.\r
-unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily\r
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.\r
-\r
-\r
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:\r
-\r
- http://www.gutenberg.org\r
-\r
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,\r
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary\r
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to\r
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.\r
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ulysses, by James Joyce
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ulysses
+
+Author: James Joyce
+
+Posting Date: August 1, 2008 [EBook #4300]
+Release Date: July, 2003
+[Last updated: November 17, 2011]
+
+Language: English
+
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ULYSSES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Col Choat
+
+
+
+
+
+ULYSSES
+
+by James Joyce
+
+
+
+
+-- I --
+
+Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of
+lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,
+ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He
+held the bowl aloft and intoned:
+
+--_Introibo ad altare Dei_.
+
+Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
+
+--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!
+
+Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
+and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the
+awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent
+towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat
+and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned
+his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking
+gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light
+untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
+
+Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the
+bowl smartly.
+
+--Back to barracks! he said sternly.
+
+He added in a preacher's tone:
+
+--For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul
+and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One
+moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
+
+He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused
+awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there
+with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered
+through the calm.
+
+--Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off
+the current, will you?
+
+He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering
+about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and
+sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages.
+A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.
+
+--The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!
+
+He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet,
+laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily
+halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as
+he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and
+lathered cheeks and neck.
+
+Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.
+
+--My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a
+Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself.
+We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out
+twenty quid?
+
+He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:
+
+--Will he come? The jejune jesuit!
+
+Ceasing, he began to shave with care.
+
+--Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
+
+--Yes, my love?
+
+--How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
+
+Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.
+
+--God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks
+you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money
+and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you
+have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you
+is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.
+
+He shaved warily over his chin.
+
+--He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is
+his guncase?
+
+--A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
+
+--I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark
+with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a
+black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If
+he stays on here I am off.
+
+Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down
+from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.
+
+--Scutter! he cried thickly.
+
+He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper
+pocket, said:
+
+--Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
+
+Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a
+dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.
+Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:
+
+--The bard's noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.
+You can almost taste it, can't you?
+
+He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair
+oakpale hair stirring slightly.
+
+--God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey
+sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. _Epi oinopa
+ponton_. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them
+in the original. _Thalatta! Thalatta_! She is our great sweet mother.
+Come and look.
+
+Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked
+down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of
+Kingstown.
+
+--Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said.
+
+He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's
+face.
+
+--The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't
+let me have anything to do with you.
+
+--Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.
+
+--You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother
+asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to
+think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and
+pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you...
+
+He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant
+smile curled his lips.
+
+--But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest
+mummer of them all!
+
+He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
+
+Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against
+his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve.
+Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in
+a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its
+loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her
+breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of
+wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a
+great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay
+and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had
+stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had
+torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
+
+Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.
+
+--Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt
+and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?
+
+--They fit well enough, Stephen answered.
+
+Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.
+
+--The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God
+knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair
+stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You
+look damn well when you're dressed.
+
+--Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.
+
+--He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror.
+Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey
+trousers.
+
+He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the
+smooth skin.
+
+Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its
+smokeblue mobile eyes.
+
+--That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan,
+says you have g.p.i. He's up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General
+paralysis of the insane!
+
+He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad
+in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and
+the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong
+wellknit trunk.
+
+--Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!
+
+Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by
+a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this
+face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
+
+--I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her
+all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead
+him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
+
+Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.
+
+--The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If
+Wilde were only alive to see you!
+
+Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
+
+--It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
+
+Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him
+round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he
+had thrust them.
+
+--It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly.
+God knows you have more spirit than any of them.
+
+Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The
+cold steelpen.
+
+--Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap
+downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and
+thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling
+jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I
+could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise
+it.
+
+Cranly's arm. His arm.
+
+--And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one
+that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you
+up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I'll
+bring down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave
+Clive Kempthorpe.
+
+Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces:
+they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. O, I shall
+expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit
+ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the
+table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the
+tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't
+want to be debagged! Don't you play the giddy ox with me!
+
+Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf
+gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower
+on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.
+
+To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.
+
+--Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at
+night.
+
+--Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I'm
+quite frank with you. What have you against me now?
+
+They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the
+water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.
+
+--Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.
+
+--Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything.
+
+He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow,
+fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of
+anxiety in his eyes.
+
+Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:
+
+--Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's
+death?
+
+Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:
+
+--What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and
+sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?
+
+--You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to
+get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the
+drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.
+
+--Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.
+
+--You said, Stephen answered, _O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is
+beastly dead._
+
+A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck
+Mulligan's cheek.
+
+--Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?
+
+He shook his constraint from him nervously.
+
+--And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You
+saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and
+Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a beastly
+thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel
+down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why?
+Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it's injected the
+wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes
+are not functioning. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks
+buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her
+last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like
+some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I
+didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.
+
+He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping
+wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:
+
+--I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.
+
+--Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.
+
+--Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.
+
+Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.
+
+--O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.
+
+He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post,
+gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew
+dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt
+the fever of his cheeks.
+
+A voice within the tower called loudly:
+
+--Are you up there, Mulligan?
+
+--I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered.
+
+He turned towards Stephen and said:
+
+--Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola,
+Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.
+
+His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level
+with the roof:
+
+--Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the
+moody brooding.
+
+His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of
+the stairhead:
+
+ _And no more turn aside and brood
+ Upon love's bitter mystery
+ For Fergus rules the brazen cars._
+
+
+Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the
+stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of
+water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of
+the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the
+harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words
+shimmering on the dim tide.
+
+A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in
+deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song:
+I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her
+door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity
+I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those
+words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.
+
+Where now?
+
+Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk,
+a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny
+window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the
+pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:
+
+ _I am the boy
+ That can enjoy
+ Invisibility._
+
+
+Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.
+
+_And no more turn aside and brood._
+
+
+Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his
+brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had
+approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar,
+roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely
+fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's
+shirts.
+
+In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its
+loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath,
+bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.
+
+Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me
+alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured
+face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on
+their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. _Liliata rutilantium te
+confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat._
+
+Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
+
+No, mother! Let me be and let me live.
+
+--Kinch ahoy!
+
+Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the
+staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry,
+heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.
+
+--Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is
+apologising for waking us last night. It's all right.
+
+--I'm coming, Stephen said, turning.
+
+--Do, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our
+sakes.
+
+His head disappeared and reappeared.
+
+--I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch
+him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.
+
+--I get paid this morning, Stephen said.
+
+--The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.
+
+--If you want it, Stephen said.
+
+--Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll
+have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent
+sovereigns.
+
+He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of
+tune with a Cockney accent:
+
+ _O, won't we have a merry time,
+ Drinking whisky, beer and wine!
+ On coronation,
+ Coronation day!
+ O, won't we have a merry time
+ On coronation day!_
+
+
+Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone,
+forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there
+all day, forgotten friendship?
+
+He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,
+smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck.
+So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and
+yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.
+
+In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form
+moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its
+yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor
+from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of
+coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.
+
+--We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?
+
+Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the
+hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open
+the inner doors.
+
+--Have you the key? a voice asked.
+
+--Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked!
+
+He howled, without looking up from the fire:
+
+--Kinch!
+
+--It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.
+
+The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been
+set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the
+doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and
+sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside
+him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set
+them down heavily and sighed with relief.
+
+--I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when... But, hush! Not a
+word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines,
+come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.
+Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.
+
+Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from
+the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.
+
+--What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.
+
+--We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There's a lemon in the
+locker.
+
+--O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove
+milk.
+
+Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:
+
+--That woman is coming up with the milk.
+
+--The blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his
+chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here,
+I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.
+
+He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three
+plates, saying:
+
+--_In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._
+
+Haines sat down to pour out the tea.
+
+--I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do
+make strong tea, don't you?
+
+Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's
+wheedling voice:
+
+--When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I
+makes water I makes water.
+
+--By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.
+
+Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:
+
+--_So I do, Mrs Cahill,_ says she. _Begob, ma'am,_ says Mrs Cahill, _God
+send you don't make them in the one pot._
+
+He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled
+on his knife.
+
+--That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five
+lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of
+Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.
+
+He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his
+brows:
+
+--Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken
+of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?
+
+--I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.
+
+--Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?
+
+--I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the
+Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.
+
+Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.
+
+--Charming! he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth
+and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming!
+
+Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened
+rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:
+
+ _--For old Mary Ann
+ She doesn't care a damn.
+ But, hising up her petticoats..._
+
+
+He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.
+
+The doorway was darkened by an entering form.
+
+--The milk, sir!
+
+--Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.
+
+An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow.
+
+--That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.
+
+--To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure!
+
+Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.
+
+--The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of
+the collector of prepuces.
+
+--How much, sir? asked the old woman.
+
+--A quart, Stephen said.
+
+He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white
+milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and
+a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe
+a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out.
+Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her
+toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed
+about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old
+woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of
+an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common
+cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid,
+whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.
+
+--It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.
+
+--Taste it, sir, she said.
+
+He drank at her bidding.
+
+--If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat
+loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten
+guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with
+dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.
+
+--Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.
+
+--I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered.
+
+--Look at that now, she said.
+
+Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice
+that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she
+slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there
+is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in
+God's likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids
+her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.
+
+--Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.
+
+--Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.
+
+Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.
+
+--Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?
+
+--I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the
+west, sir?
+
+--I am an Englishman, Haines answered.
+
+--He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak
+Irish in Ireland.
+
+--Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak
+the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.
+
+--Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill
+us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am?
+
+--No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the
+milkcan on her forearm and about to go.
+
+Haines said to her:
+
+--Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we?
+
+Stephen filled again the three cups.
+
+--Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at
+twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three
+mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a
+shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.
+
+Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly
+buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his
+trouser pockets.
+
+--Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him, smiling.
+
+Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the
+thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in
+his fingers and cried:
+
+--A miracle!
+
+He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:
+
+--Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.
+
+Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.
+
+--We'll owe twopence, he said.
+
+--Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good
+morning, sir.
+
+She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant:
+
+ _--Heart of my heart, were it more,
+ More would be laid at your feet._
+
+
+He turned to Stephen and said:
+
+--Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring
+us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland
+expects that every man this day will do his duty.
+
+--That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your
+national library today.
+
+--Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.
+
+He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:
+
+--Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?
+
+Then he said to Haines:
+
+--The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.
+
+--All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey
+trickle over a slice of the loaf.
+
+Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the
+loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:
+
+--I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.
+
+Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.
+Conscience. Yet here's a spot.
+
+--That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol
+of Irish art is deuced good.
+
+Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth
+of tone:
+
+--Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.
+
+--Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just
+thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.
+
+--Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.
+
+Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of
+the hammock, said:
+
+--I don't know, I'm sure.
+
+He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and
+said with coarse vigour:
+
+--You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?
+
+--Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the
+milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.
+
+--I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along
+with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.
+
+--I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.
+
+Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.
+
+--From me, Kinch, he said.
+
+In a suddenly changed tone he added:
+
+--To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they
+are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all.
+Let us get out of the kip.
+
+He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying
+resignedly:
+
+--Mulligan is stripped of his garments.
+
+He emptied his pockets on to the table.
+
+--There's your snotrag, he said.
+
+And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them,
+chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and
+rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God,
+we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and
+green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
+contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of
+his talking hands.
+
+--And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.
+
+Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the
+doorway:
+
+--Are you coming, you fellows?
+
+--I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,
+Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out
+with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:
+
+--And going forth he met Butterly.
+
+Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out
+and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and
+locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.
+
+At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:
+
+--Did you bring the key?
+
+--I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.
+
+He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy
+bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.
+
+--Down, sir! How dare you, sir!
+
+Haines asked:
+
+--Do you pay rent for this tower?
+
+--Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.
+
+--To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.
+
+They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:
+
+--Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?
+
+--Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on
+the sea. But ours is the _omphalos_.
+
+--What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.
+
+--No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas
+and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I
+have a few pints in me first.
+
+He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his
+primrose waistcoat:
+
+--You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?
+
+--It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.
+
+--You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?
+
+--Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.
+It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is
+Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own
+father.
+
+--What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?
+
+Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in
+loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear:
+
+--O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!
+
+--We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is
+rather long to tell.
+
+Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.
+
+--The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.
+
+--I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this
+tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. _That beetles
+o'er his base into the sea,_ isn't it?
+
+Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did
+not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in
+cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.
+
+--It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.
+
+Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.
+The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the
+smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail
+tacking by the Muglins.
+
+--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.
+The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the
+Father.
+
+Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked
+at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had
+suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved
+a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and
+began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:
+
+ _--I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
+ My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.
+ With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.
+ So here's to disciples and Calvary._
+
+
+He held up a forefinger of warning.
+
+ _--If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
+ He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
+ But have to drink water and wish it were plain
+ That i make when the wine becomes water again._
+
+
+He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward
+to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or
+wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:
+
+ _--Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said
+ And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
+ What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
+ And Olivet's breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye!_
+
+
+He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
+winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh
+wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.
+
+Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and
+said:
+
+--We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a
+believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of
+it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?
+
+--The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.
+
+--O, Haines said, you have heard it before?
+
+--Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.
+
+--You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in
+the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
+personal God.
+
+--There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.
+
+Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a
+green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.
+
+--Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.
+
+Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
+sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang
+it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk
+towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.
+
+--Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe
+or you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a
+personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?
+
+--You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
+example of free thought.
+
+He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his
+side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels.
+My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line
+along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark.
+He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt
+bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his
+eyes.
+
+--After all, Haines began...
+
+Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not
+all unkind.
+
+--After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your
+own master, it seems to me.
+
+--I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an
+Italian.
+
+--Italian? Haines said.
+
+A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.
+
+--And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.
+
+--Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?
+
+--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and
+the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.
+
+Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he
+spoke.
+
+--I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think
+like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather
+unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
+
+The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph
+of their brazen bells: _et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam
+ecclesiam:_ the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own
+rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the
+mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in
+affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church
+militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies
+fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of
+whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the
+consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning
+Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who
+held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken
+a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void
+awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a
+worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host,
+who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their
+shields.
+
+Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. _Zut! Nom de Dieu!_
+
+--Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, and I feel as one. I
+don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either.
+That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.
+
+Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman.
+
+--She's making for Bullock harbour.
+
+The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.
+
+--There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way
+when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today.
+
+The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting
+for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face,
+saltwhite. Here I am.
+
+They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on
+a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder.
+A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise
+his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.
+
+--Is the brother with you, Malachi?
+
+--Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.
+
+--Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young
+thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.
+
+--Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.
+
+Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near
+the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones,
+water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water
+rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black
+sagging loincloth.
+
+Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines
+and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips
+and breastbone.
+
+--Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of
+rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.
+
+--Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said.
+
+--Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?
+
+--Yes.
+
+--Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with
+money.
+
+--Is she up the pole?
+
+--Better ask Seymour that.
+
+--Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said.
+
+He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying
+tritely:
+
+--Redheaded women buck like goats.
+
+He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.
+
+--My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the _Uebermensch._ Toothless
+Kinch and I, the supermen.
+
+He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his
+clothes lay.
+
+--Are you going in here, Malachi?
+
+--Yes. Make room in the bed.
+
+The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached
+the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a
+stone, smoking.
+
+--Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.
+
+--Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.
+
+Stephen turned away.
+
+--I'm going, Mulligan, he said.
+
+--Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.
+
+Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped
+clothes.
+
+--And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.
+
+Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck
+Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:
+
+--He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake
+Zarathustra.
+
+His plump body plunged.
+
+--We'll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the
+path and smiling at wild Irish.
+
+Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.
+
+--The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.
+
+--Good, Stephen said.
+
+He walked along the upwardcurving path.
+
+ _Liliata rutilantium.
+ Turma circumdet.
+ Iubilantium te virginum._
+
+
+The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will
+not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
+
+A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning
+the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a
+seal's, far out on the water, round.
+
+Usurper.
+
+
+
+--You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
+
+--Tarentum, sir.
+
+--Very good. Well?
+
+--There was a battle, sir.
+
+--Very good. Where?
+
+The boy's blank face asked the blank window.
+
+Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as
+memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings
+of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling
+masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?
+
+--I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.
+
+--Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the
+gorescarred book.
+
+--Yes, sir. And he said: _Another victory like that and we are done
+for._
+
+That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From
+a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers,
+leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.
+
+--You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?
+
+--End of Pyrrhus, sir?
+
+--I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.
+
+--Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?
+
+A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel. He curled them
+between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to
+the tissue of his lips. A sweetened boy's breath. Welloff people, proud
+that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico road, Dalkey.
+
+--Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.
+
+All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round
+at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh
+more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.
+
+--Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book,
+what is a pier.
+
+--A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the water. A kind of a
+bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.
+
+Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench
+whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent.
+All. With envy he watched their faces: Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their
+likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets
+tittering in the struggle.
+
+--Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.
+
+The words troubled their gaze.
+
+--How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.
+
+For Haines's chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild
+drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A
+jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a
+clement master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly
+for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other
+too often heard, their land a pawnshop.
+
+Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not
+been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has
+branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite
+possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing
+that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?
+Weave, weaver of the wind.
+
+--Tell us a story, sir.
+
+--O, do, sir. A ghoststory.
+
+--Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.
+
+-_-Weep no more,_ Comyn said.
+
+--Go on then, Talbot.
+
+--And the story, sir?
+
+--After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.
+
+A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork
+of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text:
+
+ _--Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more
+ For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
+ Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor..._
+
+
+It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.
+Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated
+out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he
+had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow
+a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains
+about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and
+in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of
+brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of
+thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the
+soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of
+forms.
+
+Talbot repeated:
+
+ _--Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,
+ Through the dear might..._
+
+
+--Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don't see anything.
+
+--What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.
+
+His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again, having
+just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these
+craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and
+on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the
+tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long
+look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the
+church's looms. Ay.
+
+ _Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.
+ My father gave me seeds to sow._
+
+
+Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.
+
+--Have I heard all? Stephen asked.
+
+--Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.
+
+--Half day, sir. Thursday.
+
+--Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.
+
+They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.
+Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling
+gaily:
+
+--A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.
+
+--O, ask me, sir.
+
+--A hard one, sir.
+
+--This is the riddle, Stephen said:
+
+ _The cock crew,
+ The sky was blue:
+ The bells in heaven
+ Were striking eleven.
+ 'Tis time for this poor soul
+ To go to heaven._
+
+
+What is that?
+
+--What, sir?
+
+--Again, sir. We didn't hear.
+
+Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence
+Cochrane said:
+
+--What is it, sir? We give it up.
+
+Stephen, his throat itching, answered:
+
+--The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.
+
+He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries
+echoed dismay.
+
+A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:
+
+--Hockey!
+
+They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly
+they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and
+clamour of their boots and tongues.
+
+Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open
+copybook. His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness
+and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his
+cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent
+and damp as a snail's bed.
+
+He held out his copybook. The word _Sums_ was written on the headline.
+Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with
+blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.
+
+--Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them
+to you, sir.
+
+Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.
+
+--Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.
+
+--Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to
+copy them off the board, sir.
+
+--Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.
+
+--No, sir.
+
+Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's
+bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.
+But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot,
+a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained
+from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His
+mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode.
+She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire,
+an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being
+trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul
+gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek
+of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth,
+listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
+
+Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra
+that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered askance
+through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the
+hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.
+
+Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of
+their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,
+traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from
+the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement,
+flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a
+darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.
+
+--Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?
+
+--Yes, sir.
+
+In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word
+of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of
+shame flickering behind his dull skin. _Amor matris:_ subjective and
+objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed
+him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.
+
+Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My
+childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or
+lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony
+sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their
+tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.
+
+The sum was done.
+
+--It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.
+
+--Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.
+
+He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his
+copybook back to his bench.
+
+--You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said
+as he followed towards the door the boy's graceless form.
+
+--Yes, sir.
+
+In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.
+
+--Sargent!
+
+--Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.
+
+He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy
+field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and
+Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When
+he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him. He
+turned his angry white moustache.
+
+--What is it now? he cried continually without listening.
+
+--Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said.
+
+--Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore
+order here.
+
+And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man's voice
+cried sternly:
+
+--What is the matter? What is it now?
+
+Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms closed
+round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head.
+
+Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather
+of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As it was
+in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins,
+base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their spooncase
+of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all the
+gentiles: world without end.
+
+A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his
+rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.
+
+--First, our little financial settlement, he said.
+
+He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It
+slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and
+laid them carefully on the table.
+
+--Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.
+
+And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen's embarrassed hand moved
+over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money
+cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir's turban, and
+this, the scallop of saint James. An old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure,
+hollow shells.
+
+A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.
+
+--Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand.
+These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for
+shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.
+
+He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.
+
+--Three twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right.
+
+--Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy
+haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.
+
+--No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.
+
+Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too
+of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket: symbols soiled by greed and
+misery.
+
+--Don't carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You'll pull it out somewhere
+and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them very
+handy.
+
+Answer something.
+
+--Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.
+
+The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times
+now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this instant
+if I will.
+
+--Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't
+know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I
+have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?
+_Put but money in thy purse._
+
+--Iago, Stephen murmured.
+
+He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.
+
+--He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but
+an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you
+know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's
+mouth?
+
+The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems
+history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.
+
+--That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.
+
+--Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He
+tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.
+
+--I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. _I paid
+my way._
+
+Good man, good man.
+
+_--I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life._ Can you feel
+that? _I owe nothing._ Can you?
+
+Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.
+Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings.
+Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob
+Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five
+weeks' board. The lump I have is useless.
+
+--For the moment, no, Stephen answered.
+
+Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.
+
+--I knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it.
+We are a generous people but we must also be just.
+
+--I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.
+
+Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the
+shapely bulk of a man in tartan filibegs: Albert Edward, prince of
+Wales.
+
+--You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said.
+I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine in
+'46. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the
+union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your
+communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.
+
+Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the
+splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the
+planters' covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie
+down.
+
+Stephen sketched a brief gesture.
+
+--I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But
+I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are
+all Irish, all kings' sons.
+
+--Alas, Stephen said.
+
+--_Per vias rectas_, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for
+it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do
+so.
+
+ _Lal the ral the ra
+ The rocky road to Dublin._
+
+
+A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John!
+Soft day, your honour!... Day!... Day!... Two topboots jog dangling
+on to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra. Lal the ral the raddy.
+
+--That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus,
+with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press.
+Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.
+
+He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read
+off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.
+
+--Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, _the dictates of
+common sense._ Just a moment.
+
+He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow
+and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly,
+sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.
+
+Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed
+around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek
+heads poised in air: lord Hastings' Repulse, the duke of Westminster's
+Shotover, the duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, _prix de Paris_, 1866. Elfin
+riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds, backing king's
+colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds.
+
+--Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. But prompt ventilation of this
+allimportant question...
+
+Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the
+mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek
+of the canteen, over the motley slush. Fair Rebel! Fair Rebel! Even
+money the favourite: ten to one the field. Dicers and thimbleriggers
+we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past
+the meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of
+orange.
+
+Shouts rang shrill from the boys' playfield and a whirring whistle.
+
+Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley,
+the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother's darling who seems
+to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock.
+Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain,
+a shout of spearspikes baited with men's bloodied guts.
+
+--Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.
+
+He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.
+
+--I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about
+the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two
+opinions on the matter.
+
+May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of _laissez faire_
+which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old
+industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.
+European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of
+the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of
+agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who
+was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.
+
+--I don't mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.
+
+Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus.
+Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at Murzsteg,
+lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous
+offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In
+every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the
+hospitality of your columns.
+
+--I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the
+next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can
+be cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is
+regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They
+offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with
+the department. Now I'm going to try publicity. I am surrounded by
+difficulties, by... intrigues by... backstairs influence by...
+
+He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.
+
+--Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the
+jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are
+the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the
+nation's vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure
+as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of
+destruction. Old England is dying.
+
+He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a
+broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.
+
+--Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.
+
+ _The harlot's cry from street to street
+ Shall weave old England's windingsheet._
+
+
+His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which
+he halted.
+
+--A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or
+gentile, is he not?
+
+--They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see
+the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the
+earth to this day.
+
+On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting
+prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud,
+uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk
+hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full
+slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but
+knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain
+patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard
+heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their
+years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.
+
+--Who has not? Stephen said.
+
+--What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.
+
+He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell
+sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.
+
+--History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
+
+From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
+What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
+
+--The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human
+history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
+
+Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
+
+--That is God.
+
+Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
+
+--What? Mr Deasy asked.
+
+--A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
+
+Mr Deasy looked down and held for awhile the wings of his nose tweaked
+between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.
+
+--I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and
+many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no
+better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten
+years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the
+strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough's wife and her leman, O'Rourke,
+prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many
+failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my
+days. But I will fight for the right till the end.
+
+ _For Ulster will fight
+ And Ulster will be right._
+
+
+Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.
+
+--Well, sir, he began...
+
+--I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long
+at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am
+wrong.
+
+--A learner rather, Stephen said.
+
+And here what will you learn more?
+
+Mr Deasy shook his head.
+
+--Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great
+teacher.
+
+Stephen rustled the sheets again.
+
+--As regards these, he began.
+
+--Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them
+published at once.
+
+_ Telegraph. Irish Homestead._
+
+--I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two
+editors slightly.
+
+--That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field,
+M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders' association today at the
+City Arms hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You
+see if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?
+
+_--The Evening Telegraph..._
+
+--That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to
+answer that letter from my cousin.
+
+--Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.
+Thank you.
+
+--Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I
+like to break a lance with you, old as I am.
+
+--Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.
+
+He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees,
+hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield.
+The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate:
+toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub
+me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.
+
+--Mr Dedalus!
+
+Running after me. No more letters, I hope.
+
+--Just one moment.
+
+--Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.
+
+Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.
+
+--I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of
+being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know
+that? No. And do you know why?
+
+He frowned sternly on the bright air.
+
+--Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
+
+--Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.
+
+A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a
+rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing,
+his lifted arms waving to the air.
+
+--She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he
+stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That's why.
+
+On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung
+spangles, dancing coins.
+
+
+Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought
+through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn
+and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver,
+rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.
+Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By
+knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a
+millionaire, _maestro di color che sanno_. Limit of the diaphane in. Why
+in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it
+is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
+
+
+Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
+shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time.
+A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six:
+the _nacheinander_. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the
+audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles
+o'er his base, fell through the _nebeneinander_ ineluctably! I am
+getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with
+it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs,
+_nebeneinander_. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of _Los Demiurgos_.
+Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick,
+crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'. Won't you come to
+Sandymount, Madeline the mare?
+
+
+Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs
+marching. No, agallop: _deline the mare_.
+
+Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I
+open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. _Basta_! I will see if I
+can see.
+
+See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world
+without end.
+
+They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, _Frauenzimmer_:
+and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in
+the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother.
+Number one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp poked in
+the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe,
+relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One
+of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing.
+What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed
+in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of
+all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your
+omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha:
+nought, nought, one.
+
+Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.
+Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum,
+no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to
+everlasting. Womb of sin.
+
+Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man
+with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.
+They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages
+He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A _lex eterna_ stays
+about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are
+consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring
+his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred
+heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia.
+With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of
+a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.
+
+Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves.
+The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of
+Mananaan.
+
+I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half
+twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.
+
+Yes, I must.
+
+His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara's or not? My
+consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist
+brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with
+his aunt Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and
+and tell us, Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the things I
+married into! De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer
+and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers! And
+skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less! Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir.
+Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ!
+
+I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take
+me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.
+
+--It's Stephen, sir.
+
+--Let him in. Let Stephen in.
+
+A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.
+
+--We thought you were someone else.
+
+In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over the
+hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the
+upper moiety.
+
+--Morrow, nephew.
+
+He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for
+the eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and
+common searches and a writ of _Duces Tecum_. A bogoak frame over his
+bald head: Wilde's _Requiescat_. The drone of his misleading whistle
+brings Walter back.
+
+--Yes, sir?
+
+--Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?
+
+--Bathing Crissie, sir.
+
+Papa's little bedpal. Lump of love.
+
+--No, uncle Richie...
+
+--Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!
+
+--Uncle Richie, really...
+
+--Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you down.
+
+Walter squints vainly for a chair.
+
+--He has nothing to sit down on, sir.
+
+--He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.
+Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs
+here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the
+better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.
+
+_All'erta_!
+
+He drones bars of Ferrando's _aria di sortita_. The grandest number,
+Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.
+
+His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the air,
+his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.
+
+This wind is sweeter.
+
+Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you
+had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of
+them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's
+library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom?
+The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind
+ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon,
+his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine
+faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas
+father,--furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff!
+_Descende, calve, ut ne amplius decalveris_. A garland of grey hair
+on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace
+(_descende_!), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, baldpoll!
+A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns,
+the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured
+and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.
+
+And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating
+it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.
+Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own
+cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,
+invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled
+his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his
+second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and,
+rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang
+in diphthong.
+
+Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
+awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you
+might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue
+that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the
+wet street. _O si, certo_! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned
+round a squaw. More tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram
+alone crying to the rain: Naked women! _naked women_! What about that,
+eh?
+
+What about what? What else were they invented for?
+
+Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.
+You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause
+earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one
+saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles.
+Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O
+yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply
+deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the
+world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few
+thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very
+like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one
+feels that one is at one with one who once...
+
+The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again
+a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the
+unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.
+Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing
+upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a
+midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle
+stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel:
+isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze
+of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the
+higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams
+of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.
+
+He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there?
+Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand
+towards the Pigeonhouse.
+
+_--Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?_
+
+_--c'est le pigeon, Joseph._
+
+Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon.
+Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he
+lapped the sweet _lait chaud_ with pink young tongue, plump bunny's
+face. Lap, _lapin._ He hopes to win in the _gros lots_. About the nature
+of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me _La Vie de Jesus_ by
+M. Leo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.
+
+_--C'est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas
+en l'existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire a mon p-re._
+
+_--Il croit?_
+
+_--Mon pere, oui._
+
+_Schluss_. He laps.
+
+My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
+puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other
+devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: _physiques, chimiques et
+naturelles_. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of _mou en civet_, fleshpots
+of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural
+tone: when I was in Paris; _boul' Mich'_, I used to. Yes, used to
+carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder
+somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the
+prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me.
+Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. _Lui, c'est moi_. You seem to have enjoyed
+yourself.
+
+Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a
+dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging
+door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger
+toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Ferme_. Hired
+dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered
+walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not
+hurt? O, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's
+all right. Shake a shake. O, that's all only all right.
+
+You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery
+Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt from
+their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing: _Euge! Euge_! Pretending to speak
+broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across
+the slimy pier at Newhaven. _Comment?_ Rich booty you brought back; _Le
+Tutu_, five tattered numbers of _Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge_; a
+blue French telegram, curiosity to show:
+
+--Mother dying come home father.
+
+The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't.
+
+ _Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt
+ And I'll tell you the reason why.
+ She always kept things decent in
+ The Hannigan famileye._
+
+
+His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by
+the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone
+mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is
+there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
+
+Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of
+farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court
+the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the
+kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In
+Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering
+with gold teeth _chaussons_ of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the
+_pus_ of _flan breton_. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased
+pleasers, curled conquistadores.
+
+Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers
+smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his
+white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. _Un demi
+setier!_ A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me
+at his beck. _Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais,
+nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui!_ She thought you wanted a cheese
+_hollandais_. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial.
+There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call
+it his postprandial. Well: _slainte_! Around the slabbed tables the
+tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our
+saucestained plates, the green fairy's fang thrusting between his lips.
+Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith
+now, A E, pimander, good shepherd of men. To yoke me as his yokefellow,
+our crimes our common cause. You're your father's son. I know the voice.
+His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at
+his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called
+queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. _Vieille ogresse_
+with the _dents jaunes_. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, _La Patrie_, M.
+Millevoye, Felix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken,
+_bonne a tout faire_, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala.
+_Moi faire_, she said, _Tous les messieurs_. Not this _Monsieur_, I
+said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn't let
+my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes,
+I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.
+
+The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose
+tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw
+facebones under his peep of day boy's hat. How the head centre got away,
+authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil, orangeblossoms,
+drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the
+betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.
+
+Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you.
+I'll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love he
+prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls
+of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward
+in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides,
+Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations,
+the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps
+short night in, rue de la Goutte-d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of
+the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy
+without her outcast man, madame in rue Git-le-Coeur, canary and two
+buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's.
+Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won't you? I wanted to
+get poor Pat a job one time. _Mon fils_, soldier of France. I taught him
+to sing _The boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades_. Know that old
+lay? I taught Patrice that. Old Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow's
+castle on the Nore. Goes like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by
+the hand.
+
+ _O, O THE BOYS OF
+ KILKENNY..._
+
+
+Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them.
+Remembering thee, O Sion.
+
+He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.
+The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of
+seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship,
+am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the
+quaking soil. Turn back.
+
+Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly
+in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the
+barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my
+feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk,
+nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait,
+their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned
+platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when
+this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their--blind
+bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted his
+feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take
+all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's
+midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing
+Elsinore's tempting flood.
+
+The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back
+then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge
+and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a
+grike.
+
+A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the
+gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. _Un coche ensablé_ Louis Veuillot
+called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind
+have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren
+of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and
+stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout's toys. Mind you don't get one
+bang on the ear. I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well
+boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz
+an Iridzman.
+
+A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.
+Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not
+be master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From
+farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures,
+two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes.
+Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?
+
+Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their
+bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings,
+torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the
+collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon,
+spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city
+a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives, running,
+scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and
+slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among
+them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering
+resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.
+
+The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I
+just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. _Terribilia meditans_. A
+primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you
+pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The
+Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck,
+York's false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of
+a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion
+crowned. All kings' sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved
+men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers
+who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of...
+We don't want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he
+did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. _Natürlich_, put there for you.
+Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off
+Maiden's rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I
+would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft.
+When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can't see! Who's
+behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in
+on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If
+I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be
+mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his
+death. I... With him together down... I could not save her. Waters:
+bitter death: lost.
+
+A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.
+
+Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on
+all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made
+off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a
+lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He
+turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a
+field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of
+the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His
+snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented
+towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking,
+plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.
+
+Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping,
+soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped
+running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again
+reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as
+they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from
+his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a
+calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked
+round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like
+a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes
+on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies
+poor dogsbody's body.
+
+--Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel!
+
+The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless
+kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He
+slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he
+lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed
+against it. He trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed
+quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His
+hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.
+Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand,
+dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand
+again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in
+spousebreach, vulturing the dead.
+
+After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway.
+Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That
+man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my
+face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red
+carpet spread. You will see who.
+
+Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet
+out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler
+strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the
+ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and
+shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face hair trailed.
+Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing awast to Romeville. When night hides
+her body's flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway
+where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in
+O'Loughlin's of Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogues' rum lingo, for, O,
+my dimber wapping dell! A shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags.
+Fumbally's lane that night: the tanyard smells.
+
+ _White thy fambles, red thy gan
+ And thy quarrons dainty is.
+ Couch a hogshead with me then.
+ In the darkmans clip and kiss._
+
+
+Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, _frate porcospino_.
+Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him: _thy quarrons
+dainty is_. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads jabber
+on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.
+
+Passing now.
+
+A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I
+am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming
+sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps,
+trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in
+her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, _oinopa
+ponton_, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep
+the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of
+death, ghostcandled. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. He comes, pale vampire,
+through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her
+mouth's kiss.
+
+Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.
+
+No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss.
+
+His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb.
+Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:
+ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring
+wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's
+letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off.
+Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and
+scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library
+counter.
+
+His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till
+the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness
+shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there
+with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid
+sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.
+I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back.
+Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who
+ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field.
+Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne
+took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with
+coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat:
+yes, that's right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat
+I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly, frozen in
+stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is
+in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our
+sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the
+more.
+
+She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue
+hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of
+the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges
+Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you
+were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the
+braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with a grief
+and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else, Stevie: a
+pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and
+yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumplings,
+_piuttosto_. Where are your wits?
+
+Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me
+soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.
+Sad too. Touch, touch me.
+
+He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled
+note and pencil into a pock his hat. His hat down on his eyes. That is
+Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep. _Et
+vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona_. Alo! _Bonjour_. Welcome as the flowers
+in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the
+southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal
+noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the
+tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.
+
+ _And no more turn aside and brood._
+
+His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs,
+_nebeneinander_. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein
+another's foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in
+tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's
+shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. _Tiens, quel petit pied!_
+Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde's love that dare not speak its
+name. His arm: Cranly's arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I
+am. As I am. All or not at all.
+
+In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering
+greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float
+away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the
+low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a
+fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of
+waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops:
+flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It
+flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
+
+Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and
+sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water
+swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night:
+lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to,
+they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting,
+awaiting the fullness of their times, _diebus ac noctibus iniurias
+patiens ingemiscit_. To no end gathered; vainly then released,
+forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of
+lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a
+toil of waters.
+
+Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he
+said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose
+drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising
+saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise landward.
+There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath the watery
+floor. We have him. Easy now.
+
+Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a
+spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly.
+God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed
+mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a
+urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes
+upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to
+the sun.
+
+A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths
+known to man. Old Father Ocean. _Prix de paris_: beware of imitations.
+Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
+
+Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there?
+Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect,
+_Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum_. No. My cockle hat and staff and
+hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.
+
+He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying
+still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make
+their end. By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest
+day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn
+Tennyson, gentleman poet. _Già_. For the old hag with the yellow teeth.
+And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. _Già_. My teeth are very
+bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a
+dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the
+superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?
+
+My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?
+
+His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn't. Better buy one.
+
+He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock,
+carefully. For the rest let look who will.
+
+Behind. Perhaps there is someone.
+
+He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the
+air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees,
+homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. +
+
+
+
+
+-- II --
+
+Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
+He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
+liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all
+he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of
+faintly scented urine.
+
+Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting
+her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the
+kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel
+a bit peckish.
+
+The coals were reddening.
+
+Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like
+her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off
+the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat,
+its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked
+stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
+
+--Mkgnao!
+
+--O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
+
+The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the
+table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my
+head. Prr.
+
+Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see:
+the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her
+tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his
+knees.
+
+--Milk for the pussens, he said.
+
+--Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
+
+They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we
+understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too.
+Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder
+what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
+
+--Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the
+chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
+
+Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.
+
+--Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.
+
+She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively
+and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits
+narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to
+the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him,
+poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.
+
+--Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.
+
+He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped
+three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they
+can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or
+kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.
+
+He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this
+drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a
+mutton kidney at Buckley's. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better
+a pork kidney at Dlugacz's. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped
+slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough?
+To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced round
+him. No.
+
+On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by
+the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter
+she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way.
+
+He said softly in the bare hall:
+
+--I'm going round the corner. Be back in a minute.
+
+And when he had heard his voice say it he added:
+
+--You don't want anything for breakfast?
+
+A sleepy soft grunt answered:
+
+--Mn.
+
+No. She didn't want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer,
+as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled.
+Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar.
+Forgotten any little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for
+it. Old style. Ah yes! of course. Bought it at the governor's auction.
+Got a short knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At
+Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I'm proud of it.
+Still he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was
+farseeing.
+
+His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat
+and his lost property office secondhand waterproof. Stamps: stickyback
+pictures. Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too. Course they do.
+The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto's
+high grade ha. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip
+of paper. Quite safe.
+
+On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there.
+In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe.
+No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled
+the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped
+gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I
+come back anyhow.
+
+He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number
+seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George's church. Be a
+warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black
+conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn't go in
+that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as
+he walked in happy warmth. Boland's breadvan delivering with trays our
+daily but she prefers yesterday's loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.
+Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at
+dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep
+it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand,
+strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old
+Tweedy's big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of a spear. Wander
+through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet
+shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled
+pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel,
+sherbet. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well,
+meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among the
+pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal,
+the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches me from
+her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High
+wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet, colour of Molly's
+new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments
+what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass.
+
+Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track
+of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What
+Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the _Freeman_ leader: a
+homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank
+of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule
+sun rising up in the north-west.
+
+He approached Larry O'Rourke's. From the cellar grating floated up the
+flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out
+whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the
+end of the city traffic. For instance M'Auley's down there: n. g. as
+position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from
+the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.
+
+Baldhead over the blind. Cute old codger. No use canvassing him for an
+ad. Still he knows his own business best. There he is, sure enough, my
+bold Larry, leaning against the sugarbin in his shirtsleeves watching
+the aproned curate swab up with mop and bucket. Simon Dedalus takes him
+off to a tee with his eyes screwed up. Do you know what I'm going to
+tell you? What's that, Mr O'Rourke? Do you know what? The Russians,
+they'd only be an eight o'clock breakfast for the Japanese.
+
+Stop and say a word: about the funeral perhaps. Sad thing about poor
+Dignam, Mr O'Rourke.
+
+Turning into Dorset street he said freshly in greeting through the
+doorway:
+
+--Good day, Mr O'Rourke.
+
+--Good day to you.
+
+--Lovely weather, sir.
+
+--'Tis all that.
+
+Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county
+Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold,
+they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then thin of the
+competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without
+passing a pub. Save it they can't. Off the drunks perhaps. Put down
+three and carry five. What is that, a bob here and there, dribs and
+drabs. On the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with the
+town travellers. Square it you with the boss and we'll split the job,
+see?
+
+How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten barrels
+of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. O more. Fifteen. He passed Saint
+Joseph's National school. Brats' clamour. Windows open. Fresh air
+helps memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee
+doubleyou. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At
+their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom.
+
+He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring at the hanks of sausages,
+polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The figures whitened
+in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links,
+packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the
+lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs' blood.
+
+A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He
+stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling
+the items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda. And a pound and
+a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips.
+Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood.
+No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the
+clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt
+swings at each whack.
+
+The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with
+blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there: like a stallfed heifer.
+
+He took a page up from the pile of cut sheets: the model farm at
+Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
+sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round
+it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting:
+read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page
+rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the
+beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the
+breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm
+on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in
+their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and
+his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging,
+whack by whack by whack.
+
+The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime
+sausages and made a red grimace.
+
+--Now, my miss, he said.
+
+She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.
+
+--Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you,
+please?
+
+Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went
+slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the
+morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood
+outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He
+sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted
+toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways.
+The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For
+another: a constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles lane. They like
+them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the
+wood.
+
+--Threepence, please.
+
+His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket.
+Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers' pocket and laid them
+on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid,
+disc by disc, into the till.
+
+--Thank you, sir. Another time.
+
+A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze
+after an instant. No: better not: another time.
+
+--Good morning, he said, moving away.
+
+--Good morning, sir.
+
+No sign. Gone. What matter?
+
+He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim:
+planters' company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish
+government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel
+and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa.
+You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives,
+oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial
+irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered
+for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the
+balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15.
+
+Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.
+
+He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silverpowdered
+olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. Olives are packed in
+jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows
+the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons
+too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade. And Mastiansky
+with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron's
+basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it
+to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild
+perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too,
+Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times.
+Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar,
+Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa,
+chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in
+soiled dungarees. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn't
+see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that
+Norwegian captain's. Wonder if I'll meet him today. Watering cart. To
+provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.
+
+A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.
+
+No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead
+sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those
+waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it
+raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead
+names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the
+oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a
+naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over
+all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born
+everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old
+woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.
+
+Desolation.
+
+Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned
+into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins,
+chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here
+now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of
+the bed. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. On the hands down.
+Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that?
+Valuation is only twenty-eight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur:
+parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell
+the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her
+ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.
+
+Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim
+sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a
+girl with gold hair on the wind.
+
+Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered
+them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand.
+Mrs Marion.
+
+--Poldy!
+
+Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm
+yellow twilight towards her tousled head.
+
+--Who are the letters for?
+
+He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly.
+
+--A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And
+a letter for you.
+
+He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of her
+knees.
+
+--Do you want the blind up?
+
+Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her
+glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.
+
+--That do? he asked, turning.
+
+She was reading the card, propped on her elbow.
+
+--She got the things, she said.
+
+He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back
+slowly with a snug sigh.
+
+--Hurry up with that tea, she said. I'm parched.
+
+--The kettle is boiling, he said.
+
+But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled
+linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed.
+
+As he went down the kitchen stairs she called:
+
+--Poldy!
+
+--What?
+
+--Scald the teapot.
+
+On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded and
+rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting the
+kettle then to let the water flow in. Having set it to draw he took off
+the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump
+of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed
+hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won't mouse. Say they
+won't eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to
+her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He
+sprinkled it through his fingers ringwise from the chipped eggcup.
+
+Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks:
+new tam: Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan's
+seaside girls.
+
+The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown
+
+Derby, smiling. Silly Milly's birthday gift. Only five she was then. No,
+wait: four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces
+of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring.
+
+ _O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.
+ You are my lookingglass from night to morning.
+ I'd rather have you without a farthing
+ Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden._
+
+
+Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous
+old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And
+the little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into
+the parlour. O, look what I found in professor Goodwin's hat! All we
+laughed. Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.
+
+He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over: then fitted the
+teapot on the tray. Its hump bumped as he took it up. Everything on
+it? Bread and butter, four, sugar, spoon, her cream. Yes. He carried it
+upstairs, his thumb hooked in the teapot handle.
+
+Nudging the door open with his knee he carried the tray in and set it on
+the chair by the bedhead.
+
+--What a time you were! she said.
+
+She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on
+the pillow. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft
+bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder. The warmth
+of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the
+tea she poured.
+
+A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the
+act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.
+
+--Who was the letter from? he asked.
+
+Bold hand. Marion.
+
+--O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.
+
+--What are you singing?
+
+--_La ci darem_ with J. C. Doyle, she said, and _Love's Old Sweet Song_.
+
+Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves
+next day. Like foul flowerwater.
+
+--Would you like the window open a little?
+
+She doubled a slice of bread into her mouth, asking:
+
+--What time is the funeral?
+
+--Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn't see the paper.
+
+Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled
+drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a
+stocking: rumpled, shiny sole.
+
+--No: that book.
+
+Other stocking. Her petticoat.
+
+--It must have fell down, she said.
+
+He felt here and there. _Voglio e non vorrei_. Wonder if she pronounces
+that right: _voglio_. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped
+and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of
+the orangekeyed chamberpot.
+
+--Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There's a word I wanted to
+ask you.
+
+She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and,
+having wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the
+text with the hairpin till she reached the word.
+
+--Met him what? he asked.
+
+--Here, she said. What does that mean?
+
+He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.
+
+--Metempsychosis?
+
+--Yes. Who's he when he's at home?
+
+--Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It's Greek: from the Greek. That
+means the transmigration of souls.
+
+--O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.
+
+He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eyes. The same young eyes.
+The first night after the charades. Dolphin's Barn. He turned over
+the smudged pages. _Ruby: the Pride of the Ring_. Hello. Illustration.
+Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor
+naked. Sheet kindly lent. _The monster Maffei desisted and flung his
+victim from him with an oath_. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals.
+Trapeze at Hengler's. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your
+neck and we'll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so
+they metamspychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man's
+soul after he dies. Dignam's soul...
+
+--Did you finish it? he asked.
+
+--Yes, she said. There's nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the
+first fellow all the time?
+
+--Never read it. Do you want another?
+
+--Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has.
+
+She poured more tea into her cup, watching it flow sideways.
+
+Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they'll write to
+Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation: that's the word.
+
+--Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body
+after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That
+we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other
+planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past
+lives.
+
+The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Bette remind
+her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be better. An example?
+
+The _Bath of the Nymph_ over the bed. Given away with the Easter number
+of _Photo Bits_: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you
+put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six
+I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked
+nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then.
+
+He turned the pages back.
+
+--Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They
+used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for
+instance. What they called nymphs, for example.
+
+Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her,
+inhaling through her arched nostrils.
+
+--There's a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?
+
+--The kidney! he cried suddenly.
+
+He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes
+against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping
+hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork's legs. Pungent smoke shot
+up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of the
+fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back.
+Only a little burnt. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the
+scanty brown gravy trickle over it.
+
+Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf.
+He shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a
+forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant
+meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of bread,
+sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth. What was that about
+some young student and a picnic? He creased out the letter at his side,
+reading it slowly as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in the
+gravy and raising it to his mouth.
+
+Dearest Papli
+
+Thanks ever so much for the lovely birthday present. It suits me
+splendid. Everyone says I am quite the belle in my new tam. I got
+mummy's Iovely box of creams and am writing. They are lovely. I am
+getting on swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of me
+and Mrs. Will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair day
+and all the beef to the heels were in. We are going to lough Owel on
+Monday with a few friends to make a scrap picnic. Give my love to
+mummy and to yourself a big kiss and thanks. I hear them at the piano
+downstairs. There is to be a concert in the Greville Arms on Saturday.
+There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his
+cousins or something are big swells and he sings Boylan's (I was on the
+pop of writing Blazes Boylan's) song about those seaside girls. Tell him
+silly Milly sends my best respects. I must now close with fondest love
+
+Your fond daughter, MILLY.
+
+P. S. Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Byby. M.
+
+Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too. Her first
+birthday away from home. Separation. Remember the summer morning she
+was born, running to knock up Mrs Thornton in Denzille street. Jolly old
+woman. Lot of babies she must have helped into the world. She knew from
+the first poor little Rudy wouldn't live. Well, God is good, sir. She
+knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived.
+
+His vacant face stared pityingly at the postscript. Excuse bad writing.
+Hurry. Piano downstairs. Coming out of her shell. Row with her in the
+XL Cafe about the bracelet. Wouldn't eat her cakes or speak or look.
+Saucebox. He sopped other dies of bread in the gravy and ate piece after
+piece of kidney. Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still, she might do
+worse. Music hall stage. Young student. He drank a draught of cooler tea
+to wash down his meal. Then he read the letter again: twice.
+
+O, well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has
+happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case till it does. A wild
+piece of goods. Her slim legs running up the staircase. Destiny.
+Ripening now.
+
+Vain: very.
+
+He smiled with troubled affection at the kitchen window. Day I caught
+her in the street pinching her cheeks to make them red. Anemic a little.
+Was given milk too long. On the ERIN'S KING that day round the Kish.
+Damned old tub pitching about. Not a bit funky. Her pale blue scarf
+loose in the wind with her hair. _All dimpled cheeks and curls, Your
+head it simply swirls._
+
+
+Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers' pockets,
+jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says.
+Pier with lamps, summer evening, band,
+
+ _Those girls, those girls,
+ Those lovely seaside girls._
+
+
+Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion.
+Reading, lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling,
+braiding.
+
+A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen,
+yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen
+too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now.
+Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman's lips.
+
+Better where she is down there: away. Occupy her. Wanted a dog to pass
+the time. Might take a trip down there. August bank holiday, only two
+and six return. Six weeks off, however. Might work a press pass. Or
+through M'Coy.
+
+The cat, having cleaned all her fur, returned to the meatstained paper,
+nosed at it and stalked to the door. She looked back at him, mewing.
+Wants to go out. Wait before a door sometime it will open. Let her wait.
+Has the fidgets. Electric. Thunder in the air. Was washing at her ear
+with her back to the fire too.
+
+He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up,
+undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.
+
+--Miaow! he said in answer. Wait till I'm ready.
+
+Heaviness: hot day coming. Too much trouble to fag up the stairs to the
+landing.
+
+A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as
+I'm.
+
+In the tabledrawer he found an old number of _Titbits_. He folded it
+under his armpit, went to the door and opened it. The cat went up in
+soft bounds. Ah, wanted to go upstairs, curl up in a ball on the bed.
+
+Listening, he heard her voice:
+
+--Come, come, pussy. Come.
+
+He went out through the backdoor into the garden: stood to listen
+towards the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry.
+The maid was in the garden. Fine morning.
+
+He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall.
+Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to
+manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur.
+All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this
+that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top
+dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are
+fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid
+gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in
+that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still gardens
+have their drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday.
+
+He walked on. Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the
+peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny I don't remember that. Hallstand
+too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters.
+Drago's shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown
+brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder
+have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox
+there got away James Stephens, they say. O'Brien.
+
+Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. Agendath what is it? Now, my miss.
+Enthusiast.
+
+He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get
+these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head
+under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy
+limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he
+peered through a chink up at the nextdoor windows. The king was in his
+countinghouse. Nobody.
+
+Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over
+on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a
+bit. Our prize titbit: _Matcham's Masterstroke_. Written by Mr Philip
+Beaufoy, Playgoers' Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea
+a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds
+three. Three pounds, thirteen and six.
+
+Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but
+resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he
+allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still
+patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's
+not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One
+tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch
+him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly
+season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat
+certainly. _Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the
+laughing witch who now_. Begins and ends morally. _Hand in hand_. Smart.
+He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water
+flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and
+received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six.
+
+Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for
+some proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she
+said dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving. Biting
+her nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her. 9.l5.
+Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy on? 9.23. What
+possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I'm swelled after that cabbage. A
+speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.
+
+Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stockinged calf. Morning
+after the bazaar dance when May's band played Ponchielli's dance of the
+hours. Explain that: morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then
+night hours. Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her head
+dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that Boylan well off? He has money.
+Why? I noticed he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing. No use
+humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind of music that last night. The
+mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen
+vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into it. Lines in her eyes.
+It wouldn't pan out somehow.
+
+Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then: black with daggers
+and eyemasks. Poetical idea: pink, then golden, then grey, then black.
+Still, true to life also. Day: then the night.
+
+He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.
+Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled
+back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom
+into the air.
+
+In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he eyed carefully his
+black trousers: the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees. What time
+is the funeral? Better find out in the paper.
+
+A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George's
+church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron.
+
+ _Heigho! Heigho!
+ Heigho! Heigho!
+ Heigho! Heigho!_
+
+
+Quarter to. There again: the overtone following through the air, third.
+
+Poor Dignam!
+
+
+By lorries along sir John Rogerson's quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past
+Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office.
+Could have given that address too. And past the sailors' home. He turned
+from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street.
+By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal
+linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema
+on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell
+him if he smokes he won't grow. O let him! His life isn't such a bed of
+roses. Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da.
+Slack hour: won't be many there. He crossed Townsend street, passed
+the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth. And past
+Nichols' the undertaker. At eleven it is. Time enough. Daresay Corny
+Kelleher bagged the job for O'Neill's. Singing with his eyes shut.
+Corny. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout.
+Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay.
+O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my
+tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.
+
+
+In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental
+Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend,
+finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom
+Kernan. Couldn't ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read
+blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his
+right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning.
+Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather
+headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand came down
+into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card behind the
+headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket.
+
+So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and
+hair. Then he put on his hat again, relieved: and read again: choice
+blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it
+must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on,
+cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like
+that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in _dolce far niente_,
+not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot
+to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The
+air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants.
+Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on
+roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap
+I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his
+back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so
+thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of
+the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the
+volume is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in
+High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum.
+Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight?
+Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second
+per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It's the force of
+gravity of the earth is the weight.
+
+He turned away and sauntered across the road. How did she walk with her
+sausages? Like that something. As he walked he took the folded _Freeman_
+from his sidepocket, unfolded it, rolled it lengthwise in a baton and
+tapped it at each sauntering step against his trouserleg. Careless air:
+just drop in to see. Per second per second. Per second for every second
+it means. From the curbstone he darted a keen glance through the door of
+the postoffice. Too late box. Post here. No-one. In.
+
+He handed the card through the brass grill.
+
+--Are there any letters for me? he asked.
+
+While the postmistress searched a pigeonhole he gazed at the recruiting
+poster with soldiers of all arms on parade: and held the tip of his
+baton against his nostrils, smelling freshprinted rag paper. No answer
+probably. Went too far last time.
+
+The postmistress handed him back through the grill his card with a
+letter. He thanked her and glanced rapidly at the typed envelope.
+
+Henry Flower Esq, c/o P. O. Westland Row, City.
+
+Answered anyhow. He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket,
+reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where's old Tweedy's regiment?
+Castoff soldier. There: bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he's a
+grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats.
+Too showy. That must be why the women go after them. Uniform. Easier to
+enlist and drill. Maud Gonne's letter about taking them off O'Connell
+street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith's paper is on
+the same tack now: an army rotten with venereal disease: overseas or
+halfseasover empire. Half baked they look: hypnotised like. Eyes front.
+Mark time. Table: able. Bed: ed. The King's own. Never see him dressed
+up as a fireman or a bobby. A mason, yes.
+
+He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. Talk: as if
+that would mend matters. His hand went into his pocket and a forefinger
+felt its way under the flap of the envelope, ripping it open in jerks.
+Women will pay a lot of heed, I don't think. His fingers drew forth the
+letter the letter and crumpled the envelope in his pocket. Something
+pinned on: photo perhaps. Hair? No.
+
+M'Coy. Get rid of him quickly. Take me out of my way. Hate company when
+you.
+
+--Hello, Bloom. Where are you off to?
+
+--Hello, M'Coy. Nowhere in particular.
+
+--How's the body?
+
+--Fine. How are you?
+
+--Just keeping alive, M'Coy said.
+
+His eyes on the black tie and clothes he asked with low respect:
+
+--Is there any... no trouble I hope? I see you're...
+
+--O, no, Mr Bloom said. Poor Dignam, you know. The funeral is today.
+
+--To be sure, poor fellow. So it is. What time?
+
+A photo it isn't. A badge maybe.
+
+--E... eleven, Mr Bloom answered.
+
+--I must try to get out there, M'Coy said. Eleven, is it? I only heard
+it last night. Who was telling me? Holohan. You know Hoppy?
+
+--I know.
+
+Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door
+of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She
+stood still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her,
+searched his pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll
+collar, warm for a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless
+stand of her with her hands in those patch pockets. Like that haughty
+creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot.
+Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable
+Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch
+out of her.
+
+--I was with Bob Doran, he's on one of his periodical bends, and what do
+you call him Bantam Lyons. Just down there in Conway's we were.
+
+Doran Lyons in Conway's. She raised a gloved hand to her hair. In came
+Hoppy. Having a wet. Drawing back his head and gazing far from beneath
+his vailed eyelids he saw the bright fawn skin shine in the glare, the
+braided drums. Clearly I can see today. Moisture about gives long sight
+perhaps. Talking of one thing or another. Lady's hand. Which side will
+she get up?
+
+--And he said: _Sad thing about our poor friend Paddy! What Paddy?_ I
+said. _Poor little Paddy Dignam_, he said.
+
+Off to the country: Broadstone probably. High brown boots with laces
+dangling. Wellturned foot. What is he foostering over that change for?
+Sees me looking. Eye out for other fellow always. Good fallback. Two
+strings to her bow.
+
+--_Why?_ I said. _What's wrong with him?_ I said.
+
+Proud: rich: silk stockings.
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said.
+
+He moved a little to the side of M'Coy's talking head. Getting up in a
+minute.
+
+--_What's wrong with him_? He said. _He's dead_, he said. And, faith,
+he filled up. _Is it Paddy Dignam_? I said. I couldn't believe it when I
+heard it. I was with him no later than Friday last or Thursday was it in
+the Arch. _Yes,_ he said. _He's gone. He died on Monday, poor fellow_.
+Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!
+
+A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between.
+
+Lost it. Curse your noisy pugnose. Feels locked out of it. Paradise and
+the peri. Always happening like that. The very moment. Girl in Eustace
+street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering
+the display of _esprit de corps_. Well, what are you gaping at?
+
+--Yes, yes, Mr Bloom said after a dull sigh. Another gone.
+
+--One of the best, M'Coy said.
+
+The tram passed. They drove off towards the Loop Line bridge, her rich
+gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker: the laceflare of her
+hat in the sun: flicker, flick.
+
+--Wife well, I suppose? M'Coy's changed voice said.
+
+--O, yes, Mr Bloom said. Tiptop, thanks.
+
+He unrolled the newspaper baton idly and read idly:
+
+_What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete With it an
+abode of bliss._
+
+--My missus has just got an engagement. At least it's not settled yet.
+
+Valise tack again. By the way no harm. I'm off that, thanks.
+
+Mr Bloom turned his largelidded eyes with unhasty friendliness.
+
+--My wife too, he said. She's going to sing at a swagger affair in the
+Ulster Hall, Belfast, on the twenty-fifth.
+
+--That so? M'Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who's getting it up?
+
+Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and.
+No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady
+and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.
+
+ _Love's
+ Old
+ Sweet
+ Song
+ Comes lo-ove's old..._
+
+--It's a kind of a tour, don't you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully.
+_Sweeeet song_. There's a committee formed. Part shares and part
+profits.
+
+M'Coy nodded, picking at his moustache stubble.
+
+--O, well, he said. That's good news.
+
+He moved to go.
+
+--Well, glad to see you looking fit, he said. Meet you knocking around.
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said.
+
+--Tell you what, M'Coy said. You might put down my name at the funeral,
+will you? I'd like to go but I mightn't be able, you see. There's a
+drowning case at Sandycove may turn up and then the coroner and myself
+would have to go down if the body is found. You just shove in my name if
+I'm not there, will you?
+
+--I'll do that, Mr Bloom said, moving to get off. That'll be all right.
+
+--Right, M'Coy said brightly. Thanks, old man. I'd go if I possibly
+could. Well, tolloll. Just C. P. M'Coy will do.
+
+--That will be done, Mr Bloom answered firmly.
+
+Didn't catch me napping that wheeze. The quick touch. Soft mark. I'd
+like my job. Valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped
+corners, rivetted edges, double action lever lock. Bob Cowley lent him
+his for the Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings of
+it from that good day to this.
+
+Mr Bloom, strolling towards Brunswick street, smiled. My missus has just
+got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its
+way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don't you know:
+in the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can't
+he hear the difference? Think he's that way inclined a bit. Against
+my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that
+smallpox up there doesn't get worse. Suppose she wouldn't let herself be
+vaccinated again. Your wife and my wife.
+
+Wonder is he pimping after me?
+
+Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured
+hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery's Summer
+Sale. No, he's going on straight. Hello. _Leah_ tonight. Mrs Bandmann
+Palmer. Like to see her again in that. _Hamlet_ she played last night.
+Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed
+suicide. Poor papa! How he used to talk of Kate Bateman in that. Outside
+the Adelphi in London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before
+I was born that was: sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What is this the
+right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The scene he was
+always talking about where the old blind Abraham recognises the voice
+and puts his fingers on his face.
+
+Nathan's voice! His son's voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his
+father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his
+father and left the God of his father.
+
+Every word is so deep, Leopold.
+
+Poor papa! Poor man! I'm glad I didn't go into the room to look at his
+face. That day! O, dear! O, dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was best for
+him.
+
+Mr Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of the
+hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time. Wish I hadn't met
+that M'Coy fellow.
+
+He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing
+teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet
+oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they
+know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags.
+Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss.
+Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their
+haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they
+look. Still their neigh can be very irritating.
+
+He drew the letter from his pocket and folded it into the newspaper he
+carried. Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer.
+
+He passed the cabman's shelter. Curious the life of drifting cabbies.
+All weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their own. _Voglio
+e non_. Like to give them an odd cigarette. Sociable. Shout a few flying
+syllables as they pass. He hummed:
+
+ _La ci darem la mano
+ La la lala la la._
+
+He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in the
+lee of the station wall. No-one. Meade's timberyard. Piled balks. Ruins
+and tenements. With careful tread he passed over a hopscotch court with
+its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted
+child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise
+tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb
+them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it.
+And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame's school. She
+liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis's. And Mr? He opened the letter within the
+newspaper.
+
+A flower. I think it's a. A yellow flower with flattened petals. Not
+annoyed then? What does she say?
+
+Dear Henry
+
+I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it. I am sorry
+you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am
+awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called
+you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me
+what is the real meaning of that word? Are you not happy in your home
+you poor little naughty boy? I do wish I could do something for you.
+Please tell me what you think of poor me. I often think of the beautiful
+name you have. Dear Henry, when will we meet? I think of you so often
+you have no idea. I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as
+you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me
+more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what I
+will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote. O how I long to
+meet you. Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are
+exhausted. Then I will tell you all. Goodbye now, naughty darling, I
+have such a bad headache. today. and write _by return_ to your longing
+
+Martha
+
+P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to
+know.
+
+He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell
+and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it
+because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then
+walking slowly forward he read the letter again, murmuring here and
+there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus
+if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses
+when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume.
+Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his
+sidepocket.
+
+Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder did she
+wrote it herself. Doing the indignant: a girl of good family like me,
+respectable character. Could meet one Sunday after the rosary. Thank
+you: not having any. Usual love scrimmage. Then running round corners.
+Bad as a row with Molly. Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic. Go
+further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course.
+Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.
+
+Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it.
+Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere:
+pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses
+without thorns.
+
+Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the
+Coombe, linked together in the rain.
+
+ _O, Mary lost the pin of her drawers.
+ She didn't know what to do
+ To keep it up
+ To keep it up._
+
+It? Them. Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all
+day typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves. What perfume does your wife
+use. Now could you make out a thing like that?
+
+ _To keep it up._
+
+Martha, Mary. I saw that picture somewhere I forget now old master or
+faked for money. He is sitting in their house, talking. Mysterious. Also
+the two sluts in the Coombe would listen.
+
+ _To keep it up._
+
+Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there:
+quiet dusk: let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have been,
+strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper:
+fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of a well, stonecold like the hole
+in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the
+trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and
+more: all. Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.
+
+Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly
+in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered
+away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank.
+
+Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in the
+same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure
+cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be
+made out of porter. Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change
+his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. A
+million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart,
+eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter.
+One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen millions
+of barrels of porter.
+
+What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the same.
+
+An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach.
+Barrels bumped in his head: dull porter slopped and churned inside.
+The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing
+together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy
+pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.
+
+He had reached the open backdoor of All Hallows. Stepping into the porch
+he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it again
+behind the leather headband. Damn it. I might have tried to work M'Coy
+for a pass to Mullingar.
+
+Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S.J.
+on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African Mission. Prayers for the
+conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious. The
+protestants are the same. Convert Dr William J. Walsh D.D. to the true
+religion. Save China's millions. Wonder how they explain it to the
+heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for
+them. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy
+with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo. Crown
+of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks?
+Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguishedlooking. Sorry I
+didn't work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of that
+Father Farley who looked a fool but wasn't. They're taught that. He's
+not going out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to baptise
+blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see
+them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still
+life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.
+
+The cold smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps,
+pushed the swingdoor and entered softly by the rere.
+
+Something going on: some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place
+to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour? Jammed by the hour to slow
+music. That woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Women knelt in the
+benches with crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch
+knelt at the altarrails. The priest went along by them, murmuring,
+holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a
+communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it
+neatly into her mouth. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one. Her hat
+sank at once. Then the next one: a small old woman. The priest bent down
+to put it into her mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next one.
+Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? _Corpus:_ body. Corpse. Good
+idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They
+don't seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a
+corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it.
+
+He stood aside watching their blind masks pass down the aisle, one by
+one, and seek their places. He approached a bench and seated himself in
+its corner, nursing his hat and newspaper. These pots we have to wear.
+We ought to have hats modelled on our heads. They were about him here
+and there, with heads still bowed in their crimson halters, waiting for
+it to melt in their stomachs. Something like those mazzoth: it's that
+sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes
+them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called.
+There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel.
+First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family
+party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of
+that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish.
+Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure,
+waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old
+fellow asleep near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith.
+Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next
+year.
+
+He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an
+instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace
+affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn't know what
+to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S.
+Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have
+suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.
+
+Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up with
+a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be here
+with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the
+sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen's evidence on the
+invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion
+every morning. This very church. Peter Carey, yes. No, Peter Claver I am
+thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six children
+at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those crawthumpers,
+now that's a good name for them, there's always something shiftylooking
+about them. They're not straight men of business either. O, no, she's
+not here: the flower: no, no. By the way, did I tear up that envelope?
+Yes: under the bridge.
+
+The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs
+smartly. Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank
+what they are used to Guinness's porter or some temperance beverage
+Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale
+(aromatic). Doesn't give them any of it: shew wine: only the other.
+Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they'd have one old
+booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink. Queer the
+whole atmosphere of the. Quite right. Perfectly right that is.
+
+Mr Bloom looked back towards the choir. Not going to be any music. Pity.
+Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make that
+instrument talk, the _vibrato_: fifty pounds a year they say he had in
+Gardiner street. Molly was in fine voice that day, the _Stabat Mater_
+of Rossini. Father Bernard Vaughan's sermon first. Christ or Pilate?
+Christ, but don't keep us all night over it. Music they wanted.
+Footdrill stopped. Could hear a pin drop. I told her to pitch her voice
+against that corner. I could feel the thrill in the air, the full, the
+people looking up:
+
+_Quis est homo._
+
+Some of that old sacred music splendid. Mercadante: seven last words.
+Mozart's twelfth mass: _Gloria_ in that. Those old popes keen on music,
+on art and statues and pictures of all kinds. Palestrina for example
+too. They had a gay old time while it lasted. Healthy too, chanting,
+regular hours, then brew liqueurs. Benedictine. Green Chartreuse. Still,
+having eunuchs in their choir that was coming it a bit thick. What kind
+of voice is it? Must be curious to hear after their own strong basses.
+Connoisseurs. Suppose they wouldn't feel anything after. Kind of a
+placid. No worry. Fall into flesh, don't they? Gluttons, tall, long
+legs. Who knows? Eunuch. One way out of it.
+
+He saw the priest bend down and kiss the altar and then face about and
+bless all the people. All crossed themselves and stood up. Mr Bloom
+glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand
+up at the gospel of course. Then all settled down on their knees again
+and he sat back quietly in his bench. The priest came down from the
+altar, holding the thing out from him, and he and the massboy answered
+each other in Latin. Then the priest knelt down and began to read off a
+card:
+
+--O God, our refuge and our strength...
+
+Mr Bloom put his face forward to catch the words. English. Throw them
+the bone. I remember slightly. How long since your last mass? Glorious
+and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More
+interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful
+organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants
+to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon
+in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I
+schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look
+down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears.
+Husband learn to his surprise. God's little joke. Then out she comes.
+Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy
+Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes. Salvation
+army blatant imitation. Reformed prostitute will address the meeting.
+How I found the Lord. Squareheaded chaps those must be in Rome: they
+work the whole show. And don't they rake in the money too? Bequests
+also: to the P.P. for the time being in his absolute discretion.
+Masses for the repose of my soul to be said publicly with open doors.
+Monasteries and convents. The priest in that Fermanagh will case in the
+witnessbox. No browbeating him. He had his answer pat for everything.
+Liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the church. The doctors of the
+church: they mapped out the whole theology of it.
+
+The priest prayed:
+
+--Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict. Be
+our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil (may God
+restrain him, we humbly pray!): and do thou, O prince of the heavenly
+host, by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those
+other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
+
+The priest and the massboy stood up and walked off. All over. The women
+remained behind: thanksgiving.
+
+Better be shoving along. Brother Buzz. Come around with the plate
+perhaps. Pay your Easter duty.
+
+He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the
+time? Women enjoy it. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there's a
+(whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked.
+Glimpses of the moon. Annoyed if you don't. Why didn't you tell me
+before. Still like you better untidy. Good job it wasn't farther south.
+He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the aisle and out through the main
+door into the light. He stood a moment unseeing by the cold black marble
+bowl while before him and behind two worshippers dipped furtive hands in
+the low tide of holy water. Trams: a car of Prescott's dyeworks: a widow
+in her weeds. Notice because I'm in mourning myself. He covered himself.
+How goes the time? Quarter past. Time enough yet. Better get that lotion
+made up. Where is this? Ah yes, the last time. Sweny's in Lincoln place.
+Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir.
+Hamilton Long's, founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot churchyard
+near there. Visit some day.
+
+He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the other
+trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair.
+O well, poor fellow, it's not his fault. When was it I got it made up
+last? Wait. I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it must
+have been or the second. O, he can look it up in the prescriptions book.
+
+The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems
+to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher's stone. The
+alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why?
+Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.
+Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his
+alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid.
+Smell almost cure you like the dentist's doorbell. Doctor Whack. He
+ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow
+that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to
+be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue
+litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts.
+Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the
+phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever
+of nature.
+
+--About a fortnight ago, sir?
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said.
+
+He waited by the counter, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs, the
+dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs. Lot of time taken up telling
+your aches and pains.
+
+--Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then
+orangeflower water...
+
+It certainly did make her skin so delicate white like wax.
+
+--And white wax also, he said.
+
+Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to
+her eyes, Spanish, smelling herself, when I was fixing the links in my
+cuffs. Those homely recipes are often the best: strawberries for the
+teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk.
+Skinfood. One of the old queen's sons, duke of Albany was it? had only
+one skin. Leopold, yes. Three we have. Warts, bunions and pimples to
+make it worse. But you want a perfume too. What perfume does your? _Peau
+d'Espagne_. That orangeflower water is so fresh. Nice smell these soaps
+have. Pure curd soap. Time to get a bath round the corner. Hammam.
+Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice
+girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing
+I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time for
+massage. Feel fresh then all the day. Funeral be rather glum.
+
+--Yes, sir, the chemist said. That was two and nine. Have you brought a
+bottle?
+
+--No, Mr Bloom said. Make it up, please. I'll call later in the day and
+I'll take one of these soaps. How much are they?
+
+--Fourpence, sir.
+
+Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax.
+
+--I'll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny.
+
+--Yes, sir, the chemist said. You can pay all together, sir, when you
+come back.
+
+--Good, Mr Bloom said.
+
+He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the
+coolwrappered soap in his left hand.
+
+At his armpit Bantam Lyons' voice and hand said:
+
+--Hello, Bloom. What's the best news? Is that today's? Show us a minute.
+
+Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove! Long cold upper lip. To look
+younger. He does look balmy. Younger than I am.
+
+Bantam Lyons's yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a
+wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears'
+soap? Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling.
+
+--I want to see about that French horse that's running today, Bantam
+Lyons said. Where the bugger is it?
+
+He rustled the pleated pages, jerking his chin on his high collar.
+Barber's itch. Tight collar he'll lose his hair. Better leave him the
+paper and get shut of him.
+
+--You can keep it, Mr Bloom said.
+
+--Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum the
+second.
+
+--I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said.
+
+Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly.
+
+--What's that? his sharp voice said.
+
+--I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away
+that moment.
+
+Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread
+sheets back on Mr Bloom's arms.
+
+--I'll risk it, he said. Here, thanks.
+
+He sped off towards Conway's corner. God speed scut.
+
+Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap
+in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of it
+lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large
+tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming
+embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now.
+They never come back. Fleshpots of Egypt.
+
+He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a
+mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He
+eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park: cyclist doubled
+up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round
+like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big:
+college. Something to catch the eye.
+
+There's Hornblower standing at the porter's lodge. Keep him on hands:
+might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr Hornblower? How
+do you do, sir?
+
+Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather.
+Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it
+here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the
+Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more
+in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the
+floor. Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which
+in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.
+
+Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid
+stream. This is my body.
+
+He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of
+warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his
+trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward,
+lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of
+his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of
+thousands, a languid floating flower.
+
+
+
+Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking
+carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after
+him, curving his height with care.
+
+--Come on, Simon.
+
+--After you, Mr Bloom said.
+
+Mr Dedalus covered himself quickly and got in, saying:
+
+Yes, yes.
+
+--Are we all here now? Martin Cunningham asked. Come along, Bloom.
+
+Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to
+after him and slammed it twice till it shut tight. He passed an arm
+through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriagewindow
+at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman
+peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she
+was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad
+to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them.
+Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipperslappers for fear he'd
+wake. Then getting it ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making
+the bed. Pull it more to your side. Our windingsheet. Never know who
+will touch you dead. Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the nails and
+the hair. Keep a bit in an envelope. Grows all the same after. Unclean
+job.
+
+All waited. Nothing was said. Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am
+sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap: in my hip pocket. Better shift
+it out of that. Wait for an opportunity.
+
+All waited. Then wheels were heard from in front, turning: then nearer:
+then horses' hoofs. A jolt. Their carriage began to move, creaking and
+swaying. Other hoofs and creaking wheels started behind. The blinds of
+the avenue passed and number nine with its craped knocker, door ajar. At
+walking pace.
+
+They waited still, their knees jogging, till they had turned and were
+passing along the tramtracks. Tritonville road. Quicker. The wheels
+rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook
+rattling in the doorframes.
+
+--What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.
+
+--Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.
+
+Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.
+
+--That's a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died
+out.
+
+All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by
+passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the
+smoother road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man,
+clad in mourning, a wide hat.
+
+--There's a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said.
+
+--Who is that?
+
+--Your son and heir.
+
+--Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over across.
+
+The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway
+before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner and, swerving back
+to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels. Mr Dedalus
+fell back, saying:
+
+--Was that Mulligan cad with him? His _fidus Achates_!
+
+--No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone.
+
+--Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose, Mr Dedalus said, the Goulding
+faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump
+of dung, the wise child that knows her own father.
+
+Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros: the
+bottleworks: Dodder bridge.
+
+Richie Goulding and the legal bag. Goulding, Collis and Ward he calls
+the firm. His jokes are getting a bit damp. Great card he was. Waltzing
+in Stamer street with Ignatius Gallaher on a Sunday morning, the
+landlady's two hats pinned on his head. Out on the rampage all night.
+Beginning to tell on him now: that backache of his, I fear. Wife ironing
+his back. Thinks he'll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they are.
+About six hundred per cent profit.
+
+--He's in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a
+contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks
+all over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I'll
+make it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother
+or his aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a gate.
+I'll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.
+
+He cried above the clatter of the wheels:
+
+--I won't have her bastard of a nephew ruin my son. A counterjumper's
+son. Selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M'Swiney's. Not likely.
+
+He ceased. Mr Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to Mr Power's mild
+face and Martin Cunningham's eyes and beard, gravely shaking. Noisy
+selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If
+little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house.
+Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange
+feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must have been that morning
+in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs at it by
+the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up. She had
+that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch,
+Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins.
+
+Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her.
+I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn
+German too.
+
+--Are we late? Mr Power asked.
+
+--Ten minutes, Martin Cunningham said, looking at his watch.
+
+Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down. Her tomboy oaths. O jumping
+Jupiter! Ye gods and little fishes! Still, she's a dear girl. Soon be a
+woman. Mullingar. Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes: a woman too.
+Life, life.
+
+The carriage heeled over and back, their four trunks swaying.
+
+--Corny might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said.
+
+--He might, Mr Dedalus said, if he hadn't that squint troubling him. Do
+you follow me?
+
+He closed his left eye. Martin Cunningham began to brush away
+crustcrumbs from under his thighs.
+
+--What is this, he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?
+
+--Someone seems to have been making a picnic party here lately, Mr Power
+said.
+
+All raised their thighs and eyed with disfavour the mildewed buttonless
+leather of the seats. Mr Dedalus, twisting his nose, frowned downward
+and said:
+
+--Unless I'm greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?
+
+--It struck me too, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+Mr Bloom set his thigh down. Glad I took that bath. Feel my feet quite
+clean. But I wish Mrs Fleming had darned these socks better.
+
+Mr Dedalus sighed resignedly.
+
+--After all, he said, it's the most natural thing in the world.
+
+--Did Tom Kernan turn up? Martin Cunningham asked, twirling the peak of
+his beard gently.
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom answered. He's behind with Ned Lambert and Hynes.
+
+--And Corny Kelleher himself? Mr Power asked.
+
+--At the cemetery, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+--I met M'Coy this morning, Mr Bloom said. He said he'd try to come.
+
+The carriage halted short.
+
+--What's wrong?
+
+--We're stopped.
+
+--Where are we?
+
+Mr Bloom put his head out of the window.
+
+--The grand canal, he said.
+
+Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got
+it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions. Shame
+really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed
+tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don't miss
+this chance. Dogs' home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos,
+Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave.
+A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men's
+dogs usually are.
+
+A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of shower
+spray dots over the grey flags. Apart. Curious. Like through a colander.
+I thought it would. My boots were creaking I remember now.
+
+--The weather is changing, he said quietly.
+
+--A pity it did not keep up fine, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+--Wanted for the country, Mr Power said. There's the sun again coming
+out.
+
+Mr Dedalus, peering through his glasses towards the veiled sun, hurled a
+mute curse at the sky.
+
+--It's as uncertain as a child's bottom, he said.
+
+--We're off again.
+
+The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed
+gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.
+
+--Tom Kernan was immense last night, he said. And Paddy Leonard taking
+him off to his face.
+
+--O, draw him out, Martin, Mr Power said eagerly. Wait till you hear
+him, Simon, on Ben Dollard's singing of _The Croppy Boy_.
+
+--Immense, Martin Cunningham said pompously. _His singing of that simple
+ballad, Martin, is the most trenchant rendering I ever heard in the
+whole course of my experience._
+
+--Trenchant, Mr Power said laughing. He's dead nuts on that. And the
+retrospective arrangement.
+
+--Did you read Dan Dawson's speech? Martin Cunningham asked.
+
+--I did not then, Mr Dedalus said. Where is it?
+
+--In the paper this morning.
+
+Mr Bloom took the paper from his inside pocket. That book I must change
+for her.
+
+--No, no, Mr Dedalus said quickly. Later on please.
+
+Mr Bloom's glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the
+deaths: Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what
+Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne's? no, Sexton,
+Urbright. Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper.
+Thanks to the Little Flower. Sadly missed. To the inexpressible grief of
+his. Aged 88 after a long and tedious illness. Month's mind: Quinlan. On
+whose soul Sweet Jesus have mercy.
+
+_It is now a month since dear Henry fled To his home up above in the sky
+While his family weeps and mourns his loss Hoping some day to meet him
+on high._
+
+I tore up the envelope? Yes. Where did I put her letter after I read it
+in the bath? He patted his waistcoatpocket. There all right. Dear Henry
+fled. Before my patience are exhausted.
+
+National school. Meade's yard. The hazard. Only two there now. Nodding.
+Full as a tick. Too much bone in their skulls. The other trotting round
+with a fare. An hour ago I was passing there. The jarvies raised their
+hats.
+
+A pointsman's back straightened itself upright suddenly against a
+tramway standard by Mr Bloom's window. Couldn't they invent something
+automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow
+would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job
+making the new invention?
+
+Antient concert rooms. Nothing on there. A man in a buff suit with a
+crape armlet. Not much grief there. Quarter mourning. People in law
+perhaps.
+
+They went past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway
+bridge, past the Queen's theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene
+Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder.
+I said I. Or the _Lily of Killarney_? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big
+powerful change. Wet bright bills for next week. _Fun on the Bristol_.
+Martin Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have to stand a
+drink or two. As broad as it's long.
+
+He's coming in the afternoon. Her songs.
+
+Plasto's. Sir Philip Crampton's memorial fountain bust. Who was he?
+
+--How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in
+salute.
+
+--He doesn't see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?
+
+--Who? Mr Dedalus asked.
+
+--Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.
+
+Just that moment I was thinking.
+
+Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the
+white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: spruce figure: passed.
+
+Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right
+hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees?
+Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes
+feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I
+am just looking at them: well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body
+getting a bit softy. I would notice that: from remembering. What causes
+that? I suppose the skin can't contract quickly enough when the flesh
+falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders.
+Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks
+behind.
+
+He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant
+glance over their faces.
+
+Mr Power asked:
+
+--How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?
+
+--O, very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It's a good
+idea, you see...
+
+--Are you going yourself?
+
+--Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the
+county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the
+chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.
+
+--Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now.
+
+Have you good artists?
+
+--Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we'll have all
+topnobbers. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in
+fact.
+
+--And _Madame_, Mr Power said smiling. Last but not least.
+
+Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and clasped
+them. Smith O'Brien. Someone has laid a bunch of flowers there. Woman.
+Must be his deathday. For many happy returns. The carriage wheeling by
+Farrell's statue united noiselessly their unresisting knees.
+
+Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his
+mouth opening: oot.
+
+--Four bootlaces for a penny.
+
+Wonder why he was struck off the rolls. Had his office in Hume street.
+Same house as Molly's namesake, Tweedy, crown solicitor for Waterford.
+Has that silk hat ever since. Relics of old decency. Mourning too.
+Terrible comedown, poor wretch! Kicked about like snuff at a wake.
+O'Callaghan on his last legs.
+
+And _Madame_. Twenty past eleven. Up. Mrs Fleming is in to clean. Doing
+her hair, humming. _voglio e non vorrei_. No. _vorrei e non_. Looking at
+the tips of her hairs to see if they are split. _Mi trema un poco
+il_. Beautiful on that _tre_ her voice is: weeping tone. A thrush. A
+throstle. There is a word throstle that expresses that.
+
+His eyes passed lightly over Mr Power's goodlooking face. Greyish over
+the ears. _Madame_: smiling. I smiled back. A smile goes a long way.
+Only politeness perhaps. Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the
+woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it
+told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played
+out pretty quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her
+a pound of rumpsteak. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury's. Or the
+Moira, was it?
+
+They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator's form.
+
+Martin Cunningham nudged Mr Power.
+
+--Of the tribe of Reuben, he said.
+
+A tall blackbearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner
+of Elvery's Elephant house, showed them a curved hand open on his spine.
+
+--In all his pristine beauty, Mr Power said.
+
+Mr Dedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:
+
+--The devil break the hasp of your back!
+
+Mr Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as the
+carriage passed Gray's statue.
+
+--We have all been there, Martin Cunningham said broadly.
+
+His eyes met Mr Bloom's eyes. He caressed his beard, adding:
+
+--Well, nearly all of us.
+
+Mr Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions' faces.
+
+--That's an awfully good one that's going the rounds about Reuben J and
+the son.
+
+--About the boatman? Mr Power asked.
+
+--Yes. Isn't it awfully good?
+
+--What is that? Mr Dedalus asked. I didn't hear it.
+
+--There was a girl in the case, Mr Bloom began, and he determined to
+send him to the Isle of Man out of harm's way but when they were both
+...
+
+--What? Mr Dedalus asked. That confirmed bloody hobbledehoy is it?
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said. They were both on the way to the boat and he tried
+to drown...
+
+--Drown Barabbas! Mr Dedalus cried. I wish to Christ he did!
+
+Mr Power sent a long laugh down his shaded nostrils.
+
+--No, Mr Bloom said, the son himself...
+
+Martin Cunningham thwarted his speech rudely:
+
+--Reuben and the son were piking it down the quay next the river on
+their way to the Isle of Man boat and the young chiseller suddenly got
+loose and over the wall with him into the Liffey.
+
+--For God's sake! Mr Dedalus exclaimed in fright. Is he dead?
+
+--Dead! Martin Cunningham cried. Not he! A boatman got a pole and fished
+him out by the slack of the breeches and he was landed up to the father
+on the quay more dead than alive. Half the town was there.
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said. But the funny part is...
+
+--And Reuben J, Martin Cunningham said, gave the boatman a florin for
+saving his son's life.
+
+A stifled sigh came from under Mr Power's hand.
+
+--O, he did, Martin Cunningham affirmed. Like a hero. A silver florin.
+
+--Isn't it awfully good? Mr Bloom said eagerly.
+
+--One and eightpence too much, Mr Dedalus said drily.
+
+Mr Power's choked laugh burst quietly in the carriage.
+
+Nelson's pillar.
+
+--Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny!
+
+--We had better look a little serious, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+Mr Dedalus sighed.
+
+--Ah then indeed, he said, poor little Paddy wouldn't grudge us a laugh.
+Many a good one he told himself.
+
+--The Lord forgive me! Mr Power said, wiping his wet eyes with his
+fingers. Poor Paddy! I little thought a week ago when I saw him last and
+he was in his usual health that I'd be driving after him like this. He's
+gone from us.
+
+--As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said. He went
+very suddenly.
+
+--Breakdown, Martin Cunningham said. Heart.
+
+He tapped his chest sadly.
+
+Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red nose.
+Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. A lot of money he spent
+colouring it.
+
+Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful apprehension.
+
+--He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said.
+
+--The best death, Mr Bloom said.
+
+Their wide open eyes looked at him.
+
+--No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.
+
+No-one spoke.
+
+Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents,
+temperance hotel, Falconer's railway guide, civil service college,
+Gill's, catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or
+wind. At night too. Chummies and slaveys. Under the patronage of the
+late Father Mathew. Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart.
+
+White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner,
+galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning
+coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for
+a nun.
+
+--Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.
+
+A dwarf's face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy's was. Dwarf's body,
+weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society
+pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant
+nothing. Mistake of nature. If it's healthy it's from the mother. If not
+from the man. Better luck next time.
+
+--Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It's well out of it.
+
+The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle his
+bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.
+
+--In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+--But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own
+life.
+
+Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.
+
+--The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.
+
+--Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We
+must take a charitable view of it.
+
+--They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.
+
+--It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham's
+large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent.
+Like Shakespeare's face. Always a good word to say. They have no mercy
+on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive
+a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken
+already. Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the riverbed
+clutching rushes. He looked at me. And that awful drunkard of a wife
+of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the
+furniture on him every Saturday almost. Leading him the life of the
+damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday morning. Start
+afresh. Shoulder to the wheel. Lord, she must have looked a sight
+that night Dedalus told me he was in there. Drunk about the place and
+capering with Martin's umbrella.
+
+ _And they call me the jewel of Asia,
+ Of Asia,
+ The Geisha._
+
+He looked away from me. He knows. Rattle his bones.
+
+That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The
+room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through
+the slats of the Venetian blind. The coroner's sunlit ears, big and
+hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw like
+yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed.
+Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son
+Leopold.
+
+No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns.
+
+The carriage rattled swiftly along Blessington street. Over the stones.
+
+--We are going the pace, I think, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+--God grant he doesn't upset us on the road, Mr Power said.
+
+--I hope not, Martin Cunningham said. That will be a great race tomorrow
+in Germany. The Gordon Bennett.
+
+--Yes, by Jove, Mr Dedalus said. That will be worth seeing, faith.
+
+As they turned into Berkeley street a streetorgan near the Basin sent
+over and after them a rollicking rattling song of the halls. Has anybody
+here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy. Dead March from _Saul._ He's
+as bad as old Antonio. He left me on my ownio. Pirouette! The _Mater
+Misericordiae_. Eccles street. My house down there. Big place. Ward for
+incurables there. Very encouraging. Our Lady's Hospice for the dying.
+Deadhouse handy underneath. Where old Mrs Riordan died. They look
+terrible the women. Her feeding cup and rubbing her mouth with the
+spoon. Then the screen round her bed for her to die. Nice young student
+that was dressed that bite the bee gave me. He's gone over to the
+lying-in hospital they told me. From one extreme to the other. The
+carriage galloped round a corner: stopped.
+
+--What's wrong now?
+
+A divided drove of branded cattle passed the windows, lowing, slouching
+by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony
+croups. Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating their
+fear.
+
+--Emigrants, Mr Power said.
+
+--Huuuh! the drover's voice cried, his switch sounding on their flanks.
+
+Huuuh! out of that!
+
+Thursday, of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers. Cuffe sold them
+about twentyseven quid each. For Liverpool probably. Roastbeef for old
+England. They buy up all the juicy ones. And then the fifth quarter
+lost: all that raw stuff, hide, hair, horns. Comes to a big thing in a
+year. Dead meat trade. Byproducts of the slaughterhouses for tanneries,
+soap, margarine. Wonder if that dodge works now getting dicky meat off
+the train at Clonsilla.
+
+The carriage moved on through the drove.
+
+--I can't make out why the corporation doesn't run a tramline from the
+parkgate to the quays, Mr Bloom said. All those animals could be taken
+in trucks down to the boats.
+
+--Instead of blocking up the thoroughfare, Martin Cunningham said. Quite
+right. They ought to.
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said, and another thing I often thought, is to have
+municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line
+out to the cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage
+and all. Don't you see what I mean?
+
+--O, that be damned for a story, Mr Dedalus said. Pullman car and saloon
+diningroom.
+
+--A poor lookout for Corny, Mr Power added.
+
+--Why? Mr Bloom asked, turning to Mr Dedalus. Wouldn't it be more decent
+than galloping two abreast?
+
+--Well, there's something in that, Mr Dedalus granted.
+
+--And, Martin Cunningham said, we wouldn't have scenes like that when
+the hearse capsized round Dunphy's and upset the coffin on to the road.
+
+--That was terrible, Mr Power's shocked face said, and the corpse fell
+about the road. Terrible!
+
+--First round Dunphy's, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett cup.
+
+--Praises be to God! Martin Cunningham said piously.
+
+Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy Dignam
+shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too large
+for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what's up now.
+Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides decompose
+quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also. With wax.
+The sphincter loose. Seal up all.
+
+--Dunphy's, Mr Power announced as the carriage turned right.
+
+Dunphy's corner. Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief. A
+pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we'll pull up
+here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation.
+Elixir of life.
+
+But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him
+in the knocking about? He would and he wouldn't, I suppose. Depends on
+where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery. It
+would be better to bury them in red: a dark red.
+
+In silence they drove along Phibsborough road. An empty hearse trotted
+by, coming from the cemetery: looks relieved.
+
+Crossguns bridge: the royal canal.
+
+Water rushed roaring through the sluices. A man stood on his
+dropping barge, between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a
+slacktethered horse. Aboard of the _Bugabu._
+
+Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his
+raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of
+reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar,
+Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or
+cycle down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at
+the auction but a lady's. Developing waterways. James M'Cann's hobby
+to row me o'er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats.
+Camping out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without
+writing. Come as a surprise, Leixlip, Clonsilla. Dropping down lock by
+lock to Dublin. With turf from the midland bogs. Salute. He lifted his
+brown straw hat, saluting Paddy Dignam.
+
+They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.
+
+--I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.
+
+--Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.
+
+--How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping, I suppose?
+
+--Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.
+
+The carriage steered left for Finglas road.
+
+The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of
+land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands,
+knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence:
+appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and
+sculptor.
+
+Passed.
+
+On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary, the sexton's, an old tramp sat,
+grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown
+yawning boot. After life's journey.
+
+Gloomy gardens then went by: one by one: gloomy houses.
+
+Mr Power pointed.
+
+--That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.
+
+--So it is, Mr Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off.
+Murdered his brother. Or so they said.
+
+--The crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.
+
+--Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham added. That's the maxim of the
+law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person
+to be wrongfully condemned.
+
+They looked. Murderer's ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless,
+unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder.
+The murderer's image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about
+it. Man's head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met
+her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer is still at large.
+Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out.
+
+Cramped in this carriage. She mightn't like me to come that way without
+letting her know. Must be careful about women. Catch them once with
+their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen.
+
+The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars,
+rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the
+trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain
+gestures on the air.
+
+The felly harshed against the curbstone: stopped. Martin Cunningham put
+out his arm and, wrenching back the handle, shoved the door open with
+his knee. He stepped out. Mr Power and Mr Dedalus followed.
+
+Change that soap now. Mr Bloom's hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly
+and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket.
+He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other hand
+still held.
+
+Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages. It's all the same.
+Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley. Pomp of death.
+Beyond the hind carriage a hawker stood by his barrow of cakes and
+fruit. Simnel cakes those are, stuck together: cakes for the dead.
+Dogbiscuits. Who ate them? Mourners coming out.
+
+He followed his companions. Mr Kernan and Ned Lambert followed, Hynes
+walking after them. Corny Kelleher stood by the opened hearse and took
+out the two wreaths. He handed one to the boy.
+
+Where is that child's funeral disappeared to?
+
+A team of horses passed from Finglas with toiling plodding tread,
+dragging through the funereal silence a creaking waggon on which lay a
+granite block. The waggoner marching at their head saluted.
+
+Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at it
+with his plume skeowways. Dull eye: collar tight on his neck, pressing
+on a bloodvessel or something. Do they know what they cart out here
+every day? Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount
+Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every
+minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands
+every hour. Too many in the world.
+
+Mourners came out through the gates: woman and a girl. Leanjawed harpy,
+hard woman at a bargain, her bonnet awry. Girl's face stained with dirt
+and tears, holding the woman's arm, looking up at her for a sign to cry.
+Fish's face, bloodless and livid.
+
+The mutes shouldered the coffin and bore it in through the gates. So
+much dead weight. Felt heavier myself stepping out of that bath. First
+the stiff: then the friends of the stiff. Corny Kelleher and the
+boy followed with their wreaths. Who is that beside them? Ah, the
+brother-in-law.
+
+All walked after.
+
+Martin Cunningham whispered:
+
+--I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.
+
+--What? Mr Power whispered. How so?
+
+--His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham whispered. Had the
+Queen's hotel in Ennis. You heard him say he was going to Clare.
+Anniversary.
+
+--O God! Mr Power whispered. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself?
+
+He glanced behind him to where a face with dark thinking eyes followed
+towards the cardinal's mausoleum. Speaking.
+
+--Was he insured? Mr Bloom asked.
+
+--I believe so, Mr Kernan answered. But the policy was heavily
+mortgaged. Martin is trying to get the youngster into Artane.
+
+--How many children did he leave?
+
+--Five. Ned Lambert says he'll try to get one of the girls into Todd's.
+
+--A sad case, Mr Bloom said gently. Five young children.
+
+--A great blow to the poor wife, Mr Kernan added.
+
+--Indeed yes, Mr Bloom agreed.
+
+Has the laugh at him now.
+
+He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had
+outlived him. Lost her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must
+outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women than men in the
+world. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you'll soon follow
+him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who
+knows after. Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on
+a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But
+in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of
+hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the
+substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back,
+waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and
+lie no more in her warm bed.
+
+--How are you, Simon? Ned Lambert said softly, clasping hands. Haven't
+seen you for a month of Sundays.
+
+--Never better. How are all in Cork's own town?
+
+--I was down there for the Cork park races on Easter Monday, Ned Lambert
+said. Same old six and eightpence. Stopped with Dick Tivy.
+
+--And how is Dick, the solid man?
+
+--Nothing between himself and heaven, Ned Lambert answered.
+
+--By the holy Paul! Mr Dedalus said in subdued wonder. Dick Tivy bald?
+
+--Martin is going to get up a whip for the youngsters, Ned Lambert said,
+pointing ahead. A few bob a skull. Just to keep them going till the
+insurance is cleared up.
+
+--Yes, yes, Mr Dedalus said dubiously. Is that the eldest boy in front?
+
+--Yes, Ned Lambert said, with the wife's brother. John Henry Menton is
+behind. He put down his name for a quid.
+
+--I'll engage he did, Mr Dedalus said. I often told poor Paddy he ought
+to mind that job. John Henry is not the worst in the world.
+
+--How did he lose it? Ned Lambert asked. Liquor, what?
+
+--Many a good man's fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.
+
+They halted about the door of the mortuary chapel. Mr Bloom stood behind
+the boy with the wreath looking down at his sleekcombed hair and at the
+slender furrowed neck inside his brandnew collar. Poor boy! Was he there
+when the father? Both unconscious. Lighten up at the last moment
+and recognise for the last time. All he might have done. I owe three
+shillings to O'Grady. Would he understand? The mutes bore the coffin
+into the chapel. Which end is his head?
+
+After a moment he followed the others in, blinking in the screened
+light. The coffin lay on its bier before the chancel, four tall yellow
+candles at its corners. Always in front of us. Corny Kelleher, laying a
+wreath at each fore corner, beckoned to the boy to kneel. The mourners
+knelt here and there in prayingdesks. Mr Bloom stood behind near the
+font and, when all had knelt, dropped carefully his unfolded newspaper
+from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. He fitted his black
+hat gently on his left knee and, holding its brim, bent over piously.
+
+A server bearing a brass bucket with something in it came out through a
+door. The whitesmocked priest came after him, tidying his stole with one
+hand, balancing with the other a little book against his toad's belly.
+Who'll read the book? I, said the rook.
+
+They halted by the bier and the priest began to read out of his book
+with a fluent croak.
+
+Father Coffey. I knew his name was like a coffin. _Domine-namine._ Bully
+about the muzzle he looks. Bosses the show. Muscular christian. Woe
+betide anyone that looks crooked at him: priest. Thou art Peter. Burst
+sideways like a sheep in clover Dedalus says he will. With a belly on
+him like a poisoned pup. Most amusing expressions that man finds. Hhhn:
+burst sideways.
+
+_--Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo, Domine._
+
+Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin. Requiem mass.
+Crape weepers. Blackedged notepaper. Your name on the altarlist. Chilly
+place this. Want to feed well, sitting in there all the morning in the
+gloom kicking his heels waiting for the next please. Eyes of a toad too.
+What swells him up that way? Molly gets swelled after cabbage. Air of
+the place maybe. Looks full up of bad gas. Must be an infernal lot
+of bad gas round the place. Butchers, for instance: they get like raw
+beefsteaks. Who was telling me? Mervyn Browne. Down in the vaults of
+saint Werburgh's lovely old organ hundred and fifty they have to bore a
+hole in the coffins sometimes to let out the bad gas and burn it. Out it
+rushes: blue. One whiff of that and you're a goner.
+
+My kneecap is hurting me. Ow. That's better.
+
+The priest took a stick with a knob at the end of it out of the boy's
+bucket and shook it over the coffin. Then he walked to the other end and
+shook it again. Then he came back and put it back in the bucket. As you
+were before you rested. It's all written down: he has to do it.
+
+_--Et ne nos inducas in tentationem._
+
+The server piped the answers in the treble. I often thought it would be
+better to have boy servants. Up to fifteen or so. After that, of course
+...
+
+Holy water that was, I expect. Shaking sleep out of it. He must be fed
+up with that job, shaking that thing over all the corpses they trot up.
+What harm if he could see what he was shaking it over. Every mortal
+day a fresh batch: middleaged men, old women, children, women dead in
+childbirth, men with beards, baldheaded businessmen, consumptive girls
+with little sparrows' breasts. All the year round he prayed the same
+thing over them all and shook water on top of them: sleep. On Dignam
+now.
+
+_--In paradisum._
+
+Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over
+everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.
+
+The priest closed his book and went off, followed by the server. Corny
+Kelleher opened the sidedoors and the gravediggers came in, hoisted the
+coffin again, carried it out and shoved it on their cart. Corny Kelleher
+gave one wreath to the boy and one to the brother-in-law. All followed
+them out of the sidedoors into the mild grey air. Mr Bloom came last
+folding his paper again into his pocket. He gazed gravely at the ground
+till the coffincart wheeled off to the left. The metal wheels ground the
+gravel with a sharp grating cry and the pack of blunt boots followed the
+trundled barrow along a lane of sepulchres.
+
+The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn't lilt here.
+
+--The O'Connell circle, Mr Dedalus said about him.
+
+Mr Power's soft eyes went up to the apex of the lofty cone.
+
+--He's at rest, he said, in the middle of his people, old Dan O'. But
+his heart is buried in Rome. How many broken hearts are buried here,
+Simon!
+
+--Her grave is over there, Jack, Mr Dedalus said. I'll soon be stretched
+beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes.
+
+Breaking down, he began to weep to himself quietly, stumbling a little
+in his walk. Mr Power took his arm.
+
+--She's better where she is, he said kindly.
+
+--I suppose so, Mr Dedalus said with a weak gasp. I suppose she is in
+heaven if there is a heaven.
+
+Corny Kelleher stepped aside from his rank and allowed the mourners to
+plod by.
+
+--Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely.
+
+Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head.
+
+--The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I suppose we can
+do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a treacherous place.
+
+They covered their heads.
+
+--The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don't you think?
+Mr Kernan said with reproof.
+
+Mr Bloom nodded gravely looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret
+eyes, secretsearching. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We
+are the last. In the same boat. Hope he'll say something else.
+
+Mr Kernan added:
+
+--The service of the Irish church used in Mount Jerome is simpler, more
+impressive I must say.
+
+Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing.
+
+Mr Kernan said with solemnity:
+
+--_I am the resurrection and the life_. That touches a man's inmost
+heart.
+
+--It does, Mr Bloom said.
+
+Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two
+with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections.
+Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood
+every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of
+them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn
+the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are
+dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come
+forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day!
+Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the
+rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of
+powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.
+
+Corny Kelleher fell into step at their side.
+
+--Everything went off A1, he said. What?
+
+He looked on them from his drawling eye. Policeman's shoulders. With
+your tooraloom tooraloom.
+
+--As it should be, Mr Kernan said.
+
+--What? Eh? Corny Kelleher said.
+
+Mr Kernan assured him.
+
+--Who is that chap behind with Tom Kernan? John Henry Menton asked. I
+know his face.
+
+Ned Lambert glanced back.
+
+--Bloom, he said, Madame Marion Tweedy that was, is, I mean, the
+soprano. She's his wife.
+
+--O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven't seen her for some
+time. He was a finelooking woman. I danced with her, wait, fifteen
+seventeen golden years ago, at Mat Dillon's in Roundtown. And a good
+armful she was.
+
+He looked behind through the others.
+
+--What is he? he asked. What does he do? Wasn't he in the stationery
+line? I fell foul of him one evening, I remember, at bowls.
+
+Ned Lambert smiled.
+
+--Yes, he was, he said, in Wisdom Hely's. A traveller for blottingpaper.
+
+--In God's name, John Henry Menton said, what did she marry a coon like
+that for? She had plenty of game in her then.
+
+--Has still, Ned Lambert said. He does some canvassing for ads.
+
+John Henry Menton's large eyes stared ahead.
+
+The barrow turned into a side lane. A portly man, ambushed among the
+grasses, raised his hat in homage. The gravediggers touched their caps.
+
+--John O'Connell, Mr Power said pleased. He never forgets a friend.
+
+Mr O'Connell shook all their hands in silence. Mr Dedalus said:
+
+--I am come to pay you another visit.
+
+--My dear Simon, the caretaker answered in a low voice. I don't want
+your custom at all.
+
+Saluting Ned Lambert and John Henry Menton he walked on at Martin
+Cunningham's side puzzling two long keys at his back.
+
+--Did you hear that one, he asked them, about Mulcahy from the Coombe?
+
+--I did not, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+They bent their silk hats in concert and Hynes inclined his ear. The
+caretaker hung his thumbs in the loops of his gold watchchain and spoke
+in a discreet tone to their vacant smiles.
+
+--They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy
+evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for
+Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After
+traipsing about in the fog they found the grave sure enough. One of the
+drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking
+up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up.
+
+The caretaker blinked up at one of the sepulchres they passed. He
+resumed:
+
+--And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, _Not a bloody bit like
+the man_, says he. _That's not Mulcahy_, says he, _whoever done it_.
+
+Rewarded by smiles he fell back and spoke with Corny Kelleher, accepting
+the dockets given him, turning them over and scanning them as he walked.
+
+--That's all done with a purpose, Martin Cunningham explained to Hynes.
+
+--I know, Hynes said. I know that.
+
+--To cheer a fellow up, Martin Cunningham said. It's pure
+goodheartedness: damn the thing else.
+
+Mr Bloom admired the caretaker's prosperous bulk. All want to be on good
+terms with him. Decent fellow, John O'Connell, real good sort. Keys:
+like Keyes's ad: no fear of anyone getting out. No passout checks.
+_Habeas corpus_. I must see about that ad after the funeral. Did I
+write Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me
+writing to Martha? Hope it's not chucked in the dead letter office. Be
+the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That's the first sign when
+the hairs come out grey. And temper getting cross. Silver threads among
+the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to
+any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It
+might thrill her first. Courting death... Shades of night hovering
+here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when
+churchyards yawn and Daniel O'Connell must be a descendant I suppose
+who is this used to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the
+same like a big giant in the dark. Will o' the wisp. Gas of graves.
+Want to keep her mind off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so
+touchy. Tell her a ghost story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever
+seen a ghost? Well, I have. It was a pitchdark night. The clock was on
+the stroke of twelve. Still they'd kiss all right if properly keyed up.
+Whores in Turkish graveyards. Learn anything if taken young. You might
+pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones.
+Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both
+ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to
+the starving. Gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting
+to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.
+
+He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field
+after field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing.
+Sitting or kneeling you couldn't. Standing? His head might come up some
+day above ground in a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed
+the ground must be: oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too: trim
+grass and edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well,
+so it is. Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant
+poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic
+Gardens are just over there. It's the blood sinking in the earth gives
+new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every
+man his price. Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable
+for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcass of William Wilkinson, auditor
+and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and six. With
+thanks.
+
+I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh,
+nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot
+quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy
+kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of
+them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they
+are go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to
+feed on feed on themselves.
+
+But they must breed a devil of a lot of maggots. Soil must be simply
+swirling with them. Your head it simply swurls. Those pretty little
+seaside gurls. He looks cheerful enough over it. Gives him a sense of
+power seeing all the others go under first. Wonder how he looks at life.
+Cracking his jokes too: warms the cockles of his heart. The one about
+the bulletin. Spurgeon went to heaven 4 a.m. this morning. 11 p.m.
+(closing time). Not arrived yet. Peter. The dead themselves the men
+anyhow would like to hear an odd joke or the women to know what's in
+fashion. A juicy pear or ladies' punch, hot, strong and sweet. Keep
+out the damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way.
+Gravediggers in _Hamlet_. Shows the profound knowledge of the human
+heart. Daren't joke about the dead for two years at least. _De mortuis
+nil nisi prius_. Go out of mourning first. Hard to imagine his funeral.
+Seems a sort of a joke. Read your own obituary notice they say you live
+longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.
+
+--How many have-you for tomorrow? the caretaker asked.
+
+--Two, Corny Kelleher said. Half ten and eleven.
+
+The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to
+trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping
+with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its
+nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.
+
+Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He
+doesn't know who is here nor care. Now who is that lankylooking galoot
+over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now I'd
+give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never
+dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he
+could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he
+could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No, ants too. First
+thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to
+life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you
+come to look at it.
+
+ _O, poor Robinson Crusoe!
+ How could you possibly do so?_
+
+Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of
+them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could
+invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding, let it down that
+way. Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow's.
+They're so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from
+the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one
+coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible
+even in the earth. The Irishman's house is his coffin. Embalming in
+catacombs, mummies the same idea.
+
+Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads.
+Twelve. I'm thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death's
+number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn't in the chapel, that
+I'll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.
+
+Nice soft tweed Ned Lambert has in that suit. Tinge of purple. I had
+one like that when we lived in Lombard street west. Dressy fellow he was
+once. Used to change three suits in the day. Must get that grey suit
+of mine turned by Mesias. Hello. It's dyed. His wife I forgot he's not
+married or his landlady ought to have picked out those threads for him.
+
+The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the
+gravetrestles. They struggled up and out: and all uncovered. Twenty.
+
+Pause.
+
+If we were all suddenly somebody else.
+
+Far away a donkey brayed. Rain. No such ass. Never see a dead one, they
+say. Shame of death. They hide. Also poor papa went away.
+
+Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The
+boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in
+the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker.
+Wellcut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next.
+Well, it is a long rest. Feel no more. It's the moment you feel. Must be
+damned unpleasant. Can't believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone
+else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven't yet. Then
+darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you
+like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid
+all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his
+lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the
+soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the
+floor since he's doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner's death showing
+him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of _Lucia.
+Shall i nevermore behold thee_? Bam! He expires. Gone at last. People
+talk about you a bit: forget you. Don't forget to pray for him. Remember
+him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow:
+dropping into a hole, one after the other.
+
+We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and
+not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the
+fire of purgatory.
+
+Does he ever think of the hole waiting for himself? They say you do when
+you shiver in the sun. Someone walking over it. Callboy's warning. Near
+you. Mine over there towards Finglas, the plot I bought. Mamma, poor
+mamma, and little Rudy.
+
+The gravediggers took up their spades and flung heavy clods of clay in
+on the coffin. Mr Bloom turned away his face. And if he was alive all
+the time? Whew! By jingo, that would be awful! No, no: he is dead, of
+course. Of course he is dead. Monday he died. They ought to have
+some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an electric clock or
+a telephone in the coffin and some kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of
+distress. Three days. Rather long to keep them in summer. Just as well
+to get shut of them as soon as you are sure there's no.
+
+The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.
+
+The caretaker moved away a few paces and put on his hat. Had enough of
+it. The mourners took heart of grace, one by one, covering themselves
+without show. Mr Bloom put on his hat and saw the portly figure make its
+way deftly through the maze of graves. Quietly, sure of his ground, he
+traversed the dismal fields.
+
+Hynes jotting down something in his notebook. Ah, the names. But he
+knows them all. No: coming to me.
+
+--I am just taking the names, Hynes said below his breath. What is your
+christian name? I'm not sure.
+
+--L, Mr Bloom said. Leopold. And you might put down M'Coy's name too. He
+asked me to.
+
+--Charley, Hynes said writing. I know. He was on the _Freeman_ once.
+
+So he was before he got the job in the morgue under Louis Byrne. Good
+idea a postmortem for doctors. Find out what they imagine they know.
+He died of a Tuesday. Got the run. Levanted with the cash of a few ads.
+Charley, you're my darling. That was why he asked me to. O well, does
+no harm. I saw to that, M'Coy. Thanks, old chap: much obliged. Leave him
+under an obligation: costs nothing.
+
+--And tell us, Hynes said, do you know that fellow in the, fellow was
+over there in the...
+
+He looked around.
+
+--Macintosh. Yes, I saw him, Mr Bloom said. Where is he now?
+
+--M'Intosh, Hynes said scribbling. I don't know who he is. Is that his
+name?
+
+He moved away, looking about him.
+
+--No, Mr Bloom began, turning and stopping. I say, Hynes!
+
+Didn't hear. What? Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well of all
+the. Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good
+Lord, what became of him?
+
+A seventh gravedigger came beside Mr Bloom to take up an idle spade.
+
+--O, excuse me!
+
+He stepped aside nimbly.
+
+Clay, brown, damp, began to be seen in the hole. It rose. Nearly over.
+A mound of damp clods rose more, rose, and the gravediggers rested their
+spades. All uncovered again for a few instants. The boy propped
+his wreath against a corner: the brother-in-law his on a lump. The
+gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards
+the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent
+to pluck from the haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates,
+walked slowly on with shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing.
+Silently at the gravehead another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord.
+The brother-in-law, turning away, placed something in his free hand.
+Thanks in silence. Sorry, sir: trouble. Headshake. I know that. For
+yourselves just.
+
+The mourners moved away slowly without aim, by devious paths, staying at
+whiles to read a name on a tomb.
+
+--Let us go round by the chief's grave, Hynes said. We have time.
+
+--Let us, Mr Power said.
+
+They turned to the right, following their slow thoughts. With awe Mr
+Power's blank voice spoke:
+
+--Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled
+with stones. That one day he will come again.
+
+Hynes shook his head.
+
+--Parnell will never come again, he said. He's there, all that was
+mortal of him. Peace to his ashes.
+
+Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses,
+broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes,
+old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some
+charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody
+really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then
+lump them together to save time. All souls' day. Twentyseventh I'll be
+at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds.
+Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death's
+door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of
+their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the
+bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and So,
+wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the
+pound. Or a woman's with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew.
+Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it
+Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it.
+Old Dr Murren's. The great physician called him home. Well it's God's
+acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted.
+Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the _Church Times._ Marriage
+ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of
+bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more
+poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses
+nothing. Immortelles.
+
+A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the
+wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hoo! Not a budge out of him.
+Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder.
+Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a
+daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.
+
+The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve. Ought to be
+sideways and red it should be painted like a real heart. Ireland was
+dedicated to it or whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this
+infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with the basket
+of fruit but he said no because they ought to have been afraid of the
+boy. Apollo that was.
+
+How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As
+you are now so once were we.
+
+Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the
+voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in
+the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather.
+Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain
+hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph
+reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remember the face after
+fifteen years, say. For instance who? For instance some fellow that died
+when I was in Wisdom Hely's.
+
+Rtststr! A rattle of pebbles. Wait. Stop!
+
+He looked down intently into a stone crypt. Some animal. Wait. There he
+goes.
+
+An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the
+pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes. The grey
+alive crushed itself in under the plinth, wriggled itself in under it.
+Good hidingplace for treasure.
+
+Who lives there? Are laid the remains of Robert Emery. Robert Emmet was
+buried here by torchlight, wasn't he? Making his rounds.
+
+Tail gone now.
+
+One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones
+clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat
+gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that
+_Voyages in China_ that the Chinese say a white man smells like a
+corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the
+other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the
+plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes.
+Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds.
+Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole
+life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the
+air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder does the news go about
+whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned
+that from them. Wouldn't be surprised. Regular square feed for them.
+Flies come before he's well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn't care
+about the smell of it. Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste
+like raw white turnips.
+
+The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again.
+Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. Last time I
+was here was Mrs Sinico's funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills.
+And even scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case
+I read of to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied with running
+gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit. I will appear to you after
+death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after
+death. There is another world after death named hell. I do not like that
+other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel
+yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty
+beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm
+fullblooded life.
+
+Martin Cunningham emerged from a sidepath, talking gravely.
+
+Solicitor, I think. I know his face. Menton, John Henry, solicitor,
+commissioner for oaths and affidavits. Dignam used to be in his office.
+Mat Dillon's long ago. Jolly Mat. Convivial evenings. Cold fowl, cigars,
+the Tantalus glasses. Heart of gold really. Yes, Menton. Got his rag out
+that evening on the bowlinggreen because I sailed inside him. Pure fluke
+of mine: the bias. Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate
+at first sight. Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree,
+laughing. Fellow always like that, mortified if women are by.
+
+Got a dinge in the side of his hat. Carriage probably.
+
+--Excuse me, sir, Mr Bloom said beside them.
+
+They stopped.
+
+--Your hat is a little crushed, Mr Bloom said pointing.
+
+John Henry Menton stared at him for an instant without moving.
+
+--There, Martin Cunningham helped, pointing also. John Henry Menton took
+off his hat, bulged out the dinge and smoothed the nap with care on his
+coatsleeve. He clapped the hat on his head again.
+
+--It's all right now, Martin Cunningham said.
+
+John Henry Menton jerked his head down in acknowledgment.
+
+--Thank you, he said shortly.
+
+They walked on towards the gates. Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind
+a few paces so as not to overhear. Martin laying down the law. Martin
+could wind a sappyhead like that round his little finger, without his
+seeing it.
+
+Oyster eyes. Never mind. Be sorry after perhaps when it dawns on him.
+Get the pull over him that way.
+
+Thank you. How grand we are this morning!
+
+
+IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS
+
+
+Before Nelson's pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started
+for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure,
+Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines,
+Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross. The hoarse Dublin United
+Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off:
+
+--Rathgar and Terenure!
+
+--Come on, Sandymount Green!
+
+Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck
+moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.
+
+--Start, Palmerston Park!
+
+
+THE WEARER OF THE CROWN
+
+
+Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and
+polished. Parked in North Prince's street His Majesty's vermilion
+mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received
+loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured
+and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery.
+
+GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS
+
+
+Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores
+and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped
+dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's
+stores.
+
+--There it is, Red Murray said. Alexander Keyes.
+
+--Just cut it out, will you? Mr Bloom said, and I'll take it round to
+the _Telegraph_ office.
+
+The door of Ruttledge's office creaked again. Davy Stephens, minute in a
+large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets, passed out with
+a roll of papers under his cape, a king's courier.
+
+Red Murray's long shears sliced out the advertisement from the newspaper
+in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.
+
+--I'll go through the printingworks, Mr Bloom said, taking the cut
+square.
+
+--Of course, if he wants a par, Red Murray said earnestly, a pen behind
+his ear, we can do him one.
+
+--Right, Mr Bloom said with a nod. I'll rub that in.
+
+We.
+
+WILLIAM BRAYDEN, ESQUIRE, OF OAKLANDS, SANDYMOUNT
+
+
+Red Murray touched Mr Bloom's arm with the shears and whispered:
+
+--Brayden.
+
+Mr Bloom turned and saw the liveried porter raise his lettered cap as a
+stately figure entered between the newsboards of the _Weekly Freeman
+and National Press_ and the _Freeman's Journal and National Press_.
+Dullthudding Guinness's barrels. It passed statelily up the staircase,
+steered by an umbrella, a solemn beardframed face. The broadcloth back
+ascended each step: back. All his brains are in the nape of his neck,
+Simon Dedalus says. Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck,
+fat, neck, fat, neck.
+
+--Don't you think his face is like Our Saviour? Red Murray whispered.
+
+The door of Ruttledge's office whispered: ee: cree. They always build
+one door opposite another for the wind to. Way in. Way out.
+
+Our Saviour: beardframed oval face: talking in the dusk. Mary, Martha.
+Steered by an umbrella sword to the footlights: Mario the tenor.
+
+--Or like Mario, Mr Bloom said.
+
+--Yes, Red Murray agreed. But Mario was said to be the picture of Our
+Saviour.
+
+Jesusmario with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs. Hand on his
+heart. In _Martha._
+
+ _Co-ome thou lost one,
+ Co-ome thou dear one!_
+
+THE CROZIER AND THE PEN
+
+
+--His grace phoned down twice this morning, Red Murray said gravely.
+
+They watched the knees, legs, boots vanish. Neck.
+
+A telegram boy stepped in nimbly, threw an envelope on the counter and
+stepped off posthaste with a word:
+
+_--Freeman!_
+
+Mr Bloom said slowly:
+
+--Well, he is one of our saviours also.
+
+A meek smile accompanied him as he lifted the counterflap, as he passed
+in through a sidedoor and along the warm dark stairs and passage,
+along the now reverberating boards. But will he save the circulation?
+Thumping. Thumping.
+
+He pushed in the glass swingdoor and entered, stepping over strewn
+packing paper. Through a lane of clanking drums he made his way towards
+Nannetti's reading closet.
+
+WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS WE ANNOUNCE THE DISSOLUTION OF A MOST
+RESPECTED DUBLIN BURGESS
+
+
+Hynes here too: account of the funeral probably. Thumping. Thump. This
+morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man
+to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries
+are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working
+away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in.
+
+HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT
+
+
+Mr Bloom halted behind the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy
+crown.
+
+Strange he never saw his real country. Ireland my country. Member for
+College green. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was worth.
+It's the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the
+official gazette. Queen Anne is dead. Published by authority in the year
+one thousand and. Demesne situate in the townland of Rosenallis, barony
+of Tinnahinch. To all whom it may concern schedule pursuant to statute
+showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina.
+Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story. Uncle
+Toby's page for tiny tots. Country bumpkin's queries. Dear Mr Editor,
+what is a good cure for flatulence? I'd like that part. Learn a lot
+teaching others. The personal note. M. A. P. Mainly all pictures.
+Shapely bathers on golden strand. World's biggest balloon. Double
+marriage of sisters celebrated. Two bridegrooms laughing heartily at
+each other. Cuprani too, printer. More Irish than the Irish.
+
+The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he
+got paralysed there and no-one knew how to stop them they'd clank on and
+on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the
+whole thing. Want a cool head.
+
+--Well, get it into the evening edition, councillor, Hynes said.
+
+Soon be calling him my lord mayor. Long John is backing him, they say.
+
+The foreman, without answering, scribbled press on a corner of the sheet
+and made a sign to a typesetter. He handed the sheet silently over the
+dirty glass screen.
+
+--Right: thanks, Hynes said moving off.
+
+Mr Bloom stood in his way.
+
+--If you want to draw the cashier is just going to lunch, he said,
+pointing backward with his thumb.
+
+--Did you? Hynes asked.
+
+--Mm, Mr Bloom said. Look sharp and you'll catch him.
+
+--Thanks, old man, Hynes said. I'll tap him too.
+
+He hurried on eagerly towards the _Freeman's Journal_.
+
+Three bob I lent him in Meagher's. Three weeks. Third hint.
+
+WE SEE THE CANVASSER AT WORK
+
+
+Mr Bloom laid his cutting on Mr Nannetti's desk.
+
+--Excuse me, councillor, he said. This ad, you see. Keyes, you remember?
+
+Mr Nannetti considered the cutting awhile and nodded.
+
+--He wants it in for July, Mr Bloom said.
+
+The foreman moved his pencil towards it.
+
+--But wait, Mr Bloom said. He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants
+two keys at the top.
+
+Hell of a racket they make. He doesn't hear it. Nannan. Iron nerves.
+Maybe he understands what I.
+
+The foreman turned round to hear patiently and, lifting an elbow, began
+to scratch slowly in the armpit of his alpaca jacket.
+
+--Like that, Mr Bloom said, crossing his forefingers at the top.
+
+Let him take that in first.
+
+Mr Bloom, glancing sideways up from the cross he had made, saw the
+foreman's sallow face, think he has a touch of jaundice, and beyond the
+obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles
+of it unreeled. What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels:
+various uses, thousand and one things.
+
+Slipping his words deftly into the pauses of the clanking he drew
+swiftly on the scarred woodwork.
+
+HOUSE OF KEY(E)S
+
+
+--Like that, see. Two crossed keys here. A circle. Then here the name.
+Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant. So on.
+
+Better not teach him his own business.
+
+--You know yourself, councillor, just what he wants. Then round the top
+in leaded: the house of keys. You see? Do you think that's a good idea?
+
+The foreman moved his scratching hand to his lower ribs and scratched
+there quietly.
+
+--The idea, Mr Bloom said, is the house of keys. You know, councillor,
+the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the
+isle of Man. Catches the eye, you see. Can you do that?
+
+I could ask him perhaps about how to pronounce that _voglio._ But then
+if he didn't know only make it awkward for him. Better not.
+
+--We can do that, the foreman said. Have you the design?
+
+--I can get it, Mr Bloom said. It was in a Kilkenny paper. He has a
+house there too. I'll just run out and ask him. Well, you can do that
+and just a little par calling attention. You know the usual. Highclass
+licensed premises. Longfelt want. So on.
+
+The foreman thought for an instant.
+
+--We can do that, he said. Let him give us a three months' renewal.
+
+A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it
+silently. Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching
+the silent typesetters at their cases.
+
+ORTHOGRAPHICAL
+
+
+Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot
+to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view
+the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a
+harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear
+under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on
+account of the symmetry.
+
+I should have said when he clapped on his topper. Thank you. I ought
+to have said something about an old hat or something. No. I could have
+said. Looks as good as new now. See his phiz then.
+
+Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its
+flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost
+human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak.
+That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its
+own way. Sllt.
+
+NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR
+
+
+The foreman handed back the galleypage suddenly, saying:
+
+--Wait. Where's the archbishop's letter? It's to be repeated in the
+_Telegraph._ Where's what's his name?
+
+He looked about him round his loud unanswering machines.
+
+--Monks, sir? a voice asked from the castingbox.
+
+--Ay. Where's Monks?
+
+--Monks!
+
+Mr Bloom took up his cutting. Time to get out.
+
+--Then I'll get the design, Mr Nannetti, he said, and you'll give it a
+good place I know.
+
+--Monks!
+
+--Yes, sir.
+
+Three months' renewal. Want to get some wind off my chest first. Try it
+anyhow. Rub in August: good idea: horseshow month. Ballsbridge. Tourists
+over for the show.
+
+A DAYFATHER
+
+
+He walked on through the caseroom passing an old man, bowed, spectacled,
+aproned. Old Monks, the dayfather. Queer lot of stuff he must have put
+through his hands in his time: obituary notices, pubs' ads, speeches,
+divorce suits, found drowned. Nearing the end of his tether now. Sober
+serious man with a bit in the savingsbank I'd say. Wife a good cook and
+washer. Daughter working the machine in the parlour. Plain Jane, no damn
+nonsense. AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF THE PASSOVER
+
+
+He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type.
+Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice
+that. mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards
+with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear!
+All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt
+and into the house of bondage _Alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu_.
+No, that's the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob's sons. And then
+the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the
+butcher. And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the
+ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look
+into it well. Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else.
+That's what life is after all. How quickly he does that job. Practice
+makes perfect. Seems to see with his fingers.
+
+Mr Bloom passed on out of the clanking noises through the gallery on to
+the landing. Now am I going to tram it out all the way and then catch
+him out perhaps. Better phone him up first. Number? Yes. Same as
+Citron's house. Twentyeight. Twentyeight double four.
+
+ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP
+
+
+He went down the house staircase. Who the deuce scrawled all over those
+walls with matches? Looks as if they did it for a bet. Heavy greasy
+smell there always is in those works. Lukewarm glue in Thom's next door
+when I was there.
+
+He took out his handkerchief to dab his nose. Citronlemon? Ah, the soap
+I put there. Lose it out of that pocket. Putting back his handkerchief
+he took out the soap and stowed it away, buttoned, into the hip pocket
+of his trousers.
+
+What perfume does your wife use? I could go home still: tram: something
+I forgot. Just to see: before: dressing. No. Here. No.
+
+A sudden screech of laughter came from the _Evening Telegraph_ office.
+Know who that is. What's up? Pop in a minute to phone. Ned Lambert it
+is.
+
+He entered softly.
+
+ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA
+
+
+--The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to
+the dusty windowpane.
+
+Mr Dedalus, staring from the empty fireplace at Ned Lambert's quizzing
+face, asked of it sourly:
+
+--Agonising Christ, wouldn't it give you a heartburn on your arse?
+
+Ned Lambert, seated on the table, read on:
+
+--_Or again, note the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles
+on its way, tho' quarrelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling
+waters of Neptune's blue domain, 'mid mossy banks, fanned by gentlest
+zephyrs, played on by the glorious sunlight or 'neath the shadows cast
+o'er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of
+the forest_. What about that, Simon? he asked over the fringe of his
+newspaper. How's that for high?
+
+--Changing his drink, Mr Dedalus said.
+
+Ned Lambert, laughing, struck the newspaper on his knees, repeating:
+
+--_The pensive bosom and the overarsing leafage_. O boys! O boys!
+
+--And Xenophon looked upon Marathon, Mr Dedalus said, looking again on
+the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon looked on the sea.
+
+--That will do, professor MacHugh cried from the window. I don't want to
+hear any more of the stuff.
+
+He ate off the crescent of water biscuit he had been nibbling and,
+hungered, made ready to nibble the biscuit in his other hand.
+
+High falutin stuff. Bladderbags. Ned Lambert is taking a day off I see.
+Rather upsets a man's day, a funeral does. He has influence they
+say. Old Chatterton, the vicechancellor, is his granduncle or his
+greatgranduncle. Close on ninety they say. Subleader for his death
+written this long time perhaps. Living to spite them. Might go first
+himself. Johnny, make room for your uncle. The right honourable Hedges
+Eyre Chatterton. Daresay he writes him an odd shaky cheque or two on
+gale days. Windfall when he kicks out. Alleluia.
+
+--Just another spasm, Ned Lambert said.
+
+--What is it? Mr Bloom asked.
+
+--A recently discovered fragment of Cicero, professor MacHugh answered
+with pomp of tone. _Our lovely land_. SHORT BUT TO THE POINT
+
+
+--Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply.
+
+--Most pertinent question, the professor said between his chews. With an
+accent on the whose.
+
+--Dan Dawson's land Mr Dedalus said.
+
+--Is it his speech last night? Mr Bloom asked.
+
+Ned Lambert nodded.
+
+--But listen to this, he said.
+
+The doorknob hit Mr Bloom in the small of the back as the door was
+pushed in.
+
+--Excuse me, J. J. O'Molloy said, entering.
+
+Mr Bloom moved nimbly aside.
+
+--I beg yours, he said.
+
+--Good day, Jack.
+
+--Come in. Come in.
+
+--Good day.
+
+--How are you, Dedalus?
+
+--Well. And yourself?
+
+J. J. O'Molloy shook his head.
+
+SAD
+
+
+Cleverest fellow at the junior bar he used to be. Decline, poor chap.
+That hectic flush spells finis for a man. Touch and go with him. What's
+in the wind, I wonder. Money worry.
+
+--_Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks._
+
+--You're looking extra.
+
+--Is the editor to be seen? J. J. O'Molloy asked, looking towards the
+inner door.
+
+--Very much so, professor MacHugh said. To be seen and heard. He's in
+his sanctum with Lenehan.
+
+J. J. O'Molloy strolled to the sloping desk and began to turn back the
+pink pages of the file.
+
+Practice dwindling. A mighthavebeen. Losing heart. Gambling. Debts of
+honour. Reaping the whirlwind. Used to get good retainers from D. and T.
+Fitzgerald. Their wigs to show the grey matter. Brains on their sleeve
+like the statue in Glasnevin. Believe he does some literary work for the
+_Express_ with Gabriel Conroy. Wellread fellow. Myles Crawford began
+on the _Independent._ Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when
+they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same
+breath. Wouldn't know which to believe. One story good till you hear
+the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows
+over. Hail fellow well met the next moment.
+
+--Ah, listen to this for God' sake, Ned Lambert pleaded. _Or again if we
+but climb the serried mountain peaks..._
+
+--Bombast! the professor broke in testily. Enough of the inflated
+windbag!
+
+--_Peaks_, Ned Lambert went on, _towering high on high, to bathe our
+souls, as it were..._
+
+--Bathe his lips, Mr Dedalus said. Blessed and eternal God! Yes? Is he
+taking anything for it?
+
+_--As 'twere, in the peerless panorama of Ireland's portfolio,
+unmatched, despite their wellpraised prototypes in other vaunted prize
+regions, for very beauty, of bosky grove and undulating plain and
+luscious pastureland of vernal green, steeped in the transcendent
+translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight..._
+
+HIS NATIVE DORIC
+
+
+--The moon, professor MacHugh said. He forgot Hamlet.
+
+_--That mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of
+the moon shine forth to irradiate her silver effulgence..._
+
+--O! Mr Dedalus cried, giving vent to a hopeless groan. Shite and
+onions! That'll do, Ned. Life is too short.
+
+He took off his silk hat and, blowing out impatiently his bushy
+moustache, welshcombed his hair with raking fingers.
+
+Ned Lambert tossed the newspaper aside, chuckling with delight. An
+instant after a hoarse bark of laughter burst over professor MacHugh's
+unshaven blackspectacled face.
+
+--Doughy Daw! he cried.
+
+WHAT WETHERUP SAID
+
+
+All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it goes down like hot
+cake that stuff. He was in the bakery line too, wasn't he? Why they call
+him Doughy Daw. Feathered his nest well anyhow. Daughter engaged to that
+chap in the inland revenue office with the motor. Hooked that nicely.
+Entertainments. Open house. Big blowout. Wetherup always said that. Get
+a grip of them by the stomach.
+
+The inner door was opened violently and a scarlet beaked face, crested
+by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in. The bold blue eyes stared
+about them and the harsh voice asked:
+
+--What is it?
+
+--And here comes the sham squire himself! professor MacHugh said
+grandly.
+
+--Getonouthat, you bloody old pedagogue! the editor said in recognition.
+
+--Come, Ned, Mr Dedalus said, putting on his hat. I must get a drink
+after that.
+
+--Drink! the editor cried. No drinks served before mass.
+
+--Quite right too, Mr Dedalus said, going out. Come on, Ned.
+
+Ned Lambert sidled down from the table. The editor's blue eyes roved
+towards Mr Bloom's face, shadowed by a smile.
+
+--Will you join us, Myles? Ned Lambert asked.
+
+MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED
+
+
+--North Cork militia! the editor cried, striding to the mantelpiece. We
+won every time! North Cork and Spanish officers!
+
+--Where was that, Myles? Ned Lambert asked with a reflective glance at
+his toecaps.
+
+--In Ohio! the editor shouted.
+
+--So it was, begad, Ned Lambert agreed.
+
+Passing out he whispered to J. J. O'Molloy:
+
+--Incipient jigs. Sad case.
+
+--Ohio! the editor crowed in high treble from his uplifted scarlet face.
+My Ohio!
+
+--A perfect cretic! the professor said. Long, short and long.
+
+O, HARP EOLIAN!
+
+
+He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking
+off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant
+unwashed teeth.
+
+--Bingbang, bangbang.
+
+Mr Bloom, seeing the coast clear, made for the inner door.
+
+--Just a moment, Mr Crawford, he said. I just want to phone about an ad.
+
+He went in.
+
+--What about that leader this evening? professor MacHugh asked, coming
+to the editor and laying a firm hand on his shoulder.
+
+--That'll be all right, Myles Crawford said more calmly. Never you fret.
+Hello, Jack. That's all right.
+
+--Good day, Myles, J. J. O'Molloy said, letting the pages he held slip
+limply back on the file. Is that Canada swindle case on today?
+
+The telephone whirred inside.
+
+--Twentyeight... No, twenty... Double four... Yes.
+
+SPOT THE WINNER
+
+
+Lenehan came out of the inner office with SPORT'S tissues.
+
+--Who wants a dead cert for the Gold cup? he asked. Sceptre with O.
+Madden up.
+
+He tossed the tissues on to the table.
+
+Screams of newsboys barefoot in the hall rushed near and the door was
+flung open.
+
+--Hush, Lenehan said. I hear feetstoops.
+
+Professor MacHugh strode across the room and seized the cringing urchin
+by the collar as the others scampered out of the hall and down the
+steps. The tissues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air
+blue scrawls and under the table came to earth.
+
+--It wasn't me, sir. It was the big fellow shoved me, sir.
+
+--Throw him out and shut the door, the editor said. There's a hurricane
+blowing.
+
+Lenehan began to paw the tissues up from the floor, grunting as he
+stooped twice.
+
+--Waiting for the racing special, sir, the newsboy said. It was Pat
+Farrell shoved me, sir.
+
+He pointed to two faces peering in round the doorframe.
+
+--Him, sir.
+
+--Out of this with you, professor MacHugh said gruffly.
+
+He hustled the boy out and banged the door to.
+
+J. J. O'Molloy turned the files crackingly over, murmuring, seeking:
+
+--Continued on page six, column four.
+
+--Yes, _Evening Telegraph_ here, Mr Bloom phoned from the inner office.
+Is the boss...? Yes, _Telegraph_... To where? Aha! Which auction rooms
+?... Aha! I see... Right. I'll catch him.
+
+A COLLISION ENSUES
+
+
+The bell whirred again as he rang off. He came in quickly and bumped
+against Lenehan who was struggling up with the second tissue.
+
+--_Pardon, monsieur_, Lenehan said, clutching him for an instant and
+making a grimace.
+
+--My fault, Mr Bloom said, suffering his grip. Are you hurt? I'm in a
+hurry.
+
+--Knee, Lenehan said.
+
+He made a comic face and whined, rubbing his knee:
+
+--The accumulation of the _anno Domini_.
+
+--Sorry, Mr Bloom said.
+
+He went to the door and, holding it ajar, paused. J. J. O'Molloy slapped
+the heavy pages over. The noise of two shrill voices, a mouthorgan,
+echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the doorsteps:
+
+ _--We are the boys of Wexford
+ Who fought with heart and hand._
+
+EXIT BLOOM
+
+
+--I'm just running round to Bachelor's walk, Mr Bloom said, about this
+ad of Keyes's. Want to fix it up. They tell me he's round there in
+Dillon's.
+
+He looked indecisively for a moment at their faces. The editor who,
+leaning against the mantelshelf, had propped his head on his hand,
+suddenly stretched forth an arm amply.
+
+--Begone! he said. The world is before you.
+
+--Back in no time, Mr Bloom said, hurrying out.
+
+J. J. O'Molloy took the tissues from Lenehan's hand and read them,
+blowing them apart gently, without comment.
+
+--He'll get that advertisement, the professor said, staring through his
+blackrimmed spectacles over the crossblind. Look at the young scamps
+after him.
+
+--Show. Where? Lenehan cried, running to the window.
+
+A STREET CORTEGE
+
+
+Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr
+Bloom's wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a
+tail of white bowknots.
+
+--Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said,
+and you'll kick. O, my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the
+walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks.
+
+He began to mazurka in swift caricature across the floor on sliding
+feet past the fireplace to J. J. O'Molloy who placed the tissues in his
+receiving hands.
+
+--What's that? Myles Crawford said with a start. Where are the other two
+gone?
+
+--Who? the professor said, turning. They're gone round to the Oval for a
+drink. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Came over last night.
+
+--Come on then, Myles Crawford said. Where's my hat?
+
+He walked jerkily into the office behind, parting the vent of his
+jacket, jingling his keys in his back pocket. They jingled then in the
+air and against the wood as he locked his desk drawer.
+
+--He's pretty well on, professor MacHugh said in a low voice.
+
+--Seems to be, J. J. O'Molloy said, taking out a cigarettecase in
+murmuring meditation, but it is not always as it seems. Who has the most
+matches?
+
+THE CALUMET OF PEACE
+
+
+He offered a cigarette to the professor and took one himself. Lenehan
+promptly struck a match for them and lit their cigarettes in turn. J. J.
+O'Molloy opened his case again and offered it.
+
+--_Thanky vous_, Lenehan said, helping himself.
+
+The editor came from the inner office, a straw hat awry on his brow. He
+declaimed in song, pointing sternly at professor MacHugh:
+
+_--'Twas rank and fame that tempted thee, 'Twas empire charmed thy
+heart._
+
+The professor grinned, locking his long lips.
+
+--Eh? You bloody old Roman empire? Myles Crawford said.
+
+He took a cigarette from the open case. Lenehan, lighting it for him
+with quick grace, said:
+
+--Silence for my brandnew riddle!
+
+--_Imperium romanum_, J. J. O'Molloy said gently. It sounds nobler than
+British or Brixton. The word reminds one somehow of fat in the fire.
+
+Myles Crawford blew his first puff violently towards the ceiling.
+
+--That's it, he said. We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire.
+We haven't got the chance of a snowball in hell.
+
+THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME
+
+
+--Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We
+mustn't be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome,
+imperial, imperious, imperative.
+
+He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs, pausing:
+
+--What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers.
+The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: _It is meet
+to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah_. The Roman, like the
+Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on
+which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal
+obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: _It is meet to be
+here. Let us construct a watercloset._
+
+--Which they accordingly did do, Lenehan said. Our old ancient
+ancestors, as we read in the first chapter of Guinness's, were partial
+to the running stream.
+
+--They were nature's gentlemen, J. J. O'Molloy murmured. But we have
+also Roman law.
+
+--And Pontius Pilate is its prophet, professor MacHugh responded.
+
+--Do you know that story about chief baron Palles? J. J. O'Molloy asked.
+It was at the royal university dinner. Everything was going swimmingly
+...
+
+--First my riddle, Lenehan said. Are you ready?
+
+Mr O'Madden Burke, tall in copious grey of Donegal tweed, came in from
+the hallway. Stephen Dedalus, behind him, uncovered as he entered.
+
+--_Entrez, mes enfants!_ Lenehan cried.
+
+--I escort a suppliant, Mr O'Madden Burke said melodiously. Youth led by
+Experience visits Notoriety.
+
+--How do you do? the editor said, holding out a hand. Come in. Your
+governor is just gone.???
+
+
+Lenehan said to all:
+
+--Silence! What opera resembles a railwayline? Reflect, ponder,
+excogitate, reply.
+
+Stephen handed over the typed sheets, pointing to the title and
+signature.
+
+--Who? the editor asked.
+
+Bit torn off.
+
+--Mr Garrett Deasy, Stephen said.
+
+--That old pelters, the editor said. Who tore it? Was he short taken?
+
+ _On swift sail flaming
+ From storm and south
+ He comes, pale vampire,
+ Mouth to my mouth._
+
+--Good day, Stephen, the professor said, coming to peer over their
+shoulders. Foot and mouth? Are you turned...?
+
+Bullockbefriending bard.
+
+SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT
+
+
+--Good day, sir, Stephen answered blushing. The letter is not mine. Mr
+Garrett Deasy asked me to...
+
+--O, I know him, Myles Crawford said, and I knew his wife too. The
+bloodiest old tartar God ever made. By Jesus, she had the foot and mouth
+disease and no mistake! The night she threw the soup in the waiter's
+face in the Star and Garter. Oho!
+
+A woman brought sin into the world. For Helen, the runaway wife of
+Menelaus, ten years the Greeks. O'Rourke, prince of Breffni.
+
+--Is he a widower? Stephen asked.
+
+--Ay, a grass one, Myles Crawford said, his eye running down the
+typescript. Emperor's horses. Habsburg. An Irishman saved his life on
+the ramparts of Vienna. Don't you forget! Maximilian Karl O'Donnell,
+graf von Tirconnell in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king
+an Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day. Wild
+geese. O yes, every time. Don't you forget that!
+
+--The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O'Molloy said quietly,
+turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a thank you job.
+
+Professor MacHugh turned on him.
+
+--And if not? he said.
+
+--I'll tell you how it was, Myles Crawford began. A Hungarian it was one
+day... LOST CAUSES
+
+NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED
+
+
+--We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for
+us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never
+loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin
+language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is
+the maxim: time is money. Material domination. _Dominus!_ Lord! Where is
+the spirituality? Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury? A sofa in a westend club.
+But the Greek!
+
+KYRIE ELEISON!
+
+
+A smile of light brightened his darkrimmed eyes, lengthened his long
+lips.
+
+--The Greek! he said again. _Kyrios!_ Shining word! The vowels the
+Semite and the Saxon know not. _Kyrie!_ The radiance of the intellect.
+I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind. _Kyrie eleison!_ The
+closetmaker and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We
+are liege subjects of the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at
+Trafalgar and of the empire of the spirit, not an _imperium,_ that
+went under with the Athenian fleets at Aegospotami. Yes, yes. They went
+under. Pyrrhus, misled by an oracle, made a last attempt to retrieve the
+fortunes of Greece. Loyal to a lost cause.
+
+He strode away from them towards the window.
+
+--They went forth to battle, Mr O'Madden Burke said greyly, but they
+always fell.
+
+--Boohoo! Lenehan wept with a little noise. Owing to a brick received in
+the latter half of the _matinée_. Poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus!
+
+He whispered then near Stephen's ear:
+
+LENEHAN'S LIMERICK
+
+
+ _There's a ponderous pundit MacHugh
+ Who wears goggles of ebony hue.
+ As he mostly sees double
+ To wear them why trouble?
+ I can't see the Joe Miller. Can you?_
+
+In mourning for Sallust, Mulligan says. Whose mother is beastly dead.
+
+Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a sidepocket.
+
+--That'll be all right, he said. I'll read the rest after. That'll be
+all right.
+
+Lenehan extended his hands in protest.
+
+--But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railwayline?
+
+--Opera? Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled.
+
+Lenehan announced gladly:
+
+--_The Rose of Castile_. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!
+
+He poked Mr O'Madden Burke mildly in the spleen. Mr O'Madden Burke fell
+back with grace on his umbrella, feigning a gasp.
+
+--Help! he sighed. I feel a strong weakness.
+
+Lenehan, rising to tiptoe, fanned his face rapidly with the rustling
+tissues.
+
+The professor, returning by way of the files, swept his hand across
+Stephen's and Mr O'Madden Burke's loose ties.
+
+--Paris, past and present, he said. You look like communards.
+
+--Like fellows who had blown up the Bastile, J. J. O'Molloy said in
+quiet mockery. Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between
+you? You look as though you had done the deed. General Bobrikoff.
+
+OMNIUM GATHERUM
+
+
+--We were only thinking about it, Stephen said.
+
+--All the talents, Myles Crawford said. Law, the classics...
+
+--The turf, Lenehan put in.
+
+--Literature, the press.
+
+--If Bloom were here, the professor said. The gentle art of
+advertisement.
+
+--And Madam Bloom, Mr O'Madden Burke added. The vocal muse. Dublin's
+prime favourite.
+
+Lenehan gave a loud cough.
+
+--Ahem! he said very softly. O, for a fresh of breath air! I caught a
+cold in the park. The gate was open.
+
+YOU CAN DO IT!
+
+
+The editor laid a nervous hand on Stephen's shoulder.
+
+--I want you to write something for me, he said. Something with a bite
+in it. You can do it. I see it in your face. _In the lexicon of youth_
+...
+
+See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.
+
+--Foot and mouth disease! the editor cried in scornful invective. Great
+nationalist meeting in Borris-in-Ossory. All balls! Bulldosing the
+public! Give them something with a bite in it. Put us all into it, damn
+its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy.
+
+--We can all supply mental pabulum, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
+
+Stephen raised his eyes to the bold unheeding stare.
+
+--He wants you for the pressgang, J. J. O'Molloy said.
+
+THE GREAT GALLAHER
+
+
+--You can do it, Myles Crawford repeated, clenching his hand in
+emphasis. Wait a minute. We'll paralyse Europe as Ignatius Gallaher
+used to say when he was on the shaughraun, doing billiardmarking in the
+Clarence. Gallaher, that was a pressman for you. That was a pen. You
+know how he made his mark? I'll tell you. That was the smartest piece of
+journalism ever known. That was in eightyone, sixth of May, time of
+the invincibles, murder in the Phoenix park, before you were born, I
+suppose. I'll show you.
+
+He pushed past them to the files.
+
+--Look at here, he said turning. The _New York World_ cabled for a
+special. Remember that time?
+
+Professor MacHugh nodded.
+
+--_New York World_, the editor said, excitedly pushing back his straw
+hat. Where it took place. Tim Kelly, or Kavanagh I mean. Joe Brady and
+the rest of them. Where Skin-the-Goat drove the car. Whole route, see?
+
+--Skin-the-Goat, Mr O'Madden Burke said. Fitzharris. He has that
+cabman's shelter, they say, down there at Butt bridge. Holohan told me.
+You know Holohan?
+
+--Hop and carry one, is it? Myles Crawford said.
+
+--And poor Gumley is down there too, so he told me, minding stones for
+the corporation. A night watchman.
+
+Stephen turned in surprise.
+
+--Gumley? he said. You don't say so? A friend of my father's, is it?
+
+--Never mind Gumley, Myles Crawford cried angrily. Let Gumley mind
+the stones, see they don't run away. Look at here. What did Ignatius
+Gallaher do? I'll tell you. Inspiration of genius. Cabled right away.
+Have you _Weekly Freeman_ of 17 March? Right. Have you got that?
+
+He flung back pages of the files and stuck his finger on a point.
+
+--Take page four, advertisement for Bransome's coffee, let us say. Have
+you got that? Right.
+
+The telephone whirred.
+
+A DISTANT VOICE
+
+
+--I'll answer it, the professor said, going.
+
+--B is parkgate. Good.
+
+His finger leaped and struck point after point, vibrating.
+
+--T is viceregal lodge. C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon
+gate.
+
+The loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock's wattles. An illstarched
+dicky jutted up and with a rude gesture he thrust it back into his
+waistcoat.
+
+--Hello? _Evening Telegraph_ here... Hello?... Who's there?... Yes...
+Yes... Yes.
+
+--F to P is the route Skin-the-Goat drove the car for an alibi,
+Inchicore, Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh. F.A.B.P.
+Got that? X is Davy's publichouse in upper Leeson street.
+
+The professor came to the inner door.
+
+--Bloom is at the telephone, he said.
+
+--Tell him go to hell, the editor said promptly. X is Davy's
+publichouse, see? CLEVER, VERY
+
+
+--Clever, Lenehan said. Very.
+
+--Gave it to them on a hot plate, Myles Crawford said, the whole bloody
+history.
+
+Nightmare from which you will never awake.
+
+--I saw it, the editor said proudly. I was present. Dick Adams, the
+besthearted bloody Corkman the Lord ever put the breath of life in, and
+myself.
+
+Lenehan bowed to a shape of air, announcing:
+
+--Madam, I'm Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba.
+
+--History! Myles Crawford cried. The Old Woman of Prince's street was
+there first. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth over that. Out of
+an advertisement. Gregor Grey made the design for it. That gave him the
+leg up. Then Paddy Hooper worked Tay Pay who took him on to the _Star._
+Now he's got in with Blumenfeld. That's press. That's talent. Pyatt! He
+was all their daddies!
+
+--The father of scare journalism, Lenehan confirmed, and the
+brother-in-law of Chris Callinan.
+
+--Hello?... Are you there?... Yes, he's here still. Come across
+yourself.
+
+--Where do you find a pressman like that now, eh? the editor cried. He
+flung the pages down.
+
+--Clamn dever, Lenehan said to Mr O'Madden Burke.
+
+--Very smart, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
+
+Professor MacHugh came from the inner office.
+
+--Talking about the invincibles, he said, did you see that some hawkers
+were up before the recorder?
+
+--O yes, J. J. O'Molloy said eagerly. Lady Dudley was walking home
+through the park to see all the trees that were blown down by that
+cyclone last year and thought she'd buy a view of Dublin. And it
+turned out to be a commemoration postcard of Joe Brady or Number One or
+Skin-the-Goat. Right outside the viceregal lodge, imagine!
+
+--They're only in the hook and eye department, Myles Crawford said.
+Psha! Press and the bar! Where have you a man now at the bar like those
+fellows, like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O'Hagan.
+Eh? Ah, bloody nonsense. Psha! Only in the halfpenny place.
+
+His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain.
+
+Would anyone wish that mouth for her kiss? How do you know? Why did you
+write it then?
+
+RHYMES AND REASONS
+
+
+Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth? Must be
+some. South, pout, out, shout, drouth. Rhymes: two men dressed the same,
+looking the same, two by two.
+
+ _........................ la tua pace
+ .................. che parlar ti piace
+ .... mentreché il vento, come fa, si tace._
+
+He saw them three by three, approaching girls, in green, in rose, in
+russet, entwining, _per l'aer perso_, in mauve, in purple, _quella
+pacifica oriafiamma_, gold of oriflamme, _di rimirar fe piu ardenti._
+But I old men, penitent, leadenfooted, underdarkneath the night: mouth
+south: tomb womb.
+
+--Speak up for yourself, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
+
+SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY...
+
+
+J. J. O'Molloy, smiling palely, took up the gage.
+
+--My dear Myles, he said, flinging his cigarette aside, you put a false
+construction on my words. I hold no brief, as at present advised, for
+the third profession qua profession but your Cork legs are running away
+with you. Why not bring in Henry Grattan and Flood and Demosthenes and
+Edmund Burke? Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his Chapelizod boss,
+Harmsworth of the farthing press, and his American cousin of the Bowery
+guttersheet not to mention _Paddy Kelly's Budget, Pue's Occurrences_
+and our watchful friend _The Skibbereen Eagle_. Why bring in a master
+of forensic eloquence like Whiteside? Sufficient for the day is the
+newspaper thereof. LINKS WITH BYGONE DAYS OF YORE
+
+
+--Grattan and Flood wrote for this very paper, the editor cried in his
+face. Irish volunteers. Where are you now? Established 1763. Dr Lucas.
+Who have you now like John Philpot Curran? Psha!
+
+--Well, J. J. O'Molloy said, Bushe K.C., for example.
+
+--Bushe? the editor said. Well, yes: Bushe, yes. He has a strain of it
+in his blood. Kendal Bushe or I mean Seymour Bushe.
+
+--He would have been on the bench long ago, the professor said, only for
+... But no matter.
+
+J. J. O'Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:
+
+--One of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life
+fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide,
+the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him. _And in the porches of mine
+ear did pour._
+
+
+By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or the other
+story, beast with two backs?
+
+--What was that? the professor asked.
+
+ITALIA, MAGISTRA ARTIUM
+
+
+--He spoke on the law of evidence, J. J. O'Molloy said, of Roman justice
+as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the _lex talionis_. And he
+cited the Moses of Michelangelo in the vatican.
+
+--Ha.
+
+--A few wellchosen words, Lenehan prefaced. Silence!
+
+Pause. J. J. O'Molloy took out his cigarettecase.
+
+False lull. Something quite ordinary.
+
+Messenger took out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar.
+
+I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that
+it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match,
+that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives. A POLISHED
+PERIOD
+
+
+J. J. O'Molloy resumed, moulding his words:
+
+--He said of it: _that stony effigy in frozen music, horned and
+terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and
+of prophecy which, if aught that the imagination or the hand of sculptor
+has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring
+deserves to live, deserves to live._
+
+His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall.
+
+--Fine! Myles Crawford said at once.
+
+--The divine afflatus, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
+
+--You like it? J. J. O'Molloy asked Stephen.
+
+Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed. He
+took a cigarette from the case. J. J. O'Molloy offered his case to Myles
+Crawford. Lenehan lit their cigarettes as before and took his trophy,
+saying:
+
+--Muchibus thankibus.
+
+A MAN OF HIGH MORALE
+
+
+--Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O'Molloy said
+to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal
+hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it.
+She was a nice old bag of tricks. A. E. has been telling some yankee
+interviewer that you came to him in the small hours of the morning to
+ask him about planes of consciousness. Magennis thinks you must have
+been pulling A. E.'s leg. He is a man of the very highest morale,
+Magennis.
+
+Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he say
+about me? Don't ask.
+
+--No, thanks, professor MacHugh said, waving the cigarettecase aside.
+Wait a moment. Let me say one thing. The finest display of oratory I
+ever heard was a speech made by John F Taylor at the college historical
+society. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had
+spoken and the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days),
+advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.
+
+He turned towards Myles Crawford and said:
+
+--You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. Then you can imagine the style of his
+discourse.
+
+--He is sitting with Tim Healy, J. J. O'Molloy said, rumour has it, on
+the Trinity college estates commission.
+
+--He is sitting with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford said, in a child's
+frock. Go on. Well?
+
+--It was the speech, mark you, the professor said, of a finished orator,
+full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction I will
+not say the vials of his wrath but pouring the proud man's contumely
+upon the new movement. It was then a new movement. We were weak,
+therefore worthless.
+
+He closed his long thin lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised
+an outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and
+ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new
+focus.
+
+IMPROMPTU
+
+
+In ferial tone he addressed J. J. O'Molloy:
+
+--Taylor had come there, you must know, from a sickbed. That he
+had prepared his speech I do not believe for there was not even one
+shorthandwriter in the hall. His dark lean face had a growth of shaggy
+beard round it. He wore a loose white silk neckcloth and altogether he
+looked (though he was not) a dying man.
+
+His gaze turned at once but slowly from J. J. O'Molloy's towards
+Stephen's face and then bent at once to the ground, seeking. His
+unglazed linen collar appeared behind his bent head, soiled by his
+withering hair. Still seeking, he said:
+
+--When Fitzgibbon's speech had ended John F Taylor rose to reply.
+Briefly, as well as I can bring them to mind, his words were these.
+
+He raised his head firmly. His eyes bethought themselves once more.
+Witless shellfish swam in the gross lenses to and fro, seeking outlet.
+
+He began:
+
+_--Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in
+listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment
+since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported
+into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from
+this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the
+speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses._
+
+His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes
+ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. _And let our
+crooked smokes._ Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand
+at it yourself?
+
+_--And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian
+highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard
+his words and their meaning was revealed to me._
+
+FROM THE FATHERS
+
+
+It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted
+which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good
+could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That's saint Augustine.
+
+_--Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our
+language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You
+have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and
+our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise
+furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from
+primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong
+history and a polity._
+
+Nile.
+
+Child, man, effigy.
+
+By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple
+in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
+
+_--You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and
+mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra.
+Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel
+is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her
+arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at
+our name._
+
+A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it
+boldly:
+
+_--But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and
+accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will
+and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have
+brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed
+the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the
+Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai's mountaintop nor ever have come down
+with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in
+his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw._
+
+He ceased and looked at them, enjoying a silence.
+
+OMINOUS--FOR HIM!
+
+J. J. O'Molloy said not without regret:
+
+--And yet he died without having entered the land of promise.
+
+--A sudden--at--the--moment--though--from--lingering--illness--often--
+previously--expectorated--demise, Lenehan added. And with a great future
+behind him.
+
+The troop of bare feet was heard rushing along the hallway and pattering
+up the staircase.
+
+--That is oratory, the professor said uncontradicted. Gone with the
+wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of
+porches. The tribune's words, howled and scattered to the four winds.
+A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all
+that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.
+
+I have money.
+
+--Gentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I
+suggest that the house do now adjourn?
+
+--You take my breath away. It is not perchance a French compliment?
+Mr O'Madden Burke asked. 'Tis the hour, methinks, when the winejug,
+metaphorically speaking, is most grateful in Ye ancient hostelry.
+
+--That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved. All that are in favour
+say ay, Lenehan announced. The contrary no. I declare it carried. To
+which particular boosing shed?... My casting vote is: Mooney's!
+
+He led the way, admonishing:
+
+--We will sternly refuse to partake of strong waters, will we not? Yes,
+we will not. By no manner of means.
+
+Mr O'Madden Burke, following close, said with an ally's lunge of his
+umbrella:
+
+--Lay on, Macduff!
+
+--Chip of the old block! the editor cried, clapping Stephen on the
+shoulder. Let us go. Where are those blasted keys?
+
+He fumbled in his pocket pulling out the crushed typesheets.
+
+--Foot and mouth. I know. That'll be all right. That'll go in. Where are
+they? That's all right.
+
+He thrust the sheets back and went into the inner office. LET US HOPE
+
+
+J. J. O'Molloy, about to follow him in, said quietly to Stephen:
+
+--I hope you will live to see it published. Myles, one moment.
+
+He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him.
+
+--Come along, Stephen, the professor said. That is fine, isn't it? It
+has the prophetic vision. _Fuit Ilium!_ The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms
+of this world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.
+
+The first newsboy came pattering down the stairs at their heels and
+rushed out into the street, yelling:
+
+--Racing special!
+
+Dublin. I have much, much to learn.
+
+They turned to the left along Abbey street.
+
+--I have a vision too, Stephen said.
+
+--Yes? the professor said, skipping to get into step. Crawford will
+follow.
+
+Another newsboy shot past them, yelling as he ran:
+
+--Racing special!
+
+DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN
+
+
+Dubliners.
+
+--Two Dublin vestals, Stephen said, elderly and pious, have lived fifty
+and fiftythree years in Fumbally's lane.
+
+--Where is that? the professor asked.
+
+--Off Blackpitts, Stephen said.
+
+Damp night reeking of hungry dough. Against the wall. Face glistering
+tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts. Akasic records. Quicker,
+darlint!
+
+On now. Dare it. Let there be life.
+
+--They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar.
+They save up three and tenpence in a red tin letterbox moneybox. They
+shake out the threepenny bits and sixpences and coax out the pennies
+with the blade of a knife. Two and three in silver and one and seven
+in coppers. They put on their bonnets and best clothes and take their
+umbrellas for fear it may come on to rain.
+
+--Wise virgins, professor MacHugh said.
+
+LIFE ON THE RAW
+
+
+--They buy one and fourpenceworth of brawn and four slices of panloaf at
+the north city diningrooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins,
+proprietress... They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl
+at the foot of Nelson's pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They
+give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin
+to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each
+other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the
+brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down,
+peeping at the airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that
+high.
+
+Their names are Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe. Anne Kearns has the
+lumbago for which she rubs on Lourdes water, given her by a lady who got
+a bottleful from a passionist father. Florence MacCabe takes a crubeen
+and a bottle of double X for supper every Saturday.
+
+--Antithesis, the professor said nodding twice. Vestal virgins. I can
+see them. What's keeping our friend?
+
+He turned.
+
+A bevy of scampering newsboys rushed down the steps, scattering in all
+directions, yelling, their white papers fluttering. Hard after them
+Myles Crawford appeared on the steps, his hat aureoling his scarlet
+face, talking with J. J. O'Molloy.
+
+--Come along, the professor cried, waving his arm.
+
+He set off again to walk by Stephen's side. RETURN OF BLOOM
+
+
+--Yes, he said. I see them.
+
+Mr Bloom, breathless, caught in a whirl of wild newsboys near the
+offices of the _Irish Catholic and Dublin Penny Journal_, called:
+
+--Mr Crawford! A moment!
+
+--_Telegraph_! Racing special!
+
+--What is it? Myles Crawford said, falling back a pace.
+
+A newsboy cried in Mr Bloom's face:
+
+--Terrible tragedy in Rathmines! A child bit by a bellows!
+
+INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITOR
+
+
+--Just this ad, Mr Bloom said, pushing through towards the steps,
+puffing, and taking the cutting from his pocket. I spoke with Mr Keyes
+just now. He'll give a renewal for two months, he says. After he'll
+see. But he wants a par to call attention in the _Telegraph_ too,
+the Saturday pink. And he wants it copied if it's not too late I told
+councillor Nannetti from the _Kilkenny People_. I can have access to
+it in the national library. House of keys, don't you see? His name is
+Keyes. It's a play on the name. But he practically promised he'd give
+the renewal. But he wants just a little puff. What will I tell him, Mr
+Crawford? K.M.A.
+
+
+--Will you tell him he can kiss my arse? Myles Crawford said throwing
+out his arm for emphasis. Tell him that straight from the stable.
+
+A bit nervy. Look out for squalls. All off for a drink. Arm in arm.
+Lenehan's yachting cap on the cadge beyond. Usual blarney. Wonder is
+that young Dedalus the moving spirit. Has a good pair of boots on him
+today. Last time I saw him he had his heels on view. Been walking in
+muck somewhere. Careless chap. What was he doing in Irishtown?
+
+--Well, Mr Bloom said, his eyes returning, if I can get the design I
+suppose it's worth a short par. He'd give the ad, I think. I'll tell him
+... K.M.R.I.A.
+
+
+--He can kiss my royal Irish arse, Myles Crawford cried loudly over his
+shoulder. Any time he likes, tell him.
+
+While Mr Bloom stood weighing the point and about to smile he strode on
+jerkily.
+
+RAISING THE WIND
+
+
+--_Nulla bona_, Jack, he said, raising his hand to his chin. I'm up to
+here. I've been through the hoop myself. I was looking for a fellow to
+back a bill for me no later than last week. Sorry, Jack. You must take
+the will for the deed. With a heart and a half if I could raise the wind
+anyhow.
+
+J. J. O'Molloy pulled a long face and walked on silently. They caught up
+on the others and walked abreast.
+
+--When they have eaten the brawn and the bread and wiped their twenty
+fingers in the paper the bread was wrapped in they go nearer to the
+railings.
+
+--Something for you, the professor explained to Myles Crawford. Two old
+Dublin women on the top of Nelson's pillar.
+
+SOME COLUMN!--THAT'S WHAT WADDLER ONE SAID
+
+
+--That's new, Myles Crawford said. That's copy. Out for the waxies
+Dargle. Two old trickies, what?
+
+--But they are afraid the pillar will fall, Stephen went on. They see
+the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines'
+blue dome, Adam and Eve's, saint Laurence O'Toole's. But it makes them
+giddy to look so they pull up their skirts...
+
+THOSE SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES
+
+
+--Easy all, Myles Crawford said. No poetic licence. We're in the
+archdiocese here.
+
+--And settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue
+of the onehandled adulterer.
+
+--Onehandled adulterer! the professor cried. I like that. I see the
+idea. I see what you mean.
+
+DAMES DONATE DUBLIN'S CITS SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS AEROLITHS, BELIEF
+
+
+--It gives them a crick in their necks, Stephen said, and they are too
+tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between
+them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with
+their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and
+spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.
+
+He gave a sudden loud young laugh as a close. Lenehan and Mr O'Madden
+Burke, hearing, turned, beckoned and led on across towards Mooney's.
+
+--Finished? Myles Crawford said. So long as they do no worse.
+
+SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH
+MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP.
+
+
+--You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of
+Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he were
+bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a noble
+and a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of
+beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope.
+
+Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich.
+
+They made ready to cross O'Connell street.
+
+HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!
+
+
+At various points along the eight lines tramcars with motionless
+trolleys stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines,
+Rathfarnham, Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Sandymount Green, Ringsend
+and Sandymount Tower, Donnybrook, Palmerston Park and Upper Rathmines,
+all still, becalmed in short circuit. Hackney cars, cabs, delivery
+waggons, mailvans, private broughams, aerated mineral water floats with
+rattling crates of bottles, rattled, rolled, horsedrawn, rapidly.
+
+WHAT?--AND LIKEWISE--WHERE?
+
+
+--But what do you call it? Myles Crawford asked. Where did they get the
+plums?
+
+VIRGILIAN, SAYS PEDAGOGUE. SOPHOMORE PLUMPS FOR OLD MAN MOSES.
+
+
+--Call it, wait, the professor said, opening his long lips wide to
+reflect. Call it, let me see. Call it: _deus nobis haec otia fecit._
+
+--No, Stephen said. I call it _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the
+Parable of The Plums._
+
+--I see, the professor said.
+
+He laughed richly.
+
+--I see, he said again with new pleasure. Moses and the promised land.
+We gave him that idea, he added to J. J. O'Molloy.
+
+HORATIO IS CYNOSURE THIS FAIR JUNE DAY
+
+
+J. J. O'Molloy sent a weary sidelong glance towards the statue and held
+his peace.
+
+--I see, the professor said.
+
+He halted on sir John Gray's pavement island and peered aloft at Nelson
+through the meshes of his wry smile.
+
+DIMINISHED DIGITS PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES,
+FLO WANGLES--YET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?
+
+
+--Onehandled adulterer, he said smiling grimly. That tickles me, I must
+say.
+
+--Tickled the old ones too, Myles Crawford said, if the God Almighty's
+truth was known.
+
+
+Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl
+shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school
+treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His
+Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red
+jujubes white.
+
+
+A sombre Y.M.C.A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of
+Graham Lemon's, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.
+
+Heart to heart talks.
+
+Bloo... Me? No.
+
+Blood of the Lamb.
+
+His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are
+washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen,
+martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering,
+druids' altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of
+the church in Zion is coming.
+
+_Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!! All heartily welcome._ Paying game.
+Torry and Alexander last year. Polygamy. His wife will put the stopper
+on that. Where was that ad some Birmingham firm the luminous crucifix.
+Our Saviour. Wake up in the dead of night and see him on the wall,
+hanging. Pepper's ghost idea. Iron nails ran in.
+
+
+Phosphorus it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for
+instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to the
+pantry in the kitchen. Don't like all the smells in it waiting to rush
+out. What was it she wanted? The Malaga raisins. Thinking of Spain.
+Before Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny. Very good
+for the brain.
+
+From Butler's monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor's walk.
+Dedalus' daughter there still outside Dillon's auctionrooms. Must be
+selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father.
+Lobbing about waiting for him. Home always breaks up when the mother
+goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That's in their
+theology or the priest won't give the poor woman the confession, the
+absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat
+you out of house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on the
+fat of the land. Their butteries and larders. I'd like to see them do
+the black fast Yom Kippur. Crossbuns. One meal and a collation for fear
+he'd collapse on the altar. A housekeeper of one of those fellows if you
+could pick it out of her. Never pick it out of her. Like getting l.s.d.
+out of him. Does himself well. No guests. All for number one. Watching
+his water. Bring your own bread and butter. His reverence: mum's the
+word.
+
+Good Lord, that poor child's dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks
+too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It's after they feel it.
+Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution.
+
+As he set foot on O'Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from
+the parapet. Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea air sours it,
+I heard. Be interesting some day get a pass through Hancock to see the
+brewery. Regular world in itself. Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in
+too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on
+the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians. Imagine drinking
+that! Rats: vats. Well, of course, if we knew all the things.
+
+Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt
+quaywalls, gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down? Reuben
+J's son must have swallowed a good bellyful of that sewage. One and
+eightpence too much. Hhhhm. It's the droll way he comes out with the
+things. Knows how to tell a story too.
+
+They wheeled lower. Looking for grub. Wait.
+
+He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet
+per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of
+swells, floated under by the bridgepiers. Not such damn fools. Also the
+day I threw that stale cake out of the Erin's King picked it up in the
+wake fifty yards astern. Live by their wits. They wheeled, flapping.
+
+ _The hungry famished gull
+ Flaps o'er the waters dull._
+
+That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has
+no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts.
+Solemn.
+
+
+ _Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit
+ Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth._
+ --Two apples a penny! Two for a penny!
+
+
+His gaze passed over the glazed apples serried on her stand. Australians
+they must be this time of year. Shiny peels: polishes them up with a rag
+or a handkerchief.
+
+Wait. Those poor birds.
+
+He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes for
+a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down into
+the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all from
+their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel.
+
+Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his
+hands. They never expected that. Manna. Live on fish, fishy flesh they
+have, all seabirds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from Anna Liffey swim down
+here sometimes to preen themselves. No accounting for tastes. Wonder
+what kind is swanmeat. Robinson Crusoe had to live on them.
+
+They wheeled flapping weakly. I'm not going to throw any more. Penny
+quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw. They spread foot and
+mouth disease too. If you cram a turkey say on chestnutmeal it tastes
+like that. Eat pig like pig. But then why is it that saltwater fish are
+not salty? How is that?
+
+His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor
+on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.
+
+_Kino's_ 11/- _Trousers_
+
+Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you
+own water really? It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which
+in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. All kinds of
+places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck
+up in all the greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly confidential. Dr
+Hy Franks. Didn't cost him a red like Maginni the dancing master self
+advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or stick them up himself for
+that matter on the q. t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight.
+Just the place too. POST NO BILLS. POST 110 PILLS. Some chap with a dose
+burning him.
+
+If he...?
+
+O!
+
+Eh?
+
+No... No.
+
+No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely?
+
+No, no.
+
+Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about
+that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time.
+Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never
+exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek:
+parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her
+about the transmigration. O rocks!
+
+Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballastoffice. She's right
+after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.
+She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking.
+Still, I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone
+voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a
+barrel. Now, isn't that wit. They used to call him big Ben. Not half as
+witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get
+outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at stowing away number
+one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.
+
+A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him
+along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like
+that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He
+read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S.
+Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his
+foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our
+staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after
+street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are
+not Boyl: no, M Glade's men. Doesn't bring in any business either.
+I suggested to him about a transparent showcart with two smart girls
+sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I
+bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the
+eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she's writing. Get twenty of
+them round you if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women
+too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he
+didn't think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a
+false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted
+under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't lick 'em. What?
+Our envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson,
+I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser _Kansell,_ sold
+by Hely's Ltd, 85 Dame street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a
+job it was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent.
+That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her small
+head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love by her eyes.
+Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman. I disturbed her at her
+devotions that morning. But glad to communicate with the outside world.
+Our great day, she said. Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name
+too: caramel. She knew I, I think she knew by the way she. If she had
+married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of
+money. Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for
+them. My heart's broke eating dripping. They like buttering themselves
+in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the
+pawnbroker's daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed wire.
+
+He crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by. Rover
+cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil
+Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait: was in Thom's.
+Got the job in Wisdom Hely's year we married. Six years. Ten years ago:
+ninetyfour he died yes that's right the big fire at Arnott's. Val Dillon
+was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O'Reilly emptying
+the port into his soup before the flag fell. Bobbob lapping it for the
+inner alderman. Couldn't hear what the band played. For what we have
+already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly
+had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with
+selfcovered buttons. She didn't like it because I sprained my ankle
+first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old
+Goodwin's tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies' picnic
+too. Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove,
+shoulders and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we
+had that day. People looking after her.
+
+Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the red wallpaper.
+Dockrell's, one and ninepence a dozen. Milly's tubbing night. American
+soap I bought: elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny she
+looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor papa's
+daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.
+
+He walked along the curbstone.
+
+Stream of life. What was the name of that priestylooking chap was always
+squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in Citron's saint
+Kevin's parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is getting. Pen
+...? Of course it's years ago. Noise of the trams probably. Well, if he
+couldn't remember the dayfather's name that he sees every day.
+
+Bartell d'Arcy was the tenor, just coming out then. Seeing her home
+after practice. Conceited fellow with his waxedup moustache. Gave her
+that song _Winds that blow from the south_.
+
+Windy night that was I went to fetch her there was that lodge meeting on
+about those lottery tickets after Goodwin's concert in the supperroom or
+oakroom of the Mansion house. He and I behind. Sheet of her music blew
+out of my hand against the High school railings. Lucky it didn't.
+Thing like that spoils the effect of a night for her. Professor Goodwin
+linking her in front. Shaky on his pins, poor old sot. His farewell
+concerts. Positively last appearance on any stage. May be for months and
+may be for never. Remember her laughing at the wind, her blizzard collar
+up. Corner of Harcourt road remember that gust. Brrfoo! Blew up all her
+skirts and her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin. She did get flushed
+in the wind. Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up
+those pieces of lap of mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she
+liked. And the mulled rum. Could see her in the bedroom from the hearth
+unclamping the busk of her stays: white.
+
+Swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed. Always warm from her.
+Always liked to let her self out. Sitting there after till near two
+taking out her hairpins. Milly tucked up in beddyhouse. Happy. Happy.
+That was the night...
+
+--O, Mr Bloom, how do you do?
+
+--O, how do you do, Mrs Breen?
+
+--No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven't seen her for
+ages.
+
+--In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily. Milly has a position down in
+Mullingar, you know.
+
+--Go away! Isn't that grand for her?
+
+--Yes. In a photographer's there. Getting on like a house on fire. How
+are all your charges?
+
+--All on the baker's list, Mrs Breen said.
+
+How many has she? No other in sight.
+
+--You're in black, I see. You have no...
+
+--No, Mr Bloom said. I have just come from a funeral.
+
+Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who's dead, when and what did he
+die of? Turn up like a bad penny.
+
+--O, dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn't any near relation.
+
+May as well get her sympathy.
+
+--Dignam, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly,
+poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning.
+
+_Your funeral's tomorrow While you're coming through the rye.
+Diddlediddle dumdum Diddlediddle..._
+
+--Sad to lose the old friends, Mrs Breen's womaneyes said melancholily.
+
+Now that's quite enough about that. Just: quietly: husband.
+
+--And your lord and master?
+
+Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn't lost them anyhow.
+
+--O, don't be talking! she said. He's a caution to rattlesnakes. He's
+in there now with his lawbooks finding out the law of libel. He has me
+heartscalded. Wait till I show you.
+
+Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured
+out from Harrison's. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr Bloom's
+gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar,
+or they'd taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot
+arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of
+hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork
+chained to the table.
+
+Opening her handbag, chipped leather. Hatpin: ought to have a guard on
+those things. Stick it in a chap's eye in the tram. Rummaging. Open.
+Money. Please take one. Devils if they lose sixpence. Raise Cain.
+Husband barging. Where's the ten shillings I gave you on Monday? Are
+you feeding your little brother's family? Soiled handkerchief:
+medicinebottle. Pastille that was fell. What is she?...
+
+--There must be a new moon out, she said. He's always bad then. Do you
+know what he did last night?
+
+Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him, wide in
+alarm, yet smiling.
+
+--What? Mr Bloom asked.
+
+Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me.
+
+--Woke me up in the night, she said. Dream he had, a nightmare.
+
+Indiges.
+
+--Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs.
+
+--The ace of spades! Mr Bloom said.
+
+She took a folded postcard from her handbag.
+
+--Read that, she said. He got it this morning.
+
+--What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U.P.?
+
+--U.P.: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It's a great
+shame for them whoever he is.
+
+--Indeed it is, Mr Bloom said.
+
+She took back the card, sighing.
+
+--And now he's going round to Mr Menton's office. He's going to take an
+action for ten thousand pounds, he says.
+
+She folded the card into her untidy bag and snapped the catch.
+
+Same blue serge dress she had two years ago, the nap bleaching. Seen its
+best days. Wispish hair over her ears. And that dowdy toque: three old
+grapes to take the harm out of it. Shabby genteel. She used to be a
+tasty dresser. Lines round her mouth. Only a year or so older than
+Molly.
+
+See the eye that woman gave her, passing. Cruel. The unfair sex.
+
+He looked still at her, holding back behind his look his discontent.
+Pungent mockturtle oxtail mulligatawny. I'm hungry too. Flakes of pastry
+on the gusset of her dress: daub of sugary flour stuck to her cheek.
+Rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior. Josie Powell
+that was. In Luke Doyle's long ago. Dolphin's Barn, the charades. U.P.:
+up.
+
+Change the subject.
+
+--Do you ever see anything of Mrs Beaufoy? Mr Bloom asked.
+
+--Mina Purefoy? she said.
+
+Philip Beaufoy I was thinking. Playgoers' Club. Matcham often thinks of
+the masterstroke. Did I pull the chain? Yes. The last act.
+
+--Yes.
+
+--I just called to ask on the way in is she over it. She's in the
+lying-in hospital in Holles street. Dr Horne got her in. She's three
+days bad now.
+
+--O, Mr Bloom said. I'm sorry to hear that.
+
+--Yes, Mrs Breen said. And a houseful of kids at home. It's a very stiff
+birth, the nurse told me.
+
+---O, Mr Bloom said.
+
+His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in
+compassion. Dth! Dth!
+
+--I'm sorry to hear that, he said. Poor thing! Three days! That's
+terrible for her.
+
+Mrs Breen nodded.
+
+--She was taken bad on the Tuesday...
+
+Mr Bloom touched her funnybone gently, warning her:
+
+--Mind! Let this man pass.
+
+A bony form strode along the curbstone from the river staring with a
+rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavystringed glass. Tight as a
+skullpiece a tiny hat gripped his head. From his arm a folded dustcoat,
+a stick and an umbrella dangled to his stride.
+
+--Watch him, Mr Bloom said. He always walks outside the lampposts.
+Watch!
+
+--Who is he if it's a fair question? Mrs Breen asked. Is he dotty?
+
+--His name is Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Mr
+Bloom said smiling. Watch!
+
+--He has enough of them, she said. Denis will be like that one of these
+days.
+
+She broke off suddenly.
+
+--There he is, she said. I must go after him. Goodbye. Remember me to
+Molly, won't you?
+
+--I will, Mr Bloom said.
+
+He watched her dodge through passers towards the shopfronts. Denis Breen
+in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison's
+hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old
+times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust
+his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke
+earnestly.
+
+Meshuggah. Off his chump.
+
+Mr Bloom walked on again easily, seeing ahead of him in sunlight the
+tight skullpiece, the dangling stickumbrelladustcoat. Going the two
+days. Watch him! Out he goes again. One way of getting on in the world.
+And that other old mosey lunatic in those duds. Hard time she must have
+with him.
+
+U.P.: up. I'll take my oath that's Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding. Wrote
+it for a lark in the Scotch house I bet anything. Round to Menton's
+office. His oyster eyes staring at the postcard. Be a feast for the
+gods.
+
+He passed the _Irish Times_. There might be other answers Iying there.
+Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code. At their lunch
+now. Clerk with the glasses there doesn't know me. O, leave them there
+to simmer. Enough bother wading through fortyfour of them. Wanted, smart
+lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work. I called you naughty
+darling because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is
+the meaning. Please tell me what perfume does your wife. Tell me who
+made the world. The way they spring those questions on you. And the
+other one Lizzie Twigg. My literary efforts have had the good fortune to
+meet with the approval of the eminent poet A. E. (Mr Geo. Russell). No
+time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry.
+
+Best paper by long chalks for a small ad. Got the provinces now. Cook
+and general, exc. cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit
+counter. Resp. girl (R.C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop.
+James Carlisle made that. Six and a half per cent dividend. Made a big
+deal on Coates's shares. Ca' canny. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All the
+toady news. Our gracious and popular vicereine. Bought the _Irish Field_
+now. Lady Mountcashel has quite recovered after her confinement and
+rode out with the Ward Union staghounds at the enlargement yesterday
+at Rathoath. Uneatable fox. Pothunters too. Fear injects juices make
+it tender enough for them. Riding astride. Sit her horse like a man.
+Weightcarrying huntress. No sidesaddle or pillion for her, not for Joe.
+First to the meet and in at the death. Strong as a brood mare some of
+those horsey women. Swagger around livery stables. Toss off a glass
+of brandy neat while you'd say knife. That one at the Grosvenor this
+morning. Up with her on the car: wishswish. Stonewall or fivebarred gate
+put her mount to it. Think that pugnosed driver did it out of spite. Who
+is this she was like? O yes! Mrs Miriam Dandrade that sold me her old
+wraps and black underclothes in the Shelbourne hotel. Divorced Spanish
+American. Didn't take a feather out of her my handling them. As if I was
+her clotheshorse. Saw her in the viceregal party when Stubbs the park
+ranger got me in with Whelan of the _Express._ Scavenging what the
+quality left. High tea. Mayonnaise I poured on the plums thinking it was
+custard. Her ears ought to have tingled for a few weeks after. Want to
+be a bull for her. Born courtesan. No nursery work for her, thanks.
+
+Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness. Saffron bun
+and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy. Y. M. C. A. Eating
+with a stopwatch, thirtytwo chews to the minute. And still his
+muttonchop whiskers grew. Supposed to be well connected. Theodore's
+cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family. Hardy
+annuals he presents her with. Saw him out at the Three Jolly Topers
+marching along bareheaded and his eldest boy carrying one in a
+marketnet. The squallers. Poor thing! Then having to give the breast
+year after year all hours of the night. Selfish those t.t's are. Dog in
+the manger. Only one lump of sugar in my tea, if you please.
+
+He stood at Fleet street crossing. Luncheon interval. A sixpenny at
+Rowe's? Must look up that ad in the national library. An eightpenny in
+the Burton. Better. On my way.
+
+He walked on past Bolton's Westmoreland house. Tea. Tea. Tea. I forgot
+to tap Tom Kernan.
+
+Sss. Dth, dth, dth! Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a
+vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out. Phew!
+Dreadful simply! Child's head too big: forceps. Doubled up inside her
+trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out. Kill me
+that would. Lucky Molly got over hers lightly. They ought to invent
+something to stop that. Life with hard labour. Twilight sleep idea:
+queen Victoria was given that. Nine she had. A good layer. Old
+woman that lived in a shoe she had so many children. Suppose he was
+consumptive. Time someone thought about it instead of gassing about the
+what was it the pensive bosom of the silver effulgence. Flapdoodle to
+feed fools on. They could easily have big establishments whole thing
+quite painless out of all the taxes give every child born five quid at
+compound interest up to twentyone five per cent is a hundred shillings
+and five tiresome pounds multiply by twenty decimal system encourage
+people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit twentyone years
+want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum more than you think.
+
+Not stillborn of course. They are not even registered. Trouble for
+nothing.
+
+Funny sight two of them together, their bellies out. Molly and Mrs
+Moisel. Mothers' meeting. Phthisis retires for the time being, then
+returns. How flat they look all of a sudden after. Peaceful eyes. Weight
+off their mind. Old Mrs Thornton was a jolly old soul. All my babies,
+she said. The spoon of pap in her mouth before she fed them. O, that's
+nyumnyum. Got her hand crushed by old Tom Wall's son. His first bow to
+the public. Head like a prize pumpkin. Snuffy Dr Murren. People knocking
+them up at all hours. For God' sake, doctor. Wife in her throes. Then
+keep them waiting months for their fee. To attendance on your wife. No
+gratitude in people. Humane doctors, most of them.
+
+Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament a flock of
+pigeons flew. Their little frolic after meals. Who will we do it on? I
+pick the fellow in black. Here goes. Here's good luck. Must be thrilling
+from the air. Apjohn, myself and Owen Goldberg up in the trees near
+Goose green playing the monkeys. Mackerel they called me.
+
+A squad of constables debouched from College street, marching in Indian
+file. Goosestep. Foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their
+truncheons. After their feed with a good load of fat soup under their
+belts. Policeman's lot is oft a happy one. They split up in groups and
+scattered, saluting, towards their beats. Let out to graze. Best moment
+to attack one in pudding time. A punch in his dinner. A squad of others,
+marching irregularly, rounded Trinity railings making for the station.
+Bound for their troughs. Prepare to receive cavalry. Prepare to receive
+soup.
+
+He crossed under Tommy Moore's roguish finger. They did right to put him
+up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women.
+Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. _There is not in this
+wide world a vallee_. Great song of Julia Morkan's. Kept her voice up to
+the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe's, wasn't she?
+
+He gazed after the last broad tunic. Nasty customers to tackle. Jack
+Power could a tale unfold: father a G man. If a fellow gave them trouble
+being lagged they let him have it hot and heavy in the bridewell.
+Can't blame them after all with the job they have especially the young
+hornies. That horsepoliceman the day Joe Chamberlain was given his
+degree in Trinity he got a run for his money. My word he did! His
+horse's hoofs clattering after us down Abbey street. Lucky I had the
+presence of mind to dive into Manning's or I was souped. He did come a
+wallop, by George. Must have cracked his skull on the cobblestones. I
+oughtn't to have got myself swept along with those medicals. And the
+Trinity jibs in their mortarboards. Looking for trouble. Still I got to
+know that young Dixon who dressed that sting for me in the Mater and now
+he's in Holles street where Mrs Purefoy. Wheels within wheels. Police
+whistle in my ears still. All skedaddled. Why he fixed on me. Give me in
+charge. Right here it began.
+
+--Up the Boers!
+
+--Three cheers for De Wet!
+
+--We'll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree.
+
+Silly billies: mob of young cubs yelling their guts out. Vinegar hill.
+The Butter exchange band. Few years' time half of them magistrates and
+civil servants. War comes on: into the army helterskelter: same fellows
+used to. Whether on the scaffold high.
+
+Never know who you're talking to. Corny Kelleher he has Harvey Duff in
+his eye. Like that Peter or Denis or James Carey that blew the gaff on
+the invincibles. Member of the corporation too. Egging raw youths on to
+get in the know all the time drawing secret service pay from the castle.
+Drop him like a hot potato. Why those plainclothes men are always
+courting slaveys. Easily twig a man used to uniform. Squarepushing up
+against a backdoor. Maul her a bit. Then the next thing on the menu. And
+who is the gentleman does be visiting there? Was the young master saying
+anything? Peeping Tom through the keyhole. Decoy duck. Hotblooded young
+student fooling round her fat arms ironing.
+
+--Are those yours, Mary?
+
+--I don't wear such things... Stop or I'll tell the missus on you. Out
+half the night.
+
+--There are great times coming, Mary. Wait till you see.
+
+--Ah, gelong with your great times coming.
+
+Barmaids too. Tobaccoshopgirls.
+
+James Stephens' idea was the best. He knew them. Circles of ten so that
+a fellow couldn't round on more than his own ring. Sinn Fein. Back out
+you get the knife. Hidden hand. Stay in. The firing squad. Turnkey's
+daughter got him out of Richmond, off from Lusk. Putting up in the
+Buckingham Palace hotel under their very noses. Garibaldi.
+
+You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a
+squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about
+our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bakery Company's tearoom.
+Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government.
+That the language question should take precedence of the economic
+question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house. Stuff them
+up with meat and drink. Michaelmas goose. Here's a good lump of thyme
+seasoning under the apron for you. Have another quart of goosegrease
+before it gets too cold. Halffed enthusiasts. Penny roll and a walk with
+the band. No grace for the carver. The thought that the other chap pays
+best sauce in the world. Make themselves thoroughly at home. Show us
+over those apricots, meaning peaches. The not far distant day. Homerule
+sun rising up in the northwest.
+
+His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly,
+shadowing Trinity's surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing,
+outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day:
+squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies
+mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a
+bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second
+somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes.
+Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the
+blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.
+
+Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other
+coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of
+pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that.
+Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets
+his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have
+all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age
+after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese
+wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling
+suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses built of breeze. Shelter,
+for the night.
+
+No-one is anything.
+
+This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate
+this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.
+
+Provost's house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in
+there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn't live in it if they paid me. Hope
+they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.
+
+The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silverware
+opposite in Walter Sexton's window by which John Howard Parnell passed,
+unseeing.
+
+There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that's a
+coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don't
+meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. No-one knows him. Must be a
+corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal's
+uniform since he got the job. Charley Kavanagh used to come out on
+his high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the
+woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a
+pain. Great man's brother: his brother's brother. He'd look nice on the
+city charger. Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess
+there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to
+pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That's the
+fascination: the name. All a bit touched. Mad Fanny and his other sister
+Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness. Bolt upright lik
+surgeon M'Ardle. Still David Sheehy beat him for south Meath. Apply
+for the Chiltern Hundreds and retire into public life. The patriot's
+banquet. Eating orangepeels in the park. Simon Dedalus said when they
+put him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the grave and
+lead him out of the house of commons by the arm.
+
+--Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which
+the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with
+a Scotch accent. The tentacles...
+
+They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bicycle.
+Young woman.
+
+And there he is too. Now that's really a coincidence: second time.
+Coming events cast their shadows before. With the approval of the
+eminent poet, Mr Geo. Russell. That might be Lizzie Twigg with him. A.
+E.: what does that mean? Initials perhaps. Albert Edward, Arthur Edmund,
+Alphonsus Eb Ed El Esquire. What was he saying? The ends of the world
+with a Scotch accent. Tentacles: octopus. Something occult: symbolism.
+Holding forth. She's taking it all in. Not saying a word. To aid
+gentleman in literary work.
+
+His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle,
+a listening woman at his side. Coming from the vegetarian. Only
+weggebobbles and fruit. Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of
+that cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it's healthier.
+Windandwatery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as
+a bloater. Dreams all night. Why do they call that thing they gave me
+nutsteak? Nutarians. Fruitarians. To give you the idea you are eating
+rumpsteak. Absurd. Salty too. They cook in soda. Keep you sitting by the
+tap all night.
+
+Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so tasteless.
+Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy,
+symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn't be surprised if it was that
+kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical.
+For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts
+you couldn't squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don't know what poetry
+is even. Must be in a certain mood.
+
+ _The dreamy cloudy gull
+ Waves o'er the waters dull._
+
+He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of Yeates
+and Son, pricing the fieldglasses. Or will I drop into old Harris's and
+have a chat with young Sinclair? Wellmannered fellow. Probably at his
+lunch. Must get those old glasses of mine set right. Goerz lenses six
+guineas. Germans making their way everywhere. Sell on easy terms to
+capture trade. Undercutting. Might chance on a pair in the railway lost
+property office. Astonishing the things people leave behind them in
+trains and cloakrooms. What do they be thinking about? Women too.
+Incredible. Last year travelling to Ennis had to pick up that farmer's
+daughter's ba and hand it to her at Limerick junction. Unclaimed money
+too. There's a little watch up there on the roof of the bank to test
+those glasses by.
+
+
+His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can't see it. If you
+imagine it's there you can almost see it. Can't see it.
+
+He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right
+hand at arm's length towards the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes:
+completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun's disk.
+Must be the focus where the rays cross. If I had black glasses.
+Interesting. There was a lot of talk about those sunspots when we
+were in Lombard street west. Looking up from the back garden. Terrific
+explosions they are. There will be a total eclipse this year: autumn
+some time.
+
+Now that I come to think of it that ball falls at Greenwich time. It's
+the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink. Must go out there
+some first Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to
+professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to:
+man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman
+proud to be descended from some king's mistress. His foremother. Lay it
+on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt
+out what you know you're not to: what's parallax? Show this gentleman
+the door.
+
+Ah.
+
+His hand fell to his side again.
+
+Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about,
+crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then solid:
+then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock,
+like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she said. I
+believe there is.
+
+He went on by la maison Claire.
+
+Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly there
+is a new moon. Walking down by the Tolka. Not bad for a Fairview moon.
+She was humming. The young May moon she's beaming, love. He other side
+of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm's la-amp is gleaming, love. Touch.
+Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes.
+
+Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must.
+
+Mr Bloom, quickbreathing, slowlier walking passed Adam court.
+
+With a keep quiet relief his eyes took note this is the street here
+middle of the day of Bob Doran's bottle shoulders. On his annual bend,
+M Coy said. They drink in order to say or do something or _cherchez la
+femme_. Up in the Coombe with chummies and streetwalkers and then the
+rest of the year sober as a judge.
+
+Yes. Thought so. Sloping into the Empire. Gone. Plain soda would do him
+good. Where Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the
+Queen's. Broth of a boy. Dion Boucicault business with his harvestmoon
+face in a poky bonnet. Three Purty Maids from School. How time flies,
+eh? Showing long red pantaloons under his skirts. Drinkers, drinking,
+laughed spluttering, their drink against their breath. More power, Pat.
+Coarse red: fun for drunkards: guffaw and smoke. Take off that white
+hat. His parboiled eyes. Where is he now? Beggar somewhere. The harp
+that once did starve us all.
+
+I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She
+twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could
+never like it again after Rudy. Can't bring back time. Like holding
+water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then.
+Would you? Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy?
+Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the library.
+
+Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints,
+silkdames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in the
+baking causeway. Thick feet that woman has in the white stockings. Hope
+the rain mucks them up on her. Countrybred chawbacon. All the beef to
+the heels were in. Always gives a woman clumsy feet. Molly looks out of
+plumb.
+
+He passed, dallying, the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers. Cascades
+of ribbons. Flimsy China silks. A tilted urn poured from its mouth a
+flood of bloodhued poplin: lustrous blood. The huguenots brought that
+here. _La causa è santa_! Tara tara. Great chorus that. Taree tara. Must
+be washed in rainwater. Meyerbeer. Tara: bom bom bom.
+
+Pincushions. I'm a long time threatening to buy one. Sticking them all
+over the place. Needles in window curtains.
+
+He bared slightly his left forearm. Scrape: nearly gone. Not today
+anyhow. Must go back for that lotion. For her birthday perhaps.
+Junejulyaugseptember eighth. Nearly three months off. Then she mightn't
+like it. Women won't pick up pins. Say it cuts lo.
+
+Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk
+stockings.
+
+Useless to go back. Had to be. Tell me all.
+
+High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman, home and
+houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim.
+Wealth of the world.
+
+A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded.
+Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he
+mutely craved to adore.
+
+Duke street. Here we are. Must eat. The Burton. Feel better then.
+
+He turned Combridge's corner, still pursued. Jingling, hoofthuds.
+Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields,
+tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements, along sofas,
+creaking beds.
+
+--Jack, love!
+
+--Darling!
+
+--Kiss me, Reggy!
+
+--My boy!
+
+--Love!
+
+His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink
+gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slush of greens. See
+the animals feed.
+
+Men, men, men.
+
+Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables
+calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy
+food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced
+young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New
+set of microbes. A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round
+him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his
+plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump
+chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser's eyes. Bitten
+off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see
+us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don't! O! A bone!
+That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself
+at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something
+galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't
+swallow it all however.
+
+--Roast beef and cabbage.
+
+--One stew.
+
+Smells of men. His gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish
+cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale
+of ferment.
+
+Couldn't eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork to eat all
+before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing
+the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then
+on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it
+off the plate, man! Get out of this.
+
+He gazed round the stooled and tabled eaters, tightening the wings of
+his nose.
+
+--Two stouts here.
+
+--One corned and cabbage.
+
+That fellow ramming a knifeful of cabbage down as if his life depended
+on it. Good stroke. Give me the fidgets to look. Safer to eat from his
+three hands. Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born with a
+silver knife in his mouth. That's witty, I think. Or no. Silver means
+born rich. Born with a knife. But then the allusion is lost.
+
+An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the head
+bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard. Well
+up: it splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork upright,
+elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the foodlift
+across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him something
+with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I munched hum un
+thu Unchster Bunk un Munchday. Ha? Did you, faith?
+
+Mr Bloom raised two fingers doubtfully to his lips. His eyes said:
+
+--Not here. Don't see him.
+
+Out. I hate dirty eaters.
+
+He backed towards the door. Get a light snack in Davy Byrne's. Stopgap.
+Keep me going. Had a good breakfast.
+
+--Roast and mashed here.
+
+--Pint of stout.
+
+Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff.
+
+He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat
+or be eaten. Kill! Kill!
+
+Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting down
+with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the
+street. John Howard Parnell example the provost of Trinity every
+mother's son don't talk of your provosts and provost of Trinity women
+and children cabmen priests parsons fieldmarshals archbishops. From
+Ailesbury road, Clyde road, artisans' dwellings, north Dublin union,
+lord mayor in his gingerbread coach, old queen in a bathchair. My
+plate's empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir
+Philip Crampton's fountain. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief.
+Next chap rubs on a new batch with his. Father O'Flynn would make
+hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children
+fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as big as the
+Phoenix park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of it. Hate
+people all round you. City Arms hotel _table d'hôte_ she called it.
+Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you're chewing. Then
+who'd wash up all the plates and forks? Might be all feeding on tabloids
+that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.
+
+After all there's a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from
+the earth garlic of course it stinks after Italian organgrinders crisp
+of onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw
+fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe
+to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering
+bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers' buckets wobbly lights. Give us that
+brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed
+sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling
+nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don't maul them pieces,
+young one.
+
+Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed.
+Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.
+
+Ah, I'm hungry.
+
+He entered Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now
+and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.
+
+What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?
+
+--Hello, Bloom, Nosey Flynn said from his nook.
+
+--Hello, Flynn.
+
+--How's things?
+
+--Tiptop... Let me see. I'll take a glass of burgundy and... let me
+see.
+
+Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham
+and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted meats. What is home
+without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the
+obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam's potted meat.
+Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like
+pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be
+tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch the effect. _There was
+a right royal old nigger. Who ate or something the somethings of the
+reverend Mr MacTrigger_. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what
+concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle
+find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what
+they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and
+war depend on some fellow's digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and
+geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards
+full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese.
+
+--Have you a cheese sandwich?
+
+--Yes, sir.
+
+Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of
+burgundy take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber,
+Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served
+me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made
+food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.
+
+--Wife well?
+
+--Quite well, thanks... A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?
+
+--Yes, sir.
+
+Nosey Flynn sipped his grog.
+
+--Doing any singing those times?
+
+Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear. Flap ears to match.
+Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him.
+Does no harm. Free ad.
+
+--She's engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard
+perhaps.
+
+--No. O, that's the style. Who's getting it up?
+
+The curate served.
+
+--How much is that?
+
+--Seven d., sir... Thank you, sir.
+
+Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. _Mr MacTrigger_. Easier
+than the dreamy creamy stuff. _His five hundred wives. Had the time of
+their lives._
+
+--Mustard, sir?
+
+--Thank you.
+
+He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. _Their lives_. I have
+it. _It grew bigger and bigger and bigger_.
+
+--Getting it up? he said. Well, it's like a company idea, you see. Part
+shares and part profits.
+
+--Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flynn said, putting his hand in his pocket
+to scratch his groin. Who is this was telling me? Isn't Blazes Boylan
+mixed up in it?
+
+A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart. He
+raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock
+five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.
+
+His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly,
+longingly.
+
+Wine.
+
+He smellsipped the cordial juice and, bidding his throat strongly to
+speed it, set his wineglass delicately down.
+
+--Yes, he said. He's the organiser in point of fact.
+
+No fear: no brains.
+
+Nosey Flynn snuffled and scratched. Flea having a good square meal.
+
+--He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that
+boxingmatch Myler Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello
+barracks. By God, he had the little kipper down in the county Carlow he
+was telling me...
+
+Hope that dewdrop doesn't come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up.
+
+--For near a month, man, before it came off. Sucking duck eggs by God
+till further orders. Keep him off the boose, see? O, by God, Blazes is a
+hairy chap.
+
+Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirtsleeves,
+cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring's blush. Whose
+smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete. Too much fat
+on the parsnips.
+
+--And here's himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give
+us a good one for the Gold cup?
+
+--I'm off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a
+horse.
+
+--You're right there, Nosey Flynn said.
+
+Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of
+disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his
+wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather
+with the chill off.
+
+Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like
+the way it curves there.
+
+--I wouldn't do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined
+many a man, the same horses.
+
+Vintners' sweepstake. Licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits
+for consumption on the premises. Heads I win tails you lose.
+
+--True for you, Nosey Flynn said. Unless you're in the know. There's
+no straight sport going now. Lenehan gets some good ones. He's giving
+Sceptre today. Zinfandel's the favourite, lord Howard de Walden's, won
+at Epsom. Morny Cannon is riding him. I could have got seven to one
+against Saint Amant a fortnight before.
+
+--That so? Davy Byrne said...
+
+He went towards the window and, taking up the pettycash book, scanned
+its pages.
+
+--I could, faith, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. That was a rare bit of
+horseflesh. Saint Frusquin was her sire. She won in a thunderstorm,
+Rothschild's filly, with wadding in her ears. Blue jacket and yellow
+cap. Bad luck to big Ben Dollard and his John O'Gaunt. He put me off it.
+Ay.
+
+He drank resignedly from his tumbler, running his fingers down the
+flutes.
+
+--Ay, he said, sighing.
+
+Mr Bloom, champing, standing, looked upon his sigh. Nosey numbskull.
+Will I tell him that horse Lenehan? He knows already. Better let him
+forget. Go and lose more. Fool and his money. Dewdrop coming down again.
+Cold nose he'd have kissing a woman. Still they might like. Prickly
+beards they like. Dogs' cold noses. Old Mrs Riordan with the rumbling
+stomach's Skye terrier in the City Arms hotel. Molly fondling him in her
+lap. O, the big doggybowwowsywowsy!
+
+Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish
+cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath
+of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can.
+Six. Six. Time will be gone then. She...
+
+Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so
+off colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins: sardines, gaudy
+lobsters' claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of
+shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the
+French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing
+in a thousand years. If you didn't know risky putting anything into your
+mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good.
+Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it
+on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit.
+Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial
+irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters. Unsightly like
+a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them
+out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect
+on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red Bank this morning. Was he
+oysters old fish at table perhaps he young flesh in bed no June has
+no ar no oysters. But there are people like things high. Tainted game.
+Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old,
+blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might
+mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it no
+yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the
+scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course aristocrats,
+then the others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour.
+Raw pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in
+the sea to keep up the price. Cheap no-one would buy. Caviare. Do the
+grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom
+pearls. The _élite. Crème de la crème_. They want special dishes to
+pretend they're. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings
+of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff,
+Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send
+him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the
+Rolls' kitchen area. Whitehatted _chef_ like a rabbi. Combustible duck.
+Curly cabbage _à la duchesse de Parme_. Just as well to write it on the
+bill of fare so you can know what you've eaten. Too many drugs spoil the
+broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated soup. Geese
+stuffed silly for them. Lobsters boiled alive. Do ptake some ptarmigan.
+Wouldn't mind being a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress,
+halfnaked ladies. May I tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole,
+miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect
+that. A miss Dubedat lived in Killiney, I remember. _Du, de la_ French.
+Still it's the same fish perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped
+the guts out of making money hand over fist finger in fishes' gills
+can't write his name on a cheque think he was painting the landscape
+with his mouth twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha ignorant as a kish of
+brogues, worth fifty thousand pounds.
+
+Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
+
+Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress
+grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me
+memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns
+on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple
+by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton.
+Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities.
+Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub
+my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with
+ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn
+away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth.
+Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed.
+Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate
+it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky
+gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles
+fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a
+nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns
+she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips,
+her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's
+veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was
+kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
+
+Me. And me now.
+
+Stuck, the flies buzzed.
+
+His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty:
+it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the
+world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall,
+naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don't care what man looks. All
+to see. Never speaking. I mean to say to fellows like Flynn. Suppose she
+did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first? Mortal! Put you in
+your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all
+ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and
+turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods'
+food. Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we
+stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung,
+earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never
+looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something drop
+see if she.
+
+Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to
+do there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and
+walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men
+lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to the yard.
+
+When the sound of his boots had ceased Davy Byrne said from his book:
+
+--What is this he is? Isn't he in the insurance line?
+
+--He's out of that long ago, Nosey Flynn said. He does canvassing for
+the _Freeman._
+
+--I know him well to see, Davy Byrne said. Is he in trouble?
+
+--Trouble? Nosey Flynn said. Not that I heard of. Why?
+
+--I noticed he was in mourning.
+
+--Was he? Nosey Flynn said. So he was, faith. I asked him how was all at
+home. You're right, by God. So he was.
+
+--I never broach the subject, Davy Byrne said humanely, if I see a
+gentleman is in trouble that way. It only brings it up fresh in their
+minds.
+
+--It's not the wife anyhow, Nosey Flynn said. I met him the day before
+yesterday and he coming out of that Irish farm dairy John Wyse Nolan's
+wife has in Henry street with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home
+to his better half. She's well nourished, I tell you. Plovers on toast.
+
+--And is he doing for the _Freeman?_ Davy Byrne said.
+
+Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.
+
+---He doesn't buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of
+that.
+
+--How so? Davy Byrne asked, coming from his book.
+
+Nosey Flynn made swift passes in the air with juggling fingers. He
+winked.
+
+--He's in the craft, he said.
+
+---Do you tell me so? Davy Byrne said.
+
+--Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. He's
+an excellent brother. Light, life and love, by God. They give him a leg
+up. I was told that by a--well, I won't say who.
+
+--Is that a fact?
+
+--O, it's a fine order, Nosey Flynn said. They stick to you when you're
+down. I know a fellow was trying to get into it. But they're as close as
+damn it. By God they did right to keep the women out of it.
+
+Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one:
+
+--Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!
+
+--There was one woman, Nosey Flynn said, hid herself in a clock to find
+out what they do be doing. But be damned but they smelt her out and
+swore her in on the spot a master mason. That was one of the saint
+Legers of Doneraile.
+
+Davy Byrne, sated after his yawn, said with tearwashed eyes:
+
+--And is that a fact? Decent quiet man he is. I often saw him in here
+and I never once saw him--you know, over the line.
+
+--God Almighty couldn't make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips
+off when the fun gets too hot. Didn't you see him look at his watch? Ah,
+you weren't there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does
+he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to God he
+does.
+
+--There are some like that, Davy Byrne said. He's a safe man, I'd say.
+
+--He's not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He's been known
+to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O,
+Bloom has his good points. But there's one thing he'll never do.
+
+His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside his grog.
+
+--I know, Davy Byrne said.
+
+--Nothing in black and white, Nosey Flynn said.
+
+Paddy Leonard and Bantam Lyons came in. Tom Rochford followed frowning,
+a plaining hand on his claret waistcoat.
+
+--Day, Mr Byrne.
+
+--Day, gentlemen.
+
+They paused at the counter.
+
+--Who's standing? Paddy Leonard asked.
+
+--I'm sitting anyhow, Nosey Flynn answered.
+
+--Well, what'll it be? Paddy Leonard asked.
+
+--I'll take a stone ginger, Bantam Lyons said.
+
+--How much? Paddy Leonard cried. Since when, for God' sake? What's
+yours, Tom?
+
+--How is the main drainage? Nosey Flynn asked, sipping.
+
+For answer Tom Rochford pressed his hand to his breastbone and
+hiccupped.
+
+--Would I trouble you for a glass of fresh water, Mr Byrne? he said.
+
+--Certainly, sir.
+
+Paddy Leonard eyed his alemates.
+
+--Lord love a duck, he said. Look at what I'm standing drinks to! Cold
+water and gingerpop! Two fellows that would suck whisky off a sore leg.
+He has some bloody horse up his sleeve for the Gold cup. A dead snip.
+
+--Zinfandel is it? Nosey Flynn asked.
+
+Tom Rochford spilt powder from a twisted paper into the water set before
+him.
+
+--That cursed dyspepsia, he said before drinking.
+
+--Breadsoda is very good, Davy Byrne said.
+
+Tom Rochford nodded and drank.
+
+--Is it Zinfandel?
+
+--Say nothing! Bantam Lyons winked. I'm going to plunge five bob on my
+own.
+
+--Tell us if you're worth your salt and be damned to you, Paddy Leonard
+said. Who gave it to you?
+
+Mr Bloom on his way out raised three fingers in greeting.
+
+--So long! Nosey Flynn said.
+
+The others turned.
+
+--That's the man now that gave it to me, Bantam Lyons whispered.
+
+--Prrwht! Paddy Leonard said with scorn. Mr Byrne, sir, we'll take two
+of your small Jamesons after that and a...
+
+--Stone ginger, Davy Byrne added civilly.
+
+--Ay, Paddy Leonard said. A suckingbottle for the baby.
+
+Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson street, his tongue brushing his teeth
+smooth. Something green it would have to be: spinach, say. Then with
+those Rontgen rays searchlight you could.
+
+At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the
+cobblestones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks
+having fully digested the contents. First sweet then savoury. Mr Bloom
+coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they move.
+Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his?
+Wasting time explaining it to Flynn's mouth. Lean people long mouths.
+Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent
+free. Course then you'd have all the cranks pestering.
+
+He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo the closes of the bars:
+
+_Don Giovanni, a cenar teco M'invitasti._
+
+Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up. Who distilled first? Some chap
+in the blues. Dutch courage. That _Kilkenny People_ in the national
+library now I must.
+
+Bare clean closestools waiting in the window of William Miller, plumber,
+turned back his thoughts. They could: and watch it all the way down,
+swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round the
+body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric juice coils of
+intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to stand all the
+time with his insides entrails on show. Science.
+
+--_A cenar teco._
+
+What does that _teco_ mean? Tonight perhaps.
+
+ _Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited
+ To come to supper tonight,
+ The rum the rumdum._
+
+Doesn't go properly.
+
+Keyes: two months if I get Nannetti to. That'll be two pounds ten about
+two pounds eight. Three Hynes owes me. Two eleven. Prescott's dyeworks
+van over there. If I get Billy Prescott's ad: two fifteen. Five guineas
+about. On the pig's back.
+
+Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new
+garters.
+
+Today. Today. Not think.
+
+Tour the south then. What about English wateringplaces? Brighton,
+Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely
+seaside girls. Against John Long's a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy
+thought, gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages.
+Will eat anything.
+
+Mr Bloom turned at Gray's confectioner's window of unbought tarts and
+passed the reverend Thomas Connellan's bookstore. _Why I left the church
+of Rome? Birds' Nest._ Women run him. They say they used to give pauper
+children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight.
+Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same
+bait. Why we left the church of Rome.
+
+A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No
+tram in sight. Wants to cross.
+
+--Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.
+
+The blind stripling did not answer. His wallface frowned weakly. He
+moved his head uncertainly.
+
+--You're in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite.
+Do you want to cross? There's nothing in the way.
+
+The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom's eye followed its
+line and saw again the dyeworks' van drawn up before Drago's. Where I
+saw his brillantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in
+John Long's. Slaking his drouth.
+
+--There's a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it's not moving. I'll see you
+across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?
+
+--Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street.
+
+--Come, Mr Bloom said.
+
+He touched the thin elbow gently: then took the limp seeing hand to
+guide it forward.
+
+Say something to him. Better not do the condescending. They mistrust
+what you tell them. Pass a common remark.
+
+--The rain kept off.
+
+No answer.
+
+Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose. Tastes all different
+for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child's hand, his hand. Like
+Milly's was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand. Wonder
+if he has a name. Van. Keep his cane clear of the horse's legs: tired
+drudge get his doze. That's right. Clear. Behind a bull: in front of a
+horse.
+
+--Thanks, sir.
+
+Knows I'm a man. Voice.
+
+--Right now? First turn to the left.
+
+The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing
+his cane back, feeling again.
+
+Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone
+tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there?
+Must have felt it. See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense
+of volume. Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark. Wonder
+would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of
+Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he walk
+in a beeline if he hadn't that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow
+going in to be a priest.
+
+Penrose! That was that chap's name.
+
+Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers.
+Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a
+deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say.
+Of course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets. People
+ought to help. Workbasket I could buy for Molly's birthday. Hates
+sewing. Might take an objection. Dark men they call them.
+
+Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched
+together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring,
+the summer: smells. Tastes? They say you can't taste wines with your
+eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no
+pleasure.
+
+And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl
+passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have
+them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his
+mind's eye. The voice, temperatures: when he touches her with his
+fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair,
+for instance. Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black.
+Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of
+white.
+
+Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two
+shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer's just here
+too. Wait. Think over it.
+
+With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above
+his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt
+the skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough.
+The belly is the smoothest. No-one about. There he goes into Frederick
+street. Perhaps to Levenston's dancing academy piano. Might be settling
+my braces.
+
+Walking by Doran's publichouse he slid his hand between his waistcoat
+and trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of
+his belly. But I know it's whitey yellow. Want to try in the dark to
+see.
+
+He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.
+
+Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would
+he have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being
+born that way? All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned
+and drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration
+for sins you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pike hoses.
+Dear, dear, dear. Pity, of course: but somehow you can't cotton on to
+them someway.
+
+Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons' hall. Solemn as Troy.
+After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking
+a magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat
+school. I sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he'd turn up his nose
+at that stuff I drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a
+dusty bottle. Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder's court.
+Wellmeaning old man. Police chargesheets crammed with cases get their
+percentage manufacturing crime. Sends them to the rightabout. The devil
+on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a great strawcalling. Now he's really
+what they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers
+in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.
+
+Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His Excellency the lord lieutenant.
+Sixteenth. Today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer's hospital. _The
+Messiah_ was first given for that. Yes. Handel. What about going out
+there: Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a
+leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.
+
+Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.
+
+Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.
+
+His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to
+the right.
+
+Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too
+heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.
+
+Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes.
+Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?
+
+Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.
+
+The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold
+statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.
+
+No. Didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate.
+
+My heart!
+
+His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas
+Deane was the Greek architecture.
+
+Look for something I.
+
+His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded
+Agendath Netaim. Where did I?
+
+Busy looking.
+
+He thrust back quick Agendath.
+
+Afternoon she said.
+
+I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. _Freeman._
+Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?
+
+Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.
+
+His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap
+lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.
+
+Safe!
+
+
+Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:
+
+
+--And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of _Wilhelm Meister_.
+A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms
+against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in
+real life.
+
+He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step
+backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.
+
+A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a
+noiseless beck.
+
+--Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
+ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always
+feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.
+
+Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door
+he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words: heard them: and was
+gone.
+
+Two left.
+
+--Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes
+before his death.
+
+--Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with
+elder's gall, to write _Paradise Lost_ at your dictation? _The Sorrows
+of Satan_ he calls it.
+
+Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.
+
+ _First he tickled her
+ Then he patted her
+ Then he passed the female catheter.
+ For he was a medical
+ Jolly old medi..._
+
+--I feel you would need one more for _Hamlet._ Seven is dear to the
+mystic mind. The shining seven W.B. calls them.
+
+Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought
+the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed
+low: a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered.
+
+ _Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood
+ Tears such as angels weep.
+ Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta._
+
+He holds my follies hostage.
+
+Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed
+Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house.
+And one more to hail him: _ave, rabbi_: the Tinahely twelve. In the
+shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night
+by night. God speed. Good hunting.
+
+Mulligan has my telegram.
+
+Folly. Persist.
+
+--Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
+figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though
+I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
+
+--All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
+shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
+Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal
+to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a
+work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of
+Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley,
+the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal
+wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of
+schoolboys for schoolboys.
+
+A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
+me!
+
+--The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
+Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.
+
+--And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One
+can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.
+
+He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.
+
+Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the
+heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who
+suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon
+the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.
+
+Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name
+Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no
+secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching
+to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of
+light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the
+plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P.
+must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very
+illustrious sister H.P.B.'s elemental.
+
+O, fie! Out on't! _Pfuiteufel!_ You naughtn't to look, missus, so you
+naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.
+
+Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with
+grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
+
+--That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about
+the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
+undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.
+
+John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:
+
+--Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
+with Plato.
+
+--Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
+commonwealth?
+
+Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of
+allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the
+street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through
+spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after
+Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a
+shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to
+the past.
+
+Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.
+
+--Haines is gone, he said.
+
+--Is he?
+
+--I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
+you know, about Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht._ I couldn't bring him in
+to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.
+
+ _Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick
+ To greet the callous public.
+ Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish
+ In lean unlovely English._
+
+--The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.
+
+We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
+twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.
+
+--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
+Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
+world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the
+hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the
+living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the
+sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower
+of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the
+poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.
+
+From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
+
+--Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
+poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about
+_Hamlet._ He says: _il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même_, don't
+you know, _reading the book of himself_. He describes _Hamlet_ given in
+a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.
+
+His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
+
+ _HAMLET
+ ou
+ LE DISTRAIT
+ Pièce de Shakespeare_
+
+He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:
+
+--_Pièce de Shakespeare_, don't you know. It's so French. The French
+point of view. _Hamlet ou_...
+
+--The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.
+
+John Eglinton laughed.
+
+--Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
+distressingly shortsighted in some matters.
+
+Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.
+
+--A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not
+for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and
+spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one.
+Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to
+shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the
+concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.
+
+Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.
+
+_Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we had spared..._
+
+Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.
+
+--He will have it that _Hamlet_ is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said
+for Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our
+flesh creep.
+
+_List! List! O List!_
+
+My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.
+
+_If thou didst ever..._
+
+--What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
+into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
+manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris
+lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from _limbo patrum_, returning
+to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
+
+John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.
+
+Lifted.
+
+--It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with
+a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
+bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
+Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
+groundlings.
+
+Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.
+
+--Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
+by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the
+pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon
+has other thoughts.
+
+Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!
+
+--The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
+castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the
+ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who
+has studied _Hamlet_ all the years of his life which were not vanity in
+order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,
+the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,
+calling him by a name:
+
+_Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,_
+
+bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
+young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has
+died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.
+
+Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in
+the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
+to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been
+prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that
+he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you
+are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the
+guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
+
+--But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began
+impatiently.
+
+Art thou there, truepenny?
+
+--Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I
+mean when we read the poetry of _King Lear_ what is it to us how the
+poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de
+l'Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day,
+the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have _King Lear_: and it is
+immortal.
+
+Mr Best's face, appealed to, agreed.
+
+_Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, Mananaan, Mananaan
+MacLir..._
+
+How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?
+
+Marry, I wanted it.
+
+Take thou this noble.
+
+Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's
+daughter. Agenbite of inwit.
+
+Do you intend to pay it back?
+
+O, yes.
+
+When? Now?
+
+Well... No.
+
+When, then?
+
+I paid my way. I paid my way.
+
+Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe
+it.
+
+Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
+pound.
+
+Buzz. Buzz.
+
+But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under
+everchanging forms.
+
+I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
+
+A child Conmee saved from pandies.
+
+I, I and I. I.
+
+A.E.I.O.U.
+
+--Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?
+John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid
+for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.
+
+--She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She
+saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore
+his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed
+when he lay on his deathbed.
+
+Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into
+this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. _Liliata
+rutilantium._
+
+I wept alone.
+
+John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
+
+--The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got
+out of it as quickly and as best he could.
+
+--Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
+errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
+
+Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,
+softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.
+
+--A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of
+discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn
+from Xanthippe?
+
+--Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts
+into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (_absit
+nomen!_), Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever
+know. But neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlelectures saved him
+from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.
+
+--But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem
+to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.
+
+His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to
+chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless
+though maligned.
+
+--He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory.
+He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling
+_The girl I left behind me._ If the earthquake did not time it we should
+know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds,
+the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, _Venus and
+Adonis_, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London.
+Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and
+beautiful. Do you think the writer of _Antony and Cleopatra_, a
+passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose
+the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her
+and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy.
+Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He
+was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way.
+By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and
+twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping
+to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford
+wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.
+
+And my turn? When?
+
+Come!
+
+--Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,
+brightly.
+
+He murmured then with blond delight for all:
+
+_Between the acres of the rye These pretty countryfolk would lie._
+
+Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.
+
+A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its
+cooperative watch.
+
+--I am afraid I am due at the _Homestead._
+
+Whither away? Exploitable ground.
+
+--Are you going? John Eglinton's active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you
+at Moore's tonight? Piper is coming.
+
+--Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?
+
+Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.
+
+--I don't know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get
+away in time.
+
+Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. _Isis Unveiled._ Their Pali book we
+tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an
+Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma.
+The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship,
+ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies
+tend them i'the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god,
+he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls,
+shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled,
+whirling, they bewail.
+
+ _In quintessential triviality
+ For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt._
+
+--They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian
+said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering
+together a sheaf of our younger poets' verses. We are all looking
+forward anxiously.
+
+Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces,
+lighted, shone.
+
+See this. Remember.
+
+Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his
+ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with
+two index fingers. Aristotle's experiment. One or two? Necessity is that
+in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal,
+one hat is one hat.
+
+Listen.
+
+Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part.
+Longworth will give it a good puff in the _Express._ O, will he? I liked
+Colum's _Drover._ Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do you
+think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: _As in wild earth
+a Grecian vase_. Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi
+Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear
+Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's
+wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and
+Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says.
+Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in
+Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the
+grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever
+sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.
+
+Cordelia. _Cordoglio._ Lir's loneliest daughter.
+
+Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.
+
+--Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be
+so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...
+
+--O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
+correspondence.
+
+--I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.
+
+God ild you. The pigs' paper. Bullockbefriending.
+
+Synge has promised me an article for _Dana_ too. Are we going to be
+read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope
+you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.
+
+Stephen sat down.
+
+The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask said:
+
+--Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.
+
+He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a
+chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:
+
+--Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
+
+Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
+
+--Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
+first a sundering.
+
+--Yes.
+
+Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,
+from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women
+he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices,
+bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack
+dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as
+cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow
+grave and unforgiven.
+
+--Yes. So you think...
+
+The door closed behind the outgoer.
+
+Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and
+brooding air.
+
+A vestal's lamp.
+
+Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do
+had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of
+the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when
+he lived among women.
+
+Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
+Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the
+voice of that Egyptian highpriest. _In painted chambers loaded with
+tilebooks._
+
+They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of
+death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak
+their will.
+
+--Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most
+enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so
+much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.
+
+--But _Hamlet_ is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind
+of private paper, don't you know, of his private life. I mean, I don't
+care a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty...
+
+He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his
+defiance. His private papers in the original. _Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim
+in mo shagart_. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.
+
+Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:
+
+--I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but
+I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that
+Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.
+
+Bear with me.
+
+Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under
+wrinkled brows. A basilisk. _E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca_. Messer
+Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.
+
+--As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said,
+from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist
+weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where
+it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff
+time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image
+of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination,
+when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that
+which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the
+future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but
+by reflection from that which then I shall be.
+
+Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.
+
+--Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness
+might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from
+the son.
+
+Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.
+
+--That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.
+
+John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.
+
+--If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a
+drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan
+admired so much breathe another spirit.
+
+--The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.
+
+--There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a
+sundering.
+
+Said that.
+
+--If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over
+the hell of time of _King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida,_
+look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a
+man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles,
+prince of Tyre?
+
+Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.
+
+--A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.
+
+--The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant
+quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead
+to the town.
+
+Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypherjugglers
+going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good
+masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the
+sun, west of the moon: _Tir na n-og_. Booted the twain and staved.
+
+_How many miles to Dublin? Three score and ten, sir. Will we be there by
+candlelight?_
+
+--Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing
+period.
+
+--Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his
+name is, say of it?
+
+--Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
+that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter's
+child. _My dearest wife_, Pericles says, _was like this maid._ Will any
+man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?
+
+--The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. _l'art d'être
+grand_...
+
+--Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,
+another image?
+
+Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all
+men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus
+...
+
+--His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of
+all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
+images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
+grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.
+
+The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.
+
+--I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of
+the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George
+Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on
+Shakespeare in the _Saturday Review_ were surely brilliant. Oddly
+enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the
+sonnets. The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I own
+that if the poet must be rejected such a rejection would seem more in
+harmony with--what shall I say?--our notions of what ought not to have
+been.
+
+Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk's egg, prize
+of their fray.
+
+He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost
+love thy man?
+
+--That may be too, Stephen said. There's a saying of Goethe's which Mr
+Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because
+you will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is
+a _buonaroba,_ a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a
+scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord
+of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and he had written
+_Romeo and Juliet_. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He
+was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say) and he will
+never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game
+of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will not save him. No later
+undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded
+him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there
+remains to her woman's invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words,
+some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow
+of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like
+fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.
+
+They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.
+
+--The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the
+porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot
+know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls
+with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast
+with two backs that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were
+he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech
+(his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward.
+Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from
+Lucrece's bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its
+mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up
+to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because
+loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished
+personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he
+has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by
+Elsinore's rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard
+only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son
+consubstantial with the father.
+
+--Amen! was responded from the doorway.
+
+Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
+
+_Entr'acte_.
+
+A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forward, then
+blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.
+
+--You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he
+asked of Stephen.
+
+Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble.
+
+They make him welcome. _Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen._
+
+Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.
+
+He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself,
+Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends,
+stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on
+crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven
+and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His
+Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead
+when all the quick shall be dead already.
+
+Glo--o--ri--a in ex--cel--sis De--o.
+
+He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells
+aquiring.
+
+--Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion.
+Mr Mulligan, I'll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of
+Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.
+
+He smiled on all sides equally.
+
+Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:
+
+--Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.
+
+A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.
+
+--To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like
+Synge.
+
+Mr Best turned to him.
+
+--Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at
+the D. B. C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht_.
+
+--I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?
+
+--The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
+perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played
+Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining
+held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an
+Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He
+swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.
+
+--The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said,
+lifting his brilliant notebook. That _Portrait of Mr W. H._ where he
+proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.
+
+--For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.
+
+Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H.: who am I?
+
+--I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
+course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues,
+the colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very
+essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.
+
+His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.
+Tame essence of Wilde.
+
+You're darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan
+Deasy's ducats.
+
+How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.
+
+For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.
+
+Wit. You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks
+in. Lineaments of gratified desire.
+
+There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime
+send them. Yea, turtledove her.
+
+Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.
+
+--Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking.
+The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
+
+They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.
+
+Buck Mulligan's again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
+wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His
+mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.
+
+--Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!
+
+He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:
+
+--_The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the
+immense debtorship for a thing done._ Signed: Dedalus. Where did you
+launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four
+quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram!
+Malachi Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer!
+O, you priestified Kinchite!
+
+Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
+querulous brogue:
+
+--It's what I'm telling you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were,
+Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did
+for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I'm thinking, and he limp with
+leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery's
+sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.
+
+He wailed:
+
+--And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your
+conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
+drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.
+
+Stephen laughed.
+
+Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.
+
+--The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He
+heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to
+murder you.
+
+--Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
+
+Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
+ceiling.
+
+--Murder you! he laughed.
+
+Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash
+of lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words,
+palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,
+brandishing a winebottle. _C'est vendredi saint!_ Murthering Irish. His
+image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i'the forest.
+
+--Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.
+
+--... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
+_Diary of Master William Silence_ has found the hunting terms... Yes?
+What is it?
+
+--There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
+offering a card. From the _Freeman._ He wants to see the files of the
+_Kilkenny People_ for last year.
+
+--Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman?...
+
+He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,
+asked, creaked, asked:
+
+--Is he?... O, there!
+
+Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked
+with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
+honest broadbrim.
+
+--This gentleman? _Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People?_ To be sure. Good
+day, sir. _Kilkenny_... We have certainly...
+
+A patient silhouette waited, listening.
+
+--All the leading provincial... _Northern Whig, Cork Examiner,
+Enniscorthy Guardian,_ 1903... Will you please?... Evans, conduct this
+gentleman... If you just follow the atten... Or, please allow me...
+This way... Please, sir...
+
+Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
+dark figure following his hasty heels.
+
+The door closed.
+
+--The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.
+
+He jumped up and snatched the card.
+
+--What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.
+
+He rattled on:
+
+--Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
+museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that
+has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her.
+_Life of life, thy lips enkindle._
+
+Suddenly he turned to Stephen:
+
+--He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
+than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.
+Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! _The god pursuing the
+maiden hid_.
+
+--We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval.
+We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if
+at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.
+
+--Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
+from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy
+in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty
+years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary
+equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His
+art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the
+art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar
+of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter
+Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his
+back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had
+underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied
+there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love
+and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's story of the burgher's
+wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in _Richard
+III_ and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing,
+took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate,
+answered from the capon's blankets: _William the conqueror came before
+Richard III_. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O,
+and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is
+suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
+
+Cours la Reine. _Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
+Minette? Tu veux?_
+
+--The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's
+mother with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.
+
+Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
+
+--Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!
+
+--And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from
+neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those
+twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing
+behind the diamond panes?
+
+Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
+he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of
+Juno's eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do.
+Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
+
+Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
+
+--Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
+
+--Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
+spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
+
+Love that dare not speak its name.
+
+--As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
+lord.
+
+Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
+
+--It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
+other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
+stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a
+shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two
+deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained
+yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet
+Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.
+
+Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
+
+--The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
+deny that in the fifth scene of _Hamlet_ he has branded her with infamy
+tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years
+between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those
+women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her
+poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the
+first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her
+sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use
+granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.
+
+O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in
+royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her
+father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he
+has commended her to posterity.
+
+He faced their silence.
+
+ To whom thus Eglinton:
+ You mean the will.
+ But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
+ She was entitled to her widow's dower
+ At common law. His legal knowledge was great
+ Our judges tell us.
+ Him Satan fleers,
+ Mocker:
+ And therefore he left out her name
+ From the first draft but he did not leave out
+ The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
+ For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
+ And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
+ As I believe, to name her
+ He left her his
+ Secondbest
+ Bed.
+ _Punkt._
+ Leftherhis
+ Secondbest
+ Leftherhis
+ Bestabed
+ Secabest
+ Leftabed.
+
+
+Woa!
+
+--Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
+they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
+
+--He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
+and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
+shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her
+his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in
+peace?
+
+--It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
+Secondbest Best said finely.
+
+--_Separatio a mensa et a thalamo_, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
+smiled on.
+
+--Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.
+Let me think.
+
+--Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,
+Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays
+tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
+dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget
+Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.
+
+--Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...
+
+--He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for
+a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
+
+--What? asked Besteglinton.
+
+William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For
+terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...
+
+--Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought
+of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands
+and said: _All we can say is that life ran very high in those days._
+Lovely!
+
+Catamite.
+
+--The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
+ugling Eglinton.
+
+Steadfast John replied severe:
+
+--The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake
+and have it.
+
+Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?
+
+--And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
+own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself
+a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the
+famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship
+mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.
+He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted
+his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could
+Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to
+his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging
+and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked
+forth while the sheeny was yet alive: _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ with
+the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for
+witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in _Love's Labour Lost_.
+His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking
+enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter's theory
+of equivocation. The _Sea Venture_ comes home from Bermudas and the play
+Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.
+The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise
+carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired _The Merry Wives of
+Windsor_, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid
+meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.
+
+I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
+theolologicophilolological. _Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere._
+
+--Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared,'expectantly. Your dean
+of studies holds he was a holy Roman.
+
+_Sufflaminandus sum._
+
+--He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French
+polisher of Italian scandals.
+
+--A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him
+myriadminded.
+
+_Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
+inter multos._
+
+--Saint Thomas, Stephen began...
+
+--_Ora pro nobis_, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
+
+There he keened a wailing rune.
+
+--_Pogue mahone! Acushla machree!_ It's destroyed we are from this day!
+It's destroyed we are surely!
+
+All smiled their smiles.
+
+--Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
+reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different
+from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his
+wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the
+love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some
+stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with
+avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations
+are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the
+jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their
+affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old
+Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly
+to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold
+tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his
+wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his
+manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
+
+--Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
+
+--Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
+
+--Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
+
+--The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
+widow, is the will to die.
+
+_--Requiescat!_ Stephen prayed.
+
+ _What of all the will to do?
+ It has vanished long ago..._
+
+--She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the
+mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as
+rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven
+parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her
+at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in
+which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She
+read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the _Merry
+Wives_ and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought
+over _Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches_ and _The most Spiritual
+Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze_. Venus has twisted her
+lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age
+of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
+
+--History shows that to be true, _inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos_. The
+ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
+worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
+Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say
+that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man.
+I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
+
+Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping
+with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it
+him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman
+to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter
+Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with
+a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten
+forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.
+
+Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
+
+Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
+touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
+attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
+
+--A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
+evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.
+If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with
+thirtyfive years of life, _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_, with
+fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then
+you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No.
+The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to
+hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised
+that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first
+and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of
+conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an
+apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that
+mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect
+flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably
+because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.
+Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. _Amor matris_, subjective and
+objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be
+a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love
+him or he any son?
+
+What the hell are you driving at?
+
+I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.
+
+_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea._
+
+Are you condemned to do this?
+
+--They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
+annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
+hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
+lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
+grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
+unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
+care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth
+his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.
+
+In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
+
+--What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
+
+Am I a father? If I were?
+
+Shrunken uncertain hand.
+
+--Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
+field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
+Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if
+the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a
+father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet
+of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote _Hamlet_ he was not the
+father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt
+himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather,
+the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was
+born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.
+
+Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
+glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
+
+Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.
+
+--Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
+child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
+play's the thing! Let me parturiate!
+
+He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
+
+--As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the
+forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
+_Coriolanus._ His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in
+_King John._ Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the
+girls in _The Tempest_, in _Pericles,_ in _Winter's Tale_ are we know.
+Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may
+guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.
+
+--The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
+
+The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
+haste, quake, quack.
+
+Door closed. Cell. Day.
+
+They list. Three. They.
+
+I you he they.
+
+Come, mess.
+
+STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
+old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer
+one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up
+in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage
+filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are
+recorded in the works of sweet William.
+
+MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What's in a name?
+
+BEST: That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to
+say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake. _(Laughter)_
+
+
+BUCKMULLIGAN: (_Piano, diminuendo_)
+
+ _Then outspoke medical Dick
+ To his comrade medical Davy..._
+
+STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
+Richard Crookback, Edmund in _King Lear_, two bear the wicked uncles'
+names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his
+brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.
+
+BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name
+...
+
+_(Laughter)_
+
+QUAKERLYSTER: (_A tempo_) But he that filches from me my good name...
+
+STEPHEN: _(Stringendo)_ He has hidden his own name, a fair name,
+William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old
+Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in
+the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name
+is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend
+sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer
+than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name?
+That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that
+we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.
+It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the
+night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent
+constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His
+eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as
+he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from
+Shottery and from her arms.
+
+Both satisfied. I too.
+
+Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
+
+And from her arms.
+
+Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
+
+Read the skies. _Autontimorumenos. Bous Stephanoumenos._ Where's your
+configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: _sua donna.
+Già: di lui. gelindo risolve di non amare_ S. D.
+
+--What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
+celestial phenomenon?
+
+--A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.
+
+What more's to speak?
+
+Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
+
+_Stephanos,_ my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my
+feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
+
+--You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is
+strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
+
+Me, Magee and Mulligan.
+
+Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
+Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.
+_Pater, ait._ Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing
+be.
+
+Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
+
+--That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know,
+we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three
+brothers Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The
+third brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best
+prize.
+
+Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
+
+The quaker librarian springhalted near.
+
+--I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand you
+to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps
+I am anticipating?
+
+He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
+
+An attendant from the doorway called:
+
+--Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...
+
+--O, Father Dineen! Directly.
+
+Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
+
+John Eglinton touched the foil.
+
+--Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund.
+You kept them for the last, didn't you?
+
+--In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
+nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
+brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
+
+Lapwing.
+
+Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then
+Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They
+mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.
+
+Lapwing.
+
+I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.
+
+On.
+
+--You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
+took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
+Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann
+(what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard
+the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The
+other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his
+kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence,
+the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of _King Lear_ in which
+Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's _Arcadia_ and spatchcocked on to a
+Celtic legend older than history?
+
+--That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine
+a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. _Que
+voulez-vous?_ Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes
+Ulysses quote Aristotle.
+
+--Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or
+the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to
+Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of
+banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds
+uninterruptedly from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ onward till Prospero
+breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his
+book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in
+another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.
+It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married
+daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it
+was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will
+and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of
+my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin,
+committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the
+lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under
+which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty
+and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in
+the world he has created, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, twice in _As you
+like It_, in _The Tempest_, in _Hamlet,_ in _Measure for Measure_--and
+in all the other plays which I have not read.
+
+He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.
+
+Judge Eglinton summed up.
+
+--The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He
+is all in all.
+
+--He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
+All in all. In _Cymbeline,_ in _Othello_ he is bawd and cuckold. He acts
+and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he
+kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago
+ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
+
+--Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!
+
+Dark dome received, reverbed.
+
+--And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When
+all is said Dumas _fils_ (or is it Dumas _père?)_ is right. After God
+Shakespeare has created most.
+
+--Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after
+a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
+always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of
+life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The
+motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet _(père?)_ and Hamlet _fils._
+A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what
+though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for,
+Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom
+they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it:
+prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of
+love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the
+place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world
+without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck
+says: _If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated
+on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps
+will tend._ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through
+ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives,
+widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright
+who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light
+first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom
+the most Roman of catholics call _dio boia_, hangman god, is doubtless
+all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and
+cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there
+are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife
+unto himself.
+
+_--Eureka!_ Buck Mulligan cried. _Eureka!_
+
+Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's
+desk.
+
+--May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.
+
+He began to scribble on a slip of paper.
+
+Take some slips from the counter going out.
+
+--Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one,
+shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.
+
+He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.
+
+Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his
+variorum edition of _The Taming of the Shrew._
+
+--You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have
+brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe
+your own theory?
+
+--No, Stephen said promptly.
+
+--Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a
+dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.
+
+John Eclecticon doubly smiled.
+
+--Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect payment
+for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is
+some mystery in _Hamlet_ but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man
+Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes
+that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to
+visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor
+wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he
+believes his theory.
+
+I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help
+me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? _Egomen._ Who to unbelieve? Other
+chap.
+
+--You are the only contributor to _Dana_ who asks for pieces of silver.
+Then I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an
+article on economics.
+
+Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.
+
+--For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.
+
+Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then
+gravely said, honeying malice:
+
+--I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper
+Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the _Summa contra
+Gentiles_ in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and
+Rosalie, the coalquay whore.
+
+He broke away.
+
+--Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Aengus of the birds.
+
+Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts
+and offals.
+
+Stephen rose.
+
+Life is many days. This will end.
+
+--We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. _Notre ami_ Moore says
+Malachi Mulligan must be there.
+
+Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.
+
+--Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of
+Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
+straight?
+
+Laughing, he...
+
+Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.
+
+Lubber...
+
+Stephen followed a lubber...
+
+One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His
+lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe.
+
+Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt
+head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of
+no thought.
+
+What have I learned? Of them? Of me?
+
+Walk like Haines now.
+
+The constant readers' room. In the readers' book Cashel Boyle O'Connor
+Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet
+mad? The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.
+
+--O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...
+
+Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding:
+
+--A pleased bottom.
+
+The turnstile.
+
+Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...
+
+The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius.
+
+Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:
+
+_John Eglinton, my jo, John, Why won't you wed a wife?_
+
+He spluttered to the air:
+
+--O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
+playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a
+new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre! I
+smell the pubic sweat of monks.
+
+He spat blank.
+
+Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And
+left the _femme de trente ans._ And why no other children born? And his
+first child a girl?
+
+Afterwit. Go back.
+
+The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,
+minion of pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair.
+
+Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...
+
+--Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there...
+
+Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:
+
+ _I hardly hear the purlieu cry
+ Or a tommy talk as I pass one by
+ Before my thoughts begin to run
+ On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,
+ The same that had the wooden leg
+ And that filibustering filibeg
+ That never dared to slake his drouth,
+ Magee that had the chinless mouth.
+ Being afraid to marry on earth
+ They masturbated for all they were worth._
+
+
+Jest on. Know thyself.
+
+Halted, below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.
+
+--Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing
+black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.
+
+A laugh tripped over his lips.
+
+--Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that
+old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets you
+a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus.
+Couldn't you do the Yeats touch?
+
+He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:
+
+--The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.
+One thinks of Homer.
+
+He stopped at the stairfoot.
+
+--I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
+
+The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's morrice
+with caps of indices.
+
+In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet: _Everyman His
+own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three
+orgasms) by Ballocky Mulligan._
+
+
+He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying:
+
+--The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
+
+He read, _marcato:_
+
+--Characters:
+
+ TODY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)
+ CRAB (a bushranger)
+ MEDICAL DICK )
+ and ) (two birds with one stone)
+ MEDICAL DAVY )
+ MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)
+ FRESH NELLY
+ and
+ ROSALIE (the coalquay whore).
+
+He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen:
+and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:
+
+--O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to
+lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,
+multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!
+
+--The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted
+them.
+
+About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.
+
+Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,
+if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must
+come to, ineluctably.
+
+My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.
+
+A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.
+
+--Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.
+
+The portico.
+
+Here I watched the birds for augury. Aengus of the birds. They go, they
+come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots
+after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.
+
+--The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you
+see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient
+mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.
+
+Manner of Oxenford.
+
+Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.
+
+A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the gateway,
+under portcullis barbs.
+
+They followed.
+
+Offend me still. Speak on.
+
+Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail
+from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw
+of softness softly were blown.
+
+Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic:
+from wide earth an altar.
+
+ _Laud we the gods
+ And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
+ From our bless'd altars._
+
+
+The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch
+in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to
+three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy's name again?
+Dignam. Yes. _Vere dignum et iustum est._ Brother Swan was the person
+to see. Mr Cunningham's letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good
+practical catholic: useful at mission time.
+
+A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
+crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
+sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very
+reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
+purse held, he knew, one silver crown.
+
+Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long,
+of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs,
+ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey's words:
+_If I had served my God as I have served my king He would not have
+abandoned me in my old days._ He walked by the treeshade of sunnywinking
+leaves: and towards him came the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.
+
+--Very well, indeed, father. And you, father?
+
+Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton
+probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at
+Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that.
+And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to
+be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was
+very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O,
+yes: a very great success. A wonderful man really.
+
+Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.
+Iooking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M.P.
+Yes, he would certainly call.
+
+--Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.
+
+Father Conmee doffed his silk hat and smiled, as he took leave, at the
+jet beads of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again,
+in going. He had cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.
+
+Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father
+Bernard Vaughan's droll eyes and cockney voice.
+
+--Pilate! Wy don't you old back that owlin mob?
+
+A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his
+way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish.
+Of good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?
+
+O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.
+
+Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy
+square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house. Aha. And were
+they good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his
+name? Jack Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little man?
+His name was Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.
+
+Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to Master Brunny Lynam and
+pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.
+
+--But mind you don't post yourself into the box, little man, he said.
+
+The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed:
+
+--O, sir.
+
+--Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.
+
+Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee's letter
+to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox. Father
+Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square
+east.
+
+Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, in silk hat, slate
+frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender
+trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave
+deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady
+Maxwell at the corner of Dignam's court.
+
+Was that not Mrs M'Guinness?
+
+Mrs M'Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the
+farther footpath along which she sailed. And Father Conmee smiled and
+saluted. How did she do?
+
+A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to
+think that she was a pawnbroker! Well, now! Such a... what should he
+say?... such a queenly mien.
+
+Father Conmee walked down Great Charles street and glanced at the shutup
+free church on his left. The reverend T. R. Greene B.A. will (D.V.)
+speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on him to say
+a few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible ignorance. They
+acted according to their lights.
+
+Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North Circular
+road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an important
+thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.
+
+A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All
+raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly.
+Christian brother boys.
+
+Father Conmee smelt incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint
+Joseph's church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females.
+Father Conmee raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous: but
+occasionally they were also badtempered.
+
+Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift
+nobleman. And now it was an office or something.
+
+Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted
+by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father
+Conmee saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came
+from baconflitches and ample cools of butter. He passed Grogan's the
+Tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful
+catastrophe in New York. In America those things were continually
+happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared. Still, an
+act of perfect contrition.
+
+Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin's publichouse against the window of
+which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and were saluted.
+
+Father Conmee passed H. J. O'Neill's funeral establishment where Corny
+Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay.
+A constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted
+the constable. In Youkstetter's, the porkbutcher's, Father Conmee
+observed pig's puddings, white and black and red, lie neatly curled in
+tubes.
+
+Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a
+turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty
+straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above
+him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of
+the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it
+out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor
+people.
+
+On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S.J. of saint Francis
+Xavier's church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound
+tram.
+
+Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of
+saint Agatha's church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.
+
+At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for
+he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.
+
+Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked with
+care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a sixpence
+and five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into his purse.
+Passing the ivy church he reflected that the ticket inspector usually
+made his visit when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket. The
+solemnity of the occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive
+for a journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum.
+
+It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father
+Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee
+supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with
+the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently,
+tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily,
+sweetly.
+
+Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also that
+the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of the
+seat.
+
+Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the
+mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.
+
+At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an old
+woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled the
+bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and
+a marketnet: and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and
+basket down: and Father Conmee thought that, as she had nearly passed
+the end of the penny fare, she was one of those good souls who had
+always to be told twice _bless you, my child,_ that they have been
+absolved, _pray for me._ But they had so many worries in life, so many
+cares, poor creatures.
+
+From the hoardings Mr Eugene Stratton grimaced with thick niggerlips at
+Father Conmee.
+
+Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow men and
+of his sermon on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African mission and of
+the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and brown and
+yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last
+hour came like a thief in the night. That book by the Belgian jesuit,
+_Le Nombre des Élus,_ seemed to Father Conmee a reasonable plea. Those
+were millions of human souls created by God in His Own likeness to
+whom the faith had not (D.V.) been brought. But they were God's souls,
+created by God. It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all
+be lost, a waste, if one might say.
+
+At the Howth road stop Father Conmee alighted, was saluted by the
+conductor and saluted in his turn.
+
+The Malahide road was quiet. It pleased Father Conmee, road and name.
+The joybells were ringing in gay Malahide. Lord Talbot de Malahide,
+immediate hereditary lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining.
+Then came the call to arms and she was maid, wife and widow in one day.
+Those were old worldish days, loyal times in joyous townlands, old times
+in the barony.
+
+Father Conmee, walking, thought of his little book _Old Times in the
+Barony_ and of the book that might be written about jesuit houses and of
+Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere.
+
+A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough Ennel,
+Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening,
+not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the
+jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed
+adultery fully, _eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris,_ with
+her husband's brother? She would half confess if she had not all sinned
+as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband's brother.
+
+Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for
+man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our ways.
+
+Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and
+honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at
+smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit
+clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble,
+were impalmed by Don John Conmee.
+
+It was a charming day.
+
+The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages,
+curtseying to him with ample underleaves. The sky showed him a flock of
+small white clouds going slowly down the wind. _Moutonner,_ the French
+said. A just and homely word.
+
+Father Conmee, reading his office, watched a flock of muttoning clouds
+over Rathcoffey. His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble of
+Clongowes field. He walked there, reading in the evening, and heard
+the cries of the boys' lines at their play, young cries in the quiet
+evening. He was their rector: his reign was mild.
+
+Father Conmee drew off his gloves and took his rededged breviary out. An
+ivory bookmark told him the page.
+
+Nones. He should have read that before lunch. But lady Maxwell had come.
+
+Father Conmee read in secret _Pater_ and _Ave_ and crossed his breast.
+_Deus in adiutorium._
+
+He walked calmly and read mutely the nones, walking and reading till he
+came to _Res_ in _Beati immaculati: Principium verborum tuorum veritas:
+in eternum omnia indicia iustitiae tuae._
+
+A flushed young man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came a
+young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man raised
+his cap abruptly: the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care
+detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.
+
+Father Conmee blessed both gravely and turned a thin page of his
+breviary. _Sin: Principes persecuti sunt me gratis: et a verbis tuis
+formidavit cor meum._
+
+* * * * *
+
+Corny Kelleher closed his long daybook and glanced with his drooping eye
+at a pine coffinlid sentried in a corner. He pulled himself erect,
+went to it and, spinning it on its axle, viewed its shape and brass
+furnishings. Chewing his blade of hay he laid the coffinlid by and came
+to the doorway. There he tilted his hatbrim to give shade to his eyes
+and leaned against the doorcase, looking idly out.
+
+Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge.
+
+Corny Kelleher locked his largefooted boots and gazed, his hat
+downtilted, chewing his blade of hay.
+
+Constable 57C, on his beat, stood to pass the time of day.
+
+--That's a fine day, Mr Kelleher.
+
+--Ay, Corny Kelleher said.
+
+--It's very close, the constable said.
+
+Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth
+while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a
+coin.
+
+--What's the best news? he asked.
+
+--I seen that particular party last evening, the constable said with
+bated breath.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A onelegged sailor crutched himself round MacConnell's corner, skirting
+Rabaiotti's icecream car, and jerked himself up Eccles street. Towards
+Larry O'Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, he growled unamiably:
+
+--_For England_...
+
+He swung himself violently forward past Katey and Boody Dedalus, halted
+and growled:
+
+--_home and beauty._
+
+J. J. O'Molloy's white careworn face was told that Mr Lambert was in the
+warehouse with a visitor.
+
+A stout lady stopped, took a copper coin from her purse and dropped it
+into the cap held out to her. The sailor grumbled thanks, glanced sourly
+at the unheeding windows, sank his head and swung himself forward four
+strides.
+
+He halted and growled angrily:
+
+--_For England_...
+
+Two barefoot urchins, sucking long liquorice laces, halted near him,
+gaping at his stump with their yellowslobbered mouths.
+
+He swung himself forward in vigorous jerks, halted, lifted his head
+towards a window and bayed deeply:
+
+--_home and beauty._
+
+The gay sweet chirping whistling within went on a bar or two, ceased.
+The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card _Unfurnished Apartments_
+slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm shone, was
+seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut shiftstraps. A
+woman's hand flung forth a coin over the area railings. It fell on the
+path.
+
+One of the urchins ran to it, picked it up and dropped it into the
+minstrel's cap, saying:
+
+--There, sir.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Katey and Boody Dedalus shoved in the door of the closesteaming kitchen.
+
+--Did you put in the books? Boody asked.
+
+Maggy at the range rammed down a greyish mass beneath bubbling suds
+twice with her potstick and wiped her brow.
+
+--They wouldn't give anything on them, she said.
+
+Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields, his thinsocked ankles
+tickled by stubble.
+
+--Where did you try? Boody asked.
+
+--M'Guinness's.
+
+Boody stamped her foot and threw her satchel on the table.
+
+--Bad cess to her big face! she cried.
+
+Katey went to the range and peered with squinting eyes.
+
+--What's in the pot? she asked.
+
+--Shirts, Maggy said.
+
+Boody cried angrily:
+
+--Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?
+
+Katey, lifting the kettlelid in a pad of her stained skirt, asked:
+
+--And what's in this?
+
+A heavy fume gushed in answer.
+
+--Peasoup, Maggy said.
+
+--Where did you get it? Katey asked.
+
+--Sister Mary Patrick, Maggy said.
+
+The lacquey rang his bell.
+
+--Barang!
+
+Boody sat down at the table and said hungrily:
+
+--Give us it here.
+
+Maggy poured yellow thick soup from the kettle into a bowl. Katey,
+sitting opposite Boody, said quietly, as her fingertip lifted to her
+mouth random crumbs:
+
+--A good job we have that much. Where's Dilly?
+
+--Gone to meet father, Maggy said.
+
+Boody, breaking big chunks of bread into the yellow soup, added:
+
+--Our father who art not in heaven.
+
+Maggy, pouring yellow soup in Katey's bowl, exclaimed:
+
+--Boody! For shame!
+
+A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the
+Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed
+around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains,
+between the Customhouse old dock and George's quay.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The blond girl in Thornton's bedded the wicker basket with rustling
+fibre. Blazes Boylan handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper
+and a small jar.
+
+--Put these in first, will you? he said.
+
+--Yes, sir, the blond girl said. And the fruit on top.
+
+--That'll do, game ball, Blazes Boylan said.
+
+She bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe
+shamefaced peaches.
+
+Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the
+fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red
+tomatoes, sniffing smells.
+
+H. E. L. Y.'S filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane,
+plodding towards their goal.
+
+He turned suddenly from a chip of strawberries, drew a gold watch from
+his fob and held it at its chain's length.
+
+--Can you send them by tram? Now?
+
+A darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the hawker's
+cart.
+
+--Certainly, sir. Is it in the city?
+
+--O, yes, Blazes Boylan said. Ten minutes.
+
+The blond girl handed him a docket and pencil.
+
+--Will you write the address, sir?
+
+Blazes Boylan at the counter wrote and pushed the docket to her.
+
+--Send it at once, will you? he said. It's for an invalid.
+
+--Yes, sir. I will, sir.
+
+Blazes Boylan rattled merry money in his trousers' pocket.
+
+--What's the damage? he asked.
+
+The blond girl's slim fingers reckoned the fruits.
+
+Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He took
+a red carnation from the tall stemglass.
+
+--This for me? he asked gallantly.
+
+The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie
+a bit crooked, blushing.
+
+--Yes, sir, she said.
+
+Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches.
+
+Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the
+red flower between his smiling teeth.
+
+--May I say a word to your telephone, missy? he asked roguishly.
+
+* * * * *
+
+_--Ma!_ Almidano Artifoni said.
+
+He gazed over Stephen's shoulder at Goldsmith's knobby poll.
+
+Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore,
+gripping the handrests. Palefaces. Men's arms frankly round their
+stunted forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned porch of
+the bank of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed.
+
+--_Anch'io ho avuto di queste idee, ALMIDANO ARTIFONI SAID, quand' ero
+giovine come Lei. Eppoi mi sono convinto che il mondo è una bestia.
+É peccato. Perchè la sua voce... sarebbe un cespite di rendita, via.
+Invece, Lei si sacrifica._
+
+--_Sacrifizio incruento,_ Stephen said smiling, swaying his ashplant in
+slow swingswong from its midpoint, lightly.
+
+_--Speriamo,_ the round mustachioed face said pleasantly. _Ma, dia retta
+a me. Ci rifletta_.
+
+By the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram
+unloaded straggling Highland soldiers of a band.
+
+--_Ci rifletterò,_ Stephen said, glancing down the solid trouserleg.
+
+--_Ma, sul serio, eh?_ Almidano Artifoni said.
+
+His heavy hand took Stephen's firmly. Human eyes. They gazed curiously
+an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram.
+
+_--Eccolo,_ Almidano Artifoni said in friendly haste. _Venga a trovarmi
+e ci pensi. Addio, caro._
+
+--_Arrivederla, maestro,_ Stephen said, raising his hat when his hand
+was freed. _E grazie._
+
+--_Di che?_ Almidano Artifoni said. _Scusi, eh? Tante belle cose!_
+
+Almidano Artifoni, holding up a baton of rolled music as a signal,
+trotted on stout trousers after the Dalkey tram. In vain he trotted,
+signalling in vain among the rout of barekneed gillies smuggling
+implements of music through Trinity gates.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of _The Woman in White_
+far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her
+typewriter.
+
+Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion?
+Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.
+
+The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled them:
+six.
+
+Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:
+
+--16 June 1904.
+
+Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny's corner and the slab
+where Wolfe Tone's statue was not, eeled themselves turning H. E. L.
+Y.'S and plodded back as they had come.
+
+Then she stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming
+soubrette, and, listlessly lolling, scribbled on the jotter sixteens and
+capital esses. Mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She's not nicelooking,
+is she? The way she's holding up her bit of a skirt. Wonder will that
+fellow be at the band tonight. If I could get that dressmaker to make a
+concertina skirt like Susy Nagle's. They kick out grand. Shannon and
+all the boatclub swells never took his eyes off her. Hope to goodness he
+won't keep me here till seven.
+
+The telephone rang rudely by her ear.
+
+--Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five. Only
+those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir. Then I can go
+after six if you're not back. A quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven and
+six. I'll tell him. Yes: one, seven, six.
+
+She scribbled three figures on an envelope.
+
+--Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from SPORT was in looking for you. Mr
+Lenehan, yes. He said he'll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes, sir.
+I'll ring them up after five.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Two pink faces turned in the flare of the tiny torch.
+
+--Who's that? Ned Lambert asked. Is that Crotty?
+
+--Ringabella and Crosshaven, a voice replied groping for foothold.
+
+--Hello, Jack, is that yourself? Ned Lambert said, raising in salute his
+pliant lath among the flickering arches. Come on. Mind your steps there.
+
+The vesta in the clergyman's uplifted hand consumed itself in a long
+soft flame and was let fall. At their feet its red speck died: and
+mouldy air closed round them.
+
+--How interesting! a refined accent said in the gloom.
+
+--Yes, sir, Ned Lambert said heartily. We are standing in the historic
+council chamber of saint Mary's abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed
+himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin.
+O'Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days.
+The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and
+the original jews' temple was here too before they built their synagogue
+over in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were you?
+
+--No, Ned.
+
+--He rode down through Dame walk, the refined accent said, if my memory
+serves me. The mansion of the Kildares was in Thomas court.
+
+--That's right, Ned Lambert said. That's quite right, sir.
+
+--If you will be so kind then, the clergyman said, the next time to
+allow me perhaps...
+
+--Certainly, Ned Lambert said. Bring the camera whenever you like. I'll
+get those bags cleared away from the windows. You can take it from here
+or from here.
+
+In the still faint light he moved about, tapping with his lath the piled
+seedbags and points of vantage on the floor.
+
+From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.
+
+--I'm deeply obliged, Mr Lambert, the clergyman said. I won't trespass
+on your valuable time...
+
+--You're welcome, sir, Ned Lambert said. Drop in whenever you like. Next
+week, say. Can you see?
+
+--Yes, yes. Good afternoon, Mr Lambert. Very pleased to have met you.
+
+--Pleasure is mine, sir, Ned Lambert answered.
+
+He followed his guest to the outlet and then whirled his lath away among
+the pillars. With J. J. O'Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary's abbey
+where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut meal,
+O'Connor, Wexford.
+
+He stood to read the card in his hand.
+
+--The reverend Hugh C. Love, Rathcoffey. Present address: Saint
+Michael's, Sallins. Nice young chap he is. He's writing a book about the
+Fitzgeralds he told me. He's well up in history, faith.
+
+The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging
+twig.
+
+--I thought you were at a new gunpowder plot, J. J. O'Molloy said.
+
+Ned Lambert cracked his fingers in the air.
+
+--God! he cried. I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare
+after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? _I'm bloody
+sorry I did it,_ says he, _but I declare to God I thought the archbishop
+was inside._ He mightn't like it, though. What? God, I'll tell him
+anyhow. That was the great earl, the Fitzgerald Mor. Hot members they
+were all of them, the Geraldines.
+
+The horses he passed started nervously under their slack harness. He
+slapped a piebald haunch quivering near him and cried:
+
+--Woa, sonny!
+
+He turned to J. J. O'Molloy and asked:
+
+--Well, Jack. What is it? What's the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.
+
+With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an
+instant, sneezed loudly.
+
+--Chow! he said. Blast you!
+
+--The dust from those sacks, J. J. O'Molloy said politely.
+
+--No, Ned Lambert gasped, I caught a... cold night before... blast
+your soul... night before last... and there was a hell of a lot of
+draught...
+
+He held his handkerchief ready for the coming...
+
+--I was... Glasnevin this morning... poor little... what do you call
+him... Chow!... Mother of Moses!
+
+* * * * *
+
+Tom Rochford took the top disk from the pile he clasped against his
+claret waistcoat.
+
+--See? he said. Say it's turn six. In here, see. Turn Now On.
+
+He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove, wobbled
+a while, ceased, ogling them: six.
+
+Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the
+consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying
+the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the
+admiralty division of king's bench to the court of appeal an elderly
+female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of
+great amplitude.
+
+--See? he said. See now the last one I put in is over here: Turns Over.
+The impact. Leverage, see?
+
+He showed them the rising column of disks on the right.
+
+--Smart idea, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. So a fellow coming in late
+can see what turn is on and what turns are over.
+
+--See? Tom Rochford said.
+
+He slid in a disk for himself: and watched it shoot, wobble, ogle, stop:
+four. Turn Now On.
+
+--I'll see him now in the Ormond, Lenehan said, and sound him. One good
+turn deserves another.
+
+--Do, Tom Rochford said. Tell him I'm Boylan with impatience.
+
+--Goodnight, M'Coy said abruptly. When you two begin
+
+Nosey Flynn stooped towards the lever, snuffling at it.
+
+--But how does it work here, Tommy? he asked.
+
+--Tooraloo, Lenehan said. See you later.
+
+He followed M'Coy out across the tiny square of Crampton court.
+
+--He's a hero, he said simply.
+
+--I know, M'Coy said. The drain, you mean.
+
+--Drain? Lenehan said. It was down a manhole.
+
+They passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie Kendall, charming
+soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile.
+
+Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall
+Lenehan showed M'Coy how the whole thing was. One of those manholes like
+a bloody gaspipe and there was the poor devil stuck down in it, half
+choked with sewer gas. Down went Tom Rochford anyhow, booky's vest and
+all, with the rope round him. And be damned but he got the rope round
+the poor devil and the two were hauled up.
+
+--The act of a hero, he said.
+
+At the Dolphin they halted to allow the ambulance car to gallop past
+them for Jervis street.
+
+--This way, he said, walking to the right. I want to pop into Lynam's
+to see Sceptre's starting price. What's the time by your gold watch and
+chain?
+
+M'Coy peered into Marcus Tertius Moses' sombre office, then at O'Neill's
+clock.
+
+--After three, he said. Who's riding her?
+
+--O. Madden, Lenehan said. And a game filly she is.
+
+While he waited in Temple bar M'Coy dodged a banana peel with gentle
+pushes of his toe from the path to the gutter. Fellow might damn easy
+get a nasty fall there coming along tight in the dark.
+
+The gates of the drive opened wide to give egress to the viceregal
+cavalcade.
+
+--Even money, Lenehan said returning. I knocked against Bantam Lyons
+in there going to back a bloody horse someone gave him that hasn't an
+earthly. Through here.
+
+They went up the steps and under Merchants' arch. A darkbacked figure
+scanned books on the hawker's cart.
+
+--There he is, Lenehan said.
+
+--Wonder what he's buying, M'Coy said, glancing behind.
+
+--_Leopoldo or the Bloom is on the Rye,_ Lenehan said.
+
+--He's dead nuts on sales, M'Coy said. I was with him one day and he
+bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were
+fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and
+comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about.
+
+Lenehan laughed.
+
+--I'll tell you a damn good one about comets' tails, he said. Come over
+in the sun.
+
+They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by the
+riverwall.
+
+Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's,
+carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.
+
+--There was a long spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said
+eagerly. The annual dinner, you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord
+mayor was there, Val Dillon it was, and sir Charles Cameron and Dan
+Dawson spoke and there was music. Bartell d'Arcy sang and Benjamin
+Dollard...
+
+--I know, M'Coy broke in. My missus sang there once.
+
+--Did she? Lenehan said.
+
+A card _Unfurnished Apartments_ reappeared on the windowsash of number 7
+Eccles street.
+
+He checked his tale a moment but broke out in a wheezy laugh.
+
+--But wait till I tell you, he said. Delahunt of Camden street had the
+catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were
+there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and curacao to
+which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came
+solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies...
+
+--I know, M'Coy said. The year the missus was there...
+
+Lenehan linked his arm warmly.
+
+--But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after
+all the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o'clock the
+morning after the night before. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter's
+night on the Featherbed Mountain. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one
+side of the car and I was with the wife on the other. We started singing
+glees and duets: _Lo, the early beam of morning_. She was well primed
+with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband. Every jolt the
+bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell's delights! She
+has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
+
+He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
+
+--I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time.
+Know what I mean?
+
+His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in
+delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
+
+--The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey
+mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets
+in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and
+Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was
+lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last
+she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. _And what star is that,
+Poldy?_ says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. _That one, is it?_
+says Chris Callinan, _sure that's only what you might call a pinprick._
+By God, he wasn't far wide of the mark.
+
+Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.
+
+--I'm weak, he gasped.
+
+M'Coy's white face smiled about it at instants and grew grave. Lenehan
+walked on again. He lifted his yachtingcap and scratched his hindhead
+rapidly. He glanced sideways in the sunlight at M'Coy.
+
+--He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one
+of your common or garden... you know... There's a touch of the artist
+about old Bloom.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of _The Awful Disclosures of Maria
+Monk,_ then of Aristotle's _Masterpiece._ Crooked botched print. Plates:
+infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered
+cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All
+butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute
+somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.
+
+He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: _Tales of the Ghetto_
+by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.
+
+--That I had, he said, pushing it by.
+
+The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.
+
+--Them are two good ones, he said.
+
+Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth.
+He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his
+unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.
+
+On O'Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay
+apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.
+
+Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. _Fair Tyrants_ by James
+Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.
+
+He opened it. Thought so.
+
+A woman's voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen: the man.
+
+No: she wouldn't like that much. Got her it once.
+
+He read the other title: _Sweets of Sin_. More in her line. Let us see.
+
+He read where his finger opened.
+
+_--All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on
+wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For raoul!_
+
+Yes. This. Here. Try.
+
+--_Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands
+felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé._
+
+Yes. Take this. The end.
+
+--_You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.
+The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her
+queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played
+round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly._
+
+Mr Bloom read again: _The beautiful woman._
+
+Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amply
+amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched
+themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (_for Him! For Raoul!_).
+Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (_her heaving embonpoint!_).
+Feel! Press! Crushed! Sulphur dung of lions!
+
+Young! Young!
+
+An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of
+chancery, king's bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in
+the lord chancellor's court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the
+admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the
+Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal
+reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident
+and Guarantee Corporation.
+
+Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy
+curtains. The shopman's uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven
+reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, puked phlegm on the
+floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it,
+and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.
+
+Mr Bloom beheld it.
+
+Mastering his troubled breath, he said:
+
+--I'll take this one.
+
+The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
+
+--_Sweets of Sin,_ he said, tapping on it. That's a good one.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell
+twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet.
+
+Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the
+bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely
+curtains. Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas. Any
+advance on five shillings? Going for five shillings.
+
+The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:
+
+--Barang!
+
+Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint.
+J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched
+necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.
+
+Mr Dedalus, tugging a long moustache, came round from Williams's row. He
+halted near his daughter.
+
+--It's time for you, she said.
+
+--Stand up straight for the love of the lord Jesus, Mr Dedalus said.
+Are you trying to imitate your uncle John, the cornetplayer, head upon
+shoulder? Melancholy God!
+
+Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr Dedalus placed his hands on them and
+held them back.
+
+--Stand up straight, girl, he said. You'll get curvature of the spine.
+Do you know what you look like?
+
+He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulders
+and dropping his underjaw.
+
+--Give it up, father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.
+
+Mr Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.
+
+--Did you get any money? Dilly asked.
+
+--Where would I get money? Mr Dedalus said. There is no-one in Dublin
+would lend me fourpence.
+
+--You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.
+
+--How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek.
+
+Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along
+James's street.
+
+--I know you did, Dilly answered. Were you in the Scotch house now?
+
+--I was not, then, Mr Dedalus said, smiling. Was it the little nuns
+taught you to be so saucy? Here.
+
+He handed her a shilling.
+
+--See if you can do anything with that, he said.
+
+--I suppose you got five, Dilly said. Give me more than that.
+
+--Wait awhile, Mr Dedalus said threateningly. You're like the rest of
+them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother
+died. But wait awhile. You'll all get a short shrift and a long day from
+me. Low blackguardism! I'm going to get rid of you. Wouldn't care if I
+was stretched out stiff. He's dead. The man upstairs is dead.
+
+He left her and walked on. Dilly followed quickly and pulled his coat.
+
+--Well, what is it? he said, stopping.
+
+The lacquey rang his bell behind their backs.
+
+--Barang!
+
+--Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried, turning on him.
+
+The lacquey, aware of comment, shook the lolling clapper of his bell but
+feebly:
+
+--Bang!
+
+Mr Dedalus stared at him.
+
+--Watch him, he said. It's instructive. I wonder will he allow us to
+talk.
+
+--You got more than that, father, Dilly said.
+
+--I'm going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I'll leave
+you all where Jesus left the jews. Look, there's all I have. I got
+two shillings from Jack Power and I spent twopence for a shave for the
+funeral.
+
+He drew forth a handful of copper coins, nervously.
+
+--Can't you look for some money somewhere? Dilly said.
+
+Mr Dedalus thought and nodded.
+
+--I will, he said gravely. I looked all along the gutter in O'Connell
+street. I'll try this one now.
+
+--You're very funny, Dilly said, grinning.
+
+--Here, Mr Dedalus said, handing her two pennies. Get a glass of milk
+for yourself and a bun or a something. I'll be home shortly.
+
+He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on.
+
+The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of
+Parkgate.
+
+--I'm sure you have another shilling, Dilly said.
+
+The lacquey banged loudly.
+
+Mr Dedalus amid the din walked off, murmuring to himself with a pursing
+mincing mouth gently:
+
+--The little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn't do
+anything! O, sure they wouldn't really! Is it little sister Monica!
+
+* * * * *
+
+From the sundial towards James's gate walked Mr Kernan, pleased with the
+order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James's street,
+past Shackleton's offices. Got round him all right. How do you do, Mr
+Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other
+establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping alive.
+Lovely weather we're having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country. Those
+farmers are always grumbling. I'll just take a thimbleful of your best
+gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that
+General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And
+heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal
+thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most
+scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the
+firehose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever
+allowed a boat like that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins.
+You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look
+at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were
+bad here.
+
+I smiled at him. _America,_ I said quietly, just like that. _What is
+it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true?_
+That's a fact.
+
+Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there's money going there's
+always someone to pick it up.
+
+Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy
+appearance. Bowls them over.
+
+--Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?
+
+--Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.
+
+Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter
+Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson
+street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built
+under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street
+club toff had it probably. John Mulligan, the manager of the Hibernian
+bank, gave me a very sharp eye yesterday on Carlisle bridge as if he
+remembered me.
+
+Aham! Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road.
+Gentleman. And now, Mr Crimmins, may we have the honour of your custom
+again, sir. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying
+has it.
+
+North wall and sir John Rogerson's quay, with hulls and anchorchains,
+sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the
+ferrywash, Elijah is coming.
+
+Mr Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course.
+Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy
+body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Ned
+Lambert's brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He's as like it as damn
+it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash
+like that. Damn like him.
+
+Aham! Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good
+drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his
+fat strut.
+
+Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope.
+Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant's wife
+drove by in her noddy.
+
+Bad times those were. Well, well. Over and done with. Great topers too.
+Fourbottle men.
+
+Let me see. Is he buried in saint Michan's? Or no, there was a midnight
+burial in Glasnevin. Corpse brought in through a secret door in the
+wall. Dignam is there now. Went out in a puff. Well, well. Better turn
+down here. Make a detour.
+
+Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by
+the corner of Guinness's visitors' waitingroom. Outside the Dublin
+Distillers Company's stores an outside car without fare or jarvey stood,
+the reins knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some Tipperary
+bosthoon endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway horse.
+
+Denis Breen with his tomes, weary of having waited an hour in John
+Henry Menton's office, led his wife over O'Connell bridge, bound for the
+office of Messrs Collis and Ward.
+
+Mr Kernan approached Island street.
+
+Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those
+reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington. When you look back on it all
+now in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly's. No
+cardsharping then. One of those fellows got his hand nailed to the table
+by a dagger. Somewhere here lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from major
+Sirr. Stables behind Moira house.
+
+Damn good gin that was.
+
+Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that
+sham squire, with his violet gloves gave him away. Course they were
+on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that
+is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad
+touchingly. Masterly rendition.
+
+_At the siege of Ross did my father fall._
+
+A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping,
+leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades.
+
+Mr Kernan hurried forward, blowing pursily.
+
+His Excellency! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it! What a
+pity!
+
+* * * * *
+
+Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers
+prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust
+darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept
+on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies,
+leprous and winedark stones.
+
+Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights
+shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of
+their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest
+them.
+
+She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman,
+rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed
+silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her
+hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.
+
+Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished again his gem, turned it
+and held it at the point of his Moses' beard. Grandfather ape gloating
+on a stolen hoard.
+
+And you who wrest old images from the burial earth? The brainsick words
+of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat
+standing from everlasting to everlasting.
+
+Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through
+Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded tired umbrella,
+one with a midwife's bag in which eleven cockles rolled.
+
+The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the
+powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always
+without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I
+between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.
+Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me
+you who can. Bawd and butcher were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A
+look around.
+
+Yes, quite true. Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time. You say
+right, sir. A Monday morning, 'twas so, indeed.
+
+Stephen went down Bedford row, the handle of the ash clacking against
+his shoulderblade. In Clohissey's window a faded 1860 print of Heenan
+boxing Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood
+round the roped prizering. The heavyweights in tight loincloths proposed
+gently each to other his bulbous fists. And they are throbbing: heroes'
+hearts.
+
+He turned and halted by the slanted bookcart.
+
+--Twopence each, the huckster said. Four for sixpence.
+
+Tattered pages. _The Irish Beekeeper. Life and Miracles of the Curé of
+Ars. Pocket Guide to Killarney._
+
+I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes. _Stephano Dedalo,
+alumno optimo, palmam ferenti._
+
+Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet
+of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.
+
+Binding too good probably. What is this? Eighth and ninth book of Moses.
+Secret of all secrets. Seal of King David. Thumbed pages: read and read.
+Who has passed here before me? How to soften chapped hands. Recipe for
+white wine vinegar. How to win a woman's love. For me this. Say the
+following talisman three times with hands folded:
+
+--_Se el yilo nebrakada femininum! Amor me solo! Sanktus! Amen._
+
+Who wrote this? Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter
+Salanka to all true believers divulged. As good as any other abbot's
+charms, as mumbling Joachim's. Down, baldynoddle, or we'll wool your
+wool.
+
+--What are you doing here, Stephen?
+
+Dilly's high shoulders and shabby dress.
+
+Shut the book quick. Don't let see.
+
+--What are you doing? Stephen said.
+
+A Stuart face of nonesuch Charles, lank locks falling at its sides. It
+glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots. I told her
+of Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a
+pinchbeck bracelet, Dan Kelly's token. _Nebrakada femininum._
+
+--What have you there? Stephen asked.
+
+--I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing
+nervously. Is it any good?
+
+My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far and daring.
+Shadow of my mind.
+
+He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal's French primer.
+
+--What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?
+
+She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.
+
+Show no surprise. Quite natural.
+
+--Here, Stephen said. It's all right. Mind Maggy doesn't pawn it on you.
+I suppose all my books are gone.
+
+--Some, Dilly said. We had to.
+
+She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will
+drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me,
+my heart, my soul. Salt green death.
+
+We.
+
+Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite.
+
+Misery! Misery!
+
+* * * * *
+
+--Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?
+
+--Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.
+
+They clasped hands loudly outside Reddy and Daughter's. Father Cowley
+brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand.
+
+--What's the best news? Mr Dedalus said.
+
+--Why then not much, Father Cowley said. I'm barricaded up, Simon, with
+two men prowling around the house trying to effect an entrance.
+
+--Jolly, Mr Dedalus said. Who is it?
+
+--O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance.
+
+--With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked.
+
+--The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk. I'm just
+waiting for Ben Dollard. He's going to say a word to long John to get
+him to take those two men off. All I want is a little time.
+
+He looked with vague hope up and down the quay, a big apple bulging in
+his neck.
+
+--I know, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Poor old bockedy Ben! He's always
+doing a good turn for someone. Hold hard!
+
+He put on his glasses and gazed towards the metal bridge an instant.
+
+--There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.
+
+Ben Dollard's loose blue cutaway and square hat above large slops
+crossed the quay in full gait from the metal bridge. He came towards
+them at an amble, scratching actively behind his coattails.
+
+As he came near Mr Dedalus greeted:
+
+--Hold that fellow with the bad trousers.
+
+--Hold him now, Ben Dollard said.
+
+Mr Dedalus eyed with cold wandering scorn various points of Ben
+Dollard's figure. Then, turning to Father Cowley with a nod, he muttered
+sneeringly:
+
+--That's a pretty garment, isn't it, for a summer's day?
+
+--Why, God eternally curse your soul, Ben Dollard growled furiously, I
+threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw.
+
+He stood beside them beaming, on them first and on his roomy clothes
+from points of which Mr Dedalus flicked fluff, saying:
+
+--They were made for a man in his health, Ben, anyhow.
+
+--Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard said. Thanks be to
+God he's not paid yet.
+
+--And how is that _basso profondo_, Benjamin? Father Cowley asked.
+
+Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring,
+glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.
+
+Ben Dollard frowned and, making suddenly a chanter's mouth, gave forth a
+deep note.
+
+--Aw! he said.
+
+--That's the style, Mr Dedalus said, nodding to its drone.
+
+--What about that? Ben Dollard said. Not too dusty? What?
+
+He turned to both.
+
+--That'll do, Father Cowley said, nodding also.
+
+The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint
+Mary's abbey past James and Charles Kennedy's, rectifiers, attended by
+Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of
+hurdles.
+
+Ben Dollard with a heavy list towards the shopfronts led them forward,
+his joyful fingers in the air.
+
+--Come along with me to the subsheriff's office, he said. I want to
+show you the new beauty Rock has for a bailiff. He's a cross between
+Lobengula and Lynchehaun. He's well worth seeing, mind you. Come along.
+I saw John Henry Menton casually in the Bodega just now and it will cost
+me a fall if I don't... Wait awhile... We're on the right lay, Bob,
+believe you me.
+
+--For a few days tell him, Father Cowley said anxiously.
+
+Ben Dollard halted and stared, his loud orifice open, a dangling button
+of his coat wagging brightbacked from its thread as he wiped away the
+heavy shraums that clogged his eyes to hear aright.
+
+--What few days? he boomed. Hasn't your landlord distrained for rent?
+
+--He has, Father Cowley said.
+
+--Then our friend's writ is not worth the paper it's printed on, Ben
+Dollard said. The landlord has the prior claim. I gave him all the
+particulars. 29 Windsor avenue. Love is the name?
+
+--That's right, Father Cowley said. The reverend Mr Love. He's a
+minister in the country somewhere. But are you sure of that?
+
+--You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that
+writ where Jacko put the nuts.
+
+He led Father Cowley boldly forward, linked to his bulk.
+
+--Filberts I believe they were, Mr Dedalus said, as he dropped his
+glasses on his coatfront, following them.
+
+* * * * *
+
+--The youngster will be all right, Martin Cunningham said, as they
+passed out of the Castleyard gate.
+
+The policeman touched his forehead.
+
+--God bless you, Martin Cunningham said, cheerily.
+
+He signed to the waiting jarvey who chucked at the reins and set on
+towards Lord Edward street.
+
+Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head, appeared above
+the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
+
+--Yes, Martin Cunningham said, fingering his beard. I wrote to Father
+Conmee and laid the whole case before him.
+
+--You could try our friend, Mr Power suggested backward.
+
+--Boyd? Martin Cunningham said shortly. Touch me not.
+
+John Wyse Nolan, lagging behind, reading the list, came after them
+quickly down Cork hill.
+
+On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed
+Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.
+
+The castle car wheeled empty into upper Exchange street.
+
+--Look here, Martin, John Wyse Nolan said, overtaking them at the _Mail_
+office. I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings.
+
+--Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the
+five shillings too.
+
+--Without a second word either, Mr Power said.
+
+--Strange but true, Martin Cunningham added.
+
+John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes.
+
+--I'll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted, elegantly.
+
+They went down Parliament street.
+
+--There's Jimmy Henry, Mr Power said, just heading for Kavanagh's.
+
+--Righto, Martin Cunningham said. Here goes.
+
+Outside _la Maison Claire_ Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney's
+brother-in-law, humpy, tight, making for the liberties.
+
+John Wyse Nolan fell back with Mr Power, while Martin Cunningham took
+the elbow of a dapper little man in a shower of hail suit, who walked
+uncertainly, with hasty steps past Micky Anderson's watches.
+
+--The assistant town clerk's corns are giving him some trouble, John
+Wyse Nolan told Mr Power.
+
+They followed round the corner towards James Kavanagh's winerooms. The
+empty castle car fronted them at rest in Essex gate. Martin Cunningham,
+speaking always, showed often the list at which Jimmy Henry did not
+glance.
+
+--And long John Fanning is here too, John Wyse Nolan said, as large as
+life.
+
+The tall form of long John Fanning filled the doorway where he stood.
+
+--Good day, Mr Subsheriff, Martin Cunningham said, as all halted and
+greeted.
+
+Long John Fanning made no way for them. He removed his large Henry Clay
+decisively and his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all
+their faces.
+
+--Are the conscript fathers pursuing their peaceful deliberations? he
+said with rich acrid utterance to the assistant town clerk.
+
+Hell open to christians they were having, Jimmy Henry said pettishly,
+about their damned Irish language. Where was the marshal, he wanted
+to know, to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the
+macebearer laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order,
+no quorum even, and Hutchinson, the lord mayor, in Llandudno and little
+Lorcan Sherlock doing _locum tenens_ for him. Damned Irish language,
+language of our forefathers.
+
+Long John Fanning blew a plume of smoke from his lips.
+
+Martin Cunningham spoke by turns, twirling the peak of his beard, to the
+assistant town clerk and the subsheriff, while John Wyse Nolan held his
+peace.
+
+--What Dignam was that? long John Fanning asked.
+
+Jimmy Henry made a grimace and lifted his left foot.
+
+--O, my corns! he said plaintively. Come upstairs for goodness' sake
+till I sit down somewhere. Uff! Ooo! Mind!
+
+Testily he made room for himself beside long John Fanning's flank and
+passed in and up the stairs.
+
+--Come on up, Martin Cunningham said to the subsheriff. I don't think
+you knew him or perhaps you did, though.
+
+With John Wyse Nolan Mr Power followed them in.
+
+--Decent little soul he was, Mr Power said to the stalwart back of long
+John Fanning ascending towards long John Fanning in the mirror.
+
+--Rather lowsized. Dignam of Menton's office that was, Martin Cunningham
+said.
+
+Long John Fanning could not remember him.
+
+Clatter of horsehoofs sounded from the air.
+
+--What's that? Martin Cunningham said.
+
+All turned where they stood. John Wyse Nolan came down again. From the
+cool shadow of the doorway he saw the horses pass Parliament street,
+harness and glossy pasterns in sunlight shimmering. Gaily they went past
+before his cool unfriendly eyes, not quickly. In saddles of the leaders,
+leaping leaders, rode outriders.
+
+--What was it? Martin Cunningham asked, as they went on up the
+staircase.
+
+--The lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland, John Wyse
+Nolan answered from the stairfoot.
+
+* * * * *
+
+As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind his
+Panama to Haines:
+
+--Parnell's brother. There in the corner.
+
+They chose a small table near the window, opposite a longfaced man whose
+beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard.
+
+--Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat.
+
+--Yes, Mulligan said. That's John Howard, his brother, our city marshal.
+
+John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw
+went up again to his forehead whereat it rested. An instant after, under
+its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell
+once more upon a working corner.
+
+--I'll take a _mélange,_ Haines said to the waitress.
+
+--Two _mélanges,_ Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and
+butter and some cakes as well.
+
+When she had gone he said, laughing:
+
+--We call it D.B.C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed
+Dedalus on _Hamlet._
+
+Haines opened his newbought book.
+
+--I'm sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all
+minds that have lost their balance.
+
+The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street:
+
+--_England expects_...
+
+Buck Mulligan's primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter.
+
+--You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance.
+Wandering Aengus I call him.
+
+--I am sure he has an _idée fixe,_ Haines said, pinching his chin
+thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it
+would be likely to be. Such persons always have.
+
+Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely.
+
+--They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never
+capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white
+death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet.
+The joy of creation...
+
+--Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him
+this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw.
+It's rather interesting because professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an
+interesting point out of that.
+
+Buck Mulligan's watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to
+unload her tray.
+
+--He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid
+the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny,
+of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does
+he write anything for your movement?
+
+He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream.
+Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its
+smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.
+
+--Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write
+something in ten years.
+
+--Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon.
+Still, I shouldn't wonder if he did after all.
+
+He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.
+
+--This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don't
+want to be imposed on.
+
+Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of
+ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping
+street past Benson's ferry, and by the threemasted schooner _Rosevean_
+from Bridgwater with bricks.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell's yard.
+Behind him Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, with
+stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith's
+house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him a
+blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College park.
+
+Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as
+Mr Lewis Werner's cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along
+Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling.
+
+At the corner of Wilde's house he halted, frowned at Elijah's name
+announced on the Metropolitan hall, frowned at the distant pleasance of
+duke's lawn. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. With ratsteeth
+bared he muttered:
+
+--_Coactus volui._
+
+He strode on for Clare street, grinding his fierce word.
+
+As he strode past Mr Bloom's dental windows the sway of his dustcoat
+brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards,
+having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly
+face after the striding form.
+
+--God's curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You're blinder
+nor I am, you bitch's bastard!
+
+* * * * *
+
+Opposite Ruggy O'Donohoe's Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, pawing the
+pound and a half of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's, porksteaks he had been
+sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too blooming
+dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and Mrs
+MacDowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and sipping
+sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from Tunney's.
+And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the whole
+blooming time and sighing.
+
+After Wicklow lane the window of Madame Doyle, courtdress milliner,
+stopped him. He stood looking in at the two puckers stripped to their
+pelts and putting up their props. From the sidemirrors two mourning
+Masters Dignam gaped silently. Myler Keogh, Dublin's pet lamb, will
+meet sergeantmajor Bennett, the Portobello bruiser, for a purse of fifty
+sovereigns. Gob, that'd be a good pucking match to see. Myler Keogh,
+that's the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bar
+entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. Master
+Dignam on his left turned as he turned. That's me in mourning. When
+is it? May the twentysecond. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He
+turned to the right and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap awry,
+his collar sticking up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the
+image of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, beside the two puckers. One
+of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old
+fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found out.
+
+Master Dignam got his collar down and dawdled on. The best pucker going
+for strength was Fitzsimons. One puck in the wind from that fellow would
+knock you into the middle of next week, man. But the best pucker for
+science was Jem Corbet before Fitzsimons knocked the stuffings out of
+him, dodging and all.
+
+In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff's mouth and
+a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was
+telling him and grinning all the time.
+
+No Sandymount tram.
+
+Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to
+his other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The
+blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming
+end to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I'm not going tomorrow
+either, stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice
+I'm in mourning? Uncle Barney said he'd get it into the paper tonight.
+Then they'll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa's
+name.
+
+His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a
+fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they
+were screwing the screws into the coffin: and the bumps when they were
+bringing it downstairs.
+
+Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling
+the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and
+heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was standing
+on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney's for
+to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him
+again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be
+a good son to ma. I couldn't hear the other things he said but I saw
+his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was
+Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he's in purgatory now because he went to
+confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.
+
+* * * * *
+
+William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by
+lieutenantcolonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the viceregal
+lodge. In the following carriage were the honourable Mrs Paget, Miss de
+Courcy and the honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C. in attendance.
+
+The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by
+obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern
+quays. The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the
+metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river greeted
+him vainly from afar Between Queen's and Whitworth bridges lord Dudley's
+viceregal carriages passed and were unsaluted by Mr Dudley White, B.
+L., M. A., who stood on Arran quay outside Mrs M. E. White's, the
+pawnbroker's, at the corner of Arran street west stroking his nose with
+his forefinger, undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough
+more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot
+through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. In the
+porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costbag of Goulding,
+Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the
+doorstep of the office of Reuben J Dodd, solicitor, agent for the
+Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed
+her plan and retracing her steps by King's windows smiled credulously
+on the representative of His Majesty. From its sluice in Wood quay wall
+under Tom Devan's office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of
+liquid sewage. Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze,
+Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head watched and admired. On Ormond
+quay Mr Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse for the
+subsheriff's office, stood still in midstreet and brought his hat low.
+His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus' greeting. From Cahill's
+corner the reverend Hugh C. Love, M.A., made obeisance unperceived,
+mindful of lords deputies whose hands benignant had held of yore rich
+advowsons. On Grattan bridge Lenehan and M'Coy, taking leave of each
+other, watched the carriages go by. Passing by Roger Greene's office and
+Dollard's big red printinghouse Gerty MacDowell, carrying the Catesby's
+cork lino letters for her father who was laid up, knew by the style
+it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn't see what Her
+Excellency had on because the tram and Spring's big yellow furniture van
+had to stop in front of her on account of its being the lord lieutenant.
+Beyond Lundy Foot's from the shaded door of Kavanagh's winerooms
+John Wyse Nolan smiled with unseen coldness towards the lord
+lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland. The Right Honourable
+William Humble, earl of Dudley, G. C. V. O., passed Micky Anderson's all
+times ticking watches and Henry and James's wax smartsuited freshcheeked
+models, the gentleman Henry, _dernier cri_ James. Over against Dame gate
+Tom Rochford and Nosey Flynn watched the approach of the cavalcade. Tom
+Rochford, seeing the eyes of lady Dudley fixed on him, took his thumbs
+quickly out of the pockets of his claret waistcoat and doffed his cap to
+her. A charming _soubrette,_ great Marie Kendall, with dauby cheeks and
+lifted skirt smiled daubily from her poster upon William Humble, earl
+of Dudley, and upon lieutenantcolonel H. G. Heseltine, and also upon
+the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. From the window of the D. B. C. Buck
+Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely, gazed down on the viceregal equipage
+over the shoulders of eager guests, whose mass of forms darkened the
+chessboard whereon John Howard Parnell looked intently. In Fownes's
+street Dilly Dedalus, straining her sight upward from Chardenal's first
+French primer, saw sunshades spanned and wheelspokes spinning in the
+glare. John Henry Menton, filling the doorway of Commercial Buildings,
+stared from winebig oyster eyes, holding a fat gold hunter watch not
+looked at in his fat left hand not feeling it. Where the foreleg of King
+Billy's horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her hastening husband
+back from under the hoofs of the outriders. She shouted in his ear the
+tidings. Understanding, he shifted his tomes to his left breast
+and saluted the second carriage. The honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C.,
+agreeably surprised, made haste to reply. At Ponsonby's corner a jaded
+white flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind
+him, E.L.Y'S, while outriders pranced past and carriages. Opposite
+Pigott's music warerooms Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c,
+gaily apparelled, gravely walked, outpassed by a viceroy and unobserved.
+By the provost's wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes
+and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of _My girl's a Yorkshire
+girl._
+
+Blazes Boylan presented to the leaders' skyblue frontlets and high
+action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a
+suit of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute
+but he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and
+the red flower between his lips. As they drove along Nassau street His
+Excellency drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of
+music which was being discoursed in College park. Unseen brazen highland
+laddies blared and drumthumped after the _cortège_:
+
+ _But though she's a factory lass
+ And wears no fancy clothes.
+ Baraabum.
+ Yet I've a sort of a
+ Yorkshire relish for
+ My little Yorkshire rose.
+ Baraabum._
+
+Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H.
+Shrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F. Stevenson,
+C. Adderly and W. C. Huggard, started in pursuit. Striding past Finn's
+hotel Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a
+fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons
+in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate. Deep in Leinster
+street by Trinity's postern a loyal king's man, Hornblower, touched
+his tallyho cap. As the glossy horses pranced by Merrion square Master
+Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent
+with the topper and raised also his new black cap with fingers greased
+by porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up. The viceroy, on his way to
+inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer's hospital,
+drove with his following towards Lower Mount street. He passed a blind
+stripling opposite Broadbent's. In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a
+brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across
+the viceroy's path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding,
+Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to
+Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted
+themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view
+with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain.
+On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged
+punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small
+schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired
+by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the
+prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy
+trousers swallowed by a closing door.
+
+
+
+Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
+
+Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
+
+Horrid! And gold flushed more.
+
+A husky fifenote blew.
+
+Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
+
+Goldpinnacled hair.
+
+A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
+
+Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
+
+Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?
+
+Tink cried to bronze in pity.
+
+And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
+
+Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping
+answer.
+
+O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.
+
+Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
+
+Coin rang. Clock clacked.
+
+Avowal. _Sonnez._ I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. _La
+cloche!_ Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
+
+Jingle. Bloo.
+
+Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
+
+A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
+
+Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
+
+Horn. Hawhorn.
+
+When first he saw. Alas!
+
+Full tup. Full throb.
+
+Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.
+
+Martha! Come!
+
+Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
+
+Goodgod henev erheard inall.
+
+Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
+
+A moonlit nightcall: far, far.
+
+I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.
+
+Listen!
+
+The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each, and for other,
+plash and silent roar.
+
+Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.
+
+You don't?
+
+Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.
+
+Black. Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.
+
+Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.
+
+But wait!
+
+Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.
+
+Naminedamine. Preacher is he:
+
+All gone. All fallen.
+
+Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.
+
+Amen! He gnashed in fury.
+
+Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.
+
+Bronzelydia by Minagold.
+
+By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.
+
+One rapped, one tapped, with a carra, with a cock.
+
+Pray for him! Pray, good people!
+
+His gouty fingers nakkering.
+
+Big Benaben. Big Benben.
+
+Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.
+
+Pwee! Little wind piped wee.
+
+True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your
+tschink with tschunk.
+
+Fff! Oo!
+
+Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?
+
+Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.
+
+Then not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.
+
+Done.
+
+Begin!
+
+Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's head, over the
+crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing
+steel.
+
+--Is that her? asked miss Kennedy.
+
+Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl grey and _eau de Nil._
+
+--Exquisite contrast, miss Kennedy said.
+
+When all agog miss Douce said eagerly:
+
+--Look at the fellow in the tall silk.
+
+--Who? Where? gold asked more eagerly.
+
+--In the second carriage, miss Douce's wet lips said, laughing in the
+sun.
+
+He's looking. Mind till I see.
+
+She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face against
+the pane in a halo of hurried breath.
+
+Her wet lips tittered:
+
+--He's killed looking back.
+
+She laughed:
+
+--O wept! Aren't men frightful idiots?
+
+With sadness.
+
+Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair
+behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a
+hair.
+
+Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear.
+
+--It's them has the fine times, sadly then she said.
+
+A man.
+
+Bloowho went by by Moulang's pipes bearing in his breast the sweets
+of sin, by Wine's antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by
+Carroll's dusky battered plate, for Raoul.
+
+The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came. For them
+unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china. And
+
+--There's your teas, he said.
+
+Miss Kennedy with manners transposed the teatray down to an upturned
+lithia crate, safe from eyes, low.
+
+--What is it? loud boots unmannerly asked.
+
+--Find out, miss Douce retorted, leaving her spyingpoint.
+
+--Your _beau,_ is it?
+
+A haughty bronze replied:
+
+--I'll complain to Mrs de Massey on you if I hear any more of your
+impertinent insolence.
+
+--Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootssnout sniffed rudely, as he retreated as
+she threatened as he had come.
+
+Bloom.
+
+On her flower frowning miss Douce said:
+
+--Most aggravating that young brat is. If he doesn't conduct himself
+I'll wring his ear for him a yard long.
+
+Ladylike in exquisite contrast.
+
+--Take no notice, miss Kennedy rejoined.
+
+She poured in a teacup tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered
+under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned,
+waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black
+satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and two and
+seven.
+
+Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs
+ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel.
+
+--Am I awfully sunburnt?
+
+Miss bronze unbloused her neck.
+
+--No, said miss Kennedy. It gets brown after. Did you try the borax with
+the cherry laurel water?
+
+Miss Douce halfstood to see her skin askance in the barmirror
+gildedlettered where hock and claret glasses shimmered and in their
+midst a shell.
+
+--And leave it to my hands, she said.
+
+--Try it with the glycerine, miss Kennedy advised.
+
+Bidding her neck and hands adieu miss Douce
+
+--Those things only bring out a rash, replied, reseated. I asked that
+old fogey in Boyd's for something for my skin.
+
+Miss Kennedy, pouring now a fulldrawn tea, grimaced and prayed:
+
+--O, don't remind me of him for mercy' sake!
+
+--But wait till I tell you, miss Douce entreated.
+
+Sweet tea miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears
+with little fingers.
+
+--No, don't, she cried.
+
+--I won't listen, she cried.
+
+But Bloom?
+
+Miss Douce grunted in snuffy fogey's tone:
+
+--For your what? says he.
+
+Miss Kennedy unplugged her ears to hear, to speak: but said, but prayed
+again:
+
+--Don't let me think of him or I'll expire. The hideous old wretch! That
+night in the Antient Concert Rooms.
+
+She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped, sweet tea.
+
+--Here he was, miss Douce said, cocking her bronze head three quarters,
+ruffling her nosewings. Hufa! Hufa!
+
+Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from miss Kennedy's throat. Miss Douce
+huffed and snorted down her nostrils that quivered imperthnthn like a
+snout in quest.
+
+--O! shrieking, miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget his goggle eye?
+
+Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting:
+
+--And your other eye!
+
+Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner's name. Why do I always think
+Figather? Gathering figs, I think. And Prosper Lore's huguenot name.
+By Bassi's blessed virgins Bloom's dark eyes went by. Bluerobed, white
+under, come to me. God they believe she is: or goddess. Those today. I
+could not see. That fellow spoke. A student. After with Dedalus' son.
+He might be Mulligan. All comely virgins. That brings those rakes of
+fellows in: her white.
+
+By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets.
+
+Of sin.
+
+In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy
+your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let
+freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each other,
+high piercing notes.
+
+Ah, panting, sighing, sighing, ah, fordone, their mirth died down.
+
+Miss Kennedy lipped her cup again, raised, drank a sip and
+gigglegiggled. Miss Douce, bending over the teatray, ruffled again her
+nose and rolled droll fattened eyes. Again Kennygiggles, stooping,
+her fair pinnacles of hair, stooping, her tortoise napecomb showed,
+spluttered out of her mouth her tea, choking in tea and laughter,
+coughing with choking, crying:
+
+--O greasy eyes! Imagine being married to a man like that! she cried.
+With his bit of beard!
+
+Douce gave full vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman,
+delight, joy, indignation.
+
+--Married to the greasy nose! she yelled.
+
+Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each
+each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze,
+shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I
+knows. Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and
+pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!),
+panting, sweating (O!), all breathless.
+
+Married to Bloom, to greaseabloom.
+
+--O saints above! miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I
+wished
+
+I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet.
+
+--O, miss Douce! miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing!
+
+And flushed yet more (you horrid!), more goldenly.
+
+By Cantwell's offices roved Greaseabloom, by Ceppi's virgins, bright of
+their oils. Nannetti's father hawked those things about, wheedling at
+doors as I. Religion pays. Must see him for that par. Eat first. I want.
+Not yet. At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On.
+Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. On. For Raoul. Eat. If I net five
+guineas with those ads. The violet silk petticoats. Not yet. The sweets
+of sin.
+
+Flushed less, still less, goldenly paled.
+
+Into their bar strolled Mr Dedalus. Chips, picking chips off one of his
+rocky thumbnails. Chips. He strolled.
+
+--O, welcome back, miss Douce.
+
+He held her hand. Enjoyed her holidays?
+
+--Tiptop.
+
+He hoped she had nice weather in Rostrevor.
+
+--Gorgeous, she said. Look at the holy show I am. Lying out on the
+strand all day.
+
+Bronze whiteness.
+
+--That was exceedingly naughty of you, Mr Dedalus told her and pressed
+her hand indulgently. Tempting poor simple males.
+
+Miss Douce of satin douced her arm away.
+
+--O go away! she said. You're very simple, I don't think.
+
+He was.
+
+--Well now I am, he mused. I looked so simple in the cradle they
+christened me simple Simon.
+
+--You must have been a doaty, miss Douce made answer. And what did the
+doctor order today?
+
+--Well now, he mused, whatever you say yourself. I think I'll trouble
+you for some fresh water and a half glass of whisky.
+
+Jingle.
+
+--With the greatest alacrity, miss Douce agreed.
+
+With grace of alacrity towards the mirror gilt Cantrell and Cochrane's
+she turned herself. With grace she tapped a measure of gold whisky from
+her crystal keg. Forth from the skirt of his coat Mr Dedalus brought
+pouch and pipe. Alacrity she served. He blew through the flue two husky
+fifenotes.
+
+--By Jove, he mused, I often wanted to see the Mourne mountains. Must
+be a great tonic in the air down there. But a long threatening comes at
+last, they say. Yes. Yes.
+
+Yes. He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into the
+bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute.
+
+None nought said nothing. Yes.
+
+Gaily miss Douce polished a tumbler, trilling:
+
+--_O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seas!_
+
+--Was Mr Lidwell in today?
+
+In came Lenehan. Round him peered Lenehan. Mr Bloom reached Essex
+bridge. Yes, Mr Bloom crossed bridge of Yessex. To Martha I must write.
+Buy paper. Daly's. Girl there civil. Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue bloom is on
+the rye.
+
+--He was in at lunchtime, miss Douce said.
+
+Lenehan came forward.
+
+--Was Mr Boylan looking for me?
+
+He asked. She answered:
+
+--Miss Kennedy, was Mr Boylan in while I was upstairs?
+
+She asked. Miss voice of Kennedy answered, a second teacup poised, her
+gaze upon a page:
+
+--No. He was not.
+
+Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard, not seen, read on. Lenehan round the
+sandwichbell wound his round body round.
+
+--Peep! Who's in the corner?
+
+No glance of Kennedy rewarding him he yet made overtures. To mind her
+stops. To read only the black ones: round o and crooked ess.
+
+Jingle jaunty jingle.
+
+Girlgold she read and did not glance. Take no notice. She took no notice
+while he read by rote a solfa fable for her, plappering flatly:
+
+--Ah fox met ah stork. Said thee fox too thee stork: Will you put your
+bill down inn my troath and pull upp ah bone?
+
+He droned in vain. Miss Douce turned to her tea aside.
+
+He sighed aside:
+
+--Ah me! O my!
+
+He greeted Mr Dedalus and got a nod.
+
+--Greetings from the famous son of a famous father.
+
+--Who may he be? Mr Dedalus asked.
+
+Lenehan opened most genial arms. Who?
+
+--Who may he be? he asked. Can you ask? Stephen, the youthful bard.
+
+Dry.
+
+Mr Dedalus, famous father, laid by his dry filled pipe.
+
+--I see, he said. I didn't recognise him for the moment. I hear he is
+keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?
+
+He had.
+
+--I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day, said Lenehan. In
+Mooney's _en ville_ and in Mooney's _sur mer._ He had received the rhino
+for the labour of his muse.
+
+He smiled at bronze's teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes:
+
+--The _élite_ of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit, Hugh
+
+MacHugh, Dublin's most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy
+of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the
+O'Madden Burke.
+
+After an interval Mr Dedalus raised his grog and
+
+--That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see.
+
+He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye. Set down his
+glass.
+
+He looked towards the saloon door.
+
+--I see you have moved the piano.
+
+--The tuner was in today, miss Douce replied, tuning it for the smoking
+concert and I never heard such an exquisite player.
+
+--Is that a fact?
+
+--Didn't he, miss Kennedy? The real classical, you know. And blind too,
+poor fellow. Not twenty I'm sure he was.
+
+--Is that a fact? Mr Dedalus said.
+
+He drank and strayed away.
+
+--So sad to look at his face, miss Douce condoled.
+
+God's curse on bitch's bastard.
+
+Tink to her pity cried a diner's bell. To the door of the bar and
+diningroom came bald Pat, came bothered Pat, came Pat, waiter of Ormond.
+Lager for diner. Lager without alacrity she served.
+
+With patience Lenehan waited for Boylan with impatience, for
+jinglejaunty blazes boy.
+
+Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique
+triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her
+hand), soft pedalling, a triple of keys to see the thicknesses of felt
+advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action.
+
+Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in
+Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not
+happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means
+something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is.
+Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed
+on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke
+mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man.
+For Raoul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a
+jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence.
+
+Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond quay.
+Follow. Risk it. Go quick. At four. Near now. Out.
+
+--Twopence, sir, the shopgirl dared to say.
+
+--Aha... I was forgetting... Excuse...
+
+--And four.
+
+At four she. Winsomely she on Bloohimwhom smiled. Bloo smi qui go.
+Ternoon. Think you're the only pebble on the beach? Does that to all.
+
+For men.
+
+In drowsy silence gold bent on her page.
+
+From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the
+tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now
+poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly
+and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call.
+
+Pat paid for diner's popcorked bottle: and over tumbler, tray and
+popcorked bottle ere he went he whispered, bald and bothered, with miss
+
+Douce.
+
+--_The bright stars fade_...
+
+A voiceless song sang from within, singing:
+
+--... _the morn is breaking._
+
+A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive
+hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording,
+called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love's
+leavetaking, life's, love's morn.
+
+--_The dewdrops pearl_...
+
+Lenehan's lips over the counter lisped a low whistle of decoy.
+
+--But look this way, he said, rose of Castile.
+
+Jingle jaunted by the curb and stopped.
+
+She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile: fretted, forlorn,
+dreamily rose.
+
+--Did she fall or was she pushed? he asked her.
+
+She answered, slighting:
+
+--Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.
+
+Like lady, ladylike.
+
+Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode.
+Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew and
+hailed him:
+
+--See the conquering hero comes.
+
+Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered
+hero. See me he might. The seat he sat on: warm. Black wary hecat walked
+towards Richie Goulding's legal bag, lifted aloft, saluting.
+
+--_And I from thee_...
+
+--I heard you were round, said Blazes Boylan.
+
+He touched to fair miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She smiled
+on him. But sister bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her richer
+hair, a bosom and a rose.
+
+Smart Boylan bespoke potions.
+
+--What's your cry? Glass of bitter? Glass of bitter, please, and a
+sloegin for me. Wire in yet?
+
+Not yet. At four she. Who said four?
+
+Cowley's red lugs and bulging apple in the door of the sheriff's office.
+
+Avoid. Goulding a chance. What is he doing in the Ormond? Car waiting.
+
+Wait.
+
+Hello. Where off to? Something to eat? I too was just. In here. What,
+Ormond? Best value in Dublin. Is that so? Diningroom. Sit tight there.
+See, not be seen. I think I'll join you. Come on. Richie led on. Bloom
+followed bag. Dinner fit for a prince.
+
+Miss Douce reached high to take a flagon, stretching her satin arm, her
+bust, that all but burst, so high.
+
+--O! O! jerked Lenehan, gasping at each stretch. O!
+
+But easily she seized her prey and led it low in triumph.
+
+--Why don't you grow? asked Blazes Boylan.
+
+Shebronze, dealing from her oblique jar thick syrupy liquor for his
+lips, looked as it flowed (flower in his coat: who gave him?), and
+syrupped with her voice:
+
+--Fine goods in small parcels.
+
+That is to say she. Neatly she poured slowsyrupy sloe.
+
+--Here's fortune, Blazes said.
+
+He pitched a broad coin down. Coin rang.
+
+--Hold on, said Lenehan, till I...
+
+--Fortune, he wished, lifting his bubbled ale.
+
+--Sceptre will win in a canter, he said.
+
+--I plunged a bit, said Boylan winking and drinking. Not on my own, you
+know. Fancy of a friend of mine.
+
+Lenehan still drank and grinned at his tilted ale and at miss Douce's
+lips that all but hummed, not shut, the oceansong her lips had trilled.
+
+Idolores. The eastern seas.
+
+Clock whirred. Miss Kennedy passed their way (flower, wonder who gave),
+bearing away teatray. Clock clacked.
+
+Miss Douce took Boylan's coin, struck boldly the cashregister. It
+clanged. Clock clacked. Fair one of Egypt teased and sorted in the till
+and hummed and handed coins in change. Look to the west. A clack. For
+me.
+
+--What time is that? asked Blazes Boylan. Four?
+
+O'clock.
+
+Lenehan, small eyes ahunger on her humming, bust ahumming, tugged Blazes
+Boylan's elbowsleeve.
+
+--Let's hear the time, he said.
+
+The bag of Goulding, Collis, Ward led Bloom by ryebloom flowered tables.
+Aimless he chose with agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table near
+the door. Be near. At four. Has he forgotten? Perhaps a trick. Not come:
+whet appetite. I couldn't do. Wait, wait. Pat, waiter, waited.
+
+Sparkling bronze azure eyed Blazure's skyblue bow and eyes.
+
+--Go on, pressed Lenehan. There's no-one. He never heard.
+
+--... _to Flora's lips did hie._
+
+High, a high note pealed in the treble clear.
+
+Bronzedouce communing with her rose that sank and rose sought
+
+Blazes Boylan's flower and eyes.
+
+--Please, please.
+
+He pleaded over returning phrases of avowal.
+
+--_I could not leave thee_...
+
+--Afterwits, miss Douce promised coyly.
+
+--No, now, urged Lenehan. _Sonnezlacloche!_ O do! There's no-one.
+
+She looked. Quick. Miss Kenn out of earshot. Sudden bent. Two kindling
+faces watched her bend.
+
+Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord,
+and lost and found it, faltering.
+
+--Go on! Do! _Sonnez!_
+
+Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted
+them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes.
+
+_--Sonnez!_
+
+Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter
+smackwarm against her smackable a woman's warmhosed thigh.
+
+--_La Cloche!_ cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust
+there.
+
+She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren't men?), but, lightward
+gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.
+
+--You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.
+
+Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his
+chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound
+eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by
+mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering,
+a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze.
+
+Yes, bronze from anearby.
+
+--... _Sweetheart, goodbye!_
+
+--I'm off, said Boylan with impatience.
+
+He slid his chalice brisk away, grasped his change.
+
+--Wait a shake, begged Lenehan, drinking quickly. I wanted to tell you.
+
+Tom Rochford...
+
+--Come on to blazes, said Blazes Boylan, going.
+
+Lenehan gulped to go.
+
+--Got the horn or what? he said. Wait. I'm coming.
+
+He followed the hasty creaking shoes but stood by nimbly by the
+threshold, saluting forms, a bulky with a slender.
+
+--How do you do, Mr Dollard?
+
+--Eh? How do? How do? Ben Dollard's vague bass answered, turning an
+instant from Father Cowley's woe. He won't give you any trouble, Bob.
+Alf Bergan will speak to the long fellow. We'll put a barleystraw in
+that Judas Iscariot's ear this time.
+
+Sighing Mr Dedalus came through the saloon, a finger soothing an eyelid.
+
+--Hoho, we will, Ben Dollard yodled jollily. Come on, Simon. Give us a
+ditty. We heard the piano.
+
+Bald Pat, bothered waiter, waited for drink orders. Power for Richie.
+And Bloom? Let me see. Not make him walk twice. His corns. Four now. How
+warm this black is. Course nerves a bit. Refracts (is it?) heat. Let me
+see. Cider. Yes, bottle of cider.
+
+--What's that? Mr Dedalus said. I was only vamping, man.
+
+--Come on, come on, Ben Dollard called. Begone dull care. Come, Bob.
+
+He ambled Dollard, bulky slops, before them (hold that fellow with the:
+hold him now) into the saloon. He plumped him Dollard on the stool. His
+gouty paws plumped chords. Plumped, stopped abrupt.
+
+Bald Pat in the doorway met tealess gold returning. Bothered, he wanted
+Power and cider. Bronze by the window, watched, bronze from afar.
+
+Jingle a tinkle jaunted.
+
+Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom
+sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle.
+Hear.
+
+--Love and War, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. God be with old times.
+
+Miss Douce's brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind, smitten
+by sunlight. Gone. Pensive (who knows?), smitten (the smiting light),
+she lowered the dropblind with a sliding cord. She drew down pensive
+(why did he go so quick when I?) about her bronze, over the bar where
+bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast inexquisite
+nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow, _eau de
+Nil._
+
+--Poor old Goodwin was the pianist that night, Father Cowley reminded
+them. There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and the
+Collard grand.
+
+There was.
+
+--A symposium all his own, Mr Dedalus said. The devil wouldn't stop him.
+He was a crotchety old fellow in the primary stage of drink.
+
+--God, do you remember? Ben bulky Dollard said, turning from the
+punished keyboard. And by Japers I had no wedding garment.
+
+They laughed all three. He had no wed. All trio laughed. No wedding
+garment.
+
+--Our friend Bloom turned in handy that night, Mr Dedalus said. Where's
+my pipe, by the way?
+
+He wandered back to the bar to the lost chord pipe. Bald Pat carried two
+diners' drinks, Richie and Poldy. And Father Cowley laughed again.
+
+--I saved the situation, Ben, I think.
+
+--You did, averred Ben Dollard. I remember those tight trousers too.
+That was a brilliant idea, Bob.
+
+Father Cowley blushed to his brilliant purply lobes. He saved the situa.
+Tight trou. Brilliant ide.
+
+--I knew he was on the rocks, he said. The wife was playing the piano in
+the coffee palace on Saturdays for a very trifling consideration and
+who was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business? Do you
+remember? We had to search all Holles street to find them till the
+chap in Keogh's gave us the number. Remember? Ben remembered, his broad
+visage wondering.
+
+--By God, she had some luxurious operacloaks and things there.
+
+Mr Dedalus wandered back, pipe in hand.
+
+--Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court dresses. He
+wouldn't take any money either. What? Any God's quantity of cocked hats
+and boleros and trunkhose. What?
+
+--Ay, ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of
+all descriptions.
+
+Jingle jaunted down the quays. Blazes sprawled on bounding tyres.
+
+Liver and bacon. Steak and kidney pie. Right, sir. Right, Pat.
+
+Mrs Marion. Met him pike hoses. Smell of burn. Of Paul de Kock. Nice
+name he.
+
+--What's this her name was? A buxom lassy. Marion...
+
+--Tweedy.
+
+--Yes. Is she alive?
+
+--And kicking.
+
+--She was a daughter of...
+
+--Daughter of the regiment.
+
+--Yes, begad. I remember the old drummajor.
+
+Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed, lit, puffed savoury puff after
+
+--Irish? I don't know, faith. Is she, Simon?
+
+Puff after stiff, a puff, strong, savoury, crackling.
+
+--Buccinator muscle is... What?... Bit rusty... O, she is... My
+Irish Molly, O.
+
+He puffed a pungent plumy blast.
+
+--From the rock of Gibraltar... all the way.
+
+They pined in depth of ocean shadow, gold by the beerpull, bronze
+by maraschino, thoughtful all two. Mina Kennedy, 4 Lismore terrace,
+Drumcondra with Idolores, a queen, Dolores, silent.
+
+Pat served, uncovered dishes. Leopold cut liverslices. As said before he
+ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cods' roes while
+Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward ate steak and kidney, steak then kidney,
+bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate.
+
+Bloom with Goulding, married in silence, ate. Dinners fit for princes.
+
+By Bachelor's walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun in
+heat, mare's glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres:
+sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the?
+Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn.
+
+Over their voices Dollard bassooned attack, booming over bombarding
+chords:
+
+--_When love absorbs my ardent soul_...
+
+Roll of Bensoulbenjamin rolled to the quivery loveshivery roofpanes.
+
+--War! War! cried Father Cowley. You're the warrior.
+
+--So I am, Ben Warrior laughed. I was thinking of your landlord. Love or
+money.
+
+He stopped. He wagged huge beard, huge face over his blunder huge.
+
+--Sure, you'd burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said
+through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours.
+
+In bearded abundant laughter Dollard shook upon the keyboard. He would.
+
+--Not to mention another membrane, Father Cowley added. Half time, Ben.
+_Amoroso ma non troppo._ Let me there.
+
+Miss Kennedy served two gentlemen with tankards of cool stout. She
+passed a remark. It was indeed, first gentleman said, beautiful weather.
+They drank cool stout. Did she know where the lord lieutenant was going?
+And heard steelhoofs ringhoof ring. No, she couldn't say. But it would
+be in the paper. O, she need not trouble. No trouble. She waved about
+her outspread _Independent,_ searching, the lord lieutenant, her
+pinnacles of hair slowmoving, lord lieuten. Too much trouble,
+first gentleman said. O, not in the least. Way he looked that. Lord
+lieutenant. Gold by bronze heard iron steel.
+
+ --............ _my ardent soul_
+ _I care not foror the morrow._
+
+In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and War someone is.
+Ben Dollard's famous. Night he ran round to us to borrow a dress suit
+for that concert. Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical porkers.
+Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the bed,
+screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show. O saints above,
+I'm drenched! O, the women in the front row! O, I never laughed so many!
+Well, of course that's what gives him the base barreltone. For instance
+eunuchs. Wonder who's playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical.
+Knows whatever note you play. Bad breath he has, poor chap. Stopped.
+
+Miss Douce, engaging, Lydia Douce, bowed to suave solicitor, George
+Lidwell, gentleman, entering. Good afternoon. She gave her moist (a
+lady's) hand to his firm clasp. Afternoon. Yes, she was back. To the old
+dingdong again.
+
+--Your friends are inside, Mr Lidwell.
+
+George Lidwell, suave, solicited, held a lydiahand.
+
+Bloom ate liv as said before. Clean here at least. That chap in the
+Burton, gummy with gristle. No-one here: Goulding and I. Clean tables,
+flowers, mitres of napkins. Pat to and fro. Bald Pat. Nothing to do.
+Best value in Dub.
+
+Piano again. Cowley it is. Way he sits in to it, like one together,
+mutual understanding. Tiresome shapers scraping fiddles, eye on the
+bowend, sawing the cello, remind you of toothache. Her high long snore.
+Night we were in the box. Trombone under blowing like a grampus, between
+the acts, other brass chap unscrewing, emptying spittle. Conductor's
+legs too, bagstrousers, jiggedy jiggedy. Do right to hide them.
+
+Jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty.
+
+Only the harp. Lovely. Gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of a
+lovely. Gravy's rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that
+once or twice. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their
+harps. I. He. Old. Young.
+
+--Ah, I couldn't, man, Mr Dedalus said, shy, listless.
+
+Strongly.
+
+--Go on, blast you! Ben Dollard growled. Get it out in bits.
+
+--_M'appari,_ Simon, Father Cowley said.
+
+Down stage he strode some paces, grave, tall in affliction, his long
+arms outheld. Hoarsely the apple of his throat hoarsed softly. Softly he
+sang to a dusty seascape there: _A Last Farewell._ A headland, a ship, a
+sail upon the billows. Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the
+wind upon the headland, wind around her.
+
+Cowley sang:
+
+ _--M'appari tutt'amor:
+ Il mio sguardo l'incontr..._
+
+She waved, unhearing Cowley, her veil, to one departing, dear one, to
+wind, love, speeding sail, return.
+
+--Go on, Simon.
+
+--Ah, sure, my dancing days are done, Ben... Well...
+
+Mr Dedalus laid his pipe to rest beside the tuningfork and, sitting,
+touched the obedient keys.
+
+--No, Simon, Father Cowley turned. Play it in the original. One flat.
+
+The keys, obedient, rose higher, told, faltered, confessed, confused.
+
+Up stage strode Father Cowley.
+
+--Here, Simon, I'll accompany you, he said. Get up.
+
+By Graham Lemon's pineapple rock, by Elvery's elephant jingly jogged.
+Steak, kidney, liver, mashed, at meat fit for princes sat princes Bloom
+and Goulding. Princes at meat they raised and drank, Power and cider.
+
+Most beautiful tenor air ever written, Richie said: _Sonnambula._ He
+heard Joe Maas sing that one night. Ah, what M'Guckin! Yes. In his way.
+Choirboy style. Maas was the boy. Massboy. A lyrical tenor if you like.
+Never forget it. Never.
+
+Tenderly Bloom over liverless bacon saw the tightened features strain.
+Backache he. Bright's bright eye. Next item on the programme. Paying the
+piper. Pills, pounded bread, worth a guinea a box. Stave it off awhile.
+Sings too: _Down among the dead men._ Appropriate. Kidney pie. Sweets to
+the. Not making much hand of it. Best value in. Characteristic of him.
+Power. Particular about his drink. Flaw in the glass, fresh Vartry
+water. Fecking matches from counters to save. Then squander a sovereign
+in dribs and drabs. And when he's wanted not a farthing. Screwed
+refusing to pay his fare. Curious types.
+
+Never would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived: never. In the
+gods of the old Royal with little Peake. And when the first note.
+
+Speech paused on Richie's lips.
+
+Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all.
+
+Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good
+memory.
+
+--Which air is that? asked Leopold Bloom.
+
+--_All is lost now_.
+
+Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee
+murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth
+he's proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two
+notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my
+motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all.
+Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he
+whistled. Fall, surrender, lost.
+
+Bloom bent leopold ear, turning a fringe of doyley down under the vase.
+Order. Yes, I remember. Lovely air. In sleep she went to him. Innocence
+in the moon. Brave. Don't know their danger. Still hold her back. Call
+name. Touch water. Jingle jaunty. Too late. She longed to go. That's
+why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost.
+
+--A beautiful air, said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.
+
+Never in all his life had Richie Goulding.
+
+He knows it well too. Or he feels. Still harping on his daughter. Wise
+child that knows her father, Dedalus said. Me?
+
+Bloom askance over liverless saw. Face of the all is lost. Rollicking
+Richie once. Jokes old stale now. Wagging his ear. Napkinring in his
+eye. Now begging letters he sends his son with. Crosseyed Walter sir I
+did sir. Wouldn't trouble only I was expecting some money. Apologise.
+
+Piano again. Sounds better than last time I heard. Tuned probably.
+Stopped again.
+
+Dollard and Cowley still urged the lingering singer out with it.
+
+--With it, Simon.
+
+--It, Simon.
+
+--Ladies and gentlemen, I am most deeply obliged by your kind
+solicitations.
+
+--It, Simon.
+
+--I have no money but if you will lend me your attention I shall
+endeavour to sing to you of a heart bowed down.
+
+By the sandwichbell in screening shadow Lydia, her bronze and rose, a
+lady's grace, gave and withheld: as in cool glaucous _eau de Nil_ Mina
+to tankards two her pinnacles of gold.
+
+The harping chords of prelude closed. A chord, longdrawn, expectant,
+drew a voice away.
+
+--_When first I saw that form endearing_...
+
+Richie turned.
+
+--Si Dedalus' voice, he said.
+
+Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow
+endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to
+Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the
+bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting
+to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.
+
+--_Sorrow from me seemed to depart._
+
+Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves
+in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem
+dulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their
+each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each
+seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw,
+lost Richie Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person wouldn't expect
+it in the least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved word.
+
+Love that is singing: love's old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the
+elastic band of his packet. Love's old sweet _sonnez la_ gold. Bloom
+wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound
+it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.
+
+--_Full of hope and all delighted_...
+
+Tenors get women by the score. Increase their flow. Throw flower at his
+feet. When will we meet? My head it simply. Jingle all delighted. He
+can't sing for tall hats. Your head it simply swurls. Perfumed for him.
+What perfume does your wife? I want to know. Jing. Stop. Knock. Last
+look at mirror always before she answers the door. The hall. There? How
+do you? I do well. There? What? Or? Phial of cachous, kissing comfits,
+in her satchel. Yes? Hands felt for the opulent.
+
+Alas the voice rose, sighing, changed: loud, full, shining, proud.
+
+--_But alas, 'twas idle dreaming_...
+
+Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly
+man! Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out
+his wife: now sings. But hard to tell. Only the two themselves. If he
+doesn't break down. Keep a trot for the avenue. His hands and feet sing
+too. Drink. Nerves overstrung. Must be abstemious to sing. Jenny Lind
+soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half pint of cream. For creamy dreamy.
+
+Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling, full it throbbed. That's the chat.
+Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.
+
+Words? Music? No: it's what's behind.
+
+Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded.
+
+Bloom. Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music
+out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her
+tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy
+the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood,
+gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love.
+
+--... _ray of hope is_...
+
+Beaming. Lydia for Lidwell squeak scarcely hear so ladylike the muse
+unsqueaked a ray of hopk.
+
+_Martha_ it is. Coincidence. Just going to write. Lionel's song.
+Lovely name you have. Can't write. Accept my little pres. Play on her
+heartstrings pursestrings too. She's a. I called you naughty boy. Still
+the name: Martha. How strange! Today.
+
+The voice of Lionel returned, weaker but unwearied. It sang again to
+Richie Poldy Lydia Lidwell also sang to Pat open mouth ear waiting to
+wait. How first he saw that form endearing, how sorrow seemed to part,
+how look, form, word charmed him Gould Lidwell, won Pat Bloom's heart.
+
+Wish I could see his face, though. Explain better. Why the barber in
+Drago's always looked my face when I spoke his face in the glass. Still
+hear it better here than in the bar though farther.
+
+--_Each graceful look_...
+
+First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon's in Terenure. Yellow,
+black lace she wore. Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. After her.
+Fate.
+
+Round and round slow. Quick round. We two. All looked. Halt. Down she
+sat. All ousted looked. Lips laughing. Yellow knees.
+
+--_Charmed my eye_...
+
+Singing. _Waiting_ she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume
+of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat
+warbling. First I saw. She thanked me. Why did she me? Fate. Spanishy
+eyes. Under a peartree alone patio this hour in old Madrid one side in
+shadow Dolores shedolores. At me. Luring. Ah, alluring.
+
+--_Martha! Ah, Martha!_
+
+Quitting all languor Lionel cried in grief, in cry of passion dominant
+to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony. In
+cry of lionel loneliness that she should know, must martha feel. For
+only her he waited. Where? Here there try there here all try where.
+Somewhere.
+
+ --_Co-ome, thou lost one!
+ Co-ome, thou dear one!_
+
+Alone. One love. One hope. One comfort me. Martha, chestnote, return!
+
+_--Come!_
+
+It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb
+it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too
+long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent,
+aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the
+etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all
+soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...
+
+--_To me!_
+
+Siopold!
+
+Consumed.
+
+Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to her,
+you too, me, us.
+
+--Bravo! Clapclap. Good man, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore! Clapclipclap
+clap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap. Encore, enclap, said,
+cried, clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George Lidwell, Pat, Mina
+Kennedy, two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley, first gent with tank
+and bronze miss Douce and gold MJiss Mina.
+
+Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, said before.
+Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson,
+reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted, as said before just now.
+Atrot, in heat, heatseated. _Cloche. Sonnez la. Cloche. Sonnez la._
+Slower the mare went up the hill by the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too
+slow for Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the mare.
+
+An afterclang of Cowley's chords closed, died on the air made richer.
+
+And Richie Goulding drank his Power and Leopold Bloom his cider drank,
+Lidwell his Guinness, second gentleman said they would partake of two
+more tankards if she did not mind. Miss Kennedy smirked, disserving,
+coral lips, at first, at second. She did not mind.
+
+--Seven days in jail, Ben Dollard said, on bread and water. Then you'd
+sing, Simon, like a garden thrush.
+
+Lionel Simon, singer, laughed. Father Bob Cowley played. Mina Kennedy
+served. Second gentleman paid. Tom Kernan strutted in. Lydia, admired,
+admired. But Bloom sang dumb.
+
+Admiring.
+
+Richie, admiring, descanted on that man's glorious voice. He remembered
+one night long ago. Never forget that night. Si sang _'Twas rank and
+fame_: in Ned Lambert's 'twas. Good God he never heard in all his life a
+note like that he never did _then false one we had better part_ so clear
+so God he never heard _since love lives not_ a clinking voice lives not
+ask Lambert he can tell you too.
+
+Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale, told Mr Bloom, face of the
+night, Si in Ned Lambert's, Dedalus house, sang _'Twas rank and fame._
+
+He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr Bloom, of
+the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing 'TWAS RANK AND FAME in
+his, Ned Lambert's, house.
+
+Brothers-in-law: relations. We never speak as we pass by. Rift in the
+lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more.
+The night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful,
+more than all others.
+
+That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It's in the silence after you
+feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.
+
+Bloom ungyved his crisscrossed hands and with slack fingers plucked the
+slender catgut thong. He drew and plucked. It buzz, it twanged. While
+Goulding talked of Barraclough's voice production, while Tom Kernan,
+harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement talked to listening
+Father Cowley, who played a voluntary, who nodded as he played. While
+big Ben Dollard talked with Simon Dedalus, lighting, who nodded as he
+smoked, who smoked.
+
+Thou lost one. All songs on that theme. Yet more Bloom stretched his
+string. Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on.
+Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat.
+Human life. Dignam. Ugh, that rat's tail wriggling! Five bob I gave.
+_Corpus paradisum._ Corncrake croaker: belly like a poisoned pup. Gone.
+They sing. Forgotten. I too; And one day she with. Leave her: get
+tired. Suffer then. Snivel. Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing. Her
+wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:'d.
+
+Yet too much happy bores. He stretched more, more. Are you not happy in
+your? Twang. It snapped.
+
+Jingle into Dorset street.
+
+Miss Douce withdrew her satiny arm, reproachful, pleased.
+
+--Don't make half so free, said she, till we are better acquainted.
+
+George Lidwell told her really and truly: but she did not believe.
+
+First gentleman told Mina that was so. She asked him was that so. And
+second tankard told her so. That that was so.
+
+Miss Douce, miss Lydia, did not believe: miss Kennedy, Mina, did not
+believe: George Lidwell, no: miss Dou did not: the first, the first:
+gent with the tank: believe, no, no: did not, miss Kenn: Lidlydiawell:
+the tank.
+
+Better write it here. Quills in the postoffice chewed and twisted.
+
+Bald Pat at a sign drew nigh. A pen and ink. He went. A pad. He went. A
+pad to blot. He heard, deaf Pat.
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said, teasing the curling catgut line. It certainly is.
+Few lines will do. My present. All that Italian florid music is. Who
+is this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper,
+envelope: unconcerned. It's so characteristic.
+
+--Grandest number in the whole opera, Goulding said.
+
+--It is, Bloom said.
+
+Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two
+divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two
+plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always
+find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't
+see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you
+think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like:
+Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite
+flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.
+
+Instance he's playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like, till you
+hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right: then hear
+chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks, over barrels,
+through wirefences, obstacle race. Time makes the tune. Question of mood
+you're in. Still always nice to hear. Except scales up and down, girls
+learning. Two together nextdoor neighbours. Ought to invent dummy pianos
+for that. _Blumenlied_ I bought for her. The name. Playing it slow,
+a girl, night I came home, the girl. Door of the stables near Cecilia
+street. Milly no taste. Queer because we both, I mean.
+
+Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Pat set with ink pen quite
+flat pad. Pat took plate dish knife fork. Pat went.
+
+It was the only language Mr Dedalus said to Ben. He heard them as a
+boy in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles.
+Queenstown harbour full of Italian ships. Walking, you know, Ben, in the
+moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices. God, such
+music, Ben. Heard as a boy. Cross Ringabella haven mooncarole.
+
+Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed a
+moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying.
+
+Down the edge of his _Freeman_ baton ranged Bloom's, your other eye,
+scanning for where did I see that. Callan, Coleman, Dignam Patrick.
+Heigho! Heigho! Fawcett. Aha! Just I was looking...
+
+Hope he's not looking, cute as a rat. He held unfurled his _Freeman._
+Can't see now. Remember write Greek ees. Bloom dipped, Bloo mur: dear
+sir. Dear Henry wrote: dear Mady. Got your lett and flow. Hell did I
+put? Some pock or oth. It is utterl imposs. Underline _imposs._ To write
+today.
+
+Bore this. Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting
+fingers on flat pad Pat brought.
+
+On. Know what I mean. No, change that ee. Accep my poor litt pres
+enclos. Ask her no answ. Hold on. Five Dig. Two about here. Penny the
+gulls. Elijah is com. Seven Davy Byrne's. Is eight about. Say half a
+crown. My poor little pres: p. o. two and six. Write me a long. Do you
+despise? Jingle, have you the? So excited. Why do you call me naught?
+You naughty too? O, Mairy lost the string of her. Bye for today. Yes,
+yes, will tell you. Want to. To keep it up. Call me that other. Other
+world she wrote. My patience are exhaust. To keep it up. You must
+believe. Believe. The tank. It. Is. True.
+
+Folly am I writing? Husbands don't. That's marriage does, their wives.
+Because I'm away from. Suppose. But how? She must. Keep young. If she
+found out. Card in my high grade ha. No, not tell all. Useless pain. If
+they don't see. Woman. Sauce for the gander.
+
+A hackney car, number three hundred and twentyfour, driver Barton James
+of number one Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, on which sat a fare, a young
+gentleman, stylishly dressed in an indigoblue serge suit made by George
+Robert Mesias, tailor and cutter, of number five Eden quay, and wearing
+a straw hat very dressy, bought of John Plasto of number one Great
+Brunswick street, hatter. Eh? This is the jingle that joggled and
+jingled. By Dlugacz' porkshop bright tubes of Agendath trotted a
+gallantbuttocked mare.
+
+--Answering an ad? keen Richie's eyes asked Bloom.
+
+--Yes, Mr Bloom said. Town traveller. Nothing doing, I expect.
+
+Bloom mur: best references. But Henry wrote: it will excite me. You
+know how. In haste. Henry. Greek ee. Better add postscript. What is he
+playing now? Improvising. Intermezzo. P. S. The rum tum tum. How will
+you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack by. Tell me I want
+to. Know. O. Course if I didn't I wouldn't ask. La la la ree. Trails off
+there sad in minor. Why minor sad? Sign H. They like sad tail at end. P.
+P. S. La la la ree. I feel so sad today. La ree. So lonely. Dee.
+
+He blotted quick on pad of Pat. Envel. Address. Just copy out of paper.
+Murmured: Messrs Callan, Coleman and Co, limited. Henry wrote:
+
+Miss Martha Clifford c/o P. O. Dolphin's Barn Lane Dublin
+
+Blot over the other so he can't read. There. Right. Idea prize titbit.
+Something detective read off blottingpad. Payment at the rate of guinea
+per col. Matcham often thinks the laughing witch. Poor Mrs Purefoy. U.
+P: up.
+
+Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms.
+Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be.
+Wisdom while you wait.
+
+In Gerard's rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is
+all. One body. Do. But do.
+
+Done anyhow. Postal order, stamp. Postoffice lower down. Walk now.
+Enough. Barney Kiernan's I promised to meet them. Dislike that job.
+
+House of mourning. Walk. Pat! Doesn't hear. Deaf beetle he is.
+
+Car near there now. Talk. Talk. Pat! Doesn't. Settling those napkins.
+Lot of ground he must cover in the day. Paint face behind on him then
+he'd be two. Wish they'd sing more. Keep my mind off.
+
+Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his
+hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He
+waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits
+while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait.
+Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.
+
+Douce now. Douce Lydia. Bronze and rose.
+
+She had a gorgeous, simply gorgeous, time. And look at the lovely shell
+she brought.
+
+To the end of the bar to him she bore lightly the spiked and winding
+seahorn that he, George Lidwell, solicitor, might hear.
+
+--Listen! she bade him.
+
+Under Tom Kernan's ginhot words the accompanist wove music slow.
+Authentic fact. How Walter Bapty lost his voice. Well, sir, the husband
+took him by the throat. _Scoundrel,_ said he, _You'll sing no more
+lovesongs._ He did, faith, sir Tom. Bob Cowley wove. Tenors get wom.
+Cowley lay back.
+
+Ah, now he heard, she holding it to his ear. Hear! He heard.
+
+Wonderful. She held it to her own. And through the sifted light pale
+gold in contrast glided. To hear.
+
+Tap.
+
+Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more
+faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for
+other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.
+
+Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened.
+
+Her ear too is a shell, the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside.
+Lovely seaside girls. Skin tanned raw. Should have put on coldcream
+first make it brown. Buttered toast. O and that lotion mustn't forget.
+Fever near her mouth. Your head it simply. Hair braided over: shell with
+seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks the
+mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet. Yashmak. Find the way in. A cave.
+No admittance except on business.
+
+The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse in
+the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands.
+
+Wonderful really. So distinct. Again. George Lidwell held its murmur,
+hearing: then laid it by, gently.
+
+--What are the wild waves saying? he asked her, smiled.
+
+Charming, seasmiling and unanswering Lydia on Lidwell smiled.
+
+Tap.
+
+By Larry O'Rourke's, by Larry, bold Larry O', Boylan swayed and Boylan
+turned.
+
+From the forsaken shell miss Mina glided to her tankards waiting. No,
+she was not so lonely archly miss Douce's head let Mr Lidwell know.
+Walks in the moonlight by the sea. No, not alone. With whom? She nobly
+answered: with a gentleman friend.
+
+Bob Cowley's twinkling fingers in the treble played again. The landlord
+has the prior. A little time. Long John. Big Ben. Lightly he played a
+light bright tinkling measure for tripping ladies, arch and smiling,
+and for their gallants, gentlemen friends. One: one, one, one, one, one:
+two, one, three, four.
+
+Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattlemarket,
+cocks, hens don't crow, snakes hissss. There's music everywhere.
+Ruttledge's door: ee creaking. No, that's noise. Minuet of _Don
+Giovanni_ he's playing now. Court dresses of all descriptions in castle
+chambers dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating
+dockleaves. Nice that is. Look: look, look, look, look, look: you look
+at us.
+
+That's joyful I can feel. Never have written it. Why? My joy is other
+joy. But both are joys. Yes, joy it must be. Mere fact of music shows
+you are. Often thought she was in the dumps till she began to lilt. Then
+know.
+
+M'Coy valise. My wife and your wife. Squealing cat. Like tearing silk.
+Tongue when she talks like the clapper of a bellows. They can't manage
+men's intervals. Gap in their voices too. Fill me. I'm warm, dark, open.
+Molly in _quis est homo_: Mercadante. My ear against the wall to hear.
+Want a woman who can deliver the goods.
+
+Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue
+clocks came light to earth.
+
+O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that.
+It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is.
+Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the
+resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to
+the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian,
+gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle.
+Hissss. Now. Maybe now. Before.
+
+One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock
+with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock.
+
+Tap.
+
+--_Qui sdegno,_ Ben, said Father Cowley.
+
+--No, Ben, Tom Kernan interfered. _The Croppy Boy._ Our native Doric.
+
+--Ay do, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. Good men and true.
+
+--Do, do, they begged in one.
+
+I'll go. Here, Pat, return. Come. He came, he came, he did not stay. To
+me. How much?
+
+--What key? Six sharps?
+
+--F sharp major, Ben Dollard said.
+
+Bob Cowley's outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords.
+
+Must go prince Bloom told Richie prince. No, Richie said. Yes, must. Got
+money somewhere. He's on for a razzle backache spree. Much? He seehears
+lipspeech. One and nine. Penny for yourself. Here. Give him twopence
+tip. Deaf, bothered. But perhaps he has wife and family waiting, waiting
+Patty come home. Hee hee hee hee. Deaf wait while they wait.
+
+But wait. But hear. Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the
+dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic.
+
+The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth's fatigue made grave approach
+and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men
+and true. The priest he sought. With him would he speak a word.
+
+Tap.
+
+Ben Dollard's voice. Base barreltone. Doing his level best to say it.
+Croak of vast manless moonless womoonless marsh. Other comedown. Big
+ships' chandler's business he did once. Remember: rosiny ropes, ships'
+lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh
+home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him.
+
+The priest's at home. A false priest's servant bade him welcome. Step
+in. The holy father. With bows a traitor servant. Curlycues of chords.
+
+Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their days
+in. Hushaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die.
+
+The voice of warning, solemn warning, told them the youth had entered
+a lonely hall, told them how solemn fell his footsteps there, told them
+the gloomy chamber, the vested priest sitting to shrive.
+
+Decent soul. Bit addled now. Thinks he'll win in _Answers,_ poets'
+picture puzzle. We hand you crisp five pound note. Bird sitting hatching
+in a nest. Lay of the last minstrel he thought it was. See blank tee
+what domestic animal? Tee dash ar most courageous mariner. Good voice he
+has still. No eunuch yet with all his belongings.
+
+Listen. Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door deaf
+Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened. The chords harped slower.
+
+The voice of penance and of grief came slow, embellished, tremulous.
+Ben's contrite beard confessed. _in nomine Domini,_ in God's name he
+knelt. He beat his hand upon his breast, confessing: _mea culpa._
+
+Latin again. That holds them like birdlime. Priest with the communion
+corpus for those women. Chap in the mortuary, coffin or coffey,
+_corpusnomine._ Wonder where that rat is by now. Scrape.
+
+Tap.
+
+They listened. Tankards and miss Kennedy. George Lidwell, eyelid well
+expressive, fullbusted satin. Kernan. Si.
+
+The sighing voice of sorrow sang. His sins. Since Easter he had cursed
+three times. You bitch's bast. And once at masstime he had gone to play.
+Once by the churchyard he had passed and for his mother's rest he had
+not prayed. A boy. A croppy boy.
+
+Bronze, listening, by the beerpull gazed far away. Soulfully. Doesn't
+half know I'm. Molly great dab at seeing anyone looking.
+
+Bronze gazed far sideways. Mirror there. Is that best side of her face?
+They always know. Knock at the door. Last tip to titivate.
+
+Cockcarracarra.
+
+What do they think when they hear music? Way to catch rattlesnakes.
+Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked
+that best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too.
+Custom his country perhaps. That's music too. Not as bad as it sounds.
+Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless,
+gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile
+music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin's name.
+
+She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore lowcut, belongings on show.
+Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question.
+Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa's. Hypnotised,
+listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle staring down
+into her with his operaglass for all he was worth. Beauty of music you
+must hear twice. Nature woman half a look. God made the country man the
+tune. Met him pike hoses. Philosophy. O rocks!
+
+All gone. All fallen. At the siege of Ross his father, at Gorey all his
+brothers fell. To Wexford, we are the boys of Wexford, he would. Last of
+his name and race.
+
+I too. Last of my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps. No
+son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?
+
+He bore no hate.
+
+Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old. Big Ben his voice
+unfolded. Great voice Richie Goulding said, a flush struggling in his
+pale, to Bloom soon old. But when was young?
+
+Ireland comes now. My country above the king. She listens. Who fears to
+speak of nineteen four? Time to be shoving. Looked enough.
+
+--_Bless me, father,_ Dollard the croppy cried. _Bless me and let me
+go._
+
+Tap.
+
+Bloom looked, unblessed to go. Got up to kill: on eighteen bob a week.
+Fellows shell out the dibs. Want to keep your weathereye open. Those
+girls, those lovely. By the sad sea waves. Chorusgirl's romance. Letters
+read out for breach of promise. From Chickabiddy's owny Mumpsypum.
+Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you.
+
+Low sank the music, air and words. Then hastened. The false priest
+rustling soldier from his cassock. A yeoman captain. They know it all by
+heart. The thrill they itch for. Yeoman cap.
+
+Tap. Tap.
+
+Thrilled she listened, bending in sympathy to hear.
+
+Blank face. Virgin should say: or fingered only. Write something on it:
+page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young.
+Even admire themselves. See. Play on her. Lip blow. Body of white woman,
+a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes, all women. Goddess I
+didn't see. They want it. Not too much polite. That's why he gets them.
+Gold in your pocket, brass in your face. Say something. Make her hear.
+With look to look. Songs without words. Molly, that hurdygurdy boy.
+She knew he meant the monkey was sick. Or because so like the Spanish.
+Understand animals too that way. Solomon did. Gift of nature.
+
+Ventriloquise. My lips closed. Think in my stom. What?
+
+Will? You? I. Want. You. To.
+
+With hoarse rude fury the yeoman cursed, swelling in apoplectic bitch's
+bastard. A good thought, boy, to come. One hour's your time to live,
+your last.
+
+Tap. Tap.
+
+Thrill now. Pity they feel. To wipe away a tear for martyrs that want
+to, dying to, die. For all things dying, for all things born. Poor Mrs
+Purefoy. Hope she's over. Because their wombs.
+
+A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly,
+hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder
+river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave (her heaving embon) red
+rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is
+life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.
+
+But look. The bright stars fade. O rose! Castile. The morn. Ha. Lidwell.
+For him then not for. Infatuated. I like that? See her from here though.
+Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of empties.
+
+On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave
+it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over
+the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and
+finger passed in pity: passed, reposed and, gently touching, then slid
+so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding
+through their sliding ring.
+
+With a cock with a carra.
+
+Tap. Tap. Tap.
+
+I hold this house. Amen. He gnashed in fury. Traitors swing.
+
+The chords consented. Very sad thing. But had to be. Get out before the
+end. Thanks, that was heavenly. Where's my hat. Pass by her. Can leave
+that Freeman. Letter I have. Suppose she were the? No. Walk, walk,
+walk. Like Cashel Boylo Connoro Coylo Tisdall Maurice Tisntdall Farrell.
+Waaaaaaalk.
+
+Well, I must be. Are you off? Yrfmstbyes. Blmstup. O'er ryehigh blue.
+Ow. Bloom stood up. Soap feeling rather sticky behind. Must have
+sweated: music. That lotion, remember. Well, so long. High grade. Card
+inside. Yes.
+
+By deaf Pat in the doorway straining ear Bloom passed.
+
+At Geneva barrack that young man died. At Passage was his body laid.
+Dolor! O, he dolores! The voice of the mournful chanter called to
+dolorous prayer.
+
+By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand, by slops, by empties,
+by popped corks, greeting in going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and
+faint gold in deepseashadow, went Bloom, soft Bloom, I feel so lonely
+Bloom.
+
+Tap. Tap. Tap.
+
+Pray for him, prayed the bass of Dollard. You who hear in peace. Breathe
+a prayer, drop a tear, good men, good people. He was the croppy boy.
+
+Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond hallway
+heard the growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all
+treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill to
+wash it down. Glad I avoided.
+
+--Come on, Ben, Simon Dedalus cried. By God, you're as good as ever you
+were.
+
+--Better, said Tomgin Kernan. Most trenchant rendition of that ballad,
+upon my soul and honour It is.
+
+--Lablache, said Father Cowley.
+
+Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed
+and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering
+castagnettes in the air.
+
+Big Benaben Dollard. Big Benben. Big Benben.
+
+Rrr.
+
+And deepmoved all, Simon trumping compassion from foghorn nose, all
+laughing they brought him forth, Ben Dollard, in right good cheer.
+
+--You're looking rubicund, George Lidwell said.
+
+Miss Douce composed her rose to wait.
+
+--Ben machree, said Mr Dedalus, clapping Ben's fat back shoulderblade.
+Fit as a fiddle only he has a lot of adipose tissue concealed about his
+person.
+
+Rrrrrrrsss.
+
+--Fat of death, Simon, Ben Dollard growled.
+
+Richie rift in the lute alone sat: Goulding, Collis, Ward. Uncertainly
+he waited. Unpaid Pat too.
+
+Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
+
+Miss Mina Kennedy brought near her lips to ear of tankard one.
+
+--Mr Dollard, they murmured low.
+
+--Dollard, murmured tankard.
+
+Tank one believed: miss Kenn when she: that doll he was: she doll: the
+tank.
+
+He murmured that he knew the name. The name was familiar to him, that
+is to say. That was to say he had heard the name of. Dollard, was it?
+Dollard, yes.
+
+Yes, her lips said more loudly, Mr Dollard. He sang that song lovely,
+murmured Mina. Mr Dollard. And _The last rose of summer_ was a lovely
+song. Mina loved that song. Tankard loved the song that Mina.
+
+'Tis the last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round
+inside.
+
+Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait. Postoffice near Reuben J's
+one and eightpence too. Get shut of it. Dodge round by Greek street.
+Wish I hadn't promised to meet. Freer in air. Music. Gets on your
+nerves. Beerpull. Her hand that rocks the cradle rules the. Ben Howth.
+That rules the world.
+
+Far. Far. Far. Far.
+
+Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
+
+Up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for Mady, with
+sweets of sin with frillies for Raoul with met him pike hoses went Poldy
+on.
+
+Tap blind walked tapping by the tap the curbstone tapping, tap by tap.
+
+Cowley, he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness. Better give way
+only half way the way of a man with a maid. Instance enthusiasts. All
+ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Dotty.
+You daren't budge. Thinking strictly prohibited. Always talking shop.
+Fiddlefaddle about notes.
+
+All a kind of attempt to talk. Unpleasant when it stops because you
+never know exac. Organ in Gardiner street. Old Glynn fifty quid a year.
+Queer up there in the cockloft, alone, with stops and locks and keys.
+Seated all day at the organ. Maunder on for hours, talking to himself or
+the other fellow blowing the bellows. Growl angry, then shriek cursing
+(want to have wadding or something in his no don't she cried), then all
+of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind.
+
+Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom's little wee.
+
+--Was he? Mr Dedalus said, returning with fetched pipe. I was with him
+this morning at poor little Paddy Dignam's...
+
+--Ay, the Lord have mercy on him.
+
+--By the bye there's a tuningfork in there on the...
+
+Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
+
+--The wife has a fine voice. Or had. What? Lidwell asked.
+
+--O, that must be the tuner, Lydia said to Simonlionel first I saw,
+forgot it when he was here.
+
+Blind he was she told George Lidwell second I saw. And played so
+exquisitely, treat to hear. Exquisite contrast: bronzelid, minagold.
+
+--Shout! Ben Dollard shouted, pouring. Sing out!
+
+--'lldo! cried Father Cowley.
+
+Rrrrrr.
+
+I feel I want...
+
+Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap
+
+--Very, Mr Dedalus said, staring hard at a headless sardine.
+
+Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last
+sardine of summer. Bloom alone.
+
+--Very, he stared. The lower register, for choice.
+
+Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
+
+Bloom went by Barry's. Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I had.
+Twentyfour solicitors in that one house. Counted them. Litigation. Love
+one another. Piles of parchment. Messrs Pick and Pocket have power of
+attorney. Goulding, Collis, Ward.
+
+But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation: Mickey
+Rooney's band. Wonder how it first struck him. Sitting at home after
+pig's cheek and cabbage nursing it in the armchair. Rehearsing his band
+part. Pom. Pompedy. Jolly for the wife. Asses' skins. Welt them through
+life, then wallop after death. Pom. Wallop. Seems to be what you call
+yashmak or I mean kismet. Fate.
+
+Tap. Tap. A stripling, blind, with a tapping cane came taptaptapping by
+Daly's window where a mermaid hair all streaming (but he couldn't see)
+blew whiffs of a mermaid (blind couldn't), mermaid, coolest whiff of
+all.
+
+Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then blow. Even
+comb and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of. Molly in her shift in
+Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its
+own, don't you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? _Cloche.
+Sonnez la._ Shepherd his pipe. Pwee little wee. Policeman a whistle.
+Locks and keys! Sweep! Four o'clock's all's well! Sleep! All is lost
+now. Drum? Pompedy. Wait. I know. Towncrier, bumbailiff. Long John.
+Waken the dead. Pom. Dignam. Poor little _nominedomine._ Pom. It is
+music. I mean of course it's all pom pom pom very much what they call
+_da capo._ Still you can hear. As we march, we march along, march along.
+Pom.
+
+I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of
+custom shah of Persia. Breathe a prayer, drop a tear. All the same
+he must have been a bit of a natural not to see it was a yeoman cap.
+Muffled up. Wonder who was that chap at the grave in the brown macin. O,
+the whore of the lane!
+
+A frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily in the day
+along the quay towards Mr Bloom. When first he saw that form endearing?
+Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane. Horn. Who had
+the? Heehaw shesaw. Off her beat here. What is she? Hope she. Psst! Any
+chance of your wash. Knew Molly. Had me decked. Stout lady does be with
+you in the brown costume. Put you off your stroke, that. Appointment
+we made knowing we'd never, well hardly ever. Too dear too near to home
+sweet home. Sees me, does she? Looks a fright in the day. Face like dip.
+Damn her. O, well, she has to live like the rest. Look in here.
+
+In Lionel Marks's antique saleshop window haughty Henry Lionel Leopold
+dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged battered
+candlesticks melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags. Bargain: six bob. Might
+learn to play. Cheap. Let her pass. Course everything is dear if you
+don't want it. That's what good salesman is. Make you buy what he wants
+to sell. Chap sold me the Swedish razor he shaved me with. Wanted to
+charge me for the edge he gave it. She's passing now. Six bob.
+
+Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund.
+
+Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking
+glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia's tempting last
+rose of summer, rose of Castile. First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth:
+Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and big Ben Dollard.
+
+Tap. A youth entered a lonely Ormond hall.
+
+Bloom viewed a gallant pictured hero in Lionel Marks's window. Robert
+Emmet's last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.
+
+--True men like you men.
+
+--Ay, ay, Ben.
+
+--Will lift your glass with us.
+
+They lifted.
+
+Tschink. Tschunk.
+
+Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He saw
+not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor Richie
+nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee. He did not see.
+
+Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. _When my country takes
+her place among._
+
+Prrprr.
+
+Must be the bur.
+
+Fff! Oo. Rrpr.
+
+_Nations of the earth._ No-one behind. She's passed. _Then and not till
+then._ Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm
+sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two. _Let my epitaph be._ Kraaaaaa.
+_Written. I have._
+
+Pprrpffrrppffff.
+
+_Done._
+
+
+
+I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the
+corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along
+and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have
+the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter
+only Joe Hynes.
+
+--Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody
+chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?
+
+--Soot's luck, says Joe. Who's the old ballocks you were talking to?
+
+--Old Troy, says I, was in the force. I'm on two minds not to give that
+fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and
+ladders.
+
+--What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.
+
+--Devil a much, says I. There's a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the
+garrison church at the corner of Chicken lane--old Troy was just giving
+me a wrinkle about him--lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar
+to pay three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a
+hop-of-my-thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury
+street.
+
+--Circumcised? says Joe.
+
+--Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I'm
+hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can't get a penny
+out of him.
+
+--That the lay you're on now? says Joe.
+
+--Ay, says I. How are the mighty fallen! Collector of bad and doubtful
+debts. But that's the most notorious bloody robber you'd meet in a day's
+walk and the face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain.
+_Tell him,_ says he, _I dare him,_ says he, _and I doubledare him
+to send you round here again or if he does,_ says he, _I'll have
+him summonsed up before the court, so I will, for trading without a
+licence._ And he after stuffing himself till he's fit to burst. Jesus,
+I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out. _He drink me my
+teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my moneys?_
+
+For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of 13 Saint Kevin's
+parade in the city of Dublin, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter
+called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty,
+esquire, of 29 Arbour hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward,
+gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds
+avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings and no pence per
+pound avoirdupois and three stone avoirdupois of sugar, crushed crystal,
+at threepence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the
+said vendor of one pound five shillings and sixpence sterling for value
+received which amount shall be paid by said purchaser to said vendor in
+weekly instalments every seven calendar days of three shillings and no
+pence sterling: and the said nonperishable goods shall not be pawned or
+pledged or sold or otherwise alienated by the said purchaser but shall
+be and remain and be held to be the sole and exclusive property of the
+said vendor to be disposed of at his good will and pleasure until the
+said amount shall have been duly paid by the said purchaser to the said
+vendor in the manner herein set forth as this day hereby agreed between
+the said vendor, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the one
+part and the said purchaser, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns
+of the other part.
+
+--Are you a strict t.t.? says Joe.
+
+--Not taking anything between drinks, says I.
+
+--What about paying our respects to our friend? says Joe.
+
+--Who? says I. Sure, he's out in John of God's off his head, poor man.
+
+--Drinking his own stuff? says Joe.
+
+--Ay, says I. Whisky and water on the brain.
+
+--Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe. I want to see the citizen.
+
+--Barney mavourneen's be it, says I. Anything strange or wonderful, Joe?
+
+--Not a word, says Joe. I was up at that meeting in the City Arms.
+
+---What was that, Joe? says I.
+
+--Cattle traders, says Joe, about the foot and mouth disease. I want to
+give the citizen the hard word about it.
+
+So we went around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the
+courthouse talking of one thing or another. Decent fellow Joe when he
+has it but sure like that he never has it. Jesus, I couldn't get over
+that bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber. For trading without a
+licence, says he.
+
+In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There
+rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in
+life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land
+it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the
+gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the
+grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse
+fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to
+be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty
+trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty
+sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic
+eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which
+that region is thoroughly well supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close
+proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs
+while they play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden
+ingots, silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings,
+creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And heroes
+voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy, the peerless
+princes of unfettered Munster and of Connacht the just and of smooth
+sleek Leinster and of Cruahan's land and of Armagh the splendid and of
+the noble district of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.
+
+And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen
+by mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for
+that purpose, and thither come all herds and fatlings and firstfruits
+of that land for O'Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them, a chieftain
+descended from chieftains. Thither the extremely large wains bring
+foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach,
+pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs,
+drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale,
+York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of
+mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red
+green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and
+chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious,
+and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.
+
+I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him. Come out here, Geraghty, you
+notorious bloody hill and dale robber!
+
+And by that way wend the herds innumerable of bellwethers and flushed
+ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium steers
+and roaring mares and polled calves and longwoods and storesheep and
+Cuffe's prime springers and culls and sowpigs and baconhogs and the
+various different varieties of highly distinguished swine and Angus
+heifers and polly bulllocks of immaculate pedigree together with prime
+premiated milchcows and beeves: and there is ever heard a trampling,
+cackling, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting,
+champing, chewing, of sheep and pigs and heavyhooved kine from
+pasturelands of Lusk and Rush and Carrickmines and from the streamy
+vales of Thomond, from the M'Gillicuddy's reeks the inaccessible and
+lordly Shannon the unfathomable, and from the gentle declivities of the
+place of the race of Kiar, their udders distended with superabundance of
+milk and butts of butter and rennets of cheese and farmer's firkins and
+targets of lamb and crannocks of corn and oblong eggs in great hundreds,
+various in size, the agate with this dun.
+
+So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there, sure enough, was the
+citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that
+bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would
+drop in the way of drink.
+
+--There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his
+load of papers, working for the cause.
+
+The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be
+a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody
+dog. I'm told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a
+constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper
+about a licence.
+
+--Stand and deliver, says he.
+
+--That's all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here.
+
+--Pass, friends, says he.
+
+Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he:
+
+--What's your opinion of the times?
+
+Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to
+the occasion.
+
+--I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his
+fork.
+
+So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:
+
+--Foreign wars is the cause of it.
+
+And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:
+
+--It's the Russians wish to tyrannise.
+
+--Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I. I've a thirst on me
+I wouldn't sell for half a crown.
+
+--Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.
+
+--Wine of the country, says he.
+
+--What's yours? says Joe.
+
+--Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.
+
+--Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how's the old heart, citizen? says
+he.
+
+--Never better, _a chara_, says he. What Garry? Are we going to win? Eh?
+
+And with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck
+and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.
+
+The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was
+that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired
+freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded
+deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed
+hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his
+rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his
+body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in
+hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (_Ulex Europeus_).
+The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue
+projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous
+obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes
+in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the
+dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath
+issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth
+while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his
+formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of
+the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and
+tremble.
+
+He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching
+to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by
+a girdle of plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this he wore trews of
+deerskin, roughly stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased
+in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod
+with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same
+beast. From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every
+movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude
+yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of
+antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages,
+Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill,
+Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell,
+Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy
+Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff,
+Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain
+Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan,
+Marshal MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the
+Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for
+Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap,
+The Woman Who Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L.
+Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir
+Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of
+Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick
+W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez,
+Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas
+Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig
+Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly
+Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve,
+Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama
+Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye,
+the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah
+O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare. A couched spear of
+acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet reposed a savage
+animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was
+sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and
+spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time
+by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of
+paleolithic stone.
+
+So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the
+sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid O, as true as
+I'm telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.
+
+--And there's more where that came from, says he.
+
+--Were you robbing the poorbox, Joe? says I.
+
+--Sweat of my brow, says Joe. 'Twas the prudent member gave me the
+wheeze.
+
+--I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and
+Greek street with his cod's eye counting up all the guts of the fish.
+
+Who comes through Michan's land, bedight in sable armour? O'Bloom,
+the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of the
+prudent soul.
+
+--For the old woman of Prince's street, says the citizen, the subsidised
+organ. The pledgebound party on the floor of the house. And look at this
+blasted rag, says he. Look at this, says he. _The Irish Independent,_ if
+you please, founded by Parnell to be the workingman's friend. Listen to
+the births and deaths in the _Irish all for Ireland Independent,_ and
+I'll thank you and the marriages.
+
+And he starts reading them out:
+
+--Gordon, Barnfield crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's
+on Sea: the wife of William T Redmayne of a son. How's that, eh? Wright
+and Flint, Vincent and Gillett to Rotha Marion daughter of Rosa and the
+late George Alfred Gillett, 179 Clapham road, Stockwell, Playwood and
+Ridsdale at Saint Jude's, Kensington by the very reverend Dr Forrest,
+dean of Worcester. Eh? Deaths. Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London: Carr,
+Stoke Newington, of gastritis and heart disease: Cockburn, at the Moat
+house, Chepstow...
+
+--I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience.
+
+--Cockburn. Dimsey, wife of David Dimsey, late of the admiralty: Miller,
+Tottenham, aged eightyfive: Welsh, June 12, at 35 Canning street,
+Liverpool, Isabella Helen. How's that for a national press, eh, my brown
+son! How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?
+
+--Ah, well, says Joe, handing round the boose. Thanks be to God they had
+the start of us. Drink that, citizen.
+
+--I will, says he, honourable person.
+
+--Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.
+
+Ah! Ow! Don't be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint.
+Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.
+
+And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came
+swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him
+there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred
+scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage,
+fairest of her race.
+
+Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney's
+snug, squeezed up with the laughing. And who was sitting up there in
+the corner that I hadn't seen snoring drunk blind to the world only Bob
+Doran. I didn't know what was up and Alf kept making signs out of the
+door. And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen
+in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and
+the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a
+poodle. I thought Alf would split.
+
+--Look at him, says he. Breen. He's traipsing all round Dublin with a
+postcard someone sent him with U. p: up on it to take a li...
+
+And he doubled up.
+
+--Take a what? says I.
+
+--Libel action, says he, for ten thousand pounds.
+
+--O hell! says I.
+
+The bloody mongrel began to growl that'd put the fear of God in you
+seeing something was up but the citizen gave him a kick in the ribs.
+
+_--Bi i dho husht,_ says he.
+
+--Who? says Joe.
+
+--Breen, says Alf. He was in John Henry Menton's and then he went round
+to Collis and Ward's and then Tom Rochford met him and sent him round to
+the subsheriff's for a lark. O God, I've a pain laughing. U. p: up. The
+long fellow gave him an eye as good as a process and now the bloody old
+lunatic is gone round to Green street to look for a G man.
+
+--When is long John going to hang that fellow in Mountjoy? says Joe.
+
+--Bergan, says Bob Doran, waking up. Is that Alf Bergan?
+
+--Yes, says Alf. Hanging? Wait till I show you. Here, Terry, give us a
+pony. That bloody old fool! Ten thousand pounds. You should have seen
+long John's eye. U. p...
+
+And he started laughing.
+
+--Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran. Is that Bergan?
+
+--Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf.
+
+Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup
+full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and
+Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of
+deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and
+mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour
+juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day
+from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.
+
+Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born,
+that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that
+thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals.
+
+But he, the young chief of the O'Bergan's, could ill brook to be outdone
+in generous deeds but gave therefor with gracious gesture a testoon of
+costliest bronze. Thereon embossed in excellent smithwork was seen
+the image of a queen of regal port, scion of the house of Brunswick,
+Victoria her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the
+United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions
+beyond the sea, queen, defender of the faith, Empress of India, even
+she, who bore rule, a victress over many peoples, the wellbeloved, for
+they knew and loved her from the rising of the sun to the going down
+thereof, the pale, the dark, the ruddy and the ethiop.
+
+--What's that bloody freemason doing, says the citizen, prowling up and
+down outside?
+
+--What's that? says Joe.
+
+--Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. Talking about hanging,
+I'll show you something you never saw. Hangmen's letters. Look at here.
+
+So he took a bundle of wisps of letters and envelopes out of his pocket.
+
+--Are you codding? says I.
+
+--Honest injun, says Alf. Read them.
+
+So Joe took up the letters.
+
+--Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran.
+
+So I saw there was going to be a bit of a dust Bob's a queer chap when
+the porter's up in him so says I just to make talk:
+
+--How's Willy Murray those times, Alf?
+
+--I don't know, says Alf I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy
+Dignam. Only I was running after that...
+
+--You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?
+
+--With Dignam, says Alf.
+
+--Is it Paddy? says Joe.
+
+--Yes, says Alf. Why?
+
+--Don't you know he's dead? says Joe.
+
+--Paddy Dignam dead! says Alf.
+
+--Ay, says Joe.
+
+--Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as
+a pikestaff.
+
+--Who's dead? says Bob Doran.
+
+--You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.
+
+--What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five... What?... And Willy Murray
+with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's... What? Dignam
+dead?
+
+--What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about...?
+
+--Dead! says Alf. He's no more dead than you are.
+
+--Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning
+anyhow.
+
+--Paddy? says Alf.
+
+--Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him.
+
+--Good Christ! says Alf.
+
+Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted.
+
+In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by
+tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing
+luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of
+the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge
+of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was
+effected through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery
+and scarlet rays emanating from the sacral region and solar plexus.
+Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heavenworld he
+stated that he was now on the path of pr l ya or return but was still
+submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the
+lower astral levels. In reply to a question as to his first sensations
+in the great divide beyond he stated that previously he had seen as in a
+glass darkly but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities
+of atmic development opened up to them. Interrogated as to whether life
+there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard
+from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were
+equipped with every modern home comfort such as talafana, alavatar,
+hatakalda, wataklasat and that the highest adepts were steeped in
+waves of volupcy of the very purest nature. Having requested a quart of
+buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief. Asked if he
+had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the
+wrong side of Maya to acknowledge the true path for it was reported
+in devanic circles that Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the
+eastern angle where the ram has power. It was then queried whether there
+were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was:
+_We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C. K.
+doesn't pile it on._ It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr
+Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H. J. O'Neill's popular
+funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been
+responsible for the carrying out of the interment arrangements. Before
+departing he requested that it should be told to his dear son Patsy that
+the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the
+commode in the return room and that the pair should be sent to Cullen's
+to be soled only as the heels were still good. He stated that this had
+greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly
+requested that his desire should be made known.
+
+Assurances were given that the matter would be attended to and it was
+intimated that this had given satisfaction.
+
+He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was
+his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with
+your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.
+
+--There he is again, says the citizen, staring out.
+
+--Who? says I.
+
+--Bloom, says he. He's on point duty up and down there for the last ten
+minutes.
+
+And, begob, I saw his physog do a peep in and then slidder off again.
+
+Little Alf was knocked bawways. Faith, he was.
+
+--Good Christ! says he. I could have sworn it was him.
+
+And says Bob Doran, with the hat on the back of his poll, lowest
+blackguard in Dublin when he's under the influence:
+
+--Who said Christ is good?
+
+--I beg your parsnips, says Alf.
+
+--Is that a good Christ, says Bob Doran, to take away poor little Willy
+Dignam?
+
+--Ah, well, says Alf, trying to pass it off. He's over all his troubles.
+
+But Bob Doran shouts out of him.
+
+--He's a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.
+
+Terry came down and tipped him the wink to keep quiet, that they didn't
+want that kind of talk in a respectable licensed premises. And Bob Doran
+starts doing the weeps about Paddy Dignam, true as you're there.
+
+--The finest man, says he, snivelling, the finest purest character.
+
+The tear is bloody near your eye. Talking through his bloody hat. Fitter
+for him go home to the little sleepwalking bitch he married, Mooney, the
+bumbailiff's daughter, mother kept a kip in Hardwicke street, that
+used to be stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told me that was
+stopping there at two in the morning without a stitch on her, exposing
+her person, open to all comers, fair field and no favour.
+
+--The noblest, the truest, says he. And he's gone, poor little Willy,
+poor little Paddy Dignam.
+
+And mournful and with a heavy heart he bewept the extinction of that
+beam of heaven.
+
+Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing round
+the door.
+
+--Come in, come on, he won't eat you, says the citizen.
+
+So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry was
+Martin Cunningham there.
+
+--O, Christ M'Keown, says Joe, reading one of the letters. Listen to
+this, will you?
+
+And he starts reading out one.
+
+_7 Hunter Street, Liverpool. To the High Sheriff of Dublin, Dublin._
+
+_Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful
+case i hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail on the 12 of Febuary 1900 and i
+hanged..._
+
+--Show us, Joe, says I.
+
+--_... private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in
+Pentonville prison and i was assistant when..._
+
+--Jesus, says I.
+
+--_... Billington executed the awful murderer Toad Smith..._
+
+The citizen made a grab at the letter.
+
+--Hold hard, says Joe, _i have a special nack of putting the noose once
+in he can't get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my
+terms is five ginnees._
+
+_H. RUMBOLD, MASTER BARBER._
+
+--And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.
+
+--And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe. Here, says he, take them
+to hell out of my sight, Alf. Hello, Bloom, says he, what will you have?
+
+So they started arguing about the point, Bloom saying he wouldn't and he
+couldn't and excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said well
+he'd just take a cigar. Gob, he's a prudent member and no mistake.
+
+--Give us one of your prime stinkers, Terry, says Joe.
+
+And Alf was telling us there was one chap sent in a mourning card with a
+black border round it.
+
+--They're all barbers, says he, from the black country that would hang
+their own fathers for five quid down and travelling expenses.
+
+And he was telling us there's two fellows waiting below to pull his
+heels down when he gets the drop and choke him properly and then they
+chop up the rope after and sell the bits for a few bob a skull.
+
+In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor. Their
+deadly coil they grasp: yea, and therein they lead to Erebus whatsoever
+wight hath done a deed of blood for I will on nowise suffer it even so
+saith the Lord.
+
+So they started talking about capital punishment and of course Bloom
+comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the
+business and the old dog smelling him all the time I'm told those jewies
+does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don't
+know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on.
+
+--There's one thing it hasn't a deterrent effect on, says Alf.
+
+--What's that? says Joe.
+
+--The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged, says Alf.
+
+--That so? says Joe.
+
+--God's truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in
+
+Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when
+they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like
+a poker.
+
+--Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said.
+
+--That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It's only a natural
+phenomenon, don't you see, because on account of the...
+
+And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and
+this phenomenon and the other phenomenon.
+
+The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered
+medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the
+cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would,
+according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be
+calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent
+ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus,
+thereby causing the elastic pores of the _corpora cavernosa_ to rapidly
+dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood
+to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ
+resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty
+a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection _in articulo
+mortis per diminutionem capitis._
+
+So of course the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and
+he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old guard and
+the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of ninetyeight and Joe with
+him about all the fellows that were hanged, drawn and transported for
+the cause by drumhead courtmartial and a new Ireland and new this, that
+and the other. Talking about new Ireland he ought to go and get a new
+dog so he ought. Mangy ravenous brute sniffing and sneezing all round
+the place and scratching his scabs. And round he goes to Bob Doran that
+was standing Alf a half one sucking up for what he could get. So of
+course Bob Doran starts doing the bloody fool with him:
+
+--Give us the paw! Give the paw, doggy! Good old doggy! Give the paw
+here! Give us the paw!
+
+Arrah, bloody end to the paw he'd paw and Alf trying to keep him from
+tumbling off the bloody stool atop of the bloody old dog and he talking
+all kinds of drivel about training by kindness and thoroughbred dog and
+intelligent dog: give you the bloody pip. Then he starts scraping a few
+bits of old biscuit out of the bottom of a Jacobs' tin he told Terry to
+bring. Gob, he golloped it down like old boots and his tongue hanging
+out of him a yard long for more. Near ate the tin and all, hungry bloody
+mongrel.
+
+And the citizen and Bloom having an argument about the point, the
+brothers Sheares and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet
+and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara Curran and
+she's far from the land. And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown
+cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Phenomenon! The fat heap he
+married is a nice old phenomenon with a back on her like a ballalley.
+Time they were stopping up in the _City Arms_ pisser Burke told me there
+was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom
+trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bézique
+to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a
+Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw and taking the
+lout out for a walk. And one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and,
+by the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought him home as
+drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of
+alcohol and by herrings, if the three women didn't near roast him, it's
+a queer story, the old one, Bloom's wife and Mrs O'Dowd that kept the
+hotel. Jesus, I had to laugh at pisser Burke taking them off chewing
+the fat. And Bloom with his _but don't you see?_ and _but on the other
+hand_. And sure, more be token, the lout I'm told was in Power's after,
+the blender's, round in Cope street going home footless in a cab five
+times in the week after drinking his way through all the samples in the
+bloody establishment. Phenomenon!
+
+--The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and
+glaring at Bloom.
+
+--Ay, ay, says Joe.
+
+--You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is...
+
+--_Sinn Fein!_ says the citizen. _Sinn Fein amhain!_ The friends we love
+are by our side and the foes we hate before us.
+
+The last farewell was affecting in the extreme. From the belfries far
+and near the funereal deathbell tolled unceasingly while all around the
+gloomy precincts rolled the ominous warning of a hundred muffled drums
+punctuated by the hollow booming of pieces of ordnance. The deafening
+claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up
+the ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its
+supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle. A torrential rain
+poured down from the floodgates of the angry heavens upon the
+bared heads of the assembled multitude which numbered at the
+lowest computation five hundred thousand persons. A posse of Dublin
+Metropolitan police superintended by the Chief Commissioner in person
+maintained order in the vast throng for whom the York street brass and
+reed band whiled away the intervening time by admirably rendering on
+their blackdraped instruments the matchless melody endeared to us from
+the cradle by Speranza's plaintive muse. Special quick excursion trains
+and upholstered charabancs had been provided for the comfort of our
+country cousins of whom there were large contingents. Considerable
+amusement was caused by the favourite Dublin streetsingers L-n-h-n and
+M-ll-g-n who sang _The Night before Larry was stretched_ in their usual
+mirth-provoking fashion. Our two inimitable drolls did a roaring trade
+with their broadsheets among lovers of the comedy element and nobody
+who has a corner in his heart for real Irish fun without vulgarity
+will grudge them their hardearned pennies. The children of the Male and
+Female Foundling Hospital who thronged the windows overlooking the scene
+were delighted with this unexpected addition to the day's entertainment
+and a word of praise is due to the Little Sisters of the Poor for their
+excellent idea of affording the poor fatherless and motherless children
+a genuinely instructive treat. The viceregal houseparty which included
+many wellknown ladies was chaperoned by Their Excellencies to the most
+favourable positions on the grandstand while the picturesque foreign
+delegation known as the Friends of the Emerald Isle was accommodated
+on a tribune directly opposite. The delegation, present in full force,
+consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed
+_doyen_ of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a
+powerful steam crane), Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker
+Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von
+Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi,
+Hiram Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh
+Rahat Lokum Effendi, Senor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras
+y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri, Hi Hung
+Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps, Pan Poleaxe
+Paddyrisky, Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch, Borus
+Hupinkoff, Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli,
+Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivatdocent
+-generalhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein. All the
+delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest
+possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which
+they had been called upon to witness. An animated altercation (in which
+all took part) ensued among the F. O. T. E. I. as to whether the eighth
+or the ninth of March was the correct date of the birth of Ireland's
+patron saint. In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars,
+boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas,
+catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to
+and blows were freely exchanged. The baby policeman, Constable
+MacFadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly
+restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth
+of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending
+parties. The readywitted ninefooter's suggestion at once appealed to all
+and was unanimously accepted. Constable MacFadden was heartily
+congratulated by all the F.O.T.E.I., several of whom were bleeding
+profusely. Commendatore Beninobenone having been extricated from
+underneath the presidential armchair, it was explained by his legal
+adviser Avvocato Pagamimi that the various articles secreted in his
+thirtytwo pockets had been abstracted by him during the affray from the
+pockets of his junior colleagues in the hope of bringing them to their
+senses. The objects (which included several hundred ladies' and
+gentlemen's gold and silver watches) were promptly restored to their
+rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme.
+
+Quietly, unassumingly Rumbold stepped on to the scaffold in faultless
+morning dress and wearing his favourite flower, the _Gladiolus
+Cruentus_. He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough
+which so many have tried (unsuccessfully) to imitate--short,
+painstaking yet withal so characteristic of the man. The arrival of the
+worldrenowned headsman was greeted by a roar of acclamation from the
+huge concourse, the viceregal ladies waving their handkerchiefs in
+their excitement while the even more excitable foreign delegates
+cheered vociferously in a medley of cries, _hoch, banzai, eljen, zivio,
+chinchin, polla kronia, hiphip, vive, Allah_, amid which the ringing
+_evviva_ of the delegate of the land of song (a high double F recalling
+those piercingly lovely notes with which the eunuch Catalani beglamoured
+our greatgreatgrandmothers) was easily distinguishable. It was exactly
+seventeen o'clock. The signal for prayer was then promptly given by
+megaphone and in an instant all heads were bared, the commendatore's
+patriarchal sombrero, which has been in the possession of his family
+since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by his medical adviser
+in attendance, Dr Pippi. The learned prelate who administered the last
+comforts of holy religion to the hero martyr when about to pay the death
+penalty knelt in a most christian spirit in a pool of rainwater, his
+cassock above his hoary head, and offered up to the throne of grace
+fervent prayers of supplication. Hand by the block stood the grim figure
+of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot
+with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered
+furiously. As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his
+horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated
+in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been provided by the
+admirers of his fell but necessary office. On a handsome mahogany table
+near him were neatly arranged the quartering knife, the various
+finely tempered disembowelling appliances (specially supplied by the
+worldfamous firm of cutlers, Messrs John Round and Sons, Sheffield),
+a terra cotta saucepan for the reception of the duodenum, colon,
+blind intestine and appendix etc when successfully extracted and two
+commodious milkjugs destined to receive the most precious blood of the
+most precious victim. The housesteward of the amalgamated cats' and
+dogs' home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished
+to that beneficent institution. Quite an excellent repast consisting of
+rashers and eggs, fried steak and onions, done to a nicety, delicious
+hot breakfast rolls and invigorating tea had been considerately provided
+by the authorities for the consumption of the central figure of the
+tragedy who was in capital spirits when prepared for death and evinced
+the keenest interest in the proceedings from beginning to end but he,
+with an abnegation rare in these our times, rose nobly to the occasion
+and expressed the dying wish (immediately acceded to) that the meal
+should be divided in aliquot parts among the members of the sick and
+indigent roomkeepers' association as a token of his regard and esteem.
+The _nec_ and _non plus ultra_ of emotion were reached when the blushing
+bride elect burst her way through the serried ranks of the bystanders
+and flung herself upon the muscular bosom of him who was about to be
+launched into eternity for her sake. The hero folded her willowy form in
+a loving embrace murmuring fondly _Sheila, my own_. Encouraged by
+this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various
+suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb
+permitted her ardour to reach. She swore to him as they mingled the salt
+streams of their tears that she would ever cherish his memory, that she
+would never forget her hero boy who went to his death with a song on his
+lips as if he were but going to a hurling match in Clonturk park. She
+brought back to his recollection the happy days of blissful childhood
+together on the banks of Anna Liffey when they had indulged in the
+innocent pastimes of the young and, oblivious of the dreadful present,
+they both laughed heartily, all the spectators, including the venerable
+pastor, joining in the general merriment. That monster audience simply
+rocked with delight. But anon they were overcome with grief and clasped
+their hands for the last time. A fresh torrent of tears burst from their
+lachrymal ducts and the vast concourse of people, touched to the inmost
+core, broke into heartrending sobs, not the least affected being the
+aged prebendary himself. Big strong men, officers of the peace and
+genial giants of the royal Irish constabulary, were making frank use of
+their handkerchiefs and it is safe to say that there was not a dry eye
+in that record assemblage. A most romantic incident occurred when a
+handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair
+sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook
+and genealogical tree, solicited the hand of the hapless young lady,
+requesting her to name the day, and was accepted on the spot. Every lady
+in the audience was presented with a tasteful souvenir of the occasion
+in the shape of a skull and crossbones brooch, a timely and generous
+act which evoked a fresh outburst of emotion: and when the gallant young
+Oxonian (the bearer, by the way, of one of the most timehonoured names
+in Albion's history) placed on the finger of his blushing _fiancée_ an
+expensive engagement ring with emeralds set in the form of a
+fourleaved shamrock the excitement knew no bounds. Nay, even the
+ster provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan
+Tomlinson, who presided on the sad occasion, he who had blown a
+considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching,
+could not now restrain his natural emotion. With his mailed gauntlet
+he brushed away a furtive tear and was overheard, by those privileged
+burghers who happened to be in his immediate _entourage,_ to murmur to
+himself in a faltering undertone:
+
+--God blimey if she aint a clinker, that there bleeding tart. Blimey it
+makes me kind of bleeding cry, straight, it does, when I sees her cause
+I thinks of my old mashtub what's waiting for me down Limehouse way.
+
+So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish language and the
+corporation meeting and all to that and the shoneens that can't speak
+their own language and Joe chipping in because he stuck someone for a
+quid and Bloom putting in his old goo with his twopenny stump that
+he cadged off of Joe and talking about the Gaelic league and the
+antitreating league and drink, the curse of Ireland. Antitreating is
+about the size of it. Gob, he'd let you pour all manner of drink down
+his throat till the Lord would call him before you'd ever see the froth
+of his pint. And one night I went in with a fellow into one of their
+musical evenings, song and dance about she could get up on a truss of
+hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was a fellow with a Ballyhooly
+blue ribbon badge spiffing out of him in Irish and a lot of colleen
+bawns going about with temperance beverages and selling medals
+and oranges and lemonade and a few old dry buns, gob, flahoolagh
+entertainment, don't be talking. Ireland sober is Ireland free. And
+then an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the gougers
+shuffling their feet to the tune the old cow died of. And one or two
+sky pilots having an eye around that there was no goings on with the
+females, hitting below the belt.
+
+So howandever, as I was saying, the old dog seeing the tin was empty
+starts mousing around by Joe and me. I'd train him by kindness, so I
+would, if he was my dog. Give him a rousing fine kick now and again
+where it wouldn't blind him.
+
+--Afraid he'll bite you? says the citizen, jeering.
+
+--No, says I. But he might take my leg for a lamppost.
+
+So he calls the old dog over.
+
+--What's on you, Garry? says he.
+
+Then he starts hauling and mauling and talking to him in Irish and the
+old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera.
+Such growling you never heard as they let off between them. Someone that
+has nothing better to do ought to write a letter _pro bono publico_ to
+the papers about the muzzling order for a dog the like of that. Growling
+and grousing and his eye all bloodshot from the drouth is in it and the
+hydrophobia dropping out of his jaws.
+
+All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the
+lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not
+missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the
+famous old Irish red setter wolfdog formerly known by the _sobriquet_ of
+Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and
+acquaintances Owen Garry. The exhibition, which is the result of years
+of training by kindness and a carefully thoughtout dietary system,
+comprises, among other achievements, the recitation of verse. Our
+greatest living phonetic expert (wild horses shall not drag it from us!)
+has left no stone unturned in his efforts to delucidate and compare
+the verse recited and has found it bears a _striking_ resemblance (the
+italics are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards. We are not
+speaking so much of those delightful lovesongs with which the writer who
+conceals his identity under the graceful pseudonym of the Little
+Sweet Branch has familiarised the bookloving world but rather (as
+a contributor D. O. C. points out in an interesting communication
+published by an evening contemporary) of the harsher and more personal
+note which is found in the satirical effusions of the famous Raftery and
+of Donal MacConsidine to say nothing of a more modern lyrist at present
+very much in the public eye. We subjoin a specimen which has been
+rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we
+are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will
+find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical
+system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative
+and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more
+complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has
+been well caught. Perhaps it should be added that the effect is greatly
+increased if Owen's verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indistinctly in
+a tone suggestive of suppressed rancour.
+
+ _The curse of my curses
+ Seven days every day
+ And seven dry Thursdays
+ On you, Barney Kiernan,
+ Has no sup of water
+ To cool my courage,
+ And my guts red roaring
+ After Lowry's lights._
+
+So he told Terry to bring some water for the dog and, gob, you could
+hear him lapping it up a mile off. And Joe asked him would he have
+another.
+
+--I will, says he, _a chara_, to show there's no ill feeling.
+
+Gob, he's not as green as he's cabbagelooking. Arsing around from one
+pub to another, leaving it to your own honour, with old Giltrap's dog
+and getting fed up by the ratepayers and corporators. Entertainment for
+man and beast. And says Joe:
+
+--Could you make a hole in another pint?
+
+--Could a swim duck? says I.
+
+--Same again, Terry, says Joe. Are you sure you won't have anything in
+the way of liquid refreshment? says he.
+
+--Thank you, no, says Bloom. As a matter of fact I just wanted to meet
+Martin Cunningham, don't you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam's.
+Martin asked me to go to the house. You see, he, Dignam, I mean, didn't
+serve any notice of the assignment on the company at the time and
+nominally under the act the mortgagee can't recover on the policy.
+
+--Holy Wars, says Joe, laughing, that's a good one if old Shylock is
+landed. So the wife comes out top dog, what?
+
+--Well, that's a point, says Bloom, for the wife's admirers.
+
+--Whose admirers? says Joe.
+
+--The wife's advisers, I mean, says Bloom.
+
+Then he starts all confused mucking it up about mortgagor under the act
+like the lord chancellor giving it out on the bench and for the benefit
+of the wife and that a trust is created but on the other hand that
+Dignam owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow
+contested the mortgagee's right till he near had the head of me addled
+with his mortgagor under the act. He was bloody safe he wasn't run in
+himself under the act that time as a rogue and vagabond only he had a
+friend in court. Selling bazaar tickets or what do you call it royal
+Hungarian privileged lottery. True as you're there. O, commend me to an
+israelite! Royal and privileged Hungarian robbery.
+
+So Bob Doran comes lurching around asking Bloom to tell Mrs Dignam he
+was sorry for her trouble and he was very sorry about the funeral and
+to tell her that he said and everyone who knew him said that there was
+never a truer, a finer than poor little Willy that's dead to tell her.
+Choking with bloody foolery. And shaking Bloom's hand doing the tragic
+to tell her that. Shake hands, brother. You're a rogue and I'm another.
+
+--Let me, said he, so far presume upon our acquaintance which, however
+slight it may appear if judged by the standard of mere time, is founded,
+as I hope and believe, on a sentiment of mutual esteem as to request of
+you this favour. But, should I have overstepped the limits of reserve
+let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness.
+
+--No, rejoined the other, I appreciate to the full the motives which
+actuate your conduct and I shall discharge the office you entrust to
+me consoled by the reflection that, though the errand be one of sorrow,
+this proof of your confidence sweetens in some measure the bitterness of
+the cup.
+
+--Then suffer me to take your hand, said he. The goodness of your heart,
+I feel sure, will dictate to you better than my inadequate words
+the expressions which are most suitable to convey an emotion whose
+poignancy, were I to give vent to my feelings, would deprive me even of
+speech.
+
+And off with him and out trying to walk straight. Boosed at five
+o'clock. Night he was near being lagged only Paddy Leonard knew the
+bobby, 14A. Blind to the world up in a shebeen in Bride street after
+closing time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on guard, drinking
+porter out of teacups. And calling himself a Frenchy for the shawls,
+Joseph Manuo, and talking against the Catholic religion, and he serving
+mass in Adam and Eve's when he was young with his eyes shut, who wrote
+the new testament, and the old testament, and hugging and smugging. And
+the two shawls killed with the laughing, picking his pockets, the bloody
+fool and he spilling the porter all over the bed and the two shawls
+screeching laughing at one another. _How is your testament? Have you got
+an old testament?_ Only Paddy was passing there, I tell you what. Then
+see him of a Sunday with his little concubine of a wife, and she wagging
+her tail up the aisle of the chapel with her patent boots on her, no
+less, and her violets, nice as pie, doing the little lady. Jack Mooney's
+sister. And the old prostitute of a mother procuring rooms to street
+couples. Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told him if he didn't patch up
+the pot, Jesus, he'd kick the shite out of him.
+
+So Terry brought the three pints.
+
+--Here, says Joe, doing the honours. Here, citizen.
+
+--_Slan leat_, says he.
+
+--Fortune, Joe, says I. Good health, citizen.
+
+Gob, he had his mouth half way down the tumbler already. Want a small
+fortune to keep him in drinks.
+
+--Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty, Alf? says Joe.
+
+--Friend of yours, says Alf.
+
+--Nannan? says Joe. The mimber?
+
+--I won't mention any names, says Alf.
+
+--I thought so, says Joe. I saw him up at that meeting now with William
+Field, M. P., the cattle traders.
+
+--Hairy Iopas, says the citizen, that exploded volcano, the darling of
+all countries and the idol of his own.
+
+So Joe starts telling the citizen about the foot and mouth disease
+and the cattle traders and taking action in the matter and the citizen
+sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his
+sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the
+guaranteed remedy for timber tongue. Because he was up one time in a
+knacker's yard. Walking about with his book and pencil here's my head
+and my heels are coming till Joe Cuffe gave him the order of the boot
+for giving lip to a grazier. Mister Knowall. Teach your grandmother how
+to milk ducks. Pisser Burke was telling me in the hotel the wife used
+to be in rivers of tears some times with Mrs O'Dowd crying her eyes out
+with her eight inches of fat all over her. Couldn't loosen her farting
+strings but old cod's eye was waltzing around her showing her how to do
+it. What's your programme today? Ay. Humane methods. Because the poor
+animals suffer and experts say and the best known remedy that doesn't
+cause pain to the animal and on the sore spot administer gently. Gob,
+he'd have a soft hand under a hen.
+
+Ga Ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Black Liz is our hen. She lays eggs for
+us. When she lays her egg she is so glad. Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Then
+comes good uncle Leo. He puts his hand under black Liz and takes her
+fresh egg. Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook.
+
+--Anyhow, says Joe, Field and Nannetti are going over tonight to London
+to ask about it on the floor of the house of commons.
+
+--Are you sure, says Bloom, the councillor is going? I wanted to see
+him, as it happens.
+
+--Well, he's going off by the mailboat, says Joe, tonight.
+
+--That's too bad, says Bloom. I wanted particularly. Perhaps only Mr
+Field is going. I couldn't phone. No. You're sure?
+
+--Nannan's going too, says Joe. The league told him to ask a question
+tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the
+park. What do you think of that, citizen? _The Sluagh na h-Eireann_.
+
+Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat.): Arising out of the question of
+my honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right
+honourable gentleman whether the government has issued orders that these
+animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming
+as to their pathological condition?
+
+Mr Allfours (Tamoshant. Con.): Honourable members are already in
+possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole
+house. I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the
+honourable member's question is in the affirmative.
+
+Mr Orelli O'Reilly (Montenotte. Nat.): Have similar orders been issued
+for the slaughter of human animals who dare to play Irish games in the
+Phoenix park?
+
+Mr Allfours: The answer is in the negative.
+
+Mr Cowe Conacre: Has the right honourable gentleman's famous
+Mitchelstown telegram inspired the policy of gentlemen on the Treasury
+bench? (O! O!)
+
+Mr Allfours: I must have notice of that question.
+
+Mr Staylewit (Buncombe. Ind.): Don't hesitate to shoot.
+
+(Ironical opposition cheers.)
+
+The speaker: Order! Order!
+
+(The house rises. Cheers.)
+
+--There's the man, says Joe, that made the Gaelic sports revival. There
+he is sitting there. The man that got away James Stephens. The champion
+of all Ireland at putting the sixteen pound shot. What was your best
+throw, citizen?
+
+--_Na bacleis_, says the citizen, letting on to be modest. There was a
+time I was as good as the next fellow anyhow.
+
+--Put it there, citizen, says Joe. You were and a bloody sight better.
+
+--Is that really a fact? says Alf.
+
+--Yes, says Bloom. That's well known. Did you not know that?
+
+So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of
+lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil
+and building up a nation once again and all to that. And of course Bloom
+had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent
+exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw
+from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: _Look at, Bloom. Do you
+see that straw? That's a straw_. Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it
+for an hour so he would and talk steady.
+
+A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of _Brian
+O'ciarnain's_ in _Sraid na Bretaine Bheag_, under the auspices of
+_Sluagh na h-Eireann_, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the
+importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and
+ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race.
+The venerable president of the noble order was in the chair and the
+attendance was of large dimensions. After an instructive discourse by
+the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed,
+a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual high standard
+of excellence ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of
+the ancient games and sports of our ancient Panceltic forefathers. The
+wellknown and highly respected worker in the cause of our old tongue, Mr
+Joseph M'Carthy Hynes, made an eloquent appeal for the resuscitation of
+the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes, practised morning and evening
+by Finn MacCool, as calculated to revive the best traditions of manly
+strength and prowess handed down to us from ancient ages. L. Bloom, who
+met with a mixed reception of applause and hisses, having espoused the
+negative the vocalist chairman brought the discussion to a close, in
+response to repeated requests and hearty plaudits from all parts of
+a bumper house, by a remarkably noteworthy rendering of the immortal
+Thomas Osborne Davis' evergreen verses (happily too familiar to need
+recalling here) _A nation once again_ in the execution of which the
+veteran patriot champion may be said without fear of contradiction
+to have fairly excelled himself. The Irish Caruso-Garibaldi was in
+superlative form and his stentorian notes were heard to the greatest
+advantage in the timehonoured anthem sung as only our citizen can sing
+it. His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly
+enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously
+applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many
+prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press
+and the bar and the other learned professions. The proceedings then
+terminated.
+
+Amongst the clergy present were the very rev. William Delany, S. J., L.
+L. D.; the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D. D.; the rev. P. J. Kavanagh, C. S.
+Sp.; the rev. T. Waters, C. C.; the rev. John M. Ivers, P. P.; the rev.
+P. J. Cleary, O. S. F.; the rev. L. J. Hickey, O. P.; the very rev. Fr.
+Nicholas, O. S. F. C.; the very rev. B. Gorman, O. D. C.; the rev. T.
+Maher, S. J.; the very rev. James Murphy, S. J.; the rev. John Lavery,
+V. F.; the very rev. William Doherty, D. D.; the rev. Peter Fagan, O.
+M.; the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A.; the rev. J. Flavin, C. C.; the
+rev. M. A. Hackett, C. C.; the rev. W. Hurley, C. C.; the rt rev. Mgr
+M'Manus, V. G.; the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. I.; the very rev. M.
+D. Scally, P. P.; the rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P.; the very rev. Timothy
+canon Gorman, P. P.; the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C. The laity included P.
+Fay, T. Quirke, etc., etc.
+
+--Talking about violent exercise, says Alf, were you at that
+Keogh-Bennett match?
+
+--No, says Joe.
+
+--I heard So and So made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf.
+
+--Who? Blazes? says Joe.
+
+And says Bloom:
+
+--What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training
+the eye.
+
+--Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on the beer to run up
+the odds and he swatting all the time.
+
+--We know him, says the citizen. The traitor's son. We know what put
+English gold in his pocket.
+
+---True for you, says Joe.
+
+And Bloom cuts in again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the
+blood, asking Alf:
+
+--Now, don't you think, Bergan?
+
+--Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf. Heenan and Sayers was only
+a bloody fool to it. Handed him the father and mother of a beating. See
+the little kipper not up to his navel and the big fellow swiping. God,
+he gave him one last puck in the wind, Queensberry rules and all, made
+him puke what he never ate.
+
+It was a historic and a hefty battle when Myler and Percy were scheduled
+to don the gloves for the purse of fifty sovereigns. Handicapped as he
+was by lack of poundage, Dublin's pet lamb made up for it by superlative
+skill in ringcraft. The final bout of fireworks was a gruelling for both
+champions. The welterweight sergeantmajor had tapped some lively claret
+in the previous mixup during which Keogh had been receivergeneral of
+rights and lefts, the artilleryman putting in some neat work on the
+pet's nose, and Myler came on looking groggy. The soldier got to
+business, leading off with a powerful left jab to which the Irish
+gladiator retaliated by shooting out a stiff one flush to the point of
+Bennett's jaw. The redcoat ducked but the Dubliner lifted him with a
+left hook, the body punch being a fine one. The men came to handigrips.
+Myler quickly became busy and got his man under, the bout ending with
+the bulkier man on the ropes, Myler punishing him. The Englishman, whose
+right eye was nearly closed, took his corner where he was liberally
+drenched with water and when the bell went came on gamey and brimful of
+pluck, confident of knocking out the fistic Eblanite in jigtime. It was
+a fight to a finish and the best man for it. The two fought like tigers
+and excitement ran fever high. The referee twice cautioned Pucking Percy
+for holding but the pet was tricky and his footwork a treat to watch.
+After a brisk exchange of courtesies during which a smart upper cut of
+the military man brought blood freely from his opponent's mouth the
+lamb suddenly waded in all over his man and landed a terrific left to
+Battling Bennett's stomach, flooring him flat. It was a knockout clean
+and clever. Amid tense expectation the Portobello bruiser was being
+counted out when Bennett's second Ole Pfotts Wettstein threw in the
+towel and the Santry boy was declared victor to the frenzied cheers of
+the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly mobbed him with
+delight.
+
+--He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he's
+running a concert tour now up in the north.
+
+--He is, says Joe. Isn't he?
+
+--Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That's quite true. Yes, a kind of summer
+tour, you see. Just a holiday.
+
+--Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn't she? says Joe.
+
+--My wife? says Bloom. She's singing, yes. I think it will be a success
+too.
+
+He's an excellent man to organise. Excellent.
+
+Hoho begob says I to myself says I. That explains the milk in the
+cocoanut and absence of hair on the animal's chest. Blazes doing the
+tootle on the flute. Concert tour. Dirty Dan the dodger's son off Island
+bridge that sold the same horses twice over to the government to fight
+the Boers. Old Whatwhat. I called about the poor and water rate, Mr
+Boylan. You what? The water rate, Mr Boylan. You whatwhat? That's the
+bucko that'll organise her, take my tip. 'Twixt me and you Caddareesh.
+
+Pride of Calpe's rocky mount, the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy. There
+grew she to peerless beauty where loquat and almond scent the air. The
+gardens of Alameda knew her step: the garths of olives knew and bowed.
+The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.
+
+And lo, there entered one of the clan of the O'Molloy's, a comely hero
+of white face yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty's counsel learned
+in the law, and with him the prince and heir of the noble line of
+Lambert.
+
+--Hello, Ned.
+
+--Hello, Alf.
+
+--Hello, Jack.
+
+--Hello, Joe.
+
+--God save you, says the citizen.
+
+--Save you kindly, says J. J. What'll it be, Ned?
+
+--Half one, says Ned.
+
+So J. J. ordered the drinks.
+
+--Were you round at the court? says Joe.
+
+--Yes, says J. J. He'll square that, Ned, says he.
+
+--Hope so, says Ned.
+
+Now what were those two at? J. J. getting him off the grand jury list
+and the other give him a leg over the stile. With his name in Stubbs's.
+Playing cards, hobnobbing with flash toffs with a swank glass in their
+eye, adrinking fizz and he half smothered in writs and garnishee orders.
+Pawning his gold watch in Cummins of Francis street where no-one would
+know him in the private office when I was there with Pisser releasing
+his boots out of the pop. What's your name, sir? Dunne, says he. Ay, and
+done says I. Gob, he'll come home by weeping cross one of those days,
+I'm thinking.
+
+--Did you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there? says Alf. U. p: up.
+
+--Yes, says J. J. Looking for a private detective.
+
+--Ay, says Ned. And he wanted right go wrong to address the court only
+Corny Kelleher got round him telling him to get the handwriting examined
+first.
+
+--Ten thousand pounds, says Alf, laughing. God, I'd give anything to
+hear him before a judge and jury.
+
+--Was it you did it, Alf? says Joe. The truth, the whole truth and
+nothing but the truth, so help you Jimmy Johnson.
+
+--Me? says Alf. Don't cast your nasturtiums on my character.
+
+--Whatever statement you make, says Joe, will be taken down in evidence
+against you.
+
+--Of course an action would lie, says J. J. It implies that he is not
+_compos mentis_. U. p: up.
+
+_--Compos_ your eye! says Alf, laughing. Do you know that he's balmy?
+Look at his head. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat
+on with a shoehorn.
+
+--Yes, says J. J., but the truth of a libel is no defence to an
+indictment for publishing it in the eyes of the law.
+
+--Ha ha, Alf, says Joe.
+
+--Still, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.
+
+--Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half
+and half.
+
+--How half and half? says Bloom. Do you mean he...
+
+--Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A fellow that's neither fish
+nor flesh.
+
+--Nor good red herring, says Joe.
+
+--That what's I mean, says the citizen. A pishogue, if you know what
+that is.
+
+Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explaining he meant on
+account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the
+old stuttering fool. Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody
+povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him,
+bringing down the rain. And she with her nose cockahoop after she
+married him because a cousin of his old fellow's was pewopener to the
+pope. Picture of him on the wall with his Smashall Sweeney's moustaches,
+the signior Brini from Summerhill, the eyetallyano, papal Zouave to the
+Holy Father, has left the quay and gone to Moss street. And who was
+he, tell us? A nobody, two pair back and passages, at seven shillings a
+week, and he covered with all kinds of breastplates bidding defiance to
+the world.
+
+--And moreover, says J. J., a postcard is publication. It was held to
+be sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. Hole. In my
+opinion an action might lie.
+
+Six and eightpence, please. Who wants your opinion? Let us drink our
+pints in peace. Gob, we won't be let even do that much itself.
+
+--Well, good health, Jack, says Ned.
+
+--Good health, Ned, says J. J.
+
+---There he is again, says Joe.
+
+--Where? says Alf.
+
+And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter
+and the wife beside him and Corny Kelleher with his wall eye looking in
+as they went past, talking to him like a father, trying to sell him a
+secondhand coffin.
+
+--How did that Canada swindle case go off? says Joe.
+
+--Remanded, says J. J.
+
+One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James
+Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers
+saying he'd give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. What? Do you see
+any green in the white of my eye? Course it was a bloody barney. What?
+Swindled them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and
+his own kidney too. J. J. was telling us there was an ancient Hebrew
+Zaretsky or something weeping in the witnessbox with his hat on him,
+swearing by the holy Moses he was stuck for two quid.
+
+--Who tried the case? says Joe.
+
+--Recorder, says Ned.
+
+--Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.
+
+--Heart as big as a lion, says Ned. Tell him a tale of woe about arrears
+of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he'll dissolve
+in tears on the bench.
+
+--Ay, says Alf. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the dock
+the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for
+the corporation there near Butt bridge.
+
+And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry:
+
+--A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children?
+Ten, did you say?
+
+--Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid.
+
+--And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court
+immediately, sir. No, sir, I'll make no order for payment. How dare you,
+sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking
+industrious man! I dismiss the case.
+
+And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and
+in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
+the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first
+quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the
+halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave
+his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury in the
+probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the first
+chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and
+final testamentary disposition _in re_ the real and personal estate of
+the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased, versus Livingstone,
+an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of
+Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there
+about the hour of five o'clock to administer the law of the brehons at
+the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the
+county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim
+of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of
+Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the
+tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and
+of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of
+Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the
+tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he
+conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and
+truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their
+sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict
+give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the book. And
+they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and they swore by
+the name of Him Who is from everlasting that they would do His
+rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from
+their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended
+in consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and
+foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge
+against him for he was a malefactor.
+
+--Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland
+filling the country with bugs.
+
+So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe,
+telling him he needn't trouble about that little matter till the first
+but if he would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high
+and holy by this and by that he'd do the devil and all.
+
+--Because, you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have
+repetition. That's the whole secret.
+
+--Rely on me, says Joe.
+
+--Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We
+want no more strangers in our house.
+
+--O, I'm sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It's just that
+Keyes, you see.
+
+--Consider that done, says Joe.
+
+--Very kind of you, says Bloom.
+
+--The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in.
+We brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon
+robbers here.
+
+--Decree _nisi,_ says J. J.
+
+And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a
+spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling
+after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and
+when.
+
+--A dishonoured wife, says the citizen, that's what's the cause of all
+our misfortunes.
+
+--And here she is, says Alf, that was giggling over the _Police Gazette_
+with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.
+
+--Give us a squint at her, says I.
+
+And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off
+of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Misconduct
+of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago contractor, finds
+pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor. Belle in her
+bloomers misconducting herself, and her fancyman feeling for her tickles
+and Norman W. Tupper bouncing in with his peashooter just in time to be
+late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.
+
+--O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, how short your shirt is!
+
+--There's hair, Joe, says I. Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off
+of that one, what?
+
+So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a face on
+him as long as a late breakfast.
+
+--Well, says the citizen, what's the latest from the scene of action?
+What did those tinkers in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide
+about the Irish language?
+
+O'Nolan, clad in shining armour, low bending made obeisance to the
+puissant and high and mighty chief of all Erin and did him to wit of
+that which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient
+city, second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there, after
+due prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken solemn
+counsel whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once more into
+honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael.
+
+--It's on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal
+Sassenachs and their _patois._
+
+So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till
+you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy, putting your
+blind eye to the telescope and drawing up a bill of attainder to impeach
+a nation, and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and botheration and
+their colonies and their civilisation.
+
+--Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with
+them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody
+thicklugged sons of whores' gets! No music and no art and no literature
+worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us.
+Tonguetied sons of bastards' ghosts.
+
+--The European family, says J. J....
+
+--They're not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin
+Egan of Paris. You wouldn't see a trace of them or their language
+anywhere in Europe except in a _cabinet d'aisance._
+
+And says John Wyse:
+
+--Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
+
+And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo:
+
+--_Conspuez les Anglais! Perfide Albion!_
+
+He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the
+medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan _Lamh
+Dearg Abu_, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty
+valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster
+silent as the deathless gods.
+
+--What's up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had
+lost a bob and found a tanner.
+
+--Gold cup, says he.
+
+--Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.
+
+_--Throwaway,_ says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest
+nowhere.
+
+--And Bass's mare? says Terry.
+
+--Still running, says he. We're all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid
+on my tip _Sceptre_ for himself and a lady friend.
+
+--I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on _Zinfandel_ that Mr Flynn
+gave me. Lord Howard de Walden's.
+
+--Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. _Throwaway,_
+says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name
+is _Sceptre._
+
+So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was
+anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his
+luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.
+
+--Not there, my child, says he.
+
+--Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She'd have won the money only for the
+other dog.
+
+And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom
+sticking in an odd word.
+
+--Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they
+can't see the beam in their own.
+
+--_Raimeis_, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow
+that won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing
+twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost
+tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world!
+And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax
+and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our
+tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our
+Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk
+and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent
+in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the
+Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar
+now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to
+sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even
+Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from
+Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish
+hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for
+the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe
+us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the
+Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and
+bog to make us all die of consumption?
+
+--As treeless as Portugal we'll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland
+with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land.
+Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was
+reading a report of lord Castletown's...
+
+--Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain
+elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the
+trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of
+Eire, O.
+
+--Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.
+
+The fashionable international world attended EN MASSE this afternoon
+at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief
+ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine
+Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash,
+Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde
+Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia
+Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs
+Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss
+Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel
+Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall,
+Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana
+Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis
+graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was given away by
+her father, the M'Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in
+a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip
+of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with
+a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by
+bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss
+Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very
+becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty _motif_ of plume rose being
+worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the
+jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinted coral.
+Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the organ with his wellknown ability
+and, in addition to the prescribed numbers of the nuptial mass, played
+a new and striking arrangement of _Woodman, spare that tree_ at the
+conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre _in
+Horto_ after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a
+playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow,
+ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs
+Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.
+
+--And our eyes are on Europe, says the citizen. We had our trade with
+Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were
+pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.
+
+--And will again, says Joe.
+
+--And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the
+citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty will be full
+again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom
+of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with
+a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the
+O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with
+the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when the
+first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to
+the fore, none of your Henry Tudor's harps, no, the oldest flag afloat,
+the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue
+field, the three sons of Milesius.
+
+And he took the last swig out of the pint. Moya. All wind and piss like
+a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody
+life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled
+multitude in Shanagolden where he daren't show his nose with the Molly
+Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the
+holding of an evicted tenant.
+
+--Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?
+
+--An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.
+
+--Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you
+asleep?
+
+--Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir.
+
+Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead of
+attending to the general public. Picture of a butting match, trying to
+crack their bloody skulls, one chap going for the other with his head
+down like a bull at a gate. And another one: _Black Beast Burned in
+Omaha, Ga_. A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a
+Sambo strung up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under
+him. Gob, they ought to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and
+crucify him to make sure of their job.
+
+--But what about the fighting navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at
+bay?
+
+--I'll tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is.
+Read the revelations that's going on in the papers about flogging on
+the training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself
+_Disgusted One_.
+
+So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew
+of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the
+parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad
+brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend of
+a gun.
+
+--A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John
+Beresford called it but the modern God's Englishman calls it caning on
+the breech.
+
+And says John Wyse:
+
+--'Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
+
+Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane
+and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad
+till he yells meila murder.
+
+--That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the
+earth.
+
+The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber
+on the face of God's earth and their land in the hands of a dozen
+gamehogs and cottonball barons. That's the great empire they boast about
+of drudges and whipped serfs.
+
+--On which the sun never rises, says Joe.
+
+--And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, they believe it. The
+unfortunate yahoos believe it.
+
+They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth,
+and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast,
+born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified,
+flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose
+again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till
+further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.
+
+--But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere. I mean wouldn't
+it be the same here if you put force against force?
+
+Didn't I tell you? As true as I'm drinking this porter if he was at his
+last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living.
+
+--We'll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater
+Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the
+black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid
+low by the batteringram and the _Times_ rubbed its hands and told the
+whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as
+redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the
+Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full
+of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro. Ay,
+they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in
+the coffinships. But those that came to the land of the free remember
+the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance, no
+cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan.
+
+--Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was...
+
+--We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the
+poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at
+Killala.
+
+--Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that reneged us
+against the Williamites and they betrayed us. Remember Limerick and the
+broken treatystone. We gave our best blood to France and Spain, the
+wild geese. Fontenoy, eh? And Sarsfield and O'Donnell, duke of Tetuan
+in Spain, and Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria
+Teresa. But what did we ever get for it?
+
+--The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters! Do you know
+what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. Aren't they
+trying to make an _Entente cordiale_ now at Tay Pay's dinnerparty with
+perfidious Albion? Firebrands of Europe and they always were.
+
+--_Conspuez les Français_, says Lenehan, nobbling his beer.
+
+--And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven't we
+had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the
+elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that's dead?
+
+Jesus, I had to laugh at the way he came out with that about the old one
+with the winkers on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of
+God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting
+her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the
+whiskers and singing him old bits of songs about _Ehren on the Rhine_
+and come where the boose is cheaper.
+
+--Well, says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.
+
+--Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There's a bloody sight more pox
+than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin!
+
+--And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests
+and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic
+Majesty's racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his
+jockeys rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.
+
+--They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little
+Alf.
+
+And says J. J.:
+
+--Considerations of space influenced their lordships' decision.
+
+--Will you try another, citizen? says Joe.
+
+--Yes, sir, says he. I will.
+
+--You? says Joe.
+
+--Beholden to you, Joe, says I. May your shadow never grow less.
+
+--Repeat that dose, says Joe.
+
+Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with
+his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.
+
+--Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it.
+Perpetuating national hatred among nations.
+
+--But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
+
+--Yes, says Bloom.
+
+--What is it? says John Wyse.
+
+--A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same
+place.
+
+--By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm
+living in the same place for the past five years.
+
+So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck
+out of it:
+
+--Or also living in different places.
+
+--That covers my case, says Joe.
+
+--What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.
+
+--Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
+
+The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and,
+gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.
+
+--After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to
+swab himself dry.
+
+--Here you are, citizen, says Joe. Take that in your right hand and
+repeat after me the following words.
+
+The muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth
+attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og MacDonogh, authors
+of the Book of Ballymote, was then carefully produced and called forth
+prolonged admiration. No need to dwell on the legendary beauty of the
+cornerpieces, the acme of art, wherein one can distinctly discern each
+of the four evangelists in turn presenting to each of the four masters
+his evangelical symbol, a bogoak sceptre, a North American puma (a far
+nobler king of beasts than the British article, be it said in passing),
+a Kerry calf and a golden eagle from Carrantuohill. The scenes depicted
+on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs
+and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as
+wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo
+illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in
+the time of the Barmecides. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney,
+the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins,
+Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh Patrick, the brewery
+of Messrs Arthur Guinness, Son and Company (Limited), Lough Neagh's
+banks, the vale of Ovoca, Isolde's tower, the Mapas obelisk, Sir Patrick
+Dun's hospital, Cape Clear, the glen of Aherlow, Lynch's castle, the
+Scotch house, Rathdown Union Workhouse at Loughlinstown, Tullamore jail,
+Castleconnel rapids, Kilballymacshonakill, the cross at Monasterboice,
+Jury's Hotel, S. Patrick's Purgatory, the Salmon Leap, Maynooth college
+refectory, Curley's hole, the three birthplaces of the first duke of
+Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the bog of Allen, the Henry Street
+Warehouse, Fingal's Cave--all these moving scenes are still there for us
+today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have
+passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time.
+
+--Show us over the drink, says I. Which is which?
+
+--That's mine, says Joe, as the devil said to the dead policeman.
+
+--And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted.
+Also now. This very moment. This very instant.
+
+Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.
+
+--Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs
+to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold
+by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.
+
+--Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.
+
+--I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.
+
+--Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
+
+That's an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old
+lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he'd adorn a
+sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse's apron on him. And
+then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as
+limp as a wet rag.
+
+--But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not
+life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's
+the very opposite of that that is really life.
+
+--What? says Alf.
+
+--Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says
+he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is
+there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment.
+
+Who's hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.
+
+--A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.
+
+--Well, says John Wyse. Isn't that what we're told. Love your neighbour.
+
+--That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love,
+moya! He's a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.
+
+Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A
+loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M.
+B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo,
+the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear
+trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the
+brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her
+Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love
+a certain person. And this person loves that other person because
+everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
+
+--Well, Joe, says I, your very good health and song. More power,
+citizen.
+
+--Hurrah, there, says Joe.
+
+--The blessing of God and Mary and Patrick on you, says the citizen.
+
+And he ups with his pint to wet his whistle.
+
+--We know those canters, says he, preaching and picking your pocket.
+What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women
+and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text _God is love_
+pasted round the mouth of his cannon? The bible! Did you read that skit
+in the _United Irishman_ today about that Zulu chief that's visiting
+England?
+
+--What's that? says Joe.
+
+So the citizen takes up one of his paraphernalia papers and he starts
+reading out:
+
+--A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented
+yesterday to His Majesty the Alaki of Abeakuta by Gold Stick in Waiting,
+Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs, to tender to His Majesty the heartfelt
+thanks of British traders for the facilities afforded them in his
+dominions. The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion of which
+the dusky potentate, in the course of a happy speech, freely translated
+by the British chaplain, the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones,
+tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasised the cordial
+relations existing between Abeakuta and the British empire, stating that
+he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible,
+the volume of the word of God and the secret of England's greatness,
+graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the great squaw
+Victoria, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the Royal
+Donor. The Alaki then drank a lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh to the
+toast _Black and White_ from the skull of his immediate predecessor in
+the dynasty Kakachakachak, surnamed Forty Warts, after which he visited
+the chief factory of Cottonopolis and signed his mark in the visitors'
+book, subsequently executing a charming old Abeakutic wardance, in the
+course of which he swallowed several knives and forks, amid hilarious
+applause from the girl hands.
+
+--Widow woman, says Ned. I wouldn't doubt her. Wonder did he put that
+bible to the same use as I would.
+
+--Same only more so, says Lenehan. And thereafter in that fruitful land
+the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.
+
+--Is that by Griffith? says John Wyse.
+
+--No, says the citizen. It's not signed Shanganagh. It's only
+initialled: P.
+
+--And a very good initial too, says Joe.
+
+--That's how it's worked, says the citizen. Trade follows the flag.
+
+--Well, says J. J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the
+Congo Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man
+what's this his name is?
+
+--Casement, says the citizen. He's an Irishman.
+
+--Yes, that's the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and
+flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can
+out of them.
+
+--I know where he's gone, says Lenehan, cracking his fingers.
+
+--Who? says I.
+
+--Bloom, says he. The courthouse is a blind. He had a few bob on
+_Throwaway_ and he's gone to gather in the shekels.
+
+--Is it that whiteeyed kaffir? says the citizen, that never backed a
+horse in anger in his life?
+
+--That's where he's gone, says Lenehan. I met Bantam Lyons going to back
+that horse only I put him off it and he told me Bloom gave him the tip.
+Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings to five on. He's the
+only man in Dublin has it. A dark horse.
+
+--He's a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe.
+
+--Mind, Joe, says I. Show us the entrance out.
+
+--There you are, says Terry.
+
+Goodbye Ireland I'm going to Gort. So I just went round the back of
+the yard to pumpship and begob (hundred shillings to five) while I was
+letting off my _(Throwaway_ twenty to) letting off my load gob says I
+to myself I knew he was uneasy in his (two pints off of Joe and one in
+Slattery's off) in his mind to get off the mark to (hundred shillings
+is five quid) and when they were in the (dark horse) pisser Burke was
+telling me card party and letting on the child was sick (gob, must have
+done about a gallon) flabbyarse of a wife speaking down the tube _she's
+better_ or _she's_ (ow!) all a plan so he could vamoose with the pool if
+he won or (Jesus, full up I was) trading without a licence (ow!) Ireland
+my nation says he (hoik! phthook!) never be up to those bloody (there's
+the last of it) Jerusalem (ah!) cuckoos.
+
+So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it
+was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper
+all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off
+of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk
+about selling Irish industries. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gob, that
+puts the bloody kybosh on it if old sloppy eyes is mucking up the show.
+Give us a bloody chance. God save Ireland from the likes of that bloody
+mouseabout. Mr Bloom with his argol bargol. And his old fellow before
+him perpetrating frauds, old Methusalem Bloom, the robbing bagman, that
+poisoned himself with the prussic acid after he swamping the country
+with his baubles and his penny diamonds. Loans by post on easy terms.
+Any amount of money advanced on note of hand. Distance no object. No
+security. Gob, he's like Lanty MacHale's goat that'd go a piece of the
+road with every one.
+
+--Well, it's a fact, says John Wyse. And there's the man now that'll
+tell you all about it, Martin Cunningham.
+
+Sure enough the castle car drove up with Martin on it and Jack Power
+with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of
+the collector general's, an orangeman Blackburn does have on the
+registration and he drawing his pay or Crawford gallivanting around the
+country at the king's expense.
+
+Our travellers reached the rustic hostelry and alighted from their
+palfreys.
+
+--Ho, varlet! cried he, who by his mien seemed the leader of the party.
+Saucy knave! To us!
+
+So saying he knocked loudly with his swordhilt upon the open lattice.
+
+Mine host came forth at the summons, girding him with his tabard.
+
+--Give you good den, my masters, said he with an obsequious bow.
+
+--Bestir thyself, sirrah! cried he who had knocked. Look to our steeds.
+And for ourselves give us of your best for ifaith we need it.
+
+--Lackaday, good masters, said the host, my poor house has but a bare
+larder. I know not what to offer your lordships.
+
+--How now, fellow? cried the second of the party, a man of pleasant
+countenance, So servest thou the king's messengers, master Taptun?
+
+An instantaneous change overspread the landlord's visage.
+
+--Cry you mercy, gentlemen, he said humbly. An you be the king's
+messengers (God shield His Majesty!) you shall not want for aught. The
+king's friends (God bless His Majesty!) shall not go afasting in my
+house I warrant me.
+
+--Then about! cried the traveller who had not spoken, a lusty
+trencherman by his aspect. Hast aught to give us?
+
+Mine host bowed again as he made answer:
+
+--What say you, good masters, to a squab pigeon pasty, some collops of
+venison, a saddle of veal, widgeon with crisp hog's bacon, a boar's head
+with pistachios, a bason of jolly custard, a medlar tansy and a flagon
+of old Rhenish?
+
+--Gadzooks! cried the last speaker. That likes me well. Pistachios!
+
+--Aha! cried he of the pleasant countenance. A poor house and a bare
+larder, quotha! 'Tis a merry rogue.
+
+So in comes Martin asking where was Bloom.
+
+--Where is he? says Lenehan. Defrauding widows and orphans.
+
+--Isn't that a fact, says John Wyse, what I was telling the citizen
+about Bloom and the Sinn Fein?
+
+--That's so, says Martin. Or so they allege.
+
+--Who made those allegations? says Alf.
+
+--I, says Joe. I'm the alligator.
+
+--And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like
+the next fellow?
+
+--Why not? says J. J., when he's quite sure which country it is.
+
+--Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the
+hell is he? says Ned. Or who is he? No offence, Crofton.
+
+--Who is Junius? says J. J.
+
+--We don't want him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian.
+
+--He's a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was
+he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that
+in the castle.
+
+--Isn't he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power.
+
+--Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag, the
+father's name that poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the
+father did.
+
+--That's the new Messiah for Ireland! says the citizen. Island of saints
+and sages!
+
+--Well, they're still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that
+matter so are we.
+
+--Yes, says J. J., and every male that's born they think it may be their
+Messiah. And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till
+he knows if he's a father or a mother.
+
+--Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan.
+
+--O, by God, says Ned, you should have seen Bloom before that son of his
+that died was born. I met him one day in the south city markets buying a
+tin of Neave's food six weeks before the wife was delivered.
+
+--_En ventre sa mère_, says J. J.
+
+--Do you call that a man? says the citizen.
+
+--I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe.
+
+--Well, there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power.
+
+--And who does he suspect? says the citizen.
+
+Gob, there's many a true word spoken in jest. One of those mixed
+middlings he is. Lying up in the hotel Pisser was telling me once a
+month with headache like a totty with her courses. Do you know what I'm
+telling you? It'd be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow the like
+of that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, so it
+would. Then sloping off with his five quid without putting up a pint of
+stuff like a man. Give us your blessing. Not as much as would blind your
+eye.
+
+--Charity to the neighbour, says Martin. But where is he? We can't wait.
+
+--A wolf in sheep's clothing, says the citizen. That's what he is. Virag
+from Hungary! Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God.
+
+--Have you time for a brief libation, Martin? says Ned.
+
+--Only one, says Martin. We must be quick. J. J. and S.
+
+--You, Jack? Crofton? Three half ones, Terry.
+
+--Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us,
+says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our
+shores.
+
+--Well, says Martin, rapping for his glass. God bless all here is my
+prayer.
+
+--Amen, says the citizen.
+
+--And I'm sure He will, says Joe.
+
+And at the sound of the sacring bell, headed by a crucifer with
+acolytes, thurifers, boatbearers, readers, ostiarii, deacons and
+subdeacons, the blessed company drew nigh of mitred abbots and priors
+and guardians and monks and friars: the monks of Benedict of Spoleto,
+Carthusians and Camaldolesi, Cistercians and Olivetans, Oratorians
+and Vallombrosans, and the friars of Augustine, Brigittines,
+Premonstratensians, Servi, Trinitarians, and the children of Peter
+Nolasco: and therewith from Carmel mount the children of Elijah prophet
+led by Albert bishop and by Teresa of Avila, calced and other: and
+friars, brown and grey, sons of poor Francis, capuchins, cordeliers,
+minimes and observants and the daughters of Clara: and the sons of
+Dominic, the friars preachers, and the sons of Vincent: and the monks
+of S. Wolstan: and Ignatius his children: and the confraternity of the
+christian brothers led by the reverend brother Edmund Ignatius Rice. And
+after came all saints and martyrs, virgins and confessors: S. Cyr and
+S. Isidore Arator and S. James the Less and S. Phocas of Sinope and S.
+Julian Hospitator and S. Felix de Cantalice and S. Simon Stylites and
+S. Stephen Protomartyr and S. John of God and S. Ferreol and S. Leugarde
+and S. Theodotus and S. Vulmar and S. Richard and S. Vincent de Paul and
+S. Martin of Todi and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and
+S. Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence
+and S. Edward and S. Owen Caniculus and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous
+and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S.
+Synonymous and S. Laurence O'Toole and S. James of Dingle and
+Compostella and S. Columcille and S. Columba and S. Celestine and S.
+Colman and S. Kevin and S. Brendan and S. Frigidian and S. Senan and S.
+Fachtna and S. Columbanus and S. Gall and S. Fursey and S. Fintan and S.
+Fiacre and S. John Nepomuc and S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Ives of Brittany
+and S. Michan and S. Herman-Joseph and the three patrons of holy youth
+S. Aloysius Gonzaga and S. Stanislaus Kostka and S. John Berchmans
+and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S.
+Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr
+and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother
+Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S.
+Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and
+S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and
+the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S.
+Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. And all came
+with nimbi and aureoles and gloriae, bearing palms and harps and swords
+and olive crowns, in robes whereon were woven the blessed symbols of
+their efficacies, inkhorns, arrows, loaves, cruses, fetters, axes,
+trees, bridges, babes in a bathtub, shells, wallets, shears, keys,
+dragons, lilies, buckshot, beards, hogs, lamps, bellows, beehives,
+soupladles, stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline, bells, crutches,
+forceps, stags' horns, watertight boots, hawks, millstones, eyes on a
+dish, wax candles, aspergills, unicorns. And as they wended their way by
+Nelson's Pillar, Henry street, Mary street, Capel street, Little Britain
+street chanting the introit in _Epiphania Domini_ which beginneth
+_Surge, illuminare_ and thereafter most sweetly the gradual _Omnes_
+which saith _de Saba venient_ they did divers wonders such as casting
+out devils, raising the dead to life, multiplying fishes, healing the
+halt and the blind, discovering various articles which had been mislaid,
+interpreting and fulfilling the scriptures, blessing and prophesying.
+And last, beneath a canopy of cloth of gold came the reverend Father
+O'Flynn attended by Malachi and Patrick. And when the good fathers
+had reached the appointed place, the house of Bernard Kiernan and Co,
+limited, 8, 9 and 10 little Britain street, wholesale grocers, wine
+and brandy shippers, licensed fo the sale of beer, wine and spirits for
+consumption on the premises, the celebrant blessed the house and censed
+the mullioned windows and the groynes and the vaults and the arrises and
+the capitals and the pediments and the cornices and the engrailed arches
+and the spires and the cupolas and sprinkled the lintels thereof with
+blessed water and prayed that God might bless that house as he had
+blessed the house of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and make the angels of
+His light to inhabit therein. And entering he blessed the viands and the
+beverages and the company of all the blessed answered his prayers.
+
+--_Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini._
+
+--_Qui fecit coelum et terram._
+
+--_Dominus vobiscum._
+
+--_Et cum spiritu tuo._
+
+And he laid his hands upon that he blessed and gave thanks and he prayed
+and they all with him prayed:
+
+--_Deus, cuius verbo sanctificantur omnia, benedictionem tuam effunde
+super creaturas istas: et praesta ut quisquis eis secundum legem et
+voluntatem Tuam cum gratiarum actione usus fuerit per invocationem
+sanctissimi nominis Tui corporis sanitatem et animae tutelam Te auctore
+percipiat per Christum Dominum nostrum._
+
+--And so say all of us, says Jack.
+
+--Thousand a year, Lambert, says Crofton or Crawford.
+
+--Right, says Ned, taking up his John Jameson. And butter for fish.
+
+I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike when
+be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a hurry.
+
+--I was just round at the courthouse, says he, looking for you. I hope
+I'm not...
+
+--No, says Martin, we're ready.
+
+Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver.
+Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There's
+a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to
+five.
+
+--Don't tell anyone, says the citizen,
+
+--Beg your pardon, says he.
+
+--Come on boys, says Martin, seeing it was looking blue. Come along now.
+
+--Don't tell anyone, says the citizen, letting a bawl out of him. It's a
+secret.
+
+And the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.
+
+--Bye bye all, says Martin.
+
+And he got them out as quick as he could, Jack Power and Crofton or
+whatever you call him and him in the middle of them letting on to be all
+at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car.
+
+---Off with you, says
+
+Martin to the jarvey.
+
+The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the
+helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward
+with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew
+nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of
+the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning
+wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the
+equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them
+all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they
+ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did
+they come and set them, those willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And
+they laughed, sporting in a circle of their foam: and the bark clave the
+waves.
+
+But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the
+citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the
+dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and
+candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf
+round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.
+
+--Let me alone, says he.
+
+And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he bawls
+out of him:
+
+--Three cheers for Israel!
+
+Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ' sake
+and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's
+always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about
+bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it
+would.
+
+And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and
+Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf
+and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and
+the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit
+down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over
+his eye starts singing _If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew_ and
+a slut shouts out of her:
+
+--Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!
+
+And says he:
+
+--Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And
+the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.
+
+--He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.
+
+--Whose God? says the citizen.
+
+--Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a
+jew like me.
+
+Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
+
+--By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy
+name.
+
+By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.
+
+--Stop! Stop! says Joe.
+
+A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from
+the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid
+farewell to Nagyasagos uram Lipoti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander
+Thom's, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of his departure
+for the distant clime of Szazharminczbrojugulyas-Dugulas (Meadow of
+Murmuring Waters). The ceremony which went off with great _éclat_ was
+characterised by the most affecting cordiality. An illuminated scroll
+of ancient Irish vellum, the work of Irish artists, was presented to
+the distinguished phenomenologist on behalf of a large section of the
+community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver casket, tastefully
+executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work which reflects
+every credit on the makers, Messrs Jacob _agus_ Jacob. The departing
+guest was the recipient of a hearty ovation, many of those who were
+present being visibly moved when the select orchestra of Irish pipes
+struck up the wellknown strains of _Come back to Erin_, followed
+immediately by _Rakoczsy's March_. Tarbarrels and bonfires were lighted
+along the coastline of the four seas on the summits of the Hill of
+Howth, Three Rock Mountain, Sugarloaf, Bray Head, the mountains of
+Mourne, the Galtees, the Ox and Donegal and Sperrin peaks, the Nagles
+and the Bograghs, the Connemara hills, the reeks of M Gillicuddy, Slieve
+Aughty, Slieve Bernagh and Slieve Bloom. Amid cheers that rent the
+welkin, responded to by answering cheers from a big muster of
+henchmen on the distant Cambrian and Caledonian hills, the mastodontic
+pleasureship slowly moved away saluted by a final floral tribute from
+the representatives of the fair sex who were present in large numbers
+while, as it proceeded down the river, escorted by a flotilla of barges,
+the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute
+as were also those of the electrical power station at the
+Pigeonhouse and the Poolbeg Light. _Visszontlátásra, kedves baráton!
+Visszontlátásra!_ Gone but not forgotten.
+
+Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin
+anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he
+shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play in the Queen's
+royal theatre:
+
+--Where is he till I murder him?
+
+And Ned and J. J. paralysed with the laughing.
+
+--Bloody wars, says I, I'll be in for the last gospel.
+
+But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag's head round the other
+way and off with him.
+
+--Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop!
+
+Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the
+sun was in his eyes or he'd have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it
+into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old
+mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and
+laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.
+
+The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The
+observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth
+grade of Mercalli's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar
+seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year
+of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have been
+that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay ward and
+parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods
+and one square pole or perch. All the lordly residences in the vicinity
+of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself,
+in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in
+progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to be
+feared all the occupants have been buried alive. From the reports of
+eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by
+a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character. An article of
+headgear since ascertained to belong to the much respected clerk of the
+crown and peace Mr George Fottrell and a silk umbrella with gold handle
+with the engraved initials, crest, coat of arms and house number of
+the erudite and worshipful chairman of quarter sessions sir Frederick
+Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, have been discovered by search parties
+in remote parts of the island respectively, the former on the third
+basaltic ridge of the giant's causeway, the latter embedded to the
+extent of one foot three inches in the sandy beach of Holeopen bay near
+the old head of Kinsale. Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed
+an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the
+atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest
+by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received
+from all parts of the different continents and the sovereign pontiff has
+been graciously pleased to decree that a special _missa pro defunctis_
+shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of each and every
+cathedral church of all the episcopal dioceses subject to the spiritual
+authority of the Holy See in suffrage of the souls of those faithful
+departed who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst.
+The work of salvage, removal of _débris,_ human remains etc has been
+entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159 Great Brunswick street,
+and Messrs T. and C. Martin, 77, 78, 79 and 80 North Wall, assisted by
+the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall's light infantry under the
+general supervision of H. R. H., rear admiral, the right honourable sir
+Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson, K. G., K. P., K. T., P. C., K.
+C. B., M. P, J. P., M. B., D. S. O., S. O. D., M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B.
+L., Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D., F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I. and F.
+R. C. S. I.
+
+You never saw the like of it in all your born puff. Gob, if he got that
+lottery ticket on the side of his poll he'd remember the gold cup, he
+would so, but begob the citizen would have been lagged for assault and
+battery and Joe for aiding and abetting. The jarvey saved his life by
+furious driving as sure as God made Moses. What? O, Jesus, he did. And
+he let a volley of oaths after him.
+
+--Did I kill him, says he, or what?
+
+And he shouting to the bloody dog:
+
+--After him, Garry! After him, boy!
+
+And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old
+sheepsface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his
+lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb.
+Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the value of it out of him, I promise
+you.
+
+When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld
+the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in
+the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment
+as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not
+look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: _Elijah!
+Elijah!_ And He answered with a main cry: _Abba! Adonai!_ And they
+beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend
+to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over
+Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.
+
+
+
+The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious
+embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of
+all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud
+promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on
+the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on
+the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness
+the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to
+the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.
+
+The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening
+scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly. Many a time and
+oft were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy
+chat beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine, Cissy
+Caffrey and Edy Boardman with the baby in the pushcar and Tommy and
+Jacky Caffrey, two little curlyheaded boys, dressed in sailor suits with
+caps to match and the name H.M.S. Belleisle printed on both. For Tommy
+and Jacky Caffrey were twins, scarce four years old and very noisy and
+spoiled twins sometimes but for all that darling little fellows with
+bright merry faces and endearing ways about them. They were dabbling in
+the sand with their spades and buckets, building castles as children do,
+or playing with their big coloured ball, happy as the day was long. And
+Edy Boardman was rocking the chubby baby to and fro in the pushcar while
+that young gentleman fairly chuckled with delight. He was but eleven
+months and nine days old and, though still a tiny toddler, was just
+beginning to lisp his first babyish words. Cissy Caffrey bent over to
+him to tease his fat little plucks and the dainty dimple in his chin.
+
+--Now, baby, Cissy Caffrey said. Say out big, big. I want a drink of
+water.
+
+And baby prattled after her:
+
+--A jink a jink a jawbo.
+
+Cissy Caffrey cuddled the wee chap for she was awfully fond of children,
+so patient with little sufferers and Tommy Caffrey could never be got to
+take his castor oil unless it was Cissy Caffrey that held his nose and
+promised him the scatty heel of the loaf or brown bread with golden
+syrup on. What a persuasive power that girl had! But to be sure baby
+Boardman was as good as gold, a perfect little dote in his new fancy
+bib. None of your spoilt beauties, Flora MacFlimsy sort, was Cissy
+Caffrey. A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with
+a laugh in her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe
+red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme. And Edy Boardman laughed too at
+the quaint language of little brother.
+
+But just then there was a slight altercation between Master Tommy and
+Master Jacky. Boys will be boys and our two twins were no exception
+to this golden rule. The apple of discord was a certain castle of sand
+which Master Jacky had built and Master Tommy would have it right go
+wrong that it was to be architecturally improved by a frontdoor like the
+Martello tower had. But if Master Tommy was headstrong Master Jacky was
+selfwilled too and, true to the maxim that every little Irishman's house
+is his castle, he fell upon his hated rival and to such purpose that the
+wouldbe assailant came to grief and (alas to relate!) the coveted castle
+too. Needless to say the cries of discomfited Master Tommy drew the
+attention of the girl friends.
+
+--Come here, Tommy, his sister called imperatively. At once! And you,
+Jacky, for shame to throw poor Tommy in the dirty sand. Wait till I
+catch you for that.
+
+His eyes misty with unshed tears Master Tommy came at her call for their
+big sister's word was law with the twins. And in a sad plight he was
+too after his misadventure. His little man-o'-war top and unmentionables
+were full of sand but Cissy was a past mistress in the art of smoothing
+over life's tiny troubles and very quickly not one speck of sand was to
+be seen on his smart little suit. Still the blue eyes were glistening
+with hot tears that would well up so she kissed away the hurtness and
+shook her hand at Master Jacky the culprit and said if she was near him
+she wouldn't be far from him, her eyes dancing in admonition.
+
+--Nasty bold Jacky! she cried.
+
+She put an arm round the little mariner and coaxed winningly:
+
+--What's your name? Butter and cream?
+
+--Tell us who is your sweetheart, spoke Edy Boardman. Is Cissy your
+sweetheart?
+
+--Nao, tearful Tommy said.
+
+--Is Edy Boardman your sweetheart? Cissy queried.
+
+--Nao, Tommy said.
+
+--I know, Edy Boardman said none too amiably with an arch glance from
+her shortsighted eyes. I know who is Tommy's sweetheart. Gerty is
+Tommy's sweetheart.
+
+--Nao, Tommy said on the verge of tears.
+
+Cissy's quick motherwit guessed what was amiss and she whispered to
+Edy Boardman to take him there behind the pushcar where the gentleman
+couldn't see and to mind he didn't wet his new tan shoes.
+
+But who was Gerty?
+
+Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought,
+gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen
+of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced
+beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was
+more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful,
+inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking
+of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch's
+female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to
+get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost
+spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine
+Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster
+with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments
+could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves
+in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once to
+Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers drawn
+with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to
+time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not to let on whatever
+she did that it was her that told her or she'd never speak to her
+again. No. Honour where honour is due. There was an innate refinement,
+a languid queenly _hauteur_ about Gerty which was unmistakably evidenced
+in her delicate hands and higharched instep. Had kind fate but willed
+her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in her own right and had
+she only received the benefit of a good education Gerty MacDowell might
+easily have held her own beside any lady in the land and have seen
+herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors
+at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to her.
+Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her
+softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning,
+that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm
+few could resist. Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty's were of
+the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive
+brows. Time was when those brows were not so silkily seductive. It
+was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the
+Princess Novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which
+gave that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders
+of fashion, and she had never regretted it. Then there was blushing
+scientifically cured and how to be tall increase your height and you
+have a beautiful face but your nose? That would suit Mrs Dignam because
+she had a button one. But Gerty's crowning glory was her wealth of
+wonderful hair. It was dark brown with a natural wave in it. She had cut
+it that very morning on account of the new moon and it nestled about
+her pretty head in a profusion of luxuriant clusters and pared her nails
+too, Thursday for wealth. And just now at Edy's words as a telltale
+flush, delicate as the faintest rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she
+looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness that of a surety God's
+fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal.
+
+For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast eyes. She
+was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue.
+Inclination prompted her to speak out: dignity told her to be silent.
+The pretty lips pouted awhile but then she glanced up and broke out into
+a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May
+morning. She knew right well, no-one better, what made squinty Edy
+say that because of him cooling in his attentions when it was simply a
+lovers' quarrel. As per usual somebody's nose was out of joint about the
+boy that had the bicycle off the London bridge road always riding up
+and down in front of her window. Only now his father kept him in in the
+evenings studying hard to get an exhibition in the intermediate that was
+on and he was going to go to Trinity college to study for a doctor when
+he left the high school like his brother W. E. Wylie who was racing
+in the bicycle races in Trinity college university. Little recked he
+perhaps for what she felt, that dull aching void in her heart sometimes,
+piercing to the core. Yet he was young and perchance he might learn
+to love her in time. They were protestants in his family and of course
+Gerty knew Who came first and after Him the Blessed Virgin and then
+Saint Joseph. But he was undeniably handsome with an exquisite nose and
+he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the shape of his head too
+at the back without his cap on that she would know anywhere something
+off the common and the way he turned the bicycle at the lamp with his
+hands off the bars and also the nice perfume of those good cigarettes
+and besides they were both of a size too he and she and that was why Edy
+Boardman thought she was so frightfully clever because he didn't go and
+ride up and down in front of her bit of a garden.
+
+Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary of
+Dame Fashion for she felt that there was just a might that he might be
+out. A neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes (because it
+was expected in the _Lady's Pictorial_ that electric blue would be worn)
+with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket (in
+which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her
+favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy
+threequarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim graceful figure
+to perfection. She wore a coquettish little love of a hat of wideleaved
+nigger straw contrast trimmed with an underbrim of eggblue chenille and
+at the side a butterfly bow of silk to tone. All Tuesday week afternoon
+she was hunting to match that chenille but at last she found what she
+wanted at Clery's summer sales, the very it, slightly shopsoiled but you
+would never notice, seven fingers two and a penny. She did it up all by
+herself and what joy was hers when she tried it on then, smiling at the
+lovely reflection which the mirror gave back to her! And when she put
+it on the waterjug to keep the shape she knew that that would take the
+shine out of some people she knew. Her shoes were the newest thing in
+footwear (Edy Boardman prided herself that she was very _petite_ but she
+never had a foot like Gerty MacDowell, a five, and never would ash,
+oak or elm) with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle over
+her higharched instep. Her wellturned ankle displayed its perfect
+proportions beneath her skirt and just the proper amount and no more of
+her shapely limbs encased in finespun hose with highspliced heels and
+wide garter tops. As for undies they were Gerty's chief care and who
+that knows the fluttering hopes and fears of sweet seventeen (though
+Gerty would never see seventeen again) can find it in his heart to
+blame her? She had four dinky sets with awfully pretty stitchery,
+three garments and nighties extra, and each set slotted with different
+coloured ribbons, rosepink, pale blue, mauve and peagreen, and she aired
+them herself and blued them when they came home from the wash and ironed
+them and she had a brickbat to keep the iron on because she wouldn't
+trust those washerwomen as far as she'd see them scorching the things.
+She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own colour
+and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere on her because
+the green she wore that day week brought grief because his father
+brought him in to study for the intermediate exhibition and because
+she thought perhaps he might be out because when she was dressing that
+morning she nearly slipped up the old pair on her inside out and that
+was for luck and lovers' meeting if you put those things on inside
+out or if they got untied that he was thinking about you so long as it
+wasn't of a Friday.
+
+And yet and yet! That strained look on her face! A gnawing sorrow is
+there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give
+worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where,
+giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup
+feelingsthough not too much because she knew how to cry nicely before
+the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it said. The paly light of evening
+falls upon a face infinitely sad and wistful. Gerty MacDowell yearns
+in vain. Yes, she had known from the very first that her daydream of a
+marriage has been arranged and the weddingbells ringing for Mrs Reggy
+Wylie T. C. D. (because the one who married the elder brother would be
+Mrs Wylie) and in the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was
+wearing a sumptuous confection of grey trimmed with expensive blue fox
+was not to be. He was too young to understand. He would not believe in
+love, a woman's birthright. The night of the party long ago in Stoer's
+(he was still in short trousers) when they were alone and he stole
+an arm round her waist she went white to the very lips. He called her
+little one in a strangely husky voice and snatched a half kiss (the
+first!) but it was only the end of her nose and then he hastened from
+the room with a remark about refreshments. Impetuous fellow! Strength of
+character had never been Reggy Wylie's strong point and he who would
+woo and win Gerty MacDowell must be a man among men. But waiting, always
+waiting to be asked and it was leap year too and would soon be over. No
+prince charming is her beau ideal to lay a rare and wondrous love at her
+feet but rather a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found
+his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly flecked with grey, and who would
+understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all
+the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long
+long kiss. It would be like heaven. For such a one she yearns this balmy
+summer eve. With all the heart of her she longs to be his only, his
+affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness in health, till death
+us two part, from this to this day forward.
+
+And while Edy Boardman was with little Tommy behind the pushcar she was
+just thinking would the day ever come when she could call herself his
+little wife to be. Then they could talk about her till they went blue in
+the face, Bertha Supple too, and Edy, little spitfire, because she would
+be twentytwo in November. She would care for him with creature comforts
+too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that
+feeling of hominess. Her griddlecakes done to a goldenbrown hue and
+queen Ann's pudding of delightful creaminess had won golden opinions
+from all because she had a lucky hand also for lighting a fire, dredge
+in the fine selfraising flour and always stir in the same direction,
+then cream the milk and sugar and whisk well the white of eggs though
+she didn't like the eating part when there were any people that made her
+shy and often she wondered why you couldn't eat something poetical like
+violets or roses and they would have a beautifully appointed drawingroom
+with pictures and engravings and the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap's
+lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked it was so human and chintz
+covers for the chairs and that silver toastrack in Clery's summer
+jumble sales like they have in rich houses. He would be tall with
+broad shoulders (she had always admired tall men for a husband) with
+glistening white teeth under his carefully trimmed sweeping moustache
+and they would go on the continent for their honeymoon (three wonderful
+weeks!) and then, when they settled down in a nice snug and cosy little
+homely house, every morning they would both have brekky, simple but
+perfectly served, for their own two selves and before he went out to
+business he would give his dear little wifey a good hearty hug and gaze
+for a moment deep down into her eyes.
+
+Edy Boardman asked Tommy Caffrey was he done and he said yes so then she
+buttoned up his little knickerbockers for him and told him to run off
+and play with Jacky and to be good now and not to fight. But Tommy said
+he wanted the ball and Edy told him no that baby was playing with the
+ball and if he took it there'd be wigs on the green but Tommy said it
+was his ball and he wanted his ball and he pranced on the ground, if
+you please. The temper of him! O, he was a man already was little Tommy
+Caffrey since he was out of pinnies. Edy told him no, no and to be off
+now with him and she told Cissy Caffrey not to give in to him.
+
+--You're not my sister, naughty Tommy said. It's my ball.
+
+But Cissy Caffrey told baby Boardman to look up, look up high at her
+finger and she snatched the ball quickly and threw it along the sand and
+Tommy after it in full career, having won the day.
+
+--Anything for a quiet life, laughed Ciss.
+
+And she tickled tiny tot's two cheeks to make him forget and played
+here's the lord mayor, here's his two horses, here's his gingerbread
+carriage and here he walks in, chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper
+chin. But Edy got as cross as two sticks about him getting his own way
+like that from everyone always petting him.
+
+--I'd like to give him something, she said, so I would, where I won't
+say.
+
+--On the beeoteetom, laughed Cissy merrily.
+
+Gerty MacDowell bent down her head and crimsoned at the idea of Cissy
+saying an unladylike thing like that out loud she'd be ashamed of her
+life to say, flushing a deep rosy red, and Edy Boardman said she was
+sure the gentleman opposite heard what she said. But not a pin cared
+Ciss.
+
+--Let him! she said with a pert toss of her head and a piquant tilt of
+her nose. Give it to him too on the same place as quick as I'd look at
+him.
+
+Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls. You had to laugh at her sometimes.
+For instance when she asked you would you have some more Chinese tea and
+jaspberry ram and when she drew the jugs too and the men's faces on her
+nails with red ink make you split your sides or when she wanted to go
+where you know she said she wanted to run and pay a visit to the Miss
+White. That was just like Cissycums. O, and will you ever forget her the
+evening she dressed up in her father's suit and hat and the burned cork
+moustache and walked down Tritonville road, smoking a cigarette. There
+was none to come up to her for fun. But she was sincerity itself, one of
+the bravest and truest hearts heaven ever made, not one of your twofaced
+things, too sweet to be wholesome.
+
+And then there came out upon the air the sound of voices and the pealing
+anthem of the organ. It was the men's temperance retreat conducted
+by the missioner, the reverend John Hughes S. J., rosary, sermon and
+benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. They were there gathered
+together without distinction of social class (and a most edifying
+spectacle it was to see) in that simple fane beside the waves, after the
+storms of this weary world, kneeling before the feet of the immaculate,
+reciting the litany of Our Lady of Loreto, beseeching her to intercede
+for them, the old familiar words, holy Mary, holy virgin of virgins. How
+sad to poor Gerty's ears! Had her father only avoided the clutches of
+the demon drink, by taking the pledge or those powders the drink habit
+cured in Pearson's Weekly, she might now be rolling in her carriage,
+second to none. Over and over had she told herself that as she mused by
+the dying embers in a brown study without the lamp because she hated two
+lights or oftentimes gazing out of the window dreamily by the hour at
+the rain falling on the rusty bucket, thinking. But that vile decoction
+which has ruined so many hearths and homes had cist its shadow over her
+childhood days. Nay, she had even witnessed in the home circle deeds of
+violence caused by intemperance and had seen her own father, a prey to
+the fumes of intoxication, forget himself completely for if there was
+one thing of all things that Gerty knew it was that the man who lifts
+his hand to a woman save in the way of kindness, deserves to be branded
+as the lowest of the low.
+
+And still the voices sang in supplication to the Virgin most powerful,
+Virgin most merciful. And Gerty, rapt in thought, scarce saw or heard
+her companions or the twins at their boyish gambols or the gentleman
+off Sandymount green that Cissy Caffrey called the man that was so like
+himself passing along the strand taking a short walk. You never saw him
+any way screwed but still and for all that she would not like him for a
+father because he was too old or something or on account of his face
+(it was a palpable case of Doctor Fell) or his carbuncly nose with the
+pimples on it and his sandy moustache a bit white under his nose. Poor
+father! With all his faults she loved him still when he sang _Tell me,
+Mary, how to woo thee_ or _My love and cottage near Rochelle_ and they
+had stewed cockles and lettuce with Lazenby's salad dressing for
+supper and when he sang _The moon hath raised_ with Mr Dignam that
+died suddenly and was buried, God have mercy on him, from a stroke. Her
+mother's birthday that was and Charley was home on his holidays and Tom
+and Mr Dignam and Mrs and Patsy and Freddy Dignam and they were to have
+had a group taken. No-one would have thought the end was so near. Now he
+was laid to rest. And her mother said to him to let that be a warning to
+him for the rest of his days and he couldn't even go to the funeral on
+account of the gout and she had to go into town to bring him the
+letters and samples from his office about Catesby's cork lino, artistic,
+standard designs, fit for a palace, gives tiptop wear and always bright
+and cheery in the home.
+
+A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the
+house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in
+gold. And when her mother had those raging splitting headaches who was
+it rubbed the menthol cone on her forehead but Gerty though she didn't
+like her mother's taking pinches of snuff and that was the only single
+thing they ever had words about, taking snuff. Everyone thought the
+world of her for her gentle ways. It was Gerty who turned off the gas at
+the main every night and it was Gerty who tacked up on the wall of that
+place where she never forgot every fortnight the chlorate of lime Mr
+Tunney the grocer's christmas almanac, the picture of halcyon days
+where a young gentleman in the costume they used to wear then with a
+threecornered hat was offering a bunch of flowers to his ladylove with
+oldtime chivalry through her lattice window. You could see there was a
+story behind it. The colours were done something lovely. She was in
+a soft clinging white in a studied attitude and the gentleman was in
+chocolate and he looked a thorough aristocrat. She often looked at them
+dreamily when she went there for a certain purpose and felt her own
+arms that were white and soft just like hers with the sleeves back
+and thought about those times because she had found out in Walker's
+pronouncing dictionary that belonged to grandpapa Giltrap about the
+halcyon days what they meant.
+
+The twins were now playing in the most approved brotherly fashion
+till at last Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was
+no getting behind that deliberately kicked the ball as hard as ever he
+could down towards the seaweedy rocks. Needless to say poor Tommy was
+not slow to voice his dismay but luckily the gentleman in black who was
+sitting there by himself came gallantly to the rescue and intercepted
+the ball. Our two champions claimed their plaything with lusty cries and
+to avoid trouble Cissy Caffrey called to the gentleman to throw it to
+her please. The gentleman aimed the ball once or twice and then threw
+it up the strand towards Cissy Caffrey but it rolled down the slope and
+stopped right under Gerty's skirt near the little pool by the rock. The
+twins clamoured again for it and Cissy told her to kick it away and
+let them fight for it so Gerty drew back her foot but she wished their
+stupid ball hadn't come rolling down to her and she gave a kick but she
+missed and Edy and Cissy laughed.
+
+--If you fail try again, Edy Boardman said.
+
+Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip. A delicate pink crept into her
+pretty cheek but she was determined to let them see so she just lifted
+her skirt a little but just enough and took good aim and gave the ball a
+jolly good kick and it went ever so far and the two twins after it down
+towards the shingle. Pure jealousy of course it was nothing else to draw
+attention on account of the gentleman opposite looking. She felt the
+warm flush, a danger signal always with Gerty MacDowell, surging and
+flaming into her cheeks. Till then they had only exchanged glances of
+the most casual but now under the brim of her new hat she ventured a
+look at him and the face that met her gaze there in the twilight, wan
+and strangely drawn, seemed to her the saddest she had ever seen.
+
+Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted
+and with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of
+original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray
+for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. And
+careworn hearts were there and toilers for their daily bread and many
+who had erred and wandered, their eyes wet with contrition but for all
+that bright with hope for the reverend father Father Hughes had told
+them what the great saint Bernard said in his famous prayer of Mary, the
+most pious Virgin's intercessory power that it was not recorded in any
+age that those who implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned
+by her.
+
+The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of
+childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy Caffrey played with
+baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep
+she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy
+gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah! and, my word,
+didn't the little chap enjoy that! And then she told him to say papa.
+
+--Say papa, baby. Say pa pa pa pa pa pa pa.
+
+And baby did his level best to say it for he was very intelligent for
+eleven months everyone said and big for his age and the picture of
+health, a perfect little bunch of love, and he would certainly turn out
+to be something great, they said.
+
+--Haja ja ja haja.
+
+Cissy wiped his little mouth with the dribbling bib and wanted him to
+sit up properly and say pa pa pa but when she undid the strap she cried
+out, holy saint Denis, that he was possing wet and to double the half
+blanket the other way under him. Of course his infant majesty was most
+obstreperous at such toilet formalities and he let everyone know it:
+
+--Habaa baaaahabaaa baaaa.
+
+And two great big lovely big tears coursing down his cheeks. It was all
+no use soothering him with no, nono, baby, no and telling him about the
+geegee and where was the puffpuff but Ciss, always readywitted, gave
+him in his mouth the teat of the suckingbottle and the young heathen was
+quickly appeased.
+
+Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out
+of that and not get on her nerves, no hour to be out, and the little
+brats of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the
+paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured
+chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the
+evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to
+hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned
+in the church like a kind of waft. And while she gazed her heart went
+pitapat. Yes, it was her he was looking at, and there was meaning in his
+look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through
+and through, read her very soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly
+expressive, but could you trust them? People were so queer. She could
+see at once by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he
+was a foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the
+matinee idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she
+wasn't stagestruck like Winny Rippingham that wanted they two to always
+dress the same on account of a play but she could not see whether he had
+an aquiline nose or a slightly _retroussé_ from where he was sitting.
+He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting
+sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know what
+it was. He was looking up so intently, so still, and he saw her kick the
+ball and perhaps he could see the bright steel buckles of her shoes if
+she swung them like that thoughtfully with the toes down. She was glad
+that something told her to put on the transparent stockings thinking
+Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of which
+she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on
+her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he
+was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him,
+her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had
+suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had
+been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a
+protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved
+her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm. She was a
+womanly woman not like other flighty girls unfeminine he had known,
+those cyclists showing off what they hadn't got and she just yearned to
+know all, to forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her,
+make him forget the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her
+gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her,
+his ownest girlie, for herself alone.
+
+Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the afflicted. _Ora pro nobis_. Well
+has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy
+can never be lost or cast away: and fitly is she too a haven of refuge
+for the afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced
+her own heart. Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the
+stained glass windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue
+banners of the blessed Virgin's sodality and Father Conroy was helping
+Canon O'Hanlon at the altar, carrying things in and out with his eyes
+cast down. He looked almost a saint and his confessionbox was so quiet
+and clean and dark and his hands were just like white wax and if ever
+she became a Dominican nun in their white habit perhaps he might come to
+the convent for the novena of Saint Dominic. He told her that time when
+she told him about that in confession, crimsoning up to the roots of her
+hair for fear he could see, not to be troubled because that was only the
+voice of nature and we were all subject to nature's laws, he said, in
+this life and that that was no sin because that came from the nature of
+woman instituted by God, he said, and that Our Blessed Lady herself said
+to the archangel Gabriel be it done unto me according to Thy Word. He
+was so kind and holy and often and often she thought and thought could
+she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered floral design for him as a
+present or a clock but they had a clock she noticed on the mantelpiece
+white and gold with a canarybird that came out of a little house to tell
+the time the day she went there about the flowers for the forty hours'
+adoration because it was hard to know what sort of a present to give or
+perhaps an album of illuminated views of Dublin or some place.
+
+The exasperating little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky
+threw the ball out towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little
+monkeys common as ditchwater. Someone ought to take them and give them
+a good hiding for themselves to keep them in their places, the both of
+them. And Cissy and Edy shouted after them to come back because they
+were afraid the tide might come in on them and be drowned.
+
+--Jacky! Tommy!
+
+Not they! What a great notion they had! So Cissy said it was the very
+last time she'd ever bring them out. She jumped up and called them and
+she ran down the slope past him, tossing her hair behind her which had
+a good enough colour if there had been more of it but with all the
+thingamerry she was always rubbing into it she couldn't get it to grow
+long because it wasn't natural so she could just go and throw her hat at
+it. She ran with long gandery strides it was a wonder she didn't rip up
+her skirt at the side that was too tight on her because there was a lot
+of the tomboy about Cissy Caffrey and she was a forward piece whenever
+she thought she had a good opportunity to show and just because she was
+a good runner she ran like that so that he could see all the end of her
+petticoat running and her skinny shanks up as far as possible. It
+would have served her just right if she had tripped up over something
+accidentally on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to
+make her look tall and got a fine tumble. _Tableau!_ That would have
+been a very charming expose for a gentleman like that to witness.
+
+Queen of angels, queen of patriarchs, queen of prophets, of all saints,
+they prayed, queen of the most holy rosary and then Father Conroy handed
+the thurible to Canon O'Hanlon and he put in the incense and censed the
+Blessed Sacrament and Cissy Caffrey caught the two twins and she was
+itching to give them a ringing good clip on the ear but she didn't
+because she thought he might be watching but she never made a bigger
+mistake in all her life because Gerty could see without looking that
+he never took his eyes off of her and then Canon O'Hanlon handed the
+thurible back to Father Conroy and knelt down looking up at the Blessed
+Sacrament and the choir began to sing the _Tantum ergo_ and she just
+swung her foot in and out in time as the music rose and fell to
+the _Tantumer gosa cramen tum_. Three and eleven she paid for those
+stockings in Sparrow's of George's street on the Tuesday, no the Monday
+before Easter and there wasn't a brack on them and that was what he
+was looking at, transparent, and not at her insignificant ones that had
+neither shape nor form (the cheek of her!) because he had eyes in his
+head to see the difference for himself.
+
+Cissy came up along the strand with the two twins and their ball with
+her hat anyhow on her to one side after her run and she did look a
+streel tugging the two kids along with the flimsy blouse she bought only
+a fortnight before like a rag on her back and a bit of her petticoat
+hanging like a caricature. Gerty just took off her hat for a moment to
+settle her hair and a prettier, a daintier head of nutbrown tresses was
+never seen on a girl's shoulders--a radiant little vision, in sooth,
+almost maddening in its sweetness. You would have to travel many a long
+mile before you found a head of hair the like of that. She could almost
+see the swift answering flash of admiration in his eyes that set her
+tingling in every nerve. She put on her hat so that she could see from
+underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath
+caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eying her as a
+snake eyes its prey. Her woman's instinct told her that she had raised
+the devil in him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from throat
+to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose.
+
+Edy Boardman was noticing it too because she was squinting at Gerty,
+half smiling, with her specs like an old maid, pretending to nurse the
+baby. Irritable little gnat she was and always would be and that was why
+no-one could get on with her poking her nose into what was no concern of
+hers. And she said to Gerty:
+
+--A penny for your thoughts.
+
+--What? replied Gerty with a smile reinforced by the whitest of teeth. I
+was only wondering was it late.
+
+Because she wished to goodness they'd take the snottynosed twins and
+their babby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just
+gave a gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy
+asked her the time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half
+past kissing time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because
+they were told to be in early.
+
+--Wait, said Cissy, I'll run ask my uncle Peter over there what's the
+time by his conundrum.
+
+So over she went and when he saw her coming she could see him take his
+hand out of his pocket, getting nervous, and beginning to play with his
+watchchain, looking up at the church. Passionate nature though he was
+Gerty could see that he had enormous control over himself. One moment he
+had been there, fascinated by a loveliness that made him gaze, and the
+next moment it was the quiet gravefaced gentleman, selfcontrol expressed
+in every line of his distinguishedlooking figure.
+
+Cissy said to excuse her would he mind please telling her what was the
+right time and Gerty could see him taking out his watch, listening to it
+and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his
+watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the
+sun was set. His voice had a cultured ring in it and though he spoke in
+measured accents there was a suspicion of a quiver in the mellow tones.
+Cissy said thanks and came back with her tongue out and said uncle said
+his waterworks were out of order.
+
+Then they sang the second verse of the _Tantum ergo_ and Canon O'Hanlon
+got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told
+Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire to the
+flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right and she could
+see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she
+swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he
+could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch
+or whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands
+back into his pockets. She felt a kind of a sensation rushing all over
+her and she knew by the feel of her scalp and that irritation against
+her stays that that thing must be coming on because the last time too
+was when she clipped her hair on account of the moon. His dark eyes
+fixed themselves on her again drinking in her every contour, literally
+worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a
+man's passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man's face.
+It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it.
+
+Edy began to get ready to go and it was high time for her and Gerty
+noticed that that little hint she gave had had the desired effect
+because it was a long way along the strand to where there was the place
+to push up the pushcar and Cissy took off the twins' caps and tidied
+their hair to make herself attractive of course and Canon O'Hanlon stood
+up with his cope poking up at his neck and Father Conroy handed him the
+card to read off and he read out _Panem de coelo praestitisti eis_ and
+Edy and Cissy were talking about the time all the time and asking her
+but Gerty could pay them back in their own coin and she just answered
+with scathing politeness when Edy asked her was she heartbroken about
+her best boy throwing her over. Gerty winced sharply. A brief cold blaze
+shone from her eyes that spoke volumes of scorn immeasurable. It hurt--O
+yes, it cut deep because Edy had her own quiet way of saying things
+like that she knew would wound like the confounded little cat she was.
+Gerty's lips parted swiftly to frame the word but she fought back
+the sob that rose to her throat, so slim, so flawless, so beautifully
+moulded it seemed one an artist might have dreamed of. She had loved him
+better than he knew. Lighthearted deceiver and fickle like all his sex
+he would never understand what he had meant to her and for an instant
+there was in the blue eyes a quick stinging of tears. Their eyes were
+probing her mercilessly but with a brave effort she sparkled back in
+sympathy as she glanced at her new conquest for them to see.
+
+--O, responded Gerty, quick as lightning, laughing, and the proud head
+flashed up. I can throw my cap at who I like because it's leap year.
+
+Her words rang out crystalclear, more musical than the cooing of the
+ringdove, but they cut the silence icily. There was that in her young
+voice that told that she was not a one to be lightly trifled with. As
+for Mr Reggy with his swank and his bit of money she could just chuck
+him aside as if he was so much filth and never again would she cast as
+much as a second thought on him and tear his silly postcard into a dozen
+pieces. And if ever after he dared to presume she could give him one
+look of measured scorn that would make him shrivel up on the spot. Miss
+puny little Edy's countenance fell to no slight extent and Gerty could
+see by her looking as black as thunder that she was simply in a towering
+rage though she hid it, the little kinnatt, because that shaft had
+struck home for her petty jealousy and they both knew that she was
+something aloof, apart, in another sphere, that she was not of them and
+never would be and there was somebody else too that knew it and saw it
+so they could put that in their pipe and smoke it.
+
+Edy straightened up baby Boardman to get ready to go and Cissy tucked in
+the ball and the spades and buckets and it was high time too because the
+sandman was on his way for Master Boardman junior. And Cissy told him
+too that billy winks was coming and that baby was to go deedaw and baby
+looked just too ducky, laughing up out of his gleeful eyes, and Cissy
+poked him like that out of fun in his wee fat tummy and baby, without as
+much as by your leave, sent up his compliments to all and sundry on to
+his brandnew dribbling bib.
+
+--O my! Puddeny pie! protested Ciss. He has his bib destroyed.
+
+The slight _contretemps_ claimed her attention but in two twos she set
+that little matter to rights.
+
+Gerty stifled a smothered exclamation and gave a nervous cough and Edy
+asked what and she was just going to tell her to catch it while it was
+flying but she was ever ladylike in her deportment so she simply passed
+it off with consummate tact by saying that that was the benediction
+because just then the bell rang out from the steeple over the quiet
+seashore because Canon O'Hanlon was up on the altar with the veil that
+Father Conroy put round his shoulders giving the benediction with the
+Blessed Sacrament in his hands.
+
+How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse
+of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same
+time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither,
+thither, with a tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of
+the lighthouses so picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of
+paints because it was easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter
+would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along
+by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked and lighting the
+lamp near her window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like
+she read in that book _The Lamplighter_ by Miss Cummins, author of
+_Mabel Vaughan_ and other tales. For Gerty had her dreams that no-one
+knew of. She loved to read poetry and when she got a keepsake from
+Bertha Supple of that lovely confession album with the coralpink cover
+to write her thoughts in she laid it in the drawer of her toilettable
+which, though it did not err on the side of luxury, was scrupulously
+neat and clean. It was there she kept her girlish treasure trove, the
+tortoiseshell combs, her child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the
+eyebrowleine, her alabaster pouncetbox and the ribbons to change
+when her things came home from the wash and there were some beautiful
+thoughts written in it in violet ink that she bought in Hely's of Dame
+Street for she felt that she too could write poetry if she could only
+express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that
+she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the
+potherbs. _Art thou real, my ideal?_ it was called by Louis J Walsh,
+Magherafelt, and after there was something about _twilight, wilt thou
+ever?_ and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient
+loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears for she felt that
+the years were slipping by for her, one by one, and but for that one
+shortcoming she knew she need fear no competition and that was an
+accident coming down Dalkey hill and she always tried to conceal it.
+But it must end, she felt. If she saw that magic lure in his eyes there
+would be no holding back for her. Love laughs at locksmiths. She
+would make the great sacrifice. Her every effort would be to share his
+thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his
+days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was
+dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife
+or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land
+of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind.
+But even if--what then? Would it make a very great difference? From
+everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively
+recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the
+accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and
+coarse men with no respect for a girl's honour, degrading the sex and
+being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be
+just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other
+in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess. Perhaps it was
+an old flame he was in mourning for from the days beyond recall. She
+thought she understood. She would try to understand him because men were
+so different. The old love was waiting, waiting with little white
+hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would
+follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he
+was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was
+the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be
+wild, untrammelled, free.
+
+Canon O'Hanlon put the Blessed Sacrament back into the tabernacle and
+genuflected and the choir sang _Laudate Dominum omnes gentes_ and then
+he locked the tabernacle door because the benediction was over and
+Father Conroy handed him his hat to put on and crosscat Edy asked wasn't
+she coming but Jacky Caffrey called out:
+
+--O, look, Cissy!
+
+And they all looked was it sheet lightning but Tommy saw it too over the
+trees beside the church, blue and then green and purple.
+
+--It's fireworks, Cissy Caffrey said.
+
+And they all ran down the strand to see over the houses and the church,
+helterskelter, Edy with the pushcar with baby Boardman in it and Cissy
+holding Tommy and Jacky by the hand so they wouldn't fall running.
+
+--Come on, Gerty, Cissy called. It's the bazaar fireworks.
+
+But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and
+call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could
+see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set her
+pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and
+a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion
+silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left
+alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could
+be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible
+honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremour
+went over her. She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were
+and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up
+and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her
+graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately
+rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse
+breathing, because she knew too about the passion of men like that,
+hotblooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made
+her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with
+them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of
+papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do
+something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But
+this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was
+all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to
+his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there
+was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being
+married and there ought to be women priests that would understand
+without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy
+kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny
+Rippingham so mad about actors' photographs and besides it was on
+account of that other thing coming on the way it did.
+
+And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back
+and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and
+they all saw it and they all shouted to look, look, there it was and
+she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was
+flying through the air, a soft thing, to and fro, dark. And she saw a
+long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense
+hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and
+higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high,
+high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an
+entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things
+too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than
+those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being
+white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high
+it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from
+being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee
+where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn't ashamed
+and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way like that because he
+couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like
+those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he
+kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly,
+held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on
+her white brow, the cry of a young girl's love, a little strangled cry,
+wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a
+rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle
+burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures
+and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they
+shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so
+lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!
+
+Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She
+glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of
+piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl He
+was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he)
+stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a
+brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him
+and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been!
+He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes,
+for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and
+wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their
+secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to
+know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening
+to and fro and little bats don't tell.
+
+Cissy Caffrey whistled, imitating the boys in the football field to show
+what a great person she was: and then she cried:
+
+--Gerty! Gerty! We're going. Come on. We can see from farther up.
+
+Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into
+her kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of
+course without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he's too
+far to. She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet
+again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her
+dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls
+met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full
+of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She
+half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged
+on tears, and then they parted.
+
+Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy,
+to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was
+darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and
+slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic
+of her but with care and very slowly because--because Gerty MacDowell
+was...
+
+Tight boots? No. She's lame! O!
+
+Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That's why she's
+left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was
+wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse
+in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn't know it when she was on
+show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn't mind. Curiosity like a
+nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate.
+Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish. I have such
+a bad headache today. Where did I put the letter? Yes, all right. All
+kinds of crazy longings. Licking pennies. Girl in Tranquilla convent
+that nun told me liked to smell rock oil. Virgins go mad in the end I
+suppose. Sister? How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she.
+Something in the air. That's the moon. But then why don't all women
+menstruate at the same time with the same moon, I mean? Depends on the
+time they were born I suppose. Or all start scratch then get out of
+step. Sometimes Molly and Milly together. Anyhow I got the best of that.
+Damned glad I didn't do it in the bath this morning over her silly I
+will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning. That
+gouger M'Coy stopping me to say nothing. And his wife engagement in the
+country valise, voice like a pickaxe. Thankful for small mercies.
+Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves. Their
+natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices.
+Reserve better. Don't want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O.
+Pity they can't see themselves. A dream of wellfilled hose. Where was
+that? Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping
+Tom. Willy's hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot those
+girls or is it all a fake? _Lingerie_ does it. Felt for the curves
+inside her _deshabillé._ Excites them also when they're. I'm all clean
+come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice.
+Milly delighted with Molly's new blouse. At first. Put them all on to
+take them all off. Molly. Why I bought her the violet garters. Us too:
+the tie he wore, his lovely socks and turnedup trousers. He wore a pair
+of gaiters the night that first we met. His lovely shirt was shining
+beneath his what? of jet. Say a woman loses a charm with every pin she
+takes out. Pinned together. O, Mairy lost the pin of her. Dressed up to
+the nines for somebody. Fashion part of their charm. Just changes when
+you're on the track of the secret. Except the east: Mary, Martha: now as
+then. No reasonable offer refused. She wasn't in a hurry either. Always
+off to a fellow when they are. They never forget an appointment. Out on
+spec probably. They believe in chance because like themselves. And the
+others inclined to give her an odd dig. Girl friends at school, arms
+round each other's necks or with ten fingers locked, kissing and
+whispering secrets about nothing in the convent garden. Nuns with
+whitewashed faces, cool coifs and their rosaries going up and down,
+vindictive too for what they can't get. Barbed wire. Be sure now and
+write to me. And I'll write to you. Now won't you? Molly and Josie
+Powell. Till Mr Right comes along, then meet once in a blue moon.
+_Tableau!_ O, look who it is for the love of God! How are you at all?
+What have you been doing with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss,
+to see you. Picking holes in each other's appearance. You're looking
+splendid. Sister souls. Showing their teeth at one another. How many
+have you left? Wouldn't lend each other a pinch of salt.
+
+Ah!
+
+Devils they are when that's coming on them. Dark devilish appearance.
+Molly often told me feel things a ton weight. Scratch the sole of my
+foot. O that way! O, that's exquisite! Feel it myself too. Good to rest
+once in a way. Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. Safe in one way.
+Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants I
+read in a garden. Besides they say if the flower withers she wears she's
+a flirt. All are. Daresay she felt 1. When you feel like that you often
+meet what you feel. Liked me or what? Dress they look at. Always know a
+fellow courting: collars and cuffs. Well cocks and lions do the same
+and stags. Same time might prefer a tie undone or something. Trousers?
+Suppose I when I was? No. Gently does it. Dislike rough and tumble. Kiss
+in the dark and never tell. Saw something in me. Wonder what. Sooner
+have me as I am than some poet chap with bearsgrease plastery hair,
+lovelock over his dexter optic. To aid gentleman in literary. Ought to
+attend to my appearance my age. Didn't let her see me in profile. Still,
+you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying. Beauty and the
+beast. Besides I can't be so if Molly. Took off her hat to show her
+hair. Wide brim. Bought to hide her face, meeting someone might know
+her, bend down or carry a bunch of flowers to smell. Hair strong in rut.
+Ten bob I got for Molly's combings when we were on the rocks in Holles
+street. Why not? Suppose he gave her money. Why not? All a prejudice.
+She's worth ten, fifteen, more, a pound. What? I think so. All that for
+nothing. Bold hand: Mrs Marion. Did I forget to write address on
+that letter like the postcard I sent to Flynn? And the day I went to
+Drimmie's without a necktie. Wrangle with Molly it was put me off. No,
+I remember. Richie Goulding: he's another. Weighs on his mind. Funny
+my watch stopped at half past four. Dust. Shark liver oil they use to
+clean. Could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she?
+
+O, he did. Into her. She did. Done.
+
+Ah!
+
+Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little
+limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. Aftereffect not pleasant.
+Still you have to get rid of it someway. They don't care. Complimented
+perhaps. Go home to nicey bread and milky and say night prayers with the
+kiddies. Well, aren't they? See her as she is spoil all. Must have
+the stage setting, the rouge, costume, position, music. The name too.
+_Amours_ of actresses. Nell Gwynn, Mrs Bracegirdle, Maud Branscombe.
+Curtain up. Moonlight silver effulgence. Maiden discovered with pensive
+bosom. Little sweetheart come and kiss me. Still, I feel. The strength
+it gives a man. That's the secret of it. Good job I let off there behind
+the wall coming out of Dignam's. Cider that was. Otherwise I couldn't
+have. Makes you want to sing after. _Lacaus esant taratara_. Suppose I
+spoke to her. What about? Bad plan however if you don't know how to end
+the conversation. Ask them a question they ask you another. Good idea if
+you're stuck. Gain time. But then you're in a cart. Wonderful of course
+if you say: good evening, and you see she's on for it: good evening. O
+but the dark evening in the Appian way I nearly spoke to Mrs Clinch O
+thinking she was. Whew! Girl in Meath street that night. All the dirty
+things I made her say. All wrong of course. My arks she called it. It's
+so hard to find one who. Aho! If you don't answer when they solicit must
+be horrible for them till they harden. And kissed my hand when I gave
+her the extra two shillings. Parrots. Press the button and the bird will
+squeak. Wish she hadn't called me sir. O, her mouth in the dark! And you
+a married man with a single girl! That's what they enjoy. Taking a man
+from another woman. Or even hear of it. Different with me. Glad to get
+away from other chap's wife. Eating off his cold plate. Chap in the
+Burton today spitting back gumchewed gristle. French letter still in
+my pocketbook. Cause of half the trouble. But might happen sometime,
+I don't think. Come in, all is prepared. I dreamt. What? Worst is
+beginning. How they change the venue when it's not what they like. Ask
+you do you like mushrooms because she once knew a gentleman who. Or ask
+you what someone was going to say when he changed his mind and stopped.
+Yet if I went the whole hog, say: I want to, something like that.
+Because I did. She too. Offend her. Then make it up. Pretend to want
+something awfully, then cry off for her sake. Flatters them. She must
+have been thinking of someone else all the time. What harm? Must since
+she came to the use of reason, he, he and he. First kiss does the trick.
+The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop. Mushy like, tell
+by their eye, on the sly. First thoughts are best. Remember that till
+their dying day. Molly, lieutenant Mulvey that kissed her under the
+Moorish wall beside the gardens. Fifteen she told me. But her breasts
+were developed. Fell asleep then. After Glencree dinner that was when we
+drove home. Featherbed mountain. Gnashing her teeth in sleep. Lord mayor
+had his eye on her too. Val Dillon. Apoplectic.
+
+There she is with them down there for the fireworks. My fireworks. Up
+like a rocket, down like a stick. And the children, twins they must
+be, waiting for something to happen. Want to be grownups. Dressing in
+mother's clothes. Time enough, understand all the ways of the world. And
+the dark one with the mop head and the nigger mouth. I knew she could
+whistle. Mouth made for that. Like Molly. Why that highclass whore in
+Jammet's wore her veil only to her nose. Would you mind, please, telling
+me the right time? I'll tell you the right time up a dark lane.
+Say prunes and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips.
+Caressing the little boy too. Onlookers see most of the game. Of course
+they understand birds, animals, babies. In their line.
+
+Didn't look back when she was going down the strand. Wouldn't give that
+satisfaction. Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls. Fine
+eyes she had, clear. It's the white of the eye brings that out not so
+much the pupil. Did she know what I? Course. Like a cat sitting beyond
+a dog's jump. Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school
+drawing a picture of Venus with all his belongings on show. Call that
+innocence? Poor idiot! His wife has her work cut out for her. Never see
+them sit on a bench marked _Wet Paint_. Eyes all over them. Look under
+the bed for what's not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives.
+Sharp as needles they are. When I said to Molly the man at the corner of
+Cuffe street was goodlooking, thought she might like, twigged at once he
+had a false arm. Had, too. Where do they get that? Typist going up Roger
+Greene's stairs two at a time to show her understandings. Handed down
+from father to, mother to daughter, I mean. Bred in the bone. Milly for
+example drying her handkerchief on the mirror to save the ironing. Best
+place for an ad to catch a woman's eye on a mirror. And when I sent
+her for Molly's Paisley shawl to Prescott's by the way that ad I must,
+carrying home the change in her stocking! Clever little minx. I never
+told her. Neat way she carries parcels too. Attract men, small thing
+like that. Holding up her hand, shaking it, to let the blood flow back
+when it was red. Who did you learn that from? Nobody. Something the
+nurse taught me. O, don't they know! Three years old she was in front of
+Molly's dressingtable, just before we left Lombard street west. Me have
+a nice pace. Mullingar. Who knows? Ways of the world. Young student.
+Straight on her pins anyway not like the other. Still she was game.
+Lord, I am wet. Devil you are. Swell of her calf. Transparent stockings,
+stretched to breaking point. Not like that frump today. A. E. Rumpled
+stockings. Or the one in Grafton street. White. Wow! Beef to the heel.
+
+A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads and
+zrads, zrads, zrads. And Cissy and Tommy and Jacky ran out to see and
+Edy after with the pushcar and then Gerty beyond the curve of the rocks.
+Will she? Watch! Watch! See! Looked round. She smelt an onion. Darling,
+I saw, your. I saw all.
+
+Lord!
+
+Did me good all the same. Off colour after Kiernan's, Dignam's. For
+this relief much thanks. In _Hamlet,_ that is. Lord! It was all things
+combined. Excitement. When she leaned back, felt an ache at the butt
+of my tongue. Your head it simply swirls. He's right. Might have made a
+worse fool of myself however. Instead of talking about nothing. Then
+I will tell you all. Still it was a kind of language between us. It
+couldn't be? No, Gerty they called her. Might be false name however like
+my name and the address Dolphin's barn a blind.
+
+_Her maiden name was Jemina Brown And she lived with her mother in
+Irishtown._
+
+Place made me think of that I suppose. All tarred with the same brush
+Wiping pens in their stockings. But the ball rolled down to her as if
+it understood. Every bullet has its billet. Course I never could throw
+anything straight at school. Crooked as a ram's horn. Sad however
+because it lasts only a few years till they settle down to potwalloping
+and papa's pants will soon fit Willy and fuller's earth for the baby
+when they hold him out to do ah ah. No soft job. Saves them. Keeps
+them out of harm's way. Nature. Washing child, washing corpse. Dignam.
+Children's hands always round them. Cocoanut skulls, monkeys, not even
+closed at first, sour milk in their swaddles and tainted curds. Oughtn't
+to have given that child an empty teat to suck. Fill it up with wind.
+Mrs Beaufoy, Purefoy. Must call to the hospital. Wonder is nurse Callan
+there still. She used to look over some nights when Molly was in the
+Coffee Palace. That young doctor O'Hare I noticed her brushing his coat.
+And Mrs Breen and Mrs Dignam once like that too, marriageable. Worst
+of all at night Mrs Duggan told me in the City Arms. Husband rolling in
+drunk, stink of pub off him like a polecat. Have that in your nose in
+the dark, whiff of stale boose. Then ask in the morning: was I drunk
+last night? Bad policy however to fault the husband. Chickens come home
+to roost. They stick by one another like glue. Maybe the women's fault
+also. That's where Molly can knock spots off them. It's the blood of the
+south. Moorish. Also the form, the figure. Hands felt for the opulent.
+Just compare for instance those others. Wife locked up at home, skeleton
+in the cupboard. Allow me to introduce my. Then they trot you out some
+kind of a nondescript, wouldn't know what to call her. Always see a
+fellow's weak point in his wife. Still there's destiny in it, falling
+in love. Have their own secrets between them. Chaps that would go to the
+dogs if some woman didn't take them in hand. Then little chits of girls,
+height of a shilling in coppers, with little hubbies. As God made them
+he matched them. Sometimes children turn out well enough. Twice nought
+makes one. Or old rich chap of seventy and blushing bride. Marry in May
+and repent in December. This wet is very unpleasant. Stuck. Well the
+foreskin is not back. Better detach.
+
+Ow!
+
+Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket. Long and
+the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch.
+Wristwatches are always going wrong. Wonder is there any magnetic
+influence between the person because that was about the time he. Yes, I
+suppose, at once. Cat's away, the mice will play. I remember looking
+in Pill lane. Also that now is magnetism. Back of everything magnetism.
+Earth for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement.
+And time, well that's the time the movement takes. Then if one thing
+stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it's all
+arranged. Magnetic needle tells you what's going on in the sun, the
+stars. Little piece of steel iron. When you hold out the fork. Come.
+Come. Tip. Woman and man that is. Fork and steel. Molly, he. Dress up
+and look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you're
+a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming, legs, look, look and if you
+have any guts in you. Tip. Have to let fly.
+
+Wonder how is she feeling in that region. Shame all put on before third
+person. More put out about a hole in her stocking. Molly, her underjaw
+stuck out, head back, about the farmer in the ridingboots and spurs at
+the horse show. And when the painters were in Lombard street west.
+Fine voice that fellow had. How Giuglini began. Smell that I did. Like
+flowers. It was too. Violets. Came from the turpentine probably in the
+paint. Make their own use of everything. Same time doing it scraped her
+slipper on the floor so they wouldn't hear. But lots of them can't kick
+the beam, I think. Keep that thing up for hours. Kind of a general all
+round over me and half down my back.
+
+Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That's her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I leave
+you this to think of me when I'm far away on the pillow. What is it?
+Heliotrope? No. Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She'd like scent of that
+kind. Sweet and cheap: soon sour. Why Molly likes opoponax. Suits her,
+with a little jessamine mixed. Her high notes and her low notes. At the
+dance night she met him, dance of the hours. Heat brought it out. She
+was wearing her black and it had the perfume of the time before. Good
+conductor, is it? Or bad? Light too. Suppose there's some connection.
+For instance if you go into a cellar where it's dark. Mysterious thing
+too. Why did I smell it only now? Took its time in coming like herself,
+slow but sure. Suppose it's ever so many millions of tiny grains
+blown across. Yes, it is. Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this
+morning, smell them leagues off. Tell you what it is. It's like a fine
+fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you
+call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them, fine as
+anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it. Clings to everything
+she takes off. Vamp of her stockings. Warm shoe. Stays. Drawers: little
+kick, taking them off. Byby till next time. Also the cat likes to sniff
+in her shift on the bed. Know her smell in a thousand. Bathwater too.
+Reminds me of strawberries and cream. Wonder where it is really. There
+or the armpits or under the neck. Because you get it out of all holes
+and corners. Hyacinth perfume made of oil of ether or something.
+Muskrat. Bag under their tails. One grain pour off odour for years. Dogs
+at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm.
+Very well, thank you. Animals go by that. Yes now, look at it that way.
+We're the same. Some women, instance, warn you off when they have their
+period. Come near. Then get a hogo you could hang your hat on. Like
+what? Potted herrings gone stale or. Boof! Please keep off the grass.
+
+Perhaps they get a man smell off us. What though? Cigary gloves long
+John had on his desk the other day. Breath? What you eat and drink gives
+that. No. Mansmell, I mean. Must be connected with that because priests
+that are supposed to be are different. Women buzz round it like flies
+round treacle. Railed off the altar get on to it at any cost. The tree
+of forbidden priest. O, father, will you? Let me be the first to. That
+diffuses itself all through the body, permeates. Source of life. And
+it's extremely curious the smell. Celery sauce. Let me.
+
+Mr Bloom inserted his nose. Hm. Into the. Hm. Opening of his waistcoat.
+Almonds or. No. Lemons it is. Ah no, that's the soap.
+
+O by the by that lotion. I knew there was something on my mind. Never
+went back and the soap not paid. Dislike carrying bottles like that hag
+this morning. Hynes might have paid me that three shillings. I could
+mention Meagher's just to remind him. Still if he works that paragraph.
+Two and nine. Bad opinion of me he'll have. Call tomorrow. How much do
+I owe you? Three and nine? Two and nine, sir. Ah. Might stop him giving
+credit another time. Lose your customers that way. Pubs do. Fellows run
+up a bill on the slate and then slinking around the back streets into
+somewhere else.
+
+Here's this nobleman passed before. Blown in from the bay. Just went as
+far as turn back. Always at home at dinnertime. Looks mangled out: had a
+good tuck in. Enjoying nature now. Grace after meals. After supper walk
+a mile. Sure he has a small bank balance somewhere, government sit. Walk
+after him now make him awkward like those newsboys me today. Still you
+learn something. See ourselves as others see us. So long as women don't
+mock what matter? That's the way to find out. Ask yourself who is he
+now. _The Mystery Man on the Beach_, prize titbit story by Mr Leopold
+Bloom. Payment at the rate of one guinea per column. And that fellow
+today at the graveside in the brown macintosh. Corns on his kismet
+however. Healthy perhaps absorb all the. Whistle brings rain they say.
+Must be some somewhere. Salt in the Ormond damp. The body feels the
+atmosphere. Old Betty's joints are on the rack. Mother Shipton's
+prophecy that is about ships around they fly in the twinkling. No. Signs
+of rain it is. The royal reader. And distant hills seem coming nigh.
+
+Howth. Bailey light. Two, four, six, eight, nine. See. Has to change or
+they might think it a house. Wreckers. Grace Darling. People afraid of
+the dark. Also glowworms, cyclists: lightingup time. Jewels diamonds
+flash better. Women. Light is a kind of reassuring. Not going to hurt
+you. Better now of course than long ago. Country roads. Run you through
+the small guts for nothing. Still two types there are you bob against.
+Scowl or smile. Pardon! Not at all. Best time to spray plants too in
+the shade after the sun. Some light still. Red rays are longest. Roygbiv
+Vance taught us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A
+star I see. Venus? Can't tell yet. Two. When three it's night. Were
+those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No.
+Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting
+sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native land,
+goodnight.
+
+Dew falling. Bad for you, dear, to sit on that stone. Brings on white
+fluxions. Never have little baby then less he was big strong fight his
+way up through. Might get piles myself. Sticks too like a summer cold,
+sore on the mouth. Cut with grass or paper worst. Friction of the
+position. Like to be that rock she sat on. O sweet little, you don't
+know how nice you looked. I begin to like them at that age. Green
+apples. Grab at all that offer. Suppose it's the only time we cross
+legs, seated. Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs
+under them. But it's the evening influence. They feel all that. Open
+like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, in
+ballrooms, chandeliers, avenues under the lamps. Nightstock in Mat
+Dillon's garden where I kissed her shoulder. Wish I had a full length
+oilpainting of her then. June that was too I wooed. The year returns.
+History repeats itself. Ye crags and peaks I'm with you once again.
+Life, love, voyage round your own little world. And now? Sad about her
+lame of course but must be on your guard not to feel too much pity. They
+take advantage.
+
+All quiet on Howth now. The distant hills seem. Where we. The
+rhododendrons. I am a fool perhaps. He gets the plums, and I the
+plumstones. Where I come in. All that old hill has seen. Names change:
+that's all. Lovers: yum yum.
+
+Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of
+me, little wretch. She kissed me. Never again. My youth. Only once it
+comes. Or hers. Take the train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the
+same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I want. Nothing
+new under the sun. Care of P. O. Dolphin's Barn. Are you not happy in
+your? Naughty darling. At Dolphin's barn charades in Luke Doyle's house.
+Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy,
+Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. And the old
+major, partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an
+only child. So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself.
+Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she.
+Circus horse walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in
+Henny Doyle's overcoat. Van: breadvan delivering. Winkle: cockles and
+periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned on the
+sideboard watching. Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow.
+All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew.
+
+Ba. What is that flying about? Swallow? Bat probably. Thinks I'm a tree,
+so blind. Have birds no smell? Metempsychosis. They believed you could
+be changed into a tree from grief. Weeping willow. Ba. There he goes.
+Funny little beggar. Wonder where he lives. Belfry up there. Very
+likely. Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity. Bell scared him
+out, I suppose. Mass seems to be over. Could hear them all at it. Pray
+for us. And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same
+thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us. Yes, there's the light in
+the priest's house. Their frugal meal. Remember about the mistake in the
+valuation when I was in Thom's. Twentyeight it is. Two houses they have.
+Gabriel Conroy's brother is curate. Ba. Again. Wonder why they come out
+at night like mice. They're a mixed breed. Birds are like hopping mice.
+What frightens them, light or noise? Better sit still. All instinct
+like the bird in drouth got water out of the end of a jar by throwing
+in pebbles. Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands. Weeny
+bones. Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white. Colours depend
+on the light you see. Stare the sun for example like the eagle then look
+at a shoe see a blotch blob yellowish. Wants to stamp his trademark on
+everything. Instance, that cat this morning on the staircase. Colour of
+brown turf. Say you never see them with three colours. Not true. That
+half tabbywhite tortoiseshell in the _City Arms_ with the letter em on
+her forehead. Body fifty different colours. Howth a while ago amethyst.
+Glass flashing. That's how that wise man what's his name with the
+burning glass. Then the heather goes on fire. It can't be tourists'
+matches. What? Perhaps the sticks dry rub together in the wind and
+light. Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the sun.
+Archimedes. I have it! My memory's not so bad.
+
+Ba. Who knows what they're always flying for. Insects? That bee last
+week got into the room playing with his shadow on the ceiling. Might
+be the one bit me, come back to see. Birds too. Never find out. Or what
+they say. Like our small talk. And says she and says he. Nerve they have
+to fly over the ocean and back. Lots must be killed in storms, telegraph
+wires. Dreadful life sailors have too. Big brutes of oceangoing steamers
+floundering along in the dark, lowing out like seacows. _Faugh a
+Ballagh!_ Out of that, bloody curse to you! Others in vessels, bit of
+a handkerchief sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when the stormy
+winds do blow. Married too. Sometimes away for years at the ends of the
+earth somewhere. No ends really because it's round. Wife in every port
+they say. She has a good job if she minds it till Johnny comes marching
+home again. If ever he does. Smelling the tail end of ports. How can
+they like the sea? Yet they do. The anchor's weighed. Off he sails with
+a scapular or a medal on him for luck. Well. And the tephilim no what's
+this they call it poor papa's father had on his door to touch. That
+brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage.
+Something in all those superstitions because when you go out never know
+what dangers. Hanging on to a plank or astride of a beam for grim life,
+lifebelt round him, gulping salt water, and that's the last of his nibs
+till the sharks catch hold of him. Do fish ever get seasick?
+
+Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid,
+crew and cargo in smithereens, Davy Jones' locker, moon looking down so
+peaceful. Not my fault, old cockalorum.
+
+A last lonely candle wandered up the sky from Mirus bazaar in search of
+funds for Mercer's hospital and broke, drooping, and shed a cluster
+of violet but one white stars. They floated, fell: they faded. The
+shepherd's hour: the hour of folding: hour of tryst. From house to
+house, giving his everwelcome double knock, went the nine o'clock
+postman, the glowworm's lamp at his belt gleaming here and there through
+the laurel hedges. And among the five young trees a hoisted lintstock
+lit the lamp at Leahy's terrace. By screens of lighted windows, by equal
+gardens a shrill voice went crying, wailing: _Evening Telegraph, stop
+press edition! Result of the Gold Cup race!_ and from the door of
+Dignam's house a boy ran out and called. Twittering the bat flew here,
+flew there. Far out over the sands the coming surf crept, grey. Howth
+settled for slumber, tired of long days, of yumyum rhododendrons (he was
+old) and felt gladly the night breeze lift, ruffle his fell of ferns.
+He lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing,
+slumberous but awake. And far on Kish bank the anchored lightship
+twinkled, winked at Mr Bloom.
+
+Life those chaps out there must have, stuck in the same spot. Irish
+Lights board. Penance for their sins. Coastguards too. Rocket and
+breeches buoy and lifeboat. Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in
+the Erin's King, throwing them the sack of old papers. Bears in the zoo.
+Filthy trip. Drunkards out to shake up their livers. Puking overboard
+to feed the herrings. Nausea. And the women, fear of God in their faces.
+Milly, no sign of funk. Her blue scarf loose, laughing. Don't know what
+death is at that age. And then their stomachs clean. But being lost they
+fear. When we hid behind the tree at Crumlin. I didn't want to. Mamma!
+Mamma! Babes in the wood. Frightening them with masks too. Throwing them
+up in the air to catch them. I'll murder you. Is it only half fun? Or
+children playing battle. Whole earnest. How can people aim guns at each
+other. Sometimes they go off. Poor kids! Only troubles wildfire and
+nettlerash. Calomel purge I got her for that. After getting better
+asleep with Molly. Very same teeth she has. What do they love? Another
+themselves? But the morning she chased her with the umbrella. Perhaps so
+as not to hurt. I felt her pulse. Ticking. Little hand it was: now big.
+Dearest Papli. All that the hand says when you touch. Loved to count
+my waistcoat buttons. Her first stays I remember. Made me laugh to see.
+Little paps to begin with. Left one is more sensitive, I think. Mine
+too. Nearer the heart? Padding themselves out if fat is in fashion. Her
+growing pains at night, calling, wakening me. Frightened she was when
+her nature came on her first. Poor child! Strange moment for the mother
+too. Brings back her girlhood. Gibraltar. Looking from Buena Vista.
+O'Hara's tower. The seabirds screaming. Old Barbary ape that gobbled all
+his family. Sundown, gunfire for the men to cross the lines. Looking
+out over the sea she told me. Evening like this, but clear, no clouds.
+I always thought I'd marry a lord or a rich gentleman coming with a
+private yacht. _Buenas noches, señorita. El hombre ama la muchacha
+hermosa_. Why me? Because you were so foreign from the others.
+
+Better not stick here all night like a limpet. This weather makes you
+dull. Must be getting on for nine by the light. Go home. Too late for
+_Leah, Lily of Killarney._ No. Might be still up. Call to the hospital
+to see. Hope she's over. Long day I've had. Martha, the bath, funeral,
+house of Keyes, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus' song. Then that
+bawler in Barney Kiernan's. Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what
+I said about his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No.
+Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in
+company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look
+at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant.
+Three cheers for Israel. Three cheers for the sister-in-law he hawked
+about, three fangs in her mouth. Same style of beauty. Particularly nice
+old party for a cup of tea. The sister of the wife of the wild man of
+Borneo has just come to town. Imagine that in the early morning at close
+range. Everyone to his taste as Morris said when he kissed the cow. But
+Dignam's put the boots on it. Houses of mourning so depressing because
+you never know. Anyhow she wants the money. Must call to those Scottish
+Widows as I promised. Strange name. Takes it for granted we're going to
+pop off first. That widow on Monday was it outside Cramer's that
+looked at me. Buried the poor husband but progressing favourably on
+the premium. Her widow's mite. Well? What do you expect her to do? Must
+wheedle her way along. Widower I hate to see. Looks so forlorn. Poor man
+O'Connor wife and five children poisoned by mussels here. The sewage.
+Hopeless. Some good matronly woman in a porkpie hat to mother him. Take
+him in tow, platter face and a large apron. Ladies' grey flannelette
+bloomers, three shillings a pair, astonishing bargain. Plain and loved,
+loved for ever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be
+handsome for tomorrow we die. See him sometimes walking about trying to
+find out who played the trick. U. p: up. Fate that is. He, not me. Also
+a shop often noticed. Curse seems to dog it. Dreamt last night? Wait.
+Something confused. She had red slippers on. Turkish. Wore the breeches.
+Suppose she does? Would I like her in pyjamas? Damned hard to answer.
+Nannetti's gone. Mailboat. Near Holyhead by now. Must nail that ad
+of Keyes's. Work Hynes and Crawford. Petticoats for Molly. She has
+something to put in them. What's that? Might be money.
+
+Mr Bloom stooped and turned over a piece of paper on the strand. He
+brought it near his eyes and peered. Letter? No. Can't read. Better go.
+Better. I'm tired to move. Page of an old copybook. All those holes and
+pebbles. Who could count them? Never know what you find. Bottle with
+story of a treasure in it, thrown from a wreck. Parcels post. Children
+always want to throw things in the sea. Trust? Bread cast on the waters.
+What's this? Bit of stick.
+
+O! Exhausted that female has me. Not so young now. Will she come here
+tomorrow? Wait for her somewhere for ever. Must come back. Murderers do.
+Will I?
+
+Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write a
+message for her. Might remain. What?
+
+I.
+
+Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide
+comes here. Saw a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark
+mirror, breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and
+letters. O, those transparent! Besides they don't know. What is the
+meaning of that other world. I called you naughty boy because I do not
+like.
+
+AM. A.
+
+No room. Let it go.
+
+Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand.
+Nothing grows in it. All fades. No fear of big vessels coming up here.
+Except Guinness's barges. Round the Kish in eighty days. Done half by
+design.
+
+He flung his wooden pen away. The stick fell in silted sand, stuck. Now
+if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn't. Chance.
+We'll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made
+me feel so young.
+
+Short snooze now if I had. Must be near nine. Liverpool boat long gone..
+Not even the smoke. And she can do the other. Did too. And Belfast. I
+won't go. Race there, race back to Ennis. Let him. Just close my eyes
+a moment. Won't sleep, though. Half dream. It never comes the same. Bat
+again. No harm in him. Just a few.
+
+O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do
+love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met
+him pike hoses frillies for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave
+under embon _señorita_ young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan Winkle
+red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end
+Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in
+her next her next.
+
+A bat flew. Here. There. Here. Far in the grey a bell chimed. Mr Bloom
+with open mouth, his left boot sanded sideways, leaned, breathed. Just
+for a few
+
+ _Cuckoo
+ Cuckoo
+ Cuckoo._
+
+The clock on the mantelpiece in the priest's house cooed where Canon
+O'Hanlon and Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S. J. were
+taking tea and sodabread and butter and fried mutton chops with catsup
+and talking about
+
+ _Cuckoo
+ Cuckoo
+ Cuckoo._
+
+Because it was a little canarybird that came out of its little house
+to tell the time that Gerty MacDowell noticed the time she was there
+because she was as quick as anything about a thing like that, was Gerty
+MacDowell, and she noticed at once that that foreign gentleman that was
+sitting on the rocks looking was
+
+ _Cuckoo
+ Cuckoo
+ Cuckoo._
+
+
+Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.
+
+Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send
+us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us
+bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.
+
+Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!
+
+Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive
+concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by
+mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that
+which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in
+them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain
+when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being
+equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more
+efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may
+have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent
+continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately
+present constitutes the certain sign of omnipotent nature's incorrupted
+benefaction. For who is there who anything of some significance has
+apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the
+surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone
+so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature's boon
+can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just
+citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and
+to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently
+commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence
+accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced
+the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of
+profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the
+hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone
+be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously
+command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance
+or with diminution's menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating
+function ever irrevocably enjoined?
+
+It is not why therefore we shall wonder if, as the best historians
+relate, among the Celts, who nothing that was not in its nature
+admirable admired, the art of medicine shall have been highly honoured.
+Not to speak of hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers, plaguegraves,
+their greatest doctors, the O'Shiels, the O'Hickeys, the O'Lees,
+have sedulously set down the divers methods by which the sick and the
+relapsed found again health whether the malady had been the trembling
+withering or loose boyconnell flux. Certainly in every public work which
+in it anything of gravity contains preparation should be with importance
+commensurate and therefore a plan was by them adopted (whether by having
+preconsidered or as the maturation of experience it is difficult in
+being said which the discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not
+up to the present congrued to render manifest) whereby maternity was so
+far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient
+in that all hardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely
+for the copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently
+moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and
+for an inconsiderable emolument was provided.
+
+To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to be
+molestful for this chiefly felt all citizens except with proliferent
+mothers prosperity at all not to can be and as they had received
+eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the
+case was so hoving itself, parturient in vehicle thereward carrying
+desire immense among all one another was impelling on of her to be
+received into that domicile. O thing of prudent nation not merely in
+being seen but also even in being related worthy of being praised that
+they her by anticipation went seeing mother, that she by them suddenly
+to be about to be cherished had been begun she felt!
+
+Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that
+one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with
+wholesome food reposeful, cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were
+now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs
+there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her
+case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various
+latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine
+and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence
+conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of
+mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her
+thereto to lie in, her term up.
+
+Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of
+Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark
+ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
+
+Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming
+mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale
+so God's angel to Mary quoth. Watchers tway there walk, white sisters
+in ward sleepless. Smarts they still, sickness soothing: in twelve moons
+thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding
+wariest ward.
+
+In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising
+with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping
+lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin. Full she drad that
+God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins.
+Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe
+infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in
+Horne's house.
+
+Loth to irk in Horne's hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow he
+ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land
+and seafloor nine years had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe
+meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with
+good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so
+young then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes
+his word winning.
+
+As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad
+after she was that ere adread was. Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor tidings
+sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O'Hare
+Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so
+heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for
+friend so young, algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay.
+She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with
+masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men's oil to his limbs.
+The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was
+died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona Island
+through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God
+the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her
+sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in
+wanhope sorrowing one with other.
+
+Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the
+dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came
+naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the
+last for to go as he came.
+
+The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and
+he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed.
+The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman was in throes
+now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth to bear
+but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she had
+seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman's
+birth. Then she set it all forth to him for because she knew the man
+that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words
+for he felt with wonder women's woe in the travail that they have of
+motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a fair face for
+any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine
+twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.
+
+And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed
+them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came
+against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon. And
+the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they
+had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this
+learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be
+healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a
+horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make
+a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he
+said now that he should go in to that castle for to make merry with
+them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go
+otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtile. Also the lady
+was of his avis and repreved the learningknight though she trowed well
+that the traveller had said thing that was false for his subtility. But
+the learningknight would not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have
+him in aught contrarious to his list and he said how it was a marvellous
+castle. And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him
+for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers
+lands and sometime venery.
+
+And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy
+and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not
+move more for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and
+knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white
+flames that they fix then in the horns of buffalos and stags that there
+abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by magic of
+Mahound out of seasand and the air by a warlock with his breath that he
+blases in to them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich was on
+the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there was
+a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange
+fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible
+thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie
+in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness
+that therein is like to the juices of the olivepress. And also it was
+a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of
+fecund wheatkidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits
+that they do in to it swells up wondrously like to a vast mountain. And
+they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks
+out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a
+brewage like to mead.
+
+And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp
+thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe
+Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat
+in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and
+anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and
+his neighbour nist not of this wile. And he sat down in that castle with
+them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.
+
+This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the
+reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for
+there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied
+fast. Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what
+cry that it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it
+be not come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw
+a franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than
+any of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the
+one emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full
+gently. But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His
+bounty and have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long.
+And the franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her
+next. Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never
+none asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully
+delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both's health for
+he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold that was the
+goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars' hall and that was the meekest
+man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was
+the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service
+to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup. Woman's woe with wonder
+pondering.
+
+Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be
+drunken an they might. There was a sort of scholars along either side
+the board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary Merciable's
+with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, scholars of medicine, and the
+franklin that hight Lenehan and one from Alba Longa, one Crotthers, and
+young Stephen that had mien of a frere that was at head of the board
+and Costello that men clepen Punch Costello all long of a mastery of
+him erewhile gested (and of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the
+most drunken that demanded still of more mead) and beside the meek sir
+Leopold. But on young Malachi they waited for that he promised to have
+come and such as intended to no goodness said how he had broke his avow.
+And sir Leopold sat with them for he bore fast friendship to sir Simon
+and to this his son young Stephen and for that his languor becalmed him
+there after longest wanderings insomuch as they feasted him for that
+time in the honourablest manner. Ruth red him, love led on with will to
+wander, loth to leave.
+
+For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen
+other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that
+put such case it were hard the wife to die (for so it had fallen out a
+matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne's house that
+now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her
+death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case). And
+they said farther she should live because in the beginning, they said,
+the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of
+this imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had
+conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch
+were in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never
+other howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his
+judges did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said
+but all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife
+should live and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot
+upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking but the
+franklin Lenehan was prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the
+least way mirth might not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole
+affair and said how that she was dead and how for holy religion sake by
+rede of palmer and bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of
+Arbraccan her goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were
+all wondrous grieved. To whom young Stephen had these words following:
+Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now
+glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire.
+But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly
+impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord
+and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means
+to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.
+Then said Dixon junior to Punch Costello wist he what ends. But he had
+overmuch drunken and the best word he could have of him was that he
+would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if
+it so fortuned him to be delivered of his spleen of lustihead. Whereat
+Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi's praise of that beast the
+unicorn how once in the millennium he cometh by his horn, the other all
+this while, pricked forward with their jibes wherewith they did malice
+him, witnessing all and several by saint Foutinus his engines that
+he was able to do any manner of thing that lay in man to do. Thereat
+laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen and sir Leopold which
+never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange humour which he would
+not bewray and also for that he rued for her that bare whoso she might
+be or wheresoever. Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church
+that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith,
+patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness
+or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the
+influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she lie
+with a woman which her man has but lain with, _effectu secuto_, or
+peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses
+Maimonides. He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul
+was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for God's
+greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam to bear
+beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman's
+seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages
+founded. All they bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would he in like
+case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life. A wariness of
+mind he would answer as fitted all and, laying hand to jaw, he said
+dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed him, who had ever
+loved the art of physic as might a layman, and agreeing also with his
+experience of so seldomseen an accident it was good for that mother
+Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence and in such sort
+deliverly he scaped their questions. That is truth, pardy, said Dixon,
+and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young Stephen was a
+marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor
+lendeth to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he was drunken and
+that he was now in that taking it appeared eftsoons.
+
+But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had
+pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour
+and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only
+manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art
+could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart
+for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of
+lamb's wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and
+lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now Sir
+Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his
+friend's son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness and
+as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all
+accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure
+for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and
+murdered his goods with whores.
+
+About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty
+so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed
+their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for
+the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the
+vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray. Now drink we,
+quod he, of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel
+of my body but my soul's bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them
+that live by bread alone. Be not afeard neither for any want for this
+will comfort more than the other will dismay. See ye here. And he showed
+them glistering coins of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of
+two pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he
+writ. They all admired to see the foresaid riches in such dearth of
+money as was herebefore. His words were then these as followeth: Know
+all men, he said, time's ruins build eternity's mansions. What means
+this? Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a
+bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman's
+womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh
+that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the
+postcreation. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. No question but her name is
+puissant who aventried the dear corse of our Agenbuyer, Healer and Herd,
+our mighty mother and mother most venerable and Bernardus saith aptly
+that She hath an _omnipotentiam deiparae supplicem_, that is to wit, an
+almightiness of petition because she is the second Eve and she won
+us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are
+linked up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all,
+seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin. But here is the matter
+now. Or she knew him, that second I say, and was but creature of her
+creature, _vergine madre, figlia di tuo figlio_, or she knew him not and
+then stands she in the one denial or ignorancy with Peter Piscator who
+lives in the house that Jack built and with Joseph the joiner patron of
+the happy demise of all unhappy marriages, _parceque M. Léo Taxil nous
+a dit que qui l'avait mise dans cette fichue position c'était le
+sacre pigeon, ventre de Dieu! Entweder_ transubstantiality ODER
+consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality. And all cried out
+upon it for a very scurvy word. A pregnancy without joy, he said, a
+birth without pangs, a body without blemish, a belly without bigness.
+Let the lewd with faith and fervour worship. With will will we
+withstand, withsay.
+
+Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would
+sing a bawdy catch _Staboo Stabella_ about a wench that was put in pod
+of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack:
+_The first three months she was not well, Staboo,_ when here nurse
+Quigley from the door angerly bid them hist ye should shame you nor
+was it not meet as she remembered them being her mind was to have all
+orderly against lord Andrew came for because she was jealous that
+no gasteful turmoil might shorten the honour of her guard. It was an
+ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking,
+in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage, nor did her
+hortative want of it effect for incontinently Punch Costello was of them
+all embraided and they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and
+shaked him with menace of blandishments others whiles they all chode
+with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou
+chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling,
+thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up
+his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir
+Leopold that had for his cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain
+gentle, advising also the time's occasion as most sacred and most worthy
+to be most sacred. In Horne's house rest should reign.
+
+To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in
+Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he
+had not cided to take friar's vows and he answered him obedience in the
+womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days. Master
+Lenehan at this made return that he had heard of those nefarious deeds
+and how, as he heard hereof counted, he had besmirched the lily virtue
+of a confiding female which was corruption of minors and they all
+intershowed it too, waxing merry and toasting to his fathership. But he
+said very entirely it was clean contrary to their suppose for he was
+the eternal son and ever virgin. Thereat mirth grew in them the more and
+they rehearsed to him his curious rite of wedlock for the disrobing and
+deflowering of spouses, as the priests use in Madagascar island, she
+to be in guise of white and saffron, her groom in white and grain, with
+burning of nard and tapers, on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and
+the anthem _Ut novetur sexus omnis corporis mysterium_ till she was
+there unmaided. He gave them then a much admirable hymen minim by those
+delicate poets Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont that is
+in their _Maid's Tragedy_ that was writ for a like twining of lovers:
+_To bed, to bed_ was the burden of it to be played with accompanable
+concent upon the virginals. An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most
+mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous
+flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium
+of connubial communion. Well met they were, said Master Dixon, joyed,
+but, harkee, young sir, better were they named Beau Mount and Lecher
+for, by my troth, of such a mingling much might come. Young Stephen said
+indeed to his best remembrance they had but the one doxy between them
+and she of the stews to make shift with in delights amorous for life ran
+very high in those days and the custom of the country approved with it.
+Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his
+wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that
+effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters
+to the university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom
+mankind was more beholden. Bring a stranger within thy tower it will
+go hard but thou wilt have the secondbest bed. _Orate, fratres, pro
+memetipso_. And all the people shall say, Amen. Remember, Erin, thy
+generations and thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by
+my word and broughtedst in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication
+in my sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou
+sinned against my light and hast made me, thy lord, to be the slave of
+servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian. Why
+hast thou done this abomination before me that thou didst spurn me for
+a merchant of jalaps and didst deny me to the Roman and to the Indian of
+dark speech with whom thy daughters did lie luxuriously? Look forth now,
+my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and
+from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk
+and money. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my
+sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever
+in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou
+kissed my mouth. This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say,
+hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as
+mentioned for the Orient from on high Which brake hell's gates visited a
+darkness that was foraneous. Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as Tully
+saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no
+blister of combustion. The adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt's
+plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is their
+most proper _ubi_ and _quomodo_. And as the ends and ultimates of
+all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and
+originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth
+from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing
+and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it
+with our subsolar being. The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail,
+batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they
+bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed
+of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted
+sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage. And as
+no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall
+thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way
+is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness
+the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.
+
+Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly _Etienne chanson_ but he loudly
+bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic
+longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie
+order, a penny for him who finds the pea.
+
+ _Behold the mansion reared by dedal Jack
+ See the malt stored in many a refluent sack,
+ In the proud cirque of Jackjohn's bivouac._
+
+A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on
+left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm
+that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and
+witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And
+he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed wan as they might all
+mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift
+was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the
+cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some
+mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which
+Master Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and
+a blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an
+old Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would
+not lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as
+cowed he crouched in Horne's hall. He drank indeed at one draught to
+pluck up a heart of any grace for it thundered long rumblingly over all
+the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked
+him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the
+braggart's side, spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear,
+advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard,
+the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken
+place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon.
+
+But was young Boasthard's fear vanquished by Calmer's words? No, for he
+had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be
+done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the
+other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But
+could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the
+bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed no for Grace was not
+there to find that bottle. Heard he then in that clap the voice of the
+god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard?
+Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube
+Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that
+he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die
+as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to
+die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must nor
+would he make more shows according as men do with wives which Phenomenon
+has commanded them to do by the book Law. Then wotted he nought of that
+other land which is called Believe-on-Me, that is the land of promise
+which behoves to the king Delightful and shall be for ever where there
+is no death and no birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall
+come as many as believe on it? Yes, Pious had told him of that land and
+Chaste had pointed him to the way but the reason was that in the way he
+fell in with a certain whore of an eyepleasing exterior whose name, she
+said, is Bird-in-the-Hand and she beguiled him wrongways from the true
+path by her flatteries that she said to him as, Ho, you pretty man, turn
+aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so
+flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush
+or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence.
+
+This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse
+of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore
+Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a
+wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and
+know her. For regarding Believe-on-Me they said it was nought else
+but notion and they could conceive no thought of it for, first,
+Two-in-the-Bush whither she ticed them was the very goodliest grot and
+in it were four pillows on which were four tickets with these words
+printed on them, Pickaback and Topsyturvy and Shameface and Cheek by
+Jowl and, second, for that foul plague Allpox and the monsters they
+cared not for them for Preservative had given them a stout shield of
+oxengut and, third, that they might take no hurt neither from Offspring
+that was that wicked devil by virtue of this same shield which was
+named Killchild. So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr
+Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon,
+Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer. Wherein, O wretched company,
+were ye all deceived for that was the voice of the god that was in a
+very grievous rage that he would presently lift his arm up and
+spill their souls for their abuses and their spillings done by them
+contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly biddeth.
+
+So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and
+after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a
+fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won't sprout, fields
+athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too.
+Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle
+this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The rosy buds
+all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag
+and faggots that would catch at first fire. All the world saying, for
+aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the
+land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness. But by and
+by, as said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the
+west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the
+weatherwise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and
+after, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and
+in a brace of shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking
+shower, the men making shelter for their straws with a clout or
+kerchief, womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the
+pour came. In Ely place, Baggot street, Duke's lawn, thence through
+Merrion green up to Holles street a swash of water flowing that was
+before bonedry and not one chair or coach or fiacre seen about but
+no more crack after that first. Over against the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice
+Fitzgibbon's door (that is to sit with Mr Healy the lawyer upon the
+college lands) Mal. Mulligan a gentleman's gentleman that had but come
+from Mr Moore's the writer's (that was a papish but is now, folk say,
+a good Williamite) chanced against Alec. Bannon in a cut bob (which are
+now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green) that was new got to town from
+Mullingar with the stage where his coz and Mal M's brother will stay a
+month yet till Saint Swithin and asks what in the earth he does there,
+he bound home and he to Andrew Horne's being stayed for to crush a cup
+of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a skittish heifer, big of
+her age and beef to the heel, and all this while poured with rain and
+so both together on to Horne's. There Leop. Bloom of Crawford's journal
+sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun.,
+scholar of my lady of Mercy's, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden,
+T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom
+there for a languor he had but was now better, be having dreamed tonight
+a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll with red slippers on in a pair of
+Turkey trunks which is thought by those in ken to be for a change and
+Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through pleading her belly, and now
+on the stools, poor body, two days past her term, the midwives sore put
+to it and can't deliver, she queasy for a bowl of riceslop that is a
+shrewd drier up of the insides and her breath very heavy more than good
+and should be a bullyboy from the knocks, they say, but God give her
+soon issue. 'Tis her ninth chick to live, I hear, and Lady day bit off
+her last chick's nails that was then a twelvemonth and with other three
+all breastfed that died written out in a fair hand in the king's bible.
+Her hub fifty odd and a methodist but takes the sacrament and is to
+be seen any fair sabbath with a pair of his boys off Bullock harbour
+dapping on the sound with a heavybraked reel or in a punt he has
+trailing for flounder and pollock and catches a fine bag, I hear. In sum
+an infinite great fall of rain and all refreshed and will much increase
+the harvest yet those in ken say after wind and water fire shall come
+for a prognostication of Malachi's almanac (and I hear that Mr Russell
+has done a prophetical charm of the same gist out of the Hindustanish
+for his farmer's gazette) to have three things in all but this a mere
+fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes
+they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.
+
+With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter
+was in that night's gazette and he made a show to find it about him
+(for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on
+Stephen's persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit near
+by which he did mighty brisk. He was a kind of sport gentleman that
+went for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women,
+horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean
+in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses
+and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul's men, runners,
+flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the
+game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights
+till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose
+gossip. He took his ordinary at a boilingcook's and if he had but gotten
+into him a mess of broken victuals or a platter of tripes with a bare
+tester in his purse he could always bring himself off with his tongue,
+some randy quip he had from a punk or whatnot that every mother's son of
+them would burst their sides. The other, Costello that is, hearing this
+talk asked was it poetry or a tale. Faith, no, he says, Frank (that was
+his name), 'tis all about Kerry cows that are to be butchered along of
+the plague. But they can go hang, says he with a wink, for me with their
+bully beef, a pox on it. There's as good fish in this tin as ever came
+out of it and very friendly he offered to take of some salty sprats that
+stood by which he had eyed wishly in the meantime and found the place
+which was indeed the chief design of his embassy as he was sharpset.
+_Mort aux vaches_, says Frank then in the French language that had been
+indentured to a brandyshipper that has a winelodge in Bordeaux and he
+spoke French like a gentleman too. From a child this Frank had been
+a donought that his father, a headborough, who could ill keep him to
+school to learn his letters and the use of the globes, matriculated at
+the university to study the mechanics but he took the bit between his
+teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar with the justiciary and the
+parish beadle than with his volumes. One time he would be a playactor,
+then a sutler or a welsher, then nought would keep him from the bearpit
+and the cocking main, then he was for the ocean sea or to hoof it on
+the roads with the romany folk, kidnapping a squire's heir by favour of
+moonlight or fecking maids' linen or choking chicken behind a hedge. He
+had been off as many times as a cat has lives and back again with naked
+pockets as many more to his father the headborough who shed a pint
+of tears as often as he saw him. What, says Mr Leopold with his hands
+across, that was earnest to know the drift of it, will they slaughter
+all? I protest I saw them but this day morning going to the Liverpool
+boats, says he. I can scarce believe 'tis so bad, says he. And he had
+experience of the like brood beasts and of springers, greasy hoggets and
+wether wool, having been some years before actuary for Mr Joseph Cuffe,
+a worthy salesmaster that drove his trade for live stock and meadow
+auctions hard by Mr Gavin Low's yard in Prussia street. I question with
+you there, says he. More like 'tis the hoose or the timber tongue. Mr
+Stephen, a little moved but very handsomely told him no such matter and
+that he had dispatches from the emperor's chief tailtickler thanking
+him for the hospitality, that was sending over Doctor Rinderpest, the
+bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy, with a bolus or two of physic to
+take the bull by the horns. Come, come, says Mr Vincent, plain dealing.
+He'll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a
+bull that's Irish, says he. Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr
+Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English
+chinashop. I conceive you, says Mr Dixon. It is that same bull that was
+sent to our island by farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattlebreeder of them
+all, with an emerald ring in his nose. True for you, says Mr Vincent
+cross the table, and a bullseye into the bargain, says he, and a plumper
+and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock. He had horns
+galore, a coat of cloth of gold and a sweet smoky breath coming out of
+his nostrils so that the women of our island, leaving doughballs and
+rollingpins, followed after him hanging his bulliness in daisychains.
+What for that, says Mr Dixon, but before he came over farmer Nicholas
+that was a eunuch had him properly gelded by a college of doctors who
+were no better off than himself. So be off now, says he, and do all my
+cousin german the lord Harry tells you and take a farmer's blessing, and
+with that he slapped his posteriors very soundly. But the slap and the
+blessing stood him friend, says Mr Vincent, for to make up he taught him
+a trick worth two of the other so that maid, wife, abbess and widow to
+this day affirm that they would rather any time of the month whisper
+in his ear in the dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his
+long holy tongue than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in
+the four fields of all Ireland. Another then put in his word: And they
+dressed him, says he, in a point shift and petticoat with a tippet and
+girdle and ruffles on his wrists and clipped his forelock and rubbed him
+all over with spermacetic oil and built stables for him at every turn of
+the road with a gold manger in each full of the best hay in the market
+so that he could doss and dung to his heart's content. By this time the
+father of the faithful (for so they called him) was grown so heavy that
+he could scarce walk to pasture. To remedy which our cozening dames and
+damsels brought him his fodder in their apronlaps and as soon as his
+belly was full he would rear up on his hind uarters to show their
+ladyships a mystery and roar and bellow out of him in bulls' language
+and they all after him. Ay, says another, and so pampered was he that he
+would suffer nought to grow in all the land but green grass for himself
+(for that was the only colour to his mind) and there was a board put up
+on a hillock in the middle of the island with a printed notice, saying:
+By the Lord Harry, Green is the grass that grows on the ground. And,
+says Mr Dixon, if ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or
+the wilds of Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was sowing as much
+as a handful of mustard or a bag of rapeseed out he'd run amok over half
+the countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all
+by lord Harry's orders. There was bad blood between them at first, says
+Mr Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all the old Nicks
+in the world and an old whoremaster that kept seven trulls in his house
+and I'll meddle in his matters, says he. I'll make that animal smell
+hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But
+one evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal
+pelt to go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for
+himself but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row
+with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull
+and on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry
+he found sure enough that he was a lefthanded descendant of the famous
+champion bull of the Romans, _Bos Bovum_, which is good bog Latin for
+boss of the show. After that, says Mr Vincent, the lord Harry put his
+head into a cow's drinkingtrough in the presence of all his courtiers
+and pulling it out again told them all his new name. Then, with the
+water running off him, he got into an old smock and skirt that had
+belonged to his grandmother and bought a grammar of the bulls' language
+to study but he could never learn a word of it except the first personal
+pronoun which he copied out big and got off by heart and if ever he went
+out for a walk he filled his pockets with chalk to write it upon what
+took his fancy, the side of a rock or a teahouse table or a bale of
+cotton or a corkfloat. In short, he and the bull of Ireland were soon as
+fast friends as an arse and a shirt. They were, says Mr Stephen, and
+the end was that the men of the island seeing no help was toward, as
+the ungrate women were all of one mind, made a wherry raft, loaded
+themselves and their bundles of chattels on shipboard, set all masts
+erect, manned the yards, sprang their luff, heaved to, spread three
+sheets in the wind, put her head between wind and water, weighed anchor,
+ported her helm, ran up the jolly Roger, gave three times three, let the
+bullgine run, pushed off in their bumboat and put to sea to recover
+the main of America. Which was the occasion, says Mr Vincent, of the
+composing by a boatswain of that rollicking chanty:
+
+ _--Pope Peter's but a pissabed.
+ A man's a man for a' that._
+
+Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway
+as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend
+whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon,
+who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a
+cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil
+enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a
+project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched
+on. Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards
+which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend
+printed in fair italics: _Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator.
+Lambay Island_. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw
+from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir
+Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself
+to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well,
+let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it
+smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. 'Tis as cheap sitting as
+standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon
+his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by
+a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the
+prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal
+vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the
+prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities
+acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch
+defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable
+females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who hide their
+flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly
+bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might
+multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of
+their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he
+assured them, made his heart weep. To curb this inconvenient (which
+he concluded due to a suppression of latent heat), having advised with
+certain counsellors of worth and inspected into this matter, he had
+resolved to purchase in fee simple for ever the freehold of Lambay
+island from its holder, lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of
+note much in favour with our ascendancy party. He proposed to set up
+there a national fertilising farm to be named _Omphalos_ with an obelisk
+hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful
+yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life
+soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the
+functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he
+take a penny for his pains. The poorest kitchenwench no less than the
+opulent lady of fashion, if so be their constructions and their tempers
+were warm persuaders for their petitions, would find in him their man.
+For his nutriment he shewed how he would feed himself exclusively upon a
+diet of savoury tubercles and fish and coneys there, the flesh of these
+latter prolific rodents being highly recommended for his purpose, both
+broiled and stewed with a blade of mace and a pod or two of capsicum
+chillies. After this homily which he delivered with much warmth of
+asseveration Mr Mulligan in a trice put off from his hat a kerchief with
+which he had shielded it. They both, it seems, had been overtaken by the
+rain and for all their mending their pace had taken water, as might be
+observed by Mr Mulligan's smallclothes of a hodden grey which was now
+somewhat piebald. His project meanwhile was very favourably entertained
+by his auditors and won hearty eulogies from all though Mr Dixon of
+Mary's excepted to it, asking with a finicking air did he purpose also
+to carry coals to Newcastle. Mr Mulligan however made court to the
+scholarly by an apt quotation from the classics which, as it dwelt
+upon his memory, seemed to him a sound and tasteful support of his
+contention: _Talis ac tanta depravatio hujus seculi, O quirites,
+ut matresfamiliarum nostrae lascivas cujuslibet semiviri libici
+titillationes testibus ponderosis atque excelsis erectionibus
+centurionum Romanorum magnopere anteponunt_, while for those of ruder
+wit he drove home his point by analogies of the animal kingdom more
+suitable to their stomach, the buck and doe of the forest glade, the
+farmyard drake and duck.
+
+Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper
+man of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with
+animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics
+while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had
+advanced. The young gentleman, his friend, overjoyed as he was at a
+passage that had late befallen him, could not forbear to tell it his
+nearest neighbour. Mr Mulligan, now perceiving the table, asked for whom
+were those loaves and fishes and, seeing the stranger, he made him
+a civil bow and said, Pray, sir, was you in need of any professional
+assistance we could give? Who, upon his offer, thanked him very
+heartily, though preserving his proper distance, and replied that he was
+come there about a lady, now an inmate of Horne's house, that was in an
+interesting condition, poor body, from woman's woe (and here he fetched
+a deep sigh) to know if her happiness had yet taken place. Mr Dixon,
+to turn the table, took on to ask of Mr Mulligan himself whether
+his incipient ventripotence, upon which he rallied him, betokened an
+ovoblastic gestation in the prostatic utricle or male womb or was due,
+as with the noted physician, Mr Austin Meldon, to a wolf in the stomach.
+For answer Mr Mulligan, in a gale of laughter at his smalls, smote
+himself bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an admirable droll
+mimic of Mother Grogan (the most excellent creature of her sex though
+'tis pity she's a trollop): There's a belly that never bore a bastard.
+This was so happy a conceit that it renewed the storm of mirth and threw
+the whole room into the most violent agitations of delight. The spry
+rattle had run on in the same vein of mimicry but for some larum in the
+antechamber.
+
+Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student, a little
+fume of a fellow, blond as tow, congratulated in the liveliest fashion
+with the young gentleman and, interrupting the narrative at a salient
+point, having desired his visavis with a polite beck to have the
+obligingness to pass him a flagon of cordial waters at the same time by
+a questioning poise of the head (a whole century of polite breeding had
+not achieved so nice a gesture) to which was united an equivalent but
+contrary balance of the bottle asked the narrator as plainly as was ever
+done in words if he might treat him with a cup of it. _Mais bien sûr_,
+noble stranger, said he cheerily, _et mille compliments_. That you may
+and very opportunely. There wanted nothing but this cup to crown my
+felicity. But, gracious heaven, was I left with but a crust in my wallet
+and a cupful of water from the well, my God, I would accept of them and
+find it in my heart to kneel down upon the ground and give thanks to
+the powers above for the happiness vouchsafed me by the Giver of good
+things. With these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a
+complacent draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his
+bosom, out popped a locket that hung from a silk riband, that very
+picture which he had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein.
+Gazing upon those features with a world of tenderness, Ah, Monsieur, he
+said, had you but beheld her as I did with these eyes at that affecting
+instant with her dainty tucker and her new coquette cap (a gift for her
+feastday as she told me prettily) in such an artless disorder, of so
+melting a tenderness, 'pon my conscience, even you, Monsieur, had been
+impelled by generous nature to deliver yourself wholly into the hands of
+such an enemy or to quit the field for ever. I declare, I was never so
+touched in all my life. God, I thank thee, as the Author of my days!
+Thrice happy will he be whom so amiable a creature will bless with her
+favours. A sigh of affection gave eloquence to these words and, having
+replaced the locket in his bosom, he wiped his eye and sighed again.
+Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how great
+and universal must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in
+thrall the free and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb,
+the lover in the heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer
+years. But indeed, sir, I wander from the point. How mingled and
+imperfect are all our sublunary joys. Maledicity! he exclaimed in
+anguish. Would to God that foresight had but remembered me to take my
+cloak along! I could weep to think of it. Then, though it had poured
+seven showers, we were neither of us a penny the worse. But beshrew me,
+he cried, clapping hand to his forehead, tomorrow will be a new day and,
+thousand thunders, I know of a _marchand de capotes_, Monsieur Poyntz,
+from whom I can have for a livre as snug a cloak of the French fashion
+as ever kept a lady from wetting. Tut, tut! cries Le Fecondateur,
+tripping in, my friend Monsieur Moore, that most accomplished traveller
+(I have just cracked a half bottle AVEC LUI in a circle of the best wits
+of the town), is my authority that in Cape Horn, _ventre biche_, they
+have a rain that will wet through any, even the stoutest cloak. A
+drenching of that violence, he tells me, _sans blague_, has sent more
+than one luckless fellow in good earnest posthaste to another world.
+Pooh! A _livre!_ cries Monsieur Lynch. The clumsy things are dear at a
+sou. One umbrella, were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom, is worth ten
+such stopgaps. No woman of any wit would wear one. My dear Kitty told me
+today that she would dance in a deluge before ever she would starve in
+such an ark of salvation for, as she reminded me (blushing piquantly and
+whispering in my ear though there was none to snap her words but giddy
+butterflies), dame Nature, by the divine blessing, has implanted it in
+our hearts and it has become a household word that _il y a deux choses_
+for which the innocence of our original garb, in other circumstances a
+breach of the proprieties, is the fittest, nay, the only garment. The
+first, said she (and here my pretty philosopher, as I handed her to her
+tilbury, to fix my attention, gently tipped with her tongue the outer
+chamber of my ear), the first is a bath... But at this point a bell
+tinkling in the hall cut short a discourse which promised so bravely for
+the enrichment of our store of knowledge.
+
+Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while
+all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and,
+having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with
+a profound bow to the company. The presence even for a moment among a
+party of debauchees of a woman endued with every quality of modesty and
+not less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of
+the most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of
+ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled.
+A monstrous fine bit of cowflesh! I'll be sworn she has rendezvoused
+you. What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad's bud, immensely
+so, said Mr Lynch. The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater
+hospice. Demme, does not Doctor O'Gargle chuck the nuns there under the
+chin. As I look to be saved I had it from my Kitty who has been wardmaid
+there any time these seven months. Lawksamercy, doctor, cried the young
+blood in the primrose vest, feigning a womanish simper and with immodest
+squirmings of his body, how you do tease a body! Drat the man! Bless
+me, I'm all of a wibbly wobbly. Why, you're as bad as dear little Father
+Cantekissem, that you are! May this pot of four half choke me, cried
+Costello, if she aint in the family way. I knows a lady what's got a
+white swelling quick as I claps eyes on her. The young surgeon, however,
+rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just
+then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence
+had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was
+_enceinte_ which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had
+given birth to a bouncing boy. I want patience, said he, with those
+who, without wit to enliven or learning to instruct, revile an ennobling
+profession which, saving the reverence due to the Deity, is the greatest
+power for happiness upon the earth. I am positive when I say that if
+need were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the excellence of
+her noble exercitations which, so far from being a byword, should be a
+glorious incentive in the human breast. I cannot away with them. What?
+Malign such an one, the amiable Miss Callan, who is the lustre of
+her own sex and the astonishment of ours? And at an instant the most
+momentous that can befall a puny child of clay? Perish the thought! I
+shudder to think of the future of a race where the seeds of such malice
+have been sown and where no right reverence is rendered to mother and
+maid in house of Horne. Having delivered himself of this rebuke he
+saluted those present on the by and repaired to the door. A murmur
+of approval arose from all and some were for ejecting the low soaker
+without more ado, a design which would have been effected nor would
+he have received more than his bare deserts had he not abridged his
+transgression by affirming with a horrid imprecation (for he swore a
+round hand) that he was as good a son of the true fold as ever drew
+breath. Stap my vitals, said he, them was always the sentiments of
+honest Frank Costello which I was bred up most particular to honour thy
+father and thy mother that had the best hand to a rolypoly or a hasty
+pudding as you ever see what I always looks back on with a loving heart.
+
+To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of
+some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits
+of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not
+pity. The young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies
+as overgrown children: the words of their tumultuary discussions
+were difficultly understood and not often nice: their testiness and
+outrageous _mots_ were such that his intellects resiled from: nor were
+they scrupulously sensible of the proprieties though their fund of
+strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf. But the word of Mr Costello
+was an unwelcome language for him for he nauseated the wretch that
+seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity, born out
+of wedlock and thrust like a crookback toothed and feet first into the
+world, which the dint of the surgeon's pliers in his skull lent indeed
+a colour to, so as to put him in thought of that missing link of
+creation's chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin. It was now
+for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed
+through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary
+ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart
+to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them
+with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude
+of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find
+tolerable and but tolerable. To those who create themselves wits at the
+cost of feminine delicacy (a habit of mind which he never did hold
+with) to them he would concede neither to bear the name nor to herit
+the tradition of a proper breeding: while for such that, having lost
+all forbearance, can lose no more, there remained the sharp antidote of
+experience to cause their insolency to beat a precipitate and inglorious
+retreat. Not but what he could feel with mettlesome youth which, caring
+nought for the mows of dotards or the gruntlings of the severe, is ever
+(as the chaste fancy of the Holy Writer expresses it) for eating of the
+tree forbid it yet not so far forth as to pretermit humanity upon any
+condition soever towards a gentlewoman when she was about her lawful
+occasions. To conclude, while from the sister's words he had reckoned
+upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must be owned, not a little
+alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so auspicated after an
+ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the mercy as well as to
+the bounty of the Supreme Being.
+
+Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express
+his notion of the thing, his opinion (who ought not perchance to express
+one) was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not
+to be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement
+since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. The dressy
+young blade said it was her husband's that put her in that expectation
+or at least it ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I
+must acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, clapping on the table so as to
+evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory Allelujurum was round
+again today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring through his
+nose a request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I
+bade him hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst anon.
+'Slife, I'll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile potency of
+the old bucko that could still knock another child out of her. All fell
+to praising of it, each after his own fashion, though the same young
+blade held with his former view that another than her conjugial had
+been the man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy (virtuous) or
+an itinerant vendor of articles needed in every household. Singular,
+communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of
+metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal dormitory and the
+dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity, that the
+mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a
+pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of
+an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. But,
+he further added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup feelings that in
+common oppress them for I have more than once observed that birds of a
+feather laugh together.
+
+But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron,
+has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted
+to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our
+internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have
+counselled? During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary
+advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that
+moment to discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a tenant
+at will while he trembled for the security of his four per cents? Has he
+forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is it that from
+being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is,
+if report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from
+candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daughter of
+a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections upon her
+virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it was indeed highly his
+interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy woman, she has been
+too long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to
+listen to his objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of
+the desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his
+piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt
+illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata
+of society! Nay, had the hussy's scouringbrush not been her tutelary
+angel, it had gone with her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian! In the
+question of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in
+Mr Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing
+retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill
+becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield
+that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible
+at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must
+dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste
+to restore to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his
+practice consist better with the doctrines that now engross him. His
+marital breast is the repository of secrets which decorum is reluctant
+to adduce. The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for
+a consort neglected and debauched but this new exponent of morals and
+healer of ills is at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in
+its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm
+but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their
+quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid
+and inoperative.
+
+The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial
+usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the
+junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the
+delegation that an heir had been born, When he had betaken himself
+to the women's apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the
+afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic
+affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous
+exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length and
+solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would
+palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and
+obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of
+tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring
+to urge, to mollify, to refrain. The moment was too propitious for the
+display of that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union among
+tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was successively
+eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean
+section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form,
+with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs
+Murder and rendered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate
+Bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the
+rights of primogeniture and king's bounty touching twins and triplets,
+miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated, the acardiac
+_foetus in foetu_ and aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnathia
+of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan) in
+consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial
+line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the
+benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of labour
+pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the
+premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the
+actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial
+insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent
+upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetration of the species in
+the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing
+manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers _Sturzgeburt,_ the
+recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births
+conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents--in
+a word all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified
+in his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations. The gravest
+problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much
+animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as
+the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest,
+by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and
+the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and
+ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her
+person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation.
+The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro's
+inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were alleged by one as a
+_prima facie_ and natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded
+(the case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or doghaired
+infants occasionally born. The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced
+by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of
+the land he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic
+development at some stage antecedent to the human. An outlandish
+delegate sustained against both these views, with such heat as almost
+carried conviction, the theory of copulation between women and the males
+of brutes, his authority being his own avouchment in support of fables
+such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet
+has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The impression
+made by his words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily
+as it had been evoked by an allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in
+that vein of pleasantry which none better than he knew how to affect,
+postulating as the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man.
+Contemporaneously, a heated argument having arisen between Mr Delegate
+Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and theological
+dilemma created in the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other,
+the difficulty by mutual consent was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom
+for instant submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent,
+whether the better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity
+of the garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward
+voice, he delivered briefly and, as some thought, perfunctorily the
+ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God has
+joined.
+
+But Malachias' tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the
+scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and
+in the recess appeared... Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh
+creep! He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the
+other a phial marked _Poison._ Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted
+on all faces while he eyed them with a ghostly grin. I anticipated some
+such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems,
+history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel
+Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. This
+is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting
+at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back
+with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a
+bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland's, is in this life. It is what I tried
+to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language
+(he recited some), laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips), camping
+out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope... Ah!
+Destruction! The black panther! With a cry he suddenly vanished and the
+panel slid back. An instant later his head appeared in the door opposite
+and said: Meet me at Westland Row station at ten past eleven. He was
+gone. Tears gushed from the eyes of the dissipated host. The seer
+raised his hand to heaven, murmuring: The vendetta of Mananaun! The
+sage repeated: _Lex talionis_. The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy
+without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Malachias,
+overcome by emotion, ceased. The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the
+third brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself
+the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this
+relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited.
+No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in the solitude.
+The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted.
+Murderer's ground.
+
+What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the
+chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the
+merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as
+her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing
+the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a
+modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is
+young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within
+a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then
+is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old
+house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on
+him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's
+thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first
+hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged
+traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented
+handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas!
+a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this
+or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for
+a budding virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his
+studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark
+eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission
+to the head of the firm, seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in
+the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating),
+reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a
+month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young
+knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny speck within the
+mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his
+sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a
+drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the
+first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine
+and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear
+the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal
+university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever
+remember the night: first night, the bridenight. They are entwined
+in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed, and in an instant
+(_fiat_!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay,
+fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but--hold! Back! It must not be! In
+terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of
+darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe
+of day. No, Leopold. Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful
+illusion of thy strength was taken from thee--and in vain. No son of thy
+loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was
+for Rudolph.
+
+The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the
+infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions
+of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight
+ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her
+dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with
+ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms
+are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely
+haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They
+fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of
+screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And
+on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion,
+the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads
+them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and
+yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come
+trooping to the sunken sea, _Lacus Mortis_. Ominous revengeful zodiacal
+host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the
+trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter
+and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning
+multitude, murderers of the sun.
+
+Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible
+gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent
+grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven's own
+magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And lo, wonder
+of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the
+daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one,
+Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now
+arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour,
+shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call
+it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it
+streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents
+of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling,
+writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad
+metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign
+upon the forehead of Taurus.
+
+Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at
+school together in Conmee's time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades,
+Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the
+past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them
+into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to
+my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending
+bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair
+with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those
+leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something
+more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius
+father. All who wish you well hope this for you. All desire to see
+you bring forth the work you meditate, to acclaim you Stephaneforos. I
+heartily wish you may not fail them. O no, Vincent Lenehan said, laying
+a hand on the shoulder near him. Have no fear. He could not leave his
+mother an orphan. The young man's face grew dark. All could see how hard
+it was for him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent loss. He
+would have withdrawn from the feast had not the noise of voices allayed
+the smart. Madden had lost five drachmas on Sceptre for a whim of the
+rider's name: Lenehan as much more. He told them of the race. The flag
+fell and, huuh! off, scamper, the mare ran out freshly with 0. Madden
+up. She was leading the field. All hearts were beating. Even Phyllis
+could not contain herself. She waved her scarf and cried: Huzzah!
+Sceptre wins! But in the straight on the run home when all were in close
+order the dark horse Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped her. All
+was lost now. Phyllis was silent: her eyes were sad anemones. Juno, she
+cried, I am undone. But her lover consoled her and brought her a bright
+casket of gold in which lay some oval sugarplums which she partook. A
+tear fell: one only. A whacking fine whip, said Lenehan, is W. Lane.
+Four winners yesterday and three today. What rider is like him? Mount
+him on the camel or the boisterous buffalo the victory in a hack canter
+is still his. But let us bear it as was the ancient wont. Mercy on the
+luckless! Poor Sceptre! he said with a light sigh. She is not the filly
+that she was. Never, by this hand, shall we behold such another. By gad,
+sir, a queen of them. Do you remember her, Vincent? I wish you could
+have seen my queen today, Vincent said. How young she was and radiant
+(Lalage were scarce fair beside her) in her yellow shoes and frock of
+muslin, I do not know the right name of it. The chestnuts that shaded
+us were in bloom: the air drooped with their persuasive odour and with
+pollen floating by us. In the sunny patches one might easily have
+cooked on a stone a batch of those buns with Corinth fruit in them that
+Periplipomenes sells in his booth near the bridge. But she had nought
+for her teeth but the arm with which I held her and in that she nibbled
+mischievously when I pressed too close. A week ago she lay ill, four
+days on the couch, but today she was free, blithe, mocked at peril.
+She is more taking then. Her posies tool Mad romp that she is, she had
+pulled her fill as we reclined together. And in your ear, my friend, you
+will not think who met us as we left the field. Conmee himself! He was
+walking by the hedge, reading, I think a brevier book with, I doubt not,
+a witty letter in it from Glycera or Chloe to keep the page. The sweet
+creature turned all colours in her confusion, feigning to reprove a
+slight disorder in her dress: a slip of underwood clung there for the
+very trees adore her. When Conmee had passed she glanced at her lovely
+echo in that little mirror she carries. But he had been kind. In going
+by he had blessed us. The gods too are ever kind, Lenehan said. If I had
+poor luck with Bass's mare perhaps this draught of his may serve me more
+propensely. He was laying his hand upon a winejar: Malachi saw it and
+withheld his act, pointing to the stranger and to the scarlet label.
+Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. His soul is far
+away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be
+born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the
+incorruptible eon of the gods. Do you not think it, Stephen? Theosophos
+told me so, Stephen answered, whom in a previous existence Egyptian
+priests initiated into the mysteries of karmic law. The lords of the
+moon, Theosophos told me, an orangefiery shipload from planet Alpha
+of the lunar chain would not assume the etheric doubles and these
+were therefore incarnated by the rubycoloured egos from the second
+constellation.
+
+However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him
+being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which
+was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was
+not the case at all. The individual whose visual organs while the above
+was going on were at this juncture commencing to exhibit symptoms of
+animation was as astute if not astuter than any man living and anybody
+that conjectured the contrary would have found themselves pretty
+speedily in the wrong shop. During the past four minutes or thereabouts
+he had been staring hard at a certain amount of number one Bass bottled
+by Messrs Bass and Co at Burton-on-Trent which happened to be situated
+amongst a lot of others right opposite to where he was and which was
+certainly calculated to attract anyone's remark on account of its
+scarlet appearance. He was simply and solely, as it subsequently
+transpired for reasons best known to himself, which put quite an
+altogether different complexion on the proceedings, after the moment
+before's observations about boyhood days and the turf, recollecting two
+or three private transactions of his own which the other two were as
+mutually innocent of as the babe unborn. Eventually, however, both
+their eyes met and as soon as it began to dawn on him that the other was
+endeavouring to help himself to the thing he involuntarily determined
+to help him himself and so he accordingly took hold of the neck of the
+mediumsized glass recipient which contained the fluid sought after and
+made a capacious hole in it by pouring a lot of it out with, also at the
+same time, however, a considerable degree of attentiveness in order not
+to upset any of the beer that was in it about the place.
+
+The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the
+course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The
+debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on
+the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne's house had never
+beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the
+old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so
+encyclopaedic. A gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at
+the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing
+from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him,
+was Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity
+and premature wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to
+Costello, the eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose
+the squat form of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant
+before the hearth but on either flank of it the figure of Bannon in
+explorer's kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted
+sharply with the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi
+Roland St John Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young
+poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical
+inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while
+to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator,
+fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the
+dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible
+dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril
+or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that voluptuous
+loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages
+yet to come.
+
+It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted
+transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus' (Div. Scep.) contentions
+would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to
+accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated,
+deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the
+street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain
+them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questions which
+science cannot answer--at present--such as the first problem submitted
+by Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future determination of sex.
+Must we accept the view of Empedocles of Trinacria that the right ovary
+(the postmenstrual period, assert others) is responsible for the birth
+of males or are the too long neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the
+differentiating factors or is it, as most embryologists incline to
+opine, such as Culpepper, Spallanzani, Blumenbach, Lusk, Hertwig,
+Leopold and Valenti, a mixture of both? This would be tantamount to
+a cooperation (one of nature's favourite devices) between the _nisus
+formativus_ of the nemasperm on the one hand and on the other a happily
+chosen position, _succubitus felix_ of the passive element. The other
+problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant
+mortality. It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we
+are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways. Mr M.
+Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames the sanitary conditions in which
+our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by
+inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleged,
+and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity
+posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers
+and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspended carcases of
+dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas--these, he
+said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of
+the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted
+and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature,
+light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of
+the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured
+photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable
+ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months
+in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes
+some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers
+subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in
+the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or official,
+culminating in the exposure of newborn infants, the practice of criminal
+abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former
+(we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he
+cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity
+is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the
+wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they
+do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which
+often baulk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is
+that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and
+mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements,
+lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in
+fine, in nature's vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun
+to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our
+public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.
+Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy
+parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs
+unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the same
+marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet's words, give us pause.
+Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for
+whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law
+of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken
+up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the
+plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an
+increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement which, though
+productive of pain to some of our feelings (notably the maternal), is
+nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial to the
+race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest. Mr S.
+Dedalus' (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be called an interruption?)
+that an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and
+apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect
+imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females
+emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak
+of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find gastric
+relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought
+else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to.
+For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately acquainted with
+the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and
+embryo philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things
+scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides
+himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in
+the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed victuallers signifies the
+cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother. In
+a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took
+place in the commons' hall of the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30
+and 31 Holles street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in
+Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported
+by eyewitnesses as having stated that once a woman has let the cat
+into the bag (an esthete's allusion, presumably, to one of the most
+complicated and marvellous of all nature's processes--the act of sexual
+congress) she must let it out again or give it life, as he phrased it,
+to save her own. At the risk of her own, was the telling rejoinder of
+his interlocutor, none the less effective for the moderate and measured
+tone in which it was delivered.
+
+Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a
+happy _accouchement._ It had been a weary weary while both for patient
+and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave
+woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and
+now she was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone
+before, are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching
+scene. Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight
+in her eyes, that longing hunger for baby fingers (a pretty sight it is
+to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent
+prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her
+loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have
+her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that
+mite of God's clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces. He is older now
+(you and I may whisper it) and a trifle stooped in the shoulders yet
+in the whirligig of years a grave dignity has come to the conscientious
+second accountant of the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O Doady,
+loved one of old, faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that
+faroff time of the roses! With the old shake of her pretty head she
+recalls those days. God! How beautiful now across the mist of years! But
+their children are grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers
+and his, Charley, Mary Alice, Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy,
+Budgy (Victoria Frances), Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little
+Bobsy (called after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs
+of Waterford and Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a
+Purefoy if ever there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful
+will be christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of
+Mr Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer's office, Dublin Castle. And so
+time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no sigh
+break from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes from
+your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for
+you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read
+in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so with a tranquil
+heart to bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His own good time. You
+too have fought the good fight and played loyally your man's part. Sir,
+to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant!
+
+There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil
+memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart
+but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim,
+let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself
+that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will
+call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the
+most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel
+and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the
+evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine.
+Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under
+her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded
+in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.
+
+The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of
+that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied
+trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an
+unhealthiness, a _flair,_ for the cruder things of life. A scene
+disengages itself in the observer's memory, evoked, it would seem, by
+a word of so natural a homeliness as if those days were really present
+there (as some thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space
+of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at
+Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but
+with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over
+the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert
+shock. And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at times
+in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey,
+Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in
+her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent
+from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily
+against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey
+(blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long
+the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by
+that circle of girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young
+man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but
+must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the
+PIAZZETTA giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness
+or of reproach (_alles Vergangliche_) in her glad look.
+
+Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that
+antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their
+faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of
+custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant
+watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long
+ago. But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with
+preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended,
+compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field
+and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an
+instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the
+thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the
+transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the
+word.
+
+Burke's! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and
+bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor,
+punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear,
+ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and
+what not. A dedale of lusty youth, noble every student there. Nurse
+Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon
+coming downstairs with news of placentation ended, a full pound if a
+milligramme. They hark him on. The door! It is open? Ha! They are out,
+tumultuously, off for a minute's race, all bravely legging it, Burke's
+of Denzille and Holles their ulterior goal. Dixon follows giving them
+sharp language but raps out an oath, he too, and on. Bloom stays with
+nurse a thought to send a kind word to happy mother and nurseling up
+there. Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet. Looks she too not other now? Ward
+of watching in Horne's house has told its tale in that washedout pallor.
+Then all being gone, a glance of motherwit helping, he whispers close in
+going: Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?
+
+The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence
+celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny _coelum._
+God's air, the Allfather's air, scintillant circumambient cessile air.
+Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a
+doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor
+barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle.
+Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which
+thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her!
+Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all
+Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping
+under thy load, bemoiled with butcher's bills at home and ingots (not
+thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt
+gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy
+Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed
+curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead
+gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer.
+Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the
+innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile
+cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary
+pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever,
+bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious
+attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and
+trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty
+years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that
+will and would and wait and never--do. Thou sawest thy America, thy
+lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How
+saith Zarathustra? _Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die
+süsse Milch des Euters_. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink,
+man, an udderful! Mother's milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk
+too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour,
+punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk
+of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan's land. Thy cow's dug was tough,
+what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this
+but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! _Per deam
+Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum_!
+
+All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides.
+Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole
+Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil's
+sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o' me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward
+to the ribbon counter. Where's Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the
+drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal! _Benedicat vos
+omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius_. A make, mister. The Denzille lane
+boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto, Isaacs, shove em out of the
+bleeding limelight. Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou
+heap good man. Allee samee dis bunch. _En avant, mes enfants_! Fire
+away number one on the gun. Burke's! Burke's! Thence they advanced five
+parasangs. Slattery's mounted foot. Where's that bleeding awfur? Parson
+Steve, apostates' creed! No, no, Mulligan! Abaft there! Shove ahead.
+Keep a watch on the clock. Chuckingout time. Mullee! What's on you? _Ma
+mère m'a mariée._ British Beatitudes! _Retamplatan Digidi Boumboum_.
+Ayes have it. To be printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two
+designing females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art
+shades. Most beautiful book come out of Ireland my time. _Silentium!_
+Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to nearest canteen and there annex
+liquor stores. March! Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are (atitudes!)
+parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs battleships, buggery
+and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beer, beef, trample the
+bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampellers. Thunderation! Keep
+the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops boosebox. Halt! Heave to.
+Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my tootsies! You hurt? Most
+amazingly sorry!
+
+Query. Who's astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare
+misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week
+gone. Yours? Mead of our fathers for the _Übermensch._ Dittoh. Five
+number ones. You, sir? Ginger cordial. Chase me, the cabby's caudle.
+Stimulate the caloric. Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go
+again when the old. Absinthe for me, savvy? _Caramba!_ Have an eggnog or
+a prairie oyster. Enemy? Avuncular's got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated
+awful. Don't mention it. Got a pectoral trauma, eh, Dix? Pos fact. Got
+bet be a boomblebee whenever he wus settin sleepin in hes bit garten.
+Digs up near the Mater. Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin I do.
+Full of a dure. See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey
+lovekin. None of your lean kine, not much. Pull down the blind, love.
+Two Ardilauns. Same here. Look slippery. If you fall don't wait to get
+up. Five, seven, nine. Fine! Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And
+her take me to rests and her anker of rum. Must be seen to be believed.
+Your starving eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O
+gluepot. Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you'll scuse me
+saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear thee beest a gert vool. Well, doc?
+Back fro Lapland? Your corporosity sagaciating O K? How's the squaws
+and papooses? Womanbody after going on the straw? Stand and deliver.
+Password. There's hair. Ours the white death and the ruddy birth. Hi!
+Spit in your own eye, boss! Mummer's wire. Cribbed out of Meredith.
+Jesified, orchidised, polycimical jesuit! Aunty mine's writing Pa Kinch.
+Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi.
+
+Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw
+Hielentman's your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot
+boil! My tipple. _Merci._ Here's to us. How's that? Leg before wicket.
+Don't stain my brandnew sitinems. Give's a shake of peppe, you there.
+Catch aholt. Caraway seed to carry away. Twig? Shrieks of silence. Every
+cove to his gentry mort. Venus Pandemos. _Les petites femmes_. Bold bad
+girl from the town of Mullingar. Tell her I was axing at her. Hauding
+Sara by the wame. On the road to Malahide. Me? If she who seduced me had
+left but the name. What do you want for ninepence? Machree, macruiskeen.
+Smutty Moll for a mattress jig. And a pull all together. _Ex!_
+
+Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like,
+seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He've got the
+chink _ad lib_. Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn.
+Us come right in on your invite, see? Up to you, matey. Out with the
+oof. Two bar and a wing. You larn that go off of they there Frenchy
+bilks? Won't wash here for nuts nohow. Lil chile velly solly. Ise de
+cutest colour coon down our side. Gawds teruth, Chawley. We are nae fou.
+We're nae tha fou. Au reservoir, mossoo. Tanks you.
+
+'Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam,
+two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn! Have a glint, do.
+Gum, I'm jiggered. And been to barber he have. Too full for words. With
+a railway bloke. How come you so? Opera he'd like? Rose of Castile. Rows
+of cast. Police! Some H2O for a gent fainted. Look at Bantam's flowers.
+Gemini. He's going to holler. The colleen bawn. My colleen bawn. O,
+cheese it! Shut his blurry Dutch oven with a firm hand. Had the winner
+today till I tipped him a dead cert. The ruffin cly the nab of Stephen
+Hand as give me the jady coppaleen. He strike a telegramboy paddock wire
+big bug Bass to the depot. Shove him a joey and grahamise. Mare on form
+hot order. Guinea to a goosegog. Tell a cram, that. Gospeltrue. Criminal
+diversion? I think that yes. Sure thing. Land him in chokeechokee if the
+harman beck copped the game. Madden back Madden's a maddening back. O
+lust our refuge and our strength. Decamping. Must you go? Off to mammy.
+Stand by. Hide my blushes someone. All in if he spots me. Come ahome,
+our Bantam. Horryvar, mong vioo. Dinna forget the cowslips for hersel.
+Cornfide. Wha gev ye thon colt? Pal to pal. Jannock. Of John Thomas, her
+spouse. No fake, old man Leo. S'elp me, honest injun. Shiver my timbers
+if I had. There's a great big holy friar. Vyfor you no me tell? Vel,
+I ses, if that aint a sheeny nachez, vel, I vil get misha mishinnah.
+Through yerd our lord, Amen.
+
+You move a motion? Steve boy, you're going it some. More bluggy
+drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of
+most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate
+one expensive inaugurated libation? Give's a breather. Landlord,
+landlord, have you good wine, staboo? Hoots, mon, a wee drap to pree.
+Cut and come again. Right. Boniface! Absinthe the lot. _Nos omnes
+biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posterioria nostria_.
+Closingtime, gents. Eh? Rome boose for the Bloom toff. I hear you say
+onions? Bloo? Cadges ads. Photo's papli, by all that's gorgeous. Play
+low, pardner. Slide. _Bonsoir la compagnie_. And snares of the poxfiend.
+Where's the buck and Namby Amby? Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e'en
+gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower. Kind Kristyann wil yu help
+yung man hoose frend tuk bungellow kee tu find plais whear tu lay crown
+of his hed 2 night. Crickey, I'm about sprung. Tarnally dog gone my
+shins if this beent the bestest puttiest longbreak yet. Item, curate,
+couple of cookies for this child. Cot's plood and prandypalls, none! Not
+a pite of sheeses? Thrust syphilis down to hell and with him those other
+licensed spirits. Time, gents! Who wander through the world. Health all!
+_a la vôtre_!
+
+Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep
+at his wearables. By mighty! What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril,
+by James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the
+Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis.
+Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once
+a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all
+forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh
+of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies.
+Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal? Chum o' yourn passed in his checks?
+Ludamassy! Pore piccaninnies! Thou'll no be telling me thot, Pold veg!
+Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos fren Padney was took off in black
+bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never see the like
+since I was born. _Tiens, tiens_, but it is well sad, that, my faith,
+yes. O, get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives are souped.
+Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow. Jappies? High
+angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him, says he, nor
+any Rooshian. Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward,
+woozy wobblers! Night. Night. May Allah the Excellent One your soul this
+night ever tremendously conserve.
+
+Your attention! We're nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The
+least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable
+regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.
+
+Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes.
+Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not
+come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!
+
+Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o' me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for
+Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is.
+Righto, any old time. _Laetabuntur in cubilibus suis_. You coming long?
+Whisper, who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds? Hush! Sinned
+against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to
+judge the world by fire. Pflaap! _Ut implerentur scripturae_. Strike
+up a ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy.
+Christicle, who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion
+hall? Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you
+winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you
+dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed
+fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple
+extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie, that's my name, that's
+yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok.
+The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He's on the
+square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing
+yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You'll
+need to rise precious early you sinner there, if you want to diddle the
+Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch
+in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on.
+
+
+
+_The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches
+an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green
+will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping
+doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice
+gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which
+are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly.
+Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the
+murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer._
+
+THE CALLS: Wait, my love, and I'll be with you.
+
+THE ANSWERS: Round behind the stable.
+
+_(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling,
+jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. A chain of children 's hands
+imprisons him.)_
+
+THE CHILDREN: Kithogue! Salute!
+
+THE IDIOT: _(Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles)_ Grhahute!
+
+THE CHILDREN: Where's the great light?
+
+THE IDIOT: _(Gobbing)_ Ghaghahest.
+
+_(They release him. He jerks on. A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung
+between two railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and
+muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and
+snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches
+to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky
+oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his
+booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone
+makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the
+doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts,
+clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands
+the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in
+shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate
+crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter,
+cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a
+candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair
+of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey's voice, still young, sings shrill
+from a lane.)_
+
+CISSY CAFFREY:
+
+ _I gave it to Molly
+ Because she was jolly,
+ The leg of the duck,
+ The leg of the duck._
+
+_(Private Carr and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters,
+as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their
+mouths a volleyed fart. Laughter of men from the lane. A hoarse virago
+retorts.)_
+
+THE VIRAGO: Signs on you, hairy arse. More power the Cavan girl.
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet. _(She
+sings)_
+
+ _I gave it to Nelly
+ To stick in her belly,
+ The leg of the duck,
+ The leg of the duck._
+
+_(Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their tunics
+bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped
+polls. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close to the
+redcoats.)_
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Jerks his finger)_ Way for the parson.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Turns and calls)_ What ho, parson!
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: _(Her voice soaring higher)_
+
+ _She has it, she got it,
+ Wherever she put it,
+ The leg of the duck._
+
+_(Stephen, flourishing the ashplant in his left hand, chants with joy
+the_ introit _for paschal time. Lynch, his jockeycap low on his brow,
+attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia_.
+
+_(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a
+doorway.)_
+
+THE BAWD: _(Her voice whispering huskily)_ Sst! Come here till I tell
+you. Maidenhead inside. Sst!
+
+STEPHEN: _(Altius aliquantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista_.
+
+THE BAWD: _(Spits in their trail her jet of venom)_ Trinity medicals.
+Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.
+
+_(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws her shawl
+across her nostrils.)_
+
+EDY BOARDMAN: _(Bickering)_ And says the one: I seen you up Faithful
+place with your squarepusher, the greaser off the railway, in his
+cometobed hat. Did you, says I. That's not for you to say, says I. You
+never seen me in the mantrap with a married highlander, says I. The
+likes of her! Stag that one is! Stubborn as a mule! And her walking with
+two fellows the one time, Kilbride, the enginedriver, and lancecorporal
+Oliphant.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Ttriumphaliter) Salvi facti sunt._
+
+_(He flourishes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light
+over the world. A liver and white spaniel on the prowl slinks after him,
+growling. Lynch scares it with a kick.)_
+
+LYNCH: So that?
+
+STEPHEN: (_Looks behind_) So that gesture, not music not odour, would be
+a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay
+sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.
+
+LYNCH: Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburgh street!
+
+STEPHEN: We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even
+the allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of
+love.
+
+LYNCH: Ba!
+
+STEPHEN: Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug?
+This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar.
+Hold my stick.
+
+LYNCH: Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?
+
+STEPHEN: Lecherous lynx, _to la belle dame sans merci,_ Georgina
+Johnson, _ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam._
+
+_(Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands,
+his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down
+turned, in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left
+being higher.)_
+
+LYNCH: Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That or the
+customhouse. Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch and walk.
+
+_(They pass. Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a gaslamp and, clasping, climbs
+in spasms. From the top spur he slides down. Jacky Caffrey clasps to
+climb. The navvy lurches against the lamp. The twins scuttle off in the
+dark. The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his
+nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot.
+Shouldering the lamp he staggers away through the crowd with his flaring
+cresset._
+
+_Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools,
+middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow leaps in the south
+beyond the seaward reaches of the river. The navvy, staggering forward,
+cleaves the crowd and lurches towards the tramsiding on the farther side
+under the railway bridge bloom appears, flushed, panting, cramming bread
+and chocolate into a sidepocket. From Gillen's hairdresser's window a
+composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image. A concave mirror
+at the side presents to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. Grave
+Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom. he passes, struck by the
+stare of truculent Wellington, but in the convex mirror grin unstruck
+the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy._
+
+_At Antonio Pabaiotti's door Bloom halts, sweated under the bright
+arclamp. He disappears. In a moment he reappears and hurries on.)_
+
+BLOOM: Fish and taters. N. g. Ah!
+
+_(He disappears into Olhausen's, the porkbutcher's, under the downcoming
+rollshutter. A few moments later he emerges from under the shutter,
+puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. In each hand he holds a parcel, one
+containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the other a cold sheep's trotter,
+sprinkled with wholepepper. He gasps, standing upright. Then bending to
+one side he presses a parcel against his ribs and groans.)_
+
+BLOOM: Stitch in my side. Why did I run?
+
+_(He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards the lampset
+siding. The glow leaps again.)_
+
+BLOOM: What is that? A flasher? Searchlight.
+
+_(He stands at Cormack's corner, watching)_
+
+BLOOM: _Aurora borealis_ or a steel foundry? Ah, the brigade, of course.
+South side anyhow. Big blaze. Might be his house. Beggar's bush. We're
+safe. _(He hums cheerfully)_ London's burning, London's burning! On
+fire, on fire! (_He catches sight of the navvy lurching through the
+crowd at the farther side of Talbot street_) I'll miss him. Run. Quick.
+Better cross here.
+
+_(He darts to cross the road. Urchins shout.)_
+
+THE URCHINS: Mind out, mister! (_Two cyclists, with lighted paper
+lanterns aswing, swim by him, grazing him, their bells rattling_)
+
+THE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.
+
+BLOOM: _(Halts erect, stung by a spasm)_ Ow!
+
+_(He looks round, darts forward suddenly. Through rising fog a dragon
+sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon him,
+its huge red headlight winking, its trolley hissing on the wire. The
+motorman bangs his footgong.)_
+
+THE GONG: Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.
+
+_(The brake cracks violently. Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved
+hand, blunders stifflegged out of the track. The motorman, thrown
+forward, pugnosed, on the guidewheel, yells as he slides past over
+chains and keys.)_
+
+THE MOTORMAN: Hey, shitbreeches, are you doing the hat trick?
+
+BLOOM: _(Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a
+mudflake from his cheek with a parcelled hand.)_ No thoroughfare. Close
+shave that but cured the stitch. Must take up Sandow's exercises again.
+On the hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential.
+_(He feels his trouser pocket)_ Poor mamma's panacea. Heel easily catch
+in track or bootlace in a cog. Day the wheel of the black Maria peeled
+off my shoe at Leonard's corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick.
+Insolent driver. I ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous.
+Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman. Same
+style of beauty. Quick of him all the same. The stiff walk. True word
+spoken in jest. That awful cramp in Lad lane. Something poisonous I
+ate. Emblem of luck. Why? Probably lost cattle. Mark of the beast. _(He
+closes his eyes an instant)_ Bit light in the head. Monthly or effect of
+the other. Brainfogfag. That tired feeling. Too much for me now. Ow!
+
+(A sinister figure leans on plaited legs against o'beirne's wall, a
+visage unknown, injected with dark mercury. From under a wideleaved
+sombrero the figure regards him with evil eye.)
+
+BLOOM: _Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta?_
+
+THE FIGURE: (_Impassive, raises a signal arm_) Password. _Sraid Mabbot._
+
+BLOOM: Haha. _Merci._ Esperanto. _Slan leath. (He mutters)_ Gaelic
+league spy, sent by that fireeater.
+
+_(He steps forward. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path. He steps
+left, ragsackman left.)_
+
+BLOOM: I beg. (_He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on_.)
+
+BLOOM: Keep to the right, right, right. If there is a signpost planted
+by the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon? I who
+lost my way and contributed to the columns of the _Irish Cyclist_ the
+letter headed _In darkest Stepaside_. Keep, keep, keep to the right.
+Rags and bones at midnight. A fence more likely. First place murderer
+makes for. Wash off his sins of the world.
+
+_(Jacky Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs full tilt against
+Bloom.)_
+
+BLOOM: O
+
+_(Shocked, on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jacky vanish there, there.
+Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoket,
+sweets of sin, potato soap.)_
+
+BLOOM: Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves' dodge. Collide. Then snatch
+your purse.
+
+_(The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the ground. A sprawled form
+sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan
+of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels. Horned
+spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are
+on the drawn face.)_
+
+RUDOLPH: Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with
+drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.
+
+BLOOM: _(Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen,
+feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi._
+
+RUDOLPH: What you making down this place? Have you no soul? _(with
+feeble vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom)_ Are you not
+my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold
+who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham
+and Jacob?
+
+BLOOM: _(With precaution)_ I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that's
+left of him.
+
+RUDOLPH: _(Severely)_ One night they bring you home drunk as dog after
+spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?
+
+BLOOM: _(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips,
+narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent's sterling silver
+waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one
+side of him coated with stiffening mud)_ Harriers, father. Only that
+once.
+
+RUDOLPH: Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make
+you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.
+
+BLOOM: _(Weakly)_ They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I
+slipped.
+
+RUDOLPH: _(With contempt) Goim nachez_! Nice spectacles for your poor
+mother!
+
+BLOOM: Mamma!
+
+ELLEN BLOOM: _(In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow Twankey's
+crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind,
+grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net,
+appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand,
+and cries out in shrill alarm)_ O blessed Redeemer, what have they done
+to him! My smelling salts! _(She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks
+the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a
+shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out)_ Sacred Heart of Mary,
+where were you at all at all?
+
+_(Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast, begins to bestow his parcels in
+his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)_
+
+A VOICE: _(Sharply)_ Poldy!
+
+BLOOM: Who? _(He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily)_ At your service.
+
+_(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in
+Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet
+trousers and jacket, slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles
+her. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free
+only her large dark eyes and raven hair.)_
+
+BLOOM: Molly!
+
+MARION: Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to
+me. _(Satirically)_ Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?
+
+BLOOM: _(Shifts from foot to foot)_ No, no. Not the least little bit.
+
+_(He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, questions,
+hopes, crubeens for her supper, things to tell her, excuse, desire,
+spellbound. A coin gleams on her forehead. On her feet are jewelled
+toerings. Her ankles are linked by a slender fetterchain. Beside her
+a camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. A silk ladder of
+innumerable rungs climbs to his bobbing howdah. He ambles near with
+disgruntled hindquarters. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her goldcurb
+wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)_
+
+MARION: Nebrakada! Femininum!
+
+_(The camel, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a tree a large mango fruit,
+offers it to his mistress, blinking, in his cloven hoof, then droops his
+head and, grunting, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. Bloom stoops
+his back for leapfrog.)_
+
+BLOOM: I can give you... I mean as your business menagerer... Mrs
+Marion... if you...
+
+MARION: So you notice some change? _(Her hands passing slowly over her
+trinketed stomacher, a slow friendly mockery in her eyes)_ O Poldy,
+Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud! Go and see life. See the
+wide world.
+
+BLOOM: I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower
+water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the
+morning. _(He pats divers pockets)_ This moving kidney. Ah!
+
+_(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon
+soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)_
+
+THE SOAP: We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the
+earth. I polish the sky.
+
+
+_(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the
+soapsun.)_
+
+SWENY: Three and a penny, please.
+
+BLOOM: Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.
+
+MARION: _(Softly)_ Poldy!
+
+BLOOM: Yes, ma'am?
+
+MARION: _ti trema un poco il cuore?_
+
+_(In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon,
+humming the duet from_ Don Giovanni.)
+
+BLOOM: Are you sure about that _voglio_? I mean the pronunciati...
+
+_(He follows, followed by the sniffing terrier. The elderly bawd seizes
+his sleeve, the bristles of her chinmole glittering.)_
+
+THE BAWD: Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched.
+Fifteen. There's no-one in it only her old father that's dead drunk.
+
+_(She points. In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie
+Kelly stands.)_
+
+BRIDIE: Hatch street. Any good in your mind?
+
+_(With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. A burly rough pursues
+with booted strides. He stumbles on the steps, recovers, plunges into
+gloom. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.)_
+
+THE BAWD: _(Her wolfeyes shining)_ He's getting his pleasure. You won't
+get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don't be all night
+before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.
+
+_(Leering, Gerty Macdowell limps forward. She draws from behind, ogling,
+and shows coyly her bloodied clout.)_
+
+GERTY: With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. _(She murmurs)_ You
+did that. I hate you.
+
+BLOOM: I? When? You're dreaming. I never saw you.
+
+THE BAWD: Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman
+false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take
+the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.
+
+GERTY: _(To Bloom)_ When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer.
+_(She paws his sleeve, slobbering)_ Dirty married man! I love you for
+doing that to me.
+
+_(She glides away crookedly. Mrs Breen in man's frieze overcoat
+with loose bellows pockets, stands in the causeway, her roguish eyes
+wideopen, smiling in all her herbivorous buckteeth.)_
+
+MRS BREEN: Mr...
+
+BLOOM: _(Coughs gravely)_ Madam, when we last had this pleasure by
+letter dated the sixteenth instant...
+
+MRS BREEN: Mr Bloom! You down here in the haunts of sin! I caught you
+nicely! Scamp!
+
+BLOOM: _(Hurriedly)_ Not so loud my name. Whatever do you think of me?
+Don't give me away. Walls have ears. How do you do? It's ages since I.
+You're looking splendid. Absolutely it. Seasonable weather we are having
+this time of year. Black refracts heat. Short cut home here. Interesting
+quarter. Rescue of fallen women. Magdalen asylum. I am the secretary...
+
+MRS BREEN: _(Holds up a finger)_ Now, don't tell a big fib! I know
+somebody won't like that. O just wait till I see Molly! _(Slily)_
+Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you!
+
+BLOOM: _(Looks behind)_ She often said she'd like to visit. Slumming.
+The exotic, you see. Negro servants in livery too if she had money.
+Othello black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at
+the Livermore christies. Bohee brothers. Sweep for that matter.
+
+_(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks,
+upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes,
+leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands
+jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they
+rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to
+back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)_
+
+TOM AND SAM:
+
+ There's someone in the house with Dina
+ There's someone in the house, I know,
+ There's someone in the house with Dina
+ Playing on the old banjo.
+
+_(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling,
+chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(With a sour tenderish smile)_ A little frivol, shall we, if
+you are so inclined? Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a
+fraction of a second?
+
+MRS BREEN: _(Screams gaily)_ O, you ruck! You ought to see yourself!
+
+BLOOM: For old sake' sake. I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage
+mingling of our different little conjugials. You know I had a soft
+corner for you. _(Gloomily)_ 'Twas I sent you that valentine of the dear
+gazelle.
+
+MRS BREEN: Glory Alice, you do look a holy show! Killing simply. _(She
+puts out her hand inquisitively)_ What are you hiding behind your back?
+Tell us, there's a dear.
+
+BLOOM: _(Seizes her wrist with his free hand)_ Josie Powell that was,
+prettiest deb in Dublin. How time flies by! Do you remember, harking
+back in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina
+Simpson's housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game,
+finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading? Subject, what is in this
+snuffbox?
+
+MRS BREEN: You were the lion of the night with your seriocomic
+recitation and you looked the part. You were always a favourite with the
+ladies.
+
+BLOOM: _(Squire of dames, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings,
+blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pearl
+studs, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand)_ Ladies and
+gentlemen, I give you Ireland, home and beauty.
+
+MRS BREEN: The dear dead days beyond recall. Love's old sweet song.
+
+BLOOM: _(Meaningfully dropping his voice)_ I confess I'm teapot with
+curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a little teapot
+at present.
+
+MRS BREEN: _(Gushingly)_ Tremendously teapot! London's teapot and I'm
+simply teapot all over me! _(She rubs sides with him)_ After the parlour
+mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase
+ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.
+
+BLOOM: _(Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon, his
+fingers and thumb passing slowly down to her soft moist meaty palm which
+she surrenders gently)_ The witching hour of night. I took the splinter
+out of this hand, carefully, slowly. _(Tenderly, as he slips on her
+finger a ruby ring) Là ci darem la mano._
+
+MRS BREEN: _(In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, a
+tinsel sylph's diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside
+her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly)
+Voglio e non._ You're hot! You're scalding! The left hand nearest the
+heart.
+
+BLOOM: When you made your present choice they said it was beauty and
+the beast. I can never forgive you for that. _(His clenched fist at
+his brow)_ Think what it means. All you meant to me then. _(Hoarsely)_
+Woman, it's breaking me!
+
+_(Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards,
+shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his dull beard thrust out,
+muttering to right and left. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the pall of
+the ace of spades, dogs him to left and right, doubled in laughter.)_
+
+ALF BERGAN: _(Points jeering at the sandwichboards)_ U. p: Up.
+
+MRS BREEN: _(To Bloom)_ High jinks below stairs. _(She gives him the
+glad eye)_ Why didn't you kiss the spot to make it well? You wanted to.
+
+BLOOM: _(Shocked)_ Molly's best friend! Could you?
+
+MRS BREEN: _(Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss)_
+Hnhn. The answer is a lemon. Have you a little present for me there?
+
+BLOOM: _(Offhandedly)_ Kosher. A snack for supper. The home without
+potted meat is incomplete. I was at _Leah._ Mrs Bandmann Palmer.
+Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. Unfortunately threw away the
+programme. Rattling good place round there for pigs' feet. Feel.
+
+_(Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his head, appears
+weighted to one side by the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which
+a skull and crossbones are painted in white limewash. He opens it
+and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and
+tightpacked pills.)_
+
+RICHIE: Best value in Dub.
+
+_(Bald Pat, bothered beetle, stands on the curbstone, folding his
+napkin, waiting to wait.)_
+
+PAT: _(Advances with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy)_ Steak and
+kidney. Bottle of lager. Hee hee hee. Wait till I wait.
+
+RICHIE: Goodgod. Inev erate inall...
+
+_(With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. The navvy, lurching by,
+gores him with his flaming pronghorn.)_
+
+RICHIE: _(With a cry of pain, his hand to his back)_ Ah! Bright's!
+Lights!
+
+BLOOM: _(Ooints to the navvy)_ A spy. Don't attract attention. I hate
+stupid crowds. I am not on pleasure bent. I am in a grave predicament.
+
+MRS BREEN: Humbugging and deluthering as per usual with your cock and
+bull story.
+
+BLOOM: I want to tell you a little secret about how I came to be here.
+But you must never tell. Not even Molly. I have a most particular
+reason.
+
+MRS BREEN: _(All agog)_ O, not for worlds.
+
+BLOOM: Let's walk on. Shall us?
+
+MRS BREEN: Let's.
+
+_(The bawd makes an unheeded sign. Bloom walks on with Mrs Breen. The
+terrier follows, whining piteously, wagging his tail.)_
+
+THE BAWD: Jewman's melt!
+
+BLOOM: _(In an oatmeal sporting suit, a sprig of woodbine in the lapel,
+tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white
+spats, fawn dustcoat on his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in
+bandolier and a grey billycock hat)_ Do you remember a long long time,
+years and years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was
+weaned when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was it?
+
+MRS BREEN: _(In smart Saxe tailormade, white velours hat and spider
+veil)_ Leopardstown.
+
+BLOOM: I mean, Leopardstown. And Molly won seven shillings on a three
+year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old
+fiveseater shanderadan of a waggonette you were in your heyday then and
+you had on that new hat of white velours with a surround of molefur that
+Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down to nineteen and
+eleven, a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and I'll lay you what
+you like she did it on purpose...
+
+MRS BREEN: She did, of course, the cat! Don't tell me! Nice adviser!
+
+BLOOM: Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the other ducky
+little tammy toque with the bird of paradise wing in it that I admired
+on you and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was a
+pity to kill it, you cruel naughty creature, little mite of a thing with
+a heart the size of a fullstop.
+
+MRS BREEN: _(Squeezes his arm, simpers)_ Naughty cruel I was!
+
+BLOOM: _(Low, secretly, ever more rapidly)_ And Molly was eating a
+sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Frankly,
+though she had her advisers or admirers, I never cared much for her
+style. She was...
+
+MRS BREEN: Too...
+
+BLOOM: Yes. And Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O'Reilly
+were mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses,
+the tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses
+was her name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I
+ever heard or read or knew or came across...
+
+MRS BREEN: _(Eagerly)_ Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
+
+_(She fades from his side. Followed by the whining dog he walks on
+towards hellsgates. In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her
+feet apart, pisses cowily. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers
+listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous
+humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed
+sodden playfight.)_
+
+THE GAFFER: _(Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout)_ And when Cairns
+came down from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing
+it into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the
+shavings for Derwan's plasterers.
+
+THE LOITERERS: _(Guffaw with cleft palates)_ O jays!
+
+_(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Spattered with size and lime of their
+lodges they frisk limblessly about him.)_
+
+BLOOM: Coincidence too. They think it funny. Anything but that. Broad
+daylight. Trying to walk. Lucky no woman.
+
+THE LOITERERS: Jays, that's a good one. Glauber salts. O jays, into the
+men's porter.
+
+_(Bloom passes. Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled,
+call from lanes, doors, corners.)_
+
+THE WHORES:
+
+ Are you going far, queer fellow?
+ How's your middle leg?
+ Got a match on you?
+ Eh, come here till I stiffen it for you.
+
+
+_(He plodges through their sump towards the lighted street beyond. From
+a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk.
+In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the navvy and the two
+redcoats.)_
+
+THE NAVVY: _(Belching)_ Where's the bloody house?
+
+THE SHEBEENKEEPER: Purdon street. Shilling a bottle of stout.
+Respectable woman.
+
+THE NAVVY: _(Gripping the two redcoats, staggers forward with them)_
+Come on, you British army!
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Behind his back)_ He aint half balmy.
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Laughs)_ What ho!
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(To the navvy)_ Portobello barracks canteen. You ask for
+Carr. Just Carr.
+
+THE NAVVY: _(Shouts)_
+
+We are the boys. Of Wexford.
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: Say! What price the sergeantmajor?
+
+PRIVATE CARR: Bennett? He's my pal. I love old Bennett.
+
+THE NAVVY: _(Shouts)_
+
+ The galling chain.
+ And free our native land.
+
+_(He staggers forward, dragging them with him. Bloom stops, at fault.
+The dog approaches, his tongue outlolling, panting)_
+
+BLOOM: Wildgoose chase this. Disorderly houses. Lord knows where they
+are gone. Drunks cover distance double quick. Nice mixup. Scene at
+Westland row. Then jump in first class with third ticket. Then too far.
+Train with engine behind. Might have taken me to Malahide or a siding
+for the night or collision. Second drink does it. Once is a dose. What
+am I following him for? Still, he's the best of that lot. If I hadn't
+heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have
+met. Kismet. He'll lose that cash. Relieving office here. Good biz for
+cheapjacks, organs. What do ye lack? Soon got, soon gone. Might have
+lost my life too with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only
+for presence of mind. Can't always save you, though. If I had passed
+Truelock's window that day two minutes later would have been shot.
+Absence of body. Still if bullet only went through my coat get damages
+for shock, five hundred pounds. What was he? Kildare street club toff.
+God help his gamekeeper.
+
+_(He gazes ahead, reading on the wall a scrawled chalk legend_ Wet Dream
+_and a phallic design._) Odd! Molly drawing on the frosted carriagepane
+at Kingstown. What's that like? _(Gaudy dollwomen loll in the lighted
+doorways, in window embrasures, smoking birdseye cigarettes. The
+odour of the sicksweet weed floats towards him in slow round ovalling
+wreaths.)_
+
+THE WREATHS: Sweet are the sweets. Sweets of sin.
+
+BLOOM: My spine's a bit limp. Go or turn? And this food? Eat it and get
+all pigsticky. Absurd I am. Waste of money. One and eightpence too
+much. _(The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand,
+wagging his tail.)_ Strange how they take to me. Even that brute today.
+Better speak to him first. Like women they like _rencontres._ Stinks
+like a polecat. _Chacun son gout_. He might be mad. Dogdays. Uncertain
+in his movements. Good fellow! Fido! Good fellow! Garryowen! _(The
+wolfdog sprawls on his back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his
+long black tongue lolling out.)_ Influence of his surroundings. Give
+and have done with it. Provided nobody. _(Calling encouraging words he
+shambles back with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the setter into
+a dark stalestunk corner. He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the
+crubeen softly but holds back and feels the trotter.)_ Sizeable for
+threepence. But then I have it in my left hand. Calls for more effort.
+Why? Smaller from want of use. O, let it slide. Two and six.
+
+_(With regret he lets the unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. The
+mastiff mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed,
+crunching the bones. Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant.
+They murmur together.)_
+
+THE WATCH: Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom.
+
+_(Each lays hand on Bloom's shoulder.)_
+
+FIRST WATCH: Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance.
+
+BLOOM: _(Stammers)_ I am doing good to others.
+
+_(A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises hungrily from Liffey slime with
+Banbury cakes in their beaks.)_
+
+THE GULLS: Kaw kave kankury kake.
+
+BLOOM: The friend of man. Trained by kindness.
+
+_(He points. Bob Doran, toppling from a high barstool, sways over the
+munching spaniel.)_
+
+BOB DORAN: Towser. Give us the paw. Give the paw.
+
+_(The bulldog growls, his scruff standing, a gobbet of pig's knuckle
+between his molars through which rabid scumspittle dribbles. Bob Doran
+fills silently into an area.)_
+
+SECOND WATCH: Prevention of cruelty to animals.
+
+BLOOM: _(Enthusiastically)_ A noble work! I scolded that tramdriver on
+Harold's cross bridge for illusing the poor horse with his harness scab.
+Bad French I got for my pains. Of course it was frosty and the last
+tram. All tales of circus life are highly demoralising.
+
+_(Signor Maffei, passionpale, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs
+in his shirtfront, steps forward, holding a circus paperhoop, a
+curling carriagewhip and a revolver with which he covers the gorging
+boarhound.)_
+
+SIGNOR MAFFEI: _(With a sinister smile)_ Ladies and gentlemen, my
+educated greyhound. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my
+patent spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted
+thong. Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to
+heel, no matter how fractious, even _Leo ferox_ there, the Libyan
+maneater. A redhot crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part
+produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the thinking hyena. _(He glares)_ I possess
+the Indian sign. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers.
+_(With a bewitching smile)_ I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the pride
+of the ring.
+
+FIRST WATCH: Come. Name and address.
+
+BLOOM: I have forgotten for the moment. Ah, yes! _(He takes off his high
+grade hat, saluting)_ Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. You have heard
+of von Blum Pasha. Umpteen millions. _Donnerwetter!_ Owns half Austria.
+Egypt. Cousin.
+
+FIRST WATCH: Proof.
+
+_(A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's hat.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(In red fez, cadi's dress coat with broad green sash, wearing
+a false badge of the Legion of Honour, picks up the card hastily and
+offers it)_ Allow me. My club is the Junior Army and Navy. Solicitors:
+Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.
+
+FIRST WATCH: _(Reads)_ Henry Flower. No fixed abode. Unlawfully watching
+and besetting.
+
+SECOND WATCH: An alibi. You are cautioned.
+
+BLOOM: _(Produces from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower)_ This
+is the flower in question. It was given me by a man I don't know his
+name. _(Plausibly)_ You know that old joke, rose of Castile. Bloom. The
+change of name. Virag. _(He murmurs privately and confidentially)_ We
+are engaged you see, sergeant. Lady in the case. Love entanglement. _(He
+shoulders the second watch gently)_ Dash it all. It's a way we gallants
+have in the navy. Uniform that does it. _(He turns gravely to the first
+watch)_ Still, of course, you do get your Waterloo sometimes. Drop in
+some evening and have a glass of old Burgundy. _(To the second watch
+gaily)_ I'll introduce you, inspector. She's game. Do it in the shake of
+a lamb's tail.
+
+_(A dark mercurialised face appears, leading a veiled figure.)_
+
+THE DARK MERCURY: The Castle is looking for him. He was drummed out of
+the army.
+
+MARTHA: _(Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck, a copy of
+the_ Irish Times _in her hand, in tone of reproach, pointing)_ Henry!
+Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name.
+
+FIRST WATCH: _(Sternly)_ Come to the station.
+
+BLOOM: _(Scared, hats himself, steps back, then, plucking at his heart
+and lifting his right forearm on the square, he gives the sign and
+dueguard of fellowcraft)_ No, no, worshipful master, light of love.
+Mistaken identity. The Lyons mail. Lesurques and Dubosc. You remember
+the Childs fratricide case. We medical men. By striking him dead with
+a hatchet. I am wrongfully accused. Better one guilty escape than
+ninetynine wrongfully condemned.
+
+MARTHA: _(Sobbing behind her veil)_ Breach of promise. My real name
+is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I'll tell my
+brother, the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.
+
+BLOOM: _(Behind his hand)_ She's drunk. The woman is inebriated. _(He
+murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim)_ Shitbroleeth.
+
+SECOND WATCH: _(Tears in his eyes, to Bloom)_ You ought to be thoroughly
+well ashamed of yourself.
+
+BLOOM: Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare's nest. I am
+a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable
+married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street.
+My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant
+upstanding gentleman, what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy,
+one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his
+majority for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift.
+
+FIRST WATCH: Regiment.
+
+BLOOM: _(Turns to the gallery)_ The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the
+earth, known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms
+up there among you. The R. D. F., with our own Metropolitan police,
+guardians of our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men,
+as physique, in the service of our sovereign.
+
+A VOICE: Turncoat! Up the Boers! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?
+
+BLOOM: _(His hand on the shoulder of the first watch)_ My old dad too
+was a J. P. I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with
+the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under general
+Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was
+mentioned in dispatches. I did all a white man could. _(With quiet
+feeling)_ Jim Bludso. Hold her nozzle again the bank.
+
+FIRST WATCH: Profession or trade.
+
+BLOOM: Well, I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist. In fact
+we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the
+inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected
+with the British and Irish press. If you ring up...
+
+_(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a quill between his teeth. His
+scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat. He dangles
+a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds with the other hand a
+telephone receiver nozzle to his ear.)_
+
+MYLES CRAWFORD: _(His cock's wattles wagging)_ Hello, seventyseven
+eightfour. Hello. _Freeman's Urinal_ and _Weekly Arsewipe_ here.
+Paralyse Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?
+
+_(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate
+morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing,
+creased lavender trousers and patent boots. He carries a large portfolio
+labelled_ Matcham's Masterstrokes.)
+
+BEAUFOY: _(Drawls)_ No, you aren't. Not by a long shot if I know it.
+I don't see it that's all. No born gentleman, no-one with the most
+rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly
+loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak
+masquerading as a litterateur. It's perfectly obvious that with the most
+inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling copy, really
+gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath
+suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions, with which
+your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the
+kingdom.
+
+BLOOM: _(Murmurs with hangdog meekness glum)_ That bit about the
+laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may...
+
+BEAUFOY: _(His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court)_ You
+funny ass, you! You're too beastly awfully weird for words! I don't
+think you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard.
+My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my
+lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses' fees, shan't we? We are
+considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw
+of Rheims, who has not even been to a university.
+
+BLOOM: _(Indistinctly)_ University of life. Bad art.
+
+BEAUFOY: _(Shouts)_ It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral
+rottenness of the man! _(He extends his portfolio)_ We have here damning
+evidence, the _corpus delicti_, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work
+disfigured by the hallmark of the beast.
+
+A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY:
+
+Moses, Moses, king of the jews, Wiped his arse in the Daily News.
+
+BLOOM: _(Bravely)_ Overdrawn.
+
+BEAUFOY: You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you
+rotter! _(To the court)_ Why, look at the man's private life! Leading
+a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be
+mentioned in mixed society! The archconspirator of the age!
+
+BLOOM: _(To the court)_ And he, a bachelor, how...
+
+FIRST WATCH: The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.
+
+THE CRIER: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!
+
+_(Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket
+on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand.)_
+
+SECOND WATCH: Another! Are you of the unfortunate class?
+
+MARY DRISCOLL: _(Indignantly)_ I'm not a bad one. I bear a respectable
+character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation,
+six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had to leave
+owing to his carryings on.
+
+FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with?
+
+MARY DRISCOLL: He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself
+as poor as I am.
+
+BLOOM: _(In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless
+slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled: softly)_ I treated you white.
+I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station.
+Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering.
+There's a medium in all things. Play cricket.
+
+MARY DRISCOLL: _(Excitedly)_ As God is looking down on me this night if
+ever I laid a hand to them oysters!
+
+FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Did something happen?
+
+MARY DRISCOLL: He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour,
+when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety
+pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he
+interfered twict with my clothing.
+
+BLOOM: She counterassaulted.
+
+MARY DRISCOLL: _(Scornfully)_ I had more respect for the scouringbrush,
+so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked: keep it
+quiet.
+
+_(General laughter.)_
+
+GEORGE FOTTRELL: _(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly)_ Order in
+court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.
+
+_(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins
+a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in
+his stirring address to the grand jury. He was down and out but, though
+branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to
+retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to
+nature as a purely domestic animal. A sevenmonths' child, he had been
+carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There
+might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over
+a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post,
+to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the
+affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An
+acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate
+of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain
+refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of
+loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly
+rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one
+and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to
+the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or
+model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour
+reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the
+boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what
+times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with
+four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain
+ever..._
+
+_(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that
+they cannot hear.)_
+
+LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: _(Without looking up from their notebooks)_
+Loosen his boots.
+
+PROFESSOR MACHUGH: _(From the presstable, coughs and calls)_ Cough it
+up, man. Get it out in bits.
+
+_(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket. A large bucket.
+Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street Gripe, yes. Quite bad.
+A plasterer's bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery.
+Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial
+moment. He did not look in the bucket Nobody. Rather a mess. Not
+completely._ A Titbits _back number_.)
+
+_(Uproar and catcalls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash,
+dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of stickingplaster across
+his nose, talks inaudibly.)_
+
+J. J. O'MOLLOY: _(In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with
+a voice of pained protest)_ This is no place for indecent levity at
+the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a
+beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My
+client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as
+a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up
+misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on
+by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence
+being quite permitted in my client's native place, the land of the
+Pharaoh. _Prima facie_, I put it to you that there was no attempt at
+carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of
+by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would
+deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and
+somnambulism in my client's family. If the accused could speak he could
+a tale unfold--one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between
+the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from
+cobbler's weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian
+extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.
+
+BLOOM: _(Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar's vest and trousers,
+apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and looks about
+him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches
+his belt sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes
+the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.)_ Him makee velly muchee fine
+night. _(He begins to lilt simply)_
+
+ Li li poo lil chile
+ Blingee pigfoot evly night
+ Payee two shilly...
+
+_(He is howled down.)_
+
+J. J. O'MOLLOY: _(Hotly to the populace)_ This is a lonehand fight. By
+Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this
+fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has
+superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically,
+without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused
+was not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered
+with. The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very
+own daughter. _(Bloom takes J. J. O'Molloy's hand and raises it to his
+lips.)_ I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the
+hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My
+client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to
+do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or
+cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard,
+responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. He
+wants to go straight. I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down
+on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property
+at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be
+shown. _(To Bloom)_ I suggest that you will do the handsome thing.
+
+BLOOM: A penny in the pound.
+
+_(The image of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in
+silver haze is projected on the wall. Moses Dlugacz, ferreteyed albino,
+in blue dungarees, stands up in the gallery, holding in each hand an
+orange citron and a pork kidney.)_
+
+DLUGACZ: _(Hoarsely)_ Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W.13.
+
+_(J. J. O'Molloy steps on to a low plinth and holds the lapel of his
+coat with solemnity. His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with
+sunken eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F.
+Taylor. He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the
+galloping tide of rosepink blood.)_
+
+J.J.O'MOLLOY: _(Almost voicelessly)_ Excuse me. I am suffering from a
+severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words.
+_(He assumes the avine head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of
+Seymour Bushe.)_ When the angel's book comes to be opened if aught
+that the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of
+soultransfiguring deserves to live I say accord the prisoner at the bar
+the sacred benefit of the doubt. _(A paper with something written on it
+is handed into court._)
+
+BLOOM: _(In court dress)_ Can give best references. Messrs Callan,
+Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon,
+ex lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the
+highest... Queens of Dublin society. _(Carelessly)_ I was just chatting
+this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and
+lady Ball, astronomer royal at the levee. Sir Bob, I said...
+
+MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength
+ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a comb of
+brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair)_ Arrest him, constable. He
+wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was
+in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James
+Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as
+I sat in a box of the _Theatre Royal_ at a command performance of _La
+Cigale_. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures
+to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following
+Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the post a work
+of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled _The Girl with the Three
+Pairs of Stays_.
+
+MRS BELLINGHAM: _(In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the
+nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell
+quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff)_
+Also to me. Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because
+he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day
+during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the
+wastepipe and the ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently
+he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said,
+in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the
+information that it was ablossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined
+from a forcingcase of the model farm.
+
+MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Shame on him!
+
+_(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward)_
+
+THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: _(Screaming)_ Stop thief! Hurrah there,
+Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!
+
+SECOND WATCH: _(Produces handcuffs)_ Here are the darbies.
+
+MRS BELLINGHAM: He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome
+compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my
+frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself
+as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate
+proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery
+and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable,
+a buck's head couped or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether
+extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and
+eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which,
+he said, he could conjure up. He urged me (stating that he felt it
+his mission in life to urge me) to defile the marriage bed, to commit
+adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.
+
+THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(In amazon costume, hard hat,
+jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets
+with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she
+strikes her welt constantly)_ Also me. Because he saw me on the polo
+ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of
+Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger
+Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob
+_Centaur._ This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car
+and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold
+after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still.
+It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as
+he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit
+intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me
+to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He
+implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise
+him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most
+vicious horsewhipping.
+
+MRS BELLINGHAM: Me too.
+
+MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too.
+
+_(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters
+received from Bloom.)_
+
+THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Stamps her jingling spurs in a
+sudden paroxysm of fury)_ I will, by the God above me. I'll scourge the
+pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive.
+
+BLOOM: _(His eyes closing, quails expectantly)_ Here? _(He squirms)_
+Again! _(He pants cringing)_ I love the danger.
+
+THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: Very much so! I'll make it hot for
+you. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.
+
+MRS BELLINGHAM: Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and
+stripes on it!
+
+MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Disgraceful! There's no excuse for him! A married
+man!
+
+BLOOM: All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling
+glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.
+
+THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Laughs derisively)_ O, did you, my
+fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your
+life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained
+for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.
+
+MRS BELLINGHAM: _(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively)_
+Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within
+an inch of his life. The cat-o'-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.
+
+BLOOM: _(Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien)_ O
+cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet.
+Let me off this once. _(He offers the other cheek)_
+
+MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(Severely)_ Don't do so on any account, Mrs
+Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!
+
+THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Unbuttoning her gauntlet
+violently)_ I'll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since
+he was pupped! To dare address me! I'll flog him black and blue in
+the public streets. I'll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a
+wellknown cuckold. _(She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air)_
+Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick!
+Ready?
+
+BLOOM: _(Trembling, beginning to obey)_ The weather has been so warm.
+
+_(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)_
+
+DAVY STEPHENS: _Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph_
+with Saint Patrick's Day supplement. Containing the new addresses of all
+the cuckolds in Dublin.
+
+_(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and
+exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend
+John Hughes S.J. bend low.)_
+
+THE TIMEPIECE: _(Unportalling)_
+
+ Cuckoo.
+ Cuckoo.
+ Cuckoo.
+
+_(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)_
+
+THE QUOITS: Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.
+
+_(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the jurybox
+the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon
+Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford,
+Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the featureless face of a
+Nameless One.)_
+
+THE NAMELESS ONE: Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised
+her.
+
+THE JURORS: _(All their heads turned to his voice)_ Really?
+
+THE NAMELESS ONE: _(Snarls)_ Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.
+
+THE JURORS: _(All their heads lowered in assent)_ Most of us thought as
+much.
+
+FIRST WATCH: He is a marked man. Another girl's plait cut. Wanted: Jack
+the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.
+
+SECOND WATCH: _(Awed, whispers)_ And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.
+
+THE CRIER: _(Loudly)_ Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a
+wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public
+nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of
+assizes the most honourable...
+
+_(His Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial
+garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded. He bears in his
+arms an umbrella sceptre. From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic
+ramshorns.)_
+
+THE RECORDER: I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid
+Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! _(He dons the black cap)_ Let
+him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and
+detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure
+and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not
+at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him. _(A
+black skullcap descends upon his head.)_
+
+_(The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry
+Clay.)_
+
+LONG JOHN FANNING: _(Scowls and calls with rich rolling utterance)_
+Who'll hang Judas Iscariot?
+
+_(H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's
+apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life
+preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs
+grimly his grappling hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)_
+
+RUMBOLD: _(To the recorder with sinister familiarity)_ Hanging Harry,
+your Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or
+nothing.
+
+_(The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)_
+
+THE BELLS: Heigho! Heigho!
+
+BLOOM: _(Desperately)_ Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence.
+Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzee. _(Breathlessly)_ Pelvic
+basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. _(Overcome with emotion)_ I left
+the precincts. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing) Hynes, may
+I speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you
+want a little more...
+
+HYNES: _(Coldly)_ You are a perfect stranger.
+
+SECOND WATCH: _(Points to the corner)_ The bomb is here.
+
+FIRST WATCH: Infernal machine with a time fuse.
+
+BLOOM: No, no. Pig's feet. I was at a funeral.
+
+FIRST WATCH: _(Draws his truncheon)_ Liar!
+
+_(The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy
+Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath.
+He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown
+mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all
+the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)_
+
+PADDY DIGNAM: _(In a hollow voice)_ It is true. It was my funeral.
+Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease
+from natural causes.
+
+_(He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(In triumph)_ You hear?
+
+PADDY DIGNAM: Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list!
+
+BLOOM: The voice is the voice of Esau.
+
+SECOND WATCH: _(Blesses himself)_ How is that possible?
+
+FIRST WATCH: It is not in the penny catechism.
+
+PADDY DIGNAM: By metempsychosis. Spooks.
+
+A VOICE: O rocks.
+
+PADDY DIGNAM: _(Earnestly)_ Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton,
+solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk.
+Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The
+poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that
+bottle of sherry. _(He looks round him)_ A lamp. I must satisfy an
+animal need. That buttermilk didn't agree with me.
+
+_(The portly figure of John O'Connell, caretaker, stands forth, holding
+a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey,
+chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap,
+holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.)_
+
+FATHER COFFEY: _(Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak)_ Namine.
+Jacobs. Vobiscuits. Amen.
+
+JOHN O'CONNELL: _(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone)_ Dignam,
+Patrick T, deceased.
+
+PADDY DIGNAM: _(With pricked up ears, winces)_ Overtones. _(He wriggles
+forward and places an ear to the ground)_ My master's voice!
+
+JOHN O'CONNELL: Burial docket letter number U. P. eightyfive thousand.
+Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.
+
+_(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail
+stiffpointcd, his ears cocked.)_
+
+PADDY DIGNAM: Pray for the repose of his soul.
+
+_(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether
+over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on
+fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam's voice, muffled, is
+heard baying under ground:_ Dignam's dead and gone below. _Tom Rochford,
+robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his twocolumned
+machine.)_
+
+TOM ROCHFORD: _(A hand to his breastbone, bows)_ Reuben J. A florin I
+find him. _(He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare)_ My turn now on.
+Follow me up to Carlow.
+
+_(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the
+coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble, eyes of nought. All recedes.
+Bloom plodges forward again through the sump. Kisses chirp amid
+the rifts of fog a piano sounds. He stands before a lighted house,
+listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers fly about him,
+twittering, warbling, cooing.)_
+
+THE KISSES: _(Warbling)_ Leo! _(Twittering)_ Icky licky micky sticky for
+Leo! _(Cooing)_ Coo coocoo! Yummyyum, Womwom! _(Warbling)_ Big comebig!
+Pirouette! Leopopold! _(Twittering)_ Leeolee! _(Warbling)_ O Leo!
+
+_(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks,
+silvery sequins.)_
+
+BLOOM: A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.
+
+_(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three
+bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips
+down the steps and accosts him.)_
+
+ZOE: Are you looking for someone? He's inside with his friend.
+
+BLOOM: Is this Mrs Mack's?
+
+ZOE: No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse.
+Mother Slipperslapper. _(Familiarly)_ She's on the job herself tonight
+with the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for
+her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today.
+_(Suspiciously)_ You're not his father, are you?
+
+BLOOM: Not I!
+
+ZOE: You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?
+
+_(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand glides over his
+left thigh.)_
+
+ZOE: How's the nuts?
+
+BLOOM: Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier, I suppose.
+One in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.
+
+ZOE: _(In sudden alarm)_ You've a hard chancre.
+
+BLOOM: Not likely.
+
+ZOE: I feel it.
+
+_(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard
+black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist
+lips.)_
+
+BLOOM: A talisman. Heirloom.
+
+ZOE: For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?
+
+_(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm,
+cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by
+note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her
+eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)_
+
+ZOE: You'll know me the next time.
+
+BLOOM: _(Forlornly)_ I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to...
+
+_(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round
+their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong
+hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by
+the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity nude, white,
+still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth
+roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes,
+strangely murmuring.)_
+
+ZOE: _(Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously
+smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater) Schorach ani wenowach,
+benoith Hierushaloim._
+
+BLOOM: _(Fascinated)_ I thought you were of good stock by your accent.
+
+ZOE: And you know what thought did?
+
+_(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, sending on
+him a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a
+sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat
+awkward hand)_ Are you a Dublin girl?
+
+ZOE: _(Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil)_ No bloody
+fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?
+
+BLOOM: _(As before)_ Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish
+device. _(Lewdly)_ The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder
+of rank weed.
+
+ZOE: Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.
+
+BLOOM: _(In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating
+tie and apache cap)_ Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Ralegh brought
+from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of
+pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart,
+memory, will understanding, all. That is to say he brought the poison
+a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the
+food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!
+
+_(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)_
+
+THE CHIMES: Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!
+
+BLOOM: _(In alderman's gown and chain)_ Electors of Arran Quay, Inns
+Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I say,
+from the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future.
+That's my programme. _Cui bono_? But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in
+their phantom ship of finance...
+
+AN ELECTOR: Three times three for our future chief magistrate!
+
+_(The aurora borealis of the torchlight procession leaps.)_
+
+THE TORCHBEARERS: Hooray!
+
+_(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the city
+shake hands with Bloom and congratulate him. Timothy Harrington, late
+thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold chain and
+white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens.
+They nod vigorously in agreement.)_
+
+LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON: _(In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral
+chain and large white silk scarf)_ That alderman sir Leo Bloom's speech
+be printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which
+he was born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the
+thoroughfare hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth
+designated Boulevard Bloom.
+
+COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK: Carried unanimously.
+
+BLOOM: _(Impassionedly)_ These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as
+they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they?
+Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving
+apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual
+murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts
+upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are
+grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges
+in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for
+rever and ever and ev...
+
+_(Prolonged applause. Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring
+up. A streamer bearing the legends_ Cead Mile Failte _and_ Mah Ttob
+Melek Israel _Spans the street. All the windows are thronged with
+sightseers, chiefly ladies. Along the route the regiments of the
+royal Dublin Fusiliers, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the Cameron
+Highlanders and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back
+the crowd. Boys from High school are perched on the lampposts,
+telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings,
+rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the cloud appears. A
+fife and drum band is heard in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. The
+beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and
+waving oriental palms. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high,
+surrounded by pennons of the civic flag. The van of the procession
+appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard
+tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are
+followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of
+Dublin, his lordship the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the
+mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish
+representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth
+of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the
+saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop
+of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of
+Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William
+Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief
+rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist, anabaptist,
+methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society
+of friends. After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands
+with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper
+canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers,
+chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers,
+Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers,
+undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters,
+assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers,
+fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository
+hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers,
+egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. After
+them march gentlemen of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter,
+Gold Stick, the master of horse, the lord great chamberlain, the earl
+marshal, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's
+iron crown, the chalice and bible. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet.
+Beefeaters reply, winding clarions of welcome. Under an arch of triumph
+Bloom appears, bareheaded, in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with
+ermine, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the dove,
+the curtana. He is seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson
+tail, richly caparisoned, with golden headstall. Wild excitement. The
+ladies from their balconies throw down rosepetals. The air is perfumed
+with essences. The men cheer. Bloom's boys run amid the bystanders with
+branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.)_
+
+BLOOM'S BOYS:
+
+ The wren, the wren,
+ The king of all birds,
+ Saint Stephen's his day
+ Was caught in the furze.
+
+
+A BLACKSMITH: _(Murmurs)_ For the honour of God! And is that Bloom? He
+scarcely looks thirtyone.
+
+A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER: That's the famous Bloom now, the world's greatest
+reformer. Hats off!
+
+_(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)_
+
+A MILLIONAIRESS: _(Richly)_ Isn't he simply wonderful?
+
+A NOBLEWOMAN: _(Nobly)_ All that man has seen!
+
+A FEMINIST: _(Masculinely)_ And done!
+
+A BELLHANGER: A classic face! He has the forehead of a thinker.
+
+_(Bloom's weather. A sunburst appears in the northwest.)_
+
+THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted
+emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very
+puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!
+
+ALL: God save Leopold the First!
+
+BLOOM: _(In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and
+Connor, with dignity)_ Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.
+
+WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: _(In purple stock and shovel hat)_
+Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your
+judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?
+
+BLOOM: _(Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears)_ So may the
+Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.
+
+MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: _(Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom's
+head) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem._ Leopold,
+Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!
+
+_(Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He
+ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put
+on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ
+church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar
+fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic
+designs. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and
+genuflecting.)_
+
+THE PEERS: I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly
+worship.
+
+_(Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor
+diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless
+intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception
+of message.)_
+
+BLOOM: My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix
+hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated
+our former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess
+Selene, the splendour of night.
+
+_(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black
+Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her
+head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of
+cheering.)_
+
+JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: _(Raises the royal standard)_ Illustrious Bloom!
+Successor to my famous brother!
+
+BLOOM: _(Embraces John Howard Parnell)_ We thank you from our heart,
+John, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of
+our common ancestors.
+
+_(The freedom of the city is presented to him embodied in a charter. The
+keys of Dublin, crossed on a crimson cushion, are given to him. He shows
+all that he is wearing green socks.)_
+
+TOM KERNAN: You deserve it, your honour.
+
+BLOOM: On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at
+Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with
+telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do
+we yield? No! We drive them headlong! Lo! We charge! Deploying to the
+left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering
+their warcry _Bonafide Sabaoth_, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.
+
+THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Hear! Hear!
+
+JOHN WYSE NOLAN: There's the man that got away James Stephens.
+
+A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: Bravo!
+
+AN OLD RESIDENT: You're a credit to your country, sir, that's what you
+are.
+
+AN APPLEWOMAN: He's a man like Ireland wants.
+
+BLOOM: My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell
+you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall
+ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem
+in the Nova Hibernia of the future.
+
+_(Thirtytwo workmen, wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland,
+under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem.
+It is a colossal edifice with crystal roof, built in the shape of a
+huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its
+extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Government
+offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses
+are razed to the ground. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and
+boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L. B. several paupers
+fill from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin, crowded with loyal
+sightseers, collapses.)_
+
+THE SIGHTSEERS: _(Dying) Morituri te salutant. (They die)_
+
+_(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an
+elongated finger at Bloom.)_
+
+THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Don't you believe a word he says. That man is
+Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.
+
+BLOOM: Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M'Intosh!
+
+_(A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his
+sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many
+powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing
+committees, are reported. Bloom's bodyguard distribute Maundy money,
+commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive
+Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in
+sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock,_
+billets doux _in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers
+of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days'
+indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes,
+season tickets available for all tramlines, coupons of the royal and
+privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of
+the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz (politic), Care of the
+Baby (infantilic), 50 Meals for 7/6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth?
+(historic), Expel that Pain (medic), Infant's Compendium of the
+Universe (cosmic), Let's All Chortle (hilaric), Canvasser's Vade Mecum
+(journalic), Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic), Who's Who in
+Space (astric), Songs that Reached Our Heart (melodic), Pennywise's Way
+to Wealth (parsimonic). A general rush and scramble. Women press forward
+to touch the hem of Bloom's robe. The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts
+through the throng, leaps on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks
+amid great acclamation. A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken.
+Babes and sucklings are held up.)_
+
+THE WOMEN: Little father! Little father!
+
+THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS:
+
+ Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,
+ Cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.
+
+
+_(Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the stomach.)_
+
+BABY BOARDMAN: _(Hiccups, curdled milk flowing from his mouth)_
+Hajajaja.
+
+BLOOM: _(Shaking hands with a blind stripling)_ My more than Brother!
+_(Placing his arms round the shoulders of an old couple)_ Dear old
+friends! _(He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls)_
+Peep! Bopeep! _(He wheels twins in a perambulator)_ Ticktacktwo
+wouldyousetashoe? _(He performs juggler's tricks, draws red, orange,
+yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet silk handkerchiefs from his
+mouth)_ Roygbiv. 32 feet per second. _(He consoles a widow)_ Absence
+makes the heart grow younger. _(He dances the Highland fling with
+grotesque antics)_ Leg it, ye devils! _(He kisses the bedsores of a
+palsied veteran_) Honourable wounds! _(He trips up a fit policeman)_
+U. p: up. U. p: up. _(He whispers in the ear of a blushing waitress and
+laughs kindly)_ Ah, naughty, naughty! _(He eats a raw turnip offered
+him by Maurice Butterly, farmer)_ Fine! Splendid! _(He refuses to
+accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Hynes, journalist)_ My dear
+fellow, not at all! (He gives his coat to a beggar) Please accept. _(He
+takes part in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples)_
+Come on, boys! Wriggle it, girls!
+
+THE CITIZEN: _(Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald
+muffler)_ May the good God bless him!
+
+_(The rams' horns sound for silence. The standard of Zion is hoisted.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and
+reads solemnly)_ Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom
+Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim
+Meshuggah Talith.
+
+_(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town
+clerk.)_
+
+JIMMY HENRY: The Court of Conscience is now open. His Most Catholic
+Majesty will now administer open air justice. Free medical and legal
+advice, solution of doubles and other problems. All cordially invited.
+Given at this our loyal city of Dublin in the year I of the Paradisiacal
+Era.
+
+PADDY LEONARD: What am I to do about my rates and taxes?
+
+BLOOM: Pay them, my friend.
+
+PADDY LEONARD: Thank you.
+
+NOSEY FLYNN: Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance?
+
+BLOOM: _(Obdurately)_ Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are
+bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five
+pounds.
+
+J. J. O'MOLLOY: A Daniel did I say? Nay! A Peter O'Brien!
+
+NOSEY FLYNN: Where do I draw the five pounds?
+
+PISSER BURKE: For bladder trouble?
+
+BLOOM:
+
+ _Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil.,_ 20 minims
+ _Tinct. nux vom.,_ 5 minims
+ _Extr. taraxel. iiq.,_ 30 minims.
+ _Aq. dis. ter in die._
+
+CHRIS CALLINAN: What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of
+Aldebaran?
+
+BLOOM: Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. II.
+
+JOE HYNES: Why aren't you in uniform?
+
+BLOOM: When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the
+Austrian despot in a dank prison where was yours?
+
+BEN DOLLARD: Pansies?
+
+BLOOM: Embellish (beautify) suburban gardens.
+
+BEN DOLLARD: When twins arrive?
+
+BLOOM: Father (pater, dad) starts thinking.
+
+LARRY O'ROURKE: An eightday licence for my new premises. You remember
+me, sir Leo, when you were in number seven. I'm sending around a dozen
+of stout for the missus.
+
+BLOOM: _(Coldly)_ You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no
+presents.
+
+CROFTON: This is indeed a festivity.
+
+BLOOM: _(Solemnly)_ You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.
+
+ALEXANDER KEYES: When will we have our own house of keys?
+
+BLOOM: I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten
+commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile.
+Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses.
+Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and
+night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy
+must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence,
+bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal
+brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.
+Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay
+state.
+
+O'MADDEN BURKE: Free fox in a free henroost.
+
+DAVY BYRNE: _(Yawning)_ Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!
+
+BLOOM: Mixed races and mixed marriage.
+
+LENEHAN: What about mixed bathing?
+
+_(bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration.
+All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street Museum appears,
+dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked
+goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and
+plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce,
+Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural
+Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments,
+Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.)_
+
+FATHER FARLEY: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian
+seeking to overthrow our holy faith.
+
+MRS RIORDAN: _(Tears up her will)_ I'm disappointed in you! You bad man!
+
+MOTHER GROGAN: _(Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom)_ You beast! You
+abominable person!
+
+NOSEY FLYNN: Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.
+
+BLOOM: _(With rollicking humour)_
+
+ I vowed that I never would leave her,
+ She turned out a cruel deceiver.
+ With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.
+
+HOPPY HOLOHAN: Good old Bloom! There's nobody like him after all.
+
+PADDY LEONARD: Stage Irishman!
+
+BLOOM: What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of
+Casteele._(Laughter.)_
+
+LENEHAN: Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!
+
+THE VEILED SIBYL: _(Enthusiastically)_ I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it.
+I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest
+man on earth.
+
+BLOOM: _(Winks at the bystanders)_ I bet she's a bonny lassie.
+
+THEODORE PUREFOY: _(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket)_ He employs a
+mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.
+
+THE VEILED SIBYL: _(Stabs herself)_ My hero god! _(She dies)_
+
+_(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by
+stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening
+their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from
+the top of Nelson's Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness's brewery,
+asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging
+themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different
+storeys.)_
+
+ALEXANDER J DOWIE: _(Violently)_ Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the
+man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian
+men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat
+of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the
+cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite,
+bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse.
+A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his
+nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him.
+Caliban!
+
+THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He's as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!
+
+_(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper
+and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value,
+hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep's
+tails, odd pieces of fat.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Excitedly)_ This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again.
+By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry.
+He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the
+viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, _sgenl inn ban bata
+coisde gan capall._ I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex
+specialist, to give medical testimony on my behalf.
+
+DR MULLIGAN: _(In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow)_ Dr
+Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's
+private asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary
+epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of
+elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. There are
+marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also
+latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in
+consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a
+family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him
+to be more sinned against than sinning. I have made a pervaginal
+examination and, after application of the acid test to 5427 anal,
+axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be _virgo intacta._
+
+_(Bloom holds his high grade hat over his genital organs.)_
+
+DR MADDEN: Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming
+generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in
+spirits of wine in the national teratological museum.
+
+DR CROTTHERS: I have examined the patient's urine. It is albuminoid.
+Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent.
+
+DR PUNCH COSTELLO: The _fetor judaicus_ is most perceptible.
+
+DR DIXON: _(Reads a bill of health)_ Professor Bloom is a finished
+example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable.
+Many have found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint
+fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense.
+He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court
+missionary of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up
+everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that
+he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried
+grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt of pure Irish manufacture winter and
+summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one
+time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report
+states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the
+name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon
+to speak. He is about to have a baby.
+
+_(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American
+makes a street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, blank
+cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange,
+I. O. U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets
+are rapidly collected.)_
+
+BLOOM: O, I so want to be a mother.
+
+MRS THORNTON: _(In nursetender's gown)_ Embrace me tight, dear. You'll
+be soon over it. Tight, dear.
+
+_(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white
+children. They appear on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive
+plants. All the octuplets are handsome, with valuable metallic faces,
+wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern
+languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. Each
+has his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro,
+Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber,
+Vifargent, Panargyros. They are immediately appointed to positions of
+high public trust in several different countries as managing directors
+of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability
+companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates.)_
+
+A VOICE: Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?
+
+BLOOM: _(Darkly)_ You have said it.
+
+BROTHER BUZZ: Then perform a miracle like Father Charles.
+
+BANTAM LYONS: Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.
+
+_(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes
+through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the top ledge
+by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals
+several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face so as to resemble
+many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler,
+Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip
+van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild,
+Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot
+simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back,
+eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)_
+
+BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: _(In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as
+breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches
+and brown paper mitre) Leopoldi autem generatio._ Moses begat Noah
+and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O'Halloran and O'Halloran begat
+Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and
+Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat
+MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz
+and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat
+Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy
+Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat
+O'Donnell Magnus and O'Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum
+begat ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes
+begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat
+Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone
+begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely
+begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom _et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel._
+
+A DEADHAND: _(Writes on the wall)_ Bloom is a cod.
+
+CRAB: _(In bushranger's kit)_ What did you do in the cattlecreep behind
+Kilbarrack?
+
+A FEMALE INFANT: _(Shakes a rattle)_ And under Ballybough bridge?
+
+A HOLLYBUSH: And in the devil's glen?
+
+BLOOM: _(Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears
+filling from his left eye)_ Spare my past.
+
+THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: _(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook
+fair shillelaghs)_ Sjambok him!
+
+_(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms,
+his feet protruding. He whistles_ Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. _Artane
+orphans, joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate
+Mission, joining hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)_
+
+THE ARTANE ORPHANS:
+
+ You hig, you hog, you dirty dog!
+ You think the ladies love you!
+ THE PRISON GATE GIRLS:
+
+
+ If you see Kay
+ Tell him he may
+ See you in tea
+ Tell him from me.
+
+HORNBLOWER: _(In ephod and huntingcap, announces)_ And he shall carry
+the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness,
+and to Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him,
+yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.
+
+_(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide
+travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky
+and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their
+beards at Bloom.)_
+
+MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Belial! Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah!
+Abulafia! Recant!
+
+_(George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, a tailor's goose under his
+arm, presenting a bill)_
+
+MESIAS: To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
+
+BLOOM: _(Rubs his hands cheerfully)_ Just like old times. Poor Bloom!
+
+_(Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his
+shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)_
+
+REUBEN J: _(Whispers hoarsely)_ The squeak is out. A split is gone for
+the flatties. Nip the first rattler.
+
+THE FIRE BRIGADE: Pflaap!
+
+BROTHER BUZZ: _(Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of
+painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round
+his neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying)_ Forgive him his
+trespasses.
+
+_(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets
+fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)_
+
+THE CITIZEN: Thank heaven!
+
+BLOOM: _(In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid
+phoenix flames)_ Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.
+
+_(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of
+Erin, in black garments, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles
+in their hands, kneel down and pray.)_
+
+THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN:
+
+ Kidney of Bloom, pray for us
+ Flower of the Bath, pray for us
+ Mentor of Menton, pray for us
+ Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us
+ Charitable Mason, pray for us
+ Wandering Soap, pray for us
+ Sweets of Sin, pray for us
+ Music without Words, pray for us
+ Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us
+ Friend of all Frillies, pray for us
+ Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us
+ Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.
+
+_(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings
+the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the lord god omnipotent
+reigneth, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute,
+shrunken, carbonised.)_
+
+
+ZOE: Talk away till you're black in the face.
+
+BLOOM: _(In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an
+emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak
+pig by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye)_ Let me be going now, woman of
+the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the
+father and mother of a bating. _(With a tear in his eye)_ All insanity.
+Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not
+to be. Life's dream is o'er. End it peacefully. They can live on. _(He
+gazes far away mournfully)_ I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The
+blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. _(He breathes softly)_ No
+more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.
+
+ZOE: _(Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet)_ Honest? Till the next
+time. _(She sneers)_ Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or
+came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts!
+
+BLOOM: _(Bitterly)_ Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.
+I'm sick of it. Let everything rip.
+
+ZOE: _(In sudden sulks)_ I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a
+bleeding whore a chance.
+
+BLOOM: _(Repentantly)_ I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil.
+Where are you from? London?
+
+ZOE: _(Glibly)_ Hog's Norton where the pigs plays the organs. I'm
+Yorkshire born. _(She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple)_
+I say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a
+short time? Ten shillings?
+
+BLOOM: _(Smiles, nods slowly)_ More, houri, more.
+
+ZOE: And more's mother? _(She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws)_
+Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll
+peel off.
+
+BLOOM: _(Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled
+embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled
+pears)_ Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed
+monster. _(Earnestly)_ You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.
+
+ZOE: _(Flattered)_ What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for.
+_(She pats him)_ Come.
+
+BLOOM: Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.
+
+ZOE: Babby!
+
+BLOOM: _(In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair,
+fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a
+chubby finger, his moist tongue lolling and lisping)_ One two tlee: tlee
+tlwo tlone.
+
+THE BUCKLES: Love me. Love me not. Love me.
+
+ZOE: Silent means consent. _(With little parted talons she captures his
+hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor,
+luring him to doom.)_ Hot hands cold gizzard.
+
+_(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards
+the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her
+painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the
+lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)_
+
+THE MALE BRUTES: _(Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their
+loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro)_
+Good!
+
+_(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated.
+They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to
+his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)_
+
+ZOE: _(Her lucky hand instantly saving him)_ Hoopsa! Don't fall
+upstairs.
+
+BLOOM: The just man falls seven times. _(He stands aside at the
+threshold)_ After you is good manners.
+
+ZOE: Ladies first, gentlemen after.
+
+_(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out
+her hands, draws him over. He hops. On the antlered rack of the hall
+hang a man 's hat and waterproof. Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing
+them, frowns, then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is
+flung open. A man in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes
+with an ape's gait, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a
+full waterjugjar, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting
+his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel
+eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe
+into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the
+chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The
+floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar
+rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel,
+heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet
+without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls
+are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate
+is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on
+the hearthrug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he
+beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume,
+doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in
+her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and
+glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag
+of her corsetlace hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates
+mockingly the couple at the piano.)_
+
+KITTY: _(Coughs behind her hand)_ She's a bit imbecillic. _(She signs
+with a waggling forefinger)_ Blemblem. _(Lynch lifts up her skirt and
+white petticoat with his wand she settles them down quickly.)_ Respect
+yourself. _(She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which
+her hair glows, red with henna)_ O, excuse!
+
+ZOE: More limelight, Charley. _(She goes to the chandelier and turns the
+gas full cock)_
+
+KITTY: _(Peers at the gasjet)_ What ails it tonight?
+
+LYNCH: _(Deeply)_ Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
+
+ZOE: Clap on the back for Zoe.
+
+_(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at
+the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he
+repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond
+feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry,
+lolls spreadeagle in the sofacorner, her limp forearm pendent over the
+bolster, listening. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)_
+
+KITTY: _(Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot)_ O, excuse!
+
+ZOE: _(Promptly)_ Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.
+
+_(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over
+her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled
+caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances
+behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)_
+
+STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto
+Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an
+old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate _Coela enarrant gloriam Domini._
+It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and
+mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's
+that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip
+from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his
+almightiness. _Mais nom de nom,_ that is another pair of trousers.
+_Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at
+Lynch's cap, smiles, laughs)_ Which side is your knowledge bump?
+
+THE CAP: _(With saturnine spleen)_ Bah! It is because it is. Woman's
+reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form
+of life. Bah!
+
+STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes.
+How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!
+
+THE CAP: Bah!
+
+STEPHEN: Here's another for you. _(He frowns)_ The reason is because
+the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible
+interval which...
+
+THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can't.
+
+STEPHEN: _(With an effort)_ Interval which. Is the greatest possible
+ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
+
+THE CAP: Which?
+
+_(Outside the gramophone begins to blare_ The Holy City.)
+
+STEPHEN: _(Abruptly)_ What went forth to the ends of the world to
+traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller,
+having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a
+moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self
+which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. _Ecco!_
+
+LYNCH: _(With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe
+Higgins)_ What a learned speech, eh?
+
+ZOE: _(Briskly)_ God help your head, he knows more than you have
+forgotten.
+
+_(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)_
+
+FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this summer.
+
+KITTY: No!
+
+ZOE: _(Explodes in laughter)_ Great unjust God!
+
+FLORRY: _(Offended)_ Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my
+foot's tickling.
+
+_(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past,
+yelling.)_
+
+THE NEWSBOYS: Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea
+serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.
+
+_(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)_
+
+STEPHEN: A time, times and half a time.
+
+_(Reuben I Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open on his
+spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim's wallet from
+which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his
+shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden
+huddled mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from
+the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello,
+hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead
+and Ally Sloper nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering
+darkness.)_
+
+ALL: What?
+
+THE HOBGOBLIN: _(His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his
+eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then
+all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs) Il
+vient! C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene! (He whirls round
+and round with dervish howls) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He
+crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux
+sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks) Rien
+va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He
+springs off into vacuum.)_
+
+FLORRY: _(Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly)_ The end of
+the world!
+
+_(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity
+occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares
+over coughs and feetshuffling.)_
+
+THE GRAMOPHONE: Jerusalem!
+
+Open your gates and sing
+
+Hosanna...
+
+_(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star fills from it,
+proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah.
+Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End
+of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan
+filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the
+Three Legs of Man.)_
+
+THE END OF THE WORLD: _(with a Scotch accent)_ Wha'll dance the keel
+row, the keel row, the keel row?
+
+_(Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, harsh
+as a corncrake's, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with
+funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the
+banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)_
+
+ELIJAH: No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole
+Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths
+shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's
+time is 12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play
+a slick ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the
+nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the
+second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen
+Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to
+you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos?
+No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something
+within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama,
+an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once
+nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back
+number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever
+was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line
+out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know
+and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.
+J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K.
+Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up
+by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. _(He shouts)_
+Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! _(He
+sings)_ Jeru...
+
+THE GRAMOPHONE: _(Drowning his voice)_ Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh...
+_(The disc rasps gratingly against the needle)_
+
+THE THREE WHORES: _(Covering their ears, squawk)_ Ahhkkk!
+
+ELIJAH: _(In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top
+of his voice, his arms uplifted)_ Big Brother up there, Mr President,
+you hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of
+believe strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss
+Higgins and Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems
+to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been,
+Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long
+and help me save our sisters dear. _(He winks at his audience)_ Our Mr
+President, he twig the whole lot and he aint saying nothing.
+
+KITTY-KATE: I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did
+on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop and enrolled in
+the brown scapular. My mother's sister married a Montmorency. It was a
+working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.
+
+ZOE-FANNY: I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.
+
+FLORRY-TERESA: It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of
+Hennessy's three star. I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the
+bed.
+
+STEPHEN: In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without
+end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
+
+_(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon,
+Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast,
+goosestepping, tramp fist past in noisy marching)_
+
+THE BEATITUDES: _(Incoherently)_ Beer beef battledog buybull businum
+barnum buggerum bishop.
+
+LYSTER: _(In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says
+discreetly)_ He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the
+light.
+
+_(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily
+laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a
+mandarin's kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda
+hat.)_
+
+BEST: _(Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown
+of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot)_ I was
+just beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know,
+Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.
+
+JOHN EGLINTON: _(Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it
+towards a corner: with carping accent)_ Esthetics and cosmetics are for
+the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee
+wants the facts and means to get them.
+
+_(In the cone of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave,
+holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees.
+He rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mouth. About his
+head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His
+right hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by
+its two talons.)_
+
+MANANAUN MACLIR: _(With a voice of waves)_ Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor!
+Ma! White yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos.
+_(With a voice of whistling seawind)_ Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't
+have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult
+of Shakti. _(With a cry of stormbirds)_ Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father!
+_(He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its
+cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with
+the vehemence of the ocean.)_ Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the
+homestead! I am the dreamery creamery butter.
+
+_(A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to
+mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)_
+
+THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!
+
+_(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the
+mantle.)_
+
+ZOE: Who has a fag as I'm here?
+
+LYNCH: _(Tossing a cigarette on to the table)_ Here.
+
+ZOE: _(Her head perched aside in mock pride)_ Is that the way to hand
+the _pot_ to a lady? _(She stretches up to light the cigarette over the
+flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch
+with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up
+her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly
+at her cigarette.)_ Can you see the beautyspot of my behind?
+
+LYNCH: I'm not looking
+
+ZOE: _(Makes sheep's eyes)_ No? You wouldn't do a less thing. Would you
+suck a lemon?
+
+_(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom,
+then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue
+fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously,
+twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her
+spittle and, gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag,
+basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts
+two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several
+overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of
+parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor
+Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent.
+Two quills project over his ears.)_
+
+VIRAG: _(Heels together, bows)_ My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely.
+_(He coughs thoughtfully, drily)_ Promiscuous nakedness is much in
+evidence hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact
+that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you
+are a particular devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you
+perceived? Good.
+
+BLOOM: Granpapachi. But...
+
+VIRAG: Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and
+coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of
+gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I
+should opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always
+understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of
+lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a
+word. Hippogriff. Am I right?
+
+BLOOM: She is rather lean.
+
+VIRAG: _(Not unpleasantly)_ Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier
+pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest
+bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull
+has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the
+attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you
+can wear today. Parallax! _(With a nervous twitch of his head)_ Did you
+hear my brain go snap? Pollysyllabax!
+
+BLOOM: _(An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek)_
+She seems sad.
+
+VIRAG: _(Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left
+eye with a finger and barks hoarsely)_ Hoax! Beware of the flapper
+and bogus mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button
+discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon.
+_(More genially)_ Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item
+number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe
+the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she
+bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and deep in keel.
+
+BLOOM: _(Regretfully)_ When you come out without your gun.
+
+VIRAG: We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your
+money, take your choice. How happy could you be with either...
+
+BLOOM: With...?
+
+VIRAG: _(His tongue upcurling)_ Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. She
+is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in
+weight of bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two
+protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the
+noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional
+protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation,
+which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts
+are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers
+reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and
+gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their
+brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That
+suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in
+it. Lycopodium. _(His throat twitches)_ Slapbang! There he goes again.
+
+BLOOM: The stye I dislike.
+
+VIRAG: _(Arches his eyebrows)_ Contact with a goldring, they say.
+_Argumentum ad feminam_, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece
+in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosauros. For the rest Eve's
+sovereign remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. _(He twitches)_ It
+is a funny sound. _(He coughs encouragingly)_ But possibly it is only a
+wart. I presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on
+that head? Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.
+
+BLOOM: _(Reflecting)_ Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This
+searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of
+accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said...
+
+VIRAG: _(Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking)_ Stop
+twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten.
+Exercise your mnemotechnic. _La causa è santa_. Tara. Tara. _(Aside)_ He
+will surely remember.
+
+BLOOM: Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over
+parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a
+deadhand cures. Mnemo?
+
+VIRAG: _(Excitedly)_ I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. _(He taps his
+parchmentroll energetically)_ This book tells you how to act with all
+descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite,
+melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about
+amputation. Our old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with
+horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar
+and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike
+women in male habiliments? _(With a dry snigger)_ You intended to devote
+an entire year to the study of the religious problem and the summer
+months of 1886 to square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate!
+From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say?
+Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Or, put we the case,
+those complicated combinations, camiknickers? _(He crows derisively)_
+Keekeereekee!
+
+_(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores then gazes at the veiled
+mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)_
+
+BLOOM: I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence
+this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is
+will then morrow as now was be past yester.
+
+VIRAG: _(Prompts in a pig's whisper)_ Insects of the day spend their
+brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the
+inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve
+in dorsal region. Pretty Poll! _(His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally)_
+They had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand
+five hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will
+attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt
+vinegar. Bear's buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time
+we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. _(He coughs and, bending
+his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand)_ You shall
+find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember
+their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the
+seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion
+which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to
+example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That
+is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley!
+_(He blows into bloom's ear)_ Buzz!
+
+BLOOM: Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self
+then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I...
+
+VIRAG: _(His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key)_ Splendid!
+Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. _(He gobbles
+gluttonously with turkey wattles)_ Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are
+we? Open Sesame! Cometh forth! _(He unrolls his parchment rapidly and
+reads, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the letters which he
+claws)_ Stay, good friend. I bring thee thy answer. Redbank oysters will
+shortly be upon us. I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may
+help us and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister
+omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or
+viragitis. Though they stink yet they sting. _(He wags his head with
+cackling raillery)_ Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular. _(He
+sneezes)_ Amen!
+
+BLOOM: _(Absently)_ Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open
+sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve
+and the serpent contradicts. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy
+to my idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way
+through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like
+those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.
+
+VIRAG: _(His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly
+closed, psalms in outlandish monotone)_ That the cows with their those
+distended udders that they have been the the known...
+
+BLOOM: I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. _(He repeats)_
+Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their
+teats to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. _(Profoundly)_ Instinct
+rules the world. In life. In death.
+
+VIRAG: _(Head askew, arches his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers
+at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a horning claw and cries)_
+Who's moth moth? Who's dear Gerald? Dear Ger, that you? O dear, he is
+Gerald. O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe
+pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass
+tablenumpkin? _(He mews)_ Puss puss puss puss! _(He sighs, draws back
+and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw)_ Well, well. He doth
+rest anon. (He snaps his jaws suddenly on the air)
+
+THE MOTH:
+
+ I'm a tiny tiny thing
+ Ever flying in the spring
+ Round and round a ringaring.
+ Long ago I was a king
+ Now I do this kind of thing
+ On the wing, on the wing!
+ Bing!
+
+_(He rushes against the mauve shade, flapping noisily)_ Pretty pretty
+pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.
+
+_(From left upper entrance with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes
+forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed
+sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed
+bamboo Jacob's pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears
+dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour's
+face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and
+sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles
+down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his
+amorous tongue.)_
+
+HENRY: _(In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar)_
+There is a flower that bloometh.
+
+_(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards
+Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendant dewlap to the piano.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _(To himself)_ Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my
+belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my.
+Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old
+Deasy or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep
+impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially
+drunk, by the way. _(He touches the keys again)_ Minor chord comes now.
+Yes. Not much however.
+
+_(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous
+moustachework.)_
+
+ARTIFONI: _Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto._
+
+FLORRY: Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.
+
+STEPHEN: No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you
+the letter about the lute?
+
+FLORRY: _(Smirking)_ The bird that can sing and won't sing.
+
+_(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two Oxford dons with
+lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew
+Arnold's face.)_
+
+PHILIP SOBER: Take a fool's advice. All is not well. Work it out with
+the buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve
+you got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew.
+Mooney's en ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street
+hospital, Burke's. Eh? I am watching you.
+
+PHILIP DRUNK: _(Impatiently)_ Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way.
+If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality.
+Who was it told me his name? _(His lawnmower begins to purr)_ Aha, yes.
+_Zoe mou sas agapo_. Have a notion I was here before. When was it not
+Atkinson his card I have somewhere. Mac Somebody. Unmack I have it. He
+told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it, no?
+
+FLORRY: And the song?
+
+STEPHEN: Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
+
+FLORRY: Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.
+
+STEPHEN: Out of it now. _(To himself)_ Clever.
+
+PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: _(Their lawnmowers purring with a
+rigadoon of grasshalms)_ Clever ever. Out of it out of it. By the
+bye have you the book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes.
+Cleverever outofitnow. Keep in condition. Do like us.
+
+ZOE: There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of
+business with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to
+him. I know you've a Roman collar.
+
+VIRAG: Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. _(Harshly,
+his pupils waxing)_ To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I
+am the Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. Why
+I left the church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the
+Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty Jippert. _(He wriggles)_ Woman, undoing
+with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's
+lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat.
+Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni
+fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. _(He cries) Coactus volui._
+Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman's wrist.
+Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat
+yadgana. _(He chases his tail)_ Piffpaff! Popo! _(He stops, sneezes)_
+Pchp! _(He worries his butt)_ Prrrrrht!
+
+LYNCH: I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for
+shooting a bishop.
+
+ZOE: _(Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils)_ He couldn't get a
+connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.
+
+BLOOM: Poor man!
+
+ZOE: _(Lightly)_ Only for what happened him.
+
+BLOOM: How?
+
+VIRAG: _(A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage,
+cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.)
+Verfluchte Goim!_ He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig
+God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the
+pope's bastard. _(He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid,
+his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world)_
+A son of a whore. Apocalypse.
+
+KITTY: And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from
+Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow
+and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all
+subscribed for the funeral.
+
+PHILIP DRUNK: _(Gravely) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position,
+Philippe?_
+
+PHILIP SOBER: _(Gaily) c'était le sacré pigeon, Philippe._
+
+_(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.
+And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a
+whore's shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)_
+
+LYNCH: _(Laughs)_ And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated
+anthropoid apes.
+
+FLORRY: _(Nods)_ Locomotor ataxy.
+
+ZOE: _(Gaily)_ O, my dictionary.
+
+LYNCH: Three wise virgins.
+
+VIRAG: _(Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony
+epileptic lips)_ She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther,
+the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. _(He sticks out
+a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork)_
+Messiah! He burst her tympanum. _(With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks
+his hips in the cynical spasm)_ Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
+
+_(Ben Jumbo Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled,
+hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands
+forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing
+bagslops.)_
+
+BEN DOLLARD: _(Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels
+jovially in base barreltone)_ When love absorbs my ardent soul.
+
+_(The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the
+ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)_
+
+THE VIRGINS: _(Gushingly)_ Big Ben! Ben my Chree!
+
+A VOICE: Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.
+
+BEN DOLLARD: _(Smites his thigh in abundant laughter)_ Hold him now.
+
+HENRY: _(Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs)_ Thine
+heart, mine love. _(He plucks his lutestrings)_ When first I saw...
+
+VIRAG: _(Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting)_ Rats!
+_(He yawns, showing a coalblack throat, and closes his jaws by an upward
+push of his parchmentroll)_ After having said which I took my departure.
+Farewell. Fare thee well. _Dreck!_
+
+_(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb
+and gives a cow's lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to
+the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two
+ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the
+wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)_
+
+THE FLYBILL: K. II. Post No Bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
+
+HENRY: All is lost now.
+
+_(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)_
+
+VIRAG'S HEAD: Quack!
+
+_(Exeunt severally.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _(Over his shoulder to zoe)_ You would have preferred
+the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware
+Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The
+agony in the closet.
+
+LYNCH: All one and the same God to her.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Devoutly)_ And sovereign Lord of all things.
+
+FLORRY: _(To Stephen)_ I'm sure you're a spoiled priest. Or a monk.
+
+LYNCH: He is. A cardinal's son.
+
+STEPHEN: Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.
+
+_(His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland,
+appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven
+dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train,
+peeping under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His
+thumbs are stuck in his armpits and his palms outspread. Round his
+neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his breast in a corkscrew cross.
+Releasing his thumbs, he invokes grace from on high with large wave
+gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp:)_
+
+THE CARDINAL:
+
+ Conservio lies captured
+ He lies in the lowest dungeon
+ With manacles and chains around his limbs
+ Weighing upwards of three tons.
+
+_(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left
+cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and
+fro, arms akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour:)_
+
+ O, the poor little fellow
+ Hihihihihis legs they were yellow
+ He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a snake
+ But some bloody savage
+ To graize his white cabbage
+ He murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.
+
+_(A multitude of midges swarms white over his robe. He scratches himself
+with crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims:)_
+
+I'm suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to
+Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous. If they were they'd
+walk me off the face of the bloody globe.
+
+_(His head aslant he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers,
+imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying
+his hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his
+trainbearers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling,
+Easterkissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar,
+merciful male, melodious:)_
+
+ Shall carry my heart to thee,
+ Shall carry my heart to thee,
+ And the breath of the balmy night
+ Shall carry my heart to thee!
+ _(The trick doorhandle turns.)_
+
+
+THE DOORHANDLE: Theeee!
+
+ZOE: The devil is in that door.
+
+_(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking
+the waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily
+and, half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his
+pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.)_
+
+ZOE: _(Sniffs his hair briskly)_ Hmmm! Thank your mother for the
+rabbits. I'm very fond of what I like.
+
+BLOOM: _(Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep,
+pricks his ears)_ If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double
+event?
+
+ZOE: _(Tears open the silverfoil)_ Fingers was made before forks. _(She
+breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then
+turns kittenishly to Lynch)_ No objection to French lozenges? _(He nods.
+She taunts him.)_ Have it now or wait till you get it? _(He opens his
+mouth, his head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head
+follows. She whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.)_ Catch!
+
+_(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it
+through with a crack.)_
+
+KITTY: _(Chewing)_ The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have
+lovely ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with
+his lady. The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.
+
+BLOOM: _(In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic
+forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance
+towards the door. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a swift
+pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing
+his right arm downwards from his left shoulder.)_ Go, go, go, I conjure
+you, whoever you are!
+
+_(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside.
+Bloom's features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing
+calmly. Zoe offers him chocolate.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Solemnly)_ Thanks.
+
+ZOE: Do as you're bid. Here!
+
+_(A firm heelclacking tread is heard on the stairs.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Takes the chocolate)_ Aphrodisiac? Tansy and pennyroyal. But I
+bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red
+influences lupus. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This
+black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. _(He eats)_ Influence
+taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That
+priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews.
+
+_(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters. She
+is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with
+tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like
+Minnie Hauck in_ Carmen. _On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings.
+Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her
+olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted
+nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)_
+
+BELLA: My word! I'm all of a mucksweat.
+
+_(She glances round her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with
+hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck
+and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)_
+
+THE FAN: _(Flirting quickly, then slowly)_ Married, I see.
+
+BLOOM: Yes. Partly, I have mislaid...
+
+THE FAN: _(Half opening, then closing)_ And the missus is master.
+Petticoat government.
+
+BLOOM: _(Looks down with a sheepish grin)_ That is so.
+
+THE FAN: _(Folding together, rests against her left eardrop)_ Have you
+forgotten me?
+
+BLOOM: Yes. Yo.
+
+THE FAN: _(Folded akimbo against her waist)_ Is me her was you dreamed
+before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now
+we?
+
+_(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Wincing)_ Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which
+women love.
+
+THE FAN: _(Tapping)_ We have met. You are mine. It is fate.
+
+BLOOM: _(Cowed)_ Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your
+domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to
+speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before
+the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door
+and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per
+second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant
+a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family.
+Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed
+in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the
+end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with
+Athos, faithful after death. A dog's spittle as you probably... _(He
+winces)_ Ah!
+
+RICHIE GOULDING: _(Bagweighted, passes the door)_ Mocking is catch. Best
+value in Dub. Fit for a prince's. Liver and kidney.
+
+THE FAN: _(Tapping)_ All things end. Be mine. Now.
+
+BLOOM: _(Undecided)_ All now? I should not have parted with my talisman.
+Rain, exposure at dewfall on the searocks, a peccadillo at my time of
+life. Every phenomenon has a natural cause.
+
+THE FAN: _(Points downwards slowly)_ You may.
+
+BLOOM: _(Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace)_ We are
+observed.
+
+THE FAN: _(Points downwards quickly)_ You must.
+
+BLOOM: _(With desire, with reluctance)_ I can make a true black knot.
+Learned when I served my time and worked the mail order line for
+Kellett's. Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy.
+I knelt once before today. Ah!
+
+_(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the
+edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked.
+Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers
+draws out and in her laces.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Murmurs lovingly)_ To be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my
+love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace
+up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so
+incredibly impossibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model
+Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb
+toe, as worn in Paris.
+
+THE HOOF: Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.
+
+BLOOM: _(Crosslacing)_ Too tight?
+
+THE HOOF: If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you.
+
+BLOOM: Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar
+dance. Bad luck. Hook in wrong tache of her... person you mentioned.
+That night she met... Now!
+
+_(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises
+his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in midbrow. His eyes grow
+dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Mumbles)_ Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen,...
+
+BELLO: _(With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice)_ Hound of
+dishonour!
+
+BLOOM: _(Infatuated)_ Empress!
+
+BELLO: _(His heavy cheekchops sagging)_ Adorer of the adulterous rump!
+
+BLOOM: _(Plaintively)_ Hugeness!
+
+BELLO: Dungdevourer!
+
+BLOOM: _(With sinews semiflexed)_ Magmagnificence!
+
+BELLO: Down! _(He taps her on the shoulder with his fan)_ Incline feet
+forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling.
+On the hands down!
+
+BLOOM: _(Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps)_
+Truffles!
+
+_(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting,
+snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut
+tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most
+excellent master.)_
+
+BELLO: _(With bobbed hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his
+shaven mouth, in mountaineer's puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport
+skirt and alpine hat with moorcock's feather, his hands stuck deep in
+his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in)_
+Footstool! Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of
+your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness.
+
+BLOOM: _(Enthralled, bleats)_ I promise never to disobey.
+
+BELLO: _(Laughs loudly)_ Holy smoke! You little know what's in store for
+you. I'm the Tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I'll bet
+Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me,
+I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be
+inflicted in gym costume.
+
+_(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)_
+
+ZOE: _(Widening her slip to screen her)_ She's not here.
+
+BLOOM: _(Closing her eyes)_ She's not here.
+
+FLORRY: _(Hiding her with her gown)_ She didn't mean it, Mr Bello.
+She'll be good, sir.
+
+KITTY: Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir.
+
+BELLO: _(Coaxingly)_ Come, ducky dear, I want a word with you, darling,
+just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk,
+sweety. _(Bloom puts out her timid head)_ There's a good girly now.
+_(Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward)_ I only want
+to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender
+behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready.
+
+BLOOM: _(Fainting)_ Don't tear my...
+
+BELLO: _(Savagely)_ The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging
+hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian
+slave of old. You're in for it this time! I'll make you remember me for
+the balance of your natural life. _(His forehead veins swollen, his face
+congested)_ I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after
+my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle
+of Guinness's porter. _(He belches)_ And suck my thumping good Stock
+Exchange cigar while I read the _Licensed Victualler's Gazette_. Very
+possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and
+enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted
+and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will
+hurt you. _(He twists her arm. Bloom squeals, turning turtle.)_
+
+BLOOM: Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't!
+
+BELLO: _(Twisting)_ Another!
+
+BLOOM: _(Screams)_ O, it's hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches
+like mad!
+
+BELLO: _(Shouts)_ Good, by the rumping jumping general! That's the best
+bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don't keep me waiting, damn
+you! _(He slaps her face)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Whimpers)_ You're after hitting me. I'll tell...
+
+BELLO: Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him.
+
+ZOE: Yes. Walk on him! I will.
+
+FLORRY: I will. Don't be greedy.
+
+KITTY: No, me. Lend him to me.
+
+_(The brothel cook, mrs keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib,
+men's grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck
+with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)_
+
+MRS KEOGH: _(Ferociously)_ Can I help? _(They hold and pinion Bloom.)_
+
+BELLO: _(Squats with a grunt on Bloom's upturned face, puffing
+cigarsmoke, nursing a fat leg)_ I see Keating Clay is elected
+vicechairman of the Richmond asylum and by the by Guinness's preference
+shares are at sixteen three quaffers. Curse me for a fool that didn't
+buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck,
+curse it. And that Goddamned outsider _Throwaway_ at twenty to one.
+_(He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear)_ Where's that Goddamned
+cursed ashtray?
+
+BLOOM: _(Goaded, buttocksmothered)_ O! O! Monsters! Cruel one!
+
+BELLO: Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg. Pray for it as you never
+prayed before. _(He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar)_ Here,
+kiss that. Both. Kiss. _(He throws a leg astride and, pressing with
+horseman's knees, calls in a hard voice)_ Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury
+cross. I'll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. _(He bends sideways and
+squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting)_ Ho! Off we pop! I'll
+nurse you in proper fashion. _(He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the
+saddle)_ The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot
+and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop.
+
+FLORRY: _(Pulls at Bello)_ Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked
+before you.
+
+ZOE: _(Pulling at florry)_ Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet,
+suckeress?
+
+BLOOM: _(Stifling)_ Can't.
+
+BELLO: Well, I'm not. Wait. _(He holds in his breath)_ Curse it. Here.
+This bung's about burst. _(He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting
+his features, farts loudly)_ Take that! _(He recorks himself)_ Yes, by
+Jingo, sixteen three quarters.
+
+BLOOM: _(A sweat breaking out over him)_ Not man. _(He sniffs)_ Woman.
+
+BELLO: _(Stands up)_ No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has
+come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing
+under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male
+garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously
+rustling over head and shoulders. And quickly too!
+
+BLOOM: _(Shrinks)_ Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I
+tiptouch it with my nails?
+
+BELLO: _(Points to his whores)_ As they are now so will you be, wigged,
+singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape
+measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel
+force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to
+the diamondtrimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure,
+plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks,
+pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course,
+with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice
+scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be
+a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly
+flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you...
+
+BLOOM: _(A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large
+male hands and nose, leering mouth)_ I tried her things on only twice,
+a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hard up I washed them to
+save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.
+
+BELLO: _(Jeers)_ Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh? And showed
+off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds
+your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender,
+eh? Ho! ho! I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and
+short trunkleg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that
+Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne hotel, eh?
+
+BLOOM: Miriam. Black. Demimondaine.
+
+BELLO: _(Guffaws)_ Christ Almighty it's too tickling, this! You were
+a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and
+lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be
+violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell M.
+P., signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy,
+Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Croesus, the
+varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland
+and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. _(He guffaws again)_ Christ,
+wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh?
+
+BLOOM: _(Her hands and features working)_ It was Gerald converted me to
+be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School
+play _Vice Versa_. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by
+sister's stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his
+eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.
+
+BELLO: _(With wicked glee)_ Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you
+took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the
+smoothworn throne.
+
+BLOOM: Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. _(Earnestly)_
+And really it's better the position... because often I used to wet...
+
+BELLO: _(Sternly)_ No insubordination! The sawdust is there in the
+corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it
+standing, sir! I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a
+trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a
+martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.
+
+THE SINS OF THE PAST: _(In a medley of voices)_ He went through a form
+of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the
+Black church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn
+at an address in D'Olier street while he presented himself indecently to
+the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he frankly encouraged
+a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary
+outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences
+he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all
+strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did
+he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and
+what and how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar,
+gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to
+him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order?
+
+BELLO: _(Whistles loudly)_ Say! What was the most revolting piece of
+obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be
+candid for once.
+
+_(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering,
+Booloohoom. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny Cassidy's hag, blind
+stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other,
+the...)_
+
+BLOOM: Don't ask me! Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought
+the half of the... I swear on my sacred oath...
+
+BELLO: _(Peremptorily)_ Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing.
+Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a
+line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how
+many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr...
+
+BLOOM: _(Docile, gurgles)_ I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant
+
+BELLO: _(Imperiously)_ O, get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak
+when you're spoken to.
+
+BLOOM: _(Bows)_ Master! Mistress! Mantamer!
+
+_(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fill.)_
+
+BELLO: _(Satirically)_ By day you will souse and bat our smelling
+underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines
+with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won't that be
+nice? _(He places a ruby ring on her finger)_ And there now! With this
+ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress.
+
+BLOOM: Thank you, mistress.
+
+BELLO: You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in
+the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one.
+Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne.
+Drink me piping hot. Hop! You will dance attendance or I'll lecture you
+on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss,
+with the hairbrush. You'll be taught the error of your ways. At night
+your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves
+newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such
+favours knights of old laid down their lives. _(He chuckles)_ My boys
+will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above
+all, when they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new
+attraction in gilded heels. First I'll have a go at you myself. A man I
+know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just
+now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is
+on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust.
+Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? _(He points)_ For that lot. Trained
+by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. _(He bares his arm and
+plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva)_ There's fine depth for you!
+What, boys? That give you a hardon? _(He shoves his arm in a bidder's
+face)_ Here wet the deck and wipe it round!
+
+A BIDDER: A florin.
+
+_(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)_
+
+THE LACQUEY: Barang!
+
+A VOICE: One and eightpence too much.
+
+CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean.
+
+BELLO: _(Gives a rap with his gavel)_ Two bar. Rockbottom figure and
+cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine his points.
+Handle him. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If
+I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid
+gallons a day. A pure stockgetter, due to lay within the hour. His
+sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks.
+Whoa my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! _(He brands his initial C on Bloom's
+croup)_ So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen?
+
+A DARKVISAGED MAN: _(In disguised accent)_ Hoondert punt sterlink.
+
+VOICES: _(Subdued)_ For the Caliph. Haroun Al Raschid.
+
+BELLO: _(Gaily)_ Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short
+skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a
+potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the
+long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better
+instincts of the _blasé_ man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk
+on four inch Louis Quinze heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup,
+the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your powers of
+fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.
+
+BLOOM: _(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with
+forefinger in mouth)_ O, I know what you're hinting at now!
+
+BELLO: What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? _(He
+stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds
+of Bloom's haunches)_ Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your
+curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy,
+sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy
+a bucket or sell your pump. _(Loudly)_ Can you do a man's job?
+
+BLOOM: Eccles street...
+
+BELLO: _(Sarcastically)_ I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but
+there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my
+gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for
+you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all
+over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee,
+belly to belly, bubs to breast! He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he
+has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months,
+my lad! Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts
+already! That makes you wild, don't it? Touches the spot? _(He spits in
+contempt)_ Spittoon!
+
+BLOOM: I was indecently treated, I... Inform the police. Hundred
+pounds. Unmentionable. I...
+
+BELLO: Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want not your
+drizzle.
+
+BLOOM: To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll... We... Still...
+
+BELLO: _(Ruthlessly)_ No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will
+since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years.
+Return and see.
+
+_(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)_
+
+SLEEPY HOLLOW: Rip van Wink! Rip van Winkle!
+
+BLOOM: _(In tattered mocassins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing,
+fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond
+panes, cries out)_ I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's!
+But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he...
+
+BELLO: _(Laughs mockingly)_ That's your daughter, you owl, with a
+Mullingar student.
+
+_(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf
+in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and
+calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)_
+
+MILLY: My! It's Papli! But, O Papli, how old you've grown!
+
+BELLO: Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writingtable where we never wrote,
+aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and
+his menfriends are living there in clover. The _Cuckoos' Rest!_ Why not?
+How many women had you, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot,
+exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you male prostitute?
+Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the
+goose, my gander O.
+
+BLOOM: They... I...
+
+BELLO: _(Cuttingly)_ Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet
+you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to
+find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue
+you carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. They will violate
+the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook
+of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten
+shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's.
+
+BLOOM: Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return.
+I will prove...
+
+A VOICE: Swear!
+
+_(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowieknife between his
+teeth.)_
+
+BELLO: As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your
+secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You
+are down and out and don't you forget it, old bean.
+
+BLOOM: Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody...? _(He bites his
+thumb)_
+
+BELLO: Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency
+or grace about you. I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you
+skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have!
+If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We'll bury
+you in our shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck
+Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and
+sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands,
+whatever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the one cesspool. _(He
+explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh)_ We'll manure you, Mr Flower! _(He
+pipes scoffingly)_ Byby, Poldy! Byby, Papli!
+
+BLOOM: _(Clasps his head)_ My willpower! Memory! I have sinned! I have
+suff...
+
+_(He weeps tearlessly)_
+
+BELLO: _(Sneers)_ Crybabby! Crocodile tears!
+
+_(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to
+the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the
+circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M.
+Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M.
+Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold
+Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the
+recreant Bloom.)_
+
+THE CIRCUMCISED: _(In dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit
+upon him, no flowers) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad._
+
+VOICES: _(Sighing)_ So he's gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never
+heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah,
+yes.
+
+_(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of
+incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oakframe a nymph with
+hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from her
+grotto and passing under interlacing yews stands over Bloom.)_
+
+THE YEWS: _(Their leaves whispering)_ Sister. Our sister. Ssh!
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Softly)_ Mortal! _(Kindly)_ Nay, dost not weepest!
+
+BLOOM: _(Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight,
+with dignity)_ This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of
+habit.
+
+THE NYMPH: Mortal! You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster
+picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in
+fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical
+act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt
+of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to
+disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads,
+proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured
+gentleman. Useful hints to the married.
+
+BLOOM: _(Lifts a turtle head towards her lap)_ We have met before. On
+another star.
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Sadly)_ Rubber goods. Neverrip brand as supplied to the
+aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited
+testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber. My bust
+developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.
+
+BLOOM: You mean _Photo Bits?_
+
+THE NYMPH: I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me
+above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in
+four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my
+shame.
+
+BLOOM: _(Humbly kisses her long hair)_ Your classic curves, beautiful
+immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty,
+almost to pray.
+
+THE NYMPH: During dark nights I heard your praise.
+
+BLOOM: _(Quickly)_ Yes, yes. You mean that I... Sleep reveals the worst
+side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of bed
+or rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest
+there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days
+ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive
+vent. _(He sighs)_ 'Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Her fingers in her ears)_ And words. They are not in my
+dictionary.
+
+BLOOM: You understood them?
+
+THE YEWS: Ssh!
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Covers her face with her hands)_ What have I not seen in
+that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?
+
+BLOOM: _(Apologetically)_ I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up
+with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea long ago.
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Bends her head)_ Worse, worse!
+
+BLOOM: _(Reflects precautiously)_ That antiquated commode. It wasn't her
+weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds
+after weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd
+orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle.
+
+_(The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.)_
+
+THE WATERFALL:
+
+ Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
+ Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.
+
+THE YEWS: _(Mingling their boughs)_ Listen. Whisper. She is right, our
+sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous
+summer days.
+
+
+JOHN WYSE NOLAN: _(In the background, in Irish National Forester's
+uniform, doffs his plumed hat)_ Prosper! Give shade on languorous days,
+trees of Ireland!
+
+THE YEWS: _(Murmuring)_ Who came to Poulaphouca with the High School
+excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?
+
+BLOOM: _(Scared)_ High School of Poula? Mnemo? Not in full possession of
+faculties. Concussion. Run over by tram.
+
+THE ECHO: Sham!
+
+BLOOM: _(Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in nondescript
+juvenile grey and black striped suit, too small for him, white tennis
+shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops and a red schoolcap with
+badge)_ I was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a
+jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory,
+the throng penned tight on the old Royal stairs (for they love crushes,
+instinct of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles
+vice), even a pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat. There were
+sunspots that summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days.
+
+_(Halcyon days, high school boys in blue and white football jerseys and
+shorts, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen
+Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a clearing
+of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.)_
+
+THE HALCYON DAYS: Mackerel! Live us again. Hurray! _(They cheer)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent
+snowballs, struggles to rise)_ Again! I feel sixteen! What a lark! Let's
+ring all the bells in Montague street. _(He cheers feebly)_ Hurray for
+the High School!
+
+THE ECHO: Fool!
+
+THE YEWS: _(Rustling)_ She is right, our sister. Whisper. _(Whispered
+kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from
+the boles and among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.)_ Who
+profaned our silent shade?
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Coyly, through parting fingers)_ There? In the open air?
+
+THE YEWS: _(Sweeping downward)_ Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward.
+
+THE WATERFALL:
+
+ Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
+ Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.
+
+THE NYMPH: _(With wide fingers)_ O, infamy!
+
+BLOOM: I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of
+the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing
+time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke,
+flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains
+with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled
+downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits.
+She climbed their crooked tree and I... A saint couldn't resist it. The
+demon possessed me. Besides, who saw?
+
+_(Staggering Bob, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with
+humid nostrils through the foliage.)_
+
+STAGGERING BOB: (LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES,
+SNIVELS) Me. Me see.
+
+BLOOM: Simply satisfying a need I... _(With pathos)_ No girl would when
+I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play...
+
+_(High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes,
+plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.)_
+
+THE NANNYGOAT: _(Bleats)_ Megeggaggegg! Nannannanny!
+
+BLOOM: _(Hatless, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and
+gorsespine)_ Regularly engaged. Circumstances alter cases. _(He gazes
+intently downwards on the water)_ Thirtytwo head over heels per second.
+Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government
+printer's clerk. _(Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom,
+rolled in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the Lion's Head cliff into the
+purple waiting waters.)_
+
+THE DUMMYMUMMY: Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg!
+
+_(Far out in the bay between bailey and kish lights the_ Erin's King
+_sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards
+the land.)_
+
+COUNCILLOR NANNETII: _(Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced,
+his hand in his waistcoat opening, declaims)_ When my country takes her
+place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my
+epitaph be written. I have...
+
+BLOOM: Done. Prff!
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Loftily)_ We immortals, as you saw today, have not such
+a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat
+electric light. _(She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing
+her forefinger in her mouth)_ Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then
+could you...?
+
+BLOOM: _(Pawing the heather abjectly)_ O, I have been a perfect pig.
+Enemas too I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia to which
+add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long's
+syringe, the ladies' friend.
+
+THE NYMPH: In my presence. The powderpuff. _(She blushes and makes a
+knee)_ And the rest!
+
+BLOOM: _(Dejected)_ Yes. _Peccavi!_ I have paid homage on that living
+altar where the back changes name. _(With sudden fervour)_ For why
+should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules...?
+
+_(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the treestems,
+cooeeing)_
+
+THE VOICE OF KITTY: _(In the thicket)_ Show us one of them cushions.
+
+THE VOICE OF FLORRY: Here.
+
+_(A grouse wings clumsily through the underwood.)_
+
+THE VOICE OF LYNCH: _(In the thicket)_ Whew! Piping hot!
+
+THE VOICE OF ZOE: _(From the thicket)_ Came from a hot place.
+
+THE VOICE OF VIRAG: _(A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war
+panoply with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over
+beechmast and acorns)_ Hot! Hot! Ware Sitting Bull!
+
+BLOOM: It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit
+where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to
+grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted
+white sateen coatpans. So womanly, full. It fills me full.
+
+THE WATERFALL:
+
+ _Phillaphulla Poulaphouca
+ Poulaphouca Poulaphouca._
+
+THE YEWS: Ssh! Sister, speak!
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Eyeless, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple,
+softly, with remote eyes)_ Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount
+Carmel. The apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. _(She
+reclines her head, sighing)_ Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull
+waves o'er the waters dull.
+
+_(Bloom half rises. His back trouserbutton snaps.)_
+
+THE BUTTON: Bip!
+
+_(Two sluts of the coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.)_
+
+THE SLUTS:
+
+ O, Leopold lost the pin of his drawers
+ He didn't know what to do,
+ To keep it up,
+ To keep it up.
+
+BLOOM: _(Coldly)_ You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there
+were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy
+but willing like an ass pissing.
+
+THE YEWS: _(Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms
+aging and swaying)_ Deciduously!
+
+THE NYMPH: _(Her features hardening, gropes in the folds of her habit)_
+Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! _(A large moist stain appears on her
+robe)_ Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a
+pure woman. _(She clutches again in her robe)_ Wait. Satan, you'll sing
+no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. _(She draws a poniard and,
+clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his
+loins)_ Nekum!
+
+BLOOM: _(Starts up, seizes her hand)_ Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat o' nine lives!
+Fair play, madam. No pruningknife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What
+do you lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? _(He
+clutches her veil)_ A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener,
+or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier, or good mother Alphonsus,
+eh Reynard?
+
+THE NYMPH: _(With a cry flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast
+cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks)_ Poli...!
+
+BLOOM: _(Calls after her)_ As if you didn't get it on the double
+yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it.
+Your strength our weakness. What's our studfee? What will you pay on
+the nail? You fee mendancers on the Riviera, I read. _(The fleeing nymph
+raises a keen)_ Eh? I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind
+me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool
+someone else, not me. _(He sniffs)_ Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.
+
+_(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)_
+
+BELLA: You'll know me the next time.
+
+BLOOM: _(Composed, regards her) Passée._ Mutton dressed as lamb. Long
+in the tooth and superfluous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night
+would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your
+eyes are as vapid as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox. They have the
+dimensions of your other features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw
+propeller.
+
+BELLA: _(Contemptuously)_ You're not game, in fact. _(Her sowcunt
+barks)_ Fbhracht!
+
+BLOOM: _(Contemptuously)_ Clean your nailless middle finger first, your
+bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of
+hay and wipe yourself.
+
+BELLA: I know you, canvasser! Dead cod!
+
+BLOOM: I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!
+
+BELLA: _(Turns to the piano)_ Which of you was playing the dead march
+from _Saul?_
+
+ZOE: Me. Mind your cornflowers. _(She darts to the piano and bangs
+chords on it with crossed arms)_ The cat's ramble through the slag.
+_(She glances back)_ Eh? Who's making love to my sweeties? _(She darts
+back to the table)_ What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.
+
+_(Kitty, disconcerted, coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom
+approaches Zoe.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Gently)_ Give me back that potato, will you?
+
+ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.
+
+BLOOM: _(With feeling)_ It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma.
+
+ZOE:
+
+ Give a thing and take it back
+ God'll ask you where is that
+ You'll say you don't know
+ God'll send you down below.
+
+BLOOM: There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.
+
+STEPHEN: To have or not to have that is the question.
+
+ZOE: Here. _(She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh,
+and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking)_ Those that hides
+knows where to find.
+
+BELLA: _(Frowns)_ Here. This isn't a musical peepshow. And don't you
+smash that piano. Who's paying here?
+
+_(She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in his pocket and, taking out
+a banknote by its corner, hands it to her.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _(With exaggerated politeness)_ This silken purse I made out
+of the sow's ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. _(He
+indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom)_ We are all in the same sweepstake,
+Kinch and Lynch. _Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état_.
+
+LYNCH: _(Calls from the hearth)_ Dedalus! Give her your blessing for me.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Hands Bella a coin)_ Gold. She has it.
+
+BELLA: _(Looks at the money, then at Stephen, then at Zoe, Florry and
+Kitty)_ Do you want three girls? It's ten shillings here.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Delightedly)_ A hundred thousand apologies. _(He fumbles
+again and takes out and hands her two crowns)_ Permit, _brevi manu_, my
+sight is somewhat troubled.
+
+_(Bella goes to the table to count the money while Stephen talks to
+himself in monosyllables. Zoe bends over the table. Kitty leans over
+Zoe's neck. Lynch gets up, rights his cap and, clasping Kitty's waist,
+adds his head to the group.)_
+
+FLORRY: _(Strives heavily to rise)_ Ow! My foot's asleep. _(She limps
+over to the table. Bloom approaches.)_
+
+BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: _(Chattering and squabbling)_ The
+gentleman... ten shillings... paying for the three... allow me a
+moment... this gentleman pays separate... who's touching it?... ow!
+... mind who you're pinching... are you staying the night or a short
+time?... who did?... you're a liar, excuse me... the gentleman paid
+down like a gentleman... drink... it's long after eleven.
+
+STEPHEN: _(At the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence)_ No bottles!
+What, eleven? A riddle!
+
+ZOE: _(Lifting up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the
+top of her stocking)_ Hard earned on the flat of my back.
+
+LYNCH: _(Lifting Kitty from the table)_ Come!
+
+KITTY: Wait. _(She clutches the two crowns)_
+
+FLORRY: And me?
+
+LYNCH: Hoopla! _(He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the
+sofa.)_
+
+STEPHEN:
+
+ The fox crew, the cocks flew,
+ The bells in heaven
+ Were striking eleven.
+ 'Tis time for her poor soul
+ To get out of heaven.
+
+BLOOM: _(Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table between bella and
+florry)_ So. Allow me. _(He takes up the poundnote)_ Three times ten.
+We're square.
+
+BELLA: _(Admiringly)_ You're such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss
+you.
+
+ZOE: _(Points)_ Him? Deep as a drawwell. _(Lynch bends Kitty back over
+the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with the poundnote to Stephen.)_
+
+BLOOM: This is yours.
+
+STEPHEN: How is that? _Les distrait_ or absentminded beggar. _(He
+fumbles again in his pocket and draws out a handful of coins. An object
+fills.)_ That fell.
+
+BLOOM: _(Stooping, picks up and hands a box of matches)_ This.
+
+STEPHEN: Lucifer. Thanks.
+
+BLOOM: _(Quietly)_ You had better hand over that cash to me to take care
+of. Why pay more?
+
+STEPHEN: _(Hands him all his coins)_ Be just before you are generous.
+
+BLOOM: I will but is it wise? _(He counts)_ One, seven, eleven, and
+five. Six. Eleven. I don't answer for what you may have lost.
+
+STEPHEN: Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next
+Lessing says. Thirsty fox. _(He laughs loudly)_ Burying his grandmother.
+Probably he killed her.
+
+BLOOM: That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say.
+
+STEPHEN: Doesn't matter a rambling damn.
+
+BLOOM: No, but...
+
+STEPHEN: _(Comes to the table)_ Cigarette, please. _(Lynch tosses a
+cigarette from the sofa to the table)_ And so Georgina Johnson is dead
+and married. _(A cigarette appears on the table. Stephen looks at it)_
+Wonder. Parlour magic. Married. Hm. _(He strikes a match and proceeds to
+light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy)_
+
+LYNCH: _(Watching him)_ You would have a better chance of lighting it if
+you held the match nearer.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Brings the match near his eye)_ Lynx eye. Must get glasses.
+Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all
+flat. _(He draws the match away. It goes out.)_ Brain thinks. Near:
+far. Ineluctable modality of the visible. _(He frowns mysteriously)_ Hm.
+Sphinx. The beast that has twobacks at midnight. Married.
+
+ZOE: It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with
+him.
+
+FLORRY: _(Nods)_ Mr Lambe from London.
+
+STEPHEN: Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world.
+
+LYNCH: _(Embracing Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply) Dona nobis pacem._
+
+_(The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Bloom picks it up and
+throws it in the grate.)_
+
+BLOOM: Don't smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. _(To Zoe)_ You
+have nothing?
+
+ZOE: Is he hungry?
+
+STEPHEN: _(Extends his hand to her smiling and chants to the air of the
+bloodoath in the_ Dusk of the Gods)
+
+ Hangende Hunger,
+ Fragende Frau,
+ Macht uns alle kaputt.
+
+
+ZOE: _(Tragically)_ Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet! _(She takes
+his hand)_ Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand. _(She points to his
+forehead)_ No wit, no wrinkles. _(She counts)_ Two, three, Mars, that's
+courage. _(Stephen shakes his head)_ No kid.
+
+LYNCH: Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and
+shake. _(To Zoe)_ Who taught you palmistry?
+
+ZOE: _(Turns)_ Ask my ballocks that I haven't got. _(To Stephen)_ I see
+it in your face. The eye, like that. _(She frowns with lowered head)_
+
+LYNCH: _(Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice)_ Like that. Pandybat.
+
+_(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open,
+the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up.)_
+
+FATHER DOLAN: Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little
+schemer. See it in your eye.
+
+_(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the head of Don John Conmee rises
+from the pianola coffin.)_
+
+DON JOHN CONMEE: Now, Father Dolan! Now. I'm sure that Stephen is a very
+good little boy!
+
+ZOE: _(Examining Stephen's palm)_ Woman's hand.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Murmurs)_ Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read
+His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock.
+
+ZOE: What day were you born?
+
+STEPHEN: Thursday. Today.
+
+ZOE: Thursday's child has far to go. _(She traces lines on his hand)_
+Line of fate. Influential friends.
+
+FLORRY: _(Pointing)_ Imagination.
+
+ZOE: Mount of the moon. You'll meet with a... _(She peers at his hands
+abruptly)_ I won't tell you what's not good for you. Or do you want to
+know?
+
+BLOOM: _(Detaches her fingers and offers his palm)_ More harm than good.
+Here. Read mine.
+
+BELLA: Show. _(She turns up bloom's hand)_ I thought so. Knobby knuckles
+for the women.
+
+ZOE: _(Peering at bloom's palm)_ Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and
+marry money.
+
+BLOOM: Wrong.
+
+ZOE: _(Quickly)_ O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That
+wrong?
+
+_(Black Liz, a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle, rises,
+stretches her wings and clucks.)_
+
+BLACK LIZ: Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook.
+
+_(She sidles from her newlaid egg and waddles off)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Points to his hand)_ That weal there is an accident. Fell and
+cut it twentytwo years ago. I was sixteen.
+
+ZOE: I see, says the blind man. Tell us news.
+
+STEPHEN: See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago
+he was twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Twentytwo
+years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. _(He winces)_ Hurt my hand
+somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money?
+
+_(Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and
+writes idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)_
+
+FLORRY: What?
+
+_(A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a
+gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue,
+Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the
+sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the
+crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)_
+
+THE BOOTS: _(Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers)_
+Haw haw have you the horn?
+
+_(Bronze by gold they whisper.)_
+
+ZOE: _(To Florry)_ Whisper.
+
+_(They whisper again)_
+
+_(Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw set
+sideways, a red flower in his mouth. Lenehan in yachtsman's cap and
+white shoes officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat
+shoulder.)_
+
+LENEHAN: Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a
+few quims?
+
+BOYLAN: _(Seated, smiles)_ Plucking a turkey.
+
+LENEHAN: A good night's work.
+
+BOYLAN: _(Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, winks)_ Blazes
+Kate! Up to sample or your money back. _(He holds out a forefinger)_
+Smell that.
+
+LENEHAN: _(Smells gleefully)_ Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah!
+
+ZOE AND FLORRY: _(Laugh together)_ Ha ha ha ha.
+
+BOYLAN: _(Jumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear)_
+Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom dressed yet?
+
+BLOOM: _(In flunkey's prune plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings
+and powdered wig)_ I'm afraid not, sir. The last articles...
+
+BOYLAN: _(Tosses him sixpence)_ Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash.
+_(He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom's antlered head)_ Show me
+in. I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?
+
+BLOOM: Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.
+
+MARION: He ought to feel himself highly honoured. _(She plops splashing
+out of the water)_ Raoul darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only
+my new hat and a carriage sponge.
+
+BOYLAN: _(A merry twinkle in his eye)_ Topping!
+
+BELLA: What? What is it?
+
+_(Zoe whispers to her.)_
+
+MARION: Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I'll
+write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to
+raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed
+and stamped receipt.
+
+BOYLAN: (clasps himself) Here, I can't hold this little lot much longer.
+(he strides off on stiff cavalry legs)
+
+BELLA: _(Laughing)_ Ho ho ho ho.
+
+BOYLAN: _(To Bloom, over his shoulder)_ You can apply your eye to the
+keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
+
+BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness
+the deed and take a snapshot? _(He holds out an ointment jar)_ Vaseline,
+sir? Orangeflower...? Lukewarm water...?
+
+KITTY: _(From the sofa)_ Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What.
+
+_(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping
+loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)_
+
+MINA KENNEDY: _(Her eyes upturned)_ O, it must be like the scent of
+geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her!
+Stuck together! Covered with kisses!
+
+LYDIA DOUCE: _(Her mouth opening)_ Yumyum. O, he's carrying her round
+the room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and
+New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.
+
+KITTY: _(Laughing)_ Hee hee hee.
+
+BOYLAN'S VOICE: _(Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach)_ Ah!
+Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht!
+
+MARION'S VOICE: _(Hoarsely, sweetly, rising to her throat)_ O!
+Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?
+
+BLOOM: _(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself)_ Show! Hide! Show!
+Plough her! More! Shoot!
+
+BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee!
+
+LYNCH: _(Points)_ The mirror up to nature. _(He laughs)_ Hu hu hu hu hu!
+
+_(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare,
+beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the
+reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)_
+
+SHAKESPEARE: _(In dignified ventriloquy)_ 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks
+the vacant mind. _(To Bloom)_ Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest
+invisible. Gaze. _(He crows with a black capon's laugh)_ Iagogo! How my
+Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo!
+
+BLOOM: _(Smiles yellowly at the three whores)_ When will I hear the
+joke?
+
+ZOE: Before you're twice married and once a widower.
+
+BLOOM: Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon when measurements
+were taken next the skin after his death...
+
+_(Mrs Dignam, widow woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with
+deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds,
+her bonnet awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose, a
+pen chivvying her brood of cygnets. Beneath her skirt appear her late
+husband's everyday trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. She holds
+a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a large marquee umbrella under
+which her brood run with her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his collar
+loose, a hank of porksteaks dangling, freddy whimpering, Susy with a
+crying cod's mouth, Alice struggling with the baby. She cuffs them on,
+her streamers flaunting aloft.)_
+
+FREDDY: Ah, ma, you're dragging me along!
+
+SUSY: Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over!
+
+SHAKESPEARE: _(With paralytic rage)_ Weda seca whokilla farst.
+
+_(The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare's
+beardless face. The marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the children run
+aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and
+kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily.)_
+
+MRS CUNNINGHAM: _(Sings)_
+
+And they call me the jewel of Asia!
+
+MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: _(Gazes on her, impassive)_ Immense! Most bloody
+awful demirep!
+
+STEPHEN: _Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti._ Queens lay with prize bulls.
+Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first
+confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions
+of the house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was
+open.
+
+BELLA: None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.
+
+LYNCH: Let him alone. He's back from Paris.
+
+ZOE: _(Runs to stephen and links him)_ O go on! Give us some parleyvoo.
+
+_(Stephen claps hat on head and leaps over to the fireplace where he
+stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile
+on his face.)_
+
+LYNCH: _(Oommelling on the sofa)_ Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Gabbles with marionette jerks)_ Thousand places of
+entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves
+and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable
+house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about
+princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries
+extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english
+how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous.
+Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show
+with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night.
+Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in
+universal world. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then
+disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young
+with _dessous troublants_. _(He clacks his tongue loudly)_ _Ho, la la!
+Ce pif qu'il a!_
+
+LYNCH: _Vive le vampire!_
+
+THE WHORES: Bravo! Parleyvoo!
+
+STEPHEN: _(Grimacing with head back, laughs loudly, clapping himself)_
+Great success of laughing. Angels much prostitutes like and holy
+apostles big damn ruffians. _Demimondaines_ nicely handsome sparkling of
+diamonds very amiable costumed. Or do you are fond better what belongs
+they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans? _(He points about him with
+grotesque gestures which Lynch and the whores reply to)_ Caoutchouc
+statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very
+lesbic the kiss five ten times. Enter, gentleman, to see in mirror every
+positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act
+awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on
+the belly _pièce de Shakespeare._
+
+BELLA: _(Clapping her belly sinks back on the sofa, with a shout of
+laughter)_ An omelette on the... Ho! ho! ho! ho!... omelette on the...
+
+STEPHEN: _(Mincingly)_ I love you, sir darling. Speak you englishman
+tongue for _double entente cordiale._ O yes, _mon loup_. How much cost?
+Waterloo. Watercloset. _(He ceases suddenly and holds up a forefinger)_
+
+BELLA: _(Laughing)_ Omelette...
+
+THE WHORES: _(Laughing)_ Encore! Encore!
+
+STEPHEN: Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.
+
+ZOE: Go abroad and love a foreign lady.
+
+LYNCH: Across the world for a wife.
+
+FLORRY: Dreams goes by contraries.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Extends his arms)_ It was here. Street of harlots. In
+Serpentine avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the
+red carpet spread?
+
+BLOOM: _(Approaching Stephen)_ Look...
+
+STEPHEN: No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World
+without end. _(He cries) P_ater! Free!
+
+BLOOM: I say, look...
+
+STEPHEN: Break my spirit, will he? _O merde alors! (He cries, his
+vulture talons sharpened)_ Hola! Hillyho!
+
+_(Simon Dedalus' voice hilloes in answer, somewhat sleepy but ready.)_
+
+SIMON: That's all right. _(He swoops uncertainly through the air,
+wheeling, uttering cries of heartening, on strong ponderous buzzard
+wings)_ Ho, boy! Are you going to win? Hoop! Pschatt! Stable with those
+halfcastes. Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ass. Head up! Keep
+our flag flying! An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed.
+Ulster king at arms! Haihoop! _(He makes the beagle's call, giving
+tongue)_ Bulbul! Burblblburblbl! Hai, boy!
+
+_(The fronds and spaces of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.
+A stout fox, drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his
+grandmother, runs swift for the open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth,
+under the leaves. The pack of staghounds follows, nose to the ground,
+sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded. Ward
+Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, hot for a kill. From Six
+Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty
+sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips,
+bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes
+waving torches. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players,
+thimbleriggers, broadsmen. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high
+wizard hats clamour deafeningly.)_
+
+THE CROWD:
+
+ Card of the races. Racing card!
+ Ten to one the field!
+ Tommy on the clay here! Tommy on the clay!
+ Ten to one bar one! Ten to one bar one!
+ Try your luck on Spinning Jenny!
+ Ten to one bar one!
+ Sell the monkey, boys! Sell the monkey!
+ I'll give ten to one!
+ Ten to one bar one!
+
+_(A dark horse, riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost,
+his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars. The field follows, a bunch of
+bucking mounts. Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel,
+the Duke of Westminster's Shotover, Repulse, the Duke of Beaufort's
+Ceylon, prix de Paris. Dwarfs ride them, rustyarmoured, leaping, leaping
+in their, in their saddles. Last in a drizzle of rain on a brokenwinded
+isabelle nag, Cock of the North, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket,
+orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a hockeystick at
+the ready. His nag on spavined whitegaitered feet jogs along the rocky
+road.)_
+
+THE ORANGE LODGES: _(Jeering)_ Get down and push, mister. Last lap!
+You'll be home the night!
+
+GARRETT DEASY: _(Bolt upright, his nailscraped face plastered with
+postagestamps, brandishes his hockeystick, his blue eyes flashing in the
+prism of the chandelier as his mount lopes by at schooling gallop)_
+
+_Per vias rectas!_
+
+_(A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and his rearing nag a torrent
+of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips,
+potatoes.)_
+
+THE GREEN LODGES: Soft day, sir John! Soft day, your honour!
+
+_(Private Carr, Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the
+windows, singing in discord.)_
+
+STEPHEN: Hark! Our friend noise in the street.
+
+ZOE: _(Holds up her hand)_ Stop!
+
+PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY:
+
+Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire relish for...
+
+ZOE: That's me. _(She claps her hands)_ Dance! Dance! _(She runs to the
+pianola)_ Who has twopence?
+
+BLOOM: Who'll...?
+
+LYNCH: _(Handing her coins)_ Here.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Cracking his fingers impatiently)_ Quick! Quick! Where's my
+augur's rod? _(He runs to the piano and takes his ashplant, beating his
+foot in tripudium)_
+
+ZOE: _(Turns the drumhandle)_ There.
+
+_(She drops two pennies in the slot. Gold, pink and violet lights
+start forth. The drum turns purring in low hesitation waltz. Professor
+Goodwin, in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained
+inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the
+room, his hands fluttering. He sits tinily on the pianostool and lifts
+and beats handless sticks of arms on the keyboard, nodding with damsel's
+grace, his bowknot bobbing)_
+
+ZOE: _(Twirls round herself, heeltapping)_ Dance. Anybody here for
+there? Who'll dance? Clear the table.
+
+_(The pianola with changing lights plays in waltz time the prelude of_
+My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl. _Stephen throws his ashplant on the table
+and seizes Zoe round the waist. Florry and Bella push the table towards
+the fireplace. Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, begins to
+waltz her round the room. Bloom stands aside. Her sleeve filling from
+gracing arms reveals a white fleshflower of vaccination. Between the
+curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins
+a silk hat. With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and
+jauntyhatted skates in. He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk
+lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green lowcut waistcoat, stock collar
+with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary
+gloves. In his buttonhole is an immense dahlia. He twirls in reversed
+directions a clouded cane, then wedges it tight in his oxter. He places
+a hand lightly on his breastbone, bows, and fondles his flower and
+buttons.)_
+
+MAGINNI: The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. No connection
+with Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's. Fancy dress balls arranged.
+Deportment. The Katty Lanner step. So. Watch me! My terpsichorean
+abilities. _(He minuets forward three paces on tripping bee's feet) Tout
+le monde en avant! Révérence! Tout le monde en place!_
+
+_(The prelude ceases. Professor Goodwin, beating vague arms shrivels,
+sinks, his live cape filling about the stool. The air in firmer waltz
+time sounds. Stephen and Zoe circle freely. The lights change, glow,
+fide gold rosy violet.)_
+
+THE PIANOLA:
+
+Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls,
+Sweethearts they'd left behind...
+
+_(From a corner the morning hours run out, goldhaired, slimsandalled,
+in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance,
+twirling their skipping ropes. The hours of noon follow in amber gold.
+Laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking
+mirrors, lifting their arms.)_
+
+MAGINNI: _(Clipclaps glovesilent hands) Carré! Avant deux!_ Breathe
+evenly! _Balance!_
+
+_(The morning and noon hours waltz in their places, turning, advancing
+to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. Cavaliers behind
+them arch and suspend their arms, with hands descending to, touching,
+rising from their shoulders.)_
+
+HOURS: You may touch my.
+
+CAVALIERS: May I touch your?
+
+HOURS: O, but lightly!
+
+CAVALIERS: O, so lightly!
+
+THE PIANOLA:
+
+My little shy little lass has a waist.
+
+_(Zoe and Stephen turn boldly with looser swing. The twilight hours
+advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their
+cheeks delicate with cipria and false faint bloom. They are in grey
+gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the land breeze.)_
+
+MAGINNI: _Avant huit! Traversé! Salut! Cours de mains! Croisé!_
+
+_(The night hours, one by one, steal to the last place. Morning, noon
+and twilight hours retreat before them. They are masked, with daggered
+hair and bracelets of dull bells. Weary they curchycurchy under veils.)_
+
+THE BRACELETS: Heigho! Heigho!
+
+ZOE: _(Twirling, her hand to her brow)_ O!
+
+MAGINNI: _Les tiroirs! Chaîne de dames! La corbeille! Dos à dos!_
+
+_(Arabesquing wearily they weave a pattern on the floor, weaving,
+unweaving, curtseying, twirling, simply swirling.)_
+
+ZOE: I'm giddy!
+
+_(She frees herself, droops on a chair. Stephen seizes Florry and turns
+with her.)_
+
+MAGINNI: Boulangère! Les ronds! Les ponts! Chevaux de bois! Escargots!
+
+_(Twining, receding, with interchanging hands the night hours link each
+each with arching arms in a mosaic of movements. Stephen and Florry turn
+cumbrously.)_
+
+MAGINNI: _Dansez avec vos dames! Changez de dames! Donnez le petit
+bouquet à votre dame! Remerciez!_
+
+THE PIANOLA:
+
+ Best, best of all,
+ Baraabum!
+
+KITTY: (JUMPS UP) O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus
+bazaar!
+
+_(She runs to Stephen. He leaves florry brusquely and seizes Kitty.
+A screaming bittern's harsh high whistle shrieks. Groangrousegurgling
+Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the
+room.)_
+
+THE PIANOLA:
+
+ My girl's a Yorkshire girl.
+
+ZOE:
+
+Yorkshire through and through.
+
+Come on all!
+
+_(She seizes Florry and waltzes her.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _Pas seul!_
+
+_(He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, snatches up his ashplant from
+the table and takes the floor. All wheel whirl waltz twirl. Bloombella
+Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women. Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits
+in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under
+thigh. With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow
+flashes Toft's cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded
+snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall
+again.)_
+
+THE PIANOLA:
+
+ Though she's a factory lass
+ And wears no fancy clothes.
+
+_(Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they
+scootlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!)_
+
+TUTTI: Encore! Bis! Bravo! Encore!
+
+SIMON: Think of your mother's people!
+
+STEPHEN: Dance of death.
+
+_(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, horse, nag, steer, piglings,
+Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded
+ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through. Baraabum! On
+nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin Steel shark stone
+onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram
+filling bawling gum he's a champion. Fuseblue peer from barrel rev.
+evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly
+with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last switchback lumbering up
+and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber
+bumpshire rose. Baraabum!)_
+
+_(The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes
+closed he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn
+roundabout. Bright midges dance on walls. He stops dead.)_
+
+STEPHEN: Ho!
+
+_(Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper
+grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her
+face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and
+lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens
+her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and
+confessors sing voicelessly.)_
+
+THE CHOIR:
+
+ Liliata rutilantium te confessorum...
+ Iubilantium te virginum...
+
+_(from the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester's dress
+of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands gaping at
+her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)_
+
+BUCK MULLIGAN: She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the
+afflicted mother. _(He upturns his eyes)_ Mercurial Malachi!
+
+THE MOTHER: _(With the subtle smile of death's madness)_ I was once the
+beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Horrorstruck)_ Lemur, who are you? No. What bogeyman's trick
+is this?
+
+BUCK MULLIGAN: _(Shakes his curling capbell)_ The mockery of it! Kinch
+dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. _(Tears of molten
+butter fall from his eyes on to the scone)_ Our great sweet mother! _Epi
+oinopa ponton._
+
+THE MOTHER: _(Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of
+wetted ashes)_ All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in
+the world. You too. Time will come.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Choking with fright, remorse and horror)_ They say I killed
+you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.
+
+THE MOTHER: _(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth)_
+You sang that song to me. _Love's bitter mystery._
+
+STEPHEN: _(Eagerly)_ Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word
+known to all men.
+
+THE MOTHER: Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at
+Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the
+strangers? Prayer is allpowerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the
+Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.
+
+STEPHEN: The ghoul! Hyena!
+
+THE MOTHER: I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that
+boiled rice every night after your brainwork. Years and years I loved
+you, O, my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.
+
+ZOE: _(Fanning herself with the grate fan)_ I'm melting!
+
+FLORRY: _(Points to Stephen)_ Look! He's white.
+
+BLOOM: _(Goes to the window to open it more)_ Giddy.
+
+THE MOTHER: _(With smouldering eyes)_ Repent! O, the fire of hell!
+
+STEPHEN: _(Panting)_ His noncorrosive sublimate! The corpsechewer! Raw
+head and bloody bones.
+
+THE MOTHER: _(Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen
+breath)_ Beware! _(She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly
+towards Stephen's breast with outstretched finger)_ Beware God's hand!
+_(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in
+Stephen's heart.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _(Strangled with rage)_ Shite! _(His features grow drawn grey
+and old)_
+
+BLOOM: _(At the window)_ What?
+
+STEPHEN: _Ah non, par exemple!_ The intellectual imagination! With me
+all or not at all. _Non serviam!_
+
+FLORRY: Give him some cold water. Wait. _(She rushes out)_
+
+THE MOTHER: _(Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately)_ O Sacred
+Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred
+Heart!
+
+STEPHEN: No! No! No! Break my spirit, all of you, if you can! I'll bring
+you all to heel!
+
+THE MOTHER: _(In the agony of her deathrattle)_ Have mercy on Stephen,
+Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love,
+grief and agony on Mount Calvary.
+
+STEPHEN: _Nothung_!
+
+_(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier.
+Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of
+all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)_
+
+THE GASJET: Pwfungg!
+
+BLOOM: Stop!
+
+LYNCH: _(Rushes forward and seizes Stephen's hand)_ Here! Hold on! Don't
+run amok!
+
+BELLA: Police!
+
+_(Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown back stark,
+beats the ground and flies from the room, past the whores at the door.)_
+
+BELLA: _(Screams)_ After him!
+
+_(The two whores rush to the halldoor. Lynch and Kitty and Zoe stampede
+from the room. They talk excitedly. Bloom follows, returns.)_
+
+THE WHORES: _(Jammed in the doorway, pointing)_ Down there.
+
+ZOE: _(Pointing)_ There. There's something up.
+
+BELLA: Who pays for the lamp? _(She seizes Bloom's coattail)_ Here, you
+were with him. The lamp's broken.
+
+BLOOM: _(Rushes to the hall, rushes back)_ What lamp, woman?
+
+A WHORE: He tore his coat.
+
+BELLA: _(Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points)_ Who's to pay
+for that? Ten shillings. You're a witness.
+
+BLOOM: _(Snatches up Stephen's ashplant)_ Me? Ten shillings? Haven't you
+lifted enough off him? Didn't he...?
+
+BELLA: _(Loudly)_ Here, none of your tall talk. This isn't a brothel. A
+ten shilling house.
+
+BLOOM: _(His head under the lamp, pulls the chain. Puling, the gasjet
+lights up a crushed mauve purple shade. He raises the ashplant.)_ Only
+the chimney's broken. Here is all he...
+
+BELLA: _(Shrinks back and screams)_ Jesus! Don't!
+
+BLOOM: _(Warding off a blow)_ To show you how he hit the paper. There's
+not sixpenceworth of damage done. Ten shillings!
+
+FLORRY: _(With a glass of water, enters)_ Where is he?
+
+BELLA: Do you want me to call the police?
+
+BLOOM: O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student.
+Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. _(He makes
+a masonic sign)_ Know what I mean? Nephew of the vice-chancellor. You
+don't want a scandal.
+
+BELLA: _(Angrily)_ Trinity. Coming down here ragging after the boatraces
+and paying nothing. Are you my commander here or? Where is he? I'll
+charge him! Disgrace him, I will! (She Shouts) Zoe! Zoe!
+
+BLOOM: _(Urgently)_ And if it were your own son in Oxford? _(Warningly)_
+I know.
+
+BELLA: _(Almost speechless)_ Who are. Incog!
+
+ZOE: _(In the doorway)_ There's a row on.
+
+BLOOM: What? Where? _(He throws a shilling on the table and starts)_
+That's for the chimney. Where? I need mountain air.
+
+_(He hurries out through the hall. The whores point. Florry follows,
+spilling water from her tilted tumbler. On the doorstep all the whores
+clustered talk volubly, pointing to the right where the fog has cleared
+off. From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. It slows to in front
+of the house. Bloom at the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher who is
+about to dismount from the car with two silent lechers. He averts
+his face. Bella from within the hall urges on her whores. They blow
+ickylickysticky yumyum kisses. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghastly
+lewd smile. The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Zoe and Kitty
+still point right. Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws his caliph's hood
+and poncho and hurries down the steps with sideways face. Incog Haroun
+al Raschid he flits behind the silent lechers and hastens on by the
+railings with fleet step of a pard strewing the drag behind him, torn
+envelopes drenched in aniseed. The ashplant marks his stride. A pack
+of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in
+tallyho cap and an old pair of grey trousers, follow from fir, picking
+up the scent, nearer, baying, panting, at fault, breaking away, throwing
+their tongues, biting his heels, leaping at his tail. He walks,
+runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back. He is pelted with gravel,
+cabbagestumps, biscuitboxes, eggs, potatoes, dead codfish, woman's
+slipperslappers. After him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops
+in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C, 66 C, night watch, John Henry
+Menton, Wisdom Hely, V. B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes,
+Larry O'rourke, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The Nameless One,
+Mrs Riordan, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface,
+Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir
+Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Bartell d'Arcy, Joe Hynes,
+red Murray, editor Brayden, T. M. Healy, Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, John
+Howard Parnell, the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs
+Breen, Denis Breen, Theodore Purefoy, Mina Purefoy, the Westland
+Row postmistress, C. P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan,
+maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver,
+rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Joe
+Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy,
+Father Cowley, Crofton out of the Collector-general's, Dan Dawson,
+dental surgeon Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Bob Doran, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs
+Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwide
+behindinClonskeatram, the bookseller of_ Sweets of Sin, _Miss
+Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck,
+the managing clerk of Drimmie's, Wetherup, colonel Hayes, Mastiansky,
+Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty,
+Inspector Troy, Mrs Galbraith, the constable off Eccles Street corner,
+old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the mystery man on the beach, a
+retriever, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers.)_
+
+THE HUE AND CRY: _(Helterskelterpelterwelter)_ He's Bloom! Stop Bloom!
+Stopabloom! Stopperrobber! Hi! Hi! Stophim on the corner!
+
+_(At the corner of Beaver Street beneath the scaffolding Bloom panting
+stops on the fringe of the noisy quarrelling knot, a lot not knowing a
+jot what hi! hi! row and wrangle round the whowhat brawlaltogether.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _(With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly)_ You
+are my guests. Uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh
+of Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(To Cissy Caffrey)_ Was he insulting you?
+
+STEPHEN: Addressed her in vocative feminine. Probably neuter.
+Ungenitive.
+
+VOICES: No, he didn't. I seen him. The girl there. He was in Mrs
+Cohen's. What's up? Soldier and civilian.
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to
+do--you know, and the young man run up behind me. But I'm faithful to
+the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Catches sight of Lynch's and Kitty's heads)_ Hail, Sisyphus.
+_(He points to himself and the others)_ Poetic. Uropoetic.
+
+VOICES: Shes faithfultheman.
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: Yes, to go with him. And me with a soldier friend.
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: He doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter. Biff
+him one, Harry.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(To Cissy)_ Was he insulting you while me and him was
+having a piss?
+
+LORD TENNYSON: _(Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket
+flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded)_ Theirs not to reason why.
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: Biff him, Harry.
+
+STEPHEN: _(To Private Compton)_ I don't know your name but you are quite
+right. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their
+shirts. Shirt is synechdoche. Part for the whole.
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: _(To The Crowd)_ No, I was with the privates.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Amiably)_ Why not? The bold soldier boy. In my opinion every
+lady for example...
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(His cap awry, advances to Stephen)_ Say, how would it
+be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?
+
+STEPHEN: _(Looks up to the sky)_ How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of
+selfpretence. Personally, I detest action. _(He waves his hand)_ Hand
+hurts me slightly. _Enfin ce sont vos oignons._ _(To Cissy Caffrey)_
+Some trouble is on here. What is it precisely?
+
+DOLLY GRAY: _(From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving the sign
+of the heroine of Jericho)_ Rahab. Cook's son, goodbye. Safe home to
+Dolly. Dream of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.
+
+_(The soldiers turn their swimming eyes.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Elbowing through the crowd, plucks Stephen's sleeve
+vigorously)_ Come now, professor, that carman is waiting.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Turns)_ Eh? _(He disengages himself)_ Why should I not speak
+to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange?
+_(He points his finger)_ I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see
+his eye. Retaining the perpendicular.
+
+_(He staggers a pace back)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Propping him)_ Retain your own.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Laughs emptily)_ My centre of gravity is displaced. I have
+forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle
+for life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the
+tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. _(He taps his
+brow)_ But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.
+
+BIDDY THE CLAP: Did you hear what the professor said? He's a professor
+out of the college.
+
+CUNTY KATE: I did. I heard that.
+
+BIDDY THE CLAP: He expresses himself with such marked refinement of
+phraseology.
+
+CUNTY KATE: Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite
+trenchancy.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Pulls himself free and comes forward)_ What's that
+you're saying about my king?
+
+_(Edward the Seventh appears in an archway. He wars a white jersey on
+which an image of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the insignia of
+Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's
+and Probyn's horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable
+artillery company of Massachusetts. He sucks a red jujube. He is robed
+as a grand elect perfect and sublime mason with trowel and apron,
+marked_ made in Germany. _In his left hand he holds a plasterer's bucket
+on which is printed_ Défense d'uriner. _A roar of welcome greets him.)_
+
+EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly)_ Peace, perfect
+peace. For identification, bucket in my hand. Cheerio, boys. _(He turns
+to his subjects)_ We have come here to witness a clean straight fight
+and we heartily wish both men the best of good luck. Mahak makar a bak.
+
+_(He shakes hands with Private Carr, Private Compton, Stephen, Bloom and
+Lynch. General applause. Edward the Seventh lifts his bucket graciously
+in acknowledgment.)_
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(To Stephen)_ Say it again.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up)_ I understand your point
+of view though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age of
+patent medicines. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the
+point. You die for your country. Suppose. _(He places his arm on Private
+Carr's sleeve)_ Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country
+die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die.
+Damn death. Long live life!
+
+EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Levitates over heaps of slain, in the garb and
+with the halo of Joking Jesus, a white jujube in his phosphorescent
+face)_
+
+My methods are new and are causing surprise. To make the blind see I
+throw dust in their eyes.
+
+STEPHEN: Kings and unicorns! _(He fills back a pace)_ Come somewhere and
+we'll... What was that girl saying?...
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: Eh, Harry, give him a kick in the knackers. Stick one
+into Jerry.
+
+BLOOM: _(To the privates, softly)_ He doesn't know what he's saying.
+Taken a little more than is good for him. Absinthe. Greeneyed monster. I
+know him. He's a gentleman, a poet. It's all right.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Nods, smiling and laughing)_ Gentleman, patriot, scholar and
+judge of impostors.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: I don't give a bugger who he is.
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: We don't give a bugger who he is.
+
+STEPHEN: I seem to annoy them. Green rag to a bull.
+
+_(Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-day
+boy's hat signs to Stephen.)_
+
+KEVIN EGAN: H'lo! _Bonjour!_ The _vieille ogresse_ with the _dents
+jaunes_.
+
+_(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his rabbitface nibbling a quince
+leaf.)_
+
+PATRICE: _Socialiste!_
+
+DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: _(In medieval hauberk,
+two wild geese volant on his helm, with noble indignation points a
+mailed hand against the privates)_ Werf those eykes to footboden, big
+grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy!
+
+BLOOM: _(To Stephen)_ Come home. You'll get into trouble.
+
+STEPHEN: _(Swaying)_ I don't avoid it. He provokes my intelligence.
+
+BIDDY THE CLAP: One immediately observes that he is of patrician
+lineage.
+
+THE VIRAGO: Green above the red, says he. Wolfe Tone.
+
+THE BAWD: The red's as good as the green. And better. Up the soldiers!
+Up King Edward!
+
+A ROUGH: _(Laughs)_ Ay! Hands up to De Wet.
+
+THE CITIZEN: _(With a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls)_
+
+ May the God above
+ Send down a dove
+ With teeth as sharp as razors
+ To slit the throats
+ Of the English dogs
+ That hanged our Irish leaders.
+
+THE CROPPY BOY: _(The ropenoose round his neck, gripes in his issuing
+bowels with both hands)_
+
+I bear no hate to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the king.
+
+RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER: _(Accompanied by two blackmasked assistants,
+advances with gladstone bag which he opens)_ Ladies and gents,
+cleaver purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg. Knife with which Voisin
+dismembered the wife of a compatriot and hid remains in a sheet in the
+cellar, the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear. Phial
+containing arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon
+to the gallows.
+
+_(He jerks the rope. The assistants leap at the victim's legs and drag
+him downward, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.)_
+
+THE CROPPY BOY:
+
+Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.
+
+_(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts
+of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs
+Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys
+rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)_
+
+RUMBOLD: I'm near it myself. _(He undoes the noose)_ Rope which hanged
+the awful rebel. Ten shillings a time. As applied to Her Royal Highness.
+_(He plunges his head into the gaping belly of the hanged and draws out
+his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails)_ My painful
+duty has now been done. God save the king!
+
+EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Dances slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket, and
+sings with soft contentment)_
+
+On coronation day, on coronation day, O, won't we have a merry time,
+Drinking whisky, beer and wine!
+
+PRIVATE CARR: Here. What are you saying about my king?
+
+STEPHEN: _(Throws up his hands)_ O, this is too monotonous! Nothing.
+He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for
+some brutish empire of his. Money I haven't. _(He searches his pockets
+vaguely)_ GAVE IT TO SOMEONE.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: Who wants your bleeding money?
+
+STEPHEN: _(Tries to move off)_ Will someone tell me where I am least
+likely to meet these necessary evils? _Ça se voit aussi à paris._ Not
+that I... But, by Saint Patrick...!
+
+_(The women's heads coalesce. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears
+seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her
+breast.)_
+
+STEPHEN: Aha! I know you, gammer! Hamlet, revenge! The old sow that eats
+her farrow!
+
+OLD GUMMY GRANNY: _(Rocking to and fro)_ Ireland's sweetheart, the king
+of Spain's daughter, alanna. Strangers in my house, bad manners to them!
+_(She keens with banshee woe)_ Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the kine! _(She
+wails)_ You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?
+
+STEPHEN: How do I stand you? The hat trick! Where's the third person of
+the Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow.
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: _(Shrill)_ Stop them from fighting!
+
+A ROUGH: Our men retreated.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Tugging at his belt)_ I'll wring the neck of any fucker
+says a word against my fucking king.
+
+BLOOM: _(Terrified)_ He said nothing. Not a word. A pure
+misunderstanding.
+
+THE CITIZEN: _Erin go bragh!_
+
+_(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other medals,
+decorations, trophies of war, wounds. Both salute with fierce
+hostility.)_
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye. He's a proboer.
+
+STEPHEN: Did I? When?
+
+BLOOM: _(To the redcoats)_ We fought for you in South Africa, Irish
+missile troops. Isn't that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by
+our monarch.
+
+THE NAVVY: _(Staggering past)_ O, yes! O God, yes! O, make the kwawr a
+krowawr! O! Bo!
+
+_(Casqued halberdiers in armour thrust forward a pentice of gutted
+spearpoints. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in
+bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with epaulettes, gilt
+chevrons and sabretaches, his breast bright with medals, toes the line.
+He gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of the knights templars.)_
+
+MAJOR TWEEDY: _(Growls gruffly)_ Rorke's Drift! Up, guards, and at them!
+Mahar shalal hashbaz.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: I'll do him in.
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Waves the crowd back)_ Fair play, here. Make a
+bleeding butcher's shop of the bugger.
+
+_(Massed bands blare_ Garryowen _and_ God save the King.)
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: They're going to fight. For me!
+
+CUNTY KATE: The brave and the fair.
+
+BIDDY THE CLAP: Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best.
+
+CUNTY KATE: _(Blushing deeply)_ Nay, madam. The gules doublet and merry
+saint George for me!
+
+STEPHEN:
+
+The harlot's cry from street to street Shall weave Old Ireland's
+windingsheet.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Loosening his belt, shouts)_ I'll wring the neck of any
+fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.
+
+BLOOM: _(Shakes Cissy Caffrey's shoulders)_ Speak, you! Are you struck
+dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman,
+sacred lifegiver!
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: _(Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve)_ Amn't I with
+you? Amn't I your girl? Cissy's your girl. _(She cries)_ Police!
+
+STEPHEN: _(Ecstatically, to Cissy Caffrey)_
+
+ White thy fambles, red thy gan
+ And thy quarrons dainty is.
+
+
+VOICES: Police!
+
+DISTANT VOICES: Dublin's burning! Dublin's burning! On fire, on fire!
+
+_(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns
+boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse
+commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech.
+Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on
+cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. Birds of prey, winging from the sea,
+rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets,
+cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins,
+blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese. The
+midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin
+from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black
+goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless
+yawn. Tom Rochford, winner, in athlete's singlet and breeches, arrives
+at the head of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void.
+He is followed by a race of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they
+spring from the brink. Their bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy
+clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their
+skirts above their heads to protect themselves. Laughing witches in red
+cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters
+blisters. It rains dragons' teeth. Armed heroes spring up from furrows.
+They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the red cross and fight
+duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith
+O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt,
+Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond,
+John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord
+Gerald Fitzedward, The O'Donoghue of the Glens against The Glens of The
+O'Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the feldaltar
+of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns.
+From the high barbacans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the
+smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of
+unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly.
+Father Malachi O'Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his
+two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr
+Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his head
+and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrant's head an open
+umbrella.)_
+
+FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: _Introibo ad altare diaboli._
+
+THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: To the devil which hath made glad my young
+days.
+
+FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: _(Takes from the chalice and elevates a
+blooddripping host) Corpus meum._
+
+THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: _(Raises high behind the celebrant's
+petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot
+is stuck)_ My body.
+
+THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED: Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof,
+Aiulella!
+
+_(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)_
+
+ADONAI: Dooooooooooog!
+
+THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent
+reigneth!
+
+_(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)_
+
+ADONAI: Goooooooooood!
+
+_(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions
+sing_ Kick the Pope _and_ Daily, daily sing to Mary.)
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(With ferocious articulation)_ I'll do him in, so help me
+fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking
+windpipe!
+
+OLD GUMMY GRANNY: _(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand)_ Remove
+him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be
+free. _(She prays)_ O good God, take him!
+
+(THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.)
+
+BLOOM: _(Runs to lynch)_ Can't you get him away?
+
+LYNCH: He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty! _(To Bloom)_
+Get him away, you. He won't listen to me.
+
+_(He drags Kitty away.)_
+
+STEPHEN: _(Points) exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit._
+
+BLOOM: _(Runs to Stephen)_ Come along with me now before worse happens.
+Here's your stick.
+
+STEPHEN: Stick, no. Reason. This feast of pure reason.
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: _(Pulling Private Carr)_ Come on, you're boosed. He
+insulted me but I forgive him. _(Shouting in his ear)_ I forgive him for
+insulting me.
+
+BLOOM: _(Over Stephen's shoulder)_ Yes, go. You see he's incapable.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Breaks loose)_ I'll insult him.
+
+_(He rushes towards Stephen, fist outstretched, and strikes him in the
+face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls, stunned. He lies prone, his
+face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and picks it
+up.)_
+
+MAJOR TWEEDY: _(Loudly)_ Carbine in bucket! Cease fire! Salute!
+
+THE RETRIEVER: _(Barking furiously)_ Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute.
+
+THE CROWD: Let him up! Don't strike him when he's down! Air! Who? The
+soldier hit him. He's a professor. Is he hurted? Don't manhandle him!
+He's fainted!
+
+A HAG: What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under
+the influence. Let them go and fight the Boers!
+
+THE BAWD: Listen to who's talking! Hasn't the soldier a right to go with
+his girl? He gave him the coward's blow.
+
+_(They grab at each other's hair, claw at each other and spit)_
+
+THE RETRIEVER: _(Barking)_ Wow wow wow.
+
+BLOOM: _(Shoves them back, loudly)_ Get back, stand back!
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Tugging his comrade)_ Here. Bugger off, Harry. Here's
+the cops! _(Two raincaped watch, tall, stand in the group.)_
+
+FIRST WATCH: What's wrong here?
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: We were with this lady. And he insulted us. And
+assaulted my chum. _(The retriever barks)_ Who owns the bleeding tyke?
+
+CISSY CAFFREY: _(With expectation)_ Is he bleeding!
+
+A MAN: _(Rising from his knees)_ No. Gone off. He'll come to all right.
+
+BLOOM: _(Glances sharply at the man)_ Leave him to me. I can easily...
+
+SECOND WATCH: Who are you? Do you know him?
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Lurches towards the watch)_ He insulted my lady friend.
+
+BLOOM: _(Angrily)_ You hit him without provocation. I'm a witness.
+Constable, take his regimental number.
+
+SECOND WATCH: I don't want your instructions in the discharge of my
+duty.
+
+PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Pulling his comrade)_ Here, bugger off Harry. Or
+Bennett'll shove you in the lockup.
+
+PRIVATE CARR: _(Staggering as he is pulled away)_ God fuck old Bennett.
+He's a whitearsed bugger. I don't give a shit for him.
+
+FIRST WATCH: _(Takes out his notebook)_ What's his name?
+
+BLOOM: _(Peering over the crowd)_ I just see a car there. If you give me
+a hand a second, sergeant...
+
+FIRST WATCH: Name and address.
+
+_(Corny Kelleker, weepers round his hat, a death wreath in his hand,
+appears among the bystanders.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Quickly)_ O, the very man! _(He whispers)_ Simon Dedalus' son.
+A bit sprung. Get those policemen to move those loafers back.
+
+SECOND WATCH: Night, Mr Kelleher.
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: _(To the watch, with drawling eye)_ That's all right.
+I know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold cup. Throwaway. _(He laughs)_
+Twenty to one. Do you follow me?
+
+FIRST WATCH: _(Turns to the crowd)_ Here, what are you all gaping at?
+Move on out of that.
+
+_(The crowd disperses slowly, muttering, down the lane.)_
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: Leave it to me, sergeant. That'll be all right. _(He
+laughs, shaking his head)_ We were often as bad ourselves, ay or worse.
+What? Eh, what?
+
+FIRST WATCH: _(Laughs)_ I suppose so.
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: _(Nudges the second watch)_ Come and wipe your name off
+the slate. _(He lilts, wagging his head)_ With my tooraloom tooraloom
+tooraloom tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me?
+
+SECOND WATCH: _(Genially)_ Ah, sure we were too.
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: _(Winking)_ Boys will be boys. I've a car round there.
+
+SECOND WATCH: All right, Mr Kelleher. Good night.
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: I'll see to that.
+
+BLOOM: _(Shakes hands with both of the watch in turn)_ Thank you very
+much, gentlemen. Thank you. _(He mumbles confidentially)_ We don't want
+any scandal, you understand. Father is a wellknown highly respected
+citizen. Just a little wild oats, you understand.
+
+FIRST WATCH: O. I understand, sir.
+
+SECOND WATCH: That's all right, sir.
+
+FIRST WATCH: It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report
+it at the station.
+
+BLOOM: _(Nods rapidly)_ Naturally. Quite right. Only your bounden duty.
+
+SECOND WATCH: It's our duty.
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: Good night, men.
+
+THE WATCH: _(Saluting together)_ Night, gentlemen. _(They move off with
+slow heavy tread)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Blows)_ Providential you came on the scene. You have a car?...
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: _(Laughs, pointing his thumb over his right shoulder to
+the car brought up against the scaffolding)_ Two commercials that were
+standing fizz in Jammet's. Like princes, faith. One of them lost two
+quid on the race. Drowning his grief. And were on for a go with the
+jolly girls. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.
+
+BLOOM: I was just going home by Gardiner street when I happened to...
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: _(Laughs)_ Sure they wanted me to join in with the mots.
+No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. _(He
+laughs again and leers with lacklustre eye)_ Thanks be to God we have it
+in the house, what, eh, do you follow me? Hah, hah, hah!
+
+BLOOM: _(Tries to laugh)_ He, he, he! Yes. Matter of fact I was just
+visiting an old friend of mine there, Virag, you don't know him (poor
+fellow, he's laid up for the past week) and we had a liquor together and
+I was just making my way home...
+
+_(The horse neighs.)_
+
+THE HORSE: Hohohohohohoh! Hohohohome!
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: Sure it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after
+we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and
+got off to see. _(He laughs)_ Sober hearsedrivers a speciality. Will I
+give him a lift home? Where does he hang out? Somewhere in Cabra, what?
+
+BLOOM: No, in Sandycove, I believe, from what he let drop.
+
+_(Stephen, prone, breathes to the stars. Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls
+at the horse. Bloom, in gloom, looms down.)_
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: _(Scratches his nape)_ Sandycove! _(He bends down and
+calls to Stephen)_ Eh! _(He calls again)_ Eh! He's covered with shavings
+anyhow. Take care they didn't lift anything off him.
+
+BLOOM: No, no, no. I have his money and his hat here and stick.
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: Ah, well, he'll get over it. No bones broken. Well, I'll
+shove along. _(He laughs)_ I've a rendezvous in the morning. Burying the
+dead. Safe home!
+
+THE HORSE: _(Neighs)_ Hohohohohome.
+
+BLOOM: Good night. I'll just wait and take him along in a few...
+
+_(Corny Kelleher returns to the outside car and mounts it. The horse
+harness jingles.)_
+
+CORNY KELLEHER: _(From the car, standing)_ Night.
+
+BLOOM: Night.
+
+_(The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his whip encouragingly. The
+car and horse back slowly, awkwardly, and turn. Corny Kelleher on the
+sideseat sways his head to and fro in sign of mirth at Bloom's plight.
+The jarvey joins in the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the
+farther seat. Bloom shakes his head in mute mirthful reply. With thumb
+and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the two bobbies will allow the
+sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a slow nod Bloom
+conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. The car
+jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tooraloom lane. Corny Kelleher
+again reassuralooms with his hand. Bloom with his hand assuralooms Corny
+Kelleher that he is reassuraloomtay. The tinkling hoofs and jingling
+harness grow fainter with their tooralooloo looloo lay. Bloom, holding
+in his hand Stephen's hat, festooned with shavings, and ashplant, stands
+irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder.)_
+
+BLOOM: Eh! Ho! _(There is no answer; he bends again)_ Mr Dedalus!
+_(There is no answer)_ The name if you call. Somnambulist. _(He bends
+again and hesitating, brings his mouth near the face of the prostrate
+form)_ Stephen! _(There is no answer. He calls again.)_ Stephen!
+
+STEPHEN: _(Groans)_ Who? Black panther. Vampire. _(He sighs and
+stretches himself, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels)_
+
+ Who... drive... Fergus now
+ And pierce... wood's woven shade?...
+
+_(He turns on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.)_
+
+BLOOM: Poetry. Well educated. Pity. _(He bends again and undoes
+the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat)_ To breathe. _(He brushes the
+woodshavings from Stephen's clothes with light hand and fingers)_ One
+pound seven. Not hurt anyhow. _(He listens)_ What?
+
+STEPHEN: _(Murmurs)_
+
+ ... shadows... the woods
+ ... white breast... dim sea.
+
+_(He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body. Bloom,
+holding the hat and ashplant, stands erect. A dog barks in the distance.
+Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on
+Stephen's face and form.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Communes with the night)_ Face reminds me of his poor mother.
+In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A
+girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him. _(He murmurs)_... swear
+that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts,
+art or arts... _(He murmurs)_... in the rough sands of the sea... a
+cabletow's length from the shore... where the tide ebbs... and flows
+...
+
+_(Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips
+in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears
+slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an
+eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book
+in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the
+page.)_
+
+BLOOM: _(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly)_ Rudy!
+
+RUDY: _(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing,
+smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and
+ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a
+violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)_
+
+
+
+
+-- III --
+
+Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of
+the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up
+generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed. His
+(Stephen's) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit
+unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr
+Bloom in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water
+available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes hit upon an
+expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman's
+shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt bridge
+where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and
+soda or a mineral. But how to get there was the rub. For the nonce he
+was rather nonplussed but inasmuch as the duty plainly devolved upon him
+to take some measures on the subject he pondered suitable ways and means
+during which Stephen repeatedly yawned. So far as he could see he was
+rather pale in the face so that it occurred to him as highly advisable
+to get a conveyance of some description which would answer in their
+then condition, both of them being e.d.ed, particularly Stephen, always
+assuming that there was such a thing to be found. Accordingly after a
+few such preliminaries as brushing, in spite of his having forgotten
+to take up his rather soapsuddy handkerchief after it had done yeoman
+service in the shaving line, they both walked together along Beaver
+street or, more properly, lane as far as the farrier's and the
+distinctly fetid atmosphere of the livery stables at the corner of
+Montgomery street where they made tracks to the left from thence
+debouching into Amiens street round by the corner of Dan Bergin's. But
+as he confidently anticipated there was not a sign of a Jehu plying for
+hire anywhere to be seen except a fourwheeler, probably engaged by some
+fellows inside on the spree, outside the North Star hotel and there was
+no symptom of its budging a quarter of an inch when Mr Bloom, who was
+anything but a professional whistler, endeavoured to hail it by emitting
+a kind of a whistle, holding his arms arched over his head, twice.
+
+This was a quandary but, bringing common sense to bear on it, evidently
+there was nothing for it but put a good face on the matter and foot it
+which they accordingly did. So, bevelling around by Mullett's and the
+Signal House which they shortly reached, they proceeded perforce in the
+direction of Amiens street railway terminus, Mr Bloom being handicapped
+by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had,
+to vary the timehonoured adage, gone the way of all buttons though,
+entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he heroically made
+light of the mischance. So as neither of them were particularly pressed
+for time, as it happened, and the temperature refreshing since it
+cleared up after the recent visitation of Jupiter Pluvius, they dandered
+along past by where the empty vehicle was waiting without a fare or a
+jarvey. As it so happened a Dublin United Tramways Company's sandstrewer
+happened to be returning and the elder man recounted to his companion _à
+propos_ of the incident his own truly miraculous escape of some little
+while back. They passed the main entrance of the Great Northern railway
+station, the starting point for Belfast, where of course all traffic was
+suspended at that late hour and passing the backdoor of the morgue
+(a not very enticing locality, not to say gruesome to a degree, more
+especially at night) ultimately gained the Dock Tavern and in due course
+turned into Store street, famous for its C division police station.
+Between this point and the high at present unlit warehouses of Beresford
+place Stephen thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird's the
+stonecutter's in his mind somehow in Talbot place, first turning on the
+right, while the other who was acting as his _fidus Achates_ inhaled
+with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke's city bakery,
+situated quite close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed
+of our daily bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and
+most indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, O tell me
+where is fancy bread, at Rourke's the baker's it is said.
+
+_En route_ to his taciturn and, not to put too fine a point on it, not
+yet perfectly sober companion Mr Bloom who at all events was in complete
+possession of his faculties, never more so, in fact disgustingly sober,
+spoke a word of caution re the dangers of nighttown, women of ill fame
+and swell mobsmen, which, barely permissible once in a while though not
+as a habitual practice, was of the nature of a regular deathtrap for
+young fellows of his age particularly if they had acquired drinking
+habits under the influence of liquor unless you knew a little jiujitsu
+for every contingency as even a fellow on the broad of his back could
+administer a nasty kick if you didn't look out. Highly providential
+was the appearance on the scene of Corny Kelleher when Stephen was
+blissfully unconscious but for that man in the gap turning up at the
+eleventh hour the finis might have been that he might have been a
+candidate for the accident ward or, failing that, the bridewell and
+an appearance in the court next day before Mr Tobias or, he being the
+solicitor rather, old Wall, he meant to say, or Mahony which simply
+spelt ruin for a chap when it got bruited about. The reason he mentioned
+the fact was that a lot of those policemen, whom he cordially disliked,
+were admittedly unscrupulous in the service of the Crown and, as Mr
+Bloom put it, recalling a case or two in the A division in Clanbrassil
+street, prepared to swear a hole through a ten gallon pot. Never on
+the spot when wanted but in quiet parts of the city, Pembroke road for
+example, the
+
+guardians of the law were well in evidence, the obvious reason being
+they were paid to protect the upper classes. Another thing he commented
+on was equipping soldiers with firearms or sidearms of any description
+liable to go off at any time which was tantamount to inciting them
+against civilians should by any chance they fall out over anything. You
+frittered away your time, he very sensibly maintained, and health and
+also character besides which, the squandermania of the thing, fast women
+of the _demimonde_ ran away with a lot of l s. d. into the bargain and
+the greatest danger of all was who you got drunk with though, touching
+the much vexed question of stimulants, he relished a glass of choice old
+wine in season as both
+
+nourishing and bloodmaking and possessing aperient virtues (notably a
+good burgundy which he was a staunch believer in) still never beyond
+a certain point where he invariably drew the line as it simply led to
+trouble all round to say nothing of your being at the tender mercy of
+others practically. Most of all he commented adversely on the desertion
+of Stephen by all his pubhunting _confreres_ but one, a most glaring
+piece of ratting on the part of his brother medicos under all the circs.
+
+--And that one was Judas, Stephen said, who up to then had said nothing
+whatsoever of any kind.
+
+Discussing these and kindred topics they made a beeline across the back
+of the Customhouse and passed under the Loop Line bridge where a brazier
+of coke burning in front of a sentrybox or something like one attracted
+their rather lagging footsteps. Stephen of his own accord stopped for
+no special reason to look at the heap of barren cobblestones and by
+the light emanating from the brazier he could just make out the darker
+figure of the corporation watchman inside the gloom of the sentrybox. He
+began to remember that this had happened or had been mentioned as having
+happened before but it cost him no small effort before he remembered
+that he recognised in the sentry a quondam friend of his father's,
+Gumley. To avoid a meeting he drew nearer to the pillars of the railway
+bridge.
+
+--Someone saluted you, Mr Bloom said.
+
+A figure of middle height on the prowl evidently under the arches
+saluted again, calling:
+
+--_Night!_
+
+Stephen of course started rather dizzily and stopped to return the
+compliment. Mr Bloom actuated by motives of inherent delicacy inasmuch
+as he always believed in minding his own business moved off but
+nevertheless remained on the _qui vive_ with just a shade of anxiety
+though not funkyish in the least. Though unusual in the Dublin area he
+knew that it was not by any means unknown for desperadoes who had next
+to nothing to live on to be abroad waylaying and generally terrorising
+peaceable pedestrians by placing a pistol at their head in some
+secluded spot outside the city proper, famished loiterers of the
+Thames embankment category they might be hanging about there or simply
+marauders ready to decamp with whatever boodle they could in one fell
+swoop at a moment's notice, your money or your life, leaving you there
+to point a moral, gagged and garrotted.
+
+Stephen, that is when the accosting figure came to close quarters,
+though he was not in an over sober state himself recognised Corley's
+breath redolent of rotten cornjuice. Lord John Corley some called him
+and his genealogy came about in this wise. He was the eldest son of
+inspector Corley of the G division, lately deceased, who had married
+a certain Katherine Brophy, the daughter of a Louth farmer. His
+grandfather Patrick Michael Corley of New Ross had married the widow
+of a publican there whose maiden name had been Katherine (also) Talbot.
+Rumour had it (though not proved) that she descended from the house of
+the lords Talbot de Malahide in whose mansion, really an unquestionably
+fine residence of its kind and well worth seeing, her mother or aunt or
+some relative, a woman, as the tale went, of extreme beauty, had enjoyed
+the distinction of being in service in the washkitchen. This therefore
+was the reason why the still comparatively young though dissolute
+man who now addressed Stephen was spoken of by some with facetious
+proclivities as Lord John Corley.
+
+Taking Stephen on one side he had the customary doleful ditty to tell.
+Not as much as a farthing to purchase a night's lodgings. His friends
+had all deserted him. Furthermore he had a row with Lenehan and called
+him to Stephen a mean bloody swab with a sprinkling of a number of other
+uncalledfor expressions. He was out of a job and implored of Stephen to
+tell him where on God's earth he could get something, anything at all,
+to do. No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that
+was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected
+through the mother in some way, both occurrences happening at the same
+time if the whole thing wasn't a complete fabrication from start to
+finish. Anyhow he was all in.
+
+--I wouldn't ask you only, pursued he, on my solemn oath and God knows
+I'm on the rocks.
+
+--There'll be a job tomorrow or next day, Stephen told him, in a boys'
+school at Dalkey for a gentleman usher. Mr Garrett Deasy. Try it. You
+may mention my name.
+
+--Ah, God, Corley replied, sure I couldn't teach in a school, man. I was
+never one of your bright ones, he added with a half laugh. I got stuck
+twice in the junior at the christian brothers.
+
+--I have no place to sleep myself, Stephen informed him.
+
+Corley at the first go-off was inclined to suspect it was something to
+do with Stephen being fired out of his digs for bringing in a bloody
+tart off the street. There was a dosshouse in Marlborough street, Mrs
+Maloney's, but it was only a tanner touch and full of undesirables but
+M'Conachie told him you got a decent enough do in the Brazen Head over
+in Winetavern street (which was distantly suggestive to the person
+addressed of friar Bacon) for a bob. He was starving too though he
+hadn't said a word about it.
+
+Though this sort of thing went on every other night or very near it
+still Stephen's feelings got the better of him in a sense though he knew
+that Corley's brandnew rigmarole on a par with the others was hardly
+deserving of much credence. However _haud ignarus malorum miseris
+succurrere disco_ etcetera as the Latin poet remarks especially as luck
+would have it he got paid his screw after every middle of the month on
+the sixteenth which was the date of the month as a matter of fact though
+a good bit of the wherewithal was demolished. But the cream of the joke
+was nothing would get it out of Corley's head that he was living in
+affluence and hadn't a thing to do but hand out the needful. Whereas.
+He put his hand in a pocket anyhow not with the idea of finding any food
+there but thinking he might lend him anything up to a bob or so in lieu
+so that he might endeavour at all events and get sufficient to eat but
+the result was in the negative for, to his chagrin, he found his cash
+missing. A few broken biscuits were all the result of his investigation.
+He tried his hardest to recollect for the moment whether he had lost
+as well he might have or left because in that contingency it was not a
+pleasant lookout, very much the reverse in fact. He was altogether too
+fagged out to institute a thorough search though he tried to recollect.
+About biscuits he dimly remembered. Who now exactly gave them he
+wondered or where was or did he buy. However in another pocket he came
+across what he surmised in the dark were pennies, erroneously however,
+as it turned out.
+
+--Those are halfcrowns, man, Corley corrected him.
+
+And so in point of fact they turned out to be. Stephen anyhow lent him
+one of them.
+
+--Thanks, Corley answered, you're a gentleman. I'll pay you back one
+time. Who's that with you? I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse
+in Camden street with Boylan, the billsticker. You might put in a good
+word for us to get me taken on there. I'd carry a sandwichboard only
+the girl in the office told me they're full up for the next three weeks,
+man. God, you've to book ahead, man, you'd think it was for the Carl
+Rosa. I don't give a shite anyway so long as I get a job, even as a
+crossing sweeper.
+
+Subsequently being not quite so down in the mouth after the two and six
+he got he informed Stephen about a fellow by the name of Bags Comisky
+that he said Stephen knew well out of Fullam's, the shipchandler's,
+bookkeeper there that used to be often round in Nagle's back with O'Mara
+and a little chap with a stutter the name of Tighe. Anyhow he was lagged
+the night before last and fined ten bob for a drunk and disorderly and
+refusing to go with the constable.
+
+210
+
+Mr Bloom in the meanwhile kept dodging about in the vicinity of the
+cobblestones near the brazier of coke in front of the corporation
+watchman's sentrybox who evidently a glutton for work, it struck him,
+was having a quiet forty winks for all intents and purposes on his own
+private account while Dublin slept. He threw an odd eye at the same time
+now and then at Stephen's anything but immaculately attired interlocutor
+as if he had seen that nobleman somewhere or other though where he was
+not in a position to truthfully state nor had he the remotest idea when.
+Being a levelheaded individual who could give points to not a few in
+point of shrewd observation he also remarked on his very dilapidated
+hat and slouchy wearing apparel generally testifying to a chronic
+impecuniosity. Palpably he was one of his hangerson but for the
+matter of that it was merely a question of one preying on his nextdoor
+neighbour all round, in every deep, so to put it, a deeper depth and for
+the matter of that if the man in the street chanced to be in the dock
+himself penal servitude with or without the option of a fine would be
+a very rara avis altogether. In any case he had a consummate amount of
+cool assurance intercepting people at that hour of the night or morning.
+Pretty thick that was certainly.
+
+The pair parted company and Stephen rejoined Mr Bloom who, with his
+practised eye, was not without perceiving that he had succumbed to the
+blandiloquence of the other parasite. Alluding to the encounter he said,
+laughingly, Stephen, that is:
+
+--He is down on his luck. He asked me to ask you to ask somebody named
+Boylan, a billsticker, to give him a job as a sandwichman.
+
+At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr
+Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the
+direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana,
+moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair,
+whereupon he observed evasively:
+
+--Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say. Now you mention it
+his face was familiar to me. But, leaving that for the moment, how much
+did you part with, he queried, if I am not too inquisitive?
+
+--Half a crown, Stephen responded. I daresay he needs it to sleep
+somewhere.
+
+--Needs! Mr Bloom ejaculated, professing not the least surprise at
+the intelligence, I can quite credit the assertion and I guarantee he
+invariably does. Everyone according to his needs or everyone according
+to his deeds. But, talking about things in general, where, added he with
+a smile, will you sleep yourself? Walking to Sandycove is out of
+the question. And even supposing you did you won't get in after what
+occurred at Westland Row station. Simply fag out there for nothing. I
+don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why
+did you leave your father's house?
+
+--To seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer.
+
+--I met your respected father on a recent occasion, Mr Bloom
+diplomatically returned, today in fact, or to be strictly accurate, on
+yesterday. Where does he live at present? I gathered in the course of
+conversation that he had moved.
+
+--I believe he is in Dublin somewhere, Stephen answered unconcernedly.
+Why?
+
+--A gifted man, Mr Bloom said of Mr Dedalus senior, in more respects
+than one and a born _raconteur_ if ever there was one. He takes great
+pride, quite legitimate, out of you. You could go back perhaps, he
+hasarded, still thinking of the very unpleasant scene at Westland Row
+terminus when it was perfectly evident that the other two, Mulligan,
+that is, and that English tourist friend of his, who eventually euchred
+their third companion, were patently trying as if the whole bally
+station belonged to them to give Stephen the slip in the confusion,
+which they did.
+
+There was no response forthcoming to the suggestion however, such as it
+was, Stephen's mind's eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his
+family hearth the last time he saw it with his sister Dilly sitting by
+the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell
+cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he
+could drink it with the oatmealwater for milk after the Friday herrings
+they had eaten at two a penny with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and
+Katey, the cat meanwhile under the mangle devouring a mess of eggshells
+and charred fish heads and bones on a square of brown paper, in
+accordance with the third precept of the church to fast and abstain
+on the days commanded, it being quarter tense or if not, ember days or
+something like that.
+
+--No, Mr Bloom repeated again, I wouldn't personally repose much trust
+in that boon companion of yours who contributes the humorous element, Dr
+Mulligan, as a guide, philosopher and friend if I were in your shoes. He
+knows which side his bread is buttered on though in all probability he
+never realised what it is to be without regular meals. Of course you
+didn't notice as much as I did. But it wouldn't occasion me the least
+surprise to learn that a pinch of tobacco or some narcotic was put in
+your drink for some ulterior object.
+
+He understood however from all he heard that Dr Mulligan was a versatile
+allround man, by no means confined to medicine only, who was rapidly
+coming to the fore in his line and, if the report was verified, bade
+fair to enjoy a flourishing practice in the not too distant future as
+a tony medical practitioner drawing a handsome fee for his services
+in addition to which professional status his rescue of that man from
+certain drowning by artificial respiration and what they call first
+aid at Skerries, or Malahide was it?, was, he was bound to admit, an
+exceedingly plucky deed which he could not too highly praise, so that
+frankly he was utterly at a loss to fathom what earthly reason could be
+at the back of it except he put it down to sheer cussedness or jealousy,
+pure and simple.
+
+--Except it simply amounts to one thing and he is what they call picking
+your brains, he ventured to throw out.
+
+The guarded glance of half solicitude half curiosity augmented by
+friendliness which he gave at Stephen's at present morose expression
+of features did not throw a flood of light, none at all in fact on the
+problem as to whether he had let himself be badly bamboozled to judge by
+two or three lowspirited remarks he let drop or the other way about saw
+through the affair and for some reason or other best known to himself
+allowed matters to more or less. Grinding poverty did have that effect
+and he more than conjectured that, high educational abilities though he
+possessed, he experienced no little difficulty in making both ends meet.
+
+Adjacent to the men's public urinal they perceived an icecream car round
+which a group of presumably Italians in heated altercation were getting
+rid of voluble expressions in their vivacious language in a particularly
+animated way, there being some little differences between the parties.
+
+--_Puttana madonna, che ci dia i quattrini! Ho ragione? Culo rotto!_
+
+_--Intendiamoci. Mezzo sovrano piu..._
+
+_--Dice lui, pero!_
+
+_--Mezzo._
+
+_--Farabutto! Mortacci sui!_
+
+_--Ma ascolta! Cinque la testa piu..._
+
+Mr Bloom and Stephen entered the cabman's shelter, an unpretentious
+wooden structure, where, prior to then, he had rarely if ever been
+before, the former having previously whispered to the latter a few
+hints anent the keeper of it said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat
+Fitzharris, the invincible, though he could not vouch for the actual
+facts which quite possibly there was not one vestige of truth in. A few
+moments later saw our two noctambules safely seated in a discreet corner
+only to be greeted by stares from the decidedly miscellaneous collection
+of waifs and strays and other nondescript specimens of the genus _homo_
+already there engaged in eating and drinking diversified by conversation
+for whom they seemingly formed an object of marked curiosity.
+
+--Now touching a cup of coffee, Mr Bloom ventured to plausibly suggest
+to break the ice, it occurs to me you ought to sample something in the
+shape of solid food, say, a roll of some description.
+
+Accordingly his first act was with characteristic _sangfroid_ to order
+these commodities quietly. The _hoi polloi_ of jarvies or stevedores
+or whatever they were after a cursory examination turned their eyes
+apparently dissatisfied, away though one redbearded bibulous individual
+portion of whose hair was greyish, a sailor probably, still stared for
+some appreciable time before transferring his rapt attention to the
+floor. Mr Bloom, availing himself of the right of free speech, he having
+just a bowing acquaintance with the language in dispute, though, to be
+sure, rather in a quandary over _voglio_, remarked to his _protégé_ in
+an audible tone of voice _a propos_ of the battle royal in the street
+which was still raging fast and furious:
+
+--A beautiful language. I mean for singing purposes. Why do you not
+write your poetry in that language? _Bella Poetria_! It is so melodious
+and full. _Belladonna. Voglio._
+
+Stephen, who was trying his dead best to yawn if he could, suffering
+from lassitude generally, replied:
+
+--To fill the ear of a cow elephant. They were haggling over money.
+
+--Is that so? Mr Bloom asked. Of course, he subjoined pensively, at the
+inward reflection of there being more languages to start with than were
+absolutely necessary, it may be only the southern glamour that surrounds
+it.
+
+The keeper of the shelter in the middle of this _tête-â-tête_ put a
+boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table
+and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed. After
+which he beat a retreat to his counter, Mr Bloom determining to have
+a good square look at him later on so as not to appear to. For which
+reason he encouraged Stephen to proceed with his eyes while he did
+the honours by surreptitiously pushing the cup of what was temporarily
+supposed to be called coffee gradually nearer him.
+
+--Sounds are impostures, Stephen said after a pause of some little time,
+like names. Cicero, Podmore. Napoleon, Mr Goodbody. Jesus, Mr Doyle.
+Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What's in a name?
+
+--Yes, to be sure, Mr Bloom unaffectedly concurred. Of course. Our name
+was changed too, he added, pushing the socalled roll across.
+
+The redbearded sailor who had his weather eye on the newcomers boarded
+Stephen, whom he had singled out for attention in particular, squarely
+by asking:
+
+--And what might your name be?
+
+Just in the nick of time Mr Bloom touched his companion's boot but
+Stephen, apparently disregarding the warm pressure from an unexpected
+quarter, answered:
+
+--Dedalus.
+
+The sailor stared at him heavily from a pair of drowsy baggy eyes,
+rather bunged up from excessive use of boose, preferably good old
+Hollands and water.
+
+--You know Simon Dedalus? he asked at length.
+
+--I've heard of him, Stephen said.
+
+Mr Bloom was all at sea for a moment, seeing the others evidently
+eavesdropping too.
+
+--He's Irish, the seaman bold affirmed, staring still in much the same
+way and nodding. All Irish.
+
+--All too Irish, Stephen rejoined.
+
+As for Mr Bloom he could neither make head or tail of the whole business
+and he was just asking himself what possible connection when the sailor
+of his own accord turned to the other occupants of the shelter with the
+remark:
+
+--I seen him shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over his
+shoulder. The lefthand dead shot.
+
+Though he was slightly hampered by an occasional stammer and his
+gestures being also clumsy as it was still he did his best to explain.
+
+--Bottles out there, say. Fifty yards measured. Eggs on the bottles.
+Cocks his gun over his shoulder. Aims.
+
+He turned his body half round, shut up his right eye completely. Then he
+screwed his features up someway sideways and glared out into the night
+with an unprepossessing cast of countenance.
+
+--Pom! he then shouted once.
+
+The entire audience waited, anticipating an additional detonation, there
+being still a further egg.
+
+--Pom! he shouted twice.
+
+Egg two evidently demolished, he nodded and winked, adding
+bloodthirstily:
+
+_--Buffalo Bill shoots to kill, Never missed nor he never will._
+
+A silence ensued till Mr Bloom for agreeableness' sake just felt like
+asking him whether it was for a marksmanship competition like the
+Bisley.
+
+--Beg pardon, the sailor said.
+
+--Long ago? Mr Bloom pursued without flinching a hairsbreadth.
+
+--Why, the sailor replied, relaxing to a certain extent under the magic
+influence of diamond cut diamond, it might be a matter of ten years. He
+toured the wide world with Hengler's Royal Circus. I seen him do that in
+Stockholm.
+
+--Curious coincidence, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen unobtrusively.
+
+--Murphy's my name, the sailor continued. D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe.
+Know where that is?
+
+--Queenstown harbour, Stephen replied.
+
+--That's right, the sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That's
+where I hails from. I belongs there. That's where I hails from. My
+little woman's down there. She's waiting for me, I know. _For England,
+home and beauty_. She's my own true wife I haven't seen for seven years
+now, sailing about.
+
+Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene, the homecoming
+to the mariner's roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones,
+a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a
+number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic,
+Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc
+O'Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece by the way of
+poor John Casey and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way.
+Never about the runaway wife coming back, however much devoted to the
+absentee. The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he
+finally did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon him anent
+his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but
+I've come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grasswidow,
+at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead, rocked in the cradle of the
+deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the
+publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and
+onions. No chair for father. Broo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on
+her knee, _post mortem_ child. With a high ro! and a randy ro! and my
+galloping tearing tandy, O! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I
+remain with much love your brokenhearted husband D B Murphy.
+
+The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one
+of the jarvies with the request:
+
+--You don't happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you?
+
+The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the keeper took a die of
+plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was
+passed from hand to hand.
+
+--Thank you, the sailor said.
+
+He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow
+stammers, proceeded:
+
+--We come up this morning eleven o'clock. The threemaster _Rosevean_
+from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this
+afternoon. There's my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.
+
+In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket
+and handed to his neighbour a not very cleanlooking folded document.
+
+--You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked,
+leaning on the counter.
+
+--Why, the sailor answered upon reflection upon it, I've circumnavigated
+a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and
+North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage.
+I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea,
+the Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever
+scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. _Gospodi pomilyou_. That's how the
+Russians prays.
+
+--You seen queer sights, don't be talking, put in a jarvey.
+
+--Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen
+queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an
+anchor same as I chew that quid.
+
+He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his
+teeth, bit ferociously:
+
+--Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and
+the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent
+me.
+
+He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to
+be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The
+printed matter on it stated: _Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia._
+
+All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage
+women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning,
+sleeping amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of
+them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.
+
+--Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs
+like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can't bear no more
+children.
+
+See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse's liver
+raw.
+
+His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for
+several minutes if not more.
+
+--Know how to keep them off? he inquired generally.
+
+Nobody volunteering a statement he winked, saying:
+
+--Glass. That boggles 'em. Glass.
+
+Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the
+card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran
+as follows: _Tarjeta Postal, Señor A Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago,
+Chile._ There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice.
+Though not an implicit believer in the lurid story narrated (or the
+eggsniping transaction for that matter despite William Tell and the
+Lazarillo-Don Cesar de Bazan incident depicted in _Maritana_ on which
+occasion the former's ball passed through the latter's hat) having
+detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person
+he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours
+after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere) and
+the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some
+suspicions of our friend's _bona fides_ nevertheless it reminded him in
+a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday
+or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had
+ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a
+born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained
+a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest.
+Martin Cunningham frequently said he would work a pass through Egan but
+some deuced hitch or other eternally cropped up with the net result that
+the scheme fell through. But even suppose it did come to planking
+down the needful and breaking Boyd's heart it was not so dear, purse
+permitting, a few guineas at the outside considering the fare to
+Mullingar where he figured on going was five and six, there and back.
+The trip would benefit health on account of the bracing ozone and be in
+every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a chap whose liver was
+out of order, seeing the different places along the route, Plymouth,
+Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of
+the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon
+where doubtless he would see the greatest improvement, tower, abbey,
+wealth of Park lane to renew acquaintance with. Another thing just
+struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around
+on the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert
+tour of summer music embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts,
+Margate with mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne,
+Scarborough, Margate and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel
+islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative.
+Not, of course, with a hole and corner scratch company or local ladies
+on the job, witness Mrs C P M'Coy type lend me your valise and I'll post
+you the ticket. No, something top notch, an all star Irish caste, the
+Tweedy-Flower grand opera company with his own legal consort as leading
+lady as a sort of counterblast to the Elster Grimes and Moody-Manners,
+perfectly simple matter and he was quite sanguine of success, providing
+puffs in the local papers could be managed by some fellow with a bit of
+bounce who could pull the indispensable wires and thus combine business
+with pleasure. But who? That was the rub. Also, without being actually
+positive, it struck him a great field was to be opened up in the line
+of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times _apropos_ of the
+Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the
+_tapis_ in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red
+tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A
+great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet
+the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e.
+Brown, Robinson and Co.
+
+It was a subject of regret and absurd as well on the face of it and no
+small blame to our vaunted society that the man in the street, when the
+system really needed toning up, for the matter of a couple of paltry
+pounds was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead
+of being always and ever cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me
+for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum
+months of it and merited a radical change of _venue_ after the grind
+of city life in the summertime for choice when dame Nature is at her
+spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life.
+There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home
+island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora
+of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around
+Dublin and its picturesque environs even, Poulaphouca to which there was
+a steamtram, but also farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow,
+rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly
+wheelmen so long as it didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal
+where if report spoke true the _coup d'oeil_ was exceedingly grand
+though the lastnamed locality was not easily getatable so that the
+influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the
+signal benefits to be derived from it while Howth with its historic
+associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O'Malley, George IV,
+rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt
+with all sorts and conditions of men especially in the spring when young
+men's fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the
+cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left
+leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour's run from the
+pillar. Because of course uptodate tourist travelling was as yet merely
+in its infancy, so to speak, and the accommodation left much to be
+desired. Interesting to fathom it seemed to him from a motive of
+curiosity, pure and simple, was whether it was the traffic that created
+the route or viceversa or the two sides in fact. He turned back the
+other side of the card, picture, and passed it along to Stephen.
+
+--I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that had
+little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened and
+every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house,
+another was a flower. Cooks rats in your soup, he appetisingly added,
+the chinks does.
+
+Possibly perceiving an expression of dubiosity on their faces the
+globetrotter went on, adhering to his adventures.
+
+--And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his
+back. Knife like that.
+
+Whilst speaking he produced a dangerouslooking claspknife quite in
+keeping with his character and held it in the striking position.
+
+--In a knockingshop it was count of a tryon between two smugglers.
+Fellow hid behind a door, come up behind him. Like that. _Prepare to
+meet your God_, says he. Chuk! It went into his back up to the butt.
+
+His heavy glance drowsily roaming about kind of defied their further
+questions even should they by any chance want to.
+
+--That's a good bit of steel, repeated he, examining his formidable
+_stiletto_.
+
+After which harrowing _denouement_ sufficient to appal the stoutest he
+snapped the blade to and stowed the weapon in question away as before in
+his chamber of horrors, otherwise pocket.
+
+--They're great for the cold steel, somebody who was evidently quite in
+the dark said for the benefit of them all. That was why they thought
+the park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of
+them using knives.
+
+At this remark passed obviously in the spirit of _where ignorance
+is bliss_ Mr B. and Stephen, each in his own particular way, both
+instinctively exchanged meaning glances, in a religious silence of the
+strictly _entre nous_ variety however, towards where Skin-the-Goat,
+_alias_ the keeper, not turning a hair, was drawing spurts of liquid
+from his boiler affair. His inscrutable face which was really a work
+of art, a perfect study in itself, beggaring description, conveyed
+the impression that he didn't understand one jot of what was going on.
+Funny, very!
+
+There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading in fits and
+starts a stained by coffee evening journal, another the card with the
+natives _choza de_, another the seaman's discharge. Mr Bloom, so far
+as he was personally concerned, was just pondering in pensive mood. He
+vividly recollected when the occurrence alluded to took place as well
+as yesterday, roughly some score of years previously in the days of the
+land troubles, when it took the civilised world by storm, figuratively
+speaking, early in the eighties, eightyone to be correct, when he was
+just turned fifteen.
+
+--Ay, boss, the sailor broke in. Give us back them papers.
+
+The request being complied with he clawed them up with a scrape.
+
+--Have you seen the rock of Gibraltar? Mr Bloom inquired.
+
+The sailor grimaced, chewing, in a way that might be read as yes, ay or
+no.
+
+--Ah, you've touched there too, Mr Bloom said, Europa point, thinking he
+had, in the hope that the rover might possibly by some reminiscences but
+he failed to do so, simply letting spirt a jet of spew into the sawdust,
+and shook his head with a sort of lazy scorn.
+
+--What year would that be about? Mr B interrogated. Can you recall the
+boats?
+
+Our _soi-disant_ sailor munched heavily awhile hungrily before
+answering:
+
+--I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and ships.
+Salt junk all the time.
+
+Tired seemingly, he ceased. His questioner perceiving that he was not
+likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer,
+fell to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the
+globe, suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed,
+it covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly
+what it meant to rule the waves. On more than one occasion, a dozen
+at the lowest, near the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a
+superannuated old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the
+not particularly redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obliviously at
+it and it at him, dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new as someone
+somewhere sings. And it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to
+find out the secret for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes
+and all that sort of thing and over and under, well, not exactly under,
+tempting the fates. And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no
+secret about it at all. Nevertheless, without going into the _minutiae_
+of the business, the eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in
+all its glory and in the natural course of things somebody or other had
+to sail on it and fly in the face of providence though it merely went
+to show how people usually contrived to load that sort of onus on to the
+other fellow like the hell idea and the lottery and insurance which were
+run on identically the same lines so that for that very reason if no
+other lifeboat Sunday was a highly laudable institution to which the
+public at large, no matter where living inland or seaside, as the case
+might be, having it brought home to them like that should extend its
+gratitude also to the harbourmasters and coastguard service who had
+to man the rigging and push off and out amid the elements whatever the
+season when duty called _Ireland expects that every man_ and so on and
+sometimes had a terrible time of it in the wintertime not forgetting the
+Irish lights, Kish and others, liable to capsize at any moment, rounding
+which he once with his daughter had experienced some remarkably choppy,
+not to say stormy, weather.
+
+--There was a fellow sailed with me in the Rover, the old seadog,
+himself a rover, proceeded, went ashore and took up a soft job as
+gentleman's valet at six quid a month. Them are his trousers I've on
+me and he gave me an oilskin and that jackknife. I'm game for that job,
+shaving and brushup. I hate roaming about. There's my son now, Danny,
+run off to sea and his mother got him took in a draper's in Cork where
+he could be drawing easy money.
+
+--What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the
+side, bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away
+from the carking cares of office, unwashed of course and in a seedy
+getup and a strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage.
+
+--Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance, my son, Danny?
+He'd be about eighteen now, way I figure it.
+
+The Skibbereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow
+shirt with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to
+be seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink intended to represent an
+anchor.
+
+--There was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater, he remarked, sure as nuts.
+I must get a wash tomorrow or next day. It's them black lads I objects
+to. I hate those buggers. Suck your blood dry, they does.
+
+Seeing they were all looking at his chest he accommodatingly dragged
+his shirt more open so that on top of the timehonoured symbol of the
+mariner's hope and rest they had a full view of the figure 16 and a
+young man's sideface looking frowningly rather.
+
+--Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were Iying
+becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton. Fellow, the
+name of Antonio, done that. There he is himself, a Greek.
+
+--Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor.
+
+That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the.
+Someway in his. Squeezing or.
+
+--See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And
+there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his
+fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn.
+
+And in point of fact the young man named Antonio's livid face did
+actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the
+unreserved admiration of everybody including Skin-the-Goat, who this
+time stretched over.
+
+--Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He's gone
+too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay.
+
+He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression
+of before.
+
+--Neat bit of work, one longshoreman said.
+
+--And what's the number for? loafer number two queried.
+
+--Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor.
+
+--Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this
+time with some sort of a half smile for a brief duration only in the
+direction of the questioner about the number. Ate. A Greek he was.
+
+And then he added with rather gallowsbird humour considering his alleged
+end:
+
+_--As bad as old Antonio, For he left me on my ownio._
+
+The face of a streetwalker glazed and haggard under a black straw hat
+peered askew round the door of the shelter palpably reconnoitring on
+her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr
+Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment
+flusterfied but outwardly calm, and, picking up from the table the pink
+sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had
+laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though
+why pink. His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment
+round the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that
+afternoon on Ormond quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the
+lane who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B.)
+and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing which seemed
+rather vague than not, your washing. Still candour compelled him to
+admit he had washed his wife's undergarments when soiled in Holles
+street and women would and did too a man's similar garments initialled
+with Bewley and Draper's marking ink (hers were, that is) if they really
+loved him, that is to say, love me, love my dirty shirt. Still just
+then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female's room more than her
+company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a rude
+sign to take herself off. Round the side of the Evening Telegraph he
+just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side of the door
+with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all
+there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round skipper
+Murphy's nautical chest and then there was no more of her.
+
+--The gunboat, the keeper said.
+
+--It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking,
+how a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with
+disease can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober
+senses, if he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature! Of
+course I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition.
+Still no matter what the cause is from...
+
+Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely
+remarking:
+
+--In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a
+roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to
+buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.
+
+The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a prude,
+said it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be put a
+stop to _instanter_ to say that women of that stamp (quite apart from
+any oldmaidish squeamishness on the subject), a necessary evil, w ere
+not licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a thing,
+he could truthfully state, he, as a _paterfamilias_, was a stalwart
+advocate of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a policy of
+the sort, he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would confer a
+lasting boon on everybody concerned.
+
+--You as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe
+in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such,
+as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I
+believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as
+the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such
+inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?
+
+Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try
+and concentrate and remember before he could say:
+
+--They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and
+therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the
+possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause Who, from all I
+can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other
+practical jokes, _corruptio per se_ and _corruptio per accidens_ both
+being excluded by court etiquette.
+
+Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the
+mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still
+he felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly
+rejoining:
+
+--Simple? I shouldn't think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant
+you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a
+blue moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for
+instance to invent those rays Rontgen did or the telescope like Edison,
+though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean,
+and the same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural
+phenomenon such as electricity but it's a horse of quite another colour
+to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.
+
+--O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several
+of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial
+evidence.
+
+On this knotty point however the views of the pair, poles apart as they
+were both in schooling and everything else with the marked difference in
+their respective ages, clashed.
+
+--Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his
+original point with a smile of unbelief. I'm not so sure about that.
+That's a matter for everyman's opinion and, without dragging in the
+sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you _in toto_
+there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were
+genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it's the
+big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them
+like _Hamlet_ and Bacon, as, you who know your Shakespeare infinitely
+better than I, of course I needn't tell you. Can't you drink that
+coffee, by the way? Let me stir it. And take a piece of that bun. It's
+like one of our skipper's bricks disguised. Still no-one can give what
+he hasn't got. Try a bit.
+
+--Couldn't, Stephen contrived to get out, his mental organs for the
+moment refusing to dictate further.
+
+Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat Mr Bloom thought well to stir
+or try to the clotted sugar from the bottom and reflected with something
+approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance (and
+lucrative) work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or
+nay did a world of good, shelters such as the present one they were in
+run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic evenings
+and useful lectures (admittance free) by qualified men for the lower
+orders. On the other hand he had a distinct and painful recollection
+they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been prominently
+associated with it at one time, a very modest remuneration indeed for
+her pianoplaying. The idea, he was strongly inclined to believe, was
+to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak
+of. Sulphate of copper poison SO4 or something in some dried peas he
+remembered reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but he couldn't
+remember when it was or where. Anyhow inspection, medical inspection,
+of all eatables seemed to him more than ever necessary which possibly
+accounted for the vogue of Dr Tibble's Vi-Cocoa on account of the
+medical analysis involved.
+
+--Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being
+stirred.
+
+Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it Stephen lifted the heavy mug
+from the brown puddle it clopped out of when taken up by the handle and
+took a sip of the offending beverage.
+
+--Still it's solid food, his good genius urged, I'm a stickler for solid
+food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but
+regular meals as the _sine qua non_ for any kind of proper work, mental
+or manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different
+man.
+
+--Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But O, oblige me by taking away that
+knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.
+
+Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article,
+a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or
+antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least
+conspicuous point about it.
+
+--Our mutual friend's stories are like himself, Mr Bloom _apropos_ of
+knives remarked to his _confidante sotto voce_. Do you think they are
+genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and
+lie like old boots. Look at him.
+
+Yet still though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air life was
+full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it
+was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an
+entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent
+probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly
+accurate gospel.
+
+He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and
+Sherlockholmesing him up ever since he clapped eyes on him. Though a
+wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness,
+there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a jail
+delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to associate
+such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill fraternity. He
+might even have done for his man supposing it was his own case he told,
+as people often did about others, namely, that he killed him himself
+and had served his four or five goodlooking years in durance vile to say
+nothing of the Antonio personage (no relation to the dramatic personage
+of identical name who sprang from the pen of our national poet) who
+expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above described. On the
+other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable weakness because
+meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like those jarvies waiting
+news from abroad would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean
+seas to draw the long bow about the schooner _Hesperus_ and etcetera.
+And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself
+couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers
+other fellows coined about him.
+
+--Mind you, I'm not saying that it's all a pure invention, he resumed.
+Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants,
+though that is rather a far cry, you see once in a way, Marcella the
+midget queen. In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some
+Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged, they couldn't straighten
+their legs if you paid them because the muscles here, you see, he
+proceeded, indicating on his companion the brief outline of the sinews
+or whatever you like to call them behind the right knee, were utterly
+powerless from sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as
+gods. There's an example again of simple souls.
+
+However reverting to friend Sinbad and his horrifying adventures (who
+reminded him a bit of Ludwig, _alias_ Ledwidge, when he occupied
+the boards of the Gaiety when Michael Gunn was identified with the
+management in the _Flying Dutchman_, a stupendous success, and his host
+of admirers came in large numbers, everyone simply flocking to hear him
+though ships of any sort, phantom or the reverse, on the stage usually
+fell a bit flat as also did trains) there was nothing intrinsically
+incompatible about it, he conceded. On the contrary that stab in the
+back touch was quite in keeping with those italianos though candidly he
+was none the less free to admit those icecreamers and friers in the fish
+way not to mention the chip potato variety and so forth over in little
+Italy there near the Coombe were sober thrifty hardworking fellows
+except perhaps a bit too given to pothunting the harmless necessary
+animal of the feline persuasion of others at night so as to have a good
+old succulent tuckin with garlic _de rigueur_ off him or her next day on
+the quiet and, he added, on the cheap.
+
+--Spaniards, for instance, he continued, passionate temperaments like
+that, impetuous as Old Nick, are given to taking the law into their own
+hands and give you your quietus doublequick with those poignards they
+carry in the abdomen. It comes from the great heat, climate generally.
+My wife is, so to speak, Spanish, half that is. Point of fact she could
+actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in
+(technically) Spain, i.e. Gibraltar. She has the Spanish type. Quite
+dark, regular brunette, black. I for one certainly believe climate
+accounts for character. That's why I asked you if you wrote your poetry
+in Italian.
+
+--The temperaments at the door, Stephen interposed with, were very
+passionate about ten shillings. _Roberto ruba roba sua_.
+
+--Quite so, Mr Bloom dittoed.
+
+--Then, Stephen said staring and rambling on to himself or some unknown
+listener somewhere, we have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles
+triangle miss Portinari he fell in love with and Leonardo and san
+Tommaso Mastino.
+
+--It's in the blood, Mr Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the
+blood of the sun. Coincidence I just happened to be in the Kildare
+street museum 890 today, shortly prior to our meeting if I can so call
+it, and I was just looking at those antique statues there. The splendid
+proportions of hips, bosom. You simply don't knock against those kind of
+women here. An exception here and there. Handsome yes, pretty in a way
+you find but what I'm talking about is the female form. Besides they
+have so little taste in dress, most of them, which greatly enhances a
+woman's natural beauty, no matter what you say. Rumpled stockings, it
+may be, possibly is, a foible of mine but still it's a thing I simply
+hate to see.
+
+Interest, however, was starting to flag somewhat all round and then the
+others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in a fog,
+goo collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing. Shipahoy of course
+had his own say to say. He had doubled the cape a few odd times and
+weathered a monsoon, a kind of wind, in the China seas and through all
+those perils of the deep there was one thing, he declared, stood to him
+or words to that effect, a pious medal he had that saved him.
+
+So then after that they drifted on to the wreck off Daunt's rock, wreck
+of that illfated Norwegian barque nobody could think of her name for
+the moment till the jarvey who had really quite a look of Henry Campbell
+remembered it _Palme_ on Booterstown strand. That was the talk of the
+town that year (Albert William Quill wrote a fine piece of original
+verse of 910 distinctive merit on the topic for the Irish _Times_),
+breakers running over her and crowds and crowds on the shore in
+commotion petrified with horror. Then someone said something about the
+case of the s. s. _Lady Cairns_ of Swansea run into by the _Mona_ which
+was on an opposite tack in rather muggyish weather and lost with all
+hands on deck. No aid was given. Her master, the _Mona's_, said he
+was afraid his collision bulkhead would give way. She had no water, it
+appears, in her hold.
+
+At this stage an incident happened. It having become necessary for him
+to unfurl a reef the sailor vacated his seat.
+
+--Let me cross your bows mate, he said to his neighbour who was just
+gently dropping off into a peaceful doze.
+
+He made tracks heavily, slowly with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door,
+stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore
+due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings Mr Bloom who
+noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ship's
+rum sticking one out of each pocket for the private consumption of his
+burning interior, saw him produce a bottle and uncork it or unscrew and,
+applying its nozz1e to his lips, take a good old delectable swig out of
+it with a gurgling noise. The irrepressible Bloom, who also had a
+shrewd suspicion that the old stager went out on a manoeuvre after the
+counterattraction in the shape of a female who however had disappeared
+to all intents and purposes, could by straining just perceive him, when
+duly refreshed by his rum puncheon exploit, gaping up at the piers and
+girders of the Loop line rather out of his depth as of course it was all
+radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved. Some person
+or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the
+cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but after a brief
+space of time during which silence reigned supreme the sailor, evidently
+giving it a wide berth, eased himself closer at hand, the noise of his
+bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where
+it apparently awoke a horse of the cabrank. A hoof scooped anyway for
+new foothold after sleep and harness jingled. Slightly disturbed in his
+sentrybox by the brazier of live coke the watcher of the corporation
+stones who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other
+in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the
+parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human
+probability from dictates of humanity knowing him before shifted about
+and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again in to the arms
+of Morpheus, a truly amazing piece of hard lines in its most virulent
+form on a fellow most respectably connected and familiarised with decent
+home comforts all his life who came in for a cool 100 pounds a year
+at one time which of course the doublebarrelled ass proceeded to make
+general ducks and drakes of. And there he was at the end of his tether
+after having often painted the town tolerably pink without a beggarly
+stiver. He drank needless to be told and it pointed only once more a
+moral when he might quite easily be in a large way of business if--a
+big if, however--he had contrived to cure himself of his particular
+partiality.
+
+All meantime were loudly lamenting the falling off in Irish shipping,
+coastwise and foreign as well, which was all part and parcel of the same
+thing. A Palgrave Murphy boat was put off the ways at Alexandra basin,
+the only launch that year. Right enough the harbours were there only no
+ships ever called.
+
+There were wrecks and wreckers, the keeper said, who was evidently _au
+fait_.
+
+What he wanted to ascertain was why that ship ran bang against the only
+rock in Galway bay when the Galway harbour scheme was mooted by a Mr
+Worthington or some name like that, eh? Ask the then captain, he advised
+them, how much palmoil the British government gave him for that day's
+work, Captain John Lever of the Lever Line.
+
+--Am I right, skipper? he queried of the sailor, now returning after his
+private potation and the rest of his exertions.
+
+That worthy picking up the scent of the fagend of the song or words
+growled in wouldbe music but with great vim some kind of chanty or other
+in seconds or thirds. Mr Bloom's sharp ears heard him then expectorate
+the plug probably (which it was), so that he must have lodged it for the
+time being in his fist while he did the drinking and making water jobs
+and found it a bit sour after the liquid fire in question. Anyhow in
+he rolled after his successful libation-_cum_-potation, introducing an
+atmosphere of drink into the _soirée_, boisterously trolling, like a
+veritable son of a seacook:
+
+ _--The biscuits was as hard as brass
+ And the beef as salt as Lot's wife's arse.
+ O, Johnny Lever!
+ Johnny Lever, O!_
+
+After which effusion the redoubtable specimen duly arrived on the scene
+and regaining his seat he sank rather than sat heavily on the form
+provided. Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to
+grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent
+the natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort which he
+described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on
+the face of God's earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in
+large quantities, six million pounds worth of pork exported every year,
+ten millions between butter and eggs and all the riches drained out of
+it by England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the
+nose always and gobbling up the best meat in the market and a lot more
+surplus steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became
+general and all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any mortal
+thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there was that colonel Everard down
+there in Navan growing tobacco. Where would you find anywhere the like
+of Irish bacon? But a day of reckoning, he stated _crescendo_ with no
+uncertain voice, thoroughly monopolising all the conversation, was in
+store for mighty England, despite her power of pelf on account of her
+crimes. There would be a fall and the greatest fall in history.
+The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he
+affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was
+toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel,
+which he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the
+Greek hero, a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped
+their attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His
+advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work
+for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare
+a single one of her sons.
+
+Silence all round marked the termination of his _finale_. The impervious
+navigator heard these lurid tidings, undismayed.
+
+--Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a
+bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism.
+
+To which cold douche referring to downfall and so on the keeper
+concurred but nevertheless held to his main view.
+
+--Who's the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately
+interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and
+generals we've got? Tell me that.
+
+--The Irish, for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial
+blemishes apart.
+
+--That's right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic
+peasant. He's the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?
+
+While allowing him his individual opinions as everyman the keeper added
+he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no Irishman
+worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few
+irascible words when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing
+to the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long
+as they didn't indulge in recriminations and come to blows.
+
+From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was
+rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for,
+pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was
+fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel,
+unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather
+concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with
+the quixotic idea in certain quarters that in a hundred million years
+the coal seam of the sister island would be played out and if, as
+time went on, that turned out to be how the cat jumped all he could
+personally say on the matter was that as a host of contingencies,
+equally relevant to the issue, might occur ere then it was highly
+advisable in the interim to try to make the most of both countries even
+though poles apart. Another little interesting point, the amours of
+whores and chummies, to put it in common parlance, reminded him Irish
+soldiers had as often fought for England as against her, more so, in
+fact. And now, why? So the scene between the pair of them, the licensee
+of the place rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous
+invincible, and the other, obviously bogus, reminded him forcibly as
+being on all fours with the confidence trick, supposing, that is, it was
+prearranged as the lookeron, a student of the human soul if anything,
+the others seeing least of the game. And as for the lessee or keeper,
+who probably wasn't the other person at all, he (B.) couldn't help
+feeling and most properly it was better to give people like that the
+goby unless you were a blithering idiot altogether and refuse to have
+anything to do with them as a golden rule in private life and their
+felonsetting, there always being the offchance of a Dannyman coming
+forward and turning queen's evidence or king's now like Denis or Peter
+Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from that he disliked
+those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet, though such
+criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any
+shape or form, he certainly did feel and no denying it (while inwardly
+remaining what he was) a certain kind of admiration for a man who
+had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his
+political convictions (though, personally, he would never be a party to
+any such thing), off the same bat as those love vendettas of the south,
+have her or swing for her, when the husband frequently, after some words
+passed between the two concerning her relations with the other lucky
+mortal (he having had the pair watched), inflicted fatal injuries on
+his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial _liaison_
+by plunging his knife into her, until it just struck him that
+Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car for the actual
+perpetrators of the outrage and so was not, if he was reliably informed,
+actually party to the ambush which, in point of fact, was the plea some
+legal luminary saved his skin on. In any case that was very ancient
+history by now and as for our friend, the pseudo Skin-the-etcetera, he
+had transparently outlived his welcome. He ought to have either died
+naturally or on the scaffold high. Like actresses, always farewell
+positively last performance then come up smiling again. Generous to a
+fault of course, temperamental, no economising or any idea of the sort,
+always snapping at the bone for the shadow. So similarly he had a very
+shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever got rid of some l s d. in the
+course of his perambulations round the docks in the congenial atmosphere
+of the _Old Ireland_ tavern, come back to Erin and so on. Then as for
+the other he had heard not so long before the same identical lingo as he
+told Stephen how he simply but effectually silenced the offender.
+
+--He took umbrage at something or other, that muchinjured but on the
+whole eventempered person declared, I let slip. He called me a jew and
+in a heated fashion offensively. So I without deviating from plain facts
+in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his
+family like me though in reality I'm not. That was one for him. A soft
+answer turns away wrath. He hadn't a word to say for himself as everyone
+saw. Am I not right?
+
+He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride
+at the soft impeachment with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to
+glean in a kind of a way that it wasn't all exactly.
+
+--_Ex quibus_, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or
+four eyes conversing, _Christus_ or Bloom his name is or after all any
+other, _secundum carnem_.
+
+--Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides
+of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to
+right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is
+though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the
+government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all
+very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality.
+I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never
+reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due
+instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate
+people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular,
+in the next house so to speak.
+
+--Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes' war, Stephen
+assented, between Skinner's alley and Ormond market.
+
+Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that
+was overwhelmingly right. And the whole world was full of that sort of
+thing.
+
+--You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of
+conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn't remotely...
+
+All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up
+bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind,
+erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were
+very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of
+everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.
+
+--They accuse, remarked he audibly.
+
+He turned away from the others who probably and spoke nearer to, so as
+the others in case they.
+
+--Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of
+ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, would
+you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the
+inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell,
+an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for,
+imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They
+are practical and are proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any
+because you know the standard works on the subject and then orthodox as
+you are. But in the economic, not touching religion, domain the priest
+spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead
+America. Turks. It's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd
+go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better, at least
+so I think. That's the juggle on which the p.p's raise the wind on false
+pretences. I'm, he resumed with dramatic force, as good an Irishman
+as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see
+everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes _pro rata_ having a
+comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something
+in the neighbourhood of 300 pounds per annum. That's the vital issue
+at stake and it's feasible and would be provocative of friendlier
+intercourse between man and man. At least that's my idea for what it's
+worth. I call that patriotism. _Ubi patria_, as we learned a smattering
+of in our classical days in _Alma Mater, vita bene_. Where you can live
+well, the sense is, if you work.
+
+Over his untastable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this
+synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular.
+He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those
+crabs about Ringsend in the morning burrowing quickly into all colours
+of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere
+beneath or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or
+didn't say the words the voice he heard said, if you work.
+
+--Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work.
+
+The eyes were surprised at this observation because as he, the person
+who owned them pro tem. observed or rather his voice speaking did, all
+must work, have to, together.
+
+--I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest
+possible sense. Also literary labour not merely for the kudos of
+the thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel
+nowadays. That's work too. Important work. After all, from the little
+I know of you, after all the money expended on your education you are
+entitled to recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit
+as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the
+peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn.
+Each is equally important.
+
+--You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may
+be important because I belong to the _faubourg Saint Patrice_ called
+Ireland for short.
+
+--I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.
+
+--But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important
+because it belongs to me.
+
+--What belongs, queried Mr Bloom bending, fancying he was perhaps under
+some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately, I didn't catch the
+latter portion. What was it you...?
+
+Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of
+coffee or whatever you like to call it none too politely, adding: 1170
+
+--We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.
+
+At this pertinent suggestion Mr Bloom, to change the subject, looked
+down but in a quandary, as he couldn't tell exactly what construction
+to put on belongs to which sounded rather a far cry. The rebuke of some
+kind was clearer than the other part. Needless to say the fumes of
+his recent orgy spoke then with some asperity in a curious bitter way
+foreign to his sober state. Probably the homelife to which Mr B attached
+the utmost importance had not been all that was needful or he hadn't
+been familiarised with the right sort of people. With a touch of fear
+for the young man beside him whom he furtively scrutinised with an air
+of some consternation remembering he had just come back from Paris,
+the eyes more especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister,
+failing to throw much light on the subject, however, he brought to mind
+instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the
+bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves. For instance
+there was the case of O'Callaghan, for one, the halfcrazy faddist,
+respectably connected though of inadequate means, with his mad vagaries
+among whose other gay doings when rotto and making himself a nuisance
+to everybody all round he was in the habit of ostentatiously sporting in
+public a suit of brown paper (a fact). And then the usual _denouement_
+after the fun had gone on fast and furious he got 1190 landed into hot
+water and had to be spirited away by a few friends, after a strong hint
+to a blind horse from John Mallon of Lower Castle Yard, so as not to
+be made amenable under section two of the criminal law amendment act,
+certain names of those subpoenaed being handed in but not divulged
+for reasons which will occur to anyone with a pick of brains. Briefly,
+putting two and two together, six sixteen which he pointedly turned a
+deaf ear to, Antonio and so forth, jockeys and esthetes and the tattoo
+which was all the go in the seventies or thereabouts even in the house
+of lords because early in life the occupant of the throne, then heir
+apparent, the other members of the upper ten and other high personages
+simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state, he reflected
+about the errors of notorieties and crowned heads running counter to
+morality such as the Cornwall case a number of years before under their
+veneer in a way scarcely intended by nature, a thing good Mrs Grundy,
+as the law stands, was terribly down on though not for the reason they
+thought they were probably whatever it was except women chiefly who were
+always fiddling more or less at one another it being largely a matter of
+dress and all the rest of it. Ladies who like distinctive underclothing
+should, and every welltailored man must, trying to make the gap wider
+between them by innuendo and give more of a genuine filip to acts of
+impropriety between the two, she unbuttoned his and then he untied her,
+mind the pin, whereas savages in the cannibal islands, say, at ninety
+degrees in the shade not caring a continental. However, reverting to the
+original, there were on the other hand others who had forced their way
+to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps. Sheer
+force of natural genius, that. With brains, sir.
+
+For which and further reasons he felt it was his interest and duty even
+to wait on and profit by the unlookedfor occasion though why he could
+not exactly tell being as it was already several shillings to the
+bad having in fact let himself in for it. Still to cultivate the
+acquaintance of someone of no uncommon calibre who could provide food
+for reflection would amply repay any small. Intellectual stimulation,
+as such, was, he felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind.
+Added to which was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row,
+old salt of the here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the
+whole galaxy of events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the
+world we live in especially as the lives of the submerged tenth, viz.
+coalminers, divers, scavengers etc., were very much under the microscope
+lately. To improve the shining hour he wondered whether he might meet
+with anything approaching the same luck as Mr Philip Beaufoy if taken
+down in writing suppose he were to pen something out of the common
+groove (as he fully intended doing) at the rate of one guinea per
+column. _My Experiences_, let us say, _in a Cabman's Shelter_.
+
+The pink edition extra sporting of the _Telegraph_ tell a graphic lie
+lay, as luck would have it, beside his elbow and as he was just puzzling
+again, far from satisfied, over a country belonging to him and the
+preceding rebus the vessel came from Bridgwater and the postcard was
+addressed A. Boudin find the captain's age, his eyes went aimlessly
+over the respective captions which came under his special province the
+allembracing give us this day our daily press. First he got a bit of a
+start but it turned out to be only something about somebody named H.
+du Boyes, agent for typewriters or something like that. Great battle,
+Tokio. Lovemaking in Irish, 200 pounds damages. Gordon Bennett.
+Emigration Swindle. Letter from His Grace. William. Ascot meeting,
+the Gold Cup. Victory of outsider _Throwaway_ recalls Derby of '92 when
+Capt. Marshall's dark horse _Sir Hugo_ captured the blue ribband at long
+odds. New York disaster. Thousand lives lost. Foot and Mouth. Funeral of
+the late Mr Patrick Dignam.
+
+So to change the subject he read about Dignam R. I. P. which, he
+reflected, was anything but a gay sendoff. Or a change of address
+anyway.
+
+--_This morning_ (Hynes put it in of course) _the remains of the late Mr
+Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue,
+Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a
+most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise after a
+brief illness came as a great shock to citizens of all classes by whom
+he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the
+deceased were present, were carried out_ (certainly Hynes wrote it with
+a nudge from Corny) _by Messrs H. J. O'Neill and Son, 164 North Strand
+Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan
+(brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr, Martin Cunningham, John
+Power, eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora_ (must be where he called
+Monks the dayfather about Keyes's ad) _Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus,
+Stephen Dedalus B.,4., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius T. Kelleher, Joseph
+M'C Hynes, L. Boom, CP M'Coy,--M'lntosh and several others_.
+
+Nettled not a little by L. _Boom_ (as it incorrectly stated) and the
+line of bitched type but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M'Coy
+and Stephen Dedalus B. A. who were conspicuous, needless to say, by
+their total absence (to say nothing of M'Intosh) L. Boom pointed it
+out to his companion B. A. engaged in stifling another yawn, half
+nervousness, not forgetting the usual crop of nonsensical howlers of
+misprints.
+
+--Is that first epistle to the Hebrews, he asked as soon as his bottom
+jaw would let him, in? Text: open thy mouth and put thy foot in it.
+
+--It is. Really, Mr Bloom said (though first he fancied he alluded to
+the archbishop till he added about foot and mouth with which there could
+be no possible connection) overjoyed to set his mind at rest and a bit
+flabbergasted at Myles Crawford's after all managing to. There.
+
+While the other was reading it on page two Boom (to give him for the
+nonce his new misnomer) whiled away a few odd leisure moments in fits
+and starts with the account of the third event at Ascot on page three,
+his side. Value 1000 sovs with 3000 sovs in specie added. For entire
+colts and fillies. Mr F. Alexander's _Throwaway_, b. h. by _Rightaway_,
+5 yrs, 9 st 4 lbs (W. Lane) 1, lord Howard de Walden's _Zinfandel_ (M.
+Cannon) z, Mr W. Bass's _Sceptre_ 3. Betting 5 to 4 on _Zinfandel_,
+20 to 1 _Throwaway_ (off). _Sceptre_ a shade heavier, 5 to 4 on
+_Zinfandel_, 20 to 1 _Throwaway_ (off). _Throwaway_ and _Zinfandel_
+stood close order. It was anybody's race then the rank outsider drew to
+the fore, got long lead, beating lord Howard de Walden's chestnut
+colt and Mr W. Bass's bay filly Sceptre on a 2 1/2 mile course. Winner
+trained by Braime so that Lenehan's version of the business was all pure
+buncombe. Secured the verdict cleverly by a length. 1000 sovs with
+3000 in specie. Also ran: J de Bremond's (French horse Bantam Lyons was
+anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any minute) _Maximum
+II_. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking damages. Though
+that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get
+left. Of course gambling eminently lent itself to that sort of thing
+though as the event turned out the poor fool hadn't much reason to
+congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork it reduced
+itself to eventually.
+
+--There was every indication they would arrive at that, he, Bloom, said.
+
+--Who? the other, whose hand by the way was hurt, said.
+
+One morning you would open the paper, the cabman affirmed, and read:
+_Return of Parnell_. He bet them what they liked. A Dublin fusilier was
+in that shelter one night and said he saw him in South Africa. Pride it
+was killed him. He ought to have done away with himself or lain low for
+a time after committee room no 15 until he was his old self again with
+no-one to point a finger at him. Then they would all to a man have gone
+down on their marrowbones to him to come back when he had recovered
+his senses. Dead he wasn't. Simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they
+brought over was full of stones. He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer
+general. He made a mistake to fight the priests. And so forth and so on.
+
+All the same Bloom (properly so dubbed) was rather surprised at their
+memories for in nine cases out of ten it was a case of tarbarrels and
+not singly but in their thousands and then complete oblivion because it
+was twenty odd years. Highly unlikely of course there was even a shadow
+of truth in the stones and, even supposing, he thought a return highly
+inadvisable, all things considered. Something evidently riled them in
+his death. Either he petered out too tamely of acute pneumonia just when
+his various different political arrangements were nearing completion
+or whether it transpired he owed his death to his having neglected to
+change his boots and clothes-after a wetting when a cold resulted and
+failing to consult a specialist he being confined to his room till he
+eventually died of it amid widespread regret before a fortnight was at
+an end or quite possibly they were distressed to find the job was taken
+out of their hands. Of course nobody being acquainted with his movements
+even before there was absolutely no clue as to his whereabouts which
+were decidedly of the _Alice, where art thou_ order even prior to his
+starting to go under several aliases such as Fox and Stewart so the
+remark which emanated from friend cabby might be within the bounds of
+possibility. Naturally then it would prey on his mind as a born leader
+of men which undoubtedly he was and a commanding figure, a sixfooter
+or at any rate five feet ten or eleven in his stockinged feet, whereas
+Messrs So and So who, though they weren't even a patch on the former
+man, ruled the roost after their redeeming features were very few and
+far between. It certainly pointed a moral, the idol with feet of clay,
+and then seventytwo of his trusty henchmen rounding on him with mutual
+mudslinging. And the identical same with murderers. You had to come
+back. That haunting sense kind of drew you. To show the understudy in
+the title _rôle_ how to. He saw him once on the auspicious occasion
+when they broke up the type in the _Insuppressible_ or was it _United
+Ireland_, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact,
+handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said _Thank you_,
+excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid exterior notwithstanding
+the little misadventure mentioned between the cup and the lip: what's
+bred in the bone. Still as regards return. You were a lucky dog if
+they didn't set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of
+shillyshally usually followed, Tom for and Dick and Harry against. And
+then, number one, you came up against the man in possession and had to
+produce your credentials like the claimant in the Tichborne case,
+Roger Charles Tichborne, _Bella_ was the boat's name to the best of his
+recollection he, the heir, went down in as the evidence went to show
+and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, lord Bellew was it, as he
+might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship
+and then, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce
+himself with: _Excuse me, my name is So and So_ or some such commonplace
+remark. A more prudent course, as Bloom said to the not over effusive,
+in fact like the distinguished personage under discussion beside him,
+would have been to sound the lie of the land first.
+
+--That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor
+commented. She put the first nail in his coffin.
+
+--Fine lump of a woman all the same, the _soi-disant_ townclerk Henry
+Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. She loosened many a man's thighs.
+I seen her picture in a barber's. The husband was a captain or an
+officer.
+
+--Ay, Skin-the-Goat amusingly added, he was and a cottonball one.
+
+This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character occasioned a fair
+amount of laughter among his _entourage_. As regards Bloom he, without
+the faintest suspicion of a smile, merely gazed in the direction of
+the door and reflected upon the historic story which had aroused
+extraordinary interest at the time when the facts, to make matters
+worse, were made public with the usual affectionate letters that passed
+between them full of sweet nothings. First it was strictly Platonic till
+nature intervened and an attachment sprang up between them till bit by
+bit matters came to a climax and the matter became the talk of the town
+till the staggering blow came as a welcome intelligence to not a few
+evildisposed, however, who were resolved upon encompassing his downfall
+though the thing was public property all along though not to anything
+like the sensational extent that it subsequently blossomed into. Since
+their names were coupled, though, since he was her declared favourite,
+where was the particular necessity to proclaim it to the rank and file
+from the housetops, the fact, namely, that he had shared her bedroom
+which came out in the witnessbox on oath when a thrill went through the
+packed court literally electrifying everybody in the shape of witnesses
+swearing to having witnessed him on such and such a particular date in
+the act of scrambling out of an upstairs apartment with the assistance
+of a ladder in night apparel, having gained admittance in the same
+fashion, a fact the weeklies, addicted to the lubric a little, simply
+coined shoals of money out of. Whereas the simple fact of the case was
+it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch, with
+nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man
+arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim
+to her siren charms and forgetting home ties, the usual sequel, to bask
+in the loved one's smiles. The eternal question of the life connubial,
+needless to say, cropped up. Can real love, supposing there happens to
+be another chap in the case, exist between married folk? Poser.
+Though it was no concern of theirs absolutely if he regarded her with
+affection, carried away by a wave of folly. A magnificent specimen of
+manhood he was truly augmented obviously by gifts of a high order, as
+compared with the other military supernumerary that is (who was just the
+usual everyday _farewell, my gallant captain_ kind of an individual in
+the light dragoons, the 18th hussars to be accurate) and inflammable
+doubtless (the fallen leader, that is, not the other) in his own
+peculiar way which she of course, woman, quickly perceived as highly
+likely to carve his way to fame which he almost bid fair to do till the
+priests and ministers of the gospel as a whole, his erstwhile staunch
+adherents, and his beloved evicted tenants for whom he had done yeoman
+service in the rural parts of the country by taking up the cudgels on
+their behalf in a way that exceeded their most sanguine expectations,
+very effectually cooked his matrimonial goose, thereby heaping coals of
+fire on his head much in the same way as the fabled ass's kick. Looking
+back now in a retrospective kind of arrangement all seemed a kind of
+dream. And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did because it
+went without saying you would feel out of place as things always moved
+with the times. Why, as he reflected, Irishtown strand, a locality he
+had not been in for quite a number of years looked different somehow
+since, as it happened, he went to reside on the north side. North or
+south, however, it was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and
+simple, upsetting the applecart with a vengeance and just bore out the
+very thing he was saying as she also was Spanish or half so, types that
+wouldn't do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting
+every shred of decency to the winds.
+
+--Just bears out what I was saying, he, with glowing bosom said to
+Stephen, about blood and the sun. And, if I don't greatly mistake she
+was Spanish too.
+
+--The king of Spain's daughter, Stephen answered, adding something or
+other rather muddled about farewell and adieu to you Spanish onions and
+the first land called the Deadman and from Ramhead to Scilly was so and
+so many.
+
+--Was she? Bloom ejaculated, surprised though not astonished by any
+means, I never heard that rumour before. Possible, especially there, it
+was as she lived there. So, Spain.
+
+Carefully avoiding a book in his pocket _Sweets of_, which reminded him
+by the by of that Cap l street library book out of date, he took out his
+pocketbook and, turning over the various contents it contained rapidly
+finally he.
+
+--Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded
+photo which he laid on the table, that a Spanish type?
+
+Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large
+sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she
+was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously
+low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than
+vision of breasts, her full lips parted and some perfect teeth, standing
+near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was _In Old
+Madrid_, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her
+(the lady's) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about
+something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin's
+premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic
+execution.
+
+--Mrs Bloom, my wife the _prima donna_ Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom
+indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about ninety six. Very like
+her then.
+
+Beside the young man he looked also at the photo of the lady now his
+1440 legal wife who, he intimated, was the accomplished daughter of
+Major Brian Tweedy and displayed at an early age remarkable proficiency
+as a singer having even made her bow to the public when her years
+numbered barely sweet sixteen. As for the face it was a speaking
+likeness in expression but it did not do justice to her figure which
+came in for a lot of notice usually and which did not come out to the
+best advantage in that getup. She could without difficulty, he said,
+have posed for the ensemble, not to dwell on certain opulent curves of
+the. He dwelt, being a bit of an artist in his spare time, on the female
+form in general developmentally because, as it so happened, no later
+than that afternoon he had seen those Grecian statues, 1450 perfectly
+developed as works of art, in the National Museum. Marble could give
+the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry, all the rest. Yes,
+puritanisme, it does though Saint Joseph's sovereign thievery alors
+(Bandez!) Figne toi trop. Whereas no photo could because it simply
+wasn't art in a word.
+
+The spirit moving him he would much have liked to follow Jack Tar's good
+example and leave the likeness there for a very few minutes to speak for
+itself on the plea he so that the other could drink in the beauty for
+himself, her stage presence being, frankly, a treat in itself which the
+camera could not at all do justice to. But it was scarcely professional
+etiquette so. Though it was a warm pleasant sort of a night now yet
+wonderfully cool for the season considering, for sunshine after storm.
+And he did feel a kind of need there and then to follow suit like a
+kind of inward voice and satisfy a possible need by moving a motion.
+Nevertheless he sat tight just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased
+by opulent curves, none the worse for wear however, and looked away
+thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the
+other's possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving
+_embonpoint_. In fact the slight soiling was only an added charm like
+the case of linen slightly soiled, good as new, much better in fact
+with the starch out. Suppose she was gone when he? I looked for the lamp
+which she told me came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of
+his because he then recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and
+the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses (_sic_) in it which must
+have fell down sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot
+with apologies to Lindley Murray.
+
+The vicinity of the young man he certainly relished, educated,
+_distingué_ and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the
+bunch though you wouldn't think he had it in him yet you would. Besides
+he said the picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was though
+at the moment she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of
+makebelieve went on about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur
+with the usual splash page of gutterpress about the same old matrimonial
+tangle alleging misconduct with professional golfer or the newest
+stage favourite instead of being honest and aboveboard about the whole
+business. How they were fated to meet and an attachment sprang up
+between the two so that their names were coupled in the public eye
+was told in court with letters containing the habitual mushy and
+compromising expressions leaving no loophole to show that they openly
+cohabited two or three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and
+relations, when the thing ran its normal course, became in due course
+intimate. Then the decree _nisi_ and the King's proctor tries to show
+cause why and, he failing to quash it, _nisi_ was made absolute. But as
+for that the two misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one
+another, could safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till
+the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor who filed a petition for
+the party wronged in due course. He, B, enjoyed the distinction of being
+close to Erin's uncrowned king in the flesh when the thing occurred on
+the historic _fracas_ when the fallen leader's, who notoriously stuck to
+his guns to the last drop even when clothed in the mantle of adultery,
+(leader's) trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a dozen or
+possibly even more than that penetrated into the printing works of the
+_Insuppressible_ or no it was _United Ireland_ (a by no means by the
+by appropriate appellative) and broke up the typecases with hammers or
+something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from
+the facile pens of the O'Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging
+occupation reflecting on the erstwhile tribune's private morals. Though
+palpably a radically altered man he was still a commanding figure though
+carelessly garbed as usual with that look of settled purpose which went
+a long way with the shillyshallyers till they discovered to their vast
+discomfiture that their idol had feet of clay after placing him upon a
+pedestal which she, however, was the first to perceive. As those were
+particularly hot times in the general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a
+minor injury from a nasty prod of some chap's elbow in the crowd that
+of course congregated lodging some place about the pit of the stomach,
+fortunately not of a grave character. His hat (Parnell's) a silk one was
+inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was
+the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence
+meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost
+celerity) who panting and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away
+from his hat at the time all the same being a gentleman born with a
+stake in the country he, as a matter of fact, having gone into it more
+for the kudos of the thing than anything else, what's bred in the bone
+instilled into him in infancy at his mother's knee in the shape of
+knowing what good form was came out at once because he turned round to
+the donor and thanked him with perfect _aplomb_, saying: _Thank you,
+sir_, though in a very different tone of voice from the ornament of the
+legal profession whose headgear Bloom also set to rights earlier in the
+course of the day, history repeating itself with a difference, after
+the burial of a mutual friend when they had left him alone in his glory
+after the grim task of having committed his remains to the grave.
+
+On the other hand what incensed him more inwardly was the blatant jokes
+of the cabman and so on who passed it all off as a jest, laughing 1530
+immoderately, pretending to understand everything, the why and the
+wherefore, and in reality not knowing their own minds, it being a case
+for the two parties themselves unless it ensued that the legitimate
+husband happened to be a party to it owing to some anonymous letter from
+the usual boy Jones, who happened to come across them at the crucial
+moment in a loving position locked in one another's arms, drawing
+attention to their illicit proceedings and leading up to a domestic
+rumpus and the erring fair one begging forgiveness of her lord and
+master upon her knees and promising to sever the connection and not
+receive his visits any more if only the aggrieved husband would overlook
+the matter and let bygones be bygones with tears in her eyes though
+possibly with her tongue in her fair cheek at the same time as quite
+possibly there were several others. He personally, being of a sceptical
+bias, believed and didn't make the smallest bones about saying so either
+that man or men in the plural were always hanging around on the waiting
+list about a lady, even supposing she was the best wife in the world
+and they got on fairly well together for the sake of argument, when,
+neglecting her duties, she chose to be tired of wedded life and was on
+for a little flutter in polite debauchery to press their attentions on
+her with improper intent, the upshot being that her affections centred
+on another, the cause of many _liaisons_ between still attractive
+married women getting on for fair and forty and younger men, no doubt as
+several famous cases of feminine infatuation proved up to the hilt.
+
+It was a thousand pities a young fellow, blessed with an allowance of
+brains as his neighbour obviously was, should waste his valuable time
+with profligate women who might present him with a nice dose to last him
+his lifetime. In the nature of single blessedness he would one day take
+unto himself a wife when Miss Right came on the scene but in the interim
+ladies' society was a _conditio sine qua non_ though he had the gravest
+possible doubts, not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen
+about Miss Ferguson (who was very possibly the particular lodestar who
+brought him down to Irishtown so early in the morning), as to whether he
+would find much satisfaction basking in the boy and girl courtship idea
+and the company of smirking misses without a penny to their names bi or
+triweekly with the orthodox preliminary canter of complimentplaying and
+walking out leading up to fond lovers' ways and flowers and chocs. To
+think of him house and homeless, rooked by some landlady worse than any
+stepmother, was really too bad at his age. The queer suddenly things
+he popped out with attracted the elder man who was several years the
+other's senior or like his father but something substantial he certainly
+ought to eat even were it only an eggflip made on unadulterated maternal
+nutriment or, failing that, the homely Humpty Dumpty boiled.
+
+--At what o'clock did you dine? he questioned of the slim form and tired
+though unwrinkled face.
+
+--Some time yesterday, Stephen said.
+
+--Yesterday! exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow
+Friday. Ah, you mean it's after twelve!
+
+--The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself.
+
+Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence Bloom reflected.
+Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy there
+somehow was as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the
+one train of thought. At his age when dabbling in politics roughly
+some score of years previously when he had been a _quasi_ aspirant to
+parliamentary honours in the Buckshot Foster days he too recollected in
+retrospect (which was a source of keen satisfaction in itself) he had
+a sneaking regard for those same ultra ideas. For instance when the
+evicted tenants question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in
+people's mind though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper
+or pinning his faith absolutely to its dictums, some of which wouldn't
+exactly hold water, he at the outset in principle at all events was in
+thorough sympathy with peasant possession as voicing the trend of modern
+opinion (a partiality, however, which, realising his mistake, he was
+subsequently partially cured of) and even was twitted with going a
+step farther than Michael Davitt in the striking views he at one time
+inculcated as a backtothelander, which was one reason he strongly
+resented the innuendo put upon him in so barefaced a fashion by our
+friend at the gathering of the clans in Barney Kiernan's so that he,
+though often considerably misunderstood and the least pugnacious of
+mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give
+him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though, so far as politics
+themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties
+invariably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity
+and the misery and suffering it entailed as a foregone conclusion on
+fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word.
+
+Anyhow upon weighing up the pros and cons, getting on for one, as it
+was, it was high time to be retiring for the night. The crux was it
+was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue
+(somebody having a temper of her own sometimes) and spoil the hash
+altogether as on the night he misguidedly brought home a dog (breed
+unknown) with a lame paw (not that the cases were either identical or
+the reverse though he had hurt his hand too) to Ontario Terrace as he
+very distinctly remembered, having been there, so to speak. On the
+other hand it was altogether far and away too late for the Sandymount
+or Sandycove suggestion so that he was in some perplexity as to which of
+the two alternatives. Everything pointed to the fact that it behoved him
+to avail himself to the full of the opportunity, all things considered.
+His initial impression was he was a shade standoffish or not over
+effusive but it grew on him someway. For one thing he mightn't what you
+call jump at the idea, if approached, and what mostly worried him was
+he didn't know how to lead up to it or word it exactly, supposing he
+did entertain the proposal, as it would afford him very great personal
+pleasure if he would allow him to help to put coin in his way or some
+wardrobe, if found suitable. At all events he wound up by concluding,
+eschewing for the nonce hidebound precedent, a cup of Epps's cocoa and
+a shakedown for the night plus the use of a rug or two and overcoat
+doubled into a pillow at least he would be in safe hands and as warm as
+a toast on a trivet he failed to perceive any very vast amount of harm
+in that always with the proviso no rumpus of any sort was kicked up.
+A move had to be made because that merry old soul, the grasswidower
+in question who appeared to be glued to the spot, didn't appear in any
+particular hurry to wend his way home to his dearly beloved Queenstown
+and it was highly likely some sponger's bawdyhouse of retired beauties
+where age was no bar off Sheriff street lower would be the best clue
+to that equivocal character's whereabouts for a few days to come,
+alternately racking their feelings (the mermaids') with sixchamber
+revolver anecdotes verging on the tropical calculated to freeze
+the marrow of anybody's bones and mauling their largesized charms
+betweenwhiles with rough and tumble gusto to the accompaniment of large
+potations of potheen and the usual blarney about himself for as to who
+he in reality was let x equal my right name and address, as Mr Algebra
+remarks _passim_. At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his gentle
+repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his god being a jew.
+People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled
+them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender
+Achilles. Your god was a jew. Because mostly they appeared to imagine he
+came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhereabouts in the county Sligo.
+
+--I propose, our hero eventually suggested after mature reflection while
+prudently pocketing her photo, as it's rather stuffy here you just come
+home with me and talk things over. My diggings are quite close in the
+vicinity. You can't drink that stuff. Do you like cocoa? Wait. I'll just
+pay this lot.
+
+The best plan clearly being to clear out, the remainder being plain
+sailing, he beckoned, while prudently pocketing the photo, to the keeper
+of the shanty who didn't seem to.
+
+--Yes, that's the best, he assured Stephen to whom for the matter of
+that Brazen Head or him or anywhere else was all more or less.
+
+All kinds of Utopian plans were flashing through his (B's) busy brain,
+education (the genuine article), literature, journalism, prize titbits,
+up to date billing, concert tours in English watering resorts packed
+with hydros and seaside theatres, turning money away, duets in Italian
+with the accent perfectly true to nature and a quantity of other
+things, no necessity, of course, to tell the world and his wife from the
+housetops about it, and a slice of luck. An opening was all was wanted.
+Because he more than suspected he had his father's voice to bank his
+hopes on which it was quite on the cards he had so it would be just as
+well, by the way no harm, to trail the conversation in the direction of
+that particular red herring just to.
+
+The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former
+viceroy, earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers' association
+dinner in London somewhere. Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this
+thrilling announcement. Then the old specimen in the corner who appeared
+to have some spark of vitality left read out that sir Anthony MacDonnell
+had left Euston for the chief secretary's lodge or words to that effect.
+To which absorbing piece of intelligence echo answered why.
+
+--Give us a squint at that literature, grandfather, the ancient mariner
+put in, manifesting some natural impatience.
+
+--And welcome, answered the elderly party thus addressed.
+
+The sailor lugged out from a case he had a pair of greenish goggles
+which he very slowly hooked over his nose and both ears.
+
+--Are you bad in the eyes? the sympathetic personage like the townclerk
+queried.
+
+--Why, answered the seafarer with the tartan beard, who seemingly was
+a bit of a literary cove in his own small way, staring out of seagreen
+portholes as you might well describe them as, I uses goggles reading.
+Sand in the Red Sea done that. One time I could read a book in the dark,
+manner of speaking. _The Arabian Nights Entertainment_ was my favourite
+and _Red as a Rose is She._
+
+Hereupon he pawed the journal open and pored upon Lord only knows what,
+found drowned or the exploits of King Willow, Iremonger having made a
+hundred and something second wicket not out for Notts, during which
+time (completely regardless of Ire) the keeper was intensely occupied
+loosening an apparently new or secondhand boot which manifestly pinched
+him as he muttered against whoever it was sold it, all of them who were
+sufficiently awake enough to be picked out by their facial expressions,
+that is to say, either simply looking on glumly or passing a trivial
+remark.
+
+To cut a long story short Bloom, grasping the situation, was the first
+to rise from his seat so as not to outstay their welcome having first
+and foremost, being as good as his word that he would foot the bill for
+the occasion, taken the wise precaution to unobtrusively motion to mine
+host as a parting shot a scarcely perceptible sign when the others were
+not looking to the effect that the amount due was forthcoming, making a
+grand total of fourpence (the amount he deposited unobtrusively in
+four coppers, literally the last of the Mohicans), he having previously
+spotted on the printed pricelist for all who ran to read opposite him
+in unmistakable figures, coffee 2d, confectionery do, and honestly well
+worth twice the money once in a way, as Wetherup used to remark.
+
+--Come, he counselled to close the _séance_.
+
+Seeing that the ruse worked and the coast was clear they left the
+shelter or shanty together and the _élite_ society of oilskin and
+company whom nothing short of an earthquake would move out of their
+_dolce far niente_. Stephen, who confessed to still feeling poorly and
+fagged out, paused at the, for a moment, the door.
+
+--One thing I never understood, he said to be original on the spur of
+the moment. Why they put tables upside down at night, I mean chairs
+upside down, on the tables in cafes. To which impromptu the neverfailing
+Bloom replied without a moment's hesitation, saying straight off:
+
+--To sweep the floor in the morning.
+
+So saying he skipped around, nimbly considering, frankly at the same
+time apologetic to get on his companion's right, a habit of his, by the
+bye, his right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles. The
+night air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit
+weak on his pins.
+
+--It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in
+a moment. The only thing is to walk then you'll feel a different man.
+Come. It's not far. Lean on me.
+
+Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen's right and led him on
+accordingly.
+
+--Yes, Stephen said uncertainly because he thought he felt a strange
+kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and
+all that.
+
+Anyhow they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier etc. where
+the municipal supernumerary, ex Gumley, was still to all intents and
+purposes wrapped in the arms of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming
+of fresh fields and pastures new. And _apropos_ of coffin of stones the
+analogy was not at all bad as it was in fact a stoning to death on the
+part of seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that ratted at the
+time of the split and chiefly the belauded peasant class, probably the
+selfsame evicted tenants he had put in their holdings.
+
+So they turned on to chatting about music, a form of art for which
+Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made
+tracks arm in arm across Beresford place. Wagnerian music, though
+confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to
+follow at the first go-off but the music of Mercadante's _Huguenots_,
+Meyerbeer's _Seven Last Words on the Cross_ and Mozart's _Twelfth Mass_
+he simply revelled in, the _Gloria_ in that being, to his mind, the acme
+of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into
+a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the sacred music of the catholic
+church to anything the opposite shop could offer in that line such as
+those Moody and Sankey hymns or _Bid me to live and i will live
+thy protestant to be_. He also yielded to none in his admiration of
+Rossini's _Stabat Mater_, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers,
+in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable
+sensation, he might safely say, greatly adding to her other laureis and
+putting the others totally in the shade, in the jesuit fathers' church
+in upper Gardiner street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the
+doors to hear her with virtuosos, or _virtuosi_ rather. There was the
+unanimous opinion that there was none to come up to her and suffice it
+to say in a place of worship for music of a sacred character there was
+a generally voiced desire for an encore. On the whole though favouring
+preferably light opera of the _Don Giovanni_ description and _Martha_,
+a gem in its line, he had a _penchant_, though with only a surface
+knowledge, for the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn. And
+talking of that, taking it for granted he knew all about the old
+favourites, he mentioned _par excellence_ Lionel's air in _Martha,
+M'appari_, which, curiously enough, he had heard or overheard, to be
+more accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the
+lips of Stephen's respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the
+number, in fact, which made all the others take a back seat. Stephen, in
+reply to a politely put query, said he didn't sing it but launched
+out into praises of Shakespeare's songs, at least of in or about that
+period, the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter lane near Gerard the
+herbalist, who _anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus_, an instrument he was
+contemplating purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch, whom B. did not quite
+recall though the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixtyfive guineas
+and Farnaby and son with their _dux_ and _comes_ conceits and Byrd
+(William) who played the virginals, he said, in the Queen's chapel or
+anywhere else he found them and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and
+John Bull.
+
+On the roadway which they were approaching whilst still speaking beyond
+the swingchains a horse, dragging a sweeper, paced on the paven ground,
+brushing a long swathe of mire up so that with the noise Bloom was not
+perfectly certain whether he had caught aright the allusion to sixtyfive
+guineas and John Bull. He inquired if it was John Bull the political
+celebrity of that ilk, as it struck him, the two identical names, as a
+striking coincidence.
+
+By the chains the horse slowly swerved to turn, which perceiving, Bloom,
+who was keeping a sharp lookout as usual, plucked the other's sleeve
+gently, jocosely remarking:
+
+--Our lives are in peril tonight. Beware of the steamroller.
+
+They thereupon stopped. Bloom looked at the head of a horse not worth
+anything like sixtyfive guineas, suddenly in evidence in the dark quite
+near so that it seemed new, a different grouping of bones and even flesh
+because palpably it was a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a
+taildangler, a headhanger putting his hind foot foremost the while the
+lord of his creation sat on the perch, busy with his thoughts. But such
+a good poor brute he was sorry he hadn't a lump of sugar but, as he
+wisely reflected, you could scarcely be prepared for every emergency
+that might crop up. He was just a big nervous foolish noodly kind of a
+horse, without a second care in the world. But even a dog, he reflected,
+take that mongrel in Barney Kiernan's, of the same size, would be a holy
+horror to face. But it was no animal's fault in particular if he was
+built that way like the camel, ship of the desert, distilling grapes
+into potheen in his hump. Nine tenths of them all could be caged or
+trained, nothing beyond the art of man barring the bees. Whale with a
+harpoon hairpin, alligator tickle the small of his back and he sees the
+joke, chalk a circle for a rooster, tiger my eagle eye. These timely
+reflections anent the brutes of the field occupied his mind somewhat
+distracted from Stephen's words while the ship of the street was
+manoeuvring and Stephen went on about the highly interesting old.
+
+--What's this I was saying? Ah, yes! My wife, he intimated, plunging
+_in medias res_, would have the greatest of pleasure in making your
+acquaintance as she is passionately attached to music of any kind.
+
+He looked sideways in a friendly fashion at the sideface of Stephen,
+image of his mother, which was not quite the same as the usual handsome
+blackguard type they unquestionably had an insatiable hankering after as
+he was perhaps not that way built.
+
+Still, supposing he had his father's gift as he more than suspected,
+it opened up new vistas in his mind such as Lady Fingall's Irish
+industries, concert on the preceding Monday, and aristocracy in general.
+
+Exquisite variations he was now describing on an air _Youth here has
+End_ by Jans Pieter Sweelinck, a Dutchman of Amsterdam where the frows
+come from. Even more he liked an old German song of _Johannes Jeep_
+about the clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men,
+which boggled Bloom a bit:
+
+ _Von der Sirenen Listigkeit
+ Tun die Poeten dichten._
+
+These opening bars he sang and translated _extempore_. Bloom, nodding,
+said he perfectly understood and begged him to go on by all means which
+he did.
+
+A phenomenally beautiful tenor voice like that, the rarest of boons,
+which Bloom appreciated at the very first note he got out, could easily,
+if properly handled by some recognised authority on voice production
+such as Barraclough and being able to read music into the bargain,
+command its own price where baritones were ten a penny and procure for
+its fortunate possessor in the near future an _entrée_ into fashionable
+houses in the best residential quarters of financial magnates in a large
+way of business and titled people where with his university degree of
+B. A. (a huge ad in its way) and gentlemanly bearing to all the more
+influence the good impression he would infallibly score a distinct
+success, being blessed with brains which also could be utilised for the
+purpose and other requisites, if his clothes were properly attended
+to so as to the better worm his way into their good graces as he, a
+youthful tyro in--society's sartorial niceties, hardly understood how a
+little thing like that could militate against you. It was in fact only a
+matter of months and he could easily foresee him participating in their
+musical and artistic _conversaziones_ during the festivities of the
+Christmas season, for choice, causing a slight flutter in the dovecotes
+of the fair sex and being made a lot of by ladies out for sensation,
+cases of which, as he happened to know, were on record--in fact, without
+giving the show away, he himself once upon a time, if he cared to, could
+easily have. Added to which of course would be the pecuniary emolument
+by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition
+fees. Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need
+necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy
+space of time. But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or
+nay and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his
+dignity in the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to
+be handed a cheque at a muchneeded moment when every little helped.
+Besides, though taste latterly had deteriorated to a degree, original
+music like that, different from the conventional rut, would rapidly
+have a great vogue as it would be a decided novelty for Dublin's musical
+world after the usual hackneyed run of catchy tenor solos foisted on a
+confiding public by Ivan St Austell and Hilton St Just and their _genus
+omne_. Yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt he could with all the cards in
+his hand and he had a capital opening to make a name for himself and win
+a high place in the city's esteem where he could command a stiff figure
+and, booking ahead, give a grand concert for the patrons of the King
+street house, given a backerup, if one were forthcoming to kick him
+upstairs, so to speak, a big _if_, however, with some impetus of the
+goahead sort to obviate the inevitable procrastination which often
+tripped-up a too much fêted prince of good fellows. And it need not
+detract from the other by one iota as, being his own master, he would
+have heaps of time to practise literature in his spare moments when
+desirous of so doing without its clashing with his vocal career or
+containing anything derogatory whatsoever as it was a matter for himself
+alone. In fact, he had the ball at his feet and that was the very reason
+why the other, possessed of a remarkably sharp nose for smelling a rat
+of any sort, hung on to him at all.
+
+The horse was just then. And later on at a propitious opportunity he
+purposed (Bloom did), without anyway prying into his private affairs on
+the _fools step in where angels_ principle, advising him to sever his
+connection with a certain budding practitioner who, he noticed, was
+prone to disparage and even to a slight extent with some hilarious
+pretext when not present, deprecate him, or whatever you like to call it
+which in Bloom's humble opinion threw a nasty sidelight on that side of
+a person's character, no pun intended.
+
+The horse having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted and,
+rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on
+the floor which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking
+globes of turds. Slowly three times, one after another, from a full
+crupper he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had
+ended, patient in his scythed car.
+
+Side by side Bloom, profiting by the _contretemps_, with Stephen passed
+through the gap of the chains, divided by the upright, and, stepping
+over a strand of mire, went across towards Gardiner street lower,
+Stephen singing more boldly, but not loudly, the end of the ballad.
+
+_Und alle Schiffe brücken._
+
+The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely
+watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black,
+one full, one lean, walk towards the railway bridge, _to be married by
+Father Maher_. As they walked they at times stopped and walked again
+continuing their _tête-à-tête_ (which, of course, he was utterly out
+of) about sirens enemies of man's reason, mingled with a number of other
+topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind
+while the man in the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the
+sleeper car who in any case couldn't possibly hear because they were too
+far simply sat in his seat near the end of lower Gardiner street _and
+looked after their lowbacked car_.
+
+
+
+What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?
+
+Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they
+followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and
+Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left,
+Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of
+Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing
+right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching,
+disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before
+George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than
+the arc which it subtends.
+
+
+Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?
+
+Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman,
+prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and
+glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed
+corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church,
+ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers,
+the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the
+presabbath, Stephen's collapse.
+
+Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective
+like and unlike reactions to experience?
+
+Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, musical in preference to
+plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner
+of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both
+indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of
+heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox
+religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted
+the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual
+magnetism.
+
+
+Were their views on some points divergent?
+
+Stephen dissented openly from Bloom's views on the importance of dietary
+and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen's views
+on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature. Bloom
+assented covertly to Stephen's rectification of the anachronism
+involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to
+christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus,
+son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of
+Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt (died
+266 A.D.), suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment at Sletty
+and interred at Rossnaree. The collapse which Bloom ascribed to
+gastric inanition and certain chemical compounds of varying degrees of
+adulteration and alcoholic strength, accelerated by mental exertion and
+the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere, Stephen
+attributed to the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both
+from two different points of observation Sandycove and Dublin) at first
+no bigger than a woman's hand.
+
+
+Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?
+
+The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining
+paraheliotropic trees.
+
+
+Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in
+the past?
+
+In 1884 with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public
+thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard's corner and Leonard's
+corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield avenue.
+
+In 1885 with Percy Apjohn in the evenings, reclined against the wall
+between Gibraltar villa and Bloomfield house in Crumlin, barony
+of Uppercross. In 1886 occasionally with casual acquaintances and
+prospective purchasers on doorsteps, in front parlours, in third class
+railway carriages of suburban lines. In 1888 frequently with major Brian
+Tweedy and his daughter Miss Marion Tweedy, together and separately on
+the lounge in Matthew Dillon's house in Roundtown. Once in 1892 and once
+in 1893 with Julius (Juda) Mastiansky, on both occasions in the parlour
+of his (Bloom's) house in Lombard street, west.
+
+
+What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885,
+1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at
+their destination?
+
+He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual
+development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction
+of the converse domain of interindividual relations.
+
+
+As in what ways?
+
+From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received:
+existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence
+to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.
+
+What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?
+
+At the housesteps of the 4th Of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number
+7 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket
+of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.
+
+
+Was it there?
+
+It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on
+the day but one preceding.
+
+
+Why was he doubly irritated?
+
+Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded
+himself twice not to forget.
+
+
+What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly
+(respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?
+
+To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.
+
+
+Bloom's decision?
+
+A stratagem. Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the
+area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at
+the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its
+length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches
+of the area pavement and allowed his body to move freely in space by
+separating himself from the railings and crouching in preparation for
+the impact of the fall.
+
+
+Did he fall?
+
+By his body's known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in
+avoirdupois measure, as certified by the graduated machine for
+periodical selfweighing in the premises of Francis Froedman,
+pharmaceutical chemist of 19 Frederick street, north, on the last feast
+of the Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year
+one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era (jewish era five
+thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three
+hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9,
+dominical letters C B, Roman indiction 2, Julian period 6617, MCMIV.
+
+
+Did he rise uninjured by concussion?
+
+Regaining new stable equilibrium he rose uninjured though concussed by
+the impact, raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force
+at its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied
+at its fulcrum, gained retarded access to the kitchen through the
+subadjacent scullery, ignited a lucifer match by friction, set free
+inflammable coal gas by turningon the ventcock, lit a high flame which,
+by regulating, he reduced to quiescent candescence and lit finally a
+portable candle.
+
+
+What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?
+
+Reclined against the area railings he perceived through the transparent
+kitchen panes a man regulating a gasflame of 14 CP, a man lighting a
+candle of 1 CP, a man removing in turn each of his two boots, a man
+leaving the kitchen holding a candle.
+
+
+Did the man reappear elsewhere?
+
+After a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible
+through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the
+halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space
+of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.
+
+
+Did Stephen obey his sign?
+
+Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed
+softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted
+candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down
+a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's
+house.
+
+
+What did Bloom do?
+
+He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its
+flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for
+Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when
+necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid
+resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons
+of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs
+Flower and M'Donald of 14 D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting
+points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing
+the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and
+hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.
+
+
+Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?
+
+Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two,
+had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the
+college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the
+county of Kildare: of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room
+of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street:
+of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss
+Julia Morkan at 15 Usher's Island: of his aunt Sara, wife of Richie
+(Richard) Goulding, in the kitchen of their lodgings at 62 Clanbrassil
+street: of his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of
+number twelve North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of
+Saint Francis Xavier 1898: of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the
+physics' theatre of university College, 16 Stephen's Green, north: of
+his sister Dilly (Delia) in his father's house in Cabra.
+
+
+What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from
+the fire towards the opposite wall?
+
+Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope,
+stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the
+chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs
+folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of
+ladies' grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual
+position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer
+extremities and the third at their point of junction.
+
+
+What did Bloom see on the range?
+
+On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left
+(larger) hob a black iron kettle.
+
+
+What did Bloom do at the range?
+
+He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron
+kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to
+let it flow.
+
+
+Did it flow?
+
+Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of
+2400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of
+filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial
+plant cost of 5 pounds per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown,
+Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan,
+a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of
+relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at
+Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth
+and daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below
+the sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and
+waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E., on the instructions of
+the waterworks committee had prohibited the use of municipal water for
+purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of
+recourse being had to the impotable water of the Grand and Royal canals
+as in 1893) particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding
+their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch
+meter, had been convicted of a wastage of 20,000 gallons per night by
+a reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of
+the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the
+detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers,
+solvent, sound.
+
+What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier,
+returning to the range, admire?
+
+Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature
+in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's
+projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific
+exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface
+particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence
+of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic
+quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides:
+its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar
+icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance:
+its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its
+indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region
+below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability
+of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve
+and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of
+tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and
+islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas
+and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and
+volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns:
+its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones:
+its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and
+confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic
+currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence
+in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies,
+freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers,
+cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts:
+its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and
+latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments
+and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown
+gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its
+composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part
+of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead
+Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate
+dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst
+and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and
+paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow,
+hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs
+and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and
+archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and
+arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility
+in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power
+stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals,
+rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality
+derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level
+to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe),
+numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its
+ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness
+of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded
+flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
+
+
+Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he
+return to the stillflowing tap?
+
+To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of
+Barrington's lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered, (bought
+thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh
+cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a
+long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.
+
+
+What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom's offer?
+
+That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by
+submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month
+of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of
+glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.
+
+
+What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and
+prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a
+preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with
+rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region
+in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most
+sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?
+
+The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.
+
+
+What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?
+
+Dietary: concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric
+energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the
+lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.
+
+
+Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?
+
+Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and
+recuperation.
+
+
+What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the
+agency of fire?
+
+The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of
+ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was
+communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral
+masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the
+foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn
+derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat
+(radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous
+ether. Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such
+combustion, was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source
+of calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated
+through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part
+reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising
+the temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in
+temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal
+units needed to raise 1 pound of water from 50 degrees to 212 degrees
+Fahrenheit.
+
+
+What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?
+
+A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at
+both sides simultaneously.
+
+
+For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?
+
+To shave himself.
+
+
+What advantages attended shaving by night?
+
+A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from
+shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly
+encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours:
+quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when
+awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and
+perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper
+read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a
+shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might
+cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with
+precision cut and humected and applied adhered: which was to be done.
+
+
+Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?
+
+Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine
+feminine passive active hand.
+
+
+What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting
+influence?
+
+The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human
+blood even when the end justified the means, preferring, in their
+natural order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic
+surgery.
+
+
+What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the
+kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?
+
+On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal
+breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a
+moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white
+goldrimmed eggcups, an open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly
+copper, and a phial of aromatic (violet) comfits. On the middle shelf
+a chipped eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four
+conglomerated black olives in oleaginous paper, an empty pot of
+Plumtree's potted meat, an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and
+containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and
+Co's white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue
+paper, a packet of Epps's soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne Lynch's
+choice tea at 2/- per lb in a crinkled leadpaper bag, a cylindrical
+canister containing the best crystallised lump sugar, two onions, one,
+the larger, Spanish, entire, the other, smaller, Irish, bisected with
+augmented surface and more redolent, a jar of Irish Model Dairy's cream,
+a jug of brown crockery containing a naggin and a quarter of soured
+adulterated milk, converted by heat into water, acidulous serum and
+semisolidified curds, which added to the quantity subtracted for Mr
+Bloom's and Mrs Fleming's breakfasts, made one imperial pint, the total
+quantity originally delivered, two cloves, a halfpenny and a small dish
+containing a slice of fresh ribsteak. On the upper shelf a battery of
+jamjars (empty) of various sizes and proveniences.
+
+
+What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?
+
+Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets,
+numbered 8 87, 88 6.
+
+
+What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?
+
+Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction,
+preindicative of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official
+and definitive result of which he had read in the _Evening Telegraph_,
+late pink edition, in the cabman's shelter, at Butt bridge.
+
+
+Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected,
+been received by him?
+
+In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 little Britain
+street: in David Byrne's licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O'Connell
+street lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in
+his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah,
+restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of
+F. W. Sweny and Co (Limited), dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick
+M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and
+restituted the copy of the current issue of the _Freeman's Journal and
+National Press_ which he had been about to throw away (subsequently
+thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of
+the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of
+inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the
+secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.
+
+What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?
+
+The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event
+followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the
+electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss
+by failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding
+originally from a successful interpretation.
+
+
+His mood?
+
+He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he
+was satisfied.
+
+
+What satisfied him?
+
+To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to
+others. Light to the gentiles.
+
+
+How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?
+
+He poured into two teacups two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Epps's
+soluble cocoa and proceeded according to the directions for use printed
+on the label, to each adding after sufficient time for infusion the
+prescribed ingredients for diffusion in the manner and in the quantity
+prescribed.
+
+
+What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his
+guest?
+
+Relinquishing his symposiarchal right to the moustache cup of imitation
+Crown Derby presented to him by his only daughter, Millicent (Milly),
+he substituted a cup identical with that of his guest and served
+extraordinarily to his guest and, in reduced measure, to himself the
+viscous cream ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion
+(Molly).
+
+
+Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of
+hospitality?
+
+His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely, and he accepted
+them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps's massproduct,
+the creature cocoa.
+
+
+Were there marks of hospitality which he contemplated but suppressed,
+reserving them for another and for himself on future occasions to
+complete the act begun?
+
+The reparation of a fissure of the length of 1 1/2 inches in the right
+side of his guest's jacket. A gift to his guest of one of the four
+lady's handkerchiefs, if and when ascertained to be in a presentable
+condition.
+
+
+Who drank more quickly?
+
+Bloom, having the advantage of ten seconds at the initiation and taking,
+from the concave surface of a spoon along the handle of which a steady
+flow of heat was conducted, three sips to his opponent's one, six to
+two, nine to three.
+
+
+What cerebration accompanied his frequentative act?
+
+Concluding by inspection but erroneously that his silent companion was
+engaged in mental composition he reflected on the pleasures derived from
+literature of instruction rather than of amusement as he himself had
+applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the
+solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.
+
+
+Had he found their solution?
+
+In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages,
+aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text,
+the answers not bearing in all points.
+
+
+What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him,
+potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering
+of three prizes of 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively for competition by the
+_Shamrock_, a weekly newspaper?
+
+ _An ambition to squint
+ At my verses in print
+ Makes me hope that for these you'll find room?.
+ If you so condescend
+ Then please place at the end
+ The name of yours truly, L. Bloom._
+
+Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him?
+
+Name, age, race, creed.
+
+
+What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?
+
+ Leopold Bloom
+ Ellpodbomool
+ Molldopeloob
+ Bollopedoom
+ Old Ollebo, M. P.
+
+
+What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic
+poet) sent to Miss Marion (Molly) Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?
+
+ _Poets oft have sung in rhyme
+ Of music sweet their praise divine.
+ Let them hymn it nine times nine.
+ Dearer far than song or wine.
+ You are mine. The world is mine._
+
+
+What had prevented him from completing a topical song (music by R. G.
+Johnston) on the events of the past, or fixtures for the actual, years,
+entitled _If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin now_,
+commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48,
+49 South King street, and to be introduced into the sixth scene, the
+valley of diamonds, of the second edition (30 January 1893) of the grand
+annual Christmas pantomime _Sinbad the Sailor_ (produced by R Shelton
+26 December 1892, written by Greenleaf Whittier, scenery by George
+A. Jackson and Cecil Hicks, costumes by Mrs and Miss Whelan under
+the personal supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir,
+harlequinade by Thomas Otto) and sung by Nelly Bouverist, principal
+girl?
+
+Firstly, oscillation between events of imperial and of local interest,
+the anticipated diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria (born 1820, acceded
+1837) and the posticipated opening of the new municipal fish market:
+secondly, apprehension of opposition from extreme circles on the
+questions of the respective visits of Their Royal Highnesses the
+duke and duchess of York (real) and of His Majesty King Brian Boru
+(imaginary): thirdly, a conflict between professional etiquette and
+professional emulation concerning the recent erections of the Grand
+Lyric Hall on Burgh Quay and the Theatre Royal in Hawkins street:
+fourthly, distraction resultant from compassion for Nelly Bouverist's
+non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical expression of countenance
+and concupiscence caused by Nelly Bouverist's revelations of white
+articles of non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical underclothing
+while she (Nelly Bouverist) was in the articles: fifthly, the
+difficulties of the selection of appropriate music and humorous
+allusions from _Everybody's Book of Jokes_ (1000 pages and a laugh in
+every one): sixthly, the rhymes, homophonous and cacophonous, associated
+with the names of the new lord mayor, Daniel Tallon, the new high
+sheriff, Thomas Pile and the new solicitorgeneral, Dunbar Plunket
+Barton.
+
+
+What relation existed between their ages?
+
+16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen's present age Stephen
+was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom's present
+age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54
+their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13
+1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according
+as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in
+1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then
+1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen
+would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when
+Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom,
+being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have
+surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah,
+969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would
+attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to
+have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in
+the year 81,396 B.C.
+
+
+What events might nullify these calculations?
+
+The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a
+new era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent
+extermination of the human species, inevitable but impredictable.
+
+
+How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance?
+
+Two. The first in the lilacgarden of Matthew Dillon's house, Medina
+Villa, Kimmage road, Roundtown, in 1887, in the company of Stephen's
+mother, Stephen being then of the age of 5 and reluctant to give his
+hand in salutation. The second in the coffeeroom of Breslin's hotel on a
+rainy Sunday in the January of 1892, in the company of Stephen's father
+and Stephen's granduncle, Stephen being then 5 years older.
+
+
+Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and
+afterwards seconded by the father?
+
+Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative
+gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.
+
+
+Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a
+third connecting link between them?
+
+Mrs Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the
+house of Stephen's parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and
+had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms
+Hotel owned by Elizabeth O'Dowd of 54 Prussia street where, during parts
+of the years 1893 and 1894, she had been a constant informant of Bloom
+who resided also in the same hotel, being at that time a clerk in the
+employment of Joseph Cuffe of 5 Smithfield for the superintendence of
+sales in the adjacent Dublin Cattle market on the North Circular road.
+
+
+Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?
+
+He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow
+of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair
+with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North
+Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low's place of business where she had
+remained for a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular
+fieldglasses unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles
+equipped with inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems,
+private and hired landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from
+the city to the Phoenix Park and vice versa.
+
+
+Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?
+
+Because in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel
+of bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with
+continual changes of the thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds,
+velocipedes, vehicles, passing slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round
+and round the rim of a round and round precipitous globe.
+
+
+What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years
+deceased?
+
+The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her
+suppositious wealth, her lapses of responsiveness and incipient
+catarrhal deafness: the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue
+of the Immaculate Conception, her green and maroon brushes for Charles
+Stewart Parnell and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.
+
+
+Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve the rejuvenation
+which these reminiscences divulged to a younger companion rendered the
+more desirable?
+
+The indoor exercises, formerly intermittently practised, subsequently
+abandoned, prescribed in Eugen Sandow's _Physical Strength and How to
+Obtain It_ which, designed particularly for commercial men engaged in
+sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in
+front of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of
+muscles and produce successively a pleasant rigidity, a more pleasant
+relaxation and the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility.
+
+
+Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?
+
+Though ringweight lifting had been beyond his strength and the full
+circle gyration beyond his courage yet as a High school scholar he
+had excelled in his stable and protracted execution of the half lever
+movement on the parallel bars in consequence of his abnormally developed
+abdominal muscles.
+
+
+Did either openly allude to their racial difference?
+
+Neither.
+
+
+What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts
+about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen's thoughts about
+Bloom's thoughts about Stephen?
+
+He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he
+knew that he knew that he was not.
+
+
+What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective
+parentages?
+
+Bloom, only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag (subsequently
+Rudolph Bloom) of Szombathely, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, London and
+Dublin and of Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius Higgins (born
+Karoly) and Fanny Higgins (born Hegarty). Stephen, eldest surviving male
+consubstantial heir of Simon Dedalus of Cork and Dublin and of Mary,
+daughter of Richard and Christina Goulding (born Grier).
+
+
+Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or
+layman?
+
+Bloom (three times), by the reverend Mr Gilmer Johnston M. A., alone,
+in the protestant church of Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe, by James
+O'Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump
+in the village of Swords, and by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., in
+the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar. Stephen (once) by the reverend
+Charles Malone C. C., alone, in the church of the Three Patrons,
+Rathgar.
+
+
+Did they find their educational careers similar?
+
+Substituting Stephen for Bloom Stoom would have passed successively
+through a dame's school and the high school. Substituting Bloom for
+Stephen Blephen would have passed successively through the preparatory,
+junior, middle and senior grades of the intermediate and through the
+matriculation, first arts, second arts and arts degree courses of the
+royal university.
+
+
+Why did Bloom refrain from stating that he had frequented the university
+of life?
+
+Because of his fluctuating incertitude as to whether this observation
+had or had not been already made by him to Stephen or by Stephen to him.
+
+
+What two temperaments did they individually represent?
+
+The scientific. The artistic.
+
+
+What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards
+applied, rather than towards pure, science?
+
+Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining
+in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his
+appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once
+revolutionary, for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting
+telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water
+siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump.
+
+
+Were these inventions principally intended for an improved scheme of
+kindergarten?
+
+Yes, rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard,
+catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the
+twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature
+mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical
+to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls,
+historically costumed dolls.
+
+
+What also stimulated him in his cogitations?
+
+The financial success achieved by Ephraim Marks and Charles A. James,
+the former by his 1d bazaar at 42 George's street, south, the latter
+at his 6 1/2d shop and world's fancy fair and waxwork exhibition at 30
+Henry street, admission 2d, children 1d: and the infinite possibilities
+hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement if condensed
+in triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility
+(divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of
+magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to
+convince, to decide.
+
+
+Such as?
+
+K. II. Kino's 11/- Trousers. House of Keys. Alexander J. Keyes.
+
+
+Such as not?
+
+Look at this long candle. Calculate when it burns out and you receive
+gratis 1 pair of our special non-compo boots, guaranteed 1 candle power.
+Address: Barclay and Cook, 18 Talbot street.
+
+Bacilikil (Insect Powder). Veribest (Boot Blacking). Uwantit (Combined
+pocket twoblade penknife with corkscrew, nailfile and pipecleaner).
+
+
+Such as never?
+
+What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat?
+
+Incomplete.
+
+With it an abode of bliss.
+
+Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in
+4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda
+Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries
+of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot,
+registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat.
+Plamtroo.
+
+
+Which example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that
+originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably
+conduce to success?
+
+His own ideated and rejected project of an illuminated showcart, drawn
+by a beast of burden, in which two smartly dressed girls were to be
+seated engaged in writing.
+
+
+What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?
+
+Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark
+corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She
+sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks.
+On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs.
+Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He
+seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads.
+Solitary.
+
+
+What?
+
+In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel, Queen's
+Hotel. Queen's Ho...
+
+
+What suggested scene was then reconstructed by Bloom?
+
+The Queen's Hotel, Ennis, county Clare, where Rudolph Bloom (Rudolf
+Virag) died on the evening of the 27 June 1886, at some hour unstated,
+in consequence of an overdose of monkshood (aconite) selfadministered in
+the form of a neuralgic liniment composed of 2 parts of aconite liniment
+to I of chloroform liniment (purchased by him at 10.20 a.m. on the
+morning of 27 June 1886 at the medical hall of Francis Dennehy, 17
+Church street, Ennis) after having, though not in consequence of having,
+purchased at 3.15 p.m. on the afternoon of 27 June 1886 a new boater
+straw hat, extra smart (after having, though not in consequence of
+having, purchased at the hour and in the place aforesaid, the toxin
+aforesaid), at the general drapery store of James Cullen, 4 Main street,
+Ennis.
+
+
+Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or
+intuition?
+
+Coincidence.
+
+
+Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?
+
+He preferred himself to see another's face and listen to another's
+words by which potential narration was realised and kinetic temperament
+relieved.
+
+
+Did he see only a second coincidence in the second scene narrated to
+him, described by the narrator as _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The
+Parable of the Plums_?
+
+It, with the preceding scene and with others unnarrated but existent by
+implication, to which add essays on various subjects or moral apothegms
+(e.g. _My Favourite Hero or Procrastination is the Thief of Time_)
+composed during schoolyears, seemed to him to contain in itself and
+in conjunction with the personal equation certain possibilities of
+financial, social, personal and sexual success, whether specially
+collected and selected as model pedagogic themes (of cent per cent
+merit) for the use of preparatory and junior grade students or
+contributed in printed form, following the precedent of Philip Beaufoy
+or Doctor Dick or Heblon's _Studies in Blue_, to a publication of
+certified circulation and solvency or employed verbally as intellectual
+stimulation for sympathetic auditors, tacitly appreciative of successful
+narrative and confidently augurative of successful achievement, during
+the increasingly longer nights gradually following the summer solstice
+on the day but three following, videlicet, Tuesday, 21 June (S. Aloysius
+Gonzaga), sunrise 3.33 a.m., sunset 8.29 p.m.
+
+
+Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other
+frequently engaged his mind?
+
+What to do with our wives.
+
+
+What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?
+
+Parlour games (dominos, halma, tiddledywinks, spilikins, cup and ball,
+nap, spoil five, bezique, twentyfive, beggar my neighbour, draughts,
+chess or backgammon): embroidery, darning or knitting for the
+policeaided clothing society: musical duets, mandoline and guitar, piano
+and flute, guitar and piano: legal scrivenery or envelope addressing:
+biweekly visits to variety entertainments: commercial activity as
+pleasantly commanding and pleasingly obeyed mistress proprietress in
+a cool dairy shop or warm cigar divan: the clandestine satisfaction of
+erotic irritation in masculine brothels, state inspected and medically
+controlled: social visits, at regular infrequent prevented intervals
+and with regular frequent preventive superintendence, to and from female
+acquaintances of recognised respectability in the vicinity: courses of
+evening instruction specially designed to render liberal instruction
+agreeable.
+
+
+What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him
+in favour of the lastmentioned (ninth) solution?
+
+In disoccupied moments she had more than once covered a sheet of paper
+with signs and hieroglyphics which she stated were Greek and Irish and
+Hebrew characters. She had interrogated constantly at varying intervals
+as to the correct method of writing the capital initial of the name of
+a city in Canada, Quebec. She understood little of political
+complications, internal, or balance of power, external. In calculating
+the addenda of bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid.
+After completion of laconic epistolary compositions she abandoned
+the implement of calligraphy in the encaustic pigment, exposed to
+the corrosive action of copperas, green vitriol and nutgall. Unusual
+polysyllables of foreign origin she interpreted phonetically or by false
+analogy or by both: metempsychosis (met him pike hoses), _alias_ (a
+mendacious person mentioned in sacred scripture).
+
+
+What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and
+such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?
+
+The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all
+balances, proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her
+proficiency of judgment regarding one person, proved true by experiment.
+
+
+How had he attempted to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?
+
+Variously. By leaving in a conspicuous place a certain book open at a
+certain page: by assuming in her, when alluding explanatorily, latent
+knowledge: by open ridicule in her presence of some absent other's
+ignorant lapse.
+
+
+With what success had he attempted direct instruction?
+
+She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest
+comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty
+remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated
+with error.
+
+
+What system had proved more effective?
+
+Indirect suggestion implicating selfinterest.
+
+
+Example?
+
+She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she
+disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat, he bought new
+hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat.
+
+
+Accepting the analogy implied in his guest's parable which examples of
+postexilic eminence did he adduce?
+
+Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides,
+author of _More Nebukim_ (Guide of the Perplexed) and Moses Mendelssohn
+of such eminence that from Moses (of Egypt) to Moses (Mendelssohn) there
+arose none like Moses (Maimonides).
+
+
+What statement was made, under correction, by Bloom concerning a fourth
+seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by
+Stephen?
+
+That the seeker mentioned had been a pupil of a rabbinical philosopher,
+name uncertain.
+
+
+Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a
+selected or rejected race mentioned?
+
+Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn (composer), Baruch Spinoza (philosopher),
+Mendoza (pugilist), Ferdinand Lassalle (reformer, duellist).
+
+
+What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish
+languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts
+by guest to host and by host to guest?
+
+By Stephen: _suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus suil go cuin_
+(walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care).
+
+
+By Bloom: _Kkifeloch, harimon rakatejch m'baad l'zamatejch_ (thy temple
+amid thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate).
+
+
+How was a glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages
+made in substantiation of the oral comparison?
+
+By juxtaposition. On the penultimate blank page of a book of inferior
+literary style, entituled _Sweets of Sin_ (produced by Bloom and so
+manipulated that its front cover came in contact with the surface of
+the table) with a pencil (supplied by Stephen) Stephen wrote the Irish
+characters for gee, eh, dee, em, simple and modified, and Bloom in turn
+wrote the Hebrew characters ghimel, aleph, daleth and (in the absence of
+mem) a substituted qoph, explaining their arithmetical values as ordinal
+and cardinal numbers, videlicet 3, 1, 4, and 100.
+
+
+Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the
+extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?
+
+Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence
+and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary.
+
+
+What points of contact existed between these languages and between the
+peoples who spoke them?
+
+The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and
+servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having been
+taught on the plain of Shinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary
+instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel,
+and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland: their
+archaeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homiletic,
+toponomastic, historical and religious literatures comprising the works
+of rabbis and culdees, Torah, Talmud (Mischna and Ghemara), Massor,
+Pentateuch, Book of the Dun Cow, Book of Ballymote, Garland of Howth,
+Book of Kells: their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the
+isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S.
+Mary's Abbey) and masshouse (Adam and Eve's tavern): the proscription
+of their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts: the
+restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of Irish
+political autonomy or devolution.
+
+
+What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple,
+ethnically irreducible consummation?
+
+ _Kolod balejwaw pnimah
+ Nefesch, jehudi, homijah._
+
+
+Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?
+
+In consequence of defective mnemotechnic.
+
+
+How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?
+
+By a periphrastic version of the general text.
+
+
+In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?
+
+The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic
+hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of
+modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions
+(Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic). Did
+the guest comply with his host's request?
+
+Doubly, by appending his signature in Irish and Roman characters.
+
+What was Stephen's auditive sensation?
+
+He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation
+of the past.
+
+
+What was Bloom's visual sensation?
+
+He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a
+future.
+
+
+What were Stephen's and Bloom's quasisimultaneous volitional
+quasisensations of concealed identities?
+
+Visually, Stephen's: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted
+by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as
+leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair. Auditively, Bloom's: The
+traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.
+
+
+What future careers had been possible for Bloom in the past and with
+what exemplars?
+
+In the church, Roman, Anglican or Nonconformist: exemplars, the very
+reverend John Conmee S. J., the reverend T. Salmon, D. D., provost of
+Trinity college, Dr Alexander J. Dowie. At the bar, English or Irish:
+exemplars, Seymour Bushe, K. C., Rufus Isaacs, K. C. On the stage modern
+or Shakespearean: exemplars, Charles Wyndham, high comedian Osmond
+Tearle (died 1901), exponent of Shakespeare.
+
+
+Did the host encourage his guest to chant in a modulated voice a strange
+legend on an allied theme?
+
+Reassuringly, their place, where none could hear them talk, being
+secluded, reassured, the decocted beverages, allowing for subsolid
+residual sediment of a mechanical mixture, water plus sugar plus cream
+plus cocoa, having been consumed.
+
+
+Recite the first (major) part of this chanted legend.
+
+ _Little Harry Hughes and his schoolfellows all
+ Went out for to play ball.
+ And the very first ball little Harry Hughes played
+ He drove it o'er the jew's garden wall.
+ And the very second ball little Harry Hughes played
+ He broke the jew's windows all._
+
+
+
+How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part?
+
+
+With unmixed feeling. Smiling, a jew he heard with pleasure and saw the
+unbroken kitchen window.
+
+
+Recite the second part (minor) of the legend.
+
+ _Then out there came the jew's daughter
+ And she all dressed in green.
+ "Come back, come back, you pretty little boy,
+ And play your ball again."
+
+ "I can't come back and I won't come back
+ Without my schoolfellows all.
+ For if my master he did hear
+ He'd make it a sorry ball."
+
+ She took him by the lilywhite hand
+ And led him along the hall
+ Until she led him to a room
+ Where none could hear him call.
+
+ She took a penknife out of her pocket
+ And cut off his little head.
+ And now he'll play his ball no more
+ For he lies among the dead._
+
+
+How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?
+
+With mixed feelings. Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew's
+daughter, all dressed in green.
+
+
+Condense Stephen's commentary.
+
+One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by
+inadvertence twice by design he challenges his destiny. It comes when he
+is abandoned and challenges him reluctant and, as an apparition of hope
+and youth, holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation,
+to a secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him,
+consenting.
+
+
+Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?
+
+He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him
+should by him not be told.
+
+
+Why was the host (reluctant, unresisting) still?
+
+In accordance with the law of the conservation of energy.
+
+
+Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?
+
+He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the
+incitations of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the
+propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of
+opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of
+atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism,
+hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.
+
+
+From which (if any) of these mental or physical disorders was he not
+totally immune?
+
+From hypnotic suggestion: once, waking, he had not recognised his
+sleeping apartment: more than once, waking, he had been for an
+indefinite time incapable of moving or uttering sounds. From
+somnambulism: once, sleeping, his body had risen, crouched and
+crawled in the direction of a heatless fire and, having attained
+its destination, there, curled, unheated, in night attire had lain,
+sleeping.
+
+
+Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member
+of his family?
+
+Twice, in Holles street and in Ontario terrace, his daughter Millicent
+(Milly) at the ages of 6 and 8 years had uttered in sleep an exclamation
+of terror and had replied to the interrogations of two figures in night
+attire with a vacant mute expression.
+
+
+What other infantile memories had he of her?
+
+15 June 1889. A querulous newborn female infant crying to cause and
+lessen congestion. A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks
+her moneybox: counted his three free moneypenny buttons, one, tloo,
+tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away: blond, born of two dark,
+she had blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau,
+Austrian army, proximate, a hallucination, lieutenant Mulvey, British
+navy.
+
+
+What endemic characteristics were present?
+
+Conversely the nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct
+line of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant
+intervals to more distant intervals to its most distant intervals.
+
+
+What memories had he of her adolescence?
+
+She relegated her hoop and skippingrope to a recess. On the duke's lawn,
+entreated by an English visitor, she declined to permit him to make and
+take away her photographic image (objection not stated). On the South
+Circular road in the company of Elsa Potter, followed by an individual
+of sinister aspect, she went half way down Stamer street and turned
+abruptly back (reason of change not stated). On the vigil of the 15th
+anniversary of her birth she wrote a letter from Mullingar, county
+Westmeath, making a brief allusion to a local student (faculty and year
+not stated).
+
+
+Did that first division, portending a second division, afflict him?
+
+Less than he had imagined, more than he had hoped.
+
+
+What second departure was contemporaneously perceived by him similarly,
+if differently?
+
+A temporary departure of his cat.
+
+
+Why similarly, why differently?
+
+Similarly, because actuated by a secret purpose the quest of a new male
+
+(Mullingar student) or of a healing herb (valerian). Differently,
+because of different possible returns to the inhabitants or to the
+habitation.
+
+
+In other respects were their differences similar?
+
+In passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in
+unexpectedness.
+
+
+As?
+
+Inasmuch as leaning she sustained her blond hair for him to ribbon it
+for her (cf neckarching cat). Moreover, on the free surface of the lake
+in Stephen's green amid inverted reflections of trees her uncommented
+spit, describing concentric circles of waterrings, indicated by the
+constancy of its permanence the locus of a somnolent prostrate fish (cf
+mousewatching cat).
+
+Again, in order to remember the date, combatants, issue and consequences
+of a famous military engagement she pulled a plait of her hair (cf
+earwashing cat). Furthermore, silly Milly, she dreamed of having had
+an unspoken unremembered conversation with a horse whose name had been
+Joseph to whom (which) she had offered a tumblerful of lemonade which
+it (he) had appeared to have accepted (cf hearthdreaming cat). Hence, in
+passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in unexpectedness,
+their differences were similar.
+
+
+In what way had he utilised gifts (1) an owl, (2) a clock, given as
+matrimonial auguries, to interest and to instruct her?
+
+As object lessons to explain: 1) the nature and habits of oviparous
+animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of
+vision, the secular process of imbalsamation: 2) the principle of the
+pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation
+in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of
+clockwise moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the
+recurrence per hour of an instant in each hour when the longer and the
+shorter indicator were at the same angle of inclination, _videlicet_, 5
+5/11 minutes past each hour per hour in arithmetical progression.
+
+
+In what manners did she reciprocate?
+
+She remembered: on the 27th anniversary of his birth she presented to
+him a breakfast moustachecup of imitation Crown Derby porcelain ware.
+She provided: at quarter day or thereabouts if or when purchases
+had been made by him not for her she showed herself attentive to his
+necessities, anticipating his desires. She admired: a natural phenomenon
+having been explained by him to her she expressed the immediate desire
+to possess without gradual acquisition a fraction of his science, the
+moiety, the quarter, a thousandth part.
+
+
+What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make
+to Stephen, noctambulist?
+
+To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday (proper) and
+Friday (normal) on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately
+above the kitchen and immediately adjacent to the sleeping apartment of
+his host and hostess.
+
+
+What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation
+of such an extemporisation?
+
+For the guest: security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the
+host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the
+hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian
+pronunciation.
+
+
+Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and
+a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent
+eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew's
+daughter?
+
+Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother
+through daughter.
+
+
+To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest
+return a monosyllabic negative answer?
+
+If he had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at Sydney
+Parade railway station, 14 October 1903.
+
+
+What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the
+host?
+
+A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of the interment
+of Mrs Mary Dedalus (born Goulding), 26 June 1903, vigil of the
+anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag).
+
+
+Was the proposal of asylum accepted?
+
+Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.
+What exchange of money took place between host and guest?
+
+The former returned to the latter, without interest, a sum of money
+(1-7-0), one pound seven shillings sterling, advanced by the latter to
+the former.
+
+
+What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified,
+declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?
+
+To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place
+the residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal
+instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate
+a series of static semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues,
+places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident in
+the same place), the Ship hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street (W. and
+E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10 Kildare
+street, the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, a
+public garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a conjunction of two
+or more public thoroughfares, the point of bisection of a right line
+drawn between their residences (if both speakers were resident in
+different places).
+
+
+What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually
+selfexcluding propositions?
+
+The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert
+Hengler's circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive
+particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring
+to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had
+publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his
+(the clown's) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the
+summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches
+on the milled edge and tendered it m payment of an account due to and
+received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand
+Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible,
+circuitous or direct, return.
+
+
+Was the clown Bloom's son?
+
+No.
+
+
+Had Bloom's coin returned?
+
+Never.
+
+
+Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?
+
+Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to
+amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and
+international animosity. He believed then that human life was infinitely
+perfectible, eliminating these conditions?
+
+There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct
+from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of
+destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of
+the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and
+death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human
+females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable
+accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies
+and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital
+criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make
+terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres
+of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital
+growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis, from infancy through
+maturity to decay.
+
+
+Why did he desist from speculation?
+
+Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other
+more acceptable phenomena in the place of the less acceptable phenomena
+to be removed.
+
+
+Did Stephen participate in his dejection?
+
+He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding
+syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational
+reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the
+incertitude of the void.
+
+
+Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?
+
+Not verbally. Substantially.
+
+
+What comforted his misapprehension?
+
+That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from
+the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.
+
+
+In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus
+from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?
+
+Lighted Candle in Stick borne by
+
+BLOOM
+
+Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by
+
+STEPHEN:
+
+
+With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?
+
+The 113th, _modus peregrinus: In exitu Israel de Egypto: domus Jacob de
+populo barbaro_.
+
+
+What did each do at the door of egress?
+
+Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.
+
+
+For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?
+
+For a cat.
+
+
+What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the
+guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from
+the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
+
+The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
+
+
+With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his
+companion of various constellations?
+
+Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in
+incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous
+scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an
+observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000
+ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius
+(alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant
+and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the
+precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and
+nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund
+and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging
+towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic
+drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from
+immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with
+which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a
+parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.
+
+
+Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?
+
+Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the
+earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed
+in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds,
+of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable
+trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained
+by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe
+of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves
+universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in
+continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was
+again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends
+and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the
+progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.
+
+
+Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?
+
+Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem
+of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a
+number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude
+and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that,
+the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000
+pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to
+be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed
+integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands,
+hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions,
+billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series
+containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost
+kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers.
+
+
+Did he find the problems of the inhabitability of the planets and their
+satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and
+moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?
+
+Of a different order of difficulty. Conscious that the human organism,
+normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of 19 tons,
+when elevated to a considerable altitude in the terrestrial atmosphere
+suffered with arithmetical progression of intensity, according as
+the line of demarcation between troposphere and stratosphere was
+approximated from nasal hemorrhage, impeded respiration and vertigo,
+when proposing this problem for solution, he had conjectured as a
+working hypothesis which could not be proved impossible that a more
+adaptable and differently anatomically constructed race of beings might
+subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian,
+Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though
+an apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite
+differences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would
+probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to
+vanities, to vanities of vanities and to all that is vanity.
+
+ And the problem of possible redemption?
+ The minor was proved by the major.
+
+
+Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?
+
+The various colours significant of various degrees of vitality (white,
+yellow, crimson, vermilion, cinnabar): their degrees of brilliancy:
+their magnitudes revealed up to and including the 7th: their positions:
+the waggoner's star: Walsingham way: the chariot of David: the annular
+cinctures of Saturn: the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns: the
+interdependent gyrations of double suns: the independent synchronous
+discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel,
+Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes
+of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite
+compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive
+and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of
+meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth
+of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric showers
+about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence (martyr, lo August): the
+monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon in her arms:
+the posited influence of celestial on human bodies: the appearance of a
+star (1st magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night and
+day (a new luminous sun generated by the collision and amalgamation in
+incandescence of two nonluminous exsuns) about the period of the
+birth of William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent neversetting
+constellation of Cassiopeia and of a star (2nd magnitude) of similar
+origin but of lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and disappeared
+from the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about the period
+of the birth of Leopold Bloom and of other stars of (presumably) similar
+origin which had (effectively or presumably) appeared in and disappeared
+from the constellation of Andromeda about the period of the birth of
+Stephen Dedalus, and in and from the constellation of Auriga some years
+after the birth and death of Rudolph Bloom, junior, and in and from
+other constellations some years before or after the birth or death of
+other persons: the attendant phenomena of eclipses, solar and lunar,
+from immersion to emersion, abatement of wind, transit of shadow,
+taciturnity of winged creatures, emergence of nocturnal or crepuscular
+animals, persistence of infernal light, obscurity of terrestrial waters,
+pallor of human beings.
+
+
+His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing
+for possible error?
+
+That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not
+a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from
+the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the
+suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of
+different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space,
+remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a
+present before its probable spectators had entered actual present
+existence.
+
+
+Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?
+
+Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the
+delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection
+invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the
+satellite of their planet.
+
+
+Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological
+influences upon sublunary disasters?
+
+It seemed to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the
+nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to
+verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the
+sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity.
+
+
+What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and
+woman?
+
+Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian
+generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence:
+her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising
+and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced
+invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative
+interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power
+to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to
+incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her
+visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent
+propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her
+light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her
+arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction,
+when invisible.
+
+
+What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom's, who attracted Stephen's,
+gaze?
+
+In the second storey (rere) of his (Bloom's) house the light of a
+paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller
+blind supplied by Frank O'Hara, window blind, curtain pole and revolving
+shutter manufacturer, 16 Aungier street.
+
+
+How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his
+wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?
+
+With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued
+affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with
+suggestion.
+
+
+Both then were silent?
+
+Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal
+flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.
+
+
+Were they indefinitely inactive?
+
+At Stephen's suggestion, at Bloom's instigation both, first Stephen,
+then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs
+of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition,
+their gazes, first Bloom's, then Stephen's, elevated to the projected
+luminous and semiluminous shadow.
+
+
+Similarly?
+
+The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations
+were dissimilar: Bloom's longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of
+the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate
+year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point
+of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the
+institution, 210 scholars: Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the
+ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption
+an insistent vesical pressure.
+
+
+What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the
+invisible audible collateral organ of the other?
+
+To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity,
+reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pilosity.
+
+To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised
+(I January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from
+unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine
+prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic
+church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of
+the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine
+excrescences as hair and toenails.
+
+
+What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?
+
+A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament
+from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress
+of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.
+
+
+How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal
+departer?
+
+By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an
+unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and
+turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its
+staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and
+revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress.
+
+
+How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?
+
+Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its
+base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and
+forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.
+
+
+What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their
+(respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?
+
+The sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the bells
+in the church of Saint George.
+
+
+What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?
+
+By Stephen:
+
+_Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet. Iubilantium te virginum. Chorus
+excipiat._
+
+By Bloom:
+
+ _Heigho, heigho,
+ Heigho, heigho._
+
+
+Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day
+at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south
+to Glasnevin in the north?
+
+Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in bed),
+Ned Lambert (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Joe Hynes (in bed), John
+Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Patsy Dignam (in bed),
+Paddy Dignam (in the grave).
+
+
+Alone, what did Bloom hear?
+
+The double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the
+double vibration of a jew's harp in the resonant lane.
+
+
+Alone, what did Bloom feel?
+
+The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing
+point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur: the
+incipient intimations of proximate dawn.
+
+
+Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind
+him?
+
+Of companions now in various manners in different places defunct: Percy
+Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River), Philip Gilligan (phthisis,
+Jervis Street hospital), Matthew F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin
+Bay), Philip Moisel (pyemia, Heytesbury street), Michael Hart (phthisis,
+Mater Misericordiae hospital), Patrick Dignam (apoplexy, Sandymount).
+
+
+What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?
+
+The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the
+apparition of a new solar disk.
+
+
+Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?
+
+Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of charades in the house
+of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition
+of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the
+direction of Mizrach, the east.
+
+
+He remembered the initial paraphenomena?
+
+More active air, a matutinal distant cock, ecclesiastical clocks at
+various points, avine music, the isolated tread of an early wayfarer,
+the visible diffusion of the light of an invisible luminous body, the
+first golden limb of the resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon.
+
+
+Did he remain?
+
+With deep inspiration he returned, retraversing the garden, reentering
+the passage, reclosing the door. With brief suspiration he reassumed the
+candle, reascended the stairs, reapproached the door of the front room,
+hallfloor, and reentered.
+
+
+What suddenly arrested his ingress?
+
+The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into
+contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible
+fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in
+consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered.
+
+
+Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of
+furniture.
+
+A sofa upholstered in prune plush had been translocated from opposite
+the door to the ingleside near the compactly furled Union Jack (an
+alteration which he had frequently intended to execute): the blue and
+white checker inlaid majolicatopped table had been placed opposite the
+door in the place vacated by the prune plush sofa: the walnut sideboard
+(a projecting angle of which had momentarily arrested his ingress) had
+been moved from its position beside the door to a more advantageous but
+more perilous position in front of the door: two chairs had been moved
+from right and left of the ingleside to the position originally occupied
+by the blue and white checker inlaid majolicatopped table.
+
+
+Describe them.
+
+One: a squat stuffed easychair, with stout arms extended and back
+slanted to the rere, which, repelled in recoil, had then upturned an
+irregular fringe of a rectangular rug and now displayed on its amply
+upholstered seat a centralised diffusing and diminishing discolouration.
+The other: a slender splayfoot chair of glossy cane curves, placed
+directly opposite the former, its frame from top to seat and from seat
+to base being varnished dark brown, its seat being a bright circle of
+white plaited rush.
+
+
+What significances attached to these two chairs?
+
+Significances of similitude, of posture, of symbolism, of circumstantial
+evidence, of testimonial supermanence.
+
+
+What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?
+
+A vertical piano (Cadby) with exposed keyboard, its closed coffin
+supporting a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves and an emerald ashtray
+containing four consumed matches, a partly consumed cigarette and two
+discoloured ends of cigarettes, its musicrest supporting the music in
+the key of G natural for voice and piano of _Love's Old Sweet Song_
+(words by G. Clifton Bingham, composed by J. L. Molloy, sung by Madam
+Antoinette Sterling) open at the last page with the final indications
+_ad libitum, forte_, pedal, _animato_, sustained pedal, _ritirando_,
+close.
+
+
+With what sensations did Bloom contemplate in rotation these objects?
+
+With strain, elevating a candlestick: with pain, feeling on his right
+temple a contused tumescence: with attention, focussing his gaze on
+a large dull passive and a slender bright active: with solicitation,
+bending and downturning the upturned rugfringe: with amusement,
+remembering Dr Malachi Mulligan's scheme of colour containing the
+gradation of green: with pleasure, repeating the words and antecedent
+act and perceiving through various channels of internal sensibility
+the consequent and concomitant tepid pleasant diffusion of gradual
+discolouration.
+
+
+His next proceeding?
+
+From an open box on the majolicatopped table he extracted a black
+diminutive cone, one inch in height, placed it on its circular base on
+a small tin plate, placed his candlestick on the right corner of the
+mantelpiece, produced from his waistcoat a folded page of prospectus
+(illustrated) entitled Agendath Netaim, unfolded the same, examined
+it superficially, rolled it into a thin cylinder, ignited it in the
+candleflame, applied it when ignited to the apex of the cone till the
+latter reached the stage of rutilance, placed the cylinder in the basin
+of the candlestick disposing its unconsumed part in such a manner as to
+facilitate total combustion.
+
+
+What followed this operation?
+
+The truncated conical crater summit of the diminutive volcano emitted a
+vertical and serpentine fume redolent of aromatic oriental incense.
+
+
+What homothetic objects, other than the candlestick, stood on the
+mantelpiece?
+
+A timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopped at the hour of 4.46
+a.m. on the 21 March 1896, matrimonial gift of Matthew Dillon: a dwarf
+tree of glacial arborescence under a transparent bellshade, matrimonial
+gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle: an embalmed owl, matrimonial gift of
+Alderman John Hooper.
+
+
+What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and
+Bloom?
+
+In the mirror of the giltbordered pierglass the undecorated back of the
+dwarf tree regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before
+the mirror the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper with a clear
+melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate gaze regarded Bloom
+while Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless compassionated
+gaze regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle.
+
+
+What composite asymmetrical image in the mirror then attracted his
+attention?
+
+The image of a solitary (ipsorelative) mutable (aliorelative) man.
+
+
+Why solitary (ipsorelative)?
+
+_Brothers and sisters had he none. Yet that man's father was his
+grandfather's son._
+
+
+Why mutable (aliorelative)?
+
+From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix.
+From maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal
+procreator.
+
+
+What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?
+
+The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged
+and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles
+on the two bookshelves opposite.
+
+
+Catalogue these books.
+
+_Thom's Dublin Post Office Directory, 1886_. Denis Florence M'Carthy's
+_Poetical Works_ (copper beechleaf bookmark at p. 5). Shakespeare's
+_Works_ (dark crimson morocco, goldtooled).
+
+_The Useful Ready Reckoner_ (brown cloth).
+
+_The Secret History of the Court of Charles II_ (red cloth, tooled
+binding). _The Child's Guide_ (blue cloth).
+
+_The Beauties of Killarney_ (wrappers).
+
+_When We Were Boys_ by William O'Brien M. P. (green cloth, slightly
+faded, envelope bookmark at p. 217).
+
+_Thoughts from Spinoza_ (maroon leather).
+
+_The Story of the Heavens_ by Sir Robert Ball (blue cloth). Ellis's
+_Three Trips to Madagascar_ (brown cloth, title obliterated).
+
+_The Stark-Munro Letters_ by A. Conan Doyle, property of the City of
+Dublin Public Library, 106 Capel street, lent 21 May (Whitsun Eve) 1904,
+due 4 June 1904, 13 days overdue (black cloth binding, bearing white
+letternumber ticket).
+
+_Voyages in China_ by "Viator" (recovered with brown paper, red ink
+title).
+
+_Philosophy of the Talmud_ (sewn pamphlet). Lockhart's _Life of
+Napoleon_ (cover wanting, marginal annotations, minimising victories,
+aggrandising defeats of the protagonist).
+
+_Soll und Haben_ by Gustav Freytag (black boards, Gothic characters,
+cigarette coupon bookmark at p. 24). Hozier's _History of the
+Russo-Turkish War_ (brown cloth, a volumes, with gummed label, Garrison
+Library, Governor's Parade, Gibraltar, on verso of cover).
+
+_Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland_ by William Allingham (second edition,
+green cloth, gilt trefoil design, previous owner's name on recto of
+flyleaf erased).
+
+_A Handbook of Astronomy_ (cover, brown leather, detached, S plates,
+antique letterpress long primer, author's footnotes nonpareil, marginal
+clues brevier, captions small pica).
+
+_The Hidden Life of Christ_ (black boards).
+
+_In the Track of the Sun_ (yellow cloth, titlepage missing, recurrent
+title intestation).
+
+_Physical Strength and How to Obtain It_ by Eugen Sandow (red cloth).
+
+_Short but yet Plain Elements of Geometry_ written in French by F.
+Ignat. Pardies and rendered into English by John Harris D. D. London,
+printed for R. Knaplock at the Bifhop's Head, MDCCXI, with dedicatory
+epiftle to his worthy friend Charles Cox, efquire, Member of Parliament
+for the burgh of Southwark and having ink calligraphed statement on the
+flyleaf certifying that the book was the property of Michael Gallagher,
+dated this 10th day of May 1822 and requefting the perfon who should
+find it, if the book should be loft or go aftray, to reftore it to
+Michael Gallagher, carpenter, Dufery Gate, Ennifcorthy, county Wicklow,
+the fineft place in the world.
+
+
+What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of
+the inverted volumes?
+
+The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its
+place: the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females:
+the incongruity of an apple incuneated in a tumbler and of an umbrella
+inclined in a closestool: the insecurity of hiding any secret document
+behind, beneath or between the pages of a book.
+
+
+Which volume was the largest in bulk?
+
+Hozier's _History of the Russo-Turkish war._
+
+
+What among other data did the second volume of the work in question
+contain?
+
+The name of a decisive battle (forgotten), frequently remembered by a
+decisive officer, major Brian Cooper Tweedy (remembered).
+
+
+Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?
+
+Firstly, in order to exercise mnemotechnic: secondly, because after an
+interval of amnesia, when, seated at the central table, about to consult
+the work in question, he remembered by mnemotechnic the name of the
+military engagement, Plevna.
+
+
+What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?
+
+The candour, nudity, pose, tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a
+statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus purchased
+by auction from P. A. Wren, 9 Bachelor's Walk.
+
+
+What caused him irritation in his sitting posture? Inhibitory pressure
+of collar (size 17) and waistcoat (5 buttons), two articles of clothing
+superfluous in the costume of mature males and inelastic to alterations
+of mass by expansion.
+
+
+How was the irritation allayed?
+
+He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible
+stud, from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He
+unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt
+and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hairs
+extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the
+circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial
+line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae,
+thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles
+described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits
+of the mammary prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus
+one braced trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete.
+
+
+What involuntary actions followed?
+
+He compressed between 2 fingers the flesh circumjacent to a cicatrice in
+the left infracostal region below the diaphragm resulting from a sting
+inflicted 2 weeks and 3 days previously (23 May 1904) by a bee.
+He scratched imprecisely with his right hand, though insensible of
+prurition, various points and surfaces of his partly exposed, wholly
+abluted skin. He inserted his left hand into the left lower pocket of
+his waistcoat and extracted and replaced a silver coin (I shilling),
+placed there (presumably) on the occasion (17 October 1903) of the
+interment of Mrs Emily Sinico, Sydney Parade.
+
+
+Compile the budget for 16 June 1904. DEBIT
+
+ 1 Pork Kidney
+ 1 Copy FREEMAN'S JOURNAL
+ 1 Bath And Gratification
+ Tramfare
+ 1 In Memoriam Patrick Dignam
+ 2 Banbury cakes
+ 1 Lunch
+ 1 Renewal fee for book
+ 1 Packet Notepaper and Envelopes
+ 1 Dinner and Gratification
+ 1 Postal Order and Stamp
+ Tramfare
+ 1 Pig's Foot
+ 1 Sheep's Trotter
+ 1 Cake Fry's Plain Chocolate
+ 1 Square Soda Bread
+ 1 Coffee and Bun
+ Loan (Stephen Dedalus) refunded
+ BALANCE
+
+
+ L. s. d.
+ 0--0--3
+ 0--0--1
+ 0--1--6
+ 0--0--1
+ 0--5--0
+ 0--0--1
+ 0--0--7
+ 0--1--0
+ 0--0--2
+ 0--2--0
+ 0--2--8
+ 0--0--1
+ 0--0--4
+ 0--0--3
+ 0--0--1
+ 0--0--4
+ 0--0--4
+ 1--7--0
+ 0-17--5
+ 2-19--3
+ CREDIT
+
+ Cash in hand
+ Commission recd. _Freeman's Journal_
+ Loan (Stephen Dedalus)
+
+
+
+
+
+ L. s. d.
+ 0--4--9
+ 1--7--6
+ 1--7--0
+
+
+
+
+
+ 2-19--3
+
+
+
+
+Did the process of divestiture continue?
+
+Sensible of a benignant persistent ache in his footsoles he extended
+his foot to one side and observed the creases, protuberances and salient
+points caused by foot pressure in the course of walking repeatedly in
+several different directions, then, inclined, he disnoded the laceknots,
+unhooked and loosened the laces, took off each of his two boots for the
+second time, detached the partially moistened right sock through the
+fore part of which the nail of his great toe had again effracted, raised
+his right foot and, having unhooked a purple elastic sock suspender,
+took off his right sock, placed his unclothed right foot on the margin
+of the seat of his chair, picked at and gently lacerated the protruding
+part of the great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and
+inhaled the odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the
+lacerated ungual fragment.
+
+
+Why with satisfaction?
+
+Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other
+ungual fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs
+Ellis's juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of brief
+genuflection and nocturnal prayer and ambitious meditation.
+
+
+In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions
+now coalesced?
+
+Not to inherit by right of primogeniture, gavelkind or borough English,
+or possess in perpetuity an extensive demesne of a sufficient number of
+acres, roods and perches, statute land measure (valuation 42 pounds), of
+grazing turbary surrounding a baronial hall with gatelodge and carriage
+drive nor, on the other hand, a terracehouse or semidetached villa,
+described as _Rus in Urbe_ or _Qui si sana_, but to purchase by private
+treaty in fee simple a thatched bungalowshaped 2 storey dwellinghouse of
+southerly aspect, surmounted by vane and lightning conductor, connected
+with the earth, with porch covered by parasitic plants (ivy or Virginia
+creeper), halldoor, olive green, with smart carriage finish and neat
+doorbrasses, stucco front with gilt tracery at eaves and gable, rising,
+if possible, upon a gentle eminence with agreeable prospect from balcony
+with stone pillar parapet over unoccupied and unoccupyable interjacent
+pastures and standing in 5 or 6 acres of its own ground, at such
+a distance from the nearest public thoroughfare as to render its
+houselights visible at night above and through a quickset hornbeam hedge
+of topiary cutting, situate at a given point not less than 1 statute
+mile from the periphery of the metropolis, within a time limit of not
+more than 15 minutes from tram or train line (e.g., Dundrum, south, or
+Sutton, north, both localities equally reported by trial to resemble the
+terrestrial poles in being favourable climates for phthisical subjects),
+the premises to be held under feefarm grant, lease 999 years, the
+messuage to consist of 1 drawingroom with baywindow (2 lancets),
+thermometer affixed, 1 sittingroom, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants' rooms, tiled
+kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen
+wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia
+Britannica and New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and
+oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite
+automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, handtufted
+Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with
+pillar and claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel
+chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer
+with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments,
+upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three
+banner Japanese screen and cuspidors (club style, rich winecoloured
+leather, gloss renewable with a minimum of labour by use of linseed
+oil and vinegar) and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre,
+bentwood perch with fingertame parrot (expurgated language), embossed
+mural paper at 10/- per dozen with transverse swags of carmine floral
+design and top crown frieze, staircase, three continuous flights at
+successive right angles, of varnished cleargrained oak, treads and
+risers, newel, balusters and handrail, with steppedup panel dado,
+dressed with camphorated wax: bathroom, hot and cold supply, reclining
+and shower: water closet on mezzanine provided with opaque singlepane
+oblong window, tipup seat, bracket lamp, brass tierod and brace,
+armrests, footstool and artistic oleograph on inner face of door:
+ditto, plain: servants' apartments with separate sanitary and hygienic
+necessaries for cook, general and betweenmaid (salary, rising by
+biennial unearned increments of 2 pounds, with comprehensive fidelity
+insurance, annual bonus (1 pound) and retiring allowance (based on
+the 65 system) after 30 years' service), pantry, buttery, larder,
+refrigerator, outoffices, coal and wood cellarage with winebin (still
+and sparkling vintages) for distinguished guests, if entertained to
+dinner (evening dress), carbon monoxide gas supply throughout.
+
+
+What additional attractions might the grounds contain?
+
+As addenda, a tennis and fives court, a shrubbery, a glass summerhouse
+with tropical palms, equipped in the best botanical manner, a rockery
+with waterspray, a beehive arranged on humane principles, oval
+flowerbeds in rectangular grassplots set with eccentric ellipses of
+scarlet and chrome tulips, blue scillas, crocuses, polyanthus, sweet
+William, sweet pea, lily of the valley (bulbs obtainable from sir James
+W. Mackey (Limited) wholesale and retail seed and bulb merchants and
+nurserymen, agents for chemical manures, 23 Sackville street, upper), an
+orchard, kitchen garden and vinery protected against illegal trespassers
+by glasstopped mural enclosures, a lumbershed with padlock for various
+inventoried implements.
+
+
+As?
+
+Eeltraps, lobsterpots, fishingrods, hatchet, steelyard, grindstone,
+clodcrusher, swatheturner, carriagesack, telescope ladder, 10 tooth
+rake, washing clogs, haytedder, tumbling rake, billhook, paintpot,
+brush, hoe and so on.
+
+What improvements might be subsequently introduced?
+
+A rabbitry and fowlrun, a dovecote, a botanical conservatory, 2 hammocks
+(lady's and gentleman's), a sundial shaded and sheltered by laburnum
+or lilac trees, an exotically harmonically accorded Japanese tinkle
+gatebell affixed to left lateral gatepost, a capacious waterbutt,
+a lawnmower with side delivery and grassbox, a lawnsprinkler with
+hydraulic hose.
+
+
+What facilities of transit were desirable?
+
+When citybound frequent connection by train or tram from their
+respective intermediate station or terminal. When countrybound
+velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar
+attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart
+phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).
+
+
+What might be the name of this erigible or erected residence?
+
+Bloom Cottage. Saint Leopold's. Flowerville.
+
+
+Could Bloom of 7 Eccles street foresee Bloom of Flowerville?
+
+In loose allwool garments with Harris tweed cap, price 8/6, and useful
+garden boots with elastic gussets and wateringcan, planting aligned
+young firtrees, syringing, pruning, staking, sowing hayseed, trundling a
+weedladen wheelbarrow without excessive fatigue at sunset amid the scent
+of newmown hay, ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom, achieving
+longevity.
+
+
+What syllabus of intellectual pursuits was simultaneously possible?
+
+Snapshot photography, comparative study of religions, folklore relative
+to various amatory and superstitious practices, contemplation of the
+celestial constellations.
+
+
+What lighter recreations?
+
+Outdoor: garden and fieldwork, cycling on level macadamised causeways
+ascents of moderately high hills, natation in secluded fresh water and
+unmolested river boating in secure wherry or light curricle with kedge
+anchor on reaches free from weirs and rapids (period of estivation),
+vespertinal perambulation or equestrian circumprocession with inspection
+of sterile landscape and contrastingly agreeable cottagers' fires of
+smoking peat turves (period of hibernation). Indoor: discussion in
+tepid security of unsolved historical and criminal problems: lecture of
+unexpurgated exotic erotic masterpieces: house carpentry with toolbox
+containing hammer, awl nails, screws, tintacks, gimlet, tweezers,
+bullnose plane and turnscrew. Might he become a gentleman farmer of
+field produce and live stock?
+
+Not impossibly, with 1 or 2 stripper cows, 1 pike of upland hay and
+requisite farming implements, e.g., an end-to-end churn, a turnip pulper
+etc.
+
+
+What would be his civic functions and social status among the county
+families and landed gentry?
+
+Arranged successively in ascending powers of hierarchical order, that
+of gardener, groundsman, cultivator, breeder, and at the zenith of his
+career, resident magistrate or justice of the peace with a family crest
+and coat of arms and appropriate classical motto _(Semper paratus_),
+duly recorded in the court directory (Bloom, Leopold P., M. P., P. C.,
+K. P., L. L. D. (_honoris causa_), Bloomville, Dundrum) and mentioned in
+court and fashionable intelligence (Mr and Mrs Leopold Bloom have left
+Kingstown for England).
+
+
+What course of action did he outline for himself in such capacity?
+
+A course that lay between undue clemency and excessive rigour:
+the dispensation in a heterogeneous society of arbitrary classes,
+incessantly rearranged in terms of greater and lesser social inequality,
+of unbiassed homogeneous indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants
+of the widest possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing
+with confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown. Loyal to
+the highest constituted power in the land, actuated by an innate love of
+rectitude his aims would be the strict maintenance of public order,
+the repression of many abuses though not of all simultaneously (every
+measure of reform or retrenchment being a preliminary solution to be
+contained by fluxion in the final solution), the upholding of the letter
+of the law (common, statute and law merchant) against all traversers in
+covin and trespassers acting in contravention of bylaws and regulations,
+all resuscitators (by trespass and petty larceny of kindlings) of
+venville rights, obsolete by desuetude, all orotund instigators
+of international persecution, all perpetuators of international
+animosities, all menial molestors of domestic conviviality, all
+recalcitrant violators of domestic connubiality.
+
+
+Prove that he had loved rectitude from his earliest youth.
+
+To Master Percy Apjohn at High School in 1880 he had divulged his
+disbelief in the tenets of the Irish (protestant) church (to which his
+father Rudolf Virag (later Rudolph Bloom) had been converted from the
+Israelitic faith and communion in 1865 by the Society for promoting
+Christianity among the jews) subsequently abjured by him in favour of
+Roman catholicism at the epoch of and with a view to his matrimony
+in 1888. To Daniel Magrane and Francis Wade in 1882 during a juvenile
+friendship (terminated by the premature emigration of the former) he
+had advocated during nocturnal perambulations the political theory of
+colonial (e.g. Canadian) expansion and the evolutionary theories of
+Charles Darwin, expounded in _The Descent of Man_ and _The Origin
+of Species_. In 1885 he had publicly expressed his adherence to the
+collective and national economic programme advocated by James Fintan
+Lalor, John Fisher Murray, John Mitchel, J. F. X. O'Brien and others,
+the agrarian policy of Michael Davitt, the constitutional agitation of
+Charles Stewart Parnell (M. P. for Cork City), the programme of
+peace, retrenchment and reform of William Ewart Gladstone (M. P. for
+Midlothian, N. B.) and, in support of his political convictions, had
+climbed up into a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree
+on Northumberland road to see the entrance (2 February 1888) into the
+capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession of 20,000 torchbearers,
+divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2000 torches in escort of
+the marquess of Ripon and (honest) John Morley.
+
+
+How much and how did he propose to pay for this country residence?
+
+As per prospectus of the Industrious Foreign Acclimatised Nationalised
+Friendly Stateaided Building Society (incorporated 1874), a maximum
+of 60 pounds per annum, being 1/6 of an assured income, derived from
+giltedged securities, representing at 5 % simple interest on capital of
+1200 pounds (estimate of price at 20 years' purchase), of which to be
+paid on acquisition and the balance in the form of annual rent, viz. 800
+pounds plus 2 1/2 % interest on the same, repayable quarterly in equal
+annual instalments until extinction by amortisation of loan advanced for
+purchase within a period of 20 years, amounting to an annual rental of
+64 pounds, headrent included, the titledeeds to remain in possession
+of the lender or lenders with a saving clause envisaging forced sale,
+foreclosure and mutual compensation in the event of protracted failure
+to pay the terms assigned, otherwise the messuage to become the absolute
+property of the tenant occupier upon expiry of the period of years
+stipulated.
+
+
+What rapid but insecure means to opulence might facilitate immediate
+purchase?
+
+A private wireless telegraph which would transmit by dot and dash system
+the result of a national equine handicap (flat or steeplechase) of I or
+more miles and furlongs won by an outsider at odds of 50 to 1 at 3 hr
+8 m p.m. at Ascot (Greenwich time), the message being received and
+available for betting purposes in Dublin at 2.59 p.m. (Dunsink time).
+The unexpected discovery of an object of great monetary value (precious
+stone, valuable adhesive or impressed postage stamps (7 schilling,
+mauve, imperforate, Hamburg, 1866: 4 pence, rose, blue paper, perforate,
+Great Britain, 1855: 1 franc, stone, official, rouletted, diagonal
+surcharge, Luxemburg, 1878), antique dynastical ring, unique relic) in
+unusual repositories or by unusual means: from the air (dropped by an
+eagle in flight), by fire (amid the carbonised remains of an incendiated
+edifice), in the sea (amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict), on
+earth (in the gizzard of a comestible fowl). A Spanish prisoner's
+donation of a distant treasure of valuables or specie or bullion lodged
+with a solvent banking corporation loo years previously at 5% compound
+interest of the collective worth of 5,000,000 pounds stg (five million
+pounds sterling). A contract with an inconsiderate contractee for the
+delivery of 32 consignments of some given commodity in consideration of
+cash payment on delivery per delivery at the initial rate of 1/4d to be
+increased constantly in the geometrical progression of 2 (1/4d, 1/2d,
+1d, 2d, 4d, 8d, 1s 4d, 2s 8d to 32 terms). A prepared scheme
+based on a study of the laws of probability to break the bank at Monte
+Carlo. A solution of the secular problem of the quadrature of the
+circle, government premium 1,000,000 pounds sterling.
+
+
+Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?
+
+The reclamation of dunams of waste arenary soil, proposed in the
+prospectus of Agendath Netaim, Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. 15, by the
+cultivation of orange plantations and melonfields and reafforestation.
+The utilisation of waste paper, fells of sewer rodents, human excrement
+possessing chemical properties, in view of the vast production of the
+first, vast number of the second and immense quantity of the third,
+every normal human being of average vitality and appetite producing
+annually, cancelling byproducts of water, a sum total of 80 lbs. (mixed
+animal and vegetable diet), to be multiplied by 4,386,035, the total
+population of Ireland according to census returns of 1901.
+
+
+Were there schemes of wider scope?
+
+A scheme to be formulated and submitted for approval to the harbour
+commissioners for the exploitation of white coal (hydraulic power),
+obtained by hydroelectric plant at peak of tide at Dublin bar or at
+head of water at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt or catchment basins of main
+streams for the economic production of 500,000 W. H. P. of electricity.
+A scheme to enclose the peninsular delta of the North Bull at Dollymount
+and erect on the space of the foreland, used for golf links and rifle
+ranges, an asphalted esplanade with casinos, booths, shooting galleries,
+hotels, boardinghouses, readingrooms, establishments for mixed bathing.
+A scheme for the use of dogvans and goatvans for the delivery of early
+morning milk. A scheme for the development of Irish tourist traffic in
+and around Dublin by means of petrolpropelled riverboats, plying in the
+fluvial fairway between Island bridge and Ringsend, charabancs, narrow
+gauge local railways, and pleasure steamers for coastwise navigation
+(10/- per person per day, guide (trilingual) included). A scheme for
+the repristination of passenger and goods traffics over Irish waterways,
+when freed from weedbeds. A scheme to connect by tramline the Cattle
+Market (North Circular road and Prussia street) with the quays (Sheriff
+street, lower, and East Wall), parallel with the Link line railway
+laid (in conjunction with the Great Southern and Western railway line)
+between the cattle park, Liffey junction, and terminus of Midland Great
+Western Railway 43 to 45 North
+
+Wall, in proximity to the terminal stations or Dublin branches of Great
+Central Railway, Midland Railway of England, City of Dublin Steam Packet
+Company, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, Dublin and Glasgow
+Steam Packet Company, Glasgow, Dublin and Londonderry Steam Packet
+Company (Laird line), British and Irish Steam Packet Company, Dublin
+and Morecambe Steamers, London and North Western Railway Company, Dublin
+Port and Docks Board Landing Sheds and transit sheds of Palgrave, Murphy
+and Company, steamship owners, agents for steamers from Mediterranean,
+Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Holland and for Liverpool
+Underwriters' Association, the cost of acquired rolling stock for
+animal transport and of additional mileage operated by the Dublin United
+Tramways Company, limited, to be covered by graziers' fees.
+
+
+Positing what protasis would the contraction for such several schemes
+become a natural and necessary apodosis?
+
+Given a guarantee equal to the sum sought, the support, by deed of
+gift and transfer vouchers during donor's lifetime or by bequest
+after donor's painless extinction, of eminent financiers (Blum Pasha,
+Rothschild Guggenheim, Hirsch, Montefiore, Morgan, Rockefeller)
+possessing fortunes in 6 figures, amassed during a successful life, and
+joining capital with opportunity the thing required was done.
+
+
+What eventuality would render him independent of such wealth?
+
+The independent discovery of a goldseam of inexhaustible ore.
+
+
+For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation?
+
+It was one of his axioms that similar meditations or the automatic
+relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil
+recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for
+the night alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and
+renovated vitality.
+
+
+His justifications?
+
+As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human
+life at least 2/7, viz. 20 years are passed in sleep. As a philosopher
+he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an
+infinitesimal part of any person's desires has been realised. As a
+physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant
+agencies chiefly operative during somnolence.
+
+
+What did he fear?
+
+The committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration
+of the light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence
+situated in the cerebral convolutions.
+
+
+What were habitually his final meditations?
+
+Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in
+wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded,
+reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span
+of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
+
+
+What did the first drawer unlocked contain?
+
+A Vere Foster's handwriting copybook, property of Milly (Millicent)
+Bloom, certain pages of which bore diagram drawings, marked _Papli_,
+which showed a large globular head with 5 hairs erect, 2 eyes in
+profile, the trunk full front with 3 large buttons, 1 triangular foot: 2
+fading photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe,
+actress and professional beauty: a Yuletide card, bearing on it a
+pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend _Mizpah_, the
+date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders: from Mr + Mrs M. Comerford, the
+versicle: _May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome
+glee_: a butt of red partly liquefied sealing wax, obtained from the
+stores department of Messrs Hely's, Ltd., 89, 90, and 91 Dame street:
+a box containing the remainder of a gross of gilt "J" pennibs, obtained
+from same department of same firm: an old sandglass which rolled
+containing sand which rolled: a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written
+by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of the passing into
+law of William Ewart Gladstone's Home Rule bill of 1886 (never passed
+into law): a bazaar ticket, no 2004, of S. Kevin's Charity Fair, price
+6d, 100 prizes: an infantile epistle, dated, small em monday, reading:
+capital pee Papli comma capital aitch How are you note of interrogation
+capital eye I am very well full stop new paragraph signature with
+flourishes capital em Milly no stop: a cameo brooch, property of Ellen
+Bloom (born Higgins), deceased: a cameo scarfpin, property of Rudolph
+Bloom (born Virag), deceased: 3 typewritten letters, addressee, Henry
+Flower, c/o. P. O. Westland Row, addresser, Martha Clifford, c/o. P. O.
+Dolphin's Barn: the transliterated name and address of the addresser
+of the 3 letters in reversed alphabetic boustrophedonic punctated
+quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels suppressed) N. IGS./WI. UU. OX/W. OKS.
+MH/Y. IM: a press cutting from an English weekly periodical _Modern
+Society_, subject corporal chastisement in girls' schools: a pink ribbon
+which had festooned an Easter egg in the year 1899: two partly uncoiled
+rubber preservatives with reserve pockets, purchased by post from Box
+32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: 1 pack of 1 dozen creamlaid
+envelopes and feintruled notepaper, watermarked, now reduced by 3: some
+assorted Austrian-Hungarian coins: 2 coupons of the Royal and Privileged
+Hungarian Lottery: a lowpower magnifying glass: 2 erotic photocards
+showing a) buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation,
+superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior
+position) b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes
+abject) of female religious (partly clothed, eyes direct), purchased by
+post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: a press cutting
+of recipe for renovation of old tan boots: a Id adhesive stamp,
+lavender, of the reign of Queen Victoria: a chart of the measurements
+of Leopold Bloom compiled before, during and after 2 months' consecutive
+use of Sandow-Whiteley's pulley exerciser (men's 15/-, athlete's 20/-)
+viz. chest 28 in and 29 1/2 in, biceps 9 in and 10 in, forearm 8 1/2 in
+and 9 in, thigh 10 in and 12 in, calf 11 in and 12 in: 1 prospectus of
+The Wonderworker, the world's greatest remedy for rectal complaints,
+direct from Wonderworker, Coventry House, South Place, London E C,
+addressed (erroneously) to Mrs L. Bloom with brief accompanying note
+commencing (erroneously): Dear Madam.
+
+
+Quote the textual terms in which the prospectus claimed advantages for
+this thaumaturgic remedy.
+
+It heals and soothes while you sleep, in case of trouble in breaking
+wind, assists nature in the most formidable way, insuring instant relief
+in discharge of gases, keeping parts clean and free natural action, an
+initial outlay of 7/6 making a new man of you and life worth living.
+Ladies find Wonderworker especially useful, a pleasant surprise when
+they note delightful result like a cool drink of fresh spring water on
+a sultry summer's day. Recommend it to your lady and gentlemen friends,
+lasts a lifetime. Insert long round end. Wonderworker.
+
+
+Were there testimonials?
+
+Numerous. From clergyman, British naval officer, wellknown author, city
+man, hospital nurse, lady, mother of five, absentminded beggar.
+
+
+How did absentminded beggar's concluding testimonial conclude?
+
+What a pity the government did not supply our men with wonderworkers
+during the South African campaign! What a relief it would have been!
+
+
+What object did Bloom add to this collection of objects?
+
+A 4th typewritten letter received by Henry Flower (let H. F. be L. B.)
+from Martha Clifford (find M. C.).
+
+
+What pleasant reflection accompanied this action?
+
+The reflection that, apart from the letter in question, his magnetic
+face, form and address had been favourably received during the course of
+the preceding day by a wife (Mrs Josephine Breen, born Josie Powell),
+a nurse, Miss Callan (Christian name unknown), a maid, Gertrude (Gerty,
+family name unknown).
+
+
+What possibility suggested itself?
+
+The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not
+immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in
+the company of an elegant courtesan, of corporal beauty, moderately
+mercenary, variously instructed, a lady by origin.
+
+
+What did the 2nd drawer contain?
+
+Documents: the birth certificate of Leopold Paula Bloom: an endowment
+assurance policy of 500 pounds in the Scottish Widows' Assurance
+Society, intestated Millicent (Milly) Bloom, coming into force at 25
+years as with profit policy of 430 pounds, 462/10/0 and 500 pounds at
+60 years or death, 65 years or death and death, respectively, or
+with profit policy (paidup) of 299/10/0 together with cash payment of
+133/10/0, at option: a bank passbook issued by the Ulster Bank, College
+Green branch showing statement of a/c for halfyear ending 31 December
+1903, balance in depositor's favour: 18/14/6 (eighteen pounds, fourteen
+shillings and sixpence, sterling), net personalty: certificate of
+possession of 900 pounds, Canadian 4 percent (inscribed) government
+stock (free of stamp duty): dockets of the Catholic Cemeteries'
+(Glasnevin) Committee, relative to a graveplot purchased: a local press
+cutting concerning change of name by deedpoll.
+
+
+Quote the textual terms of this notice.
+
+I, Rudolph Virag, now resident at no 52 Clanbrassil street, Dublin,
+formerly of Szombathely in the kingdom of Hungary, hereby give notice
+that I have assumed and intend henceforth upon all occasions and at all
+times to be known by the name of Rudolph Bloom.
+
+
+What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom (born Virag) were in the
+2nd drawer?
+
+An indistinct daguerreotype of Rudolf Virag and his father Leopold
+Virag executed in the year 1852 in the portrait atelier of their
+(respectively) 1st and 2nd cousin, Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar,
+Hungary. An ancient haggadah book in which a pair of hornrimmed convex
+spectacles inserted marked the passage of thanksgiving in the ritual
+prayers for Pessach (Passover): a photocard of the Queen's Hotel,
+Ennis, proprietor, Rudolph Bloom: an envelope addressed: _To My Dear Son
+Leopold_.
+
+
+What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those five whole words
+evoke?
+
+Tomorrow will be a week that I received... it is no use Leopold to be
+... with your dear mother... that is not more to stand... to her...
+all for me is out... be kind to Athos, Leopold... my dear son...
+always... of me... _das Herz... Gott... dein_...
+
+
+What reminiscences of a human subject suffering from progressive
+melancholia did these objects evoke in Bloom?
+
+An old man, widower, unkempt of hair, in bed, with head covered,
+sighing: an infirm dog, Athos: aconite, resorted to by increasing doses
+of grains and scruples as a palliative of recrudescent neuralgia: the
+face in death of a septuagenarian, suicide by poison.
+
+
+Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?
+
+Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain
+beliefs and practices.
+
+
+As?
+
+The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal: the
+hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete
+mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of
+male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the
+ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity of the sabbath.
+
+
+How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?
+
+Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than
+other beliefs and practices now appeared.
+
+
+What first reminiscence had he of Rudolph Bloom (deceased)?
+
+Rudolph Bloom (deceased) narrated to his son Leopold Bloom (aged 6) a
+retrospective arrangement of migrations and settlements in and between
+Dublin, London, Florence, Milan, Vienna, Budapest, Szombathely with
+statements of satisfaction (his grandfather having seen Maria Theresia,
+empress of Austria, queen of Hungary), with commercial advice (having
+taken care of pence, the pounds having taken care of themselves).
+Leopold Bloom (aged 6) had accompanied these narrations by constant
+consultation of a geographical map of Europe (political) and by
+suggestions for the establishment of affiliated business premises in the
+various centres mentioned.
+
+
+Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these
+migrations in narrator and listener?
+
+In narrator by the access of years and in consequence of the use of
+narcotic toxin: in listener by the access of years and in consequence of
+the action of distraction upon vicarious experiences.
+
+
+What idiosyncracies of the narrator were concomitant products of
+amnesia?
+
+Occasionally he ate without having previously removed his hat.
+Occasionally he drank voraciously the juice of gooseberry fool from an
+inclined plate. Occasionally he removed from his lips the traces of food
+by means of a lacerated envelope or other accessible fragment of paper.
+
+
+What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent?
+
+The myopic digital calculation of coins, eructation consequent upon
+repletion.
+
+
+What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences?
+
+The endowment policy, the bank passbook, the certificate of the
+possession of scrip.
+
+
+Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which
+these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values
+to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.
+
+Successively, in descending helotic order: Poverty: that of the outdoor
+hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and
+doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy:
+that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d.
+in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant,
+insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated
+bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric
+public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded
+perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's House (Royal
+Hospital) Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson's Hospital for reduced but
+respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of
+misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic
+pauper.
+
+
+With which attendant indignities?
+
+The unsympathetic indifference of previously amiable females, the
+contempt of muscular males, the acceptance of fragments of bread,
+the simulated ignorance of casual acquaintances, the latration of
+illegitimate unlicensed vagabond dogs, the infantile discharge of
+decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing, nothing or less
+than nothing.
+
+
+By what could such a situation be precluded?
+
+By decease (change of state): by departure (change of place).
+
+
+Which preferably?
+
+The latter, by the line of least resistance.
+
+
+What considerations rendered departure not entirely undesirable?
+
+Constant cohabitation impeding mutual toleration of personal defects.
+The habit of independent purchase increasingly cultivated. The necessity
+to counteract by impermanent sojourn the permanence of arrest.
+
+
+What considerations rendered departure not irrational?
+
+The parties concerned, uniting, had increased and multiplied, which
+being done, offspring produced and educed to maturity, the parties, if
+not disunited were obliged to reunite for increase and multiplication,
+which was absurd, to form by reunion the original couple of uniting
+parties, which was impossible.
+
+
+What considerations rendered departure desirable?
+
+The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad,
+as represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or
+in special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and
+hachures.
+
+
+In Ireland?
+
+The cliffs of Moher, the windy wilds of Connemara, lough Neagh with
+submerged petrified city, the Giant's Causeway, Fort Camden and Fort
+Carlisle, the Golden Vale of Tipperary, the islands of Aran, the
+pastures of royal Meath, Brigid's elm in Kildare, the Queen's Island
+shipyard in Belfast, the Salmon Leap, the lakes of Killarney.
+
+
+Abroad?
+
+Ceylon (with spicegardens supplying tea to Thomas Kernan, agent for
+Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 2 Mincing Lane, London, E. C., 5 Dame
+street, Dublin), Jerusalem, the holy city (with mosque of Omar and gate
+of Damascus, goal of aspiration), the straits of Gibraltar (the unique
+birthplace of Marion Tweedy), the Parthenon (containing statues of nude
+Grecian divinities), the Wall street money market (which controlled
+international finance), the Plaza de Toros at La Linea, Spain (where
+O'Hara of the Camerons had slain the bull), Niagara (over which no human
+being had passed with impunity), the land of the Eskimos (eaters
+of soap), the forbidden country of Thibet (from which no traveller
+returns), the bay of Naples (to see which was to die), the Dead Sea.
+
+
+Under what guidance, following what signs?
+
+At sea, septentrional, by night the polestar, located at the point of
+intersection of the right line from beta to alpha in Ursa Maior produced
+and divided externally at omega and the hypotenuse of the rightangled
+triangle formed by the line alpha omega so produced and the line alpha
+delta of Ursa Maior. On land, meridional, a bispherical moon, revealed
+in imperfect varying phases of lunation through the posterior interstice
+of the imperfectly occluded skirt of a carnose negligent perambulating
+female, a pillar of the cloud by day.
+
+
+What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?
+
+5 pounds reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles
+street, missing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold
+(Poldy), height 5 ft 9 1/2 inches, full build, olive complexion, may
+have since grown a beard, when last seen was wearing a black suit. Above
+sum will be paid for information leading to his discovery.
+
+
+What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and
+nonentity?
+
+Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.
+
+
+What tributes his?
+
+Honour and gifts of strangers, the friends of Everyman. A nymph
+immortal, beauty, the bride of Noman.
+
+
+Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
+
+Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his
+cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic
+planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of
+space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere
+imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey
+the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of
+the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the
+constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination
+return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark
+crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition)
+surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.
+
+
+What would render such return irrational?
+
+An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through
+reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible
+time.
+
+
+What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?
+
+The lateness of the hour, rendering procrastinatory: the obscurity
+of the night, rendering invisible: the uncertainty of thoroughfares,
+rendering perilous: the necessity for repose, obviating movement: the
+proximity of an occupied bed, obviating research: the anticipation of
+warmth (human) tempered with coolness (linen), obviating desire and
+rendering desirable: the statue of Narcissus, sound without echo,
+desired desire.
+
+
+What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an
+unoccupied bed?
+
+The removal of nocturnal solitude, the superior quality of human
+(mature female) to inhuman (hotwaterjar) calefaction, the stimulation of
+matutinal contact, the economy of mangling done on the premises in the
+case of trousers accurately folded and placed lengthwise between the
+spring mattress (striped) and the woollen mattress (biscuit section).
+
+
+What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of
+accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?
+
+The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and
+premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the
+funeral (rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and
+Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the visit to
+museum and national library (holy place): the bookhunt along Bedford
+row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the
+Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte
+in Bernard Kiernan's premises (holocaust): a blank period of time
+including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking
+(wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of
+Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering):
+the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone
+street, lower and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street
+(Armageddon)--nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter,
+Butt Bridge (atonement).
+
+
+What selfimposed enigma did Bloom about to rise in order to go so as to
+conclude lest he should not conclude involuntarily apprehend?
+
+The cause of a brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack emitted by
+the insentient material of a strainveined timber table.
+
+
+What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured
+multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not
+comprehend?
+
+Who was M'Intosh?
+
+
+What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30
+years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction
+of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?
+
+Where was Moses when the candle went out?
+
+
+What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, charged with
+collected articles of recently disvested male wearing apparel, silently,
+successively, enumerate?
+
+A provisional failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement: to obtain
+a certain quantity of tea from Thomas Kernan (agent for Pulbrook,
+Robertson and Co, 5 Dame Street, Dublin, and 2 Mincing Lane, London E.
+C.): to certify the presence or absence of posterior rectal orifice in
+the case of Hellenic female divinities: to obtain admission (gratuitous
+or paid) to the performance of Leah by Mrs Bandmann Palmer at the Gaiety
+Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street.
+
+
+What impression of an absent face did Bloom, arrested, silently recall?
+
+The face of her father, the late Major Brian Cooper Tweedy, Royal Dublin
+Fusiliers, of Gibraltar and Rehoboth, Dolphin's Barn.
+
+
+What recurrent impressions of the same were possible by hypothesis?
+
+Retreating, at the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, Amiens
+street, with constant uniform acceleration, along parallel lines
+meeting at infinity, if produced: along parallel lines, reproduced from
+infinity, with constant uniform retardation, at the terminus of the
+Great Northern Railway, Amiens street, returning.
+
+
+What miscellaneous effects of female personal wearing apparel were
+perceived by him?
+
+A pair of new inodorous halfsilk black ladies' hose, a pair of new
+violet garters, a pair of outsize ladies' drawers of India mull, cut on
+generous lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti's Turkish
+cigarettes and containing a long bright steel safety pin, folded
+curvilinear, a camisole of batiste with thin lace border, an accordion
+underskirt of blue silk moirette, all these objects being disposed
+irregularly on the top of a rectangular trunk, quadruple battened,
+having capped corners, with multicoloured labels, initialled on its fore
+side in white lettering B. C. T. (Brian Cooper Tweedy).
+
+
+What impersonal objects were perceived?
+
+A commode, one leg fractured, totally covered by square cretonne
+cutting, apple design, on which rested a lady's black straw hat.
+Orangekeyed ware, bought of Henry Price, basket, fancy goods, chinaware
+and ironmongery manufacturer, 21, 22, 23 Moore street, disposed
+irregularly on the washstand and floor and consisting of basin, soapdish
+and brushtray (on the washstand, together), pitcher and night article
+(on the floor, separate).
+
+
+Bloom's acts?
+
+He deposited the articles of clothing on a chair, removed his remaining
+articles of clothing, took from beneath the bolster at the head of the
+bed a folded long white nightshirt, inserted his head and arms into the
+proper apertures of the nightshirt, removed a pillow from the head to
+the foot of the bed, prepared the bedlinen accordingly and entered the
+bed.
+
+
+How?
+
+With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode (his own or
+not his own): with solicitude, the snakespiral springs of the mattress
+being old, the brass quoits and pendent viper radii loose and tremulous
+under stress and strain: prudently, as entering a lair or ambush of
+lust or adders: lightly, the less to disturb: reverently, the bed of
+conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of
+marriage, of sleep and of death.
+
+
+What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?
+
+New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form,
+female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs,
+some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.
+
+
+If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
+
+To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to
+enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if
+the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first,
+last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor
+alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
+
+
+What preceding series?
+
+Assuming Mulvey to be the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell
+d'Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father
+Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show,
+Maggot O'Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon (Lord Mayor
+of Dublin), Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder,
+an unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon
+Dedalus, Andrew (Pisser) Burke, Joseph Cuffe, Wisdom Hely, Alderman John
+Hooper, Dr Francis Brady, Father Sebastian of Mount Argus, a bootblack
+at the General Post Office, Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and so
+on to no last term.
+
+
+What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and
+late occupant of the bed?
+
+Reflections on his vigour (a bounder), corporal proportion (a
+billsticker), commercial ability (a bester), impressionability (a
+boaster).
+
+
+Why for the observer impressionability in addition to vigour, corporal
+proportion and commercial ability?
+
+Because he had observed with augmenting frequency in the preceding
+members of the same series the same concupiscence, inflammably
+transmitted, first with alarm, then with understanding, then with
+desire, finally with fatigue, with alternating symptoms of epicene
+comprehension and apprehension.
+
+
+With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections
+affected?
+
+Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity.
+
+
+Envy?
+
+Of a bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the
+superincumbent posture of energetic human copulation and energetic
+piston and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction of
+a constant but not acute concupiscence resident in a bodily and mental
+female organism, passive but not obtuse.
+
+
+Jealousy?
+
+Because a nature full and volatile in its free state, was alternately
+the agent and reagent of attraction. Because attraction between agent(s)
+and reagent(s) at all instants varied, with inverse proportion of
+increase and decrease, with incessant circular extension and radial
+reentrance. Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of
+attraction produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure.
+
+
+Abnegation?
+
+In virtue of a) acquaintance initiated in September 1903 in the
+establishment of George Mesias, merchant tailor and outfitter, 5 Eden
+Quay, b) hospitality extended and received in kind, reciprocated and
+reappropriated in person, c) comparative youth subject to impulses of
+ambition and magnanimity, colleagual altruism and amorous egoism, d)
+extraracial attraction, intraracial inhibition, supraracial prerogative,
+e) an imminent provincial musical tour, common current expenses, net
+proceeds divided.
+
+
+Equanimity?
+
+As as natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or
+understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance
+with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity.
+As not so calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in
+consequence of a collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than
+theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money
+under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public
+money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of
+minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason,
+felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking,
+practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field,
+perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king's enemies,
+impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated
+murder. As not more abnormal than all other parallel processes of
+adaptation to altered conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal
+equilibrium between the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances,
+foods, beverages, acquired habits, indulged inclinations, significant
+disease. As more than inevitable, irreparable.
+
+
+Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?
+
+From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery) there arose nought but
+outrage (copulation) yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially
+violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the
+adulterously violated.
+
+
+What retribution, if any?
+
+Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by
+combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic
+bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses), not yet. Suit
+for damages by legal influence or simulation of assault with evidence of
+injuries sustained (selfinflicted), not impossibly. Hushmoney by moral
+influence possibly. If any, positively, connivance, introduction of
+emulation (material, a prosperous rival agency of publicity: moral,
+a successful rival agent of intimacy), depreciation, alienation,
+humiliation, separation protecting the one separated from the other,
+protecting the separator from both.
+
+
+By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of
+incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments?
+
+The preordained frangibility of the hymen: the presupposed intangibility
+of the thing in itself: the incongruity and disproportion between
+the selfprolonging tension of the thing proposed to be done and the
+selfabbreviating relaxation of the thing done; the fallaciously inferred
+debility of the female: the muscularity of the male: the variations of
+ethical codes: the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving
+no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as
+masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct
+feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist
+preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb
+and quasimonosyllabic onomatopoeic past participle with complementary
+masculine agent) in the passive voice: the continued product of
+seminators by generation: the continual production of semen by
+distillation: the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the
+inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy
+of the stars.
+
+
+In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and
+reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?
+
+Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial
+hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored
+(the land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles of
+Greece, the land of promise), of adipose anterior and posterior female
+hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and
+seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude,
+insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression,
+expressive of mute immutable mature animality.
+
+
+The visible signs of antesatisfaction?
+
+An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a
+tentative revelation: a silent contemplation.
+
+
+Then?
+
+He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each
+plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure
+prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.
+
+
+The visible signs of postsatisfaction?
+
+A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a
+solicitous aversion: a proximate erection.
+
+
+What followed this silent action?
+
+Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation,
+catechetical interrogation.
+
+
+With what modifications did the narrator reply to this interrogation?
+
+Negative: he omitted to mention the clandestine correspondence between
+Martha Clifford and Henry Flower, the public altercation at, in and
+in the vicinity of the licensed premises of Bernard Kiernan and Co,
+Limited, 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street, the erotic provocation
+and response thereto caused by the exhibitionism of Gertrude (Gerty),
+surname unknown. Positive: he included mention of a performance by Mrs
+Bandmann Palmer of LEAH at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King
+street, an invitation to supper at Wynn's (Murphy's) Hotel, 35, 36 and
+37 Lower Abbey street, a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency
+entituled SWEETS OF SIN, anonymous author a gentleman of fashion, a
+temporary concussion caused by a falsely calculated movement in the
+course of a postcenal gymnastic display, the victim (since completely
+recovered) being Stephen Dedalus, professor and author, eldest surviving
+son of Simon Dedalus, of no fixed occupation, an aeronautical feat
+executed by him (narrator) in the presence of a witness, the professor
+and author aforesaid, with promptitude of decision and gymnastic
+flexibility.
+
+
+Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications?
+
+Absolutely.
+
+
+Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?
+
+Stephen Dedalus, professor and author.
+
+
+What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were
+perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the
+course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration?
+
+By the listener a limitation of fertility inasmuch as marriage had been
+celebrated 1 calendar month after the 18th anniversary of her birth (8
+September 1870), viz. 8 October, and consummated on the same date with
+female issue born 15 June 1889, having been anticipatorily consummated
+on the lo September of the same year and complete carnal intercourse,
+with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last
+taken place 5 weeks previous, viz. 27 November 1893, to the birth on 29
+December 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1894,
+aged 11 days, there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days
+during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation
+of semen within the natural female organ. By the narrator a limitation
+of activity, mental and corporal, inasmuch as complete mental
+intercourse between himself and the listener had not taken place since
+the consummation of puberty, indicated by catamenic hemorrhage, of the
+female issue of narrator and listener, 15 September 1903, there remained
+a period of 9 months and 1 day during which, in consequence of a
+preestablished natural comprehension in incomprehension between the
+consummated females (listener and issue), complete corporal liberty of
+action had been circumscribed.
+
+
+How?
+
+By various reiterated feminine interrogation concerning the masculine
+destination whither, the place where, the time at which, the duration
+for which, the object with which in the case of temporary absences,
+projected or effected.
+
+
+What moved visibly above the listener's and the narrator's invisible
+thoughts?
+
+The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of
+concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.
+
+
+In what directions did listener and narrator lie?
+
+Listener, S. E. by E.: Narrator, N. W. by W.: on the 53rd parallel
+of latitude, N., and 6th meridian of longitude, W.: at an angle of 45
+degrees to the terrestrial equator.
+
+
+In what state of rest or motion?
+
+At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each
+and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the
+proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of
+neverchanging space.
+
+
+In what posture?
+
+Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right
+leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the
+attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator:
+reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the index
+finger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in
+the attitude depicted in a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the
+childman weary, the manchild in the womb.
+
+
+Womb? Weary?
+
+He rests. He has travelled.
+
+
+With?
+
+Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and
+Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and
+Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad
+the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the
+Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.
+
+
+When?
+
+Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's
+egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the
+Brightdayler.
+
+
+Where?
+
+
+
+Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his
+breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the _City Arms_ hotel
+when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his
+highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan
+that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing
+all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually
+afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her
+ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes
+and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the
+world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks
+of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because
+no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder
+she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman
+certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there
+I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and
+always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like
+that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too
+hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything
+really serious the matter with him its much better for them to go into
+a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to dring it
+into him for a month yes and then wed have a hospital nurse next thing
+on the carpet have him staying there till they throw him out or a nun
+maybe like the smutty photo he has shes as much a nun as Im not yes
+because theyre so weak and puling when theyre sick they want a woman
+to get well if his nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic and that
+dyinglooking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at
+the choir party at the sugarloaf Mountain the day I wore that dress
+Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the
+bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with
+her old maids voice trying to imagine he was dying on account of her to
+never see thy face again though he looked more like a man with his beard
+a bit grown in the bed father was the same besides I hate bandaging and
+dosing when he cut his toe with the razor paring his corns afraid hed
+get bloodpoisoning but if it was a thing I was sick then wed see what
+attention only of course the woman hides it not to give all the trouble
+they do yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite anyway love its
+not or hed be off his feed thinking of her so either it was one of those
+night women if it was down there he was really and the hotel story he
+made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who did I
+meet ah yes I met do you remember Menton and who else who let me see
+that big babbyface I saw him and he not long married flirting with a
+young girl at Pooles Myriorama and turned my back on him when he slinked
+out looking quite conscious what harm but he had the impudence to make
+up to me one time well done to him mouth almighty and his boiled eyes of
+all the big stupoes I ever met and thats called a solicitor only for
+I hate having a long wrangle in bed or else if its not that its some
+little bitch or other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the
+sly if they only knew him as well as I do yes because the day before
+yesterday he was scribbling something a letter when I came into the
+front room to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something told
+me and he covered it up with the blottingpaper pretending to be thinking
+about business so very probably that was it to somebody who thinks
+she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age
+especially getting on to forty he is now so as to wheedle any money she
+can out of him no fool like an old fool and then the usual kissing my
+bottom was to hide it not that I care two straws now who he does it with
+or knew before that way though Id like to find out so long as I dont
+have the two of them under my nose all the time like that slut that Mary
+we had in Ontario terrace padding out her false bottom to excite him bad
+enough to get the smell of those painted women off him once or twice
+I had a suspicion by getting him to come near me when I found the
+long hair on his coat without that one when I went into the kitchen
+pretending he was drinking water 1 woman is not enough for them it was
+all his fault of course ruining servants then proposing that she could
+eat at our table on Christmas day if you please O no thank you not in my
+house stealing my potatoes and the oysters 2/6 per doz going out to see
+her aunt if you please common robbery so it was but I was sure he had
+something on with that one it takes me to find out a thing like that he
+said you have no proof it was her proof O yes her aunt was very fond of
+oysters but I told her what I thought of her suggesting me to go out to
+be alone with her I wouldnt lower myself to spy on them the garters I
+found in her room the Friday she was out that was enough for me a little
+bit too much her face swelled up on her with temper when I gave her her
+weeks notice I saw to that better do without them altogether do out the
+rooms myself quicker only for the damn cooking and throwing out the dirt
+I gave it to him anyhow either she or me leaves the house I couldnt even
+touch him if I thought he was with a dirty barefaced liar and sloven
+like that one denying it up to my face and singing about the place in
+the W C too because she knew she was too well off yes because he couldnt
+possibly do without it that long so he must do it somewhere and the last
+time he came on my bottom when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a
+great squeeze going along by the Tolka in my hand there steals another
+I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back
+singing the young May moon shes beaming love because he has an idea
+about him and me hes not such a fool he said Im dining out and going to
+the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in any case
+God knows hes a change in a way not to be always and ever wearing the
+same old hat unless I paid some nicelooking boy to do it since I cant do
+it myself a young boy would like me Id confuse him a little alone with
+him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn
+red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel with that down
+on their cheek doing that frigging drawing out the thing by the hour
+question and answer would you do this that and the other with the
+coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because I told him about some dean
+or bishop was sitting beside me in the jews temples gardens when I was
+knitting that woollen thing a stranger to Dublin what place was it and
+so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues encouraging
+him making him worse than he is who is in your mind now tell me who are
+you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the german
+Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to
+make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this
+age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it
+pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway
+and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with
+all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time
+after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it why
+cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes
+love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help
+yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there
+and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to
+your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used
+to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did
+where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your
+person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was
+it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and
+have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever
+way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the real father
+what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to God he had
+a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling it neither
+would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder did he know
+me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed
+never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre
+lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone
+them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of
+incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a priest if
+youre married hes too careful about himself then give something to H
+H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I
+didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall
+though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking
+of his fathers I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in
+it who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of
+drink not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick
+their bills up with some liqueur Id like to sip those richlooking green
+and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the
+opera hats I tasted once with my finger dipped out of that American that
+had the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to
+keep himself from falling asleep after the last time after we took the
+port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely
+and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped
+straight into bed till that thunder woke me up God be merciful to us
+I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish us when I
+blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in
+Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end and then they come and
+tell you theres no God what could you do if it was running and rushing
+about nothing only make an act of contrition the candle I lit that
+evening in Whitefriars street chapel for the month of May see it brought
+its luck though hed scoff if he heard because he never goes to church
+mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey
+matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes when I lit the
+lamp because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red
+brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they
+call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took
+off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and
+perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar
+standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he
+was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had
+one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole
+sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the
+middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all
+they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had
+to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in
+him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is
+so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last
+time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for
+him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it
+themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly nobody would
+believe cutting her teeth too and Mina Purefoys husband give us a swing
+out of your whiskers filling her up with a child or twins once a year
+as regular as the clock always with a smell of children off her the one
+they called budgers or something like a nigger with a shock of hair on
+it Jesusjack the child is a black the last time I was there a squad of
+them falling over one another and bawling you couldnt hear your ears
+supposed to be healthy not satisfied till they have us swollen out like
+elephants or I dont know what supposing I risked having another not off
+him though still if he was married Im sure hed have a fine strong child
+but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly
+I suppose it was meeting Josie Powell and the funeral and thinking about
+me and Boylan set him off well he can think what he likes now if thatll
+do him any good I know they were spooning a bit when I came on the scene
+he was dancing and sitting out with her the night of Georgina Simpsons
+housewarming and then he wanted to ram it down my neck it was on account
+of not liking to see her a wallflower that was why we had the standup
+row over politics he began it not me when he said about Our Lord being a
+carpenter at last he made me cry of course a woman is so sensitive about
+everything I was fuming with myself after for giving in only for I knew
+he was gone on me and the first socialist he said He was he annoyed me
+so much I couldnt put him into a temper still he knows a lot of mixedup
+things especially about the body and the inside I often wanted to study
+up that myself what we have inside us in that family physician I could
+always hear his voice talking when the room was crowded and watch him
+after that I pretended I had a coolness on with her over him because he
+used to be a bit on the jealous side whenever he asked who are you going
+to and I said over to Floey and he made me the present of Byron's poems
+and the three pairs of gloves so that finished that I could quite easily
+get him to make it up any time I know how Id even supposing he got in
+with her again and was going out to see her somewhere Id know if he
+refused to eat the onions I know plenty of ways ask him to tuck down the
+collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil and gloves on going out I
+kiss then would send them all spinning however alright well see then let
+him go to her she of course would only be too delighted to pretend shes
+mad in love with him that I wouldnt so much mind Id just go to her and
+ask her do you love him and look her square in the eyes she couldnt fool
+me but he might imagine he was and make a declaration to her with his
+plabbery kind of a manner like he did to me though I had the devils own
+job to get it out of him though I liked him for that it showed he could
+hold in and wasnt to be got for the asking he was on the pop of asking
+me too the night in the kitchen I was rolling the potato cake theres
+something I want to say to you only for I put him off letting on I was
+in a temper with my hands and arms full of pasty flour in any case I let
+out too much the night before talking of dreams so I didnt want to let
+him know more than was good for him she used to be always embracing me
+Josie whenever he was there meaning him of course glauming me over and
+when I said I washed up and down as far as possible asking me and did
+you wash possible the women are always egging on to that putting it on
+thick when hes there they know by his sly eye blinking a bit putting on
+the indifferent when they come out with something the kind he is what
+spoils him I dont wonder in the least because he was very handsome at
+that time trying to look like Lord Byron I said I liked though he
+was too beautiful for a man and he was a little before we got engaged
+afterwards though she didnt like it so much the day I was in fits of
+laughing with the giggles I couldnt stop about all my hairpins falling
+out one after another with the mass of hair I had youre always in great
+humour she said yes because it grigged her because she knew what it
+meant because I used to tell her a good bit of what went on between us
+not all but just enough to make her mouth water but that wasnt my fault
+she didnt darken the door much after we were married I wonder what shes
+got like now after living with that dotty husband of hers she had her
+face beginning to look drawn and run down the last time I saw her she
+must have been just after a row with him because I saw on the moment she
+was edging to draw down a conversation about husbands and talk about him
+to run him down what was it she told me O yes that sometimes he used to
+go to bed with his muddy boots on when the maggot takes him just imagine
+having to get into bed with a thing like that that might murder you
+any moment what a man well its not the one way everyone goes mad Poldy
+anyhow whatever he does always wipes his feet on the mat when he comes
+in wet or shine and always blacks his own boots too and he always takes
+off his hat when he comes up in the street like then and now hes going
+about in his slippers to look for 10000 pounds for a postcard U p up
+O sweetheart May wouldnt a thing like that simply bore you stiff to
+extinction actually too stupid even to take his boots off now what
+could you make of a man like that Id rather die 20 times over than marry
+another of their sex of course hed never find another woman like me to
+put up with him the way I do know me come sleep with me yes and he knows
+that too at the bottom of his heart take that Mrs Maybrick that poisoned
+her husband for what I wonder in love with some other man yes it was
+found out on her wasnt she the downright villain to go and do a thing
+like that of course some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad
+and always the worst word in the world what do they ask us to marry them
+for if were so bad as all that comes to yes because they cant get on
+without us white Arsenic she put in his tea off flypaper wasnt it I
+wonder why they call it that if I asked him hed say its from the Greek
+leave us as wise as we were before she must have been madly in love with
+the other fellow to run the chance of being hanged O she didnt care if
+that was her nature what could she do besides theyre not brutes enough
+to go and hang a woman surely are they
+
+theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he
+noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C
+with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both
+ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his
+two old maids of sisters when I stood up and asked the girl where it was
+what do I care with it dropping out of me and that black closed breeches
+he made me buy takes you half an hour to let them down wetting all
+myself always with some brandnew fad every other week such a long one I
+did I forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind that I never got after
+some robber of a woman and he wanted me to put it in the Irish times
+lost in the ladies lavatory D B C Dame street finder return to Mrs
+Marion Bloom and I saw his eyes on my feet going out through the turning
+door he was looking when I looked back and I went there for tea 2 days
+after in the hope but he wasnt now how did that excite him because I was
+crossing them when we were in the other room first he meant the shoes
+that are too tight to walk in my hand is nice like that if I only had a
+ring with the stone for my month a nice aquamarine Ill stick him for one
+and a gold bracelet I dont like my foot so much still I made him spend
+once with my foot the night after Goodwins botchup of a concert so cold
+and windy it was well we had that rum in the house to mull and the fire
+wasnt black out when he asked to take off my stockings lying on the
+hearthrug in Lombard street west and another time it was my muddy boots
+hed like me to walk in all the horses dung I could find but of course
+hes not natural like the rest of the world that I what did he say I
+could give 9 points in 10 to Katty Lanner and beat her what does that
+mean I asked him I forget what he said because the stoppress edition
+just passed and the man with the curly hair in the Lucan dairy thats so
+polite I think I saw his face before somewhere I noticed him when I was
+tasting the butter so I took my time Bartell dArcy too that he used to
+make fun of when he commenced kissing me on the choir stairs after I
+sang Gounods _Ave Maria_ what are we waiting for O my heart kiss me
+straight on the brow and part which is my brown part he was pretty hot
+for all his tinny voice too my low notes he was always raving about if
+you can believe him I liked the way he used his mouth singing then he
+said wasnt it terrible to do that there in a place like that I dont see
+anything so terrible about it Ill tell him about that some day not now
+and surprise him ay and Ill take him there and show him the very place
+too we did it so now there you are like it or lump it he thinks nothing
+can happen without him knowing he hadnt an idea about my mother till we
+were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did he was
+lo times worse himself anyhow begging me to give him a tiny bit cut off
+my drawers that was the evening coming along Kenilworth square he kissed
+me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions
+is it permitted to enquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it
+as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket
+of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen
+always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their
+skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with
+him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right
+against the sun so he could see every atom she had on when he saw me
+from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however
+standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on
+him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion
+and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing there
+where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from
+anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but
+they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him
+coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping
+away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I
+halfturned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my
+glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for
+the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers
+the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll
+to carry about in his waistcoat pocket _O Maria Santisima_ he did look
+a big fool dreeping in the rain splendid set of teeth he had made me
+hungry to look at them and beseeched of me to lift the orange petticoat
+I had on with the sunray pleats that there was nobody he said hed kneel
+down in the wet if I didnt so persevering he would too and ruin his new
+raincoat you never know what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so
+savage for it if anyone was passing so I lifted them a bit and touched
+his trousers outside the way I used to Gardner after with my ring hand
+to keep him from doing worse where it was too public I was dying to find
+out was he circumcised he was shaking like a jelly all over they want
+to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it and father
+waiting all the time for his dinner he told me to say I left my purse in
+the butchers and had to go back for it what a Deceiver then he wrote me
+that letter with all those words in it how could he have the face to any
+woman after his company manners making it so awkward after when we met
+asking me have I offended you with my eyelids down of course he saw I
+wasnt he had a few brains not like that other fool Henny Doyle he was
+always breaking or tearing something in the charades I hate an unlucky
+man and if I knew what it meant of course I had to say no for form sake
+dont understand you I said and wasnt it natural so it is of course
+it used to be written up with a picture of a womans on that wall in
+Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere only for children
+seeing it too young then writing every morning a letter sometimes twice
+a day I liked the way he made love then he knew the way to take a woman
+when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th then I wrote
+the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it
+simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth but he never knew how to
+embrace well like Gardner I hope hell come on Monday as he said at the
+same time four I hate people who come at all hours answer the door you
+think its the vegetables then its somebody and you all undressed or
+the door of the filthy sloppy kitchen blows open the day old frostyface
+Goodwin called about the concert in Lombard street and I just after
+dinner all flushed and tossed with boiling old stew dont look at me
+professor I had to say Im a fright yes but he was a real old gent in his
+way it was impossible to be more respectful nobody to say youre out you
+have to peep out through the blind like the messengerboy today I thought
+it was a putoff first him sending the port and the peaches first and I
+was just beginning to yawn with nerves thinking he was trying to make a
+fool of me when I knew his tattarrattat at the door he must have been
+a bit late because it was l/4 after 3 when I saw the 2 Dedalus girls
+coming from school I never know the time even that watch he gave me
+never seems to go properly Id want to get it looked after when I threw
+the penny to that lame sailor for England home and beauty when I was
+whistling there is a charming girl I love and I hadnt even put on my
+clean shift or powdered myself or a thing then this day week were to go
+to Belfast just as well he has to go to Ennis his fathers anniversary
+the 27th it wouldnt be pleasant if he did suppose our rooms at the hotel
+were beside each other and any fooling went on in the new bed I couldnt
+tell him to stop and not bother me with him in the next room or perhaps
+some protestant clergyman with a cough knocking on the wall then hed
+never believe the next day we didnt do something its all very well a
+husband but you cant fool a lover after me telling him we never did
+anything of course he didnt believe me no its better hes going where
+he is besides something always happens with him the time going to the
+Mallow concert at Maryborough ordering boiling soup for the two of
+us then the bell rang out he walks down the platform with the soup
+splashing about taking spoonfuls of it hadnt he the nerve and the waiter
+after him making a holy show of us screeching and confusion for the
+engine to start but he wouldnt pay till he finished it the two gentlemen
+in the 3rd class carriage said he was quite right so he was too hes so
+pigheaded sometimes when he gets a thing into his head a good job he was
+able to open the carriage door with his knife or theyd have taken us on
+to Cork I suppose that was done out of revenge on him O I love jaunting
+in a train or a car with lovely soft cushions I wonder will he take
+a 1st class for me he might want to do it in the train by tipping the
+guard well O I suppose therell be the usual idiots of men gaping at
+us with their eyes as stupid as ever they can possibly be that was an
+exceptional man that common workman that left us alone in the carriage
+that day going to Howth Id like to find out something about him l or 2
+tunnels perhaps then you have to look out of the window all the nicer
+then coming back suppose I never came back what would they say eloped
+with him that gets you on on the stage the last concert I sang at where
+its over a year ago when was it St Teresas hall Clarendon St little
+chits of missies they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her like
+on account of father being in the army and my singing the absentminded
+beggar and wearing a brooch for Lord Roberts when I had the map of it
+all and Poldy not Irish enough was it him managed it this time I wouldnt
+put it past him like he got me on to sing in the _Stabat Mater_ by going
+around saying he was putting Lead Kindly Light to music I put him up to
+that till the jesuits found out he was a freemason thumping the piano
+lead Thou me on copied from some old opera yes and he was going about
+with some of them Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves
+talking his usual trash and nonsense he says that little man he showed
+me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffiths is he
+well he doesnt look it thats all I can say still it must have been him
+he knew there was a boycott I hate the mention of their politics after
+the war that Pretoria and Ladysmith and Bloemfontein where Gardner lieut
+Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt of enteric fever he was a lovely
+fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave
+too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock
+my Irish beauty he was pale with excitement about going away or wed be
+seen from the road he couldnt stand properly and I so hot as I never
+felt they could have made their peace in the beginning or old oom Paul
+and the rest of the other old Krugers go and fight it out between them
+instead of dragging on for years killing any finelooking men there were
+with their fever if he was even decently shot it wouldnt have been so
+bad I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the
+Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely after looking across the bay
+from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies or those sham
+battles on the 15 acres the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the
+march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the
+lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela his father made his
+money over selling the horses for the cavalry well he could buy me a
+nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him theyve lovely linen up
+there or one of those nice kimono things I must buy a mothball like I
+had before to keep in the drawer with them it would be exciting going
+round with him shopping buying those things in a new city better leave
+this ring behind want to keep turning and turning to get it over the
+knuckle there or they might bell it round the town in their papers or
+tell the police on me but theyd think were married O let them all go and
+smother themselves for the fat lot I care he has plenty of money and hes
+not a marrying man so somebody better get it out of him if I could find
+out whether he likes me I looked a bit washy of course when I looked
+close in the handglass powdering a mirror never gives you the expression
+besides scrooching down on me like that all the time with his big
+hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest for this heat always having
+to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way
+Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do it and
+stick out her tongue as far as ever she could and he so quiet and mild
+with his tingating cither can you ever be up to men the way it takes
+them lovely stuff in that blue suit he had on and stylish tie and socks
+with the skyblue silk things on them hes certainly well off I know by
+the cut his clothes have and his heavy watch but he was like a perfect
+devil for a few minutes after he came back with the stoppress tearing up
+the tickets and swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost
+over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on account of
+Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits that sponger he was making
+free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long joult over
+the featherbed mountain after the lord Mayor looking at me with his
+dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at dessert
+when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I wished I could have picked
+every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it was so tasty
+and browned and as tender as anything only for I didnt want to eat
+everything on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked
+silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into
+my muff when I was playing with them then always hanging out of them for
+money in a restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to
+be thankful for our mangy cup of tea itself as a great compliment to be
+noticed the way the world is divided in any case if its going to go on I
+want at least two other good chemises for one thing and but I dont know
+what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think didnt he say yes and
+half the girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made
+them that Andalusian singing her Manola she didnt make much secret of
+what she hadnt yes and the second pair of silkette stockings is laddered
+after one days wear I could have brought them back to Lewers this
+morning and kicked up a row and made that one change them only not to
+upset myself and run the risk of walking into him and ruining the whole
+thing and one of those kidfitting corsets Id want advertised cheap in
+the Gentlewoman with elastic gores on the hips he saved the one I have
+but thats no good what did they say they give a delightful figure line
+11/6 obviating that unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to
+reduce flesh my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the
+stout at dinner or am I getting too fond of it the last they sent from
+ORourkes was as flat as a pancake he makes his money easy Larry they
+call him the old mangy parcel he sent at Xmas a cottage cake and a
+bottle of hogwash he tried to palm off as claret that he couldnt get
+anyone to drink God spare his spit for fear hed die of the drouth or
+I must do a few breathing exercises I wonder is that antifat any good
+might overdo it the thin ones are not so much the fashion now garters
+that much I have the violet pair I wore today thats all he bought me
+out of the cheque he got on the first O no there was the face lotion
+I finished the last of yesterday that made my skin like new I told him
+over and over again get that made up in the same place and dont forget
+it God only knows whether he did after all I said to him 111 know by
+the bottle anyway if not I suppose 111 only have to wash in my piss like
+beeftea or chickensoup with some of that opoponax and violet I thought
+it was beginning to look coarse or old a bit the skin underneath is much
+finer where it peeled off there on my finger after the burn its a pity
+it isnt all like that and the four paltry handkerchiefs about 6/- in all
+sure you cant get on in this world without style all going in food and
+rent when I get it Ill lash it around I tell you in fine style I always
+want to throw a handful of tea into the pot measuring and mincing if
+I buy a pair of old brogues itself do you like those new shoes yes how
+much were they Ive no clothes at all the brown costume and the skirt and
+jacket and the one at the cleaners 3 whats that for any woman cutting
+up this old hat and patching up the other the men wont look at you and
+women try to walk on you because they know youve no man then with all
+the things getting dearer every day for the 4 years more I have of life
+up to 35 no Im what am I at all 111 be 33 in September will I what O
+well look at that Mrs Galbraith shes much older than me I saw her when
+I was out last week her beautys on the wane she was a lovely woman
+magnificent head of hair on her down to her waist tossing it back like
+that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street 1st thing I did every morning
+to look across see her combing it as if she loved it and was full of it
+pity I only got to know her the day before we left and that Mrs Langtry
+the jersey lily the prince of Wales was in love with I suppose hes like
+the first man going the roads only for the name of a king theyre all
+made the one way only a black mans Id like to try a beauty up to what
+was she 45 there was some funny story about the jealous old husband what
+was it at all and an oyster knife he went no he made her wear a kind
+of a tin thing round her and the prince of Wales yes he had the oyster
+knife cant be true a thing like that like some of those books he brings
+me the works of Master Francois Somebody supposed to be a priest about
+a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out a nice word for
+any priest to write and her a--e as if any fool wouldnt know what that
+meant I hate that pretending of all things with that old blackguards
+face on him anybody can see its not true and that Ruby and Fair Tyrants
+he brought me that twice I remember when I came to page 5 o the part
+about where she hangs him up out of a hook with a cord flagellate
+sure theres nothing for a woman in that all invention made up about he
+drinking the champagne out of her slipper after the ball was over like
+the infant Jesus in the crib at Inchicore in the Blessed Virgins arms
+sure no woman could have a child that big taken out of her and I thought
+first it came out of her side because how could she go to the chamber
+when she wanted to and she a rich lady of course she felt honoured H R H
+he was in Gibraltar the year I was born I bet he found lilies there too
+where he planted the tree he planted more than that in his time he might
+have planted me too if hed come a bit sooner then I wouldnt be here as
+I am he ought to chuck that Freeman with the paltry few shillings
+he knocks out of it and go into an office or something where hed get
+regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count
+the money all the day of course he prefers plottering about the house
+so you cant stir with him any side whats your programme today I wish hed
+even smoke a pipe like father to get the smell of a man or pretending
+to be mooching about for advertisements when he could have been in Mr
+Cuffes still only for what he did then sending me to try and patch it up
+I could have got him promoted there to be the manager he gave me a great
+mirada once or twice first he was as stiff as the mischief really and
+truly Mrs Bloom only I felt rotten simply with the old rubbishy dress
+that I lost the leads out of the tails with no cut in it but theyre
+coming into fashion again I bought it simply to please him I knew it was
+no good by the finish pity I changed my mind of going to Todd and Bums
+as I said and not Lees it was just like the shop itself rummage sale a
+lot of trash I hate those rich shops get on your nerves nothing kills me
+altogether only he thinks he knows a great lot about a womans dress and
+cooking mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it if
+I went by his advices every blessed hat I put on does that suit me yes
+take that thats alright the one like a weddingcake standing up miles
+off my head he said suited me or the dishcover one coming down on my
+backside on pins and needles about the shopgirl in that place in Grafton
+street I had the misfortune to bring him into and she as insolent as
+ever she could be with her smirk saying Im afraid were giving you too
+much trouble what shes there for but I stared it out of her yes he was
+awfully stiff and no wonder but he changed the second time he looked
+Poldy pigheaded as usual like the soup but I could see him looking very
+hard at my chest when he stood up to open the door for me it was nice of
+him to show me out in any case Im extremely sorry Mrs Bloom believe me
+without making it too marked the first time after him being insulted and
+me being supposed to be his wife I just half smiled I know my chest was
+out that way at the door when he said Im extremely sorry and Im sure you
+were
+
+yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he
+made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow
+stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up
+and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him
+what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same
+in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there
+like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with
+her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks
+like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of
+him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a
+cabbageleaf that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market or
+that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue
+of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing
+standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side the
+Queens own they were a nice lot its well the Surreys relieved them
+theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed
+outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station just to
+try some fellow or other trying to catch my eye as if it was I of the
+7 wonders of the world O and the stink of those rotten places the night
+coming home with Poldy after the Comerfords party oranges and lemonade
+to make you feel nice and watery I went into r of them it was so biting
+cold I couldnt keep it when was that 93 the canal was frozen yes it was
+a few months after a pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see
+me squatting in the mens place meadero I tried to draw a picture of
+it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not
+afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang of something there the
+woman is beauty of course thats admitted when he said I could pose for a
+picture naked to some rich fellow in Holles street when he lost the
+job in Helys and I was selling the clothes and strumming in the coffee
+palace would I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only
+shes younger or Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo
+he has nymphs used they go about like that I asked him about her and
+that word met something with hoses in it and he came out with some
+jawbreakers about the incarnation he never can explain a thing simply
+the way a body can understand then he goes and burns the bottom out of
+the pan all for his Kidney this one not so much theres the mark of his
+teeth still where he tried to bite the nipple I had to scream out arent
+they fearful trying to hurt you I had a great breast of milk with Milly
+enough for two what was the reason of that he said I could have got a
+pound a week as a wet nurse all swelled out the morning that delicate
+looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose nearly
+caught me washing through the window only for I snapped up the towel to
+my face that was his studenting hurt me they used to weaning her till he
+got doctor Brady to give me the belladonna prescription I had to get him
+to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweeter and thicker than
+cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything I
+declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if I only could remember
+the I half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master
+Poldy yes and its so much smoother the skin much an hour he was at them
+Im sure by the clock like some kind of a big infant I had at me they
+want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a
+woman I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was
+here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel
+all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd
+time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes
+with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout
+out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look
+ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the way hed take it you
+want to feel your way with a man theyre not all like him thank God some
+of them want you to be so nice about it I noticed the contrast he does
+it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose
+from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage
+brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait
+till Monday
+
+frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines
+have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of
+them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men
+that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those
+roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of
+those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about
+hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C 111
+get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for
+the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last
+Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall
+making the place hotter than it is that rain was lovely and refreshing
+just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar
+my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night
+and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared
+with their 3 Rock mountain they think is so great with the red sentries
+here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the smell of the
+rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on
+you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from
+the B Marche paris what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on it
+she was very nice whats this her other name was just a p c to tell you I
+sent the little present have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very
+clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything
+to be back in Gib and hear you sing Waiting and in old Madrid Concone
+is the name of those exercises he bought me one of those new some word
+I couldnt make out shawls amusing things but tear for the least thing
+still there lovely I think dont you will always think of the lovely teas
+we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore
+well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out
+regards to your father also captain Grove with love yrs affly Hester x
+x x x x she didnt look a bit married just like a girl he was years older
+than her wogger he was awfully fond of me when he held down the wire
+with his foot for me to step over at the bullfight at La Linea when
+that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear these clothes we have to wear
+whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for
+example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in
+them in a crowd run or jump out of the way thats why I was afraid when
+that other ferocious old Bull began to charge the banderilleros with
+the sashes and the 2 things in their hats and the brutes of men shouting
+bravo toro sure the women were as bad in their nice white mantillas
+ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses I never heard of
+such a thing in all my life yes he used to break his heart at me taking
+off the dog barking in bell lane poor brute and it sick what became
+of them ever I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them its like all
+through a mist makes you feel so old I made the scones of course I had
+everything all to myself then a girl Hester we used to compare our hair
+mine was thicker than hers she showed me how to settle it at the back
+when I put it up and whats this else how to make a knot on a thread with
+the one hand we were like cousins what age was I then the night of the
+storm I slept in her bed she had her arms round me then we were fighting
+in the morning with the pillow what fun he was watching me whenever he
+got an opportunity at the band on the Alameda esplanade when I was with
+father and captain Grove I looked up at the church first and then at the
+windows then down and our eyes met I felt something go through me like
+all needles my eyes were dancing I remember after when I looked
+at myself in the glass hardly recognised myself the change he was
+attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent
+looking disappointed and gay at the same time he was like Thomas in
+the shadow of Ashlydyat I had a splendid skin from the sun and the
+excitement like a rose I didnt get a wink of sleep it wouldnt have been
+nice on account of her but I could have stopped it in time she gave me
+the Moonstone to read that was the first I read of Wilkie Collins East
+Lynne I read and the shadow of Ashlydyat Mrs Henry Wood Henry Dunbar by
+that other woman I lent him afterwards with Mulveys photo in it so as he
+see I wasnt without and Lord Lytton Eugene Aram Molly bawn she gave me
+by Mrs Hungerford on account of the name I dont like books with a Molly
+in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore
+always shoplifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it
+O this blanket is too heavy on me thats better I havent even one decent
+nightdress this thing gets all rolled under me besides him and his
+fooling thats better I used to be weltering then in the heat my shift
+drenched with the sweat stuck in the cheeks of my bottom on the chair
+when I stood up they were so fattish and firm when I got up on the sofa
+cushions to see with my clothes up and the bugs tons of them at night
+and the mosquito nets I couldnt read a line Lord how long ago it seems
+centuries of course they never came back and she didnt put her address
+right on it either she may have noticed her wogger people were always
+going away and we never I remember that day with the waves and the
+boats with their high heads rocking and the smell of ship those Officers
+uniforms on shore leave made me seasick he didnt say anything he was
+very serious I had the high buttoned boots on and my skirt was blowing
+she kissed me six or seven times didnt I cry yes I believe I did or near
+it my lips were taittering when I said goodbye she had a Gorgeous wrap
+of some special kind of blue colour on her for the voyage made very
+peculiarly to one side like and it was extremely pretty it got as dull
+as the devil after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out
+of it somewhere were never easy where we are father or aunt or marriage
+waiting always waiting to guiiiide him toooo me waiting nor speeeed
+his flying feet their damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop
+especially the Queens birthday and throwing everything down in all
+directions if you didnt open the windows when general Ulysses Grant
+whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the
+ship and old Sprague the consul that was there from before the flood
+dressed up poor man and he in mourning for the son then the same old
+bugles for reveille in the morning and drums rolling and the unfortunate
+poor devils of soldiers walking about with messtins smelling the place
+more than the old longbearded jews in their jellibees and levites
+assembly and sound clear and gunfire for the men to cross the lines and
+the warden marching with his keys to lock the gates and the bagpipes and
+only captain Groves and father talking about Rorkes drift and Plevna and
+sir Garnet Wolseley and Gordon at Khartoum lighting their pipes for
+them everytime they went out drunken old devil with his grog on the
+windowsill catch him leaving any of it picking his nose trying to think
+of some other dirty story to tell up in a corner but he never forgot
+himself when I was there sending me out of the room on some blind excuse
+paying his compliments the Bushmills whisky talking of course but hed
+do the same to the next woman that came along I suppose he died of
+galloping drink ages ago the days like years not a letter from a living
+soul except the odd few I posted to myself with bits of paper in them so
+bored sometimes I could fight with my nails listening to that old Arab
+with the one eye and his heass of an instrument singing his heah heah
+aheah all my compriments on your hotchapotch of your heass as bad as now
+with the hands hanging off me looking out of the window if there was a
+nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the
+nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show
+I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never
+understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster
+for them not even if you shake hands twice with the left he didnt
+recognise me either when I half frowned at him outside Westland row
+chapel where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know
+grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me those country
+gougers up in the City Arms intelligence they had a damn sight less than
+the bulls and cows they were selling the meat and the coalmans bell that
+noisy bugger trying to swindle me with the wrong bill he took out of his
+hat what a pair of paws and pots and pans and kettles to mend any broken
+bottles for a poor man today and no visitors or post ever except his
+cheques or some advertisement like that wonderworker they sent him
+addressed dear Madam only his letter and the card from Milly this
+morning see she wrote a letter to him who did I get the last letter from
+O Mrs Dwenn now what possessed her to write from Canada after so many
+years to know the recipe I had for pisto madrileno Floey Dillon since
+she wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect if Im to
+believe all I hear with a villa and eight rooms her father was an
+awfully nice man he was near seventy always goodhumoured well now Miss
+Tweedy or Miss Gillespie theres the piannyer that was a solid silver
+coffee service he had too on the mahogany sideboard then dying so far
+away I hate people that have always their poor story to tell everybody
+has their own troubles that poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute
+neumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend
+more than mine poor Nancy its a bother having to answer he always tells
+me the wrong things and no stops to say like making a speech your sad
+bereavement symphathy I always make that mistake and newphew with 2
+double yous in I hope hell write me a longer letter the next time if its
+a thing he really likes me O thanks be to the great God I got somebody
+to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no
+chances at all in this place like you used long ago I wish somebody
+would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he could write
+what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan in old Madrid stuff silly women
+believe love is sighing I am dying still if he wrote it I suppose thered
+be some truth in it true or no it fills up your whole day and life
+always something to think about every moment and see it all round you
+like a new world I could write the answer in bed to let him imagine me
+short just a few words not those long crossed letters Atty Dillon used
+to write to the fellow that was something in the four courts that jilted
+her after out of the ladies letterwriter when I told her to say a few
+simple words he could twist how he liked not acting with precipat precip
+itancy with equal candour the greatest earthly happiness answer to a
+gentlemans proposal affirmatively my goodness theres nothing else its
+all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre old
+they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.
+
+Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio
+brought it in with the coffee she stood there standing when I asked her
+to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the word a hairpin
+to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing and it staring her
+in the face with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her
+appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a loo her face a mass of wrinkles
+with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the
+Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack
+flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took
+all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in
+Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was
+a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed
+virgin with the silver dress and the sun dancing 3 times on Easter
+Sunday morning and when the priest was going by with the bell bringing
+the vatican to the dying blessing herself for his Majestad an admirer
+he signed it I near jumped out of my skin I wanted to pick him up when
+I saw him following me along the Calle Real in the shop window then
+he tipped me just in passing but I never thought hed write making an
+appointment I had it inside my petticoat bodice all day reading it up
+in every hole and corner while father was up at the drill instructing to
+find out by the handwriting or the language of stamps singing I remember
+shall I wear a white rose and I wanted to put on the old stupid clock to
+near the time he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my
+sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till
+he put his tongue in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young I put my
+knee up to him a few times to learn the way what did I tell him I was
+engaged for for fun to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de
+la Flora and he believed me that I was to be married to him in 3 years
+time theres many a true word spoken in jest there is a flower that
+bloometh a few things I told him true about myself just for him to be
+imagining the Spanish girls he didnt like I suppose one of them wouldnt
+have him I got him excited he crushed all the flowers on my bosom he
+brought me he couldnt count the pesetas and the perragordas till I
+taught him Cappoquin he came from he said on the black water but it was
+too short then the day before he left May yes it was May when the infant
+king of Spain was born Im always like that in the spring Id like a new
+fellow every year up on the tiptop under the rockgun near OHaras tower
+I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old Barbary apes
+they sent to Clapham without a tail careering all over the show on each
+others back Mrs Rubio said she was a regular old rock scorpion robbing
+the chickens out of Inces farm and throw stones at you if you went anear
+he was looking at me I had that white blouse on open in the front to
+encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just
+beginning to be plump I said I was tired we lay over the firtree cove
+a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the
+galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels
+cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down and
+ladders all the mud plotching my boots Im sure thats the way down the
+monkeys go under the sea to Africa when they die the ships out far like
+chips that was the Malta boat passing yes the sea and the sky you could
+do what you liked lie there for ever he caressed them outside they love
+doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white
+ricestraw hat to take the newness out of it the left side of my face the
+best my blouse open for his last day transparent kind of shirt he had I
+could see his chest pink he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment
+but I wouldnt lee him he was awfully put out first for fear you never
+know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant
+Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all after I tried
+with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me
+somewhere because they once took something down out of a woman that was
+up there for years covered with limesalts theyre all mad to get in there
+where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough up and
+then theyre done with you in a way till the next time yes because theres
+a wonderful feeling there so tender all the time how did we finish it
+off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to
+be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my
+petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the
+life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel
+rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was
+shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little
+when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and
+drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men
+down the middle on the wrong side of them Molly darling he called me
+what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant
+he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice so I went round to
+the whatyoucallit everything was whatyoucallit moustache had he he said
+hed come back Lord its just like yesterday to me and if I was married
+hed do it to me and I promised him yes faithfully Id let him block me
+now flying perhaps hes dead or killed or a captain or admiral its nearly
+20 years if I said firtree cove he would if he came up behind me and
+put his hands over my eyes to guess who I might recognise him hes young
+still about 40 perhaps hes married some girl on the black water and is
+quite changed they all do they havent half the character a woman has she
+little knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt
+of her in broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you might
+say they could have put an article about it in the Chronicle I was a bit
+wild after when I blew out the old bag the biscuits were in from Benady
+Bros and exploded it Lord what a bang all the woodcocks and pigeons
+screaming coming back the same way that we went over middle hill round
+by the old guardhouse and the jews burialplace pretending to read out
+the Hebrew on them I wanted to fire his pistol he said he hadnt one he
+didnt know what to make of me with his peak cap on that he always wore
+crooked as often as I settled it straight H M S Calypso swinging my hat
+that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans
+higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak
+caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money I
+suppose theyre called after him I never thought that would be my
+name Bloom when I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a
+visiting card or practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom youre
+looking blooming Josie used to say after I married him well its better
+than Breen or Briggs does brig or those awful names with bottom in them
+Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad
+about either or suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan my mother whoever she
+was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely
+one she had Lunita Laredo the fun we had running along Williss road to
+Europa point twisting in and out all round the other side of Jersey they
+were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now
+when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them I was jumping
+up at the pepper trees and the white poplars pulling the leaves off and
+throwing them at him he went to India he was to write the voyages those
+men have to make to the ends of the world and back its the least they
+might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be
+drowned or blown up somewhere I went up Windmill hill to the flats
+that Sunday morning with captain Rubios that was dead spyglass like the
+sentry had he said hed have one or two from on board I wore that frock
+from the B Marche paris and the coral necklace the straits shining I
+could see over to Morocco almost the bay of Tangier white and the Atlas
+mountain with snow on it and the straits like a river so clear Harry
+Molly darling I was thinking of him on the sea all the time after at
+mass when my petticoat began to slip down at the elevation weeks and
+weeks I kept the handkerchief under my pillow for the smell of him there
+was no decent perfume to be got in that Gibraltar only that cheap peau
+dEspagne that faded and left a stink on you more than anything else I
+wanted to give him a memento he gave me that clumsy Claddagh ring for
+luck that I gave Gardner going to south Africa where those Boers killed
+him with their war and fever but they were well beaten all the same as
+if it brought its bad luck with it like an opal or pearl still it must
+have been pure 18 carrot gold because it was very heavy but what could
+you get in a place like that the sandfrog shower from Africa and that
+derelict ship that came up to the harbour Marie the Marie whatyoucallit
+no he hadnt a moustache that was Gardner yes I can see his face
+cleanshaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train again weeping tone
+once in the dear deaead days beyondre call close my eyes breath my lips
+forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the world the mists began
+I hate that istsbeg comes loves sweet sooooooooooong Ill let that out
+full when I get in front of the footlights again Kathleen Kearney
+and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of
+sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much
+about as my backside anything in the world to make themselves someway
+interesting Irish homemade beauties soldiers daughter am I ay and whose
+are you bootmakers and publicans I beg your pardon coach I thought you
+were a wheelbarrow theyd die down dead off their feet if ever they got
+a chance of walking down the Alameda on an officers arm like me on the
+bandnight my eyes flash my bust that they havent passion God help their
+poor head I knew more about men and life when I was I S than theyll all
+know at 50 they dont know how to sing a song like that Gardner said no
+man could look at my mouth and teeth smiling like that and not think of
+it I was afraid he mightnt like my accent first he so English all father
+left me in spite of his stamps Ive my mothers eyes and figure anyhow
+he always said theyre so snotty about themselves some of those cads he
+wasnt a bit like that he was dead gone on my lips let them get a husband
+first thats fit to be looked at and a daughter like mine or see if they
+can excite a swell with money that can pick and choose whoever he wants
+like Boylan to do it 4 or 5 times locked in each others arms or the
+voice either I could have been a prima donna only I married him comes
+looooves old deep down chin back not too much make it double My Ladys
+Bower is too long for an encore about the moated grange at twilight and
+vaunted rooms yes Ill sing Winds that blow from the south that he gave
+after the choirstairs performance Ill change that lace on my black dress
+to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make
+them burst with envy my hole is itching me always when I think of him I
+feel I want to I feel some wind in me better go easy not wake him have
+him at it again slobbering after washing every bit of myself back belly
+and sides if we had even a bath itself or my own room anyway I wish hed
+sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room even
+to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that
+a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away
+pianissimo eeeee one more song
+
+that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if
+that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the
+heat I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in
+the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill
+my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all
+night I couldnt rest easy in my bed in Gibraltar even getting up to see
+why am I so damned nervous about that though I like it in the winter its
+more company O Lord it was rotten cold too that winter when I was
+only about ten was I yes I had the big doll with all the funny clothes
+dressing her up and undressing that icy wind skeeting across from those
+mountains the something Nevada sierra nevada standing at the fire with
+the little bit of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing
+about in it then make a race back into bed Im sure that fellow opposite
+used to be there the whole time watching with the lights out in the
+summer and I in my skin hopping around I used to love myself then
+stripped at the washstand dabbing and creaming only when it came to the
+chamber performance I put out the light too so then there were 2 of us
+goodbye to my sleep for this night anyhow I hope hes not going to get in
+with those medicals leading him astray to imagine hes young again coming
+in at 4 in the morning it must be if not more still he had the manners
+not to wake me what do they find to gabber about all night squandering
+money and getting drunker and drunker couldnt they drink water then he
+starts giving us his orders for eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot
+buttered toast I suppose well have him sitting up like the king of
+the country pumping the wrong end of the spoon up and down in his egg
+wherever he learned that from and I love to hear him falling up the
+stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the tray and then play
+with the cat she rubs up against you for her own sake I wonder has she
+fleas shes as bad as a woman always licking and lecking but I hate their
+claws I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring like that when
+she sits at the top of the stairs so long and listening as I wait always
+what a robber too that lovely fresh place I bought I think Ill get a bit
+of fish tomorrow or today is it Friday yes I will with some blancmange
+with black currant jam like long ago not those 2 lb pots of mixed plum
+and apple from the London and Newcastle Williams and Woods goes twice as
+far only for the bones I hate those eels cod yes Ill get a nice piece
+of cod Im always getting enough for 3 forgetting anyway Im sick of that
+everlasting butchers meat from Buckleys loin chops and leg beef and rib
+steak and scrag of mutton and calfs pluck the very name is enough or
+a picnic suppose we all gave 5/- each and or let him pay it and invite
+some other woman for him who Mrs Fleming and drove out to the furry glen
+or the strawberry beds wed have him examining all the horses toenails
+first like he does with the letters no not with Boylan there yes with
+some cold veal and ham mixed sandwiches there are little houses down
+at the bottom of the banks there on purpose but its as hot as blazes he
+says not a bank holiday anyhow I hate those ruck of Mary Ann coalboxes
+out for the day Whit Monday is a cursed day too no wonder that bee bit
+him better the seaside but Id never again in this life get into a boat
+with him after him at Bray telling the boatman he knew how to row if
+anyone asked could he ride the steeplechase for the gold cup hed say
+yes then it came on to get rough the old thing crookeding about and the
+weight all down my side telling me pull the right reins now pull the
+left and the tide all swamping in floods in through the bottom and his
+oar slipping out of the stirrup its a mercy we werent all drowned he can
+swim of course me no theres no danger whatsoever keep yourself calm in
+his flannel trousers Id like to have tattered them down off him before
+all the people and give him what that one calls flagellate till he was
+black and blue do him all the good in the world only for that longnosed
+chap I dont know who he is with that other beauty Burke out of the City
+Arms hotel was there spying around as usual on the slip always where he
+wasnt wanted if there was a row on youd vomit a better face there was no
+love lost between us thats 1 consolation I wonder what kind is that book
+he brought me Sweets of Sin by a gentleman of fashion some other Mr de
+Kock I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his
+tube from one woman to another I couldnt even change my new white shoes
+all ruined with the saltwater and the hat I had with that feather all
+blowy and tossed on me how annoying and provoking because the smell of
+the sea excited me of course the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay
+round the back of the rock they were fine all silver in the fishermens
+baskets old Luigi near a hundred they said came from Genoa and the tall
+old chap with the earrings I dont like a man you have to climb up to to
+get at I suppose theyre all dead and rotten long ago besides I dont like
+being alone in this big barracks of a place at night I suppose Ill have
+to put up with it I never brought a bit of salt in even when we moved
+in the confusion musical academy he was going to make on the first floor
+drawingroom with a brassplate or Blooms private hotel he suggested go
+and ruin himself altogether the way his father did down in Ennis like
+all the things he told father he was going to do and me but I saw
+through him telling me all the lovely places we could go for the
+honeymoon Venice by moonlight with the gondolas and the lake of Como he
+had a picture cut out of some paper of and mandolines and lanterns O
+how nice I said whatever I liked he was going to do immediately if
+not sooner will you be my man will you carry my can he ought to get a
+leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving
+us here all day youd never know what old beggar at the door for a crust
+with his long story might be a tramp and put his foot in the way to
+prevent me shutting it like that picture of that hardened criminal he
+was called in Lloyds Weekly news 20 years in jail then he comes out and
+murders an old woman for her money imagine his poor wife or mother or
+whoever she is such a face youd run miles away from I couldnt rest easy
+till I bolted all the doors and windows to make sure but its worse again
+being locked up like in a prison or a madhouse they ought to be all shot
+or the cat of nine tails a big brute like that that would attack a poor
+old woman to murder her in her bed Id cut them off him so I would not
+that hed be much use still better than nothing the night I was sure
+I heard burglars in the kitchen and he went down in his shirt with a
+candle and a poker as if he was looking for a mouse as white as a sheet
+frightened out of his wits making as much noise as he possibly could
+for the burglars benefit there isnt much to steal indeed the Lord knows
+still its the feeling especially now with Milly away such an idea for
+him to send the girl down there to learn to take photographs on account
+of his grandfather instead of sending her to Skerrys academy where shed
+have to learn not like me getting all IS at school only hed do a thing
+like that all the same on account of me and Boylan thats why he did
+it Im certain the way he plots and plans everything out I couldnt turn
+round with her in the place lately unless I bolted the door first gave
+me the fidgets coming in without knocking first when I put the chair
+against the door just as I was washing myself there below with the glove
+get on your nerves then doing the loglady all day put her in a glasscase
+with two at a time to look at her if he knew she broke off the hand off
+that little gimcrack statue with her roughness and carelessness before
+she left that I got that little Italian boy to mend so that you cant
+see the join for 2 shillings wouldnt even teem the potatoes for you of
+course shes right not to ruin her hands I noticed he was always talking
+to her lately at the table explaining things in the paper and she
+pretending to understand sly of course that comes from his side of the
+house he cant say I pretend things can he Im too honest as a matter of
+fact and helping her into her coat but if there was anything wrong with
+her its me shed tell not him I suppose he thinks Im finished out and
+laid on the shelf well Im not no nor anything like it well see well see
+now shes well on for flirting too with Tom Devans two sons imitating
+me whistling with those romps of Murray girls calling for her can Milly
+come out please shes in great demand to pick what they can out of her
+round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night its as well
+he sent her where she is she was just getting out of bounds wanting to
+go on the skatingrink and smoking their cigarettes through their nose I
+smelt it off her dress when I was biting off the thread of the button
+I sewed on to the bottom of her jacket she couldnt hide much from me I
+tell you only I oughtnt to have stitched it and it on her it brings a
+parting and the last plumpudding too split in 2 halves see it comes out
+no matter what they say her tongue is a bit too long for my taste
+your blouse is open too low she says to me the pan calling the kettle
+blackbottom and I had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on
+show on the windowsill before all the people passing they all look at
+her like me when I was her age of course any old rag looks well on
+you then a great touchmenot too in her own way at the Only Way in the
+Theatre royal take your foot away out of that I hate people touching
+me afraid of her life Id crush her skirt with the pleats a lot of that
+touching must go on in theatres in the crush in the dark theyre always
+trying to wiggle up to you that fellow in the pit at the Gaiety for
+Beerbohm Tree in Trilby the last time Ill ever go there to be squashed
+like that for any Trilby or her barebum every two minutes tipping me
+there and looking away hes a bit daft I think I saw him after trying to
+get near two stylishdressed ladies outside Switzers window at the same
+little game I recognised him on the moment the face and everything but
+he didnt remember me yes and she didnt even want me to kiss her at the
+Broadstone going away well I hope shell get someone to dance attendance
+on her the way I did when she was down with the mumps and her glands
+swollen wheres this and wheres that of course she cant feel anything
+deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the
+wrong place always only the usual girls nonsense and giggling that
+Conny Connolly writing to her in white ink on black paper sealed with
+sealingwax though she clapped when the curtain came down because he
+looked so handsome then we had Martin Harvey for breakfast dinner and
+supper I thought to myself afterwards it must be real love if a man
+gives up his life for her that way for nothing I suppose there are a
+few men like that left its hard to believe in it though unless it really
+happened to me the majority of them with not a particle of love in their
+natures to find two people like that nowadays full up of each other that
+would feel the same way as you do theyre usually a bit foolish in the
+head his father must have been a bit queer to go and poison himself
+after her still poor old man I suppose he felt lost shes always making
+love to my things too the few old rags I have wanting to put her hair up
+at I S my powder too only ruin her skin on her shes time enough for that
+all her life after of course shes restless knowing shes pretty with her
+lips so red a pity they wont stay that way I was too but theres no use
+going to the fair with the thing answering me like a fishwoman when
+I asked to go for a half a stone of potatoes the day we met Mrs Joe
+Gallaher at the trottingmatches and she pretended not to see us in her
+trap with Friery the solicitor we werent grand enough till I gave her 2
+damn fine cracks across the ear for herself take that now for answering
+me like that and that for your impudence she had me that exasperated of
+course contradicting I was badtempered too because how was it there was
+a weed in the tea or I didnt sleep the night before cheese I ate was it
+and I told her over and over again not to leave knives crossed like that
+because she has nobody to command her as she said herself well if he
+doesnt correct her faith I will that was the last time she turned on the
+teartap I was just like that myself they darent order me about the place
+its his fault of course having the two of us slaving here instead of
+getting in a woman long ago am I ever going to have a proper servant
+again of course then shed see him coming Id have to let her know or shed
+revenge it arent they a nuisance that old Mrs Fleming you have to be
+walking round after her putting the things into her hands sneezing and
+farting into the pots well of course shes old she cant help it a good
+job I found that rotten old smelly dishcloth that got lost behind the
+dresser I knew there was something and opened the area window to let out
+the smell bringing in his friends to entertain them like the night he
+walked home with a dog if you please that might have been mad especially
+Simon Dedalus son his father such a criticiser with his glasses up with
+his tall hat on him at the cricket match and a great big hole in his
+sock one thing laughing at the other and his son that got all those
+prizes for whatever he won them in the intermediate imagine climbing
+over the railings if anybody saw him that knew us I wonder he didnt tear
+a big hole in his grand funeral trousers as if the one nature gave wasnt
+enough for anybody hawking him down into the dirty old kitchen now is he
+right in his head I ask pity it wasnt washing day my old pair of drawers
+might have been hanging up too on the line on exhibition for all hed
+ever care with the ironmould mark the stupid old bundle burned on them
+he might think was something else and she never even rendered down the
+fat I told her and now shes going such as she was on account of her
+paralysed husband getting worse theres always something wrong with them
+disease or they have to go under an operation or if its not that its
+drink and he beats her Ill have to hunt around again for someone every
+day I get up theres some new thing on sweet God sweet God well when Im
+stretched out dead in my grave I suppose 111 have some peace I want to
+get up a minute if Im let wait O Jesus wait yes that thing has come on
+me yes now wouldnt that afflict you of course all the poking and rooting
+and ploughing he had up in me now what am I to do Friday Saturday Sunday
+wouldnt that pester the soul out of a body unless he likes it some men
+do God knows theres always something wrong with us 5 days every 3 or 4
+weeks usual monthly auction isnt it simply sickening that night it came
+on me like that the one and only time we were in a box that Michael Gunn
+gave him to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety something he
+did about insurance for him in Drimmies I was fit to be tied though I
+wouldnt give in with that gentleman of fashion staring down at me with
+his glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his
+soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I
+could all in a swamp leaning forward as if I was interested having to
+sit it out then to the last tag I wont forget that wife of Scarli in
+a hurry supposed to be a fast play about adultery that idiot in the
+gallery hissing the woman adulteress he shouted I suppose he went and
+had a woman in the next lane running round all the back ways after
+to make up for it I wish he had what I had then hed boo I bet the cat
+itself is better off than us have we too much blood up in us or what O
+patience above its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didnt make
+me pregnant as big as he is I dont want to ruin the clean sheets I just
+put on I suppose the clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it damn
+it and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin
+for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a
+widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry
+juice no thats too purply O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of
+sin whoever suggested that business for women what between clothes and
+cooking and children this damned old bed too jingling like the dickens
+I suppose they could hear us away over the other side of the park till I
+suggested to put the quilt on the floor with the pillow under my bottom
+I wonder is it nicer in the day I think it is easy I think Ill cut
+all this hair off me there scalding me I might look like a young girl
+wouldnt he get the great suckin the next time he turned up my clothes on
+me Id give anything to see his face wheres the chamber gone easy Ive a
+holy horror of its breaking under me after that old commode I wonder
+was I too heavy sitting on his knee I made him sit on the easychair
+purposely when I took off only my blouse and skirt first in the other
+room he was so busy where he oughtnt to be he never felt me I hope my
+breath was sweet after those kissing comfits easy God I remember one
+time I could scout it out straight whistling like a man almost easy O
+Lord how noisy I hope theyre bubbles on it for a wad of money from some
+fellow 111 have to perfume it in the morning dont forget I bet he
+never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are the
+smoothest place is right there between this bit here how soft like a
+peach easy God I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman
+O Lord what a row youre making like the jersey lily easy easy O how the
+waters come down at Lahore
+
+who knows is there anything the matter with my insides or have I
+something growing in me getting that thing like that every week when was
+it last I Whit Monday yes its only about 3 weeks I ought to go to the
+doctor only it would be like before I married him when I had that white
+thing coming from me and Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr
+Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I
+suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round
+those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little
+fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so
+theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in
+the world besides theres something queer about their children always
+smelling around those filthy bitches all sides asking me if what I did
+had an offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold
+maybe what a question if I smathered it all over his wrinkly old face
+for him with all my compriments I suppose hed know then and could you
+pass it easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of
+Gibraltar the way he put it thats a very nice invention too by the
+way only I like letting myself down after in the hole as far as I can
+squeeze and pull the chain then to flush it nice cool pins and needles
+still theres something in it I suppose I always used to know by Millys
+when she was a child whether she had worms or not still all the same
+paying him for that how much is that doctor one guinea please and asking
+me had I frequent omissions where do those old fellows get all the words
+they have omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I
+wouldnt trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else
+still I liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so
+severe his nose intelligent like that you be damned you lying strap O
+anything no matter who except an idiot he was clever enough to spot
+that of course that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters
+my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything
+underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever
+something he got out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at
+myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes and I said I hadnt are you sure
+O yes I said I am quite sure in a way that shut him up I knew what was
+coming next only natural weakness it was he excited me I dont know how
+the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we
+stood staring at one another for about lo minutes as if we met somewhere
+I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother he used
+to amuse me the things he said with the half sloothering smile on him
+and all the Doyles said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament
+O wasnt I the born fool to believe all his blather about home rule
+and the land league sending me that long strool of a song out of the
+Huguenots to sing in French to be more classy O beau pays de la Touraine
+that I never even sang once explaining and rigmaroling about religion
+and persecution he wont let you enjoy anything naturally then might he
+as a great favour the very 1st opportunity he got a chance in Brighton
+square running into my bedroom pretending the ink got on his hands to
+wash it off with the Albion milk and sulphur soap I used to use and the
+gelatine still round it O I laughed myself sick at him that day I better
+not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a
+natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly he kneels down to
+do it I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits
+he has look at the way hes sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he
+without a hard bolster its well he doesnt kick or he might knock out
+all my teeth breathing with his hand on his nose like that Indian god
+he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare street all
+yellow in a pinafore lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes
+sticking out that he said was a bigger religion than the jews and
+Our Lords both put together all over Asia imitating him as hes always
+imitating everybody I suppose he used to sleep at the foot of the bed
+too with his big square feet up in his wifes mouth damn this stinking
+thing anyway wheres this those napkins are ah yes I know I hope the old
+press doesnt creak ah I knew it would hes sleeping hard had a good time
+somewhere still she must have given him great value for his money of
+course he has to pay for it from her O this nuisance of a thing I hope
+theyll have something better for us in the other world tying ourselves
+up God help us thats all right for tonight now the lumpy old jingly
+bed always reminds me of old Cohen I suppose he scratched himself in it
+often enough and he thinks father bought it from Lord Napier that I used
+to admire when I was a little girl because I told him easy piano O
+I like my bed God here we are as bad as ever after 16 years how many
+houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard
+street and Holles street and he goes about whistling every time were on
+the run again his huguenots or the frogs march pretending to help the
+men with our 4 sticks of furniture and then the City Arms hotel worse
+and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on the landing always
+somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks after them
+always know who was in there last every time were just getting on right
+something happens or he puts his big foot in it Thoms and Helys and Mr
+Cuffes and Drimmies either hes going to be run into prison over his old
+lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations or he goes and gives
+impudence well have him coming home with the sack soon out of the
+Freeman too like the rest on account of those Sinner Fein or the
+freemasons then well see if the little man he showed me dribbling
+along in the wet all by himself round by Coadys lane will give him much
+consolation that he says is so capable and sincerely Irish he is indeed
+judging by the sincerity of the trousers I saw on him wait theres
+Georges church bells wait 3 quarters the hour l wait 2 oclock well
+thats a nice hour of the night for him to be coming home at to anybody
+climbing down into the area if anybody saw him Ill knock him off that
+little habit tomorrow first Ill look at his shirt to see or Ill see if
+he has that French letter still in his pocketbook I suppose he thinks I
+dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies
+then why should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you
+then tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece
+he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life
+without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more
+with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the
+kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about with not another thing in
+their empty heads they ought to get slow poison the half of them then
+tea and toast for him buttered on both sides and newlaid eggs I suppose
+Im nothing any more when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one
+night man man tyrant as ever for the one thing he slept on the floor
+half the night naked the way the jews used when somebody dies belonged
+to them and wouldnt eat any breakfast or speak a word wanting to be
+petted so I thought I stood out enough for one time and let him he does
+it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too
+flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do
+it again if he doesnt mind himself and lock him down to sleep in the
+coalcellar with the blackbeetles I wonder was it her Josie off her head
+with my castoffs hes such a born liar too no hed never have the courage
+with a married woman thats why he wants me and Boylan though as for her
+Denis as she calls him that forlornlooking spectacle you couldnt call
+him a husband yes its some little bitch hes got in with even when I was
+with him with Milly at the College races that Hornblower with the childs
+bonnet on the top of his nob let us into by the back way he was throwing
+his sheeps eyes at those two doing skirt duty up and down I tried to
+wink at him first no use of course and thats the way his money goes this
+is the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the
+grand funeral in the paper Boylan brought in if they saw a real officers
+funeral thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse
+walking behind in black L Boom and Tom Kernan that drunken little
+barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C drunk
+in some place or other and Martin Cunningham and the two Dedaluses and
+Fanny MCoys husband white head of cabbage skinny thing with a turn in
+her eye trying to sing my songs shed want to be born all over again and
+her old green dress with the lowneck as she cant attract them any other
+way like dabbling on a rainy day I see it all now plainly and they call
+that friendship killing and then burying one another and they all with
+their wives and families at home more especially Jack Power keeping that
+barmaid he does of course his wife is always sick or going to be sick
+or just getting better of it and hes a goodlooking man still though
+hes getting a bit grey over the ears theyre a nice lot all of them well
+theyre not going to get my husband again into their clutches if I can
+help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes
+on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every
+penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and
+family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same Im sorry in a
+way for him what are his wife and 5 children going to do unless he was
+insured comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub corner and
+her or her son waiting Bill Bailey wont you please come home her widows
+weeds wont improve her appearance theyre awfully becoming though if
+youre goodlooking what men wasnt he yes he was at the Glencree dinner
+and Ben Dollard base barreltone the night he borrowed the swallowtail
+to sing out of in Holles street squeezed and squashed into them and
+grinning all over his big Dolly face like a wellwhipped childs botty
+didnt he look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a
+spectacle on the stage imagine paying 5/- in the preserved seats for
+that to see him trotting off in his trowlers and Simon Dedalus too he
+was always turning up half screwed singing the second verse first the
+old love is the new was one of his so sweetly sang the maiden on the
+hawthorn bough he was always on for flirtyfying too when I sang Maritana
+with him at Freddy Mayers private opera he had a delicious glorious
+voice Phoebe dearest goodbye _sweet_heart sweetheart he always sang it
+not like Bartell Darcy sweet tart goodbye of course he had the gift of
+the voice so there was no art in it all over you like a warm showerbath
+O Maritana wildwood flower we sang splendidly though it was a bit too
+high for my register even transposed and he was married at the time to
+May Goulding but then hed say or do something to knock the good out of
+it hes a widower now I wonder what sort is his son he says hes an author
+and going to be a university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons
+what is he driving at now showing him my photo its not good of me I
+ought to have got it taken in drapery that never looks out of fashion
+still I look young in it I wonder he didnt make him a present of it
+altogether and me too after all why not I saw him driving down to the
+Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning thats
+11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into
+mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other the first cry was
+enough for me I heard the deathwatch too ticking in the wall of course
+he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by
+this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his
+lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage when I
+saw him at Mat Dillons he liked me too I remember they all do wait by
+God yes wait yes hold on he was on the cards this morning when I laid
+out the deck union with a young stranger neither dark nor fair you met
+before I thought it meant him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either
+besides my face was turned the other way what was the 7th card after
+that the 10 of spades for a journey by land then there was a letter on
+its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the 8 of diamonds for a rise
+in society yes wait it all came out and 2 red 8s for new garments look
+at that and didnt I dream something too yes there was something about
+poetry in it I hope he hasnt long greasy hair hanging into his eyes or
+standing up like a red Indian what do they go about like that for only
+getting themselves and their poetry laughed at I always liked poetry
+when I was a girl first I thought he was a poet like lord Byron and not
+an ounce of it in his composition I thought he was quite different I
+wonder is he too young hes about wait 88 I was married 88 Milly is 15
+yesterday 89 what age was he then at Dillons 5 or 6 about 88 I suppose
+hes 20 or more Im not too old for him if hes 23 or 24 I hope hes not
+that stuckup university student sort no otherwise he wouldnt go sitting
+down in the old kitchen with him taking Eppss cocoa and talking of
+course he pretended to understand it all probably he told him he was
+out of Trinity college hes very young to be a professor I hope hes not
+a professor like Goodwin was he was a potent professor of John Jameson
+they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont
+find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar where
+poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully
+coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point
+the guitar that fellow played was so expressive will I ever go back
+there again all new faces two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that
+for him theyre my eyes if hes anything of a poet two eyes as darkly
+bright as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves young star
+itll be a change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk
+to about yourself not always listening to him and Billy Prescotts ad
+and Keyess ad and Tom the Devils ad then if anything goes wrong in their
+business we have to suffer Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to
+meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those
+fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the
+side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something
+and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that
+thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he
+bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders
+his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you
+I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock
+there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was
+looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks
+with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went
+down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger besides hed
+be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose never dream of
+washing it from I years end to the other the most of them only thats
+what gives the women the moustaches Im sure itll be grand if I can only
+get in with a handsome young poet at my age Ill throw them the 1st thing
+in the morning till I see if the wishcard comes out or Ill try pairing
+the lady herself and see if he comes out Ill read and study all I can
+find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont think
+me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the
+other part Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under
+me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2
+photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous O but then what am
+I going to do about him though
+
+no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no
+nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because
+I didnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a
+cabbage thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place
+pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so
+barefaced without even asking permission and standing out that vulgar
+way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a
+butcher or those old hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course
+hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might
+as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something
+better to say for himself an old Lion would O well I suppose its because
+they were so plump and tempting in my short petticoat he couldnt resist
+they excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure
+they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I
+wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they
+have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you
+touch it my uncle John has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying
+passing the comer of Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy
+because it was dark and they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me
+blush why should it either its only nature and he puts his thing long
+into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle
+in a sweepingbrush men again all over they can pick and choose what they
+please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different
+tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be
+always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear
+once I start I tell you for their stupid husbands jealousy why cant we
+all remain friends over it instead of quarrelling her husband found it
+out what they did together well naturally and if he did can he undo it
+hes coronado anyway whatever he does and then he going to the other
+mad extreme about the wife in Fair Tyrants of course the man never even
+casts a 2nd thought on the husband or wife either its the woman he wants
+and he gets her what else were we given all those desires for Id like to
+know I cant help it if Im young still can I its a wonder Im not an old
+shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing
+me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I
+suppose who he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at
+him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent I atom of any
+kind of expression in us all of us the same 2 lumps of lard before ever
+Id do that to a man pfooh the dirty brutes the mere thought is enough
+I kiss the feet of you senorita theres some sense in that didnt he kiss
+our halldoor yes he did what a madman nobody understands his cracked
+ideas but me still of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day
+almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love
+or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the
+Lord God I was thinking would I go around by the quays there some dark
+evening where nobodyd know me and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be
+hot on for it and not care a pin whose I was only do it off up in a gate
+somewhere or one of those wildlooking gipsies in Rathfarnham had their
+camp pitched near the Bloomfield laundry to try and steal our things if
+they could I only sent mine there a few times for the name model
+laundry sending me back over and over some old ones odd stockings that
+blackguardlooking fellow with the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me
+in the dark and ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer
+anybody what they do themselves the fine gentlemen in their silk hats
+that K C lives up somewhere this way coming out of Hardwicke lane the
+night he gave us the fish supper on account of winning over the boxing
+match of course it was for me he gave it I knew him by his gaiters and
+the walk and when I turned round a minute after just to see there was
+a woman after coming out of it too some filthy prostitute then he goes
+home to his wife after that only I suppose the half of those sailors are
+rotten again with disease O move over your big carcass out of that for
+the love of Mike listen to him the winds that waft my sighs to thee so
+well he may sleep and sigh the great Suggester Don Poldo de la Flora if
+he knew how he came out on the cards this morning hed have something to
+sigh for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in prison for
+Lord knows what he does that I dont know and Im to be slooching around
+down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled
+up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running Id just like
+to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt
+I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be
+governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one
+another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk
+like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses
+yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they
+wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to
+be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be
+if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats
+why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books
+and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I
+suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that
+theyre not satisfied and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my
+fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind
+in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I
+suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I
+knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well
+Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same
+since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any
+more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the time it was
+somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting
+God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother wouldnt
+like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still its a
+lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of
+the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants
+what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I
+hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a
+dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us
+so snappy Im not like that he could easy have slept in there on the sofa
+in the other room I suppose he was as shy as a boy he being so young
+hardly 20 of me in the next room hed have heard me on the chamber arrah
+what harm Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz
+Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vilaplana of
+Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the Calle las
+Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a
+name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like
+her O my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and
+Rodgers ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small
+blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I
+dont feel a day older than then I wonder could I get my tongue round
+any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I havent
+forgotten it all I thought I had only for the grammar a noun is the
+name of any person place or thing pity I never tried to read that novel
+cantankerous Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all
+upside down the two ways I always knew wed go away in the end I can
+tell him the Spanish and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not
+so ignorant what a pity he didnt stay Im sure the poor fellow was dead
+tired and wanted a good sleep badly I could have brought him in his
+breakfast in bed with a bit of toast so long as I didnt do it on
+the knife for bad luck or if the woman was going her rounds with the
+watercress and something nice and tasty there are a few olives in the
+kitchen he might like I never could bear the look of them in Abrines
+I could do the criada the room looks all right since I changed it the
+other way you see something was telling me all the time Id have to
+introduce myself not knowing me from Adam very funny wouldnt it Im his
+wife or pretend we were in Spain with him half awake without a Gods
+notion where he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord the cracked things
+come into my head sometimes itd be great fun supposing he stayed with us
+why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room
+he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the
+scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning
+like me as hes making the breakfast for I he can make it for 2 Im sure
+Im not going to take in lodgers off the street for him if he takes
+a gesabo of a house like this Id love to have a long talk with an
+intelligent welleducated person Id have to get a nice pair of red
+slippers like those Turks with the fez used to sell or yellow and a
+nice semitransparent morning gown that I badly want or a peachblossom
+dressing jacket like the one long ago in Walpoles only 8/6 or 18/6 Ill
+just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning Im sick of
+Cohens old bed in any case I might go over to the markets to see all
+the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of
+splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the 1st
+man Id meet theyre out looking for it in the morning Mamy Dillon used
+to say they are and the night too that was her massgoing Id love a
+big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the
+longing way then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup
+she gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream
+too I know what Ill do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a
+bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to
+go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let
+him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill
+let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is I s l o fucked yes
+and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times
+handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt
+bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe
+me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a
+mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve
+him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in
+the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in
+this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they
+hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or
+He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he
+wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out
+in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole
+as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want LI or perhaps 30/-
+Ill tell him I want to buy underclothes then if he gives me that well he
+wont be too bad I dont want to soak it all out of him like other women
+do I could often have written out a fine cheque for myself and write his
+name on it for a couple of pounds a few times he forgot to lock it up
+besides he wont spend it Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he
+doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do
+the indifferent l or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like
+that he cant keep a thing back I know every turn in him Ill tighten my
+bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or
+the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes O wait
+now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay and friendly over it O
+but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing pfooh you wouldnt know
+which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum and apple no Ill have
+to wear the old things so much the better itll be more pointed hell
+never know whether he did it or not there thats good enough for you
+any old thing at all then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his
+omission then Ill go out Ill have him eying up at the ceiling where is
+she gone now make him want me thats the only way a quarter after what an
+unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out
+their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus
+theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two
+for his night office or the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering
+the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what
+kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper
+in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that
+something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again
+so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and
+get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he
+brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first
+I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im
+asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I
+must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear
+a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich
+big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them
+and the pinky sugar I Id a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the
+middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them
+not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in
+roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then
+the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields
+of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going
+about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers
+all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the
+ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no
+God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why
+dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever
+they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then
+they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre
+afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them
+well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody
+that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you
+are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun
+shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on
+Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to
+propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth
+and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long
+kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain
+yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he
+said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I
+liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew
+I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could
+leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first
+only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many
+things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and
+old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop
+and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front
+of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil
+half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their
+tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and
+the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and
+Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons
+and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the
+cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts
+of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those
+handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit
+down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the
+posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron
+and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we
+missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his
+lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson
+sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the
+Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink
+and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and
+geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower
+of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian
+girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the
+Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked
+him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to
+say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and
+drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
+heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
+
+Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ulysses, by James Joyce
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ULYSSES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 4300-8.txt or 4300-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+ http://www.gutenberg.org/4/3/0/4300/
+
+Produced by Col Choat
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+ the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+ you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
+ owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+ has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+ Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
+ must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+ prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+ returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+ sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+ address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+ the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+ you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+ does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+ License. You must require such a user to return or
+ destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+ and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+ Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+ money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+ electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+ of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+ distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+ Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+ Chief Executive and Director
+ gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+ http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
projects / uwc.git / commitdiff